[
    {
        "title": "(Indiana Jones Prequels 1) Indiana Jones and the Peril at Delphi",
        "author": "Rob MacGregor",
        "genres": [
            "adventure"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Delphi, Greece\u20141922",
                "text": "Indy hung in the darkness like a quarter moon, suspended by a rope that burned into his chest and armpits. He heard shouts above him, but couldn't make out the words. When he dropped his head back, the aperture high above him offered no more light than a twinkling star.\n\n\"Dorian!\" he yelled. \"Send down another torch!\"\n\nHis voice bounced back and forth against the walls of the crevice; he didn't know if she had heard him or not. He rubbed his cheek against his shoulder and peered down. Blackness was everywhere, an inky veil that disoriented him, dizzied him. Nausea rolled through him. He squeezed his eyes shut and moved his hands a fraction of an inch upward on the rope, fearing that in the next second, it was going to snap and he'd follow his first torch into the fathomless darkness below him.\n\nThere was no space, no time, only the pull of gravity, the suction of the void. He couldn't have dangled more than a few minutes, but it seemed he'd been hanging here for hours, waiting for light to redeem him.\n\n\"Jones,\" Dorian shouted.\n\nHis name reverberated in the pit. He glanced up andsaw a flickering light dancing toward him. The rope that held it coiled and uncoiled, serpentine, its tongue hissing fire. Indy ducked as the torch darted past his head, then grabbed the rope and snared the end of the torch.\n\nHe gripped it, his breath erupting from his chest like hiccups. He peered at the wall in front of him, no longer certain if it was the right wall. Maybe he was too far down. He tugged on his rope twice and Doumas, Dorian's assistant, lowered him another two feet. Then he was directly opposite the tablet. It jutted out from the stone wall like a tombstone in a graveyard, and was tilted slightly downward.\n\nHe pulled a four pronged clamp from his knapsack and pounded it into the wall with a mallet. He was about to place the torch into it when something caught his eye. He held the torch in front of the tablet and leaned forward for a closer look.\n\nHe'd been told the inscription would be caked with dirt and that it would have to be cleaned once the tablet was taken to the surface. But he was staring at parallel rows of glyphs that were not only clearly recognizable, but were written in ancient Greek, a language he could read.\n\nHis eyes skipped over the words, devouring them. Excitement knotted in his gut. He put the torch back into the holder on the wall, and pulled a notepad from a side pocket of his knapsack. Quickly, he scrawled the translation. He couldn't believe it. They were right. The crazy bastards knew what they were talking about.\n\nHe wanted to yell up to the top, but decided to conserve his energy. He stuffed the notebook back into the pack, pulled out the net, and carefully covered the tablet before fastening the drawstrings to a hook at the end of the rope.\n\nHe was about to start chiseling at the wall to loosen the tablet when the rope suddenly jerked against his chest. He dropped several inches; the rope tightened under his arms.\n\n\"Hey, what the hell is going on?\"\n\nHis voice ricocheted about the crevice. He was directly below the tablet now and saw pick marks under it. Someone had not only cleaned the inscription, but had tried to remove the tablet. But who?\n\nThe rope jerked again. A weird creaking filled the crevice and he knew what it was. His rope was fraying. He pulled the torch from the wall and held it up. \"Aw, Christ.\"\n\nEasy does it, he thought. He placed the torch in his mouth, and reached for the rope above the spot where it was unraveling. He heard a resounding snap, a sharp, terrible sound that echoed in the crevice. His fingers snagged the rope.\n\nHe dangled by one hand, the frayed end rubbing against his wrist. The torch burned the hair on his arm. His face was contorted in a grimace as he stretched his other hand over his head. Sweat beaded on his brow, trickled into his eyes.\n\nHe felt a hard yank from above, and the rope slipped through his fingers. He reached desperately with his other hand, but his fist closed on black air.\n\nHe fell."
            },
            {
                "title": "COLLEGE CAPERS",
                "text": "Chicago\u2014two years earlier The night was still and tight as the two men lumbered down a narrow lane, limp bodies draped over their shoulders. Rain from a spring shower puddled in hidden depressions, shadowed by the tall buildings on either side. They were nearing a corner, and beyond it was the grassy mall, their destination.\n\nOne of the men was tall and rangy and bobbed as he walked as if constantly readjusting the weight of the body he carted. The other one was sturdy and muscular. Coils of rope hung from both sides of his belt, and he moved with the nimbleness of a mountain climber. Suddenly, he stumbled in one of the ruts and lurched to the side, almost losing his balance. Nimble, yes, but also afflicted by occasional spasms of clumsiness.\n\n\"Damn it,\" he sputtered as he recovered his footing. It was almost over, and he was edgy.\n\n\"You okay?\" the tall one asked.\n\n\"Fine. Let's stop a minute. I've got a bad feeling about this.\"\n\nThe tall one unceremoniously let the body slip from his shoulder, then pulled out a flask from inside his coat. He held it out, but his partner shook his head. \"No?\" The tall man shrugged, then took a long swallow.\n\n\"Take it easy on that stuff,\" the rope man hissed.\n\n\"It takes the edge off.\"\n\n\"Fifteen more minutes and it'll be all over,\" the rope man said. He hugged the shadows of the building as he moved ahead, the body still draped over his husky shoulder. When he reached the corner, he looked both ways. In spite of his concern, he was determined to complete his mission, and he wanted every detail perfect.\n\nHe turned to signal his partner, but the man was already standing behind him, the other body slung over his shoulder. They headed down a rain-slick sidewalk, the glow of street lamps reflecting off its surface. They stopped when they reached the first light, and slid the bodies onto the grass. Barely visible under a nearby hedge were two other bodies they'd left there half an hour earlier.\n\n\"Call your tune,\" the tall one said.\n\n\"Get Paine ready. I want him first. And make sure his hat is on straight.\" He loosened one of the ropes coiled on his belt. A hangman's noose was knotted at the end of the rope, and with a graceful swing of his arm, he tossed it over the arc of the lamp. The noose danced in the pale light.\n\n\"Okay, slide it over his neck, and make sure his name tag doesn't come off.\"\n\nThe tall man lifted the body and worked the noose over the head. When it was tight, he reached into Paine's vest, pulled out a three-cornered hat, and fit it firmly over his head. The other man, meanwhile, had scaled the lamppost, and now raised the body into place. He deftly tied the rope, then dropped to the ground.\n\n\"Hey, he looks great. Now, just three more to go.\"\n\nThe tall man tipped the flask to his mouth, once more and again, he gestured with it to his partner.\n\n\"We'll do Georgie next,\" the rope man said in response. \"God, I can't wait to see the reaction tomorrow morning.\"\n\nA headless figure wriggled beneath a dark gown like a magician struggling to free himself from chains and locks. Then the top of a head, a brow, and a face emerged from the dark cocoon. He straightened the gown over his bare legs, and gazed at himself in a full-length mirror. He ran a hand through his thick hair, which was parted in the center, then placed his mortarboard and tassel on top of his head.\n\nThe intricate lithographic lettering on his diploma would say he was Henry Jones, Jr. But those who knew him called him Indy\u2014short for Indiana, a name he'd used since his early teens. \"Henry Jr.\" was consigned to use on official documents, and by his father, who still called him Junior.\n\nIn fact, the only visible remainder of his childhood was a scar on his jaw, which he'd gotten in a scrap with thieves he'd stumbled on in a desert cavern as they uncovered a relic of the Spanish conquest.\n\nBut even his father, if he were here, would see that he was no longer a kid. He was handsome in a rugged sort of way, with clear, determined hazel eyes and the broad shoulders and musculature of a halfback. But he wasn't a football player. Although he was well coordinated, he preferred horseback riding and skiing to sports like football or baseball. He was also proficient at the use of a whip, an odd skill he rarely talked much about. Not that any of that mattered today.\n\n\"I'm a college graduate,\" he said to himself, and smiled at the image those words conjured, but his smile revealed more than a hint of irony. He was graduating in spite of everything. He'd missed so many classes last fall, his grades had nose-dived and he'd nearly been expelled. For several weeks, he'd simply lost interest in his formal education while he was attaining another sort on the street.\n\nHe and Jack Shannon, his wily roommate, had spent their nights at barrelhouse piano saloons on the South Side, listening to musicians with names like Pine Top Smith, Cripple Clarence Lofton, Speckled Red, and Cow Cow Davenport pound the keys on their uprights. The music was called barrelhouse piano because the small bars where it was played served liquor directly out of kegs. At least, they had until Prohibition started a few months back.\n\nMost of the jazzmen had come up from New Orleans, the hometown of jazz, in the last five years, and more were arriving every week. Living conditions for Negroes were better in Chicago; there were jobs in clubs where they could make fifty dollars a week compared to a dollar a night in New Orleans. And Chicago was where the recording studios were making jazz records.\n\nWhen the bars closed, Indy and Shannon often headed to freewheeling rent parties where the music continued until dawn. Shannon would bring his cornet and play along with the likes of Johnny Dunn and Jabbo Smith. Not only was Shannon one of the few whites Indy had seen play jazz, but he was undoubtedly the only economics student playing the music. Most of the jazzmen in the barrelhouse saloons were uneducated. They didn't read music, didn't follow the rules, didn't know the rules, and didn't care. They didn't even know their music was unusual, and all of that contributed to its power and integrity. \"Hey, you ready? You said you wanted to get there early, right?\"\n\nHe looked up, snapping out of his reverie. Shannon's red hair looked as wild as ever. His gown was draped over his arm, and he wore a coat and tie. The coat was too short in the sleeves, but he knew Shannon didn't give a damn about it. He had a habit of nodding his head when he was excited or nervous and he was doing it now. But Shannon always seemed a bit edgy, as though he weren't really made for this world. The only time he ever seemed perfectly at ease was when he was playing his cornet. Then his lanky body seemed to flow with the music and you no longer noticed his size twelve feet or his long neck with its bulging Adam's apple.\n\nIndy glanced once more at himself, then removed the mortarboard. They were only a couple of blocks from the grassy mall where the ceremony was being held. They'd be there in a few minutes.\n\n\"Okay. Let me get dressed. I don't have my pants on yet.\"\n\n\"Dare you to go just like that. Graduate without your pants, kiddo.\"\n\n\"No thanks. Don't see any reason to do it.\" He watched Shannon through the mirror, knowing that he would make an offer.\n\n\"Tell you what. I'll buy you a bottle of hooch. We'll get plastered.\"\n\nIndy shrugged. Hell, with the gown on, no one would know the difference. \"All right.\" He wasn't exactly looking forward to the ceremony; he just wanted to be done with it. Not wearing any pants would at least make it somewhat interesting.\n\n\"I can just hear ol' Mulhouse now,\" he said as they left the house. \"'You are a new generation, a generation of hope.'\" His voice was deep, authoritative, mimicking the university president. \" 'The war is over. Go out into the world and show others who are less fortunate that America's young people are hardworking, productive individuals who get the job done, whatever that job may be.'\"\n\nSomething like that, he thought. No, the ceremony wasn't the reason Indy wanted to arrive early.\n\n\"How is it with no pants?\" Shannon asked as they headed down an oak-shrouded street.\n\n\"Cool and breezy. You should try it.\"\n\nIndy expected him to laugh and make a joke, but Shannon wore a pensive expression. \"Is your father going to be here?\"\n\nIndy shook his head. \"He's busy. Hell, he didn't even bother to apologize.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Yeah. That's how he is. My father, the esteemed expert on grail lore, is a man with little time for anything or anyone outside of his scholarly pursuits.\"\n\n\"He always been like that?\"\n\n\"Only after my mother died when I was young. Ever since then he's become more distant from me, no matter what I do. I guess I majored in linguistics just to get his attention.\"\n\nShannon glanced at him. \"How would linguistics get his attention?\"\n\n\"For as long as I can remember, he's said that language is the key to understanding mankind. But so what? How can he expect me to understand mankind when I can't even understand him?\"\n\n\"I wish my family were staying home. Hell, I wish I weren't even graduating.\"\n\n\"What're you talking about, Jack? You've got a job and you'll be making good money.\" Shannon had been hired as an accountant with a Chicago trucking company for the salary of two hundred fifty dollars a month, a sum that seemed astonishingly high. When Indy asked how he'd gotten it, Shannon's only response was \"family connections.\"\n\n\"And you'll still have time to play in the clubs,\" Indy continued. \"Hey, remember that night we went down to the Royal Gardens and saw King Oliver? Authentic New Orleans Creole jazz. It's all moving right up here into your own backyard. What more could you ask for?\"\n\nShannon didn't say anything as they crossed the street. \"You are going to play, aren't you?\" Indy asked as he watched a shiny new Tin Lizzie motor past.\n\n\"I made a deal.\"\n\nIndy noted the dour expression on his face. \"What kind of deal?\"\n\n\"I have to stop playing jazz. That's the price of the job.\"\n\n\"That's crazy. Why?\"\n\n\"It's not 'respectable' music, Indy.\"\n\nIndy knew that jazz was slow to catch on. And many whites thought the syncopated beat\u2014accenting notes when it wasn't expected\u2014and improvisational style were 'jungle music' It causes the listener to move in strange, suggestive ways, he'd heard one radio commentator say.\n\n\"That's bullshit, Jack, because I think you could be as good as Earl Hines or Johnny Dodds. You watch; things will change as the music catches on.\"\n\n\"I don't know if that'll ever happen.\" Shannon swayed from side to side, his gangly arms moving to their own beat. \"You know, they're even blaming jazz for those riots on the South Side. Can you believe that?\"\n\n\"The rioting had nothing to do with jazz.\" But the city's race riots were a sour note in a nation that was feeling good about the Allies' victory. They created a sad contrast to the big parades that marched along New York's Fifth Avenue, celebrating America's role in the triumph.\n\n\"It's not marching music, Indy. You know what I mean. Nobody feels like a goddamn hero when they listen to it. That's the problem. It's coming from a different place, and so am I.\"\n\nIndy chuckled. \"You could always go to Europe with me, and start a new life.\"\n\n\"Don't think I haven't thought about it. I'm jealous as hell. You're going to love it.\"\n\nParis, Indy was sure, would be fascinating, but he wasn't so certain about becoming an expert in ancient languages. \"I guess. But studying old manuscripts in libraries isn't my idea of an exciting time.\"\n\n\"You keep saying that. Why are you doing it?\"\n\n\"The opportunity was there, and I wasn't going to pass it up. Simple as that.\"\n\nShannon abruptly turned down an alley, and motioned for Indy to follow.\n\n\"Where you going?\"\n\n\"C'mon,\" he said in a hushed voice. \"I said I'd buy you a bottle. Let's get a pint and take it with us. There's a guy close by who's got it.\"\n\n\"I don't know, Jack.\" Prohibition was a bad joke, but Indy was anxious to get to the campus.\n\n\"It'll only take a minute. C'mon.\"\n\nHe shrugged and followed him. Although the two men got along well, they differed considerably in their consumption of and attitude toward alcohol. Shannon had been a heavy drinker since he was seventeen, and Prohibition hadn't slowed his habit. Indy, on the other hand, had a low tolerance for alcohol and could take it or leave it.\n\nHalfway down the block, Shannon opened a gate, and strolled along the walk to a back door. He rapped out the universal code for \"it's me\"\u2014BOP; bop-bop-bob-bop; BOP; BOP A dog answered, yelping from inside the house. Shannon glanced back at Indy as if to make sure he was still there.\n\nA moment later, a short, frumpy man with a cross look on his face opened the door. A two-day stubble shadowed his jaw and his white hair was mussed, as though he'd been sleeping. He shouted at the dog, then asked what they wanted.\n\n\"A bottle of juice, Elmo, what else?\" Shannon said with a smirk.\n\nThe man motioned for them to enter. Indy smelled whiskey on his breath as soon as he stepped into the cramped kitchen.\n\nA wiry, mixed-breed dog growled from behind his master. Indy kept his distance and looked around the kitchen. Green paint was peeling from the walls, revealing patterned wallpaper. One of the cupboard doors lay on the floor where it had apparently fallen some time ago, and the room stank of urine-soaked newspapers stacked in one corner.\n\n\"Just a quick pint, Elmo. We're in a hurry.\"\n\n\"Good for you.\" He looked past Shannon and frowned at Indy's black gown. \"Who's this guy, a judge?\"\n\n\"Don't you know a college graduate when you see one? We're on our way to the big time.\"\n\n\"Is that right? This professor who visits me says I deserve an honorary degree. How do you like that?\" Elmo grinned, his teeth lining up in his mouth like a picket fence that had yellowed in the sun.\n\n\"A degree in what, moonshining?\" Shannon asked.\n\n\"No. Chemistry.\"\n\nIndy laughed, but he felt uneasy, and wished they hadn't stopped.\n\n\"You got it or not, Elmo? We don't have all day.\"\n\n\"Fifty cents.\"\n\n\"Fifty?\" Shannon threw up his hands, enraged by the price. \"How about a break for the new graduates? C'mon, Elmo.\"\n\n\"Fifty cents,\" Elmo retorted, and crossed his arms over his chest.\n\n\"All right, all right.\" Shannon turned to Indy. \"You got a quarter?\"\n\n\"What about our deal?\"\n\n\"I'll pay you back. Don't worry.\"\n\nIndy dug into his pocket. He earned expense money by tutoring high school students in Latin and French, but never had much extra. He grudgingly handed Shannon a quarter.\n\nElmo dropped the coins in his pocket, ambled across the kitchen, and descended into a cellar. Indy glanced at his watch. \"I hope he doesn't get lost down there.\"\n\nShannon waved a hand impatiently, dismissing Indy's concern. \"Relax, we'll be there in no time.\"\n\nIndy saw that the dog had bared its teeth and was growling again.\n\n\"What's his problem?\" Indy grumbled.\n\nShannon pointed at the mongrel. \"Shut up, pooch.\"\n\nBut the dog charged past them as someone banged on the door. Shannon looked toward the cellar, shrugged, then opened the door a couple of inches. \"Who is it?\"\n\n\"Ya mudda. Open up. I'm here to see Elmo.\"\n\n\"Who's there?\" the old moonshiner called out as he emerged from the basement. He slipped Indy the pint, and the graduate-to-be stuffed it inside his mortarboard. The door swung open, and a man in a dark coat, tie, and hat filled the doorway. He had a grim, menacing look on his face and a gun in his hand. Aw, hell. A damp chill raced up Indy's spine. Elmo took one look at the new visitor and bolted toward the front door. The man yelled for him to stop, but Elmo kept moving. The man charged through the house, the dog yelping at his heels.\n\nIndy and Shannon exchanged a glance and rushed for the kitchen door. At the bottom of the steps, Indy tripped on his gown and fell to his knees. He scrambled up and raced after Shannon, who was sprinting across the yard. Indy couldn't help laughing; they were getting away, escaping the danger, and he even had the whiskey. But then Shannon stopped abruptly, and Indy crashed into him. At the gate were two cops just waiting to nab them. \"Hey, you two!\" \"Shit.\"\n\nShannon spun, dashed across the yard, and ran between two houses. Indy didn't wait around for directions; he darted after him, hiking up his gown as he ran. He passed Shannon as they crossed the street. They fled across a succession of yards and in between houses. He was almost sure they had gotten away when he realized he'd run into a yard enclosed by an eight-foot wood fence. \"Damn,\" he hissed.\n\n\"Watch out!\" Shannon shouted behind him. Indy's head jerked around; he expected to see the cops. Instead, a pair of Doberman pinschers were dashing toward them. \"Christ,\" he breathed. He dropped the pint, pulled on his mortarboard, and scrambled up the fence. Just as he was about to lift a leg over the top, he was yanked back. One of the Dobermans had snared his gown. The dog snarled and shook its head from side to side as Indy struggled to get away.\n\nHe reached back and jerked hard, ripping the gown from the dog's mouth. He leaped over the fence, and dropped to the ground where Shannon was already waiting. They crossed another yard, ducked around a garage, then pulled up short. The two cops were standing in the alley with their revolvers drawn.\n\n\"Nice going, boys. Hold it right there,\" said the shorter cop.\n\nIndy froze. Now they were in trouble, and it wasn't even his trouble.\n\n\"Billy?\" Shannon said, rocking forward onto the balls of his feet. \"That you?\"\n\n\"Jesus,\" murmured the cop. \"Jack Shannon. What're you doing here?\"\n\n\"I could ask you the same thing. We were getting a pint. We're on our way to graduation.\"\n\n\"Christ, Shannon.\" He glanced at his partner. \"It's Harry's brother.\" He jerked his head toward the alley. \"Get out of here and watch who the hell you do business with from now on.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Billy.\"\n\n\"Don't thank me, Jack. Harry's going to hear about this. You can count on it.\"\n\nIndy had no idea what Shannon's brother had to do with the cop. As they hurried toward the campus, Indy's torn gown flapped like a flag behind him. \"Your brother's not a cop, is he, Jack?\"\n\nAn angry scowl tightened Shannon's face. \"No, but he's got friends. Billy Flannery is from the neighborhood.\"\n\n\"But what were they doing?\"\n\n\"Putting a small-time competitor out of business. Harry's got territory to maintain.\"\n\n\"The cops work for your brother?\"\n\n\"Wake up, Indy. They all work for the organization, and Harry's a charter member. It runs in the family.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "HANGING HEROES",
                "text": "The back of Indy's gown was in shreds, and he held it together with one hand as they passed through the gate of the campus. But he didn't give a damn. He was just grateful to be free of cops and crooks and dogs. He was graduating and that was all that mattered.\n\nHe glanced up at a banner fluttering in the breeze.\n\nCELEBRATE FOUNDING FATHERS DAY\u2014MAY 23, it read. At the sight of it his stomach knotted, and his sense of relief vanished. With everything that had just happened, he'd almost forgotten about last night. What had seemed like a notable way to end his college career no longer felt so wonderful.\n\nAs they reached the end of the lane leading to the mall, they stopped. A crowd of black-gowned students and their families were gathered on the sidewalk. Above them, bodies dangled from ropes high up on lampposts. From where they stood, the hanging mannequins looked like actual corpses dressed in American revolutionary garb complete with loose white shirts and vests, tight-fitting pants, and three-cornered hats.\n\n\"Well, look at that,\" Shannon said with a mischievous grin. \"Georgie, the two Toms, and Benji.\"\n\nIndy stared glumly at the sight. The thrill had definitely worn off. \"I don't know. It's sort of grotesque in the daylight. I guess I didn't really think they'd still be here.\"\n\nOn a weekday the campus maintenance workers would probably have cut them down and carted away by now. But it was Saturday, midmorning, graduation day, and everyone was stopping and staring.\n\n\"Well, I think it's great.\" Shannon grinned and slapped Indy on the back. \"We pulled it off.\" There wasn't a trace of concern in his voice.\n\n\"Yeah. Swell.\"\n\n\"Look. The press is even here. It's your chance to tell them all about it!\"\n\nThat was his original intention, but now he wasn't so sure he wanted to take credit for the deed, much less boast about it. Maybe it hadn't been such a good idea to postpone it from the night before Founding Fathers Day to the eve of graduation. Maybe no one would understand.\n\nShannon punched him lightly on the shoulder. \"There're my folks. See you in a while.\"\n\nIndy watched him drift into the crowd, then walked over to where photographers were snapping pictures of \"Tom Jefferson.\" Several people were talking at once, and the words struck him like blows to the gut.\n\n\"Who could have done it?\" he heard someone ask.\n\n\"What was the point?\"\n\n\"No point.\"\n\n\"It's horrible.\"\n\n\"Must have been a Bolshevik. I've heard they were on campus.\"\n\n\"Maybe it was a Royalist. I'm sure they must hate Franklin.\"\n\n\"A mad Englishman.\"\n\nNo one seemed to find it humorous or to grasp its meaning. Now he was barely able to contain himself. He felt like shouting that it was just his Founding Fathers Day exhibit, and didn't they understand what these men stood for, anyway?\n\n\"It's a disgrace to the university,\" an authoritative voice boomed from under the next lamppost. \"An outrage of the worst sort.\"\n\nMallery Mulhouse, the university president, was surrounded by reporters, students, and parents. His face was ruddier than usual, and his brow was covered in sweat.\n\nFounding Fathers Day was Mulhouse's inspiration. It involved a day of speeches and patriotic ado, and although no one was forced to participate, it was considered a gaffe for undergraduates to ignore it. During Indy's first two years, when he'd lived in a dormitory, the floor captains had been responsible for getting everyone involved in making floats for the parade or other related projects.\n\nLast year, when he'd moved into an apartment off campus, he'd avoided Founding Fathers Day. But this year, Mulhouse had required everyone taking a history or an English course to write a paper on the Founding Fathers or fail the course. Indy had grudgingly abided, but in his own way.\n\n'Anyone who would hang effigies of our nation's founders from the lampposts of an academy of higher learning is clearly a dangerous, unbalanced individual,\" Mulhouse continued. \"I consider this an act of sedition, an affront to everything this nation is about.\"\n\nA frown furrowed Indy's brow as he worked his way closer to Mulhouse. He'd expected controversy; he'd wanted it. But he hadn't counted on Mulhouse considering it some sort of high crime against the nation.\n\n\"Don't you think it was just a college prank?\" one of the reporters asked.\n\nIndignation seized Mulhouse's face, reddening it even more. \"If it's a prank, it's in extremely poor taste. Whoever was behind it will be found and proper punishment will be meted out.\"\n\n\"Are you saying that hanging these dummies could be considered a criminal act?\" another reporter called out.\n\n\"The university police have been notified, and our lawyers are looking into the legal aspects at this moment. Right now I'm not discounting anything.\"\n\n\"Dr. Mulhouse, isn't what we see here simply an example of freedom of speech as professed by our founding fathers?\" asked a student Indy recognized as the university newspaper's editor.\n\nMulhouse pointed to \"Georgie\" behind him, who was now being cut down by one of his assistants. \"Young man, hanging an effigy of our country's first president on a lamppost of a university is not an example of freedom of speech. On the contrary, it's a threat to it.\"\n\nDamn. It wasn't going well at all. Indy looked down at the mortarboard in his hand, and wondered if they could still take away his diploma. Then what? He'd be out of luck, that's what. But he should have thought about that last night.\n\n\"What do you make of it, Jones?\"\n\nHe turned to see Ted Conrad, his history professor. He was in his early thirties, wore an old-time handlebar mustache, and was Indy's favorite instructor.\n\nIndy shrugged and gazed at the nearest dummy. \"Someone went to a lot of trouble.\"\n\n\"Looks like a parting shot at Founding Fathers Day to me.\"\n\nA hint of a smile shadowed Indy's mouth. \"Could be, I suppose.\"\n\nHe admired the professor for his forthright manner as well as for his compelling ideas. Conrad had repeatedly told the class to stand up for what they believed, to question authority. Freedom of speech, he'd said, meant expressing yourself any way you wanted as long as it did not harm anyone else. That was what democracy was about. Conrad had also poked gentle fun at the exalted stature of Founding Fathers Day, and when he'd assigned the required class paper, had prodded them, saying: \"Keep in mind when you write this paper that you are attending a university, not a church.\"\n\nIndy had done just that, and now Conrad suspected him; he was sure of it.\n\n\"What I see here, Jones,\" he said, smiling as he motioned toward the hanging figures, \"looks a lot like what you were suggesting in your paper.\"\n\nIndy suddenly realized he was as transparent as water to Conrad. \"I didn't say they should've been hanged. My point was that if the British had won, our great Founding Fathers would have been branded traitors and probably hung.\"\n\n\"Oh, I know your point. I liked that paper. Gave you an A.\"\n\nGreat. He understood.\n\n\"Then you can appreciate what I did here,\" Indy exclaimed. \"This was my parting Founding Fathers Day project. Democracy in practice.\"\n\nConrad nodded. \"Only a week late, but still nicely timed to coincide with your graduation. I admire your boldness, Jones. But you're still going to have to face the consequences, you know.\"\n\nHe looked down at Indy's torn gown, and the white, hairy legs which protruded from beneath it. \"Nice outfit, by the way.\"\n\nIndy felt like an insect trapped on flypaper, still alive but ready to be squashed. He stood at one end of a long conference table in a richly paneled room on the fourth floor of the administration building. It was smack in the gray, cold heart of the university, a place few students ever ventured. Seated around the table were the dean of students, the history department chairman, a member of the university's board of regents, two university lawyers, and Ted Conrad. Except for Conrad, who'd turned him in, all were severe-looking older men in gray suits.\n\nSuddenly, the door opened and President Mulhouse strode into the conference room. He greeted everyone around the table, then looked up at Indy. \"Take a seat, Mr. Jones.\" Mulhouse pointed to a chair at the opposite end of the table.\n\nHe'd been roused early yesterday morning by two university police officers and questioned in their office. He'd confessed everything, except Shannon's participation. Dean Williams had been present and after the police were finished, he questioned Indy for another half hour about his personal life. The dean, a distinguished white-haired man, had once been a psychology professor, and his questions reflected that fact. Finally, he'd been ordered to appear here today at ten sharp.\n\n\"'The Nature of American Patriots and Traitors,' \" Mulhouse mused, tapping his finger against Indy's Founding Fathers Day paper. \"Well, that's better than 'Hanging Heroes,' as the press calls this episode.\" He peered at the new graduate over the rims of his pince-nez and stroked his chin, one of those practiced academic gestures at which he excelled. \"Did you think you could really get away with this, Mr. Jones?\"\n\n\"I... ah.. .\" Indy cleared his throat and tried to overcome his nervousness. \"I'm not trying to get away with anything. My paper is about the fine line between popular heroes and treacherous villains. If the British had won\u2014\"\n\n\"But the British didn't win, Mr. Jones,\" the history department chairman interrupted. \"And when you hung the effigies of our national heroes, our Founding Fathers, from those lampposts, you were acting like a traitor. And that's precisely how most people see it.\"\n\n\"I think we need to consider some mitigating circumstances in our judgment of Mr. Jones,\" Dean Williams said. \"I had a long talk with him yesterday morning, and I believe that he is a disturbed young man. His act was not so much an attack on our Founding Fathers, as against his own father, his only living relative, the renowned medieval scholar Dr. Henry Jones.\n\n\"As I understand it, Dr. Jones is a very busy man, and unfortunately he did not have the time to travel from New York for his son's graduation. There apparently has been some resentment on the son's part regarding his father's aloofness, and what took place the night before graduation is a manifestation of those feelings.\"\n\nIt annoyed Indy that the dean discussed him as though he weren't in the room. And what was he saying? Sure, he felt resentful toward his father, but that wasn't why he'd hung the Founding Fathers. He was about to say so when Ted Conrad spoke up.\n\n\"That's an interesting analysis, Dean Williams, but I'm not sure it has much to do with Mr. Jones's actions. His motives were obviously related to his Founding Fathers Day paper. The paper itself was well thought out. Rewriting history is, at best, speculative, but the events he described were well reasoned.\"\n\nMulhouse's mouth pursed with disapproval. \"Are you condoning his actions, Professor Conrad?\" Indy sat forward. \"Excuse me, but\u2014\" \"No, I'm not condoning what he did,\" Conrad said, ignoring Indy. \"He went considerably beyond what was required or allowed for such a project. I'm just explaining what I think motivated him.\"\n\nIt was obvious that Mulhouse wasn't buying any of it. \"Of course you can look at is psychologically or academically. But the fact remains that Mr. Jones was illustrating his disrespect for our nation's founders, and his distaste for Founding Fathers Day, an institution at this university.\"\n\nThey talked a few minutes longer about his motives with everyone agreeing that, whatever they were, he was wrong. Then Indy was asked to leave the room. \"Can I say something, please?\" he asked as he stood.\n\nMulhouse frowned at him. \"Go ahead, young man, but keep it brief.\"\n\n\"All I want to say is that my father has nothing to do with what I did. I never once thought I was symbolically hanging him.\"\n\nWith that, he turned and walked out of the room and took a seat in the outer office. He sighed heavily. He imagined them continuing their conversation, talking about the alternatives, deciding his future, and trying to dissect his personality in the process. At the very least, he was sure that Mulhouse intended to take away his diploma.\n\nWhat would he do without a degree? He wouldn't go to Paris. That was certain. He'd have to find a job. But what kind of job? Without a degree he couldn't even teach French or Latin. He didn't want to think about what he might do, because he didn't know.\n\nSeveral minutes later, the door opened and Dean Williams nodded for him to rejoin them. As Indy sat down, Mulhouse's gaze flicked toward him. \"Now, Mr. Jones, you are fortunate that I am someone who listens closely to what others have to say. First of all, our attorneys and I have discussed the possibilities of prosecuting this case. It is our consensus that there will be no benefit for this institution if we carry the matter any further, at least in a legal sense. We prefer to put this behind us.\"\n\nC'mon, just get this over with. Say it. Say you're taking away my diploma.\n\n\"The easiest way of handling the matter would be to simply expel you. But you've already graduated. Lucky for you.\" His smile was cold and hard. \"However, we understand that you are planning to attending the Sorbonne this fall. We can easily refuse to send your records, and it's doubtful whether you would be considered a legitimate student.\" His pause was deliberate, to let the significance of what he was saying sink in. \"But we're going to give you a chance to redeem yourself.\"\n\nMulhouse glanced among the others, and they nodded approvingly. \"I would like you to apologize to everyone here for what you did, then write a letter of apology, which my office will submit to the press.\"\n\nEvery eye in the room turned toward him as the men waited for him to reply. But he didn't have anything to say. Why should he apologize for something he wasn't sorry for? What about standing up for what he believed in? What about democracy?\n\nConrad was staring intently at Indy and the message was implicit: Accept what they're offering you. Indy looked away from him, irritated that Conrad\u2014who'd betrayed him, who couldn't even stick to his own principles\u2014should now presume to advise him. But if he didn't apologize, he knew Mulhouse would make good on his threat to withhold his records. The lesser of two evils, he thought, and said, \"Fine, I'll do it.\"\n\nMulhouse nodded, and smiled thinly. \"Well, we're waiting. Let's hear it.\"\n\nIndy looked down at the tabletop. \"I apologize to all of you. I'm sorry... sorry I did it. Your office will have my letter of apology tomorrow.\"\n\nThen he pushed away from the table, stood, and walked quickly out of the room. He descended the stairs two at a time until he reached the first floor, then headed across the mall. He didn't know where he was going. It didn't matter. He was literally seeing red.\n\n\"Jones, hold on, will you?\"\n\nIt was Conrad. Indy kept walking.\n\n\"Jones.\"\n\nHe stopped, turned. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"I want to talk to you.\"\n\nIndy realized he was standing just a few feet from the lamppost where he and Shannon had hung the first mannequin. \"I suppose you'd like me to climb up there and hang myself,\" he said, stabbing a finger at the lamppost. \"Or maybe you just want me to apologize to you personally. Is that it?\"\n\n\"Calm down, Jones. You did just fine in there. Just fine.\"\n\n\"Sure. I did great.\"\n\n\"Listen to me. You made your point. Believe me, you did. I talked to Mulhouse at his home for almost an hour yesterday, and he conceded that he'd overreacted.\"\n\n\"Well, I didn't hear him apologizing.\"\n\n\"No, but you didn't find yourself arrested, either. Those lawyers could have drummed up any number of charges from vandalism to treason. Don't you see? You won. Hell, if booze were legal, I'd buy you a drink.\"\n\n\"I won, but I had to apologize? What kind of victory is that?\"\n\n\"Look, Mulhouse has to maintain his cloak of credibility. If you had ripped it off by refusing to apologize, he would have had no choice but to ruin your chances at the Sorbonne.\"\n\nIndy knew Conrad was right. \"What about this apology I have to write?\"\n\n\"It's your chance to explain to everyone what you were doing. Just don't gloat; say you know it was a mistake.\"\n\n\"Yeah. I suppose.\"\n\nConrad clasped him on the shoulder. \"That's the spirit. Good luck in Paris. I envy you. I'm sure you'll do well and find what you're looking for.\"\n\nAs Conrad walked away, Indy thought about what the professor had said. What was he looking for? He didn't know, but he had the feeling that he'd recognize it when he saw it."
            },
            {
                "title": "LADY ICE",
                "text": "[ Paris\u2014October 1922 ]\n\nIt was a brisk fall morning and Indy bundled his leather jacket around his throat as he traipsed along the boulevard St. Michel. Unlike most of the Frenchmen he passed on the street, he wasn't wearing a scarf. Madelaine had given him one last Christmas, but he hadn't seen her for several weeks and wearing it reminded him of her.\n\nHe leaned forward, pulled his hat low over his brow, and picked up his pace. He not only wanted to escape the cold, but he was looking forward to the lecture this morning in his Greek archaeology class. The topic was Apollo's Oracle, and he was curious about the approach Professor Belecamus would take.\n\nHe crossed the campus, heading directly to the classroom building. After two years of studying at the Sorbonne, he felt he knew the city almost as well as a native Parisian. But, of course, he would always be a foreigner here, and oddly enough he liked the feeling. He was an outsider, on the inside.\n\nHe was in his third year of a Ph.D. program that focused on ancient written languages, and was taking his second course in classical Greek archaeology. It fit well with his study of Old Greek, but there was also something else about the course that particularly captivated him\u2014the professor.\n\nEverything about her, from the clothes and perfume she wore to the way she talked and walked, was distinctly feminine. And yet, beneath this veneer he sensed a strength and self-possession that intrigued him. The dichotomy hinted at the mystery of this woman and also defined the boundaries of her personal area. Too close and you're in trouble, it whispered.\n\nSo far that had not been a problem. He was midway through his second course with her and was excelling in it. His knowledge of Old Greek as well as his thorough understanding of Greek mythology made him something of a standout among his peers, but she had acted as if he didn't exist.\n\nA few days earlier, he had approached her after class and asked a couple of questions about her lecture. She'd answered in a brusque tone that matched the cold indifference in her eyes. He refused to be intimidated, and had told her how much he enjoyed her lectures.\n\n\"That's nice,\" she'd said, then excused herself and brushed past him.\n\nDorian Belecamus was Lady Ice. That was the way he thought of her. Yet, ice could be melted, and somewhere below her thick protective coating there must be a warm, friendly woman who longed for intimacy.\n\nOr so he fantasied.\n\nLost in thought, he collided with someone as he entered the classroom and realized it was she. He dropped to one knee to retrieve the notebook that had slipped from Belecamus's hand. His eyes shifted to her trim legs, which were just inches from his head. On most days she dressed in a long skirt and a white blouse covered by a sleeveless velveteen waistcoat. But today she wore a shorter plaid schoolgirl dress that made her look as if she might be one of the students rather than the instructor.\n\nShe crouched and plucked up a paper that had slipped out of the notebook. They stood at the same time and their eyes met; hers were lovely, wide and dark, almost black. \"Sorry, Dr. Belecamus. I didn't see you.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Jones.\" She flicked a hand at her thick raven hair. It was tied back with a bow and set off her compelling eyes, high cheekbones, and full mouth. \"Nice running into you. See me after class. I have something to talk to you about.\"\n\nAbruptly, she turned away and walked to the podium. Indy gazed after her, astonished that she'd actually smiled at him. He glanced around the classroom, expecting to see looks of envy from the men, knowing glances from the women. But no one seemed to notice. He'd broken, or at least cracked, the cake of ice that encased Dorian Belecamus, and no one cared. What was with these guys? Their expressions were as inscrutable as the mugs on the skulls that stared out from the cases that lined the walls of the room. The French were supposed to be lovers, but none of them seemed to think there was anything special about their instructor.\n\nHe sat down at a desk on the aisle, opened his notebook, and tried to think of reasons she would want to see him. He could think of none. A plain-looking girl with stringy brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses leaned over toward him from the next seat. \"God, did you see how she's dressed today?\" she whispered. \"Like she thinks she's one of us.\"\n\nNo comparison, Indy thought. Worlds apart. Worlds improved. \"She's not. Not even close,\" he said in a commiserating tone. He turned back to his notebook, cutting off the conversation.\n\n\"The topic today is one with which I am intimately familiar,\" Belecamus began. Ironic, he thought. She was intimate with a dead city.\n\n\"As a child I visited the ruins of Delphi during the early years of the modern restoration, which began in 1892.\" Her eyes darted to the door and a late arrival squirmed under her gelid stare as he found a seat. \"As a high school student and later in college, I spent my summers working first as a volunteer, then as a paid assistant at the site. Delphi became the focus of my graduate study, and my Ph.D. thesis. Before coming to teach here, I spent five years as the chief archaeologist at the ruins while associated with the University of Athens.\"\n\nShe looked down a moment, and smiled to herself. \"One of my assistants once made the mistake of jokingly referring to me as Pythia. As we all know Pythia was the name of the succession of women who served as Apollo's Oracle, or the Oracle of Delphi. To become Pythia a woman had to be from a poor farmer's family, more than fifty years old, and not particularly intelligent.\" Her eyes roamed around the room. \"I hope you can understand why I did not feel particularly charmed by the comment.\"\n\nThis elicited a collective laugh from the class. Belecamus definitely fit neither the age bracket nor the intelligence quotient, and she most likely was not from a poor family, Indy thought.\n\n\"Pythia made her pronouncements from the altar in the Temple of Apollo, where she sat on a copper-and-gold tripod set above a fissure in the earth. Intoxicating vapors supposedly rose from the aperture, causing the woman to enter a frenzied trance.\" She smiled again, as if at some private joke, and her gaze settled on Indy. \"One witness from the first century A.D. described Pythia's transformation this way: 'Her eyes flashed, she foamed at the mouth, her hair stood on end.' Then she would reply to the question which had been put to her.\"\n\nIndy suddenly felt as though she were speaking only to him, that the rest of the class no longer mattered. Heat crept up the back of his neck. His eyes remained riveted on her, taking in the way the light slipped over her black hair and glinted in her dark eyes.\n\n\"Her answer was always an incoherent babble of words and phrases. Incoherent to all, that is, except the temple priests, who interpreted them for the petitioner.\" Belecamus looked over the class. \"By the way, does anyone know what the word Delphi means? Mr. Jones, our Greek scholar, how about it?\"\n\nSo, she had been looking at him, and she was aware of his study of ancient Greek.\n\n\"It means 'place of the dolphin.'\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Okay. But tell me, why is it called that?\"\n\nIndy had learned the mythical history of Delphi as a child, long before he even knew that Greece was a country. \"Apollo arrived at the shrine in the form of a dolphin.\"\n\n\"And what did he find there?\"\n\nHe suddenly felt as if he were twelve years old again and his father was drilling him on the myths he'd assigned him to study. But Dorian Belecamus was hardly his father. \"A dragon named Python. It was the serpent-son of Gaea, the earth goddess and Poseidon, the earth shaker. Python lived in a cave on the mountain and spoke prophecies through Pythian priestesses.\"\n\n\"And what happened?\"\n\n\"Apollo killed the dragon, and tossed him into a crevice in the earth.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Mr. Jones.\" Her eyes flicked away from him and darted around the room. \"Now let's move away from the mythological aspects to our historical knowledge of Delphi.\"\n\nShe explained that for more than a millennium, from approximately 700 B.C. to A.D. 362, the mountain retreat had been the site of an oracle. She moved away from the podium as she continued talking. It was obvious she didn't need any notes. \"At the height of its influence, Delphi was the seat of power in the Mediterranean, virtually scripting the political history of the region. Hardly any action of consequence was taken by the rulers without consulting the oracle. Even skeptical philosophers including Plato and Socrates held the Oracle in high regard. Over the years, Delphi accumulated a vast treasure of gold and marble statues, paintings and jewelry, all tributes from clients.\"\n\n\"Were the predictions actually accurate?\" one of thestudents asked.\n\n\"I was just getting to that. The predictions were often worded in ambiguous phrases open to varying interpretations,\" she said. \"However, one of the possibilities usually was accurate. Let me give you a few examples.\"\n\nWhen asked how the Greeks would fare against a Persian attack in 480 B.C., the Oracle said to trust the \"wooden walls.\" Although the meaning of the walls was debated, the Greeks successfully defended themselves in their wooden fleet of ships even though they were surrounded. \"So those who interpreted the 'wooden walls' as wooden ships were proved correct,\" she concluded.\n\nWhen the Roman emperor Nero was warned: Beware of seventy-three, he chose to interpret the prediction as meaning that he would die at the age of seventy-three. Instead, he was overthrown at age thirty-one by Galba, who was seventy-three. \"Some predictions were accurate in only an ambiguous or even a cynical sense,\" she continued. \"For instance, Croesus was told that if he invaded neighboring Cyrus he would destroy a mighty empire. He did: his own.\"\n\nHocus-pocus, Indy thought. He doubted that Plato or Socrates gave a damn about the oracle. They gave lip service to the oracle only because it was the religion of the time; to defy that authority would have cost them dearly.\n\nIndy knew from his studies that the powerful priests who interpreted the babblings of Pythia were at the center of the Amphyctionic League, a coalition of Greek city-states, and were therefore well informed about important activities through the region. They simply used the oracle to create an aura of truth to their proclamations. In effect, the old woman called Pythia was simply a ritualistic vehicle of no actual consequence.\n\nHe also knew that his father would lash out at him if he ever said such a thing to him. Reducing Apollo's Oracle to a form of political corruption lacking any mystical reality was heresy. But all through his childhood, Indy had watched his father become increasingly mired in mystical musings that had taken over his life, and virtually ruined his own.\n\nHe raised his hand. \"What exactly were those vapors that Pythia breathed when she made her prophecies?\"\n\nBelecamus sounded amused by the question. \"Ah, the legendary 'mephitic' gases, as they were called. \"Who knows? Legend has it that the vapors came from the rotting carcass of Python.\"\n\n\"Fortunately, scientists don't take myths and legends as fact,\" Indy responded. \"That's where religion and science part.\"\n\nBelecamus stopped in front of him. Indy's eyes were drawn to her strong, tawny legs bare almost to her knees. \"So what do you think the vapors were, Mr. Jones?\"\n\nHe raised his eyes from her legs. For a moment he didn't answer. Her presence so near him nearly overwhelmed him. He cleared his throat and gathered his thoughts. She challenged him, and he would meet her head on. \"Most likely they were a mixture of burning incense and bay leaves. Pythia inhaled the mixture and chewed narcotic laurel leaves to enter a trance state. The so-called vapors were just another way for the priests to mystify and ritualize the activities.\"\n\nBelecamus crossed her arms. \"You're very rational, Mr. Jones. That's good. But sometimes we need to spur our imaginations in archaeology. Myths are often a springboard to truth and understanding.\"\n\n\"They can also baffle and mislead, and too often are taken as the truth themselves,\" he responded. \"Even by intelligent people.\"\n\nHis father, for instance.\n\nBelecamus smiled, and moved back to the podium. \"Well said. I hope everyone here understands the double nature of myths.\"\n\nAs the hour neared its end, Belecamus said she wanted to make an announcement. \"This lecture on Delphi, as you know, has been scheduled for weeks. But oddly enough it coincides with an urgent matter at Delphi. Just two days ago there was a minor earthquake in the area.\"\n\n\"Was there much damage?\" someone asked.\n\n\"The quake caused the earth to buckle, and a crevice has opened in Apollo's Temple. But on the bright side, there apparently has also been a new discovery\u2014a stone tablet has been spotted protruding from inside the chasm.\"\n\n\"What's on it?\" someone else asked.\n\n\"We don't know yet. I'll be leaving Paris shortly to inspect the site. What this means is that my teaching assistant will take over the course for the remainder of the semester.\"\n\nIndy felt a sudden vacancy in his chest, an absence of vital organs, as though his heart had been suctioned out. \"I want to wish you all the best for the semester. You've been a very attentive group. I'll miss you.\"\n\nEveryone applauded. As a line of students filed past Belecamus, wishing her well, Indy remained at his desk. Finally, as the last few students left, he stood up and approached the podium.\n\n\"Mr. Jones, I hope I'm not keeping you from anything. Another class? A girlfriend waiting in the hall, perhaps?\"\n\n\"No. Not at all.\"\n\n\"Good. I asked you to wait because I wanted to tell you more about my immediate plans.\"\n\n\"You do?\"\n\nHer eyes locked on his. Her look was as penetrating and intimate as an embrace and its intensity astonished him. \"Would you be interested in accompanying me to Delphi as my assistant?\"\n\n\"Me?\"\n\n\"Yes. You are my best student, and I'll need help from someone not associated with the University of Athens. Politics, if you know what I mean.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm not, uh, sure that I can leave right away,\" he stammered. \"I mean, it's the middle of the semester.\"\n\nShe waved a hand. \"Don't worry. I'll take care of everything with the university. My emergency leave was approved, and you'll receive credit for field study. Your basic costs will be covered by my research budget. What do you say?\"\n\nIndy wasn't quite sure how to respond. On the one hand, he was ecstatic. But on the other, her assumption that he would simply drop everything irritated him. Besides, archaeology wasn't even his field of study.\n\n\"It's kind of sudden.\"\n\nShe took a step closer to him, and smiled. \"It'll be worth it, Henry.\"\n\nHe wanted to correct her, to tell her to call him Indy, that Henry was his father. But just the fact that she'd addressed him by his first name was a major breakthrough. It was as if some invisible barrier between professor and student had been pierced.\n\nTo act familiar was saying that you were equals, and she'd made it clear from the first day of class that she was not their equal. She'd not only been schooled in Greek archaeology since her teens, but she was of the Greek culture. It was in her blood. In her class she was the authority, the living source of knowledge, and they were sponges, there to absorb her wisdom.\n\nAnd now she was giving him what might be the chance of a lifetime. It will be worth it. Of course, she'd meant the opportunity to work at Delphi, but hadn't she hinted at more? Or was he just imagining it? \"I'd like to think about it, but it sounds... interesting.\" Such a weak word, but nothing else came to mind.\n\n\"Don't wait too long, Henry.\" Her voice was low and breathy. \"Opportunities like this don't come along every day.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "DADA AND JAZZ",
                "text": "Indy opened the door of the Jungle, a boite in Montparnasse. It was early and he was relieved to see that the tables the Dada crowd usually claimed near the door were empty. He wasn't in any mood to listen to their banter. They were, for the most part, arrogant cynics who enjoyed insulting virtually anyone who walked in the door.\n\nHe looked around, his eyes adjusting to the dim light. The ceiling was layered with copper, the walls were wooden, and the small bar was trimmed with copper. Hanging high overhead were several dim Victorian candelabras, and a balcony with more tables encircled the place. At one end of the nightclub, under a lip of the balcony, was a small wooden stage. A single red light bulb glowed above it, spilling light onto an upright piano and a set of drums.\n\nOnly three or four tables were occupied, and at one of them near the bar Indy spotted a lone figure bent over in concentration as he scribbled something on a sheet of paper. Light from a burning candle stuck inside an empty wine bottle streaked the man's red hair. Indy strolled over and pulled out a chair.\n\n\"Hey, Jack.\"\n\n\"Indy,\" Shannon said without looking up. \"Kinda early.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nHe eased down in the chair, and noticed how a strand of Shannon's unkempt hair hung dangerously close to the candle's flame. His old college roommate had been living in Paris for the past year, after quitting his job with the trucking company in Chicago. Although he'd kept his bargain with his family and hadn't played in any clubs, he'd practiced nightly in his apartment, collected dozens of new jazz records, and all the while saved his money and planned his escape to Paris.\n\n\"I want to talk to you about something.\"\n\n\"Go ahead.\" Shannon looked up for the first time. \"What's on your mind?\"\n\nHe told Shannon about Belecamus's offer. \"I just heard about it today, and I'm still trying to sort everything out.\"\n\nShannon set his pencil on the table. \"Let me buy you a drink. I think you need one.\" He raised a hand, caught the eye of the bartender, and ordered two Pernods.\n\n\"Tell me more about this woman. This professor ofyours.\"\n\n\"Not really much to tell. I don't know her very well.\" A sly smile altered the shape of his mouth. \"Not yet, anyway.\"\n\nShannon didn't seem amused. \"If I were you, I'd ask around before I took off with her. I'd find out what she's all about.\"\n\nShannon, the analyst. \"Oh, come on. You think she'd just make this up so she can go home to Greece in the middle of the semester and take me with her?\"\n\n\"I don't know. It seems to me that she could be playing you for a sucker.\"\n\n\"Jack, for chrissake, we're not on the South Side making some gangster deal.\"\n\nShannon stared coldly at him, and Indy realized it was the wrong thing to say.\n\n\"I'm sorry. It's just that if you'd sat in on one of her classes, you'd know she isn't that type. She's serious, intelligent.\"\n\n\"And beautiful,\" Shannon added. \"Right?\"\n\n\"That too.\"\n\n\"Just watch yourself. It sounds sort of suspicious to me.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Look, if you were an archaeology student, I wouldn't think twice about it. But you're not.\"\n\nIndy shrugged off the remark. \"Look, it's an opportunity, a good one, and I don't want to pass it up on account of some vague suspicion.\"\n\nShannon held up his hands. \"Hey, I'm not arguing with you. I'm just telling you what I think.\"\n\n\"You know how ambivalent I've felt about life as a scholar. Maybe this is what I've been looking for\u2014a career with some adventure.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure about the career, but I bet your professor's going to be an adventure. Hell, I don't know. Maybe it's just what you need.\"\n\nAs their drinks arrived, Indy looked around and was surprised by the number of tables that were now occupied. It was as if a crowd had seeped out of the wall. \"To Greece,\" Shannon toasted. \"Hope it works out.\"\n\nIndy sipped his Pernod, then nodded at the scrap of paper in front of Shannon. \"What were you writing?\"\n\n\"Just a song.\"\n\n\"A song? For the band?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"Who's going to sing?\"\n\n\"The band\" was Shannon on cornet, a piano player from Brooklyn whose professional experience had been limited to performances at bar mitzvahs, and a Parisian drummer who'd never played jazz until he'd heard Shannon's records. None of them sang as far as Indy knew. Shannon waved the paper in the candlelight.\n\n\"I'm looking for a singer. A woman. She's got to be real sultry with a deep voice. No sopranos. If we were in Chicago I could go down to the Gardens or Dreamland and have my choice of ladies fitting the bill.\"\n\n\"I suppose. Not too many of them visiting Paris, though.\" \"Oh, they'll be here, Indy.\" He leaned forward, his eyes bright with sudden excitement. \"You look at the crowds we get here with this make-do band. They're hungering for jazz in this town. The bands will be coming here. Lots of 'em. Listen and tell me what you think. This is called 'Down in the Quarter.'\" Shannon frowned at the paper, then started reciting:\n\n\u2003\"You know I fled Chicago Late in twenty-one.\n\n\u2003Floated on cross the water,\n\n\u2003And never did see the sun.\n\n\u2003Finally landed in the Quarter,\n\n\u2003Left side of the Seine.\n\n\u2003But found so many Americans thought I was back from where I came.\n\n\u2003Down in the Quarter; Down in the Quarter. Meet you tonight Down in the Quarter.\n\nShannon shrugged. \"That's all I got so far.\"\n\n\"Why don't you say, thought I was going insane, for your last line on the first verse instead of back from where I came?\"\n\n\"Because it's not true. Besides, the number of beats is wrong.\"\n\nIndy nodded. \"I like it. Never knew you wrote songs.\"\n\n'Well, it's just words on paper now, but I think I've got some real gutsy love songs in me. Gotta find that singer, though.\"\n\nIndy laughed. \"Ha. I think you're looking for more than just a singer.\"\n\nThey both turned as they heard a ruckus near the door.\n\nChairs clattered. People shouted. Indy peered over his shoulder. \"What's going on?\"\n\n\"Looks like they're arguing about the table.\"\n\n\"The Dada gang. Should've guessed,\" Indy said dryly.\n\nThey had taken over two tables on either side of the door, and now one of the men was rapping on the table and chanting what sounded like czar.. . czar. . . czar.... The other chimed in: arf.. .arf.. .arf....\n\n\"What are they saying?\"\n\n\"Tzara and Arp. Tristan Tzara is a poet. Jean Arp is an artist. I heard they were going to be here tonight.\"\n\n\"So it's going to be a Dada sort of evening,\" Indy said unenthusiastically.\n\nShannon knocked back the rest of his drink. \"They're really not a bad bunch. Just sort of abrasive sometimes toward anyone they see as standing for traditional ways.\"\n\n\"Toward anyone who walks in the door,\" Indy remarked. \"They rub me the wrong way.\"\n\n\"They're making a break, Indy. We need people like that to wake us up sometimes.\"\n\n\"I agree, but they're as dependent on traditions as anyone. Maybe more so.\"\n\n\"How can you say that?\"\n\n\"Where would they be without tradition, Jack? If there were no traditions, there would be no basis for nontraditional art.\"\n\nShannon grinned, shook his head. \"Yeah, I guess so. But like I said, we need people who show us a way of breaking the old molds. If we don't do something different soon, we'll blow ourselves up in another war.\"\n\n\"You're making a break, Jack, but I bet you don't spit on priests and nuns. How's that sort of behavior going to stop us from making wars?\"\n\n\"Indy, they spat on their own friends. It was an event, you know. They were just dressed like nuns and priests.\" Shannon stood up. \"So you staying around?\"\n\n\"Just for the first set.\"\n\n\"Listen, you serious about Greece?\"\n\n\"I don't know, Jack. I've gotta think about it.\"\n\nHe punched Indy on the shoulder. \"I've got the feeling you're going.\"\n\nThe club was crowded by the time the band was midway through the set. Indy emptied his second glass of Pernod just as a solo by Shannon came to a close. The green, licorice-tasting drink was taking its effect, and he felt like walking. He debated whether he'd go over to the bar for one more drink or leave right away.\n\nHe pulled on his leather jacket, and looked for his hat. He peered under the table and on the other chairs. Finally, he reached up and felt it on his head. Yeah, it was definitely time to leave. He stood up and looked toward the stage. Shannon was pattering about the next song.\n\n\"I first heard this tune in a place called Dreamland in the Windy City,\" he said as Indy threaded his way through the tables. The song's by Freddie Keppard's band. Kep doesn't record his music. Says he's afraid people will steal his tunes. He's right because I remembered this one. It goes something like this.\"\n\nAs the song began and Indy headed toward the door, the dadaists looked him over. \"Hey, where'd you get that jacket?\" one of them called out. \"You going on a bombing mission?\"\n\nEveryone at the two tables started chanting: Arp, Arp, Arp, Arp. Like a pack of seals, Indy thought. A real swell bunch.\n\n\"You got something against our German brothers?\" another shouted in Indy's face.\n\n\"Save it for an old lady or a nun,\" he snapped, and moved on. As he reached for the door, something hit him in the back; alcohol splattered his neck. He stopped and turned.\n\n\"That's for the Red Baron's mother, ace,\" a bespectacled man yelled from the table on his left.\n\n\"Tzara, Tzara, Tzara, Tzara,\" the crowd shouted in cadence.\n\nIndy stepped over to the man, jerked the chair out from under him, then grabbed the edge of the table and stood it on end. Drinks crashed to the floor. The wine bottle with the candle in it shattered. The flame hissed for a moment, then went out.\n\nSuddenly, the music stopped and everyone in the club turned to see what was going on. No one moved or said a word for a long moment, then a voice boomed from the stage.\n\n\"That's my friend, Indiana Jones, all the way from Chicago,\" Shannon said. \"He turned over a table on the South Side one night, but that was his own table. I think he was looking for his hat.\"\n\n\"What an asshole,\" someone said.\n\n\"Hey, do our table, man.\"\n\nIndy started backing toward the door, but Shannon wasn't finished. \"Then another time, this is a true story, he hung George Washington, the first president of the United States, and three of his friends from lampposts at the University of Chicago. Imagine that. A real traditional sort of guy. Well, he had his reasons. But watch out for him next Bastille Day.\"\n\nIndy smiled, tipped his hat toward the stage, and left the Jungle. As he walked down the street, he felt the dampness on his neck and hair chilling him. But he ignored it. It was his own fault. Why had he let the bastards get the better of him? He could've just ignored them and left. Instead, he'd played their game with them, and they'd got just what they wanted\u2014a reaction.\n\nHe wandered aimlessly around the Latin Quarter, his thoughts drifting from dadaists to his impending decision.\n\nMaybe it was time for him to leave Paris. He needed a change; he needed something.\n\nHe passed a theater with a marquee advertising several serials from The Perils of Pauline. He slowed, and glanced at the poster in the front window, which showed a blonde hanging by her fingertips from a cliff. He smiled. He'd grown up on that stuff. Pauline never failed to get herself in a bad fix. If she wasn't dangling from an airplane or facing a roaring locomotive, she was trapped in a snake pit, sinking in quicksand, or chained in a dungeon. He looked at another window displaying coming attractions: The Death Ray, The Poisoned Room and The Blood Crystals. He would be gone before the serials arrived, he thought. He moved on. Now he knew he was leaving.\n\nHe walked for nearly an hour and finally found himself back in Montparnasse and outside a neighborhood dance hall. He knew he'd stopped here because this was Madelaine's favorite bal musette, and one of the first to move from the Luxembourg district. Soon, no doubt, they would all be located in the Latin Quarter. Popular trends, it seemed, always followed the artists by a few years, and the bohemian crowd was well ensconced here, just as the Impressionists of the last century had been in the Montmartre district.\n\nInside, dancers were fox-trotting to an accordion player and a violinist. The crowd was young, and well behaved compared to the Jungle or any of the boites. Once on the dance floor, the men never even spoke to the women they asked to dance. It was considered uncouth. In some ways, things hadn't changed much since the days of the minuet.\n\n\"Indy, I haven't seen you for ages. How are you?\" Madelaine said in her high squeaky voice. He turned and she planted a light kiss on his cheek. She was as vibrant and bright-eyed as ever. Her short, bobbed hair curled around her sharply sculptured face, softening it.\n\n\"I'm okay. How about you?\" He cursed himself for not noticing her first. He hadn't really expected to see her and didn't particularly want to talk to her. But now he didn't have a choice.\n\n\"I'm wonderful, and it's a wonderful night.\" She tilted her head, listening to the music as a new song began. \"Do you want to dance? We can do the java to this one.\" Her hand slid down his arm and gripped his fingers. She took a couple of steps and her body swayed in front of him.\n\n\"No thanks. I'm not up to dancing tonight.\" Madelaine was her usual exuberant self, the life of the party, and acting as if nothing had come between them.\n\n\"You're no fun, Indy,\" she pouted.\n\n\"I'm going to Greece,\" he blurted, as though his pending trip would make him more interesting to her, worthy of her attention.\n\n\"What? Greece? How splendid. Can you take me along? I'd love to see Greece.\"\n\nShort memory, he thought. \"I seem to remember your saying you didn't want to see me again because you thought we were getting too serious. You wanted to be free, I think that's the way you put it.\"\n\n\"Well, I am free. We don't have to get married to see Greece, do we?\"\n\n\"It's an archaeology field trip to Delphi. I'll be working and I can't take anyone with me.\"\n\n\"Oh, so you need to be free!\"\n\nIndy grinned. \"You got it.\"\n\n\"Madelaine, there you are,\" a man called out as he approached them. He glanced at Indy. \"Jonesy, what a surprise. Give up on the dead languages for the night?\" Then he looked at Madelaine again. \"We going to dance, love?\"\n\nIndy knew the handsome, young British man as Brent, one of Madelaine's acquaintances. Like her, he seemed to do nothing but float from dance hall to dance hall, cafe to cafe with the same crowd. There were more like him in the Latin Quarter every day. If given a choice of spending the evening with Brent and his crowd or being abused by the dadaists, Indy would be hard pressed to choose.\n\n\"Brent, guess what, Indy's going to Greece, to a place called Delphi, and he won't take me with him.\" Her voice squeaked to a new high.\n\nBrent shrugged. \"I'll take you to Greece any time you want, darling. Paris is getting so dreadfully boring. But let's dance right now. My legs won't stop moving.\"\n\nWith that, Madelaine was swept away onto the dance floor. She turned once, waved and laughed, then vanished into the crowd.\n\nIndy felt sick. Why hadn't he just left his past alone? Now more than ever he was anxious to move into the future. \"Good-bye, Madelaine,\" he said without regret, and turned away."
            },
            {
                "title": "ENCOUNTERS",
                "text": "It was almost noon as Indy pulled on his sneakers and jacket. Normally on a Saturday he would take a book and walk down to the corner for a lunch at the Deux-Magots. But today he was going to stroll over to Le Dome, the cafe where Dorian Belecamus had suggested they meet. She would answer any of his questions, and he would make a decision. It sounded simple. But somehow, he had the feeling that it wasn't going to be simple at all.\n\nHe picked his fedora off a hook on the wall. Under it was a coiled bullwhip, the only decorative item in his two-room abode. The apartment was located above a bakery on the rue Bonaparte, a few blocks from the Sorbonne. One room was a tiny kitchen with an icebox, a gas stove, and a cupboard. In the other was a mattress and box spring on the floor, a wooden table with two chairs, and a low bookcase with books strewn on and around it. He had lived in the apartment for two years, and the place looked virtually the same as when he arrived.\n\nHe inhaled deeply as he descended the stairs, but the tantalizing smell of fresh bakery goods was faint. Usually, when he left for classes, the smell was so overpowering he stopped for a couple of croissants, which he ate en route to the university. This morning, however, he'd slept late after staying up until three, finishing a new novel called Ulysses.\n\nAfter he closed the seven-hundred-thirty-page tome and fell asleep, he dreamed of Madelaine and Belecamus, but both women were in Dublin and, not surprisingly, had the same quirks and concerns as James Joyce's Molly Bloom.\n\nAs he headed toward Montparnasse, his thoughts returned to the decision he had to make in the next couple of hours. Last night he thought he had made up his mind, but now he wasn't so sure. Of course Greece was an opportunity. But was it practical? Even though he'd get fieldwork credit for the archaeology course, he'd still have to retake his other courses. In a sense, he would be penalized.\n\nBesides, what was the purpose? Did he really have an interest in pursuing an archaeology career? Or was he just intrigued by Dorian Belecamus? The fact was he had an interest in both, but he doubted that either was a long-term pursuit for him. He'd already taken two years of graduate school in linguistics. How many more would he need to qualify as an archaeologist? It didn't make sense.\n\nWhen he arrived at Le Dome, he looked around the terrace. In spite of the brisk fall weather, a few tables were occupied, probably by tourists who had heard the French always ate on sidewalks. To accommodate them, glowing coals in a large brasero warmed the air, at least in one corner. Outdoor cafes were fine with him, but only when the weather was moderate.\n\nHe stepped inside the cafe and scanned the tables. He was a few minutes early and apparently had arrived ahead of Belecamus. His eyes settled on a man in a tweed coat who was seated at a table by himself. There was a book to one side of him, and he held a pencil in his hand above a pad of paper. He looked familiar, and now he was staring intently at Indy.\n\nHe met his gaze, glanced away, then looked back at him. The man was rising from the table, moving toward him, threading his way through the crowded tables. Who was he, a writer he had met? Probably looking for a sucker to buy him a drink. He was approaching the wrong guy.\n\n\"Henry Jones, my God. How are you?\"\n\nIndy stared at him for a moment before his face fell into place. \"Professor Conrad. What're you doing here?\"\n\nConrad laughed. \"Come over, have a seat. It's a long story.\"\n\nIndy looked around once more for Belecamus, then followed Conrad to his table. \"I'm meeting someone for lunch, but she isn't here yet.\"\n\n\"Wait here until she arrives. Or better yet, why don't you both join me?\"\n\nAs Indy sat down, the waiter appeared and they ordered cups of cafe au lait. His old history professor hadn't changed much in two years. His sandy hair was still combed the same way, his blue eyes remained vibrant and alive, and his mustache still drooped over the sides of his lips. But he seemed less formal somehow, looser, more relaxed, as if he'd found something in Paris that had eluded him in the States.\n\n\"It's good to see you,\" Indy said. \"Quite a surprise.\"\n\n\"You know, I've thought about you more than once since you graduated.\"\n\nConsidering the situation the last time he'd seen Conrad, he didn't know whether that was a compliment or not. \"So why aren't you teaching?\"\n\n\"Mulhouse refused to give me tenure, and this past summer my contract wasn't renewed.\"\n\n\"Why not? You're a great teacher. Probably the best I had at the university.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Jones.\" He combed his fingers back through his hair. \"Mulhouse never gave me a reason.\" He shrugged. \"He wasn't required to. But the scuttlebutt was that he wanted me out ever since that fiasco over Founding Fathers Day.\"\n\nNo wonder the man had been thinking about him. \"I'm sorry. I guess my silly prank had more repercussions than I'd imagined.\"\n\n\"It's not your fault.\" He smiled and leaned forward. \"Ever since then, I made a point of mentioning your particular way of celebrating the day to my classes. I always related the story in a humorous vein, and apparently Mulhouse heard about it.\"\n\n\"So how long have you been here?\"\n\n\"Just a few days. I'm writing a novel that takes place in Paris during the revolution.\"\n\n\"This is the city for writers. Seems like there's a novelist or two in every cafe.\"\n\n\"I know. I saw Booth Tarkington the other day. Talked to him for a bit.\" He tapped the book on the table. \"Had to pick up one of his books after that. Seventeen. Have you read it?\"\n\n\"A few years ago.\" It was about an American boy confronting adolescence; that was all he recalled, except that the kid had a younger sister who ate bread with applesauce. \"I've seen James Joyce in here.\"\n\n\"You have?\" Conrad looked around as if expecting to see the Irish author. Then his eyes settled on someone approaching the table.\n\n\"Henry Jones. There you are.\" Indy turned and saw Dorian Belecamus strolling up to the table. She wore a blue robe and a white turban. Like Conrad, she'd stepped out of her professorial character. Both men rose to their feet, and Indy introduced the two professors.\n\n\"And you can both call me Indy, instead of Henry. That's my father's name.\"\n\nBelecamus seemed annoyed; she looked about the cafe as if in search of another table.\n\n\"It seems the place is full,\" Conrad said stiffly, reacting to her obvious unease. \"You're welcome to join me for lunch.\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't want to intrude,\" she replied.\n\n\"It won't be an intrusion.\"\n\nRealizing there were no other options, she nodded and took a seat. Indy led the conversation, telling Belecamus about Conrad's history course, and the reason he'd lost his job. At first, Belecamus seemed indifferent, but as Conrad filled in details about the hanging heroes episode her interest peaked. She glanced several times at Indy, and asked a couple of pointed questions about the university's reaction and how he dealt with it.\n\nWhen the waiter walked over, Indy and Belecamus both ordered fresh oysters and pommes frites, and Conrad ordered another cafe au lait.\n\n\"In Greece, there would have been no question about it,\" Belecamus said when the waiter walked away. \"You would go to jail if you hung an effigy of any of our leaders. Weren't you concerned about the possible repercussions?\"\n\n\"Not when it was happening. Only afterward.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Then why did you do it?\"\n\n\"I wanted to make a point.\"\n\n\"But you also got a thrill from it, didn't you?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"I suppose.\" He'd never really put it into words, but that was exactly how it had been for him.\n\nShe laughed. It was a full, throaty sound, delightful. \"You have a reckless streak in you. A bit of a rebel.\" She sat back in her chair. \"Indy.\" The word seemed to roll off her tongue like music. \"I never heard such a name, but I like it. And you can call me Dorian.\"\n\nHer hand brushed his as she sat forward again, a quick, deliberate touch that he felt all the way to his toes, like a mild electrical shock. It wasn't just the touch itself, but the realization that Lady Ice wasn't quite as impenetrable as he had believed.\n\nConrad glanced inquisitively between the two of them, but didn't comment. Indy still hadn't said anything about the impending trip to Greece, and Conrad was undoubtedly puzzled about their relationship. He told him about her offer.\n\n\"Delphi. Sounds fascinating.\" He nodded thoughtfully. \"So are you taking the professor up on it?\"\n\n\"I haven't really decided.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Belecamus asked.\n\n\"My field is linguistics, not archaeology. I'd be wasting a semester. I don't know. I'm not sure what I want to do.\"\n\nShe averted her eyes and gazed toward the door as though she wished she weren't there anymore. \"You Americans,\" she said with a sigh. \"You're a colony here. Writers, artists, students. You're fortunate. You can live in a foreign country and be right at home with your own compatriots. And yet all you do\u2014most of you\u2014is complain. You're just an unhappy bunch, lost in a sea of culture.\"\n\nThere was no rancor in her voice; she was just stating the facts as she saw them.\n\nIndy started to disagree, but the waiter appeared with their meals. They ate in silence for a while, a silence that wasn't entirely comfortable. Finally, Belecamus popped an oyster in her mouth, and pointed her fork at Indy. \"You say you're interested in archaeology and have been since you were a boy. So why're you studying linguistics?\"\n\n\"My father taught me languages early. Languages and myths. Some weeks he would only speak French to me, and other weeks it was Spanish or German. I was studying Latin an hour a day after school when I was nine. I knew the Greek myths by the time I was ten. He always said he was preparing me for a career as a scholar, a linguistics scholar.\"\n\nShe sighed and shook her head. \"That was your father. What about you? What do you want to do?\"\n\nThe way she said that bothered him, but only because it mirrored his own feelings. \"Something exciting. I guess I just don't like the idea of spending the rest of my life in libraries, poring over manuscripts of dead languages.\"\n\n\"Then why don't you switch to archaeology?\" Conrad asked. \"You'll get more variety.\"\n\n\"I don't particularly want to be a student my whole life, either.\"\n\nBelecamus pushed her plate to the side. \"Look, Indy, if the tablet that has been discovered at Delphi is important, and I have the feeling it is, you'll be able to use it as the basis for your Ph.D. With your background, I'd say you can have your doctorate easily in two years. One year of intense study, then your thesis, and you'll be an archaeologist. If it doesn't work out, you fall back on linguistics.\"\n\nThat last part didn't appeal to him. If he made a commitment to archaeology, he would stick with it. No falling back. \"What if the tablet isn't what you think?\"\n\n\"Then you choose something else for your thesis,\" she answered brusquely.\n\n\"Don't worry, Indy,\" Conrad said, \"If you really want it, you'll find what you need.\"\n\n\"All right, I'll do it.\" There. Quick, Simple.\n\nBelecamus smiled. \"Good. I thought you would. We're leaving for Athens tomorrow afternoon. Be at my office at one o'clock. Now I must go.\" She held out a hand to Conrad. \"Nice meeting you, and good luck with your writing.\"\n\nA moment later, the door to the cafe closed behind her. Indy glanced at Conrad. \"So what do you think?\"\n\n\"I think archaeology is something you'll enjoy, and you'll do very well at it.\"\n\n\"What about Professor Belecamus?\"\n\nConrad threaded and unthreaded his fingers. His reply was slow and measured. \"I don't know what it is about her, Indy, but I'd be careful. I guess my sense of her is that she is saying one thing, and thinking another.\"\n\n\"You think I should turn down the offer?\"\n\n\"I didn't say that. It's just that I sense there's more involved than she's telling.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "ON THE RAILS",
                "text": "The train rumbled along, rolling through the open countryside of southern Italy. Dorian Belecamus gazed out the window toward the shadowy hills that loomed against the plum-colored horizon. The last of the light tipped them in gold, creating a kind of magic about them. But it wasn't the magic of Greece, she thought. Her homeland was a landscape of dramatic contrasts: bleached white houses that dotted the shores of a sea so blue it made her heart ache, mountains the color of ripened grapes, skies burned by the sun.\n\nSoon, she thought. Her self-imposed exile was almost over. By morning they would arrive in Brindisi, where they would take a ship to the port of Piraeus. From there, they would go overland to Athens, and she would be home.\n\nShe turned away from the window, reached up, and switched on the reading light on her side of their private compartment. Across from her, Jones was slumped on his left side, his fedora pulled low over his brow.\n\nShe smiled as she watched him. No doubt about it, she thought. He was going to prove helpful. He was just what they needed, bright and quick, but not so bright or quick that he would present a danger to them. The quake was a perfect excuse. She and Jones would work at the ruins until the arrangements were made, and the trap set.\n\nShe heard a creaking noise; the door had moved. She hadn't closed it tightly, and thought it must be the rush of air down the corridor as someone passed by. But a shadow fell across the crack in the door and she realized someone was standing just outside.\n\nShe waited, expecting to hear a tap, and to hear the conductor tell her that dinner was being served. \"Who is it?\" she demanded when there was no tap.\n\nShe took two steps to the door and pulled it open. No one was there. She peered down the aisle and saw a man in a black suit push his way through the doorway to the next car. She glanced back at Jones, saw he was still asleep, then hurried after the man in the suit.\n\nThe next car was second class; rows and rows of passengers were reading or resting. No one was in the aisle. He must have sat down. She moved forward, looking at each passenger. She saw a man dressed in black, talking softly to a young girl. A newspaper was spread across his lap and it seemed doubtful that he'd just sat down.\n\nTwo rows further, she saw another man dressed in black. He was sleeping. Or did he just look like he was sleeping? He was an elderly man. His breathing was deep and even; his mouth hung open and a spicule of saliva glistened on his lower lip.\n\nShe continued down the aisle, where she counted four more men in black. It was useless, and what would she say if she confronted one of them? She would demand to know why he was looking in her compartment; he would deny it, and that would be that.\n\nThen she glimpsed the top of a blond man's head; his face was buried behind an issue of Punch. He wore a white shirt and tie. It was Farnsworth, of course. She should have guessed. He must have taken off his black coat, but the fool gave himself away with his English magazine.\n\nShe abruptly turned, and retreated from the car. Farnsworth had been following her around campus for the past month. After she'd noticed him and was sure he was watching her, she'd hired an investigator to find out who he was. When she'd found out his name, it was all she needed to know.\n\nQuietly, she slipped back into the compartment. After checking to see that Jones was still asleep, she settled into her seat again and opened a book on her lap. She looked down at it, but she wasn't reading. Her thoughts drifted from Farnsworth to the two most important men in her life, her father and Alex Mandraki.\n\nThe things she did for Alex. She didn't love him, but she felt committed to him. She knew, though, that whatever she did for him, she also did for her father. It was he, after all, who had introduced her to Alex, and the middle-aged colonel's future was closely tied to her father's destiny as well as her own. What her father didn't know was that she and Alex were planning on rushing forward into that future. And why not? There was no sense waiting for the inevitable.\n\nBut first she had to deal with Farnsworth. He was a trivial matter in the larger scheme, but needed to be handled swiftly and deftly. The train was the ideal place for it. After all, she'd confronted him once and told him to leave her alone. But he'd ignored her warning, and now she could no longer afford the annoyance. If she was going to act, she should do it before she was back in Greece, before Alex found out. It was her problem, after all, not his.\n\nShe reached up into the storage compartment above her seat, unstrapped a canvas shoulder bag, and rummaged through her trowels and brushes, the tools of her trade. When her fingers brushed the smooth, cold steel of her favorite hand pick, she smiled. It felt good in hand again. She quickly removed it, and stuffed it in her purse.\n\nJones was stirring in his sleep as she sat down again. She hooked her foot under his calf, lifted it, let it go. His head jerked. He glanced around, confused, still drugged with sleep, then saw her and smiled.\n\n\"Guess I drifted off. What time is it?\"\n\n\"Almost time for dinner. You've been asleep for more than an hour. Should we go for a cocktail?\"\n\nHe laid a hand on the stack of books at his side. \"I was hoping to work a little more before dinner, but I suppose it can wait.\"\n\nIndy had brought along a small library on Greek archaeology. His excitement about the prospect of working at Delphi was tempered somewhat by his insecurity about his abilities. It was a quality she intended to use to her own benefit.\n\nWhen they reached the dining car, they found an empty table. Jones ordered a beer, and Dorian, who normally drank sparingly, asked for a French seventy-five. She would need it for later.\n\n\"What kind of drink is that?\" Jones asked.\n\n\"Champagne and vodka. It's named after a French cannon used in the war.\"\n\n\"Must have quite a kick.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"It does at that.\" She tapped her fingers on the table, scrutinizing him covertly. He seemed nervous, as though he had something to say, but wasn't sure where or how to begin.\n\n\"Dr. Belecamus?\"\n\nShe leaned slightly forward. \"Please, don't call me Doctor.\"\n\n\"Dorian.\" He spoke her name as though testing its sound, savoring its taste. But he didn't say anything more. She sensed he wanted to ask why she had chosen him to accompany her, because he didn't accept her explanation that he was her best student. There were many students in other courses who had far more experience academically and in the field and they both knew it.\n\n\"Go ahead. What is it?\"\n\n\"It's nothing.\"\n\n\"Look, Indy, we're going to be working together for some time, maybe weeks. So it's important for us to be open with each other.\"\n\n\"Open. Yes.\" He repeated the words with the slow, measured speech of someone who didn't speak the language. \"I guess I was wondering what, exactly, you want me to do in Delphi.\"\n\nDorian smiled, reached across the table, and touched his hand. \"There'll be plenty to do. Don't worry about that. You'll be working and learning. It should be quite an experience.\"\n\nThough he nodded, he was still uncomfortable. Her gesture had obviously surprised him, as she had known it would. He was definitely going to be easy, she thought. No trouble at all. As compliant as a kitten. Her choice had been an excellent one.\n\n\"What I'm trying to say is that I know I don't have experience, but I don't want to do just menial work,\" he went on. \"I mean, I'd like the chance to do something significant.\"\n\nSo that was it. He wanted to be in the center of things. She slowly ran her fingers over the back of his hand. He swallowed and shifted in his chair. His skin flushed. He was staring at her hand. \"You'll have that opportunity.\" In more ways than you realize.\n\nHer fingers trailed away from his hand. \"In fact, I want you to be the first one to examine the script on the tablet when we bring it up from the crevice. You can put your knowledge of ancient Greek to use.\"\n\n\"Suppose it's not Old Greek, but Linear B?\"\n\nDorian laughed and shook her head. Linear B was the name of the script on tablets found during excavations at Knossos on Crete in 1899. No one yet had been able to crack the code. \"You've been reading too much. The chances of a Linear B tablet being found at Delphi are minute. Don't worry about it.\"\n\nShe finished her drink in several swallows, and noted the surprise on Jones' face. She laughed softly. \"What's wrong? Did you think I don't drink, that I never relax or have any fun?\"\n\nJones sipped his beer. \"Sometimes, I'm not quite sure what to think of you.\"\n\nShe smiled at him and gazed into his eyes. \"Well, I will tell you what I think about you. You not only have intelligence and potential, but you are a very handsome man. I'll admit that if you were an ugly brute I probably wouldn't have asked you along.\"\n\nThe perplexity in his expression amused her. He's probably never heard a woman speak so bluntly before, she thought. \"So what do you think of me?\" She slipped her foot out of her shoe and poked Indy's leg with her toe. \"And be honest.\"\n\nHe seemed flustered. \"I've never really met a woman like you. I guess you're part of the new women's revolution.\"\n\n\"No. I'm an exception to it.\"\n\nHe looked more perplexed than ever. He no doubt had expected her to agree with him and say that they were in the twenties now. Women were changing, and were no longer willing to be cinctured in dress or spirit. But she had her own ideas about revolution.\n\n\"Women are rebelling, Indy, but only in superficial ways\u2014smoking cigarettes in public, getting their hair bobbed. That's not a revolution.\"\n\n\"Well, it's a start.\"\n\n\"The problem with most women, especially the ones your age, is that they refuse to deal with men openly and intellectually. Instead, they prefer subterfuge, intrigue, and sex.\"\n\n\"I guess I never really thought of it that way.\" \"Well, I have, and I understand it. Most men aren't ready to deal with women on equal terms. Men don't have to use either subterfuge or intrigue to get their way with women.\" She reached out and pinched his chest. \"They do it right out in the open.\"\n\n\"Most women ask for it. They tease men.\" She burst out laughing. \"See what I mean? Women ask for it, so anything goes. Women are supposed to be the weaker sex, but let me tell you something. Secretly, most men fear and hate women.\"\n\nHe shook his head, and grinned. \"Not me. I'm not afraid of women and I definitely don't hate them. That's the problem ... I love women.\"\n\nBy the time their dinner arrived, Indy was filled with expectations. In spite of her dire comments on men, he was sure Dorian would invite him to her berth tonight and he couldn't help but imagine what it would be like with her. He thought of running his hands through her long dark hair, of touching her face, her shoulders, of reading her entire body like a blind man learning braille. He'd never met anyone like her. Never.\n\n\"Would you like some dessert?\" she asked as they finished their meals.\n\n\"Maybe some Italian ice cream.\"\n\n\"Spumoni, of course. I'll go find the waiter. The service is terribly slow.\"\n\n\"No, that's all right, Dorian,\" he said, but she was already out of her chair and heading down the aisle.\n\nHe turned, glancing after her, and saw her pause and lean toward a table where a man was seated by himself. Their eyes locked momentarily, and something flickered between them, something Indy couldn't decipher. Then the man looked away, his eyes flitting about like insects, shoulders twitching nervously. He was about thirty, fair- haired and slightly overweight. As Dorian disappeared into the next car, the stranger rose to his feet and followed her.\n\nIndy's gaze trailed after him. What the hell was going on? He was tempted to get up and follow them, but decided against it. It was none of his business.\n\nA couple of minutes later, two dishes of ice cream arrived. Indy stared at the multicolored scoop in the dish in front of him. He waited a while longer until the edges of the ice cream started to melt. He quartered it with his spoon, tasted it. What's taking her so long? What are they doing? He glanced over his shoulder, then turned back to his dish. Slowly, spoonful by spoonful, he consumed his serving. When he finished, he laid his spoon aside.\n\nTime to take a look around.\n\nHe rose from his chair and walked quickly down the aisle of the dining car. The next one, which was the last car of the train, was a bar. It was crowded, but Dorian was nowhere in sight. Neither was the man who had followed her.\n\nHe described Dorian to the bartender and asked if he'd seen her. \"No,\" the bartender said with a shake of his head. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\"But I saw her walk in here. Just a few minutes ago, and she hasn't left.\"\n\nHe pointed to the far end of the car. \"Maybe she went outside.\"\n\nOutside? He moved through the crowd to the end of the car, and opened the door. The sweet evening air rushed around him, a scent of countryside and purple skies. He stepped out onto the iron balcony and saw Dorian standing at the railing, smoking a cigarette. For a moment or two, she seemed unaware of his presence. She was as motionless and lovely as a statue in profile, the wind blowing her hair away from her face, one arm crossed at her waist, the other propped against it, holding a cigarette. Then she turned, saw him, and smiled.\n\n\"Did you get your ice cream?\"\n\nCool and possessed, he thought, and for a moment 'ice cream' turned to ice queen in his mind. He nodded, then gestured toward her cigarette. \"I didn't know you smoked.\"\n\nShe tossed the cigarette over the railing and fixed her hands at his waist. \"I probably do a lot of things you don't know about.\"\n\nIndy touched her face and kissed her, a slow, almost hesitant kiss. Her mouth tasted sweet, of exotic fruit, exotic wine, exotic everything. He ran his hands through her raven hair, loving the thickness, the softness, and then she stepped back from him, her mouth still close to his, and whispered, \"My ice cream is melting.\"\n\n\"I bet it is.\"\n\nAs he followed her back through the bar into the dining car, it occurred to him that he hadn't seen the blond man, and now the table where he'd sat was empty. A disappearing act.\n\nMaybe he'd imagined the whole thing. Maybe Dorian had stopped to pull up a stocking, and the man had been embarrassed when she'd caught him looking at her. He hadn't followed her, but had gone to the bathroom. By now he'd returned to his seat in one of the passenger cars.\n\nOf course. That must be it."
            },
            {
                "title": "INTRIGUE IN ATHENS",
                "text": "The sun was low by the time they reached the Acropolis, and the city was hidden in a copper haze. But from where they stood, high above Athens, the slanting rays bronzed the magnificent Doric columns of the Parthenon, and Indy gazed in awe.\n\n\"I grew up thinking Greece was a legend.\"\n\nDorian laughed. \"I think I hear echoes of your father.\"\n\n\"His bedtime stories were about the feats of Zeus, Heracles, Poseidon, Hermes, and all the others. Medusa, the Gorgons, Jason and the Argonauts. I heard about them all.\"\n\n\"Well, that sounds like a wonderful childhood,\" she said, hooking her arm through his.\n\nYeah, real swell, he thought, but he didn't disagree with her. Not now. He took in a deep breath, as if the magical air surrounding this bastion could somehow preserve the moment.\n\n\"What do you think is the single most amazing thing about the Acropolis?\" she asked.\n\nHe thought back to her lectures, but drew a blank and shook his head.\n\n\"That any of it still exists,\" she said and explained. The Turks stored ammunition in a building called the Propylaea and one day in 1645 it exploded. Forty-two years later, the Venetians blew up the Parthenon. The only reason it still remained was that early nineteenth-century archaeologists restored it to what they believed had been its appearance in the fifth century B.C.\n\n\"Now you sound like the professor again.\" He smiled as he said it just to show her he didn't mean it as a criticism. \"This must be a very special place for you.\"\n\n\"It is, of course, but actually my favorite place in Athens is the Tower of the Winds in the Roman Agora, especially at dawn.\"\n\n\"I'll have to see it sometime.\" Indy gazed over the city below them in the fading light. \"Great place to be an archaeologist. All the best ruins are right in your backyard.\"\n\nHe expected her to laugh. She didn't. \"Archaeology grew up around this country just as European civilization did.\"\n\nThey moved from the massive columns of the Parthenon and walked over to the Erechtheum, the only other surviving building. \"So why do you teach in Paris? I'd think you'd prefer to be here.\"\n\n\"That's complicated. You have to understand that we Greek archaeologists tend to favor the aesthetic aspects of the science. Rather than dirtying ourselves in pits looking for pottery fragments, most of us prefer to study the great works of ancient sculpture. In fact, the chairman of archaeology in all our major universities is actually the chairman of the history of sculpture.\"\n\n\"Really? Why is that?\"\n\n\"It's a way of compensating for the fact that we are economically and socially behind the northern countries which drew on our legacy. We've only been independent for ninety years, you know, after four centuries of foreign domination. So by focusing on the aesthetic aspects of archaeology, we ever so slightly elevate our present culture.\"\n\n\"You agree with that approach?\"\n\n\"No, but I understand it. I teach in Paris because it's easier to take a broader approach to the field.\"\n\nThey stopped in front of the Erechtheum and examined the Caryatids, a series of stone maidens who served as pillars on the building's southern porch. The last rays of the sun danced across the faces of the stone goddesses; behind them, light and shadow eddied across the porch. For an instant, Indy thought he saw someone standing near the base of one of the statues.\n\n\"You remind me a bit of another student,\" she said, speaking in such a soft voice that Indy almost thought she was talking to herself. \"He was from England. When he came here, he had no sense of our recent history. He knew that Lord Byron died at Missolonghi. That was it.\"\n\nShe was quiet a moment and Indy waited for her to continue. \"We should get going,\" she finally said.\n\nThe first lights winked on in the dusky haze over the city. Indy nodded, but his attention was drawn back to the Erechtheum. He peered, as best he could, into the inner recesses of the porch. The light shifted, the glare vanished, and now he could see the porch clearly. There was someone there. No, two people, two men, and they were peering out at them.\n\n\"That's odd.\"\n\n\"What?\" Dorian asked.\n\n\"There're two guys up by the Caryatids watching us.\"\n\nDorian swung around as if he'd stabbed her in the back. \"I don't see anyone.\"\n\n\"They moved back now.\"\n\nDorian took hold of his arm. \"Come on.\"\n\nHe didn't know what the hurry was, but he followed her back toward the Parthenon. Below it was a path leading to the road where horses and buggies waited. In Athens, there was a mix of carriages and automobiles, whereas in Paris autos prevailed and horses were a rarity. It was as if Athens couldn't quite decide whether to join the twentieth century.\n\nDorian tugged on his arm again. \"Indy, they're coming after us.\"\n\nHe glanced back. The two men were moving toward the Parthenon, one a few yards ahead of the other. \"Why do you think they're after us? They're probably just a couple of tourists.\"\n\n\"Look again.\" The men had closed the gap. They weren't quite running, but they weren't bothering to disguise the fact that they were in a hurry.\n\n\"Let's wait. They're probably not interested in us at all.\"\n\nDorian grabbed him by the arm. \"Don't be a fool. Run.\"\n\nThey charged forward, hurrying over the rocky escarpment. Indy felt foolish; he still doubted the men were chasing them. He stumbled and almost pulled Dorian down on top of him. A white-hot pain shot through his ankle.\n\n\"Damn it.\"\n\n\"Hurry,\" Dorian hissed. He winced as he pushed off the ground and hobbled after her.\n\nThe shadows had turned a deep purple, making it more difficult to see. They scraped their arms on the heavy thicket as they descended the path, his ankle throbbed and screamed with every step. He kept glancing back, but couldn't see anyone pursuing them.\n\nThe ruins were nearly empty and a lone carriage waited at the bottom of the path for stragglers. Dorian rushed over to it, waving her arms at the driver. The man calmly opened the door for her; Indy reeled across the road, limping as he ran.\n\n\"You all right, sir?\" the driver asked.\n\n\"Fine. Let's go.\"\n\nAs the carriage pulled away, Indy glanced out the window into the dusky night. He glimpsed the men just as they reached the road. They stopped, and stared after the carriage as it pulled away.\n\n\"They were probably just after the last carriage, not us,\" he said.\n\nShe didn't answer.\n\nDorian's house was located on a hill in an old neighborhood called Monastiraki, where at any time of the day you could look up and see the Acropolis hovering in the sky like a temple of gods. The house was quaint in appearance, with pilasters at the corners, a tile roof edged with terra-cotta goddesses, and a small yard protected from the street by a wrought iron fence and an abundance of vegetation.\n\nNot bad, Indy thought as they entered the house and he smelled dinner cooking. She'd come home after two years, and it was as if she'd never left. She had another life here that had continued despite her absence. Not only was dinner being prepared by the housekeeper, but a bubble bath awaited Dorian. While she bathed, Indy sat on the bed soaking his swollen ankle in a pail of cold water.\n\n\"Hey, Indy,\" Dorian called.\n\nHe looked at the bathroom door. \"Yeah?\"\n\n\"Bring your pail in here so we can talk.\"\n\nGood idea, he thought. He did want to talk to her and, hey, why not do it while she bathed? A mischievous smile turned on his lips as he raised his foot from the pail. \"How come I didn't think of that?\"\n\nHe set his pail down next to the bathtub and sat on a chair draped with a towel. On the floor next to the tub was a bottle and a wine glass. Dorian held a half-full glass in her hand. \"Help yourself to some retsina,\" she said as he lowered his foot into the pail.\n\n\"Thanks. What is it?\"\n\n\"A wine made from pine sap.\"\n\n\"Pine sap?\" He poured himself a glass, sipped it, and made a face.\n\nDorian laughed. \"It grows on you. Believe me. It's very popular. Some people say too popular. You just have to be careful not to overindulge.\"\n\nHe took another sip; his eyes strayed from her face. The sight of her soaking among the bubbles with one leg stretched languidly over the side reminded him of their recent tryst. He saw them entwined in her berth on the train, their movements synchronized with the rattle of the rails below them. Their lovemaking seemed almost surreal now, not like a real memory at all. He still found it hard to believe how rapidly the Lady Ice of Paris had melted in his arms. Yet, here he was, casually watching as she bathed. Everything since then seemed like a blur to him. They'd left the train yesterday morning, and spent most of the day on the ferry. When they'd reached the port of Piraeus, they'd taken a taxi to Athens. They'd arrived exhausted, and had slept twelve hours.\n\nToday, while Dorian had busied herself with details for the trip to Delphi, Indy had explored the city on his own. First, he'd dutifully spent the morning at the archaeology museum; later, he'd simply wandered around taking in the sights.\n\n\"So what do you think of Athens?\" she asked. \"I like it, but I can't stop comparing it to Paris.\" \"And what have you concluded?\" She stretched one of her legs, toes pointed toward the ceiling.\n\nThe texture of life was different here, he'd decided. The beauty of Paris was seen through the subtle changes in the quality of light. Here the light was harsher, brighter, a contrast to the craggy landscape.\n\n\"Greece is earthy, fertile; France is more intellectual, refined.\" \"I agree.\"\n\nBoth cities were tied to the past, but the past affected each city in different ways. Paris thrived as a center of artistic culture, a creative offspring of past artistic triumphs. Here, even though the past was everywhere, the culture that had flowered was now dormant. Paris was a sculpture still being defined; Athens was a monument, and its people could only stand by and watch it slowly deteriorate. Yet, in spite of living in the shadows of their forebears, the Greeks still seemed to excel in spirit. He saw them as a gregarious, talkative people who openly expressed their emotions, whether joy, anger or sorrow. Most of the men were dark, curly-haired, and handsome. They smoked black tobacco and drank endless cups of coffee while they absently fingered beads made of amber or silver. The women, however, seemed resigned to domestic drudgeries and many wore black dresses, as though they were in permanent mourning.\n\nHe tried his best to explain his thoughts, but Dorian no longer seemed interested. \"Indy, I want to tell you why I thought those men at the ruins were after us.\" \"Good. I'd like to hear about it.\" \"First, I should tell you a bit about my family,\" she said, arching her back as she washed the base of her neck, and the rosy tips of her breasts pushed through the bubbles.\n\n\"Your family?\" It was difficult to concentrate on what she was saying.\n\n\"Yes. My family. You see, Greek peasant girls don't become archaeologists. My father is a shipbuilder, and a large landholder. We even own a couple of islands.\" \"Entire islands?\" She laughed. \"Not large islands.\" \"He lives here in Athens?\"\n\n\"He has an estate here, and houses in Rome and London. He's living in Rome right now, and he can't come home.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Politics.\" She uttered the word like a curse. \"After Greece won her independence, there was no more nobility left, so those families who became involved in politics were the ones who became wealthy.\" \"That sounds pretty typical.\"\n\n\"Anyway, when the king decided to invade Turkey last year, my father took exception. He knew that it would end disastrously. And for speaking the truth, he was exiled.\"\n\nThe bitterness in her voice was reflected in the tightness of her features. \"And is still in exile.\"\n\nIndy knew that the results of the war with Turkey were exactly what she said. As he understood it, Greece had invaded its neighbor with the hopes of freeing Greeks living outside of Greece. Now the city was flooded with refugees, who had been forced from their homes in the conflict, and the loss of life had been extraordinary. \"I guess the invasion didn't solve anything, \" he said.\n\n\"What happened was a horrible mistake. We sent a hundred thousand men and they're still being butchered.\"\n\nIndy nodded, unsure of what to say. He sipped his retsina and watched her.\n\n\"You'd think we would have learned from the Great War. We suffered terribly in our support of Britain and France. The Greek people are tired of fighting, and now we are at it again.\"\n\n\"But what does this have to do with those two men at the Acropolis?\"\n\nShe rolled the stem of her glass between her fingers, gathering her thoughts. \"My father warned me not to come back until things settled down. He said it would be dangerous.\"\n\n\"So you think they work for the king?\"\n\n\"Possibly.\"\n\n\"Why don't they just stop you from working at the ruins?\" he asked.\n\n\"The king could certainly block me from returning to Delphi, but he is not a fool. Delphi is a national treasure, and it would look bad for him if he refused to allow me to go back, especially now after the earthquake.\"\n\n\"So you think they're dealing with you covertly, watching you to see what you're doing?\"\n\nShe handed Indy her empty glass, motioning for a refill. \"If they were only watching me, I would not mind. But I believe the king's men, if not the king himself, would like to hurt my father, and if I were killed, they would succeed.\"\n\n\"What are you going to do?\"\n\n\"Nothing. We're leaving for Delphi tomorrow morning as planned. I refuse to be intimidated.\"\n\nIndy tipped the bottle, filling Dorian's glass and his own. He decided the retsina wasn't so bad after all. He held out the glass to her, and watched as she soaped one of her thighs with a round sponge.\n\n\"Put the glasses down,\" she said, and slipped her hand around his neck.\n\n\"What are you doing?\"\n\nShe pulled him to her, and retsina spilled on the floor and in the tub. \"I think you need a bath.\" Her voice was husky, soft, laced with laughter. She wound her wet arms around his back, and he toppled over the side, splashing into the warm bath as Dorian's soft limbs wrapped around him.\n\n\"What about the maid?\"\n\n\"Don't worry.\"\n\n\"And dinner?\"\n\n\"It'll keep.\"\n\n\"I'm supposed to be the aggressive one,\" he sputtered, wiping his arm across his face as she tugged at his sopping clothes.\n\n\"You're too slow. Besides, you could use a few lessons.\"\n\n\"Okay, professor.\" He peeled off his wet shirt. \"I guess I'm still your student.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "JOURNEY TO DELPHI",
                "text": "The room was dark when Dorian rose from bed. She pushed the curtain aside, and the faint gray light of predawn seeped into the room. It was after five; she had to hurry.\n\nShe moved silently across the room, glanced once at the covered form on the bed, then quickly pulled on a plaid skirt, a blouse, and a wool jersey. She was about to leave the bedroom when Jones stirred. She froze, staring at him, willing him to remain asleep. When she was certain he hadn't heard her, she turned and left.\n\nAt the side of the house, she lifted a bicycle and wheeled it across the yard. She opened the wrought iron gate, winced when it creaked, then climbed on the bicycle and pedaled off.\n\nThree blocks from her house, Dorian veered left and coasted downhill. The morning air was cool, and she was glad she'd worn the sweater. Ahead of her, a distant, barely perceptible pink glow challenged the sullen grayness of the eastern horizon. She braked when she reached the bottom of the hill, turned right, and rode past Platia Monastirakiou. The square usually bustled with nut vendors, fruit stalls, and shoppers, but at this hour it was quiet. The tenth-century monastery church in the center of it looked gray and desolate, a lonely artifact of simpler times.\n\nShe passed the crumbling walls of Hadrian's Library and followed Eolou Street until she reached the Gate of Athena Archegetis, the entrance to the Roman Forum. Engraved on the surface of the pilaster that faced the Acropolis was an edict of Hadrian announcing the rules and taxes for the sale of oil. If Hadrian could see the place now, Dorian thought.\n\nShe walked her bicycle through the gate and into the ruins, passing ramshackle huts built atop the remains of the ancient public latrine. Thin filaments of smoke curled up from the doorways of a few of the huts, the first sign of the new morning. Throughout the ruins of the marketplace were makeshift homes built by some of the thousands of refugees flooding the city. Another national disaster.\n\nShe continued on until she reached an octagonal tower where she laid the bike on its side. She wasn't sure why, but the Tower of the Winds fascinated her. It had been designed in the first century B.C. by a Syrian astronomer named Andronicos of Cyrrhos and served as compass, sundial, weather vane, and water clock powered by a stream. If the clock had still worked, she would have been able to tell that it was five-thirty by reading the level of water in the interior cylinder.\n\nShe turned her gaze upward. Each face of the tower was decorated with a relief of a mythical entity which personified one of the eight winds. Directly above her on the northwest side of the tower was a relief of Skiron, who held a vessel of charcoal. Next to it, Boreas, the North Wind, blew into a conch shell.\n\n\"I got your message,\" a voice said from behind her, and a hand touched her shoulder.\n\n\"You're here early.\" She dropped her gaze, and turned. In the pale light, Alex Mandraki was a dark, brooding figure, as mysterious as the mythical entities on the tower.\n\n\"Looking out for my interests.\" His hand strayed to her face, touching it lightly, as though he were uncertain of his right to do so. \"You're a clever strategist, Dorian. You'd make a good man. A better one than most. Must be why I like you.\"\n\nShe brushed a hand against his cheek; his skin felt rough even though he had just shaved. \"You only like me? I thought you loved me.\"\n\nHe grasped her hand. His features softened as much as was possible for a man whose very glance caused his men to quaver. \"Of course I do, and I've missed you.\" He pulled her to him, and kissed her with a sudden urgency.\n\n\"I've missed you, too,\" she whispered, and drew back from him. \"Was it horrible?\"\n\n\"A slaughter. Beyond words. And there was nothing I could do to prevent it.\"\n\n\"All the more reason for what we must do.\"\n\nHe studied her for a moment, perhaps trying to read her thoughts by the intensity and sincerity of her eyes, her expression. \"I know you have to become close to the American, but I hope you aren't taking your task too seriously.\"\n\nShe smiled at him for the first time. \"Are you jealous, Alex?\"\n\n\"No.\" He raked his fingers back through his short, kinky hair. \"Not yet.\" He took her hand again. They started to walk. His hawk nose, silhouetted in the pale light, looked like a sharp, deadly beak. \"Jealousy is like hatred: an emotion that wastes energy.\"\n\n\"You could say the same about making war.\"\n\n\"In the current situation,\" he said, referring to the invasion of Turkey, \"I agree wholeheartedly. But we must never eliminate our army. We would be a weak, ineffective people. Greeks must never again be held in subjugation.\"\n\n\"You don't have to lecture to me, Alex, especially not at this hour of the morning.\"\n\n\"Something's bothering you. What is it?\"\n\nShe told him about the trouble she had encountered on the train.\n\nHe nodded and spoke in a firm, even voice. \"You did the right thing. But I warned you that Farnsworth might be trouble. I should've placed someone on the train with you.\"\n\nShe smiled up at him. \"I can handle myself quite well.\"\n\n\"So it seems. Then there is no problem.\"\n\n\"I'm not finished. I think there are two others working with Farnsworth.\" She told him about the men who had chased them at the Acropolis.\n\nA frown burrowed deep between his dark eyes. He shook his head. \"They sound like amateurs.\"\n\n\"Thank God. I was vulnerable. I didn't get a good look at either of them, but Jones did.\" She described the men as best she could.\n\n\"I'll see what I can find out, and I'll assign a guard to your truck.\"\n\n\"That's not necessary.\"\n\n\"Please, let me decide what is necessary for your protection.\" He smiled, and took her hand. \"Now I want to tell you what I have in mind for Delphi.\"\n\nWhen she pushed the bicycle toward the street a few minutes later, peach and pale yellow edged the sky. The quiet of dawn was over, and the ancient forum was waking as people trickled out of the huts. It's going to be a long day, she thought.\n\nIndy ran through the Acropolis, arms pumping at his sides, legs blurring beneath him, his breath coming in quick, sharp bursts. He could hear the men behind him, their shoes pounding the pavement, their shouts slapping the air. His head snapped around. They were rapidly closing in on him, but he couldn't run any faster; his legs wouldn't cooperate. Panic clawed at his throat.\n\nOne of the men suddenly lurched ahead of the other and slammed a bottle of retsina over his head. He knew it should have hurt, that a white-hot pain should have flashed through his skull. But the only thing he felt was an intense reverberation that echoed in his head and sounded like a horn.\n\n\"Wake up, Indy.\"\n\nHe opened his eyes and winced at the bright, cruel light. \"Oh, God,\" he moaned. The blast of a horn outside their window hammered against the inside of his head. \"What the hell's going on out there?\"\n\n\"That's our ride to Delphi. Hurry up and get ready. But drink this first.\"\n\nHe sat up in bed, rubbed his face, and saw that Dorian was already dressed. She handed him a coffee as thick as syrup in a cup not much larger than a thimble.\n\n\"No ouzo in it, I hope.\" At dinner they had finished the retsina and after the meal had sampled another Greek invention, a liqueur that reminded Indy of the Pernod he drank on occasion in Paris. His head now pounded with the after effects of the combination.\n\n\"Not a drop. I promise.\"\n\nHe grimaced when the horn sounded again, but a few minutes later he was dressed and ready to leave. He reached under the bed for his bag, but couldn't feel it. He crouched lower, spotted the bag\u2014and something else. He stretched his arm, patting the floor, and pulled out a boot. Its mate was behind it, and they looked like military issue.\n\n\"Indy, let's...\" Dorian stopped in the doorway. \"What're you doing?\"\n\n\"I was just getting my bag.\" He dropped the boot, and looked at her.\n\n\"In case you're wondering, it belongs to my housekeeper's son. He died in Turkey. I'll be waiting outside.\" She turned away.\n\nIndy kicked the boot under the bed, and grabbed his bag. Funny place to keep a dead soldier's boots, he thought. When he stepped outside, two men with rifles were standing in the back of the truck. As he climbed into the front seat next to Dorian, he asked who they were.\n\n\"Guards.\"\n\n\"Expecting trouble?\"\n\n\"Just being prepared.\"\n\nWithin minutes, they were bouncing over a gravel road as they headed into the hills outside of the city. The springs on the truck were in poor condition, and each bounce jarred Indy's head.\n\nThe truck's engine roared whenever they accelerated, making conversation difficult. \"This road. . .\" he heard Dorian say, and saw her lips moving, but he couldn't hear anything else.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"This road ... of Oedipus.\"\n\nHe frowned, shook his head. What possible connection could there be between the road and Oedipus?\n\nDorian leaned over and shouted. \"This road we are driving on hasn't changed much since the time of Oedipus.\"\n\nHe believed it.\n\nDorian gave up on conversation and Indy stared out at the gray, stony hills and pines. It seemed that every day since they'd left Paris, the trip had assumed a new dimension. First, his relationship with Dorian had shifted dramatically. Then he'd discovered that she might be persona non grata in her own country. The idea that he could be getting caught up in political machinations that he didn't comprehend disturbed him. She had said they should be open with each other, but she apparently was open only when it was opportune.\n\nNow, he was starting to understand Conrad's suspicions about Dorian. Even Shannon, who hadn't even met her, was right about one thing. Traveling with Dorian was an adventure, and he had the feeling he hadn't seen the end of it. Hell, they hadn't even reached Delphi yet.\n\nBut he'd wanted a challenge, and maybe even some danger. That was what adventure was about, after all. But he also wanted to stay alive. No doubt about that.\n\nEvery so often he glanced back to see if they were being followed. But there were only clouds of dust, spewing from under the wheels of the truck. Dorian finally leaned close to him. \"Would you stop worrying? We've got two guards with us. If there's any problem, they'll handle it.\"\n\nHe nodded, slid down in his seat and closed his eyes. Soon the drone of the engine lulled him to sleep. He dozed, was jolted awake, dozed again, a rhythm as predictable as the tick of a clock. By early afternoon, they climbed the lower slopes of Mount Parnassos, and his anticipation increased with the altitude.\n\n\"Almost there,\" Dorian said, gazing through the windshield at the mountain peak.\n\nIndy touched her thigh; she nudged it away. \"We have to act professionally while we're at the ruins. Here, you're my student, that is all. Do you understand?\"\n\nHer expression was hard, cast in stone. Indy gave a quick, nervous laugh. \"Oh, c'mon, you afraid of a scandal because I'm younger than you?\"\n\n\"This isn't funny, Jones, and age has nothing to do with it. It just doesn't look right for a professor to be sleeping with her student.\"\n\nLook right to whom? But he didn't ask. He suddenly wanted to tell her that he'd never experienced anything like their lovemaking. It was more than mere sexual passion. It was the fulfillment of his longing for a woman who was different from the others he'd known. Yet, he wanted her more than ever. She was as seductive and enigmatic as the mystery of Delphi itself, and he needed her. But he didn't say anything of this, either. He was afraid she would laugh, that she'd call him her sweet student of love or something equally humiliating.\n\n\"There.\" She pointed. \"See it?\"\n\nIndy leaned forward and saw a mountain terrace that seemed to literally hang in space, in a pocket between ominous craggy peaks. It looked small and insignificant compared to the mountain.\n\nDorian told the driver to stop for a minute. They got out and gazed up at Delphi.\n\n\"I guess I was expecting it would be larger,\" he said.\n\n\"Its size had nothing to do with its importance. Think of it, Indy. For a thousand years, kings and statesmen, military leaders and merchants, climbed the sides of this mountain, bearing questions for the oracle.\"\n\nHe recalled her saying in class that the predictions were often obscure and ambiguous. If that was so, how could it have lasted so long, and impressed so many?\n\n\"Did anyone ever keep track of the accuracy of the predictions?\"\n\n\"Why do you ask?\"\n\n\"If I were resting my future on some old lady's babblings, I'd want to know how accurate she was.\"\n\n\"You Americans.\" Dorian laughed. \"You think the world is like one of your baseball games. You want everyone to have a batting average. I doubt if anyone kept such records, but of course the tradition of the oracle would never have survived for so long if the predictions were usually wrong.\"\n\n\"I'd bet the successes had more to do with the knowledge of the priests, than the oracle.\"\n\nShe said nothing in response. Her enigmatic smile was her answer.\n\nThey climbed back in the truck and ten minutes later rounded the final bend and arrived at Delphi. At eighteen hundred feet the air was a bit cooler here than in Athens. He gazed up at the massive surrounding peaks which rose to more than eight thousand feet, and then down at the sharp drop of the landscape to the valley below.\n\nThe truck stopped and they stepped out. Most of the buildings were merely foundations and rubble, the result of centuries of earthquakes and man's own destruction. But just the sight of the tilted Doric columns of Apollo's Temple so near the steep face of the mountain sent chills along Indy's spine. Here he was at the most famous religious site of antiquity, a place once considered the center of the world, a place of earth and stone and, he was certain, of secrets still hidden.\n\n\"What do you think, Jones?\"\n\nIt bothered him that she rarely called him Indy anymore, but he let it go. What mattered was that he was here, at Delphi. \"It's not just a myth anymore. It's a real place, at least, it was.\"\n\n\"It still is a real place. Don't forget that.\"\n\nHe was about to say that right now it was more real than the Sorbonne when he saw a fat man hurrying toward them. He was trying to run, Indy thought, but his corpulence made his effort nothing more than a waddle. As he neared them, it was obvious he was excited.\n\n\"Dr. Belecamus, I'm glad you're finally here,\" he said, sucking in breathfuls of thin air. \"We've been expecting you for a couple of days.\"\n\n\"I told you I would come as fast as I could.\" Indy heard a trace of annoyance in her voice, and sensed there was animosity between them. \"Jones, this is Stephanos Doumas, the current chief of archaeology here.\"\n\nIndy pegged him to be just a few years older than he was. He extended a hand, but the man just nodded and continued talking to Dorian.\n\n\"Something incredible has happened,\" he exclaimed. \"You must come quickly and see for yourself.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"It's the crevice in the temple.\" He gestured with his hands. \"There are vapors rising from it. Vapors\u2014like those the oracle breathed.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "THE RETURN",
                "text": "Panos, the stonemason, ambled along the main street of the village, en route to the platia, the grassy park at the end of the village. As he passed the restaurant, he nodded to the familiar old men who squatted on a long wooden bench outside the crumbling wall. Except for the amber komboloi beads they fingered, they reminded him of cats, purring with contentment in the midmorning sun.\n\nSeveral feet from where they sat, a pair of rough-hewn wood beams were propped against the wall, where the brick had buckled and bulged and sent a spider web of cracks along the tarnished white stucco. Damage from the recent earthquake, he thought. But life continued on. Earthquakes and tremors were hardly more remarkable here in the village of Delphi than a heavy thunderstorm. A part of life: birth, death, earthquakes.\n\nOne of the old men called out and asked him about his mother's health. That was about all the old man ever said to him any more. He was in the village, but no longer of it. He was another visitor, like the people who came to see the ruins. Only the old men knew him; they remembered Panos from another time.\n\nSo he talked about his mother's health in terms they could understand: \"She feels much better now that herson and grandson are here again.\" He smiled. \"She says she goes up and down.\"\n\nThe old men laughed. It was what everyone in Delphi said when you asked how they were. We go up and down. That was life on the mountain. Up the mountain and down the mountain.\n\nThe sight of the old men always made him feel good. They were the standard-bearers of the village. It seemed they had always been there by the restaurant, waiting, watching, occasionally talking. He knew, though, that there had been a time when they were active, vital men, working and traveling up and down the mountain. Carpenters, craftsmen, merchants, shepherds.\n\nBut that was before the shift, when the village was moved from atop the sacred ruins to its present site. Now the men were like the ruins of Delphi itself, their aged bones no longer able to support an active existence.\n\nHe kept walking down the road as the men muttered among themselves. They were probably saying something about the accident so many years ago in which Estelle had died. Or, more likely, they were repeating an old story about what had happened afterwards. Estelle had been walking along a mountain trail carrying her infant son, Grigoris, when a landslide had buried both of them. Panos, who had been several yards ahead, had managed to dig Grigoris from the rubble. Miraculously, he was unhurt. But when Panos reached Estelle, he cried out in agony and grief. Estelle, his beautiful young wife, was dead, her skull crushed by a boulder.\n\nThat was the year of the shift. Thirty years ago, he thought. The year the archaeologists arrived. The year everything changed.\n\nBut out of Estelle's death rose a new life\u2014his own. He was transformed, changed by her death, by the shift of the village and by Milos, Estelle's father. As long as he had known him, Milos had been called the Crazy One, and afterwards he became even more crazy. But Panos learned to look beyond Milos's craziness, and slowly he came to realize that he was a seer and a guardian of ancient knowledge.\n\nPanos crossed the platia and took a seat on his favorite bench. The square itself was small and unimpressive, but the view of the valley made up for it. After Estelle's death he had spent endless days sitting at this very place and imagining himself soaring like a raven out over the valley. It was there in those days that Milos had approached him and told him that it was time for him to learn the secrets of the Order of Pythia.\n\nNearby, two men in blue work clothes were whitewashing the base of an old oak tree to protect it from insects. He'd never seen either of the men, which was odd since he knew virtually everyone who lived here. Although he'd resided in Athens for several years, he still returned to Delphi several times a year to visit his mother and to be near the sacred site.\n\nHe watched the men until the one closest to him looked his way. Panos nodded to him, greeted him, and asked how he was doing. The man paused, took off his cap, and wiped his brow with his forearm. He said he was fine, but that he'd never sweated in such cool weather before. \"The sun is hot, but the air is cool.\"\n\n\"That's how it is on the mountain. It's not like Athens,\" Panos said, quickly recognizing the man's speech as that of the capital. \"How long have you been here?\"\n\n\"Since yesterday. The government sent me.\" He puffed out his chest and spoke in a voice filled with self-importance. He watched Panos to see if he was impressed.\n\nBut Panos let him down. He laughed, and shook his head. \"So now the government sends men to tend the trees after we have an earthquake. Next thing they will move the village again.\"\n\nThe man's voice turned defensive. \"I am here because the king is coming to visit Delphi next week.\"\n\n\"Coming here?\" Panos was skeptical.\n\nThe man smiled, because he knew something that Panos, the local man, did not. \"Yes, of course. He will be coming to inspect the damage at the ruins, and he will stay for two nights.\" The man put on his cap, and turned back to his work.\n\nPanos stared out over the valley, considering what he'd heard. He knew the king had a mountain retreat a couple of miles away, but he rarely visited it. Now he was certain the prophecy was right. The timing was perfect.\n\n\"Papa. There you are.\"\n\nPanos looked over his shoulder to see Grigoris hurrying across the square towards him. His son, now grown, was almost a duplicate of him: muscular, with slender hips and dark curly hair. No doubt he'd just heard about the king's visit, and was expecting to surprise his father.\n\n\"You won't believe it, Papa. It is happening already.\"\n\nPanos rose from the bench, took his son by the arm, and led him away from the workmen. \"I know. Come on.\"\n\n\"How could you know? You've been here. I just talked to Stephanos outside the camp.\"\n\nPanos stopped, and turned to face Grigoris. \"I told you to stay away from the ruins, and it's the first thing you did when I left this morning.\"\n\n\"I didn't go into the ruins. I stayed outside. She didn't see me. Neither did the foreigner. I was very careful.\"\n\nPanos shook his head; his son tried his patience. Grigoris had made a mistake in Athens when he'd let himself be seen at the Acropolis. Then, before Panos could stop him, he'd complicated matters by chasing the pair.\n\n\"I said I was sorry about what happened. How many times do I have to apologize? I'm not a child anymore. Now will you listen to me?\"\n\n\"What would you have done if they had stopped and waited for you?\"\n\nHis son rolled his black eyes, exasperated. \"I told you Iwas just trying to scare the outsider. Maybe I would have told him to stay away from here.\"\n\nPanos stared at Grigoris a moment, silently reprimanding him. \"This is no reason to apologize to me. Apologize to yourself.\" He was about to invoke one of the sacred directives: \"Know thyself,\" but Grigoris interrupted.\n\n\"Father, the veil has parted. The vapors are rising again from the temple.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"That's what I've been trying to tell you.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" There was always mist around the Temple of Apollo in the mornings and on many occasions he'd imagined that the vapors were rising again and the prophecy of the Return had been fulfilled.\n\n\"I didn't see it myself because you told me not to go into the ruins. But it must be true.\"\n\nPanos knew that Stephanos thought Grigoris was naive; maybe this was one of his jokes. \"We'll see,\" he said.\n\n\"What are we going to do?\" the younger man asked anxiously.\n\n\"We've waited many years. We can wait a few hours or a few days longer.\"\n\nPanos thought back to the prophecy. After Estelle's death, Milos had predicted the Return and had given all the clues. At the time, Milos had been the last surviving member of the Order of Pythia, but over the years he had slowly passed the knowledge to Panos. Finally, the time had come for Panos to invoke his authority as the new leader of the Order.\n\nHe would talk to Stephanos himself, but he already sensed it was true. It was finally all coming together. There was no longer any reason to fear Dorian Belecamus because of her power at the sacred site. It was clear now; she was the one.\n\nShe would be the new Pythia; he would be the interpreter, and the first prophecy, he was certain, would be for the king himself."
            },
            {
                "title": "ICHOR RISING",
                "text": "A lantern rested on a wooden table, illuminating the interior of a primitive thatched hut. Next to the lantern lay a thick book which was open to a page filled with ancient Greek script. It was the text of a stone tablet, which had been salvaged from Delphi's archives, and its author was Plutarch, who served as a priest at Delphi in the first century A.D.\n\nFor the past several minutes, Indy had been slowly translating the inscription on a piece of paper. Although an English version was available on the next page of the book, he wanted to test his abilities. There were only three words that he wasn't certain about, and he'd guessed their meaning from the context. He blew on the paper, drying the ink, and laid the fountain pen on the table.\n\n\"Okay, let's see,\" he mumbled, and held the paper closer to the light. As far as he could tell, the script was a response to a question about why the prophecies of the oracle were often ambiguous. He read his translation in a low voice:\n\n\"For it was not just a question of some individual person consulting the oracle about the purchase of a slave or some other private matter, but of very powerful citizens, kings and tyrants with mighty ambitions, seeking the gods' advice on important issues. To anger or annoy such men by harsh truths which conflicted with their desires would have had its disadvantages for the priests of the oracle.\"\n\nIndy turned the page, and saw that there was more of the text. This time he translated it verbatim without writing the words. Like a child learning to read, he slowly read the text, stumbling over words here and there.\n\n\"As for the answers... given to ordinary people, it was also sometimes advisable that these... should be concealed from their oppressors or... hidden from their enemies. Thus these too were wrapped up in... circumlocution and... equivocation so that the meaning of the oracle, while hidden from others, could always be grasped... by those whom it concerned if they applied themselves to unraveling it.\"\n\nIt sounded like a politician explaining why he hadn't carried out his campaign promises, Indy thought as he turned the page. He scanned the accompanying English translation, and smiled. He was pleased with his accuracy, and confident he could translate the tablet that awaited him in the fissure. Now, if Dorian would stop wasting time, he could get on with it.\n\nHe pulled out his pocket watch and glanced at it. Without exception, the vapors rose from the crevice for twelve minutes before they dissipated, but the length of the quiet periods was slowly increasing. The first time they'd measured an interval it had lasted three hours and five minutes. The next time the vapors had risen, three hours and eleven minutes had elapsed. It hadn't taken long for them to realize that each interval was lengthening by six minutes. But now, their third day at Delphi, Dorian was still insisting they continue taking the measurements.\n\nIndy had been watching the fissure since 1:00 P.M. The gases had risen at 4:16 P.M., and had been quiet now for four hours and five minutes. If the schedule that had been established continued, the vapors would rise in eighteen minutes, at 8:39 P.M.\n\nIronic, he thought. He'd left his studies in midsemester for what seemed like the chance of a lifetime. But so far all he'd done was play watchdog for a hole in the ground. He shook his head in disgust. At least he could look forward to dinner. He'd be relieved at nine, then he would head into the village.\n\nHe held his hands out over the charcoal brazier which heated the hut. When he was satisfied that he was as warm as he would get, he pulled aside the cloth which covered the door. He reached for his hat, which lay on the table, but his hand hit the lantern and tipped it over. It rolled toward the edge of the table. He lunged for it and caught it just as it was about to roll onto the floor.\n\nHe carefully stood it up in the center of the table, eased his hands away. \"Now, stay there.\" He took a step backward, and his heel knocked over the brazier. Hot coals catapulted across the dirt floor, and bounced toward the walls.\n\nHe cursed, and scurried about kicking one coal after another toward the center of the hut, then out the door. He glanced around; he sniffed.\n\nSmoke.\n\nFlames suddenly raced along the base of the wall. Indy slapped at them with his jacket, then finally found the coal and kicked it out the door. He stomped out the sparks, and flapped the cloth door to get out the smoke. But the rush of air ignited a spark he'd missed, and the wall was ablaze again.\n\n\"Aw. . .\" He yelled, grabbed a gallon jug of water from the floor, and doused the fire. When he was sure every spark was out, he lowered the lantern and examined the damage. Several square feet of the wall were blackened and the hut smelled of smoke, but the structure still seemed sound. The last thing he wanted to do was end his watch by burning down the hut.\n\nBut on second thought, Dorian probably wouldn't mind.\n\nThe hut, which was made of branches, feathers, and beeswax, was an attempt to recreate the first temple of Delphi. It was part of a plan promoted by Stephanos Doumas to connect the present with the past and make the ruins more accessible and interesting to non-scientific visitors. It had been constructed outside the temple by Doumas and his assistants shortly before the earthquake, and had survived unscathed.\n\nUpon their arrival, as Doumas led them over to the crevice, Dorian had stopped at the hut, looked it over, then asked Doumas what it was. She laughed when he finished his explanation. \"So you're becoming a tourist promoter as well as an archaeologist. Is that what I taught you when you were my student?\"\n\n\"Well, not exactly, but\u2014\"\n\n\"In fact, what I taught you, Stephanos, is that tourists are a costly nuisance. Tourist promotions take away money that might go for research, and if left to their own devices tourists destroy our work.\"\n\nDoumas was taken aback by the criticism, but he quickly recovered. \"Well, a very important tourist is coming here, Dr. Belecamus. None other than the king, and I'm sure you'll agree it is a good idea to please him.\"\n\nDorian had turned away from the hut, and gazed toward the temple for several seconds. Indy was surprised by how well she hid her feelings. She must be thinking that the king's trip to Delphi was related to her family's tenuous political situation, and her return.\n\nWhen she looked back toward them, she was smiling. \"So everything is happening at once. The vapors are rising, and the king is coming.\"\n\n\"And you are here,\" Doumas added.\n\n\"Yes. I am here. Now, tell me more about these vapors.\"\n\nDoumas said the vapors had risen three times that day, each eruption about two and a half to three hours apart.\n\n\"Okay, we'll transform the hut into a lookout station, and monitor the vapors,\" she said.\n\nWhen Doumas protested that the hut wasn't built for occupation, she reminded him that he had called her about the earthquake damage and requested her assistance. \"As long as I have come all the way from Paris for that purpose, let me do my job the way I see fit, Stephanos. Is that understood?\" Doumas quickly backed off, and from that moment on there was no question that while Dorian was in Delphi, she was in charge.\n\nIndy put his hat on and stepped outside. Moonlight washed across the ruins, illuminating the columns of Apollo's Temple, the rubble and remains of ancient walls. Beyond the temple, the abrupt rise of the mountain face was hidden in shadow and left a sense of foreboding. He rubbed his hands together, fighting off the chill, and headed toward the temple.\n\nHe thought about what he'd read in recent days about Delphi, and tried to imagine what it had been like to visit the sacred shrine at its height of power. The temple had been built in the middle of the fourth century B.C. after an earlier temple was destroyed by an earthquake. In the decades and centuries that followed, a regular routine had been established. Visitors seeking knowledge of the future would first sacrifice a goat or a sheep, and if a reading of the entrails boded well, they were allowed inside the temple. If the person was wealthy, the entrails no doubt read very well, Indy figured.\n\nUpon entering the portal, they first saw walls inscribed with bits of wisdom, such as \"Know thyself\" and \"Everything in moderation.\" Beyond the portal were statues of Poseidon, Apollo and the Fates. Other treasures of the interior included a statue of Homer and the iron chair in which Pindar sat when he came to Delphi to sing odes to Apollo.\n\nBelow ground level were the central chambers of the shrine. A huge gold statue of Apollo guarded the entrance to the inner sanctuary, known as the adytum. In the inner sanctuary was the tomb of Dionysus and the tripod on which Pythia sat and inhaled the mephitic gases which supposedly rose from a fissure in the earth. Nearby was the Omphalos, a black, cone-shaped stone, which was regarded as the navel of the world, and was always near Pythia when she spoke.\n\nBut all that was gone, lost, stolen, or destroyed, he thought as he crossed the Sacred Way, a wide path which wound through the ruins. He stopped where a rope blocked entry to the temple. Until more was known about the vapors, no one was allowed to go beyond this point.\n\nBefore the rope had been put in place, Dorian had carefully measured the crevice. It was about nine feet across at the widest point, and about thirty feet long. The ground on either side of the fissure had buckled and thrust upward so that the crevice was bordered by mounds of dirt and rubble. But it was possible to approach the crevice only on the side nearest the temple entrance. A trench about twenty feet deep bordered the opposite side.\n\nA wispy thread of vapor curled upward from the mound. He checked his watch. 8:39. Four hours and twenty-three minutes after the last rising, and right on time. Within seconds, the vapors thickened and billowed above the crevice.\n\nWhat would it be like to inhale the gas? Most likely it was just water heated to a vapor by the molten earth below and forced up the chasm to the surface. Hell, he was fed up with vapor watching. He'd sample the gas, and prove that it was harmless. If he felt the least bit nauseated, he could just back away and inhale fresh air.\n\nHe glanced back across the ruins, then pushed down on the rope and stretched a leg over. The air around the top of the mound was a violet hue now. His heart beat faster as he raised his other leg. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe it was a poisonous gas.\n\nGet it over with. Do it.\n\n\"Jones, what're you doing there?\"\n\nHe lowered his leg, straddling the rope, and looked back to see Dorian stepping out from the shadows of the hut. The moonlight fell across her, illuminating one side of her face. Awkwardly, he stepped back over the rope. He rubbed his hands together, and smiled as she approached.\n\n\"It started again. Right on time.\"\n\n\"So I see.\" She moved closer to him. \"But you didn't answer my question. What were you going to do?\"\n\nHe tried to think of an excuse. But there was no point. \"I was going to take a closer look.\"\n\n\"I thought I made it clear to you that I don't want you or anyone going in there when the fumes are rising. We don't know anything about the gases.\"\n\n\"Maybe it's ichor, Dorian.\"\n\nHe could see her face clearly now: she wasn't amused. Ichor was the ethereal fluid that flowed through the veins of the gods. \"This is no time to be flippant,\" she snapped. \"The pursuit of archaeology requires rational thought and a step-by-step process.\"\n\n\"If you want me talk rationally, that's fine. The fact is, we won't know anything until someone just goes in there and inhales the gas.\"\n\n\"And you'd like to be that person, I suppose.\"\n\n\"I'm willing to try it, because I think we're wasting our time.\"\n\n\"No,\" she said firmly. \"That's not the way we're going to do it.\" Just then the vapors faded, turned wispy and vanished. Dorian noted the time. \"Where's the clipboard? Aren't you keeping track of the time?\"\n\n\"I left it in the hut, and I am keeping track.\" He told her the times the vapors had risen.\n\nDorian shook her head. \"Jones, if you're going to become an archaeologist, you have to learn patience. The age of the treasure-hunting archaeologist-adventurer is over. Archaeology is a slow, painstaking process. We study the most minute details, the fragments, the rubble, the garbage of the ages. That is how we advance our understanding of the past.\"\n\n\"I'm sure that's true. But in this case, we've got to look at the geological point of view. The longer we wait, the greater the chances of losing the tablet to an aftershock or another quake.\"\n\n\"I'm well aware of that.\" Her voice had gone hard and cold. \"Tomorrow morning, I'm going to tie a goat near the fissure and we'll watch its reactions.\"\n\n\"A goat?\" He laughed. \"That's appropriate.\" In the legend of the original Delphic Oracle, a goat had first inhaled the fumes of the rotting carcass of Python, and gone crazy. Later, shepherds discovered the fissure and many of them, intoxicated by the fumes, had fallen into the crevice.\n\n\"I thought you'd like that.\"\n\nBut Indy wasn't through challenging her. So what if she got angry with him. It would be better than being ignored. Ever since their arrival, she'd been cool towards him. Not only had she ceased being his lover, but she barely acknowledged him. He wondered if there was another man, possibly someone who lived in the village. After all, she'd worked here for years before moving to Paris.\n\n\"I bet you're hoping these gases are the real thing, that they cause people to go into trances and see the future.\"\n\n\"Jones, you're insolent and you also underestimate me. I have no preconceived notion about the vapors. I'm not trying to prove anything.\"\n\n\"What if the goat doesn't react?\"\n\n\"Then we'll get on with our business.\"\n\n\"Which is?\"\n\n\"I've decided that you should be the one to go down into the crevice. Of course, you don't have to do it if you don't want to. It's up to you, I'm giving you the first opportunity.\"\n\n\"I'll do it,\" he said without hesitating. \"The sooner the better.\"\n\n\"Good. I'm glad to hear it.\" Her dark eyes sought his, and he felt as if she were staring through him. In a softer voice, she added: \"I'm sorry if I've ignored you, but I've been very busy.\"\n\n\"That's understandable. I guess. Do you have many friends in the village?\"\n\n\"Why do you ask?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"You said you've been busy.\"\n\n\"Busy working, not socializing. If you haven't noticed, most of the villagers are very aloof from those of us who work at the ruins.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\"\n\n\"It's a tradition of sorts that goes back to when the village was moved from the ruins to allow us, the archaeologists, to excavate.\"\n\nShe smiled and was about to say something when he took a step closer to her and reached for her hand. She abruptly drew back, and addressed him in a formal voice. \"You can go to dinner now. The moussaka is great tonight. I'll take over the watch until morning.\"\n\nStill cold, he thought and even though she had warned him how she would act toward him, it still hurt. He watched as she retreated to the hut. He was about to leave, but decided to wait. He knew she wasn't quite through with him for the evening. It didn't take more than a few seconds.\n\n\"Jones,\" she yelled. \"Why is it smokey in here?\"\n\nHe walked over to the hut as she stepped out and told her what had happened.\n\nShe nodded, hands on her hips, and walked around the outside of the hut. Then she moved close to him. \"You should have let it burn,\" she whispered. She leaned forward, kissed him lightly on the lips, and the barrier that had risen between them wavered for a moment. \"You'd better go.\"\n\n\"All right. Let me get my books just in case the fire starts again.\"\n\nShe laughed, and he felt closer to her than he had since they had arrived. He stuffed the books into his canvas knapsack and paused at the entrance of the hut.\n\n\"You anxious about the king coming here?\"\n\n\"Anxious? Why no, I'm elated.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "TAVERNA INTRIGUE",
                "text": "As he ate dinner, Indy paged through his books, taking care not spill any of the spicy casserole onto the pages. Until the tablet was recovered and cleaned, he wanted to spend every spare moment studying old Greek script. He would prove to Dorian that her choice of an assistant was a worthwhile one.\n\nOccasionally, he picked up scraps of conversation from the villagers dining around him. Most of it was about the king's visit, how long it had been since he was last here, and possible reasons why he had waited for an earthquake to return. The villagers, for their part, cast curious glances Indy's way from time to time, but otherwise ignored him.\n\nAs he was finishing his dinner, he took out a pencil and made some calculations. If the vapors continued rising at the same intervals, they would appear again at 1:08 A.M., at 5:43 A.M., and then at 10:24 A.M. Dorian had said she would send the goat into the vapors early tomorrow. So 5:43 must be it, and he would be there. Nothing would keep him from missing it.\n\nIt was almost eleven when Indy gathered his books to leave. Despite the hour, several tables were still occupied. Across the street at the taverna, he heard the wail of a wind instrument he didn't recognize. He was tempted to go over for a drink, but he decided against it. Even though he'd spent hours doing very little during his stint in the hut, he was tired and ready for bed. Slinging his knapsack of books over one shoulder, he gazed upward at the twinkling constellations and headed down the road. He imagined himself an ancient Greek scholar en route to wondrous Delphi. And what would the ancient scholar learn from the oracle? That he would create a great work of scholarship, marry the daughter of a king, become a great teacher? But why wouldn't the bright young scholar realize that the oracle was a tool of the priests, that what he was told was nonsense? Probably because he didn't want to know, didn't want to pay the price of knowing.\n\nAs Indy was about to enter the Delphi Hotel, the door swung open and a slender but muscular kid of about fifteen stepped out. His hair was short-cropped; his features classical Greek. \"Hello, Nikos.\"\n\n\"Indy, you're not going to your room yet, are you? It's Saturday night. Come to the taverna with me.\" \"You're a little young, aren't you?\" His dark eyes darted about, taking in everything on the street. \"What do you mean?\" Nikos asked.\n\nIndy frowned at the kid. Back home it was illegal for anyone to drink. Here, a teenager was heading to the taverna at eleven o'clock. \"You like retsina?\"\n\n\"I don't drink,\" Nikos answered. \"My father won't let me. But I can still join the music and dancing. Please, come with me. You will see how we enjoy ourselves.\"\n\nNikos was a desk clerk at the hotel, which was owned by his father. He had grown up in the tiny village, but had been exposed to numerous foreigners and had learned English, German, and French.\n\nIndy glanced back toward the taverna, hesitating, butNikos insisted. \"Give me those books. I'll put them behind the counter. And you can have some fun, too.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Okay. But just for a few minutes.\" He handed the kid the knapsack and watched him disappear back into the hotel.\n\nIndy didn't want to offend Nikos. He was a valuable source of information, and almost the only person who said much of anything to him. Besides, a drink before bed would be fine, but one would be enough. He wanted to be in his room by midnight at the latest.\n\nNikos spoke English with Indy and asked a lot of questions about America. One time he'd wanted to know if it was true that there were cities with streets filled with automobiles, and if every house had a radio. Another time he'd asked if America was larger than Greece and Turkey together. Indy answered his questions as best he could, and in return Nikos had provided him with some inside information about what was going on in the village and at the ruins.\n\nFrom Nikos he'd learned that Dorian and Doumas had argued about him. Nikos hadn't heard everything, but had told him that Doumas had complained about his being unqualified to work at the ruins and that his presence was an offense to all Greek archaeologists. Doumas had been infuriated when Dorian had held her ground. Now Indy knew the reason for Doumas' outrage. She must have told him she wanted Indy to climb into the crevice and get the tablet.\n\n\"Let's go,\" Nikos said as he came out the door again, \"Tonight you will have some fun. Did you go to tavernas in Athens?\"\n\nIndy shook his head. \"Didn't have time.\"\n\n\"The best ones are at the Platia Phlomouson Hetairae.\" Nikos strode along beside him, swinging his arms.\n\n\"The square of the music-loving courtesans,\" Indy said.\n\n\"Yes. Your Greek is very good.\"\n\nAs they neared the taverna, Indy heard the faint but shrill whine he had heard earlier. \"What's that noise?\"\n\n\"That's not noise, Indy. That's music. It's an askomandra, you know, kind of like a bagpipe. But it's made from a sheep skin.\"\n\n\"Never heard of it. They play any jazz around here, kid?\"\n\n\"Jazz? What is jazz?\"\n\nIndy chuckled to himself. \"Guess not. Next time you're in Chicago, I'll take you to Dreamland to see the jazz bands.\"\n\n\"Dreamland is in America?\"\n\n\"Some people think so.\" Indy opened the door, and they entered the taverna.\n\n\"Good. I want to go to America,\" Nikos yelled above the cacophony.\n\nIn the center of the taverna, men were dancing in a circle of the thump of traditional Greek music and the wail of the askomandra. Indy glanced around, feeling out of place. But almost instantly a waiter in a white, blouselike shirt and vest appeared and handed him a drink.\n\n\"Ouzo,\" Nikos said when Indy held up the glass and looked at its clear contents.\n\n\"I was thinking about a beer.\"\n\nNikos gestured with his hand, moving it back and forth as he shook his head. \"No beer here. Only ouzo, retsina, raki and aretsinoto.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Indy said, and frowned at the drink. \"When in Delphi, do as the dolphins.\"\n\nSeveral men around them watched Indy. \"He's fromAmerica,\" Nikos announced loudly. They nodded, and gestured with their glasses as if showing him how to drink.\n\nWhen he took a swallow of the anise-flavored drink, twoof the men slapped him on the back, as though congratulating him on some rite of passage. Nikos looked on proudly.\n\nOne of the men, who was elderly and wore a battered Greek sailor cap, stepped forward and mumbled something to him. Indy shook his head, unable to hear him above the din.\n\nNikos leaned close to Indy's ear, and spoke loudly. \"He's a crazy old man. He talks about the old gods.\"\n\n\"What did he say?\"\n\nNikos shook his head.\n\nBut the old man was insistent. He tapped Indy on the chest and spoke again. Indy glanced at Nikos.\n\n\"Something about Pythia.\"\n\n\"What about Pythia?\"\n\nNikos spoke to the old man, who glanced at Indy, and mumbled again.\n\n\"Well, what is it?\" Indy asked when Nikos didn't say anything.\n\n\"I told you he is a crazy old man. They call him the Crazy One.\"\n\n\"But what did he say?\" Indy demanded.\n\n\"He says Pythia has you in her grasp and. . .\"\n\n\"And what?\"\n\n\"... and she will swallow you like a little mouse. That is what he said.\"\n\nIndy grinned and leaned down to Nikos. \"Tell him I haven't met her yet. But when I meet the daughter of a snake, you can bet I'll know it.\"\n\nAnother old Greek moved in front of the Crazy One, clasped Indy on the shoulder, and spoke in a slurred voice. Nikos said: \"He invited you to visit his home to sample his homemade retsina.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\" Indy smiled and nodded at the old man. \"The stuff tastes horrible.\"\n\nThe man, who didn't understand a word, nodded in agreement.\n\nIndy and Nikos both laughed. \"A friendly bunch here,\" Indy said, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth, his smile faded. The circle of dancing men broke up and dispersed, and he suddenly had a better view of the other side of the taverna. Seated at a table near the wall was Doumas, and with him was a familiar looking man with curly hair. The sight of the man made Indy feel uneasy, and he tried to recall where he'd seen him. Then he knew. He was one of the men who had chased him and Dorian at the Acropolis. He was sure of it.\n\n\"Nikos, who is that talking with Doumas?\"\n\nNikos craned his neck. \"His name is Panos. He is from Athens, but he was born here. He comes to visit his mother. He brings his son with him.\"\n\n\"How does Doumas know him?\"\n\n\"Stephanos knows everyone.\"\n\nHe wanted to see how the man would react to him and suggested they go over and greet Doumas.\n\nNikos shook his head. \"I don't think that is a good idea.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Panos is not friendly, especially to people like you, foreigners I mean.\"\n\n\"Well, it's a big world. He'll have to get over that.\" Indy worked his way through the crowd, but Doumas spotted him and rose to his feet, stepping between him and Panos.\n\nWhen Indy had first arrived, Doumas had made a point of showing off his knowledge of Delphi, and archaeology in general, at every opportunity. Then, by the second day, when he found out that Indy was not even an archaeology graduate student, he had simply ignored him.\n\n\"Evening, Stephanos,\" he said casually. \"Who's your friend? Don't think we've formally met.\"\n\n\"Mind your own business, Jones.\"\n\nIndy shrugged. \"Okay.\" He started to turn, but instead sidestepped around the rotund archaeologist, and pulled Panos to his feet.\n\n\"Hi there.\"\n\nThe man looked surprised. He shook his head. \"No English.\"\n\nIndy poked him in the chest. \"I know you,\" he said as the music started up again. \"We were playing tag at the Acropolis just the other day.\"\n\nDoumas grabbed Indy by the shoulder. \"Jones, what the hell are you doing?\" he shouted over the music.\n\nHe jabbed an elbow into Doumas's gut, and shrugged out of his grip. \"You were chasing me and my friend. Why?\" He spoke slowly and loudly, but Panos just shook his head again and tried to wrench his arm free.\n\n\"Indy, watch out,\" Nikos yelled, but it was too late. Indy saw a blur out of the corner of his eye. It wasn't Doumas, but someone else, younger, slender\u2014and in that instant the newcomer's fist slammed solidly into Indy's jaw.\n\nHe staggered back, crashing through a new circle of stomping dancers. Someone caught him under the arms; he was turned around and pushed away. Voices shouted in Greek, and the wailing askomandra wrapped around him. Fragments of faces leered. Eyes and noses shifted positions like a cubist portrait. Then he saw the man again, a younger version of Panos. The stranger pulled back his arm for another punch, but this time Indy reacted faster, and crashed his fist into the man's nose.\n\nNikos suddenly was at his side. \"Come, fast, we mustgo.\"\n\nIndy was almost out the door when the skin rose on the back of his neck as he heard a commotion behind him. He turned to see the man he'd struck charging toward him, a knife raised above his head. The man slashed as Indy raised his forearm, but his blow fell short as Doumas's meaty arms wrapped around the assailant. He was lifted off his feet, spun around, and pulled away.\n\nIndy looked around, and saw everyone in the taverna staring at him. He smiled weakly. \"I think it's past my bedtime.\" He backed out the door, and felt his jaw.\n\nNikos hurried to his side as he walked away. \"Are you all right, Indy?\"\n\n\"Think so. Are the tavernas in Athens this much fun, kid?\"\n\n\"Jones,\" a deep voice called out. Indy turned and saw Doumas standing at the door of the taverna. His face was red and sweaty, and he was jabbing a finger at him. \"You don't belong here. If you want to see Paris again, stay out of Greek business.\"\n\nIndy unlocked the door of his hotel room, opened it a few inches, and laid his books on the floor. He glanced over his shoulder, making sure Nikos hadn't followed him. Then, instead of going inside, he slammed the door shut, and moved down the hallway to the back stairs. Outside, he walked around the side to the hotel stable and mounted one of the camp's horses.\n\nHe had to get to the ruins as quickly as possible. Delphi was a trap. Doumas must be part of the conspiracy against Dorian and her father, and he had to tell her. They had to get away from here, and there was no time to waste.\n\nHe couldn't take the road through the village; he would have to pass by the taverna and Doumas or one of the others might see him. He directed the horse around the back of the stable to a narrow trail that led through the woods. He'd only taken the winding path once, and that had been during the day with Nikos. He knew he would have to rely on the horse's own savvy to find its way back home.\n\nAs Indy cantered along, the darkness closed around him like a blindfold. He could see no more than a couple of feet ahead of the horse. The trail rose steeply, then fell, and rose again. He rocked back in the saddle, gripping the reins, and slowed the horse to a trot.\n\n\"Easy, boy. Just follow the road.\"\n\nSuddenly, the trail plunged downward, and the horse skidded sideways and whinnied. \"Whoa, whoa,\" Indy yelled, pulling in the reins.\n\nThis was a mistake, a big mistake, he told himself. But he wasn't turning back now. He'd make it. Somehow. As if in response to his thoughts, the horse abruptly stopped. \"What's wrong, boy?\"\n\nThen Indy saw that the path divided, and the horse was waiting for directions. \"Hey, I don't know. Just head for camp. You know, your stable.\"\n\nThe horse blew out its nose, shook its head, and pawed the ground. But it didn't move either way. Just then Indy heard a noise behind him. He turned his head and listened. There it was again. The sound of a horse moving toward them on the trail.\n\nChrist. They were following him. Move.\n\nHe jerked the head of the horse to the left, touched its sides, and shook the rein. The horse broke into a trot, and climbed the incline. They must have seen him leaving the hotel and realized what he was doing. This was definitely no place for a confrontation, and it was probably just what they wanted. No witnesses. Real pretty. Boy, am I a sucker, he thought as he heard his pursuers closing in on him.\n\nMaybe he should get off the horse, and send it down the trail. They'd chase the horse, and he could get away. Good idea, he told himself, but just as he was about to dismount, the reins slipped from his hands. He fumbled for them in the darkness, but couldn't find them.\n\n\"Hell with it,\" he said aloud, and started to dismount the moving horse. But at that moment, the path rose, and a thick branch caught him squarely across the forehead, knocking him out of the saddle. He tumbled through the darkness and crashed with a thud to the ground.\n\nHe gasped for breath; heard hoofbeats. He rolled onto his stomach, then stumbled to his feet. He wobbled one step, another, then dropped to his knees. He tried to rise again, but fell backwards. Far overhead, constellations spun in tight, mad circles. He closed his eyes, shutting it all out, and lost consciousness.\n\nA voice. \"Indy, are you all right?\"\n\nHe blinked his eyes open and saw Nikos. \"Where'd they go? They were after me, and\u2014\"\n\n\"It was me. I was trying to catch up to you. I almost rode right over you.\"\n\n\"I feel like you did.\"\n\n\"Can you walk?\"\n\nHe sat up and rubbed his head. \"Who knows. Don't think I broke anything.\"\n\nNikos helped him to his feet. \"Why were you going back to the ruins at night?\"\n\n\"I've got to talk to Dr. Belecamus. Where's the horse?\"\n\n\"Over here,\" Nikos said, motioning down the trail. \"But you turned the wrong way. You won't get to the ruins on this path.\"\n\n\"Show me the way.\" Indy brushed himself off and walked over to the horse.\n\n\"Indy, I think you should watch out for Dr. Belecamus.\"\n\n\"Watch out for her? Why?\"\n\n\"Because of who she is. You don't know everything about her.\"\n\n\"You're right, I don't.\" He recalled what Dorian had said about the villagers' attitude toward her. \"Let's talk about it sometime. Right now though I've got to get to the ruins.\"\n\nHe untied the horse from a tree, and slung his leg over the saddle.\n\n\"Listen to me.\" Nikos hurried after him. \"It is dangerous for you to be close to her.\"\n\nIndy turned and stared down at him. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\nNikos moved nearer and gripped the reins of Indy's horse. \"The Oracle is coming back, and they say Dr. Belecamus is Pythia.\"\n\n\"Who says that?\"\n\n\"Those men in the taverna. Panos, his son, Grigoris, also Doumas, I think. They are all in the Order.\"\n\nIndy shook his head. \"What order?\"\n\n\"The Order of Pythia. They are the keepers of the old knowledge.\"\n\n\"And why do they think Belecamus is Pythia?\"\n\n\"The old man in the taverna, the Crazy One, is the oldest member of the Order, and many years ago he predicted that Pythia would return. He said it would happen after the earth shook and before the king arrived.\"\n\n\"Swell. But that doesn't answer my question. Why is Belecamus the new Pythia?\"\n\n\"The Crazy One said that Pythia would be a Dorian.\"\n\n\"A Dorian? How many are there?\"\n\nThen he remembered something he'd recently read. The Dorians were an invading tribe whose name was synonymous with the Greek Dark Ages around 1000 B.C. They had displaced the mother goddess with male deities, and their influence may have been the reason that Apollo had come into power at Delphi. There had been lots of Dorians, and Belecamus had nothing to do with them. Yet, she definitely was a \"Dorian.\"\n\n\"For years, no one said much about the prophecy,\" Nikos explained. \"But then after the earthquake, Doumas contacted Dorian Belecamus, and when she said she would return, Panos was sure the prophecy was about to come true.\"\n\n\"Do you believe it?\"\n\nNikos looked up at Indy, surprised. \"No one ever asks me about such things. But I thought it was just crazy talk until I heard the king was coming. You see, it fits.\"\n\n\"How do you know so much about what's going on?\" he asked suspiciously.\n\nNikos smiled, and leaned closer. \"That is what I do. I watch, and I listen. There is much to hear and see. Otherwise, it would be very boring here for me.\"\n\n\"That's nice, Nikos. But whether Dorian is Pythia or not, I've got to talk to her. Those men are a threat.\"\n\n\"No. You don't understand. They are not interested in harming her. They want to protect her.\"\n\n\"Protect her? From what?\"\n\n\"From outsiders. Like you.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "IN THE MIST",
                "text": "In the first gray light of dawn, a surly little goat climbed the mound of ancient rubble. It hung its head, shaking it from side to side as though it had no control over its neck muscles. As it reached the top, it leaned forward, straining on its fetter. From where Indy and Nikos stood on the Sacred Way a couple of hundred feet from the mound, it was difficult to tell whether the goat wanted to leap across the crevice, or into it. It was 5:40 A.M., and the vapors were due to rise in three minutes. No doubt the aggressive creature would get a good whiff.\n\nIndy glanced toward Dorian and Doumas, who were chatting amicably, as if they were the best of friends. He thought about the trouble he had gone to last night just to reach her, and all for nothing. He had rushed to the hut and told her about the men in the taverna and what he'd found out about the Order of Pythia. Dorian had listened quietly until he was finished, then said she was relieved that the mystery of the two men was solved. Now they could go about their business.\n\nIndy was dumbfounded by her attitude. She wasn't concerned about the organization, and thought it was amusing that they would consider her to be Pythia. She had known about the group for years, she said. It was just part of the village culture and folklore and the men were harmless. She also knew that Doumas had taken an interest in the Order; in fact, she'd encouraged it, since it provided a link between the village and the scientists.\n\nIndy had returned to the hotel feeling like a popped balloon. He was confused, but he realized Nikos was probably right, the Order was more concerned with him, the outsider, than Dorian, the supposed Pythia. As if to show his concern, Nikos had begged Indy to allow him to come along this morning. Reluctantly, he'd asked Dorian for permission, and she'd agreed, stipulating that he be responsible for the boy.\n\nDoumas suddenly shouted and pointed toward the fissure. Indy looked up, expecting to see the vapors. For a moment, he couldn't tell why Doumas was so excited. Then he realized that the goat had pulled its stake loose and was pacing precariously along the edge of the chasm. \"I'll get him,\" Nikos called out, and climbed over the rope blocking the entrance.\n\n\"No, just leave him,\" Indy shouted. \"Stay away from there.\"\n\nBut Nikos had already darted toward the base of the rubble heap. \"Goddamn it, Nikos.\" Indy chased after him, but stopped several paces short of the mound. Nikos was crouched within a couple of feet of the rope.\n\n\"Easy boy. Easy,\" Nikos said, edging closer as the goat stared down into the abyss. He was about to grab the rope when a low rumble erupted, followed by an ethereal, haunted hiss. Oh, God, another earthquake, Indy thought, then realized he'd heard something similar, but fainter, last night when the vapors had risen.\n\nThe goat lost its footing. It slid forward toward the crevice. Nikos lunged, grabbed the end of the rope, and pulled. The sudden tug knocked the animal off its feet, but an instant later it was up and scrambling to the top of the rubble again. Beyond the goat, the first tendrils of vapors rose skyward.\n\nIndy rushed to Nikos' side and grabbed the rope from him. \"Stay down,\" he ordered.\n\nHe was about to yank the animal down from the pile, when he remembered their intentions. He huddled low, covering his nose and mouth. He glanced up once and saw the goat standing motionless, enshrouded in a thick, white mist. Its head was bent down and moving slowly from side to side.\n\nThen, without warning, the goat bucked, and the rope snapped out of Indy's hand. He watched it snake away, and looked up to see the goat performing a strange dance, spinning in circles, contorting its body in odd, unlikely positions. It kicked its hoofs, front, then back. It dropped to its knees, and pounded its horns into the ground.\n\nNikos suddenly bolted up the mound after the rope. \"Get back here,\" Indy yelled, but it was too late. The vapors were thickening, and Nikos vanished into the mist with the goat.\n\nThe mist flowed over the rubble and wafted toward him. It was almost as if the vapors were sentient and aware of his position. Indy didn't know whether to go after Nikos, or back away. Then, as quickly as he'd disappeared, Nikos emerged out of the mist, and they both fled the temple.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" Dorian asked, looking between Indy and Nikos.\n\n\"Where's the goat?\" Doumas demanded.\n\n\"The goat was dancing,\" Nikos said. \"I almost got its rope, but it jumped right into the hole.\"\n\n\"Are you sure? Maybe it's made it to the other side,\" Doumas said.\n\n\"Why did you let him go up there?\" Dorian glared accusingly at Indy.\n\n\"I did it on my own,\" Nikos said. \"It's my fault. I wanted to show you that I could save the goat.\"\n\nThe mist finally dissipated, but the goat was nowhere in sight. They climbed the mound and Indy followed Nikos around to the far side, and peered into the narrow gully. It was empty. Then they were sure. The goat was lost.\n\nDorian laid a hand on Nikos's shoulder after they crossed back to the other side. \"It's all right. Did you breathe the vapors?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I don't think so. I held my breath.\"\n\n\"Good.\" She stared into the abyss. \"It's a shame, though, about the goat. Now we won't be able to tell whether its reaction was temporary fright or the actual effects of the vapors.\"\n\n\"I think it was just frightened,\" Indy said. \"Just pulling on the rope the way Nikos did might have caused the goat to react that way.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Dorian said. \"But you can't be sure.\" The doubt in her voice was clear. It seemed to him that Dorian was trying to convince herself that the vapors caused some effect.\n\n\"The only way we're going to find out for certain that the vapor is harmless is for one of us to inhale some of it,\" Indy said.\n\nDorian nodded. \"I agree. Next time the vapors rise, I'll do it myself.\"\n\n\"You will?\" Now Indy, who last night had been ready to inhale the vapors, wasn't so sure it was a good idea.\n\n\"It's time to end the speculation. Besides, I wouldn't do it if I really thought it was harmful.\"\n\nShe turned and strode down the mound and away from the temple.\n\nIndy looked at Doumas, expecting him to protest. But he simply stared after her. In about four and a half hours, they would know.\n\nPanos's expression was fixed with grim determination as he strode along the unpaved, tree-lined road with Grigoris at his side. The confrontation with the foreigner Jones had unnerved him, but it had also pushed him into making a decision. He knew it was time. Dorian Belecamus must be confronted. She must be told. She must be made to understand.\n\nHe squinted against the sun, which at midmorning had risen above the mountain's peak. They passed the turnoff to the stable and workshop, and continued ahead a short distance until they reached a trail where an ancient wall had once surrounded Delphi. The trail would take them above the sacred precinct, and they would make their approach from the steps of the theater, which overlooked Apollo's Temple. It was a longer route, but no one would see their arrival.\n\n\"She won't listen, Father,\" Grigoris said as he hurried alongside Panos. \"She is an intellectual. She will laugh at you. She will think you are a silly peasant with superstitious ideas.\"\n\n\"Is that what you think, too?\"\n\nPanos was confident that his son was deeply committed to the Order, but nonetheless he tested him from time to time.\n\nGrigoris hesitated before he spoke. \"If I had grown up in Athens and attended one of the colleges, I am sure that is what I would think.\"\n\nPanos gave him a sharp look of rebuke. He had taught his son to answer questions directly, not with obscure comments.\n\n\"But I know too much,\" he quickly continued. \"I am not as shortsighted as the intellectuals. I am open to what they would find unacceptable.\"\n\nPanos nodded in agreement. It was the answer he had hoped Grigoris would give; he beamed with pride. Someday his son would lead the Order of Pythia. As the high priest of Delphi, and emissary of Apollo, he would grow into a determined, disciplined man. But first he must learn to understand and control his darker emotions. If he failed to do so, Panos knew that the years he had spent preparing his son for his role would be lost.\n\nWhenever he became concerned about Grigoris's temperament, he thought about the Olympian gods. They behaved at times as poorly as his son. They were a tempestuous lot, who had come to power through a brutal struggle with their predecessors, the Titans. Apollo, in particular, showed the same sort of aggressiveness that Grigoris did. When Apollo was consulted at Delphi about the viability of undertaking a war, more often than not he had recommended invading the enemy.\n\nThe trail turned and they emerged just above the bowl of stone benches that formed the old amphitheater. Below, the temple was blanketed in mist, the way it was in early morning. He could barely see the columns. But this was no ordinary fog; it was too late in the morning. It was the mephitic gases\u2014ichor, the vapors of the gods\u2014welcoming him. Somehow, he had known that the vapors would be rising as he arrived. They were another sign the timing was right.\n\nHe gazed a moment at the thatched hut outside the temple, between the Sacred Way and the place where the Sanctuary of Poseidon had once stood. Doumas had told him that it was built in such a way that several men could carry it to the edge of the fissure where he and Pythia would hold court for the king and others who requested their service. Later, when Delphi's renaissance was widely recognized, there would be plenty of money available to build a new temple. As far as Panos was concerned, the remains of the old buildings could be cleared away for the new.\n\nMore than anything, Panos was anxious to hear Pythia speak. He knew he would instantly recognize what others heard only as babbling. The cryptic language of the gods was the legacy of the Order. It wasn't taught like an ordinary language, but learned at a deeper level. For sixteen hundred years, generation after generation, century after century, the Order had served as the caretaker of the sacred knowledge and the secrets. At times, the Order had fallen to one or two members, but always the knowledge and the secrets had survived.\n\nPanos had no doubt that the gods had watched over the Order, guiding its members, always instilling them with the understanding that the Oracle would return one day to the world. The gods and destiny after all were one, and the return of Pythia was inextricable. Now, at last, after all the centuries of awaiting, the new epoch was about to begin.\n\nAt that moment, he saw Dorian Belecamus\u2014Pythia\u2014 walking away from the hut. He stopped and watched as she entered the temple and disappeared into the mist. He wanted to shout for joy. He had puzzled over how he would draw her into the vapors to prove to her that she was truly Pythia. But she was doing it on her own, and that made him even more confident that everything was working out just as it was meant.\n\nHe hurried down the stone steps, Grigoris just a step behind him, and as they neared the base of the theater two more figures moved into view, trailing after Pythia. \"They're going into the temple,\" Grigoris shouted.\n\nThen, before Panos could tell him to watch and wait, Grigoris called out to Doumas. He and Indy stopped and turned toward the theater.\n\n\"You have no sense of caution,\" Panos snapped, even though as he said it he knew Grigoris was right. It was time to act, not watch.\n\n\"Panos,\" Doumas yelled. He waved his hands frantically. Grigoris charged ahead, and Panos hurried to keep up with his son. When they reached him, Doumas explained what they already knew. Belecamus was in the mist and there was no sign of her. Jones stood several steps away and watched them with curiosity. If the incident at the taverna had frightened him, he didn't show it.\n\nGrigoris stepped between Jones and the temple. \"I'll watch him, Father.\"\n\n\"What's going on?\" Jones demanded.\n\n\"None of your business,\" Doumas said. \"Do not forget what I told you last night.\"\n\nGrigoris took a step closer as if to reaffirm that he was the one who had attacked Jones.\n\nPanos turned his attention back to the temple, and asked Doumas the exact location of the fissure. The wide-girthed archaeologist waddled forward and pointed. Just then an eerie shriek pierced the veil of mist. The sound sent shivers up and down Panos's spine.\n\n\"Stay here and wait for me,\" Panos said, and rushed toward the temple. He climbed over a rope and the remains of the wall, and hastened toward a mound of rubble that was partially enveloped in the mist. He knew that the vapors would only affect those who were susceptible to trance states and that as a priest of the Order he was protected. Still, he took a deep breath and held it as he climbed the mound.\n\nHe reached the top and glanced around. No sign of her. He expelled his breath, and cautiously sniffed at the air. There was no odor to the mist, and no immediate effect. He took a step forward and gazed down into the yawning mouth of the abyss. His heart plunged in his chest as he realized that the scream he had heard might have been her last utterance as Pythia plummeted into the void. There would be no return. Not in his lifetime. Belecamus was the one; no one else could replace her now. But how could he have been so wrong?\n\nHe suddenly felt dizzy, the way he would if he stood quickly after drinking a couple of glasses of retsina. Dizzy, yet his head was clear. He felt acutely aware, and sensed that something was about to happen. Cautiously, he took a step back from the chasm; a hand gripped his elbow. He turned, startled, and jerked his arm free. It was Belecamus and her hands were raised as if she were about to shove him into the hole. Then he saw her face. Her eyes were rolled back, her mouth hung open, and her tongue lolled to one side.\n\nHe gaped, astonished. \"Do you know who you are?\"\n\nHer mouth moved, her head rocked back and forth, but no words came out.\n\n\"You are Pythia. You must understand. The Oracle is returning, and you are Pythia.\"\n\nShe took a wavering step forward, shook her head from side to side. Her jaw was working up and down, but no sound came out. Then, with a wild burst of energy, she whirled in a circle, flailing her arms, and tottered near the edge of the crevice. She was going to jump.\n\nPanos grasped her firmly around the waist, pulling her back. \"You must accept; you must accept.\"\n\nShe rocked back and forth in his arms. Then, from deep within her, a wail rose, a bellow of uncontrollable pain, of a mother giving birth. She shuddered violently and collapsed.\n\nPanos lifted her, and as he did, he realized that the air was clearing. He carried her away, knowing that the transformation was complete. Dorian Belecamus was Pythia, and the next time the vapors rose she would be drawn into the mist again and he would be there, her guide, her interpreter, and her voice to the world."
            },
            {
                "title": "READINGS",
                "text": "Dorian stood beside a bench in the platia overlooking the valley. She was wearing a cotton peasant dress instead of the baggy pants she'd worn since they'd arrived. Her hands were braced against her hips. As Indy crossed the park toward her, she reminded him of a Greek statue.\n\nHe stopped a few feet away and cleared his throat. \"How are you feeling today?\"\n\n\"Much better.\" She didn't turn her gaze from the valley.\n\nThe intensity in her eyes led Indy to believe she was watching something in particular. But all he could see was scenery. Great scenery, yes, but nothing that he or anyone else would stare at like she was. \"What do you see down there?\" he asked quietly.\n\nShe didn't hesitate. \"History... culture... the past.\" Her voice was soft, distant.\n\nIndy glanced out over the valley. It had been two days since Panos had carried her from the temple. She had slept for eleven hours and when she awakened, a doctor examined her, but found nothing wrong. He'd said she was probably suffering from stress and overwork and needed a rest. However, by noon the following day, she'd gone to the workshop, which was near the ruins, and had stayed until nine.\n\nShe seemed detached, as if only part of her were present. Was it just exhaustion, or the vapors? He'd been thinking a lot about it. It was both, he'd decided. She must have been fighting off exhaustion for days, and the vapors, or at least Dorian's suspicions about them, had triggered her collapse, a nervous breakdown.\n\n\"Well, Jones,\" she said, turning away from the valley. \"We can't just spend our entire morning in the park. We've got work to do.\"\n\n\"You sure you're up to it?\"\n\nShe straightened her back. \"I'm feeling fine. Make that great. I'm feeling great.\"\n\nThe sudden change in her mood, her energy, surprised him. It was as if she'd just awakened from a dream. \"What are we going to do?\"\n\nShe looked at him as if he'd lost his mind. \"Don't you know that we have to get the tablet out of the fissure as soon as possible? We've wasted too much time as it is. I want the tablet cleaned and on display by the time the king arrives the day after tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Aren't you rushing things a bit? I thought archaeology was slow and detailed work.\"\n\nShe smiled at him. \"It is, but we have an emergency. Every hour that tablet remains in the crevice, the danger of losing it increases.\" Now she was sounding as anxious as he had been before she walked into the vapors.\n\n\"Why do you want to show it to the king?\" he asked. \"Don't you think his trip here might be a way of harassing you for coming back?\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Come on now.\"\n\n\"What's so funny?\"\n\n\"The king may be petty, but he doesn't change his plans and take emergency trips because of someone like me. I really doubt that he even knows I'm here.\"\n\n\"You don't think there's any danger now from your family's political enemies?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"No, especially not in Delphi.\n\nDon't worry. We're safe, and when the king sees the new find, he'll see that even earthquakes have a good side to them.\"\n\nIndy shrugged, still perplexed by the sudden urgency to remove the tablet and her benign attitude toward the king. \"So what do you want me to do?\"\n\n\"Everything is being prepared. You'll be making the descent right at noon.\"\n\n\"What about the vapors?\" he asked.\n\nShe brushed her mane of thick dark hair off her shoulders. \"I've taken them into account. This morning they rose at 9:03 A.M., five hours and thirty-five minutes after the last rising, an increase of six minutes in the interval. The same pattern.\"\n\nHe took out his pocket watch, and started to calculate the next rising.\n\nShe watched him a moment, then said: \"At 2:44. You'll have plenty of time. All you have to do is set the net in place over the tablet, and chip away the earth at the base of it.\"\n\n\"What if the vapors start early?\" He was curious about her reaction, since she'd said little about her experience.\n\n\"We have no reason to believe that they won't continue to follow the pattern,\" she answered, evading the intent of his question.\n\nIndy glanced at his pocket watch again, then put it away. It was 10:35. He wondered what they were going to do until noon. \"I suppose I should get some rest before noon. You going back to the hotel?\" If she recognized his sly overture, she didn't show it.\n\n\"I said we have work to attend to, Jones. Let's go to the workshop, I want to go over the tools with you.\"\n\nShe walked at a quick pace toward the hotel where the horses were hitched. \"Coming, Jones?\" she called over her shoulder.\n\nHe tugged at his fedora, and strode after her.\n\n\"Hey, what about Doumas?\" Indy asked as they mounted their horses.\n\nShe frowned. \"What about him?\"\n\n\"I heard he was against my going down for the tablet.\"\n\nShe waved a hand. \"Oh, he's over that now. It was just a matter of wounded pride.\"\n\nIndy nodded, but he couldn't help thinking about Doumas's connection with the Order of Pythia. As they rode out of town, he wondered if the archaeologist was as interested as Panos and his son in protecting Dorian from outsiders. If so, going into the crevice with him anywhere in the area could be dangerous. But Doumas was also interested in the tablet, he rationalized, and probably would do nothing to endanger its recovery.\n\nThey'd ridden almost halfway to the workshop when Indy spotted a lone figure standing on the roadside. As they neared him, he saw it was the old man in the Greek sailor hat who had talked to him in the taverna. The Crazy One. With everything else that had happened since that night, he'd forgotten about him. He tried to recall what the man had said to him. Something about Pythia. She would swallow him. That was it. Now it meant considerably more than it had at the time. Still, it was probably just an old-timer's barroom babble.\n\nThe old man stared as they cantered by. \"Do you know him?\" Indy asked.\n\nShe smiled, and it was obvious that she did. \"He's no one to be concerned about.\"\n\n\"I've heard he's a member of the Order of Pythia, and that he's made predictions.\"\n\nShe laughed, and shook her head. \"Maybe that's why he's known as the village fool. No one takes him seriously.\" As if to tell him she didn't want to talk about the old man any longer, she prodded the sides of her horse and galloped ahead.\n\nIndy chased her all the way to the stable where they left the horses, then walked to the nearby workshop. It was a wood frame building that looked on the inside like a dusty, poorly lit library. But instead of books, the rows of shelves held artifacts. As far as he could tell, none was the type of ancient handiwork that would interest treasure hunters. No gold, silver, or valuable stones. No sign of a single piece of the vast treasure that Croesus had donated for a single reading: one hundred seventeen bricks of precious metals, a gold lion weighing five hundred seventy pounds, a four-and-a-half foot statue of his pastry cook, and a variety of other treasures. The entire fortune had long ago vanished, claimed by emperors and kings and others. Nero alone had stolen five hundred gold statues from Delphi.\n\nMost of the shelves were stacked with row after row of hand-size tablets on which were inscribed ancient readings. A dozen or so were laid out on the long table where Dorian did most of her work. \"Been catching up on your reading?\" Indy asked as he ran his fingers over one of the tablets.\n\n\"I read a couple of hundred tablets yesterday,\" she said.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"I haven't read any of them for years. It's good to refresh myself from time to time on the nature of the readings.\"\n\nIndy picked up one of the tablets, and translated the ancient Greek. It was a mundane reading regarding a merchant's plans to sell six hundred bales of wool to a new customer. The oracle had told him to hold firm on his price, then drop it slightly before sealing the bargain, and he would establish a strong, profitable relationship with the customer that would last years.\n\nHe laid the tablet down, wondering what Dorian could gain from reading such material. Maybe it was simply a way of relaxing after her breakdown. He was interested in hearing about her experience, but the only time he'd broached the subject, she had said nothing to reveal her thoughts about the matter.\n\nHe watched her as she removed a shoulder bag from a locker, and carried it over to the table. She spread out six picks with heads of different lengths, and explained that all of them originally had been the same size, but were worn by use.\n\n\"Many archaeologists prefer to use trowels because they cause less damage to artifacts. But I've found that if you're careful, the pick is a much handier tool. Go ahead and take one.\"\n\nIndy ran the point of the one he selected over his palm. \"You sure I won't damage the tablet?\"\n\n\"Not unless you hit it. Take your time and work around the base. From what's visible I'd say that about six to eight inches of it is buried. You don't have to go very close to it.\"\n\n\"Why did they use large tablets sometimes, and smaller ones other times?\" he asked.\n\n\"Most of the readings were recorded on small ones. But important readings that were not for one individual, but for everyone, were sometimes inscribed on larger tablets like the one you'll recover.\"\n\nIndy pointed to a set of brushes inside her bag, and asked if he would need one. She shook her head. \"The tablet will be cleaned after it is out of the hole.\"\n\nShe reached into the bag, and picked up a brush with wiry bristles. \"But take, this one just in case you hit something unexpected. And before I forget here is a torch holder and a mallet to pound it into the wall.\"\n\nAs Indy placed each of the tools into his knapsack, Dorian looked around as if she were missing something. \"Stephanos must have taken the ropes and net already. One rope goes around you, of course, and the other is for the tablet. Cover the tablet with the net as soon as you're down, and then attach the hooks at the opening to the loop at the end of the rope.\"\n\n\"I think I can handle that.\" The way she was treating him was annoying. Maybe he didn't have experience, but he wasn't an imbecile, and he knew how to attach hooks to a rope.\n\n\"Any questions?\"\n\n\"Don't think so.\"\n\nShe pursed her lips, he couldn't read her expression. \"This may seem very elementary to you, but what I've been telling you can make a difference between success and failure. I don't want you to get down there and not know what to do or worse, do it the wrong way.\"\n\n\"How long should it take?\"\n\n\"You're not going to be able to work comfortably dangling at the end of a rope for very long. We'll pull you up after forty-five minutes. Then, if you're up to it, we'll send you down again after a fifteen-minute rest.\"\n\n\"Maybe I'll finish the first time down.\"\n\nShe grinned. \"Don't count on it. Working in that position won't be easy. If you haven't finished by the second period, we'll wait until after the vapors have cleared, and try again around three o'clock.\"\n\n\"So the vapors are dangerous?\"\n\nShe zipped her shoulder bag shut. \"It would be difficult working in the vapors. Don't you think?\"\n\nShe was hedging, he thought. \"Yes, especially if they are dangerous.\"\n\nShe carried the bag over to her locker, and put it away. It was time to press her. \"What do you remember?\"\n\nShe walked back, and stopped in front of him. \"Pardon me?\"\n\n\"In the vapors. What happened?\"\n\nHer eyes shifted from him to the row of tablets on the table. \"I'm not sure, Indy.\" Her was voice was suddenly weary. \"I guess I've been avoiding thinking too much about it.\"\n\nIt was the first time she'd called him Indy since they'd arrived in Delphi. \"It might be a good idea to remember.'\n\nShe nodded, and slowly turned to face him. \"I remember entering the mist, inhaling and thinking that there was nothing mephitic at all about it. That it was harmless. In fact, now that I think about it, I felt good, better than I have for a very long time.\"\n\n\"But you passed out.\"\n\n\"I don't remember anything else.\"\n\n\"Maybe you were reacting to your relief that the vapors were harmless,\" he suggested. \"You were tired, you overworked yourself, and that's all it took.\"\n\n\"That's possible, I suppose, but I'm not the fainting sort. The other explanation, of course, is that the vapors were the cause.\"\n\nIndy made a face. More than ever he suspected Dorian was prone to the same sort of fascination with the mystical that consumed his father. \"Think about it. If the vapors were dangerous, then the man who carried you out\u2014 Panos\u2014would have suffered a similar reaction. I'm sure he didn't hold his breath like Nikos. He was in there too long.\"\n\nA floorboard creaked behind them, and they both turned. Doumas was standing inside the doorway. \"It's almost noon, Dr. Belecamus.\"\n\nDorian straightened, and nodded. \"Yes. I think we're ready.\"\n\nDorian watched the top of Jones's fedora vanish into the fissure as Doumas and two of his assistants slowly threaded the rope through their hands. Soon they would have the tablet. It might prove interesting, but was probably nothing of consequence.\n\nThe excavation of Delphi, for all practical matters, was over. Anything that was found would probably only reaffirm what was already known. Of course, she hadn't told that to Jones, and in his naivete he had followed her here thinking that he would be involved in a major discovery. But Jones would play an important role, and soon. He had no idea how important.\n\nAlex's ally in the king's office had done his job perfectly. Everything had worked out fine. The king had been persuaded. If anything, she was surprised with the swiftness of the decision.\n\nYet, she was having a hard time focusing on Alex's mission. Which was exactly it, she thought. Alex's mission, not hers, not really.\n\nThe vapors had changed everything. By the time she had walked into the vapors, the mystery of the oracle had dominated her thoughts. That in itself was odd. She had never really thought of the oracle as a mystery. It was a phenomenon of ancient times, of a prescientific era. Yet now she saw it as something more, as a phenomenon with a future as well as a past.\n\nBut maybe this was all wrong. Was it really possible that she could be Pythia? She needed to talk to Panos. That was critical. But she had to make sure that no one saw them.\n\n\"Can I help?\"\n\nDorian's head jerked around. Standing behind her and to one side was a young Greek she'd seen in the village. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"That's Panos's son,\" Doumas said. \"Come on over here, Grigoris, and help with the rope.\"\n\nDorian watched suspiciously. Suddenly, the rope went slack, and Doumas yelled down to Jones.\n\n\"He must be there by now,\" Dorian said.\n\nDoumas shook his head. \"No. He hasn't gone far enough yet.\"\n\n\"Then pull it tight,\" she barked, thinking that Jones must have wedged himself between the walls. \"Hurry up.\"\n\nBut Doumas didn't react fast enough, and the rope snapped taut with a twang.\n\nDorian leaned over the crevice, and called down to Jones. He answered after a moment that he was all right, but that he had lost his torch. Another one was quickly fastened to the rope that was intended for the tablet, and sent down. When Jones signaled that he had the torch. Doumas and the others resumed lowering him.\n\n\"Be careful with him,\" Dorian cautioned. It wasn't long before Jones called out that he had spotted the tablet, and they slowly lowered him the rest of the way.\n\nDorian paced back and forth along the crevice. If Jones was lucky, he might be able to complete the job and return to the surface within half an hour. A lot depended on how difficult he found the work. If her primary concern had been the tablet, she would never have let him go after it. Although he had a good mind and was surprisingly well informed about archaeology, he lacked experience. Of course Doumas had been right about him; he was unqualified. She'd chosen him for the task, though, because she realized that she had to create a challenge for him, or his interest would fade and he might return to Paris in disgust.\n\nShe couldn't let that happen. Not now. He was too much a part of her plan.\n\nShe was near the far end of the chasm when she heard an excited exchange of words between Doumas and the others. Jones couldn't have loosened the tablet already. Not that fast. Not unless it was cracked and had broken. When she reached the men, Doumas was holding one of the ropes in his hand as it dangled loosely above the hole.\n\n\"What happened?\" she yelled.\n\n\"Dr. Belecamus. The rope broke. I don't know how it happened.\"\n\n\"Which rope?\" she demanded.\n\n\"The one Jones was on,\" Doumas answered.\n\n\"What? No!\"\n\nShe dropped to her knees and peered into the chasm, but she could see only blackness. She grabbed the rope from Doumas and quickly pulled it to the surface. It looked as if it had been cut partway through, then rubbed in the dirt to look as if it were frayed. She stood up and held out the rope accusingly. The bastard Grigoris was smirking. She swore he was, though his expression was blank. And Doumas? He rocked from side to side as though he would tumble over if he didn't keep adjusting his balance. Then she suddenly remembered the other rope. Maybe Jones had grabbed it when the first one snapped. She scanned the ground, but it wasn't there. \"Where is the other one, the other rope?\"\n\nDoumas glanced at Grigoris. \"He lost it. In the excitement.\"\n\nJust then she heard a sound, a sound she couldn't believe, coming from the crevice. She dropped to her knees, and cupped her hands at her mouth. \"Indy, can you hear me?\"\n\nHis voice sounded distant, strained. \"Yeah. 1 can hear you.\"\n\n\"Are you all right?\"\n\nHe didn't answer for a moment. \"Not really. Get me a rope. Fast.\"\n\n\"Okay. Where are you?\" she yelled. \"Hanging on the tablet, but I don't know how much longer it's going to hold me.\"\n\nDorian glanced over her shoulder at Doumas. \"Stephanos, hurry. A rope.\"\n\nDoumas looked around as if he expected to see one lying nearby. \"I'll have to go back. There's one in the stable.\"\n\n\"Well, don't stand there, damn it. Get it. Fast.\" \"Run to the stable, Grigoris,\" Doumas said. \"Quick. Get the rope hanging on the hook by the door.\"\n\n\"I didn't tell you to send him for it,\" Dorian snapped, but Doumas was already waddling after the villager who had scampered away. Close behind him were his assistants. Neither of them apparently wanted to stay with her. She wondered why not.\n\nShaking her head, she turned back to the hole. \"It's coming, Jones. In a couple of minutes.\"\n\nShe should have gotten the rope herself. She didn't trust any of them.\n\nThere was no reply. \"Jones. Are you okay?\"\n\nAgain no reply.\n\nIf he had fallen, wouldn't he have yelled?\n\n\"Indy, answer me!\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" a faint voice responded after a long moment. \"Hurry.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "LAST GRASP",
                "text": "Indy straddled the tablet as if it were a saddle. He pressed his face against it, and wrapped his arms tightly around it. He could feel the etched lettering against his cheek. How much longer would he have to wait?\n\nHe tried to take his mind off his precarious situation by going over what had happened. He'd no sooner finished scribbling the translation of the tablet when the rope had started unraveling. He'd desperately pulled himself up the rope, but it had snapped just as he'd grasped the end above the fray. He'd dangled a moment, then felt a jerk from above, and the rope had slipped through his grasp. But his free hand had been reaching up, and as he fell he'd snagged the other rope and slid down it onto the tablet. He'd yelled, and the rope had gone slack and tumbled down, nearly knocking him off his precarious perch.\n\nIndy's thoughts were interrupted by a creaking as the tablet slipped downward under his weight. It tilted at a forty-five degree angle and it was getting difficult to maintain his grasp.\n\nHe realized that he was still wearing the knapsack with the tools. Nothing like digging your own grave. He didn't need the weight. He carefully shed the pack, one arm at a time. He was about to let it drop when he realized that the pick might still come in handy. He slipped his hand into the pack, felt its sharp tip, and pulled it out. Then he dropped the pack, and a moment later heard a clatter as it crashed against something. Must have bounced off the wall, he thought. He listened for it to strike bottom. He shook his head when he didn't hear anything.\n\n\"No bottom. Swell.\"\n\nTalking aloud seemed to ease his fear. \"Gotta do something. But what?\"\n\nHe felt the tablet slip another inch. He closed his eyes. He remembered Dorian stressing the use of the pick and how he should attach the rope to the tablet. She should've been more concerned about what was going on at the other end. Hell, she should've inspected the damn rope before he went down. And what about Doumas? But there was little time to ponder what had happened. He was too busy trying to stay alive.\n\nHe felt the net beneath his legs, and wondered if he should unhook the rope to lighten the load. No, that would require too much maneuvering. A good jolt now and the tablet might break loose. Besides, he was the excess weight, not the rope.\n\n\"That's it. I've got to get off.\"\n\nIf he could carve footholds and handholds with the pick, he might be able to balance himself on the wall. But for how long?\n\n\"Better to die trying to save my ass than doing nothing,\" he muttered.\n\nThe tablet groaned and slipped again. It wouldn't hold much longer. Slowly, he worked his way up the tablet toward the wall. A few more inches, he told himself. Patience. Finally, he was close enough to touch the wall with the pick. \"Now, get some leverage.\"\n\nHe stretched his hand above his head and slammed the pick at the wall. But to his surprise, he struck something, and the pick flew from his hand. The tablet groaned, tilted even further, and he slid down several inches before he caught himself.\n\nChrist, he'd hit the torch holder. He'd forgotten about it. It was still there, secured to the wall by four prongs. Now it was his only hope. He had to get back up to the wall, and get a hand on it. If he distributed his weight between the base of the tablet and the holder he might save himself yet.\n\nHe imagined himself a feather-light acrobat gliding up the tablet and effortlessly balancing himself. The tablet groaned again, and he forgot about acrobatic maneuvers. He froze, but the tablet was shaking, and he was sliding back. He cursed. He thought of his whip still coiled on the wall in his room back in Paris. If he had it now, he could lash it around the torch holder with an easy snap of his wrist. He swore that if he lived to go on another archaeological dig, the whip was going with him.\n\nHe slipped another few inches. The further he slid, the more the tablet pulled away from the wall. The groaning grew louder; the tablet was about to fall. Desperately, he clambered up the tablet and lunged for the wall. His fedora fell off his head and tumbled into the darkness, but his fingers hooked over the torch holder, first one hand, then the other. He tested the strength of the holder. The pick had knocked it slightly askew, and the prongs started to pull away.\n\n\"Real nice.\" Carefully, he stood up on the tablet, using the holder and wall to balance himself.\n\n\"Indy. . . are you all right?\" Dorian's voice echoed eerily down the fissure. \"Indy?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"The rope should be here any moment. Hold on.\"\n\n\"Good advice,\" he said.\n\nShe was calling him Indy again. Lot of good it would do if he fell. Pythia will swallow you like a mouse. The old man's words echoed in his head. Maybe he hadn't been talking about Dorian, but about the mythical python, and how he was dangling precariously inside the creature's gullet. A shiver ran up his spine. \"I hate snakes, even mythical ones.\"\n\nBut the morbid thoughts kept coming. Maybe his first professional archaeology experience would be his last. A short career. \"Good joke, Indy. Keep 'em up.\"\n\nHe looked up toward the spot of light high overhead. \"Hurry with that rope.\"\n\nAnother stray thought pushed against his mind like an annoying burr. What if no one was getting a rope? If Dorian had dispatched Doumas, he might not return at all. The bastard had probably cut the rope, and when he found out Indy had managed to save himself on the other one, he let it go. What else could it be, an accident? He doubted it.\n\nSomeone, probably Doumas, had already been down here and cleaned the tablet. That was why Doumas hadn't wanted him sent down here in the first place. Then he'd changed his mind when he realized he could protect Pythia by getting rid of him.\n\nThat made him angry. He'd show Doumas. Somehow he was going to get out of here alive. \"I'm going to make it,\" he said between clenched teeth. \"I'm not going to fall.\"\n\nHell, he might even be able to salvage the tablet yet. When the rope got here\u2014and it would get here\u2014and he was firmly attached to it, he'd grab the rope that was still knotted to the tablet. He was sure that a tug from the top would loosen it. But he'd wait until he was out of this damn hole before he'd try it.\n\n\"Indy?\"\n\n\"You got it?\" he yelled hopefully.\n\n\"No. I'm going to go see what's taking them so long. I should have gotten it myself. Doumas is useless.\"\n\nGreat. More waiting.\n\nHe tried to relax by adjusting his feet. A mistake\u2014but he realized it too late. The shifting of his weight had been all that was needed to jar the tablet free. With a loud snap, it broke and tumbled away.\n\nHis legs kicked out, then scraped against the wall. He heard a crash as the tablet struck something. His feet searched for a foothold, but the wall was nearly smooth. The torch holder bent downward, the prongs slowly working their way free.\n\n\"Oh, shit.\"\n\nThis was it. He gritted his teeth; his heart pounded in his ears as the prongs pulled out of the wall.\n\nHe fell. Again.\n\nHe was moving through a tunnel, toward a light. It was growing brighter and brighter. This is death.\n\nIndy. Indy.\n\nThe sound echoed around him.\n\nHe blinked his eyes against the light. So bright. Like a ball of flames. So close now. What would happen when he reached the light? Where would he go?\n\nHis eyes slid sideways and in the light he saw his fedora and the pack he'd dropped, and pieces of the shattered tablet. It all came back to him. He'd fallen into the abyss. His thighs had jammed against his chest. He'd felt searing pain.\n\nThen nothing.\n\nNow his ribs ached. His right hand throbbed; it was wet with blood. His throat was choked with dust, and one thigh felt as if it had been struck by a hammer. Was death this painful? Did you wake up feeling all the pain you missed when you lost consciousness? He tried to lift himself up, but couldn't. He was still moving toward the flaming light; it hurt his eyes.\n\nThen he realized it was a torch. It was attached to a rope, and coming toward him. He was alive and still in the goddamn hole.\n\nHe cringed as he sat up. Why was he still alive? The torch was swinging several feet above him now and he could see that he was on an overhang that loomed from the wall. He squinted up into the light. He couldn't tell where the tablet had been, but he was sure now that he hadn't fallen far. Maybe only fifteen, twenty feet. He felt bits of rubble from the shattered tablet underneath him. If he hadn't been wearing his leather jacket, he would have been hurt much worse.\n\nHe watched as the torch continued down past him, and the brightness faded until it was just a glimmer below him. I'm supposed to stop it. But I didn't. \"Indy. Can you hear me?\"\n\n\"Dorian, we've gone well past the depth of the tablet,\" another voice said. \"He's gone. Face it.\" The voice wasn't as loud as Dorian's, but the chasm was like a megaphone and it carried easily to him. Doumas. The bastard was giving up on him.\n\nIt was getting bright again. The torch was rising. He understood exactly what was happening. He was being abandoned. But he was in a stupor, and couldn't coordinate his thoughts with actions. He had to do something. He cleared his throat. With an effort, he yelled: \"Dorian.\" But it came out as a whisper. His throat was dry and felt like it was caked with dirt. He tried again. Louder this time, a gravely sound. But not loud enough.\n\nThe torch swung at his knees, his waist, his chest. He reached out; snared it. He felt a tug, and pulled back. Then the rope slackened, and wriggled like a snake.\n\n\"It must have caught on something,\" Doumas said. The snake rose until he felt the torch being pulled from his hand. He jerked on it.\n\nFor a moment there was no reaction, then he felt another tug on the rope, and he was pulled to his feet. He felt as if he were fishing, only he was the fish. \"What is it?\" Dorian asked.\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Give it to me. Indy. . . Indy.\"\n\nHe bent over to pick up his hat, and realized he was standing a half step from the brink of the prominence.\n\n\"Indy. Please answer.\"\n\nHe edged backward. He saw a cone-shaped rock protruding from the wall and grabbed hold of it. He pulled on the rope, and tugged again, and a third time.\n\n\"It's him. I felt it. He's down there. Indy, pull again if you can hear me.\"\n\nHe did. Quickly, they worked out a simplistic way of communicating. One tug, yes. Two, no. Was he badly hurt? No. Could he tie the rope around himself? Yes. Did he need more rope? Yes.\n\nAnother several feet coiled in front of him. He sat down to figure out the best way of attaching the rope. He didn't want it around his waist or his chest. He had at least one cracked or bruised rib on each side. Maybe more. He fumbled with the rope; his hand throbbed. He pressed his bloody palm against his stomach, trying to stop the bleeding. Finally, he tied a loop, threaded the rope through it, then stepped inside the large loop. He would sit in it like a swing.\n\nHe was about to signal Dorian that he was ready when he took another look at the rock he'd been grasping. It was black, shaped like a cone, and still partially buried in the wall. He held the torchlight over it. Its surface was thatched as if it had once been encased in a rope sheath and the strands had petrified.\n\n\"What is this?\" he whispered hoarsely.\n\nHe grabbed the pack and took out the hard-bristle brush. He scraped away some of the dirt encrusted on it and ran his fingertips over the rough surface. He lowered the torch until it was almost touching the cone. It looked like obsidian, or iron, and the thatching, he was convinced, was not natural, but man-made.\n\n\"Indy, are you all right?\" Dorian called down to him.\n\nHe glanced up, then tugged once on the rope.\n\n\"Ready?\" Dorian called.\n\nThis time he jerked twice. \"Not quite.\" He'd lost the tablet, but maybe he could salvage the cone. He didn't know why, but he sensed it was something important, something he shouldn't leave behind.\n\nHe wrapped his arms around the cone to see if he could loosen it. He pulled, and he thought it moved. He took in a deep breath and pulled again. There. It moved. He was sure of it. He laid his chest against the cone to catch his breath. He was exhausted, dizzy.\n\nThen he saw the eagle.\n\nIt was winging skyward. He watched it.\n\nThe eagle. His eagle.\n\nHere to help.\n\nThe eagle. His guardian, his protector.\n\nBut where have you been? I needed you. Indy heard his thoughts as if he were talking, but he was sure his lips weren't moving. The eagle continued soaring higher and higher. His skin tingled. He was neither asleep nor awake.\n\nHis thoughts drifted back to when he was fourteen and had met an old Navajo named Changing Man while on a desert hike with his father. The Indian had taken a liking to young Indy, and said he would see him again. It hardly seemed likely, because a few months later Indy had moved to Chicago. The summer after he graduated from high school he returned to the Southwest to work on his uncle's ranch, but by then his encounter with the old Indian was only a distant memory.\n\nHowever, one day he stopped at a trading post to buy supplies, and there was Changing Man. He not only remembered Indy, but acted as though he'd been expecting him. Was he ready for his vision quest? he asked. Indy didn't know what he meant, but he was curious about the old Indian and his ways and said yes, he was ready. The following day, he met Changing Man at daybreak outside the trading post and they hiked up a mesa. By nightfall Indy found himself alone and without food on the windswept surface. Changing Man had told him he must wait there until an animal approached him, and from that time on it would be his protector and spiritual guide.\n\nAfter two days he was delirious from hunger and his canteen was nearly empty. It was a mistake, a big mistake. Maybe vision quests worked for Indians, but no animals were interested in him, unless it was to pick at his bones after he was dead. He walked away from the stone shelter he'd built, hoping he had enough strength for the trek down. He would find water and food, go back to the ranch, and in another few weeks he would be home in Chicago again where he would start college. As he reached the edge of the mesa, he heard a voice behind him. The voice of Changing Man. Where are you going? Startled, he turned around. No one was there. He was hallucinating. But he hesitated. The trail was too steep. The sun was low. Feeling defeated, he headed back to the shelter for the night. He would wait until morning.\n\nSuddenly, an eagle swooped low over the mesa and landed on the top of the wall of his shelter. He stopped and stared, and again heard the voice of Changing Man. He will always guide you. In spite of everything, or maybe because of it, he had found his protector.\n\nHe recalled all of it as he watched the eagle soaring above him. He could see it turn its head as if it were looking for prey. Or maybe back at him. It made a noise. What was it saying? The eagle faded, but the sound continued.\n\n\"Indy, Indy.\"\n\nIt was Dorian. She sounded frantic. \"Answer me.\"\n\nHe tugged on the rope.\n\n\"There's not much time. The vapors.\"\n\nVapors. Christ. He'd forgotten all about that. Had he been down here that long? He pulled his pocket watch from inside his jacket. It had survived his fall and was still working. It was 2:44. He stood up and tightened the loop of rope. He wasn't convinced the vapors were dangerous, but there was no reason to take any chances.\n\nNo time now for the cone. He must have drifted off for a minute. But he'd come back for it, he told himself. He tugged once.\n\nA moment later, he felt himself rising and swinging out from the debris-strewn overhang. His eyes focused on the black object frozen in the wall. Then it was blanketed in darkness, lost in a lightless abyss.\n\nHe held the torch out and watched for the spot where the tablet had been. Ten, fifteen, twenty feet. He continued rising. It was hazy from the torch smoke, but then he saw it. A dark hole, and above it a smaller indention where the torch holder had been yanked from the wall. God, he was lucky People fell three feet and broke bones. He'd tumbled two stories through pitch darkness and survived with cuts, bruises, probably a couple of cracked ribs.\n\nHe heard a deep rumble from somewhere below. It was followed by the same hissing that preceded the rising of the vapors, and he knew he would not escape them. The slow, easy swing of the ascent continued, and there was nothing he could do to speed it up. He swung the torch in front of him, noticing a haze. There was too much of it to be torch smoke.\n\nHe squeezed the rope tighter and sucked in a deep breath. It hurt his ribs, and he expelled some of it. He wondered how much longer it would take to reach the surface. A minute passed. Slowly, he released the rest of the air. Tainted air. No use holding his breath if he was already breathing the vapors.\n\nHe sniffed at the air. It didn't seem to have any effect, except he was feeling drowsy. He was exhausted from the fall and his injuries. He pressed his forehead against the rope and closed his eyes. Within seconds, he felt himself drifting, half asleep, half awake.\n\nHis head jerked up, and he grabbed the rope. He must have dozed. Then he saw the vapors rising around him. How long had he been breathing them? He forced himself to concentrate on the rope and keep his balance.\n\nJust hold on. Stay awake. Try not to breathe. God, he ached.\n\nAnother minute passed, an elastic minute that felt like hours, but finally he popped through the lip of the hole, and drank in the cool air. The mound was covered in mist, and he couldn't see anyone. He climbed to his feet, wincing in pain, and felt himself being pulled down the mound.\n\n\"Indy, down here.\"\n\nHe stumbled forward, picking up momentum. He raised his arms to block his fall. Then suddenly hands were grabbing him. The rope was pulled over his chest, shoulder, arms. He crumpled to his knees, fell onto his stomach. Someone rolled him over.\n\n\"We've got to get him to the doctor.\" Dorian's voice. \"Carry him to the wagon. Fast.\"\n\nHe saw movement around him, shapes, blurs. He felt himself being lifted again. He closed his eyes.\n\n\"What happened down there, Indy?\" Dorian asked. \"How did you survive?\"\n\n\"I found a stone, a black stone,\" he mumbled.\n\n\"What kind of stone?\" It was Doumas's voice.\n\n\"Shaped like a cone, thatching on it.\"\n\n\"Can you find it again?\" Doumas asked.\n\nBut Indy never answered. His eyes closed and he was out."
            },
            {
                "title": "MANEUVERS",
                "text": "Dorian looked up from a stack of stone tablets on the workshop table as she heard a tapping sound. It was so faint that she thought it might be the wind. Then she heard it again, louder this time. \"Come in.\"\n\nThe door creaked slowly open; she saw a shadow in the doorway, then recognized Panos. \"Well, I've been waiting for you.\"\n\nPanos hesitated, looked down at his hands. \"Not as long as I've waited.\" The words were forced, a confession. Then he stepped inside and peered at the rows of stone tablets. \"Soon, a new, modern house of records will be built.\" His voice was stronger, and the words were spoken like a challenge. He watched her closely.\n\n\"I know,\" she answered.\n\n\"Do you?\" Again, he shifted his eyes as she met his gaze, and she realized that he was feeling self-conscious, maybe overwhelmed.\n\n\"It will be needed,\" she added.\n\n\"Tell me who you are,\" he demanded, but his eyes still shifting about uneasily.\n\nShe smiled and answered without hesitating. \"Pythia, of course.\"\n\nHe nodded, glancing up at her. \"The veil is receding. I knew it would.\"\n\nShe picked up one of the stone tablets and ran her fingers over it. \"I understand now that the oracle never left us. The last Pythia merely put it to bed, and now it is reawakening.\"\n\n\"Well said.\"\n\n\"It's very strange, but I understand now that my life's work has been only a prelude to the Return. A week ago I would have laughed at such an idea. Now, I know it for a fact.\"\n\nPanos paced in front of the long table covered with stone tablets. He picked one of them up, examined it briefly, then laid it back down. There was something defiant in the act, as if he were making claim to the workshop and everything it represented and daring her to challenge him. \"My son, Grigoris, told me that Jones found something in the crevice. What was it?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure. He said something about a black stone.\"\n\nPanos spun on his heels and faced her. \"The stone is important, and Doumas must not ever touch it.\" He spoke sharply; his eyes flared. \"It is ours, and we must have it.\"\n\nDorian was baffled. She was surprised by his outburst. She didn't know what he was talking about.\n\n\"Don't you understand? He has found the Omphalos. We must claim it.\"\n\nThe Omphalos was a mysterious aspect of the Oracle of Delphi that Dorian had never clearly grasped. In legend, it was sometimes described as a stone that was as large as a room, other times as one that was small and portable, cone-shaped, like Jones had described. Sometimes, even Delphi itself was called the Omphalos, the navel of the world. She'd always viewed it as more symbolic than real, more of a definition of Delphi than a relic that could be recovered.\n\n\"How do you know it's the Omphalos?\"\n\n\"The Oracle could not return without the Omphalos,\" he answered.\n\n\"Why is that, Panos?\"\n\nHe frowned at her. \"You still have much to remember. Pythia should know the great secret of Delphi.\"\n\nShe smiled at him. \"I am Pythia, but I am also Dorian Belecamus, and I do not know everything that Pythia knows. Tell me about the Omphalos.\"\n\nPanos paused a moment; she had the distinct impression that he wasn't sure he should say anything. Then he made up his mind, and spoke. \"The secret is simple. The vapors only enhance what the Omphalos creates. The Omphalos is the power of Delphi.\"\n\n\"Yes. Simple.\" She made it sound like an interesting fact. Nothing more. But in all her years of study and her work at Delphi, she had never heard such a thing. The Omphalos had always been nebulous, symbolic, never the power itself.\n\n\"Does that mean the authority of Pythia can be taken beyond Delphi if we have the Omphalos?\"\n\n\"The navel of the world is wherever the Omphalos is.\" Dorian crossed her arms, and leaned against the table. \"Panos, I have so much to remember. Tell me more about the Omphalos. Where did it come from?\"\n\nHe pointed his index finger skyward. \"It was a gift from Apollo himself.\"\n\nShe raised her eyes as if the gods inhabited the rafters. \"You mean the Omphalos fell from the sky and landed here at Delphi?\"\n\nHe stared at the stone tablets on the table for well over a minute before answering. \"That is another secret.\"\n\nShe waited expectantly for him to continue. \"I would like to answer yes, but the truth is that it fell elsewhere, and a messenger of Apollo brought it here, to the sacred place where the gases were rising from the ground.\"\n\nProbably a meteorite, Dorian thought. It made sense that such a stone would be worshiped, and the fact that it had not fallen right where the vapors were rising made it even more believable. She smiled confidently. \"We will get the Omphalos. But now the king is coming.\"\n\n\"Yes. And you must speak to him. He needs to understand who you are. He must accept it.\" She nodded solemnly.\n\n\"I know you will sway him.\" His words were gentle, soothing, but he was still uncomfortable in her presence, and stared at the table as he spoke. \"Yes, and I already sense what Pythia will say.\" He slowly shifted his gaze. His eyes gave him away. He was hoping she would give him a hint.\n\n\"I'll tell you what I already know,\" she began. \"Soon the world will recognize that the Oracle of Delphi is alive. All the world will look to the Oracle for hope, and the power of Greece will be magnified a hundredfold.\"\n\nPanos smiled broadly. \"And Pythia will tell this to the king.\" Her eyes blinked rapidly. \"Yes, and more.\" She took the stonemason by the arm and led him to the door, all the while whispering, telling him far more than he had expected to hear.\n\nPanos sipped his retsina, and listened to Doumas. It was early afternoon and only a couple of other tables in the taverna were occupied. They were seated in the same booth where they had been when Jones swaggered over to them the other night, and now the foreigner was on his mind again. The man was a problem, potentially a serious one.\n\nDoumas, unfortunately, didn't see it that way. A fat intellectual, all paunch and jowls, he was more committed to ideas than action. \"I don't know what Grigoris was thinking, but you've got to control him. He almost killed Jones. What's worse is that Belecamus suspects it was no accident.\"\n\nDoumas's double chin was shaking as he spoke; hereminded Panos of an overweight turkey. He wanted to tell him that he was spineless, that he'd failed to deal with Jones, but instead he acted surprised. \"How do you know that?\"\n\n\"Because she found me arguing with Grigoris in the stable. He actually pulled a knife on me so I wouldn't take her another rope.\"\n\nPanos poured himself another glass of retsina from the bottle on the table. \"Did she see the knife or hear anything that was said?\"\n\n\"I don't think so. She was in a hurry. But she knew we were arguing.\"\n\nPanos cast a look of annoyance at the occupants of one of the other tables. They were foreigners, three men and a woman. They were talking loudly, and spoke English. The woman, in particular, had an abrasive voice. He wished they would leave. They shouldn't be here, not in the taverna, not in Delphi. Not now.\n\n\"There is something I don't understand. If the rope broke, why is Jones still alive?\"\n\nDoumas looked exasperated. \"He got lucky.\"\n\nPanos thought a moment. He knew he should tell Doumas that he would control Grigoris, but the truth was he was out of control. \"I will talk to my son. He should not have threatened you. He will apologize. I promise.\"\n\nDoumas didn't look satisfied. Too bad. \"Now, tell me something. What is the connection between Jones and Belecamus?\"\n\nDoumas smiled, a sly smile that said he should know what it was. \"She likes younger foreign men. What else can I say?\"\n\nSo that was it. Now Panos was more certain than ever that Jones must be quickly eliminated. He could only be trouble; he could slow the transformation. It was time to put Doumas to the test. \"One way or another Jones must be taken care of. Immediately. We can't chance him interfering with our work.\"\n\n\"He won't interfere. He's confined to a bed in his hotel room. I'm sure he won't be going anywhere until after the king has come and gone. Besides, you are sure to anger Belecamus if anything happens to him.\"\n\n\"How can we be certain he stays in bed? I don't trust him. He doesn't understand what Delphi is about.\"\n\n\"You worry too much, Panos. You know what the tablet in the crevice said. Nothing can stop the Return now. Not Jones, not anyone. It will happen as sure as the king is rich.\"\n\nPanos glowered at him. \"The tablet was confirmation of the blueprint. But we must still do what is necessary to fulfill it.\"\n\nDoumas emptied his glass, then set it on the table. \"You have to understand my position. I am a scientist, an archaeologist. I have a reputation.\"\n\nPanos laughed. \"What is your reputation, Stephanos? Caretaker of old stones. Stop wavering. Your rubble will still be there no matter what you do.\"\n\n\"What do you want of me, Panos? I got Belecamus here. I went down that hole and interpreted the tablet. I could have been killed. What more do you want?\"\n\n\"You wanted to know about the Order of Pythia. You wanted to know everything. Now you must fulfill your responsibilities.\"\n\n\"I'm not a killer. That's Grigoris's work.\"\n\nPanos bolted out of his chair, and grabbed Doumas by the collar. \"Don't talk that way about my son,\" he growled between clenched teeth. \"Do you understand? I don't want to hear that.\"\n\nAs he lowered himself back into the chair he saw the group of foreigners looking their way. He ignored them.\n\nDoumas glared back at him. \"Don't ask me to kill Jones, or anyone. I won't do it. But I will tell you something that you don't know. Something valuable.\"\n\nPanos stared sullenly at him. \"What is it?\"\n\nDoumas leaned over the table. \"I know precisely whenthe vapors will rise. There's a pattern, and unless things change I can predict the time of the risings tomorrow, next month, and for years.\"\n\nPanos considered what he'd said. He was surprised that Doumas would know such a thing and made an effort to control his astonishment. \"Go ahead. Tell me.\"\n\nAs Doumas spoke, Panos gazed over the archaeologist's shoulder at two uniformed men who had entered the taverna. They looked around, and took a table. The taller of the two looked familiar.\n\nPanos concentrated on what Doumas was saying. \"That's good to know. Six minutes is the key.\"\n\nHis gaze shifted to the other table again. Now he remembered where he'd seen the man. Belecamus had met him the morning he'd followed her from her house to the Roman Agora. From the way they'd acted he was sure they were close to each other. He remembered thinking that the officer was potential trouble, and now he knew he was right.\n\n\"We have another problem.\" He tilted his head toward the table.\n\nDoumas followed his glance. \"Military men. Probably related to the king's trip.\"\n\nPanos could tell by Doumas's expression that he knew something more. \"Who is he, Stephanos? I've seen the one with her.\"\n\nDoumas looked back again, as if he hadn't recognized the man. He leaned over the table again. \"Colonel Alexander Mandraki. Belecamus has been seeing him off and on for years. Lovers.\"\n\nPanos frowned. \"What could she see in him? He's ugly.\"\n\nDoumas grinned. \"Power, of course. You should know that.\"\n\nA tight smile curled on Panos's lips as he sat back in his chair. A plan was taking form. \"We must turn him against Jones so that he does our work for us.\"\n\nDoumas glanced warily over this shoulder, making certain that Mandraki wasn't listening to them. \"That's a possibility.\"\n\n\"Then, Belecamus will be angry with him, which will also be to our advantage.\"\n\n\"But her allegiance is with Mandraki,\" Doumas said. \"She won't turn against him.\"\n\n\"Maybe not for long. But the shock of finding out who has killed her young lover-student will surely alienate her, at least temporarily, and all we need is a few hours.\"\n\nDoumas threaded his fingers, and cracked his knuckles. \"Two birds, one stone. You're clever, Panos. You should have been a politician.\"\n\nPanos looked over at the foreigners, who were getting up from their table. When the transformation was complete he would be a politician of sorts, a power broker for the world's leaders who would come to him seeking access to Pythia, Oracle of Delphi.\n\n\"Let's not waste any more time, Stephanos.\"\n\n\"All right, I'll go tell him about Jones.\"\n\n\"No, I'll do it myself. You intellectuals have a hard time dealing with emotional matters. I want to make sure it gets done right. I want him angry so he acts.\"\n\nPanos pushed his chair away from the table, and moved away without another word.\n\nDoumas watched as Panos leaned over Mandraki's table and said something to him. This should be interesting, he thought, and refilled his glass. The colonel nodded, and turned to the other man at the table. The soldier abruptly stood, and walked over to the bar. Mandraki motioned Panos to sit down, and listened as the little man rested an elbow on the table and raised a hand to his mouth in a gesture of confidentiality.\n\nDoumas looked away as two of the foreigners from the other table left the taverna. He knew exactly what Panos thought about him. To rugged, earthy people like the stonemason, excessive weight was a sign of weakness. Panos saw him as a bumbling, overeducated guardian of the ruins. But that was fine. Just what he wanted.\n\nHe knew that Panos envisioned himself as the new high priest of the oracle, but he was a fool to think that Dorian Belecamus would let him manipulate her. Belecamus had her own agenda. Even if the vapors affected her as Panos said, she would not always be under their influence.\n\nPanos didn't know Belecamus; he only knew of her. He didn't know the stories about her, which anyone in the archaeology faculties could tell him. Even the Crazy One, who supposedly knew so much, didn't know anything of her private life. Doumas knew Belecamus; he knew the stories, and knew they were true.\n\nMandraki's face darkened and clouded over. The corners of his lips turned down. He rubbed his chin and nodded, then with a flick of his hand dismissed Panos as if he were chasing away a fly. Panos literally leaped to his feet, and knocked over his chair.\n\nThe colonel sneered and pointed to the door; Doumas clearly heard Mandraki's angry voice. \"Get out of my sight, malaka.\"\n\nPanos quickly retreated. The colonel's companion moved back to the table and picked up the fallen chair. Mandraki waved a hand, as if to say it was nothing, then motioned for the soldier to sit down. \"Malaka,\" Mandraki repeated loudly.\n\nDoumas laughed to himself. It felt good to see the leader of the Order of Pythia, who thought so much of himself and so little of him, called an asshole and dismissed like a servant who performed his duties poorly.\n\nIf Belecamus was a normal woman, she would act as Panos expected. She would shun her Colonel Alex if he killed Jones. But to Belecamus, Jones was already a dead man. He was sure of it.\n\nNow everything was in his hands, Doumas thought. Thecolonel would never let Panos near Belecamus long enough for him to lead her to the crevice and if Panos failed, the blueprint would no longer be viable. The opportunity would be missed. Panos, his lifework destroyed, would go back to Athens and his masonry work, and Dorian Belecamus, the failed Pythia, would return to Paris and her teaching.\n\nBut that wouldn't be the end of it. After all, the message he'd uncovered on the tablet before Belecamus arrived had convinced him that Panos was on the right track. However, the inscription clearly had left open the matter of who would assume the duties of the new Pythia. Even the Crazy One's old prophecy, which had mentioned the return of a Dorian, did not specify that she was the oracle.\n\nIn spite of what had happened at the crevice, he was certain she was not Pythia. She was ruthless and cunning, and those were definitely not traits of a good Pythia. Maybe the high priest was cunning, but Pythia was an innocent, an immaculate peasant woman transformed to a divination tool.\n\nWhen everyone left and he was alone and in charge of Delphi, he would quietly recover the black stone\u2014the Omphalos. Then he would test the young village girls, and maybe among them he would find the true Pythia. More and more, he was feeling that it was his destiny, not Panos's, to nurture the new Pythia. He would be the interpreter, the priest, and the one who would present her to the world.\n\nThe power would be his."
            },
            {
                "title": "ROYAL RECEPTION",
                "text": "His eyes blinked open, but Indy didn't move, barely breathed. He felt something in the air that shouldn't have been there, a presence. Someone was in here with him. His limbs tensed instinctively. Slowly, he turned his head, scanning the room.\n\nThen he saw a figure standing in front of the window, silhouetted by the afternoon sunshine. \"Ah, Christ, Nikos,\" he said as he recognized the aquiline nose and classical Greek features. \"What are you doing now?\"\n\nThe kid was getting to be a pest. He'd been looking in on him every few hours for the past two days, and Indy had just talked to him before he'd fallen asleep.\n\n\"Sorry. I was just leaving, and didn't want to wake you up. I got the knapsack. I put it under the bed.\"\n\n\"That was fast.\"\n\n\"You slept almost four hours.\"\n\n\"I did?\" Indy grimaced as he sat up, and touched his side. The last time they'd talked he'd asked Nikos if he would discreetly pick up his knapsack from the workshop. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes. \"Did anyone see you?\"\n\nNikos shook his head. \"No one was there. I got in through a window.\"\n\nIndy's gaze strayed to the bedstand. He squinted, trying to make sense of what he saw. A ceramic bowl rested on the bedstand, and inside it were three heads of garlic twisted together. \"What's this?\"\n\nNikos's dark eyes moved from the bowl to Indy. \"Moly. It will help you.\"\n\nIndy looked at it again. \"Moly. God, I haven't heard anyone call garlic by that name since I was a kid.\"\n\nNikos took a couple steps closer to him. \"I didn't know there was moly in America. What did you use it for when you were a kid?\"\n\n\"It's a long story.\"\n\n\"Tell me,\" he said, sitting at the foot of the bed.\n\nIndy clasped his hands behind his head, and recalled the incident, one of those he would never forget.\n\n\"Get me the moly,\" his father had said one day, and when Indy admitted he didn't know what he was talking about he was forced to eat a clove of garlic a day until he knew why it was called moly. The question mystified Indy for nearly two weeks, long enough for him to lose a couple of friends who thought he smelled. As a result, he spent more time reading Homer, another task required by his father.\n\nFinally, while struggling through a scene in The Odyssey, he discovered moly. It was a species of garlic which supposedly possessed magical power. Hermes gave it to Odysseus for protection against the enchantments of Circe. After that his father never required him to either eat garlic, or call it moly.\n\n\"You think I need protection, Nikos?\"\n\n\"Yes, I do.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"There are strange things going on.\"\n\n\"Like what?\" he asked. He'd bet it had something to do with the Order of Pythia, and expected Nikos to tell him that Panos and Doumas had conspired to kill him. But he was wrong.\n\n\"After I got back from the workshop, two Americans came to the hotel. They were very friendly. They told me they knew you, and wanted to see you.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Yes, but before I could bring them up here, three soldiers came and took them away.\"\n\n\"Took them where?\"\n\nNikos shook his head.\n\nIndy was baffled. \"Did you get their names?\"\n\n\"They didn't say, but there is something else I must also tell you.\"\n\n\"Oh, what else?\" Now he'd hear about the Order. Again, he was wrong.\n\n\"It's Dr. Belecamus. I didn't think it mattered, but now I am not so sure.\"\n\nThree sharp raps at the door cut Nikos off. He jumped off the bed as if he'd just been shocked by a jolt of electricity.\n\n\"Go ahead, open it,\" Indy told him.\n\nIt was Dorian. She was dressed in a white gown, and looked as if she were on her way to a ball. Her black hair shone in the late afternoon light filtering through the window, and her beauty was startling. She glanced from Nikos to Indy. \"An I interrupting anything?\"\n\n\"No. Come on in.\"\n\n\"I have to go now,\" Nikos said. He gave Indy a furtive look, and disappeared out of the door.\n\nDorian moved over to the bed. \"How are you feeling today?\"\n\nIndy shrugged. \"Better. Nice to see you.\" His voice was tinged with sarcasm. It was only her second visit since his accident, and the first time she'd stayed just a couple of minutes. She'd apologized for the accident, but when he'd asked how it had happened, she'd said she had no idea. He didn't believe her. He was sure she'd been hiding something, probably her suspicions about Doumas.\n\n\"I've been busy, but I've been thinking about you. I hear Nikos has been keeping you company.\" Her smile indicated she thought the boy's interest in Indy was humorous. \"That's nice, but what do you two talk about?\"\n\n\"Lots of things. Just now, for instance, he was telling me about two Americans. He said they came to the hotel and were asking for me.\"\n\n\"Did you see them? \" she asked brightly.\n\n\"No, Nikos said that soldiers came and took them away.\"\n\n\"That was their escort,\" she said. \"I met them at the taverna earlier, and invited them to the royal reception this evening. A charming couple. I came up to ask if you'd come, too.\"\n\n\"But who are they? I don't know anyone in Greece.\"\n\nDorian gave him a wicked smile. \"I found out a little bit about your past. It was your old girlfriend you left in Paris.\"\n\n\"Madelaine?\" Indy was baffled.\n\n\"That's the one. She was with a British man named Brent. Friendly chap. They were in Athens when they heard that the king was going to be here, and they came straight away.\"\n\n\"I can't believe it. Why did you invite them to the reception?\"\n\n\"Well, actually they were hinting around for an invitation. They were delighted when I made the offer.\"\n\n\"I can imagine. They're very good guests. They've got lots of experience at parties.\"\n\nDorian sat on the bed and patted his thigh. \"You sound a bit jealous.\"\n\nHe laughed nervously. \"No, not jealous. Just amazed.\"\n\n\"Please come with me? I'm sure they would like to see you.\"\n\n\"Think I'd like to see them myself.\"\n\n\"Good. Then you must be feeling better.\"\n\n\"Guess so. I know I don't like laying in bed day and night.\"\n\n\"Now you'll get a chance to meet the king. I understand he's heard what happened to you, and I'm sure he'll want to see you. You can tell him all about your adventure into the heart of Delphi.\"\n\n\"I was hoping you'd be interested yourself. You haven't even asked about the tablet.\"\n\nShe looked baffled. \"Why should I ask about the tablet? It was lost, wasn't it?\"\n\n\"Someone was down there before me and cleaned it off.\"\n\n\"What?\" Her expression turned incredulous. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"I even had time to translate it.\"\n\n\"You did? What did it say?\"\n\n\"I'll read it to you.\" Indy swung his legs over the side of the bed, and straightened his nightshirt. He reached under the bed, and gritted his teeth as he felt a stab of pain in his side. Then his hand touched the knapsack, and he pulled it out.\n\n\"How did you get that?\" Dorian asked, suspiciously.\n\n\"Oh, I sent for it,\" he said evasively.\n\nHe reached into the side pocket, and found the notebook. He could barely make out his handwriting. Considering he'd scribbled it while suspended in near darkness, it wasn't surprising. Slowly, he read his translation. The legend began with a question, and was followed by a response.\n\n\"'We must know. Will Pythia always be?\n\nThis question is asked by each generation and the answer is always the same. Wide is the power of Apollo's Oracle but only as long as belief exists.\n\nIndeed, the day will come when the last Pythia departs sacred Delphi. Only then will fade the great power of Apollo and crumble to dust the works of his followers.'\"\n\nHe looked up from the notebook at Dorian who remained quiet, pensive. \"There's more.\" He turned the page to where he had written the second question and response.\n\n\"'O Pythia! We pray thee reverence these boughs of supplication which we bear in our hands, and deliver to us something more comforting concerning the future of the oracle. Else we will not leave thy sanctuary, but will stay here till we die.\n\nTrue it is what has been said. Only when the Oracle is a distant memory, will there be hope. Now lift thy hearts and journey happily home for upon the restoration the oracle will return and its great secret will be revealed.'\"\n\nDorian put a hand to her throat. \"Interesting, very interesting,\" she murmured. She stood up and ran her hands down her gown, pressing out the wrinkles. She smiled weakly. \"Too bad we weren't able to recover it. Well, you'd better get ready. It's getting late. I'll have a carriage in front of the hotel in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\"Twenty minutes? Gee, thanks for the advance notice.\" But she didn't respond; she was already out the door.\n\nHe winced as he shrugged on his shirt, then carefully slipped into his pants. He didn't have many clothes with him so his khaki pants, white cotton shirt and a tie would have to do for the reception. When he was dressed, he pulled on his leather coat and hat. He looked around the room, and saw the moly. He picked it up off the table and turned it over in his hand. He didn't consider himself superstitious. Moly was garlic, and garlic was just that\u2014 garlic. But then again, it couldn't hurt having it with him, he thought, and stuck it in his jacket pocket.\n\nThe lobby of the Delphi Hotel was anything but grandiose. It was a shabby parlor with a worn rug, a couch that had seen better days, and a couple of straight-backed chairs. On one side was the checkin desk, and to the rear of it beneath the staircase was a cot where Nikos was lying on his side. When he saw Indy, he bolted to his feet.\n\n\"What are you doing out of bed?\"\n\n\"I'm going to the king's reception.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\nThe door to the street opened, and Dorian peered in. \"There you are. Come on. The carriage is waiting.\"\n\n\"Okay.\" He glanced at Nikos and shrugged. \"Talk to you later.\"\n\nAs they headed out of the village and up the mountain to the clip-clop of hoofs, Indy tried to get comfortable. But he was jostled from side to side, and his ribs ached. He wished he'd stayed in bed, and almost told Dorian he wanted to turn back. \"When are they going to get automobiles around here, anyhow?\"\n\n\"You're not in Chicago, Indy. Besides, a buggy ride is as smooth as a Model T on this road.\"\n\n\"You're probably right,\" he said. \"By the way, why are you going to this reception? I'm surprised you were invited, or even wanted to attend.\"\n\n\"Come now, Indy. We are not barbarians.\" She laid a hand on his arm, but only for a moment. \"It is the 1920s, after all. We have protocol like any civilized people. The king will show respect toward me, and I will do likewise toward him. My political opinions won't be discussed.\"\n\nHe was tempted to rest a hand on her thigh, and test her reaction, but he thought better of it. Sure, he wanted things to be as they were before they arrived in Delphi, but then again, if she did change her attitude, he wasn't in any condition to do anything about it. At least, not this evening.\n\n\"Tomorrow morning, Indy, I'd like you to join the king's entourage when he visits the ruins.\" \"Why?\"\n\n\"Why not? I was thinking it would be a good time for you to tell him about the tablet. He'll be very busy this evening.\"\n\nA few minutes later, the king's retreat came into view high above the road. The massive structure was made of stone and seemed almost to grow from the mountain itself. Both mansion and mountain were painted shades of red and orange by the last rays of sunlight. As they turned off the main road, he noticed groups of tiny figures on the veranda, then the mansion vanished from sight.\n\nThey stopped at a security post, and a guard consulted a list when Dorian gave their names. Then they were waved through. The carriage brought them to the front door. As they climbed the steps, another guard manning the entrance looked them over. He frowned at Indy's outfit, then reluctantly waved them through. Dorian ignored him, but Indy appraised him with the same stern demeanor. \"Straighten your tie, fellow.\"\n\nThen they were inside. The room was crowded with guests and waiters in white coats carrying drinks and hor d'oeuvres. There were at least a half dozen fireplaces in the room, fires blazing in each of them. \"You ever been here before?\" Indy asked.\n\n\"Just once. It's a lovely place.\"\n\n\"Big, I bet.\"\n\n\"Thirty-four rooms, including fifteen bedrooms. Just average for a king, I'd say.\"\n\n\"Lots of places to lie down at least. Maybe we could borrow one. It's the 1920s, after all.\"\n\nShe tipped her head towards him, and spoke tersely. \"Don't be silly, or flirtatious, and whatever you do, don't say anything foolish to the king.\"\n\n\"I think I can handle myself.\"\n\nIndy spotted Doumas moving through the crowd toward them\u2014just the person he didn't care to see. The roly-poly archaeologist either was incompetent or had intentionally allowed him to be lowered on a frayed rope. \"Look who's coming,\" he said to Dorian. \"I don't feel so well.\"\n\n\"Jones, on your feet already? Remarkable recovery. I'm amazed at your resilience.\"\n\nSuddenly, they were good friends. Wonderful. \"So am I.\"\n\n\"Now what's this you were saying about a black stone?\" He busily munched on a plateful of hors d'oeuvres as he spoke.\n\nIndy frowned. \"I don't remember saying anything about it.\"\n\n\"Well, whether you remember or not, you did,\" Doumas said. \"When we pulled you out of the hole you mumbled that you had found a cone-shaped stone and you wanted to go back and get it.\"\n\n\"Did I say that?\"\n\n\"You were out of your head,\" Doumas said. \"But what exactly was it you saw?\"\n\nIndy glanced at Dorian. She watched him intently. \"Just what I said. It had something covering it like rope that had been petrified. And I would like to go back for it.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Dorian asked.\n\nIndy didn't know, but he'd been thinking a lot about the stone. In fact, he couldn't get it out of his head. \"I just think it's worth going after, especially since we lost the tablet.\"\n\n\"You're not really in any condition to do it,\" Doumas said. \"Don't you agree, Dr. Belecamus?\"\n\nDorian spoke sharply. \"I'm not sure that you are, either, and I don't want anyone going into the crevice without asking me. Is that understood, Stephanos?\"\n\n\"Of course, but\u2014\"\n\nDorian walked away without another word, and disappeared into the crowd.\n\n\"She's angry with me,\" Doumas said. \"Because of the rope.\" He picked a slice of sweetbread off his plate and bit away half of it.\n\nA beat passed as Indy considered the man's audacity. \"I'm the one who should be angry. What the hell happened, anyhow?\"\n\n\"The rope was rotten. Then in the confusion, we lost the other one. Sorry. I was going to apologize earlier, but I didn't want to disturb you.\"\n\nIndy was about to accuse him of going into the hole himself and cleaning the tablet when Doumas leaned close and spoke in his ear. \"If I were you, Jones, I'd be careful around Dr. Belecamus tonight. Her boyfriend is here, you know. That's him over there, the man in the colonel's uniform. He's jealous, I understand.\"\n\nIndy almost gagged from the putrid odor emanating from Doumas. He stepped back. The man Doumas nodded toward had a ruddy face and a prominent hooked nose. He looked to be in his early fifties, maybe twenty years older than Dorian.\n\n\"Thanks. I'll remember that,\" Indy said. One day Doumas was trying to kill him, the next he was warning him of danger. It didn't make sense.\n\nAnd what about the way Dorian had reacted in his room to his comments about the tablet? She'd seemed shaken, not by the fact that someone had cleaned the tablet, but by what it said. Particularly, the last lines which were about the Oracle returning, and some great secret being revealed.\n\nThe number of coincidences connected with the old man's predictions were growing, he thought. The earthquake had happened. A Dorian had shown up. The king had arrived. Now the tablet seemed to confirm what the old man had said. Hell, no wonder she'd blanched. She was probably starting to wonder if she actually was Pythia. But coincidences happened all the time. They were only mysterious if you were looking for mystery.\n\n\"Indy, there you are.\"\n\nHe turned at the sound of the squeaky voice. \"Madelaine.\" She looked as if nothing had changed and she was just at another bal musette. \"I heard you'd be here, but I hardly believed it.\"\n\n\"Isn't this just splendid. I just love Greece, don't you?\"\n\n\"It grows on you.\"\n\n\"Your friend, Dorian, said you had an accident. But you look fine to me.\"\n\nIndy was about to tell her what had happened when she said something that stopped him cold. \"Isn't your buddy, Jack Shannon, going to be here?\"\n\n\"What are you talking about? Shannon's in Paris.\"\n\n\"No, he's here. I saw him earlier today in the little taverna. He was with someone else who said he knew you, too.\"\n\n\"You saw him here?\"\n\n\"That's what I just said.\"\n\n\"Who was the other man?\"\n\n\"I don't remember. Jack introduced him, but there was so much going on. Tom, Terry, maybe Larry. He was older.\"\n\n\"How much older?\"\n\n\"He was maybe thirty-five, forty. You know, old. He had a beard. He was a Canadian, I think. I don't know.\"\n\nWho did he know who had a beard and would travel to Greece with Shannon? He couldn't think of anyone, no one who was older, no one he knew.\n\n\"Are you sure about this? Did you talk to Shannon?\"\n\n\"Of course. We had a glass of ouzo together. He said they were looking for you. He seemed worried.\" She glanced around. \"Now where did Brent go with my drink?\"\n\n\"How did Jack know I was hurt?\"\n\n\"Don't think he did. They'd just gotten here, about an hour before us.\"\n\n\"You met Dorian. Did she talk to them?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" She was getting annoyed by the questions. She craned her neck, and stood on her toes, looking about the room.\n\nBut Indy persisted. \"Did you and Brent come to the hotel to see me after you heard I was hurt?\"\n\nShe smiled awkwardly. \"Well, we really didn't get a chance yet.\" She squeezed his arm. \"But now you're here, and everything is okay.\"\n\n\"Yeah. First rate.\"\n\nJust then the king was announced and a tall graying man entered the room. He shook hands with one person after another as he moved through the crowd, walking with a slight limp. Madelaine slipped away, either for a closer glimpse of the king or in search of Brent and her drink.\n\nIndy spotted Dorian standing with the colonel. He was sure that they'd both been looking his way. He wanted more than anything to ask her about Shannon and the other man, but he hesitated, remembering that Nikos had said it was soldiers who had taken the pair away. What reason would Dorian give this time, and where the hell had they taken them?\n\nHe couldn't hold himself back any longer. He wanted answers. He headed across the room, but suddenly he found himself face to face with the king, who extended his hand. Indy quickly introduced himself as they shook hands.\n\n\"Oh, yes. You must be the one I heard about who fell into the hole.\"\n\nIndy nodded, uncomfortable at the royal attention. \"It won't happen again.\"\n\nThe king laughed, and clasped him on the shoulder. \"Let's hope not. Tomorrow morning I'm going to visit the ruins. Will you be there?\"\n\nIndy had other things on his mind right now, but what could he say? \"Yes. Of course.\"\n\n\"Good. Then maybe you can tell me all about what happened. See you then.\"\n\nIndy stepped back as the king turned and began talking with someone else. He didn't see Dorian or the colonel now. He wandered about the room, and out onto the veranda. She was nowhere in sight.\n\n\"You look lost, Indy,\" Doumas said from behind him.\n\n\"Have you seen Dr. Belecamus?\"\n\n\"She's gone. She left with Colonel Mandraki a few minutes ago.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "AROUND THE FIRE",
                "text": "Indy quietly slipped out of the mansion, and walked to the rear where the drivers waited near their carriages. He asked after Doumas's carriage, and was directed to the driver. \"Mr. Doumas said you should take me back to the hotel.\"\n\nThe driver looked dubiously at him. \"Are you sure? He told me to wait for him.\"\n\n\"He's staying the night.\" Indy leaned forward. \"Too much ouzo.\"\n\n\"Already?\"\n\n\"Already,\" Indy said gravely.\n\nThe man nodded, and climbed into his seat as Indy slid into the carriage. None of what he'd said was true, but he didn't feel guilty about stranding Doumas.\n\nWhen he arrived at the hotel, Nikos was lying on his cot intently reading a book. \"Have you seen Dorian?\"\n\n\"No. She hasn't returned,\" the boy said, rising to his feet. He ran a hand over his short-cropped hair. \"You are back early.\"\n\n\"Maybe not early enough. Who is this Colonel Mandraki?\"\n\n\"That's what I was going to tell you about when she came into the room. He is Alex, her boyfriend.\"\n\nNo wonder she'd turned cool towards him since they'd arrived in Delphi.\n\n\"He is a very dangerous man, and I think Dr. Belecamus is the same when he is around. That is why I brought you the moly. For your protection.\"\n\n\"Thanks. Now tell me more about the Americans who came to see me.\"\n\n\"One was tall and thin with red hair and a little beard on his chin.\" Nikos rubbed his chin, indicating the sparse beard. \"The other one was shorter and had a big beard. And look. I have something for you.\" He reached under the counter, and held out a coiled whip. \"Your tall friend wanted me to give this to you before you saw him. He said you would know about it. Then he was going to walk into your room. But the soldiers came.\"\n\nIndy took the whip and ran his hands over it. That confirmed it. Shannon was here, but he still didn't know the identity of the other man.\n\n\"Indy, I have another question about America.\"\n\nHe wasn't in the mood for small talk. \"It's not a very good time, but go ahead.\"\n\n\"Is it true that Americans put applesauce on their bread?\"\n\nIndy stared at him. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\nHe held up the book he'd been reading. \"In here the girl eats bread like that.\" It was a ragged-looking copy of Seventeen, \"Where did you get that book?\"\n\n\"One of the Americans gave it to me. The shorter one with the beard,\"\n\nIndy remembered that day in Le Dome in Paris when Ted Conrad had talked about meeting Booth Tarkington and showed him his used copy. He took the book, and opened the cover. It was signed by Tarkington and inscribed, \"To Ted\u2014best of luck in your writing.\"\n\nBut what in the world was Conrad, his old history professor, doing here, and why with Shannon? They didn't know each other. And why did Mandraki want to keep them away from him?\n\n\"Look, I found this in the book,\" Nikos said. \"Do you know him?\"\n\nHe handed Indy a picture of a handsome, smiling man who looked about Indy's age. He was standing beside what looked like a Greek statue and behind him were the stone steps of an amphitheatre.\n\n\"Never seen him in my life,\" Indy said. He tapped the edge of the photograph against the counter and frowned. \"You said my friends were taken by soldiers. Were they asked nicely to go with them, like an escort?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Nothing nice about it. They were taken like criminals, and Colonel Mandraki was the one who was in charge.\"\n\n\"Where would they take them?\"\n\n\"I don't know, but they left in the direction of the ruins.\"\n\n\"That's a start. I'm going to look for them. Can I keep this?\" He held up the photograph.\n\n\"If you let me go with you.\"\n\nIndy hesitated. \"I don't want you to get in trouble, Nikos.\"\n\n\"I can help you find them. I know good hideouts near the ruins. We can look there.\"\n\nIndy slipped the photograph inside his jacket pocket, and hooked the whip on his belt. \"Okay, but just remember that we're not playing hide-and-seek with these soldiers. This is serious business.\"\n\n\"I know. Do you have the moly?\"\n\nIndy forced a smile. \"Yeah.\"\n\nA few minutes later, they mounted horses. Indy touched a hand to his sore ribs, then nudged the sides of his horse and they rode off at a gallop. As they neared the ruins, Indy gestured toward the workshop and they turned off the road. The place appeared quiet and deserted, but he wanted to check anyhow. They dismounted near the stables, and walked cautiously towards the workshop. He tried the door, and was surprised to find it unlocked. Slowly, he pushed it open. A kerosene lamp was burning on the long table.\n\nHe moved along the rows of shelves stacked with stone tablets, looking down each aisle. There was no sign of Dorian or anyone else. He was heading back toward the door when he noticed something white and filamentous protruding from one of the lockers. He dropped to one knee, and felt the material. He was almost sure he knew what it was. He opened the door. He was right. It was Dorian's dress, the one she'd worn this evening to the reception. She'd been here, and changed. The fact that she hadn't gone back to the hotel meant she and Mandraki were in a hurry.\n\nHe was about to close the door when he noticed a sheet of paper taped to the back wall of the locker. On it were three columns of numbers. The first two sets of numbers read across the page as:\n\n\u20021 4:23 P.M. (3:05)\n\n\u20021 7:28 P.M. (3:11)\n\nIt didn't take long to figure out what it was. The number on the left represented days, and day one, he was certain, was the day they arrived and had started monitoring the vapors. In the center column were the times of the risings and the numbers on the right represented the length of time between risings.\n\nHe ran his finger down the page and realized that it was not only a record of previous risings, but a schedule of future ones for the next several days. One set of numbers was underlined. It read:\n\n\u20039 11:41 A.M. (6:53)\n\nIndy counted the days since they had arrived. Today was the eighth. Tomorrow morning the king would visit the ruins and the vapors would rise at 11:41. That could be useful. He quickly memorized the times of the risings for the next couple of days.\n\n\"There's nobody here,\" Nikos said.\n\n\"I know. They were here and left, and wherever they went, Dorian didn't want to wear her dress.\"\n\n\"Maybe she didn't want to get it dirty.\"\n\nIndy nodded. \"Could be. Know of any dirty hiding places where they might have taken my friends?\"\n\nNikos thought a moment. \"There's a cave above the ruins.\"\n\n\"Do you think Dorian knows about it?\"\n\n\"I know she does.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\" Indy persisted.\n\nNikos suddenly looked uneasy. His dark eyes darted about. He scuffed his shoes on the floorboards. \"You see, one day when I was twelve, I did something bad.\"\n\n\"Go on.\"\n\n\"I followed Dr. Belecamus and a boyfriend up there. I snuck in the cave after them, and watched them do it.\"\n\n\"This boyfriend. You mean the colonel?\"\n\nNikos shook his head. \"No. Someone else. A helper. Someone like you. A student.\"\n\nSo she made a habit of getting involved with her graduate students, Indy thought. Real nice. He didn't know why, but he felt jealous, betrayed.\n\n\"Come on. Let's go take a look.\"\n\nThey followed a trail to the ruins, and ascended to the old stadium which was beyond the theater. From there Nikos led the way to a wooded path. He pointed toward the dark mountainside above them. \"It's right about there.\"\n\nIndy didn't see anything but the silhouette of trees against the moonlit sky. It didn't look promising, but they didn't have much choice. The path was steep and twisted around boulders. With almost every step, shoots of pain flashed through his sore ribs and thigh. But he kept going, impelled by the dark cloud of Dorian's betrayal. Finally, Nikos stopped and pointed. The moonlight revealed a ledge about three feet wide. \"It's just a little farther,\" he whispered.\n\nThe ledge curved around an outcropping of rock. It narrowed; Indy's feet were only inches from the edge. He was suddenly grateful that the darkness obscured the view below. It didn't seem so dangerous when he couldn't see how far he would fall if he slipped.\n\n\"Stop,\" Nikos whispered. He was pressed up against the wall, his face in shadows.\n\nHe was about to ask what was wrong when he heard the clatter of footsteps ahead on the ledge. Someone was moving along just ahead of them; the rocks hid whoever it was. There was no time to do anything but try to melt into the boulders. He pressed himself against the wall, and recoiled in pain as a jagged stone poked him in the side.\n\nThe footsteps grew louder. He saw movement in the dark. Whoever it was stopped, probably sensing their presence. They were trapped.\n\nA weird, pathetic bleating cut through the silence and Nikos laughed. \"It's just a goat with three little ones behind her.\"\n\n\"What are they doing here?\"\n\n\"They live up here. They're wild.\"\n\nNikos softly called the goat, but the animal obdurately held its ground. \"Is there any other way we can go?\" Indy asked.\n\n\"No.\"\n\nIndy looked around, and spotted a thick branch hanging over the trail. He unhitched his whip, and with a smooth snap of his wrist snared the branch. Then he swung out from the ledge and around the goats, landing on the far side of them.\n\n\"Move it,\" he hissed, and the goat and its little ones hurried ahead.\n\n\"How did you do that?\" Nikos asked, amazed.\n\n\"Lucky, I guess. Let's go.\"\n\nThey cautiously worked their way around the rocks until they could see the mouth of the cave. Light flickered from the interior. Someone was there.\n\nIndy patted Nikos on the shoulder. \"Good going. You were right.\"\n\nThey edged closer.\n\nA tree grew from somewhere above the ledge and its branches shrouded the cave's entrance. No wonder they hadn't seen the light from the fire when Nikos had first pointed out its location. As they moved within a few feet of the opening, Indy heard the murmur of voices. Behind him, Nikos cleared his throat. Indy turned to him, touched a finger to his mouth. But he tripped over a loose rock, sending it tumbling into the ravine.\n\n\"There, did you hear that?\" It was Dorian's voice. \"Alex, go out and take a look.\"\n\nIndy held his breath. Oh, God. If that eagle was his protector, he needed its help now.\n\n\"I was just out there,\" Mandraki barked. \"I told you it's goats. Stupid little goats.\"\n\n\"Sorry. I guess I'm nervous,\" Dorian answered.\n\nIndy wiped his brow. He thanked God. He thanked the eagle. He thanked whoever else might be responsible for keeping Mandraki in the cave. He carefully moved forward until he reached the corner of the opening. He dropped to one knee, and peered into the cave. A fire burned in the center of the cavern, its smoke disappearing through an unseen chimney in the roof. Several figures were seated around the blaze. Dorian's back was to him, and next to her was Mandraki. Across from them, he could see two soldiers with rifles.\n\nHis eyes adjusted to the flickering light, and now he could see two bodies lying prone beyond the fire. They were on their stomachs, hands tied behind them. Beyond them were three long, shallow holes and a shovel lying on the ground. Was this an excavation site that he didn't know about? He doubted it. The holes looked more like graves. New ones. Three of them.\n\n\"Alex?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"This was a big mistake,\" Dorian said. \"We should have left them alone.\"\n\n\"No. It wasn't a mistake. If I'd allowed them to talk to Jones, he'd be gone, and we need him tomorrow.\"\n\n\"By now he knows something is going on. He won't show up at the ruins. He'll be looking for his friends.\"\n\n\"We can control that situation,\" Mandraki assured her.\n\nIndy motioned Nikos to move back. Cautiously, they edged away from the cave entrance until they were out of hearing range. \"Listen, Nikos, I want you to go back to the hotel. If anyone asks for me, say I came back early and went to bed.\"\n\n\"What are you going to do?\"\n\n\"Find a safe place to keep watch. Sooner or later, Dorian and Mandraki will leave. That's when I make my move.\"\n\nWhile Nikos headed down toward the ruins, Indy worked his way above the ledge until he found a spot with a view that would allow him to see anyone leaving the cave. That is, if he could stay awake. He gathered together leaves for a cushion and sat down, propping his back against a tree. He rubbed his sore thigh, and adjusted the band covering his ribs. He tried to relax, and puzzled again over what Dorian and Mandraki would want with Shannon and Conrad, and why the two men had come here. But the more he thought about it the more baffled he became.\n\nHe closed his eyes, started to doze, and jerked awake.\n\nHe stood up and paced to stay alert. Just as he settled down again, he heard a noise, not from below but from the rise above him. He turned his head and listened. Must be the goats.\n\nBelow him he saw a dancing shadow. He leaned forward, and watched. Then he realized it was light from the fire in the cave. They'd probably just stoked it with more wood. He readjusted his position, hunkering lower against the trunk as he tried to get comfortable. He hugged himself, rubbing his arms. It was chilly and damp. If the four in the cave were taking turns watching their captives, it was going to be a long night.\n\nHis eyelids felt heavy again. He blinked, rubbed his cheeks, and stared ahead. He imagined Dorian and Mandraki huddled by the fire staying warm, then the image slid away and shifted. He and Dorian were in a berth on the train snuggled together. Warm, safe. But then he sensed something ominous. It was near, but he couldn't see it. It was a man, a blond-haired man staring down at him, the same man who had followed Dorian after she'd spoken to him, the man who had disappeared on the train. The man pointed, and his mouth moved. What was he saying? A warning about something, but Indy couldn't hear him clearly.\n\nIndy jerked awake, shaking his head. Just a dream. Stay awake. He rubbed his arms. But a few minutes later he drifted off again. Voices.\n\nSomeone was disturbing his sleep. He should know who it was. He should do something, but the voices blended with a dream in which he was back in Chicago. Dorian's voice.\n\nDorian didn't belong in Chicago. He blinked his eyes open, and took his bearings. I'm on the mountain. Waiting. But for what? Then it all came back.\n\nThe moon was dipping behind the mountain, but there was still enough light to see the ledge. No one was there.\n\nBut a man's voice issued from the cave. Then Dorian's voice. They were arguing.\n\nHow long had he slept? He pulled out his watch. He'd been here more than two hours.\n\n\"I'm leaving,\" Dorian said.\n\n\"All right. I'm coming with you,\" the man answered. He spoke in a lower voice to someone else, then Dorian emerged from the cave.\n\nIndy peered down at the ledge as Mandraki followed her. He watched them until they were out of sight. He waited, listened. The sound of their footsteps receded, then vanished. He stood up again, a hand resting on his coiled whip. Now he was ready.\n\nHe worked his way along the ridge above the ledge, looking for the way down. The scent of the air was rich, cold, almost sweet, and made him want to close his eyes again, sleep again. Somewhere along there the underbrush opened enough to climb down, he thought. Okay, this was it. He was about to descend when the snap of a twig brought him up short.\n\nHe spun around.\n\nAt first he didn't see anything. Then he glimpsed a shadow, an arm upraised, a blade stabbing the air, rushing toward him. He blocked the blow with his forearm, grabbed the man by the wrist and elbow and smashed his arm against his knee. The knife flew from his hand into the darkness.\n\nThe attacker tried to escape, but Indy snagged his collar, and pulled him back. Then he saw who it was. \"You. You bastard.\"\n\nIndy landed a solid punch to Grigoris's jaw and sent him reeling. He crashed against a tree trunk, and slumped to the ground. He walked over to him and crouched. Grigoris's hand slithered along the ground toward the knife, serpentine, silent. Just as he reached it, Indy snapped it up.\n\nHe held the blade beneath the man's chin. \"I don't like you very much. You make a sound, I'll remove your tonsils. Got that?\"\n\nHe checked the man's pockets and found a handkerchief. He gagged him with it. \"That was good of you. Didn't have to use my own. Now unlace your boots.\"\n\nGrigoris stared at him until Indy pressed the point of the knife against his neck. \"Do it.\" When he was done, Indy took the laces from him and knotted them together. Then he bound Grigoris's wrists behind his back and around a tree. It wouldn't hold him long, but it should slow him down. He'd think twice about trying anything again. Or so Indy hoped.\n\nHe stood up. \"If I see you again tonight, I'm going to throw you off the mountain. Got that?\"\n\nIndy made his way down to the ledge, and then to the entrance of the cave. The fire was burning low. Shannon and Conrad was still lying on the floor where he'd seen them earlier. Nearby sat a guard.\n\nOne guard. Where the hell was the other one?\n\nA branch creaked overhead. He looked up, and as he did the other guard dropped to the ledge. He swung the butt of his rifle at Indy's head. Indy ducked, then drove his head into the soldier's gut. The two of them barreled into the mouth of the cave as Indy wrestled for the rifle. Then suddenly he felt cold metal jammed behind his ear. It was the other guard.\n\n\"Don't move, malaka, or you're dead.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "UNDER GUARD",
                "text": "The approach of dawn was already washing away the dark texture of the night sky as they were marched along the ledge. Shannon, all arms and legs and wild red hair and goatee, lurched and bobbed as he followed one of the guards. Indy was behind him, then came Conrad, his wool sport coat rumpled and soiled, his face and beard gritty from the damp earth of the cave. Even though Indy had been lying next to them for several hours, it was the first time he'd actually seen them. All three had been gagged and blindfolded.\n\n\"Siga, siga,\" ordered the other guard from behind them, over and over. \"Siga, siga.\" Keep moving, but not too fast.\n\nIndy was groggy from lack of sleep; his body felt battered. But he knew that they weren't going to be killed. Not yet, at least. Fortunately, the guards hadn't realized that Indy could understand them, and they'd talked freely while he'd listened. The one at the rear, who had a slightly higher rank than his companion, had said they must wait for Mandraki to return, as he'd ordered. The other guard, however, the one who had jumped him, was convinced that Indy was someone important and that he should take him immediately to Mandraki. Then the first man said that he should be the one to take Jones because of his rank. They had argued off and on for hours, and had finally agreed that if Mandraki had not returned by dawn, they would both take all three captives to the stables and from there the guard with the higher rank would get the colonel.\n\nWhen they reached the end of the ledge, Indy finally had a chance to exchange looks with Shannon and Conrad. He couldn't tell what they were thinking, but he saw fear in both men's eyes. He didn't blame them. He probably had the same look in his own eyes.\n\nAs they descended the path to the valley, the sky beyond the mountain pass to the east slowly turned from sullen gray to a deep rose. Below them, the ruins were still in shadow, and blanketed by fog. All Indy could see of the temple were the pillars, and they looked ghostly, as if they would vanish with the fog. If the vapors were rising now, they would be indistinguishable from the fog. Maybe that was why Dorian wanted the schedule. But if she were Pythia, what did that have to do with what was happening now? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.\n\nBy the time they were near the ruins, Indy's body didn't seem to know whether it should be hot or cold. His forehead was damp with perspiration and his fingers were numb from the cold. They emerged from the path, headed past the stadium, then went around the rear of the crumbling stone theater. The fog was lifting and Indy hoped someone would see them. Certainly, three men bound and gagged would be an unusual sight, and the word would go out. Someone surely would investigate, especially today, the day the king was expected to visit the ruins.\n\nAs if in answer to his thoughts, Indy saw a shadowy figure moving through the woods along the path between the stables and the ruins. Please, be someone with the king, he pleaded silently. Then he saw it was a woman. It was Dorian, and his hopes plummeted. As she walked up to the, she quickly assessed the situation. \"Good work. We were looking for him,\" she said, nodding toward Indy as if he were a sheep or cow that had strayed out of its fence.\n\nWhen the guards told her where they were planning to take them, she shook her head. \"There're too many people who might see them. Take them over there to the hut, and remove their gags. Then get them some food.\"\n\nShe smiled at Indy. \"We don't want you to starve before you see the king.\" She looked him over and shook her head. \"We'll have to get you some fresh clothes, too, and you must try to get some rest.\"\n\nShe was crazy, she had to be, he thought as they were rushed to the thatched hut. Why the hell would she still want him to see the king? If he hadn't inhaled the vapors himself, he'd be ready to believe that they'd warped her thinking.\n\nOutside the hut, the guards untied their gags, and warned them with gestures not to talk. One after the other they were shoved through the doorway. The light was dim inside, but they could still see each other. No one said a word; not for a minute or two. Indy rubbed his jaw, and looked around. The table and chairs had been removed, but otherwise the hut was the same as when he'd last seen it. He lowered himself to the floor and leaned his back against the wall. Underneath the cloth that covered the doorway, he could see the guard's black boots.\n\nConrad slumped down next to him. \"I'd say good to see you, Indy, but under the circumstances...\"\n\nShannon paced across the hut. \"I don't like this. In fact, I hate it. I mean I'm definitely out of my environment. I can't go on like this. I want to play my cornet. I want to hear some jazz, any jazz, even counterfeit jazz, and I want a drink, even that god-awful pine sap shit they drink here. Anything.\"\n\n\"Jack, shut up,\" Indy hissed. \"Or they'll gag us again.\"\n\n\"No one's ever going to gag me again. We've got to get out of here.\"\n\n\"We will get out, Shannon. We'll figure a way,\" Conrad said. \"But Indy's right, keep it down.\"\n\nIndy looked between the two men. \"One of you mind telling me what the hell you're doing here?\"\n\nNeither spoke for a moment. \"Come on, you're not wearing gags,\" he whispered. \"And don't tell me you just decided to go off on a Greek vacation together. Hell, I didn't think you two even knew each other.\"\n\nThe two guards were arguing, probably about who was going to get the food for them. Conrad took advantage of the distraction. \"Let me start by going back to that day at Le Dome when you introduced me to Belecamus. After you both left the restaurant, I was approached by an English gentleman named Gerald Farnsworth, who had a lot of disturbing things to say about Belecamus. I got worried and told him that you were leaving for Greece with her the following day, but that I didn't know where you lived or how to contact you. He said he would catch the train, and tell you himself.\"\n\nFarnsworth promised to send him a telegraph in a day or two, he continued. When he didn't hear from him, he contacted the police, and found out that his body had been found on a railroad bed. He'd been stabbed with a pointed object, like an ice pick.\n\nIndy felt a knot in his stomach as he realized that the man who had followed Dorian from the dining car of the train must have been Farnsworth. He glanced toward the doorway again. The boots were no longer visible, and the arguing was more distant now. He listened as Conrad continued.\n\nThat night, Conrad had gone to the Jungle and started drinking. He'd just ordered his third scotch when Shannon recognized him as a professor from his alma mater. It didn't take long for Conrad to discover that Shannon had been Indy's college roommate, and that he also had talked to Indy before he'd left for Greece.\n\n\"When I told Jack what I'd found out, he knew you were in trouble, and he wanted to help.\"\n\nIndy couldn't contain himself any longer. \"What did Farnsworth tell you?\"\n\nConrad frowned. \"I had a photograph with me when I arrived. I must have misplaced it. Anyhow, it's\u2014\"\n\n\"Wait a minute.\" Indy reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the photo Nikos had given him. It was crumpled now, and he did his best to flatten it out. \"You mean this one?\"\n\n\"That's it,\" Conrad said excitedly.\n\n\"Keep it down.\" Now Shannon was taking charge of the noise level.\n\nThey all glanced anxiously toward the doorway, and listened. The guards were still talking, but in more restrained tones.\n\nIndy held up the photo. \"So who is he?\"\n\n\"His name is Richard Farnsworth, Gerald's younger brother and a former archaeology graduate student at the University of Athens where Belecamus used to teach. He disappeared two years ago. No trace of him was ever found.\n\n\"So Gerald Farnsworth started searching for his brother,\" Conrad continued. \"He found out that Richard and Dorian Belecamus had been lovers, but that she also was involved with Mandraki. It just so happened that the weekend Richard disappeared the colonel was seen with Belecamus.'\n\nA chill ran through Indy. Although Conrad was still talking, the words sounded as though they were being spoken underwater. Long vowels, short consonants, like a voice played on seventy-eight rpm. He rubbed his ear against his shoulder and tried to clear his head.\n\n\"Gerald Farnsworth also found out about another graduate student of hers who was found shot to death in his apartment just a year earlier. He had also been her lover, and there were suspicions about her, but no one was ever charged in the murder. Then, shortly after Farnsworth disappeared, she resigned from the university. Supposedly, she was about to face charges of unprofessional and inappropriate behavior with students.\" \"Damn inappropriate,\" Shannon put in. \"That's when she left Greece for Paris.\" \"She gave me quite a different story about why she left Greece,\" Indy said. His anger and resentment were building. \"I guess she's got an appetite for graduate students, and I was just one in a line. But how come Nikos, the kid at the hotel, didn't know who Farnsworth was? He gave me the photograph.\"\n\n\"Because Farnsworth never came here to Delphi. Her affair with him was in Athens. She's been careful to avoid romances here where it would be too difficult to hide.\"\n\nShe must have had at least one, Indy thought, recalling Nikos's story. The frigid feeling had passed; in its place was a huge, heavy lump in his gut.\n\n\"And when she's done with her boys she feeds them to her killer boyfriend,\" Shannon added. \"But that's not all, old buddy.\"\n\nIndy couldn't imagine what else they could tell him after the Farnsworth story.\n\n\"My family has a few contacts in this neighborhood of the world,\" Shannon began. \"You know what I'm talking about. People with connections. Political connections. Inside information.\"\n\nMob contacts, Indy thought, but Shannon was being as cagey as ever. \"What did you find out?\"\n\n\"First of all, your archaeology prof had more than an old stone tablet in mind when she took this trip. Do you know her father is a Greek dissident and he's living in Italy?\"\n\n\"She told me all about that. Her old man has a gripe against the king. A difference of opinion.\"\n\n\"It's more than a difference of opinion. Her friend, Mandraki, is close to her father. I hear that he's up to something, maybe planning a coup, and that Dorian Belecamus is involved.\"\n\n\"A coup?\"\n\n\"Right. So someone I know broke into her office at the university, and discovered a letter from Mandraki that verified it.\"\n\nShannon was probably that someone, Indy thought. \"But if what you say is true, why would Dorian bring me along?\"\n\n\"They're going to use you somehow,\" Shannon said. \"It must have something to do with your seeing the king today. My guess is that they're going to kill him and you're supposed to take the fall. These guys are just like Chicago gangsters. Maybe smarter.\"\n\n\"Did Mandraki threaten to kill you?\"\n\n\"Didn't you see those graves in the cave before they blindfolded you?\" Shannon asked. \"They're planning on killing all of us today.\"\n\nJust then the cloth door of the hut was pushed aside and one of the guards stepped, into the hut. He gestured angrily for them to stop talking. His partner brought in three plates, each containing a piece of hard bread, boiled-potatoes, and a slice of feta cheese.\n\nAs they ate in silence, Indy decided that Dorian was capable of doing what Shannon had suggested. He didn't know how she planned to do it, but somehow he had to warn the king.\n\nIndy moved over next to Shannon as he finished eating. \"Sorry you guys got involved.\"\n\n\"We got ourselves involved.\"\n\nConrad laid down his fork. \"I didn't realize how quickly we would be singled out once we got here. But Belecamus remembered me, of course.\"\n\n\"By the away,\" Shannon said, \"what the hell is your squeaky-voiced friend Madelaine doing here?\" He laughed for the first time. \"That really threw me. We'd just gotten here, and the last person I expected to see walks up to me in the street.\"\n\nJust then the two guards burst into the hut and pulled Shannon and Conrad to their feet. \"What's going on?\" Indy yelled.\n\nHe leaped up, but was shoved to the ground and kicked in the stomach. By the time he uncurled himself, Shannon and Conrad were gone, and he was gagged again. \"Bastards,\" he muttered into the gag. He rolled over and peered toward the door. He could still see a pair of boot heels. He wondered if he would ever see Shannon or Conrad again. He thought of Shannon and their college antics, and how upset he'd been that Conrad had turned him in to the dean. All of that seemed distant and petty compared to the trouble they now faced. His attraction to Dorian Belecamus had gotten the better of him. That was what it amounted to. Angrily, he kicked at the wall, and to his surprise his foot broke through. He realized that the spot he'd kicked had been burned in the fire he'd accidentally started the day he was in here timing the vapors. He pulled his foot back, and looked at the heels in the doorway. They hadn't moved.\n\nCautiously, he jabbed his foot at the burned thatchwork around the hole. Piece by piece he knocked off chunks of the wall until he'd made a hole that looked wide enough for him to squeeze through. He crept forward feet first, wriggling his way through on his stomach. But his thighs were too large, and he wedged tightly against the wall.\n\nHe pressed his legs together, and tried again, gritting his teeth as the thigh he'd bruised in his fall scraped against the wall. This time he made it, and now he was half out of and half in the hut. He worked his knees against the ground and edged further out.\n\nNot much more to go now, he thought, and then his shoulders stuck firmly. He twisted right and left, pulled and pushed, but nothing worked. If anything, he was caught even tighter. He expelled the air from his lungs and buckled his knees, pulling as hard as he could. The hut shook, but he was still trapped. He looked up at the doorway. The boot heels were no longer visible.\n\nOh, shit. Now what?\n\nIt didn't take long for an answer. He felt hands grip his ankles and pull. He grunted as his shoulders scraped sharply against the thatch, and then he was through the hole.\n\nHe turned his head and saw a pair of black shoes. He looked up. But it wasn't the guard. It was Nikos.\n\nThe kid quickly loosened the rope on his wrists and removed the gag. \"The guard,\" Indy whispered.\n\n\"Don't worry. I took care of him,\" Nikos said, holding up a club.\n\nIndy rose to his feet, and grinned as he brushed himself off. \"How did you know I was here?\"\n\n\"I didn't until I saw the soldier at the door. I came looking for you because I saw Colonel Mandraki taking your friends into the back door of the hotel and up the stairs. There's a soldier guarding them in one of the rooms.\n\nJust then Indy heard the click of a gun being cocked. He looked up to see Mandraki's rugged face glaring at him, a sneer curled on his lips. He was aiming a revolver at him. \"You going somewhere, Jones?\"\n\nIndy kept his eyes on the gun, and remained silent. The last thing he wanted to do was antagonize this man, who no doubt would pull the trigger without a second thought.\n\nMandraki looked over at Nikos. \"Get back to that hotel and stay there,\" he said through gritted teeth. \"If you say a word to anyone, I'll kill him. Then I'll come after you.\"\n\nNikos glanced once at Indy, then hurried away.\n\n\"I don't like killing children, Jones, but I will if I have to. It's up to you, you know.\"\n\n\"I don't know what you mean.\"\n\nMandraki's smile was sinister. \"You're going to do what I say or the kid and your two friends die.\"\n\n\"What do you want me to do?\"\n\n\"There's going to be an accident. The king is going to fall into the crevice after the vapors rise. You're going to give him some help with a little push.\"\n\nLike hell I am, Indy thought. \"What if he doesn't want to walk into the vapors?\"\n\n\"He will, because you're going to tell him how the vapors cured your injuries, and that you believe it will help any ailments he might have. He has a bad hip. He's gone to doctors all over the world, but he's still in pain. He'll want to try the vapors. I guarantee it.\"\n\nIndy didn't know what to say. He had to find a way to stop Mandraki.\n\n\"If you attempt to warn the king, I will kill you instantly. Remember that. But if you cooperate in this accident, you and your friends will be allowed to leave the country right away. Do you understand?\"\n\nIndy didn't believe him. Not for a second. Mandraki tossed a cloth bag to Indy. \"Get in the hut and change your clothes. We want you to look presentable for the king.\"\n\nAnd then he smiled broadly and laughed.\n\nA stray thought crossed Indy's mind at that moment. If the eagle was his protector, he wasn't doing a very good job."
            },
            {
                "title": "ENTRANCING TALES",
                "text": "From his position on a jut of rock at the base of the mountain slope beyond Apollo's Temple, Panos gazed across the ruins toward a cluster of people gathered on the roadway near the entrance. The king had not arrived, but he would at any time. It was after eleven and the vapors would rise at 11:41.\n\n\"Let's go,\" Grigoris said. \"We can get closer.\"\n\nPanos shook his head. \"Plenty of time.\"\n\nAs always, Grigoris was in a rush. But this morning he was also in a sudden, dark mood. When Panos arrived here half an hour ago, Grigoris had spilled his tale of woe from last night. He had listened, glanced at his son's laceless boots, and shrugged. It didn't matter, he told him. What he meant was that Jones didn't matter. Not any more. He'd seen two of Mandraki's soldiers march the three outsiders down from the mountain. They were not going to present any more problems.\n\n\"Look there.\" Grigoris's finger jabbed toward the road just as Panos saw a large motorcar stop near the entrance. The king had arrived. He watched as a man in a suit stepped out of the front seat of the car and opened the back door. A moment later, a tall, grey-haired man was helped from the back seat of the car. He wore a safari outfit like so many of the foreigners who came to Delphi, and for a moment Panos didn't recognize him. But there was no doubt from the show of deference by the others that he was the king. Just the sight of the man who ruled his country left Panos feeling awed.\n\nHe recalled now what Belecamus had told him as she escorted him out of the workshop. He was still puzzled by it. The king was in danger, and the danger was nearby, she'd said. Had that been Pythia speaking, or Belecamus, or both? It was confusing.\n\nHe motioned to Grigoris, and they moved down the trail until they were just outside the ruins. They waited behind a hummock of trees less than fifty yards from the pillars. They'd gone as far as they dared, and now they watched as the group neared the temple.\n\nPanos focused his attention on the king. He felt his heart pounding. He knew a monumental event was about to happen. History. For once it wasn't in the past. It was happening right here and now, an important historical event that affected the world. He was seeing it; he would be part of it.\n\nBelecamus was on one side of the king, Mandraki on the other. He didn't like the way the colonel seemed to lead the procession, as if he were in charge. And why was Doumas hanging back like a fool? Then Panos drew in a sharp breath as he realized Jones was among the group. What was he doing there? It didn't make sense.\n\nEven from this distance, he sensed the danger, a dark presence that chilled him. It must be Jones. But if Jones were free, Mandraki had allowed it. Suddenly, he knew the colonel was the true source of danger. He was going to assassinate the king, and somehow use Jones to do it.\n\nHe couldn't let it take place. Not today of all days. Not here in Delphi. So much was at stake. He glanced at Grigoris and saw the hate in his eyes and knew that he too had recognized Jones. \"Father, do you see\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, now listen closely to me. Don't do anything until I tell you. The timing must be right.\"\n\nGrigoris stared at Jones and slowly nodded. When he spoke, it was without conviction. \"I understand. We are here, and that will be enough.\"\n\nGrigoris was repeating Panos's own words. But now Panos wasn't so sure they were true.\n\nDoumas followed the king's entourage through the ruins as Belecamus alternated between gloating about her days as Delphi's chief archaeologist and pointing out the damages created by the earthquake. Maybe no one else thought she was gloating, but her hubris was obvious to him. He was well aware of the extent of her work, and the limits of it. Nothing would please him more than seeing her leave Delphi and never return, at least not while he was in charge of the ruins.\n\nThis would definitely not be the way he would present Delphi to the king. What the hell did Mandraki know? There was no reason for him to be at the king's side. Then there was Jones. Probably the only reason he was still alive was that the king had requested his attendance, and Belecamus didn't want anyone asking questions.\n\nBut he looked like a lunatic. The pants he wore were too short, and the shirt too baggy. His shoes were covered with mud. If it had been any other place than the ruins, he wouldn't be allowed near the king. And it wasn't only his clothes. He dragged along as if he hadn't slept for days. What the hell had he been doing since he'd run off with Doumas's carriage?\n\nAs they approached the temple, Belecamus was talking about the crevice. She was making much of the fact that the vapors were similar to the historical accounts of the mephitic vapors of Apollo's Oracle. She even tossed in a mythological reference calling the vapors ichor, the life-force of the gods. Doumas almost laughed. He'd never heard her speak of Delphi in such romantic terms. Must be Jones's influence, he thought.\n\n\"And what effects do these vapors have on someone who inhales them?\" the king inquired as he limped ahead.\n\n\"All we can say for certain is that they don't seem to cause any ill effects. There may be a feeling of well-being, but that could just be psychological. However, I should say that Mr. Jones has other ideas, which he can tell you about later, if you're interested. He seems to think they have a healing effect.\"\n\nVery clever, Doumas thought. She was overlooking what had happened to her, probably because she thought it would sound too unprofessional to say that she had been overcome by the vapors and had acted oddly for a couple of days. She hadn't even admitted that she had inhaled them herself. But what was this about Jones?\n\nOne thing seemed certain now: she wasn't about to say she was Pythia. So Panos had lost. She wasn't going to cooperate as he'd hoped. Why would she? The stonemason had been a fool to think she would.\n\n\"When do these vapors rise?\" the king asked. \"They seem to come and go irregularly. Wouldn't you say, Stephanos?\"\n\nNow why had she said that, and placed him in the position of agreeing with a lie? He cleared his throat. \"Well, they seem to come less and less often with each succeeding day.\"\n\nThe next one was due anytime; she must know it. But maybe in all the distraction with the king's visit, she'd forgotten. He wondered if he should mention it. But what if he was wrong? The king would think he was a fool. He might even lose his position here if the king decided to wait for the vapors and nothing happened. No, he couldn't take any chances.\n\nDoumas moved closer to Belecamus as she led the way past the tilting columns of the temple. When he got a chance, he'd mention the timing of the vapors, and let her handle it. But she seemed anxious to keep moving and told the king that he could see the crevice from atop the mound.\n\n\"Mr. Jones, why don't you tell his Highness about your experience?\" Belecamus said as she took the king's arm, and guided him up the mound. \"You know more about it than anyone else.\"\n\nIncredible, Doumas thought. First, the colonel guiding the way, now Jones, who wasn't any more qualified, was going to take over. He didn't want any part of it. Reluctantly, he trailed after the others, stopping about halfway up the mound near the king's two aides.\n\nAs the king peered into the crevice, Jones talked about his fall. He described the tablet, and to Doumas' surprise gave an accurate account of what it had said. The king, however, didn't seem very interested. He listened as Jones described his fall onto a ledge, then interrupted and ask how the vapors had affected him.\n\n\"I think the vapors have a healing effect,\" Indy said, but he didn't sound very convinced himself. \"You see, I was injured in my fall, but I recovered very rapidly.\"\n\n\"And no ill effects?\"\n\nJones shook his head.\n\nHe didn't look much better, Doumas thought.\n\n\"I would like to test these vapors myself sometime,\" the king said.\n\nNot if they caused you to act like Belecamus, Doumas thought. He took a couple of steps forward, suddenly realizing that Belecamus was setting something up. The king was going to see the vapors, and maybe inhale them.\n\nNow Belecamus was talking about the tablet and the return of the oracle. \"In fact, some villagers say there's an old prophecy about Pythia returning after an earthquake and around the time the king arrives.\"\n\nThe king smiled. \"Is that so?\"\n\nDoumas sucked in his breath as he realized he'd been mistaken. She was going to do it.\n\nJust then, as if their speaking of the vapors had called them up, Doumas heard the telltale rumble and hissing. The gases started rising. She'd planned it this way. Maybe she was Pythia. But then she stepped down off the top of the mound as the vapors covered their ankles. Mandraki moved ahead of her, and blocked the two aides from reaching the king.\n\n\"Let them be,\" he ordered.\n\n\"Your Highness,\" one of the aides called out as the vapors billowed around the king's chest and shoulders. But the king ignored him. Belecamus abruptly turned away from Mandraki and disappeared into the vapors with the king and Jones as the gases completely engulfed them. It was all happening so fast that Doumas hardly noticed that Panos and Grigoris were among them.\n\nSuddenly, chaos reigned in the temple. Panos charged up the mound toward them, but Mandraki shoved him back down. The two aides were frantic, clawing their way toward the king. Mandraki struggled to contain them,.but just then Grigoris barreled into the colonel.\n\nAgain, Panos charged up the mound and this time vanished into the vapors. Mandraki had his hands full with Grigoris and the aides and didn't see what was happening. Doumas watched in stunned disbelief until a scream that was more animal than human pierced the air. Shivers radiated up his spine. He knew that Belecamus was transforming into Pythia. It was happening, and just the way Panos had planned it. He heard Panos's voice proclaiming Pythia's presence.\n\nNo. He had to stop them. He was the one who must have the power, not Panos. He struggled up the mound, stumbled, and slipped backwards. He could hear Dorian babbling, and the king's voice. He crawled ahead, climbed to his feet, and hurled himself into the vapors at the spot where Panos had disappeared.\n\nThe cloud of vapors shut out the others. The commotion beyond the vapors seemed distant, unimportant. Even the king, who stood within Indy's reach, appeared ghostlike, a dim silhouette. But he could hear him filling his lungs with great breathfuls of the vapors.\n\n\"Sir. Your Highness.\" Was that how he should address him? The king ignored him. \"Excuse me, Your Highness.\" He had to tell him about the danger. But how was he going to save Shannon and Conrad, and himself? Their lives were in danger no matter what happened to the king.\n\n\"My hip is already healing.\" Jubilance riddled the king's voice. \"This place is a miracle.\"\n\nBefore Indy could say anything further, another figure swirled through the vapors. It was Dorian. Her hair was standing on end as she tossed her head spasmodically from side to side. Spittle ran down her jaw. Her eyes threatened to burst from their sockets. She screamed.\n\n\"What's wrong with you?\" the king gasped.\n\nThen Panos was moving behind her. \"Your Highness, Pythia has returned,\" he boomed. \"What is it you wish to ask?\"\n\nThe king stared. Pythia moved closer to him and leered at him, her tongue hanging from her mouth. \"Get away; get away from me.\"\n\nSuddenly, she was babbling. The words gushed from her mouth, but made no sense. Indy detected a familiar word here, a phrase there. Latin. French. Greek. English. But it was gibberish.\n\n\"Pythia is addressing you, Your Highness,\" Panos said. \"She says you are the one who should get away. You are in danger. Someone very near wants to kill you. Flee this place; flee now for your life. But go with the knowledge that Delphi will soon rise in fame again, and the fortunes of our country will change.\"\n\n\"Who are you to tell me this?\" the king demanded. \"It is not I; it is Pythia who speaks.\" The king looked skeptically at Dorian. Her head hung to the side, her eyes were closed, and she was rocking back and forth. \"She is Pythia?\"\n\nIndy jerked his head as the hulking figure of Doumas appeared. His arms were outstretched; he lunged for Panos and grabbed him around the waist. Dorian was knocked off her feet; her head bounced hard against the ground. Indy lurched toward her, but Doumas and Panos rammed into him.\n\nIndy stumbled back, trying to recover his balance, but his feet slipped over the edge of the crevice. He slid down, clawing at the earth until he clutched a partially buried rock at the very brink of the hole. But the rock was loose. Oh God, no. I don't want to die. Not here. Not with these guys.\n\nHe pulled as hard as he could, raising his chest over the edge of the hole just as the rock broke free. His legs dangled; he inched forward, threw a leg over the top, then rolled over on his back.\n\nHe looked up just in time to see a foot about to stomp on his face. He grabbed it at the last instant and shoved it back. Then he saw that the foot belonged to Grigoris, who was coming at him again. But Doumas collared him. He held father and son by their necks and spun them in circles dangerously close to the edge. At any moment they could tumble over, and take Indy with them.\n\nIndy tried to roll further away from the crevice, but as he did several feet tripped over him and bodies tumbled toward the crevice. Someone yelled, and Indy saw hands grappling for purchase. He reached out and grabbed a wrist. Whoever it was hung precariously in midair, stretching Indy's arm to its limit.\n\nHe heard a prolonged scream as one of the men\u2014he couldn't tell who\u2014plunged into the abyss. His yells echoed down the chasm, and finally trailed off into deadly silence. To his left, Panos was hanging half over the ledge, and Grigoris struggled to pull him up.\n\nWho had fallen\u2014Doumas? Then who was hanging onto his hand? With an effort that took all of his strength, he pulled, digging his feet into the loose earth. He saw an arm, a shoulder, then the neck and head of the king. With the help of the king's free hand, Indy pulled him the rest of the way out of the hole.\n\nThey got to their feet at the same time, and the king stared at Indy for a long moment. \"I'll remember this,\" he said. \"You saved my life.\"\n\nAs suddenly as the vapors had arrived, they dispersed, like fog burned off by the sun. It was as if Doumas had been eaten alive by the power below Delphi and now the enigmatic force was retracting its ethereal tendrils.\n\nSuddenly, the king's aides were attending to him, hustling him away from the ruined temple. \"He wanted to kill me,\" the king said.\n\n\"Who did?\" one of his aides asked.\n\n\"The obese one, the archaeologist. But I was warned by Pythia. That woman is Pythia.\"\n\nMandraki, meanwhile, scooped up Dorian, and Grigoris was helping his father to his feet.\n\n\"Good time to get out of here,\" Indy muttered, and hurried away. He cut behind the theater to the path leading to the stables. He ran as best he could, his bruised thigh throbbing with every step. The vapors hadn't done a damn thing for his thigh, or his ribs, for that matter. The path ended at the workshop, and he dashed across the grassy yard to the stables.\n\nHe walked along the stalls and picked out a horse, one that Dorian had said was the strongest and fastest. He threw the saddle over its back, but as he did, the horse reared up, knocking the saddle off and nearly trampling Indy.\n\nHe quickly abandoned the stall. \"Try you some other day, fellow.\"\n\nThe next stall was empty, but in the one after it was the horse that Indy had been riding. He quickly saddled the steed, and was about to mount him when he spotted Mandraki headed his way carrying Dorian in his arms. He could ride past them, but Mandraki was probably armed.\n\nHe cursed under his breath and turned the horse back into the stall, removed the saddle, and ducked low. A few seconds later, Mandraki lumbered into the stable. Stay away from this stall, Indy ordered in his mind. He closed his eyes as he heard the creaking of a door. It was the next stall, the empty one. Mandraki placed Dorian on the hay-covered floor.\n\n\"Dorian, wake up. We've got to get going\"\n\nIndy heard a sharp slap, then another. \"Damn it, Dorian. What's wrong with you?\"\n\nDorian blinked her eyes as she felt a hard slap across one cheek, then the other. She didn't know where she was. Then she saw Alex's face looming over her. She looked around. \"What am I doing in this stable? Oh, my head.\" She gingerly touched a lump near her temple.\n\n\"Everything went wrong. What were you doing in the vapors? You were supposed to leave with me.\"\n\n\"I did, but then I don't know what happened.\"\n\n\"Well, the king got away, and he knows there was an attempt on his life,\" Mandraki said. \"Did Jones try to push him?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Dorian answered. \"I couldn't see. I was just trying to find my way out of there without falling into the hole. Are we in trouble?\"\n\nMandraki shook his head. \"No. He thinks it was Doumas who tried to kill him, and he's dead. He fell.\"\n\n\"So we're safe.\"\n\n\"Not until we clean up after ourselves,\" Mandraki said. \"We've got to act fast.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nMandraki frowned at her, confused by her sudden denseness. \"We've got to get rid of Jones and his friends. Then when we're done with them, I'm going to personally handle those two village idiots, the father and son. Any idea what they were doing there?\"\n\nShe turned her head aside. \"I don't know.\"\n\n\"The other day the older one told me that Jones was pursuing you. Why would he take an interest in my affairs? Or should I say yours?\"\n\nMandraki had always tolerated her flings with younger men, unless he thought they were lasting too long. Then he ended them, his way. Jones would be no exception, she knew. But she wanted him alive. Somehow, she had to stall Mandraki. She had her own plans for Jones.\n\n\"You go on, Alex. I'm going to lie here awhile and rest.\"\n\n\"You sure?\"\n\nJust then she heard a wheezing noise.\n\n\"What was that?\" Mandraki said. He stood up, and shoved the stall door open.\n\nThe straw and dust tickled the inside of Indy's nostrils. His nose twitched; he held his breath. He tried his best to hold off the sneeze that was building up. Mandraki was only a few feet away, and would surely hear him. In spite of himself, his head jerked spasmodically and he let out a choking, muffled sneeze.\n\n\"Damn it,\" he hissed under his breath. The door of the next stall creaked open. Indy waited, frozen in place. A hand slid into his field of vision; it patted the nose of the horse above him. If Mandraki opened the gate, he'd see him. No doubt about it.\n\n\"What's wrong, boy, got a cold?\" Thank God. He thought it was the horse. \"You don't look so good,\" Mandraki backed out of the stall, and moved on.\n\nIndy's relief was short-lived; almost immediately, another sneeze started to build. Hurry, get out of here, he silently told Mandraki as the colonel saddled a horse in another stall. Finally, after one of the longest minutes in his life, Indy heard Mandraki leading the horse out of the stall.\n\n\"Are you sure you're okay?\" the colonel asked Dorian. \"Yes. I'll be coining along in a few minutes.\" As soon as Mandraki galloped off, Indy let out a loud sneeze that ended in a hoot. It felt so good he smiled. But a moment later the smile faded. \"Who is there?\"\n\nThe danger of Mandraki had been so great that he'd forgotten about Dorian. \"No one.\"\n\n\"Jones! Is that you?\"\n\nAs he stood up, he touched his belt and wished the guards hadn't taken his whip. Dorian definitely was someone to approach with caution. He opened her stall and stared at her; he felt as if he were watching a poisonous spider. She was lying on her side, propping her head up with an elbow. He didn't see any weapons on her, but he wasn't about to let down his guard, either.\n\nShe sat up, threaded her hand through her hair. Bits of straw fell over her shoulders. \"Come in here,\" she said in a low, throaty voice. A few days ago, that same voice had been seductive. Now it was viperous.\n\nHe didn't move, didn't say a word. Her eyes beckoned him.\n\n\"Did you hear what I told the king when we were in the vapors?\" she asked.\n\n\"I heard the translation.\"\n\n\"What did I say?\" She opened her dark eyes and stared intently at him.\n\nHe wasn't sure whether she actually didn't know or was simply testing him. He repeated what Panos had said to the king.\n\n\"I warned him of a threat against his life,\" Dorian said. \"You see, I defied Alex.\"\n\n\"Did you?\"\n\n\"I saved the king's life, Indy. You were going to kill him.\"\n\n\"That was what your boyfriend wanted me to do,\" Indy countered. \"Now he wants to kill me, and my friends.\"\n\n\"I can help you.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I don't trust you, Dorian. I know too much about you.\"\n\nHer dark eyes seemed to burrow inside him. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Your old boyfriend, Farnsworth. You killed him, and his brother. And who knows how many more.\"\n\n\"I did not.\"\n\n\"I'm going.\" He backed out of the stall, and moved to the adjoining one. But as he saddled the horse, Dorian blocked the doorway.\n\n\"I haven't always done the right thing, Indy,\" she said in a soft voice. \"I've let Alex manipulate me. But that's over. I swear. I can help you get your friends away from him. I'll prove to you that I'm not what you think.\"\n\n\"Thanks, but I'll work on it myself.\"\n\n\"If you go to the hotel, you will be killed.\" She said it matter-of-factly. \"That is exactly what Alex expects you to do. He won't kill them until he has you. They are his bait. If you want to live, hide until morning. I'll bring your friends to the temple at eight-thirty.\"\n\nHe thought about it. She was probably right about the hotel. He had little chance of getting Shannon and Conrad away from Mandraki without at least one of them getting killed. \"Make it earlier.\"\n\n\"No. Eight-thirty. Be on time. No later.\"\n\nIndy knew from the schedule in Dorian's locker that the vapors would rise at 8:38. What the hell did she have in mind now? But then what choices did he have?\n\nIt came down to this: Dorian was the least trustworthy person he knew, but at the moment her help seemed his only option.\n\n\"I'll be there.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "NEW RISING",
                "text": "Fog covered the ruins like piles of freshly cut wool. Panos could see only a vague outline of the thatched hut where he had spent the night, and turned away from it in disgust. Despite the fog, he was confident that Belecamus\u2014Pythia\u2014would be here within minutes. She would be drawn to the vapors just as the rich and powerful would soon be attracted to Delphi like ants swarming over spilt honey. Soon, Delphi would flourish in a renaissance of the ancient ways. The Oracle's coffers would weigh heavy, and a new temple would be built on the ruins of the old. There would be no place for thatched huts at Delphi. He would make sure of that.\n\nThe hut had been Doumas's way of connecting the past with the present, but it had been a feeble link in comparison to the potent strength of the Return. But Doumas had been a contradiction. He had ponderously sought to understand the Order of Pythia in the same way that he had studied old crumbling buildings. Although he was never actually inducted into the Order, he had become privy to many of its secrets. But in the end he must have been jealous of the power the oracle priest would amass. He'dfoolishly tried to change the tide of history and erase the inevitable return of Pythia.\n\nNo, that wasn't quite right, Panos realized. Doumas had wanted the power himself. That was why he had attacked him, instead of Pythia. But of course he was unsuccessful, and his life had abruptly ended in failure. Thanks to Grigoris, Panos had escaped a similar end.\n\nIn the two hours since he'd gotten up, Panos had eaten nothing, and he would continue fasting until after the rising. This morning he would ask Pythia how the king would respond to what had happened yesterday, and how long it would take before her power was widely recognized. The more specifics he knew, the better he could plan.\n\nHe'd spent more than an hour this morning seated on the dirt floor of the hut figuring out how long the spans between risings would be in a week, a month, a year, and longer. At first, he had been worried about how rapidly the span between risings was increasing. Soon there would be only one rising a day, then one every two days. But he realized that as the quiet periods became longer, the speed of change slowed down. By the time there was a week between risings, it would take ten weeks before the quiet time expanded by another hour, and two hundred forty weeks or almost five years before the breaks would increase to eight days. After that, the increases would be even slower. Decades would pass before the breaks were two weeks long.\n\nHe heard footsteps approaching from behind the hut. She was here. He knew it. But then Grigoris emerged from the fog. \"What are you doing here? I told you to stay away this morning.\"\n\n\"They are coming, Father. I saw Pythia leave the hotel.\"\n\n\"I knew she would,\" Panos snapped, then forced asmile. \"Thanks for telling me.\" He had a hard time staying angry with Grigoris, especially so soon after his son had saved him from tumbling into the crevice. Grigoris always tried to do what he thought was right, just as Panos had taught him. But he'd also taught him to obey his commands, and that lesson was the one Grigoris had the most difficulty following.\n\n\"But I thought you would want to know that she is not alone.\"\n\nIndy had slept in what he had hoped would be the least likely place that Mandraki would look for him. The fact that he was still alive told him that the cave above the ruins had been a good choice.\n\nNow, he slowly worked his way along the ledge. He couldn't even see his feet through the fog. It was much thicker than yesterday, making the walk particularly treacherous. One step in the wrong place and he would plunge down the mountainside. The walk was nothing less than a metaphor of what his life had become. One wrong move and he was dead.\n\nAs he carefully worked his way around the boulders, he thought back to those first days here when he had spent hours waiting and watching as he timed the risings of the vapors. He'd been terribly bored and restless. Now he was neither. The struggle for survival had honed his senses, making him keenly aware and interested in what was going on around him.\n\nFinally, he reached the end of the ledge and moved along the path. By quarter after eight he was still on the mountainside a couple of hundred feet above the ruins. But when he gazed down at ancient Delphi all he saw was a harsh white haze that looked like a fresh blanket of snow.\n\nHe climbed down the rest of the way, not bothering to hide; he was already hidden, but so was everyone else, if indeed there was anyone. He stopped as he reached the Sacred Way and peered through the fog. He couldn't see more than ten feet in front of him. He moved forward, looking from side to side with each step.\n\nThen he heard voices. He listened. Yes, voices like the distant gurgling of water. He couldn't tell which direction they were coming from, or how far away they were. He moved ahead again, stopping every few feet to listen. Had he imagined the voices? Maybe they were the collective babble of all the Pythias drawn back to wander in the fog looking for their sacred Delphi, or to greet the new Pythia. Then again, maybe he hadn't heard anything at all.\n\nSuddenly, the pillars at the entrance of the temple loomed in front of him. He pulled out his watch. It was 8:33. The vapors would rise in five minutes. He looked around, wondering what to do.\n\n\"Jones, where are you?\" It was Dorian's voice and it echoed through the temple. So she was here.\n\nHe peered past the tilting columns toward the crevice. \"Right here,\" he shouted.\n\n\"Come up here. Right now,\" Dorian commanded. \"I have your friends.\"\n\nHe hesitated.\n\n\"Quickly. I've kept my side of the bargain.\"\n\nHe walked into the temple, and approached the mound. \"How do I know?\"\n\n\"Tell him,\" Dorian said.\n\n\"We're here with her. No one else,\" Shannon said. But Indy thought he detected a sharp edge to his voice.\n\n\"Get up here, Jones.\"\n\nHe stopped at the bottom of the mound. \"Why up there?\"\n\n\"The vapors, of course. I want you here to see what happens.\"\n\nHe was halfway-up the mound before he saw three silhouettes shrouded in mist. \"What's the point?\"\n\n\"You'll see.\"\n\nHe kept climbing, and now he could make out more details. Shannon and Conrad stood to one side of Dorian. Neither was handcuffed. Why hadn't they tried to get away? Then he saw the reason. Dorian raised a revolver, and aimed it at him.\n\n\"Sorry, Indy,\" Shannon said. \"She was holding it on my head.\"\n\nHe heard a sound behind him, and realized what he had feared all along; it was a trap.\n\nPanos didn't like the fact that the two outsiders were with her, or that Jones was climbing the mound to join them. She must have known they were dangerous, though; that was why she was armed. But why had she brought them here, why now?\n\nHe climbed the mound, Grigoris at his side, knowing there was nothing he could do about them right now. They were here; so be it. But in a matter of seconds Belecamus would catapult into trance, and then he would take charge.\n\nThe moment he accepted the outsiders, their presence suddenly made surprising sense. He knew why they were here, and what Pythia would tell them. He was in tune with her. He knew her words even before they were spoken. That was the way of the oracle priest.\n\nJones looked startled when he saw them, but he sounded almost relieved. \"You guys! Dorian, what are they doing here?\"\n\n\"What do you think? The vapors are rising,\" Pythia responded.\n\nIt was time, and Pythia dropped down onto one knee. It was impossible to distinguish fog from vapors, but Pythia inhaled deeply. Her head was bent low, and her hair had fallen over her face. Then the haze thickened and she was no longer visible.\n\nPanos waded into the vapors, Grigoris at his heels. Pythia stood up, rocked from side to side. He looked at her hands and saw that she no longer held the gun. Her head lolled forward, then she raised it up. Her eyes, which had bulged when the king stood here, were now mere slits. There was something different about her. It was as if she were concealing something. She looked at him, then cocked her head, peering at the other men. Finally, her gaze settled on Jones. She smiled, an odd, crooked smile, then stepped forward and embraced him.\n\nJones don't return the embrace. His body was rigid. She muttered something under her breath which Panos couldn't hear. It didn't matter; he knew what she was saying.\n\n\"Pythia says you are to leave today for your homelands and tell all those you know about the return of Pythia. Many wonders will soon be taking place here, and the world must know about it.\"\n\nPythia laughed, a disturbing cackling sound, and stepped back from Jones.\n\n\"Like what?\" Jones asked. \"What sort of wonders?\" \"Guidance concerning the future. Those who know what to expect will be far stronger than those who do not.\"\n\n\"Nobody believes in that stuff anymore,\" the tall, red-haired man said.\n\n\"You are a fool if you don't believe,\" Grigoris said, and stepped forward as if to challenge him.\n\n\"What wonderful things does Pythia foresee?\" Jones challenged as he stared intently at her. \"Tell me something.\" \"It is a great gift she offers the world, which must be used wisely,\" Panos said. \"Not for your entertainment.\" Pythia giggled again, and grinned. Jones looked doubtful, and Panos was about to admonish him when he heard a voice from outside the vapors. \"Dorian, where are you?\"\n\nIt was Mandraki. \"Ignore him,\" Panos said.\n\n\"It's a trick,\" said one of the outsiders.\n\n\"I'll take care of it,\" Grigoris said.\n\n\"Wait!\" Panos shouted, but Grigoris ignored him.\n\nAn instant later, Panos heard the report of a gun, and acry from his son. \"No! No!\" He rushed from the vapors; Grigoris was lying on his face halfway down the mound.\n\nPanos stumbled down the slope, and dropped to his knees by Grigoris's side. His son's head was tilted in an odd way. He turned him over. His face was a shattered mass of blood, chips of bone, and brain.\n\nPanos jerked his head back in horror. \"You. . . you!\"\n\nHe stared into the icy eyes of Colonel Mandraki, who stood at the bottom of the mound amid the clearing fog, a rifle in his hand and an ammunition belt strapped from shoulder to waist.\n\n\"You killed my son.\"\n\nA shell clicked into the firing chamber. \"Malaka,\" Mandraki cursed, and aimed at Panos's head.\n\nHe pulled the trigger.\n\nAt the sound of the first shot, Indy ducked to the ground. Conrad and Shannon did the same. But Dorian remained standing.\n\nWhy hadn't they run from the mound while they had a chance? Dorian's gun had disappeared from her hand, and she was cackling like an old witch. What the hell was this effect the vapors had on her? But they'd stood there and watched and listened to Panos's prattle, and now Mandrakiwas here.\n\nAnother gunshot exploded. Christ. What was going on out there? Indy didn't really want to know. He wanted to be as far from here as possible. But now they were trapped between Mandraki and the crevice. Either direction was certain death.\n\n\"Dorian, come out of there,\" Mandraki bellowed.\n\nShannon was at his side. \"We've had it, Indy. Soon as the vapors are gone, it's over.\"\n\n\"Dorian,\" Mandraki called again.\n\nTheir only other option was to walk around the crevice and drop into the gully, but that was no good either. They'd be trapped, as good as dead.\n\nDorian took a step forward. The vapors were starting to thin, and Indy could vaguely make out Mandraki's form.\n\n\"Dorian, where are you?\" Mandraki demanded. \"Do you have all three of them?\"\n\nShe remained silent. Was she still Pythia, or somewhere in between? Then Indy saw her pull the revolver from the folds of a cloth belt. She raised the muzzle to her head. God, she was going to kill herself. \"Alex,\" she shouted. \"Watch out!\"\n\nThen she lowered the gun, aimed, and fired.\n\nMandraki took a faltering step back. His rifle clattered to the ground. He rocked on his heels, clutching his chest. Then he crumpled over, joining the carnage."
            },
            {
                "title": "PARISIAN PALS",
                "text": "\"I killed him in self-defense,\" she said quietly. \"He was going to kill all of us.\"\n\nIndy stared at the bodies sprawled across the mound. \"Why would he want to kill you?\"\n\n\"Plenty of reasons. Jealousy mainly. Panos told him about us. But he was angry that the king got away and he blamed me.\"\n\nHe watched her closely. There was no sign of any trance-induced aberrations in her features. She was calm, and actually looked relieved after killing her long-standing lover. The gun dangled loosely in her hand. He hoped she was going to drop it, because he was going to pounce on it when she did.\n\nHis eyes slid to Shannon and Conrad who were standing to one side of him. They were as nervous now as when he'd arrived.\n\nDorian sensed their unease. \"Don't look at me like I'm some kind of madwoman. You're all alive because of me.\"\n\n\"What are you going to do now?\" Conrad asked, taking a step closer to her.\n\nShe smiled amiably. \"I know exactly what I'm going to do, and you three are going to help me.\"\n\nConrad moved another pace closer, and held out his hand. \"That's good, Dorian. I'll take the gun. You don't need it anymore.\"\n\nHer body tensed and she pointed the revolver at Conrad. \"Don't patronize me, Professor. I know what I'm doing. Sit down, all three of you. I'm going to give you a little history lesson about Delphi. You like history, don't you, Professor?\"\n\nShe grinned at him, and for an instant Indy recognized the expression he'd seen on her face when she was Pythia. He wondered about that, and sat down with the others as she'd ordered.\n\n\"In ancient times, Delphi was like a magnet that drew people from around the Mediterranean,\" she began.\n\nThis was madness. Three bodies were lying behind her, and she was lecturing as if she were in class at the Sorbonne. Indy was tempted to tell her to shut up, but he was certain she could shoot him with as much ease as she had killed Mandraki.\n\n\"It was not only the mephitic gases that were involved in Pythia's power, but also the Omphalos, a mysterious black cone-shaped stone.\" Dorian looked over her audience. \"It's down there in the crevice within our reach. Indy found it, and I want it.\"\n\n\"How are we going to get it?\" Shannon asked, playing the role of interested student.\n\n\"You and the professor are going to lower your friend on a rope. He's going to get a chance to improve his archaeological skills, and recover one of the most valuable artifacts of all time.\"\n\nShe turned to Indy. \"Do you agree to do it?\" As if he had a choice, he thought. \"I don't see any rope.\"\n\n\"You're going to get it. Go to the workshop. You'll find a rope and my excavating tools on the table. And hurry.\" Then her voice toughened. \"But if you're not back in fifteen minutes, your friends will be joining the others. Do you understand?\"\n\n\"You don't have to threaten me, Dorian.\"\n\nShe smiled and her features softened. \"I like you, Indy. I'm sorry I have to do it this way. But I have no choice. Without the gun, I couldn't count on your cooperation.\"\n\nIndy quickly descended the mound, passing the bodies of Panos, Grigoris, and Mandraki. He rushed across the ruins to the wooded trail that led to the workshop. He had to tell someone what had happened, but he didn't have time to go to the village or anywhere else. As it was, he had to hurry in order to retrieve the equipment and get back in time.\n\nHe found the same rope that had been used to pull him from the hole neatly coiled on the table. Next to it was Dorian's knapsack and her excavating tools. From the way they were laid out, he wondered if she had planned the whole thing. If that were the case, she must also have planned to kill Mandraki. The woman was truly the Ice Queen, after all\u2014a cold-blooded, cold-hearted killer.\n\nHe glanced around the workshop. Everything else looked the same as when he'd last seen it. He walked over to Dorian's locker, and found the schedule of risings still taped to the back wall. The next one was due at 3:49 P.M. There should be plenty of time to get the Omphalos, or whatever it was, out of the hole. But the vapors were more of an annoyance than anything else to Indy. He'd breathed the so-called mephitic gases a couple of times now and had never experienced anything unusual. It was like walking in fog, nothing more.\n\nThe king had wanted to believe so badly in their healing properties that the pain in his hip probably did subside for awhile. Indy would be surprised if the pain wasn't back. So why was Dorian's reaction to the vapors so dramatically different from his own and everyone else's? What made her Pythia, but not anyone else?\n\nHe was about to close the locker door when he spotted something familiar on the top shelf. He reached up and grabbed his whip. Maybe she considered it a memento from another graduate-student lover. But this graduate student had a big advantage. He knew about the others, and of their demise.\n\nHe hitched the whip on his belt and as he left the workshop, he slung the pack over one shoulder and the rope over the other. He'd taken only a step out the door when he saw two men approaching on horseback. He was in luck. He'd tell them to get help. As they moved closer, though, his hope faded as rapidly as light at the end of the day. Soldiers.\n\nHe lowered his head, pulled his hat down low, and walked quickly away. But just as he reached the beginning of the trail to the ruins one of the men called out to him. \"You there. Have you seen Colonel Mandraki?\"\n\nHe shook his head, and kept walking.\n\n\"Let's check the ruins,\" the soldier said, and Indy recognized his voice. The same bastard who had jumped him outside the cave.\n\n\"Hey, wait a minute. Isn't that the guy we were guarding?\" the other said.\n\nIndy kept moving, hoping the soldiers would start another argument. As the trail curved and he moved out of sight, he broke into a run. But he'd gone only a dozen yards before he heard the thunder of horses behind him.\n\nHe leaped off the trail, dropped the rope and knapsack and unhitched his whip. As the first rider neared him, he snapped it with a swift, smooth swing. The whip uncoiled in an elliptical arc, and snared the soldier by the neck. With a quick jerk, he yanked him to the ground. The second horse reared to avoid the soldier in its path, and threw its rider.\n\nIndy snatched up a rifle that had fallen at his feet, and aimed it at the soldiers. \"On your feet. Get against that tree.\" They did as he said, but as he leaned over to pick up the coil of rope, one of the men lunged at him. Indy swung the butt of the rifle around and cracked it against the side of his head. The soldier took two stuttering steps, tottered, then dropped to his knees, and fell over.\n\nThe other soldier, meanwhile, slipped a hand into his boot and pulled a knife. With a smooth motion, he hurled it from ankle level. Indy ducked and the knife stuck into the trunk of a tree barely an inch from his head. He glanced at the blade, then back at the soldier. The man stared at him, uncertain what to do. Then, deciding that retreat was the best idea, he turned and ran.\n\nBut Indy was ready for him. He'd gone only a couple of steps before the whip unfurled and caught him around the ankles. He reeled him in like a fish, but his \"catch\" turned on him. He leaped up, threw a punch that glanced off Indy's shoulder. Indy landed one of his own solidly against the man's jaw. The soldier fell backwards, struck his head against a tree trunk, and was out cold.\n\nIndy found a length of rope in the saddlebag of one of the horses. He tied the rope around the chest of one of the soldiers, looped it over a thick branch, then pulled the man to his feet as he tied the other end around his partner. When he was finished both men were seated back to back, and held up by the rope and branch. \"I'd stick around and chat, fellows, but I'm short on time.\"\n\nWith that he hooked his whip back on his belt, grabbed the knapsack, rope, and rifle, and mounted one of the horses. But he was loaded down with too much gear, and tumbled out of the saddle. He glared at the groggy soldiers as he dusted himself off.\n\n\"Don't say a word.\"\n\nThis time he slipped the rope and knapsack in a saddle bag. He mounted the horse again, and galloped off. Not much time left, and he didn't want to test Dorian. Butnow things were going to be different. He was armed and all he had to do was catch her off guard.\n\nHe reined in the horse as he reached the outskirts of the ruins. The fog had lifted, but the columns of the temple obscured the view of the mound, and he couldn't see any of them. He dismounted, grabbed the gear, and walked as fast as he could toward the temple, holding the rifle parallel with his legs. As the mound came into view, he stopped short. No one was on it or anywhere nearby. The temple looked empty. And the bodies were gone.\n\n\"What the hell.\"\n\nHe wasn't sure what to do. Check the hut. He hurried over to it, and stopped outside the door. On the far side of it were two horses. He heard voices coming from inside.\n\n\"You think these bone diggers do it in here on the floor, Brent?\"\n\n\"Mm. Probably with the bones.\"\n\n\"I don't believe it,\" Indy muttered. He threw open the cloth door. \"What are you two doing here?\"\n\n\"Indy! Hiya, kiddo.\" Madelaine was wearing riding pants, high boots, and a felt hat with a pheasant feather.\n\n\"Jonesy, look at you.\" Brent stepped out of the hut after her and stroked his thin mustache. \"All decked out for archaeology\u2014rope, knapsack, even a rifle, and dirty, too. Real authentic.\"\n\n\"Can you keep it down?\" Indy glanced toward the mound, but nothing had changed. No one was in sight.\n\n\"We're leaving for Athens this morning, and decided to ride out and say good-bye,\" Madelaine said in her squeaky voice. \"The king's left, you know, so it's getting boring.\"\n\n\"Boring is not the word for it,\" Brent chimed in, adjusting the kerchief he wore with his safari outfit.\n\n\"Listen, did you see anyone else here?\"\n\n\"Not a soul,\" Madelaine said. \"Didn't think we'd see you, either. So what exciting things have you been doing? Haven't seen you since the royal reception.\"\n\n\"Nothing much,\" Indy said dryly.\n\n\"Where's Shannon? Haven't seen him since we got here.\"\n\n\"He's around.\"\n\nHe had to do something. He needed them to get help, but they'd probably fetch soldiers, and he doubted he could trust any of them. He jammed a hand in his jacket pocket and felt a head of garlic, and suddenly an idea occurred to him.\n\n\"Listen, are you going back to the village before you leave?\"\n\n\"We're not riding horses to Athens,\" Brent said. \"You can be sure of that.\"\n\n\"Would you mind doing me a favor?\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" Madelaine said. \"If it doesn't take too long, and if Brent doesn't mind.\"\n\n\"Go to the hotel for me, and tell Nikos, the kid at the desk, that I'm going down into the crevice again and need my moly.\"\n\n\"Your what?\" she said.\n\n\"He knows what it is.\"\n\n\"Of course. Moly. It's an archaeology thing,\" Brent said knowingly. \"One of those digging tools or something. For boring holes, I think. I'm right, aren't I, Jonesy?\"\n\n\"That's it. Please hurry. I need it real fast.\"\n\n\"Do you want us to bring it back to you?\" Madelaine asked.\n\n\"No. Nikos can handle it. I've got to go. Have a goodtrip.\"\n\n\"See you in Paris, Indy.\" She kissed him on the cheek, then hooked her arm in Brent's as they walked out of the hut and over to their horses.\n\nIndy picked up the rifle and peered toward the mound. Dorian must have seen Madelaine and Brent, and decidedto hide. He moved away from the hut, crossed the Sacred Way, and stopped at one of the pillars.\n\nHe set the rifle against it, and stepped out into view. \"Dorian, where are you?\"\n\n\"Right behind you.\"\n\nIndy jumped at the sound of her voice. When he turned, she was standing by the pillar, one hand aiming her revolver at him, the other gripping the rifle.\n\n\"Surprise.\"\n\nShe must have been watching from the other side of the pillar. But he guessed she was too far away to have heard their conversation.\n\n\"What did you tell your friends?\"\n\n\"That I was busy, and wished them a good trip to Athens.\"\n\nShe looked toward the road. \"Why are they heading back to the village?\"\n\n\"To get their bags and a carriage, I suppose. They just rode out to say good-bye.\"\n\nShe nodded, and watched him closely. \"You are on my side, aren't you?\"\n\nIndy looked at the rifle, then gave Dorian the most sincere look he could manage. \"Of course I am. I'd be dead if you hadn't saved us.\"\n\n\"If your charming friends bring back soldiers we're all in trouble, you know.\"\n\n\"They won't. And you don't have to point that gun at me, either.\"\n\nShe jabbed the rifle lightly in his side. \"I'm not a fool, Indy. Where did you get this rifle?\"\n\nHe told her about his encounter with the soldiers. \"If I hadn't stopped them, they would be here now looking for Mandraki.\"\n\n\"Well, they wouldn't find him here.\"\n\nHe didn't know what she meant. \"Where are Shannon and Conrad?\" he asked as they headed toward the mound.\n\n\"Jack and Ted?\" She glanced toward the crevice. \"Let's go find them.\"\n\nSo they were Jack and Ted now. This better not be a sick joke, he thought. If they were dead, he would... He didn't know what he would do, but it wouldn't be nice.\n\n\"Where are the bodies?\"\n\n\"Gone,\" she said blithely.\n\nGone, he thought, like Richard Farnsworth and who knows how many other old boyfriends. He waited for her to explain as they climbed the mound.\n\n\"Did you see Alex anywhere out there?\" she asked as she reached the top of the mound.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Alex. Did you see him?\"\n\nShe was mad, all right. \"Dorian. Remember, you killed Alex.\"\n\n\"No, I didn't.\" She smiled, then turned toward the crevice. \"It's okay, fellows. Everyone's gone, and Indy's back.\"\n\nOh, Jesus. His stomach knotted. She must have shot them and dumped their bodies in the hole. She was denying everything, even that she'd killed Mandraki. It must be the vapors. Somehow, they had affected her mind, and he couldn't stop himself from telling her exactly what he was thinking.\n\n\"What did the vapors do to you, Dorian? I don't understand.\"\n\nShe looked into his eyes, and laughed. \"You mean when I was Pythia? You don't know, do you, Indy? You don't know what I felt in the vapors.\"\n\n\"No, I don't.\"\n\nShe took a step closer to him.\n\nCareful. Watch her closely, Indy thought.\n\n\"I felt the same as you,\" she said.\n\nIndy frowned, shook his head. \"What do you mean? I don't understand.\"\n\n\"There was no trance,\" she said, curtly. \"I was faking all of it.\"\n\n\"How could you? I mean you were babbling, and Panos was interpreting it.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Panos wanted to believe so badly that he thought he was interpreting. But he was just following cues I had given him. I told him that the king was in danger the day before I faked the trance. He knew that was what Pythia was supposed to tell him.\"\n\nGod, she was even more devious than he'd given her credit for. \"Where are they, Dorian?\" He spoke tersely. He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. \"Where is Jack? Where is Ted?\"\n\nShe motioned Indy to walk around to the other side of the crevice. \"Over there.\"\n\nHe moved away from her, sidling around the crevice to avoid turning his back on her. The mound on the other side was more like a pinnacle, narrow on top with steep sides, the crevice on one side, the gully on the other. Indy peered over the far edge and for a second didn't see anything. Then, he spotted the pair twenty feet below, squatting, backs against the dirt wall. \"Are you guys okay?\"\n\n\"Just fine,\" Shannon said.\n\n\"Pull them out with the rope,\" Dorian ordered. \"And hurry, we've got work to do.\"\n\nHe started to say he'd use his whip, but caught himself. So far she hadn't paid it any heed, and he was better keeping it that way.\n\nHe pulled Shannon out first as Conrad pushed from below. \"You had me worried, Jack,\" he said as he grabbed him by the arm. \"Why didn't you answer?\"\n\nHe tossed the line back down and Conrad quickly scaled the side of the gully.\n\n\"She knew where we were,\" Shannon said offhandedly.\n\n\"She made us dump the bodies in the hole, then jump in here.\"\n\n\"Only two of the bodies,\" Conrad said, brushing off his hands. \"Mandraki's still alive. She let him go.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I told you I didn't kill him,\" Dorian called from across the crevice. \"When I saw him stand up so bravely and hobble away, I couldn't do it. I let him go.\"\n\n\"You know what else?\" Shannon said. \"There was no blood where he'd been lying. Figure that out.\"\n\nIndy couldn't. But he had an ominous feeling they hadn't seen the last of Colonel Mandraki."
            },
            {
                "title": "OMPHALOS",
                "text": "Indy descended into the darkness clutching a torch in one hand and the rope that was knotted around his waist in the other. In spite of what happened the last time he'd been lowered into this hole, he felt oddly safe. This time he knew he was in good hands. Shannon and Conrad were going to do their best to keep him alive.\n\nThey lowered him slowly and steadily, and it wasn't long before he spotted the place where the tablet had ripped away from the wall. Not much farther. He held the torch out, looking for the ledge. A little farther now. Not much more.\n\nHe stretched his arm out as far as he could and peered down. The torchlight flickered off the walls. Then he saw it, a rocky plateau jutting from the wall. But there was something else, too. Something he hadn't expected.\n\n\"Oh, God.\"\n\nHis feet dropped onto the ledge. The rope went slack. Dorian yelled down to him; her voice echoed eerily off the walls. He tugged twice at the rope to let them know he was here, and all the while kept his eyes on the ghastly sight of Panos's body. It was lying at an angle across the bed of rock with one leg dangling over the edge. His head was face down, and his right arm was curled over the black cone. In death, Panos had found the Omphalos.\n\nIndy moved closer, bent down on one knee. Carefully, he lifted the dead man's wrist off the stone, but as he did the body slid farther over the edge. It hung in midair for a moment, then Indy let go. The body vanished into the bowels of Delphi. An appropriate burial site for the leader of the Order of Pythia, he thought, and he was with his son.\n\nHe stared into the blanket of darkness a moment longer. He had no reason to miss either man. They had caused him more grief than most people who crossed his path. Yet, their deaths still affected him, if for no other reason than to remind him that death followed life, and that he was as vulnerable as the next person. Maybe more so. Maybe he was the next person.\n\nHe shrugged off the disturbing thought, and turned his attention to the Omphalos. He ran a hand over its rough surface, and wondered how much of it was still in the wall. He slipped off the knapsack, picked out a trowel, and began scraping away at the rock and dirt that held it to the wall. After a few minutes, he'd made little progress, and realized that he needed to make a more concerted attack. He put away the trowel in favor of a pick and stabbed at the wall. For the next half hour, he chipped away at rock and dirt, gouging a hole around the stone.\n\nFinally, he took it in both hands and tested how firmly it was implanted. If he had been dealing with a fragile ceramic piece, he knew what he was doing would have been foolhardy. But this artifact seemed as sturdy as the engine block of a Model T.\n\nThe cone moved slightly as he wiggled it back and forth. He pulled harder, but his hands slipped off and he tumbled back onto the ledge. He rolled onto his stomach and his leg slipped over the side. He patted the air as he stared down into the abyss.\n\n\"Careful, Indy. Careful,\" he said to himself. He sidled away from the edge, and went back to work chipping away at the rock.\n\n\"Indy. Everything okay?\" Dorian shouted.\n\nSure. Things were great. Couldn't be better. He tugged twice at the rope to let her know that he didn't have it.\n\nHe chipped more, pulled and twisted the stone, chipped again, and pulled some more. He was sure that it was almost free. He placed his feet against the wall, grabbed the cone with both hands, and pulled as hard as he could. His hands slipped off, and he sprawled onto his back.\n\nHe lifted himself up on his elbows, and stared at the stone in disgust. He kicked it with his heel in anger. It was all that was needed; it broke free. He blinked away the dust, and grinned as he lifted the Omphalos from the rubble. He laid it down on the ledge, and brushed it off. It was about a foot and a half long and about six or seven inches in diameter at the base, and narrowed to a rounded nub. It felt heavy as iron.\n\nProper procedure, as Dorian had taught him, called for taking out the tape measure and notepad from the knapsack and jotting down its exact dimensions and description and detailing its removal. But considering the conditions he was working under, it seemed a bit ridiculous. He laughed aloud at the irony. The professor was armed and there was a fair chance that after he surfaced with the prize find, she would kill him. That, he knew, was definitely not proper procedure.\n\nHe pulled once on the rope. \"I've got it,\" he yelled. \"Pull me up.\"\n\nHe dropped the torch on the ledge and pressed the cone against his chest as he gripped the rope. He felt himself being lifted and tried to relax. He didn't want to think about what would happen when he got to the surface. He couldn't do anything about it. Not now at least. Maybe not even then.\n\nThe Omphalos felt oddly warm. The sensation spread across his chest until the warmth had imbued him, made him drowsy. He closed his eyes, drifted. . .\n\nIt was light as day. He was looking at an eagle, his eagle, and it was perched on the edge of a nest. He could see eggs in the nest. Silver-colored eggs. He was dreaming and awake at the same time. He felt ecstatic, better than he'd ever felt. But what was happening? What was he seeing? The eagle cocked its head as if to get a better look at him, or to see if it had his attention. With a sudden thrust of its beak, the bird broke open one of theeggs.\n\nThe bird and nest were gone, and Indy saw himself with the king in a room filled with books. A royal library. The king wore a blue satin robe and slippers. Oddly, he suddenly knew that the king would survive Mandraki's threat to his life, but he also knew that he would soon be exiled. It was as if it had already happened.\n\nHe noticed that the king held something in his hands. It was the Omphalos, and he was offering it to Indy. Then as suddenly as the king had appeared, he was gone, and Indy saw the Omphalos in a museum. Standing next to it was the curator, whom Indy recognized as Marcus Brody, an old friend and sometimes substitute father. He was smiling and proud. Then the scene wavered, and Indy's feeling of contentment shifted to shock. The glass case holding the relic was shattered; the Omphalos was gone. He heard Brody's voice: Stolen. It's been stolen.\n\nBut the outrage he felt was cut short as the eagle again appeared in front of him perched on the nest. It tilted its head as before, then drilled its beak into anotheregg.\n\nIndy was talking to Dorian. She was excited, telling himhe must do something. He had to act fast. But what was he supposed to do? Then Mandraki was facing him. He raised a gun, pointed it at Indy's heart. He fired.\n\nThe eagle again. Another egg was shattered, and this time the images came at him fast and hard. He glimpsed a tweedy man with a pipe and mustache in an office crammed with books. He spoke in a tone of voice that inferred authority. \"Do not mix mythology and archaeology, or your thesis will be rejected. They are two separate disciplines. If you want Greece as your focal region, take up the challenge of Linear B. You have the perfect background for tackling a language puzzle.\"\n\nThen the man dissolved. When he solidified again, he was Mandraki. He raised his gun, and fired.\n\nSilver eggs. Two left. The eagle's beak viciously pecked at one of them, and as it shattered Indy saw himself standing in front of a class talking. He couldn't hear the words, but he knew he was giving an archaeology lecture. Suddenly, the classroom faded; he was in the center of a circle of massive stones. Stonehenge. He was embracing a woman. He couldn't see her face, but he knew he was close to her like no other woman.\n\nThen the woman was gone. Mandraki again. Aiming. He fired.\n\nThe last egg. The black eye of the eagle watched him. Then it lightly tapped the egg. A crack fissured lengthwise along its shell, and it fell apart. Indy saw himself again, older now, in the prime of his career. He looked savvy, more adventurer than scholar. The vision winked out and was replaced by a college of images: Jungles. Deserts. Ruins. Lost cities. Relics of power. More ominous now: a pit of snakes, a close-up of an insignia of a black, broken cross. A hand bearing a dagger, but another offering help. A voice overlaid the images: \"Adventures beyond imagining, but not without serious danger. Ultimately, a reunion with the father. What he seeks, you will find.\"\n\nThe changing scenes vanished as a harsh light struck him. He heard voices. Hands again. This time they were lifting him from the hole. He squinted his eyes against the bright light. He was on his knees, still gripping the blackcone.\n\n\"So this is it,\" Dorian said. \"The Omphalos.\"\n\nIndy felt numb, overwhelmed, unable to speak. He blinked his watery eyes, and saw Dorian laying down the rifle. Still holding the revolver, she took the Omphalos from his arms. It was heavier than she expected, and she clutched it to her chest.\n\nIndy's head was clearing. The dream, the fantasy, whatever had happened to him, was over. He tried to concentrate on what was real, here, and now. Shannon and Conrad hovered above him. They helped him shed the knapsack.\n\nSuddenly, Dorian sucked in her breath, a look of bewilderment and shock crossing her face. The revolver dangled loosely in her hand inches from Indy's head. She didn't move; her features were frozen in the instant of surprise.\n\nWith a quick, deft move, Shannon snapped the revolver from her grip, and Conrad picked up the rifle. Dorian didn't react. Her expression changed to a ghastly stare, then she collapsed, still clinging to the black stone.\n\n\"What happened?\" Shannon asked.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Indy said, still confused by his experience in the tunnel. \"Let's get her to the workshop.\"\n\n\"I'll put the stone in the knapsack,\" Shannon said. He tried to loosen it from Dorian's grip, but she writhed, grimaced, and screamed.\n\n\"Just let her carry it,\" Conrad said.\n\nShannon lifted her by the elbows and Indy grabbed her feet. But she kicked and twisted and moaned, and the going was slow. As they left the temple and headed toward the path leading to the workshop, Indy abruptly stopped.\n\n\"Wait a minute. I don't think the workshop is a good idea. She's too hard to carry, and we don't have all day. Besides, I ran into some soldiers earlier.\" He quickly told them about his encounter. \"As soon as someone finds them, we're going to have company.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" Conrad said. \"We've got to get out of here. Maybe we should just leave her.\"\n\nIndy shook his head. \"Let's take her to the hut, then figure out what to do.\"\n\nThey no sooner had made up their minds when a rider on a galloping horse charged into the ruins. \"Hurry,\" Indy hissed.\n\nThey hustled Dorian into the hut, and lowered her to the ground. Indy instantly dropped to his hands and knees and looked out the charred hole in the rear. \"Take this,\" Shannon said, and handed him Dorian's revolver.\n\nIndy could see legs. Someone was running toward the hut. \"Indy, where are you?\"\n\n\"Oh, God. It's just Nikos,\" Indy said, relieved, then yelled to Nikos.\n\n\"I got your message. What happened?\" the boy said, gasping for breath as he stepped into the hut.\n\n\"Plenty, \" Indy said.\n\nNikos gaped at the sight of Dorian, who was still twisting about and grimacing. \"Pythia!\"\n\n\"I don't know who she is, Nikos,\" Indy said. \"But Panos and Grigoris are dead.\" He told him what happened at the crevice.\n\n\"What are you going to do? If Colonel Mandraki is still alive he will come for her and all of you.\"\n\n\"We've got to get out of here, and fast,\" Conrad said.\n\n\"You're right about that,\" Shannon put in. \"I'm starting to really miss Paris.\"\n\n\"Nikos, what are the chances of you getting us a carriage?\" Indy asked.\n\n\"A carriage? How about an auto?\"\n\n\"You got one?\"\n\n\"Colonel Mandraki does. He left the key at the desk of the hotel. I can get it, and I can drive it, too. I know how.\"\n\n\"I don't know about stealing his car,\" Indy said warily.\n\n\"Why not?\" Shannon said. \"If we have it, he won't.\"\n\n\"But Mandraki will know what to look for.\"\n\n\"So what?\" Shannon responded. \"We'll get to Athens, ditch the car, and get out of the country as fast as possible. Besides, he was shot, remember. He's not going to be in any shape to go anywhere.\"\n\nConrad nodded toward Dorian, who now looked as if she was asleep. \"What about her?\"\n\n\"Leave her,\" Shannon said. \"Let Mandraki take care of her. She deserved whatever she gets.\"\n\nIndy thought a moment. \"Nikos, can you drive the car here without letting anyone see you?\"\n\n\"Everyone will see me,\" he said proudly. \"They will see I can drive.\"\n\nIndy nodded. \"That's what I thought.\" He turned to Conrad. \"Listen, why don't Jack and I go get the uniforms off those soldiers I tied up. We'll ride horses into the village and then take the car. You stay with Dorian, and we'll pick you up.\"\n\n\"Everyone in the village knows you by sight,\" Conrad protested. \"You won't make a very believable soldier. Let's do it this way. You stay here. Jack and I will get the car.\"\n\n\"Good idea,\" Shannon said. \"Besides, I'm starting to think you attract trouble, Indy.\"\n\n\"Okay. Okay.\"\n\n\"I'll get the car ready,\" Nikos said, and hurried out the door.\n\nConrad picked up the rifle from where he'd set it against the wall, and Indy returned the revolver to Shannon. Just then, Dorian moaned loudly. She rolled over, letting the Omphalos slip to the ground. She sat up and rubbed her face.\n\n\"You going to be all right with her?\" Conrad asked.\n\n\"I'll be fine.\" As they left, Indy knelt down beside Dorian and slipped the Omphalos inside the knapsack.\n\nShe watched him closely, but remained silent.\n\n\"What happened?\" he asked.\n\nShe opened her mouth, but didn't speak right away. \"I thought I was dead.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"I was being suffocated, squeezed to death by a giant snake. A python. It was wrapped around me. It was horrible. I could smell its cold, acrid breath.\"\n\nShe hugged herself and shivered. Her black hair fell over one side of her face. She sat like a child, with one leg tucked under her, the other stretched out. \"It seemed so real.\" She seemed neither professor nor killer. She was helpless, confused. He didn't want to feel sorry for her, but he did.\n\n\"Why did you fake the trances, Dorian?\"\n\n\"Don't you understand, Indy? Don't you realize the power of Pythia?\"\n\n\"Wait a minute. You said there was no Pythia, you were faking.\"\n\n\"I didn't say there was no Pythia. Just ask the king. He saw, and I'm sure he believes.\"\n\n\"And now that Panos is dead, your priest is gone.\"\n\nShe leaned forward and that transfixing smile held his gaze again, drew him closer. \"Panos was not meant to be my priest. He was not the right one. It is you, Indy. You will be my priest. . . and lover.\"\n\nIndy forced himself to move back from her. \"No. I don't think so.\"\n\n\"Do you think I cannot be Pythia, that nobody will believe? You know yourself that the readings were almost always ambiguous, interpreted one way if a certain thing happened, and another if something else happened. It's a technique. I'll teach it to you. We'll invent our own way of communicating with gestures and key words.\"\n\nShe reached for his hand. \"Think of it, we'll be two of the most powerful and well-known people in the world. Do you realize that?\"\n\nIndy pulled his hand back and stood up. \"Sure.\"\n\nShe stood, and moved close to him. \"Don't you want me, Indy? I'll be yours. It'll be worth it, I promise. Think about it.\"\n\nHe could smell her musky scent, and felt the pull of her eyes again. He took another step back. \"Even if I was interested, there's the big matter of trust here, Dorian. You brought me here with the intention of using me as your fall guy in your crazy plot to kill the king. And you've got a history.\"\n\n\"No, that plot was not my doing. That was Alex's game. Same with Richard Farnsworth. He killed him; I didn't.\"\n\nIndy's hands tightened into fists. His cheeks flamed with anger. \"But you were part of his game. You didn't stop it.\"\n\n\"I couldn't. He forced me. Anyhow, you know that I went against him. I shot him, for God's sake. He should be dead. What more can I do to show you my intentions?\"\n\n\"You killed Farnsworth's brother. He was on that train to Brindisi. You stabbed him with a pick from your tool kit, then you threw him off the back of the train while I was eating ice cream.\"\n\n\"No. That's not what happened. He tried to kill me. I was only defending myself.\"\n\nShe had an answer for everything and the answer always sounded reasonable. That was her gift. \"There's one thing I still don't understand. If you were just faking it in the vapors, why did you fake this last fit when you took the Omphalos from me? What was the point of that?\"\n\n\"No. I didn't fake that. I don't know what happened, and I don't want to think about it, either.\"\n\nNow that she'd admitted the truth, Indy knew that he couldn't so easily dismiss his own experience with the Omphalos as a meaningless dream.\n\nJust then a car horn honked. Indy slung the knapsack over his shoulder. \"Good-bye.\"\n\n\"You're taking the Omphalos?\"\n\n\"Yes. I'll see that it gets into a museum.\"\n\n\"Take me with you, too. I can't stay here now.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Please.\" She grabbed his arm. \"You don't know what kind of things Alex would do to me.\"\n\nThe car honked again. \"All right. Under one condition. I'm taking you to the king's palace and you are going to confess to your part in the assassination plot and turn in Mandraki.\"\n\n\"Okay. I'll do it. Whatever you say.\"\n\nThey stepped outside the hut and both gazed toward Apollo's Temple. With his free hand, Indy reached into his pocket and pulled out his watch.\n\n\"It's eight minutes to four.\" The vapors should have been rising for three minutes now, but there was no sign of them.\n\n\"The pattern's broken,\" Dorian said softly."
            },
            {
                "title": "ESCAPE FROM DELPHI",
                "text": "A shiny Pierce-Arrow was parked outside the ruins, and for an instant Indy thought it must belong to the king. Then he saw Conrad behind the wheel. \"Is that Mandraki's car?\"\n\n\"One of them,\" Dorian said as they hurried toward the car.\n\nBack in the States, you could buy a flivver for two hundred eighty dollars or five dollars a week on the installment plan, but few people could afford an elegant Pierce-Arrow, and no doubt the cost for one in Greece was much higher. \"He must have money.\"\n\n\"Lots.\"\n\n\"Let's go,\" Conrad said from behind the front seat as he eyed Dorian warily.\n\n\"Where're your uniforms?\"\n\n\"The soldiers were gone.\" Conrad glanced over at Shannon. \"We almost didn't get away. Jack told Nikos to go back to the hotel for his cornet, and while we waited half the village came out to see the car. I think word got around.\"\n\nIndy peered down the road toward the village. \"Let's get the hell out of here.\"\n\n\"What's she doing here?\" Shannon asked.\n\n\"I'm taking her to the king.\"\n\nShannon smirked. \"You're what?\"\n\n\"She's going to confess.\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"Well, I can't leave her here. Mandraki will kill her, if he's still alive.\"\n\n\"I heard two soldiers talking,\" Nikos said from the back seat. \"The colonel is okay. The bullet hit his ammunition belt.\"\n\n\"Nice shot,\" Indy said to Dorian. \"Nikos, you better get out. We've got to go.\"\n\n\"I want to go to Athens with you,\" he beamed. \"My father gave me permission.\"\n\n\"Did he know how you were going?\"\n\n\"Well, no.\"\n\n\"It could be dangerous.\"\n\n\"You think so?\" he asked hopefully.\n\nSuddenly, a military truck appeared on the road, coming from the direction of the village. Conrad cranked the engine, stepped hard on the accelerator pedal. It sputtered.\n\n\"It's flooded,\" Shannon yelled.\n\nConrad tried again.\n\nThe truck closed in on them. Indy jerked open the back door and grabbed Dorian by the arm. \"Get in. Quick.\"\n\nThe engine revved to life.\n\nBut Dorian surprised him. She twisted her arm away and ran toward the truck.\n\n\"Dorian,\" he shouted, and leaped from the car. But the knapsack snagged on the door. He pulled it loose, but it was too late. She was running directly at the oncoming truck, waving her hands and calling out to Mandraki. The truck braked.\n\nShe's dead, he thought.\n\n\"Get in, for chrissake,\" Conrad yelled as he started to drive away. Indy trotted after the car, and leaped onto the running board. He looked back and saw Mandraki embracing Dorian in the middle of the road.\n\n\"What the hell?\" Indy exclaimed.\n\nA dozen soldiers poured out of the back of the truck and opened fire. Conrad stepped hard on the accelerator as Shannon returned the fire.\n\nIndy swung the door open and was about to slide into the back seat when he felt something strike him between the shoulder blades. He dropped face first onto the seat.\n\nShannon let out a whoop as they roared away. \"I got their front tires.\"\n\nIndy was gasping for breath. \"Good. But I think they got me.\"\n\nNikos helped him shed the knapsack. Indy expected blood and pain.\n\n\"You're not shot,\" Nikos said.\n\n\"What?\" He rolled over and saw Nikos holding up the knapsack.\n\n\"See, there's the hole, but only through the back of it. The bullet hit the thing you found. It saved you.\"\n\nIndy opened the knapsack and stared incredulously at the Omphalos. He considered picking it up to look for the bullet's mark, but thought better of it.\n\n\"You okay?\" Conrad called over his shoulder as they raced down the mountain.\n\n\"Just fine.\"\n\n\"You're as lucky as Colonel Mandraki,\" Nikos said.\n\nShannon turned in his seat. \"I don't understand Mandraki. The woman shoots him and he welcomes her like someone who had just saved his life.\"\n\nIndy shook his head. \"I don't get it, either.\"\n\nThe telegraph operator in the back of the truck finished tapping out the message. He waited until he received acknowledgment, then nodded to Mandraki. \"They'll never make it to Athens,\" Mandraki said, and he smiled at Dorian, pleased with himself.\n\n\"Good,\" she said. \"But we can't hide their deaths. Too many witnesses.\"\n\nMandraki frowned. \"We can't admit to killing them, either. The king will use it against me.\"\n\n\"Relax, Alex. It will be no problem. They stole an officer's car, and an archaeological artifact, a national treasure. They were killed in a gun battle as they tried to escape. Simple as that.\"\n\n\"You are a complex woman, Dorian. But I like your simple solutions. Now tell me which one of them shot me.\"\n\nIt was twilight as they descended the hills to the outskirts of the capital. The lights of Athens were blinking on below them. Indy was tired, thirsty, and hungry, but most of all he was anxious to get to the presidential palace. It was the one place he felt that they would be safe for the night. If they could get through the front gate.\n\n\"You ask me, we should skip the visit to the palace and go on to Piraeus, and take the first boat out of here,\" Shannon said. \"With luck, we could be in Paris tomorrow night.\"\n\n\"That wouldn't be luck. That would be a miracle,\" Conrad quipped. \"But it might be a good idea to get out of here if we can.\"\n\nIndy shook his head. \"They'll be waiting for us at the port.\"\n\n\"But they're behind us,\" Shannon said.\n\n\"Mandraki won't be there, but his men will be watching for us. You can count on it.\"\n\n\"The port isn't the only place they're waiting,\" Conrad said. \"Take a look at what's ahead.\"\n\nIndy grimaced. \"Swell. A roadblock.\"\n\nNikos leaned forward. \"I bet this is where it gets dangerous.\"\n\nIndy frowned at the impetuous kid. \"At least one of the places.\"\n\n\"Look,\" Conrad said. \"Let's reason with them. We'll explain we have to get to the presidential palace, that we have important information for the king. It's possible they're loyal.\"\n\nThere was no time to argue about it. He stepped on the brake and slowed. They were fifty yards short of the roadblock when one of the soldiers pointed. Several others raised their guns. They fired and the windshield shattered. \"I don't think they're open to conversation,\" Indy said.\n\nConrad stepped on the gas pedal and veered off the road. He headed along a slope, attempting to loop around the roadblock. The car tilted precariously and gunfire rattled off the roof. What happened next seemed to take only an instant. The hill was too steep; the car rolled over and kept rolling. Indy didn't know which way was up as he was hurtled about, but finally the car landed on its wheels again. Miraculously, they were on the road, and past the roadblock. But now Indy was behind the wheel, Conrad to his right and Shannon in the back seat.\n\n\"Hey, I'm driving.\"\n\nIndy glanced into the mirror and saw soldiers in the road firing another volley. Bullets pinged off the trunk. They would be chased, but if the Pierce-Arrow could stay on the road, it could outrun any Greek military vehicle.\n\n\"We're out of range,\" he said, \"and the city's just ahead. We're going to make it.\"\n\n\"We are?\" Conrad asked. He looked glassy-eyed and stared straight ahead.\n\n\"Never would have guessed you could drive like that, Ted.\"\n\n\"I didn't, either. I was ducking under the wheel.\"\n\nIndy looked over his shoulder. \"Hey, what happened to Nikos?\"\n\nThe kid rose up from the floorboards. \"Wait until I tell my friends about this.\"\n\n\"How you doing, Jack?\"\n\n\"I feel like my neck's broken, and I've got a fat lip. Guess I won't be blowing any tunes for the king tonight.\"\n\n\"Speaking of the king. Anybody know how to get to the palace?\" Indy asked.\n\n\"I do,\" Nikos said. \"It's by the new Olympic Stadium.\"\n\n\"Where is that from the Acropolis?\"\n\n\"I'll show you.\"\n\nIndy noticed people staring at the car as they cruised into the city. \"Guess they're pretty impressed by the Pierce-Arrow.\" Then he saw the reflection of the car in the window of a shop. The top was flattened, the driver's side was smashed, and the entire vehicle was pockmarked with bullet holes.\n\n\"Lucky we're alive.\"\n\n\"Indy, here's the Platia Phlomouson Hetairae,\" Nikos said as they drove around a square. \"You remember I told you about it?\"\n\n\"The what?\" Shannon asked.\n\n\"It's where the best tavernas in town are found,\" Indy answered.\n\n\"I could use a drink,\" Shannon said as they drove on.\n\n\"There's the stadium,\" Nikos said. \"Turn left when you pass it.\"\n\nSuddenly soldiers poured out of the stadium, charging into the road, blocking traffic and waving guns. \"Maybe they're on our side this time,\" Conrad said hopefully.\n\nA bullet glanced off the hood, another tore into the front seat between Indy and Conrad. \"No, don't think so.\"\n\n\"This is getting old,\" Shannon groused.\n\nIndy swung the wheel to the left, and drove rapidly along a winding narrow street until they reached a main crossroad.\n\nNikos pointed to the right. \"The palace is down there.\"\n\nMore soldiers were hustling into the street where Nikos pointed. Instead of turning, Indy drove straight ahead and directly into a park. He barreled along the sidewalk, scattering the promenading citizens who cursed and shook their fists.\n\n\"Where are we, Nikos?\"\n\n\"In the palace garden. Go that way,\" he yelled.\n\nIndy veered to the right, and headed toward the boulevard that fronted the palace grounds. He swerved onto it, and now the palace was on his right. \"We're going to make it,\" Conrad said.\n\n\"You're dreaming,\" Shannon answered.\n\nIndy slowed as they neared the main gate. A couple of dozen armed soldiers stood guard.\n\n\"They're the king's men,\" Indy said. \"They must be.\"\n\n\"You ask me, they look just like the ones who've been shooting at us,\" Shannon said.\n\nNow Indy wasn't so sure. \"I'm going around. Must be another way inside.\"\n\nThey circled the palace, but the only other entrance didn't look any more inviting. \"What is that funny looking machine by the soldiers?\" Nikos asked, his voice filled with awe.\n\nIndy kept driving.\n\n\"It's called a tank,\" Conrad explained. \"They started using them in the war. The first tank battle was fought in 1917 at Cambrai.\"\n\n\"Always nice to have a history professor on hand,\" Indy remarked. \"I say we try the main entrance. What do you think, Ted?\"\n\n\"We've got nothing to lose. No one shot at us when we passed.\"\n\n\"Definitely a favorable sign,\" Shannon said, his voice thick with irony.\n\nNikos pointed toward the main entrance. \"Look, the gate is opening for us.\"\n\nIndy turned the wheel. A safe harbor, at last. Suddenly, he slammed on the brakes. Another tank blocked the entrance. \"I hope it's the welcoming committee.\" Indy looked around, assessing the situation. He was about to back up, but the first tank now was right behind them.\n\nSoldiers surrounded the battered car, their rifles trained on them. \"This doesn't look good,\" Conrad muttered.\n\nHands yanked at the locked doors amid excited yells and shouts of orders. Then everyone stepped back. No one fired. The soldiers stared as if the car were on exhibit.\n\n\"What's going on?\" Shannon asked.\n\nWith the soldiers out of the way, it was obvious. The two tanks were closing in on them. A second later, they were greeted by a high-pitched screech of crushed metal as one rolled into the front, the other struck the rear.\n\n\"Goddamn,\" Shannon yelled, popping his door open. They dove out of the car and into the grasp of the soldiers. Indy was lifted by his arms and legs; the knapsack was ripped from his grip. \"Hey, that's my bag. I need it back.\"\n\nThey ignored him. Behind him the tanks crunched the remains of the Pierce-Arrow.\n\n\"Your Highness,\" Dorian said, \"the man is dangerous. We don't need foreigners like him. I think he and his friends should be immediately expelled.\"\n\nThe king leaned back in his thickly padded chair in the royal library. \"If what you tell me is true, then expulsion might be too easy for them. After all, it's a matter of honor as well as justice when someone steals the property of one of our officers, and then opens fire on him.\"\n\n\"I understand your feeling, Your Highness. However, as you know, no one was injured.\"\n\nThe king stroked his chin and considered what she had said. \"Why are you defending him, Dr. Belecamus?\"\n\nYou'll never find out, she thought. \"I feel partially responsible. This man is one of my graduate students and I brought him here.\"\n\n\"I've already met Mr. Jones, as you recall. I found him a bit odd, but that's not unusual for Americans. However, I didn't think he was a criminal, and I'd like to hear his story.\"\n\nExactly what she wanted to avoid. She glanced at Mandraki. Say something, damn it.\n\n\"I don't think it's going to be necessary to go to that trouble,\" Mandraki said. \"You see, in deference to Dr. Belecamus, I don't want to press charges against Jones or the other men.\"\n\nThe king nodded, and motioned to one of his aides. \"Prepare their exit papers. I want them on board the ship to Brindisi in the morning.\"\n\nDorian stood, feeling relieved, and extended a hand. \"Thank you, Your Highness. I appreciate this, and I apologize for the inconvenience it's caused you.\"\n\n\"I'll be happy to take charge of them until their ship leaves,\" Mandraki said.\n\nThe king shrugged, then waved a hand. \"It's no trouble keeping them here tonight. In fact, I'd prefer it. I don't want to hear about any more wild escapades.\"\n\nHe said it with a tone of finality, and Dorian knew it would do no good to argue. She was about to stand up when the king changed topics.\n\n\"Now what about the artifact? It was the reason you pursued Jones and the others, wasn't it?\" He glanced at Mandraki. \"Besides the car, of course.\"\n\n\"Yes, it was, Your Highness.\"\n\n\"Well, do you want to take it with you?\"\n\nJust the thought of the Omphalos made Dorian uneasy. She never wanted to hold it again. But she couldn't say that to the king.\n\n\"I'd rather not right now. I'll send someone to pick it up in a couple of days.\"\n\n\"What is this thing, the Omphalos?\"\n\n\"I believe it's a meteorite that was cut and polished and covered with a rope netting that's petrified. Its value was symbolic in the time of Pythia. Now it's mostly a curiosity.\"\n\n\"Why did Jones want it?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"Who knows? I think he was a little deranged from breathing those vapors. I was speaking prematurely when I said they had no apparent effect. The fact is, they seem to have varying effects.\"\n\nShe smiled modestly, the humble servant. \"I'm just pleased, Your Highness, that they affected me in a way that helped you. I don't recall what happened, but I understand that I was able to warn you of a threat against your life.\"\n\nThe king touched his hip, and she wondered if he still believed the vapors had healed him. \"Yes, I want to thank you. It was a peculiar situation, but if I hadn't been warned who knows what would have happened.\" He stroked his chin, and nodded. Then he rose from his chair. \"Well, now it's late.\"\n\nDorian said good night, and waited as Mandraki shook the king's hand. She smiled to herself as she heard the king murmur that he was sorry about what happened to his car. As she and Mandraki left the library, she spoke quickly under her breath. \"I think we did just fine. He'll go to bed soon, and by the time he wakes up they'll be gone.\"\n\nMandraki didn't respond.\n\n\"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"I'm not worried about Jones anymore,\" he said in a hushed voice as they walked down the wide hallway. \"We've got to get that bastard out of power. The Agora is filled with refugees; more are arriving every day. The country is falling apart.\"\n\n\"He'll pay for his mistakes,\" Dorian said. \"We'll see to it, and we'll do it right this time.\"\n\n\"And soon,\" Mandraki added."
            },
            {
                "title": "IN THE PALACE",
                "text": "In a barren cell somewhere below the palace, Indy hovered on the border of sleep. He saw the eagle flapping its wings, soaring high above him, then Mandraki's face obliterated the eagle. The colonel smiled cruelly, then pointed the barrel of his gun in his face.\n\nIndy jerked awake, pounded the hard mattress, and turned over. He knew that what had happened to him in the crevice had been more than a dream. But he didn't want to think about it, didn't want to give it meaning, because all he could see was death, his death obliterating his future.\n\nHe turned over again, trying to stop his thoughts, but couldn't do it for more than a few seconds. He counted backwards from one hundred. Ninety-nine, ninety-eight ...He made it to eighty-five before the numbers muddled in his mind, and he drifted. Eighty-six, seventy-eight... He slept.\n\nHe blinked his eyes open.\n\nSomething had jarred him from his sleep.\n\nHe listened.\n\nHe heard breathing.\n\nShannon and Conrad.\n\nBut another noise had awakened him. He heard it again. Hollow, distant voices.\n\nGrowing closer.\n\nFootsteps echoed in the hallway. He heard a jingle of keys. A voice like gravel growled, another grunted in response. Now what?\n\nThe door opened. In the dim light from the hall he saw two uniformed guards enter the cell. They looked around. One pointed at Indy and the other immediately jerked him from the floor.\n\n\"What's going on?\" Shannon shouted as Indy was dragged toward the door.\n\n\"Where're you taking him?\" Conrad stood, but he was pushed back down. The door slammed shut.\n\nHope this isn't the execution call, Indy thought. \"Is it morning already?\" he asked in Greek as he was led away.\n\nThe guards didn't answer. No one had told the prisoners anything. They'd been fed soup, bread, and water, and given a blanket and a thin mattress apiece. But their pleas to see the king or anyone who would listen to them were met with silence. In fact, they didn't even know the whereabouts of Nikos. They hadn't seen him since they left the car, and Indy hoped that somehow in the confusion he had managed to escape.\n\nThey reached a stairway, and the guards literally ran him up the steps. \"Hey, boys, what's the rush?\" He was ushered into a back hallway. He glimpsed a huge kitchen off the hall where men in white uniforms scrubbed the floor. He smelled the faint odor of food.\n\n\"Oh, time for breakfast already?\" The guards' sullen expressions remained intact. \"Guess not.\"\n\nThey kept walking, and soon they entered another hallway, but this one was ornate, suitable for a palace. His feet sank into the plush carpeting. The walls were mahogany and the cornices were trimmed with gold leaf. He had no doubt that he was now in the main part of the palace.\n\nHalfway down the hallway they stopped in front of double doors tall enough for a giant to enter without ducking. One of the guards tapped lightly. Immediately, the door opened a couple of inches. A few words were exchanged, then Indy was escorted into a library filled with books that reached from floor to ceiling.\n\nThe royal library, he thought. Like in my dream-vision.\n\nA large, muscular man in a suit pointed to a wooden chair and Indy sat down. He looked up glumly at the man, expecting an interrogation session. But why in a library? Maybe he was going to beat him to death with books. Joyce's Ulysses could kill him with a single blow.\n\n\"Hello, Mr. Indiana Jones.\"\n\nIndy looked around and saw the king step into view. He was wearing a blue satin robe and slippers\u2014just like in the vision\u2014and he limped slightly as he walked.\n\n\"Your Highness.\" Indy stood up, but the guard shoved him back into his chair.\n\nThe king lowered himself into a swivel chair in front of a fireplace. \"I'm talking to you against the wishes of my advisors. They thought I should expel you from the country without another word.\"\n\n\"Really?\" It was the best news Indy had heard since they'd left Delphi. \"I'm sure my friends and I will accept that. But\u2014\"\n\nThe king raised a hand, cutting him off. \"The reason I've decided to talk to you is that I feel I owe you at least that. You saved my life.\"\n\n\"I feel very fortunate to be here with you.\"\n\nThe king laughed. \"You are fortunate to be alive, much less in the palace. If the reports I received were accurate, luck must be on your side.\"\n\nIndy tried to answer, but his throat was dry and his voice cracked.\n\nThe king snapped his fingers and murmured something to a man who had been hidden by the bookshelves. Indy looked around, wondering how many other people were in the room. A moment later, the aide handed Indy a glass of water.\n\n\"Now, tell me why you stole an artifact from Delphi and an automobile from Colonel Mandraki.\"\n\nIndy gulped the water down, and cleared his throat. \"Mandraki was going to kill you. I mean, he wanted me to kill you.\"\n\n\"Wait.\" The king interrupted. \"Start from the beginning. Why did you go to Delphi with Dorian Belecamus?\"\n\nIndy told his story, starting with his first encounter with Dorian. He told the king everything, from her ploy to become Pythia to the story of Richard Farnsworth. He hoped all the details would make his story about the assassination plot more believable.\n\nThe king listened closely, expressing astonishment at Belecamus's double dealings. \"No wonder the miracle vapors didn't work. The cure didn't last any longer than the new Pythia.\"\n\nHe asked about Stephanos Doumas, and Indy told him that the dead archaeologist had been involved in the Order of Pythia, but not in the assassination attempt. \"So you say that this supposed attempt to kill me had nothing to do with this mystical order, but was a military plot led by Colonel Mandraki?\"\n\nIndy nodded.\n\nThe king looked distracted. \"I'm well aware that my political enemies are growing in numbers, and that everything has not worked as I had hoped. But until now none of them has attempted to kill me.\" He turned to Indy and smiled. \"If what you say about Mandraki is true, I don't feel so bad now about his car being destroyed.\"\n\nHe got up and hobbled over to the fireplace. He rubbed his hands together over the low-burning fire, then turned to Indy. \"I'd like to offer you and your friends a choice of staying in the palace as my guests of honor, or leaving and doing as you please.\"\n\n\"I think I can speak for my friends and say that the three of us are ready to go back to Paris.\" Then he asked about Nikos.\n\nThe king glanced to the side and the aide who had brought the water appeared again. The man watched Indy as the king spoke under his breath. He said something back to the king, then after another exchange the aide moved away. \"I'm sorry, Mr. Jones,\" the king said, \"but we know nothing about the boy. I hope he was able to get out of the car.\"\n\n\"Are you saying he never got out?\" Indy raised his voice, and the guard by the door took a couple of steps toward him until the king motioned that it was okay.\n\n\"I'm saying I don't know. If I knew he was dead, I would tell you.\"\n\nThe aide returned carrying the knapsack and handed it to the king, who offered it to Indy. \"I believe this is yours.\"\n\nIncredible. He's going to give me the Omphalos, Indy thought. Again, just like the vision.\n\nHe shook his head. \"No, it's not mine. It's the Omphalos. It belongs to everyone.\"\n\n\"It seems that there has been more attention given to this stone than it deserves,\" the king said.\n\n\"I'm not so sure about that, Your Highness.\"\n\nThe king reached into the knapsack and scooped out the cone with one hand. \"Dr. Belecamus, for all her faults, is an authority on Delphi, and she told me that the Omphalos is really nothing more than a curiosity, a meteorite actually. I'm sure if it was of great value she wouldn't have left the palace without it. I'd like you to take it as a memento of your trip.\"\n\n\"Your Highness, I think you should put it back in the knapsack. If it's held too long, it may. . . you may. . .\" Indy didn't know how to explain it. He really didn't believe it, but something had happened to him, and to Dorian.\n\n\"I don't see anything unusual about it.\" The king turned it over in his hands. \"It feels warm.\"\n\nHe folded down into his chair. \"I feel a little drowsy.\"\n\nThe knapsack dropped to the floor as he wrapped his arms around the Omphalos. For several seconds he was motionless. Then his eyes grew wide, his mouth twisted in an expression of shock, and Indy knew that the artifact was working its spell. He rushed forward, but the burly guard caught him before he reached the king.\n\n\"Do something,\" Indy barked. \"Can't you see he needs help? Get the stone.\"\n\nThe aide moved to the king's side, asked if he was okay. Carefully, he lifted the Omphalos and set it on the floor. \"The doctor. Quickly,\" he yelled.\n\nThe king raised his hand. \"No. I'm okay.\"\n\nHe ran his hands over his face. \"Release him,\" he told the guard who still held Indy.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Your Highness. I tried to warn you.\"\n\nThe king stared down at the Omphalos. \"I had the strangest experience. It was like a dream, but I was awake. I was surrounded by horrendous army ants, and they were picking at me. They were trying to carry me away.\"\n\nIndy nodded, uncertain what to say.\n\n\"What happened to me?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Indy said. \"I think the artifact needs to be carefully studied by scientists.\"\n\n\"It needs to be locked away,\" the king retorted. \"Or maybe lost again.\" A beat passed. \"Well, if you're going to make the ferry on time, you better be on your way.\"\n\nAs the king accompanied him to the door of the library, Indy thought there was something different about him now. But he wasn't sure what it was.\n\nHe thanked the king for his help.\n\n\"Thank you for yours. Now, I have some army ants to deal with this morning.\" With that, he turned and walked away.\n\nAs the door closed behind Indy, he realized what it was about the king. He no longer limped.\n\nThe city was just coming awake as they walked out a side door of the palace, and headed toward the street. A church bell pealed, a rooster crowed. The clatter of a horse and buggy contrasted with the rumble of a car engine. \"I can't believe we're getting out of this nightmare alive,' Shannon said.\n\nAs they reached the street, a soldier with a rifle approached them. \"Now what?\" Indy said wearily.\n\nThe soldier pointed to a new Cadillac waiting at the curb. \"Your ride to the port.\"\n\nAs he closed the door after them, Indy couldn't help commenting on the irony. \"That guy was probably ready to kill us yesterday.\"\n\n\"He's only doing his job,\" Conrad said.\n\n\"Yeah, just following the score,\" Shannon said.\n\n\"And what are we doing?\" Indy asked.\n\n\"Playing it by ear.\"\n\n\"It's more interesting that way,\" Indy said.\n\n\"To some people, \" Conrad responded. He stared out the window toward the palace with a look of longing. \"It would have been nice to stay at the palace for a few days. I might have gotten inspired for my novel.\"\n\nIndy looked over at him as the car pulled away. \"What about everything that's happened to you in the last few days?\"\n\n\"Experiences are deceptive, Indy. A writer is much better off working from the material of his inner self rather than from confusing experiences.\"\n\nIndy mulled over that a moment. \"If you ask me, people are confusing, not experiences.\"\n\nConrad didn't answer and they were each left with his thoughts. As they passed the remains of Hadrian's Library and neared the Roman Forum, Indy gazed out at the refugee shanties that were built on top of the ruins. Smoke was curling from a few rooftops and reminded him of the vapors rising from the crevice in Apollo's Temple.\n\nThen he saw her moving through the gray dawn, her long hair tied in a braid. There was no doubt in his mind that it was Dorian Belecamus.\n\n\"Stop.\"\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Shannon asked as Indy opened the door. \"We've got to get to Piraeus.\"\n\n\"Listen, wait five minutes for me. If I'm not back, go on. I'll meet you at the ferry. There's something I've got to do.\"\n\n\"We don't have much time,\" Conrad warned.\n\n\"I know. I know.\"\n\nHe slammed the door without another word and hurried past a hodgepodge of shanties. She had been headed in that direction, and he thought he knew her destination. He passed by the ancient gate to the Forum, continued a ways, then saw the Tower of the Winds. She stood beneath it, gazing upward.\n\nDorian stared intently at the face of Lips, the southwest wind, who was speeding along the voyage of a ship. Jones and the others would soon be gone. The danger was over. And yet, she felt empty.\n\nShe would miss Jones. She had truly enjoyed his company, something he would never believe. He wouldn't understand the complexity of her life, and how forces beyond her personal life were directing her. She also knew that even if she had succeeded in breaking away from Mandraki and becoming Pythia, it would not have been any different. Those same political forces still would have driven her, and her fantasy about herself and Jones in the seat of power would have failed.\n\nShe didn't know what her future was. Maybe she would return to Paris. Maybe not. Nothing would be resolved until Mandraki acted. Her life was not really hers, and she detested that.\n\n\"Now I know why this is your favorite ruin.\"\n\nShe spun around, startled. \"Indy!\"\n\n\"You're just like it. Different faces for different winds.\"\n\n\"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"On my way back to Paris. Just saying adio.\"\n\nShe glanced around. Mandraki was inspecting the refugee situation and he would meet her here any time. \"You shouldn't be here. Figete.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"Now you're telling me to get lost. I'm not leaving until you've satisfied my curiosity. Why did Mandraki take you back after you shot him? He doesn't exactly seem like the forgiving type.\"\n\nShe knew he wouldn't go away until she answered. \"He didn't know who shot him. You can see through the vapors better than you can see into them. He only heard me call his name.\"\n\n\"That figures. You deceived him just like you did me and probably every other man in your life. And I thought for a while that I loved you.\"\n\nShe met his cold stare. \"I'm not really a bad person, Indy. I do what I have to do. But you're a man. You wouldn't understand.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Your gender has nothing to do with it. If every woman were like you, we'd all be in\u2014\"\n\n\"Just go. Please.\"\n\nBut it was too late. Mandraki stood just five feet away, and he was raising a revolver.\n\nThe gun seemed to move in slow motion. This couldn't be happening. The vision couldn't be true. What about all the adventures? Had his entire future, or the lack of it, depended on whether or not he left the car to follow Dorian?\n\n\"Jones, you're dead.\"\n\n\"No!\" Dorian yelled, and she stepped between them.\n\n\"Get out of my way, Dorian. Now!\"\n\n\"No. You aren't going to kill him.\"\n\n\"Move out of the way.\"\n\n\"You'll have to kill me first.\"\n\n\"Damn you, Dorian.\" The gun fired.\n\nIndy caught Dorian as she collapsed. He felt the warmth of her blood seeping through his shirt and heard the soft, terrible wheezing as she tried to pull air into her lungs. He knew Mandraki was still standing there with the gun as he placed Dorian gently on the ground. He elevated her head so she wouldn't drown in her own blood.\n\n\"Dorian,\" Mandraki whimpered. \"I didn't mean it. The gun just fired.\"\n\nShe tried to speak, but couldn't. She tried to lift her hand, but couldn't do that, either. Indy bent over her, touched her cheek.\n\n\"Get away from her,\" Mandraki yelled. \"You did this. You killed her. Now you're dead.\"\n\nIndy looked up into the barrel of the gun. Just like the vision. So this was it.\n\nHe heard a gunshot.\n\nMandraki staggered a couple of steps. \"Malaka,\" he cursed, and he dropped to the ground.\n\nIndy recognized the guard from the king's library, standing in the clearing. As the guard moved toward them, Indy saw Mandraki lift his weapon and aim it at him again.\n\nBut the guard was ready. He pumped several shots into him. The gun fell from Mandraki's hand. Blood oozed from his mouth. This time he wouldn't get up.\n\nWhen Indy looked down at Dorian, she was dead. Her eyes gazed vapidly at the blue morning sky overhead. Oddly, he knew he was going to miss her. In spite of her shortcomings, she had influenced his life. He would never be the same person again, and he knew that he had found the career that would be his life's work. He brushed a hand across Dorian's cheek, then closed the lids of her eyes.\n\n\"Indy, are you all right?\"\n\n\"Nikos! What are you doing here?\"\n\nNikos glanced anxiously around. \"I hid in the palace garden all night, then I saw you leaving in the car. I followed you in a taxi, because I wanted to say good-bye.\"\n\n\"I've got to get to the ferry.\"\n\n\"C'mon. The taxi's waiting. You can still make it.\"\n\nHe glanced once more at Dorian's frozen expression, and turned away.\n\nThe ferry's horn blasted as they arrived at the port. He shook hands with Nikos, and thanked him for his help. \"Come visit me in Paris.\"\n\n\"I want to go to America too, and see a jazz band and the Grand Canyon,\" Nikos called after him.\n\n\"Why not?\" Indy said, and smiled. Then he strode up the gangway. The horn blasted one final time, and the gangway rose behind him.\n\nAs the ferry edged away from the pier, Indy heard another horn. It was Shannon playing his cornet on the deck. He strolled over to him, nodding to Conrad. Shannon blew a few more bluesy notes, then lowered the horn.\n\n\"You just made it, Indy. What the hell were you doing?\"\n\n\"I'll tell you later. We've got plenty of time to talk. But what was that tune? Don't think I've ever heard it?\"\n\n\"That's because you've only seen the lyrics. It's called 'Down in the Quarter.' Still need a singer, but at least I've got a new verse.\" He snapped his fingers, then tapped a beat on his cornet.\n\n\u2003Took a trip to Greece;\n\n\u2003left the Quarter far behind.\n\n\u2003But Lord, never knew how I'd miss that second home of mine.\n\n\"My sentiments, too,\" Indy said.\n\n\"Got something for you,\" Conrad said, and he handed Indy a package. \"It arrived just before you got here.\"\n\n\"What's this?\" Indy ripped open the envelope attached to the top of the package, and saw it was a note from the king.\n\nDear Mr. Jones\u2014I hope you will change your mind and accept the Omphalos. Bury it at sea, if you wish, but please take it far from Greece and Delphi. The days of Apollo's Oracle are long over, and we Greeks must look to our future rather than try to revive our distant past. Thank you.\n\n\"What is it?\" Shannon asked as the ferry pulled away from the pier.\n\n\"A piece of a falling star, I guess.\" Indy balanced the package on the railing.\n\n\"What are you going to do with it?\"\n\nHe looked down at the dark blue sea. \"I don't know. I'll have to think about it. But I know a museum curator in Chicago who would be very pleased to have it in his Greek collection. ...\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Allan Quartermain 1) King Solomon's Mines",
        "author": "H. Rider Haggard",
        "genres": [
            "historical fiction",
            "adventure",
            "Africa"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "I Meet Sir Henry Curtis",
                "text": "It is a curious thing that at my age\u2014fifty-five last birthday\u2014I should find myself taking up a pen to try and write a history. I wonder what sort of a history it will be when I have done it, if I ever come to the end of the trip! I have done a good many things in my life, which seems a long one to me, owing to my having begun so young, perhaps. At an age when other boys are at school, I was earning my living as a trader in the old Colony. I have been trading, hunting, fighting, or mining ever since. And yet it is only eight months ago that I made my pile. It is a big pile now I have got it\u2014I don't yet know how big\u2014but I don't think I would go through the last fifteen or sixteen months again for it; no, not if I knew that I should come out safe at the end, pile and all. But then I am a timid man, and don't like violence, and am pretty sick of adventure. I wonder why I am going to write this book: it is not in my line. I am not a literary man, though very devoted to the Old Testament and also to the \"Ingoldsby Legends.\" Let me try and set down my reasons, just to see if I have any.\n\nFirst reason: Because Sir Henry Curtis and Captain John Good asked me to.\n\nSecond reason: Because I am laid up here at Durban with the pain and trouble in my left leg. Ever since that confounded lion got hold of me I have been liable to it, and its being rather bad just now makes me limp more than ever. There must be some poison in a lion's teeth, otherwise how is it that when your wounds are healed they break out again, generally, mark you, at the same time of year that you got your mauling? It is a hard thing that when one has shot sixty-five lions as I have in the course of my life, that the sixty-sixth should chew your leg like a quid of tobacco. It breaks the routine of the thing, and putting other considerations aside, I am an orderly man and don't like that. This is by the way.\n\nThird reason: Because I want my boy Harry, who is over there at the hospital in London studying to become a doctor, to have something to amuse him and keep him out of mischief for a week or so. Hospital work must sometimes pall and get rather dull, for even of cutting up dead bodies there must come satiety, and as this history won't be dull, whatever else it may be, it may put a little life into things for a day or two while he is reading it.\n\nFourth reason and last: Because I am going to tell the strangest story that I know of. It may seem a queer thing to say that, especially considering that there is no woman in it\u2014except Foulata. Stop, though! there is Gagaoola, if she was a woman and not a fiend. But she was a hundred at least, and therefore not marriageable, so I don't count her. At any rate, I can safely say that there is not a petticoat in the whole history. Well I had better come to the yoke. It's a stiff place, and I feel as though I were bogged up to the axle. But \"sutjes, suties,\" as the Boers say (I'm sure I don't know how they spell it), softly does it. A strong team will come through at last, that is if they ain't too poor. You will never do anything with poor oxen. Now to begin.\n\nI, Allan Quatermain, of Durban, Natal, Gentleman, make oath and say\u2014That's how I began my deposition before the magistrate, about poor Khiva's and Ventv\u00f6gel's sad deaths; but somehow it doesn't seem quite the right way to begin a book. And, besides, am I a gentleman? What is a gentleman? I don't quite know, and yet I have had to do with niggers\u2014no, I'll scratch that word \"niggers\" out, for I don't like it. I've known natives who are, and so you'll say, Harry, my boy, before you're done with this tale, and I have known mean whites with lots of money and fresh out from home, too, who ain't. Well, at any rate, I was born a gentleman, though I've been nothing but a poor travelling trader and hunter all my life. Whether I have remained so I know not, you must judge of that. Heaven knows I've tried. I've killed many men in my time, but I have never slain wantonly or stained my hand in innocent blood, only in self-defence. The Almighty gave us our lives, and I suppose he meant us to defend them, at least I have always acted on that, and I hope it won't be brought up against me when my clock strikes. There, there, it is a cruel and a wicked world, and for a timid man I have been mixed up in a deal of slaughter. I can't tell the rights of it, but at any rate I have never stolen, though I once cheated a Kafir out of a herd of cattle. But then he had done me a dirty turn, and it has troubled me ever since into the bargain.\n\nWell it's eighteen months or so ago since I first met Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, and it was in this way. I had been up elephant hunting beyond Bamangwato, and had had bad luck. Everything went wrong that trip, and to top up with I got the fever badly. So soon as I was well enough I trekked down to the Diamond Fields, sold such ivory as I had, and also my waggon and oxen, discharged my hunters, and took the post-cart to the Cape. After spending a week in Cape Town, finding that they overcharged me at the hotel, and having seen everything there was to see, including the botanical gardens, which seem to me likely to confer a great benefit on the country, and the new Houses of Parliament, which I expect will do nothing of the sort, I determined to go on back to Natal by the Dunkeld, then lying in the docks waiting for the Edinburgh Castle due in from England. I took my berth and went aboard, and that afternoon the Natal passengers from the Edinburgh Castle transhipped, and we weighed and put out to sea.\n\nAmong the passengers who came on board there were two who excited my curiosity. One, a man of about thirty, was one of the biggest-chested and longest-armed men I ever saw. He had yellow hair, a big yellow beard, clear-cut features, and large grey eyes set deep into his head. I never saw a finer-looking man, and somehow he reminded me of an ancient Dane. Not that I know much of ancient Danes, though I remember a modern Dane who did me out of ten pounds; but I remember once seeing a picture of some of those gentry, who, I take it, were a kind of white Zulus. They were drinking out of big horns, and their long hair hung down their backs, and as I looked at my friend standing there by the companion-ladder, I thought that if one only let his hair grow a bit, put one of those chain shirts on to those great shoulders of his, and gave him a big battle-axe and a horn mug, he might have sat as a model for that picture. And by the way it is a curious thing, and just shows how the blood will show out, I found out afterwards that Sir Henry Curtis, for that was the big man's name, was of Danish blood. He also reminded me strongly of somebody else, but at the time I could not remember who it was.\n\nThe other man who stood talking to Sir Henry was short, stout, and dark, and of quite a different cut. I suspected at once that he was a naval officer. I don't know why, but it is difficult to mistake a navy man. I have gone on shooting trips with several of them in the course of my life, and they have always been just the best and bravest and nicest fellows I ever met, though given to the use of profane language.\n\nI asked a page or two back, what is a gentleman? I'll answer it now: a Royal Naval officer is, in a general sort of a way, though, of course, there may be a black sheep among them here and there. I fancy it is just the wide sea and the breath of God's winds that washes their hearts and blows the bitterness out of their minds and makes them what men ought to be. Well, to return, I was right again; I found out that he was a naval officer, a lieutenant of thirty-one, who, after seventeen years' service, had been turned out of her Majesty's employ with the barren honour of a commander's rank, because it was impossible that he should be promoted. That is what people who serve the Queen have to expect: to be shot out into the cold world to find a living just when they are beginning to really understand their work, and to get to the prime of life. Well, I suppose they don't mind it, but for my part I had rather earn my bread as a hunter. One's halfpence are as scarce perhaps, but you don't get so many kicks. His name I found out\u2014by referring to the passengers' list\u2014was Good\u2014Captain John Good. He was broad, of medium height, dark, stout, and rather a curious man to look at. He was so very neat and so very clean shaved, and he always wore an eyeglass in his right eye. It seemed to grow there, for it had no string, and he never took it out except to wipe it. At first I thought he used to sleep in it, but I afterwards found that this was a mistake. He put it in his trousers pocket when he went to bed, together with his false teeth, of which he had two beautiful sets that have often, my own being none of the best, caused me to break the tenth commandment. But I am anticipating.\n\nSoon after we had got underway evening closed in, and brought with it very dirty weather. A keen breeze sprang up off land, and a kind of aggravated Scotch mist soon drove everybody from the deck. And as for that Dunkeld, she is a flat-bottomed punt, and going up light as she was, she rolled very heavily. It almost seemed as though she would go right over, but she never did. It was quite impossible to walk about, so I stood near the engines where it was warm, and amused myself with watching the pendulum, which was fixed opposite to me, swinging slowly backwards and forwards as the vessel rolled, and marking the angle she touched at each lurch.\n\n\"That pendulum's wrong; it is not properly weighted,\" suddenly said a voice at my shoulder, somewhat testily. Looking round I saw the naval officer I had noticed when the passengers came aboard.\n\n\"Indeed, now what makes you think so?\" I asked.\n\n\"Think so. I don't think at all. Why there\"\u2014as she righted herself after a roll\u2014\"if the ship had really rolled to the degree that thing pointed to then she would never have rolled again, that's all. But it is just like these merchant skippers, they always are so confoundedly careless.\"\n\nJust then the dinner-bell rang, and I was not sorry, for it is a dreadful thing to have to listen to an officer of the Royal Navy when he gets on to that subject. I only know one worse thing, and that is to hear a merchant skipper express his candid opinion of officers of the Royal Navy.\n\nCaptain Good and I went down to dinner together, and there we found Sir Henry Curtis already seated. He and Captain Good sat together, and I sat opposite to them. The captain and I soon got into talk about shooting and what not; he asking me many questions, and I answering as well as I could. Presently he got on to elephants.\n\n\"Ah, sir,\" called out somebody who was sitting near me, \"you've got to the right man for that; Hunter Quatermain should be able to tell you about elephants if anybody can.\"\n\nSir Henry, who had been sitting quite quiet listening to our talk, started visibly.\n\n\"Excuse me, sir,\" he said, leaning forward across the table, and speaking in a low, deep voice, a very suitable voice it seemed to me, to come out of those great lungs. \"Excuse me, sir, but is your name Allan Quatermain?\"\n\nI said it was.\n\nThe big man made no further remark, but I heard him mutter \"fortunate\" into his beard.\n\nPresently dinner came to an end, and as we were leaving the saloon Sir Henry came up and asked me if I would come into his cabin and smoke a pipe. I accepted, and he led the way to the Dunkeld deck cabin, and a very good cabin it was. It had been two cabins, but when Sir Garnet or one of those big swells went down the coast in the Dunkeld, they had knocked away the partition and never put it up again. There was a sofa in the cabin, and a little table in front of it. Sir Henry sent the steward for a bottle of whisky, and the three of us sat down and lit our pipes.\n\n\"Mr. Quatermain,\" said Sir Henry Curtis, when the steward had brought the whisky and lit the lamp, \"the year before last about this time you were, I believe, at a place called Bamangwato, to the north of the Transvaal.\"\n\n\"I was,\" I answered, rather surprised that this gentleman should be so well acquainted with my movements, which were not, so far as I was aware, considered of general interest.\n\n\"You were trading there, were you not?\" put in Captain Good, in his quick way.\n\n\"I was. I took up a wagon load of goods, and made a camp outside the settlement, and stopped till I had sold them.\"\n\nSir Henry was sitting opposite to me in a Madeira chair, his arms leaning on the table. He now looked up, fixing his large grey eyes full upon my face. There was a curious anxiety in them I thought.\n\n\"Did you happen to meet a man called Neville there?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes; he outspanned alongside of me for a fortnight to rest his oxen before going on to the interior. I had a letter from a lawyer a few months back asking me if I knew what had become of him, which I answered to the best of my ability at the time.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Sir Henry, \"your letter was forwarded to me. You said in it that the gentleman called Neville left Bamangwato in the beginning of May in a waggon with a driver, a voorlooper, and a Kafir hunter called Jim, announcing his intention of trekking if possible as far as Inyati, the extreme trading post in the Matabele country, where he would sell his wagon and proceed on foot. You also said that he did sell his waggon, for six months afterwards you saw the waggon in the possession of a Portuguese trader, who told you that he had bought it at Inyati from a white man whose name he had forgotten, and that the white man with a native servant had started off for the interior on a shooting trip, he believed.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nThen came a pause.\n\n\"Mr. Quatermain,\" said Sir Henry, suddenly, \"I suppose you know or can guess nothing more of the reasons of my\u2014of Mr. Neville's journey to the northward, or as to what point that journey was directed?\"\n\n\"I heard something,\" I answered, and stopped. The subject was one which I did not care to discuss.\n\nSir Henry and Captain Good looked at each other, and Captain Good nodded.\n\n\"Mr. Quatermain,\" said the former, \"I am going to tell you a story, and ask your advice, and perhaps your assistance. The agent who forwarded me your letter told me that I might implicitly rely upon it, as you were,\" he said, \"well known and universally respected in Natal, and especially noted for your discretion.\"\n\nI bowed and drank some whisky and water to hide my confusion, for I am a modest man\u2014and Sir Henry went on.\n\n\"Mr. Neville was my brother.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I said, starting, for now I knew who Sir Henry had reminded me of when I first saw him. His brother was a much smaller man and had a dark beard, but now I thought of it, he possessed eyes of the same shade of grey and with the same keen look in them, and the features too were not unlike.\n\n\"He was,\" went on Sir Henry, \"my only and younger brother, and till five years ago I do not suppose we were ever a month away from each other. But just about five years ago a misfortune befell us, as sometimes does happen in families. We had quarrelled bitterly, and I behaved very unjustly to my brother in my anger.\" Here Captain Good nodded his head vigorously to himself. The ship gave a big roll just then, so that the looking-glass, which was fixed opposite us to starboard, was for a moment nearly over our heads, and as I was sitting with my hands in my pockets and staring upwards, I could see him nodding like anything.\n\n\"As I daresay you know,\" went on Sir Henry, \"if a man dies intestate, and has no property but land, real property it is called in England, it all descends to his eldest son. It so happened that just at the time when we quarrelled our father died intestate. He had put off making his will until it was too late. The result was that my brother, who had not been brought up to any profession, was left without a penny. Of course it would have been my duty to provide for him, but at the time the quarrel between us was so bitter that I did not\u2014to my shame I say it (and he sighed deeply) offer to do anything. It was not that I grudged him anything, but I waited for him to make advances, and he made none. I am sorry to trouble you with all this, Mr. Quatermain, but I must to make things clear, eh, Good?\"\n\n\"Quite so, quite so,\" said the captain. \"Mr. Quatermain will, I am sure, keep this history to himself.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said I, for I rather pride myself on my discretion.\n\n\"Well,\" went on Sir Henry, \"my brother had a few hundred pounds to his account at the time, and without saying anything to me he drew out this paltry sum, and, having adopted the name of Neville, started off for South Africa in the wild hope of making a fortune. This I heard afterwards. Some three years passed, and I heard nothing of my brother, though I wrote several times. Doubtless the letters never reached him. But as time went on I grew more and more troubled about him. I found out, Mr. Quatermain, that blood is thicker than water.\"\n\n\"That's true,\" said I, thinking of my boy Harry.\n\n\"I found out, Mr. Quatermain, that I would have given half my fortune to know that my brother George, the only relation I have, was safe and well, and that I should see him again.\"\n\n\"But you never did, Curtis,\" jerked out Captain Good, glancing at the big man's face.\n\n\"Well, Mr. Quatermain, as time went on, I became more and more anxious to find out if my brother was alive or dead, and if alive to get him home again. I set inquiries on foot, and your letter was one of the results. So far as it went it was satisfactory, for it shewed that till lately George was alive, but it did not go far enough. So, to cut a long story short, I made up my mind to come out and look for him myself, and Captain Good was so kind as to come with me.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said the captain; \"nothing else to do, you see. Turned out by my Lords of the Admiralty to starve on half pay. And now perhaps, sir, you will tell us what you know or have heard of the gentleman called Neville.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Legend of Solomon's Mines",
                "text": "\"What was it that you heard about my brother's journey at Bamangwato?\" said Sir Henry, as I paused to fill my pipe before answering Captain Good.\n\n\"I heard this,\" I answered, \"and I have never mentioned it to a soul till to-day. I heard that he was starting for Solomon's Mines.\"\n\n\"Solomon's Mines!\" ejaculated both my hearers at once. \"Where are they?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" I said;\"I know where they are said to be. I once saw the peaks of the mountains that border them, but there was a hundred and thirty miles of desert between me and them, and I am not aware that any white man ever got across it save one. But perhaps the best thing I can do is to tell you the legend of Solomon's Mines as I know it, you passing your word not to reveal anything I tell you without my permission. Do you agree to that? I have my reasons for asking it.\"\n\nSir Henry nodded, and Captain Good replied, \"Certainly, certainly.\"\n\n\"Well,\" I began, \"as you may guess, in a general way, elephant hunters are a rough set of men, and don't trouble themselves with much beyond the facts of life and the ways of Kafirs. But here and there you meet a man who takes the trouble to collect traditions from the natives, and tries to make out a little piece of the history of this dark land. It was such a man as this who first told me the legend of Solomon's Mines, now a matter of nearly thirty years ago. It was when I was on my first elephant hunt in the Matabele country. His name was Evans, and he was killed next year, poor fellow, by a wounded buffalo, and lies buried near the Zambesi Falls. I was telling Evans one night, I remember, of some wonderful workings I had found whilst hunting koodoo and eland in what is now the Lydenburg district of the Transvaal. I see they have come across these workings again lately in prospecting for gold, but I knew of them years ago. There is a great wide waggon road cut out of the solid rock, and leading to the mouth of the working or gallery. Inside the mouth of this gallery are stacks of gold quartz piled up ready for crushing, which shows that the workers, whoever they were, must have left in a hurry, and about twenty paces in the gallery is built across, and a beautiful bit of masonry it is.\n\n\"'Ay,' said Evans, 'but I will tell you a queerer thing than that;' and he went on to tell me how he had found in the far interior a ruined city, which he believed to be the Ophir of the Bible, and, by the way, other more learned men have said the same long since poor Evans' time. I was, I remember, listening open-eared to all these wonders, for I was young at the time, and this story of an ancient civilisation and of the treasure which those old Jewish or Phoenician adventurers used to extract from a country long since lapsed into the darkest barbarism took a great hold upon my imagination, when suddenly he said to me, \"Lad, did you ever hear of the Suliman Mountains up to the north-west of the Mashukulumbwe country?\" I told him I never had. \"Ah, well,\" he said, \"that was where Solomon really had his mines, his diamond mines, I mean.\"\n\n\"'How do you know that?' I asked.\n\n\"'Know it; why what is \"Suliman\" but a corruption of Solomon! and, besides, an old Isanusi (witch doctor) up in the Manica country told me all about it. She said that the people who lived across those mountains were a branch of the Zulus, speaking a dialect of Zulu, but finer and bigger men even; that there lived among them great wizards, who had learnt their art from white men when 'all the world was dark,' and who had the secret of a wonderful mine of \"bright stones.\"'\n\n\"Well, I laughed at this story at the time, though it interested me, for the diamond fields were not discovered then, and poor Evans went off and got killed, and for twenty years I never thought any more of the matter. But just twenty years afterwards\u2014and that is a long time, gentlemen, an elephant hunter does not often live for twenty years at his business\u2014I heard something more definite about Suliman's Mountains and the country which lies beyond it. I was up beyond the Manica country at a place called Sitanda's Kraal, and a miserable place it was, for one could get nothing to eat there, and there was but little game about. I had an attack of fever, and was in a bad way generally, when one day a Portugee arrived with a single companion\u2014a half-breed. Now I know your Delagoa Portugee well. There is no greater devil unhung in a general way, battening as he does upon human agony and flesh in the shape of slaves. But this was quite a different type of man to the low fellows I had been accustomed to meet; he reminded me more of the polite dons I have read about. He was tall and thin, with large dark eyes and curling grey moustachios. We talked together a little, for he could speak broken English, and I understood a little Portugee, and he told me that his name was Jos\u00e9 Silvestre, and that he had a place near Delagoa Bay; and when he went on next day with his half-breed companion, he said, 'Good-bye,' taking off his hat quite in the old style. 'Good-bye, senor,' he said; 'if ever we meet again I shall be the richest man in the world, and I will remember you.' I laughed a little\u2014I was too weak to laugh much\u2014and watched him strike out for the great desert to the west, wondering if he was mad, or what he thought he was going to find there.\n\n\"A week passed, and I got the better of my fever. One evening I was sitting on the ground in front of the little tent I had with me, chewing the last leg of a miserable fowl I had bought from a native for a bit of cloth worth twenty fowls, and staring at the hot red sun sinking down into the desert, when suddenly I saw a figure, apparently that of a European, for it wore a coat, on the slope of the rising ground opposite to me, about three hundred yards away. The figure crept along on its hands and knees, then it got up and staggered along a few yards on its legs, only to fall and crawl along again. Seeing that it must be somebody in distress, I sent one of my hunters to help him, and presently he arrived, and who do you suppose it turned out to be?\"\n\n\"Jos\u00e9 Silvestre, of course,\" said Captain Good. \"Yes, Jos\u00e9 Silvestre, or rather his skeleton and a little skin. His face was bright yellow with bilious fever, and his large, dark eyes stood nearly out of his head, for all his flesh had gone. There was nothing but yellow parchment-like skin, white hair, and the gaunt bones sticking up beneath.\n\n\"'Water! for the sake of Christ, water!' he moaned. I saw that his lips were cracked, and his tongue, which protruded between them, swollen and blackish.\n\n\"I gave him water with a little milk in it, and he drank it in great gulps, two quarts or more, without stopping. I would not let him have any more. Then the fever took him again, and he fell down and began to rave about Suliman's Mountains, and the diamonds, and the desert. I took him into the tent and did what I could for him, which was little enough; but I saw how it must end. About eleven o'clock he got quieter, and I lay down for a little rest and went to sleep. At dawn I woke again, and saw him in the half light sitting up, a strange, gaunt form, and gazing out towards the desert. Presently the first ray of the sun shot right across the wide plain before us till it reached the far-away crest of one of the tallest of the Suliman Mountains more than a hundred miles away.\n\n\"'There it is!' cried the dying man in Portuguese, stretching out his long, thin arm, 'but I shall never reach it, never. No one will ever reach it!'\n\n\"Suddenly he paused, and seemed to take a resolution. 'Friend,' he said, turning towards me, 'are you there? My eyes grow dark.'\n\n\"'Yes,' I said; 'yes, lie down now, and rest.'\n\n\"'Ay,' he answered, 'I shall rest soon, I have time to rest\u2014all eternity. Listen, I am dying! You have been good to me. I will give you the paper. Perhaps you will get there if you can live through the desert, which has killed my poor servant and me.'\n\n\"Then he groped in his shirt and brought out what I thought was a Boer tobacco pouch of the skin of the Swart-vet-pens (sable antelope). It was fastened with a little strip of hide, what we call a rimpi, and this he tried to untie, but could not. He handed it to me. 'Untie it,' he said. I did so, and extracted a bit of torn yellow linen, on which something was written in rusty letters. Inside was a paper.\n\n\"Then he went on feebly, for he was growing weak: 'The paper has it all, that is on the rag. It took me years to read. Listen: my ancestor, a political refugee from Lisbon, and one of the first Portuguese who landed on these shores, wrote that when he was dying on those mountains which no white foot ever pressed before or since. His name was Jos\u00e9 da Silvestra, and he lived three hundred years ago. His slave, who waited for him on this side the mountains, found him dead, and brought the writing home to Delagoa. It has been in the family ever since, but none have cared to read it till at last I did. And I have lost my life over it, but another may succeed, and become the richest man in the world\u2014the richest man in the world. Only give it to no one; go yourself!' Then he began to wander again, and in an hour it was all over.\n\n\"God rest him! he died very quietly, and I buried him deep, with big boulders on his breast; so I do not think that the jackals can have dug him up. And then I came away.\"\n\n\"Ay, but the document,\" said Sir Henry, in a tone of deep interest.\n\n\"Yes, the document; what was in it?\" added the captain.\n\n\"Well, gentlemen, if you like I will tell you. I have never showed it to anybody yet except my dear wife, who is dead, and she thought it was all nonsense, and a drunken old Portuguese trader who translated it for me, and had forgotten all about it next morning. The original rag is at my home in Durban, together with poor Dom Jos\u00e9's translation, but I have the English rendering in my pocket-book, and a facsimile of the map, if it can be called a map. Here it is.\"\n\n\"I, Jos\u00e9 da Silvestra, who am now dying of hunger in the little cave where no snow is on the north side of the nipple of the southernmost of the two mountains I have named Sheba's Breasts, write this in the year 1590 with a cleft bone upon a remnant of my raiment, my blood being the ink. If my slave should find it when he comes, and should bring it to Delagoa, let my friend (name illegible) bring the matter to the knowledge of the king, that he may send an army which, if they live through the desert and the mountains, and can overcome the brave Kukuanes and their devilish arts, to which end many priests should be brought, will make him the richest king since Solomon. With my own eyes have I seen the countless diamonds stored in Solomon's treasure chamber behind the white Death; but through the treachery of Gagool the witchfinder I might bring nought away, scarcely my life. Let him who comes follow the map, and climb the snow of Sheba's left breast till he comes to the nipple, on the north side of which is the great road Solomon made, from whence three days' journey to the King's Place. Let him kill Gagool. Pray for my soul. Farewell.\n\n\"JOS\u00c9 DA SILVESTRA.\"\n\nWhen I had finished reading the above and shewn the copy of the map, drawn by the dying hand of the old Dom with his blood for ink, there followed a silence of astonishment.\n\n\"Well,\" said Captain Good, \"I have been round the world twice, and put in at most ports, but may I be hung if I ever heard a yarn like that out of a story book, or in it either, for the matter of that.\"\n\n\"It's a queer story, Mr. Quatermain,\" said Sir Henry. \"I suppose you are not hoaxing us? It is, I know, sometimes thought allowable to take a greenhorn in.\"\n\n\"If you think that, Sir Henry,\" I said, much put out, and pocketing my paper, for I do not like to be thought one of those silly fellows who consider it witty to tell lies, and who are for ever boasting to new comers of extraordinary hunting adventures which never happened, \"why there is an end of the matter,\" and I rose to go.\n\nSir Henry laid his large hand upon my shoulder. \"Sit down, Mr. Quatermain,\" he said, \"I beg your pardon; I see very well you do not wish to deceive us, but the story sounded so extraordinary that I could hardly believe it.\"\n\n\"You shall see the original map and writing when we reach Durban,\" I said, somewhat mollified, for really when I came to consider the matter it was scarcely wonderful that he should doubt my good faith. \"But I have not told you about your brother. I knew the man Jim who was with him. He was a Bechuana by birth, a good hunter, and for a native a very clever man. The morning Mr. Neville was starting, I saw Jim standing by my waggon and cutting up tobacco on the disselboom.\n\n\"'Jim,' said I, 'where are you off to this trip? Is it elephants?'\n\n\"'No, Baas,' he answered, 'we are after something worth more than ivory.'\n\n\"'And what might that be?' I said, for I was curious. 'Is it gold?'\n\n\"'No, Baas, something worth more than gold,' and he grinned.\n\n\"I did not ask any more questions, for I did not like to lower my dignity by seeming curious, but I was puzzled. Presently Jim finished cutting his tobacco.\n\n\"'Baas,' said he.\n\n\"I took no notice.\n\n\"'Baas,' said he again.\n\n\"Eh, boy, what is it?' said I.\n\n\"'Baas, we are going after diamonds.'\n\n\"'Diamonds! why, then, you are going in the wrong direction; you should head for the Fields.'\n\n\"'Baas, have you ever heard of Suliman's Berg?' (Solomon's Mountains).\n\n\"'Ay!'\n\n\"'Have you ever heard of the diamonds there?'\n\n\"'I have heard a foolish story, Jim.'\n\n\"'It is no story, Baas. I once knew a woman who came from there, and got to Natal with her child, she told me:\u2014she is dead now.'\n\n\"'Your master will feed the aasvogels (vultures), Jim, if he tries to reach Suliman's country, and so will you if they can get any pickings off your worthless old carcass,' said I.\n\n\"He grinned. 'Mayhap, Baas. Man must die; I'd rather like to try a new country myself; the elephants are getting worked out about here.'\n\n\"'Ah! my boy,' I said, 'you wait till the \"pale old man\" (death) gets a grip of your yellow throat, and then we'll hear what sort of a tune you sing.'\n\n\"Half an hour after that I saw Neville's waggon move off. Presently Jim came running back. 'Good-bye, Baas,' he said. 'I didn't like to start without bidding you good-bye, for I daresay you are right, and we shall never come back again.'\n\n\"'Is your master really going to Suliman's Berg, Jim, or are you lying?'\n\n\"'No,' says he; 'he is going. He told me he was bound to make his fortune somehow, or try to; so he might as well try the diamonds.'\n\n\"'Oh!' said I; 'wait a bit, Jim; will you take a note to your master, Jim, and promise not to give it to him till you reach Inyati?' (which was some hundred miles off).\n\n\"'Yes,' said he.\n\n\"So I took a scrap of paper, and wrote on it, 'Let him who comes ... climb the snow of Sheba's left breast, till he comes to the nipple, on the north side of which is Solomon's great road.'\n\n\"'Now, Jim; I said, 'when you give this to your master, tell him he had better follow the advice implicitly. You are not to give it to him now, because I don't want him back asking me questions which I won't answer. Now be off, you idle fellow, the waggon is nearly out of sight.'\n\n\"Jim took the note and went, and that is all I know about your brother, Sir Henry; but I am much afraid\u2014\"\n\n\"Mr. Quatermain,\" said Sir Henry, \"I am going to look for my brother; I am going to trace him to Suliman's Mountains, and over them if necessary, till I find him, or till I know that he is dead. Will you come with me?\"\n\nI am, as I think I have said, a cautious man, indeed a timid one, and I shrunk from such an idea. It seemed to me that to start on such a journey would be to go to certain death, and putting other things aside, as I had a son to support, I could not afford to die just then.\n\n\"No, thank you, Sir Henry, I think I had rather not,\" I answered. \"I am too old for wild-goose chases of that sort, and we should only end up like my poor friend Silvestre. I have a son dependent on me, so cannot afford to risk my life.\"\n\nBoth Sir Henry and Captain Good looked very disappointed.\n\n\"Mr. Quatermain,\" said the former, \"I am well off, and I am bent upon this business. You may put the remuneration for your services at whatever figure you like, in reason, and it shall be paid over to you before we start. Moreover, I will, before we start, arrange that in the event of anything happening to us or to you, that your son shall be suitably provided for. You will see from this how necessary I think your presence. Also if by any chance we should reach this place, and find diamonds, they shall belong to you and Good equally. I do not want them. But of course the chance is as good as nothing, though the same thing would apply to any ivory we might get. You may pretty well make your own terms with me, Mr. Quatermain; and of course I shall pay all expenses.\"\n\n\"Sir Henry,\" said I, \"this is the most liberal offer I ever had, and one not to be sneezed at by a poor hunter and trader. But the job is the biggest I ever came across, and I must take time to think it over. I will give you my answer before we get to Durban.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" answered Sir Henry, and then I said good-night and turned in, and dreamt about poor long-dead Silvestre and the diamonds."
            },
            {
                "title": "Umbopa Enters Our Service",
                "text": "It takes from four to five days, according to the vessel and the state of the weather, to run up from the Cape to Durban. Sometimes, if the landing is bad at East London, where they have not yet got that wonderful harbour they talk so much of, and sink such a mint of money in, one is delayed for twenty-four hours before the cargo boats can get out to take the goods off. But on this occasion we had not to wait at all, for there were no breakers on the Bar to speak of, and the tugs came out at once with their long strings of ugly flat-bottomed boats, into which the goods were bundled with a crash. It did not matter what they were, over they went slap bang; whether they were china or woollen goods they met with the same treatment. I saw one case containing four dozen of champagne smashed all to bits, and there was the champagne fizzing and boiling about in the bottom of the dirty cargo boat. It was a wicked waste, and so evidently the Kafirs in the boat thought, for they found a couple of unbroken bottles, and knocking the tops off drank the contents. But they had not allowed for the expansion caused by the fizz in the wine, and feeling themselves swelling, rolled about in the bottom of the boat, calling out that the good liquor was \"tagati\" (bewitched). I spoke to them from the vessel, and told them that it was the white man's strongest medicine, and that they were as good as dead men. They went on to the shore in a very great fright, and I do not think that they will touch champagne again.\n\nWell, all the time we were running up to Natal I was thinking over Sir Henry Curtis' offer. We did not speak any more on the subject for a day or two, though I told them many hunting yarns, all true ones. There is no need to tell lies about hunting, for so many curious things happen within the knowledge of a man whose business it is to hunt; but this is by the way.\n\nAt last, one beautiful evening in January, which is our hottest month, we steamed along the coast of Natal, expecting to make Durban Point by sunset. It is a lovely coast all along from East London, with its red sandhills and wide sweeps of vivid green, dotted here and there with Kafir kraals, and bordered by a ribbon of white surf, which spouts up in pillars of foam where it hits the rocks. But just before you get to Durban there is a peculiar richness about it. There are the deep kloofs cut in the hills by the rushing rains of centuries, down which the rivers sparkle; there is the deepest green of the bush, growing as God planted it, and the other greens of the mealie gardens and the sugar patches, while here and there a white house, smiling out at the placid sea, puts a finish and gives an air of homeliness to the scene. For to my mind, however beautiful a view may be, it requires the presence of man to make it complete, but perhaps that is because I have lived so much in the wilderness, and therefore know the value of civilisation, though to be sure it drives away the game. The Garden of Eden, no doubt, was fair before man was, but I always think it must have been fairer when Eve was walking about it. But we had miscalculated a little, and the sun was well down before we dropped anchor off the Point, and heard the gun which told the good folk that the English Mail was in. It was too late to think of getting over the Bar that night, so we went down comfortably to dinner, after seeing the Mails carried off in the lifeboat.\n\nWhen we came up again the moon was up, and shining so brightly over sea and shore that she almost paled the quick large flashes from the lighthouse. From the shore floated sweet spicy odours that always remind me of hymns and missionaries, and in the windows of the houses on the Berea sparkled a hundred lights. From a large brig lying near came the music of the sailors as they worked at getting the anchor up to be ready for the wind. Altogether it was a perfect night, such a night as you only get in Southern Africa, and it threw a garment of peace over everybody as the moon threw a garment of silver over everything. Even the great bulldog, belonging to a sporting passenger, seemed to yield to the gentle influences, and giving up yearning to come to close quarters with the baboon in a cage on the foc'sle, snored happily in the door of the cabin, dreaming no doubt that he had finished him, and happy in his dream.\n\nWe all\u2014that, is Sir Henry Curtis, Captain Good, and myself\u2014went and sat by the wheel, and were quiet for a while.\n\n\"Well, Mr. Quatermain,\" said Sir Henry, presently, \"have you been thinking about my proposals?\"\n\n\"Ay,\" echoed Captain Good, \"what do you think of them, Mr. Quatermain? I hope you are going to give us the pleasure of your company as far as Solomon's Mines, or wherever the gentleman you knew as Neville may have got to.\"\n\nI rose and knocked out my pipe before I answered. I had not made up my mind, and wanted the additional moment to complete it. Before the burning tobacco had fallen into the sea it was completed; just that little extra second did the trick. It is often the way when you have been bothering a long time over a thing.\n\n\"Yes, gentlemen,\" I said, sitting down again, \"I will go, and by your leave I will tell you why and on what terms. First for the terms which I ask.\n\n\"1. You are to pay all expenses, and any ivory or other valuables we may get is to be divided between Captain Good and myself.\n\n\"2. That you pay me \u00a3500 for my services on the trip before we start, I undertaking to serve you faithfully till you choose to abandon the enterprise, or till we succeed, or disaster overtakes us.\n\n\"3. That before we start you execute a deed agreeing, in the event of my death or disablement, to pay my boy Harry, who is studying medicine over there in London at Guy's Hospital, a sum of \u00a3200 a year for five years, by which time he ought to be able to earn a living for himself. That is all, I think, and I daresay you will say quite enough too.\"\n\n\"No,\" answered Sir Henry, \"I accept them gladly. I am bent upon this project, and would pay more than that for your help, especially considering the peculiar knowledge you possess.\"\n\n\"Very well. And now that I have made my terms I will tell you my reasons for making up my mind to go. First of all, gentlemen, I have been observing you both for the last few days, and if you will not think me impertinent I will say that I like you, and think that we shall come up well to the yoke together. That is something, let me tell you, when one has a long journey like this before one.\n\n\"And now as to the journey itself, I tell you flatly, Sir Henry and Captain Good, that I do not think it probable that we can come out of it alive, that is, if we attempt to cross the Suliman Mountains. What was the fate of the old Dom da Silvestra three hundred years ago? What was the fate of his descendant twenty years ago? What has been your brother's fate? I tell you frankly, gentlemen, that as their fate was so I believe ours will be.\"\n\nI paused to watch the effect of my words. Captain Good looked a little uncomfortable; but Sir Henry's face did not change. \"We must take our chance,\" he said.\n\n\"You may perhaps wonder,\" I went on, \"why, if I think this, I, who am, as I told you, a timid man, should undertake such a journey. It is for two reasons. First I am a fatalist, and believe that my time is appointed to come quite independently of my own movements, and that if I am to go to Suliman's Mountains to be killed, I shall go there and shall be killed there. God Almighty, no doubt, knows His mind about me, so I need not trouble on that point. Secondly, I am a poor man. For nearly forty years I have hunted and traded, but I have never made more than a living. Well, gentlemen, I don't know if you are aware that the average life of an elephant hunter from the time he takes to the trade is from four to five years. So you see I have lived through about seven generations of my class, and I should think that my time cannot be far off anyway. Now, if anything were to happen to me in the ordinary course of business, by the time my debts were paid there would be nothing left to support my son Harry whilst he was getting in the way of earning a living, whereas now he would be provided for for five years. There is the whole affair in a nutshell.\"\n\n\"Mr. Quatermain,\" said Sir Henry, who had been giving me the most serious attention; \"your motives for undertaking an enterprise which you believe can only end in disaster reflect a great deal of credit on you. Whether or not you are right, time and the event of course alone can show. But whether you are right or wrong, I may as well tell you at once that I am going through with it to the end, sweet or bitter. If we are going to be knocked on the head, all I have to say is that I hope we shall get a little shooting first, eh, Good?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" put in the captain. \"We have all three of us been accustomed to face danger, and hold our lives in our hands in various ways, so it is no good turning back now.\"\n\n\"And now I vote we go down to the saloon and take an observation, just for luck, you know.\" And we did\u2014through the bottom of a tumbler.\n\nNext day we went ashore, and I put Sir Henry and Captain Good up at the little shanty I have on the Berea, and which I call my home. There are only three rooms and a kitchen in it, and it is built of green brick with a galvanised iron roof, but there is a good garden with the best loquot trees in it that I know, and some nice young mangoes, of which I hope great things. The curator of the botanical gardens gave them to me. It is looked after by an old hunter of mine, named Jack, whose thigh was so badly broken by a buffalo cow in Sikukuni's country, that he will never hunt again. But he can potter about and garden, being a Griqua by birth. You can never get your Zulu to take much interest in gardening. It is a peaceful art, and peaceful arts are not in his line.\n\nSir Henry and Good slept in a tent pitched in my little grove of orange trees at the end of the garden (for there was no room for them in the house), and what with the smell of the bloom and the sight of the green and golden fruit\u2014for in Durban you will see all three on the tree together\u2014I daresay it is a pleasant place enough (for we have few mosquitoes here unless there happens to come an unusually heavy rain).\n\nWell, to get on\u2014for unless I do you will be tired of my story before ever we fetch up at Suliman's Mountains\u2014having once made up my mind to go I set about making the necessary preparations. First I got the deed from Sir Henry, providing for my boy in case of accidents. There was some little difficulty about getting this legally executed, as Sir Henry was a stranger here, and the property to be charged was over the water, but it was ultimately got over with the help of a lawyer, who charged \u00a320 for the job\u2014a price that I thought outrageous. Then I got my cheque for \u00a3500. Having paid this tribute to my bump of caution, I bought a waggon and a span of oxen on Sir Henry's behalf, and beauties they were. It was a twenty-two-foot waggon with iron axles, very strong, very light, and built throughout of stink wood. It was not quite a new one, having been to the Diamond Fields and back, but in my opinion it was all the better for that, for one could see that the wood was well seasoned. If anything is going to give in a waggon, or if there is green wood in it, it will show out on the first trip. It was what we call a \"half-tented\" waggon, that is to say, it was only covered in over the after twelve feet, leaving all the front part free for the necessaries we had to carry with us. In this after part was a hide \"cartle,\" or bed, on which two people could sleep, also racks for rifles, and many other little conveniences. I gave \u00a3125 for it, and think it was cheap at the price. Then I bought a beautiful team of twenty salted Zulu oxen, which I had had my eye on for a year or two. Sixteen oxen are the usual number for a team, but I had four extra to allow for casualties. These Zulu oxen are small and light, not more than half the size of the Africander oxen, which are generally used for transport purposes; but they will live where the Africanders will starve, and with a light load will make five miles a day better going, being quicker and not so liable to get footsore. What is more, this lot were thoroughly \"salted,\" that is, they had worked all over South Africa, and so had become proof (comparatively speaking) against red water, which so frequently destroys whole teams of oxen when they get on to strange \"veldt\" (grass country). As for \"lung sick,\" which is a dreadful form of pneumonia, very prevalent in this country, they had all been inoculated against it. This is done by cutting a slit in the tail of an ox, and binding in a piece of the diseased lung of an animal which has died of the sickness. The result is that the ox sickens, takes the disease in a mild form, which causes its tail to drop off, as a rule about a foot from the root, and becomes proof against future attacks. It seems cruel to rob the animal of his tail, especially in a country where there are so many flies, but it is better to sacrifice the tail and keep the ox than to lose both tail and ox, for a tail without an ox is not much good except to dust with. Still it does look odd to trek along behind twenty stumps, where there ought to be tails. It seems as though nature had made a trifling mistake, and stuck the stern ornaments of a lot of prize bulldogs on to the rumps of the oxen.\n\nNext came the question of provisioning and medicines, one which required the most careful consideration, for what one had to do was to avoid lumbering the waggon up, and yet take everything absolutely necessary. Fortunately, it turned out that Good was a bit of a doctor, having at some period in his previous career managed to pass through a course of medical and surgical instruction, which he had more or less kept up. He was not, of course, qualified, but he knew more about it than many a man who could write M.D. after his name, as we found out afterwards, and he had a splendid travelling medicine chest and a set of instruments. Whilst we were at Durban he cut off a Kafir's big toe in a way which it was a pleasure to see. But he was quite flabbergasted when the Kafir, who had sat stolidly watching the operation, asked him to put on another, saying that a \"white one\" would do at a pinch.\n\nThere remained, when these questions were satisfactorily settled, two further important points for consideration, namely, that of arms and that of servants. As to the arms I cannot do better than put down a list of those we finally decided on from among the ample store that Sir Henry had brought with him from England, and those which I had. I copy it from my pocket-book, where I made the entry at the time.\n\n\"Three heavy breechloading double-eight elephant guns, weighing about fifteen pounds each, with a charge of eleven drachms of black powder.\" Two of these were by a well-known London firm, most excellent makers, but I do not know by whom mine, which was not so highly finished, was made. I had used it on several trips, and shot a good many elephants with it, and it had always proved a most superior weapon, thoroughly to be relied on.\n\n\"Three double .500 expresses, constructed to carry a charge of six drachms,\" sweet weapons, and admirable for medium-sized game, such as eland or sable antelope, or for men, especially in an open country and with the semi-hollow bullet.\n\n\"One double No. 12 central-fire Keeper's shotgun, full choke both barrels.\" This gun proved of the greatest service to us afterwards in shooting game for the pot.\n\n\"Three Winchester repeating rifles (not carbines), spare guns.\n\n\"Three single-action Colt's revolvers, with the heavier pattern of cartridge.\"\n\nThis was our total armament, and the reader will doubtless observe that the weapons of each class were of the same make and calibre, so that the cartridges were interchangeable, a very important point. I make no apology for detailing it at length, for every experienced hunter will know how vital a proper supply of guns and ammunition is to the success of an expedition.\n\nNow as to the men who were to go with us. After much consultation we decided that their number should be limited to five, namely, a driver, a leader, and three servants.\n\nThe driver and leader I got without much difficulty, two Zulus, named respectively Goza and Tom; but the servants were a more difficult matter. It was necessary that they should be thoroughly trustworthy and brave men, as in a business of this sort our lives might depend upon their conduct. At last I secured two, one a Hottentot called Ventv\u00f6gel (wind-bird), and one a little Zulu named Khiva, who had the merit of speaking English perfectly. Ventv\u00f6gel I had known before; he was one of the most perfect \"spoorers\" (game trackers) I ever had to do with, and tough as whipcord. He never seemed to tire. But he had one failing, so common with his race, drink. Put him within reach of a bottle of grog and you could not trust him. But as we were going beyond the region of grog-shops this little weakness of his did not so much matter.\n\nHaving got these two men I looked in vain for a third to suit my purpose, so we determined to start without one, trusting to luck to find a suitable man on our way up country. But on the evening beforethe day we had fixed for our departure the Zulu Khiva informed me that a man was waiting to see me. Accordingly when we had done dinner, for we were at table at the time, I told him to bring him in. Presently a very tall, handsome-looking man, somewhere about thirty years of age, and very light-coloured for a Zulu, entered, and, lifting his knob-stick by way of salute, squatted himself down in the corner on his haunches, and sat silent. I did not take any notice of him for a while, for it is a great mistake to do so. If you rush into conversation at once, a Zulu is apt to think you a person of little dignity or consideration. I observed, however, that he was a \"Keshla\" (ringed man), that is, that he wore on his head the black ring, made of a species of gum polished with fat and worked in with the hair, usually assumed by Zulus on attaining a certain age or dignity. Also it struck me that his face was familiar to me.\n\n\"Well,\" I said at last, \"what is your name?\"\n\n\"Umbopa,\" answered the man in a slow, deep voice.\n\n\"I have seen your face before.\"\n\n\"Yes; the Inkoosi (chief) saw my face at the place of the Little Hand (Isandhlwana) the day before the battle.\"\n\nThen I remembered. I had been one of Lord Chelmsford's guides in that unlucky Zulu War, and had had the good fortune to leave the camp in charge of some waggons the day before the battle. While I had been waiting for the cattle to be inspanned I had fallen into conversation with this man, who held some small command among the native auxiliaries, and he had expressed to me his doubts of the safety of the camp. At the time I had told him to hold his tongue, and leave such matters to wiser heads; but afterwards I thought of his words.\n\n\"I remember,\" I said; \"what is it you want?\"\n\n\"It is this, 'Macumazahn' (that is my Kafir name, and means the man who gets up in the middle of the night, or, in vulgar English, he who keeps his eyes open). I hear that you go on a great expedition far into the North with the white chiefs from over the water. Is it a true word?\"\n\n\"It is.\"\n\n\"I hear that you go even to the Lukanga River, a moon's journey beyond the Manica country. Is this so also, 'Macumazahn?'\"\n\n\"Why do you ask whither we go? What is it to thee?\" I answered, suspiciously, for the objects of our journey had been kept a dead secret.\n\n\"It is this, O white men, that if indeed you travel so far I would travel with you.\"\n\nThere was a certain assumption of dignity in the man's mode of speech, and especially in his use of the words \"O white men,\" instead of \"O Inkosis\" (chiefs), which struck me.\n\n\"You forget yourself a little,\" I said. \"Your words come out unawares. That is not the way to speak. What is your name, and where is your kraal? Tell us, that we may know with whom we have to deal.\"\n\n\"My name is Umbopa. I am of the Zulu people, yet not of them. The house of my tribe is in the far North; it was left behind when the Zulus came down here a 'thousand years ago,' long before Chaka reigned in Zululand. I have no kraal. I have wandered for many years. I came from the North as a child to Zululand. I was Cetywayo's man in the Nkomabakosi Regiment. I ran away from Zululand and came to Natal because I wanted to see the white man's ways. Then I served against Cetywayo in the war. Since then I have been working in Natal. Now I am tired, and would go North again. Here is not my place. I want no money, but I am a brave man, and am worth my place and meat. I have spoken.\"\n\nI was rather puzzled at this man and his way of speech. It was evident to me from his manner that he was in the main telling the truth, but he was somehow different from the ordinary run of Zulus, and I rather mistrusted his offer to come without pay. Being in a difficulty, I translated his words to Sir Henry and Good, and asked them their opinion. Sir Henry told me to ask him to stand up. Umbopa did so, at the same time slipping off the long military great coat he wore, and revealing himself naked except for the moocha round his centre and a necklace of lions' claws. He certainly was a magnificent-looking man; I never saw a finer native. Standing about six foot three high he was broad in proportion, and very shapely. In that light, too, his skin looked scarcely more than dark, except here and there where deep black scars marked old assegai wounds. Sir Henry walked up to him and looked into his proud, handsome face.\n\n\"They make a good pair, don't they?\" said Good; \"one as big as the other.\"\n\n\"I like your looks, Mr. Umbopa, and I will take you as my servant,\" said Sir Henry in English.\n\nUmbopa evidently understood him, for he answered in Zulu, \"It is well;\" and then with a glance at the white man's great stature and breadth, \"we are men, thou and I.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "An Elephant Hunt",
                "text": "Now I DO NOT propose to narrate at full length all the incidents of our long journey up to Sitanda's Kraal, near the junction of the Lukanga and Ralukwe Rivers, a journey of more than a thousand miles from Durban, the last three hundred or so of which, owing to the frequent presence of the dreadful \"tsetse\" fly, whose bite is fatal to all animals except donkeys and men, we had to make on foot.\n\nWe left Durban at the end of January, and it was in the second week of May that we camped near Sitanda's Kraal. Our adventures on the way were many and various, but as they were of the sort which befall every African hunter, I shall not\u2014with one exception to be presently detailed\u2014set them down here, lest I should render this history too wearisome.\n\nAt Inyati, the outlying trading station in the Matabele country, of which Lobengula (a great scoundrel) is king, we with many regrets parted from our comfortable waggon. Only twelve oxen remained to us out of the beautiful span of twenty which I had bought at Durban. One we had lost from the bite of a cobra, three had perished from poverty and the want of water, one had been lost, and the other three had died from eating the poisonous herb called \"tulip.\" Five more sickened from this cause, but we managed to cure them with doses of an infusion made by boiling down the tulip leaves. If administered in time this is a very effective antidote. The waggon and oxen we left in the immediate charge of Goza and Tom, the driver and leader, both of them trustworthy boys, requesting a worthy Scotch missionary who lived in this wild place to keep an eye to it. Then, accompanied by Umbopa, Khiva, Ventv\u00f6gel, and half a dozen bearers whom we hired on the spot, we started off on foot upon our wild quest. I remember we were all a little silent on the occasion of that departure, and I think that each of us was wondering if we should ever see that waggon again; for my part I never expected to. For a while we tramped on in silence, till Umbopa, who was marching in front, broke into a Zulu chant about how some brave men, tired of life and the tameness of things, started off into a great wilderness to find new things or die, and how, lo, and behold! when they had got far into the wilderness, they found it was not a wilderness at all, but a beautiful place full of young wives and fat cattle, of game to hunt and enemies to kill.\n\nThen we all laughed and took it for a good omen. He was a cheerful savage was Umbopa, in a dignified sort of a way, when he had not got one of his fits of brooding, and had a wonderful knack of keeping one's spirits up. We all got very fond of him.\n\nAnd now for the one adventure I am going to treat myself to, for I do dearly love a hunting yarn.\n\nAbout a fortnight's march from Inyati, we came across a peculiarly beautiful bit of fairly-watered wooded country. The kloofs in the hills were covered with dense bush, \"idoro\" bush as the natives call it, and in some places, with the \"wacht-een-beche\" (wait-a-little) thorn, and there were great quantities of the beautiful \"machabell\" tree, laden with refreshing yellow fruit with enormous stones. This tree is the elephant's favourite food, and there were not wanting signs that the great brutes were about, for not only was their spoor frequent, but in many places the trees were broken down and even up-rooted. The elephant is a destructive feeder.\n\nOne evening, after a long day's march, we came to a spot of peculiar loveliness. At the foot of a bush-clad hill was a dry river-bed, in which, however, were to be found pools of crystal water all trodden round with the hoof-prints of game. Facing this hill was a park-like plain, where grew clumps of flat-topped mimosa, varied with occasional glossy-leaved machabells, and all round was the great sea of pathless, silent bush.\n\nAs we emerged into this river-bed path we suddenly started a troop of tall giraffes, who galloped, or rather sailed off, with their strange gait, their tails screwed up over their backs, and their hoofs rattling like castanets. They were about three hundred yards from us, and therefore practically out of shot, but Good, who was walking ahead, and had an express loaded with solid ball in his hand, could not resist, but upped gun and let drive at the last, a young cow. By some extraordinary chance the ball struck it full on the back of the neck, shattering the spinal column, and that giraffe went rolling head over heels just like a rabbit. I never saw a more curious thing.\n\n\"Curse it!\" said Good\u2014for I am sorry to say he had a habit of using strong language when excited\u2014contracted, no doubt, in the course of his nautical career; \"curse it! I've killed him.\"\n\n\"Ou, Bougwan,\" ejaculated the Kafirs; \"ou! ou!\"\n\nThey called Good \"Bougwan.\" (glass eye) because of his eyeglass.\n\n\"Oh, 'Bougwan!' \" re-echoed Sir Henry and I, and from that day Good's reputation as a marvellous shot was established, at any rate among the Kafirs. Really he was a bad one, but whenever he missed we overlooked it for the sake of that giraffe.\n\nHaving set some of the \"boys\" to cut off the best of the giraffe meat, we went to work to build a \"scherm\" near one of the pools about a hundred yards to the right of it. This is done by cutting a quantity of thorn bushes and laying them in the shape of a circular hedge. Then the space enclosed is smoothed, and dry tambouki grass, if obtainable, is made into a bed in the centre, and a fire or fires lighted.\n\nBy the time the \"scherm\" was finished the moon was coming up, and our dinner of giraffe steaks and roasted marrow bones was ready. How we enjoyed those marrow-bones, though it was rather a job to crack them! I know no greater luxury than giraffe marrow, unless it is elephant's heart, and we had that on the morrow. We ate our simple meal, pausing at times to thank Good for his wonderful shot, by the light of the full moon, and then we began to smoke and yarn, and a curious picture we must have made squatted there round the fire. I, with my short grizzled hair sticking up straight, and Sir Henry with his yellow locks, which were getting rather long, were rather a contrast, especially as I am thin, and short, and dark, weighing only nine stone and a half, and Sir Henry is tall, and broad, and fair, and weighs fifteen. But perhaps the most curious looking of the three, taking all the circumstances of the case into consideration, was Captain John Good, R.N, There he sat upon a leather bag, looking just as though he had come in from a comfortable day's shooting in a civilised country, absolutely clean, tidy, and well dressed. He had on a shooting suit of brown tweed, with a hat to match, and neat gaiters. He was, as usual, beautifully shaved, his eyeglass and his false teeth appeared to be in perfect order, and altogether he was the neatest man I ever had to do with in the wilderness. He even had on a collar, of which he had a supply, made of white guttapercha.\n\n\"You see, they weigh so little,\" he said to me, innocently, when I expressed my astonishment at the fact; \"I always like to look like a gentleman.\"\n\nWell, there we all sat yarning away in the beautiful moonlight, and watching the Kafirs a few yards off sucking their intoxicating \"daccha\" in a pipe of which the mouthpiece was made of the horn of an eland, till they one by one rolled themselves up in their blankets and went to sleep by the fire, that is, all except Umbopa, who sat a little apart (I noticed he never mixed much with the other Kafirs), his chin resting on his hand, apparently thinking deeply.\n\nPresently, from the depths of the bush behind us, came a loud \"woof, woof!\" \"That's a lion,\" said I, and we all started up to listen. Hardly had we done so, when from the pool, about a hundred yards off, came the strident trumpeting of an elephant. \"Unkungunklovo! Unkungunklovo!\" (elephant! elephant!) whispered the Kafirs; and a few minutes afterwards we saw a succession of vast shadowy forms moving slowly from the direction of the water towards the bush. Up jumped Good, burning for slaughter, and thinking, perhaps, that it was as easy to kill elephant as he had found it to shoot giraffe, but I caught him by the arm and pulled him down.\n\n\"It's no good,\" I said, \"let them go.\"\n\n\"It seems that we are in a paradise of game. I vote we stop here a day or two, and have a go at them,\" said Sir Henry, presently.\n\nI was rather surprised, for hitherto Sir Henry had always been for pushing on as fast as possible, more especially since we had ascertained at Inyati that about two years ago an Englishman of the name of Neville had sold his waggon there, and gone on up country; but I suppose his hunter instincts had got the better of him.\n\nGood jumped at the idea, for he was longing to have a go at those elephants; and so, to speak the truth, did I, for it went against my conscience to let such a herd as that escape without having a pull at them.\n\n\"All right, my hearties,\" said I. \"I think we want a little recreation. And now let's turn in, for we ought to be off by dawn, and then perhaps we may catch them feeding before they move on.\"\n\nThe others agreed, and we proceeded to make preparations. Good took off his clothes, shook them, put his eyeglass and his false teeth into his trousers pocket, and folding them all up neatly, placed them out of the dew under a corner of his mackintosh sheet. Sir Henry and I contented ourselves with rougher arrangements, and were soon curled up in our blankets, and dropping off into the dreamless sleep that rewards the traveller.\n\nGoing, going, go\u2014What was that?\n\nSuddenly from the direction of the water came a sound of violent scuffling, and next instant there broke upon our ears a succession of the most awful roars. There was no mistaking what they came from; only a lion could make such a noise as that. We all jumped up and looked towards the water, in the direction of which we saw a confused mass, yellow and black in colour, staggering and struggling towards us. We seized our rifles, and slipping on our veldtschoons (shoes made of untanned hide), ran out of the scherm towards it. By this time it had fallen, and was rolling over and over on the ground, and by the time we reached it it struggled no longer, but was quite still.\n\nAnd this was what it was. On the grass there lay a sable antelope bull\u2014the most beautiful of all the African antelopes\u2014quite dead, and transfixed by its great curved horns was a magnificent blackmaned lion, also dead. What had happened evidently was this. The sable antelope had come down to drink at the pool where the lion\u2014no doubt the same we had heard\u2014had been lying in wait. While the antelope was drinking the lion had sprung upon him, but was received upon the sharp curved horns and transfixed. I once saw the same thing happen before. The lion, unable to free himself, had torn and bitten at the back and neck of the bull, which, maddened with fear and pain, had rushed on till it dropped dead.\n\nAs soon as we had sufficiently examined the dead beasts we called the Kafirs, and between us managed to drag their carcasses up to the scherm. Then we went in and laid down, to wake no more till dawn.\n\nWith the first light we were up and making ready for the fray. We took with us the three eight-bore rifles, a good supply of ammunition, and our large water-bottles, filled with weak, cold tea, which I have always found the best stuff to shoot on. After swallowing a little breakfast we started, Umbopa, Khiva, and Ventv\u00f6gel accompanying us. The other Kafirs we left with instructions to skin the lion and the sable antelope, and cut up the latter.\n\nWe had no difficulty in finding the broad elephant trail, which Ventv\u00f6gel, after examination, pronounced to have been made by between twenty and thirty elephants, most of them full-grown bulls. But the herd had moved on some way during the night, and it was nine o'clock, and already very hot, before, from the broken trees, bruised leaves and bark, and smoking dung, we knew we could not be far off them.\n\nPresently we caught sight of the herd, numbering, as Ventv\u00f6gel had said, between twenty and thirty, standing in a hollow, having finished their morning meal, and flapping their great ears. It was a splendid sight.\n\nThey were about two hundred yards from us. Taking a handful of dry grass I threw it into the air to see how the wind was; for if once they winded us I knew they would be off before we could get a shot. Finding that, if anything, it blew from the elephants to us, we crept stealthily on, and thanks to the cover managed to get within forty yards or so of the great brutes. Just in front of us and broadside on stood three splendid bulls, one of them with enormous tusks. I whispered to the others that I would take the middle one; Sir Henry covered the one to the left, and Good the bull with the big tusks.\n\n\"Now,\" I whispered.\n\nBoom! boom! boom! went the three heavy rifles, and down went Sir Henry's elephant dead as a hammer, shot right through the heart. Mine fell on to its knees, and I thought he was going to die, but in another moment he was up and off, tearing along straight past me. As he went I gave him the second barrel in the ribs, and this brought him down in good earnest. Hastily slipping in two fresh cartridges, I ran close up to him, and a ball through the brain put an end to the poor brute's struggles. Then I turned to see how Good had fared with the big bull, which I had heard screaming with rage and pain as I gave mine its quietus. On reaching the captain I found him in a great state of excitement. It appeared that on receiving the bullet the bull had turned and come straight for his assailant, who had barely time to get out of his way, and then charged blindly on past him, in the direction of our encampment. Meanwhile the herd had crashed off in wild alarm in the other direction.\n\nFor a while we debated whether to go after the wounded bull or follow the herd, and finally decided for the latter alternative, and departed thinking that we had seen the last of those big tusks. I have often wished since that we had. It was easy work to follow the elephants, for they had left a trail like a carriage road behind them, crushing down the thick bush in their furious flight as though it were tambouki grass.\n\nBut to come up with them was another matter, and we had struggled on under a broiling sun for over two hours before we found them. They were, with the exception of one bull, standing together, and I could see, from their unquiet way and the manner in which they kept lifting their trunks to test the air, that they were on the look out for mischief. The solitary bull stood fifty yards or so this side of the herd, over which he was evidently keeping sentry, and about sixty yards from us. Thinking that he would see or wind us, and that it would probably start them all off again if we tried to get nearer, especially as the ground was rather open, we all aimed at this bull, and at my whispered word fired. All three shots took effect, and down he went dead. Again the herd started on, but unfortunately for them about a hundred yards farther on was a nullah, or dried water track, with steep banks, a place very much resembling the one the Prince Imperial was killed in in Zululand. Into this the elephants plunged, and when we reached the edge we found them struggling in wild confusion to get up the other bank, and filling the air with their screams, and trumpeting as they pushed one another aside in their selfish panic, just like so many human beings. Now was our opportunity, and firing away as quick as we could load we killed five of the poor beasts, and no doubt should have bagged the whole herd had they not suddenly given up their attempts to climb the bank and rushed headlong down the nullah. We were too tired to follow them, and perhaps also a little sick of slaughter, eight elephants being a pretty good bag for one day.\n\nSo after we had rested a little, and the Kafirs had cut out the hearts of two of the dead elephants for supper, we started home-wards, very well pleased with ourselves, having made up our minds to send the bearers on the morrow to chop out the tusks.\n\nShortly after we had passed the spot where Good had wounded the patriarchal bull we came across a herd of eland, but did not shoot at them, as we had already plenty of meat. They trotted past us, and then stopped behind a little patch of bush about a hundred yards away and wheeled round to look at us. As Good was anxious to get a near view of them, never having seen an eland close, he handed his rifle to Umbopa, and, followed by Khiva; strolled up to the patch of bush. We sat down and waited for him, not sorry of the excuse for a little rest.\n\nThe sun was just going down in its reddest glory, and Sir Henry and I were admiring the lovely scene, when suddenly we heard an elephant scream, and saw its huge and charging form with uplifted trunk and tail silhouetted against the great red globe of the sun. Next second we saw something else, and that was Good and Khiva tearing back towards us with the wounded bull (for it was he) charging after them. For a moment we did not dare to fire\u2014though it would have been little use if we had at that distance\u2014for fear of hitting one of them, and the next a dreadful thing happened\u2014Good fell a victim to his passion for civilised dress. Had he consented to discard his trousers and gaiters as we had, and hunt in a flannel shirt and a pair of veldtschoons, it would have been all right, but as it was his trousers cumbered him in that desperate race, and presently, when he was about sixty yards from us, his boot, polished by the dry grass, slipped, and down he went on his face right in front of the elephant.\n\nWe gave a gasp, for we knew he must die, and ran as hard as we could towards him. In three seconds it had ended, but not as we thought. Khiva, the Zulu boy, had seen his master fall, and brave lad that he was, had turned and flung his assegai straight into the elephant's face. It stuck in his trunk.\n\nWith a scream of pain the brute seized the poor Zulu, hurled him to the earth, and placing his huge foot on to his body about the middle, twined his trunk round his upper part and tore him in two.\n\nWe rushed up mad with horror, and fired again, and again, and presently the elephant fell upon the fragments of the Zulu.\n\nAs for Good, he got up and wrung his hands over the brave man who had given his life to save him, and myself, though an old hand, I felt a lump in my throat. Umbopa stood and contemplated the huge dead elephant and the mangled remains of poor Khiva.\n\n\"Ah well,\" he said presently, \"he is dead, but he died like a man.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Our March into the Desert",
                "text": "We had killed nine elephants, and it took us two days to cut out the tusks and get them home and bury them carefully in the sand under a large tree, which made a conspicuous mark for miles round. It was a wonderfully fine lot of ivory. I never saw a better, averaging as it did between forty and fifty pounds a tusk. The tusks of the great bull that killed poor Khiva scaled one hundred and seventy pounds the pair, as nearly as we could judge.\n\nAs for Khiva himself, we buried what remained of him in an ant-bear hole, together with an assegai to protect himself with on his journey to a better world. On the third day we started on, hoping that we might one day return to dig up our buried ivory, and in due course, after a long and wearisome tramp, and many adventures which have not space to detail, reached Sitanda's Kraal, near the Lukanga River, the real starting-point of our expedition. Very well do I recollect our arrival at that place. To the right was a scattered native settlement with a few stone cattle kraals and some cultivated lands down by the water, where these savages grew their scanty supply of grain, and beyond it great tracts of waving \"veldt\" covered with tall grass, over which herds of the smaller game were wandering. To the left was the vast desert. This spot appeared to be the outpost of the fertile country, and it would be difficult to say to what natural causes such an abrupt change in the character of the soil was due. But so it was. Just below our encampment flowed a little stream, on the farther side of which was a stony slope, the same down which I had twenty years before seen poor Silvestre creeping back after his attempt to reach Solomon's Mines, and beyond that slope began the waterless desert covered with a species of karoo shrub. It was evening when we pitched our camp, and the great fiery ball of the sun was sinking into the desert, sending glorious rays of many coloured light flying over all the vast expanse. Leaving Good to superintend the arrangement of our little camp, I took Sir Henry with me, and we walked to the top of the slope opposite and gazed out across the desert. The air was very clear, and far, far away I could distinguish the faint blue outlines here and there capped with white of the great Suliman Berg.\n\n\"There,\" I said, \"there is the wall of Solomon's Mines, but God knows if we shall ever climb it.\"\n\n\"My brother should be there, and if he is, I shall reach him somehow,\" said Sir Henry, in that tone of quiet confidence which marked the man.\n\n\"I hope so,\" I answered, and turned to go back to the camp, when I saw that we were not alone. Behind us, also gazing earnestly towards the far-off mountains, stood the great Zulu Umbopa.\n\nThe Zulu spoke when he saw that I had observed him, but addressed himself to Sir Henry, to whom he had attached himself.\n\n\"Is it to that land that thou wouldst journey, Incubu?\" (a native word meaning, I believe, an elephant, and the name given to Sir Henry by the Kafirs) he said, pointing towards the mountains with his broad assegai.\n\nI asked him sharply what he meant by addressing his master in that familiar way. It is very well for natives to have a name for one among themselves, but it is not decent that they should call one by their heathenish appellations to one's face. The man laughed a quiet little laugh which angered me.\n\n\"How dost thou know that I am not the equal of the Inkosi I serve?\" he said. \"He is of a royal house, no doubt; one can see it in his size and in his eye; so, mayhap, am I. At least I am as great a man. Be my mouth, oh Macumazahn, and say my words to the Inkoos Incubu, my master, for I would speak to him and to thee.\"\n\nI was angry with the man, for I am not accustomed to be talked to in that way by Kafirs, but somehow he impressed me, and besides I was curious to know what he had to say, so I translated, expressing my opinion at the same time that he was an impudent fellow, and that his swagger was outrageous.\n\n\"Yes, Umbopa,\" answered Sir Henry, \"I would journey there.\"\n\n\"The desert is wide and there is no water, the mountains are high and covered with snow, and man cannot say what is beyond them behind the place where the sun sets; how shalt thou come thither, Incubu, and wherefore dost thou go?\"\n\nI translated again.\n\n\"Tell him,\" answered Sir Henry, \"that I go because I believe that a man of my blood, my brother, has gone there before me, and I go to seek him.\"\n\n\"That is so, Incubu; a man I met on the road told me that a white man went out into the desert two years ago towards those mountains with one servant, a hunter. They never came back.\"\n\n\"How do you know it was my brother?\" asked Sir Henry.\n\n\"Nay, I know not. But the man, when I asked what the white man was like, said that he had thine eyes and a black beard. He said, too, that the name of the hunter with him was Jim, that he was a Bechuana hunter and wore clothes.\"\n\n\"There is no doubt about it,\" said I; \"I knew Jim well.\"\n\nSir Henry nodded. \"I was sure of it,\" he said. \"If George set his mind upon a thing he generally did it. It was always so from his boyhood. If he meant to cross the Suliman Berg he has crossed it, unless some accident has overtaken him, and we must look for him on the other side.\"\n\nUmbopa understood English, though he rarely spoke it.\n\n\"It is a far journey, Incubu,\" he put in, and I translated his remark.\n\n\"Yes,\" answered Sir Henry, \"it is far. But there is no journey upon this earth that a man may not make if he sets his heart to it. There is nothing, Umbopa, that he cannot do, there are no mountains he may not climb, there are no deserts he cannot cross; save a mountain and a desert of which you are spared the knowledge, if love leads him and he holds his life in his hand counting it as nothing, ready to keep it or to lose it as Providence may order.\"\n\nI translated.\n\n\"Great words, my father,\" answered the Zulu (I always called him a Zulu, though he was not really one), \"great swelling words fit to fill the mouth of a man. Thou art right, my father Incubu. Listen! What is Life? It is a feather, it is the seed of the grass, blown hither and thither, sometimes multiplying itself and dying in the act, sometimes carried away into the heavens. But if the seed be good and heavy it may perchance travel a little way on the road it wills. It is well to try and journey one's road and to fight with the air. Man must die. At the worst he can but die a little sooner. I will go with thee across the desert and over the mountains, unless perchance I fall to the ground on the way, my father.\"\n\nHe paused awhile, and then went on with one of those strange bursts of rhetorical eloquence which Zulus sometimes indulge in, and which to my mind, full as they are of vain repetitions, show that the race is by no means devoid of poetic instinct and of intellectual power.\n\n\"What is life? Tell me, O white men, who are wise, who know the secrets of the world, and the world of stars, and the world that lies above and around the stars; who flash their words from afar without a voice; tell me, white men, the secret of our life\u2014whither it goes and whence it comes!\n\n\"Ye cannot answer; ye know not. Listen, I will answer. Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go. Like a storm-driven bird at night we fly out of the Nowhere; for a moment our wings are seen in the light of the fire, and, lo! we are gone again into the Nowhere. Life is nothing. Life is all. It is the hand with which we hold off Death. It is the glow-worm that shines in the night-time and is black in the morning; it is the white breath of the oxen in winter; it is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset.\"\n\n\"You are a strange man,\" said Sir Henry, when he ceased.\n\nUmbopa laughed. \"It seems to me that we are much alike, Incubu. Perhaps I seek a brother over the mountains.\"\n\nI looked at him suspiciously. \"What dost thou mean?\" I asked; \"what dost thou know of the mountains?\"\n\n\"A little; a very little. There is a strange land there, a land of witchcraft and beautiful things; a land of brave people, and of trees, and streams, and white mountains, and of a great white road. I have heard of it. But what is the good of talking? it grows dark. Those who live to see will see.\"\n\nAgain I looked at him doubtfully. The man knew too much.\n\n\"Ye need not fear me, Macumazahn,\" he said interpreting my look. \"I dig no holes for ye to fall in. I make no plots. If ever we cross those mountains behind the sun, I will tell what I know. But Death sits upon them. Be wise and turn back. Go and hunt elephant. I have spoken.\"\n\nAnd without another word he lifted his spear in salutation, and returned towards the camp, where shortly afterwards we found him cleaning a gun like any other Kafir.\n\n\"That is an odd man,\" said Sir Henry.\n\n\"Yes,\" answered I, \"too odd by half. I don't like his little ways. He knows something, and won't speak out. But I suppose it is no use quarrelling with him. We are in for a curious trip, and a mysterious Zulu won't make much difference one way or another.\"\n\nNext day we made our arrangements for starting. Of course it was impossible to drag our heavy elephant rifles and other kit with us across the desert, so dismissing our bearers we made an arrangement with an old native who had a kraal close by to take care of them till we returned. It went to my heart to leave such things as those sweet tools to the tender mercies of an old thief, of a savage whose greedy eyes I could see gloating over them. But I took some precautions.\n\nFirst of all I loaded all the rifles, and informed him that if he touched them they would go off. He instantly tried the experiment with my eight bore, and it did go off, and blew a hole right through one of his oxen, which were just then being driven up to the kraal, to say nothing of knocking him head over heels with the recoil. He got up considerably startled, and not at all pleased at the loss of the ox, which he had the impudence to ask me to pay for, and nothing would induce him to touch them again.\n\n\"Put the live devils up there in the thatch,\" he said, \"out of the way, or they will kill us all.\"\n\nThen I told him that if, when we came back, one of those things was missing I would kill him and all his people by witchcraft; and if we died and he tried to steal the things I would come and haunt him and turn his cattle mad and his milk sour till life was a weariness, and make the devils in the guns come out and talk to him in a way he would not like, and generally gave him a good idea of judgment to come. After that he swore he would look after them as though they were his father's spirit. He was a very superstitious old Kafir and a great villain.\n\nHaving thus disposed of our superfluous gear we arranged the kit we five\u2014Sir Henry, Good, myself, Umbopa, and the Hottentot Ventv\u00f6gel\u2014were to take with us on our journey. It was small enough, but do what we would we could not get it down under about forty pounds a man. This is what it consisted of;\u2014\n\nThe three express rifles and two hundred rounds of ammunition.\n\nThe two Winchester repeating rifles (for Umbopa and Ventv\u00f6gel), with two hundred rounds of cartridge.\n\nThree \"Colt\" revolvers and sixty rounds of cartridge.\n\nFive Cochrane's water-bottles, each holding four pints.\n\nFive blankets.\n\nTwenty-five pounds' weight of biltong (sundried game flesh).\n\nTen pounds' weight of best mixed beads for gifts.\n\nA selection of medicine, including an ounce of quinine, and one or two small surgical instruments.\n\nOur knives, a few sundries, such as a compass, matches, a pocket filter, tobacco, a trowel, a bottle of brandy, and the clothes we stood in.\n\nThis was our total equipment, a small one indeed for such a venture, but we dared not attempt to carry more. As it was that load was a heavy one per man to travel across the burning desert with, for in such places every additional ounce tells upon one. But try as we would we could not see our way to reducing it. There was nothing but what was absolutely necessary.\n\nWith great difficulty, and by the promise of a present of a good hunting knife each, I succeeded in persuading three wretched natives from the village to come with us for the first stage, twenty miles, and to carry each a large gourd holding a gallon of water. My object was to enable us to refill our water-bottles after the first night's march, for we determined to start in the cool of the night. I gave out to these natives that we were going to shoot ostriches, with which the desert abounded. They jabbered and shrugged their shoulders, and said we were mad and should perish of thirst, which I must say seemed very probable; but being desirous of obtaining the knives, which were almost unknown treasures up there, they consented to come, having probably reflected that, after all, our subsequent extinction would be no affair of theirs.\n\nAll next day we rested and slept, and at sunset ate a hearty meal of fresh beef washed down with tea, the last, as Good sadly remarked, we were likely to drink for many a long day. Then, having made our final preparations, we lay down and waited for the moon to rise. At last about nine o'clock up she came in all her chastened glory, flooding the wild country with silver light, and throwing a weird sheen on the vast expanse of rolling desert before us, which looked as solemn and quiet and as alien to man as the star-studded firmament above. We rose up, and in a few minutes were ready, and yet we hesitated a little, as human nature is prone to hesitate on the threshold of an irrevocable step. We three white men stood there by ourselves. Umbopa, assegai in hand and the rifle across his shoulders, a few paces ahead of us, looked out fixedly across the desert; the three hired natives, with the gourds of water, and Ventv\u00f6gel, were gathered in a little knot behind.\n\n\"Gentlemen,\" said Sir Henry, presently, in his low, deep voice, \"we are going on about as strange a journey as men can make in this world. It is very doubtful if we can succeed in it. But we are three men who will stand together for good or for evil to the last. And now before we start let us for a moment pray to the Power who shapes the destinies of men, and who ages since has marked out our paths, that it may please Him to direct our steps in accordance with His will.\"\n\nTaking off his hat he, for the space of a minute or so, covered his face with his hands, and Good and I did likewise.\n\nI do not say that I am a first-rate praying man, few hunters are, and as for Sir Henry I never heard him speak like that before, and only once since, though deep down in his heart I believe he is very religious. Good too is pious, though very apt to swear. Anyhow I do not think I ever, excepting on one single occasion, put in a better prayer in my life than I did during that minute, and somehow I felt the happier for it. Our future was so completely unknown, and I think the unknown and the awful always bring a man nearer to his Maker.\n\n\"And now,\" said Sir Henry, \"trek.\"\n\nSo we started.\n\nWe had nothing to guide ourselves by except the distant mountains and old Jos\u00e9 da Silvestra's chart, which, considering that it was drawn by a dying and half distraught man on a fragment of linen three centuries ago, was not a very satisfactory sort of thing to work on. Still, such as it was, our sole hope of success depended on it. If we failed in finding that pool of bad water which the old Dom marked as being situated in the middle of the desert, about sixty miles from our starting-point, and as far from the mountains, we must in all probability perish miserably of thirst. And to my mind the chances of our finding it in that great sea of sand and karoo scrub seemed almost infinitesimal. Even supposing da Silvestra had marked it right, what was there to prevent its having been generations ago dried up by the sun, or trampled in by game, or filled with the drifting sand?\n\nOn we tramped silently as shades through the night and in the heavy sand. The karoo bushes caught our shins and retarded us, and the sand got into our veldtschoons and Good's shooting boots, so that every few miles we had to stop and empty them; but still the night was fairly cool, though the atmosphere was thick and heavy, giving a sort of creamy feel to the air, and we made fair progress. It was very still and lonely there in the desert, oppressively so indeed. Good felt this, and once began to whistle the \"Girl I left behind me,\" but the notes sounded lugubrious in that vast place, and he gave it up. Shortly afterwards a little incident occurred which, though it made us jump at the time, gave rise to a laugh. Good, as the holder of the compass, which being a sailor, of course he thoroughly understood, was leading, and we were toiling along in single file behind him, when suddenly we heard the sound of an exclamation, and he vanished. Next second there arose all round us a most extraordinary hubbub, snorts, groans, wild sounds of rushing feet. In the faint light too we could descry dim galloping forms half hidden by wreaths of sand. The natives threw down their loads and prepared to bolt, but remembering that there was nowhere to bolt, cast themselves upon the ground and howled out that it was the devil. As for Sir Henry and myself we stood amazed; nor was our amazement lessened when we perceived the form of Good careering off in the direction of the mountains, apparently mounted on the back of a horse and halloaing like mad. In another second he threw up his arms, and we heard him come to the earth with a thud. Then I saw what had happened; we had stumbled right on to a herd of sleeping quagga, on to the back of one of which Good had actually fallen, and the brute had naturally enough got up and made off with him. Singing out to the others that it was all right I ran towards Good, much afraid lest he should be hurt, but to my great relief found him sitting in the sand, his eyeglass still fixed firmly in his eye, rather shaken and very much startled, but not in any way injured.\n\nAfter this we travelled on without any further misadventure till after one o'clock, when we called a halt, and having drunk a little water, not much, for water was precious, and rested for half an hour, started on again.\n\nOn, on we went, till at last the east began to blush like the cheek of a girl. Then there came faint rays of primrose light, that changed presently to golden bars, through which the dawn glided out across the desert. The stars grew pale and paler still till at last they vanished; the golden moon waxed wan, and her mountain ridges stood out clear against her sickly face like the bones on the face of a dying man; then came spear upon spear of glorious light flashing far away across the boundless wilderness, piercing and firing the veils of mist, till the desert was draped in a tremulous golden glow, and it was day.\n\nStill we did not halt, though by this time we should have been glad enough to do so, for we knew that when once the sun was fully up it would be almost impossible for us to travel in it. At length, about six o'clock, we spied a little pile of rocks rising out of the plain, and to this we dragged ourselves. As luck would have it here we found an overhanging slab of rock carpeted beneath with smooth sand, which afforded a most grateful shelter from the heat. Underneath this we crept, and having drunk some water each and eaten a bit of biltong, we laid down and were soon sound asleep.\n\nIt was three o'clock in the afternoon before we woke, to find our three bearers preparing to return. They had already had enough of the desert, and no number of knives would have tempted them to come a step farther, So we had a hearty drink, and having emptied our water bottles filled them up again from the gourds they had brought with them, and then watched them depart on their twenty miles' tramp home.\n\nAt half-past four we also started on. It was lonely and desolate work, for with the exception of a few ostriches there was not a single living creature to be seen on all the vast expanse of sandy plain. It was evidently too dry for game, and with the exception of a deadly-looking cobra or two we saw no reptiles. One insect, however, was abundant, and that was the common or house fly. There they came, \"not as single spies, but in battalions,\" as I think the Old Testament says somewhere. He is an extraordinary animal is the house fly. Go where you will you find him, and so it must always have been. I have seen him enclosed in amber, which must, I was told, have been half a million years old, looking exactly like his descendant of to-day, and I have little doubt but that when the last man lies dying on the earth he will be buzzing round\u2014if that event should happen to occur in summer\u2014watching for an opportunity to settle on his nose.\n\nAt sunset we halted, waiting for the moon to rise. At ten she came up beautiful and serene as ever, and with one halt about two o'clock in the morning, we trudged wearily on through the night, till at last the welcome sun put a period to our labours. We drank a little and flung ourselves down, thoroughly tired out, on the sand, and were soon all asleep. There was no need to set a watch, for we had nothing to fear from anybody or anything in that vast untenanted plain. Our only enemies were heat, thirst, and flies, but far rather would I have faced any danger from man or beast than that awful trinity. This time we were not so lucky as to find a sheltering rock to guard us from the glare of the sun, with the result that about seven o'clock we woke up experiencing the exact sensations one would attribute to a beefsteak on a gridiron. We were literally being baked through and through. The burning sun seemed to be sucking our very blood out of us. We sat up and gasped.\n\n\"Phew,\" said I, grabbing at the halo of flies, which buzzed cheerfully round my head. The heat did not affect them.\n\n\"My word,\" said Sir Henry.\n\n\"It is hot!\" said Good.\n\nIt was hot, indeed, and there was not a bit of shelter to be had. Look where we would there was no rock or tree, nothing but an unending glare, rendered dazzling by the hot air which danced over the surface of the desert as it does over a red-hot stove.\n\n\"What is to be done?\" asked Sir Henry; \"we can't stand this for long.\"\n\nWe looked at each other blankly.\n\n\"I have it,\" said Good, \"we must dig a hole and get in it, and cover ourselves with the karoo bushes.\"\n\nIt did not seem a very promising suggestion, but at least it was better than nothing, so we set to work, and with the trowel we had brought with us and our hands succeeded in about an hour in delving out a patch of ground about ten foot long by twelve wide to the depth of two feet. Then we cut a quantity of low scrub with our hunting knives, and creeping into the hole pulled it over us all, with the exception of Ventv\u00f6gel, on whom, being a Hottentot, the sun had no particular effect. This gave us some slight shelter from the burning rays of the sun, but the heat in that amateur grave can be better imagined than described. The Black Hole of Calcutta must have been a fool to it; indeed, to this moment I do not know how we lived through the day. There we lay panting, and every now and again moistening our lips from our scanty supply of water. Had we followed our inclinations we should have finished all we had off in the first two hours, but we had to exercise the most rigid care, for if our water failed us we knew that we must quickly perish miserably.\n\nBut everything has an end, if only you live long enough to see it, and somehow that miserable day wore on towards evening. About three o'clock in the afternoon we determined that we could stand it no longer. It would be better to die walking than to be slowly killed by heat and thirst in that dreadful hole. So taking each of us a little drink from our fast diminishing supply of water, now heated to about the same temperature as a man's blood, we staggered on.\n\nWe had now covered some fifty miles of desert. If my reader will refer to the rough copy and translation of old da Silvestra's map, he will see that the desert is marked as being forty leagues across, and the \"pan bad water\" is set down as being about in the middle of it. Now forty leagues is one hundred and twenty miles, consequently we ought at the most to be within twelve or fifteen miles of the water if any should really exist.\n\nThrough the afternoon we crept slowly and painfully along, scarcely doing more than a mile and a half an hour. At sunset we again rested, waiting for the moon, and after drinking a little managed to get some sleep.\n\nBefore we lay down Umbopa pointed out to us a slight and indistinct hillock on the flat surface of the desert about eight miles away. At the distance it looked like an ant-hill, and as I was dropping off to sleep I fell to wondering what it could be.\n\nWith the moon we started on again, feeling dreadfully exhausted, and suffering tortures from thirst and prickly heat. Nobody who has not felt it can know what we went through. We no longer walked, we staggered, now and again falling from exhaustion, and being obliged to call a halt every hour or so. We had scarcely energy left in us to speak. Up to now Good had chatted, and joked, for he was a merry fellow; but now he had not a joke left in him.\n\nAt last, about two o'clock, utterly worn out in body and mind, we came to the foot of this queer hill, or sand koppie, which did at first sight resemble a gigantic ant-heap about a hundred feet high, and covering at the base nearly a morgen (two acres) of ground.\n\nHere we halted, and driven by our desperate thirst sucked down our last drops of water. We had but half a pint a head, and we could each have drunk a gallon.\n\nThen we lay down. Just as I was dropping off to sleep I heard Umbopa remark to himself in Zulu\u2014\n\n\"If we cannot find water we shall all be dead before the moon rises tomorrow.\"\n\nI shuddered, hot as it was. The near prospect of such an awful death is not pleasant, but even the thought of it could not keep me from sleeping."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Water! Water!\n\n[ In two hours time, about four o'clock, I woke up. As soon as the first heavy demand of bodily fatigue had been satisfied, the torturing thirst from which I was suffering asserted itself. I could sleep no more. I had been dreaming that I was bathing in a running stream, with green banks and trees upon them, and I awoke to find myself in that arid wilderness, and to remember that, as Umbopa had said, if we did not find water that day we must certainly perish miserably. No human creature could live long without water in that heat. I sat up and rubbed my grimy face with my dry and horny hands. My lips and eyelids were stuck together, and it was only after some rubbing and with an effort that I was able to open them. It was not far off the dawn, but there was none of the bright feel of dawn in the air, which was thick with a hot murkiness I cannot describe. The others were still sleeping. Presently it began to grow light enough to read, so I drew out a little pocket copy of the \"Ingoldsby Legends\" I had brought with me, and read the \"Jackdaw of Rheims.\" When I got to where ]\n\n\u2003\"A nice little boy held a golden ewer,\n\n\u2003Embossed, and filled with water as pure\n\n\u2003As any that flows between Rheims and Namur,\"\n\nI literally smacked my cracked lips, or rather tried to smack them. The mere thought of that pure water made me mad. If the Cardinal had been there with his bell, book, and candle, I would have whipped in and drank his water up, yes, even if he had already filled it with the suds of soap worthy of washing the hands of the Pope, and I knew that the whole concentrated curse of the Catholic Church should fall upon me for so doing. I almost think I must have been a little light-headed with thirst and weariness and want of food; for I fell to thinking how astonished the Cardinal and his nice little boy and the jackdaw would have looked to see a burnt up, brown-eyed, grizzled-haired little elephant hunter suddenly bound in and put his dirty face into the basin, and swallow every drop of the precious water. The idea amused me so that I laughed or rather cackled aloud, which woke the others up, and they began to rub their dirty faces and get their gummed-up lips and eyelids apart.\n\nAs soon as we were all well awake, we fell to discussing the situation, which was serious enough. Not a drop of water was left. We turned the water-bottles upside down, and licked the tops, but it was a failure, they were as dry as a bone. Good, who had charge of the bottle of brandy, got it out and looked at it longingly; but Sir Henry promptly took it away from him, for to drink raw spirit would only have been to precipitate the end.\n\n\"If we do not find water we shall die,\" he said.\n\n\"If we can trust to the old Don's map there should be some about,\" I said; but nobody seemed to derive much satisfaction from that remark. It was so evident that no great faith could be put in the map. It was now gradually growing light, and as we sat blankly staring at each other, I observed the Hottentot Ventv\u00f6gel rise and begin to walk about with his eyes on the ground. Presently he stopped short, and uttering a guttural exclamation, pointed to the earth.\n\n\"What is it?\" we exclaimed; and simultaneously rose and went to where he was standing pointing at the ground.\n\n\"Well,\" I said, \"it is pretty fresh Springbok spoor; what of it?\"\n\n\"Sprinbucks do not go far from water,\" he answered in Dutch.\n\n\"No,\" I answered, \"I forgot; and thank God for it.\"\n\nThis little discovery put new life into us; it is wonderful how, when one is in a desperate position, one catches at the slightest hope, and feels almost happy in it. On a dark night a single star is better than nothing.\n\nMeanwhile Ventv\u00f6gel was lifting his snub nose, and sniffing the hot air for all the world like an old Impala ram who scents danger. Presently he spoke again.\n\n\"I smell water,\" he said.\n\nThen we felt quite jubilant, for we knew what a wonderful instinct these wild-bred men possess.\n\nJust at that moment the sun came up gloriously, and revealed so grand a sight to our astonished eyes that for a moment or two we even forgot our thirst.\n\nFor there, not more than forty or fifty miles from us, glittering like silver in the early rays of the morning sun, were Sheba's breasts; and stretching away for hundreds of miles on each side of them was the great Suliman Berg. Now that I, sitting here, attempt to describe the extraordinary grandeur and beauty of that sight language seems to fail me. I am impotent even before its memory. There, straight before us, were two enormous mountains, the like of which are not, I believe, to be seen in Africa, if, indeed, there are any other such in the world, measuring each at least fifteen thousand feet in height, standing not more than a dozen miles apart, connected by a precipitous cliff of rock, and towering up in awful white solemnity straight into the sky. These mountains standing thus, like the pillars of a gigantic gateway, are shaped exactly like a woman's breasts. Their bases swelled gently up from the plain, looking, at that distance, perfectly round and smooth; and on the top of each was a vast round hillock covered with snow, exactly corresponding to the nipple on the female breast. The stretch of cliff which connected them appeared to be some thousand feet in height, and perfectly precipitous, and on each side of them, as far as the eye could reach, extended similar lines of cliff, broken only here and there by flat table-topped mountains, something like the world-famed one at Cape Town; a formation, by the way, very common in Africa.\n\nTo describe the grandeur of the whole view is beyond my powers. There was something so inexpressibly solemn and overpowering about those huge volcanoes\u2014for doubtless they are extinct volcanoes\u2014that it fairly took our breath away. For awhile the morning lights played upon the snow and the brown and swelling masses beneath, and then, as though to veil the majestic sight from our curious eyes, strange mists and clouds gathered and increased around them, till presently we could only trace their pure and gigantic outline swelling ghostlike through the fleecy envelope. Indeed, as we afterwards discovered, they were normally wrapped in this curious gauzy mist, which doubtless accounted for one not having made them out more clearly before.\n\nScarcely had the mountains vanished into cloud-clad privacy before our thirst\u2014literally a burning question\u2014reasserted itself.\n\nIt was all very well for Ventv\u00f6gel to say he smelt water, but look which way we would we could see no signs of it. So far as the eye could reach there was nothing but arid sweltering sand and karoo scrub. We walked round the hillock and gazed about anxiously on the other side, but it was the same story, not a drop of water was to be seen; there was no indication of a pan, a pool, or a spring.\n\n\"You are a fool,\" I said, angrily, to Ventv\u00f6gel; \"there is no water.\"\n\nBut still he lifted his ugly snub nose and sniffed.\n\n\"I smell it, Baas\" (master), he answered; \"it is somewhere in the air.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, \"no doubt it is in the clouds, and about two months hence it will fall and wash our bones.\"\n\nSir Henry stroked his yellow beard thoughtfully. \"Perhaps it is on the top of the hill,\" he suggested.\n\n\"Rot,\" said Good; \"whoever heard of water being found on the top of a hill!\"\n\n\"Let us go and look,\" I put in, and hopelessly enough we scrambled up the sandy sides of the hillock, Umbopa leading. Presently he stopped as though he was petrified.\n\n\"Nanzia manzie!\" (here is water), he cried with a loud voice.\n\nWe rushed up to him, and there, sure enough, in a deep cup or indentation on the very top of the sand koppie was an undoubted pool of water. How it came to be in such a strange place we did not stop to inquire, nor did we hesitate at its black and uninviting appearance. It was water, or a good imitation of it, and that was enough for us. We gave a bound and a rush, and in another second were all down on our stomachs sucking up the uninviting fluid as though it were nectar fit for the gods. Heavens, how we did drink! Then when we had done drinking we tore off our clothes and sat down in it, absorbing the moisture through our parched skins. You, my reader, who have only to turn on a couple of taps and summon \"hot\" and \"cold\" from an unseen vasty boiler, can have little idea of the luxury of that muddy wallow in brackish tepid water.\n\nAfter awhile we arose from it, refreshed indeed, and fell to on our \"biltong,\" of which we had scarcely been able to touch a mouthful for twenty-four hours, and ate our fill. Then we smoked a pipe, and lay down by the side of that blessed pool under the overhanging shadow of the bank, and slept till mid-day.\n\nAll that day we rested there by the water, thanking our stars that we had been lucky enough to find it, bad as it was, and not forgetting to render a due share of gratitude to the shade of the long-departed da Silvestra, who had corked it down so accurately on the tail of his shirt. The wonderful thing to us was that it should have lasted so long, and the only way that I can account for it is by the supposition that it is fed by some spring deep down in the sand.\n\nHaving filled both ourselves and our water-bottles as full as possible, in far better spirits we started off again with the moon. That night we covered nearly five-and-twenty miles, but, needless to say, found no more water, though we were lucky enough on the following day to get a little shade behind some ant-heaps. When the sun rose and, for awhile, cleared away the mysterious mists, Suliman's Berg and the two majestic breasts, now only about twenty miles off, seemed to be towering right above us, and looked grander than ever. At the approach of evening we started on again, and, to cut a long story short, by daylight next morning found ourselves upon the lowest slopes of Sheba's left breast, for which we had been steadily steering. By this time our water was again exhausted and we were suffering severely from thirst, nor indeed could we see any chance of relieving it till we reached the snow line far far above us. After resting an hour or two, driven to it by our torturing thirst, we went on again, toiling painfully in the burning heat up the lava slopes, for we found that the huge base of the mountain was composed entirely of lava beds belched out in some far past age.\n\nBy eleven o'clock we were utterly exhausted, and were, generally speaking, in a very bad way indeed. The lava clinker, over which we had to make our way, though comparatively smooth compared with some clinker I have heard of, such as that on the Island of Ascension for instance, was yet rough enough to make our feet very sore, and this, together with our other miseries, had pretty well finished us. A few hundred yards above us were some large lumps of lava, and towards these we made with the intention of lying down beneath their shade. We reached them, and to our surprise, so far as we had a capacity for surprise left in us, on a little plateau or ridge close by we saw that the lava was covered with a dense green growth. Evidently soil formed from decomposed lava had rested there, and in due course had become the receptacle of seeds deposited by birds. But we did not take much further interest in the green growth, for one cannot live on grass like Nebuchadnezzar. That requires a special dispensation of Providence and peculiar digestive organs. So we sat down under the rocks and groaned, and I for one heartily wished that we had never started on this fool's errand. As we were sitting there I saw Umbopa get up and hobble off towards the patch of green, and a few minutes afterwards, to my great astonishment, I perceived that usually uncommonly dignified individual dancing and shouting like a maniac, and waving something green. Off we all scrambled towards him as fast as our wearied limbs would carry us, hoping that he had found water.\n\n\"What is it, Umbopa, son of a fool?\" I shouted in Zulu.\n\n\"It is food and water, Macumazahn,\" and again he waved the green thing.\n\nThen I saw what he had got. It was a melon. We had hit upon a patch of wild melons, thousands of them, and dead ripe.\n\n\"Melons!\" I yelled to Good, who was next me; and in another second he had his false teeth fixed in one.\n\nI think we ate about six each before we had done, and, poor fruit as they were, I doubt if I ever thought anything nicer.\n\nBut melons are not very satisfying, and when we had satisfied our thirst with their pulpy substance, and set a stock to cool by the simple process of cutting them in two and setting them end on in the hot sun to get cold by evaporation, we began to feel exceedingly hungry. We had still some biltong left, but our stomachs turned from biltong, and besides we had to be very sparing of it, for we could not say when we should get more food. Just at this moment a lucky thing happened. Looking towards the desert I saw a flock of about ten large birds flying straight towards us.\n\n\"Skit, Baas, skit!\" (shoot, Master, shoot!), whispered the Hottentot, throwing himself on his face, an example which we all followed.\n\nThen I saw that the birds were a flock of pauw (bustards), and that they would pass within fifty yards of my head. Taking one of the repeating Winchesters I waited till they were nearly over us, and then jumped on to my feet. On seeing me the pauw bunched up together, as I expected they would, and I fired two shots straight into the thick of them, and, as luck would have it, brought one down, a fine fellow, that weighed about twenty pounds. In half an hour we had a fire made of dry melon stalks, and he was toasting over it, and we had such a feed as we had not had for a week. We ate that pauw; nothing was left of him but his bones and his beak, and we felt not a little the better afterwards.\n\nThat night we again went on with the moon, carrying as many melons as we could with us. As we got higher up we found the air grew cooler and cooler, which was a great relief to us, and at dawn, so far as we could judge, were not more than about a dozen miles from the snow line. Here we found more melons, so had no longer any anxiety about water, for we knew that we should soon get plenty of snow. But the ascent had now become very precipitous, and we made but slow progress, not more than a mile an hour. Also that night we ate our last morsel of biltong. As yet, with the exception of the pauw, we had seen no living thing on the mountain, nor had we come across a single spring or stream of water, which struck us as very odd, considering all the snow above us, which must, we thought, melt sometimes. But as we afterwards discovered, owing to some cause, which it is quite beyond my power to explain, all the streams flowed down upon the north side of the mountains.\n\nWe now began to grow very anxious about food. We had escaped death by thirst, but it seemed probable that it was only to die of hunger. The events of the next three miserable days are best described by copying the entries made at the time in my note-book.\n\n21st May.\u2014Started 11 a.m., finding the atmosphere quite cold enough to travel by day, carrying some watermelons with us. Struggled on all day, but saw no more melons, having, evidently, passed out of their district. Saw no game of any sort. Halted for the night at sundown, having had no food for many hours. Suffered much during the night from cold.\n\n22nd.\u2014Started at sunrise again, feeling very faint and weak. Only made five miles all day; found some patches of snow, of which we ate, but nothing else. Camped at night under the edge of a great plateau. Cold bitter. Drank a little brandy each, and huddled ourselves together, each wrapped up in our blanket to keep ourselves alive. Are now suffering frightfully from starvation and weariness. Thought that Ventv\u00f6gel would have died during the night.\n\n23rd.\u2014Struggled forward once more as soon as the sun was well up, and had thawed our limbs a little. We are now in a dreadful plight, and I fear that unless we get food this will be our last day's journey. But little brandy left. Good, Sir Henry, and Umbopa bear up wonderfully, but Ventv\u00f6gel is in a very bad way. Like most Hottentots, he cannot stand cold. Pangs of hunger not so bad, but have a sort of numb feeling about the stomach. Others say the same. We are now on a level with the precipitous chain, or wall of lava, connecting the two breasts, and the view is glorious. Behind us the great glowing desert rolls away to the horizon, and before us lies mile upon mile of smooth hard snow almost level, but swelling gently upwards, out of the centre of which the nipple of the mountain, which appears to be some miles in circumference, rises about four thousand feet into the sky. Not a living thing is to be seen. God help us, I fear our time has come.\n\nAnd now I will drop the journal, partly because it is not very interesting reading, and partly because what follows requires perhaps rather more accurate telling.\n\nAll that day (the 23rd May) we struggled slowly on up the incline of snow, lying down from time to time to rest. A strange, gaunt crew we must have looked, as, laden as we were, we dragged our weary feet over the dazzling plain, glaring round us with hungry eyes. Not that there was much use in glaring, for there was nothing to eat. We did not do more than seven miles that day. Just before sunset we found ourselves right under the nipple of Sheba's left breast, which towered up thousands of feet into the air above us, a vast, smooth hillock of frozen snow. Bad as we felt we could not but appreciate the wonderful scene, made even more wonderful by the flying rays of light from the setting sun, which here and there stained the snow blood red, and crowned the towering mass above us with a diadem of glory.\n\n\"I say,\" gasped Good, presently, \"we ought to be somewhere near the cave the old gentleman wrote about.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said I, \"if there is a cave.\"\n\n\"Come, Quatermain,\" groaned Sir Henry, \"don't talk like that; I have every faith in the Dom; remember the water. We shall find the place soon.\"\n\n\"If we don't find it before dark we are dead men, that is all about it,\" was my consolatory reply.\n\nFor the next ten minutes we trudged on in silence, when suddenly Umbopa, who was marching along beside me, wrapped up in his blanket, and with a leather belt strapped so tight round his stomach to \"make his hunger small,\" as he said, that his waist looked like a girl's, caught me by the arm.\n\n\"Look!\" he said, pointing towards the springing slope of the nipple.\n\nI followed his glance, and perceived some two hundred yards from us what appeared to be a hole in the snow.\n\n\"It is the cave,\" said Umbopa.\n\nWe made the best of our way to the spot, and found sure enough that the hole was the mouth of a cave, no doubt the same as that of which da Silvestra wrote. We were none too soon, for just as we reached shelter the sun went down with startling rapidity, leaving the whole place nearly dark. In these latitudes there is but little twilight. We crept into the cave, which did not appear to be very big, and huddling ourselves together for warmth, swallowed what remained of our brandy\u2014barely a mouthful each\u2014and tried to forget our miseries in sleep. But this the cold was too intense to allow us to do. I am convinced that at that great altitude the thermometer cannot have been less than fourteen or fifteen degrees below freezing point. What this meant to us, enervated as we were by hardship, want of food, and the great heat of the desert, my reader can imagine better than I can describe. Suffice it to say that it was something as near death from exposure as I have ever felt. There we sat hour after hour through the bitter night, feeling the frost wander round and nip us now in the finger, now in the foot, and now in the face. In vain did we huddle up closer and closer; there was no warmth in our miserable starved carcasses. Sometimes one of us would drop into an uneasy slumber for a few minutes, but we could not sleep long, and perhaps it was fortunate, for I doubt if we should ever have woke again. I believe it was only by force of will that we kept ourselves alive at all.\n\nNot very long before dawn I heard the Hottentot Ventv\u00f6gel, whose teeth had been chattering all night like castanets, give a deep sigh, and then his teeth stopped chattering. I did not think anything of it at the time, concluding that he had gone to sleep. His back was resting against mine, and it seemed to grow colder and colder, till at last it was like ice.\n\nAt length the air began to grow grey with light, then swift golden arrows came flashing across the snow, and at last the glorious sun peeped up above the lava wall and looked in upon our half-frozen forms and upon Ventv\u00f6gel, sitting there amongst us stone dead. No wonder his back had felt cold, poor fellow. He had died when I heard him sigh, and was now almost frozen stiff. Shocked beyond measure we dragged ourselves from the corpse (strange the horror we all have of the companionship of a dead body), and left it still sitting there, with its arms clasped round its knees.\n\nBy this time the sunlight was pouring its cold rays (for here they were cold) straight in at the mouth of the cave. Suddenly I heard an exclamation of fear from some one, and turned my head down the cave.\n\nAnd this was what I saw. Sitting at the end of it, for it was not more than twenty feet long, was another form, of which the head rested on the chest and the long arms hung down. I stared at it, and saw that it too was a dead man, and what was more, a white man.\n\nThe others saw it too, and the sight proved too much for our shattered nerves. One and all we scrambled out of the cave as fast as our half-frozen limbs would allow."
            },
            {
                "title": "Solomon's Road",
                "text": "Outside the cave we halted, feeling rather foolish.\n\n\"I am going back,\" said Sir Henry.\n\n\"Why?\" asked Good.\n\n\"Because it has struck me that\u2014what we saw\u2014may be my brother.\"\n\nThis was a new idea, and we re-entered the cave to put it to the proof. After the bright light outside, our eyes, weak as they were with staring at the snow, could not for awhile pierce the gloom of the cave. Presently however we grew accustomed to the semi-darkness, and advanced on the dead form.\n\nSir Henry knelt down and peered into its face.\n\n\"Thank God,\" he said, with a sigh of relief, \"it is not my brother.\"\n\nThen I went and looked. The corpse was that of a tall man in middle life with aquiline features, grizzled hair, and a long black moustache. The skin was perfectly yellow, and stretched tightly over the bones. Its clothing, with the exception of what seemed to be the remains of a woollen pair of hose, had been removed, leaving the skeleton-like frame naked. Round the neck hung a yellow ivory crucifix. The corpse was frozen perfectly stiff.\n\n\"Who on earth can it be?\" said I.\n\n\"Can't you guess?\" asked Good.\n\nI shook my head.\n\n\"Why, the old Dom, Jos\u00e9 da Silvestra, of course\u2014who else?\"\n\n\"Impossible,\" I gasped, \"he died three hundred years ago.\"\n\n\"And what is there to prevent his lasting for three thousand years in this atmosphere I should like to know?\" asked Good. \"If only the air is cold enough flesh and blood will keep as fresh as New Zealand mutton for ever, and Heaven knows it is cold enough here. The sun never gets in here; no animal comes here to tear or destroy. No doubt his slave, of whom he speaks on the map, took off his clothes and left him. He could not have buried him alone. Look here,\" he went on, stooping down and picking up a queer shaped bone scraped at the end into a sharp point, \"here is the 'cleft-bone' that he used to draw the map with.\"\n\nWe gazed astonished for a moment, forgetting our own miseries in this extraordinary and, as it seemed to us, semi-miraculous sight.\n\n\"Ay,\" said Sir Henry, \"and here is where he got his ink from,\" and he pointed to a small wound on the dead man's left arm. \"Did ever man see such a thing before?\"\n\nThere was no longer any doubt about the matter, which I confess for my own part perfectly appalled me. There he sat, the dead man, whose directions, written some ten generations ago, had led us to this spot. There in my own hand was the rude pen with which he had written them, and there round his neck was the crucifix his dying lips had kissed. Gazing at him my imagination could reconstruct the whole scene, the traveller dying of cold and starvation, and yet striving to convey the great secret he had discovered to the world:\u2014the awful loneliness of his death, of which the evidence sat before us. It even seemed to me that I could trace in his strongly marked features a likeness to those of my poor friend Silvestre his descendant, who had died twenty years ago in my arms, but perhaps that was fancy. At any rate, there he sat, a sad memento of the fate that so often overtakes those who would penetrate into the unknown; and there probably he will still sit, crowned with the dread majesty of death, for centuries yet unborn, to startle the eyes of wanderers like ourselves, if any such should ever come again to invade his loneliness. The thing overpowered us, already nearly done to death as we were with cold and hunger.\n\n\"Let us go,\" said Sir Henry, in a low voice; \"stay, we will give him a companion,\" and lifting up the dead body of the Hottentot Ventv\u00f6gel, he placed it near that of the old Dom. Then he stooped down, and with a jerk broke the rotten string of the crucifix round his neck, for his fingers were too cold to attempt to unfasten it. I believe that he still has it. I took the pen, and it is before me as I write\u2014sometimes I sign my name with it.\n\nThen leaving those two, the proud white man of a past age, and the poor Hottentot, to keep their eternal vigil in the midst of the eternal snows, we crept out of the cave into the welcome sunshine and resumed our path, wondering in our hearts how many hours it would be before we were even as they are.\n\nWhen we had gone about half a mile we came to the edge of the plateau, for the nipple of the mountain did not rise out of its exact centre, though from the desert side it seemed to do so. What lay below us we could not see, for the landscape was wreathed in billows of morning mist. Presently, however, the higher layers of mist cleared a little, and revealed some five hundred yards beneath us, at the end of a long slope of snow, a patch of green grass, through which a stream was running. Nor was this all. By the stream, basking in the morning sun, stood and lay a group of from ten to fifteen large antelopes\u2014at that distance we could not see what they were.\n\nThe sight filled us with an unreasoning joy. There was food in plenty if only we could get it. But the question was how to get it. The beasts were fully six hundred yards off, a very long shot, and one not to be depended on when one's life hung on the results.\n\nRapidly we discussed the advisability of trying to stalk the game, but finally reluctantly dismissed it. To begin with the wind was not favourable, and further, we should be certain to be perceived, however careful we were, against the blinding background of snow, which we should be obliged to traverse.\n\n\"Well, we must have a try from where we are,\" said Sir Henry. \"Which shall it be, Quatermain, the repeating rifles or the expresses?\"\n\nHere again was a question. The Winchester repeaters\u2014of which we had two, Umbopa carrying poor Ventv\u00f6gel's as well as his own\u2014were sighted up to a thousand yards, whereas the expresses were only sighted to three hundred and fifty, beyond which distance shooting with them was more or less guess work. On the other hand, if they did hit, the express bullets being expanding, were much more likely to bring the game down. It was a knotty point, but I made up my mind that we must risk it and use the expresses.\n\n\"Let each of us take the buck opposite to him. Aim well at the point of the shoulder, and high up,\" said I; \"and Umbopa do you give the word, so that we may all fire together.\"\n\nThen came a pause, each man aiming his level best, as indeed one is likely to do when one knows that life itself depends upon the shot.\n\n\"Fire!\" said Umbopa, in Zulu, and at almost the same instant the three rifles rang out loudly; three clouds of smoke hung for a moment before us, and a hundred echoes went flying away over the silent snow. Presently the smoke cleared, and revealed\u2014oh, joy!\u2014a great buck lying on its back and kicking furiously in its death agony. We gave a yell of triumph\u2014we were saved, we should not starve. Weak as we were, we rushed down the intervening slope of snow, and in ten minutes from the time of firing the animal's heart and liver were lying smoking before us. But now a new difficulty arose, we had no fuel, and therefore could make no fire to cook them at. We gazed at each other in dismay.\n\n\"Starving men must not be fanciful,\" said Good; \"we must eat raw meat.\"\n\nThere was no other way out of the dilemma, and our gnawing hunger made the proposition less distasteful than it would otherwise have been. So we took the heart and liver and buried them for a few minutes in a patch of snow to cool them. Then we washed them in the ice-cold water of the stream, and lastly ate them greedily. It sounds horrible enough, but honestly, I never tasted anything so good as that raw meat. In a quarter of an hour we were changed men. Our life and our vigour came back to us, our feeble pulses grew strong again, and the blood went coursing through our veins. But mindful of the results of over-feeding on starving stomachs, we were careful not to eat too much, stopping whilst we were still hungry.\n\n\"Thank God!\" said Sir Henry; \"that brute has saved our lives. What is it, Quatermain?\"\n\nI rose and went to look at the antelope, for I was not certain. It was about the size of a donkey, with large curved horns. I had never seen one like it before, the species was new to me. It was brown, with faint red stripes, and a thick coat. I afterwards discovered that the natives of that wonderful country called the species \"Inco.\" It was very rare, and only found at a great altitude where no other game would live. The animal was fairly shot high up in the shoulder, though whose bullet it was that brought it down we could not, of course, discover. I believe that Good, mindful of his marvellous shot at the giraffe, secretly set it down to his own prowess, and we did not contradict him.\n\nWe had been so busy satisfying our starving stomachs that we had hitherto not found time to look about us. But now, having set Umbopa to cut off as much of the best meat as we were likely to be able to carry, we began to inspect our surroundings. The mist had now cleared away, for it was eight o'clock, and the sun had sucked it up, so we were able to take in all the country before us at a glance. I know not how to describe the glorious panorama which unfolded itself to our enraptured gaze. I have never seen anything like it before, nor shall, I suppose, again.\n\nBehind and over us towered Sheba's snowy breasts, and below, some five thousand feet beneath where we stood, lay league on league of the most lovely champaign country. Here were dense patches of lofty forest, there a great river wound its silvery way. To the left stretched a vast expanse of rich undulating veldt or grass land, on which we could just make out countless herds of game or cattle, at that distance we could not tell which. This expanse appeared to be ringed in by a wall of distant mountains. To the right the country was more or less mountainous, that is, solitary hills stood up from its level, with stretches of cultivated lands between, amongst which we could distinctly see groups of dome-shaped huts. The landscape lay before us like a map, in which rivers flashed like silver snakes, and Alp-like peaks crowned with wildly twisted snow wreaths rose in solemn grandeur, whilst over all was the glad sunlight and the wide breath of Nature's happy life.\n\nTwo curious things struck us as we gazed. First, that the country before us must lie at least five thousand feet higher than the desert we had crossed, and secondly, that all the rivers flowed from south to north. As we had painful reason to know, there was no water at all on the southern side of the vast range on which we stood, but on the northern side were many streams, most of which appeared to unite with the great river we could trace winding away farther than we could follow it.\n\nWe sat down for a while and gazed in silence at this wonderful view. Presently Sir Henry spoke.\n\n\"Isn't there something on the map about Solomon's Great Road?\" he said.\n\nI nodded, my eyes still looking out over the far country.\n\n\"Well, look; there it is!\" and he pointed a little to our right.\n\nGood and I looked accordingly, and there, winding away towards the plain, was what appeared to be a wide turnpike road. We had not seen it at first because it, on reaching the plain, turned behind some broken country. We did not say anything, at least not much; we were beginning to lose the sense of wonder. Somehow it did not seem particularly unnatural that we should find a sort of Roman road in this strange land. We accepted the fact, that was all.\n\n\"Well,\" said Good, \"it must be quite near us if we cut off to the right. Hadn't we better be making a start?\"\n\nThis was sound advice, and so soon as we had washed our faces and hands in the stream, we acted on it. For a mile or so we made our way over boulders and across patches of snow, till suddenly, on reaching the top of the little rise, there lay the road at our feet. It was a splendid road cut out of the solid rock, at least fifty feet wide, and apparently well kept; but the odd thing about it was that it seemed to begin there. We walked down and stood on it, but one single hundred paces behind us, in the direction of Sheba's breasts, it vanished, the whole surface of the mountain being strewn with boulders interspersed with patches of snow.\n\n\"What do you make of that, Quatermain?\" asked Sir Henry.\n\nI shook my head, I could make nothing of it.\n\n\"I have it!\" said Good; \"the road no doubt ran right over the range and across the desert the other side, but the sand of the desert has covered it up, and above us it has been obliterated by some volcanic eruption of molten lava.\"\n\nThis seemed a good suggestion; at any rate, we accepted it, and proceeded down the mountain. It was a very different business travelling along down hill on that magnificent pathway with full stomachs to what it had been travelling up hill over the snow quite starved and almost frozen. Indeed, had it not been for melancholy recollections of poor Ventv\u00f6gel's sad fate, and of that grim cave where he kept company with the old Don, we should have been positively cheerful, notwithstanding the sense of unknown dangers before us. Every mile we walked the atmosphere grew softer and balmier, and the country before us shone with a yet more luminous beauty. As for the road itself, I never saw such an engineering work, though Sir Henry said that the great road over the St. Gothard in Switzerland was very like it. No difficulty had been too great for the Old World engineer who designed it. At one place we came to a great ravine three hundred feet broad and at least a hundred deep. This vast gulf was actually filled in, apparently with huge blocks of dressed stone, with arches pierced at the bottom for a water-way, over which the road went sublimely on. At another place it was cut in zigzags out of the side of a precipice five hundred feet deep, and in a third it tunnelled right through the base of an intervening ridge a space of thirty yards or more.\n\nHere we noticed that the sides of the tunnel were covered with quaint sculptures mostly of mailed figures driving in chariots. One, which was exceedingly beautiful, represented a whole battle scene with a convoy of captives being marched off in the distance.\n\n\"Well,\" said Sir Henry, after inspecting this ancient work of art, \"it is very well to call this Solomon's Road, but my humble opinion is that the Egyptians have been here before Solomon's people ever set a foot on it. If that isn't Egyptian handiwork, all I have to say is it is very like it.\"\n\nBy midday we had advanced sufficiently far down the mountain to reach the region where wood was to be met with. First we came to scattered bushes which grew more and more frequent, till at last we found the road winding through a vast grove of silver trees similar to those which are to be seen on the slopes of Table Mountain at Cape Town. I had never before met with them in all my wanderings, except at the Cape, and their appearance here astonished me greatly.\n\n\"Ah!\" said Good, surveying these shining-leaved trees with evident enthusiasm, \"here is lots of wood, let us stop and cook some dinner; I have about digested that raw meat.\"\n\nNobody objected to this, so leaving the road we made our way to a stream which was babbling away not far off, and soon had a goodly fire of dry boughs blazing. Cutting off some substantial hunks from the flesh of the inco which we had brought with us, we proceeded to toast them on the end of sharp sticks, as one sees the Kafirs do, and ate them with relish. After filling ourselves, we lit our pipes and gave ourselves up to enjoyment, which, compared to the hardships we had recently undergone, seemed almost heavenly.\n\nThe brook, of which the banks were clothed with dense masses of a gigantic species of maidenhair fern interpersed with feathery tufts of wild asparagus, babbled away merrily at our side, the soft air murmured through the leaves of the silver trees, doves cooed around, and bright-winged birds flashed like living gems from bough to bough. It was like Paradise.\n\nThe magic of the place, combined with the overwhelming sense of dangers left behind, and of the promised land reached at last, seemed to charm us into silence. Sir Henry and Umbopa sat conversing in a mixture of broken English and Kitchen Zulu in a low voice, but earnestly enough, and I lay, with my eyes half shut, upon that fragrant bed of fern and watched them. Presently I missed Good, and looked to see what had become of him. As I did so I observed him sitting by the bank of the stream, in which he had been bathing. He had nothing on but his flannel shirt, and his natural habits of extreme neatness having reasserted themselves, was actively employed in making a most elaborate toilet. He had washed his guttapercha collar, thoroughly shaken out his trousers, coat, and waistcoat, and was now folding them up neatly till he was ready to put them on, shaking his head sadly as he did so over the numerous rents and tears in them, which had naturally resulted from our frightful journey. Then he took his boots, scrubbed them with a handful of fern, and finally rubbed them over with a piece of fat, which he had carefully saved from the inco meat, till they looked, comparatively speaking, respectable. Having inspected them judiciously through his eyeglass, he put them on and began a fresh operation. From a little bag he carried he produced a pocket comb in which was fixed a tiny looking-glass, and in this he surveyed himself. Apparently he was not satisfied, for he proceeded to do his hair with great care. Then came a pause whilst he again contemplated the effect; still it was not satisfactory. He felt his chin, on which was now the accumulated scrub of a ten days' beard. \"Surely,\" thought I, \"he is not going to try and shave.\" But so it was. Taking the piece of fat with which he had greased his boots he washed it carefully in the stream. Then diving again into the bag he brought out a little pocket razor with a guard to it, such as are sold to people afraid of cutting themselves, or to those about to undertake a sea voyage. Then he vigorously scrubbed his face and chin with the fat and began. But it was evidently a painful process, for he groaned very much over it, and I was convulsed with inward laughter as I watched him struggling with that stubbly beard. It seemed so very odd that a man should take the trouble to shave himself with a piece of fat in such a place and under such circumstances. At last he succeeded in getting the worst of the scrub off the right side of his face and chin, when suddenly I, who was watching, became aware of a flash of light that passed just by his head.\n\nGood sprang up with a profane exclamation (if it had not been a safety razor he would certainly have cut his throat), and so did I, without the exclamation, and this was what I saw. Standing there, not more than twenty paces from where I was, and ten from Good, were a group of men. They were very tall and copper-coloured, and some of them wore great plumes of black feathers and short cloaks of leopard skins; this was all I noticed at the moment. In front of them stood a youth of about seventeen, his hand still raised and his body bent forward in the attitude of a Grecian statue of a spear thrower. Evidently the flash of light had been a weapon, and he had thrown it.\n\nAs I looked an old soldier-like looking man stepped forward out of the group, and catching the youth by the arm said something to him. Then they advanced upon us.\n\nSir Henry, Good, and Umbopa had by this time seized their rifles and lifted them threateningly. The party of natives still came on. It struck me that they could not know what rifles were, or they would not have treated them with such contempt.\n\n\"Put down your guns!\" I halloed to the others, seeing that our only chance of safety lay in conciliation. They obeyed, and walking to the front I addressed the elderly man who had checked the youth.\n\n\"Greeting,\" I said, in Zulu, not knowing what language to use. To my surprise I was understood.\n\n\"Greeting,\" answered the man, not, indeed, in the same tongue, but in a dialect so closely allied to it, that neither Umbopa or myself had any difficulty in understanding it. Indeed, as we afterwards found out, the language spoken by this people was an old-fashioned form of the Zulu tongue, bearing about the same relationship to it that the English of Chaucer does to the English of the nineteenth century.\n\n\"Whence come ye?\" he went on, \"what are ye? and why are the faces of three of ye white, and the face of the fourth as the face of our mother's sons?\" and he pointed to Umbopa. I looked at Umbopa as he said it, and it flashed across me that he was right. Umbopa was like the faces of the men before me, so was his great form. But I had not time to reflect on this coincidence.\n\n\"We are strangers, and come in peace,\" I answered, speaking very slow, so that he might understand me, \"and this man is our servant.\"\n\n\"Ye lie,\" he answered, \"no strangers can cross the mountains where all things die. But what do your lies matter, if ye are strangers then ye must die, for no strangers may live in the land of the Kukuanas. It is the king's law. Prepare then to die, O strangers!\"\n\nI was slightly staggered at this, more especially as I saw the hands of some of the party of men steal down to their sides, where hung on each what looked to me like a large and heavy knife.\n\n\"What does that beggar say?\" asked Good.\n\n\"He says we are going to be scragged,\" I answered grimly.\n\n\"Oh, Lord,\" groaned Good; and, as was his way when perplexed, put his hand to his false teeth, dragging the top set down and allowing them to fly back to his jaw with a snap. It was a most fortunate move, for next second the dignified crowd of Kukuanas gave a simultaneous yell of horror, and bolted back some yards.\n\n\"What's up?\" said I.\n\n\"It's his teeth,\" whispered Sir Henry, excitedly. \"He moved them. Take them out, Good, take them out!\"\n\nHe obeyed, slipping the set into the sleeve of his flannel shirt.\n\nIn another second curiosity had overcome fear, and the men advanced slowly. Apparently they had now forgotten their amiable intentions of doing for us.\n\n\"How is it, O strangers,\" asked the old man solemnly, \"that the teeth of the man (pointing to Good, who had nothing on but a flannel shirt, and had only half finished his shaving) whose body is clothed, and whose legs are bare, who grows hair on one side of his sickly face and not on the other, and who has one shining and transparent eye, and teeth that move of themselves, coming away from the jaws and returning of their own will?\"\n\n\"Open your mouth,\" I said to Good, who promptly curled up his lips and grinned at the old gentleman like an angry dog, revealing to their astonished gaze two thin red lines of gum as utterly innocent of ivories as a new-born elephant. His audience gasped.\n\n\"Where are his teeth?\" they shouted; \"with our eyes we saw them.\"\n\nTurning his head slowly and with a gesture of ineffable contempt, Good swept his hand across his mouth. Then he grinned again, and lo, there were two rows of lovely teeth.\n\nThe young man who had flung the knife threw himself down on the grass and gave vent to a prolonged howl of terror; and as for the old gentleman his knees knocked together with fear.\n\n\"I see that ye are spirits,\" he said, falteringly; \"did ever man born of woman have hair on one side of his face and not on the other, or a round and transparent eye, or teeth which moved and melted away and grew again? Pardon us, O my lords.\"\n\nHere was luck indeed, and, needless to say, I jumped at the chance.\n\n\"It is granted,\" I said, with an imperial smile. \"Nay, ye shall know the truth. We come from another world, though we are men such as ye; we come,\" I went on, \"from the biggest star that shines at night.\"\n\n\"Oh! oh!\" groaned the chorus of astonished aborigines.\n\n\"Yes,\" I went on, \"we do, indeed;\" and I again smiled benignly as I uttered that amazing lie. \"We come to stay with you a little while, and bless you by our sojourn. Ye will see, O friends, that I have prepared myself by learning your language.\"\n\n\"It is so, it is so,\" said the chorus.\n\n\"Only, my lord,\" put in the old gentleman, \"thou hast learnt it very badly.\"\n\nI cast an indignant glance at him, and he quailed.\n\n\"Now, friends,\" I continued, \"ye might think that after so long a journey we should find it in our hearts to avenge such a reception, mayhap to strike cold in death the impious hand that\u2014that, in short\u2014threw a knife at the head of him whose teeth come and go.\"\n\n\"Spare him, my lords,\" said the old man in supplication; \"he is the king's son, and I am his uncle. If anything befalls him his blood will be required at my hands.\"\n\n\"Yes, that is certainly so,\" put in the young man with great emphasis.\n\n\"You may perhaps doubt our power to avenge,\" I went on, heedless of this by-play. \"Stay, I will show you. Here, you dog and slave (addressing Umbopa in a savage tone), give me the magic tube that speaks;\" and I tipped a wink towards my express rifle.\n\nUmbopa rose to the occasion, and with something as nearly resembling a grin as I have ever seen on his dignified face, handed me the rifle.\n\n\"It is here, O lord of lords,\" he said, with a deep obeisance.\n\nNow, just before I asked for the rifle I had perceived a little klipspringer antelope standing on a mass of rock about seventy yards away, and determined to risk a shot at it.\n\n\"Ye see that buck,\" I said, pointing the animal out to the party before me. \"Tell me, is it possible for man, born of woman, to kill it from here with a noise?\"\n\n\"It is not possible, my lord,\" answered the old man.\n\n\"Yet shall I kill it,\" said I, quietly.\n\nThe old man smiled. \"That my lord cannot do,\" he said.\n\nI raised the rifle, and covered the buck. It was a small animal, and one which one might well be excused for missing, but I knew that it would not do to miss.\n\nI drew a deep breath, and slowly pressed on the trigger. The buck stood still as stone.\n\n\"Bang! thud!\" The buck sprang into the air and fell on the rock dead as a door nail.\n\nA groan of terror burst from the group before us.\n\n\"If ye want meat,\" I remarked coolly, \"go fetch that buck.\"\n\nThe old man made a sign, and one of his followers departed, and presently returned bearing the klipspringer. I noticed, with satisfaction, that I had hit it fairly behind the shoulder. They gathered round the poor creature's body, gazing at the bullet hole in consternation.\n\n\"Ye see,\" I said, \"I do not speak empty words.\"\n\nThere was no answer.\n\n\"If ye yet doubt our power,\" I went on, \"let one of ye go stand upon that rock that I may make him as this buck.\"\n\nNone of them seemed at all inclined to take the hint, till at last the king's son spoke.\n\n\"It is well said. Do thou, my uncle, go stand upon the rock. It is but a buck that the magic has killed. Surely it cannot kill a man.\"\n\nThe old gentleman did not take the suggestion in good part. Indeed, he seemed hurt.\n\n\"No! no!\" he ejaculated, hastily, \"my old eyes have seen enough. These are wizards, indeed. Let us bring them to the king. Yet if any should wish a further proof, let him stand upon the rock, that the magic tube may speak with him.\"\n\nThere was a most general and hasty expression of dissent.\n\n\"Let not good magic be wasted on our poor bodies,\" said one, \"we are satisfied. All the witchcraft of our people cannot show the like of this.\"\n\n\"It is so,\" remarked the old gentleman, in a tone of intense relief; \"without any doubt it is so. Listen, children of the stars, children of the shining eye and the movable teeth, who roar out in thunder and slay from afar. I am Infadoos, son of Kafa, once King of the Kukuana people. This youth is Scragga.\"\n\n\"He nearly scragged me,\" murmured Good.\n\n\"Scragga, son of Twala, the great king\u2014Twala, husband of a thousand wives, chief and lord paramount of the Kukuanas, keeper of the great road, terror of his enemies, student of the Black Arts, leader of an hundred thousand warriors, Twala the One-eyed, the Black, the Terrible.\"\n\n\"So,\" said I, superciliously, \"lead us then to Twala. We do not talk with low people and underlings.\"\n\n\"It is well, my lords, we will lead you, but the way is long. We are hunting three days' journey from the place of the king. But let my lords have patience, and we will lead them.\"\n\n\"It is well,\" I said, carelessly, \"all time is before us, for we do not die. We are ready, lead on. But Infadoos, and thou Scragga, beware! Play us no tricks, make for us no snares, for before your brains of mud have thought of them, we shall know them and avenge them. The light from the transparent eye of him with the bare legs and the half-haired face (Good) shall destroy you, and go through your land: his vanishing teeth shall fix themselves fast in you and eat you up, you and your wives and children; the magic tubes shall talk with you loudly, and make you as sieves. Beware!\"\n\nThis magnificent address did not fail of its effect; indeed, it was hardly needed, so deeply were our friends already impressed with our powers.\n\nThe old man made a deep obeisance, and murmured the word \"Koom, Koom,\" which I afterwards discovered was their royal salute, corresponding to the Bay\u00e9te of the Zulus, and turning, addressed his followers. These at once proceeded to lay hold of all our goods and chattels, in order to bear them for us, excepting only the guns, which they would on no account touch. They even seized Good's clothes, which were, as the reader may remember, neatly folded up beside him.\n\nHe at once made a dive for them, and a loud altercation ensued.\n\n\"Let not my lord of the transparent eye and the melting teeth touch them,\" said the old man. \"Surely his slaves shall carry the things.\"\n\n\"But I want to put 'em on!\" roared Good, in nervous English.\n\nUmbopa translated.\n\n\"Nay, my lord,\" put in Infadoos, \"would my lord cover up his beautiful white legs (although he was so dark Good had a singularly white skin) from the eyes of his servants? Have we offended my lord that he should do such a thing?\"\n\nHere I nearly exploded with laughing; and meanwhile, one of the men started on with the garments.\n\n\"Damn it!\" roared Good, \"that black villain has got my trousers.\"\n\n\"Look here, Good,\" said Sir Henry, \"you have appeared in this country in a certain character, and you must live up to it. It will never do for you to put on trousers again. Henceforth you must live in a flannel shirt, a pair of boots, and an eyeglass.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, \"and with whiskers on one side of your face and not on the other. If you change any of these things they will think that we are impostors. I am very sorry for you, but, seriously, you must do it. If once they begin to suspect us, our lives will not be worth a brass farthing.\"\n\n\"Do you really think so?\" said Good, gloomily.\n\n\"I do, indeed. Your 'beautiful white legs' and your eyeglass are now the feature of our party, and as Sir Henry says, you must live up to them. Be thankful that you have got your boots on, and that the air is warm.\"\n\nGood sighed, and said no more, but it took him a fortnight to get accustomed to his attire."
            },
            {
                "title": "We Enter Kukuanaland",
                "text": "All that afternoon we travelled on along the magnificent roadway, which headed steadily in a north-westerly direction. Infadoos and Scragga walked with us, but their followers marched about one hundred paces ahead.\n\n\"Infadoos,\" I said at length, \"who made this road?\"\n\n\"It was made, my lord, of old time, none know how or when, not even the wise woman Gagool, who has lived for generations. We are not old enough to remember its making. None can make such roads now, but the king lets no grass grow upon it.\"\n\n\"And whose are the writings on the walls of the caves through which we have passed on the road?\" I asked, referring to the Egyptian-like sculptures we had seen.\n\n\"My lord, the hands that made the road wrote the wonderful writings. We know not who wrote them.\"\n\n\"When did the Kukuana race come into this country?\"\n\n\"My lord, the race came down here like the breath of a storm ten thousand thousand moons ago, from the great lands which lie there beyond,\" and he pointed to the north. \"They could travel no farther, so say the old voices of our fathers that have come down to us, the children, and so says Gagool, the wise woman, the smeller out of witches, because of the great mountains which ring in the land,\" and he pointed to the snow-clad peaks. \"The country, too, was good, so they settled here and grew strong and powerful, and now our numbers are like the sea sand, and when Twala the king calls up his regiments their plumes cover the plain as far as the eye of man can reach.\"\n\n\"And if the land is walled in with mountains, who is there for the regiments to fight with?\"\n\n\"Nay, my lord, the country is open there,\" and again he pointed towards the north, \"and now and again warriors sweep down upon us in clouds from a land we know not, and we slay them. It is the third part of the life of a man since there was a war. Many thousands died in it, but we destroyed those who came to eat us up. So since then there has been no war.\"\n\n\"Your warriors must grow weary of resting on their spears.\"\n\n\"My Lord, there was one war, just after we destroyed the people that came down upon us, but it was a civil war, dog eat dog.\"\n\n\"How was that?\"\n\n\"My lord, the king, my half-brother, had a brother born at the same birth, and of the same woman. It is not our custom, my lord, to let twins live, the weakest must always die. But the mother of the king hid away the weakest child, which was born the last, for her heart yearned over it, and the child is Twala the king. I am his younger brother born of another wife.\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"My lord, Kafa, our father, died when we came to manhood, and my brother Imotu was made king in his place, and for a space reigned and had a son by his favourite wife. When the babe was three years old, just after the great war, during which no man could sow or reap, a famine came upon the land, and the people murmured because of the famine, and looked round like a starved lion for something to rend. Then it was that Gagool, the wise and terrible woman, who does not die, proclaimed to the people, saying, 'The king Imotu is no king.' And at the time Imotu was sick with a wound, and lay in his hut not able to move.\n\n\"Then Gagool went into a hut and led out Twala, my half-brother, and the twin brother of the king, whom she had hidden since he was born among the caves and rocks, and stripping the 'moocha' (waist-cloth) off his loins, showed the people of the Kukuanas the mark of the sacred snake coiled round his waist, wherewith the eldest son of the king is marked at birth, and cried out loud, 'Behold, your king whom I have saved for you even to this day!' And the people being mad with hunger, and altogether bereft of reason and the knowledge of truth, cried out, 'The king! The king!' but I knew that it was not so, for Imotu, my brother, was the elder of the twins, and was the lawful king. And just as the tumult was at its height Imotu the king, though he was very sick, came crawling from his hut holding his wife by the hand, and followed by his little son Ignosi (the lightning).\n\n\"'What is this noise?' he asked; 'Why cry ye The king! The king?'\n\n\"Then Twala, his own brother, born of the same woman and in the same hour, ran to him, and taking him by the hair stabbed him through the heart with his knife. And the people being fickle, and ever ready to worship the rising sun, clapped their hands and cried, 'Twala is king! Now we know that Twala is king!'\"\n\n\"And what became of his wife and her son Ignosi? Did Twala kill them too?\"\n\n\"Nay, my lord. When she saw that her lord was dead, she seized the child with a cry, and ran away. Two days afterwards she came to a kraal very hungry, and none would give her milk or food, now that her lord the king was dead, for all men hate the unfortunate. But at nightfall a little child, a girl, crept out and brought her to eat, and she blessed the child, and went on towards the mountains with her boy before the sun rose again, where she must have perished, for none have seen her since, nor the child Ignosi.\"\n\n\"Then if this child Ignosi had lived, he would be the true king of the Kukuana people?\"\n\n\"That is so, my lord; the sacred snake is round his middle. If he lives he is the king; but alas! he is long dead.\"\n\n\"See, my lord,\" and he pointed to a vast collection of huts surrounded with a fence, which was in its turn surrounded by a great ditch, that lay on the plain beneath us. \"That is the kraal where the wife of Imotu was last seen with the child Ignosi. It is there that we shall sleep to-night, if, indeed,\" he added, doubtfully, \"my lords sleep at all upon this earth.\"\n\n\"When we are among the Kukuanas, my good friend Infadoos, we do as the Kukuanas do,\" I said, majestically, and I turned round suddenly to address Good, who was tramping along sullenly behind, his mind fully occupied with unsatisfactory attempts to keep his flannel shirt from flapping up in the evening breeze, and to my astonishment butted into Umbopa, who was walking along immediately behind me, and had very evidently been listening with the greatest interest to my conversation with Infadoos. The expression on his face was most curious, and gave the idea of a man who was struggling with partial success to bring something long ago forgotten back into his mind.\n\nAll this while we had been pressing on at a good rate down towards the undulating plain beneath. The mountains we had crossed now loomed high above us, and Sheba's breasts were modestly veiled in diaphanous wreaths of mist. As we went on the country grew more and more lovely. The vegetation was luxuriant; without being tropical, the sun was bright and warm, but not burning, and a gracious breeze blew softly along the odorous slopes of the mountains. And, indeed, this new land was little less than an earthly paradise; in beauty, in natural wealth, and in climate I have never seen its like. The Transvaal is a fine country, but it is nothing to Kukuanaland.\n\nSo soon as we started, Infadoos had despatched a runner on to warn the people of the kraal, which, by the way, was in his military command, of our arrival. This man had departed at an extraordinary speed, which Infadoos had informed me he would keep up all the way, as running was an exercise much practised among his people.\n\nThe result of this message now became apparent. When we got within two miles of the kraal we could see that company after company of men was issuing from its gates and marching towards us.\n\nSir Henry laid his hand upon my arm, and remarked that it looked as though we were going to meet with a warm reception. Something in his tone attracted Infadoos' attention.\n\n\"Let not my lords be afraid,\" he said hastily, \"for in my breast there dwells no guile. This regiment is one under my command, and comes out by my orders to greet you.\"\n\nI nodded easily, though I was not quite easy in my mind.\n\nAbout half a mile from the gates of the kraal was a long stretch of rising ground sloping gently upwards from the road, and on this the companies formed up. It was a splendid sight to see them, each company about three hundred strong, charging swiftly up the slope, with flashing spears and waving plumes, and taking their appointed place. By the time we came to the slope twelve such companies, or in all three thousand six hundred men, had passed out and taken up their positions along the road.\n\nPresently we came to the first company, and were able to gaze in astonishment on the most magnificent set of men I have ever seen. They were all men of mature age, mostly veterans of about forty, and not one of them was under six feet in height, whilst many were six feet three or four. They wore upon their heads heavy black plumes of Sakabwla feathers, like those which adorned our guides. Round their waists and also beneath the right knee were bound circlets of white ox tails, and in their left hands were round shields about twenty inches across. These shields were very curious. The framework consisted of an iron plate beaten out thin, over which was stretched milk-white ox hide. The weapons that each man bore were simple, but most effective, consisting of a short and very heavy two-edged spear with a wooden shaft, the blade being about six inches across at the widest part. These spears were not used for throwing, but like the Zulu \"bangwan,\" or stabbing assegai, were for close quarters only, when the wound inflicted by them was terrible. In addition to these bangwans each man also carried three large and heavy knives, each knife weighing about two pounds. One knife was fixed in the ox tail girdle, and the other two at the back of the round shield. These knives, which are called \"tollas\" by the Kukuanas, take the place of the throwing assegai of the Zulus. A Kukuana warrior can throw them with great accuracy at a distance of fifty yards, and it is their custom on charging to hurl a volley of them at the enemy as they come to close quarters.\n\nEach company stood like a collection of bronze statues till we were opposite to it, when at a signal given by its commanding officer who, distinguished by a leopard skin cloak, stood some paces in front, every spear was raised into the air, and from three hundred throats sprang forth with a sudden roar the royal salute of \"Koom.\" Then when we had passed the company formed up behind us, and followed us towards the kraal, till at last the whole regiment of the \"Greys\" (so called from their white shields), the crack corps of the Kukuana people, was marching behind us with a tread that shook the ground.\n\nAt length, branching off from Solomon's Great Road, we came to the wide fosse surrounding the kraal, which was at least a mile round, and fenced with a strong palisade of piles formed of the trunks of trees. At the gateway this fosse was spanned by a primitive drawbridge which was let down by the guard to allow us to pass in. The kraal was exceedingly well laid out. Through the centre ran a wide pathway intersected at right angles by other pathways so arranged as to cut the huts into square blocks, each block being the quarters of a company. The huts were dome-shaped, and built, like those of the Zulus, of a framework of wattle, beautifully thatched with grass; but, unlike the Zulu huts, they had doorways through which one could walk. Also they were much larger, and surrounded with a verandah about six feet wide, beautifully paved with powdered lime trodden hard. All along each side of the wide pathway that pierced the kraal were ranged hundreds of women, brought out by curiosity to look at us. These women are, for a native race, exceedingly handsome. They are tall and graceful, and their figures are wonderfully fine. The hair, though short, is rather curly than woolly, the features are frequently aquiline, and the lips are not unpleasantly thick as is the case in most African races. But what struck us most was their exceedingly quiet dignified air. They were as well-bred in their way as the habitu\u00e9es of a fashionable drawing-room, and in this respect differ from Zulu women, and their cousins the Masai who inhabit the district behind Zanzibar. Their curiosity had brought them out to see us, but they allowed no rude expressions of wonder or savage criticism to pass their lips as we trudged wearily in front of them. Not even when old Infadoos with a surreptitious motion of the hand pointed out the crowning wonder of poor Good's \"beautiful white legs,\" did they allow the feeling of intense admiration which evidently mastered their minds to find expression. They fixed their dark eyes upon their snowy loveliness (Good's skin is exceedingly white), and that was all. But this was quite enough for Good, who is modest by nature.\n\nWhen we got to the centre of the kraal, Infadoos halted at the door of a large hut, which was surrounded at a distance by a circle of smaller ones.\n\n\"Enter, sons of the stars,\" he said, in a magniloquent voice, \"and deign to rest awhile in our humble habitations. A little food shall be brought to you, so that ye shall have no need to draw your belts tight from hunger; some honey and some milk, and an ox or two, and a few sheep; not much, my lords, but still a little food.\"\n\n\"It is good,\" said I, \"Infadoos, we are weary with travelling through realms of air; now let us rest.\"\n\nAccordingly we entered into the hut, which we found amply prepared for our comfort. Couches of tanned skins were spread for us to rest on, and water was placed for us to wash in.\n\nPresently we heard a shouting outside; and stepping to the door, saw a line of damsels bearing milk and roasted mealies, and honey in a pot. Behind these were some youths driving a fat young ox. We received the gifts, and then one of the young men took the knife from his girdle and dexterously cut the ox's throat. In ten minutes it was dead, skinned, and cut up. The best of the meat was then cut off for us, and the rest I, in the name of our party, presented to the warriors round us, who took it off and distributed the \"white men's gift.\"\n\nUmbopa set to work, with the assistance of an extremely prepossessing young woman, to boil our portion in a large earthenware pot over a fire which was built outside the hut, and when it was nearly ready we sent a message to Infadoos, and asked him, and Scragga the king's son, to join us.\n\nPresently they came, and sitting down upon little stools, of which there were several about the hut (for the Kukuanas do not in general squat upon their haunches like the Zulus), helped us to get through our dinner. The old gentleman was most affable and polite, but it struck us that the young one regarded us with suspicion. He had, together with the rest of the party, been overawed by our white appearance and by our magic properties; but it seemed to me that on discovering that we ate, drank, and slept like other mortals, his awe was beginning to wear off and be replaced by a sullen suspicion\u2014which made us feel rather uncomfortable.\n\nIn the course of our meal Sir Henry suggested to me that it might be well to try and discover if our hosts knew anything of his brother's fate, or if they had ever seen or heard of him; but, on the whole, I thought that it would be wiser to say nothing of the matter at that time.\n\nAfter supper we filled our pipes and lit them: a proceeding which filled Infadoos and Scragga with astonishment. The Kukuanas were evidently unacquainted with the divine uses of tobacco-smoke. The herb was grown among them extensively; but, like the Zulus, they only used it for snuff, and quite failed to identify it in its new form.\n\nPresently I asked Infadoos when we were to proceed on our journey, and was delighted to learn that preparations had been made for us to leave on the following morning, messengers having already left to inform Twala the king of our coming. It appeared that Twala was at his principal place, known as Loo, making ready for the great annual feast which was held in the first week of June. At this gathering all the regiments, with the exception of certain detachments left behind for garrison purposes, were brought up and paraded before the king; and the great annual witch-hunt, of which more by-and-by, was held.\n\nWe were to start at dawn; and Infadoos, who was to accompany us, expected that we should, unless we were detained by accident or by swollen rivers, reach Loo on the night of the second day.\n\nWhen they had given us this information our visitors bade us good night; and, having arranged to watch turn and turn about, three of us flung ourselves down and slept the sweet sleep of the weary, whilst the fourth sat up on the look-out for possible treachery."
            },
            {
                "title": "Twala the King",
                "text": "It will not be necessary for me to detail at length the incidents of our journey to Loo. It took two good days' travelling along Solomon's Great Road, which pursued its even course right into the heart of Kukuanaland. Suffice it to say that as we went the country seemed to grow richer and richer, and the kraals, with their wide surrounding belts of cultivation, more and more numerous. They were all built upon the same principles as the first one we had reached, and were guarded by ample garrisons of troops. Indeed, in Kukuanaland, as among the Germans, the Zulus, and the Masai, every able-bodied man is a soldier, so that the whole force of the nation is available for its wars, offensive or defensive. As we travelled along we were overtaken by thousands of warriors hurrying up to Loo to be present at the great annual review and festival, and a grander series of troops I never saw. At sunset on the second day we stopped to rest awhile upon the summit of some heights over which the road ran, and there on a beautiful and fertile plain before us was Loo itself. For a native town it was an enormous place, quite five miles round I should say, with outlying kraals jutting out from it, which served on grand occasions as cantonments for the regiments, and a curious horse-shoe-shaped hill, with which we were destined to become better acquainted, about two miles to the north. It was beautifully situated, and through the centre of the kraal, dividing it into two portions, ran a river, which appeared to be bridged at several places, the same perhaps that we had seen from the slopes of Sheba's Breasts. Sixty or seventy miles away three great snow-capped mountains, placed like the points of a triangle, started up out of the level plain. The conformation of these mountains was unlike that of Sheba's Breasts, being sheer and precipitous, instead of smooth and rounded.\n\nInfadoos saw us looking at them and volunteered a remark\u2014\n\n\"The road ends there,\" he said, pointing to the mountains known among the Kukuanas as the \"Three Witches.\"\n\n\"Why does it end?\" I asked.\n\n\"Who knows?\" he answered, with a shrug; \"the mountains are full of caves, and there is a great pit between them. It is there that the wise men of old time used to go to get whatever it was they came to this country for, and it is there now that our kings are buried in the Place of Death.\"\n\n\"What was it they came for?\" I asked eagerly.\n\n\"Nay, I know not. My lords who come from the stars should know,\" he answered with a quick look. Evidently he knew more than he chose to say.\n\n\"Yes,\" I went on, \"you are right, in the stars we know many things. I have heard, for instance, that the wise men of old came to those mountains to get bright stones, pretty playthings, and yellow iron.\"\n\n\"My lord is wise,\" he answered coldly, \"I am but a child and cannot talk with my lord on such things. My lord must speak with Gagool the old, at the king's place, who is wise even as my lord,\" and he turned away.\n\nAs soon as he was gone, I turned to the others and pointed out the mountains. \"There are Solomon's diamond mines,\" I said.\n\nUmbopa was standing with them, apparently plunged in one of the fits of abstraction which were common to him, and caught my words.\n\n\"Yes, Macumazahn,\" he put in, in Zulu, \"the diamonds are surely there, and you shall have them since you white men are so fond of toys and money.\"\n\n\"How dost thou know that, Umbopa?\" I asked sharply, for I did not like his mysterious ways.\n\nHe laughed; \"I dreamed it in the night, white men,\" and then he too turned upon his heel and went.\n\n\"Now what,\" said Sir Henry, \"is our black friend at? He knows more than he chooses to say, that is clear. By the way, Quatermain, has he heard anything of\u2014of my brother?\"\n\n\"Nothing; he has asked every one he has got friendly with, but they all declare no white man has ever been seen in the country before.\"\n\n\"Do you suppose he ever got here at all?\" suggested Good; \"we have only reached the place by a miracle; is it likely he could have reached it at all without the map?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Sir Henry, gloomily, \"but somehow I think that I shall find him.\"\n\nSlowly the sun sank, and then suddenly darkness rushed down on the land like a tangible thing. There was no breathing-space between the day and the night, no soft transformation scene, for in these latitudes twilight does not exist. The change from day to night is as quick and as absolute as the change from life to death. The sun sank and the world was wreathed in shadows. But not for long, for see in the east there is a glow, then a bent edge of silver light, and at last the full bow of the crescent moon peeps above the plain and shoots its gleaming arrows far and wide, filling the earth with a faint refulgence, as the glow of a good man's deeds shines for awhile upon his little world after his sun has set, lighting the faint-hearted travellers who follow on towards a fuller dawn.\n\nWe stood and watched the lovely sight, whilst the stars grew pale before this chastened majesty, and felt our hearts lifted up in the presence of a beauty we could not realise, much less describe. Mine has been a rough life, my reader, but there are a few things I am thankful to have lived for, and one of them is to have seen that moon rise over Kukuanaland. Presently our meditations were broken in upon by our polite friend Infadoos.\n\n\"If my lords are rested we will journey on to Loo, where a hut is made ready for my lords to-night. The moon is now bright, so that we shall not fall on the way.\"\n\nWe assented, and in an hour's time were at the outskirts of the town, of which the extent, mapped out as it was by thousands of camp fires, appeared absolutely endless. Indeed, Good, who was always fond of a bad joke, christened it \"Unlimited Loo.\"Presently we came to a moat with a drawbridge, where we were met by the rattling of arms and the hoarse challenge of a sentry. Infadoos gave some password that I could not catch, which was met with a salute, and we passed on through the central street of the great grass city. After nearly half an hour's tramp, past endless lines of huts, Infadoos at last halted at the gate of a little group of huts which surrounded a small courtyard of powdered limestone, and informed us that these were to be our \"poor\" quarters.\n\nWe entered, and found that a hut had been assigned to each of us. These huts were superior to any which we had yet seen, and in each was a most comfortable bed made of tanned skins spread upon mattresses of aromatic grass. Food too was ready for us, and as soon as we had washed ourselves with water, which stood ready in earthenware jars, some young women of handsome appearance brought us roasted meat and mealie cobs daintily served on wooden platters, and presented it to us with deep obeisances.\n\nWe ate and drank, and then the beds having by our request been all moved into one hut, a precaution at which the amiable young ladies smiled, we flung ourselves down to sleep, thoroughly wearied out with our long journey.\n\nWhen we woke, it was to find that the sun was high in the heavens, and that the female attendants, who did not seem to be troubled by any false shame, were already standing inside the hut, having been ordered to attend and help us to \"make ready.\"\n\n\"Make ready, indeed,\" growled Good, \"when one has only a flannel shirt and a pair of boots, that does not take long. I wish you would ask them for my trousers.\"\n\nI asked accordingly, but was informed that these sacred relics had already been taken to the king, who would see us in the forenoon.\n\nHaving, somewhat to their astonishment and disappointment, requested the young ladies to step outside, we proceeded to make the best toilet that the circumstances admitted of. Good even went the length of again shaving the right side of his face; the left, on which now appeared a very fair crop of whiskers, we impressed upon him he must on no account touch. As for ourselves, we were contented with a good wash and combing our hair. Sir Henry's yellow locks were now almost down to his shoulders, and he looked more like an ancient Dane than ever, while my grizzled scrub was fully an inch long, instead of half an inch, which in a general way I considered my maximum length.\n\nBy the time that we had eaten our breakfasts, and smoked a pipe, a message was brought to us by no less a personage than Infadoos himself that Twala, the king, was ready to see us, if we would be pleased to come.\n\nWe remarked in reply that we should prefer to wait till the sun was a little higher, we were yet weary with our journey, &c. &c. It is always well, when dealing with uncivilised people, not to be in too great a hurry. They are apt to mistake politeness for awe or servility. So, althoughwe were quite as anxious to see Twala as Twala could be to see us, we sat down and waited for an hour, employing the interval in preparing such presents as our slender stock of goods permitted\u2014namely, the Winchester rifle which had been used by poor Ventv\u00f6gel, and some beads. The rifle and ammunition we determined to present to his Royal Highness, and the beads were for his wives and courtiers. We had already given a few to Infadoos and Scragga, and found that they were delighted with them, never having seen anything like them before. At length we declared that we were ready, and guided by Infadoos, started off to the levee, Umbopa carrying the rifle and beads.\n\nAfter walking a few hundred yards, we came to an enclosure, something like that which surrounded the huts that had been allotted to us, only fifty times as big. It could not have been less than six or seven acres in extent. All round the outside fence was a row of huts, which were the habitations of the king's wives. Exactly opposite the gateway, on the further side of the open space, was a very large hut, which stood by itself, in which his Majesty resided. All the rest was open ground; that is to say, it would have been open had it not been filled by company after company of warriors, who were mustered there to the number of seven or eight thousand. These men stood still as statues as we advanced through them, and it would be impossible to give an idea of the grandeur of the spectacle which they presented, in their waving plumes, their glancing spears, and iron-backed ox-hide shields.\n\nThe space in front of the large hut was empty, but before it were placed several stools. On three of these, at a sign from Infadoos, we seated ourselves, Umbopa standing behind us. As for Infadoos, he took up a position by the door of the hut. So we waited for ten minutes or more in the midst of a dead silence, but conscious that we were the object of the concentrated gaze of some eight thousand pairs of eyes. It was a somewhat trying ordeal, but we carried it off as best we could. At length the door of the hut opened, and a gigantic figure, with a splendid tiger-skin karross flung over its shoulders, stepped out, followed by the boy Scragga, and what appeared to us to be a withered-up monkey, wrapped in a fur cloak. The figure seated itself upon a stool, Scragga took his stand behind it, and the withered-up monkey crept on all fours into the shade of the hut and squatted down.\n\nStill there was silence.\n\nThen the gigantic figure slipped off the karross and stood up before us, a truly alarming spectacle. It was that of an enormous man with the most entirely repulsive countenance we had ever beheld. The lips were as thick as a negro's, the nose was flat, it had but one gleaming black eye (for the other was represented by a hollow in the face), and its whole expression was cruel and sensual to a degree. From the large head rose a magnificent plume of white ostrich feathers, the body was clad in a shirt of shining chain armour, whilst round the waist and right knee was the usual garnish of white ox-tails. In the right hand was a huge spear. Round the neck was a thick torque of gold, and bound on to the forehead was a single and enormous uncut diamond.\n\nStill there was silence; but not for long. Presently the figure, whom we rightly guessed to be the king, raised the great spear in its hand. Instantly eight thousand spears were raised in answer, and from eight thousand throats rang out the royal salute of \"Koom.\" Three times this was repeated, and each time the earth shook with the noise, that can only be compared to the deepest notes of thunder.\n\n\"Be humble, O people,\" piped out a thin voice which seemed to come from the monkey in the shade, \"it is the king.\"\n\n\"It is the king,\" boomed out eight thousand throats, in answer. \"Be humble, O people, it is the king.\"\n\nThen there was silence again\u2014dead silence. Presently, however, it was broken. A soldier on our left dropped his shield, which fell with a clatter on the limestone flooring.\n\nTwala turned his one cold eye in the direction of the noise.\n\n\"Come hither, thou,\" he said, in a voice of thunder.\n\nA fine young man stepped out of the ranks, and stood before him.\n\n\"It was thy shield that fell, thou awkward dog. Wilt thou make me a reproach in the eyes of strangers from the stars? What hast thou to say?\"\n\nAnd then we saw the poor fellow turn pale under his dusky skin.\n\n\"It was by chance, O calf of the black cow,\" he murmured.\n\n\"Then it is a chance for which thou must pay. Thou hast made me foolish; prepare for death.\"\n\n\"I am the king's ox,\" was the low answer.\n\n\"Scragga,\" roared the king, \"let me see how thou canst use thy spear. Kill me this awkward dog.\"\n\nScragga stepped forward with an ill-favoured grin, and lifted his spear. The poor victim covered his eyes with his hand and stood still. As for us, we were petrified with horror.\n\nOnce, twice, he waved the spear and then struck, ah, God! right home\u2014the spear stood out a foot behind the soldier's back. He flung up his hands and dropped dead. From the multitude around rose something like a murmur, it rolled round and round, and died away. The tragedy was finished; there lay the corpse, and we had not yet realised that it had been enacted. Sir Henry sprang up and swore a great oath, then, overpowered by the sense of silence, sat down again.\n\n\"The thrust was a good one,\" said the king; \"take him away.\"\n\nFour men stepped out of the ranks, and lifting the body of the murdered man, carried it away.\n\n\"Cover up the blood-stains, cover them up,\" piped out the thin voice from the monkey-like figure; \"the king's word is spoken, the king's doom is done.\"\n\nThereupon a girl came forward from behind the hut, bearing a jar filled with powdered lime, which she scattered over the red mark, blotting it from sight.\n\nSir Henry meanwhile was boiling with rage at what had happened; indeed, it was with difficulty that we could keep him still.\n\n\"Sit down, for heaven's sake,\" I whispered; \"our lives depend on it.\"\n\nHe yielded and remained quiet.\n\nTwala sat still until the traces of the tragedy had been removed, then he addressed us.\n\n\"White people,\" he said, \"who come hither, whence I know not, and why I know not, greeting.\"\n\n\"Greeting Twala, King of the Kukuanas,\" I answered.\n\n\"White people, whence come ye, and what seek ye?\"\n\n\"We come from the stars, ask us not how. We come to see this land.\"\n\n\"Ye come from far to see a little thing. And that man with ye,\" pointing to Umbopa, \"does he too come from the stars?\"\n\n\"Even so; there are people of thy colour in the heavens above; but ask not of matters too high for thee, Twala, the king.\"\n\n\"Ye speak with a loud voice, people of the stars,\" Twala answered, in a tone which I scarcely liked. \"Remember that the stars are far off, and ye are here. How if I make ye as him whom they bear away?\"\n\nI laughed out loud, though there was little laughter in my heart.\n\n\"O king,\" I said, \"be careful, walk warily over hot stones, lest thou shouldst burn thy feet; hold the spear by the handle, lest thou shouldst cut thy hands. Touch but one hair of our heads, and destruction shall come upon thee. What, have not these,\" pointing to Infadoos and Scragga (who, young villain that he was, was employed in cleaning the blood of the soldier off his spear), \"told thee what manner of men we are? Hast thou ever seen the like of us?\" and I pointed to Good, feeling quite sure that he had never seen anybody before who looked in the least like him as he then appeared.\n\n\"It is true, I have not,\" said the king.\n\n\"Have they not told thee how we strike with death from afar?\" I went on.\n\n\"They have told me, but I believe them not. Let me see you kill. Kill me a man among those who stand yonder\"\u2014and he pointed to the opposite side of the kraal\u2014\"and I will believe.\"\n\n\"Nay,\" I answered; \"we shed no blood of man except in just punishment; but if thou wilt see, bid thy servants drive in an ox through the kraal gates, and before he has run twenty paces I will strike him dead.\"\n\n\"Nay,\" laughed the king, \"kill me a man, and I will believe.\"\n\n\"Good, O king, so be it,\" I answered, coolly; \"do thou walk across the open space, and before thy feet reach the gate thou shalt be dead; or if thou wilt not, send thy son Scragga\" (whom at that moment it would have given me much pleasure to shoot).\n\nOn hearing this suggestion Scragga gave a sort of howl, and bolted into the hut.\n\nTwala frowned majestically; the suggestion did not please him.\n\n\"Let a young ox be driven in,\" he said.\n\nTwo men at once departed, running swiftly.\n\n\"Now, Sir Henry,\" said I, \"do you shoot. I want to show this ruffian that I am not the only magician of the party.\"\n\nSir Henry accordingly took the \"express,\" and made ready.\n\n\"I hope I shall make a good shot,\" he groaned.\n\n\"You must,\" I answered. \"If you miss with the first barrel, let him have the second. Sight for 150 yards, and wait till the beast turns broadside on.\"\n\nThen came a pause, till presently we caught sight of an ox running straight for the kraal gate. It came on through the gate, and then, catching sight of the vast concourse of people, stopped stupidly, turned round, and bellowed.\n\n\"Now's your time,\" I whispered.\n\nUp went the rifle.\n\nBang! thud! and the ox was kicking on his back, shot in the ribs. The semi-hollow bullet had done its work well, and a sigh of astonishment went up from the assembled thousands.\n\nI turned coolly round\u2014\n\n\"Have I lied, O king?\"\n\n\"Nay, white man, it is a truth,\" was the somewhat awed answer.\n\n\"Listen, Twala,\" I went on. \"Thou hast seen. Now know we come in peace, not in war. See here\" (and I held up the Winchester repeater); \"here is a hollow staff that shall enable you to kill even as we kill, only this charm I lay upon it, thou shalt kill no man with it. If thou liftest it against a man, it shall kill thee. Stay, I will show thee. Bid a man step forty paces and place the shaft of a spear in the ground so that the flat blade looks towards us.\"\n\nIn a few seconds it was done.\n\n\"Now, see, I will break the spear.\"\n\nTaking a careful sight I fired. The bullet struck the flat of the spear, and broke the blade into fragments.\n\nAgain the sigh of astonishment went up.\n\n\"Now, Twala\" (handing him the rifle), \"this magic tube we give to thee, and by-and-by I will show thee how to use it; but beware how thou usest the magic of the stars against a man of earth,\" and I handed him the rifle. He took it very gingerly, and laid it down at his feet. As he did so I observed the wizened monkey-like figure creeping up from the shadow of the hut. It crept on all fours, but when it reached the place where the king sat, it rose upon its feet, and throwing the furry covering off its face, revealed a most extraordinary and weird countenance. It was (apparently) that of a woman of great age, so shrunken that in size it was no larger than that of a year-old child, and was made up of a collection of deep yellow wrinkles. Set in the wrinkles was a sunken slit, that represented the mouth, beneath which the chin curved outwards to a point. There was no nose to speak of; indeed, the whole countenance might have been taken for that of a sundried corpse had it not been for a pair of large black eyes, still full of fire and intelligence, which gleamed and played under the snow-white eyebrows, and the projecting parchment-coloured skull, like jewels in a charnel-house. As for the skull itself, it was perfectly bare, and yellow in hue, while its wrinkled scalp moved and contracted like the hood of a cobra.\n\nThe figure to whom this fearful countenance, which caused a shiver of fear to pass through us as we gazed on it, belonged, stood still for a moment, and then suddenly projected a skinny claw armed with nails nearly an inch long, and laid it on the shoulder of Twala, the king, and began to speak in a thin, piercing voice\u2014\n\n\"Listen, O king! Listen, O people! Listen, O mountains and plains and rivers, home of the Kukuana race! Listen, O skies and sun, O rain and storm and mist! Listen, all things that live and must die! Listen, all dead things that must live again\u2014again to die! Listen, the spirit of life is in me, and I prophesy. I prophesy! I prophesy!\"\n\nThe words died away in a faint wail, and terror seemed to seize upon the hearts of all who heard them, including ourselves. The old woman was very terrible.\n\n\"Blood! blood! blood! rivers of blood; blood everywhere. I see it, I smell it, I taste it\u2014it is salt; it runs red upon the ground, it rains down from the skies.\n\n\"Footsteps! footsteps! footsteps! the tread of the white man coming from afar. It shakes the earth; the earth trembles before her master.\n\n\"Blood is good, the red blood is bright; there is no smell like the smell of new-shed blood. The lions shall lap it and roar, the vultures shall wash their wings in it, and shriek in joy.\n\n\"I am old! I am old! I have seen much blood; ha, ha! but I shall see more ere I die, and be merry. How old am I, think ye? Your fathers knew me, and their fathers knew me, and their fathers' fathers. I have seen the white man, and know his desires. I am old, but the mountains are older than I. Who made the great road, tell me? Who wrote in pictures on the rocks, tell me? Who reared up the three silent ones yonder, who gaze across the pit, tell me?\" (And she pointed towards the three precipitous mountains we had noticed on the previous night.)\n\n\"Ye know not, but I know. It was a white people who were before ye are, who shall be when ye are not, who shall eat ye up, and destroy ye. Yea! yea! yea!\n\n\"And what came they for, the white ones, the terrible ones, the skilled in magic and all learning, the strong, the unswerving? What is that bright stone upon thy forehead, O king? Whose hands made the iron garments upon thy breast, O king? Ye know not, but I know. I the old one, I the wise one, I the Isanusi!\" (witch doctress.)\n\nThen she turned her bald vulture-head towards us.\n\n\"What seek ye, white men of the stars\u2014ah, yes, of the stars? Do ye seek a lost one? Ye shall not find him here. He is not here. Never for ages upon ages has a white foot pressed this land; never but once, and he left it but to die. Ye come for bright stones; I know it\u2014I know it; ye shall find them when the blood is dry; but shall ye return whence ye came, or shall ye stop with me? Ha! ha! ha!\n\n\"And thou, thou with the dark skin and the proud bearing\" (pointing her skinny finger at Umbopa), \"who art thou, and what seekest thou? Not stones that shine, not yellow metal that gleams, that thou leavest to 'white men from the stars.' Methinks I know thee; methinks I can smell the smell of the blood in thy veins. Strip off the girdle\u2014\"\n\nHere the features of this extraordinary creature became convulsed, and she fell to the ground foaming in an epileptic fit, and was carried off into the hut.\n\nThe king rose up trembling, and waved his hand. Instantly the regiments began to file off, and in ten minutes, save for ourselves, the king, and a few attendants, the great space was left clear.\n\n\"White people,\" he said, \"it passes in my mind to kill ye. Gagool has spoken strange words. What say ye?\"\n\nI laughed. \"Be careful, O king, we are not easy to slay. Thou hast seen the fate of the ox; wouldst thou be as the ox?\"\n\nThe king frowned. \"It is not well to threaten a king.\"\n\n\"We threaten not, we speak what is true. Try to kill us, O king, and learn.\"\n\nThe great man put his hand to his forehead.\n\n\"Go in peace,\" he said, at length. \"To-night is the great dance. Ye shall see it. Fear not that I shall set a snare for ye. Tomorrow I shall think.\"\n\n\"It is well, O king,\" I answered, unconcernedly, and then, accompanied by Infadoos, we rose, and went back to our kraal."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Witch-hunt",
                "text": "On reaching our hut, I motioned to Infadoos to enter with us.\n\n\"Now, Infadoos,\" I said, \"we would speak with thee.\"\n\n\"Let my lords say on.\"\n\n\"It seems to us, Infadoos, that Twala, the king, is a cruel man.\"\n\n\"It is so, my lords. Alas! the land cries out with his cruelties. To-night ye will see. It is the great witch-hunt, and many will be smelt out as wizards and slain. No man's life is safe. If the king covets a man's cattle, or a man's life, or if he fears a man that he should excite a rebellion against him, then Gagool, whom ye saw, or some of the witchfinding women whom she has taught, will smell that man out as a wizard, and he will be killed. Many will die before the moon grows pale to-night. It is ever so. Perhaps I too shall be killed. As yet I have been spared, because I am skilled in war, and beloved by the soldiers; but I know not how long I shall live. The land groans at the cruelties of Twala, the king; it is wearied of him and his red ways.\"\n\n\"Then why is it, Infadoos, that the people do not cast him down?\"\n\n\"Nay, my lords, he is the king, and if he were killed Scragga would reign in his place, and the heart of Scragga is blacker than the heart of Twala, his father. If Scragga were king the yoke upon our neck would be heavier than the yoke of Twala. If Imotu had never been slain, or if Ignosi, his son, had lived, it had been otherwise; but they are both dead.\"\n\n\"How know you that Ignosi is dead?\" said a voice behind us. We looked round with astonishment to see who spoke. It was Umbopa.\n\n\"What meanest thou, boy?\" asked Infadoos; \"who told thee to speak?\"\n\n\"Listen, Infadoos,\" was the answer, \"and I will tell thee a story. Years ago the King Imotu was killed in this country, and his wife fled with the boy Ignosi. Is it not so?\"\n\n\"It is so.\"\n\n\"It was said that the woman and the boy died upon the mountains. Is it not so?\"\n\n\"It is even so.\"\n\n\"Well, it came to pass that the mother and the boy Ignosi did not die. They crossed the mountains, and were led by a tribe of wandering desert men across the sands beyond, till at last they came to water and grass and trees again.\"\n\n\"How knowest thou that?\"\n\n\"Listen. They travelled on and on, many months' journey, till they reached a land where a people called the Amazulu, who too are of the Kukuana stock, live by war, and with them they tarried many years, till at length the mother died. Then the son, Ignosi, again became a wanderer, and went on into a land of wonders, where white people live, and for many more years learned the wisdom of the white people.\"\n\n\"It is a pretty story,\" said Infadoos, incredulously.\n\n\"For many years he lived there working as a servant and a soldier, but holding in his heart all that his mother had told him of his own place, and casting about in his mind to find how he might get back there to see his own people and his father's house before he died. For many years he lived and waited, and at last the time came, as it ever comes to him who can wait for it, and he met some white men who would seek this unknown land, and joined himself to them. The white men started and journeyed on and on, seeking for one who is lost. They crossed the burning desert, they crossed the snow-clad mountains, and reached the land of the Kukuanas, and there they met thee, oh Infadoos.\"\n\n\"Surely thou art mad to talk thus,\" said the astonished old soldier.\n\n\"Thou thinkest so; see, I will show thee, oh my uncle.\n\n\"I am Ignosi, rightful king of the Kukuanas!\"\n\nThen with a single movement he slipped off the \"moocha\" or girdle round his middle, and stood naked before us.\n\n\"Look,\" he said; \"what is this?\" and he pointed to the mark of a great snake tattooed in blue round his middle, its tail disappearing in its open mouth just above where the thighs are set into the body.\n\nInfadoos looked, his eyes starting nearly out of his head, and then fell upon his knees.\n\n\"Koom! Koom!\" he ejaculated; \"it is my brother's son; it is the king.\"\n\n\"Did I not tell thee so, my uncle? Rise; I am not yet the king, but with thy help, and with the help of these brave white men, who are my friends, I shall be. But the old woman Gagool was right, the land shall run with blood first, and hers shall run with it, for she killed my father with her words, and drove my mother forth. And now, Infadoos, choose thou. Wilt thou put thy hands between my hands and be my man? Wilt thou share the dangers that lie before me, and help me to overthrow this tyrant and murderer, or wilt thou not? Choose thou.\"\n\nThe old man put his hand to his head and thought. Then he rose, and advancing to where Umbopa, or rather Ignosi, stood, knelt before him and took his hand.\n\n\"Ignosi, rightful king of the Kukuanas, I put my hand between thy hands, and am thy man till death. When thou wast a babe I dandled thee upon my knee, now shall my old arm strike for thee and freedom.\"\n\n\"It is well, Infadoos; if I conquer, thou shalt be the greatest man in the kingdom after the king. If I fail, thou canst only die, and death is not far off for thee. Rise, my uncle.\"\n\n\"And ye, white men, will ye help me? What have I to offer ye! The white stones, if I conquer and can find them, ye shall have as many as ye can carry hence. Will that suffice ye?\"\n\nI translated this remark.\n\n\"Tell him,\" answered Sir Henry, \"that he mistakes an Englishman. Wealth is good, and if it comes in our way we will take it; but a gentleman does not sell himself for wealth. But, speaking for myself, I say this. I have always liked Umbopa, and so far as lies in me will stand by him in this business. It will be very pleasant to me to try and square matters with that cruel devil, Twala. What do you say, Good, and you, Quatermain?\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Good, \"to adopt the language of hyperbole, in which all these people seem to indulge, you can tell him that a row is surely good, and warms the cockles of the heart, and that so far as I am concerned I'm his boy. My only stipulation is, that he allows me to wear trousers.\"\n\nI translated these answers.\n\n\"It is well, my friends,\" said Ignosi, late Umbopa; \"and what say you, Macumazahn, art thou too with me, old hunter, cleverer than a wounded buffalo?\"\n\nI thought awhile and scratched my head.\n\n\"Umbopa, or Ignosi,\" I said, \"I don't like revolutions. I am a man of peace, and a bit of a coward\" (here Umbopa smiled), \"but, on the other hand, I stick to my friends, Ignosi. You have stuck to us and played the part of a man, and I will stick to you. But mind you I am a trader, and have to make my living, so I accept your offer about those diamonds in case we should ever be in a position to avail ourselves of it. Another thing: we came, as you know, to look for Incubu's (Sir Henry's) lost brother. You must help us to find him.\"\n\n\"That will I do,\" answered Ignosi. \"Stay, Infadoos, by the sign of the snake round my middle, tell me the truth. Has any white man to thy knowledge set his foot within the land?\"\n\n\"None, oh Ignosi.\"\n\n\"If any white man had been seen or heard of, wouldst thou have known it?\"\n\n\"I should certainly have known.\"\n\n\"Thou hearest, Incubu,\" said Ignosi to Sir Henry, \"he has not been here.\"\n\n\"Well, well,\" said Sir Henry, with a sigh; \"there it is; I suppose he never got here. Poor fellow, poor fellow! So it has all been for nothing. God's will be done.\"\n\n\"Now for business,\" I put in, anxious to escape from a painful subject. \"It is very well to be a king by right divine, Ignosi, but how dost thou purpose to become a king indeed?\"\n\n\"Nay, I know not. Infadoos, hast thou a plan?\"\n\n\"Ignosi, son of the lightning,\" answered his uncle, \"to-night is the great dance and witch-hunt. Many will be smelt out and perish, and in the hearts of many others there will be grief and anguish and anger against the King Twala. When the dance is over, then will I speak to some of the great chiefs, who in turn, if I can win them over, shall speak to their regiments. I shall speak to the chiefs softly at first, and bring them to see that thou art indeed the king, and I think that by tomorrow's light thou shall have twenty thousand spears at thy command. And now must I go and think, and hear, and make ready. After the dance is done I will, if I am yet alive, and we are all alive, meet thee here, and we will talk. At the best there will be war.\"\n\nAt this moment our conference was interrupted by the cry that messengers had come from the king. Advancing to the door of the hut we ordered that they should be admitted, and presently three men entered, each bearing a shining shirt of chain armour, and a magnificent battle-axe.\n\n\"The gifts of my lord the king to the white men from the stars!\" exclaimed a herald who came with them.\n\n\"We thank the king,\" I answered; \"withdraw.\"\n\nThe men went, and we examined the armour with great interest. It was the most beautiful chain work we had ever seen. A whole coat fell together so closely that it formed a mass of links scarcely too big to be covered with both hands.\n\n\"Do you make these things in this country, Infadoos?\" I asked; \"they are very beautiful.\"\n\n\"Nay, my lord, they come down to us from our forefathers. We know not who made them, and there are but few left. None but those of royal blood may wear them. They are magic coats through which no spear can pass. He who wears them is well-nigh safe in the battle. The king is well pleased or much afraid, or he would not have sent them. Wear them to-night, my lords.\"\n\nThe rest of the day we spent quietly resting and talking over the situation, which was sufficiently exciting. At last the sun went down, the thousand watchfires glowed out, and through the darkness we heard the tramp of many feet and the clashing of hundreds of spears, as the regiments passed to their appointed places to be ready for the great dance. About ten the full moon came up in splendour, and as we stood watching her ascent Infadoos arrived, clad in full war toggery, and accompanied by a guard of twenty men to escort us to the dance. We had already, as he recommended, donned the shirts of chain armour which the king had sent us, putting them on under our ordinary clothing, and finding to our surprise that they were neither very heavy nor uncomfortable. These steel shirts, which had evidently been made for men of a very large stature, hung somewhat loosely upon Good and myself, but Sir Henry's fitted his magnificent frame like a glove. Then strapping our revolvers round our waists, and taking the battle-axes which the king had sent with the armour in our hands, we started.\n\nOn arriving at the great kraal, where we had that morning been interviewed by the king, we found that it was closely packed with some twenty thousand men arranged in regiments round it. The regiments were in turn divided into companies, and between each company was a little path to allow free passage to the witchfinders to pass up and down. Anything more imposing than the sight that was presented by this vast and orderly concourse of armed men it is impossible for one to conceive. There they stood perfectly silent, and the moonlight poured its light upon the forest of their raised spears, upon their majestic forms, waving plumes, and the harmonious shading of their various-coloured shields. Wherever we looked was line upon line of set faces surmounted by range upon range of glittering spears.\n\n\"Surely,\" I said to Infadoos, \"the whole army is here?\"\n\n\"Nay, Macumazahn,\" he answered, \"but a third part of it. One third part is present at this dance each year, another third part is mustered outside in case there should be trouble when the killing begins, ten thousand more garrison the outposts round Loo, and the rest watch at the kraals in the country. Thou seest it is a very great people.\"\n\n\"They are very silent,\" said Good; and indeed the intense stillness among such a vast concourse of living men was almost overpowering.\n\n\"What says Bougwan?\" asked Infadoos.\n\nI translated.\n\n\"Those over whom the shadow of Death is hovering are silent,\" he answered, grimly.\n\n\"Will many be killed?\"\n\n\"Very many.\"\n\n\"It seems,\" I said to the others, \"that we are going to assist at a gladiatorial show arranged regardless of expense.\"\n\nSir Henry shivered, and Good said that he wished that we could get out of it.\n\n\"Tell me,\" I asked Infadoos, \"are we in danger?\"\n\n\"I know not, my lords, I trust not; but do not seem afraid. If ye live through the night all may go well. The soldiers murmur against the king.\"\n\nAll this while we had been advancing steadily towards the centre of the open space, in the midst of which were placed some stools. As we proceeded we perceived another small party coming from the direction of the royal hut.\n\n\"It is the king, Twala, and Scragga his son, and Gagool the old, and see, with them are those who slay,\" and he pointed to a little group of about a dozen gigantic and savage-looking men, armed with spears in one hand and heavy kerries in the other.\n\nThe king seated himself upon the centre stool, Gagool crouched at his feet, and the others stood behind.\n\n\"Greeting, white lords,\" he cried, as we came up; \"be seated, waste not the precious time\u2014the night is all too short for the deeds that must be done. Ye come in a good hour, and shall see a glorious show. Look round, white lords; look round,\" and he rolled his one wicked eye from regiment to regiment. \"Can the stars show ye such a sight as this? See how they shake in their wickedness, all those who have evil in their hearts and fear in the judgment of 'Heaven above.'\"\n\n\"Begin! begin!\" cried out Gagool in her thin piercing voice; \"the hy\u00e6nas are hungry, they howl for food. Begin! begin!\" Then for a moment there was intense stillness, made horrible by a presage of what was to come.\n\nThe king lifted his spear, and suddenly twenty thousand feet were raised, as though they belonged to one man, and brought down with a stamp upon the earth. This was repeated three times, causing the solid ground to shake and tremble. Then from a far point of the circle a solitary voice began a wailing song, of which the refrain ran something as follows:\u2014\n\n\"What is the lot of man born of woman?\"\n\nBack came the answer rolling out from every throat in that vast company\u2014\n\n\"Death!\"\n\nGradually, however, the song was taken up by company after company, till the whole armed multitude were singing it, and I could no longer follow the words, except in so far as they appeared to represent various phases of human passions, fears, and joys. Now it seemed to be a love song, now a magestic swelling war chant, and last of all a death-dirge ending suddenly in one heartbreaking wail that went echoing and rolling away in a volume of blood-curdling sound. Again the silence fell upon the place, and again it was broken by the king lifting up his hand. Instantly there was a pattering of feet, and from out of the masses of the warriors strange and awful figures came running towards us. As they drew near we saw that they were those of women, most of them aged, for their white hair, ornamented with small bladders taken from fish, streamed out behind them. Their faces were painted in stripes of white and yellow; down their backs hung snake-skins, and round their waists rattled circlets of human bones, while each held in her shrivelled hand a small forked wand. In all there were ten of them. When they arrived in front of us they halted, and one of them, pointing with her wand towards the crouching figure of Gagool, cried out\u2014\n\n\"Mother, old mother, we are here.\"\n\n\"Good! good! good!\" piped out that aged iniquity. \"Are your eyes keen, Isanusis (witch doctresses), ye seers in dark places?\"\n\n\"Mother, they are keen.\"\n\n\"Good! good! good! Are your ears open, Isanusis, ye who hear words that come not from the tongue?\"\n\n\"Mother, they are open.\"\n\n\"Good! good! good! Are your senses awake, Isanusis\u2014can ye smell blood, can ye purge the land of the wicked ones who compass evil against the king and against their neighbours? Are ye ready to do the justice of 'Heaven above,' ye whom I have taught, who have eaten the bread of my wisdom and drunk of the water of my magic?\"\n\n\"Mother, we can.\"\n\n\"Then go! Tarry not, ye vultures; see the slayers,\" pointing to the ominous group of executioners behind, \"make sharp their spears; the white men from afar are hungry to see. Go.\"\n\nWith a wild yell the weird party broke away in every direction, like fragments from a shell, the dry bones round their waists rattling as they ran, and made direct for various points of the dense human circle. We could not watch them all, so fixed our eyes upon the Isanusi nearest us. When she came within a few paces of the warriors, she halted and began to dance wildly, turning round and round with an almost incredible rapidity, and shrieking out sentences such as \"I smell him, the evil-doer!\" \"He is near, he who poisoned his mother!\" \"I hear the thoughts of him who thought evil of the king!\"\n\nQuicker and quicker she danced, till she lashed herself into such a frenzy of excitement that the foam flew in flecks from her gnashing jaws, her eyes seemed to start from her head, and her flesh to quiver visibly. Suddenly she stopped dead, and stiffened all over, like a pointer dog when he scents game, and then with outstretched wand began to creep stealthily towards the soldiers before her. It seemed to us that as she came their stoicism gave way, and that they shrank from her. As for ourselves, we followed her movements with a horrible fascination. Presently, still creeping and crouching like a dog, she was before them. Then she stopped and pointed, and then again crept on a pace or two.\n\nSuddenly the end came. With a shriek she sprang in and touched a tall warrior with the forked wand. Instantly two of his comrades, those standing immediately next to him, seized the doomed man, each by one arm, and advanced with him towards the king.\n\nHe did not resist, but we saw that he dragged his limbs as though they were paralysed, and his fingers, from which the spear had fallen, were limp as those of a man newly dead.\n\nAs he came, two of the villainous executioners stepped forward to meet him. Presently they met, and the executioners turned round towards the king as though for orders.\n\n\"Kill!\" said the king.\n\n\"Kill!\" squeaked Gagool.\n\n\"Kill!\" re-echoed Scragga, with a hollow chuckle.\n\nAlmost before the words were uttered, the horrible deed was done. One man had driven his spear into the victim's heart, and to make assurance doubly sure, the other had dashed out his brains with his great club.\n\n\"One,\" counted Twala the king, just like a black Madame Defarge, as Good said, and the body was dragged a few paces away and stretched out.\n\nHardly was this done, before another poor wretch was brought up, like an ox to the slaughter. This time we could see, from the leopard-skin cloak, that the man was a person of rank. Again the awful syllables were spoken, and the victim fell dead.\n\n\"Two,\" counted the king.\n\nAnd so the deadly game went on, till some hundred bodies were stretched in rows behind us. I have heard of the gladiatorial shows of the C\u00e6sars, and of the Spanish bull-fights, but I take the liberty of doubting if they were either of them half as horrible as this Kukuana witch hunt. Gladiatorial shows and Spanish bull-fights, at any rate, contributed to the public amusement, which certainly was not the case here. The most confirmed sensation-monger would fight shy of sensation if he knew that it was well on the cards that he would, in his own proper person, be the subject of the next \"event.\"\n\nOnce we rose and tried to remonstrate, but were sternly repressed by Twala.\n\n\"Let the law take its course, white men. These dogs are magicians and evil-doers; it is well that they should die,\" was the only answer vouchsafed to us.\n\nAbout midnight there was a pause. The witchfinders gathered themselves together, apparently exhausted with their bloody work, and we thought that the whole performance was done with. But it was not so, for presently, to our surprise, the old woman, Gagool, rose from her crouching position, and supporting herself with a stick, staggered off into the open space. It was an extraordinary sight to see this frightful vulture-headed old creature, bent nearly double with extreme age, gather strength by degrees till at last she rushed about almost as actively as her ill-omened pupils. To and fro she ran, chanting to herself, till suddenly she made a dash at a tall man standing in front of one of the regiments, and touched him. As she did so, a sort of groan went up from the regiment, which he evidently commanded. But all the same, two of its members seized him and brought him up for execution. We afterwards learned that he was a man of great wealth and importance, being, indeed, a cousin of the king's.\n\nHe was slain, and the king counted one hundred and three. Then Gagool again sprang to and fro, gradually drawing nearer and nearer to ourselves.\n\n\"Hang me if I don't believe she is going to try her games on us,\" ejaculated Good in horror.\n\n\"Nonsense!\" said Sir Henry.\n\nAs for myself, as I saw that old fiend dancing nearer and nearer, my heart positively sank into my boots. I glanced behind us at the long rows of corpses, and shivered.\n\nNearer and nearer waltzed Gagool, looking for all the world like an animated crooked stick, her horrid eyes gleaming and glowing with a most unholy lustre.\n\nNearer she came, and nearer yet, every pair of eyes in that vast assemblance watching her movements with intense anxiety. At last she stood still and pointed.\n\n\"Which is it to be?\" asked Sir Henry to himself.\n\nIn a moment all doubts were set at rest, for the old woman had rushed in and touched Umbopa, alias Ignosi, on the shoulder.\n\n\"I smell him out,\" she shrieked. \"Kill him, kill him, he is full of evil; kill him, the stranger, before blood flows for him. Slay him, O king.\"\n\nThere was a pause, which I instantly took advantage of.\n\n\"O King,\" I called out, rising from my seat, \"this man is the servant of thy guests, he is their dog; whosoever sheds the blood of our dog sheds our blood. By the sacred law of hospitality I claim protection for him.\"\n\n\"Gagool, mother of the witch doctors, has smelt him out; he must die, white men,\" was the sullen answer.\n\n\"Nay, he shall not die,\" I replied; \"he who tries to touch him shall die indeed.\"\n\n\"Seize him!\" roared Twala to the executioners, who stood around red to the eyes with the blood of their victims.\n\nThey advanced towards us, and then hesitated. As for Ignosi, he raised his spear, and raised it as though determined to sell his life dearly.\n\n\"Stand back, ye dogs,\" I shouted, \"if ye would see tomorrow's light. Touch one hair of his head and your king dies,\" and I covered Twala with my revolver. Sir Henry and Good also drew their pistols, Sir Henry pointing his at the leading executioner, who was advancing to carry out the sentence, and Good taking a deliberate aim at Gagool.\n\nTwala winced perceptibly, as my barrel came in a line with his broad chest.\n\n\"Well,\" I said, \"what is it to be, Twala?\"\n\nThen he spoke.\n\n\"Put away your magic tubes,\" he said; \"ye have adjured me in the name of hospitality, and for that reason, but not from fear of what ye can do, I spare him. Go in peace.\"\n\n\"It is well,\" I answered, unconcernedly; \"we are weary of slaughter, and would sleep. Is the dance ended?\"\n\n\"It is ended,\" Twala answered, sulkily. \"Let these dogs,\" pointing to the long rows of corpses, \"be flung out to the hy\u00e6nas and the vultures,\" and he lifted his spear.\n\nInstantly the regiments began in perfect silence to defile off through the kraal gateway, a fatigue party only remaining behind to drag away the corpses of those who had been sacrificed.\n\nThen we too rose, and making our salaam to his majesty, which he hardly deigned to acknowledge, departed to our kraal.\n\n\"Well,\" said Sir Henry, as we sat down, having first lit a lamp of the sort used by the Kukuanas, of which the wick is made of the fibre of a species of palm leaf, and the oil of clarified hippopotamus fat, \"well, I feel uncommonly inclined to be sick.\"\n\n\"If I had any doubts about helping Umbopa to rebel against that infernal blackguard,\" put in Good, \"they are gone now. It was as much as I could do to sit still while that slaughter was going on. I tried to keep my eyes shut, but they would open just at the wrong time. I wonder where Infadoos is. Umbopa, my friend, you ought to be grateful to us; your skin came near to having an air-hole made in it.\"\n\n\"I am grateful, Bougwan,\" was Umbopa's answer, when I had translated, \"and I shall not forget. As for Infadoos, he will be here by-and-by. We must wait.\"\n\nSo we lit our pipes and waited."
            },
            {
                "title": "We Give a Sign",
                "text": "For a long while-two hours, I should think\u2014we sat there in silence, for we were too overwhelmed by the recollection of the horrors we had seen to talk. At last, just as we were thinking of turning in\u2014for already there were faint streaks of light in the eastern sky\u2014we heard the sound of steps. Then came the challenge of the sentry, who was posted at the kraal gate, which was apparently answered, though not in an audible tone, for the steps came on; and in another second Infadoos had entered the hut, followed by some half-dozen stately-looking chiefs.\n\n\"My lords,\" he said, \"I have come according to my word. My lords and Ignosi, rightful King of the Kukuanas, I have brought with me these men,\" pointing to the row of chiefs, \"who are great men among us, having each one of them the command of three thousand soldiers, who live but to do their bidding, under the king's. I have told them of what I have seen, and what my ears have heard. Now let them also see the sacred snake around thee, and hear thy story, Ignosi, that they may say whether or no they will make cause with thee against Twala, the king.\"\n\nFor answer, Ignosi again stripped off his girdle, and exhibited the snake tattooed around him. Each chief in turn drew near and examined it by the dim light of the lamp, and without saying a word passed on to the other side.\n\nThen Ignosi resumed his moocha, and addressing them, repeated the history he had detailed in the morning.\n\n\"Now ye have heard, chiefs,\" said Infadoos, when he had done, \"what say ye; will ye stand by this man and help him to his father's throne, or will ye not? The land cries out against Twala, and the blood of the people flows like the waters in spring. Ye have seen to-night. Two other chiefs there were with whom I had it in my mind to speak, and where are they now? The hyaenas howl over their corpses. Soon will ye be as they are if ye strike not. Choose then, my brothers.\"\n\nThe eldest of the six men, a short, thick-set warrior with white hair, stepped forward a pace and answered\u2014\n\n\"Thy words are true, Infadoos; the land cries out. My own brother is among those who died to-night; but this is a great matter, and the thing is hard to believe. How know we that if we lift our spears it may not be for an impostor? It is a great matter, I say, and none may see the end of it. For of this be sure, blood will flow in rivers before the deed is done; many will still cleave to the king, for men worship the sun that still shines bright in the heavens, and not that which has not risen. These white men from the stars, their magic is great, and Ignosi is under the cover of their wing. If he be indeed the rightful king, let them give us a sign, and let the people have a sign, that all may see. So shall men cleave to us, knowing that the white man's magic is with them.\"\n\n\"Ye have the sign of the snake,\" I answered.\n\n\"My lord, it is not enough. The snake may have been placed there since the man's birth. Show us a sign. We will not move without a sIgn.\"\n\nThe others gave a decided assent, and I turned in perplexity to Sir Henry and Good, and explained the situation.\n\n\"I think I have it,\" said Good, exultingly; \"ask them to give us a moment to think.\"\n\nI did so, and the chiefs withdrew. As soon as they were gone, Good went to the little box in which his medicines were, unlocked it, and took out a note-book, in the front of which was an almanack. \"Now, look here, you fellows, isn't tomorrow the fourth of June?\"\n\nWe had kept a careful note of the days, so were able to answer that it was.\n\n\"Very good; then here we have it\u2014'4 June, total eclipse of the sun commences at 11 \u00b7 15 Greenwich time, visible in these Islands\u2014Africa, &c.' There's a sign for you. Tell them that you will darken the sun tomorrow.\"\n\nThe idea was a splendid one; indeed, the only fear about it was a fear lest Good's almanack might be incorrect. If we made a false prophecy on such a subject, our prestige would be gone for ever, and so would Ignosi's chance of the throne of the Kukuanas.\n\n\"Suppose the almanack is wrong,\" suggested Sir Henry to Good, who was busily employed in working out something on the fly-leaf of the book.\n\n\"I don't see any reason to suppose anything of the sort,\" was his answer. \"Eclipses always come up to time; at least, that is my experience of them, and it especially states that it will be visible in Africa. I have worked out the reckonings as well as I can, without knowing our exact position; and I make out that the eclipse should begin here about one o'clock tomorrow, and last till half-past two. For half an hour or more there should be total darkness.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Sir Henry, \"I suppose we had better risk it.\"\n\nI acquiesced, though doubtfully, for eclipses are queer cattle to deal with, and sent Umbopa to summon the chiefs back. Presently they came, and I addressed them thus\u2014\n\n\"Great men of the Kukuanas, and thou, Infadoos, listen. We are not fond of showing our powers, since to do so is to interfere with the course of nature, and plunge the world into fear and confusion; but as this matter is a great one, and as we are angered against the king because of the slaughter we have seen, and because of the act of the Isanusi Gagool, who would have put our friend Ignosi to death, we have determined to do so, and to give such a sign as all men may see. Come hither,\" and I led them to the door of the hut and pointed to the fiery ball of the rising sun; \"what see ye there?\"\n\n\"We see the rising sun,\" answered the spokesman of the party.\n\n\"It is so. Now tell me, can any mortal man put out that sun, so that night comes down on the land at mid-day?\"\n\nThe chief laughed a little. \"No, my lord, that no man can do. The sun is stronger than man who looks on him.\"\n\n\"Ye say so. Yet I tell you that this day, one hour after mid-day, will we put out that sun for a space of an hour, and darkness shall cover the earth, and it shall be for a sign that we are indeed men of honour, and that Ignosi is indeed King of the Kukuanas. If we do this thing, will it satisfy ye?\"\n\n\"Yea, my lords,\" answered the old chief with a smile, which was reflected on the faces of his companions; \"if ye do this thing we will be satisfied indeed.\"\n\n\"It shall be done; we three, Incubu the Elephant, Bougwan the clear-eyed, and Macumazahn, who watches in the night, have said it, and it shall be done. Dost thou hear, Infadoos?\"\n\n\"I hear, my lord, but it is a wonderful thing that ye promise, to put out the sun, the father of all things, who shines for ever.\"\n\n\"Yet shall we do it, Infadoos:\"\n\n\"It is well, my lords. To-day, a little after mid-day, will Twala send for my lords to witness the girls dance, and one hour after the dance begins shall the girl whom Twala thinks the fairest be killed by Scragga, the king's son, as a sacrifice to the silent stone ones, who sit and keep watch by the mountains yonder,\" and he pointed to the three strange-looking peaks where Solomon's road was supposed to end. \"Then let my lords darken the sun, and save the maiden's life, and the people will indeed believe.\"\n\n\"Ay,\" said the old chief, still smiling a little, \"the people will believe indeed.\"\n\n\"Two miles from Loo,\" went on Infadoos, \"there is a hill curved like the new moon, a stronghold, where my regiment, and three other regiments which these men command, are stationed. This morning we will make a plan whereby other regiments, two or three, may be moved there also. Then if my lords can indeed darken the sun, in the darkness I will take my lords by the hand and lead them out of Loo to this place, where they shall be safe, and thence can we make war upon Twala, the king.\"\n\n\"It is good,\" said I. \"Now leave us to sleep awhile and make ready our magic.\n\nInfadoos rose, and, having saluted us, departed with the chiefs.\n\n\"My friends,\" said Ignosi, as soon as they were gone, \"can ye indeed do this wonderful thing, or were ye speaking empty words to the men?\"\n\n\"We believe that we can do it, Umbopa\u2014Ignosi, I mean.\"\n\n\"It is strange,\" he answered, \"and had ye not been Englishmen I would not have believed it; but English 'gentlemen' tell no lies. If we live through the matter, be sure I will repay ye!\"\n\n\"Ignosi,\" said Sir Henry, \"promise me one thing.\"\n\n\"I will promise, Incubu, my friend, even before I hear it,\" answered the big man with a smile. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"This: that if you ever come to be king of this people you will do away with the smelling out of witches such as we have seen last night; and that the killing of men without trial shall not take place in the land.\"\n\nIgnosi thought for a moment, after I had translated this, and then answered\u2014\n\n\"The ways of black people are not as the ways of white men, Incubu, nor do we hold life so high as ye. Yet will I promise it. If it be in my power to hold them back, the witchfinders shall hunt no more, nor shall any man die the death without judgment.\"\n\n\"That's a bargain, then,\" said Sir Henry; \"and now let us get a little rest.\"\n\nThoroughly wearied out, we were soon sound asleep, and slept till Ignosi woke us about eleven o'clock. Then we got up, washed, and ate a hearty breakfast, not knowing when we should get any more food. After that we went outside the hut and stared at the sun, which we were distressed to observe presented a remarkably healthy appearance, without a sign of an eclipse anywhere about it.\n\n\"I hope it will come off,\" said Sir Henry, doubtfully. \"False prophets often find themselves in painful positions.\"\n\n\"If it does not, it will soon be up with us,\" I answered, mournfully; \"for so sure as we are living men, some of those chiefs will tell the whole story to the king, and then there will be another sort of eclipse, and one that we shall not like.\"\n\nReturning to the hut we dressed ourselves, putting on the mail shirts which the king had sent us as before. Scarcely had we done so when a messenger came from Twala to bid us to the great annual \"dance of girls\" which was about to be celebrated.\n\nTaking our rifles and ammunition with us so as to have them handy in case we had to fly, as suggested by Infadoos, we started boldly enough, though with inward fear and trembling. The great space in front of the king's kraal presented a very different appearance from what it had done on the previous evening. In the place of the grim ranks of serried warriors were company after company of Kukuana girls, not overdressed, so far as clothing went, but each crowned with a wreath of flowers, and holding a palm leaf in one hand and a tall white lily (the arum) in the other. In the centre of the open space sat Twala, the king, with old Gagool at his feet, attended by Infadoos, the boy Scragga, and about a dozen guards. There were also present about a score of chiefs, amongst whom I recongised most of our friends of the night before.\n\nTwala greeted us with much apparent cordiality, though I saw him fix his one eye viciously on Umbopa.\n\n\"Welcome, white men from the stars,\" he said; \"this is a different sight from what your eyes gazed on by the light of last night's moon, but it is not so good a sight. Girls are pleasant, and were it not for such as these\" (and he pointed round him) \"we should none of us be here to-day; but men are better. Kisses and the tender words of women are sweet, but the sound of the clashing of men's spears, and the smell of men's blood, are sweeter far! Would ye have wives from among our people, white men? If so, choose the fairest here, and ye shall have them, as many as ye will,\" and he paused for an answer.\n\nAs the prospect did not seem to be without attractions to Good, who was, like most sailors, of a susceptible nature, I, being elderly and wise, and foreseeing the endless complications that anything of the sort would involve (for women bring trouble as surely as the night follows the day), put in a hasty answer\u2014\n\n\"Thanks, O king, but we white men wed only with white women like ourselves. Your maidens are fair, but they are not for us!\"\n\nThe king laughed. \"It is well. In our land there is a proverb which says, 'Woman's eyes are always bright, whatever the colour,' and another which says, 'Love her who is present, for be sure she who is absent is false to thee;' but perhaps these things are not so in the stars. In a land where men are white all things are possible. So be it, white men; the girls will not go begging! Welcome again; and welcome, too, thou black one; if Gagool here had had her way thou wouldst have been stiff and cold now. It is lucky that thou, too, camest from the stars; ha! ha!\"\n\n\"I can kill thee before thou killest me, O king,\" was Ignosi's calm answer, \"and thou shalt be stiff before my limbs cease to bend.\"\n\nTwala started. \"Thou speakest boldly, boy,\" he replied, angrily; \"presume not too far.\"\n\n\"He may well be bold in whose lips are truth. The truth is a sharp spear which flies home and fails not. It is a message from 'the stars,' O king!\"\n\nTwala scowled, and his one eye gleamed fiercely, but he said nothing more.\n\n\"Let the dance begin,\" he cried, and next second the flower-crowned girls sprang forward in companies, singing a sweet song and waving the delicate palms and white flowers. On they danced, now whirling round and round, now meeting in mimic warfare, swaying, eddying here and there, coming forward, falling back in an ordered confusion delightful to witness. At last they paused, and a beautiful young woman sprang out of the ranks and began to pirouette in front of us with a grace and vigour which would have put most ballet girls to shame. At length she fell back exhausted, and another took her place, then another and another, but none of them, either in grace, skill, or personal attractions, came up to the first.\n\nAt length the king lifted his hand.\n\n\"Which think ye the fairest, white men?\" he asked.\n\n\"The first,\" said I, unthinkingly. Next second I regretted it, for I remembered that Infadoos had said that the fairest woman was offered as a sacrifice.\n\n\"Then is my mind as your minds, and my eyes as your eyes. She is the fairest; and a sorry thing it is for her, for she must die!\"\n\n\"Ay, must die!\" piped out Gagool, casting a glance from her quick eyes in the direction of the poor girl, who, as yet ignorant of the awful fate in store for her, was standing some twenty yards off in front of a company of girls, engaged in nervously picking a flower from her wreath to pieces, petal by petal.\n\n\"Why, O king?\" said I, restraining my indignation with difficulty; \"the girl has danced well and pleased us; she is fair, too; it would be hard to reward her with death.\"\n\nTwala laughed as he answered\u2014\n\n\"It is our custom, and the figures who sit in stone yonder\" (and he pointed towards the three distant peaks) \"must have their due. Did I fail to put the fairest girl to death to-day misfortune would fall upon me and my house. Thus runs the prophecy of my people: 'If the king offer not a sacrifice of a fair girl on the day of the dance of maidens to the old ones who sit and watch on the mountains, then shall he fall and his house.' Look ye, white men, my brother who reigned before me offered not the sacrifice, because of the tears of the woman, and he fell, and his house, and I reign in his stead. It is finished; she must die!\" Then turning to the guards\u2014\"Bring her hither; Scragga, make sharp thy spear.\"\n\nTwo of the men stepped forward, and as they did so, the girl, for the first time realising her impending fate, screamed aloud and turned to fly. But the strong hands caught her fast, and brought her, struggling and weeping, up before us.\n\n\"What is thy name, girl?\" piped Gagool. \"What! wilt thou not answer; shall the king's son do his work at once?\"\n\nAt this hint Scragga, looking more evil than ever, advanced a step and lifted his great spear, and as he did so I saw Good's hand creep to his revolver. The poor girl caught the glint of the cold steel through her tears, and it sobered her anguish. She ceased struggling, but merely clasped her hands convulsively, and stood shuddering from head to foot.\n\n\"See,\" cried Scragga in high glee, \"she shrinks from the sight of my little plaything even before she has tasted it,\" and he tapped the broad blade of the spear.\n\n\"If ever I get the chance, you shall pay for that, you young hound!\" I heard Good mutter beneath his breath.\n\n\"Now that thou art quiet, give us thy name, my dear. Come, speak up, and fear not,\" said Gagool in mockery.\n\n\"Oh, mother,\" answered the girl in trembling accents, \"my name is Foulata, of the house of Suko. Oh, mother, why must I die? I have done no wrong!\"\n\n\"Be comforted,\" went on the old woman, in her hateful tone of mockery. \"Thou must die indeed, as a sacrifice to the old ones who sit yonder\" (and she pointed to the peaks); \"but it is better to sleep in the night than to toil in the day-time; it is better to die than to live, and thou shalt die by the royal hand of the king's own son.\"\n\nThe girl Foulata wrung her hands in anguish, and cried out aloud: \"Oh, cruel; and I so young! What have I done that I should never again see the sun rise out of the night, or the stars come following on his track in the evening: that I should no more gather the flowers when the dew is heavy, or listen to the laughing of the waters ! Woe is me, that I shall never see my father's hut again, nor feel my mother's kiss, nor tend the kid that is sick! Woe is me, that no lover shall put his arm around me and look into my eyes, nor shall men children be born of me! Oh, cruel, cruel!\" and again she wrung her hands and turned her tear-stained, flower-crowned face to Heaven, looking so lovely in her despair\u2014for she was indeed a beautiful woman\u2014that it would assuredly have melted the hearts of any one less cruel than the three fiends before us. Prince Arthur's appeal to the ruffians who came to blind him was not more touching than this savage girl's.\n\nBut it did not move Gagool or Gagool's master, though I saw signs of pity among the guard behind, and on the faces of the chiefs; and as for Good, he gave a sort of snort of indignation, and made a motion as though to go to her. With all a woman's quickness, the doomed girl interpreted what was passing in his mind, and with a sudden movement flung herself before him, and clasped his \"beautiful white legs\" with her hands.\n\n\"Oh, white father from the stars!\" she cried, \"throw over me the mantle of thy protection; let me creep into the shadow of thy strength, that I may be saved. Oh, keep me from these cruel men and from the mercies of Gagool!\"\n\n\"All right, my hearty, I'll look after you,\" sang out Good, in nervous Saxon. \"Come, get up, there's a good girl,\" and he stooped and caught her hand.\n\nTwala turned and motioned to his son, who advanced with his spear lifted.\n\n\"Now's your time,\" whispered Sir Henry to me; \"what are you waiting for?\"\n\n\"I am waiting for the eclipse,\" I answered; \"I have had my eye on the sun for the last half-hour, and I never saw it look healthier.\"\n\n\"Well, you must risk it now, or the girl will be killed. Twala is losing patience.\"\n\nRecognising the force of the argument, having cast one more despairing look at the bright face of the sun, for never did the most ardent astronomer with a theory to prove await a celestial event with such anxiety, I stepped with all the dignity I could command between the prostrate girl and the advancing spear of Scragga.\n\n\"King,\" I said, \"this shall not be; we will not tolerate such a thing; let the girl go in safety.\"\n\nTwala rose from his seat in his wrath and astonishment, and from the chiefs and serried ranks of girls, who had slowly closed up upon us in anticipation of the tragedy, came a murmur of amazement.\n\n\"Shall not be, thou white dog, who yaps at the lion in his cave, shall not be! art thou mad? Be careful lest this chicken's fate overtakes thee, and those with thee. How canst thou prevent it? Who art thou that thou standest between me and my will? Withdraw, I say. Scragga, kill her. Ho, guards! seize these men.\"\n\nAt his cry armed men came running swiftly from behind the hut, where they had evidently been placed beforehand.\n\nSir Henry, Good, and Umbopa ranged themselves alongside of me, and lifted their rifles.\n\n\"Stop!\" I shouted boldly, though at the moment my heart was in my boots. \"Stop! we, the white men from the stars, say that it shall not be. Come but one pace nearer, and we will put out the sun and plunge the land in darkness. Ye shall taste of our magic.\"\n\nMy threat produced an effect; the men halted, and Scragga stood still before us, his spear lifted.\n\n\"Hear him! hear him!\" piped Gagool; \"hear the liar who says he will put out the sun like a lamp. Let him do it, and the girl shall be spared. Yes, let him do it, or die with the girl, he and those with him.\"\n\nI glanced up at the sun, and to my intense joy and relief saw that we had made no mistake. On the edge of its brilliant surface was a faint rim of shadow.\n\nI lifted my hand solemnly towards the sky, an example which Sir Henry and Good followed, and quoted a line or two of the \"Ingoldsby Legends\" at it in the most impressive tones I could command. Sir Henry followed suit with a verse out of the Old Testament, whilst Good addressed the King of Day in a volume of the most classical bad language that he could think of.\n\nSlowly the dark rim crept on over the blazing surface, and as it did so I heard a deep gasp of fear rise from the multitude around.\n\n\"Look, O king! look, Gagool! Look, chiefs and people and women, and see if the white men from the stars keep their word, or if they be but empty liars!\"\n\n\"The sun grows dark before your eyes; soon there will be night\u2014ay, night in the noontime. Ye have asked for a sign; it is given to ye. Grow dark, O sun! withdraw thy light, thou bright one; bring the proud heart to the dust, and eat up the world with shadows.\"\n\nA groan of terror rose from the onlookers. Some stood petrified with fear, others threw themselves upon their knees, and cried out. As for the king, he sat still and turned pale beneath his dusky skin. Only Gagool kept her courage.\n\n\"It will pass,\" she cried; \"I have seen the like before; no man can put out the sun; lose not heart; sit still\u2014the shadow will pass.\"\n\n\"Wait, and ye shall see,\" I replied, hopping with excitement.\n\n\"Keep it up, Good, I can't remember any more poetry. Curse away, there's a good fellow.\"\n\nGood responded nobly to the tax upon his inventive faculties. Never before had I the faintest conception of the breadth and depth and height of a naval officer's objurgatory powers. For ten minutes he went on without stopping, and he scarcely ever repeated himself.\n\nMeanwhile the dark ring crept on. Strange and unholy shadows encroached upon the sunlight, an ominous quiet filled the place, the birds chirped out frightened notes, and then were still; only the cocks began to crow.\n\nOn, yet on, crept the ring of darkness; it was now more than half over the reddening orb. The air grew thick and dusky. On, yet on, till we could scarcely see the fierce faces of the group before us. No sound rose now from the spectators, and Good stopped swearing.\n\n\"The sun is dying\u2014the wizards have killed the sun,\" yelled out the boy Scragga at last. \"We shall all die in the dark,\" and animated by fear or fury, or both, he lifted his spear, and drove it with all his force at Sir Henry's broad chest. But he had forgotten the mail shirts that the king had given us, and which we wore beneath our clothing. The steel rebounded harmless, and before he could repeat the blow Sir Henry had snatched the spear from his hand, and sent it straight through him. He dropped dead.\n\nAt the sight, and driven mad with fear at the gathering gloom, the companies of girls broke up in wild confusion, and ran screeching for the gateways. Nor did the panic stop there. The king himself, followed by the guards, some of the chiefs, and Gagool, who hobbled away after them with marvellous alacrity, fled for the huts, so that in another minute or so ourselves, the would-be victim Foulata, Infadoos, and some of the chiefs, who had interviewed us on the previous night, were left alone upon the scene with the dead body of Scragga.\n\n\"Now, chiefs,\" I said, \"we have given you the sign. If ye are satisfied, let us fly swiftly to the place ye spoke of. The charm cannot now be stopped. It will work for an hour. Let us take advantage of the darkness.\"\n\n\"Come,\" said Infadoos, turning to go, an example which was followed by the awed chiefs, ourselves, and the girl Foulata, whom Good took by the hand.\n\nBefore we reached the gate of the kraal the sun went out altogether.\n\nHolding each other by the hand we stumbled on through the darkness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Before the Battle",
                "text": "Luckily for us, infadoos and the chiefs knew all the pathways of the great town perfectly, so that notwithstanding the intense gloom we made fair progress.\n\nFor an hour or more we journeyed on, till at length the eclipse began to pass, and that edge of the sun which had disappeared the first, became again visible. In another five minutes there was sufficient light to see our whereabouts, and we then discovered that we were clear of the town of Loo, and approaching a large flat-topped hill, measuring some two miles in circumference. This hill, which was of a formation very common in Southern Africa, was not very high; indeed, its greatest elevation was not more than 200 feet, but it was shaped like a horse-shoe, and its sides were rather precipitous, and strewn with boulders. On the grass table-land at the top was ample camping ground, which had been utilised as a military cantonment of no mean strength. Its ordinary garrison was one regiment of three thousand men, but as we toiled up the steep side of the hill in the returning daylight, we perceived that there were many more warriors than that upon it.\n\nReaching the table-land at last, we found crowds of men huddled together in the utmost consternation at the natural phenomenon which they were witnessing. Passing through these without a word, we gained a hut in the centre of the ground, where we were astonished to find two men waiting, laden with our few goods and chattels, which of course we had been obliged to leave behind in our hasty flight.\n\n\"I sent for them,\" explained Infadoos; \"also for these,\" and he lifted up Good's long-lost trousers.\n\nWith an exclamation of rapturous delight Good sprang at them, and instantly proceeded to put them on.\n\n\"Surely my lord will not hide his beautiful white legs!\" exclaimed Infadoos, regretfully.\n\nBut Good persisted, and once only did the Kukuana people get the chance of seeing his beautiful legs again. Good is a very modest man. Henceforward they had to satisfy their aesthetic longings with his one whisker, his transparent eye, and his movable teeth.\n\nStill gazing with fond remembrance at Good's trousers, Infadoos next informed us that he had summoned the regiments to explain to them fully the rebellion which was decided on by the chiefs, and to introduce to them the rightful heir to the throne, Ignosi.\n\nIn half an hour the troops, in all nearly twenty thousand men, constituting the flower of the Kukuana army, were mustered on a large open space, to which we proceeded. The men were drawn up in three sides of a dense square, and presented a magnificent spectacle. We took our station on the open side of the square, and were speedily surrounded by all the principal chiefs and officers.\n\nThese, after silence had been proclaimed, Infadoos proceeded to address. He narrated to them in vigorous and graceful language\u2014for like most Kukuanas of high rank, he was a born orator\u2014the history of Ignosi's father, how he had been basely murdered by Twala, the king, and his wife and child driven out to starve. Then he pointed out how the land suffered and groaned under Twala's cruel rule, instancing the proceedings of the previous night, when, under pretence of their being evil-doers, many of the noblest in the land had been hauled forth and cruelly done to death. Next he went on to say that the white lords from the stars, looking down on the land, had perceived its trouble, and determined, at great personal inconvenience, to alleviate its lot; how they had accordingly taken the real king of the country, Ignosi, who was languishing in exile, by the hand, and led him over the mountains; how they had seen the wickedness of Twala's doings, and for a sign to the wavering, and to save the life of the girl Foulata, had actually, by the exercise of their high magic, put out the sun, and slain the young fiend Scragga; and how they were prepared to stand by them, and assist them to overthrow Twala, and set up the rightful king, Ignosi, in his place.\n\nHe finished his discourse amidst a murmur of approbation, and then Ignosi stepped forward, and began to speak. Having reiterated all that Infadoos his uncle had said, he concluded a powerful speech in these words:\u2014\n\n\"O chiefs, captains, soldiers, and people, ye have heard my words. Now must ye make choice between me and him who sits upon my throne, the uncle who killed his brother, and hunted his brother's child forth to die in the cold and the night. That I am indeed the king these\"\u2014pointing to the chiefs\u2014\"can tell ye, for they have seen the snake about my middle. If I were not the king, would these white men be on my side, with all their magic? Tremble, chiefs, captains, soldiers, and people! Is not the darkness they have brought upon the land to confound Twala, and cover our flight, yet before your eyes?\"\n\n\"It is,\" answered the soldiers.\n\n\"I am the king; I say to ye, I am the king,\" went on Ignosi, drawing up his great stature to its full, and lifting his broad-bladed battle-axe above his head. \"If there be any man among ye who says that it is not so, let him stand forth, and I will fight him now, and his blood shall be a red token that I tell ye true. Let him stand forth, I say;\" and he shook the great axe till it flashed in the sunlight.\n\nAs nobody seemed inclined to respond to this heroic version of \"Dilly, Dilly, come and be killed,\" our late henchman proceeded with his address.\n\n\"I am indeed the king, and if ye do stand by my side in the battle, if I win the day ye shall go with me to victory and honour. I will give ye oxen and wives, and ye shall take place of all the regiments; and if ye fall I will fall with ye.\n\n\"And, behold, this promise do I give ye, that when I sit upon the seat of my fathers, bloodshed shall cease in the land. No longer shall ye cry for justice to find slaughter, no longer shall the witchfinder hunt ye out so that ye be slain without a cause. No man shall die save he who offendeth against the laws. The 'eating up' of your kraals shall cease; each shall sleep secure in his own hut and fear not, and justice shall walk blind throughout the land. Have ye chosen, chiefs, captains, soldiers, and people?\"\n\n\"We have chosen, O king,\" came back the answer.\n\n\"It is well. Turn your heads and see how Twala's messengers go forth from the great town, east and west, and north and south, to gather a mighty army to slay me and ye, and these my friends and my protectors. Tomorrow, or perchance the next day, will he come with all who are faithful to him. Then shall I see the man who is indeed my man, the man who fears not to die for his cause; and I tell ye he shall not be forgotten in the time of spoil. I have spoken, O chiefs, captains, soldiers, and people. Now go to your huts and make you ready for war.\"\n\nThere was a pause, and then one of the chiefs lifted his hand, and out rolled the royal salute, \"Koom.\" It was a sign that the regiments accepted Ignosi as their king. Then they marched off in battalions.\n\nHalf an hour afterwards we held a council of war, at which all the commanders of regiments were present. It was evident to us that before very long we should be attacked in overwhelming force. Indeed, from our point of vantage on the hill we could see troops mustering, and messengers going forth from Loo in every direction, doubtless to summon regiments to the king's assistance. We had on our side about twenty thousand men, composed of seven of the best regiments in the country. Twala had, so Infadoos and the chiefs calculated, at least thirty to thirty-five thousand on whom he could rely at present assembled in Loo, and they thought that by midday on the morrow he would be able to gather another five thousand or more to his aid. It was, of course, possible that some of his troops would desert and come over to us, but it was not a contingency that could be reckoned on. Meanwhile, it was clear that active preparations were being made to subdue us. Already strong bodies of armed men were patrolling round and round the foot of the hill, and there were other signs of a coming attack.\n\nInfadoos and the chiefs, however, were of opinion that no attack would take place that night, which would be devoted to preparation and to the removal by every possible means of the moral effect produced upon the minds of the soldiery by the supposed magical darkening of the sun. The attack would be on the morrow, they said, and they proved to be right.\n\nMeanwhile, we set to work to strengthen the position as much as possible. Nearly the entire force was turned out, and in the two hours which yet remained to sundown wonders were done. The paths up the hill, which was rather a sanitarium than a fortress, being used generally as the camping place of regiments suffering from recent service in unhealthy portions of the country, were carefully blocked with masses of stones, and every other possible approach was made as impregnable as time would allow. Piles of boulders were collected at various spots to be rolled down upon an advancing enemy, stations were appointed to the different regiments, and every other preparation which our joint ingenuity could suggest was taken.\n\nJust before sundown we perceived a small company of men advancing towards us from the direction of Loo, one of whom bore a palm leaf in his hand as a sign that he came as a herald.\n\nAs he came, Ignosi, Infadoos, one or two chiefs, and ourselves, went down to the foot of the mountain to meet him. He was a gallant-looking fellow, with the regulation leopard-skin cloak.\n\n\"Greeting!\" he cried, as he came near; \"the king's greeting to those who make unholy war against the king; the lion's greeting to the jackals who snarl around his heels.\"\n\n\"Speak,\" I said.\n\n\"These are the king's words. Surrender to the king's mercy ere a worse thing befall ye. Already the shoulder has been torn from the black bull, and the king drives him bleeding about the camp.\"\n\n\"What are Twala's terms?\" I asked for curiosity.\n\n\"His terms are merciful, worthy of a great king. These are the words of Twala, the one-eyed, the mighty, the husband of a thousand wives, lord of the Kukuanas, keeper of the great road (Solomon's Road), beloved of the strange ones who sit in silence at the mountains yonder (the Three Witches), calf of the black cow, elephant whose tread shakes the earth, terror of the evil-doer, ostrich whose feet devour the desert, huge one, black one, wise one, king from generation to generation! these are the words of Twala: 'I will have mercy and be satisfied with a little blood. One in every ten shall die, the rest shall go free; but the white man Incubu, who slew Scragga, my son, and the black man, his servant, who pretends to my throne, and Infadoos, my brother, who brews rebellion against me, these shall die by torture as an offering to the silent ones.' Such are the merciful words of Twala.\"\n\nAfter consulting with the others a little, I answered him in a loud voice, so that the soldiers might hear, thus\u2014\n\n\"Go back, thou dog, to Twala, who sent thee, and say that we, Ignosi, veritable king of the Kukuanas, Incubu, Bougwan, and Macumazahn, the wise white ones from the stars, who make dark the sun, Infadoos, of the royal house, and the chiefs, captains, and people here gathered, make answer and say, 'That we will not surrender; that before the sun has twice gone down Twala's corpse shall stiffen at Twala's gate, and Ignosi, whose father Twala slew, shall reign in his stead.' Now go, ere we whip thee away, and beware how ye lift a hand against such as we.\"\n\nThe herald laughed loud. \"Ye frighten not men with such swelling words,\" he cried out. \"Show yourselves as bold tomorrow, O ye who darken the sun. Be bold, fight, and be merry, before the crows pick your bones till they are whiter than your faces. Farewell; perhaps we may meet in the fight; wait for me, I pray, white men.\" And with this shaft of sarcasm he retired, and almost immediately the sun sank.\n\nThat night was a busy one for us, for as far as was possible by the moonlight all preparations for the morrow's fight were continued. Messengers were constantly coming and going from the place where we sat in council. At last, about an hour after midnight, everything that could be done was done, and the camp, save for the occasional challenge of a sentry, sank into sleep. Sir Henry and I, accompanied by Ignosi and one of the chiefs, descended the hill and made the round of the outposts. As we went, suddenly, from all sorts of unexpected places, spears gleamed out in the moonlight, only to vanish again as we uttered the password. It was clear to us that none were sleeping at their posts. Then we returned, picking our way through thousands of sleeping warriors, many of whom were taking their last earthly rest.\n\nThe moonlight flickered along their spears, and played upon their features and made them ghastly; the chilly night wind tossed their tall and hearse-like plumes. There they lay in wild confusion, with arms outstretched and twisted limbs; their stern, stalwart forms looking weird and unhuman in the moonlight.\n\n\"How many of these do you suppose will be alive at this time tomorrow?\" asked Sir Henry.\n\nI shook my head and looked again at the sleeping men, and to my tired and yet excited imagination it seemed as though death had already touched them. My mind's eye singled out those who were sealed to slaughter, and there rushed in upon my heart a great sense of the mystery of human life, and an overwhelming sorrow at its futility and sadness. To-night these thousands slept their healthy sleep, tomorrow they, and many others with them, ourselves perhaps among them, would be stiffening in the cold; their wives would be widows, their children fatherless, and their place know them no more for ever. Only the old moon would shine serenely on, the night wind would stir the grasses, and the wide earth would take its happy rest, even as it did aeons before these were, and will do \u00e6ons after they have been forgotten.\n\nYet man dies not whilst the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains. His name is forgotten, indeed, but the breath he breathed yet stirs the pine-tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spoke yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited to-day; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he felt are our familiar friends\u2014the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also!\n\nTruly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable and immortal elements of life, which, having once been, can never die, though they blend and change and change again for ever.\n\nAll sorts of reflections of this sort passed through my mind\u2014for as I get older I regret to say that a detestable habit of thinking seems to be getting a hold of me\u2014while I stood and stared at those grim yet fantastic lines of warriors sleeping, as their saying goes, \"upon their spears.\"\n\n\"Curtis,\" I said to Sir Henry, \"I am in a condition of pitiable funk.\"\n\nSir Henry stroked his yellow beard and laughed, as he answered\u2014\n\n\"I've heard you make that sort of remark before, Quatermain.\"\n\n\"Well, I mean it now. Do you know, I very much doubt if one of us will be alive tomorrow night. We shall be attacked in overwhelming force, and it is exceedingly doubtful if we can hold this place:\"\n\n\"We'll give a good account of some of them, at any rate. Look here, Quatermain, the business is a nasty one, and one with which, properly speaking, we ought not to be mixed up, but we are in for it, so we must make the best of it. Speaking personally, I had rather be killed fighting than any other way, and now that there seems little chance of my finding my poor brother, it makes the idea easier to me. But fortune favours the brave, and we may succeed. Anyway, the slaughter will be awful, and as we have a reputation to keep up, we shall have to be in the thick of it.\"\n\nSir Henry made this last remark in a mournful voice, but there was a gleam in his eye which belied it. I have a sort of idea that Sir Henry Curtis actually likes fighting.\n\nAfter this we went and slept for a couple of hours.\n\nJust about dawn we were awakened by Infadoos, who came to say that great activity was to be observed in Loo, and that parties of the king's skirmishers were driving in our outposts.\n\nWe got up and dressed ourselves for the fray, each putting on our chain-armour shirt, for which at the present juncture we felt exceedingly thankful. Sir Henry went the whole length about the matter, and dressed himself like a native warrior. \"When you are in Kukuanaland, do as the Kukuanas do,\" he remarked, as he drew the shining steel over his broad shoulders, which it fitted like a glove. Nor did he stop there. At his request, Infadoos had provided him with a complete set of war uniform. Round his throat he fastened the leopard-skin cloak of a commanding officer, on his brows he bound the plume of black ostrich feathers, worn only by generals of high rank, and round his centre a magnificent moocha of white ox-tails. A pair of sandals, a leglet of goats' hair, a heavy battle-axe, with a rhinoceros-horn handle, a round iron shield, covered with white ox-hide, and the regulation number of tollas, or throwing knives, made up his equipment, to which, however, he added his revolver. The dress was, no doubt, a savage one, but I am bound to say I never saw a finer sight than Sir Henry Curtis presented in this guise. It showed off his magnificent physique to the greatest advantage, and when Ignosi arrived presently, arrayed in similar costume, I thought to myself that I never before saw two such splendid men. As for Good and myself, the chain armour did not suit us nearly so well. To begin with, Good insisted upon keeping on his trousers, and a stout, short gentleman with an eyeglass, and one half of his face shaved, arrayed in a mail shirt carefully tucked into a very seedy pair of corduroys, looks more striking than imposing. As for myself, my chain shirt being too big for me, I put it on over all my clothes, which caused it to bulge out in a somewhat ungainly fashion. I discarded my trousers, however, determined to go into battle with bare legs, in order to be the lighter, in case it became necessary to retire quickly, retaining only my veldtschoons. This, a spear, a shield, which I did not know how to use, a couple of tollas, a revolver, and a huge plume, which I pinned into the top of my shooting hat, in order to give a bloodthirsty finish to my appearance, completed my modest equipment. In addition to all these articles, of course we had our rifles, but as ammunition was scarce, and they would be useless in case of a charge, we had arranged to have them carried behind us by bearers.\n\nAs soon as we had equipped ourselves, we hastily swallowed some food, and then started out to see how things were progressing. At one point in the table-land of the mountain there was a little koppie of brown stone, which served for the double purpose of headquarters and a conning tower. Here we found Infadoos surrounded by his own regiment, the Greys, which was undoubtedly the finest in the Kukuana army, and the same which we had first seen at the outlying kraal. This regiment, now three thousand five hundred strong, was being held in reserve, and the men were lying down on the grass in companies, and watching the king's forces creep out of Loo in long ant-like columns. There seemed to be no end to those columns\u2014three in all, and each numbering at least eleven or twelve thousand men.\n\nAs soon as they were clear of the town, they formed up. Then one body marched off to the right, one to the left, and the third came slowly on towards us.\n\n\"Ah,\" said Infadoos, \"they are going to attack us on three sides at once.\"\n\nThis was rather serious news, for as our position on the top of the mountain, which was at least a mile and a half in circumference, was an extended one, it was important to us to concentrate our comparatively small defending force as much as possible. But as it was impossible for us to dictate in what way we should be attacked, we had to make the best of it, and accordingly sent orders to the various regiments to prepare to receive the separate onslaughts."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Attack",
                "text": "Slowly, and without the slightest appearance of haste or excitement, the three columns crept on. When within about five hundred yards of us, the main or centre column halted at the root of a tongue of open plain which ran up into the hill, to enable the other two to circumvent our position, which was shaped more or less in the form of a horse-shoe, the two points being towards the town of Loo, their object being, no doubt, that the threefold assault should be delivered simultaneously.\n\n\"Oh, for a gatling!\" groaned Good, as he contemplated the serried phalanxes beneath us. \"I would clear the plain in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\"We have not got one, so it is no use yearning for it; but suppose you try a shot, Quatermain. See how near you can go to that tall fellow who appears to be in command. Two to one you miss him, and an even sovereign, to be honestly paid if ever we get out of this, that you don't drop the ball within ten yards.\"\n\nThis piqued me, so, loading the express with solid ball, I waited till my friend walked some ten yards out from his force, in order to get a better view of our position, accompanied only by an orderly, and then, lying down and resting the express upon a rock, I covered him. The rifle, like all expresses, was only sighted to three hundred and fifty yards, so to allow for the drop in trajectory I took him half way down the neck, which ought, I calculated, to find him in the chest. He stood quite still and gave me every opportunity, but whether it was the excitement or the wind, or the fact of the man being a long shot, I don't know, but this was what happened. Getting dead on, as I thought, a fine sight, I pressed, and when the puff of smoke had cleared away, I, to my disgust, saw my man standing unharmed, whilst his orderly, who was at least three paces to the left, was stretched upon the ground, apparently dead. Turning swiftly, the officer I had aimed at began to run towards his force, in evident alarm.\n\n\"Bravo, Quatermain!\" sang out Good; \"you've frightened him.\"\n\nThis made me very angry, for if possible to avoid it, I hate to miss in public. When one can only do one thing well, one likes to keep up one's reputation in that thing. Moved quite out of myself at my failure, I did a rash thing. Rapidly covering the general as he ran, I let drive with the second barrel. The poor man threw up his arms, and fell forward on to his face. This time I had made no mistake; and\u2014I say it as a proof of how little we think of others when our own pride or reputation are in question\u2014I was brute enough to feel delighted at the sight.\n\nThe regiments who had seen the feat cheered wildly at this exhibition of the white man's magic, which they took as an omen of success, while the force to which the general had belonged\u2014which, indeed, as we afterwards ascertained, he had commanded\u2014began to fall back in confusion. Sir Henry and Good now took up their rifles, and began to fire, the latter industriously \"browning\" the dense mass before him with a Winchester repeater, and I also had another shot or two, with the result that so far as we could judge we put some eight or ten men hors de combat before they got out of range.\n\nJust as we stopped firing there came an ominous roar from our far right, then a similar roar from our left. The two other divisions were engaging us.\n\nAt the sound, the mass of men before us opened out a little, and came on towards the hill up the spit of bare grass land at a slow trot, singing a deep-throated song as they advanced. We kept up a steady fire from our rifles as they came, Ignosi joining in occasionally, and accounted for several men, but of course produced no more effect upon that mighty rush of armed humanity than he who throws pebbles does on the advancing wave.\n\nOn they came, with a shout and the clashing of spears; now they were driving in the outposts we had placed among the rocks at the foot of the hill. After that the advance was a little slower, for though as yet we had offered no serious opposition, the attacking force had to come up hill, and came slowly to save their breath. Our first line of defence was about half-way up the side, our second fifty yards further back, while our third occupied the edge of the plain.\n\nOn they came, shouting their war-cry, \"Twala! Twala! Chiele! Chiel\u00e9!\" (Twala! Twala! Smite! Smite!). \"Ignosi! Ignosi! Chiele! Chiel\u00e9!\" answered our people. They were quite close now, and the tollas, or throwing knives, began to flash backwards and forwards, and now with an awful yell the battle closed in.\n\nTo and fro swayed the mass of struggling warriors, men falling thick as leaves in an autumn wind; but before long the superior weight of the attacking force began to tell, and our first line of defence was slowly pressed back, till it merged into the second. Here the struggle was very fierce, but again our people were driven back and up, till at length, within twenty minutes of the commencement of the fight, our third line came into action.\n\nBut by this time the assailants were much exhausted, and had besides lost many men killed and wounded, and to break through that third impenetrable hedge of spears proved beyond their powers. For awhile the dense mass of struggling warriors swung backwards and forwards in the fierce ebb and flow of battle, and the issue was doubtful. Sir Henry watched the desperate struggle with a kindling eye, and then without a word he rushed off, followed by Good, and flung himself into the hottest of the fray. As for myself, I stopped where I was.\n\nThe soldiers caught sight of his tall form as he plunged into the battle, and there rose a cry of\u2014\n\n\"Nanzia Incubu!\" (Here is the Elephant!) \"Chiel\u00e9! Chiel\u00e9!\"\n\nFrom that moment the issue was no longer in doubt. Inch by inch, fighting with desperate gallantry, the attacking force was pressed back down the hillside, till at last it retreated upon its reserves in something like confusion. At that moment, too, a messenger arrived to say that the left attack had been repulsed; and I was just beginning to congratulate myself that the affair was over for the present, when, to our horror, we perceived our men who had been engaged in the right defence being driven towards us across the plain, followed by swarms of the enemy, who had evidently succeeded at this point.\n\nIgnosi, who was standing by me, took in the situation at a glance, and issued a rapid order. Instantly the reserve regiment round us (the Greys) extended itself.\n\nAgain Ignosi gave a word of command, which was taken up and repeated by the captains, and in another second, to my intense disgust, I found myself involved in a furious onslaught upon the advancing foe. Getting as much as I could behind Ignosi's huge frame, I made the best of a bad job, and toddled along to be killed, as though I liked it. In a minute or two\u2014the time seemed all too short to me\u2014we were plunging through the flying groups of our men, who at once began to re-form behind us, and then I am sure I do not know what happened. All I can remember is a dreadful rolling noise of the meeting of shields, and the sudden apparition of a huge ruf fian, whose eyes seemed literally to be starting out of his head, making straight at me with a bloody spear. But\u2014I say it with pride\u2014I rose to the occasion. It was an occasion before which most people would have collapsed once and for all. Seeing that if I stood where I was I must be done for, I, as the horrid apparition came, flung myself down in front of him so cleverly, that, being unable to stop himself, he took a header right over my prostrate form. Before he could rise again, I had risen and settled the matter from behind with my revolver.\n\nShortly after this, somebody knocked me down, and I remember no more of the charge.\n\nWhen I came to, I found myself back at the koppie, with Good bending over me with some water in a gourd.\n\n\"How do you feel, old fellow?\" he asked, anxiously.\n\nI got up and shook myself before answering.\n\n\"Pretty well, thank you,\" I answered.\n\n\"Thank Heaven! when I saw them carry you in I felt quite sick; I thought you were done for.\"\n\n\"Not this time, my boy. I fancy I only got a rap on the head, which knocked me out of time. How has it ended?\"\n\n\"They are repulsed at every point for the time. The loss is dreadfully heavy; we have lost quite two thousand killed and wounded, and they must have lost three. Look, there's a sight!\" and he pointed to long lines of men advancing by fours. In the centre of, and being borne by each group of four, was a kind of hide tray, of which a Kukuana force always carried a quantity, with a loop for a handle at each corner. On these trays\u2014and their number seemed endless\u2014lay wounded men, who as they arrived were hastily examined by the medicine men, of whom ten were attached to each regiment. If the wound was not of a fatal character, the sufferer was taken away and attended to as carefully as circumstances would allow. But if, on the other hand, the wounded man's condition was hopeless, what followed was very dreadful, though doubtless it was the truest mercy. One of the doctors, under pretence of carrying out an examination, swiftly opened an artery with a sharp knife, and in a minute or two the sufferer expired painlessly. There were many cases that day in which this was done. In fact, it was done in most cases when the wound was in the body, for the gash made by the entry of the enormously broad spears used by the Kukuanas generally rendered recovery hopeless. In most cases the poor sufferers were already unconscious, and in others the fatal \"nick\" of the artery was done so swiftly and painlessly that they did not seem to notice it. Still it was a ghastly sight, and one from which we were glad to escape; indeed, I never remember one which affected me more than seeing those gallant soldiers thus put out of pain by the red-handed medicine men, except, indeed, on an occasion when, after an attack, I saw a force of Swazis burying their hopelessly wounded alive.\n\nHurrying from this dreadful scene to the further side of the koppie, we found Sir Henry (who still held a bloody battle-axe in his hand), Ignosi, Infadoos, and one or two of the chiefs in deep consultation.\n\n\"Thank heavens, here you are, Quatermain! I can't quite make out what Ignosi wants to do. It seems that, though we have beaten off the attack, Twala is now receiving large reinforcements, and is showing a disposition to invest us, with a view of starving us out.\"\n\n\"That's awkward.\"\n\n\"Yes; especially as Infadoos says that the water supply has given out.\"\n\n\"My lord, that is so,\" said Infadoos; \"the spring cannot supply the wants of so great a multitude, and is failing rapidly. Before night we shall all be thirsty. Listen, Macumazahn. Thou art wise, and hast doubtless seen many wars in the lands from whence thou camest\u2014that is if, indeed, they make wars in the stars. Now tell us, what shall we do? Twala has brought up many fresh men to take the place of those who have fallen. But Twala has learnt a lesson; the hawk did not think to find the heron ready; but our beak has pierced his breast; he will not strike at us again. We too are wounded, and he will wait for us to die; he will wind himself round us like a snake round a buck, and fight the fight of 'sit down.'\"\n\n\"I hear you,\" I said.\n\n\"So, Macumazahn, thou seest we have no water here, and but a little food, and we must choose between these three things\u2014to languish like a starving lion in his den, or to strive to break away towards the north, or\"\u2014and here he rose and pointed towards the dense mass of our foes\u2014\"to launch ourselves straight at Twala's throat. Incubu, the great warrior\u2014for to-day he fought like a buffalo in a net, and Twala's soldiers went down before his axe like corn before the hail; with these eyes I saw it\u2014Incubu says 'Charge;' but the Elephant is ever prone to charge. Now what says Macumazahn, the wily old fox, who has seen much, and loves to bite his enemy from behind? The last word is in Ignosi the king, for it is a king's right to speak of war; but let us hear thy voice, O Macumazahn, who watchest by night, and the voice too of him of the transparent eye.\"\n\n\"What sayest thou, Ignosi?\" I asked.\n\n\"Nay, my father,\" answered our quondam servant, who now, clad as he was in the full panoply of savage war, looked every inch a warrior king, \"do thou speak, and let me, who am but a child in wisdom beside thee, hearken to thy words.\"\n\nThus abjured, I, after taking hasty counsel with Good and Sir Henry, delivered my opinion briefly to the effect that, being trapped, our best chance, especially in view of the failure of our water supply, was to initiate an attack upon Twala's forces, and then I recommended that the attack should be delivered at once, \"before our wounds grew stiff,\" and also before the sight of Twala's overpowering force caused the hearts of our soldiers \"to wax small like fat before a fire.\" Otherwise, I pointed out, some of the captains might change their minds, and, making peace with Twala, desert him, or even betray us into his hands.\n\nThis expression of opinion seemed, on the whole, to be favourably received; indeed, among the Kukuanas my utterances met with a respect which has never been accorded to them before or since. But the real decision as to our course lay with Ignosi, who, since he had been recognised as rightful king, could exercise the almost unbounded rights of sovereignty, including, of course, the final decision on matters of generalship, and it was to him that all eyes were now turned.\n\nAt length, after a pause, during which he appeared to be thinking deeply, he spoke:\u2014\n\n\"Incubu, Macumazahn, and Bougwan, brave white men, and my friends; Infadoos, my uncle, and chiefs; my heart is fixed. I will strike at Twala this day, and set my fortunes on the blow, ay, and my life; my life and your lives also. Listen: thus will I strike. Ye see how the hill curves round like the half-moon, and how the plain runs like a green tongue towards us within the curve?\"\n\n\"We see,\" I answered.\n\n\"Good; it is now mid-day, and the men eat and rest after the toil of battle. When the sun has turned and travelled a little way towards the dark, let thy regiment, my uncle, advance with one other down to the green tongue. And it shall be that when Twala sees it he shall hurl his force at it to crush it. But the spot is narrow, and the regiments can come against thee one at a time only; so shall they be destroyed one by one, and the eyes of all Twala's army shall be fixed upon a struggle the like of which has not been seen by living man. And with thee my uncle shall go Incubu my friend, that when Twala sees his battle-axe flashing in the first rank of the 'Greys' his heart may grow faint. And I will come with the second regiment, that which follows thee, so that if ye are destroyed, as it may happen, there may yet be a king left to fight for; and with me shall come Macumazahn the wise.\"\n\n\"It is well, O king,\" said Infadoos, apparently contemplating the certainty of the complete annihilation of his regiment with perfect calmness. Truly these Kukuanas are a wonderful people. Death has no terrors for them when it is incurred in the course of duty.\n\n\"And whilst the eyes of the multitude of Twala's regiments are thus fixed upon the fight,\" went on Ignosi, \"behold, one-third of the men who are left alive to us (i.e., about 6,000) shall creep along the right horn of the hill and fall upon the left flank of Twala's force, and one-third shall creep along the left horn and fall upon Twala's right flank. And when I see that the horns are ready to toss Twala, then will I, with the men who are left to me, charge home in Twala's face, and if fortune goes with us the day will be ours, and before Night drives her horses from the mountains to the mountains we shall sit in peace at Loo. And now let us eat and make ready; and, Infadoos, do thou prepare, that the plan be carried out; and stay, let my white father Bougwan go with the right horn, that his shining eye may give courage to the men.\"\n\nThe arrangements for attack thus briefly indicated were set in motion with a rapidity that spoke well for the perfection of the Kukuana military system. Within little more than an hour rations had been served out to the men and devoured, the three divisions were formed, the plan of attack explained to the leaders, and the whole force, with the exception of a guard left with the wounded, now numbering about 18,000 men in all, was ready to be put in motion.\n\nPresently Good came up and shook hands with Sir Henry and myself.\n\n\"Good-bye, you fellows,\" he said, \"I am off with the right wing according to orders; and so I have come to shake hands in case we should not meet again, you know,\" he added, significantly.\n\nWe shook hands in silence, and not without the exhibition of as much emotion as Englishmen are wont to show.\n\n\"It is a queer business,\" said Sir Henry, his deep voice shaking a little, \"and I confess I never expect to see tomorrow's sun. As far as I can make out, the Greys, with whom I am to go, are to fight until they are wiped out in order to enable the wings to slip round unawares and outflank Twala. Well, so be it; at any rate, it will be a man's death! Good-bye, old fellow. God bless you! I hope you will pull through and live to collar the diamonds; but if you do, take my advice and don't have anything more to do with pretenders!\"\n\nIn another second Good had wrung us both by the hand and gone; and then Infadoos came up and led off Sir Henry to his place in the forefront of the Greys, whilst, with many misgivings, I departed with Ignosi to my station in the second attacking regiment."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Last Stand of the Greys",
                "text": "In a few more minutes the regiments destined to carry out the flanking movements had tramped off in silence, keeping carefully under the lee of the rising ground in order to conceal the movement from the keen eyes of Twala's scouts.\n\nHalf an hour or more was allowed to elapse between the setting out of the horns or wings of the army before any movement was made by the Greys and the supporting regiment, known as the Buffaloes, which formed its chest, and which were destined to bear the brunt of the battle.\n\nBoth of these regiments were almost perfectly fresh, and of full strength, the Greys having been in reserve in the morning, and having lost but a small number of men in sweeping back that part of the attack which had proved successful in breaking the line of defence, on the occasion when I charged with them and got knocked silly for my pains. As for the Buffaloes, they had formed the third line of defence on the left, and as the attacking force at that point had not succeeded in breaking through the second, had scarcely come into action at all.\n\nInfadoos, who was a wary old general, and knew the absolute importance of keeping up the spirits of his men on the eve of such a desperate encounter, employed the pause in addressing his own regiment, the Greys, in poetical language: in explaining to them the honour that they were receiving in being put thus in the forefront of the battle, and in having the great white warrior from the stars to fight with them in their ranks, and in promising large rewards of cattle and promotion to all who survived in the event of Ignosi's arms being successful.\n\nI looked down the long lines of waving black plumes and stern faces beneath them, and sighed to think that within one short hour most, if not all, of those magnificent veteran warriors, not a man of whom was under forty years of age, would be laid dead or dying in the dust. It could not be otherwise; they were being condemned, with that wise recklessness of human life that marks the great general, and often saves his forces and attains his ends, to certain slaughter, in order to give the cause and the remainder of the army a chance of success. They were foredoomed to die, and they knew it. It was to be their task to engage regiment after regiment of Twala's army on the narrow strip of green beneath us, till they were exterminated, or till the wings found a favourable opportunity for their onslaught. And yet they never hesitated, nor could I detect a sign of fear upon the face of a single warrior. There they were\u2014going to certain death, about to quit the blessed light of day for ever, and yet able to contemplate their doom without a tremor. I could not even at that moment help contrasting their state of mind with my own, which was far from comfortable, and breathing a sigh of envy and admiration. Never before had I seen such an absolute devotion to the idea of duty, and such a complete indifference to its bitter fruits.\n\n\"Behold your king!\" ended old Infadoos, pointing to Ignosi; \"go fight and fall for him, as is the duty of brave men, and cursed and shameful for ever be the name of him who shrinks from death for his king, or who turns his back to his enemy. Behold your king! chiefs, captains, and soldiers; now do your homage to the sacred snake, and then follow on, that Incubu and I may show ye the road to the heart of Twala's forces.\"\n\nThere was a moment's pause, then suddenly there rose from the serried phalanxes before us a murmur, like the distant whisper of the sea, caused by the gentle tapping of the handles of six thousand spears against their holders' shields. Slowly it swelled, till its growing volume deepened and widened into a roar of rolling noise, that echoed like thunder against the mountains, and filled the air with heavy waves of sound. Then it decreased and slowly died away into nothing, and suddenly out crashed the royal salute.\n\nIgnosi, I thought to myself, might well be a proud man that day, for no Roman emperor ever had such a salutation from gladiators \"about to die.\"\n\nIgnosi acknowledged this magnificent act of homage by lifting his battle-axe, and then the Greys filed off in a triple-line formation, each line containing about one thousand fighting men, exclusive of officers. When the last line had gone some five hundred yards, Ignosi put himself at the head of the Buffaloes, which regiment was drawn up in a similar three-line formation, and gave the word to march, and off we went, I, needless to say, uttering the most heartfelt prayers that I might come out of that job with a whole skin. Many a queer position have I found myself in, but never before in one quite so unpleasant as the present, or one in which my chance of coming off safe was so small.\n\nBy the time that we reached the edge of the plateau the Greys were already half-way down the slope ending in the tongue of grass land that ran up into the bend of the mountain, something as the frog of a horse's foot runs up into the shoe. The excitement in Twala's camp on the plain beyond was very great, and regiment after regiment were starting forward at a long swinging trot in order to reach the root of the tongue of land before the attacking force could emerge into the plain of Loo.\n\nThis tongue of land, which was some three hundred yards in depth, was even at its root or widest part not more than three hundred and fifty paces across, while at its tip it scarcely measured ninety. The Greys, who, in passing down the side of the hill and on to the tip of the tongue, had formed in column, on reaching the spot where it broadened out again reassumed their triple-line formation, and halted dead.\n\nThen we\u2014that is, the Buffaloes\u2014moved down the tip of the tongue and took our stand in reserve, about one hundred yards behind the last line of the Greys, and on slightly higher ground. Meanwhile we had leisure to observe Twala's entire force, which had evidently been reinforced since the morning attack, and could not now, notwithstanding their losses, number less than forty thousand, moving swiftly up towards us. But as they drew near the root of the tongue they hesitated, having discovered that only one regiment could advance into the gorge at a time, and that there, some seventy yards from the mouth of it, unassailable except in front, on account of the high walls of boulder-strewn ground on either side, stood the famous regiment of Greys, the pride and glory of the Kukuana army, ready to hold the way against their forces as the three Romans once held the bridge against thousands. They hesitated, and finally stopped their advance; there was no eagerness to cross spears with those three lines of grim warriors who stood so firm and ready. Presently, however, a tall general, with the customary headdress of nodding ostrich plumes, came running up, attended by a group of chiefs and orderlies, being, I thought, none other than Twala himself, and gave an order, and the first regiment raised a shout, and charged up towards the Greys, who remained perfectly still and silent till the attacking troops were within forty yards, and a volley of tollas, or throwing knives, came rattling among their ranks.\n\nThen suddenly, with a bound and a roar, they sprang forward with uplifted spears, and the two regiments met in deadly strife. Next second, the roll of the meeting shields came to our ears like the sound of thunder, and the whole plain seemed to be alive with flashes of light reflected from the stabbing spears. To and fro swung the heaving mass of struggling, stabbing humanity, but not for long. Suddenly the attacking lines seemed to grow thinner, and then with a slow, long heave the Greys passed over them, just as a great wave heaves up and passes over a sunken ridge. It was done; that regiment was completely destroyed, but the Greys had but two lines left now; a third of their number were dead.\n\nClosing up shoulder to shoulder once more, they halted in silence and awaited attack; and I was rejoiced to catch sight of Sir Henry's yellow beard as he moved to and fro, arranging the ranks. So he was yet alive!\n\nMeanwhile we moved up on to the ground of the encounter, which was cumbered by about four thousand prostrate human beings, dead, dying, and wounded, and literally stained red with blood. Ignosi issued an order, which was rapidly passed down the ranks, to the effect that none of the enemies' wounded were to be killed, and so far as we could see this order was scrupulously carried out. It would have been a shocking sight, if we had had time to think of it.\n\nBut now a second regiment, distinguished by white plumes, kilts, and shields, was moving up to the attack of the two thousand remaining Greys, who stood waiting in the same ominous silence as before, till the foe was within forty yards or so, when they hurled themselves with irresistible force upon them. Again there came the awful roll of the meeting shields, and as we watched the grim tragedy repeated itself. But this time the issue was left longer in doubt; indeed, it seemed for awhile almost impossible that the Greys should again prevail. The attacking regiment, which was one formed of young men, fought with the utmost fury, and at first seemed by sheer weight to be driving the veterans back. The slaughter was something awful, hundreds falling every minute; and from among the shouts of the warriors and the groans of the dying, set to the clashing music of meeting spears, came a continuous hissing undertone of \"S'gee, s'gee,\" the note of triumph of each victor as he passed his spear through and through the body of his fallen foe.\n\nBut perfect discipline and steady and unchanging valour can do wonders, and one veteran soldier is worth two young ones, as soon became apparent in the present case. For just as we thought that it was all up with the Greys, and were preparing to take their place so soon as they made room by being destroyed, I heard Sir Henry's deep voice ringing out above the din, and caught a glimpse of his circling battle-axe as he waved it high above his plumes. Then came a change; the Greys ceased to give; they stood still as a rock, against which the furious waves of spearmen broke again and again, only to recoil. Presently they began to move again\u2014forward this time; as they had no firearms, there was no smoke, so we could see it all. Another minute and the onslaught grew fainter.\n\n\"Ah, they are men indeed; they will conquer again,\" called out Ignosi, who was grinding his teeth with excitement at my side. \"See, it is done!\"\n\nSuddenly, like puffs of smoke from the mouth of a cannon, the attacking regiment broke away in flying groups, their white headdresses streaming behind them in the wind, and left their opponents victors, indeed, but, alas! no more a regiment. Of the gallant triple line, which, forty minutes before, had gone into action three thousand strong, there remained at most some six hundred blood-bespattered men; the rest were under foot. And yet they cheered and waved their spears in triumph, and then, instead of falling back upon us as we expected, they ran forward, for a hundred yards or so, after the flying groups of foemen, took possession of a gently rising knoll of ground, and, resuming the old triple formation, formed a threefold ring around it. And then, thanks be to God, standing on the top of the mound for a minute, I saw Sir Henry, apparently unharmed, and with him our old friend Infadoos. Then Twala's regiments rolled down upon the doomed band, and once more the battle closed in.\n\nAs those who read this history will probably long ago have gathered, I am, to be honest, a bit of a coward, and certainly in no way given to fighting, though, somehow, it has often been my lot to get into unpleasant positions, and to be obliged to shed man's blood. But I have always hated it, and kept my own blood as undiminished in quantity as possible, sometimes by a judicious use of my heels. At this moment, however, for the first time in my life, I felt my bosom burn with martial ardour. Warlike fragments from the \"Ingoldsby Legends,\" together with numbers of sanguinary verses from the Old Testament, sprang up in my brain like mushrooms in the dark; my blood, which hitherto had been half-frozen with horror, went beating through my veins, and there came upon me a savage desire to kill and spare not. I glanced round at the serried ranks of warriors behind us, and somehow, all in an instant, began to wonder if my face looked like theirs. There they stood, their heads craned forward over their shields, the hands twitching, the lips apart, the fierce features instinct with the hungry lust of battle, and in the eyes a look like the glare of a bloodhound when he sights his quarry.\n\nOnly Ignosi's heart seemed, to judge from his comparative self possession, to all appearance, to beat as calmly as ever beneath his leopard-skin cloak, though even he still kept on grinding his teeth. I could stand it no longer.\n\n\"Are we to stand here till we put out roots, Umbopa\u2014Ignosi, I mean\u2014while Twala swallows our brothers yonder?\" I asked.\n\n\"Nay, Macumazahn,\" was the answer; \"see, now is the ripe moment : let us pluck it.\"\n\nAs he spoke, a fresh regiment rushed past the ring upon the little mound, and wheeling round, attacked it from the hither side.\n\nThen, lifting his battle-axe, Ignosi gave the signal to advance, and, raising the Kukuana battle-cry, the Buffaloes charged home with a rush like the rush of the sea.\n\nWhat followed immediately on this it is out of my power to tell. All I can remember is a wild yet ordered rushing, that seemed to shake the ground; a sudden change of front and forming up on the part of the regiment against which the charge was directed; then an awful shock, a dull roar of voices, and a continuous flashing of spears, seen through a red mist of blood.\n\nWhen my mind cleared I found myself standing inside the remnant of the Greys near the top of the mound, and just behind no less a person than Sir Henry himself. How I got there I had, at the moment, no idea, but Sir Henry afterwards told me that I was borne up by the first furious charge of the Buffaloes almost to his feet, and then left, as they in turn were pressed back. Thereon he dashed out of the circle and dragged me into it.\n\nAs for the fight that followed, who can describe it? Again and again the multitudes surged up against our momentarily lessening circle, and again and again we beat them back.\n\n\u2003\"The stubborn spearmen still made good\n\n\u2003The dark impenetrable wood;\n\n\u2003Each stepping where his comrade stood\n\n\u2003The instant that he fell,\"\n\n...as I think the \"Ingoldsby Legends\" beautifully puts it.\n\nIt was a splendid thing to see those brave battalions come on time after time over the barriers of their dead, sometimes holding corpses before them to receive our spear thrusts, only to leave their own corpses to swell the rising piles. It was a gallant sight to see that sturdy old warrior, Infadoos, as cool as though he were on parade, shouting out orders, taunts, and even jests, to keep up the spirit of his few remaining men, and then, as each charge rolled up, stepping forward to wherever the fighting was thickest, to bear his share in repelling it. And yet more gallant was the vision of Sir Henry, whose ostrich plumes had been shorn off by a spear stroke, so that his long yellow hair streamed out in the breeze behind him. There he stood, the great Dane, for he was nothing else, his hands, his axe, and his armour, all red with blood, and none could live before his stroke. Time after time I saw it come sweeping down, as some great warrior ventured to give him battle, and as he struck he shouted, \"O-hoy! O-hoy!\" like his Bersekir forefathers, and the blow went crashing through shield and spear, through headdress, hair, and skull, till at last none would of their own will come near the great white \"tagati\" (wizard), who killed and failed not.\n\nBut suddenly there rose a cry of \"Twala, y' Twala,\" and out of the press sprang forward none other than the gigantic one-eyed king himself, also armed with battle-axe and shield, and clad in chain armour.\n\n\"Where art thou, Incubu, thou white man, who slew Scragga, my son\u2014see if thou canst kill me!\" he shouted, and at the same time hurled a tolla straight at Sir Henry, who, fortunately, saw it coming, and caught it on his shield, which it transfixed, remaining wedged in the iron plate behind the hide.\n\nThen, with a cry, Twala sprang forward straight at him, and with his battle-axe struck him such a blow upon the shield, that the mere force and shock of it brought Sir Henry, strong man as he was, down upon his knees.\n\nBut at the time the matter went no further, for at that instant there rose from the regiments pressing round us something like a shout of dismay, and on looking up I saw the cause.\n\nTo the right and to the left the plain was alive with the plumes of charging warriors. The outflanking squadrons had come to our relief. The time could not have been better chosen. All Twala's army had, as Ignosi had predicted would be the case, fixed their attention on the bloody struggle which was raging round the remnant of the Greys and the Buffaloes, who were now carrying on a battle of their own at a little distance, which two regiments had formed the chest of our army. It was not until the horns were about to close upon them that they had dreamed of their approach. And now, before they could even assume a proper formation for defence, the outflanking Impis had leapt, like greyhounds, on their flanks.\n\nIn five minutes the fate of the battle was decided. Taken on both flanks, and dismayed by the awful slaughter inflicted upon them by the Greys and Buffaloes, Twala's regiments broke into flight, and soon the whole plain between us and Loo was scattered with groups of flying soldiers, making good their retreat. As for the forces that had so recently surrounded us and the Buffaloes, they melted away as though by magic, and presently we were left standing there like a rock from which the sea has retreated. But what a sight it was! Around us the dead and dying lay in heaped-up masses, and of the gallant Greys there remained alive but ninety-five men. More than 2,900 had fallen in this one regiment, most of them never to rise again.\n\n\"Men,\" said Infadoos, calmly, as between the intervals of binding up a wound in his arm he surveyed what remained to him of his corps, \"ye have kept up the reputation of your regiment, and this day's fighting will be spoken of by your children's children.\" Then he turned round and shook Sir Henry Curtis by the hand. \"Thou art a great man, Incubu,\" he said, simply; \"I have lived a long life among warriors, and known many a brave one, yet have I never seen a man like thee.\"\n\nAt this moment the Buffaloes began to march past our position on the road to Loo, and as they did so a message was brought to us from Ignosi requesting Infadoos, Sir Henry, and myself to join him. Accordingly, orders having been issued to the remaining ninety men of the Greys to employ themselves in collecting the wounded, we joined Ignosi, who informed us that he was pressing on to Loo to complete the victory by capturing Twala, if that should be possible. Before we had gone far we suddenly discovered the figure of Good sitting on an ant-heap about one hundred paces from us. Close beside him was the body of a Kukuana.\n\n\"He must be wounded,\" said Sir Henry, anxiously. As he made the remark, an untoward thing happened. The dead body of the Kukuana soldier, or rather what had appeared to be his dead body, suddenly sprang up, knocked Good head over heels off the ant-heap, and began to spear him. We rushed forward in terror, and as we drew near we saw the brawny warrior making dig after dig at the prostrate Good, who at each prod jerked all his limbs into the air. Seeing us coming, the Kukuana gave one final most vicious dig, and with a shout of \"Take that, wizard,\" bolted off. Good did not move, and we concluded that our poor comrade was done for. Sadly we came towards him, and were indeed astonished to find him pale and faint indeed, but with a serene smile upon his face, and his eyeglass still fixed in his eye.\n\n\"Capital armour this,\" he murmured, on catching sight of our faces bending over him. \"How cold he must have been,\" and then he fainted. On examination we discovered that he had been seriously wounded in the leg by a tolla in the course of the pursuit, but that the chain armour had prevented his last assailant's spear from doing anything more than bruise him badly. It was a merciful escape. As nothing could be done for him at the moment, he was placed on one of the wicker shields used for the wounded, and carried along with us.\n\nOn arriving before the nearest gate of Loo, we found one of our regiments watching it in obedience to orders received from Ignosi. The remaining regiments were in the same way watching the other exits to the town. The officer in command of this regiment coming up, saluted Ignosi as king, and informed him that Twala's army had taken refuge in the town, whither Twala himself had also escaped, but that he thought that they were thoroughly demoralised, and would surrender. Thereupon Ignosi, after taking counsel with us, sent forward heralds to each gate ordering the defenders to open, and promising on his royal word life and forgiveness to every soldier who laid down his arms. The message was not without its effect. Presently, amid the shouts and cheers of the Buffaloes, the bridge was dropped across the fosse, and the gates upon the further side flung open.\n\nTaking due precautions against treachery, we marched on into the town. All along the roadways stood dejected warriors, their heads drooping, and their shields and spears at their feet, who, as Ignosi passed, saluted him as king. On we marched, straight to Twala's kraal. When we reached the great space, where a day or two previously we had seen the review and the witch hunt, we found it deserted. No, not quite deserted, for there, on the further side, in front of his hut, sat Twala himself, with but one attendant\u2014Gagool.\n\nIt was a melancholy sight to see him seated there, his battle-axe and shield by his side, his chin upon his mailed breast, with but one old crone for companion, and notwithstanding his cruelties and misdeeds, a pang of compassion shot through me as I saw him thus \"fallen from his high estate.\" Not a soldier of all his armies, not a courtier out of the hundreds who had cringed round him, not even a solitary wife, remained to share his fate or halve the bitterness of his fall. Poor savage! he was learning the lesson that Fate teaches to most who live long enough, that the eyes of mankind are blind to the discredited, and that he who is defenceless and fallen finds few friends and little mercy. Nor, indeed, in this case did he deserve any.\n\nFiling through the kraal gate, we marched straight across the open space to where the ex-king sat. When within about fifty yards the regiment was halted, and accompanied only by a small guard we advanced towards him, Gagool reviling us bitterly as we came. As we drew near, Twala, for the first time, lifted up his plumed head, and fixed his one eye, which seemed to flash with suppressed fury almost as brightly as the great diamond bound round his forehead, upon his successful rival\u2014Ignosi.\n\n\"Hail, O king!\" he said, with bitter mockery; \"thou who hast eaten of my bread, and now by the aid of the white man's magic hast seduced my regiments and defeated mine army, hail! what fate hast thou for me, O king?\"\n\n\"The fate thou gavest to my father, whose throne thou hast sat on these many years!\" was the stern answer.\n\n\"It is well. I will show thee how to die, that thou mayest remember it against thine own time. See, the sun sinks in blood,\" and he pointed with his red battle-axe towards the fiery orb now going down; \"it is well that my sun should sink with it. And now, O king! I am ready to die, but I crave the boon of the Kukuana royal house to die fighting. Thou canst not refuse it, or even those cowards who fled to-day will hold thee shamed.\"\n\n\"It is granted. Choose\u2014with whom wilt thou fight? Myself I cannot fight with thee, for the king fights not except in war.\"\n\nTwala's sombre eye ran up and down our ranks, and I felt, as for a moment it rested on myself, that the position had developed a new horror. What if he chose to begin by fighting me? What chance should I have against a desperate savage six feet five high, and broad in proportion? I might as well commit suicide at once. Hastily I made up my mind to decline the combat, even if I were hooted out of Kukuanaland as a consequence. It is, I think, better to be hooted than to be quartered with a battle-axe.\n\nPresently he spoke.\n\n\"Incubu, what sayest thou, shall we end what we began to-day, or shall I call thee coward, white\u2014even to the liver?\"\n\n\"Nay,\" interposed Ignosi, hastily; \"thou shalt not fight with Incubu.\"\n\n\"Not if he is afraid,\" said Twala.\n\nUnfortunately Sir Henry understood this remark, and the blood flamed up into his cheeks.\n\n\"I will fight him,\" he said; \"he shall see if I am afraid.\"\n\n\"For God's sake,\" I entreated, \"don't risk your life against that of a desperate man. Anybody who saw you to-day will know that you are not a coward.\"\n\n\"I will fight him,\" was the sullen answer. \"No living man shall call me a coward. I am ready now!\" and he stepped forward and lifted his axe.\n\nI wrung my hands over this absurd piece of Quixotism; but if he was determined on fighting, of course I could not stop him.\n\n\"Fight not, my white brother,\" said Ignosi, laying his hand affectionately on Sir Henry's arm; \"thou hast fought enough, and if aught befell thee at his hands it would cut my heart in twain.\"\n\n\"I will fight, Ignosi,\" was Sir Henry's answer.\n\n\"It is well, Incubu; thou art a brave man. It will be a good fight. Behold, Twala, the Elephant is ready for thee.\"\n\nThe ex-king laughed savagely, and stepped forward and faced Curtis. For a moment they stood thus, and the setting sun caught their stalwart frames and clothed them both in fire. They were a well-matched pair.\n\nThen they began to circle round each other, their battle-axes raised.\n\nSuddenly Sir Henry sprang forward and struck a fearful blow at Twala, who stepped to one side. So heavy was the stroke that the striker half overbalanced himself, a circumstance of which his antagonist took a prompt advantage. Circling his heavy battle-axe round his head, he brought it down with tremendous force. My heart jumped into my mouth; I thought that the affair was already finished. But no; with a quick upward movement of the left arm Sir Henry interposed his shield between himself and the axe, with the result that its outer edge was shorn clean off, the axe falling on his left shoulder, but not heavily enough to do any serious damage. In another second Sir Henry got in another blow, which was also received by Twala upon his shield. Then followed blow upon blow, which were, in turn, either received upon the shield or avoided. The excitement grew intense; the regiment which was watching the encounter forgot its discipline, and, drawing near, shouted and groaned at every stroke. Just at this time, too, Good, who had been laid upon the ground by me, recovered from his faint, and, sitting up, perceived what was going on. In an instant he was up, and, catching hold of my arm, hopped about from place to place on one leg, dragging me after him, yelling out encouragements to Sir Henry\u2014\n\n\"Go it, old fellow!\" he halloed. \"That was a good one! Give it him amidships,\" and so on.\n\nPresently Sir Henry, having caught a fresh stroke upon his shield, hit out with all his force. The stroke cut through Twala's shield and through the tough chain armour behind it, gashing him in the shoulder. With a yell of pain and fury Twala returned the stroke with interest, and, such was his strength, shore right through the rhinoceros' horn handle of his antagonist's battle-axe, strengthened as it was with bands of steel, wounding Curtis in the face.\n\nA cry of dismay rose from the Buffaloes as our hero's broad axe-head fell to the ground; and Twala, again raising his weapon, flew at him with a shout. I shut my eyes. When I opened them again, it was to see Sir Henry's shield lying on the ground, and Sir Henry himself with his great arms twined round Twala's middle. To and fro they swung, hugging each other like bears, straining with all their mighty muscles for dear life, and dearer honour. With a supreme effort Twala swung the Englishman clean off his feet, and down they came together, rolling over and over on the lime paving, Twala striking out at Curtis' head with the battle-axe, and Sir Henry trying to drive the tolla he had drawn from his belt through Twala's armour.\n\nIt was a mighty struggle, and an awful thing to see.\n\n\"Get his axe!\" yelled Good; and perhaps our champion heard him.\n\nAt any rate, dropping the tolla, he made a grab at the axe, which was fastened to Twala's wrist by a strip of buffalo hide, and still rolling over and over, they fought for it like wild cats, drawing their breath in heavy gasps. Suddenly the hide string burst, and then, with a great effort, Sir Henry freed himself, the weapon remaining in his grasp. Another second and he was up upon his feet, the red blood streaming from the wound in his face, and so was Twala. Drawing the heavy tolla from his belt, he staggered straight at Curtis and struck him upon the breast. The blow came home true and strong, but whoever it was made that chain armour understood his art, for it withstood the steel. Again Twala struck out with a savage yell, and again the heavy knife rebounded, and Sir Henry went staggering back. Once more Twala came on, and as he came our great Englishman gathered himself together, and, swinging the heavy axe round his head, hit at him with all his force. There was a shriek of excitement from a thousand throats, and, behold! Twala's head seemed to spring from his shoulders, and then fell and came rolling and bounding along the ground towards Ignosi, stopping just at his feet. For a second the corpse stood upright, the blood spouting in fountains from the severed arteries; then with a dull crash it fell to the earth, and the gold torque from the neck went rolling away across the pavement. As it did so Sir Henry, overpowered by faintness and loss of blood, fell heavily across it.\n\nIn a second he was lifted up, and eager hands were pouring water on his face. Another minute, and the great grey eyes opened wide.\n\nHe was not dead.\n\nThen I, just as the sun sank, stepping to where Twala's head lay in the dust, unloosed the diamond from the dead brows, and handed it to Ignosi.\n\n\"Take it,\" I said, \"lawful King of the Kukuanas.\"\n\nIgnosi bound the diadem upon his brows, and then advancing placed his foot upon the broad chest of his headless foe and broke out into a chant, or rather a paean of victory, so beautiful, and yet so utterly savage, that I despair of being able to give an adequate idea of it. I once heard a scholar with a fine voice read aloud from the Greek poet Homer, and I remember that the sound of the rolling lines seemed to make my blood stand still. Ignosi's chant, uttered as it was in a language as beautiful and sonorous as the old Greek, produced exactly the same effect on me, although I was exhausted with toil and many emotions.\n\n\"Now,\" he began, \"now is our rebellion swallowed up in victory, and our evil-doing justified by strength.\n\n\"In the morning the oppressors rose up and shook themselves, they bound on their plumes and made them ready for war.\n\n\"They rose up and grasped their spears: the soldiers called to the captains, 'Come, lead us'\u2014and the captains cried to the king, 'Direct thou the battle.'\n\n\"They rose up in their pride, twenty thousand men, and yet a twenty thousand.\n\n\"Their plumes covered the earth as the plumes of a bird cover her nest, they shook their spears and shouted, yea, they hurled their spears into the sunlight; they lusted for the battle and were glad.\n\n\"They came up against me; their strong ones came running swiftly to crush me; they cried, 'Ha! ha! he is as one already dead.'\n\n\"Then breathed I on them, and my breath was as the breath of a storm, and lo! they were not.\n\n\"My lightnings pierced them; I licked up their strength with the lightning of my spears; I shook them to the earth with the thunder of my shouting.\n\n\"They broke\u2014they scattered\u2014they were gone as the mists of the morning.\n\n\"They are food for the crows and the foxes, and the place of battle is fat with their blood.\n\n\"Where are the mighty ones who rose up in the morning?\n\n\"Where are the proud ones who tossed their plumes and cried, 'He is as one already dead?'\n\n\"They bow their heads, but not in sleep; they are stretched out, but not in sleep.\n\n\"They are forgotten; they have gone into the blackness, and shall not return; yea, others shall lead away their wives, and their children shall remember them no more.\n\n\"And I\u2014I! the king\u2014like an eagle have I found my eyrie\n\n\"Behold! far have I wandered in the night time, yet have I returned to my little ones at the daybreak.\n\n\"Creep ye under the shadow of my wings, O people, and I will comfort ye, and ye shall not be dismayed.\n\n\"Now is the good time, the time of spoil.\n\n\"Mine are the cattle in the valleys, the virgins in the kraals are mine also.\n\n\"The winter is overpast, the summer is at hand.\n\n\"Now shall Evil cover up her face, and Prosperity shall bloom in the land like a lily.\n\n\"Rejoice, rejoice, my people! let all the land rejoice in that the tyranny is trodden down, in that I am the king.\"\n\nHe paused, and out of the gathering gloom there came back the deep reply\u2014\n\n\"Thou art the king.\"\n\nThus it was that my prophecy to the herald came true, and within the forty-eight hours Twala's headless corpse was stiffening at Twala's gate."
            },
            {
                "title": "Good Falls Sick",
                "text": "After the fight was ended, Sir Henry and Good were carried into Twala's hut, where I joined them. They were both utterly exhausted by exertion and loss of blood, and, indeed, my own condition was little better. I am very wiry, and can stand more fatigue than most men, probably on account of my light weight and long training; but that night I was fairly done up, and, as is always the case with me when exhausted, that old wound the lion gave me began to pain me. Also my head was aching violently from the blow I had received in the morning, when I was knocked senseless. Altogether, a more miserable trio than we were that evening it would have been difficult to discover; and our only comfort lay in the reflection that we were exceedingly fortunate to be there to feel miserable, instead of being stretched dead upon the plain, as so many thousands of brave men were that night, who had risen well and strong in the morning. Somehow, with the assistance of the beautiful Foulata, who, since we had been the means of saving her life, had constituted herself our handmaiden, and especially Good's, we managed to get off the chain shirts, which had certainly saved the lives of two of us that day, when we found that the flesh underneath was terribly bruised, for though the steel links had prevented the weapons from entering, they had not prevented them from bruising. Both Sir Henry and Good were a mass of bruises, and I was by no means free. As a remedy Foulata brought us some pounded green leaves, with an aromatic odour, which, when applied as a plaster, gave us considerable relief. But though the bruises were painful, they did not give us such anxiety as Sir Henry's and Good's wounds. Good had a hole right through the fleshy part of his \"beautiful white leg,\" from which he had lost a great deal of blood; and Sir Henry had a deep cut over the jaw, inflicted by Twala's battle-axe. Luckily Good was a very decent surgeon, and as soon as his small box of medicines was forthcoming, he, having thoroughly cleansed the wounds, managed to stitch up first Sir Henry's and then his own pretty satisfactorily, considering the imperfect light given by the primitive Kukuana lamp in the hut. Afterwards he plentifully smeared the wounds with some antiseptic ointment, of which there was a pot in the little box, and we covered them with the remains of a pocket-handkerchief which we possessed.\n\nMeanwhile Foulata had prepared us some strong broth, for we were too weary to eat. This we swallowed, and then threw ourselves down on the piles of magnificent karrosses, or fur rugs, which were scattered about the dead king's great hut. By a very strange instance of the irony of fate, it was on Twala's own couch, and wrapped in Twala's own particular karross, that Sir Henry, the man who had slain him, slept that night.\n\n[ I say slept; but after that day's work sleep was indeed difficult. To begin with, in very truth the air was full ]\n\n\"Of farewells to the dying\n\nAnd mournings for the dead.\"\n\nFrom every direction came the sound of the wailing of women whose husbands, sons, and brothers had perished in the fight. No wonder that they wailed, for over twenty thousand men, or nearly a third of the Kukuana army, had been destroyed in that awful struggle. It was heart-rending to lie and listen to their cries for those who would never return; and it made one realise the full horror of the work done that day to further man's ambition. Towards midnight, however, the ceaseless crying of the women grew less frequent, till at length the silence was only broken at intervals of a few minutes by a long, piercing howl that came from a hut in our immediate rear, and which I afterwards discovered proceeded from Gagool wailing for the dead king Twala.\n\nAfter that I got a little fitful sleep, only to wake from time to time with a start, thinking that I was once more an actor in the terrible events of the last twenty-four hours. Now I seemed to see that warrior, whom my hand had sent to his last account, charging at me on the mountain-top; now I was once more in that glorious ring of Greys, which made its immortal stand against all Twala's regiments, upon the little mound; and now again I saw Twala's plumed and gory head roll past my feet with gnashing teeth and glaring eye. At last, somehow or other, the night passed away; but when dawn broke I found that my companions had slept no better than myself. Good, indeed, was in a high fever, and very soon afterwards began to grow light-headed, and also, to my alarm, to spit blood, the result, no doubt, of some internal injury inflicted by the desperate efforts made by the Kukuana warrior on the previous day to get his big spear through the chain armour. Sir Henry, however, seemed pretty fresh, notwithstanding his wound on the face, which made eating difficult and laughter an impossibility, though he was so sore and stiff that he could scarcely stir.\n\nAbout eight o'clock we had a visit from Infadoos, who seemed but little the worse\u2014tough old warrior that he was\u2014for his exertions on the previous day, though he informed us he had been up all night. He was delighted to see us, though much grieved at Good's condition, and shook hands cordially; but I noticed that he addressed Sir Henry with a kind of reverence, as though he were something more than man; and indeed, as we afterwards found out, the great Englishman was looked on throughout Kukuanaland as a supernatural being. No man, the soldiers said, could have fought as he fought, or could, at the end of a day of such toil and bloodshed, have slain Twala, who, in addition to being the king, was supposed to be the strongest warrior in Kukuanaland, in single combat, sheering through his bull-neck at a stroke. Indeed, that stroke became proverbial in Kukuanaland, and any extraordinary blow or feat of strength was thenceforth known as \"Incubu's blow.\"\n\nInfadoos told us also that all Twala's regiments had submitted to Ignosi, and that like submissions were beginning to arrive from chiefs in the country. Twala's death at the hands of Sir Henry had put an end to all further chance of disturbance; for Scragga had been his only son, and there was no rival claimant left alive.\n\nI remarked that Ignosi had swum to the throne through blood. The old chief shrugged his shoulders. \"Yes,\" he answered; \"but the Kukuana people can only be kept cool by letting the blood flow sometimes. Many were killed indeed, but the women were left, and others would soon grow up to take the places of the fallen. After this the land would be quiet for awhile.\"\n\nAfterwards, in the course of the morning, we had a short visit from Ignosi, on whose brows the royal diadem was now bound. As I contemplated him advancing with kingly dignity, an obsequious guard following his steps, I could not help recalling to my mind the tall Zulu who had presented himself to us at Durban some few months back, asking to be taken into our service, and reflecting on the strange revolutions of the wheel of fortune.\n\n\"Hail, O king!\" I said, rising.\n\n\"Yes, Macumazahn. King at last, by the grace of your three right hands,\" was the ready answer.\n\nAll was, he said, going on well; and he hoped to arrange a great feast in two weeks' time in order to show himself to the people.\n\nI asked him what he had settled to do with Gagool.\n\n\"She is the evil genius of the land,\" he answered, \"and I shall kill her, and all the witch doctors with her! She has lived so long that none can remember when she was not old, and always she it is who has trained the witch-hunters, and made the land evil in the sight of the heavens above.\"\n\n\"Yet she knows much,\" I replied; \"it is easier to destroy knowledge, Ignosi, than to gather it.\"\n\n\"It is so,\" he said, thoughtfully. \"She, and she only, knows the secret of the 'Three Witches' yonder, whither the great road runs, where the kings are buried, and the silent ones sit.\"\n\n\"Yes, and the diamonds are. Forget not thy promise, Ignosi; thou must lead us to the mines, even if thou hast to spare Gagool alive to show the way.\"\n\n\"I will not forget, Macumazahn, and I will think on what thou sayest:\"\n\nAfter Ignosi's visit I went to see Good, and found him quite delirious. The fever from his wound seemed to have taken a firm hold of his system, and to be complicated by an internal injury. For four or five days his condition was most critical; indeed, I firmly believe that had it not been for Foulata's indefatigable nursing he must have died.\n\nWomen are women, all the world over, whatever their colour. Yet somehow it seemed curious to watch this dusky beauty bending night and day over the fevered man's couch, and performing all the merciful errands of the sick-room as swiftly, gently, and with as fine an instinct as a trained hospital nurse. For the first night or two I tried to help her, and so did Sir Henry so soon as his stiffness allowed him to move, but she bore our interference with impatience, and finally insisted upon our leaving him to her, saying that our movements made him restless, which I think was true. Day and night she watched and tended him, giving him his only medicine, a native cooling drink made of milk, in which was infused the juice of the bulb of a species of tulip, and keeping the flies from settling on him. I can see the whole picture now as it appeared night after night by the light of our primitive lamp, Good tossing to and fro, his features emaciated, his eyes shining large and luminous, and jabbering nonsense by the yard; and seated on the ground by his side, her back resting against the wall of the hut, the soft-eyed, shapely Kukuana beauty, her whole face, weary as it was, animated by a look of infinite compassion\u2014or was it something more than compassion?\n\nFor two days we thought that he must die, and crept about with heavy hearts. Only Foulata would not believe it.\n\n\"He will live,\" she said.\n\nFor three hundred yards or more around Twala's chief hut, where the sufferer lay, there was silence; for by the king's order all who lived in the habitations behind it had, except Sir Henry and myself, been removed, lest any noise should come to the sick man's ears. One night, it was the fifth night of his illness, as was my habit, I went across to see how he was getting on before turning in for a few hours.\n\nI entered the hut carefully. The lamp placed upon the floor showed the figure of Good, tossing no more, but lying quite still.\n\nSo it had come at last! and in the bitterness of my heart I gave something like a sob.\n\n\"Hush\u2014h\u2014h!\" came from the patch of dark shadow behind Good's head.\n\nThen, creeping closer, I saw that he was not dead, but sleeping soundly, with Foulata's taper fingers clasped tightly in his poor white hand. The crisis had passed, and he would live. He slept like that for eighteen hours; and I scarcely like to say it, for fear I should not be believed, but during the entire period did that devoted girl sit by him, fearing that if she moved and drew away her hand it would wake him. What she must have suffered from cramp, stiffness, and weariness, to say nothing of want of food, nobody will ever know; but it is a fact that, when at last he woke, she had to be carried away\u2014her limbs were so stiff that she could not move them.\n\nAfter the turn had once been taken, Good's recovery was rapid and complete. It was not till he was nearly well that Sir Henry told him of all he owed to Foulata; and when he came to the story of how she sat by his side for eighteen hours, fearing lest by moving she should wake him, the honest sailor's eyes filled with tears. He turned and went straight to the hut where Foulata was preparing the midday meal (we were back in our old quarters now), taking me with him to interpret in case he could not make his meaning clear to her, though I am bound to say she understood him marvelously as a rule, considering how extremely limited was his foreign vocabulary.\n\n\"Tell her,\" said Good, \"that I owe her my life, and that I will never forget her kindness.\"\n\nI interpreted, and under her dark skin she actually seemed to blush.\n\nTurning to him with one of those swift and graceful motions that in her always reminded me of the flight of a wild bird, she answered softly, glancing at him with her large brown eyes\u2014\n\n\"Nay, my lord; my lord forgets! Did he not save my life, and am I not my lord's handmaiden?\"\n\nIt will be observed that the young lady appeared to have entirely forgotten the share which Sir Henry and myself had had in her preservation from Twala's clutches. But that is the way of women! I remember my dear wife was just the same. I retired from that little interview sad at heart. I did not like Miss Foulata's soft glances, for I knew the fatal amorous propensities of sailors in general, and Good in particular.\n\nThere are two things in the world, as I have found it, which cannot be prevented: you cannot keep a Zulu from fighting, or a sailor from falling in love upon the slightest provocation!\n\nIt was a few days after this last occurrence that Ignosi held his great \"indaba\" (council), and was formally recognised as king by the \"indunas\" (head men) of Kukuanaland. The spectacle was a most imposing one, including, as it did, a great review of troops. On this day the remaining fragment of the Greys were formally paraded, and in the face of the army thanked for their splendid conduct in the great battle. To each man the king made a large present of cattle, promoting them one and all to the rank of officers in the new corps of Greys which was in process of formation. An order was also promulgated throughout the length and breadth of Kukuanaland that, whilst we honoured the country with our presence, we three were to be greeted with the royal salute, to be treated with the same ceremony and respect that was by custom accorded to the king, and the power of life and death was publicly conferred upon us. Ignosi, too, in the presence of his people, reaffirmed the promises that he had made, to the effect that no man's blood should be shed without trial, and that witch-hunting should cease in the land.\n\nWhen the ceremony was over, we waited upon Ignosi, and informed him that we were now anxious to investigate the mystery of the mines to which Solomon's Road ran, asking him if he had discovered anything about them.\n\n\"My friends,\" he answered, \"this have I discovered. It is there that the three great figures sit, who here are called the 'Silent Ones,' and to whom Twala would have offered the girl, Foulata, as a sacrifice. It is there, too, in a great cave deep in the mountain, that the kings of the land are buried; there shall ye find Twala's body, sitting with those who went before him. There, too, is a great pit, which, at some time, long-dead men dug out, mayhap for the stones ye speak of, such as I have heard men in Natal speak of at Kimberley. There, too, in the Place of Death is a secret chamber, known to none but the king and Gagool. But Twala, who knew it, is dead, and I know it not, nor know I what is in it. But there is a legend in the land that once, many generations gone, a white man crossed the mountains, and was led by a woman to the secret chamber and shown the wealth, but before he could take it she betrayed him, and he was driven by the king of the day back to the mountains, and since then no man has entered the chamber.\"\n\n\"The story is surely true, Ignosi, for on the mountains we found the white man,\" I said.\n\n\"Yes, we found him. And now I have promised ye that if ye can find that chamber, and the stones are there--\"\n\n\"The stone upon thy forehead proves that they are there,\" I put in, pointing to the great diamond I had taken from Twala's dead brows.\n\n\"Mayhap; if they are there,\" he said, \"ye shall have as many as ye can take hence\u2014if, indeed, ye would leave me, my brothers.\"\n\n\"First we must find the chamber,\" said I.\n\n\"There is but one who can show it to thee\u2014Gagool.\"\n\n\"And if she will not?\n\n\"Then shall she die,\" said Ignosi, sternly. \"I have saved her alive but for this. Stay, she shall choose,\" and calling to a messenger he ordered Gagool to be brought.\n\nIn a few minutes she came, hurried along by two guards, whom she was cursing as she walked.\n\n\"Leave her,\" said the king to the guards.\n\nAs soon as their support was withdrawn, the withered old bundle, for she looked more like a bundle than anything else, sank into a heap on to the floor, out of which her two bright wicked eyes gleamed like a snake's.\n\n\"What will ye with me, Ignosi?\" she piped. \"Ye dare not touch me. If ye touch me I will blast ye as ye sit. Beware of my magic.\"\n\n\"Thy magic could not save Twala, old she-wolf, and it cannot hurt me,\" was the answer. \"Listen: I will this of thee, that thou reveal where is the chamber where are the shining stones.\"\n\n\"Ha! ha!\" she piped, \"none know but I, and I will never tell thee. The white devils shall go hence empty-handed.\"\n\n\"Thou wilt tell me. I will make thee tell me.\"\n\n\"How, O king? Thou art great, but can thy power wring the truth from a woman?\"\n\n\"It is difficult, yet will I do it.\"\n\n\"How, O king?\"\n\n\"Nay, thus; if thou tellest not thou shalt slowly die.\"\n\n\"Die!\" she shrieked, in terror and fury; \"ye dare not touch me\u2014man, ye know not who I am. How old think ye am I? I knew your fathers, and your fathers' fathers' fathers. When the country was young I was here, when the country grows old I shall still be here. I cannot die unless I be killed by chance, for none dare slay me.\"\n\n\"Yet will I slay thee. See, Gagool, mother of evil, thou art so old thou canst no longer love thy life. What can life be to such a hag as thee, who hast no shape, nor form, nor hair, nor teeth\u2014hast naught, save wickedness and evil eyes? It will be mercy to slay thee, Gagool.\"\n\n\"Thou fool,\" shrieked the old fiend, \"thou accursed fool, thinkest thou that life is sweet only to the young? It is not so, and naught thou knowest of the heart of man to think it. To the young, indeed, death is sometimes welcome, for the young can feel. They love and suffer, and it wrings them to see their beloved pass to the land of shadows. But the old feel not, they love not, and, ha! ha! they laugh to see another go out into the dark; ha! ha! they laugh to see the evil that is done under the sun. All they love is life, the warm, warm sun, and the sweet, sweet air. They are afraid of the cold, afraid of the cold and the dark, ha! ha! ha!\" and the old hag writhed in ghastly merriment on the ground.\n\n\"Cease thine evil talk and answer me,\" said Ignosi, angrily. \"Wilt thou show the place where the stones are, or wilt thou not? If thou wilt not thou diest, even now,\" and he seized a spear and held it over her.\n\n\"I will not show it; thou darest not kill me, darest not. He who slays me will be accursed for ever.\"\n\nSlowly Ignosi brought down the spear till it pricked the prostrate heap of rags.\n\nWith a wild yell she sprang to her feet, and then again fell and rolled upon the floor.\n\n\"Nay, I will show it. Only let me live, let me sit in the sun and have a bit of meat to suck, and I will show thee.\"\n\n\"It is well. I thought I should find a way to reason with thee. Tomorrow shalt thou go with Infadoos and my white brothers to the place, and beware how thou failest, for if thou showest it not, then shalt thou slowly die. I have spoken.\"\n\n\"I will not fail, Ignosi. I always keep my word: ha! ha! ha! Once a woman showed the place to a white man before, and behold evil befell him,\" and here her wicked eyes glinted. \"Her name was Gagool too. Perchance I was that woman.\"\n\n\"Thou liest,\" I said, \"that was ten generations gone.\"\n\n\"Mayhap, mayhap; when one lives long one forgets. Perhaps it was my mother's mother who told me, surely her name was Gagool also. But mark, ye will find in the place where the bright playthings are, a bag of hide full of stones. The man filled that bag, but he never took it away. Evil befell him, I say, evil befell him! Perhaps it was my mother's mother who told me. It will be a merry journey\u2014we can see the bodies of those who died in the battle as we go. Their eyes will be gone by now, and their ribs will be hollow. Ha! ha! ha!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Place of Death",
                "text": "It was already dark on the third day after the scene described in the previous chapter, when we camped in some huts at the foot of the \"Three Witches,\" as the triangle of mountains were called to which Solomon's great road ran. Our party consisted of our three selves and Foulata, who waited on us\u2014especially on Good\u2014Infadoos, Gagool, who was borne along in a litter, inside which she could be heard muttering and cursing all day long, and a party of guards and attendants. The mountains, or rather the three peaks of the mountains, for the whole mass evidently consisted of a solitary upheaval, were, as I have said, in the form of a triangle, of which the base was towards us, one peak being on our right, one on our left, and one straight in front of us. Never shall I forget the sight afforded by those three towering peaks in the early sunlight of the following morning. High, high above us, up into the blue air, soared their twisted snow-wreaths. Beneath the snow the peaks were purple with heaths, and so were the wild moors that ran up the slopes towards them. Straight before us the white ribbon of Solomon's great road stretched away uphill to the foot of the centre peak, about five miles from us, and there stopped. It was its terminus.\n\nI had better leave the feelings of intense excitement with which we set out on our march that morning to the imagination of those who read this history. At last we were drawing near to the wonderful mines that had been the cause of the miserable death of the old Portuguese Dom, three centuries ago, of my poor friend, his illstarred descendant, and also, as we feared, of George Curtis, Sir Henry's brother. Were we destined, after all that we had gone through, to fare any better? Evil befell them, as that old fiend Gagool said, would it also befall us? Somehow, as we were marching up that last stretch of beautiful road, I could not help feeling a little superstitious about the matter, and so I think did Good and Sir Henry.\n\nFor an hour and a half or more we tramped on up the heather-fringed road, going so fast in our excitement that the bearers with Gagool's hammock could scarcely keep pace with us, and its occupant piped out to us to stop.\n\n\"Go more slowly, white men,\" she said, projecting her hideous shrivelled countenance between the curtains, and fixing her gleaming eyes upon us; \"why will ye run to meet the evil that shall befall ye, ye seekers after treasure?\" and she laughed that horrible laugh which always sent a cold shiver down my back, and which for awhile quite took the enthusiasm out of us.\n\nHowever, on we went, till we saw before us, and between ourselves and the peak, a vast circular hole with sloping sides, three hundred feet or more in depth, and quite half a mile round.\n\n\"Can't you guess what this is?\" I said to Sir Henry and Good, who were staring in astonishment down into the awful pit before us.\n\nThey shook their heads.\n\n\"Then it is clear that you have never seen the diamond mines at Kimberley. You may depend on it that this is Solomon's Diamond Mine; look there,\" I said, pointing to the stiff blue clay which was yet to be seen among the grass and bushes which clothed the sides of the pit, \"the formation is the same. I'll be bound that if we went down there we should find 'pipes' of soapy brecciated rock. Look, too,\" and I pointed to a series of worn flat slabs of rock which were placed on a gentle slope below the level of a watercourse which had in some past age been cut out of the solid rock; \"if those are not tables once used to wash the 'stuff,' I'm a Dutchman.\"\n\nAt the edge of this vast hole, which was the pit marked on the old Don's map, the great road branched into two and circumvented it. In many places this circumventing road was built entirely of vast blocks of stone, apparently with the object of supporting the edges of the pit and preventing falls of reef. Along this road we pressed, driven by curiosity to see what the three towering objects were which we could discern from the hither side of the great hole. As we got nearer we perceived that they were colossi of some sort or another, and rightly conjectured that these were the three \"Silent Ones\" that were held in such awe by the Kukuana people. But it was not until we got quite close that we recognised the full majesty of these \"Silent Ones.\"\n\nThere upon huge pedestals of dark rock, sculptured in unknown characters, twenty paces between each, and looking down the road which crossed some sixty miles of plain to Loo, were three colossal seated forms\u2014two males and one female\u2014each measuring about twenty feet from the crown of the head to the pedestal.\n\nThe female form, which was nude, was of great though severe beauty, but unfortunately the features were injured by centuries of exposure to the weather. Rising from each side of her head were the points of a crescent. The two male colossi were, on the contrary, draped, and presented a terrifying cast of features, especially the one to our right, which had the face of a devil. That to our left was serene in countenance, but the calm upon it was dreadful. It was the calm of inhuman cruelty, the cruelty, Sir Henry remarked, that the ancients attributed to beings potent for good, who could yet watch the sufferings of humanity, if not with rejoicing, at least without suffering themselves. The three formed a most awe-inspiring trinity, as they sat there in their solitude and gazed out across the plain for ever. Contemplating these \"Silent Ones,\" as the Kukuanas called them, an intense curiosity again seized us to know whose were the hands that had shaped them, who was it that had dug the pit and made the road. Whilst I was gazing and wondering, it suddenly occurred to me (being familiar with the Old Testament) that Solomon went astray after strange gods, the names of three of whom I remembered\u2014\" Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians, Chemosh the god of the Moabites, and Milcom the god of the children of Ammon\"\u2014and I suggested to my companions that the three figures before us might represent these false divinities.\n\n\"Hum,\" said Sir Henry, who was a scholar, having taken a high degree in classics at college, \"there may be something in that; Ashtoreth of the Hebrews was the Astarte of the Phoenicians, who were the great traders of Solomon's time. Astarte, who afterwards was the Aphrodite of the Greeks, was represented with horns like the half-moon, and there on the brow of the female figure are distinct horns. Perhaps these colossi were designed by some Phoenician official who managed the mines. Who can say?\"\n\nBefore we had finished examining these extraordinary relics of remote antiquity, Infadoos came up, and, having saluted the \"Silent Ones\" by lifting his spear, asked us if we intended entering the \"Place of Death\" at once, or if we would wait till after we had taken food at mid-day. If we were ready to go at once, Gagool had announced her willingness to guide us. As it was not more than eleven o'clock, we\u2014driven to it by a burning curiosity\u2014announced our intention of proceeding instantly, and I suggested that, in case we should be detained in the cave, we should take some food with us. Accordingly Gagool's litter was brought up, and that lady herself assisted out of it; and meanwhile Foulata, at my request, stored some \"biltong,\" or dried gameflesh, together with a couple of gourds of water in a reed basket. Straight in front of us, at a distance of some fifty paces from the backs of the colossi, rose a sheer wall of rock, eighty feet or more in height, that gradually sloped up till it formed the base of the lofty snow-wreathed peak, which soared up into the air three thousand feet above us. As soon as she was clear of her hammock, Gagool cast one evil grin upon us, and then, leaning on a stick, hobbled off towards the sheer face of the rock. We followed her till we came to a narrow portal solidly arched, that looked like the opening of a gallery of a mine.\n\nHere Gagool was waiting for us, still with that evil grin upon her horrid face.\n\n\"Now, white men from the stars,\" she piped; \"great warriors, Incubu, Bougwan, and Macumazahn the wise, are ye ready? Behold, I am here to do the bidding of my lord the king, and to show ye the store of bright stones.\"\n\n\"We are ready,\" I said.\n\n\"Good! good! Make strong your hearts to bear what ye shall see. Comest thou too, Infadoos, who didst betray thy master?\"\n\nInfadoos frowned as he answered\u2014\n\n\"Nay, I come not, it is not for me to enter there. But thou, Gagool, curb thy tongue, and beware how thou dealest with my lords. At thy hands will I require them, and if a hair of them be hurt, Gagool, be'st thou fifty times a witch, thou shalt die. Hearest thou?\"\n\n\"I hear, Infadoos; I know thee, thou didst ever love big words; when thou wast a babe I remember thou didst threaten thine own mother. That was but the other day. But fear not, fear not, I live but to do the bidding of the king. I have done the bidding of many kings, Infadoos, till in the end they did mine. Ha! ha! I go to look upon their faces once more, and Twala's too! Come on, come on, here is the lamp,\" and she drew a great gourd full of oil, and fitted with a rush wick, from under her fur cloak.\n\n\"Art thou coming, Foulata?\" asked Good in his villainous Kitchen Kukuana, in which he had been improving himself under that young lady's tuition.\n\n\"I fear, my lord,\" the girl answered, timidly.\n\n\"Then give me the basket.\"\n\n\"Nay, my lord, whither thou goest, there will I go also.\"\n\n\"The deuce you will!\" thought I to myself; \"that will be rather awkward if ever we get out of this.\"\n\nWithout further ado Gagool plunged into the passage, which was wide enough to admit of two walking abreast, and quite dark, we following her voice as she piped to us to come on, in some fear and trembling, which was not allayed by the sound of a sudden rush of wings.\n\n\"Hullo! what's that?\" halloed Good; \"somebody hit me in the face.\"\n\n\"Bats,\" said I; \"on you go.\"\n\nWhen we had, so far as we could judge, gone some fifty paces, we perceived that the passage was growing faintly light. Another minute, and we stood in the most wonderful place that the eyes of living man ever lit on.\n\nLet the reader picture to himself the hall of the vastest cathedral he ever stood in, windowless indeed, but dimly lighted from above (presumably by shafts connected with the outer air and driven in the roof, which arched away a hundred feet above our head), and he will get some idea of the size of the enormous cave in which we stood, with the difference that this cathedral designed of nature was loftier and wider than any built by man. But its stupendous size was the least of the wonders of the place, for running in rows down its length were gigantic pillars of what looked like ice, but were, in reality, huge stalactites. It is impossible for me to convey any idea of the overpowering beauty and grandeur of these pillars of white spar, some of which were not less than twenty feet in diameter at the base, and sprang up in lofty and yet delicate beauty sheer to the distant roof. Others again were in process of formation. On the rock floor there was in these cases what looked, Sir Henry said, exactly like a broken column in an old Grecian temple, whilst high above, depending from the roof, the point of a huge icicle could be dimly seen. And even as we gazed we could hear the process going on, for presently with a tiny splash a drop of water would fall from the far-off icicle on to the column below. On some columns the drops only fell once in two or three minutes, and in these cases it would form an interesting calculation to discover how long, at that rate of dripping, it would take to form a pillar, say eighty feet high by ten in diameter. That the process was, in at least one instance, incalculably slow, the following instance will suffice to show. Cut on one of these pillars we discovered a rude likeness of a mummy, by the head of which sat what appeared to be one of the Egyptian gods, doubtless the handiwork of some old-world labourer in the mine. This work of art was executed at about the natural height at which an idle fellow, be he Phoenician workman or British cad, is in the habit of trying to immortalise himself at the expense of nature's masterpieces, namely, about five feet from the ground; yet at the time that we saw it, which must have been nearly three thousand years after the date of the execution of the drawing, the column was only eight feet high, and was still in process of formation, which gives a rate of growth of a foot to a thousand years, or an inch and a fraction to a century. This we knew because, as we were standing by it, we heard a drop of water fall.\n\nSometimes the stalactites took strange forms, presumably where the dropping of the water had not always been on the same spot. Thus, one huge mass, which must have weighed a hundred tons or so, was in the form of a pulpit, beautifully fretted over outside with what looked like lace. Others resembled strange beasts, and on the sides of the cave were fan-like ivory tracings, such as the frost leaves upon a pane.\n\nOut of the vast main aisle, there opened here and there smaller caves, exactly, Sir Henry said, as chapels open out of great cathedrals. Some were large, but one or two\u2014and this is a wonderful instance of how nature carries out her handiwork by the same unvarying laws, utterly irrespective of size\u2014were tiny. One little nook, for instance, was no larger than an unusually big doll's house, and yet it might have been the model of the whole place, for the water dropped, the tiny icicles hung, and the spar columns were forming in just the same way.\n\nWe had not, however, as much time to examine this beautiful place as thoroughly as we should have liked to do, for unfortunately Gagool seemed to be indifferent to stalactites, and only anxious to get her business over. This annoyed me the more, as I was particularly anxious to discover, if possible, by what system the light was admitted into the place, and whether it was by the hand of man or of nature that this was done, also if it had been used in any way in ancient times, as seemed probable. However, we consoled ourselves with the idea that we would examine it thoroughly on our return, and followed on after our uncanny guide.\n\nOn she led us, straight to the top of the vast and silent cave, where we found another doorway, not arched as the first was, but square at the top, something like the doorways of Egyptian temples.\n\n\"Are ye prepared to enter the Place of Death?\" asked Gagool, evidently with a view to making us feel uncomfortable.\n\n\"Lead on, Macduff,\" said Good, solemnly, trying to look as though he was not at all alarmed, as indeed did we all except Foulata, who caught Good by the arm for protection.\n\n\"This is getting rather ghastly,\" said Sir Henry, peeping into the dark doorway. \"Come on, Quatermain\u2014seniores priores. Don't keep the old lady waiting!\" and he politely made way for me to lead the van, for which I inwardly did not bless him.\n\nTap, tap, went old Gagool's stick down the passage, as she trotted along, chuckling hideously; and still overcome by some unaccountable presentiment of evil, I hung back.\n\n\"Come, get on, old fellow,\" said Good, \"or we shall lose our fair guide.\"\n\nThus adjured, I started down the passage, and after about twenty paces found myself in a gloomy apartment some forty feet long, by thirty broad, and thirty high, which in some past age had evidently been hollowed, by hand-labour, out of the mountain. This apartment was not nearly so well lighted as the vast stalactite ante-cave, and at the first glance all I could make out was a massive stone table running its length, with a colossal white figure at its head, and life-sized white figures all round it. Next I made out a brown thing, seated on the table in the centre, and in another moment my eyes grew accustomed to the light, and I saw what all these things were, and I was tailing out of it as hard as my legs would carry me. I am not a nervous man, in a general way, and very little troubled with superstitions, of which I have lived to see the folly; but I am free to own that that sight quite upset me, and had it not been that Sir Henry caught me by the collar and held me, I do honestly believe that in another five minutes I should have been outside that stalactite cave, and that the promise of all the diamonds in Kimberley would not have induced me to enter it again. But he held me tight, so I stopped because I could not help myself. But next second his eyes got accustomed to the light, too, and he let go of me, and began to mop the perspiration off his forehead. As for Good he swore feebly, and Foulata threw her arms round his neck and shrieked.\n\nOnly Gagool chuckled loud and long.\n\nIt was a ghastly sight. There at the end of the long stone table, holding in his skeleton fingers a great white spear, sat Death himself, shaped in the form of a colossal human skeleton, fifteen feet or more in height. High above his head he held the spear, as though in the act to strike; one bony hand rested on the stone table before him, in the position a man assumes on rising from his seat, whilst his frame was bent forward so that the vertebrae of the neck and the grinning, gleaming skull projected towards us, and fixed its hollow eye-places upon us, the jaws a little open, as though it were about to speak.\n\n\"Great heavens!\" said I, faintly, at last, \"what can it be?\"\n\n\"And what are those things?\" said Good, pointing to the white company round the table.\n\n\"And what on earth is that thing?\" said Sir Henry, pointing to the brown creature seated on the table.\n\n\"Hee! hee! hee!\" laughed Gagool. \"To those who enter the Hall of the Dead, evil comes. Hee! hee! hee! ha! ha!\"\n\n\"Come, Incubu, brave in battle, come and see him thou slewest;\" and the old creature caught his coat in her skinny fingers, and led him away towards the table. We followed.\n\nPresently she stopped and pointed at the brown object seated on the table. Sir Henry looked, and started back with an exclamation; and no wonder, for there seated, quite naked, on the table, the head which Sir Henry's battle-axe had shorn from the body resting on its knees, was the gaunt corpse of Twala, last king of the Kukuanas. Yes, there, the head perched upon the knees, it sat in all its ugliness, the vertebr\u00e6 projecting a full inch above the level of the shrunken flesh of the neck, for all the world like a black double of Hamilton Tighe. Over the whole surface of the corpse there was gathered a thin, glassy film, which made its appearance yet more appalling, and for which we were, at the moment, quite unable to account, till we presently observed that from the roof of the chamber the water fell steadily, drip! drop! drip! on to the neck of the corpse, from whence it ran down over the entire surface, and finally escaped into the rock through a tiny hole in the table. Then I guessed what it was\u2014Twala's body was being transformed into a stalactite.\n\nA look at the white forms seated on the stone bench that ran around that ghastly board confirmed this view. They were human forms indeed, or rather had been human forms; now they were stalactites. This was the way in which the Kukuana people had from time immemorial preserved their royal dead. They petrified them. What the exact system was, if there was any, beyond placing them for a long period of years under the drip, I never discovered, but there they sat, iced over and preserved for ever by the silicious fluid. Anything more awe-inspiring than the spectacle of this long line of departed royalties, wrapped in a shroud of ice-like spar, through which the features could be dimly made out (there were twenty-seven of them, the last being Ignosi's father), and seated round that inhospitable board, with Death himself for a host, it is impossible to imagine. That the practice of thus preserving their kings must have been an ancient one is evident from the number, which, allowing for an average reign of fifteen years, would, supposing that every king who reigned was placed here\u2014an improbable thing, as some are sure to have perished in battle far from home\u2014fix the date of its commencement at four and a quarter centuries back. But the colossal Death, who sits at the head of the board, is far older than that, and unless I am much mistaken, owes his origin to the same artist who designed the three colossi. He was hewn out of a single stalactite, and, looked at as a work of art, was most admirably conceived and executed. Good, who understood anatomy, declared that so far as he could see the anatomical design of the skeleton was perfect down to the smallest bones.\n\nMy own idea is, that this terrific object was a freak of fancy on the part of some old-world sculptor, and that its presence had suggested to the Kukuanas the idea of placing their royal dead under its awful presidency. Or perhaps it was placed there to frighten away any marauders who might have designs upon the treasure chamber beyond. I cannot say. All I can do is to describe it as it is, and the reader must form his own conclusion.\n\nSuch, at any rate, was the White Death, and such were the White Dead!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Solomon's Treasure Chamber",
                "text": "While we had been engaged in getting over our fright, and in examining the grisly wonders of the place, Gagool had been differently occupied. Somehow or other\u2014for she was marvellously active when she chose\u2014she had scrambled on to the great table, and made her way to where our departed friend Twala was placed, under the drip, to see, suggested Good, how he was \"pickling,\" or for some dark purpose of her own. Then she came hobbling back, stopping now and again to address a remark (the tenor of which I could not catch) to one or other of the shrouded forms, just as you or I might greet an old acquaintance. Having gone through this mysterious and horrible ceremony, she squatted herself down on the table immediately under the White Death, and began, so far as I could make out, to offer up prayers to it. The spectacle of this wicked old creature pouring out supplications (evil ones, no doubt) to the arch enemy of mankind, was so uncanny that it caused us to hasten our inspection.\n\n\"Now, Gagool,\" said I, in a low voice\u2014somehow one did not dare to speak above a whisper in that place\u2014\"lead us to the chamber.\"\n\nThe old creature promptly scrambled down off the table.\n\n\"My lords are not afraid?\" she said, leering up into my face.\n\n\"Lead on.\"\n\n\"Good, my lords;\" and she hobbled round to the back of the great Death. \"Here is the chamber; let my lords light the lamp, and enter,\" and she placed the gourd full of oil upon the floor, and leaned herself against the side of the cave. I took out a match, of which we still had a few in a box, and lit the rush wick, and then looked for the doorway, but there was nothing before us but the solid rock. Gagool grinned. \"The way is there, my lords.\"\n\n\"Do not jest with us,\" I said, sternly.\n\n\"I jest not, my lords. See!\" and she pointed at the rock.\n\nAs she did so, on holding up the lamp we perceived that a mass of stone was slowly rising from the floor and vanishing into the rock above, where doubtless there was a cavity prepared to receive it. The mass was of the width of a good-sized door, about ten feet high and not less than five feet thick. It must have weighed at least twenty or thirty tons, and was clearly moved upon some simple balance principle, probably the same as that upon which the opening and shutting of an ordinary modern window is arranged. How the principle was set in motion, of course none of us saw; Gagool was careful to avoid that; but I have little doubt that there was some very simple lever, which was moved ever so little by pressure on a secret spot, thereby throwing additional weight on to the hidden counterbalances, and causing the whole huge mass to be lifted from the ground. Very slowly and gently the great stone raised itself, till at last it had vanished altogether, and a dark hole presented itself to us in the place which it had filled.\n\nOur excitement was so intense, as we saw the way to Solomon's treasure chamber at last thrown open, that I for one began to tremble and shake. Would it prove a hoax after all, I wondered, or was old Da Silvestra right? and were there vast hoards of wealth stored in that dark place, hoards which would make us the richest men in the whole world? We should know in a minute or two.\n\n\"Enter, white men from the stars,\" said Gagool, advancing into the doorway; \"but first hear your servant, Gagaoola the old. The bright stones that ye will see were dug out of the pit over which the Silent Ones are set, and stored here, I know not by whom. But once has this place been entered since the time that those who stored in the stones departed in haste, leaving them behind. The report of the treasure went down among the people who lived in the country from age to age, but none knew where the chamber was, nor the secret of the door. But it happened that a white man reached this country from over the mountains, perchance he too came 'from the stars,' and was well received of the king of the day. He it is who sits yonder,\" and she pointed to the fifth king at the table of the dead. \"And it came to pass that he and a woman of the country who was with him came to this place, and that by chance the woman learnt the secret of the door\u2014a thousand years might ye search, but ye should never find it. Then the white man entered with the woman, and found the stones, and filled with stones the skin of a small goat, which the woman had with her to hold food. And as he was going from the chamber he took up one more stone, a large one, and held it in his hand.\" Here she paused.\n\n\"Well,\" I asked, breathless with interest as we all were, \"what happened to Da Silvestra?\"\n\nThe old hag started at the mention of the name.\n\n\"How knowest thou the dead man's name?\" she asked, sharply; and then, without waiting for an answer, went on\u2014\n\n\"None know what happened; but it came about that the white man was frightened, for he flung down the goat-skin, with the stones, and fled out with only the one stone in his hand, and that the king took, and it is the stone that thou, Macumazahn, didst take from Twala's brows.\"\n\n\"Have none entered here since?\" I asked, peering again down the dark passage.\n\n\"None, my lords. Only the secret of the door hath been kept, and every king hath opened it, though he hath not entered. There is a saying, that those who enter there will die within a moon, even as the white man died in the cave upon the mountain, where ye found him, Macumazahn. Ha! ha! mine are true words.\"\n\nOur eyes met as she said it, and I turned sick and cold. How did the old hag know all these things?\n\n\"Enter, my lords. If I speak truth the goat-skin with the stones will lie upon the floor; and if there is truth as to whether it is death to enter here, that will ye learn afterwards. Ha! ha! ha! \" And she hobbled through the doorway, bearing the light with her; but I confess that once more I hesitated about following.\n\n\"Oh, confound it all!\" said Good, \"here goes. I am not going to be frightened by that old devil;\" and followed by Foulata, who, however, evidently did not at all like the job, for she was shivering with fear, he plunged into the passage after Gagool\u2014an example which we quickly followed.\n\nA few yards down the passage, in the narrow way hewn out of the living rock, Gagool had paused, and was waiting for us.\n\n\"See, my lords,\" she said, holding the light before her, \"those who stored the treasure here fled in haste, and bethought them to guard against any who should find the secret of the door, but had not the time,\" and she pointed to large square blocks of stone, which had, to the height of two courses (about two feet three), been placed across the passage with a view to walling it up. Along the side of the passage were similar blocks ready for use, and, most curious of all, a heap of mortar and a couple of trowels, which, so far as we had time to examine them, appeared to be of a similar shape and make to those used by workmen to this day.\n\nHere Foulata, who had throughout been in a state of great fear and agitation, said that she felt faint and could go no farther, but would wait there. Accordingly we set her down on the unfinished wall, placing the basket of provisions by her side, and left her to recover.\n\nFollowing the passage for about fifteen paces farther, we suddenly came to an elaborately painted wooden door. It was standing wide open. Whoever was last there had either not had the time, or had forgotten, to shut it.\n\nAcross the threshold lay a skin bag, formed of a goat-skin, that appeared to be full of pebbles.\n\n\"Hee! hee! white men,\" sniggered Gagool, as the light from the lamp fell upon it. \"What did I tell ye, that the white man who came here fled in haste, and dropped the woman's bag\u2014behold it!\"\n\nGood stooped down and lifted it. It was heavy and jingled.\n\n\"By Jove! I believe it's full of diamonds,\" he said, in an awed whisper; and, indeed, the idea of a small goat-skin full of diamonds is enough to awe anybody.\n\n\"Go on,\" said Sir Henry, impatiently. \"Here, old lady, give me the lamp,\" and taking it from Gagool's hand, he stepped through the doorway and held it high above his head.\n\nWe pressed in after him, forgetful, for the moment, of the bag of diamonds, and found ourselves in Solomon's treasure chamber.\n\nAt first, all that the somewhat faint light given by the lamp revealed was a room hewn out of the living rock, and apparently not more than ten feet square. Next there came into sight, stored one on the other as high as the roof, a splendid collection of elephant-tusks. How many of them there were we did not know, for of course we could not see how far they went back, but there could not have been less than the ends of four or five hundred tusks of the first quality visible to our eyes. There, alone, was enough ivory before us to make a man wealthy for life. Perhaps, I thought, it was from this very store that Solomon drew his material for his \"great throne of ivory,\" of which there was not the like made in any kingdom.\n\nOn the opposite side of the chamber were about a score of wooden boxes, something like MartiniHenry ammunition boxes, only rather larger, and painted red.\n\n\"There are the diamonds,\" cried I; \"bring the light.\"\n\nSir Henry did so, holding it close to the top box, of which the lid, rendered rotten by time even in that dry place, appeared to have been smashed in, probably by Da Silvestra himself. Pushing my hand through the hole in the lid I drew it out full, not of diamonds, but of gold pieces, of a shape that none of us had seen before, and with what looked like Hebrew characters stamped upon them.\n\n\"Ah!\" I said, replacing the coin, \"we shan't go back empty-handed, anyhow. There must be a couple of thousand pieces in each box, and there are eighteen boxes. I suppose it was the money to pay the workmen and merchants.\"\n\n\"Well,\" put in Good, \"I think that is the lot; I don't see any diamonds, unless the old Portuguese put them all into this bag.\"\n\n\"Let my lords look yonder where it is darkest, if they would find the stones,\" said Gagool, interpreting our looks. \"There my lords will find a nook, and three stone chests in the nook, two sealed and one open.\"\n\nBefore interpreting this to Sir Henry, who had the light, I could not resist asking how she knew these things, if no one had entered the place since the white man, generations ago.\n\n\"Ah, Macumazahn, who watchest by night,\" was the mocking answer, \"ye who live in the stars, do ye not know that some have eyes that can see through rock?\"\n\n\"Look in that corner, Curtis,\" I said, indicating the spot Gagool had pointed out.\n\n\"Hullo, you fellows,\" he said, \"here's a recess. Great heavens! look here.\"\n\nWe hurried up to where he was standing in a nook, something like a small bow window. Against the wall of this recess were placed three stone chests, each about two feet square. Two were fitted with stone lids, the lid of the third rested against the side of the chest, which was open.\n\n\"Look!\" he repeated, hoarsely, holding the lamp over the open chest. We looked, and for a moment could make nothing out, on account of a silvery sheen that dazzled us. When our eyes got used to it, we saw that the chest was three-parts full of uncut diamonds, most of them of considerable size. Stooping, I picked some up. Yes, there was no mistake about it, there was the unmistakable soapy feel about them.\n\nI fairly gasped as I dropped them.\n\n\"We are the richest men in the whole world,\" I said. \"Monte Christo is a fool to us.\"\n\n\"We shall flood the market with diamonds,\" said Good.\n\n\"Got to get them there first,\" suggested Sir Henry.\n\nAnd we stood with pale faces and stared at each other, with the lantern in the middle, and the glimmering gems below, as though we were conspirators about to commit a crime, instead of being, as we thought, the three most fortunate men on earth.\n\n\"Hee! hee! hee!\" went old Gagool behind us, as she flitted about like a vampire bat. \"There are the bright stones that ye love, white men, as many as ye will; take them, run them through your fingers, eat of them, hee! hee! drink of them, ha! ha!\"\n\nThere was something so ridiculous at that moment to my mind in the idea of eating and drinking diamonds, that I began to laugh outrageously, an example which the others followed, without knowing why. There we stood and shrieked with laughter over the gems which were ours, which had been found for us thousands of years ago by the patient delvers in the great hole yonder, and stored for us by Solomon's long-dead overseer, whose name, perchance, was written in the characters stamped on the faded wax that yet adhered to the lids of the chest. Solomon never got them, nor David, nor Da Silvestra, nor anybody else. We had got them; there before us were millions of pounds' worth of diamonds, and thousands of pounds' worth of gold and ivory, only waiting to be taken away.\n\nSuddenly the fit passed off, and we stopped laughing.\n\n\"Open the other chests, white men,\" croaked Gagool, \"there are surely more therein. Take your fill, white lords!\"\n\nThus adjured, we set to work to pull up the stone lids on the other too, first\u2014not without a feeling of sacrilege\u2014breaking the seals that fastened them.\n\nHoorah! they were full too, full to the brim; at least, the second one was; no wretched Da Silvestra had been filling goat-skins out of that. As for the third chest, it was only about a fourth full, but the stones were all picked ones; none less than twenty carats, and some of them as large as pigeon-eggs. Some of these biggest ones, however, we could see by holding them up to the light, were a little yellow, \"off coloured,\" as they call it at Kimberley.\n\nWhat we did not see, however, was the look of fearful malevolence that old Gagool favoured us with as she crept, crept like a snake, out of the treasure chamber and down the passage towards the massive door of solid rock.\n\nHark! Cry upon cry comes ringing up the vaulted path. It is Foulata's voice!\n\n\"Oh, Bougwan! help! help! the rock falls!\"\n\n\"Leave go, girl! Then\u2014\"\n\n\"Help! help! she has stabbed me!\"\n\nBy now we are running down the passage, and this is what the light from the lamp falls on. The door of rock is slowly closing down; it is not three feet from the floor. Near it struggle Foulata and Gagool. The red blood of the former runs to her knee, but still the brave girl holds the old witch, who fights like a wild cat. Ah! she is free! Foulata falls, and Gagool throws herself on the ground, to twist herself like a snake through the crack of the closing stone. She is under\u2014ah. God! too late! too late! The stone nips her, and she yells in agony. Down, down, it comes, all the thirty tons of it, slowly pressing her old body against the rock below. Shriek upon shriek, such as we never heard, then a long sickening crunch, and the door was shut just as we, rushing down the passage, hurled ourselves against it.\n\nIt was all done in four seconds.\n\nThen we turned to Foulata. The poor girl was stabbed in the body, and could not, I saw, live long.\n\n\"Ah! Bougwan, I die!\" gasped the beautiful creature. \"She crept out\u2014Gagool; I did not see her, I was faint\u2014and the door began to fall; then she came back, and was looking up the path\u2014and I saw her come in through the slowly falling door, and caught her and held her, and she stabbed me, and I die, Bougwan.\"\n\n\"Poor girl! poor girl!\" Good cried; and then, as he could do nothing else, he fell to kissing her.\n\n\"Bougwan,\" she said, after a pause, \"is Macumazahn there? it grows so dark, I cannot see.\"\n\n\"Here I am, Foulata.\"\n\n\"Macumazahn, be my tongue for a moment, I pray thee, for Bougwan cannot understand me, and before I go into the darkness\u2014I would speak a word.\"\n\n\"Say on, Foulata, I will render it.\"\n\n\"Say to my lord, Bougwan, that\u2014I love him, and that I am glad to die because I know that he cannot cumber his life with such as me, for the sun cannot mate with the darkness, nor the white with the black.\n\n\"Say that at times I have felt as though there were a bird in my bosom, which would one day fly hence and sing elsewhere. Even now, though I cannot lift my hand, and my brain grows cold, I do not feel as though my heart were dying; it is so full of love that could live a thousand years, and yet be young. Say that if I live again, mayhap I shall see him in the stars, and that\u2014I will search them all, though perchance I should there still be black and he would\u2014still be white. Say\u2014nay, Macumazahn, say no more, save that I love\u2014Oh, hold me closer, Bougwan, I cannot feel thine arms\u2014oh! oh!\"\n\n\"She is dead\u2014she is dead!\" said Good, rising in grief, the tears running down his honest face.\n\n\"You need not let that trouble you, old fellow,\" said Sir Henry.\n\n\"Eh!\" said Good; \"what do you mean?\"\n\n\"I mean that you will soon be in a position to join her. Man, don't you see that we are buried alive?\"\n\nUntil Sir Henry uttered these words, I do not think the full horror of what had happened had come home to us, preoccupied as we were with the sight of poor Foulata's end. But now we understood. The ponderous mass of rock had closed, probably for ever, for the only brain which knew its secret was crushed to powder beneath it. This was a door that none could hope to force with anything short of dynamite in large quantities. And we were the wrong side of it!\n\nFor a few minutes we stood horrified there over the corpse of Foulata. All the manhood seemed to have gone out of us. The first shock of this idea of the slow and miserable end that awaited us was overpowering. We saw it all now; that fiend Gagool had planned this snare for us from the first. It would have been just the jest that her evil mind would have rejoiced in, the idea of the three white men, whom, for some reason of her own, she had always hated, slowly perishing of thirst and hunger in the company of the treasure they had coveted. I saw the point of that sneer of hers about eating and drinking the diamonds now. Perhaps somebody had tried to serve the poor old Don in the same way, when he abandoned the skin full of jewels.\n\n\"This will never do,\" said Sir Henry, hoarsely; \"the lamp will soon go out. Let us see if we can't find the spring that works the rock.\"\n\nWe sprang forward with desperate energy, and standing in a bloody ooze, began to feel up and down the door and the sides of the passage. But no knob or spring could we discover.\n\n\"Depend on it,\" I said, \"it does not work from the inside; if it did Gagool would not have risked trying to crawl underneath the stone. It was the knowledge of this that made her try to escape at all hazards, curse her.\"\n\n\"At all events,\" said Sir Henry, with a hard little laugh, \"retribution was swift; hers was almost as awful an end as ours is likely to be. We can do nothing with the door; let us go back to the treasure room.\" We turned and went, and as we did so I perceived by the unfinished wall across the passage the basket of food which poor Foulata had carried. I took it up, and brought it with me back to that accursed treasure chamber that was to be our grave. Then we went back and reverently bore in Foulata's corpse, laying it on the floor by the boxes of coin.\n\nNext we seated ourselves, leaning our backs against the three stone chests of priceless treasures.\n\n\"Let us divide the food,\" said Sir Henry, \"so as to make it last as long as possible\" Accordingly we did so. It would, we reckoned, make four infinitesimally small meals for each of us, enough, say, to support life for a couple of days. Besides the \"biltong,\" or dried gameflesh, there were two gourds of water, each holding about a quart.\n\n\"Now,\" said Sir Henry, \"let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.\"\n\nWe each ate a small portion of the \"biltong,\" and drank a sip of water. We had, needless to say, but little appetite, though we were sadly in need of food, and felt better after swallowing it. Then we got up and made a systematic examination of the walls of our prison-house, in the faint hope of finding some means of exit, sounding them and the floor carefully.\n\nThere was none. It was not probable that there would be one to a treasure chamber.\n\nThe lamp began to burn dim. The fat was nearly exhausted.\n\n\"Quatermain,\" said Sir Henry, \"what is the time\u2014your watch goes?\"\n\nI drew it out, and looked at it. It was six o'clock; we had entered the cave at eleven.\n\n\"Infadoos will miss us,\" I suggested. \"If we do not return to-night, he will search for us in the morning, Curtis.\"\n\n\"He may search in vain. He does not know the secret of the door, not even where it is. No living person knew it yesterday, except Gagool. To-day no one knows it. Even if he found the door he could not break it down. All the Kukuana army could not break through five feet of living rock. My friends, I see nothing for it but to bow ourselves to the will of the Almighty. The search for treasure has brought many to a bad end; we shall go to swell their number.\"\n\nThe lamp grew dimmer yet.\n\nPresently it flared up and showed the whole scene in strong relief, the great mass of white tusks, the boxes full of gold, the corpse of poor Foulata stretched before them, the goat-skin full of treasure, the dim glimmer of the diamonds, and the wild, wan faces of us three white men seated there awaiting death by starvation.\n\nSuddenly it sank, and expired."
            },
            {
                "title": "We Abandon Hope",
                "text": "I can give no adequate description of the horrors of the night which followed. Mercifully they were to some extent mitigated by sleep, for even in such a position as ours, wearied nature will sometimes assert itself. But I, at any rate, found it impossible to sleep much. Putting aside the terrifying thought of our impending doom\u2014for the bravest man on earth might well quail from such a fate as awaited us, and I never had any great pretensions to be brave\u2014the silence itself was too great to allow of it. Reader, you may have lain awake at night and thought the silence oppressive, but I say with confidence that you can have no idea what a vivid tangible thing perfect silence really is. On the surface of the earth there is always some sound or motion, and though it may in itself be imperceptible, yet does it deaden the sharp edge of absolute silence. But here there was none. We were buried in the bowels of a huge snow-clad peak. Thousands of feet above us the fresh air rushed over the white snow, but no sound of it reached us. We were separated by a long tunnel and five feet of rock even from the awful chamber of the dead; and the dead make no noise. The crashing of all the artillery of earth and heaven could not have come to our ears in our living tomb. We were cut off from all echoes of the world\u2014we were as already dead.\n\nAnd then the irony of the situation forced itself upon me. There around us lay treasures enough to pay off a moderate national debt, or to build a fleet of ironclads, and yet we would gladly have bartered them all for the faintest chance of escape. Soon, doubtless, we should be glad to exchange them for a bit of food or a cup of water, and, after that, even for the privilege of a speedy close to our sufferings. Truly wealth, which men spend all their lives in acquiring, is a valueless thing at the last.\n\nAnd so the night wore on.\n\n\"Good,\" said Sir Henry's voice at last, and it sounded awful in the intense stillness, \"how many matches have you in the box?\"\n\n\"Eight, Curtis.\"\n\n\"Strike one, and let us see the time.\"\n\nHe did so, and in contrast to the dense darkness the flame nearly blinded us. It was five o'clock by my watch. The beautiful dawn was now blushing on the snow-wreaths far over our heads, and the breeze would be stirring the night mists in the hollows.\n\n\"We had better eat something and keep up our strength,\" said I.\n\n\"What is the good of eating?\" answered Good; \"the sooner we die and get it over the better.\"\n\n\"While there is life there is hope,\" said Sir Henry.\n\nAccordingly we ate and sipped some water, and another period of time passed, when somebody suggested that it might be as well to get as near to the door as possible and halloa, on the faint chance of somebody catching a sound outside. Accordingly Good, who, from long practice at sea, has a fine piercing note, groped his way down the passage and began, and I must say he made a most diabolical noise. I never heard such yells; but it might have been a mosquito buzzing for all the effect it produced.\n\nAfter awhile he gave it up, and came back very thirsty, and had to have some water. After that we gave up yelling, as it encroached on the supply of water.\n\nSo we all sat down once more against our chests of useless diamonds in that dreadful inaction, which was one of the hardest circumstances of our fate; and I am bound to say that, for my part, I gave way in despair. Laying my head against Sir Henry's broad shoulder I burst into tears; and I think I heard Good gulping away on the other side, and swearing hoarsely at himself for doing so.\n\nAh, how good and brave that great man was! Had we been two frightened children, and he our nurse, he could not have treated us more tenderly. Forgetting his own share of miseries, he did all he could to soothe our broken nerves, telling stories of men who had been in somewhat similar circumstances, and miraculously escaped; and when these failed to cheer us, pointing out how, after all, it was only anticipating an end that must come to us all, that it would soon be over, and that death from exhaustion was a merciful one (which is not true). Then, in a diffident sort of a way, as I had once before heard him do, he suggested that we should throw ourselves on the mercy of a higher Power, which for my part I did with great vigour.\n\nHis is a beautiful character, very quiet, but very strong.\n\nAnd so somehow the day went as the night had gone (if, indeed, one can use the terms where all was densest night), and when I lit a match to see the time it was seven o'clock.\n\nOnce more we ate and drank, and as we did so an idea occurred to me.\n\n\"How is it,\" said I, \"that the air in this place keeps fresh? It is thick and heavy, but it is perfectly fresh.\"\n\n\"Great heavens!\" said Good, starting up, \"I never thought of that. It can't come through the stone door, for it is air-tight, if ever a door was. It must come from somewhere. If there were no current of air in the place we should have been stifled when we first came in. Let us have a look.\"\n\nIt was wonderful what a change this mere spark of hope wrought in us. In a moment we were all three groping about the place on our hands and knees, feeling for the slightest indication of a draught. Presently my ardour received a check. I put my hand on something cold. It was poor Foulata's dead face.\n\nFor an hour or more we went on feeling about, till at last Sir Henry and I gave it up in despair, having got considerably hurt by constantly knocking our heads against tusks, chests, and the sides of the chamber. But Good still persevered, saying, with an approach to cheerfulness, that it was better than doing nothing.\n\n\"I say, you fellows,\" he said, presently, in a constrained sort of voice, \"come here.\"\n\nNeedless to say we scrambled over towards him quick enough.\n\n\"Quatermain, put your hand here where mine is. Now, do you feel anything?\"\n\n\"I think I feel air coming up.\"\n\n\"Now listen.\" He rose and stamped upon the place, and a flame of hope shot up in our hearts. It rang hollow.\n\nWith trembling hands I lit a match. I had only three left, and we saw that we were in the angle of the far corner of the chamber, a fact that accounted for our not having noticed the hollow ring of the place during our former exhaustive examination. As the match burnt we scrutinised the spot. There was a join in the solid rock floor, and, great heavens! there, let in level with the rock, was a stone ring. We said no word, we were too excited, and our hearts beat too wildly with hope to allow us to speak. Good had a knife, at the back of which was one of those hooks that are made to extract stones from horses' hoofs. He opened it, and scratched away at the ring with it. Finally he got it under, and levered away gently for fear of breaking the hook. The ring began to move. Being of stone, it had not got set fast in all the centuries it had lain there, as would have been the case had it been of iron. Presently it was upright. Then he got his hands into it and tugged with all his force, but nothing budged.\n\n\"Let me try,\" I said, impatiently, for the situation of the stone, right in the angle of the corner, was such that it was impossible for two to pull at once. I got hold and strained away, but with no results.\n\nThen Sir Henry tried and failed.\n\nTaking the hook again, Good scratched all round the crack where we felt the air coming up.\n\n\"Now, Curtis,\" he said, \"tackle on, and put your back into it; you are as strong as two. Stop,\" and he took off a stout black silk handkerchief, which, true to his habits of neatness, he still wore, and ran it through the ring. \"Quatermain, get Curtis round the middle and pull for dear life when I give the word. Now.\"\n\nSir Henry put out all his enormous strength, and Good and I did the same, with such power as nature had given us.\n\n\"Heave! heave! it's giving,\" gasped Sir Henry; and I heard the muscles of his great back cracking. Suddenly there came a parting sound, then a rush of air, and we were all on our backs on the floor with a great flag-stone on the top of us. Sir Henry's strength had done it, and never did muscular power stand a man in better stead.\n\n\"Light a match, Quatermain,\" he said, as soon as we had picked ourselves up and got one breath; \"carefully, now.\"\n\nI did so, and there before us was, God be praised! the first step of a stone stair.\n\n\"Now what is to be done?\" asked Good.\n\n\"Follow the stair, of course, and trust to Providence.\"\n\n\"Stop!\" said Sir Henry; \"Quatermain, get the bit of biltong and the water that is left; we may want them.\"\n\nI went creeping back to our place by the chests for that purpose, and as I was coming away an idea struck me. We had not thought much of the diamonds for the last twenty-four hours or so; indeed, the idea of diamonds was nauseous, seeing what they had entailed upon us; but, thought I, I may as well pocket a few in case we ever should get out of this ghastly hole. So I just stuck my fist into the first chest and filled all the available pockets of my old shooting coat, topping up\u2014this was a happy thought\u2014with a couple of handfuls of big ones out of the third chest.\n\n\"I say, you fellows,\" I sung out, \"won't you take some diamonds with you? I've filled my pockets.\"\n\n\"Oh! hang the diamonds!\" said Sir Henry. \"I hope that I may never see another:\"\n\nAs for Good, he made no answer. He was, I think, taking a last farewell of all that was left of the poor girl who loved him so well. And, curious as it may seem to you, my reader, sitting at home at ease and reflecting on the vast, indeed the immeasurable, wealth which we were thus abandoning, I can assure you that if you had passed some twenty-eight hours with next to nothing to eat and drink in that place, you would not have cared to cumber yourself with diamonds whilst plunging down into the unknown bowels of the earth, in the wild hope of escape from an agonising death. If it had not, from the habits of a lifetime, become a sort of second nature with me never to leave anything worth having behind, if there was the slightest chance of my being able to carry it away, I am sure I should not have bothered to fill my pockets.\n\n\"Come on, Quatermain,\" said Sir Henry, who was already standing on the first step of the stone stair. \"Steady, I will go first.\"\n\n\"Mind where you put your feet; there may be some awful hole underneath,\" said I.\n\n\"Much more likely to be another room,\" said Sir Henry, as he slowly descended, counting the steps as he went.\n\nWhen he got to \"fifteen\" he stopped. \"Here's the bottom,\" he said. \"Thank goodness! I think it's a passage. Come on down.\"\n\nGood descended next, and I followed last, and on reaching the bottom lit one of the two remaining matches. By its light we could just see that we were standing in a narrow tunnel, which ran right and left at right angles to the staircase we had descended. Before we could make out any more, the match burnt my fingers and went out. Then arose the delicate question of which way to turn. Of course, it was impossible to know what the tunnel was or where it ran to, and yet to turn one way might lead us to safety, and the other to destruction. We were utterly perplexed, till suddenly it struck Good that when I had lit the match the draught of the passage blew the flame to the left.\n\n\"Let us go against the draught,\" he said; \"air draws inwards, not outwards.\"\n\nWe took this suggestion, and feeling along the wall with the hand, whilst trying the ground before us at every step, we departed from that accursed treasure chamber on our terrible quest. If ever it should be entered again by living man, which I do not think it will be, he will find a token of our presence in the open chests of jewels, the empty lamp, and the white bones of poor Foulata.\n\nWhen we had groped our way for about a quarter of an hour along the passage, it suddenly took a sharp turn, or else was bisected by another, which we followed, only in course of time to be led into a third. And so it went on for some hours. We seemed to be in a stone labyrinth which led nowhere. What all these passages are, of course I cannot say, but we thought that they must be the ancient workings of a mine, of which the various shafts travelled hither and thither as the ore led them. This is the only way in which we could account for such a multitude of passages.\n\nAt length we halted, thoroughly worn out with fatigue, and with that hope deferred which maketh the heart sick, and ate up our poor remaining piece of biltong, and drank our last sup of water, for our throats were like lime-kilns. It seemed to us that we had escaped Death in the darkness of the chamber only to meet him in the darkness of the tunnels.\n\nAs we stood, once more utterly depressed, I thought I caught a sound, to which I called the attention of the others. It was very faint and very far off, but it was a sound, a faint, murmuring sound, for the others heard it too, and no words can describe the blessedness of it after all those hours of utter, awful stillness.\n\n\"By heaven! it's running water,\" said Good. \"Come on.\"\n\nOff we started again in the direction from which the faint murmur seemed to come, groping our way as before along the rocky walls. As we went it got more and more audible, till at last it seemed quite loud in the quiet. On, yet on; now we could distinctly make out the unmistakable swirl of rushing water. And yet how could there be running water in the bowels of the earth? Now we were quite near to it, and Good, who was leading, swore that he could smell it.\n\n\"Go gently, Good,\" said Sir Henry, \"we must be close.\" Splash! and a cry from Good.\n\nHe had fallen in.\n\n\"Good! Good! where are you?\" we shouted, in terrified distress. To our intense relief, an answer came back in a choky voice.\n\n\"All right; I've got hold of a rock. Strike a light to show me where you are.\"\n\nHastily I lit the last remaining match. Its faint gleam discovered to us a dark mass of water running at our feet. How wide it was we could not see, but there, some way out, was the dark form of our companion hanging on to a projecting rock.\n\n\"Stand clear to catch me,\" sung out Good. \"I must swim for it.\"\n\nThen we heard a splash, and a great struggle. Another minute and he had grabbed at and caught Sir Henry's outstretched hand, and we had pulled him up high and dry into the tunnel.\n\n\"My word!\" he said, between his gasps, \"that was touch and go. If I hadn't caught that rock, and known how to swim, I should have been done. It runs like a mill-race, and I could feel no bottom.\"\n\nIt was clear that this would not do; so after Good had rested a little, and we had drunk our fill from the water of the subterranean river, which was sweet and fresh, and washed our faces, which sadly needed it, as well as we could, we started from the banks of this African Styx, and began to retrace our steps along the tunnel, Good dripping unpleasantly in front of us. At length we came to another tunnel leading to our right.\n\n\"We may as well take it,\" said Sir Henry, wearily; \"all roads are alike here; we can only go on till we drop.\"\n\nSlowly, for a long, long while, we stumbled, utterly weary, along this new tunnel, Sir Henry leading now.\n\nSuddenly he stopped, and we bumped up against him.\n\n\"Look!\" he whispered, \"is my brain going, or is that light?\"\n\nWe stared with all our eyes, and there, yes, there, far ahead of us, was a faint glimmering spot, no larger than a cottage window pane. It was so faint that I doubt if any eyes, except those which, like ours, had for days seen nothing but blackness, could have perceived it at all.\n\nWith a sort of gasp of hope we pushed on. In five minutes there was no longer any doubt: it was a patch of faint light. A minute more and a breath of real live air was fanning us. On we struggled. All at once the tunnel narrowed. Sir Henry went on his knees. Smaller yet it grew, till it was only the size of a large fox's earth\u2014it was earth now, mind you; the rock had ceased.\n\nA squeeze, a struggle, and Sir Henry was out, and so was Good, and so was I, and there above us were the blessed stars, and in our nostrils was the sweet air; then suddenly something gave, and we were all rolling over and over and over through grass and bushes, and soft, wet soil.\n\nI caught at something and stopped. Sitting up I halloed lustily. An answering shout came from just below, where Sir Henry's wild career had been stopped by some level ground. I scrambled to him, and found him unhurt, though breathless. Then we looked for Good. A little way off we found him too, jammed in a forked root. He was a good deal knocked about, but soon came to.\n\nWe sat down together there on the grass, and the revulsion of feeling was so great, that I really think we cried for joy. We had escaped from that awful dungeon, that was so near to becoming our grave. Surely some merciful Power must have guided our footsteps to the jackal hole at the termination of the tunnel, (for that is what it must have been). And see, there on the mountains, the dawn we had never thought to look upon again was blushing rosy red.\n\nPresently the grey light stole down the slopes, and we saw that we were at the bottom, or rather, nearly at the bottom, of the vast pit in front of the entrance to the cave. Now we could make out the dim forms of the three colossi who sat upon its verge. Doubtless those awful passages, along which we had wandered the live-long night, had originally been, in some way, connected with the great diamond mine. As for the subterranean river in the bowels of the mountain, Heaven only knows what it was, or whence it flows, or whither it goes. I for one have no anxiety to trace its course.\n\nLighter it grew, and lighter yet. We could see each other now, and such a spectacle as we presented I have never set eyes on before or since. Gaunt-cheeked, hollow-eyed wretches, smeared all over with dust and mud, bruised, bleeding, the long fear of imminent death yet written on our countenances, we were, indeed, a sight to frighten the daylight. And yet it is a solemn fact that Good's eyeglass was still fixed in Good's eye. I doubt whether he had ever taken it out at all. Neither the darkness, nor the plunge in the subterranean river, nor the roll down the slope, had been able to separate Good and his eyeglass.\n\nPresently we rose, fearing that our limbs would stiffen if we stopped there longer, and commenced with slow and painful steps to struggle up the sloping sides of the great pit. For an hour or more we toiled steadfastly up the blue clay, dragging ourselves on by the help of the roots and grasses with which it was clothed.\n\nAt last it was done, and we stood on the great road, on the side of the pit opposite to the colossi.\n\nBy the side of the road, a hundred yards off, a fire was burning in front of some huts, and round the fire were figures. We made towards them, supporting one another, and halting every few paces. Presently, one of the figures rose, saw us, and fell on to the ground, crying out for fear.\n\n\"Infadoos, Infadoos! it is us, thy friends.\"\n\nWe rose; he ran to us, staring wildly, and still shaking with fear.\n\n\"Oh, my lords, my lords, it is indeed you come back from the dead!\u2014come back from the dead!\"\n\nAnd the old warrior flung himself down before us, and clasped Sir Henry's knees, and wept aloud for joy."
            },
            {
                "title": "Ignosi's Farewell",
                "text": "Ten days from that eventful morning found us once more in our old quarters at Loo; and, strange to say, but little the worse for our terrible experience, except that my stubbly hair came out of that cave about three shades greyer than it went in, and that Good never was quite the same after Foulata's death, which seemed to move him very greatly. I am bound to say that, looking at the thing from the point of view of an oldish man of the world, I consider her removal was a fortunate occurrence, since, otherwise, complications would have been sure to ensue. The poor creature was no ordinary native girl, but a person of great, I had almost said stately, beauty, and of considerable refinement of mind. But no amount of beauty or refinement could have made an entanglement between Good and herself a desirable occurrence; for, as she herself put it, \"Can the sun mate with the darkness, or the white with the black?\"\n\nI need hardly state that we never again penetrated into Solomon's treasure chamber. After we had recovered from our fatigues, a process which took us forty-eight hours, we descended into the great pit in the hope of finding the hole by which we had crept out of the mountain, but with no success. To begin with, rain had fallen, and obliterated our spoor; and what is more, the sides of the vast pit were full of ant-bear and other holes. It was impossible to say to which of these we owed our salvation. We also, on the day before we started back to Loo, made a further examination of the wonders of the stalactite cave, and, drawn by a kind of restless feeling, even penetrated once more into the Chamber of the Dead; and, passing beneath the spear of the white Death, gazed, with sensations which it would be quite impossible for me to describe, at the mass of rock which had shut us off from escape, thinking, the while, of the priceless treasures beyond, of the mysterious old hag whose flattened fragments lay crushed beneath it, and of the fair girl of whose tomb it was the portal. I say gazed at the \"rock,\" for examine as we would, we could find no traces of the join of the sliding door; nor, indeed, could we hit upon the secret, now utterly lost, that worked it, though we tried for an hour or more. It was certainly a marvellous bit of mechanism, characteristic, in its massive and yet inscrutable simplicity, of the age which produced it; and I doubt if the world has such another to show.\n\nAt last we gave it up in disgust; though, if the mass had suddenly risen before our eyes, I doubt if we should have screwed up courage to step over Gagool's mangled remains, and once more enter the treasure chamber, even in the sure and certain hope of unlimited diamonds. And yet I could have cried at the idea of leaving all that treasure, the biggest treasure probably that has ever in the world's history been accumulated in one spot. But there was no help for it. Only dynamite could force its way through five feet of solid rock. And so we left it. Perhaps, in some remote unborn century, a more fortunate explorer may hit upon the \"Open Sesame,\" and flood the world with gems. But, myself, I doubt it. Somehow, I seem to feel that the millions of pounds' worth of gems that lie in the three stone coffers will never shine round the neck of an earthly beauty. They and Foulata's bones will keep cold company till the end of all things.\n\nWith a sigh of disappointment we made our way back, and next day started for Loo. And yet it was really very ungrateful of us to be disappointed; for, as the reader will remember, I had, by a lucky thought, taken the precaution to fill the pockets of my old shooting coat with gems before we left our prison-house. A good many of these fell out in the course of our roll down the side of the pit, including most of the big ones, which I had crammed in on the top. But, comparatively speaking, an enormous quantity still remained, including eighteen large stones ranging from about one hundred to thirty carats in weight. My old shooting coat still held enough treasure to make us all, if not millionaires, at least exceedingly wealthy men, and yet to keep enough stones each to make the three finest sets of gems in Europe. So we had not done so badly.\n\nOn arriving at Loo, we were most cordially received by Ignosi, whom we found well, and busily engaged in consolidating his power, and reorganising the regiments which had suffered most in the great struggle with Twala.\n\nHe listened with breathless interest to our wonderful story; but when we told him of old Gagool's frightful end, he grew thoughtful.\n\n\"Come hither,\" he called, to a very old Induna (councillor), who was sitting with others in a circle round the king, but out of ear-shot. The old man rose, approached, saluted, and seated himself.\n\n\"Thou art old,\" said Ignosi.\n\n\"Ay, my lord the king!\"\n\n\"Tell me, when thou wast little, didst thou know Gagaoola the witch doctress?\"\n\n\"Ay, my lord the king!\"\n\n\"How was she then\u2014young, like thee?\"\n\n\"Not so, my lord the king! She was even as now; old and dried, very ugly, and full of wickedness.\"\n\n\"She is no more; she is dead.\"\n\n\"So, O king! then is a curse taken from the land.\"\n\n\"Go!\"\n\n\"Koom! I go, black puppy, who tore out the old dog's throat. Koom!\"\n\n\"Ye see, my brothers,\" said Ignosi, \"this was a strange woman, and I rejoice that she is dead. She would have let ye die in the dark place, and mayhap afterwards she had found a way to slay me as she found a way to slay my father, and set up Twala, whom her heart loved, in his place. Now go on with the tale; surely there never was the like!\"\n\nAfter I had narrated all the story of our escape, I, as we had agreed between ourselves that I should, took the opportunity to address Ignosi as to our departure from Kukuanaland.\n\n\"And now, Ignosi, the time has come for us to bid thee farewell, and start to seek once more our own land. Behold, Ignosi, with us thou camest a servant, and now we leave thee a mighty king. If thou art grateful to us, remember to do even as thou didst promise: to rule justly, to respect the law, and to put none to death without a cause. So shalt thou prosper. Tomorrow, at break of day, Ignosi, wilt thou give us an escort who shall lead us across the mountains? Is it not so, O king?\"\n\nIgnosi covered his face with his hands for awhile before answering.\n\n\"My heart is sore,\" he said at last; \"your words split my heart in twain. What have I done to ye, Incubu, Macumazahn, and Bougwan, that ye should leave me desolate? Ye who stood by me in rebellion and in battle, will ye leave me in the day of peace and victory? What will ye\u2014wives? Choose from out the land! A place to live in? Behold, the land is yours as far as ye can see. The white man's houses? Ye shall teach my people how to build them. Cattle for beef and milk? Every married man shall bring ye an ox or a cow. Wild game to hunt? Does not the elephant walk through my forests, and the river-horse sleep in the reeds? Would ye make war? My Impis (regiments) wait your word. If there is anything more that I can give, that will I give ye.\"\n\n\"Nay, Ignosi, we want not these things,\" I answered; \"we would seek our own place.\"\n\n\"Now do I perceive,\" said Ignosi, bitterly, and with flashing eyes, \"that it is the bright stones that ye love more than me, your friend. Ye have the stones; now would ye go to Natal and across the moving black water and sell them, and be rich, as it is the desire of a white man's heart to be. Cursed for your sake be the stones, and cursed he who seeks them. Death shall it be to him who sets foot in the place of Death to seek them. I have spoken, white men; ye can go.\"\n\nI laid my hand upon his arm. \"Ignosi,\" I said, \"tell us, when thou didst wander in Zululand, and among the white men in Natal, did not thine heart turn to the land thy mother told thee of, thy native land, where thou didst see the light, and play when thou wast little, the land where thy place was?\"\n\n\"It was even so, Macumazahn.\"\n\n\"Then thus does our heart turn to our land and to our own place.\"\n\nThen came a pause. When Ignosi broke it, it was in a different voice.\n\n\"I do perceive that thy words are, now as ever, wise and full of reason, Macumazahn; that which flies in the air loves not to run along the ground; the white man loves not to live on the level of the black. Well, ye must go, and leave my heart sore, because ye will be as dead to me, since from where ye will be no tidings can come to me.\n\n\"But listen, and let all the white men know my words. No other white man shall cross the mountains, even if any may live to come so far. I will see no traders with their guns and rum. My people shall fight with the spear, and drink water, like their forefathers before them. I will have no praying-men to put fear of death into men's hearts, to stir them up against the king, and make a path for the white men who follow to run on. If a white man comes to my gates I will send him back; if a hundred come, I will push them back; if an army comes, I will make war on them with all my strength, and they shall not prevail against me. None shall ever come for the shining stones; no, not an army, for if they come I will send a regiment and fill up the pit, and break down the white columns in the caves and fill them with rocks, so that none can come even to that door of which ye speak, and whereof the way to move it is lost. But for ye three, Incubu, Macumazahn, and Bougwan, the path is always open; for behold, ye are dearer to me than aught that breathes.\n\n\"And ye would go. Infadoos, my uncle, and my Induna, shall take thee by the hand and guide thee, with a regiment. There is, as I have learnt, another way across the mountains that he shall show ye. Farewell, my brothers, brave white men. See me no more, for I have no heart to bear it. Behold, I make a decree, and it shall be published from the mountains to the mountains, your names, Incubu, Macumazahn, and Bougwan, shall be as the names of dead kings, and he who speaks them shall die. So shall your memory be preserved in the land for ever.\n\n\"Go now, ere my eyes rain tears like a woman's. At times when ye look back down the path of life, or when ye are old and gather yourselves together to crouch before the fire, because the sun has no more heat, ye will think of how we stood shoulder to shoulder in that great battle that thy wise words planned, Macumazahn, of how thou wast the point of that horn that galled Twala's flank, Bougwan; whilst thou stoodst in the ring of the Greys, Incubu, and men went down before thine axe like corn before a sickle; ay, and of how thou didst break the wild bull's (Twala's) strength, and bring his pride to dust. Fare ye well for ever, Incubu, Macumazahn, and Bougwan, my lords and my friends.\"\n\nHe rose, looked earnestly at us for a few seconds, and then threw the corner of his karross over his head, so as to cover his face from us.\n\nWe went in silence.\n\nNext day at dawn we left Loo, escorted by our old friend Infadoos, who was heart-broken at our departure, and the regiment of Buffaloes. Early as the hour was, all the main street of the town was lined with multitudes of people, who gave us the royal salute as we passed at the head of the regiment, while the women blessed us as having rid the land of Twala, throwing flowers before us as we went. It really was very affecting, and not the sort of thing one is accustomed to meet with from natives.\n\nOne very ludicrous incident occurred, however, which I rather welcomed, as it gave us something to laugh at.\n\nJust before we got to the confines of the town, a pretty young girl, with some beautiful lilies in her hand, came running forward and presented them to Good (somehow they all seemed to like Good; I think his eyeglass and solitary whisker gave him a fictitious value), and then said she had a boon to ask.\n\n\"Speak on.\"\n\n\"Let my lord show his servant his beautiful white legs, that his servant may look on them, and remember them all her days, and tell of them to her children; his servant has travelled four days' journey to see them, for the fame of them has gone throughout the land.\"\n\n\"I'll be hanged if I do!\" said Good, excitedly.\n\n\"Come, come, my dear fellow,\" said Sir Henry, \"you can't refuse to oblige a lady.\"\n\n\"I won't,\" said Good, obstinately; \"it is positively indecent.\"\n\nHowever, in the end he consented to draw up his trousers to the knee, amidst notes of rapturous admiration from all the women present, especially the gratified young lady, and in this guise he had to walk till we got clear of the town.\n\nGood's legs will, I fear, never be so greatly admired again. Of his melting teeth, and even of his \"transparent eye,\" they wearied more or less, but of his legs, never.\n\nAs we travelled, Infadoos told us that there was another pass over the mountains to the north of the one followed by Solomon's great road, or rather that there was a place where it was possible to climb down the wall of cliff that separated Kukuanaland from the desert, and was broken by the towering shapes of Sheba's Breasts. It appeared, too, that rather more than two years previously a party of Kukuana hunters had descended this path into the desert in search of ostriches, whose plumes were much prized among them for war headdresses, and that in the course of their hunt they had been led far from the mountains, and were much troubled by thirst. Seeing, however, trees on the horizon, they made towards them, and discovered a large and fertile oasis of some miles in extent, and plentifully watered. It was by way of this oasis that he suggested that we should return, and the idea seemed to us a good one, as it appeared that we should escape the rigours of the mountain pass, and as some of the hunters were in attendance to guide us to the oasis, from which, they stated, they could perceive more fertile spots far away in the desert.\n\nTravelling easily, on the night of the fourth day's journey we found ourselves once more on the crest of the mountains that separate Kukuanaland from the desert, which rolled away in sandy billows at our feet, and about twenty-five miles to the north of Sheba's Breasts.\n\nAt dawn on the following day, we were led to the commencement of a precipitous descent, by which we were to descend the precipice, and gain the desert two thousand and more feet below.\n\nHere we bade farewell to that true friend and sturdy old warrior, Infadoos, who solemnly wished all good upon us, and nearly wept with grief. \"Never, my lords,\" he said, \"shall mine old eyes see the like of ye again. Ah! the way that Incubu cut his men down in the battle! Ah! for the sight of that stroke with which he swept off my brother Twala's head! It was beautiful\u2014beautiful! I may never hope to see such another, except perchance in happy dreams.\"\n\nWe were very sorry to part from him; indeed, Good was so moved that he gave him as a souvenir\u2014what do you think?\u2014an eyeglass. (Afterwards we discovered that it was a spare one.) Infadoos was delighted, foreseeing that the possession of such an article would enormously increase his prestige, and after several vain attempts actually succeeded in screwing it into his own eye. Anything more incongruous than the old warrior looked with an eyeglass I never saw. Eyeglasses don't go well with leopard-skin cloaks and black ostrich plumes.\n\nThen, having seen that our guides were well laden with water and provisions, and having received a thundering farewell salute from the Buffaloes, we wrung the old warrior's hand, and began our downward climb. A very arduous business it proved to be, but somehow that evening we found ourselves at the bottom without accident.\n\n\"Do you know,\" said Sir Henry that night, as we sat by our fire and gazed up at the beetling cliffs above us, \"I think that there are worse places than Kukuanaland in the world, and that I have spent unhappier times than the last month or two, though I have never spent such queer ones. Eh! you fellows?\"\n\n\"I almost wish I were back,\" said Good, with a sigh.\n\nAs for myself, I reflected that all's well that ends well; but in the course of a long life of shaves, I never had such shaves as those I had recently experienced. The thought of that battle still makes me feel cold all over, and as for our experience in the treasure chamber\u2014!\n\nNext morning we started on a toilsome march across the desert, having with us a good supply of water carried by our five guides, and camped that night in the open, starting again at dawn on the morrow.\n\nBy mid-day of the third day's journey we could see the trees of the oasis of which the guides spoke, and by an hour before sundown we were once more walking upon grass and listening to the sound of running water."
            },
            {
                "title": "Found",
                "text": "And now I come to perhaps the strangest thing that happened to us in all that strange business, and one which shows how wonderfully things are brought about.\n\nI was walking quietly along, some way in front of the other two, down the banks of the stream, which ran from the oasis till it was swallowed up in the hungry desert sands, when suddenly I stopped and rubbed my eyes, as well I might. There, not twenty yards in front, placed in a charming situation, under the shade of a species of fig tree, and facing to the stream, was a cosy hut, built more or less on the Kafir principle of grass and withes, only with a full-length door instead of a bee-hole.\n\n\"What the dickens,\" said I to myself, \"can a hut be doing here!\" Even as I said it, the door of the hut opened, and there limped out of it a white man clothed in skins, and with an enormous black beard. I thought that I must have got a touch of the sun. It was impossible. No hunter ever came to such a place as this. Certainly no hunter would ever settle in it. I stared and stared, and so did the other man, and just at that juncture Sir Henry and Good came up.\n\n\"Look here, you fellows,\" I said, \"is that a white man, or am I mad?\"\n\nSir Henry looked, and Good looked, and then all of a sudden the lame white man with the black beard gave a great cry, and came hobbling towards us. When he got close, he fell down in a sort of faint.\n\nWith a spring Sir Henry was by his side.\n\n\"Great Powers!\" he cried, \"it is my brother George!\"\n\nAt the sound of the disturbance, another figure, also clad in skins, emerged from the hut, with a gun in his hand, and came running towards us. On seeing me he too gave a cry.\n\n\"Macumazahn,\" he halloed, \"don't you know me, Baas? I'm Jim the hunter. I lost the note you gave me to give to the Baas, and we have been here nearly two years.\" And the fellow fell at my feet, and rolled over and over, weeping for joy.\n\n\"You careless scoundrel!\" I said; \"you ought to be well hided.\"\n\nMeanwhile the man with the black beard had recovered and got up, and he and Sir Henry were pump-handling away at each other, apparently without a word to say. But whatever they had quarrelled about in the past (I suspect it was a lady, though I never asked), it was evidently forgotten now.\n\n\"My dear old fellow,\" burst out Sir Henry at last, \"I thought that you were dead. I have been over Solomon's Mountains to find you, and now I come across you perched in the desert, like an old Aasv\u00f6gel (vulture).\"\n\n\"I tried to go over Solomon's Mountains nearly two years ago,\" was the answer, spoken in the hesitating voice of a man who has had little recent opportunity of using his tongue, \"but when I got here, a boulder fell on my leg and crushed it, and I have been able to go neither forward nor back.\"\n\nThen I came up. \"How do you do, Mr. Neville?\" I said; \"do you remember me?\"\n\n\"Why,\" he said, \"isn't it Quatermain, eh, and Good too? Hold on a minute, you fellows, I am getting dizzy again. It is all so very strange, and, when a man has ceased to hope, so very happy.\"\n\nThat evening, over the camp fire, George Curtis told us his story, which, in its way, was almost as eventful as our own, and amounted shortly to this. A little short of two years before, he had started from Sitanda's Kraal, to try and reach the mountains. As for the note I had sent him by Jim, that worthy had lost it, and he had never heard of it till to-day. But, acting upon information he had received from the natives, he made, not for Sheba's Breasts, but for the ladder-like descent of the mountains down which we had just come, which was clearly a better route than that marked out in old Dom Silvestra's plan. In the desert he and Jim suffered great hardships, but finally they reached this oasis, where a terrible accident befell George Curtis. On the day of their arrival, he was sitting by the stream, and Jim was extracting the honey from the nest of a stingless bee, which is to be found in the desert, on the top of the bank immediately above him. In so doing he loosed a great boulder of rock, which fell upon George Curtis' right leg, crushing it frightfully. From that day he had been so dreadfully lame, that he had found it impossible to go either forward or back, and had preferred to take the chances of dying on the oasis to the certainty of perishing in the desert.\n\nAs for food, however, they had got on pretty well, for they had a good supply of ammunition, and the oasis was frequented, especially at night, by large quantities of game, which came thither for water. These they shot, or trapped in pitfalls, using their flesh for food, and, after their clothes wore out, their hides for covering.\n\n\"And so,\" he ended, \"we have lived for nearly two years, like a second Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday, hoping against hope that some natives might come here and help us away, but none have come. Only last night we settled that Jim should leave me, and try to reach Sitanda's Kraal and get assistance. He was to go tomorrow, but I had little hope of ever seeing him back again. And now you, of all people in the world, you, who I fancied had long ago forgotten all about me, and were living comfortably in old England, turn up in a promiscuous way and find me where you least expected. It is the most wonderful thing I ever heard of, and the most merciful too.\"\n\nThen Sir Henry set to work and told him the main facts of our adventures, sitting till late into the night to do it.\n\n\"By Jove!\" he said, when I showed him some of the diamonds; \"well, at least you have got something for your pains, besides my worthless self.\"\n\nSir Henry laughed. \"They belong to Quatermain and Good. It was part of the bargain that they should share any spoils there might be.\"\n\nThis remark set me thinking, and having spoken to Good I told Sir Henry that it was our unanimous wish that he should take a third share of the diamonds, or if he would not, that his share should be handed to his brother, who had suffered even more than ourselves on the chance of getting them. Finally, we prevailed upon him to consent to this arrangement, but George Curtis did not know of it till some time afterwards.\n\nAnd here, at this point, I think I shall end this history. Our journey across the desert back to Sitanda's Kraal was most arduous, especially as we had to support George Curtis, whose right leg was very weak indeed, and continually throwing out splinters of bone; but we did accomplish it somehow, and to give its details would only be to reproduce much of what happened to us on the former occasion.\n\nSix months from the date of our re-arrival at Sitanda's, where we found our guns and other goods quite safe, though the old scoundrel in charge was much disgusted at our surviving to claim them, saw us all once more safe and sound at my little place on the Berea, near Durban, where I am now writing, and whence I bid farewell to all who have accompanied me throughout the strangest trip I ever made in the course of a long and varied experience.\n\nJust as I had written the last word, a Kafir came up my avenue of orange trees, with a letter in a cleft stick, which he had brought from the post. It turned out to be from Sir Henry, and as it speaks for itself I give it in full.\n\n\"Brayley Hall, Yorkshire\n\n\u2002\"MY DEAR QUATERMAIN,\u2014\n\n\u2002\"I sent you a line a few mails back to say that the three of us, George, Good, and myself, fetched up all right in England. We got off the boat at Southampton, and went up to town You should have seen what a swell Good turned out the very next day, beautifully shaved, frock coat fitting like a glove, brand new eyeglass, &c &c. I went and walked in the park with him, where I met some people I know, and at once told them the story of his 'beautiful white legs.'\n\n\u2002\"He is furious, especially as some ill-natured person has printed it in a society paper.\n\n\u2002\"To come to business, Good and I took the diamonds to Streeter's to be valued, as we arranged, and I am really afraid to tell you what they put them at, it seems so enormous. They say that of course it is more or less guess-work, as such stones have never to their knowledge been put on the market in anything like such quantities It appears that they are (with the exception of one or two of the largest) of the finest water, and equal in every way to the best Brazilian stones. I asked them if they would buy them, but they said that it was beyond their power to do so, and recommended us to sell by degrees, for fear we should flood the market. They offer, however, a hundred and eighty thousand for a small portion of them.\n\n\u2002\"You must come home, Quatermain, and see about these things, especially if you insist upon making the magnificent present of the third share, which does not belong to me, to my brother George. As for Good, he is no good. His time is too much occupied in shaving, and other matters connected with the vain adorning of the body. But I think he is still down on his luck about Foulata. He told me that since he had been home he hadn't seen a woman to touch her, either as regards her figure or the sweetness of her expression.\n\n\u2002\"I want you to come home, my dear old comrade, and buy a place near here. You have done your day's work, and have lots of money now, and there is a place for sale quite close which would suit you admirably. Do come; the sooner the better; you can finish writing the story of our adventures on board ship. We have refused to tell the story till it is written by you, for fear that we shall not be believed If you start on receipt of this, you will reach here by Christmas, and I book you to stay with me for that. Good is coming, and George, and so, by the way, is your boy Harry (there's a bribe for you). I have had him down for a week's shooting, and like him. He is a cool young hand; he shot me in the leg, cut out the pellets, and then remarked upon the advantage of having a medical student in every shooting party.\n\n\u2002\"Good-bye, old boy; I can't say any more, but I know that you will come, if it is only to oblige\n\n\u2002\"Your sincere friend,\n\n\u2002\"HENRY CURTIS.\n\n\u2002\"P.S.\u2014The tusks of the great bull that killed poor Khiva have now been put up in the hall here, over the pair of buffalo horns you gave me, and look magnificent; and the axe with which I chopped off Twala's head is stuck up over my writing table. I wish we could have managed to bring away the coats of chain armour.\n\n\u2002\"H.C.\"\n\nTo-day is Tuesday. There is a steamer going on Friday, and I really think I must take Curtis at his word, and sail by her for England, if it is only to see my boy Harry and see about the printing of this history, which is a task I do not like to trust to anybody else."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Dirk Pitt 21) Crescent Dawn",
        "author": "Clive Cussler",
        "genres": [
            "adventure"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "HOSTILE HORIZONS",
                "text": "[ 327 A.D. THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA ]\n\nThe drumbeat echoed off the wooden bulkheads, reverberating in a rhythmic staccato of flawless precision. The celeusta rapped methodically at his goatskin drum in a smooth yet mechanical fashion. He could bang for hours without missing a beat--his musical training based more on endurance than harmony. Though there was a recognized value to his steady cadence, his audience of galley rowers simply hoped that the monotonous performance would soon reach an end.\n\nLucius Arcelian rubbed a sweaty palm across his leggings, then tightened his grip on a heavy oak oar. Pulling the blade through the water in a smooth motion, he quickly matched strokes with the men around him. A young native of Crete, he had joined the Roman Navy six years earlier, attracted by lucrative wages and an opportunity to acquire Roman citizenship at retirement. Physically tested in the years since, he now aspired only to advance to a less laborious position aboard the imperial galley before his arms completely gave out.\n\nContrary to Hollywood myth, slaves were not used aboard ancient Roman galleys. Paid enlistees propelled the ships, typically recruited from seafaring lands under the empire's rule. Like their legionary counterparts in the Roman Army, the enlistees endured weeks of grueling training before being put to sea. The oarsmen were lean and strong, capable of rowing twelve hours a day, if need be. But aboard the Liburnian-type bireme galley, a small and light warship that featured just two banks of oars on either side, the oarsmen acted as supplemental propulsion to a large sail rigged above deck.\n\nArcelian gazed at the celeusta, a minuscule bald man who drummed with a pet monkey tied beside him. He could not help but notice a striking resemblance between the man and the monkey. Both had big ears and round jolly faces. The drummer wore his mug in a constant look of mirth, grinning at the crew with bright wily eyes and chipped yellow teeth. His image somehow made the rowing easier, and Arcelian realized that the galley's captain had made a wise choice in selecting the man.\n\n\"Celeusta,\" called out one of the rowers, a dark-skinned man from Syria. \"The wind blows fierce and the waters seethe. Why hath we been given the command to row?\"\n\nThe drummer's eyes lit up. \"It is not for me to question the wisdom of my officers or else I, too, would be pulling an oar,\" he replied, laughing heartily.\n\n\"I would wager that the monkey could row faster,\" the Syrian replied.\n\nThe celeusta eyed the monkey curled up beside him. \"He is a rather strong little fellow,\" he replied, playing along. \"But in answer to your question, I know not the answer. Perhaps the captain wishes to exercise his talkative crew. Or perhaps he simply desires to run faster than the wind.\"\n\nStanding on the upper deck a few feet above their heads, the galley's captain gazed fitfully astern at the horizon. A pair of distant blue-gray dots danced on the turbulent waters, gradually increasing in size with each passing minute. He turned and looked at the breeze filling his sail, wishing that he could run much, much faster than the wind.\n\nA deep baritone voice suddenly disrupted his focus.\n\n\"Is it the wrath of the sea that weakens your knees, Vitellus?\"\n\nThe captain turned to find a robust man in an armored tunic staring at him with a derisive gaze. A Roman centurion named Plautius, he commanded a garrison of thirty legionaries stationed aboard the ship.\n\n\"Two vessels approach from the south,\" Vitellus replied. \"Pirates both, I am most certain.\"\n\nThe centurion casually gazed at the distant ships, then shrugged.\n\n\"Mere insects,\" he said without concern.\n\nVitellus knew better. Pirates had been a nemesis to Roman shipping for centuries. Though organized piracy in the Mediterranean had been wiped out by Pompey the Great hundreds of years ago, small groups of independent thieves still preyed on the open waters. Solitary merchant ships were the usual targets, but the pirates knew that the bireme galleys often carried valuable cargo as well. Contemplating his own vessel's lading, Vitellus wondered whether the sea-borne barbarians had been tipped off after his ship had left port.\n\n\"Plautius, I need not remind you of the importance of our cargo,\" he stated.\n\n\"Yes, of course,\" the centurion replied. \"Why do you think I am on this wretched vessel? It is I who has been tasked with ensuring its safety until delivery is made to the Emperor in Byzantium.\"\n\n\"Failure to do so would mean fateful consequences for us and our families,\" Vitellus said, thinking of his wife and son in Naples. He scanned the seas off the galley's bow, noting only rolling waves of slate-colored water.\n\n\"There is still no sign of our escort.\"\n\nThree days earlier, the galley had departed Judaea with a large trireme warship as escort. But the ships had become separated during a violent squall the night before, and the escort had not been seen since.\n\n\"Have no fear of the barbarians,\" Plautius spat. \"We will turn the sea red with their blood.\"\n\nThe centurion's brashness was part of the reason that Vitellus had taken an instant disliking toward him. But there were no doubts about his ability to fight, and for that the captain was thankful to have him near.\n\nPlautius and his contingent of legionaries were members of the Scholae Palatinae, an elite military force normally assigned to protection of the Emperor. Most were battle-hardened veterans who had fought with Constantine the Great on the frontier and in his campaign against Maxentius, a rival Caesar whose defeat led to the unification of the splintered empire. Plautius himself bore a wicked scar along his left bicep, a reminder of a fierce encounter with a Visigoth swordsman that nearly cost him his arm. He proudly wore the scar as a badge of toughness, an attribute that nobody who knew him dared to question.\n\nAs the twin pirate ships drew near, Plautius readied his men along the open deck, supplemented by spare galley crewmen. Each was armed with the Roman battle accoutrements of the day--a short fighting sword called a gladius, a round laminated shield, and a throwing lance, or pilum. The centurion quickly divided his soldiers into small fighting groups in order to defend both sides of the ship.\n\nVitellus kept a fixed eye on their pursuers, who now stood within clear sight. They were smaller sail-and oar-driven vessels of sixty feet in length, roughly half the size of the Roman galley. One displayed pale blue square sails and the other gray, while both hulls were painted a flat pewter to match the sea, an old disguise trick favored by Cilician pirates. Each vessel carried twin sails, which accounted for their superior speed under brisk winds. And the winds were blowing strong, offering the Romans little chance of escape.\n\nA glimmer of hope beckoned when the forward lookout shouted a sighting of land ahead. Squinting toward the bow, Vitellus eyed the faint outline of a rocky shoreline to the north. The captain could only speculate as to what land it was. Sailing primarily by dead reckoning, the galley had been blown well off its original course during the earlier storm. Vitellus silently hoped they were near the coast of Anatolia, where other ships of the Roman fleet might be encountered.\n\nThe captain turned to a bulldog-shaped man who wielded the galley's heavy tiller.\n\n\"Gubernator, steer us to land and toward any leeward waters that may avail itself. If we can take the wind out of their sails, then we can outrun the devils with our oars.\"\n\nBelowdecks, the celeusta was ordered to beat a rapid-fire rhythm. There was no talking now between Arcelian and the other oarsmen, just a low bellow of heavy breathing. Word had filtered down of the pursuing pirate ships, and each man concentrated on pulling his oar as quickly and efficiently as possible, knowing his own life was potentially at stake.\n\nFor nearly half an hour, the galley held its distance from the pursuing vessels. Under both sail and oar, the Roman vessel pushed through the waves at nearly seven knots. But the smaller and better-rigged pirates ultimately gained ground again. Pushed to the brink of exhaustion, the galley's oarsmen were finally allowed to slow their strokes to conserve energy. As the brown, dusty landmass arose before them, almost beckoning, the pirates closed in and made their attack.\n\nWith its companion ship holding astern of the galley, the blue-sailed vessel worked its way abeam and then, oddly, moved ahead of the Roman ship. As it passed, a motley horde of armed barbarians stood on deck and loudly taunted the Romans. Vitellus ignored the shouts, staring at the coastline ahead. The three vessels were within a few miles of shore, and he could see the winds diminish slightly in his square-rigged sail. He feared it was too little and too late for his exhausted oarsmen.\n\nVitellus scanned the nearby landscape, hoping he could put in ashore and let his legionaries fight on soil, where they were strongest. But the coastline was a high-faced wall of rocky bluffs that showed no safe haven to run the galley aground.\n\nSpeeding almost a quarter mile ahead, the lead pirate ship suddenly pivoted. In an expert tack, the vessel swung completely around and quickly veered head-on toward the galley. At first glance, it appeared to be a suicidal move. Roman sea strategy had long relied upon ramming as a primary battle tactic, and even the small bireme was outfitted with a heavy bronze prow. Perhaps the barbarians were more brawn than brains, Vitellus considered. He'd like nothing more than to ram and sink the first ship, knowing the second vessel would likely retreat.\n\n\"When she turns again, if she turns, follow and impale her with our ram at any cost,\" he instructed the steersman. A junior officer was stationed in the ladder well to await directional orders for the oarsmen. On deck, the legionaries held their shields in one hand and their throwing spears in the other, awaiting first blood. Silence befell the ship as everyone waited.\n\nThe barbarians held their bow to the galley until they were within a hundred feet. Then as Vitellus predicted, the adversary tacked sharply to port.\n\n\"Strike her!\" the Roman shouted, as the helmsman pushed the tiller all the way over. Belowdecks, the starboard rowers reversed their oars for several strokes, twisting the galley hard to starboard. Just as quickly, they reverted to forward propulsion, joining their port-side oarsmen at maximum effort.\n\nThe smaller pirate ship tried to slip abeam of the galley, but the Roman ship turned with her. The barbarians lost momentum when their sails fell slack as they tacked, while the galley surged ahead. In an instant, the hunter became the prey. As the wind refilled its sails, the smaller ship jumped forward, but not quick enough. The galley's bronze ram kissed the stern flank of the pirate ship, ripping a gash clear to the transom. The vessel nearly keeled over at impact before righting itself, the stern settling low in the water.\n\nA cheer rang out among the Roman legionaries, while Vitellus allowed himself a grin in belief that victory had suddenly swung in their favor. But then he turned to face the second ship and instantly realized that they'd been had.\n\nDuring the engagement, the second vessel had quietly drawn closer. As the galley's ram hit home, the gray-sailed ship immediately drew along the galley's port beam. The crunch of shattered oars filled the air as a fusillade of arrows and grappling hooks rained down on the deck. Within seconds, the two ships were drawn and lashed together as a mass of sword-wielding barbarians flooded over the side.\n\nThe first wave of attackers barely touched the deck when they were impaled by a barrage of razor-sharp spears. The Roman slingers were lethally accurate, and a dozen invaders fell dead in their tracks. But the invasion barely slowed, as a dozen more barbarians took their place. Plautius held his men back until the horde swarmed the deck, then rose and charged. The clang of sword on sword rang over the dying shouts of agony as the slaughter ensued. The Roman legionaries, better trained and disciplined, easily repelled the initial attacks. The barbarians were used to attacking lightly armed merchants, not well-armed soldiers, and they faltered at the stiff resistance. Beating back the boarding party, Plautius rallied half his men to press the attack and personally led the way as the Romans pursued the barbarians onto their own ship.\n\nThe barbarians quickly broke ranks, but then regrouped at the realization that they vastly outnumbered the legionaries. Attacking in groups of three and four, they would target a single Roman and overrun his position. Plautius lost six men before quickly organizing his troops into a fighting square.\n\nOn the stern deck of the galley, Vitellus watched as the Roman centurion cut a man in two with his sword, mowing through the barbarians like a scythe. The captain had gamely turned the galley inshore during the fight, with its pursuer lashed alongside. But the pirate ship dropped a stone anchor, which eventually found bottom and ground both ships to a halt.\n\nMeanwhile, the blue-sailed vessel had curled around and attempted to rejoin the fight. With flooding from its damaged hull slowing its pace, it aimed clumsily for the galley's exposed starboard flank. Duplicating the move of its sister ship, the vessel slipped alongside, and its crew quickly flung grapples.\n\n\"Oarsmen to arms! Report to the deck!\" Vitellus shouted.\n\nBelowdecks, the exhausted oarsmen rallied to the cry. Trained as soldiers first, the oarsmen and every other sailor aboard were expected to defend the ship. Arcelian followed his brethren in line as they gulped down a splash of cold water from a clay pot, then rushed to the deck with a sword in hand.\n\n\"Keep your head down,\" he said to the celeusta, who had passed out the arms and now followed at the end of the line.\n\n\"I prefer to look the barbarian in the eye when I kill him,\" the drummer replied with his trademark grin.\n\nThe oarsmen joined the fight none too soon as the second wave of pirates began storming the starboard rail. The galley's crew quickly engaged the attackers in a mass of steel and flesh.\n\nAs Arcelian stepped onto the main deck, he was aghast at the carnage. Dead bodies and severed limbs were scattered everywhere amid growing pools of blood. Untested in battle, he unwittingly froze for a moment, until an officer ran by and yelled at him, \"Sever the grappling lines!\"\n\nSpotting a taut rope stretching off the galley's bow, he sprang forward and sliced the line free with his sword. He watched as the cut line whipped back toward the blue-sailed ship, whose deck stood several feet below his own. He then peered down the galley's rail and noticed a half dozen more grapple lines affixed to the pirate ship.\n\n\"Cut the lines!\" he shouted. \"Shove the barbarian clear.\"\n\nThe words fell on deaf ears, as he realized that nearly every crewman aboard was engaged with the barbarians in a fight for life. Only at the stern of the galley did he observe with encouragement that the celeusta had joined the effort, attacking a grapple line with a small hatchet. But time was short. Aboard the slowly sinking pirate vessel, the barbarians began making a determined effort to board en masse, realizing their ship had little time left afloat.\n\nArcelian stepped over a dying shipmate to reach the next grapple and quickly raised his sword. Before the blade came down, he heard a whistling through the air, and then a razor-tipped arrow bit into the deck an inch from his foot. Ignoring it, he swung the blade through the rope, then dove beneath the rail as another arrow darted overhead. Peering over the edge, he spotted his assailant, a Cilician archer wedged at the top of the pirate ship's mast. The archer had already turned his attention away from the oarsman and was aiming his next arrow astern. Arcelian looked on in horror as he realized that the archer was aiming at the celeusta, who was about to cut a third grapple line.\n\n\"Celeusta!\" the oarsman screamed.\n\nThe warning came too late. An arrow ripped into the little man's chest, burying itself nearly to the quiver. The drummer gasped, then dropped to his knees, as a flow of blood turned his chest red. In a final act of allegiance, he slammed the hatchet through the grapple line, then fell over dead.\n\nThe barbarian ship began settling lower in the water, inciting a final rush to the galley. Just two grapple lines remained binding the ships together, a point lost on all of the pirates save the archer. Still perched in the mast, he took aim and fired again at Arcelian, sending an arrow whizzing over his head.\n\nArcelian saw that the remaining grapple lines were amidships, although the two vessels were touching at the stern and the fighting had drifted aft. The oarsman dropped to all fours and scurried beneath the rail to the first line. A dying barbarian lay nearby, his midsection a jagged mass of exposed flesh. The strong oarsman approached and nimbly hoisted the man over his shoulder, then turned and stepped to the grapple line. Immediately there came a thwack, and an arrow drove hard into the barbarian's back. With his free hand, Arcelian swung the sword and sliced the line in two as a second arrow burrowed into his human shield. The oarsman collapsed to the deck, rolling the now dead barbarian off his shoulder while catching his breath.\n\nNearly spent from his ordeal, Arcelian surveyed the final grapple, which had clawed into a yardarm a dozen feet above his head. Peeking over the rail, he spotted the enemy archer, who had finally abandoned his perch on the mast and was descending toward the deck. Seizing the opportunity, Arcelian jumped up and ran down his own deck, climbing onto the rail where the grapple line sloped down. Catching his balance, he started to swing the sword, but momentum beat him to the punch.\n\nThe force of the two divergent ships on the single line was too powerful to bear, and the iron grapple lost its grip on the masthead. The rope's high tension flung the grapple like a projectile, spinning it in a low arc toward the water. The sharpened barbs whizzed past Arcelian, barely sparing him a bloody demise. But the rope looped around his thigh and jerked him off the rail, throwing him into the water just ahead of the pirate vessel's bow.\n\nUnable to swim, Arcelian splashed wildly, trying to keep his head above water. Flailing about, he felt something hard in the water and latched onto it with both hands. A chunk of wooden railing from the pirate ship knocked loose during the earlier collision, the flotsam was just large enough to keep him afloat. The blue-sailed pirate ship suddenly loomed over him, and he kicked frantically to escape its path. He was carried farther away from the galley in the process, catching a current that was just too much to overcome in his weakened state. Kicking weakly to hold his position, he watched wide-eyed as the pirate ship caught a gust of wind and accelerated toward the shore, its deck riding low above the water.\n\nWhile Arcelian had freed the starboard grapples from the Roman ship, Vitellus and a junior officer had cleared the port-side lines, save for a remaining grapple near the stern. Leaning against the tiller with an arrow protruding from his shoulder, the captain yelled over to the centurion on the adjacent ship.\n\n\"Plautius, return to the vessel,\" he said in a weakened voice. \"We are cast free.\"\n\nThe centurion and his legionaries were still battling fiercely on the opposite vessel, though their fighting numbers had diminished. Plautius pulled his bloodied sword from the neck of a barbarian and gave a quick glance toward the galley.\n\n\"Proceed with the cargo. I shall detain the barbarians,\" he yelled, plunging his sword into another attacker. There were but three legionaries left standing with him, and Vitellus could see that their remaining breaths would be few.\n\n\"Your bravery shall be recorded,\" the captain yelled, cutting the last line. \"Farewell, Centurion.\"\n\nFree of the anchored attack ship, the galley leaped forward as its lone sail filled with the breeze. His gubernator long dead, Vitellus muscled the steering oar landward, feeling the grip turn slick with his own blood. An odd silence crept over the deck, prompting him to stagger to the forward rail and peer down. The sight below stunned him.\n\nLittered across the deck was a mass of dead and dismembered bodies, Roman and barbarian intermixed, in a wash of red. A nearly equal number of attackers and crewmen had engaged one another, fighting to a mortal standstill. It was a scene of carnage like no other he had ever witnessed.\n\nShaken by the sight and faint from loss of blood, he stared at the heavens.\n\n\"Protect thee for thy Emperor,\" he gasped.\n\nSwaying back to the stern, he wrapped his tired arms around the tiller and adjusted its angle. Cries for help echoed up from men afloat in the water, but the captain's ears fell deaf as the ship sailed by. With his eyes staring vacantly at the land ahead, he gripped the tiller with his last bit of energy and fought for the final moments of his life.\n\nDrifting in the choppy waters, arcelian looked up in surprise to see the Roman ship sailing clear, suddenly bearing down on his own position. Crying for help, he watched in anguish as the galley slipped past him, ignoring him in complete silence. A moment later, he caught a profile of the ship as it turned and he saw with horror that not a single soul stood upon her main deck. Only the lone figure of Captain Vitellus was visible, slumped over the tiller on the raised stern. Then the ship's sails rustled in the wind, and the wooden galley darted toward shore, soon disappearing completely from sight."
            },
            {
                "title": "JUNE 1916 PORTSMOUTH, ENGLAND",
                "text": "The naval dock was abuzz with activity, despite the dampening effects of a cold drizzle. Royal Navy stevedores busily worked beneath a steam-powered derrick, hoisting huge amounts of food, supplies, and munitions aboard the gray leviathan moored at the dock. On board, the crates were neatly stowed in the ship's forward hold, while a throng of sailors in heavy woolen pea-coats readied the ship for sea.\n\nThe HMS Hampshire still maintained a spit-and-polish finish, despite more than a decade at sea and its recent action at the Battle of Jutland. A Devonshire class armored cruiser of ten thousand tons, she was one of the largest ships in the British Navy. Armed with a dozen large deck guns, she was also one of the deadliest.\n\nIn an empty storehouse a quarter mile down the quay, a blond-haired man stood by an open siding and studied the ship's loading through a pair of brass binoculars. He held the binoculars to his eyes for nearly twenty minutes until a green Rolls-Royce appeared, crossing the dock and pulling up in front of the main gangway. He watched intently as a band of Army officers in khaki uniforms quickly materialized, surrounding the car and then assisting the vehicle's occupants up the gangway. From their dress, he judged the two arrivals as a politician and a high-ranking military officer. He caught a quick glimpse of the officer's face, smiling to himself as he noted that the man wore a heavy mustache.\n\n\"Time to make our delivery, Dolly,\" he said aloud.\n\nHe stepped into the shadows, where a weather-beaten cart was hitched to a saddled horse. Stuffing the binoculars under the seat, he climbed aboard and slapped the reins. Dolly, an aged dappled gray mare, lifted her head in annoyance, then shuffled forward, pulling the cart out into the rain.\n\nThe dockhands paid scant attention to the man when he pulled his cart up alongside the ship a few minutes later. Dressed in a faded woolen coat and soiled trousers, a flat cap pulled low over his brow, he resembled dozens of other local paupers who survived by the odd job here and there. In this instance, it was an acted role, embellished by a failure to shave and a liberal dousing of cheap scotch on his clothes. When it was deemed time to perform, he made his presence known by advancing Dolly to the base of the gangway, effectively blocking its use.\n\n\"Get that nag out of the way,\" cursed a red-faced lieutenant overseeing the loading.\n\n\"Aye got a d'livry for the 'Ampshire,\" the man growled in a Cockney accent.\n\n\"Let me see your papers,\" the lieutenant demanded.\n\nThe deliveryman reached inside his jacket and handed the officer a crumpled page of watermarked stationery. The lieutenant frowned as he read it, then slowly shook his head.\n\n\"This is not a proper bill of lading,\" he said, quietly eyeing the deliveryman.\n\n\"It's wot the general gave me. That and a fiver,\" the man replied with a wink."
            },
            {
                "title": "The lieutenant walked around and surveyed the crate, which was roughly the size of a coffin. On the top was an address stenciled in black paint:PROPERTY OF THE ROYAL NAVY TO THE ATTENTION OF SIR LEIGH HUNT SPECIAL ENVOY TO THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE C/O CONSULATE OF GREAT BRITAIN PETROGRAD, RUSSIA",
                "text": "\"Humph,\" the officer muttered, eyeing the paperwork again. \"Well, it is signed by the general. Very well,\" he said, passing the paper back. \"You, there,\" he barked, turning to a nearby stevedore. \"Help get that crate aboard. Then get this wagon out of here.\"\n\nRope was strung around the crate, and a shipboard derrick yanked it into the sky, swinging it over the rail and depositing it in the forward hold. The deliveryman gave a mock salute to the lieutenant, then slowly drove the horse off the dock and out of the navy yard. Turning down a nearby dirt road, he ambled past a small port warehouse district that ended at an expanse of open farmland. A mile farther down the road, he turned into an uneven drive and parked the cart beside a dilapidated cottage. An old man with a game leg limped out of a nearby barn.\n\n\"Make your delivery?\" he asked the driver.\n\n\"I did. Thank you for the use of your cart and horse,\" the man replied, pulling a ten-pound note out of his wallet and handing it to the farmer.\n\n\"Begging your pardon, sir, but that's more than my horse is worth,\" the farmer stammered, holding the note in his hands as if it were a baby.\n\n\"And a fine horse it is,\" the man replied, giving Dolly a farewell pat on the neck. \"Good day,\" he said to the farmer, tipping his hat without another word, then walking up the drive.\n\nHe turned down the road and hiked a few minutes until detecting the sound of an automobile headed his way. A blue Vauxhall touring sedan rounded a corner, then slowed to a stop beside him. The deliveryman stepped closer as the rear door of the sedan opened and he climbed in. A staid-looking man in the attire of an Anglican priest slid across the backseat to make room. He stared at the deliveryman with a shroud of apprehension masking his dull gray eyes, then reached for a decanter of brandy mounted to the seat back. Pouring a healthy shot into a crystal tumbler, he passed it to the deliveryman, then directed the driver to proceed down the road.\n\n\"The crate is aboard?\" he asked bluntly.\n\n\"Yes, Father,\" the deliveryman replied in a sarcastic tone of reverence. \"They bought the phony bill of lading and loaded the crate into the forward hold.\" There was no longer any trace of a Cockney accent as he spoke. \"In seventy-two hours, you can bid farewell to your illustrious general.\"\n\nThe words seemed to trouble the vicar, though they were what he had anticipated. He silently reached into his overcoat and retrieved an envelope stuffed thick with banknotes.\n\n\"As we agreed. Half now, half after the... event,\" he said, passing over the envelope as his words fell away.\n\nThe deliveryman smiled as he eyed the thick stack of currency. \"I wonder if the Germans would pay this much to sink a ship and murder a general,\" he said. \"You wouldn't happen to be working for the Kaiser, now, would you?\"\n\nThe minister firmly shook his head. \"No, this is a theological matter. Had you been able to locate the document, this would not have been necessary.\"\n\n\"I searched the manor three times. If it was there, I would have found it.\"\n\n\"As you have told me.\"\n\n\"You are certain that it was carried aboard?\"\n\n\"We've learned of a meeting on the general's schedule with the Father Superior of the Russian Orthodox Church in Petrograd. There can be little doubt as to the purpose. The document must be aboard. It will be destroyed along with him, and so the secret shall die.\"\n\nThe Vauxhall's tires touched wet cobblestone as they entered the outskirts of Portsmouth. The driver navigated toward the city center, passing block after block of tall brick row houses. Reaching a main crossroads, he turned into the rear driveway of a nineteenth-century stone church labeled St. Mary's as the rain began to fall with intensity.\n\n\"I'd like you to drop me at the railway station,\" the deliveryman said, observing the large motorcar bisect a churchyard cemetery and pull to a stop behind the rectory.\n\n\"I was asked to drop off a sermon,\" the minister replied. \"Won't take more than a moment. Why don't you join me?\"\n\nThe deliveryman suppressed a yawn as he looked out the rain-streaked window. \"No, I think I'll wait here and keep dry.\"\n\n\"Very well. We'll return shortly.\"\n\nThe minister and driver walked away, leaving the deliveryman to count his blood money. As he attempted to tally up the Bank of England notes, he had trouble reading the numbers and realized his vision was blurring. He felt a wave of fatigue sweep over him and quickly tucked the money away and lay down on the seat to rest. Though it seemed like hours, it was only a few minutes later when a mist of cold water struck his face and he pried open his heavy eyelids. The stern face of the minister looked down upon him amid a shower of rain. His brain told him that his body was moving, but there was no feeling in his legs. He focused his blurry eyes enough to see the driver was carrying his legs, while the minister dragged him by the arms. A mute sense of panic rang within his skull, and he willed himself to retrieve a Webley Bulldog pistol from his pocket. But his limbs refused to respond. The brandy, he thought with momentary clarity. It was the brandy.\n\nA canopy of green leaves filled his vision as he was carried beneath a grove of towering oak trees. The minister's face still swayed above him, a sullen mask of indifference illuminated by two frigid eyes. Then the face fell away, or rather he did. He heard more than felt his body drop into a trench, splashing down hard into a muddy puddle. Flat on his back, he gazed up at the minister, who stood high over him with a faint aura of guilt.\n\n\"Forgive us our sins in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,\" he heard the minister say solemnly. \"These we take to the grave.\"\n\nThe back side of a shovel appeared, followed by a clump of soggy dirt that fell and bounced off his chest. Another shovelful of dirt tumbled down, and then another.\n\nHis body was paralyzed and his voice frozen, but his mind still operated with reason. With crushing horror, he fully grasped that he was being buried alive. He fought again to move his limbs, but there was no response. As the dirt piled high within his grave, his screams of terror blared only within his mind, until his last breath was painfully snuffed out.\n\nThe periscope cut a lazy arc through the boiling black water, its presence nearly invisible under the night sky. Thirty-five feet beneath the surface, a baby-faced German naval Oberleutnant named Voss slowly rotated the viewing piece three hundred and sixty degrees. He lingered over a few speckled lights that rose high in the distance. They were lantern lights from a scattering of farmhouses that dotted Cape Marwick, a frigid, windswept stretch of the Orkney Islands. Voss had nearly completed his circular survey when his eye caught a faint glimmer on the eastern horizon. Dialing the viewing lens to a crisper focus, he patiently tracked a steady movement of the light.\n\n\"Possible target at zero-four-eight degrees,\" he announced, fighting to contain the excitement in his voice.\n\nSeveral other sailors stationed in the submarine's cramped control room perked to attention at his words.\n\nVoss tracked the object for several more minutes, during which time a quarter moon broke briefly through a bank of thick storm clouds. For a fleeting moment, the moonlight cast a sheen on the object, exposing its dimensions against the island hills behind it. Voss felt his heart flutter and noticed his palms suddenly grow sweaty on the periscope handgrips. Blinking hard, he confirmed the visual image, then stood away from the eyepiece. Without saying a word, he sprinted from the control room, scrambling down the tiny aft passageway that ran the length of the sub. Reaching the captain's cabin, he knocked loudly, then slid open a thin curtain.\n\nCaptain Kurt Beitzen was asleep in his bunk but woke instantly and flicked on an overhead lamp.\n\n\"Kapitan, I've spotted a large vessel approaching from the southeast approximately ten kilometers off. I caught a brief glimpse of her profile. A British warship, possibly a battleship,\" Voss reported excitedly.\n\nBeitzen nodded as he sat upright, flinging off a blanket. He had slept in his clothes and quickly pulled on a pair of boots, then followed his second officer to the control room. An experienced submariner, Beitzen took a long look through the attack periscope, then barked out range and heading coordinates.\n\n\"She's a warship,\" he confirmed nonchalantly. \"Is this quadrant clear of mines?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Voss replied. \"Our nearest release was thirty kilometers north of here.\"\n\n\"Stand by to attack,\" Beitzen ordered.\n\nBeitzen and Voss moved to a wooden chart table, where they plotted a precise intercept course and relayed orders to the helm. Though submerged, the submarine rocked and pitched from the turbulent seas overhead, making the urgent task more stressful.\n\nBuilt in the shipyards of Hamburg, the U-75 was a UE-1 class submarine, designed primarily for laying down mines on the seafloor. In addition to a large stock of mines, she carried four torpedoes and a powerful 105mm deck gun. Her mine-laying duty was nearly complete, and none of the crew was expecting an encounter with an enemy warship.\n\nUnder Beitzen's command, the U-75 was on only its second mission since being launched six months earlier. The current cruise had been deemed a minor success already, as the sub's mines had sunk a small merchant ship and two trawlers. But this was their first crack at a prize of major stature. Word quickly rippled through the crew that they were targeting a British warship, boosting the focus and tension to high levels. Beitzen himself knew that such a kill would guarantee him the Iron Cross.\n\nThe German commander gently guided the submarine to a position perpendicular to Marwick Cape. If the warship held her bearing, she would pass within a quarter mile of the lurking sub. The U-boat's torpedoes had an accurate range of less than half a mile, necessitating an uncomfortably close firing position. In World War I, most merchant ships were actually sunk by the U-boats' deck guns. The U-75 didn't have that option against the heavily armed cruiser, particularly in the present rough seas.\n\nPositioned for the kill, the captain hung to the periscope, waiting for his quarry. Another flash of moonlight revealed that the Oberleutnant was close to the mark. The vessel appeared to be an armored cruiser, somewhat smaller than the fearsome dreadnoughts.\n\n\"Tubes one and two, stand by for firing,\" Beitzen commanded.\n\nThe cruiser was now less than a mile away, its imposing size nearly masking the horizon. Beitzen quickly double-checked the torpedoes' firing profile, then eyed the target once more. The vessel was quickly approaching their strike range.\n\n\"Open bow caps,\" he ordered.\n\nA few seconds later, a reply rang through the control room, \"Bow caps open.\"\n\n\"Tubes one and two ready.\"\n\n\"Ready,\" came the reply.\n\nBeitzen tracked the cruiser through the periscope, waiting patiently while the crew around him held their breaths. He watched until the big surface ship appeared directly in front of them. Beitzen parted his lips to give the fire command when a bright flash suddenly filled his eyepiece. A second later, a muffled explosion rocked through the sub's steel bulkheads.\n\nBeitzen stared dumbfounded through the periscope as flames and smoke burst from the cruiser, lighting the night sky with a blaze of persimmon red. The big warship shuddered and shook, and then her bow burrowed under the waves. The stern quickly rose up, hung suspended in midair for a few moments, then chased the bow down toward the seafloor. In less than ten minutes, the mammoth cruiser disappeared completely from sight.\n\n\"Voss... you are certain there are no mines in this quadrant?\" he asked hoarsely.\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" the officer replied, double-checking a chart of mine-field locations.\n\n\"She's gone,\" he finally muttered to the anxious crew awaiting his orders. \"Close bow caps and stand down.\"\n\nAs the disappointed crew resumed their duties, the captain clung to the periscope, staring blankly through the eyepiece. A handful of survivors had escaped in lifeboats, but there was nothing he could do to help them in the turbulent waters. Watching the empty black sea before him, he struggled to find an answer. Yet none of it made sense. Warships just didn't blow up by themselves.\n\nIt was a long while before Beitzen pried himself away from the periscope and staggered quietly to his cabin. Fated to die later in the war, he would never learn the truth of why the Hampshire had blown up. But in his remaining days, the young Kapitan never shook the image from his mind of the cruiser's last minutes, when the massive warship seemingly died without cause."
            },
            {
                "title": "OTTOMAN DREAM",
                "text": "[ JULY 2012 CAIRO, EGYPT ]\n\nThe noonday sun burned through the dense layer of dust and pollutants that hung over the ancient city like a soiled blanket. With the temperature well over the century mark, few people lingered about the hot stones that paved the central court of al-Azhar Mosque.\n\nSituated in eastern Cairo some two miles from the Nile, al-Azhar stood as one of the city's most historic structures. Originally constructed in the year 970 A.D. by Fatimid conquerors, the mosque was rebuilt and expanded through the centuries, ultimately attaining status as Islam's fifth most important mosque. Elaborate stone carvings, towering minarets, and onion-domed spires vied for the eye's attention, reflecting a thousand years of artistry. Amid its fortress-like stone walls, the centerpiece of the complex was a wide rectangular court surrounded by rising arcades on every side.\n\nIn the shade of an arcade portico, a slight man in baggy trousers and a loose-fitting shirt wiped clean a pair of tinted glasses, then surveyed the courtyard. In the heat of the day, only a small number of youths were about, studying the architecture or walking in silent meditation. They were students from the adjacent al-Azhar University, a preeminent institution for Islamic learning in the Middle East. The man touched a thick beard that covered his own youthful face, then lifted a worn backpack to his shoulder. With a white cotton keffiyeh wrapped about his head, he easily passed as just another theology student.\n\nStepping into the sunlight, he trekked across the court toward the southeast arcade. The facade above the keel-shaped arches featured a series of ornate roundels and niches cut into the stucco, which he noticed had become favored roosting spots for some local pigeons. He walked toward a protruding central arch topped by a high rectangular panel, which signified the entrance to the prayer hall.\n\nThe call to midday salat, or prayer, had occurred nearly an hour earlier, leaving the expansive prayer hall nearly empty. Outside the foyer, a small group of students sat cross-legged on the ground, listening to a university instructor lecture on the Qur'an. Skirting around the group, the man approached the hall entry. There he met a bearded man in a white robe, who eyed him sternly. The visitor removed his shoes and quietly offered a blessing to Muhammad, then proceeded in with a nod from the doorman.\n\nThe prayer hall was an open expanse of red carpet punctuated by dozens of alabaster pillars that rose to a beamed ceiling. As in most mosques, there were no pews or ornate altars to provide orientation. Cupola-shaped patterns in the carpet, outlying individual positions of prayer, pointed toward the head of the hall. Noting that the bearded doorman no longer paid him any attention, the man made his way quickly along the pillars.\n\nApproaching several men kneeling in prayer, he spotted the mihrab across the hall. An often unassuming niche carved into a mosque's wall, it indicated the direction of Mecca. Al-Azhar's mihrab was cut of smooth stone and arched with a wavy black-and-ivory stone inlay that had a nearly modern design.\n\nMoving to a pillar closest to the mihrab, the man slipped off his backpack, then lay prone on the carpet in prayer. After several minutes, he gently pushed his pack to the side until it wedged against the base of the pillar. Spotting a pair of students walking in the direction of the entrance, he rose and followed them to the foyer, where he retrieved his shoes. Passing the bearded elder, he muttered, \"Allahu Akbar,\" then quickly stepped into the courtyard.\n\nHe pretended to briefly admire a rosette in the facade, then quickly made his way to the Barber's Gate, which led out of the mosque compound. A few blocks away, he climbed into a small rental car parked on the street and drove in the direction of the Nile. Passing through a dingy industrial neighborhood, he turned onto the lot of a crumbling old brickyard and pulled behind its abandoned loading dock. There he pulled off his loose trousers and shirt, revealing a pair of jeans and silk blouse underneath. The eyeglasses were removed, along with a wig, and then the fake beard. The male Muslim student was no more, replaced by an attractive, olive-skinned woman with hard dark eyes and stylishly layered short black hair. Ditching her disguise in a rusty garbage bin, she hopped back into the car and rejoined Cairo's sluggish traffic, crawling away from the Nile to the Cairo International Airport on the northeast side of town.\n\nShe was standing in line at the checkin counter when the backpack exploded. A small white cloud rose over al-Azhar Mosque as the prayer hall roof was blown off and the mihrab shattered into a pile of rubble. Though the explosion had been timed to detonate between daily prayers, several students and mosque attendants were killed and dozens more injured.\n\nAfter the initial shock subsided, the Cairo Muslim community was outraged. Israel was blamed first, then other Western nations were targeted when no one claimed responsibility for the blast. In a few weeks, the prayer hall would be repaired and a new mihrab quickly installed. But to Muslims across Egypt and around the world, the anger at the assault on such a sacred site lasted much longer. Few could have recognized, however, that the attack was only the first salvo in a strategic ploy that would attempt to transform the very dominance of the entire region."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "TAKE THE KNIFE AND CUT IT FREE.\"\n\nAn angry scowl covered the Greek fisherman's face as he handed his son a rusty serrated knife. The teenage boy stripped down to his shorts, then leaped off the side of the boat, the knife held firmly in one hand.\n\nIt had been nearly two hours since the trawler's fishing nets had first snagged on the bottom, much to the surprise of the old Greek, who had safely dragged these waters many times before. He ran his boat in every direction, hoping to work the nets free, cursing loudly as his frustration mounted. Try as he might, the nets held firm. It would be a costly loss to cut away a portion of his nets, but the fisherman grudgingly accepted the occupational hazard and sent his boy over the side.\n\nThough windswept on the surface, the waters of the eastern Aegean Sea were warm and clear, and at thirty feet down the boy could faintly see the bottom. But it was still well beyond his ability to freedive, so he halted his descent and attacked the dangling nets with his knife. It took several dives before the last strand was cut free and the boy yanked to the surface with the damaged nets, exhausted and out of breath. Still cursing over his loss, the fisherman turned the boat west and putted off toward Chios, a Greek island close to the Turkish mainland, which rose from the azure waters a short distance away.\n\nA quarter mile farther out to sea, a man studied the fisherman's plight with curiosity. His frame was tall and lean yet robust, his skin deeply tanned from years in the sun. He lowered an old-fashioned brass telescope from his brow, exposing a pair of sea-green eyes that flickered with intelligence. They were reflective eyes, hardened by adversity and numerous brushes with death, yet they softened easily with humor. He rubbed his hand through thick ebony hair flecked with gray, then he stepped onto the bridge of the research vessel Aegean Explorer.\n\n\"Rudi, we've surveyed a good chunk of the bottom between here and Chios, haven't we?\" he asked.\n\nA diminutive man with horn-rimmed glasses looked up from a computer station and nodded his head.\n\n\"Yes, our last grid ran within a mile of the eastern shore. With the Greek island situated less than five miles from Turkey, I don't even know whose waters we're in. We had about ninety percent of the grid complete when the AUV's rear sensor blew a seal and flooded with salt water. We'll be down at least two more hours while our technicians repair the damage.\"\n\nThe AUV, or autonomous underwater vehicle, was a torpedo-shaped robot packed with sensing equipment that was dropped over the side of the research ship. Self-propelled and preprogrammed with a designated survey path, the AUV would cruise above the seafloor collecting data that was periodically relayed back to the surface ship.\n\nRudi Gunn resumed tapping at the keyboard. Dressed as he was in a tattered T-shirt and plaid shorts, nobody would have guessed he was the Deputy Director for the National Underwater and Marine Agency, the prominent government organization responsible for the scientific study of the world's oceans. Gunn was normally confined to NUMA's Washington headquarters rather than stationed aboard one of the turquoise-colored research vessels that the agency used to gather information on marine life, ocean currents, and environmental pollution. An adept administrator, he relished escaping the hubris of the nation's capital and getting his hands dirty in the field, especially when his boss had escaped likewise.\n\n\"What sort of bottom contours have we seen in the shallows around here?\"\n\n\"Typical of the local islands. A sloping shelf extends offshore a short distance before abruptly plunging to thousand-foot depths. We're in about a hundred and twenty feet of water here. As I recall, this area has a fairly sandy bottom, with few obstructions.\"\n\n\"That's what I thought,\" the man replied, a sparkle growing in his eye.\n\nGunn caught the look and said, \"I detect a devious plot in the boss's head.\"\n\nDirk Pitt laughed. As the Director of NUMA, he had led dozens of underwater explorations, with remarkable results. From raising the Titanic to discovering the ships of the lost Franklin Expedition in the Arctic, Pitt had an uncanny knack for solving the mysteries of the deep. A quietly confident man with an insatiable curiosity, he'd been enamored of the sea from an early age. The lure never waned, and drew him out of NUMA's Washington headquarters on a regular basis.\n\n\"It's a known fact,\" he said cheerily, \"that most inshore shipwrecks are found by the nets of local fishermen.\"\n\n\"Shipwrecks?\" Gunn replied. \"As I recall, our invitation from the Turkish government was to locate and study the impact of algae blooms reported along their coastal waters. There was no mention of any wreck searches.\"\n\n\"I only take them as they come,\" Pitt smiled.\n\n\"Well, we are out of commission for the moment. Do you want to drop the ROV over the side?\"\n\n\"No, the nets of our neighborhood fisherman are snagged well within diving range.\"\n\nGunn looked at his watch. \"I thought you were leaving in two hours to spend the weekend in Istanbul with your wife?\"\n\n\"More than enough time,\" Pitt said with a grin, \"for a quick dive on the way to the airport.\"\n\n\"Then I guess this means,\" Gunn replied with a resigned shake of the head, \"that I gotta go wake up Al.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "\"Which way to the bottom?\" Al Giordino shouted, the cobwebs from an afternoon siesta slowly clearing from his dark brown eyes.\n\nPitt had taken a visual bearing using several landmarks on the neighboring island. Guiding Giordino inshore on a decided angle, they motored just a short distance before Pitt ordered the engine cut. He then threw a small anchor over the bow, tying it off when the line went slack.\n\n\"Just over a hundred feet,\" he remarked, eyeing a red stripe on the line that was visible underwater.\n\n\"And just what do you expect to find down below?\"\n\n\"Anything from a pile of rocks to the Britannic,\" Pitt replied, referring to a sister ship of the Titanic that was sunk by a mine in the Mediterranean during World War I.\n\n\"My money's on the rocks,\" Giordino replied, slipping into a blue wet suit whose seams were tested by his brawny shoulders and biceps.\n\nDeep down, Giordino knew there would be something more interesting than an outcropping of rocks at the bottom. He had too much history with Pitt to question his friend's apparent sixth sense when it came to underwater mysteries. The two had been childhood friends, in Southern California, where they'd learned to dive together off Laguna Beach. While serving in the Air Force, they'd both taken a temporary assignment at a fledgling new federal department tasked with studying the oceans. Scores of projects and adventures later, Pitt now headed up the vastly expanded agency called NUMA, while Giordino worked alongside him as his Director of Underwater Technology.\n\n\"Let's try an elongated circle search off the anchor line,\" Pitt suggested, as they buckled on their air tanks. \"My bearing puts the net snag slightly inshore of our present position.\"\n\nGiordino nodded, then stuffed a regulator into his mouth and slipped backward off the Zodiac and into the water. Pitt splashed in a second later, and the two men followed the anchor line to the bottom.\n\nThe blue waters of the Aegean Sea were remarkably clear, and Pitt had no trouble seeing fifty feet or more. As they approached the darkened bottom, he noted with some satisfaction that the seafloor was a combination of flat gravel and sand. Gunn's assessment was correct. The area appeared to be naturally free of obstructions.\n\nThe two men spread apart a dozen feet above the seafloor and swam a lazy arc seaward around the anchor line. A small school of sea bass cruised by, eyeing the divers suspiciously before darting away to deeper water. As they angled around toward Chios, Pitt noticed Giordino waving at him. Thrusting his legs in a strong scissors kick, Pitt swam closer, finding his partner pointing to a large shape ahead of them.\n\nIt was a towering brown shadow that seemed to waver in the thin light. It reminded Pitt of a windblown tree, its leafy branches sprouting skyward. Swimming closer, he saw that it was no tree but the remnants of the fisherman's nets drifting lazily in the current.\n\nLeery of entanglement, the two divers moved cautiously, positioning themselves up current as they approached. The nets were caught on a single point, protruding just above the seafloor. Pitt could see a faint trench scratched across the gravel-and-sand bottom, ending in an upright spar tangled with the nets. Kicking closer to the obstruction, he could see that it was a corroded T-shaped iron anchor about five feet in length. The anchor was tilted on its side, with one fluke pointing toward the surface, the fisherman's nets hopelessly ensnarled around it, while the other fluke was embedded in the seafloor. Pitt reached down and fanned away around the base, revealing that the buried fluke was wedged between a thick beam of wood and a smaller cross frame. Pitt had explored enough shipwrecks to recognize the thick beam as a ship's keel.\n\nHe turned away from the nets and eyed the wide, shallow trench that had recently been scratched across the bottom. Giordino was already hovering over it, tracking it to its origin. Like Pitt, he had surmised what happened. The fishing nets had snagged the anchor at one end of the wreck and dragged it along the keel line until it had caught a cross frame and held firm. The action had unwittingly exposed a large portion of an aged shipwreck.\n\nPitt swam toward Giordino, who was fanning sand from a linear protrusion. Clearing the protective sediment revealed several pieces of cross frame beneath the keel. Giordino gazed into Pitt's dive mask with bright eyes and shook his head. Pitt's underwater sense had sniffed out a shipwreck, and an old one at that.\n\nUncovering bits and pieces as they swept the perimeter, they could tell that the ship was about fifty feet long, and its upper deck had long since eroded away. Most of the vessel had in fact disappeared, with just a few sections of the hull surviving intact. Yet at the stern, portions of several small compartments were evident beneath soft sand. Ceramic dishes, tile, and fragments of unglazed pottery were visible throughout, although the ship's actual cargo was not apparent.\n\nWith their bottom time beginning to run low, the two divers returned to the stern and scooped away sections of gravel and sand, searching for anything that might help identify the wreck. Poking through an area of loose timbers, Giordino's fingers brushed upon a flat object under the sand and he dug down to find a small metal box. Holding it up to his mask, he could see a pin-type locking mechanism was encrusted to the front, though the shackle was mostly corroded away. Carefully wrapping it in a dive bag, he checked his watch, then swam over to Pitt and signaled that he was surfacing.\n\nPitt had uncovered a small row of clay pots, which he left undisturbed as Giordino approached. He was turning to follow Giordino to the surface when a small glint in the sand caught his eye. It came from opposite the pots, where his fins had brushed up some bottom sediment. Pitt swam around and fanned away more sand, exposing a flat section of ceramic. Though it was caked with concretions, he could see that the design featured an elaborate floral motif. Digging his fingers into the sand, he grasped the edges of a rectangular box and pulled it free.\n\nThe ceramic container was about twice the size of a cigar box, its flat sides emblazoned with a blue-and-white design that matched the lid. The box felt heavy for its size, and Pitt carefully tucked it under one arm before kicking toward the surface.\n\nA steady afternoon breeze was building from the northwest, pestering the water with whitecaps. Giordino was already aboard the Zodiac, yanking up the anchor, when Pitt appeared. He kicked over to the rubber boat and handed Giordino the box, then climbed aboard and stripped off his dive gear.\n\n\"Guess you owe that fisherman a bottle of ouzo,\" Giordino said, starting up the outboard motor.\n\n\"He certainly put us on an interesting wreck,\" Pitt replied, drying his face with a towel.\n\n\"Not an amphora-carrying Bronze Age wreck, but she still looked pretty old.\"\n\n\"Possibly medieval,\" Pitt guessed. \"A mere child, by Mediterranean wreck standards. Let's get to shore and see what we've got.\"\n\nGiordino gunned the motor, driving the Zodiac up on its keel, then turned toward the nearby island. Chios itself was two miles away, but it was another three miles up the coast before they entered the small bay of a sleepy fishing village called Vokaria. They tied up at a weather-beaten pier that looked like it had been built during the Age of Sail. Giordino then threw a towel down onto the dock, and Pitt laid out the two artifacts.\n\nBoth items were covered in a layer of sandy concretion, built up over centuries underwater. Pitt located a freshwater hose nearby and carefully scrubbed away some of the layered muck on the ceramic box. Free of grime and held aloft under the sunlight, it dazzled the eye. An intricate floral pattern of dark blue, purple, and turquoise burst against a bright white background.\n\n\"Looks a bit Moroccan,\" Giordino said. \"Can you pop the top off?\"\n\nPitt carefully worked his fingers under the overhanging lid. Finding a light resistance, he gently forced it free. Inside, the box was filled with dirty water, along with an oblong object that glittered faintly through the murk. Pitt carefully tilted the box to one side, draining it.\n\nHe reached in and pulled out a semicircular object that was heavily encrusted. To his shock, he could see that it was a crown. Pitt held it up gingerly, feeling the heavy weight of its solid-gold construction, the metal gleaming from portions that were free of sediment.\n\n\"Will you look at that?\" Giordino marveled. \"Looks like something straight out of King Arthur.\"\n\n\"Or perhaps Ali Baba,\" Pitt replied, looking at the ceramic box.\n\n\"That shipwreck must be no ordinary merchant runner. You think it might be some sort of royal vessel?\"\n\n\"Anything is possible,\" Pitt replied. \"It would seem somebody important was traveling aboard.\"\n\nGiordino took hold of the crown and placed it on his head at a rakish angle.\n\n\"King Al, at your service,\" he said, with a wave of his arm. \"Bet I could attract a fine local lady wearing this.\"\n\n\"Along with some men in white jackets,\" Pitt scoffed. \"Let's take a look at your lockbox.\"\n\nGiordino set the crown back into the ceramic case, then picked up the small iron box. As he did, the corroded padlock slipped off, dropping to the towel.\n\n\"Security ain't what it used to be,\" he muttered, setting the box back down. Emulating Pitt, he worked the edges of the lid with his fingers, prying the top off with a pop. Only a small amount of seawater sloshed about inside, for the container was filled nearly to the rim with coins.\n\n\"Talk about hitting the jackpot,\" he grinned. \"Looks like we may be in for an early retirement.\"\n\n\"Thank you, no. I'd rather not spend my retirement years in a Turkish prison,\" Pitt replied.\n\nThe coins were made of silver and badly corroded, several of them melded together. Pitt reached to the bottom of the pile and pulled out one that glimmered, a lone gold coin that hadn't suffered the effects of corrosion. He held it up to his eye, noting an irregular stamp, indicative of hammered coinage. Swirling Arabic lettering was partially visible on both sides, surrounded by a serrated ring. Pitt could only guess as to the age and origin of the coin. The two men curiously examined the other coins, which in their condition revealed few markings.\n\n\"Based on our limited evidence, I'd guess we have an Ottoman wreck of some sort on our hands,\" Pitt declared. \"The coins don't look Byzantine, which means fifteenth century or later.\"\n\n\"Somebody should be able to date those accurately.\"\n\n\"The coins were a lucky find,\" Pitt agreed.\n\n\"I say fund the project another month and avoid going back to Washington.\"\n\nA battered Toyota pickup truck approached along the dock, squealing to a halt in front of the men. A smiling youth with big ears climbed out of the truck.\n\n\"A ride to the airport?\" he asked haltingly.\n\n\"Yes, that's me,\" Pitt said, retrieving his overnight bag from the Zodiac.\n\n\"What about our goodies?\" Giordino asked, carefully wrapping the items in the towel before the driver could examine them.\n\n\"To Istanbul with me, I'm afraid. I know the Director of Maritime Studies at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. He'll find a good home for the artifacts and hopefully tell us what we found.\"\n\n\"I guess that means no wild night out on Chios for King Al,\" Giordino said, passing the towel to Pitt.\n\nPitt glanced at the sleepy village ringing the harbor, then climbed into the idling truck.\n\n\"To be honest,\" he said as the driver began pulling away, \"I'm not sure Chios is ready for King Al.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "The commuter plane touched down at ataturk international airport in Istanbul just before dark. Scurrying around a mass of commercial jumbo jets like a mosquito in a beehive, the small plane pulled into an empty terminal slot and bumped to a halt.\n\nPitt was one of the last passengers off the plane and had barely stepped into the tiled terminal when he was mauled by a tall attractive woman with cinnamon-colored hair.\n\n\"You were supposed to beat me here,\" Loren Smith said, pulling away after a deep embrace. \"I was afraid you weren't going to come at all.\" Her violet eyes beamed with relief as she gazed at her husband.\n\nPitt crooked an arm around her waist and gave her a long kiss. \"A tire problem on the plane delayed our departure. Have you been waiting long?\"\n\n\"Less than an hour.\" She crumpled her nose and licked her lips. \"You taste salty.\"\n\n\"Al and I found a shipwreck on the way to the airport.\"\n\n\"I should have guessed,\" she said, then gave him a scolding look. \"I thought you told me flying and diving didn't mix?\"\n\n\"They don't. But that puddle jumper I flew in on barely cleared a thousand feet, so I'm plenty safe.\"\n\n\"You get the bends while we're in Istanbul, and I'll kill you,\" she said, holding him tight. \"Is the shipwreck anything interesting?\"\n\n\"It appears to be.\"\n\nHe held up his overnight bag with the artifacts wrapped inside. \"We retrieved a couple of artifacts that should be revealing. I invited Dr. Rey Ruppe of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum to join us for dinner tonight, in hopes that he can shed some further light.\"\n\nLoren stood on her toes and looked into Pitt's green eyes, her brow wrinkled.\n\n\"It's a good thing I knew when I married you that you'd always keep the sea as a mistress,\" she said.\n\n\"Fortunately,\" he replied with a grin while holding her close, \"I have a heart big enough for the both of you.\"\n\nGrabbing her hand, they waded through the terminal crowd and collected his baggage, then caught a taxi to a hotel in Istanbul's central historic district of Sultanahmet. After a quick shower and change, they hopped another cab for a short ride to a quiet residential area a dozen blocks away.\n\n\"Balikci Sabahattin,\" the cabdriver announced.\n\nPitt helped Loren out onto a quaint cobblestone lane. On the opposite side of the street was the restaurant, housed in a picturesque wood-frame house built in the 1920s. The couple waded past some tables outside to reach the front door and entered an elegant foyer. A thickset man with thinning hair and a jovial smile stepped up and shoved out a hand in greeting.\n\n\"Dirk, glad you could find the place,\" he said, crushing Pitt's hand in a vise grip. \"Welcome to Istanbul.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Rey, it's good to see you again. I'd like you to meet my wife, Loren.\"\n\n\"A pleasure,\" Ruppe replied graciously, shaking Loren's hand with less vigor. \"I hope you can forgive an old shovel jockey's intrusion on dinner tonight. I'm off to Rome in the morning for an archaeology conference, so this was the only opportunity I had to discuss your husband's underwater discovery.\"\n\n\"It's no intrusion at all. I'm always fascinated by what Dirk pulls off the seafloor,\" she said with a laugh. \"Plus, you have obviously led us to a lovely dining spot.\"\n\n\"One of my favorite seafood restaurants in Istanbul,\" Ruppe replied.\n\nA hostess appeared and escorted them down a hallway to one of several dining rooms fitted into the former house. They took their seats at a linen-covered table aside a large window that overlooked the back garden.\n\n\"Perhaps you can recommend some regional favorites, Dr. Ruppe,\" Loren said. \"It's my first visit to Turkey.\"\n\n\"Please, call me Rey. When in Turkey, you can never go wrong with fish. Both the turbot and sea bass are excellent here. Of course, I can never seem to eat my fill of kebobs, either,\" he grinned, rubbing his belly.\n\nAfter placing their orders, Loren asked Ruppe how long he had lived in Turkey.\n\n\"Gosh, going on twenty-five years now. I came over one summer from Arizona State to teach a marine archaeology field school and never left. We located an old Byzantine merchant trader off the shores of Kos that we excavated, and I've been busy here ever since.\"\n\n\"Dr. Ruppe is the foremost authority on Byzantine and Ottoman marine antiquities in the eastern Mediterranean,\" Pitt said. \"His expertise has been invaluable on many of our projects in the region.\"\n\n\"Like with your husband, shipwrecks are my true love,\" he said. \"Since taking the maritime studies post at the Archaeology Museum, I regrettably spend less time in the field than I'd prefer.\"\n\n\"The burden of management,\" Pitt concurred.\n\nThe waiter set a large plate of mussels with rice on the table as an appetizer, which they all quickly sampled.\n\n\"You certainly work out of a fascinating city,\" Loren noted.\n\n\"Yes, Istanbul does live up to its nickname as the 'Queen of Cities.' Born to the Greeks, raised by the Romans, and matured under the Ottomans. Its legacy of ancient cathedrals, mosques, and palaces can grip even the most jaded historian. But as a home to twelve million people, it does have its challenges.\"\n\n\"I've heard that the political climate is one of them.\"\n\n\"Is changing it the purpose of your visit, Congresswoman?\" Ruppe asked, with a grin.\n\nLoren Smith smiled at the allusion. Though a long-serving House representative from the state of Colorado, she wasn't much of a political animal.\n\n\"Actually, I only came to Istanbul to visit my wayward husband. I've been traveling with a congressional delegation touring the south Caucasus and just stopped off on my way back to Washington. A State Department envoy on the plane mentioned that there were U.S. security concerns about the growing fundamentalist movement in Turkey.\"\n\n\"He's right. As you know, Turkey is a secular state that is ninety-eight percent Muslim, mostly of the Sunni faith. But there has been a growing movement under Mufti Battal, who's centered here in Istanbul, for fundamentalist reforms. I'm no expert in these matters, so I can't tell you the actual extent of his appeal. But Turkey is suffering economic distress like other places, which breeds unhappiness and discontent with the status quo. The hard times seem to be playing right into his hands. He's visible everywhere these days, really attacking the sitting President.\"\n\n\"Aside from upsetting the Western alliances, I can't help but think that a Turkish shift toward fundamentalism would make the entire Middle East an even more dangerous place,\" Loren replied.\n\n\"With a Shia-controlled Iran flexing her military muscle, I fear your concerns are quite valid.\"\n\nTheir dinners were brought to the table, Loren receiving a baked sea bass dish and Pitt a grilled grouper plate, while Ruppe dined on Black Sea turbot.\n\n\"Sorry to ruin the meal with politics, it's a bit of an occupational hazard,\" Loren apologized. \"The sea bass is outstanding, I'm happy to report.\"\n\n\"I don't mind, and I'm sure Dirk is used to it,\" Ruppe said with a wink. He turned to his old friend. \"So, Dirk, tell me about your project in the Aegean.\"\n\n\"We're investigating a number of low-oxygen dead zones in the eastern Mediterranean,\" Pitt replied between bites. \"The Turkish Environment Ministry has steered us to a number of regional spots in the Aegean where recurring algae blooms have snuffed out all marine life. It's a growing problem we've been seeing in many places around the globe.\"\n\n\"I know that it's been a major concern in the Chesapeake Bay, right in our own backyard,\" Loren remarked.\n\n\"Dead zones in the Chesapeake have become quite large in recent summer months,\" Pitt acknowledged.\n\n\"All due to pollutants?\" Ruppe asked.\n\nPitt nodded. \"In most instances, the dead zones are located near the delta areas of large rivers. Low oxygen levels are usually a direct result of nutrient pollution, primarily in the form of nitrogen from agricultural or industrial runoff. The nutrients in the water initially create a mass growth of phytoplankton, or algae blooms. When the algae ultimately die and sink to the bottom, the decomposition process removes oxygen from the water. If the process reaches critical mass, the water becomes anoxic, killing all marine life and creating a dead zone.\"\n\n\"What have you found so far in Turkish waters?\"\n\n\"We've confirmed the presence of a moderately sized dead zone between the Greek island of Chios and the Turkish mainland. We are continuing to conduct survey work in the region and will ultimately map the perimeter and intensity of the zone.\"\n\n\"Have you traced its source?\" Loren asked.\n\nPitt shook his head. \"The Turkish Environment Ministry is helping identify potential industrial or agricultural polluters in the area, but we're not close to identifying the source, or sources, just yet.\"\n\nThe waiter appeared and cleared their dinner dishes, then brought a tray of fresh apricots and three coffees to the table. Loren was surprised to find that her coffee was already sweetened.\n\n\"Dirk, is your shipwreck located in the dead zone?\" Ruppe asked.\n\n\"No, but not far off. We were actually laid up repairing our sensing equipment when we discovered the site. A fishing boat that is now short a few feet of net gave us some help.\"\n\n\"In your call, you mentioned retrieving some artifacts?\"\n\n\"Yes, I actually brought them with me,\" Pitt replied, nodding toward a black bag that sat near his feet.\n\nRuppe's eyes lit up, then he looked at his watch. \"It's after eleven, and I've probably kept you up too late as it is. But the museum is just a few minutes down the road. I'd love to take a look at the items, and then you can leave them in the safety of my lab, if you like.\"\n\n\"Don't be ridiculous,\" Loren piped up, averting potential disappointment for her husband. \"We're both dying to have your assessment.\"\n\n\"Great,\" Ruppe smiled. \"Let's enjoy our coffee, and then we can go to my office to take a proper look at what you found.\"\n\nThe coffee cups drained and the check paid, the trio wandered out of the restaurant and up the street. Ruppe stopped in front of a green Volkswagen Karmann Ghia convertible parked at the curb.\n\n\"My apologies for the lack of legroom, I know the backseat is pretty cramped,\" he said.\n\n\"I love these old VWs,\" Loren said. \"I haven't seen one this nice in ages.\"\n\n\"She's getting on in years but still runs like a top,\" Ruppe said. \"I've found it to be a great car for zipping around the cramped streets of Istanbul, though I miss having air-conditioning.\"\n\n\"Who needs that when the top goes down?\" Pitt mused, taking the passenger seat after Loren had wedged herself into the backseat.\n\nRuppe drove back into the heart of the city, then turned through a large arched gate.\n\n\"We're entering the grounds of Topkapi, the old Ottoman palace,\" he explained. \"Our museum is located near the entrance to the inner courtyard. You should take a tour of the palace, if you have the chance. But go early, it's a tourist favorite.\"\n\nRuppe motored through a parklike setting studded with historic buildings. Driving up a slight rise, he pulled into an employee parking lot at the rear of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. A half block away rose the high wall that surrounded the inner palace of Topkapi.\n\nAfter uncoiling themselves from the cramped car, Loren and Pitt followed Ruppe toward a large neoclassical building.\n\n\"The museum actually encompasses three buildings,\" Ruppe explained. \"There's the Museum of the Ancient Orient around the front, next to the Tiled Kiosk, which houses the Museum of Islamic Art. I kick around here in the main building, which houses the Archaeology Museum.\"\n\nRuppe led them up the back steps of the columned building, constructed in the nineteenth century. After he unlocked the back door, they were greeted by a night watchman stationed just inside.\n\n\"Good evening, Dr. Ruppe,\" the guard said. \"Working late again?\"\n\n\"Hi, Avni. Just a quick visit with some friends, and then we'll be gone.\"\n\n\"Take your time. It's just me and the crickets.\"\n\nRuppe led his guests through the main hallway, which was filled with ancient statues and carvings. Exhibit halls on either side showcased elaborate tombs from across the Middle East. The archaeologist stopped and pointed out a massive stone sarcophagus covered with bas-relief carvings.\n\n\"The Alexander Sarcophagus, our most famous artifact. The scenes along the sides depict Alexander the Great in battle. Nobody knows who's actually inside, though many believe it's a Persian Governor named Mazaeus.\"\n\n\"Beautiful artwork,\" Loren murmured. \"How old is it?\"\n\n\"Fourth century B.C.\"\n\nRuppe guided them down a side corridor and into a spacious office overflowing with books. A large lab table occupied one wall, its stainless steel surface covered with artifacts in varying stages of conservation. Ruppe flicked on a bank of overhead lights, which brightly illuminated the room.\n\n\"Let's take a look at your soggy goods,\" he said, pulling a couple of stools up to the table.\n\nPitt unzipped the bag and pulled out Giordino's iron box, unwrapping it carefully from the towel.\n\n\"Somebody's piggy bank, I believe,\" he said. \"The lock came off by itself,\" he explained with a guilty grin.\n\nRuppe slipped on a pair of reading glasses and studied the box.\n\n\"Yes, it looks like the equivalent of a strongbox, quite old from the appearance.\"\n\n\"The contents might make dating it a little easier,\" Pitt remarked.\n\nRuppe's eyes widened as he opened the lid. Spreading a cloth on the table, he carefully laid out the silver and gold coins, seven in all.\n\n\"I should have let you pay for dinner,\" he said.\n\n\"My word, is that real gold?\" Loren asked, picking up the gold coin and noting its heavy weight.\n\n\"Yes, looks to be from an Ottoman mint,\" Ruppe replied, studying the stamped inscription. \"They operated several around the empire.\"\n\n\"Can you read any of the writing?\" she asked, admiring the swirling Arabic script.\n\n\"It appears to be a rendition of 'Allahu Akbar,' or 'God is great.'\"\n\nRuppe crossed the room and scanned his bookshelf, finally retrieving a thick-bound volume from the shelves. Flipping its pages, he stopped at a photograph of several antique coins. Comparing the image with one of the coins, he nodded in satisfaction.\n\n\"A match?\" Pitt asked.\n\n\"Spot-on. Identical to coins known to be minted in Syria, during the sixteenth century. Congratulations, Dirk, you've likely discovered an Ottoman wreck from the Age of Suleiman the Magnificent.\"\n\n\"Who's Suleiman?\" Loren asked.\n\n\"One of the most successful and admired of the Ottoman sultans, perhaps only behind the reigning founder of the empire, Osman I. He expanded the Ottoman Empire across southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa during his reign in the mid fifteen hundreds.\"\n\n\"Perhaps this was a gift or offering to the Sultan,\" Pitt said, removing the ceramic box from his bag and slowly unwrapping it. Loren's eyes brightened at the intricate design in blue, purple, and white that adorned the lid.\n\n\"What beautiful artistry,\" she remarked.\n\n\"The old Muslim craftsmen did wonders with tile and ceramic,\" Ruppe said. \"I haven't seen anything quite like this, however.\"\n\nHe held the box up to the light and studied it carefully. There was a small uneven crack on one side, which he rubbed a finger over.\n\n\"The design is similar to items I've seen known as Damascus ware,\" he said. \"It's a pattern from the well-known ancient kilns of Iznik, Turkey.\"\n\nHe carefully pried the lid off, then removed the encrusted crown from inside.\n\n\"Oh my,\" Loren said, inching closer.\n\nRuppe was equally impressed. \"That's something you don't see every day,\" he said, holding it for study under a portable lamp. He picked up a small dental pick and lightly scraped off a particle of sediment.\n\n\"This should clean up quite nicely, given a careful scrubbing,\" he said. Examining it a bit closer, he squinted with a furrowed brow. \"That's odd,\" he said.\n\n\"What is it?\" Loren asked.\n\n\"There appears to be an inscription on the inside rim. I can just make out a few letters, but it appears to be Latin.\"\n\n\"That doesn't make much sense,\" Loren said.\n\n\"No,\" Ruppe agreed. \"But I think after a bit of conservation, we'll be able to figure it out. Should allow us a good chance at identifying its origin.\"\n\n\"I knew we came to the right place,\" Pitt said.\n\n\"It would seem that your shipwreck may contain more than one mystery,\" Ruppe said.\n\nLoren looked at the crown through tired eyes, then suppressed a yawn.\n\n\"I'm afraid I've kept you up far too late,\" Ruppe remarked, placing the crown in a wall safe, then putting the lockbox, coins, and ceramic box into a plastic bin filled with fresh water. \"I'll be anxious to examine the items in more detail with the help of my associates as soon as I return from Rome.\"\n\n\"I'd like to know what a gold crown inscribed in Latin is doing on an Ottoman shipwreck,\" Pitt said.\n\n\"We may never know, but I'm curious to see what else is on that wreck,\" Ruppe replied. \"Strange as it seems, there's actually been only a small number of Ottoman wrecks discovered in the Med.\"\n\n\"If you can notify the Turkish authorities of our find, we'll do what we can to help,\" Pitt said. He handed Ruppe a nautical chart with the wreck's location marked in red. \"It's pretty close to Chios, so the Greeks might have something to say about it.\"\n\n\"I'll make a call first thing in the morning,\" Ruppe said. \"Is there any chance you and your vessel could help initiate a full survey of the site?\"\n\nPitt smiled. \"I'd like nothing more than to figure out exactly what we found. I'll manage to divert our vessel for a day or two. We have an archaeologist already aboard who can help direct the work.\"\n\n\"Fine, fine. I'm on good terms with the Turkish Ministry of Culture. They'll be pleased to know that the wreck is in good hands.\"\n\nHe looked at Loren, who was fighting to keep her eyes open.\n\n\"My dear, forgive my historic ramblings. It's very late, and I need to get you back to your hotel.\"\n\n\"You better, before I lie down to sleep on one of the sarcophagi outside.\"\n\nRuppe locked up his office, then escorted them past the guard and out of the building. As they were descending the museum's steps, a pair of muted explosions erupted in the distance, and a series of nearby alarms sounded suddenly, echoing over the high walls of Topkapi. The trio stopped, astonished, and listened to the faint voices of men shouting and then the pop of gunfire rattling through the night sky. More shots were fired, the sounds drawing closer to them. Seconds later, the door to the museum opened behind them, and the security guard came running toward them with a horrified look on his face.\n\n\"The palace is under attack!\" he yelled. \"The Chamber of the Sacred Relics in Topkapi has been raided, and the guards at Bab-us Selam are not responding. I must make sure the gate is barricaded.\"\n\nBab-us Selam, or the Gate of Salutations, was the main entry point into the enclosed sanctuary of Topkapi Palace. It was a high-towered palisade resembling a Disneyland castle, where tourists lined up in the morning to explore the palace and grounds of the grand Ottoman sultans. A security station was located just inside the gate, which housed several Turkish Army guards assigned to night duty. Situated just up the road, the gate was clearly wide open, and no guards were visible.\n\nThe museum guard, Avni, sprinted past Ruppe and across the parking lot. About a hundred yards from the gate, he ran past a white utility van parked just off the road. The van's motor immediately turned over and coughed to life.\n\nIts headlights were turned off, immediately triggering an uneasy feeling in Pitt. Sensing something amiss, he instinctively followed after Avni.\n\n\"Be right back,\" he grunted, then took off at a sprint.\n\n\"Dirk!\" Loren shouted, confused at her husband's sudden reaction. But he didn't bother to answer when he noticed the white van begin to pull forward.\n\nPitt knew what was about to happen but was powerless to prevent it. When the van lurched forward with a whining squeal from its motor, he could only watch as if it were a movie scene in slow motion. The van aimed for the museum guard and quickly picked up speed. Running at full tilt, Pitt shouted a warning.\n\n\"Avni! Behind you!\" he yelled.\n\nBut it was a futile gesture. With its headlights still turned off, the van lurched forward and struck the museum guard from behind. His body flew high off the vehicle's hood, then cartwheeled to the pavement with a thud. The van continued accelerating, then screeched to a stop in front of the open gate.\n\nPitt kept running, quickly approaching the prone guard. From the grotesque shape of the man's head, Pitt could tell that the guard's skull had been shattered, killing him instantly. Unable to do anything for him now, Pitt proceeded toward the van.\n\nThe van driver sat behind the wheel, anxiously staring through the open Bab-us Selam portal. With the engine running, he failed to detect Pitt's footsteps until he was alongside the van. He turned to look out the open side window and was met by a pair of hands that reached in and grabbed him by the collar. Before he could even resist, his head and torso were yanked halfway through the window.\n\nPitt heard additional footfalls approach, but only caught a shadow out of the corner of his eye as he wrestled with the driver. He had looped an elbow beneath the man's chin and was nearly ripping his head off. The driver regained his wits and struggled to release Pitt's grip, jamming his knees under the steering wheel and flailing with his arms. But Pitt was able to exert pressure on the driver's throat until he gasped for air, then started to fall limp in his arms.\n\n\"Let him go,\" a female voice suddenly barked.\n\nPitt turned toward the prone body of the dead museum guard while maintaining his grip on the choking van driver. Loren and Ruppe had followed him up the road to assist Avni and were now positioned alongside the dead man. Ruppe was leaning down on one knee, holding his hand to a bloody gash inflicted across his forehead, while Loren stood alongside looking at Pitt with fear in her eyes.\n\nStanding beside them was a short woman wearing a black ski mask, sweater, and pants. She stood with her arm extended, pointing a pistol at Loren's head.\n\n\"Let him go,\" she said once more to Pitt, \"or the woman dies.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Topkapi palace was the grand residence of the ottoman sultans for nearly four hundred years. A sprawling maze of garnished tiled buildings and chambers built on a hillside compound overlooking the Golden Horn, the palace contained a treasury of Turkey's rich history. The popular and crowded guided tours provided a glimpse into the personal lives of the ruling sultans, while showcasing an impressive collection of art, weapons, and jewelry. Yet amid the royal opulence, the palace contained a serious collection of holy Islamic relics revered throughout the world. And it was these objects that the thieves had targeted.\n\nA catering van had easily smuggled a small cache of arms and plastic explosives into the palace grounds several days before. The thieves merely entered the complex as tourists late in the day and quietly slipped aside, hiding in a groundskeeper's shed. Under cover of darkness, long after the last tourists had left and the entrances secured, the thieves collected their weapons and moved on the Chamber of the Sacred Relics, where many of the holy objects were stored.\n\nThe actual assault took barely a minute, as they blasted their way through a side wall with the explosives, then shot and killed a nearby guard. They quickly gathered their desired relics, then escaped through the damaged wall.\n\nThe thieves had carefully orchestrated a series of small, diversionary explosions at various points around the compound as they made their way south on foot. Once past the main gate, they would be whisked off the grounds in the waiting van. It would take only a few minutes from there to reach the maze of Sultanahmet's winding streets and become lost to the night.\n\nPolice sirens wailed in the distance as two men in black sprinted through Bab-us Selam, each toting a canvas bag. The woman aiming the handgun at Loren immediately barked clipped orders to the men as they approached the van. The two thieves threw their bags in the back, then dragged the semiconscious driver there and laid him out. One of the men hurried around front and climbed into the driver's seat, while the second man produced his own pistol and leveled it at Loren. The woman barked again at Pitt.\n\n\"You. Away from the van,\" she ordered, training her gun on Pitt. \"This woman is coming with us. If you wish to see her alive again, you will tell the police we escaped through the Gulhane Park Gate.\" She motioned her weapon toward the northeast side of the compound.\n\nPitt's hands clenched into fists, and his eyes nearly shot flames of anger, but there was nothing he could do. The woman sensed his wrath and leveled her gun at his head.\n\n\"Don't even think about it,\" she said.\n\nThe gunman grabbed Loren by the arm and roughly shoved her into the back of the van, then climbed in and closed the door behind them. The woman backpedaled to the front passenger door, holding her gun on Pitt until she jumped inside. The new driver immediately floored it, and the van squealed away with its tires smoking.\n\nPitt quickly ran to Ruppe, who had staggered to his feet but wobbled from the blow to his head administered by the woman.\n\n\"Your car,\" Pitt said hurriedly.\n\nRuppe quickly fished out the keys.\n\n\"You go now. I'll just slow you down.\"\n\n\"Are you all right?\"\n\n\"Just a scratch,\" he replied with a weak smile, eyeing his blood-smeared hand. \"I'll be fine. You go ahead, and I will inform the police when they arrive.\"\n\nPitt nodded as he grabbed the keys and dashed off toward the Karmann Ghia. The old Volkswagen fired on the first turn of the key. Pitt immediately jammed it into gear and chirped the tires as he sped off after the van.\n\nThe exterior grounds of Topkapi were laid out in the rough shape of a tilted A, with an entry gate at the base of each leg. Anticipating a more likely police response through the northern Gulhane Park Gate, the thieves headed for the Imperial Gate to the south. Despite a daily influx of tourist buses to the palace, the tree-lined roads through the grounds were narrow, curving affairs that limited speed.\n\nPitt took to the main road on which the van had exited, but the van was well out of sight by now. Passing several small side drives, Pitt felt his heart beat faster in the fear that he might not be able to locate the van. Professional thieves were usually not murderers, he tried telling himself. They would probably let Loren free at the first opportune moment. But then his mind flashed back to the image of the museum guard being intentionally run over. They had heard plenty of gunshots over the palace wall as well. An uncomfortable pang hit him at the realization that these thieves were in fact not afraid to kill.\n\nHe pushed the accelerator down harder, eliciting a painful wail from the Volkswagen's air-cooled motor. The Karmann Ghia was far from a fast car, but its size and weight made it a nimble cornering vehicle. Pitt pushed the little car to its limits, constantly shifting between second and third gears as he shot down the curving road. Once he pushed it a little too far, sending a hubcap bounding into an elm tree when the back wheel kissed a curb.\n\nThe roadway straightened for a short stretch, then ended at a crossroads. Pitt slammed on the brakes, skidding into the empty intersection, as he contemplated which way to turn. A quick glance to either side revealed no traffic and no sign of the van. Pitt thought back to the woman's remark about the Gulhane Gate. He had no clue where it was but recalled her wave of the pistol. Despite the twists and turns he had driven, he was certain that she had motioned to what was now his right. Jamming the gearshift into first, he stomped on the gas and popped the clutch, shooting off down the paved road to his left.\n\nThe wide canopies of aged oak trees whizzed by overhead as he accelerated hard, following the road as it faded to the right. Dropping down a low hill, he came to another crossroads. This time, he spotted a road sign in English, \"Exit,\" with an arrow pointing to the right. Slowing only slightly, he screeched through the turn with a squeal of blistering rubber, the Volkswagen drifting into the oncoming lane that was thankfully devoid of traffic.\n\nThe road opened onto an extended straightaway that led through the Imperial Gate. Pitt could sense an increase in light radiating ahead, as the trees and shrubs of the palace grounds gave way to the crowded urbanization of Istanbul's ancient city center. Staring down the road, Pitt caught a glimpse of taillights turning just outside the gate.\n\nIt was the van.\n\nPitt felt a surge of hope as he held the throttle down and raced to the gate. The thieves must have been right, he thought. If the Istanbul police were responding to the alarm, they hadn't yet made it to the Imperial Gate. As he approached the gate, he caught a glimpse of what appeared to be the bodies of two Turkish soldiers lying beside the road.\n\nHe ignored the sight, bursting past the gate and making a sharp right turn, slowing to avoid a loud squeal of tires. A glance ahead revealed that the van had cut south, down a perpendicular boulevard. Pitt quickly followed suit, flicking off his headlights as he made a sharp turn, then closed in on the van.\n\nA congested mass of cars and people by day, the city's historic Sultanahmet center was oddly quiet late at night. Pitt sped around a beat-up taxicab, then slowed as he saw the van stopped at a traffic light.\n\nThey were traveling past Hagia Sophia, one of the grandest monuments surviving from the Byzantine era. Built as a basilica by the Roman Emperor Justinian and later converted to a mosque, it stood as the largest domed building in the world for almost a thousand years. Its ancient frescoes and mosaics, along with its towering architecture, made it one of Istanbul's most important cultural landmarks.\n\nThe van turned right again, crossing Sultanahmet Square and the forecourt of Hagia Sophia, where a handful of tourists milled about, taking photos of the illuminated exterior. Pitt tried to edge closer to the van but was cut off by a pair of taxis pulling away from the curb.\n\nThe van slowed its pace to avoid attention as a police wagon stormed by on a cross street with its lights and siren blazing, heading up the hill toward Topkapi. The small congregation of vehicles moved out of the square and down a block before stopping at a red light. A rusty garbage truck ambled down the cross street, then stopped near the corner to pick up a pile of trash. The truck momentarily blocked the van, which was wedged from behind by one of the taxis.\n\nSitting two cars behind that, Pitt watched a slow-moving garbageman attack the trash pile and decided the situation afforded him the chance to act. Without hesitation, he leaped out of the Karmann Ghia and rushed toward the back of the van, crouching low while hugging the sides of the taxis to avoid detection. The van's rear panel doors had tinted windows, but Pitt could make out a figure seated on the right side who either had very short hair or was wearing a ski cap.\n\nThe light turned green, and the van lurched forward, then stopped, forced to wait while the lackadaisical garbageman slowly disposed of the pile of bulging plastic trash bags. Pitt approached the van in a crouch and placed a foot on its bumper, then grabbed the door handle with his right hand. Flinging the door open, he lunged in, his balled left fist coiled to strike.\n\nIt was a risky move, one that could get both Loren and himself killed. But he had the element of surprise on his side and rightly figured the gunman in the rear had let his guard down and was relishing the success of the theft. Deep down, there was another motive for abandoning caution. Pitt knew he could never live with himself if he failed to act and something happened to Loren.\n\nWith the door flung open, Pitt peered into the rear compartment while already in motion. He had gambled correctly and found the uninjured gunman seated on a bench to the right. Seated opposite was the original van driver, who was slowly regaining his color. Loren was seated beside him, wedged against a partition that divided the rear from the driver's compartment. In the fraction of a second that they made eye contact, Pitt could see a look of fright in his wife's eyes.\n\nSurprise was completely his, as the gunman didn't even have his pistol on Loren but was holding it down at his side. He gave Pitt a startled look through his ski mask before Pitt's balled fist struck him on the chin. With surging adrenaline and controlled rage, Pitt could have probably put his fist through the van's side panel had he aimed differently. The blow instantly knocked the man cold, sending him teetering to the floorboard without ever raising his weapon.\n\nThe other man reacted quickly, perhaps relishing the opportunity to retaliate against the earlier assault. He dove onto the back of Pitt's outstretched body, pinning Pitt's torso against the floor. The man had a gun in his pocket, which he struggled to retrieve while wrapping his other arm around Pitt. Pushed flat, Pitt immediately raised himself with his arms but couldn't quite shake the man's half bear hug. Seeking any measure of leverage he could, Pitt wedged a foot against the rear bumper, then tried shifting his weight to the rear. With his attacker glued to his back, Pitt heaved with both his arms and legs, flinging himself backward and out of the van.\n\nThe taxicab was idling just a foot or two behind the van. Hurtling through the air, the two intertwined bodies slammed backward onto the cab's hood, the van driver sandwiched beneath Pitt and bearing the brunt of the impact. The man gasped as the breath was knocked from his lungs, and Pitt felt the grip around his torso soften. Spinning to his feet, Pitt pulled the man's arm away, then shoved an elbow into the driver's head with repeated blows. It was enough to stun the man into submission and he sank to the pavement before he could find the grip on his gun.\n\nCatching his breath, Pitt looked up to see Loren scampering out of the van. In her hand, she was clutching one of the black bags.\n\n\"Quick, let's go,\" he urged, grabbing her arm and pulling her down the street. They staggered a few steps to the sidewalk, Loren resisting any attempts at speed.\n\n\"I can't run in these shoes,\" she pleaded.\n\nPitt heard a yell from the direction of the van but wasted no time looking. Instead, he roughly grabbed his wife and shoved her toward the alcove of a small square building a few steps away. He dove after her as two quick cracks from a pistol rang out. A pair of concrete chips flew in the air as the bullets peppered the ground near their feet.\n\nThe doorway provided cover, but just temporarily. It would only be seconds before the woman with the pistol stepped down the street far enough to have a clear shot at the two of them.\n\n\"Where to now?\" Loren gasped, her heart pounding in fear.\n\nPitt quickly surveyed an ancient weathered door that stood at the top of the steps.\n\n\"A simple choice, I'd say,\" he replied, nodding toward the door. \"We go in.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Two firm kicks on the wooden door were sufficient to dislodge the well-worn dead bolt from its housing and force an opening. Loren and Pitt quickly slithered into a plain, empty room, sided by a counter and cash register. At the back of the room was a wide, dimly lit stairwell that led to a lower level.\n\nFrom outside the door, they could hear the sound of running footsteps approach. Pitt turned and swung the door closed as he caught a glimpse of the woman in black sprinting around the back of the taxi. He missed seeing the muzzle flash from her pistol as she fired again, but he saw the slug bury itself into the door a few inches from his face.\n\n\"I guess we go down,\" he said, grabbing Loren's hand and rushing to the stairs. They had hopped down a few of the carved stone steps when Loren yanked on his arm.\n\n\"I can't make it that far in heels,\" she said, noticing that the stairwell descended a considerable distance below them. She quickly yanked off her pumps, then proceeded to scurry down the stairs.\n\n\"Why does practicality never enter into the design of women's shoes?\" Pitt asked, catching up with her.\n\n\"Only a man would have to ask,\" she grumbled, breathing hard from their exertion.\n\nThey continued plunging down the stairs, which descended over fifty steps. Their argument over footwear was lost to a sense of awe as their surroundings unfolded before them under sparse lighting.\n\nThey had descended into a huge man-made subterranean cavern. It was a totally unexpected and somewhat bizarre structure to find in the middle of bustling Istanbul. The steps ended at a wooden platform, which overlooked the deep cavern. Pitt admired a forest of thirty-foot-high marble columns that stretched into the darkness by the dozen, their capitals supporting a towering multi-arched ceiling. A bank of red overhead lights lightly illuminated the space, lending it a mysterious, almost hellish appearance.\n\n\"What is this place?\" Loren asked, her voice echoing off the stone walls. \"It's breathtaking, in more ways than one.\"\n\n\"It's an underground cistern. A huge one, by the looks of it. The Romans built hundreds of them under the streets of Istanbul in order to store water, which was transported in from the countryside via aqueducts.\"\n\nThey stood in what was actually the largest cistern in Istanbul, the Yerebatan Sarnici. Originally constructed by Emperor Constantine and later enlarged by Justinian, the structure stretched nearly five hundred feet in length. In its day, the cistern's mortar-lined floor and walls were capable of holding 2.8 million cubic feet of water. Abandoned during the Ottoman reign, it became a forgotten, mud-filled bog until restored by the Turkish government in the twentieth century. As testament to Roman construction prowess, the floor of the cavern still stored a few feet of water for effect.\n\nThe vast chamber was nearly silent but for the splattering of water that occasionally dripped from the ceiling. The silence was suddenly disrupted by the sound of footsteps overhead as the armed woman in black rushed through the office and started down the stone steps. Pitt and Loren immediately took off running, following a raised wooden ramp that led toward the far end of the chamber.\n\nThe ramp ultimately split into a circular walkway that allowed tourists to view the myriad of carved columns that supported the cistern's ceiling. Beneath it, the flat, shallow waters made a tranquil home to hundreds of colorful carp that never saw the light of day. Pitt and Loren had little time to admire the fish as they sprinted to the far end of the chamber.\n\nThe wooden ramps were wet from the dripping ceiling, and Loren slipped repeatedly in her stocking feet. Falling as they rounded a sharply angled corner, she lay for a second, catching her breath, until Pitt helped her to her feet. The sound of shoes rushing down the stone steps behind them echoed through the chamber.\n\n\"Why is she still bothering with us?\" Pitt asked aloud as he dragged Loren around the corner.\n\n\"Might have something to do with this,\" she replied, holding up the black bag still clutched in one hand. \"I took it from the van. I thought it might be important.\"\n\nPitt smiled at his wife's instincts. \"Yes, it probably is,\" he said. \"But it's not important enough to get killed over.\"\n\nThe pursuing footfalls had reached the bottom of the stairs, their tone changing to a muted thump on the wooden ramp. Pitt and Loren ran a few more yards, turning down a section of ramp that suddenly terminated in a dead end.\n\n\"Give me the bag, and you may walk away.\"\n\nThe woman's voice echoed through the cavern in angry repetition. After a silent pause, her steps resumed at a quickened pace. Though still out of view under the dim lights, she was audibly closing the gap.\n\n\"Into the water,\" Pitt whispered, grabbing the black bag from Loren while guiding her to the rail. In her long dress, she clumsily climbed over the rail, then let Pitt help lower her quietly into the waist-deep water. Her body gave off an involuntary shiver, from both the cool water and the threat at hand.\n\n\"Move to the back of the far column and stay out of sight until I call for you,\" he directed quietly.\n\n\"Where will you be?\"\n\n\"Giving her the bag back.\"\n\nHe leaned through the rail and gave her a quick kiss, then watched as she waded past several rows of marble columns before disappearing from sight. Satisfied that she was safely hidden, he turned and moved back down the platform. A thundering boom caused him to pause as a chunk of wooden railing splattered into the water a few feet ahead of him. He spotted the figure of the shooter a hundred feet away and he quickly sprinted ahead until a row of columns blocked her from view.\n\nHis mind raced in the few seconds of cover he had. He quickly contemplated the black bag, which was lightly weighed down by two separate objects. There was no place for concealment on the empty wooden ramps, so his eyes drifted upward at the huge columns nearby. He noted that every third column or so had a small red light fixture mounted near the crown, which backlit the cistern. As the sound of the woman's footsteps drew closer, Pitt hoisted the bag and split the two objects through the exterior cloth. He then twisted the loose center cloth until the bag resembled a barbell, with the weighted objects at either end.\n\n\"Drop it!\" he heard the woman's voice yell.\n\nIn the dim light, Pitt gambled that she was still too far away for an accurate shot, so he took two quick steps toward the railing. The pistol barked again, twin muzzle flashes clearly visible out of the corner of Pitt's eye as the shots thundered through the chamber. One bullet hit the rail while the other whistled past his ear. Already in motion, all he could do was keep moving.\n\nWith a third step, he swung the bag up from the floor and flung it upward with all his strength. Without breaking pace, he grabbed the top railing and pulled himself over the side. The bag spun like a pinwheel and was still drifting skyward when Pitt hit the water. He immediately spun under the surface toward the ramp, under its supports, kicking in the direction of the woman. With a controlled effort, he swam smoothly in the shallow water, trying not to break the surface. An old hand at free diving, he easily covered seventy-five feet before gently easing up for air.\n\nHe held perfectly still, quietly catching his breath beneath the ramp while checking where the woman was located. He correctly gauged that he had bypassed her beneath the ramp as she ran toward the point of his initial splash. Peering from the water's edge, he saw her pacing on the far side with her gun pointed at the water.\n\nSlipping back under the ramp, he cautiously followed it in the other direction until it made an angled turn. There was more illumination in the area than he preferred, but the bend offered a point of concealment as a staging area for attack. He started to pull himself up a support beam when he detected a new set of footsteps pounding down the stone stairs. A car horn honking on the street blared in the background.\n\n\"Miss Maria, we must leave at once,\" shouted a male voice in Turkish. \"The police are beginning to search outside of Topkapi.\"\n\nPitt crept back into the water as the woman broke into a run in his direction. Hearing her pass overhead, he held perfectly still, listening as she began climbing the stone steps. Nearing the top, she hesitated for a moment, then a shrill voice boomed through the cistern.\n\n\"I shall not forget you!\" she shrieked.\n\nThe sound of her footsteps fell away, and the car horn ceased honking. Pitt sat still in the cold water, listening to the eerie echo of the falling water droplets. Satisfied that the assailants were in fact gone, he climbed onto the ramp and made his way to the end, calling out Loren's name along the way.\n\nHis freezing wife appeared from behind one of the columns and waded to the ramp, where Pitt hoisted her up. Though her hair was a mess, her dress soaked, and she shivered with cold, she still looked radiant to Pitt.\n\n\"You all right?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said. \"Are they gone?\"\n\nPitt nodded, holding her hand as they walked down the ramp.\n\n\"Nasty people,\" she said. \"I wonder how many they killed during the heist.\"\n\nPitt could only speculate. \"Did they hurt you?\" he asked.\n\n\"No, but they clearly weren't afraid to kill. They didn't seem to care at all when I told them I was a U.S. Congresswoman.\"\n\n\"They must have less regard for politicians here than in America.\"\n\n\"Did you give her the bag?\"\n\n\"No, I'm afraid she had to leave empty-handed. As you heard, she doesn't intend to forget us.\"\n\n\"Where did you hide it?\"\n\nPitt stopped and pointed toward the crown of a marble column that rose from the water just a few feet away. Wrapped around a high-mounted light fixture atop the column, the twisted black bag hung dangling over the water.\n\n\"It's not hidden,\" he said with a slight grin. \"It's just a tad out of reach.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "ANOTHER CUP OF TEA, SHEIKH?\"\n\nThe guest nodded slightly as his host proceeded to refill his cup with black tea. Barely thirty, he was the youngest of five sons born to one of the ruling royal families of the United Arab Emirates. A slight man, he wore a perfectly pressed, bone-white headdress wrapped with a gold-threaded agal, which barely hinted at the multibillions of petrodollars that his family controlled.\n\n\"The Mufti's movement appears to have a sound footing in Turkey,\" he said, setting the teacup down. \"I am pleased at the progress you have reported.\"\n\n\"Mufti Battal has a devoted following,\" the host replied, gazing toward a portrait of a wise-looking man in black robe and turban hanging on the far wall. \"The times and conditions have been conducive to expanding the movement, and the Mufti's personal popularity has enhanced its appeal. We have a real opportunity ahead to change Turkey and her role in the world. Achieving such change, however, requires considerable resources.\"\n\n\"I am committed to the cause here, as I am committed to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt,\" the Sheikh replied.\n\n\"Like our Egyptian brothers, we will unite in the way of Allah,\" the host replied with a bow.\n\nThe Sheikh rose and crossed the high-rise office, which looked and felt like the interior of a mosque. Small kilim prayer rugs were aligned in an open space, facing a tiled mihrab aimed at Mecca. On the opposite wall, a high bookshelf was filled with antique copies of the Qur'an. Only a huge illuminating picture window warmed the otherwise austere and reverent interior.\n\nThe Sheikh moved to the window and admired the panorama before him. The office building was situated on the Asian bank of the Bosphorus and offered a breathtaking view of old Istanbul on the European shore, just across the slim waterway. The Sheikh stared at the towering minarets of the Suleymaniye Mosque in the distance.\n\n\"Istanbul has an earnest respect for its past, as it should,\" he said. \"One cannot attain greatness without building on the past.\"\n\nHe turned to his host. \"My brothers are all Western educated. They wear British-made suits and crave sleek automobiles,\" he said with disdain.\n\n\"But you are not like them?\"\n\n\"No,\" the Sheikh replied thoughtfully. \"I attended the Islamic University at Madinah. Since an early age, I have devoted myself to Allah. There is no greater purpose in life than to expound the words of the Prophet.\" He turned slowly from the window with a distant look.\n\n\"The threats to our ways never cease,\" he said. \"In Cairo, the Zionists bomb al-Azhar, yet there is no global outrage.\"\n\n\"Mufti Battal and I are outraged.\"\n\n\"As am I. Such affronts cannot be ignored,\" the Sheikh said.\n\n\"We must strengthen the foundation of our house to withstand all outside forces.\"\n\nThe Sheikh nodded in agreement. \"As you know, I have been blessed with a sizable fortune. I will continue to support the way of the Sunnah here. I share in the wisdom of Istanbul in venerating our past.\"\n\n\"Upon it, we will build great blessings to Allah.\"\n\nThe Sheikh eased toward the door. \"I will arrange the transfer of funds shortly. Please pass my blessings to Mufti Battal.\"\n\n\"He will be both grateful and delighted. Praise be to Allah.\"\n\nThe Sheikh responded in kind, then joined an entourage waiting for him outside the door. When the Arab contingent had left the foyer, the host closed the door and returned to his desk, where he removed a key from the top drawer. Stepping to an inconspicuous side door, he turned the lock and entered an adjacent office nearly three times the size of the former. The room was not only large but also grand in appearance, and nearly the opposite in ambience. Brightly lit, it featured a stylish mix of contemporary art and classical oil paintings, unique tribal floor coverings, and nineteenth-century European furniture. Accented by overhead spotlights, the room's prominent features were opposing banks of built-in shelves, which were loaded with expensive antiques and relics from the Ottoman era, including porcelain vases, detailed tapestries, and jeweled weaponry. In the center of one shelf was the collection's show-piece, a gold-threaded tunic on a mannequin in a glass-enclosed case. A placard inside indicated that the tunic had been worn by Mehmed I, an Ottoman Sultan who ruled in the fifteenth century.\n\nA petite woman with short black hair was seated on a divan, reading a newspaper. Her presence stirred a touch of annoyance in the man's face, and he walked past her without saying a word. Reaching a carved desk near the window, he peeled off a keffiyeh and black robe, revealing a sport shirt and slacks underneath.\n\n\"Your meeting with the Sheikh was productive?\" she asked, lowering her paper.\n\nOzden Aktan Celik nodded in reply.\n\n\"Yes, the nitwit runt of the royal litter has agreed to another infusion of cash. Twenty million, to be exact.\"\n\n\"Twenty?\" the woman replied, her eyes widening. \"Your skills at persuasion are impressive indeed.\"\n\n\"Simply a matter of playing one spoiled rich Arab off another. When our Kuwaiti benefactor learns of the Sheikh's contribution, he will be forced to exceed it out of ego alone. Of course, your recent visit to Cairo helped up the ante.\"\n\n\"Amazing how the Zionist threat can be milked for such profits. Just think of the money that would be saved if the Arabs and Israelis ever kissed and made up.\"\n\n\"They'd each find another scapegoat to antagonize,\" Celik said, taking a seat behind the desk. He was a well-proportioned man, with thinning black hair combed back on the sides. His nose was wide, but he had a strong face, and would not have looked out of place on the cover of Gentlemen's Quarterly magazine. Only his dark eyes hinted at a personality quirk, dancing constantly in a pirouette of emotional intensity. They twitched with anger as they focused on the woman.\n\n\"Maria, I would have preferred that you not show yourself so quickly. Particularly given your chaotic performance last night.\" His eyes centered on her with a glowering intensity.\n\nWhatever intimidation he intended had absolutely no effect on the woman.\n\n\"The operation went off entirely as planned. It was only the intrusion by some meddling bystanders that delayed our exit.\"\n\n\"And subverted the acquisition of the Muhammad artifacts,\" he hissed. \"You should have killed them all on the spot.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. But as it turns out, two of them were U.S. government officials, including a Congresswoman. Their deaths would have overshadowed our objective. And our objective seems to have been attained.\" She folded the newspaper she was reading and tossed it over to Celik.\n\nIt was a copy of Milliyet, a Turkish daily newspaper, its blazing headlines proclaiming \"Murdering Thieves Attack Topkapi, Steal Holy Relics.\"\n\nCelik nodded. \"Yes, I've read the accounts. The media is blaming domestic heathens for stealing and desecrating our nation's sacred Muslim relics. Exactly the headlines we intended. But you forget that we have paid influence with a number of local reporters. What is it that the police believe?\"\n\nMaria took a sip from a glass of water before responding. \"We can't be certain. My informant within the department was only able to obtain an electronic copy of the incident report this morning. It appears they have no real suspects, though the American woman did give some physical descriptions and reported that our team appeared to be speaking in Arabic.\"\n\n\"I told you I didn't like the idea of using Iraqi operatives.\"\n\n\"They are well trained, my brother, and, if caught, still provide a safe scapegoat. A Shia thief, even if from Iraq, is nearly as productive as a Western infidel for our purposes. They are well paid to keep quiet. And besides, they falsely believe they are working for their Shia brethren. I couldn't have obtained this without them,\" she added, opening a small suitcase at her feet.\n\nReaching inside, she pulled out a flat object wrapped in loose brown paper. She stepped over and placed the package on the desk in front of Celik. His darting eyes zeroed in on the package, and he began unwrapping it with trembling fingers. Beneath the paper he uncovered a green taffeta bag. Opening the bag, he gently removed its contents, a faded black banner that was missing chunks along its border. He stared at the banner for nearly a minute before gently picking it up and holding it reverently in the air.\n\n\"Sancak-i Serif. The sacred standard of Muhammad,\" he whispered in awe.\n\nIt was one of the most treasured relics of Topkapi, and perhaps the most important historically. The black woolen banner, created from the turban of a defeated foe, had served as the battle standard for the prophet Muhammad. He had carried it with him into the key Battle of Badr, where his victory had allowed for the very rise of Islam itself.\n\n\"With this, Muhammad changed the world,\" Celik said, his eyes a sparkling mixture of reverence and delusion. \"We shall do the same.\"\n\nHe carried it over and set it on the glass case housing Sultan Mehmed's tunic.\n\n\"And how were the other relics lost?\" he asked, turning and facing the woman.\n\nMaria stared at the floor, pondering a reply. \"The American woman grabbed the second bag when she escaped the van. They hid in the Yerebatan Sarnici. I was forced to leave before I could retrieve it,\" she added with disdain.\n\nCelik said nothing, but his eyes bored through the woman like a pair of lasers. Again his hands trembled, but this time in anger. Maria quietly attempted to stave off an explosion.\n\n\"The mission was still a success. Even if all of the targeted relics were not obtained, the impact is the same. The entry and removal of the battle standard will generate the desired public response. Remember our strategic plan. This is just one step in our quest.\"\n\nCelik slowly cooled but still sought an explanation.\n\n\"What were these American tourists doing at Topkapi in the middle of the night?\"\n\n\"According to the police report, they were at the Archaeological Museum, near the Bab-us Selam Gate, meeting with one of the curators. The man--his name is Pitt--is some sort of underwater expert for the U.S. government. He apparently discovered an old shipwreck near Chios and was discussing the artifacts with the museum's nautical authority.\"\n\nCelik perked up at the mention of the wreck. \"Was it an Ottoman vessel?\" he asked, eyeing the encased tunic before him.\n\n\"I don't have any other information.\"\n\nCelik stared at the colorful threads of the aged tunic. \"Our legacy must be preserved,\" he said quietly, as if in a trance that had taken him back in time. \"The riches of the empire belong to us. See if you can find out more about this shipwreck.\"\n\nMaria nodded. \"It can be done. What of this man Pitt and his wife? We know where they are staying.\"\n\nCelik continued staring at the tunic. \"I do not care. Kill them if you want, but do it quietly. Then prepare for the next project.\"\n\nMaria nodded, a thin smile crossing her lips."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Sophie elkin dragged a brush through her straight black hair, then took a hurried look at herself in the mirror. Dressed in worn khaki pants and a matching cotton shirt, and, without any makeup, she would have been hard-pressed to make herself appear any plainer. Yet there was no hiding her natural beauty. She had a narrow face with high cheekbones, a petite nose, and soft aquamarine-colored eyes. Her skin was smooth and flawless, despite the many hours she spent outdoors. The features were mostly inherited from her mother, a French woman who had fallen in love with an Israeli geology student studying in Paris and had migrated with him to Tel Aviv.\n\nSophie had always minimized her looks and femininity. Even at an early age, she spurned the dresses her mother would buy, preferring pants so she could join the neighborhood boys in rough-and-tumble activities. An only child, she'd been close to her father, who had ascended to the head of the Geology Department at Tel Aviv University. The independent young girl had relished accompanying him on field expeditions to study the geological formations in the surrounding deserts, where she raptly absorbed his fireside tales of biblical events on the very grounds where they camped.\n\nHer father's work led her to study archaeology in college. While attaining her advanced degrees, she was jolted by the arrest of a fellow student for stealing artifacts from the university archives. The incident introduced her to the dark world of underground antiquities trading, which she grew to detest for its impact in the destruction of historic cultural sites. Upon receiving her doctorate, she abandoned academics and joined the Israel Antiquities Authority. With passion and dedication, she worked up to head of the Antiquities Robbery Prevention Unit in a few short years. Her devotion left little time for a personal life, and she dated infrequently, preferring to spend most nights working late.\n\nGrabbing a handbag, she left her small hillside apartment overlooking the Mount of Olives and drove toward the Old City of Jerusalem. The Antiquities Authority was housed in the Rockefeller Museum, a sprawling white limestone structure situated near the northeast corner of the Old City. Employing just twelve people, her department was tasked with the impossible duty of protecting the roughly thirty thousand ancient cultural resource sites located around Israel.\n\n\"Good morning, Soph,\" greeted the department's senior detective, a lanky, bug-eyed man named Sam Levine. \"Can I get you a coffee?\"\n\n\"Thanks, Sam, I'd like that,\" she said, covering a yawn as she squeezed into her cramped office. \"There was some sort of all-night construction going on near my apartment last night. I slept terribly.\"\n\nSam returned with the coffee and plopped down on the other side of her desk.\n\n\"If you weren't going to sleep, then you should have joined us on recon last night,\" he said with a grin.\n\n\"Any apprehensions?\"\n\n\"No, our Hebron grave robbers must have taken the night off. We gave up by midnight but did come away with a nice stack of picks and shovels.\"\n\nPerhaps the world's second-oldest profession, grave robbing ranked near the top of the Robbery Prevention Unit's criminal hit list. Several times a week, Sophie or Sam would lead a late-night stakeout of ancient grave sites around the country where signs of recent excavation had been observed. Pots, jewelry, and even the bones themselves could usually find a ready buyer in the underground antiquities market that pervaded Israel.\n\n\"Now that they know we are onto them, they'll probably lay low for a couple of weeks,\" Sophie said.\n\n\"Or move elsewhere. Assuming they've got enough cash to buy some new shovels,\" he added, smiling again.\n\nSophie glanced through some reports and news clippings on her desk, then passed one of the articles to Sam.\n\n\"I'm concerned about this excavation at Caesarea,\" she said.\n\nSam quickly skimmed the article.\n\n\"Yes, I've heard about this. It's a university-sponsored excavation of the old port facilities. It says here that they have uncovered some fourth-century seaport artifacts and a possible grave. You really think the site is a theft target?\"\n\nSophie drained her coffee, then set down the cup with an agitated stare.\n\n\"The reporter might as well have put up a banner and flashing lights. Any time the word 'grave' finds its way into print, it's like a magnet. I've begged the news reporters a thousand times to avoid publicizing grave sites, but they are more interested in selling papers than protecting our heritage.\"\n\n\"Why don't we go down and take a look? We're scheduled for a recon tonight, but I could reassign the boys down there. They'd probably enjoy a trip to the coast.\"\n\nSophie looked at her desk calendar, then nodded. \"I'm free after one. I suppose we could go check it out, and stay the night if it looks worthwhile.\"\n\n\"Now you're talking. For that, I'll go steal you another cup of coffee,\" he said, jumping out of his chair.\n\n\"Okay, Sam, you got a deal.\" Then she looked at him sternly. \"But just don't use the word 'steal' around me!\"\n\nSituated on the mediterranean coast about thirty miles north of Tel Aviv, Caesarea was a lightly populated enclave easily overshadowed by its historic past as a seat of Roman power. Built by King Herod the Great as a fortified port city in the first century B.C., Caesarea featured the famous hallmarks of Roman architecture. A high-columned temple, a grand hippodrome, and an ornate palace along the sea all graced the city, which was fed cool inland water via massive brick aqueducts. Herod's most impressive engineering feat was not on land, however. He designed and built massive breakwaters out of concrete blocks, using them to create the largest protected harbor in the eastern Mediterranean. The success of the harbor propelled Caesarea to greater importance as the capital of Judaea under Roman rule, and the city remained a key commerce center for over three hundred years.\n\nSophie was well acquainted with the remains of the ancient city, having spent a summer at the site while in college. Turning off the busy coastal highway, she eased the car through a luxury-home development, then entered the remains of the Roman site, which was now a protected state park. The centuries had not been kind to the original construction, its old Roman buildings having long since crumbled. Yet many remnants of the city's ancient features were still intact, including a large section of an arched aqueduct that stretched across the ocher sands, not far from a sizable amphitheater that faced the sea.\n\nSophie parked the car in a lot near the hilltop entrance, adjacent to some Crusader-era fortifications.\n\n\"The university team is excavating near the harbor,\" she said to Sam. \"It's just a short walk from here.\"\n\n\"I wonder if there's anything to eat around here?\" He eyed the barren park hills around them with trepidation.\n\nSophie tossed him a water bottle from the backseat. \"I'm sure there are some restaurants back near the highway, but you'll have to settle for a liquid diet for now.\"\n\nThey walked down a trail that weaved toward the beach, broadening at several points along the bluff. They passed a long-forgotten road that had once been lined with residences and small businesses, their ghostly remnants little more than disorderly piles of stone. As they descended the trail, the small harbor opened up before them. There was little left to recognize its boundaries, as the original breakwaters had become submerged centuries ago.\n\nThe trail led to a wide clearing, where little piles of stone were scattered across the field in all directions. A cluster of beige tents was assembled farther down, and Sophie could discern a few people working under a large awning in the center. The trail continued another hundred yards down the hill, to where the waters of the Mediterranean lapped at the beach. Two men were visible working on a small spit of land, bracketed by a pair of generators that hummed loudly in the distance.\n\nSophie headed toward the large awning, which she could see was erected over an area of active excavation. Two young women stood near a mound of dirt, filtering the soil through a screened box. As she stepped closer, Sophie could see an older man hunched over in a trench, picking at the soil with a small trowel and brush. With rumpled clothes, a close-cropped gray beard, and a pair of glasses perched at the end of his nose, Keith Haasis bore the marked appearance of a distinguished university professor.\n\n\"How much Roman treasure have you unearthed today, Dr. Haasis?\"\n\nThe bearded man stood up in the trench with an annoyed look on his face, which immediately transformed into a wide grin when he recognized the inquisitor.\n\n\"Sophie!\" he thundered. \"How good to see you.\" He hopped out of the trench and rushed over, giving her a big bear hug.\n\n\"It's been too long,\" he said.\n\n\"I just saw you two months ago at the biblical archaeology conference in Jerusalem,\" she chided.\n\n\"Like I said, much too long,\" he laughed.\n\nIn her younger days, Sophie had attended numerous seminars held by the archaeology professor from the University of Haifa, which had led to a professional friendship. Haasis was a highly valued contact, as both an archaeology expert and as a source of information on newly discovered sites and destructive activity.\n\n\"Dr. Haasis, this is my assistant, Sam Levine,\" she said, introducing her companion. Haasis introduced his nearby students, then led Sophie and Sam to a circle of camp chairs that surrounded a large cooler. The professor passed out chilled cans of soda, then wiped his brow and plopped into a chair.\n\n\"Somebody needs to turn up the ocean breeze today,\" he said with a tired smile. Then, gazing at Sophie, he asked, \"I presume this is an official visit?\"\n\nTaking a drink, Sophie nodded in reply.\n\n\"Any particular concerns?\"\n\n\"A bit of overstated publicity in yesterday's Yedioth Ahronoth,\" she said, retrieving the newspaper article from a shoulder bag. Passing the article to Haasis, she coldly eyed Sam drain his can of soda and snatch a second from the cooler.\n\n\"Yes, a local reporter stopped by for an interview a few days ago,\" Haasis said. \"His story must have been picked up in Jerusalem.\"\n\nHe smiled at Sophie as he passed the article back.\n\n\"Nothing wrong with a little publicity for some proper archaeology,\" he said.\n\n\"Nothing, that is, except a brazen invitation to every thief with a shovel,\" she replied.\n\nHaasis waved his arm through the air. \"This site has been plundered for centuries. Any 'Roman treasure' that was buried around here is long gone, I'm afraid. Or didn't your agent think so?\"\n\n\"What agent?\" Sophie asked.\n\n\"I was up in Haifa for a meeting, but my students said an antiquities agent stopped by yesterday and surveyed the project site. Stephanie,\" he said, calling over his shoulder.\n\nOne of the girls at the screened box hurried over. A gangly coed of barely twenty, she stood before Haasis with a look of devotion.\n\n\"Stephanie, tell us about this fellow from the Antiquities Authority who came by yesterday,\" he asked.\n\n\"He said he was with the Robbery Prevention Unit. He wanted to check the security of our artifacts, so I gave him a tour of the site. He seemed most interested in the harbor excavation and the papyrus document.\"\n\nSophie and Sam looked at each other with raised eyebrows.\n\n\"Do you recall his name?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yosef something. He was kind of short, dark-skinned, with curly hair. Looked Palestinian, to be honest.\"\n\n\"Did he show you any identification?\" Sam asked.\n\n\"No, I don't think so. Is anything the matter?\"\n\n\"No, not at all,\" Haasis said. \"Thanks, Stephanie. Why don't you take some drinks down to the others?\"\n\nHaasis waited until the girl left with an armful of cans, then turned to Sophie.\n\n\"Not one of your agents?\" he asked.\n\nSophie shook her head. \"Certainly not from the Robbery Prevention Unit.\"\n\n\"Maybe he was from the national parks authority, or one of your own regional offices. These darn kids don't seem to remember anything these days.\"\n\n\"It's possible,\" she replied in a doubtful tone. \"Can you show us your excavation sites? I'm most interested in the tomb. As you know, the grave robbers around Jerusalem have created a cottage industry as of late.\"\n\nHaasis smiled, then jerked his thumb over his shoulder. \"It's right behind us.\"\n\nThe trio stood and walked around to a wide trench that ran behind the chairs. A sprinkling of red plastic markers was pinned into the ground surrounding a small section of exposed bones. Sophie recognized a femur among the remains embedded in the dirt.\n\n\"There's no formal tomb. We've just uncovered a single grave at the edge of the site. It's really unrelated to the diggings here,\" Haasis explained.\n\n\"What is this site?\" Sam asked.\n\n\"We believe it was something of a shipping warehouse. We targeted the area after a set of bronze scales was uncovered here some years ago. Our hope is to collect samples of grains, rice, and other food staples that might have come through the port. If successful, it will provide us a better understanding of the type and volume of trade that passed through Caesarea when it was a thriving center of trade.\"\n\n\"How does the grave fit in?\" Sophie asked.\n\n\"We haven't performed any dating, but my guess is this fellow was a casualty of the Muslim invasion of the city in 638 A.D. The grave lies just outside the foundation of the building, so I think we'll find that he was a lone body hastily buried against the wall.\"\n\n\"The newspaper article called it a tomb 'rich with artifacts,'\" Sam noted.\n\nHaasis laughed. \"Journalistic license, I'm afraid. We found a few buttons made of animal bone and the heel from a sandal before we halted excavation. But that's the extent of any 'rich artifacts' from the grave site.\"\n\n\"Our friendly neighborhood grave robbers are liable to be sorely disappointed,\" Sam said.\n\n\"Indeed,\" the professor replied. \"For our real riches have been uncovered along the seawall.\" He nodded toward the Mediterranean, where the hum from the generators still drifted up the hill. \"We discovered an early papyrus document that has us very excited. Come, let's take a walk down to the water, then I'll show you the artifact.\"\n\nHaasis led Sophie and Sam to the trail, then guided them down the hill. Small ridges of scattered stone broke the soil in odd patterns around them, faint reminders of the city's once congested multitude of buildings that had long ago been reduced to rubble.\n\n\"Using molds to pour and set his concrete blocks in place, King Herod constructed two large breakwaters that circled toward each other like a pair of arms,\" Haasis lectured as they walked. \"Warehouses were built atop the breakwaters, and a towering lighthouse stood at the harbor entrance.\"\n\n\"I recall that an early research project mapped a large number of stones underwater believed to have fallen from the lighthouse,\" Sophie said.\n\n\"A shame Herod's work didn't survive the sea's ravages,\" Sam said, looking out at the water and finding little visible evidence of the original breakwaters.\n\n\"Yes, most all of the blocks are now completely submerged. But this is where the heart of my interest lies,\" Haasis said, motioning toward the invisible bay. \"The warehouse up the hill makes a nice field school for the students, but the port facility is what makes Caesarea unique.\"\n\nThey crossed the beach and hiked onto a small finger of land that poked into the wave-driven sea. Two male students were laboriously excavating a deep pit in the center of the rocky spit. Nearby, a diver could be seen working in the water, applying a compressor-driven water jet under the surface.\n\n\"This is where the main breakwater originated,\" Haasis explained, speaking loudly to overcome the drone of a nearby compressor. \"On this site we believe was situated the equivalent of a customs house. One of the boys recovered the papyrus document in a shattered pot over there,\" he said, pointing to a nearby trench. \"We expanded some test trenches in several directions but have found no other artifacts.\"\n\n\"Amazing that it would survive so close to the water,\" Sam said.\n\n\"We've found fragments of the foundation that are still above mean high-tide levels.\"\n\nThey peered into the active test pit, where one of the students pointed out a small flat section of marble tiling.\n\n\"Looks like you've reached the basement,\" Sophie remarked.\n\n\"Yes, I'm afraid there may not be much left to excavate.\"\n\n\"What's the diver up to?\"\n\n\"He's a marine engineer helping reconstruct the layout of the original port facilities. He seems to think there may be a subterranean chamber to our customs house and is poking around for an underwater access.\"\n\nSophie walked over to the edge of the embankment and stared down at the diver. He was working in ten feet of water almost directly beneath her, manhandling a water jet against the hard-packed bottom. Without noticing the audience above him, the diver broke off his probing and began to ascend. He held the nozzle of the water jet upright, which sprayed a fountain of water skyward when he broke the surface. Standing right in its path, Sophie was doused with a blasting spray of salt water before she could jump out of the way.\n\n\"You damn fool!\" she cursed, wiping the salt water out of her eyes with her dripping sleeves.\n\nRealizing what he had done, the diver quickly spun the nozzle seaward, then swam to the edge of the embankment and shut off the compressor. Turning to his victim, he gazed at the wet clothes clinging tightly to her body, then spat out his regulator.\n\n\"Behold, a goddess from the sea?\" he said with a wide smile.\n\nSophie shook her head and turned her back on him, growing angrier at the sight of Sam laughing out loud. Haasis suppressed his own mirth and came to her rescue.\n\n\"Sophie, there's a towel in my tent. Come, let's get you dried off.\"\n\nThe diver popped his regulator back into his mouth and disappeared under the surface as Sophie followed Haasis up the trail. They reached the professor's tent, where she rubbed her hair and clothes dry as best she could. The warm breeze would dry her clothes quickly, but she shivered at the sudden evaporative cooling effect on her damp skin.\n\n\"May I see the artifacts you have excavated?\" she asked.\n\n\"Certainly. They're right next door.\"\n\nThe professor led her to a large peaked tent that was open at one end. Inside were the artifacts recovered from the warehouse site, mostly potsherds and tile fragments, strewn about a long linen-covered table. The student Stephanie was busy with a camera and notebook, carefully numbering and recording each piece before storing them in thin plastic boxes. Haasis ignored the artifacts and led Sophie to a small table at the back of the tent. A single sealed box was on the table, which Haasis handled cautiously as he removed the lid.\n\n\"I wish we had found more,\" he said wistfully, standing aside to let Sophie peer into the box.\n\nInside was an elongated patch of brown material, pressed between two plates of glass. Sophie immediately recognized it as papyrus, a common writing surface in the Middle East up to the end of the first millennium. The sample was worn and frayed, yet clean rows of handwritten symbols were plainly visible down most of the document's length.\n\n\"It appears to be a port facility record of some sort. I can make out references to a large quantity of grain and a herd of livestock being off-loaded at the wharf,\" Haasis said. \"We'll learn more after laboratory analysis, but I think it might be a customs bill for a merchant vessel delivering goods from Alexandria.\"\n\n\"It's a splendid find,\" Sophie complimented. \"With luck, it will enhance the information gathered from the warehouse site.\"\n\nHaasis laughed. \"My luck, it will prove entirely contradictory.\"\n\nThey both turned as a tall figure entered the tent carrying a large plastic bin. Sophie saw it was the diver, still clad in a wet suit, his loose dark hair streaked with water. Still angered over her dousing, she began to make a caustic remark but felt her voice wither when she was met by a bright smile and a pair of deep green eyes that bored right through her.\n\n\"Dirk, there you are,\" Haasis said. \"May I introduce the lovely but damp Sophie Elkin of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Sophie, this is Dirk Pitt, Jr., on loan from the U.S. National Underwater and Marine Agency.\"\n\nThe son and namesake of the agency head, Dirk walked over and set down the bin. Still flashing a disarming smile, he warmly shook hands with Sophie. She didn't offer a protest when he was slow to release his grip.\n\n\"My apologies for the shower, I didn't realize you were standing there.\"\n\n\"No trouble, I'm nearly dry now.\" She was inwardly startled at how her anger had suddenly been displaced by an odd tingle. She absently patted her hair to prove her point.\n\n\"I hope you'll allow me the honor of buying you dinner tonight to make amends.\"\n\nDirk's forward proposal caught her off guard, and she stumbled to answer, muttering something unintelligible. Somewhere a voice inside screamed at her for losing her normally unflappable manner. Haasis thankfully intervened to save the awkward moment.\n\n\"Dirk, what's in the box?\" he asked, eyeing it curiously.\n\n\"Just a few goodies from the subterranean chamber.\"\n\nHaasis's mouth dropped. \"It truly exists?\"\n\nDirk nodded.\n\n\"What chamber?\" Sophie asked.\n\n\"While I was surveying the remains of the inshore breakwater, I found a small underwater opening near Keith's test pits. I could only squeeze my arm in, but I could feel my hand break the water's surface. That's why I was using the water jet, to blast a larger hole through the mud and concretions.\"\n\n\"How large is the cavity?\" Haasis asked excitedly.\n\n\"It's not much bigger than a crawl space, about six feet deep. But most of it is above water. I'll go out on a limb and speculate that it was part of a cellar used for storage or records archives.\"\n\n\"How did you come to that conclusion?\" Sophie inquired.\n\nDirk dried off the plastic bin he had carried in and carefully pulled off the watertight lid. Inside were several ceramic boxes, rectangular in shape and colored a reddish orange. He pulled one out and handed it to Sophie.\n\n\"Hopefully you can decipher its contents,\" he said. \"They didn't teach me ancient texts in marine engineering school.\"\n\nSophie set the box on a table and gently pried off the lid. Inside were a half dozen tightly wound rolls of material.\n\n\"They're papyrus rolls,\" she said in a shocked voice.\n\nHaasis could no longer contain himself, slipping on a pair of white gloves and squeezing in alongside Sophie.\n\n\"Let me take a look,\" he said, pulling one of the rolls out and slowly unrolling it across the tabletop. An odd but orderly script filled the page, handwritten with a bold stroke.\n\n\"It appears to be Coptic Greek,\" Sophie said, looking over the professor's shoulder. An ancient text developed in Egypt using the Greek alphabet, Coptic script was a common written language in the eastern Mediterranean during the time of Roman rule.\n\n\"Indeed,\" he confirmed. \"It appears to be an annual record from the harbormaster, for port fees and dockage. These are the names of vessels, with their lading,\" he said, running a gloved finger down a pair of columns.\n\n\"Isn't that a reference to the Emperor?\" Sophie asked, pointing to a block at the top.\n\n\"Yes,\" Haasis replied, trying to interpret the heading. \"It's titled a report of Caesarea port fees, or something to that effect. Written on behalf of Emperor Marcus Maxentius.\"\n\n\"If my memory serves, Maxentius was a contemporary of Constantine.\"\n\n\"Maxentius ruled in the west and Constantine in the east, before the latter consolidated power.\"\n\n\"So this must date to the early fourth century.\"\n\nHaasis nodded with a glimmer in his eye, then looked at the other scrolls. \"These may offer us an amazing glimpse into life in Judaea under Roman rule.\"\n\n\"Ought to provide fodder for a good thesis or two from your students,\" Dirk said, as he emptied the bin of three additional ceramic boxes. Tucking the empty bin under his arm, he turned and headed out of the tent.\n\n\"Dirk, you just uncovered a magnificent historical find,\" Haasis said with wonder. \"Where on earth are you going?\"\n\n\"I'm gonna go get wet like a damn fool,\" he replied with a twisted grin, \"because there's plenty more where those came from.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Ozden celik arrived at the fatih mosque, one of istanbul's largest, an hour after morning salat and found the ornate interior halls of the complex mostly empty. Bypassing the main prayer hall, he followed a side corridor to the rear of the structure, then exited into a small courtyard. Marble paving stones led to a nondescript building located in an area cordoned off from tourists and worshippers. Celik made his way to the threshold and entered through a heavy wooden door.\n\nStepping inside, he found himself in a bright and bustling office. Cloisters of gray cubicles extended in all directions, fronted by a large wooden reception desk. The clamorous din of churning laser printers and ringing phones filled the air, lending the feel of a telemarketing call center. Only the odor of burning incense and photos of Turkish mosques on the walls indicated otherwise. That and the absence of any women.\n\nCelik noted that all of the office workers were bearded men, many wearing long robes, tapping at their computers in apparent incongruity. A young man behind the counter stood as Celik approached.\n\n\"Good morning, Mr. Celik,\" he greeted. \"The Mufti is expecting you.\"\n\nThe secretary led Celik past a line of cubicles to a large corner office. The room was sparsely decorated, containing only the requisite Turkish rugs on the floor for expression. More notable were the sagging rows of bookshelves that lined the walls, packed tightly with religious tomes reflecting the scholarly background of an Islamic Mufti.\n\nMufti Altan Battal sat at a barren executive desk, scribbling on a writing pad, with a pair of open books on either side of him. He looked up and smiled as the secretary ushered Celik into the office.\n\n\"Ozden, you have arrived. Please, take a seat,\" he offered. \"Hasan, let us talk in peace,\" he added, shooing away the secretary. The assistant quickly backpedaled, closing the door on his way out.\n\n\"Just putting the finishing touches on Friday's sermon,\" the Mufti said, setting a pencil down on the desk beside a cell phone.\n\n\"You should have one of your Imams do that for you.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. But I feel that it is my calling. Deferring to one of the mosque Imams might create jealousies as well. I would rather ensure that all of the Imams of Istanbul speak with one voice.\"\n\nAs Mufti of Istanbul, Battal was the theological leader of all three thousand of the city's mosques. Only the President of the Diyanet Isleri, a nonelected post in Turkey's secular government, technically wielded greater spiritual authority over the country's Muslim population. Yet Battal had developed far greater influence over the hearts and minds of the mosque-going public.\n\nDespite his seniority, Battal appeared nothing like the stereo-typical stern gray cleric with a raging beard. He was a tall, powerfully built man with an imposing presence. Not yet fifty years old, he had a long face that expressed the sunny disposition of a Labrador puppy. He often wore suits instead of robes and inflected a deprecating sense of humor that made his brand of fundamentalist Islam almost seem fun.\n\nYet despite his sunny persona, the message he sold was a bleak one. Raised on the extreme fundamentalist tenets of Islamic interpretation, he vocally supported Islamism, the expansion of Islam as both a religious and political movement. His worldview taught the subjugation of women's rights while strongly turning away from Western culture and mores. He had gradually built a power base by railing against the forces of foreign influence, then turned his sights on the secular government as economic conditions within Turkey soured. Although he hadn't publicly taken a militant stance, he believed in jihad for the defense of Islamic territory. Like Celik, he was driven by a powerful ego, and privately aspired to command the country as both its religious and political leader.\n\n\"I have some very good news to report, on several fronts,\" Celik said.\n\n\"My friend Ozden, you are always working behind the scenes on my behalf. What is it that you have done for our cause now?\"\n\n\"I recently met with Sheikh Zayad of the Emirati Royal Family. He is pleased with the work you have done and wishes to make another substantial contribution.\"\n\nBattal's eyes widened. \"On top of his earlier generosity? This is wonderful news. I am still at a loss, however, as to his interest in our movement here in Turkey.\"\n\n\"He is a man of vision,\" Celik replied, \"who supports adherence to the Sharia path. He is troubled by the growing threats against us, as evident by the recent mosque attacks here and in Egypt.\"\n\n\"Yes, despicable acts of violence against our holy sites. And on top of that, there is the recent theft of the Prophet's relics from Topkapi. These are intolerable assaults on our faith by outside forces of evil.\"\n\n\"The Sheikh concurs with your sentiments. He sees his country's security, and that of the entire region, being safer under a fundamentalist Sunni rule.\"\n\n\"Which leads to your next bit of news?\" Battal said with a knowing grin.\n\n\"So, the birds have been singing, eh? Well, as you may know, I met with the Felicity Party's leadership council, and they have agreed to accept you as their presidential candidate. They actually appeared ecstatic at your willingness to replace Imam Keya as their presidential candidate.\"\n\n\"A tragedy that he was killed in the Bursa Mosque blast,\" Battal said with sincerity.\n\nCelik suppressed a knowing look and nodded his head. \"The party leadership has expressed their willingness to adopt your platform demands,\" he continued.\n\n\"We are similar in philosophy,\" Battal replied agreeably. \"You are aware that the Felicity Party only garnered about three percent of the vote in the last presidential election?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Celik replied, \"but that was not with you atop the ballot.\"\n\nIt was an alluring appeal to Battal's ego, which had blossomed with his recent rise in popularity.\n\n\"The election is only a few weeks away,\" he noted.\n\n\"Which is perfect for us,\" Celik replied. \"We will catch the ruling party by surprise, and they will barely have time to react to your candidacy.\"\n\n\"Do you think I really have a chance?\"\n\n\"Polling figures indicate that if you entered the race, you'd be less than ten percentage points behind. It's a deficit that could easily be overcome by events.\"\n\nBattal stared off at his bookshelf of Muslim writings. \"It may be a singular opportunity to erase the wrongdoings of Ataturk and lead our country back to its rightful path. We must adhere to Sharia, the law of Islam, in every aspect of our governance.\"\n\n\"It is your duty to Allah,\" Celik replied.\n\n\"There will be strong opposition to my candidacy, particularly on constitutional grounds. Are you positive we can overcome the challenges?\"\n\n\"You forget that the Prime Minister is a hidden ally to our cause. He has kept his true faith concealed from the public and will be with us in forming a new government.\"\n\n\"I enjoy your confidence, Ozden. I will of course have a key role for you in leading our new state, praise Allah.\"\n\n\"I am counting on it,\" Celik replied smugly. \"As for your announced entry into the presidential race, I will assist your advisers in coordinating a large public rally. With some of the Sheikh's money, we will be able to create a media blitz that will flood the opposition. I am also working on some other programs to boost your popularity.\"\n\n\"So be it,\" Battal said, standing and shaking hands with Celik. \"With you by my side, my friend, what can we not achieve?\"\n\n\"Nothing, my master. Nothing at all.\"\n\nCelik left the meeting with a skip in his step. The foolish naif could be played like a violin, he thought. Once elected, Celik would be pulling all the strings. And should Battal have a change of heart, Celik had a slew of dirty tricks up his sleeve to keep the Mufti in line.\n\nExiting the mosque under an unusually clear and sunny sky, he felt the future was looking very bright indeed.\n\nIn a dimly lit cubicle within the secured walls of Fort Gordon, Georgia, Turkish language analyst George Withers listened to the conversation through a set of cushioned headphones. An employee of the NSA's Georgia Regional Security Operations Center, Withers was one of an army of linguists paid to eavesdrop on Middle East communications from the Army base tucked amid the forested hills surrounding Augusta.\n\nUnlike most of his voice intercept work that involved real-time translation of phone calls captured from satellite transmissions, this conversation was hours old. The data had originated from a listening post at the U.S. Embassy in Istanbul, which had intercepted a cellular phone call to the Turkish National Intelligence Organization. The call had been digitally recorded and encrypted, then sent to Fort Gordon via an NSA relay station in Cyprus.\n\nWithers had no way of knowing that the call had actually originated from Battal's own cell phone. Sitting idle on his desk, the phone had been remotely activated by the Turkish intelligence agency. Like most modern cell phones, Battal's had a built-in tracking device, which allowed it to be targeted with a secret software download. Sitting unused or even turned off, the cell phone's microphone could be turned on remotely, gathering all nearby audio inputs. Once activated, the audio could be transmitted through a normal cell call without the user's knowledge. The Mufti had been placed on a watch list by Turkey's Intelligence Director, a hardened secularist who had grown nervous of Battal's growing popularity and power. Battal's conversation with Celik, and every other person who entered his office, was now on a direct feed to the Turkish intelligence agency. The American linguist listening in was therefore an eavesdropper on an eavesdropper.\n\nCorrectly gauging the nature of the call and guessing that it was transmitted by an unauthorized recording, Withers decided that it was worth forwarding to an intelligence analyst for further assessment. Glancing at a desk clock and seeing that it was time for his lunch break, he quickly typed in a computer command. Seconds later, a written transcript of the conversation appeared on his computer monitor, courtesy of the agency's voice recognition software. Withers reviewed the transcript, correcting a few errors and clarifying a comment or two that the software failed to decipher, then added his own comments to a summary page. E-mailing it to an agency specialist in Turkish affairs, he rose from his desk and headed to the cafeteria, thinking that the report would probably never again see the light of day."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "The u.s. Director of national intelligence sat quietly through his weekly staff briefing on Eurasian and Middle Eastern affairs. A taciturn retired Army general named Braxton, he was the President's chief intelligence funnel for the Defense Department, Homeland Security, the CIA, and a dozen other agencies responsible for protecting the nation's security.\n\nThe briefing was dominated by the usual field updates of events taking place in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran. A parade of intelligence officers and Pentagon officials marched in and out of the secure conference room at the Liberty Crossing Intelligence Campus, the recently constructed home of the DNI located in McLean, Virginia.\n\nThe briefing was on its third hour before the agenda turned to Israel. John O'Quinn, a deputy national intelligence officer for western Asia, slipped away from the mammoth conference table to refill his coffee cup as a CIA intelligence officer discussed the latest developments on the West Bank.\n\n\"All right, all right, there's nothing new there,\" Braxton interrupted impatiently. \"Let's move on to the rest of the Med. What's the latest on the al-Azhar Mosque bombing in Cairo?\"\n\nO'Quinn hurried back to the table as the CIA officer fielded the question.\n\n\"The final death toll was only seven, as the blast occurred at a time of sparse attendance. We don't know if that was intentional or not. There was a single explosion, which severely damaged the mosque's main prayer hall. As you know, al-Azhar is considered the state mosque of Egypt, and is also one of the oldest and most revered sites in Islam. The public outrage has been intense, with several anti-Israel marches taking place throughout the streets of Cairo. We're quite sure that the protests are being organized by the Muslim Brotherhood.\"\n\n\"Does Cairo know who is responsible for the bombing?\"\n\n\"They don't,\" the CIA man replied. \"No one with any credibility has taken responsibility, which isn't surprising given the nature of the attack. Our fear is that the Muslim Brotherhood will gain renewed traction from the attack to make further inroads into the Egyptian parliament.\"\n\n\"That's all we need is for the Egyptians to go fundamentalist on us,\" Braxton muttered with a shake of his head. \"What's our intelligence assessment as to who pulled it off?\"\n\n\"We really don't know, sir. We're looking at potential al-Qaeda connections, but have nothing firm at the moment. There's a somewhat curious detail from the Egyptian National Police, and that is that they claim to have found residue samples of HMX from the blast site.\"\n\n\"The meaning being?\"\n\n\"Hmx is a tightly controlled plastic explosive. It's high-end stuff, mostly used for nuclear devices and rocket propellant. It's not something we'd normally associate with al-Qaeda, and we find it a bit odd that it surfaced in Egypt.\"\n\nSitting in an adjacent chair, O'Quinn felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. He quickly cleared his throat.\n\n\"You sure it was HMX?\" he asked.\n\n\"We're awaiting our own test samples, but that's what the Egyptians reported.\"\n\n\"That mean something to you, O'Quinn?\" General Braxton asked.\n\nThe intelligence officer nodded. \"Sir, there was a planted bomb explosion at the Yesil Mosque in Bursa, Turkey, three days before the al-Azhar blast. You may have seen a field brief on it. Three fatalities, including a prominent leader in the fringe Felicity political party. Like in Egypt, it was an old, venerated mosque.\" He took a quick sip of his coffee, then added, \"The Turkish authorities have confirmed that the blast was caused by a planted parcel of HMX explosives.\"\n\n\"So we have two planted bombs in two countries three days apart,\" the general stated. \"Both in historic mosques, both ostensibly with a low designated kill rate, and both ostensibly using the same explosive material. All right, then, somebody please tell me who and why.\"\n\nAn uneasy silence filled the room before O'Quinn finally braved to speak.\n\n\"Sir, I don't think anyone was aware of the similarities in explosives until just now.\"\n\nThe CIA man agreed. \"We'll get some analysts to search for a possible link right away. Given the nature of the explosives, I might speculate that the Iranians have some involvement.\"\n\n\"What do the Turks think?\" Braxton asked.\n\n\"Like Egypt, there have been no claims of responsibility. We have had no indication that the Turks have identified any suspects.\"\n\nThe general began fidgeting in his seat, his cobalt blue eyes boring into O'Quinn like a pair of drill bits. O'Quinn had worked for the general for less than a year but had slowly gained his professional respect. He could tell by his demeanor that the Director wanted more, and finally he asked for it.\n\n\"What is your assessment?\" the general asked gruffly.\n\nO'Quinn's mind churned to expel a coherent reply, but he had more questions than answers.\n\n\"Sir, I can't formulate the Egyptian blast, but, as far as the Bursa mosque bombing, some believe there may be a link to the recent artifact thefts at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.\"\n\n\"Yes, I read about that,\" the general replied. \"I understand a Congresswoman was somehow involved in the incident.\"\n\n\"Loren Smith, of Colorado. She recovered a portion of the stolen artifacts but was nearly killed in the process. She somehow managed to keep her name out of the papers.\"\n\n\"Sounds like someone I could use on my staff,\" Braxton muttered.\n\n\"I believe some sort of explosives were used during the Topkapi breakin,\" O'Quinn continued. \"I will make an immediate inquiry to determine if there is a match to the Bursa and Cairo bombings.\"\n\n\"What would be the motive?\"\n\n\"The typical incidences of mosque bombings, as we've seen in Iraq, are Shia attacks on Sunni mosques, or visa versa,\" offered the CIA officer. \"Though in the case of Turkey, I believe the Shia Muslims in the country are a nonviolent minority.\"\n\n\"That's correct,\" O'Quinn stated. \"A more likely culprit would be Kurdish separatists. Turkey is holding national elections in less than four weeks. It's possible that the Turkish attacks were instigated by the Kurds, or another fringe political party trying to stir up trouble, though I'm not sure that would explain a link to Cairo.\"\n\n\"I would think the Turkish authorities would have been quick to publicly blame the Kurds if they thought they were actually behind the attacks,\" Braxton said.\n\n\"You're probably right,\" O'Quinn replied, flipping through his briefing notes. His fingers stopped at a copy of the NSA intercept transcript recorded by George Withers.\n\n\"Sir, there's another development on the Turkish front that may be cause for alarm.\"\n\n\"Go ahead,\" the general said.\n\n\"Altan Battal, the Muslim Mufti of Istanbul and a leading fundamentalist cleric in Turkey, will be entering the upcoming presidential election, according to an NSA call intercept.\"\n\n\"President Yilmaz has had a stable leadership run for several years,\" Braxton noted. \"And Turkey is strongly secular. I can't imagine that this Battal fellow represents more than a marginal candidacy.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid that's not the case,\" O'Quinn replied. \"President Yilmaz's popularity has waned considerably due to the poor state of the economy, and he's been stung by recent corruption charges within his administration. Mufti Battal, on the other hand, has become a rising public figure in the country, particularly with the poor and unemployed. There's no telling how he'll perform as a political candidate, but many fear he could represent a legitimate challenge to the incumbent.\"\n\n\"Tell me more about this Battal,\" the general asked.\n\n\"Well, sir, his claimed bio states that he was orphaned at an early age and forced to fight for survival in the ghetto slums of west Istanbul. He escaped a life of poverty when he came to the aid of an old man being robbed by a neighborhood thug. In gratitude, the man, a mosque elder, sent Battal to a private Muslim school, where he paid the boy's room and board well into his teens. The school was heavily fundamentalist, which apparently drives his views today. He has a heavy scholarly bent yet also a gift for oration, which helped accelerate his rise through Istanbul's Muslim hierarchy. He now stands as the chief theologian for all of Istanbul. Though personally charming, his writings and sermons espouse Taliban-like interpretations of Islam, with plenty of rallying about the evils of the West and the dangers of foreign influence. There's no telling what would happen if he was elected, but we'd have to face the real possibility of losing Turkey overnight.\"\n\n\"Does he have a chance to win the election?\" Braxton asked with rising dread in his voice.\n\nO'Quinn nodded. \"Our assessment is that he could have a real shot at it. And if the Turkish military should sustain his election, then all bets are off.\"\n\nAn Air Force colonel seated at the table gasped. \"A fundamentalist takeover of Turkey? That would be an unmitigated disaster. Turkey is a NATO country and one of our strongest allies in the region. We have a variety of military resources in the country, including tactical nuclear weapons. The Air Force base at Incirlik is critical for our operations in Afghanistan.\"\n\n\"Not to mention the listening posts on their soil we use to monitor the Russians and the Iranians,\" added the CIA man.\n\n\"Turkey is currently a key transfer point for supplies into Afghanistan, as they were for Iraq,\" grieved an Army major seated beside the colonel. \"Loss of those supply lines would jeopardize our entire Afghan campaign.\"\n\n\"We foresee all kinds of potentially disastrous scenarios,\" O'Quinn added quietly, \"from a closure of the Bosphorus, and its flow of Russian oil and gas, to an emboldened Iran. The entire Middle East would be affected, and the impact of such a change on the balance of power is nearly impossible to predict.\"\n\n\"Turkey has been a quiet friend and trading partner of Israel, exporting large quantities of food and fresh water, among other things,\" the CIA officer said. \"If Turkey and Egypt were both to make a turn toward fundamentalism, it would heighten Israel's isolation. In addition to emboldening Iran, I would fear a greater aggression from Hamas, Hezbollah, and other frontline adversaries of Israel, which would only lead to greater violence in the region. Such a turnabout in ruling power could in fact become the trigger point that we have long feared, the one that sparks World War Three from the heart of the Middle East.\"\n\nThe room fell silent as Braxton and the others digested the words with quiet dread. The general finally shook off the uneasy tension and barked a stream of orders.\n\n\"O'Quinn, I want a full report on this Mufti Battal on my desk first thing in the morning. I'll also need an executive summary for the Presidential Daily Brief. We'll reconvene here Friday, where I expect a full assessment from both State and CIA. Assign whatever resources are necessary,\" he added with clenched teeth, \"but don't let this get ahead of us.\" He slammed his briefing book shut, then glared at the CIA man.\n\n\"World War Three?\" he hissed. \"Not on my watch!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "The call to morning salat drifted through the open hotel window, waking Pitt earlier than he would have preferred. Leaving the warm comfort of Loren's side, he rose from bed and peered out the window. The black-tipped minarets of Istanbul's Sultanahmet Mosque scratched a hazy sky just a few blocks away. Pitt noted wryly that the Islamic call to prayer no longer came from a muezzin shouting from the heights of the minaret but rather from loudspeakers situated around the mosque.\n\n\"Can you turn that racket off?\" Loren mumbled from beneath a blanket.\n\n\"You'll have to take it up with Allah,\" Pitt replied.\n\nHe closed the window, then gazed through the pane at the towering architecture of the nearby mosque and the blue waters of the Sea of Marmara just beyond. A large contingent of freighters was already assembling in line, waiting their turn to sail up the narrow Bosphorus Strait. Loren materialized out of the bed, slipping into a robe and joining her husband at the picture window.\n\n\"I didn't realize that blaring came from the mosque,\" she said a bit meekly. \"It's quite beautiful. Built by the Ottomans, I presume?\"\n\n\"Yes, in the early seventeenth century, I believe.\"\n\n\"Let's go have a look after breakfast. But after last night's excitement, that may be all the sightseeing I'll be up for today,\" she said with a yawn.\n\n\"No shop-till-you-drop at the Grand Bazaar?\"\n\n\"Maybe next time. I want our lone full day together in Istanbul to be relaxing.\"\n\nPitt watched a red freighter chug off the shoreline, then said, \"I think I have just the ticket.\"\n\nThey quickly showered and dressed, then ordered breakfast brought to their room. They were readying to leave when the phone rang. Pitt answered and spoke for several minutes, then hung up the receiver.\n\n\"It was Dr. Ruppe, calling from the airport. He wanted to make sure you were okay,\" he explained.\n\n\"I'd feel better if you told me the police had captured those criminals.\"\n\nPitt shook his head. \"Apparently not. Rey is a little irate, as the local media is blaming the breakin and murders on an anti-Muslim movement. Apparently, some valuable jewelry was ignored at Topkapi in favor of several Muhammad relics.\"\n\n\"You said murders in the plural,\" Loren remarked.\n\n\"Yes, there were a total of five security guards killed in the ordeal.\"\n\nLoren grimaced. \"The fact that several of the murderers were Persian-looking didn't clue the police in another direction?\"\n\n\"The police have our account. I'm sure they are operating under a different scenario.\" Deep down, Pitt wasn't so sure but hid his anger at the thought of his wife's kidnappers escaping scot-free.\n\n\"The other news, according to Ruppe,\" he continued, \"is that they kept our names and involvement out of the paper. Apparently, there is widespread outrage at the theft, which is being viewed as a deep insult to the Muslim community.\"\n\n\"Even after our near-death experience, that's okay with me,\" Loren mused. \"By the way, what exactly did they end up stealing?\"\n\n\"They made off with a battle standard that belonged to Muhammad. Apparently, the outrage would have been even more magnified if you hadn't liberated the second black bag.\"\n\n\"What did it contain?\"\n\n\"A cloak of Muhammad's, called the Holy Mantle, along with a letter written in his hand. Part of what is known as the Sacred Trusts.\"\n\n\"It's terrible that somebody would try to steal such relics,\" Loren said, shaking her head.\n\n\"Come on, we better go see the rest of this town before anything else disappears.\"\n\nThey exited the lobby of the hotel and entered the bustling streets of old Istanbul. Pitt noticed a man in mirrored sunglasses staring at Loren as he passed on his way into the hotel. Tall and sporting a near-ballerina figure, Loren seldom failed to attract the male eye. Dressed in light slacks and an amethyst blouse that nearly matched the color of her eyes, she looked vivacious despite the turmoil of the night before.\n\nWalking down a block or two, they stopped and peered in the window of an upscale rug shop called Punto of Istanbul, admiring an elegant Serapi carpet that hung on the wall. Strolling to the end of the street, they crossed the Hippodrome, a long, narrow park around which the chariots raced in the Byzantine era. Just beyond was the mosque of Sultan Ahmet I.\n\nCompleted in 1617, it was the last of Istanbul's great imperial mosques. The exterior featured a rising cascade of domes and semi-domes that climbed in height and grandeur until culminating in a massive central dome. By the time Pitt and Loren had entered the mosque's arched courtyard, most of the morning worshippers had been replaced by camera-toting tourists.\n\nThey made their way into the prayer hall, its expansive interior dimly lit by high banks of stained-glass windows. Overhead, the curving domes were covered in a maze of intricately patterned tiles, many in shades of blue, which gave the building its nickname, the Blue Mosque. Pitt studied an archway filled with familiar-looking floral tiles, which were manufactured in the nearby city of Iznik.\n\n\"Look at that design,\" he said to Loren. \"It's nearly identical to the pattern on the ceramic box we pulled from the wreck.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" Loren agreed, \"though the coloring is a little different. Congratulations, it's more evidence that your wreck sank around sixteen hundred.\"\n\nPitt's satisfaction was short-lived. Eyeing a green-tiled wall on the opposite side of the prayer hall, he spotted a man in sunglasses looking in his direction. It was the same man who had gawked at Loren outside the hotel.\n\nWithout saying a word, Pitt slowly herded Loren toward the exit, consciously staying close to a group of German tourists on a guided tour. He casually surveyed the crowd scattered about the mosque, trying to discern whether Sunglasses had any partners. Pitt noticed a thin Persian man with a bushy mustache shuffling along nearby, a serious scowl on his face. He appeared incongruous among the other tourists standing with their necks craned toward the ceiling. It seemed unlikely that the Topkapi thieves would have tracked them down so quickly, though Pitt recalled the threatening words of the woman in the cistern. He decided to find out for sure.\n\nFollowing the Germans out of the prayer hall, Pitt and Loren pulled on the shoes they had removed earlier and followed the tour group into the courtyard. Pitt watched from the corner of his eye as the Persian followed suit.\n\n\"Stay here,\" Pitt told Loren, then turned and quickly strode across the marble tile toward the man.\n\nThe Persian immediately turned, pretending to study a nearby column behind him. Pitt strode right up and gazed down at the man, who stood a head shorter.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" Pitt said. \"Can you tell me who's buried in Ataturk's tomb?\"\n\nThe man at first avoided Pitt's gaze, peering instead toward the prayer hall exit where Sunglasses now stood. Spotting a shake of the head, he turned and faced Pitt with a look of contempt.\n\n\"I wouldn't know where that dog lies,\" he spat, his eyes glistening with an arrogant intimidation born of a hardened life in the streets. An undercover police agent he was clearly not. When Pitt noticed the telltale bulge of a holstered handgun under the man's loose shirt, he decided not to press the issue. He gave the man a cold, knowing look, then turned and stepped away. Walking back to Loren, he half expected a bullet in the back and silently hoped the crowds and mosque security were sufficient deterrents to spare an immediate attack.\n\n\"What was that about?\" Loren asked as he returned.\n\n\"Just checking the time. Come on, let's see if we can catch a cab.\"\n\nThe German tour group was slowly moving toward the courtyard exit, but Pitt grabbed Loren's hand and dragged her past them, slipping out before they converged on the doorway. Pitt didn't bother looking back, knowing full well that Sunglasses and the Persian would be in pursuit. Prodding Loren to the street, he got lucky and commandeered a cab that was off-loading an elderly pair of tourists out front.\n\n\"To the Eminonu ferry docks, as fast as you can,\" he directed the cabdriver.\n\n\"Why all the rush?\" Loren asked, slightly agitated at being hustled into the car.\n\n\"I think we are being tailed.\"\n\n\"That man you spoke to inside the mosque?\"\n\nPitt nodded. \"And another fellow wearing sunglasses who I saw earlier outside our hotel.\"\n\nAs the cab pulled into traffic, Pitt looked out the back window. A small orange sedan screeched up to the curb with a lone driver inside. Pitt looked across the mosque grounds to see the German tourist group still congregated around the mosque exit. He smiled as he spotted the Persian clumsily fighting his way through the thick crowd.\n\n\"Why don't we go to the police?\" Loren asked, a rising note of alarm in her voice.\n\nPitt flashed a reassuring grin. \"What, and ruin our one and only relaxing day in Istanbul?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "The yellow taxi quickly melted into traffic, leaving the domed mosque and its minarets in the rearview mirror. Had the driver turned north and wound through the crowded maze of the historic old city, he would have easily lost the orange sedan to thick traffic. But the judicious cabdriver, thoughtful to make good time, instead turned south and headed toward a divided motorway called the Kennedy Caddesi.\n\nThe pursuers desperately attempted to catch up. The orange sedan sped away from the mosque after picking up its two passengers, nearly getting sideswiped by a tourist bus as it wove through traffic.\n\n\"I think they turned right,\" the driver said in a hesitant voice.\n\n\"Go,\" Sunglasses directed from the front passenger seat while nodding at the driver to follow his instincts.\n\nThe car turned south, bolting through a red light, before slowing behind a procession of crawling vehicles. Seated in the backseat, the Persian suddenly pointed down the road, spotting a yellow cab two blocks ahead turning onto the Caddesi.\n\n\"I think that is their cab,\" he shouted.\n\nThe driver nodded, his knuckles tightening around the steering wheel. There was little he could do to prod his way through the clogged traffic, and he anxiously cursed the surrounding vehicles while the seconds ticked by. Finally spotting a break in oncoming traffic, he burst down the left lane for a block, then nosed back into the right lane. The traffic moved forward, and he quickly entered the Caddesi, flooring the accelerator and weaving down the highway like a Formula 1 racer.\n\nThe highway looped around the eastern boundary of Topkapi, hugging the Bosphorus shoreline. Traffic moved briskly as the road turned north then west along the Golden Horn, a natural water inlet that divided the European sector of Istanbul. Pitt looked down at the waterway, admiring a large green dredge ship that was churning the waters off the shoreline. As the cab approached the Galata Bridge, which stretched north over the Golden Horn into the district of Beyoglu, a throng of cars and buses suddenly materialized, impeding movement to a crawl. The cab exited the Caddesi at the first opportunity, snaking down to a ferry dock near the base of the bridge.\n\n\"Bogaz Hatti dock at Eminonu,\" the cabdriver announced. \"The next ferry departure will be right over there,\" he added with a wave of his arm. \"If you hurry, you can just catch it.\"\n\nPitt paid the driver, adding a healthy tip, then surveyed the road behind them as he exited the cab. Seeing no sign of the orange sedan, he casually escorted Loren to the ticket window.\n\n\"You just can't stay away from the water, can you?\" Loren said, eyeing several large ferryboats on the waterfront.\n\n\"I thought a relaxing cruise on the Bosphorus was just what the doctor ordered.\"\n\n\"Actually, that does sound enticing,\" she admitted, relishing some fresh-air sightseeing. \"Just so long as we're alone and there's lunch involved.\"\n\nPitt grinned. \"Lunch is guaranteed. And I think we've lost our friends.\"\n\nPurchasing their tickets, they walked down one of the busy docks and boarded a modern passenger ferry, grabbing some seats by a window. A triple blast of the ship's horn signaled its departure before the gangway was pulled aside.\n\nOn the road out front, the orange sedan screeched to a halt, its two passengers flying out of the side doors. Bypassing the ticket booth, they sprinted down to the dock, only to watch the ferryboat churn into the strait. Panting to catch his breath, Sunglasses stared at the ferry, then turned to the Persian.\n\n\"Find us a boat,\" he hissed. \"Now!\"\n\nAt twenty miles in length and seldom more than a mile wide, the Bosphorus Strait was at once one of the world's busiest and most scenic waterways. Dividing the heart of Istanbul, it had been a historic trading route, utilized by the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines. In modern times, it had become a major conduit for Russia, Georgia, and other countries bordering the Black Sea. Tankers, freighters, and containerships constantly clogged the narrow waterway that split the European and Asian continents.\n\nThe ferryboat steamed north at a comfortable clip, easing past the hilly skyline of Istanbul under a clear blue sky. The vessel soon passed under the Bosphorus Bridge and later the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge, both towering suspension bridges that rose high above the waterway. Pitt and Loren sipped hot tea while surveying the neighboring boat traffic and the hillside architecture. The crowded shoreline slowly receded into a line of stately waterfront mansions, diplomatic missions, and former palaces that resided against a green forested backdrop.\n\nThe ferry made several leisurely port stops before approaching almost within sight of the Black Sea.\n\n\"Care to go up to the top deck for a better view?\" Pitt asked.\n\nLoren shook her head. \"Looks too breezy for me. How about another tea instead?\"\n\nPitt duly agreed and walked over to a small cafe and ordered two more black teas. Had they climbed to the top deck, Pitt might have observed the small speedboat carrying three men that raced up the strait toward the ferryboat.\n\nThe ferry soon turned toward the European shore and docked beside a pair of smaller car ferries at the Port of Sariyer. An old fishing village, Sariyer still exuded the historic Turkish charm of many upper Bosphorus havens that were slowly being overrun with affluent retirees.\n\n\"There are supposed to be some good seafood restaurants here,\" Loren said, reading from a tour book. \"How about we get off for lunch?\"\n\nPitt agreed, and they soon joined a throng of sightseers clogging the gangway to exit the ship. The dock was near the base of a large hill, with the town spread along shoreline flats to their right. The town's main road fed into a small waterfront park to their left, which caught Pitt's eye when an old Citroen Traction Avant motored onto the grassy field.\n\nThey walked through a small fish market, observing a fresh catch of sea bass being unloaded from a small fishing boat. Ambling past a row of competing seafood restaurants, they selected a small waterfront cafe at the end of the block. A spry waitress with long black hair seated them at a patio table along the water's edge, then quickly covered their table with meze, small appetizer portions of various Turkish dishes.\n\n\"You have to try the calamari,\" Loren said, shoving a rubbery blob into Pitt's mouth.\n\nPitt playfully crunched one of her fingers with his teeth. \"A nice match with the white cheese,\" he replied after swallowing the fried squid.\n\nThey enjoyed a leisurely meal, watching the sea traffic maneuvering down the strait, along with the tourists bustling through the adjoining restaurants. Finishing their seafood dishes, Pitt was reaching for a glass of water when Loren suddenly clutched his arm.\n\n\"Swallow a bone?\" he asked, noting a tight-lipped grimace on her face.\n\nLoren slowly shook her head as she released her grip. \"There's a man standing outside the door. He was one of the men in the van last night.\"\n\nPitt took a drink from his water glass, casually turning his head toward the cafe's front door. Outside the entrance, he could see a brown-skinned man in a blue shirt milling about the door. He had turned toward the street, obscuring his face from Pitt.\n\n\"Are you certain?\" Pitt asked.\n\nLoren saw the man steal a quick glance through the window before turning away again. She looked at her husband with fear in her eyes and nodded.\n\n\"I recognize his eyes,\" she said.\n\nPitt thought the profile looked familiar, and Loren's reaction convinced him she was right. It had to be the man Pitt had slugged in the back of the van.\n\n\"How could they have tracked us here?\" she asked, slightly hoarse.\n\n\"We were the last ones on the boat, but they must have been close enough to see us board,\" Pitt reasoned. \"They probably followed in another boat. It wouldn't have taken long to scout the restaurants near the ferry dock.\"\n\nThough he kept a calm demeanor, Pitt felt a deep uneasiness over the safety of his wife. The Topkapi thieves had proven last night that they weren't afraid to murder. If they had taken the trouble to track them down, it could be for only one reason--retaliation for disrupting the burglary. The threat by the woman in the cistern suddenly didn't sound so hollow.\n\nThe cafe's waitress appeared and, while clearing away their lunch dishes, asked if they wanted dessert. Loren started to shake her head, but Pitt spoke up.\n\n\"Yes, indeed. Two coffees and two orders of your baklava, please.\"\n\nAs the waitress scurried back to the kitchen, Loren admonished Pitt.\n\n\"I can't eat any more. Especially not now,\" she added, glaring toward the front door.\n\n\"Dessert is for him, not us,\" he replied quietly. \"Make a show of heading for the restroom, then wait for me by the kitchen.\"\n\nLoren responded immediately, pretending to whisper in Pitt's ear, then slowly rising and moving down a short hall that led to both the kitchen and restrooms. Pitt noted the man at the door stiffen slightly as he observed her movement, then relaxed when the waitress delivered the coffee and dessert to the table. Pitt surreptitiously slipped a stack of Turkish lira on the table, then poked a fork into the thick slab of baklava. Taking a peek toward the door, he saw the blue-shirted man turn again toward the street. Pitt dropped his fork and rose from the table in a flash.\n\nLoren stood waiting at the end of the hallway as Pitt rushed by, grabbed her hand, and yanked her into the kitchen. A startled chef and dishwasher simply stopped and stared as Pitt smiled and said hello, then squeezed past some boiling pots with Loren in tow. A back door opened onto a small alley that curved to the main front street. They hustled up to the corner and turned to head away from the restaurant when Loren squeezed Pitt's hand.\n\n\"How about that trolley?\" she asked.\n\nAn antiquated open-air trolley used to shuffle locals and tourists from one end of town to the other was moving slowly down the street toward them.\n\n\"Let's board on the other side,\" Pitt agreed.\n\nThey crossed the street just before the trolley approached and then quickly jumped aboard. The seats were all taken, so they were forced to stand as the trolley passed by the front of the cafe. The man in the blue shirt still stood out front and casually surveyed the trolley as it motored by. Pitt and Loren turned away and tried to screen themselves behind another passenger, but their cover was limited. The man's eyes froze at the sight of Loren's purple blouse, then he swung around and pressed his face to the restaurant window. Pitt could see the shock in the man's face as he turned back and watched the trolley recede down the street. Quickly stumbling after the trolley, he yanked a cell phone from his pocket and frantically dialed as he ran.\n\nLoren looked at Pitt with apologetic eyes. \"Sorry, I think he spotted me.\"\n\n\"No matter,\" Pitt replied, trying to stifle her fears with a sure grin. \"It's a small town.\"\n\nThe trolley made a brief stop at the fish market, where most of the passengers climbed off. Observing their tail still in pursuit a block away, Pitt and Loren grabbed a seat and crouched low as the trolley resumed speed.\n\n\"I think I saw a policeman earlier near the dock,\" Loren said.\n\n\"If he's not around, we might be able to short-hop another ferry.\"\n\nThe trolley cruised another block, then approached its stop near the ferry dock. The old vehicle's wheels were still turning when Pitt and Loren jumped off and scurried toward the dock. But this time, it was Pitt's turn to grab Loren's arm and freeze.\n\nAhead of them, the dock was now empty, the next ferry not due for another half hour. Of greater concern to Pitt was the appearance of two men near the dock's entrance. One was the Persian from the Blue Mosque, pacing about the quay, alongside his friend in the sunglasses.\n\n\"I think we best find some alternate transportation,\" Pitt said, guiding Loren in the other direction. They quickly stepped toward the road, where a 1960s-era Peugeot convertible rambled by, followed by a small group of locals on foot trailing it to the waterfront park. Pitt and Loren approached the Turks and tried to melt into the small party for cover. Their attempt failed when the blue-shirted man from the restaurant appeared down the road. Shouting to his cohorts on the dock, he waved excitedly, then pointed in Pitt's direction.\n\n\"What do we do now?\" Loren asked, seeing the men on the dock move in their direction.\n\n\"Just keep moving,\" Pitt replied.\n\nHis eyes were dancing in all directions, searching for an avenue of escape, but their only immediate option was to keep moving with the crowd. They followed the group into the park, finding the open grassy field now lined with two uneven rows of old cars. Pitt recognized many of the highly polished vehicles as Citroen and Renault models built in the fifties and sixties.\n\n\"Must be a French car club meet,\" he mused.\n\n\"Wish we could actually enjoy it,\" Loren replied, constantly gazing over her shoulder.\n\nAs the group of people around them began to disperse across the field, Pitt led Loren to a cluster of people in the first row. They were congregated around the star of the show, a gleaming early-fifties Talbot-Lago with a bulbous body designed by Italian coach-maker Ghia. Working their way to the back of the crowd, Pitt turned and surveyed their assailants.\n\nThe three men were just entering the park together at a brisk pace. Sunglasses was obviously the team leader, and he promptly directed the other two men to either edge of the field while he slowly moved toward the center row of cars.\n\n\"I don't think we'll be able to leave the way we came in,\" Pitt said. \"Let's try to keep ahead of them. We might be able to cut up to the main road from the other end of the park and flag down a car or bus.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't be opposed to attempting a carjacking at this point,\" Loren replied grimly. She moved quickly, skirting around and between the cars, with Pitt a step or two behind. They tried as best they could to use other onlookers as cover, but the crowds thinned as they moved down the row. They soon reached the last car, a postwar two-door convertible painted metallic silver and green. Pitt noticed an older man seated inside taping a \"For Sale\" sign to the windshield.\n\n\"The last of our cover,\" Pitt remarked. \"Let's move fast to the trees.\"\n\nPitt grabbed Loren's hand, and they started to run across the last section of grass field. A thick line of trees circled the park's perimeter, beyond which Pitt was certain the coastal road lay just to the west.\n\nThey'd run just twenty yards when the sight ahead ground them both to a dead stop. Beyond the trees, they could now see a high stone wall that enveloped the southern half of the park. As a deterrent to the private residence on the other side, the wall was topped with shards of broken glass. Pitt knew that even with his help there was no way Loren could quickly scale the wall and outrun their pursuers, let alone avoid a bloody scrape in the process.\n\nPitt wheeled around and quickly spotted the three men. They were still picking their way through the cars, slowly converging on them. Tugging Loren's hand, Pitt began walking back toward the line of cars.\n\n\"What do we do now?\" Loren asked, fear evident in her voice.\n\nPitt looked at her with a devilish sparkle in his eye.\n\n\"In the words of Monty Hall, let's make a deal.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "DOES SHE SPORT A COTAL TRANSMISSION?\" PITT ASKED.\n\nThe older bearded man leaned over and opened the car's driver's-side door.\n\n\"She certainly does,\" he said in a clearly American accent. \"You familiar with Delahayes?\" His face perked up as he gazed at the tall, dark-haired man and his attractive wife.\n\n\"I've long admired the marque,\" Pitt replied, \"especially the coachwork-bodied vehicles.\"\n\n\"This is a 1948 Model 135 convertible coupe, with a custom body from the Paris shop of Henri Chapron.\"\n\nThe large two-door convertible had clean but heavy lines that exemplified the simple designs of auto manufacturers immediately after World War II. Loren admired the striking green-and-silver paint scheme, which made the car look even longer.\n\n\"Did you restore it yourself?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes. I'm a miner by trade. I ran across the car at an old dacha in Georgia while working a project on the Black Sea coast. It was in rough shape but all there. Brought it back to Istanbul and had some local talent help me with the restoration. It's not concours quality, but I think she looks nice. They squeezed a lot of speed out of her six-cylinder engine, so she runs like a demon.\" He reached out a hand toward Pitt. \"My name is Clive Cussler, by the way.\"\n\nPitt shook the man's hand, then quickly introduced himself and Loren.\n\n\"She's a beauty,\" Pitt added, though his eyes were focused on the nearby crowd. The man with the sunglasses was staring at him from five cars away, walking casually in his direction. Pitt spotted the other two men farther afield but closing from the flanks.\n\n\"Why are you selling the car?\" he asked while quietly motioning Loren to approach the passenger door.\n\n\"I'm headed over to Malta for a bit and I won't have room for it there,\" the man said with a disappointed look. He smiled as Loren opened the left side suicide door. A black-and-tan dachshund sleeping on the seat gave her an annoyed look, then hopped out and ran to its owner. Loren slid into the leather-bound front passenger seat, then waved to Pitt.\n\n\"You look good in the car,\" Cussler said, turning on the sales charm.\n\nLoren smiled back. \"Would it be all right if we took it for a little test-drive around the park?\" she asked.\n\n\"Why, of course. The keys are in it.\" He turned to Pitt. \"You're familiar with the Cotal transmission? You only need to use the clutch to start and stop.\"\n\nPitt nodded as he quickly slipped behind the wheel of the right-hand-drive car. Turning the ignition key, he listened with satisfaction as the motor immediately fired to life.\n\n\"We'll be back shortly,\" he said, waving to the man out of the window.\n\nPitt reversed the car, then turned down the back row of show cars, hoping to avoid Sunglasses. The assailant stepped around the last car in line and spotted Pitt behind the wheel just as the Delahaye pulled forward. Pitt gently mashed the throttle, trying to keep the rear wheels from spinning on the slick grass as the car lurched ahead. Sunglasses hesitated, then yelled for him to stop. Pitt promptly ignored the plea as the tires found their grip and the old car accelerated quickly, leaving the man in his tracks.\n\nPitt could hear additional shouting over the whine of the engine, then Loren called out a warning ahead. The Topkapi thief in the blue shirt appeared along the row of cars a dozen yards ahead.\n\n\"He's got a gun,\" Loren yelled as the accelerating car drew them closer.\n\nPitt could see that the man had produced a handgun, which he tried to obscure by holding it flat against the side of his leg. He stood near the back of a Peugeot wood-paneled wagon, waiting for the Delahaye to draw alongside.\n\nWith the motor screaming at high revolutions, Pitt popped the French car's tiny dash-mounted shifter into second gear. Just a few feet ahead, the blue-shirted man raised his arm holding the pistol.\n\n\"Duck down,\" Pitt shouted, then floored the accelerator.\n\nThe triple-carbureted engine spurted power, throwing Pitt and Loren back into their seats. The sudden acceleration threw off the gunman's timing as well, and he quickly struggled to aim the weapon toward the windshield. Pitt refused to give him the chance.\n\nYanking the steering wheel hard to the right, Pitt aimed the Delahaye's curved prow directly for the startled gunman. Blocked by the back of the Peugeot, the man had only one way to move. Furiously backpedaling, he abandoned making a precise shot in order to avoid becoming a hood ornament.\n\nThe Delahaye's front fender scraped along the Peugeot's bumper before creasing the gunman's leg, knocking him away from the car. Two shots rang out from his pistol before he crumpled alongside the Peugeot, writhing in agony. Both shots flew high, one shredding through the canvas roof, the other catching air.\n\nPitt hurriedly cranked the steering wheel back to avoid ramming the remaining row of cars. Fishtailing across the lawn, the Delahaye nearly struck a farmer's pickup truck entering the park loaded with melons. Shocked visitors scattered from their path as Pitt pounded on the horn in warning. Stealing a glance in the rearview mirror, he spotted Sunglasses and the Persian approaching the downed gunman, but neither had a weapon drawn.\n\nLoren peeked up from beneath the dash, the color drained from her face. As they wheeled toward the park exit, Pitt gave her a reassuring wink.\n\n\"That fellow was right,\" he said with a slight grin. \"She is a demon.\"\n\nPitt made as if he knew where he was going, bursting out of the park and turning left down the main road, which headed south along the Bosphorus toward Istanbul. The park gunmen showed no hesitation in making pursuit, quickly commandeering the farmer's idling truck at gunpoint. Shoving their injured accomplice in first, the other two men hopped into the vehicle and roared out of the park while melons flew off the truck bed like fired cannon shot.\n\nDespite the Delahaye's age, Pitt and Loren had the advantage in vehicles. The French car's roots had been in racing, with Delahayes competing successfully in the prewar Le Mans races. Hidden beneath the streamlined bodies custom-built for rich and famous Parisians were high-performing motor machines. A taut suspension and high-revving engine, by 1950s standards, gave Pitt ample opportunity to drive fast. The narrow, winding road, sprinkled with afternoon traffic, would prove to be an equalizer, however.\n\nScreaming through the curves with the pedal to the floor, Pitt quickly shifted through the Cotal transmission. With the use of electromagnetic clutches, the transmission allowed Pitt to change gears by simply flicking the small gear lever mounted on the dash. He was well versed in driving old cars, having his own collection of antique vehicles housed in an airport hangar near Washington, D.C. It was a passion akin to his love of the sea, and he found he was actually enjoying himself, if not the circumstances, in pushing the old Delahaye to its limits.\n\nLoren kept a resolute eye out the convertible's rear window as they squealed through a tight S-turn. She noticed Pitt frowning as he glanced at the instrument panel.\n\n\"Something wrong?\"\n\n\"The fuel gauge is tickling empty,\" he replied. \"I'm afraid a test-drive to Istanbul isn't in the cards.\"\n\nAn uptick in traffic began to impede their headway, and on a straight section of road Loren spotted the truck behind them playing catch-up at high speed.\n\n\"We need to find a busy place to lose them,\" she suggested.\n\nThere were few options on the small road, which traveled through an area filled with stately mansions. More cars clogged the roadway as they approached the village of Buyukdere, and Pitt passed the slower vehicles at every opportunity. Aided by the traffic, the pickup truck had steadily closed to within a quarter mile, with just a handful of interceding cars in between.\n\nPitt considered entering the populated portion of the village to the west, but slow-moving traffic clogged the artery into town. Skipping the cutoff, he clung to the coastal road, which suddenly spurted over the water on a lengthy bridged section. Finding a letup of oncoming traffic, Pitt accelerated hard, passing a line of cars slowed by a lethargic dump truck. He shook free of most of the traffic as the road touched land again, winding past the Bosphorus version of Embassy Row, where numerous foreign consulates occupied opulent summer retreats along the waterside.\n\n\"How's our melon truck holding up?\" Pitt asked, his eyes glued to the road ahead.\n\n\"Just passing that dump truck, about a half mile back,\" Loren reported, before the vehicles behind them disappeared in a sweeping curve.\n\nThe green Delahaye tore past the ornate grounds of the British Summer Embassy when Pitt was suddenly forced to downshift while braking hard. Up ahead, a large moving van was unsuccessfully trying to back into a private drive, blocking both lanes of traffic in the process.\n\n\"Get out of the way!\" Loren found herself yelling.\n\nThe truck driver never heard her, but it wouldn't have mattered. He casually inched the truck forward for a second try, ignoring the blare of car horns honking from the other direction.\n\nPitt quickly scanned the road for an out and found only one. Dropping the car into low gear, he sped forward and turned into the open gate of a walled estate to his right. The paved road turned to crushed gravel as they entered the grounds of an aging wooden mansion once owned by the Danish Royal Family. A sweeping circular drive divided a vast overgrown garden before looping past the steps of the salmon-colored main residence.\n\nA gardener tending roses in the center island looked on incredulously as the old French sports car entered the grounds, appearing as if it was an original inhabitant of the estate. He watched curiously as the Delahaye slowed to a stop behind some thick shrubs rather than continuing on to the manor's front steps. A few seconds later, he realized why.\n\nPreceded by the screech of skidding tires, the weathered pickup truck suddenly barreled through the front gate. The driver took the turn too fast, and the truck's tail drifted into a stone entry pillar, clipping the left rear fender. A few surviving melons popped out of the truck bed and disintegrated against the side of the pillar, leaving a trail of sticky orange flesh dripping to the ground.\n\nThe driver quickly regained control and charged toward the Delahaye, which sat idling straight ahead. Pitt intentionally baited the truck, not wanting it to stop and blockade the gate. He quickly stomped on the gas and popped the clutch, spewing a cloud of gravel and dust as the car shot forward. The truck closed fast, but not before Pitt reached the semicircular portion of the drive that curved past the residence. He accelerated hard as he turned left, blowing past the manor and into the opposite curve.\n\nIn the truck a dozen yards behind, the Persian leaned out the passenger window with a Glock automatic and began firing at the French car. Because of the angle of the curve, he had to reach out in front of the truck's windshield to aim, handicapping his accuracy. A few shots tore through the Delahaye's trunk, but the passengers and car mechanicals went unscathed.\n\nBy now, Pitt was drifting the car through the second curve, feathering the throttle to maintain momentum. At the outer edge of the turn, a large statue of Venus stood off the drive, with one raised arm pointing to the heavens.\n\n\"Look out,\" Loren shrieked as the speeding Delahaye drifted toward the marble statue.\n\nPitt held the wheel firm and eased his foot harder on the accelerator. As a succession of gunshots whistled over the roof, the car continued to slide toward the edge of the drive and the imposing Venus. The car's tires spun, then slowly bit into the loose gravel as the vehicle's momentum gradually shifted forward. Loren gripped the dashboard with white knuckles as the Delahaye's prow slipped onto the grass, heading for the bulk of marble. But the rear tires found their grip, shoving the front of the car just past the statue before nosing back onto the drive. Pitt and Loren heard a sharp scraping sound as the rear fender skimmed Venus's base, which ceased when all four wheels regained the gravel.\n\n\"You tore her arm off,\" Loren remarked, peering out the back window at the statue.\n\n\"I certainly hope that the Delahaye's owner carries collision insurance,\" Pitt said without looking back.\n\nAs the Delahaye charged toward the front gate, it was the truck's turn to navigate the second curve. The Persian still had his pistol dangling out the passenger door, lofting shots at the Delahaye while urging the driver to go faster. But with a higher center of gravity and balding tires, there was no way the truck could match the French convertible's slalom through the curve. Attempting to match speed, the ungainly vehicle almost immediately lost traction and began a sideways slip in the direction of the statue. Panicking as they started to drift off the driveway, Sunglasses stomped on the brakes, which only served to exacerbate the lateral drift.\n\nThe groundskeeper stared with his jaw open as the old truck smashed into Venus at a hard angle. The mangled artwork disappeared in a cloud of dust as the truck bounded forward and into a spin. Sliding back across the gravel drive, the truck spun three times before plowing into a thicket of small willows. The vehicle continued to slide, finally jarring to a halt against a thick chestnut tree as the three occupants were hurled against the dashboard.\n\nSunglasses slumped back into his seat, rubbing a fat lip obtained from kissing the steering wheel. Beside him, the man in the blue shirt was stemming the flow of blood from a mashed nose. Only the Persian escaped the collision unscathed, having braced himself with his free arm.\n\nListening to the engine idling without damage, he turned to the driver.\n\n\"Let's keep after them.\"\n\nSunglasses shook off his daze and reversed gear, roughly bouncing the truck back onto the drive. Hitting the brakes, a loud clattering arose from behind the cab. The Persian glanced out the rear window to see the decapitated head of Venus rolling about the truck bed with a clatter.\n\nBy the time they got back onto the drive, Pitt had already exited the estate. As he had hoped, the diversion had allowed sufficient time for the moving truck to sort itself out, and the coastal road was now clear. Pitt quickly pushed the old car up to high speed on the paved road.\n\n\"We might have bought a little time,\" he said, \"but we're about out of gas.\"\n\nLoren leaned over to see the fuel gauge needle flicker directly above the E.\n\n\"Maybe they'll stay in the clutches of Venus,\" she said hopefully.\n\nSpeeding past the Austrian Summer Embassy, the road opening up, they could see another shoreside village up ahead. A large car ferry was visible at the town dock, loading passengers and vehicles for a run down the Bosphorus.\n\n\"That ferry might be our best bet,\" Pitt said as the road dropped sharply to the waterfront.\n\n\"Yes, for that peaceful, relaxing cruise you were telling me about,\" Loren muttered.\n\nA roguish grin crossed Pitt's lips. \"Peaceful, perhaps, for someone,\" he replied.\n\nThey drove past a sign proclaiming the town of Yenikoy, and made their way through light traffic to the dock. Pitt pulled up behind an open truck loaded with oriental carpets waiting to board the ferry. He quickly scanned the dockside, eyeing a row of waterfront bars and restaurants similar to those in Sariyer.\n\n\"There's the truck,\" Loren suddenly blurted.\n\nPitt looked back up the road, catching a glimpse of the truck approaching the town a half mile away. He turned to Loren and motioned up a side street with his thumb.\n\n\"I want you to slip up to that restaurant with the green awning and order me a beer,\" he said.\n\n\"The dingy place with the darkened windows?\" she asked, looking past a number of clean, respectable establishments.\n\nPitt nodded.\n\n\"What about our cruise?\"\n\n\"We're going to give our seats up for our friends. Stay put until I get there. Now, go,\" he directed, giving her a quick kiss.\n\nHe watched as she climbed out of the car and hightailed it up the street, then tentatively entered the scruffy bar. A few seconds later, he spotted the pickup truck in his rearview mirror rumbling up to the dock. Pitt noted with some amusement that the truck's front fender was mashed flat and streaked with white marble dust. A demolished front headlight left a vacant cavity that now resembled an empty eye socket. There was no doubt that the assailants had spotted the French car as the battered truck took its place in line to board the ferry three cars behind Pitt.\n\nPitt noticed the carpet truck in front of him dawdle as the ramp to the ferry cleared free and he quickly revved the Delahaye and jumped past the big vehicle, eliciting an angry honk from the driver. The truck offered a slight buffer of concealment, which Pitt hoped would hide the fact that he was the lone occupant in the car.\n\nPitt paid the toll attendant and drove onto the car deck of the covered ferry, pulling up behind a small sedan packed with young kids. He quickly jumped out of the car and looked behind him. The carpet truck was stuck idling alongside the toll attendant, blocking the other vehicles as its driver fished in his pockets for fare money. If any of the gunmen had hopped out of the pickup truck, they weren't yet visible. Pitt turned around and surveyed the ferryboat.\n\nIt was a double-decker, with the covered lower deck carrying the vehicles while passengers sat topside. He started to step toward a staircase when he spotted a vendor selling popcorn to the kids parked in front of him. The man was almost Pitt's height and build, with similar dark wavy hair.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" Pitt called to the man. \"Would you be kind enough to watch my car while I go to the restroom?\" He pulled a ten-lira Turkish bill out of his wallet as he asked the question.\n\nThe vendor spotted the note and nodded profusely. \"Why, yes, of course,\" he answered.\n\nPitt stuffed the bill into the man's hand, then guided him to the driver's door.\n\n\"Please sit inside,\" Pitt requested. \"Nobody will bother my car if it is occupied.\"\n\nThe man set down his rack of popcorn and eagerly jumped inside, excited to sit in the stylish old car.\n\n\"I'll be right back,\" Pitt said with a wink, then hurried toward the staircase.\n\nHe climbed to the upper deck and melded through the passengers as he made his way to the stern. The pickup truck was just coming up the ramp as he peered over the side, spotting all three figures sitting inside the cab.\n\nThe pickup was the last vehicle to board, and the dock crew soon pulled away the car ramp while the ferry crew raised a collapsible gate across the stern. Pitt felt the engine rumble belowdecks, then three blasts of the horn announced the ferry's imminent departure. Making his way to the stern rail, he waited for the ferry's prop to engage, then glanced forward.\n\nAt the head of the center stairwell, he saw Sunglasses appear, searching the crowd in frantic haste. Pitt could only imagine the look in the gunmen's faces when they had approached the Delahaye only to find a popcorn vendor sitting behind the wheel. He had little time to consider the amusement, though, as the deck suddenly swayed beneath his feet and a surge of boiling water arose off the ferry's stern.\n\nHe quickly climbed over the rail, creating a minor stir among the surrounding passengers that immediately drew Sunglasses' attention. The gunman started running across the deck, but Pitt disappeared from sight. He lowered himself from a rail stanchion until he hung by outstretched arms and then dropped himself to the lower deck. Landing in a tuck, he sprang to his feet and vaulted over the lower deck stern gate, then leaped from the transom in a furious lunge for the dock.\n\nThe ferry had pulled a few feet away when he jumped, and Pitt just managed to catch a foot on the edge of the auto ramp and roll forward. Tumbling down the ramp, he regained his balance and slowly stood up. The accelerating ferry was moving quickly into the channel, already putting nearly twenty feet between itself and the dock.\n\nPitt looked up to see Sunglasses rush to the ferry's upper rail and stare dismally at the growing distance between ship and shore. The assailant turned his gaze to Pitt, instinctively reaching a hand toward the holster he wore beneath a light jacket before abandoning the notion.\n\nPitt studied the figure, then threw him a jovial wave as if he were an old friend. Sunglasses stood impervious, staring back at Pitt with a face of chilled granite, as the ferry slowly made its way down the strait."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "The setting sun cast a golden hue on the mediterranean's westerly breakers as they crashed against the Israeli shoreline. Sophie gazed at the blue horizon thankful that the heat of the day had finally passed, then turned and stepped into the artifact tent. Professor Haasis was hunched over a papyrus scroll, his face aglow as he attempted to decipher the ancient script. Sophie smiled to herself, thinking how he resembled a wide-eyed kid in a candy shop.\n\n\"Give your brain a rest, Professor,\" she said. \"They'll still be here in the morning.\"\n\nHaasis looked up with a sheepish grin. On a long table before him were spread over a dozen of the ceramic boxes, each housing an assortment of the small papyrus scrolls. He reluctantly rolled up the scroll he was examining and placed it back in one of the boxes.\n\n\"Yes, I suppose I should take a break to eat,\" he said. \"I just can't help myself. It is such an amazing wealth of data. This last scroll, for example,\" he said, tapping the box for emphasis, \"it describes how an Anatolian merchant ship loaded with grain from Egypt was forced to seek safe harbor here when its mast shattered. Little gems like that make my heart beat faster.\"\n\n\"That doesn't exactly sound on par with the Dead Sea Scrolls,\" Sophie replied with a chuckle.\n\n\"Well, the average man on the street may not care about this,\" he replied, \"but for those who make history their life's work, it's like discovering a window to the past that used to be shuttered.\"\n\nHaasis pulled off a pair of white gloves. \"I really need to get these transferred to the university lab for proper analysis and conservation, but I just can't resist taking a first look.\"\n\nHe had examined all but three of the boxes by the time he stood and stretched.\n\n\"What's become of Dirk?\" he asked. \"I haven't seen him since he delivered the final box.\"\n\nSophie shrugged her shoulders, trying to appear indifferent. But the same question had been lingering in her head. Dirk's earlier dinner invitation had given her a rush all afternoon. She even sneaked off to wash up and to brush her hair, angry for once in her life that she hadn't carried any makeup with her. She felt her heart stop when a figure suddenly entered the tent behind them. Spinning around, she looked in disappointment to see that it was only Sam.\n\n\"You guys ready for dinner? The mess tent is featuring spaghetti and meatballs,\" he announced. A smear of red sauce on his chin revealed that he had already made a first pass through the chow line.\n\n\"Sounds great,\" Haasis replied. \"Come along, Sophie, let's eat.\"\n\nThe antiquities agent moved slowly toward the exit, trying hard to hide her disappointment.\n\n\"Sam,\" she asked, \"are we set up for tonight?\"\n\nHer assistant nodded. \"Raban and Holder will be arriving within the hour. I told them we'd run surveillance till about midnight.\"\n\n\"Professor Haasis has offered us a tent, so I think I will stay the night. You can hitch a ride home with the boys, if you'd rather.\"\n\n\"I think I will. Sleeping on the ground isn't as much fun as it was when I was thirteen,\" Sam replied, rubbing his back.\n\nThey walked out of the tent to find Dirk standing outside with a beach towel draped over his arm like a waiter. He was dressed in khakis and a polo shirt, and Sophie couldn't help but think how nicely he had cleaned up. She fought hard to suppress a smile.\n\n\"I believe we had a dinner date,\" he said to her with a slight bow.\n\n\"I almost forgot,\" she lied.\n\nHe took her arm and escorted her behind Sam and Haasis as the group walked to the mess tent nearby. Sophie turned to follow the two men into the tent but felt Dirk suddenly tug her in the opposite direction.\n\n\"We're not eating with the others?\" she asked.\n\n\"Not unless you have a craving for spaghetti that comes out of a can,\" he replied.\n\n\"No, not particularly,\" she replied, shaking her head.\n\n\"Good. Then it's off to Cape Pitt.\"\n\nHe guided Sophie down to the shoreline, where they walked along the beach a short distance. When they reached a rocky ledge that jutted into the sea, Dirk turned and helped her climb over the boulder-strewn surface.\n\n\"This was the site of a Roman palace,\" Sophie said, recalling the prior excavation of a large structure that featured Greek columns and a decorative pool.\n\n\"Many believe it was King Herod's, built after he constructed the harbor,\" Dirk replied, showing he had studied up on Caesarea.\n\n\"I don't remember there being a restaurant located here,\" Sophie said, with a playful grin.\n\n\"It's just behind that last wall.\"\n\nThey climbed through the ruins to the tip of the promontory. Just past a crumbled stone wall, they reached a sheltered recess that offered a commanding view of the sea. Sophie laughed when she spotted an ice chest parked beside a small hibachi, its charcoal embers glowing red-hot.\n\n\"King Herod's Cafe, open for business. Hope you don't mind eating alfresco,\" Dirk said, spreading out the towel on a sandy spot. He quickly produced a bottle of white wine from the cooler and poured them each a glass.\n\n\"To damn fools,\" he said, clinking his glass against hers. Sophie blushed, then quietly sipped her wine.\n\n\"What's on the menu?\" she asked, trying to change the subject.\n\n\"Fresh sea bass, snared by yours truly this afternoon. Grilled in lemon and olive oil, and accompanied by a vegetable kabob, organically grown on a kibbutz up the road.\" He held up a pair of skewers loaded with peppers, tomatoes, and onions.\n\n\"I'm sure glad I passed on the spaghetti,\" Sophie replied.\n\nDirk threw the kabobs and a pair of fish fillets onto the small grill and quickly had dinner served. Sophie found the fresh food tasted delicious and hungrily devoured her entire plate.\n\n\"It was terrific,\" she said, setting down her empty plate. \"You sure you're not a professional chef?\"\n\nDirk laughed. \"Far from it. Put me in a kitchen, and I don't get much past peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. But show me a hot grill, and I'll happily run amok.\"\n\n\"You run amok with nice results,\" she said with a smile.\n\nAs he sliced up a small melon for dessert, she asked how he liked working at NUMA.\n\n\"I couldn't ask for a better job. I'm able to work in and around the sea, virtually anywhere in the world. Most of our projects are both interesting and fundamentally important to preserving the health of our oceans. And on top of that, I get to work closely with my family.\"\n\nHe noticed a faint look of alarm cross Sophie's face at the mention of his family.\n\n\"My father is the Director of NUMA,\" he explained. \"And I have a twin sister named Summer who is a NUMA oceanographer. It's actually on account of my father that I was able to come to Israel. He relieved me on a survey project we've been working on along the coast of Turkey.\"\n\n\"Professor Haasis told me that he has several old friends at NUMA and holds the organization in high regard.\"\n\n\"He has certainly done some fine work here himself,\" Dirk replied.\n\n\"So your time in Caesarea is short?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid so. Two more weeks, then I must head back to Turkey.\"\n\nHe passed her a plate of sliced melon, then asked, \"Okay, now it's your turn. How did you come to be an archaeologist with a gun?\"\n\nSophie smiled. \"An interest in geology and history, instilled by my father from an early age, I suppose. I love archaeology and digging up the past, but I have always felt pain at seeing our cultural treasures being looted for profit. Working at the Antiquities Authority, I feel like I can help make a difference, although we are vastly outnumbered by the bad guys.\"\n\nDirk waved a hand toward the coastline. \"Caesarea has been pretty well picked through over the centuries. You think the professor's small diggings here are really at risk?\"\n\n\"Your discovery today proved that there are still cultural riches to be found. I was actually more concerned about the grave site, which a local reporter foolishly publicized in the press. The presence of someone masquerading yesterday as an antiquities agent doesn't help my radar any, either.\"\n\n\"Well, at least we haven't uncovered any gold or treasure. Any looter ransacking our site is apt to be sorely disappointed.\"\n\n\"You'd be surprised at the varied desires of the high-end artifact collector. Many collectors value cultural antiquities as much as treasure, to everyone's detriment. Those scrolls of yours would fetch a small fortune on the black market. I know I'll feel a lot better when Professor Haasis has all of the artifacts safely transported to the University of Haifa.\" She glanced at her wristwatch.\n\n\"I really should get back and coordinate our evening reconnaissance.\"\n\nDirk poured her a half glass of wine.\n\n\"How about a small one for the road?\"\n\nSophie nodded and took the glass as Dirk sat close beside her with his own glass. The surf pounded the rocks around them as a deep blue twilight settled over their heads. It was a relaxing romantic moment, the kind that had escaped Sophie's life for quite some time. She turned to Dirk and whispered, \"I'm sorry I yelled at you today.\"\n\nHe leaned over and kissed her softly, letting their lips linger.\n\n\"You can make it up to me another time.\"\n\nSnuggling close, they finished the wine before Sophie forced herself to end their time together. Holding hands, they retraced their steps across the beach and up the hill toward camp. A generator-powered string of lights swayed over the assembly of tents, illuminating the campsite in a chalky glow. Sam was settled on a rock wall to one side, speaking to two men in dark clothes.\n\n\"I'm in the last tent on the left,\" Dirk said to Sophie. \"Make sure the grave robbers don't disturb my sleep, will you?\"\n\n\"Good night, Dirk.\"\n\n\"Good night.\"\n\nDirk watched Sophie join her colleagues, then turned toward the row of tents. Before turning in, he stepped over to the large artifact tent, which was still ablaze with light. Haasis was back at it, hunched over a scroll of papyrus with a magnifying glass in one hand.\n\n\"Uncover any secrets for the ages?\" Dirk asked.\n\nHaasis looked up momentarily, then gazed back at the papyrus.\n\n\"Nothing that weighty here, but still fascinating. Come take a look, I think you will appreciate this.\"\n\nDirk stepped closer, looking over Haasis's shoulder at the thin layer of fibered paper lined with a bold flowing script.\n\n\"It's all Greek to me,\" he said with a smirk.\n\n\"Oh, sorry,\" Haasis replied. \"I'll give you a rough translation. This scroll provides a description of port activity sometime around 330 A.D., I believe. There is a brief description of a damaged Cypriot marauder that was captured adrift by an imperial Roman trireme. The vessel was subsequently towed to Caesarea, where the port authorities discovered that its decks were covered in blood and that a small cache of Roman armament was aboard. Many of the crew bore evidence of fresh wounds from an earlier battle.\"\n\n\"They were pirates?\" Dirk said.\n\n\"Yes, apparently so. The incident created a stir, it says, as the personal armaments of a centurion named Plautius were found aboard. He was identified as a Scholae Palatinae, whatever that was.\"\n\n\"Probably didn't result in a nice consequence for the Cypriot crew.\"\n\n\"No, it didn't,\" Haasis replied. \"The vessel was impressed into service as an imperial merchant ship, while the crew were summarily executed.\"\n\n\"Swift justice, indeed,\" Dirk said, picking up one of the ceramic boxes. \"Do all of the scrolls contain such gripping accounts?\"\n\n\"Only to an antiquities voyeur like me,\" Haasis said with a grin, then rolled up the scroll and put it back in one of the boxes. \"I've reviewed most of the scrolls, and they are primarily bureaucratic records of port revenues and the like. Nothing too astounding individually, but collectively they will provide an important snapshot of daily life here nearly two millennia ago.\"\n\nHe wrapped the box in a loose cloth and placed it on top of a filing cabinet, then turned off an adjacent overhead light. The other boxes had all been carefully wrapped and stored in plastic bins for transport to the university.\n\n\"I'll leave something to look at in the morning,\" he said with a yawn. \"You think you found everything in the chamber?\"\n\n\"I believe so,\" Dirk replied, \"but I'll borrow one of your trowels and take a second look, just to be sure.\"\n\n\"I never thought inviting a marine engineer to a field dig would generate such an abundance of work for me,\" Haasis said as he guided Dirk out of the tent.\n\nUp the hill, they both spotted Sophie walking along the perimeter with one of her agents.\n\n\"Coming to Caesarea, I never thought there were such dazzling discoveries to be made,\" Dirk replied with a wink, then strolled toward his tent for the night."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "The rattle of automatic gunfire sent Dirk bolt upright in his cot.\n\nThe shots sounded dangerously close. Dirk heard some shouting and then the return fire from a handgun. He quickly slipped into a pair of shorts and sandals, then staggered out of his tent as a cascade of gunfire from multiple weapons erupted above the camp. His first clouded thoughts were of Sophie, but he had little time to react. He heard, then spotted two figures charging down the trail, brandishing assault rifles.\n\nDirk immediately ducked behind the side of his tent, then scurried to a low retaining wall a short distance to the rear. He silently slipped over the wall and followed its cover away from the tents. To the rear of the camp were the crumbled remnants of several buildings that had once served the ancient port city. He threaded his way through the mounds of weathered debris, following a slight rise to a small corner partition. The darkened stone barrier provided a tight point of concealment by which he could observe the entire camp.\n\nWhile his quick reaction had allowed for his escape, his fellow camp mates were not so fortunate. Sophie had been the next to react, bursting out of her tent near the trail with gun in hand. But one of the gunmen stood just a few feet away and quickly trained his assault rifle on her before she could shake the cobwebs from her eyes. Staring down the gun barrel, she had no choice but to reluctantly drop her weapon to the ground. The gunman responded by viciously jabbing the rifle into her shoulder, knocking her hard to her knees.\n\n\"What's going on here?\" Professor Haasis shouted, emerging from his tent half dressed.\n\n\"Shut up,\" the other gunman ordered, swinging his rifle stock into the professor's ribs. Haasis sprawled forward, emitting a pained gasp as his body struck the ground. Sophie crawled over and helped him to his feet, both swaying weakly under the overhead lights. Another thug appeared on the trail and took over guarding Sophie and Haasis, while the other gunmen herded the archaeology students from their tents. Sophie gazed toward Dirk's tent, reacting with muted surprise when one of the gunmen found it empty.\n\nUp the trail, there was a noisy commotion before several figures came into view. One of the antiquities agents, his right arm a bloody mess, staggered down the trail while struggling to support Sam. Sophie's deputy had a nasty gash across his forehead and shuffled his feet in a dazed state. Two more gunmen marched from behind, prodding the wounded men into camp.\n\n\"Sam, are you all right?\" Sophie cried, moving cautiously toward the two agents. She grabbed hold of Sam and helped him sink to the ground beside the other seated captives. One of the female students assisted the agent named Raban, wrapping a torn shirt around his wounded arm, while Sophie held a palm to Sam's bleeding forehead.\n\n\"Where's Holder?\" she whispered to Raban.\n\nThe agent gave her a grim look and shook his head.\n\nRecovering from his blow, Haasis stood and shouted at his captors.\n\n\"What do you want? There's nothing here worth killing for.\"\n\nSophie studied the group of armed assailants for the first time. They appeared to be Arabs, each wearing a black headdress that covered his lower face. Yet they weren't the typical dirt-digging grave robbers looking for a few shekels from an old pot or two. They wore dark military-style fatigues and black boots that appeared nearly new. And they carried modern AK-74 assault rifles, updated versions of the venerable Kalashnikov AK-47. Sophie wondered for a moment if they might be a militant commando group that had stumbled onto their camp by mistake. But then one of them replied to Haasis's query.\n\n\"The scroll. Where is it?\" barked the gang's obvious leader, a heavy-browed man who bore a deep scar along his right jawline.\n\n\"What scroll?\" Haasis replied.\n\nThe man reached beneath his jacket and retrieved a small holstered SIG Sauer pistol. Casually aiming it at Haasis's thigh, he squeezed the trigger once.\n\nThe gun's report elicited a scream from one of the students as Haasis collapsed to the ground, grabbing his leg above the bloody wound. Sophie quickly spoke up.\n\n\"They're in the large tent,\" she said, pointing the way. \"There is no need for further shooting.\"\n\nOne of the gunmen ran into the tent and rummaged around a few minutes before emerging with a ceramic box in one hand and a papyrus scroll in the other.\n\n\"There are many scrolls. Secured in plastic bins, more than a dozen of them,\" he reported.\n\n\"Do not leave any behind,\" the leader barked. Then he nodded toward the captives.\n\n\"Take them down to the amphitheater,\" he ordered two of his other men.\n\nThe pair of gunmen motioned with their weapons for the captives to stand and move. Sophie helped Sam to his feet while a pair of students helped up Dr. Haasis. With prods and shoves, the captives were herded along the path that led down to the beach. The scar-faced leader walked over to the artifact tent and grabbed the scroll from his subordinate's fingers. He studied it under one of the hanging lights for several minutes, then grabbed the ceramic box and ordered the man to retrieve a truck parked outside the grounds.\n\nDirk watched from his hiding spot until Sophie and the others had been marched out of the camp. He then quietly crept through the ruins, making his way toward the beach on a parallel track to the captives. His mind raced to try to develop a rescue plan or find something to use as a weapon, but his options were few against men armed with automatic assault rifles.\n\nThere was little ambient lighting once he moved from the camp, and he struggled to keep his footing over the rocky ground. He kept his eyes on the beam of a flashlight that danced to his right, carried by the guard leading the group. The hillside leveled briefly as Dirk crossed what had once been a stone-paved road. The flashlight beam disappeared behind a wall less than fifty feet to his side, but he could still track the shuffling steps of the captives making their way down the path. Wary of the sound of his own footsteps, he stopped and crouched low for a minute or two until the procession moved well ahead, then he made his way to the back side of the wall. Loose gravel crunched underfoot as he approached the barrier. Feeling along its sides, he moved to the end, then peered around the edge to find the meandering beam of light.\n\nA cold ring of steel suddenly jabbed into the side of his throat, nearly blocking his windpipe. Dirk jerked his head to see one of the scarf-clad Arabs materialize from the other side of the wall, pressing an assault rifle farther into his neck. Even under the dim light, Dirk could detect the malicious hostility in the man's dark eyes.\n\n\"Do not move or you are dead,\" he whispered."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "The rifle's muzzle never left the back of dirk's neck as he was marched up the trail into camp. He was forced into the artifact tent, where one of the Arabs was busy stacking up the plastic bins for removal. The man had let his scarf slip, allowing Dirk to observe his small, ferretlike facial features. A second later, the terrorist leader entered the tent.\n\n\"Cover your face,\" he barked to the man in Arabic. The subordinate immediately retied his scarf with a quiet look of indignation. The leader then turned toward Dirk and the other guard.\n\n\"Why did you bring this man here?\" he demanded.\n\n\"I counted the occupied tents, and we were a body short. I spotted him trailing his friends down to the beach.\" He held up a pair of night vision goggles that had proved Dirk's undoing.\n\nThe leader nodded in acknowledgment as he looked Dirk over.\n\n\"Shall I kill him here or put him with the others?\" the guard asked.\n\nThe leader shook his head. \"Tie him up and put him in the truck. A hostage might be useful until we are clear of here.\" He pulled out his pistol and leveled it at Dirk, allowing the other man to follow his directive.\n\nCutting some rope from the tent awning, the guard tightly bound Dirk's wrists and arms behind his back. Jabbing again with his rifle, he prodded Dirk out the tent and up the hillside. A hundred yards along the trail, they passed the body of the antiquities agent named Holder, lying facedown in a pool of blood. Parked nearby was a dilapidated utility truck that had been backed from the parking lot to the side of the path.\n\nThe guard led Dirk to the back of the truck and gave him a hard shove, propelling him facedown onto the truck bed. Before Dirk could roll over, the guard climbed up and quickly tied his ankles together with a spare piece of rope.\n\n\"Do not try to leave the truck, my tall friend, or I shall kill you,\" the guard said. He then gave Dirk a swift kick to the ribs before jumping off the back of the truck.\n\nDirk shook off the sting as he watched the guard turn and walk back to the camp. He struggled with his wrist bindings, but they were tied too tightly to try to work free. Sliding around the back of the truck, he felt around for a loose tool or object but only bumped into a short stack of artifact bins. He then slithered around until he faced the open back of the truck.\n\nThe vehicle had folding double doors, leaving a straight drop to the ground. Dirk looked over the lip of the truck bed and eyed the rear bumper, a rusty plate of curved steel covered in flaking white paint. The inner edge of the bumper was thin and corroded but could serve as a cutting edge.\n\nReaching the bumper with his hands behind his back required a delicate balancing act, and he almost rolled out of the truck at first. But straining against one end of the bumper, he was able to press the rope against the ragged edge and work it back and forth. He'd barely begun to fray the rope when he heard steps along the path and he quickly slid back onto the truck bed with his hands beneath him.\n\nThe earlier guard, along with the ferret-faced man, appeared, carrying plastic artifact bins, which they placed on the back of the truck. Ferret-face then hopped in and stowed the bins near the cab, taking the opportunity to do his cohort one better by kicking Dirk in the back of the head as he passed by.\n\nDirk exaggerated the pain from the blow, groaning loudly and writhing as if in severe pain. The Arab chuckled at the result, jabbering to his comrade as they returned to camp. Dirk immediately resumed his position against the bumper, grating against the wrist ties. After one frenzied stroke, the rope frayed, and he felt the serrated edge scratch his wrist. He quickly worked the rope free, unraveling it from his wrists and arms. Rolling to an upright position, he attacked the rope around his ankles with his freed hands. But he hesitated when a crunching sound of footsteps on gravel sounded down the path. A stubborn knot was holding the line tight. He quickly relaxed the tension in his legs and worked the knot free. As the rope fell slack, he slid back into the truck, loosely wrapping the line around his ankle, then lying down with his arms behind him.\n\nThere was only one Arab on the trail, which Dirk recognized as Ferret-face. Dirk smiled to himself when he saw that the man was carrying an armload of artifact bins and no weapon. Like before, he placed the bins on the truck bed, then climbed inside to position them near the cab. Dirk resumed his artificial moans while writhing about to better position himself. He waited until the bins were stacked and the Arab turned to give him the obligatory kick. But the second Ferret-face's foot was raised, Dirk sprang forward, rolling his body forcefully into the man's other ankle.\n\nStanding on one foot, the man was immediately thrown off balance by the impact. As he was falling down, Dirk jumped up, grabbed the foot that had been thrust at his chest, and shoved it skyward. The startled assailant crashed to the truck bed, landing on his head and shoulders while sending a trio of artifact bins flying. One of the bins turned over at Dirk's feet, releasing the ceramic box inside. Dirk reached down and grabbed the box, then lunged at Ferret-face. The Arab was struggling to his knees as Dirk smashed the box against the man's temple. The box shattered, sending him sprawling on the bed unconscious.\n\n\"Sorry about that, Dr. Haasis,\" Dirk muttered as he collected a mangled roll of papyrus in his hand and stuffed it in a bin. He then quickly tied Ferret-face into the same configuration as he himself had been bound, then jumped off the truck.\n\nThe trail was still quiet as Dirk moved to the front of the truck, checking but failing to find the vehicle's ignition keys. He continued across the parking lot, moving quietly and methodically, before slipping down into an adjacent field at a run. Leery now of the gunmen's night vision goggles, he figured his best chance at avoiding detection was to just get quickly out of sight.\n\nHe started down the hillside toward the beach, sticking to lowlying gullies and washes that offered the most concealment. He contemplated running out of Caesarea Park and trying to obtain outside help but knew that by the time any police would respond, the thieves would be long gone. And so might Sophie, Haasis, and the others.\n\nHe staggered across the stony remnants of a two-thousand-year-old residence and then past an ancient garden until he reached a bluff that overlooked the beach. Below and to his left rose the shadow of a Roman amphitheater. It was one of the best-preserved structures at Caesarea, a towering semicircle of stone seats that stood mostly intact and was still utilized for outdoor concerts and theater performances. With dramatic flair, the Romans had positioned the open end along the beach, offering theatergoers a spectacular view of the Mediterranean Sea as a stage backdrop.\n\nDirk worked his way along the bluff until he could see over the high stands of the amphitheater. A crossed pair of flashlight beams on the ground illuminated the group of captives, huddled in a mass on the beach behind the stage. Dirk could make out the two armed gunmen striding back and forth in the light, jabbering to each other over the crash of the nearby waves. He could also see that they were positioned in a difficult spot to approach undetected, with wide beachfront on either side and the flat expanse of open stage in front.\n\nHe watched as a silver-tipped breaker crashed onto the beach, rolling to within twenty yards of the group before dissipating away. It was nearly high tide, he observed. Watching another wave roll high onto the beach, he made up his mind. Guarding the captives, the gunmen had their backs to the sea and wouldn't expect an attack from that direction. A seaward approach was his only chance.\n\nHe gazed up the beach, barely making out the spit of land angling into the sea where he had discovered the ancient scrolls. Mentally searching for a tactic, he cursed that most of his dive equipment was back in his tent. But there was the pit excavation, which was still incomplete. There was a good chance that some digging tools were still nearby. And there was also his generator and water jet.\n\nHe thought for a moment, then twisted his face into a grimace.\n\n\"Well, a mad plan is better than no plan,\" he muttered to himself, then hastily descended the bluff toward the sea."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Sophie felt the eyes of the gunman stare at her incessantly. Stalking back and forth like a hungry tiger, the shorter of the two gunmen aimed his bloodshot eyes at her with nearly every step. She intentionally avoided making eye contact, tending to Sam and Raban or looking away toward the sea. This only served to frustrate the guard, and he finally demanded her attention.\n\n\"You,\" he said, waving his gun at her. \"Stand up.\"\n\nSophie rose slowly to her feet but kept her eyes focused on the ground. The gunman poked his rifle beneath her chin, forcing her to raise her head.\n\n\"Leave her alone,\" Raban cried in a weakened voice.\n\nThe gunman stepped over and thrust a boot at the agent, striking him on the side of the jaw. Raban crumpled over, lying on the sand in an open-eyed daze.\n\n\"Coward,\" Sophie said, finally looking the Arab in the eye with contempt.\n\nHe slowly moved close to her. Easing his rifle up, he gently poked her in the cheek and jaw with the weapon's muzzle.\n\n\"Mahmoud, you like that one?\" his partner said, watching the confrontation with amusement. \"She is pretty, for a Jew. And even prettier for an antiquities agent,\" he added with a laugh.\n\nMahmoud said nothing, his eyes boring salaciously into Sophie's. He eased the gun barrel down the side of her neck, then followed the border of her open-collared shirt, pressing the cool metal against her skin. When the barrel reached the top button of her blouse, he held it there, straining against the clasp. When it failed to give, he slowly pulled the barrel to one side, attempting a glimpse of her left breast.\n\nSophie wanted to knee him in the groin but opted for a quick kick to the shin, hoping it would lessen the likelihood of him killing her. Mahmoud jumped back, grunting in pain as he hopped about on one foot. His partner laughed aloud at the scene, heaping further humiliation on the gunman.\n\n\"You have a spirited one there. I think she is too brazen for you,\" he taunted.\n\nMahmoud shook off the blow and marched over to Sophie. He stood so close that she could smell the dank odor of his breath.\n\n\"We shall see who is spirited,\" he hissed, a rabid glare to his eyes.\n\nHe turned to hand his rifle to his partner when the loud whine of a generator erupted down the beach. A few seconds later, a pounding splash of cascading water echoed over the waves. All eyes turned that direction, and a faint silvery arc could be seen shooting over the horizon.\n\n\"Mahmoud, go and see what that is,\" the partner ordered, his demeanor suddenly serious.\n\nMahmoud leaned toward Sophie and whispered in her ear, \"I shall have fun with you when I return.\"\n\nSophie eyed him with daggers as he turned and marched down the beach, his rifle at the ready. She then collapsed onto the sand, trying to hide her hands that trembled with fright. Trying to calm herself, she thought again of Dirk and wondered whether he might have had anything to do with the commotion.\n\nAs the figure of Mahmoud disappeared into the darkness, the other gunman paced nervously in front of the captives. He scanned down either stretch of beach, then stepped around the captives and surveyed the empty seats of the amphitheater with a flashlight. Finding nothing amiss, he resumed his position along the beachfront.\n\nLying on the sand, Sam rolled to a sitting position, finally regaining his bearings after an earlier blow to the head.\n\n\"How are you feeling, Sam?\" Sophie asked him.\n\n\"Okay,\" he answered in a slurred voice. He looked around at his fellow captives, slowly reorienting himself. His gaze shifted toward the gunman, and he raised an unsteady arm in his direction and asked, \"Who's that?\"\n\n\"One of several terrorists holding us hostage,\" Sophie replied bitterly. But she nearly choked on her last words as she glanced toward the guard and realized that wasn't who Sam was asking about.\n\nA dozen yards behind the Arab, a shadowy figure had emerged from the surf and was making a quick beeline toward the guard. He was tall and thin and carried a blunt object in his arms. Sophie's heart nearly pounded out of her chest when she recognized the owner of the profile.\n\nIt was Dirk.\n\nThe gunman stood with his back to the sea, his eyes focused on the area around the amphitheater. Just a turn of the head would expose Dirk's approach, leaving him quick fodder for the assault rifle. Sophie realized she had to hold the guard's attention so that Dirk could approach unseen.\n\n\"What... what is your name?\" she stammered.\n\nThe gunman gave her a quizzical look, then laughed.\n\n\"My name? Ha. You can call me David, the boy shepherd tending to my flock.\"\n\nHe was proud of his joke and gazed at Sophie with beaming eyes. Sophie tried not to look past him as the shadowy figure moved closer.\n\n\"What will you do with the artifacts, David?\" she asked, struggling to keep the man engaged.\n\n\"Why, turn them into cash, of course,\" he replied with a chuckle. It was then that he detected movement behind him, but he turned too late.\n\nThe flat blade of a shovel struck him in the side of the head as he turned. The blow stunned him, dropping him to his knees, as he fumbled to train his gun. Dirk quickly reversed his swing, leveling a second blow to the other side of the man's head, which knocked him down and out.\n\n\"Everybody here all right?\" Dirk asked, catching his breath as the salt water dripped off his body.\n\nSophie jumped up and grabbed his arm, relieved at his presence.\n\n\"We're okay, but there's another gunman who just walked down the beach.\"\n\n\"I know. I set off the water jet to lure him away.\"\n\nAs he spoke, they could hear the distant generator sputter to a halt, the cascading waterfall dying with it.\n\n\"He'll be coming right back,\" she said in a low tone.\n\nDirk quickly surveyed the small group of captives. Sam sat with a dazed look in his eye, leaning against the bloodied agent Raban. Dr. Haasis was lying down with his leg wrapped in a shirt bandage, looking as if he was in a state of shock. The remaining students--three women and two men--sat looking at him with hopeless anxiety. Dirk could plainly see that the collected group would be unable to make a speedy escape. He gazed at the sleeping gunman, then turned to Sophie.\n\n\"Help me get his jacket off.\"\n\nDirk lifted the man's torso off the ground while Sophie stripped off his loose black jacket. Holding him under the arms, Dirk dragged the man around to the back side of the captives.\n\n\"Bury his legs in the sand, then sit in front of his upper body,\" he told the two male students. They quickly shoved sand over his feet and legs, then tried to conceal the rest of his body by sitting cross-legged in front of it.\n\nDirk yanked off the gunman's scarf and wrapped it around his head, then slipped into the black jacket. He ran back around to the front of the group and picked up the assault rifle.\n\n\"He's coming,\" someone whispered in a frightened voice.\n\n\"Sit back down,\" Dirk said to Sophie as he checked the weapon. It was a mass-produced AK-74, likely smuggled into the country through Egypt. Dirk was vaguely familiar with the gun, having fired a similar version at a shooting range one time. He felt along the left side of the receiver to ensure that the fire selector switch was on automatic, then pulled back on the charging lever. He quickly raised the weapon and faced the group as if standing guard.\n\nMahmoud appeared along the beach and trudged up to the captives with an annoyed scowl.\n\n\"Someone made a water fountain with a generator,\" he muttered. \"Shot fifty feet into the sky.\"\n\nDirk kept his back toward the man, waiting for him to step closer. When he felt him draw near, he slowly wheeled around, casually leveling the AK-74 at Mahmoud's chest.\n\n\"You take good care of the girl while I was gone?\" the Arab asked. Then he froze.\n\nIt dawned on him that his silent partner had suddenly grown taller, was sporting a wet pair of short pants, and gazed bitterly at him through a pair of green eyes. Then there was the Kalashnikov rifle pointed in his direction.\n\n\"Drop your weapon,\" Dirk ordered.\n\nSophie repeated the command in Arabic, but it was unnecessary. Mahmoud knew exactly what Dirk meant. The Arab looked at Sophie and the students, then back to Dirk. Amateurs, he thought. His partner, Saheem, might have been duped, but he wouldn't be.\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" he said with a nod, extending his weapon toward the ground. But with a sudden move, he dropped to one knee and pulled the rifle stock to his shoulder while taking aim at Dirk.\n\nThe AK-74 in Dirk's hands barked first. Four slugs tore into Mahmoud's chest, throwing him backward, before he had a chance to squeeze the trigger. A heaving gasp dribbled from his lips, but his dying words were drowned by a frightened scream from one of the students. Sophie jumped to her feet and stepped close to Dirk.\n\n\"He was a filthy pig,\" she said, eyeing the dead man.\n\nDirk took a deep breath to calm his pounding pulse, then walked over to Mahmoud and picked up his rifle. Up the hill, the horn on the utility truck suddenly blared, echoing down to the beach.\n\n\"A probable call to arms,\" Dirk said. \"We need to get everyone away from here and out of sight.\"\n\nHe walked over to the group and called to one of the students, a wiry man with long legs.\n\n\"Thomas, we need you to go get us some help. There's a housing development less than a mile up the beach. Find a phone, and see if you can get some police here pronto. Just be sure to tell them what they'll be up against.\"\n\nThe young man stood up and looked hesitantly at his friends, then turned and took off down the beach at a sprint. Dirk quickly scanned the area around them, then stood before the remaining group.\n\n\"We need to move before they come looking for their friends. Let's see if we can get around the back side of the amphitheater, for starters,\" he said.\n\n\"This one is stirring,\" replied one of the students, motioning toward the prone figure of Saheem.\n\n\"Leave him be,\" Dirk replied. He stepped over to Sophie and handed her one of the assault rifles. \"Did you serve in the Israel Defense Forces?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes, I did my two years,\" she said. Israel's mandatory military conscription also applied to women. She took the gun without hesitation.\n\n\"Can you cover our retreat?\" he asked.\n\n\"I can try.\"\n\nDirk leaned over and kissed her forehead. \"Stay close to us.\"\n\nHe walked over and helped Dr. Haasis to his feet. The professor's eyes were dull and his skin pale from the shock of his wound. With help from the other male student, Dirk hauled him across the sand. With the others in tow, he led them over the amphitheater's stage and toward the far edge of the tiered seats. Sophie followed the group a few paces behind, peering through the darkness for any approaching figures.\n\nGasping for breath, Dirk muscled the deadweight of Haasis to the rear of the towering structure. Nearby was a storage shed that had been constructed to house concert equipment and was positioned against the side of the theater. Dirk dragged Haasis behind the shed and gently laid him on the ground. The other students and the wounded agents fell in alongside the professor as Sophie brought up the rear.\n\n\"We'll hold up here and wait for the police to arrive,\" Dirk said, finding the corner a manageable defensive position.\n\n\"Dirk, I see lights coming down the trail,\" Sophie reported quietly.\n\nThey peered around the side of the shed toward a pair of faint lights that bobbed down the hill. The beams slowly made their way along the beach, accompanied by an occasional shout of a name. One of the beams sprayed upon Saheem, who had managed to stand up but was staggering about in a daze. The dead body of Mahmoud was soon discovered, amplifying a frenzied murmur of voices. One of the lights turned and fanned across the interior of the amphitheater. Dirk wrapped an arm around Sophie and jerked her back from the edge.\n\n\"Sorry,\" he whispered, relaxing his grip only slightly. \"They have night vision goggles.\"\n\nSophie slipped an arm around Dirk's torso and squeezed back. They clung to each other for a minute before Dirk attempted another peek. To his relief, both light beams were proceeding down the beach and could soon be seen bounding up the hill. A few minutes later, the faint rumble of the utility truck was heard making its way out of the park.\n\nA wail of sirens and flashing lights arrived at the park just ten minutes later. Dirk and Sophie hiked up to the camp as a patrol of armed police with high-beamed flashlights and barking German shepherds burst down the trail. They led the police to the amphitheater, where Haasis and the injured agents were quickly evacuated by ambulance. Dirk noted with curiosity that the body of Mahmoud had disappeared, dragged up the hill by his comrades and carted off with the stolen artifacts.\n\nAfter extensive questioning by the police, Dirk took a look inside the artifact tent. As he expected, all of the scroll boxes had been removed. What he didn't expect to find were the storehouse artifacts, which were still scattered about the tables in varying states of analysis and conservation. He exited the tent to find Sophie approaching from the parking lot. Under the overhead lights, he could see her eyes were red, and she appeared to be trembling. Dirk stepped over and grabbed her hand.\n\n\"They just took Arie away,\" she said, referring to agent Holder. \"Shot dead over some stupid artifacts.\"\n\n\"They were as apt at stealing as they were at killing. They heisted only the scrolls, didn't even bother with the other artifacts,\" he replied, nodding toward the tent.\n\nSophie's face seemed to harden. \"The phony antiquities agent tipped them off. The young student, Stephanie, thought he was one of the gunmen here tonight.\"\n\n\"Any idea who would use such commando tactics to acquire black market antiquities?\"\n\nSophie nodded. \"I would have to suspect the Mules. A gang of Lebanese smugglers with suspected ties to Hezbollah. They're mostly known for transporting weapons and drugs, but they've drifted into antiquities before. They're the only ones I know of who would kill for artifacts.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't think those scrolls would be very easy to pawn.\"\n\n\"They've probably already been paid for. This was likely a contract job for a wealthy collector. One who knows no bounds.\"\n\n\"Catch them,\" Dirk said quietly.\n\n\"For Holder's sake, I will,\" she replied firmly. She gazed at the sea for a while, then looked at Dirk with a softened expression.\n\n\"I'm not sure any of us would be alive if you hadn't showed up on the beach.\"\n\nDirk smiled. \"I just wanted to make sure I got a second date.\"\n\n\"That,\" she said, standing and giving him a peck on the cheek, \"I can almost guarantee.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Pitt stood in the terminal waiting area and let out a slow sigh of relief. Looking out the window, he watched Loren's plane back away from the gate and head toward a line of jets awaiting takeoff from Ataturk International Airport. At last he could relax, knowing his wife was out of danger.\n\nIt had been an uneasy interval since he had stood on the dock of Yenikoy and watched the would-be assassins sail off on the Bosphorus ferry. He and Loren had quickly hailed a cab and raced back to Istanbul, sneaking into the rear entrance of their hotel and quietly checking out. They crisscrossed the city to ensure they weren't being followed, then checked into a modest hotel near the airport for the night.\n\n\"We probably should have gone to the U.S. Mission and reported the whole thing,\" Loren complained as they entered their bland room. \"They could have at least provided us security at a nice hotel.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" Pitt conceded. \"After thirty-seven briefings with a dozen bureaucrats, they'd probably find a safe place for us by a week from Thursday.\" He wasn't surprised that she hadn't pushed for diplomatic aid earlier. Despite her years in Congress, she rarely used her status to press for special treatment.\n\n\"The State Department is going to hear about it all the same,\" she replied. \"Those creeps need to be put behind bars.\"\n\n\"Just do me a favor and wait until you are safely home before you blow your horn.\"\n\nRebooking their flights, he saw her off on the first departure to Washington. With time to kill before catching his flight to Chios, he ate breakfast at an airport cafe, then tried phoning Dr. Ruppe. He was surprised when the archaeologist answered the number in Rome he had given Pitt.\n\n\"You calling from the airport?\" Ruppe asked as a highly amplified boarding announcement blared from a speaker above Pitt's head.\n\n\"Yes, I just saw Loren off and I'm waiting for my flight out.\"\n\n\"I thought you two were staying another day.\"\n\nPitt filled him in on their adventure up the Bosphorus.\n\n\"Thank goodness you two are safe,\" Ruppe said, shocked at the story. \"Those guys must certainly be well connected. Have you reported this to the police?\"\n\n\"No,\" Pitt replied. \"I was a bit leery after they discovered our whereabouts so quickly.\"\n\n\"Probably a wise move. The Turkish police have had a reputation for corruption. And based on my spate of bad news, you were probably right to think that way.\"\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"I got a call from my assistant at the museum. Apparently, someone broke into my office and tossed the place during daylight hours. The good news is, they didn't find my safe, so your gold crown is still safe.\"\n\n\"And the bad news?\"\n\n\"They took the coins and some of my papers, which included your charts showing the location of the wreck. I can't say for sure, but it would seem to me there has to be a connection with all these events. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.\"\n\n\"Another by-product of the leaky Turkish police?\" Pitt asked.\n\n\"Might well be. My assistant already reported the crime, and they are conducting an investigation. But like the Topkapi robbery, they claim to be working without any leads.\"\n\n\"They ought to have a bushelful by now,\" Pitt lamented.\n\n\"Well, I guess there's not much more to be done. I'll try to have an interpretation of your crown when I get back to Istanbul.\"\n\n\"Take care, Rey. I'll call in a few days.\"\n\nPitt hung up the phone, hoping that his involvement with the Topkapi thieves was at an end.\n\nBut deep down, he had a feeling that it wasn't."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "The moroccan-styled villa commanded an arresting view of the Mediterranean from its rocky perch along the Turkish coastline. While not as gargantuan as some of the moneyed estates situated near the sea, it was built with a discerning eye for detail. Exquisitely glazed tiles covered every external wall, while miniature spires capped each roofline. Yet functionality superseded opulence, and a high premium was placed on the resident's privacy. A high stone wall encircled the landward perimeter, obscuring the interior compound from the eyes of locals and tourists alike who traveled along the coastal road to the nearby beach resort of Kusadasi.\n\nOzden Celik stood at a large picture window, staring beyond the shimmering blue sea toward the faint outline of Samos, a Greek island fifteen miles away.\n\n\"It is a travesty that the islands off our own shore have been taken by another nation,\" he said bitterly.\n\nMaria sat at a nearby desk, reviewing a stack of financial documents. The sunlit room was decorated similarly to the Bosphorus office, with tribal rugs on the floor and collectible artifacts from the Ottoman era gracing the walls and shelves.\n\n\"Do not antagonize yourself over the failings of men long dead,\" she said.\n\n\"The land was still ours when Suleiman ruled. It was the great Ataturk who sacrificed our empire,\" he said in a sarcastic tone.\n\nMaria ignored the comment, having heard her brother rail against the founder of modern-day Turkey many times before. Celik turned to his sister, his eyes ablaze with intensity. \"Our heritage cannot be forgotten nor our rightful destiny denied.\"\n\nMaria nodded quietly. \"The Sheikh's wire transfer has cleared,\" she said, holding up a bank transmittal.\n\n\"Twenty million euros?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes. How much did you promise the Mufti?\"\n\n\"I told him to expect twelve million, so let's give him fourteen, and we'll keep the remainder as before.\"\n\n\"Why so generous?\" she asked.\n\n\"It's important to maintain his trust. Plus, it will allow me greater influence as to where the money is spent.\"\n\n\"I assume you have a strategy for that?\"\n\n\"Of course. Attorneys and judicial bribes will absorb a large portion, to ensure that the Felicity Party, with Mufti Battal atop the ticket, appears on the ballot come Election Day. The remaining funds will be used for traditional political expenses; organized rallies, promotion and advertising, and additional fund-raising.\"\n\n\"His coffers must be filling fast, given the squeeze he's putting on his mosques, not to mention his general rising popularity.\"\n\n\"All of which we can take credit for,\" Celik replied smugly.\n\nIt had taken Celik several years to find and cultivate the right Islamic leader to front his goals. Mufti Battal had just the right mix of ego and charisma to lead the movement while still being malleable to Celik's designs. Under Celik's carefully choreographed campaign of bribes and threats, Battal had consolidated pockets of fundamentalist Islamic support throughout Turkey and gradually built it into a national movement. Working behind the scenes, Celik was about to turn the religious movement into a political one. Smart enough to realize his own aspirations would meet public resistance in some quarters, he hitched his wagon to the populist Mufti.\n\n\"It appears from the media reports that public outrage is still high over the Topkapi theft,\" Maria said. \"It is being viewed as a very visible affront to the Muslim faithful. I would be surprised if it didn't raise the Mufti's popularity a percentage point or two.\"\n\n\"Exactly the intent,\" Celik replied. \"I must ensure that he releases a public statement strongly condemning the heinous thieves,\" he added with a wry smile.\n\nHe stepped over to the desk, noting an array of coins in a felt box beside a stack of research journals and a nautical chart. They were the objects stolen from Dr. Ruppe, taken by Maria when she ransacked the archaeologist's office while visiting the museum dressed as a tourist.\n\n\"A bit risky, returning to the scene of the crime?\" he asked.\n\n\"It wasn't exactly the Topkapi Privy Chamber,\" she replied. \"I thought there was an outside chance our second bag of Muhammad relics might have ended up there, until I heard otherwise from the police. It was a quick and easy job to access his office.\"\n\n\"Anything of interest beyond the coins?\" he asked, admiring one of the gold pieces he pulled from the container.\n\n\"An Iznik ceramic box. There's a note by the archaeologist that says it dates to the Age of Suleiman, along with the coins. They apparently all came from the shipwreck discovered by the American.\"\n\nCelik's brow rose in interest. \"So it is a Suleiman shipwreck? I wish to know more.\"\n\nThere was a knock on the office door, which opened a second later to reveal a large man in a dark suit. He had a light complexion and gray, hardened eyes that had clearly witnessed the darker side of life.\n\n\"Your visitors have arrived,\" he said in a coarse voice.\n\n\"Show them in,\" Celik ordered, \"and return with another Janissary.\"\n\nThe term Janissary dated back many centuries and referred to the personal guards and elite troops of the Ottoman sultans. In an odd twist of loyalty, the original Janissaries who served the Islamic palace typically were not Muslim themselves but Christians from the Balkans area. Conscripted as young boys, they were schooled and groomed as servants, bodyguards, and even Army commanders in service to the Sultan's empire.\n\nIn a similar fashion, Celik's Janissaries were Christian recruits from Serbia and Croatia, mostly former military commandos. In Celik's case, however, they were hired strictly as bodyguards and mercenaries.\n\nThe Janissary disappeared for a moment, then returned with a companion, who escorted three men into the room. They were the assassins who had chased Pitt and Loren up the Bosphorus. They shuffled in with a noticeable hint of apprehension, all avoiding direct eye contact with Celik.\n\n\"Did you eliminate the intruders?\" Celik asked without greeting.\n\nThe tallest of the three, who had worn the mirrored sunglasses, spoke for the group.\n\n\"The man named Pitt and his wife apparently detected our presence and fled on a ferryboat to Sariyer. We established contact with them, but they escaped.\"\n\n\"So you failed,\" Celik said, letting the words hang in the air like an executioner's sword. \"Where are they now, Farzad?\"\n\nThe man shook his head. \"They checked out of their hotel. We don't know if they are still in the city.\"\n\n\"The police?\" he asked, turning to Maria.\n\nShe shook her head. \"Nothing has been reported.\"\n\n\"This man Pitt. He must be lucky, if not resourceful.\"\n\nCelik walked over to the desk and picked up the gold coin from Ruppe's office.\n\n\"He will no doubt return to his shipwreck. An Ottoman shipwreck,\" he added with emphasis. He walked close to Farzad and looked him in the eye. \"You have failed once. I will not tolerate a second failure.\"\n\nHe stepped back and addressed all three men. \"You will be paid in full for your work. You can collect your wages on the way out. Each of you is to remain underground until called for the next project. Is that clear?\"\n\nAll three men nodded quietly. One of the Janissaries opened the door, and the men made a quick retreat for the exit.\n\n\"Wait,\" Celik's voice suddenly boomed. \"Atwar, another word with you. The others may go.\"\n\nThe man who had worn the blue shirt stood where he was while Farzad and the Persian left the room. The first Janissary stayed in the room, closing the door then moving behind Atwar. Celik stepped close to the Iraqi.\n\n\"Atwar, you let this man Pitt subdue you during the Topkapi theft. As a result, we lost the Holy Mantle of the Prophet that was in our hands. Now yesterday, you let him elude you again?\"\n\n\"He caught us all by surprise,\" Atwar stammered, looking to Maria for support.\n\nShe said nothing as Celik pulled open a desk drawer and retrieved a three-foot-long bowstring. As with his Ottoman ancestors, it was his favored tool for execution.\n\n\"Unlike Farzad, you have failed me twice,\" Celik said, nodding at the Janissary.\n\nThe guard stepped up and grabbed Atwar in a bear hug from behind, pinning the man's arms to his side. The Iraqi tried to struggle, but the Janissary was too powerful to break the grip.\n\n\"It was her fault,\" he cried, motioning his head toward Maria. \"She ordered us to abduct the woman. None of this would have happened if we had let her go.\"\n\nCelik ignored the words, slowly stepping closer until he was inches from the struggling man's face.\n\n\"You will not fail me again,\" Celik whispered in his ear. Then he flung the cord around Atwar's neck and tightened it with a lacquered wooden cylinder.\n\nThe man screamed, but his voice was quickly snuffed out as the cord tightened around his throat. His face turned blue and his eyes bulged as Celik twisted the block, applying greater pressure to the cord. A perverse look of delight filled Celik's eyes as he stared into the face of the dying man. He held the twisted cord tight well after his victim's body fell limp, seeming to savor the moment. He finally unraveled the garrote, taking his time removing it from the dead man's throat before returning it to the desk drawer.\n\n\"Take his body offshore after dark and dump it into the sea,\" he said to the Janissary. The guard nodded, then dragged the stiffening body out of the room.\n\nThe act of murder seemed to invigorate Celik, and he paced the room with nervous energy. The gold coin was back in his hand, fondled like a child's toy.\n\n\"You should have never brought in these imbeciles to do our work,\" he barked at Maria. \"My Janissaries would have not failed at the task.\"\n\n\"They have served us well in the past. Besides, as you have just shown, they are expendable.\"\n\n\"We can't have any mistakes going forward,\" he lectured. \"The stakes are too high.\"\n\n\"I will personally lead the next operation. Speaking of which, are you certain you wish to proceed in Jerusalem? I'm not sure the benefits are worth the risk.\"\n\n\"It has the potential to create a massive unifying impact. Beyond that, with a bit of inflated Zionist fright, it will be good for another twenty million euros from our Arab backers.\" Celik stopped pacing for a moment then gazed at his sister. \"I realize it is not without danger. Are you committed to the task?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" she replied without batting an eye. \"My Hezbollah contact has already made arrangements with a top operator who will assist with the mission for the right price. And should there be any difficulties, they will offer the necessary culpability.\"\n\n\"Hezbollah was not opposed to the nature of the mission?\"\n\n\"I didn't provide them all of the details,\" Maria replied with a sly smile.\n\nCelik walked over to his sister and gently stroked her cheek. \"You have always proven to be the best partner a man could ask for.\"\n\n\"We have a destiny,\" she replied, echoing his earlier words. \"When our great-grandfather was exiled by Ataturk in 1922, the first Ottoman Empire ended. Our grandfather and father spent their lives as outcasts, failing to fulfill the dream of restoration. But by the grace of Allah, a renewed empire is now within our fingertips. We have little choice but to act, for the honor of our father and all those before him.\"\n\nCelik stood silent as teardrops welled in his eyes, his hand squeezing the gold coin until his fist shuddered."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE MANIFEST",
                "text": "The lemon yellow submersible slipped beneath the sloshing waters of the moon pool and rapidly disappeared from sight. The pilot descended quickly, not wishing to loiter about the mother ship while fierce currents matched wits with a Force 7 wind.\n\nThe frigid waters off the Orkney Islands northeast of the Scottish mainland were seldom mild. North Atlantic storm fronts routinely pounded the rocky islands with towering waves, while gale force winds seemed to blow without relief. But a hundred feet beneath the raging waters, the submersible's three passengers quickly turned a blind eye to the violent surface weather.\n\n\"I was a bit afraid of the descent, but this is actually much calmer than that rolling ship,\" stated Julie Goodyear from the rear seat. A research historian from Cambridge University on her first dive, she had been fighting the ill effects of seasickness since boarding the NUMA research vessel Odin in Scapa Flow three days earlier.\n\n\"Miss Goodyear, I guarantee that you are going to enjoy this flight so much, you're not going to want to go back to that bouncing tub,\" replied the pilot in a Texas drawl. A steely-eyed man with a horseshoe mustache, Jack Dahlgren toggled the diving controls with a surgeon's deft touch as he eased their descent.\n\n\"I believe you may be correct. That is, unless the claustrophobia in here gets the better of me,\" Julie replied. \"I don't know how you two manage the confinement in here on a regular basis.\"\n\nThough Julie was a tall woman, she still gave up a few inches to both Dahlgren and the woman seated in the copilot's seat. Summer Pitt turned and flashed her a comforting smile.\n\n\"If you focus your vision on the world out there,\" she said, motioning toward the submersible's forward viewing port, \"then you tend to forget how cramped it is in here.\"\n\nWith long red hair and bright gray eyes, Summer posed a striking figure even in her grease-stained dive jumpsuit. Standing six feet tall in her bare feet, the daughter of NUMA's Director, and the twin sibling to her brother, Dirk, she was well accustomed to tight quarters. Employed as an oceanographer for the underwater agency, she had spent many an hour studying the seafloor from the constricted confines of small submersibles.\n\n\"How about I shed a little light on the matter,\" Dahlgren said, reaching up and flicking a pair of overhead toggle switches. Twin banks of external floodlights suddenly came on, illuminating the dark green sea surrounding them.\n\n\"That's better,\" Julie said, peering nearly forty feet into the depths. \"I had no idea that we would be able to see so far.\"\n\n\"The water is surprisingly clear,\" Summer remarked. \"It's much better visibility than we had in Norway.\" Summer and the crew of the Odin were returning from a three-week project off the Norwegian coast where they had monitored temperature changes in the sea and its impact on local marine life.\n\n\"Depth of one hundred seventy feet,\" Dahlgren reported. \"We should be nearing the bottom.\"\n\nHe adjusted the submersible's ballast tanks to neutral buoyancy as a sandy brown bottom appeared in the depths beneath them. Engaging the vessel's electric motor, he applied forward thrust, making a slight course correction as he eyed a gyrocompass.\n\n\"We're near high water, and the current is still ripping through here at about two knots,\" he said, feeling the push against the submersible's outer hull.\n\n\"Not a fun place to go free diving,\" Summer replied.\n\nThey glided just a short distance before a large tubular object filled the view port.\n\n\"Mark one funnel,\" Dahlgren said as they hovered over the huge tube.\n\n\"It's so large,\" Julie said excitedly. \"I'm used to looking at the funnels in proportion to the ship on grainy old black-and-white photographs.\"\n\n\"Looks like it came down pretty hard,\" Summer remarked, noting one end of the thin rusting funnel was twisted and crushed flat.\n\n\"Eyewitness reports claim that the Hampshire stood on her bow and actually flipped over as she sank,\" Julie said. \"The funnels would have popped out at that point, if not earlier.\"\n\nSummer reached to a console and engaged a pair of high-definition video cameras.\n\n\"Cameras rolling. Jack, it looks like there's the beginning of a debris field to our left.\"\n\n\"I'm on it,\" Dahlgren replied, guiding the submersible across the current.\n\nA short distance beyond the funnel, a scattering of dark objects poked from the sand. They were mostly undecipherable debris long on corrosion that had fallen from the ship as it tilted and sank to the bottom.\n\nSummer noted a brass shell casing and a ceramic plate mixed with unidentifiable bits and pieces as the concentration of objects intensified. Then a towering black figure slowly materialized in the water directly ahead of them. Inching closer, they saw it was the unmistakable form of a massive shipwreck.\n\nA near century underwater had taken its toll on the World War I British cruiser. The vessel appeared as a tangled mass of rusted steel, sitting upright on the bottom with a heavy lean to starboard. Sections of the ship were nearly buried in sand, due to the effects of a scouring current. Summer could see that the superstructure had long since collapsed, while the teak decking had eroded away decades ago. Even sections of the hull plating had fallen in. The grand cruiser and survivor of Jutland was sadly just a shadow of her former self.\n\nDahlgren guided the submersible over the Hampshire's stern, hovering above it like a helicopter. He then piloted it across the ship's length until reaching the bow, which was partially buried in the sand, the ship having augured into the seabed by her prow. He turned and guided the submersible several more times across its length, a video camera capturing digital footage while a secondary still camera snapped images that would later be pieced into a mosaic photo of the entire wreck.\n\nAs they returned to the stern, Summer pointed to a jagged hole cut into the exposed deck plate near an aft hold. Beside the hole was an orderly pile of debris that stood several feet high.\n\n\"That's an odd hole,\" she remarked. \"Doesn't look like it had anything to do with the ship's sinking.\"\n\n\"The pile of debris alongside tells me that some salvors have been aboard,\" Dahlgren said. \"Did somebody get inside her before the government protected the wreck site?\"\n\n\"Yes, the wreck was first discovered by Sir Basil Zaharoff in the nineteen thirties and partially salvaged,\" Julie said. \"They were after some gold rumored to have been aboard. Due to the treacherous currents, they reportedly didn't salvage a great deal off the ship. Nobody seems to believe they found much gold, if any at all.\"\n\nDahlgren guided them over the curved surface of the stern hull until he found a pair of empty drive shafts protruding from below.\n\n\"Somebody got her big bronze propellers, anyway,\" Dahlgren noted.\n\n\"The British government didn't secure the wreck site until 1973. No one has legally been allowed to dive on the wreck since. It took me three years to obtain approval simply to conduct a photographic survey, and that only happened because my uncle is an MP.\"\n\n\"Never hurts to have family in high places,\" Dahlgren remarked, giving Summer a wink.\n\n\"I'm just glad your agency offered the resources to help,\" Julie said. \"I'm not sure I could have obtained the grant money necessary to hire a commercial submersible and crew.\"\n\n\"We had the help of a couple of Cambridge microbiologists on our Norway project,\" Dahlgren replied. \"Brought some Old Speckled Hen with them. Darn nice people, so we were only glad to reciprocate.\"\n\n\"Old Speckled Hen?\" Julie asked.\n\n\"An English beer,\" Summer said with a slight roll of her eyes. \"The fact of the matter is, once Jack heard there was a shipwreck involved, there was no way we weren't going to help.\"\n\nDahlgren just smiled as he powered the submersible along a few feet above the cruiser. \"Let's see if we can find out where they struck that mine,\" he said finally.\n\n\"Was it a mine or a torpedo that sank the Hampshire?\" Summer asked.\n\n\"Most historians believe she struck a mine. There was a fierce gale blowing the night she sank. The Hampshire attempted to sail with several escort destroyers, but they couldn't keep pace in the rough seas so the cruiser continued on without them. An explosion occurred near the bow, which supports a collision with a mine. The German submarine U-75 was in the area and had reported releasing a number of mines farther up the coast.\"\n\n\"It sounds as if it was a terrible tragedy,\" Summer remarked.\n\n\"The ship sank in less than ten minutes. Only a handful of lifeboats were lowered, and they were either crushed against the ship or capsized in the heavy seas. Those men that were able to stay afloat were still doused by the frigid water. Most of the crew died of exposure long before reaching shore. Of the six hundred and fifty-five crewmen aboard, only twelve men survived.\"\n\n\"Lord Kitchener not being one of them,\" Summer said quietly. \"Did they find his body?\"\n\n\"No,\" Julie replied. \"The famed field marshal didn't take to the lifeboats but went down with the ship.\"\n\nA reflective silence filled the submersible as the occupants pondered the sunken war grave visible just beneath them. Dahlgren steered along the port hull near the main deck, which had collapsed in some areas by several feet. As they neared the bow, Dahlgren detected some buckling along the hull plates. Then the underwater lights fell upon a gaping cavity near the waterline that stretched almost twenty feet across.\n\n\"No wonder she sank so fast,\" Dahlgren remarked. \"You could drive a pickup truck through that hole.\"\n\nHe angled the submersible until its lights were pointed inside the blast hole, revealing a twisted mass of metallic carnage that spread over two decks. A large haddock emerged from the interior, staring curiously at the bright lights before disappearing into the darkness.\n\n\"Are the cameras still shooting?\" Julie asked. \"This will make for some great research footage.\"\n\n\"Yes, we're still rolling,\" Summer replied. \"Jack, can you move us a little closer to the impact?\" she asked, staring intently out the view port.\n\nDahlgren tweaked the propulsion controls until they hovered just a foot or two from the gouged section of hull.\n\n\"Something in particular catch your eye?\" Julie asked.\n\n\"Yes. Take a look at the blast edge.\"\n\nJulie scanned the jagged rust-covered steel without comprehension. In the pilot's seat, Dahlgren's eyes suddenly widened.\n\n\"I'll be. The lip of that mangled steel looks to be shoved outward,\" he said.\n\n\"Appears to be the case around the entire perimeter,\" Summer said.\n\nJulie looked from Dahlgren to Summer in confusion.\n\n\"What are you saying?\" she finally asked.\n\n\"I think she's saying that the Germans got a bum rap,\" Dahlgren replied.\n\n\"How so?\"\n\n\"Because,\" Summer said, pointing to the hole, \"the blast that sank the Hampshire appears to have come from inside the ship.\"\n\nNinety minutes later, the trio sat in the wardroom of the Odin reviewing video footage of the Hampshire on a large flat-screen monitor. Dahlgren sped through the wreck's initial footage, then slowed the viewing speed as the camera approached the port-side hole. Julie and Summer sat alongside with their noses to the screen, carefully studying the images.\n\n\"Stop right there,\" Summer directed.\n\nDahlgren froze the video on a close-up image of the shattered hull plate.\n\n\"That view shows it quite clearly,\" Summer said, pointing to the serrated steel edge that flared out like flower petals. \"The force of the blast that created that had to come from within the ship.\"\n\n\"Could it have been caused by Zaharoff's salvage team?\" Julie asked.\n\n\"Not likely,\" Dahlgren replied. \"Though they probably made use of explosives here and there, they probably cut their way into the interior spaces they were seeking. They would have had no reason to create such a massive entry point, especially this close to the main deck.\" He hit the \"Play\" button on the video controls as he spoke. \"We saw evidence of an internal explosion all around the opening, which wouldn't be the case if Zaharoff had just tried to enlarge the existing hole.\"\n\n\"How about an internal munitions explosion that might have been triggered by a mine or torpedo attack?\" Summer asked.\n\n\"Not big enough,\" Dahlgren replied. \"From what we could view inside, there was plenty of internal damage, but it was all focused near the hull. If the ship's munitions had gone off, it would have blown away major sections of the ship.\"\n\n\"Then that leaves an internal explosion,\" Julie said. \"Perhaps there is something to the old rumors after all.\"\n\n\"What rumors would those be?\" Summer asked.\n\n\"The death of Lord Kitchener in 1916 was a momentous event. He had been the hero of Khartoum in the Sudan two decades earlier and was considered a key architect for the eventual defeat of Germany in World War One. Of course, he may have been best known for his iconic recruiting poster, which displayed his image pointing an outstretched finger, urging you to join the Army. When his body was never found, wild conspiracy theories took root, suggesting that he had survived the sinking or that a double had been sailing in his place. Others claimed that the IRA had planted a bomb aboard the ship when it was overhauled in Belfast a few months earlier.\"\n\n\"I guess this throws a new wrench into your biography,\" Summer remarked.\n\n\"Is that why you wanted to survey the Hampshire, because of Kitchener?\" Dahlgren asked.\n\nJulie nodded. \"Documenting the state of the Hampshire was actually suggested by my dean, but the driving force was certainly my biography of the field marshal. I guess I'll have to return to Kitchener's old estate near Canterbury and take another look at his archives.\"\n\n\"Canterbury?\" Summer asked. \"That's not too far from London, is it?\"\n\n\"No, less than a hundred miles.\"\n\n\"London is my next stop after we return to Yarmouth.\"\n\n\"Yarmouth is our next port of call after we drop you at Kirk-wall,\" Dahlgren explained to Julie. \"We're going to resupply there, then some of us are headed to Greenland for another project,\" he added, giving Summer an envious look.\n\n\"I will be flying to Istanbul next week to join my brother on a project in the Mediterranean.\"\n\n\"Sounds sunny and warm,\" Julie said.\n\n\"You're telling me,\" Dahlgren grunted.\n\n\"Maybe I can help you with your research for a few days, before my flight leaves London,\" Summer offered.\n\n\"You'd do that?\" Julie asked, surprised at the offer. \"Diving into some dusty old books is not the same as diving into a shipwreck.\"\n\n\"I don't mind. I'm curious to know myself what happened with the Hampshire. Heck, it's the least I can do since we helped open this can of worms.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Summer. That would be marvelous.\"\n\n\"No problem,\" she replied with a smile. \"After all, who doesn't love a mystery?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "The shop marked \"solomon brandy--antiquities\" was situated on a quiet side street in Jerusalem's Old City, not far from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Like the seventy-four other licensed dealers in the country, Brandy was officially sanctioned by the State of Israel to sell and trade in antiquities, providing that the artifacts at hand were not stolen goods.\n\nThe legal stipulation was a minor impediment to most dealers, who simply reused legitimate tracking identification numbers to sell nebulous items that came in the back door. Israel's antiquities laws strangely enough created a huge demand in Holy Land relics, and forgeries, by allowing the legal trade of artifacts, a practice banned by most other nations. Antiquities were often actually smuggled into Israel from neighboring countries, where they could be legitimized and sold to other dealers and collectors around the world.\n\nSophie Elkin stepped into Brandy's well-lit shop, cringing at the sound of a loud buzzer that activated with the opening door. The small interior was empty of people but crammed with artifacts that overflowed from glass cases fronting all four walls. She moved to a center island case filled with small clay pots tagged with the label \"Jericho.\" Sophie's trained eye could tell that they were all forgeries, which would soon be treasured heirlooms for unknowing tourists making their once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to the Holy Land.\n\nA stumpy man with pancake eyes emerged from the back room, wearing a dusty apron over rumpled clothes. He set a small clay figurine down on the counter, then looked up at Sophie with unease.\n\n\"Miss Elkin, what a surprise,\" he said in a flat tone that indicated her appearance was not quite welcomed.\n\n\"Hello, Sol,\" Sophie replied. \"No tourists in yet?\"\n\n\"It's still early. They see the sights in the morning, then shop in the afternoon.\"\n\n\"We need to talk.\"\n\n\"My license is current. I've filed my reporting in a timely manner,\" he protested.\n\nSophie shook her head. \"What can you tell me about the theft and shootings at Caesarea?\"\n\nBrandy visibly relaxed, then shook his head.\n\n\"A sad tragedy. One of your men was killed?\"\n\n\"Thomas Raban.\"\n\n\"Yes, I remember him. Very loud and vociferous. He threatened to wrap a shovel around my neck once, as I recall,\" he said with a smirk.\n\nSophie had caught Brandy in a sting operation two years earlier, accepting a large quantity of artifacts stolen from Masada. She'd dropped the charges when he agreed to secretly cooperate with the prosecution of the actual artifact thieves. But the antiquities agent used the old case to occasionally press him for information on other field investigations. Brandy would usually evade most of her inquiries, but in all her dealings with him he had never outright lied to her.\n\n\"I want the man who killed him,\" Sophie said.\n\nBrandy shrugged his shoulders. \"I'm afraid I can't help you.\"\n\n\"You hear things, Solomon. Was it the Mules?\"\n\nBrandy gazed nervously toward the window, looking for any lingering strangers. \"They are a dangerous organization, the Mules. Terrorists operating within our own borders. You don't want to get too close to them, Miss Elkin.\"\n\n\"Were they responsible?\"\n\nBrandy looked her in the eye. \"There are suspicions,\" he said in a low voice. \"But I cannot say with certainty any more than you can.\"\n\n\"I know of no others who steal artifacts at the point of a gun and are not afraid to pull the trigger.\"\n\n\"Nor do I,\" Brandy admitted. \"At least not in our country.\"\n\n\"Tell me, Solomon, who would have hired such a team?\"\n\n\"Certainly not a dealer,\" he spat indignantly. \"I don't have to tell you how things work in the black market. The preponderance of illegal excavating is done by dirt-poor Arabs who are paid a pittance for their discoveries. The artifacts are then passed through a series of middlemen--sometimes dealers, sometimes not--until finding a home with a public or private collector. But I can tell you that no dealer in Israel is going to jeopardize his livelihood by purchasing artifacts with blood on them. There's just too much risk.\"\n\nThough Sophie had few doubts that half the artifacts in Brandy's store were acquired from illegal excavations, she knew that he was right. The quality of the best dealers' inventories was based on secret, shadowy deal making that entailed trust by both parties. There was too much potential exposure to trade with the wrong elements. Killing for artifacts just seemed far beyond the realm for the dealers that Sophie knew.\n\n\"I believe that no smart dealer would knowingly involve himself with such butchers,\" she said. \"Have you heard of any attempts to sell Roman papyrus scrolls from the fourth century?\"\n\n\"So, that is what they stole from Caesarea,\" he replied with a comprehending nod. \"No, I am not aware of any effort to pawn such articles.\"\n\n\"If the goods are not on the market, then it must have been a job for a private collector.\"\n\n\"That's how I would see it,\" Brandy agreed.\n\nSophie stepped to the counter and picked up the small clay figurine. It was in the crude shape of an ox with a gilded yoke. She studied the shape and design closely.\n\n\"First Temple period?\" she asked.\n\n\"You have a keen eye,\" he replied.\n\n\"Who's it for?\"\n\nBrandy stammered a bit. \"A banker in Haifa. He specializes in early Israelite earthenware. He has a small but quite impressive collection, actually.\"\n\n\"Any papyrus scrolls in his possession?\"\n\n\"No, not his area of interest. He's more of a hobbyist than a dire fanatic. The few collectors I know that are into papyrus are focused on particular texts or content. None are what you'd call a high roller.\"\n\n\"Then tell me, Sol, who would be passionate about these scrolls and also have the means to go to this extreme?\"\n\nBrandy gazed at the ceiling in thought.\n\n\"Who's to say? I know wealthy collectors in Europe and the U.S. who are willing to go to great lengths to acquire a specific artifact. But there are certainly dozens of other collectors in the same league that I've never even heard of.\"\n\n\"Knowledge of the Caesarea scrolls was but a day old,\" Sophie said. \"It doesn't seem likely to me that a Western collector could have responded so quickly. No, Solomon, I think that this was instigated by a regional source. Any local names fit the profile?\"\n\nBrandy shrugged and shook his head. Sophie expected little else. She knew that the high-dollar collectors were the gravy train for dealers like Brandy. He probably had no clue who was behind the Caesarea attack, but he certainly wasn't going to raise suspicions about any of his major clients.\n\n\"If you hear anything, anything at all, you let me know,\" she said. She started to leave, then turned and faced him with an admonishing glare.\n\n\"When I find these murderers--and I will--I won't treat kindly any accomplices, whether it's by act or knowledge,\" she stated.\n\n\"You have my word, Miss Elkin,\" Brandy replied impassively.\n\nThe buzzer sounded as the front door was opened, and a lean man with a stiff upright posture walked in. He had a square handsome face, sandy combed-back hair, and roving blue eyes that glistened in recognition of Sophie. Dressed in worn khakis and a Panama hat, he cut a dashing figure laced with just a hint of snake oil.\n\n\"Well, if it isn't the lovely Sophie Elkin,\" he said with an upper-crust British accent. \"Is the Antiquities Authority here to expand its biblical artifact collection beyond those acquired by confiscation?\"\n\n\"Hello, Ridley,\" she replied coolly. \"And, no, the Antiquities Authority is not in the artifact-collection business. We prefer that they remain where they are, in proper cultural context.\"\n\nShe glided over to the case of Jericho pots. \"I'm just here to admire Mr. Brandy's latest batch of forgeries. Something you should know a thing or two about.\"\n\nIt was a stinging rebuke to Ridley Bannister. A classically trained archaeologist from Oxford, he had become a high-profile authority on biblical history in print and on television. Though many of his fellow archaeologists viewed him as a showman rather than an academic, no one denied that he had a remarkable understanding of the region's history. On top of that, he seemed perpetually blessed with good luck. His peers marveled at his uncanny ability to produce exciting discoveries from even the most obscure digs, locating royal graves, important stone carvings, and dazzling jewelry from overlooked sites. Equally savvy at promotion, he exploited book and film deals on his discoveries to attain a comfortable wealth.\n\nHis luck had run thin, however, when an underling brought him a small stone slab with an Aramaic inscription that dated to 1000 B.C. Bannister authenticated the marker as a possible cornerstone from Solomon's Temple, never suspecting that the carved stone was a forgery designed to earn the digger a fat bonus. Bannister took the fall, however, in a crushing embarrassment that his professional colleagues happily fostered. His reputation tainted, he quickly fell out of the limelight and soon found himself working limited excavations and even hosting guided tourist trips through the Holy Land.\n\n\"Sophie, you know as well as I that Solomon here is the most reputable antiquities dealer in all of Israel,\" he said, redirecting the conversation.\n\nSophie rolled her eyes. \"Be that as it may, it's probably not a wise move for a reputable archaeologist to be seen hanging around a dealer's shop,\" she said, then stepped toward the door.\n\n\"Ditto, Miss Elkin. It was lovely seeing you again. Let's do have a drink together sometime.\"\n\nSophie gave him an icy smile, then turned and walked out of the shop. Bannister watched her through the window as she made her way down the street.\n\n\"A beautiful lass,\" he muttered. \"I've always wanted to cultivate that relationship.\"\n\n\"That one?\" Brandy said, shaking his head. \"She'd sooner throw you behind bars.\"\n\n\"She might be worth the trip,\" Bannister agreed with a laugh. \"What was she doing here?\"\n\n\"Investigating the theft and shooting at Caesarea.\"\n\n\"An ugly incident, indeed.\" He looked at Brandy closely. \"You didn't have anything to do with that, did you?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" he replied, angry that Bannister would even insinuate his involvement.\n\n\"Do you know what was stolen?\"\n\n\"Elkin mentioned some papyrus scrolls, fourth-century Roman.\"\n\nThe description seized Bannister's attention, but he fought to maintain a disinterested demeanor.\n\n\"Any idea of their content?\"\n\nBrandy shook his head. \"No. I can't imagine they'd contain anything astounding from that time period.\"\n\n\"You're probably right. I wonder who financed the theft?\"\n\n\"Now you are starting to sound like Miss Elkin,\" Brandy said. \"I really haven't heard anything about it. Maybe you should ask the Fat Man?\"\n\n\"Ah yes. The very reason for my visit. You received the amulets from my associate Josh?\"\n\n\"Yes, with a message that I was to hold them until we talked.\" Brandy stepped to the back room, then returned with a small box. He opened it up and laid out two green stone pendants, each featuring a carved ram motif.\n\n\"A nice matched pair of amulets from the Canaanite period,\" Brandy said. \"Did these come from Tel Arad?\"\n\n\"Yes. A former student of mine is leading a dig there for an American university.\"\n\n\"That boy could get himself into trouble for looting an antiquities dig.\"\n\n\"He's quite aware of that, but it's an exceptional case. The boy is actually straight as an arrow. He inadvertently trenched into a grave site and came away with some sterling artifacts. They actually dug up four identical amulets. One went to the university and one was donated to the Israel Museum. Josh sent me the other two as gifts for helping him in his career over the years.\"\n\nBrandy raised his brow while asking, \"You want me to sell them?\"\n\nBannister smiled. \"No, my friend. While I realize they would garner a pretty penny, I don't really need the cash. Take one for yourself and do with it what you wish.\"\n\nBrandy's eyes lit up. \"That is a very generous gift.\"\n\n\"You've been a valuable friend over the years, and I may need your help in the future. Take it with my blessings.\"\n\n\"Shalom, my friend,\" Brandy replied, shaking Bannister's hand. \"May I ask what you are going to do with the other amulet?\"\n\nBannister scooped it up and eyeballed it for a second, then slipped it into his pocket as he headed toward the door.\n\n\"I'm taking it to the Fat Man,\" he said.\n\n\"Wise idea,\" Brandy replied. \"He'll pay you top dollar for it.\"\n\nBannister waved good-bye and stepped into the street smiling to himself. He was banking that the Fat Man would pay him for the amulet all right, but in something much more valuable than cash."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "Julie goodyear strolled past a monstrous pair of long-silenced fifteen-inch naval guns pointed toward the Thames, then walked up the steps to the entrance of the Imperial War Museum. The venerated national institution in the London borough of Southwark was housed in a nineteenth-century brick edifice originally constructed as a hospital for the mentally ill. Known for its extensive collection of photographs, art, and military artifacts from World Wars I and II, the museum also contained a large archive of war documents and private letters.\n\nJulie checked in at the information desk in the main atrium, where she was escorted up two floors in a phone-booth-sized elevator, then climbed an additional flight of stairs until reaching her destination. The museum's reading room was an impressive circular library constructed in the building's high central dome.\n\nA bookish woman in a brown dress smiled in recognition as she approached the help desk.\n\n\"Good morning, Miss Goodyear. Back for another visit with Lord Kitchener?\" she asked.\n\n\"Hello again, Beatrice. Yes, I'm afraid the field marshal's enduring mysteries have drawn me back once more. I phoned a few days ago with a request for some specific materials.\"\n\n\"Let me see if they have been pulled,\" Beatrice replied, retreating into the private archives depository. She returned a minute later with a thick stack of files under her arm.\n\n\"I have an Admiralty White Paper inquiry on the sinking of the HMS Hampshire and First Earl Kitchener's official war correspondence in the year 1916,\" the librarian said as she had Julie sign out the documents. \"Your request appears to be complete.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Beatrice. I should just be a short while.\"\n\nJulie took the documents to a quiet corner table and began reading the Admiralty report on the Hampshire. There was little information to be had. She had seen earlier accusations against the Royal Navy by residents of the Orkneys, who claimed the Navy dithered in sending help to the stricken ship after its loss had been reported. The official report clearly covered up any wrongdoings by the Navy and brushed aside rumors that the ship sank by means other than a mine.\n\nKitchener's correspondence proved only slightly more illuminating. She had read his war correspondence before and had found it mostly mundane. Kitchener held the post of Secretary of State for War in 1916, and most of his official writings reflected his preoccupation with manpower and recruiting needs of the British Army. A typical letter complained to the Prime Minister about pulling men from the Army to work in munition factories on the home front.\n\nJulie skimmed rapidly through the pages until nearing June fifth, the date of Kitchener's death on the Hampshire. The discovery that the Hampshire had sunk from an internal explosion compelled her to consider the possibility that someone may have actually wanted him dead. The notion led her to an odd letter that she had seen months before. Thumbing through the bottom of the file, her fingers suddenly froze on the document.\n\nUnlike the aged yellowing military correspondence, this letter was still bright white, typed on heavy cotton paper. At the top of the page was embossed \"Lambeth Palace.\" Slowly, Julie read the letter.\n\n\u2002Sir,\n\n\u2002At behest of God and Country, I implore you a final time to relinquish the document. The very sanctity of our Church depends upon it. For while you may be waging a temporal war with the enemies of England, we are waging an eternal crusade for the salvation of all mankind. Our enemies are wicked and cunning. Should they seize the Manifest, it could spell the demise of our very faith. I strongly submit there is no choice but for you to accede to the Church. I await your submittal,\n\n\u2002--Randall DavidsoN\n\nJulie recognized the author as the Archbishop of Canterbury. In the margins, she noticed a handwritten notation that said \"Never!\" It was written in a script that she recognized as Kitchener's.\n\nThe letter struck her as perplexing on several levels. Kitchener, she knew, had been a churchgoing religious man. Her research had never revealed any conflicts with the Church of England, let alone the head of the Church himself, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Then there was the reference to the document or Manifest. What could that possibly be?\n\nThough the letter seemed to have no possible bearing on the Hampshire, it was intriguing enough to stir her interest. She made a photocopy of the letter, then worked her way through the rest of the folder. Near the bottom, she found several documents related to Kitchener's trip to Russia, including a formal invitation from the Russian Consulate and an itinerary while in Petrograd. She copied these as well, then returned the folder to Beatrice.\n\n\"Find what you were looking for?\" the librarian asked.\n\n\"No, just an odd kernel here and there.\"\n\n\"I've found that the key to discovering historical treasures is to just keep on kicking over the stones. Eventually, you'll get there.\"\n\n\"Thank you for your assistance, Beatrice.\"\n\nAs she left the museum and made her way to her car, Julie reread the letter several times, finally staring at the Archbishop's signature.\n\n\"Beatrice is right,\" she finally muttered to herself. \"I need to kick over some more stones.\"\n\nShe didn't have far to go. Barely a half mile down the road sat historic Lambeth Palace. A collection of ancient brick buildings towering over the banks of the Thames River, it served as the historical London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Of particular interest to Julie was the presence on the grounds of the Lambeth Palace Library.\n\nJulie knew that the palace was not typically open to the public, so she parked on a nearby street and walked to the main gate. Passing a security checkpoint, she was allowed to proceed to the Great Hall, a Gothic-style red brick building accented with white trim. Contained inside the historic structure was one of the oldest libraries in Britain, and the principal repository for the Church of England's archives, dating back to the ninth century.\n\nShe stepped to the entrance door and rang a bell, then was escorted by a teenage boy to a small but modern reading room. Approaching the reference desk, she filled out two document request cards and handed them to a girl with short red hair.\n\n\"The papers of Archbishop Randall Davidson, for the period of January through July 1916,\" the girl read with interest, \"and any files regarding First Earl Horatio Herbert Kitchener.\"\n\n\"I realize the latter request may be a bit unlikely, but I wish to at least attempt an inquiry,\" Julie said.\n\n\"We can perform a computerized search of our archives database,\" the girl replied without enthusiasm. \"And what is the nature of your request?\"\n\n\"Research for a biography of Lord Kitchener,\" Julie replied.\n\n\"May I please see your reader ticket?\"\n\nJulie fished through her purse and handed over a library card, having utilized the Lambeth archives on several occasions. The girl copied her name and contact information, then peered at a clock on the wall.\n\n\"I'm afraid we'll be unable to retrieve these documents before closing time. The data should be available for your review when the library reopens on Monday.\"\n\nJulie looked at the girl with disappointment, knowing that the library would still be open for another hour.\n\n\"Very well. I will return on Monday. Thank you.\"\n\nThe red-haired girl clutched the document request cards tightly in her hand until Julie left the building. Then she waved the teenage boy to the counter.\n\n\"Douglas, can you please watch the desk for a minute?\" she asked in an urgent tone. \"I need to place a rather important phone call.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "Oscar gutzman was his real name, but everyone called him the Fat Man. The origin of the moniker was evident at first sight. Carrying well over three hundred pounds on a five-foot frame, he appeared nearly as wide as he was tall. With a clean-shaven head and unusually large ears, he resembled an escapee from a traveling carnival. Yet his appearance belied the fact that Gutzman was one of the richest men in Israel.\n\nHe grew up a ragtag urchin in the streets of Jerusalem, digging up coins from the hillside tombs with orphaned Arab boys or bumming free meals from Christian soup kitchens. His exposure to Jerusalem's diverse religions and culture, along with a hustler's ability to survive the streets, served him well as an adult businessman. Building a tiny construction firm into the largest hotel developer in the Middle East, he became a self-made man of huge riches who floated freely with the power brokers of the entire region. His personal drive for wealth and success was surpassed, however, by his passion for antiquities.\n\nIt was the death of his younger sister at an early age, in a traffic accident outside a synagogue, that had altered his life. Like others who suffer a tragic personal loss, he began a private search for God. Only his quest migrated from the spiritual to the tangible as he sought to prove the truth of the Bible through physical evidence. A small collection of biblical-era antiquities had grown exponentially with his accumulated wealth, turning an early hobby into a lifelong passion. His artifacts, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, were now stored in warehouses spread over three countries. In his late sixties, Gutzman now devoted his full time and resources to his personal quest.\n\nRidley Bannister entered an upscale boutique hotel situated on a prime parcel of Tel Aviv beachfront. The lobby was decorated in a minimalist contemporary style, with a number of uncomfortable-looking black leather chairs sitting starkly on a bright white-tiled floor. Bannister considered the design well executed, though he normally detested the look. A matronly hotel clerk greeted him warmly as he stepped to the front desk.\n\n\"I have an appointment with Mr. Gutzman. My name is Bannister,\" he said.\n\nAfter a confirming phone call, he was escorted by a burly security guard to a private elevator and whisked to the top floor. Stepping off the elevator, the door to the penthouse was immediately thrown open by the Fat Man, a large cigar dangling from his lips.\n\n\"Ridley, come in, my boy, come in,\" Gutzman greeted in a wheezy voice.\n\n\"You're looking well, Oscar,\" Bannister replied, shaking hands before entering the apartment.\n\nBannister still found himself marveling at Gutzman's apartment, which resembled a museum more than a residence. Shelves and display cases were crammed everywhere, stuffed with pottery, carvings, and other relics, all thousands of years old. Gutzman led him down a hallway lined with ancient Roman mosaics, taken from a public bath in Carthage. They passed under a stone arch from the ruins of Jericho and entered an expansive living room that overlooked the sands of Tel Aviv's Gordon Beach and the sparkling Mediterranean beyond.\n\nTaking a seat in an overstuffed leather chair, Bannister was surprised to find the residence empty but for a lone servant. On his prior visits, he had always found a throng of antiquities dealers milling about, hoping to hawk their latest prized artifact to the rich collector.\n\n\"The heat... I find it more oppressive all the time,\" Gutzman said, gasping from the walk to the front door. He then sank into an adjacent chair.\n\n\"Marta, some cold drinks, please,\" he shouted to his servant.\n\nBannister removed the pendant from his pocket and placed it in Gutzman's hand.\n\n\"A gift to you, Oscar. It's from Tel Arad.\"\n\nGutzman studied the pendant, a broad smile slowly forming across his face.\n\n\"This is quite nice, Ridley, thank you. I have a similar specimen from Nahal Besor. Early Canaanite, I would say.\"\n\n\"You are correct, as usual. Is this new?\" Bannister asked, pointing to a small glass plate on the coffee table that had a molded rim.\n\n\"Yes,\" Gutzman said, his eyes perking up. \"I just acquired it. Excavated from Beth She'an. Second-century molded glassware, probably manufactured in Alexandria. Look at the polishing on it.\"\n\nBannister picked up the plate and studied it closely.\n\n\"It's in beautiful condition.\"\n\nThe servant Marta appeared, delivering two glasses of lemonade, before disappearing into the kitchen.\n\n\"So, Ridley, what is the latest buzz in the world of legal archaeological discovery?\" Gutzman asked with a chuckle.\n\n\"There appear to be relatively few new projects slated to take the field next year. The Israel Museum will be sponsoring a dig on the shores of Galilee in search of an early settlement, while Tel Aviv University has approval for new exploration work at Megiddo. Most of the academic efforts appear to be directed at the continuation of existing field projects. There are, of course, the usual assortment of foreign theologically sponsored digs, but, as we know, they seldom amount to much.\"\n\n\"True, but at least they show more imagination than the academic institutes,\" Gutzman said with derision.\n\n\"I've been looking at two sites that I think you will be interested in. One is at Beit Jala. If Bathsheba's tomb exists, I think it would be there, in the town of her birth, which was then called Giloh. I've already formulated a site summary and excavation plan.\"\n\nGutzman nodded for him to continue.\n\n\"The second site is near Gibeon. There's an outside chance of proving King Manasseh's palace is located there. This one needs more research but has great potential, I believe. I can obtain the necessary excavation paperwork as before under the auspices of the Anglican Church, if you are agreeable to sponsorship.\"\n\n\"Ridley, you have always delivered exciting finds, and I have found much joy in collaborating with your field digs. But I'm afraid my days of field sponsorship have come to an end.\"\n\n\"You have always been most generous, Oscar,\" Bannister replied, suppressing his anger at losing the support of a longtime benefactor.\n\nGutzman gazed out the window with a distant look in his eye.\n\n\"I have spent most of my personal fortune collecting artifacts that support the narratives of the Bible,\" he said. \"I own mud bricks allegedly from the Tower of Babel. I have stone footings that may have supported Solomon's Temple. I have a million and one objects from the biblical era. Yet there is an element of doubt about each and every one of my pieces.\"\n\nHe suddenly fell into a wheezing fit, coughing and gasping for air, until he settled himself with a drink of lemonade.\n\n\"Oscar, do you need help?\"\n\nThe Fat Man shook his head. \"My emphysema has been getting the better of me lately,\" he gasped. \"The doctors are not hopeful.\"\n\n\"Nonsense. You're as strong as David.\"\n\nGutzman smiled then slowly rose to his feet. The act seemed to give him renewed strength, and he stepped briskly over to a cabinet, then returned carrying a small plate of glass.\n\n\"Take a look at this,\" he said, handing it to the archaeologist.\n\nBannister took the glass, observing that it was actually two sealed plates compressing a document in the middle. Holding it up to the light, he could see the protected document was a rectangular piece of papyrus with clear horizontal writing.\n\n\"A fine example of Coptic script,\" he noted.\n\n\"Do you know what it says?\"\n\n\"I can make out a few words, but am a bit lost without my reference materials,\" he acknowledged.\n\n\"It's a harbormaster's report from the Port of Caesarea. It details the capture of a pirate vessel by a Roman galley. The pirates had in their possession armaments from a Roman centurion, one belonging to the Scholae Palatinae.\"\n\n\"Caesarea,\" Bannister said with a raised brow. \"I understand that some papyrus artifacts were taken as part of the recent theft there. Along with the occurrence of at least one murder.\"\n\n\"Yes, most unfortunate. The document clearly dates to the early fourth century,\" Gutzman said, brushing off the inference.\n\n\"Interesting,\" Bannister replied, suddenly feeling uneasy with his host. \"And the significance?\"\n\n\"I believe it offers potentially confirming evidence of the Manifest, as well as an important clue to the cargo's disposition.\"\n\nThe Manifest. So that's what it was all about, Bannister thought. The old goat was staring down the Grim Reaper and was making a desperate play for divine evidence before his time ran out.\n\nBannister chuckled to himself. He had pocketed a lot of money from both Gutzman and the Church of England trying to hunt down the legend of the Manifest. Perhaps there was still more to be gained.\n\n\"Oscar, you know I've searched extensively both here and in England and have come up empty.\"\n\n\"There must be another path.\"\n\n\"We both came to the conclusion that it probably no longer exists, if it ever did in the first place.\"\n\n\"That was before this,\" Gutzman said, tapping the glass plate. \"I've been at this game a long time. I can smell the link here. It is real and I know it. I've decided to devote myself and my resources to this and nothing else.\"\n\n\"It is a compelling clue,\" Bannister admitted.\n\n\"This will be,\" the Fat Man said in a tired voice, \"the culmination of my life's quest. I hope you can help me reach it, Ridley.\"\n\n\"You can count on me.\"\n\nMarta appeared again, this time reminding Gutzman of a pending doctor appointment. Bannister said good-bye and let himself out of the apartment. Leaving the hotel, he contemplated the papyrus scroll and whether Gutzman's assumptions could possibly be correct. The old collector did know his stuff, he had to admit. Of more concern to Bannister was formulating a means to profit from the Fat Man's new pursuit. Deep in thought, Bannister didn't notice a young man in a blue jumpsuit waiting beside his car.\n\n\"Mr. Bannister?\" the youth inquired.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Courier delivery, sir,\" he replied, handing Bannister a large, thin envelope.\n\nBannister slid into his car and locked the doors before opening the letter. Shaking out the contents, he just sat and shook his head when a first-class airline ticket to London plopped into his lap."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "SUMMER, OVER HERE!\"\n\nStepping off the train from Great Yarmouth with a travel bag over her shoulder, Summer had to scan the crowded platform a moment before spotting Julie standing to one side, waving her hand in the air.\n\n\"Thanks for meeting me,\" she said, greeting the researcher with a hug. \"I'm not sure I'd find my way out of here alone,\" she added, marveling at the massive covered rail yard of the Liverpool Street Station in northeast London.\n\n\"It's actually pretty simple,\" Julie replied with a grin. \"You just follow all the other rats out of the maze.\"\n\nShe led Summer past several station platforms and through the bustling terminal concourse to a nearby parking lot. There they climbed into a green Ford compact that resembled an overgrown insect.\n\n\"How was the voyage down to Yarmouth?\" Julie asked as she navigated the car into the London traffic.\n\n\"Miserable. We caught a northerly storm front after leaving Scapa Flow and faced gale force winds during our entire run down the North Sea. I'm still feeling a little wobbly.\"\n\n\"I guess I should be thankful I was able to fly back from Scotland.\"\n\n\"So what's the latest on the mystery of the Hampshire's sinking?\" Summer asked. \"Have you established any connection with Lord Kitchener?\"\n\n\"Just a very few loose threads, quite tenuous at best, I'm afraid. I checked the Admiralty's official inquiry into the sinking of the Hampshire, but it was a banal White Paper that simply blamed destruction on a German mine. I also examined the claim that the IRA may have planted a bomb on the ship, but it seems to be without merit.\"\n\n\"Any chance that the Germans could have planted a bomb?\"\n\n\"There's absolutely no indication from known German records, so that seems unlikely as well. It was their belief that a mine from U-75 caused the sinking. Unfortunately, the U-boat's captain, Kurt Beitzen, didn't survive the war, so we have no official German account of the event.\"\n\n\"So that's two brick walls. Where are those loose threads that you were talking about?\" Summer asked.\n\n\"Well, I carefully reviewed some of my documents on Kitchener and rechecked his military war records. Two unusual documents cropped up. In the late spring of 1916, he made a special request to the Army for two armed bodyguards for an unspecified reason. In that age, bodyguards were something of a rarity, reserved for perhaps only the King. The other item was a strange letter I found in his military files.\"\n\nStopping at a red light, she reached into a folder on the backseat and handed Summer a copy of the letter from Archbishop Davidson.\n\n\"Like I said, they are two flimsy items that probably mean nothing.\"\n\nSummer quickly scanned the letter, wrinkling her brow at its contents.\n\n\"This Manifest he refers to... Is it some sort of Church document?\"\n\n\"I really haven't a clue,\" Julie replied. \"That's why our first stop is the Church of England's archives at Lambeth Palace. I've ordered up the Archbishop's personal records in hopes we might find something more substantial.\"\n\nThey crossed the River Thames over the London Bridge and drove into Lambeth, where Julie parked the green Ford near the palace. Summer absorbed the beauty of the ancient building that fronted the water, with Buckingham Palace visible across the river. They made their way to the Grand Hall, where they were escorted to the library's reading room. Summer noticed a thin, handsome man smile at them from a copy machine as they entered.\n\nThe archivist had a thick stack of folders waiting when Julie approached the desk.\n\n\"Here are the Archbishop's records. I'm afraid we had nothing on file related to Lord Kitchener,\" the young woman declared.\n\n\"Quite all right,\" Julie replied. \"Thank you for searching.\"\n\nThe two women moved to a table and split the files and then began poring through the documents.\n\n\"The Archbishop was a rather prolific writer,\" Summer noted, impressed with the volume.\n\n\"Apparently so. This is his correspondence for just the first half of 1916.\"\n\nAs she attacked the file, Summer noticed the man at the copy machine gather some books and take a seat at the table directly behind her. Her nose detected a dose of cologne, musky but pleasing, which wafted from the man's direction. Taking a quick glance over her shoulder, she noticed he wore an antique-looking gold ring on his right hand.\n\nShe flipped through the letters quickly, finding them mostly dry pronouncements on budget and policy directed at the subordinate Bishops around Britain, along with their in-kind replies. After an hour, the women had both weeded through half of their piles.\n\n\"Here's a letter from Kitchener,\" Julie suddenly announced.\n\nSummer peered anxiously across the table. \"What does it say?\"\n\n\"It appears to be a response to the Archbishop's letter, as it is dated just a few days later. It's short, so I'll read it to you:\n\n\u2002\"Your Excellency,\n\n\u2002\"I regret that I am unable to comply with your recent request. The Manifest is a document of powerful historic consequence. It demands public exposure when the world is again at peace. I fear that in your hands, the Church would only bury the revelation, in order to protect its existing theological tenets.\n\n\u2002\"I beg of you to recall your subordinates, who continue to persecute me ceaselessly.\n\n\u2002\"Your obedient servant,\n\n\u2002\"H.H. Kitchener\"\n\n\"Whatever could this Manifest be?\" Summer wondered.\n\n\"I don't know, but Kitchener clearly held a copy of it and felt it was important.\"\n\n\"Obviously the Church did, too.\"\n\nSummer heard the man behind her clear his throat, then turn and lean over their table.\n\n\"Pardon me for overhearing, but did you say Kitchener?\" he asked with a disarming smile.\n\n\"Yes,\" Summer replied. \"My friend Julie is writing a biography of the field marshal.\"\n\n\"My name is Baker,\" Ridley Bannister lied, obtaining introductions in return. \"Might I suggest that a better source of Lord Kitchener historical documents may be found at the Imperial War Museum?\"\n\n\"Kind of you to say, Mr. Baker,\" Julie replied, \"but I've already exhaustively searched their materials.\"\n\n\"Which brings you here?\" he asked. \"I wouldn't expect a military hero's influence to stretch very far into the Church of England.\"\n\n\"Just tracing some correspondence he had with the Archbishop of Canterbury,\" she replied.\n\n\"Then this would indeed be the place,\" Bannister said, smiling broadly.\n\n\"What is the nature of your research?\" Summer asked him.\n\n\"Just a bit of hobby research. I'm investigating a few old abbey sites that were destroyed during Henry VIII's purge of the monasteries.\" He held up a dusty book entitled Abbey Plans of Olde England, then turned again toward Julie.\n\n\"Have you uncovered any new secrets about Kitchener?\"\n\n\"That honor belongs to Summer. She helped prove that the ship he was sunk on may have had a planted explosive aboard.\"\n\n\"The Hampshire?\" he said. \"I thought it was proven that she had struck a German mine.\"\n\n\"The blast hole indicates that the explosion originated inside the ship,\" Summer replied.\n\n\"Perhaps the old rumor of the IRA planting a bomb aboard may have been true,\" he said.\n\n\"You know the story behind that?\" Julie asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Bannister replied. \"The Hampshire was sent to Belfast for a refit in early 1916. Some believe a bomb was inserted into the ship there and detonated months later.\"\n\n\"You seem to know a lot about the Hampshire,\" Summer commented.\n\n\"I'm just an obsessive World War One history buff,\" Bannister replied. \"So, where is your research taking you from here?\"\n\n\"We'll be going to Kent for another pass through Kitchener's personal papers housed at Broome Park,\" Julie said.\n\n\"Have you seen his last diary?\"\n\n\"Why, no,\" Julie said, surprised at the question. \"It has always been presumed to have been lost.\"\n\nBannister looked down at his watch. \"Oh my, look at the time. I'm afraid I must run. It was a delight to meet you ladies,\" he said, rising from the table and offering a faint bow. \"May your quest for historical knowledge meet with profound fulfillment.\"\n\nHe quickly returned his book to the librarian, then waved good-bye as he left the reading room.\n\n\"Quite a handsome fellow,\" Julie gushed with a grin.\n\n\"Yes,\" Summer agreed. \"He was certainly knowledgeable about Kitchener and the Hampshire.\"\n\n\"That's true. I wouldn't think too many people would be aware that Kitchener's last diary went missing.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't it have gone down with him on the ship?\"\n\n\"Nobody knows. He traditionally captured his writings in small bound books that covered the period of a single year. His writings from 1916 were never found, so it's always been presumed that he carried it with him on the Hampshire.\"\n\n\"What do you make of Mr. Baker's claim that the IRA may have bombed the Hampshire?\"\n\n\"It's one of many outlandish assertions that arose after the sinking that I've found has no historical justification. It's difficult to believe that the Hampshire would have been carrying a bomb aboard for over six months. The IRA, or Irish Volunteers as they were known at the time, certainly wouldn't have known that far in advance that Kitchener would set foot on the ship. They didn't actually become a very militant group until the Easter Rising in April of 1916, well after the Hampshire had left Belfast. More telling is the fact that they never actually claimed responsibility for the sinking.\"\n\n\"Then I guess we keep digging,\" Summer said, opening up a new folder of the Archbishop's papers.\n\nThey worked for another hour before the stacks grew thin. Nearing the bottom of her last folder, Summer suddenly sat upright when she read a short letter from a Bishop in Portsmouth. She read it a second time before passing it over to Julie.\n\n\"Take a look at this,\" she said.\n\n\"'The parcel has been delivered and the messenger sent away,'\" Julie said, reading the letter aloud. \"'The item of interest shall cease to be a concern within 72 hours.' Signed, Bishop Lowery, Portsmouth Diocese.\"\n\nJulie set the letter down and gave Summer a blank look. \"I'm afraid I don't see the relevancy,\" she said.\n\n\"Look at the date.\"\n\nJulie gazed at the top of the letter. \"June 2, 1916. Three days before the Hampshire sank,\" she said in a surprised voice.\n\n\"It would seem,\" Summer said quietly, \"that the plot has thickened.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "After exiting the library, ridley bannister made his way across the Lambeth Palace grounds to a small brick building adjacent to the main living quarters. Entering through an unmarked door, he stepped into a cramped office, where a handful of men in security uniforms stared at video surveillance monitors or worked at desk computers. Ignoring the quizzical look from a man seated near the door, Bannister stepped toward a private office in the rear and walked through its open door.\n\nA falcon-eyed man with greasy hair was seated at a desk watching a live video feed on his computer. Bannister could see the figures of Julie and Summer seated at a table in the reading room. The man looked up, shooting Bannister a disappointed look.\n\n\"Bannister, there you are. You were supposed to check in with me before the ladies arrived. Now you've blown your cover.\"\n\nBannister slid into a wooden chair facing the desk. \"Sorry, old boy, they forgot my wake-up call at the Savoy this morning. I do want to thank you for the airline tickets, though. Glad you remembered first class this time.\"\n\nThe Archbishop of Canterbury's chief of security ground his teeth in contempt.\n\n\"You did purge the files before they were turned over to them?\" he asked, motioning toward his computer screen.\n\n\"I've been through those files before, Judkins,\" Bannister said, picking a piece of lint off his jacket. \"There's nothing incriminating in those files.\"\n\nJudkins's face turned red. \"You had orders to review and clean those files.\"\n\n\"Orders? Orders, you say? Have I unknowingly been conscripted into the Archbishop's private army?\"\n\nThere had been an immediate dislike between the two men the instant they had met, and the feelings only festered over time. But Judkins was Bannister's appointed contact, and there was little either man could do about it. The archaeologist pushed the line with Judkins as far as he dared without jeopardizing his contractual arrangements with the Church.\n\n\"You are an employee of the Archbishop and you will obey his requests accordingly,\" the security chief responded, his eyes aglow.\n\n\"I am nothing of the sort,\" Bannister retorted. \"I am a simple mercenary for historical truth. While it may be true that the Archbishop has enlisted my services from time to time, I am under no obligation to 'follow orders' or even bow or curtsy in the esteemed Archbishop's general direction.\"\n\nJudkins withheld responding, staring silently at Bannister while he waited for his blood pressure to decrease. When his face finally lost its red bluster, he spoke in a direct tone.\n\n\"While it certainly wouldn't be my choice, the Archbishop has elected to retain your services to inform and advise him of historical discoveries, particularly in the Middle East, that may have a bearing on existing Church doctrine. This alleged Manifest, and its prior association with the Church, has been deemed extremely sensitive. We, I mean the Archbishop, needs to know why this Cambridge researcher is inquiring into the records of Archbishop Davidson and at what risk to the Church.\"\n\nBannister smiled thinly at Judkins's forced deference.\n\n\"Julie Goodyear is a historian from Cambridge who has written several highly regarded biographies on leading figures of the nineteenth century. She is currently writing a bio on Lord Kitchener. Miss Goodyear and the American woman, Summer Pitt, have apparently discovered that Kitchener's ship, the Hampshire, was destroyed by an internal explosion. They seem to think there may be some remote connection to the late Archbishop Davidson.\"\n\nJudkins physically paled at the news.\n\n\"My dear Judkins, is there something wrong?\"\n\n\"No,\" the security chief replied with a violent shake of his head. \"What about this Manifest?\"\n\n\"The Archbishop knows that I made a diligent search for the document several years ago. At a considerable cost, I might add,\" he said with a wink. \"I am relatively certain that it vanished along with Kitchener on the Hampshire.\"\n\n\"Yes, that is the Archbishop's understanding. However, there may be some related historical events that could prove, shall we say, troublesome to the Church and embarrassing to the Archbishop. I want you on those two women now.\"\n\n\"You want me?\" Bannister replied, raising a brow.\n\n\"The Archbishop wants you,\" Judkins replied angrily. \"Track them closely and extinguish things if you have to before they become a problem.\"\n\n\"I'm an archaeologist, not an assassin.\"\n\n\"You know what to do. Just handle it. You've got my number.\"\n\n\"Yes. And you've got my number?\" Bannister asked, rising to his feet. \"The number of my Bermuda bank account, that is?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Judkins grumbled. \"Now, get out.\"\n\nThe security chief could only shake his head as Bannister bowed to him gracefully, then marched out of his office like he owned it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "The bright morning mediterranean sun had already begun baking the Aegean Explorer's deck when Rudi Gunn stepped into the sunlight with the day's first mug of coffee. He was startled to see an unfamiliar stretch of Turkish coastline just a mile or two off the ship's side railing. He heard the whir of an outboard motor in the distance and squinted until he spotted the ship's Zodiac bounding over the waves toward shore.\n\nHis groggy mind suddenly focused on the research project at hand, and he scurried to the stern of the ship. Making his way past a white submersible, he was disappointed to find the autonomous underwater vehicle lying securely in a padded rack. A large torpedo-shaped device, the robotic AUV contained a variety of sensors used to sample the water as it ran free of the ship. When he had staggered to bed six hours earlier, the Explorer was tracking the AUV as it surveyed a large grid ten miles from shore.\n\nGulping a large swallow of coffee, he turned and made his way forward, then climbed two flights of stairs to the bridge. There he found Pitt studying a coastal chart with the ship's captain, Bruce Kenfield.\n\n\"Good morning, Rudi,\" Pitt greeted. \"You're up early.\"\n\n\"I could feel the engines throttle down from my bunk,\" Gunn replied. \"How come we pulled off-line?\"\n\n\"Kemal received word that his wife was in a traffic accident. It's apparently not serious, but we put him ashore so that he could go check on her.\"\n\nKemal was a marine biologist with the Turkish Environment Ministry who had been assigned to the NUMA vessel to monitor and assist with the water-sampling project.\n\n\"That's unfortunate,\" Gunn said. \"After the Zodiac returns, how long will it take us to return to the grid and resume operations?\"\n\nPitt smiled and shook his head. \"We technically can't resume the survey until Kemal or a replacement is on board the ship. Our invite from the Turkish government specified that a representative from the Environment Ministry must be aboard at all times while we are conducting survey work in Turkish waters. At this point, it looks like we might be down for three or four days.\"\n\n\"We are already behind schedule. First our sensor flooded and now this. We may have to extend the project in order to complete the areas we agreed to survey.\"\n\n\"So be it.\"\n\nGunn noticed that Pitt seemed to share none of the frustration that he was feeling. It was uncharacteristic for a man that he knew hated to leave things unfinished.\n\n\"Since you returned from Istanbul, we've only had two full days of surveying on the new grid,\" Gunn said. \"Now we go idle again, and you're not even upset. What gives?\"\n\n\"It's simple, Rudi,\" Pitt replied. \"Halting work on the algae bloom project means resuming work on an Ottoman shipwreck excavation,\" he said with a wink.\n\nLess than four hours after the Zodiac was hoisted back aboard, the Aegean Queen reached Chios, dropping anchor a hundred yards from the site of the Ottoman shipwreck. Little time had been spent examining the site after Pitt and Giordino's initial dive, barely allowing the ship's underwater archaeologist, Rodney Zeibig, the chance to stake an aluminum grid over the exposed portions of the wreck.\n\nZeibig hastily trained a handful of scuba-qualified scientists in the art of underwater survey and documentation, then coordinated a careful examination of the wreck. Pitt, Giordino, and even Gunn took a hand in the dive rotation, photographing, measuring, and excavating test pits at various locations around the site. A small amount of artifacts, mostly ceramics and a few iron fittings, were retrieved as skeletal fragments of the wreck were exposed.\n\nPitt stood near the stern rail of the Aegean Explorer eyeing a growing pattern of whitecaps that dotted the sea under a stiffening westerly breeze. An empty Zodiac bounced wildly on the waves, moored to a nearby buoy that was fixed to the wreck site. A pair of divers suddenly poked to the surface, then bellied their way into the inflatable boat. One of the men released the mooring line while the other started the outboard engine, then they quickly raced to the side of the research ship. Pitt lowered a cable over the side and helped hoist the Zodiac onto the deck with the two men still seated in it.\n\nRudi Gunn and Rod Zeibig hopped out and began stripping off their wet suits.\n\n\"It's turned a bit bouncy out there,\" remarked Zeibig, a buoyant man with bright blue eyes and salt-and-pepper hair.\n\n\"I've passed the word that we're halting dive operations until the winds settle down,\" Pitt said. \"The weather forecast indicates that things should be calm by morning.\"\n\n\"A good idea,\" the archaeologist replied, \"although I think Rudi will be on pins and needles until he gets back to the wreck.\"\n\n\"Find something of interest?\"\n\nGunn nodded with an excited look in his eyes. \"I was digging in grid C-1 and touched a large carved stone. I only uncovered a small corner of it before our bottom time ran out. I think it may possibly be some sort of monolith or stele.\"\n\n\"That could add a clue to the ship's identity,\" Pitt said.\n\n\"I just hope we don't have to share in her discovery,\" Zeibig said, nodding toward the starboard rail.\n\nPounding over the waves just over two miles away was a high-performance motor yacht headed directly for the Aegean Explorer. It was Italian built, with wraparound smoked-glass windows and a large open stern deck. A red Turkish flag with white crescent and star flew from a mast, along with a smaller red flag that featured a single gold crescent. Though it was far smaller than a Monte Carlo show yacht, Pitt still could see that it was an expensive luxury boat. The three men watched as the yacht closed to within a half mile before slowing to a halt, where it bobbed on the unsettled waters.\n\n\"I wouldn't be too concerned about your wreck, Rod,\" Gunn said. \"They don't exactly look like they're here to perform excavation work.\"\n\n\"Probably somebody just nosing about to see what a research ship is doing parked out here,\" Pitt said.\n\n\"Or perhaps we're blocking the view of someone's villa on shore,\" Gunn muttered.\n\nPitt assumed that no one besides Ruppe knew of the location of the wreck site. Perhaps he had already notified the Turkish Ministry of Culture, he considered. But then he remembered that Ruppe's office had been burglarized and his chart to the site stolen with the artifacts. His concern was diverted when he heard his name shouted from the forward part of the ship. He turned to see Giordino hanging his torso out of a work bay door beneath the bridge.\n\n\"Some info from Istanbul just came in for you over the wire,\" Giordino shouted.\n\n\"Speak of the devil,\" Pitt muttered. \"Be right there,\" he yelled back, then turned to the other two men.\n\n\"I bet that is Dr. Ruppe's analysis of our earlier artifacts from the wreck.\"\n\n\"I'd like to see his results,\" Zeibig said.\n\nThe two divers quickly changed clothes, then met up with Pitt and Giordino in the small bay, which housed several computers linked to a satellite communications system. Giordino handed Pitt a multipage printout, then sat down at one of the computers.\n\n\"Dr. Ruppe also e-mailed a couple of photographs with the report,\" he said, tapping at a keyboard to open an electronic file. A close-up image of a gold coin filled the computer screen.\n\nPitt quickly scanned the report then passed it to Zeibig.\n\n\"Are we still looking at an Ottoman wreck?\" Gunn asked.\n\n\"Almost certainly,\" Pitt replied. \"Dr. Ruppe found a representative coin from a mint in Syria that he believes is identical to one of the coins in Al's lockbox. It dates to around 1570. Unfortunately, Ruppe says he had to base the comparison on memory, since the coins were stolen from his office.\"\n\n\"I'd have to agree with him,\" Giordino said. \"It looks like the same coin to me.\"\n\n\"The mint marks were known to have been used between 1560 and 1580,\" Zeibig said, reading from the report.\n\n\"So we know the wreck is no older than 1560,\" Gunn said. \"A shame the whole box of coins was taken, as that might have zeroed things in a bit more.\"\n\n\"The other dating clue was the ceramic box that held the crown,\" Pitt said. \"As Loren and I discovered at the Blue Mosque, the particular design indicates the tiles came from the kilns of Iznik.\"\n\nGiordino clicked to the next few photographs, which showed a number of known tile samples from Iznik.\n\n\"Unfortunately, the ceramic box was also taken from Ruppe's office, so again we're working from memory.\"\n\n\"His report indicates that the tiles incorporate patterns and colors that were popular with Iznik ceramics in the late sixteenth century,\" Zeibig noted.\n\n\"At least we have some consistency,\" Giordino noted.\n\n\"I can also attest that from what I saw of the wreck's framing, it corresponds with known sixteenth-century vessel construction in the Mediterranean,\" Zeibig added, looking up from the report.\n\n\"That's three for three,\" Gunn said.\n\n\"Which brings us to King Al's crown,\" Pitt replied with raised inflection.\n\nGiordino pulled up a new photograph, which showed a detailed image of the gold crown. The seabed encrustations had all been cleaned from it, leaving a sparkling headpiece that looked as if it had just left the goldsmith.\n\n\"Thank goodness my baby was kept safe in Dr. Ruppe's vault,\" Giordino said.\n\n\"Dr. Ruppe calls this one of the most significant finds in Turkish waters, as well as one of the most mysterious,\" Pitt said. \"Despite considerable research, he was unable to utilize the crown's shape and size as a clue in identifying its provenance. However, after a thorough cleaning, he clarified the faint engraving on the inside of the band.\"\n\nGiordino brought up an enlarged photo of the crown while Zeibig thumbed to the description in the report.\n\n\"The engraving is in Latin,\" Zeibig reported with a quizzical look. \"Ruppe translated the inscription as follows: 'To Artrius, in gratitude for capturing the relic pirates.--Constantine.'\"\n\n\"Ruppe found records of a Roman Senator named Artrius. It so happens that he lived during the rule of Constantine,\" Pitt said.\n\n\"Constantine the Great?\" Gunn blurted. \"The Roman Emperor? Why, he lived a thousand years earlier.\"\n\nThe room fell silent as everyone stared at the photographic image. Nobody had expected such a disconnect with the shipwreck's other artifacts, particularly by something as remarkable as the gold crown. And yet there was no clue as to why it was aboard. Pitt inched away from the monitor and stood up, finally breaking the silence.\n\n\"I hate to say it,\" he said with a grin, \"but I guess this means that King Al has been transferred to the Roman Legion.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Broome park was a characteristic old english manor. Purchased by Kitchener in 1911, it featured a towering Jacobean-style brick house built during the rule of Charles I, surrounded by 476 acres of lush, parklike grounds. During his short occupancy, Kitchener labored extensively to upgrade the estate's gardens, while commissioning an elaborate fountain or two. But like top hat and tails or horse and carriage, Broome Park's original grace and charm was now mostly reserved for an earlier age.\n\nSixty miles southeast of London, Julie turned off at Dover and followed the short road to the estate. Summer was surprised to see a foursome playing golf on a stretch of grass just beyond a sign welcoming them to Broome Park.\n\n\"It's an all-too-familiar tale around Britain,\" Julie explained. \"Historic manors are passed down from generation to generation until one day the heir wakes up and realizes he can't afford the taxes and maintenance. First the surrounding acreage is sold off, then more desperate measures are eventually taken. Some are converted to bed-and-breakfasts, others leased to corporations for conferencing or used as outdoor concert venues.\"\n\n\"Or even converted into golf courses,\" Summer said.\n\n\"Precisely. Broome Park has probably suffered the worst of all fates. Most of the manor has been sold off as a time-share and overnight lodging, while the surrounding grounds have been converted into a golf course. I'm sure Horatio Herbert is looking down in disgrace.\"\n\n\"Is the estate still in the hands of Kitchener's heirs?\"\n\n\"Kitchener was a lifelong bachelor, but he bequeathed the estate to his nephew Toby. Toby's son Aldrich now runs the place, though he's getting on in years.\"\n\nJulie parked the car in a wide lot, and they walked to the main entrance, passing an ill-kept rose garden along the way. Summer was more impressed when they entered the main foyer, which showcased a large cut-glass chandelier and a towering oil painting of the old man himself, his stern gray eyes seemingly imposing their will even from the flat canvas.\n\nA wiry white-haired man was seated at a desk reading a book, but he looked up and smiled when he noted Julie coming in.\n\n\"Hello, Miss Goodyear,\" he said, springing up from the desk. \"I received your message that you would be coming by this morning.\"\n\n\"You're looking well, Aldrich. Keeping the manor full?\"\n\n\"Business is quite nice, thank you. Had a couple of short-term visitors check in already today.\"\n\n\"This is my friend Summer Pitt, who's helping me with my research.\"\n\n\"Nice to meet you, Miss Pitt,\" he said, extending a hand. \"You probably want to get right to work, so why don't you follow me on back?\"\n\nHe led them through a side door into a private wing that encompassed his own living quarters. They walked through a large sitting area filled with artifacts from North Africa and the Middle East, all acquired by Kitchener during his Army years stationed in the region. Aldrich then opened another door and ushered them into a wood-paneled study. Summer noticed that one entire wall was lined with tall mahogany filing cabinets.\n\n\"I would have thought you'd have all of Uncle Herbert's files memorized by now,\" Aldrich said to Julie with a smile.\n\n\"I've certainly spent enough time with them,\" Julie agreed. \"We just need to review some of his personal correspondence in the months preceding his death.\"\n\n\"Those will be in the last cabinet on the right.\" He turned and walked toward the doorway. \"I'll be at the front desk, should you require any assistance.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Aldrich.\"\n\nThe two women quickly dove into the file cabinet. Summer was glad to see the correspondence was of a more personal and interesting nature than the records at the Imperial War Museum. She slowly read through dozens of letters from Kitchener's relatives, along with what seemed an endless trail of correspondence from building contractors, who were being cajoled and pushed by Kitchener to complete refurbishments on Broome Park.\n\n\"Look how cute this is,\" she said, holding up a card of a hand-drawn butterfly sent from Kitchener's three-year-old niece.\n\n\"The gruff old general was quite close with his sister and brothers and their children,\" Julie said.\n\n\"Looking at an individual's personal correspondence is a great way to get to know him, isn't it?\" Summer said.\n\n\"It really is. A shame that the handwritten letter has become a lost art form in the age of e-mail.\"\n\nThey searched for nearly two hours before Julie sat up in her chair.\n\n\"My word, it didn't go down on the Hampshire,\" she blurted.\n\n\"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"His diary,\" Julie replied with wide eyes. \"Here, take a look at this.\"\n\nIt was a letter from an Army sergeant named Wingate, dated a few days before the Hampshire was sunk. Summer read with interest how the sergeant expressed his regret at being unable to accompany Kitchener on his pending voyage and wished the field marshal well on his important trip. It was a brief postscript at the bottom of the page that made her stiffen.\n\n\"'P.S. Received your diary. Will keep it safe till your return,'\" she read aloud.\n\n\"How could I have missed it?\" Julie lamented.\n\n\"It's an otherwise innocuous letter, written in very messy handwriting,\" Summer said. \"I would have skimmed past it, too. But it's a wonderful discovery. How exciting, his last diary may indeed still exist.\"\n\n\"But it's not here or in the official records. What was that soldier's name again?\"\n\n\"Sergeant Norman Wingate.\"\n\n\"I know that name but can't place it,\" Julie replied, racking her brain.\n\nA high-pitched squeak echoed from the other room, slowly growing louder in intensity. They looked to the doorway to see Aldrich entering the study pushing a tea cart with a bad wheel.\n\n\"Pardon the interruption, but I thought you might enjoy a tea break,\" he said, pouring cups for each of them.\n\n\"That's very kind of you, Mr. Kitchener,\" Summer said, taking one of the hot cups.\n\n\"Aldrich, do you happen to recall an acquaintance of Lord Kitchener by the name of Norman Wingate?\" Julie asked.\n\nAldrich rubbed his brow as his eyes darted toward the ceiling in thought.\n\n\"Wasn't he one of Uncle Herbert's bodyguards?\" he asked.\n\n\"That's it,\" Julie said, suddenly remembering. \"Wingate and Stearns were his two armed guards approved by the Prime Minister.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Aldrich said. \"The other fellow... Stearns, you say his name was? He went down on the Hampshire with Uncle Herbert. But Wingate didn't. He was sick, I believe, and didn't make the trip. I recall my father often lunching with him many years later. The chap apparently suffered a bit of guilt for surviving the incident.\"\n\n\"Wingate wrote that he had the field marshal's last diary in his possession. Do you know if he gave it to your father?\"\n\n\"No, that would have been here with the rest of his papers, I'm certain. Wingate probably kept it as a memento of the old man.\"\n\nA faint buzzer sounded from the opposite end of the house. \"Well, someone is at the front desk. Enjoy the tea,\" he said, then shuffled out of the study.\n\nSummer reread the letter then examined the return address.\n\n\"Wingate wrote this from Dover,\" she said. \"Isn't that just down the road?\"\n\n\"Yes, less than ten miles,\" Julie replied.\n\n\"Maybe Norman has some relatives in the city that might know something.\"\n\n\"Might be a long shot, but I suppose it's worth a try.\"\n\nWith the aid of Aldrich's computer and a Kent Regional Phone Directory, the women assembled a list of all the Wingates living in the area. They then took turns phoning each name, hoping to locate a descendant of Norman Wingate.\n\nThe phone queries, however, produced no leads. After an hour, Summer hung up and crossed out the last name on the list with a shake of her head.\n\n\"Over twenty listings and not even a hint,\" she said with disappointment.\n\n\"The closest I had was a fellow who thought Norman might have been a great-uncle, but he had nothing else to offer,\" Julie replied. She looked down at her watch.\n\n\"I suppose we should go check into our hotel. We can finish the files in the morning.\"\n\n\"We're not staying at Broome Park?\"\n\n\"I booked us in a hotel in Canterbury, near the cathedral. I thought you'd want to see it. Besides,\" she said, her voice dropping to a whisper, \"the food here isn't very good.\"\n\nSummer laughed, then stood and stretched her arms. \"I won't tell Aldrich. I'm wondering if we might be able to make one stop along the way first.\"\n\n\"Where would that be?\" Julie asked with a quizzical look.\n\nSummer picked up the letter from Wingate and read the return address. \"Fourteen Dorchester Lane, Dover,\" she said with a wry smile.\n\nThe motorcyclist slipped on a black helmet with matching visor, then peeked around the back end of a gardener's truck. He patiently waited as Julie and Summer stepped out the front door of Broome Park. Careful not to let himself be seen, he watched as they climbed into their car across the parking lot and then drove down the road to the exit. Starting his black Kawasaki motorcycle, he eased toward the lane, keeping a wide buffer between himself and the departing car. Watching Julie turn toward Dover, he let a few cars pass, then followed suit, keeping the little green car just ahead in his sights."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "Modern dover is a bustling port city best known for its ferry to Calais and its world-famous white chalk cliffs up the easterly coastline. Julie drove into the historic city center before pulling over and asking for directions. They found Dorchester Lane a few blocks from the waterfront, a quiet residential street lined with old brick row houses constructed in the 1880s. Parking the car under a towering birch tree, the women walked up the cleanly swept steps of number fourteen and rang the bell. After a long pause, the door was pulled open by a disheveled woman in her twenties who held a sleeping baby in her arms.\n\n\"Oh, I'm terribly sorry to bother you,\" Julie whispered. \"I hope we didn't wake the baby.\"\n\nThe woman shook her head and smiled. \"This one could sleep through a U2 concert.\"\n\nJulie quietly introduced the two of them. \"We're seeking information on a man who lived at this address quite some time ago. His name was Norman Wingate.\"\n\n\"That was my grandfather,\" the woman replied, perking up. \"I'm Ericka Norris. Wingate was my mother's maiden name.\"\n\nJulie looked at Summer and smiled in disbelief.\n\n\"Please, won't you come in?\" Norris offered.\n\nThe young woman led them into a modest yet warmly decorated family room, easing herself into a rocking chair with the sleeping baby.\n\n\"You have a lovely home,\" Julie said.\n\n\"My mum grew up in this house. I think she said grandfather bought it just before World War One. She lived here most of her life, as she and Dad purchased the home from him.\"\n\n\"Is she still alive?\"\n\n\"Yes, she's a spry ninety-four. We had to move her into the old folks' home a few months back so she could receive proper nursing care. She insisted that we move in here when the baby was on the way. More room for us, at least.\"\n\n\"Your mum might still be able to help us out,\" Julie said. \"We're looking for some old records from the war that your grandfather might have had in his possession.\"\n\nNorris thought for a moment. \"Mum did end up with all of my grandparents' belongings,\" she said. \"I know she got rid of most of it over the years. But there are some old books and photographs in the nursery that you are welcome to have a look at.\"\n\nShe cautiously led them up a flight of stairs and into a pale blue room with a wooden crib on one wall. She gently laid the baby in the crib, eliciting a slight whimper from him before he drifted back to sleep.\n\n\"Over here are my grandfather's things,\" she whispered, stepping to a high wooden shelf. Old clothbound books filled the shelves, fronted by black-and-white photographs of men in uniform. Julie picked up one photograph showing a young soldier standing next to Kitchener.\n\n\"Is this your grandfather?\"\n\n\"Yes, with Lord Kitchener. He headed up the entire Army during the war, did you know?\"\n\nJulie smiled. \"Yes. He's actually the reason we are here.\"\n\n\"Grandfather often spoke about how he would have died along with Kitchener on his ship that sank during a voyage to Russia. But his father was gravely ill, and Kitchener had excused him from the trip.\"\n\n\"Ericka, we found a letter from your grandfather indicating that Kitchener had sent him his personal diary for safekeeping,\" Julie said. \"We're hoping to locate that diary.\"\n\n\"If grandfather kept it, it would be here. Please, have a look.\"\n\nJulie had read Kitchener's earlier diaries, which had been kept in small hardbound books. Scanning the shelves, she froze when she spotted a similarly bound book on the top shelf.\n\n\"Summer... can you reach that small blue book up high?\" she asked nervously."
            },
            {
                "title": "Stretching to her toes, Summer reached up and pulled the book down and handed it to Julie. The historian's heart began to beat faster when she noticed there was no title printed on the spine or front cover. Slowly opening the cover, she turned to a lined title page. In neat handwritten script was written:Journal of H H K",
                "text": "[ Jan. 1, 1916 ]\n\n\"That's it,\" Summer blurted, staring at the page.\n\nJulie turned the page and began reading the first entries, which described efforts by the author to boost compensation for new military recruits. She soon flipped to the last written entry, located halfway through the book, which was dated June 1, 1916. She then closed the book and looked hopefully at Norris.\n\n\"This lost diary has long been sought by historians of Kitchener,\" she said quietly.\n\n\"If it means that much to you, then go ahead and take it,\" Norris replied, waving her hand at the book as if it were of no consequence. \"No one around here is likely to be reading it anytime soon,\" she added, smiling toward her sleeping baby.\n\n\"I will donate it to the Kitchener collection at Broome Park, if you should ever change your mind about that.\"\n\n\"I'm sure Grandfather would be thrilled to know that there are still people around with an interest in Kitchener and 'the Great War,' as he used to call it.\"\n\nJulie and Summer thanked the young mother for the diary, then tiptoed down the stairs and out of the house.\n\n\"Your detour to Dover certainly produced an unexpected bit of good luck,\" Julie said with a smile as they stepped to her car.\n\n\"Persistence leads to luck every time,\" Summer replied.\n\nExcited with their discovery, Julie was oblivious to the black motorcycle that followed them off Dorchester Lane and onto the road to Canterbury, holding a steady pace several cars behind. As Julie drove, Summer skimmed through the diary, reading passages of interest out loud.\n\n\"Listen to this,\" she said. \"'March third. Received an unexpected letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury requesting a private viewing of the Manifest. The cat has finally escaped the bag, though how, I do not know. The late Dr. Worthington had assured me his secrecy in life, but perhaps he has failed me in death. No matter. I declined the Archbishop's invitation while risking his ire, in hopes that the matter can be deferred until the time when we are once again at peace.'\"\n\n\"Dr. Worthington, you say?\" Julie asked. \"He was a well-known Cambridge archaeologist around the turn of the last century. He carried out several high-profile excavations in Palestine, if my memory serves.\"\n\n\"That would seem an odd connection,\" Summer replied, skimming more pages. \"Kitchener was right about upsetting the Archbishop, though. Two weeks later, he has this to say: 'Called upon this morning by Bishop Lowery of Portsmouth, on behalf of Archbishop Davidson. He eloquently expressed a strong desire for me to donate the Manifest to the Church of England for the good of all mankind. He failed to elaborate, however, on the Church's intended use of the document. From the earliest moments, my kindred hopes were for a benevolent quest for the truth. It is now regrettably apparent that my Church is reacting in fear, with suppression and concealment their primary aim. In their hands, the Manifest might disappear for all posterity. This I cannot allow, and I informed Bishop Lowery as much, to his extreme disappointment. Though now is not the time, I believe that at the conclusion of this great conflict, a public release of the Manifest will offer a spark of hope for all mankind.'\"\n\n\"He certainly makes this Manifest sound profound,\" Julie said. \"And now Bishop Lowery has made an appearance. His cryptic letter to Davidson in June suddenly becomes more interesting.\"\n\n\"Kitchener doesn't provide much detail, but his anguish with the Church keeps growing,\" Summer said. \"In April, he writes, 'Plans for the summer offensive in France are nearly complete. The constant harassment from the Archbishop's minions is becoming overwhelming. P.M. has approved my request for a security detail. Thankfully, I didn't have to specify why.'\"\n\n\"So our friends Wingate and Stearns finally appear on the scene,\" Julie noted.\n\nSummer thumbed faster through the pages as they approached the outskirts of Canterbury.\n\n\"In his April and May passages, he is bogged down with war planning and an occasional weekend away with relatives at Broome Park. Wait, though, listen to this. 'May fifteenth. Received another threatening call from Bishop Lowery. With his nefarious manner, I believe the country would be better served if he headed the Directorate of Military Intelligence rather than the Portsmouth Diocese.' A day later, he writes, 'Caught in a streetside confrontation by an anonymous C of E member who demanded the Manifest. Corporal Stearns disposed of the renegade without further incident. I'm beginning to regret ever discovering the blasted thing back in 'seventy-seven... or letting Dr. Worthington decipher it last year. Who would have imagined that an old slip of papyrus sold by a beggar during our survey of Palestine would have such consequence?'\"\n\nSummer turned to the next page. \"Does that date mean anything to you?\"\n\nJulie contemplated her earlier writings on Kitchener. \"That was well before his famous heroics in Khartoum. In 1877, I believe he was stationed in the Middle East. That's about the time that he took over an Army survey party in northern Palestine, as part of the Palestine Exploration Fund established by Queen Victoria.\"\n\n\"He worked as a surveyor?\"\n\n\"Yes, and he took over the field survey team when its commander fell ill. They did quite top-notch work, despite being threatened on several occasions by local Arab tribesmen. Much of the Palestine survey data was in fact still being utilized as recently as the nineteen sixties. But as for Kitchener, he was traveling throughout the Middle East at that point, so there's no telling where he specifically may have acquired it. Unfortunately, he didn't begin keeping a diary until many years later.\"\n\n\"It must be very old if it is a papyrus document.\" Summer neared the end of the diary and halted at a late May entry.\n\n\"Julie, this is it,\" she gasped. \"He writes, 'Another dire warning received from the Archbishop. I daresay they seem to be stopping at nothing in obtaining their desired wants. I have little doubt they haven't already slipped into Broome Park for a look around. My response will hopefully put them at bay. I told them that I am taking the Manifest to Russia and placing it on loan with the Orthodox Church in Petrograd for safekeeping until the war's end. Imagine their chagrin if they knew I actually safeguarded it with Sally, under the watchful eyes of Emily, till my return.'\"\n\n\"So he didn't take it to Russia,\" Julie said, her voice crackling with excitement.\n\n\"Apparently not. Listen to this. On June first, he writes, 'My last entry for now. Prying eyes seem to be everywhere. I feel an uneasy dread about the trip at hand, but it is vital that the Russians stay with us and not negotiate a unilateral armistice with Germany. Will pass this diary to Corporal Wingate for safekeeping. H.H.K.'\"\n\n\"I've read other accounts that he was uneasy when he departed and seemed to be dreading the trip,\" said Julie. \"He must have had a premonition.\"\n\n\"Probably so or he wouldn't have left the diary behind. But the bigger question is, who was Sally?\"\n\n\"She must have been someone trustworthy, but I don't believe I've ever run across anyone named Sally in my research on Kitchener.\"\n\n\"Not an old secretary, or perhaps the wife of a fellow officer?\" Summer asked.\n\nJulie shook her head.\n\n\"How about a pet name for one of his aides?\"\n\n\"No, I should think there would be references in his correspondence somewhere, but I don't recall seeing it.\"\n\n\"It doesn't seem right that he would trust a casual acquaintance with the document. How about the other name, Emily?\"\n\nJulie thought for a moment as she waited to enter a traffic roundabout that led to downtown Canterbury.\n\n\"I can recall two Emilys, actually. Kitchener's maternal grand-mother was named Emily, though she was long dead by 1916. Then there was his oldest brother, who had a granddaughter named Emily. I'll have to check my genealogy records when we get to the hotel to see when she was born. Her father, Kitchener's nephew, was named Hal. He used to visit Broome Park rather regularly.\"\n\n\"So the younger Emily would actually be a cousin to Aldrich?\" Summer asked.\n\n\"Yes, that would be correct. Perhaps we can talk to Aldrich about her in the morning.\"\n\nJulie had reached the city center and drove Summer slowly past Canterbury's famed historic cathedral. A few blocks away, she turned into the Chaucer Hotel, one of the city's modest old inns. After checking into neighboring rooms, the women met for dinner in the hotel restaurant. Summer devoured a large plate of fish and chips, not realizing how hungry the day's excursion had made her. Julie nearly matched her appetite, pushing away a plate cleaned of pasta.\n\n\"If you'd like to walk the meal off, we can take a stroll over to the cathedral,\" Julie offered.\n\n\"I appreciate the tour-guide offer,\" Summer replied, \"but, to be honest, I'd like to spend some more time analyzing Kitchener's diary.\"\n\nJulie beamed at the reply. \"I was hoping you'd say that. I've been anxious to study the writings since we checked in.\"\n\n\"There's a quiet lounge off the lobby. How about we order some tea and take another pass through the diary there? I'll take notes while you read this time,\" she added with a smile.\n\n\"That would be lovely,\" Julie agreed. \"I'll go get the diary and a notebook from my room and meet you there.\"\n\nShe climbed the stairs to the second floor and entered her room, then hesitated when she noticed her work papers strewn across the bed. The door suddenly slammed shut behind her as the lights were flicked off. A shadow approached as she started to scream, but a gloved hand quickly covered her mouth before her voice could resonate. Another arm slipped around her waist and pulled her tight against the assailant, who seemed to be wearing padded clothing. Then a deep voice grunted in her ear.\n\n\"Don't make a sound or you'll never live to see the dawn.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "Summer waited in the lounge twenty minutes before phoning Julie's room. Receiving no answer, she waited another five minutes, then went upstairs and knocked on her door. Her concern heightened when she noticed a \"Do Not Disturb\" sign dangling from the doorknob. She saw a night maid was working her way down the corridor turning down beds and convinced her to check Julie's room. Opening the door and turning on the light, the maid gasped in shock.\n\nJulie was seated on the floor with her arms behind her back and tied to the bed frame with a sheet. Another sheet was wrapped around her ankles, while a pillowcase covered her head. A desperate wiggling of her arms and legs revealed that she was very much alive.\n\nSummer burst past the maid and ripped the pillowcase off Julie's head. Julie's wide eyes looked at Summer in relief as the American untied a knotted stocking that was wrapped around Julie's head in a gag.\n\n\"Are you hurt?\" Summer asked, moving on to untie the sheet binding Julie's arms.\n\n\"No... I'm okay,\" she stuttered, fighting back tears of fear and relief rolled into one. \"Just a little scared.\"\n\nShe quickly regained her composure while finding a steady voice.\n\n\"He was actually quite gentle. I don't think he meant to harm me.\"\n\n\"It was just one man?\"\n\nJulie nodded.\n\n\"Did you see what he looked like?\"\n\n\"No, I'm afraid not. I think he was hiding in the bathroom, and I walked right past. He turned the lights off, then threw that pillowcase over my head. I don't have a clue what he looked like. I just remember that his clothes seemed lumpy or padded.\"\n\nThe hotel manager soon arrived, followed by a pair of Canterbury police officers. They carefully searched the room, then took a detailed report from Julie, Summer, and the maid. The historian had left her purse in the room, but it wasn't taken by the thief. Julie looked at Summer with dread when she realized that the only item missing from the room was Kitchener's diary.\n\n\"Typical hotel burglary attempt,\" Summer heard one of the officers tell the hotel manager out in the corridor. \"She obviously surprised him in the room, and he decided to tie her up before fleeing. I don't have to tell you that there's a slim chance of catching the bugger.\"\n\n\"Yes, unfortunately I've seen it before,\" the manager replied. \"Thank you, Detective.\"\n\nThe hotel manager returned to the room and apologized profusely to Julie, promising to have increased security on the floor all night. After he left, Summer offered to let Julie sleep in her room.\n\n\"Yes, if you don't mind, I think I'd be much more comfortable,\" she said. \"Let me grab my toothbrush.\"\n\nJulie walked into the bathroom, then suddenly called to Summer.\n\n\"What is it, Julie?\" she said, rushing in.\n\nJulie stood with a grim look on her face, pointing to a small vanity mirror next to the sink. The room thief had left her a warning, written in her own pink lipstick, on the mirror. Pointed and succinct, it said simply, \"Let K be.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "Julie awoke the next morning after a fitful night's sleep. Her sense of fear and anxiety had gradually evolved into a feeling of indignant violation. Rising early, she found herself burning with anger.\n\n\"Who could have known that we discovered the diary?\" she said, pacing the floor of the hotel room. \"We had only just found it ourselves.\"\n\nSummer was in the bathroom, fixing her hair. \"Perhaps he didn't actually know about the diary,\" she replied. \"He might have just been trying to find out what you knew and got lucky.\"\n\n\"I suppose it's possible. But why the warning? What is it about Kitchener's death nearly a century after the fact that someone would still be afraid of?\"\n\nSummer sprayed on a touch of perfume, then joined Julie in the bedroom. \"I'd say one thing is certain. It has to be someone who knows more than we do about either the Manifest or the sinking of the Hampshire.\"\n\n\"Or both,\" Julie concurred. She caught a whiff of Summer's perfume. \"That's a lovely fragrance,\" she said.\n\n\"Thank you. It was a gift from a friend of mine in British Columbia.\"\n\n\"The cologne,\" Julie suddenly blurted. \"I nearly forgot. The intruder who tied me up last night had the scent of men's cologne. I'm sure it was the same fragrance as worn by that fellow we met at Lambeth Library.\"\n\n\"You mean Mr. Baker? Do you think it was him?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure about anything at the moment, but I think it could have been him. Don't you remember? He asked us about the diary. I thought it was a bit odd, at the time.\"\n\n\"You're right. We'll check with the library when we get back to London,\" Summer said. \"I'm sure there's a good chance the librarian will be able to identify him.\"\n\nJulie was slightly relieved, but the revelation only fueled her inquisitiveness.\n\n\"In the meantime, I say we get on over to Broome Park and see what Aldrich knows about his cousin Emily.\"\n\nThey ate a quick breakfast at the hotel, then hopped in the car and drove to Broome Park. Two miles outside of Canterbury, the car sailed through a deep dip in the road.\n\n\"Something doesn't feel right,\" Julie said, detecting a sharp vibration through the steering column.\n\nThe car struck another small rut in the road, and the passengers felt a sudden jerk followed by a wail of screeching metal. Summer looked out the window in shock to see the right front wheel bounding ahead of the car and onto the shoulder of the road. The car immediately veered sharply to the right into the oncoming lane. Julie yanked the steering wheel hard left to compensate, but there was no reaction.\n\nThe wheel-less right hub ground into the asphalt amid a spray of sparks as the car careened counterclockwise. The vehicle's three remaining tires smoked and squealed as the car spun around and then slid off the road backward. Bounding over the shoulder, the car skidded across a patch of grass before slamming into a low embankment. As the dust cleared, Julie shut off the idling motor, then turned to Summer.\n\n\"You okay?\" she asked breathless.\n\n\"Yes,\" Summer replied, taking a deep breath herself. \"Quite a jolt. I'd say we were a bit lucky.\"\n\nShe saw that Julie looked pale and still had her hands clenched tightly to the steering wheel.\n\n\"It was him,\" she said quietly.\n\n\"Well, if it was, he'll have to do a lot better than that to take us down,\" Summer replied defiantly, trying to lift Julie's spirits. \"Let's see if we can get back on the road.\"\n\nAs she opened her door, a black motorcycle came blazing up the road. The rider slowed slightly, giving the damaged car a long gaze. Then he applied a heavy throttle and roared on down the road.\n\n\"Don't bother helping us,\" Summer spat as the black shape disappeared around the bend.\n\nShe hiked over to the road and found the stray wheel lying on the shoulder. Standing it upright, she rolled it back to the car. Julie had climbed out but was sitting on a large rock, her hands still shaking. Summer opened the trunk and retrieved the jack, then worked it under the front bumper. The ground was hard and mostly level, which enabled her to raise the hub off the ground. Despite some deep scoring on the hub, she was able to mount the wheel, fastening it down with a trio of lug nuts cannibalized from the other wheels. She made sure the lugs were tightened all the way around, then stowed the jack back in the trunk.\n\n\"Summer, you handled that with ease,\" Julie complimented. She had regained her demeanor and finally stopped shaking. \"I thought we would have to ring the auto club.\"\n\n\"My father has been teaching me how to work on antique cars,\" she said with a proud grin. \"He always says that any girl ought to be able to change a tire.\"\n\nJulie surveyed a slight crease to the rear bumper, then handed the car keys to Summer.\n\n\"Do you mind driving the rest of the way? My nerves are shot.\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" Summer replied. \"As long as you don't mind some slow going through any potholes.\"\n\nTaking the keys, she hopped into the right-hand seat and started the car, then eased back onto the road. They felt no more ill effects from the car, and soon pulled into the parking lot at Broome Park. The two women entered the manor, finding Aldrich laying out croissants and tea in the garden atrium. Julie made no mention of their auto accident as she pulled him aside for a moment.\n\n\"Aldrich, I wonder if I could ask you about Emily Kitchener?\"\n\nThe old man's eyes lit up immediately. \"Why, Emily was a lovely lady. I was just telling a guest about her last night. She used to love walking the gardens here in the evening to hear the nightingales sing. Hard to believe she's been gone ten years now.\"\n\n\"She used to live here at the estate?\" Summer asked.\n\n\"Oh yes. My father took her in when her husband was killed in a railway accident. That must have been around 1970. She lived in what's now the Windsor Suite, on the top floor.\"\n\n\"Do you by chance recall her having any friends or associates named Sally?\" Julie asked.\n\n\"No, I don't recall anyone named Sally,\" he replied with a shake of his head.\n\n\"Did she ever mention being given any documents or papers from Lord Kitchener?\" Summer queried.\n\n\"She never made any mention to me of such. Of course, she would have been quite young when the Earl died. You are welcome to take a look at her things, if you like. I have a few boxes of her possessions down in the basement.\"\n\nSummer gave Julie a hopeful gaze.\n\n\"If it wouldn't be an imposition,\" Julie said to Aldrich.\n\n\"Not at all. I can take you down right now.\"\n\nAldrich led them to his private quarters and through a locked door to a corner stairway. Down the steps, they reached a dimly lit basement, which was little more than a broad corridor that extended beneath a fraction of the whole residence. Aged wooden crates and dust-covered furniture were stacked high along both walls.\n\n\"Much of this old furniture was the Earl's,\" Aldrich explained as he led them down the corridor. \"I really must arrange for another auction one of these days.\"\n\nAt the end of the corridor, they reached a heavy door sealed with a dead bolt.\n\n\"This was originally a surplus pantry,\" he said, reaching for the bolt before realizing it had already been pulled aside. \"They sealed it up tight to keep out the rats.\"\n\nHe flicked on an exterior light switch, then grabbed a pull handle and yanked the heavy door aside, revealing a ten-foot-long compartment lined with shelves on either side and a wooden cabinet at the far end. The shelves were jam-packed with cardboard boxes, mostly filled with documents and estate records.\n\n\"Emily's things should be right down here,\" he said, stepping to the rear and pointing at a waist-high shelf where three boxes were marked \"E.J. Kitchener.\"\n\n\"Emily Jane Kitchener,\" Aldrich said. \"Might be easiest for you to simply look through the boxes in here. Will you need an escort back upstairs?\"\n\n\"Thank you, Aldrich, but that won't be necessary,\" Julie replied. \"We'll lock things up and find our way out.\"\n\n\"I hope you both can join us for dinner tonight. We're having a fish fry in the garden.\" The old caretaker then turned and shuffled out of the pantry.\n\nSummer smiled as she watched him leave. \"He is the cutest little fellow,\" she said.\n\n\"An old-fashioned gentleman,\" Julie agreed, pulling two of the boxes to the front of the shelf. \"Here you go, one for you and one for me.\"\n\nSummer stepped over and flipped open the top of the box, which she noted was not sealed shut. The contents were a disheveled mess, as if someone had hastily thrown the items in the box or it had subsequently been rifled through. She smiled to herself as she pulled out a baby blanket and laid it on an empty shelf. Next to that she laid some children's dresses, a large doll, and several porcelain figurines. At the bottom of the box, she found some costume jewelry and a book of nursery rhymes.\n\n\"Box number one is filled with childhood memories,\" she said, carefully repacking the items. \"Nothing of relevance, I'm afraid.\"\n\n\"I'm not faring much better,\" Julie replied, setting a pair of sequined boots on the shelf. \"Mostly shoes, sweaters, and a few evening gowns here.\" From the bottom, she pulled out a flat tray of dinnerware. \"And some tarnished silverware,\" she added.\n\nThe women replaced the two boxes, then jointly opened the third box.\n\n\"This looks more promising,\" Julie said, retrieving a thin packet of letters.\n\nAs she began scanning the letters, Summer inventoried the rest of the box. Most of the contents were prized books of Emily's, along with a few framed photos of herself and her husband. At the bottom of the box, Summer found a large envelope that was stuffed with old photographs.\n\n\"No luck here,\" Julie said, finishing the last letter and inserting it back into its envelope. \"These are all old letters from her husband. No mention of our mystery girl. I guess the secret of Sally just isn't meant to be revealed.\"\n\n\"It was an admitted long shot,\" Summer replied, pulling the photographs out of the envelope and spreading them across the shelf for Julie to see. They were all sepia-tinted images from nearly a century before. Julie held up one photo of a young woman in a riding outfit, holding the reins of a horse.\n\n\"She was a pretty young woman,\" Summer remarked, noting a delicate face set with penetrating eyes similar to her famous uncle.\n\n\"Here's one with Kitchener,\" Julie said, pointing to an earlier photo in a garden setting. Kitchener stood in his uniform next to a couple with their young daughter, clutching a large doll, between them. Summer recognized the toddler as a younger version of Emily from the horse picture.\n\n\"She looks about four years old there,\" Summer said, picking up the photo and flipping it over to see if a date was written on the back. She nearly choked when she read the inscription.\n\n\"April, 1916. Uncle Henry and Emily with Sally at Broome Park.\"\n\nShe shoved the photo in Julie's face. Julie read the inscription, then flipped it over and studied the image with a wrinkled brow.\n\n\"But that's Emily with her parents. Her mother's name was Margaret, I believe.\"\n\nSummer looked at her and smiled. \"Sally is the doll.\"\n\nBy the time the lightbulb clicked on in Julie's head, Summer was already tearing through the first box of Emily Kitchener's possessions. In an instant, she pulled out a porcelain-faced blond doll that was dressed in a checkerboard apron. Holding the doll up in the air, Summer compared it to the one in the photograph.\n\nIt was the same doll.\n\n\"He said the Manifest was safeguarded with Sally,\" Julie muttered. \"And Sally is a doll?\"\n\nThe two women studied the doll, whose clothes and extremities were well worn from the attentive play of a young girl nearly a century earlier. With tentative fingers, Summer turned the doll over and pulled off its checkerboard apron and matching calico dress. A heavy seam was visible along the doll's back, which kept the stuffing inside. Only the stitching was crude and uneven, not matching the workmanship of the rest of the doll.\n\n\"This doesn't look like the work of an expert seamstress,\" Summer noted.\n\nJulie rummaged through one of the other boxes until producing a tarnished silver dinner knife.\n\n\"You care to perform the surgery?\" she asked nervously, handing Summer the knife.\n\nSummer laid the doll facedown on the shelf and began sawing at the topmost stitch. The dull-edged knife was a poor match for the tough catgut thread, but she eventually cut through the first few stitches. Setting the knife aside, she pulled apart the remaining seam, opening up the back side of the doll. Inside was a compressed mass of cotton wadding.\n\n\"Sorry, Sally,\" she said, carefully pulling out the wadding as if the doll were an animate object. Julie peered anxiously over Summer's shoulder, but slumped when she saw that the doll's torso was filled with nothing but cotton. She closed her eyes and shook her head as Summer pulled out a large ball of it.\n\n\"Silly idea,\" she muttered.\n\nBut Summer wasn't through. Peering inside the cavity, she felt around with her fingertips.\n\n\"Wait, I think there may be something in here.\"\n\nJulie's eyes popped open as she watched Summer reach into the doll's left leg and grab hold of an object. Summer worked it back and forth until pulling out a linen-wrapped tube several inches long. Julie leaned closer as Summer set the object on the shelf and gently unwrapped the linen. Inside was a thick piece of parchment rolled into a scroll. Summer held the top edge down, then carefully unrolled it across the shelf as both women held their breath.\n\nThe parchment proved to be blank. But they soon saw it was protecting a smaller scroll rolled inside. It was a bamboo-colored papyrus leaf with a single column of script running down its center.\n\n\"This... this must be the Manifest,\" Julie uttered quietly, her eyes locked on the ancient document.\n\n\"It appears to be written in some sort of ancient script,\" Summer noted.\n\nJulie stared at the lettering, finding it familiar. \"It appears similar to Greek,\" she said, \"but it's nothing that I've seen before.\"\n\n\"That would most likely be Coptic Greek,\" thundered a male voice behind them.\n\nThe women jumped at the unexpected assertion. Spinning their heads toward the door, they were shocked to find Ridley Bannister standing in the entry. He was dressed in a thickly padded black leather jacket and pants favored by dirt-track motorcycle racers. But neither woman noticed his unusual attire. Their attention was focused instead on the snub-nosed revolver he held in his hand, aimed squarely at their chests."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "You are the one that attacked me in my hotel room,\" Julie blurted, finally recognizing the leather outfit.\n\n\"Attack is rather a harsh description,\" Bannister replied casually. \"I prefer to think that we were just sharing research information.\"\n\n\"Stealing, you mean,\" Summer said.\n\nBannister shot her a hurt look. \"Not at all,\" he said. \"Strictly borrowing. You'll find that the diary has found a new home with the rest of Kitchener's private papers upstairs.\"\n\n\"Oh, a penitent thief,\" Summer replied sarcastically.\n\nBannister ignored the cut.\n\n\"I must say, I am quite impressed with your sleuthing abilities,\" he said, eyeing Julie. \"The leather diary was a marvelous discovery, though the Earl's comments were less than startling. But then identifying Sally on top of that. Quite an encore.\"\n\n\"We weren't quite as sloppy as you,\" Summer remarked.\n\n\"Yes, well, I had limited time to peruse Emily Kitchener's possessions. Be that as it may, a job well done. I searched ten years ago myself without such success.\" He raised the pistol and motioned with it.\n\n\"Would you ladies be so kind as to move to the rear of this compartment? I'll be needing to leave with the Manifest.\"\n\n\"To borrow?\" Julie asked.\n\n\"Not this time, I'm afraid,\" Bannister replied with a sharklike smile.\n\nJulie peered at the scroll before slowly stepping away.\n\n\"Tell us first. What is the significance of the Manifest?\" she asked.\n\n\"Until it has been authenticated, no one can say for sure,\" Bannister said, creeping over to retrieve the parchment with the papyrus inside. \"It's just an old document that some seem to think could rattle the theological powers that be.\" He picked up the scroll with his free hand and gently placed it in an inside pocket of his jacket.\n\n\"Was Kitchener deliberately killed because of it?\" Julie asked.\n\n\"I would assume so. But that's one you'll have to take up with the Church of England. It's been nice chatting with you ladies,\" he said, backpedaling toward the door, \"but I'm afraid I have a plane to catch.\"\n\nHe stepped out of the pantry and began closing the door behind him.\n\n\"Please don't leave us in here,\" Julie begged.\n\n\"Not to worry,\" Bannister replied. \"I'll be sure and phone Aldrich in a day or so and let him know there's a pair of lovely lasses locked in his basement. Good-bye.\"\n\nThe door slammed shut with a whoosh followed by the sound of the dead bolt sliding home. Then Bannister flicked off the pantry's lights, plunging it into blackness. He quietly crept upstairs to Aldrich's quarters, stopping to replace the unloaded Webley pistol in a glass cabinet of Kitchener's military artifacts, where he had borrowed it minutes before. Waiting until the lobby cleared, he slipped out of the manor unseen and quickly hopped upon his rented motorcycle.\n\nThree hours later, he called the Lambeth Palace head of security from a phone at Heathrow Airport.\n\n\"Judkins, it's Bannister.\"\n\n\"Bannister,\" the security man replied with an acid tongue. \"I've been waiting for you to report. You've tracked this Goodyear woman?\"\n\n\"Yes. She and the American have been down at Broome Park digging up Kitchener documents. Still there, as a matter of fact.\"\n\n\"Are they going to prove problematic?\"\n\n\"Well, they are a bit suspicious and have certainly been barking up the right tree.\"\n\n\"But do they have anything damaging to us?\" the security man asked impatiently.\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Bannister replied, patting his chest pocket with a wide grin. \"They have nothing. Nothing at all.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "The sealed pantry was as black as a cave. Summer placed a hand on the shelf for balance as she waited a moment for her eyes to adjust to the sudden darkness. But without a source of light, there was nothing to see. She remembered her cell phone and pulled it out of her pocket, the device emitting a dull blue glow.\n\n\"No phone signal down here, I'm afraid, but at least we've got a night-light,\" she said.\n\nUsing the cell phone as a flashlight, she stepped to the door, pushing it first with her shoulder, then applying a few firm kicks with the heel of her foot. The thick door didn't budge at all, and she knew that even a sumo wrestler wouldn't have been able to snap off the heavy dead bolt. She eased back over to Julie, flashing the phone toward her to find a scared look on her face.\n\n\"I don't like this one bit,\" Julie said in a shaky voice. \"I think I want to scream.\"\n\n\"You know, Julie, that's a good idea. Why don't we?\"\n\nSummer tilted her head toward the ceiling and let out a loud scream. Julie immediately joined in, yelling repeatedly for help.\n\nMuffled by the thick pantry door, the screams registered only faintly upstairs. The few guests who detected the faraway cries assumed it was somebody with an iPod cranked too high. The sound didn't register at all in Aldrich's aged ears.\n\nThe women took a short break, then tried yelling again. As more minutes ticked by without a response, they resigned themselves to the fact that they couldn't be heard. The screaming had served as a release, though, helping to expel the anxiety of their imprisonment. Julie, in particular, seemed to regain the composure that she had been close to losing.\n\n\"I guess we might as well get comfortable if we're going to be in here awhile,\" she said, pulling a large box onto the floor and using it as a chair. \"Do you think he'll actually call Aldrich?\" she asked somberly.\n\n\"I suspect so,\" Summer replied. \"He didn't act like a trained killer, nor seem psychotic to me.\" Deep down, she wasn't so certain.\n\n\"Personally, I'd rather not wait for Aldrich,\" she added. \"Maybe there's something in one of these boxes that can help us get out of here.\"\n\nUnder the dim glow of her cell phone, she began cracking open some of the other boxes. But it became readily apparent that there was nothing but papers, clothes, and a few odd personal belongings packed away in the former pantry. Soon growing discouraged, she pulled a box down alongside Julie and took a seat.\n\n\"It would seem we have little more than a nice wardrobe to help us escape.\"\n\n\"Well, at least we have something to wear in case we get cold,\" Julie said. \"Now, if only we had something to eat.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid the pantry is bare in regards to food,\" Summer replied. Then she thought for a moment, contemplating her own words. \"Aldrich said that this was built as a secondary pantry, didn't he?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Julie confirmed. \"And thank goodness for the rat-proofing.\"\n\n\"Julie, do you know where the main kitchen is located in the manor?\"\n\nThe researcher thought for a moment. \"I've never set foot in it, but it's located off the main dining hall, along the west side of the residence.\"\n\nSummer visualized the orientation of the estate. \"We're on the west side, aren't we?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"So the kitchen would be located roughly above us?\"\n\n\"Yes, that would be right. What are you driving at?\"\n\nSummer rose to her feet and circled the room, studying the walls behind the storage boxes with her cell-phone light. She slowly made her way to the rear of the pantry, examining a bank of four wooden cabinet doors now visible behind a stack of boxes. She passed the phone to Julie to hold for her.\n\n\"If you were Kitchener's chef and you needed a sack of flour from the pantry, would you go lugging it through the house?\" she asked, moving the stack of boxes aside. Then she reached up to the top two cabinet doors and tried to open them. But they were sealed shut.\n\n\"They're faux doors,\" Julie said, holding up the light while Summer dug her nails under the doors' edges to no avail. \"Try the bottom doors.\"\n\nJulie shoved a box on the floor aside so that Summer could try the lower doors. Tugging at the edges, she was surprised when both doors flew open effortlessly. Behind them appeared to be an empty black compartment.\n\n\"Move the light in,\" Summer requested.\n\nJulie shoved the cell phone past the doors, illuminating a large tray at the base of the compartment that was affixed to a rear rack. A pulley wheel was visible to one side with a tight loop of rope around it that then ascended past the upper cabinet. Julie turned the cell light upward, revealing a long vertical shaft.\n\n\"It's a dumbwaiter,\" Julie said. \"Why, of course. How did you know?\"\n\nSummer shrugged her shoulders. \"A lifelong aversion to doing things the hard way, I suppose.\"\n\nShe surveyed the shelf for a moment. \"It's a little tight, but I think it will suffice as an elevator. I'm afraid I'm going to have to borrow that light back.\"\n\n\"You can't go up that thing,\" Julie said. \"You'll break your neck.\"\n\n\"No worries. I think I can just fit.\"\n\nSummer took the cell phone and corkscrewed her long legs into the opening, then wormed the rest of her body in until she sat cross-legged on the tray. A pair of frayed ropes dangled beside the pulley used to hoist the tray, but she dared not test her weight on them. Placing the phone in her lap, she instead surveyed a thin link of bicycle chain that spooled around the actual pulley. She then leaned her head back into the pantry.\n\n\"Wish me luck. Hopefully I'll meet you at the front door in five minutes,\" she told Julie.\n\n\"Do be careful.\"\n\nSummer grabbed the chain with both hands and pulled down hard. The tray immediately rose off its base, and Summer rose up into the chute. Julie quickly grabbed a boxful of clothes and emptied it on the base as a cushion, should Summer lose her grip and fall.\n\nBut the athletic young oceanographer didn't fall. Summer was able to pull herself up ten feet before her hands and arm muscles began to weaken. She then found she could tilt the tray forward and wedge her feet against one side of the chute while pressing her back against the opposite side. Supporting her weight in this manner, she could temporarily free her hands from the biting edge of the pulley chain. Resting a few minutes, she then pulled herself up several more feet before pausing again.\n\nShe spotted the upper pulley just a few feet above her head and made one more effort to rise to the top. With her hands and arms aching, she muscled herself even with the pulley, scrunching her head beneath the top of the chute. The back side of a cabinet door appeared in front of her, and she quickly pushed on it with her feet. But the door didn't budge.\n\nShe could feel her arms weakening as she pushed with her feet again, this time detecting a hairline movement to the door. She was positioned too high and close to the pulley to wedge herself against the chute for relief and she could feel her hold on the chain waning. Realizing she was seconds from losing her grip, she pushed herself backward as far as she could, then rocketed forward, jamming her feet against the door with all her might.\n\nShe heard a horrendous crash as the cabinet door burst open, sending a wave of bright light into the cavernous chute. Summer was momentarily blinded by the sudden change in light as she slid through the door, letting go of the chain as her momentum carried her across a smoothly polished surface.\n\nHer vision clearing, she found herself lying on a large teak buffet. It sat in a small but brightly lit lounge that had been constructed from an original section of the manor's kitchen. Summer was startled to see a half dozen elderly couples seated around the room having tea. They all silently stared at her as if she was an alien from Ursa Minor.\n\nSlowly sliding off the buffet and onto her feet, she surveyed the source of the loud crash. Scattered about the floor were spoons, teacups, and saucers from a large formal tea set that had been sent flying when she kicked open the door.\n\nSummer ruefully brushed herself off, hiding her grease-stained hands as she smiled at the collected gawkers.\n\n\"I do hate to miss teatime,\" she said apologetically, then quickly scurried from the room.\n\nShe ran into Aldrich in the hall as he rushed toward the commotion and redirected him to help Julie. Together, they dashed down the stairs and unlocked the pantry door. A relieved Julie smiled at the sight of Summer.\n\n\"I heard a terrible crash. Is everything all right?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Summer grinned, \"but I might owe Aldrich a new tea set.\"\n\n\"Poppycock!\" the old man grunted. \"Now, tell me again who locked you in here.\"\n\nJulie described Bannister and his motorcycle attire.\n\n\"Sounds like that fellow Baker,\" Aldrich said. \"Checked out this morning.\"\n\n\"What do you know of him?\" Summer asked.\n\n\"Not much, I'm afraid. Said he was a writer living in London who was down for a golf holiday. But I vaguely remember him visiting before, must be four or five years ago. I recall letting him into the archives. He's quite knowledgeable about the Earl. In fact, he was the one who also inquired about Emily.\"\n\nJulie and Summer looked at each other knowingly, then Summer stepped back into the pantry.\n\n\"Would you like me to call the police?\" Aldrich asked.\n\nJulie thought for a moment. \"No, I don't suppose that will be necessary. He has what he came looking for, so I don't think he'll be bothering us again. Besides, I'm sure he gave you a phony name and address in London.\"\n\n\"He's going to get more than a piece of my mind if he shows up here again,\" Aldrich huffed. \"You poor dears. Please, come upstairs and have some tea.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Aldrich. We'll be right along.\"\n\nAs Aldrich strutted off, Julie sat down on a Queen Anne bench beside some covered furniture and breathed heavily. Summer exited the pantry a second later, noting a paleness in Julie's face.\n\n\"You all right?\" Summer asked.\n\n\"Yes. Didn't want to admit it, but I am a bit claustrophobic. I don't care to experience that feeling again anytime soon.\"\n\nSummer turned and closed the heavy door behind her.\n\n\"No need for either of us to set foot in there again,\" she said. \"Where's Aldrich?\"\n\n\"He went upstairs to make us some tea.\"\n\n\"I hope he can find some cups.\"\n\nJulie shook her head with a disappointed grimace.\n\n\"I can't believe it. We had the clue to Kitchener's death right in our hands and it was plucked away by that thief before we had the chance to figure out what it all meant.\"\n\n\"Don't look so depressed. All is not lost,\" Summer replied consolingly.\n\n\"But we have so little left to go on. We'll probably never find out the true meaning of the Manifest.\"\n\n\"To quote Aldrich, poppycock,\" Summer replied. \"We've still got Sally,\" she added, holding up the doll.\n\n\"What good is that?\"\n\n\"Well, our friend may have stolen the left leg, but we've still got the right.\"\n\nShe held the flayed doll toward Julie, yanking away a small piece of cotton stuffing. Peering inside, the historian could make out the tip of yet another scroll of paper, this one in the right leg.\n\nShe said nothing, her eyes ablaze, as Summer gently worked the object free from the doll's interior. As Summer laid it on the bench and carefully unrolled it, they could both see that it was not a sheet of parchment or papyrus like the other scroll. Instead, it was simply a typewritten letter, with the heading \"University of Cambridge Archaeology Department\" emblazoned across the top."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "DIVERS ARE STILL DOWN,\" GUNN ANNOUNCED.\n\nStanding on the bridge of the Aegean Explorer, he peered through a pair of binoculars at an empty Zodiac tied to a drop line that ran down to the Ottoman shipwreck. Every few seconds, he spotted a dual set of air bubbles breaking the surface a few feet from the buoyed line. Gunn swung the glasses past the Zodiac, refocusing the lenses on the large blue Italian yacht that was stationed close by. He noted curiously that its bow was facing him, which put the yacht perpendicular to the current. A partial glimpse of the rear deck showed some men scurrying about in activity, but Gunn's view was quickly obscured by the vessel's superstructure.\n\n\"Our nosy friend is still perusing the neighborhood,\" he said.\n\n\"The Sultana?\" Pitt said, having earlier deciphered the Italian yacht's name.\n\n\"Yes. Looks like she's crept a little closer to the wreck site.\"\n\nPitt looked up from the chart table, where he was examining some documents.\n\n\"He must be rather hard up for entertainment.\"\n\n\"I can't figure out what he's up to,\" Gunn said, setting down the binoculars. \"He's got his side thrusters on, positioning himself crossways to the current.\"\n\n\"Why don't you call him on the radio and ask him?\"\n\n\"The captain tried a number of friendly calls last night. Couldn't even get a response.\"\n\nGunn stepped over and took a seat at the table opposite Pitt. Lying on the table were two tiny ceramic canisters that had been recovered from the wreck site. Pitt was comparing the items with an archaeological assessment of a merchant ship excavated by famed underwater archaeologist George Bass.\n\n\"Any luck dating these?\" Gunn asked, picking up one of the canisters and eyeing it closely.\n\n\"They're very similar to some pottery found on a merchant ship that sank near Yassi Ada in the fourth century,\" Pitt said, showing Gunn a photograph from the report.\n\n\"So Al's Roman crown isn't a phony?\"\n\n\"No, it would appear legitimate. We've got an Ottoman-era wreck that for some reason is carrying Roman artifacts.\"\n\n\"A nice find any way you slice it,\" Gunn said. \"I wonder where the items originated?\"\n\n\"Dr. Zeibig is assessing some grain samples that were embedded in one of the potsherds, which may indicate the vessel's point of origin. Of course, if you'd have let us uncover the rest of your monolith, we might already have an answer.\"\n\n\"Oh no you don't,\" Gunn protested. \"That's my find, and Rod said I could recover it with him on our next dive. You just keep Al away from it. Which reminds me,\" he said, looking at his watch. \"Iverson and Tang should be back up anytime now.\"\n\n\"Then I better go rouse Al,\" Pitt said, rising from the table. \"We're scheduled for the next dive.\"\n\n\"I think I saw him napping next to his new toy,\" Gunn said.\n\n\"Yes, he's been anxious to test-dive the Bullet.\"\n\nAs Pitt made his way across the bridge, Gunn gave one last warning.\n\n\"Now, remember. You two keep your hands off my monolith,\" he cried, waving a finger at Pitt as he departed.\n\nPitt retrieved a dive bag from his cabin, then stepped to the rear deck of the ship. In the shadow of a white, aerodynamically shaped submersible, he found Giordino napping on a rolled-up wet suit. Pitt's approaching presence was enough to wake Giordino, and he cocked open a lazy eyelid.\n\n\"Time for another trip to my soggy royal yacht?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes, King Al. We've been assigned to examine grid C-2, which appears to be a ballast mound.\"\n\n\"Ballast? How am I to add to my jewelry collection from the ballast mound?\" Sitting up, he began slipping into his wet suit while Pitt unzipped his dive bag and followed suit. A few minutes later, Gunn came rushing up with a concerned look on his face.\n\n\"Dirk, the divers were due up ten minutes ago, but they've yet to surface.\"\n\n\"They might be taking a cautious decompression stop,\" Giordino suggested.\n\nPitt gazed toward the empty Zodiac moored a short distance away. Iverson and Tang, the two men in the water, were both environmental scientists who Pitt knew to be experienced divers.\n\n\"We'll take the chase boat and have a look,\" Pitt said. \"Give us a hand, Rudi.\"\n\nGunn helped lower a small rigid inflatable that was barely big enough to hold both men and their dive gear. Pitt quickly strapped on his tank, mask, and fins as Giordino started the outboard motor and drove them at full throttle toward the Zodiac. There was no sign of the two divers when they pulled alongside the larger inflatable boat.\n\nThe chase boat was still slowing when Pitt rolled over the side and into the water. He quickly swam over to the drop line, then descended alongside the rope. He expected to find the two men hanging on to the line ten or twenty feet beneath the surface in decompression, but they were nowhere to be seen. Pitt cleared his ears as he approached the fifty-foot mark, then kicked harder, pushing to reach the bottom. In the depths below, he could faintly make out the yellow aluminum excavation grid pegged into the sandy bottom. He flicked on an underwater flashlight as he approached the base of the drop line, where the visibility dimmed to a greenish murk.\n\nHe briefly searched the perimeter around the anchored line, then swam over the grid, following the length of the shipwreck. He hesitated as he crossed over the fourth grid box, noting that there was a large indentation in the sand where Gunn's beloved stone monolith had previously rested. Scanning ahead, he spotted a blue object near the ballast pile. Thrusting his fins sharply, he quickly kicked over to the prone figure of one of the divers.\n\nThe body was wedged beneath the aluminum grid, with a number of ballast stones rolled onto the chest. A glance into the wide unblinking eyes behind the mask told Pitt that the NUMA scientist named Iverson was quite dead. Pitt searched the man's equipment and noticed he seemed to be missing his regulator. A few yards away, Pitt spotted it on the seabed, a clean cut in the line indicating that it had been severed.\n\nPitt noticed a light above him and was thankful to make out the stout figure of Giordino descending upon him. Approaching within a few feet, Giordino motioned toward the body of Iverson. Pitt responded by shaking his head, then held up the severed regulator, showing where it had been cut. Giordino nodded, then pointed toward the stern of the wreck, and Pitt joined him in swimming aft.\n\nThey found the body of Tang drifting above the seafloor with a finned foot caught in the grid holding him anchored. He had drowned like Iverson, though he appeared to have flailed more wildly in his last moments of life. His mask, weight belt, and one fin had been torn away, and his severed regulator was visible in the nearby sand. Pitt drew his flashlight to the dead man's face, revealing a large purple welt on the right cheekbone. The scientist had probably seen what happened to Iverson and tried to defend himself, Pitt thought. Only the assailants had been too powerful or too many. Pitt turned the light to the deep around them, but the waters were empty. The attackers had already returned to the Italian yacht.\n\nGrabbing hold of Tang's buoyancy compensator, he gave the corpse a tug upward as Giordino motioned that he would retrieve Iverson's body. Pitt ascended slowly with his dead companion, kicking toward the drop line as he rose. Nearing the surface, he detected the low rumble of engines come to life. As the sound increased in intensity, he rightly figured that it was the yacht, throttling up, as it proceeded to flee the scene.\n\nWhile Pitt's hunch was correct, he never envisaged the yacht's path. Rising to the surface, he realized too late that the engines' roar had grown significantly louder and that a surface shadow was rapidly approaching. He broke the water alongside the Zodiac and chase boat, looking up to see the imposing hull of the yacht screaming toward him at high speed just twenty feet away. The large blue hull slapped against the surface while a fountain of white water sprayed from its churning propellers off the stern.\n\nIn an instant, the yacht burst upon the two small boats, instantly crushing the Zodiac with its battering hull and dicing propellers while batting the small chase boat across the waves like an insect. The demolished Zodiac quickly sank to the bottom as the yacht broke toward the horizon, surging like a bolt of lightning.\n\nIn the yacht's wake, the drop-line buoy slowly found its way back to the surface after being pummeled to the depths. Cut free from its line, it bobbed gently amid a foaming boil of sea that was colored crimson with human blood."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "Giordino saw the shadow of the yacht pass overhead and surfaced a few yards from the buoy, the body of Iverson still in tow. He manually inflated the dead man's buoyancy compensator as he watched the mangled remains of the Zodiac sink nearby. In the distance, he spotted the partially deflated chase boat drifting rapidly away with the aid of a light breeze. He quickly scanned the waters around him but saw no sign of Pitt. It was then that he noticed a dark spot in the water near the drifting buoy.\n\nFearing the worst, he let go of Iverson and swam toward the buoy, intending to submerge and search for Pitt underwater. Reaching the buoy, he felt his stomach drop when he realized the darkened water nearby was created by human blood that pooled bright red. The center of the pool was suddenly disrupted by the rising presence of a wet suit-clad body. The body floated facedown, its head and extremities submerged, concealing its identity. The torso clearly displayed the source of the blood in the water. Sliced and mangled like it had been run over with a lawnmower, the body's back side was a gruesome mix of shredded flesh and neoprene, mutilated by the yacht's churning propellers.\n\nGiordino fought back his revulsion and swam hurriedly to the body. Dreading what he would find, he gently grabbed the torso and eased the head out of the water.\n\nIt wasn't Pitt.\n\nHe nearly jumped out of his wet suit when he immediately felt a firm tap on his shoulder. Spinning around, he came face-to-face with Pitt, who had surfaced right behind him. Giordino noticed a faint streak of white paint on Pitt's hood and shoulder.\n\nSpitting out his regulator, Giordino asked, \"You okay?\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm fine,\" Pitt replied, though Giordino could see a tint of anger in his friend's eyes.\n\n\"You and Tang were in the way of that freight train?\" Giordino asked.\n\nPitt nodded. \"Tang saved my life.\"\n\nWhen he'd surfaced in the path of the speeding yacht, Pitt had just seconds to react. He quickly tucked an arm through Tang's buoyancy compensator and pulled the dead man to his chest, then leaned back and attempted to submerge. By then, the yacht was already upon them, slapping down hard onto Tang, and Pitt beneath him. Together, they were pummeled beneath the hull until they passed the wildly spinning propellers. Pitt had just been able to keep Tang above him, and the dead man's body bore the brunt of the slicing blades.\n\nPitt felt revulsion and anger at having to use the scientist's body as a human shield, but he knew that he would have otherwise been cut to ribbons.\n\n\"They killed him twice today,\" Giordino said somberly.\n\n\"They . . .\" Pitt muttered, gazing toward the receding profile of the yacht racing toward the horizon. His mind was already churning over the question of who would commit murder over an old shipwreck, and why?\n\n\"We better get him out of here before every shark in the Mediterranean shows up for lunch,\" Giordino said, grabbing hold of Tang's arm.\n\nThe Aegean Explorer had already weighed anchor and was creeping up to the men in the water. A group of deckhands lowered a crane and quickly hoisted the dead men aboard, then helped pull up Giordino and Pitt. The ship's captain and doctor scurried to the scene, followed closely by Gunn. The NUMA Deputy Director had a dazed look about him as he held an ice pack to his head.\n\n\"They both died in the water,\" Pitt said as the doctor kneeled down and quickly examined each man. \"Drowned.\"\n\n\"Both accidental?\" the captain asked.\n\n\"No,\" Pitt said as he stripped off his wet suit. He pointed to a severed air hose extending from Iverson's dive tank.\n\n\"Somebody cut their air lines.\"\n\n\"The same people that tried to iron us with the bottom of their rich Italian hull,\" Giordino added.\n\n\"I knew they were lying when they came aboard,\" Captain Kenfield said, shaking his head. \"But I certainly didn't suspect they would resort to murder.\"\n\nPitt noticed a lump on Gunn's head that he was rubbing with the ice pack.\n\n\"What happened to you?\"\n\nGunn grimaced as he lowered the pack.\n\n\"While you were down, the yacht sent over a small launch filled with armed thugs. Claimed they were with the Turkish Ministry of Culture.\"\n\n\"Policing the high seas in a luxury yacht?\" Giordino asked skeptically.\n\n\"I asked for their identification, but was shown the stock of a rifle instead,\" Gunn said, repositioning the ice pack to the knot on his head.\n\n\"They told us in no uncertain terms that we had no authority to be working on a shipwreck of the Ottoman Empire,\" the captain said.\n\n\"Interesting, that they knew what the wreck was,\" Giordino noted.\n\n\"What else did they want?\" Pitt asked.\n\n\"They demanded all of the artifacts that we had removed from the wreck,\" Kenfield said. \"I told them to get off my ship, but that didn't go over too well. They marched Rudi and me onto the bridge wing and threatened to kill us. The crew had no choice but to acquiesce.\"\n\n\"Did they take everything?\" Giordino asked.\n\nGunn nodded. \"They cleared out the lab, then beat it back to their yacht just before you guys surfaced.\"\n\n\"But not before ordering us off the site and threatening us to stay off the radio,\" Kenfield added.\n\n\"I hate to tell you they didn't just take all our artifacts, Rudi,\" Pitt said. \"They also dug up your monolith from the wreck site.\"\n\n\"That's the least of our losses,\" he said grimly. \"They've got Zeibig.\"\n\nThe captain nodded. \"They asked who was in charge of the wreck excavation. Dr. Zeibig happened to be in the lab, and they forced him to go with them.\"\n\n\"After what they did to Iverson and Tang, we know they won't hesitate to kill him, too,\" Giordino said quietly.\n\n\"Have you tried contacting anyone yet?\" Pitt asked the captain.\n\n\"I just got off the satellite phone with the Turkish Ministry of Culture. They confirmed that they possess no yachts and have no policing resources assigned to this region. I also contacted the Turkish Coast Guard. Unfortunately, they don't have any vessels in the immediate area, either. They have directed us to their base at Izmir to file a report.\"\n\n\"In the meantime, the bad guys are able to disappear completely with Zeibig,\" Pitt said.\n\n\"I'm afraid there isn't much else we can do,\" the captain said. \"That yacht is at least twice as fast as the Aegean Explorer. There's no way we could try pursuing them with any hopes of catching up. And once in port, we can alert our own government authorities as well.\"\n\nGiordino loudly cleared his throat as he stepped forward. \"I know something that could keep pace with that yacht.\"\n\nHe turned toward Pitt and gave him a confident wink.\n\n\"You sure she's ready?\" Pitt asked.\n\n\"She's as ready,\" Giordino said, \"as a hungry alligator in a duck pond.\"\n\nPreviously prepared for launch, it took only a few minutes to check that all systems were operational before Giordino's new submersible was lowered over the side. Seated at side-by-side controls, Giordino performed a quick safety check while Pitt radioed the bridge of the Aegean Explorer.\n\n\"Explorer, please give me a current fix on our target,\" he asked.\n\n\"Radar shows she's holding on a steady course of zero-one-two degrees,\" replied the voice of Rudi Gunn. \"She's now approximately ten miles north of us.\"\n\n\"Roger, Explorer. Please follow at speed while we go try to catch the fox. Bullet out.\"\n\nPitt was wary of the notion of playing chase in a submersible. Normally reliant on battery power for propulsion, research submersibles were historically slow, plodding vehicles designed for limited range. But the Bullet had broken the rules of submersible development.\n\nNamed for the vessel's speed rather than shape, the Bullet was based on a design by Marion Hyper-Subs. The NUMA prototype mated a steel submersible cabin to a high-performance powerboat hull. As a submersible, the Bullet was capable of diving to depths of a thousand feet. On the surface, separate propulsion motors in a pressurized engine compartment along with a 525-gallon fuel tank allowed the Bullet to travel long distances at high speed. The design permitted the sub to reach remote dive sites without the need for an accompanying support vessel.\n\n\"Ready to engage surface drive,\" Giordino announced, then reached over and pressed the starter buttons for a pair of turbocharged diesel engines.\n\nA deep rumble echoed behind them as the twin 500-horsepower motors churned to life. Giordino visually checked several gauges on the instrument panel, then turned to Pitt.\n\n\"We're ready to roll.\"\n\n\"Let's see what she can do,\" Pitt replied, easing back the throttle controls.\n\nThey were immediately pushed back into their seats as the powerful diesels shoved the submersible ahead. In just a few seconds, the vessel was riding high on its sleek white hull, racing across the waves. Pitt felt the sub pitch and roll through the choppy seas, but as he gained a feel for its stability he gently added more throttle. With the control cabin perched near the forward edge of the vessel, he felt like they were flying over the water.\n\n\"Thirty-four knots,\" he said, eyeing a navigation screen readout. \"Not too shabby.\"\n\nGiordino nodded with a wide smile. \"I figure she can do well over forty on a flat sea.\"\n\nThey blasted north across the Aegean Sea, bounding for nearly twenty minutes before they spotted a speck on the horizon. They pursued the yacht for another hour, drawing slowly closer as they passed north of the Dardanelles, weaving around a pair of large oil tankers sailing from the Black Sea. The large Turkish island of Gokceada soon loomed before them, and the yacht altered course to the east of the island.\n\nPitt followed on a zigzag course so as not to appear to be directly following the yacht, then eased back on the throttles when they approached within a few miles. The yacht slowly turned away from Gokceada and angled toward the Turkish mainland, hugging close to the coastline as it gradually reduced speed. Pitt turned and followed on a delayed parallel tack, holding well out to sea while staying within visible range of the luxury boat. Skimming low in the water, from a distance the Bullet appeared to be just a small pleasure craft out for an afternoon cruise.\n\nThe yacht traveled several more miles up the Turkish west coast, then suddenly slowed and veered into a semiprotected cove. As they sped past offshore, Pitt and Giordino could make out a few buildings and a dock with a small freighter moored alongside. Pitt held their course until they were a mile or two north of the cove and well out of sight, before dropping his own throttle to an idle.\n\n\"Seems like we've got two choices,\" Giordino said. \"We can put ashore somewhere and make for the cove on foot. Or we can wait until dark and take the Bullet into the cove through the basement.\"\n\nPitt eyed the craggy coastline a half mile away.\n\n\"I'm not sure there are a whole lot of good spots to run aground around here,\" he said. \"Plus, if Zeibig or anyone else should get injured, hiking back out could be problematic.\"\n\n\"Agreed. Then into the cove it is.\"\n\nPitt glanced at his orange-faced Doxa dive watch. \"Dusk will be here in about an hour. We can start heading in then.\"\n\nThe hour passed quickly. Pitt radioed the Aegean Explorer with their position and instructed Rudi to bring the research vessel to a holding spot ten miles south of the cove. Giordino used the time to retrieve a digital marine chart of the coastal area and program a submerged route into the center of the cove. Once underwater, an autopilot system would drive the submersible to the specified location using computer-enhanced dead reckoning.\n\nAs darkness approached, Pitt guided the Bullet to within a half mile of the cove entrance, then shut off the surface diesels. Giordino sealed and pressurized the engine compartment, then opened a pair of hull gates that allowed water to be pumped into the ballast chambers. The bow chamber flooded first, and the submarine was soon diving beneath the surface.\n\nPitt deployed a set of dive fins, then engaged the electric thrusters for propulsion. He fought the urge to turn on the vessel's exterior floodlights as the watery world beyond the acrylic bubble faded to black. He eased the sub forward at low speed until Giordino told him to release the controls.\n\n\"The autopilot will do the driving from here,\" he said.\n\n\"You sure that thing won't impale us on a submerged rock or obstruction?\" Pitt asked.\n\n\"We're equipped with high-frequency sonar that reads out a hundred meters in front of us. The autopilot will make course corrections for minor obstacles or give us a warning if something substantial is blocking our course.\"\n\n\"Kind of takes the fun out of flying blind,\" Pitt remarked.\n\nWhile Pitt had no aversion to computers, he was old-school when it came to piloting. He could never be completely comfortable letting a computer operate the controls. There was a nuanced feel to the pilot's controls, both in the air and underwater, which even the best computers could not sense. Or so he told himself. With his hands free, he carefully noted their progress, standing ready to take the controls at a moment's notice.\n\nThe Bullet submerged to a depth of thirty feet, then automatically engaged its electronic thrusters. The submersible moved slowly along its programmed path, compensating for a light current as it eased into the entrance of the cove. Giordino noted that the sonar screen remained clear as they crept to the cove's center. A light flashed on the monitor, and the electric motors ceased whirring as they reached their designated end point.\n\n\"That concludes the automated portion of the program,\" Giordino announced.\n\nPitt's hands were already on the controls.\n\n\"Let's go see if we can find a parking space,\" he replied.\n\nPurging the ballast chambers in tiny increments, they slowly ascended until just the top few inches of the cabin's acrylic bubble broke the surface. Overhead, they could see that the sky was in its last vestiges of twilight while the water around them appeared black. Giordino shut off all interior lights and unnecessary display panels, then goosed the ballast tanks a final time to elevate them a few more inches.\n\nRising out of their seats, the two men gazed at the shoreline. They could see that the circular cove was populated on the northern shoreline by only three buildings. The structures fronted a wooden pier that stretched perpendicular to shore. The blue Italian yacht was clearly visible, docked to the right side of the pier behind a small workboat. On the opposite side of the pier was a large rusty freighter. A wheeled crane on the pier was busy loading cargo onto the freighter under the blaze of some fixed overhead lights.\n\n\"You think Rod is still aboard the yacht?\" Giordino asked.\n\n\"I think we should assume so, for starters. What do you say we double-park alongside her and take a look? They shouldn't be expecting us.\"\n\n\"I say surprise is a good thing. Let's move.\"\n\nPitt took a course bearing, then submerged the Bullet and crept toward the dockyard. Giordino activated the sonar system, helping guide them to within a few yards of the yacht. Easing gently to the surface again, they arose in its shadow just off its port beam. Pitt started to pull alongside the yacht when he noticed a commotion on the stern deck.\n\nA trio of armed men came bursting from the interior and turned toward the dock. A second later, a fourth man came into view, being pushed across the deck by the others.\n\n\"It's Zeibig,\" Pitt remarked, catching a brief glimpse of the scientist's face.\n\nFrom their low position in the water, they could just barely see Zeibig, who had his hands tied behind his back. Two of the gunmen roughly hoisted him up onto the dock, then prodded him toward shore. Pitt noticed one of the gunmen return to the boat and take up a casual position on the stern.\n\n\"Scratch one yacht,\" Pitt said quietly. \"I think it's time to go invisible.\"\n\nGiordino had already opened the ballast chambers, and the Bullet quickly vanished into the inky depths. They reconnoitered the cove once more, then crept in and surfaced just behind the stern of the freighter, tucking in right against its transom. It was an optimally concealed spot, obscured from shore by the freighter while mostly hidden from the pier by an adjacent stack of fuel drums. Giordino quietly climbed out and attached a mooring line to the pier, Pitt shutting down the power systems and joining him.\n\n\"Won't be a pretty scene if that big boy fires up his engines,\" Giordino said, eyeing the submersible floating just above the freighter's propellers.\n\n\"At least we've got his license plate number,\" Pitt replied, looking up at the ship's stern. In broad white letters was painted the ship's name, Osmanli Yildiz, which meant \"Ottoman Star.\"\n\nThe two men crept along the pier until they reached the shadow of a large generator sitting across from the freighter's forward hold. Ahead of them was a handful of dockworkers occupied with loading large wooden crates into the freighter with the high crane. The blue yacht, with its armed gunman still pacing the deck, was moored just a few feet in front of it. Giordino gazed ruefully up at the bright overhead lights that illuminated the path ahead.\n\n\"I'm not so sure it's going to be easy to pass Go and collect our two hundred dollars from here,\" he said.\n\nPitt nodded, peering around the generator to survey the dockyard. He could see a small two-story stone building onshore flanked by a pair of prefabricated warehouses. The interior of the right-hand warehouse was brightly illuminated, highlighting a pair of forklifts that hauled crates out of an open bay door for the crane to transfer. In contrast, the left-hand warehouse appeared dark, with no visible activity around it.\n\nPitt turned his attention to the stone building in the center. A bright porch light illuminated its front facade, clearly revealing a gunman standing guard outside the front door.\n\n\"The stone building in the middle,\" he whispered to Giordino. \"That's where Zeibig has to be.\"\n\nHe peered again, spotting the headlights of a car that was approaching from the surrounding hillside. The vehicle bounded down a steep gravel road, then turned onto the dock and pulled up in front of the stone building. Pitt was surprised to recognize the car as a late-model Jaguar sedan. A well-dressed man and woman climbed out of the car and entered the building.\n\n\"I think we need to make our play pretty quickly,\" Pitt whispered.\n\n\"Any thoughts on how to get off this pier?\" Giordino asked, sitting perched on the side of a ladder tilted against the generator.\n\nPitt looked around, then gazed at Giordino for a moment, a small grin spreading across his face.\n\n\"Al,\" he said, \"I think you're sitting on it.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "Nobody paid any attention to the two men dressed in faded turquoise jumpsuits walking down the pier with their heads hanging down and carrying an aluminum ladder. They were obviously a pair of crewmen from the freighter returning the borrowed equipment to shore. Only they were members of the crew that nobody had ever seen before.\n\nThe men working on the dock were busy securing a crate marked \"Textiles\" to the crane and paid no heed as Pitt and Giordino passed by. Pitt had noticed the guard on the yacht glance at them momentarily before turning away.\n\n\"Which way do we go, boss?\" Giordino asked as he stepped off the pier, holding the front end of the ladder.\n\nThe illuminated warehouse was nearly in front of them, its open bay door, just a few yards to their right.\n\n\"I say we avoid the crowds and go left,\" Pitt replied. \"Let's shoot for the other warehouse.\"\n\nThey turned and walked along the waterfront, passing the narrow stone building. Pitt guessed it had originally been built as a fisherman's house but now served as an administrative office for the dock facility. Unlike the gunman on the yacht, the man guarding the front door eyed them suspiciously as they passed by the courtyard in front of the house. Giordino attempted to trivialize their presence by casually whistling \"Yankee Doodle Dandy\" as they passed, figuring the Turkish gunman would be unfamiliar with the tune.\n\nThey soon reached the second warehouse, a darkened building with its large waterfront drop-down door sealed shut. Giordino tried the handle on a small entry door alongside and found it unlocked. Without hesitating, he led Pitt inside, where they deposited the ladder against a work desk illuminated by a flickering overhead light. The rest of the building's interior was empty, save for some dusty crates in the corner and a large sealed container near the rear loading dock.\n\n\"That was easy enough,\" Pitt said, \"but I don't think waltzing in the front door of the building next door looks as promising.\"\n\n\"No, that guard watched us like a hawk. Maybe there's a back door?\"\n\nPitt nodded. \"Let's go see.\"\n\nPicking up a wooden mallet he noticed lying on the desk, he walked across the warehouse with Giordino. Adjacent to the loading dock was a small entry door, which they slipped through. They quietly made their way to the back side of the stone building only to find it had no rear or side doors. Pitt approached one of the lower-level windows and tried to peek in, but the blinds had been tightly drawn. He stepped away and studied the second-floor windows, then tiptoed back to the warehouse to confer with Giordino.\n\n\"Looks like we're back to the front door,\" Giordino said.\n\n\"Actually, I was thinking of trying an upstairs entry,\" Pitt replied.\n\n\"Upstairs?\"\n\nPitt motioned toward the ladder. \"Might as well put that thing to use. The windows were dark upstairs, but they didn't appear to have the blinds drawn. If you can create a distraction, I could climb up and enter through one of the windows. We can try to surprise them from above.\"\n\n\"Like I said, surprise is a good thing. I'll go get the ladder while you work on that distraction.\"\n\nAs Giordino padded across the warehouse, Pitt stuck his head out the back door and searched for a means to create a diversion. An option appeared in the form of a flatbed truck parked behind the opposite warehouse. He ducked back inside as Giordino approached with the ladder, but then he suddenly looked past him curiously.\n\n\"What's up?\" Giordino asked.\n\n\"Look at this,\" Pitt said, stepping closer to the steel shipping container sitting nearby.\n\nIt was painted in a desert-khaki-camouflage scheme, but it was some black-stenciled lettering that had caught Pitt's attention. Several points around the container were marked, in English, \"Danger--High Explosives.\" Beneath the warning was stenciled \"Department of the U.S. Army.\"\n\n\"What the heck would a container of Army explosives be doing here?\" Giordino asked.\n\n\"Search me. But I'd be willing to bet the Army doesn't know about it.\"\n\nPitt walked to the front of the container and slid across the dead bolt, then swung open the heavy steel door. Inside were dozens of small wooden crates with similar warnings stenciled on their sides, each tightly secured to metal shelves. Near the doorway, one of the crates had been pried open. Inside were several small plastic containers the size of bricks.\n\nPitt pulled one of the containers out and peeled off the plastic lid. Inside was a small rectangular block of a compressed clear powdery substance.\n\n\"Plastic explosives?\" Giordino asked.\n\n\"It doesn't look like C-4, but it must be something similar to it. There's enough here to blow this warehouse to the moon and back.\"\n\n\"You think that stuff might be helpful in creating a distraction?\" Giordino asked, raising an eyebrow in a sly arch.\n\n\"I know so,\" Pitt replied, resealing the container and handing it carefully to his partner. \"There's a truck parked in back of the other warehouse. See if you can make it go boom.\"\n\n\"And you?\"\n\nPitt held up the hammer. \"I'll be knocking on the door upstairs.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "Zeibig had not feared for his life. He was certainly distressed at being abducted at gunpoint, handcuffed, and locked in a cabin on a luxury yacht. Reaching the cove, he had his doubts as he was roughly herded ashore and into the old stone building, where he was directed to sit in an open conference room. His captors, all tall, pale-skinned men with hardened dark eyes, were certainly menacing enough. Yet they had not yet proven to be abusive. His feelings changed when a car pulled up in front and an austere Turkish couple emerged and entered the building.\n\nZeibig noted the guards suddenly assume a stiff, deferential posture as the visitors stepped inside. The archaeologist could hear them discussing the freighter and its cargo with a dock foreman for several minutes, surprised that the woman seemed to be making most of the demands. Finishing their shipping business, the couple strolled into the conference room, where the man glared at Zeibig with angry contempt.\n\n\"So, you are the one responsible for stealing the artifacts of Suleiman the Magnificent,\" Ozden Celik hissed, a vein throbbing out from his temple.\n\nDressed in an expensive suit, he looked to Zeibig to be a successful businessman. But the red-eyed anger in the man bordered on psychotic.\n\n\"We were simply conducting a preliminary site investigation under the auspices of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum,\" Zeibig replied. \"We are required to turn over all recovered artifacts to the state, which we were intending to do when we returned to Istanbul in two weeks.\"\n\n\"And who gave the Archaeology Museum ownership of the wreck?\" Celik asked with a furl of his lips.\n\n\"That you'll have to take up with the Turkish Cultural Minister,\" Zeibig replied.\n\nCelik ignored the comment as he moved to the conference table with Maria at his side. Spread across the mahogany surface were several dozen artifacts that the NUMA divers had retrieved from the wreck site. Zeibig watched them peruse the items, then he suddenly became wide-eyed himself at the sight of Gunn's monolith lying at the far end of the table. Curiosity caused him to crane his neck, but it was too far away to make out the inscription.\n\n\"To what age have you dated this shipwreck?\" Maria asked. She was dressed in dark slacks and a plum-colored sweater but unstylish walking shoes.\n\n\"Some coins given to the museum indicate that the wreck sank in approximately 1570,\" Zeibig said.\n\n\"Is it an Ottoman vessel?\"\n\n\"The materials and construction techniques are consistent with coastal merchant vessels of the eastern Mediterranean in that era. That's as much as we know at the moment.\"\n\nCelik carefully reviewed the collection of artifacts, admiring fragments of four-hundred-year-old ceramic plates and bowls. With the experienced eye of a collector, he knew that the wreck had been accurately dated, confirmed by the coins now in his possession. Then he approached the monolith.\n\n\"What is this?\" he asked Zeibig, pointing to the stone.\n\nZeibig shook his head. \"It was removed from the wreck site by your men.\"\n\nCelik carefully studied the flat-sided stone, noticing a Latin inscription on its surface.\n\n\"Roman garbage,\" he muttered, then examined the remaining artifacts before stepping back over to Zeibig.\n\n\"You will never again plunder that which belongs to the Ottoman Empire,\" he said, his dark eyes staring madly into Zeibig's pupils. His hand slipped into his coat pocket and retrieved a thin leather cord. He twirled it in front of Zeibig's face for a moment, then slowly pulled it taut. Celik moved as if stepping away from Zeibig, then turned and whipped the strap over the archaeologist's head as he whirled behind him. The cord immediately constricted around Zeibig's neck, and he was jerked to his feet by a firm upward yank.\n\nZeibig twisted and tried to drive his elbows into Celik, but a guard stepped forward and grabbed his cuffed wrists, pulling his arms forward as the cord tightened around his neck. Zeibig could feel the cord bite into his thorax, and he struggled for air while the blood pounded in his ears. He heard a loud pop and wondered if the sound was his eardrum bursting.\n\nCelik heard the sound as well but ignored it, his eyes ablaze with bloodlust. Then a second blast erupted nearby, shaking the entire building with the accompanying force of a thundering boom. Celik nearly lost his balance as the floor vibrated and window glass shattered upstairs. He instinctively released his grip on the leather garrote.\n\n\"Go see what that was,\" he barked at Maria.\n\nShe nodded and quickly followed the foreman out the front door to investigate. Celik immediately tightened his grip on the leather strap as the guard remained stationary, holding firm to Zeibig's wrists.\n\nZeibig had managed to suck in a few breaths of air during the interlude and renewed his efforts to break free. But Celik jabbed a shoulder into his back, turning as he pulled on the leather strap and nearly pulling the archaeologist off his feet.\n\nTurning red and feeling his head pounding as he gasped for air, Zeibig gazed into the eyes of the guard, who smiled back at him sadistically. But then a puzzled look crossed the guard's face. Zeibig heard a muffled thump, then felt the leather strap suddenly slip free from his neck.\n\nThe guard let go of Zeibig's wrists and quickly fumbled inside his jacket. In the fuzzy, oxygen-deprived recesses of Zeibig's brain, he knew the man was reaching for a gun. With a sudden impulse that felt like it was happening in slow motion, Zeibig leaned forward and grabbed the guard's sleeve. The guard hastily tried to shake the hand free before finally shoving the archaeologist away with his free arm. As he gripped his handgun in a shoulder holster, an object whizzed by and struck him in the face. He staggered a bit until a second blow hit home and he crumpled unconscious to the floor.\n\nZeibig turned with blurry vision to see a man standing beside him, holding a wooden mallet in his hand, a grim look of satisfaction on his face. Coughing and sputtering for air, Zeibig smiled as his senses revived and he could see that it was Pitt.\n\n\"You, my friend,\" he said, wheezing out the words in pain, \"have arrived like a breath of fresh air.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "Nearly the entire dock crew had flocked to the rear of the warehouse to watch the smoldering remains of the truck light up the night sky. Giordino's handiwork could not have produced a better diversion. And it was all so simple.\n\nSneaking to the side of the truck, he'd quietly opened the cab door and peeked inside. The interior reeked of cigarette smoke, with dozens of butts littering the floor amid smashed cans of soda pop. A notebook, some tools, and the bony remains of roasted chicken wrapped in brown paper sat on the bench seat. But it was a thin, ragged sweatshirt stuffed under the seat that caught Giordino's eye.\n\nGiordino grabbed the shirt and easily ripped off a sleeve, then searched the dashboard until he found the cigarette lighter and pushed the knob in. He then made his way to the rear of the truck and unscrewed the gas cap. He carefully dangled the sleeve in the tank until it was partially saturated with gasoline, then pulled it up and laid the dry end over the side of the gas tank. He left the fuel-soaked end just inside the filler tube and rested the cap on top of it to seal in the vapors. When he heard a popping sound, he scurried to the cab and retrieved the cigarette lighter, then hurriedly ignited the dry end of the sleeve before the lighter turned cold.\n\nHe barely had time to run to the rear of the stone building before the small flame crept up the sleeve to the fuel-soaked section of the cloth. The flames quickly ran to the filler, igniting the vapors in an explosion that blew apart the fuel tank.\n\nBut it was the charge of plastic explosives, positioned on top of the fuel tank, which did the real damage a second later. Even Giordino was surprised by the massive blast that blew the truck entirely off the ground and incinerated its back end.\n\nPitt had done his best to coordinate his breakin with the sound of the blast. Perched on the ladder outside one of the darkened second-story windows, he shattered the glass with his mallet as the building itself shook before him. He quickly climbed in, finding himself in the guest bedroom of the comfortably appointed living quarters. He was sneaking down the stairs when he heard Zeibig's struggling gasps and sprang with his mallet to lay down Celik and the guard.\n\nRegaining his strength, Zeibig stood and looked down at the unconscious Celik, who had a large bump on the side of his head.\n\n\"Is he dead?\"\n\n\"No, just napping,\" Pitt replied, noticing the prone figure beginning to stir. \"I suggest we get out of here before they wake up.\"\n\nPitt grabbed Zeibig by the arm and started to lead him toward the front door, but the archaeologist suddenly stopped in his tracks.\n\n\"Wait... the stele,\" he said, stepping over to Gunn's stone slab.\n\nPitt gazed at the excavated stone, which stood nearly four feet high.\n\n\"Too big to take as a souvenir, Rod,\" he said, urging their departure.\n\n\"Let me study the inscription for just a moment,\" Zeibig pleaded.\n\nRubbing the surface with his fingers, he quickly read the Latin several times, pressing himself to memorize the words. Satisfied that he had it down, he looked at Pitt with a weak smile.\n\n\"Okay, got it.\"\n\nPitt led the way to the front entrance and flung open the door only to be met by an attractive woman with dark hair on her way in. Pitt knew he had seen her face before, but the evening clothes she wore obscured the context. Maria, however, recognized Pitt immediately.\n\n\"Where did you come from?\" she demanded.\n\nThe harsh voice immediately came back to Pitt as the one that had threatened him in the Yerebatan Sarnici cistern in Istanbul. He was startled by her sudden appearance here but then realized it all made sense. The Topkapi thieves had ransacked Ruppe's office, which had led them to the wreck site.\n\n\"I'm from the Topkapi vice squad,\" Pitt said in a wry tone.\n\n\"Then you will die together with your friend,\" she snapped in reply.\n\nLooking past them, she caught a glimpse of her brother and the guard lying on the floor of the conference room. A twinge of fear and anger crossed her brow, and she quickly backpedaled across the porch and turned toward the warehouse to yell for help. But her words were never heard.\n\nA burly arm appeared from the shadows and wrapped around her waist, joined by a hand that gripped tightly over her mouth. The fiery woman kicked and flailed, but she was like a child's doll in the powerful grip of Al Giordino.\n\nHe carried her back up to the doorway and into the foyer, as he nodded pleasantly at Zeibig.\n\n\"Where would you like this one?\" he asked, turning to Pitt.\n\n\"In a fetid Turkish prison cell,\" Pitt replied. \"But I guess we'll have to make do with a closet for the moment.\"\n\nPitt located a small broom closet off the stairwell and opened the door, and Giordino deposited Maria inside. Zeibig brought over a desk chair, which Pitt wedged beneath the handle after Giordino slammed the door shut. A deluge of muffled voices and angry kicks immediately ensued from within.\n\n\"That one's a devil,\" Giordino remarked.\n\n\"More than you know,\" Pitt replied. \"Let's not give her a second chance at us.\"\n\nThe three men scurried out of the building and onto the darkened waterfront. The burning truck still had everyone's attention, though a few dockworkers returned to loading the freighter. The armed guards were nervously securing the area around the blast as the trio quickly made their way onto the pier. Pitt found a discarded gunnysack and draped it over Zeibig's hands to disguise the fact that he was still wearing handcuffs.\n\nThey moved by the extended crane, stepping as quickly as they dared without drawing attention. Keeping close to the freighter, they turned a shoulder toward the yacht and the idling workboat as they moved past, Pitt and Giordino shielding Zeibig as best they could. They relaxed slightly as they distanced themselves from the brightly illuminated section of the pier and saw no workers ahead of them. The shoreline remained quiet, and Pitt figured they were home free as they approached the stern of the freighter.\n\n\"Next stop, the Aegean Explorer,\" Giordino muttered quietly.\n\nBut the hopeful feelings vanished as they reached the end of the pier. Stepping to the edge, Pitt and Giordino looked down at the water, then scanned the area around them in disbelief.\n\nThe Bullet was nowhere to be seen."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "Celik came to slowly, with a pounding ache in his head and a loud thumping in his ears. Rising unsteadily first to his knees and then to his feet, he shook off the fog and realized the thumping originated well beyond his ear canal. Detecting his sister's muffled voice, he stepped to the closet and kicked away the chair. Maria practically flew out, her face glowing red with anger.\n\nTaking one look at the dazed appearance of her brother, she quickly calmed down.\n\n\"Ozden, are you all right?\"\n\nHe rubbed the bump on his head with a slight wince.\n\n\"Yes,\" he replied coarsely. \"Tell me what happened.\"\n\n\"It was that American from the research vessel again. He and another man set off an explosion in one of the trucks, then came in here and freed the archaeologist. They must have followed the yacht here.\"\n\n\"Where are my Janissaries?\" he asked, weaving slightly back and forth.\n\nMaria pointed to the prone guard lying beneath the conference table.\n\n\"He must have been attacked with you. The others are investigating the explosion.\"\n\nShe took Celik's arm and led him to a leather chair, then poured him a glass of water.\n\n\"You had better rest. I will alert the others. They cannot have gotten far.\"\n\n\"Bring me their heads,\" he spat with effort, then leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes.\n\nMaria stepped onto the porch as two of the guards approached.\n\n\"The fire has been extinguished,\" reported one of the men.\n\n\"Intruders have attacked us and taken the captive. Search the dock and waterfront immediately,\" she ordered, \"then launch the yacht and scour the cove. They must have a boat with them.\"\n\nAs the men ran off, Maria stared into the blackened cove, sensing that the intruders were still close at hand. A thin smile crossed her lips, her anger dissipating as she contemplated her revenge."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "A t that particular moment, the men from numa had neither boat nor submersible.\n\nGiordino peered into the water, trying to determine if the Bullet had sunk at her mooring. Then he stepped over to examine a black iron bollard he had used to tie the craft up. There was no sign of the mooring line.\n\n\"I'm sure I tied her securely,\" he said.\n\n\"Then someone sank her or moved her,\" Pitt replied. He peered down the dock a moment in quiet thought.\n\n\"That small workboat. Wasn't she ahead of the yacht when we went ashore?\"\n\n\"Yes, you're right. She's idling in back of the yacht now. We couldn't see much of her on the way back because of the generator. Perhaps she towed the Bullet somewhere.\"\n\nA female voice was suddenly detected yelling loudly on the shore, followed by the shouts of several men. Pitt peeked around the stern of the freighter and saw several gunmen running toward the pier.\n\n\"Looks like the party is over,\" he said, glancing toward the water. \"I think it's time we think about getting wet.\"\n\nZeibig held up his cuffed wrists.\n\n\"It's not that I'm afraid of the water, mind you,\" he said with a crooked grin. \"But I don't particularly relish the idea of drowning per se.\"\n\nGiordino put a hand on his shoulder.\n\n\"Right this way, my friend, for some dry patio seating.\"\n\nGiordino led Zeibig to the wall of empty fuel drums stacked along the edge of the pier. He quickly rolled several drums aside, hoisting them like beer cans, until creating a small recessed space.\n\n\"Pier-side seating for one,\" he said, waving a hand toward it.\n\nZeibig took a seat on the pier, scrunching his legs together.\n\n\"Can I order a Manhattan while I'm waiting?\" he asked.\n\n\"Just as soon as the entertainment ends,\" Giordino replied, wedging a drum against the archaeologist. \"Don't you go anywhere until we get back,\" he added, then stacked several more drums around Zeibig until he was fully concealed.\n\n\"Not to worry,\" Zeibig's muffled voice echoed in reply.\n\nGiordino quickly rearranged a few more drums, then turned to Pitt, who was gazing down the pier. At the far end, a pair of guards could be seen heading across the waterfront toward the pier.\n\n\"I think we better evaporate now,\" Pitt said, stepping to the end of the pier, where a welded-steel ladder trailed down into the water.\n\n\"Right behind you,\" Giordino whispered, and together the two men scrambled down the ladder, sliding quietly into the dark water.\n\nThey wasted no time working their way back toward shore, swimming between the pier's support pilings while safely out of view from above. Pitt was already formulating an escape plan but faced a dilemma. Stealing a boat seemed their best hope, and they had a choice between the workboat and the yacht. The workboat would be easier to commandeer, but the faster yacht could easily run them down. He braced himself for the daunting task of capturing the yacht without weapons when Giordino tapped him on the shoulder. He stopped and turned to find his partner treading water alongside.\n\n\"The Bullet,\" Giordino whispered. Even in the darkness, Pitt could see the white teeth from his partner's broad smile.\n\nGazing ahead through the pilings, Pitt looked at the workboat and the yacht just beyond. But sitting low in the water behind the workboat, he now noticed the crest of the submersible. They had walked right by it when they crossed the pier. Obscured by the generator, it had gone unseen when the men were trying to conceal Zeibig from any probing eyes aboard the yacht.\n\nThe two men quietly worked their way closer, observing that the submersible's mooring line was attached to the stern of the workboat. It had indeed been the suspicious guard on the back of the yacht who had strolled down the pier after Pitt and Giordino walked by and discovered the strange vessel astern of the freighter. Enlisting the aid of the workboat's captain, they had towed it alongside the yacht in order to get a better look at it under the bright dock lights.\n\nPitt and Giordino swam forward until they were even with the Bullet. They could see the armed gunman standing on the stern deck of the workboat and another man in its wheelhouse.\n\n\"I think our best bet is to keep the towline and pull her into the cove to submerge,\" Pitt whispered. A sudden fray of shouting came from shore as the Janissaries began extending their search down the pier.\n\n\"You jump on the Bullet and prep her for diving,\" Pitt said, not wishing to waste any more time. \"I'll see what I can do with the workboat.\"\n\n\"You'll need some help with that armed guard,\" Giordino said with concern.\n\n\"Blow him a kiss when I get aboard.\"\n\nThen Pitt took a deep breath and disappeared under the water."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 44",
                "text": "The guard couldn't quite make out the commotion on shore, but he could see that some of his fellow Janissaries were headed down the pier. He had already tried radioing his discovery of the submersible to his commander, not knowing that the man was still lying unconscious in the stone building. He contemplated returning to the yacht but thought it better to safeguard the submersible from the stern of the workboat. He stood there, gazing toward shore, when he was startled by a voice calling from the water.\n\n\"Pardon me, boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo?\" wafted a gruff voice.\n\nThe guard immediately stepped to the stern rail and looked down at the submersible. A soggy Giordino stood on the Bullet's frame, one hand placed on the acrylic bubble for support while the other waved cheerily at the startled gunman. He quickly jerked his weapon up and started to shout at Giordino when he detected the sound of some squishy footsteps approaching from behind.\n\nToo late, he turned to find Pitt barreling into him like he was a blocking dummy. Pitt kept his elbows high, striking the man on the side, just beneath the shoulder. With legs pinned against the rail, the guard had no way to balance himself from the blow. With a warbled grunt, he flipped over the side, splashing hard into the water.\n\n\"Company,\" Giordino shouted to Pitt as he released the hatch and scurried inside the submersible.\n\nPitt turned to see two men walking down the dock, gazing at him with alarm. He ignored them, turning his attention to the boat's small wheelhouse. A middle-aged man with a chubby face and sunbaked skin stumbled out at the sound of the splash, then froze at the sight of Pitt on the deck.\n\n\"Arouk?\" he called, but the guard was just gurgling to the surface.\n\nPitt's eyes were already scanning the stern deck. Clamped to the gunwale a few feet away was a six-foot-long gaff. He quickly lunged for it, gripped the base, and whipped the barbed iron hook toward the workboat's captain.\n\n\"Over the side,\" Pitt barked, waving the hook toward the water.\n\nSeeing the determined look in Pitt's eye, the captain saw no reason to hesitate. With his hands raised, he calmly stepped to the rail and threw his legs over the side, slipping heavily into the water. On the other side of the boat, the guard named Arouk had surfaced and begun shouting to his cohorts down the pier.\n\nPitt didn't wait around to decipher the conversation. Dropping the gaff, he raced into the wheelhouse and yanked the workboat's throttle to its stops. The boat lurched forward, then faltered as the trailing towline drew taut with the submersible. The boat gradually regained momentum and accelerated at what seemed like a snail's pace to Pitt. He glanced at the pier in time to see the two guards step to the edge and train their weapons on him. His reflexes still quick, he dove to the floor an instant before the guns opened fire.\n\nThe wheelhouse exploded in a hail of splintered wood and shattered glass as a pair of extended bursts ripped through the structure. Shaking away a blanket of splinters and shards, Pitt crawled to the helm and reached up to the wheel, pulling it three-quarters of a turn to starboard.\n\nWith just a few yards to spare, the workboat was quickly closing on the yacht moored directly ahead. While Pitt could have turned hard into the cove, he knew doing so would leave Giordino and the Bullet exposed to sustained gunfire. In the confusion, he had no idea whether Giordino had even entered the submersible before the shooting began. He could only hope to deflect attention until they could reach a safer haven out in the cove.\n\nSpotting a seat cushion on the pilot's chair, he ripped it away and crawled to the blasted remnants of the port-side window. Tossing it into the air, he succeeded in drawing the gunmen's attention again as they finished reloading their weapons. Another volley of gunfire shredded the exterior of the wheelhouse with vicious effect. Inside, Pitt clung to the deck with the seat cushion over his head as more splinters and shards sprayed about the cabin. The bullets kept flying until the gunmen emptied their clips for a second time.\n\nWhen the firing ceased, Pitt raised his head to see that the workboat was pulling alongside the yacht. He crawled to the wheel and eased it to starboard, then held it steady. As the boat approached the bow of the yacht, he kneeled and cranked the wheel hard over.\n\nThe old boat was now chugging along at eight knots as its bow turned sharply away from the yacht and the pier. Pitt could hear more yelling, but his move had bought a few precious seconds of safety as the yacht obscured the aim of the gunmen. They would now have to either board the yacht or step down the pier to get a clear shot, by which time Pitt hoped to be out of accurate range.\n\nHe stood for a moment and peeked out the back of the wheelhouse, spotting the Bullet bounding merrily behind. A dull glow from some of the interior electronics told him that Giordino had made his way inside and was powering up the submersible. He looked beyond it to the yacht, where he noticed a bubble of diesel exhaust erupt from the stern waterline. Pitt had banked on escaping in the Bullet before the yacht could get under way, but his opponent was jumping the gun. To make matters worse, he spotted the two gunmen racing across the yacht's stern deck with their guns at the ready.\n\nPitt ducked down and tweaked the wheel, angling the workboat toward the center of the cove while taking the Bullet out of the direct line of fire. The rattling of machine guns preceded a spray of bullets, most of which scattered harmlessly into the transom. Pitt willed the boat to go faster, but the old tub had peaked out with the submersible in tow.\n\nWhen Pitt guessed they were a hundred yards from the pier, he suddenly cranked the wheel hard to port, then eased back on the throttle. He held the wheel well over until the boat had drifted completely around, and the yacht rose ahead off the bow. As the boat bobbed in the cove under idle, Pitt stepped to the stern and quickly untied the towline to the Bullet. Tossing it toward the submersible, he leaned over the rail and yelled at Giordino.\n\n\"Wait for me here,\" he said, motioning with his hands for him to stay put.\n\nGiordino nodded, then held a thumbs-up against the acrylic bubble where Pitt could see it. Pitt turned and ran back to the wheelhouse as more gunfire opened up from shore, now peppering the workboat's bow. Reaching the wheelhouse, Pitt jammed open the throttle and adjusted the wheel until he was bearing for the end of the pier.\n\n\"Stay where you are, big girl,\" he muttered aloud, eyeing the luxury boat.\n\nFree of the submersible, the workboat squeezed out another few knots of speed. Pitt kept the bow aimed toward the deep end of the pier, not wanting to give away his hand just yet. To the gunmen on the yacht, it appeared as if the boat was stuck in a large counterclockwise circle. Pitt held the ruse until the boat was passing parallel to the yacht some fifty yards away, then he turned the wheel sharply once more.\n\nAligning the bow till it was aimed amidships of the yacht, he straightened the wheel, then wedged a life jacket into the bottom spokes to hold it steady. Ignoring a fresh spray of gunfire that raked the bow, he sprinted out of the wheelhouse and onto the stern deck, where he dove headfirst over the rail.\n\nThe yacht's captain was the first to realize they were about to get rammed and he screamed for help to release the dock lines. A crewman appeared on deck and scrambled onto the pier, quickly releasing the bow and spring lines. One of the gunmen tucked away his rifle and crossed the deck to the stern line. Rather than hopping onto the pier to release a shortly secured line, he attempted to unravel the opposite end, which was knotted tightly around a bollard on the yacht's stern.\n\nThe captain saw the bow and spring lines tossed free, then turned in horror to see the workboat bearing down less than twenty yards away. Panicking in self-preservation, he jumped to the helm and pressed down the twin throttles, hoping that the stern line was also clear.\n\nBut it wasn't.\n\nThe yacht's big diesel engines bellowed as the twin props dug into the water and thrust the vessel forward. But it surged only a few feet before the stern line grew taut, anchoring it to the pier. The guard tumbled backward with a scream, nearly losing several fingers as the line snapped tight.\n\nThe water churned and boiled off the stern as the yacht fought to break loose. Then suddenly the line slipped free, the crewman on the pier bravely unraveling the dock line and ducking for cover. The yacht burst forth like a rodeo bronco, churning ahead in a spray of foam. The captain glanced out the bridge window, then clutched the helm with white knuckles, realizing the attempted escape had failed.\n\nThe unmanned workboat plowed into the yacht, striking the starboard flank just ahead of the stern. The boat's blunt, heavy bow easily shattered the fiberglass shell of the yacht, mashing its opposite side into the pier pilings. The sound of grinding metal filled the air as the starboard driveline was crushed, mangling a score of fuel and hydraulic lines and high-spinning gears. The combined momentum swung the yacht's stern to the pier, where its spinning port propeller was knocked off by a piling. The yacht gamely lurched forward as a final gasp, breaking free of both the workboat and pier before its motors fell silent and it drifted aimlessly toward shore.\n\nPitt didn't bother watching the collision but instead swam hard underwater, surfacing only momentarily for a quick gulp of air. He pushed himself until his lungs ached, and his stroke count indicated he was close to where he had cut the Bullet loose. Easing to the surface, he gazed toward the pier while regaining his breath. The success of the attack was clearly evident. He could see the yacht drifting helplessly toward shore while the workboat, its motor still throbbing at high revolutions, pounded repeatedly into the pier as its mangled bow sank lower and lower into the water. Numerous people raced along the pier, surveying the scene and yelling in confusion. Pitt couldn't help but grin when his ears detected a female voice shouting amid the fray.\n\nSecure for the moment, he turned and paddled into the cove, his eyes searching the surface of the water. He took a quick bearing from shore to convince himself he was in the right location, then slowly surveyed the waters around him. In every direction, all he could see was small, dark lapping waves, and he suddenly felt very alone.\n\nFor the second time that night, the Bullet had disappeared without him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "Rod zeibig grimaced when he heard the first burst of automatic gunfire. Any hopes of a stealthy getaway seemed to vanish with the metallic clatter of spent shell casings spewing across the wooden pier. Of greater concern was the safety of Pitt and Giordino, who were clearly the target of the barrage.\n\nZeibig was surprised to hear the gunfire continue for several minutes unabated. Curiosity finally overcoming his fear, he leaned over the edge of the pier and peeked around the stack of fuel drums. Near the opposite end of the dock, he could just make out the superstructure of the yacht and a number of men yelling to shore. On the pier, he noticed a crewman furiously engaged with one of the mooring lines.\n\nZeibig ducked back into his hiding nook as more gunfire resumed. Seconds later, the gunfire ceased, and then a loud crash shook the pier, jiggling the fuel drums around him. More shouts erupted in the aftermath, but the gunfire remained silent. With a melancholy conjecture, the archaeologist quietly wondered if Pitt and Giordino had died in a last rebellious act.\n\nStaring blankly into the cove while contemplating his own fate, he noticed a sudden disturbance in the water before him. A dull greenish glow appeared faintly in the depths, which gradually grew brighter. Zeibig looked on, unbelieving, as the transparent bubble of the Bullet quietly broke the surface directly in front of him. Seated at the controls was the burly figure of Al Giordino, an unlit cigar dangling from his lips.\n\nThe archaeologist didn't wait for a formal invitation to board but hastily lowered himself down a mussel-covered piling and into the water before the submersible finished surfacing. Swimming to its stern, Zeibig climbed up on one of the exterior ballast tanks, then crept to the rear hatch. Giordino immediately opened the hatch and ushered Zeibig inside, quickly resealing it behind him.\n\n\"Boy, am I glad to see you,\" Zeibig said, squeezing into the copilot's seat while trying not to drip water on any of the electronics.\n\n\"I wasn't relishing a swim home myself,\" Giordino replied, rushing to blow the ballast tanks and submerge the vessel as quickly as possible. Craning his neck upward, he scanned the pier around the fuel drums for sight of any observers.\n\n\"No one has bothered to expend much time at this end of the pier,\" Zeibig reported, watching the water rise up and over the top of the acrylic bubble. He then turned to Giordino with trepidation in his voice.\n\n\"I heard a big crash, and then the shooting stopped. Dirk?\"\n\nGiordino nodded. \"He stole the workboat that had towed the Bullet to the other side of the pier. He cut me loose, then set off after the moored yacht.\"\n\n\"I think he was successful,\" Zeibig replied in a morose tone.\n\nEyeing a depth-gauge reading of thirty feet, Giordino halted the ballast pumps, then gently backed the submersible away from the pier. Reversing thrust, he angled into the cove, then gave Zeibig a reassuring smile.\n\n\"Knowing Dirk, I don't think he rode the boat to the end of the line. As a matter of fact, I'd wager a month's salary that he's swimming laps in the middle of the cove this very moment.\"\n\nZeibig's eyes immediately perked up. \"But how will we ever find him?\"\n\nGiordino affectionately patted the pilot console. \"We'll trust the penetrating peepers of the Bullet,\" he said.\n\nWith his own eyes glued to a navigation screen, Giordino guided the submersible along a meandering track he had recorded at the point where Pitt had cut him free from the workboat. The dead reckoning system wouldn't return him to an exact position the way GPS would, but it would be very close.\n\nGiordino followed the trail at a depth of thirty feet, gradually rising to just ten feet as he approached the original starting point. He then eased back on the propulsion controls until they hovered in a stationary position.\n\n\"Are we out of range of their gunmen?\" Zeibig asked.\n\nGiordino shook his head. \"We were lucky not to take any fire earlier. They were all focused on stopping the boat. I don't think I'd like to give them a second chance.\"\n\nHe reached over and toggled on several switches beside an overhead monitor. \"Let's hope the boss hasn't strayed too close to shore.\"\n\nA grainy blank image appeared on the monitor as it displayed the readings from the submersible's sonar system. Giordino dialed up the system's frequency, which produced a more detailed image while reducing the range of the scan. Both men studied the screen intently, seeing only a flat display of mottled shadows. Giordino then feathered a side thruster, gently rotating the submersible in a clockwise direction. There was little change in the image as the forward-looking sensor scanned the center of the cove. Then Giordino noticed a small smudge at the top of the screen.\n\n\"There's something small about a hundred feet away,\" he said.\n\n\"Is it Dirk?\" Zeibig asked.\n\n\"If it's not a porpoise, a kayak, or a million other potential items of floating debris,\" he replied.\n\nHe adjusted the thrusters and guided the submersible toward the target, watching it grow in size as they moved closer. When the shadow began to run off the top of the sonar screen, Giordino knew they were almost directly beneath the target.\n\n\"Time to take a look,\" he said, then gently purged the ballast tanks.\n\nPitt was floating on his back, conserving energy from his swim from the workboat and several minutes of treading water, when he felt a slight disruption in the water beneath him. He turned over to see the dim interior lights of the Bullet, rising fast just a few feet away. He swam closer, positioning himself directly above the acrylic bubble as it broke to the surface. Giordino was quick to cut the ascent, allowing only the top few inches of the Bullet to bob above the water.\n\nPitt lay prone on the bubble, spreading his arms wide for support. Beneath him, he could see Giordino looking up at him with a relieved smile, then motioning to inquire if he was okay. Pitt pressed his thumb and forefinger together and held it against the acrylic, then pointed toward the center of the cove. Giordino nodded in reply, then gestured for him to hang on.\n\nHugging the acrylic with his arms and legs, Pitt held tight as the submersible began moving forward. Giordino eased the thrusters ahead slowly until they were creeping along at just a few knots. Pitt felt like he was waterskiing on his belly. The small waves sloshed around his face, and he had to strain his neck skyward every few seconds to grab a breath of fresh air. When the dock lights receded to a safe distance, Pitt rapped his knuckles as hard as he could on the acrylic. The forward movement halted immediately, and a few seconds later the submersible rose fully to the surface amid a small surge of bubbles.\n\nPitt slid off the acrylic nose and onto the Bullet's frame, then stepped to the rear hatch. He hesitated a moment, turning a last gaze toward shore. In the distance, he could just make out the workboat alongside the pier, sinking heavily by its bow. Nearby, some men in a Zodiac were trying to run a line from the pier to the yacht before it drifted aground. With some measure of relief, Pitt could see that hunting for the submersible appeared low on the shore crew's priorities. The hatch then popped open beside him, and Giordino welcomed him inside.\n\n\"Thanks for coming back to get me,\" Pitt said with a sideways grin.\n\n\"King Al leaves no man behind,\" Giordino puffed. \"I trust you kept our shore hosts duly occupied?\"\n\n\"Put a nasty scratch in their yacht, which should keep them out of commission for the moment,\" he replied. \"Nevertheless, since you have already retrieved the good Dr. Zeibig I see no point in loitering.\"\n\nHe followed Giordino to the pilot seats, where they quickly submerged the vessel. Silently, they crept out of the cove at a safe depth, ascending again once they were a half mile offshore. Giordino reconfigured the Bullet for surface running, and to Zeibig's astonishment they were soon charging across the black sea at better than thirty knots.\n\nA quick radio call to the Aegean Explorer confirmed that she was standing off the southeast tip of Gokceada. Thirty minutes later, the lights of the research vessel came into clear view upon the horizon. As they drew closer, Pitt and Giordino saw that a second, larger vessel was positioned on the opposite side of the Explorer. Giordino slowly eased back the Bullet's throttles as it approached, guiding it alongside the starboard flank of the NUMA ship and an overhanging crane. Pitt recognized the second vessel as a Turkish Coast Guard frigate, which held station a short distance off the Explorer's port beam.\n\n\"Looks like the cavalry has finally arrived,\" Pitt said.\n\n\"I'll gladly point the way to the guys in the black hats,\" Zeibig replied.\n\nA pair of divers appeared in a Zodiac and attached a lift cable to the Bullet, then the sleek submersible was hoisted aboard. Rudi Gunn stood on the stern deck and helped secure the sub before stepping to the rear hatch. His downturned face brightened when he saw Zeibig climb out ahead of Pitt and Giordino.\n\n\"Rod, are you all right?\" he asked, helping the archaeologist step to the deck.\n\n\"Yes, thanks to Dirk and Al. I could use a bit of help in losing these, however,\" he added, holding up his handcuffed wrists.\n\n\"The shipboard machine shop should be able to manage that,\" Gunn replied.\n\n\"Al's got the location of the yacht and its crew,\" Pitt said. \"A little base of operations up the coast. We can pass the coordinates to the Turkish Coast Guard or run up there with them in the Explorer.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid that's not in the cards,\" Gunn replied, shaking his head. \"We've been ordered to proceed to Canakkale, a port town on the Dardanelles, as soon as we got you safely aboard.\"\n\nHe motioned toward the Turkish frigate, which had inched closer when the submersible appeared. Pitt gazed over and noticed for the first time that a row of armed sailors lined the frigate's rail, their weapons pointed at the NUMA research ship.\n\n\"What's with the threatening posture?\" he asked. \"We've had two crewmen murdered and another kidnapped. Didn't you radio the Coast Guard earlier?\"\n\n\"I did,\" Gunn replied testily. \"But that's not why they're here. It seems somebody else called them first.\"\n\n\"Then why the show of arms?\"\n\n\"Because,\" Gunn said, his eyes red with anger, \"we are under arrest for looting a submerged cultural resource.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 46",
                "text": "Dusk had arrived in the eastern mediterranean, casting a pale rosy tint to the sky as the Ottoman Star broached the entrance to the Port of Beirut, just north of the Lebanese capital. The old frigate had made a swift voyage from the Aegean, reaching the port city in less than forty-eight hours. Circling past a modern new containership terminal, the freighter turned west through the port complex, steaming in slowly to dock at an older general-cargo quay.\n\nDespite the late hour, many of the local dockworkers stopped and stared as the freighter was berthed, smiling at the odd spectacle on her deck. Carefully wedged beside the forward hatch and resting on a hastily constructed wooden cradle sat the damaged Italian yacht. A pair of workmen in coveralls was busy cutting and patching the large gash in its hull inflicted by the now sunken workboat.\n\nMaria sat quietly on one side of the ship's bridge, silently watching the captain deal with the small parade of port, customs, and trade representatives who filed aboard in search of paperwork and money. Only when the local textile distributor complained about his short shipment did she intervene.\n\n\"We were forced to accelerate our departure,\" she said bluntly. \"You'll receive the difference with the next shipment.\"\n\nThe browbeaten distributor nodded, then left quietly, not wishing to tangle with the fiery woman who owned the ship.\n\nThe dockyard cranes were quickly engaged, and soon metal containers filled with Turkish textiles and produce were being rapidly unloaded from the ship. Maria stuck to her perch on the bridge, watching the work with disinterested eyes. Only when she spotted a dilapidated Toyota truck pull up and park alongside the gangway did she sit upright and stiffen. She turned to one of the Janissary guards that her brother had sent to accompany her on the voyage.\n\n\"A man I am to meet has just pulled up on the dock. Please search him carefully, then escort him to my cabin,\" she ordered.\n\nThe Janissary nodded, then stepped briskly off the bridge. He was mildly surprised to find the driver of the truck was an Arab attired in scruffy peasant clothes and wearing a ragged keffiyeh wrapped around his head. His dark eyes glared with intensity, however, deflecting attention from the long scar on the right side of his jaw, which he had acquired in a knife fight while a teen. The guard duly searched him, then showed him aboard, escorting him to Maria's large and stylishly appointed cabin.\n\nThe Turkish woman sized him up quickly as she offered him a seat, then dismissed the Janissary from her cabin.\n\n\"Thank you for coming here to meet me, Zakkar. If that is indeed your name,\" she added.\n\nThe Arab smiled thinly. \"You may call me Zakkar. Or any other name, if it so pleases you.\"\n\n\"Your talents have come highly recommended.\"\n\n\"Perhaps that is why so few can afford me,\" he replied, removing the dirty keffiyeh and tossing it onto an adjacent chair. Seeing that his hair was trimmed in a neat Western cut, Maria realized that the grubby outfit was simply a disguise. Given a shave and a suit, he could easily pass as a successful businessman, she thought, not knowing that he often did.\n\n\"You have the initial payment?\" he asked.\n\nMaria rose and retrieved a leather satchel from a cabinet drawer.\n\n\"Twenty-five percent of the total, as we agreed. Payment is in euros. The balance will be wired into a Lebanese bank account, according to your instructions.\"\n\nShe stepped closer to Zakkar but clung to the satchel.\n\n\"The security of this operation must be unquestioned,\" she said. \"No one is to be involved who is less than completely trustworthy.\"\n\n\"I would not be alive today if conditions were otherwise,\" he replied coldly. He pointed at the satchel. \"My men are willing to die for the right price.\"\n\n\"That will not be necessary,\" she said, handing him the satchel.\n\nAs he peered inside at its contents, Maria stepped to a bureau and retrieved several rolled-up charts.\n\n\"Are you familiar with Jerusalem?\" she asked, laying the charts across a coffee table.\n\n\"I operate in Israel a good portion of the time. It is Jerusalem where I am to transport the explosives?\"\n\n\"Yes. Twenty-five kilos of HMX.\"\n\nZakkar raised his brow at the mention of the plastic explosives. \"Impressive,\" he murmured.\n\n\"I will require your assistance in placing the explosives,\" she said. \"There may be some excavation work required.\"\n\n\"Of course. That is not a problem.\"\n\nShe unrolled the first chart, an antiquated map labeled, in Turkish, \"Underground Water Routes of Ancient Jerusalem.\" Placing it aside, she displayed an enlarged satellite photograph of Jerusalem's walled Old City. She traced a finger across the eastern face of the wall to the hillside beyond, which descended into the Kidron Valley. Her finger froze atop a large Muslim cemetery perched on the hill, its individual white gravestones visible in the photo.\n\n\"I will meet you here, at this cemetery, at exactly eleven p.m., two nights from now,\" she said.\n\nZakkar studied the photo, noting the nearby cross streets, which were overlaid on the image. Once they were committed to memory, he looked up at Maria with a quizzical gaze.\n\n\"You will be meeting us there?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes. The ship will be sailing from here to Haifa.\" She paused, then added firmly, \"I will be leading the operation.\"\n\nThe Arab nearly scoffed at the notion of a woman directing him on an assignment, but then he considered the handsome payoff he would receive for the indignity.\n\n\"I will be there with the explosives,\" he promised.\n\nShe moved to her bunk and pulled out a pair of wooden foot-lockers stored underneath. The heavy lockers had metal handles affixed to each end and were stenciled with the words \"Medical Supplies,\" written in Hebrew.\n\n\"Here is the HMX. I will have my guards carry it to the dock.\"\n\nShe stepped to the Arab mercenary and looked him hard in the eye.\n\n\"One last thing. I want no cowardice over our objective.\"\n\nZakkar smiled. \"As long as it is in Israel, I do not care what or whom you destroy.\"\n\nHe turned and opened the door. \"Till Jerusalem. May Allah be with you.\"\n\n\"And also with you,\" Maria muttered, but the Arab had already slid down the corridor, the Janissary following close behind.\n\nAfter the explosives were transported to the Arab's truck, Maria sat down and studied the photograph of Jerusalem once more. From the antiquated cemetery, she eyed the glistening target positioned just up the hill.\n\nWe'll shake up the world this time, she thought to herself, before carefully returning the photograph and charts to a locked cabinet."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 47",
                "text": "Rudi gunn paced the bridge like a nervous cat. Though the bump on his head had long since receded, a purple bruise still blemished his temple. Every few steps, he would stop and scan the weathered dock of Canakkale for signs of relief. Finding none, he would shake his head and resume pacing.\n\n\"This is crazy. We're on our third day of impoundment. When are we going to be released?\"\n\nPitt looked up from the chart table, where he was studying a map of the Turkish coast with Captain Kenfield.\n\n\"Our consulate in Istanbul has assured me that our release is imminent. The necessary paperwork is promised to be meandering through the local bureaucracy even as we speak.\"\n\n\"The whole situation is outrageous,\" Gunn complained. \"We're placed in lockdown while the killers of Tang and Iverson are allowed to slip free.\"\n\nPitt couldn't argue with him, but he did understand the dilemma. Long before the Aegean Explorer had contacted the Turkish Coast Guard, the marine authority had been alerted by two earlier radio calls. The first reported that the NUMA ship was illegally salvaging a historic Turkish shipwreck protected by the Cultural Ministry. The second call reported two divers killed during the salvage operation. The Turks refused to identify the source of the calls but rightfully acted on them in advance of the Aegean Explorer's request.\n\nOnce the NUMA ship was escorted to the port city of Canakkale and impounded, the case was turned over to the local police, further compounding the confusion. Pitt immediately phoned Dr. Ruppe in Istanbul to document their approved presence on the wreck site, then he phoned his wife, Loren. She quickly badgered the State Department to push for their immediate release even after the police had searched the ship and, finding no artifacts, slowly realized there was no basis for arrest.\n\nRod Zeibig ducked his head through the doorway and broke the air of exasperation.\n\n\"You guys got a minute?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Gunn replied. \"We're just busy here pulling our hair out of our heads one strand at a time.\"\n\nZeibig stepped in with a folder in his hand and headed to the chart table.\n\n\"Maybe this will perk you up. I've got some information on your stone monolith.\"\n\n\"Apparently, it's not mine anymore,\" Gunn mused.\n\n\"Did you manage to remember your Latin inscription?\" Pitt asked, sliding over to allow room for Gunn and Zeibig to sit down.\n\n\"Yes. I actually wrote it down right when we got back to the ship but put it aside during all the commotion. I finally examined it this morning and performed a formal translation.\"\n\n\"Tell me it's the gravestone of Alexander the Great,\" Gunn said wishfully.\n\n\"That would be wrong on two accounts, I'm afraid. The stone tablet is not a grave marker per se but a memorial. And there's no mention of Alexander.\"\n\nHe opened the folder, revealing a handwritten page of Latin that he had jotted down after viewing the monolith. The next page contained a typewritten translation, which he handed to Gunn. He read it silently at first, then aloud.\n\n\"In Remembrance of Centurion Plautius. Scholae Palatinae and loyal guardian of Helena. Lost in battle at sea off this point. Faith. Honor. Fidelity. --CORNICULAR TRAIANUS\"\n\n\"Centurion Plautius,\" Gunn repeated. \"It's a memorial to a Roman soldier?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Zeibig replied, \"which adds veracity to Al's crown being of Roman origin, a gift from the Emperor Constantine.\"\n\n\"A Scholae Palatinae loyal to Helena,\" Pitt said. \"The Scholae Palatinae were the elite security force of the later Roman emperors, as I recall, similar to the Praetorian Guard. The reference to Helena must be Helena Augustus.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Zeibig agreed. \"The mother of Constantine I, who ruled in the early fourth century. Helena lived from 248 to 330 A.D., so the stone and the crown would presumably date to that era.\"\n\n\"Any idea who this Traianus is?\" Gunn asked.\n\n\"A cornicular y is a military officer, typically a deputy position. I searched some Roman databases for a Traianus but came up empty.\"\n\n\"I guess the big mystery still remains: Where did the crown and monolith originate and why were they in an Ottoman wreck?\"\n\nHe gazed past Zeibig, perking up at the sight of two men in blue uniforms who were making their way down the quay toward the ship.\n\n\"Well, well, the local constables have returned,\" he said. \"I hope that's our parole papers they are carrying with them.\"\n\nCaptain Kenfield met the officers on the dock and escorted them aboard, where Pitt and Gunn joined them in the wardroom.\n\n\"I have your impoundment release here,\" the elder officer stated in clear English. He was a round-faced man with drooping ears and a thick black mustache.\n\n\"Your government was very persuasive,\" he added with a thin smile. \"You are free to go.\"\n\n\"Where does the investigation of my murdered crewmen stand?\" Kenfield inquired.\n\n\"We have reopened the case as a potential homicide. At present, however, we have no suspects.\"\n\n\"What about that yacht, the Sultana?\" Pitt asked.\n\n\"Yes, we saw the boat nearly cut Dirk to shreds,\" Gunn pressed.\n\n\"We were able to trace that vessel to its owner, who informs us that you must be mistaken,\" the officer replied. \"The Sultana is on a charter cruise off Lebanon. We received e-mail photos this morning of the vessel moored in the Port of Beirut.\"\n\n\"The Sultana was heavily damaged,\" Pitt said. \"There is no way she could have sailed to Lebanon.\"\n\nThe officer's assistant opened a briefcase and pulled out several printed photographs, which he handed to Pitt. The photos showed bow and port-side views of the blue yacht moored at a dusty facility. Pitt didn't fail to notice that none of the photos showed the starboard flank, where he had rammed the yacht. The last photo showed a close-up of a Lebanese daily newspaper with the present date, the yacht appearing in the background. Gunn leaned over Pitt and studied the photos.\n\n\"That sure looks like the same boat,\" he said reluctantly. He could only nod when Pitt showed him the photo of a life ring that clearly showed the yacht's name. Pitt simply nodded, finding no evidence that the photos had been doctored.\n\n\"It doesn't belie the fact that one of our scientists was also kidnapped and taken to the yacht's facility up the coast,\" Pitt said.\n\n\"Yes, our department contacted the local police chief at Kirte, who sent a man to investigate the dock facility you described.\" He turned and nodded to his assistant, who retrieved a thick packet from his case and handed it to his supervisor.\n\n\"You may have a copy of the report that was filed in Kirte. I've taken the liberty of having it translated into English for you,\" the officer said, handing it to Pitt while giving him an apologetic look. \"The investigator reported that not only were the ships you described absent from the harbor, there were in fact no vessels at all at the facility.\"\n\n\"They certainly covered their tracks quickly,\" Gunn remarked.\n\n\"The facility records indicate a large freighter similar to the one you described was at the dock earlier in the day, taking on a shipment of textiles. However, the records indicate that the vessel left harbor at least eight hours before your alleged arrival at the facility.\"\n\nThe officer looked at Pitt with a sympathetic gaze.\n\n\"I'm sorry there is little else we can do at the moment, pending additional evidence,\" he added.\n\n\"I realize this has turned into a rather confusing incident,\" Pitt said, suppressing his frustration. \"I wonder, though, if you can tell me who owns the shipping facility near Kirte?\"\n\n\"It is a privately held company called Anatolia Exports. Their contact information is in the report.\" He looked at Pitt with a pensive gaze. \"If there is any additional service I can provide, please let me know.\"\n\n\"Thank you for your assistance,\" Pitt replied tersely.\n\nAs the police officers left the boat, Gunn shook his head.\n\n\"Unbelievable. Two murders and a kidnapping, and nobody is at fault but us.\"\n\n\"It's a raw deal, all right,\" Captain Kenfield said.\n\n\"Only because we're playing against a stacked deck,\" Pitt said. \"Anatolia Exports apparently bought off the Kirte police. I think our resident constable recognized that.\"\n\n\"I suppose the whole situation was a bit embarrassing for them, so perhaps they are just trying to save face,\" Kenfield said.\n\n\"They should be more concerned with doing their job,\" Gunn swore.\n\n\"I would have thought they'd be jumping through hoops after you told them that you spotted the woman from the Topkapi theft,\" Kenfield said to Pitt.\n\nPitt shook his head. \"I didn't tell them anything about her.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Gunn asked incredulously.\n\n\"I didn't want to endanger the ship anymore while we're in Turkish waters. We've seen firsthand what they're capable of doing, whoever 'they' are. Plus, I had a sneaking suspicion it would go nowhere with the local police.\"\n\n\"You're probably right about that,\" Kenfield said.\n\n\"But we just can't let them walk away,\" Gunn protested.\n\n\"No,\" Pitt agreed with a determined shake of the head. \"And we won't.\"\n\nThe lines had been cast and the Aegean Explorer was inching away from the dock when a dilapidated yellow taxi came roaring into view. The rusty vehicle skidded to a stop at the water's edge, the rear door flew open, and a tall, slender woman jumped out.\n\nPitt was standing on the bridge when he spotted his daughter running along the dock.\n\n\"It's Summer,\" he shouted to the captain. \"Hold the boat.\"\n\nPitt ran down to the main deck, ducking when a large duffel bag came flying through the air and landed at his feet. A second later, a thin pair of hands appeared on the side rail, followed by a bushel of red hair. Summer then swung her body over the side, landing on her feet on the forward deck. Pitt approached, holding her bag, and gave her a clenching hug.\n\n\"You know we were coming back to get you,\" he said with a laugh.\n\nRealizing that the ship had reversed power and was returning to the dock, Summer gave her father a sheepish look.\n\n\"Sorry,\" she said, still catching her breath. \"When I phoned the ship from London, Rudi told me you'd probably be here for another day or two. But when the taxi neared the dock, I saw you pulling away and panicked. I really didn't want to miss the boat.\"\n\nPitt turned and waved up to the bridge, indicating it was safe to depart. Then he casually escorted Summer to her cabin.\n\n\"I wasn't expecting to see you for another few days,\" he said.\n\n\"I took an earlier flight from London and figured it would be easier to catch you here in Canakkale coming from Istanbul.\" Her face turned somber as she said, \"I heard about your shipwreck... and what happened to Tang and Iverson.\"\n\n\"We've had our share of trouble and excitement,\" he replied as they entered her cabin and he placed her bag on the bunk. \"Why don't we go grab a coffee in the wardroom, and I'll tell you all about it.\"\n\n\"I'd like that, Dad. Then I can tell you all about what I've been up to in England.\"\n\n\"Don't tell me you've got a mystery of your own?\" he asked, smiling.\n\nSummer gave her father an earnest gaze, then replied, \"One bigger than you could ever imagine.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "THE CRESCENT'S SHADOW",
                "text": "SOPHIE, I THINK I MAY HAVE A HOT ONE FOR YOU.\"\n\nSam Levine nearly tripped as he burst into the Director of Antiquities' office. The cuts and bruises on his face from the incident at Caesarea had mostly healed, but he still carried a large scar on his cheek from the encounter with the Arab thieves. Sophie was seated at her desk, studying a Tel Aviv police report on a grave looting, but looked up with interest.\n\n\"Okay, I'm listening.\"\n\n\"One of our network informants, an Arab boy named Tyron, reports a possible dig tonight in the Muslim cemetery at Kidron.\"\n\n\"Kidron? That's just over the wall from the Old City. Somebody's getting rather brazen.\"\n\n\"If it is even true. Tyron has had a spotty track record when it comes to tips.\"\n\n\"Who is supposedly turning the shovels?\"\n\n\"I only got one name out of him, a petty thief named Hassan Akais,\" Sam replied, sliding into a chair opposite Sophie's desk.\n\n\"Doesn't ring a bell,\" Sophie replied after contemplating the name. \"Should I know him?\"\n\n\"We picked him up a few years ago on a raid at Jaffa. We didn't have enough on him to press charges, so he was let go. Seems to have kept his hands clean since then. He's been paying our informant to tend some sheep, and apparently the boy overheard talk of an operation tonight.\"\n\n\"It sounds like small fish to me.\"\n\n\"I thought so, too. But then there's this,\" Sam said, handing Sophie a computer printout. \"I ran his name through the system and, lo and behold, the Mossad suspects him of having possible links to the Mules.\"\n\nSophie leaned forward and studied the paper with heightened interest.\n\n\"His links appear a bit tenuous, at best,\" Sam added, \"but I thought you would want to know.\"\n\nSophie nodded as she finished reading the report but neglected to pass it back to Sam.\n\n\"I would like to talk to this Hassan,\" she finally replied in a measured tone.\n\n\"We're a bit thin for an operation tonight. Lou and the gang are in Haifa until tomorrow, and Robert is home sick with the flu.\"\n\n\"Then it will just have to be you and me, Sammy. Any objections?\"\n\nSam shook his head. \"If this guy had anything to do with Caesarea, then I want him, too.\"\n\nThey made their plans for the evening rendezvous, then Sam rose and left the office. Sophie had resumed reading the police report when she suddenly felt someone staring at her. She looked up in surprise to see Dirk, standing outside her doorway, holding a large bouquet of lilacs in his hand.\n\n\"Pardon me, I'm looking for the chief gunslinger around here,\" he said with a radiant smile.\n\nSophie practically leaped out of her chair.\n\n\"Dirk, I didn't think you'd be free until next week,\" she said, hopping over and giving him a peck on the cheek.\n\n\"The university suspended the excavation at Caesarea for the season, so I guess my work is through for now,\" he said, placing the flowers on her desk. He then grabbed her in a tight embrace and kissed her. \"I missed you,\" he whispered.\n\nSophie felt her skin flush, then remembered her office door was open.\n\n\"I can take a short break,\" she stammered. \"Shall we go have lunch?\"\n\nAs soon as he nodded, she led him away from the prying eyes of the office and into a nearby courtyard.\n\n\"I know a beautiful spot to picnic in the Old City. We can grab something to eat along the way,\" she offered.\n\n\"Sounds perfect,\" he said. \"I haven't seen much of Jerusalem. A walk in the streets is always the best way to capture the essence of an interesting city.\"\n\nSophie grabbed his hand and led him off the manicured grounds of the Rockefeller Museum. Just a short distance away stood Herod's Gate, one of a handful of entry points into Jerusalem's Old City. Roughly a mile square, the Old City is the religious heart of Jerusalem, containing the historical landmarks of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Western Wall, and the Dome of the Rock. An imposing stone wall constructed by the Ottoman Turks over four hundred years ago runs in a complete perimeter around the historic section.\n\nWalking through the gate and into the Muslim Quarter, Dirk admired the aged beauty of the cut limestone, which seemed to be the basis of every monument, business, and residence in the city no matter how shabby or dilapidated. But he was more amused watching the diverse population making their way through the narrow streets and alleys. Spotting an Armenian Jew waiting for a crossing light beside an Ethiopian in a white robe and a Palestinian wearing a keffiyeh, he realized that he was treading on a patch of ground unique in all the world.\n\nSophie guided him down a dark and dusty alley that led to a bustling open-air market called, in Arabic, a souk. She expertly navigated their way past a throng of vendors, stopping to purchase some falafel, lamb kebabs, sweet cakes, and a bag of fruit from the assorted hawkers.\n\n\"You said you wanted some local flavor, so here it is,\" Sophie teased, making Dirk carry their ad hoc lunch.\n\nShe led him down a few more blocks, then crossed onto the grounds of the St. Anne's Church. A graceful stone structure built by the Crusaders, its location in the heart of the Muslim Quarter represented one of the many peculiar juxtapositions to be found in the ancient city.\n\n\"A nice Jewish girl is taking me to a Christian church?\" Dirk asked with a chuckle.\n\n\"We're actually headed to the grounds in back of the church. A place that I thought an underwater explorer might enjoy visiting. In addition to the fact,\" she added with a wink, \"it's a lovely spot for a picnic.\"\n\nThey entered the property and made their way to the rear grounds, where they found an open area shaded by mature sycamore trees. A trail led a short distance to a fenced chasm that dropped away like an open mine. Remnants of brick walls, stone columns, and ancient arches rose from the dry base of the cavity.\n\n\"This was the original Pool of Bethesda,\" Sophie said as they peered down into the now-dusty depths. \"It was originally a reservoir for the First and Second Temples, then baths were later constructed. Of course, it was better known as a healing center after it was written that Jesus cured an invalid here. There's not much water left, I'm afraid.\"\n\n\"Probably just as well,\" Dirk replied. \"Otherwise, it would be wall-to-wall tourists vying to take a bath.\"\n\nThey found a secluded bench beneath a towering sycamore, where they sat down and attacked their lunch, passing the delicacies back and forth.\n\n\"Tell me, how is Dr. Haasis getting on?\" she asked.\n\n\"Quite well, actually. I just visited him this morning before traveling to Jerusalem. He's resting at home but eager to get back to work. The leg wound didn't prove serious, so he should be free of his crutches in another week or two.\"\n\n\"The poor fellow. I feel so sorry for him.\"\n\n\"He told me he feels bad for you. He seems to think it was his fault that your agents were placed in such a dangerous situation.\"\n\nSophie shook her head. \"That is ridiculous. He had no way of knowing an armed band of terrorists would attack any more than we did.\"\n\n\"He's a man with a generous soul,\" Dirk said, sampling a fresh fig from the bag of fruit. \"By the way, the Israeli Security Agency grilled me pretty good over the last few days. I hope you can tell me that you're close to catching the bad guys.\"\n\n\"Shin Bet, as they are known, has taken the lead on the investigation, but I'm afraid the trail of evidence has already turned cold. The assailants' truck was found to be a stolen vehicle. It was discovered driven into the sea near Nahariyya. Shin Bet thinks that the thieves likely crossed into Lebanon shortly after departing Caesarea. They are believed to be connected with a smuggling operation that has known ties to Hezbollah. I fear they will be difficult to identify, let alone capture.\"\n\n\"Any idea who they might have been working for?\"\n\n\"Not really. I've made plenty of inquiries and have a few suspicions, but no hard proof. Sam and I are doing everything we can,\" she said, her voice drifting away as her thoughts turned to the dead agent Holder.\n\nDirk reached over and clasped her hand in his and squeezed tight.\n\n\"I never thought I'd have to deal with something like this,\" she continued, falling teary-eyed.\n\nShe looked into Dirk's eyes and squeezed his hand back. \"I'm really glad that you are here,\" she said, then leaned over and kissed him.\n\nThey sat huddled for a long while, Sophie feeling safe again in the arms of Dirk. Staring at the empty pools of Bethesda, she eventually regained the will to face her job again. Taking a deep breath, she smiled through moist eyes.\n\n\"Can you smell the jasmine in the air?\" she asked. \"I've always loved the fragrance. It reminds me of when I was a child, and all the days were filled with happiness.\"\n\n\"They will be again,\" Dirk promised.\n\n\"I must be getting back,\" she finally whispered, though her arms retained their lock around Dirk.\n\n\"I'll be waiting for you,\" he replied.\n\nShe suddenly remembered the planned operation with Sam that night.\n\n\"We can have dinner, but I'm afraid I have to work tonight. A surveillance job. We received a tip about an artifact thief who might be connected to the Lebanese smugglers.\"\n\n\"May I come along?\"\n\nSophie started to shake her head, then relented. \"We are a bit shorthanded. It's just Sam and me, so we could use some extra support. But no heroics this time.\"\n\n\"A silent observer, that's me. I promise,\" he said, smiling.\n\nThey rose together and took a final look at the dry pools. Sophie felt a sudden hesitancy to leave, though she didn't know why. She finally gathered Dirk's hand and led him slowly away from the pools, fighting a swirl of emotions within her heart."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 49",
                "text": "The ottoman star crept slowly into the israeli port of Haifa, the decrepit freighter relegated to a berth at the end of the quiet west terminal. With only a small quantity of remaining textiles to off-load, the Turkish crew could have easily emptied the ship's holds in a few hours. But they were under strict orders to procrastinate unloading so that work would not be completed until late in the evening.\n\nPresenting a pair of fake passports at the port's customs office, Maria and one of the Janissaries then rented a car and made their way out of Haifa. Posing as a married couple on holiday, they could travel through most of the country with limited scrutiny. But in making their way to Jerusalem, they took no chances. Maria drove a circuitous route to avoid entering the West Bank and being subjected to additional security checkpoints, which might find the fanny pack under her seat containing a gun, cash, and a pair of night vision goggles.\n\nMaria knew well that attempting to transport the HMX explosives into and through the country was another matter. Zakkar and his associates in the Mules could handle that risk, at a cost that was well worth the price. The Arab smuggler had carefully outlined to Maria how the explosives would be transported via truck, then on foot, even strapped to the bellies of a herd of sheep at one point, in order to reach the destination without being detected by the Israeli security forces.\n\nBut that was only half of the challenge. The Turkish woman had other equally important business to conduct in person. With the help of a tourist map, they entered the busy streets of Jerusalem, bypassing the Old City in making their way to one of the newer neighborhoods to the west. Locating the recently opened Waldorf Astoria Hotel, they parked their car on the street and walked to the next block south. Tucked into a row of trendy tourist shops, they found a tiny teahouse, with strings of beads shading the windows, and stepped inside.\n\nAt a corner table in the dimly lit cafe, Maria spotted a bearded man rise to his feet and smile in her direction, revealing a gold-plated front tooth. Maria approached him with her Janissary in tow.\n\n\"Al-Khatib?\" she asked.\n\n\"At your service,\" the Palestinian replied, bending toward her in a slight bow. \"Won't you join me?\"\n\nMaria nodded and sat down at the table with the Janissary beside her. Al-Khatib took a seat across from them and poured them each a cup of tea. Maria noticed that he had the sunbaked skin and callused hands of an old artifact plunderer, which was exactly what he was.\n\n\"Welcome to Jerusalem,\" he said by way of a toast.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Maria replied, gazing around the room to ensure there were no prying ears nearby.\n\n\"Have you succeeded with the task for which you were hired?\" she asked in a low voice.\n\n\"Yes, with ease,\" the Palestinian replied, smiling again. \"The aqueduct was exactly where you indicated it would be. It is an amazing historical validation. May I ask where you obtained the research data?\"\n\nIt was Maria's turn to smile.\n\n\"As you know, the present wall around the Old City was constructed by Suleiman the Magnificent in the early fifteen hundreds. His engineers mapped the route in detail, incorporating the locations of existing obstructions. The maps, which we have acquired in Turkey, are replete with abandoned aqueducts and other features constructed back to the Age of Herod, which have since been lost or hidden.\"\n\n\"A marvelous discovery, and one that I would love to examine some time,\" al-Khatib said hungrily.\n\n\"I'm afraid I didn't bring the documents with me on this trip,\" she lied. \"My family has an extensive collection of Ottoman artifacts, and the maps were part of a larger acquisition.\" She neglected to mention that they had all been stolen from a museum in Ankara.\n\n\"Historical documents of prized value, I should think. May I ask the purpose of the excavation?\"\n\nMaria brushed aside the inquiry. \"You were able to expand the opening around the aqueduct?\" she countered.\n\n\"Yes, I have done as you requested. I quietly enlarged the opening, then burrowed a meter or two into the hillside. The entrance is properly concealed by scrub brush.\"\n\n\"Excellent,\" Maria replied, then reached into her pack and retrieved an envelope filled with Israeli banknotes. Al-Khatib's eyes widened as she slid the fat envelope across the table.\n\n\"There is a bonus for your timely work,\" she said.\n\n\"I am most grateful,\" the Palestinian gushed, quickly stuffing the envelope into his pocket.\n\nMaria finished her cup of tea, then said, \"You will show us to the site now.\"\n\nAl-Khatib looked at his watch with dismay. \"It will be dark shortly, but there is a bright moon tonight.\"\n\nThen he saw the cold, determined look in Maria's eyes and quickly backpedaled.\n\n\"Of course, if that is what you wish,\" he stammered. \"Do you have a car?\"\n\nHe paid the bill, then the trio made their way down the street to the rental. Following al-Khatib's directions, Maria drove around the southern end of the Old City, then turned north into the Kidron Valley. The Palestinian directed her to the fringe of an ancient Muslim cemetery, where Maria concealed the car behind an adjacent stone warehouse that was crumbling at the seams.\n\nTheir shadows disappeared under the approaching twilight as the Janissary removed a pickax and a bag filled with electric lanterns from the rear of the car. He and Maria then followed the Palestinian as he hopped over a low stone wall and wound his way through the dusty cemetery. The grounds were all but deserted at the late hour, but the group kept to the remote western section, well away from a mosque in the center and a side road to the east. The Janissary did his best to conceal the ax, hiding the business end under his arm as he walked.\n\nTo the east of them rose the Mount of Olives, dominated by a large Jewish cemetery and several churches and gardens. Rising from a hillside to their immediate west stood the towering stone wall that surrounded the Old City. Just over the wall was the original Temple Mount, now occupied by the al-Haram ash-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary. At the center of the holy grounds was the Dome of the Rock, a towering structure that housed the stone upon which Abraham had prepared to sacrifice his son. In Islamic tradition, that rock was also deemed the departure point for Muhammad's visit to heaven during his Night Journey, earmarked by his footprint in the stone. Maria could just make out the top of the Muslim shrine's large gold dome, the towering structure appearing maple brown in the fading light.\n\nAl-Khatib reached the simple marker of a Muslim Emir who'd died in the sixteenth century and turned left. Stepping to the end of an irregular row of grave sites, he began climbing the rocky hillside that rose sharply toward the Old City. Maria fumbled for a flashlight in her pack but kept it turned off, stumbling over rocks and scrub, until reaching a slight plateau, where al-Khatib slowed.\n\n\"We are close,\" he whispered.\n\nFlicking on his own penlight, he led them higher up the hill, stopping finally beside a pair of desert shrubs. Panting for breath, Maria noticed that both plants were actually dead, their roots wedged into a small mound of stones. Behind the dead shrubs was an orderly stack of limestone rocks.\n\n\"It is behind here,\" al-Khatib said, waving his light toward the plants. He turned and nervously scanned up and down the hillside to ensure they were not being observed.\n\n\"There are occasional security patrols in this area,\" he cautioned.\n\nMaria pulled out the pair of night vision goggles and carefully scanned the surroundings. The nearby sounds of the city wafted down the valley, and a blanket of lights twinkled across the surrounding hills. But all was empty in the cemetery below.\n\n\"There is no one about,\" she confirmed.\n\nAl-Khatib nodded, then knelt down and began tossing the stones aside. When a small opening appeared, Maria ordered the Jannisary to assist. Together, the two men quickly cleared away a concealed entrance, exposing a narrow passageway almost five feet in height. After removing all of the obstructions, the Palestinian stood and rested.\n\n\"The aqueduct was actually quite small,\" he said to Maria, circling his hands together in a tight diameter. \"A good deal of digging was required to enlarge it.\"\n\nMaria looked at the man without pity as she considered the original construction history. The aqueduct opening found on the hillside was simply an outlet, she knew, for a much more elaborate engineering feat. Nearly two thousand years before, Roman engineers under Herod had constructed a series of aqueducts from the distant hills of Hebron, which brought fresh water to the town and the fortress of Antonia, built on the site of the Temple Mount. The aqueducts were all constructed by hand, by laborers much more fit than the pudgy Palestinian who stood before her, Maria thought.\n\nShe held her flashlight to the mouth of the passage and flicked it on. The light revealed a narrow tunnel that ran five feet into the hillside. In the rear, she could see the small aqueduct opening at floor level, which continued deeper into the dirt wall. The tunnel was cleanly carved, and Maria could see that al-Khatib had excavated it with some skill.\n\n\"You have done nice work,\" she told him, turning off her light. Then she took the pickax from the Janissary and handed it to the Palestinian.\n\n\"I need you to dig another two or three feet,\" she demanded.\n\nThe well-paid artifact hunter readily nodded, hoping for an additional bonus while curious as to the task at hand. Taking a lantern from the Janissary, he squeezed to the rear of the tunnel and began digging into the rocky wall. The Janissary stepped in behind him and with gloved hands began removing the loose dirt and chipped debris accumulating around al-Khatib's feet.\n\nAs Maria stood watch near the entrance, al-Khatib labored steadily, swinging the ax for nearly twenty minutes straight and carving away several more feet of soil. Breathing hard, he laid a heavy stroke into the hillside, feeling an odd lightness through the ax's handle. Yanking back the ax, he realized he had punched a hole through to an open space behind the wall of dirt. The startled Palestinian stopped and held up the lantern. He could see only a black expanse of emptiness through the small hole but marveled at the rush of cool air that flowed through it.\n\nWith renewed energy, he furiously attacked the barrier, quickly expanding the hole to man-size. Pushing the debris aside, he barreled through the opening with the lantern, stumbling into a wide, high-ceiling cavern.\n\n\"Praise be Allah,\" he gasped, tossing the pickax aside as he gazed at the far walls.\n\nThey reflected alabaster white because of the electric lantern and revealed even rows of chisel marks. Al-Khatib's trained eye recognized the rock as limestone, showing where large blocks had been cut and removed by hand.\n\n\"A quarry, like Zedekiah's Cave,\" he blurted as Maria and the Janissary entered with another pair of lanterns.\n\n\"Yes,\" Maria replied. \"Only this one was lost to history when the Second Temple was destroyed.\"\n\nBeneath the walls of the Old City, less than a mile away, was another vast cave, carved by slaves who chiseled limestone for Herod the Great's many engineering projects. Its name was acquired from the last king of Judah, Zedekiah, who reportedly used it as a hiding place to escape the armies of Nebuchadnezzar.\n\nWith the added light, the trio could see that the quarry dispersed into multiple passages, extending like fingers of a hand into the darkness. Al-Khatib eyed a large main tunnel that stretched directly east as far as he could see.\n\n\"This must extend well under the Haram ash-Sharif,\" he said uneasily.\n\nMaria nodded in reply.\n\n\"And the Dome of the Rock?\" he asked, tension apparent in his voice.\n\n\"The Dome's sacred stone is itself situated on bedrock, but the main tunnel does underlie the structure. Another tunnel approaches the al-Aqsa Mosque, in addition to other points on the grounds. That is, if Suleiman's maps are accurate, which they have proven to be so far.\"\n\nThe Palestinian's face turned pale as his initial excitement turned to trepidation.\n\n\"I do not wish to tread beneath the site of the sacred rock,\" he said solemnly.\n\n\"That will not be necessary,\" Maria replied. \"Your work is finished.\"\n\nAs she spoke, she reached into her pack and retrieved a compact Beretta pistol, which she leveled at the startled Palestinian.\n\nUnlike her brother, Maria felt no rush or thrill at taking the life of another. In fact, she felt nothing at all. Committing murder was the emotional equivalent of changing her socks or eating a bowl of soup. They were at different ends of the sociopathic scale, products of abusive childhoods and genetic homogeneity, but they had both ended up as remorseless killers.\n\nThe pistol barked twice, sending a pair of slugs into al-Khatib's chest as the echo of the shots reverberated loudly through the chamber. The relic hunter dropped to his knees, a momentary look of incomprehension in his eyes, before he fell over dead. Maria calmly walked over and removed the envelope of banknotes from his pocket and stuffed it in her pack. Then she glanced at her watch.\n\n\"We have less than an hour before the explosives are to be delivered,\" she said to the Janissary. \"Let us survey the quarry and select our sites.\"\n\nStepping over the dead man's body, she retrieved his lantern, then quickly scurried off into the dark."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 50",
                "text": "It was nearing ten o'clock when Sophie pulled into a small dirt lot outside the northeast wall of the Old City and parked behind a closed dress shop. Across the road and down a short hill was the northern tip of the Muslim cemetery, which meandered south across a widening gulch as part of the Kidron Valley headlands. Shutting off the ignition, she turned to Dirk, who gazed at her from the passenger seat.\n\n\"Are you sure you want to do this?\" she asked. \"Most night operations turn out to be a boring exercise in futility.\"\n\nDirk smiled as he nodded his head. \"I'm not one to waste the chance for a stroll in the moonlight with a beautiful girl.\"\n\nSophie suppressed a laugh. \"You're the only one I know who could find something romantic in a stakeout.\"\n\nBut she had to admit to similar feelings. They had enjoyed an intimate dinner at a quiet Armenian cafe inside the Jaffa Gate, and as the evening progressed she developed a compelling desire to cancel the surveillance operation and invite him to her apartment instead. She quelled the notion, knowing the prospect of obtaining potential information about the killers of agent Holder was much too important.\n\n\"It's not like Sam to be late,\" she said, checking her watch, then gazing out the window for his vehicle.\n\nA minute later, her cell phone vibrated, and she answered, speaking animatedly in Hebrew.\n\n\"It was Sam,\" she said after hanging up. \"He was in an auto accident.\"\n\n\"Is he all right?\"\n\n\"Yes. Apparently a van filled with Christian pilgrims missed a turn and drove into him. He's okay, but his car is wrecked. He thinks a few elderly tourists might be injured, so it's going to take a while to clean up. He doesn't think that he'll be able to get here for another hour.\"\n\n\"Then I guess we better start without him,\" Dirk replied, opening the door and climbing out of the car. Sophie followed him, opening the trunk and removing a pair of night vision binoculars, which she strung around her neck. Then she leaned over and opened a large leather case that was lying flat in the trunk. Inside was a weathered, government-issue Tavor TAR-21 assault rifle. Sophie slid in a fully loaded clip and chambered the first round, then slid the weapon over her shoulder.\n\n\"Armed for bear this time, I see,\" Dirk remarked.\n\n\"After Caesarea, I will always be better armed,\" she said, her voice filled with resolve.\n\n\"Why not let the Shin Bet handle the stakeout if you suspect the Lebanese smugglers are involved?\"\n\n\"I considered that,\" she replied, \"but the tip was rather flimsy. We're most likely dealing with some ragtag teenage pothunters who probably won't even show up.\"\n\n\"That would be all right with me,\" Dirk said with a wink as he grabbed her hand.\n\nThey crossed the road and hiked down the embankment that spilled into the cemetery. Sophie stopped and scanned the grounds with her binoculars.\n\n\"We need to move farther down,\" she said quietly.\n\nThey hiked another dozen yards down the slope, stopping at a low rise that offered an unobstructed view of nearly the entire cemetery. Around them, the Muslim flat stone graves glimmered white under the moonlight like an array of displaced teeth scattered about a sand-colored blanket. Sophie took a seat on a stone ledge and carefully surveyed the lower grounds with her night vision glasses. She spotted a few kids playing a late-night game of soccer on the other side of the Western Wall, but the cemetery itself appeared deserted. She was scanning toward the east when she felt Dirk's body slide in alongside her, his arm wrapping around her waist. She slowly lowered the binoculars.\n\n\"You are distracting me from my work,\" she protested lightly, then placed a hand around the back of his neck and kissed him passionately.\n\nThey embraced for several minutes until a faint shuffling sound disrupted their intimacy. Sophie quickly gazed down the hill again.\n\n\"Three men with large backpacks,\" she whispered. \"Two of them appear to be carrying shovels or possibly weapons, I can't tell.\"\n\nShe put down the binoculars and looked up the hill. \"We need Sam,\" she said with frustration.\n\n\"He's still a half hour away,\" Dirk said, glancing at his watch.\n\nThe sound of the three men's steps grew louder as they trudged up the center of the cemetery. Sophie unholstered her Glock pistol and handed it to Dirk.\n\n\"We'll make the arrest,\" she whispered. \"Then I'll call the Jerusalem police to take them in.\"\n\nDirk nodded in agreement as he took the pistol, checking to see that it was loaded. They crept from their spot, moving slowly down the hill. They followed the larger grave markers for cover, which gradually carried them to their right. Approaching a raised tomb that offered concealment, they inched along its high back side, then kneeled down and waited.\n\nThe minutes ticked by slowly as the three purported grave robbers worked their way closer. Sophie quietly clipped her flashlight to the barrel of the Tavor, then held perfectly still as the men trudged by a few feet away. She nodded to Dirk, then suddenly sprang to her feet. Leaping behind the men, she clicked on the flashlight, then shouted in Arabic, \"Stop! Hands in the air!\"\n\nThe three men turned and froze at the sudden ambush, squinting as Sophie played the light's beam on their faces. Two of the men, each holding an AK-74 pointed at the ground, glared at her with menace. One of them was short, shabbily dressed, with droopy eyes, who Sophie recognized as Hassan Akais, the subject of the tip. The second was equally dirty, distinguished by a prominently bent nose. It was the third man, however, who sent a shiver down Sophie's spine. Clearly the leader of the trio, he calmly stared back at her with probing eyes that danced above a deep scar on the right side of his jaw. It was the same face that had glared at her in Caesarea, leading the assault that killed detective Holder.\n\nSophie's hands trembled in recognition, causing the flashlight's beam to flicker about the terrorist's face. Sensing her hesitation, Akais quickly and silently swung his weapon up to bear on Sophie. As his finger reached for the trigger, a loud shot echoed through the cemetery. A splotch of red materialized on the gunman's wrist as a 9mm slug tore through his forearm.\n\nThe man winced in pain, letting go of the trigger while grabbing his bloodied arm with his free hand. He looked up blankly at Sophie before spotting Dirk standing a few steps to her side, an automatic pistol extended in his hands at arms' length.\n\n\"Throw down your weapons or I shall aim a bit higher next time,\" Dirk commanded.\n\nThe other Arab, who wore a long, straggly beard, quickly shed his AK-74, but the wounded man didn't move. He stared at Dirk with hatred in his eyes. Then suddenly his face softened, and he gritted his teeth in a defiant smirk as his gaze shifted past Dirk's shoulder.\n\n\"I'm afraid it is you who shall throw down your weapons,\" came a hardened female voice from the darkness. \"Place your hands in the air where I can see them.\"\n\nDirk turned toward the voice to find a short-haired woman standing directly behind Sophie with a pistol pointed to the back of her skull. He saw she was dressed in dark, casual clothes, but had her own night vision goggles perched on her forehead. Dirk felt another presence, and he craned his neck slightly to see the shadow of another man in the darkness with a raised gun aimed at his own head.\n\nSophie gave him an apologetic look as she lowered her Tavor to the ground. With little choice, Dirk smiled innocently at the Turkish woman, then gently tossed his pistol onto a nearby grave."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 51",
                "text": "Dirk and Sophie were marched at gunpoint up the side of the hill and into the narrow passageway. Like the Arab terrorists that followed them, they were startled at the sight of the huge quarry that awaited on the other side, now illuminated by the pale glow of several lanterns. Sophie had visited Zedekiah's Cave on several occasions and was astonished to find another, equally expansive quarry situated beneath the Temple Mount. Her awe turned to fear when she spotted the bloodstained body of al-Khatib lying facedown beside one of the lanterns. Her fear was only enhanced at her recognition of the Arab terrorist leader.\n\n\"The tall one... he led the attack at Caesarea,\" she whispered to Dirk.\n\nDirk nodded, already aware that the well-armed contingent was after something more important than an old grave or two. The Janissary prodded them to a low stone ledge, where they took a seat, under gunpoint, near the dead Palestinian. Maria ignored them as she gathered the heavy backpacks from the three Arabs.\n\n\"This is the entire quantity?\" she asked Zakkar.\n\n\"Yes, all twenty-five kilos are there, with fuzes and detonators,\" the Arab replied. He gazed up at the high ceiling. \"Do you aim to blow up the Dome of the Rock?\"\n\nMaria looked at him coldly. \"Yes, and the al-Aqsa Mosque. Do you have a problem with that?\"\n\nThe Arab shook his head. \"You will cause great anger in our lands. But perhaps it will result in the greater good of Allah.\"\n\n\"There will be a greater good,\" Maria replied sharply.\n\nShe knelt down and quickly inventoried the explosives, then rose to her feet. Noticing Sophie and Dirk observing her movements, her face quickly soured.\n\n\"You nearly exposed our mission,\" she hissed at Zakkar.\n\nThe Arab shook his head. \"They are archaeological police looking for grave looters,\" he said without acknowledging his own recognition of Sophie and Dirk. \"It was a random surveillance. Why don't we just kill them now?\" he asked, tilting his head in their directioN\n\n\"Israeli archaeologists, you say?\" Maria mulled her own words over. \"No, we shall not kill them. They shall die 'accidentally' in the blast,\" she said with a wicked grin. \"They will make the perfect scapegoats.\"\n\nShe waved for the Janissary to approach, then turned again to Zakkar.\n\n\"Have your two men stand guard,\" she said, glancing at her watch. \"It is time we set the explosives, which I wish to detonate at one o'clock.\"\n\nShe picked up a lantern as the Janissary hoisted up two of the backpacks. Zakkar addressed his two men, then picked up the other pack and a lantern and followed Maria as she disappeared down one of the passageways.\n\n\"Destruction of the Dome will unleash a horrific wave of bloodshed,\" Sophie whispered to Dirk.\n\n\"Silence!\" barked the bearded Arab, briefly waving his gun in Sophie's direction.\n\nHis partner, the wounded man named Akais, sat on a nearby rock, cradling his arm. The gunshot had missed any major arteries, and he had stemmed the flow of blood with his keffiyeh, now wrapped tightly around his arm. Though he had walked easily up the hill and into the quarry under his own power, he was now suffering a moderate degree of shock from loss of blood. At times he would glare at Dirk with rage, then his eyes would glaze over into a thousand-mile stare.\n\nDirk methodically surveyed the quarry, searching for a means of escape that wouldn't garner a bullet in the back. But there appeared to be few avenues. Staring at the dead Palestinian for a few moments, he took note of the two remaining lanterns. One was lying on the floor near the dead man, some ten feet from his own position. The bearded gunman slowly circled the other lamp, perched on a stone across the cavern.\n\nDirk caught Sophie's attention and casually motioned toward the bearded guard. Then he rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth, whispering beneath it.\n\n\"The lantern... can you turn it off?\"\n\nSophie eyed the lamp and the adjacent guard, then nodded faintly with a determined glare. She then carefully scanned the walls of the cavern, examining every cut and chisel mark that she could make out in the dim light. On a wall beyond the guard, she found what she was looking for, an irregular mark from which to build a story.\n\nShe stared at the spot with rapt fascination until the guard caught her gaze and turned to see what she was looking at. Keeping her eyes locked on the wall, she gently rose to her feet and took a step forward.\n\n\"Do not move,\" the Arab hissed, turning back toward her.\n\nSophie tried her best to ignore him without getting shot.\n\n\"This quarry is two thousand years old, directly beneath the Dome of the Rock,\" she murmured. \"I think I see a sign of the Prophet over there.\"\n\nThe guard looked suspiciously at her, then at Dirk. The NUMA engineer gave him the best clueless and uninterested look he could muster. Grabbing the lantern, the Arab backed slowly to the wall, keeping his assault rifle leveled on the pair. Reaching the wall, he took several hasty glances at the carved limestone. A pair of parallel gouges ran lightly across the surface at eye level while a faded mark in charcoal was visible between the cuts. The gunman looked at the mark blankly, then focused on Sophie.\n\n\"Yes, that's it,\" she said, taking another tentative step forward. When the gunman didn't react, she continued walking toward him at a cautious pace.\n\n\"Any tricks, and your friend dies first,\" the Arab spat, keeping his gun aimed at Dirk. He then turned and yelled at his companion.\n\n\"Hassan, stay alert.\"\n\nThe wounded gunman responded by sluggishly nodding his head.\n\n\"Now, show me,\" the gunman continued, speaking to Sophie while backing away from the wall.\n\nSophie crept to the wall and placed a hand on the surface near the cuts and marking. She had seen similar cuts in the walls of Zedekiah's Cave and knew they were nothing more than the preliminary markings for a limestone slab that for some reason was never cut by the quarrymen. The faded charcoal was likely a numerical marking or placeholder for the unused stone. Yet she played it for much more.\n\n\"Like his footprint in the Dome's sacred rock above, I believe this may be an indication of Muhammad's departure on the Night Journey,\" she said, referring to the visit to heaven atop a winged steed. \"I can't quite make it out under the light, though. May I borrow the lantern?\"\n\nShe never looked at the guard, instead pretending to be engrossed in the wall carving as she extended a hand out toward him. He reacted instinctively, tentatively passing the lantern while also shifting the muzzle of his rifle in her direction. Grabbing the lantern, Sophie held it up to the wall, her eyes still glued to the charcoal marking.\n\n\"See this here,\" she said quietly, pointing her free hand at the rock. She then casually let her hand slip to the base of the lantern, where her fingers groped for the power switch. Finding it with her index finger, she clicked the lamp off and froze.\n\nUnder the yellow glow of the far lamp, she was still quite visible to the Arab. He started to grunt a command at her, then noticed a sudden movement out of the corner of his eye.\n\nDirk had quietly been waiting for that moment. The instant Sophie's lantern went dark, he sprang from the ledge. He knew bullets would follow him immediately, so he took two steps and dove for the light.\n\nHe wasn't to be disappointed. The bearded gunman swung his weapon and fired instantly. But Dirk had already hit the ground, and the bullets whizzed high over his head. Extending an arm as he landed, he grabbed the lantern one-handed. Not bothering to fumble with the switch, he simply slammed the lantern against the ground, smashing the glass panes and bulb.\n\nThe cavern plunged into total darkness, which was quickly punctuated by bursts of fiery light from the muzzle of the Arab's assault rifle. The angered gunman fired several protracted rounds at Dirk, which echoed like thunder through the quarry as bullets ricocheted off the limestone walls.\n\nThe fire was aimed at Dirk's last position, but he had immediately rolled away from the lantern and scurried crablike across the floor toward the entry passage. After crawling twenty feet, he stopped and circled around, groping about the floor with his hands. The firing ceased as he found what he was looking for--the body of the dead Palestinian. Or, more precisely, the pickax that lay near the man's feet.\n\nAn uncomfortable silence fell over the cavern as the odor of gunpowder drifted through the air. The Arab gunman, confident that he had killed Dirk, turned and fired toward the spot where Sophie had been standing moments earlier. But under the glow of the muzzle flash, he saw that she was no longer there.\n\nRunning a hand along the wall for guidance, Sophie smartly had run toward and then past the gunman while he was firing at Dirk. When the shooting stopped, she froze, the lantern still clasped in her hand, as she willed her heart to stop beating so loudly.\n\n\"Hassan, do you have a light?\" the Arab shouted.\n\nThe wounded gunman was slowly regaining his senses and rose to his feet unsteadily.\n\n\"I am here, by the entrance. Do not shoot this way,\" he pleaded in a weak voice.\n\n\"The light?\" his partner barked.\n\n\"It is in my backpack, which I can't seem to locate,\" Akais replied, groping around his feet.\n\n\"The others took the backpacks,\" replied the other man angrily.\n\nDirk made the most of the distracting conversation to move in for the kill. Hoisting the pickax over his shoulder, he crept toward the entryway and the voice of the wounded gunman. In his unsteady state, he would be the easiest to take down. With a little luck, Dirk could swap the ax for an assault rifle and shoot the other man before he knew what happened.\n\nAs the conversation died, Dirk still stood several feet from the wounded man. He would have to take a blind swing at him, as he couldn't afford to reveal his position. Halting for a moment, he slid a foot forward silently, then slid again. But even in his diminished state, Akais detected a presence nearby.\n\n\"Salaam?\" he suddenly asked.\n\nThe voice was close, Dirk realized, close enough to strike. He had taken another soft step forward and raised the ax to swing when a lantern suddenly came on across the cavern. He spun to see it was Maria, with a lantern in one hand and a pistol in the other. Staring at Dirk, she eased the pistol to her left until it was aimed at the heart of Sophie, who stood crouched against the wall just a few feet away.\n\n\"Drop the ax or she dies now,\" the Turkish woman said.\n\nSophie gave him a forlorn look as he reluctantly dropped the pickax to the ground. Looking at her eyes wide with fear was the last thing he remembered. Then Hassan smacked the stock of his rifle into the back of Dirk's head and he crumpled to the ground in a sea of darkness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 52",
                "text": "A well-traveled white taxi turned into the dirt lot and came to a stop alongside Sophie's car. Sam Levine quickly paid the driver, then hopped out. As the cab drove off into the night, Sam tried phoning Sophie. Not surprised that she didn't answer, he sent her a text message telling her where he was. When there was no response to that, he set off for the cemetery, knowing that she usually turned her phone off during a reconnaissance operation.\n\nHe crossed the street with a slight limp, his side and hip aching from the auto accident. In the confusion, he had left his night vision gear in the trunk of his damaged car, but he did have an automatic pistol holstered at his side. By moving slowly and quietly, he banked that Sophie would be able to spot him before he disrupted the surveillance.\n\nClimbing down the embankment, he realized that he would have no problem moving slowly. He winced as a steep step sent a shooting pain through his leg, and he resorted to taking small, stutter steps as he navigated the sloping grounds that led to the cemetery.\n\nThe cemetery appeared silent and empty as he crept past the ancient tombs. He stopped every few yards to look and listen, expecting Sophie to silently appear out of the dark and tap him on the shoulder. But she never materialized.\n\nHiking another few steps, he stopped again, this time at hearing a distant noise. It was the clacking sound of rocks being piled upon one another, emanating from the center of the cemetery. Sam quietly tiptoed a few yards closer, stopping behind a low retaining wall. The clattering continued from down the hill. As he peered cautiously over the wall, under the light of a half-moon, he could just make out several shadowy figures moving about a flat grave near a short stone lamp tower that had lost its illumination decades ago.\n\nThe antiquities agent pulled out his pistol, then sat and waited. Several minutes ticked by as he wondered where Sophie was and why she wasn't making an arrest. Perhaps she had abandoned the recon, he thought, but that didn't prevent him from doing his duty.\n\nClimbing over the wall with a grimace, he hobbled downhill toward the grave robbers. The sound of rattling stones ceased, and he could make out several of the figures retreating toward the southern end of the cemetery. He tried to run, but the stinging pain in his joints quickly slowed him to a shuffle. With a rising sense of desperation, he stopped and shouted, \"Halt!\"\n\nThe demand had an inverse effect. Rather than stopping the intruders, it prompted them to flee quicker. Sam could hear their accelerated steps as they ran through the cemetery and past its southern boundary. Moments later, the sound of not one but two automobiles starting up disrupted the night, followed by the screech of tires as both cars quickly sped away.\n\nSam shook his head in dismay as he spotted the receding taillights. Then he thought again about his supervisor.\n\n\"Sophie, are you out there?\" he shouted.\n\nBut he was only answered by the silence of the empty graveyard.\n\nAmbling down to the light tower, he stepped to the adjacent grave site, expecting to find a hastily dug crater burrowed into it. Instead, he was surprised to see an orderly mound of stones covering the grave. It was unusual for robbers to conceal their handiwork, he knew. Curious, he lifted a few of the stones off the top of the mound. He nearly fell backward when a human hand appeared in the moonlight.\n\nWorking more hesitantly, he gently removed more of the stones until revealing the bloodied torso and head of the murdered Palestinian. Staring at the corpse with revulsion, Sam silently wondered what sort of twisted thieves had come to the graveyard to make a deposit."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 53",
                "text": "A dull light seemed to burn through dirk's eyes, though his lids were tightly closed. There was nothing dull, however, in the throbbing pain that surged through his head.\n\nWith a Herculean effort, he slowly forced open an eyelid, cringing as he slowly focused on a glowing lantern sitting inches from his face. Climbing back to full consciousness, he noticed the discomfort of the cold, hard limestone floor beneath his body. His arms stirred slightly as his hands groped along the surface, searching for support.\n\nTaking a deep breath, he pressed with his arms, raising his torso while pulling up his legs, until he reached a sitting position. An explosion of stars swirled before his eyes, and he nearly passed out again, staving off slumber by breathing deeply. Resting a few minutes until the dizziness and nausea passed, he noticed a cool dampness on his back. Rubbing a hand across the back of his head, he felt a stinging knot that was caked with dried blood.\n\nThe gears in his mind slowly began churning as he recognized his surroundings. Sitting alone in the empty cavern, he immediately called out to Sophie in a weakened voice. Only silence countered his ringing ears. Grabbing the lantern, he painfully rose to his feet, the pounding in his skull rising to new proportions as he staggered about like a drunk.\n\nHe gradually regained his strength and steadiness as he searched around the cavern, then crawled out the passageway. The cemetery appeared dark and silent around him, so he quickly reentered the quarry.\n\nHe shouted for her again, this time in a stronger voice that echoed through the chamber. From deep inside one of the tunnels, he thought he heard a faint slap in reply. Though his hearing was far from optimal, the sound, if real, seemed to emanate from the large tunnel to his right. It was the same tunnel that Maria and her men had entered with the explosives.\n\nDucking slightly as he entered the six-foot-high tunnel, Dirk moved as briskly as his throbbing head would allow. Unbeknownst to him, the tunnel stretched more than two hundred yards into the hillside, bisecting the grounds of the Haram ash-Sharif several feet above his head. Of greater importance to the bombers was its proximity to the Dome of the Rock, burrowing beneath it to within a few yards of the revered rock itself.\n\nThe tunnel curved and twisted, occasionally passing through small chambers where pockets of limestone had neatly been quarried away. As Dirk rounded a tight bend, he detected a faint light glowing from the tunnel ahead. With the skip of a heartbeat, he forced himself to double his pace, ignoring the pounding ache that shot through his head with each labored step.\n\nThe distant light brightened as he jogged through a small, rectangular chamber, then into a straight section of tunnel. Chasing the beckoning rays, he staggered out of the tunnel and into a final chamber that curved around like a punch bowl. Parked in the center was one of the electric lanterns. To his right, Dirk saw a mass of clear puttylike material pressed onto the wall with several wire detonators dangling from its core. To his left lay Sophie, squirming and wriggling, a gag in her mouth and her feet and wrists bound with straps from a backpack. A large rock had been placed between her knees, effectively pinning her to the ground. When she gazed at Dirk, the terror in her glistening eyes quickly vanished.\n\n\"I see you're trying to have a blast without me,\" he said with a weary grin.\n\nBut he didn't give her the opportunity to reply. Heaving the rock from between her legs, he hoisted her over his shoulder, then grabbed both lanterns with his free hand. Finding renewed strength, he quickly shuffled back down the tunnel, careful not to bang her head against the low ceiling.\n\nHe carried her more than half the distance to the main cavern before dizziness reappeared in full force. Reaching the small chamber, he gently set her on the ground and removed her gag as he caught his breath.\n\n\"You look terrible,\" she said. \"Are you badly hurt?\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" he grunted. \"You were the one with the worries.\"\n\n\"What time is it?\" she asked hurriedly.\n\n\"Five minutes to one,\" Dirk replied, gazing at his watch.\n\n\"The explosives. The woman said they were set to detonate at one a.m.\"\n\n\"Let 'em blow. Let's just get out of here.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nDirk was startled by the tone in her voice. It was less of a request than a demand.\n\n\"If the Dome and the mosque are destroyed, it will mean disaster for my country. War will ensue like no other we have seen.\"\n\nDirk looked into Sophie's dark eyes, seeing determination, hope, love, and despair. With the seconds ticking, he knew he couldn't hope to win a debate on the matter.\n\n\"I think I can disable the detonator,\" he said, untying her hands. \"But you've got to get out of here. Here's an extra lantern. Untie your feet and head for the exit.\"\n\nHe turned to run back into the tunnel, but she grabbed his shirt and pulled him close for a quick but passionate kiss.\n\n\"Be careful,\" she said. \"I love you.\"\n\nHis mind in a whirl, Dirk took off running. Her words seemed to extinguish all pain, and he found himself nearly sprinting through the tunnel. In a matter of seconds, he charged into the last chamber and approached the plastic explosives.\n\nAs a marine engineer, he had a rudimentary knowledge of explosives, having worked on salvage projects where underwater demolitions had been required. Though he was unfamiliar with the HMX explosives, the detonating technology in front of him was a common configuration. A single electronic timer fuze was wired to a string of detonator caps, which in turn were embedded in the explosives.\n\nHe glanced at his watch, seeing it was three minutes to one.\n\n\"Don't blow early,\" he muttered under his breath as he held the light to the wall.\n\nHe quickly searched the plastic explosives for additional fuzes, not realizing the quantity of HMX in front of him was enough to level a skyscraper. Finding only the one fuze, he grabbed hold of it and yanked it from the wall. The fuze, with its associated detonator caps, slipped freely from the HMX. With the blasting device dangling in his hand, Dirk took off running back down the tunnel.\n\nHe soon reached the now-dark and empty rectangular chamber, where he was thankful to see by her absence that Sophie had heeded his directions to flee. He stopped for a moment and hurled the fuze assembly against the far wall of the chamber, then dashed into the tunnel. With a sense of relief and fading adrenaline, he stepped into the main chamber, the pain in his head renewing its friendship. He made his way across the dark cavern, noticing for the first time that the body of the Palestinian was no longer there.\n\nSqueezing through the entry tunnel, he welcomed the fresh air outside by sucking in several deep breaths, then glanced around for Sophie. Not spotting her or her light, he flicked off his own lantern momentarily, then called out her name. Neither her light nor her voice responded.\n\nThen a sick feeling suddenly hit Dirk like a blow to the belly. The mosque. Sophie had said that the Dome and the mosque would be destroyed. There must be a second set of explosives for the mosque, and Sophie was inside trying to deactivate it.\n\nDirk shot back through the passageway like an arrow. Inside the main cavern, there were three small tunnels bored into the hillside to the left of the Dome tunnel. Dirk raced to the entrance of each, shouting out Sophie's name down the dark corridors. At the entrance to the last tunnel, he heard a garbled reply, and recognized her silky voice calling from the distance. He immediately burst into the tunnel, running at a sprint through the chiseled corridor.\n\nHe'd taken only a few steps when he heard a popping noise in the distance, like a short string of firecrackers exploding. It was the detonators that he had pulled free beneath the Dome, now igniting harmlessly in the rectangle chamber.\n\nDirk's heart pounded like a sledgehammer as he realized the second cache would detonate at any second.\n\n\"Sophie... get out of there... now!\" he shouted between pounding breaths.\n\nAhead in the tunnel he could see a faint glimmer of light, and he knew he was getting closer. Then he heard another series of pops, and he dove to the floor with an agonized heart.\n\nThe explosion shook the ground like an earthquake, accompanied by an earsplitting boom. Seconds later, the expanding force of exploding gasses burst through the tunnel with a roaring gust, blowing a shower of dust and rock in front of it. Dirk felt his body lift off the ground and slam into the wall, knocking the breath out of him. Hammered by rock and buried in a blanket of choking dust, he felt the world around him once again turn to black."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 54",
                "text": "Sam had been standing with his back to the hillside, examining the dead Palestinian, when Dirk briefly emerged from the passageway in search of Sophie. Hearing someone else call Sophie's name, the antiquities agent wheeled around in time to catch a glimpse of Dirk's lantern disappearing back into the passageway. Sam once more pulled out his phone and tried calling Sophie, then crept slowly up the hill.\n\nHe was only a few yards from the quarry entrance when the cache of explosives detonated. From his vantage, it was little more than a muffled bang followed by a slight rumble beneath his feet. Seconds later, a plume of smoke and dust came pouring out of the small passageway.\n\nHe approached the entrance and found a discarded lantern in the bushes while waiting for the air to clear. Turning on the lamp, he stepped cautiously through the passageway. He was stunned as he stepped into the main cavern, shocked that a huge quarry existed unrecorded beneath the Temple Mount.\n\nThe air was still thick with smoke and dust, and Sam kept a sleeve to his nose as he surveyed the interior. He poked a head into each of the four tunnels, hesitating at the last one, which spewed a heavy plume, and then he suddenly heard the clattering sound of rock on rock echoing from within.\n\nProceeding slowly into the tunnel, he detected the glow of another light far down the corridor. Accelerating his pace, he encountered a pile of debris shaken from the walls by the blast. Stepping carefully past the rubble, he moved farther into the depths of the hillside. The dark tunnel straightened for several yards, and Sam could suddenly see the lantern burning brightly ahead.\n\nA nervous sweat poured down his face as he coughed away the dust that caked his nasal passages. Making his way past a jagged boulder, he staggered out of the tunnel and into a large chamber illuminated by the lantern set on a fallen rock. The chamber resembled an underground gravel pit, with mounds of rocks piled on the floor throughout. A large, irregular hole had been eaten out of the ceiling just over the worst of the debris, the handiwork of the blast. A thick white haze still hung over everything, obscuring visibility despite the light.\n\nFrom the opposite side of the chamber, Sam detected a faint movement.\n\n\"Sophie?\" he called, reaching uneasily for the grip of his handgun.\n\nLike an apparition, a figure appeared through the haze. With a brief sense of relief, Sam recognized Dirk emerging from the gloom. The relief faded when he saw that Dirk held the limp body of Sophie in his arms.\n\n\"Is she all right?\" he asked quietly.\n\nSam tentatively stepped closer, observing that Dirk had covered her head and torso with a light jacket. It was then that he noticed Sophie's dangling limbs appeared misshapen and coated with a thick layer of blood and dust.\n\nHe looked up at Dirk for an explanation and immediately shivered. Any hope for Sophie's well-being was immediately extinguished by Dirk's ragged appearance. Dirk stood staring at him with a battered and bloodied face, his eyes lost and soulless. The life seemed to be crushed out of him, and Sam knew at once that Sophie was dead."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 55",
                "text": "The explosion beneath the haram ash-sharif was nearly suppressed before the smoke even cleared. The Dome of the Rock had been Maria's primary target, and it was there that she had planted the bulk of the explosives. But they went undetonated, rendered harmless when Dirk pulled out the blasting caps. It was a second, smaller cache, planted beneath the al-Aqsa Mosque, that did explode, though ultimately with minimal effect.\n\nThe ground beneath the eighth-century mosque shook and its windows rattled, but no fireballs erupted from the earth to consume it. Seconds before the explosives detonated, Sophie had removed a large block of them and tossed them down the tunnel before attempting to remove the fuzes in the remaining material. The diminished blast did little more than crack the foundation of a fountain behind the mosque. The Haram's Palestinian caretakers initially took little note, believing the explosion came from another part of Jerusalem.\n\nInside the quarry, Sam Levine had been fast to act. Police and paramedics arrived quickly, treating Dirk while removing Sophie's body to the morgue. Shin Bet security agents were equally prompt. The quarry was thoroughly searched, and the remaining explosives carefully secured and removed. The entire complex was then sealed off before the proprietors of Haram ash-Sharif even realized what had happened.\n\nNews of the attempted attack quickly spread through Jerusalem, creating an uproar. Local Muslims decried the assault, while the city's Jews were horrified at the potential desecration of the Temple Mount. Each faction blamed the other, and tempers soared on all sides. Publicly defensive while privately tightening security around the city, the Israeli government quietly brought Jerusalem's Muslim leaders to the quarry, where they jointly agreed to permanently barricade the site against future intrusion.\n\nAnger in the street remained high, but outbursts were remarkably few, and violence was averted. Within days, the tensions abated, as no one stepped forward to claim responsibility for the attacks, while the real bombers disappeared without a trace."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 56",
                "text": "General braxton read the cia report without uttering a word. Only a sporadic twitching of the National Intelligence Director's mustache revealed a hint of emotion. Across his desk, intelligence officer O'Quinn and an Israeli CIA specialist sat silently staring at their shoes. They quickly sat upright when they observed Braxton remove a pair of granny-style reading glasses from the tip of his nose.\n\n\"So let me see here,\" the general said in his gravelly voice. \"Some nuts nearly blow up half of Jerusalem, and neither Mossad nor Shin Bet have a clue who did it? Is that the truth or is that just what the Israelis are telling us?\"\n\n\"The Israelis clearly lack confidence in the investigation,\" the CIA man replied. \"They believe a Lebanese weapons-and drug-smuggling ring known as the Mules are at least partially responsible. The Mules have known ties to Hezbollah, so it's possible they targeted Jerusalem in retaliation for Israel's continued problems in Gaza. The American involved in the incident identified one of the bombers as being involved in a recent terrorist incident at an archaeological dig in Caesarea.\"\n\n\"Is the American one of our agents?\" Braxton asked.\n\n\"No, he's a marine engineer with NUMA. He's recovering from minor injuries at an Israeli Army hospital in Haifa.\"\n\n\"A marine engineer? What in blazes was he doing in Jerusalem?\"\n\n\"Apparently he was romantically involved with the antiquities agent who was killed in the blast. He happened to accompany her on a routine stakeout and got caught up in the fray. A good thing, it turned out, as he was the one who prevented the main cache of explosives from detonating beneath the Dome of the Rock.\"\n\n\"Sir, we really dodged a bullet on that one,\" O'Quinn said. \"There were enough explosives there to easily level the entire Dome structure, let alone a good chunk of the Old City. It would have ignited regional animosity like nothing we've seen. I'm certain that missiles would be flying over Israel today had the shrine been taken out.\"\n\nBraxton grunted, boring his eyes into O'Quinn. \"Since we're on the topic of explosives, I see you have some unsavory homegrown connections to add to the mix.\"\n\n\"We obtained a sample of the unexploded ordnance from the Israelis and confirmed in lab testing that it is in fact HMX. It was produced by a domestic manufacturer under contract with the U.S. Army,\" O'Quinn reported soberly.\n\n\"It's our own bloody explosives?\" the general thundered.\n\n\"I'm afraid so. We've done some digging, and it appears that the Jerusalem sample matches up with a shipment of high-grade HMX that was secretly sold to Pakistan for use in their nuclear weapons program back in the early nineties. The Pakistanis have since confirmed that a container of HMX went missing a short time thereafter. Black market operatives in the military are believed to have sold it to buyers outside the country, but no evidence of its use has emerged until this year.\"\n\n\"An entire container of HMX. Unbelievable,\" Braxton said.\n\n\"The container would have housed approximately eight thousand pounds of the high explosive. It accounts for significant destructive power.\"\n\nThe general closed his eyes and shook his head. \"I presume this attack is connected to the other recent mosque bombings?\" he asked without opening his eyes.\n\n\"We know that the al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo and the Yesil Mosque in Bursa were both hit with HMX. In both cases, nobody claimed responsibility for the attacks. And no evidence was found linking the blasts to any local factions. We appear to have a similar set of circumstances in Jerusalem.\"\n\n\"What of this dead Palestinian who was found in the graveyard?\"\n\n\"He was a low-level artifact hunter with no known terrorist associations,\" the CIA man responded. \"He may have had some involvement with the discovery of the quarry, but he is not believed to have been a player in the actual attack.\"\n\n\"Which takes us to the still unanswered questions of who and why.\"\n\nO'Quinn gave the general a pained look. \"Nobody has claimed responsibility for any of the attacks, and I'm afraid we just don't have a firm trail,\" he said. \"As Joe can verify, the intelligence agencies are looking at suspects across the board, from fringe Christian and Jewish sects to al-Qaeda and other Muslim fanatic groups. We're reliant on the foreign intelligence agencies, and they don't have any strong connections at this point.\"\n\nThe CIA man nodded. \"General, the targets have all been sites of theological importance in the Sunni Muslim world. We think there's a strong possibility that the attacks are originating from a Shia source. The possible Hezbollah link in the Jerusalem attack furthers the theory. I have to tell you, there is a growing contingency within the agency that believes it's the Iranians, trying to divert attention from their weapons program.\"\n\n\"It's a viable motivation,\" Braxton agreed, \"but they'd certainly be playing with fire if they got caught with dirty hands.\"\n\nO'Quinn quietly shook his head.\n\n\"I have to disagree, sir,\" he said. \"These bombings don't have the earmark of the Iranians. It would certainly represent a new level of external extremism that we haven't seen before.\"\n\n\"You're not giving me much else to go on, O'Quinn,\" the general growled. \"What about that Turk, Mufti Battal, that you were excited about?\"\n\n\"He's entered the presidential race, as we feared. He and his party would certainly benefit from any outrage in the fundamentalist community that these bombings may incite. It raises the point that these attacks may be linked to specific political goals rather than general terrorist tactics. As for Battal, we're monitoring his activities closely, but we've yet to witness any pattern of coercive tactics so far. We certainly have no hard proof of a link, at this point.\"\n\n\"So you've got nothing there. Perhaps the question you boys need to be thinking about is where they intend to strike next.\"\n\n\"The targets have clearly been growing in significance,\" O'Quinn said.\n\n\"And they've been denied in their latest outing, which ought to scare us all, in what they might be planning next.\"\n\n\"The Kaaba in Mecca might be a possible target. I'll see to it that the Saudis are advised to increase security,\" O'Quinn said.\n\n\"We've got analysts working overtime on the matter,\" the CIA man added. In the true Washington vernacular of helplessness, he added, \"We're doing everything we can.\"\n\nBraxton brushed off the comment with a glare. \"Let me tell you what to do,\" Braxton said, leaning forward over his desk while eyeballing both intelligence men with ire. \"It's really a simple exercise to put a stop to this. All you have to do,\" he said, his voice rising to a fever pitch, \"is find me the rest of those explosives!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 57",
                "text": "The ottoman star eased into the cove north of the Dardanelles late in the afternoon, docking at the long pier that now stood empty. Beneath the adjacent rippled waters, the sunken workboat still sat on the sandy bottom, waiting for the shore crane and a dive crew to raise it from the depths.\n\nStanding on the ship's bridge, Maria was surprised to note her brother's Jaguar parked on the dock. Celik watched as the ship approached the pier, then emerged from the Jaguar's backseat as the mooring lines were secured. He briskly stepped down the quay with an attache case tucked under his arm and boarded the ship.\n\n\"I wasn't expecting you to meet me here, Ozden,\" Maria said by way of a greeting.\n\n\"Time is short,\" he replied, gazing about the bridge with an agitated expression. The captain and helmsman caught his drift and quickly stepped off the bridge, leaving Celik alone with his sister.\n\n\"I heard that the police searched the facilities after we departed,\" Maria said. \"Is it not dangerous for you to be here?\"\n\nCelik smirked. \"The local police have been well paid to look after our interests. They paid a cursory visit and were kept away from the warehouses.\" The police investigators reminded him of the assault by the NUMA men, and he subconsciously rubbed the spot on his head where Pitt had clubbed him.\n\n\"Those Americans will pay for their intrusion,\" he said in a guttural tone. \"But we have more important matters to address first.\"\n\nMaria braced for the onslaught over the failure at Jerusalem, but the expected outburst never materialized. Celik quietly gazed out the forward window, eyeing the empty dock.\n\n\"Where is the Sultana?\"\n\n\"I left it in Beirut to complete the repair work. The crew will bring her to Istanbul in a few days.\"\n\nCelik nodded, then stepped close to his sister.\n\n\"Now, tell me, Maria, why did the mission fail?\"\n\n\"I am uncertain myself,\" she replied calmly. \"The primary charge failed to detonate. It was set with multiple fuzes, and I am positive it was staged properly. There must have been outside interference. Even the secondary charge should have produced more damage. I suspect the Israeli archaeologist who was killed may have somehow disabled some of the charges.\"\n\n\"The results were disappointing,\" Celik replied, suppressing his usual vitriol, \"but I am thankful for your safe return.\"\n\n\"We put the Lebanese smugglers ashore in Tripoli on the voyage back, so the Israelis have nowhere to search and no trail to follow.\"\n\n\"You have always covered your tracks well, Maria.\"\n\nDespite his unusually calm demeanor, she could see the distress in his face.\n\n\"How is the Mufti faring?\" she asked.\n\n\"He is campaigning like a professional politician and has won the public support of some key members of the Grand National Assembly. But he is still trailing in the polls by at least five percentage points, and we have just days to go before the election.\" He looked at her with an admonishing gaze. \"The Jerusalem attack failed to give us the boost that is necessary for us to win.\"\n\n\"Perhaps it is beyond our control,\" she said.\n\nMaria's words suddenly released the anger that Celik had kept bottled up.\n\n\"No!\" he shouted. \"We are too close. We must not fail to seize the opportunity. The restoration of our family empire is at stake,\" he said, nearly tasting the power of his own planned ascension. The mad eyes were suddenly ablaze, and his face pulsed red with fury. \"We cannot let this chance slip through our fingers.\"\n\n\"The Golden Horn?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he replied, opening his attache case and pulling out a map. \"The intercept must occur tomorrow night,\" he said, handing her a folder. \"Enclosed is the target ship's schedule and route. Can you be ready?\"\n\nMaria looked at her brother with trepidation.\n\n\"Yes, I believe so,\" she said quietly.\n\n\"Good. There is a team of Janissaries waiting to board the ship who will act in support of the operation. I will be counting on you.\"\n\n\"Ozden, are you sure you want to do this?\" she asked. \"The risks are high. It will mean the death of a great many of our own countrymen. And I fear the repercussions if we don't succeed.\"\n\nCelik stared at his sister with a gaze born of delusion, then nodded firmly.\n\n\"It is the only way.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 58",
                "text": "Abel hammet watched the rays of the setting sun sparkle like balls of fire atop the loafing waves of the Mediterranean. Standing on an open bridge wing, the Israeli ship captain watched the sun drop beneath the horizon, ushering in a welcome evening breeze. Sucking in deep breaths of the cool air, he swore he could detect the smell of Turkish pine trees from the shoreline ahead. Peering over the distant prow of his vessel, he could just begin making out a few twinkling lights along the southern Turkish coast. Temporarily refreshed, he stepped back onto the bridge of the Dayan to complete his watch.\n\nAt just under a hundred meters in length, the Dayan was a relatively small tanker, certainly minuscule in comparison to the supertankers that plied oil from the Persian Gulf. Though sharing most of the characteristics of the crude carriers, she had actually been purpose-built for a slightly different cargo: fresh water. Spurred by a recent trade agreement, the Israeli government had three identical vessels constructed to transport water to its dry and dusty shores.\n\nSitting two hundred and fifty miles across the Mediterranean from Israel, Turkey was one of the few countries in the arid region that actually possessed a surplus of fresh water. Controlling the headwaters of both the Tigris and Euphrates, as well as other rich highland rivers, it sat on a strategic resource that would only grow in importance in the coming decades. Tapping it as a new export, the country had agreed to sell a tiny fraction of its water to Israel in a trial trade deal.\n\nDayan carried just over a million gallons, and Hammet knew its contribution to Israel's water supply was a drop in the bucket, but the biweekly commutes across the Med ultimately added up. For him, it was easy sea duty, and he and his nine-man crew enjoyed the work.\n\nStanding in the center of the wheelhouse, he studied the ship's progress on a navigation monitor.\n\n\"Engine back two-thirds,\" he ordered the helmsman. \"We're forty miles from Manavgat. No use in us arriving before daybreak since the pumping facility won't be manned any earlier.\"\n\nThe helmsman repeated the order as the speed was reduced on the ship's single engine. Riding high on the sea with an empty hold, the tanker gradually slowed from twelve knots to eight. As midnight approached a few hours later, the executive officer appeared on deck to relieve the captain. Hammet took a final scan of the radar system before turning in.\n\n\"There's a vessel coming up behind us off our port flank, but otherwise the seas are clear,\" he told the exec. \"Just keep us off the beach, Zev.\"\n\n\"Yes, Captain,\" the man replied. \"No midnight swims tonight.\"\n\nHammet retired to his cabin a deck below and quickly fell asleep. But he awoke a short time later, feeling something amiss. Shaking away the cobwebs, he realized that the ship's engine was not throbbing and shuddering through the deck as usual when under way. He thought it odd that no one had come to wake him if there was a navigational problem or mechanical issue with the ship.\n\nSlipping on a bathrobe, the captain exited his cabin and climbed a stairwell up to the bridge. Stepping into the darkened wheelhouse, Hammet froze in shock. A few feet in front of him, the executive officer was lying facedown in a small pool of blood.\n\n\"What's going on here?\" he barked at the helmsman.\n\nThe helmsman stared back at him in wide-eyed silence. Under the dimmed lights of the bridge, Hammet could see that the young man had an ugly gash across the side of his face. The captain's vision was suddenly diverted out the forward window, where he noticed the lights of another vessel shining dangerously close to the tanker's port beam.\n\n\"Hard right rudder!\" he shouted at the helmsman, ignoring a rustling behind him.\n\nA tall figure emerged from the back wall, dressed in black, with an ebony ski mask covering his head and face. In his hands, he held an assault rifle, which he raised to shoulder height. The helmsman ignored Hammet's command, merely staring as the gunman stepped closer. Hammet turned and looked just in time to see the rifle whipping toward his face. He heard the crash of the gun's stock strike him on the side of the jaw an instant before a flash of pain surged through him like a bolt of lightning. He felt his knees buckle, and then the pain vanished as everything turned to black and he joined his executive officer flat on the deck."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 59",
                "text": "RIDLEY, MY FRIEND, COME IN, COME IN.\"\n\nThe Fat Man's voice sounded like sand in a mixer as he welcomed Bannister into his Tel Aviv apartment for the second time in as many weeks.\n\n\"Thank you, Oscar,\" the archaeologist replied, strutting in with an air of confidence that had been notably lacking on his last visit.\n\nGutzman led him to a sitting area, where a thin, well-dressed Arab sat at a nearby desk, reviewing some documents. He looked up, eyeing Bannister with a suspicious stare.\n\n\"That is Alfar, one of my curators,\" Gutzman said with a derisive wave of his hand. Catching a look of caution in Bannister's face, he added, \"Do not worry. His ears are safe.\"\n\nGutzman reached his favorite sitting chair and tumbled into it without grace.\n\n\"Now, what is of such importance that you have called on me again so soon?\" he asked.\n\nBannister spoke quietly, buttering up his victim for the kill.\n\n\"Oscar, you know as well as I that hunting for history is at best a speculative business. We may search for days, weeks, or even years for that one monumental discovery and still come up empty. Sure, along the way there may be important finds and occasionally the exciting piece that taps the imagination. Most of the effort usually ends up going for naught. But there is always the chance of that rare instance where the stars are in alignment and one is very, very lucky to find a singular gift from the heavens.\"\n\nHe leaned forward in his chair for effect and stared into the Fat Man's eyes.\n\n\"Oscar, I believe I may be on the verge of such a find.\"\n\n\"Well, what is it, my boy?\" Gutzman wheezed. \"Don't toy with me.\"\n\n\"I was just in London for a short visit and happened to call on an antiquities dealer I've known for a number of years. He recently acquired a cache of items stolen years ago from the Church of England's archives,\" he lied, pausing, again for effect.\n\n\"Go on.\"\n\n\"A portion of the material contained original artwork, jewelry, and artifacts liberated from the Holy Land during the Crusades.\" Bannister looked cautiously back and forth across the room, then added in a low voice, \"Included in the works was an original copy of the Manifest.\"\n\nGutzman's eyes inflated like balloons.\n\n\"Are... are you serious?\" he rasped. He tried to contain his excitement, but his face turned flush with exaltation.\n\n\"Yes,\" Bannister replied, producing an intentionally poor photocopy of the papyrus document. \"I have not seen the original myself, but I've been assured that it is authentic.\"\n\nGutzman studied the page for several minutes without uttering a word. Only the ruffling of the page in his unsteady fingers disturbed the silent room.\n\n\"It exists,\" he finally said in a hushed tone. \"I cannot believe by God's good graces that it has come to be.\" The old man then looked at Bannister sternly. \"This dealer, he will sell it to me?\"\n\nBannister nodded. \"Given the nature of his acquisition, he is forced to sell it quietly. That is why he has priced it at only five million pounds sterling.\"\n\n\"Five million pounds!\" Gutzman cursed, propelling himself into a coughing fit. When he recovered his breath, he stared into Bannister's eyes.\n\n\"I will never pay that,\" he said, finding a strong voice.\n\nBannister paled slightly, not anticipating the response. \"I suspect the price may be negotiable, Oscar,\" he stuttered. \"And the dealer indicated he would have the document carbon-dated at his expense.\"\n\nHaving purchased artifacts from grave robbers to politicians, Gutzman knew how to get his price. More than that, he knew when he was being played, and the hesitation in Bannister's voice did not go undetected.\n\n\"Stay here,\" the Fat Man said, rising unsteadily from his chair and leaving the room.\n\nHe returned a moment later with a thick binder. Gutzman sat down and opened it, revealing a collection of photographs encased in plastic sleeves. Ancient artifacts of assorted age and style, large and small, appeared in the photographs. Bannister recognized statues, carvings, and pottery that he knew were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Gutzman flipped to the back of the binder, then removed several photos and handed them to Bannister.\n\n\"Take a look at these,\" the Fat Man huffed.\n\n\"Part of your collection?\"\n\n\"Yes, from my storehouse in Portugal.\"\n\nBannister studied the photos. The first showed a small collection of rusty swords and spear tips. The second photo showed an iron military helmet that Bannister recognized as a Roman Heddernheim type. A thin bronze panel containing the image of an eagle, a scorpion, and several crowns appeared in the next photo. The final image was of an object undistinguishable to Bannister. It appeared to be a large, angular mass of metal that was twisted and warped on one side.\n\n\"A rare collection of Roman armament,\" Bannister said. \"I'm guessing the eagle and scorpion reliefs are part of a battle standard?\"\n\n\"Very good, Ridley. It's not just any standard, however, but the emblem for the Scholae Palatinae, the elite Roman guards of Constantine the Great. What do you make of that last object, my friend?\"\n\nBannister studied the photograph again but shook his head.\n\n\"I'm afraid I don't recognize it.\"\n\nGutzman smiled in minor triumph. \"It is the bronze ram from an imperial galley ship. Based on its size, it likely came from a Liburnian bireme.\"\n\n\"Yes, I see it now. The business end has been flattened by contact. Where on earth did you find this?\"\n\n\"It was lodged in the hull of another vessel, a fourth-century Cypriot raider, if the story is to be believed. The damaged vessel ran aground and sank in a protected area of soft silt. A number of the artifacts were remarkably preserved. It wasn't long before the wreck was picked over by local divers, well before the state archaeologists arrived on the scene. A wealthy collector snatched up most of the items before the authorities knew what had been removed.\"\n\n\"Let me guess who the wealthy collector was,\" Bannister said with a smirk.\n\nGutzman let out a gurgled laugh. \"A fortunate tip that came my way, in this particular instance,\" he said, grinning.\n\n\"They are extremely nice pieces, Oscar. But why are you showing them to me?\"\n\n\"I purchased these artifacts many years ago. And for many years, I have thought about the rumor of the Manifest. Is it true? Could the cargo possibly exist? Then, one night, I had a dream. I dreamt that I was holding the Manifest in my hands, much like I held your copy today. And, in my mind, I see Roman weapons and artifacts around me. But not just any artifacts. I see these artifacts,\" he said, pointing to the pictures.\n\n\"We often dream the reality we seek,\" Bannister said. \"You really think there is a connection between the Manifest and these Roman relics? Couldn't they have come from any sea engagement?\"\n\n\"Not just any sea engagement would involve the Scholae Palatinae. You see, they were the successors to the Praetorian Guard, who were wiped out by Constantine at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, when he routed Maxentius and consolidated the empire. No, it's clear to me that the Cypriot vessel tangled with a galley of imperial decree.\"\n\n\"Does the vessel itself date to the proper era?\"\n\nGutzman smiled again. \"The vessel, as well as the armaments and artifacts, all consistently date to approximately 330 A.D. Then there is this,\" he said, pointing to a weathered Roman shield in one of the photographs.\n\nBannister had missed it in his first viewing, but now noticed the shield beside the spear tips, featuring a faded Chi-Rho cross across its center.\n\n\"The cross of Constantine,\" Bannister muttered.\n\n\"Not only that but the papyrus from Caesarea adds weight to the theory,\" Gutzman said. \"The dream is real, Ridley. If your Manifest is true, then I have already heard the voice of Helena through my own artifacts.\"\n\nBannister's eyes lit up with intrigue at the possibility of it all.\n\n\"Tell me, Oscar,\" he asked pointedly, \"where was the shipwreck discovered?\"\n\n\"The vessel was found near the village of Pissouri, on the southern coast of Cyprus. Perhaps it is not impossible that the actual cargo of the Manifest is buried in the vicinity?\" he speculated with raised brows. \"Now, that would be a gift from the heavens, would it not, Ridley?\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" the archaeologist said, the wheels turning in his head. \"It would be a discovery for the ages.\"\n\n\"But, alas, we are jumping the gun. I must examine the Manifest first and see if it is indeed authentic. You tell your London friend I'm willing to pay a hundred thousand pounds for it. But I will require the carbon dating and a personal examination first,\" he said, rising to his feet.\n\n\"A hundred thousand pounds?\" Bannister replied, his voice the one now rasping.\n\n\"Yes, and not a penny more.\"\n\nThe old collector patted Bannister on the shoulder. \"Thank you for coming to me first, Ridley. I believe that we are on the path to glorious things here.\"\n\nBannister could only nod in disappointment as he walked to the door. After he was safely down the elevator, Gutzman walked back to the living area and approached Alfar.\n\n\"You listened to our conversation?\" the Fat Man asked.\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Oscar. Every word,\" the Arab replied in a course accent. \"But I do not understand why you do not buy this Manifest.\"\n\n\"Very simple, Alfar. I am quite certain that it is Bannister who possesses the Manifest, not some London broker. He is trying to bilk me mightily for it and he yet might succeed.\"\n\n\"Then why tell him about your Roman artifacts?\"\n\n\"To plant the seed. You see, he has a gift for discovery. He now leaves here disillusioned about selling the Manifest but also bewildered, as am I, about the possibility that the artifacts actually exist. I am certain that his ego will drive him there immediately. It may be a fool's gamble, but why not try? Bannister is resourceful and lucky. If it can be found, then he is the man to do it. So why not let him find it for us?\"\n\n\"You are a smart man, Mr. Oscar. But how will you control Bannister?\"\n\n\"I want you to contact Zakkar. Tell him I have a simple surveillance job for him, one that will pay very well.\"\n\n\"He left word that he does not want to set foot in Israel for several months, if possible.\"\n\n\"Feeling the heat, is he?\" Gutzman said with a chuckle. \"No matter. You tell him not to worry, the job won't be in Israel. It's Cyprus where he'll have to earn his pay.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 60",
                "text": "Hammet winced under the glare of the bright fluorescent lights that welcomed his first efforts at opening his eyes. The discomfort was nothing in comparison to the searing pain that throbbed from the back of his head. Forcing his lids open once more, he fought to identify where he was. The first answer was: Flat on his back, staring into a bank of overhead lights.\n\n\"Captain, how are you feeling?\" came the familiar voice of the Dayan's executive officer.\n\n\"Like I was leveled by a locomotive,\" Hammet replied, raising his head to take in his surroundings.\n\nAs his vision cleared, he could see he was lying on a dining table in the ship's mess, a stack of linen napkins serving as a makeshift pillow beneath his head. Members of his crew circled around him, concern and fear evident in their faces. Suddenly feeling self-conscious at his position, he raised himself to his elbows and slid off the table, the executive officer helping him slump into a chair. Overcoming a wave of nausea, he peered at the exec and nodded in thanks.\n\nFor the first time, he noticed that the executive officer wore a bloodied bandage around his head and that his skin was two shades paler than normal.\n\n\"I feared you were dead,\" Hammet said.\n\n\"Lost a bit of blood, but I'll manage. You had us more worried, as you slept the night away.\"\n\nThe tanker captain gazed toward a nearby porthole, seeing the rays of the early-morning sun streaming in. He suddenly realized that the ship's engine was silent and that the ship was obviously moored in place. A few feet along the bulkhead, he was startled to see a pair of black-clad men sitting on either side of the entry door. They cradled automatic rifles on their laps while staring back at him with menacing glares.\n\n\"How'd they get aboard?\" Hammet asked quietly.\n\n\"Not sure,\" the exec replied. \"Must have been by small boat from that freighter. A group of armed men burst onto the bridge before we knew what was happening.\"\n\n\"Did you get off a distress call?\"\n\nThe exec shook his head grimly. \"No time.\"\n\nHammet took a headcount of his crew seated around him, noticing his third officer was absent.\n\n\"Where's Cook?\"\n\n\"He was taken to the bridge early on. My guess is, they had him piloting the ship.\"\n\nA short time later, the door to the mess was thrown open, and the third officer brusquely shoved inside by another gunman. Sporting a large bruise on his cheek, the young officer stepped to the table and approached Hammet.\n\n\"Glad to see you're okay, Captain,\" he said.\n\n\"What can you report?\" Hammet asked.\n\n\"Sir, they had me pilot the ship at gunpoint. We tracked north at full speed all night, following a black freighter named the Ottoman Star. At around dawn, we docked alongside her in a small protected cove. We're still in Turkish waters, about ten miles north of the Dardanelles.\"\n\n\"Any idea who these people are?\"\n\n\"No, sir. They spoke Turkish but made no demands. Can't imagine why someone would hijack an empty water tanker.\"\n\nHammet nodded in response, quietly wondering the same thing.\n\nThe israeli tanker crew was held aboard the ship for another twenty-four hours, given access to the galley but little else. Several times Hammet approached the guards with questions or requests but each time was silently rebuked with the muzzle of a gun. Throughout the day and night, they could hear the sound of workers and machinery echoing from the forward deck. Sneaking a peek out the porthole, Hammet could glimpse a crane swinging crates from the freighter to the tanker.\n\nThey were finally taken off the ship late in the day when some additional guards arrived and they were ordered to help load the ship. Marched down the pier, Hammet was shocked to see what had been done to his vessel. The assailants had cut away a pair of huge holes in the forward deck. The tanker's twin forward storage tanks, which each held 150,000 gallons of water, were now exposed like a half-open can of sardines. The captain could see that the crates he had witnessed being off-loaded from the freighter now lined the perimeter bulkheads of each exposed tank.\n\n\"The idiots have converted our tanker to a cargo carrier,\" he cursed as they were led ashore.\n\nHis dismay only grew when the crew was marched into the south warehouse and directed to transport the small boxes of plastic explosives from the Army container. They were guided back to the tanker, where they deposited the explosives in the center of the two open tanks. Hammet took a second to study the crates already loaded aboard, seeing they were filled with fifty-pound bags marked \"Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil.\"\n\n\"They mean to blow up the ship,\" he whispered to his exec as they were marched back for a second load of HMX.\n\n\"With us in it, I imagine,\" the exec replied.\n\n\"One of us needs to try to slip away. We've got to find some help to stop this madness.\"\n\n\"As the captain, you'll be the first missed.\"\n\n\"With that bloody head wrap, you wouldn't be far behind,\" Hammet said.\n\n\"I'll try,\" came a voice from behind them. It was the tanker's helmsman, a diminutive man named Green.\n\n\"It's dark in the warehouse, Green,\" Hammet said. \"See if you can get lost in the shadows.\"\n\nBut the guards were poised to prevent an escape and ordered Green back in line every time he lingered or tried to drift away from the others. Reluctantly, he joined the line of explosives haulers.\n\nThe crew continued their forced labor until the explosives in the container dwindled. Hammet curiously noted a dark-eyed woman in a jumpsuit monitoring their progress from the tanker's deck before taking a position up on the bridge. As they returned to the warehouse for what he knew would be the last load, Hammet turned to his helmsman.\n\n\"Try to stay behind in the container,\" he whispered.\n\nThe captain passed the word for his entire crew to quickly crowd into the container before a guard yelled at them to slow down. But it gave Green the chance to slip to the back of the container. He quickly climbed to the top shelf, then stretched against the side of the wall, his bantam body barely visible from below. Hammet let the other crewmen carry out the last of the explosives, then walked out of the container with his palms up.\n\n\"No more,\" he said to the nearest guard, then followed the others across the warehouse.\n\nStepping quickly, he couldn't help craning his neck as the guard walked over and peeked into the container. Satisfied that it was empty, the guard turned and slammed the door shut. Hammet turned away, holding his breath as he prayed for silence. But his hopes vanished with the sound of the dead bolt sliding closed with a sickening thud that Hammet felt all the way down to his toes."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 61",
                "text": "The tires of the commuter plane kicked up a cloud of dust as they touched down on the dry runway of Canakkale Airport a short distance southeast of the Dardanelles. The plane turned toward its designated terminal, slowly pulling to a stop as its twin propellers fell quiet. Summer watched from behind a barricade as her brother stepped off the plane with the last passengers. He walked with a slight limp and sported a few small bandages but otherwise appeared healthy. But as he stepped closer, she could see that he carried the worst of his wounds internally.\n\n\"Still in one piece, I see,\" she said, giving him a hug. \"Welcome to Turkey.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" he replied in a low voice.\n\nGone was his usual positive energy and upbeat disposition. Even his eyes seemed darker, Summer thought. Not sad and mournful, as she might have expected, but cold and almost angry. It was a look she had never seen in her brother before. Gently grabbing his arm, she led him toward the baggage claim.\n\n\"We read the news about the attack on the Dome of the Rock, never imagining you were involved,\" she said quietly. \"Then Dad heard through the grapevine that you were there and had prevented the explosion.\"\n\n\"I only stopped one of the charges from going off,\" he said bitterly. \"The Israeli security forces kept me out of the news while they patched me up at an Army hospital. I guess they didn't want the presence of an American to muddy up the local politics.\"\n\n\"Thank goodness, you weren't severely injured.\" She paused and looked at him with concern. \"I'm sorry to hear about your Israeli friend.\"\n\nDirk nodded but said nothing. They soon reached the baggage claim and found his luggage. Making their way to a small borrowed van in the parking lot, Summer said, \"We've got one more pickup to make.\"\n\nDriving to the opposite end of the airport, she found a dilapidated warehouse building marked \"Air Cargo.\" Requesting a pickup for NUMA, she was handed a pair of overnight packages, and then two men wheeled out a small crate and loaded it into the rear of the van.\n\n\"What's in the crate?\" Dirk asked as they pulled away.\n\n\"A replacement inflatable boat. The Aegean Explorer lost two of her dinghies during a melee over a shipwreck.\"\n\nSummer filled Dirk in on what she knew about the discovery of the Ottoman wreck, the death of the two NUMA scientists, and the abduction of Zeibig.\n\n\"The Turks haven't busted the guys in the yacht?\" Dirk asked.\n\nSummer shook her head. \"Dad's pretty livid over the response from the local authorities. The Explorer was impounded for a few days and blamed for the deaths of Tang and Iverson.\"\n\n\"Justice rules for those with power. That's tough news about Tang and Iverson. I've worked with them on other projects. Both good men,\" he said, his voice trailing away as the discussion of death directed his thoughts to Sophie.\n\n\"On top of that, the algae bloom survey has fallen to pieces. Our Turkish environmental representative, who is required to be on board, is absent with some kind of family need. Meanwhile, Rudi and Al have been having trouble with the new AUV.\" She wanted to add that Dirk's arrival would help cheer everybody up, but she knew that wouldn't be the case in his current condition.\n\nSummer drove to Canakkale's commercial docks and located the Aegean Explorer moored beside some large fishing boats. She led her brother aboard and to the ship's wardroom, where Pitt, Gunn, and Giordino were discussing their sailing schedule with Captain Kenfield. They warmly greeted the younger Pitt as he entered with his sister.\n\n\"Didn't your father teach you not to play with explosives?\" Giordino joked, pumping Dirk's hand with a crushing grip.\n\nDirk forced a smile, then hugged his dad before sitting down at the table. \"Summer tells me you've found an Ottoman shipwreck,\" he said. The tone in his voice made it clear his focus was elsewhere.\n\n\"One that's caused us a lot of trouble,\" Pitt replied. \"She dates to around 1570, and came with some unusual Roman artifacts aboard.\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, all that's left of those artifacts is some photographs,\" Gunn added ruefully.\n\n\"Of course, it all pales in comparison to Summer's discovery,\" Pitt said.\n\nDirk turned toward his sister. \"What was that?\" he asked.\n\n\"You mean she didn't tell you?\" Giordino said.\n\nSummer gave Dirk a sheepish look. \"We ran out of time, I guess.\"\n\n\"Such modesty,\" Gunn said, rifling through a stack of papers on the table. \"Here, I made a copy from Summer's original,\" he said, handing a sheet of paper to DirK\n\nHe held up the page and studied it carefully:\n\nUniversity of Cambridge Department of ArchaeologY\n\nTranslation (Coptic Greek): Imperial Vessel Argon Special Manifest for Delivery to Emperor Constantine ByzantiuM\n\nManifest: Personal items of Christ, including a small wardrobe with: Cloak Lock of hair Letter to Peter Personal effects Large crypt stone Altar--from Church of Nazarene Contemporary painting of Jesus Ossuary of J.\n\nAssigned to 14th Legionaries, at Caesarea Septarius, Governor of JudaeA\n\n\"This is for real?\" Dirk asked.\n\n\"The original is written on papyrus. I saw it briefly,\" Summer replied with a shake of her head, \"so I know it exists. This was a translation performed by a well-known Cambridge archaeologist and etymologist in 1915.\"\n\n\"It's incredible,\" Dirk said, his attention fully grabbed by the document. \"All of these items personally related to Jesus. They must have been collected by the Romans after his death and destroyed.\"\n\n\"No, far from it,\" Summer said. \"They were obtained by Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, in 327 A.D. The items on the Manifest were sacred, and likely sent to Constantine to celebrate the Roman Empire's conversion to Christianity.\"\n\n\"I still can't believe you found it in England, of all places,\" Gunn said finally.\n\n\"All on account of our dive on HMS Hampshire,\" Summer explained. \"Field Marshal Kitchener apparently obtained the papyrus document while conducting a survey of Palestine in the 1870s. Its meaning apparently wasn't understood until the translation was made decades later. Julie Goodyear, the authority on Kitchener who helped locate the Manifest, thinks that the Church of England may possibly have killed Kitchener because of it.\"\n\n\"I guess you could understand their fears,\" Giordino stated. \"Finding an ossuary with Jesus' bones in it would certainly kick over a few apple carts.\"\n\n\"It's an interesting connection to the Roman artifacts we found on the Ottoman wreck, which also date to the time of Constantine and Helena,\" Gunn noted.\n\n\"So these Jesus artifacts were placed on a Roman ship leaving Caesarea?\" Dirk asked.\n\nSummer nodded. \"Helena is known to have made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where she claimed to have discovered the True Cross. Fragments of the cross reside in churches all over Europe today. A common tale relates how the nails from the cross were melted down and incorporated into a helmet and bridle for Constantine. So Helena and the cross apparently made it safely to Byzantium. There is no mention of these items, however,\" she added, pointing to the list. \"They must have been shipped separately and were apparently lost to history ages ago. Can you just imagine the impact if we could have seen a contemporary image of Jesus?\"\n\nThe room fell silent as everyone's imagination conjured up a visual image of Christianity's namesake. Everyone, that is, except Dirk. His eyes remained focused on the bottom of the Manifest.\n\n\"Caesarea,\" he said. \"It indicates that the shipment left Caesarea under the guard of Roman legionaries.\"\n\n\"That's just where you were working, isn't it?\" his father asked.\n\nDirk nodded.\n\n\"They didn't happen to leave a sailing plan lying around etched in stone, did they?\" Giordino asked.\n\n\"No, but we were fortunate in uncovering a number of papyrus documents from that era. The most interesting of them described the capture and execution of some Cypriot pirates. What was interesting was that the pirates had apparently battled a legionary force at sea sometime before they were captured. Dr. Haasis, whom I worked with at Caesarea, said the Roman legionaries were part of some group called the Scholae Palatinae, led by a centurion named Platus, as I recall.\"\n\nGunn nearly fell out of his chair.\n\n\"What... what did you say his name was?\" he stammered.\n\n\"Platus, or perhaps it was Platius.\"\n\n\"Plautius?\" Gunn asked.\n\n\"Yes, that was it. How did you know?\"\n\n\"That was the name on my marker, er, the marker that was found on the wreck site. It was a memorial to Plautius, who apparently died in a sea battle.\"\n\n\"But you don't have any clue where the marker came from?\" Dirk asked.\n\nGunn shook his head as Zeibig's face suddenly brightened.\n\n\"Dirk, you said the pirates were from Cyprus?\" he asked.\n\n\"That's what the papyrus record indicated.\"\n\nZeibig rifled through some papers, pulling out a page of research data.\n\n\"The Roman Senator inscribed on the gold crown, Artrius? Dr. Ruppe sent some historical research which indicated that he served as Governor of Cyprus for a short while.\"\n\nA thin smile crossed Pitt's face. \"Cyprus, that's the clue we've been missing. If the Cypriot historical records are intact, I'll bet you'll find that Traianus, the name on the monolith, was also on Cyprus. Perhaps he even reported to Governor Artrius.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Giordino agreed. \"Traianus was probably ordered by the Governor to erect a memorial after the gold crown arrived in the mail.\"\n\n\"But what was the Roman crown and marker doing on an Ottoman wreck?\" Dirk asked.\n\n\"I think I have a theory about that,\" Zeibig said. \"As I recall, Cyprus historically remained under Venetian rule long after the fall of the Roman Empire. But the Ottomans came around and successfully invaded the island around 1570, which just happens to be the approximate date of our shipwreck. I'd speculate that the gold crown and stone tablet were simply antiquarian spoils of war that were being shipped back to the sitting Sultan in Constantinople.\"\n\n\"We can assume from the Manifest that Plautius was assigned to transport the religious relics on behalf of Helena,\" Gunn said. \"The stele from the wreck, along with Dirk's papyrus discovery, confirms that he lost his life fighting pirates off of Cyprus. Is it possible that the events all occurred on the same voyage?\"\n\n\"I would wager that members of this Scholae Palatinae, like the Praetorian Guard, would not be far from the Emperor's seat of power except in unusual circumstances,\" Pitt said.\n\n\"Such as guarding his mother while she traveled to Jerusalem,\" Summer said.\n\n\"Which would explain the gold crown,\" Giordino said. \"It may well have been awarded to Artrius while he was Governor of Cyprus, sent from Constantine in appreciation for capturing the pirates who killed Plautius.\"\n\n\"The same pirates that stole the relics?\" Gunn asked. \"That's the real question. Who ended up with the relics?\"\n\n\"I performed a cursory historical search on the Manifest items,\" Summer said. \"While there are claimed fragments of the True Cross located in dozens of churches across Europe, I could find no substantive record of any of the items on the Manifest being exhibited today or in the past.\"\n\n\"So they disappeared with Plautius,\" Gunn said.\n\n\"The record at Caesarea stated that the pirates were captured and brought to port on their own ship,\" Dirk stated. \"The vessel's decks were bloodied, and a number of Roman weapons were found aboard. While they had apparently battled Plautius, it wasn't clear what became of his ship. Or the relics, for that matter.\"\n\n\"Which probably means that the Roman galley of Plautius was sunk,\" Pitt said.\n\nThe others in the room noticeably perked up at the notion, knowing that if one man could find an important shipwreck, it was the lean fellow with the green eyes sitting in front of them.\n\n\"Dad, could we try to look for it after the completion of the Turkish project?\" Summer asked.\n\n\"That may be sooner than you think,\" Gunn said.\n\nSummer turned and gave him a puzzled look.\n\n\"The Turkish Environment Ministry informed us that they have discovered a significant amount of waste dumping by a large chemical plant in Ciftlik, a town near Chios,\" Pitt explained. \"Rudi looked at the currents, and there seems to be a strong correlation with the dead zone we were mapping in the vicinity of the Ottoman wreck.\"\n\n\"Better than a ninety-five percent probability,\" Gunn confirmed. \"The Turks have kindly asked us to come back in a year and do some sample testing, but at this point we no longer need to extend any of our survey work.\"\n\n\"Does that mean we go back to the Ottoman wreck?\" Summer asked.\n\n\"Dr. Ruppe is organizing a formal excavation under the auspices of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum,\" Pitt said. \"Until he has the necessary approvals from the Cultural Ministry, he has suggested that we avoid any further work on the site.\"\n\n\"So we can try for the Roman galley?\" Summer asked excitedly.\n\n\"We're on the hook for assessing a small region just south of here,\" Pitt said. \"We should be able to complete the work in two or three days. Providing, that is, that our AUV is operational,\" he said, shooting Gunn a sideways glance.\n\n\"That reminds me,\" Summer said. \"I've got your spare parts.\"\n\nShe tossed the two overnight packages to Gunn, who quickly tore the seal off the first one and looked inside.\n\n\"Our replacement circuit board,\" he replied happily. \"That should get us back in the water.\"\n\nHe looked at the other package, then slid it over to Pitt.\n\n\"This one's addressed to you, boss.\"\n\nPitt nodded, then looked around the table. \"If we've got an operational AUV again, then let's go finish up our Turkey survey project,\" he said with a wry grin, \"because it's a long voyage to Cyprus.\"\n\nAn hour later, the Aegean Explorer gently shoved off from the Canakkale dock. Pitt and Giordino watched from the bridge as Captain Kenfield guided the vessel out the mouth of the Dardanelles, then south along the Turkish coastline. Once the Explorer was safely clear of the busy strait, Pitt sat down and opened the overnight package.\n\n\"Cookies from home?\" Giordino asked, taking a seat across from Pitt.\n\n\"Not quite. I had Hiram do some digging on the Ottoman Star and the Sultana.\"\n\n\"Hiram\" referred to Hiram Yaeger, NUMA's head of computer resources. From the NUMA headquarters building in Washington, Yaeger managed a sophisticated computer center that tracked detailed oceanographic and weather data around the globe. A skilled computer hacker, Yaeger had a nose for uncovering secrets, and didn't mind utilizing both authorized and unauthorized data sources when the need arose.\n\n\"Two vessels that I'd like to find at the bottom of the sea,\" Giordino said. \"Was Yaeger able to find anything?\"\n\n\"It appears so,\" Pitt replied, perusing several pages of documents. \"Both vessels are apparently registered in Liberia, under a shell company. Yaeger was able to trace ownership to a private Turkish entity called Anatolia Exports, the same outfit the police mentioned. The company has a lengthy history of shipping Turkish textiles and other goods to trading partners throughout the Mediterranean. It owns a warehouse and office building in Istanbul, as well as a shipping facility on the coast near the town of Kirte.\"\n\n\"Ah yes, I know the latter quite well,\" Giordino said with a smirk. \"So who runs this outfit?\"\n\n\"Ownership records cite a couple named Ozden Celik and Maria Celik.\"\n\n\"Don't tell me... They drive a Jaguar and like to run over people with boats.\"\n\nPitt passed over a photo of Celik that Yaeger had gleaned from a Turkish trade association conference. Then he shared a number of satellite photos of the Celiks' properties.\n\n\"That's our boy,\" Giordino said, examining the first photo. \"What else do we know about him and his wife?\"\n\n\"Maria is actually his sister. And data is somewhat scarce. Yaeger indicates that the Celiks are secretive types who keep a very low profile. He says he had to do some real digging to find any juice.\"\n\n\"And did he?\"\n\n\"Listen to this. A genealogical trace puts both Celiks as greatgrandchildren of Mehmed VI.\"\n\nGiordino shook his head. \"Afraid I don't know the name.\"\n\n\"Mehmed VI was the last ruling Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. He and his clan were kicked off the throne and out of the country when Ataturk swept into power in 1923.\"\n\n\"And now the poor boy has nothing to show for it but a mangy old freighter. No wonder he has a chip on his shoulder.\"\n\n\"He apparently has a lot more than that,\" Pitt said. \"Yaeger believes the pair may be among the richest people in the country.\"\n\n\"I guess some of that explains the fanaticism over the Ottoman shipwreck.\"\n\n\"And the brashness of the Topkapi theft. Though there might have been another motivation.\"\n\n\"Such as?\"\n\n\"Yaeger found a possible financial link to an Istanbul marketing organization. The organization is helping promote the candidacy of Mufti Battal in the upcoming presidential election.\"\n\nPitt set down the page he was reading. \"Rey Ruppe in Istanbul told us about this Mufti. He has a large fundamentalist following and is viewed as a dangerous power in some circles.\"\n\n\"Never hurts to have friends with deep pockets. I wonder what's in it for Celik?\"\n\n\"A question that might have an illuminating answer,\" Pitt said.\n\nHe set down the last of the report and pondered the wealthy Turk and his savage sister while Giordino took a look at the satellite photos.\n\n\"I see the Ottoman Star has returned to home port,\" Giordino said. \"I wonder what a Greek tanker is doing alongside her.\"\n\nHe slid the photo across the table for Pitt to examine. Pitt took a look at the high overhead shot of the now-familiar cove, spotting the freighter at the dock. On the opposite side of the dock was a small tanker ship, its blue-and-white flag barely visible atop its mast. The flag caught his eye, and Pitt studied it a moment before grabbing a magnifying glass from behind the chart table.\n\n\"That's not a Greek flag,\" he said. \"The tanker is from Israel.\"\n\n\"News to me that Israel has its own tanker fleet,\" Giordino said.\n\n\"Did you say something about an Israeli tanker?\" Captain Kenfield asked, overhearing the conversation from across the bridge.\n\n\"Al found one parked in the cove of our Turkish friends,\" Pitt said.\n\nKenfield's face turned pale. \"While we were in port, there was an alert making the rounds about an Israeli tanker that went missing off the coast near Manavgat. It's actually a water tanker.\"\n\n\"I recall seeing one a few weeks back,\" Pitt remarked. \"What's the size of the missing ship?\"\n\n\"The ship was named the Dayan, I believe,\" he said, stepping to a computer and performing a quick search. \"She's eight hundred gross tons and three hundred ten feet long.\"\n\nHe turned the computer monitor toward Pitt and Giordino so that they could see a photograph of the ship. It was a dead match.\n\n\"The photos are less than twenty-four hours old,\" Giordino said, noting a date stamp on the image.\n\n\"Captain, how's your secure satellite phone working?\" Pitt asked.\n\n\"Fully operational. Do you want to make a call?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Pitt replied. \"I think it's time we call Washington.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 62",
                "text": "O'quinn, good of you to come by. Please, step inside and grab a seat.\"\n\nThe intelligence officer was startled that the Vice President of the United States greeted him in the second-floor foyer of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and personally showed him into his office. Washington protocol surely dictated that a secretary or aide escort a lesser being into the sanctified lair of the Number Two. But James Sandecker was that rare breed who had little use for such pageantry.\n\nA retired Navy admiral, Sandecker had been responsible for founding the National Underwater and Marine Agency decades earlier and building it into a powerhouse oceanographic unit. He surprised everyone by passing the reins to Pitt and accepting a vice presidential appointment, where he hoped to further the cause of protecting the world's oceans. A small but fiery individual with flaming red hair and goatee, Sandecker was known in the capital as a blunt and outspoken man who was nevertheless highly respected. O'Quinn had often been amused during intelligence briefings to see how quickly the Vice President could dissect an issue, or individual, in order to get to the heart of the matter.\n\nStepping into the large office, O'Quinn admired a collection of antique oil paintings, featuring old ships and racing yachts, which lined the paneled walls. He followed Sandecker to his desk and took a seat opposite of him.\n\n\"Do you miss the sea much, Mr. Vice President?\"\n\n\"There's no shortage of days that I'd prefer to be sailing something other than a desk,\" Sandecker replied, reaching into a drawer and jamming a large cigar between his teeth. \"Are you monitoring events in Turkey?\" he asked pointedly.\n\n\"Yes, sir. That's part of my regional assignment.\"\n\n\"What do you know about a nutcase named Ozden Celik?\"\n\nO'Quinn had to think a moment. \"He's a Turkish businessman who's been associated with members of the Saudi Royal Family. We think he might be involved in helping to finance the fundamentalist Felicity Party of Mufti Battal. Why do you ask?\"\n\n\"He's apparently been up to a few other things. You're aware of the Israeli tanker ship that went missing two days ago?\"\n\nO'Quinn nodded, recalling mention of the incident in a daily briefing report.\n\n\"The vessel has been observed at a small shipping facility controlled by Celik a few miles north of the Dardanelles. I have reliable word that this Celik was behind the recent theft of Muslim artifacts at Topkapi.\" Sandecker slid a satellite photo of the tanker across his desk.\n\n\"Topkapi?\" O'Quinn repeated, his brows rising like a pair of drawbridges. \"We believe there may be a link between the Topkapi theft and the recent mosque attacks at al-Azhar and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.\"\n\n\"The President is aware of that possibility.\"\n\nO'Quinn studied the satellite photograph.\n\n\"If I may ask, sir, how did you acquire this information?\"\n\n\"Dirk Pitt at NUMA. Two of his scientists were killed by Celik's men and a third kidnapped and taken to the same facility,\" Sandecker replied, pointing to the photo. \"Pitt got his man out, and he discovered a container of plastic explosives at the facility. An Army supply of HMX, to be exact.\"\n\n\"Hmx is the explosive compound identified from the mosque bombings,\" O'Quinn said excitedly.\n\n\"Yes, I recall that from your presidential briefing.\"\n\n\"Celik must be acting on behalf of Mufti Battal. It's clear to me that the anonymous mosque attacks, utilizing our explosives, are an attempt to incite fundamentalist outrage across the Middle East, and particularly in Turkey. Their goal must be to sway public opinion in order to sweep Battal into office.\"\n\n\"It's a logical motive. That's why this hijacked Israeli tanker is cause for concern.\"\n\n\"Have we contacted the Turkish government?\"\n\n\"No,\" Sandecker replied with a shake of his head. \"The President is worried that any action on our part could be construed as American meddling in the election outcome. Frankly, we don't know how deep Battal's tentacles may reach into the existing government. The stakes are simply too high, and the race too close, to risk a potential backlash that might throw the election to his party.\"\n\n\"But our analysts tell us that the Mufti stands an even chance of winning anyway.\"\n\n\"The President understands that, but he nevertheless has ordered absolutely no U.S. involvement until after the election.\"\n\n\"There are backdoor channels we could use,\" O'Quinn protested.\n\n\"It's already been deemed too risky.\"\n\nSandecker pulled the cigar from his teeth and examined the chewed end. \"It's the President's mandate, O'Quinn, not mine.\"\n\n\"But we can't simply look the other way.\"\n\n\"That's why I called you here. You have intelligence contacts in the Mossad, I presume?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes, of course,\" O'Quinn nodded.\n\nSandecker leaned over his desk, his bright blue eyes boring into the intelligence officer.\n\n\"Then I would suggest that you consider calling them and telling them where their missing tanker is located.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 63",
                "text": "Rudi gunn had completed repairs on the faulty auv sensors by dusk, shortly before the Aegean Explorer reached its survey grid some twenty miles southeast of Canakkale. The AUV was deployed, and the ship's crew resumed their round-the-clock tracking schedule. By the time the midnight shift went on duty, the bridge had emptied to just the ship's second officer and a helmsman.\n\nThe ship was cruising at a slow speed to the north when the helmsman suddenly gawked at the radar screen.\n\n\"Sir, a vessel has suddenly appeared off our port beam, less than a quarter mile off,\" he stuttered excitedly. \"I swear, she wasn't there a minute ago.\"\n\nThe bridge officer glanced at the radar scope, seeing a small amoeba of yellow light nearly merge with the center point, which represented the Aegean Explorer.\n\n\"Where on earth did she come from?\" he blurted. \"Right twenty degrees rudder,\" he quickly ordered, fearful that the unknown vessel was on a perpendicular heading.\n\nAs the helmsman turned the ship's wheel over, the officer stepped to the port bridge window and peered outside. The moon and stars were concealed by low clouds, draping the sea in darkness. Expecting to clearly view the lights of the nearby vessel, the officer was surprised to see only black.\n\n\"The fool doesn't have her running lights on,\" he said, searching the sea unsuccessfully for a shadow. \"I'll try her on the radio.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't advise that,\" barked a crisp voice with the hint of a Hebrew accent.\n\nThe officer turned in shock to find two men dressed in dark camouflage entering the bridge from the starboard wing. The taller of the two men stepped forward, exposing a lean face blunted by a lantern jaw. The intruder stopped a few feet from the officer, leveling a light machine gun at his chest.\n\n\"Have your helmsman resume his course,\" the commando said, a stern look from his dark eyes expressing his will. \"There is no danger to your vessel.\"\n\nThe officer reluctantly nodded to the helmsman. \"Resume original heading,\" he said. Turning to the commando, he stammered, \"What are you doing on our ship?\"\n\n\"I'm looking for a man named Pitt. Bring him to the bridge.\"\n\n\"There is no one aboard by that name,\" the officer lied.\n\nThe commando took a step closer.\n\n\"Then I will clear my men off and sink your vessel,\" he threatened in a low voice.\n\nThe officer wondered if it was an idle threat. But a gaze into the battle-hardened eyes of the commando left no doubt that it was a possibility. Nodding sullenly, the officer relieved the helmsman at the wheel so he could retrieve Pitt. The second commando immediately fell in step behind the helmsman as he exited by a rear stairwell.\n\nA few minutes later, Pitt was marched onto the bridge, a look of anger searing his drowsy eyes.\n\n\"Mr. Pitt? I am Lieutenant Lazlo, Israeli Navy Special Forces.\"\n\n\"Excuse me if I don't welcome you aboard, Lieutenant,\" Pitt replied drily.\n\n\"My apologies for the intrusion, but we require your assistance on a sensitive mission. I have been assured that sources in your government at the highest level have approved your cooperation.\"\n\n\"I see. If that is the case, then were the midnight theatrics really necessary?\"\n\n\"We are operating in Turkish waters without authorization. It is essential that we maintain our secrecy.\"\n\n\"Okay, Lieutenant, put down your guns and tell me what this is all about.\"\n\nThe commando reluctantly lowered his weapon, indicating for his partner to follow suit.\n\n\"We have been ordered to effect the rescue of the crew of the Israeli tanker Dayan. It has been reported that you are familiar with the facility where the ship is being held.\"\n\n\"Yes, the cove north of the Dardanelles. Is she still there?\"\n\n\"Intelligence reports within the last ten hours confirm as much.\"\n\n\"Why not use diplomatic channels to get their release?\" Pitt asked, baiting the man.\n\n\"Your government has provided information that there may be a connection between the hijackers and the recent attack on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. The report of an explosives stockpile at the facility has our intelligence specialists fearing another attack.\"\n\nPitt nodded, understanding that pursuing Celik through official channels might entail a dangerous delay. The Turk was clearly up to no good, and Pitt would like nothing more than to put him out of business.\n\n\"Very well, Lieutenant, I'll be happy to help.\" He turned and faced the second officer. \"Rogers, please inform the captain that I've left the ship. By the way, Lieutenant, how did you get aboard?\"\n\n\"We have a small inflatable tied up off the starboard flank. Our departure will be made easier if your vessel can temporarily slow.\"\n\nRogers obliged the request, then stood on the bridge wing and watched Pitt and several shadows slip over the rail and quietly vanish into the night. A few minutes later, the helmsman called him over to the radar scope.\n\n\"She's disappeared,\" the man said, gazing at the screen.\n\nRogers looked at the empty blue radar screen and nodded. Somewhere on the open sea, Pitt had disappeared from the surface along with the mystery vessel. It was, he fervently hoped, only a temporary vanishing act."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 64",
                "text": "The tekumah wasted no time returning to the stealthy depths. A Dolphin class submarine built at the HDW shipyards in Kiel, Germany, she was one of only a handful of subs operated by the Israeli Navy. Diesel-powered and relatively small in size, she was nevertheless packed with a sophisticated array of electronics and weaponry that made her a formidable underwater foe.\n\nThe inflatable had barely touched the side of her hull when waiting crewmen hoisted Pitt and the commandos onto the deck and hustled them down a hatch while the inflatable was stowed in a watertight compartment. Pitt had just taken a seat in the sub's cramped officers' mess when the dive command reverberated through the vessel.\n\nLazlo secured his weapons, then brought a pair of coffees to the table and sat down opposite Pitt. Reaching into a nearby folder, he laid out a satellite photo of Celik's shipping facility, similar to the one Pitt had received from Yaeger.\n\n\"We're going in with two small teams,\" the Israeli explained. \"One will search the tanker and the other the shore facilities. Can you tell me about the buildings?\"\n\n\"Provided I can go in with you,\" Pitt replied.\n\n\"I don't have authorization for that.\"\n\n\"Look, Lieutenant,\" Pitt said, staring coldly at the commando. \"I didn't come along with you just to take a joyride on a submarine. Celik's men killed two of my scientists and kidnapped a third. His sister abducted my wife at gunpoint. And sitting inside his compound is enough high-grade explosives to start World War Three. I understand that you want the Dayan's crewmen back, but there's potentially a lot more at stake here.\"\n\nLazlo sat silent for a moment. Pitt was not the man he expected to find aboard the research vessel. Far from being some nebbish egghead scientist, Pitt was all substance.\n\n\"Very well,\" the commando replied quietly.\n\nPitt took the photo and carefully explained the layout of the two warehouses and the stone administrative building.\n\n\"Can you tell me about any security elements?\" Lazlo asked.\n\n\"It's a functioning port facility first, but we encountered a number of armed personnel. I suspect that they were mostly Celik's personal security detail, but a number were probably assigned to the site. I would anticipate a small but heavily armed security presence. Lieutenant, are your men trained in demolitions?\"\n\nThe commando smiled. \"We are Shayetet 13. Demolitions are an important part of our training.\"\n\nPitt had heard of the Israeli Special Forces unit, which was similar in function to the U.S. Navy SEALs. They were called the \"Bat Men,\" he recalled, on account of the batwing insignia they wore on their uniforms.\n\n\"Members of my government are very concerned about a container of HMX plastic explosives that we found sitting in this warehouse,\" Pitt said, pointing to the photo.\n\nLazlo nodded. \"Our mission orders are for rescue only, but the elimination of those explosives would be of mutual interest. If they are still there, we will take care of them,\" he promised.\n\nA short man in an officer's uniform ducked into the mess and stared at the two men with a humorless face.\n\n\"Lazlo, we'll be at the deployment zone in forty minutes.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Captain. By the way, this is Dirk Pitt, from the American research vessel.\"\n\n\"Welcome aboard, Mr. Pitt,\" the captain replied without emotion. He quickly turned his attention back to Lazlo. \"You'll have approximately two hours of darkness to complete your mission. I'm warning you, I don't want to be on the surface at daybreak.\"\n\n\"Captain, I can make you a promise,\" the commando replied with cool arrogance. \"If we're not back in ninety minutes, then you may sail without us.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 65",
                "text": "Lazlo would be wrong about the mission's duration, but not in the manner that he expected.\n\nSurfacing two miles northwest of the cove, the Tekumah quickly off-loaded its commando team for the second time that night. Dressed in nondescript black fatigues, Pitt joined the eight-man rescue team that climbed into a pair of inflatable boats and raced away from the sub. Stopping outside the entrance to the cove, the pilot of each boat shut off its outboard engine and resumed propulsion with a silent, battery-powered electric motor.\n\nGliding into the cove, Pitt took a disappointed look toward the pier, then whispered to Lazlo.\n\n\"She's gone.\"\n\nThe Israeli commando silently cursed as he saw that Pitt was right. Not only was the tanker gone but the entire pier was empty. The buildings on shore appeared dark and uninhabited as well.\n\n\"Alpha Team, revise landing to joint shore recon,\" he radioed to the other boat. \"Assigned target is the east warehouse.\"\n\nThere was still a chance that the tanker crew was held captive ashore, but he knew it was false optimism. The success of any covert operation, he knew from years of experience, was always the quality of the intelligence. And this time, the intelligence appeared to have failed.\n\nThe two boats ran ashore simultaneously a few yards from the pier, their occupants scrambling ashore like silent ghosts. Pitt followed Lazlo's squad as they approached the stone building and then stormed in with a fury. Watching from the front courtyard, Pitt could tell by sound that the building was deserted, like the rest of the port facility. He made his way toward the west warehouse, hearing the light steps of Lazlo approach as he reached the door.\n\n\"We haven't cleared this building yet,\" the Israeli whispered in a hard tone.\n\n\"It's empty like the others,\" Pitt said, flinging open the door and stepping inside.\n\nLazlo saw that Pitt's words were true as he flicked on the interior lights, revealing a cavernous building that was empty save for a large metal container on the far side.\n\n\"Your explosives?\" the commando asked.\n\nPitt nodded. \"Let's hope it's still full.\"\n\nThey stepped across the warehouse to the container, where Pitt slid the dead bolt free. Pulling on the handle, he was suddenly confronted by a lunging figure from inside who swung a piece of broken crate. Pitt managed to sidestep the blow, then turned to throw a punch. But before he could strike, the toe of Lazlo's boot appeared out of nowhere, burying itself in the attacker's stomach. The startled assailant gasped as he was lifted off his feet and slammed into the side of the container. He meekly dropped his makeshift weapon as the muzzle of Lazlo's assault rifle was prodded into his cheek.\n\n\"Who are you?\" Lazlo barked.\n\n\"My name is Levi Green. I am a seaman from the tanker Dayan. Please don't shoot,\" he pleaded.\n\n\"Fool,\" Lazlo muttered, pulling away his rifle. \"We are here to rescue you.\"\n\n\"I... I'm sorry,\" he said, turning to Pitt. \"I thought you were a dockworker.\"\n\n\"What are you doing in this container?\" Pitt asked.\n\n\"We were forced to load its contents, boxes of explosives, on the Dayan. I hid in here in hopes of escaping, but they locked the door, and I was trapped.\"\n\n\"Where are the other crewmen?\" Lazlo asked.\n\n\"I don't know. Back on the ship, I suppose.\"\n\n\"The tanker is no longer here.\"\n\n\"They modified the ship,\" Green said, his eyes still wide with fear. \"Cut open the forward tanks and filled them with bags of fuel oil. We were forced to place the boxed explosives inside.\"\n\n\"What do you mean 'bags' of fuel oil?\" Pitt asked.\n\n\"There were crates and crates of the stuff in fifty-pound bags. They were marked as some sort of fuel oil mixture. Ammonium something or other.\"\n\n\"Ammonium nitrate?\" Pitt asked.\n\n\"Yes, that was the stuff.\"\n\nPitt turned to Lazlo. \"Ammonium nitrate fuel oil, or ANFO. It's a cheap but highly effective blasting agent,\" he said, recalling the devastating effect a truckload of similar material had on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City back in 1995.\n\n\"How long have you been in the container?\" Lazlo asked the seaman.\n\nGreen looked at his watch. \"Just over eight hours.\"\n\n\"Which means they may have a hundred-mile head start,\" Pitt computed quickly.\n\nLazlo reached down and grabbed Green's collar, then yanked him to his feet.\n\n\"You're coming with us. Let's move.\"\n\nTwo miles to sea, the Tekumah's captain was relieved to see the Bat Men approach the rendezvous point less than an hour after they had departed. But his sentiment turned when Lazlo and Pitt reported the disappearance of the Dayan. The submarine's radar records were hastily reviewed, and the Dayan's Automatic Identification System signal was accessed, but neither provided any indication as to the tanker's whereabouts. The three men sat down and studied a map of the eastern Mediterranean.\n\n\"I will alert naval command,\" the captain said. \"They might already be within hours of Haifa or Tel Aviv.\"\n\n\"I believe that's a wrong assumption,\" Pitt said. \"If history repeats, they're looking to detonate that ship at a Muslim site, to make it look like an attack by Israel.\"\n\n\"If they were to strictly target a major population center, Athens appears closest,\" Lazlo noted.\n\n\"No, Istanbul is somewhat closer,\" Pitt said, eyeing the map. \"And it's a Muslim city.\"\n\n\"But they wouldn't attack their own people,\" the captain said derisively.\n\n\"Celik has shown no shortage of ruthlessness to date,\" Pitt countered. \"If he's already bombed mosques in his country and throughout the region, there's no reason to doubt he wouldn't kill thousands more of his own countrymen.\"\n\n\"The tanker is that dangerous?\" the captain asked.\n\n\"In 1917, a French cargo ship carrying wartime explosives caught fire and blew up in Halifax Harbor. Over two thousand nearby residents were killed in the blast. The Dayan may be carrying ten times the explosive power of that French freighter. And if she's headed to Istanbul, she'll be sailing into a city center of over twelve million people.\"\n\nPitt pointed to the marine approach to Istanbul on the map. \"At a speed of twelve knots, she would still be two or three hours from the city.\"\n\n\"Too far out of range for us or our boats to catch her,\" the captain said, \"not that I would sail through the Dardanelles anyway. I'm afraid the best that we can do is alert the Greek and Turkish authorities while we remove ourselves from their territorial waters. In the meantime, we can leave it to the intelligence satellites to figure out exactly where she's headed.\"\n\n\"What about the crewmen?\" Lazlo said.\n\n\"Lieutenant, I'm afraid there's nothing more we can do,\" the captain replied.\n\n\"Three hours,\" Pitt muttered quietly while studying the route to Istanbul. \"Captain, if I'm going to have a chance at catching her, I need to get back to my ship at once.\"\n\n\"Catch her?\" Lazlo asked. \"How? I didn't see a helicopter aboard your ship.\"\n\n\"Not a helicopter,\" Pitt replied with a determined voice. \"But something that's nearly as fast as a speeding bullet.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 66",
                "text": "The bullet tore across the water like a high-speed hydroplane. Steering with a firm grip on the yoke as the turbo diesels whined loudly under full power behind him, Pitt shot Giordino a quick glance from the pilot's seat.\n\n\"You were wrong about her top speed,\" he said, nearly yelling to be heard.\n\nGiordino craned his head toward the navigation screen, where a small readout indicated that they were traveling at forty-three knots.\n\n\"Always better to under-promise and over-deliver,\" he replied with a thin smile.\n\nSeated in the passenger seat behind them, Lieutenant Lazlo found no such mirth. The brawny commando felt like he was inside a blender, as the Bullet pitched and rolled over the waves. Struggling repeatedly to stay in his seat, he finally discovered the straps to a seat belt and buckled himself tightly in, hoping he could forgo a bout of seasickness.\n\nPitt had caught a break when the Tekumah returned him to the Aegean Explorer. The Bullet had already been fully fueled and prepped for launching. Rousing Giordino, they hurriedly deployed the submersible. When Lazlo realized that Pitt had a real chance of chasing down the tanker, he quickly insisted on joining them.\n\nThey soon found themselves screaming through the busy Dardanelles Strait in the dead of night, dodging ships, in a desperate race toward Istanbul. It took all of Pitt's focus and energy to keep the Bullet on an even keel while slipping between the tankers and merchant ships traveling in both directions. A bright set of xenon headlights helped improve visibility while Giordino provided a second set of eyes to detect smaller vessels or debris in the water.\n\nIt wasn't the way Pitt would have preferred to travel through the historic waterway. With a love of history, he knew that both Xerxes and Alexander the Great had led their armies in opposite directions across the strait formerly known as the Hellespont. Not far from Canakkale, on the southwest shore, stood Troy, site of the Trojan War. And farther north, on the opposite shore, were the landing beaches where the failed Allied campaign of Gallipoli originated in World War I. The beaches and barren hillsides were simply a blur to Pitt, whose eyes darted between the navigation screen and the black waves ahead that quickly vanished beneath the speeding bow.\n\nThe narrow passage of the Dardanelles soon opened into the broad waters of the Sea of Marmara. Pitt relaxed slightly, now that he had more room to maneuver about the scattered string of ships, and was thankful that the open water remained calm. Passing by the northern tip of the island named Marmara, he was diverted by the sound of Rudi Gunn's calm voice calling over the radio.\n\n\"Aegean Explorer calling Bullet,\" Gunn said.\n\n\"This is Bullet. What do you have for me, Rudi?\" Pitt replied over a radio headset.\n\n\"I can give you a tentative confirmation. Hiram located an updated sat image that appears to show the vessel in question entering the Dardanelles.\"\n\n\"Do you know what time that was?\"\n\n\"Looks to be about twenty-three hundred hours local time,\" Gunn replied.\n\n\"You might want to give Sandecker a call back.\"\n\n\"I already have. He said he'll wake some people up over here.\"\n\n\"He better. There may not be much time. Thanks, Rudi.\"\n\n\"Be careful and stay afloat. Explorer out.\"\n\n\"Let's just hope Celik doesn't own the Turkish Navy and the Coast Guard, too,\" Giordino muttered.\n\nPitt wondered how far Celik's corrupt reach actually extended, but there was little he could do about it now. He glanced at the nav screen, noting that they were now traveling at forty-seven knots, the Bullet finding more speed as her fuel load was burned down.\n\n\"Can we catch them if we have to?\" Lazlo asked.\n\nPitt looked at his watch. It was four a.m. A quick mental calculation told him that at their respective top speeds, both vessels would approach Istanbul in about an hour.\n\n\"Yes,\" he replied.\n\nBut he knew it would be close. Very close."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 67",
                "text": "There would be no repeat of jerusalem this time, maria thought to herself. Working under the glow of the tanker's deck lights, she carefully inserted a dozen individual blasting caps into separate blocks of the HMX plastic explosive. She then wired each blasting cap to individual electronic timer fuzes. Glancing at her watch, she stood and gazed past the ship's bow. Ahead on the horizon was a blanket of twinkling white dots layered beneath a hazy black sky. The lights of Istanbul were now less than ten miles ahead. Kneeling down to the deck, she set each timer for a two-hour delay, then activated the fuzes.\n\nPlacing the charges into a small box, she climbed down into the opened section of the forward port water tank. The floor of the tank was packed tight with crates of ammonium nitrate fuel oil, and she had to snake her way past a maze of pallets to reach the center. In a cramped nook, she found a wide stack of wooden bins that held three thousand pounds of HMX. She proceeded to bury one of the charges deep into the middle bin, then stuffed four more of the charges in nearby crates of the ANFO. Making her way to the starboard-side tank, she repeated the process with the remaining charges, ensuring that they were all safely concealed.\n\nShe was climbing back to the ship's bridge when her cell phone rang. She saw to no surprise that it was her brother calling.\n\n\"Ozden, you are up early,\" she answered.\n\n\"I am on my way to the office to personally witness the occasion.\"\n\n\"Don't stand too close to the window, there's no telling how powerful the blast will be.\"\n\nMaria could hear her brother snicker. \"I am sure there will be no disappointment this time. Are you on schedule?\"\n\n\"Yes, we are operating to plan. The lights of Istanbul are already in view. I have arranged for the event to transpire in just under two hours.\"\n\n\"Excellent. The yacht is on its way; it should rendezvous with you shortly. Will you be joining me?\"\n\n\"No,\" Maria replied. \"I think it is better if the crew and I disappear with the Sultana for a short while. We will take the boat to Greece for safekeeping, but I will make my way back in time for the election.\"\n\n\"Our destiny is near, Maria. We shall taste the fruits of our labor shortly. Farewell, my sister.\"\n\n\"Good-bye, Ozden.\"\n\nAs she hung up the phone, she reflected briefly on their odd relationship. They had grown up together on an isolated Greek island and, by nature, had been close siblings, drawing nearer after their mother had died at a young age. Their demanding father had placed high expectations on them both, but he had always treated Ozden like waiting royalty. Perhaps that is why she had always been the tougher of the two, baring knuckles and fighting her way through her youth, more a second son to her father than a daughter. Even now, as her brother went to sit in his gilded office, it was she who commanded the ship and led the mission. She had always been the shadow fighter while her brother took the front seat. But it was all right with her, for she knew that Ozden was nothing without her. Standing on the bridge and peering over the broad bow of the tanker, she felt she was the one in power now, and she would enjoy every second of it.\n\nBut her shell of armor cracked slightly when the ship's radio suddenly blared.\n\n\"Istanbul Coast Guard to tanker Dayan. Istanbul Coast Guard to tanker Dayan. Come in, please.\"\n\nAn angry scowl crossed her face, then she turned and spat to the pilot.\n\n\"Assemble the Janissaries.\"\n\nIgnoring the radio call, she turned and quietly studied the tanker's radar screen, mentally preparing for the coming engagement.\n\nThe emergency midnight diplomatic warnings from Israel and the U.S. were ultimately directed to the Turkish Coast Guard, whose Istanbul command base gave assurances that all approaching tankers would be stopped and searched well short of the city. A local fast patrol craft was scrambled, joined by an Istanbul police boat, to stand picket south of the Bosphorus.\n\nTensions heightened when a large, unidentified ship appeared on the radar screen, steaming north. Suspicions were immediately raised when the vessel's Automatic Identification System transponder was found to be deactivated. When repeated radio calls went unanswered, the smaller and speedier police boat was dispatched to go investigate.\n\nRacing toward the ship, the police soon saw by its shadow and running lights that it was clearly a tanker the size of the Dayan. The police boat zipped down the tanker's high flanks, then circled around her stern. The police commander took note of the Israeli flag flying from the aft mast as he read the ship's name beaded in white letters across the transom.\n\n\"It's the Dayan,\" he said, transmitting to the Coast Guard patrol boat.\n\nThey were to be the last words he would ever speak."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 68",
                "text": "The Dayan's deck and running lights cut to black an instant before the fusillade erupted. A line of armed Janissaries materialized on the tanker's stern rail and simultaneously fired down on the small police boat. The small boat's captain was the first to die, cut down by a direct burst through the bridge windshield. Another police officer standing on the deck was gunned down an instant later, shot in the back before he knew what hit him. Another man on the deck, a veteran police sergeant, reacted quicker, diving behind the gunwale and returning fire with his service automatic. But he was killed when the boat drifted aside and he lost his cover, the Janissaries all concentrating fire on him.\n\nThe shooting fell quiet for a moment as the fourth and last man aboard the police boat climbed up from below. Seeing his dead comrades, he stepped onto the stern deck with his hands in the air. He was a young rookie, new to the force, and his voice quivered as he begged the gunmen not to shoot. But his plea was met by a short burst of fire, and he crumpled to the deck, joining his comrades in death.\n\nThe lifeless police boat meandered behind the tanker for several minutes like a lost puppy. In its wheelhouse, the radio sputtered with repeated hails from the Coast Guard vessel, calls that fell only on dead ears. The big tanker's wash finally nudged its bow aside, and the floating morgue motored aimlessly toward the western horizon.\n\nThe sound of gunfire was Hammet's call to action. The Israeli tanker captain had been in a state of anguish for hours, ever since he and his crew had been forced back into the mess room after loading the plastic explosives aboard ship and setting sail. He knew that the armed Turks, whoever they might be, had converted his vessel into a suicide bomb ship, and that the Israeli crew would likely be part of the blast.\n\nThe captain and his first officer had quietly discussed escape plans, but their options were few. The pair of guards watching them at the door appeared at a higher state of readiness than before and was rotated out for a fresh pair every two hours. Food had been cut off to the captives, and they were no longer allowed to approach the bulkhead and peer out the porthole.\n\nAt that late hour, the tanker's crew were mostly sprawled out on the floor asleep. Hammet was lying among his men, although sleep was the furthest thing from his mind. He feigned slumber, however, when the door opened, and a man whispered excitedly to the guards. The two men arose immediately and slipped out, leaving the Israeli crew temporarily unguarded.\n\nHammet instantly jumped to his feet.\n\n\"Everybody up,\" he said quietly, shaking awake his first officer and those around him. As the groggy crew staggered to its feet, Hammet assembled them near the door and quietly formulated a plan.\n\n\"Zev, take the men and see if you can get them off the aft escape raft without being detected,\" he ordered his exec. \"I'm going to visit the engine room and see if I can disable the ship. You have my order to jettison without me if I can't catch up in ten minutes.\"\n\nThe exec started to voice a protest when the sound of gunfire echoed from the stern of the ship.\n\n\"Belay that,\" Hammet said quickly. \"Take the men across the deck and try to deploy the port inflatable. You might have to just toss it over the rail since we're at speed.\"\n\n\"That's going to be a tough jump into the sea for some of the men.\"\n\n\"Grab some lines and life vests from the day locker, and they can lower themselves down. Now, move!\"\n\nHammet knew they had only minutes, if not seconds, and he hurriedly prodded the men out of the mess room. As the last man hustled by, he stepped onto the deck and closed the door behind him. They stood near the base of the high stern superstructure facing the starboard rail. The exec quickly led the crew forward and across the facing of the superstructure, each man hugging the wall to avoid detection from the bridge high above. Hammet turned and moved the other direction, heading for an aft passageway to the engine room.\n\nThe sound of automatic gunfire still ripped through the air, and as he reached the rear of the superstructure he could see a half dozen armed men at the stern rail firing toward the water. Ducking down, he sprinted across to a side doorway that opened to a stairwell. With his heart pounding, he rushed down the stairs, passing three decks, before exiting into a wide passageway. A door to the engine room stood just ahead, which he approached cautiously before opening it slowly. He was met by a gust of warm air and a deep mechanical rumble as he stepped inside and carefully peered around.\n\nHammet had hoped that the hijackers didn't enlist a standby engineer for their one-way voyage, and he was correct. The engine room stood empty. He quickly climbed down a grated stairwell, then stood next to the tanker's huge diesel engine, pondering what to do. There were assorted means he could use to shut down the engine, but a sudden power failure would raise immediate alarm. He needed a delayed effect that would allow time for the crew to safely escape first.\n\nThen he gazed past the engine toward two large fuel bunkers that sat forward like a fat pair of horizontal grain silos.\n\n\"Of course,\" he muttered to himself, quickly stepping forward with a glint in his eye."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 69",
                "text": "In less than ten minutes, hammet was back at the top of the stairwell, peering across the stern deck. The shooting had long since ceased, and Hammet did not see any of the Janissaries about, giving him an uneasy feeling. Beyond the stern rail, he spotted the shadow of a small boat, angling away from the tanker, which he rightly suspected was the target of the gunfire.\n\nStepping quickly, he made his way across the rear wall of the superstructure to the port-side deck. Peering around the corner, he was relieved to find it empty. A pair of ropes tied to the rail and dangling over the side gave him hope that the crew had already escaped. But his heart sank when he spotted the inflatable life raft still secured in its rack alongside the bulkhead. He cautiously moved closer, peering over the side to see if anyone was hanging from the ropes but saw only empty water below.\n\nThe shot rang out before he felt it, a single clap from a nearby pistol. A trickle of blood ran warm down his leg before a burning ache pulsated in his upper thigh. The leg quickly turned wobbly, and he fell to his other knee as a figure emerged from the bulkhead shadows.\n\nMaria walked calmly over, keeping her pistol leveled at Hammet's chest as she drew closer.\n\n\"A bit late to be out for a stroll, Captain,\" she said coldly. \"Perhaps you best join your comrades.\"\n\nHammet stared at her with disappointment in his eyes.\n\n\"Why do this?\" he cried.\n\nShe ignored the query as a pair of Janissaries ran up, alerted by the gunshot. At her orders, they grabbed Hammet and dragged him across the deck, depositing him in the ship's mess. There, he found his forlorn crew, seated on the floor with long faces, a guard pacing back and forth with his rifle at the ready.\n\nThe Janissaries roughly dumped the captain on the floor, then took up positions on either side of the door. The Dayan's executive officer rushed over to help Hammet to a seated position while a crew medic attended to the leg wound.\n\n\"I was hoping not to find you here,\" Hammet said, wincing.\n\n\"Sorry, Captain. Those men at the stern stopped shooting just as we tossed our lines over the side. We were spotted before we even had a chance to deploy the inflatable.\"\n\nThough the bleeding from his leg wound had been halted, Hammet could sense his body going into shock. He took several deep breaths, trying to relax.\n\n\"Any luck at your end?\" the exec asked.\n\nThe captain looked down at his wounded leg, then forced a pained nod.\n\n\"I suppose you could say so,\" he replied, his eyes turning glassy as his voice wavered. \"One way or another, I believe our voyage is about near its end.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 70",
                "text": "Three miles to the north, the turkish coast guard patrol boat repeatedly hailed both the Dayan and the police craft, but to no avail. When the sight of distant muzzle flashes was reported to the bridge, the patrol boat's captain ordered an immediate intercept of the tanker.\n\nAs the Coast Guard boat sped toward the big ship, its bow-mounted 30mm turreted gun was manned while a small boarding crew was readied. The boat made a quick sweep around the tanker, then drew up on the tanker's starboard flank when no police boat was spotted. The captain then hailed the Dayan over the loudspeaker.\n\n\"This is Coast Guard vessel SG-301. You are hereby ordered to heave to and prepare for boarding,\" he shouted.\n\nAs the Coast Guard captain waited to see if the Dayan would slow, his second officer called out to him.\n\n\"Sir, there's another vessel approaching from our starboard.\"\n\nThe captain looked over to see a dark-colored luxury yacht pull up abreast of the Coast Guard boat, then drop back behind it.\n\n\"Tell him to back off, if he doesn't want to get blasted out of the water,\" the captain ordered testily. His attention was quickly diverted back to the tanker, where a figure suddenly appeared above them at the rail.\n\nThe captain was surprised to see it was a woman, who stood waving at the boat while attempting to shout something. The captain stepped to the bridge wing, then called back to his helmsman.\n\n\"Bring us in tight, I can't hear her.\"\n\nMaria smiled to herself as the Coast Guard boat eased to within a few feet of the tanker's hull. Standing at the rail, she towered over the smaller vessel yet was easily able to look right at the bridge.\n\n\"I need your help,\" she shouted at the pair of officers, who both now stood on the wing.\n\nNot waiting for a reply, she reached down to a small duffel bag at her feet and quickly tossed it over the rail. Her throw was nearly perfect, the bag arcing toward one of the officers, who easily plucked it out of the air. She waited a second to watch the officer open the bag, then she dropped to the deck and covered her head.\n\nThe ensuing explosion lit up the night sky with a bright flash followed by a thunderous roar. Maria waited for the flying debris to land before peeking over the side rail. The Coast Guard boat's bridge was a scene of annihilation. The blast had gutted the entire superstructure, vaporizing all of the men who stood there. Smoke billowed to the sky from a dozen small fires that were consuming the boat's electronic components. Around the rest of the boat, stunned and burned sailors were picking themselves up after having been knocked flat by the concussion.\n\nMaria crept down the passageway on her own vessel, then yelled through an open doorway.\n\n\"Now!\" she screamed.\n\nHer small team of armed gunmen burst out of the door and sprinted to the rail, immediately spraying their weapons on the dazed sailors below. The firefight was short-lived, as the 30mm gun crew was quickly eradicated, followed by the boarding crew. A few of the sailors recovered quickly and returned fire. But they were forced to shoot at an awkward angle, which deprived them of cover. Within minutes they were overwhelmed, and the patrol boat's deck was a mass of dead and wounded men.\n\nMaria called for her shooters to cease, then spoke into a handheld radio. Seconds later, the blue yacht came racing up alongside the patrol boat, then slowed and gingerly began nudging against the Coast Guard vessel's bow. It took just a few bumps before the patrol boat was scraping and banging against the side of the tanker. Without power, the patrol boat began losing momentum and slid back alongside the tanker's flank.\n\nThe yacht slowed as well, gradually slipping abreast of the patrol boat while keeping it pressed against the Dayan until the Dayan's stern loomed up. Holding steady, the yacht waited until the tip of the boat's bow crossed the transom, then gave it a hard nudge with full bow thrusters. The boat pivoted left and surged across the flattened waters off the tanker's stern. A muffled bang arose from beneath the surface as the tanker's giant bronze propeller dug into the hull of the boat.\n\nWith its decks bloodied by the dead and wounded and its wheelhouse spewing smoke, the Coast Guard boat suddenly lurched and listed heavily to starboard. Only a scattering of screams pierced the night air as its bow nosed into the air, and then the entire ship rocked back onto its stern, disappearing beneath the waves as if she'd never been."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 71",
                "text": "Both physical and mental fatigue were beginning to weigh on Pitt after two hours of running at high speed at night. They had traveled past the center of the Sea of Marmara, where they encountered larger swells that sent the Bullet airborne every few seconds. In the rear seat, Lazlo had finally calmed his stomach but had grown sore from the ceaseless pounding on the submersible's hull.\n\nTheir hopes were lifted when they picked up the radio traffic from the Coast Guard patrol boat on the international distress channel.\n\n\"I think I heard them call the Dayan,\" Giordino said, dialing up the volume on the VHF radio to hear over the roar of the Bullet's engines.\n\nThey listened closely over the next few minutes as the repeated calls to the Dayan went unanswered. Then the radio fell silent altogether. A few minutes later, Giordino spotted a small white flash on the horizon.\n\n\"Did you see that?\" he asked Pitt.\n\n\"I caught glimpse of a flash dead ahead.\"\n\n\"It looked like a fireball to me.\"\n\n\"An explosion?\" Lazlo asked, craning his neck forward. \"Is it the tanker?\"\n\n\"No, I don't think so,\" Pitt replied. \"It didn't appear that large. But we're too far away to know for sure.\"\n\n\"It could be upward of ten miles away,\" Giordino agreed. He gazed at the navigation screen, eyeing the entrance to the Bosphorus near the top of its digital map. \"That would put them pretty close to Istanbul.\"\n\n\"Which means we're still about fifteen minutes behind,\" Pitt said.\n\nThe cabin fell silent in conjunction with the radio. Pitt, like the others, could only assume that the Turkish authorities had failed to stop the tanker. It might well be up to them to avert a catastrophic explosion that could kill tens of thousands. But what could three men in a submersible possibly hope to do?\n\nPitt shook the thought from his mind as he tapped the throttle levers, ensuring that they were fully against their stops, as he sighted a direct path toward the burning lights of Istanbul."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 72",
                "text": "Maria paced the tanker's bridge with an anger that turned her features to cold stone.\n\n\"I was not expecting a challenge from the Coast Guard,\" she said. \"How did they know we were approaching?\"\n\nA short, ashen-faced man piloting the tanker shook his head.\n\n\"The Dayan is known to be missing. It's possible a passing vessel identified us and reported it to the Coast Guard. Perhaps it is a good thing. The authorities will now know right away that the Israelis are responsible for the attack.\"\n\n\"I suppose that is true. Still, we cannot afford any further interference.\"\n\n\"The radio has been silent. I don't believe they had the opportunity to alert anyone,\" the captain said. \"On top of which, the radar is clear of vessels ahead of us.\"\n\nHe glanced out the side window, noting the lights of the blue yacht visible just a few yards off the tanker's beam.\n\n\"The Sultana's reported some minor damage during contact with the Coast Guard vessel,\" he reported, \"but they are ready to take us off at any time.\"\n\n\"How long until we can evacuate?\"\n\n\"I will slow the vessel as we enter the eastern channel of the Bosphorus. You can prepare to evacuate as I align the ship toward the Golden Horn and set the automatic pilot. I would estimate that the ship will be in position in about fifteen minutes.\"\n\nMaria looked at her watch. The electronic fuzes were timed to detonate in just over one hour.\n\n\"Very well,\" she said calmly. \"Let us not delay.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 73",
                "text": "Pale bands of crimson streaked across the dark gray sky as the sun prepared its daily climb over the eastern horizon. All across Istanbul, pious Muslims were arising early to partake in a large meal before daybreak. The muezzins would begin their warbled cries shortly, beckoning the faithful to mosque for dawn prayer. The mosques would be more crowded than usual, as the Islamic calendar showed it was the last week of Ramadan.\n\nThe name Ramadan refers to the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, when tradition dictates that the first verses of the Qur'an were revealed to Muhammad. Adherents focus on attaining a closer relationship with God during the month, which is fostered through a strict adherence to fasting during daylight hours. The act of self-purification is promoted not only by fasting but by an emphasis on good deeds toward others. Special food and gifts are given to friends and relatives while charity and aid are offered to the poor. But just a few miles from the city's historic mosques, Maria Celik was preparing to unleash her own brand of charity.\n\nThe Israeli tanker steamed into the mouth of the Bosphorus, hugging close to the Asian shoreline. When the Golden Horn slipped into view across the strait, the tanker's pilot reduced power.\n\n\"Now is the time,\" he said to Maria.\n\nThe swift current of the Bosphorus, flowing south from the Black Sea, quickly slowed the large vessel to a crawl. Maria gathered several men along the starboard flank and lowered a steel accommodation ladder over the side. The yacht cruised up immediately and held station off the foot of the stairs.\n\n\"Secure the prisoners and then get the rest of the men off,\" she ordered one of the Janissaries, then stepped onto the lowered stairway.\n\nShe made her way down the metal steps, then was helped aboard the yacht by a waiting crewman. Climbing up to the wheelhouse, she was met by her two Iraqi hired thugs. Even in the predawn darkness, the one named Farzad was wearing his trademark sunglasses.\n\n\"You have made the preparations in Greece?\" she asked them.\n\n\"Yes,\" Farzad replied. \"We can make a quiet entry through Thios. A secure covered berth has been reserved for the Sultana, and transportation has been arranged for you to Athens. Your return flight to Istanbul is booked in three days.\"\n\nMaria nodded as they watched the remaining Janissaries climb down the stairway and hop onto the yacht. The guards watching the tanker crew had been quietly pulled, and the door to the mess room chained shut.\n\nOn the bridge of the Dayan, the pilot watched the last of the Janissaries step off, then he signaled the yacht that he was changing course. As the Sultana temporarily slipped away from the tanker's side, the pilot increased the engine's revolutions to half speed and eased the bow toward the west. Taking a bearing toward the Suleymaniye Mosque, he programmed the automatic pilot and then engaged it.\n\nHe was about to step off the bridge when he noticed a flashing on the console. Glancing at the warning light, he simply shook his head.\n\n\"Nothing I can do about that now,\" he muttered, then scrambled down to the stairwell and leaped to the waiting yacht, leaving the massive Dayan to her own devices."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 74",
                "text": "The bullet spewed a rooster tail of white water from its stern as it tore into the entrance of the Bosphorus Strait. A few early-rising fishermen stared in awe at the hybrid submersible /speedboat as it zipped by in the gloomy light of dawn.\n\nPitt was scanning the horizon ahead when he spotted an approaching boat traveling at high speed.\n\n\"Kind of has a familiar profile to her,\" he remarked to Giordino.\n\nAs the Italian yacht powered south under speed, the two vessels raced by each other quickly, passing just a short distance apart.\n\n\"That's Celik's yacht, all right,\" Giordino confirmed.\n\n\"Leaving the scene of the crime, most likely.\"\n\n\"Probably an indication that there's not a whole lot of time left on the clock,\" Giordino replied, eyeing Pitt with a cautionary gaze.\n\nPitt said nothing, shoving aside the suicidal nature of approaching the bomb ship while he formulated a plan to stop it.\n\n\"That must be her up ahead.\"\n\nIt was Lazlo, raising an arm and pointing off the port bow. Two miles ahead, they could see the stern of a large tanker disappearing behind a rise on the western shoreline.\n\n\"They're sending her into the Golden Horn,\" Pitt said, any doubt about the tanker's mission fully erased.\n\nThe watery heart of Istanbul for over two thousand years, the famed harbor is surrounded by some of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the city. Directed at the Suleymaniye Mosque, situated just two blocks from the waterfront, the tanker's detonation would not only shatter the historic structure, but devastate the half million people who lived within a mile of the impact zone.\n\nBut the pilotless Dayan wasn't there yet. It had just narrowly missed colliding with an early-morning ferry when the Bullet approached from behind. Pitt noticed the ferryboat's captain shaking a fist and angrily tooting his horn at the tanker, oblivious to the fact that its wheelhouse was empty.\n\n\"No sign of anyone aboard,\" Giordino said, craning his neck at the tanker's high deck and superstructure.\n\nPitt throttled around the Dayan's port flank, looking for a means of access, then shot around the tanker's bow to her starboard side. Giordino quickly pointed to the stairs extending off the rear flank.\n\n\"Beats climbing a rope,\" Giordino said.\n\nPitt guided the submersible close alongside the lowered steps.\n\n\"The helm's yours, Al,\" he said. \"Stick around... but not too close.\"\n\n\"You sure you want to go aboard?\"\n\nPitt nodded with a firm eye.\n\n\"Lazlo,\" he said, turning toward the commando. \"With your expertise, we'll take a crack at defusing the explosives. If that fails, I'll try to get her turned toward the Sea of Marmara, and then we can bail out.\"\n\n\"Don't do any unnecessary sightseeing,\" Giordino said as they made their way out the rear hatch.\n\n\"I'll dial you up on channel 86 if I need you,\" Pitt said before stepping out.\n\n\"I'll keep my ears on,\" Giordino replied.\n\nPitt crept along the port pontoon until reaching the lowered stairs, easily grabbing its handrail and pulling himself on. Lazlo followed right on his heels. Pitt raced to the top of the stairs, then leaped onto the tanker, gazing ahead at the huge forward deck. He immediately saw the two large steel cutouts that Green had described, housing the mixture of explosives materials.\n\n\"Give us time,\" he said to himself as Lazlo followed him at a sprint toward the storage tanks. \"Just give us time.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 75",
                "text": "The janissary approached maria tentatively, reluctant to intrude on her conversation with the yacht's captain. Noticing him gradually encroach on her space, she finally turned and snapped at him.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"Miss Celik, the boat we just passed traveling in the opposite direction? I... I believe it may be the same vessel used by the intruders at the Kirte port facility.\"\n\nMaria's jaw dropped, but only for a moment. Wheeling around, she peered out the back window, just catching a glimpse of the Bullet as it rounded the bluff into the Golden Horn.\n\nTurning back to the yacht's captain, her eyes blazed with fury.\n\n\"Turn us around at once,\" she bellowed. \"We're going back.\"\n\nPitt barely knew where to start. The forward port hold was like a rat's maze at eye level. Six-foot-high pallets filled with heavy bags of ANFO were stacked everywhere, loaded in apparent haste. Somewhere in the middle were hidden the powerful stores of HMX. And attached to that, Pitt hoped, would be a readily apparent fuze and blasting cap.\n\nPitt had told Lazlo that they had five minutes to locate and defuse the explosives. Lazlo was simultaneously searching the starboard hold, after having given Pitt an on-the-fly explanation of what to look for. Half the allotted time had already been expended by the time Pitt had worked his way to the center of the hold and discovered dozens of blocks of the plastic explosive stacked in several wooden bins. With the seconds ticking by loudly in his head, Pitt hastily opened the bins one by one, tossing the explosives aside when no visible fuze was found inside. It wasn't until he reached the last bin that he found an electric timer wired to a small blasting cap pressed into a block of the plastic explosive. With a hopeful nod, he quickly yanked the mechanism from the HMX, then retraced his steps through the maze.\n\nFive minutes had already elapsed when he climbed the ladder out of the hold and stepped onto the deck. Lazlo was just climbing out of the starboard hold and sprinted over to Pitt, carrying a pair of timers in his hand. Pitt held up his timer and blasting cap, handing it to Lazlo.\n\n\"I found this in the main cache of HMX,\" Pitt said.\n\n\"It's no good,\" Lazlo replied with a stern shake of his head. \"They've got multiple charges hidden throughout the hold. I inadvertently found this one tucked into a crate of the ANFO,\" he said, holding up one of the timers. \"I'm positive there are more.\"\n\nHe looked at Pitt's timer, then compared it to the two that he held.\n\n\"Fourteen minutes until she goes off,\" he said, turning and winging the timers over the side rail. \"There's no way we can find them all.\"\n\nPitt digested his words.\n\n\"Try to find the crew,\" he ordered. \"I'll get us turned back into the strait.\"\n\nPitt didn't wait for a reply, taking off at a sprint for the bridge. The deck beneath his feet rumbled and vibrated, and he suddenly felt the whole ship shudder. Reaching a side stairwell, he took a quick glance aft, then wished he hadn't.\n\nBearing down on the tanker from the east was the blue yacht of Ozden Celik."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 76",
                "text": "Tailing off the stern of the tanker, giordino had already spotted the hard-charging yacht bearing down in his direction. He flicked the marine radio to channel 86 and tried sending a warning call to Pitt, but there was no answer from the Dayan's bridge. Accelerating the submersible, he eased away from the tanker, heading into the center of the channel while pulling parallel with the Dayan's superstructure. He was too low in the water to see anyone on the bridge, but he did spot Lazlo working his way across the deck.\n\nPeering behind him, he was surprised to note the yacht had altered course and was suddenly closing fast on the Bullet. He realized they must not have seen him drop Pitt and Lazlo at the tanker. Despite the early-morning gloom, he could make out two figures climbing to the yacht's forward rail. In their arms, he knew, were automatic weapons aimed at him.\n\nGiordino immediately goosed the throttles to the submersible. The Bullet nearly leaped out of the water, surging quickly up to speed. Giordino tore past the bow of the tanker, then pulled close to the northern shoreline. A short distance ahead was the Galata Bridge, which he figured would provide some cover. But a quick glance behind revealed that the fast yacht was less than fifty yards behind, having closed the gap while the Bullet was accelerating. Giordino cursed aloud as he spotted a small flash of yellow light erupt from the yacht's bow.\n\nThe burst of gunfire struck the water inches from the submersible's hull, though Giordino could neither see nor hear the bullets striking. He nevertheless whipped the steering yoke hard left, followed by a sharp turn to the right. The nimble submersible responded immediately, zigzagging across the water. The action was enough to temporarily disrupt the accuracy of the yacht's shooters.\n\nThe Galata Bridge suddenly loomed up, and in a flash Giordino passed under it. He banked hard once more, then he looked back to see the yacht burst from under the bridge and follow suit. The faster and more maneuverable Bullet was finally showing its legs, and the distance between the two vessels gradually began to increase. But that spurred only more shooting from the yacht.\n\nGiordino kept up the zigzag pattern as he eyed another bridge, the Ataturk, less than a half mile ahead. A sudden banging above his head forced him to duck involuntarily, then he looked up to see that a trio of bullet holes had pierced the submersible's acrylic bubble. Any thoughts of ducking behind an obstacle and trying to submerge suddenly vanished, so he set his sights on the bridge.\n\nSeveral thick footings arose from the channel to support the Ataturk, and Giordino targeted them for cover. Circling in and between the footings, he knew he could distract the yacht while avoiding a direct line of fire. But his concern for self-preservation diminished when he thought of Pitt and the explosives-laden tanker.\n\nJust over a mile behind, the Dayan was surely on its final death march. He had to be available to get both men off the tanker, and most likely soon. Right now, he had no way of knowing if Pitt and Lazlo had any hope at all.\n\nThen he turned and looked behind him and saw that the pursuing yacht had suddenly vanished."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 77",
                "text": "Lazlo only had to follow his ears to locate the tanker's captive crewmen. Though in a weakened state from his gunshot wound, Captain Hammet had his men seeking an escape route the minute the guards left the mess room. The heavily wrapped chain locking the entry door was quickly deemed unbreakable, so the men turned their sights elsewhere. They were surrounded by steel bulkheads, and so there was in fact only one way to go and that was up.\n\nUsing butcher knives from the small galley, the crew began making their way through the ceiling panels and into an overhead duct, hoping to breach the deck above. Lazlo heard the clatter from a storeroom he was searching in an adjacent bay and immediately raced to the mess's door. Quickly unraveling the chain, which was tied in a simple knot, he kicked open the door. Several crewmen, standing on tabletops with knives in their hands, stopped what they were doing and stared at him in surprise.\n\n\"Who's in command here?\" Lazlo barked.\n\n\"I'm captain of the Dayan,\" Hammet said. He was seated in a nearby chair with his leg resting on a stool.\n\n\"Captain, we have just minutes before the ship blows up. What is the quickest way to get you and your crew off?\"\n\n\"The aft emergency lifeboat,\" Hammet replied, rising to his feet with a grimace. \"You can't disable the explosives?\"\n\nLazlo shook his head.\n\n\"Every man to the lifeboat,\" Hammet ordered. \"Let's move.\"\n\nThe crewmen quickly piled out the door, Lazlo and the executive officer helping Hammet out last. Stepping onto the deck, Hammet felt an unusual vibration beneath his feet, then looked over the rail. The Israeli captain was shocked to see the minarets of the Suleymaniye Mosque rising a short distance ahead of them.\n\n\"We're in the middle of Istanbul?\" he stammered.\n\n\"Yes,\" Lazlo replied. \"Come, we have little time.\"\n\n\"But we must get the tanker turned around and out of here,\" he protested.\n\n\"Someone is on the bridge attempting that.\"\n\nHammet started to follow the others toward the stern, then hesitated as the deck shuddered again.\n\n\"Oh, no,\" he groaned with a sullen frown. \"I made her run dry of fuel.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 78",
                "text": "Pitt had only just discovered that same fact. Racing onto the bridge, he had ignored a pair of flashing red lights on the main console as he searched for and found the control that disabled the auto helm. The tanker was just approaching the Galata Bridge, steaming toward its center span, as Pitt regained control of the helm. Glaring at a bridge support off his port bow, he realized there was insufficient room to cut the big ship around. He would have to cross under the bridge first, then make a sweeping turn around and back under to exit the Golden Horn.\n\nAs the bow began to slip under the bridge, Pitt saw that the span ahead appeared to be at nearly eye level, and he wondered whether the tanker's tall superstructure would fit beneath it. Waiting for it to approach, he finally looked down at the flashing red lights. With dismay, he saw they were low-fuel indicators for both the main and auxiliary fuel tanks. When Hammet had sneaked into the engine room, he had opened release valves on the bunkers that dumped fuel into the bilge, where it was then pumped over the side. The tanks were now dry, Pitt knew, as evidenced by the faltering engine that was drawing on the last remaining bit of fuel.\n\nWith a sudden certainty, Pitt knew he had no chance to guide the tanker back toward the Sea of Marmara, where it could explode without harm. Just sailing it safely away from the city was now a lost hope. Standing on the bridge of a ticking time bomb, one that was about to lose power, most men would have fallen prey to panic. They would have felt only the heart-pounding urge to flee, to get off the death ship and try to save their own skins.\n\nBut Pitt wasn't like most men. His pulse barely beat above normal, as he coolly surveyed the surrounding coastline. While his nerves were calm, his mind was in hyperdrive, exploring any and all remedies to the crisis at hand. Then a potential solution appeared across the harbor. Risky and foolhardy, he thought, but it was a solution all the same. Dialing the bridge marine radio to channel 86, he picked up the transmitter.\n\n\"Al, where are you?\" he called.\n\nGiordino's voice immediately crackled back through the speaker.\n\n\"I'm about a mile ahead of you. Been playing cat and mouse with the yacht, but I guess they got tired of my scent. Keep your eyes open, because they're screaming back in your direction. You and Lazlo ready for me to come fetch you off that ship?\"\n\n\"No, I need you somewhere else,\" Pitt replied. \"A large dredge ship, sitting off the southeast corner of the bridge.\"\n\n\"I'm there. Out.\"\n\nThe tanker's superstructure had just slipped under the bridge span when the engine shuddered again. Passing back into the morning light, Pitt saw the blue yacht bearing down on the tanker barely a hundred yards ahead. Ignoring the yacht, he applied full left rudder, then stepped to the rear window, wondering how Lieutenant Lazlo was making out."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 79",
                "text": "The israeli commando was helping carry captain hammet to the lifeboat when the sound of gunfire erupted a short distance away. A second later, shattered glass fell crashing to the deck from above. Lazlo peered up, seeing that the fire was concentrated on the windows of the bridge. He could just make out the radio masts of the yacht as it slid along the tanker's starboard beam.\n\n\"Quickly, into the boat,\" Lazlo urged the sailors.\n\nSix of the crewmen had already climbed into the covered fiberglass lifeboat. It was positioned on a steeply angled pad just above the stern rail, its bow pointing to the water below. The executive officer and another man then assisted Hammet as he stumbled through the boat's rear entry. He fumbled with his seat belt and ordered his crewmen to fasten themselves in. Then he looked up at the entry just as Lazlo was about to close it from the outside.\n\n\"You're not coming with us?\" Hammet asked with a shocked look.\n\n\"My work is not finished,\" Lazlo replied. \"Launch yourself immediately and head to shore. Good luck.\"\n\nHammet tried to thank the commando, but Lazlo quickly shut the door and jumped off the boat. Seeing that his crew were all secured in their seats, the captain turned to his executive officer.\n\n\"Set us loose, Zev.\"\n\nThe exec pulled a lever that released an external clamp, sending the lifeboat sliding. The boat slipped off its ramp, then plunged to the water some forty feet below, its prow knifing several feet beneath the surface. The boat barely had time to right itself on the surface when the blue yacht appeared nearby, and the clatter of machine-gun fire erupted. Only this time, the gunfire didn't originate from the yacht.\n\nHiding on the stern, Lazlo let loose with two quick bursts from his M-4 assault rifle. Aimed at two armed men crouching on the yacht's bow, the burst killed one of the men outright, his limp body rolling over the side. The second gunman barely escaped injury and quickly retreated into the main cabin.\n\nStanding on the bridge, Maria watched the incident with anger. Glancing at her watch, she shrieked at the yacht's captain.\n\n\"There is still time! Take us alongside the ramp.\"\n\n\"What about the lifeboat?\" he asked.\n\n\"Forget them. We'll deal with them later.\"\n\nThe yacht surged forward, escaping Lazlo's view as it ran up to the lowered ramp. Maria quickly ordered two of her Janissaries up the steps.\n\n\"I'll go secure the bridge,\" volunteered the Iraqi Farzad. He retrieved a Glock pistol from a concealed shoulder holster, then stepped toward the cabin door.\n\nMaria nodded. \"See that the tanker runs ashore. Quickly!\"\n\nLazlo had crossed the stern and just peeked over the rail as the yacht pulled away from the ramp. A spray of gunfire from a gunman on the yacht peppered the rail, forcing Lazlo to dive for the deck. Looking up, he cursed as he spotted the two Janissaries crest the ramp and dive onto the ship, taking cover behind a bulkhead near the superstructure.\n\nRemaining prone, Lazlo rolled against the rail, then shimmied backward to a large scupper that drained the deck of seawater. He curled inside it, finding some cover behind a flat flange in front of the scupper. It was far from an optimal defensive position, but Lazlo didn't think he had been seen and might surprise the boarders.\n\nHe was right. The trained commando waited patiently as the two Janissaries attempted to move aft in tandem. When they both had revealed themselves on the deck, Lazlo raised his rifle and fired.\n\nHis initial aim was true, as his rifle pumped four rounds into the chest of the first man, dropping him dead instantly. The second man immediately dropped and rolled behind a stanchion before Lazlo's aim could catch up with him.\n\nBoth shooters now found themselves pinned down in their defensive positions. A protracted volley erupted back and forth, as each hoped a lucky shot would subdue his opponent.\n\nOn the bridge, Pitt tried to ignore the gunfire while keeping the tanker's rudder turned hard over. But he still maintained a wary eye on the yacht, tracking its roving position. It was while sneaking a peek out the rear window that he had spotted a third man climb aboard behind the Janissaries and disappear toward the forward deck, several moments before Lazlo started shooting.\n\nAs the firefight erupted below, Pitt searched the bridge for a possible weapon of his own, digging through an emergency kit mounted above the chart table. Poking his head briefly out the side window, he saw that the surviving Janissary engaged with Lazlo was positioned almost directly below him. He quickly dashed back to the kit and returned with a large fire extinguisher. Hanging out the window, he took quick aim and let it fly.\n\nThe makeshift red missile missed the Janissary's head by inches, instead striking him on the back of the shoulder. The gunman gasped at the surprise blow, more from the shock than pain, and instinctively turned and craned his head upward to eye the source of the attack.\n\nTwenty yards away, Lazlo locked in on the man through the sights of his carbine and squeezed the trigger. The quick burst produced no violent scream or splattering blood. The Janissary simply slumped forward in death, leaving a sudden, uncomfortable silence about the ship."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 80",
                "text": "The tanker's bridge appeared to be empty when farzad entered slowly from the rear stairwell. Noticing the shoreline of Sultanahmet sliding horizontally across the bow, he stepped to the helm to halt the sweeping turn. He lowered his pistol as he located, then reached for, the rudder controls.\n\n\"Let's not fiddle with that just now,\" Pitt said.\n\nPitt emerged from a crouched position behind a console by the port bulkhead. In his hand, he held a brass flare gun pinched from the emergency kit.\n\nFarzad looked at Pitt with surprised recognition that quickly evolved to anger. But his ire turned to mirth when he gazed at Pitt's weapon.\n\n\"I have been anxious to meet again,\" Farzad said in a deep accented voice.\n\nAs he subtly tried to raise his pistol, Pitt pulled the trigger on the flare gun. The ignited flare burst across the bridge, striking Farzad in the chest with a cloud of sparks. His clothing promptly caught fire as the charge fell to the floor, then spun off into the corner like a rodent on fire. A second later, the starburst ignited, sending a shower of flame and smoke across the wheelhouse.\n\nPitt had already dived to the floor, covering his head, as the sparks blew quickly by. Farzad had been less reactive, patting down his incinerated clothes when the starburst sent a second wave of flames his way. He was enveloped in a cloud of smoke and sparks before stepping away from the eruption, coughing for air. Pitt immediately jumped to his feet and bounded forward, hoping to tackle the man before he could see to shoot. But the hired gunman was still aware of Pitt and turned the Glock in his direction.\n\nA loud gunshot thundered through the bridge, but Pitt knew that Farzad hadn't pulled the trigger. The gunman's body was instantly thrown back toward the helm, then slid to the floor, leaving a bloody trail along the console.\n\nLazlo stepped quickly onto the bridge, his smoking rifle aimed at the prone and smoldering body of Farzad.\n\n\"You okay?\" Lazlo asked, eyeing Pitt off to his side.\n\n\"Yes, just enjoying a small light show,\" Pitt replied, coughing because of the heavy smoke that lingered in the air. \"Thanks for the timely entrance.\"\n\nLazlo passed over the now-dented fire extinguisher, which he had held tucked under one arm.\n\n\"Here, thought you might like this back. I appreciate the earlier aerial support.\"\n\n\"You just returned the favor,\" Pitt said, then applied the extinguisher to a scattering of small fires that the flare had ignited.\n\n\"I didn't notice this one slip aboard,\" Lazlo said, ensuring that Farzad was indeed dead.\n\n\"He quickly jumped on behind the first two.\"\n\n\"I imagine that they'll try again.\"\n\n\"Time's running short,\" Pitt replied. \"But you might raise that ramp all the same.\"\n\n\"Good idea. What about us?\"\n\n\"We might be cutting it close. I trust you can swim?\"\n\nLazlo rolled his eyes, then nodded. \"See you below,\" he said, then disappeared down the stairwell.\n\nThe smoke from the flare cleared quickly out of the shattered bridge windows as Pitt stepped to the helm and gauged their position. The Dayan was more than halfway through its wide U-turn, its bow inching slowly toward the southern span of the Galata Bridge. Pitt tweaked the rudder to guide the big tanker dangerously close to the shoreline as it completed its turn, then he nudged up the engine revolutions. The stuttering and hesitation from belowdecks was worse than before, and Pitt fought to squeeze as much speed out of the faltering engine as he could.\n\nHe quickly scanned the shoreline waters for signs of the Bullet, but it was nowhere in sight. After Pitt's earlier radio call, Giordino had raced at top speed toward the dredge ship and had already passed under the Galata Bridge. As if he knew Pitt was searching for him, Giordino suddenly hailed the tanker on the marine radio.\n\n\"Bullet here. I'm past the bridge and just pulling alongside the green cutter dredge. What do you want me to do?\"\n\nPitt told him his plan, which evoked a low whistle from Giordino.\n\n\"I hope you had your Wheaties today,\" he added. \"How much time do you have?\"\n\nPitt glanced at his watch. \"About six minutes. We should be along in about half that time.\"\n\n\"Thanks for bringing the powder keg my way. Just don't be late,\" he added, then quickly signed off.\n\nBy now, the Dayan had completed its turn, and the south span of the Galata Bridge loomed ahead less than a quarter of a mile away. Pitt willed the ship to go faster, as he felt the seconds tick by, while the bridge seemed to hold its distance. The timing would be close, he knew, but there was little he could do about it now.\n\nThen the unwanted sound of silence suddenly drifted from the tanker's bowels. The rumbling and stumbling beneath his feet vanished as the console in front of him lit up like a Christmas tree. The Dayan's fuel-starved engine had finally given up its last gasp."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 81",
                "text": "Tailing the dayan a few dozen yards off its starboard flank, Maria gazed at it through a pair of binoculars. To her disappointment, the big tanker had continued to veer away from shore and was quickly approaching a return pass under the Galata Bridge. She realized why when she scanned the tanker's wheelhouse and caught a brief glimpse of Pitt at the helm.\n\n\"They have failed,\" she said, her voice nearly hoarse with anger. \"Get my last men aboard quickly.\"\n\nThe yacht's captain looked at her nervously.\n\n\"Shouldn't we be getting clear?\" he urged.\n\nMaria stepped close so that no one else on the bridge could hear.\n\n\"We can part once the men are aboard,\" she whispered coldly.\n\nHer last three Janissaries assembled on deck as the yacht raced over to the Dayan's flank. As the yacht approached the tanker's accommodation ladder to off-load the gunmen, the stairway suddenly rose off the water. At the top of the steps, Lazlo stood at the hydraulic controls hoisting the ramp up.\n\n\"Shoot him!\" Maria yelled, spotting the commando.\n\nThe startled Janissaries quickly aimed their weapons at Lazlo and fired. The Israeli commando had been watching the men's reaction and turned to step from the rail. But he lingered a moment longer at the controls, wishing to keep the ramp out of reach. The hesitation proved costly, as a burst from one of the guns caught him in the shoulder.\n\nHe immediately lost his balance, falling forward onto the controls, before slipping to the deck to avoid further gunfire. His left arm was numb, and he felt a sharp pain in his shoulder, but his senses were still intact as he heard a loud crash from below. One-handing his rifle, he shimmied to the rail, then stood and peered quickly over the side.\n\nTo his disappointment, he saw that the lower end of the stairway swung out from the tanker and was positioned just over the yacht. Then he looked closer and realized that it was actually wedged into the yacht itself. Falling on the controls, he had inadvertently released the lower-end retracting cable. The heavy steel platform had shot toward the sea like an arrow. Only instead of striking water, it had crashed into the topside bow of the yacht, penetrating several feet through the deck.\n\nDespite the damage and heightened angle, two of the Janissaries had already leaped onto the ramp and were attempting a fast climb to the top. Lazlo aligned his gun on the rail and fired a sustained round, sending both men flailing over the side and into the water.\n\nSuddenly feeling dizzy from a loss of blood, Lazlo curled back onto the deck and rummaged for a medical kit in his combat pack. Fighting the urge to lay down and go to sleep, he told himself he only needed to keep the yacht at bay a few more minutes. Then he glanced up toward the bridge and wondered how much more time Pitt really needed.\n\nTime was anything but an ally to Pitt now. The last time he checked, there were less than six minutes until detonation, but he tried not to think about it. His focus was simply on driving the tanker a short distance beyond the bridge.\n\nSince the engine had quit, the tanker was sailing on pure momentum. Multiple shipboard generators provided auxiliary power for Pitt to turn the rudder, but the huge single propeller had spun its last turn. The Golden Horn's gentle current pushed lightly at his stern, and Pitt hoped it would be enough to keep up speed for a few more minutes. Given enough time, the current was ultimately capable of carrying the tanker safely to the Sea of Marmara. But time was going the way of the ship's fuel.\n\nWith agonizing slowness, the south span of the Galata Bridge grew larger in the forward bridge window, and Pitt was relieved to note that the Dayan was still gliding along at seven knots. Sporadic gunfire caught his attention again, and he dared a quick glance out the window. The yacht was so close to the tanker's side that he could see only a fraction of the boat. He spotted Lazlo, lying near the head of the stairway, and felt assured that the tanker was still secure for the moment.\n\nThe underside of the bridge soon loomed up, casting the deck and wheelhouse in a brief shadow. Pitt took to the helm and feathered the rudder controls with nervous fingers. The rest would be up to Giordino, he thought quietly.\n\n\"I just hope you can hold your end of the bargain, partner,\" he muttered aloud, then watched the shadow cast by the bridge gradually fall away."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 82",
                "text": "AT 454 FEET IN LENGTH, THE IBN BATTUTA WAS ONE OF the largest dredge ships Giordino had ever seen. Owned and operated by the Belgian company Jan De Nul, it was one of just a handful of self-propelled cutter suction dredges in existence. Unlike a regular suction dredge, which slurped up mud and goo from the seafloor using a long, trailing vacuum tube, the cutter dredge also had a digging mechanism, or cutter head. In the Ibn Battuta's case, the head was a six-foot-diameter ball faced with counterrotating tungsten carbide teeth capable of chewing through solid rock. Affixed to a hull-mounted boom that could be lowered to the seafloor, the cutter head resembled the open jaws of a megalodon shark waiting to bite.\n\nThe dredger had been operating fifty feet from shore and was moored by a pair of huge support legs, called spuds, that protruded through the ship's forward hull. The ship was perpendicular to shore, with its stern facing the channel, which played directly into Pitt's hands.\n\nGiordino, approaching the ship from the stern, spotted a heavy length of chain dangling over the dredger's starboard rail. He eased the Bullet alongside, then cut power. Quickly climbing out, he snared the chain, and attached it to the Bullet before it could drift away. Hoisting himself up the chain, he grabbed the ship's rail and pulled himself onto the deck.\n\nAs a potential hazard in the channel, the Ibn Battuta, named for a fourteenth-century Moroccan explorer, stood brightly illuminated by dozens of overhead lights. Giordino peered from one end of the ship's deck to the other and found it completely empty, the crew still asleep in their bunks. Only a lone seaman stood early-morning watch on the bridge, and he had been oblivious to Giordino's approach and boarding.\n\nGiordino quickly moved aft, searching for the dredger's controls, which he prayed weren't located in the wheelhouse. In the center of the stern deck, forward of a large A-frame and well ahead of the cutter apparatus, he spotted a small, elevated shack with broad windows. Climbing up its steps, he entered it and took a seat in the rear-facing operator's chair. He was thankful to find that the dredging mechanism could be operated by a single man, but he cringed when he saw that the control panel was labeled in Dutch.\n\n\"Well, at least it isn't Turkish,\" he muttered while quickly scanning the board.\n\nFinding a switch marked \"Dynamo,\" he flicked it to the \"Macht\" position. A deep rumble shook the deck as the dredge's massive power generator fired to life. Up on the bridge, the seaman standing watch rushed to the rear window at the noise and quickly spotted Giordino's figure in the controls shack. His excited voice was soon blaring over a two-way radio affixed to the shack's wall. Giordino calmly reached over and turned the radio off before gazing to his left.\n\nThe high prow of the tanker was just emerging from beneath the Galata Bridge, barely a hundred yards away. Giordino abandoned his efforts at trying to decipher the Dutch console and frantically started pushing buttons. One series initiated a grinding sound ahead of him, and he looked up with satisfaction to see the teeth of the cutter head rotating with a menacing whine. The supporting boom stretched horizontally off the dredger's stern, holding the head some twenty feet above the water. It was way too high for what Pitt had in mind.\n\n\"Wat doe jij hier?\" a deep voice suddenly grumbled at Giordino.\n\nGiordino turned to see a squat man with tousled hair climbing into the small controls house. The Ibn Battuta's pump engineer, still wearing his pajamas under a dingy overcoat, stepped over and clamped a hand on Giordino's shoulder. Giordino calmly raised a finger and pointed out the window.\n\n\"Look!\" he said.\n\nThe engineer glanced to the side and froze in shock at the sight of the Dayan bearing down on the dredge ship. He started to say something as he turned back toward Giordino only to be met with the balled fist of a right cross. Giordino's knuckles struck him on the button of his chin, and he wilted like a wet noodle. Giordino quickly caught the man in his arms and laid him gently on the floor.\n\n\"Sorry, my friend. It ain't the time for pleasantries,\" he said to the unconscious engineer before scrambling back to the console. He sensed the shadow of the high tanker blanket the controls shack as he hurriedly surveyed the console. Noticing a small lever to the side, he reached over and pushed it down. With great relief, he watched the end of the boom suddenly drop toward the water. He held the lever down until the cutter head was nearly submerged, its rotating teeth creating a foamy froth on the surface.\n\nReleasing the lever, he glanced up the channel. The bow of the huge tanker was now less than twenty feet away. With a helpless feeling, he stood and watched it approach, knowing there was nothing else to be done."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 83",
                "text": "Pitt knew it was a desperate gamble, but his options were nearly nonexistent. There had simply been no time to get the tanker safely to open sea, and with the engine now dead there was no chance of escaping the crowded shores of Istanbul. Even if the tanker detonated in the center of the Golden Horn, thousands would die. Pitt's only hope was to try to submerge at least some of the explosives and minimize their destructive force.\n\nAnd that's where the Ibn Battuta came into play. With its rock-eating cutter head, Pitt knew the dredger had the ability to slice through the tanker like a can opener. But he had to put the tanker right on the money for it to work. If he came in too tight, he would rip the boom right off the back of the dredger. Approach too wide, and he would miss the head completely.\n\nGliding powerless under the Galata Bridge, he gazed ahead at the dredger off his bow. Though the cutter head was still elevated above the water, he could see its rotating teeth and knew that Giordino was at work. He lightly tapped the rudder control, then stepped to the starboard window and poked his head out. Riding high in the water, he couldn't quite see down the tanker's slab sides to the surface, which added to the difficulty of alignment. He tried not to focus on the fact that he had one, and only one, chance to succeed.\n\nQuickly approaching the Belgian dredger, Pitt was relieved to see its stern boom drop, lowering the cutter head into the water. A few seconds later, he spotted Giordino standing near the stern rail, waving at him to edge the tanker in closer. Pitt sprinted back to the helm and turned a few degrees to starboard, then waited for the bow to respond. When the tanker inched in closer, Giordino raised his arms in the air, giving Pitt the thumbs-up.\n\nPitt left the helm and returned to the side window to watch the impact. Behind him, he suddenly noticed the roar of a high-revving engine, punctuated by the shrill scream of a woman's voice. He glanced down to see Lazlo still lying prone on the deck at the head of the stairway. This time, he noticed a small pool of blood on the deck near his chest. Beyond Lazlo, he saw the yacht alongside, wildly weaving back and forth, once even banging into the side of the tanker.\n\nPitt idly wondered why the yacht was even still hanging around. But it wasn't worth pondering now, he thought, as he turned and faced the dredger, and the moment of truth.\n\n\"Get us clear!\" Maria screamed for at least the third time.\n\nThe normally controlled tyrant was flush with panic as she repeatedly looked at her watch. There were just minutes to go.\n\nSweat ran down the yacht captain's brow as he swung its rudder to and fro, fighting to break free of the embedded ramp. He had waited until they cleared the Galata Bridge before reversing engines, bucking against the momentum of the tanker. Yet the ramp remained lodged in the yacht's deck like a barbed hook in the mouth of an angry marlin.\n\nThe yacht's engines howled as the captain applied full reverse power before trying to swing the boat wide. Unknown to the captain, the stairway's lower wheels and axle had caught around the anchor chain in the yacht's anchor locker and was now hopelessly entangled by the wrenching motion of the boat.\n\nThe stairway now was a twisted pretzel of steel, yet the platform refused to break apart. With its props churning a maddening boil of water off its stern, the yacht was dragged alongside the tanker like a puppy on a short leash. The captain looked ahead at the dredger, waiting for the Dayan to turn away from the Belgian ship. But as they drew closer, he came to the grim realization that the tanker wasn't going to move clear.\n\nWith desperate urgency, he swung the yacht hard side to side, slapping against the side of the tanker before pulling wide. But the stubborn platform refused to break free. The Dayan's bow was now abreast of the dredger, but he could see that there was a narrow gap between the vessels, although a boom hung low in the water.\n\nWith Maria still staring him down, he nodded toward the dredger.\n\n\"The boom will break our tie to the ramp,\" he said. \"We will be free shortly.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 84",
                "text": "Pitt's alignment was less than perfect, but not by much.\n\nThe Dayan's bow grazed several feet past the cutter head before the rotating teeth made contact with the tanker's hull. Though muffled somewhat by the water, the cutter emitted a screeching wail as its teeth ground against the steel hull plates. For several feet, the head simply forged a deep indentation into the tanker's side. Then the endless line of teeth caught a hull plate seam and ripped open a gaping hole.\n\nOnce breached, there was no going back. The rotating cutter ball ate through the hull like a hungry beaver, fed by the forward momentum of the 8,000-ton tanker. The tungsten teeth chewed past the hull and into the stainless steel tanks that held fresh water when the ship was under load. But instead of being fresh, it was now murky green, as the waters of the Bosphorus rapidly began filling the tanks.\n\nFrom his high perch, Pitt could see water swirling around the bottom of the forward starboard tank. He could only hope that rising waters would spill over into the port tank and dilute the explosive force of both stockpiles. But time was not on his side.\n\nScanning the deck of the Ibn Battuta, he spotted Giordino already sneaking back to the NUMA submersible. He had been replaced at the stern rail by a handful of the dredger's crew. Awakened by the racket, they stood staring dumbfounded at the physical carnage their ship was inflicting on the huge tanker just a few feet in front of them.\n\nAs the cutter head bore even with the bridge, Pitt stepped to the helm and as a final gesture cut the rudder fifteen degrees to port. Already slowed by the incoming water, the tanker might travel another half mile, Pitt guessed, before exploding, and he wanted to ensure that she was headed to the center of the channel. The head was still grinding across the hull with a metallic din when Pitt abandoned the bridge, hurrying down the stairwell to grab Lazlo and get off the ship.\n\nHe didn't wait around to watch the fate of the yacht. With Maria still screaming in the Sultana captain's ear, the captain tucked the yacht up against the tanker's hull, hoping to avoid a direct collision with the dredger. He quickly noticed the subtle bank of the tanker as it eased to port, giving him a slim hope of escape. The turn allowed the yacht to pass just clear of the dredger's boom, as the cutter head was pulled free of the Dayan. But there was no room to escape the head itself.\n\nThe masticating ball reached the bow of the yacht, striking the starboard hull. Still being dragged like a rag doll, the yacht was pulled up and across the top of the cutter head. The cutter easily chewed a six-foot swath across the underside of the yacht's fiberglass hull before decapitating its whirling twin propellers. The yacht's thumping motors fell silent as the engine compartment flooded, and the yacht began settling by its stern.\n\nThe captain stood frozen in shock, his hands still glued to the wheel. But Maria showed no such restraint. Retrieving a Beretta pistol from her purse, she stepped close to the captain, pressed the muzzle against his ear, and pulled the trigger.\n\nNot waiting for his body to hit the floor, she scurried to the yacht's bow to free them from the tanker once and for all."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 85",
                "text": "By the time that pitt reached the main deck, the tanker had already developed a noticeable list. The cutter head had ripped a two-hundred-foot gouge down its length, slashing into every one of the starboard storage tanks. A full crew of men with pumps couldn't have staved off the flooding for long. It was exactly the effect Pitt had hoped for, but now he had to find a way off for Lazlo and himself.\n\nAs the tanker rapidly leaned to starboard, Pitt figured it would be either a short hop down the stairway or, if necessary, a jump from the rail. As he approached Lazlo, he was surprised to see the yacht still clinging alongside. From the angled position of the tanker's deck, he was able to peer right down onto the yacht and see the entangled stairway impaled in it. Of greater interest was the figure of Maria standing on the bow, wielding a pistol. She fired several shots into the twisted link of steel that held the ramp together, then spotted Pitt a short distance above her.\n\n\"Die with the ship!\" she yelled, aiming the gun at Pitt and pulling the trigger.\n\nPitt was a hair faster, diving to the deck alongside Lazlo as the bullet whizzed over his head.\n\n\"Come on, Lieutenant, it's time we find another exit,\" he said to the commando.\n\nLazlo struggled to turn his way, looking at Pitt with glassy eyes that were barely open. Pitt suddenly realized the severity of his wound, seeing the bloody shoulder that Lazlo had managed to patch with a bandage. Every second counted now, though, so Pitt reached over and took a firm grip of the back of Lazlo's collar.\n\n\"Hang on, partner,\" he said.\n\nIgnoring Maria, Pitt sprang to a crouch, then backpedaled up the inclined deck, dragging Lazlo behind him. Maria immediately fired, peppering a handful of shots in their direction. Her shots struck close but missed both men before Pitt had them safely out of sight. Regaining a touch of strength, Lazlo had Pitt pull him to his feet. The commando's jacket was soaked red, and a trail of blood had followed him across the deck.\n\nThe tanker suddenly lurched beneath their feet, listing almost thirty degrees to starboard. Pitt quickly realized that their most immediate danger wasn't from the pending explosives.\n\n\"Can you climb with me?\" Pitt asked Lazlo.\n\nThe tough commando nodded, and with an arm around Pitt for support he took shaky steps up the deck.\n\nBehind them, Maria continued shooting, her target again the battered stairway. Several more well-aimed shots at the ramp's joint finally weakened the metal, which had bent sharply with the sinking tanker. Stomping the ramp with her foot, its joint finally broke free, releasing the upper stairway to swing hard against the ship.\n\nFree at last, Maria sneered at the tanker from the bow of the slowly sinking yacht. The tanker would drift well clear before exploding, and she might have time to make it back to the bridge for safety. At the very least, she thought, Pitt and Lazlo would die with the ship.\n\nShe might have been right, only she failed to account for the Dayan's own bit of vindictive wrath."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 86",
                "text": "From the twentieth floor of his high-rise office situated on the eastern shore of the Bosphorus, Ozden Celik watched the events unfold with increasing dread. He had barely been able to make out the shadow of the tanker when it first approached Istanbul under the faint light of dawn. But the slowly graying sky had expanded his panoramic view until the towering minarets of Suleymaniye Mosque were clearly visible across the waters of the strait.\n\nWith a tripod-mounted pair of high-magnification binoculars, he focused on the Dayan just as its emergency lifeboat was released off the stern. He watched in dismay as the tanker crossed under the Galata Bridge while the Sultana appeared alongside in an apparent gun battle. Celik could feel his heart pounding when he saw the tanker complete a wide turn and reemerge beneath the far end of the bridge.\n\n\"No, you are supposed to run ashore by the mosque!\" he cursed aloud at the sluggish tanker.\n\nHis frustration mounted when repeated phone calls to Maria went unanswered. He lost sight of the yacht when the tanker turned, its high profile obscuring the smaller vessel. Holding his breath, Celik hoped that the yacht had turned and fled up the Golden Horn to escape the blast, which he knew was now imminent. But his eyes bulged in horror when the Dayan passed close to the dredge ship, then turned toward the channel, revealing that the yacht was still alongside its starboard flank.\n\nFocusing the binoculars, he saw his sister on the yacht's bow, shooting a gun first at the tanker, then at the metal stairway. Celik couldn't help but notice the tanker listing precariously above her.\n\n\"Get away! Get away!\" Celik shouted to his sister from two miles away.\n\nThe eyepieces dug into his brow as he watched the scene with horror. Maria at last succeeded in freeing the yacht from the stairway's clasp, but it didn't move far. Celik had no idea that the yacht had been stripped of its propellers and was itself sinking. Baffled by the sight, he couldn't understand why the yacht hung close to the heavily listing tanker.\n\nFrom his vantage point across the strait, Celik could not hear the symphony of creaks and groans that emanated from the bowels of the tanker as its center of gravity was upset. The massive flooding across the Dayan's entire length augmented the starboard list until the deck rose like a steep mountain. Crashing sounds erupted throughout the tanker as dishes, furniture, and equipment lost their fight with gravity and tumbled against the starboard bulkheads.\n\nAs the starboard rail touched the water, the hulking tanker wallowed completely up onto its side, holding the awkward position for several seconds. The Dayan could have broken up or simply sank on its side, but it instead held together and resumed its death roll with a flourish.\n\nStill standing on the bow of the yacht, Maria felt the shadow of the tanker cross her body as the ship began to flip over. Drifting just a few yards from the bigger Dayan, the yacht was well within its reach. There would be no escaping its destructive blow.\n\nMaria looked up and raised an arm, as if to ward off the blow of the giant tanker as it rolled over. Instead, she was flattened like an insect. The capsizing Dayan slammed the water's surface, engulfing the yacht while creating a ten-foot wave that crashed toward the shoreline, tossing the Ibn Battuta about like a rowboat. The dark, barnacle-encrusted hull of the tanker filled the horizon, its mammoth bronze propeller spinning idly in the morning sky. Muffled bangs from collapsing bulkheads mixed with rushing water echoed throughout the hull as the overturned ship slowly began to settle by the bow.\n\nCelik gripped his binoculars with trembling hands as he watched his sister die beneath the weight of the capsized tanker. Frozen in shock, he stared unblinking before his emotions brimmed over. Heaving the tripod across his office with a wail, he fell to the carpet, then covered his eyes and sobbed uncontrollably."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 87",
                "text": "Celik wasn't the only one who watched in horror as the tanker capsized. Giordino was just climbing into the Bullet when he heard a crashing sound behind him and turned to see the Dayan turn turtle atop the yacht. He quickly sealed the rear hatch as the resulting wave barreled into the Ibn Battuta, carrying the submersible up and away from the dredge ship.\n\nGiordino quickly fired up the diesel engines and motored toward the tanker. He thought anxiously of Pitt, who had waved at him from the bridge of the tanker just minutes before. The bridge was now far underwater, and all he could see was the cold, lifeless underbelly of the Israeli tanker.\n\nIgnoring the danger that the tanker might explode at any time, he raced along its near side. Surprisingly little debris had floated away when the ship turned over, and he was able to speed quickly down its length to search for bodies in the channel. He knew that Pitt was like a dolphin in the water. If he had somehow survived the capsizing, there was at least a chance that he had swum clear.\n\nNearing the submerged bow, Giordino swung around and motored back close to the hull, either not knowing or caring that the timed explosives would detonate in less than two minutes. The waters ahead of him remained empty as he passed the tanker's midsection and approached the stern. With a heavy heart, he reluctantly considered the notion that his old friend had not made it off alive.\n\nNudging the throttles higher, he started to turn away when he noticed a pair of ropes stretched over the hull. Oddly, the lines appeared to run from the ship's submerged port rail up the hull and over the keel, a short distance in front of the propeller. With a glimmer of hope in his eye, Giordino accelerated briskly, sweeping around the tanker's broad stern, which was now rising high into the air.\n\nReaching the tanker's opposite side, he spotted the ropes dangling high from the keel, but the hull was otherwise empty. Then barely fifty yards away in the water he spotted two objects. Turning instantly, he raced closer, seeing with joy that it was Pitt towing an injured Lazlo away from the ship.\n\nGiordino sped in closer, then expertly reversed engines to quickly drift alongside. Pitt hoisted Lazlo onto a pontoon, then shouted at Giordino as the latter moved to open the hatch.\n\n\"No time,\" Pitt yelled. \"Get us out of here.\"\n\nGiordino nodded, then waited until Pitt climbed aboard and wrapped an arm around Lazlo before accelerating. The two men were tossed and splashed as the Bullet charged quickly ahead, bounding over the harbor waters. Giordino turned and sped toward the Galata Bridge, determining that it would provide the closest cover.\n\nThe Bullet was a hundred yards shy of the bridge when a deep thump sounded across the channel. Though a portion of the explosive material had fallen to the seabed when the Dayan capsized, nearly half of the fuel oil and most of the HMX remained lodged in the two forward storage tanks. But with the ship sinking by the bow, the flooded tanks were almost entirely underwater, greatly diluting the blast's impact.\n\nA quick series of successive thumps sounded as the timed fuzes detonated, and then a huge explosion ripped open the tanker's hull. The concussion echoed across the hills and streets of Istanbul like a sonic boom. A fountain of white water blew from the tanker's underside, spraying chunks of steel and debris a hundred feet into the air. The jagged chunks fell to earth across a quarter-mile swath, raining down in a deadly hail from the heavens.\n\nYet the terrifying blast proved mostly benign. Due to the angle of the sinking tanker, the main force of the blast was centered ahead of it and toward the Bosphorus. Pitt's last-second course adjustment had diverted the impact away from shore and toward a wide patch of empty water.\n\nAs the steel and debris splashed into the bay, a loud creak echoed from the tanker as the perforated section of hull gave way. The decimated bow broke free and promptly sank quickly to the channel bottom while the remaining hull lingered on the surface a few moments before foundering.\n\nBobbing beneath a span of the Galata Bridge, Giordino climbed out of the Bullet's cabin to check on his passengers.\n\n\"Thanks for the lift,\" Pitt said as he attended to Lazlo.\n\n\"You boys were cutting it a bit close there,\" Giordino replied.\n\n\"We got lucky. Maria Celik wanted to use us for target practice on the starboard rail, so we hiked up the deck. Happened to find a pair of lines that had been lowered over the port side, and we were scrambling down them as the ship turned turtle. We managed to make it over the keel, then slid down the other side to avoid the yacht.\"\n\n\"You needn't have worried,\" Giordino said with a grin. \"It got flattened like a pancake.\"\n\n\"Any survivors?\"\n\nGiordino shook his head.\n\n\"Lazlo needs medical attention,\" Pitt said. \"We better get him to shore.\"\n\nHe and Giordino helped him inside the submersible, then they motored toward the southern shoreline.\n\n\"That was some blast,\" Giordino said to Pitt. \"Could have been a lot worse.\"\n\nPitt simply nodded quietly, staring out the cockpit window.\n\nAhead of them, the massive remains of the Israeli tanker rose up high by its stern. The vessel stood near vertical in an almost defiant manner before plunging beneath the waves with a rush. Somewhere not far across the strait, the twisted dreams of a renewed Ottoman dynasty sank with it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 88",
                "text": "The tanker explosion rattled istanbul more politically than physically. The confirmed loss of the police boat and Coast Guard vessel in conjunction with the attack put the country's military forces on high alert. When the tanker was identified as the Dayan, a flurry of high-level accusations between Turkey and Israel went flying across diplomatic channels. Protests by panic-stricken residents of the city nearly led to a military response. But fears of a Turkish/Israeli conflict were assuaged when the authorities found the Dayan's rescued crewmen.\n\nInterviewed publicly, the crewmen detailed their hijacking and captivity at the hands of the unknown gunmen. Turkish sentiment quickly turned when the men described loading the explosives at gunpoint and almost dying aboard the ship but for their last-minute rescue. Privately, after checking Lazlo into a hospital, Pitt and Giordino had informed Turkish authorities of their role in sinking the tanker.\n\nWhen U.S. intelligence secretly provided evidence that the same HMX explosives were used in the mosque attacks in Bursa, Cairo, and Jerusalem, the Turkish forces were quick to act. Secret raids were immediately carried out against Celik's home, office, and port facilities, while the Ottoman Star was located in Greek waters and seized. As public pressure mounted to identify who committed the attack and why, the official investigation wasn't kept quiet for long.\n\nWith the release of their names, Ozden and Maria Celik became public pariahs and a source of national embarrassment. When it was later discovered that they had orchestrated the breakin at Topkapi, the national embarrassment and anger turned to outright rage. Investigators and journalists alike dove into the pair's concealed pasts, revealing their ties to the last Ottoman ruling family, as well as to underworld mobsters and drug runners who had kick-started Celik business holdings.\n\nInevitably, the Celiks' financial dealings with Arab royalty were uncovered, leading to the revelation that millions of dollars had been funneled to Mufti Battal. The objective of the Celiks' attacks became readily apparent, and public furor was directed to the Mufti and his Felicity Party. Although no evidence was found that the Mufti was involved or even aware of the terrorist attacks, the damage was done.\n\nThe final confirmation of the Celiks' guilt was confirmed when divers were sent to the bottom of the Golden Horn. The mangled remains of the Sultana were located not far from the shattered hull of the tanker. A salvage team brought the wreck to the surface, where it was left to a police forensics team to remove the crushed body of Maria Celik from the flattened deck of the yacht.\n\nHis name in ruin, his assets seized, and his dead sister's body held in the Istanbul city morgue, there was nothing left of Ozden Celik's empire but the man himself.\n\nYet he had apparently vanished into nothingness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 89",
                "text": "The Friday noon prayer, called khutbah, was typically the highest-attended Muslim service of the week. It was the time when the resident mosque Imam would offer a separate, faith-inspiring sermon before leading the assemblage in prayer.\n\nAt Istanbul's Fatih Mosque, the prayer hall remained oddly empty, despite the muezzin's recent call to prayer. The khutbah was normally packed to the gills, with dozens of people spilling out of the prayer hall and into the courtyard, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mufti Battal while listening to his words of hope. But that was not the case today.\n\nBarely fifty ardent followers stood in the open hall as Mufti Battal entered and stepped to a raised platform near the mihrab. The once-mighty Mufti looked like he had aged twenty years in the past week. His eyes were sunken and cold, his skin pale and lifeless. The swagger and conceit that had fueled his rise to power was completely absent. Gazing at the sparse crowd, he trembled slightly, suppressing the single emotion of rage.\n\nSpeaking in a subdued voice, he began his homily railing against the dangerous, unchecked powers of the establishment. In uncharacteristic fashion, he was soon rambling incoherently, targeting a litany of perceived ills and threats. The somber faces staring back at him in disillusionment finally checked his diatribe. Ending his sermon abruptly, he recited a short passage from the Qur'an dealing with redemption, then led the small audience in prayer.\n\nNot wishing to mingle with his brethren, Battal quickly stepped to the side of the prayer hall and entered an anteroom where he kept a small office. He was surprised to find a bearded man in the room seated in front of his desk. He was dressed in the faded white shirt and trousers of a laborer, and wore a wide-brimmed hat that partially covered his face.\n\n\"Who let you in here?\" Battal thundered at the man.\n\nThe stranger stood and raised his head to look Battal in the eye, then tugged on his fake beard.\n\n\"I let myself in, Altan,\" replied the haggard voice of Ozden Celik.\n\nBeneath his commoner's disguise, his appearance was not far removed from that of Battal's. He had the same drawn, gaunt face and pasty skin. Only his eyes burned with a greater, somewhat crazed intensity.\n\n\"You have endangered me by coming here,\" Battal hissed. He quickly stepped to the back door and opened it cautiously, sticking his head out in surveillance.\n\n\"Come, follow me,\" he said to Celik, then slipped out the door.\n\nHe led him down a corridor, then entered a seldom-used storage room at the rear of the mosque. A washing machine was wedged into one corner, fronted by a cluster of old towels left to dry on a wire clothesline. As Celik followed him in, Battal closed the door behind him and locked it.\n\n\"Why have you come here?\" he asked impatiently.\n\n\"I need your help to get out of the country.\"\n\n\"Yes, your life is finished in Turkey. As nearly is mine.\"\n\n\"I have sacrificed everything for you, Altan. My wealth, my property. Even my sister,\" he added, his voice quivering. \"It was all done for the aim of making you President.\"\n\nBattal stared at Celik with nothing but contempt.\n\n\"You have destroyed me, Ozden,\" he said, his face flush with anger. \"I was crushed in the election. My benefactors have disappeared. My congregation has abandoned me. All because you have tainted my reputation. And now this.\"\n\nHe pulled a letter out of his pocket and winged it at Celik. The Turk ignored it, simply shaking his head as it fell to the floor.\n\n\"It is from the Diyanet. I have been relieved as Mufti of Istanbul.\" Battal's eyes flared as he sneered at Celik. \"You have utterly destroyed me.\"\n\n\"It was all done to achieve our destiny,\" Celik replied quietly.\n\nBattal could control his emotions no longer. He grabbed Celik by his shirt and flung him across the room. Celik fell against the hanging laundry, snapping the line as he dropped to the ground covered in towels. He struggled to get to his feet, but Battal was already on him. Grabbing a loose end of the clothesline, Battal quickly wrapped it around Celik's throat and drew it tight. Celik fought back fiercely, punching and flailing at the Mufti. But Battal was too big and powerful, and too bent on vengeance. Surging with pent-up rage, he ignored Celik's blows and yanked the line tighter.\n\nThe horror of being strangled was not lost on Celik. Struggling to breathe, he saw a parade of his own garroted victims flash before his eyes as the life was slowly choked from his body. Failing in a last desperate attempt to break free, he stared at the Mufti with a combination of fear and defiance before his eyes rolled back and his body fell limp. Battal kept his death grip on Celik for another five minutes, less out of assurance than psychotic fury. Finally letting go, he stepped slowly from the dead man, staggering out of the storage room with trembling hands and a permanently disabled mind.\n\nIt was late the next morning when Celik's body was discovered by a Bosphorus fisherman. Surreptitiously dumped into the harbor, it had floated about the Golden Horn for most of the night before drifting ashore at Seraglio Point.\n\nThe expired body of Ozden Celik, the world's last Ottoman, was found just a few steps from the walls of Topkapi, in the shadow of the glory of his legendary ancestors."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 90",
                "text": "Pitt and giordino found lazlo on the third floor of the Istanbul Hospital, situated in a pleasant but heavily guarded room overlooking the Bosphorus. The commando was lying in bed, reading a three-day-old copy of Haaretz, an Israeli daily newspaper, when the two men were allowed to enter.\n\n\"Don't tell me you are still front-page news back home?\" Pitt asked as he entered and shook hands.\n\n\"It is good to see you, my friends,\" Lazlo replied, sheepishly putting the paper aside. \"Yes, we are still big news in Israel. However, I am sad to report that I seem to be getting all of the credit. It was you who disabled the tanker,\" he said to Pitt. \"And none of it would have been possible without the Bullet,\" he added to Giordino.\n\n\"I think it's safe to say it was a team effort,\" Pitt replied.\n\n\"Among other things, the three of us have improved my country's relationship with Turkey tenfold,\" Lazlo boasted.\n\n\"Not to mention helping keep Ataturk's vision of a secular Turkish government in play for a few more years,\" Pitt noted.\n\n\"I think somebody should put us in for a Nobel Prize,\" Giordino said with a smirk.\n\n\"I heard they found the body of Celik this morning,\" Lazlo said.\n\n\"Yes, he was apparently strangled, then pitched into the Golden Horn,\" Pitt said.\n\n\"Did you beat me to the task?\"\n\nPitt smiled. \"Not this time. A police detective told us they are pretty certain Mufti Battal is responsible. An undercover cop at Battal's mosque reported seeing a man matching Celik's description and dress in the building about the time of his estimated death.\"\n\n\"A pair of devils, in my book,\" Lazlo said.\n\nAn attractive nurse came into the room momentarily to check Lazlo's medication, then left under his watchful gaze.\n\n\"Anxious to get home, Lieutenant?\" Giordino asked.\n\n\"Not particularly,\" Lazlo replied with a grin. \"And by the way, it is now Commander Lazlo. I've received word of my promotion.\"\n\n\"Let me be the first to congratulate you,\" Giordino said, slipping him a bottle of whisky he had smuggled into the hospital. \"Perhaps you can find someone around here to share it with,\" he added with a wink.\n\n\"You Americans are all right,\" Lazlo replied with a wide smile.\n\n\"How is the prognosis?\" Pitt asked.\n\n\"I'm scheduled for surgery in Tel Aviv in another week, then will be subject to several weeks of therapy. But the recovery should be full, and I hope to report back to duty before the end of the year.\"\n\nThey were interrupted by the entrance of a man in a wheelchair, who rolled in with his leg in a cast.\n\n\"Abel, there you are,\" Lazlo greeted. \"It's time you meet the men who helped save your life.\"\n\n\"Abel Hammet, master of the Dayan. Or ex-master, I should say,\" he said, greeting Pitt and Giordino warmly. \"Lazlo here has told me everything you did. You really put yourself out on a limb, and my crew and I can't thank you enough.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry your tanker was still lost in the end,\" Pitt replied.\n\n\"The Dayan was a good ship,\" Hammet said wistfully. \"But the good news is that we're getting a brand-new vessel. The Turkish government has committed to building us a replacement, apparently using the appropriated assets of one Ozden Celik to pay for it.\"\n\n\"Who says there's no justice in the world?\" Giordino quipped.\n\nAs the men laughed, Pitt glanced at his watch.\n\n\"Well, the Aegean Explorer is due to shove off in about an hour,\" he said. \"I'm afraid we're going to have to be on our way.\"\n\nHe shook hands with Hammet, then turned to Lazlo.\n\n\"Commander, I'd be glad to have you by my side any day,\" he said.\n\n\"It would be my honor,\" Lazlo replied.\n\nAs Pitt and Giordino moved toward the door, Lazlo called out to them.\n\n\"Where are you headed? Back to your shipwreck?\"\n\n\"No,\" Pitt replied. \"We're sailing to Cyprus.\"\n\n\"Cyprus? What's waiting for you there?\"\n\nPitt gave the commander a cryptic grin.\n\n\"A divine revelation, I hope.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "MANIFEST DESTINY",
                "text": "ST. JULIEN PERLMUTTER HAD JUST SETTLED INTO AN OVER size leather armchair when the phone rang. His favorite reading post was custom-built, as it had to be to accommodate his nearly four-hundred-pound frame. He glanced at a nearby grandfather clock, noting it was nearly midnight. Reaching past a tall glass of port parked on a side table, he answered the phone.\n\n\"Julien, how are you?\" came a familiar voice over the line.\n\n\"Well, if it isn't the savior of Constantinople,\" Perlmutter replied in a booming voice. \"I've read with glee about your exploits in the Golden Horn, Dirk. I hope you weren't injured in the affair?\"\n\n\"No, I'm fine,\" Pitt replied. \"And by the way, they call it Istanbul these days.\"\n\n\"Bilgewater. It was Constantinople for sixteen hundred years. Ridiculous to change it now.\"\n\nPitt had to laugh at his old friend, who spent most of his waking hours living in the past. \"I hope I didn't catch you in bed?\" he asked.\n\n\"No, not at all. I was just sitting down with a copy of Captain Cook's papers from his first voyage to the Pacific.\"\n\n\"One of these days, we'll have to go find what's left of the Endeavor,\" Pitt said.\n\n\"Aye, a noble mission that would be,\" Perlmutter replied. \"So where are you, Dirk, and why the late call?\"\n\n\"We just docked at Limassol, Cyprus, and I have a mystery I could use your help with.\"\n\nThe large bearded man's eyes twinkled at hearing the words. As one of the world's foremost marine historians, Perlmutter had a hunger for nautical enigmas that exceeded his appetite for food and drink. Having associated with Pitt for years, he knew that when his friend called he usually had something beguiling.\n\n\"Pray tell,\" Perlmutter said in his deep bassoon voice.\n\nPitt proceeded to tell him about the Ottoman wreck and its Roman-era artifacts, then he sprang the story of the Manifest and its list of contents.\n\n\"My word, that's an epic cargo,\" Perlmutter said. \"A pity that little, if any of it, would survive after two millennia under the sea.\"\n\n\"Yes, the ossuary might be the best that could be hoped for.\"\n\n\"You would surely stir a hornet's nest with that,\" Perlmutter said.\n\n\"If any of it still exists, it deserves to be found,\" Pitt replied.\n\n\"Absolutely. Even without the cargo, an intact Roman galley would be a gem to discover. Do you have a starting point to conduct the search?\"\n\n\"The purpose of my call,\" Pitt said. \"I'm hoping that you might know of some unidentified ancient wrecks off the southern Cyprus coast. Any data on the historic trade routes around the island would probably be helpful, too.\"\n\nPerlmutter thought for a moment. \"I have a few resources on the shelf that might be of assistance. Give me a couple of hours, and I'll see what I can do.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Julien.\"\n\n\"Say, Dirk,\" Perlmutter added, before hanging up. \"Were you aware that Cyprus was known to produce the best wines in the Roman Empire?\"\n\n\"You don't say.\"\n\n\"A glass of Commandaria, I've heard, tastes as it did two thousand years ago.\"\n\n\"I'll be sure and find you a bottle, Julien.\"\n\n\"You're a good man, Dirk. So long.\"\n\nHanging up the phone, Perlmutter took a long sip of his port wine, savoring its deep, sweet flavor. Then propelling his huge frame to his feet, he stepped to a ceiling-high shelf overflowing with nautical books and began humming to himself as he rifled through the titles.\n\nIt was less than two hours later when the satellite phone on the Aegean Explorer rang with a return call from Perlmutter.\n\n\"Dirk, I've found just a morsel so far, but it might be a start,\" the historian said.\n\n\"Every little bit helps,\" Pitt replied.\n\n\"It's a shipwreck, from the fourth century. It was discovered by sport divers back in the nineteen sixties.\"\n\n\"Roman?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure. The archaeological report I have is quite dated, but it indicates that some Roman weaponry was among the artifacts recovered. As you know, Cyprus was never deemed of much military importance to the Romans but rather as a trading source for copper and grain. And, of course, wine. So the existence of weapons on this wreck might be of significance.\"\n\n\"Long shot or not, it sounds worth a look. Where is the wreck located?\"\n\n\"She was found off of a town called Pissouri, which is near you on the southern coast. The wreck was located about a quarter mile off the public beach there. I found a later reference that the site was partially excavated in the nineties, however, and the artifacts put on display at the Limassol District Archaeological Museum.\"\n\n\"That's convenient,\" Pitt said. \"Does the location hold up to the Roman trading routes?\"\n\n\"Actually, the merchant ships of the day sailing from Judaea would have typically followed along the Levant coast en route to Constantinople. Same goes for the Roman galleys, which would generally hug the coastline to stay in calmer waters. But our knowledge of maritime practices in those days is limited.\"\n\n\"It may well be that they never intended to sail to Cyprus,\" Pitt replied. \"Thanks, Julien, we'll look into the wreck.\"\n\n\"I'll keep nosing about for more. In the meantime, happy hunting.\"\n\nAs Pitt hung up the phone, his two children stepped onto the bridge with small travel bags slung over their shoulders.\n\n\"Jumping ship before we start our survey?\" Pitt asked.\n\n\"You've got a starting point?\" Summer asked.\n\n\"The good Mr. Perlmutter just helped me lay out a search grid.\"\n\n\"I talked Dirk into helping me attack the local archives,\" she replied. \"I thought I'd see if we could find some local references to the Manifest, or perhaps a history of local piracy. You don't mind if we catch up with you in a day or two?\"\n\n\"No, that sounds like a good idea. Where's your first stop?\"\n\nSummer gave her father a blank look. \"To be honest, we haven't identified the local resources to visit. You wouldn't have any suggestions, would you?\"\n\nPitt couldn't help but grin at the request while he glanced at a page of notes he had written while talking to Perlmutter.\n\n\"It just so happens,\" he said with a wink, \"that I know exactly where you should go.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 92",
                "text": "Summer and Dirk found the limassol district ar chaeological Museum in a modern building east of the city center, not far from the town's scenic municipal garden. A variety of pottery and artifacts from Cyprus's rich history, some dating to 2000 B.C., were displayed in simple glass cases throughout the three wings of the building. Summer admired a display of terra-cotta animal figures from the Archaic Age while waiting for the museum's curator.\n\n\"I am Giorgos Danellis. May I help you?\" asked a round-faced man with a Greek accent.\n\nSummer introduced herself and her brother. \"We are interested in a fourth-century shipwreck that was discovered near Pissouri,\" she explained.\n\n\"Yes, the Pissouri wreck,\" Danellis replied with a nod. \"The display is in room three.\"\n\nAs he escorted them to the other room, he asked, \"Are you with the British Museum?\"\n\n\"No, we work for the National Underwater and Marine Agency,\" Dirk replied.\n\n\"Oh, sorry,\" the curator replied. \"There was a fellow in here a few days ago inquiring about the same exhibit. I thought you might be related.\"\n\nHe stepped to a large glass case that was filled with dozens of artifacts. Summer noted that most were ceramic containers, along with some deteriorated wood fragments with rusty iron fittings.\n\n\"What can you tell us about the ship?\" she asked.\n\n\"She dates to the first half of the fourth century,\" he said, pointing to a corroded silver coin on the lower display shelf. \"This Roman denarius found on the wreck depicts Emperor Constantine with laurels, which indicates that the vessel was sunk around 330 A.D.\"\n\n\"Was she a Roman galley?\" Dirk asked.\n\n\"There was some speculation to that end when she was first discovered, but most experts believe she was a merchant galley. Wood samples show she was built of Lebanese pine, which would tend to support the hypothesis.\" He pointed to an artist's rendition of a high-prowed galley with twin square sails that hung on the wall.\n\n\"The archaeologists believe she was a probably a merchant transporting grain or olive oil.\"\n\nDirk pointed to a sea-ravaged sword hilt that was tucked behind a clay pot.\n\n\"She had armament aboard?\" he asked.\n\nThe curator nodded. \"Allegedly, there was much more, but I'm afraid that sword remnant is all that we recovered. The archaeologists were forced to conduct a hurried excavation when it was discovered that the wreck site was being systematically plundered by thieves. I've heard stories that a great many weapons were removed from the site before the archaeologists arrived.\"\n\n\"How do you account for all those weapons on a merchant ship?\" Summer asked.\n\nThe curator looked blank. \"I don't really know. Perhaps it was part of their cargo. Or perhaps a high-ranking official was traveling aboard.\"\n\n\"Or there's another possibility,\" Dirk said.\n\nDanellis and Summer looked at him curiously.\n\n\"It seems to me,\" he said, \"that this vessel may have been a pirate ship. It reminds me of the account I read in Caesarea of the captured Cypriot pirate vessel that was found with Roman arms aboard.\"\n\n\"Yes, that could well be the case,\" the curator replied. \"Some of the crew's belongings were quite luxurious for the day,\" he added, pointing to a glass plate and stylized ceramic cup.\n\n\"Mr. Danellis, are there any other known shipwrecks from that era in Cypriot waters?\" Summer asked.\n\n\"No. There's a suspected Bronze Age wreck on the north shore, but this would otherwise be the oldest wreck that I'm aware of. What exactly is your interest?\"\n\n\"We're researching a Roman galley sailing on behalf of Constantine that may have been lost in Cypriot waters. It would have sailed at about the same time as the Pissouri shipwreck.\"\n\n\"I know nothing of that,\" he replied, shaking his head. \"But you might want to make a visit to the monastery of Stavrovouni.\"\n\nSummer gave him a skeptical look. \"Why a monastery?\"\n\n\"Well, aside from its beautiful location,\" Danellis replied, \"the monastery played host to Constantine's mother, Helena, when she journeyed back from the Holy Land with the True Cross.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 93",
                "text": "The aegean explorer crept close to the shoreline, then abruptly wheeled about and headed out to sea at its same plodding pace. A thin insulated cable stretched taut off its stern, disappearing below the surface. Fifty meters beyond, the cable tugged at a small, cigar-shaped towfish that glided through the water a few feet above the seafloor. A pair of transducers on the towfish sent sound waves bouncing off the bottom, then recorded their timed rate of return. Processors on board the ship converted the sonar signals to a visual image, providing a simulated picture of the floor's contours.\n\nSeated on the ship's bridge, Pitt studied a video monitor of the sonar images, watching an undulating, rock-strewn bottom scroll by. Standing nearby, Giordino took a break from staring over Pitt's shoulders and gazed over at the beachfront with a pair of binoculars.\n\n\"Enjoying the scenery?\" Gunn asked.\n\n\"Could be better,\" Giordino replied. \"Although it is enhanced by a pair of lovely young ladies seeking refuge from the sun in a sea cave.\"\n\nThe beach off Pissouri was a narrow strip of sand backed by high cliffs, atop which sat its namesake village. Though popular with the British servicemen stationed at the nearby base of Akrotiri, the beach was still one of the quieter ones along the southern coast.\n\n\"It looks like we'll soon be running out of beachfront real estate,\" Giordino noted as the ship slowly worked its way east while conducting the grid survey.\n\n\"Then that can only mean that we're getting close to the wreck,\" Pitt replied optimistically.\n\nAs if responding to his prophecy, the Pissouri wreck appeared on the screen a few minutes later. Giordino and Gunn crowded around as the image unfolded on the monitor. Far from appearing like an actual ship, the site was little more than an elongated mound, with small sections of the keel and frame exposed by the shifting sands. That even that much remained of the seventeen-hundred-year-old ship was a miracle in itself.\n\n\"It certainly presents the image of an old wreck,\" Gunn said.\n\n\"It's the only wreck we've found off Pissouri, so it must be Perlmutter's fourth-century ship,\" Giordino said. \"I'm surprised it wasn't closer to shore, though,\" he added, noting that they were nearly a half mile from the beach.\n\n\"You have to remember that the Mediterranean was a bit shallower two thousand years ago,\" Gunn said.\n\n\"That would explain its position,\" he replied. \"Are we going to dive it up?\" he asked, turning to Pitt.\n\nPitt shook his head. \"No need to. First, it's already been picked clean. And second, it's not our wreck.\"\n\n\"How can you be so sure?\" Gunn asked.\n\n\"Summer called. She and Dirk saw the artifact exhibit at the Limassol Museum. The archaeologists who excavated her are certain it is not a Roman galley. Dirk believes it could be a secondary pirate vessel involved with the attack on the Romans. It might be worth a dive later on, but Summer indicated that it had been pretty well plundered before the archaeologists got to it.\"\n\n\"So we use this as a starting point?\" Gunn asked.\n\n\"It's the best data point we've got,\" Pitt replied with a nod. \"If the pirate ship came ashore here and wrecked, we can only hope that the Roman vessel is somewhere in the neighborhood.\"\n\nGiordino took a seat near the monitor and tried to get comfortable.\n\n\"Well, let's keep searching, then,\" he remarked. \"As the man said, Rome wasn't built in a day.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 94",
                "text": "Summer drove east on the main coastal highway from Limassol, with Dirk relinquishing the driving duties since she had just come from England. A Crown Colony of Great Britain during the first half of the twentieth century, Cyprus still held visible reminders of its former British rule. English was spoken most everywhere, the currency in the southern Greek half of the country was denominated in pounds, and the road traffic traveled on the left-hand side.\n\nSummer turned their rental car inland, following the well-paved highway toward Nicosia. The road began a gentle ascent as they approached the eastern extremes of the Trodoos Mountains. Traveling through mostly desolate hills, they turned off onto a narrow asphalt crossroad. The road climbed sharply, twisting its way up a small mountain. Perched dramatically atop the summit sat the monastery of Stavrovouni.\n\nSummer parked the car in a small lot at the foot of the complex. Walking past an empty entry station, they approached a long wooden stairway to the summit. A beggar dressed in ragged clothes and a wide-brimmed hat sat nearby, his head hanging down in apparent slumber. The siblings tiptoed past, then climbed the stairs to the grounds of the monastery, which offered commanding views of the entire southeast portion of the island. Passing through an open courtyard, they approached a stern-faced monk in a woolen robe standing near the monastery entrance.\n\n\"Welcome to Stavrovouni,\" he said with reserve, then gazed at Summer. \"Perhaps you are not aware, but we are adherents to the Athonite Orthodoxy here. I am afraid that we do not allow women into the monastery.\"\n\n\"My understanding is that you wouldn't be here if it wasn't for a woman,\" she replied tartly. \"Does the name Helena ring a bell?\"\n\n\"I'm very sorry.\"\n\nSummer rolled her eyes at the monk, then turned to Dirk.\n\n\"I guess I'll stay here and look at the frescoes,\" she said, motioning toward the painted courtyard walls. \"Enjoy your tour.\"\n\nDirk leaned over and whispered to his sister, \"If I'm not back in an hour, then it means I decided to join up.\"\n\nWith his sister seething, he turned and followed the monk through an open wooden door.\n\n\"Can you tell me about Helena's role with the monastery and the history of the site?\" Dirk asked.\n\n\"In ancient times, this mountaintop housed a Greek temple. It had been long abandoned and in a state of disrepair when Saint Helena arrived in Cyprus after her pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The good saint is said to have put an end to a thirty-year drought that had been baking the land. While on Cyprus, she had a dream in which she was told to construct a church in the name of the venerable cross. Stavrovouni, in case you didn't know, means 'Cross Mountain.' It was here she built the church, leaving behind the cross of the penitent thief she had brought from Jerusalem, along with a fragment of the True Cross.\"\n\nThe monk led Dirk into the small church, guiding him past a large wooden iconostasis to reach the altar. On the altar stood a large wooden cross, encased in silver. A tiny gold frame set within the cross protected a smaller wooden fragment.\n\n\"The church has suffered much destruction and vandalism over the centuries,\" the monk explained, \"first by the Mamelukes and later by the Ottomans. I'm afraid little is left of Helena's legacy but for this sacred piece of the True Cross,\" he said, pointing to the gold-encased fragment.\n\n\"Are you aware of any other relics of Jesus that Helena may have left on Cyprus?\" Dirk asked.\n\nThe monk rubbed his chin a moment. \"No, none that I know of, but you should speak to Brother Andros. He's our resident historian here. Let's see if he is in his office.\"\n\nThe monk led Dirk down a corridor to their left, which housed a number of austere guest rooms. A pair of small offices occupied the end, where Dirk could see a thin man shaking hands with a monk and then turning his way.\n\nAs they passed, Dirk said, \"Ridley Bannister?\"\n\n\"Why, yes,\" Bannister replied, looking at Dirk with startled suspicion.\n\n\"My name is Dirk Pitt. I just read your last book about your excavations in the Holy Land. I recognized you from the dust jacket. I have to tell you, I've enjoyed reading about your discoveries.\"\n\n\"Why, thank you,\" Bannister replied, reaching out and shaking hands. A tentative look then crossed his brow. \"You said your last name is Pitt? You don't by chance have a relative named Summer?\"\n\n\"Yes, she's my sister. She's waiting out front, as a matter of fact. Do you know her?\"\n\n\"I believe we met at an archaeology conference some time ago,\" he stammered. \"So what brings you to Stavrovouni?\" he asked, quickly changing topics.\n\n\"Summer recently found evidence that Helena may have shipped more than just the True Cross from Jerusalem and that these relics may have been lost in Cyprus. We're hoping to find clues to the whereabouts of a Roman galley that sailed on her behalf.\"\n\nThe dim corridor light masked Bannister's sudden paleness. \"A fascinating prospect,\" he said. \"Do you have any inkling where the relics might be?\"\n\n\"We're starting with a known shipwreck near a place called Pissouri. But as you know, two-thousand-year-old clues are hard to come by.\"\n\n\"Indeed. Well, I'm afraid I must be running along. It was a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Pitt, and good luck with your search.\"\n\n\"Thank you. And be sure to say hello to Summer on your way out.\"\n\n\"I will.\"\n\nBannister, of course, had no such intentions. Walking quickly down the corridor, he reentered the church and found a side exit on the opposite wall. Stepping into the sunlight, he crept cautiously toward the courtyard until spotting Summer studying a wall fresco. Waiting until she turned her back toward him, he quietly scooted across the grounds, reaching the upper stairway without being observed.\n\nJogging down the stairs, he nearly tripped on the beggar at the base before making his way to his car. He drove quickly down the winding road until reaching the highway, where he pulled to the side, parking behind a cluster of carob trees. There, he sat and waited, watching the road for Dirk and Summer.\n\nSeconds after he sped out of the monastery parking lot, another car started up. The driver wheeled alongside the base of the stairway, then stopped and waited as the mangy beggar rose to his feet and climbed into the passenger seat. Removing his hat, the beggar revealed a long scar on his right jaw.\n\n\"Quickly,\" Zakkar snapped at the driver. \"Don't let him get out of our sight.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 95",
                "text": "Summer was standing across the courtyard when Dirk stepped out of the monastery.\n\n\"How's things in the boys' club?\" she asked with a touch of bitterness.\n\n\"Not the frat party you might think it is.\"\n\n\"Any luck?\"\n\nDirk described what he had learned of the church's history and the display from the True Cross.\n\n\"I met with the resident historian, but he had little to add in the way of Helena's visit to Cyprus. The place has been ransacked so many times, there's no archival data left. The bottom line is, nobody has any knowledge of relics beyond the True Cross.\"\n\n\"Did he know anything about Helena's fleet?\"\n\nDirk shook his head. \"As far as anybody knows, Helena arrived and left Cyprus without incident.\"\n\n\"Then Plautius and his galley must have been attacked before she arrived.\"\n\nShe grabbed his arm and pulled him toward one of the courtyard walls.\n\n\"Come look at this,\" she said.\n\nShe led him to a trio of large frescoes painted on a linear section of shaded wall. The frescoes looked faded to the point of invisibility, at a quick glance. Dirk stepped closer and studied the first panel. It was a customary Madonna and Child, featuring a haloed infant Jesus held in Mary's arms. Both figures' wide eyes and flat dimensions indicated it was a style of art from long ago. The next panel showed a crucifixion scene, Jesus on the cross, his head hung low in agony. Somewhat unusual for the genre, Dirk noted, the two beggar thieves were illustrated hanging from neighboring crosses.\n\nHe then stepped to the third panel, where Summer stood with a pleased expression on her face. It depicted a crowned woman in profile pointing toward the upper corner of the fresco. Her finger was pointing at a towering green mountain capped by a pair of crosses. The geological features of Stavrovouni were clearly visible in the hilltop rendering.\n\n\"Helena?\" Dirk said.\n\n\"It has to be,\" Summer replied. \"Now, look at the bottom.\"\n\nDirk peered closely at the lower portion of the fresco, observing a section of faded blue that represented the sea. The image of three ships on the water was barely visible beneath Helena's profile. Crude in representation, each ship was the same approximate size, and was powered by both sail and oars. With the proper perspective, Dirk could see that two of the ships appeared to be pursuing the third vessel. Studying the faded plaster, he pointed to the two chase craft.\n\n\"This one appears to be sinking by the stern,\" he said, \"while the other one is turning out to sea.\"\n\n\"Look at the sail on the lead ship,\" Summer said.\n\nStraining his eyes, Dirk could just see a faint symbol on the ship's sail. It appeared to be an \"X\" with a high-legged \"P\" written over its center.\n\n\"It's the Chi-Rho monogram that was used by Constantine,\" she explained. \"It was the divine symbol that supposedly came to him in a dream before his victory at the Battle of Milvian Bridge. He used it on his battle standard and as an emblem of his rule.\"\n\n\"Then the picture is either Helena arriving in Cyprus with an escort . . .\" he said.\n\n\"Or it is Plautius's galley fleeing two Cypriot pirate ships,\" she said, completing his thought.\n\nA chip in the fresco obscured the path of the galley, but the continuation of a shoreline along the bottom indicated that it was headed toward land. Slightly above the horizon was another small image, of a nude woman emerging from the sea, a pair of dolphins at her side.\n\n\"The meaning of that is lost on me,\" Summer said as Dirk examined the image.\n\nJust then, the dour monk walked by, having escorted a pair of French tourists through the church. Dirk hailed him and inquired about the frescoes.\n\n\"Yes, they are very old,\" the monk said. \"The archaeologists believe they date to the Byzantine Age. Some have claimed that these walls were part of the original church, but nobody knows for sure.\"\n\n\"This last fresco,\" Summer asked, \"is it an image of Helena?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" the monk confirmed. \"She's arrived by sea and envisions the church here on Stavrovouni.\"\n\n\"Do you know what this figure is?\" she asked, pointing to the nude woman.\n\n\"That would be Aphrodite. You see, the monastery here was built on the ruins of a temple to Aphrodite. The artist must have been paying homage to the site before Helena commissioned the church to be built here.\"\n\nShe thanked the monk, then watched him shuffle back to the monastery door.\n\n\"Well, we were close,\" she said. \"Now we know there were two pirate ships, anyway.\"\n\n\"The image makes it appear that the Roman vessel was still afloat after battling the pirates. It was heading somewhere,\" Dirk muttered, staring at the image until his eyes turned blurry. He finally stepped away from the panel and joined Summer in heading toward the exit.\n\n\"I guess we got all we can from here,\" he said. \"By the way, did you talk to Ridley Bannister?\"\n\n\"Ridley who?\" she asked as they descended the stairway to the parking lot.\n\n\"Ridley Bannister, the British archaeologist. He said he knew you.\"\n\nReceiving a blank look, Dirk proceeded to describe his encounter in the monastery.\n\n\"I never saw him,\" she said. Then the wheels of suspicion began to turn in her head. \"What does he look like?\"\n\n\"Thin, medium build, sandy hair. I suppose women might find him handsome.\"\n\nSummer suddenly froze on the steps. \"Did you notice if he was wearing a ring?\"\n\nDirk thought a moment. \"Yes, I think so. On his right ring finger. I noticed it when we shook hands. It was solid gold with a funny design, like something out of the Middle Ages.\"\n\nSummer's face turned flush with anger. \"That's the guy who stole the Manifest from Julie and me at gunpoint. He said his name was Baker.\"\n\n\"He's a well-known and respected archaeologist,\" Dirk said.\n\n\"Respected?\" Summer hissed. \"I bet he's here searching for the galley, too.\"\n\n\"One of the monks did mention he was working on a book about Helena.\"\n\nSummer was fuming by the time they reached the car. The image of Bannister taking the Manifest in the basement of Kitchener's manor saturated her mind. She drove aggressively down the winding monastery road, her anger reflected in her driving. Entering the main highway, she never considered that the source of her wrath was in a car now following close behind.\n\nHer temper waned as they reached the outskirts of Limassol. By the time they found the city's commercial docks, she actually felt encouraged.\n\n\"If Bannister is here, then the galley must exist,\" she said to Dirk.\n\n\"He certainly hasn't found it yet,\" he replied.\n\nSummer nodded with satisfaction. Who knows, she thought, perhaps we're closer than we think."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 96",
                "text": "SHOVING OFF ALREADY?\" SUMMER ASKED.\n\nShe stood on the Aegean Explorer's bridge, watching a pair of crewmen hoist in and stow the forward mooring line. It had been less than an hour since the ship had touched the dock at Limassol, and she and Dirk had climbed aboard.\n\nPitt stood near the helm, sipping a cup of coffee.\n\n\"We've got to get back around to the western side of the Akrotiri Peninsula in order to keep tabs on Rudi's AUV,\" he said.\n\n\"I thought you were surveying with the towed sonar fish?\"\n\n\"We are. We actually completed our first grid off Pissouri and started a new survey grid to the west. But Rudi reconfigured the AUV for sidescan sonar duty, so we put her to work. She's currently running a large grid to the east of Pissouri. We'll keep pushing west with the Explorer and cover twice as much ground.\"\n\n\"Makes sense,\" she replied. \"How much longer will the AUV stay under?\"\n\n\"She'll be down another eighteen hours before surfacing. That will allow us a good run of our own before having to pick her up.\"\n\n\"Dad, I'm sorry we didn't come up with more promising research to go on.\"\n\n\"Your fresco seems to confirm the role of the Pissouri wreck as one of the pirate ships. If the galley exists, we've got a good chance of being in the ballpark.\"\n\nThe Aegean Explorer proceeded to steam south around the stubby Akrotiri Peninsula, then turned northwest toward Pissouri some twenty miles away. The research ship's sensors soon made contact with a pair of floating transducer buoys, which relayed data from the AUV as it glided over the seabed two hundred feet beneath the surface. While Gunn and Giordino reviewed the AUV's results, Pitt launched the towed sonar fish off the stern of the Explorer, sharing monitoring duties with Dirk and Summer.\n\nIt was nine the next morning when Summer stepped onto the bridge with a cup of hot coffee, ready to relieve her father in front of the screen.\n\n\"Anything new at the picture show?\" she asked.\n\n\"A repeat is playing, I'm afraid,\" Pitt replied, standing and stretching. \"The same rock and sand that's been rolling by all night. Outside of a small sunken fishing boat that Dirk picked up, it's been slim pickings.\"\n\n\"I just checked with Al in the survey shack,\" she said, slipping into Pitt's seat. \"He said they've got similar results with the AUV.\"\n\n\"We're nearly at the end of this grid,\" Pitt said. \"Shall we keep working west?\"\n\nSummer smiled at her father. \"When it comes to finding a shipwreck, I know better than to question your instincts.\"\n\n\"Then west it is,\" he replied with a wink.\n\nCaptain Kenfield stepped over from the helm and spread out a local marine chart across the table.\n\n\"Where exactly would you like to configure the next grid?\" he asked Pitt.\n\n\"We'll just extend the current grid, running as close to shore as we can get. Let's run another two miles west, to this point here,\" he said, pointing to a small coastal promontory on the map.\n\n\"Fair enough,\" Kenfield said. \"I'll run the coordinates to Petra tou Romiou, as it says on the chart, or the Rock of Aphrodite.\"\n\nSummer stiffened in her chair. \"Did you say the Rock of Aphrodite?\" she asked.\n\nKenfield nodded, then retrieved a dog-eared traveler's guide to Cyprus shelved behind the chart table.\n\n\"I was just reading about it last night. Petra tou Romiou, or Rock of Romios, takes its name from a Byzantine folk hero who allegedly tossed huge boulders into the sea to ward off pirates. The large rock formations are still visible in the surf. However, the site is also known from ancient times as the place where Aphrodite, the patron goddess of Cyprus, emerged from the sea in a wave of foam.\"\n\n\"Dad, that's it,\" Summer said, jumping from her seat. \"The Aphrodite image was in the fresco. It didn't represent the temple at Stavrovouni, where the monastery stands. It's where the Roman galley was headed. Someone on shore, or perhaps the pirates themselves, saw the galley fleeing toward the rocks.\"\n\n\"It's roughly within sight of the Pissouri wreck site,\" Kenfield noted.\n\n\"I'll buy it,\" Pitt said, smiling at his daughter's enthusiasm. \"The Rock of Aphrodite it is. Let's go see if the goddess will show us some love.\"\n\nA short time later, they reached the end of the survey lane and pulled in the towfish. As the ship changed course to resume its search down the coast, a palpable optimism surged through the bridge. Caught up in the anticipation, no one noticed the small boat trailing a half mile behind, where Ridley Bannister followed the turquoise ship with a pair of binoculars glued to his eyes."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 97",
                "text": "Six hours later, the goddess aphrodite was showing the NUMA surveyors anything but love. The seabed around the Petra tou Romiou proved void of any man-made objects. Dirk had taken over the next survey shift, staring at an endless scroll of rocks and sand on the monitor, while Summer and Pitt loitered about, hoping for a strike. Giordino stepped onto the bridge, surprised to see that Summer's enthusiasm had waned to frustration.\n\n\"The AUV's due up in about forty-five minutes,\" he said to Pitt.\n\n\"We're only a few minutes away from finishing this lane,\" Dirk noted.\n\n\"All right, break off when we cross the end point, then we'll go pick up the big fish,\" Pitt said.\n\n\"Anything at all?\" Giordino asked.\n\n\"If you have a fetish for rock gardens, you'd enjoy the seafloor here,\" Dirk said.\n\nGiordino eased over to the helm and gazed out the forward window. Seeing they were near the shoreline, he picked up a pair of binoculars and scanned a pebble-strewn beach that ran west of the large rock formation.\n\n\"Any Greek goddesses lying about?\" Summer asked with a hint of disdain.\n\n\"No, the gods have deserted the beach on this sunny afternoon. Even the shady sea caves are empty of spirits.\"\n\nPitt approached him with an inquiring look on his face. \"Mind if I take a peek?\"\n\nAs Pitt scanned the shoreline, Dirk announced that they had reached the end of the survey lane.\n\n\"Al, can you help secure the towfish?\" he asked, turning off the sonar system.\n\n\"At your service,\" Giordino replied, and the two men headed for the stern.\n\nPitt kept his eyes glued to the shore, then turned to Kenfield.\n\n\"Captain, would you mind taking us in a little closer to shore, on a bearing of twenty degrees,\" he said.\n\n\"What's up, Dad?\" Summer asked.\n\n\"Just exploring the possibility that King Al might have struck gold once more.\"\n\nAs the Aegean Explorer eased into shallow water, Pitt got a better look at the shoreline. From a low, pebbly beach around Petra tou Romiou, the terrain climbed dramatically to the east, rising in high chalky cliffs several hundred feet high. The Mediterranean's steady waves rolled into the base of the cliffs with a rumble, splashing foam high against the rocks at water's edge. Across the lower cliff face, scattered indentations were worn into the limestone where the sea had scoured away a hole, or sea cave, as Giordino had called them. It was the caves that had caught Pitt's attention, and he studied each one carefully. He finally focused on one in particular, a small black opening low above the water with tumbled rocks around its perimeter.\n\n\"Towfish is aboard,\" Dirk announced, stepping back onto the bridge with Giordino.\n\nPitt put down the binoculars. \"Captain, what's the tidal stage right now?\" he asked.\n\n\"We're just past high tide,\" Kenfield replied. \"Tidal range is fairly minimal here, a couple of feet or so.\"\n\nPitt nodded with a slight smile, then turned to Gunn.\n\n\"Rudi, you've done some ocean modeling. How much of a change in sea level would you say the Mediterranean has witnessed in the last seventeen hundred years?\"\n\nGunn scratched his head. \"The sea level today is probably two to three meters higher than it was two thousand years ago. I can give you an accurate estimate if I check the NUMA database.\"\n\n\"That's not necessary,\" Pitt replied. He gazed at the sea cave once more. \"I think she'd just about fit,\" he muttered.\n\n\"We really need to go retrieve the AUV now,\" Gunn pleaded.\n\n\"Okay, but before you go, you'll need to drop Summer and me in the Zodiac. Dirk, too, if you want to come.\"\n\n\"No thanks, Dad,\" Dirk replied. \"I've had my share of goose chasing with Summer. I'll help with the AUV.\"\n\n\"But where are we going?\" Summer asked.\n\n\"Why, to that cliff,\" Pitt said, pointing to the shore with a smile. \"Where else are we going to find ourselves a Roman galley?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 98",
                "text": "As the aege an explorer slipped eastward to chase down the AUV, Pitt gunned the outboard on the new Zodiac and raced toward the shoreline. Summer sat on the bow, her long red hair blowing in the wind and a hopeful expression on her face, as they approached the sea cave. The low opening at water's edge reflected little light, telling Pitt that the cave did indeed penetrate well into the cliff.\n\nDrawing near, Pitt could see that the entrance was wide enough for the Zodiac to slip through. Though the tide was now lower, the wave action made clearing the opening a treacherous proposition. Spotting an exposed grouping of flat rocks to the right, he nudged the Zodiac alongside and waited for a wave to carry it. Summer quickly jumped out and wrapped a line around a boulder to secure the craft.\n\n\"Looks like we're going to have to get wet,\" Pitt said, grabbing a flashlight and hopping out of the Zodiac.\n\nSummer followed him as he crept along the rocks until being forced to wade into the water near the cave's entrance. A submerged layer of stones formed a crude ledge, which Pitt followed into the opening as a small wave rolled up to his neck. Flicking on the flashlight he held over his head, he could see the cave ran like a tunnel for at least twenty feet before expanding into the gloom beyond.\n\nHe stopped and waited as Summer navigated her way across the slippery rocks, grabbing his hand before almost falling under.\n\n\"Might be easier to swim,\" she gasped.\n\n\"I see a dry ledge just up ahead,\" Pitt replied, playing the light around.\n\nHugging the side wall, they worked their way forward, finding that the submerged ledge gradually rose until they stepped completely out of the water. Above their heads, the ceiling grew to enormous heights as the tunnel expanded into a large cavern. The water flowed through a curved channel in the shape of a large \"U,\" indicating that it looped back toward the sea. Pitt could see that the water didn't appear stagnant but flowed with a mild current.\n\nThey followed the ledge a few yards farther as it led toward a large sandy rise. Pitt was surprised to see a soft, faint light bathing the interior cavern. Looking up, he could see where a few slim rays of sunlight slipped through a fissure in the cliff face.\n\nSuddenly, Pitt felt Summer's hand clench his arm.\n\n\"Dad!\" she cried.\n\nHe saw she was staring wide-eyed ahead. Turning to look, he expected to see a flying bat or perhaps a snake on the ground. Instead, he saw the hull of an aged ship.\n\nThe vessel sat upright on a sandy ledge, appearing little damaged under the dim light. Stepping closer, Pitt could see that it was built of an ancient design. An angled prow rose in a high arch that curled back over the open deck. Dozens of small round holes dotted the sides above the waterline, which Pitt recognized as perforations for oars. There were no actual oars in sight, only a number of broken stubs that dangled from a few of the openings.\n\nApproaching the dust-covered ship, they saw that its single mast had been shattered near the base, the thick pole now lying across the aft deck. Playing the flashlight beam across the high stern, Pitt could see the skeletal remains of a man draped over the wooden tiller.\n\n\"It's a galley,\" Pitt said with a grin. \"An old one, by the looks of it. She probably snapped off her mast when she sailed through the cave entrance.\"\n\nSummer remained in silent awe. Stepping to the bow, she finally found the words to call her father.\n\n\"Dad, look at this.\"\n\nThe galley's prow was a crumpled mass of timber at the waterline. Looking closer, they could see several bent copper spikes protruding in a horizontal band on either side.\n\n\"The only real damage to the hull,\" Summer noted. \"They must have driven into the cliff face a few times before slipping into this grotto.\"\n\n\"It appears that she may have had a ram fitted here at one time,\" Pitt mused.\n\nUsing the spikes as a stepladder, he climbed up the bow, then pulled himself over the side. The sight on board nearly took his breath away. The entire deck was littered with skeletal remains clad in faded tunics or robes, a few with swords still clutched in their bony hands. A number of battle shields and spears were also scattered about, painting a grim picture of a bloody fight to the death.\n\n\"Any sign that it is Roman?\" Summer asked from below.\n\n\"Of course it is.\"\n\nSummer froze at the comment. It wasn't the cold tone in which the words were said but rather that they didn't come from Pitt.\n\nShe turned to see the figure of Ridley Bannister approach out of the darkness, his clothes wet from the chest down. In his hands, he carried a small video camera, which he turned on, bathing the cavern in a hazy blue light.\n\n\"Well, if it isn't the esteemed archaeologist Ridley 'Baker' Bannister,\" Summer sneered as he stepped closer. \"Did you bring your gun this time?\"\n\n\"Oh, no. That was Field Marshal Kitchener's revolver, actually. Quite empty of bullets it was, I'm chagrined to say.\" He held the video camera up for her to see. \"It's nice to see you again, Miss Pitt. Now, if you'd be so kind as to step out of the way, I will proceed to document my discovery.\"\n\n\"Your discovery?\" she said, her blood beginning to boil. \"Why, you lying pig, you didn't find anything.\"\n\n\"It's as good as mine now. I suppose I should tell you that I'm on excellent terms with the Cyprus Director of Antiquities. I've already made arrangements for the exclusive film and book rights in the event of discovery, which you have kindly aided. I'll be sure to make a note of your generous contributions.\"\n\nBannister placed the camera to his eye and started filming the exterior of the galley.\n\n\"Is the Manifest cargo aboard, by the way?\" he asked, scanning along the side of the vessel.\n\nFocusing the camera lens on the damaged prow, he didn't notice Summer rush at him until it was too late. Reaching out a long arm, Summer ripped the camera from his hands and tossed it into the rocks. A shattering sound ensued as the lens smashed, though the camera's bluish external light remained glowing.\n\nBannister stared at the damaged camera, then slowly became enraged. Grabbing the taller woman by her shirt lapels, he began shaking her in anger. A student of judo, Summer prepared to counter his grab with a takedown when a loud staccato burst through the cave. The gunfire was still echoing when Summer felt Bannister's fingertips slip free of her shirt. The archaeologist gave her a pained look, then slowly sagged to the ground. As he fell prone, Summer saw that his khaki pants had sprouted stains of blood in several spots.\n\nLooking past him, Summer saw three men standing on the rise. Even in the low light, she could see that they appeared to be Arabs. The tallest of the three stood at the center, smoke rising from a compact Uzi machine pistol cradled in his arms. He slowly took a step forward, keeping the weapon aimed at Summer as his eyes scanned the galley.\n\n\"So,\" Zakkar said in halting English. \"You have found the treasure.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 99",
                "text": "Summer stood immobile as the three men moved closer. At her feet, Bannister clutched at his wounds, an uncomprehending look of shock etched in his face. Zakkar lowered his Uzi as he drew near, his attention focused on the galley.\n\n\"Gutzman will be pleased,\" he said in Arabic to his nearest associate, the bearded gunman from the Dome of the Rock attack named Salaam.\n\n\"What of these two?\" Salaam asked, aiming a small penlight at Summer and Bannister.\n\n\"Kill them and throw their bodies into the ocean,\" Zakkar replied, rubbing a hand over the ancient ship's hull.\n\nHaving understood the conversation, Bannister tried pulling himself across the ground, grunting in pain as he clawed his way behind Summer. Salaam ignored him as he stepped close to Summer, then raised a pistol at her head.\n\n\"Run!\"\n\nPitt's shout rang loudly from the deck of the galley, catching all of the Arabs by surprise. Summer watched the gunman in front of her glance toward the ship, his eyes instantly flaring in horror.\n\nWhistling through the air at him was a pilum, the iron-tipped Roman javelin. Salaam had no chance to move before the razor-sharp spear struck him in the chest. The finely crafted weapon cut a path completely through the man's torso, its tip exiting his back below the kidney. The stunned man spit out a mouthful of blood, then dropped to the ground stone dead.\n\nIn the moment that Salaam was struck, Summer was already calculating her options. She instantly decided she could either lunge for the gunman's pistol, or run and dive into the water, or break for her father on the ship. The adrenaline was already surging through her veins, screaming for her brain to respond. But Summer let logic run its course before making a move. She quickly judged that the handgun would be no match for Zakkar's Uzi. And though her heart told her to run to her father, reason dictated that the water was much closer.\n\nSuppressing her emotional urges, she took a powerful step to her right and then leaped. The sound of gunfire was already ripping through the air when her outstretched hands broke the water's surface and the rest of her body tumbled in after. The slope of the sandbar dropped away sharply, and she plunged into the depths without breaking her neck.\n\nShe instinctively swam down, following the slight current, which carried her away from the cave's entrance. She was a strong swimmer to begin with, and her pumping adrenaline drove her deeper, until her hand brushed the channel floor at a depth of fifteen feet. The water was pitch-black, so she tried to use the current to guide her forward, occasionally grazing against the walls of rock.\n\nShe swam hard for a dozen strokes, driving smoothly through the water. When her air began to expire, she eased toward the surface, confident that she had put sufficient distance between herself and the gunmen to catch a quick breath. With her lungs beginning to ache, she raised a fist over her head in the scuba diver's safe ascent pose and kicked toward the surface. She rose a dozen feet, and her upraised hand suddenly brushed against rock. An uneasy feeling crept over her as she groped along the hard surface. Slowly, she nosed her face up alongside her hand until her cheek was flush against the overhead rock, the water's current rippling against her face.\n\nHer pounding heart skipped a beat as she realized the water channel had turned into a submerged tunnel, and there was no air to be had."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 100",
                "text": "Zakkar' s uzi had opened fire the instant summer dove into the grotto pool. His aim had been toward the galley, however, as he stitched a lead seam along the side rail a second after Pitt had ducked beneath it. Pitt quickly raced a few feet down the deck, scooping up a round wooden shield lying near his feet. Popping it up briefly, he flung the shield at Zakkar like a Frisbee, hoping to keep his attention away from Summer. Sidestepping the disk, Zakkar opened fire again, nearly catching Pitt at the rail with a short burst.\n\nIn his quick glance over the rail, Pitt had seen Summer dive for the channel and heard her splash in. The water remained quiet, and the gunmen weren't wasting shots into the channel, giving him confidence that his daughter had swum out of harm's way.\n\nBannister was proving equally adept at dodging bullets. In the confusion caused by Pitt's spear attack, he had dragged himself behind some low rocks, concealing himself, as he drifted in and out of consciousness from his wounds. The Arabs paid him little heed anyway. They were more concerned with avenging the death of their partner.\n\n\"Get aboard by the stern,\" Zakkar shouted at his accomplice, after checking on the impaled gunman. \"I shall pursue from the front.\"\n\nThe Arab retrieved the dead man's penlight, then made his way to the galley's bow, keeping a cautious eye out for Pitt on the deck above.\n\nPitt had seen only the three armed men enter the cavern together and hoped there were no others. He had no idea who they were, but their readiness to kill was more than apparent. He knew it meant he would have to beat them to the punch.\n\nUnder the dim light, he surveyed the galley's main deck, spotting companionways at either end that descended to the rowing deck. Making his way to the aft companionway, he picked up a sword and another shield from the battle remnants lying about the deck. The shield felt unusually heavy, and he flipped it over to find three stubby arrows fastened to the back. They were throwing arrows, issued to Roman soldiers late in the empire. Each arrow was about a foot in length, with a heavy lead weight at its center and a bronze barbed tip at the end. Pitt tucked the shield under his arm, then climbed over the fallen mast that crossed the rear deck.\n\nHe could hear the sound of the two gunmen trying to board the ends of the ship as he moved aft toward the raised stern section. Stepping toward the centerline, he tripped over the skeletal remains of a Roman legionary and nearly fell through the open companionway to the lower deck. He cursed himself at the racket he made, but the accident gave him an idea.\n\nTaking the sword, he jammed the tip into the deck plank so that it stood upright. He then hoisted the torso of the skeleton and wedged it atop the sword's hilt. He quickly wrapped it in a crumbling cloak that was lying beneath the bones, then spotted a broken lance nearby. He eased the spear through the skeleton's ribs, then concealed its base in the cloak while its business end protruded in a menacing manner. In the low light, the ancient warrior appeared almost alive.\n\nAbove him, Pitt heard a thud as the gunman climbing up the transom jumped onto the raised steering deck. Pitt quietly retreated to the fallen mast, climbing over the thick spar and hiding in its shadows. He silently unfastened the three throwing arrows from the shield, then fished through his pocket for a coin. Retrieving a quarter, he clenched it in his hand and waited.\n\nThe gunman moved cautiously, patiently scanning the main deck for movement before climbing down from the steering deck. He descended one of two ladders that were mounted on either side of the rowing-deck companionway. To Pitt's good fortune, the gunman climbed down the ladder closest to him.\n\nPitt held to the shadows until he heard the man's shoes hit the main deck. He then raised his hand and flicked his wrist, tossing the quarter high into the air. The coin landed right where Pitt aimed, near the base of the skeleton, tinkling loudly across the silent deck.\n\nThe startled gunman instantly turned toward the noise, spotting the cloaked figure holding a spear. He immediately pumped two shots from his automatic pistol into the skeleton, watching in amazement as it disintegrated into a small heap. His surprise was short-lived, for Pitt was already on his feet, flinging the first arrow from twenty feet away.\n\nFinding the ancient weapon surprisingly well balanced, Pitt was dead-on with his first throw, striking the man near the hip. The gunman grunted in pain from the penetration of the sharp projectile, wheeling around as the second arrow whizzed past his chest. Fumbling to remove the first arrow, he looked toward Pitt, only to see a third arrow flying in his direction. Too overwhelmed to shoot, he instinctively stepped to the side to avoid the incoming barb. Only there was no deck beneath his feet.\n\nFalling where Pitt hadn't, he plunged down the open companionway with a gasp. The sickening crack of breaking bones echoed from the rowing deck a second later, followed by a morbid silence.\n\n\"Ali?\" cried Zakkar from the bow.\n\nBut there would be no answer to his query."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 101",
                "text": "For the second time in as many minutes, summer faced a life-or-death choice. Should she turn back or keep going? She had no idea how far back the ceiling had become submerged. It could be five feet or fifty yards. But swimming against the current, light as it was, could make fifty yards seem like a mile. Following her instincts this time, she made a snap decision. She would keep going forward.\n\nKicking and stroking, she propelled herself through the tunnel, her arms and head occasionally bumping into the surrounding stone. Every other stroke, she would raise an arm above her, hoping to break the surface into a pocket of air. But every time her hand would drag against immersed stone. She felt her heart pounding harder, and fought a sudden reflex to exhale, as a creeping sense of panic began to set in. How long had she been underwater? she asked herself. A minute? Two minutes? It seemed like an eternity. But whatever the answer, she knew the more important question was how many more seconds could she hold out?\n\nShe tried kicking even harder, but it began to feel like she was swimming in slow motion as her brain labored for oxygen. Her arms and legs felt an odd burning sensation as the effects of hypoxia sapped her muscles. The black water seemed to turn even darker before her eyes, and she no longer felt the salt water stinging them. An internal voice yelled at her to remain strong, but she could feel herself slipping.\n\nAnd then she saw it. A faint green glow appeared in the water ahead of her. Perhaps it was just a trick of the eyes or the first stages of blacking out, but she didn't care. Exhaling what little air was left in her chest, she summoned every last remaining reserve of energy and kicked hard toward the light.\n\nHer limbs now burned with fire as her ears rung in a deafening tone. Her heart felt like it was going to beat out of her chest while her lungs ached to explode. But she ignored the pain, the doubts, and the urge to let go, and kept pulling herself through the water.\n\nThe green glow gradually expanded into a warm light, bright enough to show particles and sediment in the seawater. Just overhead, a silvery gleam caught her eye, appearing like a bowlful of mercury. With her energy failing fast, she kicked upward with a final, desperate surge of strength.\n\nSummer emerged from the water like a show dolphin at Sea World, rising high into the air before tumbling back with a splash. Gasping and panting for air, she paddled to a nearby rock and clung to its barnacled surface while her oxygen-depleted body tried to restore order. She rested for nearly five minutes before regaining the strength to move. Then, in the distance, she heard muffled gunfire, and she remembered her father.\n\nTaking her bearings, she found she was in a semisubmerged rock outcropping a hundred yards west of the cave. She quickly spotted the NUMA Zodiac, tied to the rocks beside two other small boats. Plunging back into the water, she circled around the rocks and began swimming toward the boats.\n\nHer arms soon felt like lead weights, and several times the surf nearly flung her onto the shoreline rocks, but she managed to reach the boats without collapsing. The Zodiac didn't carry a radio, so she dragged herself onto the deck of the first of the two other boats, a small wooden trawler that Zakkar had appropriated. Inside its tiny, open wheelhouse, she found a marine band radio and immediately hailed the Aegean Explorer.\n\nDirk, Giordino, and Gunn were all on the bridge when Summer's frantic voice burst over the radio.\n\n\"Summer, this is Explorer. Go ahead,\" Gunn replied calmly.\n\n\"Rudi, we found the galley inside the cave. But three armed men showed up. I escaped, but Dad's still in there, and they're trying to kill him.\"\n\n\"Take it easy, Summer. We're on our way. Try to hide until we get there, and keep yourself out of danger.\"\n\nKenfield had already turned the Explorer around and was accelerating to top speed by the time Gunn hung up the transmitter. Dirk stepped forward and looked out the bridge window.\n\n\"We're six or seven miles away,\" he lamented to Gunn. \"We'll never get there in time.\"\n\n\"He's right,\" Giordino said. \"Stop the boat.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, stop the boat?\" Gunn cried.\n\n\"Give us two minutes to launch the Bullet, and we'll get there in a flash.\"\n\nGunn considered the request a moment. Even to Gunn, Pitt was more than a boss, he was like a brother. If the tables were reversed, he knew exactly what Pitt would do.\n\n\"All right,\" he said with reservation. \"Just don't get yourselves killed.\"\n\nDirk and Giordino immediately bolted for the door.\n\n\"Al, I'll meet you on deck,\" Dirk told him. \"I need to grab something on the way.\"\n\n\"Just don't miss the bus,\" Giordino replied, then disappeared aft.\n\nDirk hustled down to the ship's lower deck, which housed the crew accommodations. Sprinting to his father's cabin, he burst in, stepping up to a small, built-in work desk. Above the desk was a shelf of books, and Dirk quickly scanned their titles. His eyes halted when he spotted a heavy, leather-bound edition of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Ripping the book off the shelf, he quickly flipped the cover open for a second.\n\n\"'To the great white beast, Ishmael,' \" he muttered, then tucked the book under his arm and darted out of the cabin."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 102",
                "text": "Pitt had nearly forgotten about zakkar, who had finally clambered over the bow and now shouted for his partner. Met with silence, the Arab flicked on Salaam's penlight and aimed it at the aft end of the deck. The light's beam played upon the figure of Pitt, who stood with a shield in his hand and an upturned grin on his face.\n\nBut Pitt was already diving over the other side of the mast when Zakkar's Uzi barked, sending a burst over his head and into the raised steering deck. Pitt didn't wait for his accuracy to improve, quickly snaking across the deck and launching himself down the companionway as Zakkar chased after him.\n\nThe body of Ali lay barely visible in the small patch of light that reached the lower deck from above. Pitt could see that the Arab's head was tilted at an unnatural angle, his neck having snapped in the fall. Pitt quickly knelt alongside the body, searching the surrounding deck for the gun, but it wasn't there. Let loose during Ali's fall, it had bounced into one of the recessed rowing stations nearby. Pitt had left his flashlight on the upper deck while throwing the pilum and had no chance of locating the gun in the pitch-blackness.\n\nAs Zakkar charged aft overhead, Pitt moved forward, groping along a center walkway that divided the rowing stations on either side of the ship. He had left all his Roman weapons above deck and now found himself defenseless in the unlit bay. His only hope was to get up the forward companionway as Zakkar descended in the stern.\n\nBut Zakkar knew he had his man on the run and didn't hesitate dropping down the aft ladder. Pitt could hear him descending and shuffled faster, spotting a faint ray of light ahead, which he knew was the open companionway.\n\nHis feet dropping to the lower deck, Zakkar spent only a second examining the dead figure of Ali before playing the small flashlight beam across the deck. He detected a movement at the far end, then locked the light on Pitt struggling to reach the forward ladder. He immediately aimed and fired a burst ahead of him.\n\nPitt dove for the deck as the bullets chewed into the wood around him. Several small crates were stacked near the base of the companionway, and he quickly crawled forward, ducking behind them for cover. Zakkar stepped closer and fired again, splintering one of the crates just inches from Pitt's head.\n\nUnarmed, Pitt was in a hopeless situation. His only real chance was to somehow scale the ladder before Zakkar moved any closer. He again searched for a weapon, but only spotted another skeleton lying nearby. The long-expired body had belonged to another Roman legionary, as the bones were clad in an armored tunic and helmet. The dead soldier must have fallen through the companionway when he was killed in battle, Pitt surmised. Studying the armor for a moment, he suddenly reached over and plucked them off the dried bones.\n\nBy the fourth century, the Roman soldier had turned to iron for much of his protective gear. Brutally heavy, it could withstand the sharpest spears and strongest swords. And perhaps, Pitt considered, it just might resist the slugs from a 9mm Uzi submachine pistol. Pitt slipped on the heavy circular helmet, which had an enlarged back piece that swooped outward to protect the neck. He then studied the armored breastplate. Known as a cuirass, it was an iron sheet molded in the shape of a man's chest, with matching back plate. Pitt could see it was obviously made for a man shorter than himself.\n\nWasting no time in trying to fit in the cuirass, he simply flung the twin plates onto his back, tying them around his throat with a leather strap. Crawling to the base of the companionway, he looked up at the deck overhead, took a deep breath, then sprang up the ladder as fast as his arms and legs could propel him.\n\nZakkar was still fifty feet away, running down the aisle with his penlight aimed at the ladder, when he saw Pitt spring up it. The experienced killer immediately stopped and raised his weapon. Holding the light beneath the barrel with his left hand, he took careful aim at Pitt and pulled the trigger.\n\nThe wood around Pitt exploded in a shower of splinters as the bullets sprayed into the ladder's supporting bulkhead. He felt three hard thumps on his back that knocked him forward like the blows of a sledgehammer, but he was able to keep moving. With his arms and legs pumping, he jumped onto the open deck as a second fusillade shredded the top of the ladder where his feet had just been.\n\nPitt made his way to the side rail, surprised to have escaped the companionway unscathed. Still clad in his Roman armor, he prepared to jump over the side when he noticed another pilum on the deck, identical to the one he had flung at the first gunman. Deciding to take the offensive, he grabbed the spear and inched back toward the open companionway.\n\nZakkar had already approached the foot of the ladder and wisely flicked off the penlight. The galley was suddenly deathly silent as both men froze in their tracks. Zakkar then began slowly climbing the shredded ladder, moving quietly inch by inch. Unable to hold both the light and the gun as he climbed, he stuffed the light in his teeth, then held the Uzi up high.\n\nOnly his head had cleared the deck when he spotted Pitt moving a few feet away. The pilum left Pitt's hand quickly, rotating in a spiral as it shot toward the Arab. But the target was too small, and Zakkar easily ducked his head, leaving the pilum to harmlessly strike the ladder frame. Zakkar stuck the Uzi out and fired at Pitt without looking before rising up the ladder as his clip ran dry.\n\nPitt was already at the rail and threw himself over the side as the bullets flew by wildly. But the volley had thrown off his balance, and he landed awkwardly on the sand some fifteen feet below. A burst of pain flared through his right ankle as he rose and took a step, immediately hopping onto his other foot. With a twisted ankle, the water channel suddenly appeared miles away. But much closer was the body of Salaam. It lay just a few feet away, and Pitt knew he had been armed with a pistol.\n\nQuickly hobbling over, Pitt bent over the dead man and searched around his hands.\n\n\"Looking for this?\" came a sudden taunt from the galley.\n\nHesitantly peering over his shoulder, Pitt saw Zakkar looking at him with the dead gunman's pistol aimed squarely at his head."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 103",
                "text": "Pitt didn't know why the arab didn't immediately shoot him. Zakkar stood motionless for several seconds before Pitt noticed that he was looking past him. Pitt cautiously followed his gaze toward the channel, where an unusual disturbance appeared in the water.\n\nA dull glow was visible beneath the surface, gradually growing brighter as a mass of bubbles agitated the waters above it. A glaring bank of xenon lights was the first thing to emerge from the depths, followed by an acrylic cockpit and then a long white hull. Pitt gave a grim smile toward the Bullet as it broke to the surface, then bobbed in the grotto channel.\n\nSeated at the controls, Dirk and Giordino looked out of the cockpit in awe at the sight of the large cavern and the Roman galley parked at its center. Then they saw Pitt standing under the barrel of Zakkar's gun, both men bathed in the submersible's glaring lights. Looking up at the Arab, Dirk nearly choked in recognition.\n\n\"That's the terrorist from Jerusalem,\" he stammered to Giordino. \"Keep the lights on him.\"\n\nBefore Giordino could respond, Dirk had bolted from his seat and opened the rear hatch. In an instant, he climbed to the side ballast tank, still clutching Herman Melville's book in his hand. The submersible was nearly ten feet from the bank as Giordino pivoted it to face the galley, but Dirk didn't wait for him to move closer. Taking a running leap, he jumped into the channel and swam to shore, holding the book over his head.\n\nOn the galley's deck, Zakkar surveyed the scene with agitation. He turned his pistol toward Pitt and fired a quick shot, watching him fall prone to the sand. Then he focused his attention on the submersible. Though he heard the splash of Dirk jumping into the water, he couldn't see him emerge on shore due to the Bullet's blinding lights. Taking careful aim, he shot out one of them, then peppered the acrylic bubble with several shots before eliminating a second light. Then he noticed a tall figure emerge on shore with his arms stretched out in front of him.\n\nZakkar fired first, missing with a bullet that whizzed instead within a hair of Dirk's left ear. Dirk kept moving, marching directly toward the Arab without flinching. A surge of emotions ran through his body, from loving thoughts of Sophie to torrid flashes of anger and vengeance. But noticeably absent was any sense of fear.\n\nLocking Zakkar in the sights of the Colt .45 he held in his outstretched hands, he calmly squeezed the trigger. Neither the roar nor the kick from the .45 slowed his pace, and he marched closer, squeezing the trigger with each step like some robotic soldier.\n\nDirk's first shot splintered the rail in front of Zakkar, and Zakkar flinched with his return volley, missing high. He didn't get another chance to fire. The next slug from Dirk's .45 tore into Zakkar's shoulder, nearly taking his arm off. He spun, then fell back against the rail, where he was hit again in the side.\n\nSlumped over the rail as the life drained out of him, Zakkar wasn't allowed a slow death. Dirk marched closer, pumping five more shots into him, until leaving an ugly mass of red carnage streaming down the galley's hull. He stood staring at the dead terrorist as the cavern fell silent for a moment, then he turned at the sound of splashing water behind him.\n\nSummer had helped guide the Bullet through the sea cave's entrance and came staggering up the submerged ledge. Reaching dry land, she ran up to Dirk, panting, \"Where's Dad?\"\n\nDirk nodded grimly toward the prone figure in the Roman helmet and armor lying near the first dead gunman. Giordino had since run the submersible to shore and hopped out, joining Dirk and Summer in rushing over to Pitt.\n\nThe head of NUMA stirred slowly, then looked up and gave his kids a weary smile.\n\n\"Dad, are you okay?\" Summer asked.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" he assured. \"Just got knocked a bit woozy. Help me to my feet.\"\n\nAs Dirk and Summer helped him up, Giordino surveyed the armor and grinned.\n\n\"Hail, Caesar,\" he said, thumping his chest with a closed fist.\n\n\"I should thank Caesar,\" Pitt replied, pulling off the helmet. He held it up, showing a crease near the temple where Zakkar had grazed it with a bullet.\n\n\"That'll ring your bell,\" Giordino said.\n\nPitt swung the cuirass off his back and examined it. Three neat, round bullet holes had pierced the breastplate, but they had just left indentations in the back plate. Only by doubling over the armor had Pitt's life been spared.\n\n\"There's something to be said for Roman engineering,\" he said.\n\nDropping the armor to the ground, he looked over at Dirk and the .45 still gripped in his hand.\n\n\"That Colt looks familiar.\"\n\nDirk reluctantly passed the weapon to his father. \"You told me once how Loren had sent you a gun in Mongolia hidden in a cutout copy of Moby-Dick. I checked your cabin on a hunch and saw it on the shelf. Hope you don't mind.\"\n\nPitt shook his head, then gazed at the bloody muck that was left of Zakkar.\n\n\"You did quite a number on him,\" he said.\n\n\"That lowlife led the attacks at Caesarea and Jerusalem,\" Dirk replied coldly, leaving unsaid the fact that Zakkar was indirectly responsible for Sophie's death.\n\n\"It's pretty odd that he ended up here,\" Summer said.\n\n\"I suspect your British friend might know something about that,\" Pitt said, pointing toward Bannister.\n\nThe archaeologist had pulled himself upright against the rocks and stared at them with a dazed look.\n\n\"I'll go check on him,\" Giordino offered. \"Why don't you guys find out what's aboard.\"\n\n\"Did you find the Manifest cargo?\" Summer asked hopefully.\n\n\"I was a bit too preoccupied to find out,\" Pitt replied. \"Come, somebody help a feeble old man aboard.\"\n\nWith Dirk and Summer's aid, Pitt hobbled up onto the galley, then climbed down the companionway to the dark galley deck. He limped over to the stack of crates that he had earlier used for cover.\n\n\"I suggest we start here,\" he said. Grabbing one of the smaller crates, he blew a layer of dust off of its side, then shined a flashlight at it. A faded red Chi-Rho symbol was visible on the wood.\n\n\"Summer, that's your Cross of Constantine,\" Dirk noted.\n\nSummer grabbed the flashlight from her father's hand and studied the image, nodding quietly in excitement.\n\nThe crate showed damage along its side, where a burst from Zakkar's Uzi had riddled the edge. Pitt took the butt of his .45 and rapped it carefully against the damaged seam to open the crate. The narrow end piece easily popped off, causing the damaged front cover to fall away. A pair of well-worn leather sandals tumbled out of the open box, falling to the deck. Summer tracked the sandals with the flashlight's beam, noting a small slip of parchment strapped to one of the shoes. Shining the light closer, she illuminated a handwritten label penned in Latin:Sandalii ChristuS\n\nThe translation was not lost on anyone. They were staring at the shoes of Jesus."
            },
            {
                "title": "EPILOGUE: THE SAVIORS",
                "text": "The crowds had gathered outside the doors of hagia sophia in an immense line that stretched for more than six blocks. Pious Christians rubbed elbows with devout Muslims as pilgrims of both religions waited anxiously for the doors to open to the exhibit displayed inside. The venerated landmark building had been witness to countless historical dramas in the fourteen hundred years it had dominated the skyline of Istanbul. Yet few events in its past had generated the kind of excitement that pulsed through the crowd clamoring for a chance to make their way inside.\n\nThose in the crowd paid scant attention to the old green Delahaye convertible parked in front of the entrance. Had they looked closer, they might have noticed a seam of bullet holes stitched across the trunk, which the car's new owner had yet to repair.\n\nInside the building, a small group of VIPs stepped reverently across Coronation Square, admiring the dual exhibits beneath Hagia Sophia's towering main dome one hundred and seventy-seven feet above their heads. To their right, they found a display devoted to the life of Muhammad, containing the stolen battle pendant, a partial handwritten recitation of the Qur'an, and other artifacts gleaned from the personal collection of Ozden Celik. On the left side of the hall were the relics of Jesus, discovered on the galley in Cyprus. Dozens of armed guards began assembling around the display cases of both exhibits, preparing for the museum's formal opening to the public.\n\nGiordino and Gunn were conversing with Loren and Pitt near a glass-encased ossuary when Dr. Ruppe joined them.\n\n\"It's magnificent!\" Ruppe beamed. \"I can't believe you pulled this off. A joint exhibit featuring relics from the lives of both Jesus and Muhammad. And in such a setting.\"\n\n\"With its historic legacy as both a church and a mosque, Hagia Sophia seemed like the perfect place to showcase the artifacts,\" Pitt said. \"I guess you could say that the Mayor of Istanbul owed me one as well,\" he added with a grin.\n\n\"It certainly helped that the folks in Cyprus agreed to a tour of the Jesus artifacts while they construct a permanent exhibit for the relics and the galley,\" Gunn said.\n\n\"Don't forget the late Mr. Celik's contributions,\" Giordino said.\n\n\"Yes, the Muhammad relics all belong to the good people of Turkey now,\" Pitt noted.\n\n\"Another job well done,\" Ruppe said. \"The public is going to be thrilled. It really is an inspired lesson in tolerance to combine the religious histories.\" He looked at Pitt with an arched brow. \"You know, if I were a gambling man, I might think you were simply trying to hedge your bets in the afterlife.\"\n\n\"It never hurts to have insurance,\" he replied with a wink.\n\nAcross the square, Julie Goodyear stood enthralled before a small case containing several faded sheets of papyrus.\n\n\"Summer, can you believe this? It's an actual letter written by Jesus to Peter.\"\n\nSummer smiled at the enthusiasm displayed on the historian's face.\n\n\"Yes, there's a translation below. He appears to be instructing Peter to make preparations for a large gathering. Some biblical archaeologists believe it could be a reference to the Sermon on the Mount.\"\n\nAfter staring at the document for a short while, Julie turned to Summer and shook her head.\n\n\"It's just unbelievable. The fact that these artifacts were listed on a physical document that survived to this day is amazing enough. But then to have actually discovered all of the artifacts, and in excellent condition to boot, is nothing short of a miracle.\"\n\n\"With some hard work and a little luck thrown in,\" Summer replied with a smile. Spotting Loren and Pitt across the floor, she said, \"Come on, I want you to meet my father.\"\n\nAs Summer led Julie across the floor, Julie made her stop for a moment at the very first item in the Jesus exhibit. Displayed in a thick, protective case was the original Manifest. Beneath it was a small tag that read \"On Loan from Ridley Bannister.\"\n\n\"It's nice to see the original again, though frankly I'm surprised that Mr. Bannister agreed to loan it to the exhibit,\" Julie said.\n\n\"He nearly died in the grotto on Cyprus, and I dare say he came out of the experience a changed man. It was actually his suggestion to include the Manifest in the exhibit, and he has already agreed to display it permanently, along with the other relics, in Cyprus. Of course, he has managed to produce a book and documentary film about the Manifest,\" she added with a smirk.\n\nThey stepped over to Pitt and the others, where Summer introduced her friend.\n\n\"It's a pleasure to meet the young lady responsible for all this historic treasure,\" Pitt said graciously.\n\n\"Please, my role was minuscule,\" Julie replied. \"You and Summer were the ones that discovered the actual relics. Especially the most intriguing item,\" she added, pointing over Pitt's shoulder at the limestone ossuary.\n\n\"Yes, the ossuary of J,\" Pitt replied. \"It created quite a stir, at first. But after careful analysis, the epigraphists deciphered the Aramaic inscription found on the front as reading 'Joseph,' not 'Jesus.' A number of experts postulate it's Joseph of Aramathea, but I guess we'll never know for sure.\"\n\n\"I would think it's likely. He was wealthy enough for an elaborate tomb and ossuary. Why else would Helena have included it in the collection? It's just a shame that the bones have vanished.\"\n\n\"That's a mystery I'll leave to you,\" Pitt said. \"Speaking of which, Summer tells me that you've found a new clue regarding Lord Kitchener and the Hampshire.\"\n\n\"Yes, indeed. Summer may have told you how we found letters from a Bishop named Lowery who hounded Kitchener to turn over the Manifest shortly before the Hampshire's sinking. Lowery was disabled in an automobile accident a short time later and ended up taking his own life in a bout of depression. I found a suicide note in his family's papers in which he admitted to his role in the Hampshire disaster. The ship was intentionally sunk out of fear that Kitchener was taking the Manifest to Russia for public release. At a time when the First World War was at a stalemate, the Church of England was apparently terrified of its contents, particularly in regard to the ossuary of J and its paradox to the Resurrection.\"\n\n\"I guess the Church is going to have a bit of explaining to do.\"\n\nAs they talked, Loren drifted over to a small painting displayed behind velvet ropes. Easily destined to be the most popular item of the exhibit, it was a contemporary portrait of Jesus on a wooden panel, painted by a Roman artist. Though lacking the skilled hand of a Rembrandt or a Rubens, the artist nevertheless had created a strikingly realistic portrait of a reflective man. Lean-faced, dark-haired, and bearded, the subject stared from the panel with a striking aura. It was the eyes, Loren decided. The olive-colored orbs nearly jumped off the panel, gleaming with a mixture of intensity and compassion.\n\nLoren studied the painting for several minutes, then called Summer to her side.\n\n\"The only known contemporary image of Jesus,\" Summer said reverently as she approached. \"Isn't it remarkable?\"\n\n\"Yes, quite.\"\n\n\"Most of the Roman paintings that survived from that era are in the form of frescoes, so a freestanding portrait is quite rare. One of the experts believes it may have been created by the same artist who painted a well-known fresco in Palmyra, Syria. The artist likely painted frescoes in the homes of the wealthy of Judaea and supplemented his income with portraits. The historians seem to think he captured Jesus at the height of his ministry, shortly before he was arrested and crucified.\"\n\nShe followed Loren's gaze and studied the subject.\n\n\"He has a true Mediterranean look about him, doesn't he?\" Summer said. \"A real man of the sun and wind.\"\n\n\"Certainly nothing like the images created by the master medieval painters depicting Jesus as though he was born in Sweden,\" Loren said. \"Does he remind you of someone?\" she asked, entranced by the image.\n\nSummer tilted her head while studying the painting, then smiled. \"Now that you mention it, there is a resemblance.\"\n\n\"A resemblance to whom?\" Pitt asked, stepping over to join them.\n\n\"He has wavy black hair, a lean face, and a tan complexion,\" Loren said. \"The same features as you.\"\n\nPitt looked at the painting, then shook his head. \"No, his eyes aren't quite as green. And judging by the background, he couldn't have stood more than five foot three and weighed much over a hundred pounds. On top of that, there's another big difference between us,\" he added with a slight grin.\n\n\"What's that?\" Loren asked.\n\n\"He walked on water. I swim in it.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 105",
                "text": "The afternoon heat had passed its zenith, and the sun was casting long shadows on the Jerusalem District Court Building when the final jury verdict was read. The television and print reporters were the first to exit the building, anxious to file their stories on the trial. The courthouse hounds and curiosity seekers who had filled the courtroom gallery filed out next, gossiping among themselves about the outcome. Last came the witnesses and attorneys, thankful that the long trial had finally reached its end. Noticeably absent, however, was the defendant. Oscar Gutzman would not stroll freely out the front door of the courthouse. Cuffed and under heavy guard, he was quietly escorted out the back door and into a waiting police van, which whisked him away to Shikma Prison to begin serving his sentence.\n\nDirk Jr. and Sam Levine lingered in the foyer, thanking the prosecuting attorneys for their good work, before stepping out into the fading sunlight. Both men wore the look of bitter justice on their faces, knowing that the verdict would never fully make up for the deaths of Sophie and her fellow antiquities agent.\n\n\"Fifteen years for aiding and abetting the death of agent Holder at Caesarea,\" Sam said. \"We couldn't have done much better.\"\n\n\"It should ensure that he dies in prison,\" Dirk replied impassively.\n\n\"In his poor health, I'll be surprised if he survives the first year.\"\n\n\"Then you better get moving if you're going to try him on antiquities charges,\" Dirk said.\n\n\"Actually, we've already cut a plea deal with his attorneys. Although we had a solid case against him for trafficking in stolen antiquities, adding a few years to his sentence would have been an academic exercise.\"\n\n\"So what did you get out of him?\"\n\n\"All charges were dropped in exchange for him cooperating in the ongoing investigation into the sources of the stolen artifacts in his collection. In addition,\" Sam said with a smile, \"Gutzman has agreed to bequeath his entire collection to the State of Israel upon his death.\"\n\n\"That's a pretty good coup.\"\n\n\"We think so,\" Sam replied as they reached the bottom of the courthouse steps. \"It will take a little of the sting out of our losses.\"\n\n\"Nice to know that something good will come out of all this,\" Dirk replied. He reached over and shook Levine's hand. \"Keep up the good fight, Sam. Sophie would have wanted you to carry on.\"\n\n\"I will. Take care, Dirk.\"\n\nAs Sam headed toward the parking lot, Dirk heard someone call out his name. He turned to see Ridley Bannister, easing down the steps with the aid of a polished cane.\n\n\"Yes, Bannister,\" Dirk replied.\n\n\"If you've got a moment,\" the archaeologist said, hobbling up to Dirk. \"I just wanted to tell you that, prior to the trial, I wasn't aware that you were involved with Miss Elkin. She was a professional colleague of sorts, although we didn't always see eye to eye. Nevertheless, I just wanted to say that I always considered her a remarkable woman.\"\n\n\"I share your sentiment,\" Dirk said quietly. \"Thank you, by the way, for participating in the trial. Your testimony was instrumental in putting Gutzman away.\"\n\n\"I knew that he bought stolen artifacts, but I never imagined he'd go so far as to hire trained terrorists to augment his collection. It's not difficult to get caught up in the allure of artifacts, and I carry my own sins in that regard. But you have to make right at the end of the day. You and your family showed me the way, in addition to saving my life. For that, I shall always be grateful.\"\n\n\"How much longer will you need that?\" Dirk asked, pointing to the cane.\n\n\"Just another few weeks. The doctors in Cyprus did a splendid job of patching me up.\"\n\n\"It was good of you to agree to loan the Manifest to their new museum.\"\n\n\"It belongs with the other artifacts that NUMA bestowed,\" Bannister replied. \"Perhaps it will make a few amends to your sister. Summer is quite a saucy young lady, by the way. Please tell her that I'd be honored to dine with her some time.\"\n\n\"I'll pass the word. What's next for you?\"\n\n\"The Ark of the Covenant. I've uncovered a lead that suggests it may be hidden in a cave in Yemen. It looks promising. How about yourself?\"\n\n\"I think I'm through working in the Mediterranean for a while,\" Dirk said quietly.\n\n\"Well, cheers to you wherever you end up next. And give my best to your father and Summer.\"\n\n\"Good luck, Bannister. I'll see you around.\"\n\nDirk watched as the archaeologist hobbled over to a taxi stand and hailed a cab. Dirk's own hotel was only a few blocks away, so he decided to proceed there on foot. Walking through the streets of west Jerusalem, he soon fell oblivious to the dense traffic and crowded sidewalks, his mind lost in an emotional fog.\n\nHe marched past the hotel and continued walking for another mile, entering the Old City through Herod's Gate. He stepped absently through the narrow streets, pulled to the east by an unseen compass.\n\nFollowing a nun jaywalking across a side street, he looked up to find himself standing on the grounds of St. Anne's Church. He felt a calmness settle over him as he made his way around the back to the Pool of Bethesda.\n\nThe bench where he had shared lunch with Sophie was empty, and he took a seat under the shade of the sycamore trees. Lost in thought, he stared at the empty pools long after the sun had dipped beneath the horizon. He was still sitting in silent contemplation when the evening sky rustled up a cool breeze that carried the sweet scent of jasmine gently across the ancient grounds."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Tomb Raider 2) The Lost Cult",
        "author": "E. E. Knight",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "The Tomb Raider fell through darkness.\n\nShe dropped, as she did all things, purposefully: back slightly arched, arms tight to her sides, feet shoulder-width apart, shivering. The air was far below zero at this altitude. She inhaled the mask's oxygen through her mouth, as she had since she'd started flushing the nitrogen out of her blood in the Royal Australian Air Force C-130J transport an hour ago.\n\nGetting the nitrogen out of her blood saved her from the bends. Breathing through her mouth saved her a nosebleed.\n\nA high-altitude low-open jump is nothing to sneeze at\u2014or during.\n\nShe watched the flashing red telltale projected onto the inside of her visor by a tiny laser cylinder near her temple, corrected her course by extending an arm. The distant lights of the island of Mauritius, now twenty thousand feet below, comforted her. The Indian Ocean was a big dark place\u2026\n\nTerminal velocity. Glorious! The free fall equivalent of rapture of the deep, helped by warmer air as she passed into a more comfortable thermal layer. If it weren't for the masked HALO helmet\u2014it made her look a bit like Darth Vader, or so the Aussie aircrew had joked\u2014her eyelids would be peeled back to her hairline about now.\n\nThe rugged volcanic mountains of the southern half of the island could now be distinguished from the horizon. The drop aimed for an expansive estate on the coast that had once been a sugar plantation.\n\nShe watched her telltale, slowly spreading her arms and legs to retard her fall. Her jumpsuit cracked in the wind. As the altitude ticked down, she placed her gloved hand on the rip cord in case the auto-deploy failed. It didn't. Her employers issued good equipment, she granted them that \u2026 Blast, I've overshot.\n\nAfter the hard, internal-organ-rearranging jerk of the black chute opening, she swung herself in a tight 180 to get back on course. Not many seconds now. A flashback to standing on the electric swings at the amusement park as a child, her father glowering, her nanny shouting imprecations, played through her head. She corrected course again, fighting the breeze coming from the interior of the island\u2026\n\n\u2026and saw the rooftop cooling unit on Lancaster Urdmann's estate below. The industrial-sized air conditioner was her DIP: desired impact point. She got her first good view of the Renaissance-style main house. It was uglier than the satellite pictures let on. Urdmann had all the taste and restraint of a sybaritic Saudi prince.\n\nWhy anyone needed two outdoor pools and a spa\u2026 But then Lancaster Urdmann\u2014ex-arms dealer ex-Cold War military financier with a penchant for working both sides of the Iron Curtain\u2014could afford them. When Urdmann retired from the grit and danger of gunrunning, he'd indulged a passion he had developed as he roamed the global hot spots: collecting and selling antiquities. Now he was in possession of some Iraqi artifacts acquired from the fleeing gangsters of Hussein's regime, and the Americans and British weren't interested in meeting his price for stolen goods.\n\nSo she'd been hired to handle the retrieval.\n\nThe Tomb Raider landed hop-skip atop the van-sized air-conditioning unit, thinking that satellite guidance was a Very Good Thing. Feeling a bit giddy, she fought the urge to bring her heels together and stick the landing, gymnast style. The exhilaration of a jump would blur her focus if she let it, and she had to stay clearheaded and on task. Instead of posing, she whirled her hands to take in her chute, unbuckled the harness, and let the packs of gear fall. With that done, she unzipped the jumpsuit.\n\nShe felt uncomfortably hot\u2014ironic considering that the tight black overall covering her from crown to corns was a piece of insertion technology colloquially known as a coolsuit. Another gift from her employer, it prevented body temperature being detected from the outside. Inside, you sweated.\n\nNo rooftop guards. She crouched, did a few experimental stretches. No cramps, no joint pain. She began to fill pockets and belt pouches with gear, touched the ear transmitter beneath her head sheath. \"Osprey is at alpha.\"\n\n\"Copy Osprey,\" her guardian angel said. \"Proceed.\"\n\nShe snapped open a tool kit on her chest. Its tiny light revealed the latest in high-tech burglar equipment. Ignoring the jimmies, skeleton keys, alligator clips, and minicomputer, she selected an Allen wrench and began opening the access panel on the cooling unit. It came away easily.\n\nShe dropped inside. The dunnage bag with the rest of the gear waited among the whining fans and cauldronlike condensers, placed by the prep team a few days ago. A scribbled drawing duct-taped to the end of the bag caught her eye. A childish stick figure that was\u2014how had her biology teacher at Wimbledon put it?\u2014mammiferous looked back at her. It read:\n\n\u2002HI LARA!\n\n\"Oh, grow up,\" she muttered.\n\nShe lifted off the panel to the intake duct. The prep team had done a good job; the metal didn't look cut. She stuck her head inside. The meter-long blades of the intake fan roared below.\n\nHer insulated snips cut the connection between fan and control unit. She stopped the fan with the bottom of her boot, dropped her backpack to the duct below the fan, and wriggled between the blades.\n\nIt took a little over thirty seconds for the fan to come back on. By then the Tomb Raider was negotiating the elevator junction. She passed one of the heat sensors on the way. The little gauge did double duty: checking the function of the air conditioner and triggering an alarm if an intruder, animal or human, tried the air shafts. She crawled past, hoping the coolsuit was doing its job, following the schematics she'd committed to memory.\n\nTwo turns later, she looked through the wall-mounted air-conditioning duct cover and down into Urdmann's display room.\n\nNow for the fun bit.\n\nA new oxyacetylene minicutter came out of a pouch on her arm. She began cutting, careful not to let the cover fall; the floor was one big pressure sensor\u2026\n\n\"Osprey here. I'm at objective. Going for the alarm box.\"\n\n\"Copy Osprey.\"\n\nShe took a tube out of her pack, screwed on another piece, which she then unfolded into a rifle stock. The line thrower was a one-shot weapon; she had to do this right the first time.\n\nTurn on the laser, find the target, exhale halfway, press the trigger button\u2014\n\nWith a shoulder-bruising foop, the compressed air cartridge exploded and the harpoon with its trailing line covered the twenty meters in an eyeblink, burying itself just above the alarm box. She coated the metal side of the launcher with quick-acting glue and anchored it to the side of the shaft.\n\nThen she slid headfirst down the threaded nylon line, gloves and inner-thigh padding absorbing the burn.\n\nPatching the bypass into the alarm was hard enough under normal conditions, but she had to do it upside down while hanging from her crisscrossed knees. She'd practiced it in Baghdad with a virtual reality helmet, but that alarm had been only similar to Urdmann's, not an exact replica. She broke open the alarm panel with her knife, had to read the cryptic electronic notations on the motherboard by helmet-light\u2014and the distorting visor wasn't a help. She popped a memory chip out of the board, and flashing lights went on in the display room. Out came two miniature alligator clamps attached to the spoof board in her kit. She fitted them, mentally timing down the seconds she had until every alarm in the house went off. Five, four, three\u2026\n\nGreen light on her spoof board.\n\nShe dropped to the floor, drew a .22 pistol fitted with a silencer. With three quick shots she killed the alarm lights; there were no local switches to turn them off. She hoped the guards on the grounds hadn't seen the lights through the glass doors leading to the patio for the few seconds they'd been flashing.\n\n\"Osprey. Bypass completed. Are we clean?\"\n\n\"Copy Osprey. The house sent out a tamper alarm to the security company. Not your fault; we anticipated it. We smothered the call.\"\n\n\"Please convey my thanks to the White Hats.\" Hackers on your side were also a Very Good Thing. \"Any sign of the guards?\"\n\n\"Negative.\"\n\nShe peeled off the coolsuit hood and mask, shook her hair out. She mopped sweat out of her eyes with the tight-folding towel she always carried in her pack.\n\nUrdmann displayed his treasures more brazenly than Lara did her own. Urdmann's category cards romanced the art, whereas in her own collection she kept description to a minimum. The walls held tapestries, rugs, and friezes; the waist-level cases containing artifacts were arranged in mazelike concentric squares, so that one had to do a good amount of twisting and turning to reach the central display. Here and there larger pieces, everything from urnlike Chinese burial caskets to statues and busts in varying degrees of deterioration, stood on pedestals.\n\nAll of the highest quality. Urdmann's prices pushed the envelope even for four-thousand-year-old artifacts, but the man sold no forgeries. The one redeeming quality in an otherwise disgusting character was his professionalism. She grudgingly granted him a modicum of respect for that.\n\nShe resisted the impulse to browse and found the Iraqi artifacts in a slightly taller case in the center of the room. Urdmann was proud of his new acquisitions. She popped the locks with a glass cutter and began to sort the items, separating the choice from the dross, the legally obtained from the stolen. This was why they needed a Tomb Raider instead of an agent: Not just anyone could distinguish Old Babylonian cuneiform from neo-Assyrian, or a holy symbol of Marduk from a whimsical bit of decor.\n\nOne of her targeted items, the rarest and most valuable, wasn't with the others: a briefcase-sized set of legal tablets that were in a very real sense the world's first comprehensive law book\u2014a codified set of Hammurabi's laws. She'd have to explore the house, starting with Urdmann's study, so she'd better secure what she already had.\n\nShe reached into a satchel at her belt, unfolded and carefully filled two bags with tablets, a pair of painted vases, jewelry, and religious icons, then removed a cylinder from her equipment vest and triggered the built-in packing balloons to inflate and cushion the pieces. Then she took a second cylinder the size of a shaving-cream canister from her pack and squirted its contents into the bags. The Styrofoam-like packing would lock the items in place.\n\nWith the alarm disabled, it was a simple matter to cut out a pane in the glass doors, remove it with a suction cup, and step out onto the patio. She tossed the bags behind a shrub, tied them with a nylon line, and began to scale the Renaissance-style exterior. Baroque architecture looked impressive, but it gave her any number of hand-and footholds. She picked her path to the roof using Juliet balconies and cornices.\n\nBack on the roof, she reported in to Roost. Then she hauled up the bags, keeping an eye toward the guardhouse at the rear of the grounds. She retrieved the rest of the gear from the air conditioner.\n\n\"Condor is on the way, Osprey,\" her guardian angel reported.\n\nShe tossed her two cushioned sacks of swag into a bigger bag. This one was bright orange. She turned a knob that inflated more cushioning within the semiluminous pickup container. With that done, she inflated the last item, a miniature dirigible complete with a wind-guiding tail. As it filled automatically with helium, she let go of the wire-cored line, and the dirigible shot up into the air, still inflating.\n\nEven if the guards had seen the balloon take off, it was too late now.\n\nTwo hundred meters of line later, the orange pickup bag lifted off the roof. Condor, a fixed-wing recovery aircraft, would snatch the line in midair between protruding, antlike jaws.\n\nIt was all over, save for a few ifs, ands, and buts.\n\nIf Condor's pilot flew as well as the Australians who'd dropped her, Iraq would get its treasures returned quietly.\n\nAnd Lara Croft would get a chunk of her life back without having to give endless depositions to the lawyers of three different countries following the murder of Von Croy in Paris and her bloody pursuit of the cabal that had killed him.\n\nBut the Tomb Raider wanted those last, missing tablets. Not just because they were part of her mission. And not just because they belonged to the Iraqi people. She would be fully within her rights to pull out now, take no further risks. The mission parameters gave her that option. But she knew she wouldn't take it. To leave the law tablets behind would be to grant Urdmann a small victory, and she found that she wasn't prepared to do that.\n\nUrdmann's upstairs study and bedroom were accessible from the other end of the roof. She went to the edge of the roof and peered down at his balcony. A curtain flapped in the breeze through an invitingly open French door. The study balcony was beside that of the bedroom.\n\nAs she climbed down to the study balcony, she heard the mellow burr of the Condor's engines. Far above, signal strobes began to flash on the rising balloon, line, and recovery case.\n\nGood work, lads.\n\nNow on the narrow balcony, back against the wall, she heard a sonorous snore from the bedroom.\n\nShe used an old-fashioned jimmy on the French door and crept into the study. Ambient light from the exterior illumination gave her enough to go on. She could still hear the snoring from the connecting bedroom.\n\nThe tablets sat on a library table beneath a picture of a dark-eyed, comely woman with Betty Page bangs. Urdmann was hiding them in plain sight, like Poe's purloined letter, using them as bookends to a set of Gibbon's Rise and Fall: first editions, by the look of them. She reached out and gently touched the tablets on which some nameless scribe had set down the laws of another age.\n\nThe wonder of it fed the Tomb Raider's soul.\n\nThe snoring in the next room stopped. She held her breath until the noise came back louder than ever.\n\nShe took one of the tablets from its wooden stand, ignoring the first-edition Gibbon, and examined it with her kit light. It was a solid sheet of clay. Rows of wedge shapes had been pressed into the wet clay with a stylus; then the tablet had been baked and glazed. If there'd been a binding, it had long since rotted away.\n\nThe lights came on. She startled, but didn't drop the tablet.\n\n\"Lara Croft,\" came a smooth, BBC-pitched voice from behind. \"So they cared enough to send the very best.\"\n\nThe snoring still echoed from the other room.\n\nWith a glance, she checked Lancaster Urdmann's reflection in the window. He didn't appear to be holding a gun. The Tomb Raider carefully replaced the tablet.\n\nThen she turned on her heel, swinging the .22 up and pointing it at Urdmann. His eyes were brown, a slightly darker shade than hers. They held no fear, no emotion at all.\n\n\"Oh, please,\" he said. He touched a button on the wall, and the snoring cut off.\n\nLancaster Urdmann had a lush fringe of salt-and-pepper hair running from the crown of his tanned, mostly bald head to his thick sideburns. He wore a silken Turkish robe. A landslide of hairy fat descended from his chin.\n\nUrdrnann ignored the pistol and looked into the Tomb Raider's eyes. \"I knew an attempt like this would be made, so I added a couple of extra alarms. It was that Kunai fellow showing up with that cock-and-bull story about needing a translation of symbols from some Babylonian law book that tipped me off. His whole story stank from here to the Yukon.\"\n\nThe Tomb Raider had no idea what he was talking about, but then she wasn't familiar with all the preparations that had gone into this operation. Perhaps an agent going under the name Kunai had attempted an earlier reconnaissance and been rebuffed.\n\n\"I'd love to chat, Urdmann, but I've got an early meeting,\" Lara said.\n\n\"Then leave, by all means. I've no gun; I'm not stopping you.\"\n\n\"Very reasonable of you. I'll just take these tablets and be on my way.\"\n\nHe took a step closer. \"Leave me my souvenirs, Croft. I had to negotiate with some very unpleasant people to acquire them.\"\n\n\"Those 'unpleasant people' were thieves and worse.\"\n\n\"Yes, well, as I said, unpleasant. But I did what I had to do to safeguard the tablets. You should be thanking me.\"\n\n\"The tablets are part of Iraq's heritage. They belong in Iraq, not in the study of Lancaster Urdmann.\"\n\n\"As if the bloody wogs gave that\"\u2014he snapped his fingers\u2014\"for their heritage before we dug it up for them and told them that it was worth something!\"\n\n\"Cut the John Bull, Urdmann.\" She reached with her free hand, grabbed one of the tablets.\n\nUrdmann took another step closer. \"No, Croft.\"\n\n\"I'll shoot,\" she warned.\n\nHe shook his head, his jowls trembling like jelly. \"You're no killer, Croft. You won't shoot an unarmed man.\"\n\nShe grinned wolfishly in response.\n\n\"We can come to an arrangement. Some money for the upkeep of that drafty old manor of yours. Perhaps\u2014\"\n\nFor an obese man, Urdmann moved fast. The Tomb Raider moved faster. Her pistol spat even as he lunged at her, and a track of red scored Urdmann's fleshy right forearm. He fell back, clawing at his desk.\n\n\"Don't say I didn't warn you,\" she said drily.\n\n\"You shot me,\" Urdmann said, blood running from between his fingers as he smothered the wound. His brown eyes held shock now. And anger. \"That bloody burns!\"\n\n\"It's only a scratch,\" Lara said. \"If I'd really shot you, you'd know it.\" As she spoke, keeping the pistol trained on him all the while, she stuffed the tablets into her pack. Then, as an afterthought, she tossed him her travel towel. \"I suppose you realize you're dripping blood all over a thirteenth-century rug.\"\n\n\"Eleventh!\" Urdmann protested, grabbing the towel and pressing it to his arm. A film of greasy sweat had appeared on his brow.\n\n\"I'll take your word for it. But you might want to look at those pikes again. Please drop dead at your earliest convenience.\"\n\nShe stepped past him onto the balcony. Behind her, one of Urdmann's guards burst in, rifle at the ready.\n\n\"No, don't shoot, you fool! You'll damage the tablets,\" Urdmann bellowed.\n\nShe swung over the side of the balcony and dropped to the ground. A Klaxon sounded. Lights went on all over the grounds.\n\nOh, bother.\n\nShe hit and rolled, then ran downhill, heading for the west wall. A peacock squawked as she leapt a decorative hedge. She climbed up an iron fence topped with sharpened spear points.\n\n\"Osprey!\" her guardian angel broke in. \"Condition check.\"\n\n\"Running for my life,\" she gasped.\n\n\"Why aren't you with Condor? They just picked up the cargo. Why did you break plan?\"\n\n\"Contingency.\"\n\nFor the first time, the guardian angel's voice showed signs of stress. \"There is no contingency. You were supposed to go out on Condor. Now\u2014\"\n\n\"Listen,\" she interrupted. \"Can we talk about this later? I'm kind of busy now. I'll see you in the Seychelles by the seashore.\"\n\nShe ripped the coolsuit going over another fence. She made note of the extraction point and jumped down into the outer grounds.\n\nLancaster Urdmann employed a full-time security staff of eight. Labor in Mauritius was cheap. But they stayed on the inner grounds, in the house, and at the road gate.\n\nShe heard a police whistle blow from Urdmann's balcony. Flashlights bobbed at the side of the house, then swung in her direction.\n\nShe crabbed into a stand of brush. Beyond the estate's outer wall, a hundred meters away, the night sky loomed. She crawled toward it, hoping that whatever firearms the guards possessed didn't come equipped with light intensifiers. The coolsuit would hide her from an infrared scope.\n\nThe outer wall was concrete with shards of broken glass embedded at the top amongst coils of razor wire. Lara angled for a thick palm near the wall. Urdmann's landscapers had cleared everything on the other side of the wall, trying to keep people out, not in.\n\nThe Tomb Raider saw the lights of a jeep roaring across the outer grounds. She climbed the palm, got amongst the fronds at the top, saw a clear a spot on the other side of the wall, and jumped. She brushed wire on her way down, but her falling weight carried her through. She didn't think she'd been cut too badly.\n\nAs she hurried down the steep slope, she marked the little inflatable boat waiting for her among the oceanside rocks.\n\nGunfire from behind\u2014she threw herself sideways. Urdmann's guards stood on the roof of their vehicle, muzzles blossoming yellow as they fired automatic weapons at her over the top of the wall.\n\nTrigger-happy amateurs. You get what you pay for, Urdmann. One man with a scope would have got me.\n\nShe dropped to her bottom and slid on the loose soil as bullets zipped all around. She bumped and thudded, smashing body and gear on volcanic stone, cushioning the precious items in her pack with flesh and bone, until she was out of the line of fire and among the giant boulders at the edge of the ocean.\n\nThe com-link was gone; the headset had come off somewhere on the slide. She waded out, felt the sting of seawater on her battered thighs and backside, reached a hand down. It came back up bloody.\n\nScratch one coolsuit as expended in the line of duty\u2026\n\nDjbril, her freelance ex-military gearhead, helped her into the boat with a smile but said nothing. It was his kind of mission: a week's worth of lounging on a cocktail-service-included beach capped off with one night of noisy excitement. When she had settled into the boat, Djbril tossed her a first aid kit, still not saying a word. That was one of the things she liked about him.\n\nThen the Zodiac's two-hundred-horsepower engine roared to life, and the boat shot away from shore, heading for the open ocean."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Ten hours later, Lady Croft tested the water temperature in the spa-sized tub in the bathroom of her room at the Stansfield resort hotel in the Seychelles and dumped the second of three boxes of lavender-scented Epsom salts into the sudsy water.\n\nShe glanced at the full-length mirror in the shower door next to the tub, turned, lifted her robe, and winced. The pummeling she'd taken on her slide to the sea had left a series of black-and-blue souvenirs of Mauritius. At least the cuts and abrasions were healing nicely, thanks to applications of antibiotic cream.\n\nNow for a glorious soak, then a real sleep. Upon arriving at the hotel, she'd stuffed herself with poached eggs, fried tomatoes, and toast\u2014she never skipped breakfast, but contingencies sometimes forced her to enjoy it at seven o'clock at night. Then she'd limped down to the hotel druggist for the Epsom salts.\n\nSpeaking of which, the tub was nearly full. She topped it off with the third box of bath salts. Then she stuck one leg in up to the knee, relishing the painfully hot water.\n\nExquisite. She stuck her other leg in and prepared to lower herself ever so slowly into the steaming bath.\n\nHer suite door buzzed loudly. Go away, she thought at whoever was out there. Whoever was out there wasn't listening; the door buzzed again. Sighing, Lara left the tub, rewrapped her cushy robe about herself, and went to the door. She looked through the peephole, saw an oversized nose and watery blue eyes.\n\nThe American. The guardian angel in her ear. She opened the door.\n\n\"Hey, Lara.\" A thin veneer of Yale lay over an accent from the Georgia pinewoods. \"Hope you weren't sleeping.\" She liked the American; he was so awkwardly polite.\n\n\"What now? Did you miss something at the debriefing?\"\n\n\"No. We missed something on Condor. The Hammurabi tablets. The Iraqis are screaming.\"\n\n\"And why do you think I've got them?\"\n\n\"Because you're Lara Croft, that's why.\"\n\nShe had to smile at that. \"Supposing I do know where they are, when is my record going to be cleared? That was our deal, wasn't it?\"\n\n\"It's been done.\"\n\n\"Not according to my lawyers.\"\n\nHer guardian angel frowned, reached for his cell phone. Lara crossed the room to the bulging Viennese dresser for hers. They faced each other like two gunfighters across the burgundy-colored carpeting and punched in numbers.\n\nThe American held up his index finger, spoke into his phone. Waited. Spoke some more.\n\n\"A fax is coming through,\" said the associate working the graveyard shift at her solicitor's, her voice tinny in Lara's ear.\n\nThe American closed his cell phone with a click. \"You should be good now.\"\n\nHer phone: \"Yes, here's your Interpol file, Lady Croft. All the stops are gone.\"\n\n\"Thank you so much,\" she said and hung up.\n\n\"Well?\" asked the American. \"Where are the tablets then?\"\n\nShe walked over to the tub, went down into a very unlady-like squat, reached one hand into the still-steaming water, and pulled up a waterproof case. She opened the seal and extracted her lucky backpack.\n\n\"You take that with you into the tub?\" the American asked, looking at the battered backpack.\n\n\"Never out of reach when I'm out of England.\"\n\nShe pulled out the tablets in their own cushioned, waterproof wrapper. Handed them over. \"That concludes our business, I believe.\"\n\n\"It does. Sorry about the delay. Unintentional, I assure you.\"\n\n\"I never thought otherwise,\" she said. \"Now, if you'll excuse me. I'm sore, and very, very tired.\"\n\nThe American flicked a strand of straw-colored hair out of his eyes. \"We've got a cure for that where I come from. Some good Kentucky bourbon, a strong set of hands, and a big ol'\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't drink,\" she said. \"And if you want to cure something, I suggest you focus on your prep team. That was sloppy work. Urdmann spotted the Kunai fellow right from the start.\"\n\n\"Kunai? We didn't send anyone in with that cover.\"\n\n\"My mistake.\" She took a scrunchie out of her robe pocket and began to put up her hair. \"Be an angel and close the door quietly on your way out, would you?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Chaos reigned in the converted farmhouse during the last morning of Dr. Stephen Frys's life. Dresser drawers hung open in his bedroom\u2014dark, thanks to the still-closed curtains, except for a guttering candle. Dropped towels lay all over the bath, but no water speckled the tub; he'd washed in a basin so he could hear any suspicious sounds coming from outside the house. The bed stood as tidy as on any normal morning, but only because the professor hadn't slept in it.\n\nDr. Frys even skipped his beloved morning tea, taken with lemon, sugar, toast, and the incomparable view of the Scottish Highlands, a tradition that dated back to the first morning he and his late wife had spent in Whistlecrack House thirty-one years ago.\n\nBlood\u2014thanks to a trembling hand during his shave\u2014spotted his chin and the mole on his left cheek as he lumbered down the narrow stairs. He listened to the silent darkened house and heard only the wind outside.\n\nHe dropped his dusty suitcase to the kitchen floor with a thud, then removed his thick, black-framed eyeglasses and rubbed them clean with his handkerchief, a gesture any of his senior students knew meant a pause in the lecture while the professor turned something over in his mind. As he put the handkerchief back, he patted his pocket, reassuring himself that his cell phone was still there.\n\nAny visitor to Whistlecrack House stopped and looked at the fireplace first when they arrived in the kitchen. Almost big enough to climb in if one crouched, it filled one wall, a great arch of brick with iron-mongered doors, a spit, hooks, and shelves for baking, roasting, or frying foods.\n\nLast night the fireplace had been roaring. Paper after age-yellowed paper, notebook after notebook, reams of photocopied research, even old-fashioned carbon copies had flamed yellow-orange, curled, blackened, and then turned to fine gray ash almost as quickly as he could feed the fire.\n\nDr. Frys checked the blackened mass. A substantial part of his life lay in the still-smoldering heap. He prodded the pile with a poker, and the fire burst into new life as he exposed the last few unburned reams of typescript. He stirred the mass to make sure of the destruction.\n\nLife does save its best jokes for last. The ashes were all that remained of research that had once made him a bit of a joke in his profession \u2026 until he gave up trying to pry open closed and comfortable minds. But now that same research had turned out to be of unexpected interest to hard-eyed, ruthless men. He'd always been half afraid of the secrets he'd discovered, but after three decades in which not even a graduate student had asked about his M\u00e9ne work, he'd half forgotten about it as well. He and Von Croy should have abandoned their research without publishing any of it, left the frightful revelations where no one would ever find them.\n\nBut the cat was out of the bag now\u2014and she'd had rabid kittens.\n\nHe checked the clock, pulled out his cell phone, and tapped in a number. It wasn't even eight yet, but there was no harm in checking.\n\nJust the answering service again, and he'd already left a message.\n\nDr. Frys stepped lightly past a cream-colored wall covered with family photos\u2014an empty hook and an oval a slightly lighter shade than the rest of the wall marked the place where a photo had hung\u2014and went to the front sitting room. Without parting the curtains, he looked through the narrow gap between glass and fabric, wincing as the morning sun hit his eye. He repeated the process at the other side of the window.\n\nNo sign of them.\n\nThe note for the police\u2014or them\u2014to find sat on the mantel. An identical copy rested folded inside a little plastic 35 mm film canister he'd put down the kitchen drain, blocking the plumbing. Even if the police didn't find it, the new owners would.\n\nHe picked up his suitcase and walked to the garage, the final change to the house that his beloved wife, Emme, had lived to see. He opened the connecting door with a swift motion. His eyes swept across the dim garage, checking the condition of its sole window before he entered.\n\nThe powerful old Merkur beeped an acknowledgment as he deactivated its alarm. He placed his suitcase in the boot and pushed it shut with a soft click. He popped the bonnet and picked up his attach\u00e9 case from where it lay atop the fluid reservoirs, hidden there since last night. Grit smeared the weathered leather.\n\nHe climbed into the car, pulled the door closed as softly as he had the boot, and took a deep breath as he slid the key into the ignition.\n\nThen came the temptation. Again.\n\nWouldn't it be easier to just chuck the contents of his attach\u00e9 into the fire and wait, engine running, in the closed garage until he escaped into the sleep he so desperately needed? Oblivion. No more strange eyes watching him as he bought his groceries, no more funny looks from the police as he spoke of burglars who took nothing, no more fearful listening at each creak and crack in the old house. A younger heart might be able to summon the courage to fight them, but his old pump with its bad valve\u2026\n\nAlmost too much effort to run. He resettled his glasses on his nose. No. It wasn't just his life and sanity they threatened. When he'd seen that accursed monocle, realized how near the rot had spread\u2026\n\nReaching into his coat pocket, he pulled out his cell phone and placed it in its dashboard cradle, checked the battery indicator, and started the car. With luck, and he couldn't have expended all his share in sixty-eight years of living, he'd meet her in London before his flight. Von Croy had always spoken highly of her. Personally, Frys had always considered her to be a bit of a loose cannon, to say the least. There was no question of her talent, her knowledge, her bravery. But her methods were so \u2026 unorthodox. Those pistols she wore\u2014and, according to the magazines, was not shy of using\u2014he did not consider them to be the proper tools of a serious archaeologist. But now the very qualities that had caused him to view Lara Croft with suspicion had made him seek her out for help.\n\nThe electric garage door answered to the sun-visor button.\n\nHe didn't wait for it to open all the way but backed out as soon as he thought he had clearance. But he thought wrong. He tore away the plastic weather strip at the bottom of the garage door, heard splintered wood scrape across the roof of his car as he backed out and turned around in the gravel driveway.\n\nThe glitter of sun on a windscreen down the road panicked him. A sedan was coming from the north. He forgot about shutting the garage door again as he backed around and shifted into drive, then stomped on the accelerator. Gravel flew as his tires spun. He fishtailed at the end of the driveway and knocked over the white-painted rural delivery postbox with \"Whistlecrack House\" painted in green, friendly script on each side.\n\nA silver roadster appeared in the road south of his driveway, pulling out from cover as it moved to block the narrow mountain road. The driver stared straight at him from under a cloth cap, daring him to smash into the side of the little sports car. Frys swerved into the leafless bushes the little car had been concealed behind and barreled straight through, then swerved back onto the road that snaked along the side of the fells.\n\nThe sedan and the silver roadster were right behind him. With a burst of speed, the roadster shot ahead, coming around his right side too quickly for Frys to do anything but swerve into the gravel it kicked up from the slender verge. Then it was past him. Its brake lights flared, and he stomped on his own brakes as the sedan pulled next to him, the sound of its tires like the yowling of an alley cat. He dragged the Merkur against the mountainside, caught a flash of the sedan driver's pox-scarred cheek in the second before his air bag deployed, smacking him in the face and flipping his glasses off the back of his head.\n\nFighting dizziness, Frys clawed the white mass of the air bag down, saw blurred images of men getting out of the sedan and roadster. One coming around his side of the car carried a tire iron \u2026 or perhaps a gun. It was impossible to tell without his specs.\n\nThere was still a way out.\n\nHe shifted the car into reverse, ignored the horrible squealing from the left front tire, and floored it. Bang! He jumped, unsure if the noise had been a gunshot or a tire exploding. But the car was still moving, and he was still alive \u2026 He held the steering wheel purposefully straight, directing the Merkur across the road and off the steep mountainside.\n\nLife does save its best jokes for last, Professor Stephen Frys (emeritus) thought again as the car began to slide down the hill to the discordant tune of the suspension tearing itself to bits. Then it tipped and rolled over backwards and began to tumble. It occurred to him that he hadn't gripped his attach\u00e9 case to his chest, and he groped for it blindly. But then a hard whump, like a cricket bat striking the back of his head, brought the oblivion he'd rejected only moments before, back in the garage."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Lara Croft rose out of the water with her guns up and ready. She wore her usual shoreline training gear: a torso-covering dry suit, surf shoes, her two-gun rig, and a radio-mike headset that allowed short-range communication in three ounces of ear-fitted plastic.\n\nWith one addition.\n\nA hard plastic shell clung around her hips like an oversized black fanny pack. Two short crablike arms with socket ends extended forward from the shell to her hip points.\n\nThe December Irish Sea air hit her like a slap. She inhaled; the seawater in the tide pool she'd swum through had left an iron taste, almost bloodlike, in her mouth, thanks to the wash from all the rusting metal lying about the pierside. Gantries and loaders dating back to before the Great War loomed all around this coastal piece of postindustrial Lancashire.\n\nShe squelched through the mud under barnacle-encrusted pilings, lost her footing, recovered, spotted a plastic keg with a large \"4\" spray-painted on it.\n\nThe Heckler & Koch USP Match pistol muzzles angled in toward the number, blasted out their .45-caliber staccato.\n\nThe ejected cartridge cases hissed as they struck the wet mud. The fl\u00e9chette shells did their job, fragmenting into a dozen lethal slivers on impact. Plastic splinters flew out the rear of the keg.\n\n\"Four down,\" she said into the radio mike as she holstered her guns.\n\nShe made for a wooden ladder, climbed it. She peered over the top, studied the abandoned wharf. Well, not quite abandoned. The Special Air Service and the Royal Marines used it for training. Sometimes they let her breathe some of its Irish Sea air for weapons training. Lady Croft was a generous giver to funds that supplemented the income of the relatives of men who never came home from missions that could never be publicly acknowledged.\n\nA rusted corrugated shed sat atop a pallet in the middle of the wharf. A \"5\" the height of a surfboard was painted on its side, facing her.\n\nNo challenge doing it the easy way. Using the strength in her inner thighs, she let go and hung on to the ladder by main force, pressing her knees outward against the sides of the ladder. She unholstered her guns.\n\n\"VADS: double nitro,\" she said into the mike.\n\nThe new voice-activated, variable ammunition delivery system on her back recognized it was being addressed and responded. As it should: she'd spent enough hours patiently \"training\" it. It clicked softly as the tops of new magazines appeared in the arm sockets. She pressed the ambidextrous magazine release levers, ejected the empty fl\u00e9chette magazines, and lowered her guns to her hip points where the fresh magazines waited in the crab arms. The fresh magazines slammed into the USP grips with a satisfying tschuck.\n\nShe aimed her custom guns, though if the shells did what Djbril promised, aiming wasn't that critical. She squeezed the triggers.\n\nThe shells hit, exploding on impact, blowing fist-sized holes in the shed. She kept firing, enjoying the thunderous sound of the explosions magnified by the interior of the shed. When the military-only twelve-round magazines were empty, there was nothing left of the shed but its roof, resting in the torn metal nailed to the pallet.\n\n\"Five down,\" she said into her headset.\n\n\"Was that a chuffin' rush, or what?\" crackled Djbril's voice in reply.\n\n\"No comment. We're not done yet.\"\n\n\"Into the rabbit hole, Alice.\"\n\nAn old warehouse stood at the other end of the pier. She holstered her guns and trotted along the wharf toward it.\n\nIt was dark inside.\n\n\"VADS: left lumen.\" VADS didn't care if she used Latin or Swahili; it was all the same to the computer \u2026 as long as Lara Croft was the one doing the talking. A magazine popped out at her left hip point. She slammed the gun down on it. Brought the H&K back up, released the safety with her trigger finger\u2014one of the reasons she loved this pistol was its custom functionality, the right/left operation of both the safety and magazine eject without a change in grip\u2014and did a scan of the junk-filled warehouse from catwalk to rat traps.\n\nShe got out of the door frame fast, checked three and nine o'clock. The old windows were boarded over and covered with tarps that the SAS put up and took down to simulate a variety of lighting conditions.\n\n\"Long way off yet, Croft.\"\n\nShe fired the illumination rounds into the darker nooks and crannies of the unlighted warehouse, jumped to the side as something whizzed past, and leapt over a pile of scrap, still firing.\n\nBasically chemical paintballs, the illumination rounds splattered phosphorescent dye where they hit. Looking for suspicious outlines, she sprinted across the cracked concrete.\n\nLara slid under a stack of rusting oil drums just as a second rubber bullet fired from somewhere on the catwalk hit where she had stood an instant before.\n\n\"Nice try,\" she said.\n\n\"Keeping you on your toes, Croft.\"\n\nShe looked through a hole in the oil drum shielding her, saw a pile of loading pallets with an old rag painted with a \"6\" taped to it.\n\nFour more illumination shells went up into the catwalk. Djbril probably had hid himself somewhere up there; it was both too obvious and too good a place to watch her from.\n\n\"VADS: right pyro, left rubber.\"\n\nThe magazines popped out, ready for loading into her pistols. She slid on her back, working herself behind a pile of scrap metal, the smooth, hard plastic of the harness gliding over the floor.\n\nRubber bullets bounced off the wall behind her.\n\n\"If I can see you, I can kill you, Croft.\"\n\nShe rolled behind an old stripped forklift up on blocks, fired her right pistol into the pallets. Phosphorus glowed bright in the bullet holes, and the pallets began to burn. She removed the VADS, wiggled under the forklift.\n\n\"Okay, Croft,\" Djbril whispered over the radio. \"You got it. Draw.\"\n\nShe waited. Smoke billowed up. She brought her head and left arm out from under the forklift. She heard a cough from the catwalk. It came from an old rug and a portable radio. The three glowing red points of the tritium TRU-DOTs on her USP Match sights floated over the fabric. She fired rubber bullets into a suspicious, foot-shaped bulge.\n\n\"Bugger!\" the voice in her ear said. \"Lay off, luv.\"\n\n\"What was that about a draw?\"\n\n\"Yuh got me, pilgrim,\" came the mock\u2014John Wayne drawl.\n\n\"I respect your confidence in your workmanship. But supposing this contraption had put armor-piercing in?\"\n\n\"I'd need a new ankle.\"\n\nHer strictly-off-the-books armorer threw the top of the rug off his body, unloaded his rifle, slung it over his shoulder, and slid down the access ladder sailor style, using his feet to slow himself.\n\n\"Thought for sure you'd go up the ladder first to get a look around,\" he said, pulling back a navy blue balaclava and taking off his long-sleeved gloves. \"I could have had you in the doorway, you know.\"\n\n\"Knowing exactly when and where your target's going to show helps,\" she said, crawling out from under the forklift and getting to her feet.\n\n\"You could have found another entrance. The roof is full of them.\"\n\n\"I'm on a schedule today.\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah. The lecture. Sorry to keep you waiting, professor.\"\n\nIt had been a long day. Djbril had started before dawn with a detailed briefing on the new gun system, how the VADS held and distinguished a dozen clips with whatever mix of ammunition she chose. He showed her how to open the \"turtle shell\" to replace the magazines in their racks that led to the crab-arm \"feeders\" and the control unit, a tiny pocket PC built into the buckle-cover at the front of the harness. Wireless technology linked the microphone headset to the control unit. He had created VADS almost from scratch, with a little assistance from some college engineering students and a twelve-thousand-pound check from Lady Croft.\n\nThe bullets themselves came in six flavors: armor-piercing for hard targets, fl\u00e9chette for soft targets you wished to turn into sausage stuffing, pure explosive, incendiary, illumination, and less-lethal rubber bullets. For maximum destruction, he recommended a mix of armor-piercing, explosive, and incendiary. \"A killer cocktail,\" he'd said that morning, demonstrating it on a mannequin in body armor placed within an upright freezer.\n\nThe mannequin had gone into the defunct appliance looking like a stud from one of those American reality shows set on a beach resort, complete with suntan and impossibly white teeth. After twenty-four rounds, it had come out in charcoal-colored chunks.\n\nThen he'd let Lara try out the different loads in her personal, custom-made H&K .45s. The ammunition impressed her.\n\nAt nine she took a break from gunsmithing to check her voice mail. Calls to her London office from everyone from her accountants to a retired Scottish archaeologist named Frys, who claimed to have known Von Croy, had to be answered. She had no luck reaching Dr. Frys, but got the day's other business out of the way while Djbril filled some magazines with his special ammunition.\n\nThen Djbril had talked her into trying the VADS auto-reloader. After ninety rather repetitious\u2014and therefore tiresome\u2014minutes mapping the software to her voice, she had tried the system out on the course.\n\nNow she was sold.\n\n\"Wish I'd had this behind the green door.\"\n\nDjbril raised an eyebrow. \"What, a copper door in some vault that you\u2014\"\n\n\"Czechoslovakia. The Strahov Fortress. A biological facility.\"\n\nHe waited for her to say more. She didn't, so he let it drop, changing the subject.\n\n\"Well, what do you think? Will the Ministry of Defense, or better yet, the Americans, buy it? We can adapt it for battle rifles, scout-snipers\u2014\"\n\n\"Visions of defense contracts dancing in your head already?\" she said, leafing through the documentation.\n\n\"It started out as a bit of a lark and a giggle, yeah, but if there's money to be made\u2026\"\n\n\"Think again. You'll run into a lot of 'airplanes have no military purpose or value' types, you know. Try it on your mates in the regiment. Maybe you can get someone's ear that way.\" She rubbed her right shoulder. She'd fired over two hundred rounds, one-handed at that, and the ache was setting in.\n\n\"You can keep the prototype,\" he told her. \"It's the least we can do after you funded our beta. Plus, we made it to your measurements.\"\n\n\"And where did you get my vital statistics, I wonder? I don't post them on my CV.\"\n\nDjbril brought his heel down hard enough on the concrete for Lara to feel it. He set his eyes straight forward, gave a formal salute. \"Sir! Sworn to secrecy on sources and methods. Sir!\"\n\nLara rolled her eyes. She loved military men the way she loved dogs and horses: They were noble, reliable, and very comforting to have around at times, but they had their limitations.\n\n\"I'll take the prototype, seeing as how you went to so much trouble. Wrap it up and send it to Winston at the house, would you? The documentation, too. Now I've got to run. My lecture's at seven.\"\n\nHe followed her to her motorcycle, a Triumph Speed Triple. It glittered silver and black in the afternoon sun, 955 cc's of warp speed.\n\n\"London in two and a half hours? That's going to be some ride, even on that.\"\n\n\"Two. I need to stop and wash the cordite off.\"\n\n\"It's your license.\"\n\nShe unbuckled her holsters and handed them over. Djbril looked at the scratches on the all-weather coating and the dent in the left trigger guard and clicked his tongue in disapproval. \"I'll put new O-rings in while I'm at it. They don't make this variant anymore; you should take better care of them.\"\n\nShe needed to get out of the training rig. \"You think I'd use my field pistols on experimental ammunition? That pair is safe at home.\"\n\n\"Good. We in the regiment would hate to see anything happen to your pair, Lara.\" He puckered his lips, flirting like a disco swain.\n\n\"He 'who dares' gets slapped in the face sometimes, you know.\"\n\nDjbril smiled at the play on the regimental motto, Who dares, wins. Taken, of course, from a much older Empire's qui audet vincit."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "\"Lara Croft?\" the crackling voice said over the bad connection.\n\n\"We verified it with Frys's phone,\" Tisdale said. He felt a migraine coming on. He stood at the Heathrow airport phone, worried at his teeth with the edge of the plastic calling card, utterly drained from the botched Frys job in Scotland.\n\n\"Lara Croft.\" The Prime's voice was the same monotone it had been upon hearing about the death of Professor Frys.\n\n\"Well, Croft Foundation offices,\" Tisdale replied.\n\n\"Same thing. Wait a moment, would you?\"\n\nTisdale waited, looked at the cracked cell phone. The contents of Frys's briefcase were now nestled in the carry-on of a courier and would be in Peru in twenty-four hours. The Merkur had tossed both phone and briefcase onto the hillside as it rolled. He and Dohan in the roadster had stayed to investigate the wreck and phone the police to report the accident while the sedan limped off with the others. Dohan, a Scot, handled the officers smoothly while Tisdale stood silently beside him, sweating at the thought of Frys's property in the boot. When the police, having recorded all the particulars, sent them on their way, Tisdale had barely been able to light his pipe at the thought of how close he'd been to using the needle. He was a chartered accountant, albeit one with a peculiar set of interests, not some hardened drug lord used to being questioned by the police.\n\nMoving, and occasionally hiding, money was Tisdale's forte, not car wrecks and bodies.\n\nThe Prime came back on: \"You're in luck, Twenty-eight. She's in London tonight. If you move quickly, you can catch her off her guard.\"\n\nThe blood pounded at the back of his eyes as the headache hit full force. \"What\u2014tonight?\"\n\n\"Talk to Sixty. He'll get you men.\"\n\nSixty. Egorov. The driver of the sedan. More surveillance, stolen cars, pistols, danger\u2014and headaches. Tisdale briefly considered declining, but to do so would forfeit a position built up with years of quiet, devoted service. \"How do you want her handled?\" he asked.\n\n\"Alive would be better,\" the Prime replied. \"But she can't get so much as a hint of our existence. Not until the Awakening. Then it won't matter.\"\n\nMention of the goal straightened Tisdale's spine. \"I'll handle it, sir. No worries. It'll make up for the death of\u2014\"\n\n\"Forget about it. Just think about Croft. Your future position depends on how you handle her.\"\n\n\"Sir \u2026 sir?\"\n\n\"Yes?\" The tone suggested that the conversation should be over by now. But Tisdale had to let him know, ask for understanding.\n\n\"I've had my dreams.\"\n\n\"Fantastic!\" More interest in the voice now. \"What were they?\"\n\n\"Murky. Floating. I swam, swam in and out of tunnels. Smooth-sided tunnels.\" Tisdale warmed to the subject; he had to pass on the vision, pure and powerful and as breath-taking as a glassful of vodka, neat. \"Reminded me of one of those documentaries about the circulatory system, where they put a fiber-optic camera up someone's leg.\"\n\n\"Congratulations. You've taken your first step toward immortality.\"\n\n\"Were they like that for you?\"\n\n\"Goodbye, Twenty-eight. We'll talk more after you get Croft. I don't want a call saying you've failed. Understand?\"\n\n\"I understand.\"\n\nTisdale replaced the phone on its hook with a trembling hand and pocketed Frys's cell phone. His head hurt worse than ever."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Lara Croft's King's College lectures were always well attended. The departments closest to her area of expertise, history and classics, would have nothing to do with her\u2014the feeling was mutual\u2014but oddly enough, the geography department was happy to sponsor her whenever she had the time and inclination to give a talk.\n\nThe late autumn rain steamed off her hot Triumph Speed Triple as she detached her hard-shell carryall from the back of the bike and hurried onto the Strand Campus. The carryall held a change of clothes and her computer.\n\nShe strode past the two Greek statues, their marble eyes seeming to look with disapproval upon her wet biking attire as she went to the information booth to verify her room number.\n\nShe was late. A tight-mouthed woman who introduced herself as Miss Wallesley reminded her of that fact. Lara apologized as best as she could, then asked if there was a place that she could change clothes.\n\n\"Hmphf. I should hope so. Follow me, please.\"\n\nThe women's WC outside the theater gave her room to change and warm up her computer while Miss Wallesley stood with crossed arms outside. Lara reorganized her hair before putting on a blouse and did her best to smooth out the wrinkles in the lightweight sports jacket she unrolled.\n\nHer shoulders ached from all the shooting she'd done and the long ride into London. The Triumph was a lightning-quick bike, but the stiff suspension had taken its toll. She tied a Sudanese scarf loosely about her throat\u2014its sandy color complemented the greens and browns in the sports coat nicely\u2014and surveyed the results.\n\nNow she could get away with clomping about in high boots. She looked more Ralph Lauren than Road Warrior.\n\n\"We're fifteen minutes past now,\" Miss Wallesley reminded her as she left the WC.\n\nShe handed the woman her motorcycle jacket.\n\nIf anyone knew the value of time, it was Lara Croft. Her life had hung on seconds more times than she cared to think about. And if there was one thing being a tiger's whisker from death had taught her, it was to filter the essentials of life from the trivial.\n\nTonight was trivial.\n\nBesides, she'd already apologized, and the participants knew she was on the way.\n\nShe strode to the front of the lecture hall to a smattering of applause. The shell-shaped hall was a mixture of old and new: new technology grafted onto blackboards, stairs, and walls as old as the college itself. The audience, ranked stadium style in their fixed plastic chairs, was a mixture of college students and adults. The background chatter quieted as soon as she entered.\n\nMiss Wallesley, for all her fussiness, knew how to set up a computer. Lara worked the presentation slides from her lectern, going point by point through her lecture. Geography, history, ethnography, some interesting myths of the Sudanese\u2026\n\nShe knew from her recent experiences with the Mahdists that some of those myths weren't myths at all. But she kept those memories to herself.\n\n\"\u2014and let me end this presentation with a plea. Though it sounds like something from two centuries ago, the Sudan, and indeed the entire horn of Africa, is still a center of what's left of the international slave trade, not to mention the trafficking in women that still takes place from Indochina to the European Union. Great Britain led the world once in a crusade to lift the burdens forced on innocent shoulders. I ask that your voices persuade her to do so again.\"\n\nShe turned to her final slide, a photograph she'd placed after her summary. It was a telephoto of a line of black figures\u2014men, women, and children chained neck-to-neck in bonds that had changed little since the days of the Romans\u2014being marched in a line down a dirt road in Somalia.\n\nThe students looked at the picture with frowning, lip-biting, brow-furrowing concern. She would have preferred anger. Of course, they hadn't her experience.\n\nThe question-and-answer session was short. There was only one adolescent crack about her love life, instantly booed down by the rest of the audience. She fended off a question about the Paris \"Monstrum\" murders with a frown and a prepared spiel: \"Much of the press is wrong, as usual. I had the misfortune of being the only name involved in the investigation that returned a few photos and hits from the archive searches, so my involvement was\u2014how should I put this?\u2014'sexed up,' to use the current idiotic idiom. Apologies to any of the Fourth Estate present, of course.\n\n\"Any more geographical questions? No? Then I thank King's College, Strand Campus, the geography department, and all of you for your invitation and interest.\"\n\nThe applause was warm, which she preferred to enthusiastic. Enthusiastic was for celebrities\u2014and she hated celebrity.\n\nNaturally, a few diehards clustered about the lectern as she packed up. Are you going to write a book? What's the most beautiful place you've ever been? Where's your favorite place to dive? Are you going to accept the invitation to try out for Britain's biathlon team?\n\nThe last she answered with something other than a shrug.\n\n\"If I were to be an Olympian, I'd want to be in a combined event. You get to compete against men. But I don't have the time, or a good enough horse.\" She noticed a woman with a camel hair coat over her arm tape-recording her answer, but before she could say anything, a magazine was thrust toward her.\n\n\"Please, Lady Croft, would you sign this?\" A pretty girl who looked a bit too young for college, Lara judged from her accent that she was a Hong Kong native, was holding out a road rally magazine with a shot of Lara at the end of her punishing race from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska.\n\n\"Where did you dig up this old thing?\" Lara asked. The magazine was from six years ago.\n\n\"I'm a huge fan,\" the girl gushed. \"I bought it on the Internet.\"\n\nThe idea of having fans struck Lara as a bit absurd\u2014she wasn't a pop star, after all\u2014but people sometimes picked strange idols. She signed the magazine, and the girl snatched it out of her hands with a squeal and rushed off.\n\nNext up was the woman with the camel hair coat and the tape recorder. \"Lara Croft?\" she asked with an American accent. \"I'm Heather Rourke. It's great to finally meet you.\"\n\nHeather Rourke was close to Lara in height and frame. While she was not a beauty, her immaculate makeup made the most of her blue eyes and Celtic cheekbones.\n\n\"Yes, Heather? I hope you enjoyed the lecture. I have a rule against tape-recording, however. As I believe I stated clearly at the outset.\"\n\nThe woman looked disappointed, as though she'd expected to be recognized. \"Yes, but surely that doesn't apply to me.\"\n\n\"Why wouldn't it?\"\n\n\"Haven't you received my letters and calls?\" she asked in turn.\n\nLara searched her memory. Rourke \u2026 Rourke\u2026 \"You're some kind of journalist, aren't you? With a magazine?\"\n\n\"I've written for several. And appeared on TV. I was hoping to do a story on you.\"\n\n\"Sorry, not interested. I do apologize for not recognizing your name. My reading only occasionally gets past the fifteenth century, and I rarely watch television.\"\n\n\"Perhaps we could\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm afraid not. I haven't had much luck with journalists.\"\n\n\"I'd still like\u2014\"\n\nBut Lara had already turned to the next person in line. The press frenzy following Von Croy's murder had only made her more determined than ever to steer clear of reporters.\n\nThe man she had turned to in escaping Heather Rourke was built like a security wall. He wore a cable-knit sweater over a turtleneck. His chest and shoulders resembled a modern art sculpture made out of cannonballs and structural steel pillars. Shaggy\u2014not artfully shaggy, but wet-weather-on-an-oil-rig shaggy\u2014honey blond hair brushed Nordic features. He had black leather gloves on his hands and a matching black waist pouch large enough to carry a knife or a gun.\n\nLara felt a tiny alarm go off in her nervous system and involuntarily tensed. Only men who didn't want to leave fingerprints wore gloves indoors.\n\nBut his soft blue eyes didn't belong to a killer.\n\n\"Please, Miss Croft,\" he said. He was bulky, and awkward about it. She realized he hadn't been at the lecture; a man his size would have been impossible to miss.\n\nHis accent placed him as Norwegian or Danish. Not her night to talk to Londoners, evidently. There was a stiffness about him; he held his arms pressed to his sides like a soldier standing to attention.\n\n\"No way!\" a student said.\n\n\"Quick, get a picture. Lara Croft and the Borg. Beyond cool,\" another added.\n\nA flash went off. She was tired and hungry; everything was going out of balance and fuzzy.\n\n\"I am Nils Bjorkstrom. May we speak together?\" the giant asked. He had anxious anguish in his eyes. \"It is important.\"\n\nShe'd never heard of him. He looked stolid, but didn't have the feel of a military type, and no agency would employ him as a field operative. He stood out too much.\n\n\"Let's step into the hall.\"\n\n\"XXXtreme rules!\" one of the students yelled as she shut the door behind them.\n\nThe hallway was no good either, with students stepping up and back like nervous pigeons.\n\n\"Lady Croft, would you sign my program?\" a very correct jacket-and-tie type asked.\n\nLara signed it absently. Another college boy wanted a picture with her.\n\n\"I'm sony, the flashes are giving me a headache,\" she said. She shrugged away the students and ducked around the corner that was the Norwegian and pulled him to the stairs. He had strong arms; they felt like banisters.\n\n\"What is it, Mr. Bjorkstrom?\"\n\n\"An hour of your time is all I ask.\"\n\nHe didn't look like he was selling anything, and the marketing stick-at-noughts who wanted her to be pictured with their dreck always brandished presentation folios. \"What is this about?\"\n\nWith some difficulty, he retrieved a photograph from his waist pouch. Lara realized that the stiffness she'd noticed in his arms came from the fact that they were both artificial. He had artificial hands, the thumb and forefinger working like pliers within the leather gloves.\n\nHeather Rourke chose that moment to appear at the top of the stairs, card in hand. Lara glared at her, and the journalist shrank away. When she glanced back, she was looking at a photograph of the man before her standing on an Alpine prominence with his arm\u2014flesh and blood, by the look of it\u2014around\u2026\n\nLara felt an emotional stab. A piece of her youth stood grinning into the camera. Blond hair, high cheekbones, frosted blue eyes, and creamy white skin red from windburn, it could only be Alison Jane Harfleur. She looked up at the man. \"You're a friend of Alison's? I haven't seen her in years. How is she?\"\n\n\"I do not know; Ajay has disappeared,\" he said, using her old nickname. \"I am afraid she may be in danger. Please, Miss Croft. I need your help.\"\n\nLara nodded. Ajay, her old friend, in danger\u2026 \"We could grab a bite, if you like, and discuss this in more detail.\"\n\nHe smiled with a nice set of teeth, whitened in the American fashion. \"I do not know London well, but I saw some places between the tube station and here.\"\n\n\"London food's terrible unless you know where to eat. I'll give you a ride, if you don't mind a motorcycle.\"\n\n\"I will follow you. I have a car\u2014specially made.\"\n\nThe ice broken, Lara let her curiosity out.\n\n\"What's Ajay plunged herself into now?\"\n\n\"If I knew for certain, I would go myself and not \u2026 trouble you. She is my intended \u2026 my fiancee.\"\n\nGood for you, Alison. He seems an interesting man \u2026 I bet your parents hate him!\n\n\"Congratulations, Mr. Bjorkstrom.\"\n\nHe winced. \"Please, Nils will do. My friends call me Borg. Something of a joke. I do not mind, and I would be honored to call Lara Croft my friend.\"\n\n\"Then it's Lara, Borg.\" She offered her hand.\n\n\"No, please.\"\n\nShe kept her hand out. Finally, he extended the artificial limb. She grasped the gloved fingers and they shook.\n\n\"Now that the formalities are over, let's eat.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Heather Rourke watched her prospect leave the building with the himbo. Correction: celebrity himbo.\n\nIf Lady Croft thought Heather Rourke could be brushed off so easily, she would soon learn otherwise. She spotted one of the students who'd cheered for \"the Borg\" and taken pictures; he looked to be no more than seventeen. She checked her hair and lipstick in the door glass, put on her best smile, and approached the young man."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Nils Bjorkstrom followed Lara in his car as she made her way through London's eternal traffic stoppages. As she drove, Lara turned the name, the association, over in her mind. Ajay. Alison Jane Harfleur. She'd entered Gordonstoun a year behind Lara.\n\nLike Lara, Alison had been something of an outsider, but while in Lara's case it was because of her interest in archaeology and history, in Alison's it was because of her family's financial circumstances. The Harfleurs were an old name without any of the old money, reduced to living in a decrepit Regency manor house. What funds they had went toward getting their only child a proper education.\n\nThe friendship had begun when Lara returned for her second year. At mealtimes, while the other girls chatted about Saint-Tropez or Marbella or Corfu, sixteen-year-old Lara spoke of Angkor Wat and showed off a backpack she'd discovered there. On a corpse!\n\n\"Not even Coach,\" Elizabeth Lloyd-Patterson sniffed.\n\n\"Where were you in August, Alison?\" another girl asked.\n\nThe Harfleur girl lowered her eyes. \"Back home.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Elizabeth said, attaching immense significance and condescension to the single syllable.\n\n\"Is your mother feeling better?\" Lara broke in. She remembered Alison mentioning that her mother had been in the hospital for a foot operation. Minor surgery, but the others didn't bother with details unless they came off a Paris runway.\n\nRelief flooded sixteen years of keeping up appearances. \"Much better. Very kind of you to ask, Lara.\"\n\nAlison was interested in the backpack story, Von Croy, Angkor Wat. Lara had started calling her Ajay because there was another Allison at Gordonstoun, and in return Ajay called Lara \"LC.\"\n\nLara had liked her in an older sister sort of way. She'd known all too well what it was like to be at the bottom of a feminine pecking order. It had been the same for her when she arrived at Gordonstoun. But unlike her, Ajay lacked the spirit to fight back. When Ajay\u2014something of a late bloomer\u2014burst into a woman's figure, Lara had happily donated some of the \"prissy\" outfits she hated to Ajay.\n\nThe friendship wasn't all one-sided. Ajay was brilliant at chemistry and knew how to parse a literature paper to garner top marks. Lara didn't bother with flowery phraseology; she tended to say what she thought in three brief paragraphs. Drove her lecturers batty. What do you mean, \"Hamlet whines like a desperate, self-centered drip,\" Miss Croft?\n\nLara had exchanged letters and an occasional call with Ajay after she'd moved on to finishing school in Switzerland, but they'd seen less of each other. Lara spent her summers in Greece, Italy, and Egypt. Once in a while they reunited, but they were like two allies who no longer shared a joint war, speaking more of old times than the future. What Ajay provided for Lara as she matured was an appreciative audience for her vacation exploits, something that Lord Croft went out of his way to deny her.\n\nThe girls were reunited when Ajay won a scholarship from a science foundation and joined Lara at the same Swiss finishing school that Lara so despised. Lara hated to even remember its name; she had spent as much time as she could sneaking off the grounds. The skills, habits, and forms the school tried to instill had struck Lara as anachronistic. Though looking back now, she supposed she'd mellowed\u2014a little. At least, the lessons in fencing and horsemanship that she'd taken had come in handy more than once in the years since.\n\nAjay had been a breath of fresh air in that stuffy atmosphere. They became roommates, and their friendship rekindled. Until Mexico.\n\nIt had seemed a simple enough trip at first, a between semesters jaunt to Cancun. The two friends had had fun in the airport, fun on the plane, fun at the hotel, and then fun on the jungle's step pyramids. But then Lara had decided to wander away from the tourist paths, looking for some Olmec burial mounds she'd seen mentioned in an old conquistador diary. Instead of burial mounds, they'd stumbled onto an airstrip with camouflaged bush hoppers.\n\nDrug runners \u2026 or so they assumed. They never got near enough to the cargo to check before the shooting started. Lara had been in danger before\u2014perhaps without quite so many bullets flying around\u2014but she knew how to handle herself. Not so Ajay. The girl had panicked, run screaming into the jungle. It had taken Lara hours to find her. They had been lucky the drug runners hadn't found either of them first.\n\nBack in Switzerland, Ajay started reading Lara's archaeology books, determined to redeem herself in her friend's eyes by becoming as much like Lara as she could. Ajay's precise mind, superb memory, and indefatigable energy now turned toward the arcana of lost civilizations that Lara found so fascinating. Suddenly Lara found that instead of having a friend, she had a disciple.\n\nThey'd finished school and gone their separate ways for a time. Lara had suffered her disastrous' accident in the Himalayas and through it found the strength to chart her own course\u2014even at the cost of being disowned by her father. And then Ajay had contacted her about an expedition to the Black Sea that she'd heard Lara was planning. She wanted in.\n\nOn paper, it made sense. Lara had her eye on a Sarmatian artifact\u2014the Pearl Breastplate. She felt a tickling affinity for the old barbarian tribe, terror of Rome's eastern frontier and allegedly the descendents of the Amazons\u2014and Ajay could speak Russian better than she. Not only that, but Ajay had been studying archaeology and anthropology on a Cambridge Fellows scholarship, specializing in ancient Sarmatia, of all things. Lara put her memories of Mexico aside and welcomed her old friend on board.\n\nTogether, they pieced together a map from details in an old Roman geography treatise by Strabo, then headed into the Caucasus Mountains, looking for the ruins of an all-but-forgotten Sarmatian temple. Despite the trouble in Chechnya, it was a strangely peaceful expedition. Lara didn't use her guns once, though she kept them ready beneath the cloaks and scarves of the native dress. The temple turned out to be mostly collapsed and emptied on the surface, but it extended deep below the ground and required a good deal of spelunking to explore. Not a problem for Lara.\n\nBut once again, Ajay fell short. Lara's would-be prot\u00e9g\u00e9 managed to get lost while crawling through the catacombs. First her light had failed. Then she burned herself with a flare and dropped it down a fissure. Finally, alone in the dark, she hadn't had the sense to use the backup chemical lights that Lara had demanded she carry, and instead had started screaming.\n\nBy the time Lara dragged her out, Ajay was quiet, ashen-faced, and trembling with fear and humiliation. But moments later, she insisted on going back in. Lara, who had been ready to send her home, melted a little at that: She liked a \"get back on the horse\" attitude and was impressed with Ajay's courage. But the rest of the expedition turned out to be as tiresome as a date gone wrong. Lara spent too much time nannying Ajay and not enough thinking about the temple. She felt as though she'd missed something.\n\nIt turned out she had. The Pearl Breastplate ended up in the hands of Larson and Pierre, who'd followed her and done a more thorough job of investigating nooks and crannies. The only souvenirs Lara brought home were a Russian foot fungus and a dispirited partner.\n\nShortly afterwards, just prior to leaving on a trip to Peru, she'd taken Ajay to dinner at an Italian restaurant near Cambridge and did her best to explain why the two of them wouldn't be working together in the field again.\n\n\"You're being unfair,\" Ajay said, pushing her spaghetti Bolognese away.\n\n\"Unfair? Because I care whether a friend of mine lives or dies?\"\n\n\"It's my life to risk.\"\n\n\"You lost your head, Ajay. Just like you did in Mexico.\"\n\n\"That was different.\"\n\n\"Was it? Next time it could get us both killed.\"\n\n\"Then I'll work on my own, so I'm the only one in jeopardy.\"\n\n\"Don't, Ajay. You've so many talents that put you head and shoulders above the crowd. Above me, if you're thinking this is some kind of rivalry.\"\n\n\"Not a rivalry. Partners don't compete.\"\n\n\"There's lots of places to do fieldwork safely. If you think you have to contribute by getting dirty, I can name\u2014\"\n\n\"I want the same thing you do. To know what no one else knows, to touch something no one else has touched since Pharaoh dreamed of his fat cattle eating the lean.\"\n\nLara startled at that. \"That was in my journal. You read my journal?\"\n\n\"No \u2026 I\u2014\"\n\nLara's eyes made her admit the truth.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Lara. After you pulled me out of the dark and started going back in without me \u2026 I needed to see what you thought of me. If you still respected me.\"\n\n\"Chase your own dreams, Ajay. Chasing mine is\"\u2014Lara caught herself on the verge of accusing Ajay of a personality disorder\u2014\"dangerous.\"\n\n\"You were about to use another word,\" Ajay said. \"What was it? Sick? Is that what you think of me, Lara?\"\n\n\"I think it will be better for both of us if we work separately, that's all.\"\n\n\"Fine.\" Ajay pushed back her chair and stood, throwing her napkin down on the table. \"I know when I'm not wanted.\" She turned her back and stalked out of the restaurant.\n\nLara hadn't seen Ajay, or heard from her, since."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Lara drove into Soho and parked the bike in a Tottenham Court alley off of Frith Street. Borg parked in a garage nearby. They met outside a pair of glass doors that read \"Little Italy.\" As they entered, upbeat jazz came over the restaurant's speakers.\n\n\"Lady Croft,\" the maitre d' said, beaming. A few patrons leaned to get a better look at the newcomers.\n\n\"The back room, Johnny,\" Lara said.\n\n\"Of course.\" He led them up a flight of stairs.\n\nLittle Italy's close-walled back room looked as though it should have organized-crime wiseguys leaning over their plates of squid and pasta beneath the closely hung pictures of Italian landscapes and doorways. Instead, well-dressed couples chatted over savory-smelling dishes and bottles of wine. Beneath some of the tables, bags from London's famous department stores bulged with holiday purchases.\n\n\"The tuna's really good,\" Lara suggested as they sat at a table tucked into a private corner. \"The house Chianti is one of the best you can get in London \u2026 or so I'm told. I don't drink alcohol myself.\"\n\n\"Red Chianti, please,\" Borg responded as their waiter asked if they would have anything to drink. The waiter cocked an eyebrow at Lara. She ordered a seltzer water and lime.\n\n\"Dinner is my treat,\" she said, noting the look of alarm that had passed over Borg's features as he glanced at the menu.\n\n\"Thank you,\" he said with a smile. \"Ajay always said you were generous. Her parents thought a great deal of you.\"\n\n\"I wasn't the influence Lord Harfleur hoped I'd be.\"\n\nThe waiter returned with their drinks and poured a taste of the wine into Borg's glass. The big man took a sip, then nodded. \"Very good.\"\n\nThe waiter filled Borg's glass. He took their dinner order, then left them alone.\n\n\"What's happened to Ajay?\" Lara asked. \"What is it that you're afraid of?\"\n\nBorg emptied his glass in one swallow and refilled it from the bottle; there was, Lara noticed, a rough but very real grace in the way he manipulated the mechanisms that served as his hands. \"I met Ajay when she came to me for training. I was already in the papers; 'extreme' sports were becoming popular. I was known for climbing, base jumps, and some cave exploration. Die Welt did an extensive article. She found me through it. There I was, in Iceland, at a photo shoot for some hiking boots, and suddenly she is there.\n\n\"She was so upfront and brash. 'Teach me to do everything you can do,' she said. It was before my accident, when I could do what few others could. At first, I laughed. She asked so many questions. Rappelling, oxygen gear, altitude disorders, lighting for scuba cave dives.\"\n\n\"Learning about a subject was never difficult for Ajay,\" Lara said.\n\n\"Oh, but she worked hard.\"\n\n\"So you took her on.\"\n\n\"More than that.\" His eyes became wet. \"I fell in love. How many women travel to Iceland just to acquire a personal trainer? How many women show such determination to improve?\"\n\nDetermination \u2026 or obsession? Lara wondered. It wasn't the first time she'd asked herself this question with regard to Ajay. Of course, there were times when she'd wondered the same thing about herself.\n\n\"We became \u2026 treasure hunters. She determined \u2026 was determined to restore her family fortune through valuables found this way. I thought it was just a dream, but in my love for her said nothing.\n\n\"We did not meet with success. We could hardly cover our expenses, Lara. Though we had many good times together. Until\u2026\"\n\n\"Your accident?\"\n\n\"We were on a climb in Bulgaria. She was convinced of the presence of a cliffside treasure trove from the days of Darius. I was in the lead; she was tied to me. She slipped. I anchored, pulled her up. She was winded, so I did something foolish. I unhooked from her, knowing that if I lost my footing on the next lateral we would both go down. I was driving another piton to help her across the lateral when I slipped. I landed badly, compound fractures in both arms. We abandoned the climb, but because of my injuries, it took us two days to get to help. The Bulgarian doctors \u2026 they meant well, but all they knew to do was remove the limbs. I did not know until I awoke.\"\n\nLara could imagine what was left unsaid. The agony of walking with broken limbs, the smell of sepsis as the flesh died, waking up in some provincial hospital where they washed the dressings and reused them. Waking up without arms. And always wondering if Ajay could have said something. Done something. Stopped the doctors from performing the unnecessary amputations \u2026 if they were unnecessary.\n\nThere was a moment of silence as the waiter brought their food. Lara dove into her chicken piccata with an appetite. Borg filled his glass again, then continued. \"I despaired, but Ajay helped me through it. The story made me more famous than ever in the media. A fund was started in my name. I had a job as a, what is it they say, color commentator for an American extreme sports cable channel. They paid for arms, special arms, as a stunt, and filmed me using them. I traveled and narrated other shows they did. They called me 'the Borg.' I saw less of Ajay, but I thought I could make enough money with television or a book to help her family. But while I did this, she became involved with them.\"\n\n\"Them?\" Lara's psychic antennae quivered at the inflection.\n\n\"A group. Also treasure hunters, I think. Thought. Now I am not sure. I have had only one conversation with Ajay about them. She disappeared soon after. I think they first contacted her when I was back in Norway, in a special hospital for physical therapy. Or perhaps she contacted them. She sought out treasure-hunting jobs. I know she did some work in the Mideast.\"\n\n\"If my fianc\u00e9 were in hospital, I'd stay a little closer,\" Lara said, and instantly regretted it.\n\nBorg averted his eyes, poured the last of the wine from the bottle.\n\n\"So she just disappeared?\" Lara asked.\n\n\"Four months ago,\" said Borg. \"I tried to find her myself, but I failed. I quit at the cable channel to look for her; they now say 'breach of contract' and will pay me no more money. I know the name and reputation of Lara Croft\u2014most of us in these sports do\u2014and I know you once were a friend to Ajay, so I have come to you. You have perhaps contacts and sources I do not have. Also, there is one other door that is not open to me; I think you can get through it.\"\n\n\"What door is that?\"\n\n\"Lord Harfleur's.\"\n\nLara raised an eyebrow. \"He did not approve of me,\" Borg confessed. \"He wished for Ajay to marry into money and society. I have little of either, by his measure, even with the television job. Our engagement is secret from him.\"\n\n\"You think he knows where she is?\"\n\n\"She wrote him always, wherever she went.\"\n\n\"Then why not you?\"\n\nHis artificial thumb and forefinger clicked closed on the stem of the wine glass again. \"Her mind has been turned against me by this \u2026 group. Not a religion, not a political society. They are, what is the word \u2026 theosophists. Mythologists.\"\n\n\"I thought you said they were treasure hunters.\"\n\n\"That, too.\"\n\n\"Do they have a name?\"\n\n\"I heard her call them the 'Many' once.\"\n\n\"The Many?\"\n\n\"That is what she said.\"\n\n\"So that's what the Scientologists are calling themselves these days.\"\n\n\"No. The 'Many' is an old\"\u2014it took him a moment to find the word\u2014\"cult.\"\n\n\"I've never heard of them, and I know a lot about old cults.\"\n\nBorg shrugged. He emptied his glass. \"I was away too much. Perhaps if I had seen her more, she would have confided in me.\" A maudlin tone had crept into Borg's voice, and he was beginning to slur his words.\n\nLara tried to keep things on subject. \"You still haven't explained why you think she's in danger.\"\n\n\"The Many have done something to her, Lara. Brainwashed her. Or perhaps kidnapped her. The Ajay I know would not just disappear.\"\n\nThe Ajay Lara knew had done exactly that. But she didn't tell Borg. Instead, she said, \"Suppose I go to see Lord Harfleur, and it turns out that Ajay has written to him after all, and those letters are perfectly normal? Suppose they show that she joined the Many of her own free will and is happy to be there? What then?\"\n\n\"Then I will leave her in peace,\" Borg said, though Lara could see the pain it cost him to say so. \"But I do not think you will find that.\"\n\n\"The 'Many,'\" Lara mused, leaning back in her chair. She was tired, sore. \"It's late, Borg. After midnight.\"\n\nHe stirred a bit at that. \"I did not mean to keep you out so late. I have talked too much. Please, if you decide to help, contact me at my hotel.\"\n\n\"Not so fast,\" said Lara. \"You're in no condition to drive anywhere. When I'm in town this late, I usually stay overnight at my office. It's nearer than your hotel, and there's a couch you can use.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "A near-freezing mist flowed through London's streets, creating halos around the streetlights. Lara pulled her motorcycle into the alley behind the Mayfair Croft Trust offices and parked it at the back. Borg unclasped his arms from about her waist and dismounted from the bike. He'd actually apologized outside the restaurant as he'd clasped his prosthetic limbs around her, as though they were something to be ashamed of.\n\nLara unstrapped her hard-sided case from the back of the bike and steered Borg, who was unsteady on his feet, out of the alley. A taxi crawled along the street, its headlamps slowly sweeping by as Lara guided Borg along the elegant iron railings that lined the sidewalk and the small front yards of the townhomes that had stood here since the eighteenth century.\n\nCoping with her case, keys, and a slightly drunk, melancholy dinner companion prevented Lara from noticing anything amiss until the last second. She heard the click of a car door, and suddenly two men appeared from the clipped shrubbery to either side of the white-painted entrance to her office.\n\n\"Someone wants to speak to you,\" a pockmarked man said in a heavy Russian or Eastern European accent. He held a gun close to his side, pointed right at Lara. Next to him, a bronze-skinned man, spindly as a chimney sweep's brush, gripped a pistol tightly, as though afraid it might jump out of his hand.\n\nLara heard a step behind her and turned her head. A black, classic-style London taxi was waiting at the curb. A good-looking man, face pale and strained, held the door open. Lara looked inside the cab, saw handcuffs resting on the seat. The driver was a large but indistinct shape.\n\n\"Lara Croft,\" the pale man said. Like the others, he, too, held a gun. His grip on it was ominously shaky. \"Please get into the car. And your friend.\"\n\nBorg sagged against the rail, breathing hard and gulping. Lara wondered for a moment if he was having a heart attack.\n\n\"We don't need him. Put him down,\" the pockmarked Russian said.\n\nTime slowed as the spindly man raised his gun. Lara readied herself to spring on him, wondering if the bullet from the Russian's gun would kill her before she reached him.\n\nThe Russian struck aside the gun barrel with his free hand. \"No, zjelob. Knock him. In the head. With your gun.\"\n\nThe spindly man took a bowlegged step toward Borg, gun raised high to strike the sagging Norwegian.\n\nA torrent, a waterfall, a tsunami of Chianti-scented vomit poured out of Borg and splattered across sidewalk and the splindly man, whose face took on a look of sheer horror.\n\nGrimacing, the Russian stepped back to keep Borg's vomit off his shoes. Lara acted. She bowled her case at the Russian with a quick underhand throw. His gun fired with a bang and a flash. The case deflected the bullet, then bowled into the shooter's stomach, knocking him off balance. Lara was right behind.\n\nShe got a grip on the Russian's gun hand, encouraged him to let go by bringing her booted heel down hard on his instep. She caught a glimpse of the spindly figure turning his gun toward her before Borg clubbed him across the back of the head with a sweeping blow from his right artificial limb.\n\nA knife appeared in the Russian's other hand, sprouting from his sleeve like a magician's trick flower. He slashed for Lara's throat, but she brought her shoulder up, and the motorcycle jacket absorbed most of the blade.\n\nLara twisted the pocket automatic, trying to wrest it from the Russian's hand. A muffled pop sounded between them, and the pockmarked man grunted. Then Lara was holding the gun, and the Russian was slowly falling to the ground. Judging by the blood that was pumping from his chest, the wound was fatal. In any case, she had neither the time nor the inclination to render assistance. Pivoting on one heel, she dropped to a crouch and pointed the gun at the pale man by the taxi door, who was trembling so badly that he looked as though raw electrical current was coursing through him. He closed his eyes and fired his gun. The crack of Lara's pistol came a split second later.\n\nShe heard his bullet whiz by her ear.\n\nHers struck him in the thigh.\n\nHe cried out, dropping the gun and gripping the leg as it collapsed under him.\n\nThe taxi roared off, its door hanging open, but not before Lara had memorized its license number.\n\nLara glanced at the spindly victim of Borg's strength, who lay stretched out on the sidewalk. His eyes gaped open, lifeless and dry.\n\n\"He is dead,\" Borg said, his voice no longer slurred.\n\n\"This one, too,\" Lara said as she quickly checked the Russian. Then she walked over to the man with the leg wound, who lay whimpering and writhing on the sidewalk. She kicked his dropped gun away, though he seemed in no condition to make a grab for it.\n\n\"Was that Urdmann behind the wheel?\" she asked.\n\n\"Who?\" the man groaned.\n\nThere were no witnesses to what had happened \u2026 at least no visible ones. Lara wondered if any eyes were peeking out through drawn curtains. A siren began to wail in the distance.\n\n\"Lancaster Urdmann.\"\n\nThe man turned so that his weight didn't rest on his injured leg. \"Never heard of him, Croft. Three men with pistols \u2026 You would have done better to just get in the taxi. We'd have made it worth\u2014\" He reached into his suit coat pocket.\n\n\"Drop it,\" Lara ordered, aiming her pistol at his right eye. She felt blood running down her arm from where the Russian's knife had cut through her leather jacket.\n\n\"Take it easy, okay?\" He produced a leather-covered notepad to which a pen was attached by a leather loop. \"I'm going to write down a phone number.\" He removed the pen and clicked it open, but instead of writing, he stabbed downward suddenly and poked himself in the thigh with the point.\n\nLara kicked out, knocking the pen away.\n\n\"Too late, Croft.\" He looked up at her and gave an incongruous giggle. \"At least the headaches will stop now.\" He stiffened, eyes bulging. His body jerked in one terrible spasm, spine arching above the pavement. Then he fell back and lay still."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Lara usually preferred to let dead bodies lie. The less involvement with police, inspectors, and prosecuting attorneys, the better. At least, such had always been her experience, and the recent business with Von Croy, as much farce as tragedy, hadn't exactly changed her opinion.\n\nBut this time the corpses lay on her doorstep. And there must have been eyes peeking out from behind curtains, because it wasn't long before the police arrived. As crime scene technicians and uniformed police hovered about the bodies and set up yellow crime scene tape all around, a constable escorted Lara and a sobered\u2014if not completely sober\u2014Borg off the sidewalk and into the Croft Trust offices: two tiny rooms and a WC, and one larger room with tall, thin windows, a cavernous old fireplace, and a long leather couch, into the comfortable embrace of which Lara and Borg gratefully sank \u2026 but not for long.\n\nLara was taken to one of the smaller rooms and questioned. She told the police everything she knew, which wasn't much. The only real clue she had was the license number of the taxi, and she had no reason to hide it. At last she was allowed back into the larger room, where she found Borg stretched out on the couch, sound asleep under the watchful gaze of the constable. She sat at the big desk from which Gwenn, her sole full-time employee\u2014an ambitious Welsh woman raising a three-year-old daughter while studying for an M.B.A.\u2014ran the day-to-day operations of the Croft Trust.\n\nAfter no more than ten minutes, a uniformed Special Branch man with an expression that would have won him a role in a commercial for indigestion medication came stomping into the room. He removed his checkered hat with a snap, rested it atop a clipboard, and held it in place with a thumb. He nodded at the constable, then at Lara.\n\n\"Lady Croft.\"\n\nShe got to her feet. \"Captain Dools.\" She was surprised to see Dools. He'd been peripherally involved in the investigation of Von Croy's murder, but his beat was international terrorism, not street crime, however bloody. \"Am I under arrest?\"\n\n\"Not yet. Come with me,\" he added softly, motioning to the snoring form of Borg. \"No need to wake Sleeping Beauty.\"\n\nLara followed him back into the room where she'd been questioned. There was a fold-out couch, a small desk, and a full bookcase. In one corner was a midget refrigerator and, next to it, a rolling cabinet with a coffeemaker and an electric teakettle on top. Lara decided to remind Dools, gently, that he was on her turf. \"Please, Captain, have a seat. Can I get you some coffee? Tea?\"\n\n\"Just some answers, please, Lady Croft. What happened out there?\"\n\nLara perched on the edge of the couch. \"My dinner companion, Mr. Bjorkstrom, and I were at the door when three men accosted us. They were armed, we weren't, but I don't think they were expecting us to fight back. Borg\u2014Mr. Bjorkstrom, that is\u2014killed one of the men in self-defense. The second shot himself as I struggled with him for his gun. The third man shot at me, but he missed. I didn't. At that point, the driver of the taxi decided to make himself scarce, which he did. I tried to question the third man, the one I wounded, but he stuck himself with that pen you have in an evidence bag.\"\n\nDools was scribbling notes on his clipboard. \"Did you recognize any of the men who attacked you?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nHe glanced up. \"Perfect strangers, eh? No idea who they might be?\"\n\n\"You're the ones with the computers and fingerprint kits,\" Lara said.\n\n\"Quite.\" Dools consulted his clipboard. \"The cab number you gave us checked out. A missing vehicle, presumed stolen. I'm sure it's been dumped somewhere. Odd set of bodies out there. One scrawny, bowlegged, unidentified male, possibly Middle Eastern, without so much as a penny in his pocket. We've just sent his prints on to Interpol. One dermatologist's nightmare with false ID but a face that matches Anatoli Egorov, who has stops for questioning on three different EU lists. Possible terrorist connections. Then there's Eric Tisdale, the bloke who stuck himself with the poisoned pen.\"\n\n\"Another terrorist?\" Lara asked. \"He didn't strike me as the type. Seemed more like an accountant, to tell the truth.\"\n\nDools flashed a grin at her. \"And so he was. An accountant with a record as clean as a hospital sheet. Like I said, an odd set. Hard to imagine them sharing a bottle of sauce at a chip stand, let alone accosting Mayfair citizenry.\"\n\n\"Nevertheless,\" Lara said, recognizing a pregnant pause when she heard one.\n\n\"That pen of yours that stuck Tisdale\u2014\"\n\n\"Captain Dools, please. It wasn't my pen, or Mr. Bjorkstrom's. Save the quiz show traps for someone who is actually guilty of a crime.\"\n\n\"Humor me,\" Dools said evenly. \"There are some strange stories associated with your name floating around the Home Office, Lady Croft. The Von Croy murder wasn't the first time you've come to our attention. I hear you've left bodies on every continent save Antarctica.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't be so sure of that. Blowing snow can cover a lot of\u2014\"\n\n\"Spare me your wit.\"\n\n\"If you spare me your innuendo. What does this have to do with Her Majesty's Special Branch, Captain?\"\n\n\"The streets of London are difficult enough without multiple homicides filling the papers and setting up a row.\" He lowered his voice. \"Privately, at least as far as Egorov goes, you've just saved the taxpayers arrest, trial, and incarceration expenses. Publicly, this is the second time I've had to clean up bodies you've left scattered on the London pavement. I'd like it to be the last, or I'll find something you are guilty of and make it stick. Friends at the Home Office or no.\"\n\nLara felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. \"If it's a choice between a jail cell and a cemetery plot, Captain, I'll take the cell. Now, do you have any more questions, or should I call my attorneys?\"\n\n\"Yes, there is one more thing. We recovered a body from a car wreck at the base of a mountain this morning in Scotland. The victim was a retired doctor of archaeology at the University of Glasgow, name of Frys. Turns out he called your office twice this morning before the, er, accident. And here's a funny coincidence: Our chartered accountant, Tisdale, had a receipt for a petrol purchase in Scotland yesterday tucked into his wallet, as well as a cellular phone belonging to the late Professor Frys in his jacket pocket. Odd, that. If you can shed any light on how the lines are connected in the triangle between you, Tisdale, and Frys, I'll think better of you.\"\n\nLara felt the room sway for just a moment as the importance of what the Special Branch man had said sank in.\n\nA picture popped into her head, a thoughtful university publicity shot. Of course. Dr. Stephen Frys. Now she remembered him. One of Von Croy's old cronies, part of the \"Dawn Club\" that met for breakfast once a year, archaeologists and anthropologists and classicists, mostly. The Dawn Club had put out a quarterly journal in the fifties and sixties, but it had died off. The surviving members still met occasionally. She'd even gone to one of their meetings as Von Croy's guest \u2026 and been bored to distraction.\n\nSo this wasn't an old enemy like Urdmann trying to pay off blood with blood, as she'd assumed. Frys had retired years ago, and hadn't done any actual fieldwork for decades before that. What could Frys have wanted with her? Whatever it was, it seemed that someone had been willing to kill him over it \u2026 and to kill her, too. Yet she had no idea what it could be.\n\n\"Care to shed any light?\" Dools invited again.\n\n\"No.\" Lara showed him the office phone log and played back the voice mail messages. Sure enough, Dr. Frys's calls were among them.\n\nShe put the dead man's voice on speakerphone. Miss Croft, this is an old colleague of Dr: Von Croy's, Dr. Frys. I must meet with you at your earliest convenience. Please call me back as soon as possible.\n\nA moment of silence. Then: \"If I knew what it was about, I'd tell you, Captain.\"\n\n\"According to the records, Frys called twice. Where's the other message?\"\n\nShe skipped ahead, but there was no other message from Frys. \"He must have just hung up the second time,\" Lara guessed. \"Look, Captain Dools, I want to find out what's going on as much as you do. More. Someone just tried to kill me. They may try again.\"\n\n\"We'll keep an eye on the place tonight,\" Dools said, passing her his card. \"If you think of anything else, call me.\" He turned to go. \"Oh, and one more thing: Don't leave the country without checking with me first. I'm putting a stop on your passport, just in case. And on your friend's, too.\"\n\nLara sighed. It might have been easier just to let herself be kidnapped."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "\"Coffee, tea?\" she asked Borg after the police finally left. They'd photocopied Gwenn's call log. It was after 3 A.M.\n\n\"Tea, please,\" Borg said. The fight and the police questioning had cemented something between them: In the space of six hours, he'd gone from stranger to ally.\n\nBorg looked at a framed print above a small sofa, a silhouette of a woman engaged in an inverted climb up a question-mark-shaped rock, literally hanging on by her fingernails. Chinese characters drawn in cloudlike brushstrokes stood out against a polarized blue sky.\n\nHe glanced at her, waiting for the light on the electric teakettle. \"This is you, correct? The ponytail?\"\n\n\"Correct. It's one of those business inspirational posters. You know, picture of a skier or something, an exhortation involving excellence below. This one only sold in East Asia. Milk or lemon?\"\n\n\"Milk. What do the characters say?\"\n\n\"Chinese proverb: Fall down seven times, get up eight.\"\n\n\"Ajay would have liked that.\"\n\nThe kettle light went out. Lara made the tea. \"Do sit down.\"\n\nShe carried the tray over, placed the cup before him. He fumbled with the sugar packet.\n\n\"I'll be mother,\" Lara said. In a proper English tea, whoever poured and fixed was known as \"mother.\" She smiled at herself. Breakfast at eight in the evening in the Seychelles, teatime at three-thirty in the morning: The only consistent thing about her life was its lack of routine. \"Would you like sugar?\"\n\n\"I can do it myself.\"\n\nPerhaps being watched made him nervous. She walked over to the desk, flicked on the computer. \"Are you going to be in London long?\"\n\n\"I have taken too much of your time. I will drive back to my hotel as soon as I have finished the tea.\"\n\n\"You're not in any state to drive, Nils,\" she said. \"You're staying right here, on the sofa.\"\n\n\"I do not wish to deprive you of your bed\u2026\"\n\n\"You're not. There's a fold-out couch in the other room. So that's settled. Tomorrow I'll drive out to the Harfleur House and see what I can find out about Ajay. By the way, you handled yourself well out there. Vomiting was an inspiration.\"\n\nBorg winced, and his face turned bright red. \"I'm not used to having guns pointed at me. I was scared out of my senses. And the wine \u2026 I apologize.\"\n\n\"Apologize nothing,\" she said. \"You saved our lives.\"\n\nBorg sipped his tea. \"Those men. Alive one moment, and then dead. So fast. A friend of mine died once when we BASE jumped, but that was different. It was an accident, and I did not actually see it. Just his body, afterward. Now I've killed a man. I've killed someone. Will they arrest me?\"\n\n\"I doubt it. If Dools was going to arrest either one of us, he would have done it already.\"\n\n\"You do not seem upset, Lara,\" Borg observed. \"Have you killed men before?\"\n\n\"I have,\" she said after a moment. \"But I take no pleasure in it. We both acted in self-defense, Nils. Try to remember that. They would have killed us without hesitation.\"\n\n\"I know. But still, taking the life of a fellow human being, even a criminal \u2026 It is hard to bear.\"\n\n\"It is,\" Lara agreed. \"But would you prefer that it was easy?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Borg. \"I would not.\"\n\n\"Neither would I,\" said Lara. \"Now, let's see if we can get some sleep.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Ajay's family may have fallen on hard times, but Harfleur House still possessed a certain aloof grandeur. It stood behind a line of smaller, but somehow more ostentatious, houses; at some point, the Harfleurs had sold much of the lands of their estate, and only some hedges now separated the old country society from the new. The narrow windows at the front of the house, three rows of them, and the slightly higher square turrets at either end, put Lara in mind of one of Lord Nelson's battleships. It wouldn't have surprised her to see cannon emerge from hidden gun ports.\n\nLara had risen early that morning to find Borg already awake. He'd wanted to come with her to the Harfleurs, but Lara thought that would be counterproductive, given the feelings of Ajay's father. Borg had reluctantly agreed. Then Lara had called her usual car service and arranged for transportation to Harfleur House. She owned several cars, garaged at her aunt's old mansion and in London for her frequent trips in and out of Heathrow, but didn't employ a full-time driver. She liked to work her own gearshift. But her shoulder was sore from the shallow wound inflicted by the Russian the night before, and she felt that she deserved a little pampering.\n\nA crowd of reporters was gathered outside the office, waiting for her to emerge; news of last night's dustup had obviously gotten out. While waiting for the car to show, Lara called Gwenn to prepare her for what awaited at the office. When the car arrived, a Rolls-Royce, she waded through the throng, ignoring the shouted questions and popping flashes, and jumped into the backseat. She'd told Borg to wait five or ten minutes, then leave the offices by the back door; hopefully, no one would see him. She could just imagine what the gossip columnists would make of Lara Croft and \"the Borg.\"\n\nA graying gardener in a misbuttoned cardigan clipped at some tired hedges as the Rolls turned into the driveway leading to the house. Lara saw the outlines of old flower beds given over to hostas and juniper shrubs, or just replaced with grass.\n\nThe car pulled into the turnaround, and Lara stepped out. Someone had done a careful job of turning the central fountain into a fishpond. A torpid goldfish opened its mouth to her.\n\nThe window frames needed work. The wood was rotting under the paintwork, but a cheery holiday wreath hung from the imposing double front doors. Lara climbed the marble stairs with a feeling of d\u00e9ja vu. It had been years since she'd come here, yet in a way, it felt like just yesterday. She half expected to see her younger self come running around the corner. She took a breath and pressed the bell. Three chimes sounded from within.\n\nAjay's mother opened the door, looking a lot older than the last time Lara had seen her. In fact, had she passed Lady Harfleur on the street, Lara doubted she would have recognized the woman. But Lady Harfleur, for her part, recognized Lara at once.\n\n\"Why, Lady Croft,\" she sang. \"What a delightful surprise! It's been ages since we had the pleasure of seeing you.\"\n\n\"Lady Harfleur,\" Lara said, keeping with the formalities. \"I apologize for just stopping by like this, out of the blue.\"\n\n\"Nonsense, dear. Please come in. What a lovely car. Don't have your driver trouble; it's fine where it is. Lord Harfleur is working his way through the Times, but I know he'll want to see you.\"\n\n\"I've come about Ajay \u2026 Alison,\" Lara began, but Lady Harfleur waved a hand airily as she led Lara through a grand hall almost devoid of furniture.\n\n\"I think it's wonderful that you two have stayed such close friends,\" Lady Harfleur chirped.\n\n\"Close \u2026 friends,\" Lara repeated, not sure she'd heard correctly.\n\n\"Oh, yes. Alison writes to us regularly about all your exploits together. I must say, you certainly lead an exciting life! Well, here we are.\" She knocked at a stout oak door, then pushed it open. \"Dear, look who's come to visit.\"\n\nLord Harfleur was much as Lara remembered him: a thin-haired cross between George Sanders and Jacques Chirac. He wasn't reading the Times. Ajay's father was asleep at his desk in front of a portable television: Some Latin American variety show featuring girls dressed mostly in sequins and a host with mother-of-pearl teeth played silently on the screen. A thin wire ran from the TV to the earpiece that lay on his lordship's shoulder.\n\n\"Dear!\"\n\nLord Harfleur's eyes popped open. Lady Harfleur reached across the desk and hit a button on the television as though she were killing a spider and making sure of it, and the TV died.\n\n\"Look who's stopped by to say hello.\"\n\nLord Harfleur rubbed his eyes and stood. He evinced not the slightest surprise at the unannounced guest. \"Hmph. So nice to see you again, Lara. Ajay's told us so much about your work together.\"\n\n\"Yes, well\u2026\"\n\nLord Harfleur frowned. \"Don't know as I approve entirely. The papers have the most lurid stories about you. Still, you've always had the decency to keep Alison out of the press.\"\n\nLara nodded and smiled, trying to sort things out. Had Ajay invented an entire relationship with Lara and played it out for her parents? It seemed unthinkable, and yet what other explanation was there for what she was hearing? Still, she thought it best to go with the flow for now. \"How is your brother, your lordship? I remember him very well from my visits all those years ago.\"\n\n\"He's puttering around in the garden somewhere.\" His face broke into a smile. \"Always manages to find his way home by dark.\"\n\nLara thought of the man in the misbuttoned cardigan. Not the gardener after all, apparently\u2026\n\n\"Tea, Lara, dear?\" Lady Harfleur put in.\n\n\"No, thank you. I can't stay long. I've come about Alison, actually.\"\n\nLord Harfleur reached into his shirt pocket and extracted a pack of cigarettes with a book of matches stuck in the plastic. \"Dear, I'd like a cup, even if our guest doesn't. Why don't you bring tea for three in here? She might change her mind.\"\n\n\"Our help has to be off sometimes,\" Lady Harfleur confided to Lara with a trill of laughter that sounded practiced. Then she turned back to her husband. \"If you're going to smoke, at least open a window. And put on your jacket, so you don't take your death.\"\n\nLady Harfleur hobbled out, and his lordship went to the window, opened it with a grunt, and lit up. He shook out his match with a smooth, thoughtless gesture, then tossed it out the window. His lordship must have been very attractive in his prime, Lara decided. Even if his family's fortune had run out, he still had the grace of those to the manner born.\n\nHe offered the pack to Lara.\n\n\"I don't smoke,\" she said.\n\n\"Thought all you young things smoked on the sly to keep yourselves so thin.\"\n\n\"I prefer to exercise,\" Lara said.\n\nLord Harfleur grunted. Clearly, he disapproved of exercise, at least for women. \"So you've come about Alison, eh, Croft? What's she got herself mixed up in now?\"\n\n\"I'm not quite sure, but I think she could be in some trouble.\"\n\nHis lordship blew a lungful of carcinogens out the window. \"And whose fault is that?\"\n\nLara sighed. \"Look, Lord Harfleur, I don't know what Alison may have been telling you about the two of us, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Lies,\" said Lord Harfleur bitterly.\n\n\"I beg your pardon?\"\n\n\"You heard me. She made it all up, or most of it, anyway. A father knows.\" He gazed sadly at Lara. \"Alison \u2026 is not quite right.\" He tapped the side of his head. \"Took a wrong turn somewhere. Known for years. It's the money, you see. Don't give a tinker's cuss about it myself, but it matters to her more than anything. I tried to get her help, but she wouldn't hear of it. Stormed out. Haven't seen her since. Just letters. Letters filled with lies about the two of you going off on your expeditions together. A lot of rubbish about restoring the family fortune, the family name.\"\n\n\"I-I'm sorry,\" Lara said. \"I didn't know.\"\n\n\"Not your fault,\" Lord Harfleur said, but he looked at her as if he didn't quite believe that. \"Lady Harfieur doesn't suspect a thing,\" he added, dropping his voice to a whisper. \"And I prefer to keep it that way. It would break her heart if she knew.\"\n\n\"I understand. I won't say anything. But if Alison has written you lately, there may be a clue in those letters about what she's up to.\"\n\nBefore Lord Harfleur could reply, his wife arrived with tea on a tray. She poured a cup for her husband.\n\n\"Thank you, dear,\" he said. \"Lara was just telling me about her latest project with Alison.\"\n\nLady Harfieur smiled. \"I expect you'll be going down to join them soon. Buenos Aires is beautiful this time of year! And that doctor friend of yours, the jungle surgeon: What a brilliant man! So thoughtful, too. He autographed one of his books for us, didn't he, dear?\"\n\n\"That he did,\" said Lord Harfleur.\n\nLady Harfleur crossed the room to a coffee table cluttered with an assortment of magazines and books. She picked up a large book and brought it to Lara.\n\nLara took it. The book was titled Rare Flora of the Amazon Basin. The name of the author was Dr. Tejo Kunai. There was something familiar about that name, but Lara couldn't place it at first.\n\n\"He's Portuguese, I believe,\" Lady Harfleur rattled on. \"Studies native medicines and all that. Quite famous in his field, apparently. Been in The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine. But then, you know all that!\"\n\nThen she had it. Kunai \u2026 Not Urdmann's Kunai?\n\nLara opened the book at random. Photographs of silver white blossoms in close-up against a dark background filled the page. \"Beautiful,\" she said.\n\n\"Yes, isn't it?\"\n\nLara turned to the back flap and looked at the picture of Dr. Tejo Kunai. An older man with delicate, dark features looked back at her in black-and-white sagacity. She'd never seen him before.\n\n\"Perhaps you'd like to see Alison's old room, dear?\" Lady Harfleur asked.\n\n\"I'd love to,\" Lara said, putting the book down on the edge of Lord Harfleur's desk.\n\n\"I'll leave you women to it,\" Lord Harfleur grunted. \"Think I'll join Roddy in the garden.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "Upstairs, Lady Harfleur opened the door to Ajay's room and ushered Lara inside. It hadn't changed much in the years since Lara had last seen it. Pictures of out-of-date pop idols were on the walls, along with some framed photographs of Lara and Ajay from their various schools and the trips to Mexico and the Caucasus. But there were none more recent.\n\n\"Lara, I brought you up here so we could speak privately,\" Lady Harfleur said after she'd shut the door behind them. \"Just between you and me, I realize that much of what Alison has told us over the years about your partnership is, shall we say, an exaggeration.\"\n\nLara couldn't hide her surprise. \"You know?\"\n\n\"A mother always knows. But Lord Harfleur, bless his trusting heart, doesn't suspect a thing. For his sake, I pretend to believe all that she writes us.\"\n\n\"But Alison went to Buenos Aires for a reason,\" Lara pointed out. \"She didn't make that up.\"\n\n\"No, she didn't. And to be perfectly frank, I'm worried about her.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"There's a bit of her grandfather in Alison. Not my father, but his lordship's. He was a gambler, liked long odds, didn't know when to quit. He kept trying to win back the family fortune. Wound up squandering what little was left of it.\"\n\nLara nodded. \"There's a bit of that in the Croft family tree, too. And now you think that Alison is following his example?\"\n\nLady Harfleur nodded grimly. \"Only it's her own life she's gambling with. Or that is my fear.\" She fixed a steely gaze on Lara. \"Tell me the truth, Lara. Is she after some bit of jewel that you are, too? Is that why you've come to see us?\"\n\n\"No.\" For a moment, she considered telling her about Borg, but then decided to keep silent about his involvement for now. \"I heard from mutual friends that Alison might have gotten into something over her head. My sole concern is for her well-being. You have my word on that, Lady Harfleur.\"\n\nLady Harfleur nodded and glanced out the window, where Lord Harfleur could be seen talking to the man whom Lara had taken for the gardener. \"Alison idolizes you, Lara. She's tried to remake herself in your image. I saw it happening, tried to get her to see what she was doing, but she wouldn't listen. And now, these letters and postcards from Buenos Aires, all filled with promises of a rosy future, the family fortune restored. You don't suppose she's been brainwashed, like that Hearst woman, do you?\"\n\n\"Brainwashed by whom? Judging from his book, Dr. Kunai doesn't seem like the type to go in for that sort of thing.\"\n\n\"No, I suppose not\u2026\" Lady Harfleur bent to straighten a tousled comforter that lay at the foot of Ajay's bed. \"Oh, how did this get here?\"\n\nLara leaned closer.\n\nLady Harfleur pulled a thick and obviously ancient leather-bound Bible from beneath the comforter. \"Been in the family for centuries. All sorts of notations about the Harfleurs, going back to Henry VIII.\"\n\n\"What's bookmarked?\" asked Lara, interested as always in old things. The tip of a satin ribbon, faded to the color of thin tea, peeked from between the closed pages.\n\n\"It's bookmarked? Why, so it is. I don't have my glasses; would you mind?\"\n\nLara took the Bible and opened it to the marked page. It was in the Book of Daniel. A line of italicized text caught her eye, the fearful magic words that foretold doom for a nation:\n\nMene, mene, tekel, upharsin.\n\n\"Numbered, numbered\u2026,\" she translated the phrase from the Aramaic.\n\nWhat had Borg said? The Many? The Mene? The Numbered?\n\n\"What's this?\" Lady Harfleur pulled at the edge of a piece of paper that had emerged from between two pages when Lara opened the book.\n\nOn the paper was a pencil-rubbed etching that reminded Lara of the Greek letter Omega: \u03a9.\n\nWritten beside it, in Ajay's precise handwriting, were the date and location of the rubbing: the ruins of Smyrna, sixteen months ago.\n\n\"Why, look at that date!\" Lady Harfleur exclaimed. \"Lara, she must have been here! Snuck in and out without ever telling us, like a common thief!\"\n\n\"Except she didn't take anything,\" Lara said. \"Instead, she left this behind. Almost as if she wanted you to find it.\" Or wanted me to find it, she added silently to herself.\n\n\"But why would she do such a thing?\" Lady Harfleur asked.\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\nOmega was the last letter in the Greek alphabet; it often had the metaphorical connotation of the end, an ending \u2026 In electrical engineering terms, omega signified resistance. Might Ajay's mysterious new associates in Buenos Aires have a political agenda, a resistance movement dedicated to ending the current Argentine government? But then again, the symbol wasn't even a proper omega. It was thicker in the center, like a worm, and thin at the tips\u2014which curled up slightly, something Lara had never seen in representations of the Greek letter.\n\nSo perhaps it wasn't Greek. She recalled that Urdmann had told her Kunai had asked him about an ancient Babylonian text. Did the Babylonians employ a similar character?\n\nThere were too many possibilities. She didn't even know if it was the same Kunai.\n\n\"Lady Harfleur, did Alison ever mention a group called 'The Many' or something similar in any of her letters?\"\n\n\"I don't believe so,\" Lady Harfleur replied after a moment's thought. \"Why? Is it important?\"\n\n\"It may be. I just don't know.\" She glanced again at the symbol. \"Do you mind if I keep this?\"\n\n\"Take it, please. Whatever you need to find Alison and bring her home. You are going after her, aren't you?\"\n\n\"I'm going to do what I can,\" Lara promised. \"Ajay and I were best friends once. I still care about her.\"\n\n\"Bless you, dear. If you find her, will you give her a message from me?\"\n\n\"Of course I will.\"\n\n\"Tell her, 'Bugger the money, bugger the family name, bugger whatever destiny she thinks she has to fulfill \u2026 Bugger all of it. Just come back home.'\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "\"Give me a few days to run all this down,\" Lara said over the phone to Borg as she told him about her interview with Lord and Lady Harfleur. \"It's got to fit together somehow. We might do better to chase this Tejo Kunai than Ajay. If we find him, we'll probably find her.\"\n\n\"I want to go with you, if you're going after her.\"\n\nLara turned it over in her head. She preferred to work alone, but then she tried to put herself in Borg's shoes. \"Don't leave or switch hotels without calling me, okay?\" she directed. God, she was sounding like Dools.\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nBack at the manor, she breezed in and immediately gave Winston the rest of the day off. The last thing she needed were wheezy exhortations to be more careful on London's streets. She almost missed her days as a recluse.\n\nShe needed some time in her library and archives.\n\nCroft manor had, deep within its foundation, a secret room that dated back to the English Civil War. One reached it through a wall panel and a narrow staircase; it was easy to imagine Cavaliers sitting there over a candle plotting confusion to the Roundheads. In the springtime quiet before the Blitz of 1940, her grandfather had turned it into a bomb shelter, adding a better ventilation system and electric lighting. About the time of the Berlin Uprising in the early fifties, it was upgraded again with its own stove, a diesel generator in a separate room, a thicker security door, and additional storage space for the household staff, which, at that time, numbered six people.\n\nLara made the next modifications, adding fiber-optic lines for a security system and converting the whole thing into a four-room, walk-in safe. Cold-forged steel cages held the treasures she'd picked up around the world.\n\nThe ones that were too dangerous, or too valuable, for public display.\n\nThe two larger, better-lit rooms held her private library. Well, not all of it was hers: Von Croy had willed her his collection, acquired in turn from other sources. She checked her index\u2014an Oxford postgrad student had helped her with the dreary task of cataloguing\u2014and found what she wanted, Von Croy's old copy of the Dawn Roundtable Record.\n\nShe brought up a folio containing letters from Frys to Von Croy. Lara had mixed feelings about Von Croy. She owed much of her identity to him; he had awakened her desire to rediscover what was lost to the world. Under his guidance, she'd looked at 100,000-year-old skulls in the Klasies River Mouth Caves in South Africa and found imprints of an ear of wheat from the seventh millennium B.C. at the Mehrgarh dig in Pakistan. He'd told her stories about the real-life King Pakal, elevated by the Mayan to the rank of maize god after his death and shown, on the imposing, carved lid of his sarcophagus, surrounded by elaborate, stylized religious icons. Great people, long forgotten and waiting to be rediscovered by the intrepid and intellectually curious.\n\nBut Von Croy could be so damned obtuse at times\u2014a source of wisdom but full of concealed knowledge and uncertain motivations, like the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. He'd often dropped dark hints that the world was not what Homo sapiens thought it to be. \"There are powers and histories beyond our poor, insignificant perception,\" he used to croak, sounding like some leathery old crocodile god from the upper Nile. \"Probe too far, and we may be swallowed up like a fish so intent on a wriggling worm that it doesn't see the snapping turtle coming up behind it.\"\n\nThe letters from Frys to Von Croy were in the same vein. Apparently, a paper titled \"The M\u00e9ne and Other Faiths of Proto-Ur\" had troubled both of them in its original form. Von Croy had suggested at first that they publish everything their research had uncovered, holding nothing back, but Dr. Frys had responded from Scotland with alarm:\n\nMadness, Werner. Either we'll be accused of a hoax\u2014the Piltdown man of the archaeological world\u2014or, God forbid (ha!), we'll be taken seriously. It would be a revelation that could cause an intellectual cataclysm. What is man, that they aren't now mindful of him? If I may quote the gentleman from Providence: \"The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.\"\n\nVon Croy's next letter must have agreed, for Dr. Frys had calmed down by the following correspondence, dated a week later.\n\nI believe the new version, with just the sampling of proto-Ur text (we really must come up with a name for this language; how does Froyan sound?) is satisfactory. Just the suggestion that another civilization, advanced at least to the level of Rome's, existed prior to the last ice age will cause us more than enough grief. With the texts gone, we needn't worry that others will look into the guessed-at web that held together a civilization encompassing the entire Pacific Rim and beyond, even unto Arabia and Africa.\n\nBut in the letter after that, only a week later, Frys was hysterical again.\n\nNo! No! and a thousand times No! We can't mention them. Not a footnote, or I'll destroy the collection.\n\nLara read it twice. There was no mention of what Frys meant by \"them.\" But it was like listening to one end of a phone conversation. She wished she had Frys's half of the correspondence, the letters that Von Croy had sent to him, but Von Croy evidently didn't keep copies of friendly collegial correspondence.\n\nHad this old research cost Frys his life?\n\nAnd where did Ajay and Kunai fit in? She did a LEXIS-NEXIS search for the name Tejo Kunai, and variations thereof, but found no evidence of anyone by that name other than the author of the book that Lady Harfleur had shown her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "After dinner, Lara went to the indoor pool to relax. Her grandfather had built the pool to be big and deep, but inspiration from her mother had made it beautiful after Lara had inherited it.\n\nVisitors always thought that Lara had designed the mosaics of Artemis and Helen, the dolphins and the seabirds, the soothing aqua, gray, and sea-foam tones contrasted with deeper browns. But she'd taken the images from a painting her mother had done while bedridden during pregnancy\u2014her mother had been subject to miscarriages. Mum had once theorized that Lara's passion for the classical world was the outcome of her poring through books of Greek, Roman, and Levantine art for inspiration.\n\nThe water felt like melted snow. She didn't heat the pool; its chill gave her body a wake-up call. There were a number of questions she had to consider. She dove and swam laps and finally framed the questions properly.\n\n1. What was it about the M\u00e9ne that had so frightened Professor Frys and Von Croy?\n\n2. Why did Tejo Kunai, and presumably Alison Harfieur, want this frightening piece of knowledge or information, presumably in the possession of Frys?\n\n3. Why had Kunai gone to see Urdmann?\n\nIt was clear to her that Kunai wanted something having to do with the M\u00e9ne cult. She listed the possibilities: an artifact; the reputation that would come with publication of the discoveries Frys and Von Croy had feared to reveal; even, perhaps, the resurrection of the cult itself. That was why Kunai had gone to see Urdmann: for his expertise, yes, but also because of his reputation as someone who could be trusted not to involve the police in anything illegal.\n\nAfterward, he must have threatened Frys, and Frys had tried to contact her for help. But Kunai had gotten to him first.\n\nAnd very nearly gotten to her as well.\n\nClearly, Kunai was a dangerous man. It was hard to square these actions with the dignified portrait of an elderly gentleman on the back flap of the book that Lady Harfleur had shown her. Still, Lara knew very well that appearances could be deceiving. How often had men underestimated her simply because she happened to be attractive?\n\nBut where did Ajay fit into everything? Why had she secretly returned to Harfleur House? And why had she left that strange symbol for Lara to find? Was it a clue, a cry for help? Or a taunt?\n\nWas Ajay the innocent, brainwashed victim that Borg imagined her to be? Lara didn't share his confidence in that explanation. Her history with Ajay wouldn't permit it. She had to consider the possibility that Ajay was Kunai's willing accomplice.\n\nIt struck her suddenly that Borg might be part of the plot; How much did she know about him, really?\n\nSighing, Lara pulled herself from the pool. There were too many questions and not enough answers. But she had an idea where she might be able to find some.\n\nFirst, though, she needed to call Dools and get the stop taken off her passport."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "The sun and surf of Mauritius made a welcome break from England's dreary December.\n\nLara's reconnaissance of Lancaster Urdmann's estate from the wheel of a rented Land Rover found no obvious gaps in security. She parked the Rover where it couldn't be seen from the road and observed the gatehouse through binoculars. Anyone who approached the formidable closed gates had to pull up next to a bunkerlike station that housed a single guard.\n\nLara waited until the guard picked up a magazine, rose from his chair, and disappeared into the WC at the back of the bunker. Then she ran over to the gatehouse and jumped up on the ledge in front of the window to get a look through the armored glass. While listening for the sound of a toilet flush, she noted that the gate-open button next to the window required a key. Then she saw her photograph on a clipboard.\n\nUrdmann had gone so far as to do a few mock-ups of her in sunglasses, a hat, even a man's beard and sideburns. In big letters at the bottom was a sum of rupees that would allow a guard to retire in style for spotting and apprehending her.\n\nWhy would Urdmann be expecting another visit from her? She'd told no one, not even Borg\u2014whom she'd told to wait for her call\u2014of her plans to return to Mauritius. No one except Dools, that is, and she knew better than to suspect that straight arrow of any mischief.\n\nShe'd entered the country quietly, under a fake French passport. At first she'd been tempted to simply call Urdmann and offer him a drink in the hotel bar. Perhaps the two of them could discuss Kunai and the M\u00e9ne in a civilized fashion. After all, the bullet wound she'd given him\u2014a scratch, really\u2014had only settled an account that went back to her earliest days as a Tomb Raider.\n\nBefore the inheritance from her aunt, Lara had been supporting herself on a shoestring budget after her parents had cut her off for refusing to marry that awful prig, the Earl of Farringdon. Urdmann had offered to take a set of Aztec artifacts off her hands at a price she later learned had undervalued the Sun Stones of Quetzalcoatl by 20 percent. Nor had he turned them over to the Mexican National Archives as he'd promised.\n\nBut he'd taught her a valuable lesson. A brilliant mind and a first-class education didn't automatically instill character; that had to come from a surer source. She later learned that archaeological relics weren't the only things he traded; in those days, they were just a passion, and his real money had come from weapons.\n\nSince then, their paths had crossed a number of times, and her respect for Urdmann as a human being had steadily dwindled \u2026 while her respect for his archaeological knowledge had, however grudgingly, grown.\n\nEvidently, she'd taught Urdmann a lesson as well. His security, so lax on her last visit, was much improved now. Getting in wasn't going to be as easy as she'd hoped. But she had to find a way, because she knew that the fat man wasn't going to consider his wound anything but a fresh insult to be avenged."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "The Tomb Raider lay still in her inflated cocoon, smelling the wood enclosing her and listening to the activity outside the crate.\n\n\"It's a special delivery, sir,\" the guard said after they'd set her box down. She heard a separate grunt, perhaps from the courier, perhaps from another of Urdmann's employees.\n\n\"The dog didn't signal for explosives or guns, but he's interested in something. There's a letter for you with it.\"\n\nPause.\n\n\"Madame Tussaud's.\"\n\nPause.\n\n\"T-U-S-S-A-U-D-S, sir. London, England. The manifest lists a 'Lara Croft statue.' Yes, that's right: Lara Croft.\"\n\nShe heard the envelope open.\n\n\"A card, from the Croft House. It reads: 'Sorry about the blood on the carpet. I thought you'd like a little reminder of me.' It is signed. Of course, sir.\"\n\nThe crate was lifted again, and carried for almost two minutes before it was set down again, heavily. A few seconds later, she heard a crowbar applied to the wooden crate. At least they'd paid attention to the \"This End Up\" markings.\n\n\"The boss told us to be careful with it.\"\n\n\"0ui,\" a second voice responded.\n\nThe Tomb Raider froze herself into the selected pose, gun up and face turned to the right. She'd had to do some quick work with her computer and the hotel printer to get the documentation right. A suitable payoff to the airport courier service that morning had ensured instant delivery, no questions asked.\n\nThe courier service was an excellent example of a Creole proverb of Mauritius: Si t'as du pognon, t'as du pouvoir\u2014if you've got bucks, you've got power.\n\nOf course, the philosophy operated everywhere. The Mauritians just phrased it more musically.\n\nThey got through the crate and used a blade on the cardboard. Lara forced herself to look at the light coming through the widening cracks so her eyes would be adjusted by the time they had it open. From her limited view, it looked like she was in a garage. She saw groundskeeping gear hanging from hooks, a workbench covered with tools, and the bonnet of an automobile.\n\nOne of the guards let loose with a Hindi oath. Another pulled away the inflated plastic wrapping about her.\n\n\"Tussaud's\u2014of course! The wax sculptures,\" the more garrulous of the guards said. They wore khaki shorts, with high white socks and Sam Browne belts. Neither had a weapon out. \"They are very famous. Must have cost the boss a mint.\"\n\n\"No, you're wrong there. It was sent to him. Didn't you see the manifest?\"\n\nIt was hard not to move her eyes. One reached up to touch her.\n\nShe brought the gun down, pointing it between the two guards.\n\nTheir reaction was worthy of a photograph. One took a startled step back and tripped on the lid of her packing case, falling to the floor; the other flung up his hands like a soccer goalie blocking a ball kicked at his face.\n\nThe Tomb Raider flexed her stiff legs. \"Good afternoon, gentlemen.\"\n\n\"Y-you're alive!\" stuttered the guard still standing.\n\n\"Very observant.\" She swiveled her gun barrel to the one on the floor, who had been in the process of pulling his own gun. \"If you're going to take out your gun, do it with thumb and forefinger. Grasp it by the bottom.\"\n\nHe complied, placing the gun on the floor.\n\n\"Kick it to me.\"\n\nAfter the pistol had slid to her foot, her gun returned to the guard still standing. \"Just like him,\" she instructed him.\n\nThe pistol joined its twin.\n\n\"Now we can relax,\" she said, holstering her gun and picking up the two pistols on the floor. \"What are your names?\"\n\n\"Dinesh,\" the one on the floor said.\n\n\"Harbe,\" the other said. \"I don't understand. The dog \u2026 he detected no firearm.\"\n\n\"Because I wasn't carrying one,\" Lara said. \"It's a toy. Very realistic looking, though, wouldn't you agree?\"\n\nWith a growl, Harbe made a move toward her. She brought up the pistols. \"Not so fast, Harbe. These are real enough. Whatever Mr. Urdmann is paying you, it's not worth a bullet.\"\n\nHarbe wilted.\n\nLara grinned. \"Now, Harbe, where's Urdmann?\"\n\n\"Say noth\u2014,\" Dinesh began.\n\nLara cut him off. \"Quiet now.\"\n\n\"Third floor,\" Harbe said.\n\nShe looked around the garage, let her eyes linger on a beautiful Rolls-Royce, then looked further. The tool shelf held what she was looking for. The garage also had a pair of convenient support pillars, festooned with work lights and extension cords.\n\n\"Now, I'm only going to need a few minutes of your employer's time. Gunfire really makes conversation difficult, so I can't have you two running around setting off alarms. Dinesh, if you'd please get up and go to the column there. You both have handcuffs? Good. If you both would stand back-to-back.\"\n\nThey complied, and she removed the handcuffs from their belts and carefully closed the bracelets so the pillar was enclosed in a ring of flesh and steel. She went to the workbench and returned with some clean rags and silver duct tape and went to work gagging the guards.\n\n\"As a reward for being so agreeable, I'm going to take care with the tape and make sure I don't gum up your skin and hair too badly.\" She wadded up two rags and stuck one into each of their mouths, then wrapped up their heads in duct tape.\n\n\"Breathing fine? Comfortable?\"\n\nNeither bothered to nod. Harbe had tears in his eyes.\n\n\"Worried about your paycheck, Harbe?\" She tucked a card in his breast pocket. \"I've got friends on the Seychelles. Much more beautiful there, and the pay would probably be better. I'll let Mr. Urdmann know you're in here; you'll be loose by teatime.\"\n\nShe turned out the light."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Urdmarm's house looked different with the sun shining. Antique bombe chests with expensive vases atop them stood at intervals in the hallway with suits of armor, statues, and even ancient farming implements. She heard a vacuum from somewhere down the marble-floored hallway. Women's voices echoed from the other end of the house.\n\nLara's memory of the layout of the house was perfect. Avoiding the museum, she found the servants' staircase. She climbed to the first floor, looked out a window. The guard at the gatehouse was leaning out the window, chatting with a gardener working outside the walls. A third man, also a guard, rode up on his ATV and joined them, lifting a canteen from a gear bag at the front of the four-wheeler. It seemed that no one had yet checked inside the garage.\n\nShe left the stairway at the third floor and turned down the hallway that ran to the center of the house. Carpeting silenced her footfalls. A cleaning cart stood outside Urdmann's suite; a faint splashing echoed from the open door.\n\n\"Hew, hew, hew, hee,\" she heard. A masculine giggle.\n\nThe Tomb Raider felt her face tighten into a tiger's grin. She trotted down the hallway toward the splashing.\n\nShe walked past some simple black-and-white smocks and white crepe-soled shoes, discarded on the floor of Urdmann's bedroom.\n\nShe didn't bother with guns this time, just stepped through the doorway and stood in front of the phone next to the loo. Bubbles hid most of what was going on in the master bath\u2014a mass of stone and porcelain and mirror larger than some London hotel rooms. Urdmann shared the tub with two bronze-skinned women who, combined, probably didn't weigh as much as his hairy torso.\n\n\"Diddling the help, Lancaster?\" she said.\n\n\"Croft?!\"\n\nThe cleaning women squawked, slid around behind Urdmann's bulk. He was large enough to hide both, head to toe.\n\nShe offered him a towel and one of his wispy robes. \"I was hoping for a quick chat.\"\n\n\"You've got to be fu\u2014\"\n\n\"Language, Urdmann. There are ladies present. I'm prepared to trade. Down in your museum I noticed you had Akhenaton's crook. How would you like the flail as well?\"\n\nThe red left his cheeks and went into his eyes.\n\n\"The flail? I thought it was lost. Early grave robbers getting into the first tomb, or some such.\"\n\n\"Can we talk without the staff around?\"\n\nUrdmann without bubbles looked a little bit like a soused orangutan. She was relieved when he put on the robe and squelched across the floor to his bedroom.\n\n\"Excuse us, ladies,\" Lara said, shutting the door on the two maids, who clung to each other amid the bubbles of the bath. She followed Urdmann across the bedroom and into his office.\n\n\"Rumor has it you've left more than a dozen children scattered about the globe,\" she said, interposing herself between Urdmann and his desk, the stolen pistols casually displayed in her hands.\n\n\"What's the matter, Croft? Jealous?\"\n\n\"Try disgusted.\"\n\n\"You can be as high and mighty as you like. The fact remains, I've got something you want, haven't I? What is it that's worth the flail of Akhenaton?\"\n\n\"Everything you know about Tejo Kunai. What he was looking for, what you told him, any associates you met\u2014\"\n\n\"Kunai?\" Urdmann sank into a papa-san chair by the window. Rattan crackled under his weight. \"That CIA snoop who was working with you?\"\n\n\"He's not CIA. He was here on his own.\"\n\n\"Toss me a smoke, won't you? In the box on top of the desk.\"\n\n\"And set off a radio alarm?\"\n\n\"Croft, I want Akhenaton's flail. I'm not tricking you.\"\n\nThe top of the lacquer box was painted with a Taoist picture of Chinese philosophers tasting vinegar. The Tomb Raider opened it, extracted a cigarette and a book of matches, and tossed them to Urdmann.\n\n\"Better,\" Urdmann said, lighting up. Jets of smoke poured out of his nostrils. He held his cigarette between thumb and forefinger. \"My heart can't take these sudden appearances, Croft. You keep popping up over my shoulder like a guardian angel. If I didn't know better, I might think you were obsessed with me.\"\n\n\"I'm a born bear baiter,\" she said.\n\n\"I really should take you by the ear and toss you out the window, Akhenaton's flail or no. But you're armed, I see \u2026 and with two pistols that look suspiciously like the make and model I issue my guards.\" He fingered the suture swellings on his arm with his free hand.\n\n\"Yes, quite a coincidence, that.\"\n\nHe sighed. \"And the statue from Tussaud's?\"\n\n\"You're looking at her. But about Kunai\u2026\"\n\n\"Kunai \u2026 nervous fellow. High laugh. Kept toying with a little monocle. I must say I liked him, even though I suspected his story from the first. But nervous. Always seemed to be listening over his shoulder. He had some rubbings he wanted translated. Pre-Zoroastrian rubbish. The M\u00e9ne. I assume you've heard of this myth from the mouth of your late teacher.\"\n\n\"I'm still learning. Werner Von Croy didn't think the M\u00e9ne 'rubbish.'\"\n\nUrdmann shrugged. \"Kunai's rubbings were some sort of decree. Seems the M\u00e9ne upset the Babylonian king.\"\n\n\"What were they? A cult?\"\n\n\"More like a full-blown religion of some kind. Kunai's record was a list of proscribed glyphs. Anyone found with one of the symbols on the walls of his dwelling, inscribed onto any device, or uttering one of a list of forbidden prayers was to be tortured and killed. Oddly enough, old King Bashphet of Babylon wrote into the law a codicil declaring that even a pardon from the king himself couldn't reverse the sentence. Perhaps he was getting senile and worried he'd be talked into reversing his own laws.\"\n\n\"The Babylonians had translations of the symbols?\"\n\nUrdmann smoked and looked skyward. \"Yes Let's see, there was seawater, freshwater, ice, mountain, cave, crops, animals, sacrifice, cataclysm, something called a 'judge god,' ruling man, supplicant man, slave man, wealth property... some astrological stuff as well, havmg to do with the sun and stars and moon and comets and so forth. That list is by no means complete.\"\n\n\"You kept a copy?\"\n\n\"No I tried to get one, but Kunai wanted the translation done right there and then. His check was good\u2014I called the bank\u2014so I translated as best as I could over the course of an afternoon.\"\n\n\"How about the death-sentence prayers?\"\n\n\"Mumbo jumbo. One oddity, though. Most religions have their worshippers lift their eyes up. This one had them cast their gaze down, within to the depths. Don't know if they meant their souls or the earth itself: lots of 'in deep places of the heart, beneath still waters\u2026' That sort of thing.\"\n\nThe Tomb Raider drew something on a sheet of Urdmann's cotton-pulp stationery. The Greek letter omega, only thickened at the middle, with the ends turned up.\n\n\"Recognize this? And don't try to tell me it's just an omega.\"\n\n\"The Babylonians had that one first and last on the list. Don't know why they repeated it. It stood for 'god.' Or possibly 'gods.'\"\n\nThe Tomb Raider felt a chill. \"Anything else?\"\n\n\"He asked if I'd ever come across any platinum panels in my dealings. I was curious by then, acted as though something about platinum panels jogged my memory, and asked. He said they would have come out of South America, pre-Columbian. A little under a meter square. Thin, etched closely.\"\n\n\"Have you?\"\n\n\"No. I told him I'd never heard of that sort of thing. And if I had, that sort of thing tends to get melted down by grave robbers. He didn't seem happy at the idea.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Lancaster. You've done me more good than you know.\"\n\n\"Only by accident, Croft. Won't happen again.\"\n\n\"Send me the hospital bill for the bullet wound.\"\n\n\"I'd rather have the flail.\"\n\n\"Yes, well, so would I, for that matter.\"\n\nUrdmann's face purpled. \"You said!\u2026\"\n\n\"I never said I had the flail. I just asked if you wanted it.\"\n\n\"You little bitch!\"\n\nShe brought up a pistol sharply. \"Now, now, Lancaster. I'm sure you don't want another scratch to go with the last one, do you?\"\n\n\"I'll get you for this, Croft!\"\n\n\"Very original. Now, before I tie you up, you're going to place a call down to the front gate and let them know that I'm about to be driving out of here.\"\n\n\"Driving out?\" Urdmann looked close to a heart attack. \"In what?\"\n\n\"I saw a fine Rolls in your garage. I thought I'd borrow it, take it for a drive. Don't worry; you'll get it back in one piece \u2026 unless your guards try something stupid, that is.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Underground, finally at the Whispering Abyss, and his Tomb Raider wasn't up to the task. Even weighted with responsibilities as he was, the irony of it brought a smile to the Prime's face.\n\nThe Prime had been putting off that conclusion for a week now. Facing facts meant he had to act on them, and acting on them meant hurting Alison.\n\nBut the M\u00e9ne Restoration was worth a few emotional bruises.\n\nNow enlightenment\u2014the explanation of his new dreams and desires\u2014was finally within reach. Though his reach had been into the right part of the earth, the grasp had failed\u2014repeatedly. Alison told him she'd seen the Panels of the Prophecies in the light of her torch, but every time she tried to pry them away\u2026\n\nThe Prime could see Alison better now, making her way up the stairs. Relief washed down his spine. The breeze coming up from the Abyss smelled of gunfire, and his sensitive nose detected blood. From here the climb would be easier for her. He turned from the Whispering Abyss and paced around the room.\n\nLeonid, at the winch, sensed his mood, retreated to one of the air shaft alcoves around the circular chamber, and lit a cigar.\n\nThe leader of the cult of the M\u00e9ne needed to pace.\n\nThe Prime checked his watch. It would be getting dark up on the surface. Another hour, and the cursed arthropods would be up and hunting again.\n\nA variety of mutated creatures in this isolated stretch of Andean cloud forest had claimed the Abyss as their own.\n\nIronic that a variant of the Sacred Vine had so altered some of the local wildlife. He looked at a green frog that had found its way down one of the air shafts. A line of tiny eyes ran down its spine. He waved his hand over the frog: the eyes blinked, and it hopped. Frogs were like canaries in a coal mine; changes to an environment showed in them first.\n\nThe Food Chain, a Frangible Web. A line from the title of his doctoral thesis. Deep Gods, how could it be that he had ever been interested in such trivia?\n\nHe'd wasted years photographing tadpoles and counting toes before he had been enlightened to the true state of the world by Kunai. And now, thanks to that happy chance, he was standing in the spot where demigods had once ordered the affairs of men. At the cusp, as it were, of a new age that would come out of this ancient place.\n\nThe roof over the Abyss was old, a low dome like an enormous stone igloo. The masonry set into the walls was unusual, interlocking triangles growing smaller and smaller until they reached the centerpoint of the dome. One would expect some sort of design or emblem there, but there was none. With the smell of gunfire gone now, even the air wafting up from the Abyss felt ancient, damp and cool.\n\nHe wondered what sort of hands had worked the blood-colored granite millennia ago.\n\nThe circular chamber, a forty-meter expanse of shaped red granite surrounding the gaping Abyss, looked like a movie set now. A generator clattered in the corner, over-whelming the faint jungle sounds that drifted down the shafts ringing the room. Cables snaked their way to lights set on stands and the electric winch that had been set up among the old stonework. Modern girders had been fitted where once beams had lain for M\u00e9ne priests to stand upon as they chanted the ancient rites, pushing captives into the Abyss as sacrifices all the while.\n\nLong, long lengths of wire-cored rope ran from the winch down into the Abyss. His engineers had been through purgatory figuring breaking strengths and load weights with the makeshift gear they'd smuggled into the ruins past the Peruvians. It wasn't the person at the end of the line that mattered so much. It was the weight of all the cable descending into darkness. The ancient stairs running their corkscrew length down and down and down had disappeared in some long-ago earthquake, and now the only way to the panels was via an arduous and treacherous descent. They only used the winch in emergencies; the sound had been known to wake up the hive.\n\nThough Alison had fallen short at the last jump, the Prime didn't regret bringing her along. She'd been good company during their hunt for the location of this ancient interface. What's more, she truly believed.\n\nSome of his followers chafed about money, groaned and bleated at every setback. Not Alison. Ever since he'd shared his vision with her\u2014the bits and pieces he'd picked up from Kunai, Von Croy, the Old Man\u2014she'd been at his side every step, arguing down the malcontents, walking first into every danger. A German shepherd couldn't have been more loyal.\n\nWhen he'd mused aloud that they would have to put Croft out of the way through an assassination or kidnapping, she'd thrilled at the idea and kissed him. \"I hope they get her alive. It'll drive LC mad, when she finds out who did it.\"\n\nThe Prime had gone along with it. He had to admit that Alison knew which tripwires were connected to which reactions in the Croft psyche. Besides, he'd already planned to use Croft to retrieve the tablets as a contingency in case Alison couldn't manage the job. And now, as it turned out, she couldn't manage it. But she would still be useful in handling Croft. They'd once been close. Alison knew how to read people\u2014except, perhaps, herself.\n\nAnd him, of course.\n\nBest of all, she was a superlative lover. There was a lot of spare time to fill while waiting for men and equipment and information to arrive.\n\nHe'd actually become quite fond of her, in his way. He regretted the words he'd have to say to her now. But feelings couldn't stand in the way of the Restoration of the Old Order."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Alison came up the last stairs, unhooked her safety line, and sat at the edge of the Abyss, catching her breath. She'd been beaten, or frightened, and looked it. Gunpowder residue marked her cheek like a bruise; she'd taped a dressing to her forearm. Alison's glycogen-starved muscles trembled as she unslung the shotgun from her back and set it aside.\n\n\"They woke up,\" she said. \"Angry, as usual.\"\n\n\"And the panels?\"\n\n\"Couldn't get near them. Sorry. Let me try again tomorrow. I could really use another shot of juice. Do you have\u2014\"\n\n\"Too much isn't good for you, my pet.\" What he really should have said was that the supply gathered, at great time and expense from the atoll, was running short, but the concern he voiced was also the truth.\n\n\"Or, better yet, just dump a drum of DDT down there.\"\n\n\"Air currents. It would come back up in our faces, even if we could get the right chemicals. Obtaining powerful nerve agents in large quantities has gotten more difficult of late. And contrary to its name, the Whispering Abyss has a bottom. I don't want to hurt whatever might be down there.\"\n\n\"Then six men with shotguns\u2014\"\n\n\"After we lost Kurt and Yassim and Rafael? You want to ask for the next group of volunteers? No, going in noisy just aggravates them. Defense of the nest, I suppose.\"\n\n\"You're the expert.\"\n\n\"I'm the Prime. It's time for me to act for the good of the M\u00e9ne Restoration. We'll get your old friend to retrieve them.\"\n\nAlison bit her lower lip. \"Bugger Lara. I can\u2014\"\n\n\"No. I don't want you down there again. You forget, I've got a stake in your well being, too.\"\n\n\"Don't coddle me.\"\n\n\"Don't dispute my decisions.\"\n\nHe and Alison were both teeth grinders. Their jaws worked as they stared at each other, until Leonid put his cigar out at the center of one of the equilateral triangles and tapped his watch.\n\n\"We're both overwrought,\" the Prime said. \"We need to leave before they come up. We'll talk about it once we're safe in the hut.\"\n\nShe fed shells into the shotgun. \"I'll stay. I'll blast them as they come up. Whittle down the numbers.\"\n\nThe Prime took out the old monocle, looked at Alison through its distorting lens.\n\n\"Alison, look at me.\"\n\nThe shells went in schuck schuck schuck\u2026\n\n\"Alison!\"\n\nShe looked up, met his eyes through the lens. The red plastic of the shell with its metal cap dropped, rolled into one of the grooves in the floor.\n\nThe Prime began to spin the lens on its handle. It glittered, catching the generator-powered lights. \"Alison, relax.\"\n\n\"Relax,\" she agreed.\n\n\"Let's talk about it in safety. Fair enough?\"\n\n\"Fair enough.\"\n\n\"Now follow me. I've never played you false, or for a fool, have I?\"\n\nShe followed. \"Never.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "Lara Croft had her research spread out on her aunt's old craft table in what had once been an aviary attached to the mansion. Brown leather-bound tomes opened to unevenly typeset pages alongside a modern microfilm reader covered the waist-high worktable's butcher-block surface. Two plates containing the remnants of quick baked-beans-on-toast meals stood nearby. A samovar next to tea things on a little table in the corner steamed away.\n\nThe glass-enclosed annex to the house had the advantage of being farthest from the telephone and the front door. It held happy memories, along with a variety of plants and small trees. Her grandfather had built it to indulge a passion for exotic birds. She liked the space of her aunt's huge worktable, the bank of fluorescent lights over the table for nighttime, and the variety of places to put her feet on the stool or the table rail.\n\nLara tended to fidget as she learned. Her muscles had to tap out each new fact.\n\nDuring her aunt's time, all the birds but one had been donated to a local zoo, and the glass enclosure had been turned into a greenhouse. The remaining bird was an African gray parrot, a favorite of her grandfather's. Named Sir Garnet, he was older than Winston and just as much a fixture of the Croft estate as the butler. Sir Garnet enjoyed screaming matches with the local crows and tormented the cats from neighboring estates by running back and forth at the base of the glass wall as they stood outside watching helplessly.\n\nAs Lara read into the night, taking notes on her laptop, Sir Garnet caught her mood and ascended to the top of the tallest tree in the greenhouse, a sweet acacia, and went to work trimming twigs. If she was going to work, so was he. She ignored the snaps and snicks, accompanied by an occasional satisfied cackle when a twig full of tiny sets of neatly paired compound leaves fell to the floor. In another six weeks the tree would erupt in yellow-orange blossoms. Her aunt used to collect and dry the petals to put into sachets for the dressers and wardrobes.\n\nShe'd kept up the tradition. Her clothes still smelled faintly of honeysuckle in the spring.\n\nLara refilled her tea from the samovar. It was a thank-you gift from the Russian government after she'd cleaned house in Murmansk in pursuit of the Spear of Destiny. Michelov and his pet admiral\u2026\n\nShivering from the cold.\n\nShe brought herself back to the microfilm reader and waited for the tea to kick in. Lara rubbed her eyes, opened the next book. She'd ordered volumes from libraries in Beijing to Buenos Aires, Sydney to Oslo, in an effort to duplicate Von Croy and Frys's original research.\n\nIt was heavy going. She was on her fourth cup of black lifeboat tea.\n\nWinston's familiar shuffle sounded behind her.\n\n\"Will there be anything else, miss?\"\n\nHe clung to his formalities like the balding parrot above clung to his acacia branch.\n\n\"You don't have to ask permission to retire, Winston,\" Sir Garnet called from the ceiling. In her voice.\n\n\"You don't have to ask permission to retire, Winston,\" she repeated.\n\nShe had told Winston this every night since coming into her inheritance, but to Winston formalities were as much a part of the Croft estate as the old bricks from the days of King James. It was part of his code not to drop the ritual, just as it was her code not to treat employees as inferiors. \"Good God, it's eleven thirty. Don't bother with breakfast in the morning.\"\n\n\"One small matter, miss. Have you looked at your phone messages?\"\n\nShe'd called Borg first thing upon returning, after having decided that the key to Alison's whereabouts was in Von Croy and Frys's old research. Her shadowy attackers needed something buried in the work the partners did decades ago. Borg had been eager to go right to Buenos Aires and pick up the trail, but she'd demurred. They didn't know enough yet.\n\nBy reading the references listed in their paper, perhaps she could piece together what Ajay was after. Lara had also been trying to reach Frys's only remaining family, a forty-five-year-old son who was, as it happened, a professor in his own right at Dublin University \u2026 though he wasn't an archaeologist like his dad. His field was biology. But Lara still wanted to talk with him. He might have memories of his father's earlier work.\n\n\"Anything important?\"\n\n\"That journalist. Heather Rourke. She's called twice today.\"\n\nLara groaned. \"I don't have time for interviews and photo shoots. As I've told her at least twice.\"\n\n\"She came to the door uninvited while you were in the Indian Ocean last week. Cheeky.\"\n\n\"I admire her determination. You've got a withering stare. Then again, steady drops hollow the stone.\"\n\n\"You remember your Goethe. Your tutor would be pleased.\"\n\n\"Herr Baltz would rather I'd said Steter trapfen holt den stein. Is she being a nuisance? I could speak to her.\"\n\n\"Have you hollowed?\"\n\n\"No.\" She stretched. \"I redirect the drip.\"\n\nShe returned to her books, driving herself to put in a few more hours.\n\nThe whole M\u00e9ne business was like a fog, a fog where unsheathed stilettos waited in determined hands.\n\nWhat she was learning from her global collection of books and microfilm copies wasn't making her feel any easier. Usually she slept long and soundly when home in England, but lately her dreams had been invaded. Falling \u2026 drowning, always in suffocating darkness. She'd awake and hurry to the nearest window to look for the sun.\n\nShe glanced into the glass wall of the aviary. Thanks to her dark jumper, a trick of the light made her face and arms appear to float against the night outside. It was like looking at one's own ghost.\n\n\"Don't wear yourself out, miss,\" Winston said. His voice was soft and soothing when he chose to make it so, very like her grandfather's.\n\n\"Good night, Winston,\" Sir Garnet called. He was used to that exchange as well.\n\nThere were smiles in the glances they exchanged. If she couldn't have her parents, Winston was the next best thing. Her father's traditional conservativism and her mother's unstinting\u2014but unvoiced\u2014affection existed in that creaking old frame \u2026 without the qualities that had divided her from her parents.\n\nLara listened to the shuffling steps, promising herself that after her next trip she'd send Winston to Jamaica for a fortnight. Winston loved Ian Fleming novels. She'd put him up at the Fleming House at Goldeneye, where he could watch sun-bronzed girls run back and forth on the beach all day.\n\nWith a guilty pang she realized she'd promised herself that before her last trip. And probably the one before that, too.\n\nShe returned to the microfilm reader, turned the knob to advance a page: \"So the M\u00e9ne hold the number three holy\u2026\"\n\nNow, why would Kunai, a botanist who'd published papers on the medicinal value of rain forest blossoms and tubers, along with more lucrative coffee table books of exotic blossoms, become interested in a dead cult?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "Lara Croft awoke to the sound of a rosewood tray landing atop her research.\n\nSir Garnet gave an outraged squawk. He'd been asleep, too.\n\n\"Breakfast, miss.\"\n\nShe blearily took in Winston's morning coat. The inviting smells of eggs, fried potatoes, hot buttered toast, fresh jam, and sausages made her open her eyes. A neatly creased paper sat beneath the tray.\n\nThere were disadvantages to being too used to sleeping rough. She'd set her head down at 4 A.M. atop Von Junst's Unaussprichliche Kulten and nodded off. She felt a twinge in her trapezius muscles as she straightened.\n\nYou are not aging, Croft. It's just that you took no exercise yesterday.\n\n\"Sausages, Winston? I told you not to bother getting up to cook.\"\n\n\"They're fresh from the market. They were coming with eggs and milk this morning anyway\u2014\"\n\n\"Give them to your dogs.\"\n\n\"Only after you've had two bites.\"\n\nTempted to tell him what he could bite, Lara held her tongue. Winston would absorb a fit of morning crankiness with the same dignified aplomb as he would a knighthood.\n\nShe hated being babied. Winston knew it, but did it anyway, with the same obstinacy that made him ask to be allowed to retire, or iron the London Times, or perform any of the little duties that she didn't give a toss about. Unless, of course, she was sick. The last time she'd been seriously ill, as opposed to just wounded, was twelve years ago. But still. She remembered how much she'd appreciated his attentiveness to all the small details of her comfort then, and sighed.\n\nSwallowing two tiny bites of sausage, she watched him fill Sir Garnet's feed bowl, knowing she was being watched in turn. The taste of the sausage awoke her appetite, and by the time Winston had finished with the damp rag used to mop up Sir Garnet's droppings, she had finished the sausages and poached eggs\u2014the centers were perfectly gelled, Winston being the twenty-four-carat treasure that he was\u2014and was starting in on the fried potatoes and toast.\n\nHaving seen to her stomach, Winston shuffled out of the aviary.\n\nHer mood rose with her blood sugar. Feeling mischievous enough to upset Winston's morning routine, Lara picked up the aviary's hose. As she turned the tap and washed the buttery smear from the toast from her fingers, she decided that hearty breakfasts, a reliable postal service, and parliamentary democracy were England's three great gifts to the world. Probably in that exact order.\n\nShe glanced at the morning paper as she absently turned the hose on the nearby plants and Sir Garnet, who shook and turned on his perch under the gentle rain, clucking contentedly. She was considering a swim to work the kinks out when she heard the gate bell.\n\nSir Garnet ceased preening and fluttered to a higher branch so he could look down the lane for a visitor.\n\n\"Courier for you, miss,\" Sir Garnet announced, recognizing the white and red of the express delivery van.\n\nLara wasn't about to make Winston walk the length of Croft Manor with whatever was being delivered, especially not after her recent delivery to Urdmann. She wouldn't put it past him to pay her back in her own coin\u2014or a deadlier one. Worried now, she replaced the hose and hurried through the aviary, into the house, and to the massive timber door of the front entrance.\n\nWinston was already signing for the delivery. How had the old man moved so fast? She sometimes suspected him of having a twin, or of secret passages in Croft Manor known only to the staff and handed down from servant to servant like Masonic passwords.\n\n\"South America, miss,\" he said and handed her the letter-sized packet.\n\n\"Professor Alex Frys,\" she read. Mind and body were both wide awake now. \"So my letter did get through.\"\n\nShe took it into her home office, a small converted sitting room, woke her computer, entered her desktop password\u2014\"Boxgrove,\" the dig where as a child on a school trip she'd found her first artifact, a flint edge\u2014and opened her file on Alex Frys. It contained a copy of the letters she'd sent, one to the care of his father's attorney in Scotland and the other to his university address in Dublin. She'd also made a note that an e-mail sent to the university had received an \"out of the country\" auto reply. She turned on her scanner.\n\nThe courier pouch had originated in Peru. It contained a letter, some photos, and a map. She read the letter first.\n\n\u2002Lady Croft,\n\n\u2002It was with a species of relief that I received your letter. It took some time to find me; I have given the university a delivery-service address.\n\n\u2002I would be happy to meet with you, but I fear your journey may involve more distance than your proposed visit to me in Dublin. It may involve physical danger as well, but I get ahead of myself.\n\n\u2002Let me begin by saying you were correct to call Dad's death \"untimely,\" but only partially so. In the months before his demise, anxiety had been growing in him. I've since learned that Dad had bought a new security system for his house and made a number of reports to the police about prowlers, and even one that said he'd been followed on the very road where he met his death! He gave me reason to fear for his safety not four days before his accident, during a phone conversation late at night. Dad was not a man to drink, so a slurred conversation shortly after midnight, complete with whispered warnings of a \"conspiracy\" against him (all this from a teetotaler whom I had only seen drunk once before, upon the death of my mother), caused me to worry.\n\n\u2002I confess that I moved too slowly. I called his assistant at the university, fearing either rapid onset of senile dementia or trouble with students from a country Dad had removed artifacts from\u2014there have been the odd threats before. The police met me at the plane, having been told by Dad's assistant that I was on the way.\n\n\u2002They wished me to identify his body, or what the car crash left of it.\n\n\u2002Among his papers I found your number. The police said that he'd called you on the last day of his life. I heard a report that you might be mixed up with his murderers, or I would have called you then. I've just now learned that you've been cleared, so I have decided to contact you.\n\n\u2002I found the most astonishing note tucked in the kitchen drain when I was doing dishes and had a stoppage. Apparently Dad had reason to believe something was going on at an old dig of his in Peru involving research he'd done years ago. Frankly, I thought that he might have been slipping at the last and imagined the whole thing. I decided to fly down here and investigate on my own and take a look around. But what I found \u2026 It is beyond me.\n\n\u2002Please come at once. As I write this, I am observing the old site at a distance with the aid of a Peruvian park ranger named Fenni at the ruins of Ukju Pacha, in the eastern beginnings of the Andes. There is a river man named Paulo Williams you may trust; he works out of Puerto Maldonado, though if you have your own method of getting to the location I've highlighted on the enclosed 1:10,000 scale map, do so.\n\n\u2002I shall give you more details when we meet.\n\n\u2002As to Dad's notes concerning the M\u00e9ne, which you inquired about, they have entirely disappeared. He burned them at the last.\n\n\u2002Come soon!\n\n\u2002Alex Frys\n\nLara looked at the black-and-white photos printed on copier paper. Paulo Williams squinted out from a forest of lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth; he had the bleary, narrow-eyed look of a man who enjoyed his tequila. Juan Fermi stared proudly into the camera; a grin split the wide face of an upper Amazon native.\n\nThe photo of Alex Frys wasn't framed very well; he only took up half the print. Lara saw a river behind him, thick jungle vegetation at its banks. He was older than Lara had pictured, a middle-aged man with smooth skin, a narrow, pointed chin, and receding hairline. He looked at the camera out of the sides of his eyes. His face rather reminded her of a portrait of William Shakespeare \u2026 had Shakespeare worn a Vandyke beard and cotton khakis.\n\nPeru. Serious terrain. Tough enough without a potentially murderous cult to deal with. She should call Djbril and ask about the VADS rig.\n\nKunai might be at Ukju Pacha. Ajay was probably with him. Her last known address had been Buenos Aires.\n\nIt was time to call Borg.\n\n\"So nice to see you again, Lady Croft,\" said the British Airways flight attendant as Lara took her seat aboard the flight to Peru.\n\n\"Hello, Mishez.\" She'd flown before with Mishez, an archetypical first-class attendant with mannequin-perfect looks and an even, white-toothed smile.\n\nMishez reached into the first-class cooler. \"Your usual big bottle of water?\"\n\n\"Yes, please.\"\n\nMishez's pretty eyes widened as Borg crammed himself into the seat next to Lara. \"Oh, my,\" she said. \"Aren't you?\u2026\"\n\nLara was amused. It took a lot to fluster a professional like Mishez. The woman was actually blushing. \"Mishez, this is my friend, Nils Bjorkstrom.\"\n\n\"Please, call me Borg,\" said Nils to Mishez with a smile.\n\n\"I'll be happy to get you anything you like, Borg,\" Mishez said.\n\nI'll just bet you would, thought Lara. She tuned out the preflight bustle and pulled the volume by Von Junst out of her carry-on."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "There'd been on-again, off-again debates among archaeologists for years about just when civilization had started during the last Ice Age. A few obscure artifacts going back 100,000 years or more were the source of much controversy. Von Croy had been one of the proponents of a \"proto-Ur\" civilization that had come into existence during a warm period of a few tens of thousands of years during the last glaciation. A few wilder souls claimed there'd been a fairly advanced civilization up the Pacific Rim from the subcontinent and Indochina, perhaps even stretching to the Americas, and that it was this civilization, or the dim memories of it, that had given rise to ancient legends of Atlantis and Lemuria.\n\nLara never dismissed anything out of hand; she'd seen too many impossibilities walking the earth.\n\nProfessors Von Croy and Frys believed that they'd discovered the religion of the proto-Ur civilization, or rather inferred its existence, mostly through laws amongst the earliest recorded civilizations barring its practice. Symbols, prayers, gods, rituals \u2026 It appeared that the rites of the M\u00e9ne, going under a variety of names, had been banned everywhere, from predynastic Egypt to the early Shang dynasty in China.\n\nOf course, it was all conjecture. Supposition was the inevitable result of patched-together written records thousands of years old which were themselves based on oral history stretching back many thousands of years earlier. The common thread was the image Lara had first seen in Ajay's bedroom, the distinctively shaped omega symbol.\n\nAnyone found carrying that symbol was to be killed by a variety of methods that in themselves cast an interesting light on the respective cultures involved. Burning alive, bloodletting, crushing \u2026 There was no shortage of ways to kill someone, Lara reflected. In all the data, she found only one explanation for the harsh policy: a Chinese fragment maintaining that \"evil wizards\" used the omega mark to summon up and control murderous floods and storms.\n\nLara paged through the Von Junst until she came to his discussion of the glyph. Beside her, Borg drowsed, his eyes closed, headphones over his ears.\n\nCertain ancient insignia inexplicably exist worldwide. Like the turned cross, or the swastika, the snaked omega of the M\u00e9ne has been found from the Americas to Siam to the Horn of Africa. Some maintain that this is a vestige of an ancient worldwide culture, possibly advanced. Others claim it only proves that the Red Indians of the American frontier brought familiar symbols with them along with their families and flocks as they crossed the ancient polar land bridge. But the snaked omega was thought by these ancient peoples such an ill-favored design that they went out of their way to efface it wherever it was found, though its former presence can sometimes be ascertained by the designs around it. Only the most remote monuments still bear it. I have seen with my own eyes on the paradise-isle of Bali brave scouts turn pale and tribal elders grow taciturn when shown the design, the best rubbing of which was acquired from a half-sunken temple in the Selat Surabaya at the east end of Java\u2026\n\nLara traced the sinuous design with her finger.\n\n\"I hate that thing,\" Borg said in her ear.\n\nShe looked up. \"What's that?\"\n\n\"That omega thing. Alison had an obsession with it.\"\n\n\"Obsession?\"\n\n\"Is this the right word? Fixation. It reminded me of that movie about the UFOs with Steven Spielberg's direction. The character who made the volcanic upthrust his id\u00e9e fixe. He would create it out of mashed potatoes and mud and so on. Alison would do the same. One time I spilled sugar as we had coffee. I came back with a paper towel and found she'd etched it in the sugar. She hadn't even been aware of doing it.\"\n\n\"What did she say about it?\"\n\nBorg's eyes shifted to Mishez as she walked past, down the aisle. \"She said she dreamed it.\"\n\n\"Was it like this?\" She tapped the image in the book. \"Or different?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure.\" Borg used one of his artificial fingers to change the channel on his in-seat screen.\n\n\"Well, look at it more closely.\"\n\n\"I would rather not. It\u2014it gives me nightmares.\"\n\n\"A symbol? You mean it's appeared in your nightmares?\"\n\n\"No, Lara.\" He looked at her, and his eyes were deadly serious. \"The symbol gives me nightmares. I see it, and then in the night I have nightmares. I dream of suffocating, of a mass pressing down on my chest. I wake and gasp for air. I do not like this nightmare. I am not looking forward to sleeping tonight.\"\n\nLara thought back to her own recently troubled sleep and dreams of suffocating. Could the symbol have given them both identical uncomfortable dreams? Could it be so deeply embedded in the collective human unconscious Jung had postulated?\n\nMishez replaced Lara's empty water bottle without being asked. Borg turned down the offer of a beverage and put his headphones back on.\n\nLara envied Mishez for a moment. No worries beyond her career, dates, and how to spend a layover in Lima. The last time Lara had flown with Mishez, she'd been nursing bruises on both knees and her left elbow after her experiences in the Nevada desert.\n\nLara realized she was tired.\n\nStrange \u2026 Usually at the start of a trip she was as antsy as a mongoose hearing a rustle in the grass. It was only after the battles against exhaustion and pain had been won, and the trip was over, that her mood sometimes darkened and she found herself wishing for a simpler life.\n\nShe closed Von Junst, took a swallow of the chilled water, and felt better immediately. No point letting that 19th century theosophist get the better of her. She lifted her eye mask and snapped the soothing gel pads over her face.\n\nBut she fell into a strange dream, where the omega design of the M\u00e9ne grew and grew and expanded and expanded into an umbrella hovering over her until it dropped and engulfed her in its dark, smothering mouth."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "After they arrived in Peru, there was a day's delay in Iquitos, with Borg fretting over his climbing equipment, which was supposed to have been shipped to him from the States but had yet to arrive.\n\n\"I've got plenty of gear,\" Lara said, fuming at the delay and keeping an eye on the bags with her guns and VADS gear. There were also parachutes. Her research into Ukju Pacha had mentioned that the ruins centered around a gigantic chasm called the Whispering Abyss. One legend said that sacrifices were thrown down it to prevent earthquakes, and priests descended an endless staircase to speak to gods who lived deep within the earth.\n\n\"This is \u2026 specialized. A different set of arms. I did not wish to haul them all over London; they're only useful for climbing. You never saw my TV program?\"\n\n\"No. Television's just living vicariously. I'd rather have the real thing.\"\n\nThe courier arrived, sweat and apologies pouring out of him in equal quantities.\n\n\"There was some trouble at customs,\" the driver said. \"The delivery fee will of course be refunded to you.\"\n\n\"Not me. My producer.\" Another man\u2014and a certain Tomb Raider\u2014might have bawled out the courier over something that wasn't his fault. Lara felt a tingle of admiration.\n\n\"Back in the good graces of your cable network?\" Lara asked.\n\n\"Fortune turns again my way. The new host of my show is not working out, it seems. I have heard him called 'wannabe,' which, I understand, is bad. They want me to return.\"\n\nBorg opened the cases, high-impact plastic equipment boxes with steel edges. Lara walked around behind him to look but only saw packing material before Borg closed them again.\n\n\"Now we are ready to find this boatman of yours,\" he said.\n\n\"Not mine. The young professor's.\"\n\nThey took a smaller plane, an old De Havilland floatplane, to the next stop. Their final flight destination was Puerto Maldonado, at the edge of the Madre de Dios rain forest.\n\n\"Ecologists?\" the pilot asked.\n\n\"Si, photojournalist,\" Lara answered in Spanish.\n\n\"You travel with many cameras. All those boxes,\" the pilot said, referring to the cargo filling his bay and the third row of seats at the back of the plane.\n\n\"We brought our own darkroom,\" she said.\n\nHe landed the plane with the gentle touch Lara was used to in an aircraft owner-operator. \"Upriver she saw a catamaran-style barge, the Tank Girl, as the plane taxied across the water to the dock. Good; Williams was awaiting them, as planned.\n\nA shirtless Peruvian native\u2014a member of the Machinguenga tribe, to judge by his tattoos\u2014looped lines around one of the plane's pontoons and secured it to one of several docks projecting from the riverfront. Lara and Borg climbed out of the plane, and the pilot opened the cargo doors. Lara gave the dockhand two dollars\u2014she usually traveled with American currency\u2014and he helped them unload.\n\nPuerto Maldonado was one of those whitewashed South American towns where the age of a building could be determined by its distance from the stone mission church. It lived at the pace of an earlier century. Old men watched them from storefront benches; old women leaned on their elbows from wide-open windows. Children wore only underwear in the heat.\n\nA vintage Chevy Blazer roared up to the dock in a blue haze of oily exhaust, just beating a tiny Volkswagen. The driver jumped out, landing on neon-colored athletic shoes endorsed by Michael Jordan. \"Taxi? Taxi?\"\n\nThe Volkswagen driver pounded his steering wheel in frustration, then frowned at the amount of gear coming out of the now-moored plane. He didn't bother to climb out of his cab.\n\n\"Taxi, sir?\" he called to Borg out the window. \"Very cheapest rates.\"\n\nThe Blazer's driver hurried over and grabbed one of Borg's cases. \"Air-conditioned ride! Ten dollars American!\"\n\nLara ignored him, pointed to a flat-bottomed canoe tied up at the dock. \"Yours?\" she asked the shirtless dockhand in Spanish.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"What is your name?\"\n\n\"Julio, se\u00f1orita.\"\n\nShe handed him a bill. \"Take us out to that boat.\"\n\n\"Tank Girl, si,\" the native said, smiling.\n\n\"We're going in the canoe,\" she told Borg, then turned to the driver of the Blazer. \"Sorry, no taxi.\"\n\nThe man continued to pull at Borg's case, until the Norwegian put his weight into the tug-of-war. Then the driver shifted gear and began to help Julio load the long canoe with their gear. Lara handed a pair of dollars to the enterprising taxi driver. He accepted the money, then pressed a brochure into her hand in return. \"Many good trips. Rain forest, bird-watching, Inca ruins. Air-conditioned ride.\" Then he was gone.\n\nBorg wiped the sweat from his face with one sleeve. \"I hope there is air-conditioning aboard the Tank Girl.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't count on it,\" Lara said.\n\nThey climbed down the short ladder into the canoe, and Lara helped Julio cast off.\n\nA wide-eyed, mud-splattered boy watched them from the riverbank. Borg and the boy swapped silly faces. Lara gave in to a giggle. It occurred to her that she liked having Borg along; she seldom laughed when she was alone in the field.\n\nOther boys in short smocks probed the muddy riverside with nets, occasionally lifting fish into tin buckets. Beyond them the town slept in the afternoon sun, its structures hidden behind a hedge of balconies. Clouds were already piling up for the daily rainstorm. The sputtering sound of motorbikes carried from across the muddy riverside."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "The Tank Girl was a river catamaran nearly twenty meters long with short deck space at the bow and stern. The rest was boxy superstructure in front and the silver fuel tanks at the stern that gave the boat her name. Atop the mobile-home-like superstructure was a flying bridge, protected from the sun by an awning stretched on squared loops of steel and accessible by ladders fore and aft.\n\nJulio waved to another native on deck, who prodded a figure drowsing out the afternoon in a hammock slung across the back of the flying bridge.\n\nLara recognized Paulo Williams. He was two meters tall and thin. His collar bones showed at his crewneck T-shirt, and his legs were like bronze toothpicks, as though his NBA-sized body had shed every ounce of fat to protect itself from the heat.\n\n\"You must be Croft,\" he called as the canoe tied up. His was a strange accent, a combination of American drawl and Portuguese consonants.\n\nLara picked up her backpack and the duffel bag containing her guns and the VADS hardware. \"And you're Paulo Williams. I'm sorry we're late.\"\n\n\"No complaints from me. A man can have a good time in Puerto Maldonado.\"\n\nLara didn't wait for him to elaborate, but pitched in to get the canoe unloaded. With Borg's assistance, the job went quickly.\n\n\"That's everything,\" she said at last, clapping her Machinguenga chauffeur on the shoulder. \"Thank you, Julio.\"\n\nJulio didn't say good-bye. Among his people farewells were only said to the dead. He shoved off and paddled away from the Tank Girl.\n\nLara heard the aft door to the main cabin open. A woman in a sleeveless khaki vest, her red hair tied up off her shoulders in the heat, stepped out. \"Glad you could join us, Lara.\"\n\nLara fought to hide her shock. Heather Rourke. The journalist she'd been avoiding. \"What do you think you're doing here, Heather?\"\n\n\"My job,\" the reporter said. \"One way or another, Heather Rourke always gets her story.\"\n\nLara glanced at Borg. \"Is this your doing, Borg? Did you tip her off?\"\n\n\"I have never spoken to this woman before,\" he said somewhat stiffly.\n\n\"He's blameless,\" Heather interjected. \"I called the publicist for his network. Asked a few questions. She was eager to inform me of where he was heading. Then it was just a matter of figuring out where a Tomb Raider might go after landing in this part of Peru. Ukju Pacha came up in my research. Short of parachuting into the jungle, this river is the only route to the ruins, so I took a chance on intercepting you here.\"\n\nLara turned to Williams. \"Captain, I don't know what this woman may have told you, but she's no associate or friend of mine. I want her off the boat.\"\n\nWilliams shrugged. \"Can't do that. She's already paid.\"\n\n\"You mean you won't do it.\"\n\n\"She's a paying customer, same as you two,\" Williams answered.\n\n\"You might as well accept it, Lara,\" Heather said. \"I'm coming along for the ride.\"\n\nLara considered picking her up and throwing her bodily off the boat, but that would only be playing into the journalist's hands. Borg and she could hire a plane and get to Alex Frys's camp by parachute drop, but for all she knew, it might take days to organize a plane trip, and Frys's message had stressed the need for haste.\n\nThe first few raindrops hit the deck of the boat. She could see the rain coming, a curtain masking the landscape.\n\n\"Suit yourself,\" Lara said. \"But I'm warning you, Heather. It could get rough.\"\n\n\"Are you threatening me?\"\n\n\"If I was, you wouldn't have to ask,\" Lara said. \"I'm trying to put some sense into your thick head, that's all.\"\n\nThe reporter seemed offended. \"I haven't spent my career at a computer, Ms. Croft. I've covered stories from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Dictators have threatened to have me shot. I can handle myself.\"\n\n\"She could help, Lara,\" Borg said. \"The people upriver might fear the world press more than they fear the Peruvian government.\"\n\n\"Let's get inside,\" Lara said as the rain increased in intensity."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "Lara looked around the box-shaped main cabin as they brought the gear in. The Tank Girl worked for a living. The barge carried no amenities for passengers. The cabin had scratched plastic windows and duct-taped cushions on the storage benches lining the walls. Cubbyholes filled with what looked like mail covered the stem side of the big room; forward was a dirty combination of galley, chartroom, and machine shop. Beyond a paneled partition festooned with lad-mag pinups, Lara could see the main bridge. A radio squawked within, broadcasting the chatter like a talkative parrot.\n\n\"Could I speak to you alone, Captain?\" Lara asked. The rain hit with a roar. Water poured from the sky in torrents. A few drops found a way into the cabin.\n\nWilliams shrugged and led her forward to the main bridge. A young man whose tattoos marked him as another Machinguenga was lounging in a hammock chair.\n\n\"Francisco, take a hike.\" Williams flicked his thumb at a side door. Without a word, the man stepped into the rain and moved off along the narrow freeboard running along the side of the main cabin.\n\nLara decided to use her ass-kicking tone. The captain didn't look the type to fall for a bright smile and batted eye-lashes. \"What's the journalist doing here?\"\n\n\"Like I said, she's paying her way, same as you. Fares are the next thing to pure profit for me.\" Williams took a milk jug half full of loose tobacco from a railed shelf. \"Most places you keep your smoke where it won't dry out. In the Madre you have to fight to keep it dry.\"\n\n\"So you're bringing a journalist on a secret trip?\"\n\n\"Nothing secret about the Girl's route. Unclench those tight little cheeks; your friend upriver knows about it. When I told him who wanted to tag along, he about stroked out.\"\n\n\"Did he?\" Perhaps Frys had been in the cloud forest too long.\n\n\"He wants a journalist around, especially one named Heather Rourke.\"\n\n\"Why's her name important?\"\n\nWilliams rolled a cigarette with tobacco-stained fingers. \"An old river turtle like me has to tell you who Heather Rourke is?\"\n\n\"Apparently.\"\n\n\"She's got connections with SNN. You have heard of Satellite Network News?\"\n\nSNN was famous for providing free technology to developing nations. Internet access, dishes, fiber-optic networks even. She'd heard it lauded everywhere from The Economist to The Wall Street Journal. \"Yes. I don't travel with a dish, though.\"\n\n\"There's even a little bar in Mal that has SNN.\"\n\nLara wondered why Heather had introduced herself as working for a magazine she'd never heard of. To get her off her guard? She'd certainly not recognized the face. Just her keeping a low profile was interesting, a rare thing for prestige journalists these days.\n\n\"Don't feel too bad about it,\" Williams said, lighting the cigarette. \"I was funnin' you. Your friend Frys at the other end had to tell me who she was, too.\"\n\n\"You can get him on the radio?\" She looked at the set, a military antique dating from the days of Che Guevara at least.\n\n\"If he's around.\"\n\nShe stepped away to give him room. \"Do you mind?\"\n\nHe went to the radio, twisted the dial. \"Mynah, this is Tank Girl. You on this channel? Over?\"\n\n\"English?\" Lara asked.\n\n\"His Spanish isn't much. Makes him stand out more than his English does.\"\n\nWilliams tried again, and still didn't get an answer.\n\n\"What's 'Mynah' for?\"\n\n\"He's not using his name in case the radio is being monitored. He's posing as a bird whachacallit.\"\n\n\"An ornithologist?\"\n\n\"Bingo.\"\n\nNot much of a cover. The mynah bird was famous for using its voice to fake its identity to fool predators. Plus, they weren't native to this part of the world. \"And he trusts you because?\u2026\"\n\nWilliams took a contemplative puff. \"'Cause I showed him the old canopy tower when he first came upriver. Perfect for his purposes. Plus, I had it in for that expedition up at Ukju. The guy who runs their supplies is an old rival, you might say.\"\n\n\"How big a rival?\"\n\n\"You know those movies where two sailing ships run out their guns and shoot at each other as they go past?\" He gestured with his cigarette toward a scattering of bullet holes in the aluminum wall near the wheel. \"Kind of like that.\"\n\n\"And are more bullets apt to fly on this trip?\" Lara asked.\n\nWilliams grinned. \"Hard to say. If they do, just keep your head down.\"\n\nLara smiled back. \"That's not my style, Captain,\" she said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "It would be a two-day trip upriver. The passengers had a choice: they could either sleep in hammocks slung from the walls or on the narrow plastic cushions of the benches. The only privacy anyone would have on the catamaran would be in the washroom.\n\nAnd it wasn't much of a washroom. The sink held the leavings of the captain and his mate's shaves, the floor of the tiny shower was black, and flies crawled on the rim of the toilet. Lara hardly had room to change into cargo shorts and a brief black tank top. She strapped on her pistols and felt much better.\n\nThe rain quit and a spectacular evening came on, the orange and purple of the sky turning the rain forest and the shadows it cast onto the river the deepest black. They didn't have dinner until they anchored for the night. The plastic windows and screens crawled with insects trying to get in at the cabin lights.\n\n\"Two questions answered already without me opening my mouth,\" Heather said over her plate of pork and beans.\n\n\"What's that?\" Captain Williams asked, pouring a shot of gin into his water glass.\n\n\"The real Lara Croft. Question one: Why the skimpy outfits? Question two: Why the ponytail? The answers are the heat and the humidity.\" She lifted her own gorgeous ruin of a hairstyle from her damp neck and pulled her sweat-soaked shirt out from her chest.\n\nBorg wouldn't fit at the table. He sat on one of the benches lining the cabin, next to Francisco the mate. Borg looked forward all the time, as if news of Ajay might come floating down the river.\n\n\"How many stops before our destination?\" Lara asked.\n\n\"Three. Propane to the Macaw Lodge tomorrow, then more diesel for the Peruvian National Post at Delago. A diesel delivery to the Fitzcarraldo Gold Mine last. There's a couple Brazil nut farms and another mine I visit now and then, too, but they don't get anything but mail this trip. We won't even tie up, just toss the sacks onto their docks as we go by.\"\n\n\"They let you deliver mail?\" Heather asked.\n\n\"I'm a private contractor, you might say. The police only care that I don't run coca or guns.\" He screwed the top back on his gin. \"I make enough to support my lifestyle.\"\n\nHeather looked at Lara's pistols. \"Those don't squirt water. The police don't have a problem with your carrying them?\"\n\n\"I've got a lawyer who knows how to get me the right paperwork. A kidnapping by local guerrillas would be a terrible inconvenience.\"\n\n\"I've been in the mountains of Iran and Afghanistan with nothing but a tape recorder and some cameras. Never felt the need for guns.\"\n\nLara knew a double bid when she heard one. She redoubled. \"Did you have a guide?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"He was armed.\"\n\n\"Yes. You know the men in that part of the world, I expect. Very attached to their rifles.\"\n\n\"Then the only difference between you and me is who would do the shooting.\"\n\n\"I didn't fly three thousand miles to make you an enemy, Lady Croft. But I want your story. The real story. I've heard some strange things in London and Washington.\"\n\n\"I can't remember the last time I heard something that wasn't strange coming out of those two places.\"\n\nHeather Rourke snorted. \"Point taken. But that's why I'm here. I came to get an accurate picture of your life.\"\n\n\"Why the interest? I'm not glamorous. I'm not political. I'm a scholar with a bent for adventure. You were at my lecture in London. You saw what I do.\"\n\nThe journalist picked up her plate and took it to the little sink. \"My interest in you started in a house in Georgetown, of all places. A prominent senator was giving a party. The conversation got around to the most interesting man/most interesting woman you ever met. I listened to a Chinese businessman who'd served as an army officer in Tibet tell the most amazing story about you and some kind of underworld kingpin named Marco Bartoli. To hear him, you took down an entire syndicate single-handed.\"\n\n\"He exaggerated. I'd suspect anything a Chinese hatchet man has to say about Tibet.\"\n\nHeather returned to the table. \"It was an astonishing story, nonetheless. You made quite an impression on the local monks, apparently. One of them said something to this ex-army officer that he never forgot.\"\n\n\"And what might that be?\"\n\n\"The monk said that you were a spirit warrior, strong as a mountain but supple as a river. He said that determination like yours could topple the throne of a kingdom. Well, after hearing that, I decided I had to meet you for myself.\"\n\n\"The Chinese do know how to tell a story to the credulous. I'm surprised you fell for it. Americans are paying tens of thousands of dollars to have their sofas rearranged by anyone who can properly pronounce 'feng shui.' Here are the facts, if you're interested. I was \u2026 involved with Bartoli. He was a thief and a smuggler, but it was the Chinese who smashed him. I just found the door, so to speak. I suspect the man you heard was Li Yuan, a Chinese Intelligence man who handled most of the arrests. I'd heard he'd gotten a private industry job in America as a reward.\"\n\nHeather nodded. \"That was his name.\"\n\n\"Li wouldn't admit to achievement without a set of thumbscrews. Even then you'd only get 'I was very fortunate to have arrested the criminal.' Confucianism.\"\n\n\"You impressed him enough that he told the story the way a military man might describe serving under Patton. What the monks had to say made a deep impression on him.\"\n\n\"Some monks who haven't seen a woman in twenty years have one drop in on a snowmobile, and you're shocked that I made an impression?\"\n\nBorg snorted.\n\n\"Call it a draw, ladies,\" Captain Williams cut in. \"Let's have one more drink and get to bed.\"\n\n\"Water will do, thanks,\" Lara said.\n\n\"I don't like gin,\" the journalist said. \"I don't suppose there's any wine on board?\"\n\n\"This isn't a cruise ship, lady,\" Williams said.\n\nLara leaned across the table and caught the mate's eye. \"Francisco, do you have any masato?\"\n\n\"Yes, se\u00f1orita. There is some on board.\"\n\nWilliams grunted.\n\n\"Then get it. Perhaps Heather would like to try a native drink.\"\n\nHeather's left eyebrow almost met a bedraggled bang. \"Native as in\u2014\"\n\n\"Local Indian. More of a beer. Very appropriate for an after-dinner drink.\"\n\n\"I'll try anything once,\" Heather said, emptying her water glass and pushing it toward Francisco, who was opening a jug.\n\nFrancisco poured some of the amber liquid for himself and a generous portion for the journalist. He offered it to Lara, but she shook her head.\n\nBorg turned it down. \"I've given up drinking for a while. I had a wonderful dinner ruined by too much wine.\"\n\nHe and Lara shared a sympathetic smile.\n\nHeather sniffed the brew.\n\n\"You'll find it helps with digestion,\" Lara said, suppressing a smile with an effort.\n\nHeather tasted it. \"Not bad. Like a stout or a bock.\"\n\nFrancisco downed his and smacked his bare belly through his open shirt. Lara caught Heather stealing a glance at the tight stomach muscles. \"What's that blue tattooing under your eye, Francisco?\" Heather asked.\n\n\"I am of an ancient line. In my tribe, this means the blood of Incan kings flows in my veins. In the days of the Sun Empire\u2014\"\n\n\"Cisco, give it a rest,\" Williams said, slamming down his glass. \"That act is fine for some piece of tail working on her master's in environmental studies, but this woman's a respected journalist. Give her the story straight.\"\n\nFrancisco showed no sign of embarrassment. \"The mark is from the days when my people were taken by the rubber slavers. Those who were the best gatherers were tattooed by the rubber men to show they had a good eye. It became a symbol of status, and from there became a tradition.\"\n\n\"Believe it or not, the truth makes you more interesting, Francisco.\" Heather took another swallow of the native beer.\n\n\"What's this made of? Sweet potatoes? Plantains?\"\n\nLara waited till Heather swallowed. \"Manioc, fermented in women's saliva.\"\n\nHeather still choked. \"What?\"\n\n\"Yes, the local women all use their saliva for fermentation,\" Francisco said. \"My mother sends me what she makes.\"\n\nHeather's eyes narrowed at Lara, but to her credit the journalist finished her glass. \"Still tastes good on a hot night.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "They awoke the next morning to a cacophony of screeches. Lara got out of her hammock and stretched as she went out by the tanks on the stern. Heather was atop the cabin, taking pictures of a sky full of birds.\n\nLara went back into the cabin, unzipped her pack, which hung at the head end of her hammock, and got out a tiny pair of lightweight binoculars. She went back outside and took in the breathtakingly colorful birds. They weren't really a flock, Lara noticed as she climbed the aft ladder to the top deck, just hundreds of groups of two and three and four birds rising and wheeling southeast.\n\n\"Red-bellied macaws,\" Captain Williams grunted. \"Get under the awning unless you want to be dumped on.\"\n\nLara looked at the spotted deck and joined him at the wheel on the flying bridge. She saw Borg up forward with Francisco, gaping like the rest of them. Borg still wore a long-sleeved cotton shirt and gloves to cover his artificial arms.\n\n\"Macaws?\" Heather said, joining them. \"Those are three-thousand-dollar birds.\"\n\n\"Not down here,\" Lara said. \"There must be a clay lick nearby.\"\n\n\"Yeah, in those hills there. We're going around a bend in the river today, then into the hills near the Macaw Lodge. They get a lot of bird-watchers.\" He inflated his lungs \"Cisco,\" he bellowed. \"I'm not paying you to be a tour guide. Let's make some river.\"\n\nThe Tank Girl sputtered to life as the anchors came up. Borg helped with the lines in his own stiff way.\n\nLara enjoyed the clear-skied morning, and sat on the cool white propane fuel tanks with her research into Ukju Pacha. The others avoided the tanks as though they were live bombs, which, in a way, they were. If the tanks exploded, the whole boat would be reduced to matchsticks, but in the morning the metal was pleasantly cool against her skin. This time of year in the southern tropics, she would have to enjoy the air and the sun while she could before the inevitable afternoon rains came.\n\nWhen Williams and Cisco made their deliveries, she retreated into the cabin; no point advertising her presence to the locals. Kunai knew who she was, but whether he was baiting her in some fashion through the kidnapping attempt, and perhaps the actions of the young Frys, remained to be seen. She'd been baited before. The would-be trappers always forgot that both prey and trapper had to meet at the bait and that when they did, the roles could be reversed. In any case, she could do little about it until she got to the headwaters of the Manu River.\n\nWorrying about it wouldn't change the future. Verbally fencing with Heather about her background provided some mental diversion.\n\n\"What are you writing?\" Lara asked from her perch, seeing Heather taking notes in a spiral notebook. It was the cheap sort of thing a student might carry, a strange accessory for a woman who could afford a tailored camel hair coat.\n\nThe journalist turned back a page. \"'.As I watch Lara Croft read atop the riverboat tank, she puts to mind one of the jaguars lurking in the Peruvian jungle. In repose she sits perfectly still, save for a wiggling foot that betrays her working mind, the way that same cat might twitch his tail as he watches the game trail from a bough above. Her hair matches her brown eyes, her portrait-perfect skin goes with her swimsuit model's body, she might be reading Vogue while the photographer sets up his lights and equipment. But her military-cut shorts, hiking boots elaborately laced and tied, and black sleeveless top suggests she's prepared for a run to the heights of Machu Picchu instead of the makeup artist. Then there's her weapons\u2014matched pistols in a two-gun rig of black canvas holsters\u2014worn gunfighter style. Whatever mysteries of the past she might probe, she is ready to face danger in the present\u2026' Shall I go on? It's just impressions.\"\n\n\"Does it bother you that they're wrong?\"\n\n\"What do you mean by that? You object to the cat metaphor? I thought I was being flattering.\"\n\nLara closed her book. \"Flattery doesn't enter into it. You want to describe me to the world, right? Or I should say describe me to the world and get it right.\"\n\n\"Yes. Of course.\"\n\n\"It's impossible to depict reality.\"\n\n\"I do the best I can.\"\n\n\"This is why I don't like journalists. The act itself transforms.\"\n\nHeather made a swishing sound and passed her hand over her head.\n\n\"Look, you've heard of those African natives who think taking a picture steals part of their soul.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Is it the Bushmen?\"\n\n\"There are many different groups that feel that way. It doesn't matter. We laugh at it, but I've come to the conclusion they're right. Celebrity alters. It can't be helped. It's not your fault, of course. As soon as you write a sentence about me and someone reads it, that puts an image in the reader's head, an image that's nothing like me. I've been altered. A piece of my soul is gone.\"\n\n\"Why do you care what people think?\"\n\n\"Why do you try to shape their thoughts?\"\n\nHeather tapped her pen against the wire spiral. \"I don't.\"\n\n\"Strange thing for a journalist with your reputation to say.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"What you choose to make a story and what you choose to leave unexamined determines the political agenda. Is that journalism or advocacy?\"\n\n\"I tell the truth.\"\n\nLara was tempted to tell her that there was no such thing. The fact that she didn't believe it kept her silent. \"Find another subject.\"\n\n\"Like your friend with the artificial arms?\"\n\n\"Your readers might like it better. Look at him with this boat. Determination. That's an example to write about. I'm not that interesting.\"\n\nHeather cocked her head. \"I've known you for all of a day, and I already think you're the most interesting woman I've met in years. Since you brought up determination\u2026\"\n\n\"Save the flattery for the next celeb you target.\"\n\n\"Small potatoes,\" Heather said quietly.\n\n\"What does that mean?\" Lara asked.\n\n\"You want my cards on the table?\"\n\nLara hopped down from the tank. \"Absolutely. You'll find I respond to honesty.\"\n\nShe closed her notebook. \"You won't think I'm mad? No matter what I say?\"\n\nLara crossed her arms, waited as ten more meters of rain forest slid by.\n\n\"Ever since I 'made it' into big-league journalism, I've become part of those Washington clubs and circles that people like to call the elite. Some of the power-broker glitter disappointed; I learned that more public policy is created in corporate boardrooms than in congressional debates. Same story in London, and Beijing, for that matter. At the parties, at the meetings, at the conferences, I didn't talk much. I listened. Maybe it's part of being a woman, but when you're an outsider with your nose pressed up against the glass for most of your life, you get pretty good at reading lips and body language.\"\n\nIf you're waiting for an us-girls-against-the-world expression of sympathy, Lara thought, you'll still be sitting there when we arrive upriver.\n\nHeather looked over her shoulder, then back at Lara. \"I started to wonder if I was really moving among the elite. I got the feeling that I was talking to middle managers and PR flacks. But every now and then, key people would just be gone for a week or two. And when they returned, it was like some decision had been made. A story changed, perhaps, or a policy dropped off the radar screen. I started looking into secret societies. I got an interview with a man. Even now I can't say his name\u2014he's still in a hospital bed, dying\u2014and he told me a story about his role in the Illuminati. And you.\"\n\n\"The Illuminati? He was hospitalized with senile dementia, I take it.\"\n\n\"He had captained a nuclear submarine before he ran one of the largest charitable foundations in the world. Straight and stable and sharp as a diamond drill bit.\"\n\n\"So you think I can give you insight into secret societies?\"\n\n\"I'm pretty sure you work for one.\"\n\nLara laughed. \"Despite my title, I'm too much the anarchist for oaths and countersigns and secret ceremonies.\"\n\n\"When the gentleman in the hospital dies, I'm going to tell his story. I'd like to tell yours. Call me an anarchist, too, but I don't like the idea of my life being influenced by twenty-one men meeting on some estate outside of Rome, or Sydney, or Denver.\"\n\n\"If that's what you want, I'll tell all, and then you can take this boat back to the airstrip at Puerto Maldonado.\"\n\nHeather clicked her pen.\n\n\"There are secret societies. There are not-so-secret ones. Some have more money than they know what to do with. Others operate out of the back room of a Coventry laundry. People are social creatures. They work together to get things done. Most of these societies are just that: groups of men and women with an agenda. The world is full of powerful entities: corporations, government agencies, cartels, even the broadcasting network that I'm guessing is paying your expenses now. Once in a while it will seem that one rises to prominence, but none of them become predominant because there are so many other competing ideologies, religions, political movements, what-have-you. The world is a big, fractious place. Secret societies just sound scary because they're secret. There are a few that are malevolent, but then there are drug cartels and terrorist groups motivated by religion, too. But no one group runs everything.\"\n\n\"But you've fought them.\"\n\n\"I've defended myself. I've been shot at and chased by everything from poppy plantation guards to slavers.\"\n\n\"So you really just like archaeology? It's not a cover? I'll keep it off the record.\"\n\n\"Even if it were 'just a cover,' it wouldn't be very smart to mention that to the press, now would it? But, no, it's not a cover. It's a calling. Churchill said the further you can see into the past, the better you can predict the future, or words to that effect. Everything that's happened has happened before; we just keep remaking it with a different cast. Like all the film versions of Dracula floating around out there. Since nothing particularly new or interesting happens today, I try to learn more about how it fit together three thousand years ago.\"\n\nHeather scrunched her eyebrows. \"That simple? What about that 'spirit warrior' stuff the old monk said?\"\n\nLara laughed. \"Just because someone speaks with a bunch of incense burning in the background doesn't mean he knows what he's talking about.\"\n\n\"I promise you, off the record.\"\n\nWhat could she tell her that wouldn't be a lie?\n\n\"Heather, I neither work for a secret society, nor am I Lady Croft, cultbuster. I like to think of myself as a twenty-first-century version of Walter Raleigh. I like to explore. There are still many, many places on this planet where 'no man has gone before,' or at least not for a hatful of centuries. There have been times when I've learned that some icon, which perhaps possesses no more power than that which people choose to invest in it due to their own beliefs, is about to fall into the wrong hands\u2014according to my judgment and sensibilities, anyway. I see to it that said object ends up where it won't be a harm to anyone.\"\n\n\"And you decide all this on your own?\"\n\n\"No, the voices in my head get their say, too. I've been out-voted a few times.\" She drew her guns with a rip of Velcro, twirled them, and put them back in their holsters.\n\nHeather blinked rapidly. She glanced over at Francisco, idling on the deck.\n\n\"That's a joke, Heather.\"\n\n\"You're very sure of yourself, aren't you?\"\n\n\"I've learned there's precious little else I can be sure of.\"\n\n\"So what are you after on this trip? And why have you brought that giant along? You said you worked alone.\"\n\n\"Why don't you ask him?\"\n\n\"I did.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"He wouldn't say.\"\n\n\"Then it's not for me to say, either.\"\n\n\"Who can I ask then?\"\n\n\"You'll meet him when I do. As to whether he'll be any more forthcoming with answers, your guess is as good as mine.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "The next day the ship's whistle alerted Lara to trouble. It was just after the regular afternoon downpour, with the deck still awash in rainfall on its way over the side, that a second riverboat made its appearance.\n\nIt was long and narrow, and if it had had dragon heads fore and aft, Lara would have taken it for a screw-driven Viking longship. Instead, a long awning stretched from stem to stem, covering wheelhouse, cargo, and open deck space.\n\n\"That crazy bastard!\" Williams shouted as Lara joined him at the wheel. \"He's coming right for us. Outta the way, Dominguez!\" Then quietly, \"What's he playing at this time?\"\n\n\"Trouble?\" Lara asked.\n\n\"A new game.\"\n\n\"Your rival, I assume.\"\n\n\"Yes, the Plato.\"\n\nWilliams edged a little closer to the bank. Lara heard something scrape along the bottom of the pontoon. The Plato gave a derisive hoot of its air horn.\n\n\"Cisco!\" Williams shouted. The Tank Girl's captain opened a cabinet next to his knee. Lara spotted the red shape of a fire extinguisher. Williams pulled a shotgun out from behind it.\n\nThe mate hurried in, his hair slick from the rain.\n\n\"Take the wheel. Keep her straight.\"\n\nShe smelled the gun oil from the pump-action. Her hands went to her guns by themselves.\n\nWilliams dashed out onto the front of the catamaran. Lara followed him as far as the door. She leaned out and saw him put the shogun to his shoulder.\n\n\"Stay off, Dominguez!\"\n\nIn the Plato's wheelhouse, a pot-bellied man under a wide straw hat pinched thumb and finger.\n\n\"Bastard! Keep off!\" Williams shouted.\n\nThe Plato's captain edged his ship over as the two riverboats came alongside. Lara caught a flash of a wide-faced man in a camouflage-pattered T-shirt reclining against burlap bags with a book open on his lap, before another man, shirtless, stood up and flung a skin of something at the cabin of the Tank Girl.\n\n\"Go back to Dallas, gringo!\"\n\nLara, again on instinct, drew, flicked off her safety, and fired her right hand pistol at the cartwheeling shape. Liquid sprayed. Her shots deflected the skin just enough so that, instead of crashing through the cabin window, it hit the pontoon with a wet slap before falling into the river.\n\nThe Tomb Raider half expected a Molotov cocktail. Instead, she caught the smell of something noxious, like American skunk.\n\nThe Plato passed with nothing more threatening than the sight of the shirtless man's buttocks pointed out over the side.\n\n\"You don't wear those just for show,\" Williams said as she lowered her gun. \"I didn't know people could draw and shoot like that outside of a rodeo gun show.\"\n\nWilliams went to the pontoon, covered his nose and mouth.\n\n\"Animal entrails,\" he said from behind his hand. He grabbed a bucket from the side, dipped it in the river, and poured water over the deck and pontoon. Borg and Heather approached from the stern, smelled the splatter, and retreated to windward. \"It's always something.\"\n\n\"So that's your rival for the river trade?\" Lara asked, flicking the safety back on her gun and holstering it again. Monkeys hooted at them from the forest as Francisco turned the boat away from the riverbank and back into the channel.\n\n\"It's stupid. He's not even outfitted to haul fuel.\"\n\n\"Then why?\"\n\n\"I forget. A woman. A case of bourbon. Maybe it was a song on the stereo in the cantina. He lost a tooth, and I detached a retina. Turns out men don't just shake hands and make up down here.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "The Tank Girl changed directions with the river irmumerable times as they moved between higher and higher hills, all coated with thick, multicanopied jungle. When they stopped for the night, they were in the cloud forest proper for the first time. Thick bands of white and gray hung about the hilltops like vaporous mushroom caps.\n\nMonkeys and birds screeched and squawked and hollered, exchanging noises from riverbank to riverbank like opposing armies trading artillery shells.\n\n\"If man leaves the forest, does it still make a sound?\" Lara asked.\n\n\"I like it,\" Borg said. \"It is \u2026 it is untouched. No, what is the word? Like primitive?\"\n\n\"Primeval,\" Lara said.\n\n\"I could take off my clothes and plunge into the water and cover myself with mud to keep off the insects. Become a wild man. Pound my chest when I find the right mate to keep the other males away.\"\n\nShe smiled at the image. Perhaps she'd slip into a leopard-skin bikini and a sloth-claw necklace and join him in howling at the moon.\n\nHe looked at the misty green hilltops. \"What is she doing here, I wonder?\"\n\nLara felt a twinge somewhere just behind her breastbone. There was only one \"she\" in Borg's life: Ajay. \"I've wondered that myself. I've got a theory now. You want to hear it?\"\n\n\"Anything.\"\n\n\"Some say the Inca weren't the first civilization here, but just built upon the foundations of an older one, one swallowed by the jungle but not quite digested.\"\n\n\"Older?\"\n\n\"A theory. It's called proto-Ur, for lack of a better term. They crossed oceans; it's thought that they extended from the Mideast and then around the Pacific Rim. The protos worshipped gods, but they were strange sorts of gods, gods that dwelled here on earth, or perhaps beneath it, like the Polynesians with their volcanoes.\"\n\n\"Yes. They worshipped places?\"\n\n\"No. Gods of places. Deep places, the bottom of caverns, the ocean. This religion was apparently ordered to an extent that wasn't seen again until the Confucians or the medieval Catholic church. Everyone in the faith was ranked by a number. They were called the M\u00e9ne, the numbered. They had an important temple here, if I've done my research correctly. I think Ajay is after some kind of sacred M\u00e9ne artifacts.\"\n\nThe ancient trees at the banks, weighed down with creeper, moss, and vine, black-trunked where the river touched them, extended sun-chasing boughs out over the river as though they were cupped ears listening to the conversation.\n\n\"In the ruins?\"\n\n\"Below them. In a shaft, a deep pit. It translates as the 'Whispering Abyss.' That's why I brought the parachutes. At the bottom\u2014\"\n\n\"Uff, look at those,\" Borg exclaimed, lifting his mechanical arm. Something the size of a pointer trotted off a downed trunk and plunged into the river.\n\n\"Giant otters,\" Captain Williams called down from the flying bridge. \"They're called river wolves in this part of the headwaters.\"\n\n\"Is everything around here of that size?\" Borg asked.\n\nWilliams started counting on his fingers as he steered with his elbow. \"Spiders that can cover a cantaloupe. River fish weighing hundreds of pounds. Snakes about as long as this boat. Funny thing, though: It's the small stuff that'll kill you out here. Bugs and fevers and intestinal parasites and so on. Snakes got nothing on them.\"\n\n\"Do you think she is all right, Lara?\" Borg's voice wasn't any louder than the sound of the river passing over the catamaran's pontoons.\n\nLara put her hand on his bowling-ball-like shoulder. There was nothing to regret; he was never hers to begin with. \"We'll know in a day or two.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "Green, cloud-cloaked mountains filled the eastern horizon. A stream joined the river at a stretch of grassland, and behind the grassland a small mountain of a thousand meters or so rose above the adjoining hills.\n\n\"End of the line,\" Williams said. \"Old Girl can't navigate much further upstream. Rapids.\"\n\n\"Where are we?\" Borg asked as Lara checked the gear.\n\n\"An old coffee plantation,\" Williams said. \"The would-be coffee man who built the place went out of business decades ago. The Peruvian government seized the property over taxes and decided to try to cater to the eco-tourist trade. They built a canopy observation tower and ranger station in the old plantation house. But there were plenty of birds and animals to see in easier-to-reach areas of the Madre de Dios preserve where the guerrillas didn't operate.\"\n\nLara could make out moss-covered pilings where the dock had once stood. Now only a series of rocks jutted out from them, with a cable to use as a handrail.\n\nFrancisco threw a lasso over one of the pilings and pulled the boat to the rocks. \"There is the canopy tower on that mountain; you can just see it above the trees. See the wood?\" Lara followed Francisco's pointing finger and saw it, a rounded hut colored to blend in with the treetops.\n\n\"What happened to this place?\" Heather asked.\n\nAt the bow, Williams dropped an anchor.\n\n\"Guerrillas,\" Francisco explained. \"They burned the dock and the old house that was being used as a ranger station. They have been driven away, but there is no money to rebuild. What would be the point? Few want to come here except those interested in the ruins.\" He opened the gate at the ship's rail and dropped a gangplank. \"Hurry.\"\n\n\"Why hurry?\"\n\n\"This part of the mountains. No good. The forest people do not hunt here.\"\n\nTo Lara it looked no different than any other stretch of river, save that the channel had grown rockier and the hills crowded closer.\n\n\"Is it the ruins?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Even the Shining Path never stayed here long, just passed through.\"\n\nLara threw the pack with her VADS gear over her shoulder. \"Thanks for the warning.\"\n\nHeather navigated the gangplank first. Borg and Lara, with Francisco's help, got the gear to the grassy riverside. There was a path, flanked by tree trunks pitched the color of railroad ties.\n\nLara pressed a booted foot outside the path. The ground was spongy and wet but firm. A helicopter might be able to get in here, provided the pilot was sharp enough to perform a hover pickup.\n\n\"You're not going on vacation anytime soon?\" she called to Williams.\n\nHe laughed. \"Lady, my whole life's a vacation.\"\n\n\"Keep your radio on,\" she said.\n\n\"You call anytime, I'll come get you. But allow for a couple days' notice if I'm at the other end of the route. The Tank Girl isn't an airport cab service.\"\n\n\"He's got that right,\" Heather said, quietly enough that it wouldn't carry out to the barge. \"New York taxis are cleaner.\"\n\nLara inventoried the luggage. Something was bothering her, but she couldn't put her finger on it yet. She gave Francisco a hundred American dollars as he handed her the bag with the jump gear. \"Extra danger wages.\"\n\nHe pocketed the bills smoothly. \"Thank you, beautiful lady. Sleep light.\"\n\n\"I will.\"\n\n\"You deserting or what, Cisco?\" Williams bawled. \"Daylight's wasting!\"\n\nFrancisco nodded at Lara. He ran down the rock-drift, lifted the tether line, and trotted up the plank just before it fell. No good-byes, just like the man with the canoe.\n\nHeather swatted at her exposed arm. \"Damn bugs!\"\n\nLara tossed her a bottle of DEET. \"Use it. A little does a lot. Careful; it can melt plastic.\"\n\nLara and Borg found a pole and began to put together a hammock gear-tote when they caught sight of a broad-brimmed sulfur-colored hat bobbing swiftly through the brush from the treeline, as if whoever was wearing it was jogging.\n\n\"We are being welcomed after all,\" she said, touching Borg's elbow and pointing.\n\nBorg craned his neck. \"A man, I think.\"\n\nA figure that looked more like a beekeeper than a park ranger emerged from the tall grass. His broad felt hat had netting fixed over his face and bound at the neck, and he'd tied his sleeves and pants at the cuffs. He wore thick work gloves over his hands. All in all, Lara thought that he resembled the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz.\n\n\"Whoo\u2014that was a run,\" he huffed. \"I dressed and left as soon as I caught sight of the boat. Captain Williams wastes no time. Sorry about the outfit. Ran out of repellent. I'm Alex Frys.\"\n\nLara suddenly realized what had been bothering her. Williams had left no supplies, no mail, for Frys or for the Peruvian ranger, Fermi.\n\nFrys extended a gloved hand. \"Lady Croft, I presume?\"\n\nA nervous little laugh at the end of his question\u2014along with his glittering eyes and the sweat on his face behind the netting that dangled like a veil from his hat\u2014made Lara wonder if he'd been in the jungle too long. Malaria? His skin clung tight across his cheekbones.\n\nPerhaps just a man in the throes of an obsession. She shook his hand.\n\nFrys turned to the others. \"Heather Rourke. Pleased to meet you. The press could be helpful to me in unmasking these murderers. And who is this strong-looking gentleman? A bodyguard?\"\n\n\"Nils Bjorkstrom,\" Borg said. He gave a short bow rather than shaking hands. Frys kept his eyes fixed on Borg's and away from the artificial limbs. \"Not a bodyguard. I am here out of concern for someone thought to be in the ruins on that mountain you watch.\"\n\n\"A woman?\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\n\"I know they have a woman working with them.\"\n\n\"Then she is still alive, at least. Thank God.\"\n\n\"Won't you follow me?\" Frys said. Borg picked up his pack, and he and Lara took the pole bearing the rest of their gear.\n\nA poison dart frog, impossibly green against the pathway log it clung to, jumped out of the way as they started up the trail. Lara caught a serpentine flash of mottled coral in the stalks as a deadly fer-de-lance went after the frog's movement. Biting flies tried to get at her scalp through her hair. She dabbed repellent across her tightly bound mane.\n\n\"The heat's bad down here, I know,\" said Frys. \"Once we're in the canopy tower, you'll be more comfortable. Welcome to paradise!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "Thanks to the supplies and gear, the trek up the small mountain took the better part of the afternoon. Even Borg began asking for breaks\u2014he had the heavy end of the pole going uphill\u2014as they reached the halfway mark.\n\nLara arrived at the canopy tower wet and enervated. The afternoon rain found its way through the canopy via a million cascades, turning the hike into an uphill slog under a series of shower heads. Once thoroughly soaked, though, with the greasy layers of sweat and insect repellent washed away, she felt cooler and clean \u2026 for about five seconds. The footing on the path had been poor. They'd slipped many times, and each fall required a break while they got set to lift the equipment again. While the way had been cleared by machetes, undergrowth, decomposition, and mudslides had broken down or covered the wood-chip path. Here in the rain forest, paths did not last long.\n\nLara looked up at the platform, almost eight stories high. Supported both by the three-meter-thick Samauma tree in which it sat and and a long spiral staircase paralleling the smooth-sided trunk like another tree, it looked to be about the size of a modest one-bedroom flat. She was happy to see a cargo net and winch for hauling up their gear.\n\n\"Not powered by anything but muscle, sorry,\" Frys said.\n\n\"Where is your police friend?\"\n\n\"Fermi? Back in Puerto Maldonado. I was worried something would hold you up, so he went down to expedite things. Naturally, you showed up right after he left. Serves me right for getting anxious.\"\n\n\"He didn't take a little launch called the Plato downriver, did he?\"\n\n\"I think so. Sergeant Fermi knows all the captains. The Plato can make it upriver, to some of the mines in the mountains; it happened to be passing, and he hailed it over the radio. Why?\"\n\n\"We met her on the river. The captains of our boat and the Plato had a minor altercation.\"\n\nFrys chuckled behind his veil of mosquito netting. \"That's how it is down here. Everyone is either crawl-over-broken-glass friends or enemies, it seems. Care to come up? It's dry.\"\n\nLuckily the stairs had a rail. Lara lost count of the tightly turning steps after seventy-two, when Heather sat down and moaned: \"That's it. Between the slope and these steps, I need a rest.\"\n\nFrys offered her his arm, and the party continued their slow, clockwise climb.\n\nThe canopy tower had been built to last. Thick hardwood beams, fixed to the tree with steel cable, made a platform for a one-room house with wide windows under a sloping overhang. Lara marked a trapdoor allowing access to the underside of the house where it joined the top branches of the tree, presumably for repairs.\n\nAt the top, their host stripped off his hat and, with it, the netting, and wiped his high forehead with a towel. He still looked a little like Shakespeare, but she'd never pictured the Bard with a suntan and graying facial hair. \"No mosquitoes up here.\"\n\nFrys's camp gear lay scattered around the inside of the house. Above the windows, lines of hooks for equipment or hammocks or perhaps even weather curtains extended around all four walls. A tiny toilet room filled the northeast corner, with a spigot mounted above a stainless steel basin next to the WC's door. A pipe fixed to the wall ran up from the spigot to what Lara assumed to be a rain catcher on the roof. On the other side of the toilet room, a case on the wall\u2014she saw a fringe of broken glass\u2014held a newly tacked up map.\n\nThe western viewing window, the one facing the ruins of Ukju Pacha, had a portable telescope with University of Dublin stenciled on its barrel. The university's telescope rested on its own tripod, with a camera mount attached to the eyepiece.\n\n\"The ruins are about eight kilometers away on that mountain that's a little higher than this one,\" Frys said, standing next to the telescope. Butterflies the size of dinner plates fluttered among the treetops. \"Where you landed is opposite. The river goes on a southern hairpin turn here. It actually comes up against the ruins, but I understand there's a good deal of white water in between.\"\n\nA clipboard hung next to the field telescope, filled with notes. Lara had a quick look. Frys had been marking how many people he observed on any given day, along with the equipment they brought into the ruins. \"It's a splendid view if there's no rain or fog,\" Frys continued. \"When the sun goes down and the granite of the mountaintops goes red \u2026 spectacular.\"\n\n\"How many people working the ruins, on average?\" she asked Frys.\n\n\"Usually around ten or so. The most I've ever seen is fifteen, but there may very well be more. Hard to tell exactly at this distance, even with the telescope. I think some may be underground, out of view.\"\n\n\"But no tourists?\" Heather said, rubbing her right and then her left quadriceps.\n\n\"Shining Path scared them away. It's tough to get even the Machinguenga into this part of the cloud forest. No guide business to speak of. Which is too bad; this is a biologist's paradise. I should know: I am one.\" He giggled again.\n\nLara redirected the rain catcher to refill her canteen. She took a mouthful and spat it out the window, then drank. Delicious. If blue sky could be bottled, it would taste like Andean rainwater. \"None of Kunai's people know you're here?\"\n\n\"The roof is green shingle, and there's camouflage-pattern paint on the walls for the bird-watchers. It doesn't stand out against the rest of the jungle. Besides, even if they see the platform, there's no reason for them to think it's inhabited now. I've been keeping a low profile.\"\n\nLara leaned out the window and looked at the exterior. Forest lichens and bromeliads living on the canopy tower added their own natural coloration.\n\n\"Have you taken any pictures?\" Borg asked, noticing a camera mount on the telescope.\n\n\"Just a few. So far it looks like a minor archaeological survey. I just get a few figures at this distance. Can't tell male from female half the time. Tea? It's one of the few things I'm not out of.\"\n\nOver tea, held like a children's party on the floor with water heated on a small gas camp stove, Frys told them more about his father's research, how, in recent years, his father had become more guarded and reclusive, taking some of his papers out of the college library. \"I thought he was just slipping,\" Frys said. \"Being alone, after cancer took Mum, hit him hard. In the last year, after he retired, he went on and on about the M\u00e9ne. If only I'd paid attention.\"\n\nHeather looked over her notes. \"Cults, ancient markings, secret societies. Murder. Now mysterious goings-on at a mountaintop.\"\n\n\"Welcome to my world,\" Lara said from the telescope. The sun began to break the rain clouds up. With better light, the ruins stood out against the green mountaintop. They did not look like much: just some rings of stones crowning the hilltop.\n\n\"You suspect this Kunai in your father's death?\" Borg asked.\n\n\"My father feared him,\" Frys said.\n\n\"He's the Prime, isn't he?\" Lara put in.\n\n\"The what?\" asked Heather.\n\n\"The leader of the M\u00e9ne cult,\" Lara said.\n\n\"Yes, I heard my dad mention that term,\" Frys said. \"And I came across it in that paper he wrote with Von Croy. I read it before coming out here, thought I might find a clue. A lot of mumbo jumbo, if you ask me.\"\n\n\"Mumbo jumbo?\" Lara shook her head. \"Hardly. Some of the Frys-Von Croy paper was guesswork, but it was pretty good guesswork, as far as I can make out. Von Junst actually spoke to some alleged members of the cult back in the 1840s, in Finland, of all places. There have been attempts to resurrect the M\u00e9ne over the centuries, some more successful than others. What they said matched another account from the other side of the world.\"\n\nLara spoke as though addressing a room full of students. She gave an overview of what she'd discovered about the M\u00e9ne, their gods from the deep places of the earth, and the Prime, the man who spoke to and for the Deep Gods. \"Their leader, the Prime, cannot lie, or so it is said. He can shape the thoughts of others, give men strength and courage in battle through special gifts brought from meads made from the berries of sacred flowers.\n\n\"I believe that's how Kunai first happened upon the M\u00e9ne cult. It was an accident. He made a study of native medicines in Peru. Sold a few to a German pharmaceutical firm and became rich. There's a blossom in this cloud forest called the Orouboran water hyacinth \u2026 at least, that's what it is called now. But back in the days of the M\u00e9ne, it was called the Dreamflower.\"\n\n\"But I thought the M\u00e9ne were a protoculture, before all civilization and writing. How do we know what they called anything?\" asked Borg.\n\n\"That's correct, of course,\" Lara said. \"What I should say is that those who came after the M\u00e9ne, who preserved fragments of the old knowledge, the old ways, into civilized time, called it the Dreamflower, at least according to a translation of Babylonian laws I obtained from a rather unpleasant colleague.\"\n\n\"That sounds interesting,\" said Heather. \"Who is this unpleasant colleague?\"\n\n\"He'd be worth a story, but I don't think he's involved with this.\"\n\nLara looked through the telescope again. Her vision momentarily blurred. She was dead tired from the long, hot trip. Better to go tomorrow night. \"The police, the government, can't arrest Kunai?\" she asked Frys.\n\n\"Not enough evidence in Scotland. No sign that he's been in the UK in years, but he may be traveling with a false passport. Down here, he's untouchable. According to Fermi, the Peruvians will only act if we get evidence that he's taking artifacts out of the country. Then the law will step in.\"\n\nLara slowly shifted the telescope, traversing the extensive site. She could make out a line of overgrown ruins, not nearly as well-preserved as some others she'd seen in Peru, and therefore possibly older, running around the distant rounded mountaintop like a king's crown. She smelled an old secret over there the way a hunter felt game on the trail ahead: tiny impressions, each unimportant in itself but together a red flag, what another, less attuned to the little signals, might call instinct or even precognition.\n\n\"We'll make the Peruvians listen,\" she said. \"But anything can happen out here. That's the challenge to those who go into the jungle. It's got its own law.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "After a night wrapped in hammocks they breakfasted on tinned meat and cereal-like breakfast bars.\n\nAfter breakfast, with the sun now well up from the horizon thanks to their tropical latitude, Borg showed Lara his specialized climbing limbs. Still experimental, they fitted onto his stumps better than his everyday arms.\n\nIt was Lara's first good look at his stumps. Metal capped the limbs just below the shoulder, complete with stout, knoblike fixtures for locking on his arms. A short wire, tipped with what looked like a USB plug, dangled from each metal cap.\n\n\"I had a second surgery in Japan. There are computer chips implanted in the stumps,\" Borg explained. \"They read tension put on them by different muscle fibers from my shoulders. My everyday arms only use it to open and close the working fingers. The climbing arms can do much more.\n\n\"A German engineering firm for climbing equipment and a Japanese robotics company worked together to make them.\"\n\nBorg knelt over the open case. The mechanical arms resembled props from a Terminator movie. Each appeared to be specialized.\n\n\"The left is really a piton gun. It works on the same principle as a nail gun, only it takes a slightly larger spike. I place a magazine of five pitons in the forearm, here.\" He showed Lara the flattened, nail-like climbing anchors with their eye-holes for rope, linked together like a line of nails for a nail gun. \"The right one, the 'claw,' has a grapnel that also works as an anchor.\"\n\nLara found a moment to admire the four-fingered hand as Borg worked it. The talonlike fingers spread like flower petals, and could reverse themselves. \"I have ten meters of cable I can play out, attached to a power winch. Takes me up or down.\"\n\n\"Must have cost a great deal.\"\n\n\"The idea was for me to make climbs no other single man could. So far all I have done with them is promotional videos and some easy climbs. Perhaps someday. For now, it will get us back up the Abyss.\"\n\n\"There's that boat again,\" Heather said from the window. Her hair was bound up at the back of her head in a pair of thick rubber bands.\n\n\"The Tank Girl?\" Lara asked.\n\n\"No, the other one. The boat with the yahoos that threw the dead animal.\"\n\nShe left Borg and rushed to the window. The Plato waited on the banks of the river, only its bow visible among the trees.\n\nLara looked back to the landing, three kilometers away, but motion on the trail halfway up their mountain caught her eye. A dozen or more men in khaki pants and black T-shirts, gripping an assortment of assault weapons, rushed out of the forest. Some gestured to guide the others.\n\n\"We've got callers,\" Lara said grimly. She went to her VADS pack.\n\n\"Perhaps Fermi has returned,\" Frys said, a quaver in his voice. He went to the window, then ducked back. \"Those are men from the ruins!\"\n\n\"Not such a secret hideout after all,\" the Tomb Raider said, mentally kicking herself for not going to the ruins the previous evening despite her fatigue. Or setting a watch. Sloppy, Croft. She closed the VADS belt around her waist and slipped on the headset. The belt-box computer winked green at her, and her headset gave a confirmation tone.\n\n\"Are you going to fight them?\" Frys asked.\n\n\"Got a problem with that?\" Lara asked in turn.\n\n\"Well,\" said Frys, \"there are an awful lot of them. Maybe we should just surrender.\"\n\n\"They didn't let your father surrender,\" Lara said. \"And they won't let us surrender, either.\"\n\nFrom far below came the sound of boots clattering up the stairs.\n\nLara looked at the staircase again. The tight spiral would provide ample cover for the men until they were almost at the top. The attackers would be able to use tear gas, shotguns \u2026 If only she could get at the stairway from the side\u2026\n\nThe hammocks caught her eye, especially Alex Frys's. It was huge, with elastic cording at either end.\n\nShe took it off the wall and hurried over to the little hatch in the center of the hut that allowed access to the underside, presumably to trim branches and repair the network of cables securing the platform to the treetop.\n\n\"Lara, what are you doing?\" demanded Heather. \"There's got to be fifteen or twenty men out there!\"\n\nLara pulled open the hatch and looked for footholds, a way down below the platform. \"They're not professional soldiers, Heather,\" she said meanwhile. \"Professionals wouldn't have run in a mob, all bunched up like that.\" Nor would they have run pell-mell for the stairs as though in a race to be first to the top, but she didn't have time to explain everything.\n\nThe voices of Borg, Heather, and Frys, all offering conflicting advice, blended into a babble. Lara shut them out. She dropped through the hatch, crouched on a branch, and threw one end of the hammock around the three-meter-wide trunk. Catching it, she fashioned the hammock into a lumberman's belt.\n\nThe Tomb Raider needed her hands free.\n\nBorg's face appeared above the open hatch. \"What can I do to help?\"\n\n\"Close the hatch and pray,\" Lara said.\n\nThen, trusting her life to something designed for a summer afternoon, she leaned back against the nylon and elastic of the hammock. It held. She gripped the smooth gray bark between her knees and lowered the belt, then her knees, then her belt again, being careful to stay opposite the spiral stairs.\n\nShe risked a peek around the tree trunk.\n\nThe black-and-tans pounded up the stairs, some carrying assault rifles with bayonets fixed, others with Taser guns mounted under the barrels.\n\nThe Tasers looked like flashlights with pistol grips; they fired a pair of needles with wires leading back to a capacitor in the handle. Upon impact, a 50,000-volt charge, enough to incapacitate anyone, completed the circuit.\n\nShe'd been hit by a Taser once. It felt like being struck between the shoulder blades with a mallet. Her heart hadn't settled down for fifteen minutes afterwards.\n\nThe man first in line on the stairs carried an assault shotgun. He could kill everyone in the canopy tower by just sticking the muzzle over the lip of the floor and sweeping the room. The question was, were they here to kill or to capture?\n\n\"VADS: right rubber.\"\n\nA clip appeared at her right hip point. She slammed her gun down on it, leaned around the tree using the elastic lumberman's belt, aimed, and fired.\n\nThe Tomb Raider bounced a rubber bullet off the lead man's stomach. He dropped his shotgun, gasping. The man behind him crashed into him, and both sprawled on the narrow staircase.\n\n\"Turn around, boys,\" she shouted in English. \"Trespassers will be punished. Severely.\"\n\nHer second rubber bullet caught the third man in the temple. Muzzle flashes against the green canopy and the angry chatter of automatic weapons fire sounded across the treetops. She heard bullets thunk into tree trunks behind her and punch through branches with cracking sounds. She supposed that answered her \"kill or capture\" question. Back behind the tree, she used VADS to load fl\u00e9chettes into both her pistols. \"Not easily discouraged, don't want to play nice,\" she said to herself.\n\nSwinging on the pivot of her hammock, she popped out from the other side of the tree and opened fire. The brass cartridge cases tumbled far, far down to the forest floor. Blood spray from the stairway followed the cartridge cases down, and she hid behind the bole again to the sound of curses, screams, and moans.\n\nBullets whizzed through airspace she'd occupied a moment before, ripping the skinlike bark off the three-meter-thick Samauma.\n\nShe scooted out and dropped two more of the men on the stairs. This time she felt the bullets hit the tree near her feet. She drew them back, relying on the hammock to hold her up. They shot at the hammock, but the web of nylon cording couldn't easily be cut by gunfire.\n\nA pair of hissing grenades\u2014she caught a whiff of tear gas\u2014flew past her before spinning downward.\n\nNot overly bright, or perhaps just overexcited.\n\nThe Tomb Raider heard footfalls between the gunshots at the tree. The black-and-tans were rushing the platform despite her. She swung out again and cut three more down.\n\nA whistle sounded. \"Back to the boat!\" someone shouted in Spanish.\n\nOn her next swing outward, Lara saw that it wasn't a trick. The black-and-tans were hurrying back down the circular steps, carrying or dragging their wounded.\n\nThe Tomb Raider could have put more bullets between the retreating pairs of shoulderblades, but there were already four dead on the staircase. The hot USP Matches went back into their holsters.\n\nLara Croft worked legs and hammock to get back to the treetop before one of the black-and-tans reached the bottom of the stairs and took advantage of the better shooting position.\n\n\"Are they gone?\" Frys asked as he extended a hand to help her through the trapdoor.\n\nThe look she gave him made him pull it back.\n\n\"They're running. Leaving dead on the stairs, too.\" She hauled herself up through the hatch.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" Borg asked.\n\n\"It was like hitting targets on a range. They were totally exposed from the side on those stairs. Slaughter.\"\n\n\"How terrible,\" Heather said.\n\n\"I like my fights as one-sided as possible,\" Lara said. She went to the window and gazed down at the fleeing men. One turned and ran backwards down the trail, emptying his magazine at the canopy tower until he tripped and flipped over. Not a single one of his bullets hit the structure, though it was nearly as wide as the broad side of a barn.\n\n\"Let's see that map.\" Lara strode over to the east-facing wall, which had a smaller window than the others. She traced the river, looked at the elevation marks.\n\n\"Think they'll take the river all the way back?\" she asked Frys.\n\n\"The hike would be formidable. Solid forest between here and the ruins, and there's no trail that I know of.\"\n\n\"That's what I thought.\" Lara smiled grimly. \"Borg, you up for a run? This might be our chance. We could get in ahead of them.\"\n\n\"Help me with my arms, please.\"\n\nAnother time she would have been interested to learn more about the elaborate connections between Borg's stumps and the mechanical arms. But with time an issue, she just followed his directions. Attaching the arms was no more difficult than putting a lens on a camera body: All she had to do was line up a red triangle and a red square, then turn, and the arm clicked into place. Then she plugged in the USB cables.\n\nLara and Borg helped each other into the special packs they'd brought, and slung water-carrying camel packs over those. The packs came equipped with straws to make for convenient rehydrating on the move.\n\n\"Are those parachutes?\" Heather asked, indicating the closure on the larger packs Lara and Borg wore beneath the camels.\n\n\"They are,\" Lara replied.\n\n\"Umm, so where's the plane?\" Heather continued.\n\n\"There isn't one,\" Borg said. \"It will be a base jump, from the edge of the Whispering Abyss.\"\n\nHeather blinked her eyes.\n\nLara adjusted the straps on her lucky pack so that it would sit nestled atop the parachute. \"Don't let me forget to change this before we jump.\"\n\nBorg nodded. \"Of course.\"\n\nShe went to the window. The healthy survivors of the attack on the canopy tower were splashing into the river, to be hauled up on board the Plato.\n\n\"Bring the telescope over here.\"\n\nIt took her a moment to get it aligned. She looked through the eyepiece, searching for the face she'd seen on the back of the book jacket, that of Tejo Kunai. Instead, she saw someone else.\n\nAjay.\n\nHer old schoolmate stood at the front of the boat, one booted foot on the rail. She had machine pistols strapped in holsters on either thigh, a tank top, and wraparound blue sunglasses. Her hair hung from the back of her head in a single braid.\n\nPerhaps Ajay saw the distant flash of telescope glass in the morning sun. She stared straight at the canopy tower, slapped her pistol butts.\n\nThen Lara recognized another face. Fermi, the Peruvian park ranger, was helping the wounded to board the boat.\n\nShe turned away from the window, addressed Heather and Frys: \"There are bodies on the stairs. You two can bury them while we're gone.\"\n\n\"Shouldn't we put them somewhere for the police?\" Frys asked.\n\n\"Leave them out, then. Just make sure it's downwind. The ants and the flies will leave less for the Peruvians than if you just buried them.\"\n\n\"I'll radio Fermi,\" Frys decided. \"He can bring the police back with him.\"\n\n\"I doubt it,\" Lara said. \"He's already back, aboard the Plato.\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\n\"I just got a good look at him through the telescope. It's him, all right.\"\n\n\"But that means\u2026\"\n\n\"Right. They've known you were here the whole time. You can't trust Fermi, and that means you can't trust the park service, either. Radio Williams. Get him to call in the police. Whatever's going on at Ukju Pacha, the M\u00e9ne are willing to kill to keep it secret.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "Lara Croft ignored the bodies on the stairs, but not the blood. This wasn't the time for a slip: It was a long way down. At the bottom, Lara and Borg dashed for cover in the great roots of the tree. Lara listened for a few minutes for footfalls, conversation, any sign that the black-and-tans had left a team behind. Nothing. She pulled out her global positioning system, a handheld device about the size and shape of a pocket PC, and checked the location of the first waypoint on the route to the ruins.\n\nThen they ran.\n\nAfter the first sprint, they settled down into a jog. Only a few broad-leafed shade plants and spiky ferns thrived beneath the thick canopy. The spongy footing endangered them only on the slopes.\n\nDead branches lay on a carpet of dead leaves, and fallen trees were being slowly consumed by moss and lichen. Lara had been in enough rain forests to know that it took only a year or two, if that, for even the biggest deadfall to become nothing more than a fern-nursing clump of compost on the forest floor.\n\nThey jogged for thirty minutes, stopped for five, then jogged for thirty minutes more, sucking water from their camel packs. The run became more difficult as they headed uphill. She spotted a familiar looking plant, and stopped to gather its plump leaves. Borg asked to be shown her GPS.\n\n\"I thought so,\" he said. \"Why this course? The ground isn't much easier, and we're taking the long way to the ruins.\"\n\n\"But it's the short way to the river gorge. I want to go to the cliff here.\" She tapped the waypoint on the green screen.\n\n\"Why? To see how far upriver the Plato has gotten?\"\n\n\"We'd win the race to the ruins, but only by an hour at most. I want to try to slow them up a little more.\"\n\n\"There's water at the ruins, I hope,\" Borg said.\n\n\"I can't see them making the climb down to the river every time someone needs to brew coffee.\"\n\n\"Coffee. That sounds good right now.\"\n\nShe extracted the leaves she'd gathered. \"Try this. It's muna, a native remedy for headaches and fatigue.\"\n\n\"What's in it?\"\n\n\"Don't worry, it's not a local methamphetamine. The biochemistry, as I understand it, just helps your body move oxygen around more efficiently. Salicylic acid, too, for the pain, probably.\"\n\nThey both chewed the slightly bitter leaves. She felt her batteries recharge.\n\nBorg looked over his shoulder at a sudden crunching noise. A furry face blinked out at them from behind a fallen trunk, its jaws working on a tuber of some sort. The animal squeaked, turned tail, and disappeared beneath two roots of an upright tree.\n\n\"A sloth?\" Borg asked.\n\n\"No. It looked like a guinea pig.\"\n\n\"I have never heard of a guinea pig of that size.\"\n\n\"They grow them big around here, I guess. Perhaps Frys can explain \u2026 if we ever see him again, that is. I've never tried a BASE jump like this.\"\n\nBorg lifted his classic chin, and his seafarer's eyes met hers. \"I have much experience with such jumps, Lara. We can do it, as long as the legend of the Whispering Abyss hasn't grown in the telling. All it takes is nerve and skill, and you have no shortage of either.\"\n\n\"How could Ajay have left this man? Every time he spoke, Lara had a hard time not daydreaming about climbing into a seagoing yacht with him and sailing up a fjord."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "The Plato hadn't rounded the southern hairpin turn before the gorge when Lara and Borg reached the cliff. They were on the shoulder of the mountain holding the ruins of Ukju Pacha, but those ruins were still a few kilometers away, at the narrowest point of the river. Lara placed her feet carefully at the edge of the cliff and looked down six hundred meters of sheer rock, thankful that she didn't suffer from vertigo. Pure whitewater flowed beneath, with a tow path running along their side of the cliff.\n\nThe river made two turns here, like the letter zed with a short middle line. At the top corner of the zed was the ruins, and another cliff. She and Borg stood downriver at the bottom corner of the zed. She picked up a rock, tossed it underhand, and then watched, timing its descent into the foaming water far below.\n\nA moment later, the Plato came into sight, pulling up the rapids at the end of the zed. A team of horses or, more likely, mules\u2014she couldn't tell at this distance\u2014had a line out to the Plato, hauling it up through the spots of rushing water too swift for the boat's engines.\n\n\"Like shooting fish in a barrel,\" Lara observed.\n\nBorg adjusted the straps over his beefy shoulders with his claw hand. No wonder he had a frame like that, if he spent much time with those heavy arms attached. \"And how will you shoot? You have perhaps a rifle in sections packed away?\"\n\n\"I don't need a rifle.\" Lara picked up a cricket-ball-sized rock she'd spotted earlier. \"Find a few about this size, would you?\"\n\n\"You will stop them with rocks?\"\n\n\"I will stop them with physics. Force equals mass times velocity squared.\"\n\n\"Meaning what?\"\n\n\"You'll see.\"\n\nBorg searched the cliff's edge for rocks as Lara planted herself on a prominence. She threw her stone cricket-bowler style. She watched it fall as Borg handed her another stone of similar size.\n\nThe pop-pop-pop of small-arms fire aimed back up at her echoed in the canyon above the rush of water, but the bullets fired straight up at the cliff top were no more of a threat at this distance than the hummingbirds that flitted among the blossoms at the cliff's edge.\n\nIt took her three tries before she hit. The fourth rock went through the canopy and out the boat's bottom, judging from the frantic bailing that commenced. She threw two more rocks. She saw one splash beyond the boat, but the other hit dead center.\n\nThe black-and-tans fled the filling center of the boat, shouting at the man with the mules in harness. She saw water come in over the boat's side, dusted her palms off, and pulled her minibinoculars out of her pack.\n\nThe black-and-tans worked like demons to save their wounded. She watched a man, helped by Ajay, pulling another through the water using the towline to get to the shore. If nothing else, the M\u00e9ne were loyal to one another.\n\nBorg gasped. \"Give me those glasses.\"\n\n\"Yes, Ajay is down there. She's a strong swimmer. The current is quick, but it's not that dangerous. All the white water is at the turns in the river.\"\n\n\"I want it anyway.\"\n\nLara adjusted the straps on her pack. \"There's no time, Borg. We have to get to the ruins.\"\n\n\"We are here for Ajay.\"\n\n\"Yes, but she's down there, and we're up here. Unless you're Superman, there's nothing you can do from this distance. Besides, it's more than Alison now. Haven't you been paying attention? We're going to get Ajay out, yes, but the M\u00e9ne are up to work I haven't quite fathomed yet. Murder, attempted murder\u2014I don't like anything I've learned about them. We need to find out more, and the ruins are the best place to do that.\"\n\nBorg nodded. \"All right. I will wait. I know one thing, though. The M\u00e9ne have brainwashed her. Alison would never be with such people, a murderer like this Kunai, willingly. I'm sure of it.\"\n\nLara wasn't so sure, but Borg was already running toward the ruins. The sight of Ajay had renewed his energy even more than the muna leaves."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "Far above Ukju Pacha, condors circled on their spread wings, tiny black crosses against a blue sky. Crouched out of sight behind a fallen tree, Lara examined the M\u00e9ne camp through her minibinoculars, but saw no one moving either among the tents or within the ruins.\n\nThe \"expedition\" had camped under the three-meter-tall walls of Ukju Pacha. Their garbage was bagged according to customary practice, but rain forest raiders had torn open the sacks to get at the refuse within. Lara nodded at Borg, and they rose from concealment and approached the seemingly deserted camp from downwind, masking their scent with the odor of the garbage in case the M\u00e9ne used dogs to guard their enclave. But there was no barking, no sound or movement at all from within the camp.\n\nThe ruins\u2014above ground anyway, the Tomb Raider corrected herself-were not as extensive as Machu Picchu, nor did they have the horizon-changing outline of Mexico's Mayan step pyramids. But the blocks of stone that made up the walls still stood flush, to the ancient engineers' credit, though root and vine covered the quarried granite.\n\nThey searched the camp. The tents were deserted. Lara found a flowerlike rain catcher with several white plastic water jugs set beneath. They refilled their camel packs from one.\n\nThe M\u00e9ne had guns enough for a military camp, as Lara learned when Borg lifted the lid of a crate and found weapons and ammunition stacked inside. She lifted a shotgun by its sling, smelled the residue in its lethal muzzle. What had they been shooting at?\n\nA path descended to the cliff. She turned down it.\n\n\"I thought you wanted to go into the ruins,\" Borg said.\n\n\"Not just yet. We need to slow up our friends a little further.\" They trotted down to the cliff. It was not as sheer as the one from which she'd given the Plato its physics lesson, but it was still a precipitous drop. A series of wooden steps snaked its way up the side of the cliff from the river, with platforms placed every ten meters or so for tourists to rest and look down the picturesque gorge.\n\nThe wood was old and gray, sagging in some parts. Until recently, the Peruvian rain forest had owned it. But the stairs had been cut clear, and recent repairs with rope and roughhewn logs had made the rickety structure serviceable again.\n\nLara hurled a rock at a pair of scarlet macaws perched on the handrail halfway down.\n\n\"What did you do that for?\" Borg asked.\n\n\"I didn't want to hurt them. VADS: right nitro, left pyro.\"\n\n\"What's that you said?\"\n\nLara loaded her guns and took aim at the platforms hugging the vertical part of the cliff.\n\nShe aimed, first right, then left, then two more rights, then another left\u2026\n\n\"Good God!\" Borg exclaimed as the bullets reduced the stairway to burning kindling.\n\nShe reloaded, selected a new section of the stairway.\n\n\"The Peruvians aren't going to like this.\"\n\n\"If we live, I'll write them a check. Back up.\"\n\nA third load destroyed the top landing. The wood gave off a wispy white smoke as it crackled and burned.\n\n\"Now they'll have to take the long way around. With any luck, we'll be long gone by then.\"\n\nBorg stepped back as the staircase shrieked and collapsed with a crash. \"What do you expect to find here?\"\n\nThe Tomb Raider slid the hot guns back into their holsters. \"I'm not sure. There's something at the bottom of the Whispering Abyss that they need. If we can't steal it somehow\u2014\"\n\n\"You'll destroy it just like the staircase.\"\n\n\"Only as a last resort.\"\n\nBorg shook his head. \"You're some archaeologist.\"\n\n\"I never claimed that title,\" Lara said. \"Once, long ago, a man called me a Tomb Raider. Started off as a radio call sign. I didn't like him much, but I liked the name. I get in, I get what I want, and I leave again before matters get complicated.\"\n\n\"So now we walk all the way back up to the ruins.\"\n\n\"Not exactly,\" she said, checking her laces.\n\n\"How's that?\"\n\n\"Haven't you been around me long enough? We run, of course.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "Whatever Ukju Pacha had been, it wasn't a city. There were no dwellings or aqueduct-fed plots, as at Machu Picchu. Occasional towering stones jutted out of the ground next to smaller markers. A few post-and-lintel structures remained, roughly the size of the triptychs at Stonehenge, though the posts were built from many smaller stones and only the lintels were a single block.\n\nLara and Borg found no depressions of any kind, no staircases leading to any kind of abyss, whispering or otherwise.\n\n\"What did your books say about this place?\" Borg asked. He stood on his tiptoes to touch a lintel.\n\n\"Not enough. 'Unidentified pre-Columbian,' which is archaeologist-speak for 'not a clue, sorry.'\"\n\n\"It reminds me of a cemetery. Grave markers.\"\n\nLara touched an ivylike plant growing up a mound of markers. Closed buds about the size of pea pods indicated it was getting ready to flower. She tore one open, pulled out the white petals. They began to turn brown in the warm air and sunlight.\n\n\"That's an odd reaction,\" she said.\n\nBorg grunted. \"Perhaps they are night-blooming flowers.\"\n\nLara nodded. \"The M\u00e9ne worshipped the deep places of the earth. It makes sense that they might have worshipped flowers that bloomed in darkness. I wish I could see the ruins from the point of view of those condors! Perhaps a pattern would emerge\u2026\"\n\nShe broke off.\n\n\"What?\" asked Borg, looking around. \"Did you hear something?\"\n\n\"No, I just realized something.\" She scrambled up the marker, using narrow cracks in the stone as hand-and footholds.\n\n\"There's an opening up here,\" she called down to Borg. \"Like a chimney.\"\n\n\"Can you get in?\"\n\nLara felt a mild breeze of cool air wafting from the opening. Taking her battered MagLite 6 cell from her pack, she had a look inside. The passage extended beyond the beam. \"It's too narrow,\" she called back. \"But at least now we know what to look for.\"\n\nBorg hunted amongst the markers for a wider passage.\n\nMeanwhile, Lara returned to the strange vines with the closed buds. She felt that she was missing something, something about how they were growing\u2026\n\nCultivated, that was it. No weeds grew where the flowering vines thrived, unlike the riotous chaos at the walls and gardens and outer markers.\n\nThe plants circled an area of three rounded chimneys. In the center of these, three slabs of stone leaned together, like drunks hanging on to each other around a bottle. A spill of budded vines fell from the top and grew thick all about the four-meter-high blocks.\n\nThe Tomb Raider tried beneath, but old masonry filled in the arches between the stones.\n\nNothing to do but go up again.\n\nShe grabbed a vine and used it to haul herself up the smooth, sloping granite. She made it to the top, stood triumphantly astride a triangular shaft leading into darkness. All around her other little chimneys of stone conducted air, and possibly light, into the earth. She marked a circle of them sixty meters away. A very wide circle. Could that be the cap of the Whispering Abyss?\n\nBig enough for her. And Borg.\n\nThe M\u00e9ne had even left a ladder within.\n\n\"Borg, get up here. I've found the way in.\"\n\nBorg made a motion with his right arm like a fisherman casting. Metal flashed as it fell. It took Lara's eyes a second to recognize what they'd seen. Borg's claw hand, at the end of a cable, landed in the hole. Borg reeled the cable back into his arm, and the grapnel-fingers fixed at the edge.\n\nThe Tomb Raider stood on the claw for good measure as Borg c1imbed\u2014or rather winched himself up, using a pinch-hook he extended from the left piton arm for assistance at the top of the slab. The climb done, he folded the hook back into the piton arm as a man might close a Swiss Army knife.\n\n\"Does it have a magnifying glass for starting fires?\"\n\nBorg laughed. He pointed to a jawlike protrusion near the piton-firing muzzle with one of the grapnel-fingers. \"No. It does have a pincer, so I can grip a stick.\" He worked the grapnel-fingers. \"Then I can rub it with another stick here. But I find it's easier to just hold a butane candlelighter.\"\n\nHis shaggy hair was like a golden halo in the sun. Lara wanted to kiss him, but she held back. His heart still belonged to Ajay, and it wasn't for her to judge whether Ajay was brainwashed or not. At least, not without meeting her first.\n\nLara stuck her head in the triangular gap, shifted her body so that it blocked the sun, and let her eyes adjust. The ladder had duct tape running down one side of it. How odd. She followed the tape up and down with her eyes.\n\nOne of the rungs had what could be a pressure switch. The wires ran down to what looked like a plastic canteen.\n\nBooby trap. Not powerful enough to damage the giant blocks, but anyone at the top of the ladder would be launched out the entrance like a circus performer shot from a cannon.\n\nCute.\n\nIt wasn't that far down. She let herself fall through the hole headfirst, somersaulted as she dropped, and landed on her toes next to the ladder. A red switch at the side of the canteen glowed beside a small antenna. So they turned it on and off by radio.\n\nBest not to touch.\n\nShe stood in a plain chamber, triangular, with an arched tunnel about a meter and three quarters high leading from each wall. They would have to crouch.\n\n\"Can you jump down?\" she called up to Borg. \"The ladder is dangerous.\"\n\n\"Move the ladder, please.\"\n\n\"I can't. It's wired to explosives.\"\n\n\"I thought you meant it wouldn't hold my weight. Just a moment.\"\n\nHe blocked the sun, then descended at the end of his cable, his arm humming.\n\n\"How long are those batteries good for?\" she asked, vexed for not thinking to ask sooner.\n\n\"Four days of use. A little less in extreme cold, or if I use the winch to pull my weight up a great deal. I climbed the Cordier Pillar of the Grands Charmoz with what is in the batteries and had power for thirty-six more hours.\"\n\n\"We should be all right then. That's some feat of engineering.\"\n\n\"They made a video. The Japanese say I will be in the commercial once they go to market: 'Extraordinary gear for extraordinary people.' But they're still having trouble with the artificial legs they're working on. They want to bring out the arms and legs as a set. We shall see.\"\n\nShe searched the floor. Footprints went into and came out of each arch. Beams of light from above illuminated all three dark tunnels at irregular distances. But only one had brown stains about the size of a euro coin.\n\n\"Looking for bread crumbs?\" Borg asked.\n\n\"Bloodstains. Let's start there.\" It also went in the direction of the circle of air shafts she'd seen.\n\nThe tunnel was a tight fit. Lara had to crouch, and Borg had to duckwalk, through the tunnel for about thirty meters before it widened out into a long chamber, pyramid shaped, that just gave her room to stand up. Borg still had to crouch. The limited light from the air shafts in the tunnel didn't allow them to view this new chamber, so they turned on their torches.\n\nDead end. Something glittered at the far wall.\n\n\"The builders weren't very tall,\" Borg grumbled.\n\nThe bloodstains ended abruptly in the middle of the floor, clustered a little more thickly near, but not at, the end of the chamber.\n\nNear a gap in the floor.\n\nLara followed the gap; it ran along to the join at the bottom of the sloping walls at the edge of the room and turned back the way they'd come in. She had to go on hands and knees to explore thanks to the sloping roof. \"This whole part of the floor is separate.\"\n\n\"Same on this side,\" Borg said, sniffing. \"Do you smell oil?\"\n\n\"Yes. Like a garage.\"\n\nShe went to the far end of the pyramid chamber. It deadended at what turned out to be a mosaic, the first decoration they'd seen. Green glass, recently cleaned, formed the omega sign she'd seen before, though this one was more oval shaped than the others, almost skull-like.\n\n\"Never seen this variant,\" she said, letting the light play in the reflections.\n\n\"I wouldn't mind never having seen it in the first place.\"\n\nWas the bloodstain a false lead to another trap, perhaps? But her instincts gained over years of tomb raiding told her she'd gone in the right direction.\n\nShe saw a shadow on the other side of the glass.\n\n\"Borg, get your light closer, please.\"\n\nA bar, placed horizontally descended from the center of the omega skull, just as the spinal cord did from the human brain.\n\nThe Tomb Raider searched above and below the glass, pressed here and there and\u2014\n\nA matched pair of stone panels below the omega-skull swung inward She checked the space with her flashlight. Not wide enough to crawl through, but she could easily reach the bar.\n\n\"Careful Lara!\" said Borg, looking over her shoulder. \"It might be another booby trap.\"\n\n\"What religion are you, Borg?\"\n\n\"Roman Catholic. I'm not observant, really.\"\n\n\"Even though you're not observant, would you booby-trap a cross at the front of a church?\"\n\n\"Of course not.\"\n\n\"Neither would the M\u00e9ne. The bar is in a groove. I think it's a lever of some kind.\"\n\nShe tried moving it to the left.\n\nThe floor vibrated, and both Lara and Borg started at a deep rumble. A section of floor at the entrance to the pyramid chamber rose and rotated as it came up, mining into a shark-tooth of stone moving to block their entrance as the floor with the mass of bloodstains dropped.\n\n\"Run,\" she called, jumping to her feet and hurrying to the gap. Borg was a step behind. Both jumped and landed on the descending square of stone.\n\nShe hadn't noticed the gap bisecting the first section of floor.\n\nThe platform descended about three meters, into cooler, damper air, then stopped. The lubricant smell filled their nostrils.\n\nThey stood next to a pillar of salt. Or so it looked.\n\nLara wondered about the column. It was some kind of whitish crystal, slick with fluid, rising to a hole in the roof where the section of floor that had risen would be. It was the width of a mechanic's lift and came out of a crystal ring set in the floor.\n\n\"Hydraulics,\" she said. She wondered if the mechanism had survived the millennia intact, or if these new M\u00e9ne had somehow brought it back into repair.\n\nThey stood at the edge of a cave\u2014or, rather, a tunnel, now. It had a disturbing uniformity to it; it was about the diameter of one of the older London tubes.\n\nOnly one direction to go.\n\nIf time weren't an issue, she would have taken measurements, photographed the sides of the cave for tool marks, chipped off a sample of the rock face, even taken a vial of the water trickling from cracks here and there before it disappeared into fissures in the floor. As it was, she just searched the cave ceiling long enough to find another bar like the one she'd found above. It shone faintly silver in the beam of her flashlight. She hopped up on a small ledge to better examine it.\n\nThe Tomb Raider tapped it with a fingernail. It looked like solid platinum, but it was harder than the precious kind. Perhaps it was the industrial kind with iridium mixed in to harden it.\n\nPlatinum existed in the Andes, along with richer deposits of silver and gold. But industrial platinum? Man-made, that\u2014for in nature it was usually found mixed with baser metals\u2014and only very recently, in archaeological terms, at that.\n\nUnless this was an entirely new kind of metal.\n\nThey followed the tunnel, using their lights. It sloped down gently beneath them.\n\n\"It is a relief to be cool again,\" said Borg after a moment.\n\n\"Yes. Almost pleasant down here.\" Lara caught the sparkle of foil in her flashlight, lifted up a breakfast bar wrapper. \"Garbage: the archaeologist's friend.\"\n\n\"What does it tell you?\"\n\nLara pocketed the wrapper. She hated litter. \"Our society values speed and convenience over taste.\"\n\n\"So we're still far from the Abyss?\"\n\n\"No. And if I'm not mistaken, this may be it.\"\n\nThey turned off their torches. Their eyes adjusted, picked up a faint glow.\n\n\"Hell?\" Borg joked.\n\n\"Maybe just a doorway to it.\"\n\n\"I don't see a sign reading, 'Abandon hope all ye who enter here.'\"\n\n\"Wouldn't keep me out anyway,\" Lara said.\n\nShe gazed in wonder as they entered the domed chamber, which was perhaps a little bigger than the forty-three-meter circumference of the Pantheon in Rome, if not as high. Around the edges of the dome, narrow, triangular-shaped shafts brought in light and fresh air. Modern lighting and power equipment waited, deactivated. A gaping hole in the center echoed with the faint sound of moving air. Kunai and his M\u00e9ne had made improvements to the old stonework in the form of a girder, winches, and lines. A gigantic spool of cable rested at the end of the winch. Other cables went down the edge of the Abyss, some electrical, others climbing line.\n\nLara looked up a light shaft. It looked large enough to wiggle up, and at about head height the surface became rougher, though it appeared to narrow near the top, as a chimney does to better draw up air. Polished surfaces lined the back and sides of the shaft, helping the light down. Platinum again? The M\u00e9ne used the stuff like pig iron. At the bottom of the shafts, where the light fell, little plots of earth supported slimelike lichens. She checked another shaft, found similar shining plate. This one had brown residue on it. Dried blood.\n\n\"The Whispering Abyss,\" she said. The currents came up the shaft.\n\nBorg crouched next to the generator. \"Do you want this on?\"\n\n\"No. I'm not trusting anything of theirs that's electrical after seeing that bomb on the ladder. But we could use a bunch of these.\" She tapped a box with her toe. Row upon row of chemical lights lay within, cylinders about the size of a small cigar, along with neatly wound lengths of cording. She cracked one and shook it until it glowed green, then picked up a lanyard and attached the chemical light to it with a small hook at the end of the lanyard. She hung it around her neck.\n\n\"Fill your pockets,\" she said. She put another lighted lanyard around his neck.\n\nShe cracked another and shook it until it glowed green. Then walked to the center of the room.\n\nThe Whispering Abyss yawned beneath them. She measured the diameter of the sound with her eye. It was perhaps a little smaller than legend had it. It would make the jump difficult.\n\nSome might say suicidal."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "Borg joined her at the edge of the pit.\n\nShe dropped the chemical light in her hand, watched it fall past the stone stairs, past their crumbled end, become a dot, then a wink, then a nothing.\n\n\"Bottomless?\" Borg asked.\n\n\"They built a staircase leading nowhere, just for show?\"\n\n\"Then to what purpose?\"\n\n\"The priests would go down and return with revelations. Their gods spoke to them from the depths. Another legend says that sacred etchings are down there. All this gear makes me think the second. Think we can do a BASE jump?\"\n\nBorg got down on one knee to look at the side of the sound. \"A climb would be safer.\"\n\n\"Time, Borg. We may only have hours.\"\n\n\"Too bad the film crew isn't here.\"\n\nThey laid out their parachutes, put on the harnesses. Lara took extra care with Borg's.\n\n\"Did we ever decide who would go first?\" Borg asked.\n\n\"I will,\" Lara said.\n\n\"How many BASE jumps have you done?\"\n\n\"A dozen or so. I jumped off a skyscraper in Hong Kong once.\"\n\n\"I've done over a hundred, including a cavern jump in Mexico. The cavern was much bigger than this, of course.\"\n\n\"The air currents will help. We don't know what we're going to land on. I'll go first.\"\n\n\"Very well. Tight spirals, Lara. Very tight.\"\n\nHe helped her place her specially designed chute on the floor. It spread out behind her like a huge wedding train.\n\nThey put on light-intensifying goggles. Lara shook a chemical light to life.\n\nBorg gave her a nod. \"Good luck, Tomb Raider.\"\n\n\"See you in hell.\"\n\nShe ran so that the chute could partially fill. Behind her, Borg gave her chute a fluff.\n\nThe Tomb Raider jumped into darkness, felt a reassuring jerk as the stunt chute opened fully with a whipcrack sound. She grabbed her right toggle, tried to get into a spiral\u2014\n\nChute and parachutist hit the wall. Her canopy collapsed. She fell in a tangle of lines, righted herself, and her chute opened again. Pulled on the right toggle again, tried to get herself into a spin \u2026 but hit the wall again, the breath rushing out of her at the impact, and pushed herself away by instinct before the chute collapsed further.\n\nLara Croft felt like a pebble falling down a drain.\n\nShe tried the left toggle. M\u00e9ne mysticism or no, the left toggle worked better for her, and her breathing returned to normal as she descended in a smooth, tight spiral.\n\nEven so, each turn swung her farther outward, forcing her to kick against the wall whenever it got too close. The chute required constant adjustments; she performed them with precision and skill.\n\nThen the shaft widened. She found herself able to drift. The stairs clung intact here.\n\nShe looked down, saw a ledge. She caught a glint of shining metal beneath it.\n\nHer heart sped up, as it always did when she was in sight of an objective. The walls sloped inward again\u2014like a bowl's\u2014around the ledge, almost a mirror image of the chamber above. The shaft continued down beyond the ledge. She turned so she'd hit the walkway lengthwise.\n\nThe wind flowing up from the Abyss caught her chute oddly. She ran into the wall again, slipped, and tumbled\u2014rolled off the ledge in the tangle of her harness.\n\nShe grabbed as she fell, caught the ledge with her left hand, then got her right up, too. The chute hung beneath her. Lara managed to wedge one foot into a crack, but the other leg was tangled up in her lines.\n\nShe pulled herself up, caught her legs in the chute again, and slipped back.\n\nSomething struck the wall next to her with enough force for the impact to transmit through the wall. She turned her head and saw Borg land on the ledge, cleaner than she had. The chemical light stick around his neck filled his face with shadows. He looked like a child holding a torch under his chin while telling a ghost story.\n\nHe pulled in his chute. \"The piton, by your left knee.\"\n\nEight centimeters of steel stuck out from the wall. She swung her left foot up, got it on the piton.\n\nAccurate with that cannon of his.\n\nWith the leverage from her leg, it was easy to get back on the ledge. The Tomb Raider sat for a moment, legs dangling over the edge of the walkway, gathering in her chute and getting her bearings. She looked up at the circle of light far above. They'd come down perhaps the height of New York's Empire State Building.\n\nShe noticed something on the wall between her legs.\n\n\"Borg\u2014,\" she began.\n\nA buzzing sound rising from below cut her comment off.\n\nAn impossibility flew straight for Borg. Occupied with drawing up his chute, he didn't see it until it was on him.\n\nLara caught a flash of yellow chitin, trailing legs, the hum of wings.\n\nThe flier was the size of an eagle, but far more agile. It looked like a gigantic bee. It changed course without banking, like a helicopter. She swept her guns up.\n\nBut before she could fire, another yellow-armored flier erupted from the darkness and flew at her face. She knocked it away; her forearm felt like it had struck a glass vase.\n\nBorg yelped. One of the things had landed on his metal claw arm, where it pumped frantically with its abdomen, trying to sting.\n\nNow there were two more darting around the Tomb Raider. She crouched, fired. The explosive and incendiary shells turned the insects into burning goo. Chunks fell away into darkness.\n\nBorg swung his arm, smashed the thing clutching at his cybernetic limb against the wall. Another came up at him, and she shot it on the wing; it described one neat loop and dropped back into the Abyss.\n\nMore came up, and she shot them, and then still more came up, and she reloaded and shot again. She had VADS switch to explosive bullets, and the bugs exploded like fireworks all around them.\n\nThen they were gone, as quickly as they'd come. Bits of insect, bulbous-eyed heads and crablike legs mostly, lay scattered about the ledge.\n\nBorg was looking at his piton arm. A broken-off stinger was lodged in the joint. It was the size of a switchblade.\n\n\"Nils, are you stung?\" No answer. \"Borg, are you stung?\"\n\nBorg shook his head as though awakening from a dream. He used the digits of his other arm to pull the stinger free.\n\n\"Where were those things?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Remember the oversized butterflies and other creatures we've seen? I'm beginning to think that something in the ecosystem here is creating mutations.\"\n\n\"They are deadly, whatever they are.\"\n\n\"Keep your voice down,\" Lara cautioned. \"Maybe the noise drew them.\"\n\nBorg nodded. \"What do we do now?\" he asked in a whisper.\n\nLara knelt at the edge and and ran her hands across the side of the shaft beneath the ledge. It was pebbled; she held her light up close to see better. The Abyss wall was encrusted with masses of tiny shells, long dead, empty and dry.\n\nAnd something else. The same things she'd seen glinting beneath the ledge before the insects came.\n\nBorg gasped, seeing them, too.\n\nThey were panels, the now-usual platinum color. Dirt-covered but legible, each about the size of the Mona Lisa in its frame and covered with fine engraving, close-placed, the lines orderly and regular, not quite letters and not quite hieroglyphs. Lara counted nine of them, just beneath the base of the stairs where the ledge was a little thicker. Netting and lines lay here, placed by the cultists in readiness for drawing up the plates if they could ever be detached.\n\nA strange place to put holy texts, the Tomb Raider thought. It would be like putting artwork around the wainscoting rather than at eye level.\n\nShe saw a roll of cargo netting, a crowbar, and a hammer left on the ledge. She'd bet the contents of the Croft bank account that Ajay's fingerprints could be lifted off those tools.\n\n\"Is this what they are looking for?\" Borg asked.\n\n\"I think so.\"\n\n\"You mean to take them?\"\n\n\"If I can get them off the wall without making a racket and bringing those bugs back up\u2014yes, I mean to take them.\"\n\n\"Let's have a look.\" Borg bent and shook another chemical light, put it in his mouth, and hung over the ledge. Lara imitated him, her ponytail dangling down the Whispering Abyss.\n\nThe Tomb Raider could detect no fitting. Not so much as a fingernail's gap could be found between the plates and the wall behind. Each one was infinitesimally curved to match the shape of the wall. It was as though the platinum alloy had grown from the cave wall, etching and all.\n\nThe edges of the plates were scored with fresh chisel marks.\n\nWhy didn't they just do rubbings? Take photographs that could be examined at leisure?\n\nLara tried pushing on a plate, hard. She searched the rim with her fingernails. Nothing. No, judging from the marks, Ajay had already tried forcing the plates in all sorts of different ways.\n\nBut only from the outside?\n\n\"Borg, check the ledge. There's got to be something.\"\n\nShe examined the stairs, the wall next to them, then the wall beneath them, holding her green chemical light, trying to detect any\u2014\n\nWhat have we here?\n\nA thumbprint-sized triangular stone was recessed into the rough cave wall so it could only be seen if you held your light close and at a certain angle. She pressed it, and heard a distinctive click.\n\nNothing more.\n\n\"Borg, the wall here, start pushing.\"\n\nThey both did so, huffing and puffing as they tried the side of the wall beneath the stairs. Lara got on her knees at the base of the stairs, shoved, and was rewarded by the feel of the bottom three stairs disappearing into the wall.\n\nA meter-wide chamber ran in a ring around the Abyss.\n\n\"I'll have to go in. You're too big.\"\n\nShe lit another chemical light and tossed it in. The backs of the panels could be seen, all secured at top and bottom by a long, curved platinum rod passing through triangular loops at the edges of the plates. The rod was also etched with tiny lines. Why decorate this concealed space?\n\nShe crawled inside.\n\nThe bars had an obvious handle, and showed no signs of corrosion after all the millennia they had sat there. She pushed the top handle to the left. It wouldn't move. She tried moving it to the right, and it slid with only the faintest of grinding sounds.\n\n\"You got it,\" Borg whispered loudly.\n\nThe bottom slide moved identically to the top. She tried a plate, experimented with pulling and pushing, careful to keep a finger in the triangular securing loop so it wouldn't fall away into the Whispering Abyss.\n\nThe plate came free when she pushed down.\n\nThe plates were thin, perhaps five millimeters thick, and flanged so that the interior side was slightly larger than the exterior side. Each weighed a few kilos.\n\nBorg's upside-down head suddenly appeared at the hole, a chemical light clutched between his teeth. She let out a frightened gasp.\n\nHe spat out the light. \"Got you!\" he chuckled.\n\nYou've got me all right, Nils. Too bad you want someone else.\n\n\"Fine time for jokes,\" she said, moving to the access-chamber entrance at the base of the stairs and placing the panel up on the ledge. \"Get the netting ready.\"\n\nSoon eight more plates joined the first. They stacked them each atop the other. Slightly curved, they fitted together perfectly, and heavily.\n\n\"Those will be hard to climb with.\"\n\n\"We'll use the M\u00e9ne lines, just tie them into the netting down here and haul them up once we've made it back to the top. They've got strong enough rope. I think I saw a muscle-powered winch.\"\n\n\"Let us hope these stairs last for a while,\" Borg said, looking at the lighted exit far above, seemingly as distant as Mars.\n\nLara secured the netting shut with D-rings, standard climbing gear that they both carried. She looped a length of M\u00e9ne mountain line through the rings and tested the weight.\n\nSixty kilos or so. The line would hold easily.\n\nThey repacked their chutes carefully. This way, in case of a fall during the climb, there was at least a chance for survival.\n\n\"Let's try the stairs,\" she said.\n\n\"Just like Ajay. Go, go, go. It will be a difficult climb, Lara. Let us sit for a moment and eat so we have strength when we need it. Five minutes, okay?\"\n\nWithout waiting for her to agree, he sat and opened a meal bar, washed his mouth out with water from his camel pack, and began to eat.\n\nLara looked at her watch. The smell of the food bar made her stomach growl. Perhaps he was right.\n\nA little worried that the smell of the fruit bar might bring back the flying whatever-they-weres, Lara dropped down next to him at the base of the stairs. The chemical lights gave their faces strange green mottles as they ate and drank in silence; easily portable food kept the body going, but it didn't inspire dinnertime conversation.\n\nWhen they finished, they started up the stairs.\n\n\"What is the plan to get Alison out?\" Borg asked.\n\n\"My plan is to have a bunch of helicopters filled with Peruvian soldiers show up and arrest the whole lot of them for attempted kidnapping and murder. Ajay will have sense enough to surrender. We can sort everything out after that.\"\n\n\"Sense? She is brainwashed.\"\n\n\"Not necessarily, Borg. She may have seen the M\u00e9ne as her ticket to a lot of money, enough to restore her family fortune. That's always been her goal.\"\n\n\"She would never willingly join such killers.\"\n\n\"Maybe she didn't know they were killers until it was too late. For all we know, she's playing a game of her own, going along with the cult until she can get away with the platinum.\"\n\nBorg took a deep breath, let it out slowly. \"Perhaps. She could be impetuous. And the lure of riches would be strong, as you say. But I still believe she has been brainwashed. This Kunai has her under some kind of spell.\"\n\n\"Is there something you're not telling me, Borg? What makes you insist on that as the only explanation?\"\n\n\"Her attitude, everything. It all changed while I was in the hospital. I saw a different person when I got out. I can understand some strangeness at first. The arms. I was not used to them. The limbs disgusted even me at first. But she could hardly stand to look at me with the arms off.\"\n\nThe hurt in his voice put a knot in her stomach. How well had Borg really known Ajay? She was a woman of dreams and passions and single-minded, even obsessive, drive. In her quest for an El Dorado to restore her family's wealth and name, would she ride an injured horse, no matter how much she loved him?\n\nAfter all, Lara hadn't. When Ajay had proved herself unfit for the Tomb Raider's fieldwork, endangering both herself and Lara, Lara had ended their brief partnership without hesitation, even though she'd known it might cost their friendship as well, which it had. Ever since, she'd worked alone. Attachments slowed you up. Feelings got in the way. How long had she waited next to the body of Oliver, or Von Croy?\n\nStop it, Croft. You're in the field, not your bed. This is one of the mind trips that brings tears, and tears are the last thing you need right now.\n\n\"We'll get it sorted, Borg. One of us is wrong about her. I'm hoping it's me.\"\n\n\"But what if I am the one who is wrong? What will you do then? Shoot her?\"\n\n\"I can't imagine it coming to that.\"\n\nBorg stopped climbing the stairs. \"I won't let you hurt her, Lara.\"\n\n\"Is that a threat?\"\n\n\"A promise.\"\n\n\"Borg, this is no time to argue. We've got to work together so everyone comes out of this alive. I have to trust you, and you have to trust me.\"\n\nHe said nothing, just turned and resumed climbing the stairs."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "Usually vertical climbs meant screaming winds that brought freezing mountain temperatures and ice crystals, numbness and joint pain from the cold and altitude. But the climb back up the Whispering Abyss had none of these.\n\nA trail of pitons commenced once the stairs gave out. All Lara and Borg had to do was grasp piton after piton in the inchworm progress of climbers and continue to feed line back to the panels sitting on the ledge below.\n\nLara let Borg lead. Whatever awkwardness he had displayed in getting on and off jets, or shaking hands, or eating was gone now. For the first time in her life, Lara found herself wondering if she was slowing a man down. Borg climbed, rested, climbed again, never wasting a motion or a chance to give his body a break from the strain if the placement of the pitons allowed, then after a moment continuing up with faint clicks and snicks as his arms hooked pitons and tested them. At times he improved the vertical path, using his piton arm to drive new holds.\n\nBehind him, Lara yanked out some of the pitons as she climbed, sending them spinning down the shaft. She wanted delay, to keep the M\u00e9ne in the ruins of Ukju Pacha long enough for the Peruvian army to arrive, and putting gaps in their path down might prevent them from discovering that the plates were missing until it was too late.\n\n\"It is too bad we did not know the way was so well prepared before we made our jump,\" said Borg. \"We could have climbed down.\"\n\n\"We still would have had to jump,\" said Lara. \"It would have taken us too long to get down and back. Besides, I saw the look on your face as you landed. You wouldn't have missed that jump for the world.\"\n\n\"It was \u2026 invigorating,\" Borg admitted.\n\nThat was not exactly the word that Lara would have chosen.\n\nWhen they reached the lines left by the M\u00e9ne, Lara spliced one to the rope at the other end of which was the plates. Despite the cool of the underground, her back was a sheet of sweat under her parachute and packs. Her guns and VADS gear seemed an unbearable weight at times, and she fought the temptation to just unbuckle and fling them the way of the pitons.\n\nLara took the lead when they reached the spot where the stairs resumed. At last, muscles shaking and sparking, she put a hand up over the lip of the Whispering Abyss and followed the muzzle of her gun into the domed chamber. It was deserted. She holstered her pistol and glanced at her watch.\n\nThey'd been in the Abyss for more than three hours. That was cutting it close. The crew of the Plato could arrive at any moment. They had to hurry.\n\nShe helped Borg up. Quickly, the two of them fixed the smaller line leading back to the platinum plates to the hand winch. Lara bent to operate it, then paused. Something nagged at her, but she couldn't quite put a finger on it.\n\n\"What is it, Lara?\" Borg asked.\n\nShe looked carefully about the chamber. Then she saw it. There were nine shafts cut into the top of the dome, so closely placed that the amount of sunlight streaming down each one should have been the same. Except it wasn't.\n\nSomething\u2014or someone\u2014was blocking four of the shafts.\n\nShe drew her pistols.\n\nToo late. Half a dozen men dropped down from the shafts, armed with shotguns and assault rifles.\n\n\"Drop your guns,\" came a voice that sounded somehow familiar.\n\nThe Tomb Raider looked for its source, but saw only the men who were training their weapons on her and Borg. With a curse, she dropped her guns. The USPs clattered to the floor, now just so much impotent metal.\n\n\"Lie down,\" said the voice. \"Face down, arms out.\"\n\nLara complied. Through the corner of her eye, she saw Borg obeying as well.\n\nM\u00e9ne came and stood with pistols to their heads while others handcuffed both of them. With Borg, the black-and-tans were forced to attach the cuffs to metal fittings intended for other uses.\n\n\"Clever trick with the boat,\" the man with his gun to Lara's head said in an Irish accent. \"The Prime figured you'd shoot the donkeys.\"\n\n\"The only asses I wanted to hurt were aboard the Plato,\" she said.\n\nShe got a pistol-smack on the side of the head for that.\n\nFootsteps entered the domed chamber from the tunnel. Lara raised her head from the ancient floor. She saw three people. She knew them all.\n\nHeather Rourke, her arms behind her back, perhaps handcuffed \u2026 perhaps not.\n\nAlison Harfleur, her left hand on Heather's elbow, her right on the butt of a machine pistol dangling from a strap about her shoulders.\n\nAnd Alex Frys.\n\nHe smiled at her. \"Thank you for fetching the Prophecy Panels, Lady Croft.\"\n\nNow she recognized the voice she'd heard earlier, but she said nothing.\n\nAjay, meanwhile, let go of Heather and walked over to where Lara's guns lay on the floor. She looked older than when Lara had last seen her, eight years ago. A bit more muscular. A lot more tan. Was she savoring the moment? Her expression was that of a student with the highest grades posted after an exam.\n\nAjay stooped and picked up Lara's guns. \"Very nice.\" She extended the pistol, sighting between Lara's eyes. \"You always did insist on the best accessories, Lara. The best guns. The best friends. But why not? You could afford it, couldn't you? Money was never a problem for Lady Croft.\"\n\nFrys glared at her. \"Give me those, Alison. We don't want any accidents.\"\n\nAlison thrust out her jaw, her eyes clear and hard as diamonds. \"Croft is dangerous. She should be killed.\"\n\n\"That is my decision, not yours. Give me the guns. Now.\"\n\nFor an instant, the two-locked eyes, and Lara wondered who would prevail. But then Ajay held out her hands, and Frys took the pistols from her. He examined them for a second, then walked casually to the edge of the Abyss and tossed them over. \"You won't be needing these anymore,\" he said.\n\nLara felt as if she'd just lost a favorite pet. Two of them.\n\nBorg chose this moment to speak. \"It is me, Alison. Nils. Don't you know me?\"\n\n\"I'm not likely to forget a freak like you,\" Ajay sneered.\n\n\"That's a fine way to talk to youf fianc\u00e9,\" Lara said, still stung by the loss of her custom pistols.\n\n\"Fianc\u00e9? He told you we were engaged?\" She seemed uncertain whether to be insulted or amused.\n\n\"We'd spoken of marriage several times,\" Borg said defensively.\n\n\"Before your accident,\" Ajay said. \"And I never accepted your proposals.\"\n\n\"I'm still the same man I was then.\"\n\n\"Not from where I'm standing.\"\n\nDespite the millennia-old rocks beneath her body, Lara felt the world shift. She'd trusted Borg \u2026 and he'd lied to her. He and Ajay had never been engaged. She wondered what else he'd lied about.\n\nFrys, meanwhile, turned to one of his men. \"What are you waiting for, Sixty-one? Winch up the panels!\"\n\nHe looked back at Lara. \"Don't pretend that you saw through my little charade,\" he said. \"Admit it: I had you fooled completely, didn't I?\"\n\n\"Where's Kunai?\" Lara asked in turn.\n\nFrys smiled. \"Many creatures in nature survive by imitating another. I used the name of a dead man, a ghost for you and others, like the police in Glasgow, to chase.\"\n\n\"You murdered Kunai, took his identity. Is that it?\"\n\n\"Tejo Kunai put the pieces of the M\u00e9ne faith back together, and he'll always be honored for it. But like John the Baptist, he was but a meteor presaging a greater light.\"\n\nMegalomania, even good-natured megalomania, gave Lara the creeps. Nor had it escaped her notice that Frys hadn't answered her question. He seemed decidedly reticent on the subject of Kunai. She decided to change the subject.\n\n\"What about the panels? What do they do?\"\n\n\"You'll find out soon enough. The whole world will find out.\"\n\n\"You are crazy. Insane.\" It was Borg. \"Listen to him, Alison. Can't you see that he's done something to you? Brainwashed you in some way?\"\n\n\"Nobody has brainwashed me,\" Ajay said. \"You're an idiot, Nils. You always were.\"\n\n\"You loved me. I know you did.\"\n\n\"I needed you. There's a difference.\"\n\nFrys approached, his hiking boots expanding to fill Lara's vision. \"Our guests look uncomfortable there on the ground. Two-twenty-one, Forty, help them up, would you?\"\n\nStrong hands hooked Lara under the armpits and pulled her to her feet. Borg was likewise hauled erect. Alison's cruel words seemed to have hit him hard. He looked as though he'd been physically beaten.\n\nFrys checked the fit of Lara's handcuffs, then returned to where Heather and Ajay stood. The journalist seemed dazed. She showed no awareness of her surroundings.\n\n\"What have you done to Heather?\" Lara asked.\n\n\"Ms. Rourke has decided to join us,\" Frys said.\n\n\"Is that true, Heather?\"\n\nNo answer.\n\n\"You've drugged her,\" Lara said accusingly. \"Are you going to brainwash her like you did Alison?\"\n\n\"I told you,\" Ajay said. \"Nobody brainwashed me.\"\n\n\"I never figured you for the cult-joining type, Ajay,\" Lara said.\n\n\"If your wit were as quick as your mouth, LC, you'd see the big picture.\"\n\n\"And what's that?\"\n\n\"Alison,\" Frys said. \"Enough. We've got what we want. The panels are ours!\"\n\nThe netting containing the panels had finally been winched to the edge of the Abyss. Two of the M\u00e9ne maneuvered the netting onto solid ground and cut it open. Frys and Ajay knelt to examine them.\n\n\"Beautiful,\" Ajay breathed. She turned to Lara. \"How did you get them loose, Lara? I tried everything!\"\n\n\"Obviously not everything.\"\n\nFrys gave each panel a loving polish with a piece of chamois before slipping it into in an empty crate produced by another of his minions.\n\nLara glimpsed motion behind Borg. He had extended his claw hand fractionally and was working to get the fingers into the links of his handcuffs. She had to cover the noise, provide a distraction. \"Alex, was it worth killing your father over those?\"\n\nThe leader of the M\u00e9ne stiffened. \"I didn't kill him. He panicked and drove his car off a cliff. I would rather have waited until he died of natural causes \u2026 but the stars were coming round right, you see, and would not do so again in my lifetime. Sixty-one, Forty, the crate is ready.\"\n\nLara didn't want the subject changed. \"The stars will be right for what?\"\n\n\"To learn that now, you would have to join us,\" Frys said.\n\n\"I might,\" she said, \"if I knew more.\"\n\n\"Give it a rest, LC,\" Ajay said. \"You're not fooling anybody.\"\n\nBorg quit working his mechanical hand, waggled the fingers at Lara. \"Alison, you don't belong with this circus,\" he said. He took a step toward Ajay, but men with guns shoved him back \u2026 and into Lara. She moved to block their view as his claw hand began to explore her wrists.\n\nAt a signal from Frys, the men started filing out of the tunnel.\n\n\"Now what?\" Lara asked. \"Are you going to kill us?\"\n\nBefore Frys could reply, the ting of Lara's handcuff link parting echoed off the dome. Borg lifted his arms\u2014\n\nAjay reacted faster than Lara would have given her credit for. She pivoted, extended her leg in a classic Tae Kwon Do kick, and connected with Borg's chest.\n\nBorg stumbled backward, his prosthetic arms wind-milling. Then he cried out as the floor dropped away beneath him, and he vanished into the Whispering Abyss.\n\n\"Nils!\" Lara hurled herself backward, twisting as she dove after Borg. She saw him falling beneath her, clutching at his chest, tumbling as he fell. By clasping her hands to her sides, turning her body into an arrow, she caught up to him, grabbed a strap of his harness just as they struck the wall. They bounced off, but Lara kept her grip. Borg seemed to have been knocked unconscious by the impact.\n\nBiting back the pain, Lara pulled Borg's chute open from the back, then let go so her shoulder wouldn't be dislocated when it opened. She heard it flutter open with a crack. Then she bounced off the wall again. Somehow, despite the blinding pain, she got her own chute open.\n\nGod, she hurt.\n\nThis descent made the last one seem like a picnic. She bounced off the wall again, and her chute folded and seemed unlikely to open again properly; perhaps part of it had caught a piton and ripped. She fell fast, but in a tight spiral. Too dark to see the walls \u2026 like falling in a nightmare.\n\nThe nightmare ended with a painful jar when she struck bottom. She fell onto something that felt like a soggy mattress. She untangled from her chute, found one of the stolen chemical lights in her pocket, lit it, held it up as she stood shakily. Her left leg was stiff and wobbly, but it held her up. At least nothing seemed to be broken.\n\nBulbous structures, each with a single round entrance, clung to the walls. She saw one of the huge beelike insects emerge from one opening, and instinctively reached for her empty holster.\n\nThen she saw her guns. They lay one beside the other near a mound of insect debris. She took a step toward them, and the flying thing launched itself at her with an angry buzz.\n\nP-kooof!\n\nFrom above, a metal spike drove through the huge insect, carrying parts of arthropod with it as it plunged into the litter-covered ground. Lara looked up to see Borg drifting down, an avenging cybernetic angel on nylon wings.\n\nHe landed and came out of his chute with the facility of a commando.\n\nLara, meanwhile, made it to her guns. They were both in one piece, a testament to H&K's rugged engineering.\n\n\"Nice shot,\" she said.\n\n\"Nice save,\" he complimented her in turn.\n\nAn angry humming from all around quieted them. Lara stood with pistols ready, but nothing emerged from the hive to attack.\n\nThey stood in a trash pit: pieces of broken nest mostly, pressed material that looked like attic insulation. Among the nest fragments were bones and parts of animal carcasses, old and desiccated. Above the garbage layer, whole nests ringed the bottom of the Abyss. The noises of insects moving about in them, like the scratchings of a thousand mice behind the wainscoting of a decrepit old house, made Lara eager to get away before more killer insects emerged.\n\n\"Is your VADS system still operational?\" Borg asked in a whisper.\n\nLara checked the inventory screen on the tiny hard drive that controlled the device; fortunately, it too had survived the fall. \"I think so. But I'd rather not have to shoot our way out. I used most of my fancy shells on that wooden staircase. As for what's left, the illumination rounds might not penetrate their chitin, and the rubber bullets might just bounce off. That leaves armor piercing, and I've only got twenty-four of those, plus a couple of reserve clips in my holsters. I never entirely trust technology.\"\n\nBorg looked back up the shaft of the Abyss. \"I do not think I could climb out of here again.\"\n\nLara shook her head. \"Me, either. But there may be another way out. Do you feel that?\"\n\n\"A breeze!\"\n\nIt flowed past them as steadily as though it came from a ventilation duct. Holding up her chemical light, Lara followed it. The floor of the Abyss sloped away under an overhang. The breeze was strongest here. She crouched, took a look under.\n\nAnother rounded tunnel, silted up with the dirt and dust of ages, sloped down. The wall was covered with fossilized barnacles and mussel shells. Had some long arm of the Pacific once extended this far beneath the Andes? \"Looks like this is our best bet,\" Lara said.\n\n\"Do we have enough light?\" Borg asked.\n\n\"Don't like full-dark spelunking? Don't worry. I have lots of these glo-sticks. We'll die of thirst before we run out of light.\"\n\n\"I don't want either to happen. I will trust you to get us out of here alive.\"\n\n\"Then you're going to tell me what really happened between you and Alison. We might not be down here if you'd told me the truth to begin with.\"\n\n\"I know. I am ashamed.\" His expression took on a hang-dog look in the light of Lara's glo-stick. \"But I thought of Alison as my fianc\u00e9e, please know that. I loved her very much.\"\n\n\"How do you feel now?\"\n\n\"I \u2026 don't know. But I still believe she is in this man's power somehow.\"\n\nLara remembered Ajay's intent face, her cold blue eyes, as she delivered the kick that sent Borg over the edge. \"Nils, you have a lot to learn about women.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "As he waited in the sun atop Ukju Pacha for the helicopter to arrive, Alex Frys, the Prime, reflected on his triumph. Words that had not been spoken since men hunted mastodons would soon be chanted. Rites performed, offerings made.\n\nThe world transformed.\n\nIt bothered him that Croft and the Norwegian were dead. Croft, anyway. The Norwegian was worth more as spare parts, as an auto broker might say. But the deaths were his responsibility, and though he did not shirk at killing, the Prime preferred live converts to dead heroes.\n\nTejo, dear Tejo, if only you'd not insisted\u2026\n\nIf the Prime stood up and walked about thirty meters farther into the ruins, he'd be at the spot where he first met Professor Tejo Kunai. He'd been, what was it, sixteen? Doing college work already on the Amazon headwaters ecosystem, thanks to his father, who was doing fieldwork that summer here at the Ukju Pacha ruins. Kunai had been setting up a clinic on the river and had taken a few days off to visit the ruins and gather botanical samples. The professor had been darkly handsome, with bright, intense eyes that blazed out like Rasputin's from his thickly bearded face.\n\nHis father had been lonely. In those days, the Peruvian archaeologists were busy preserving the tourist mecca of Machu Picchu, and his father's friend and sometime collaborator Von Croy was somewhere in Southeast Asia. Alex had introduced the Old Man to Dr. Kunai, something his father forgot in his later years, and they had formed a strangely complementary triumvirate. Kunai spoke of flowers and native medicines handed down for generations, the Old Man gabbled on and on about a lost civilization that might explain everything from the legend of Atlantis to Noah's flood, and he, with schoolboy enthusiasm, couldn't wait to put in a word about the strange animal species found in this isolated reach of the Andes eastern slope.\n\nWhen Professor Frys spoke to Kunai of some translations of ancient texts from Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula that mentioned a holy plant bestowed on the M\u00e9ne by forgotten gods, Kunai could hardly contain himself. He'd heard native legends about a plant granting immortality. They rushed out and gathered specimens by lantern light.\n\nThus the first domino that would lead to the Old Man's death had gone down on the table.\n\nAt the end of the summer, Alex had gone back to school. He kept in loose contact with Kunai, swapping occasional postcards. It was gratifying to know a celebrity, even if Kunai's name was only recognized in humanitarian circles. They did not meet again for a decade.\n\nThe Old Man had retired from fieldwork by then, and Alex was a doctoral candidate in biology.\n\nKunai, who had taken a long-distance avuncular interest in Alex's schooling, came to England for a conference, and after a courtesy visit to the Old Man, invited Alex to join him for dinner one night. There, over bottles of sherry\u2014the surgeon's sole remaining Portuguese affectation\u2014Kunai related a fantastic story.\n\nOver the past decade, he'd devoted every spare minute to running down legends about the M\u00e9ne. He'd learned a great deal and was on the verge of acquiring far more knowledge. He'd finally tracked down the family of a gentleman who had sailed with Captain Cook to the South Seas. On Easter Island, this sailor had acquired\u2014some said stolen\u2014a curious clear crystal from a native priest. Six months ago, Kunai had tried to purchase the crystal, sight unseen, but the family, suspicious, had refused to sell it, or even to show Kunai their ancestor's collection of South Seas artifacts. Apparently, there had been an ugly scene, one that made it impossible for Kunai to approach them openly again. But Alex could do it. Would he, as a favor to his old friend, use his university credentials to pose as a researcher seeking to examine the old artifacts for a scholarly article?\n\nKunai's eyes blazed across the dinner table; it was impossible to resist such passion. If Alex had asked any questions about the ultimate objective of the visit, he'd since forgotten. But he did consult his father. After a roundabout conversation, making up a story about a possible trip back to Peru, Alex asked him about the M\u00e9ne.\n\n\"The M\u00e9ne shouldn't be spoken of,\" his father said. \"It's too dangerous.\"\n\n\"Dad, your whole career as a scientist has been about bringing forgotten cultures and religions back into the light. You've rejected ignorance and superstition!\"\n\n\"You have much to learn,\" the elder Frys said. \"When Von Croy and I started researching the M\u00e9ne, we thought as you do now. But we concluded that there are some things that should remain cloaked in ignorance. Not all knowledge is a good thing, Son. And not all myth is mere superstition.\"\n\n\"What is it you're so afraid of?\"\n\n\"I've said too much already. And why are you so curious after all these years? Has Kunai been expounding his theories to you?\"\n\n\"No, of course not,\" Alex lied.\n\nFrys shook his head. \"He was a good man, once. Now \u2026 His search for old secrets has warped him, I'm afraid. He worries me. I know that the two of you have kept in touch. I can't forbid you to see him. But be careful, Son. Not everything he says can be believed.\"\n\nBut his father's warning had only made Kunai seem more interesting to Alex, a figure of mystery and ancient wisdom possessing a courage his father lacked.\n\nAlex and Kunai traveled to the country house in Cornwall after making suitable arrangements with the elderly couple. Kunai did not go to the door, but waited in the lane in a rented car.\n\nThe couple lived the sort of life the newspapers always called \"quiet.\" They offered Alex tea and took him up to a study. Alex found it difficult to believe that this polite and friendly old couple had nearly come to blows with Kunai. Surely it had all been a misunderstanding.\n\nThe proud gentleman turned off a burglar alarm, opened a wall safe, and took out his seafaring ancestor's souvenirs one by one, explaining their provenance to Alex as he did so. Alex examined an old spyglass frozen open, a sextant, some maps and buttons, leather-bound journals, and a triangular piece of clear crystal mounted at the end of an ivory and brass handle.\n\n\"We're not sure what this is,\" the old man said. \"At first we thought it was a sort of monocle, but it doesn't appear to alter an image for the better. A doctor told us that surgeons used to put a mirror under a man's nose to see if he still lived\u2014it would fog if he breathed, you see\u2014and thought it might be a unique tool for that purpose. The glass in it is most smooth, you see.\"\n\nThe old man held it under Alex's nose and showed him the telltale moisture.\n\nAlex sat down and made a show of taking notes from one of the journals. The couple retired from the upstairs, leaving the door open and saying he should just call out if he needed anything.\n\nOnce alone, Alex went to the double-glazed window and waved to Kunai, sitting in the car below, out of sight from the ground floor of the house but visible from this height, parked on the other side of a hedge. He returned to the table, looked through the strange glass. The old couple were right; it didn't appear to refract light, or magnify. If anything, objects seen through it looked a little cloudier. Not knowing what else to do, he traced its shape in his notebook.\n\nThe doorbell rang downstairs.\n\nAlex heard the door open, then a startled cry, then a crash, a shout, and another breaking crash. He rushed down the stairs. Kunai stood, a blood-splattered pipe in his gloved hand, over the bodies of the old couple. \"They put up a struggle! Can you believe it? The crazy old bitch picked up a poker from the fire!\" He laughed and tossed the pipe aside.\n\nA frightened family cat hissed from beneath the television carriage.\n\nAlex might have said, \"Good Lord, man,\" or something even more ineffectual. He couldn't remember very well. He leaned against the wall, his legs threatening to buckle. Kunai dashed upstairs, squeezing past Alex on the stairs and giving his shoulder a reassuring squeeze as he went by.\n\nWhen Kunai returned moments later, he held the strange triangular glass in one hand. \"Well, I've got it,\" he said happily. \"At last, I've got it!\"\n\nAlex could only stare at the mess in the parlor.\n\nKunai squeezed his shoulder again. \"Never mind them, lad. They're dead, and overdue for it, too. Natural life span should never have risen much above fifty. Causes difficulties the world over. We'll set that right.\"\n\nKunai went into the kitchen. Alex followed listlessly, as in a dream. The older man rummaged around, found cooking oil, and dumped it into a deep pan. He poured the cooking oil all over the stovetop, the wooden cabinets, and the floor. Then he placed the pan on the kitchen floor and turned on the burner full blast. The oil on the stove top began to flame and stink immediately.\n\n\"That'll do.\" Taking Alex by the arm, Kunai led him out of the house and put him into the car. He went around the front of the car and climbed into the driver's seat, then calmly stripped off his blood-spattered gloves and stuffed them into a plastic bag, which he slid beneath the seat.\n\n\"You're a murderer,\" Alex managed to say once the engine started.\n\n\"Great men have great responsibilities, Alex. These responsibilities require them to do unpleasant things at times. I'm the leader of a movement that's one day going to make a new world.\"\n\n\"You're a mad murderer, then.\"\n\n\"Let's have dinner, Alex. Chinese food is conducive to\u2014\"\n\nSuddenly Alex's strength and will came roaring back, as if he had just awakened from a dream. Except it had been no dream. \"I'm getting out of here! I'm going to the police!\" He pulled at the door handle; he would jump, though the car was moving swiftly now.\n\n\"Look at me, Alex.\"\n\nSuch was the commanding tone of Kunai's voice that Alex did look. Sparkling and shining between them was the piece of triangular glass on its ivory and brass handle.\n\n\"It's quite reasonable, really,\" said Kunai, glancing at him through the glittering glass. \"A bargain, when you think about it. Why, a whole civilization perished once, warring over possession of this thing. The death of two old codgers is a small price to pay.\"\n\n\"A small price.\" Yes, when you put it that way, Alex thought, it was a bargain. Suddenly he felt much better about everything. He even had a bit of an appetite."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "They talked it out over noodles and plum wine. Alex found himself in the mood to listen, in the mood for anything Dr. Kunai suggested.\n\nKunai told him that humanity, from time immemorial, could be divided into three groups. Ninety percent of the run of mankind weren't much more than cattle. Stolid, unimaginative, easily led as long as everyone else in the herd moved in the same direction around them. Of the remaining 10 percent, 90 percent of them were useful enough thanks to charisma or skill to serve as guides and overseers of the herd, setting the standards for culture, thought, behavior. From policeman to pulpit-pounder, politician to professor, this middle order could be counted on to move the herd without even realizing they were part of it.\n\nThen there was the third group. Kunai thought it numbered less than the traditional one out of a hundred, but the ancient texts, added to by ages of secret learning, quoted that figure, so he accepted it. Visionaries who could keep their light a little ahead of the rest. Some became madmen or artists or prophets, unable to channel what burned within but desperate to relay it to the world somehow. A few more, unable to bear seeing the human world for what it was, committed spiritual suicide and fell back into the herd by adopting conventional religion or politics or commerce, drugs, or sex. A very few were suited by temperament to take on real responsibility for the control of the beautiful, terrible virus that was mankind. Stalin. Mao. Hitler.\n\nHistory called these men monsters. And perhaps they were. But they had at least risen above the common herd and dared to stamp their dreams into flesh and blood.\n\n\"You admire Hitler?\" Alex was aghast.\n\n\"Admire? No. One does not admire failure.\" The glass twinkled again in Kunai's hand, and Alex realized how reasonable the older man was being. How wise. Of course one did not admire failure. But to succeed in such a world-shaping dream \u2026 that would be worthy of admiration. He heard himself saying as much to Kunai, and Kunai nodded his head in agreement.\n\n\"But there's one thing I don't understand,\" Alex said. \"Why didn't you kill me with those two in the house?\"\n\n\"Why do you think?\"\n\n\"Is \u2026 is it because I'm one of the one in a hundred? The third group?\"\n\nKunai laughed, the crystal winking in his hand. \"Perhaps \u2026 someday. I think you have a destiny, lad. I've had the most brilliant dreams of late. Every now and then your face appears in them.\"\n\nKunai then told him of the M\u00e9ne and the Forgotten Gods.\n\nThey dwelled in the deep places of the world, mostly sleeping, awaking only now and again to glance at how the world had grown. Long ago they'd channeled some small part of their formidable mental energies into a dexterous life-form on the African savannah that showed an aptitude for tool use, intending to fashion living tools of their own to gather information on the constantly changing, and therefore inhospitable, surface of the world. The Deep Gods selected the M\u00e9ne to act as conduits to this new race so that the work might be performed efficiently.\n\nThe M\u00e9ne, exalted among men and humble before the Deep Gods, carried out their duties. Their labors done, the Gods charged the M\u00e9ne with the ordering of men on the surface of the world and returned to their slumbers. They wished to wait for the day when their servants might carry them to other worlds.\n\nAlex still remembered that wondrous conversation over packets of sweet-and-sour sauce and placemats covered with trite explanations of Chinese astrology. Everything seemed so clear after that, the details of the world so bright and sharp they almost hurt his eyes, like the light bouncing off the crystal that Kunai had taken from the foolish old couple. It was like that picture in the Gestalt psychology textbooks of the old woman with the gnarled, hawklike nose, and babushka, her neck buried deep in her fur collar. Tejo Kunai told him to look again at the woman's nose, and suddenly the profile of a beautiful young woman in a feathered hat appeared, her graceful neck plunging into an elegant dress.\n\nKunai went on to tell him that it was the M\u00e9ne's responsibility to weigh men, judge them, and place them in their proper category. The Deep Gods bestowed gifts to further set the M\u00e9ne priests above the ordinary run of men. For the faithful, there was even a \"final conversion\" that guaranteed immortality on earth. Unfortunately, at some point in the mists of history, the M\u00e9ne had lost control of their charges, and mankind had escaped the tyranny of the ruling M\u00e9ne caste. They bred and spread and bred still further, covering and dirtying the earth as flies will a slice of fruit, fighting and ultimately hunting the M\u00e9ne who tried to keep them in line.\n\nThey even revolted against the Deep Gods, exposed and killed those that could be found near the surface. Consciousnesses that had watched the birth of stars and pondered the expansion of the universe winked out.\n\nThe Deep Gods had made their tool too keen. They woke and reacted, turned the Earth on its head and covered the surface in water and ice. Old mountain ranges sank and new ones rose. Whole continents broke up.\n\nBut man survived.\n\nOver the millennia, man grew again while the Deep Gods slept. Only now, said Kunai, the technology of man disturbs the Deep Gods' dreams, interferes with their sight, blots out the calls from others of their kind among the stars. The Deep Gods are waking. Man must again be hushed and organized and put under the control of a firm hand.\n\n\"They told you this?\" Alex asked.\n\n\"Not in so many words. It's still an incomplete puzzle, but I can see what the picture is supposed to be. They send dreams on certain nights to those of the right temper, loyal through prayer and deed, saying that the time is coming, the stars are moving, and soon it will be the hour for the Deep Gods to wake.\"\n\n\"You are one of these priests?\"\n\n\"I've learned much. The M\u00e9ne were all but dead. Much of the religion had fallen back into ritual, without understanding what the ritual meant. Even more was mere superstition, grafted on over thousands of years by the credulous, the stupid. I've begun to piece the true faith back together. There are more of us now. I helped get a Dutch madman out of a sanitarium in Switzerland, made contact with an owner of a Buenos Aires shipping firm who is a devout believer, recruited an excommunicated Kenyan bishop now living in South Africa. There is much yet to do, but time is running out. You've seen how things are going in the world. If we don't blow ourselves up, it'll be a slow death from poisoned air and water. The extinctions have already begun. You're a biologist, Alex. Surely you've seen it coming.\"\n\n\"And you want to preserve the environment? Protect life on Earth?\"\n\n\"It's what the Deep Ones want. What they've always wanted. The greatest danger to life on this planet is humanity itself. That's why they must be kept under strict control.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "Kunai stayed with him for a few weeks. The bodies in Cornwall made the papers, described, of course, as a \"quiet couple.\" The police traced phone records and visited Alex, but by then Kunai had coached him on the story. He told the police he'd visited the couple two days before the fire. Shocking. Showed them the receipts from hiring the car and a petrol station purchase. Asked if the journal of their seafaring ancestor had survived the fire.\n\n\"It's cooked. You open the pages and it crumbles,\" the detective said.\n\n\"They should have donated it to a library,\" Alex said, shaking his head sadly.\n\nAll the while Kunai, described as a \"flatmate,\" sat in front of the television, the bit of crystal in his hand along with the television clicker.\n\nThe crystal worked exactly as Kunai had promised it would. The detective looked at the receipt printed May 29 and read it as printed May 27. Alex had the feeling he could have told the detectives he'd flown down to Cornwall on Icarus's old wings and they'd have smiled and nodded and taken his word for it as long as Kunai was there, gazing through the crystal, making it glitter and sparkle in his fingers.\n\nHe heard no more of the case or the CID men.\n\nAlex asked about the crystal. Kunai explained that it allowed him to put whatever he desired into another person's mind: belief, fear, hope.\n\n\"How did you find out about it?\"\n\n\"It was from your father, many years ago. I asked him about the paper he was writing with Von Croy. He mentioned legendary crystals that allowed the priests to influence others. He even hinted that there might be one still in existence. I got a little more out of him, but then he became suspicious and would say no more.\"\n\n\"Yes, once Dad clams up about something, that's the end of it. But how do you operate the crystal?\"\n\nKunai answered, \"It's a little like acting. First I summon up in myself the state I wish to induce in another: in the case of our friends from the constabulary, simple credulity. Then I put it into the subject's head by looking at him or her through the crystal. By the time that sailor with Cook discovered it, some fat old Easter Islander was using it to seduce the neighbor's daughters and then get a feast thrown in his name when the inevitable pregnancy was announced. There was a murder, but such things weren't closely investigated back then. Anyway, the chief died, and the sailor took the crystal away with him. The secret of its power was passed from father to son, and then from father to son again. Then some pious son suspected it to be Satanic and stole it away from his father after a wild night's carousing, which led to the death of both father and son in a struggle over its possession. The crystal's purpose and powers were forgotten by the family after that.\"\n\n\"Can you use it to control anyone?\" Alex asked.\n\n\"Some people are more easily influenced than others. Indeed, some seem to be immune altogether. Either I'm not able to summon up a strong enough feeling to overcome their will, or their brain is wired in such a way that it has no effect. Magic and technology become one and the same at a high enough level, as that writer Clarke pointed out, and this thing didn't exactly come with an instruction manual.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 44",
                "text": "Alex began to secretly read his father's research, at least the parts of it that weren't under lock and key, and he and Kunai traveled to an ancient temple near Rangoon and spoke with the priests there. Shortly afterward, Alex had an omega-like symbol that Kunai told him was the oldest known sign of the M\u00e9ne tattooed on the back of his head, then let his hair grow back over it. At the same time, he received his first number in the old M\u00e9ne tradition. That number was four hundred and ninety-one. As the newest was always the lowest, that meant there were at least four hundred and ninety other people in Kunai's network.\n\nThe M\u00e9ne hierarchy reordered each supplicant's number yearly to reflect his or her standing in the cult. Always it was divided into the same 90 percent, 10 percent, 1 percent ratio. The l0 percent decided the order of the lowest 90 percent, while the top l percent decided the order of the top 10 percent.\n\nOnly Tejo Kunai's number didn't change. He was number one.\n\nThe Prime.\n\nAlex's number grew steadily lower, until, after only seven years, he made it into the top 10 percent. At that point, he gave up all but a small portion of his university duties and devoted himself full-time to the business of the M\u00e9ne. With his higher position, he learned more and more about the nature of his responsibilities, which were not always pleasant. And he began to have dreams.\n\nSometimes he flew in his dreams, but more often he dove into deep, cool waters. Voices would whisper phrases to him, and dates. They promised him power, foretold that he would rise above all other men to a universal throne that none had ever sat upon, although many had tried. He saw Kunai's face, still and peaceful and as composed as a death mask. He saw faces at a conference table, nodding as he spoke. He saw a beautiful woman with sharp blue eyes. He beheld himself seated upon a golden throne that shone like the sun\u2026\n\nHe hadn't seen Kunai for four years when the old man showed up bedraggled on his doorstep during a spring storm. Kunai had lost weight, a little of the fire was out of his eyes, and his hair was gone.\n\n\"Leukemia. It's in remission. The doctors tell me to rest, but what is that against the Awakening?\"\n\nWith that, dripping first in the hall and then on the kitchen floor and table, Kunai told Alex that he'd dreamed that the Deep Gods were beginning to rouse themselves. One or two had awakened, a vanguard of the consciousnesses to come.\n\nAlex made him a cup of coffee, forced him to eat some buttered toast. Kunai tore into the bread like a starved man and then went on with his tale.\n\n\"Meet, yes, we're going to meet. I've been to Capricorn Atoll to prepare for instructions. Detailed instructions, not just impressions from dreams. I need to get the nine plates, the Prophecy Panels used to communicate with the Deep Ones. The ones originally at the atoll were destroyed long ago. But I know where there is another set.\"\n\n\"Not another cottage in Cornwall, I hope,\" Alex joked.\n\nKunai did not smile. \"They're in the Whispering Abyss, or so it's written on an Ethiopian monolith. Whispering Abyss. You know from whom I first heard those words?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Your father. Where I first met you, in Peru. I saw some bits of an article he was doing when I first became involved in the Truth and the Old Order. All this time, right under my nose.\"\n\n\"He's quit all his research into us, you know that. Warned me a dozen times not to have anything to do with you.\"\n\nKunai's eyes lit up as he smiled. \"Now you understand why I told you to keep your membership a secret from even your father.\"\n\n\"I'll call him and ask for a visit. You can use the crystal on him before the door's half open and\u2014\"\n\n\"I've already been to Scotland, Eighteen. The crystal didn't even make him blink. Tough-minded old bird!\"\n\nThe Old Man was that.\n\n\"What do you need of me?\" Alex always had that phrase ready on his lips when conversing with someone ranked seventeen or higher.\n\n\"Visit your father. Any pretense will do. We need those old papers of his on the M\u00e9ne. The precise location of the Abyss is recorded there, I'm sure of it. Someone's killed Von Croy, so the only other copies are buried somewhere in Lara Croft's vault, and I'm content that they remain there. I don't want her to get even a whiff of our interest. If half of what I've heard about her is true, she could spell trouble for us. Meanwhile, I've put together a team that can go anywhere in the world on three days' notice and retrieve the plates as soon as you get the information.\"\n\n\"It shouldn't be a problem,\" Alex said.\n\n\"Wait. Your task is greater than mere theft. It won't be enough for us to possess your father's papers. He, more than anyone now living, will know the danger we pose. He will alert the world.\"\n\n\"No one would believe him.\"\n\n\"Perhaps not. But we can't afford to take that chance. You're going to have to eliminate him, Alex.\"\n\n\"K-kill him, you mean? My own father?\"\n\n\"Eighteen, I've been waiting for some time to make you my direct subordinate. As number two, your power would be second only to my own. But there's one final trial before you join the elite. One last test to pass. To show your devotion, you must sacrifice someone near to you. It's something that all of us 1-percenters have done to reach our positions.\"\n\n\"I thought the text read 'sacrifice that which is dearest.' I was going to give up my college chair.\"\n\nKunai chuckled. \"Like a Catholic might give up chocolate for Lent? No, Alex. A blood sacrifice is necessary.\" Kunai produced a revolver from his jacket pocket and pushed it across the kitchen table. \"Wipe it off carefully and then wear gloves.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "Alex ate dinner with the Old Man\u2014well, the Old Man ate, and Alex made enough of a hash of his broiled meat to make it look as if he'd eaten\u2014then left. After a visit to the hardware store and two strong cups of coffee laced with equally strong whiskey, he hurried back for the ferry across the Irish Sea to Dublin.\n\nHe bought a ticket but never boarded.\n\nHe went back to the Old Man's house, wearing a cheap woolen cap with oversized earflaps.\n\nThe glass cutter hadn't even touched the window when he saw the Old Man standing in the doorway of the kitchen, carrying a Clint Eastwood\u2014sized pistol. He almost ruptured himself in his haste to get away, leaping the hedge and cutting through backyards to a chorus of barking dogs.\n\n\"I'm sorry, but I couldn't do it,\" he confessed to Kunai later. They sat in his tiny kitchen. Alex poured himself a hot cup of coffee and spiked it with scotch.\n\nThere were dark circles under Kunai's eyes, his skin had thinned against the bones of his face. \"You disappoint me. I fear you won't keep your number very long.\"\n\n\"No!\" Alex protested. \"I've given my life to this.\"\n\n\"But you can't give your father's? Getting those papers was your responsibility. You've failed.\"\n\n\"I've had dreams too of late. Very specific ones.\" Alex felt as light as air. When he walked to the counter, it seemed as though his feet didn't touch the kitchen tiles.\n\n\"Specific how?\" Kunai coughed.\n\n\"You can't keep up the pace anymore. You're making bad decisions.\"\n\n\"What are you saying?\" Kunai fumbled at his shirt pocket, going for the crystal that he always carried.\n\n\"Responsibility flows up, as well as down,\" Alex said. He grabbed the scotch bottle and smashed Kunai across the face with it. The blow sent the older man spilling from the chair, and Alex dropped down on him, driving his knee against Kunai's throat. Cartilage crackled under his knee, sounding like bubble wrap being popped.\n\nAlex prized open Kunai's weakening fingers and grasped the crystal on its ivory handle. He looked at the distorted image of his mentor, tried to funnel his own sense of exhilaration and peace to Kunai.\n\nBut the image in the glass shrank to a tiny point, black and dead.\n\nThe Prime is dead, Alex thought as he knelt above the body, gasping for breath.\n\nLong live the Prime."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 46",
                "text": "But Tejo Kunai still had work to do. Alex called a meeting of the top 1 percent, in this case numbers two through eight; he had spoken in Kunai's name often enough before that no one was suspicious. All knew of the man's health problems. At the meeting, Alex entered with the crystal in hand and announced that Kunai had died and appointed him successor. For men and women who claimed to be an intellectual, spiritual, and moral elite, they became convinced of his inheritance of the mantle of leadership astonishingly easily. Not one of them proved able to resist the suggestive power of the crystal. He asked for detailed, written status reports of their current projects and the responsibilities of the 10 percent under them, especially those of the team selected to recover the plates.\n\nAmong those reports, he first saw A1ison's picture. She'd been hired through lower-numbered functionaries as an archaeologist willing to work for money. He recognized her beautiful blue eyes from his dreams.\n\nHe used the substantial funds now at the M\u00e9ne's disposal to have Alison visit him in Lisbon, then Buenos Aires, then India, as he became familiar with the global organization that before he'd only known from having his strings pulled. Now he pulled the strings. She needed only the tiniest nudge of the crystal to be convinced to join. He fell in love with the brilliant mind first, then the young, strong body. They first made love the night she got her tattoo."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 47",
                "text": "The Prime looked across the ruins of Ukju Pacha, brought back to the present by the sound of helicopter blades in the distance. Ajay hung about one of the vents to the Whispering Abyss as though listening for clues to the fate of Lara Croft and her ex-lover, Borg. His Tomb Raider swayed on her feet; the effects of the avitos bulbs she'd crushed between her teeth before entering the chamber, which had allowed her to kick the Norwegian with enough strength to send him flying into the Abyss, were ebbing, leaving her sapped and moody.\n\nHe didn't want to think about Alison anymore. He was getting tired of her anyway. He resolved to look to the future.\n\nAnd there she was, sitting on the grass, waiting for her next set of instructions: Heather Rourke. Bright, pretty, mature, and plugged into the Washington, D.C., power network, where journalists often wielded as much or more influence than the politicians they covered. The time for globe-trotting and obelisk-rubbing was just about over. Once the Prophecy Panels were in place and had served their purpose, it would be useful to have someone with the keys to the global telecommunications kingdom among the chosen M\u00e9ne."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 48",
                "text": "The wasps chased Lara and Borg.\n\nAt least, that was how she thought of the giant insects that had been attacking them for what seemed like hours now. The other bugs had resembled fat bumblebees, but these were waspish, their thin black bodies splashed with bright yellow; their long legs dangled limply as they flew.\n\nThe Tomb Raider backpedaled, a necklace of chemical lights strung across her chest, guns out, protecting Borg as he picked their path through the tunnel. The buzzing suddenly grew louder, indicating that the wasps were coming again.\n\n\"Incoming!\" she cried, and dropped to the ground.\n\nTight streams of sticky tobacco-juice-like liquid flashed out of the dark, passing over her head. Lara fired back, lighting the twisting tunnel with muzzle flashes. Her VADS system had run dry awhile ago, and she was down to reserve ammunition now. But again the wasps retreated.\n\nBorg cried out in Norwegian as a parting salvo of wasp spit struck his neck. As they had discovered, the liquid was a powerful acid; Lara had taken some across the back of her hand in an earlier assault and it still burned. Thankfully, neither of them had been hit in the eyes, ears, or mouth yet. Now Borg dropped his chemical light and clawed at his already-blistering skin.\n\nLara slung her camel pack under her arm and squeezed it like a bagpipe, directing the spray across Borg's neck. When it was washed clear of the poison, she helped him to his feet. \"Still with me, Borg?\"\n\n\"For now,\" Borg said. \"But I do not think we can hold them off much longer.\"\n\n\"With any luck, we won't need to. The breeze is stronger than ever. We're going to make it.\"\n\nWater was flowing somewhere ahead of them, and together they hurried toward the sound. Behind them, the buzzing began to grow louder again.\n\nAt a Y-intersection in the tunnel, they came to an underground river. Lara knelt and put her hand into the swift-moving flow.\n\nCold. Not quite ice-cold, but cold enough for hypothermia to set in within twenty minutes or so.\n\nLara ignored the buzzing as best as she could and looked around.\n\nThey stood in a much rougher underground chamber. They'd traveled west, or perhaps southwest, some distance\u2014GPS didn't work deep underground, so she'd navigated on instinct and air currents, following the breeze.\n\nThe river plunged into the rock wall of the chamber a stone's throw away. The breeze was coming from a narrow space between the river and the wall.\n\n\"I hope you are not thinking what I think you are thinking,\" Borg said.\n\n\"How are you at swimming with those arms, Nils?\" Lara asked.\n\n\"I am an excellent sinker,\" he replied.\n\n\"We have two choices,\" she said. \"Either we take a deep breath and jump in this river and hope it comes out into the open before we run out of air, or we try to fight our way back past the wasps with the twelve bullets I've got left.\"\n\nBorg knelt and peered down the river, just as she had.\n\n\"Cover up your light,\" he said.\n\nShe pocketed her chemical stick, placed a hand over the glow that made its way through the cotton canvas.\n\nAfter a moment in the coal-mine dark of the cave, they both saw a faint smear of light in the river.\n\n\"Sunlight,\" Lara breathed.\n\n\"It seems a long way off,\" Borg said. \"But it's there.\"\n\nThe buzzing behind them grew louder again. The wasps were coming back, with fresh poison to spit.\n\n\"It looks like the river is our best chance,\" Borg said, glancing nervously behind them.\n\n\"I agree.\" Lara turned off the VADS gear. According to Djbril, water wouldn't harm the system, but there was no point taking unnecessary risks. \"Were you serious about not being able to swim?\"\n\n\"My arms are functional underwater, but their weight drags me down. I can fight against it for a time, using my legs, but not for very long.\"\n\n\"You'll have to hold on to me. I won't let you sink.\"\n\n\"I hate this,\" he said.\n\n\"Just think of it as another BASE jump. A really wet one.\"\n\n\"It is not the wet that I mind. It is the cold.\"\n\n\"When we get back to civilization, I'll put us up in a Jacuzzi suite.\"\n\n\"The current is swift,\" Borg observed. \"It's going to be quite a ride.\" He lit a chemical light and tossed it into the river. The light disappeared into the cavern mouth. \"Hopefully, that will show us any rocks in our path.\"\n\n\"Good thinking, Nils.\" She lit one of hers and tossed it in for good measure.\n\n\"Here come the wasps!\" cried Borg as the first stream of spit splattered off the rocks beside him.\n\n\"Hang on to my backpack with that claw of yours,\" Lara said, then rolled into the river with a splash. Borg was right behind her.\n\nThe chilled water stuck its knives everywhere in Lara's body. Diamond-pointed filaments of shock ran up her limbs. Right after her dip in the Jacuzzi suite, she'd write a check to a university to come up with a microthin survival wetsuit that she could fit into her lucky pack.\n\nAs she rode the swift current, trying to keep her toes pointed downstream, Borg's kicks struck her own quickly fluttering calves.\n\n\"You managing?\" Borg sputtered.\n\nThe Tomb Raider's eyes didn't leave the bobbing glow of the chemical lights ahead. \"It's okay. We're in the tunnel.\"\n\nBlast, a rock.\n\nShe bounced off it sideways. Ahead loomed an overhanging bulge\u2014\n\n\"Duck!\" she croaked. There was just enough time to submerge. She hoped Borg would sink as well as he'd promised. A sharp tug at her backpack, and Borg no longer kicked. He'd struck the rock, perhaps been knocked unconscious.\n\nThe mechanical hand kept its grip where a human hand would have let go. Lara fought the deadweight, broke the surface as the water plunged down a short drop. She managed to get a breath before being sucked under again.\n\nThe deadly cold flow, indifferent to the humans fighting in its grip, worked for them for a change and pushed them to the surface.\n\nLara turned so she could sidestroke and pull Borg along. Her chemical necklace revealed a larger cavern. They came up and out of the water, followed by her head. The channel widened, slowed. She could see the lights they'd thrown floating ahead, hardly bobbing at all.\n\nBorg, a hundred-plus kilos of deadweight, twitched, started kicking and thrashing. Lara risked not looking ahead and shifted herself so she could support his head.\n\n\"Borg! Borg!\"\n\n\"Ja, ja!\" he sputtered, but calmed down a moment later.\n\nThe Tomb Raider turned and swam on, holding the light up as much as possible. She caught up to her thrown light, bobbing gently in the cold, dark water; the current had slowed with the widening of the tunnel. The pain in her limbs ebbed, replaced by a warm feeling.\n\nAlarm bells went off somewhere, but her brain was muzzy. In Russia she'd had a wetsuit \u2026 Where was Michelov? The Spear\u2026\n\nThe next thing she knew, she was being dragged out of the water and onto a smooth-pebbled shore. Borg was pulling her, but whether he was even aware of doing so, she couldn't tell. Once out of the water, he collapsed, holding his head. A distant roar filled the cavern, and a stronger light shone from further downstream. Their two thrown chemical lights floated past, heading toward the light. The breeze here was warmer, and smelled of green, growing life, though the rocks were still cave cold.\n\nThe Tomb Raider stripped off her backpack with numb fingers, took out her shiny silver survival blanket. She threw it around Borg and herself, then pulled him up and off the cave floor. She wrapped herself around his back, put her legs around his stomach, and searched his wet hair for the cut that was the source of the blood running down his face. She lifted a flap of skin and saw pink-tinged skull beneath.\n\n\"You're cut. Not too bad,\" she lied. A dressing from her lucky pack helped. When she had better light she'd have to do stitches.\n\n\"C-c-cold.\"\n\n\"I know. It hurts the worst once you're out of it.\"\n\nLara clung to him, feeding off his warmth, hoping that her body was feeding the warmth back into him and not just draining his life away. His hard, warm body and the masculine scent trapped under the survival sheet stirred her\u2026\n\n\"Where did you grow up, Borg?\"\n\n\"Tretten in the Gudbrandsdalen, near Lillehammer.\"\n\n\"Did you see the Olympics?\"\n\n\"I was seventeen. Of course. We went into town every night to see what was going on, ten of us in a van.\"\n\n\"Which country had the sexiest women?\"\n\n\"Norway, of course.\"\n\nLara squeezed him. \"A true patriot. How about second sexiest?\"\n\n\"Hmmm\u2026\" Borg pursed his lips. Lara felt his heart beat a little stronger. \"The Italians dressed very well. The Americans went to the most parties, or that is what I was told by the Norwegians. I had a crush on a Chinese skater, but though I tried many times, I never saw her in person. The Chinese women were guarded like a harem. But I think I will have to say the Czech women came in second. They were proud to be led by a poet and flirted with everyone. Worse than the French girls, even.\"\n\n\"Did you kiss any Olympians?\"\n\n\"Ha!\"\n\n\"And that's Norwegian for?\"\n\n\"'None of your business.'\"\n\nIt had grown warm under the blanket. She looked at his dressing. It seemed to have stanched the worst of the bleeding.\n\n\"Borg, do you think you can stand?\"\n\n\"Yes. Let's find the sun. But first, some food, Lara, to keep us on our legs.\"\n\nThey lit chemical lights and gasped.\n\nAll around them, half submerged in stone, crystal arcs like great pieces of clamshell stuck up. In the cavern, which stretched far beyond the range of their lights. In the water. There were some even in the ceiling.\n\nThe Tomb Raider got out her MagLite, probed the shadows.\n\n\"It is like\u2026\" Borg gasped. \"It is like Krypton.\"\n\n\"Like what?\"\n\n\"From the Superman stories. The planet where he was born\u2026\"\n\nLara had spent much of her childhood reading Aristotle and Cicero\u2014with a dash of Sappho or Ovid when she felt in the mood for something spicy\u2014rather than comics. But she understood what he meant. \"You're right; it is like another world. But we need our strength, and we can't afford to waste it on exploration. Let's eat.\"\n\nThey sat next to one of the crystal outcroppings, an arc of mineral as clear as a pane of glass. Did the creatures that lived in the Whispering Abyss, presumably Von Junst's Elder Gods, shape this crystal in some way? What had lived among these sloping old pieces of dome?\n\nThere were bits of shell among the ruins. More sea bottom, thrust up into the Andes?\n\nOnce they had eaten, they felt stronger. They rose and left the strangely beautiful crystal city, splashing through ankle-deep water at times as they followed the channel and the now-fading light.\n\n\"It's light outside,\" Lara said, checking her watch.\n\n\"Let's run,\" Borg said. \"I thought I'd never see another sunrise.\" He hurried toward the familiar surface world.\n\n\"Just don't hit your head again!\"\n\nLater, she berated herself for not noticing that the cavern wasn't inhabited by bats. They could see sunlight now, so bright to their dark-inured senses that they had to wince.\n\nThat's when they hit the web.\n\nIt stretched, two volleyball nets across, over the cavern mouth, partially supported by a couple of roots descending from above. Borg hit it and stopped. Lara, partially blinded by the bright light, tried to pull up to keep from running into him and lost her footing in the loose riverside pebbles. She fell headfirst into the strands.\n\nThey were as thick as heavyweight fishing wire and as sticky as superglue.\n\nOut of the corner of her eye she saw something dance down the web on horribly hairy legs, its body about the size of a snapping turtle's.\n\nNot counting the swollen abdomen and long, hairy, frantically working legs.\n\nHer eyes adjusted, and she saw cocoons with a few parrot feathers sticking out, and something that looked like a monkey's tail.\n\n\"Lara, shoot!\" Borg shouted as the spider alighted on his piton arm.\n\n\"Hands \u2026 stuck!\"\n\nHis claw arm was free. He reached for the sheathed survival knife at his belt, pulled it out, dropped it next to her hand.\n\nShe grasped the hilt, got a rush of strength from it, enough to pull the web far enough so she could saw at it.\n\nBorg fired a piton. He didn't have a hope of hitting the spider, but the recoil startled it. It ran up the web.\n\n\"Hurry, Lara,\" Borg said.\n\n\"I am!\"\n\nIt was hard to cut with the blade held so it faced back along her forearm.\n\n\"Hurry very much!\" Borg insisted.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"You don't want to know.\"\n\nAt the elbow, her arm was almost free!\n\n\"I do want to know.\"\n\n\"It's above you and coming down on a line NOW!\"\n\nShe took a chance, dropped the knife, and reached for her holster, not wanting to think about what would happen if the gun were tangled as well\u2014\n\nThe butt in her hand, safety flicked off, she pointed it upwards, unable to see.\n\n*BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!*\n\nThe hot cartridge cases landed on her uncovered thighs, burning, but she didn't care.\n\nShe felt wet goo strike her back.\n\n\"It's going back up!\" Borg said.\n\nShe fired twice more for good measure. Spiders were sensitive to vibrations, and she hoped it wouldn't stop fleeing until it hit the Brazilian border.\n\nThe hot gun went back in its holster, and she retrieved Borg's knife, cut away the web from her face so she could better see what she was doing, and freed the rest of her. She drew her other gun, searched the roof with flashlight and eye.\n\nThe wounded spider didn't return. Just a thousand tiny ones, each with eight eyes glittering in the light. Babies.\n\nHungry babies.\n\nShe tore Borg loose, and they fled.\n\nThe river spilled out into twilight. Lara and Borg stood on a precipice overlooking another stretch of river, westward flowing and therefore not the same one they'd followed to the canopy tower and ruins. The humidity felt like an old friend welcoming them. Squawks and howls of perfectly normal jungle life were like applause.\n\nThey'd come out of the Whispering Abyss.\n\n\"Not this time!\" the Tomb Raider shouted at the heavens.\n\n\"You are crazy, Lara.\"\n\nShe loved how he said crazy. Hell, she was one wet ponytail hair from loving him, period. Alison or no Alison. A kick about a meter below the teeth sends a clear message about a girl's commitment to a relationship."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 49",
                "text": "\"That's quite a story,\" Heather said, looking out over Lima's white rooftops from the plushly fitted top-floor El Condado hotel suite. She'd just heard an outline of the history of the M\u00e9ne. She didn't have to fake her interest in the story, just in Frys.\n\nFrys lounged in a gold-and-beige upholstered armchair, playing with his odd bit of glass on a handle. The affectation struck her as cute, like Leslie Howard's Scarlet Pimpernel with his monocle examining the prince regent's waistcoat and cuffs and criticizing His Royal Highness's tailors. She felt a little better disposed toward him now that he'd revealed the reasons behind her kidnapping, although she had a strange feeling that he hadn't told her the whole truth about what had happened to Lara Croft and Borg. He'd told her that they'd been tied up and left for the park rangers to find, but every so often, images returned to Heather as if out of a half-forgotten dream, images that told a very different story.\n\nAlison Harfleur, that Lara Croft wannabe, reclined on one of the king-sized beds, supported by a small mountain of fringed pillows, reading The Economist.\n\n\"It's the story of a lifetime,\" Frys assured her. \"And it can be yours to tell.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't be the first time the human race has had what it thought was the history of the world rewritten.\"\n\nThe blond version of Lara Croft threw down the magazine and punched her pillow. \"You don't mean to take her to Capricorn Atoll?\"\n\n\"Ms. Rourke, won't you excuse us,\" Frys said, escorting Alison to the connecting door between suites.\n\n\"So it's 'Ms. Rourke' now, is it?\" said Alison bitterly.\n\nBut Frys leaned close and whispered something, holding the crystal up to his eye, and Alison exited without further complaint, though she left the door open.\n\nHeather was intrigued by Frys, but she didn't trust him, not for a second. She'd seen how he'd used Alison, then cast her aside. Now it was her turn. But nobody used Heather Rourke. And nobody, but nobody, cast her aside. \"Can I go down to the caf\u00e9 and get something to eat?\" she asked when Frys returned.\n\nFrys shook his head. \"There's room service.\"\n\n\"I need to go to the pharmacy in the lobby. Splitting headache.\"\n\n\"Alison will go for you. Just tell her what you\u2014\"\n\n\"Let her get her own damn Tylenol!\" Ajay's voice interrupted from the other room.\n\n\"I'd like to stretch my legs anyway,\" Heather said. \"Besides, we have to trust each other if we're going to work together.\"\n\nFrys smiled. \"Yes, of course.\" He opened the door, and six feet six inches of muscle looked up from a magazine.\n\n\"Thirty-two, would you take Heather down to the chemist in the lobby and bring her straight back up?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" the cultist said.\n\nHeather followed the meaty guard down the elegantly wallpapered hall.\n\nHe pressed the button on the elevator. The doors slid closed.\n\n\"Do you have a name to go with that number?\" she asked him.\n\n\"I am Boris,\" he replied expressionlessly.\n\nThe elevator slid to a halt. The door opened, and Boris stood half in and half out until she exited into the lobby. Then he conducted her past a women's restroom and into the chemist's.\n\nThere Heather picked out a suitable assortment of aspirin and travel necessities and a new lipstick, then tapped her foot as Boris paid. As they walked back to the elevator, she snatched the bag out of his hand and ducked into the restroom.\n\n\"I have to pee,\" she said, jumping through the door before he could interpose his bulk.\n\nBoris actually came in behind her, then blanched and withdrew at a glare from the Peruvian matron working on her eyes at the bulb-lined vanity mirror. Heather felt like a runaway heiress in a Depression-era screwball comedy as he pounded on the door and demanded that she come out.\n\n\"Can you help me?\" she whispered in Spanish. At first she'd just planned to leave a note in lipstick on one of the stall doors, but the woman might be a better choice.\n\n\"Siiiii?\" the woman said disapprovingly, one painted eyebrow rising almost to her widow's peak.\n\n\"Do you have a piece of paper and a pen? It is a crisis.\"\n\nThe one-woman-to-another, this-is-really-serious urgency in her voice brought a quick response. The matron produced a pen and a slip of notebook paper from her purse, suddenly eager to help.\n\nHeather wrote her name, a pair of phone numbers, and the words CAPRICORN ATOLL\u2014BIG MEETING on the paper. \"Please go somewhere with a \u2026 with a \u2026 fax.\" She had to use the English word. \"You know, fax?\"\n\n\"Si, fax, my office has one,\" the woman said.\n\n\"Fax this to both these numbers. Right away, please. Right away.\"\n\n\"What is this?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, I don't have time to explain. Please help me.\"\n\n\"If there is danger, I can call the police.\"\n\n\"They have friends in the police.\"\n\nTo her credit, the unknown woman didn't look frightened. She glanced toward the door, against which Boris was still hammering. \"I will do it. Don't let a doubt enter your thoughts.\"\n\nRelief flooded through Heather. \"Thank you. If you give me your name and phone number, I'll make sure you are paid for your trouble.\"\n\n\"No, no, please. I am happy to help.\" A smile, not a bright one, not a charming one, but a reassuringly small one, appeared on the woman's face. She squeezed Heather's hand and walked out of the bathroom.\n\nHeather heard a growl, cracked open the door.\n\nBoris had grabbed the woman by the upper arm.\n\n\"Wait, you,\" he said in very thick Spanish. \"Come with me.\"\n\nThe Peruvian matron, the top of her hairstyle not even reaching Boris's shoulder, spun her head like a wolf snapping at a challenger. \"Unhand me this instant!\" she said through bared teeth. The opera diva Troyanos as Carmen couldn't have put any more fire in her voice.\n\nBoris shrunk away from the matron, who walked off with what Heather could only describe as imperious dignity. Then Boris grabbed Heather by the arm\u2014the thug had a thing for grabbing women, evidently\u2014and walked her back to the elevator."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 50",
                "text": "Borg hardly flinched as the curved needle passed through his skin one more time.\n\nHe looked a little like a lobotomy patient with the side of his head freshly, if poorly, knife-shaved. They were two kilometers from the cave, on the unfamiliar riverbank.\n\n\"Last stitch is done,\" she said. \"I just have to tie it.\"\n\nSix granny knots, stained with iodine, now held Borg's scalp on. She dabbed up the blood. \"It's not a bad look, really. I can see it catching on with the soccer rowdies.\"\n\n\"I need another Tylenol,\" Borg said.\n\nShe handed him a tablet.\n\n\"Strange. You'd think after what happened to my arms, such a minor pain would be nothing.\"\n\n\"Pain doesn't work that way, unfortunately. It always finds a way to come back as strong as ever.\"\n\nLara knew a lot about pain. She'd been in a codependent relationship with it for most of her adult life. And on those occasions when she wasn't bruised and bloody from one of her overseas challenges, she pushed her body to its limits with athletics or making a hundred round-trips through her assault course, feeling the burn of hot pistols through thin leather gloves, paying for her achievements with coins of freshly minted pain.\n\nShe kept Borg talking as she put together a tent out of a parachute, her concerns about a possible concussion or him slipping into a coma fading.\n\n\"Where is she, I wonder?\" Borg asked in the middle of the chitchat.\n\nLara knew whom he was talking about. \"We can't worry about Ajay now. We have to think about where we are.\"\n\nShe had her answer, calculated to within a meter, of course, thanks to the GPS, which had begun working again once they'd emerged from underground. The problem wasn't that: It was that their location was a long, long hike from the nearest airport. The river they camped next to flowed west, toward the Pacific Ocean, but a mass of mountains were in the way. She looked at the stands of Peruvian hardwoods all around. Among them stood balsa trees: easily shaped and more buoyant than cork.\n\n\"Borg, how much do you know about dugout canoes?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 51",
                "text": "\"The front provides power, the rear steers,\" Lara said. Working with fire, Neolithic tools improvised from river rocks, and their knives, they'd managed to fell and then hollow out a balsa trunk. It looked like a conveyance from The Flintstones, but it would float and carry them.\n\n\"I'll take the front,\" Borg offered.\n\nLara added an outrigger, weighted with pitons, and fixed it to the body of their canoe with cording and parachute harness. Their biggest danger with such a makeshift float was tipping over.\n\nThe oars looked like broken tennis rackets, built of bundles of trimmed branches roughly tied together and covered with parachute nylon. It would take days to whittle proper oars with knives, and they didn't have days. Borg attached his to his piton arm with a D-ring and gripped it in the claw arm.\n\nUsing their parachute packs as seat cushions, they got out on the river. They experimented with their canoe, tried some turns. Draft was the canoe's only asset. Balsa would float on heavy dew; as long as there was a river, and no rapids, they wouldn't need to portage. With a little luck, within a few hours they'd run into some natives, hopefully before whitewater wrecked their canoe. It wouldn't be the first time Lara had traded a cheap watch and expensive sunglasses for transportation out of the bush.\n\nThey heard the rapids before they saw them, which was always a bad sign.\n\nWhitewater appeared beneath them. It happened too fast to react. One second they hung at the top of a forty-degree slope of solid white froth descending into a gorge, the next they were plunging down into the wash.\n\nThe balsa-wood canoe tore down the incline like an out-of-control Alpine schusser on one ski. You can't fight white water, but you can control what it does to you by using your momentum. Lara paddled like a fury\u2014if the canoe turned sideways in the flow, the outrigger would be ripped away, and then the canoe would turn over, and the river would win against them.\n\nToo busy trying to steer to even know if her voice carried above the roaring water, she shouted instructions to Borg.\n\nThen a rock\u2014and ruin. She didn't even see it until it was too late.\n\nIt ripped away the outrigger; hours of labor turning raw materials into a careful balance of wood and lashing were destroyed with a single sharp blow. The impact tore the paddle from Lara's hands and set the canoe on its side. Lara and Borg plunged into the river.\n\nBut they hung on.\n\nThey rode the cool water, submerging and coming up for a breath, then plunging in again. Borg locked on to her and the canoe in a mechanical death grip. A rock struck her in the hip; the blow stunned her into letting go of the canoe.\n\nBut Borg's claw held.\n\nSomehow he hauled her back to the canoe, somehow pushed her atop it so she rode it like a lizard hugging a tree, Borg hung off the end, preventing it from rolling, performing the function the outrigger had. Then she discovered she could hear Borg panting and sputtering.\n\nAnd so they came through the rapids.\n\nThe gorge opened into steep mountains at the base of the rapids; a little ways downstream a few huts on stilts fought against river, mountainside, and forest for a place on the bank. Dogs barked at the drenched pair and chickens flapped at the commotion.\n\nA single log fishing dock-cum-bridge, sort of a split rail fence for access to the river and its banks, projected out and across the river. No doubt it was torn away and rebuilt several times a year thanks to floods. She slipped off the canoe, and together they kicked toward the dwellings.\n\n\"Boating never was my calling,\" Borg said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 52",
                "text": "Alex Frys got the call on the charter jet, an airbus, somewhere over Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific.\n\n\"Lady Croft is in Lima, making a stink at the Tourism Bureau,\" the voice said.\n\n\"The Tourism Bureau? Not the Interior Department?\" Frys wasn't sure he'd heard right; the airplane phone had a good deal of static.\n\nWell, he hadn't wanted her dead, after all. She'd been of service to the M\u00e9ne Restoration. Shooting her and throwing her into the Abyss just hadn't seemed\u2014cricket. Killing unnecessarily was a failing of Kunai's, not his. Not that he'd been too disappointed when she'd jumped. But not half as disappointed as he was now to learn that she had somehow survived.\n\n\"Tourism Bureau,\" his contact confirmed. \"Talking about guerrillas and gunfights and getting stranded thanks to corrupt park officials. She's threatening to write an article for the Times Sunday color supplement: Peru, a Journey Into Hell and Back. Needless to say, the men at Tourism are not amused.\"\n\n\"You don't say,\" Frys said, making conversation while his mind worked.\n\n\"I understand this has gone all the way to the president. He's put them up in a hotel on the seashore south of Lima, sent a doctor and two nurses down to tend to them, even ordered one of the state-dinner chefs to supervise their meals. Questions are being asked. I fear your friend Fermi will not be in uniform much longer.\"\n\nThe Prime smiled. One day, perhaps soon, Fermi would be able to laugh in the face of the president. \"Anything else, Thirty-three?\"\n\n\"Lara Croft knows you have left the country.\"\n\nToo late, Lara Croft.\n\nPerhaps he shouldn't have hurried out of Peru, but it had been necessary to gather the fourteen others of the 1 percent to witness what was being prepared at Capricorn Atoll. He had thought it would be jolly for them to travel together. But that wasn't thinking like the Prime, now, was it? He had responsibilities.\n\n\"You know the name of the hotel where she is staying?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" the voice at the other end crackled.\n\n\"Contact Don Sabato. He owes Tejo Kunai a favor for improving the potency of his coca crop. Tell him Kunai is calling that favor in. Croft needs to be killed. He might use La Raza again. La Raza arranged the disappearance of that troublesome lawyer last year.\"\n\n\"The president will go mad!\"\n\n\"Let him. The time is coming when presidents will not matter.\"\n\n\"I heard that from Kunai. Now from you?\"\n\nThe Prime sighed. \"With such questions, you wonder why you remain Thirty-three year after year?\"\n\n\"Sorry, sir. I will call Don Sabato at once.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Thirty-three. Tell him to hurry. This opportunity moves quickly.\" He turned the phone off.\n\nAlison had an I-told-you-so look on her face that he longed to wipe off. Perhaps she needed words. \"You were right,\" he said. \"I was wrong. We should have not left loose ends.\"\n\n\"We'll hear from her shortly, I'm sure,\" Alison said.\n\n\"I doubt it. Don Sabato has killed an American ambassador and three Peruvian generals. I believe his men can handle one woman. And if not, the Pacific is a very big place in which to hide.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 53",
                "text": "Peru did not have the world's best beaches, but where the dramatic Pacific shoreline met the desert beauty of Andean mountains, one did without beaches and just drank in the beauty.\n\nLara didn't have time for scenery, however. She read the confirmation from her favorite Pacific Air pilot, a New Zealander called \"Shanks,\" and snapped shut the laptop on loan to Lady Croft from the Ministry of Tourism. Ever since reading Heather's fax, scanned and put into her priority e-mail box by Gwenn back at the Croft Foundation offices, she'd been making travel arrangements.\n\nIt had been a rough pair of days getting to Lima, then a rough three hours alternately kicking butt and dropping names in government offices. When it was done, she had a car at their disposal, a hotel suite, and round-the-clock medical care.\n\nBut Borg still didn't have arms. His prosthetics had a new kind of mount, quite experimental, and the technology had hardly made it out of the labs yet, let alone to the otherwise adequate Peruvian hospitals. So Borg still wore his climbing arms, which he hid beneath an extra-long coat to avoid looking like a half-exposed Terminator cyborg while in public.\n\nLara nodded at the private-duty nurse in the anteroom of the suite and looked in on Borg. He lay with his feet propped up on the hotel bed's headboard, snoring deep in his chest like a largish dog.\n\nThe first morning flight to Hawaii would carry them out of Peru, and from there they would travel south to Fiji. Djbril would have a fresh lot of VADS ammunition for her .45s waiting there in forty-eight hours thanks to overnight mail by a security service courier. Then Shanks would get them to Capricorn Atoll.\n\nShe'd considered trying to make a few calls to London and Washington to see if she couldn't get the Special Boat Service or a SEAL team on board. But having friends in high places didn't always translate into action, and she knew she didn't have enough hard evidence to persuade reluctant governments to act. Plus, their special forces were otherwise engaged at the moment.\n\nSo it was up to her.\n\nAgain.\n\nA hunch told her that whatever was going to happen would happen on the twenty-first of December. While the world was Christmas shopping, in the Southern Hemisphere they would be celebrating the first day of summer. Von Junst had mentioned ceremonies celebrating the Deep Ones taking place at the summer and winter solstices.\n\nShe left Borg a note to meet her at the hotel pool cabana, mentioned it to the nurse, and changed into a just-purchased black bikini, flip-flops, and new sunglasses. Air and sun poolside would recharge batteries drained by her week in the Amazon headwaters and escape from the Whispering Abyss.\n\nThe hotel, a beautiful colonial style with colonnades both facing the city and the sea, stood atop the sandy cliffs of the Costa Verde. She'd never been to this part of Lima before, the Barranco district, full of old trees and older homes, and found it utterly charming. Too bad she didn't have time to explore.\n\nMost months this part of the coast lay under blankets of fog, but for a few glorious months around Christmas, the sun turned Lima into paradise. She watched Peruvian penguins and Inca terns search the breakwaters below the cliffs, then found an unoccupied chaise.\n\nBikini: fitting nicely. Sunglasses: on. Sunscreen: slathered. Bruises: healed or covered by towel.\n\nShe'd better carbon copy her diving inventory to Shanks so he could check it over before she arrived. She didn't sleep, but fell into something that wasn't quite a nap, but just as relaxing. Feisty salsa music from the cabana bar forced her to tap her fingers, keeping time. She rolled over.\n\nAmerican and European tourists yakked with the cabana bartender about pizza, and she opened her eyes.\n\n\"What kind of cheese do they use? Do you know what deep dish is? No, not peppers, pepperoni.\"\n\nThe sun turned orange as it approached the horizon. She felt rubbery; the sun had performed its usual gentle, warm massage.\n\nShe swung her legs off the chaise, saw Borg circumnavigating the pool, looking out of place in his long coat."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 54",
                "text": "At the hotel's rear colonnade, a sun-dried Peruvian who looked as though he was dressed for a golf game lowered a pair of microbinoculars and spoke into a cell phone. The phone was the kind that could take and send pictures. He snapped two shots of Lara Croft wrapping a towel about her waist, chose one, and hit \"send.\"\n\nBorg spoke first. \"We leave again tomorrow?\"\n\n\"I want to see what they're going to try to do with those plates. Unfortunately, anyone who might know is either dead or working for them, and I don't think my only other source is in the mood for a third talk. How's the head?\"\n\nHe tapped the stitches. \"I have an appointment with the hotel stylist. I will ask her to shorten the rest.\"\n\n\"Hmmm \u2026 from the right angle, you look like Brad Pitt with bed hair. Could be worse.\"\n\n\"Brad Pitt has metal arms?\"\n\nShe sensed an uneasiness behind his joke. \"What's wrong, Nils?\"\n\n\"I had a strange dream. It made me think of something.\" They walked out to the rail looking out over the sand cliffs and the water below.\n\n\"About the M\u00e9ne glyph?\"\n\n\"No. No, not that dream. About Alison. You, too.\"\n\n\"Men and their fantasies,\" she joked.\n\n\"No, not that. I was thinking \u2026 It went bad with Alison after my accident. She hated when I touched her with the arms. The touch made her wince. She said she did not mind them, but preferred the old me.\"\n\n\"Yes?\" Lara asked, wondering what he was getting at.\n\n\"'The old me.' You never knew the old me.\"\n\n\"I wish I'd known you when you were chasing Chinese figure skaters in Lilleharmner. I was a pretty fair gymnast at that age, and only a couple of years behind you. Maybe I'd have put English girls on your list.\"\n\n\"You don't mean\u2014\"\n\nShe took a step closer. \"Nils, put your arms around me.\"\n\nBorg smiled, moved his arms.\n\nWhirs and a click signaled that his hands had joined behind her. To Lara, they were not artificial, just the strong limbs of a strong man.\n\nLara patted the hair at the back of his head. \"There. Your arms are around me. Your arms. You're an incredible man, Nils.\"\n\n\"But not a whole one.\"\n\n\"Whole where it counts. Determination. Kindness. Courage.\"\n\nHis eyebrows knitted. \"You would have such a man in your life?\"\n\n\"Most men can't keep up with me. Back in the Abyss, I had a hard time keeping up with you. You saved my life after the canoe tipped.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. You saved mine first.\"\n\n\"I think convention demands a kiss. If not convention, then this sunset.\" Lara tipped her head.\n\nHe kissed her, a little tentatively. It made her think of his reluctance to shake her hand back in London.\n\n\"You call that a kiss?\" she said. \"This is a kiss.\"\n\nBut before their lips could touch again, Lara heard a metallic thunk behind her. At first she feared that some piece of Borg's arm had fallen off. But then Borg shoved her roughly to the ground.\n\nIn a flash, she saw the grenade, a lethal cylinder spinning where it had landed.\n\nBorg plunged down on it without a word, without and instant's hesitation, covering it with his metallic, multimillion-dollar limbs.\n\nLara ripped her towel off and threw it over his hands just as the grenade went off. Borg flew back, hit the rail.\n\nGunfire ripped across the pool patio, followed by screams. Lara flattened at the sound, hands going to her thighs where her holsters usually rested. But not, unfortunately, at the moment.\n\nHer ears searched for the source of the gunfire. She heard only screams from behind and in the cabana and a shout from the greenery bordering the pool.\n\nBorg moved, his limbs blackened and badly scratched but still intact.\n\nLara rolled into the pool as more shots struck the pool patio near her, sending chips flying. Blood from a cut on her side\u2014either a bullet or a ceramic chip had grazed her; she hadn't felt the impact in the heat of the action\u2014dissolved in the blue pool water.\n\nA woman under a tipped-over chaise longue shrieked horribly. Children were screaming in terror.\n\nIf flesh were a conductor of emotion, Lara's anger would have set the pool to bubbling. Grenades and machine guns near a pool filled with children! She saw a linen jacket and a tropical shirt fleeing through the shrubbery and disappearing around the side of the hotel.\n\nLara kicked off her flip-flops as she swam, clambered up the pool ladder, and dashed, dripping, across the patio. She hurdled a line of chaises, then a hedge, and turned the corner of the hotel in time to see the man she was pursuing disappear into a silver sedan in the hotel turnaround. The car\u2014as she ran across the decorative stone at the edge of the pavement, she saw it was a Volvo\u2014raced up the tree-lined hotel lane in a haze of diesel smoke, just missing a teenager driving a small motorcycle with a red plastic bin attached to the back.\n\nThe lad pulled up to the front of the hotel. As he got off the motorcycle, Lara read the white letters on the back of his red vest: CHICAGO'S HOT PIZZA and a Lima phone number.\n\nJust a dirt bike. My kingdom for more horsepower!\n\nNo time for explanations. She snatched his helmet out of his hands as he fiddled with the box on the back of his motorcycle\u2014it was a tiny starter Kawasaki, great gasoline mileage but woefully underpowered\u2014and jumped into the saddle, feeling the engine's heat on her bare legs.\n\n\"Senorita!\" the astonished teen said.\n\n\"I'll fill it up before I return it,\" she said, putting on the helmet. The inside smelled of onions and Calvin Klein cologne.\n\nShe gunned it off the kickstand and changed up two gears in as many seconds. By the time she turned onto the Avenida Arequipa, she had a feel for the nimble bike, which thankfully had fairly new tires.\n\nThe Tomb Raider would need the tread."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 55",
                "text": "La Raza, in the passenger seat of the Volvo, slapped the leather upholstery in disgust. \"What do you mean you're not sure?\"\n\n\"We threw the grenade\u2014\"\n\n\"You were supposed to shoot her!\" he shouted angrily at the two men in the back seat. \"Walk up to the pool, pull out your guns, and shoot her. The grenades were only if she hid behind the bar or what-have-you. Don't you hear a word said to you?\"\n\nThe Volvo's driver held down the horn and screamed obscenities at the car ahead, which was creeping past a truck.\n\n\"Calm, Jorge, no need to get us in an accident,\" La Raza said. Turnip heads! But one made soup with whatever ingredients were handy.\n\n\"Now, tell me again. You shot her, and she fell into the pool.\"\n\n\"Most definitely.\" The machine gun man sitting directly behind La Raza searched the pockets of his linen sport coat, came up with a packet of cigarillos with a book of matches strapped to it with a rubber band. \"Now, after the shooting, the smoke! It settles the blood again.\" He had two red tears tattooed at the edge of his eye. In the language of prison, it meant he'd killed two men. La Raza wondered if he'd bull-shitted them to death.\n\nThe man in the tropical shirt behind the driver just looked at his feet, passing his pistol from hand to hand.\n\n\"Did you see her die?\" he asked Tropical Shirt.\n\n\"I saw her fall in the pool.\"\n\n\"I saw her blood. I know I saw blood!\" Sport Coat insisted.\n\n\"Jefe,\" Jorge said. \"We are being followed. A motorbike is coming up fast.\"\n\nLa Raza tried to see around the truck behind him. He took Jorge's word for it. \"Police?\"\n\n\"A woman in a bikini. A young woman, athletic. Very attractive. Perhaps a ponytail.\"\n\nSport Coat took the cigarillo out of his mouth. \"No! She was wounded by the grenade, killed by the bullets. I saw her fall!\"\n\n\"Get in the other lane!\" La Raza ordered.\n\nIt was the target, the same woman as the one in the phone picture. Though she had a helmet on, there could be no mistake with such a figure. La Raza watched the girl, half mesmerized, and thought for a moment of his wife as she'd been on their honeymoon in Aruba fifteen years ago.\n\n\"Hurry, you fool, she's gaining on us.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 56",
                "text": "Lara gunned the Kawasaki down the Avenida Arequipa, fearing that the Volvo would turn at Surquillo and get on the Pan-American Highway. She doubted the little Kawasaki could keep up with the Volvo there. Only her ability to nip between cars was allowing her to keep up with the car in the evening after-work traffic.\n\nThe Volvo passed Surquillo without turning. It shot along the parkland and golf courses of San Isidro, heading for central Lima. They would probably dump the car somewhere in the poorer northern sections of town and change vehicles.\n\nThe traffic dissolved into a mass of taillights as the sun continued to set."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 57",
                "text": "\"Jefe, I do not mean to tell you your business,\" Jorge began, looking in the rearview mirror. \"But we are four men, armed, in a car. She is one woman on a motorbike. We were supposed to kill her. Why is she chasing us?\"\n\nThe fixer felt his cheeks burn. Old habits died hard; the instinct to flee a crime scene and be home in time to listen to the first reports over the radio had clouded his judgment as much as his anger toward the two third-class gunmen the Don had fobbed off on him. His wife, who thought him a security expert specializing in protecting visiting executives, always wondered Why he laughed so heartily when a movie mentioned \"professional killers.\"\n\nLa Raza tightened his seat belt. \"You are right. Perhaps a traffic accident, Jorge\u2026\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 58",
                "text": "The brake lights exploded in her face and the back of the Volvo rose. The analytical part of Lara Croft's mind listened to the squealing tires: The aged Volvo diesel was either pre-antilock brakes or they'd been replaced by conventional ones. Her eyes and hands and body, connected in a loop that didn't go through the conscious part of her brain that was now occupied with brake technology, leaned left, and the bike jumped onto the grassy median.\n\nHer rear wheel kicked up a rooster tail of dirt, and she shot ahead of the Volvo, now skidding a little left, starting a scherzo of squealing tires and horns behind.\n\nThe Volvo accelerated out of the skid, followed her as she turned into Lima Centro.\n\nThe chase turned into a classic duel between power and agility. After each corner, the Volvo gained on her a bit more, until at last she could make out the Mars symbol in the Kawasaki's compact-sized mirror. Gunfire chased her up the street and around corners. A department store window fell in a shower of shards as she turned into the heart of the old city.\n\nWhere were the Peruvian police? The chase blew through more lights than she could count, swerved into and out of oncoming traffic, and was causing a fender bender every thirty seconds or so.\n\nShe turned into the Plaza Mayor and forced the issue. She swung around a horse and carriage in front of the two yellow towers of the cathedral and rode up onto the square of crisscrossing sidewalks that filled two city blocks at the center of town.\n\nEvening strollers scattered.\n\nThe Volvo followed. Lara turned the headlight on and off and shouted, not having a horn to blow. In the distance, she saw police lights flashing.\n\nFinally!\n\nShe shot across traffic, foot and vehicle, and up the Jir\u00e9n de la Union. The glowing decorations and window displays of the stores and boutiques, filled with Christmas shoppers, cast a colorful patina on the avenue. The Volvo followed, weaving around cabs, and she exited the Plaza San Martin, a square not quite as big as the one she'd crossed at the other end of the crowded connecting street.\n\nShe saw a red and white flag ahead, before an imposing building. She drove up on the sidewalk next to the flag and forced a controlled skid to turn around, leaving a crescent tire mark. She straightened her motorcycle, faced the oncoming Volvo.\n\nHer six-cylinder nemesis charged, its dazzling headlights stabbing out toward her like horns. Lara loosed the bike. The Kawasaki jumped forward.\n\nThe opposing vehicles closed the gap in a flash. Lara downshifted and lifted her front wheel off the pavement just in time for it to hit the oncoming car. She threw her weight forward, and the driving rear wheel climbed the bumper and grille. She launched the bike off the windshield, straightened the Kawasaki in midair by throwing her weight, and landed with a knee-popping bounce of tires.\n\nThe Volvo tried to turn but struck the curb and slid into the building instead. Before the occupants could fight their way past the air bags and out the doors, they were looking at a dozen pistols and shotguns. Lara marked the approach of sirens from both directions.\n\nThe Volvo, one axle broken, leaked oil onto the sidewalk in front of the Ministry of Justice. Uniformed Peruvians ordered the four men to lie down. Other officers approached her, guns drawn.\n\nSmoothly, Lara retrieved the red plastic case from the back of the bike and turned to meet the arriving officers.\n\n\"Se\u00f1ores,\" she said in Spanish as they lowered their guns and their faces broke into disbelieving grins, \"I believe someone has ordered a pizza.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 59",
                "text": "The gull white seaplane skimmed the choppy South Pacific waters at thirty feet, Capricorn Atoll a blue smudge on the horizon ahead.\n\nFrom above, Capricorn Atoll looked like a shark rising out of the depths. One side of the atoll was made up of a conical mountain, sheer where it faced the ocean and sloping off to the lagoon in the center. The mountain ridge fell off into two arms embracing the lagoon at the center, which was partially open to the sea on the west side, where just a series of rocky shards, the teeth at the bottom of the shark's open maw, protected a deep harbor.\n\nThe circle of land surrounding the lagoon gave the island its topographic designation: atoll. Its position, precisely on the tropic of Capricorn, gave it its name.\n\nIt was dusk on December 21, the summer solstice south of the equator.\n\nThe man at the controls, a sun-streaked island-hopper named Shanks, kept checking the sea. His right eye would wince, then his left cheek would twitch, causing his eye to wince again, as though the two sides of his visage were fighting for control of the whole; Shanks was a ragged bundle of nerves everywhere but his hands.\n\nFrom his forearms down, Shanks was the coldest dead-stick pilot that Lara had ever known.\n\n\"Sea's a little better now that we're away from the storm,\" Shanks said in his rasping New Zealand drawl. They all wore headsets and microphones plugged into the plane so that they could hear each other over the engine noise. \"Should be fine in the lagoon. You know about this island, right?\"\n\n\"I've learned about it only recently,\" Lara said.\n\n\"What about the island?\" Borg asked. Like Lara, Borg wore a wet suit and surf shoes.\n\nLara launched into lecture mode. \"Capricorn Atoll used to be the home of a tribe the Fiji Islanders to the north called Muwati. In 1863, investigating the disappearance of the whaler Giron, the French frigate Loire stopped at the island after sighting a set of masts in the lagoon. No one knows what happened during the visit. The emperor Louis Napoleon put all records pertaining to the Loire's investigation of the Giron and the island under government seal, but when the Loire turned north again, the atoll was uninhabited and the lagoon at the center had been named Blood Bay. Upon the frigate's return to Fiji, the natives feted the first officer\u2014the captain had died during events on the island\u2014and his crew with such enthusiasm that the French-Fijian babies born nine months later were given noble names and wanted for nothing over the course of their lives.\"\n\n\"Were they cultists?\" Borg asked.\n\n\"We'll never know. Then, in 1926, the National Geographic Society sent an expedition to explore the island over the objections of the French Republic. The explorers, photographers, and naturalists spent only one night at the atoll and returned one man short. According to a couple of lines in National Geographic, they'd picked up a quick-presenting fever on arrival and spent a delirious night before quitting the atoll for a Fiji hospital. The missing naturalist, a Canadian named DuBois, had evidently wandered into the lagoon in his illness and drowned. It wasn't the sort of article that inspired tourism to the atoll.\"\n\n\"Enough history,\" Shanks said. \"You know how to creep a guy out, Lara.\"\n\n\"We need you to set us down well away from the island,\" Lara told him through the headset.\n\n\"Here?\" Shanks' voice crackled back. \"I thought we'd set down inside the atoll.\"\n\n\"Sorry, we don't want our presence announced.\"\n\nShanks tipped the wing and circled. \"I don't like the looks of that chop, Lara. Won't be an easy landing. Or takeoff, for that matter. And we've got typhoons brewing east and west of the Fiji chain. Ocean's getting all stirred up.\"\n\nShe knew all that, but none of it made a difference. \"You can do it,\" she said into the mike.\n\nHer long-haired pilot looked at his controls. \"Yeah. Every time I hear from you, Lara, I think, 'Finally. An easy trip. She'll just need a shuttle to Raiat\u00e9a.' But it never is. I've always got to punch a hurricane and land in the eye of the storm, pick you up, and take off again before my ship gets tossed, or get you off a volcano before the bugger goes Krakatau, or drop you into China somewhere and get out again before I get a SAM sigmoidoscopy.\"\n\nLara chuckled. \"You still take my calls. Why?\"\n\n\"Who wants to die in bed?\"\n\n\"The sane?\"\n\n\"Naw! What I want, Lara\u2014what I want is for a bunch of blokes to be sitting round the bar thirty years from now, shooting away, and one of 'em says: 'My pa, he knew this bonzo bloke, Shanks Muldoon, pilot, could fly a water heater if you stuck a big enough engine on it. You want to hear what the crazy bastard tried to do?'\u2014and then they tell the story about how I snuffed it.\"\n\nLara glanced behind her, where Borg, whiter-faced than usual, was checking the fit of his seat belt. \"I'll do my best to keep giving you opportunities to realize your dream,\" she said.\n\n\"That's the spirit. Now hang on; I'll try to set her down. We go ass over, the best way out will be the door in back.\"\n\nHe worked the flaps and throttle. The wave tops, not that far away to begin with, suddenly looked close enough to touch.\n\nShanks lifted the boatlike nose of the plane higher than he normally would, and Lara felt the first touch of a wave at the back of the boat. Then it was smack-smack-smack-shushhhhh as the ship cut through the chop and landed.\n\nThe seaplane rocked as the short waves hit the floats at the wingtips. Spray washed up on the canopy.\n\nShanks let the engines idle. \"You want me back on the twenty-second, right?\"\n\n\"It'll all be over by then, one way or another. I'll try and radio, but if you don't hear from me\u2014\"\n\n\"Come anyway?\"\n\nLara leaned across the seats and kissed his stubbled cheek. \"I was going to say 'use your judgment,' but that's playing jazz on a saxophone with a broken reed, isn't it?\"\n\n\"The storms are tracking funny. Looks like they're going to circle this damn island like a couple of ballroom dancers 'round the glitter ball. I should be able to cut through the tail of the western storm.\"\n\n\"Christmas toddies will be on me.\"\n\n\"I'll be at Tongatapu waiting for your call, Lara. I'll put an order in while I'm there.\"\n\nShe squeezed back into the passenger-cargo area and shouldered her lucky backpack, placing her feet carefully and bracing with her hands so she didn't trip as the plane rocked. She put on her holsters, her guns wrapped in protective plastic bags to keep the ocean spray off. Shanks followed, forced to bend almost double because of his long frame.\n\nThey put the inflatable boat out the passenger-cargo door, tied it off, and inflated it. Borg, a little green from the motion, helped Shanks with the trickiest part, moving the little outboard from the plane to its fixture in the Zodiac. The little boat alternately lunged at the seaplane and fell away in the confused sea.\n\nLara made the difficult jump into the Zodiac, landed on her knees, and grabbed one of the sidelines. She pulled the Zodiac up tight to the cargo hatch, sea spray already speckling her wraparound sunglasses.\n\nThe balky boat jumped again; a wave forced its way between seaplane and Zodiac and hit her full in the face.\n\n\"Bollocks!\" she spat as Shanks laughed.\n\n\"Temper, temper!\"\n\nShe gauged the motion of the boat and seaplane, gripping a fold-out handle at the cargo door in one hand and the boat with the other, waiting for both to bottom\u2026\n\n\"Now, Nils!\"\n\nWith Shanks letting out the line wrapped around the outboard's rudder-propeller housing, Borg dropped the engine into the fitting. Lara let go of the plane and shot home the bolts that would secure it.\n\nThe hard part over, Borg and Shanks passed over the diving gear\u2014she'd purchased some water wings for Borg\u2014bags of equipment, her VADS harness, binoculars, a satellite phone with a solar recharger, food, and fuel. Finally Borg\u2014still in his climbing arms; the Peruvians hadn't gotten around to forwarding his regular arms from the Madre de Dios canopy tower\u2014tried the difficult transfer.\n\nHe fell in, wetting his lower half. A little Pacific never hurt anyone. She helped him into the boat, filled the gas reservoir, and started the motor.\n\nShe gave Shanks the thumbs-up. He returned a finger-waggling salute-cum-wave.\n\nThe cargo in its netting checked one final time, she let go the line going back to the seaplane and motored off into the chop. The ocean felt like a horse in a buck-trot beneath her, and Borg dry-heaved off the starboard inflatable.\n\n\"Got it bad?\"\n\n\"Strange,\" he gasped. \"I never get airsickness. But boats do it \u2026 urp \u2026 every time, even if it's just a little bit rough.\"\n\nShe squeezed his ankle, it being the only part she could reach as she worked the motor tiller.\n\nIn case of accident they stood by until Shanks lifted off. He gunned the wide-bodied craft, shaped like a white sperm whale with a wing and twin engines mounted high, and blasted through the wave tops until it took somewhat gracelessly to the air.\n\n\"A good man,\" Borg said.\n\n\"Storms or no storms, we'll see him again. Now let's get to the island.\" She nosed the Zodiac over and opened the throttle wide.\n\nBorg groaned and closed his eyes."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 60",
                "text": "They floated along the edge of the Tonga Trench, one of the deepest points in the Pacific.\n\nThe easy way to reach the atoll would be to motor through one of the many channels on the west side. But Lara Croft didn't want to announce her presence on the island. The Prime and his cult had been one step ahead of her since she first began to look into Ajay's disappearance. It was time for her to steal a march on him.\n\nShe pointed the Zodiac straight for the highest point of the island.\n\nBorg sat where she put him, leaned when she told him, as the little boat skipped through the chop toward land. Though it was sunny, distant masses of cloud from the storm systems Shanks had mentioned sent spiraling arms across the skies like the two whales in the Chinese yin-yang symbol.\n\n\"You have any plan for action at all?\" Borg inquired with a groan.\n\n\"Not the slightest.\"\n\n\"This doesn't worry you?\"\n\nShe had to raise her voice above the engine; they were nearing shore, and the chop was turning into surf. \"I'm at my best pell-mell. Besides, Sherlock Holmes always said it was a capital mistake to theorize before gathering facts. Experience has taught me to agree. I've no idea what we're going to find here, so how can I make plans?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 61",
                "text": "Volcanic rock, blue-black in the spray, rose above them. Clusters of green iguanas lay on the flatter prominences. Not quite a wall, but only the most charitable would call it a slope. More of a ridge than a peak, the mass before them was the biggest remnant of the volcano that had formed Capricorn Atoll millennia ago.\n\nA line of rocks, occasionally appearing as the surf fell away before smashing into them again, ringed this side of the island. Once inside the ring, Lara and Borg would be relatively safe; there would be only the surf to contest their landing.\n\nLara turned the Zodiac and motored back out to sea. Either this part of the island had no beaches, or some combination of tide and storm had covered them.\n\n\"I'm going to try to get us past the rocks,\" she told Borg. \"Try to get a piton in, and we'll tie up.\"\n\nBorg nodded, looked in the magazine in his arm that held the pitons, snapped it shut again. \"Just say when.\"\n\nIn response she let the little engine roar. Down a wave, up\u2014\n\nSomething poked the bow of the boat from below: a rock. Lara threw her weight to counterbalance, and with the wash of a wave they were beyond the rocks, trapped in a little swirl with a gentle slope rising from the seaweed-coated coral.\n\n\"Now, Nils!\"\n\nBorg fired his piton, hooked the arm on it immediately and clung to the boat with his other limb. The sea dropped away, and the boat hung sideways. Lara hung on to the side lines until the sea came up again.\n\n\"Another piton! Here!\" She pointed.\n\nBorg fired again; a piece of coral bounced off her sunglasses.\n\nLara got a handful of climbing line from the cargo netting, looped it through the boat's side line. The sea fell away again, and they hung on. Then, when it came up again, Borg looped line around the boat as she fixed it to the pitons.\n\nOne more swell of the sea and they'd turn the Zodiac into an improvised shelf suspended from the pitons.\n\nThey didn't get it.\n\nThe next time the boat fell away from the wall, Lara saw a flash of flying limbs, and then Borg hit the churning green water, the splash lost in the roar of surf hitting the breakers and the mountainside.\n\nShe snaked a line around her wrist and dove into the surf after him. Bubbles and stirred-up ocean obscured her vision. She caught a flash of a leg and went after it.\n\nBorg struck the volcanic rock bottom, tried to right himself, but was caught in the undertow. Lara shot after him, ran out of line, abandoned her tether. She got an arm around him just as another wave lifted them both\u2014air!\u2014and threw them against the cliff wall as they went down again, Borg kicking madly but trying to not interfere with her grip. She had the rhythm of the waves now, and the second time the ocean pushed them up she used the thrust to bodysurf back toward the Zodiac, now hanging inverted by a single line.\n\nThe ocean flung them against the lava wall with a smack, and Lara felt the skin on her knee tear. She grabbed on to the bow of the Zodiac, and this time, when the surf receded, the water didn't take them with it. They both gasped, catching up on oxygen for a moment. Lara looked at the last piton; it was holding well enough, but they'd lost some of the gear.\n\nThey hung on through one more wave, this time using the Zodiac as a fender. Then Borg shot another piton into the rock, and they pulled themselves out of the surf, clinging to the rock like lizards.\n\n\"Sorry, Lara,\" Borg panted. \"I let go to fix a knot\u2014\"\n\n\"We're both alive. That's enough.\"\n\nBorg climbed to an outcropping, sending a startled crested iguana scrambling away, and Lara, a line fixed to her, negotiated the Zodiac and surf to pass up what was left of the gear. She still had her lucky pack, guns, and VADS gear\u2014she'd done everything but handcuff those essentials to the Zodiac\u2014but they'd lost the heavy oxygen gear, climbing supplies, food, and the portable radio-satellite phone.\n\nShe tossed up the netting bag holding the flippers and masks anyway, and joined him on the rock. The surf was beautiful again, instead of a deadly menace.\n\nBorg looked at the slope. \"This is no worse than the Jungfrau. We don't need gear, except perhaps near the very top, and there's enough line for us to support each other.\"\n\nOn the next rock over, a feud broke out among a heap of crested iguanas. They bobbed their heads and opened their jaws at one another.\n\n\"Let's get to it,\" Lara said, helping Borg into his pack.\n\nOn the way up the two-hundred-meter slope, she kept reminding herself that the mountain only looked big. Set this volcanic heap against even the lesser peaks of the Alps, and it would shrink to insignificance. Here and there they were able to walk up the side, but most of the ascent was a four-limbed clamber over sharp rocks that made her grateful for her tough reef walkers and leather gloves.\n\n\"Does this ridge have a name?\" Borg asked as they paused to suck air and water.\n\n\"The Nuku Hava.\" Lara couldn't say if she had even pronounced it properly.\n\n\"What's that mean?\"\n\n\"I don't know and didn't have time to find out. Getting the Polynesians to say anything about this island is one flat down from impossible.\"\n\nThey chatted over the route for the next fifty meters, then started up again. Near the top, the cliff became sheer, with spots that would require an inverted climb if they didn't choose another route. Borg, who had a feel for mountains that rivaled a sailor's instinct for weather, found a chimney. He led Lara up it, climbing expertly and efficiently with his artificial limbs. Being at the other end of the line was like having a mountain goat on a lead.\n\nLara shrugged to herself. Nils Bjorkstrom's love for Alison was the only obstacle he couldn't seem to get over."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 62",
                "text": "There is no good way to knock at a tent. Alex Frys settled for clearing his throat.\n\n\"Yes?\" Heather Rourke called from inside.\n\n\"I've brought some dinner. I haven't seen you all day.\"\n\nShe unzipped the tent and let him in. The little nylon-floored household consisted of a cot, a bag of clothes, and some magazines scattered on the floor.\n\nHeather took a pair of kiwis off the tray, sat primly on her field cot. \"Last night's beach party was a bit much for me. Gassim is dying from the wounds Lara gave him at the canopy tower.\"\n\n\"I know.\" This was the second time she'd gotten her Irish up since he'd taken her, more or less forcibly, to Capricorn Atoll.\n\nShe persisted. \"Gassim should be in a hospital. And that old trout, Mr. Van Schwellenkammer or Seven or however you say it, looks ready to keel over at any moment.\"\n\nNone are so blind as those who refuse to see. \"I don't doubt it.\"\n\n\"Yet you've got them propped up, clapping along to the drums and pipes and that abalone shell horn like it's a summer Baptist revival.\"\n\n\"Different people choose different ways to say good-bye to earthly life.\"\n\n\"One other thing. In the lagoon last night, I saw \u2026 eyes. Sets of eyes, like those of cats or raccoons or something reflecting the firelight.\" She shuddered.\n\nHe'd told Boris to keep her away from the shoreline. But then Boris had been drinking last night. \"Seabirds floating,\" he said.\n\nThe Prime reached into his pocket, felt the reassuring handle on the crystal. Heather didn't know how right she was. But, again, willfully blind. Still, she could be useful. Perhaps even fun. He'd woken up from an afternoon nap feeling randy, rested, and ready. He'd hoped to finally become intimate with Heather. But all this talk of death\u2026\n\n\"Tonight is important,\" he told her. \"The most important night of my life. I thought I'd get it off to a good start by dining with you.\"\n\n\"Why so important?\" she asked, finally looking up at him.\n\n\"It's the solstice. A planetary tipping point. Revelations are at hand.\" Well, not at hand, if one wanted to speak precisely.\n\n\"You want me to see these 'revelations,' too?\"\n\n\"Absolutely,\" he said, sitting on the bunk next to her. He poured her some wine. \"It will be the biggest story of your career, and I'll be happy to guide you as you shape it.\"\n\n\"Shape it?\"\n\n\"The world isn't quite ready yet for the full truth. We have to give it to them a little bit at a time.\"\n\n\"I've been a journalist since junior high school. I think I know how to report a story, thanks.\"\n\nFrys raised the crystal on its ivory and brass handle. He practiced the gesture in the mirror a lot, trying to look like an eighteenth century gentleman with his monocle. Heather Rourke's fuzzy outline was black as midnight, closed to him. \"We could accomplish great things together.\"\n\nHe leaned closer, brimming over with lust. With other women, with Alison, it was the simplest thing in the world to pour it through the lens and into them, until they exploded into red-orange flame and fell back for the taking.\n\nThe same pinks and greens formed in his lens. \"The wine is good,\" Heather said, and the pink grew brighter, then faded away again.\n\nFrustrated, he took it from his eye. Kunai had told him there were people like this, people resistant or even immune to the effects of the crystal. But until now, he'd never actually met one. Heather wasn't immune, but she was highly resistant. And the more he used the crystal to influence her emotions, the more resistant she seemed to get. He would spend hours trying to coerce her with the crystal, only to develop a splitting headache. Instead of the passion he'd hoped to instill in her, she'd regard him with a kind of wary neutrality, as if she were using him as much as he was using her. The most perverse thing of all was that this only made his desire for her stronger than ever.\n\nOne of the magazines lying open on the floor caught his eye; the latest issue of People. He got off the cot and picked it up. It was open to an article about Ozzy Osbourne, but that wasn't what drew his attention.\n\nThe article had tiny black letters scrawled in what looked like crayon between the lines. He read aloud:\n\nCults don't thrive on faith alone. It takes money, and in the M\u00e9ne's case the Prime can draw on bank accounts set up from Sydney to London, Tokyo to Rio de Janeiro. But money can only buy so much power. The true influence of the M\u00e9ne might be measured in the portfolios of ministers rather than\u2026\n\nThat was as far as she'd gotten. He looked up. She was watching him coolly.\n\n\"Very resourceful,\" he admitted. \"My men must not have searched your clothing thoroughly enough. Did you have a pen sewn in the lining?\"\n\n\"No. Just an eyeliner with my makeup.\"\n\n\"This will have to stop.\" He raised the crystal again, looked at her shifting energies, now dark and closed. He tried to turn them white, a new, clean slate for him to begin on, but even with all the force of his will, she only sparkled a little, like the white dots of stars against an evening sky. And the black engulfed them as soon as he stopped straining. It was ironic. In his experience, journalists could be led around by the nose, even without the help of a piece of Deep Gods technology or magic or whatever the hell it was.\n\nIf he couldn't control her better, or if she couldn't be persuaded to behave herself, he just might have to give her a more active role to play in the coming ceremony."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 63",
                "text": "From the top of Nuku Hava ridge, Capricorn Atoll became a paradise again.\n\nLara and Borg surveyed what they could of the central lagoon in the star-bright Pacific night. They might have been able to see more of the M\u00e9ne camp, but their German optics were rolling around with more mundane forms of sand beneath the upended Zodiac. A few tiny figures walked along the beachfront, standing on a lava rock flow to look into the lagoon. The mass of stone, descending into the lagoon like a boat ramp the width of the M-4, had regular enough lines to make Lara think that it had been shaped.\n\nLara strapped on her VADS gear and readied her guns in their holsters, then tested the headset.\n\n\"What next?\" Borg asked.\n\n\"I want a better look at their camp. We'll try and get in. I'd like a word with Alex Frys.\"\n\nThe trek down from the ridge was easy, the slope gentle on this side of the lagoon. When Lara finally saw the tents in the distance, she climbed a mango tree for a better look while Borg hid their remaining gear among its roots.\n\nLara saw a few casually dressed cultists and shirtless natives, muscular islanders who had shaved their heads smooth and covered their scalps with tattoos. Evidently the French frigate had not been as thorough in destroying the as the Fijians had believed.\n\n\"Any sign of Alison?\" Borg asked when she descended again.\n\n\"No. One strange thing, though. The big tent in the center is a hospital. IVs, blood in ice coolers, two men who look as though they are attending to casualties. Either their plane crashed on landing, or they brought their injured with them.\"\n\n\"Interesting way to run an expedition.\"\n\n\"Maybe it's a healing,\" Lara half joked. \"The plates we found are supposed to draw their gods, or allow communication.\"\n\n\"Lara Croft, the look on your face says we will find out soon.\"\n\n\"Exactly. Best way to learn about a religion is to observe the rituals. Barring joining, that is. I don't imagine you're interested?\"\n\nBorg ran his fingers across the rainbow arc of a red-tipped fern. \"Over Frys's dead body, as the English say.\"\n\n\"That sounds more like John Wayne than Oscar Wilde. Not that I don't agree with the sentiment.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 64",
                "text": "As the moon rose at the end of this, the longest day of the year, they had all the time they wanted to explore the M\u00e9ne campsite.\n\nIt lay empty. They'd watched the entire camp pick up and file away, carrying tiki torches.\n\nAs the long arms of the twin storms reached for each other overhead, the evening became hazy, with confused winds blowing the trees first one way, then the other. A curtain of clouds boiled up on the horizon beyond the toothlike shards of volcanic rock at the eastern end of the lagoon.\n\nThe M\u00e9ne had left their tents open and bags of waste lying around what had once been the hospital tent. Rats, the living residue on any island visited by shipping, nosed around in the trash, occasionally squealing and fighting for choice scraps. Lara even found a charcoal fire still alight in a cooking pit. Like many tiny streams joining to form a river, the individual tracks all led out to the beach, where they joined into one trail leading toward the volcanic rock ramp that led into the lagoon the French frigate sailors had named Blood Bay."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 65",
                "text": "The M\u00e9ne looked more like they were preparing for a luau than a sacred ceremony: no robes, no chanting, no strange arm movements and lifting of holy relics. Even the drumming had stopped.\n\nLara and Borg, hidden a hundred meters away behind a fallen palm on the beach, watched Frys lead perhaps thirty M\u00e9ne from the jungle, walking, and in the case of the wounded and infirm, being carried on stretchers down the wide stone path. Ajay brought up the rear, hands ready on the machine pistols at her hips, searching the jungle around the volcanic ramp.\n\nThey looked, if anything, like a tour group off a cruise ship, save for the tiki torches they carried. Aloha shirts and shorts, sandals and boat shoes, cheap straw hats and leis adorned the M\u00e9ne, and at their head Alex Frys wore swimming trunks and a loose-fitting souvenir T-shirt. Only the machine pistols at Ajay's hips and the occasional assault rifle in the group revealed that they were on business more serious. Even those nearest the water, each carrying one of the platinum panels taken from the Whispering Abyss, bore their treasures with all the reverence of boys toting schoolbooks.\n\nHeather, easily spotted thanks to her red hair, stood among a mix of islanders and others. One of them might have been the Peruvian park ranger Fermi, but at this distance Lara couldn't tell.\n\nFrys and a group of natives\u2014she could now distinguish the black pseudo-omega symbols tattooed on their skulls\u2014walked down the ramp and thigh-deep into the lagoon as the cloud-streaked sky turned orange. Frys raised his arms and began to speak loudly. The gusting wind carried away most of what he said; Lara caught only scattered words: \"offering \u2026 not death \u2026 life \u2026 final threshold.\" And then the group parted and one of the M\u00e9ne limped down, stripping a bandage from his head as he dragged his injured leg into the water.\n\nTwo natives steadied the injured man in the water, and another passed Frys a square green bottle. He handed it to the limping man, who poured the contents down his throat until it ran out the sides of his mouth and he sputtered for breath. Then the injured man left the steadying arms of the natives and continued to walk down the ramp, his arms stretched wide as though he were waiting for an embrace. Lara thought she heard a wailing cry, but it might have been seabirds.\n\nHip-deep, then stomach-deep\u2014\n\nHe disappeared beneath the surface of the lagoon in a flash, as though he had stepped off an underwater cliff.\n\nLara waited for his head to break the waters of the lagoon farther out. She waited in vain.\n\n\"What the hell?\" Borg whispered. \"He drowned himself? That's seawater; his body should float.\"\n\n\"Something dragged him, under. Current, or maybe a shark \u2026\" She didn't want to think about other possibilities.\n\nSeven more times they watched the ritual, seven green bottles used and then placed on the volcanic ramp. An old woman in a wheelchair; a wounded man on a stretcher who had to be floated out by the natives and then dumped in; an aging man who walked with the aid of two rubber-tipped canes; a young man with a shaved head who had trouble tipping his head back to accept the contents of the bottle and had to be tilted by the islanders; a man in a back brace; a woman who coughed repeatedly into a handkerchief as she waded in; and a couple who walked into the water hand in hand, wearing flowers about their necks as though they were attending a beach wedding.\n\nEach time, as the water reached a level somewhere between their belly buttons and armpits, they disappeared in the blink of an eye.\n\nOnce, when the man in the stretcher was tipped in, Lara thought she saw a flash of something moving quickly just below the surface, but the torchlight played tricks in the rippling lagoon waters and she couldn't say what she saw.\n\n\"If they try this on Heather, we must fight them,\" Borg said.\n\nLara nodded. Or if even one of the \u2026 sacrifices or offerings \u2026 had resisted, she might have gone to their aid. But not one showed anything but eagerness to get into the water. And as far as she could tell, they were not drugged. They were, in fact, as she could tell by their bows to Frys, all members of the cult.\n\nNone of them broke the surface again.\n\nThe cultists waded back out of the water, and all, even Frys, turned to face the bottom of the ramp, knelt, and touched their foreheads to the rock surface. With that over, several in attendance embraced.\n\nIncluding Frys and Ajay. Borg stiffened and growled at the sight.\n\nThe water took on a faint phosphorescence, brighter farther out in the lagoon than close to shore.\n\n\"What is that glow?\" Borg asked.\n\nLara shook her head. \"I don't know. There are single-celled organisms that live on the surface of the water that glow, but usually they're most visible near shore. I've never seen it that strong at a distance.\"\n\nThen a metallic groan and a fierce bubbling from the lava ramp froze them. The M\u00e9ne, led again by Frys, disappeared into the ground. Their heads did not bob as those of people walking down a stairway would have, but went down smoothly.\n\n\"My God!\" Borg said.\n\n\"You couldn't be more wrong \u2026 C'mon!\" Lara grabbed at Borg's shoulder and dashed for the tree line. They kept to the growth, running for the lava ramp and startling birds into flight right and left, but Lara didn't care. They had to reach that ramp in time to\u2014\n\nToo late.\n\nThe surface of the ramp closed with a last hiss of air. The bubbling in the lagoon to either side of the lava ramp trickled off to nothing. Lara watched, her ponytail flapping in the fluky but strengthening winds.\n\nShe probed and explored and went so far as to wade into the water where Frys had stood. Borg almost danced with anxiety on the shaped volcanic stone as she stuck her hands into the water, looking for some device to operate the door. All she could do was find the fissures marking the ramp. She thought of the counterweighted platform in the ruins of Ukju Pacha and ran up the ramp to the other end.\n\nThe ramp ended in a natural amphitheater. The hill wall had been flattened and shaped into a rectangle about the size of a movie-theater screen, and in the darkness she could make out a huge version of the pseudo-omega symbol worked into the stone, the carving filled with silvery metal. This one had arms longer than the others she had seen, and what could only be eyes bulging from either side of the elongated skull-like shape. In its size, the skill of its artistry, and its evident age, the carving would be a great discovery, but she had no time to admire it. Instead, she searched the inlaid rock and surrounding stone for a device or trigger for the ramp, but came up empty again.\n\nThe M\u00e9ne had locked the door behind them and taken the key."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 66",
                "text": "\"The glow is getting brighter,\" Borg said as they wandered back down the ramp to the beach. With the strange ceremony over, Capricorn Atoll was once again a South Pacific paradise save for the growing wind kicking up surf and sand.\n\nLara had never seen a glow like that. And it wasn't at the surface; it was deep, coming up through the water as a uniform light, rather than as the flows and tendrils of the surface organisms which were caught by the currents and moved by the wind.\n\nBorg rubbed his chin with a mechanical claw. \"Lara, they all disappeared toward that glow. Ajay went down through a tunnel in this rock. But the others, the ones who waded into the water, perhaps they were going to the same place by a different path?\"\n\n\"You could be right, Nils. Let's go get the flippers and masks and have a look.\"\n\nThey hurried back to their remaining gear at the mango tree. It took Lara a moment of casting about outside the M\u00e9ne camp to determine under which tree they'd placed it. Lara cut a two-meter length of line and tied knots at each end. Then they slung the bags and ran back to the beach.\n\nShe watched him fit his mask. She spat in hers, wiped the saliva around. The new plastics didn't fog, but she still did it out of habit. \"You sure you want to try the lagoon? There could be \u2026 sharks. You saw what happened to those people. It looked like something \u2026 took them.\"\n\n\"I can go anywhere you will.\"\n\nThey tried an exploratory swim out into the lagoon. Lara helped Borg along by pulling him with her knotted line. Borg kicked with water wings on to compensate for the weight of his arms, the water growing clearer and clearer the farther they got from shore. The ground sloped away fast from the lagoon beach; the water here was a good deal deeper than in a typical atoll. Lara spotted a strange round shape below.\n\n\"Wait a moment,\" she told Borg, and dove.\n\nAway from the surface, she could see better. The ocean floor sloped away toward the source of the bluish glow coming from the sea bottom. She saw more orbs like the one she had dove to investigate, only deeper down.\n\nShe looked at the nearest one more closely. The four-meter orb, like a crystal mushroom top, was tethered to the sea floor by a net of vines joining at a taproot and was open at the bottom like a diving bell. She swam farther down, saw row after row of sea grasses, but\u2014and she thought this strange\u2014no fish. She rose and broke the surface inside the sphere, took a small, cautious breath. It invigorated her like pure oxygen.\n\nThe translucent interior of the crystal dome glowed faintly from little splotches, like blue algae, growing on its outer surface. More roots clung to the interior walls.\n\nWithin the sphere, woven sea grass nets held little grape-like bulbs. The baskets had been fashioned, filled with the bulbs, and then hung there, but for what purpose she couldn't begin to guess. Curious, she reached up and gave one an experimental squeeze. It broke easily; milky liquid flowed down her hand. She felt a tug at her ankle, gasped\u2014\n\nBorg floated beneath. She kicked over, and he shot up into the air pocket. He'd partially deflated his water wings.\n\n\"What's this?\" he asked, gasping for air.\n\n\"It's like a diving bell. They're growing stuff in here, or drying it, or preserving it.\" She pointed at the nets full of berries, or grapes, or whatever they were.\n\n\"I don't like this. I feel like these vines are reaching for me.\"\n\nShe plunged her face into the water; the taproots that held the spheres had masses of fronds waving back and forth in the lagoon current. They gave off tiny, champagne-sized bubbles which rose within the diving bell, evidently replenishing the oxygen supply. With her eyes, she followed the seafloor down to the glow, saw more of the crystal diving bells, then looked up again. \"There's more of these. We can use them to get to the bottom of the lagoon. To the glow.\"\n\n\"You can dive that deep without a helmet?\"\n\n\"I've heard of pearl divers who go deeper, just on what they can carry in their lungs.\"\n\n\"You'll need weights,\" Borg said, blowing his water wings back up. \"My arms will do for me. I'm a fantastic sinker.\"\n\n\"I remember.\" They left the crystal diving bell suspended in its seaweed cables, and Lara led him toward the surface. On shore, they filled their flipper bags with rocks. Lara put her guns back in their plastic bags and secured them in her holsters, and then they turned and waded out into the lagoon.\n\n\"You ready?\" she asked, kicking with her flippers to stay on the surface.\n\n\"I'll follow you.\"\n\n\"If you need to go back to the surface, just grab me and do a dive kill.\" She demonstrated the classic throat-cut pantomime. \"Just rise slowly and wait for me at the mango tree where we hid the gear.\"\n\nThey both took three deep breaths and plunged into the undersea world of Blood Bay."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 67",
                "text": "They dove, Lara leading Borg with the knotted line. They rested and caught their breath in the first diving bell, then swam to the next in the direction of the blue glow at the bottom. The second held more masses of the odd bulbs, some as big as a healthy-sized lemon. They made easy adjustments to the changing water pressure thanks to the diving bells. The diving bells obviated the ear pain and the feeling of being wrapped up by a python from sinus cavities to diaphragm that made deep skin diving a mixed pleasure on the way down.\n\nFrom the second diving bell they examined the lagoon-bottom glow. It came from a dome\u2014almost a sphere. The top of it was perhaps thirty meters below the surface, the bottom sixty. The glowing dome rested upon an upthrust rock like a seer's crystal ball on its mount. The gash of a deep abyss ended at the upthrust. Lara had a hard time gauging the scale of the dome, but she thought it looked to be about the size of the Pantheon in Rome: roughly the same size as the dome at the Whispering Abyss.\n\nBorg elbowed her. \"Lara, at the bottom of the sphere.\"\n\nA pair of figures with smallish flippers swam out from under the edge of the dome and disappeared into shadow at the lagoon floor.\n\n\"Next we'll head for that sphere,\" she said, pointing to a small one near the dome.\n\n\"Long swim, Lara. There is another one, closer, on the way,\" Borg said.\n\nLara spotted gray shapes in the blue glow, with odd T-shaped heads.\n\n\"Look around the base of it. Those are sharks. Hammerheads. They can be dangerous, but their usual prey is stingrays\u2014that's why their heads are like that, to pin the rays.\"\n\n\"I'd rather not get pinned. Sounds like my drowning dream. The far one it is.\"\n\nThey filled their lungs and dove again, a long downward glide. The sharks fled as they passed\u2014were they afraid of swimmers here? Lara did not want to meet anyone who frightened a great hammerhead. Lara looked up at the diving bell they were bypassing. She saw feet hanging down. She waved Borg on and made a detour.\n\nThe diving bell held two bodies. She recognized both from the ceremony on the beach: the older woman and the first man in, the one with the bad leg and the head wound.\n\nShe took a quick breath of air and dove to catch up with Borg.\n\nHe hung about the bottom of the final diving bell. When he saw she was on her way, he entered and rose.\n\n\"What was that about?\" he asked, after they'd taken a few breaths. This sphere was apparently unused or had recently been emptied; nothing hung within, though the taproot and undersea vines still kept it full of oxygen.\n\n\"Two of the people who walked into the water\u2014their bodies ended up there.\"\n\nBorg asked the question on her mind. \"Where are the others?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I want to find out.\"\n\n\"Where to next?\"\n\n\"The dome. At the bottom where it overhangs the rock.\"\n\n\"If we see other divers?\"\n\n\"Avoid them. Maybe the M\u00e9ne swim in and out of here all the time. If we can't find an entrance, we meet back here.\"\n\nNearer to the dome, Lara saw that the light came in patches rather than being uniform. The sandy floor looked like an underwater vineyard. Stakes held plant tendrils in place, and there was none of the riotous mix of corals, rock, and plant life of a typical near-shore bottom. Lara put her hand on the meter-thick crystal of the dome. The translucent crystal was faceted irregularly, as though it had been grown into the dome shape rather than cut. She looked beneath the lip and saw air trapped within, and waved for Borg to follow. They broke the surface among thick roots that reminded her of mangrove growth, stretching from crystal to rock seabed and back again in a tangled web. The light from the crystal gave everything a blue-green glow. She heard water lapping and dripping in a confusing mix of echoes\u2014\n\nBorg disappeared with a yelp. She felt something seize her foot. It dragged her down, she grabbed at one of the roots, but the pull was too strong.\n\nThen she saw what pulled at her. She gasped involuntarily, losing precious air.\n\nThree inhuman figures, web-fingered and flipper-footed, were pulling her down to the edge of the dome. Another three had Borg. Naturally green or made to appear that way in the light from the glowing dome, they had thick, swollen skin, great wattles under their necks, and faces reminiscent of the creature from the black lagoon. One of the three released its hold on Lara's leg and went for her arm.\n\nBorg's piton arm bubbled as he fired into one of his attackers. The creature folded at the waist.\n\nLara drew her diving knife and stabbed at the clawed hands pulling her down. The creatures seemed immune to pain. She tried sawing at a wrist instead, and the grip released. She must have cut a tendon.\n\nBorg sent his claw shooting toward the surface. Lara felt the pressure of its passage as it shot past her face. It fixed on something, probably a root, and stopped his descent. Lara stabbed at another of the creatures, but only managed a glancing blow. The blade opened a shallow wound in the swimmer's thick, sharklike skin, but no blood flowed. It won her a chance to grab on to Borg's cable with her free hand.\n\nBorg pressed his piton arm to the forehead of the creature gripping his left leg. Lara saw an explosion of gray tissue as the piton shattered its skull.\n\nHer lungs screamed for air. She almost severed another webbed hand, stomped at the one holding her leg, her flippers making anything but blows from the heel ineffectual. Borg fired two more pitons at one coming for her, jaws agape to reveal pointed teeth. Both pitons hit home, and the creature sank. But now Borg was in real trouble. One of the swimmers had gotten him in a bear hug and emptied his lungs with a Heimlich maneuver. Another bit Borg in the fleshy softness behind his knee.\n\nFace contorted with pain, Borg looked up at Lara and used his piton arm to release his claw arm from its mounting before she could come to his aid. Freed of the pull, the arm drew Lara back up into the dome, away from Borg, as the monstrous creatures dragged him down to the caves. She shot past yet another swimmer coming out of the depths.\n\nShe recognized him\u2014or it.\n\nIt was the wounded man from the ceremony who'd been tipped off his stretcher into the lagoon. Where wounds had been, she saw thick, pasty scabs of greenish skin. Thin wounds at his neck\u2014gills?, she wondered\u2014leaked blood into the water, and his eyes had a milky film covering them, so that just the vaguest suggestion of iris and pupil remained. Lara did not have time to make a more detailed examination; the cable drew her past him even as he reached out toward her sluggishly with hands that were now ragged claws. She surfaced back in the root forest.\n\nHer lungs sucked in life-sustaining air. For an intoxicating second she forgot Borg, the swimming monstrosities, even the M\u00e9ne, in the joy of simply breathing.\n\nThen she scrambled up and out of the water, kicked off her flippers and turned, ready to stab anything that came up behind her.\n\nNothing emerged.\n\nShe clambered up the roots, into a honeycomb of smooth-skinned, fungus-covered wood, and found a place to hide next to the edge of the dome. She quieted the rage she felt at the loss of Borg by drawing her pistols. The VADS control screen, after some hesitation, glowed green to show that it was ready for action.\n\nShe heard water, lapping and dripping and trickling among the roots. The oxygen and clean salt smell made her feel strong and alert.\n\nThe crystal wall next to her diverted her for a moment. Unlike the outside, it was regularly formed from triangular facets about the size of her hand. She looked within the crystal and saw that blotches of tiny glowing growths clung together. Some bits floated, spiraling in the currents moving through the crystal. Evidently the dome was constructed like double-paned glass, with a space in between where water flowed and these organisms thrived. Animal or vegetable, she couldn't tell without a microscope, and interested as she was, she had a bill to settle with the M\u00e9ne.\n\nAlex Frys, the Prime, would hate paying the wergild on Nils Bjorkstrom's life.\n\nThe Tomb Raider picked a promising root and climbed up into the dome."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 68",
                "text": "The space stole the Tomb Raider's breath away.\n\nShe crouched among the roots next to the dome wall, peering across the arena-like circular space. Frozen, hardly breathing, moving only her eyes, she tried to take it all in.\n\nThe floor at the center of the great dome was over half water, a gigantic moon pool such as divers use in undersea stations open to the ocean. The mangrovelike plants grew in a web up the sides of the dome, pressing against the luminous crystal. Thinner branches grew right to the top of the dome. Here and there they flowered. There was something vaguely familiar about those white flowers, and after a moment, the Tomb Raider realized that they had been cultivated to make a map of the night sky in the northern hemisphere. She marked Ursa Major and Minor, Orion, and several other constellations, all formed from the white blossoms. Here and there tiny buds grew.\n\nShe'd seen similar buds before, at Ukju Pacha. Was this a saltwater variant of the M\u00e9ne plant?\n\nAt the center of the dome, a clear crystal cylinder the width of an ancient redwood ran down to the ocean. The cylinder housed another crystal within, shaped like a screw. At the bottom, where the cylinder met the water, six long wooden spokes the size of palm trunks stuck out into the water, pushed round and round by thrashing creatures like the ones that had taken Borg.\n\nIt was a giant Archimedes' screw. It drew water to the top of the dome, where it sprayed out in a mist, feeding the tangled roots there as well and perhaps feeding fresh water to the organisms in the space between the two domes. The Tomb Raider looked at the plump leaves on the vines. Some, new and young and uncurling, were as thin as a fingernail. As they grew, they swelled, it appeared, until they turned into the grape-sized fruit pods she had seen earlier in the diving bells, gathered there for some unknown purpose.\n\nAt the edge of the moon pool the nine platinum panels she'd removed from the Whispering Abyss stood fitted into a ledge where the root-covered floor of the dome met the moon pool. The arrangement and spacing reminded her of how they had been placed in Peru.\n\nAt the center of an orderly line of fourteen older M\u00e9ne facing the water, Alex Frys led chants with Ajay. Behind them, held by cultists of lesser rank, Heather stood with some others. Lara marked that they had plastic cuffs about their wrists\u2014the sort of disposable restraints placed on protesters and political demonstrators.\n\nThe green-skinned swimmers at the Archimedes' screw left off their labors and swam to the edges of the pool.\n\n\"The Awakening is coming,\" Frys said. \"Power and glory!\"\n\n\"The Awakening is coming,\" his flock repeated. \"Power and glory!\"\n\n\"A new dawn is coming,\" Frys said. \"In power and glory.\"\n\n\"A new dawn is coming in power and glory.\"\n\nThe slice of water Lara could see from her vantage point boiled and clouded as something rose from the depths. The Tomb Raider made out the crest of a bulbous head the size of a weather balloon. It almost filled the moon pool.\n\nThen the eyes, the terrible, shining, multifaceted eyes, began to glow with a red light bright enough to turn the dome into an antechamber of hell. The hair on the back of Lara Croft's neck rose as she gazed upon the Deep God."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 69",
                "text": "The Deep God extended a thin, rippled tentacle from the hanging, rootlike mass that trailed from the bottom of its bulbous head and rested the tip upon one of the panels. The Tomb Raider watched, transfixed, as Frys hurried over. He splashed into the water, and in his eagerness slipped and sat down hard.\n\nThe Deep God took no notice, but an irreverent chuckle or two broke out among the M\u00e9ne.\n\n\"Behold!\" Frys said. \"Uhluhtc calls its fellow Deep Gods.\"\n\nWhitish etchings on the nine panels began to glow. The patterns now looked like circuitry designed jointly by Intel and M. C. Escher, the artist who did the never-ending forced-perspective staircases. Lara felt the dome begin to vibrate.\n\nThe tentacle danced across the panels. Lara Croft saw flaps of skin atop the Deep God's head move, like flower petals opening and closing. When they opened, she saw fold after fold, ring after ring, of what looked like brain tissue. So the thing was called Uhluhtc? It was a fitting name.\n\n\"For the Deep Gods will wake, the Deep Gods will restore, the Deep Gods will rule,\" the assembly chanted. \"Power and glory for ever and ever!\"\n\n\"Hear the Call!\" Frys shouted. His face was expressionless. The M\u00e9ne were silent.\n\nA faint rumble, like whale song played through a subwoofer, echoed in the dome. The frequency was too low for Lara to determine its source: Uhluhtc, the panels, or the dome itself.\n\nWith that, the M\u00e9ne's eyes went to the dome. The Tomb Raider's gaze followed. A single red flower opened to the left of the flower representing Rigel in Orion's Belt.\n\n\"The sign of the Cataclysm,\" Ajay called, pointing up at the red flower.\n\n\"Then the Deep Gods will wake, then the Deep Gods will restore, then the Deep Gods will rule,\" the M\u00e9ne said as one. \"Power and glory for ever and ever.\"\n\n\"Show your devotion through sacrifice,\" Frys said, his face blank, as though he were in a trance. Only then did Lara realize that the inhuman monstrosity was actually speaking through the Prime. Frys was somehow channeling Uhluhtc.\n\n\"Give Uhluhtc the sacrifices,\" Ajay barked to the M\u00e9ne.\n\nThe M\u00e9ne parted; the gun-carrying cultists shoved Heather and the other eight of the bound group forward toward the stairs into the ocean.\n\nThe screams of the sacrifices cut the misty air.\n\nLong tentacles ending in three-fingered webbed hands the size of car doors reached for the bound figures. The captives screamed and kicked as the armed cultists shoved them toward the creature in the moon pool.\n\nLara had seen enough. She aimed her gun at the thin tentacle working the panels fifteen meters away. She flicked off the safety\u2014\n\nThree figures emerged from a dark archway of roots. Borg\u2014soaked, bleeding, and bound, his piton arm removed\u2014was dragged in by a pair of native cultists.\n\nAlex Frys came out of his trance as he recognized Borg.\n\n\"Croft,\" he said.\n\nThe Tomb Raider aimed. A shot echoed across the pool. The thin tentacle fell, twitching along its severed length.\n\nA moan, a moan the like of which had not been heard in twelve thousand years, sounded and shook the ripening bulbs from the vines. Lara shifted her aim to Ajay\u2014\n\nHOW DARE YOU! The Voice exploded in Lara's head like a psychic bomb.\n\nThrough double vision, she saw Ajay draw her machine pistols.\n\n<LESSER THING YOU CROFT MAMMAL WOMAN PAY IN PAIN OUTRAGE!>\n\nLara fought the drunken, painful sensation in her brain that threatened to paralyze her, pointed her other gun, tried to aim for the gigantic head, fired\u2026\n\nThe lines of M\u00e9ne dissolved into chaos.\n\n\"There she is,\" she heard Ajay shout.\n\n<PAIN! TRAITORS FOOLS WEAK STUPID VERTEBRATES DIE YOU SHALL DIE ALL DIE!>\n\nThe Deep God disappeared in a whirl of water. The pain went with it, and Lara could see and hear and think clearly again \u2026 just in time to duck behind one of the lichen-covered roots as Ajay fired her machine pistol. One of the M\u00e9ne guards fired his Kalashnikov at her as well.\n\n\"No, you fools, you'll damage the dome!\" she heard Frys shriek.\n\nLara popped up on the other side of a mass of roots and took down the guard holding Borg with a .45 double tap to the chest. She fired at Frys as he dove among the roots at the edge of the dome, but missed.\n\n\"Kill her! Would someone please kill her?\" Frys screamed from his hiding spot.\n\nAjay rushed toward Borg.\n\n\"Nils!\" Lara shouted.\n\nBorg raised the stumps of his amputated arms, but they did not slow Ajay. She grabbed him, pivoted, and suddenly he was in a headlock, held as shield between his former lover and Lara. Ajay fired a burst from her free pistol at Lara.\n\nThe old schoolmates' eyes locked.\n\nLara sighted on Ajay's right eye, placed her finger on the trigger. Ajay fired again, but Borg chose that moment to try to wrench free, throwing off her aim.\n\nLara wanted to shoot. No, too much risk of hitting Borg.\n\nBorg, still facing Lara, butted his head backward and connected solidly with the front of Ajay's skull.\n\nAlison Harfleur dropped senseless to the ground. Borg fell beside her.\n\nThe water in the moon pool boiled again. Dozens of gilled M\u00e9ne horrors flopped out of the water, their greenish skin glistening like wet rubber, their wide-open mouths revealing rows of pointed teeth. They attacked anything that moved: M\u00e9ne cultist, sacrifice \u2026 but the abominations did not stay to fight. Instead, they dragged their shrieking victims to the moon pool and dove in, pulling them under in a flutter of webbed limbs.\n\nFrys tore himself from the grasp of one of the swimmers and fled toward the arched tunnel from which Borg had been dragged just moments ago. Lara ran around the edge of dome to intercept him, dodged an awkward lunge from one of the green servants of the Deep Ones, and fired at the Prime. He ducked into darkness.\n\nLara ran after him. As she ran, she saw a mutant clawing at Heather. The reporter blocked the blow with her bound wrists. The creature's webbed claws sliced open Heather's wrists\u2014and the plastic restraint as well. Heather rolled, but the monster got a hold of her feet. Without slowing down, Lara shot the creature on her leaping run toward the tunnel mouth.\n\nLara pulled up just outside the dark portal, aimed her right gun down the tunnel. \"VADS, left lumen.\"\n\nAs she reloaded her left gun, Frys popped out from around the corner of the darkened root-archway, an arm's length away from the Tomb Raider. One hand held a small pistol, the other the crystal on its ivory handle.\n\nHe fixed his gaze on Lara.\n\n\"Drop the guns, Croft!\" he ordered, staring at her through the lens.\n\nLara complied. She wanted a better look at the monocle anyway; she'd been curious about it since first learning of its existence. She stared into it, saw a fuzzy version of Frys's right eye.\n\nBehind her, more shots and screaming. It seemed unimportant now.\n\nFrys stood, legs planted a little wider than his shoulders, one hand clutching the small pistol and the other holding the monocle between himself and Lara.\n\n\"Now pay attention, Croft,\" Frys said. He seemed tired, a hundred years old. \"You've committed a terrible crime. We all must answer for our actions, sooner or later.\"\n\nLara agreed with that. Frys wasn't such a bad person at heart. He'd gone bad, that was all. A pair of fleeing cultists with a sacrifice following pushed past her, but she hardly noticed them, so intense was her concentration.\n\nFrys continued: \"Here is what you must do now. You'll dive into the moon pool and swim down, down farther than you ever have before. The Transformed will help; you've met them already. They will bring you deeper, where you will answer for your deeds and serve until your crime is expunged. This will take a lifetime, if the Deep Gods are merciful. If not, it might take several.\"\n\n\"Yes?\" Lara asked. She stood before Frys, strangely relaxed as she saw him through the glass. All her doubts and reconsiderations vanished. She knew exactly what she must do.\n\nThe Tomb Raider held out her hand. \"Alex, give it over.\" She didn't take her eyes from his face, slowly turning lighter in the little piece of crystal.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Hand me that, please. It's too dangerous a toy for the likes of you, I'm afraid.\" She opened and closed her palm.\n\nBehind her, she heard Heather scream, \"Borg, look out!\" More gunfire echoed in the dome.\n\nLara didn't dare take her eyes off the Prime.\n\n\"Come on, I don't have all day. Hand it over,\" she demanded.\n\nFrys's arm shook. He lowered the crystal from his eye as if fighting the impulse of his own muscles, placed it in Lara's outstretched hand. Then Lara put the crystal to her own eye. The wavy shadow that was Alex Frys pulsed. As her eye focused on him, the color drained away, and he became as white as a sheet of paper waiting to be written on.\n\nAs I thought. An empty space within. Tragic cases like his find solace in cults, either as followers or leaders. It fills a hole. What was it, Alex? A remote father? A lonely childhood?\n\n\"Alex, if anyone should talk to the Deep Ones, it's you,\" she said. \"Humanity no longer needs to be numbered, weighed, and judged like cattle at auction. You'll go down and explain, won't you?\"\n\n\"I'll go down and explain,\" Frys said, walking toward the moon pool stairs. Lara saw Heather empty one of Ajay's guns into one of the \"Transformed\" as Borg knocked another back with a powerful kick. Ajay lay unconscious between them.\n\nAlex Frys stepped over the dead body of the cultist Lara had shot in the chest without even a glance downward. Lara picked up her guns as he walked away.\n\nAt the edge of the moon pool, a screaming elderly cultist hung on to one of the fixed platinum panels with his fingernails. He reached out a hand toward the Prime, but Frys ignored him. The cultist disappeared with a wail. Frys stepped down into the moon pool and submerged.\n\n\"I hope they're merciful,\" Lara said, and slipped the crystal into her lucky pack.\n\nA flash of green\u2014she emptied her right gun into another M\u00e9ne mutant leaping from a hiding place among the thick roots. It showed no expression as it died; the creature just sagged and sat, its pupiless eyes vacant.\n\n<VERY GOOD CROFT.>\n\nThe Voice was back in her head again. Lara felt her knees buckle.\n\n<What?> she thought dully.\n\n<SUPERB EXTRAORDINARY OUTSTANDING YOU ARE TRULY ONE IN A THOUSAND LARA CROFT.>\n\n<Go away.>\n\n<HEAR ME YOU WON A CONTROL LENS WITH IT YOU COULD RULE THE SURFACE WORLD ULTIMATE POWER ULTIMATE FREEDOM THE WORLD FOR YOUR DESIRES WE ASK LITTLE TRIFLES IN RETURN.>\n\n<I wouldn't know what to do with it,> she thought back. <You keep to your world. Leave us ours.>\n\n<VERY WELL ONE THING CORRECTION YOURS IS OURS TOO OURS OURS OURS OURS\u2026>\n\nThe Voice faded away.\n\nNothing moved within the Dome now but the three passengers who had gone upriver on the Tank Girl on a trip that seemed to Lara to have begun a very long time ago.\n\nPlus one would-be Tomb Raider. Ajay gave a groan.\n\n\"I think it's time we got out of here,\" Heather said, picking up a Kalashnikov. She pulled out the magazine, looked at the bullets remaining, and slammed it back into the gun.\n\n\"I thought you couldn't shoot,\" Lara said.\n\n\"I'm a quick study with monsters on my ass,\" Heather said.\n\n\"One of you must pick up Alison,\" Borg said.\n\n\"First I've got to take care of those plates,\" Lara said. \"VADS: right nitro.\"\n\n\"No!\" Ajay howled. She rose, drawing her other machine pistol. Her pupils gaped wide, her body trembled, sweat plastered clothing and hair to her body. Milky white liquid ran from the corners of her mouth. \"You'll all join Alex at the bottom. Uhluhtc demands it. But first, drop the lens!\"\n\n\"Lens?\"\n\n\"The crystal on the stick!\" Ajay screamed, her voice cracking. \"Don't play dumber than you are. Lara Croft is going to return to England, oh yes, and take up residence in that fine estate, become a bit of a recluse perhaps, and have very few visitors, but she'll buy the Harfleur manor and fix it up properly\u2014\"\n\nLara reached into her lucky pack and took out the crystal. \"Very well, Ajay. If you really want to be me so badly, catch!\"\n\nShe threw it to Ajay, who lowered the machine pistol to grab the falling lens. Ajay caught it, held it for one second before Heather clubbed her across the back of the head with the Kalashnikov.\n\n\"I know Lara Croft, girl,\" Heather panted. \"Seen her in action. You're no Lara Croft, and I'll accept no substitutes.\"\n\nLara nodded at Heather, bent to retrieve the lens, reached behind her, and put it back in her lucky pack.\n\nAjay's head came up, and she flung herself at Lara. Lara's pistols fell with a clatter as Ajay attacked her like a wild animal, hissing and gibbering.\n\nIt felt like wrestling a tiger. The Tomb Raider got her knee up, somehow forced Alison off her, and rolled over the small roots covering the dome floor, drawing her diving knife.\n\nAjay smiled and drew her own knife, a K-bar-style fighting and survival blade, complete with blood gutters. She waved it before Lara. Lara dropped into a defensive stance.\n\nAjay stabbed, powered through Lara's guard, bounced her blade off a rib as Lara just managed to turn the point. In return, Lara drove at Ajay's neck with her own blade, cut a piece of cheek instead.\n\nThe pair broke away and circled through the water, blood glistening on their knives.\n\n\"What if we kill each other, Ajay?\" Lara asked. \"Would you call that a tie?\"\n\n\"I'll take it,\" Ajay said, lunging at Lara. \"All I ever wanted was to be your equal.\"\n\nLara stepped in, feinted, and swung her empty fist at Ajay's jaw. Ajay brought up her guard hand and caught Lara's arm. Lara brought her knife across Ajay's exposed forearm, going for the tendons at the wrist, but only cut Ajay's muscle. Ajay swung with her own blade, and Lara felt a hard thump at her back, waited for the pain and the horrible feeling of a lung deflating, but realized Ajay had buried her knife in the Tomb Raider's lucky pack. Then she felt warmth inside her wet suit, and knew that Ajay had gotten to at least some skin after all.\n\nLara used her leverage to throw Ajay across her hip, judo style. Ajay rolled over in the water and rose again, knife held toward Lara like a lance.\n\n<CROFT!> The Voice exploded in her brain like fireworks.\n\nLara fell back, stunned.\n\nThe Deep God lunged out of the pool, tentacles reaching for her. Some had fingers, some had hooks, some even had what looked like eyeballs. A thick-fingered one knocked Ajay aside.\n\nBorg kicked one of Lara's pistols over to her. She snatched for it, knowing that whether she would live or die could very well depend on whether the pistol was loaded with illumination shells or explosive. She grabbed it as it slid past and felt the custom grip of her right-hand gun with a thrill of triumph\u2014\n\n\u2014then felt the world jerked away from her. The tentacle lifted her into the air, and for a moment Lara thought it would dash her brains out against the housing of the Archimedes' screw. Instead, it pulled her over the moon pool.\n\nA tooth-lined mouth big enough to swallow an SUV opened beneath her. She saw pieces of what had perhaps once been Alex Frys in the circular rows of teeth.\n\n<HUMANS UNDERSTAND NOTHING> the Voice cackled in her head.\n\nIt dropped her, but she clung to the tentacle with her left arm and fired her pistol into the maw of the Deep One.\n\nA howl of pain and anger tore at her mind, and she nearly dropped her gun.\n\n<HURT YOU EACH SHOT AS HURTS ME> came the Voice, gloating through its pain.\n\nOne more psychic blast like that, and Lara knew she would fall unconscious, easy prey for the Deep One. It was time for Plan B. She swung herself around and aimed with her right hand for the crystal screw housing\u2026\n\n*Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!*\n\n<WHAT?>\n\nExplosions ripped across the crystal housing of the Archimedes' screw. Great shards of crystal fell away.\n\n*Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!*\n\n<STOP! NO!>\n\nThe screw's mounting shattered in a shower of water and crystal.\n\nLara saw the screw begin to drop. It spun as it picked up speed.\n\nLara looked down at one of the Deep God's red eyes as it brought up a second tentacle to grab her.\n\nShe used her free hand to wave bye-bye and slid down the tentacle. She kicked out and fell into the moon pool instead of the God's mouth. The forest of tentacles turned for her. The redwood-sized screw plunged out of the shattered crystal housing, spinning like a rifled bullet. The screw struck Uhluhtc, tearing through its flesh even as its weight dragged the Deep One back to the depths it had risen from.\n\nWater cascaded from cracks in the peak of the dome where what was left of the screw housing descended. More and more water forced its way in as the dome gave way to damage and water pressure.\n\nBorg ignored the falling seawater, patting Ajay with his stumps, trying to waken her. Ajay moaned.\n\n\"Now?\" Heather asked, tossing Ajay's knife and gun into the moon pool. Fluid from the Deep God covered the surface like an oil slick.\n\n\"Almost,\" Lara said, retrieving her other USP Match. \"VADS: both armor.\"\n\nShe loaded the armor-piercing magazines, stepped over to where she had a good view of the nine plates from the Whispering Abyss, and went down the line, riddling the platinum plates\u2014or were they circuit boards?\u2014with bullet holes.\n\n\"What was that for?\" Heather asked above the sound of falling water.\n\n\"Just hitting the snooze button,\" Lara said.\n\nAjay rose, looked wide-eyed at the destruction all around. She glared at Lara, snarled, and rose.\n\n\"Ah-ah,\" Lara said, pointing her right USP. Borg put himself between the gun barrel and Ajay.\n\n\"No, Lara,\" he said.\n\nAjay ran for the edge of the dome and jumped down among the twisting roots. Borg rose and followed.\n\n\"Now,\" Lara said, looking at Heather.\n\n\"Make for the diving bells, Borg,\" Lara yelled as Borg jumped down among the roots.\n\nLara and Heather ran together, under a monsoonlike downpour of seawater. The ocean rose to meet them, welling up from the moon pool and the edges of the dome as air escaped out the top.\n\nLara filled her lungs, grabbed Heather's hand, and plunged in. Heather kicked off her shoes and breaststroked next to Lara as they swam out under the lip of the dome.\n\nFar above, Lara glimpsed Ajay frantically kicking for the surface, felt a stab of regret. Whatever M\u00e9ne potion she had taken to enhance her physical abilities, it had interfered with that wonderful brain of hers. Borg followed, just a couple of meters ahead of her and Heather, not rising as quickly with just his legs to power him.\n\nLara yanked on Heather's red hair, pointed toward the nearest diving bell. She got her point across. When Heather swam for the sphere, Lara swam after Borg and caught up to him easily. She grabbed him by the wet suit and pulled him toward the diving bell by main force. Borg pointed toward the distant figure of Ajay, but Lara shook her head and continued hauling him to the sphere.\n\nThey broke the surface together.\n\n\"Lara!\" Borg protested with his first breath. Heather looked like a doused Irish setter, and did nothing but breathe as Lara struggled with the armless Norwegian.\n\n\"We have to rise slower than our bubbles or we'll get decompression sickness. Understand, Borg? You know what that is.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" he said. Then his eyes widened. \"Ajay!\"\n\n\"Too late,\" Lara said.\n\nBorg plunged anyway.\n\n\"Slower than your bubbles,\" Lara said to Heather, took a breath, and went after him.\n\nBorg kicked her all the way up, but she managed to retard his rise. Heather helped restrain him, grabbing him by a leg.\n\nIt might have been the most awkward ascent in lung-diving history. But at last they reached the surface, bursting into the pure, clear, life-giving Pacific air.\n\nThey bobbed under the stars. The arms of the storm were breaking up, revealing the night sky above. With nothing to compete with the stars, each sparkle of diamond dust stood out bright and clear.\n\nShanks would have no trouble bringing the floatplane in. Lara had some flares in her lucky pack to signal him.\n\nHeather and Borg both sputtered; he'd taken in some ocean, evidently, but floated easily in the calm of the lagoon.\n\nLara heard a faint cry. She swam swiftly to the source, found Ajay, her eyes two bruised wells. Blood ran from her ears.\n\nDecompression sickness. Nitrogen bubbles expanding in the bloodstream, wreaking havoc with soft tissue as they did.\n\nShe got an arm around Ajay and followed the others to the shore, making for the tiki torches at the camp. One final time, she dragged Ajay's body out of darkness.\n\nNils Bjorkstrom, on his knees in the wet sand, looked through his wet hair at Ajay. He let out an anguished cry and staggered to his feet, sank down beside her, cradling her in his stumps.\n\nAjay's bloodied eyes were open, but Lara doubted she could see Nils. Alison Harfleur keened weakly. She was dying \u2026 and painfully.\n\nLara unholstered her left gun, ejected the illumination magazine, and put in one of the spares from her lucky pack.\n\n\"You're going to shoot her?\" Heather asked, disbelieving.\n\n\"No!\" Lara said. \"I'm going up to the camp. Try to find a radio or a satellite phone. But if any M\u00e9ne have escaped up the tunnel, I'm going to be ready for them.\"\n\n\"Are you going to radio for your ride home?\" Borg asked, tears in his eyes.\n\n\"I'm going to call for a plane to get Ajay to a hospital,\" Lara said. \"We've got to get her in a pressure chamber as soon as possible.\"\n\nHeather followed her as she trotted toward the tents. \"I've done enough scuba diving to know that she'll be dead before a plane can get here. It might be kinder to just shoot her.\"\n\nLara flicked the safety on her gun, handed it to Heather. \"Be my guest. I'd rather give her a fighting chance, no matter how small.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because that's what I'd want.\"\n\n\"Do you really think she can make it?\"\n\n\"No. I don't. But she's proved me wrong before, Heather.\"\n\n\"You almost sound like you admire her.\"\n\n\"Not at all. At least, not now. Not after what the Alison I knew turned into.\"\n\n\"Surely it was Frys. The crystal. He just about had me with it. He tried to use it on you.\"\n\n\"No, Ajay wanted it, in the end. She was 90 percent there before she even met him, I expect. Just a tiny nudge and \u2026 She wanted to be the Prime. She didn't need a crystal to encourage her to overreach.\"\n\nHeather pursed her lips. \"Still, nasty thing, that crystal.\"\n\n\"Yes, that's why I'm going to destroy it.\"\n\n\"I think you mean it.\"\n\nLara searched the ground, picked up a rock. \"Von Croy would have been surprised to see this. He was a collector, and I became one, too. Now I think Frys\u2014the father, I mean\u2014was right. There are some things that human beings are not yet ready to know.\" She took off her lucky backpack, rummaged in it for the crystal, then began to laugh.\n\n\"What?\" Heather asked, pulling her wet hair out of her eyes so she could see. \"On a night like this, what could possibly be funny?\"\n\nLara held up the shattered crystal on its ivory handle. \"Ajay did the world a great service after all. She must have smashed it when she tried to stab me.\"\n\nShe looked up at the stars, bright and close enough to touch\u2014which reminded her that she'd have to ask someone at the Royal Observatory to keep an eye on the vicinity of Rigel."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 70",
                "text": "Heather Rourke checked her Bulova watch for the umpteenth time.\n\nOutside it rained, a typical dreary English winter day. She'd been battling a head cold all week. She'd even considered canceling, but in the end she hadn't. She knew that she needed closure.\n\nShe'd spent a half hour examining the pub from beams to bogs, nursing a whiskey and soda. Croft was late. Somehow, that didn't surprise her.\n\n\"Set me up again, please,\" she told the bartender. The barkeep left off his talk with a beer drinker at the other end of the bar.\n\nA motorcycle rumbled outside, and she heard tires screech.\n\nLara Croft had arrived.\n\nShe entered, smelling of leather, auto exhaust, burnt rubber, and just a hint of Armani.\n\n\"Hot lemonade, please,\" she told the bartender.\n\n\"Hot lemonade?\"\n\n\"Hot water. Lemons. A little sugar.\" She revealed her brilliant teeth.\n\n\"Yes, but we don't\u2014\"\n\n\"Tea then. Black and strong. You've got that, don't you?\"\n\n\"Strong enough to stand a spoon up in it, miss.\"\n\nLara Croft slid onto the stool next to Heather. A sheltie trotted up and gave her motorcycle boots a sniff. She reached down to pat its head.\n\n\"Thanks for finding time to meet with me,\" Heather offered as a greeting.\n\nLara laughed. \"If I'd given you an hour a month ago, the whole affaire d'M\u00e9ne might have turned out better \u2026 for you, anyway. Or maybe not. You must have gotten a terrific story out of it.\"\n\nHeather shrugged. \"I wrote it up. Everything that happened to me. Everything you told me. And you know what? It was terrific. Best thing I ever wrote.\"\n\n\"I'm glad. When is it going to be published? And where?\"\n\nNow it was Heather's turn to laugh. \"Are you kidding? SNN won't touch it without video. Gave it to an editor I know at the Atlantic, and she advised me to try a publication called Weird Tales. When I showed it to National Geographic, they did everything but have security show me out. Wish I had that magic lens. It would make my conversations with editors so much easier.\"\n\n\"Better that you don't.\"\n\nHeather downed a gulp of her new drink. \"Agreed.\"\n\n\"Hope it doesn't hurt your rep in the journo world.\"\n\n\"Seems the theory being whispered in Washington is that I got dehydrated in the jungle and went a bit delirious. You can have the article if you want it. For your archives.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I look forward to reading it.\"\n\nThe bartender put down a tray holding a pot of tea, sugar, and an empty cup. She poured her tea and took a sip. Then slid a five-pound note across the bar and told the bartender to keep the change.\n\n\"Any news from Borg?\" Heather asked.\n\n\"He's got his cable show back, I understand,\" Lara said. \"One of these days, I'll have to watch it. But somehow I never seem to have the time to curl up in front of the telly.\"\n\n\"He took it hard, losing Ajay like that. A terrible way to die.\"\n\n\"She was lost to him a long time before that, Heather.\"\n\nHeather thought back to the journalistic wolf packs up and down the East Coast, in Washington, D.C., New York, the Cape, and the Hamptons. She had run with those packs. But the whiff of fresh blood she'd scented at a Georgetown soiree a year ago struck her as pale and pointless now. Would she ever have the same rush, sitting at a polished table opposite some egotistical president or prime minister, after seeing the face of a Deep God?\n\nShe thought not. In a way, she understood Ajay. \"Legend hunting might be addictive. I'd like to try it again. Any chance of you teaching me to be a Tomb Raider? I don't quit easily.\" She was only half joking.\n\nLara Croft's eyes went moist, but no tears fell.\n\nHeather realized belatedly what she'd said, whom she'd reminded Lara of. She looked away, offered her friend silence as an apology.\n\nThe trill of Lara's cell phone broke the quiet.\n\n\"Excuse me, please,\" Lara said, standing and striding toward the door.\n\nHeather finished her second whiskey and paid the bartender for both drinks. She put on her camel hair coat and walked outside.\n\nThe Tomb Raider she'd seen in action in Peru and on the Capricorn Atoll stood next to her cycle, the earpiece of her cell phone held in by her finger, microphone hanging in front of her mouth.\n\n\"When's the next flight out of Heathrow? Good. Tell him I'll be on it. I just have to run home and pick up my bag. No, Winston, you'll do no such thing. Jamaica is paradise this time of year, and you're going to spend a fortnight there if I have to put a chlorpromazine dart into you and have you shipped as cargo.\" She clicked the phone closed.\n\n\"Going somewhere special?\" Heather asked.\n\nLara grinned as she replaced her phone and earpiece. \"Smelling another story, Heather? Sorry, dear, no room for tagalongs on this trip.\"\n\n\"I learned my lesson; don't worry. But you will promise to at least tell me about it when you get back, won't you? Off the record, of course.\"\n\nThe Tomb Raider put on her helmet, zipped up her jacket against the drizzle. Heather could still make out the dazzlingly beautiful brown eyes, shining with excitement behind the smoked plastic. The lioness had caught the scent of game. \"It's a deal, provided you write it up for my archives.\"\n\nLara Croft didn't wait for a reply, but flicked on the twin headlamps and gunned her Triumph motorcycle, sending pebbles flying. Heather watched her drive out of sight, trying to imagine herself on that motorcycle, a Tomb Raider in the tradition of Lara Croft, speeding into the cold rain down the public highway toward an unknown destiny. Then she laughed, shook her head, and walked over to where she had parked her car. One Tomb Raider in the world was plenty.\n\nAs long as that Tomb Raider's name was Lara Croft."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Excavation",
        "author": "James Rollins",
        "genres": [
            "thriller",
            "adventure",
            "mystery"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "\u2002'And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.' \u2014Genesis 2:7"
            },
            {
                "title": "Prologue",
                "text": "[ Sunrise ]\n\n[ Andean Mountains ]\n\n[ Peru, 1538 ]\n\nThere was no escape.\n\nCrashing through the misty jungle, Francisco de Almagro had long given up all prayer of ever outrunning the hunters who dogged his trail. Panting, he crouched along the thin path and caught his breath. He wiped the sweat from his brow with his sleeve. He still wore his Dominican robe, black wool and silk, but it was stained and torn. His Incan captors had stripped him of all possessions, except for his robe and cross. The tribal shaman had warned the others not to touch these talismans from his \"foreign\" god, afraid of insulting this stranger's deity.\n\nThough the heavy robes ill suited his flight through the dense, cloud-draped jungle of the upper Andes, the young friar still refused to shed his raiment. They had been blessed by Pope Clement when Francisco had first been ordained, and he would not part with them. But that did not mean he couldn't alter them to suit his situation better.\n\nHe grabbed the hem of his garment and ripped it to his thighs.\n\nOnce his legs were free, Francisco listened to the sounds of pursuit. Already the call of the Incan hunters grew louder, echoing along the mountain pass behind him. Even the screeching cries of the disturbed monkeys from the jungle canopy overhead could not mask the rising clamor of his captors. They would be upon him soon.\n\nThe young friar had only one hope left\u2014a chance at salvation\u2014not for himself, but for the world.\n\nHe kissed the torn edge of his robe and let it drop from his fingers. He must hurry.\n\nWhen he straightened too quickly, his vision darkened for a heartbeat. Francisco grabbed the bole of a jungle sapling, struggling not to fall. He gasped in the thin air. Small sparks danced across his vision. High up in the mountainous Andes, the air failed to fill his lungs adequately, forcing him to rest frequently, but he could not let shortness of breath stop him.\n\nShoving off the tree, Francisco set off once again down the trail, stumbling and weaving. The sway in his gait was not all due to the altitude. Before his scheduled execution at dawn, he had suffered a ritualistic bloodletting and been forced to consume a draught of a bitter elixir\u2014chicha, a fermented drink that had quickly made the ground under his feet wobble. The sudden exertion of running from his captors heightened the drug's effect.\n\nAs he ran, the limbs of the jungle seemed to reach for him, trying to trap him. The path seemed to tilt first one way, then the other. His heart hammered in his throat; his ears filled with a growing roar, washing away even the calls of his pursuers. Francisco stumbled out of the jungle and almost toppled over a cliff's edge. Far below, he discovered the source of the thunderous rumbling\u2014frothing white waters crashing over black rocks.\n\nA part of his mind knew this must be one of the many tributaries that fed the mighty Urabamba River, but he could not dwell on topography. Despair filled his chest, squeezing his heart. The chasm lay between him and his goal. Panting, Francisco leaned his hands on his scraped knees. Only then did he notice the thin, woven-grass bridge. It spanned the chasm off to the right.\n\n\"Obrigado, meu Deus!\" he thanked his Lord, slipping into Portuguese. He had not spoken his native language since first taking his vows in Spain. Only now, with tears of frustration and fear flowing down his cheeks, did he fall back upon his childhood tongue.\n\nPushing up, he crossed to the bridge and ran his hands over the braided lengths of ichu grass. A single thick cord stretched across the width of river below, with two smaller ropes, one on each side, to assist in balance. If not for his current state, he might have appreciated the engineering feat of the bridge's construction, but now all his thoughts dwelt on escape\u2014putting one foot in front of the other, maintaining his balance.\n\nAll his hopes lay in reaching the altar atop the next peak. As they did many of the mountains of the region, the Incas revered and worshiped this jungle-fringed spire. But to reach his goal, Francisco needed first to cross this chasm, then climb out of the cloud forest to the crag's rocky escarpment above.\n\nWould he have enough time?\n\nTurning to listen once again for the sounds of pursuit, Francisco could hear nothing but the crashing tumble of the river below. He had no idea how far behind the hunters remained, but he imagined they were closing the distance quickly. He dared not tarry or cower from the drop below.\n\nFrancisco ran a sweating palm over the stubble of his shaven scalp, then grasped one of the two support ropes of the bridge. He squeezed his eyes closed for a moment and grabbed the other cable. With the Lord's Prayer on his lips, he stepped onto the bridge and set off across the chasm. He refused to look down, instead fixing his eyes on the bridge's end.\n\nAfter an endless time, he felt his left foot strike stone. Sagging in relief, he clambered off the bridge and onto solid rock. He almost fell to his knees, ready to kiss and bless the earth, but a sharp call barked out behind him. A spear struck deep into the loam near his heel. Its shaft thrummed from the impact.\n\nFrancisco froze like a startled rabbit, then another cry shouted forth. Glancing behind him, he saw a single hunter standing on the far side. Their eyes met briefly across the chasm.\n\nPredator and prey.\n\nUnder a headdress of azure and red feathers, the man grinned at him. He wore thick chains of gold. At least, Francisco prayed it was gold. He shuddered.\n\nNot hesitating, Francisco slipped a silver dagger from inside his robe. The weapon, stolen from the shaman, had been his means of escape. It must now serve him again. He grabbed one of the bridge's balancing ropes. He would never have time to hack through the main trunk of the span, but if he could sever the side ropes, his pursuers would have difficulty crossing. It might not stop them, but it could gain him some time.\n\nHis shoulders protested as he sawed at the dried-grass braid. The ropes seemed to be made of iron. The man called out to him, speaking calmly in his heathen language. The friar understood none of his words, but the menace and promise of pain were clear.\n\nRenewed fear fueled Francisco's muscles. He dug and sliced at the rope while hot tears streaked his muddy face. Suddenly, the rope severed under his blade, snapping away. One end grazed his cheek. Instinctively, he reached a hand to touch the injury. His fingers came back bloody, but he felt nothing.\n\nSwallowing hard, he turned to the second support rope. Another spear struck the rock at the cliff's edge and fell away into the chasm. A third followed. Closer this time.\n\nFrancisco glanced up. Four hunters now lined the far side of the chasm. The newest hunter held a fourth spear, while the first hunter deftly strung a bow. Time had run out. Francisco eyed the untouched rope support. It was death to stay there. He would have to hope that severing the one braid would slow them enough.\n\nTurning, he sped back into the jungle on the far side of the chasm. The path climbed steeply, straining his legs and chest. Here the trees were less thick, the canopy less dense. As he struggled, the forest grew thinner with each hard-earned league. While glad to see the jungle begin to thin, he knew the lack of foliage also made him an easier target for the hunters. With each step, he expected an arrow to feather his back.\n\nSo close\u2026Lord, do not forsake me now.\n\nHe refused to look ahead, concentrating on the ground beneath his feet. He fought to place one foot after the other. Suddenly light burst around him, as if the Lord Himself had pushed aside the trees to shine His Glory down upon him. Gasping, he raised his head. Even such a simple movement was difficult. In a single step, the jungle was behind him. Raw sunlight from the dawning sun blazed across the red and black stones of the barren peak.\n\nHe was too weak even for a prayer of thanks. Scrambling up through the last of the brush, he used his hands and feet to fight for the summit. It must happen there. At their holy altar.\n\nCrying now, but deaf to his own sobs, he crawled the final distance to the slab of granite. Reaching the stone altar, he collapsed back upon his heels and raised his face to the heavens. He cried out, not in prayer, but in simple acknowledgment that he yet lived, casting his voice for all to hear.\n\nHis call was answered. The sharp cries of hunters again echoed up from the pass below. They had crossed the chasm and renewed their pursuit.\n\nFrancisco lowered his face from the blue skies. Around him, spreading to all horizons, were the countless peaks of the Andes. Some were snow-tipped, but most were as barren as the one upon which he knelt. For a moment, Francisco could almost understand the Incas' worship of these mountain heights. Here among the clouds and skies, one was closer to God. A sense of timelessness and a promise of eternity seemed to ring forth in the heavy silence. Even the hunters grew hushed\u2014either from respect for the mountain or from a desire to sneak upon their prey unawares.\n\nFrancisco was too tired to care.\n\nHis gaze settled upon the one other type of peak that shared these heights. Below, to the west, were two smoldering mountains, volcanic caldera, twin craters staring up at the same morning skies. From here, the shadowed pair were like two blasted and cursed eyes.\n\nHe spat in their direction and raised a fist with his thumb thrust between his two fingers in a ward against evil.\n\nFrancisco knew what lay within those warm valleys. From his mountaintop altar, he christened the twin volcanoes. \"Ojos el de Diablo,\" he whispered\u2026the Devil's eyes.\n\nShivering at the sight, he turned his back on the view. He could not do what must be done while staring at those eyes. He now faced the east and the rising sun.\n\nKneeling before the blaze of glory, he reached within his robe and slipped out the cross that hung from around his neck. He touched the warm metal against his forehead. Gold. Here was the reason the Spaniards had struggled through these foreign jungles\u2014the dream of riches and wealth. Now their lust and greed would damn them all.\n\nFrancisco turned the crucifix and kissed the golden figure upon its surface. This was why he had come here. To bring the word of the Lord to these savages\u2014and now his cross was the only hope for all the world. He brushed a finger along the back of the cross, fingering the etchings he had carefully carved into the soft gold.\n\nMay it save us all, he prayed silently, and nestled the cross back into his robes, resting it near his heart.\n\nFrancisco raised his eyes to the dawn. He had to be certain the Incas never took the cross from him. Though he had reached one of the Incas' sacred sites\u2014this natural mountaintop altar\u2014one final act was required of him to ensure the cross's safety.\n\nOnce again, he slipped free the shaman's silver dagger from his robe.\n\nWith a prayer of contrition on his lips, he begged forgiveness for the sin he was about to commit. Whether he damned his soul or not, he had no choice. Tears in his eyes, he raised the knife and slashed the blade across his throat. Lancing pain dropped the dagger from his fingers. He fell to his hands. Blood poured from his throat across the dark stones under him.\n\nIn the dawn's light, his red blood glowed brilliantly against the black rock. It was his last sight as he died\u2014his life's blood flowing across the Incan altar, shining as brightly as gold."
            },
            {
                "title": "Day One",
                "text": "[ Ruins ]\n\n[ Monday, August 20, 11:52 A.M. ]\n\n[ Johns Hopkins University ]\n\n[ Baltimore, Maryland ]\n\nProfessor Henry Conklin's fingers trembled slightly as he unwrapped the final layer of blankets from around his frozen treasure. He held his breath. How had the mummy fared after the three-thousand-mile trip from the Andes? Back in Peru, he had been so careful to pack and crate the frozen remains in dry ice for the trip to Baltimore, but during such a long journey anything could have gone wrong.\n\nHenry ran a hand through his dark hair, now dusted with a generous amount of grey since passing his sixtieth birthday last year. He prayed his past three decades of research and fieldwork would pay off. He would not have a second chance. Transporting the mummy from South America had almost drained the last of his grant money. And nowadays any new fellowships or grants were awarded to researchers younger than he. He was becoming a dinosaur at Texas A&M. Though still revered, he was now more coddled than taken seriously.\n\nStill, his most recent discovery of the ruins of a small Incan village high in the Andes could change all that\u2014especially if it proved his own controversial theory.\n\nHe cautiously tugged free the final linen wrap. Fog from the thawing dry ice momentarily obscured his sight. He waved the mist away as the contorted figure appeared, knees bent to chest, arms wrapped around legs, almost in a fetal position, just as he had discovered the mummy in a small cave near the frozen summit of Mount Arapa.\n\nHenry stared at his discovery. Ancient eye sockets, open and hollow, gazed back at him from under strands of lanky black hair still on its skull. Its lips, dried and shrunken back, revealed yellowed teeth. Frayed remnants of a burial shawl still clung to its leathered skin. It was so well preserved that even the black dyes of the tattered robe shone brightly under the surgical lights of the research lab.\n\n\"Oh God!\" a voice exclaimed at his shoulder. \"This is perfect!\"\n\nHenry jumped slightly, so engrossed in his own thoughts he had momentarily forgotten the others in the room. He turned and was blinded by the flash of a camera's strobe. The reporter from the Baltimore Herald moved from behind his shoulder to reposition for another shot, never moving the Nikon from her face. Her blond hair was pulled over her ears in a severe and efficient ponytail. She snapped additional photos as she spoke. \"What would you estimate its age to be, Professor?\"\n\nBlinking away the glare, Henry backed a step away so the others could view the remains. A pair of scientists moved closer, instruments in hand.\n\n\"I\u2026I'd estimate the mummification dates back to the sixteenth century\u2014some four to five hundred years ago.\"\n\nThe reporter lowered her camera but did not move her eyes from the figure cradled on the CT scanning table. A small trace of disgust pleated her upper lip. \"No, I meant how old do you think the mummy was when he died?\"\n\n\"Oh\u2026\" He pushed his wire-rimmed glasses higher on his nose. \"Around twenty\u2026It's hard to be accurate on just gross examination.\"\n\nOne of the two doctors, a petite woman in her late fifties with dark hair that fell in silky strands to the small of her back, glanced back at them. She had been examining the mummy's head, a tongue depressor in hand. \"He was thirty-two when he died,\" she stated matter-of-factly. The speaker, Dr. Joan Engel, was head of forensic pathology at Johns Hopkins University and an old friend of Henry's. Her position there was one of the reasons he had hauled his mummy to Johns Hopkins. She elaborated on her statement, \"His third molars are partially impacted, but from the degree of wear on the second molars and the lack of wear on the third, my estimation should be precise to within three years, plus or minus. But the CT scan results should pinpoint the age even more accurately.\"\n\nBelying her calm demeanor, the doctor's jade eyes shone brightly as she spoke, crinkling slightly at the corners. There was no disgust on her face when she viewed the mummy, even when she handled the desiccated remains with her gloved fingers. Henry sensed her excitement, mirroring his own. It was good to know Joan's enthusiasm for scientific mysteries had not waned from the time he had known her back in her undergraduate years. She returned to the study of the mummy, but not before giving Henry a look of apology for contradicting his previous statement and estimation of age.\n\nHenry's cheeks grew heated, more from embarrassment than irritation. She was as keen and sharp as ever.\n\nSwallowing hard, he tried to redeem himself. He turned to the reporter. \"I hope to prove these remains found at this Incan site are not actually Incan, but another tribe of Peruvian Indians.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"It has been long known that the Incas were a warrior tribe that often took over neighboring tribes and literally consumed them. They built their own cities atop these others, swallowing them up. From my study of Machu Picchu and other ruins in the remote highlands of the Andes, I've theorized that the lowland tribes of the Incas did not build these cloud cities but took them over from a tribe that already existed before them, robbing these ancestors of their rightful place in history as the skilled architects of the mountaintop cities.\" Henry nodded toward the mummy. \"I hope this fellow will be able to correct this error in history.\"\n\nThe reporter took another picture, but was then forced back by the pair of doctors who were moving their examination farther down the mummy. \"Why do you think this mummy can prove this theory?\" she asked.\n\n\"The tomb where we discovered it predates the Incan ruins by at least a century, suggesting that here might be one of the true builders of these mountain citadels. Also this mummy stands a good head taller than the average Inca of the region\u2026even its facial features are different. I brought the mummy here to prove this is not an Incan tribesman but one of the true architects of these exceptional cities. With genetic mapping available here, I can substantiate any\u2014\"\n\n\"Professor Conklin,\" Joan again interrupted him. \"You might want to come see this.\"\n\nThe reporter stepped aside to let Henry pass, her Nikon again rising to cover half her face. Henry pushed between the two researchers. They had been fingering the body's torso and belly. Engel's assistant, a sandy-haired young man with large eyes, was bent over the mummy. He was carefully tweezing and extracting a length of cord from a fold around the figure's neck.\n\nJoan pointed. \"His throat was slashed,\" she said, parting the leathery skin to reveal the bones underneath. \"I'd need a microscopic exam to be sure, but I'd say the injury was ante-mortem.\" She glanced to Henry and the reporter. \"Before death,\" she clarified. \"And most likely, the cause of death here.\"\n\nHenry nodded. \"The Incas were fond of blood rituals; many involved decapitation and human sacrifice.\"\n\nThe doctor's assistant continued working at the wound, drawing out a length of cord from the wound. He paused and glanced to his mentor. \"I think it's some sort of necklace,\" he mumbled, and pulled at the cord. Something under the robe shifted with his motion.\n\nJoan raised her eyes to Henry, silently asking permission to continue.\n\nHe nodded.\n\nSlowly the assistant tugged and worked the necklace loose from its hiding place. Whatever hung there was carefully dragged along under the robe's ragged cloth. Suddenly the ancient material ripped and the object hanging from the cord dropped free for all to see.\n\nA gasp rose from their four throats. The gold shone brilliantly under the halogen spotlights of the laboratory. A flurry of blinding flashes followed as the reporter snapped a rapid series of photos.\n\n\"It's a cross,\" Joan said, stating the obvious.\n\nHenry groaned and leaned in closer. \"Not just a cross. It's a Dominican crucifix.\"\n\nThe reporter spoke with her camera still fixed to her face. \"What does that mean?\"\n\nHenry straightened and waved a hand over a Latin inscription. \"The Dominican missionary order accompanied the Spanish conquistadors during their attack upon the Central and South American Indians.\"\n\nThe reporter lowered her camera. \"So this mummy is one of those Spanish priests?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Cool!\"\n\nJoan tapped at the cross with her tongue depressor. \"But the Incas weren't known to mummify any of their Spanish conquerors.\"\n\n\"Until now,\" Henry commented sourly. \"I guess if nothing else the discovery will be worth a footnote in some journal article.\" His dreams of proving his theory dimmed in the glare of the golden crucifix.\n\nJoan touched his hand with a gloved finger. \"Don't despair yet. Perhaps the cross was just stolen from one of the Spaniards. Let's first run the CT scan and see what we can discover about our friend here.\"\n\nHenry nodded but held no real hope in his heart. He glanced to the pathologist. Her eyes shone with genuine concern. He offered her a small smile, which, surprisingly, she returned. Henry remembered that smile from long ago. They had dated a few times, but both had been too devoted to their studies to pursue more than a casual acquaintance. And when their careers diverged after graduation, they had lost contact with each other, except for the occasional exchange of Christmas cards. But Henry had never forgotten that smile.\n\nShe patted his hand, then called to her assistant. \"Brent, could you let Dr. Reynolds know we're ready to begin the scan?\" She then turned to Henry and the reporter. \"I'll have to ask you to join us in the next room. You can view the procedure from behind the leaded glass in the control room.\"\n\nBefore leaving, Henry checked the mummy to ensure it was properly secured on the scanner's table, then slipped the gold crucifix from around the figure's neck. He carried it with him as he followed the others out of the room.\n\nThe adjoining cubicle was lined with banks of computers and rows of monitors. The research team planned on using a technique called computer tomography, or CT, to take multiple radiographic images which the computer would then compile into a three-dimensional picture of the mummy's interior, allowing a virtual autopsy to be performed without damaging the mummy itself. Besides the professional contact, this was the reason Henry had hauled his mummy halfway around the world. Johns Hopkins had performed previous analyses on other Peruvian ice mummies in the past and still had backing from the National Geographic organization to continue with others. The facility also had a keen genetics lab to map ancestry and genealogy, ideal for adding concrete data to substantiate his controversial theories. But with the Dominican cross in hand, Henry held out little hope of success.\n\nOnce inside the control room, the door, heavy with lead shielding, closed snugly behind them.\n\nJoan introduced them to Dr. Robert Reynolds, who waved them to the chairs while his technician began calibrating for the scan. \"Grab a seat, folks.\"\n\nWhile the others scooted chairs into a cluster before the viewing window, Henry remained standing to maintain a good view of both the computer monitors and the window that looked out upon the scanner and its current patient. The large white machine filled the back half of the next room. The table bearing the mummy protruded from a narrow tunnel leading into the heart of the unit.\n\n\"Here we go,\" Dr. Reynolds said as he keyed his terminal.\n\nHenry jumped a bit, almost dropping the gold cross, as a sharp clacking erupted from the speakers that monitored the next room. Through the window, he watched the tray holding the contorted figure slowly inch toward the spinning core of the scanner. As the crown of the mummy's head entered the tunnel, the machine's clacking was joined by a chorus of loud thunking as the device began to take pictures.\n\n\"Bob,\" Joan said, \"bring up a surface view of the facial bones first. Let's see if we can pinpoint where this fellow came from.\"\n\n\"You can determine that from just the skull?\" the reporter asked.\n\nJoan nodded, but did not turn from the computers. \"The structure of the zygomatic arch, the brow, and the nasal bone are great markers for ancestry and race.\"\n\n\"Here it comes,\" Dr. Reynolds announced.\n\nHenry turned from the window to look over Joan's shoulder. A black-and-white image appeared on the monitor's screen, a cross section of the mummy's skull.\n\nJoan slipped on a pair of reading glasses and squeaked her chair closer to the monitor. She leaned forward to study the image. \"Bob, can you rotate it about thirty degrees?\"\n\nThe radiologist nodded, chewing on a pencil. He tapped a few buttons, and the skull twisted slightly until it was staring them full in the face. Joan reached with a small ruler and made some measurements, frowning. She tapped the screen with a fingernail. \"That shadow above the right orbit of the eye. Can we get a better look at it?\"\n\nA few keys were tapped and the image zoomed in closer. The radiologist removed the pencil from between his teeth. He whistled appreciatively.\n\n\"What is it?\" Henry asked.\n\nJoan turned and tilted her glasses down to peer over their rims at him. \"A hole.\" She tapped the glass indicating the triangular shadow on the plane of bone. \"It's not natural. Someone drilled into his skull. And from the lack of callus formation around the site, I'd guess the procedure was done shortly after his death.\"\n\n\"Trepanning\u2026skull drilling,\" Henry said. \"I've seen it before in other old skulls from around the world. But the most extensive and complicated were among the Incas. They were considered the most skilled surgeons at trepanning.\" Henry allowed himself a glimmer of hope. If the skull had been bored, maybe he had uncovered a Peruvian Indian.\n\nJoan must have read his thoughts. \"I hate to dash your hopes, but trepanning or not, the mummy is definitely not of South American ancestry. It is clearly European.\"\n\nHenry could not find his voice for a few breaths. \"Are\u2026are you sure?\"\n\nShe took off her glasses, settled them back in her pocket, and sighed softly, clearly well accustomed to passing on a dire diagnosis. \"Yes. I'd say he came from Western Europe. I'd guess Portugal. And given enough time and more study, I could probably pinpoint even the exact province.\" She shook her head. \"I'm sorry, Henry.\"\n\nHe recognized the sympathy in her eyes. With despair in his heart, he struggled to keep himself composed. He stared down at the Dominican cross in his hand. \"He must have been captured by the Incas,\" he finally said. \"And eventually sacrificed to their gods atop Mount Arapa. If his blood was spilled on such a sacred site, European or not, they would have been forced to mummify his remains. It was probably why they left him his cross. Those who died on holy sites were honored, and it was taboo to rob their corpses of any valuables.\"\n\nThe reporter had been hurriedly jotting notes, even though she had a tape recorder also monitoring their conversation. \"It'll make a good story.\"\n\n\"Story, maybe\u2026even a journal article or two\u2026\" Henry shrugged, attempting a weak smile.\n\n\"But not what you were hoping for,\" Joan added.\n\n\"An intriguing oddity, nothing more. It sheds no new light on the Incas.\"\n\n\"Perhaps your dig back in Peru will produce more intriguing finds,\" the pathologist offered.\n\n\"There is that hope. My nephew and a few other grad students are delving into a temple ruin as we speak. Hopefully, they'll have better news for me.\"\n\n\"And you'll let me know?\" Joan asked with a smile. \"You know I've been following your discoveries in both the National Geographic and Archaeology magazines.\"\n\n\"You have?\" Henry stood a little straighter.\n\n\"Yes, it's all been very exciting.\"\n\nHenry's smile grew wider. \"I'll definitely keep you updated.\" And he meant it. There was a certain charm to this woman that Henry still found disarming. Add to that a generous figure that could not be completely hidden by her sterile lab coat. Henry found a slight blush heating his cheeks.\n\n\"Joan, you'd better come see this,\" the radiologist said in a hushed voice. \"Something's wrong with the CT.\"\n\nJoan swung back to the monitor. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"I was just fiddling with some mid-sagittal views to judge bone density. But all the interior views just come back blank.\" As Henry looked on, Dr. Reynolds flipped through a series of images, each a deeper slice through the interior of the skull. But each of the inner images was the same: a white blur on the monitor.\n\nJoan touched the screen as if her fingers could make sense of the pictures. \"I don't understand. Let's recalibrate and try again.\"\n\nThe radiologist tapped a button and the constant clacking from the machine died away. But a sharper noise, hidden behind the knock of the scanner's rotating magnets, became apparent. It flowed from the speakers: a high-pitched keening, like air escaping from the stretched neck of a balloon.\n\nAll eyes were drawn to the speakers.\n\n\"What the hell is that noise?\" the radiologist asked. He tapped at a few keys. \"The scanner's completely shut down.\"\n\nThe Herald reporter sat closest to the window looking into the CT room. She sprang to her feet, knocking her chair over. \"My God!\"\n\n\"What is it?\" Joan stood up and joined the reporter at the window.\n\nHenry pushed forward, fearing for his fragile mummy. \"What\u2014?\" Then he saw it, too. The mummy still lay on the scanning table in full view of the group. Its head and neck convulsed upon the table, rattling against the metal surface. Its mouth stretched wide open, the keening wail issuing from its desiccated throat. Henry's knees weakened.\n\n\"My God, it's alive!\" the reporter moaned in horror.\n\n\"Impossible,\" Henry sputtered.\n\nThe convulsing corpse grew violent. Its lanky black hair whipped furiously around its thrashing head like a thousand snakes. Henry expected at any moment that the head would rip off its neck, but what actually happened was worse. Much worse.\n\nLike a rotten melon, the top of the mummy's skull blew away explosively. Yellow filth splattered out from the cranium, spraying the wall, the CT scanner, and the window.\n\nThe reporter stumbled away from the fouled glass, her legs giving way beneath her. Her mouth chanted uncontrollably, \"Oh my God oh my God oh my God\u2026\"\n\nJoan remained calm, professional. She spoke to the stunned radiologist. \"Bob, we need a Level Two quarantine of that room. Stat!\"\n\nThe radiologist just stared, unblinking, as the mummy quieted its convulsions and lay still. \"Damn,\" he finally whispered to the fouled window. \"What happened?\"\n\nJoan shook her head, still calm. She replaced her glasses and studied the room. \"Perhaps a soft eruption of pocketed gas,\" she mumbled. \"Since the mummy was frozen at a high altitude, methane from decomposition could have released abruptly from the sudden thawing.\" She shrugged.\n\nThe reporter finally seemed to have composed herself and tried to take a picture, but Joan blocked her with a palm. Joan shook her head. There would be no further pictures.\n\nHenry had not moved since the eruption. He still stood with one palm pressed to the glass. He stared at the ruins of his mummy and the brilliant splatters sprayed on walls and machine. The debris shone brightly, glowing a deep ruddy yellow under the halogens.\n\nThe reporter, her voice still shaky, waved a hand at the fouled lead window. \"What the hell is that stuff?\"\n\nClutching the Dominican crucifix in his right fist, Henry answered, his voice dull with shock: \"Gold.\"\n\n[ 5:14 P.M. ]\n\n[ Andean Mountains, Peru ]\n\n\"Listen\u2026and you could almost hear the dead speak.\"\n\nThe words drew Sam Conklin's nose from the dirt. He eyed the young freelance journalist from the National Geographic.\n\nAn open laptop computer resting on his knees, Norman Fields sat beside Sam and stared out across the jungle-shrouded ruins. A smear of mud ran from the man's cheek to his neck. Though he wore an Australian bushwacker and matching leather hat, Norman failed to look the part of the rugged adventure photojournalist. He wore thick glasses with lenses that slightly magnified his eyes, making him look perpetually surprised, and though he stood a little over six feet, he was as thin as a pole, all bones and lanky limbs.\n\nSam rolled up to one elbow on his mat of woven reed. \"Sorry, what was that, Norm?\" he asked.\n\n\"The afternoon is so quiet,\" his companion whispered, his Boston accent flavoring his words. Norman closed his eyes and breathed deeply. \"You can practically hear the ancient voices echoing off the mountains.\"\n\nSam carefully laid the tiny paintbrush beside the small stone relic he had been cleaning and sat up. He tapped his muddied cowboy hat back farther on his head and wiped his hands on his Wranglers. Again, like so many times before, after working for hours upon a single stone of the ruins, the overall beauty of the ancient Incan city struck him like a draught of cold beer on a hot Texas afternoon. It was so easy to get lost in the fine ministrations of brush on stone and lose sight of the enormity and breadth of the whole. Sam pushed into a seated position to better appreciate the somber majesty.\n\nHe suddenly missed his cutting horse, a painted Appaloosa still back on his uncle's dusty ranch outside Muleshoe, Texas. He itched to ride among the ruins and follow its twisted paths to the mystery of the thick jungle beyond the city. He sat there with the ghost of a smile on his face, soaking up the sight.\n\n\"There is something mystical about this place,\" Norman continued, leaning back upon his hands. \"The towering peaks. The streams of mist. The verdant jungle. The very air smells of life, as if some substance in the wind encourages a vitality in the spirit.\"\n\nSam patted the journalist's arm in good-natured agreement. The view was a wondrous sight.\n\nBuilt in a high saddle between two Andean peaks, the newly discovered jungle city spread in terraced plazas across half a square mile. A hundred steps connected the various stonework levels. From Sam's vantage point among the remains of the Sun Plaza, he could survey the entire pre-Columbian ruin below him: from the homes of the lower city outlined in lines of crumbling stone, to the Stairway of the Clouds that led to Sun Plaza on which they perched. Here, like its sister city Machu Picchu, the Incas had displayed all their mastery of architecture, merging form and function to carve a fortress city among the clouds.\n\nYet, unlike the much-explored Machu Picchu, these ruins were still raw. Discovered by his uncle Hank only a few months back, much still lay hidden under vine and trees. A spark of pride flared with the memory of the discovery.\n\nUncle Hank had pinpointed its location from old tales passed among the Quechans of the region. Using hand-scrawled maps and pieces of tales, he had led a team out from Machu Picchu along the Urabamba River, and in only ten days, discovered the ruins below Mount Arapa. The discovery had been covered in all the professional journals and popular magazines. Nicknamed the Cloud Ruins, his uncle's picture beamed from many a front page. And he deserved it\u2014it had been a miraculous demonstration of extrapolation and archaeological skill.\n\nOf course, this sentiment might be clouded by Sam's feelings for his uncle. Hank had raised Sam since his parents had died in a car crash when he was nine years old. Henry's own wife had died of cancer the same year, about four months earlier. Drawn together in grief, they developed a deep bond. The two had become nearly inseparable. So it was to no one's surprise that Sam pursued a career in archaeology at Texas A&M.\n\n\"I'd swear if you listen close enough,\" Norman said, \"you can even hear the wail of the warriors calling from high in the peaks, the whispers of hawkers and buyers from the lower city, the songs of the laborers in the terraced fields beyond the walls.\"\n\nSam tried to listen, but all he could hear were the occasional snatches of raised voices and the rasping of shovel and pick echoing up from a nearby hole. The noises were not the voices of the Incan dead, but of the workers and his fellow students laboring deep in the heart of the ruins. The gaping hole led to a shaft that dropped thirty feet straight down, ending in a honeycomb of excavated rooms and halls, a subterranean structure of several levels. Sam sat up straighter. \"You ought to be a poet, Norman, not a journalist.\"\n\nNorman sighed. \"Just try listening with your heart, Sam.\"\n\nHe thickened his west Texas drawl, knowing how it irritated Norman, who hailed from Boston. \"Right now all I kin hear with is my belly. And it ain't saying nothing but complaining about dinnertime.\"\n\nNorman scowled at him. \"You Texans have no poetry in your souls. Just iron and dust.\"\n\n\"And beer. Don't forget the beer.\"\n\nThe laptop computer suddenly chimed the six o'clock hour, drawing their attention.\n\nA rattling groan escaped the narrow confines of Sam's throat. \"We'd better wrap up the site before the sun sets. By nightfall, the place will be crawling with looters.\"\n\nNorman nodded and twisted around to gather his camera packs. \"Speaking of grave robbers, I heard gunfire last night,\" he said.\n\nSam frowned while storing away his brushes and dental picks. \"Guillermo had to scare off a band of huaqueros. They were trying to tunnel into our ruins. If Gil hadn't found them, they might have pierced the dig and destroyed months of work.\"\n\n\"It's good your uncle thought to hire security.\"\n\nSam nodded, but he heard the trace of distaste in Norman's voice at the mention of Guillermo Sala, the ex-policeman from Cuzco assigned as the security head for the expedition. Sam shared the journalist's sentiment. Black-haired and black-eyed, Gil bore scars that Sam suspected weren't all from the line of duty. Sam also noticed the sidelong glances he shared with his compadres when Maggie passed. The quick snippets of Spanish exchanged with guttural laughs heated Sam's blood.\n\n\"Was anyone hurt in the gunfire?\" Norman asked.\n\n\"No, just warning shots to scare off the thieves.\"\n\nNorman continued stuffing his gear. \"Do you really think we'll find some tomb overflowing with riches?\"\n\nSam smiled. \"And discover the Tutankhmen of the New World? No, I don't think so. It's the dream of gold that draws the thieves, but not my uncle. Knowledge is what lured him here\u2014and the truth.\"\n\n\"But what is he is so doggedly searching for? I know he seeks some proof that another tribe existed before the Incas, but why this stubborn need for secrecy. I need to report to the Geographic at some point to update them before the next deadline.\"\n\nSam bunched his brows. He had no answer for Norman. The same questions had been echoing in his own mind. Uncle Hank was keeping some snippet of information close to his chest. But this was always like the professor. He was open in all other ways, but when it came to professional matters, he could be extremely tight-lipped.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Sam finally said. \"But I trust the professor. If he has his nose into something, we'll just have to wait him out.\"\n\nA shout suddenly arose from the excavated hole on the neighboring terrace: \"Sam! Come look!\"\n\nRalph Isaacson's helmeted head popped from the shaft, excitement bright in his eyes. The large African-American, a fellow grad student, hailed from the University of Alabama. Financed on a football scholarship, he had excelled in his undergraduate years and managed to garner an academic scholarship to complete his masters in archaeology. He was as sharp as he was muscular. \"You have to see this!\" The carbide lamp of Ralph's mining helmet flashed toward them. \"We've reached a sealed door with writing on it!\"\n\n\"Is the door intact?\" Sam called back, getting to his feet excitedly.\n\n\"Yes! And Maggie says there's no evidence of tampering.\"\n\nThis could be the breakthrough all of them had been searching for these past months. An intact tomb or royal chamber within the ancient ruins. Sam helped Norman, burdened by his sling of cameras, up the steep steps toward the highest terrace of the Sun Plaza.\n\n\"Do you think\u2014?\" Norman huffed.\n\nSam held up a hand. \"It may just be a basement level to one of the Incan temples. Let's not get our hopes up.\"\n\nBy the time they had reached the excavated terrace, Norman was wheezing. Ralph frowned in disdain at the photographer's exertion. \"Havin' trouble there, Norman? I could ask Maggie to help carry you.\"\n\nThe photographer rolled his eyes and refrained from commenting, too winded to speak.\n\nSam joined them atop the plaza. He was breathing hard, too. Any exertion at this high altitude taxed lungs and heart. \"Leave him alone, Ralph,\" he scolded. \"Show us what you found.\"\n\nRalph shook his head and led the way with his helmet lamp. The black man's wide frame filled the three-foot-wide shaft as he mounted the ladder. Unlike Sam, Ralph did not get along with Norman. Ever since the photographer had let his sexual orientation be known, a certain friction had grown between the two. Raised in the Bible Belt, Ralph seemed unable to let go of certain prejudices that had nothing to do with color. But Henry had insisted they all work together. Be a team. So the two had developed a grumbling cooperation.\n\n\"Jackass,\" Norman mumbled under his breath, shifting his camera load.\n\nSam clapped the photographer on the shoulder and glanced into the excavated hole. The rungs of the ladder descended thirty feet to the warren of chambers and hallways below. \"Don't let him get to you,\" Sam said. He waved toward the ladder. \"Go on. I'll follow.\"\n\nAs they descended, Ralph spoke, his words growing in excitement again. \"We just got the carbon-dating back on the deepest level this morning. Did you hear, Sam? A.D. 1100. Predating the damn Incas by two damn centuries.\"\n\n\"I heard,\" Sam said. \"But the margin of error on dating still leaves this result questionable.\"\n\n\"Maybe\u2026but wait 'til you see the etchings!\"\n\n\"Are they Incan imagery?\" Sam called down.\n\n\"It's too soon to say. When we uncovered the door, I rushed up to fetch you two. Maggie is still down there trying to clean up the door. I figured we should all be present.\"\n\nSam continued to climb down. Lamplight bloomed from below, casting his shadow up the wall of the shaft. He could imagine Maggie bent with her nose an inch from the door, meticulous with brush and tweezers as she freed the history of these people from centuries of mud and clay. He could also picture her auburn hair pulled back in a long ponytail as she worked, the way her nose crinkled when deep in concentration, the small noises of pleasure she made when she discovered something new. If only he could attract a tenth of the attention the stones of the ruins earned from her.\n\nSam stumbled on a rung of the ladder and had to catch himself with a quick grab.\n\nAfter three more steps, his feet touched rock. He stepped from the ladder into the cramped cavern of the first level. The sodium lamps stung his eyes with their brightness while the heavy odor of turned soil and moist clay filled his nostrils. This was not a dusty, dry tomb of Egypt. The continual mist and frequent jungle storms of the high Andes saturated the soil. Rather than sand, the archaeologists battled moldy roots and wet clay to release the trapped secrets of the underground structure. Around Sam, the handiwork of ancient engineers glowed in the light, bricks and stones so skillfully fitted together that not even a knife blade could slide between them. But even such design could not fully withstand the ravages of time. Many areas of the subterranean structure had been weakened by winding roots and centuries of accumulated clay and soil.\n\nAround Sam, the ruins groaned. It was a frequent noise, stressed stones settling after the team had cleared the clay and dirt from the rooms and halls, hollowing them out. The local Quechan workers had installed a latticework of wooden support beams, bolstering the ancient, root-damaged bulwarks and ceilings. But still the underground structure moaned with the weight of earth piled atop it.\n\n\"This way,\" Ralph said, guiding them toward the wooden ladder that descended to the second level of tunnels and rooms. However, that was not their final destination. After climbing down two more ladders, they reached the deepest level, almost fifty feet underground. This section had not been fully cleared or cataloged. Among the honeycomb of narrow excavated tunnels and rooms bolstered by wooden frames, shirtless workers hauled sacks of mud and debris. Normally, the tunnels echoed with the workers' native songs, but now the halls were quiet. Even the workers suspected the importance of this discovery.\n\nSilence hung like a wool blanket across the ruins. The garrulous Ralph had finally halted his discourse on the discovery of the sealed chamber. The three proceeded in silence through the last of the tunnels to the deepest room. Once in the wider chamber, the trio, who had been squeezing through the passage single file, spread out. Sam could finally see more than just the bowed back of Norman Fields.\n\nThe chamber was no larger than a cramped single-car garage. Yet, in this small room buried fifty feet underground, Sam sensed that history was about to be revealed. The chamber's far side was a wall of quarried stone, again so artfully constructed that the granite pieces fit together like an intricate jigsaw puzzle. Though still covered in many places with layers of clay and mud, the workmanship had obviously withstood the ages and the elements. Yet as amazing as the architecture was, what stood in the center of the wall drew all their eyes: a crude stone arch blocked by a carefully fitted slab of rock. Three horizontal bands of a dull metal, each a handspan wide, crossed the doorway and were bolted to both door and frame.\n\nNo one had been through this portal since the ancients had sealed it.\n\nSam forced himself to breathe. Whatever lay past the locked door was more than just a passage to a subbasement. Whoever had sealed it had intended to protect and preserve something of enormous value to their society. Beyond this portal lay secrets hidden for centuries.\n\nRalph finally broke the silence. \"Damn thing's sealed tighter than Fort Knox!\"\n\nHis words broke the door's spell on Sam. He finally noticed Maggie seated cross-legged before the portal. She leaned an elbow on one knee and rested a cheek in her palm. Her eyes were fixed on the door, studying it. She did not even acknowledge their presence.\n\nOnly Denal, the thirteen-year-old Quechan boy who served as camp translator, greeted them with a small nod as they entered. The youth had been hired off the streets of Cuzco by Sam's uncle. Raised in a Catholic missionary orphanage, Denal was fairly fluent in English. He was also respectful. Slouching against a wooden support to the right, Denal held a cigarette, unlit, between his lips. Smoking had been outlawed in the dig for the sake of preserving what was uncovered and protecting the air quality in the tunnels.\n\nSam glanced around and noticed someone was missing. \"Where's Philip?\" he asked. When the professor had left for the States, Philip Sykes, the senior grad student, had been assigned to oversee the dig. He should have been there, too.\n\n\"Sykes?\" Maggie frowned. A hint of her Irish brogue shone through the tightness in her voice. \"He took a break. Left over an hour ago an' hasn't been back.\"\n\n\"His loss,\" Sam mumbled. No one argued about fetching the Harvard graduate student for the moment. After assuming the title of team leader, Philip's haughty attitude had rubbed everyone raw, even the stoic Quechans. Sam approached the door. \"Maggie, Ralph mentioned writing on the doorway. Is it legible?\"\n\n\"Not yet. I've cleared the mud, but I've been afraid to scrape at the surface and risk damaging the engraving. Denal sent one of the workers to fetch an alcohol wash kit for the final cleaning.\"\n\nSam leaned closer to the archway. \"I think it's polished hematite,\" he said as he rubbed the edge of one of the bands. \"Notice the lack of rust.\" He backed away so Norman could take a few photos of the untouched door.\n\n\"Hematite?\" Norman asked as he measured the room's light.\n\nRalph answered while the journalist snapped his pictures. \"The Incas never discovered the art of smelting iron, but the mountains around here were rich with hematite, a metallic ore from old asteroid impacts. All the Incan tools found to date were either made of plain stone or hematite, which makes the construction of their sophisticated cities all the more amazing.\"\n\nAfter Norman had taken his photos, Maggie reached a finger out to the top band of metal, her finger hovering over its surface, as if she feared touching it. With her fingertip, she traced the band where it was fastened to the stone arch. Each bolt was as thick around as a man's thumb. \"Whoever built this meant to keep whatever is inside from ever seeing the light of day.\"\n\nBefore anyone could respond, a black-haired worker pushed into the chamber. He bore vials of alcohol and distilled water along with a handful of brushes.\n\n\"Maybe the etchings will reveal a clue to what lies within,\" Sam said.\n\nSam, Maggie, and Ralph each took brushes and began painting the diluted alcohol solution across the bands. Norman looked on as the students labored. Working on the center band, Sam's nose and eyes burned from the fumes as the alcohol worked upon the dirt caught in the metal's inscriptions. A final dousing with distilled water rinsed the alcohol away, and clean rags were passed to the three students so they could wipe away the loosened debris.\n\nSam gently rubbed the center of his band in small buffing circles.\n\nMaggie worked on the seal above him, Ralph on the band below. He heard a slight gasp from Ralph. Maggie soon echoed his surprise. \"Sweet Mary, it's Latin,\" she said. \"But that\u2026that's impossible!\"\n\nSam was the only one to remain quiet. Not because his band was blank, but because what he had uncovered shocked him. He stepped away from his half-cleaned band. All he could do was point to its center.\n\nNorman bent closer to where Sam had been working. He, too, didn't say a word, just straightened, his jaw hanging open.\n\nSam continued to stare at what he had uncovered. In the center of the band was a deeply etched cross on which was mounted the tiny figure of a crucified man.\n\n\"Jesus Christ,\" Sam swore.\n\nGuillermo Sala sat on a stump at the jungle's edge, a rifle leaning against his knee. As the sun crept closer to the horizon behind him, young saplings growing at the ruin's edge spread their thin shadows across the ground, stretching toward the square pit fifteen meters away. From the hole's opening, lamplight glowed out into the twilight, swallowing the shadows as they reached toward the shaft. Even the hungry shadows knew what lay below, Gil thought. Gold.\n\n\"We could slit their throats now,\" Juan said at his elbow. He nodded toward the circle of tents where the scientists had retreated to study the engravings on the tomb's door. \"Blame it on grave robbers.\"\n\n\"No. The murder of gringo s always draws too much fire,\" Gil said. \"We stick to the plan. Wait for night. While they sleep.\" He sat patiently as Juan fidgeted beside him. Four years in a Chilean prison had taught Gil much about the price of haste.\n\nJuan swore under his breath, while Gil merely listened to the awakening rain forest around him. At night, the jungle came alive in the moonlight. Each evening, games of predator and prey played out among the black shadows. Gil loved this time of the evening, when the forest first awoke, shedding its green innocence, revealing its black heart.\n\nYes, he could wait, like the jungle, for the night and the moon. He had already waited almost a year. First, by ensuring that he was assigned as security for this team, then putting the right men together. He came to guard the tomb and did so dutifully\u2014not for the sake of preserving the past for these Yankee scientists, but to safeguard the treasures for himself.\n\nThese maricon Americans galled him with their stupidity and blindness to the poverty around them. To raid a country's tombs for the sake of history when the smallest trinket below could feed a family for years. Gil remembered the treasures discovered in 1988 at Pampa Grande, in an unmolested Moche tomb. A flow of gold and jewels. Peasants, trying to snatch a crumb from the harvest of wealth, had died at the hands of guards just so the treasures could languish in foreign museums.\n\nSuch a tragedy will not occur here, he thought. It was our people's heritage! We should be the ones to profit from our past!\n\nGil's hand strayed to the bulge in his vest. It was one of the many gifts from the leftist guerrillas in the mountains who had helped Gil in this venture. Gil patted the grenade in his pocket.\n\nIt was meant to erase their tracks after the raid on the tomb, but if these pelotudo American scientists tried to interfere\u2026well, there were always quicker ways to die than by a knife's blade.\n\nMaggie O'Donnel despised Latin. Not a simple distaste for the dead language, but a heartfelt loathing. Educated in strict Catholic schools in Belfast, she had been forced to study years of Latin, and even after repeated raps across her knuckles from sadistic nuns, none of it had sunk in. She stared now at the charcoal tracings of the door's inscription spread across the table in the main tent.\n\nSam had a magnifying lens fixed over one of the filigreed etchings from the top band. A lantern swung over his head. He was the best epigrapher of the group of students, skilled at deciphering ancient languages. \"I think this says Nos Christi defenete, but I wouldn't stake my eyeteeth on it.\"\n\nThe journalist, Norman Fields, hung over Sam's shoulder, his camera ready on his hip.\n\n\"And what does that bloody mean?\" Maggie asked sourly, feeling useless, unable to contribute to the translation. Ralph Isaacson, who was just as weak in his Latin skills, at least knew how to cook. He was outside the tent struggling to light the campstove and get dinner started.\n\nEver since the professor had left, the team had struggled to efficiently clear the ruins and catalog as much as possible. Each had their assigned duties. Every evening, Ralph did the cooking, leaving cleanup to Norman and Sam, while Maggie and Philip tediously entered the day's reports into the computer log.\n\nSam interrupted her reverie. He scrunched up his nose as he tried to read the writing. \"I think it says 'Christ preserve them,' or 'Christ protect them,' \" he said. \"Something like that.\"\n\nPhilip Sykes, the senior grad student, lay sprawled on a cot, a cold rag across his eyes. His irritation at being left out of the discovery still clearly rankled him. \"Wrong,\" he said bitingly, not moving from where he lay. \"It translates, Christ protect us. Not them.\" He followed his assessment with a disdainful noise.\n\nMaggie sighed. It was no wonder Philip knew Latin so well. Just another reason to hate the dead language. He was forever a font of trivial knowledge, ready at any instance to correct the other students' errors. But where he excelled in facts, he lagged in on-site experience\u2014hence, the team was burdened with him now. He needed to clock dig hours before he could earn his Ph.D. After that, Maggie suspected the wanker would never leave the ivy halls of Harvard, his alma mater, where his deceased father's chair in archaeology surely awaited him. The Ivy League was still one big boys' club. And Philip, son of an esteemed colleague, had a key.\n\nStretching her shoulders, she moved closer to Sam. A yawn escaped her before she could stop it. It had been a long day topped by fervid activity: photographing the door, getting a plaster cast of the bands, charcoal etching the writing, logging and documenting everything.\n\nSam gave her a small smile and shifted aside the etching of the middle band. It contained only the single crucifix carved into the metallic hematite. No other writing. Sam lowered his magnifying glass on the third and final onionskin tracing. \"Lots of writing on this one. But the script is much smaller and isn't as well preserved,\" he said. \"I can only make out part of it.\"\n\n\"Well then, what can you read?\" Maggie asked, sinking into a folding chair near the table. A seed of a headache had started to grow behind her right temple.\n\n\"Give me a few minutes.\" Sam cocked his head to the side as he squinted through his lens. His Stetson, usually tilted on his head, rested on the table beside him. Professor Conklin had insisted on a bit of common courtesy out here in the jungle. When inside the tents, hats had to come off, and Sam still maintained the protocol, even though his uncle was not present. Sam had been raised well, Maggie thought with a small hidden grin. She stared at the professor's nephew. Sam's dusky blond hair still lay plastered in place from the Stetson's imprint.\n\nMaggie resisted the urge to reach over and tousle his hair back to a loose mop. \"So what do you think, Sam? Do you truly think the Spanish conquistadors etched these bands?\"\n\n\"Who else? The conquistadors must have searched this pyramid and left their mark.\" Sam raised his head, a deep frown on his face. \"And if the Spanish were here, we can kiss good-bye any chance to find the tomb intact. We can only hope the conquistadors left us a few scraps to confirm Doc's theory.\"\n\n\"But according to the texts, the Spanish never discovered any cities in this region. There is no mention of the conquistadors ever reaching their thieving hands this far from Cuzco.\"\n\nSam merely pointed to the table laden with Latin etchings. \"There's the proof. We can at least walk away with that. The conquistadors that arrived here must never have made it back to their battalions at Cuzco. The natives must have killed them before they could make it down out of the mountains. The discovery of this city died with them.\"\n\n\"So maybe they didn't get a chance to loot this tomb,\" Maggie insisted.\n\n\"Perhaps\u2026\"\n\nMaggie knew her words did little to convince anyone. She, too, knew that if the conquistadors had the time to etch the bands, then they had more than enough time to raid the temple. She didn't know what else to say, so she simply slumped in her seat.\n\nSam spoke up. \"Okay. This is the best I'm able to pick out of this mess. Domine sospitate something something hoc sepulcrum caelo relinquemeus. Then a few lines I couldn't make out at all, followed by ne peturbetur at the end. That's it.\"\n\n\"And what does that mean?\" Maggie asked.\n\nSam shrugged and gave her one of his wise-ass smiles. \"Do I look like a Roman?\"\n\n\"Oh my God!\" Philip exclaimed, drawing Maggie and Sam's attention. He bolted upright. The rag dropped from his face to his lap.\n\n\"What?\" Sam lowered his magnifying lens.\n\n\"The last part translates, We leave this tomb to Heaven. May it never be disturbed.\"\n\nRalph suddenly pushed through into the tent, his hands full with four mugs. \"Who wants coffee?\" He paused when he saw them all frozen with eyes wide. \"What happened?\"\n\nSam was the first one able to speak. \"How about we break out the champagne instead? Toast a few ol' conquistadors for protecting our investment here.\"\n\n\"What?\" Ralph asked, his face scrunched with confusion.\n\nPhilip spoke next, his voice edged with reserved excitement. \"Mr. Isaacson, our tomb may still be intact!\"\n\n\"How do you\u2014?\"\n\nMaggie picked up one of the onionskin tracing sheets. She held it toward him. \"By Jesus, you gotta love Latin.\"\n\nSam could barely contain his excitement as he waited for his computer to connect to the university's internet site via the satellite hookup. He sat in the communication tent with the other students gathered around behind him. The tent was weathertight and insulated against the elements, protecting the delicate equipment from the eternal mists of the jungle heights.\n\nSam checked his watch for the hundredth time. Two minutes shy of ten o'clock, the time each evening when Sam or Philip updated the professor on their progress on the dig. That night, though, was the first time the team had exciting news for his uncle. Sam jabbed hurriedly at the keys as the connection was made. He initiated the video feed. The small camera fixed to the top of the monitor blinked on its red eye. The video satellite link had been a gift from the National Geographic Society. \"Smile everyone,\" Sam muttered as he finished calling up his uncle's internet address.\n\nThe computer whirred through its connections and a small flittering picture of Henry appeared in the upper right hand corner. Sam tapped a few keys and the picture filled the entire screen. The video feed was jittery. When his uncle waved a hand in greeting, his fingers stuttered across his face.\n\nSam pulled the microphone closer. \"Hi, Doc.\"\n\nHis uncle smiled. \"I see everyone is with you tonight. You must have something for me.\"\n\nSam's face ached from the wide grin still plastered to his lips, but he wasn't going to give up the team's prize that easily. \"First give us the lowdown about the mummy. You said yesterday that the CT was scheduled for this morning. How'd it go?\" Sam regretted his question as soon as he saw his uncle's face cloud over. Even from three thousand miles away, Sam could tell the old man didn't have good news. Sam's smile faded away. \"What happened?\" he asked more soberly.\n\nHenry shook his head, again it was a jittering movement, but the words flowed smoothly through the receiver. \"We were correct in judging the mummy as non-Inca,\" he began, \"but unfortunately, it was European.\"\n\n\"What?\" Sam's shock was shared by the others.\n\nHenry held up a wavering hand. \"As near as I can tell, he was a Dominican priest, probably a friar.\"\n\nMaggie leaned toward the microphone. \"And the Incas mummified one of their hated enemies\u2014a priest of a foreign god?\"\n\n\"I know. Strange. I plan to do a little research here and see if I can trace this friar's history before returning. It's not what I wanted to prove, but it is still intriguing.\"\n\n\"Especially in the light of our discovery here,\" Sam added.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Henry asked.\n\nSam explained about their discovery of the sealed door and the Latin inscriptions.\n\nHenry was nodding by the end of Sam's description. \"So the conquistadors truly did find the village. Damn.\" Henry slowly took off his glasses and rubbed at the small indentations on his nose. His next words seemed more like he was thinking aloud. \"But what happened here five hundred years ago? The answer must lie behind that door.\"\n\nSam could almost hear the gears whirring in his uncle's mind.\n\nPhilip grabbed the mike. \"Should we open the door tomorrow?\"\n\nSam interrupted before his uncle could answer. \"Of course not. I think we should wait until Doc returns. If it's a significant find, I think we'd need his expertise and experience to explore it.\"\n\nPhilip's face grew red. \"I can handle anything we discover.\"\n\n\"You couldn't even handle\u2014\"\n\nHenry interrupted, his voice stern and tight. \"Mr. Sykes is right, Sam. Open the door tomorrow. Whatever lies hidden beyond the sealed portal may aid my research here in the States.\" His uncle's eyes traveled over the entire group. \"And it is not just Philip I trust. I am counting on all of you to proceed as I've taught you\u2014cautiously and meticulously.\"\n\nEven with these last words, Sam noticed the gloating expression on Philip's face. The Harvard grad would be unbearable from there on out. Sam's fingers gripped the table's edge with anger. But he dare not question his uncle. It would sound so petty.\n\n\"Sam,\" his uncle continued, \"I'd like a few words in private.\" Henry's words were severe and scolding in tone. \"The rest of you should hit your pillows. You've a long day tomorrow.\"\n\nMuttering arose from the others as they said their good-byes and shuffled off.\n\nHenry's voice followed them from the tent. \"And good work, folks!\"\n\nSam watched the others leave. Philip was last to slip out of the tent, but not before shining a tight smile of triumph on his lips. Sam's right hand balled into a fist.\n\n\"Sam,\" his uncle said softly, \"are they all gone?\"\n\nForcing his hand to relax, Sam faced his uncle again. \"Yeah, Uncle Hank,\" he said, dropping to a more familiar demeanor.\n\n\"I know Philip can rankle everyone. But he is also a smart kid. If Philip can grow to be half the archaeologist his father was, he'll be a fine scholar. So cut him some slack.\"\n\n\"If you say so\u2026\"\n\n\"I do.\" Henry slid his chair closer to the computer. His shaky image grew on the screen. \"Now as to the reason I wanted to speak to you in private. Though I voiced my support of Philip, I need you to be my eyes and ears tomorrow. You've had a lot more dig experience, and I'm counting on you to help guide Philip.\"\n\nSam could not suppress a groan. \"Uncle Hank, he'll never listen. He already thinks he's the big buck at the salt lick.\"\n\n\"Find a way, Sam.\" Henry replaced his eyeglasses, ending the matter. He stared silently at Sam as if weighing him. \"If you are to be my eyes and ears, you'll need to know everything I know, Sam. There are some items I've kept from the others. To properly evaluate what you discover tomorrow, you'll need to be fully informed.\"\n\nSam sat straighter. His irritation at Philip vanished in a single heartbeat. \"What?\"\n\n\"Two items. First, something odd happened to the mummy here at Johns Hopkins.\" Henry explained about the explosion of the mummy's skull and the brilliant golden discharge.\n\nSam's eyebrows were high on his forehead. \"Christ, Uncle Hank, what the hell happened?\"\n\n\"The pathologist here hypothesized a possible burst of trapped methane from sudden thawing. But after four decades in the field, I've never seen its like before. And that discharge\u2026Dr. Engel is researching what it is. I may know more in a few days, but until then, I want you to keep your eyes open. The mystery as to what occurred in this village five centuries ago may be answered when you open that door.\"\n\n\"I'll watch out for any clues and proceed with care, even if I have to force an iron bit and reins on Philip.\"\n\nHis uncle laughed. \"But remember, Sam, experienced riders know it's best to control a willful horse with only the lightest touch on the reins. Let Philip think he is leader and all will go well.\"\n\nSam frowned. \"Still\u2026why the secrecy, Uncle Hank?\"\n\nHenry sighed, a slight shake of his head. He suddenly seemed much older, his eyes tired. \"In the world of research, secrets are important.\" Henry glanced up at Sam. \"Remember the looters. Even in the remote wilds of the Andes, a few loose lips drew the scavengers like flies to horse droppings. The same can occur in the research community. Loose lips can sink grants, fellowships, and tenures. It's a hard lesson I don't like teaching.\"\n\n\"You can trust me.\"\n\nHenry smiled. \"I know, Sam. I trust you completely. I would have been glad to share all I know with you, but I didn't want to burden you with secrets. Not yet. You'll find how it weighs on your heart when you can't speak openly with your own colleagues. But matters now force me to shift my burden onto your shoulders. You must know the last piece of the puzzle, the reason I am sure an older tribe built this city.\" Henry leaned closer to the screen. \"I believe I may even know who it was.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about? Who? This site has the Incas' stamp all over it.\"\n\nHis uncle held up a hand. \"I know. I never disputed that the Incas eventually took over this site. But who was here before them? I've read tales, recorded oral histories spread from ancestor to ancestor, of how the first Incan king went to the sacred mountains and discovered a bride in a wondrous city. Returning with her, he started the Incan empire that would last hundreds of years. So even in their ancient tales, the Incas admit that a foreign tribe shared their roots. But who? It's the mystery I've been investigating for decades. My research into this matter led to the discovery of these ruins. But the answer to the question\u2014who built this city?\u2014that I only discovered last month.\"\n\nSpeechless, Sam's mind spun at the prospect of how much his uncle had kept hidden. \"Y\u2026you truly know who built this city?\"\n\n\"Let me show you.\" Henry reached to his own keyboard and mouse and began manipulating files. \"I wish I could claim it was a brilliant piece of research on my part, but in actuality it was one of those fortuitous events that always seem to push archaeology forward.\"\n\nHis uncle's image shrank to the corner of the screen and a three-dimensional schematic of the current dig appeared. Colored lines marked off the various levels of the dig. The detail of the computer-generated landscape and surmounting ruins amazed Sam. Using the mouse, Henry manipulated the pointer, and the screen zoomed into an aerial close-up of the ruins atop the Sun Plaza. A small black square marked the entrance tunnel to the ruins below.\n\n\"Here is our site. The tunnel into the underground structure.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Sam said, \"but what does this have to do with\u2014?\"\n\n\"Patience, my boy.\" Henry cracked a wry smile from the corner of the screen. \"Last month, a bit of luck occurred\u2014I received a CD-ROM from a fellow researcher from Washington University in St. Louis. It contained computer-generated maps of several Moche pyramids currently under excavation at Pampa Grande along the coast. Six hundred miles away.\"\n\n\"Moche sites?\" Sam remembered his lessons on this region. Many centuries before the Incan civilization arose, the Moche were a tribe that lived along a two-hundred-mile stretch of Peruvian coast. Pyramid builders and masters of intricate metalwork, their tribes had prospered between A.D. 100 and 700. Then for no known reason, their civilization vanished.\n\nHenry tapped a few more keys, and Sam's computer screen split into two images, side by side. On the left was the aerial map of their ruins. On the right was a new computer schematic of a flat-topped pyramid. His uncle pointed a finger at it. \"Here is the pyramid at Pampa Grande.\" He zeroed the image onto the tip of the Moche structure.\n\n\"Oh Lord!\" Sam gasped.\n\n\"Now you know my little secret.\" The two images merged together, overlapping one another. It was a perfect match. \"The Sun Plaza is actually the tip of a buried Moche pyramid. Our underground ruins are actually the remains of a subterranean pyramid. One of their sacred temples.\"\n\n\"My God, Uncle Hank! Why are you keeping this a secret? You should announce your discovery!\"\n\n\"No. Not until I have further physical proof. I had hoped the researchers here at Johns Hopkins would be able to correlate genetic markers in the mummy to a Moche lineage, thus substantiating my claims. But\u2026\" Henry shrugged. \"It looks like the mysteries of this jungle ruin just grow with each new piece we add to the puzzle.\"\n\n\"The Moche,\" Sam said, stunned with too much information. Mummified priests, exploding skulls, buried pyramids, strange warnings scrawled in Latin\u2026how would they tie it all together?\n\nAs if reading his thoughts, his uncle spoke, \"The answers to all these mysteries may lie beyond that door, Sam. I can almost feel it. So be careful.\"\n\nGuillermo studied the dark camp. Midnight beckoned. The group of young scientists and the Quechan laborers had all retired to their tents. The only lights left were those positioned around the dig.\n\nRaising his rifle, Gil signaled Juan and Miguel.\n\nJuan, his skeletal frame barely discernible under the eaves of the surrounding forest, nudged his companion. Broad of back but squat in height, Miguel stepped out from the jungle's edge, his back bowed with a large canvas bag. It contained the tools they would need to crack through the tomb door. Juan followed, a pickax over his shoulder.\n\nGil waved them toward the highest terrace. He knew they would have to be quick, but Gil did not complain. Sufficient hours until daybreak still remained, and the news that the tomb had a good chance of being intact had buoyed Gil's hopes for a significant strike.\n\nHe joined Juan and Miguel by the entrance to the shaft. \"Keep it quiet, you hijos de putas,\" he hissed to them. Gil threw the switch that sped current from the generator in the camp to the lamps below. He nodded for Juan to lead, followed by Miguel.\n\nGil kept a watch on the camp as they climbed down. The surrounding rain forest, its edges lit up by the four spotlights positioned at the compass points around the ruins, echoed with the hoots and occasional screeches of the night. The jungle noises and the chugging rattle of the camp's generator should mask their efforts.\n\nSatisfied, Gil hooked his rifle over his shoulder and climbed down the ladder to join the others.\n\n\"Ai, Dios mio, it's a fucking maze down here,\" Juan whispered sourly.\n\nMiguel just grunted, spitting out a jawful of hoja de coca. The coca leaves splattered against the granite stonework.\n\nNeither had been down into the ruins. Only Gil had intimate knowledge of the tunnels and rooms of the buried building. Crouching, he led them through the maze to the last chute that led to the sealed door.\n\nJuan continued to grumble behind him until the thin man stepped fully into the chamber and saw the door. \"Jesu Christo!\"\n\nGil allowed himself a small grin. The arched doorway set in quarried stone spoke of ancient times and hidden treasures. Its bands glowed in the glare of the single sodium lamp. The writing and crucifix were a dark blemish against the silvery metal.\n\n\"We don't have all night,\" Gil snapped.\n\nThey knew what had to be done. Miguel dropped his bag of tools to the floor with a clanking clatter and fished through its contents. Juan swung his pickax in precise swings, loosening the rock around the bolts. Miguel then used his crowbar and hammer to free the bolts. Within minutes, the top band fell to the mud and rock underfoot.\n\nJuan wiped sweat from his brow, his grin wide. Miguel's shirt clung to him like he had just climbed from a river. Even Gil, who did nothing more than oversee the labors, found himself mopping his face with a handkerchief. The eternal dampness of the tombs seemed to cling to them, as if claiming the three as its own.\n\nIn short order, the other two bands soon joined the first in the mud. Rock dust sifted through the room, stinging eyes and irritating noses raw. Juan sneezed and swore a stream of vulgarities.\n\nGil clapped him on the shoulder. \"A little respect for our ancestors, ese. They are about to make us rich.\" He wiped a smudge of mud from Juan's cheek with his thumb. \"Filthy rich.\"\n\nWith a swing of his arm, Gil waved his two companions aside. He grabbed the crowbar and approached the unfettered block of stone. \"Let's see, mamita, what you've been hiding for so long.\"\n\nGil worked the edge of the crowbar between rock and arch, then leaned his weight against the bar, his shoulder and back muscles straining. The door held firm against his efforts. He dug his toes in and pushed harder. Suddenly a loud grinding crack erupted from the door, and the stone shifted.\n\nGil stepped back, his face still ruddy from the struggle. He nodded to Juan and Miguel. \"Put your backs into it.\"\n\nThe two leaned their shoulders to the loosened stone door and shoved. The block of stone toppled forward. Dust bloomed like a shrouded phantom from the mouth of the burial chamber, and a muffled thud echoed through the room as the stone struck the floor of the tomb's entrance.\n\nWaving the cloud of dust from his face, Gil strode to the door. \"Hand me one of those lights,\" he said, bending by the entrance.\n\nMiguel tossed him a flashlight from his canvas bag. Gil caught its long silver handle.\n\n\"Stinks in there,\" Juan said as he joined Gil and stared over his shoulder.\n\n\"It's a grave,\" Gil said, clicking on the light. \"What did you expect from\u2014\" Words died in his mouth as the light lanced into the dark depths of the tomb, illuminating the passage ahead. Beyond a short entry hall lay a huge chamber, about thirty meters along each side. Gil had expected to discover piles of bones and scattered pottery, but what his handlamp actually revealed was a sight he could never have imagined\u2014not even in his most drunken dreams.\n\n\"Dios mio!\" he exclaimed in a voice hoarse with awe.\n\nHis partners gathered to either side, speechless.\n\nAhead, the right and left walls of the square chamber were plated with sheets of gold. The beam of Gil's flashlight reflected and sparked off the mirrored surfaces, a brilliance that almost blinded after the dim tunnels of the excavation. But Gil ignored all this, his light still fixed on a single object resting against the far stone wall of the chamber, directly opposite the gathered trio.\n\n\"We are all going to be filthy rich, mi amigos.\"\n\nAcross the open chamber stood a six-foot golden idol, a figure of an Incan king outfitted in ritual mantle and crown, bearing a staff topped by a stylized sun. The detail work was so lifelike that the figure's stern face seemed ready to shout a warning at any moment. But no word of protest was raised. The Incan king, sculpted of gold, stood silent as Gil led the others into the chamber.\n\nBending, Gil ducked through the threshold. He did not wait for the others. He pushed forward down the short hallway, the gold drawing him on. Past the doorway, he was able to stand straight again. Gil held his breath at the sight. Both the roof and floor were also covered in precious metals, an intricate pattern of gold and silver tiles, each about a meter wide. The roof's pattern was a mirror image of the floor. At the feet of the idol were piled tools and weapons, also sculpted of precious metals and bejeweled with rubies, sapphires, amethysts, and emeralds. Gil shook his head. The sheer amount of wealth was too large to comprehend.\n\nJuan finally moved forward to stand beside Gil. He shifted uneasily, intimidated by their find. When he spoke, he tried to act undaunted, but his voice cracked. \"S\u2026so let's get hauling.\"\n\nMiguel had joined them by now and made the sign of the cross, eyeing the golden king.\n\n\"He's not one of your dead relatives, Miguel,\" Juan jibed at his compadre. \"Lighten up.\"\n\n\"This place is cursed,\" Miguel mumbled, eyes wide as he searched the room. \"We should hurry.\"\n\n\"Miguel is right,\" Gil said. \"We must move fast. Grab what we can tonight and store it in the jungle. We'll return before daybreak and take care of the americanos and their scrawny Indian laborers. Once they're out of the way, we can call in the additional men, those we can trust, to help clear this lot out.\"\n\nJuan started across the tiled floor, his bootheels echoing oddly in the hollow chamber. He nodded toward the mound of precious items left at the foot of the idol. \"I say we collect all the small stuff. Leave the lugging and toting of the heavier objects to the others. Make them earn their share.\"\n\nGil followed, with Miguel hovering at his heels. \"When we're done here, there'll be plenty for everyone. A hundred men couldn't spend this wealth in a lifetime.\"\n\nJuan glanced back, a wide grin on his face. \"Oh yeah? Just watch me.\"\n\nHalfway across the chamber, the trap was sprung. Juan stepped on a silver tile, and the corresponding gold tile in the roof above snapped open. A cascade of silver\u2014thousands of tiny chains\u2014swept over Gil's companion. Gasping, Juan ducked as his form was instantly drenched in the fine chains. Once fallen, the chains draped from the open panel, like a frozen waterfall of silver. They clinked brightly as Juan danced among them, shocked but clearly unharmed. His motions only succeeded to enmesh himself further.\n\n\"What the\u2014?\" Juan started to say, reaching to shove aside the tangling links of silver. His hand darted back. \"Shit, they got hooks all over them.\"\n\nGil finally noticed the hundreds of glinting centimeter-long barbs sprouting along the lengths of chain. Their points were all curved upward, hinged, so they caused no harm when they fell from the ceiling.\n\nGil froze in mid-reach. Fuck, he thought as he suddenly realized the danger. A warning rose too late on his lips.\n\nSuddenly the cascade of chains spun viciously around Juan, ripping upward at the same time. The man screamed, an animal's cry of panic and fear. Juan was lifted two meters off the ground by the barbed chains, writhing in their hooked grips, before his weight finally dropped him to the floor.\n\nJuan pushed himself onto his hands and knees. Most of his clothes had been ripped from his body, along with large swaths of skin. He raised his face toward Gil. His left ear was gone; his scalp lay torn and flapped over to one side. Both eyes were bloody ruins. Blind, all Juan could do was howl. Even now, Gil saw Juan's skin begin to blacken where the hooks had dug in.\n\nPoison.\n\nStill Juan wailed in agony, crawling, dragging himself slowly across the floor. He didn't make it far. The poisons reached his heart, and he collapsed to the gold and silver tiles. The scream ending in mid-rattle.\n\nMiguel went to check on his friend.\n\nGil grabbed a fistful of Miguel's shirt and pulled him to a stop. The two men shared a single gold tile on the floor. With their friend's cries echoing away to nothing, Gil now heard the tick and grind of massive gears hidden behind the tiles and walls all around them. They had walked into a massive booby trap.\n\nGil glanced around. They stood on the single tile that centered the room. He studied the gold under his feet. \"It must have been built to activate only after someone fully entered the room.\" He eyed the tiles that led toward the golden idol and those that led back toward the entrance. The ticking of the gears sounded from all around. He suspected neither path was now safe.\n\nMiguel moaned beside him.\n\nGil scowled at the enormous wealth around him. Knowing death lurked behind its beauty, the luster faded from the gold. \"We're trapped.\"\n\nNestled in his sleeping bag atop a camp cot, Sam awoke to the noise of some animal snuffling by his tent door. At night, opossums and other curious nocturnal creatures were always wandering from the rain forest's edge to investigate the camp. But whatever was out there now was large. Its shadow, cast by the camp's spotlights, blotted out a good section of the tent flap. Sam tried to remember if he had snapped the fasteners after zipping up the door against mosquitoes. His first thought was jaguar. A few of the large cats had been spotted along the Urabamba River, which ran through the jungle below the ruins.\n\nAs silently as possible, Sam reached for his Winchester rifle, a legacy from his grandfather, passed from father to son through the Conklin family, dating back to 1884. Sam didn't go anywhere without it. The rifle had not been fired for years, more a keepsake and good-luck charm than a weapon. But right now, unloaded, it might serve as a good club.\n\nHis fingers slipped over the wooden butt of the rifle.\n\nWhatever was outside rattled the flap near his toes. Damn, he had forgotten to fasten the door! Sam sprang up in his sleeping bag and snatched the rifle up in his fist.\n\nAs he swung the rifle back, the flap was torn open.\n\n\"Sam, are you awake?\" Maggie peeked her head under the flap and made a halfhearted effort to knock on the canvas side of the tent.\n\nSam lowered the rifle to his lap, his heart still pounding in his ears. He swallowed hard to clear his throat and forced his voice into a nonchalant tone. \"Yeah, I'm up, Maggie. What's the matter?\"\n\n\"I couldn't sleep and got to thinking about those etchings. I needed to run something by you.\"\n\nSam had some fantasies of Maggie sneaking to his tent in the dead of night, but none of them involved discussing ancient Latin etchings. Still, any nighttime visit from Maggie was welcome. \"Okay. Give me a sec'.\"\n\nRolling out of his sleeping bag, he slipped his Wranglers over his boxers. With a night this muggy, he wouldn't normally bother with a shirt, but with Maggie out there, modesty more than comfort mattered. Sam pulled a leather vest over his shoulders.\n\nGrabbing his Stetson, he pulled down the zipper to the tent and pushed through into the night. Silver glow from a full moon washed over the camp, paling the four spotlights at the camp's periphery. He swiped his disheveled hair back from his forehead and trapped it under his hat.\n\nMaggie stepped back. She still wore the same khaki pants with a matching vest over a blood-red shirt. The only indication that Maggie had made any effort at relaxing this night was that she had untied her hair from its usual ponytail. Cascades of auburn curls, frosted silver by the night, flowed over her shoulders.\n\nTransfixed by the play of moonlight across Maggie's cheeks and lips, Sam had to search for his voice. \"So\u2026what's up?\"\n\nAs usual, her eyes didn't seem to see Sam. \"It's that writing on the last band. The bottom one. Those missing words an' lines. Latin's a weird language. A single word can change the entire meaning of the message.\"\n\n\"Yeah?\"\n\n\"What if we're not reading it right? What if one of those missing words or lines negates our translation?\"\n\n\"Maybe it might\u2026but tomorrow we'll know the truth anyway. When we crack the tomb in the morning, it'll be intact or it won't.\"\n\nA hint of irritation entered her voice. \"Sam, I want to know before we open the tomb. Don't you want to know what the conquistadors really meant to communicate on those bands?\"\n\n\"Sure, but the words are illegible.\"\n\n\"I know, Sam\u2026but that was with just alcohol cleaning.\" She looked at him meaningfully.\n\nSuddenly Sam knew why Maggie had roused him. He kept his lips clamped tight. Two years ago, he had presented a paper on the use of a phosphorescent dye to detect and bring out the faint written images worn by time on rock and metal. He had been uniformly scoffed at for his idea.\n\n\"You packed your stuff, didn't you?\" Maggie said.\n\n\"I don't know what you're talking about,\" Sam mumbled. He had told no one, not even his uncle, that he had refused to abandon his theory, spending years researching the various viscosities of different dyes and ranges of UV light. He had kept his studies under close wrap, not wanting to humiliate himself until he could test it in the field, try it when no one else was around to ridicule him. Suddenly he realized he was not unlike his uncle in keeping secrets.\n\nMaggie's eyes glowed in the dark. \"I read your paper. You found a way to make it work, didn't you, Sam?\"\n\nHe just stood, unblinking. How had she known? Finally, the shock faded enough for him to speak. \"I think I solved it. But I haven't had a chance to put it through a field trial.\"\n\nMaggie pointed toward the ruins. \"Then it's about time. The others are already waiting for us by the entrance to the excavation.\" She turned to leave.\n\n\"Others?\"\n\nGlancing back over her shoulders, Maggie frowned. \"Ah sure, Sam\u2026Norman and Ralph. They should be in on this.\"\n\n\"I suppose.\" Sam rolled his eyes, preparing himself to be humiliated if he should fail. At least, Philip had not been invited. Sam could not have tolerated failing in front of Mr. Harvard. \"Let me grab my bottles and UV light.\"\n\nAs Sam reached for his tent flap, the jungle suddenly erupted in a cacophony of screeches and calls. A thousand birds burst from the canopies around the camp and took to the air.\n\nMaggie took a step closer to Sam. \"What the hell\u2026?\"\n\nSam glanced around, but the rain forest quickly settled back down. \"Something must have spooked them.\" He listened a bit longer, but only the humming of the generator reached his ears. The jungle lay silent, like a dark stranger staring toward them. Sam studied the forest a moment more, then turned back to his tent. \"I'll get my stuff.\"\n\nHe pushed through the flap and collected the satchel that held his dyes and special ultraviolet handlamp. As he was leaving, his eyes settled on the old Winchester. Instinctively, he grabbed it and slung it over his shoulder, but not before quickly loading a few 44/40 cartridges into the rifle's magazine and pocketing a cardboard box of spare shells. After years of overnight camps in the Texas wilderness, Sam had learned to be prepared.\n\nCrawling out of the tent, he found Maggie's back to him. She searched the edges of the jungle. \"It's still so bloody quiet,\" she said. \"It's like the forest's holding its breath.\"\n\n\"If we want to test this,\" Sam said, anxious to be under way, \"we'd better hightail it. Dawn is only a few hours away.\"\n\nMaggie nodded, reluctantly pulling her gaze away from the jungle.\n\nSam led the way toward the terraced ruins. With the rain forest so subdued, their footsteps on the granite stones seemed unusually loud. Sam found himself walking carefully, afraid of disturbing the silence, as though they were strolling through a graveyard at midnight. He was glad when they finally reached the summit of the Sun Plaza. Light shone up from the excavated shaft.\n\nLimned in the light were two shadowy figures\u2014one thin and one wide. Norman and Ralph. They stood apart from one another.\n\nThe ex-linebacker raised a hand in greeting. He pointed toward the shaft. \"Who left the lamps on?\"\n\nMaggie shook her head as she climbed onto the flat-topped plaza. \"I know I switched them off.\" She surveyed the ruins around them. \"That feckin' Guillermo probably turned them on during his rounds and left 'em on. Where is he anyway? I thought he was supposed to be guarding this place.\"\n\n\"He's probably in the forest watching out for those looters from last night. Maybe he was the one who spooked all those birds.\"\n\nThe jungle remained deathly still. Norman eyed the black forest. \"I never liked the dark. I get the willies alone in my darkroom at home.\"\n\nRalph teased him with a remarkable rendition of the Twilight Zone theme. Norman pretended not to hear.\n\nSam climbed down first while Maggie and the others followed. Once at the bottom of the ladder, he helped Maggie off the rungs.\n\nShe turned to him, her head slightly bent, her palm still resting in his. \"Did you hear something just then?\"\n\nSam shook his head. All he could hear was his own pounding heart. He found his hand squeezing hers.\n\nRalph and Norman joined them.\n\nMaggie pulled her hand away, listened for a moment more, then shrugged and took the lead. \"Must be those Incan ghosts,\" she muttered.\n\n\"Thanks, Maggie,\" Norman said sourly. \"That's just what I wanted to hear when crawling through the ruins at midnight. I already got a bad enough feeling about this.\"\n\nRalph again started his Twilight Zone theme.\n\n\"Bite me, Isaacson,\" Norman snapped.\n\n\"I don't lean that way, Normie.\"\n\n\"Are you sure? You were a football player, weren't you? What's with all that ass slapping and piling on one another?\"\n\n\"Shut up.\"\n\n\"Jesus,\" Maggie exclaimed. \"Enough from the both of you. I can't hear a feckin' thing.\"\n\nFollowing behind Maggie, Sam ignored them all, lost in appreciating how Maggie moved as she climbed. Through the thin cotton khakis, her legs were muscled and firm and their shapeliness drew his eyes up her curves. Sam swallowed hard and wiped the dampness from his brow with a handkerchief. She's a colleague, he had to remind himself. Like the army, his uncle frowned on fraternization while in the field. Unwanted attentions among members could strain a small site.\n\nStill, it never hurt to look.\n\nAs they traversed to the second level of the dig, Sam marveled at his uncle's revelation. This was once a Moche pyramid! It was hard to believe. Sam ran a palm along the granite stone walls.\n\nAhead, Maggie stopped again, pausing with her hand on the ladder that led to the third level. \"Now I know I heard something,\" she whispered. \"Words\u2026and somethin' knocking\u2026\"\n\nSam strained to hear, but he still heard nothing. He glanced to Ralph and Norman. Both men shook their heads. Norman's eyes were huge behind his eyeglasses. Sam swung back to Maggie, ready to dismiss her worry, when a scream burst from below, blowing past them like a frightened bird.\n\nMaggie turned wide eyes toward Sam.\n\nSam swung the Winchester from his shoulder.\n\nGil studied the metal tiles all around him. The gears of the hidden mechanism ticked and groaned behind the walls.\n\nMiguel shared the gold square with him, crowding Gil's right side. The squat man's eyes were wide with fear, and words of prayer whispered from his lips.\n\nGil ignored him. No gods would protect them there. Survival was up to them. But Gil was not only interested in survival. His eyes kept drifting to the wealth at the feet of the golden idol. Counting, Gil noted that fifteen rows of tiles lay between him and the statue of the Incan king, and fifteen rows lay behind him. Fifteen meters either way. Too far to jump.\n\nHe scowled at the trap, sensing that there must be some key to crossing this floor. He turned in a slow circle. The tiles' pattern was not that of a checkerboard but a complicated crisscrossing pattern of gold and silver squares. It was not unlike some of the geometric patterns found in the work of Incan tapestries and clothing. There was an order, a clue perhaps to a safe course. But what was it?\n\nJuan's corpse lay upon a neighboring gold tile, where he had managed to drag himself before dying. Blood pooled under his silent form. No new trap had been triggered when Juan had crawled off the silver tile that had originally sprung the trap. Could that be the answer? Were the gold tiles safe and the silver a danger?\n\nThere was only one way to find out.\n\nGil unslung his short rifle and poked it into Miguel's ribs. \"Move,\" he ordered.\n\nMiguel glanced from the rifle's barrel to Gil's face. \"\u00bfQue?\"\n\n\"Hop over to that gold square,\" Gil nodded toward a tile beyond the neighboring silver one. The direction led toward the golden idol. If they were to risk their lives, Gil wanted something to show for their efforts.\n\nMiguel still stood frozen, disbelief and horror on his face.\n\n\"Go. Or die right here.\" Gil shoved his rifle harder against Miguel.\n\nHis squat companion stumbled back a step, his heels just inside the square. \"Please, ese, don't make me do this.\"\n\n\"Do as I say, or I'll use your corpse to test the tiles.\"\n\nMiguel trembled, gaze swinging between the rifle and Juan's corpse. Finally, his shoulders sagged. He turned to face the deadly pattern, made the sign of the cross, and jumped. His legs were so wobbly from fear that he barely managed to leap the short distance. He landed hard and fell to his hands and knees on the gold tile.\n\nGil saw that the man's eyelids were squeezed tight as he froze in place, expecting the worse. But nothing happened. Slowly, Miguel opened his eyes and pushed shakily to his feet. He turned toward Gil, a feeble smile on his lips.\n\nGil called to him, relieved to find his theory proving true. \"The gold tiles are safe. Stick to them and we can get in and out of here.\" Still, Gil was taking no chances on being wrong. He waved his rifle. \"Go on to the next, and I'll follow.\"\n\nMiguel nodded. The next gold tile adjoined the tile he occupied. He merely had to step onto it. He did so slowly. Again nothing happened. The ancient mechanism just continued its continual creaking from beyond the walls and ceiling. Miguel moved onto the next golden tile, again having to leap a silver one. Still safe.\n\nAs Gil followed, he saw Miguel's attitude grow more relaxed, though his lips still moved silently in continuous prayer. The pair slowly worked their way across the chamber. Tile by tile, row by row, they neared the golden idol. At last they reached the last tier that stood between them and the treasure. The tiles were all silver. The only gold tile was the one upon which the idol and the treasure rested.\n\nMiguel turned to Gil, his expression clearly asking what now?\n\nGil studied the Incan king. Against the backdrop of black granite, the statue's gold eyes seemed to stare back, mocking him. Gil bristled. He would not be thwarted by a bunch of idol worshipers. Not when he was so close.\n\nHe moved beside Miguel, again sharing his tile. Neither dared cross that silver river of tiles to the treasure beyond, but that did not mean he could not pilfer the piled wealth at the statue's feet. Holding his rifle by its butt, Gil reached out with his weapon, stretching his arm across the silver toward the statue.\n\nThe tip of his rifle just reached the hoard. Gil nudged a few of the items, searching. He held his breath as he did so. What if there was another booby trap there? His straining ears seemed to pick up a slight change in the cadence of the mechanism's gears. He cringed, but nothing happened.\n\nGil swore under his breath. The rifle bobbled in his extended grip. He was getting too jumpy. He took a steadying breath, then concentrated on his task, refusing to fail. He ground his teeth and ignored the growing burn from his straining shoulder. Finally, his efforts paid off. A pair of twin goblets was exposed, one gold, one silver, each embedded with rubies and emeralds in a serpent pattern. But the feature that most attracted Gil was the arched handles on the cups.\n\nSomething he could hook!\n\nSlipping his rifle's barrel through the handle of one, he lifted it free of the pile. He tilted the weapon, and the silver goblet slid down the barrel to rest against its wooden stock. Gil pulled the weapon back and stood. He shook the treasure off his weapon and passed it to Miguel. \"For your bravery, mi amigo.\"\n\nMiguel held the goblet in trembling fingers. There was enough wealth in that single token to set up the squat man and his family for the rest of their lives. Miguel whispered a prayer of thanks.\n\nGil frowned and turned away. His companion should be thanking him, not his God. Gil knelt again and stretched his rifle to retrieve the golden cup. The second goblet was soon in his hands. Here was his reward. He knew a dealer in stolen antiquities that would pay triple the price of the gold in the cup for any intact Incan artifacts. Gil shoved the goblet into his jacket and turned his back on the statue.\n\nHe plotted what he had to do next. He patted the grenade in his vest. He had to protect the rest of the wealth here until he could bring in a demolitions team to neutralize the booby trap. Once the cursed apparatus was disabled, he and his team could collect the rest of the riches at their leisure. In his mind, he pictured the only other obstacle to his plans: the group of americanos sleeping snugly in their tents. He gripped his rifle. They must never see the dawn.\n\nWith his plan set, Gil waved Miguel on toward the exit. His companion needed no further coaxing, clearly glad to escape with his single small treasure. Miguel hopped to the next gold square.\n\nIt shot up under him with a scream of gears and pulleys. The tile, with Miguel atop it, flew toward the ceiling, borne up by a thick trunk of wood. Overhead, the corresponding silver tile in the ceiling slid back. Silver spikes thrust downward.\n\nMiguel saw his death and tried to roll off the tile, taking his chance on the fall below\u2014but he was not quick enough. His legs, from the knees down, were pinned by the spikes, driven through muscle and bone. Miguel screamed. Bones snapped like broken twigs as he thrashed in the grip of the spikes.\n\nThe gold tile then descended, sliding smoothly back to its place in the floor's pattern. Smeared with blood, it was empty. Gil looked up. Miguel still hung by his spiked legs from the roof.\n\nBlood rained down from Miguel's ruined legs. He thrashed, arms pushing against the stakes. He finally won his freedom and fell the two stories to the metal floor. Again the crack of bones sounded with the impact.\n\nGil had glanced away when Miguel fell. He turned back. Miguel lay broken upon the tiles. Only one limb was still intact. The man tried to push up on his good right arm, but the pain was too much. He collapsed again. Too weak, too shocked to scream, only a low moan escaped his lips. He stared at Gil with begging eyes.\n\nGil could not save him.\n\nRaising his rifle, Gil whispered, \"I'm sorry, ese.\" He shot Miguel through the forehead, the rifle's blast deafening in the enclosed space. Miguel's moaning stopped. Blood dribbled from the small hole in his forehead.\n\nGil studied the tiles once again. A gold one had killed Miguel! Why were they no longer safe? Was his theory wrong to begin with\u2014or had the rules changed? He remembered the shift in the mechanism's cadence as he had fished through the treasure. Something had altered. Gil stared. Miguel had landed on a silver square with no repercussion. Were the silver tiles now the safe ones? Gold when one approached, silver as one left. Could it be that easy?\n\nGil had no other cohort to bully into taking the risk. He would have to test his theory himself. Cautiously, he reached with his rifle and tapped its butt on the next tile\u2014a silver one. Nothing happened. But did that prove anything? Maybe it would take his full weight to spring the trap. Slowly, he reached a booted foot and placed it on the square. Holding his breath, he leaned his weight onto this leg, ready to leap back with any shift in the tile or change in the gear's timbre. Soon he stood with one leg on the new silver tile and one on the gold tile. Still, nothing changed.\n\nCringing, Gil pulled his other leg over onto the silver. He stood motionless. No harm came to him. Safe.\n\nSighing out his trapped breath, he wiped the sweat from his eyes. Tears ran down his cheeks. He did not know when they had begun to flow.\n\nHe stood on the silver tile. The next one would require leaping a gold square. Before he could lose his nerve, he leaped, rifle in hand and landed roughly on the silver tile. He froze but remained safe.\n\nGrinning, he straightened and glanced back to the king. \"I beat you, you bastard!\"\n\nHe turned toward the exit and worked his way cautiously, but more rapidly, across the floor. It was his speed that saved his life. He hopped from one silver tile to its neighbor, just leaping off the first as it opened under him. From the shift in his footing as he jumped, he fell hard to the next tile. Overhead, a spray of water jetted from small openings that appeared in the corresponding roof tile. It showered into the newly opened pit behind him. Gil rolled around. A bit of the mist from the spray struck his exposed cheek; it burned with a touch of fire. Gil shoved away. Acid!\n\nHe touched his flaming cheek. His skin already lay blistered and oozing.\n\nGil shivered at the thought of being trapped in that pit below when the shower of acid struck. His death would have been long and painful.\n\nThe burning rain ended and the silver tile slid closed over the pit. Death had come within a breath of claiming him. Trembling, he struggled to his feet.\n\nHe stared at the traitorous silver tile. Silver! He had been wrong all along. Only pure luck and chance had carried him this far.\n\nWith this horrible realization dawning, he swung to face the exit. Escape lay three rows away\u2014about three meters. He now knew he could trust none of the tiles. He would have to risk jumping. If he dived, he might just make it.\n\nGil stared at his rifle. He could not chance its weight. He dropped it along with the ammunition belt slung over his chest to the floor. Taking out the heavy golden goblet, Gil stared at it a moment, then returned it to inside his vest. He would rather die than lose this treasure. He shrugged out of his boots instead. Besides, if he was barefooted, he had a better grip on the tile's silver surface anyway.\n\nOnce ready, he backed to the far edge, giving himself as much of a running start as possible. But he had only two short steps at most. Girding himself, Gil closed his eyes, and for the first time in decades, he prayed to his God for strength and luck. Prepared, he opened his eyes and clenched his fist. \"Now or never,\" he mumbled.\n\nLeaning forward, he dashed two quick steps, then flung himself headfirst with all the strength in his legs. He flew across the rows of tiles and landed hard upon the stone floor, ducking enough to take the brunt of the collision on his left side. Something snapped in his shoulder as he rolled into the short passage and came to rest against the toppled stone door.\n\nWith a grimace, Gil shoved to his feet. He ignored the shooting pain in his neck. He had made it! Fingering his shoulder, he realized he had most likely broken his collarbone. Not a big deal. He had once taken three bullets in the chest. In comparison, this was nothing more than a scratch.\n\nGil pulled free the precious goblet. One of its lips was slightly bent from the weight of his fall. But, like Gil, it had sustained no real harm.\n\nStepping to the edge of the deadly pattern, Gil raised the chalice and spat toward the distant Incan king, the gold idol bright against the black stone. \"I'll come back and rape you yet!\" he cursed.\n\nWith that promise, he turned on a heel and fled.\n\nMaggie knelt by the top of the ladder that led down to the third level of the ruins. \"Someone's coming!\" she whispered, pushing Sam back from her shoulder.\n\nAn instinct told her they needed to hide. Raised on the streets of Belfast, Maggie knew to listen to that inner voice of hers. Surviving among the constant gunfire and bombings between the warring Irish factions and the British military had taught Maggie O'Donnel the value of a good hiding place.\n\n\"C'mon,\" Maggie urged, pulling Sam with her. Norman and Ralph followed.\n\nSam resisted, raising his rifle. \"Maybe it's looters. We should stop them.\"\n\n\"And get us all killed, you stupid git? You don't know how many are down there, or how well they're armed. Now let's go!\"\n\nNorman agreed. \"She's right. The leftist guerrillas around here, the Shining Path, are well equipped. Russian AK-47s and the like. We should leave any investigation to the security team.\"\n\nSam stared back to the ladder, then shook his head and followed Maggie. She led the group to a side chamber. No sodium lamps lit the room. Darkness swallowed them.\n\n\"Stay low,\" Maggie warned. \"But be prepared to run on my signal.\"\n\nSam muttered as he hunkered down beside her, \"Maggie O'Donnel, combat archaeologist.\"\n\nMaggie could just make out Sam's form as a darker shadow among the others, but she could imagine his sarcastic smile.\n\n\"You know,\" Ralph added in a whisper, \"it's probably just Gil or one of his men.\"\n\n\"And the scream?\" Maggie said.\n\n\"I'm sure that\u2014\"\n\nMaggie reached a hand to his knee to quiet the large man. She could hear the creaking wood as someone mounted the ladder from below. Whoever climbed was in a hurry. She could hear his panting breath and his scrambled flight. Lowering herself closer to the stone floor, Maggie watched the climber's head rise from the shaft.\n\nShe recognized the lanky black hair and the spidery white scar on his bronze cheek. Guillermo Sala. The ex-policeman frantically crawled from the ladder, his feet almost slipping. Maggie allowed a breath of relief to escape her throat. Ralph was right. It was just the camp's guard.\n\nShe started to stand when she spotted the large burn blistered on his cheek. It cracked and bled. Gil swiped a hand to his wounded face and smeared the blood across his shirt. His eyes were wide, the whites of which almost glowed in the lantern near the ladder. His lips were thin with hatred\u2014but she also sensed fear and shock emanating from him.\n\nMaggie knew that expression. A childhood friend, Patrick Dugan, had worn the same shocked face when caught by a stray bullet during a firefight back in Belfast. He had raised his head too soon from their shared hiding place in a roadside drainage ditch. Maggie had known better. Even as Patrick's body collapsed atop her, she hadn't moved. Danger lay in haste. Having learned her lesson, Maggie stayed hidden and kept the others back with a hand.\n\nWhat had happened below? What could frighten a man as hard and tough as Gil?\n\nAs on that noon day in the streets of Belfast, Maggie knew safety still lay in the shadows. She peered from the room's edge as Gil reached to his vest and fingered an object bulging in a pocket. It seemed to center the panicked man, as a crucifix would reassure an old woman.\n\nThen, from another pocket, he pulled free what looked like a green apple with a handle. It took Maggie a heartbeat to recognize the armament, so out of place in an ancient Incan ruin.\n\nBloody hell! A grenade!\n\nWith a final glance at the shaft, Gil scrabbled to his feet and raced down the tunnel.\n\nListening to his fading footsteps, Maggie found she could not move. In her mind's eye, the grenade still loomed large\u2014a familiar weapon in the war on the streets of her home. Buried childhood panic swelled, threatening to choke her. Her hands trembled. She clenched her fists, refusing to succumb to the panic attack that verged. Her vision swam slightly as her breath became stilted.\n\nSam must have sensed her distress. \"Maggie\u2026?\" He reached to her shoulder.\n\nHis touch ignited her. She sprang to her feet. \"Och, we need to get out of here,\" she said, her words rushed. \"Now!\"\n\nSam pulled his Stetson firmer on his head. \"Why? It's only Guillermo.\"\n\nHer face fierce, Maggie swung toward Sam. The Texan had not seen the grenade. Sam backed a step from whatever he saw in her eyes. She did not have time to explain her fears. \"Go, you bloody wanker!\" she hollered, the panic thickening the Irish brogue on her tongue. She shoved Sam toward the tunnel and waved the others after him.\n\nSam's long legs ate up the distance. Maggie followed, keeping one eye on their back trail. Ahead, Ralph kept up with Sam, but Norman, burdened with his cameras, had slipped behind.\n\n\"Hurry,\" she urged the journalist.\n\nNorman glanced back. His face was stark white in the glow of the lamps. But he fought for more speed and closed the distance as the two quicker men reached the ladder to the next level of the dig.\n\nAhead, Sam flew up the wooden rungs with Ralph at his heels. Norman went next. Maggie stood at the foot of the ladder, her ears straining for any danger behind them. Far away, echoing up from below, she thought she could just make out a deep ticking, like a large watch winding down.\n\n\"Maggie, c'mon!\" Sam whispered urgently to her from above.\n\nMaggie turned to find the ladder clear. For a moment, time had slipped away from her. It was one of the signs of a pending attack. Not now! She flew up the ladder. Sam helped her off the last rung, hauling her up with his arms. The ladder to the surface lay only a handful of meters away. On her feet, Maggie led the way.\n\nShe followed the zigzagging line of lanterns, lights flickering past as she ran. As she spotted the ladder's base, she heard a low grunting coming from the shaft to the surface. It was Gil. It sounded like he had almost reached the plaza above.\n\nWith her goal in sight and a freshening breeze from above encouraging her, Maggie sped faster.\n\nSuddenly, words echoed down to her: \"Swallow this, you hijo de puta!\"\n\nMaggie froze as a hard object pinged and bounced down the shaft to land at the foot of the ladder. She stared in disbelief at the green metallic cylinder. It rested in the mud beside the wooden beam that acted as the main shaft support. The grenade!\n\nMaggie cartwheeled back toward Sam. He grunted as she fell against his chest. \"Back\u2026back\u2026back\u2026\" she chanted.\n\nThe group tumbled, tangled in each other's arms, away from the ladder.\n\n\"What\u2014?\" Sam said in her ear.\n\nWith adrenaline fierce in her veins, she shoved Sam and the others into a side chamber.\n\nThe blast caught them at the entrance. The concussion and explosion of air propelled them all across the room. They struck the far wall and fell to the stone floor in a pile of limbs.\n\nWith the lamps flickering around them, Maggie rolled up to her knees. Past her ringing ears, she heard Ralph groan beside her. Maggie took stock of her own injuries. She seemed to be unscathed, but as she viewed the damage done by the grenade through the settling dust, a moan escaped her throat, too.\n\nThey were trapped!\n\nThe passage that led to the last ladder was now a tumble of rock and dirt. The grenade had collapsed the tunnel to the surface, taking out a good section of the first level's ceiling. Stones lay in a jumble from the triggered landslide.\n\nAround her, the remainder of the ruins grumbled and groaned with the shift in stresses. Thirty feet of earth pushed to collapse more of the subterranean ruin.\n\nWhat were they going to do?\n\nThen the lights flickered a final time and died. Blackness swallowed them up.\n\n\"Everyone okay?\" Sam asked numbly, his voice exaggerated by his deafened ears.\n\nNorman answered, \"Fine. I'm buried thirty feet underground\u2026in a tomb. But otherwise, I'm fine.\"\n\n\"Okay here, too, Sam,\" Ralph added, his usual bravado dimmed.\n\nSam coughed on the thick dust in the air. \"Maggie?\"\n\nShe could no longer answer. She felt her limbs stiffen and begin the first of the characteristic tremors. She fell back upon the stone floor as the seizure grabbed her body and dragged her consciousness away.\n\nThe last she heard was Norman's strangled cry. \"Sam, something's wrong with Maggie!\"\n\nGil fled from the blast in the pit, the roar ripping through the quiet jungle. Smoke and debris, sweeping up into the night, chased him down the slope to the floor of the camp. Though the loose stones cut his bare feet, he scrambled down the stairs, cursing himself for abandoning his boots below. Why hadn't he tossed his footwear and rifle free of the booby trap before he jumped? But he knew the answer. He had panicked.\n\nOverhead, a flock of frightened parrots scattered across the beam of one of the nearby spotlights. The blaze of blue-and-red plumage across the black night startled him. As the single explosion echoed away, the jungle answered the grenade's challenge with bird screeches and monkey calls.\n\nThe jungle had awakened\u2014as had the camp below.\n\nLights swelled within several of the workers' cheap tents. Shadows already moved inside as the sleepers awakened. Even one of the students' tents blossomed with the warm glow.\n\nWeaponless and with no companions, Gil dared not try to take the camp alone. He would have to gather other men and return quickly to eliminate the americanos and their workers. At least the grenade had managed to bring down the only entrance to the subterranean ruins. The bounty below should be protected until he could return with men and construction tools to dig it free. Not concerned about \"damaging the fragile site,\" his team could have the treasure hoard plucked in short order. A day or two at the most.\n\nYet, before Gil could gather more men, he had one more mission to complete here at the camp. Reaching the cluster of tents, he slipped into the darker shadows between two of the workers' rough shelters. Faces began to peek out of tent flaps. Their eyes were surely on the plume of dirt still smoking from the excavation site.\n\nNo one spotted Gil.\n\nAs he slipped behind the tents, the whispered squabble in the guttural Quechan tongue could be heard from the neighboring tent. A shrill voice also called from where the students kept their more expensive shelters. \"Guillermo! Sam! What happened?\" It was the pompous leader of these maricon students.\n\nGil ignored the growing exchange of voices. From a pile of stacked work tools, he silently removed a pickax and shearing knife. Crossing to the rear of one of the shelters, Gil used the knife to slice a new entrance. His sharp blade hissed through the thick canvas. Slipping through the hole, Gil entered the tent with his pickax.\n\nHe studied his quarry\u2014the satellite communication system. Luckily, he did not need to wreak havoc on the entire assembly. It had a weak link. The small computer itself. Much of the other equipment had spare parts, but not the CPU. Without it, the camp would be cut off from sounding the alarm or calling for help.\n\nGil raised the pickax over his shoulder and waited. His fractured collarbone protested the weight of the iron tool\u2014but he did not have long to pause. Again Philip Sykes's angered voice barked frantic orders from his tent flap, clearly scared to leave the safety of his shelter: \"Sala, where the hell are you?\"\n\nAs the student yelled, Gil drove the ax's spike into the center of the computer. Cobalt sparks bloomed in the shadowed interior of the tent, but they quickly died away. Gil did not bother hauling the pickax free or checking to see if his sabotage had been noticed. He simply ducked back through the sliced rear of the tent and darted away.\n\nWith all eyes turned toward the smoking tunnel on the plaza above, Gil slipped into the jungle fringe unseen, knife in hand and revenge in his heart.\n\nHe clenched the blade's hilt in a white-knuckled fist.\n\nNo one bested Guillermo Sala\u2014especially not an ancient Incan idol!\n\n\"Hurry, Sam!\" Norman's voice was frantic in the darkness.\n\nIn the stygian darkness of the temple ruins, Sam dug through his bag of research tools. None of them had thought to bring a flashlight. He would have to improvise. Blind, his fingers sifted through the clinking bottles. His palm finally settled on his buried Wood's lamp. It was the ultraviolet light source used to illuminate his deciphering dyes. Pulling it free, Sam clicked it on.\n\nUnder the glow of ultraviolet light, an eerie tableau appeared. Dust, which still hung in the air from the explosion, fluoresced like snow in the odd purplish light but did little to obscure the others. The teeth, whites of the eyes, and pale clothing of his companions all shone with an unnatural brightness.\n\nNorman Fields knelt beside Maggie. She stared at the ceiling, her back arched off the stone, her heels drumming on the ancient floor. Norman held her shoulders, while Ralph hovered over them like a dark phantom. Norman glanced up at Sam. \"She's having some type of seizure.\"\n\nSam scooted beside them. \"She must have hit her head. Maybe a bad concussion.\" He lifted his lamp to examine her eyes, but the ultraviolet light did little to illuminate her pupils. Under the glow, her facial muscles twitched and convulsed; her eyelids fluttered. \"I can't tell for sure.\" Sam examined his companions' faces.\n\nNone of them knew what to do.\n\nSmall noises of strangulation escaped Maggie's throat.\n\n\"Aren't you supposed to keep her from swallowing or biting her tongue or something?\" Ralph said, uncertain.\n\nSam nodded. Already Maggie's face had taken on a vaguely purplish hue. \"I need a gag.\"\n\nNorman reached to his back pocket and extracted a small handkerchief. \"Will this work?\"\n\nSam had no idea, so he simply took the scrap of cloth and twisted it into a rope. He hesitated as he reached toward Maggie, uncertain what to do. A small sliver of saliva trailed from the corner of her mouth. Though slipping an iron bit in his horse's mouth was second nature to him, this was different. Sam fought back his fear.\n\nGently he tried to push Maggie's chin down, but her jaw muscles were clenched and quivering. It took extra force to pry her mouth open, more than he would have imagined. Finally, he used a finger to roll the tip of her tongue forward. Her mouth was hot and very wet. He cringed but worked the handkerchief back between her molars, pinning her tongue down and keeping her from gnashing.\n\n\"Good job,\" Norman congratulated him.\n\nAlready, Maggie's breathing seemed more even.\n\n\"I think it's ending,\" Ralph said. \"Look.\"\n\nMaggie's heels had stopped their drumming, and her back relaxed to the floor.\n\n\"Thank God,\" Sam muttered.\n\nAfter a few more seconds, Maggie's trembling stopped. An arm rose to bat weakly at the empty air. She blinked a few times, her eyes glazed and blind. Then her gaze settled on him, and suddenly Sam knew Maggie was back. She stared at him, her anger bright.\n\nHer fingers found Sam's hand, the one holding her gag in place. She shoved him away and spat out the gag. \"Wh\u2026what are you trying to do?\" She rubbed roughly at her lips as she sat up.\n\nNorman saved Sam from having to explain. \"You were having a seizure.\"\n\nMaggie pointed to the saliva-soaked handkerchief. \"So you all tried to suffocate me? Next time just roll me on my side.\" She waved away their explanations. \"How long was I out?\"\n\nSam found his voice. \"Maybe two minutes.\"\n\nMaggie frowned. \"Damn.\" She crossed to the wall of tumbled stone and clay that blocked the way out of the buried temple.\n\nFrom her lack of surprise or concern at the seizure, it dawned on Sam that her attack was not from a blow to the head. He found his voice, his own anger freeing his tongue. \"You're an epileptic.\"\n\nThrowing back her hair, Maggie turned on him. \"Idiopathic epilepsy. I've had attacks periodically since I was a teenager.\"\n\n\"You should have told someone. Does Uncle Hank know?\"\n\nMaggie looked away. \"No. The attacks are so infrequent that I'm not even on medication. And it's been three years since I've had a seizure.\"\n\n\"Still you should have told my uncle.\"\n\nFire edged her words. \"And be kicked off this dig? If Professor Conklin knew about my epilepsy, he would never have let me come.\"\n\nSam met her heat with his own. \"Maybe you shouldn't have. Not only is it unsafe for you, but you've put my uncle at risk. He's both responsible and liable for this dig. He could be sued by your relatives.\"\n\nMaggie opened her mouth to argue, but Norman interrupted. \"If you're done debating medical histories and the finer points of tort law, might I point out that we are now buried under thirty feet of unstable rock?\"\n\nAs if to emphasize his words, stones groaned overhead, and a slide of dirt hissed from between two large granite slabs and trailed to the floor.\n\nRalph moved forward. \"For once I agree with Norman\u2014let's get our butts out of here.\"\n\n\"My point exactly,\" Norman added.\n\nSam frowned at Maggie once more. Emotions warred in his chest. He did not regret his words\u2014Maggie had a responsibility to tell someone\u2014but he wished he could go back and erase the anger from his outburst. He had been frightened for her, his heart squeezed into a tight ball, but he had been unable to voice such a thing aloud. So instead, he found himself snapping at her.\n\nSam turned away. In truth, a part of him understood her desire to maintain her secret. He, too, would have done anything to remain on this dig\u2014even lie.\n\nHe cleared his throat. \"Philip and the others must have heard the explosion. When they find our tents empty, they'll know we're down here and come looking. They'll dig us out.\"\n\n\"Hopefully they'll do so before we run out of air,\" Norman added.\n\nRalph moved to join the group now huddled before the collapsed section of the tunnel. \"I hate putting my life in Philip's hands.\"\n\nSam agreed. \"And if we survive, we'll never live it down.\"\n\nIn the dead quiet of the tomb, stones could be heard creaking and groaning overhead. Sam glanced up, raising his lamp. Dirt trickled from between several stones. The explosion had clearly destabilized the ruins of the pyramid. Reexcavating this site to rescue them might bring the entire temple down around their ears, and it was up to Philip Sykes to realize this.\n\nShaking his head, Sam lowered his lamp. He could not imagine a worse situation.\n\n\"Did you hear something?\" Norman asked. The photographer was staring now, not at the blockage of debris, but back behind them, deeper into the temples.\n\nSam listened. Then he heard it too and swung around. A soft sliding noise, like something being dragged along the stone floor of the ruins. It came from farther into the maze of tunnels and rooms. Beyond the edge of his light, from the total darkness, the noise seemed to be coming closer.\n\nMaggie touched his arm. \"What is it?\"\n\nWith her words, the noise abrubtly stopped.\n\nSam shook his head. \"I don't know,\" he whispered. \"But whatever it is, it now knows we're here.\"\n\nPhilip Sykes was hoarse from yelling. He stood in his bare feet at the flap of his tent, robe snugged tight to his slim figure. Why was no one answering him? Outside the tent, the camp was in turmoil after the explosion. Men ran across the shadowy ruins, some armed with bobbing flashlights, others with work tools. No one seemed to know what had happened. Spats of native Indian dialect were shouted from the top of the Sun Plaza, where the cloud of dust was finally dissipating. But Philip understood only a smattering of Quechan words. Not enough to decipher the frantic calls and answers.\n\nHe looked at the luminous dial of his watch. It was after midnight, for Christ's sake. Various scenarios played in his head. The looters from the previous day had returned with better arms, and they were attacking the camp. Or maybe the Quechan laborers themselves, a swarthy and suspicious lot, had mutinied. Or maybe one of the three generators had just exploded.\n\nPhilip clutched the collar of his robe tight to his neck. Where were his fellow students? Finally, fear and irritation drove him barefooted from the flap. He took a quick peek around the edge of his tent. Farther back, the three other shelters were dark humps huddled against the night. Why hadn't the others been roused? Were they hiding in the dark?\n\nStepping back to his own tent, Philip's eyes grew wide. Maybe he should do the same. His own lamplit shelter was surely an illuminated target for any aggressor. He darted inside and blew out the lamp. As he turned back to the tent's entrance, a huge black shadow filled the doorway. Philip gasped.\n\nA flashlight blinded him.\n\n\"What do you want?\" he moaned, his knees weak.\n\nThe light shifted to illuminate the face of one of the Quechan workers. Philip could not say which of the many laborers stood at his tent flap. They all looked the same to him. The man garbled some words of Quecha, but Philip understood none of it. Only the wave of the man's hand, indicating Philip should follow, was clear.\n\nStill, Philip hesitated. Did the man here mean him harm or was he trying to help? If only Denal, the filthy urchin from Cuzco who had acted as their translator, were there. Unable to communicate, Philip felt defenseless, isolated, and trapped among these foreigners.\n\nAgain the shadowy figure waved for Philip to follow, then stepped back and turned to leave. Philip found himself skittering after the man into the darkness. He did not want to be alone any longer. Barefooted still, he hurried to keep up.\n\nOutside the shelter of his tent, the night wind had grown a crisp edge to it. It sliced through Philip's robe to his bare skin. The man led him to the other students' tents. Once there, he threw back the flap to Sam's tent and flashed the light inside for Philip to see. Empty!\n\nPhilip backed up a step and surveyed the ruins. If the bastard was out there, why hadn't Conklin answered his calls? His Quechan guide showed him the other tents. They were empty, too. Sam, Maggie, Ralph, even the photographer Norman, had disappeared. Panic, more than the cold breezes from the mountaintops, set Philip's limbs to shaking. Where were they?\n\nThe worker turned to him. His eyes were dark shadows. He mumbled something in his native tongue. From his tone, the Indian was just as concerned.\n\nEdging farther away, Philip waved an arm behind him. \"We\u2026we need to call for help,\" he mumbled from behind chattering teeth. \"We need to let someone know what's going on.\"\n\nPhilip turned and hurried toward the communication tent. The Quechan worker followed with the flashlight. Philip's shadow jittered across the path ahead of him. He needed to alert the authorities. Whatever was happening, Philip could not handle it himself.\n\nAt the tent, Philip worked the zipper and snaps with fumbling fingers. Finally the flap was open, and he crawled within. The worker remained at the entrance, pointing the flashlight inside. In the beam of light, Philip stared wide-eyed at their communication equipment. A pickax was embedded in the heart of the central computer.\n\nPhilip slid to his knees with a moan. \"Oh, God\u2026no.\"\n\nSam held the Winchester pointed toward the dark corridor that led to the heart of the ruins. A furtive scuffing and shuffling moved toward them through the darkness.\n\nBeside him, Ralph held Sam's ultraviolet lamp out toward the darkness. Its illumination did little to pierce the well of shadows. What lay within the blackness remained a mystery.\n\nMaggie and Norman stood behind the two men. Leaning forward, Maggie whispered in Sam's ear, her breath hot on his neck. \"Gil was running from something. Something that scared the hell out of him.\"\n\nSam's arms trembled with her words, his grip on the rifle slipping. \"I don't need to hear this right now,\" he hissed back at her, steadying his hand.\n\nRalph had heard her words, too. The ex\u2013football player swallowed audibly and raised the lamp higher, as if that would spread the glow farther. It didn't.\n\nSam tired of this game of silences. He cleared his throat, and called out, \"Who's there!\"\n\nHis answer was instant and blinding. Light flared up from the dark corridor, so bright it stung the eye. The group tumbled backward. Sam's finger twitched on the rifle's trigger, but only instinct drilled into him from hunting trips with his uncle kept him from firing off a round: you never shoot what you can't see.\n\nSam kept his rifle pointed, but he eased back on the trigger.\n\nA squeaky voice, timid and frosted with terror, echoed up from behind the blinding light. \"It's me!\" The light suddenly tilted away from their gathered faces to play across the ceiling. A small figure stepped forward.\n\nSam lowered his weapon, silently thanking his uncle for his training in restraint. \"Denal?\" It was the young Indian lad who acted as their translator. The boy's face was ashen, his eyes glowing with fear. Sam shouldered his rifle. \"What the hell are you doing down here?\"\n\nThe boy hurried forward, keeping the flashlight he bore pointed down now. Words in fractured English rushed from him. \"I\u2026I see Gil sneakin' down here with Juan and Miguel. With bags of stuff. So I follow 'em.\"\n\nMaggie pushed beside the trembling boy and put an arm around him. \"What happened?\"\n\nDenal used his free hand to slip a cigarette to his lips. He did not light it, but its familiar presence seemed to calm him. He spoke around the cigarette. \"I no know\u2026not sure. After they broke the sealed door\u2014\"\n\n\"What!\" Sam gasped out. Even in their dire situation, such a betrayal shocked him.\n\nDenal merely nodded. \"I no see much. I stay out of sight. They crawl through door\u2026and\u2026and\u2026\" Denal glanced up to Sam, his eyes frightened. \"Then I hear screaming. I run. Hide.\"\n\nMaggie spoke, \"Goddamn. The feckin' bastard was going to loot the place right out from under our noses.\"\n\n\"But obviously something went wrong,\" Norman added tensely, glancing back at the wall of rubble behind them. He turned back around. \"What about the other two? Juan and Miguel?\"\n\n\"I no know.\" Denal seemed to see the blockage for the first time. He crossed to the cascade of boulders and clay. \"Guillermo run out\u2026I wait. I scared others might catch me. But no one come out. Then big boom. Stones fall\u2026I run.\" Denal raised a hand toward the tumbled section of the temple. \"I should no come down alone. I should tell you instead. I so stupid.\"\n\nSam took the Wood's lamp from Ralph and turned off its ultraviolet glow. \"Stupid? You at least thought to bring a flashlight.\"\n\nMaggie moved closer to Sam. \"What are we going to do?\"\n\n\"We'll just have to wait for Philip to realize we're down here.\"\n\nNorman scowled at Sam's side. \"We'll be waiting a long time.\"\n\nDenal crossed back to them. \"Why no call him on walkie-talkie?\"\n\nSam frowned. \"Like the flashlight, that's another thing none of us thought to bring.\"\n\nDenal reached to a back pocket and pulled free a small handheld unit. \"Here.\"\n\nSam stared at the walkie-talkie. A smile grew on his face. \"Denal, don't ever call yourself stupid again.\" He took the pocket radio. \"If you're stupid, what does that make all of us?\"\n\nDenal stared gloomily back at the rubble. \"Trapped.\"\n\nPhilip still knelt in the communication tent when the camp's radio erupted with static. The loud noise drew a gasp from the startled student. Garbled words flowed between screeches of static: \"\u2026stones collapsed\u2026someone pick up the line\u2026\"\n\nIt was English! Someone he could talk to! Philip scrambled for the receiver. He stabbed at the transmission button and spoke into the receiver. \"Base camp here. Is anyone out there? We have an emergency! Over!\"\n\nPhilip waited for a response. Hopefully whoever was there would be able to send help. Static was his only answer for a few strained heartbeats; then words formed again. \"Philip?\u2026It's Sam.\"\n\nSam? Philip's heart sank. He raised the receiver. \"Where are you? Over.\"\n\n\"We're trapped down in the temple ruins. Gil blew the entrance.\" Sam explained about the security chief's betrayal. \"The whole structure is unstable now.\"\n\nPhilip silently thanked whatever angel had been watching over him and kept him from being buried down there with the others.\n\n\"You'll need to send an S.O.S. to Machu Picchu,\" Sam finished. \"We'll need heavy equipment.\"\n\nEyeing the pickax in the damaged CPU, Philip groaned softly. He clicked the transmit button. \"I have no way of reaching anyone, Sam. Someone took out the satellite system. We're cut off.\"\n\nThere was a long pause as Philip waited for a response. He imagined the string of expletives flowing from the Texan's lips. When Sam next spoke, his voice was angered. \"Okay, Philip, then at first light send someone out on foot. Someone fast! In the meantime, you'll need to survey the damage on the surface when the sun's up. If you and the workers could begin a cautious excavation\u2014at least get started\u2014then when help arrives you can move quickly. I don't know how long the air will hold out down here.\"\n\nPhilip nodded, even though Sam could not see. His mind dwelt on other concerns\u2014like his own safety. \"But what about Gil?\" he asked.\n\n\"What about him?\" Sam's voice had a trace of irritation.\n\n\"He's surely long gone.\"\n\n\"But what if he comes back?\"\n\nAgain a long pause. \"You're right. If he blew the place and sabotaged the communications, he must be planning to return. You'd better post guards, too.\"\n\nPhilip swallowed hard as the growing danger he faced dawned on him. What if Gil returned with more bandits? They had only a few hunting rifles and a handful of machetes. They would be sitting ducks for any marauders. Philip glanced to the single Quechan Indian who still held the flashlight at the tent's entrance. And who among these swarthy-skinned foreigners could he trust?\n\nA squelch of static drew Philip's attention back to the radio. \"I'm gonna sign off now, Philip. I have to conserve this walkie-talkie's battery. I'll check back with you after sunrise to get an update on how things look from above. Okay?\"\n\nPhilip held the receiver with a hand that now shook slightly. \"Okay. I'll try to reach you at six.\"\n\n\"We'll be here. Over and out.\"\n\nPhilip settled the receiver back to the radio unit and stood up. From outside the tent, the worst of the commotion from the riled camp seemed to have died down. Philip crossed to the tent's flap and stood beside the small Quechan Indian.\n\nBarefoot, wearing only his robe, Philip stared out at the black jungle and the smoking ruins. The chill of the night had settled deep into his bones. He hugged the robe tight to his frame. Deep in his heart, a part of him wished he had been trapped down in the temple with the others.\n\nAt least he wouldn't be so alone."
            },
            {
                "title": "Day Two",
                "text": "[ Janan Pacha ]\n\n[ Tuesday, August 21, 7:12 A.M. ]\n\n[ Regency Hotel ]\n\n[ Baltimore, Maryland ]\n\nAs early-morning sunlight pierced the gaps in the heavy hotel curtains, Henry sat at the small walnut desk and stared at the row of artifacts he had recovered from the mummy: A silver ring, a scrap of faded illegible parchment, two Spanish coins, a ceremonial silver dagger, and the heavy Dominican cross. Henry sensed that clues to the priest's fate were locked in these few items, like a stubborn jigsaw puzzle. If only he could put it all together\u2026\n\nShaking his head, Henry stretched a crick from his back and rubbed at his eyes under his glasses. He must look a mess. He still wore his wrinkled grey suit, though he had tossed the jacket on the rumpled bed. He had been up all night studying the items, managing only a short catnap around midnight. The artifacts kept drawing him back to the hotel-room desk and the array of books and periodicals he had borrowed from the library at Johns Hopkins. Henry simply could not quit working at the puzzle, especially after his first discovery.\n\nHe picked up the friar's silver ring for the thousandth time. Earlier, he had gently rubbed the tarnish from its surface and uncovered faint lettering around a central heraldic icon. Henry raised his magnifying lens and read the name on the ring: \"de Almagro.\" The surname of the Dominican friar. Just this one piece to the puzzle brought the man to life in Henry's mind. He was no longer just a mummy. With a name, he had become flesh and blood again. Someone with a history, a past, even a family. So much power in just a name.\n\nLaying the magnifier down, Henry retrieved his pen and began adding final details to his sketch of the ring's symbol. A part of it was clearly a family crest\u2014surely the de Almagro coat of arms\u2014but a second image was incorporated around the family heraldry: a crucifix with a set of crossed sabers above it. The symbol was vaguely familiar, but Henry could not place it.\n\n\"Who were you, Friar de Almagro?\" he mumbled as he worked. \"What were you doing at that lost city? Why did the Incas mummify you?\" Chewing his lower lip in concentration, Henry finished the last flourishes on his drawing, then picked the paper up and stared at it. \"This will have to do.\"\n\nHe glanced to his watch. It was almost eight o'clock. He hated to call so early, but he could not wait any longer. He swiveled his chair and reached for the phone, making sure the portable fax unit was hooked in properly. Once satisfied, he dialed the number.\n\nThe voice that answered was officious and curt. \"Archbishop Kearney's office. How may I help you?\"\n\n\"This is Professor Henry Conklin. I called yesterday to inquire about gaining access to your order's old records.\"\n\n\"Yes, Professor Conklin. Archbishop Kearney has been awaiting your call. One moment please.\"\n\nHenry frowned at the receptionist's manner. He had not expected to reach the archbishop himself, but some minor clerk in their records department.\n\nA stern but warm voice picked up the line. \"Ah, Professor Conklin, your news about the mummified priest has caused quite a stir here. We're most interested in what you've learned and how we might be of help.\"\n\n\"Thank you, but I didn't think the matter would require disturbing Your Eminence.\"\n\n\"Actually, I am quite intrigued. Before entering the seminary, I did a master's thesis in European history. A chance to participate in such a study is more of an honor than a bother. So, please, tell me how we can be of assistance.\"\n\nHenry smiled inwardly at his luck in finding a history buff among these men of the cloth. He cleared his throat. \"With Your Eminence's help and access to Church archives, I had hoped to piece together the man's past, maybe shed light on what happened to him.\"\n\n\"Most certainly. My offices are fully at your disposal, for if the mummy is truly a friar of the Dominican order, then he deserves to be sanctified and interred as befits a priest. If descendants of this man still survive, I would think it fitting that the remains be returned to the family's parish for proper burial.\"\n\n\"I quite agree. I've tried to glean as much information as I can on my own, but from here, I'll need to access your records. So far, I've been able to determine the fellow's surname\u2014de Almagro. He was most likely a friar in the Spanish chapter of the Dominicans dating back to the 1500s. I also have a copy of the man's family coat of arms that I'd like to fax you.\"\n\n\"Hmm\u2026the 1500s\u2026for records that old, we might have to search individual abbeys' records. It might take some time.\"\n\n\"I assumed so, but I thought to get started before I headed back to Peru.\"\n\n\"Yes, and that does give me an idea where to start. I'll forward your records to the Vatican, of course, but there is also a very old Dominican enclave in Cuzco, Peru, headed by an Abbot Ruiz, I believe. If this priest was sent on a mission to Peru, the local abbey there might have some record.\"\n\nHenry sat up straighter in his chair, excitement fueling his tired body. Of course! He should have thought of that himself. \"Excellent. Thank you, Archbishop Kearney. I suspect your help will prove invaluable in solving this mystery.\"\n\n\"I hope so. I'll have my secretary give you our fax number. I'll be awaiting your transmission.\"\n\n\"I'll forward it immediately.\" Henry barely paid attention while he was passed back to the receptionist and given the fax number. His mind spun on the possibilities. If Friar de Almagro had been in Peru long, surely there might even be some of the man's letters and reports at the abbey in Cuzco. Perhaps some clue to the lost city might be contained in such letters.\n\nHenry replaced the receiver with numb fingers and slid his sketch of the ring into the fax machine. He dialed out and listened to the whir and buzz as the fax engaged.\n\nAs the drawing was forwarded, Henry forced his mind to the other mystery that surrounded the mummy. He had spent the night pursuing this fellow's past, but with such matters out of his hands, he allowed himself to speculate on the last puzzle concerning the mummy. Something he had not related to the archbishop. Henry pictured the explosion of the mummy's skull and the splatter of gold.\n\nWhat exactly had happened? What was that substance? Henry knew the archbishop could shed no new light on that matter. Only one person could help him, someone whom he had been looking for an excuse to call anyway. Since meeting her again for the first time in almost three decades, he could not get the woman out of his mind.\n\nThe fax machine chimed its completion, and Henry picked up the phone. He dialed a second number. It rang five times before a breathless voice answered. \"Hello?\"\n\n\"Joan?\"\n\nA puzzled voice. \"Yes?\"\n\nHenry pictured the pathologist's slender face framed by a fall of hair the shade of ravens' wings. Time had barely touched her: just a hint of grey highlights, a pair of reading glasses perched on her nose, a few new wrinkles. But her most delightful features remained unchanged: her shadowy smile, her amused eyes. Even her quick intelligence and sharp curiosity had not been dulled by years in academia. Henry suddenly found it difficult to speak. \"Th\u2026this is Henry. I'm\u2026I'm sorry to disturb you so early.\"\n\nHer voice lost its cold dispassion and warmed considerably. \"Early? You just caught me arriving home from the hospital.\"\n\n\"You worked all night?\"\n\n\"Well, I was reviewing the scans of your mummy, and\u2026well\u2026\"\u2014a small embarrassed pause\u2014\"I sort of lost track of time.\"\n\nHenry glanced down at his own wrinkled clothing and smiled. \"I know what you mean.\"\n\n\"So have you learned anything new?\"\n\n\"I've put together a few things.\" He quickly related his discovery of the friar's name and his call to the archbishop. \"How about yourself? Anything new on your front?\"\n\n\"Not much. But I'd like to sit down and go over some of my findings. The material in the skull is proving most unusual.\"\n\nBefore Henry could stop himself or weigh such a decision, he pushed forth. \"How about lunch today?\" He cringed as the words came out. He had not meant to sound so desperate. His cheeks grew heated with his awkwardness.\n\nA long pause. \"I'm afraid I can't do lunch.\"\n\nHenry kicked himself for being so unprofessional. Surely she saw through his words. Ever since Elizabeth had died, he had forgotten the knack of approaching a woman romantically\u2014not that he'd ever had much of a desire to do so before now.\n\nJoan continued, \"But how about dinner? I know a nice Italian place on the river.\"\n\nHenry swallowed hard, struggling to speak. Dare he hope that she was suggesting more than just a meeting of colleagues? Perhaps a renewal of old feelings? But it had been so long. So much life had passed between their college years and now. Surely whatever tiny spark that had once flared between them had long gone to ash. Hadn't it?\n\n\"Henry?\"\n\n\"Yes\u2026yes, that would be great.\"\n\n\"You're staying at the Sheraton, yes? I can pick you up around eight o'clock. That is, if a late dinner is okay with you?\"\n\n\"Sure, that would be fine. I often eat late, so that's no problem. And\u2026and as a matter of fact, um\u2026\" Henry's nervous blathering was thankfully interrupted by the beep of an incoming call. He awkwardly coughed. \"I'm sorry, Joan. I've got another call. I'll be right back.\"\n\nHenry lowered the receiver, took a long calming breath, then clicked over to the other line. \"Yes?\"\n\n\"Professor Conklin?\"\n\nHenry recognized the voice. His brow crinkled. \"Archbishop Kearney?\"\n\n\"Yes, I just wanted to let you know that I received your fax and took a look at it. What I saw came as quite a surprise.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"The emblem of the crossed swords over the crucifix. As a former European historian, it's one I'm quite familiar with.\"\n\nHenry picked up the friar's silver ring and held it to the light. \"I thought it looked familiar myself, but I couldn't place it.\"\n\n\"I'm not surprised. It's a fairly archaic design.\"\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"It is the mark of the Spanish Inquisition.\"\n\nHenry's breath caught in his throat. \"What?\" Images of torture chambers and flesh seared by red-hot irons flashed before his eyes. The black sect of Catholicism had long been disbanded and vilified for the centuries of deaths and tortures it had inflicted in the name of religion.\n\n\"Yes, from the ring, it seems our mummified friar was an Inquisitor.\"\n\n\"My God,\" Henry swore, forgetting for a moment to whom he was speaking.\n\nAn amused chuckle arose from the Archbishop. \"I thought you should know, but I must be going now. I'll forward your information to the Vatican and to Abbot Ruiz in Peru. Hopefully we'll learn more soon.\"\n\nThe archbishop hung up. Henry sat stunned, until the phone rang in his hand, startling him. \"Oh, God\u2026Joan.\" Henry clicked back to the pathologist he had left on hold. \"I'm sorry that took so long,\" he said in a rush, \"but it was Archbishop Kearney again.\"\n\n\"What did he want?\"\n\nHenry related what he had learned, still shaken by the revelation.\n\nJoan was silent for a moment. \"An Inquisitor?\"\n\n\"It would appear so,\" Henry said, collecting himself. \"One more piece to an expanding puzzle.\"\n\nShe replied, \"Amazing. It seems we'll have even more to ponder over dinner tonight.\"\n\nHenry had momentarily forgotten their supper arrangements. \"Yes, of course. I'll see you tonight,\" he said with genuine enthusiasm.\n\n\"It's a date.\" Joan quickly added her good-byes, then hung up.\n\nHenry slowly returned the receiver to its cradle. He did not know what surprised him more\u2014that the mummy was a member of the Spanish Inquisition or that he had a date.\n\nGil climbed the stairs of the only hotel in the jungle village of Villacuacha. The wooden planks creaked under his weight. Even in the shadowed interior of the inn, the late-morning heat could not be so easily escaped. Already a sweltering warmth wrapped itself around Gil like a heavy blanket. He swiped the dampness from his neck with the cuff of his torn sleeve and swore under his breath. The night-long flight through the jungle had left him scratched and foul-tempered. He had managed only a short nap after arranging this meeting.\n\n\"He had better not be late,\" Gil grumbled as he climbed to the third landing. After fleeing the campsite of the Americans, Gil had reached a dirt track in the jungle just as the sun finally rose. Luckily, he stumbled upon a local Indian with a mule and a crooked-wheeled wagon. A handful of coins had bought him passage to the village. Once there, Gil had telephoned his contact\u2014the man who had arranged for Gil's infiltration onto the Americans' team. They had agreed to a noon meeting at this hotel.\n\nGil patted the golden cup secured in his pocket. His contact, a dealer in antiquities, should pay a tidy sum for such a rare find. And this broker in stolen goods had better not balk at Gil's price. If Gil had any hopes of hiring a crew to return to the dig and commandeer the site, he would need quick funding\u2014all in cash.\n\nGil ran a hand over the long knife at his belt. If it came down to it, he would persuade the fellow to meet his price. He would let nothing stand between him and his treasure, not after how much it had cost him already.\n\nAtop the stairs, Gil pushed the taped bandage covering his burned cheek more firmly in place. He would be rewarded for his scarring. That he swore. Teeth gritted with determination, Gil walked down the narrow corridor. He found the right door and rapped his knuckles on it.\n\nA man's firm voice answered. \"Come in.\"\n\nGil tried the door. It was unlocked. He pushed his way into the room and was instantly struck by two things. First, the refreshing coolness of the room. Overhead, a ceiling fan turned languidly creating a gentle stir to the air that seemed to wash away the humidity. A double set of French doors were swung wide open upon a small balcony overlooking the hotel's shaded garden courtyard. From somewhere beyond the steamy warmth of the jungle, a cool breeze flowed through those open doors into the room. White-lace curtains drifted in the gentle breezes, while thin mosquito netting around the single bed billowed softly like the sails of a ship.\n\nBut more than the breezes, the room's occupant struck Gil as the source of the room's coolness. It was the first time Gil had ever met his contact in person. The tall man sat in a cushioned rattan chair, facing Gil, his back to the open double doors. Dressed all in black, from shoes to buttoned shirt, the fellow sat with his legs casually crossed, a drink clinking with ice in one hand. From his burnished complexion, he was clearly of Spanish descent. Dark eyes stared at Gil, appraising him from under clipped black hair. A thin mustache also traced the man's upper lip. He did not smile. The only movement was a flick of the man's eyes toward the other chair in the room, indicating Gil should sit.\n\nStill wearing his ripped and sweat-stained clothes, Gil felt like a peasant before royalty. He could not even manage to roil up a bit of righteous anger at the man's attitude. He sensed a vein of hardness in the man that Gil could never match, nor dare challenge. Gil forced his tongue to move. \"I\u2026I have what we talked about.\"\n\nThe man merely nodded. \"Then we need only discuss the price.\"\n\nGil lowered himself slowly to the chair. He found himself perched just at the edge of the seat, not comfortable enough to lean back. He suddenly wanted nothing more than to be done with this deal, no matter what the price. He longed to leave the chill of the room for the familiar swelter of the bustling town.\n\nGil could not even meet the other man's eyes. He found himself staring out the window at the town's church steeple, the thin white cross stark against the blue sky.\n\n\"Show me what you found,\" the man said, his drink still clinking as he gently rocked his glass, drawing back Gil's attention.\n\n\"Yes, of course.\" Swallowing the dry lump in his throat, Gil fished out the dented chalice and placed it on the table between them. Rubies and emeralds flashed brightly against the gold setting. Gil felt a resurgence of his resolve as he eyed the jeweled dragon wrapped around the thick gold cup. \"And\u2026and there's more,\" Gil said. \"With enough men and the right tools, by week's end, I could have a hundred times as much.\"\n\nIgnoring Gil's words, the man lowered his drink to the table and reached to the Incan cup. He picked up the chalice, raised it to the sunlight, and examined its surface for an excruciatingly long time.\n\nGil's hands wrung in his lap as he waited. He stared at the dent along the cup's lip as the man studied the workmanship on the chalice. Gil feared such a blemish might significantly reduce the price. The fellow had insisted any artifacts be brought to him intact.\n\nAs the man finally lowered the cup back to the table, Gil dared meet his eyes. He saw only anger there.\n\n\"The dent\u2026it\u2026it was already there,\" Gil stammered quickly.\n\nThe man stood silently and crossed to a small bar behind Gil. Gil listened as the man added more ice to his glass. He then stepped behind Gil.\n\nGil could not bring himself to twist around. He just stared at the treasure atop the table. \"If you don't want it, I\u2026I will not hold you to any obligation.\"\n\nWithout turning, Gil knew the man leaned toward him. The small hairs on the nape of his neck quivered with the instinct of his cave-dwelling ancestors. Gil then felt the man's breath at his ear.\n\n\"It is only ordinary gold. Worthless.\"\n\nSensing the danger too late, Gil's hand snapped toward the knife at his belt. His fingers found only an empty sheath. Before Gil could react, his head was yanked back by the hair; he saw his own knife gripped in the man's hand. He did not even have time to wonder how the the blade had been snatched from his side. A flick of the man's wrist, and the dagger sliced open Gil's throat, a line of fire from ear to ear. Gil was tossed forward and fell to the floor as his blood spilled across the whitewashed planks.\n\nRolling to his back, Gil saw the man return to the bar for his abandoned drink while Gil choked on his own blood. \"P\u2026Please\u2026\" he gurgled out, one arm raised in supplication as the light in the room began to dim. The man ignored him.\n\nEyes filled with tears, Gil again turned to the open window and the bright crucifix in the blue sky. Please, not like this, he prayed silently. But he found no salvation there either.\n\nFinished with his drink, the man eyed the still form of Guillermo Sala. The pool of blood appeared almost black against the white floor. He felt no satisfaction in the killing. The Chilean had served his purpose and was now more a risk than a benefit to his cause.\n\nSighing, he crossed the room, careful not to foul his polished shoes with blood. He retrieved the Incan treasure from the table and weighed it briefly, judging its worth once the gems had been pried free and the cup melted into a brick. It was not the discovery his group had hoped to find, but it would have to do. From Gil's description of the underground vault, there was still a chance of a more significant strike. Stepping back to the room's bed, he collected the small leather satchel and secured the cup inside.\n\nHe studied the room. It would be cleaned up by nightfall.\n\nSatchel in hand, he left the room and its cool breezes for the moist heat of the narrow corridor and the stairs. Sweat quickly broke across his forehead. He ignored it. He had grown up in these moist highlands and was well-accustomed to the swelter. Born of mixed blood, Spanish and local Indian, he was a mestizo, a half-breed. Neither Spanish nor Quechan. Despite carrying this mark of dishonor among the highland people, he had managed to fight his way to a place of respect.\n\nOnce through the hotel's small lobby, he crossed into the midday sunlight. The steps outside were blinding in the bright light. Shading his eyes against the glare, he worked his way down the steps and almost stumbled over an Indian woman and her babe near the foot of the stairs.\n\nThe woman, wearing a rough-spun tunic and shawl, was as startled by him as he excused himself. But she fell to her knees before him, snatching at his pant leg and raising her baby, wrapped in a brightly colored alpaca blanket, toward him. She beseeched him in her native Quecha.\n\nHe smiled benignly at her and nodded in answer. Placing his bag on the last step, he reached to his throat and slipped out his silver pectoral crucifix. It stood stark against his black raiment. He raised a hand over the babe's head and gave a quick benediction. Once done, he kissed the baby on the forehead, collected his bag, and continued down the village street toward his church, the steeple overhead guiding him home.\n\nThe small Indian woman called after him, \"Gracias! Thank you, Friar Otera!\"\n\nIn the darkness of the collapsed temple, time stretched. Maggie was sure entire days had passed, but if her watch was accurate, it was only the following morning, close to noon. They had been trapped for less than half a day.\n\nArms across her chest, Maggie studied the others as she stood a few paces down the main corridor. With his rifle slung over a shoulder, Sam stood by the rockfall, the walkie-talkie glued to his lips. Since dawn, the Texan had been in periodic contact with Philip, conserving the walkie-talkie's battery as much as possible but trying to aid their fellow student in his appraisal of the ruined site.\n\n\"No!\" Sam yelled into the walkie-talkie. \"The debris pile is all that is holding up this level of the dig. If you try to excavate the original shaft, you'll drop the rest on top of us.\" A long pause where Sam listened to Philip's response. \"Shit, Philip! Listen to me! I'm down here. I can see how the support walls are leaning on the blockade of stone. You'll kill us. Find where those looters had been tunneling into the dig. That's the best chance.\"\n\nSam shook his head at the walkie-talkie. \"The bastard is spooked up there,\" he told her. \"He's looking for the quickest fix as usual.\"\n\nMaggie offered Sam a wan smile. Personally, she was looking for the quickest fix, too.\n\nRalph and Norman were huddled around their only light source, Denal's flashlight. Ralph held it for Sam to survey the destruction and the state of their crumbling roof. Norman had snapped a few photographs after the short naps they had managed overnight. He now stood with his camera hanging by a strap, clutched to his belly. If they survived this, Norman was going to produce some award-winning footage of their adventure. Still, from his pale face, Maggie was sure the photographer would gladly trade his Pulitzer for the chance to escape alive.\n\n\"Watch out!\"\n\nThe call from behind startled Maggie. She froze, but a hand suddenly shoved her off her feet. She stumbled a couple steps forward just as a large slab of granite crashed to the stones behind her. The entire temple shook. Dust choked her for a few breaths.\n\nWaving a hand, Maggie turned to see a dusty Denal crawling to his feet. The chunk of loosened rock stood between them. Maggie was dumbstruck by how close she had come to being crushed.\n\nSam was already beside her. \"You need to keep an eye on the ceiling,\" he admonished her.\n\n\"No feckin' kidding, Sam.\" She turned to the boy as he clambered over the slab. Her voice softened with appreciation. \"Thank you, Denal.\"\n\nHe mumbled something in his native tongue, but he could not meet her eyes. If the light were better, Maggie was sure she'd find him blushing. She lifted his chin and kissed him on the cheek. When she pulled away, his eyes had grown wider than saucers.\n\nMaggie turned to spare Denal further embarrassment. \"Sam, maybe we should retreat down another level.\" She waved a hand to the fallen rock. \"You're right about the instability of this area. We might be safer a little farther away.\"\n\nSam considered her suggestion, taking off his Stetson and finger-combing his hair as he studied the ceiling. \"Maybe we'd better.\"\n\nRalph stepped forward, raising the light toward the ceiling. \"Look how all the roof slabs are out of alignment.\"\n\nMaggie studied the roof. Ralph had keen eyes. Some of the square stones were tilted a few centimeters askew from the others, displaced by the explosion. As they watched, one of the stones shifted another centimeter.\n\nSam must have seen it, too. His voice was shaky. \"Okay, everybody, down another floor.\"\n\nRalph led the way with the flashlight.\n\nNorman followed. \"Right now, I'd love a large glass of lemonade, filled to the brim with ice.\"\n\nSam nodded his head. \"If you're taking orders, Norm, I'll take something with a bit of a head on it. Maybe a tall Corona in a frosted mug with a twist of lime.\"\n\nMaggie wiped the dust and sweat from her forehead as she followed. \"In Ireland, we drink our pints warm\u2026but right now, I'm even willin' to bow to your crass American custom of drinkin' it cold.\"\n\nRalph laughed as they reached the ladder. \"I doubt the Incas left us a cooler down there, but I'm willing to search.\" Ralph waved his flashlight for Maggie to mount the ladder first while he lit the way.\n\nMaggie's smile faded from her lips as she climbed away from Ralph's light and into the gloom of the next level. Their banter in the face of their predicament did little to fend off the true terror; the darkness beyond the brightness was always there, reminding them how precarious their situation was.\n\nAs she awaited the others, she considered Ralph's last words. Just what had the Incas left them down there? What lay within the chamber beyond the sealed door, and what had happened to Gil's two companions?\n\nBy the time the others had regrouped at the foot of the ladder on the second level, Maggie's curiosity had been piqued. Also by focusing on these mysteries, her fear of being buried under fifty feet of collapsing temple could be somewhat allayed. If the anxiety grew too intense\u2026\n\nMaggie shook her head. She would not lose control again. She watched Sam climb down the ladder with a twinge of guilt. After her attack last night, she had not been totally honest with him. She had failed to explain that the onset of her \"seizures\" had begun after witnessing the death of Patrick Dugan in the roadside ditch in Belfast. Afterward, the doctors had not been able to find any physiological cause for her attacks, though the consensus was the seizures were most likely a form of severe panic. She shoved back the growing guilt. The details were not Sam's business. After the initial entrapment, she had come to grips with their situation. As long as she could keep herself distracted, she would be okay.\n\nNearby, Sam tried his walkie-talkie. The radio still worked, but the static was a bit worse this much deeper. He let Philip know about their repositioning.\n\nOnce he was done, Maggie crossed to Sam. She wet her lips. \"I'd like to borrow your ultraviolet lamp.\"\n\n\"What for?\"\n\n\"I want to go see what damage Gil and the others did to the dig.\"\n\n\"I can't let you go traipsing about on your own. We need to stick together.\" He began to turn away.\n\nShe grabbed his shoulder. \"It wasn't a request, Sam. I'm going. It'll only take a few minutes.\"\n\nDenal stood a few steps away. \"I\u2026I go with you, Miss Maggie.\"\n\nSam faced them and seemed to recognize her determination. \"Fine. But don't be gone longer than fifteen minutes. We need to conserve our light sources, and I don't want to be hunting you both down.\"\n\nMaggie nodded. \"Thanks, Sam.\"\n\n\"I'm coming with you two,\" Norman said, snugging his camera around his shoulder.\n\nRalph also had a gleam of interest, but Sam squashed it. \"The three of you go on. Ralph and I will go through this level with the flashlight and assess the structural integrity.\" He dug his lamp out of his pocket and held it toward Maggie, but he did not release it without a final word of caution. \"Fifteen minutes. Be careful.\"\n\nShe heard the worry in his stern voice, and that dulled the annoyance in her own response. \"I know, Sam,\" she said softly, taking the Wood's lamp from him. \"You needn't worry.\"\n\nHe grinned, then returned to his walkie-talkie and ongoing argument with Philip.\n\nMaggie clicked on the ultraviolet light and signaled for her two companions to follow her to the next ladder. As they abandoned the brighter light, the darkness of the temple wrapped close around them. Ahead, the purplish glow lit up the quartz in the granite blocks, creating a miniature starscape spreading down the passage. Maggie led them onward, the others sticking closer to her side.\n\nAs they traversed the series of ladders to the deepest level of the dig, Maggie's heart began thudding louder and louder in her own ears. Soon her heartbeat seemed almost to be coming from beyond her chest.\n\n\"What's that noise?\" Norman asked as he stepped off the rung of the last ladder.\n\nDenal answered, his voice a whisper. \"I hear it before. After Se\u00f1or Sala crawled through that doorway.\"\n\nMaggie realized the beating in her ears wasn't her own heart but the external thudding of something deeper in the temple. It even reverberated through the stones under her feet.\n\n\"It sounds like a big clock ticking,\" Norman said.\n\nMaggie raised her light. \"Let's keep going.\" Compared to the sonorous beat from below, her own voice sounded like the squeak of a mouse.\n\nWinding past the last of the tunnels, Maggie soon stood before the violated doorway. Broken bolts marked where the seals had been shattered. In the dirt to the sides of the threshold, the three bands of etched hematite lay discarded, all of them cracked and chipped from the crowbar used to pry them loose. The offending tool still leaned against the wall.\n\nDenal bent and picked up the crowbar, hefting it in his grip. He glanced to Maggie. She did not begrudge him a weapon.\n\nThe doorway ahead lay partially blocked by the toppled stone that had once sealed the section of the temple ahead. Norman knelt a couple spaces back from the opening. He nudged his glasses higher on his nose and tried to peer inside. \"I can't see anything.\"\n\nMaggie moved beside him. Neither seemed willing to draw closer to the door. She remembered the terror in Gil's eyes and the bloody blistering across his cheek. What lay ahead?\n\nNorman exchanged a glance with her. She shrugged and stepped forward, the lamp held before her like a pistol. She paused just at the edge of the doorway, then extended her arm through the threshold. The glow stretched down the throat of a short passage. The deep ticking sounded much louder there. Maggie spoke quietly. \"There seems to be a large room just ahead. But the light doesn't quite reach it.\" She glanced over her shoulder back to Norman.\n\n\"Maybe we'd better wait for the others,\" the photographer whispered.\n\nMaggie was about to suggest exactly the same thing, but since Norman suggested it first, she now balked. She could picture Sam's smug expression if she didn't at least take a peek. They had wasted the battery of the Wood's lamp to come this far; they should at least have something to show for the expenditure. \"I'm going in,\" she said, moving forward before fear slowed her. She would not be ruled by the paralyzing terror of her childhood.\n\n\"Then we'd better all go,\" Norman said, closing in to crowd her rear as she began to crawl over the toppled stone door.\n\nMaggie scrabbled over the obstruction and stood in the hall. Norman and Denal joined her. \"Look,\" she said, pointing her lamp. \"There's somethin' ahead, reflecting back the glow.\" Intrigued, she crept ahead slowly.\n\n\"Wait,\" Norman said. \"Let's see what's out there first.\"\n\nMaggie turned to see the photographer raise his camera.\n\n\"Don't look at the flash directly,\" he warned.\n\nShe swung back around just as the camera exploded for a briefest second. She gasped. After so long, such brightness stung. But her shocked response wasn't all due to the pain. Blazed for just a fractured second, an image of the room had branded her retinas. \"D\u2026Did you see that?\" she asked.\n\nDenal mumbled something in his native tongue, clearly awed.\n\nNorman coughed to clear his throat. \"Gold and silver everywhere.\"\n\nMaggie raised her own light, its purplish glow now seeming so feeble. \"And that statue\u2026did you see it? It had to be at least two meters tall.\"\n\nNorman moved next to her as Maggie edged forward again. Denal kept to their side with his crowbar. Norman whispered, \"Two meters. It couldn't have been gold, too. Could it?\"\n\nMaggie shrugged. \"When the Spanish first arrived here, they described the Temple of the Sun found in Cuzco. The Coriancha. The rooms were said to have been plated with thick slabs of gold and, in the innermost temple, stood a life-size model of a cornfield. Stalks, leaves, ears, even the dirt itself\u2026all of gold.\" By now, they had reached the room's entrance. Maggie knelt down and ran a hand gently over the gold plate at her feet. \"Amazing\u2026we must have uncovered another Sun Temple.\"\n\nNorman stood still. \"What's that out there? Out on the floor.\"\n\nMaggie pushed back up. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nHe pointed to a dark shadow at the edge of her light's reach. She raised her lamp. Its glow reflected across the gold and silver like moonlight spilling on a still pond. Some dark island lay out there, a ripple on the pond. Maggie began to step closer with her light, one foot on the edge of the metal floor.\n\nDenal stopped her, holding his crowbar across her path. \"No, Miss Maggie,\" he murmured. \"Smells wrong here.\"\n\n\"He's right,\" Norman said. \"What's that reek?\"\n\nNow brought to her attention, Maggie noticed an underlying stench that penetrated through the cloying scent of wet clay and mold. She nodded to the camera. \"Do it again, Norman.\"\n\nNodding, the photographer raised his camera as Maggie turned her eyes back to the floor. The flash exploded out into the room. Maggie swore and stumbled away from the tiles. \"Sweet Jesus!\"\n\nShe covered her mouth. She had been staring at the dark island on the room's floor when Norman's flash had burst forth. The tortured face still blazed in her mind's eye. The torn and twisted body, the eyes wide with death, and the blood\u2026so much blood. Another body lay beyond the first, close to the far wall.\n\n\"Juan and Miguel,\" Denal mumbled.\n\nThere was a long stretch of silence.\n\n\"Gil didn't do that to them, did he?\" Norman asked. \"Murder them for the gold?\"\n\nMaggie slowly shook her head. Juan's mutilated form had become just a shadowed lump again. As she stared, the thudding heartbeat of some great beast still echoed across the treasure room. She now recognized it for what it was\u2014the ticking of large gears behind the walls and floor of the room.\n\nThe warning etched on the chamber's seals suddenly wormed through Maggie's skull: We leave this tomb to Heaven. May it never be disturbed.\n\n\"Maggie?\"\n\nShe turned to Norman. \"No. Gil didn't murder them. The room did.\"\n\nBefore Norman could react, the chamber shuddered violently, throwing them all down. Maggie landed hard upon the edge of the plated floor, knocking the wind from her chest. Gulping air, she scrambled back, sensing the danger.\n\n\"What was that?\" Norman yelled.\n\nMaggie swung her lamp around. Through the entrance to the tomb, a thick cloud of dust rolled toward them. She fought to speak. \"Och! Jesus! Up\u2026up\u2026!\" Maggie urged them all.\n\n\"What's going on?\" Norman pressed, panic edging his voice.\n\nMaggie pushed him toward the exit. \"Goddamm it! Move, Norman! The bloody temple is collapsing!\"\n\nSam checked on Ralph. The large black man pushed groggily up on his arms. His scalp had been clipped when a section of the roof had given way. Luckily a grinding from above had warned them before the sky came crashing down. \"Are you okay?\" Sam asked, dusting off his Wranglers.\n\nRalph rolled to his knees. \"Yeah, I think.\" He gingerly touched a bloody bump on his forehead. \"I never been tackled by a slab of granite before.\"\n\n\"Don't move,\" Sam warned. He collected the flashlight from where it had fallen. \"I'm gonna check on what happened.\"\n\nRalph scowled and climbed to his feet. \"Like hell. We stick together.\"\n\nSam nodded. Truthfully, he didn't want to investigate on his own. This level of the temple was now almost a solid cloud of drifting silt and dust. Sam coughed, covering his mouth and nose with the crook of his elbow. \"This way,\" he mumbled. He led them back to the shaft leading up to the first level of the temple.\n\nRalph groaned as the remains of the shattered ladder came into view ahead. \"This can't be good.\"\n\nAnd it wasn't. The way up was blocked by a jumbled pile of hewn boulders, like tumbled children's blocks. \"The first level must have entirely collapsed,\" Sam said.\n\nSam's walkie-talkie squelched static at his waist. He collected it and heard Philip's frantic voice. \"\u2026okay? Report, goddamm it! Over!\"\n\nSam pressed the transmitter. \"Philip, Sam here. We're okay.\" Overhead, the roof moaned ominously; dirt drizzled down. \"But I don't know for how long. How're you coming with tunneling in a new entrance from the base of the hill?\"\n\nStatic\u2026then\u2026\"\u2026just found the looter's shaft. It's barely begun\u2026at least two days\u2026sent for help, but don't know how long\u2026\" Static overwhelmed the tinny voice of their fellow student, but Sam had still heard the panic.\n\n\"Shit, two days\u2026\" Ralph grumbled. \"The temple will never last that long.\"\n\nSam tried to get more information from Philip, but only snatches of words made it through. \"I'll try to reposition for better reception,\" Sam yelled into the radio. \"Stand by!\"\n\nHe slipped the walkie-talkie away. \"Let's find the others. Make sure they're safe.\"\n\nRalph nodded. \"Maybe it's best if we holed up in the lowest level anyway.\" Another small groan sounded overhead. \"It looks like this place is going to crumble one level at a time.\"\n\nSam led the way through the corridors. \"Let's just hope we're rescued before we run out of levels.\"\n\nRalph had no rebuttal and followed in silence.\n\nJust as they reached the ladder that led down to the third level, Sam saw Norman pop out of the shaft, his eyes wide in the flashlight. The photographer held a hand against the glare. \"Thank God, you're okay!\" Norman said in a rush. \"We didn't know what we'd find.\"\n\nDenal came next. Sam noted the crowbar in the teenager's hand, but didn't comment on it.\n\nMaggie climbed out last. \"What happened?\" she asked tersely, clicking off the Wood's lamp.\n\n\"The top level collapsed,\" Sam said, and quickly recounted their narrow escape. \"With the upper levels so shaky, we thought it best to shelter in the fifth level. Just in case.\"\n\n\"So we keep our heads as low as we can,\" Maggie said.\n\nNorman eyed the ladder. \"That means back down again.\"\n\nSam saw a worried glance pass between Maggie and Norman. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"We found Juan and Miguel down there,\" Norman said.\n\nSam knew from his tone and manner that the men were not alive. \"What happened to them?\"\n\nMaggie answered, \"You'd better see for yourself.\" She turned away.\n\nIn silence, the group clambered down the ladders to the deepest level of the temple. Sam soon found himself staring at the scattered seals of the door. \"The bastards\u2026\" he mumbled under his breath as he bent by the doorway.\n\n\"They've paid for their crimes, Sam,\" Maggie said dourly. \"Come on.\" She ushered him into the next room, then followed herself, sticking close to his side.\n\nWith his flashlight, Sam quickly took in the scene in the next chamber. He did not let the light's beam linger too long on either broken body. For a moment, he had a sudden flash-back to seeing his own parents' bloody bodies being carried away on stretchers. Safely buckled into the backseat of the family Ford, Sam had escaped the fatal crash with only a broken arm. He rubbed his forearm now. \"Wh\u2026what happened to them?\"\n\n\"The tomb's booby-trapped,\" Maggie said, then nodded ahead. \"Listen to the winding of winches under the floor. Some bloody contraption meant to catch looters.\"\n\n\"I didn't think the Incas had such technology.\"\n\n\"No, but some of the coastal Indians were fairly advanced in pulley construction for their irrigation systems. If they helped here\u2026?\" She shrugged.\n\nSam's light beam focused on the gold Incan king as it stood against the wall of black granite. \"Either way, there's the lure. One look at that prize and who wouldn't rush over.\" Sam played his light over the pattern of gold and silver tiles. He knew a trap when he saw one. \"Here's a game I wouldn't want to play.\"\n\nThe stones rumbled underfoot, and a grinding roar echoed down from the levels above. \"We may be forced to,\" Maggie said. \"Buttressed by the trap's machinery, this may be the safest room if the rest of the temple collapses.\"\n\nRalph's voice called back to them from the threshold. \"Sam, try to reach Sykes again! Light a fire under him! This place is coming apart!\"\n\nSam unhooked the walkie-talkie and switched it back on. Static screeched from the speakers. It was silenced as Sam hit the transmitter. \"Philip, if you can hear me, come in. Over.\"\n\nWhite noise was his only answer, then a few words came through: \"\u2026trying to widen the shaft so more workers can dig\u2026will work around the clock\u2026\"\n\n\"Speed it up, Philip!\" Sam insisted. \"This place is a shaky house of cards.\"\n\n\"\u2026doing the best\u2026damn workers don't understand\u2026\" A long stretch of static followed.\n\n\"This is useless,\" Sam mumbled to himself with a shake of his head. He raised the radio to his lips. \"Just keep us informed on the hour!\" He switched the walkie-talkie off and turned to Maggie. \"We've a long wait ahead of us.\"\n\nMaggie stood with her head cocked, listening to the moans of the strained temple. \"I hope we have a long time,\" she said with clear worry. Sam tried to put an arm over her shoulders, but she shrugged it off. \"I'm okay.\"\n\nSam watched Maggie retreat from the room. With a final pass of his light over the deadly chamber, Sam turned to follow, but the pattern of gold and silver fixed in his mind. It was no plain checkerboard, but a complex mix of zigzagging steps with two patches of rectangular gold islands, one at the upper left of the room, and one at the lower right.\n\nSam stopped, pondering the pattern. It was naggingly familiar. He turned back to the floor, shining his light across it.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Maggie called back to him.\n\n\"Just a sec,\" Sam stepped to the edge of the chamber. He stood silently, letting his mind calm. There was a clue hidden here. He just knew it. The two men's corpses had distracted him, shocked him from noticing before. \"My god,\" Sam mumbled.\n\nMaggie had returned cautiously to his side. \"What?\"\n\nSam waved his light across the thirty rows of yard-wide tiles. \"You were right about other Peruvian Indians being involved here. This isn't Incan.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Maggie asked. \"That statue sure looks Incan.\"\n\n\"I don't mean the statue. The Incas probably added that later. I meant the floor, the room itself. The booby trap.\"\n\n\"I don't understand.\"\n\n\"Look at the pattern. It's so large that I almost missed it.\" Sam pointed with his flashlight's beam. \"The various tribes in ancient Peru\u2014the Paracas, the Huari, the Nasca, the Moche, even the Incas\u2014none of them had a written language. But their pictographs and ideograms, found in drawings and woven in their textiles, were elaborate and unique to each tribe. Look at this pattern. The two golden rectangles at opposite corners connected by snaking zigzagging lines. Where have you seen that before?\"\n\nMaggie took a step closer. \"Sweet Jesus, you're right. It's a huge pictograph.\" She turned to face Sam, eyes bright with excitement. \"It is Moche, not Inca.\"\n\n\"It's just like Uncle Hank had figured,\" Sam mumbled, his voice awed. \"We're in a Moche pyramid.\"\n\n\"What? When did Professor Conklin mention anything about the Moche?\"\n\nSam realized he had misspoken, letting out his uncle's secret. Sam sighed. Considering their circumstances, any secrets now seemed ludicrous. \"Listen, Maggie, there's something my uncle's kept from you all.\" Sam quickly recounted how the professor had discovered that the Sun Plaza here matched the tip of a Moche pyramid found along the coast. \"He made the discovery just before he left with the mummy.\"\n\nMaggie frowned. \"So I wasn't the only one keepin' secrets\u2026\"\n\nSam blushed, remembering his own lambasting of Maggie for keeping facts hidden. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\nA long stretch of silence ensued. Maggie finally spoke. \"It makes rough sense. Considering the complexity of the room, the Moche were better at metallurgy than the Incas. They also built elaborate canals and irrigation systems for their lands, with crude pumps and gearwork. If any of the tribes was capable of constructing this trap in precious metals, it would be the Moche.\" Maggie nodded toward the pattern. \"You're the expert epigrapher. What does it mean?\"\n\nSam explained, using his flashlight as a pointer. \"See how the stair-step pattern connects the two gold rectangles. It depicts the rising of a spirit from this world to the realm of spirits and gods.\" Sam turned to Maggie. \"It basically means this is the gateway to Heaven.\"\n\n\"Jesus\u2026\"\n\n\"But that's not all.\" Sam shone his light on the ceiling, where an inverted image of the floor's pattern was depicted in tile. \"Each gold tile on the floor has a matching silver tile above it and vice versa. The Moche\u2026and the Incas for that matter\u2026believed in dualism. In the Quechan language, yanantin and yanapaque. Mirror imagery, light and dark, upper and lower.\"\n\n\"Yin and yang,\" Maggie mumbled.\n\n\"Exactly. Dualism is common in many cultures.\"\n\n\"So what you're saying\u2026\" Maggie found her eyes drifting to the two mutilated corpses.\n\nSam finished her statement, \"Here also lies the gateway to Hell.\"\n\nFrom across the ruins, Philip stared at the collapsed hilltop. The entire roof of the subterranean temple had caved in on itself, leaving a clay-and boulder-strewn declivity ten feet deep. A smoky smudge still hung over the sunken summit like some steaming volcano, silt forever hanging in the moist air.\n\nPhilip remained near his post by the communication tent, but he wasn't due to contact Sam for another half hour. Philip hugged his arms around his chest. The Quechan workers were all but useless. Pantomiming and drawing out his instructions were the only ways to communicate with the uneducated lot\u2014and still, they often mistook his orders.\n\nHowever, Philip was beginning to suspect some of their \"misunderstandings\" were deliberate, especially after he had insisted the Indians attempt to redig the original shaft, defying Sam's own warnings. The Texan's assessment had quickly proven valid; the temple had collapsed further when some of the laborers attempted to pry loose a particularly large slab of granite. One of the Indians had broken his leg when the roof gave way. Ever since, the Quechans had grown sullen and slow to respond to his orders.\n\nUpon reaching Sam earlier, Philip had deliberately sidestepped mentioning his own culpability for their near tragedy. Luckily, poor communications had saved him from having to explain in detail.\n\nPhilip glanced to the jungle's edge. If nothing else, at least the workers had discovered the partially excavated tunnel of the looters near the foot of the jungle-shrouded hill. From his calculations, he estimated another forty feet of tunnel would have to be dug before reaching the temple itself\u2014and at the current pace, it would take closer to four days, rather than the two-day estimate he had given Sam.\n\n\"That is, unless help arrives first,\" he grumbled. If not, the others were doomed. Even if the temple remained standing, which was doubtful, water would become more and more crucial. Even in this humidity, death by dehydration posed a real danger. Help must come. He would not have the deaths of the others on his hands\u2014or his r\u00e9sum\u00e9. If such a scandal broke with his name associated with it, he risked losing any chance of a future position at Harvard.\n\nPhilip shadowed his eyes against the late-afternoon sun. A pair of workers had left at dawn to seek help, running on long, lean legs. The two young men looked capable of maintaining their pace all day long. If so, they should be reaching the tiny village of Villacuacha and a telephone anytime, and with an expedient response, a rescue operation could be under way within the next two days.\n\nPhilip pinned all his plans on this one hope\u2014rescue. With others around, he would be relieved of any direct culpability. Even if the other students died, it would not be his sole responsibility. Shared blame could weaken the blemish on his own record.\n\nBut there was one other reason he prayed for the appearance of rescuers. The sun was near setting, and Philip feared another long black night with the forest screeching around him. Guillermo Sala was out there somewhere, surely waiting for the proper time to attack.\n\nStaring off toward the distant village of Villacuacha, Philip sent a whispered prayer to the two Indian runners. \"Hurry, you bastards.\"\n\nAlong a jungle trail, Friar Otera glanced toward the setting sun, then pulled the cowl of his robe higher over his head, shadowing his features. They should be at the ruins by midday tomorrow. \"Come,\" he ordered, and led the way.\n\nBehind, a row of five brown-robed monks kept pace with him. The brush of their robes was the only sound disturbing the twilight forest. The jungle always grew strangely quiet as the sun began to set, hushed as if the creatures of the forest held their breath against the dangers of the approaching night. Soon the dark predators would be loose again for the hunt.\n\nIt was this pregnant silence that allowed the black-haired friar to hear the snap of a branch and the ragged huffing breath of someone approaching. He cocked his head. No, two men approached. Friar Otera held up an arm and, without a word, the others stopped. The Church had trained them well.\n\nSoon two bare-chested Indians appeared along the trail ahead. Sweat shone off their sleek bodies as if they were aglow in the last rays of the sun. On closer inspection, it was clear the two, thorn-scratched and shaky of limb, had traveled far and at a hard pace.\n\nWithin his cowl, the friar's lips drew to hard lines of satisfaction. Though he hated his poor upbringing here among the Indians, it now proved useful. As a boy, he had been chased and tormented because he was of mixed blood, a half-bred mestizo. The shadowy jungle trails became his only sanctuary from the constant ridicule and he knew these jungle trails as well as any. He also knew any attempt to call for help must travel this trail\u2014and he had his orders. Friar Otera raised a palm in greeting.\n\nThe first of the Indians seemed wary of the group of strangers. Wisely so, since the jungles were the haunts of many guerrillas and marauders. But soon recognition of their robed raiments and silver crosses filled the Indian's eyes. He dropped to his knees, chattering his thanks in guttural Quecha.\n\nFriar Otera bowed his head, crossing his wrists within the long folds of his sleeves. One hand reached the dagger's hilt in his hidden wrist sheath. \"Fear not, my child. Calm yourself. Tell me what has happened.\"\n\n\"Friar\u2026Father, we have run far. Seeking help. We are workers for some norte americanos high in the mountains. There was an accident. A horrible accident.\"\n\n\"An accident?\"\n\n\"An underground tomb has collapsed, trapping some of the americanos. They will die unless we hurry.\"\n\nFriar Otera shook his head sadly. \"Horrible indeed,\" he muttered in his native Quecha, though inwardly it galled him to do so. The old language, a crude derivation of the Incan language called runa simi, was so plain and base, the language of the poor. And he hated to be reminded of his own roots by speaking it so fluently. A spark of anger rose in his heart, but he kept it hidden within the shadows of his robe. Friar Otera listened in silence as the frantic Indian finished explaining about the explosion and the damaged satellite phone. He just nodded in understanding.\n\n\"So we must hurry, Father, before it's too late.\"\n\nFriar Otera licked his lips. So only one of the americanos was still loose among the ruins. How fortuitous. \"Yes, we must hurry,\" he agreed with the panting Indian. \"You have done well bringing us this news, my child.\"\n\nThe Indian lowered his head in thanks and relief.\n\nFriar Otera slipped past the kneeling Indian and approached the second fellow. \"You have done well, too, my child.\"\n\nThis other Indian had remained silent during the exchange and had not knelt. His dark eyes had remained wary. He backed up a step now, somehow sensing the danger, but he was too late.\n\nFriar Otera lashed out with the long blade hidden at his wrist, slicing cleanly. The man's hands flew to his slashed throat, trying to stanch the flow of blood. A spraying spurt struck the friar's robe as the Indian fell to his knees. Too late to pray now, heathen. With a scowl, Friar Otera used his booted foot to topple the gurgling man backward.\n\nStepping over the body, Friar Otera continued on his way down the trail. He had not even heard a sound as the other monks dealt with the first Indian. He nodded in satisfaction.\n\nThe Church had certainly trained them well.\n\nJoan tried the wine. It was a decent vintage Merlot, not too dry, with a sweet bouquet. She nodded, and the waiter filled her glass the rest of the way. \"It should accent the porterhouse nicely,\" she said with a shy smile.\n\nAcross the candlelit table, Henry returned her smile. \"A forensic pathologist and a wine connoisseur to boot. You've grown to be a woman of many surprises. As I recall, you used to be a beer-and-tequila woman.\"\n\nShe stifled a short laugh. \"Time has ways of refining one's taste. As does a stomach that can no longer tolerate such excesses.\" She eyed Henry. He still filled his dark suit well, a double-breasted charcoal jacket over a crisp white shirt and pale rose tie. The colors accented perfectly the salting of silver-grey in his dark hair. Clean-shaven and impeccably attired, it was hard to believe this fellow had been tromping through the Peruvian jungles just last week. \"And I must say you're full of surprises, too, Henry. Your years in the field have done you no harm.\"\n\nHenry, fork in hand, glanced up from the remains of his Caesar salad. He wore a roguish grin, an expression that took Joan back to her college years. \"Why, Dr. Engel,\" he teased, \"if I didn't know better, I'd say you were trying to pick me up?\"\n\n\"It was a simple compliment, Professor Conklin. That's all. Just a professional courtesy. I say it to all the visiting doctors.\"\n\n\"Ah\u2026so that explains your current academic popularity.\" Henry stabbed a crouton, hiding a smile.\n\nJoan feigned insult and snapped her napkin toward his hand.\n\n\"Ow.\" Henry rubbed his knuckles as if they stung. \"Okay, okay\u2026then I guess we'd best stick to business.\"\n\n\"Maybe we should,\" she said with a tired smile.\n\nThus far, their evening had been spent catching up on each other's pasts. Joan had nodded when Henry mentioned the death of his wife from cancer. Joan had heard the news from mutual friends. It was about the same time her own marriage had ended in a bitter divorce. Afterward, it seemed both had immersed themselves completely in their respective professions, becoming renowned in their fields. During this time, neither had sought out any intimate relationships, still shy from their wounded hearts. It seemed pain was pain, no matter what the circumstance.\n\n\"Have you learned anything new about the gold debris found inside the mummy's skull?\" Henry asked more soberly.\n\nJoan sat straighter, switching to her more professional demeanor. \"Not much. Just that it's certainly not gold. It's more of a dense viscid liquid. At room temperatures, it's moldable, like warm clay. I suspect it's some type of heavy metal amalgam, perhaps mercury mixed with something else.\" She shrugged.\n\nHenry's brows furrowed, and he shook his head slightly. \"It doesn't make sense. The Incas' skill with metals was not considered advanced. Even smelting iron was beyond them. I find it strange they could create a new amalgam.\"\n\n\"Well, they must have learned something. They filled the mummy's skull full of the odd metal.\"\n\n\"Yes, I suppose\u2026\"\n\n\"But why do you think they did that?\" she asked. \"Fill his skull?\"\n\n\"I can only theorize. The Incas revered the braincase as a source of power. They even made drinking mugs from their slain enemies' skulls. My guess is that the Incas feared the friar's Christian god and performed this odd rite to avoid the wrath of this foreign deity.\"\n\nJoan curled her nose. \"So they drilled holes in the man's skull, removed the brain, and filled the space with the amalgam as an offering to the stranger's god?\"\n\nHenry shrugged and nodded. \"It's a theory. The Incas seemed to have a fascination with trepanation. If you took all the skulls from around the world, they would not equal the number of Incan skulls found with such mutilations. So I wager there must be a religious significance to the act. But it's only a theory so far.\"\n\n\"And not a bad one, I suppose,\" she said with a smile. \"But perhaps tomorrow I'll have more answers for you about the amalgam itself. I contacted Dr. Kirkpatrick at George Washington University, a metallurgy specialist. He owes me a favor. He's agreed to come by tomorrow and take a look at the substance.\"\n\nHenry brightened with her words, his eyes glinting. \"I'd like to be there when he examines the material.\"\n\n\"Sure\u2026\" Joan was momentarily flustered. She had been considering some way to arrange a meeting with Henry again before he left, and here he was dropping it in her lap. \"Th\u2026that would be wonderful\u2026your company would be welcome anytime.\" Joan mentally struck her forehead with the heel of her hand. Why was she acting like a tongue-tied adolescent? She was forty-eight years old, for Christ's sake. When would these games between men and women ever grow more comfortable?\n\nJoan found Henry smiling at her. \"I'd enjoy working beside you again, too.\"\n\nShe blushed and wiped her hands on her napkin in her lap. She was saved from having to speak by the server's arrival with two platters of sizzling steaks. The two waited silently as dishes and silverware were exchanged. Once the waiter left, Joan spoke up, \"So what about your end of the deal? Anything new on this Friar de Almagro?\"\n\nHenry's voice was subdued. \"No\u2026I'm still waiting to hear back from the archbishop's people.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"When I was working on the metal, I got to thinking about the Dominican cross you found. I was wondering if it was really gold, or maybe another amalgam like the debris in the skull.\"\n\nHenry glanced up quickly. \"By God, I never considered that!\"\n\nShe enjoyed his surprise and the look of admiration in his eyes. She continued, \"Maybe it wasn't the Incas who created this metal. Perhaps it was their Spanish conquerors.\"\n\nHenry nodded. \"Now that's something I could more easily believe. The Spanish conquistadors! Maybe when this metallurgist reviews the material, we can at least put this part of the mystery to rest.\"\n\nJoan grinned at his enthusiasm. There was nothing more attractive than a man who could share her passion for the mysteries of science\u2014especially one as handsome as Henry.\n\n\"First thing when I get back to the Sheraton,\" Henry continued, \"I'm gonna take a closer look at the cross again.\"\n\nJoan tested her steak. It was a perfect medium rare. The chefs here never disappointed. \"If you do, I'd like to know what you think as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"In that case\u2026if you'd like, since you're dropping me off at the Sheraton, why don't you come up to the room and see for yourself. After working with the amalgam all day, you'd be the better one to judge it anyway.\"\n\nJoan looked up from her steak to see if there was more of an invitation behind his words. She was not one to bed any man who happened to pique her interest, even an old friend\u2026but she wouldn't mind extending their evening together.\n\nHenry was working at his own steak with studied concentration. He glanced at her from above his glasses, his eyes questioning her hesitation.\n\nJoan made her decision. \"Why\u2026yes, I'd love to take another peek at the cross.\"\n\nHenry bobbed his head, returning to his steak. \"Excellent.\"\n\nJoan saw how his smile widened. She found her own grin growing brighter. They might as well be two teenagers out on a first date.\n\nWith the matter settled, both turned their attention to the table and the quality of the dinner. The remainder of the conversation consisted of the simple pleasantries of two diners: a review of the meal, shared stories of their different professions, even a discussion on the pending stormfront aiming at the coast from the Great Lakes. By the time dessert was served\u2014a delightfully rich vanilla cr\u00eame br\u00fbl\u00e9e shared with two spoons\u2014both had grown out of their awkwardness and into a comfortable warmth.\n\n\"Whatever happened to us back at Rice?\" Joan finally asked, feeling comfortable enough to broach an awkward topic. \"Why didn't we work out?\"\n\nHenry fingered his cup of coffee. \"I think there was too much life ahead of us. You wanted to pursue medicine. I wanted to get my masters at Texas A&M. I think at the time there was not much room for anything else, especially not a committed relationship.\"\n\n\"The woes of the career-driven,\" she mumbled. Joan's thoughts drifted to her own husband. It was his common complaint about their marriage. She was never home, never there for him.\n\nHenry sipped his coffee. \"Maybe. I suppose. But then eventually I met Elizabeth and you met Robert.\" Henry shrugged.\n\n\"Hmm\u2026\"\n\nHenry sighed and set his cup down. \"Maybe we should be going. It is getting near time for me to contact the team in Peru.\"\n\nJoan glanced at her watch. It was almost ten o'clock. Where had the time gone? \"And I've got an early day tomorrow myself. If we're to take a peek at that cross tonight, we ought to be going.\"\n\nHenry insisted on paying the bill after a mild protest from Joan. \"It's the least I can do after all you've done,\" he said, pulling out his wallet. \"Besides, the tab will be coming out of my research grant anyway.\" He offered her a quirked grin.\n\nJoan held up her palms, relinquishing any claims on the check. \"If the government is paying, it's all yours.\"\n\nShortly thereafter, following a short car ride, Joan found herself sharing an elevator with the professor. A degree of nervousness set in again as silence enveloped them. Henry fidgeted with the buttons on his suit. The doors chimed open on the seventh floor, and the two crossed down to Henry's hotel room.\n\n\"Excuse the mess,\" he said as he keyed open the door. \"I wasn't expecting company.\" Henry held open the door for Joan to step through.\n\nJoan stared at the ruins of the professor's hotel room. The bed had been overturned and the mattress shredded. Every drawer had been pulled and dumped; even the television lay on its side on the rug, its back panel unscrewed.\n\n\"My God!\" Henry exclaimed, stunned.\n\n\"You said it was a mess, but I wasn't expecting this,\" Joan said in a halfhearted attempt at a joke.\n\nHenry dashed into the room, giving it all a quick glance around. He sifted through some papers by the toppled desk and uncovered his laptop. He picked it up and tested it. A beep as it turned on revealed it had been undamaged. A sigh of relief escaped him. \"All my research\u2026thank God.\"\n\nJoan cautiously entered the room. \"You shouldn't touch too much. I'll call hotel security. Whoever burglarized the room might still be around.\"\n\nHenry righted the desk and put the computer down. \"Why didn't they take my laptop?\"\n\nDialing the front desk, Joan spoke, \"I suspect they were after bigger game. I wager that reporter's piece in the Baltimore Herald this morning caught the eyes of some petty thieves.\"\n\nHenry seemed to jolt with her words. \"The cross!\" He strode across the room.\n\n\"Tell me you left it in the hotel safe,\" Joan said.\n\nShaking his head, Henry moved to one of the sconces on the wall. \"After traveling through so many foreign countries, I've developed my own system of security.\"\n\nAs Joan related the burglary to the front desk, Henry used a Swiss army knife to unscrew the fixture from the wall and reached to the niche behind it. He retrieved a small velvet pouch, heavy with whatever was inside. He spilled out the large Dominican cross and silver ring into his palm.\n\nJoan replaced the phone. \"Security is on its way. You were lucky this time, Henry. Next time use the hotel's safe.\"\n\nHenry looked around the room. \"I think you're right. These thieves were damned thorough.\" Joan stayed silent as Henry examined the disheveled room. \"Welcome back to America,\" he muttered sourly.\n\nJoan's eyes strayed to a suit box from Barney's tossed in a corner. A register receipt was still taped to its cover. She eyed Henry's handsome suit. So it seemed the professor had done some last-minute shopping for their \"date.\" She forced down a small smile and silently cursed the thieves that had ruined their evening.\n\nSoon two large men in blue suits appeared at the open door. They flashed identification and entered. \"We've called the police. They'll be here in a moment to take a statement. Another room is already being prepared for you.\"\n\nHenry turned to Joan. \"Why don't you head home. I can take care of matters here.\"\n\n\"I suppose I'd better. But tomorrow bring the crucifix with you to the lab. I'll have Dr. Kirkpatrick look it over. He'll know for sure if it's gold or not.\"\n\nHenry looked about the room with a forlorn expression. \"Thanks, I'll do that.\"\n\nShe moved to leave, but he stopped her with a touch on her arm. She turned to find him smiling at her. \"As weird as this may sound considering the state of my room, I had a nice night.\"\n\nShe squeezed his hand and held it a fraction longer than professionally necessary. \"I did, too.\" She returned his smile, if only a bit more shyly. \"I'll see you tomorrow.\"\n\nHe nodded, and as she stepped from the room, he added softly, \"I look forward to it.\"\n\nJoan didn't turn, pretending not to have heard, when actually she feared her reddening face would reveal too plainly her heart. Only when she was safely in the elevator and the doors had closed did she let out a long sigh of relief. \"Get ahold of yourself,\" she warned the empty elevator. \"He's an old friend. That's all.\"\n\nStill as the elevator headed down, a small shiver of pleasure passed through her. Tomorrow could not come soon enough.\n\nAs another tumble of rocks echoed down from above, Sam glanced up from where he knelt. His eyes flicked to the others gathered around the three bands of hematite. Norman stared up toward the roof with a small flinch of his shoulders. Ralph only grumbled and continued swathing the yellow dye across his band with a small paintbrush. Denal sat to one side, running his hands slowly up and down the crowbar in his lap.\n\nOnly Maggie met his eyes. \"The second level must be collapsed by now,\" she whispered.\n\nSam nodded with a deep sigh. None of them wanted to consider what that meant. He glanced to his watch. It was a little after ten in the evening. At this rate, there was little chance the pyramid would remain intact for another two days. To distract from the weight of rock slowly crumbling down upon them, they had attempted to keep busy. Sam's suggestion that they test his experimental dyes on the hematite bands had been grudgingly accepted.\n\n\"Now what?\" Ralph asked. He stretched a kink from his back where he bent over his band.\n\nSam scooted closer. \"Next you need to sponge the excess dye gently away with this lipophilic agent.\" He passed Ralph a dry sponge and a jar of clear solution.\n\n\"I'm ready, too,\" Maggie said, and reached for a second sponge.\n\nWith Sam directing, the other two students soon had the bands prepped for deciphering. Sam lifted the black Wood's lamp and switched it on. \"Okay, extinguish the flashlight.\"\n\nOnce done, darkness suddenly collapsed tighter around them. A pool of purplish light was all that stood between them and absolute blackness. Bathed within the glow, the two bands fluoresced a soft green. The group clustered tighter.\n\n\"Amazing,\" Maggie exclaimed.\n\nUnder Sam's ultraviolet lamp, the ancient writing stood in stark relief, the green lettering glowing brightly, as crisp as the day it had been etched into the metal.\n\n\"Cool,\" Ralph said, patting Sam on the shoulder.\n\nHolding back his own whoop of pride, Sam ran a finger along the lettering, carefully reading the writing on the first band. \"Nos Christi defenete. Malum ne fugat.\" Sam concentrated intently as he translated the scrawled Latin. \" 'Christ protect us. May the evil never escape.' \" A chill passed down Sam's spine.\n\n\"Not the words you want to hear trapped in a collapsed tomb,\" Ralph said.\n\n\"Especially when we're sitting right outside the cursed chamber,\" Norman added, eyeing Sam. \"What was that you said about the pictograph in the next room? The gateway to Heaven, the gateway to Hell?\"\n\nSam waved the photographer's fears away. \"That's just a rough interpretation from a Judeo-Christian viewpoint. The ancient Peruvians didn't believe in a biblical heaven or hell, but in three distinct levels of existence: janan pacha, the upper world; cay pacha, our world; and uca pacha, the lower or interior world. They believed these three worlds were closely linked, and that certain sacred areas, named pacariscas, were where the three worlds came together.\" Sam glanced over his shoulder. \"From the pictographs next door, I suspect that chamber was revered and protected as a pacariscas.\"\n\nNorman stared toward the open doorway to the booby-trapped chamber. \"A gateway to both the lower and upper worlds.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\nMaggie elbowed Sam. \"Enough already! Get on with the second band.\"\n\nSam cleared his throat and bent over the etched hematite, this time translating as he ran a finger along the Latin scribblings. \" 'Lord above, keep us safe. We beseech you. We leave this tomb to Heaven. May it never be disturbed. Beware\u2026' \" Sam read the last two lines and his breath caught in his throat. He leaned away. \"Oh, God!\"\n\nMaggie leaned nearer. \"What?\"\n\nSam glanced at the others. \" 'Beyond lies the workings of Satan, the will of the Devil. I seal this passage against the Serpent of Eden, lest mankind be damned forever.'\"\n\nFive pairs of eyes turned to the open doorway.\n\n\"The Serpent of Eden?\" Norman asked nervously.\n\nMaggie explained, voice hushed. \"Genesis. The corrupter of mankind, a tempter of forbidden knowledge.\"\n\n\"It's signed,\" Sam said, returning their attentions to the hematite bands. \"Friar Francisco de Almagro, servant of our Lord, 1535.\"\n\nRalph glanced over Sam's shoulder. \"Didn't your uncle say he thought the mummy was probably a Dominican friar?\"\n\nSam nodded. \"Yeah. This may be the fellow's last written testament. After sealing the tomb here, he must've been killed for some reason. But why?\" Sam knelt back upon his heels. \"What happened here? What was it about the next room that scared the man so much? It couldn't have just been the booby traps. Not with that reference to the Serpent of Eden.\"\n\nMaggie nodded toward the open doorway. \"Whatever the answer, it lies in there somewhere, maybe something the Moche discovered and the conquering Incas usurped. Something that spooked the bejesus out of our dead friar.\"\n\n\"I wish my uncle were here,\" Sam muttered. \"We could use his expertise.\"\n\nMore boulders shifted overhead, grinding like old bones. \"I don't think your uncle would share that wish,\" Norman said, eyeing the roof.\n\nMaggie suddenly stood up and collected the flashlight. \"I want to see that chamber again.\"\n\nSam noticed how her legs trembled for a second before she was able to take a step away. He suspected most of her stated curiosity was just a desire to move, to keep busy and distracted. He pushed to his feet. \"I'll go with you.\"\n\nRalph stood up, too. \"Norman and I'll go check the next level up.\"\n\nNorman's eyes widened. \"I will?\"\n\nRalph glowered at the photographer. \"Quit being such a pantywaist.\"\n\nNorman scowled and rolled to his feet. \"Oh, all right.\" He fished out the second flashlight. Denal had found the extra handlamp among the bag of tools abandoned by Gil's gang.\n\n\"Be quick,\" Sam warned. \"It's not safe up there, and we need to conserve the batteries.\"\n\n\"Trust me,\" Norman said. \"Between Ralph's company and falling slabs of granite, I'll be damned quick.\"\n\nDenal also stood. He moved alongside Sam and Maggie, making his own decision on where to go.\n\nWith a wave, Norman and Ralph set off.\n\n\"C'mon,\" Maggie said behind him.\n\nSam and Denal followed her as she ducked through the doorway. Sam noticed Denal quickly touch his forehead and make the sign of the cross, a whispered prayer on his lips, before passing through the threshold.\n\nIn silence, the trio returned to the edge of the tiled floor. Gold and silver reflected their light brightly. The Incan king stood bright as a yellow star against the black granite stonework. The ticking of the machinery echoed in muffled time to Sam's own heartbeat. Tilting his Stetson, he studied the pictograph, tracing the flashlight's beam from the golden rectangle that represented the physical world, cay pacha, to the distant square that represented the upper world, janan pacha. A zigzag of gold tiles connected the two bases. \"Well?\" he asked. \"What now?\" Sam purposely kept the light away from the two bodies upon the floor.\n\nLike a caged lioness, Maggie stalked back and forth before the puzzle. \"There has to be a way across,\" she muttered. \"Solve that and whatever prize lies here will most likely be revealed.\"\n\n\"The Serpent of Eden?\" Sam asked.\n\nMaggie turned to him, eyes bright in the reflected glow. \"Don't you want to know what he meant?\"\n\n\"Honestly, right now I'd just prefer to get our butts out of here.\"\n\n\"Well, until then\u2026\" Maggie swung back to the tiled pictograph. \"I'm going to keep working.\" Without another word, Maggie stepped upon one of the gold tiles that made up the rectangle of gold at this edge.\n\n\"No, Miss Maggie!\" Denal shouted.\n\nSam reached for her at the same time, but Maggie stepped onto a neighboring gold tile, out of his reach. \"What are you doing?\" he yelled.\n\nShe turned back\u2014not to Sam, but the boy. \"What's the safest path, Denal?\"\n\nSam glanced to his side. The young Quechan stood trembling by the edge of the floor, eyes wild. \"Maggie, what are you talking about?\" Sam asked. \"He doesn't know.\"\n\n\"He knows,\" she said. \"He warned me from stepping on the floor the first time here.\" She stared intently at the boy. \"I saw a look of recognition on your face, Denal.\"\n\nThe boy backed a step away.\n\nMaggie continued. \"I've solved part of the riddle. I stand on the section of the pictograph that represents our world.\" She pointed a hand toward the distant rectangle of gold on the far side of the room. \"And I must reach janan pacha, the upper world. Isn't that so? But how do you move across the floor safely? The gold path is too obvious.\"\n\nDenal just shook his head vehemently.\n\nSam lowered his flashlight. \"Maggie, Denal can't know\u2014\"\n\nMaggie's face hardened, and she swung away. She moved to step on one of the gold tiles that stair-stepped toward the distant rectangle.\n\n\"No!\" Denal called out suddenly. Tears in his eyes. \"I'll tell you.\"\n\nStunned, Sam stared at the teenager.\n\nHe seemed to sag under his gaze. \"The old amautas of my people. They speak stories of a bad place like this. Very old stories. I no know for sure. But they say that life be balanced between janan and cay. To walk between them, you must balance the sun and the moon.\"\n\n\"The sun and moon?\" Maggie said. She turned to the floor. \"Ah sure! Of course.\" Maggie stepped onto a neighboring silver tile.\n\n\"Maggie! Don't!\"\n\nShe ignored Sam and moved back to a gold square. \"To follow the gold staircase of tiles, you have to alternate each step with a silver one. Balance the silver an' gold, the moon an' the sun.\"\n\nSam called out. \"You can't know that for certain.\"\n\n\"I'm sure.\" Maggie continued across the room, stepping from silver to gold and back to silver again. She spoke hurriedly as she worked across the pattern. \"Gold was considered by the Incas to be the sweat of the sun, while silver was the tears of the moon. Sun an' moon\u2026gold an' silver\u2026\"\n\nSam stood at the edge of the floor, unable to breathe.\n\nDenal mumbled in his native tongue, fear strong in his voice. \"She goes\u2026she no come back.\"\n\nSam barely heard him, his heart in his throat.\n\nHe tugged on Sam's arm. \"Miss Maggie must stop,\" he beseeched. \"The amautas say who travels to janan pacha can never return. She must stop!\"\n\nThe boy's warning finally sank into Sam. He jerked as if he had touched flame. \"Maggie!\"\n\nThe surging panic in his voice drew her gaze.\n\n\"Denal says that if you cross the room, you can't come back!\"\n\nMaggie glanced toward the far wall, then back at Sam. She still stood on the same tile, but her voice shook. \"Th\u2026that makes no bloody sense. Why would the room be one-way?\"\n\n\"I don't know. But now is not the time to test it.\"\n\nMaggie sighed. \"Maybe you're right\u2026\" She stepped back onto the silver tile she had just vacated.\n\n\"No!\" Denal yelled.\n\nThe boy's scream saved Maggie's life. Flinching, she yanked back her leg just as the silver tile hinged open under her boot.\n\n\"Watch out!\" Sam yelled. \"Above you!\" He had spotted the corresponding gold tile on the roof drop open. A thick rain of spears shot out, whistling, and disappeared into the pit opened under the silver tile.\n\nMaggie had backed from the cascade of blades, legs trembling fiercely. She fell to her knees as the silver tile swung closed again. \"Sam\u2026?\"\n\nGesturing wildly, Denal explained, \"She must no come back. If starts, Miss Maggie must finish.\"\n\nThe woman's eyes were wide with fear as she stared back at Sam across the six yards of floor. Sam could see a glaze of panic beginning to set in. What was he to do?\n\nSuddenly the entire room shook violently. A thunderous roar accompanied it. Sam was thrown to the floor. Maggie ducked, covering her head with her arms. Two metal tiles dislodged from above and crashed with loud clangs.\n\nOnly Denal managed to keep his feet. The Quechan boy glanced toward the room's entrance. Dust and clouds of silt rolled toward them. \"The temple! It falls!\"\n\nSam rolled back to his feet as the floor settled. \"Oh, God\u2026Norman and Ralph\u2026\"\n\nAs if hearing his call, two figures suddenly burst through the cloudy silt. Coughing, Ralph skidded to a stop beside Sam. From head to foot, the large black man was grey with granite dust, as was Norman behind him. The photographer sneezed loudly.\n\nRalph was out of breath. \"It's all coming apart!\"\n\nThe groan of shifting stones seemed to come from all around them. Occasional loud crashes still erupted regularly, as close as the antechamber next door.\n\nNorman wiped his nose on his sleeve. \"There's nothing above us now.\"\n\nRalph pulled Sam to the neighboring wall of the short passage. \"Feel.\"\n\nSam placed his hand on the wall of stacked granite stones. It trembled under his palm as the stresses from the tons of granite blocks and clay strained these last bulwarks. \"All that's holding this place together is a lick and a promise,\" Sam realized aloud.\n\nNorman suddenly drew their attention with an urgent call. He pointed toward the patterned floor. \"Maggie!\"\n\nSam swung around. Across the tiles, he spotted the Irish student sprawled on her side on the same gold tile. Her limbs twitched and spasmed. She was having another seizure.\n\n\"What the hell is she doing out there?\" Ralph asked angrily.\n\n\"I don't have time to explain.\" Sam unslung his rifle and passed it to Ralph. \"Stay here!\" He darted onto the gold tiles.\n\nDenal yelled a warning, but Sam ignored the boy. Sam danced from silver to gold as he climbed the staircase pattern toward janan pacha. Reaching Maggie's tile, he knelt beside her and cradled her head in his lap. His touch seemed to calm her slightly. Using this cue, he stroked her hair and called to her softly. Her trembling limbs quieted. \"Maggie\u2026if you can hear me, come to me. Follow my voice.\"\n\nA small moan escaped from her lips.\n\n\"C'mon, Maggie\u2026we need you\u2026this is no time to be napping.\"\n\nHer eyelids fluttered, and then she was staring at him. \"Sam\u2026?\"\n\nHe leaned down and hugged her tightly. The smell of her hair and sweat sharp in his nose. \"Thank God!\"\n\nMaggie pushed from his embrace and quickly took in the scene. \"You shouldn't have come out here,\" she scolded, but there was no heat in her voice, only relief. \"The temple?\"\n\n\"It's comin' down around our ears. This is the last level intact.\"\n\nMaggie glanced up at Sam, an unspoken question in her eyes.\n\nSam answered, \"An hour at most, I'd guess.\"\n\n\"What are we to do?\"\n\nHelping her to her feet, Sam stood. Maggie had to lean on his arm for support, her legs still weak. Her palms were hot on his bare skin. \"You got me thinking earlier. Just why did the Moche or Incas build this room so it was one-way only?\"\n\nMaggie shook her head.\n\nSam glanced to the far wall. \"It makes no sense\u2026unless\u2026unless there was another way out.\"\n\n\"A secret passage?\"\n\n\"There must be more than just this booby-trapped room. Why the dire warning from the mummified friar? There's nothing here. Something must lie beyond this chamber.\"\n\n\"But if you're right, where's the entrance?\"\n\nSam pointed to the large statue of the Incan king. It seemed to glower at them, gold against the dark stones. \"If anybody would know, he would. A clue must lie with him.\" Sam met Maggie's eyes.\n\n\"So we'll have to cross over there,\" she said, swallowing hard. She offered Sam a wavery half smile. \"One last puzzle.\"\n\nThe roof again rumbled ominously. \"Right. We either solve it, or we kiss our asses good-bye.\"\n\nRalph called over to them. \"What're you two doing? We're running out of time!\"\n\nSam quickly related what they planned to do.\n\n\"That's insane! You're risking your lives on pretty thin guesses!\"\n\nSam nodded toward the roof. \"I'd rather take my chances than just wait for the sky to fall.\"\n\nRalph had no answer. He just shifted from foot to foot nervously. \"Okay, boss, but be careful,\" he finally conceded.\n\nDenal stepped onto the tile floor, his face ashen. \"I come with.\"\n\n\"No!\" Maggie and Sam called out in unison.\n\nDenal just continued onward. \"I know old stories. I help. I no die without a fight, too.\" He followed their path to join them. He glared up at Sam. \"My mama, before she die, she teach me to be brave. I no shame her.\"\n\nSam stared for a moment, then clapped the boy on the shoulder. \"Thanks, Denal.\"\n\nHe smiled weakly, but his eyes kept flicking between the Incan king and the patterned floor. With shaky fingers, he fished out a bent cigarette from a pocket and slipped it between his lips. He caught Sam eyeing the unlit cigarette and stared back defiantly. \"Let's go.\"\n\nSam turned to leave. \"You know those things will stunt your growth.\"\n\n\"Not if I don't light them,\" Denal said sourly.\n\n\"You find a way out of here,\" Sam said, \"and you can smoke your lungs black.\"\n\nMaggie trailed behind them. \"Keep moving. This roof isn't goin' to last forever.\"\n\nSam continued in silence. Each step onto a new tile brought an ever-growing sense of dread. But nothing happened. Between Maggie and Denal, they seemed to have solved the riddle of the tiles, but what then?\n\nSam came to the midpoint of the floor and froze.\n\nMaggie called from a couple rows back. \"Why've you stopped?\"\n\nHe stepped aside so she could see.\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\nSam was extra careful proceeding onto the next gold tile. The blood made the surface slick. He was mindful not to touch the torn and fouled body of Juan that shared the tile. The dead man's eyes seemed to track him as he passed. Sam glanced away, but the smell was strong this close, the metallic tang of blood mixed with the more earthy smell of decay. He continued on, sighing loudly once he stepped onto the next tile.\n\nFor a few rows, he sped faster, glad to escape the dead man. Neither of the other two spoke as they followed. Only the scuff of boots indicated they continued behind him. Farther across the room, he could hear Ralph and Norman mumbling nervously, but their words were too quiet to make out.\n\nAt last Sam stepped onto the four gold tiles that made up the pictograph of janan pacha. Bending in relief, Sam leaned his hands on his knees. He closed his eyes and thanked the heavens for his safe passage.\n\nMaggie and Denal joined him.\n\n\"You both okay?\" Sam asked, straightening.\n\nMaggie could only nod. Her face shone with a sheen of sweat. Denal's cigarette trembled between his lips, but he bobbed his head, too.\n\nSam glanced to the wall. They were now grouped at the upper left of the pictograph. The last row of tiles was all silver. Only the statue itself, in the middle of the wall, stood upon a gold tile amid a small pile of gold and silver trinkets and offerings. \"Now what? How do we reach the statue from here?\"\n\nMaggie turned in a slow circle. \"Listen.\"\n\nSam frowned. \"What\u2014?\" Then he realized what she meant.\n\nDenal did, too. \"It stopped.\"\n\nSam cocked his head. There was no trace of the ticking machinery that geared the booby trap.\n\n\"It ended as soon as we arrived here,\" Maggie said.\n\nSam nodded. \"Our following the path correctly must have deactivated it.\"\n\n\"So it should be safe to follow the silver tiles to the statue?\" Maggie asked, glancing toward Denal.\n\nThe Quechan boy shrugged. \"I no know.\"\n\nSam took a girding breath and stepped off the gold tiles and onto the row of silver. He cringed for a heartbeat, but nothing happened. He glanced to Maggie.\n\n\"The gears are still silent,\" she said, meeting his eyes. \"It must be okay.\"\n\nSam continued tile by tile to the golden statue. The others followed. Soon they stood before the Incan warrior. He seemed to be glaring down at them from under a headdress. The three studied their adversary.\n\nThe statue stood almost a full two yards taller than most men, posted with his back to a narrow silver archway in the granite wall. He bore a staff in one hand and a typical Incan bola in the other, three stones slung on llama tendon.\n\n\"Look at his llautu crown,\" Sam said, pointing to the figure's braided headdress topped by three parrot feathers and a fringe of tassels. \"It definitely marks this one as a Sapa Inca. One of their kings.\"\n\n\"Yes, but the facial detail an' depiction of realistic musculature is unlike the Incas' usual stylization,\" Maggie whispered. \"It's as perfect a work as Michelangelo's David.\"\n\nSam leaned closer to study the ancient king's face. \"Strange. Whichever Sapa Inca is represented here was clearly worshiped as no other.\"\n\nA step away, Denal cleared his throat. \"The wall\u2026it is not stone.\"\n\nSam turned away from the statue. The boy's gaze was not on the golden idol, but the black wall behind it. Sheer granite spread all around. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nMaggie gasped. \"Denal means it's not stonework. Look there are no seams or joints. It's not stacked stone blocks like the temple.\"\n\nSam moved to the rock and ran a palm along it. \"It's a wall of solid granite.\"\n\nA voice called from across the room. \"Did you find anything?\" It was Norman.\n\nSam turned his head and yelled, \"We found the mountain!\" Sam arched his neck and examined the wall. \"The pyramid must have been built at the base of this cliff face.\"\n\n\"But why?\" Maggie asked.\n\nSam thought out loud. \"The Incas revered mountains. But why build a huaca, or holy place here? What was so special about this cliff?\"\n\nMaggie answered after a moment, \"Wh\u2026what if there was a cave?\"\n\nSam slapped his hand against the granite wall. \"Of course. Caverns were considered to be pacariscas, mystical places joining the three worlds of their religion. They were often used as places of ritual. It makes sense!\"\n\n\"But where's the entrance?\" Maggie asked.\n\n\"I don't know, but the statue must be a key. Did you notice the silver archway behind the statue? It's large enough to cover a narrow opening.\"\n\nMaggie and Sam returned to the statue. Sam leaned his shoulder against it and tried to shove the idol aside.\n\n\"Be careful,\" Maggie warned.\n\nDenal stood with one fist clenched at his throat.\n\nBut nothing happened. The statue could not be budged. \"Damn it,\" Sam swore, taking off his Stetson and swiping his damp hair back. \"The thing must weigh close to a ton.\"\n\nMaggie frowned at him. \"Brute force isn't the answer. With the complexity shown here, there has to be a mechanism to unlock the pathway.\" She elbowed Sam aside and approached the statue. Stretching on the tip of her toes, she examined it closely, her nose only inches from the golden surface. Slowly she worked her way down the statue's physique.\n\nSam grew impatient, especially when the floor began to tremble again. \"This place isn't going to stand much longer,\" he mumbled.\n\n\"Aha!\" Maggie exclaimed. She turned to Sam, her face at the Incan king's waist. \"Here's the answer.\" She pointed to the statue's belly button.\n\n\"What are you talking about?\"\n\nMaggie reached and pushed her finger through the hole. Her entire finger was swallowed up. \"The Incas considered the navel to be a place of power. They believed the umbilicus once joined the physical body of man to the gods of creation.\"\n\nSam crouched with Denal. \"Another fusion of worlds.\"\n\nMaggie slipped her finger out. \"It's a keyhole. Now we just need to find the key.\"\n\nSam straightened, thinking aloud. \"The navel links the gods of janan pacha to mankind in the physical world\u2026to cay pacha. If this chamber is a point where all three worlds unite\u2026then the key must be something from the lower world, from uca pacha.\"\n\nMaggie clutched his elbow in understanding. \"By inserting the key into the navel lock, then all three worlds would be united.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but where do we find such a key?\"\n\nDenal nudged Sam. He pointed to the statue's feet, to where a small mound of gold and silver offerings were piled. \"Uca pacha lies at bottom of feet.\"\n\n\"Och! We've been feckin' fools for sure.\" Maggie dropped to her knees and began sifting through the objects. \"The lower world! Sometimes it's best to hide somethin' in plain sight.\"\n\nSam joined her. Working through the pile, he held up a golden figurine of a panther with ruby eyes, then cast it aside. \"There's enough wealth here to finance a small nation.\"\n\n\"And it'll do us not a nit of good if we don't survive.\"\n\nAs if to remind them further, the temple rumbled and shook as another section gave way. The tiles overhead trembled and clanged. One of the booby traps sprang on its own, triggered by the roof's shaking: a huge granite block carved with a demon's face crashed to the floor and embedded itself in the silver tile below.\n\nMaggie and Sam eyed each other grimly.\n\nRalph called from behind them, coughing slightly. \"That's it! We're sealed in, folks! If there's another way out, I suggest you find it damn quick!\"\n\nMaggie whispered, \"The structure of the floor and trap is coming apart. If Norman and Ralph are goin' to join us\u2014\"\n\n\"You're right. Keep searching.\" Sam stood up. \"Ralph! Norman! Come on over! Now!\" The two other students were obscured in a cloud of granite dust. But Ralph waved his flashlight in acknowledgment and started toward them.\n\nSam returned to Maggie. \"They're coming. Any luck?\"\n\nShe shook her head; her hand trembled as she picked through the pieces. \"I can't think clearly. What if I miss a clue? We won't have a second chance.\" A small sob escaped her throat.\n\nSam knelt beside her. \"We'll get out of here.\" He put an arm around her shoulders and held her tight.\n\nShe leaned into his embrace, silent for several heartbeats. Then a final shudder passed through her, and she seemed to relax again. Slipping from under his arm, she turned to Sam, her dusty face marred by trails of tears. She wiped at her cheeks and mumbled, \"Thanks, Sam.\"\n\nNo words were needed. He nodded and returned to his own search alongside her. They worked as a team, sifting through the pile of objects. Sam almost tossed aside their salvation, but Maggie stopped him, grabbing his wrist.\n\nSam held a foot-long golden dagger with a silver handle. \"What?\"\n\n\"Look at the carving on the hilt.\"\n\nSam raised it into the beam of the flashlight Denal was holding. It bore the figure of a man with prominent fangs. Sam recognized the figure from ancient ceramic pottery. \"It's the fanged god Aiapaec.\"\n\nMaggie nodded. \"A god of the Moche tribes!\"\n\nSam remembered his uncle's assessment of this buried pyramid. It was clearly Moche. Here was more proof. \"This will make Uncle Hank happy\u2026that is, if we get out of here to show it to him.\" He began to place the dagger aside.\n\nMaggie stopped him again. \"Wait, Sam. Some scholars say that the Incas may have incorporated the Moche god, Aiapaec, into their own pantheon of gods. But the Inca's renamed him\u2014Huamancantac!\"\n\n\"The god of guano\u2026bat dung?\" Sam stared at her as if she were mad. What was her point? Then understanding dawned on him. \"The god of bats\u2026and caverns! A spirit from the lower world, uca pacha!\"\n\nSam sprang to his feet, dagger in hand.\n\n\"It must be the key!\" Maggie exclaimed.\n\nJust then Ralph and Norman joined the trio by the statue. \"I don't know what you're all excited about, but I'd suggest we get out of here.\" He pointed toward the rear of the chamber.\n\nSam turned. There was no rear of the chamber. With the dust settling from the last of the major rumbles, the back of the room was a tumbled pile of blocks. \"Christ!\" Overhead, a quarter of the heavy roof tiles hung crooked or tilted. And in the background, the continual groan of tons of granite sounded from above their heads.\n\nNorman's voice was a squeak. \"There's no place else to run.\"\n\n\"Maybe there is,\" Sam said. He turned and stabbed the dagger into the statue's belly. It sank to the level of the hilt.\n\nNothing happened.\n\nNorman shifted his feet, staring at the impaled knife. \"Okay, Brutus, you've stabbed Caesar. What now?\"\n\nSam tried turning the knife like a key, but it refused to move. He pulled the dagger back out, his eyes on Maggie. \"I was sure you were right.\" He held the gold dagger between them, clutching it tightly. \"Th\u2026this has to be the key!\" he said between clenched teeth, frustration trembling his voice. \"It must be!\"\n\nAs he spoke the last word, the dagger shifted in his hands. The length of gold blade molded itself into a jagged lightning bolt. It shone brightly in the beam of the flashlights. Sam almost dropped the knife, but his left hand steadied his right, both palms now clutching the hilt. \"Did anyone else see that? Or did my mind just snap?\" Sam ran his fingers over the knife, searching for the catch that had triggered the transformation. He found nothing.\n\nAnother cascade of rock tumbled behind them. It was the chamber's roof collapsing, taking out half of the roof tiles. The clang of rock and metal echoed sharply. Death rolled toward them in a gnash of rock, but none of them moved.\n\nInstead, Maggie raised her hands toward the dagger, then lowered them back again, clearly afraid of disturbing the miracle. \"It's now the symbol of Pachacamac. The Incan god of creation.\" She met Sam's wide eyes. \"Use it!\"\n\nSam nodded and turned back to the statue. With the tip of the dagger trembling, Sam edged the knife into the belly of the Incan king. It took a bit of rocking back and forth to insert the jagged blade fully, but with one final push, the knife slid home.\n\nA cracking grind of gears exploded, loud enough to vanquish the crash of boulders behind them.\n\nAs Sam held tight to the hilt of the dagger, the Incan statue split neatly in half, from crown to feet, a seam appearing from nowhere. The two halves pulled apart from the dagger's hilt, along with the silver archway behind it. Beyond the statue, a natural fissure in the rock was revealed.\n\nSam stood frozen before the split statue, the knife still in his grip, the blade now pointing toward the cavern entrance. \"Holy shit!\"\n\nStunned, Sam raised the dagger. It was once again just the straight blade he had first found. He let his arm drop and turned to the others. A blinding flash of Norman's camera caught him off guard. Sam rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his hand. \"Warn a guy next time,\" he complained.\n\n\"And ruin that natural expression of awe,\" Norman answered. \"Not a chance.\"\n\nThe others all began talking at once\u2014amazement, wonder, and relief ringing brightly. Ralph shone his flashlight down the throat of the fissure. It delved deep into the cliff face, beyond the reach of Ralph's light. \"I hear what sounds like running water,\" he said. \"The cavern must be plenty deep.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Sam said. He finally held up his dagger, getting the others' attention. \"I have no idea what just happened here, but let's get our asses out of this temple before it crushes us flat as pancakes.\"\n\nWith more of the roof falling behind them, no one argued. They filed quickly past Sam and into the coolness of the natural cavern.\n\nAs Ralph slid by, he returned Sam's Winchester. \"I have my own now,\" the large man said, lifting a snubby lever-action rifle.\n\nSam recognized it as Gil's weapon. \"Where?\"\n\nRalph jerked his thumb back at the tile floor. \"I picked it up when Norm and I crossed. Gil must have run off in too big a hurry, abandoning it.\" Ralph hefted an ammo belt from his shoulder. \"His loss\u2026our gain.\"\n\n\"Hopefully we won't need either,\" Sam said.\n\nRalph shrugged and continued into the tunnel.\n\n\"You'd better try one last time to reach Philip,\" Maggie said, glancing back at the crumbling room. \"Let him know we're safe and not to give up on us. With water and shelter, we should be able to survive until help arrives.\"\n\n\"You're right. In the caves, I might not be able to reach him.\" Sam had forgotten all about Philip Sykes. He pulled the walkie-talkie free, stepped away from the threshold, and switched it on. Static immediately squealed when Sam hit the transmitter. \"Sykes, can you read us? Over?\"\n\nThe answer was immediate and choppy. \"\u2026alive? Thank God\u2026the whole hill is gone\u2026We're\u2026as fast as we can! Over.\"\n\nSam smiled. He quickly summarized their discovery and the miracle of the dagger. \"So we're gonna hole up in the caves here until you can free us. Did you get all that? Over.\"\n\nThe answer was scratchier as the walkie-talkie's battery weakened. \"\u2026caves? Don't wander too far. I'll try and\u2026\" Static drowned the rest.\n\nSam turned to stare at the pale faces of his friends. \"Just hurry your ass, Philip!\" he yelled into the walkie-talkie. \"And get word to Uncle Hank as soon as possible!\"\n\nStatic was his only response. The battery was too weak to send a signal through all the jumble of rock and clay overhead. Sam swore under his breath and turned off the walkie-talkie, conserving the little juice that was left. He prayed Philip had got all that.\n\nBiting his lower lip, he joined the others. Beyond them lay a well of darkness. Though Sam was relieved at the escape from the crumbling pyramid, Friar de Almagro's warning still echoed in his head: The Serpent of Eden\u2026may it never be disturbed.\n\nSam motioned them toward the black caverns. \"Let's go.\"\n\nThe path through the rock was tight, so they proceeded single file. Ralph took the lead, and Sam brought up the rear. In the cramped space, Sam felt as if the rock were squeezing closed around him. At one point, they had to slide sideways, crushed between two walls of granite. Once through the jam, they could hear the echoing sound of rushing waters growing. The sound whetted Sam's thirst. His tongue felt like dry burlap in his mouth.\n\nRalph called back from the lead. \"I think it opens up just ahead. C'mon.\"\n\nSam hurried forward, stepping almost on Maggie's heels. They had been climbing and scraping their way through the passage for close to an hour by then. At last, Sam felt a stirring of the air. He sensed a large space ahead. It coaxed them all to a faster clip.\n\nThe passage widened at last. The team could now proceed as a group. Ralph, a step ahead of the rest, held one of the flashlights. \"There's something ahead,\" he mumbled.\n\nTheir pace slowed as the passage came to an end. Ralph raised his flashlight. \"I don't believe it!\" he gasped.\n\nSam agreed. The others stood silent beside him. Ahead lay an open chamber, a cavern with a river channel worn through the center of the floor. But that was not what triggered the stunned reactions from the others. Pillars linked roof to floor, their lengths carved with intricate images and fantastic creatures. In the stone, embedded silver reflected the flashlight, eyes from thousands of carved figures, sentinels from an ancient world.\n\nRalph lowered the light. \"Look!\" Across the floor of the dark cavern, a path of beaten gold wound from the passage's opening over to the rumbling river and followed the course deeper into the warren of caves. The bright path disappeared around a curve in the cavern wall.\n\n\"Amazing,\" Sam said.\n\nRalph spoke at his shoulder. \"The other chamber must have been a decoy, a trap protecting what lies ahead.\"\n\nSam stepped forward, tentatively placing a boot on the gold path. \"But what have we discovered?\"\n\nMaggie moved to his side as Norman snapped a few pictures. \"We've found a place to rest. And that's enough for now.\"\n\nThe others mumbled their agreement, thirst and exhaustion overwhelming wonder and mystery.\n\nEven Sam agreed. The mysteries could wait 'til morning. Still, as the others moved forward down the curving gold path toward the river, Sam could not help but notice how the shining track bore a distinct resemblance to a winding snake.\n\nA golden serpent.\n\nHenry sat by his computer and watched the on-screen phone connections whir through their internet nodes, the modem buzzing and chiming in sync. \"C'mon, Sam, pick up the damn phone,\" he muttered to himself. It was at least the tenth time he had tried to reach the camp in Peru.\n\nVarious scenarios played in his head\u2014from the mundane, such as a glitch in the site's satellite feed, to the more frightening scene of an armed attack on the camp by looters. \"I should never have left.\"\n\nHenry glanced to the clock in the upper right-hand corner of his laptop's screen. It was after eleven. He took a deep breath, calming his war of nerves. There might even be a simpler reason for the lack of response. Because of the burglary and the ensuing paperwork with hotel security, Henry had been over twenty minutes late in making his call. The students probably gave up on him and were already sound asleep in their bunks.\n\nStill, Henry waited one last time for the line to feed through to Peru. He watched the screen icon appear, indicating the satellite had been reached. The signal leaped for the metal transmitting dish at the Andean site. Henry held his breath. But again the signal died, no connection.\n\n\"Damn!\" Henry slammed his fist on the desk as the modem switched off. Though there were a thousand other excuses for the lack of connection, Henry knew in his heart something was wrong. A creeping dread. Once before, he had experienced a similar fear, the day his brother Frank\u2014Sam's dad\u2014had died in the car crash. He recalled that phone call at four in the morning, the cold sensation of terror as he had reached for the receiver. He now felt a similar dread.\n\nSomething had happened down in Peru. He just knew it.\n\nHenry reached for the computer once again, but before his hand touched a key, the phone beside the laptop rang loudly, startling him. His heart in his throat, he stared at the receiver, flashing back to that horrible morning years ago. He clenched his fist. \"Get ahold of yourself, Henry,\" he said, forcing his fingers to relax. Closing his eyes and girding himself, he picked up the phone and raised it to his ear. \"Hello?\"\n\nA woman's voice answered. \"Henry? It's Joan.\"\n\nThough relieved it was just his colleague, Henry recognized the stress in her voice. This wasn't a casual call. \"Joan, what's wrong?\"\n\nHis sudden worry must have caught her off guard. She stuttered for a moment, then spoke. \"I\u2026I just thought you should know. I dropped by my office after our date\u2026um, evening together\u2026and discovered someone had tried to break into the morgue where the mummy's remains are stored. The security guard startled them off, but he was unable to catch them.\"\n\n\"The mummy?\"\n\n\"It's fine. The thieves never even got through the door.\"\n\n\"It seems that Herald reporter's story drew more flies than we suspected.\"\n\n\"Or maybe the same ones,\" Joan added. \"Maybe after failing to find anything in your hotel room, they came here next. What did the police say?\"\n\n\"Not much. They didn't seem particularly interested since nothing was stolen.\"\n\n\"Didn't they dust for prints or anything?\"\n\nHenry laughed. \"You've been watching too many cop shows. The only thing they did was check the tapes from the security cameras in the hallway.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"No help. The camera lenses had been spray-painted over.\"\n\nJoan was silent for several breaths.\n\n\"Joan?\"\n\n\"They did the same here. That's how the guard was alerted. He noticed the blacked-out monitor.\"\n\n\"So you think it was the same team of thieves?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Well, hopefully the close call with the security guard will keep them from any further mischief.\" But Henry was not convinced.\n\nJoan sighed loudly. \"I hope you're right. I'm sorry I bothered you.\"\n\n\"It was no bother. I was up.\" Henry avoided telling her about his inability to reach Sam. Though it made no sense at all, Henry had a feeling that tonight's events were somehow intertwined: the burglary at the hotel, the attempted breakin at the morgue, his difficulty in reaching Sam. It was nonsense, of course, but the small hairs on the back of Henry's neck stood on end.\n\n\"I should let you go,\" Joan said. \"I'll see you in the morning.\"\n\nHenry frowned in confusion, then remembered his schedule to meet with Joan at the lab. After the night's hubbub and his nagging worry over his nephew, Henry had momentarily forgotten about the planned rendezvous with Joan. \"Yes, of course. I'll see you then. Good night.\" Just before he hung up the phone, he added a quick, \"Thanks for calling,\" but the phone line was already dead.\n\nHenry slowly hung up the receiver.\n\nHe stared at his computer screen, then clicked it off. There was no further reason to keep trying to reach the camp. He knew he would fail. Snapping shut the laptop, he made a whispered promise to himself. \"If I can't reach the camp by tomorrow night, I'm on the first red-eye out of here.\" But even that decision did not calm his twanging nerves."
            },
            {
                "title": "Day Three",
                "text": "[ Substance Z ]\n\n[ Wednesday, August 22, 6:03 A.M. ]\n\n[ Caverns ]\n\n[ Andean Mountains, Peru ]\n\nSam studied the dagger's gold blade in the feeble light cast by the single flashlight. He had the last guard shift of the night. The others lay sprawled behind him, curled on the flat rock of the cavern floor, pillows made from rumpled shirts and packs. Ralph snored softly, but at least the big man was sleeping. Earlier, Sam had been unable to drowse, except for a brief catnap fraught with terrifying images of falling rocks and unseen monsters. He had been relieved when Norman had nudged him to take his shift.\n\nSam raised his eyes from the dagger and glanced about the cavern. All around him, silver eyes studied Sam from the dozens of carved pillars, creatures that were half-human, half-animal. Incan gods and spirits. Nearby, the golden path reflected the meager light, a bright vein in the dark rock. Sam imagined the generations of Incan Indians that must have walked this trail. The footpath continued along the river's bank deeper into the series of caves, and Sam longed to follow it. But the consensus of the group was to make camp there, near a water source and the fissure opening, and await rescue. Exploration could come later.\n\nGlancing at his watch, Sam suspected the sun was just now rising above the Andean mountains. Down there, however, the blackness seemed to grow deeper and more endless. Time lost all meaning; it stretched toward eternity.\n\nThough Sam tried to ignore his hunger, his stomach growled loudly. How long had it been since any of them had anything to eat? Still, he shouldn't complain. At least, with the stream, they had water.\n\nHe just needed to keep himself distracted.\n\nSam fingered the blade of the dagger, pondering the mystery of its mechanism. How had yesterday's transformation occurred? He couldn't even fathom the trigger that unfolded the dagger into a jagged lightning bolt. It had done so with such smoothness and lack of mechanical friction, appearing to melt into the new form. The trick was too damned convincing. How intricate was the technology developed here? Friar de Almagro's warning of the Serpent of Eden suggested a source of forbidden knowledge, a font of wisdom that could corrupt mankind. Was this an example of it?\n\nA cough drew his attention. Barefoot, Maggie sidled toward him. Even disheveled, she was striking. Covered only by a thin blouse, buttoned loosely, her breasts moved under the fabric. Sam's mouth grew dry. He dropped his eyes before he embarrassed himself, but his gaze only discovered the soft curves of waist and leg.\n\n\"You must quit fondling that thing, Sam,\" she said quietly. \"People are goin' to start talking.\"\n\n\"What?\" Sam asked, shocked, glancing up at her.\n\nMaggie offered him a tired smile and nodded toward the dagger.\n\n\"Oh\u2026\" He tucked it away. \"So\u2026so you couldn't sleep?\"\n\nShe shrugged, sitting beside him. \"Rock doesn't make such a great mattress.\"\n\nSam nodded, allowing her this tiny falsehood. He suspected her restlessness was the same as his: bone-deep worries and the omnipresent press of the darkness around them. \"We're going to get out of here,\" he said plainly.\n\n\"By trusting in good ol' Philip Sykes?\" she said, rolling her eyes.\n\n\"He's an ass, but he'll pull us through.\"\n\nShe stared up at a neighboring pillar and was silent. After a time, she spoke, \"Sam, I wanted to thank you again for coming out on the tiles when I had that last\u2026that last seizure.\"\n\nHe began to protest that no such thanks were needed.\n\nShe stopped him with a touch to his hand. \"But I need you to know something\u2026I think I owe you that.\"\n\nHe turned to face her more fully. \"What?\"\n\n\"I am not truly epileptic,\" she said softly.\n\nSam scrunched his face. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"The psychologists diagnosed it as post-traumatic stress syndrome, a severe form of panic attack. When tension reaches a certain level\"\u2014Maggie waved a hand in the air\u2014\"my body rebels. It sends my mind spinning away.\"\n\n\"I don't understand. Isn't that a war-trauma thing?\"\n\n\"Not always\u2026besides there are many forms of war.\"\n\nSam didn't want to press her any further, but his heart would not let him stay silent. \"What happened?\"\n\nShe studied Sam for a long breath, her eyes judging him, weighing his sincerity. Finally, she glanced away, her voice dull. \"When I was twelve years old, I saw a schoolyard friend, Patrick Dugan, shot by a stray bullet from an IRA sniper. He collapsed in my arms as I hid in a roadside ditch.\"\n\n\"God, how awful\u2026\"\n\n\"Bullets kept flying. Men and women were screamin', cryin'. I didn't know what to do. So I hid under Patrick's body.\" Maggie began to tremble as she continued the story. \"His\u2026his blood soaked over me. It was hot, like warm syrup. The smell of a slaughterhouse\u2026\"\n\nSam slid closer to Maggie, pulling her to him. \"You don't have to do this\u2026\"\n\nShe did not withdraw from him but neither did she respond to his touch. She gazed without blinking toward the darkness, lost in a familiar nightmare. \"But Patrick was still alive. As I hid under him, he moaned, too low for others to hear. He begged me to help him. He cried for his mama. But I just hid there, using his body as a shield, his blood soaking through my clothes.\" She turned to Sam, her voice catching. \"It was warm, safe. Nothin' could make me move from my hiding place. God forgive me, I forced my ears not to hear Patrick's moans for help.\" A sob escaped her throat.\n\n\"Maggie, you were only a child.\"\n\n\"I could have done something.\"\n\n\"And you could've been killed just as well. What good would that have done Patrick Dugan?\"\n\n\"I'll never know,\" she said with the heat of self-loathing tears on her cheek. She struggled away from Sam's arm and turned angry, hurt eyes toward him. \"Will I?\"\n\nSam had no answer. \"I'm sorry,\" he offered feebly.\n\nShe wiped brusquely at her face. \"Ever since then, the goddamn attacks occur. Years of pills and therapy did nothing. So I stopped them all.\" She swallowed hard. \"It's my problem, something I must live with\u2026alone. It's my burden.\"\n\nAnd your self-imposed punishment for Patrick's death, Sam thought, but he kept silent. Who was he to judge? Images of his parents' crumpled forms being yanked like sides of beef from the smashed car while he sat strapped in the backseat, watching it all, tumbled through his mind. Survivor's guilt. It was a feeling with which he was well acquainted. He still often woke with his bedsheets clinging to his damp skin, cold sweat soaking his body.\n\nMaggie's next words drew him back to the black cavern. \"In the future, Sam, don't risk yourself for me. Okay?\"\n\n\"I\u2026I can't promise that.\"\n\nShe stared angrily at him, tears brightening her eyes.\n\n\"Maggie\u2014?\"\n\nThey were interrupted by the appearance of Norman. \"Sorry, folks, but I must talk to a man about a horse,\" the photographer grumbled, hair sticking up in all directions. He crossed over the gold path and headed for a nearby boulder, seemingly oblivious to the tension between the pair.\n\nSam turned to Maggie, but she would not meet his eyes. She pushed to her feet. \"Just\u2026just don't risk your life\u2026\" As she stepped away, Sam heard her mumble something else. The words had been meant only for herself but the cavern acoustics carried the words to him. \"I don't want another death on my hands.\"\n\nLeaning forward, ready to follow and console her, Sam paused, then relaxed back down to his seat. There was nothing he could say. He himself had heard all the platitudes before, after his parents had died. Don't blame yourself. There was nothing you could do. Accidents happen. No words had helped him then either. But at least Sam had had his Uncle Henry. Having just lost his own wife, Uncle Hank had seemed to sense that some things had to be faced alone, worked out in silence, rather than probed and prodded for an answer. It was this silence more than grief that had bound nephew to uncle, like two raw-edged wounds healing and scarring together.\n\nSam watched Maggie walk away, shoulders slumped. She had been right. It was her burden. Still, Sam could not suppress the urge to rush over to her, to take her in his arms and protect her.\n\nBefore he could act, a shriek drew him around. He flew to his feet, pulling out the dagger. He stepped to where his grandfather's Winchester leaned against a rock.\n\nNorman came running around the boulder's edge, zipping up his fly, and glancing in panic behind him.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Sam asked as Norman stumbled to his side.\n\nThe photographer could not catch his breath for a moment. One arm kept gesturing back at the boulder as he gasped and choked. \"B\u2026Behind\u2026\"\n\nRalph drew beside them, bleary from his sudden awakening. He rubbed sleep from his eyes, Gil's lever-action rifle held in his other hand. \"Goddammit, Norman. You scream like a girl.\"\n\nNorman ignored Ralph's jibe, too panicked to care. \"I\u2026I thought they were just\u2026just patches of lichen or spots of lighter rock. But something moved out there!\"\n\n\"Who? What are you talking about?\" Sam asked.\n\nNorman shuddered, then finally seemed to collect himself. He waved them all back toward the boulder. By then, Maggie and Denal hovered a few steps away. \"I'm not sure.\" He led them back, but this time stayed well away from the rock and whatever lurked behind it.\n\nSam remained at the photographer's side. The dark stone on the far side of the rock lay in shadows. Streaks of quartz or white gypsum ran in streams up the nearby cavern wall. \"I don't see anything.\"\n\nNorman reached a hand back toward the others. \"Gimme one of the lights.\"\n\nDenal moved up and passed the second flashlight to the photographer. Norman clicked it on; light speared the inky gloom.\n\nSam twitched back in shock. It was not veins of quartz or gypsum that ran down the walls. These pale streaks flowed, streaming down the walls to pool at its foot. Even now, rivulets started spreading across the floor toward the gathered party. Sam shifted his own lantern. \"Spiders\u2026\" Each was as pale as the belly of a slug and had to be a hand-spread wide. There had to be hundreds\u2026no thousands of them.\n\nRalph stepped back. \"Tarantulas.\"\n\n\"Albino tarantulas,\" Maggie moaned.\n\nThe army continued its scurried march. Scouts skittered to either side of the boulder. A few paused where the rock was damp and steamed slightly from Norman's morning relief, clearly drawn to the warmth.\n\n\"It's our body heat,\" Sam said. \"The damned things must be blind and drawn by noise and warmth.\"\n\nBehind him, Denal started gibbering in his native Quecha.\n\nSam swung around. The young Indian was gesturing in the opposite direction, toward the far side of the gold path. Norman turned his flashlight to where Denal pointed. As another flank of the army streamed down the other wall on pale, hairy legs, Sam suddenly had an awful sensation crawl up his back.\n\nSam arched his neck, raising his lantern high.\n\nOverhead, the roof was draped by a mass of roiling bodies, crawling, mating, fighting. Thousands of pendulous egg sacs hung in ropy wombs of silk. The students had stumbled into the main nest of the tarantulas\u2026and the army of predators was hunting for prey. They were already moving down the pillars, as if the carved figures were giving birth to them.\n\nThe group scattered from under the shadow of the monstrosity, fleeing back to their campsite.\n\nAs they retreated, Sam studied the huge spiders. Dependent upon the meager resources found in these caves, the tarantulas had clearly evolved a more aggressive posture. Instead of waiting for prey to fall into webs, these normally solitary spiders had adapted a more cooperative strategy. By massing together, they could comb the caves more successively for any potential sources of a blood meal, taking down larger prey by their sheer numbers\u2014and Sam had no intention of being their next course.\n\n\"Okay, folks, I think we've overstayed our welcome,\" he said. \"Gather our gear and let's get the hell out of Dodge.\"\n\n\"Where to?\" Maggie asked.\n\n\"There's a path through these caves, right? Those Indians who forged it must have done so for a reason. Maybe it's a way out. Anyone object to finding out?\"\n\nNo one did. Five sets of eyes were still on the encroaching tarantulas.\n\nSam slipped the gold dagger into his vest and collected his grandfather's rifle. He gestured to the others to collect their few possessions. \"One flashlight only,\" he said, as he led the way down the path. \"Conserve the other. I don't want to run out of illumination down here.\" A shiver passed through Sam at the mere thought of being trapped, blind, with a pale army of poisonous predators encircling him. He tightened his grip on his rifle but knew it would do him little good if the lights went out.\n\nNorman followed with the flashlight, glancing frequently behind him.\n\n\"As long as we keep moving, the spiders won't get you, Norman,\" Ralph said with a scowl.\n\nThe photographer still kept an eye on their backtrail. \"Just remind me\u2026no more bathroom breaks. Not until I see the light of day.\"\n\nSam ignored their nervous chatter. It was not what lay behind them that kept Sam's nerves taut as bowstrings, but the trail ahead. Just where in the hell would this path take them?\n\nUnfortunately there was only one way to find out.\n\nAs they proceeded, Norman mumbled behind him. \"Lions and tigers and bears, oh my\u2026\"\n\nSam glanced back, his brow furrowed in confusion.\n\nNorman nodded to the gold path. \"Sort of reminds me of the yellow brick road.\"\n\n\"Great,\" Ralph groused. \"Now the fruit thinks he's Dorothy.\"\n\n\"I wish I was. Right now I wouldn't mind a pair of ruby slippers to whisk me home,\" Norman grumbled. \"Or even back to a farm in Kansas.\"\n\nSam rolled his eyes and continued onward.\n\nThe remainder of the long morning stretched into an endless hike, mostly at a steady incline. Legs and backs protested as the cavern system led them higher inside the Andean mountain. If not for the lack of food and the growing exhaustion, Sam might have better appreciated the sights: towering stalagmites, cavernous chambers with limpid pools that glowed with a soft phosphorescence, cataracts that misted the gold trail at times with a welcome cooling spray, even a side cave so festooned with lacy crystals that it looked as if the chamber was full of cotton candy. It was a wonderland of natural beauty.\n\nAnd everywhere they went, the carved pillars marked their way as grim sentinels, watching the group pass with unblinking silver eyes.\n\nBut as amazing as the sights were, the memory of what lay behind them never fully vanished. Breaks to drink from the stream were often accompanied by worried glances toward the rear. So far there had been no sign of pursuit by the tarantula army. It seemed they had left the spiders far behind.\n\nSlowly, the morning wound to afternoon. The only highlight was a brief lunch to split a pair of Milky Way bars found stashed in Norman's camera case. Chocolate had never tasted so good. But even this small taste of heaven was short-lived, and only succeeded in amplifying everyone's hunger. Tempers began to grow short and attitudes sullen as they marched through the afternoon.\n\nTo make matters worse, a sharp pungency began to fill the cavern's normally crisp air. Noses wrinkled. \"Ammonia. Smells like the ass end of a skunk,\" Sam commented.\n\n\"Maybe the air is going bad,\" Norman said with a worried expression on his haggard face.\n\n\"Don't be a fool,\" Ralph snapped. \"The air would have been worse when we were deeper.\"\n\n\"Not necessarily,\" Maggie said. Her eyes had narrowed suspiciously, squinting at the darkness beyond the light. \"Not if there was a source giving off the noxious fumes.\"\n\nRalph still scowled, clearly tired and irritated. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nInstead of answering, Maggie turned to Sam. \"All those tarantulas. From the look of them, they were well fed. What do the feckin' things eat down here?\"\n\nSam shook his head. He had no answer.\n\n\"Oh God!\" This came from Norman, who had taken the lead with the flashlight. The gold path led over a short rise into a neighboring cavern. From the echo of his exclamation, the chamber was large.\n\nThe others hurried to join him.\n\nMaggie stared at the scene ahead, holding a hand over her mouth and nose. The sting burned their eyes and noses. \"There's the answer. The source of the tarantulas' diet.\"\n\nSam groaned. \"Bats.\"\n\nAcross the roof of the next cave, thousands of black and brown bats hung from latched toes, wings tight to bodies. The juveniles, squirming among the adults, were a paler shade, almost a coppery hue. Sharp squeaks and subsonic screeches spread the warning of intruders across the legion of winged vermin. Hundreds dropped from their perches to take flight, skirting through the air.\n\nThe source of the odor was immediately clear.\n\n\"Shit,\" Ralph swore.\n\n\"Exactly,\" Norman commented sullenly. \"Bat shit.\"\n\nThe floor of the cavern was thick with it. Carved pillars, fouled with excrement, speared upward through the odorous mess. The reek from the aged droppings was thick enough to drive them all back with a stinging slap.\n\nNorman tumbled away, choking and spitting. Bent at the waist, he leaned on his knees, gagging.\n\nRalph looked as if his dark skin had been bleached by the corrosive exposure. \"We can't cross here,\" he said. \"We'd be dead before we reached the other side.\"\n\n\"Not without gas masks,\" Maggie agreed.\n\nSam was not going to argue. He could barely see, his eyes were watering so fiercely. \"Wh\u2026what are we going to do then?\"\n\nDenal spoke up. He had hung back from the cavern's opening and so had borne the least of the exposure. Even now, he was not facing ahead, but behind. He had an arm pointed. \"They come again.\"\n\nSam turned, blinking away the last of the burn. He took the flashlight from the incapacitated Norman. Several yards down the gold trail, three or four white bodies scurried across the rocky landscape. Scouts of the tarantula army.\n\n\"To hell with this,\" Ralph said, voicing all their concerns.\n\n\"What now?\" Maggie asked.\n\nSam glanced forward and backward. Everyone began talking at once. Sam raised the light to get everyone's attention. \"Stay calm! It won't do us any good to panic!\"\n\nAt that moment, Sam's flashlight flickered and died. Darkness swallowed them up, a blackness so deep it seemed as if the world had completely vanished. Voices immediately dropped silent.\n\nAfter a long held breath, Norman spoke from the darkness. \"Okay, now can we panic?\"\n\nJoan ushered Henry into her lab. \"Please make yourself at home,\" she offered, then glanced at her wristwatch. \"Dr. Kirkpatrick should be here at noon.\"\n\nBehind her, Henry had paused in the dooway to her suite of labs, his eyes wide. \"It's like a big toy store in here. You've done well since our years at Rice.\"\n\nShe hid a smile of satisfaction.\n\nSlowly, Henry wandered further into the laboratory, his gaze drifting over the plethora of equipment. Various diagnostic and research devices lined the back of the room: ultracentrifuge, hematology and chemistry analyzer, mass spectrograph, chromatograph, a gene sequencer. Along one wall was a safety hood for handling hazardous substances; along the other stood cabinets, incubators, and a huge refrigerated unit.\n\nHenry walked along the row of machines and glanced into a neighboring room. \"My God, you even have your own electron microscope.\" Henry rolled his eyes at her. \"To book any time on our university's, it takes at least a week's notice.\"\n\n\"No need for that here. Today, my lab is at your full disposal.\"\n\nHenry crossed to a central U-shaped worktable and set down his leather briefcase, his eyes still drifting appreciatively around the room. \"I've had dreams like this\u2026\"\n\nChuckling to herself, Joan stepped to a locked stainless-steel cabinet, keyed it open and, with two hands, extracted a large beaker. \"Here's all the material we collected from the walls and floor of the radiology lab.\"\n\nShe saw Henry's eyes widen as she placed the jar before him. He leaned over a bit, pushing his glasses higher on his nose. \"I didn't realize there was so much,\" he said. The yellowish substance filled half of the liter-sized beaker. It shone brightly under the room's fluorescent lights.\n\nJoan pulled up a stool. \"From the amount, I judge it must have filled the skull's entire cranium.\"\n\nHenry picked the beaker up. Joan noticed that he quickly grabbed it with his other hand. The stuff was heavier than it appeared. He tilted the jar, but the unknown substance refused to flow. Replacing the beaker on the table, he commented, \"It looks solid.\"\n\nJoan shook her head. \"It's not.\" She grabbed a glass rod and thrust it into the material. It sank but not without some effort, like pushing through soft clay. Joan released the rod, and it remained standing straight in the jar. \"Malleable, but not solid.\"\n\nHenry tried to move the glass rod. \"Hmm\u2026definitely not gold. But the hue and brilliance are a perfect match. Maybe you were right before, a new amalgam or something. I've certainly never seen anything like it.\"\n\nJoan glanced at him, eyebrows raised. \"Or maybe you have. Let's compare it to the gold cross. You brought it with you, yes?\"\n\nHe nodded. Twisting back to the table, Henry dialed the lock on his briefcase and snapped it open. \"I figure it's safer with me than at the hotel.\" He removed the ornate Dominican cross and held it toward her.\n\nThe workmanship was incredible. The Christ figure lay stretched and stylized upon a scrolled cross; the pain of his agony sculpted in the strain of his limbs, yet his face was full of passionate grace. \"Impressive,\" she said.\n\n\"And solid\u2026so I doubt it's made of the same amalgam.\" Henry placed the crucifix beside the beaker. The strange material and the cross glinted and shone equally.\n\n\"Are you sure?\"\n\nHenry met her eyes over the rim of his spectacles. He shrugged his brows. \"I'll leave the final assessment to your expert.\"\n\nShe reached for the crucifix. \"May I?\"\n\n\"Of course, Joan.\"\n\nHer hand hesitated for a heartbeat when Henry used her name. The intimacy and surroundings brought back sudden memories of when the two were lab partners during a semester in undergraduate biology. How strange and vivid that recollection was at the moment. More than just d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu.\n\nWithout meeting his eye, Joan took the cross from the table. The past was the past. She hefted the crucifix in her palm. It, too, weighed more than it appeared\u2014but didn't gold always seem that way? She held the crucifix up to the light, tilting it one way, then the other, studying it.\n\nHenry theorized aloud while she examined the relic. \"It's definitely the work of a Spanish craftsman. Not Incan work. If the cross is confirmed to be composed of the same amalgam, then we'll know for sure the Spanish brought the substance to the New World, rather than the other way around\u2026\"\n\nHe continued talking, but something had caught Joan's attention. Her fingers felt small scratches on the crucifix's back surface. She reached to a pocket and slipped out her reading glasses. Putting them on, she turned the crucifix over and squinted. It was not the artist's signature or some piece of archaic scripture. Instead it seemed to be row after row of fine marks. They covered the entire surface of the crucifix's back side.\n\n\"What is this?\" Joan asked, interrupting Henry.\n\nHe moved closer, shoulder to shoulder with her. Joan noticed the faint scent of him, a mix of aftershave and a richer muskiness. She tried to ignore it.\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" he asked.\n\n\"Here.\" With a fingernail, she pointed to the marks.\n\n\"Ah, I noticed those. I think they're a result of the cross rubbing against the friar's robe, slowly abrading the soft gold over the years.\"\n\n\"Mmm, maybe\u2026but they seem too symmetrical, and some of the marks are quite deep and irregular.\" She turned slightly to Henry, almost nose to nose. His breath was on her cheek, his eyes staring deep into hers.\n\n\"What are you suggesting?\"\n\nShe shook her head, stepping away. \"I don't know. I'd like to get a closer look.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\nJoan led him around the corner of the table where sets of microscopes were positioned. She moved to a bulky binocular unit with a large glass tray under it. \"A dissection microscope. Normally I use it to study gross tissues more closely.\"\n\nShe placed the cross facedown on the tray and switched on the light source. Illuminated from above, the gold glowed with an inner fire. Joan adjusted the light so it shone obliquely across the crucifix. Bending over the eyepiece, she made fine adjustments in the lenses. Under the low magnification, the surface of the cross filled the view. The marks on the crucifix were in stark relief, appearing as deep gouges in the metal, long valleys, clearly precise and uniform. The scratches composed a series of repeated tiny symbols: rough squares, crude circles, horizontal and vertical squiggles, hash marks, nested ovals.\n\n\"Take a look,\" Joan said, moving aside.\n\nHenry bent over the scope. He stared a few moments in silence, then a low whistle escaped his lips. \"You're right. These are not random scratches.\" His gaze flicked toward her. \"I think there's even silver embedded in some of the grooves. Perhaps traces of the tool used to scratch these marks.\"\n\n\"For such painstaking work, there must be some reason to go through all that effort.\"\n\n\"But why?\" Henry's lips tightened as he pondered this new mystery, his eyes slightly narrowed. Finally, he expelled a breath. \"It may be a message. But who knows for sure? Maybe it's just an ordinary prayer. Some benediction.\"\n\n\"But in code? And why on the back of the cross? It must mean something more.\"\n\nHenry shrugged. \"If the friar notched it as a message while imprisoned, it may have been the only way he could keep it secure. The Incas revered gold items. If the cross was with him when he died on the altar, the Incas would have kept the crucifix with the body.\"\n\n\"If you're right, who was his message meant for?\"\n\nHenry shook his head slowly, his gaze thoughtful. \"The answer may lie in this code.\"\n\nJoan moved back to the scope. She slid a legal pad and a pen from a drawer, then sat down and positioned herself to copy the marks on her paper. \"Let's check it out. I've always liked dabbling with cryptograms. If I don't have any luck, I can also run it by someone in the computer department, pass it through a decryption program. They may be able to crack it.\"\n\nHenry stood behind her as she recorded the writing. \"You've grown into a woman of many talents, Dr. Joan Engel.\"\n\nJoan hid her blush as she concentrated on her task, copying the marks carefully. She worked quickly and efficiently, not needing to look up as she jotted what she saw. After years of making notes while studying a patient's sample under a microscope, she had grown skilled at writing blind.\n\nIn five minutes, a copy lay on the table beside her. Row after row of symbols lined the yellow paper. She straightened from her crouch, stretching a kink from her neck.\n\n\"Hold still,\" Henry said behind her. He slid a hand along her shoulder and gently lifted the cascade of hair from the back of her neck. His knuckles brushed her skin.\n\nShe suppressed a shiver. \"Henry\u2026?\"\n\n\"Don't move.\" His fingers reached to knead the muscles of her strained upper shoulders. At first, his skin was cool against her own, but as he worked, heat built under his strong fingers, warming her sore muscles.\n\n\"I see you've not lost your touch.\" She leaned into his fingers, remembering another time, another place. \"So if I tell you to stop, ignore me,\" she said, feigning a nonchalance that the huskiness of her voice betrayed.\n\n\"It's the least I can do after all your help.\" His own words were heavier than usual.\n\nA sharp rap on the laboratory door interrupted the moment.\n\nHenry's hands froze, then pulled back.\n\nJoan shifted from her chair, her shoulders and neck still warm from his touch. She glanced at her watch. \"It must be Dr. Kirkpatrick. He's right on time.\"\n\nHenry cursed the metallurgist's impeccable timing. He rubbed his palms together, trying to wipe away the memory of Joan's skin. Get ahold of yourself, man. You're acting like a smitten teenager.\n\nHe watched Joan walk away. One of her hands reached to touch her neck gently. Then she brushed her hair back into place, a midnight flow against her white smock. Mysteries or not, right now all he wished for was a few more moments alone with her.\n\nJoan crossed to the door, opened it, and greeted the visitor. \"Dale, thanks for coming over.\"\n\nDale Kirkpatrick, the metallurgy expert from George Washington University, stood a good head taller than Henry, but he was waspishly thin with an elongated face that seldom smiled. He tried to do so now with disastrous results, like a coroner greeting the bereaved. \"Anything for a colleague.\"\n\nHenry sensed the red-haired man had shared more with Joan than just a professional relationship. The pair's eyes met one another awkwardly, and the welcoming handshake was a touch longer than custom dictated. Henry instantly disliked him. The man wore an expensive silk suit and shoes polished to a glowing sheen. His heels tapped loudly as he was invited into the room. In his left hand, he carried a large equipment case.\n\nHenry cleared his throat.\n\nJoan swung around. \"Dale, let me introduce you to Professor Henry Conklin.\"\n\nKirkpatrick held out his hand. \"The archaeologist.\" It was a statement not a question, but Henry scented a trace of dismissal in his voice.\n\nThey shook hands, briefly and curtly.\n\n\"I appreciate your help in this matter,\" Henry said. \"It's posed quite a mystery. We can't make heads or tails of this amalgam or whatever it is.\"\n\n\"Yes\u2026well, let me just take a look.\" The man's attitude was again polite, but a touch haughty, as if his mere presence would bring light to darkness.\n\n\"It's over here,\" Joan said, guiding him to the worktable.\n\nOnce presented with the enigma, Kirkpatrick cocked his head, studying the strange substance in silence. Joan began to speak, but the specialist held up a finger, quieting her. Henry had an irrational urge to break that finger. \"It's not gold,\" he finally declared.\n\n\"We sort of figured that out,\" Henry said sourly.\n\nThe man glanced back at him, one eyebrow held high. \"Undoubtedly, or I wouldn't have been called in, now would I?\" He turned back to the beaker and reached for the glass rod still embedded in the material. He fiddled with it. \"Semisolid at room temperature,\" he mumbled. \"Have you ascertained a true melting point for the substance?\"\n\n\"Not yet.\"\n\n\"Well, that's easy enough to do.\" He told Joan what he would need. Soon they were gathered around a ceramic bowl warming over the low purple flame of a Bunsen burner. A sample of the metal filled the bottom half of the bowl with a thermometer embedded in it.\n\nThe metallurgist spoke as the material slowly heated under the hazards hood. \"If it's an amalgam of different elements, the constituent metals should separate out for us as it melts.\"\n\n\"It's already melted,\" Henry said with a nod toward the bowl.\n\nDale swung his attention back, frowning. \"That's impossible. It's only been warming for a few seconds. Even gold doesn't melt at such a low temp.\"\n\nBut Henry's observation proved true. Using tongs, Dale jostled the bowl. The substance now appeared as loose as cream, only golden in color. He looked up to Joan. \"What's the temperature?\"\n\nJoan's face was bunched in consternation. \"Ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit.\"\n\nHenry's eyes widened. \"Body temperature.\"\n\nAway from the heat source, the bowl quickly cooled and the metallic substance grew turgid as the trio pondered the result.\n\nHenry spoke first. \"I didn't see any breakdown into component metals like you said. Does that mean it's not an amalgam?\"\n\n\"It's too soon to say.\" But Dale's voice had lost its edge.\n\n\"What next?\"\n\n\"A few more tests. I'd like to check its conductivity and its response to magnetism.\"\n\nIn short order, they molded a sample of the soft metal into a cube and inserted two electrodes into it. Dale nodded, and Joan engaged the battery hookup. As soon as the current flowed, the cube melted into a sludge that ran across the worktable.\n\n\"Switch it off!\"\n\nJoan flipped the toggle. The material instantly solidified again. Dale touched the metal. \"It's cool.\"\n\n\"What just happened?\" Henry asked.\n\nDale just shook his head. He had no answer. \"Bring me the magnets from my case.\"\n\nHenry and Joan positioned the two shielded magnets on either side of a second sample cube. Dale fastened a potentiometer on its side. \"On my signal, raise the shields.\" He leaned closer to the meter. \"Now.\"\n\nJoan and Henry flicked open the lead dampers. Just as with the flow of electricity, the cube melted like ice in an oven, running across the table.\n\n\"Shield the magnets,\" Dale ordered.\n\nOnce done, the substance instantly stopped flowing across the tabletop, freezing in place. Dale again fingered the solidified metal. He now wore a worried expression.\n\n\"Well?\" Henry asked.\n\n\"You said the substance exploded out of the mummy's skull when exposed to the CT scanner.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Joan said. \"It blew across the entire room.\"\n\n\"Then even the CT scanner's X rays affect the metal,\" Dale mumbled to himself, tapping a pen on the table's edge. \"Interesting\u2026\"\n\nHenry packed away the magnets. \"What are you thinking?\"\n\nDale's eyes cleared and focused. He turned to them. \"The substance must be capable of using any radiant energy with perfect efficiency\u2014electric current, magnetic radiation, X rays. It absorbs these various energies to change state.\" He nudged a trickle of the solidified metal. \"I don't think there's even any heat given off as it changes form. It's an example of the perfect consumption of energy. Not even waste heat! I've\u2026I've never seen anything like this. It's thermodynamically impossible.\"\n\nHenry studied the contents of the beaker. \"Are you suggesting the scanner's X rays triggered the mummy's explosion?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Bombarded by that amount of concentrated radiation, some of the material might have changed state\u2014this time from liquid to gas. The sudden expansion could have caused the violent explosion, expelling the liquefied metal. Once away from the radiation, it changed back to this semisolid state.\"\n\n\"But what is it?\" Joan asked.\n\nHe held up that irritating finger again. \"Let me try one more thing.\" Taking another sample cube of the soft metal, he squeezed it like a lump of clay. \"Has it ever completely solidified?\"\n\nJoan shook her head. \"No. I even tried freezing it, but it remained malleable.\"\n\nDale swung on his seat. \"Professor Conklin, could you pass me one of the magnets' insulating sleeves?\"\n\nHenry had been wrapping the last of the heavy magnets in a copper-impregnated cloth. He undid his work and passed the wrap to Dale.\n\n\"The sleeve blocks the magnet's effects\u2026so I don't accidentally damage some expensive electronics in passing. It shields almost all forms of radiation.\"\n\nHenry began to get an inkling of the metal expert's plan.\n\nDale took the gold cube and wrapped it in the black cloth. Once it was totally shielded, he placed the shrouded cube back on the table. He then took a chisel and hammer from his case. Positioning the chisel's edge on the cube, he struck the tool a resounding blow with the mallet. A muffled clang was the only response. The cube resisted the chisel.\n\nQuickly unwrapping the cube, Dale revealed the unblemished surface. He took the chisel again, and only using the force of his thumb, he drove it through the exposed cube. He explained these results. \"All around us is low ambient radiation. It's always present\u2014various local radio waves, electromagnetic pulses from the building's wiring, even solar radiation. This substance uses them all! That's why it remains semisolid. Even these trace energies weaken its solidity.\"\n\n\"But I don't understand,\" Joan said. \"What type of metal or amalgam could do this?\"\n\n\"Nothing that I've ever seen or heard about.\" Dale suddenly stood up, carefully lifting the soft cube in steel tongs. He nodded toward the neighboring room, to the electron-microscope suite. \"But there's a way to investigate closer.\"\n\nHenry soon found himself trailing the other two into the next room. He carried both the beaker of the strange metal, now sealed with a rubber stopper and the mummy's Dominican crucifix. Already, Joan and Dale were bowed head-to-head as they prepared a shaving of the metal to use in the electron microscope.\n\nHenry crossed to a small table off to the side, setting down the beaker and the cross. The large electron microscope occupied the rear of the room. Its towering optical column reached for the room's ceiling. A bank of three monitors was crowded before it.\n\nJoan warmed up the unit, flipping switches and quickly checking baseline calibrations. Dale finished prepping the sample, locking it into place on the scanner's tray. He gave Joan a thumbs-up.\n\nHenry, all but forgotten, scowled and sank to a stool by his table.\n\nAcross the small room, the optical column began to hum and click as its tungsten hairpin gun bombarded the sample with an electron beam. Dale hurried to Joan's side before the monitors. The pathologist jabbed at a keyboard, and the screens bloomed with a grey glow in the dim room. The words STAND BY could be seen even from where Henry sat.\n\n\"How long will this take?\" Henry called over.\n\nJoan glanced at him, her face a mixture of surprise and embarrassment. She must have finally realized how little she had acknowledged him. \"Not long. The EM will need about ten minutes to compile and calculate an image.\" Joan offered Henry a weak, apologetic smile, then turned away.\n\nHenry swung away himself, turning his attention back to the crucifix. He tapped its brilliant surface with a finger. After testing the unknown substance, the friar's cross was clearly composed of the real thing. \"Mere gold,\" Henry muttered to himself. At least one mystery was solved, but that still left another enigma.\n\nGrasping the crucifix, Henry flipped it over to study its back side and the rows of small scratches. What was Francisco de Almagro trying to say? Henry ran a finger along the marks. Was this some last message? If so, what was so important? As Henry fingered the cross, he felt a twinge of misgiving, similar to the one the previous night when his attempt to communicate with the camp failed. He pushed aside such irrational worries. He was being paranoid. But for the hundredth time that day, his thoughts drifted to Sam and the other students. How were they faring with the buried pyramid? Had they perhaps already discovered the answers to these puzzles?\n\nHenry palmed the crucifix between his two hands, resting his forehead on his fingertips. So many oddities surrounded the dig. Henry sensed there was a connection, some way to bring all these strands together: mummified priests, mysterious metals, sealed crypts. But what was the connection? Henry felt the crucifix's outline pressed into his palms. A cross of gold and a coded message. Could this be the answer?\n\nHe imagined the young friar, crouched over his cross, etching it with some sharp tool. Painstaking work while his death neared. In Henry's hands were perhaps the last words of this man. But what did he want to say? \"What was so important?\" Henry whispered.\n\nThe image of the cross crystallized in Henry's mind, turning slowly before his inner eye.\n\nJoan suddenly gasped behind him, pulling him out of his reverie. He twisted around. She faced his direction, but her eyes were not fixed on Henry. He followed the path of her gaze to his right elbow.\n\nThe beaker rested on the tabletop where Henry had placed it. His breath caught when he saw its contents.\n\n\"Henry\u2026?\"\n\nThe beaker no longer contained a pool of the raw metal. Inside, leaning against the glass side, was a crude copy of the Dominican gold cross. Roughly cruciform in shape, the detail was blurred. The Christ figure was no more than a blunt suggestion upon its surface.\n\nJoan and Dale moved closer.\n\n\"Did you do that?\" Dale asked.\n\nHenry glanced at the man as if he were mad. He pointed to its sealed stopper. \"Are you kidding?\"\n\nAs they all watched, the cross seemed to lose some of its detail. The edges became less sharp, and the figure slid from the cross to pool at the bottom of the beaker. Still, the cross itself persisted in its general shape.\n\nHenry tried to explain, \"I was just thinking about it when\u2014\"\n\nA sharp chime rang from nearby, loud in the small room.\n\nThey all turned to see the monitors waver, then blink into greyscale images.\n\n\"Maybe we're one step closer to an answer,\" Dale announced tacitly. He stepped back toward the bank of monitors.\n\nHenry and Joan followed. Their eyes met briefly. Henry could see the consternation and something that looked like fear in her eyes. Before he knew what he was doing, he reached out and gave her hand a quick reassuring squeeze. She acknowledged the gesture by moving a few inches closer to Henry's side.\n\nWith a final worried glance toward the cross in the jar, Henry joined the others at the monitors.\n\nDale stood bent over the keyboard, one finger tracing along the screen. Upon the monitor was an unearthly landscape, a rough terrain of oddly shaped peaks and valleys, as if someone had taken a black-and-white photo of the surface of Mars. \"This is impossible,\" Dale said. He pointed to a section of screen that magnified a corner of the landscape. \"Look. The metal is actually an aggregation of tiny particles. See how they're latched and interlinked.\"\n\nOn the screen, the cross-sectional view revealed tiny octagonal structures hooked to one another by six articulated legs. Each miniscule structure was joined to its surrounding neighbors in a dense tetrahedral pattern.\n\nJoan reached to touch one of the grey particles displayed on the monitor. \"They appear almost organic, like viral phages, or something.\"\n\nThe metallurgist grumbled, one hand indicating the general landscape across the rest of the screens. \"No, definitely not viral. From the fracturing and internal matrix, the substance is distinctly inorganic. I'd almost say crystalline in structure.\"\n\n\"Then what the hell is it?\" Henry finally asked, growing irritated with the man. \"Metal, crystal, viral, vegetable, mineral?\"\n\nKirkpatrick's gaze flicked toward the cross in the beaker, then he shook his head. \"I don't know. But if I had to guess, I'd pick all of the above.\"\n\nFrom the edge of the communication tent, Philip Sykes watched the sun begin to sink toward the mountains. This was the second day of his vigil by the collapsed ruins. What once had been a jungle-shrouded hill that hid the buried temple was now a cratered and broken ruin. Edges of toppled granite boulders and slabs from the temple jutted from the churned dark soil like exposed broken teeth.\n\nIf Philip had not gotten that call from Sam, informing him of the students' discovery of a natural cavern system, he would have thought them all dead. For the past half day, the mound no longer shifted or sagged. The noise from grinding rocks no longer groaned up from the earth. The dig site lay as silent as a grave. The temple had collapsed fully.\n\nBut Sam had called.\n\nPhilip clenched a fist. A part of him wished the arrogant Texan hadn't. It would have been easier to call them all dead; then Philip would be free to abandon the site, leave these cursed Indians to their black jungle. Every hour that Philip remained there he risked an attack from Guillermo Sala. Philip clutched his arms around himself as a chill breeze blew down from the mountaintop. Who would get there first\u2014the rescue party called in by the pair of Indians or Gil's henchmen returning to finish their work?\n\nThe tension ground at Philip's nerves. \"If only I could leave\u2026\" But he knew he couldn't, not before the rescue tunnel was completed. Philip stared toward the jungle's edge.\n\nNearby, the calls and low singing from the Quechan workers echoed up from the obscured work site on the far side of the mound. The looters' tunnel had been excavated a full fifteen yards that day. Though the Indians still shot him dark looks and muttered sharp words, Philip could not fault their hard work. The crew had split into three shifts and dug with pickax and shovel all night long and into the day.\n\nIt was even possible that Philip's estimation of two days to dig the others free might not turn out to be too far off the mark.\n\nBut would that be soon enough?\n\nA sudden commotion rose from farther back in the jungle, where a few of the Indians were taking a break in the shade of the trees. Philip stood straighter, as if an extra inch of height would pierce the shadows of the forest. He held his breath.\n\nAn Indian, one of the workers, burst from the tree line. He waved an arm at Philip in the universal gesture to come. Philip refused to move; he even took a step back. As he hesitated, the Indians' voices grew more distinct as other workers gathered beyond the forest's edge. From the happy and relieved noises, Philip gathered that whatever new discovery had been made must not be a threat.\n\nPhilip girded himself with a firm breath, then stomped down from the height of the campsite toward the forest. Even the short exertion of crossing the clearing soon had Philip sucking for breath through his teeth. Tension and exhaustion had weakened his ability to handle the thin air. A seed of a headache bloomed behind his right temple by the time he neared the forest's edge.\n\nBefore he reached the eaves, a flow of excited Indians flocked into the clearing from the trees. They roiled around, grinning wide, teeth bright in the late afternoon sunshine. Soon the press of workers broke around Philip, like a rock in a stream. The way finally parted enough for Philip to see who the Indians were leading into camp.\n\nSix figures, robed in mud brown attire and leather sandals, stepped from the trees, faces warm and open as they threw back the cowls from their heads. They too wore smiles upon their faces, but not the toothy grins of the crude Indians, only simple, kind countenances.\n\nOne of the robed men was clearly the leader. He stood a bit taller than the others and was the only one with a prominent silver pectoral cross.\n\n\"Monks\u2026\" Philip muttered in amazement.\n\nSome of the Indians dropped to their knees at the feet of these religious men and bowed for a blessing. While the other monks placed palms atop heads and whispered prayers in Spanish, the head of this group approached Philip.\n\nThe man shrugged back his own cowl to reveal a strong handsome face framed by black hair. \"We have heard of your time of need, my son,\" he said simply. \"My name is Friar Dominic Otera, and we've come to offer what aid we can.\"\n\nPhilip blinked. English! The man had spoken English! He suppressed an urge to step over and hug the friar. Instead, he tried to compose himself enough to speak. \"How\u2026how did you\u2014?\"\n\nThe monk held up a hand. \"On our journey among the small nearby villages, we came upon the Indians you sent for help. I've sent them on to Villacuacha to alert the authorities, but in the meantime, we've come to offer prayers and consolation in the tragedy here.\"\n\nPhilip felt himself sag as his burden was finally eased. There were now others\u2014others who spoke English\u2014who could share his anxiety. Philip found himself blathering, unable to form a clear thought, blurting out a mixture of heartfelt thanks interspersed with his own worries. None of it made sense.\n\nFriar Otera crossed to Philip and placed a cool palm upon his cheek. \"Calm yourself, my son.\"\n\nHis touch centered Philip. \"Yes\u2026yes\u2026where are my manners? You've all traveled far and must be thirsty and famished.\"\n\nThe monk lowered his face. \"The Lord is all the sustenance we need, but as travelers we would be remiss in refusing your hospitality.\"\n\nPhilip bobbed his head like a fool; he could not help himself, so giddy with relief was he. \"Then, please, come to my tent. I have juice, water, and can put together some quick sandwiches.\"\n\n\"That is most gracious. Then perhaps, out of the harsh sun, you can tell me what has befallen your group.\"\n\nPhilip led the monks toward the cluster of tents, though he noticed that three lagged behind, continuing their ministrations among the workers.\n\nThe friar noticed that Philip had paused. \"They will join us later. The Lord's work must always come first.\"\n\nSwinging back around, Philip nodded. \"Of course.\" In short order, Philip and the friar were ensconced in his personal tent upon camp chairs. Resting between them was a platter of hard cheeses and sliced meats. The other two monks had shyly accepted glasses of fresh guava juice and had retired outside in the shadow of the tent, leaving Friar Otera and Philip in peace.\n\nAfter sampling what Philip offered, the friar leaned back in the canvas chair with a sigh of gratitude. \"Most delicious and kind.\" He placed both palms upon his knees, studying Philip. \"Now tell me, my son, what has happened here? How can we help?\"\n\nPhilip sipped his juice and collected himself. The simple duties as host had calmed his nerves, but he found himself unable to meet the friar's gaze. In the dim tent, the man's eyes were dark, penetrating shadows, wells that seemed to see into his soul. Philip had been raised Presbyterian but had never been particularly religious. Yet, he could sense power in this quiet figure who sat opposite him, and his initial relief had slowly changed to a mild trepidation in the presence of the man. He knew he could not lie to him; the monk would know his true heart.\n\nSetting down his glass, Philip began his story of Gil's betrayal and subsequent sabotage. \"\u2026and after the explosion, the temple continued to collapse in on itself, driving those trapped deeper and deeper. There was nothing I could do to help them.\"\n\nFriar Otera nodded his head, once, like a benediction. \"Be at peace, Philip. You've done all you could.\"\n\nPhilip drew strength from these words. He had done all he could. He sat up straighter as he continued relating how the Indians were attempting to dig a rescue shaft, and how Sam and the others had discovered a secret tunnel behind a golden idol. He found himself going on and on. He even described Sam's discovery of the statue's key. \"A gold knife that somehow transformed.\"\n\nThe friar's eyes grew wide at this last bit, slowing Philip's tale. The monk interrupted, \"A gold knife and a hidden tunnel into the mountain?\" The man's voice had grown strangely dark and deep.\n\n\"Yes,\" Philip said tentatively.\n\nThe friar was silent a moment, then returned to his normal even demeanor. \"Thank the Lord for their salvation. At least your friends found a safe shelter. The Lord always opens a way for those of good heart.\"\n\n\"I hope to have the rescue shaft completed in two days or so. But if the Indians I sent can fetch more help\u2014?\"\n\nFriar Otera suddenly stood. \"Fear not. The Lord will watch over all those here. In his eyes, we are all his beloved sheep. No harm will come.\"\n\nPhilip quickly pushed from his own chair, meaning to accompany the friar.\n\nThe man waved him back down. \"Rest, Philip, you've earned it. You've done the Lord's work here protecting your friends.\"\n\nSinking back into his chair, Philip sighed as Friar Otera bowed his way from the tent. \"Thank you,\" he called as the monk departed.\n\nAlone in his tent, Philip closed his eyes for a moment. He believed he could sleep. The burden was no longer his own, and the onus for his questionable actions had been absolved.\n\nPhilip stared at the closed flap of his tent. He remembered the smoldering power he had sensed in the man.\n\nFriar Otera must be a truly religious man.\n\nWell away from the tents, at the edge of the forest, Friar Otera met with one of his fellow monks. Otera forced his fingers to stop trembling. Could it be true? After so long?\n\nThe monk fished through his shoulder pack and passed Otera the radio. Stepping a few paces away under the forest's eaves, Otera dialed the proper channel and called to his superior.\n\nHe reverted to Spanish. \"Contact has been made. Over.\"\n\nA short burst of static, then a quick response. \"And your assessment?\"\n\n\"Favorable. The site appears golden. I repeat golden.\" Friar Otera gave a terse summary of what he had learned from the pasty-faced student.\n\nEven across the airwaves, Friar Otera heard the mutter of shock and the whispered words in Spanish, \"El Sangre del Diablo.\"\n\nFriar Otera shuddered with the mere mention of that name. \"And your orders?\"\n\n\"Befriend the student. Earn his trust. Then light a flame under these workers. Dig a way to that tunnel.\" A long pause, then his final order. \"Once contact is made, clean the site\u2026thoroughly.\"\n\nFor the first time that day, Friar Otera smiled. He fingered the dagger in its wrist sheath. The haughty student here reminded him of those youths who had once spat upon Otera's poor upbringing, his mixed blood. It would be a pleasure to see this americano beg for his life. But more important, if what he suspected was true, there were even larger victories at stake. He had waited for so long, borne too many indignities from these Spanish missionaries who thought themselves his superior. No, if he was right, he would show them their mistake, their blindness. He would no longer be shunned and glanced over. Otera raised the radio to his hard lips, playing the good soldier. \"Confirm contact and clean the site. I understand. Over and out.\"\n\nOtera stepped back from the forest and returned the radio to the monk who stood guard. \"And?\" the fellow asked, packing away the radio.\n\nFriar Otera straightened his pectoral crucifix. \"We have a green light.\"\n\nThe other monk's eyes grew aghast. \"Then it's true!\" The man made the sign of the cross. \"May the Lord protect us.\"\n\nFriar Otera trudged back toward the camp. The words from the radio still echoed in his head.\n\nEl Sangre del Diablo.\n\nSatan's Blood.\n\nMaggie fumbled with the second flashlight, her fingers trembling. She thumbed the switch, and light flared out into the black caverns, blinding her for a second. The pale faces of her fellow students and the young Indian boy stared back along the trail. In that minute of darkness, more of the tarantula scouts had scurried onto the gold trail. To the side, more spiders approached, their albino limbs like pale-legged starfish against the black rock.\n\nSam glanced back toward the toxic bat cavern. \"I\u2026I don't know. The place will be swarming with tarantulas in a few minutes, but we can't trudge through waist-deep guano in the next cavern without dying from the fumes. There's got to be another way.\"\n\nMaggie strode off the Incan footpath toward the nearby underground stream. It gurgled in its narrow channel, casting up a fine cool mist. \"We swim,\" she said matter-of-factly, pointing her light at the rapidly flowing water.\n\n\"Swim?\" Norman asked, his voice cracking. \"Are you mad? That water's from snowmelt. We'll die of hypothermia.\"\n\nMaggie swung around. \"The current is swift but relatively smooth through this section of the caverns. We jump in and let the water shoot us through the bat cave and away from the spiders.\" She waved a hand across the river's fine mist. \"This may even insulate us a bit from the worst of the toxic fumes.\"\n\nSam approached her side and glanced at her with appreciative eyes. \"Maggie's right. It might work. But we need to stick together for this one. Once past the bats, we'll need to haul our asses out of this stream ASAP. If the current doesn't kill us, the cold may.\"\n\nDenal sidled to the edge of the river's carved stone bank. The waters flowed about a meter below the lip. \"I go first,\" he said, looking back. \"Make sure it be safe.\"\n\n\"No, Denal,\" Maggie said and reached for him.\n\nHe stepped beyond her reach. \"I be strong swimmer. If I make it to the far side, I yell.\" He glanced at the other faces. \"Then you all come. If no call, then no come.\"\n\nSam moved toward the boy. \"I'll do it, Denal,\" Sam said, patting the side pocket of his vest. \"I have my Wood's lamp to light the way.\"\n\nDenal pulled the lamp from his own pocket and flicked on the purplish light. \"I no ask. I go.\" The boy then turned and jumped over the lip's edge.\n\n\"Denal!\" Sam yelled, rushing to the river.\n\nMaggie stopped Sam from leaping in after him. She followed the boy's path in the current. He bobbed in the water as it thrust him back and forth in the narrow channel, but he managed to keep the lamp thrust above the water, its purplish glow a beacon in the dark cave. Then the river carried him past a curve in the wall and down a tunnel.\n\n\"Damn kid picked my pocket,\" Sam muttered, a mixture of respect and worry in his voice.\n\n\"He'll make it,\" Maggie said.\n\nThe waiting quickly grew intolerable. None dared speak lest they miss Denal's call.\n\nOnly Ralph hung back at the foot path, keeping an eye on the spiders. \"Here comes the main army,\" he warned.\n\nMaggie swung around. It was as if a foaming white surf crested just at the edge of their light's reach. \"C'mon, Denal, don't let us down.\"\n\nAs if the boy had heard her, a sharp distant cry echoed from farther in the caves. Denal had made it.\n\n\"Thank God,\" Sam sighed. \"Let's get out of here.\"\n\nNorman quickly finished packing his gear into a waterproof case while Ralph climbed over to join them, eyes still on the tarantulas.\n\nSam unslung the Winchester and nodded for Ralph to do the same with his rifle. \"Try to keep your gun above water. The rifles could probably survive a short dip, but I'd rather keep them dry.\"\n\nRalph finally turned and eyed the water with a sick expression. \"To hell with the rifle, I just hope I can keep my own head above water.\" He raised his face to the other three. \"I can't swim.\"\n\n\"What?\" Sam exclaimed. \"Why didn't you tell us that before?\"\n\nRalph shrugged. \"Because Maggie was right. The river's the only way out of here.\"\n\nNorman shoved up next to them. \"I'll stick with Ralph. I did a stint in water rescue in the army.\"\n\nRalph frowned at him, disbelieving. \"You were in the army?\"\n\n\"Three years at Fort Ord, until I was discharged during a witch-hunt at my base.\" Norman's face took on a bitter cast. \"So much for don't ask, don't tell.\"\n\nRalph shook his head. \"I'll take my chances on my own.\"\n\nThe photographer's face grew fierce. He snapped at Ralph, \"Like hell you will, you brain-addled jock. Quit this macho posturing and accept some help. It's not like I'm gonna try to cop a feel. You're not even my type!\" Norman shoved his camera case at Ralph, his voice serious. \"It's insulated with foam. It's meant to float after a raft capsizes. Keep the damn thing clutched to your chest, and I'll do the rest.\"\n\nRalph took the case reluctantly. \"What about this?\" He held up Gil's rifle.\n\nSam reached for it. \"I'll manage both.\"\n\nHe reached for the gun, but Maggie snatched it first. \"Two guns will weigh you down, Sam. The flashlight is waterproof and doesn't weigh nary a bit.\"\n\nSam hesitated, then nodded. \"At the first sign of trouble, toss the rifle away. We need the light more than we need a second gun.\"\n\nShe nodded at his advice. \"Let's go. The spiders aren't gonna like their meal escaping.\"\n\nSam waved for Norman and Ralph to go first, just in case of trouble. Sam and Maggie would follow.\n\nNorman slid down to a small spit of rock just above the waterline, arms cartwheeling for balance. \"Now,\" he called up to Ralph.\n\nThe large football player bit his lower lip, clutched the camera case to his chest, and jumped in before his fear of the water drove him away.\n\nMaggie kept her light focused on them. Norman dived in smoothly, his lithe form coming up beside the floundering black man. \"Lie on your back!\" Norman yelled as the current dragged the two away. \"Hug the case tight to your chest!\"\n\nRalph fumbled around a bit more, coughing water and kicking frantically.\n\n\"Don't fight it!\"\n\nRalph finally obeyed, rolling to his back.\n\nNorman swam at his side, one hand snarled in the neck of Ralph's shirt, keeping the man's head above water. As the two drifted away, Norman admonished the big man with one final warning. \"Keep tight to that case,\" he sputtered. \"Lose my cameras, and I'll let you drown!\"\n\n\"We're next,\" Sam said, shoving his Stetson into his pack. \"You ready?\"\n\nMaggie took a deep breath and nodded.\n\n\"You gonna be okay?\" he said, straightening and meeting her eyes.\n\nMaggie knew he was referring to her panic attacks more than the threat from the water. \"It was my idea, wasn't it? I'll be fine.\"\n\n\"You first then,\" he said.\n\nShe opened her mouth to argue when she felt a tickle on her leg. Glancing down, she saw a tarantula as large as a fist climbing up her khakis. Gasping in disgust, she knocked it away with her flashlight. Raising Gil's snub-nosed rifle above her head, she jumped gracelessly into the water.\n\nHer back and bottom crashed into the water with a resounding splash. The brief sting of the impact was immediately replaced with lung-constricting cold. Her head burst above the water with a silent scream of shock. All her muscles cramped tight. She had to force her limbs to move. The cold burned through her clothes and froze the breath in her lungs.\n\nSam splashed just behind her.\n\nBefore she could turn or speak, the current grabbed her and started sweeping her down the channel. Maggie floated on her back, legs thrust before her so she could bounce off any unseen obstacles. She kept the flashlight above the water and used the stock of the rifle as a paddle to help her stay afloat.\n\nJust at the edge of her light's reach, she saw Norman and Ralph disappearing down the throat of the river tunnel.\n\nSam called to her. \"How you holding up?\"\n\nMaggie frowned. Now was not the time for a conversation. She spat out a mouthful of cold water after a sudden splash had caught her by surprise. The icy water froze even the fillings in her mouth. \"Fine!\" she sputtered.\n\nThen the current dragged her into the black maw of the tunnel. The low roof flew by overhead, low enough that the tip of the rifle dragged along the rock above. Small sparks spat out where steel and rock rubbed. The scraping sound was eerily loud in the tight space.\n\nJust as suddenly they were out of the tunnel and into the bat cave. Maggie's eyes instantly stung; her nose burned. Overhead, circling bats dove and glided through the edge of the flashlight's beam, still disturbed and wary of the two-legged intruders. A small sliver of sunlight lightened one corner of the arched roof. The bat's doorway. Too high and too small to do them any good.\n\nBut Maggie had little time for sight-seeing. The current had grown even swifter through this chamber, a mixed blessing. Though the swift waters churned a cloud of mist that washed away the worst of the guano fumes, the faster waters also frothed and tossed her body more vigorously.\n\nMaggie's limbs grew leaden as the cold tried to freeze the marrow of her bones. Breathing became laborious. She gave up trying to keep the rifle above water and used it as a rudder to keep her from bouncing too hard against the jagged rocks on either side. She concentrated on just keeping the flashlight pointed forward.\n\nNow nearly blind from the fumes and with her nose on fire, Maggie gasped and choked. Something suddenly scrabbled at her upraised arm, weighting it down, digging at her skin. Blinking, Maggie saw a huge bat perched on her arm, tiny claws scratching at her, leathered wings batting wildly. Sharp fangs glinted in the glow of the flashlight. She let out a strangled gasp. Wide eyes and huge ears swung toward the sound. Crying out, she shoved her arm underwater, taking her chances that the flashlight was insulated enough to take a short dunk. She was in luck; the flashlight shone brightly under the water, and the shock of the cold stream dislodged the bat.\n\nIt rolled through the water, bumping against her shoulder as it passed.\n\nMaggie lifted the flashlight from the water, paddling fiercely.\n\nThen the bat was on her again. Maggie felt a small tug on her hair trailing in the water. Like a hooked fish, the bat had snatched at this purchase. Now twisting and rolling, it climbed the tangled strands. Maggie felt tiny claws scratch at her scalp. The bat screeched wildly, almost in her ear.\n\nThe creature's distress call was answered from above. The cavern erupted with squeaks and supersonic piping, like fingernails dragged across a blackboard. Overhead, the roof seemed to drop lower as the entire massed colony took flight, diving toward the screeching bat tangled in Maggie's hair.\n\nOh, God! She beat at the winged creature with her flashlight, trying to club it away, but only succeeded in snarling it further. Claws ripped across her cold cheek, a line of fire.\n\nSuddenly a hand appeared, pushing back her flashlight. \"Hold still!\"\n\nIt was Sam. He grabbed the squirming bat and ripped it from its nest in her hair, tearing out hundreds of roots along with the foul creature. He tossed it away. The bat hit the far bank with a wet smack.\n\n\"Here they come!\" Sam yelled.\n\nMaggie barely had time to see the dark cloud descend toward them, and even less time to take a breath, before Sam shoved her head underwater. Maggie would have panicked, but Sam held tight to her, his body close to hers, his touch the only warmth in the icy stream. She released control to him, letting him carry her as she held her trapped breath.\n\nSoon the channel straightened, and the current grew swift and smooth. Maggie risked opening her eyes. The flashlight still glowed under the water, illuminating Sam's face. His blond hair, normally plastered under his Stetson, wove like fine kelp across his face. His eyes met hers. She drew strength from his solid gaze. He pulled her tighter to him. She didn't resist.\n\nThe current dragged them swiftly away, tumbling them to and fro. Maggie's lungs cried for air. Unable to hold out any longer, she wiggled slightly from Sam's grasp and pushed toward the surface. She would only risk a quick breath.\n\nAs her head popped from the water, she gulped air into her frozen lungs. She was ready to duck back down, when she noticed two things\u2014the air had cleared of the burning sting and just ahead a small purplish glow lit the left bank.\n\nSam surfaced beside her with a whoosh of expelled air.\n\nMaggie lifted her flashlight and pointed. \"There!\"\n\nSam twisted around. As they neared the site, Maggie spotted Norman helping Ralph from the water. The huge football player crawled on hands and knees. Atop the bank, Denal was limned in the eerie light of the Wood's lamp. His teeth shone a whitish purple as he waved the lamp overhead, signaling to them.\n\nTogether, Maggie and Sam kicked toward the shore, but they didn't have to struggle far. The channel curved with a deep natural eddy at the bend. The current tossed Maggie and Sam into the sluggish pocket. With limbs deadened by cold and clothes waterlogged, it was an effort to climb from the water. Like Ralph, Maggie found herself crawling onto the bank and collapsing on her back.\n\nSam threw himself across the rock beside her, tossing his Winchester up higher on the stony bank. \"So much for keeping the guns dry.\"\n\nNorman stepped beside Maggie. His teeth chattered as he spoke. \"Y\u2026you both need to keep moving. And\u2026and get out of those wet clothes.\" He tugged off his own soaked shirt.\n\nMaggie noticed Denal had already stripped to his skivvies, and Ralph was slowly kicking off his clinging pants.\n\n\"We're not out of danger yet,\" Norman continued. \"That water was near freezing. We'll die unless we can get dry and warm.\"\n\nMaggie found her limbs beginning to tremble. Sam glanced at her. \"It's j\u2026just the cold,\" she said, knowing what he was thinking.\n\n\"Up with the both of you,\" Norman said sternly.\n\nGroaning, Sam pushed up as the photographer offered Maggie his arm. Too exhausted to object, she took Norman's hand and let him help her to her feet.\n\n\"Now strip,\" he said.\n\nMaggie's fingers were numb and blue in the flashlight beam. She fumbled at her buttons and shrugged out of her shirt, too cold and exhausted to worry about exposing herself. Hell, she thought, yanking her zipper down, a good blush would be welcome right now.\n\nSoon she stood in nothing but her wet bra and panties.\n\nThe others kept their eyes politely turned, except Denal who stared widely at her. Once the boy realized he was caught gaping, he quickly looked away.\n\nMaggie scowled to cover her grin. She slapped Sam on his damp boxers as she stepped past him. \"Norman says to keep moving. We have to stay warm.\"\n\nMaggie could feel Sam's eyes on her back as she moved away. The Texan mumbled behind her, \"Oh, don't worry. Keep walking ahead of me dressed like that, and I'll be plenty warm.\"\n\nThis time she couldn't hide her smile.\n\n\"Th\u2026this must lead somewhere,\" Sam said, trying to control his chattering teeth, as he pointed out the gold path that continued along the river.\n\nNo one answered, busy as they were shivering and rubbing frigid limbs. The icy water had lowered everyone's core body temperature and, with no way to start a fire, they were all at risk of hypothermia. They needed to find a dry, warm place\u2026and soon.\n\nSam, who had moved ahead of them, suddenly called out. With his flashlight pointed over a rise in the trail, Sam's half-naked form was striking, limned in the back glow. Maggie had not realized just how fine a physique her fellow colleague had hidden under his baggy clothes. From broad shoulders down to his narrow waist and strong legs, Sam struck a handsome pose.\n\n\"Come see this!\" Sam exclaimed, a broad grin on his face.\n\nMaggie saw Norman grab for his camera case as she climbed to join the others.\n\nBefore her, spreading across a cavern as large as her university's soccer stadium, was a small dark city. Sam's light was the only source of illumination, but its dim glow was enough to light up the entire chamber. Houses of brick, some three stories high, dotted the floor, while up the walls climbed tier after tier of stacked granite homes, like a jumble of toy blocks. Empty windows stared back at them. Throughout the city, brighter splashes of gold and silver decorated many of the abodes. But what caught all their eyes was what stood in the town's center. Across the chamber, a massive gold statue stretched toward the ceiling, towering over the buildings. It was similar to the one that guarded the entrance to the cavern, but it was too distant and dark to make out any details.\n\n\"My God,\" Norman said, \"it's a huge subterranean village.\"\n\nAs Maggie crossed to Sam's side, the mustiness of the chamber suddenly caught her attention, and she knew Norman's assessment was wrong. She recognized this smell\u2014dusty decay mixed with the spiced scent of mummification herbs. \"It's not a village,\" she corrected Norman, \"but a necropolis. One of the Incas' underground cities of the dead.\"\n\nRubbing his arms and stamping his cold feet, Sam agreed. \"A burial tomb\u2026but I've never heard of one this extensive or elaborate.\"\n\nNorman's flash exploded as the photographer snapped a series of rapid pictures. The added light froze the city in stark relief. \"Maybe we can hole up in one of those houses and get warm. Pool our body heat like the Aleuts do in their igloos.\"\n\nMaggie again noticed the deep ache from her cold limbs. \"It's worth a try.\" She led the way toward the town's outskirts, following the gold path that ended at the city's edge.\n\nSam trailed behind. \"I may have a better idea.\" But he did not elaborate when Maggie glanced over her shoulder. He just waved her ahead.\n\nMaggie turned back, but not before noticing the purplish tinge to the Texan's lips. Behind Sam, the others fared no better. Ralph's limbs quaked and trembled as he followed. The big man seemed to fare the worst of all of them. He had swallowed a lot of icy water while traveling the stream and did not look well.\n\nHurrying, Maggie led the group quickly down the series of golden switchbacks to the cavern floor. She reached the town's edge, and the smell of earthy decay, like aged compost, filled her nostrils. She stared down the streets of this city of the dead. The tombs of the necropolis had been built like homes to keep the spirits of the deceased happy, reminding them of their prior lives, surrounding them with the familiar. Doorways bore sculpted lintels depicting various fanciful creatures, both mythological and zoomorphic\u2014a mix of man and animal.\n\nJust like the pillars that had marked the path.\n\nMaggie touched one, a cross between a panther and a woman. \"They depict the gods of uca pacha, protectors of the dead.\"\n\nAcross the avenue, Sam studied a brightly painted fresco on the side of a two-story building. He pointed. \"And here are various mallaqui\u2026spirits of the underworld.\"\n\nNorman moved up to them. \"I hate to interrupt your art history lecture, but Ralph is not looking so good.\"\n\nMaggie glanced back. Ralph leaned against one of the doorways, head hanging. Even supported, his huge frame swayed slightly. \"We need to find shelter. Get him warm.\"\n\nSam turned to Denal. \"Are your matches still dry?\"\n\nThe boy nodded. He pulled out a plastic-wrapped bundle from within his armful of damp clothes. It was the boy's extra box of cigarettes wrapped with a small box of matches. He passed the matches to Sam.\n\nMaggie moved to Sam's side. \"A fire? But what about kindling?\"\n\nAs answer, Sam swung away and ducked into one of the neighboring abodes. From within, she heard shifting and sliding and realized in horror what Sam was planning. Sam backed out through the doorway, dragging something with him. With a grunt, he swung around, tossing his burden into the street. Bones cracked and clattered, and dust billowed up. It was a linen-wrapped mummy.\n\n\"They make good kindling,\" Sam said simply.\n\n\"Ugh!\" Norman responded with disgust, and covered his mouth.\n\nHaving caught his breath, Sam crossed to the mummy and pulled free Denal's box of matches. Sam struck a match and soon had the linen wrap smoldering. Small flames grew as the old bones and leather inside fueled the fire. Orange flames spat higher and higher.\n\nMaggie, while aghast at the source of kindling, still drew nearer the welcoming heat.\n\nSam, leaning on a wall now, jerked his arm at the surrounding necropolis. \"If nothing else, we'll never have to worry about running out of wood.\"\n\nRalph sat as near to the flames as possible. After an hour, the heat had finally reached his cold bones. As he sat, he tried to ignore the source of the combustion. A mummified hand sprawled from the flames, quivering slightly from the heat. He glanced away.\n\nAcross the fire, Sam had taken apart both rifles and carefully cleaned and dry-fired them. Maggie half dozed in the warmth nearby, one arm around Denal. The Quechan boy stared into the flames, eyes wide and glazed. The day had taken its toll on all of them. Norman stood a few paces off. He had taken a couple of photographs, but Ralph could tell the photographer, as tired as he was, was itching to move deeper into the underground city. But not alone. The blackness, even with the fire, was like a physical presence, a dark stranger at their shoulders.\n\nNorman seemed to catch Ralph studying him. He moved nearer. \"How're you feeling?\" Norman asked.\n\nRalph glanced away. \"Better.\"\n\nNorman settled on the stone floor beside him.\n\nBefore he could restrain himself, Ralph scooted an inch away.\n\nNorman noticed the subtle shift. \"Don't worry, big fella, I'm not making a move on you.\"\n\nRalph inwardly kicked himself. Old patterns were hard to erase. \"Sorry\u2026\" he said softly. \"I didn't mean anything.\"\n\n\"Yeah, right. Can't be caught sittin' next to the faggot.\"\n\n\"It's not that.\"\n\n\"Then what is it?\"\n\nRalph hung his head. \"Okay, maybe it was. I was raised strict Southern Baptist. My uncle Gerald was even a minister with the Church. We get that sort of thinkin' drilled into us.\"\n\n\"So what else is new? My parents were Mormon. They weren't too thrilled to learn I was gay either.\" Norman snorted. \"Neither did the army for that matter. I was kicked out of both families.\"\n\nRalph could not face Norman. While he had experienced prejudice during his life, Ralph at least had his family around him for support.\n\nNorman stood up, camera in hand.\n\nRalph suddenly reached out and gripped Norman's hand. The thin photographer flinched. \"Thanks. For back at the river.\"\n\nNorman pulled his hand free, suddenly and uncharacteristically awkward. \"No problem. Just don't try and kiss me. I'm not that type of girl.\"\n\n\"That's not what I heard,\" Ralph said.\n\nNorman turned away. \"Oh, man, Ralph, the comedian. I miss the bigoted jock already.\"\n\nBy the early evening, Henry felt even more out of place. He now trailed behind Joan and Dale as they marched through the deserted halls of Johns Hopkins. At this point in the evening, they were the last ones around. After the endless battery of tests in Joan's lab, they were retiring to her office to plan the next day's experiments.\n\nAs they walked, the two researchers were still deep in conversation about the mysterious material. \"We'll need a complete crystallography assay of Substance Z,\" the gangly metallurgist said in an excited rush, using his new name for the strange element.\n\nHenry sensed the man was already planning in which research journals to publish his findings.\n\n\"And I'd like to see how the material reacts in the presence of other radiation, especially gamma rays.\"\n\nJoan nodded. \"I'll check with the nuclear lab. I'm sure something can be arranged.\"\n\nAs Henry followed behind them, he lifted the beaker of the material and studied the crude replica of the Dominican cross. Substance Z. The other two scientists weren't seeing the forest through the trees. Here was the bigger mystery. The chemical and molecular attributes of the material, though intriguing, were nothing compared to the fact that the material had transformed on its own.\n\nNeither of the other two seemed to place much weight on that fact. The metallurgist had attributed the transformation to the proximity of the material to the gold cross itself, theorizing some transfer of energy or electrons that made the material churn into its new form. \"All metal gives off a unique energy signature,\" Dale had explained. \"With the sample's acute sensitivity to various radiation, the material must have responded to the gold, changing its crystalline matrix to match the signature. It's amazing!\"\n\nHenry had disagreed, but had remained silent. He knew the answer lay elsewhere. He remembered how he had been pondering the code on the crucifix when the transformation had occurred. It was not the proximity to the cross that had changed Substance Z, but the proximity to Henry. Something had happened, but Henry was not ready to voice any wild speculations aloud\u2014at least not yet. It was not his way, not until he had more information. One of the first lessons he taught his students\u2014proceed with knowledge, not speculation. To Henry, the only thing certain about Substance Z was that it should not be dabbled with lightly. But the other two scientists were deaf to his rumblings of caution.\n\nHis right hand fingered the Dominican crucifix resting in the pocket of his sports jacket. Friar Francisco de Almagro knew something, something he had wanted to tell the outside world, his final testament. Henry suspected that the answers to the mysteries of Substance Z would not be found in nuclear labs or research facilities, but instead, in the crude scratches on the back of the friar's cross. Yet, before Henry dared to voice his own opinions or conduct his own experiments, he first planned to decipher this ancient code. And Henry knew exactly where to start. Tomorrow he would again consult the archbishop. Perhaps some old records might mention a code among the Dominican friars.\n\n\"Here we are,\" Joan announced. She jingled her keys from a pocket and went to open the door. Grabbing the knob, the door gave way under her touch. \"That's odd. It's unlocked. Maybe I forgot\u2014\"\n\nShe began to push the door open when Henry suddenly stopped her. \"No!\" He grabbed the pathologist by the elbow. Remembering that Joan had locked the door earlier, he yanked her away from the open doorway, tripping over a janitor's bucket behind him. He barely kept his balance.\n\n\"Henry!\" she yelled in shock.\n\nDale scowled at him as if the archaeologist had gone mad. \"What are you doing?\"\n\nHenry did not have time to explain. Danger signals reverberated up and down his spine. \"Run!\"\n\nBut it was too late.\n\nBehind Dale's shoulder, a dark figure appeared in the doorway to Joan's office. \"Don't move,\" the trespasser ordered coldly.\n\nStartled, Dale swung around, his face draining of color. He backed several quick steps in the opposite direction from Henry and Joan.\n\nThe man moved forward into the hall. He wore a charcoal suit over a black shirt and tie; his skin was coppery with Spanish features, ebony hair, dark eyes. But what drew most of Henry's attention was the large pistol, outfitted with a thick silencer, in his right fist. He brandished it back and forth, covering both sides of the hallway. \"Which of you has the gold crucifix? Relinquish it and you'll live.\"\n\nDale quickly pointed to Henry.\n\nThe assailant swung the barrel in his direction. \"Professor Conklin, do not make me shoot you.\"\n\nAt that moment, the metallurgist's courage ran out. With the gunman's back turned, Dale made a run for it. His expensive shoes betrayed him, hard heels striking loudly on the waxed linoleum. The gunman did not even turn. He simply pointed his pistol back and fired; the shot was muffled by the silencer\u2014but its effect was not. The force of the bullet knocked Dale off his feet. He went flying headfirst to the floor, skidding several feet before stopping, leaving a trail of blood across the white tiles. He tried to push up once, then collapsed back down, a dark pool spreading under him.\n\n\"Now, Professor Conklin,\" the burglar said, holding out his free hand. \"The cross, please.\"\n\nBefore Henry could respond, a second dark-suited man stepped from Joan's office. He glanced at the fallen metallurgist, then back to the shooter. He spoke rapidly in Spanish, but Henry understood. \"Carlos, I've destroyed all the paperwork and files.\"\n\nThe leader, Carlos, glanced to the other man. He lowered the pistol slightly. \"And the computer?\"\n\n\"The hard drive has been wiped and purged.\"\n\nCarlos nodded.\n\nHenry used the momentary distraction of the newcomer to slip the Dominican crucifix from his jacket pocket and flip it into the toppled janitor's bucket. Only Joan noticed. Her eyes were huge with fear.\n\nRaising the pistol, Carlos turned to Henry. \"I'm losing patience, Professor. The cross, please.\"\n\nHenry stepped forward, placing himself between the shooter and Joan. He held out the beaker with the crude cross. He hoped the shape and the color would fool these thieves. He refused to lose the ancient relic.\n\nThe man's eyes narrowed suspiciously. He took the beaker and held it before him. Even distracted, the pistol never wavered from where it pointed, straight at Henry's heart.\n\nThe shooter's accomplice stood at the man's shoulders. \"Is it\u2026?\"\n\nCarlos ignored the man, still staring at the mock-up of the original crucifix. Whispered words of a Spanish prayer flowed from his lips, a benediction. Then the cross in the beaker changed, melting before the man's gaze into a perfectly symmetrical pyramid.\n\nHenry gasped.\n\nThe second man fell to his knees. \"Dios mio!\"\n\nCarlos lowered the beaker, his hand shaking. \"We've found it!\" Exultant, he turned to his captives.\n\nHenry backed into Joan. She clutched his hand fiercely. Henry sensed he had made a grave miscalculation. The thieves hadn't been after the Dominican crucifix because it was gold, but because they had suspected it was made of Substance Z. Henry had inadvertently handed them the very prize they had sought. Who were these people?\n\nCarlos nodded toward Henry and Joan, but his brusque orders were for his companion. \"Silence them.\"\n\nThe second man stood, pulling his own gun, much larger and more intimidating than the leader's weapon.\n\n\"Wait!\" Henry begged.\n\nIgnoring him, the man aimed his pistol at Henry and fired. Henry's chest exploded with fire. Joan screamed. Henry fell to his knees, his hand slipping from Joan's. He glanced up in time to see the man twist the gun toward Joan.\n\n\"No!\" he moaned, raising one hand futilely.\n\nToo late. A muffled shot.\n\nJoan clutched her own chest and fell. She turned stunned eyes to Henry, then glanced down. Henry followed her gaze. Her fingers pulled out a feathered barb from between her breasts, then she fell backward.\n\nHenry glanced to his own chest. There was no bleeding bullet hole, only a red-feathered spot of agony. Tranquilizing darts?\n\nWords, in Spanish, floated around him as the drug took effect.\n\n\"Get the men up here now.\"\n\n\"What about the dead one?\"\n\n\"Leave him in the office along with the janitor's body.\"\n\nCarlos's face suddenly bloomed close to Henry's. His wavery dark eyes were huge. Henry felt lost in them. \"We're going for a short ride, Professor. Pleasant dreams.\"\n\nHenry slumped, but not before noticing the tiny silver cross dangling from a chain around the man's neck. He had seen it before. It was an exact match to the one found on the mummified friar.\n\nA Dominican cross!\n\nBefore he could ponder this newest mystery, the black grip of the drug hauled him away."
            },
            {
                "title": "Day Four",
                "text": "[ Necropolis ]\n\n[ Thursday, August 23, 7:45 A.M. ]\n\n[ Caverns ]\n\n[ Andean Mountains, Peru ]\n\nSam awoke on the stone floor of the cavern as someone nudged his side with a toe. Now what? Groaning a protest, he rolled away from the fire and found Norman standing nearby, staring out at the dark necropolis. The photographer had pulled the last guard shift. Even though the bat cave stood between them and the tarantula army, no one had been willing to take any chances.\n\n\"What is it?\" Sam asked groggily, rubbing his eyes. After yesterday's labors and near deadly swim in the icy stream, he wished for nothing more than another half day beside the warmth of the crackling flames. Even the smell was rather pleasant, considering the source of the fuel\u2014almost a burnt cinnamon. From the heart of the bonfire, a charred skull glared through the flames at him. Stretching, Sam pushed up. \"Why did you wake me?\"\n\nNorman kept staring at the shadowed tombs of the Incan dead. \"It's getting lighter in here,\" he finally said.\n\nSam frowned. \"What are you talking about? Did someone throw another log on the fire?\" He glanced to the three bundled mummies stacked nearby like cords of wood, waiting to stoke the flames.\n\nNorman swung around; he held a small device in his palm. It was his light meter. \"No. While on guard, I checked a few readings. Since five o'clock this morning, the meter has been reading rising footcandles.\" Norman's glasses reflected the firelight. \"You know what that must mean?\"\n\nSam was too tired to think this early, not without at least a canteen of coffee. He pushed to a seated position. \"Just spill it already.\"\n\n\"Dawn,\" Norman said, as if this made it all clear.\n\nSam just looked at him.\n\nNorman sighed. \"You really aren't a morning person, are you, Sam?\"\n\nBy now the others were stirring slowly from their makeshift beds. \"What's going on?\" Maggie asked around a wide yawn.\n\n\"Riddles,\" Sam said.\n\nNorman shot Sam a sour look and stepped closer to encompass the entire group as he spoke. \"My light meter's been registering stronger and stronger signals since dawn.\"\n\nMaggie sat up straighter. \"Really?\" She glanced beyond the firelight at the dark cave.\n\n\"I waited a couple hours to be sure. I didn't want to give anyone false hope.\"\n\nSam pushed to his feet. He wore only his pants. His vest still lay drying beside the fire. He had been using it as a pillow. \"You're not suggesting\u2014?\"\n\nMaggie interrupted, her words laced with excitement. \"Maybe Norman's right. If the readings are stronger as the morning progresses, then sunlight must be getting down here from somewhere.\" She clapped Norman on the shoulder and shook him happily. \"By Jesus, there must be a way out nearby!\"\n\nHer words sank into Sam's consciousness. A way out! Sam stepped to the pair. \"You're sure the meter is not just registering flare-ups in the campfire?\"\n\nNorman frowned as Ralph and Denal edged around the fire to join the group. \"No, Sam.\" He lifted his device. \"It's definitely picking up sunlight.\"\n\nSam nodded, satisfied with the photographer's expertise. Norman was no fool. Sam squinted at the dark cavern. Firelight basked the walls and reflected off the monstrous gold statue in the center of the city. Sam prayed Norman was correct in his conclusions. \"Then let's find out where that light's coming from. Can you use the meter to track the source?\"\n\n\"Maybe\u2026\" Norman said. \"If I keep it shielded from the torches and widen the f-stop\u2026\" He shrugged.\n\nRalph volunteered a suggestion. He seemed back to his old self since yesterday's trials, only perhaps slightly more subdued. \"Maybe Norm and I could circle the camp and search out where the light reads the strongest. It should give us a direction to start.\"\n\nSam nudged the photographer when he did not immediately respond. \"Norman?\"\n\nThe thin man glanced at the wall of darkness at the edge of the fire's pool of light. He did not look like he cared for Ralph's idea, but he finally admitted reluctantly, \"It might work.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Sam rubbed his hands and put a plan together. \"While you reconnoiter, we'll finish breaking down the camp. Take the flashlight. You can click it on and off as you take your readings. But be careful, the batteries on this one are wearing down, too.\"\n\nRalph took the flashlight and tested it, thumbing the switch. \"We'll be careful.\"\n\nNorman glanced to the fire, then back to the darkness. \"If we're gonna do this, we'd better hurry. There's no telling when we might lose the sunlight. Even passing clouds could block the footcandles stretching down to us.\" Contrary to his own words, Norman still hesitated, his face tight.\n\nSam noticed the photographer's tension. \"What's wrong?\"\n\nNorman shook his head. \"Nothing. I've just seen too many cheap horror movies.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"Splitting up the group. In horror movies, that's when the killer starts knocking off the college co-eds.\"\n\nSam laughed, believing the photographer was cracking a joke\u2014but Norman wasn't smiling. Sam's laughter died. \"You don't seriously think\u2014\"\n\nSuddenly something huge crashed into the bonfire. Flaming bits of wrap and bone exploded outward, stinging bare flesh and rattling across the stone floor. Smoke billowed, and darkness threatened to consume the group as the campfire was scattered. Luckily, a large flaming brand landed a t o p the stacked mummies nearby and set them on fire, returning the light. Shadows from the various pyres danced across the walls of the tombs.\n\nSam spun around, pulling Maggie behind him. Amid the ruins of their original fire rested a large square block, clearly a hewn-granite brick from one of the structures. He glanced up. There was no overhanging cornice from where the huge block could have fallen.\n\nRalph voiced Sam's own thoughts. \"That was no accident.\" The Alabama football player clicked on his flashlight and stabbed its beam into the darkness beyond the reach of the fires.\n\n\"Get the guns,\" Sam said. \"Now.\"\n\nRalph nodded, tossing the light to Norman, then grabbed the rifle leaning against the stone wall. Sam bent and retrieved his own Winchester from beside his makeshift bed. Maggie kept close to his side, Denal at her hip.\n\nBeyond the occasional crack and snap from the fire as dried bones burst from the heat, nothing could be heard. Yet all around them, Sam could sense movement. Shadows danced in the firelight, but some of the pools of darkness seemed to slink and slide. Something was out there, closing in on them.\n\n\"Ghosts come for us,\" Denal mumbled.\n\nMaggie put her arm around the boy's shoulder. She comforted the lad, but no one argued against his words. The spread of the necropolis, limned in flame and thick with shifting shadows, made even their worst nightmares seem possible.\n\nBut what moved through the necropolis was much worse.\n\nNorman's flashlight caught one of the slinking interlopers in his beam. It froze for a heartbeat like a deer in headlights\u2014but this was no doe or buck. As pale as the albino tarantulas, it stood on two legs, naked, hunched, knuckling on one long, thickly muscled arm. Sam's first thought was ape, but the creature was hairless, bald-pated.\n\nIt hissed at the light\u2014at them\u2014huge black eyes narrowed to angry slits, teeth pointed and sharp. Then it flew from the light, disappearing into the gloom, moving faster than Sam would have thought possible.\n\nIt had appeared and vanished so quickly that none of the group had time to comment. Sam had not even thought to raise his rifle; neither had Ralph. Norman's beam jittered as the photographer's arm trembled.\n\n\"What in bloody hell was that?\" Maggie finally whispered.\n\nSam positioned his Winchester to his shoulder. In the distance, faint echoes could be heard all around them: the scrape of rock, strangled hisses, guttural coughs, even one piercing howl, clearly a challenge being trumpeted. It sounded as if scores of the creatures had them trapped, surrounded, but the cavern acoustics were deceptive. Ralph met Sam's gaze, fear glinting bright in the big man's eyes.\n\n\"What are they?\" Maggie repeated.\n\n\"Mallaqui,\" Denal answered. Spirits of the underworld.\n\n\"And you wanted Ralph and me to go out there alone,\" Norman said, voice squeaking, flashlight trembling. \"Let's take a lesson from horror flicks. We stick together from here on.\"\n\nNo one argued. In fact, no one said a word.\n\nAll eyes stared into the dark heart of the necropolis.\n\nHenry woke and wished he hadn't. His head ached and throbbed as if someone had been using his temples for a drum solo. His mouth was full of sour acid and as sticky as Elmer's glue. He groaned because that was all he was capable of doing for the moment. Taking several breaths, he concentrated on making out his surroundings. The only light came from a slitted window high up the rear wall of the tiny room.\n\nMemories of the attack in the halls of Johns Hopkins returned. One of his hands crawled across his chest to finger a tender spot in its center. The feathered barb was gone. Slowly he pushed up to find himself lying atop a frame bed, poorly cushioned by a worn mattress. He still wore his same clothes\u2014Levi's and a grey shirt, only his Ralph Lauren sports coat was gone. Tossing aside a thin wool blanket, Henry pushed himself up.\n\nThe room was spartan. Besides the bed, the only other pieces of furniture were a wormwood desk huddled in the back corner and a prayer bench set before a plain wooden crucifix. Henry stared at the cross, its deep cherry stain stark against the whitewashed plaster. Before his mind's eye, he again pictured the silver Dominican cross hanging from around his attacker's neck. What the hell was going on?\n\nHe swung his feet to the floor, causing his ears to ring and his vision to dim for a fraction of a second. He took a deep breath, but not before noticing a strong, familiar smell from the tattered blanket on the bed. He fingered the coarse wool which was slightly greasy. He raised it to his nose and sniffed. Llama. Wool from the llama was the poorest quality of the textiles produced in South American countries, used by the peasants only. It was seldom exported.\n\nUnderstanding slowly dawned. South America?\n\nHenry quickly stood, wobbling for a moment on his weak legs, then quickly regaining his strength. \"No, it can't be!\"\n\nHe stepped to the only door, short-framed but solid. He tested the latch. Locked, of course. Moving to the room's center, he stared up at the high window. Birds whistled in some nearby tree, and a warm breeze stirred the dust motes in the stream of sunlight. Too bright. Henry sensed that this was not the same day when he had been shot by the tranquilizer dart. How long had he been out? The thin breeze smelled of frying oil, and in the distance rose the vague noises of a market, its strident voices hawking wares in Spanish.\n\nHenry's heart sank as he realized the truth. He had been abducted, whisked out of the country. Another face appeared to him: straight fall of midnight hair, bright eyes, full lips. His breath caught in his throat as he remembered Joan pulling the feathered dart from between her breasts and slumping to the floor. Where was she?\n\nMore worried about Joan than himself, Henry stepped to the door and pounded his fist, shaking the planks in their frame. Before he could even call out, a small peekhole slid open near the top of the door. Dark eyes stared at him.\n\n\"I want to know what\u2014!\"\n\nThe peephole slammed shut. Muffled words, too low to hear distinctly, were exchanged a few paces down the hall. Someone left in a hurry. Henry pounded the door again. \"Let me out of here!\"\n\nHe had not truly expected a response; he had only been venting his frustration. So he was shocked when someone responded to his call. A voice called to him from down the hall. \"Henry? Is that you?\"\n\nRelief flooded his chest, cooling his hot blood. \"Joan!\"\n\n\"Are you okay?\" she yelled back.\n\n\"Fine. How 'bout you?\"\n\n\"Sore, sick, and mad as hell.\"\n\nHenry heard a lot of fear in her voice, too. He didn't know what to say. Apologize for getting her in this trouble? Offer false promises of rescue? He cleared his throat and called back. \"Sorry\u2026that wasn't much of a second date, was it?\" he called out.\n\nA long pause\u2026then a soft chuckle. \"I've had worse!\"\n\nHenry pressed both palms against the door. He longed to wrap his arms around her.\n\nFrom outside the cell, the sound of someone approaching suddenly echoed down the hall. Joan must have heard, too; she grew quiet. Henry held his breath. Now what? A voice, firm and curt, spat just outside his door. Henry recognized the cadence of an order.\n\nThe grate of a sliding bolt sounded, then the door to his cell swung open. Henry did not know what he had expected, but he was shocked when he discovered two robed monks outside his cell. Their cowls were tossed back and prominent crucifixes hung from beaded chains around their necks.\n\nHenry stepped away as his gaze fixed on the familiar face of the taller monk. It was the gunman from Johns Hopkins, the one named Carlos. Once again, the man held a pistol in his grip, but this time there was no silencer. \"Be cooperative, Professor Conklin, and all will go well.\"\n\n\"Wh\u2026where am I? What do you want with us?\"\n\nCarlos ignored him, instead signaling his companion. The guard crossed to another door down the hall and freed the bolt. Swinging the door open, he barked in Spanish and pulled a gun from a slit at the waist of his robe. He waved its muzzle, signaling the occupant to vacate the room.\n\nJoan stepped out cautiously, her eyes instantly finding Henry's. He saw the clear relief in her gaze. Tears glistened. She wiped brusquely at her face and needed no further prodding from the guard to join Henry and Carlos. Her eyes flicked a moment to the pistol in the taller monk's hand, then back to Henry. \"Why are we here?\" she whispered. \"What do they want?\"\n\nBefore Henry could answer, Carlos spoke. \"Come. Your questions will be answered.\" Turning on his heel, the tall monk led them down the hall. The other monk, gun in fist, followed.\n\nJoan slipped her hand into Henry's. He squeezed as much reassurance into her grip as possible. If these men had meant them dead, they wouldn't have drugged them and dragged them all the way here. But where was here? And what did they want? There was only one way to find out.\n\nHenry followed Carlos. He studied the swish of the gunman's robe, sandals tapping quietly on the flagstone floor. And why these damnable disguises?\n\nAs they were led down a maze of halls and up two flights of stairs, Joan remained silent at his side. Her gait was stiff. They passed only one other monk in the hallway, a cowled figure, head bowed. He stepped aside to let the procession pass without raising his face. Henry heard a mumbled prayer upon the man's lips as he walked past. He never looked up.\n\nHenry glanced back; the monk continued down the hall, either unaware or uncaring about the guns and prisoners.\n\n\"Strange,\" he mumbled.\n\nAt last, Carlos stopped before a set of large double doors, polished and waxed to a brilliant sheen. African mahogany, Henry guessed, and expensive. Carved in relief upon the doors was a mountain range with villages dotting the slopes. Henry knew the view. He had seen it many times while visiting Peru. It was a well-known region of the Andean mountains.\n\nHenry frowned at the door as Carlos knocked.\n\nA deep voice answered, \"Entrada!\"\n\nCarlos swept open the doors on oiled hinges and revealed a room as handsome as the mahogany doors. An ornate prayer altar, adorned in silver and gold leaf, stood in the corner, while underfoot, an elaborate woven alpaca rug cushioned Henry's steps as he entered. To either side, shelves lined with dusty volumes filled the walls from floor to ceiling. In the center of the room, a massive desk rested, with an incongruous computer stationed at one end.\n\nBehind the immense desk, a large man, elderly but still vigorous, pushed to his feet with a squeak of his chair. His size made even the desk seem small.\n\nBut Henry ignored the man and room, his eyes drawn to the wide windows beyond. Outside rose the steeple of a stately colonial church, towering above the surrounding town. Henry gaped at the view, shocked. He instantly recognized the landmark structure, knew with certainty where he was\u2014Cuzco, Peru. Beyond the windows stood the Spanish Church of Santo Domingo, a Dominican church built atop the ruins of the Incas' Temple of the Sun.\n\nHenry glanced back to the room at hand. Knowledge of where they had been imprisoned suddenly dawned. The monks, the view, even the figure now standing behind the wide desk, grinning a welcome\u2026\n\nOh, God.\n\nHenry stepped forward, eyes coming to rest on the large man, his captor. His features were distinctly Spanish, almost aristocratic. Henry recalled his conversation with the archbishop back in Baltimore. The bishop had promised to pass on the archaeologist's questions to a Dominican colleague in Peru. Henry remembered the name that the Archbishop had mentioned. \"Abbot Ruiz?\" he said aloud.\n\nThe huge man bowed his head in greeting. \"Professor Conklin, welcome to the Abbey of Santo Domingo.\" He seemed unperturbed by Henry's recognition. Abbot Ruiz's girth matched his height. His chest and belly swelled his cassock and black robe. His large size did not seem soft, more like a man who had once been solid with muscle, but whose shape had become bulky with age.\n\nHenry faced his adversary. He had always considered himself a good judge of character, but the abbot confounded him. His manner was open and friendly. Silver-haired, he seemed a kindly grandfather. But Henry knew, considering the circumstances, that this judgment could not be further from the truth.\n\nJoan shifted beside Henry. \"You know this man?\"\n\nHenry shook his head. \"Not exactly.\"\n\nAbbot Ruiz waved them toward a pair of overstuffed chairs. \"Professor Conklin and Dr. Engel, please make yourselves comfortable.\"\n\nHenry stepped nearer the desk. \"I'd prefer to stand until I get some answers.\"\n\n\"As you wish,\" he said, wearing a wounded expression. The abbot returned to his own seat, sinking into it with a sigh.\n\nJoan joined Henry at the desk. \"Just what do you want with us, goddammit?\"\n\nThe abbot frowned, the false warmth melting from his face. \"This is a holy place of our Lord. Refrain from blasphemies here.\"\n\n\"Blasphemies?\" Henry said angrily. \"Your man over there killed a colleague of ours, then drugged and kidnapped us. Just how many Commandments, let alone international laws, did he break?\"\n\n\"We care not for secular laws. Friar Carlos is a warrior in the Lord's army and above any international rules. As for Friar Carlos's soul, do not fear. He has been absolved in Holy Confession, his sins forgiven.\"\n\nHenry scowled. They were all mad.\n\nJoan spoke up. \"Fine\u2026everyone's soul has been cleaned, pressed, and folded. Now why the heck have you kidnapped us?\"\n\nThe abbot's face remained tight, angered\u2014the kindly grandfather persona long gone. \"Two reasons. First, we wish to learn more of what Professor Conklin has discovered at the ruins in the Andes. And second, what both of you have learned in the States from the mummy.\"\n\n\"We'll not cooperate,\" Henry said sternly.\n\nRuiz fingered a large seal ring on his right hand, twisting it around and around the digit. \"That is yet to be seen,\" he said coldly. \"Our order has grown skilled over the centuries at loosening tongues.\"\n\nHenry's blood chilled at the man's words. \"Who are you?\"\n\nRuiz clucked his tongue. \"I ask the questions here, Professor Conklin.\" The abbot reached to a desk drawer and pulled it open. He lifted a familiar object from within and placed it upon his desk. It was the laboratory beaker containing Substance Z. The golden material was still in the shape of the small pyramid. \"Where exactly did you find this?\"\n\nHenry pictured the mummy's head exploding. He sensed he had better not lie, not until he figured out how much these others knew. Still, he refused to give away the complete truth. \"We found it\u2026in Friar de Almagro's possession.\"\n\nJoan glanced sharply at him.\n\nThe abbot's eyes opened wider. \"So our old colleague was successful in his mission. He had discovered the source of el Sangre del Diablo.\"\n\nHenry's brows bunched as he translated the abbot's words. \"The blood of the Devil?\"\n\nRuiz studied Henry in silence for several moments, then steepled his fingers before him and spoke slowly. \"I sense you know more than you're voicing, Professor Conklin. And though we've refined our tools over the centuries, I think simple honesty may gain your cooperation more easily and fully. You are, after all, a man of science and history\u2026and curiosity may win out where threats fail. Would you hear me out?\"\n\n\"As if I had any choice\u2026\"\n\nAbbot Ruiz stood again. He collected the beaker and made it vanish within the folds of his vestments. \"All men have free will, Professor Conklin. It is what damns us or saves us.\" The abbot stepped around his desk and waved for the monk named Carlos to lead the way. \"The Sanctum,\" he ordered.\n\nHenry noted the friar's shocked expression, then the quick nod and the turn of a heel. Carlos opened the office door and led them out.\n\nEver the good soldier of the Lord, Henry thought.\n\n\"Where are you taking us now?\" Joan asked, sticking to Henry's side.\n\nRuiz marched beside them as they reentered the hallway. \"To reveal the truth in the hopes that you will be equally open.\"\n\n\"The truth about el Sangre del Diablo?\" Henry asked, prying for more information. \"How do you know about it?\"\n\nThe abbot sighed loudly, seeming to weigh whether or not to answer. Finally, he spoke. \"The metal was first discovered by the Spanish conquistadors here in Cuzco.\" The abbot waved a hand. \"It was found in the Incas' sacred Temple of the Sun.\"\n\n\"The ruins under the Church of Santo Domingo?\" Henry asked. The temple had first been described by historian Pedro de Cieza de Leon as among the richest in gold and silver to be found anywhere in the world. Even the walls of the Incan temple had been plated with inch-thick slabs of gold\u2014until the Spanish had ransacked and stripped it, tearing the structure down to the foundations to build their God's church atop it.\n\n\"Exactly,\" Ruiz said with a sigh. \"The temple must have been a wondrous sight before it was pillaged. A shame really.\"\n\n\"And this Devil's blood?\" Joan pressed. \"Why that name?\"\n\nThe group reached a long winding staircase leading deep into the heart of the Abbey. The abbot moved slowly down the steps, his great bulk hindering him. He wheezed slightly as he spoke. \"The Incas had colorful names for silver and gold\u2014the moon's tears, the sun's sweat. When the Spanish conquerors first learned of this other metal and witnessed its unearthly properties, they declared the material blasphemous, naming it just as colorfully el Sangre del Diablo. Satan's Blood.\"\n\nHenry found himself being drawn into this story. This was his field of expertise, but he had heard no such stories. \"Why are there no records of this discovery?\"\n\nThe abbot shrugged. \"Because the Church was summoned and agreed with the conquistadors. The metal was studied, its unusual properties noted, and was declared by Pope Paul III in 1542 to be an abomination in the eyes of our Lord. The work of Satan. The Dominicans who had accompanied the Spanish confiscated all such samples and returned them to Rome, for purification. All records of the metal's discovery were destroyed. To speak of it or write of it was deemed the same as communing with the Devil.\" The abbot glanced to the walls as they followed Friar Carlos. \"Several historians were burned when they resisted the Pope's decree, here in this very building. It was our order's burden to preserve the secrecy.\"\n\n\"Your order\u2026you keep saying that as if you're separate from the Catholic Church.\"\n\nRuiz frowned. \"We are most definitely a part of the Holy Roman Church.\" The abbot glanced away, almost guiltily. \"Unfortunately, most of Rome has forgotten us. Except for a handful of men in the Vatican, none still know this order's true mission.\"\n\n\"Which is?\" Henry asked.\n\nRuiz shook his question away. \"Come and you will see.\"\n\nThey had reached the bottom of the long staircase. Henry estimated they had to be at least fifty feet underground. A string of raw lightbulbs lit the way ahead. Henry glanced to the walls and was startled to see the characteristic work of the Incas\u2014massive blocks of granite stacked and jigsawed together with immense skill.\n\nThe abbot must have noticed as Henry ran his palm along the wall. \"We are now under the Abbey. Like the Church of Santo Domingo, the Abbey also rests on ancient Incan foundations. These passages actually merge and connect to the Temple of the Sun.\"\n\n\"Are we going there?\" Joan asked. \"To this temple?\"\n\n\"No\u2026we're going somewhere even more astounding.\"\n\nWith Carlos still leading, the group traveled the maze of passages. Henry noted the occasional wooden footbridge straddling open sections of the stone floor. At first, he attributed them to regions where the ancient Incan stonework had succumbed to earthquakes or simple wear. Then, as he crossed another of these bridges, he realized they were too regular and the pits too square. He suddenly suspected where the group traveled.\n\n\"This is the place of the pit!\" Henry blurted out, staring back at the warren of hallways with their many twists and turns.\n\n\"So you've heard of this place?\" Ruiz said with a smile.\n\n\"Place of the pit?\" Joan asked.\n\n\"An underground labyrinth. A hellhole where Incan rulers tossed their most hated enemies. It was fraught with booby-trapped pitfalls lined by razored flint. They'd also throw in scorpions, spiders, snakes, even injured pumas, to torment the prisoners.\"\n\nJoan studied the walls around them. \"How awful\u2026\"\n\n\"It was one of the Incas' most infamous torture chambers. The Spanish conquistadors wrote extensively of it. It was supposed to be here in Cuzco, but it was believed long destroyed.\" Henry turned to the abbot. \"Apparently it wasn't.\"\n\nCarlos stopped at a bend in the corridor. He stood stiffly by a bare section of stone wall, almost at attention. From his narrowed angry eyes, the friar plainly did not agree with the abbot's decision to bring the captives here.\n\nAbbot Ruiz stepped beside Carlos. \"We've reached the center of the labyrinth. The Sanctum of our order.\"\n\nHenry glanced up and down the corridor. All he saw were stacked granite blocks. There was no sign of a door.\n\nThe abbot approached the bare wall and pressed his large ruby ring against a small stainless-steel plate embedded in a shadowed cubbyhole. Then he stepped back as the grind of gears sounded from behind the bricks.\n\nHenry tensed, not knowing what to expect.\n\nSuddenly a section of the granite wall slowly dropped away, sinking into the floor. Bright light blazed from within, its effect almost blinding after the dimness of the dark hallways. With a groan, the section dropped fully away.\n\nAs the glare faded, Henry stared openmouthed.\n\nJoan gasped beside him.\n\nAhead lay a large chamber, the size of a small warehouse. Starkly white and shining with stainless steel, it was an extensive state-of-the-art laboratory. Beyond the windows and vacuum-sealed glass doors, a legion of figures, dressed in sterile suits, labored at various stations. Muffled by the glass walls, the strains of Beethoven floated out from the laboratory.\n\nHenry glanced back to the Incan stonework labyrinth, then back to the technologically advanced laboratory. \"Okay, you've got my attention.\"\n\nThe expected attack never came. A full hour had passed by the time Sam stepped away from the large bonfire, rifle held tight to his shoulder. The dark necropolis rose to shadowed heights all around them. Firelight splashed across the nearest tombs, but most of the city of the dead was shrouded by an inky blackness. Only the towering gold statue at the center of town reflected the flames, a blazing pillar of brightness in the midnight cavern.\n\nNothing moved out there.\n\n\"Maybe they left,\" Norman whispered.\n\nSam disagreed. \"They're still out there.\"\n\n\"It's the flames,\" Maggie finally said, her voice sharp but quiet, drawing the men's eyes momentarily from the tense vigil of the necropolis. \"They tried to destroy the first campfire, hurling that big rock. But it was only chance that lit the stack of other mummies by accident. If the fire had failed us completely, we'd all be bloody dead.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Norman asked.\n\n\"They fear the flames,\" Sam said, realizing Maggie was right. He looked at her with renewed respect. \"That's what's holding them back.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"From the lack of pigment on the one we saw, it's clearly not a creature of sunlight. Most likely a cave dweller.\"\n\n\"But what was it?\" Ralph asked.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Maggie snapped. The tension was making everyone edgy. She pulled Denal to her side. The boy's eyes were huge with fear, both real and superstitious. \"But whatever it was, it was no spirit. No mallaqui. It was flesh an' blood. I don't know\u2026maybe it's some type of bald gorilla or something.\"\n\nRalph shook his head, repositioning his own rifle slightly. Sam could guess the large man's arm was getting as tired as his own. \"There are no large apes reported on the South American continent.\"\n\n\"But many parts of the Andes still remain unexplored,\" Maggie countered. \"Like this place.\"\n\n\"But it looked almost human,\" Norman said.\n\nSam would not have used that term to describe the misshapen and bent-backed creature that had been caught in the flashlight's beam. He again pictured the beastly face armed with razored teeth. Definitely not human.\n\nMaggie persisted. \"All across the world, people report seeing strange hidden creatures in highland haunts\u2014the Sasquatch of the Sierras, the Yeti of the Himalayas.\"\n\nRalph snorted. \"Great. And we've discovered the abominable snowmen of the Andes.\"\n\nThe camp grew quiet again, the pressure of their situation discouraging any further talk. Total silence fell, except for the occasional pop or crackle from the fire. After a while, Sam began to hope Norman's first statement was true. Maybe the strange creatures had left.\n\nThen, from deep in the cavern, a sharp bark erupted, followed by a guttural grunting from all around.\n\nEveryone tensed. Sam fingered the trigger of his Winchester.\n\n\"The natives are growing restless,\" Norman whispered.\n\nThe coarse calls and gibbering escalated, echoing throughout the cavern. It sounded like hundreds of the creatures surrounded them.\n\nSam's eyes tried to pierce the darkness. \"Fire or not, they may be gathering courage to attack.\"\n\n\"What should we do?\" Norman asked.\n\n\"Two options,\" Sam answered. \"One, we hole up in one of the tombs. Light a huge bonfire near the entrance and wait them out. Hold them off if they attack.\" Sam jiggled his pocket. \"I've got maybe a dozen shells. And Ralph has around thirty.\"\n\nMaggie glanced to the narrow entrance of one of the neighboring tombs. From her pinched expression, it was clear she did not care for that idea. \"We'd be trapped in there. We could be swamped with no means of escape. And I'm afraid their fear of the firelight may wane.\"\n\n\"And what if the fire goes out?\" Norman asked. \"If we run out of mummies while holed up in there, who's going to go wandering out for more?\"\n\nSam nodded at their concerns. \"Exactly, not a great choice. So there is also option number two: We try to find that way out. We use Norman's light meter to guide us. We go armed and bearing torches. If flames scare them, then wielding burning brands may hold them off\u2014at least long enough to get our asses out of here.\"\n\nRalph stood with his head cocked, listening to the growing howls. \"Whatever we decide, we'd better hurry.\"\n\n\"Like I said before, they're growing more confident because we aren't doing anything,\" Maggie said. \"But if we began moving, taking the fire with us, that ought to spook them again. Also maybe this cavern is their home. If it's a territorial thing, by moving, showing them that we're leaving, they may not attack.\"\n\n\"That's a lot of maybes,\" Ralph countered.\n\nMaggie shrugged. \"I'd rather keep movin' than pin ourselves down. I don't think it's wise to stay in one spot too long. I vote for leaving.\"\n\n\"Me too,\" Denal quickly added, his voice small and scared.\n\nNorman nodded. \"We've overstayed our welcome here.\"\n\nSam eyed Ralph.\n\nThe large ex-football player shrugged. \"Let's break camp.\"\n\n\"I'm for that.\" It heartened Sam to hear a unanimous decision, but he prayed it was the correct one. \"Ralph and I need our arms free with the rifles. Everyone else grab a torch.\"\n\nAs the beasts shrieked and screeched, Ralph and Sam maintained a watch on the black necropolis. The others hurriedly worked at constructing torches. Another mummy was dragged from a nearby tomb, and its limbs were broken off, one each for Denal, Maggie, and Norman.\n\nNorman stepped back, brandishing a thin mummified leg. \"I've heard of pulling someone's leg, but this is ridiculous.\" His face shone with sweat from exertion and tension. The photographer crossed to the bonfire and lit the foot in the flames. \"Something tells me I'm going to Hell for this.\" He glanced around the necropolis. \"But then again, maybe I'm already there.\"\n\nIgnoring his nervous chatter, Maggie and Denal followed his example. Soon each held aloft a flaming limb.\n\n\"I've got a spare torch just in case,\" Maggie said, pointing her thumb to the broken arm protruding from under the straps of her shoulder bag. \"We can collect more on the way as we need them.\"\n\n\"If worse comes to worst,\" Norman said, \"I also have a strobe flash on my camera as a last resort.\"\n\n\"Then let's head out,\" Sam said. \"I'll take the lead. Norman's with me. We'll need his meter to guide us. Maggie, can you manage both your torch and the flashlight?\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\n\"Then you follow us with Denal. Ralph will guard our rear. We'll cut through town first. We know there's no exit behind us\u2026so our best bet is to move forward.\" Sam stared at the others. No one voiced any objections to his plan. \"Let's go.\"\n\nThe team set off. The avenues between the necropolis's tombs were wide enough for them to cluster together. Norman walked to one side of Sam, reading his meter, shielding the unit from the torchlight with his body. Maggie marched on Sam's other side, her flashlight pointed forward. Denal kept to Maggie's hip. Only Ralph did as Sam had instructed earlier. He hung back and watched their rear.\n\nAs they tackled the maze of streets, heading toward the distant wall of the cavern, Maggie's earlier assessment proved only somewhat valid. The cacophony of howls did die down. The creatures were clearly shaken by the shifting firelight\u2014but unfortunately not as completely as they had hoped. Cries and grunts still echoed around them, and even worse, the calls sounded closer.\n\nSuddenly a huge blast of rifle fire exploded behind them. Sam spun around, heart in his throat, his Winchester ready at his shoulder. Ralph stood a couple yards back, the barrel of his rifle smoking.\n\n\"Damn!\" Sam yelled, his ears still ringing from the blast. \"Did you see something?\"\n\nRalph shook his head and scowled at the shadowed necropolis. \"Just a warning shot. If the fire didn't completely scare 'em, I thought the rifle might get their attention.\"\n\n\"Jesus, you nearly gave me a heart attack!\" Maggie exclaimed. \"Warn us before you do that again.\"\n\nRalph glanced back, his face growing sheepish. \"Sorry. I just needed to do something. Those cries were crawling up my spine.\"\n\nNorman picked himself up from the stony floor where he had ducked. \"Do that again, and you're gonna owe me a new pair of undershorts.\"\n\nDenal still stood by Maggie. \"Listen,\" he said. \"It quiet now.\"\n\nWith the ringing in his ears fading, Sam realized the boy was right. If nothing else, Ralph's rash act had subdued the howling. The cavern grew deathly still.\n\n\"Maybe that scared them away,\" Norman said hopefully, dusting off the seat of his pants.\n\n\"Don't count on it,\" Sam said. \"Let's go.\"\n\nThe team continued into the maze of avenues and streets. Whoever had laid out the necropolis hadn't been much of a municipal planner, Sam decided. There was not a straight thoroughfare to be found, and many of the streets ended blindly. Their progress, as Sam judged by their proximity to the central golden statue, was slow, a snail's creep, requiring plenty of backtracking and stops to consult the light meter.\n\n\"We're gonna get ourselves lost in here,\" Norman complained at one point, hunched over the meter, cupping its aperture against the torchlight.\n\n\"There's got to be a way out,\" Sam argued.\n\nThe group grew more and more nervous\u2014not because of any howling or signs of the creatures, but because the quiet had begun to chafe nerves. Without any clue to the beasts' whereabouts, every shifting shadow or scrape of rock made Sam twitch. Though no one said anything, they all knew the creatures were still out there, some primeval instinct that warned of hidden predators. The feeling of eyes staring at them, the sense of something breathing in the darkness.\n\nAs they continued, the silence pressed heavier. No one spoke anymore; even Norman's complaints died away. Sam glanced to the heights around them, wishing the howling would start again. Anything was better than this damnable quiet.\n\nA growled scream sounded from overhead. Maggie stabbed her light to the roof of a neighboring tomb. Pale faces stared back at them. Huge black eyes reflected the light; lips pulled back in a keening cry, slashing teeth exposed.\n\n\"Back!\" Sam screamed, shoving Denal and Maggie behind him.\n\nThen the beasts leaped, heaving over the roof's edge toward them.\n\nRalph's rifle blasted. One of the misshapen creatures twisted in midair. Blood plumed out from its wounded neck. It spun and crashed to the stone floor, rolling and howling.\n\nSam herded the others back, retreating down the street. He sighted down the Winchester's long barrel. One of the creatures rose up from where it crouched on the street. Sam got his first good look at one of the beasts. It was as pale and hairless as the one spotted earlier, but this one was skinnier, emaciated. Each rib could be seen through the stretched skin. Even its limbs were just long bone and pale sinew, almost stretched like taffy. But it was its face that gave Sam pause. It was slightly muzzled like a bear, with teeth that seemed all fangs. Clearly a carnivore. But even more disconcerting were the huge black eyes. Sam sensed a rudimentary intelligence in its gaze: curiosity mixed with fury. A lethal combination.\n\nBut Sam recognized caution, too. The emaciated creature glanced back at its wounded companion, still writhing on the ground. When it turned around, its black eyes had narrowed into wary slits.\n\nIt hissed at Sam. Then in a flash of long pale limbs, it vanished down a side street, moving too fast for the eye to follow. Sam could not even shift his rifle sight in time. It was a blurred white ghost.\n\nDamn, it moved fast.\n\nOther of its brethren roiled from every opening, crawling from black windows, creeping from narrow doorways. As they moved, Sam noted subtle differences among them. Some were smaller, dwarfish models of the one he had just studied. Others were thicker-bodied. Some even bore what looked like vestigial wings sprouting from where the scapulas would be on a human. The only clear constants among them were the penetrating, hungry black eyes and the translucent skin.\n\n\"Sam\u2026on your left!\" Maggie called.\n\nHe spun. One creature, a squat brute bearing a huge brick above its head, raced toward them atop bowlegged limbs.\n\nSam had a heartbeat to aim. Instinct from years of pheasant and duck hunting served him well now. He sighted his target and squeezed the trigger. The bullet hit the beast square in the chest; the force of the collision stopped the creature's rush. It tripped to one knee, skidding slightly. Blood, black as oil against white skin, spilled down its bare chest. The stone brick toppled from its fingers, followed quickly by the bulk of the beast.\n\nAnother rifle shot drew his attention back to the right. By now, Ralph stood a few paces away. Sam saw another beast crumple to the floor. Ralph backed, waving an arm. \"Keep going!\"\n\nA scream warned Sam again, but not from Maggie's throat this time. One of the bent-backed creatures, a female with pendulous breasts flat as pancakes, howled a ululating cry of attack. In her pale hands was a raised club.\n\nHe struggled to twist the rifle around.\n\n\"Sam!\"\n\nThe club swung toward him, slicing faster than he had expected. He tripped back a step. But he was not fast enough. The club struck the Winchester's barrel with a resounding clang. The rifle tore from his grip and clattered onto the stone.\n\nSam's hand stung from the blow. The club circled back, toward his head this time. The female beast screamed her triumph. Off balance, Sam could not even duck.\n\nThen his left ear suddenly flamed with pain. He yelped, both in distress and surprise.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Maggie gasped, shoving her flaming torch farther past his shoulder and into the attacker's face.\n\nThe beast's eyes widened in terror at the fire. Its triumphant scream changed in mid-peal to a cry of horror. The club fell from its trembling fingers as it shielded its face with an arm.\n\nMaggie came around Sam's side and jabbed the torch.\n\nThe creature darted away, swinging around, and scrambled up the side of a tomb and away. Again moving with preternatural speed.\n\nMaggie swung on Sam, frowning fiercely. \"Grab your rifle!\" She turned to Norman. \"Use the torches.\" She jabbed an arm toward Ralph as another rifle blast echoed through the cavern. The black man was surrounded on all sides. \"Go help him! I'll stick with Sam and Denal. We need to watch each other's backs as we retreat.\"\n\nNorman started toward the embattled ex\u2013football player, harrying away a pair of brutish forms with his flaming limb. \"Retreat to where?\" he called back.\n\n\"Anywhere but here!\" Maggie answered.\n\nNorman nodded, as if that were answer enough, and hurried forward, entering the fray around Ralph. More rifle fire and a swinging torch quickly cleared a space around the tall black man.\n\nTo the left, Sam heard Denal gasp. Swinging around with his rifle, Sam saw the small Quechan lad backing away from a trio of smaller creatures, miniature versions of the ones who had attacked Sam. They shuffled across the floor, knuckling on one forearm, remarkably reminiscent of small apes.\n\nUsing his free hand, Sam pulled Denal behind him, then raised his rifle. He aimed at the closest of the three, almost at point-blank range range, and blew away the back of the creature's skull. Splatter sprayed upon the other two, giving them reason to pause.\n\n\"Get back!\" Sam yelled, drawing Maggie and Denal into a side street as the remaining pair approached. Another creature clawed at Maggie from a rooftop, but a swipe of her torch drove it away.\n\nThen the pair of scuttling monsters on the street howled and leaped\u2014but not at the humans. The pair tore into their fallen companion, ripping with teeth and claws, burrowing bloody muzzles into its flesh.\n\nSam, Maggie, and Denal continued their retreat.\n\n\"What the hell are those things?\" Maggie mumbled, horrified.\n\nSam had no answer.\n\nMore and more creatures joined the meal, drawn by the scent of blood. Without the torches near, they boiled from every niche and shadowed alcove. They were all ravenous. Whatever tenuous neutrality had governed the creatures ended with the scent of fresh meat and blood.\n\nA booming voice called out from around the corner. \"Sam! Maggie!\" It was Ralph. \"We can't get to you now! There're too many!\"\n\nSam watched the carnage. Driven by their wild bloodlust, Sam feared that fire would fail to cow these creatures now. \"Don't try to reach us!\" Sam yelled back. \"We'll keep going this way! Head for the gold statue! Rendezvous there!\"\n\nMore rifle fire exploded from around the corner.\n\nMaggie shone her flashlight behind them. The way was momentarily clear. The feast in the other street had drawn the pack like moths to flame. \"Hurry,\" Maggie urged. \"Who knows how long the buggers will be satisfied with local fare?\"\n\nSam needed no further encouragement. Herding Denal and Maggie before him, he urged them to speed down the avenues. Blindly, they took any turns that seemed to head toward the towering golden idol. All around, the screams of the monsters yowled and echoed, urging them forward. Sam reloaded his rifle on the fly, fingers fumbling shells into place. Once done, he shouldered the gun and closed the distance with Maggie.\n\n\"How're you holding up?\" he wheezed between tight lips.\n\nShe glanced at him, her face pale and bright with sweat in the torchlight. \"Okay,\" she said. \"But ask me again when we stop running.\"\n\nSam reached and squeezed her elbow. He knew what she meant. While fighting and fleeing, the depth of their terror was held in check by adrenaline. True shock at their situation had yet to sink in fully.\n\nMaggie patted Sam's hand. \"I'll be okay.\"\n\nSam offered her a weak smile. \"We'll get out of here.\"\n\nShe nodded\u2014but he knew she didn't necessarily believe him. Neither of them was a fool. The creatures here were obviously scavengers and cannibals. From their pale skin and large eyes, they had been cave dwellers for generations. Maybe for millennia. Interbreeding, mutating\u2026who knows what they once were? Maybe an unknown species of large ape, maybe even some prehistoric man. But if there was truly a way out of these caverns, why hadn't the beasts left?\n\nSam's mind ground on this puzzle, keeping his thoughts away from panic. Maybe Denal had been correct. Maybe these beasts were mallaqui, spirits of the underworld. If the Incas had come upon this trapped tribe of beasts, they could have believed they were beings of the uca pacha, the lower spirit level. Is that why they built such an extensive necropolis down here? Did they believe these monsters would protect their dead? Considering the attack upon Sam's group, the demonic beasts had proved themselves great guard dogs.\n\nSam shook his head, unsure of his own conclusions. A small part of him sensed that a vital piece of this puzzle was still missing\u2014for the moment, there would be no further answers.\n\nSam, Maggie, and Denal ran on. In the distance, occasional blasts of rifle fire cut through the caterwauling screams, marking Ralph's and Norman's presence across the necropolis. But it was rare, startling Sam each time the blast echoed within the cavern.\n\n\"I hope they're doing all right,\" Maggie gasped after a volley of rapid rifle shots. She leaned against the sill of a window, catching her breath.\n\n\"They'll make it. With Ralph's strength and Norman's wit, how could they fail?\"\n\nMaggie nodded. She leaned forward to peer around the next corner. \"By Jesus, there it is!\" she said, stepping forward. She waved for Sam and Denal to follow.\n\nSam stepped around the corner and stared down the next street. It was long and straight, the first such thoroughfare in the cursed maze. Down the tomb-lined avenue, the base of the huge statue could be seen. This close, the statue was clearly an Incan king, a Sapa Inca, like the one that guarded the secret entrance to the caverns. The sculpture stood with its arms raised. Its palms touched the distant ceiling, as if supporting the roof over their heads.\n\nDenal stared, mouth hanging open.\n\n\"It's the same king,\" Maggie said. She lifted her flashlight. It had to be at least twenty stories tall.\n\nSam followed where she pointed. Under a feathered and tasseled llautu crown, the king seemed to stare down at them, a slight scowl on his aristocratic face. It looked like the same king being honored here, too. \"You're right. He must've been the Sapa Inca who had conquered the original Moche tribe, the ones who built the buried pyramid. I'd wager this was his way of placing his stamp upon this mountain citadel.\"\n\nMaggie craned her neck. \"Not a subtle guy.\"\n\n\"Well, let's go introduce ourselves.\" Sam led the way, still wary of attack from the denizens of the necropolis. Though he kept his rifle at the ready, this street seemed truly dead. No scrabbling sounds. The keening howls far away.\n\nSam, hurrying, meant to keep them that way.\n\nThe street proved much longer than it first appeared. The towering statue made the distance seem deceptively shorter. To either side, the tombs also grew in size and stature as they progressed toward the central plaza, further tricking the eye's assessment of distance.\n\nThe group's initial run eventually died down to a tripping walk on exhausted legs.\n\nMaggie's flashlight played across the ornamentation of these elaborate mausoleums. Some stood four stories high, gilded with gold-and-silver designs, encrusted with rubies and emeralds. Fanciful creatures\u2014dragons, winged leopards, human/animal hybrids\u2014adorned the facades. She ran a finger along an elaborate mosaic depicting a ceremonial procession. \"The tombs here must be of the kapak, the higher classes,\" she said, panting.\n\nSam nodded. \"Clustered around the feet of their god, the Sapa Inca. Notice the position of his palms. Another symbol of how their king was a physical link between the upper world and this one.\"\n\nFinally, the row of tombs ended, and the plaza beyond stretched to the gold feet of the statue. Sam glanced up. The statue climbed to the very roof of the chamber. \"Wow\u2026\"\n\nMaggie was not as impressed. She stood with her back to the sight, staring at the dark necropolis. Howls of the beasts echoed sporadically in the distance. \"What the devil are those beasts?\" she mumbled.\n\nSam crossed to her. \"I don't know. But I think they bear some rudimentary intelligence. A few were using tools to attack. Rocks and clubs.\"\n\n\"I noticed, but they were only the thicker-limbed ones,\" Maggie said. \"Did you notice that?\"\n\nSam frowned and lifted his rifle. \"I was sort of busy holding them off.\"\n\n\"Well, it's true. The others just fought with tooth and nail. It was almost like the pack was divided into four distinct classes. Each with its own function and abilities.\"\n\n\"Like bees? Workers, drones, and queen?\"\n\n\"Exactly. First, there were those thin, lanky ones.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I saw one of those. They move as quick as cheetahs.\"\n\n\"But did you notice they never fought?\"\n\n\"Yeah, now that you mention it. The skinny ones appeared first, then just sort of hung around at the fringes.\" Sam glanced to Maggie. \"But what are they? A type of scout?\"\n\nMaggie shrugged. \"Probably.\"\n\nSam pondered her theory in silence. He pictured the battle again in his mind. \"What about those pitbull-looking things? The ones that weren't scared of the flames.\"\n\n\"Another class. Did you notice the lack of genitalia on them?\"\n\n\"I really wasn't looking down there. But if they were sexless, I can guess what you're thinking\u2014drones, just like the bees.\"\n\nMaggie nodded. \"Infertile workers of limited intelligence. Their fearlessness of the flames was probably more from stupidity than bravery. But who knows?\"\n\n\"And the ones with the weapons?\" Sam asked. \"Those bigger ones with the muscles and weird vestigial wings. Let me guess. Soldiers.\"\n\nMaggie shook her head. \"Or maybe just laborers. I don't know. But did you see that gigantic fellow who hung back and seemed to bark orders? I'm sure he's some type of pack leader. I saw no one bigger than he.\"\n\n\"That's a lot of conclusions and suppositions on only a brief glimpse.\"\n\n\"It's what your uncle taught us to do. Extrapolate. Take the tiny shards of an ancient people and construct a civilization.\"\n\n\"Still, without more information, I'd be hard-pressed\u2014\"\n\nDenal suddenly tugged on Sam's free arm.\n\nHe glanced back down to the boy.\n\nDenal stared into the dark necropolis. \"Mister Sam, I hear no gunshots.\"\n\nSam turned, so did Maggie. She wore a deep frown. \"Denal's right,\" she said. \"We haven't heard any rifle fire for a while.\"\n\nSam studied the city, searching for any sign of Norman and Ralph. Echoing screams still rattled over the dark city. \"Maybe they've outrun them.\"\n\nMaggie swung in a slow circle, scanning the spread of tombs. From this point, the necropolis rose in a wide bowl around them. Seven avenues led out like spokes into the surrounding maze of tombs. \"I don't see any sign of Norman's torch out there.\"\n\nSam stepped beside her. Silent. Where were they? Had they been caught? Fear for his friends knotted his stomach.\n\n\"They must be out there somewhere,\" he said quietly. \"They must be.\"\n\nHarried by a mob of beasts, Norman and Ralph backed through a tomb's doorway, ducking under its low lintel. The musty stench and odor of cinnamon filled the narrow space. It accentuated the cloying closeness of the cramped tomb. Beyond the doorway, pale creatures mewled and growled from hungry throats.\n\nSwinging the flaming torch, now burnt down to the knobbed knee of the mummified leg, Norman drove back the scrabble of creatures from the doorway. So far the flames, feeble as they were, kept them at bay. \"C'mon, Ralph,\" Norman begged. He risked a glance backward, his glasses sliding down his sweat-slick nose.\n\nDeeper in the tomb, Ralph fought his rifle, struggling with the bolt. \"Goddamn worthless piece of shit,\" he swore. \"Still jammed.\"\n\n\"Well, unjam it!\" Norman cried.\n\n\"What the hell do you think I'm trying to do?\" Ralph attacked the rifle with more vigor, his muscles bunching in his thick arms, but with no better success. When Ralph raised his face, his expression was answer enough.\n\n\"Fuck.\" Norman poked his torch into a pale face that got too near. With a wail, the foul visage vanished. \"What now? I'm running out of leg!\"\n\n\"Hold on.\" A rustling and heaving sounded from behind. Norman dared not look back. The beasts were getting bolder and making grabs for his torch as the fear of the flames waned. Ralph appeared at his side, voice strained. \"Move out of the way!\"\n\nNorman stepped aside as the large man dropped a bundle at the doorway. It was a desiccated mummy, wrapped in a fetal position. \"Light it,\" Ralph ordered.\n\nNorman brought his flaming brand to the dry wool bandages. Smoke billowed, filling the narrow space. The bright flames, like the light of salvation, bloomed upon the mummified corpse. More smoke choked the chamber. Norman's eyes stung; he coughed coarsely.\n\n\"Stand back,\" Ralph warned, then kicked the flaming bundle through the entryway. It skidded to a stop right outside the doorway and blazed brighter.\n\nThe creatures scattered, squealing like startled swine.\n\nNorman backed a step, sighing in relief. That should buy them a bit more time. \"Can you get the rifle working?\"\n\n\"I don't know. There's a shell jammed tighter than shit. I can't jimmy it free.\" Ralph shook his head as he stared at the flames. \"Our only hope is that the others see the fire and come investigate.\"\n\n\"But they won't know the fire means we're in trouble. What if we tried screaming for help?\"\n\nRalph glanced back, hopelessness in his expression. He shook his head. \"Wouldn't do us any good. The acoustics in this place will only bounce the noise all around.\" Ralph glanced to Norman. \"But I'm open to any other bright ideas.\"\n\nNorman chewed his lower lip, turning in a slow circle, looking for some answer among the scattered pottery and tokens of the dead. \"I think I do have a bright idea,\" he exclaimed, passing his torch to Ralph, then fishing through the camera bag slung across his back. He hefted out the flash unit and held it up. \"A really bright idea!\"\n\n\"What are you thinking?\"\n\nNorman waved away the question. \"I need to get to that window slit.\" He pointed to a narrow gap in the brickwork near the ceiling. It was much too small for the beasts to get through, but it would suit his needs fine. \"I need a boost. How strong are you?\"\n\nRalph frowned. \"I could lift four of your scrawny asses.\"\n\n\"One scrawny ass will do.\" Norman settled his camera bag on the floor. \"Gimme a knee up.\"\n\nCrouching, Ralph helped Norman climb from knee to shoulder.\n\n\"Now up,\" Norman said, kneeling atop Ralph's shoulders and balancing with one hand braced on Ralph's head.\n\nWith an explosive exhalation, Ralph heaved straight up, shoving Norman toward the high roof. Once his feet were steady, he hissed at Norman, \"Hurry up with whatever you're doing.\"\n\nNorman pulled up to the window's sill and peered outside. The view stretched all the way to the gold statue. Perfect.\n\n\"Hurry!\" Ralph said from below.\n\nNorman felt his balance shift under him. He grabbed the window's edge to keep from falling. \"Steady there, big boy!\"\n\n\"Get going! You're not as light as you look.\"\n\n\"Are you saying I'm fat?\" Norman said with feigned offense.\n\n\"Enough wisecracks already. You're not funny!\"\n\nNorman grumbled, \"Everyone's a critic.\" He freed his flash from his vest pocket. Holding the flash up, he triggered the bright light in quick bursts\u2014three short, followed by three long flashes, ending again with three short. Then Norman waited a few seconds and repeated the signal.\n\nThe incandescent light was blinding as it reflected off the surrounding tomb walls. Norman squeezed out one more sequence of signals, then switched off the lamp, conserving the bulb. It would have to do.\n\nWith a final glance at the gold statue so tantalizingly close, Norman dropped back.\n\n\"What were you doing?\" Ralph asked as Norman awkwardly hopped from his perch. Ralph rubbed his bruised shoulders.\n\n\"Making a 911 call.\" Norman pushed his flash unit back into his pack. \"An old-fashioned S.O.S.\"\n\nRalph glanced up at the hole. \"Smart,\" he mumbled.\n\n\"You're welcome,\" Norman answered, proud of his ingenuity. He straightened, slinging his camera bag over his shoulder. \"Now if only someone spotted my signal.\"\n\nNorman suddenly felt something squirm in his hair. He ducked and batted at it; his wrist hit something solid. Squeaking with shock, Norman rolled to the side and spun around.\n\nOne of the creatures continued to paw at him through the open window near the roof, its arm stretched toward him. Norman backed away. A leering face, wide with teeth, appeared upside down at the opening and growled at them. It seemed Norman's clever ploy had attracted someone\u2014unfortunately not who he had hoped.\n\n\"Shit!\" Norman whispered.\n\nOverhead, scratching and scraping sounds began to echo from the rooftop. It sounded like a hundred crows scrabbling up there. In the back corner, one of the slab sections of the stone roof suddenly shifted an inch with a cracking grind of granite.\n\nBoth Norman and Ralph spun in horror to stare at the gap in the slabs. \"They're forcing their way in!\" Ralph groaned.\n\n\"How fucking strong are they?\"\n\n\"With enough of 'em, they could probably tear this place apart.\"\n\nThe scrape of claws and the ominous grind of stone reverberated through the high, narrow chamber.\n\nNorman stepped away, then glanced toward their only exit. Flames from the burning mummy blocked the doorway. They were trapped in a snare of their own making.\n\n\"Me and my bright ideas,\" he moaned.\n\nMaggie was the first to spot the strobe of Norman's flash. \"Over there!\" she yelled, drawing the attention of Sam and Denal. \"Sweet Jesus, they're alive.\" She had noticed a red glow a moment ago among the maze of tombs. At first, she wasn't sure it was them. Now she knew!\n\nSam sidled next to her. He had been circling the statue's base, searching, too. \"Where?\"\n\nAs answer, a second series of flashes exploded through the necropolis. It was not far, just past the end of one of the avenues that spoked away from the central plaza. \"They must be in trouble,\" Sam said.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Maggie asked, her jubilation waning to worry.\n\n\"That's old Morse code. An S.O.S. signal.\"\n\nMaggie stared toward the dark necropolis. \"What are we going to do?\"\n\nSam glanced at her. \"I have to try and help them.\" The flare of flashing light blazed again, then died away. \"They must be pinned down.\"\n\nDenal spoke up, raising his torch a bit higher. \"I go, too.\"\n\n\"And I sure as hell am not staying here alone,\" Maggie said. \"Let's go.\" She started toward the avenue that led most directly toward the trapped students. A hand pulled her back.\n\n\"No,\" Sam said, \"you and Denal stay here.\"\n\nMaggie swung around, shaking out of his grip. \"Like bloody hell! I'm not puttin' up with any of your chauvinistic bullshit, Sam.\"\n\n\"And I'm not asking you to. If I get the others free, we're gonna be running like scared rabbits with a pack of wolves on our heels. We're gonna need a hole to hide in.\" Sam stepped back to the statue. He raised his rifle and tapped its butt against the gold ankle. A dull clang reverberated up the leg.\n\n\"It's hollow,\" Maggie said, amazed.\n\n\"And a good place to hide,\" Sam said. \"When I was circling around, I found a doorway on the far side. In the left heel of the idol.\" Sam reached to his waist and slipped out the gold dagger. He held its hilt out toward Maggie. \"I need you to pick that lock before I get back with the others.\"\n\nMaggie accepted the dagger and the responsibility. \"My da' was once a thief in his youth\u2026here's hoping there's a genetic predisposition.\"\n\nSam smiled at her. \"I always suspected there was something criminal about you.\"\n\nShe returned his smile. \"I'll get the bloody door open. You just bring back the others.\" She held out her torch. \"And be careful.\"\n\nHe stepped closer to accept the flaming brand. In the torchlight, she could see the intensity smoldering in his blue eyes. Grabbing the torch, he let his hand linger on hers. \"You, too,\" he said, his voice a touch huskier. He hesitated another breath.\n\nMaggie raised her face toward him. For a moment, she thought he was going to kiss her, but then he stepped away.\n\n\"I'd better get going.\"\n\nShe nodded. Somewhere deep inside her, in a place that seldom stirred, she felt disappointment and turned slightly to keep from betraying her feelings. \"Don't you do anythin' stupid,\" she implored.\n\nDenal spoke up from a pace away. \"I see no more flashes. They stop.\"\n\nSam swung around\u2026whatever tenuous moment they had shared faded away like scattered embers. He studied the spread of the necropolis. \"That can't be a good sign,\" he said quietly.\n\n\"Hurry, Sam.\"\n\nNodding, the Texan raised his rifle toward the cavern roof. \"Cover your ears.\"\n\nShe and Denal did so, but even with their palms clamped tight to the sides of their heads, the rifle blast was deafening.\n\nAfter the ringing died away, Sam lowered the rifle. \"Hopefully, that'll let them know the cavalry is coming.\"\n\nMaggie frowned as Sam started down the avenue.\n\nAnd will let the creatures know, too, she thought dourly.\n\n\"That had to be Sam!\" Ralph said. \"He must have seen your signal!\"\n\nNorman eyed the gap in the slabs overhead. After the single rifle blast, pale fingers had returned to tug and push on the granite, widening the space another inch. Black eyes stared in at the trapped pair. Norman jabbed his torch at the faces, but to little effect. The roof was too high. They simply backed away, then quickly returned.\n\n\"Sam won't make it here in time,\" Norman mumbled. \"Not unless we find some way to chase these roof rats away.\"\n\nRalph turned from the doorway. \"I may have an idea.\"\n\nNorman watched as Ralph shrugged the ammo belt from his shoulder. \"With the rifle jammed, we won't need this any longer.\" He held up the strap of leather with over twenty intact shells still on it, then stepped toward the entrance.\n\nNorman began to get an inkling of Ralph's plan. \"That might just work.\"\n\n\"And it might blast a way out of here for us, too.\" Ralph tossed the belt into the flames. In half a heartbeat, the shells began exploding like popcorn on a skillet, sputtering and cracking. Outside, ricochets pinged off the neighboring tomb walls. The mummy underneath the belt was riddled to shreds, and bits of it were scattered across the stone.\n\nOverhead, beasts fled in a squealing rush from the noise and the cascade of flaming debris. Norman stepped nearer the gap to be sure they had actually fled. He raised his torch high toward the crevice in the roof. It was empty. No more peering faces or scrabbling fingers. He grinned. \"It's working\u2014\"\n\n\"Get back!\" Ralph hollered.\n\nFire suddenly tore into Norman's leg. Dropping his torch, he crumpled to the floor as bolts of agony shot all the way up into his belly. He cried out, mouth open for a moment in a silent scream, then a high-pitched whine escaped his lips: \"Shhhiiittt!\"\n\nRalph was instantly at his side, dragging him back toward the shadowed wall. \"Goddammit, Norm, what did you think you were doing?\"\n\nNorman was not in the mood for a discussion of his shortcomings. With teeth clenched against the pain, he stared down at his right leg. A thick wetness soaked through the knee of his khakis. The room began to spin.\n\n\"You caught a ricochet,\" Ralph explained. He pulled off his shirt. \"Why did you step from cover?\"\n\nNorman groaned and waved an arm toward the gap in the roof slabs. \"I wanted to be sure\u2014oh, the hell with it\u2014I wasn't thinking.\" His face squeezed tight as Ralph gently examined the wound. \"It's not like I tossed handfuls of bullets into campfires when I was a kid. But I guess with my army training I should've known better than to break cover.\"\n\n\"I don't think it hit any major arteries,\" Ralph said. \"I don't see any spurting, but your knee is all shot to hell. I'm gonna have to wrap it tight to support it and to restrict any further seeping.\" Ralph took his own shirt, a thick flannel, and shredded it into strips. Taking a scrap, he touched Norman's leg. \"This will hurt.\"\n\n\"Then let's not do it,\" Norman said sourly, grimacing.\n\nRalph frowned at him.\n\nNorman sighed and waved him closer. \"Oh, go ahead. Just do it.\"\n\nNodding, Ralph took his leg and bent it up. Norman's knee exploded with pain, like a stick of dynamite going off inside. But worse was the sick grate of bone on bone. Norman gasped, tears in his eyes. \"Do you even know what you're doing?\"\n\nRalph just continued to work, ignoring his agony. He wrapped his scraps of flannel shirt several times around Norman's knee from thigh to mid-shin. \"Back at the University of Alabama, football players were always banging up their knees. If nothing else, I know how to place a quick support wrap.\" Ralph finished his handiwork with a final firm tug, cinching the wrap tight.\n\nNorman's fists clenched; he writhed slightly. It felt like something with huge claws had clamped his knee. Then it was over.\n\nHis torturer scooted back. \"That should keep you from dying.\"\n\nNorman wiped the tears from his eyes. The pain subsided. \"Great bedside manner, Doc.\"\n\nRalph eyed him a moment, worry creasing his brow as he studied the photographer. Finally, he glanced back toward the entryway. It was quiet. The bullets had long since stopped popping in the fire. \"Now the bad news. We need to get out of here. My stunt's not going to keep those monsters away for long.\"\n\nNorman glanced to the doorway. Pieces of the shredded and scattered mummy smoldered beyond the threshold, while distantly, spats of flames still dotted the stone floor. But at least the exit was open. He nodded and raised an arm. \"Help me up.\"\n\nRalph stood, then used a muscled forearm to pull Norman from the floor.\n\nGasping from the movement, Norman was careful to keep his weight off his injured leg. Once up, he tentatively leaned on his heel, gauging the amount of pressure he could withstand. Pain throbbed, but the support wrap kept his knee immobilized. Norman hobbled a few steps, leaning heavily on Ralph's wide shoulder.\n\n\"Can you make it?\"\n\nNorman glanced up. Sweat beaded his forehead from this small exertion. He felt queasy from the continual throbbing in his leg. He offered Ralph a sick grin. \"Do I have any choice?\"\n\nOverhead, something stirred. Claws again scrabbled on the rock. It sounded as if one of the beasts had hidden up there, but now with the streets quiet again, it was slinking off. The two men stood immobile, straining to listen, waiting to be sure the beast had moved away. Silence for ten full counts.\n\nThey dared not wait any longer. Where there was one, others might soon follow. \"Let's get out of here,\" Norman said.\n\nRalph collected the torch from the floor. He fanned its embers into a brighter flame, then stepped beside Norman. \"Grab my shoulder. Lean on me.\"\n\nNorman didn't argue, but he held the man back for a moment. His voice serious for a moment. \"If we get in trouble\u2026leave me.\"\n\nRalph did not answer.\n\nHe squeezed the larger man's shoulder harder. \"Did you hear me?\"\n\n\"I don't listen to fool's talk.\" Ralph raised a palm toward Norman's face.\n\n\"Oh, don't go Oprah on me, Ralph. I'm not talkin' to the hand.\" Norman pushed Ralph forward. They stumbled together toward the door. Norman kept speaking to distract himself from his pain. \"I'm not saying you should throw me to the monsters as bait and hightail it away. I'm just saying\u2026let's be practical. If we get in trouble, leave me in some cubbyhole and run. Put those ex\u2013football player legs of yours to use.\"\n\n\"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it,\" Ralph muttered. He helped Norman ease through the low door.\n\nNorman straightened, and the pair cautiously entered the street. The avenue was strewn with flaming bits of cloth. It looked like a war zone. \"That was more of a show than I expected.\"\n\n\"But at least it helped chase those things off,\" Ralph said.\n\nNorman glanced up and down the street. Ralph was right. There was no sign of the monsters. \"Thank God.\" For the moment, they were safe.\n\n\"C'mon,\" Ralph said. \"Let's get the hell away from here.\"\n\n\"Anything you say, boss.\"\n\nRalph set off with Norman in tow, their pace slow but steady. Soon they had left the smoldering remains of the mummy behind. Only a small pool of light cast by the stubby torch marked their progress. Norman had wriggled free his flash and held it ready, prepared to scare off any stragglers with the blinding light if necessary. At one-minute intervals, he also strobed a quick series of flashes to indicate their current location for Sam or any of the others to follow.\n\nOf course, the flashes of light also gave away their position to the cave beasts, but it was a calculated risk. With Norman injured, they needed help, as in big guns, and that required a signal.\n\nNorman lifted his flash and spat a series of blinding bursts toward the ceiling. \"I feel like a goddamn firefly.\"\n\nRalph frowned, discouraging any conversation. They were already enough of a target.\n\nNorman frowned at his companion's unspoken scolding but stayed silent, biting back a quip. He knew Ralph was growing more and more nervous. The large man had begun to pause, glancing quickly over his shoulder, as if he sensed something was tracking them.\n\nNorman never heard anything, but his head now pounded continually. Still, he knew Ralph was mistaken about one thing. If they were being tracked, it wasn't a few whispered words that drew the creatures. Norman studied his leg. Blood seeped slowly from between the folds of the wrap. Considering the lack of light, he suspected the beasts' other senses were keen. I'm a meal on the run, Norman thought morosely.\n\nSilently they continued onward, aiming for the gold statue. No attack came, but the cavern had grown strangely quiet. Only the occasional howl sounded from somewhere within the depths of the cavern. Ralph's shoulder became more and more hunched and tight under Norman's grip.\n\nFinally, Norman slowed. By now, his skull felt two sizes too small, and his steps had become dizzied. \"I need a rest break,\" he whispered.\n\n\"Already?\" Ralph hissed, eyes wide on the surroundings.\n\nNorman let go of Ralph's shoulder and hopped to a nearby tomb wall. \"Just for a few moments.\"\n\nRalph scowled and swung the torch closer to Norman. The frustration in the large man's face waned to worry. \"Shit, Norman, you look like crap.\"\n\n\"Good, because that's exactly how I feel.\" Norman slid down the cool stone wall and sat on his rump.\n\nRalph crouched beside Norman, his eyes back to surveying the length of the street. \"It can't be much farther.\"\n\nNorman bit his lower lip, then spoke the words he had been trying not to say for the past few minutes. \"Ralph, you need to go on alone.\"\n\nHe shook his head\u2014but not before hesitating a moment, Norman noticed. \"I can't leave you here.\"\n\n\"Yes, you can.\" Norman forced as much false cheer into his voice as possible. \"I'm gonna crawl into this tomb, cuddle up with the homey here, and wait for you to fetch that Texan with that big rifle of his.\"\n\nSighing, Ralph pondered his words. \"Maybe\u2026\" He shoved to his feet. He even took a step away. Then he suddenly swung back. \"Fuck that! You didn't leave me back at the river, and I'm not leaving you now!\" Ralph held out his torch. \"Take it!\"\n\nNorman grabbed the flaming brand. \"What are you\u2014?\"\n\nRalph bent down and scooped up Norman under both arms, ignoring his squawk of protest. \"I'll carry your ass out of here if I have to.\"\n\nNorman squirmed a moment, then relented. \"Let me down\u2026if you're that determined, I can manage a little longer.\"\n\nLowering him back to his feet, Ralph hissed in his ear. \"I don't want to hear anything else about abandoning you.\"\n\nNorman grinned, inwardly relieved that Ralph had refused to leave. \"And I didn't think you cared.\"\n\nRalph's brows bunched. \"Just get your crippled ass moving.\"\n\nNorman hopped a step forward, while Ralph's grip held him steady. \"I hope you're right that it isn't far to the statue.\" Moving another painful step forward, Norman noticed Ralph hesitate. Ralph's hand remained clamped to Norman's upper arm, but he wasn't following.\n\nRalph's grip spasmed tighter for a moment, then relaxed.\n\nNorman turned. \"What's the holdup?\"\n\nHis hand fell limply from Norman's shoulder. Ralph fingered weakly at his thick neck, disbelief on his face. Blood poured over Ralph's fingers. The large black man reached for Norman with his other hand, pleading. \"R\u2026run!\" Ralph gurgled.\n\nNorman was unable to move. He stared transfixed by the spear of sharpened white bone protruding like a branch from the side of his friend's neck.\n\nRalph crashed to his knees. \"G\u2026Goddammit! Run!\"\n\nFrom behind Ralph, a tall, pale creature rose on spindly limbs. Their tracker had come out of hiding. Huge black eyes glared at Norman as the creature lifted a second spear of bone and leaped toward him, bounding high over Ralph's back.\n\nNorman danced backward but was too slow on his injured leg. The beast plunged toward him, bone spear raised.\n\nDucking, Norman braced for the impact.\n\nBut Ralph suddenly bellowed with rage and lunged forward. He snatched the ankle of the creature as it flew past, a lineman grabbing a fumbled pass. He yanked the beast clear of Norman and swung the startled creature through the air, swatting it against the neighboring wall.\n\nIts skull shattered like eggshells.\n\nAs its carcass collapsed in a tangle of limbs, so did Ralph. He struck the floor hard, too weak to break his own fall.\n\nNorman rushed to his side, ignoring the pain as he fell to his hands. \"Don't move! I'll get help! Sam can't be far.\" Norman gently turned his friend's face upward.\n\nGlazed eyes stared back. Empty.\n\nNorman's hand flinched back. Ralph was already gone. He crawled back, tears blurring his vision.\n\nAround him, the cavern echoed again with the yammering howls and gibbering cries of the beasts. More trackers. They detected fresh blood and were drawn by their ravenous hunger.\n\nNorman pressed his forehead against the cool rock and took several deep breaths. He was too tired to run, but he forced himself up. He would not let Ralph's sacrifice be for nothing. Glancing at Ralph's body, he stood unsteadily, torch in hand.\n\nHe turned on his good heel and swung around. Only three yards away crouched another of the foul creatures: squat, with thick arms and bent back. It growled at Norman.\n\nNorman's eyes narrowed with rage. He shoved his torch high. \"Fuck you!\" he screamed, fists clenched and trembling. He put all his hate and sorrow into his cry, as tears rolled down his cheek.\n\nLike those of a frightened deer, the beast's eyes flared wide, clearly startled by the unusual reaction of its injured prey. Disconcerted, it crept back, then scampered down a side street.\n\nNorman's cry ended with a choking sob. He wiped at his face, then shoving his glasses higher on his nose, he limped forward. \"You-all sure as hell better not get in my way! I'm not in the fuckin' mood!\"\n\nMaggie knelt by the door in the heel of the great statue. It was a long and narrow silver inset, about half a meter wide and two meters tall, flush almost with the surrounding gold walls. She was surprised Sam had even spotted it.\n\nWhile Denal shone the flashlight, she once again worked the tip of the golden dagger into the narrow slot in the door's center. It had to be a keyhole, but so far no amount of manipulation of the gold dagger's tip would release the catch.\n\n\"Miss Maggie,\" Denal said quietly behind her, the flashlight's beam jittering. They rarely spoke, and only in whispers, afraid to attract the ears of the predators out there. \"Mister Sam gone a long time.\"\n\nShe pictured Sam sneaking around the necropolis, alone, and pounded her fist against the unyielding surface in frustration. \"I know that, Denal!\" she hissed. Besides a flurry of rifle shots, sounding like an asthmatic machine gun, and one screamed shout, there had been no indication that anyone but the creatures still moved out there.\n\nThe boy mumbled a meek apology.\n\nSighing, Maggie leaned back, resting the dagger on her lap. \"I didn't mean to snap at you, Denal. I'm the one who should be sorry. It's\u2026it's just that I can't get this damn thing open, and they're counting on me.\" Maggie felt near tears.\n\nHe placed his hand on her shoulder.\n\nEven that small bit of solace went a long way to calm her frayed nerves. She took a shuddering breath, forcing herself to calm down. Glancing at Denal, she patted his hand. \"Thanks.\" She stared into the boy's scared eyes, then returned to study the door. \"Denal, I'm sorry for getting you into this mess.\"\n\n\"No sorry. It were my choice to spy on Gil. I wanted to help you. My mama, before she die, she say I must help others. Be brave, Denal, she tell me.\"\n\n\"Your mother sounds like a wonderful woman.\"\n\nDenal sniffed back tears. \"She was.\"\n\nWell, by Jesus, she thought silently, I'm not going to let that wonderful woman's boy die down here.\n\nWith renewed determination, she raised the gold dagger; the foot-long blade glittered in the flashlight beam. She remembered Sam's trick at transforming the dagger. She tilted the knife and examined its sculpted hilt, the fanged god Huamancantac. She ran her fingers along its contoured handle. She found no catch to trigger the change. \"How did you do that, Sam?\"\n\nMaggie glanced to the door, then back up to the statue. She needed to think. Why a door in the back of the heel? The Greek myth of Achilles came to mind. The invincible warrior's only weak spot was his heel. But there was no such corresponding myth among the Incas or any of the Peruvian tribes.\n\nStill, the coincidence kept nagging her. Could there be some connection? Many myths crossed cultures and continents. Just because she had never heard of such an Incan myth did not mean it did not exist. Without a written language, much of Incan heritage had been lost over the ages\u2014perhaps tales of the Incan equivalent of Achilles had been lost, too.\n\nLifting the dagger, she recalled the Greek myth. The great Achilles was finally brought down by a blow to his heel. But it wasn't a knife that slew the magically protected warrior. It had been an arrow. She shook her head at this useless train of thought.\n\nIf only you were an arrow, she wished at the dagger.\n\nIn her hands, the hilt grew suddenly cool and the golden blade stretched and thinned, blossoming at its tip into a sharp arrowhead.\n\n\"Jesus!\" Maggie blurted out, popping to her feet. She turned to Denal, holding out the transformed knife. \"Look!\"\n\nDenal, though, was staring the other way, gaping out at the necropolis. He backed toward her, raising an arm. \"Miss Maggie\u2026?\"\n\nWith her gaze, she followed where he pointed. At the shadowed edge of the tombs, pale, monstrous shapes crouched. They had crept up on them so silently, even now not a growl or yowl escaped them. Maggie noticed several of the faces stared up at the gigantic statue\u2014but not all of them. Several pairs of hungry eyes stared directly at them.\n\nAs if knowing they had been spotted, the creatures began to slink, crawl, and waddle out from the necropolis's edge. Silent, like twisted shadows. There had to be at least two dozen of them.\n\nMaggie pulled Denal back with her into the small cubby between the two heels of the Incan king. Denal had a flashlight, and the remains of their one torch. It would not hold the hordes off. They needed help. She risked a step forward and yelled with all the wind in her lungs. There was no reason to hide in silence any longer. \"Sam! Help!\" Her call echoed throughout the large cavern.\n\nA pair of the nearest beasts, angered by the noise, rushed toward her. They were of the soldier class of the pack, loping on muscular legs, eyes narrowed to black slits, fangs bared. They resembled hairless bears, muzzles stretched wide as they attacked.\n\nMaggie brandished her only weapon, the dagger now shaped like an arrow. If she could kill one of them\u2026\n\nThe nearest of the two raised up from its crouched run, ready to lash out at her, then its eyes flicked toward her only weapon. The beast howled as if struck and fell back, colliding with its partner. The two tangled together, claws raking each other as they fought to back away. Slitted eyes had widened in raw panic. Whining, they fled back to the others.\n\nMaggie stepped farther from her hiding place. She lifted her weapon high. A squeal of fear ran through the massed beasts. Like a school of startled fish, they spun and darted away.\n\nLowering the transformed knife, she frowned at the gold arrow. What had just happened? She ran a finger down the shaft of the arrow. She glanced back at the locked door. More from the beasts' reaction than her own insight, Maggie suspected she truly held the key to the Incan statue. They had obviously feared it. But why? Did the beasts recall some frightening memory of the Incas who had once traveled here with this strange knife. If so, how? It had been so long ago, at least five centuries. Was it some type of collective memory, a genetic instinct among this diverse pack?\n\nStepping toward the silver door, she was determined to test her theory. Crouching, she slid the slender arrow through the slit. If this proved to be the key, then it also suggested the Incas had shared some common myths with the Greeks. This fact alone could be worth an entire doctoral thesis. Holding her breath, Maggie slid the arrow home.\n\nAsmall click sounded\u2014and the door swung open.\n\nA dark chamber lay beyond.\n\nMaggie hung back. She glanced to her hand. With the door open, the gold dagger had returned to its original shape. The long blade glinted in the light. Holding the weapon toward the doorway, she recalled the booby traps in the other chamber. Still, there was only one way to proceed. Without turning, she waved her free hand toward Denal.\n\n\"Bring me the flashlight.\"\n\nShining the light forward, she noticed that beyond the doorway lay a small, unadorned chamber, its floor of gold matching the statue. It was plenty large enough to house all of them. She leaned forward and cast the light up. There was no ceiling. The beam climbed into the hollow heart of the gold statue. It seemed to go on forever.\n\nPushing back out, she ran her light along the length of the Incan king. Overhead, his raised gold palms held up the roof of the cavern. For a hiding place, it was not exactly unobtrusive.\n\nMaggie turned to face the dark necropolis. But where the hell were the others?\n\nSam froze when he heard Maggie's cry for help. He stared forward for a heartbeat into the maze of streets. For the past half hour, there had been no further sign of Ralph and Norman. The last he had heard was an explosive \"fuck you,\" then nothing else. The streets lay silent.\n\nWhere the hell are you guys?\n\nSam had to accept the possibility that both were lost. He apologized silently if he was wrong and swung around. He headed back toward the statue at a dead run. No longer having to blindly track the two men, Sam could move faster. He knew the way back to the statue, knew which were the proper turns and which were dead ends.\n\nSam reached the last street, the straight avenue that aimed for the central plaza. From there, he even spotted the glow of Maggie's torchlight highlighting the statue's base. Tugging his Stetson snugly across his brow, he started down the street.\n\nBefore he had taken two steps, a cry of pain drew his attention to the right. Sam twisted around, rifle raised. Down a short side street, a figure slid along the left wall, hunched and feeble. The shape was too dark to be one of the cavern predators.\n\nSam raised his torch and, in turn, was blinded by a sudden explosion of light. Someone screamed at him: \"Get away, you fuckin' shithead!\"\n\nBlinking back the glare, Sam lowered his rifle. \"Norman?\"\n\nThe figure had stopped a few yards back; a quieter, meeker voice answered. \"Uh, Sam?\" Norman lowered the flash which he had used to blind the Texan.\n\nSam let out a whoop and hurried to Norman's side. His joy quickly deflated when he took in the photographer's injury. \"Where's Ralph?\"\n\nNorman pocketed his flash and just shook his head. He would not meet Sam's eyes. Instead, he asked, \"How about Maggie and Denal?\"\n\n\"At the statue,\" Sam said, his voice subdued. The loss of Ralph was like a deadweight in his chest\u2014but now was not the time to mourn. He straightened and reached to pull Norman under an arm. \"We need to hurry. They may be in trouble.\"\n\nNorman backed away, shoving at Sam's arm. Tears welled up. \"I won't get anyone else killed.\"\n\n\"Bullshit, it's just your leg.\" Sam bullied up to Norman and scooped the photographer's shoulder under one arm. \"How good were you at a three-legged race?\"\n\nNorman opened his mouth, clearly meaning to protest, but a fierce growling rose behind them from deeper down the street. They both glanced back; then Norman leaned more heavily on Sam. \"Let's find out.\"\n\nSam nearly carried the injured photographer, but he was not going to leave the man behind. They returned to the main thoroughfare and headed out at a fast clip, limping and hopping. The yowling rose all around them now. It seemed to be paralleling their track.\n\n\"It's\u2026it's my leg,\" Norman moaned at his ear. He started to lean away. \"The blood is attracting them. If you leave me here, they might\u2014\"\n\n\"Sorry, no meals on this flight,\" Sam answered, pulling Norman closer, refusing to let the man sacrifice himself.\n\nThey hurried forward amid the escalating cries of the predators. The statue grew too slowly in front of them.\n\n\"We're not going to make it,\" Norman said, nodding toward a handful of pale forms leaping along the rooftops behind them, moving with incredible speed. One paused to howl at the cavern roof.\n\n\"Scouts,\" Sam said. \"They've spotted us and are calling for reinforcements.\" Sam kept going, swinging his Winchester backward, and fired off one round. It was a blind shot. The bullet rebounded off the wall and bounced between the tomb walls to either side. Something yelped past the reach of their light.\n\nNorman mumbled with grim satisfaction, \"You've really got to watch those damn ricochets.\"\n\nShouldering the rifle, Sam hauled the photographer with him. The Winchester had only one shot in the chamber, then Sam would have to reload\u2014which meant stopping. They would not survive the delay.\n\nA voice called from down the street, drawn by his rifle blast. \"Sam! Hurry! I have a way inside the statue!\" It was Maggie. He spotted her small form at the end of the street, outlined in torchlight.\n\n\"Then get inside! Now!\" Sam hollered back.\n\n\"Just move your asses! Don't worry 'bout me!\"\n\nNorman glanced at the mass of beasts upon their tail. \"Personally I was worrying more about them,\" he said sourly.\n\nLungs on fire, legs burning, Sam forced them to a faster pace. He fought to close the distance with Maggie. He was now close enough to see her eyes widen at the sight of the company pursuing them.\n\n\"Holy shit,\" she said. \"Hurry!\" She ran toward them.\n\n\"Get back!\" Sam gasped.\n\nBut she ignored him. She raced toward them with Denal at her heels. As Maggie drew near, she waved the gold dagger overhead and whistled a piercing note, a sheepherder calling his dogs.\n\nWhat the hell did she think she was doing?\n\nSam glanced anxiously behind him. The forefront of the pale legion tumbled from the rooftops onto the street, almost at his heels. Sam shoved Norman forward and swung to face the coming onslaught with the single shell in his Winchester.\n\nMaggie appeared at Sam's side. \"Don't!\" She shoved his rifle down and stepped forward. She brandished the long blade.\n\n\"Maggie!\" But to Sam's shock, the squabble of creatures skidded to a stop, claws scraping rock. Black eyes were fixed on the knife. Even overhead, the scouts backed from the roof's edge, retreating. Those caught on the street crouched against the sight of the blade. They scrabbled slowly away.\n\nMaggie indicated their party should do the same. \"I don't know how long their fear will overwhelm the hunger for fresh meat.\" Maggie glanced at their group with concerned eyes. \"Where's Ralph?\"\n\n\"Dead,\" Norman said softly.\n\n\"Oh, God, no\u2026\" Maggie muttered, returning to guard the group with the dagger.\n\nSam kept at Maggie's shoulder. He glanced between the knife and the huddled pack. \"Why do they fear it?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Maggie answered tightly, voice strained with the news of Ralph. \"Right now, all I care is that it works.\"\n\nSam agreed with her, but he could not keep his mind from working on the beasts' odd reaction. He remembered his earlier assessment that the creatures might be some inbred line of ape or prehistoric man, cave creatures the Incas had discovered down here and had revered as mallaqui, underworld spirits. But why would they fear this old Incan dagger?\n\nSam frowned, sensing he was still far from the true answer to the mysteries here. But as Maggie had said, the first thing a good researcher did when investigating something strange was to survive.\n\nTo either side, the line of tombs suddenly vanished. They had reached the central plaza.\n\n\"Around here,\" Maggie said, finally turning her back on the mass of creatures crouched down the street. She quickly led them to the door he had noticed earlier. Skirting around the heel, Sam saw the way now lay open.\n\n\"How did you manage to unlock it?\" Sam asked.\n\nMaggie passed him back the dagger. \"It seems the weapon is also an all-purpose skeleton key. It changed to match this lock, too.\"\n\n\"You're kidding?\" Sam flipped the dagger back and forth, examining it. \"How did you get it to work?\"\n\nMaggie's brows furrowed. \"That's the thing. I don't truly know.\"\n\nPanting and wheezing, Norman pushed beside them, leaning on Denal now like a human crutch. \"We've got company!\" he gasped out, pointing back.\n\nSam turned. The pale beasts had begun to creep again from the shadowed streets and into the central plaza. Low growls began to flow. Sam herded everyone through the doorway in the golden heel. \"It seems their hunger is winning out.\"\n\nMaggie ducked in. \"Hurry, Sam! Help me with the door!\"\n\nWithout turning from the slathering pack, Sam backed to the narrow entry. As he struggled through, his rifle's strap caught on the door's hinge. Sam yanked on it, but only jammed the leather strap tighter. \"Goddammit!\"\n\nSensing his distress, one of the creatures bounded forward, growling and snarling, all teeth and claw. A soldier. As it neared, it hissed at Sam, drool foaming from its mouth, and swiped a razored claw at his throat.\n\nDucking back, Sam parried the attack with the gold dagger. The knife struck pale flesh, but it was a pinprick in a bull. The creature heaved up, screaming its rage. Blood splattered Sam from the injury, while he fought to unhook the rifle.\n\n\"Leave it!\" Maggie yelled.\n\n\"It's our only weapon!\" With one hand on his rifle, Sam kept the gold dagger between himself and his adversary. Other pale beasts squealed and cried behind the injured one. They had smelled the blood.\n\nSam met the eyes of the creature looming over him. In those black wells, Sam sensed a dark intelligence. It raised its injured arm, red blood drizzling down its pale flesh from the knife wound. A low growl of hate seeped from its throat. Sam tensed for the blow.\n\nBut instead the beast suddenly jerked away as if it were a marionette directed by some unseen hand. The raised arm blackened, starting from the clawed hand, then spreading down the arm like a flaming poison. Wisps of smoke trailed up from the limb. Howling in pain, the creature crashed backward into its brethren. Its arm, now charred, crumbled and fell away to ash, but still the burning spread. The beast rolled on the stone floor. In mere seconds, its pale torso and other limbs blackened to match the granite beneath it. Smoke swirled around the writhing figure; even spats of flame shone through cracks in its flesh.\n\nSam knew what he was witnessing. The rare phenomenon had been documented in the past, but never witnessed: Spontaneous combustion.\n\nStunned, Sam backed away, his rifle forgotten. Without him tugging any longer, the gun simply clattered to the floor. He left it where it fell, brandishing the dagger instead.\n\nBeyond the doorway, the pale creatures retreated from their charred brother. The large beast lay unmoving, a sculpture of ash upon the stone floor.\n\nMaggie crouched and grabbed the Winchester's stock and dragged it into the small chamber with them. \"Help me with the door.\"\n\nSam nodded dully. He glanced at the gold dagger, then slipped it carefully into his belt. With his hands free, he joined Maggie in hauling the heavy door closed. Once shut, it snapped tight, the lock clicking in place.\n\nMaggie leaned against the silver entry. \"We should be safe now.\"\n\nSuddenly the floor under them rumbled. Everyone tensed.\n\n\"Great, you had to say that,\" Norman whined, his eyes on the floor.\n\nUnder their feet, a deep-throated gurgling arose. It sounded like the rush and churn of a mighty river beneath the floor. The sound grew deafening, echoing up the hollow statue overhead.\n\n\"What the hell is that?\" Maggie asked.\n\n\"Another trap!\" Sam yelled.\n\n\"This way,\" Abbot Ruiz said, turning and walking down the long, sleek hallway.\n\nHenry hung back as the abbot continued their tour of the research complex beneath the Abbey of Santo Domingo. Joan, her street clothes now masked in sterile white laboratory coveralls, walked alongside the large man, while Henry marched beside the stoic-faced Friar Carlos, who watched the group from under lowered lids, suspicious and vigilant. The foursome, now all dressed in matching white lab suits, seemed part of the research team that manned the suites of laboratories. Only the 9mm Glock carried in Carlos's tight fist suggested otherwise.\n\nFor the better part of the afternoon, Abbot Ruiz had passed from lab to lab, highlighting the advanced studies being done here: everything from botanical sciences to nuclear medicine, even a huge computer lab devoted to the human genome project. Henry did a mental calculation. Hidden within the heart of an Incan labyrinth, the honeycomb of laboratories must encompass the entire heart of the abbey. Henry could not believe this complex had been kept secret for so long.\n\nJoan spoke up as Abbot Ruiz continued down the hallway, asking the very question that had been nagging him, too. \"Why show us all this?\"\n\nRuiz nodded, clearly expecting the question. \"As I said before, to gain your cooperation. But also to impress upon you the significance of the level of commitment here, so that what I show you next will be viewed within the proper context.\" The abbot turned a perspiring face toward Henry and Joan. \"While I may operate from faith in my religion, I suspect you will need more concrete evidence. I suspect, like the Apostle Thomas, you will need to place your fingers in the wounds of Christ before you believe the miracle you are about to witness.\"\n\nHenry edged closer to Joan, speaking for the first time in over an hour.\n\n\"Miracles? That's the first religious reference I've heard you utter while down here. Just what are you truly doing here?\" Henry waved an arm to encompass the complex as they continued down the hall. \"Discounting the murders and kidnappings, how is this all an undertaking of the Catholic Church?\"\n\nThe abbot nodded knowingly. \"Come. The answer lies just ahead.\"\n\nEven with the 9mm Glock pointed at his kidneys, Henry was oddly intrigued. As a scientist and historian, whatever mystery lay hidden here, Henry needed no gun to keep him following. Just what had he stumbled onto?\n\nJoan reached and took his hand as they approached the end of the hall. Though her eyes were also bright with curiosity, Henry could tell she was nervous. Her palm was hot in his. He gently drew her to his side.\n\nBlocking the way ahead was an immense stainless-steel wall. In the center was a huge door, large enough for an elephant to pass through. Massive bolts secured the door tight. Off to one side was an electronic palm lock and keypad. It was obvious that before them stood the centermost chamber of the complex, the Inner Sanctum.\n\nWithout turning, Ruiz spoke. \"None but the most devoted have ever stepped foot within this chamber. What lies ahead is mankind's hope for salvation and redemption.\"\n\nHenry dared not speak, his curiosity too keen. He did not want to say anything that would dissuade the abbot from opening the vault. A man had been murdered to keep this secret, and Henry meant to find out what it was.\n\nJoan did not have as much devotion to the mystery. \"Why let us see?\" she asked.\n\nRuiz still did not turn. His eyes were fixed on the doorway, his voice husky with reverence. \"All answers lie within.\" He took his signet ring and pressed it into a niche. The palm pad lit up, and the abbot placed his left palm upon its surface; then with his other hand hidden by his bulk, he tapped a code to open the way.\n\nThick locks released with the roll of heavy bearings, and the bolts slid smoothly back, freeing the door. As Abbot Ruiz backed away, the massive door swung open toward them. It had to be at least two feet thick. From the opening, the perfumed scent of incense wafted out. After the sterility of the labs, the fragrance was cloying. A chill breeze carried the scent, as if the room beyond were refrigerated.\n\nBut neither the incense nor the chill seemed to bother Abbot Ruiz. The rotund man raised his arms in supplication as the door slowly opened.\n\nOnce the door was fully open, the abbot crossed himself solemnly and led the way forward. He spoke not a word, and Henry sensed that to speak would blaspheme the moment. He kept his lips clamped, but his eyes widened with anticipation.\n\nAs Abbot Ruiz stepped carefully through the entrance, sensors within the vault switched on a flood of halogen lights. The room burst with brightness, like a subterranean sunrise.\n\nJoan gasped. From her vantage point, she had spotted what lay ahead. Henry had first to maneuver around the eclipsing form of the abbot to see what mystery the chamber contained. As he climbed over the threshold, his hand fell away from Joan's. He stumbled numbly into the room.\n\nThe chilly chamber was twenty yards square. At each corner, a small brazier smoked with a thin trail of incense. Upon each of the titanium walls hung monstrous silver crosses, each as tall as a man. An even larger crucifix hung from the ceiling three stories overhead.\n\nBut as stunning as all this was, it was nothing compared to what lay below the hanging cross. In the center of the room, upon an ornate silver altar, lay a life-size sculpture of a man. Henry moved nearer. The figure rested as if asleep, dressed in flowing robes, pillowed by his long hair, hands crossed upon his belly as if he lay at peace. The visage was relaxed in slumber. A profound peace emanated from the figure. Henry drifted to the side to view the face better.\n\nUpon the figure's brow rested a crown of thorns.\n\nOh, God!\n\nIt was the figure of Christ\u2014sculpted of solid gold!\n\nNo, not gold\u2026Henry did not have to step any closer to recognize his mistake. The halogen spotlights blazed upon the figure of the sleeping Christ. The metal seemed almost to flow under the light. No, this was not gold! It was el Sangre del Diablo. The entire life-size sculpture had been molded from Satan's Blood.\n\nHenry felt his knees grow weak. Words escaped him. The chill of the room crept into his bones. No wonder the room was refrigerated. At room temperature, the soft metal would likely loose its fine detail, like the cross had at Joan's lab back in Johns Hopkins.\n\nAbbot Ruiz crossed to a plain wooden prayer bench that stood before the altar and knelt upon its hard surface, lips moving in silent worship. Once done, he climbed back to his feet, zippered open his sterile lab suit, and withdrew the beaker containing the golden sample from Joan's lab. The substance still retained the rough pyramidal shape. Abbot Ruiz kissed the tips of his fingers, then unstoppered the jar and reached within the beaker to remove its contents. Gently, the man's large hands dislodged the metal from the glass and lifted it free. Leaning forward, he reverently placed the pyramid atop the sculpture, near the folded hands of the Christ figure.\n\n\"Come,\" the abbot said solemnly, returning to his prayer bench. \"It was your discovery, your gift, Professor Conklin. You should share in this.\"\n\nRuiz knelt again, bowing his head in prayer. Henry crossed to the abbot's shoulder with Joan at his side. Carlos still stood near the door, gun held steady, face hard.\n\nAbbot Ruiz prayed, his words mumbled, face covered humbly with his hands.\n\nHenry studied the figure, the room. He did not know what to expect. Still, what happened shocked him; Henry had to blink a few times to make sure it was not some optical illusion.\n\nThe pyramid composed of Substance Z melted and flowed across the sculpture. The folded hands parted enough to allow the molten metal to flow under them. As the golden fingers settled again, the flow of Substance Z formed a perfectly shaped lily, a redolent bloom and slender stem, grasped within the golden fingers of Christ.\n\nThe abbot sighed and lowered his hands, a beatific smile on his features. He pushed to his feet.\n\n\"What just happened?\" Joan mumbled.\n\n\"Your sample has been added to ours\u2026bringing us one step closer to our goal.\" The abbot backed from the altar, drawing the others with him.\n\n\"How did you do that?\" Henry asked, nodding toward the statue.\n\n\"You have witnessed why the metal was thought demonic by the Vatican. It is the most unique property of el Sangre del Diablo.\" Ruiz turned to Joan. \"We've read your notes and reports. Like you, we've learned over the years that the metal is responsive to any external source of energy: electricity, X rays, radiation, thermal. It uses any and all forms of energy with perfect efficiency, changing state from solid to liquid. But what you had yet to discover was the property the Incas demonstrated to the Dominican friars who first arrived.\"\n\n\"And what is that?\" Henry asked.\n\nAbbot Ruiz's gaze flicked toward Henry. \"It also responds to human thought.\"\n\n\"What?\" Joan gasped.\n\nHenry, though stunned, remained silent. In his mind, he remembered how the sample had tried to form a replica of the Dominican cross when he had been holding and pondering the crucifix.\n\nThe abbot continued, \"With focused concentration, it will respond to a brain's alpha waves just as it will to X rays or microwaves. It will melt and flow into whatever form is fixed in the supplicant's mind.\"\n\n\"Impossible\u2026\" Joan mumbled, but her voice held no force.\n\n\"No, not impossible. The brain can produce significant emanations. Quantifiable and measurable. Back in the early seventies, experiments in both Russian and CIA think tanks demonstrated that certain unique individuals could manipulate objects or influence photographic film with nothing but the strength of their minds.\" Ruiz glanced back at the Christ figure. \"But in this case it is not the individual that is unique, but the substance. It is attuned to the emanations of the human brain, the very thoughts of man.\"\n\nHenry found his tongue, almost choking. \"But this is an amazing discovery. Wh\u2026why the secrecy?\"\n\n\"To preserve mankind's hope for salvation,\" Abbot Ruiz stated solemnly. \"Upon the Holy Edict of Pope Paul III in 1542, our Spanish sect of the Dominicans was given the mantle to pursue any end to keep the demonic metal from corrupting mankind. To keep its existence secret and to sanctify it.\"\n\nHenry's eyes narrowed. \"You keep saying that\u2014your sect. What do you mean by that? Who exactly are you?\"\n\nThe abbot stared at Henry as if judging whether or not he was worthy of a response. When he spoke it was low and with an undercurrent of threat. \"Who are we? Our order is one of the Dominican's oldest, founded in the thirteenth century. We were once called the Keepers of the Question. It was our order that first accompanied the conquistadors into the New World, into the land of heathens. As discoverers of el Sangre, we were granted the task of confiscating every ounce of the demonic metal and putting everyone associated with its discovery to the Question, until knowledge of the el Sangre vanished into the folds of the Church.\"\n\nUnderstanding slowly dawned in Henry. He remembered the symbol of the crossed swords on Friar de Almagro's ring. \"Oh, God,\" he mouthed.\n\nAbbot Ruiz straightened, unashamed. \"We are the last of the Inquisitors.\"\n\nHenry shook his head, disbelieving. \"But you were disbanded. Rome disavowed the Spanish Inquisition in the late nineteenth century.\"\n\n\"In name only\u2026the Holy Edict of Pope Paul III was never revoked.\"\n\n\"So you fled here?\" Henry asked.\n\n\"Yes, far from prying eyes and closer to the source of el Sangre del Diablo. Our order considered our mission too vital to abandon.\"\n\n\"Mission to do what?\" Joan asked. \"Surely with all your research here, you don't still believe the metal to be tainted by the devil?\"\n\nHer words drew a patronizing smile from the abbot. \"No. On the contrary, we now believe el Sangre to be blessed.\" A smile grew at their consternation. \"For the metal to be able to divine the mind of man and turn his thoughts into physical reality, the hand of God must be involved. Within our labs, our sect has worked for centuries to refine the material and to expand the metal's receptivity to pure thought.\"\n\nHenry frowned. \"But to what end?\"\n\nThe abbot spoke matter-of-factly. \"So we can eventually reach the mind of God.\"\n\nHenry could not hide his shock. Joan moved closer to him, reaching for his hand.\n\nRuiz continued, \"We believe that with enough technologically refined ore, we can build a vessel sensitive enough to receive the mind or spirit of our Holy Lord.\"\n\n\"You must be joking,\" Joan gasped.\n\nThe abbot's expression was somberly stoic.\n\n\"And what then?\" Henry asked, sensing something was being left unsaid.\n\nThe abbot cocked his head. \"Professor Conklin, that's our most guarded secret. But if we are to win your cooperation, I suppose I must show you everything. The final revelation.\" Ruiz stepped toward the altar. \"Come. You must understand.\"\n\nHenry sensed that the abbot, though he might whisper of guarded secrets, actually enjoyed this little dog-and-pony show for his guests. In some ways, it worried Henry. To reveal these secrets so openly suggested that the sect had no real concern that Joan or Henry would ever be sharing such knowledge with the world. The abbot's confidence and willingness to talk, more than anything, made Henry edgy.\n\nOnce at the altar, Abbot Ruiz waved an arm over the golden figure. \"Here is our ultimate goal.\"\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Joan said. Henry shared her confusion.\n\nThe abbot touched the sculpture with a single trembling finger. \"Here is an empty vessel, responsive only to our thoughts. But with enough raw material, we hope to reach the spirit of God Himself. To bring his will into physical form.\"\n\nHenry stared at the sleeping figure of Christ. \"You're not suggesting\u2014\"\n\n\"We believe it was by providence that el Sangre was delivered into the hands of the Church when first discovered in the New World. It was a challenge to our faith. A test of God. If we bring together enough of this divine substance, God's mind will reach out and enter our vessel here, bring it to life.\" Abbot Ruiz turned to Henry, his eyes bright with zeal. \"Our goal is to bring a living God back to this earth.\"\n\n\"You're talking about initiating the Second Coming!\" Joan exclaimed.\n\nAbbot Ruiz nodded, turning to stare across the golden figure. \"Christ born again here on Earth.\"\n\nHenry shook his head. This was insane. \"So why us? Why do you need us?\"\n\nRuiz smiled and drew them away. \"Because you discovered the remains of Friar Francisco de Almagro, one of our predecessors. In the sixteenth century, he was sent to search for a rumored deposit of el Sangre, a strike so large that it was said by the Incas to 'flow from the mountaintops like water.' He never returned and was assumed killed. But when I received word from Archbishop Kearney in Baltimore, our hope was renewed. Maybe our ancestor had discovered the mother lode, only to die before he could bring back the knowledge.\" He glanced at the slumbering Christ figure. \"We pray, Professor Conklin, that you've stumbled upon our means to reach God.\"\n\n\"You truly think this mythical mother lode is at my dig?\"\n\nThe abbot raised his eyebrows. \"Word has reached us from our agent on-site there. Signs look promising. But after that accident at the underground temple, it'll take us a while to\u2014\"\n\nHenry tensed. \"What accident? What are you talking about?\"\n\nRuiz's face grew grim. \"Oh, yes, that's right. You would have no way of knowing about the collapse.\" The abbot quickly related what had happened at the ruins.\n\nThe blood drained from Henry's face.\n\n\"But fear not, though the students are trapped, their last transmission suggested that they'd found a natural cavern in which to take shelter.\"\n\n\"I need to get up there! Now!\" Henry blurted out, pulling from Joan's grasp. All interest in anything here died to cold ash. Oh, God\u2026he had forgotten all about Sam. He had not even considered that his nephew might be in danger, too.\n\n\"There is nothing you can do. I'm in contact with my men up there. Any change, one way or the other, and I'll tell you immediately.\"\n\nHenry's blood, which had drained from his face, rushed back. \"You'll get no cooperation from me! Not until I know my nephew is safe!\"\n\n\"Calm yourself, Professor Conklin. I've already sent a team of mining experts to assist in the rescue.\"\n\nHenry wrung his hands together. Joan stepped nearer, drawing an arm around his shoulders. He stood stiffly in her embrace. After the death of his wife and brother, Sam was his only family. Henry had no room for anyone else. If he had not been so enamored of his old college flame, Henry might have been thinking more clearly and avoided this whole mess. Stepping out of Joan's embrace, Henry spoke to the abbot through clenched teeth. \"If any harm comes to Sam from this, I will kill you.\"\n\nAbbot Ruiz backed up a step, while Friar Carlos moved in with his Glock, warning Henry off. The abbot's voice trembled slightly. \"I'm sure your nephew is safe.\"\n\nAnother booby trap!\n\nAs the gold floor trembled underfoot, Sam pulled Maggie to his side. She had been attempting to unlock the statue's door, but it had locked tight behind them. \"Brace yourselves!\" Sam yelled above the growing roar of rushing water below. \"Be ready to act!\" Through his bootheels, the reverberations thrummed up his legs and tingled his ribs and spine.\n\nA step away, Denal supported Norman; the young Quechan's eyes were huge saucers.\n\nThe rumble below grew deafening in the small space, and the floor bucked under Sam's boots. \"Hang on!\"\n\nSuddenly the roar filled the space around them; the floor trembled as if holding back an immense pressure. Then the loud knock of catches releasing echoed all around them. The platform shot upward under them. Norman fell to his hands and knees, crying out in pain as his injured limb struck the metal floor. No one else spoke, hushed with fear, frozen in tense postures.\n\nThe platform rocked and jolted, but continued on its upward course\u2014slowly at first, then faster, spinning slightly as it ascended the shaft. Underfoot, the floor continued to tremble with whatever force propelled it.\n\n\"Hydraulics!\" Norman cried out over the roar. He was helped to his feet by Denal.\n\n\"What?\" Sam asked.\n\nMaggie pushed free of Sam's embrace and studied the floor. \"They must've tapped into an underground river, perhaps a tributary of the one we swam in yesterday. It's a bloody hydraulic lift!\"\n\nSam stared up into the throat of the passage above. \"But where is it taking us?\"\n\nMaggie frowned. \"If they wanted to kill intruders, this is an overly elaborate way to do it,\" Maggie said, eyeing the flow of smooth walls. \"I think it's taking us all the way up.\"\n\n\"To the roof?\" Sam said, remembering the stance of the Incan king, arms raised up, palms on the ceiling as if supporting the ceiling of the cavern. He pictured the statue's form. It was a straight shot up.\n\n\"Hopefully not just to crush us up there,\" Norman said sourly. \"That would ruin an otherwise perfectly good day.\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Maggie answered, her voice unsure.\n\nDenal suddenly cried out. He pointed overhead. \"Look!\"\n\nMaggie swung her flashlight up, but there was no need. Far above them the end of the passage came into sight, a dome of gold, the interior crown of the statue's skull. Light streamed from regularly spaced cracks in the roof's surface. Then like the petals of a flower, six sections of the roof peeled fully open. Bright sunlight flowed down toward them.\n\n\"It's a way out!\" Sam exclaimed. He whipped off his Stetson and let out a whoop of joy. \"We've made it!\"\n\nNorman added more quietly, \"Some of us, that is.\"\n\nSam's smile faded. He replaced his hat, picturing Ralph's face. Norman was right. It was inappropriate to cheer their own salvation when one of their friends was not beside them.\n\nMaggie moved nearer to Sam. Her eyes were bright with both relief and sadness. She craned her neck to study the opening dome.\n\nSam put his arm around her. \"I'm sure Ralph would be glad we escaped.\"\n\n\"Maybe\u2026\" she mumbled softly.\n\nHe hugged her tighter. \"The dead do not begrudge the living, Maggie\u2014not Ralph, not even your friend Patrick Dugan back in Ireland\u2026\" And to this list, Sam silently added his own parents.\n\nMaggie leaned into him, her voice tired. \"I know, Sam. I've heard it all before.\"\n\nHolding her, he gave up on words. He knew that sometimes forgiving yourself for living was harder than facing death itself. It was something you had to do on your own.\n\nSlowly now, the elevator climbed toward freedom, and the platform pushed up into the opened dome. Finally, it settled to a stop. The six sections of the dome had retracted fully. Underfoot, the click of latches bumped the floor, locking the platform in place once again. Below them, the whoosh of water receded, flushing down the shaft.\n\n\"We're home,\" Norman said.\n\nAfter the dimness of the cavern, the late-afternoon sunlight was blinding, even when filtered through the heavy mists that seemed to cloak the skies overhead.\n\n\"But where the hell are we?\" Sam asked, stepping forward. He craned his neck all around.\n\nThey appeared to be in some deep wooded valley. Towering steep walls of reddish black rock surrounded them on all sides, impossible to scale without mountaineering equipment and considerable skill. Overhead, mists roiled and obscured the sunlight to a bright haze.\n\n\"What's that smell?\" Norman asked.\n\nThe air, thin and warm, was tainted by the odor of rotten eggs. \"Sulfur,\" Maggie said. She turned in a slow circle, then pointed an arm. \"Look!\"\n\nNear the north wall of the valley, a plume of steam shot skyward from a crack in the rock near its base. \"A volcanic vent,\" Sam said. This region of the Peruvian Andes was still geologically active, riddled with volcanic cones, some cold and silent, others still steaming. Earthquakes rattled through the mountains almost daily.\n\nMaggie waved an arm. \"This is no rift valley. We're in some type of volcanic caldera.\"\n\nNorman limped closer, eyes on the rock walls. He frowned. \"Great. Why is the phrase 'out of the frying pan, into the fire' coming to mind right now?\"\n\nIgnoring the photographer's dour words, Sam studied the heights around them. \"If you're right, Maggie, we must be among that cluster of volcanic peaks east of our camp.\" He nodded his head to a dark shadow to the south. Another cone, its rocky silhouette masked in steam, seemed to climb from the south wall itself, towering over their volcanic valley. \"Look how many there are.\"\n\nMaggie nodded. \"You're probably right. This region's never been explored. Too steep and dangerous to trek through.\"\n\nDenal spoke up, sticking close to Norman's side. He wiped his brow with a shirtsleeve. \"Warm in here,\" he muttered.\n\nSam agreed, taking off his Stetson and swiping back his damp hair. At this altitude, wearing only his vest, he should be chilled as twilight approached, but instead the breeze was warm, almost balmy.\n\n\"It's the steam vents,\" Maggie explained. \"They're keeping this place heated and humid.\"\n\n\"Like some tropical greenhouse,\" Norman said, his eyes on the jungle surrounding the gold dome. \"Look at all this growth.\" He struggled to free his camera.\n\nAround them spread a dense forest. Draped with vines, the tangle of trees spread in all directions. From their vantage point higher in the valley, they could spot a few open meadows, breaks in the jungle canopy, mostly near the ubiquitous volcanic vents. Otherwise, within the walls of the volcanic cone, the forest appeared undisturbed. Under its insulating canopy, a profusion of wild growth flourished. Giant ferns, with fronds longer than a man was tall, obscured the forest floor, while hundreds of orchids with fist-sized yellow blooms hung from the crooks of trees. Even some form of jungle rose climbed on thorny creepers along limbs and vines.\n\nNorman snapped a few photographs, while the others wandered along the forest's edge.\n\nWithin this verdant and flowered splendor, birds whistled and piped in alarm, disturbed by their presence. A small flock of blue-winged parrots darted across the misty skies. Closer, the barking calls of monkeys warned them away, echoing off the rock walls. Their tiny bodies darted and flew among the trees and vines, flashes of fiery fur and whipping tails.\n\nBeyond this wall of greenery, the babble of water over rock promised the presence of some spring-fed creek nearby.\n\n\"It's like some lost Eden,\" Norman said.\n\nSam nodded, though a seed of worry took root. He remembered the Latin warning etched on the hematite bands by Francisco de Almagro: Beware the Serpent of Eden.\n\nA similar thought must have passed through Maggie's mind. Her lips were pinched sternly, and her eyes narrowed in suspicion. \"We've got company,\" she suddenly whispered.\n\nSam tensed, eyes instantly on the alert. \"What?\"\n\nMaggie stood immobile, only her eyes moved, indicating a direction in which to look.\n\nBehind them, a sudden grind of metal sounded. The dome was closing back up, their only means of retreat from the volcanic caldera vanishing.\n\nSam searched the section of jungle Maggie had indicated. Finally, he spotted a small face in the shadows, staring back at him. The figure must have known he had been spotted and rose from his crouch. He stepped from the dense thicket at the jungle's edge. From other spots, seven more men slipped into the clearing around the gold dome.\n\nMocha-skinned and dark-eyed, the men were clearly of Quechan heritage. They stood only to about Sam's shoulder, but bore spears a good head taller than the Texan. They wore traditional Indian garb: unadorned haura trousers and shirts fancifully decorated with parrot and condor feathers.\n\nThe leader, wearing a crimson headband, stepped forward and spoke sternly in his native tongue.\n\nDenal translated, face scrunched. \"He wants us to follow him.\"\n\nThe small hunter turned and stepped back to the forest's edge. He pushed aside the giant frond of a tree fern to reveal a hidden path. The man ducked under the leafy growth and started down the trail. The other hunters hung back to ensure Sam's group followed.\n\nWithout any reason yet to fear them, Sam waved. \"Let's go\u2026maybe they know a way back to the dig.\" Still, as he eyed their long weapons, Sam cinched his Winchester more snugly over his shoulder. If trouble should arise, he wanted to be ready.\n\nDenal touched Sam's elbow. The boy's eyes were narrowed in suspicion, too. He seemed about to say something, then shook his head and fished out a bent cigarette from a pocket. He mumbled something in his native tongue as he slipped the filter to his lips.\n\n\"What is it, Denal?\"\n\n\"Something no right,\" he grumbled but said nothing more. Ahead, the boy helped Norman under the frond and onto the path.\n\nSam followed last with Maggie beside him. As the jungle swallowed them up, they proceeded in silence for several minutes.\n\n\"What do you make of them?\" Maggie finally whispered.\n\n\"They're obviously a Quechan tribe. Hundreds like them live as hunter-gatherers out in the wilds.\"\n\nMaggie pointed a thumb back toward the clearing. \"And they just ignore a dome made of beaten gold?\"\n\nSam pondered her words. She was right. The hunters had seemed more shocked to see them than the wealth at their backs. Denal's consternation also nagged at him. What was wrong here?\n\nHe studied the Indians as they marched onward. They moved silently, spears carried comfortably, pushing vines from their way. Soon the path crossed a small stream forded by a series of large stone blocks set in the flow. Who were these hunters?\n\nThe answer to his question appeared around a bend in the path.\n\nThe thick jungle opened, and a village appeared as if by magic. The cluster of stone homes surrounded a central plaza and spread in terraced steps up into the jungle itself; almost all of the homes were half-buried in the growth, shadowed by the high canopy. Jungle flowers festooned stone rooftops and grew in planted yards. The fragrant blooms negated the sulfurous smell of the volcanic vents.\n\nSam stared, his mouth gaping open. Llamas and small pigs moved around the narrow streets, while men and women came to doorways and windows to gawk equally at the four strangers. There had to be over a hundred inhabitants here, dressed in poncholike cushmas, or sleeved shirts with small capes, or long Indian anacu tunics.\n\nThe homes were as equally decorated as their inhabitants: lintels and window edges were sculpted elaborately, while silver and gold adornments glinted in the setting sun's haze.\n\nNorman limped ahead, leaning on Denal's shoulder. From a doorway, one of the younger women, dressed in a wool llikla shawl, nervously approached Norman. She held out a loose wreath of blue flowers woven with yellow parrot feathers. The thin photographer smiled and bowed down. Taking the opportunity, the woman darted forward and slipped the handwoven adornment over the photographer's head. Norman straightened as she giggled, a hand over her lips, and danced away.\n\nNorman turned to Denal, fingering the gift with an embarrassed grin. \"Does this clash with my shirt?\" he asked, and limped onward. The photographer seemed oblivious to what they had stumbled upon.\n\nSam and Maggie, though, stood frozen at the village's edge. In his mind, Sam stripped away the jungle growth from the homes and erased the people and animals from the streets. He recognized the layout of this town. The central plaza, the spoked avenues, the terraced homes\u2026it was the same spread as the necropolis below!\n\nMaggie grabbed his elbow. \"Do you know what this place is?\" she whispered, staring up at Sam with huge eyes. \"This is not some Quechan tribe, eking out a fist-to-mouth existence.\"\n\nSam nodded. \"These are Denal's ancestors,\" he said, coming to the same conclusion as Maggie, his voice numb with shock.\n\nThey had stumbled upon a living Incan village!\n\nAs the sun set, Philip heard a noise he had not thought to hear: the rasp of static from the camp's radio. He jolted to his feet, knocking over the camp stool on which he had been sitting. Friar Otera and the other Dominicans were all down at the excavation site. A pair of experienced miners had arrived just past noon today and were helping direct the Quechan laborers.\n\nPhilip tore open the communication tent's flap and dived into its shadowed interior. He snatched up the receiver. \"Hello!\" he yelled into the handpiece. \"Can anyone hear me?\"\n\nStatic\u2026then a jittery response. \"\u2026ilip? It's Sam! The walkie-talkie's battery\u2026We made it out of the caves\u2026\" Garbled static flared up.\n\nPhilip adjusted the radio's antennae. \"Sam! Come back! Where are you?\"\n\nWords fought through the static. \"We're in one of the volcanoes\u2026east, I think.\"\n\nPhilip's heart sang. If the others were safe, there was no further reason to continue to excavate the shaft. It was all over! He'd be able to leave soon! He pictured his own apartment back at Harvard, where his books, computer, and papers were all neatly organized and cataloged. He glanced down at his torn shirt and filthy pants. After this expedition, he was done with fieldwork forever!\n\nHis glee made him miss some of Sam's last words, but it no longer mattered. \"\u2026helicopters or some other aerial surveillance. We'll set up a signal fire on the ridge. Search for us!\" Sam asked one final question. \"Have you got word to Uncle Hank yet?\"\n\nPhilip frowned and hit the transmitter. \"No, but I'm sure word's reached Cuzco by now. Help's arriving here already. It shouldn't be long.\"\n\nA squelch of static erupted when Philip released the button.\n\nSam's voice was more faded. \"You won't believe what we've found up here, Philip!\"\n\nHe rolled his eyes. Like he really gave a damn. But Sam's next words drove away even his profound apathy: \"We've found a lost Incan tribe!\"\n\nPhilip hit the transmit button. \"What?\"\n\n\"\u2026too long a story\u2026battery weak\u2026call same time tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Sam, wait!\"\n\n\"Search for our signal fire!\" Then the static ground away all further communication.\n\nPhilip tried for another few minutes to raise Sam again, but to no avail. Either the battery had grown too weak, or the bastard had switched off his walkie-talkie. Philip slammed the receiver in place. \"Fucker!\"\n\nSuddenly the slap of canvas drew his attention around. The slender figure of Friar Otera slid within the tent. The tall monk straightened by the doorway, outlined by the setting sun behind him, his face masked in shadows. \"Who were you talking to?\" the man asked\u2014harshly.\n\nPhilip guessed the monk was fatigued by the day's efforts at digging. Standing, Philip welcomed him further inside. \"It was Sam!\" he said excitedly. \"He and the others made it out of the caverns!\"\n\nPhilip was pleased to see the man's shocked expression. \"How? Where are they?\"\n\nAfter quickly retelling Sam's story, Philip concluded, \"We'll need some way to spot his signal fire\u2026a helicopter or something.\"\n\nThe friar nodded, eyes hooded. \"That's good,\" he mumbled.\n\n\"But that's not even the biggest news,\" Philip said smugly, as if the discovery had been his own. \"Sam thinks he's found an actual group of Incas up there, some lost tribe.\"\n\nFriar Otera's eyes flicked toward the student.\n\nPhilip gasped at what he glimpsed in those hard eyes, something feral and dangerous. He stumbled back a step, tripping over a discarded mug. By the time he caught himself, Friar Otera was already at his side, gripping his elbow tightly.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" the man asked.\n\nCringing, Philip glanced up. Whatever he had seen in the friar's eyes had vanished. Only warmth and concern shone in the monk's face. It must have been a trick of the light before. Philip cleared his throat. \"I\u2026I'm fine.\"\n\nFriar Otera released his elbow. \"Good. We wouldn't want anything to happen to you.\" He turned away. \"I must share your good news with the others,\" he said, then bowed out of the tent.\n\nPhilip let out a long sigh of relief. He didn't know what it was about Friar Otera that made him so edgy. The guy was only a dirt-water monk after all. Still, Philip had to rub the goose bumps from his arms. Something about that man\u2026\n\nSitting with Maggie on the stairs at the edge of the plaza, Sam stared at the firelit celebrations below. Torches and fires dotted the open space in the center of the Incan village. Musicians bore instruments of every size and shape: drums made of llama skin, tambourines ringing with tiny silver cymbals, trumpets made of gourds and wood, flutes constructed of reeds or various lengths of cane, even several pipes fashioned from the large pinions of the mountain condor. All across the town, voices sang in celebration at the arrival of the newcomers.\n\nEarlier, before the sun had set, the village shaman, or socyoc, had tossed his mystical chumpirun, a set of small colored pebbles, upon the ground to tell their fortune. The grim-faced, tattooed man had studied the stones, then risen up, arms high, and declared Sam's group to be emissaries of Illapa, the god of thunder. He had ordered this night's celebration in their honor.\n\nAgainst their objections, the small group had been bustled off and treated like visiting royalty. Washed, groomed, and dressed in clean native wear, the team had regathered for the night's feast and celebration. The dinner had been endless, course after course of local fare: roasted guinea pig, bean stew with bits of parrot meat, a salad made of spinachlike amaranth leaves chopped with a type of native carrot called arracacha, and herbed pies made from oca, a relative of the sweet potato. After not eating for so long, the group had stuffed themselves, refusing nothing offered lest it offend their hosts.\n\nOnly Norman had eaten sparingly. He had started to run a fever from his injuries and retired early to the stone-and-mud hut assigned them. Denal had gone shortly thereafter, not sick, just sleepy-eyed and exhausted, leaving Sam and Maggie to oversee the remainder of the night's celebration alone.\n\nYawning, Sam ran a hand over the knee-length beige tunic he now wore and readjusted the short, knotted yacolla cape that he had slung over one shoulder. Unwilling to part with his Stetson, he tugged the hat lower over his brow.\n\nOnce comfortable, he leaned back on his hands. \"How could these folks have remained hidden here for so long?\" he mumbled.\n\nMaggie stirred beside him. \"Because they wanted it that way.\" She was decked out in a long sienna tunic that reached to her ankles. It was secured by an ivory white sash and matching shawl. She fingered the gold dragon pin holding the shawl in place. \"Did you notice that most of the village is purposefully hidden in the jungle? Almost camouflaged. I doubt even satellite scans could pick out this hidden town, especially with all the geothermal activity around here. It would confound any thermal scans.\"\n\nSam stared at the misted night skies. Few stars could be seen. \"Hmm. You may be right.\"\n\nMaggie changed the tack of the conversation. \"So, Sam, how does it feel to be a messenger of the thunder god?\"\n\nHe smiled lazily. \"Prophetic pebbles or not, I think that shaman must have heard echoes of our rifle blasts. I think that's why he associated us with Illapa.\"\n\nMaggie glanced quickly at him. \"I never even considered that. It's a great theory.\"\n\nSam enjoyed the praise, grinning slightly.\n\n\"But what about the necropolis down below? How does that fit in? It's almost a mirror image of this place.\"\n\nSam frowned. \"I don't know. But considering its location, it may have something to do with the Incas' three levels of existence. If this village was considered to be part of the middle or living world\u2014of cay pacha\u2014then the village below this one would certainly be thought of as uca pacha, the lower world.\"\n\n\"The world of the dead.\"\n\n\"Exactly\u2026a necropolis.\"\n\nMaggie's brows drew together in thought. \"Hmm\u2026maybe. But if your theory is sound, where's the third village?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"The Incas were very structured. If they built matching cities in the lower and middle worlds, where's the village of the upper world, of janan pacha?\"\n\nSam shook his head, growing tired. \"I don't know. But we'll get more answers tomorrow. For now, let's just enjoy the celebration in our honor.\" He raised his mug of chicha, a fermented corn drink, and took a long sip. He grimaced at the bitter taste.\n\nMaggie settled back. \"Not to your liking,\" she teased.\n\n\"It'll never replace a cold bottle of Bud. But, sheesh, this brew packs quite a kick.\" Sam found himself becoming a little light-headed. By then, the celebration had run long into the night. Even the moon had set.\n\nMaggie smiled and leaned into him a bit. He took a chance and put his arm around her. She did not pull away or make a joke of it. Sam took another swig of the corn beer. He hoped the moment's warmth was not all from the fermented brew.\n\nBefore them, a new group began an elaborate dance around the central fire pit. The celebrants, both men and women, wore gold or silver face paint and danced in precise rhythm to a tune played on the skull of some jungle deer, the horns of which acted as a flute.\n\n\"It's beautiful,\" Maggie said. \"Like a dream. Stories we've read come to life.\"\n\nSam pulled her closer to him. \"I only wish Uncle Hank were here to see it.\"\n\n\"And Ralph, too,\" Maggie said softly.\n\nSam glanced at the woman in his arms. She was staring into the firelight, her eyes ablaze, the warm glow bathing her face.\n\nShe must have sensed his scrutiny. She turned to him, their faces close, too close. \"But you were right, Sam,\" she said softly. \"Before\u2026when you said the dead don't begrudge the living. You were right. We're alive\u2026we're here. And we mustn't waste this gift with guilt an' sorrow. That would be the true tragedy.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"It's wrong to live a life as if you were dead.\" His voice was just an exhaled whisper. Sam remembered the years following the loss of his parents. He and his uncle had shared their sorrow together, leaning on each other. But in truth, the two of them were not unlike Maggie. In part, they, too, had barred outsiders, using their shared tragedy as a barrier against getting close to others. He didn't want to do that any longer.\n\nSam dared to inch a little nearer to Maggie.\n\nShe stared up into his eyes, her lips slightly parted.\n\nHe leaned nearer, his heart thundering in time with the drums\u2014then suddenly the music ended. A heavy silence descended over the plaza.\n\nMaggie glanced away at the interruption, ending the intimate moment. \"It seems the party's over.\"\n\nSam's heart squeezed tight in his chest. He could not trust his voice. He swallowed hard, freeing his tongue. \"I\u2026I guess it is,\" he choked out.\n\nA figure crossed toward them. It was the shaman, whose name they had learned was Kamapak. On his tattooed face, he wore a wide smile as he approached, climbing the stairs. Sam and Maggie rose to greet him. He babbled in his native tongue, arms lifted in both thanks and farewell, clearly wishing them a good night's rest. Already the fires around them were being extinguished.\n\nStanding, Sam's head spun slightly with the effects of the chicha beer. Steadying himself for a breath, he stared at the fading flames, a mirror of his own inner hopes and passions. He turned away. It hurt too much to look.\n\nChaperoned by the shaman, Sam and Maggie drifted back toward the rooms assigned them. The Inca still talked excitedly as he led them.\n\nSam wished Denal were still there to translate for them, but he was able to discern a few familiar words. Something about one of their mythic gods, Inkarri. Not understanding, Sam just smiled and nodded in the universal manner of the nonfluent.\n\nWhen they reached the row of homes bordering the square, Kamapak finally grew quiet and patted Sam on the shoulder. The shaman bowed his head, then whisked away to oversee the end of the celebration.\n\nMaggie paused, watching him leave. Her room was separate from the men's. Sam stood awkwardly, wondering if that moment ago could be rekindled, but Maggie's next words doused cold water on those embers. \"What was all that about Inkarri?\"\n\nSam shrugged, recalling the Inca's epic story. Supposedly, Inkarri was the living son of Inti, the Sun, and the last god-king of his people. It was said he was captured by the Spanish conquerors and beheaded, but his decapitated head did not die. It was stolen away and hidden in a sacred cave\u2014where, to this day, it had supposedly been growing a new body. When the body was complete, Inkarri would rise again and restore the Incas to their former splendor.\n\nBut this was, of course, just plain myth. The last leader of the Incas had been Atahaulpa. He had been garroted to death by the Spanish army led by Pizarro in 1533, and his body cremated. Sam shook his head. \"Who knows what the shaman was suggesting? Maybe in the morning we could have Denal talk to him.\"\n\nMaggie frowned. \"It's still strange. I'd always thought that myth originated when tales of the Spanish conquest were mixed with Biblical stories brought by missionaries, stories of Christ's resurrection. It's odd to hear the socyoc of this isolated tribe recounting the same tale here.\"\n\n\"Well, whatever the source, he sure as hell seemed excited.\"\n\nNodding, Maggie continued to stare out at the terraced village as the campfires were extinguished and the torches ground into the sand. Darkness spread across the stone homes, swallowing them away. Finally, she sighed and turned away. \"I guess I'd better turn in. We have a long day tomorrow. Good night, Sam.\"\n\nHe waved her off, then turned to the reed mat that hung over his own door. As he pushed aside the barrier, stories of Incan gods faded into the background, replaced by the memory of Maggie staring up a him, eyes bright with the promise of passion. Sam's chest still ached at the untimely interruption.\n\nMaybe he had read too much into that fiery moment. Still, he knew the memory of her lips would haunt his dreams this coming night.\n\nSighing, he ducked into his room."
            },
            {
                "title": "Day Five",
                "text": "[ Inkarri ]\n\n[ Friday, August 24, 6:30 A.M. ]\n\n[ Cuzco, Peru ]\n\nJoan had not slept all night. She sat at the small desk in her cell, a tiny oil lamp illuminating her work. The crinkled sheet of yellow legal paper was spread upon the wormwood desk. The sliver of a pencil in her hand was now worn dull, the eraser rubbed down to its metal clasp. Still, she worked at deciphering the row after row of symbols. It was her handwritten copy of the coded message found on the back of Friar Francisco de Almagro's crucifix. Nobody had thought to confiscate the paper from her, but why would they? No one but she and Henry knew the significance of the scrawled symbols.\n\nJoan tapped the pencil against her lips. \"What were you trying to warn us about?\" she mumbled for the thousandth time since returning to her cell after dinner last night. She had been unable to sleep, her mind fraught both with worry over her imprisonment and curiosity about the revelations in the Abbey's laboratory.\n\nAnd her fellow prisoner down the hall had offered her no solace.\n\nAfter learning of his nephew's danger, Henry had grown distant from her, his eyes hard and angry, his manner closed. He had not spoken a single word over dinner. As a matter of fact, he had hardly touched his lamb chops. Any attempt of hers to allay his fears was met with a polite rebuff.\n\nSo Joan had returned to her cell, tense and anxious. At about midnight, she had begun working on the code after her failed attempt at slumber.\n\nJoan stared at her night's work. Large sections of the message had been translated, but many gaps still existed. Her success so far was mostly due to the one large clue provided by Abbot Ruiz himself: the name el Sangre del Diablo. From the wide variety of runelike symbols, Joan had already estimated each mark corresponded to a letter of the alphabet, a simple replacement code. So it was just a matter of finding a matching sequence of symbols that would correspond to the same sequence of letters in el Sangre del Diablo. She had prayed that somewhere in the cryptogram the friar would mention the name.\n\nAnd he had!\n\nWith that handful of symbols now assigned specific letters, it was just a matter of trial and error to decipher the rest of the cryptogram. But it was still difficult. She was far from fluent in Spanish. She wished Henry had been there to help her\u2014especially since it was so disconcerting to realize that the tidbits she had deciphered so far were glimpses into a man's last words, his final warning to the world.\n\nShe held the paper up. A chill passed through her as she read: Here is my last willed words. May God forgive me\u2026the Serpent of Eden\u2026pestilence\u2026. Satan's Blood corrupts God's good work\u2026Prometheus holds our salvation\u2026pray\u2026may the Serpent never be loosed.\n\nSighing, Joan laid down her pencil and paper, then rubbed her tired eyes. This was the best she could accomplish. Friar de Almagro had been either insane or scared witless, but after what she had witnessed in the vault below, Joan could not be sure his ravings didn't hold some kernel of truth. Whatever he had found, it had terrified him.\n\nThe sound of approaching footsteps echoed down the hall, interrupting her reverie.\n\nQuickly, she folded the yellow paper and pocketed it again. If she had a private moment with Henry, she would get his feedback\u2026that is, if he would listen to her. She remembered how stubborn Henry had been as a youth, full of deep moods that she could never touch back then. But she wouldn't let that stop her now. Even if she had to twist his arm, she would make him hear her out. Francisco de Almagro had feared something up in the mountains, something associated with the mysterious metal. If Henry's nephew was in the thick of things up there, Henry had best listen to her.\n\nA sharp knock on her door was followed by a voice. \"The abbot wishes to see you both.\" The curt voice was Carlos's. Joan swung around as a jangle of keys unlocked her door.\n\nNow what?\n\nHenry sat once again in the abbot's study. Rows of books lined the walls, and the wide windows were cracked open upon a view of the Church of Santo Domingo, its cross bright in the morning sunlight. Behind him, another monk stood guard, pistol in hand.\n\nBut Henry saw none of it as he sat huddled in on himself. In his mind's eye, he pictured Sam buried under piles of rubble and tons of granite blocks. His fists clenched. It was his fault. What had he been thinking when he left the excavation site to a handful of inexperienced students? He knew the answer. He had been blinded by the possibility of proving his theory. Nothing else had mattered. Not even Sam's safety.\n\nThe creak of heavy doors announced the arrival of someone else. Henry glanced back over his shoulder to see Joan escorted in by the dark-eyed Carlos. Her eyelids were puffy, and from the wrinkled state of her blouse and pants, it looked like any attempts at sleep had failed her, too.\n\nJoan offered Henry no smile when she entered the room. But why should she? She was yet another person whose life had been threatened by Henry's folly. He had reentered her life only to endanger it.\n\n\"Sit down,\" Carlos ordered the woman roughly. \"Abbot Ruiz will be joining you shortly.\" The friar then mumbled something in Spanish to the other guard, his words too rushed and quiet for Henry to make out. Then Carlos left.\n\nJoan sank into the other cushioned chair before the wide mahogany desk. \"How are you holding up?\" she asked.\n\nHenry did not feel like talking, but she deserved at least the courtesy of a response. \"Okay. How about you?\"\n\n\"The same. It was a long night.\" Joan glanced toward the guard and leaned a little closer. She touched Henry's knee, feigning intimacy, just two lovers consoling one another. Her words were no more than soft breaths. \"I think I've deciphered most of the code on your mummy's crucifix.\"\n\nDespite his despair, Henry was jolted. \"What?\"\n\nHis startled reaction drew the eye of the guard. The monk glared at him, lifting his pistol higher.\n\nHenry lowered his voice, then reached and touched Joan's cheek. It did not require much acting to play the lover of this woman. \"What do you mean?\" he whispered. \"I tossed the cross away back at the lab.\"\n\nJoan reached to a pocket in her blouse and pulled out the corner of a yellow sheet of paper. \"My copy.\"\n\nHenry's eyes grew wide. Here he had been wallowing all night in his own guilt and anger, and Joan had spent the hours laboring at the crucifix's cryptogram. Shame flushed his cheeks. But why should her action surprise him? She had always been so resourceful.\n\nJoan continued in hushed tones, \"It warns that this mysterious metal is dangerous. His last words seemed to be a garbled warning about some disease or pestilence associated with Substance Z. Something I think his order knew nothing about\u2026and still doesn't.\"\n\nHenry found himself drawn into the mystery. He could not help Sam directly from here, but knowledge could be a powerful weapon. \"What was he afraid of?\"\n\nJoan shrugged her face. \"I couldn't decipher it all. There are gaps missing and strange references: the Serpent of Eden, the Greek myth of Prometheus.\" She stared intently at Henry. \"I need your help in figuring it out.\"\n\nHenry's gaze flicked toward the guard. He wanted to get a peek at her translation, but there was no way with the guard looking on. \"The Serpent of Eden is surely a reference to the tempter of forbidden knowledge in the Bible, a metaphoric reference to something that both tantalizes and corrupts.\"\n\n\"Like Substance Z, perhaps.\"\n\nHenry's brows lowered. \"Maybe\u2026\"\n\n\"But what about the Prometheus reference?\"\n\nHenry shook his head. \"I don't see that connection at all. He was one of the mythic Titans who stole fire from the gods and brought it to mankind. He was punished by being chained to a rock and had his liver eaten out by a huge vulture each day.\"\n\nJoan frowned. \"Strange\u2026why mention that?\"\n\nHenry leaned back into his chair and silently pondered the mystery. It was better than uselessly worrying over Sam. He took off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. \"There must be a reason.\"\n\n\"That is assuming the man was still sane when he etched the cross.\"\n\n\"I don't know. Let me think about this. According to Abbot Ruiz, Francisco was pursuing the mother lode, the true source of el Sangre. He already knew of its transformational property, so I think your earlier assumption was correct. He discovered something up in the mountains, something that changed his mind about the metal.\"\n\n\"And something that scared the hell out of him.\"\n\nHenry nodded. \"But he was also eventually executed and mummified, suggesting he had been captured by the Incas after making this discovery. If he wanted to get a warning out to his order, a message on the cross was a smart move on his part, a calculated chance. He must have known that the Incan shamans would have left unmolested any personal items, especially gold, on the body of the deceased. It was his one chance of getting his message out, even if he did not. He must have hoped his body would be returned to the Spaniards, rather than mummified and buried like it was.\"\n\n\"So what does all this suggest?\"\n\nHenry turned to Joan, worry in his eyes. He had no answer.\n\nAny response from Joan was cut off as the door opened again. Abbot Ruiz marched into the room, his face red from either exertion or excitement. Carlos followed in his wake and took up a station beside the other guard. Ruiz continued to his desk, sighing as he eased his large bulk into his seat. He eyed Henry and Joan for a few silent moments. \"I have good news, Professor Conklin. Word from the mountains reached us early this morning.\"\n\nHenry sat up straighter. \"Sam and the others?\"\n\n\"You'll be pleased to hear they've made it out of the buried temple. They're safe.\"\n\nHenry swallowed back a sob of relief. Joan reached a hand out to him, and he clutched it gratefully. \"Thank God.\"\n\n\"Indeed you should,\" Ruiz said. \"But that is not all.\"\n\nHenry raised his eyes. Joan still held his hand.\n\n\"It seems you've trained your nephew well.\" Ruiz wore a broad smile.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Henry asked, his voice hard.\n\n\"He and his fellow students have made an astounding discovery up in the mountains.\"\n\nHenry's eyes narrowed.\n\nThe abbot leaned back in his chair, clearly enjoying the suspense. \"He's found a lost Incan tribe, a village nestled high in a volcanic cone.\"\n\n\"What?\" Shocked, Henry clutched Joan's hand harder. He did not know what to make of this pronouncement. Was it some trick of the abbot's? But Henry could think of no motive. \"Are\u2026are you sure?\" he asked, dismayed.\n\n\"That is what we are going to verify,\" Ruiz said. \"I've spent all morning making arrangements and getting everything in order for our journey.\"\n\n\"Our journey?\"\n\n\"Yes, both you and I. We'll need your expertise up there, Professor Conklin. We'll also need your presence to convince your nephew to cooperate fully with us.\" Abbot Ruiz quickly told of Sam's radioed message and of the students' escape through caves to the hidden site of the village. \"So you see, Professor Conklin, we don't know exactly where this volcano is. There are hundreds in the area. Your nephew has proposed signaling us by a set of bonfires, and with you alongside us, I'm sure he'll do so posthaste.\"\n\nHenry sat stunned by the news. It was too much to assimilate at once. Sam was safe\u2014but if Henry got involved, if he went along with Ruiz's plan, then he could put Sam into more danger. On the other hand, out in the field, perhaps he'd have a chance to warn his nephew, stop whatever Ruiz schemed. Imprisoned here, he had little chance of doing anything to help his nephew.\n\nJoan squeezed his hand, clearly sensing his distress. He found comfort in her grip.\n\nAbbot Ruiz stood up. \"We're set to leave by helicopter in ten minutes,\" he said. \"Time is critical.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Henry asked, taking strength from Joan.\n\nRuiz stared Henry down. \"Because we have come to believe your nephew has uncovered more than just an Incan tribe. He may have unearthed the site of el Sangre del Diablo's mother lode. Why else would a small clan of Incas still be hiding up there? Unless they were guarding something.\"\n\nJoan and Henry exchanged concerned glances.\n\n\"We must hurry.\" The abbot waved to Carlos, who shuffled forward in his robe, his 9mm Glock again in his hand.\n\n\"Move,\" the guard said harshly, jabbing his gun into Henry's throat.\n\nThe abbot seemed oblivious to his aide's rough manner. As if washing his hands of the matter, he circled around the desk and headed to the door.\n\nAt gunpoint, Henry and Joan stood.\n\n\"Not you,\" Carlos said, indicating Joan. \"You're staying here.\"\n\nJoan's brows crinkled with fear.\n\nStill holding her hand, Henry pulled her closer. \"She comes with me, or I don't leave.\"\n\nBy the door, the abbot paused at the commotion. \"Fear not, Professor. Dr. Engel simply remains here to ensure your cooperation. As long as you obey our orders, no harm will come to her.\"\n\n\"Fuck that! I'm not going!\" Henry said fiercely.\n\nA nod from the abbot and Carlos struck faster than Henry could react. The large man swung his arm and slapped Joan a resounding blow across her face. She fell to the floor, a surprised cry on her lips.\n\nHenry was instantly at her side, kneeling beside her.\n\nShe lifted her hands from her pale face. Her fingers were bloody, her lip split.\n\nHenry turned to take in both Ruiz and Carlos. \"You goddamned bastards! There was no need for that!\"\n\n\"And there is no need for profanity either,\" Ruiz said calmly from the doorway. \"The lesson could've been much worse. So I'll invite you again, Professor Conklin, please come with me. Do not disobey again, or Carlos will not be so lenient next time.\"\n\nJoan nudged Henry away. \"Go,\" she said around her tears, her voice shaky. \"D\u2026Do as they say.\"\n\nHe leaned closer to her. He knew he had to leave. Still\u2026\"I can't abandon you here.\"\n\nShe pushed to her knees and swiped at the blood trailing down her chin. \"You have to,\" she said tremulously, near to sobbing. Joan then reached out and hugged him, falling into his arms. She whispered in his ears, her voice instantly dropping from its frightened demeanor to a firmer tone. \"Go, Henry. Help Sam.\"\n\nHenry was stunned by the transformation, suddenly realizing the \"shrinking violet\" act was for the benefit of their captors.\n\nJoan continued, \"If the bastards are right about the mother lode being up there, you're the only one who knows of Francisco's warning. So go. I'll manage what I can from here.\"\n\nHenry could find no words to match this woman's strength. \"But\u2014?\"\n\nShe hugged him tighter, faking a sob, then hissed into his ear, \"Oh, quit this chauvinistic crap. I thought you were better than that.\" She leaned her cheek against his own. Her voice grew louder again for the benefit of Carlos and Ruiz. \"Oh, please, do\u2026do whatever they ask of you. For my sake. Just come back to me!\"\n\nEven considering the circumstances, Henry could not hold back a tight grin. He buried his expression in the folds of her thick raven hair. \"Okay, now you're laying it on a bit too thick.\"\n\nShe kissed him gently by the earlobe, her breath hot on his neck, her voice a whisper again. \"I meant every word. You had better come back for me, Henry. I won't have you disappearing from my life like you did after college.\"\n\nThey held each other for a few silent seconds. Then she shoved him brusquely away. \"Go!\"\n\nHenry rose to his feet, his neck still warm from her kiss. He saw new tears in Joan's eyes that he suspected were not faked. \"I'll be back,\" he said softly to her.\n\nCarlos grabbed his elbow. \"Come on,\" he spat sourly, and yanked him away.\n\nHenry did not resist this time. He turned to the door, but not before catching Joan as she mouthed one final warning, her bloody fingers touching her breast pocket.\n\nAs Henry was led away, Joan's last message echoed through his thoughts\u2014both a mystery and a warning.\n\nBeware the Serpent.\n\nTwo things struck Sam when he awoke the next morning and crawled out of his bed of straw. First, amazement that he could have slept at all. Around him, scattered throughout the stone room were countless examples of Incan handiwork: pottery with enameled designs, woven tapestries hung upon the walls depicting gods in battle, simple wooden utensils and stone tools. He really was in a living Incan village! He could not believe the dream from last night was still real.\n\nSecond, he realized that the Incas'chicha beer had created the most brain-splintering hangover he'd ever had. His head pounded like one of the drums from last night, and his tongue felt as furry as a monkey's tail. \"God, I didn't even drink that much,\" he groaned. He stretched, adjusted the loincloth he'd donned the day before, and rolled to his feet. \"It must be the altitude,\" he decided aloud.\n\nSearching for his tunic, he found it in a corner and slipped into it. Rounding up his Stetson, he headed toward the door. He noticed Denal and Norman were already up and about. Their beds were empty.\n\nShoving aside the reed mat that hung across the doorway, Sam blinked against the painful glare of late-morning sunlight. Too bright for his bleary eyes. Nearby, birds sang from the treetops, and a scent of lavender almost overpowered the ever-present reek of sulfur from the volcanic vents. Sam groaned at the morning.\n\n\"About time,\" Maggie said from nearby. Norman and Denal were at her side. \"You'll be happy to know the Incas also developed a form of coffee.\"\n\nSam raised both hands and ambled toward the sound of her voice. \"Give me!\"\n\nHis eyes slowly adjusted to the light, and he found his three companions, dressed in matching tunics, gathered around two women who were working at a small brick stove with an open baking hearth beneath it. The trio smiled at his sorry state.\n\nHe hobbled over to them. Thick earthenware pots rested on small openings atop the stone oven, bubbling warmly with morning porridges and stews. The smell of baking bread arose from the oven, along with another odor he could not place.\n\nSam bent and took a deep whiff from the oven, clearing his head of the cobwebs.\n\n\"Llama dung,\" Maggie said.\n\nSam straightened. \"What?\"\n\n\"They use llama dung to fuel their ovens.\"\n\nTaking a step back, Sam frowned. \"Delightful.\"\n\nThe pair of young Incan women who were cooking chattered amongst themselves, skirting quick glances toward the strangers. One of them was pregnant, her belly swelling hugely. Sam knew the work ethic of the Incas was severe. Everyone worked. They had a saying: Ama sua, ama lulla, ama quella. Do not steal, do not lie, do not be lazy. The only nod toward pampering the pregnant women was the presence of a low wooden stool, or duho, providing them with the opportunity to settle their weight while they worked. It was one of the few pieces of furniture the Incas built.\n\nSam accepted a mug of a thick syrupy brew from Maggie and looked at it doubtfully.\n\n\"It helps,\" Maggie said with a wan smile. It seemed she had not completely escaped the aftereffects of the wicked brew either.\n\nSam sipped at the Incan coffee. It tasted nutty with a hint of cinnamon. Satisfied that it tasted better than it looked, he settled in with his drink. He sipped quietly for a few precious moments. Maggie was right. The Incan coffee helped clear his head, but his thoughts remained fuzzy at the edges. He swore off chicha forever. Finally, he lifted his face from the steam of his mug. \"So what's the morning's plan?\"\n\nNorman answered. \"Morning? It's almost noon, Sam. I'm ready for a short siesta.\" His words were jaunty, but his pale face gave him away. Sam hadn't noticed at first, but the photographer's skin had a sickly sheen to it. Sam saw how he had to lean heavily on Denal as he limped away from the wall.\n\n\"How's the leg?\" Sam asked.\n\nNorman hiked up the edge of his tunic. His knee was bandaged, but it was obviously swollen.\n\nOne of the women leaned closer, studying Norman's leg. She babbled something in Inca. Three pairs of eyes turned to Denal.\n\nHe translated. It was lucky his Quechan language was so similar to the native Inca from which it was derived. Otherwise, the group would be hard-pressed to communicate there. \"She says Norman needs to go to the temple.\"\n\n\"Temple?\" Sam said.\n\n\"I'm not gonna have some witch doctor work on me,\" Norman said, dropping the edge of his tunic. \"I'll tough it out until help arrives. Speaking of which, have you tried to reach Philip at the camp?\"\n\nSam shook his head, worry for the photographer crinkling his eyes. \"I'll do it now. If we can't get a helicopter up here tonight, maybe you'd better consult the witch doctor. The Incas were known for their proficiency at natural medicines. Even surgery.\"\n\nNorman rolled his eyes. \"I don't think my HMO will cover the costs.\"\n\nSam waved him back to the shelter. \"Then at least go lie down. I'm going to call Sykes right now.\"\n\nDenal helped Norman back to the room. Sam followed to get his walkie-talkie from the pack. He cast a concerned look at Norman when the man gave out a soft cry as he settled atop the straw bed. \"Make sure he drinks plenty today,\" Sam said to Denal. \"Once you've got him settled, join me. I'll need your help in some translation with the natives.\"\n\nSam then slipped through the reed covering and stepped a few paces away, clicking on the walkie-talkie. The battery indicator was in the red range. It would not last much longer without a recharge. \"Sam to base. Sam to base. Over.\"\n\nMaggie came over to listen in.\n\nThe response was almost immediate. \"About time, Conklin!\" Philip whined at him. Static frosted his words.\n\n\"Any luck arranging a rescue up here? Norman's injured bad, and we need a quick evac.\"\n\nThe excitement in his fellow student's voice could not be completely masked by white noise. \"Your uncle's coming! The professor! He's just leaving Cuzco! He should be here with a helicopter and supplies by dawn tomorrow.\"\n\nMaggie clutched Sam's elbow excitedly.\n\nPhilip continued, \"I didn't get to speak to him. Radio's still out. But word passed from Cuzco, to the nearby town of Villacuacha, then to our base by a makeshift walkie-talkie network some monks set up this morning. Word just reached us this past hour!\"\n\nSam's emotions were mixed. Uncle Hank was coming! But still a frown marred his lips. He had hoped for rescue today, but such a hope was not realistic. They were hundreds of miles away from anyplace with even a crude form of airport. He clicked the transmit button. \"Great news, Philip! But get that helicopter up here as soon as possible. Light a fire under Uncle Hank if you can. We'll keep a fire burning here all night long, just in case he's able to arrive any earlier.\" The red light on his battery indicator began blinking ominously. \"I gotta go, Philip! I'll call you at sunset for an update.\"\n\nStatic ate most of Philip's response. The scratchy white noise began tweaking Sam's residual headache. He cursed and clicked the walkie-talkie off. He hoped his last message reached Philip.\n\n\"Dawn tomorrow,\" Maggie said, relief clear in her voice. She turned to stare at the village. \"It'll be great to have Professor Conklin here.\"\n\nSam stepped next to her. \"I'm still worried about Norman. I really think we should talk to Kamapak, the shaman. See if the Incas here at least have the equivalent of aspirin or a pain reliever.\"\n\nOff to the side, Denal bowed through the reed mat. He crossed toward them. \"Norman sleeps,\" the boy said as he joined them, but his lips were tight with concern.\n\n\"Maybe we'd better find that shaman,\" Maggie said. \"Can you help us, Denal?\"\n\nThe youth nodded, and turned toward the village. \"I ask.\" He hesitated before going, squinting at the homes. \"But something no right here.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"There no children,\" Denal said, glancing up at them.\n\nMaggie and Sam frowned at each other, then stared out at the spread of stone homes. \"Sure there are\u2026\" Sam started to say, but his voice died away. They had not noticed any youngsters when they had arrived yesterday, but the sun had been close to setting. The celebration had run late into the evening, so the lack of children had not struck Sam as odd enough to notice.\n\n\"He's right,\" Maggie said. \"I've been up for at least an hour, and I've seen no wee ones either.\"\n\nSam pointed toward where the two women still worked at the ovens. \"But she's pregnant. The children must be somewhere. Maybe they're hiding them from us as a precaution.\"\n\nMaggie scrunched up her nose, unconvinced. \"They seemed to accept us so readily. No guards or anything.\"\n\n\"Let's go ask,\" Sam said, nodding toward the pregnant Incan woman.\n\nHe led the others back to the oven. Sam nudged Denal. \"Ask her where the children are kept.\"\n\nDenal stepped closer and spoke to the woman. She seemed uncomfortable so near the boy. She guarded her belly with a hand. Her answer was clearly agitated, involving much arm movement and pointing.\n\nSam glanced to where she indicated. She was pointing toward the neighboring volcanic cone that overlooked this caldera.\n\nDenal finally gave up and turned back to Sam. \"There no children. She say they go to janan pacha. Heaven.\" Denal nodded to the towering volcano.\n\n\"Sacrifices, do you think?\" Maggie said, stunned. Infanticide and blood rites with children were not unknown in Incan culture.\n\n\"But all their children?\"\n\nMaggie crossed to the woman. She cradled her arms and rocked them in the universal sign of baby. \"Wawas\u2026wawas\u2026?\" she asked, using the Quechan word for baby. Maggie then pointed to the woman's large gravid belly.\n\nThe woman's eyes widened with shock, then narrowed with anger. She held a hand pressed to her belly. \"Huaca,\" she said firmly, and spoke rapidly in Quecha.\n\n\"Huaca. Holy place,\" Denal translated. \"She say her belly be home now only to gods, no longer children. No children here for many, many years. They all go to temple.\"\n\nThe woman turned her back on them, dismissing them. Clearly offended by their line of questioning.\n\n\"What do you suppose she's talking about, Sam?\" Maggie asked.\n\n\"I don't know. But I think we have another reason now to seek out that shaman.\" Sam waved Denal and Maggie to follow him. \"Let's go find Kamapak.\"\n\nTheir search ended up being harder than Sam had thought. Most of the men had gone to work the fields or hunt, including the shaman. Denal managed to glean some directions from a few of the villagers who had duties within the town's limits. Sam's group soon found themselves trekking down a jungle path. They passed groves of fruit and avocado trees being harvested and pruned. And a wide plowed meadow where fields of grainlike quinoa alternated with rows of corn, chili pepper plants, beans, and squash. Both men and women worked the fields. In an unplanted area, men were using tacllas, or foot plows, to turn the soil, while women helped, using a simple hoe called a lampa. Maggie and Sam paused to watch them labor, amazed to see these ancient Incan tools at work.\n\n\"I can't believe this,\" Sam said for the hundredth time that day.\n\nDenal nudged Sam. \"This way,\" he said, urging them on.\n\nSam and Maggie followed, still looking over their shoulders. They reentered the jungle and within a short time came upon a clearing. The shaman stood with a handful of other men. Cords of hewn wood were stacked on sleds. The gathered Incas could have been brothers, all strong, muscular men. Only the shaman's tattoos distinguished him from the others. Kamapak, at first, was startled by their appearance, then smiled broadly and waved them all forward. He spoke rapidly.\n\nDenal translated. \"He welcomes us. Says we come in time to help.\"\n\n\"Help with what?\"\n\n\"Hauling wood back to town. Last night, at the feast, the many campfires burned their stores.\"\n\nSam groaned, his head still pounding slightly from his hangover. \"Emissaries of the gods, or not, I guess we're expected to earn our keep.\" Sam took up a position beside Kamapak, taking up one of the many shoulder straps used to haul the sled. Denal was beside him.\n\nMaggie walked ahead, helping to clear chunks of volcanic stone and make a path.\n\nWith six men acting as oxen, dragging the sled proved easier than Sam expected. Still, one of the men passed Sam a few leaves of a coca plant. When chewed, the cocaine in the leaves helped offset the altitude effects\u2026and his hangover. Sam found his head less achy. He wondered if the leaves might help Norman's fever and pain.\n\nFeeling better now, Sam conversed with the shaman as he hauled on the sled. Denal translated.\n\nSam's inquiry about children was met with the same consternation. \"The temple receives our children from our women's bellies. This close to janan pacha\"\u2014again a nod to the towering volcanic cone to the south\u2014\"the god, Con, has blessed our people. Our children are his children now. They live in janan pacha. Gifts to Con.\"\n\nMaggie had been listening and glanced back. Sam shrugged at her. Con was one of the gods of the northern tribes. In stories, he had epic battles with Pachacamac, creator of the world. But it was said that it was the god, Con, who created man upon this earth.\n\n\"This temple,\" Sam asked, speaking around his wad of bittersweet leaves. \"May we see it.\"\n\nThe shaman's eyes narrowed. He shook his head vehemently. \"It is forbidden.\"\n\nFrom the man's strong rebuff, Sam did not pursue the matter. So much for being emissaries of the god of thunder, he thought. It seemed Illapa was not high on this village's totem pole.\n\nMaggie slipped back to Sam's side. She whispered, \"I was thinking about Denal's observation about the missing children and got to thinking about the village's makeup. There is another element of this society that is missing, too.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Elders. Old people. Everyone we've seen has been roughly the same age\u2026give or take twenty years.\"\n\nSam's feet stumbled as he realized Maggie was right. Even the shaman could not be much older than Sam. \"Maybe their life expectancy is poor.\"\n\nMaggie scowled. \"Life is pretty insulated here. No major predators, unless you count those things down in the deep caves.\"\n\nSam turned to Kamapak and, with Denal's help, questioned him about the missing old folk.\n\nHis answer was just as cryptic. \"The temple nurtures us. The gods protect us.\" From the singsong way the words were spoken, it was clearly an ancient response. And apparently an answer to most questions. When Maggie made her own inquiries\u2014into health care and illness among the members\u2014she received the same answer.\n\nShe turned to Sam. \"It seems the old, the young, the frail, and the sick end up there.\"\n\n\"Do you think they're being sacrificed?\"\n\nMaggie shrugged.\n\nSam pondered her words, then turned to Denal, trying a different tack on this conversation. \"Try describing those creatures we saw in the caves.\"\n\nThe boy frowned, tiring of his role as translator, but he did as Sam asked. The shaman's brows grew dark with the telling. He called a halt to the sled. His words were low with a hint of threat as Denal translated. \"Do not speak of those who walk through uca pacha, the underworld. They are mallaqui, spirits, and it is ill to whisper of them.\" With those words, the shaman waved the sled on.\n\nSam glanced at the volcanic mountain to the south. \"Heaven up there, and hell below us. All the spiritual realms of the Inca joined in this one valley. A pacariscas, a magical nexus.\"\n\n\"What do you think it means?\" Maggie said.\n\n\"I don't know. But I'll be glad when Uncle Hank arrives.\"\n\nSoon the team of haulers and their load of wood reached the village's edge. By now it was well past noon, and the workers tossed off their harnesses and began meandering into the village proper. The spread of homes once again was full of chattering and happy people. It seemed even the workers in the field had returned for a midday rest.\n\nSam, Maggie, and Denal wandered back to their own shelters. Ahead, Sam noticed that the women who had been cooking at the stove were now spooning out roasted corn and stew into stone bowls. He smiled, suddenly realizing how hungry he was.\n\n\"We should wake Norman,\" Maggie said. \"He should try an' eat.\"\n\nDenal ran ahead. \"I get him,\" the boy called back.\n\nMaggie and Sam took their places in line before the stove. Other ovens around the village also steamed into the air, like mini volcanic vents. Like most Incan townships, this village was broken into distinct ayllu, extended family units or groupings. Each ayllu had its own open-air kitchen. Among the Incas, meals were always eaten outdoors, weather permitting.\n\nReaching the head of the line, Sam was handed a bowl of steaming stew topped by a ladle of mashed roasted corn. Poked into it was a small chunk of dried meat, charqui, jerked llama steak.\n\nSam was sniffing at it when Denal burst from the nearby doorway and hurried toward them, his boyish face drawn and serious.\n\n\"What is it?\" Maggie asked.\n\n\"He gone,\" Denal glanced around the area. \"I find his blanket and straw all messed up.\"\n\n\"Messed up?\" Sam asked.\n\nDenal swallowed hard, clearly worried and scared. \"Like he fighting someone.\"\n\nMaggie glanced to Sam. \"Before we panic,\" he said, \"let's simply ask.\" Sam waved Denal back to the pregnant women dishing stew. The boy interrupted her serving.\n\nDenal spoke rapidly. The woman nodded, a smile growing on her face. When Denal turned to Sam, he was not sharing her smile.\n\n\"They take Norman to the temple.\"\n\nBy late afternoon, Joan found herself ensconced with a young monk in one of the many laboratory cubicles deep in the heart of the Abbey. Faithful to his word, the abbot had left orders that Joan be treated as a guest. So her request to observe the Abbey's researchers at work was grudgingly allowed\u2014though her personal guard dog was never far away. Even now, Joan could see Carlos through the observation window. He rested one palm on his holstered pistol.\n\nA young monk named Anthony drew back her attention. \"Of course, we all have our own personal theories,\" he said matter-of-factly, his English fluent. \"It is not as if we let our faith cloud our experimentation. The abbot always says our faith should withstand the vigors of science.\"\n\nJoan nodded and leaned a bit closer to the man. They now stood before a bank of computers and monitors. Several technicians worked a few cubicles down, dressed the same as they were, in sterile white lab suits, but otherwise they were alone.\n\nAnthony logged onto the computer. Near his elbow was a tray of minute samples of the Incan metal, row after row of miniscule gold teardrops embedded in plastic wells. Fresh from the freezer, a slight fog of dry ice still clung to the tray. She had learned the lab was trying to learn the nature of the metal in an attempt to accelerate their desired goal of bringing Christ back to earth. They had already developed methods to rid the metal of contaminating impurities, heightening the miraculous abilities of the substance.\n\nJoan studied the teardrop samples. To test her own theory, she needed one of those pearls of gold. But how? The samples were so close, but with so many eyes watching, the tray might as well have been locked behind iron bars. Joan tightened her fists, determined not to fail in her mission. She needed just a moment's distraction. Taking a deep breath, she readied herself.\n\n\"I'm almost set,\" the young monk said, working at the keyboard.\n\nAnd so was she.\n\nJoan leaned her left breast more firmly against his shoulder as she peered at the tray. She had picked Anthony as her guide because of the youth's age; clean-shaven and dark-haired, he could not be much older than twenty. But besides his impressionable age, she had selected him from all the others for another reason. When she had first entered the labs, guarded by Carlos, Joan had noticed how the young man's eyes had widened in appreciation. She saw how his gaze had settled upon her breasts, then darted away. Back at Johns Hopkins, she had taught enough undergraduates to recognize when one seemed interested in more than just a scholarly education. Usually, she gently rebuffed any advances, but now she would exploit these feelings. Cloistered here among the monks, Joan suspected this youth could be easily unnerved by the attentions of a woman\u2014and from the youth's reaction now, she had been proven right.\n\nAnthony swallowed hard, his cheeks reddening. He pulled away slightly from her touch.\n\nJoan took the advantage. She slid onto the neighboring stool, one hand crossing to rest on the youth's knee. \"I'd be most interested in hearing your own theories, Anthony. You've been here a while. What do you think of el Sangre del Diablo?\" She squeezed his knee ever so slightly.\n\nAnthony glanced back to the glass partition, toward Carlos. Her hand was hidden from view by their bodies. The young monk did not pull away this time, but his face was almost a shade of purple. He sat frozen, stiff as a statue. If Joan's hand had wandered any higher up his leg, she expected she would have discovered exactly how stiff the young man was.\n\nShe had spent the entire afternoon brushing against him, touching him, whispering close to his ear. With gentle cajoling and urging, she had finally guided him to this last lab, where actual samples of the mysterious metal were being analyzed. Now the truly tricky part began.\n\nJoan tilted her head, attentive to the young monk. \"So tell me, what do you think the metal is, Anthony?\"\n\nHe almost choked on his words, \"Maybe nan\u2026nanobots.\"\n\nNow it was Joan's turn to startle, her hand slipping away from his knee. \"Excuse me?\"\n\nAnthony nodded rapidly, relaxing slightly, now able to discourse on familiar territory. \"Several of us\u2026the younger researchers among us\u2026think maybe the metal is actually some dense accumulation of nanobots.\"\n\n\"As in nanotechnology?\" Joan said. She had read a few theoretical articles that had discussed the possibility of building subcellular machines\u2014nanobots\u2014that could manipulate matter at the molecular or even atomic level. A recent article published in Scientific American described a crude first attempt to construct such microscopic robots by scientists at UCLA. In her mind, she remembered her own electron microscope scan of the metal: the tiny particulate matrix linked together by hooklike appendages. But nanobots? Impossible. The youth here had obviously been reading too much science fiction.\n\n\"Come see,\" Anthony said, suddenly excited to be able to show off for his audience. He reached to the tray and lifted one of the pellets of metal with a pair of stainless-steel tweezers. He fed it into the machine before him. \"Electron crystallography,\" he explained. \"It's our own design here. It can isolate one unit of the metal's crystalline structure and construct a three-dimensional picture. Just watch.\" He tapped a monitor screen with the tweezers.\n\nJoan leaned closer, fishing out her eyeglasses, forgetting for the moment her seduction of the young monk. When she had asked Anthony to show her the metal, she hadn't meant such a close look. But now the scientist in Joan was intrigued.\n\nAn image appeared on the screen, in crisp detail, rotating slowly to show all surfaces. Joan recognized it. A single microscopic particle of the metal. It was octagonal in shape with six threadlike appendages: one on top, one on bottom, and four radiating out from midsection. At the end of each were four tiny clawed hooks, like sparrow's talons.\n\nAnthony pointed to the screen with the tip of a pen. \"In overall shape and architecture, it bears a clear resemblance to a hypothesized nanobot proposed by Eric Drexler in his book Engines of Creation. He theorized a molecular machine in two sections: computer and constructor. The nanobot's brain and brawn, so to speak.\" He tapped at the central octagonal core. \"Here's the central processor, its programmed brain, surrounded by six nodes, or constructors, that manipulate the arms.\" The young monk moved his pointer along to the thin talonlike hooks. \"Here is what Drexler called its molecular positioners.\"\n\nJoan frowned. \"And you think this thing can actually manipulate matter at the molecular level?\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Anthony said. \"We have enzymes in our bodies right now that act as natural organic nanobots. Or take the mitochondria inside our cells\u2026those organelles are no more than microscopic power stations, manipulating matter at the atomic level to produce ATP, or energy, for our cells. Even the thousands of viruses in nature are forms of molecular machines.\" He glanced to her. \"So you see, Mother Nature has already succeeded. Nanobots already exist.\"\n\nJoan slowly nodded, turning back to the screen. \"This thing looks almost viral,\" she mumbled. Joan had seen blowups of attacking viral phages. Under the electron microscope, they had appeared like lunar modules landing on cell membranes, more machine than living organism. This image reminded her of those viral assays.\n\n\"What was that?\" Anthony asked.\n\nJoan tightened her lips. \"Just thinking out loud. But you're right. Even the prions that cause mad cow disease could be considered nanobots. They all manipulate DNA at the molecular level.\"\n\n\"Yes, exactly! Organic nanobots,\" he said, his face flushed with excitement. He pointed back at the screen. \"Some of us think this may be the first inorganic nanobot discovered.\"\n\nJoan frowned. Maybe it was possible. But to what end? she wondered. What is its purpose? She remembered Friar de Almagro's warning etched on the crucifix. He had been frightened of some pestilence associated with the metal. If the monk was correct, was this a clue? Many of the natural \"organic\" nanobots she had mentioned to Anthony\u2014viruses, prions\u2014were disease vectors. She sensed that with more time she could unravel the mystery. Especially with the use of this facility, she thought, glancing around the huge laboratory.\n\nBut first, she had one experiment to perform. Before handling disease vectors, it was always best to have a way of sterilizing them. And the dead friar had hinted at a way in his cryptogram: Prometheus holds our salvation.\n\nPrometheus, the bearer of fire.\n\nWas that the answer? Fire had always been the great sterilizer. Joan remembered the assessment made by Dale Kirkpatrick, the metallurgist. He had noted that Substance Z used energy with perfect efficiency. But what if the metal received too much heat, like from a flame? Maybe as sensitive as it was, it couldn't handle such an extreme.\n\nJoan had come down here to test her theory, to steal a sample of metal on which to experiment. She risked a quick glance back at Friar Carlos. Her guard dog was clearly bored, too confident in the defenses of the Abbey to be worried about a mere woman.\n\nCasually, Joan removed her glasses, then leaned more tightly into Anthony as he reached for a pen. The young man flinched at the sudden contact and jerked his arm back. His elbow knocked Joan's glasses from her hands. She made sure her eyewear landed atop the tray of precious samples. Small gold droplets danced and rolled across the desktop, like spilled marbles.\n\nAnthony jumped up. \"I'm sorry. I should have watched what I was doing.\"\n\n\"That's okay. No harm done.\" Joan scooted off her stool. She quickly palmed two of the rolling teardrops. Others tumbled to the floor. Technicians scurried forward to help Anthony gather the stray samples. Joan backed away.\n\nCarlos appeared suddenly at her side, gun at the ready. \"What happened?\"\n\nJoan pointed with one hand, while quickly pocketing her pilfered samples with the other. She nodded toward the flurry of activity. \"It seems not even this blessed lab can escape Murphy's Third Law.\"\n\n\"And what's that?\"\n\nJoan turned an innocent face toward Carlos. \"Shit happens.\"\n\nCarlos scowled and grabbed her by the elbow. \"You've been down here long enough. Let's go!\"\n\nShe did not resist. She had what she had come for\u2014and more.\n\nFrom where he knelt on the laboratory floor, Anthony raised an arm in farewell. She graced him with a smile and a wave. The young man deserved at least that.\n\nCarlos quickly led her back through the underground labyrinth. She thought it fitting that the dregs of the Spanish Inquisition should end up holing themselves in the equivalent of an Incan torture chamber. She wondered if the choice of location was purposeful. One torturer taking up residence after another.\n\nSoon Joan found herself before the door to her own cell.\n\nCarlos nodded for her to enter.\n\nBut Joan hesitated, turning to him. \"I don't suppose you have a cigarette on you.\" She didn't smoke, but he didn't know that. She scrunched up her face in feigned discomfort. \"It's been two days, and I can't stand it any longer.\"\n\n\"The abbot forbids smoking in the abbey.\"\n\nJoan frowned. \"But he's not here, is he?\"\n\nAn actual smile shadowed his lips. He glanced up the hall, as a packet of cigarettes appeared in his hands. Nothing like the communal secrecy of a closet smoker. He shook out two. \"Here.\"\n\nShe pocketed one and slipped the other to her lips. \"Do you mind?\" she mumbled around the filter, leaning toward him for a light.\n\nThe perpetual scowl returned, but he reached to his robe and removed a lighter. He flamed the tip of her cigarette.\n\n\"Thanks,\" she said.\n\nHe just nodded toward the door of her cell.\n\nShe backed up, pulled the latch, and entered her cell.\n\n\"Those things will kill you,\" Carlos mumbled behind her, closing and locking the door.\n\nJoan heard his footsteps retreat, then leaned against the door with a long sigh, smoke trailing from her lips. She held back a wracking cough. She had done it. After allowing herself a few moments to savor her victory, she pushed off the door and set to work. The missing samples might be discovered.\n\nShe crossed to the small desk and sat down. Removing the cigarette from her lips, she carefully rested it on the edge of the table. Suddenly fearing hidden cameras, Joan hunched over her desk and slipped out the few abstracts and articles on nanotechnology that the young monk had sent her. She planned on reading more about the young monk's theory. As she scooted the papers aside, a highlighted sentence from a personal paper caught her eye: We have come to believe that each particulate structure of the metal may actually be a type of microscopic manufacturing device. But this raises two questions. To what purpose was it designed? And who programmed it?\n\nJoan straightened slightly, pondering these last two questions. Nanotechnology? She again pictured the nanobot's crystalline shape and hooked appendage arms. If the young researcher was correct, what the hell was the purpose of this strange metal? Had Friar de Almagro long ago discovered the answer? Was this what terrified him?\n\nLeaning over the desk to cover her subterfuge, Joan slipped out one of the two gold droplets. Regardless of the answer, she knew one thing for sure. The metal had terrified the mummified friar, and he had possibly hinted at a way to destroy it.\n\nJoan rolled the gold tear across the oak tabletop. Now warmed, the metal was like a piece of soft putty. She had to handle it carefully. Using her pen, she scooped a tiny bit onto the pen's tip and wiped it on the desktop. She had to be frugal. The test sample was about the size of a small ant.\n\nOnce done, she retrieved her cigarette, knocked off the ash, and lowered its glowing tip toward the metal. \"Okay, Friar de Almagro. Let's see if Prometheus is our salvation.\"\n\nLicking her lips, she touched the gold.\n\nThe reaction was not loud, no more than a firm cough, but the result was fierce. Joan's arm was thrown back. The cigarette flew from her fingers. Woodsmoke curled into the air. Her own gasp of surprise was louder than the explosion. She waved a hand through the smoke. A hole had been blown clear through the oak desktop.\n\n\"My God,\" she said, thanking her stars that she hadn't used the entire teardrop of metal. It would have taken out the entire desk and probably the wall behind it.\n\nShe glanced to the door, listening for footsteps. No one had heard.\n\nGrimly, she stood and stepped to the door. She touched the lock, a plan coming to mind. She fingered the remaining golden samples, weighing them, calculating. She must get word out\u2014especially to Henry.\n\nBut did she have enough of the volatile metal to blast her way to freedom? Probably not\u2026She stepped away from the door. She would bide her time until the right moment.\n\nShe must wait, be as patient as Friar de Almagro. It had taken him five hundred years to get his message out. Joan stared at the smoldering hole in the desk\u2014but someone had finally heard him.\n\nAs the sun set, Henry waited while the large helicopter refueled at the jungle-fringed landing strip. The abbot's crew of six men worked to load the final supplies into the cargo bay. Henry stood off to the side, at the edge of the dilapidated runway. Rotorwash scattered empty oil cans and trash across the hard-packed dirt strip. Nearby, in the shadow of a wooden shack, Abbot Ruiz, who had discarded his robes and stood dressed in a khaki safari outfit, argued with the pinched-face Chilean mechanic. It seemed the price of petrol was a heated debate.\n\nHenry turned his back on them. Off to his left, two of the abbot's armed acolytes stood guard over him, ensuring that he, a sixty-year-old professor, did not make a break for the jungle. But the guards were unnecessary. Even if he could disarm the guards and bolt, Henry knew he would not survive ten steps into that jungle.\n\nBeyond the edge of the forest, Henry had caught flashes of sunlight on metal, guerrillas hidden from sight, protecting their investment. This weed-choked strip was clearly a base for drug and gun smugglers. Henry also noted the crates of Russian vodka stacked by the side of the shack. Black-market central, he judged.\n\nHe resigned himself to his fate. They had traveled all afternoon from Cuzco to this unmarked landing strip. From there, he estimated it would be a four-hour hop to another secret refueling stop near Machu Picchu, then another three to four hours to reach the ruins. They should arrive just as the sun rose tomorrow.\n\nHe had until then to devise a way to thwart the abbot's group.\n\nHenry recalled his brief contact with Philip Sykes. The student had clearly sounded relieved, but fear also traced his voice. Henry cursed himself for getting not only his own nephew into this jam, but all the other students, too. He had to find some way to protect them. But how?\n\nA voice called out from near the helicopter. The tanks were topped and ready for the next leg of the journey.\n\n\"Finish loading!\" Ruiz yelled back over the growl of the rotors. The abbot passed a fistful of bills to the tight-lipped Chilean. It seemed a price had been set.\n\nBeside the helicopter, the last crates of excavation and demolition equipment still waited to be loaded. Among the gear, Henry noted four boxes with Cyrillic lettering burned into the wooden side planks. Clearly Russian contraband: grenades, AK-47 assault rifles, plastique. Lots of armament for an archaeological team, Henry thought sourly.\n\nThe abbot waved for Henry's guards to herd him back toward the pair of helicopters. Henry was under no delusions. He was just one more piece of equipment, another tool to be used, then discarded. Once the abbot had what he wanted, Henry suspected he would end up like Dr. Kirkpatrick back at Johns Hopkins, lying facedown, a bullet in the back\u2014as would Joan, Sam, and the other students.\n\nHenry was led back to the helicopter. He knew better than to resist. As long as Joan was captive, he had to wait, alert for any opportunity that might arise. As Henry crossed the hard dirt runway, he thought back to their last moment together. He remembered the scent of her hair, the brush of her skin as she whispered in his ear, the heat of her breath on his neck. His hands grew clammy thinking about the danger she faced. No harm must come to her. Not now, not later. He would find a way to free her.\n\nAbbot Ruiz was all smiles when Henry reached the waiting helicopter. \"We're off, Professor Conklin,\" he hollered, and climbed into the cabin. \"Up to your ruins.\"\n\nFrowning at the man's jovial manner, Henry was nudged by a guard to follow. Once inside, Henry strapped himself into the seat beside the abbot.\n\nLeaning his large bulk forward, Ruiz talked to the pilot, their heads together so they could hear each other. The pilot pointed to his radio headpiece. When Ruiz turned back to Henry, his smile had faded away. \"There seems to be more trouble up there,\" he said.\n\nHenry's heart beat harder in his chest. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Your nephew had brief contact with the student at the ruins. It seems that the National Geographic photographer has got himself into a bit of a bind.\"\n\nHenry remembered Philip's description of Norman's injury. He had not been allowed to talk long enough to get any details, other than that the photographer was hurt and needed medical attention. \"What's the matter?\"\n\nThe abbot was climbing back out of the helicopter. \"Change in plans,\" he said with a deep frown. \"I need to haggle for more fuel, enough to take us directly to the ruins. No more stops.\"\n\nHenry grabbed Ruiz's arm. \"What's happening?\"\n\nOne of his guards knocked Henry's hand away, freeing the abbot. But Ruiz answered, \"Your nephew seems to think the Incas are going to sacrifice the photographer.\"\n\nHenry looked startled.\n\nAbbot Ruiz patted Henry's knee. \"Don't worry, Professor Conklin. We might not be able to rescue the photographer. But we'll get up there before the others are killed.\" Then the large man ducked under the idling rotors, holding his safari hat atop his head.\n\nHenry leaned back into his seat, clenching his fists. Bloodrites. He had not even imagined that possibility but, considering the Incan religious ceremonies, he should have! Sam and the others were now trapped between two bloodthirsty enemies\u2014the disciples of the Spanish Inquisition and a lost tribe of Incan warriors.\n\nFrom outside the window, Henry saw the abbot give the pilot a thumbs-up as lackeys of the guerrillas rolled two spare fuel tanks toward the waiting helicopter.\n\nNarrowing his eyes, Henry suspected it was not altruism on the abbot's part that motivated this change in plans. It was not to save the other students' lives, but to protect Ruiz's stake in what might lie up there. If Sam and the others were killed, the site of the Sangre mother lode might be lost, possibly for centuries again. Abbot Ruiz was not taking any chances. Another two fistfuls of bills passed to the now-smiling Chilean.\n\nUnder the carriage of the helicopter, Henry felt the bump and scrape as the spare fuel tanks were loaded in place. The abbot crossed back toward the helicopter, hurrying.\n\nHenry leaned his head back, a soft groan escaping his throat.\n\nTime was running out\u2014for all of them.\n\nMaggie watched Sam stalk back and forth across the stone room, like a prodded bull awaiting the ring. He held his Stetson in a white-knuckled grip, slapping it repeatedly against his thigh. With their own clothes clean and dry, he had changed back into his Wrangler jeans and vest. Maggie suspected his change in dress was a reflection of Sam's anger and frustration with the Incas.\n\nThough she understood Sam's attitude, she and Denal still wore the loose Incan wear, not wanting to offend their hosts.\n\nSam had tried all afternoon to get the shaman to allow them access to the temple or to bring Norman back. Kamapak's answer was always the same; Sam could translate it himself by now: \"It is forbidden.\" And with no way of knowing where this sacred temple was hidden, they could not plot any rescue. The forested valley easily covered a thousand acres. They were at the mercy of the Incas.\n\n\"I contacted Philip and let him know the situation,\" Sam said, speaking rapidly, breathless, \"but he's no help!\"\n\nMaggie stepped forward and stopped Sam's pacing with a touch to his arm. \"Calm down, Sam.\"\n\nSam's eyes were glazed with guilt and frustration. \"It's my fault. I should've never left him alone. What was I thinking?\"\n\n\"They'd welcomed us as part of their tribe, accepted us warmly. There was no way you could've anticipated this.\"\n\nSam shook his head. \"Still, I should have taken precautions. First, Ralph\u2026now Norman. If only I had\u2026if I had just\u2014\"\n\n\"What?\" Maggie asked, now grabbing Sam's arm in an iron grip. She was going to make him listen. His ranting and breast-beating was doing them no good. \"What would you have done, Sam? If you had been there when the Incas came to take Norman, what do you think you could have done to stop them? Any resistance would probably have gotten us all killed.\"\n\nSam shuddered under her grip, the glaze clearing from his eyes. \"So what do we do? Wait while they pick us off one at a time?\"\n\n\"We use our heads, that's what we do. We need to think clearly.\" Maggie let Sam go, trusting him to listen now. \"First, I don't think they're going to pick us off. Norman was injured, so he was taken to the temple. We aren't hurt.\"\n\n\"Maybe\u2026\" Sam glanced at Denal, who stood by the reed mat that covered their doorway, peeking out. Sam lowered his voice. \"But what about him? They take children there, too.\"\n\n\"Denal is past puberty. To the Incas, he's an adult. I doubt he's at risk.\"\n\n\"But did you see how they stare at him when he passes? It's like they're curious and a little confused.\"\n\nMaggie nodded. And fearful, too, she added silently. But she did not want to set Sam off again.\n\nDenal spoke up from the doorway. \"People come.\"\n\nMaggie heard them, too. Those who approached were not being secretive. The chattering of many excited voices sounded from beyond their shelter. Some were raised in song.\n\nSam crossed to join Denal. \"What's going on?\"\n\nDenal shrugged, but Maggie saw his hands tremble a bit as they held the reed mat open. Sam placed a protective hand on the boy's shoulder and took up his Winchester in the other. Armed now, Sam pulled back the covering. The Texan stepped out, his back straight, confrontational.\n\nMaggie hurried to join them. She didn't want Sam doing anything rash.\n\nOutside, the sun had fully set. Night had cloaked the terraced village while they had discussed Norman's plight. Throughout the spread of homes, a scatter of torches bloomed, bright as stars in the darkness, while the full moon overhead served as the only other illumination.\n\nAs they watched, the neighboring plaza filled with a growing number of Incas. Some bore torches, while others held aloft pieces of flint, striking them together and casting sparks like fireflies into the night. Across the plaza, a rhythmic drumbeat stirred a handful of Incan women to dance, their tunics flaring around their legs. In the center of the square, a fire suddenly flared.\n\n\"Another celebration,\" Maggie said.\n\nOne of the men with the flints neared, smiling white teeth at them. He sparked his stones, matching the drums' rhythm. Flutes and pipes joined the chorus.\n\n\"It's like the fuckin' Fourth of July,\" Sam muttered.\n\n\"Definitely a party of some sort,\" Maggie agreed. \"But what are they celebrating?\" From Sam's stricken expression, Maggie suddenly wished she had remained silent. She stepped closer to him, knowing what he was thinking. Maggie had studied the Incan culture, too. A village would always celebrate after a blood ritual. A sacrifice was a joyous occasion. \"We don't know this has anything to do with Norman,\" Maggie reasoned.\n\n\"But we don't know it doesn't,\" Sam grumbled.\n\nDenal, who had been keeping close to the doorway, suddenly pushed forward. \"Look!\" he said, pointing.\n\nAcross the plaza, the mass of bodies entering the square parted. A lone figure wandered through them, dressed in an umber-colored robe and black yacolla cape knotted at one shoulder. He seemed dazed and walked with a slight drunken sway to his step.\n\nSam's voice matched the man's confusion. \"Norman?\"\n\nMaggie grabbed Sam's elbow. \"Sweet Mary, it's him!\"\n\nThe two glanced at each other before rushing toward Norman. Around them, the celebrants were in full swing. The music grew louder, the chanting and singing along with it. Before they could reach Norman's side, Kamapak appeared from the crowd, blocking their path. In the firelight, the shaman's tattoos were spidery traces on his cheeks and neck: abstract symbols of power and strange feathered dragons.\n\nSam started to raise his rifle, but Maggie pushed the barrel down. \"Hear him out.\"\n\nThe shaman spoke grandly. Denal translated. \"Your friend has been accepted as worthy by the gods of janan pacha. He is now ayllu, family, with the Sapa Inca.\"\n\n\"The Sapa Inca?\" Maggie asked, still holding the barrel of Sam's rifle. \"Who?\"\n\nBut the shaman was already turning away, inviting them forward to Norman's side. The photographer finally seemed to spot them. He waved a weak arm and stumbled in their direction. His face was still pale\u2014not the ashen complexion of fever or illness, but more of shock. Sam hurried to his side. Maggie and Denal stayed beside the shaman.\n\nKamapak witnessed the reunion with clear pleasure. Maggie repeated her question with Denal's help. \"I don't understand. Sapa Inca?\" Maggie had never thought this small village had any distinct leader, let alone one of the revered god-kings of the Incas. \"Who is your Sapa Inca?\"\n\nThe shaman frowned when Denal translated her words, then spoke slowly. Denal turned to her. \"He say he gave you the name of the Sapa Inca before. It be Inkarri. He live at the Temple of the Sun.\"\n\n\"Inkarri\u2026?\" Maggie remembered the mention last night of the beheaded warrior king. Her brows bunched together.\n\nAny further inquiry was interrupted by Sam's reappearance with Norman. \"You are not going to believe this,\" Sam said as introduction. He nodded to Norman. \"Show her.\"\n\nNorman reached to his robe and parted it enough to reveal his bare knee. For a single heartbeat, Maggie frowned, leaning a bit forward but saw nothing out of the ordinary. \"I don't see\u2014\" Then it struck her like a dive into a cold lake on a hot day. \"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!\"\n\nNorman's knee was healed. No, not healed. There was absolutely no sign of the bullet damage. No puckered entry wound, no scar. It was as if Norman had never been injured.\n\n\"But that's not the most amazing thing,\" Norman said, drawing both Maggie's and Sam's attention.\n\n\"What?\" the Texan asked.\n\nNorman raised his palms to his face. \"My eyes.\"\n\n\"What about them?\" She noticed the photographer's thick eyeglasses were missing.\n\nThe photographer glanced around the plaza, his voice awed. \"I can see. My vision is a perfect twenty-twenty.\"\n\nBefore either student could react, Kamapak raised his arms and voice. His words, booming off the stone walls and stretching across the square, were meant not just for them, but for the entire gathered Incan tribe.\n\n\"What's he saying?\" Sam asked Denal as he shouldered his rifle.\n\nBefore the boy could answer, Norman spoke dully. \"He says this night, when the moon rises to its zenith, the Sapa Inca will come. After many centuries, he will descend from his gold throne and walk among his people.\"\n\nKamapak pointed to the group of students.\n\nNorman finished, wearing a surprised look on his face, \" 'Here stands the future of our tribe. They will take Inkarri back to cay pacha, the middle world. The reign of the Incas will begin again.'\"\n\nA roaring cheer rose from the gathered Incas.\n\nOnly their group remained silent. Sam stared with his mouth hanging open. Maggie found no words either, so awed was she. How could Norman have known what the shaman had said? Denal moved closer to Maggie, his eyes fearfully locked on Norman.\n\nShrugging, Norman said, \"Hey, don't look at me for an explanation, guys. I failed first-year Spanish.\"\n\nAs the celebration continued, Sam sat with Norman on the steps of the plaza. He wanted answers. \"So tell us what happened. What is this Temple of the Sun?\"\n\nNorman shook his head. He ran a finger over his knee. \"I don't know.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Maggie asked. She sat on Norman's far side, while Denal rested on a lower step, his eyes on the continuing celebration. The boy was smoking one of the last of his precious cigarettes. Its tip flared like a torch with each long inhalation. After the terrors of the day, Sam could not begrudge Denal this one vice. \"What did the temple look like?\" Maggie persisted.\n\nNorman turned to her, his eyes both worried and angry. \"That's just it\u2026I don't know.\"\n\n\"Then what do you know?\" Sam asked.\n\nNorman turned away, his face aglow in the reflected firelight. \"I remember being snatched from my bed in our room. I tried to struggle, but I was too weak to offer more than a couple of good kicks at my kidnappers. Soon I was being carried, none too gently, I might add, between two warriors along a path heading south. After about three-quarters of an hour, we hit the south wall of the cone, with that other big black volcano hanging over us. There was a steep climb, and then I saw a sudden dark cut in the rock. A tunnel opening, right through the side of the volcano.\"\n\n\"Where did it go?\" Sam asked, drawing Norman's gaze.\n\n\"I don't know. But I saw daylight at the end of the tunnel. I'm sure of it.\"\n\n\"Maybe it connects to the other volcano,\" Maggie said. \"A path to the Incas'janan pacha.\"\n\n\"What else?\" Sam asked the photographer.\n\nNorman slowly shook his head. \"I remember being carried a good way down the shaft until a side cavern appeared ahead. Torchlight was coming from it. As we neared, someone stepped out, greeting my kidnappers with a raised staff.\" The photographer glanced away and frowned.\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"And after that, my mind's a blank. The next thing I recall is being led back out of the tunnel, the last rays of the setting sun blinding me.\" Norman picked at the robe he wore. \"And I was wearing this.\"\n\nMaggie leaned back on her stone seat, digesting Norman's story. \"And you could understand the Incan language\u2026\" She shook her head. \"Maybe some hypnotic learning process. It could explain the memory lapse. But the level of healing\u2014your knee, your eyes\u2014this is far beyond anythin' even Western medicine could do. It's\u2026it's almost miraculous.\"\n\nSam frowned. \"I don't believe in miracles. There's an answer here. And it lies in that temple.\" He met Norman's gaze. \"Could you find your way back there?\"\n\nNorman pinched his lips for a moment, then spoke. \"I believe so. The trail was clear, and there were these stone trailside markers every hundred yards or so. The warriors would stop and quickly spout a few mumbled words and go on.\"\n\n\"Prayer totems,\" Sam mumbled. At least he was relatively certain he could find this Temple of the Sun if necessary. He would have to be satisfied with that for now. Tomorrow Uncle Hank would arrive, and Sam could leave these strange mysteries to his uncle's expertise. As worrisome and frightening as the day had been, Sam was just relieved Norman had been healed, no matter how or why.\n\nAcross the plaza, the raucous drums died away, and the dancers slowed and stopped. A single Incan woman climbed atop a stone pedestal and began to sing softly, her voice lonely in the fiery night. Soon, the gathered throng solemnly joined in her song, their hundred voices rising like steam toward the midnight sky. Nearby, Denal began softly singing along. Though the words were not translated, Sam sensed joy mixed with reverence, almost like a Christian hymn.\n\nMaggie's words played through his mind. Miracles. Had the Incas stumbled upon some wondrous font of healing? The equivalent of Ponce de Leon's mythic fountain of youth. Sam's mouth grew dry at the thought of discovering such a find.\n\nListening to the crowd quietly sing, Sam looked over the square; he again was stunned that there were no children, no babes in arms or toddlers clinging to their mothers' hems. Nor were any elders mixed with these younger men and women. All the faces singing up at the full moon overhead were too uniform, all near the same age.\n\nWho were these people? What had they discovered? A sudden shiver, that had nothing to do with the cooling valley, passed through Sam.\n\nFinally, a hush spread like a wave over the square. Sam's eyes were drawn to the plaza's south side as the celebrants all fell to their knees. The small woman who had led the singing climbed off her pedestal and knelt, too. Soon only a solitary figure remained. He stood on the far side, unmoving, tall for an Inca, at least six feet. He bore a staff with a sunburst symbol at its top.\n\nMaggie urged them all to kneel, too. \"It must be the Sapa Inca,\" she whispered.\n\nSam settled to his knees, not wanting to offend this leader. Any cooperation would depend on this fellow's good graces.\n\nThe man slowly moved through the crowd. Men and women bowed their foreheads to the stones as he passed. No one spoke. Though not borne atop the usual golden litter of the Sapa Incas, the man wore the raiments of kings: from the llautu crown of woven braids with parrot feathers and red vicuna wool tassels, down to a long robe of expensive cumbi cloth decorated with appliqu\u00e9s of gold and silver. Even his sandals were made of alpaca leather and decorated with rubies. In his right hand, he bore a long staff, as tall as the man himself, topped by a palm-sized gold sunburst.\n\nNorman mumbled, \"The staff. I remember it. From the tunnel shaft.\"\n\nSam glanced at the photographer and saw the man's nervous fear. He touched Norman's shoulder in a gesture of support.\n\nAs the king neared, Sam studied his features. Typical Incan: mocha-colored skin, wide cheeks, full strong lips, dark eyes that pierced. In each earlobe was a disc of gold stamped with a sunburst icon that matched his staff's headpiece.\n\nThe Sapa Inca stepped to within three yards of the kneeling trio. Sam nodded in a show of respect. It was not fitting to stare directly at Incan rulers. They were the sun's children, and as with the sun itself, one's eyes must be diverted from the brightness. Still, Sam refused to touch his head to the stones of the plaza.\n\nThe Incan king did not seem to take offense. His gaze was intense but not hostile. With a look of burning curiosity, he took one more step toward them. His shadowed face was now aglow in the fiery light from a nearby torch, forging its ruddy planes into a coppery gold.\n\nMaggie gasped.\n\nSam's brow crinkled at her reaction, and he dared stare more openly at the man\u2014then it struck him, too. \"My God\u2026\" he mumbled, stunned. This close, there could be no mistaking the resemblance, especially with the torch bathing the king's countenance in a golden light. They had all seen this man before. He matched the figure sculpted in gold back in the caverns, both the life-size idol guarding the booby-trapped room and the towering statue in the center of the necropolis.\n\nThe Sapa Inca took one step closer. With the torchlight gone from his face, he became just a man again. He studied them all for several silent moments. The plaza was as quiet as a tomb. Finally, he lifted his staff and greeted them. \"I am Inca Inkarri,\" he said in English, his voice coarse and guttural. \"Welcome. May Inti keep you safe in his light.\"\n\nSam remained kneeling, too stunned to move.\n\nThe king tapped his staff twice on the stone, then raised it high. On this signal, warbling cheers rose from a hundred throats. Men and women leaped to their feet, the drums thundered, flutes and tambourines added their brightness.\n\nThe Sapa Inca ignored the commotion and lowered his staff.\n\nKamapak appeared like a ghost from the dancing crowd. The shaman's face beamed with radiant awe, his tattoos almost glowing against his flushed skin. \"Qoylluppaj Inkan, Inti Yayanchis,\" he intoned, bowing slightly at the waist, and continued to speak. Even without any translation, Kamapak was obviously begging some boon from this king.\n\nOnce the shaman was finished, the Sapa Inca grunted a terse answer and waved Kamapak away. The shaman's smile broadened, clearly having obtained a favorable answer, and stepped back. The king nodded soberly at Sam's group, his eyes lingering a moment on Denal; then he swung back around and followed the shaman through the clusters of celebrants.\n\n\"I guess we passed muster,\" Sam said, breathing again.\n\n\"And were summarily dismissed,\" Maggie added.\n\nSam turned to Norman. \"What were they saying?\"\n\nThe photographer leaned back on his heels, his eyes narrowed. \"Kamapak wanted to talk in private with the king\"\u2014Norman faced Sam\u2014\"about us.\"\n\nSam frowned. \"What about us?\"\n\n\"About our future here.\"\n\nSam did not like the sound of that. He watched the shaman and the king cross the plaza toward a large two-story home to the left of the square. \"What do you make of this Sapa Inca fellow?\" he asked Maggie.\n\n\"He's obviously had some exposure to the outside world. Learned a little English. Did you notice his face? He must be a direct descendant of that ancient king of the statues.\"\n\nSam nodded. \"I'm not surprised at the similarity. This is a closed gene pool. No outsiders to dilute the Incan blood.\"\n\n\"Until we arrived, that is,\" Norman said.\n\nSam ignored the photographer's words. \"But what about him claiming to be the mythic Inkarri?\"\n\nMaggie shook her head.\n\n\"Who's this Inkarri?\" Norman asked.\n\nMaggie quickly explained the story of the beheaded king who was prophesied to rise again to lead the Incas back to glory.\n\n\"The Second Coming, so to speak,\" Norman said.\n\n\"Right,\" Maggie said, frowning slightly. \"Again clear evidence of Christian influence. Further proof of some Western intrusion here.\"\n\nSam was less convinced. \"But if they've been out of the valley, why do they continue to hide?\"\n\nMaggie waved a hand toward Norman. \"They obviously discovered something here. Something that heals. Avolcanic spring or something. Maybe they've been protecting it.\"\n\nSam glanced at Norman, then back to the Incan king who disappeared into the home along with Kamapak. All the mysteries here seemed to start and end at the temple. If only Norman could remember what had happened\u2026\n\n\"I'd love to be a fly on the wall during their conversation,\" Maggie muttered, staring across the plaza.\n\nNorman nodded.\n\nSam sat up straighter. \"Why don't we?\"\n\n\"What?\" Maggie asked, turning back to him.\n\n\"Why not eavesdrop? They have no glass on their windows. Norman can understand their language. What's to stop us?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Norman said sourly. \"Maybe a bunch of men with spears.\"\n\nMaggie agreed. \"We shouldn't do anything to make 'em mistrust us.\"\n\nSam, though, continued to warm to his idea. After a day spent wringing his hands over Norman's fate, he was tired of operating in the dark. He cinched his Winchester to his shoulder and stood. \"If the shaman and king are discussing our fate, I want to know what they decide.\"\n\nMaggie stood, reaching for his elbow. \"We need to talk about this.\"\n\nSam stepped away from her grip. \"What do you say, Norman? Or would you rather be dragged to the altar in the morning? And I don't mean to be married.\"\n\nNorman fingered his thin neck and stood. \"Well, when you put it that way\u2026\"\n\nMaggie was now red-faced. \"This isn't the way we should be handling this. This is stupid and a risk to all our lives.\"\n\nSam's cheeks flushed. \"It's better than hiding in a hole,\" he said angrily, \"and praying you're not killed.\"\n\nMaggie stepped away from him, blinking in shock, a wounded look on her face. \"You bastard\u2026\"\n\nSam realized Maggie thought he had been referring to her incident in Ireland, using her own trauma to knock aside her arguments. \"I\u2026I didn't mean it that way,\" he tried to explain.\n\nMaggie pulled Denal to her side and turned her back on Sam. Her words were for Norman, dismissive. \"Don't get yourself killed.\" She stalked off toward the row of homes.\n\nNorman stared at her back. \"Sam, you've really got to watch that mouth of yours. It's no wonder you and your uncle are bachelors.\"\n\n\"I didn't mean\u2014\"\n\n\"Yeah, I know\u2026but still\u2026next time think before you speak.\" Norman led the way around the edge of the plaza. \"Come on, James Bond, let's get this over with.\"\n\nSam watched as Maggie ducked into her room; then he turned to follow Norman. His heart, on fire a moment ago, was now a burned cinder in his chest. \"I'm such a jackass.\"\n\nNorman heard him. \"No argument here.\"\n\nSam scowled and tugged at the brim of his Stetson. He passed Norman with his angry stride. \"Let's go.\"\n\nAs the celebration raged around them, they reached the squat two-story home. It was clearly the abode of a kapak, the nobleman of the Incas. The windows and door were framed in hammered silver. Firelight blazed from the uncovered windows, and muffled voices could be heard from inside.\n\nSam searched around to ensure no one was watching, then he pulled Norman into the narrow alley beside the home. It was cramped, allowing only enough room for them to move single file. Sam crept along first. Ahead, flickering light could be seen coming from a courtyard which was closed off by a shoulder-high wall. As they neared, Sam spotted small decorative holes piercing the walls: star-shaped and crescent moons. A perfect place from which to spy.\n\nWaving Norman onward, Sam slunk up to one of the holes and peeked through. Beyond was a central garden courtyard, rich with orchids and climbing flowering vines. Sleeping parrots rested on perches, heads tucked under wings. Amid the riotous growth, a fire pit blazed in the center of the courtyard.\n\nTwo figures stood limned against the flames: Kamapak and Inkarri.\n\nThe shaman touched one of his tattoos with a fingertip, mumbling a prayer, then opened his chuspa pouch and cast a pinch of powder upon the fire. A spat of blue flames chased embers higher into the sky. Kamapak spoke to the king as he stepped in a circle around the fire, tossing more powder into the flames.\n\nNorman, positioned at a neighboring spy hole, translated. His lips were near Sam's ear, his words breathless.\n\nThe shaman spoke. \"As I told you, though they are pale-skinned and came from below, they are not mallaqui, spirits of uca pacha. They are true people.\"\n\nThe king nodded, pensively staring into the flames. \"Yes, and the temple has healed the one. Inti accepts them.\" Inkarri stared back at Kamapak. \"Still, they are not Inca.\"\n\nKamapak finished whatever ritual he had been performing and crossed to one of the reed floor coverings and folded himself smoothly to the floor, legs crossed under him. \"No, but they do not come with murder in their hearts either\u2026like the others long ago.\"\n\nThe king sat on a woven mat beside the shaman. His voice was tired. \"How long has it been, Kamapak?\"\n\nThe shaman reached to a pouch and pulled out a long string of knotted rope. He spread it on the stones of the courtyard. Sam recognized it as a quipu, an Incan counting tool. Kamapak pointed to one knot. \"Here is when we discovered the Mochico in this valley, when your armies first came here, five hundred and thirty years ago.\" He moved his fingers down several ropes. \"And here is when you died.\"\n\nSam pulled back and stared quizzically at Norman. Died? The photographer shrugged. \"That's what he said,\" Norman mouthed.\n\nFrowning, Sam started to return to his eavesdropping when a shouted bark startled him. Torches flared at either end of the alley. Sam and Norman froze, caught red-handed. Harsh orders were yelled at them.\n\n\"Th\u2026they want us to come out,\" Norman said.\n\nSam touched the rifle's stock, then thought better of it. He'd wait first to see how this all played out. \"C'mon.\"\n\nHe pushed past Norman and slid down the alley toward the waiting guards. Angry faces met them at the plaza. A circle of men, some bearing torches, all bearing spears, surrounded them. The music had stopped. Hundreds of sweating bodies stared in their direction.\n\nFrom the doorway, the shaman and the king appeared. A spatter of words were exchanged between the guards and the shaman. The king stood stoically at the doorway.\n\nFinally, the Sapa Inca lifted his staff, and all grew silent. Turning to Sam, he spoke in strained English, \"At the temple, Inti whispered your tongue in my ear so I could speak to you. Come then. Learn what you seek in dark corners.\" He turned and reentered the stately abode.\n\nKamapak frowned, clearly disappointed with them, and waved them both inside the same courtyard upon which they had eavesdropped.\n\nThe Sapa Inca gestured to woven rugs on the floor.\n\nSam and Norman sat.\n\nThe king strode to the fire, speaking to the flames. \"What be it that you seek?\" he asked.\n\nSam sat straighter. \"Answers. Like who you really are.\"\n\nThe Sapa Inca sighed and slowly nodded. \"Some now call me Inkarri. But I will speak my true name to you, my first name, my oldest name, so you will know me. My birth name be Pachacutec. Inca Pachacutec.\"\n\nSam furrowed his brows. Pachacutec was a name he knew. He was the ancient founder of the Incan empire, the leader who expanded the Incas from their sole city of Cuzco to a dominion encompassing all the lands between the mountains and the coast. \"You are a descendant of the Earth Shaker?\" Sam asked, using the Incan nickname for their founder.\n\nThe king glowered. \"No, I am the Earth Shaker. I am Pachacutec.\"\n\nSam frowned at this answer. Impossible. Clearly this man had the delusions of all kings\u2014that they were the embodiment of their ancestors, the dead reincarnated in the living.\n\nKamapak spoke up in his native tongue. The shaman's hands were very animated. He picked up the length of knotted rope, the quipu, from where it had been left. He shook it at them.\n\nNorman translated, \"Kamapak claims everyone here in the valley is over four hundred years old. Even their king.\"\n\n\"So this Sapa Inca believes he's the original Pachacutec.\"\n\nNorman nodded. \"The real McCoy.\"\n\nSam shook his head, dismissing all this Incan mysticism. But in a small corner of his mind, he pondered Norman's cure and new abilities. Something miraculous was definitely going on, but could this tribe have lived for that long? He remembered his own thoughts about a fountain of youth. Was it possible?\n\nSam asked the question that had been nagging him since arriving here. \"Tell us about this Temple of the Sun.\"\n\nPachacutec glanced to the sunburst symbol on the staff in his hand, then to the bonfire. His face suddenly took on a tired look, his eyes so old that for a moment Sam could almost believe this man had lived five hundred years. \"To understand, I must tell stories I hear from other mouths,\" he whispered. \"From the Mochico who first came to this sacred place.\"\n\nSam's heart clenched. So the Moche had been here first! Uncle Hank had been right.\n\nThe Sapa Inca nodded to the shaman. \"Tell them, Kamapak, of the Night of Flaming Skies.\"\n\nThe shaman bowed his head in acknowledgment and crossed to the fire's edge. His voice took on a somber tone. Norman translated. \"Sixty years before Inca Pachacutec's armies conquered this valley, there came a night when the skies were ablaze with a hundred fiery trails, bits of flaming sun chasing each other across the black skies. They fell from janan pacha and crashed into these sacred mountains. The Mochico king ordered his hunters to gather these bits of the sun, finding them in smoking nests throughout the mountains.\"\n\nSam found himself nodding. Clearly this was a description of a meteor shower.\n\nKamapak continued, \"This gathered treasure was brought back to the Mochico king. He named the pieces, the Sun's Gold, and ensconced his treasure in a cave here in this secret valley.\"\n\nPachacutec interrupted, \"But then I come with my armies. I kill their king and make the Mochico my slaves. I force them to take me to this treasure. I must kill many before the way be opened. Here I find a cave full of sunlight you can touch and hold. I fall to my knees. I know it be Inti himself. The god of the sun!\" The king's eyes were full of past glory and wonder. It seemed to revitalize him.\n\nThe shaman continued the story, as Norman translated. \"To honor Inti and to punish the Mochico for imprisoning our god, Pachacutec sacrificed every Mochico in this valley and the village below. Once done, Pachacutec prayed for seven days and seven nights for a sign from Inti. And he was heard!\"\n\nThe shaman opened his bag and, with a mumbled prayer, tossed a bit of purplish dust on the fire; blue flames flared for a heartbeat. Then he continued, \"As reward for his loyalty, a wondrous temple grew in the cave, a huaca constructed from this hoard of Mochico sun gold. In this sacred temple, Inti healed the sick and kept death from those who honored the sun god.\"\n\nSam had to force himself to breathe. Had these ancient Indians truly discovered some otherworldly fountain of youth? Sam only had to stare at Norman, healed and translating, to begin to believe.\n\n\"Pachacutec gave up his crown to his son and retired to this valley, leaving the governing of the Incan empire to his descendants. He and his chosen followers remained here, worshiping Inti, never dying. Soon, even the children born in the valley were made into gods by the temple's power and given as gifts to janan pacha.\"\n\nWith these words, the king's eyes flicked toward the south, where the tall neighboring volcano loomed. A certain brooding look grew in his eyes.\n\nSam had to admit a perverse internal logic to the story. If these valley dwellers never died, then sacrificing children was good population management. The resources of this volcanic valley were not unlimited and continued births would soon overwhelm the resources. The tale also succeeded in explaining the lack of elderly residents. No one aged here.\n\nPachacutec interrupted again, his tone bitter. \"But the time of peace ended. A hundred seasons passed, and men in tall ships came, men with strange beasts and stranger tongues.\"\n\n\"The Spanish,\" Sam mumbled to himself.\n\n\"They kill my people, drive them from their homes. Like the jaguar, there be no escaping their teeth. They come even here. I speak to them. Tell them of Inti. I show them the temple and how it protects us. Their eyes grow hungry. They kill me, meaning to steal Inti from us.\"\n\n\"They killed you?\" Sam blurted out before he could stop it.\n\nPachacutec rubbed the back of his neck, as if kneading out some stubborn pain. He waved his other hand at Kamapak, motioning him to continue.\n\nThe shaman's words grew dour as Norman translated. \"The Spanish came with lust in their hearts. And as Pachacutec had slain the Mochico king, the foreigners slew our king. Pachacutec was taken to the center of the village.\" The shaman waved toward the plaza beyond. \"And his head was cut from his body.\"\n\nSam's excitement about discovering the fountain of youth dried in his chest. This last story was clearly preposterous. And if this was false, then all of the others probably were, it. too. Just fireside fables. Whatever cured Norman had nothing to do with these stories. Still, Sam was compelled to listen 'til the end. \"But you live now. How is that?\"\n\nThe shaman answered, glancing almost guiltily down. \"The night the Sapa Inca was slain I heard the Spanish speak of burning his body. Such a cruelty is worse than death to our people. So I sneaked out and stole my king's head from where he lay dead. With the Spanish in pursuit, I took my king to the temple and prayed to Inti. Again the god heard and proved his love.\" The shaman threw another pinch of dust on the fire, a clear obeisance to his god.\n\nPachacutec continued the last of the tale. \"The temple carried me back from death. I opened my eyes as my head lay on the altar. From my bloody mouth, I warned the strangers of Inti's anger. This show of Inti's strength made warriors into women. They screamed, wailed, tore at their hair, and ran away. The dogs sealed the lower entrance, but word of my death be already flying. The killers were captured, and their shaman sacrificed.\"\n\nSam frowned. He knew one way to test the veracity of these stories. \"What was the name of this Spanish shaman?\"\n\nKamapak answered, voice tight with old hatred, hands balled into fists: \"Francisco de Almagro.\"\n\nPachacutec scowled at the name and spat into the fire. \"We had this shaman dog captured for his blasphemies. But he fled like a coward and fouled a sacred site with his own blood. After his death, we made holes in his skull and drove out his god with ours.\"\n\nSam sat shocked. He remembered his uncle's story of the golden substance that exploded from the mummy's skull. The ancient and modern stories seemed to match. But what these two were describing\u2014immortality\u2014how could it be true?\n\nAs Sam's mind roiled, the shaman finished the story as Norman continued to translate the ancient Inca language. \"After the foreigners fled, the temple slowly grew Pachacutec another body. Inti warned our king that these strange men from across the sea were too strong and too many, and Inti must be protected. So the path here was left sealed. We allowed ourselves to be forgotten. But Inti had promised Pachacutec that there would come a day when the path would reopen, a time when the Incan dynasty would begin again. When that day came, for our loyalty, our people had been promised not only their own lands back, but also the rest of the world.\"\n\nPachacutec's eyes blazed with fire and glory. \"We will rule all!\"\n\nSam nodded. \"Inkarri reborn from his secret cave.\"\n\nPachacutec turned his back on the fire and them. \"So my people have named me after my rebirth. Inkarri, child of the sun.\"\n\n\"When does this path to the world below reopen?\"\n\n\"When the gods of janan pacha are ready to leave,\" Pachacutec answered, waving an arm toward the south. \"Until then, we must live as the temple tells us. All who threaten Inti must be sacrificed.\"\n\nThe shaman turned his back, too. Norman quietly translated, color draining from his face. \"You have shown your deceit this night, hiding your shame in the cloak of night.\" His last words came out pained. \"At dawn, when the sun rises and Inti can see our loyalty, you will be sacrificed to our god. Your blood will stain the plaza.\"\n\nThe shaman signaled with his right hand.\n\nSam shot to his feet, but he was too late. Incan warriors swarmed from adjacent rooms and swept over them. Sam fought, but with no success. His rifle was knocked to the stones. Disturbed parrots screamed in the trees.\n\n\"No!\" Sam yelled, but neither the shaman nor the king would face them as they were dragged away.\n\nDressed in her own khakis and shirt, Maggie huddled in the shadow of the courtyard wall. Holding her breath, afraid to move, she watched Sam and Norman being dragged away. Sweet Jesus, what was she going to do? She silently cursed the mule-headed Texan. He had to go charging blindly into danger. She turned and leaned her back on the stone wall. Hiding as still as a mouse, she had heard most of Pachacutec's and Inkarri's stories and knew there was no way to talk them out of this jam.\n\nAt least, she had hid Denal before coming here.\n\nEarlier, she had heard the music in the plaza stop abruptly. She had peeked out and watched as Sam and Norman were seized. While instinct had told her to run with Denal as far and fast as possible, she had fought against it. The other two were her friends, and she could not abandon them without trying to help. So she had whisked Denal into the jungle's edge and told him to stay out of sight. Then she had sneaked back here to discover the fate of her friends.\n\nNow she knew. Maggie peeked through a crescent-shaped hole in the courtyard wall. It was empty. Even the king and the shaman were gone. Maggie stared at the sole reason she still tarried here. Sam's Winchester rifle lay on the granite cobblestones of the courtyard. If a rescue was going to succeed, she would need that weapon.\n\nListening for voices, she studied the surrounding rooms for any sign of motion. It seemed clear. Her hands trembled with fear at what she was about to attempt. She bit her lip, refusing to let panic into her heart. Sam and Norman were depending on her. Taking a final deep breath, she grabbed the top of the wall, pulled herself up, and hooked a leg over the edge. She struggled for a few moments, then managed to boost herself over.\n\nWith her heart thundering in her throat, Maggie dropped into the courtyard. A blue-and-gold macaw ruffled its feathers, watching her, still tense from the excitement a few moments ago. Maggie willed the bird to remain quiet and crept to the foliage's edge. The rifle lay only ten meters away. She just needed to dash across the open space, grab the rifle, then flee back over the wall.\n\nIt sounded easy until Maggie's legs began to tremble under her. She knew she would have to act now or lose herself to panic. Clenching her fists, she pushed from the shadows of the trees and ran across the cobbles. Her hands settled upon the stock of the rifle just as voices sounded behind her. Someone was returning! She froze like a deer in headlights, fear paralyzing her. She could not move, could not think.\n\nSuddenly, a log in the fire popped, loud as the blast from a starter's gun.\n\nIt was what she needed. A gasp of fear escaped her throat, releasing her. She snatched the rifle and ran, not caring who might hear her. Terror gave her legs. She flew through the foliage and over the wall in a heartbeat.\n\nShe sank gratefully into the shadows, rifle clutched to her chest.\n\nThe voices behind her grew louder. Gulping air as silently as she could, she turned and peeked into the courtyard. It was Kamapak and Pachacutec returning. She watched the tattooed shaman cross to the yard's center and throw a handful of powder into the fire. Azure flame danced to the rooftops, then died back down.\n\nThe two men spoke in their native tongue. The only word decipherable was the name Inkarri. The king seemed reluctant to do what the shaman wanted, but finally his shoulders sagged, and he nodded.\n\nStraightening and stepping near the fire, Pachacutec reached to his shoulder and pulled the gold tupu pin that held his robe. The fine cloth fell like a flow of water from his body to pool around his ankles. The Sapa Inca stepped free of his robe, naked of all except his llautu headpiece and his staff.\n\nA hand flew to Maggie's lips, clamping away her cry of shock. But something must have been heard. The king glanced to the courtyard wall, staring for a long breath, then turned away.\n\nMaggie's stomach churned with acid. But she knew better than to move. She could not risk the scuff of stone alerting them further to her presence. She stared.\n\nFrom the neck up, the king's skin was the familiar mocha brown of the Andean Indians, but from the neck down, his skin was as pale as something found under a rock. It reminded Maggie of the beastly predators that haunted the caverns below. But Pachacutec's skin was even paler, almost translucent. Vessels could be seen moving blackish blood under his skin; bones appeared as buried shadows. The man's belly and chest were flat, hairless. Not even nipples or a navel marred the smooth surface. He was also sexless, completely lacking external genitalia.\n\nSexless and unnaturally smooth. Maggie found one word coming to mind as she stared at this strange apparition. Unformed. It was as if the king's body were a blank slate waiting to be molded, like pale clay.\n\nOh, God. The realization dawned on her.\n\nThe story of Inkarri was true!"
            },
            {
                "title": "Day Six",
                "text": "[ The Serpent of Eden ]\n\n[ Saturday, August 25, 4:48 A.M. ]\n\n[ Andean Mountains, Peru ]\n\nHenry stared out the window as the helicopter banked over the jungle-stripped ruins. He had not slept all night. Worries and fears had kept him awake as their bird flew over the midnight jungles. He had yet to come up with any plan to thwart his captors. And without the additional stop to refuel, their flight from the guerrilla airstrip had been shortened. Time was running out.\n\nBelow, the campsite was still dark. The sun had yet to rise. Only a set of work lights near the base of the buried pyramid illuminated the dig. Apparently, even after the news of the students' escape, work continued to open the temple. The abbot's people sought every scrap of their precious el Sangre del Diablo.\n\nThe abbot, wearing a radio headpiece, yelled over the roar of the rotors. \"We're here, Professor Conklin! I assume that I do not need to remind you what will happen if you fail to cooperate fully!\"\n\nHenry shook his head. Joan. She was still being held hostage at the Abbey. Any punishment for failings on his part would be exacted against her. Henry cleared his throat and pointed to the abbot's radio headpiece. \"Before we land, I want to speak to Dr. Engel. To make sure she's unharmed.\"\n\nThe abbot frowned, not in anger but in disappointment. \"I am faithful to my word, Professor Conklin. If I say she will remain safe, she will.\"\n\nOnly until you have what you want, Henry thought dourly. His eyes narrowed. \"Excuse me if I doubt your hospitality. But I would still like to speak to her.\"\n\nAbbot Ruiz sighed and shrugged his large bulk. He slipped his headset off and passed it to Henry. \"Be quick. We're landing.\" The abbot nodded toward a cleared square not far from the students' tents.\n\nThe helicopter righted its banking turn and began to settle toward the flat stone plateau. Below, Henry spotted men with flashlights positioned at the periphery of their landing site, guiding the chopper down. Henry did not fail to notice the mud brown robes the flashlight-bearers wore. More of the abbot's monks.\n\nHenry pulled the headpiece in place and positioned the microphone.\n\nThe abbot leaned forward and was talking to the pilot, pointing to the radio. After a minute of static, a scratchy voice filled his earphones. \"Henry?\"\n\nIt was Joan! He held the microphone steady. \"It's me, Joan. Are you okay?\"\n\nStatic blazed, then words trailed through. \"\u2026fine. Have you reached the camp?\"\n\n\"Just landing now. Are they treating you well?\"\n\n\"Just like the Hyatt here. Only the room service is a little slow.\"\n\nDespite her light words, Henry could hear the suppressed tension in her voice. He pictured those tiny crinkled lines that etched her eyes when she was worried. He had to swallow hard to speak. He would not let anything happen to her. \"Slow room service? I'll see what I can do from here,\" Henry said. \"See if I can light a fire under hotel management.\"\n\n\"Speaking of fire, Henry, remember back at college we shared that classical mythology class together. I was in the Abbey's library today. They have the professor's book here. Can you believe that? Even that chapter I helped him write about Prometheus.\"\n\nHenry's brows drew together. \"Small world, isn't it?\" he answered blandly, going along with her ploy. Back at Rice University, the two had never shared such a class. Clearly Joan was trying to get a message to him. Something about the myth of Prometheus, a definite reference to Friar de Almagro's etched warning.\n\nHe heard the heightened tension in her voice. \"Remember the difficulty we had in translating the line Prometheus holds our salvation?\"\n\nHenry chuckled with false mirth. \"How could I forget it?\" He clenched his hands in his lap. What was Joan hinting at? Something about fire. But what? What does fire have to do with salvation? And time was running short. The helicopter was about to land.\n\nJoan must have sensed his confusion. She spoke rapidly, practically just blurting it out. \"Well, I also reread the section where Prometheus slays the great Serpent. Do you remember that? Where fire was the final solution?\"\n\nHenry suddenly tensed as he realized what she was saying. The Great Serpent. The Serpent of Eden. Understanding dawned in him. She was offering him a way of destroying el Sangre del Diablo. \"Sure. But I thought that event was said to be done by Hercules. Are you sure your interpretation is accurate?\"\n\n\"Definitely. Prometheus packed a vicious punch. You should have seen the picture in the book. Think plastic explosive.\"\n\n\"I\u2026I understand.\"\n\nA shudder suddenly shook through the helicopter's frame. Henry jumped in his seat, startled. Outside, the helicopter's skids bumped on the granite stones, then settled to a stop.\n\nThe abbot's face appeared before Henry's, yelling to be heard above the slowing rotors. \"You've talked long enough. We've landed!\" He turned to the pilot and made a slashing motion across his neck.\n\nHenry was about to be cut off. \"Joan!\"\n\n\"Yes, Henry!\"\n\nHe clutched his microphone tightly, struggling with words he thought he'd never speak to another woman. \"I just wanted to tell you that\u2026that I\u2014\" Static blasted in his ears as the radio contact suddenly ended.\n\nWincing, Henry stared at the radio. What had he wanted to say to Joan? That he was falling in love with her? How could he presume she shared any deeper feelings than mere friendship?\n\nThe radio was taken from his numb fingers.\n\nEither way, the chance was gone.\n\nAs two Incas stood guard, Sam struggled with the woven grass ropes that bound his hands behind his back, but he only succeeded in tightening them.\n\nBeside him, Norman sat on the stones of the plaza, shivering slightly. The photographer had long given up trying to free himself, resolved as he was to the inevitability of their deaths.\n\nAlready the skies paled to the east, heralding the approach of dawn, but the village still lay cast in grays and blacks. Once the sun fully rose and the streets were bathed in golden light, the two would be sacrificed to the sun god, Inti.\n\nBut at least, it was just the two of them.\n\nMaggie and Denal had managed to escape. All night long, men had been searching the terraced village and surrounding jungle, but with no luck. Maggie must have heard the commotion from Sam's capture and run off with the boy, disappearing into the dark jungle. But how long could the two remain hidden once the sun was fully up? Sam prayed Denal and Maggie could avoid capture until his uncle arrived with help. But when would that be? He had no way of knowing. His walkie-talkie was still inside his vest, but with his arms bound behind him, there was nothing he could do.\n\nHe yanked on his bonds. If he could only free a hand\u2026\n\nA rifle blast suddenly pierced the quiet dawn. The crack echoed over the valley, but it clearly came from the east. Maggie! She must have been discovered.\n\nBoth guards turned in the direction of the rifle shot. They spoke hurriedly as more men poured into the square, led by Kamapak. With much chattering, the group of barefooted hunters took off toward the forest's edge. The tattooed shaman waved even the two guards away to aid in the search.\n\nBound tight, Sam and Norman were not a threat.\n\nOnce the square was empty, Kamapak crossed to them. He wore a worried expression.\n\nSam suspected the shaman feared his god's wrath if all these foreigners were not slain at dawn.\n\nIn his hands, Kamapak bore small bowls of paint. He knelt beside Norman and spoke to the photographer as he placed down his dyes, then slid a long narrow flint knife from his sashed belt.\n\nAs the man spoke, Sam stared hungrily at the shard of sharpened stone. How he longed to grab that weapon.\n\nNorman groaned after the shaman finished his explanation.\n\n\"What is it?\" Sam asked.\n\n\"It seems the shaman has come to prepare us for the sacrifice,\" Norman said, meeting Sam's eye. He nodded to the dyes. \"Marks of power are to be written on our bodies.\"\n\nThe shaman dipped a finger in the red dye, intoning a prayer loudly, then picked up the splinter of flint.\n\nNorman's gaze followed the blade, his face paling. He glanced sidelong at Sam, but he kept one eye on Kamapak.\n\n\"What else?\" Sam asked, sensing something unspoken.\n\n\"Before the sun rises, he also plans to cut out our tongues\u2026so our screams don't offend Inti.\"\n\n\"Great\u2026\" Sam said sourly.\n\nKamapak raised his knife toward the growing dawn. As he continued his chanted prayer, the bright edge of the sun rose above the eastern lip of the volcanic cone. Like an awakening eye, Sam thought. For a moment, he understood the Incas' worship of the sun. It was like some immense god peeking down on their lowly world. Kamapak sliced his thumb with his knife, greeting the sun with his own blood.\n\nEven though Sam's own life was threatened, a small part of him watched the ritual with clear fascination. Here was an actual Incan sacrificial rite, a dead tradition coming to life. He studied the tiny pots of natural dyes: red from rose madder, blue from indigo, purple from crushed mollusks.\n\nAs Kamapak continued his prayers, Norman suddenly stiffened beside the Texan. Sam glanced up from his study of the dyes to see a figure break from the cover of a nearby doorway. He almost gasped as he recognized the figure: It was Maggie.\n\nBehind Kamapak's back, she dashed across the stones, barefooted like the hunters\u2014but, also like the warriors, she was armed. In her right hand was a long wooden cudgel.\n\nKamapak must have sensed the danger. He began to turn, but Maggie was already there. She swung the length of hardened wood and struck a fierce blow to the side of the shaman's head. The blow sounded like a softball struck by a Louisville Slugger. Kamapak was knocked to his hands, then fell to his face, unmoving. Blood welled through the man's dark hair.\n\nSam stared, too shocked to react for a few seconds. He turned to face Maggie. She seemed equally stunned by her act. The cudgel fell from her limp fingers to clatter on the granite cobbles.\n\n\"The knife,\" Sam said, drawing her gaze from the limp form of the shaman. He nodded toward the sliver of flint and twisted around to indicate his roped wrists.\n\n\"I've got my own,\" Maggie said, alertness returning in a rush. She glanced around the plaza and drew forth the gold dagger from her belt. She hurriedly sliced Sam's lashed wrists.\n\nSam jumped to his feet, rubbing his wrists. He stepped over to check on Kamapak. The shaman lay unmoving, but his chest did rise and fall. Sam let out a relieved breath. The man was just unconscious.\n\nMaggie passed Sam the gold dagger after freeing Norman, then helped pull the photographer to his feet. \"Can you both run?\"\n\nNorman nodded weakly. \"If I have to\u2026\"\n\nVoices sounded from nearby. Somewhere a woman's voice was raised in alarm. \"It looks like you'll have to,\" Maggie said.\n\nIn unison, they all turned to run, but they were already too late.\n\nAround the square, armed men and women entered from streets and alleys. Sam and the others were herded to the center of the plaza and surrounded.\n\nSam noticed Norman had the shaman's shard of flint gripped in one fist. The photographer lifted it. \"If they mean to take my tongue, they're gonna have to fight me for it.\"\n\n\"Where's Denal?\" Sam whispered.\n\n\"I left him with the rifle,\" Maggie answered. \"He was supposed to lead the others away so I could try and free you. We were to rendezvous in the jungle.\"\n\n\"I don't think that plan's gonna work,\" Norman said. He pointed his flint knife. \"Look.\"\n\nAcross the square, one of the hunters held Sam's Winchester in his grip. He handled the weapon as if it were a poisonous snake. The man sniffed slightly at the barrel's end, crinkling his nose.\n\n\"Denal\u2026\" Maggie mumbled.\n\nThere was no sign of the boy.\n\nAgruff voice sounded behind them. They turned.\n\nPachacutec pushed through the crowd. He was in full raiment, from feathered crown to fanciful robe. He lifted his staff. The golden sunburst caught the first rays of the rising sun and glinted brightly.\n\nThe king spoke slowly in Inca, while Norman translated. \"We have captured the strangers in our midst. Inti rises for his sacrifice. Revive Kamapak so the gods can be honored.\"\n\nOff to the side, a trio of women worked on Kamapak. They bathed his face in cold water and rubbed his limbs while chanting. Slowly Kamapak's arms began to move. Then his eyes flickered open. He seemed blind for a moment until the memory of his assault returned. Anger shone in his gaze. Weakly pushing away the women, he shoved to his feet. He wobbled a bit, but one of the hunters helped steady him.\n\nKamapak ambled shakily toward his king.\n\nPachacutec spoke again, this time in English, drawing the eyes of the students. \"It be an honor to give blood to Inti. You disgrace our god with your fighting.\"\n\nBy now, the sun had risen enough that the center of the square was bathed in sunlight. Sam brandished his dagger, bright in the morning light. Disgrace or not, he wasn't going to give his blood without drawing the same from his attackers. He raised the knife higher, wishing he had a more intimidating weapon, something to strike terror.\n\nWith this thought, the handle of the dagger grew warm and the length of gold blade shimmered and twisted, spreading and curving, until the form of a striking snake sprouted from the hilt. Sam froze, afraid to move, unsure what had just happened.\n\nHe stared at the transformed dagger. Gold fangs were open to the sun, threatening the gathered throng.\n\nPachacutec had taken a step back when the transformation had started. He now took a step nearer, eyes wide with awe.\n\nSam did not know how the transformation had occurred, but the miracle of the dagger was clearly something the Incas had never seen. Sam raised the golden asp high.\n\nPachacutec lifted his staff, mimicking Sam's pose. His eyelids lowered slightly, as if in prayer. Suddenly the golden sunburst symbol atop his staff flowed and transformed to match the serpent. Two snakes stared each other down.\n\nNow it was Sam's turn to back away. Pachacutec met the Texan's gaze. Sam no longer saw anger in the man's eyes, but tears.\n\nTo the king's side, Kamapak fell to his knees, bowing his head toward Sam. The gathered throng followed suit. Foreheads pressed to the stones.\n\nPachacutec lowered his staff. He stepped toward them. Arms wide. \"Inti has blessed you. The sun god of the Mochico listens to your dreams. You be one of the chosen of Inti!\" The king crossed to stand before Sam. He offered his hand. \"You be safe in our house. All of you!\"\n\nSam was too confused to react. The sudden change in the Incas was unnerving. But he could not quite trust the transformation, any more than he could understand what had happened to the dagger.\n\nMaggie pushed beside Sam. \"What about Denal?\"\n\nPachacutec heard her. \"The boy. He be not fourteen years. Too young for huarachicoy.\" He smiled as if this explained it all.\n\nSam frowned. Huarachicoy was the ceremonial feast where a boy was accepted as a man into a tribe, when he was given his first huara, the loincloth of an adult tribesman. \"What do you mean 'too young'?\"\n\nKamapak raised his face and spoke. Norman translated. \"It was decided that the boy, like all the tribe's children, was to be taken to the temple. He was to be gifted directly to the gods.\"\n\nMaggie turned to Sam. \"Sacrifice,\" she said with fear.\n\n\"When?\" Sam asked. \"When was this to be done?\"\n\nPachacutec glanced to the rising sun. The bright disk was fully above the volcanic edge. \"It be done already. The boy be with the gods.\"\n\nSam stumbled backward. \"No\u2026\"\n\nThe Texan's reaction confused the king. The Sapa Inca's bright smile faltered. \"Be this not Inti's wish?\"\n\n\"No!\" Sam said more forcefully.\n\nMaggie grabbed Sam's elbow. \"We need to go to that temple. Maybe he's still alive. We don't know for sure that he's dead.\"\n\nSam nodded at her words. There was a chance. He faced Kamapak and Pachacutec. \"Take us to the temple.\"\n\nThe king bowed his head, offering no argument to one of the chosen. Instead, he waved, and the shaman stood. \"Kamapak will guide you.\"\n\n\"I'm coming with you,\" Maggie said.\n\n\"Me too,\" Norman added, swaying a bit on his feet. Clearly the transformation and the long stressful night had taken its toll on him.\n\nSam shook his head. \"Norman, you need to stay here. You can speak the local lingo. Get the Incas to light a signal fire on the highest ridge so the evac helicopter can find us.\" Sam reached to his vest pocket and pulled out the walkie-talkie. \"Here. Contact Sykes and get a status report. But more importantly\u2026get Uncle Hank up here ASAP!\"\n\nNorman looked worried with the burden of his assignment, but he accepted the walkie-talkie with a slow nod. \"I'll do what I can.\"\n\nSam clapped the photographer on the shoulder, then he and Maggie hurried away, stopping only to collect Sam's Winchester.\n\n\"Be careful!\" Norman called to them. \"There's something strange up there!\"\n\nSam didn't need to be told that. All he had to do was look at the golden viper mounted on the dagger's hilt in his hand.\n\nBright sunlight glinted off its sharp fangs.\n\nHe shivered. Old words of warning rang in his head: Beware the Serpent of Eden.\n\nHenry trudged toward the collapsed subterranean temple. Even from here, he saw how the crown of the hill had fallen in on itself. Sodium lamps highlighted the excavation on the lee side of the slope, where workers still struggled to dig a rescue shaft into the buried ruins.\n\nAs Henry walked, Philip's litany of the events of the past few days droned on: \"\u2026and then the temple started to implode. There was nothing I could do to stop it\u2026\" Philip Sykes had come running up to Henry as soon as the professor had cleared the helicopter's rotors, wearing a smile that was half panicked relief and half shame, like a dog with his tail tucked between his legs. Henry ignored his student's ceaseless explanation. The theme was clear from the start: I'm not to blame!\n\nHenry finally touched Philip's shoulder. \"You've done a great job, Mr. Sykes. Considering the circumstances and confusion here, you've managed admirably.\"\n\nPhilip bobbed his head. \"I did, didn't I?\" He ate up the praise with a big spoon\u2026and then thankfully grew quiet, content at being absolved for any of the tragedy. Henry, though, knew the student was hiding more than he was telling. Henry had heard the disparaging comments whispered from some of the Quechan workers as they passed. He knew enough of the local Indian dialect to tell that the laborers resented Philip. Henry suspected that if he questioned the workers, a different view of the events of the past few days would come to light\u2026and that Philip would not come out looking so squeaky clean.\n\nBut right now, Henry had more important concerns.\n\nHe eyed the two guards who flanked them. They no longer brandished their guns, but they kept their hands on holstered pistols. Abbot Ruiz marched ahead of them, wheezing through nose and mouth. The altitude and exertion in climbing through the ruins were clearly taxing the heavy man.\n\nAs they finally reached the site where a black tunnel opened into the side of the buried temple, a man dressed in the brown robes of a friar stepped toward them. He was darkly handsome with cold eyes that seemed to take in everything with a sharp glance.\n\nAbbot Ruiz stared hungrily at the tunnel opening. \"Friar Otera, how do things fare here?\"\n\nThe monk remained bowed. \"We should reach the temple ruins by noon, Your Eminence.\"\n\n\"Good. Very good. You have done brilliantly.\" He stepped past the bowing man without a glance, dismissing him.\n\nHenry, though, caught the glint of white-hot anger in the monk's eyes as he straightened, the man's face settling back to passive disinterest. But Henry knew better. A few words of faint praise were not going to satisfy this man as they had Philip. Closer to him now, Henry noted some Indian features mixed with his Spanish heritage: a deeper complexion, a slightly wider nose, and eyes so deep a brown they seemed almost black. Friar Otera was clearly a mestizo, a half-breed, a mixture of Spanish and Indian blood. Such men had hard lives here in South America, their mixed blood often a mark of humiliation and ridicule.\n\nHenry followed the abbot, but remained attuned to the friar's movements. He knew he had better keep a close watch. There were dangerous layers to this man that had nothing to do with the abbot's schemes. Henry noticed how even Philip gave the man a wide berth as the student clambered up the loose soil toward the tunnel opening.\n\nFriar Otera took up a pace behind Henry.\n\nAs they reached the excavated tunnel, the sun climbed fully into the sky. The clear blue skies promised a hot day to come.\n\nSuddenly a crackle of static drew their eyes toward Philip. The student reached inside his jacket and pulled free a walkie-talkie. \"It must be Sam,\" Philip said. \"He's early.\"\n\nHenry stepped nearer. His nephew had said he would contact base around ten o'clock. The call was a few hours ahead of schedule.\n\n\"Base here,\" Philip said, lips pressed to the receiver. \"Go ahead, Sam.\"\n\nStatic and interference whined for a few seconds, then\u2026\"Philip? It's not Sam. It's Norman.\"\n\nPhilip glanced over the radio to the others, brows raised. Henry understood the Harvard student's shock. From Sam's last radio message, Norman had been at risk of being sacrificed last night. Thank God, he was still alive!\n\nNorman continued, speaking rapidly. \"When do you expect the helicopters? We need them up here now!\" Panic etched his voice.\n\n\"They're right here!\" Philip yelled back. \"As a matter of fact, Professor Conklin's with me.\" Philip held out the walkie-talkie.\n\nHenry took it, but not before noticing the narrowing of Abbot Ruiz's eyes. A warning against any slip of the tongue. Henry raised the radio. \"Norman, it's Henry. What's going on up there?\"\n\n\"Denal's in danger! Sam and Maggie have gone to rescue him. But we need help up here ASAP. Within the hour, several signal fires should be blazing near the cone's western ridge. They should be visible through the mists. Hurry!\"\n\nHenry eyed the Abbot. He was already waving some of his men back toward the helicopter. They had thought to have a few hours until Sam called, but clearly Abbot Ruiz was more than happy to accelerate the schedule, especially with Norman's next words.\n\n\"There's something strange up here\u2026borders on the miraculous, Professor. Must see to\u2026\" The static was growing worse, eating away words.\n\nThe abbot met Henry's gaze, his eyes bright with religious hope. Ruiz nodded for Henry to question the photographer.\n\n\"Does it have anything to do with a strange type of gold?\" Henry asked.\n\nNorman seemed not to have heard, cutting in and out, \"\u2026a temple. I don't know how\u2026heals\u2026no children though.\"\n\nThe choppy transmission was clouding any clear meaning. Henry gripped the walkie-talkie firmly and pressed it closer to his lips. If he had any hope of warning Sam and the others, it would have to be now. \"Norman, sit tight! We're coming! But tell Sam not to do anything rash. He knows I don't trust him to act on his own.\"\n\nBeside him, Philip startled at his words. Henry prayed Norman would be as equally shocked by such a statement. The entire team knew Henry held his nephew in the highest esteem and would never disparage Sam or any of them in this manner, but Abbot Ruiz didn't know that. Henry pressed the receiver again. \"I mean it. Do nothing. I don't trust Sam's judgment.\"\n\n\"Professor?\" Norman's voice was full of confusion. Static raged from the unit. Any further words dissolved away.\n\nHenry fiddled with the radio but only got more static. He thumbed it off. \"Batteries must have died,\" Henry said morosely. He prayed Norman had understood his veiled warning, but if not, at least no harm had been done. Abbot Ruiz seemed oblivious of Henry's attempt at a secret message. He handed the radio back to Philip.\n\nPhilip returned the walkie-talkie to a pocket, then opened his mouth. \"What do you mean you don't trust Sam, Professor. Since when?\"\n\nHenry took a step forward, trying to signal the Harvard grad to shut up.\n\nBut Abbot Ruiz had already heard. He swung back to Henry and Philip. \"What's all this about?\" he asked, his face narrowed with suspicion.\n\n\"Nothing,\" Henry answered quickly. \"Mr. Sykes here and my nephew have an ongoing rivalry. He's always thought I favored Sam over him.\"\n\n\"I never thought that, Professor!\" Philip said loudly. \"You trusted all of us!\"\n\n\"Did you now?\" Ruiz asked, stalking up to them. \"Trust seems to be something that all of us are losing at this moment.\"\n\nThe abbot waved a hand, and Friar Otera appeared behind Philip with a bared blade.\n\n\"No!\" Henry yelled.\n\nThe thin man grabbed a handful of the student's hair and yanked Philip's head back, exposing his throat.\n\nPhilip squawked but grew silent when he saw the blade. He stiffened when the knife touched his throat.\n\n\"Is another lesson in order so soon?\" the abbot asked.\n\n\"Leave the boy be,\" Henry begged. \"He doesn't know what he's saying.\"\n\nThe abbot stepped beside Philip, but his words were for Henry. \"Were you trying to pass a warning up there? A secret signal perhaps?\"\n\nHenry stared Ruiz full in the face. \"No. Philip just misspoke.\"\n\nRuiz turned to the terrified student. \"Is that so?\"\n\nPhilip just moaned, closing his eyes.\n\nThe abbot leaned and spoke in Philip's ear. \"If you wish to live, I expect the truth.\"\n\nThe student's voice cracked. \"I\u2026I don't know what you're asking.\"\n\n\"A simple question. Does Professor Conklin trust his nephew?\"\n\nPhilip's eyes flicked toward Henry, then away again. \"I\u2026I guess.\"\n\nThe abbot's face grew grim, clearly dissatisfied by the vague answer. \"Philip,\" he intoned menacingly.\n\nThe student cringed. \"Yes!\" he gasped out. \"Professor Conklin trusts Sam more than any of us. He always has!\"\n\nThe abbot nodded, and the knife left the student's throat. \"Thank you for your candor.\" Ruiz turned to Henry. \"It seems a further lesson is needed to convince you of the value of cooperation.\"\n\nHenry felt ice enter his veins.\n\n\"For your deception against the path of God, a severe punishment is in order. But who should it be exacted upon?\" The abbot seemed to ponder the question for a moment, then spoke. \"I think I shall leave this up to you, Professor Conklin.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"You get a choice on who will bear the burden of your sins: Philip or Dr. Engel?\"\n\n\"If you're going to punish anyone,\" Henry said, \"then punish me.\"\n\n\"We can't do that, Professor Conklin. We need you alive. And making this choice is punishment enough, I imagine.\"\n\nHenry blanched, his knees weakening.\n\n\"We have no need for two hostages. Whoever you choose\u2014Philip or Dr. Engel\u2014will be killed. It is your choice.\"\n\nHenry found Philip's eyes upon him, begging him for his life. What was he to do?\n\n\"Make your decision in the next ten seconds or both will die.\"\n\nHenry closed his eyes. He pictured Joan's face, laughing and smiling over their dinner in Baltimore, candlelight glowing on her cheeks. He loved her. He could no longer deny it, but he could also not dismiss his responsibility here. Though Philip was often a thoughtless ass, he was still one of his students, his responsibility. Henry bit his lips, tears welling. He remembered Joan's lips at his ear, her breath on his neck, the scent of her hair.\n\n\"Professor?\"\n\nHenry opened his eyes and stared angrily at the abbot. \"You bastard\u2026\"\n\n\"Choose. Or I will order both of them slain.\" The abbot raised a hand, ready to signal the friar. \"Who will die for your sins?\"\n\nHenry choked on the words, \"D\u2026Dr. Engel.\" He sagged after he spoke Joan's death sentence. But what other choice did he have? Though many years had passed since their time together at Rice, Joan had not changed. Henry still knew her heart. She would never forgive Henry if he preserved her life at the cost of Philip's. Still, his decision cut him like a huge jagged dagger in his chest. He could hardly breathe.\n\n\"So be it,\" Abbot Ruiz stated mildly, turning away. \"Let it be done.\"\n\nSam followed Kamapak as the shaman trotted out of the jungle's fringes and into the brightness of the morning sun. Even with the cloak of mist overhead, the sun's brilliance was painful after the dim light of the shadowed jungle.\n\nShading his eyes, Sam stumbled to a stop. Maggie pulled up beside him. Both were winded from the high-altitude jog. A headache rang in Sam's skull as he surveyed the land beyond the jungle's edge.\n\nA hundred yards away rose an almost vertical wall of bare volcanic stone, a cliff of crenellated rock, knife-sharp, and as coppery red as fresh blood. Above it loomed the black cone of the neighboring volcanic mountain, imposing in its heights.\n\nAhead, a thin trail zigzagged up the wall to the opening of a tunnel seventy yards above the valley floor. It looked like a hard climb. Two men could be seen working their way down the slope from the opening. Sunlight flashed off the spears they carried. Denal was not with them.\n\n\"C'mon!\" Sam said, pointing his transformed dagger toward the men.\n\nMaggie nodded, too winded to speak. Adjusting Sam's rifle over her shoulder, she cinched it higher and followed.\n\nKamapak led the way through a small field of wild quinoa, a type of highland wheat, along the forest's edge. Beyond the green fields, at the base of the cliff, lay a wide apron of scraggled scrub and tumbled volcanic rock. A handful of vents steamed nearby, collared with yellow stains of sulfur. The air was humid and warm, a foul-smelling sauna.\n\nThey met the other two Incas at the trailhead that led up to the tunnel above. As Kamapak spoke to the guards, Sam studied the spears the two men brandished. Their blades were gold like his dagger. But more importantly, the weapons appeared unbloodied. Sam tried to listen to the conversation, but he could understand none of it. Finally, the shaman waved the men back toward the village and began the steep climb, leading them upward.\n\nSam stopped Kamapak with a touch to his shoulder. \"Denal?\" he asked.\n\nThe shaman just shook his head, pointed up, and continued the journey.\n\n\"What do you think?\" Maggie asked.\n\n\"I don't know. But apparently the answer lies up there.\"\n\nMaggie glanced worriedly toward the opening far above. \"At the temple?\"\n\nSam nodded grimly, and the two followed Kamapak up the series of switchbacks that climbed the wall. Any further talk was cut off by the need to breathe. Sam's grip on his knife grew slick. He heard Maggie panting behind him. The muscles of his legs began to protest from the exertion.\n\nOnly Kamapak seemed unaffected. Acclimated to the altitude and moist heat, the shaman seemed unfazed by the climb. He reached the opening before they did and waited for them. He spoke as they approached. The only word recognizable to Sam was Inti, the god of the sun.\n\nSam glanced behind him and surveyed the spread of valley. Below, the village, half-covered in jungle, was barely discernible. Then suddenly a series of small fires climbed the rocky ridge off to the left, reaching to the lip of the volcanic cone. The signal fires. \"Good going, Norman,\" he wheezed quietly.\n\nMaggie joined him. \"Let's hope your uncle gets here soon,\" she said, eyeing the fires. Then she nudged Sam toward the tunnel. \"Let's get going.\"\n\nKamapak struck a torch to flame and led the way inside. The tunnel was wide enough for four men to walk abreast and seemed to stretch straight ahead. No curves or turns. The walls around them were smooth volcanic stone.\n\n\"A lava tube,\" Maggie said, touching the stone.\n\nSam nodded and pointed ahead. The darkness of the tunnel had seemed at first impenetrable. But as Sam grew accustomed to the gloom, he noticed a vague light coming from far ahead. Sunlight. \"Norman was right,\" he said. \"The tunnel must connect either to another valley or a cavern open to the sky.\"\n\nBefore Maggie could respond, Kamapak stopped ahead. The shaman lit two torches embedded in the right wall. They framed a small cave that neither Sam nor Maggie had noticed in the darkness. Kamapak knelt before the entrance.\n\nAs flames blew forth, a glow from the side chamber reflected back the torchlight into the main tunnel. Drawn like moths, Sam and Maggie moved forward.\n\nSam reached the entrance first. He stumbled to a stop as he saw what lay in the side chamber. Maggie reached his side. She tensed, then grabbed the Texan's upper arm. Her fingers dug in tightly.\n\n\"The temple,\" she whispered.\n\nIn the neighboring cave stood a sight to humble any man. The space was as large as a two-car garage, but every surface was coated with gold\u2014floor, ceiling, walls. It was a virtual golden cavern! And whether it was a trick of the light or some other property, the golden surfaces seemed to flow, whorling and eddying, sliding along the exposed surfaces but never exposing the underlying volcanic rock. In the center of the room's floor was a solid slab of gold, clearly an altar or bed. Its top surface was contoured slightly, molded to match the human physique. Above the altar, hanging like a golden chandelier, was a fanciful sphere of filigreed gold, strands and filaments twined and twisted into a dense mesh. It reminded Sam of a spider's egg sac, more organic than metal. Even here the illusion of flowing gold persisted. The entwined mass of strands seemed to wind and churn slowly in the flickering torchlight.\n\n\"Where's Denal?\" Maggie asked.\n\nSam shook his head, still too shocked to speak. He pointed his serpent-shaped knife at the central altar. \"No blood.\"\n\n\"Thank God. Let's\u2014\" Maggie jumped back a step.\n\nA small spiral of gold filament snaked out from the mass above the altar and stretched toward Sam. \"Don't move,\" Sam mumbled, freezing in place himself.\n\nThe thread of gold spun through the air, trailing like a questing tentacle. It seemed drawn toward Sam's extended dagger. Finally it stretched long enough to brush against the gold serpent, touching a fang. Instantly, the golden sculpture melted, features dissolving away, surfaces flowing like warm wax. The hilt grew cold in Sam's grip as heat was absorbed from it. Then the gold reshaped itself, stretching and sharpening, into the original dagger.\n\nThe questing filament retreated, pulled back into the main mass like a reeled in fishing line.\n\nSam held the dagger before his eyes. \"What the hell just happened?\"\n\nMaggie found her tongue, crossing into Sam's shadow, keeping his wide shoulders between her and the gold cave, the temple. \"It's not gold. It can't be. Whatever your blade is made of, it's the same as the temple. What the Mochico called sun gold. Some metal culled from meteors.\"\n\n\"But it almost seems alive,\" Sam said, backing away with her.\n\nKamapak rose to his feet, eyes full of awe for Sam. He mumbled something at Sam, then bowed his head.\n\n\"I don't think we should tinker with it, Sam. Let's find out what happened to Denal, and leave this until more experienced scientists arrive.\"\n\nSam nodded dully. \"This is what Friar de Almagro saw. It's what must have scared the man into sealing off this caldera. The Serpent of Eden.\"\n\n\"That an' the decapitated head of Pachacutec,\" Maggie mumbled.\n\nSam turned to her. On the way to the temple, Maggie had told him how she had eavesdropped on Norman and Sam's fireside conversation, knew the fabricated story of Inkarri. \"You don't buy into that nonsense of the beheaded king, do you?\"\n\nMaggie glanced down. \"There's something I didn't tell you, Sam.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I wanted more time to think about what I saw before speaking.\" She glanced up at him. \"I sneaked into the courtyard after you an' Norman were dragged away. I saw Pachacutec without his robe. His body was\u2026was wrong.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"It was like\u2014\"\n\nA scream suddenly echoed down the passage, cutting off the conversation. Sam and Maggie froze.\n\n\"Denal!\" Maggie gasped out as the cry echoed away.\n\n\"He's alive!\"\n\nSam stepped farther down the tunnel, toward the point where the vague glow of sunlight could be seen coming from ahead. \"But for how much longer? Let's go.\"\n\nKamapak raised an arm to block them. He shook his head fiercely, babbling clear words of warning. The only understandable syllables were janan pacha. Incan Heaven. Sam recalled how the children of the villagers were said to be given as gifts to the gods at janan pacha. It was where they must have taken Denal! Kamapak stared defiantly at Sam, forbidding them passage.\n\n\"Fuck this!\" Sam mumbled angrily. He brandished his dagger before Kamapak. \"We're going, buddy. So either move or I'll carve a door in you.\"\n\nThe tone of his voice must have breached the language barrier. Kamapak backed away, fear in his eyes at the dagger. Sam did not wait for the shaman to change his mind. He led the way at a fast clip. Kamapak, though, trailed behind them, muttering prayers under his breath.\n\nSoon they were at the exit of the tunnel. It emptied onto the floor of another volcanic caldera. But the mists there were thicker, the sunlight filtered to a twilight glow. Even drapes of heavy fog obscured the forested jungle ahead. The reek of sulfur was strong enough to burn the eyes, and the heat was stifling. A clear path led into the jungle.\n\n\"We must be in the neighboring caldera,\" Maggie whispered.\n\nSam nodded and continued into the valley. Maggie followed, and after a moment's hesitation, so did Kamapak. The shaman's posture was slightly hunched, his eyes on the strange skies, like he feared something would reach out and grab him. Clearly, the shaman had never been there. Some strong taboo.\n\n\"Not exactly my idea of heaven, that's for sure,\" Sam said as he led the way into the jungle, wiping the sweat from his brow. Under the canopy, twilight became night.\n\nAround them, the jungle was quiet. No bird calls or the rustle of animals. In the gloom, Sam did spot a few monkeys hidden in the canopy overhead, but they were motionless, quiet. Only their eyes tracked the strangers in their midst.\n\nMaggie already had the rifle unslung, and Sam hoped she was the experienced marksman she claimed to be. Especially since their only other weapon was Sam's dagger.\n\nNo one dared even whisper as they followed the path to where the jungle opened ahead. As they reached the brighter light, Sam crouched and held up a hand, halting them. They needed a plan. He glanced to Maggie. Her eyes were wide with fear and worry. Kamapak huddled behind her, wary.\n\nThen another scream erupted, piercing the jungle like an arrow. It came from just ahead. \"Help me!\" The terror was clear in the boy's voice.\n\n\"To hell with caution,\" Sam blurted, and stood. \"C'mon!\" He raced down the last of the path, Maggie at his heels.\n\nThey burst from the jungle cover into the outskirts of another Incan village. There, too, terraced stone homes climbed the gentle slopes and lay half-hidden in the fringes of the jungle. But that was the only similarity. The jungle had encroached on the village, claiming it. Everywhere weeds and bits of forest grew from between the slabs of granite, sprouting as if from the stone itself. Nearby, a tree grew from one of the cracked rooftops, spreading its limbs to envelop the house.\n\nBut as unkempt as the village was, the smell was even worse.\n\nThe streets were full of refuse and offal. Old animal bones lay scattered like broken glass in an alley, many with pieces of hide or fur still clinging to them. Underfoot, shattered shards of pottery crumbled.\n\n\"Jesus,\" Maggie said, covering her mouth. \"It's the third city.\"\n\n\"What?\" Sam whispered.\n\n\"Remember from the celebration the first night. You guessed the necropolis was built as a city of uca pacha, the lower world, while the other village was of cay pacha, the middle world. Well, here's the third village. A city of the upper world, of janan pacha.\"\n\nSam glanced at the fouled and ruined streets in disgust. This was no heavenly city. But he dared not stop to ponder the mystery. Waving them on, Sam led them down the avenue.\n\nAs they ran, Kamapak stared at the ruined village with horror, eyes wide with disbelief.\n\nObviously this is not his idea of Heaven either, Sam thought.\n\nAhead noises began to be heard: grunting and soft angry squeals. But through the noise, one sound drew them on. Sobbing. It had to be Denal.\n\nSam slowed as the street emptied onto the village's main square. He peeked around the corner, then fell back. \"Damn\u2026\"\n\n\"What?\" Maggie whispered. She crept to the corner and looked.\n\nSam saw her shoulders tense. He joined her at the corner, forcing back his initial shock. Stripped naked as a newborn, Denal stood in the center of the square, dazed and terrified.\n\nAnd with clear reason.\n\nAround him, the square was crammed with pale creatures. Some as large as bulls, others no bigger than muscled calves. Sam recognized the sickly forms. These were the same beasts that had haunted the necropolis below. They circled the boy, sniffing, snuffling at his heels. Occasional fights broke out, sudden hissed screams and slashes of razored claws. They had yet to decide what to make of the boy.\n\nBut one thing was clear. They were hungry. Saliva drooled from almost all their lips. They looked near starved. All knobbed bones and skin.\n\nOne of the nearest creatures suddenly spun in their direction. It was one of the spindly-legged beasts. One of the pack's scouts. Sam and Maggie barely slid back into hiding before being spotted.\n\nSam nudged Maggie back.\n\nThe tattooed shaman looked just as confused and horrified. Clearly he had never suspected what his janan pacha had truly hidden. Before Sam could stop him, Kamapak stepped around the corner, arms raised. With tears in his eyes, the shaman lifted his voice in song, bright with religious fervor. Kamapak strode toward the pack of creatures.\n\nThe beasts on the square grew quiet.\n\nSam pulled Maggie farther back. He whispered in her ear. \"We need to circle around. Take advantage of the shaman's distraction. See if we can free Denal.\"\n\nShe nodded, and the pair took off at a run, diving down a cross street that paralleled the plaza. They heard Kamapak's song droning on. Sam tried to race as quietly as possible, avoiding bones and pottery.\n\n\"This way!\" Maggie hissed and darted into an alley between two homes.\n\nSam followed and soon found himself crouched again before the square, but this time, Denal lay directly ahead of them. The boy had not noticed them; he had fallen to his knees, his eyes fixed on where the shaman stood.\n\nThe beasts had also been attracted by the singing. The monstrous throng had drifted away from the terrified boy and toward the new oddity. A path lay open.\n\nIf they were to rescue Denal, it was now or never.\n\nSam took a deep breath, then crept out, keeping low to the ground. Maggie followed, rifle at her shoulder.\n\nAcross the plaza, Sam spotted the shaman, now surrounded by the beasts. A few of the dwarfish members of the pack, the sexless drones, picked at the robe Kamapak wore. Others, the taller, more muscled hunters kept back warily, heads cocked, studying the newcomer, listening to the singing. But how long would his song keep the monsters cowed? Sam immediately had his answer. One of the hunters raced forward and clubbed the shaman to the stones of the plaza. Sam took a step toward Kamapak, but Maggie restrained him with a grip on his elbow.\n\nKamapak slowly pushed up and touched his bloody forehead. The pack stared as the shaman raised his red fingers. Then the beasts caught the scent of his blood and all else was forgotten. The pale forms surged and leaped forward, scrambling and swamping the shaman. Kamapak screamed in terror and pain. Screeches and howls accompanied the attack. Even from where he stood, Sam could hear bones snap and flesh rip.\n\nDenal turned away from the horrible sight and finally spotted Sam. He struggled to his feet and ran toward the pair on wobbly legs. The boy's eyes were puffy from tears, his face pale with terror. He opened his mouth to speak, but Sam raised a finger to his own lips. Denal clamped his mouth closed but could not stop a small whimper from escaping.\n\nSam and Maggie were soon at his side. As Sam pulled the boy to him, the growls and hisses began to die down across the plaza. Kamapak's own screams had already been silenced.\n\n\"We need to get clear of here!\" Maggie whispered.\n\nAcross the square, handfuls of the beasts had settled to the stones with their meals. Bits of torn robe were everywhere. Blood lay in a trampled pool on the stones. But Kamapak himself was gone, shredded apart and torn by the claws and teeth of the creatures. All that remained were bloody gob-bets being gnawed and fought over.\n\nBut, unfortunately, there was not enough of the thin shaman to go around. Several of the beasts now searched, sniffing, for another source of food. Their feral eyes fell back upon the boy. Their group was spotted.\n\n\"Damn it,\" Sam muttered.\n\nScreeches rose again from the remaining creatures. Even those with fresh meat raised bloody muzzles to see what else might be claimed.\n\n\"Denal, how'd you get down here?\" Sam asked, retreating across the square, no longer needing to be quiet. \"Is there another way out?\"\n\nThe boy shook his head. \"The guards took me to the temple. Made me lie down on the altar. Then I wake up\u2026I here, dizzy, no clothes.\" Denal's voice cracked. \"Th\u2026then these things come!\"\n\n\"What the hell are they?\"\n\nDenal stuttered. \"Th\u2026their gods.\"\n\nOne of the nearest beasts lunged at them. Maggie eyed it through the rifle's sight and fired. The creature flew back, half its skull blown away. \"Well, these feckin' gods bleed.\"\n\nThe dead beast was set upon by some of its brethren. More meat for the feast. But it did not slow the others down; bloodlust and hunger had driven them into a near frenzy.\n\nSam, Denal, and Maggie continued to retreat until new growls arose behind them. Sam swung around. More of the creatures shambled and crept into the back of the square, late-comers to the party, drawn by the fresh blood and screams. From the rooftops all around, other pale beasts clambered and howled their hunger.\n\n\"I think the dinner bell's just been rung,\" Sam said dourly.\n\nJoan worked in her cell. She had spent the morning poring over various journal articles, abstracts, and typed notes on the theory of nanotechnology supplied to her by the earnest young monk. She was especially intrigued by the paper on the theory of biomimetic systems, the idea of constructing microscopic machines by imitating already existing biological models, such as mitochondria and viruses. The article by a Dr. Eric Drexler proposed using proteins and nucleic acids as the building components of a micromachine, or nanobot. The article expounded on how present-day biology could inspire the generation of \"synthetic, nonbiological structures.\"\n\nJoan leaned back, picturing the microscopic octagonal units that composed Substance Z. Their shape had struck her as familiar, almost an imitation of viral phages. Were these units actual examples of biomimetic constructs?\n\nReaching to the tabletop, Joan rifled through her papers until she came across a printout from the scanning probe microscopy analysis. It broke down the component parts of the strange unit.\n\n\u2002Assay 134B12\n\n\u2002SPM analysis: utilizing phase imaging, force modulation, pulsed forced microscopy (results cross referenced with mass spectrograph analysis #134B8)\n\n\u2002Initial findings:\n\n\u2002Shell architecture: macromolecules of Si (silicon) and H(hydrogen), specifically cubosiloxane (H8S18O12) plus tectosilicates\n\n\u2002Articulated arms: Si (silicon) nanotubes interfaced with Au(gold)\n\n\u2002Core: Unable to analyze\n\nJoan tapped at the sheet of paper. So the arms of the nanoparticle contained gold, hence the hue of Substance Z. But what intrigued her more was the shell composition. It was mostly silicon. In nature, almost all biologic building blocks were based on hydrocarbons\u2014molecules of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. But here was a construct that replaced carbon with silicon.\n\n\"Hydrosilicons,\" she mumbled, naming this new class of molecule. Though hydrocarbons made up most of biology, in geology, it was silicon that made up the dominant element in the earth's crust. Could this structure be some link between biology and geology? Or as the young monk had proposed, was this the first inorganic nanobot to be discovered.\n\nLastly, her eyes rested on the last line of the report. The composition of the core. Unable to analyze. Here was the crux of the mystery. The exterior was known and quantifiable, but the inner workings were still an enigma. This brought her back to the ultimate question raised by the young monk in his own personal papers: What is the purpose of this microscopic machine? And who had programmed it?\n\nBefore Joan could ponder the mysteries any deeper, she heard the scrape of heel on stone from down the hall. She glanced to her watch and furrowed her brow. It was much too early for anyone to be fetching her lunch. She bit her lower lip. Whoever approached probably had nothing to do with her, but she could not take that risk.\n\nJoan hurriedly straightened up the contents of her desktop. She shifted the research papers into a neat pile, then folded the worn sheet of legal paper with Friar de Almagro's code and stuffed it in a pocket. Next she slid the single book allowed in her room, a King James Bible, over the ragged hole she had blown through the oak desktop, hiding the result of her experimentation last night.\n\nFinally, she rolled the cigarette she had bummed from Friar Carlos off the desk and tucked it into her breast pocket. She surveyed her handiwork, satisfied that no sign of her secret experiment with Substance Z had been discovered.\n\nAnd luckily she did. The footsteps stopped right outside her door. Joan tensed. A key was fitted into the lock and turned.\n\nShe swung around as the door was pulled open. It was Friar Carlos with his 9mm Glock. She stood, brows raised in question. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Out,\" he said brusquely, waving his pistol. \"Come with me.\"\n\nJoan hesitated; fear that she had been caught iced her blood.\n\n\"Now!\" Carlos barked.\n\nNodding, Joan stepped forward and through the door. One hand fingered the collar of her blouse. On the underside of the removable plastic stay of her collar were the two teardrop-sized pearls of Substance Z. She could not risk leaving the samples in her cell. The room might be searched, or she might be reassigned to a new cell. So she had devised this way to keep the golden drops hidden and in her possession.\n\nCarlos nodded her forward. She followed his directions. She expected him to lead her down to the labs, but instead he herded her to a new section of the Abbey. She frowned at the unfamiliar surroundings. \"Where are we going?\"\n\n\"You'll see when you get there.\"\n\nThe friar, never a warm fellow, was even more tight-lipped today. His tense attitude heightened her nervousness. What was going on? This wing of the Abbey was spartan. Plain stone floors with a string of bare bulbs illuminated the way. There were no lines of small doors opening into tiny domiciles. Joan glanced up and down the long hall. They had not passed a single of the Abbey's denizens since entering this wing.\n\n\"Is th\u2026there something wrong?\" she asked, unable to keep the tremble from her voice.\n\nFriar Carlos did not answer. He simply guided her to a small staircase at the end of the hall. It was only six steps and led to a thick oak door banded in iron. A small crucifix etched in silver marked the door. Above the crucifix was a pair of crossed swords.\n\nJoan remembered Henry remarking on such a symbol found on Friar de Almagro's heraldic ring. She remembered its meaning. It was the mark of the Inquisition.\n\nNervousness became a clammy fear as Carlos backed her to the side at gunpoint and knocked on the door. His rap was clearly a code. A latch was slid open from inside, the grate of iron on wood loud in the empty, bare hall.\n\nCarlos stepped back as the door was swung open. Joan felt the heat of the next room flow out like the breath of a dragon. She was not allowed to back away. The 9mm Glock was pressed firmly into her side.\n\nA heavy figure, his bared chest gleaming with sweat, stood in the doorway. He had shrugged his monk's robes from his shoulders and let it hang from his sashed belt. He ran a hand over his bald pate, which was also gleaming, and spoke in clipped Spanish. Carlos answered. The big monk nodded his head and waved them inside.\n\n\"Go,\" Carlos ordered.\n\nWith no other choice, Joan followed. The next room was something from old horror movies. To the left was a row of barred cells, straw-floored, with no beds. To the right was a wall upon which were hung neatly coiled chains. A row of leather whips hung from pegs. In the center of the room was a brazier, red hot with flickers of flames. Amid the glowing coals, three long iron poles were embedded.\n\nBranding irons.\n\nJoan glanced around the room. She was in a mock-up of a medieval dungeon. No, she corrected herself. She could smell a familiar scent. Something from her days at the emergency room. Blood and fear. This was no mock-up, no wax museum set. It was real.\n\n\"Why\u2026why am I here?\" Joan asked aloud, but in her heart she already knew the answer. Henry had made some mistake. As frightening as her surroundings were, Joan felt a twinge of worry for Henry. What had happened to him? She faced Carlos. \"Am I to be punished?\"\n\n\"No,\" the friar said, his words as casual as if speaking of the weather. \"You are to be killed.\"\n\nJoan felt her knees weaken. The heat of the room suddenly sickened her. She could hardly breathe. \"I\u2026I don't understand.\"\n\n\"And you don't need to,\" Carlos answered. He nodded to the large monk.\n\nUsing a pair of leather gloves, the thick man judged his irons. He pulled them from the coals and eyed their glowing tips. He pursed his lips, content, then spoke in Spanish.\n\nCarlos raised his pistol. \"Move to the far wall.\"\n\nJoan did not trust her legs. She glanced around the room, then back to Carlos. \"Why all this? Why this way?\" She weakly pointed at his gun. \"You could have killed me in the room.\"\n\nCarlos's lips grew grimmer. He studied the tools of interrogation, the tools of the Inquisition, and answered, \"We need the practice.\"\n\nMaggie stared down her rifle and squeezed the trigger. The pale face flew back, the mouth a bloody ruin. Pivoting on her toe, Maggie swung the barrel at her next target. The blasts of the Winchester had deafened her by now to the screeches and howls. She operated on instinct. She fired again, blowing back one of the pale scouts that had wandered too near. Its high-pitched squeal as it was set upon by its brethren managed finally to slice through her numb ears.\n\nShe lowered her rifle, wheezing between clenched teeth. The five beasts she had slain so far were at least keeping the throng momentarily occupied.\n\nSomething touched her shoulder. She butted the rifle's stock at it.\n\n\"Whoa!\" Sam yelled in her ear. \"Hold on! It's me!\" He gripped her shoulder more firmly.\n\nMaggie licked her dry lips, shaking slightly. \"What are we going to do?\" she moaned. The beasts still had them boxed in the center of the plaza and were not backing down. She had made no headway in blasting a path to freedom. For every creature she shot down, more would leap and scramble to fill the gap.\n\nSam released his grip. \"I've been counting. You have only one more round left.\"\n\nMaggie glanced at the rifle. \"Jesus!\" She raised the weapon. Her last shot had better be good. She forced her hands not to tremble.\n\nSam pushed her gun down. \"Let me try.\"\n\n\"With what?\" she hissed at him.\n\nHe raised his gold knife. \"Remember the creatures at the necropolis?\"\n\n\"Sam, you're gonna have to let them come damn close,\" she argued, pulling the rifle free of his grip.\n\n\"Maybe not.\" Sam stepped in front of her. Taking off his Stetson, he lifted the gold dagger high and waved his hat with his other hand. He screamed a raw bellow of challenge.\n\nHundreds of eyes lifted from their meals and growled back at Sam.\n\nThe Texan replaced his hat, leaving only the dagger held in an upthrust fist. The growls from the massed throats died down as gazes flicked to the gold knife. A trickle of whimpering sounded to one side. Sam seemed to have heard it, too. He swung toward the noise, the weak spot in the throng. He waved his dagger with long sweeping motions, repeating his bellow of anger.\n\nThe wall of pale forms began to pull back from him, breaking apart.\n\n\"Stick to my back,\" Sam whispered at Maggie and Denal.\n\nMaggie waved the naked boy ahead, then covered their rear with the Winchester. One bullet, she kept reminding herself.\n\nSam began a slow approach toward the throng, brandishing his dagger, jabbing, swiping, growling.\n\nWith bleating cries, several of the beasts galloped out of his path. The standoff broke down. More and more of the beasts fled, dragging off the bloody chunks they had managed to scavenge.\n\n\"I think it's working,\" Sam said.\n\nSuddenly, something lunged at Sam. Vestigial wings beat on its back, identifying it as one of the hunters. Sam stumbled back, tripping over Denal.\n\nMaggie danced away, keeping her feet and swinging her rifle.\n\nBut she was too slow.\n\nSam fell atop the boy as the creature leaped atop them. Denal screamed in terror. Sam shoved his only weapon up. The dagger. The screeching beast impaled itself on the blade. It seemed a small weapon compared to the hooked claws and shredding fangs of the attacker\u2014but the effect was anything but small.\n\nThe tiny wings of the beast seemed suddenly to work. The creature appeared to fly straight up off Sam's blade, squealing a noise that made even Maggie cringe. It rolled to the stones of the plaza and lay belly up. Small flames could be seen lancing from between the clawed fingers that clutched its wounded abdomen.\n\nAround them, the pale throng froze and became silent, eyes wide, unblinking.\n\nThe flames spread from the beast's belly. Like a wildfire in dry grass, the blaze blew through the creature. It arched and writhed; jaws stretched wide in a silent scream of agony. Flames shot out of its throat, flickering like some fiery tongue, and then its head was consumed. The creature's bulk collapsed to the stone, dead. Flames still danced along its blackened form, a sick pyre.\n\nSam and Denal were already on their feet. \"Let's go,\" Sam said.\n\nThe Texan threatened again with his dagger, but this time, there was no challenge. The remaining beasts in his path cleared out. Huddled in a tight group, they crossed toward the exit. All three held their breath.\n\nMaggie stared at the smoldering form of the attacker. Spontaneous combustion. She tried to add this piece to the growing puzzle. She shook her head. Now was not the time.\n\nShe turned her attention forward.\n\nSam continued to threaten the few beasts who still hovered at the edges of their path. An especially large monster, all muscle and bone, still glared from one side. Its eyes were narrowed with wary hatred. Of all the creatures there, this one appeared well fed. It hunched on one knuckled fist, like some silverback gorilla, but naked and pale. Maggie recognized it as one of the rare \"leaders\" of the pack. She noticed it lacked any external genitalia. Like Pachacutec's body, she realized.\n\nOne of Maggie's eyes twitched as a horrible realization began to dawn. She was so shocked that she failed to notice what the hulking beast held in its other clawed fist. \"Sam!\"\n\nThe creature swung his arm and threw a boulder the size of a ripe pumpkin at the Texan. Sam glanced over but could not move in time. The chunk of granite struck Sam's fist. The dagger flew from his grip. It landed in the middle of a clutch of the beasts.\n\nThe giant stone-thrower roared in triumph, raising on its legs and striking its barreled chest with one of its gnarled fists. Its triumphant bellow was echoed by others all across the plaza. Without the dagger, they had no defense now.\n\nMaggie raised her rifle toward the howling gorilla. \"Shut up, asshole!\" She pulled the trigger, and the monster fell backward, crashing to the stones. Its legs tremored in death throes for a breath, then grew still.\n\nAs the echoes of her rifle blast died down, silence returned to the plaza. No one moved. With the death of the leader, the pack was momentarily cowed.\n\nFinally, Maggie hissed, \"Sam, that was my last shell.\"\n\n\"Then I'd say we've overstayed our welcome here.\"\n\nAs if hearing him, the creatures began to creep slowly toward them again.\n\nThe Texan turned to Denal. \"How fast can you run?\"\n\n\"Just watch me!\" Denal flew down the empty street ahead.\n\nSam and Maggie took off after the boy, racing together through the fouled village.\n\nAngry screeches and hungry howls erupted behind them. The chase was on. With the prey on the run, the pack abandoned their wariness. Bloodlust overcame fear. Scouts ran along neighboring streets, white blurs between homes, tracking them. Behind them, hunters gave chase, howling their challenge.\n\nMaggie struggled to keep up with Sam, fighting to get the Winchester over her shoulder.\n\n\"Leave it,\" Sam yelled back.\n\n\"But\u2014?\"\n\nSam slowed and grabbed the rifle from her. He whipped it over his head and threw it behind them. The prized Winchester clattered and skittered across the rock. \"I'd rather save you, than a damned rusted rifle.\"\n\nUnburdened and strangely energized by Sam's words, Maggie increased her pace. They ran side by side, matching stride. Soon they were out of the village and onto the jungle path. Trees and whipping branches strove to slow them down, but they pushed onward, scratched and bloodied.\n\nDenal was a few meters ahead of them, leaping and running naked through the woods.\n\n\"Make for the tunnel!\" Sam called ahead.\n\n\"What tunnel?\" Denal called back, almost tripping.\n\nMaggie realized Denal had no memory of getting here. She yelled. \"Just stick to the trail, Denal. It leads right to it!\"\n\nThe boy increased his stride. Sam and Maggie struggled to follow. Behind them, they could hear the snap of branches and the yipping barks of the hunters.\n\nGasping, neither tried to speak any longer. Maggie's vision narrowed to a pinpoint and, as she ran, her legs spasmed and cramped. She began to slow.\n\nSam's arm was suddenly under her, pulling her along.\n\n\"No\u2026Sam\u2026go on.\" But she was too weak even to fight him.\n\n\"Like hell I will.\" He hauled her with him. The chase seemed endless. Maggie did not remember the trail being this long.\n\nThen finally sunlight returned. The jungle fell behind them. Ahead, the black eye of the tunnel lay only a handful of meters ahead. Denal was already there, hovering at the entrance.\n\nSam half carried her up the short slope to the entrance. \"Get inside!\" he called to the boy.\n\nMaggie glanced over her shoulder. Pale forms burst through the jungle foliage, ripping away clinging vines. Some loped on two legs, some ran on all fours.\n\n\"Get inside! Now, Denal!\"\n\n\"I\u2026I can't!\" the boy whined.\n\nMaggie swung forward. Denal still crouched by the entrance. He would take a step toward the shadowed interior, then back away.\n\nSam and Maggie joined him. The Texan pushed her toward the tunnel. \"Go!\"\n\nMaggie stumbled into the entrance, her vision so dimmed that the gloom of the tunnel was blinding. She twisted around to see Sam pull Denal into his arms.\n\nThe boy screeched like a butchered pig as Sam leaped into the tunnel beside her. Denal writhed and contorted in the man's arms.\n\n\"What's wrong with him?\" Maggie asked, as she and Sam limped deeper down the throat of the tunnel.\n\nDenal's back arched in a tremored convulsion. \"I think he's having a seizure,\" Sam said, holding the boy tight.\n\nBehind them, the screeches of the beasts echoed up the passage. Maggie glanced over her shoulder. The beasts piled up at the entrance, twisted forms limned in the sunlight. But none entered. None dared pursue their escaping prey into the tunnel. \"They won't come in here,\" Maggie muttered. She frowned as she swung around. Like Denal, she added silently.\n\nSam finally fell to his knees, exhausted, legs trembling. He laid Denal down. The boy's eyes were rolled white, and a frothing saliva clung to his lips. He gurgled and choked.\n\n\"I don't understand what's the matter with him,\" Sam said.\n\nMaggie glanced back to the writhing mass of beasts at the tunnel's opening. She slowly shook her head.\n\nFinally, Denal coughed loudly. His body relaxed. Maggie reached toward the boy, thinking he was expiring. But when she touched him, Denal's eyes rolled back. He stared at her, then sat up quickly, like coming out of a bad dream. \"Que paso?\" he asked in Spanish.\n\n\"I had to drag you inside,\" Sam said. \"What was wrong?\"\n\nDenal's brows pinched together as he struggled back to English. \"It would not let me come inside.\"\n\n\"What wouldn't?\"\n\nDenal pressed a finger against his forehead, eyes squeezed shut. \"I don't know.\"\n\nMaggie suspected the answer. \"It was the temple.\"\n\nSam glanced over the boy's head at her. \"What?\"\n\nMaggie stood. \"Let's get out of here.\"\n\nSam helped the boy up. They followed her as she slowly trudged back toward the distant exit. Ahead, the two torches that framed the golden alcove, the Incan's Temple of the Sun, could be seen flickering from their notches in the wall.\n\nAs Maggie drew abreast of the cave, she slowed and stopped, studying the golden altar and the webbed mass of golden filaments above it.\n\nSam drew up to her, but his eyes were still cautiously watching their backtrail for any renewed sign of pursuit. He mumbled as he joined her, \"If that was Incan Heaven back there, I hate to see their idea of Hell.\"\n\nMaggie nodded toward the golden temple. \"I think it's right here.\"\n\nDenal hung back, keeping as far from the shining room as possible.\n\nSam stepped beside her. \"I know. It's hard to believe the Incas would feed their children to those monsters.\"\n\n\"No, Sam. You don't understand. Those monsters are their children.\" Maggie turned toward Sam. She ignored his incredulous look. She needed to voice her theory aloud. \"They told us the temple takes their children, turns them into gods, and sends them to janan pacha.\" Maggie pointed back toward where the last of the beasts still cavorted and whined at the entrance. \"Those are the missing children.\"\n\n\"How\u2026why\u2026?\"\n\nMaggie touched Sam's shoulder. \"As I tried to tell you before, I saw Pachacutec without his king's robes. His body was hairless, pale, with no genitalia. His body looked just like one of those beasts. Like that big creature I shot. One of the pack's leaders.\"\n\nSam's brows bunched; his eyes shone with disbelief. He glanced to the temple. \"You're saying that thing actually grew him a new body?\"\n\n\"As well as it was able. As Sapa Inca or king, it gave him the body of a pack leader.\"\n\n\"But that's impossible.\"\n\nMaggie frowned. \"As impossible as Norman's healed knee?\" she asked. \"Or his repaired eyesight? Or his ability to suddenly communicate with the Incas? Think about it, Sam!\" She nodded to the temple. \"This thing is some biological regenerator. It's kept the Incas alive for hundreds of years\u2026it grew their leader a new body. But why? Why does it do that?\"\n\nSam shook his head.\n\nMaggie pointed once again toward the beastly caldera. \"That's the price for eternal life here. The children! It takes their offspring and\u2026and I don't know\u2026maybe experiments with them. Who knows? But whatever the purpose, the temple is using the Incas' children as biologic fodder. The villagers are no more than cattle in a reproductive experiment.\"\n\n\"But what about Denal?\" Sam asked.\n\nShe glanced to the boy. He was unchanged\u2026mostly. She remembered his reluctance to enter the tunnel. \"I think the temple needs more malleable material, earlier genetic cells, like from newborns. Denal was too old. So it did to him like it does to all its experiments. Once finished, it instilled some mental imperative to cross to the next caldera and implanted phobic blocks on returning. You saw Denal's inability to enter here, just like the creatures'. I suspect those beasts we found at the necropolis two days ago had migrated from the caldera through other tunnels, perhaps looking for another way out, and became trapped down there. I think the beasts are allowed to go anywhere except into the villagers' valley. That is forbidden.\"\n\n\"But why?\"\n\n\"Because the temple is protecting its investment from its own biologic waste products. It can't risk some harm coming to its future source of raw genetic material. So it protects the villagers.\"\n\n\"But if these creatures are a risk, why doesn't it just destroy the experiments once it's done with them? Why let them live?\"\n\nMaggie shrugged. \"I'm not sure. Maybe the neighboring caldera is a part of the experiment, some natural testing ground for its creations. It monitors how they adapt and function in a real environment.\"\n\n\"And what about the way they burn up when I stabbed them?\"\n\n\"Spontaneous combustion. A fail-safe mechanism. Did you notice how Denal's guards had spears made of the same gold? A blow from one of these weapons, even a scratch, must set off some energy cascade. It's just another level of protection for the villagers.\"\n\nSam stared at the temple, horror growing in his eyes. \"It still sounds crazy. But considering what happened to Norman, I can't deny that you might be right.\" He turned to Maggie. \"But, if so, why is the temple doing all this? What is its ultimate goal? Who built it?\"\n\nMaggie frowned. She had no answer. She began to shake her head when a new noise intruded into the tunnel.\n\n\u2026whump, whump, whump\u2026\n\nSam and Maggie both turned toward the tunnel's other end. It was coming from the valley beyond.\n\n\"C'mon,\" Sam said excitedly. He led them at a fast clip toward the bright sunlight.\n\nAs they reached the end, squinting at the late morning's glare, Sam pointed. \"Look! It's the cavalry!\" Circling through the mists overhead was a dark shadow. As it descended farther, the green-black body of a military transport helicopter came into sight. \"It's Uncle Hank! Thank God!\"\n\nMaggie also sighed with relief. \"I'll be glad to get the professor's take on all this.\"\n\nSam put his arm around her. She didn't resist.\n\nThen deeper down in the valley, a new sound challenged the beat of the rotors. A more rapid thumping: drums! It seemed the Incas had also spotted the strange bird entering their valley. The sharp clangs of beaten gongs began to ring through the valley, strident and angry.\n\nMaggie glanced at Sam. \"War drums.\"\n\nSam's arm dropped from her shoulder; his grin faded. \"I don't understand. Norman should've warned the Incas not to fear the professor or the others.\"\n\n\"Something must've gone wrong.\"\n\nSam now wore a deep frown. \"I've got to reach my uncle and warn him.\" He began to lead the way down the steep switchbacks.\n\nBelow in the valley, the helicopter descended toward the flat field of quinoa planted at the jungle's edge. The shafts of the plants were beaten flat by the rotor's wash.\n\nMaggie followed. \"But what about Norman?\" she yelled over the roar of the helicopter.\n\nSam did not answer, but his pace increased.\n\nNorman hid in the fringes of the jungle as the helicopter landed in the green meadow beyond. He kept tucked behind the leaves of a thorny bush; tiny green ants marched down a frond before his eyes, too busy to be bothered by the thumping beat of the helicopter as its skids settled into the field.\n\nNorman, though, felt every thudding whump deep in his chest. Cringing, he prayed he was wrong and hoped he had misinterpreted Professor Conklin's words. \"After all that's occurred this last week,\" he mumbled to himself, \"maybe I'm just being paranoid.\" Still, Norman remained hidden as the passenger compartment of the chopper slid open. A part of him knew that he was not wrong. Professor Conklin had been trying to warn Norman about something. But what?\n\nThe answer was soon apparent. A mix of men, some dressed in fatigues and jungle camouflage, others dressed in the brown robes of monks, clambered from the helicopter. The men, even the monks, moved too efficiently to be just a rescue team. Crated gear was off-loaded from a hatch and cracked open. Norman saw assault rifles passed from hand to hand. Several of the men knelt and attached grenade launchers to their weapons.\n\nNorman hunkered down even lower. Oh, God! He hadn't been paranoid enough.\n\nFrom deeper in the jungle, the drums and clanging gongs that had sounded from the Incan village fell silent. Norman held his breath. He was glad he had warned Pachacutec to prepare the village. If there had been no danger, the plan was for Norman to accompany the professor back to the village, halting any bloodshed and making introductions.\n\nNorman considered returning to the village now. The Incas were prepared for hostilities, but not for this. He should warn them to flee. But Norman knew Pachacutec never would. The two had shared a long talk this morning, and it was clear the Incan king would brook no challenge to the tribe's autonomy. Pachacutec would not run.\n\nSo Norman remained hidden, peering through the fronded branches of his lookout post. The leader of the men, a rotund fellow outfitted in a safari suit and matching hat, barked orders and aligned his men for a march to the village. The men were quick to obey. In only ten minutes from the time the skids hit the ground, the assault team was under way. They operated with military precision.\n\nA pair of men took the point. Crouching, they ran from under the blades of the helicopter and raced to the trailhead that led to the village. From their reconnaissance in the air, Norman was sure the twisted trails to the village had been mapped. The other four men followed more slowly, cautiously, guns at the ready. The large leader, red-faced and covered in a sheen of sweat, moved behind them, armed with a pistol and flanked by a single guard for protection.\n\nNorman waited until the entire troupe had vanished into the jungle to finally breathe. He sat hunched, unsure what to do. He had to get word to Sam. Trying to peer toward the cliff face that contained the temple's tunnel, he could determine nothing about their fate. The jungle blocked his view.\n\nIf he could maybe work his way through the jungle\u2026\n\nHe started to shift when new voices froze him in place. He trembled, half-crouched. From the far side of the helicopter, two other men climbed from the helicopter. Norman instantly recognized the professor. He was unshaven, and his clothes looked like they had been slept in for a few days, but there was no mistaking his proud demeanor.\n\nHenry stumbled a step forward, shoved at gunpoint by a tall dark man dressed in a monk's robe. The gunman had dark black hair and an even darker scowl. A silver cross glinted on his chest.\n\nNorman did not understand all this religious garb. Clearly it was some ruse.\n\nVoices reached him as the pair stepped farther away from the helicopter. \"You will cooperate with us fully,\" the dark man said, \"or the student at the dig will suffer the same fate as the woman friend of yours.\"\n\nNorman saw Henry's shoulders slump slightly, defeated. He nodded.\n\nFrom his hiding place, Norman clenched his fists in helpless frustration. The gunman had to have been referring to Philip. The Harvard student must be held hostage back at the camp.\n\n\"The collected prisoners will be questioned,\" the man continued. \"You will help in the interrogation.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" Henry snapped back. \"But if my nephew or any of the others are harmed, you can all go fuck yourselves.\"\n\nThe man's countenance grew even darker, but he just stepped back. He used his free hand to slip out a cigarette.\n\nNorman shifted his crouched position, his right hand landing upon a chunk of volcanic rock. He clutched the rock and stared back at the sole man holding the professor captive. Norman worked the red rock free. If he sneaked along that ridge of basalt, it would put the helicopter between him and the guard. Norman already began to move, sidling along the jungle's edge. He knew even the chopper's pilot had left with the assault team, leaving only the single guard. It was a risk, but one that could save them all. If he could free the professor, they could flee together and join Sam's group.\n\nNorman reached the folded ridge of volcanic basalt, took a deep breath, then broke from cover and dashed across the open few yards to reach the cover of the ridge. He dived back into the welcome shadows, waiting for bullets to pepper the slope behind him, sure he had been seen. Nothing happened. He leaned a moment on the rough rock. He raised the chunk of volcanic stone, suddenly questioning how smart this was. Before fear could immobilize him, he pushed onward, scuttling like a crab in the shadow of the basalt ridge.\n\nOnce he was sure he had gone far enough, he risked a quick peek over the ridge. He was right. The bulk of the helicopter stood between him and the gunman. Norman climbed over the ridge as quietly as possible. The soft scrape of rock sounded explosively loud, but Norman knew it was all in his head. Besides, he was committed. Out in the open.\n\nHe ran with the rock clutched to his chest, his heart pounding so loudly that even the Incas at the village could probably hear it. But he made it to the shadow of the helicopter. He knelt and spotted the feet of the two men on the far side. They seemed unaware of his presence.\n\nCrawling under the helicopter, Norman moved around the extra fuel tanks. Strands of quinoa tickled his arms as he sneaked to the far side of the chopper. Ahead, both the professor and the gunman stood, their backs to him. The pair stared toward the jungle. The robed guard exhaled a long trail of smoke.\n\nHolding his breath and biting his lip, Norman slipped free. He could either creep slowly, thus avoiding any obstacles\u2026or simply make a mad dash toward his quarry. But Norman didn't trust his shaky legs with speed. So he stepped cautiously, placing one foot after the other, edging toward the gunman.\n\nHe was only an arm's length away when all hell broke loose.\n\nExplosions suddenly rocked the valley. The center of the jungle ripped far into the sky, flaming shards raining down.\n\nNorman gasped at the sight, unable to stop his surprised response.\n\nHearing him, the gunman twisted on a heel and dropped to a crouch.\n\nNorman found himself staring at the business end of a pistol. \"Drop it!\" the man ordered.\n\nThere was no need for words. The rock in Norman's hand was already falling from his numb fingers.\n\nFrom the jungles, screams and yells echoed forth. Gunfire rattled like a cupful of teeth.\n\nOver the man's head, Norman spotted Henry. He wore a look of hopelessness and defeat.\n\nNorman slumped, matching the expression. \"I'm sorry, Professor.\"\n\nSam stumbled to a stop when the first explosion tore through the valley. He crouched slightly at the rain of flaming debris. \"What the hell\u2014?\"\n\nDenal crouched down, too.\n\nMaggie was at Sam's shoulder, her eyes wide. \"They're attacking the village!\"\n\nSam stayed low. \"Uncle Hank would never do that.\"\n\n\"What if it's not the professor,\" Maggie said. \"Maybe someone else saw the signal fires. Thieves. Huaqueros. Maybe even the same bastards who tried to tunnel into our dig last week. Maybe they intercepted our radio messages an' beat Uncle Hank here.\"\n\nSam sank to the slope. \"What are we going to do?\"\n\nMaggie's eyes were fierce. \"Stop them.\" She nodded toward where the helicopter rested in the field, half-obscured by a peninsula of jungle. \"Take that out, and these thieves aren't going anywhere. Then call the professor and warn him to come with the police or army.\" She turned to Sam. \"We can't let them murder and steal what we found here.\"\n\nSam was nodding with her words. \"You're right. We have to at least try.\" He stood up. \"I'll go and reconnoiter the site. See what's up.\"\n\n\"No,\" Maggie argued. \"We remain together.\"\n\nSam frowned, but Maggie's expression did not budge.\n\nEven Denal nodded his head. \"I go, too.\" Sam caught the way the boy glanced up at the tunnel entrance. Denal was not being heroic; he just didn't want to be left alone\u2026especially naked and weaponless.\n\nSam stood and surveyed the valley.\n\nAutomatic gunfire echoed up from the jungle. Other explosions would occasionally erupt, tossing trees and rocks into the sky. Amidst the weapons fire, whispers of Incan war cries mixed with the screams of the dying. Smoke billowed up and through the jungle.\n\n\"Okay,\" Sam said. \"We all go. But stick together and keep quiet. We'll sneak to the jungle's edge and creep as close to the chopper as possible. Find out if there are any guards.\"\n\nMaggie nodded and waved him forward.\n\nSam hurried down the last of the switchbacks and led them through the escarpment of volcanic boulders and scrub bushes. Soon the shadows of the jungle swallowed up the trio. Sam raised a finger to his lips and guided them with hand signals. Within the embrace of the forest, the sounds of warfare grew muffled.\n\nCrouching, Sam picked a path through the foliage. They had to get to the helicopter before the thieves finished subduing the village. Sam prayed that there were some backup weapons in the helicopter. If they were to hold the valley until Uncle Hank got there, they would need their own fire-power.\n\nThe shadowy jungle grew brighter ahead. It was the forest's edge. Sam slowed his approach. Now was not the time to be caught. He signaled the others to hang back. Sam alone crept the last of the way. Just as he was fingering away a splayed leaf of a jungle fern, a familiar voice reached him.\n\n\"Leave the boy alone, Otera! There's no reason to hurt him.\"\n\nUncle Hank!\n\nSam pulled back the leaf to view the open meadow beyond. The large military helicopter squatted like some monstrous locust upon the field of quinoa. But closer still was a sight that froze Sam's blood. His uncle stood before a man dressed in a monk's habit, but the man was no disciple of god. He bore in his right fist a large pistol. Sam, familiar with guns, recognized it as a .357 Spanish Astra. It was a weapon capable of stopping a charging bull\u2014and it was pointed at his uncle's chest.\n\nOver his uncle's shoulder, Sam spotted a third member of this party. It was Norman! The photographer's face was pale with fear.\n\nThe man named Otera glared at Sam's uncle. \"Since when are you the one giving orders here?\" He suddenly swung his gun and viciously struck Norman across the face. The photographer fell to his knees, blood welling from a cut on his brow.\n\n\"Leave him alone!\" Uncle Hank said, stepping around to shield Norman.\n\nOtera, his back now slightly turned to Sam, raised his pistol. \"I think you've outlived your usefulness, old man. From the messages, these students know where the gold is hidden. So with this fellow here, I see no need to keep you around.\" Sam distinctly heard the gun cock.\n\nOh, God! Frantic, Sam slid from his hiding place and ran across the wet field.\n\nThe motion drew his uncle's attention. Henry's eyes widened in surprise. Sam saw his uncle struggle to stifle any further reaction\u2014but even this small response was noticed.\n\nOtera pivoted around just as Sam reached him, gun at chest level. Sam yelled and leaped at him, then an explosion of gunfire stung his ears. Sam was flung backward, away from his uncle's captor. He landed in the meadow on his back.\n\n\"No!\" he heard his uncle yell.\n\nSam tried to push to his elbows, but he found he could not move. Not even breathe. It felt as if some huge weight sat on his chest. Pain lanced out in all directions. From the corner of his eye, he saw his uncle leap on the back of the robed gunman, tackling and crushing him to the ground.\n\nSam smiled at the old man's fierceness. Good for you, Uncle Hank.\n\nThen all went black.\n\nFrom a couple meters away, Maggie had spotted Sam suddenly burst from his hiding place and out into the open. What was the damned fool doing? She hurried forward with Denal beside her. As she reached Sam's hiding place, the crack of a single gunshot sounded from beyond the leafy fern.\n\nPanicked, Maggie ripped away the fronds. She saw Sam collapsed in the flattened meadow, his arms twitching spastically. Even from her hiding place, she could see a gout of blood welling from a huge chest wound. Blind to all else, she ran from cover. She would no longer hide in a ditch while a friend died. \"Sam!\"\n\nAs she ran, she finally noticed the struggle beyond the Texan's body. It made no sense. The professor sat on the back of a struggling monk. The gun, still smoking in the wet grass, was just beyond the man's reach. Suddenly, as if in a dream, Norman appeared out of nowhere. He bore a huge red rock over his head. He brought it down with a resounding blow atop the pinned man's head. The man went limp, and Professor Conklin climbed off him.\n\nIt was then a race to see who could reach Sam first.\n\nSam's uncle won. He fell to his knees beside his nephew. \"Oh, no\u2026oh, God!\"\n\nNorman and Maggie reached him at the same time.\n\nFalling to his hands and knees, Norman reached and checked for a pulse. Maggie sank more slowly. She saw the glassy way Sam stared up at the skies. She knew no one was there; his eyes were empty.\n\nNorman just confirmed it. \"He's dead.\"\n\nAt gunpoint, Joan crossed toward the wall of chains. She knew if she allowed herself to be bound to that dungeon wall that she was a dead woman; any hope of escape would be gone. Her mind spun on various plans and scenarios. Only one idea came to mind.\n\nAs she was prodded by Friar Carlos's pistol, her fingers clutched her collar. She slipped out the plastic stay that held her collar stiff and scraped one of the soft teardrop samples of Substance Z into her palm. She had to time this right.\n\nOn the way toward the wall, she sidled near the large, bare-chested monk who still stoked the flaming brazier. He leaned over his handiwork, stirring the glowing coals with one of the iron brands. Joan noted the slight bubble of drool at the corner of his lips. The thick-limbed brute clearly lusted to test his irons on her flesh. He caught her staring and grinned, a flash of desire.\n\nJoan suddenly felt no guilt for what she was about to do.\n\nNudging past him, she flicked the pebble of metal into the brazier, then turned her back and ducked\u2014and lucky that she did. The explosion was more forceful than she had expected. She was thrown forward, crashing to the stone floor, and skidded on hands and knees. Her back burned. The smell of singed silk struck her nose. She rolled around, twisting her sore back to the cool stone.\n\nBehind her, the brazier was a twisted ruin. The iron brands were scattered; one was even impaled through a wooden support pillar. The echo of the explosion slowly died in her ears, the ringing replaced with a pained howling. Her gaze shifted to the large monk. He lay on his back several meters away. His bare chest was charred and blistered. A hand rose and knocked a coal from his belly with a groan. The man sat up, one side of his face blackened. At first, Joan thought it was just soot; then the man cried out, and his burned skin split open, raw and red. Blood ran down his neck.\n\nOh, God. She turned her face away.\n\nCarlos, unharmed, was already on his feet. He crossed to a telephone on the wall and barked in Spanish. A call for help. Once done, he slammed the receiver down and stepped over the wounded man. The monk clutched at Carlos's pant leg, but the friar shook him loose and crossed to Joan.\n\nHe pointed his gun. \"Get up.\"\n\nJoan pulled to her feet, gasping as her singed shirt peeled from her back. Carlos frowned and forced Joan around so he could view her injuries. \"You'll live,\" he said.\n\n\"But for how long?\" Joan asked with a sour look. \"Until the next time you decide to kill me?\" Joan waved a hand around the room. \"What just happened?\"\n\nCarlos scowled at the man still moaning on the floor. \"An apprentice. It seems he has much to learn still.\"\n\nJoan bowed her head, hiding her grim satisfaction. Carlos blamed the monk for the explosion. Good. Now for the next step in her plan. At her collar, she scraped a second dollop of gold under a fingernail, then reached to her pocket. She fingered out the cigarette Carlos had given her yesterday. With trembling fingers, she brought it to her lips. \"Do you mind?\" she asked, raising her face.\n\nHe frowned harshly at the moaning monk. \"Go ahead. We've got a few minutes until someone comes for him.\" He reached out, and a lighter appeared in his fingers.\n\nBending, she lit the cigarette, then nodded her thanks. She took a long drag, sighing appreciatively and loudly. \"That's better,\" she said heavily, exhaling in Carlos's direction.\n\nJoan saw him eye the glowing tip of her cigarette. His pupils dilated at the scent of nicotine.\n\nShe took a second drag, then passed him the cigarette, sighing out the smoke languidly. \"Here. Thanks. But that's enough for me.\"\n\nHe accepted her offering with a tight smile. \"Afraid for your health?\"\n\nShe shrugged, too tense to trust her voice. She spotted the glint of gold on the underside of the cigarette, a quarter inch from its glowing tip. \"Enjoy,\" she finally said.\n\nCarlos held up the cigarette in a salute of thanks. Then he grinned and drew it to his lips. Joan took a small step away, turning her shoulders slightly.\n\nShe watched the friar take a long drag on the cigarette. Its end grew red hot as it burned toward the filter. Joan swung away as the white paper flamed toward the smear of gold.\n\nThe explosion this time was not as severe.\n\nStill, it threw her to her knees.\n\nJoan twisted around, her head ringing with the blast. Carlos still stood, but his face was a cratered, smoking ruin. He fell backward, landing atop the burned monk, who now screamed in horror.\n\nJoan rolled to her feet and recovered the friar's Glock from the floor. She crossed to the wailing monk. Crouching, she roughly checked his burns. Third degree over sixty percent of his body. He thrashed from her touch, crying out. She stood. He was a dead man, but didn't know it yet. He would not survive these burns. \"Not so fun playing with fire, is it?\" she mumbled.\n\nShe raised her pistol and aimed between his eyes. The monk stared at her in terror, then fainted away. Sighing, she lowered the Glock. She couldn't do it, not even to give him a quick end. She moved away.\n\nTime was crucial. She had a gun and a remaining sliver of gold. Nothing must stop her from escaping. She hefted the pistol and stepped clear of the two prone bodies. She eyed the friar's corpse for a moment.\n\n\"You were right, Carlos,\" she said, turning to the door. \"Smoking kills.\"\n\nMaggie touched Henry's shoulder as he knelt over his nephew's body. His shoulders were wracked with painful sobs. Maggie knew no words could ease his pain. Her years in Belfast had taught her that much. On both sides of the fighting, Irish and English, Catholic and Protestant, there were just grieving mothers and fathers. It was all so stupid. So insane.\n\nBehind her, gunfire continued to bark throughout the jungle, though by now it had died to sporadic fits. The most intense fighting had already ended. The Incas had no prayer against such armament.\n\nShe stared at Sam, unable to look at the ragged wound, the blood. She found her gaze resting on his face. His Stetson had been knocked off when he fell. He seemed almost naked without it. His tousled sandy hair was mussed and unkempt, like he was just sleeping. She reached and touched a lanky lock, tucking it behind an ear. Tears she had been holding back finally began to flow. Her vision blurred.\n\nHenry reached to her hand, sensing her pain, needing support himself. His cold fingers wrapped around hers. Where words failed, simple human contact soothed. She leaned into the professor's side. \"Oh, Sam\u2026\" her voice cracked.\n\nNorman knelt across from Sam's body. Behind him, Denal stood quietly. The naked boy was now covered in Norman's poncho, leaving the photographer only a pair of knee-length breeches. Norman cleared his throat. \"Maggie, what about the temple?\" he said softly. \"Maybe\u2026maybe it could\u2026\" He shrugged.\n\nMaggie raised her teary eyes. \"What?\"\n\nNorman nodded to Sam's body. \"Remember Pachacutec's story.\"\n\nHorror replaced sorrow. Her eyes widened. She pictured the Sapa Inca's pale body and remembered what lay in the neighboring valley. She slowly shook her head. The temple held no salvation. She could not imagine giving Sam's body over to it.\n\nHenry spoke, his voice coarse with tears. \"Wh\u2026what temple?\"\n\nNorman pointed toward the volcanic wall. \"Up there! Something the Incas found. A structure that heals.\" Norman stood and exposed his knee. He told of the injury he sustained.\n\nThe professor's face grew incredulous. He turned to Maggie for confirmation.\n\nShe slowly nodded her head.\n\n\"But Sam's d\u2026dead,\" Henry said.\n\n\"And the king was beheaded,\" Norman countered. He looked to Maggie for support. \"We owe it to Sam at least to try.\"\n\nHenry stood as another grenade exploded, and gunfire grew heated again. The weapons fire sounded much closer. \"We can't risk it,\" he said sternly. \"I need to get you all into hiding. It's our only hope of surviving.\"\n\nMaggie had stopped listening after the word hiding. A part of her wanted to agree with the professor. Yes, run, hide, don't let them catch you. But something new in her heart would not let her. She stared at Sam's still face. A single tear sat on his cheek. She reached with a finger and brushed it off. Patrick Dugan, Ralph, her parents\u2026and now Sam. She was done hiding from death.\n\n\"No,\" Maggie said softly. She reached and took Sam's Stetson from where it had fallen in the damp grass, then swung to face the others. \"No,\" she said more forcefully. \"We take Sam to the temple. I won't let them win.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\nMaggie shoved to her feet. \"No, Professor, this is our choice. If there is even a chance of saving Sam, we attempt it!\"\n\nNorman was nodding. \"I saw a stretcher in the helicopter when I got the rope to tie up the monk.\"\n\nMaggie glanced to where the man who had shot Sam still lay unconscious in the grass. His breath was ragged, his pallor extreme. He would probably die from the blow to the skull, but as an extra precaution, they had lashed his legs and arms. They stopped at gagging him, mostly because of his labored breathing. Her chest tightened with anger at the sight of him. She glanced away, to the helicopter. \"Get the stretcher!\"\n\nNorman and Denal hurried to the chopper's open door.\n\nHenry stepped to her side. \"Maggie, Sam's dead. Not only is this wrong, it's likely to get everyone killed.\"\n\nMaggie stood up to the professor. \"I'm done hiding in ditches,\" she said. She remembered Sam's scathing words last night when she resisted eavesdropping on the shaman and the king. She had tried to justify her reluctance, but Sam had been closer to the truth. Even then, fear had ruled her\u2014but no longer. She faced Henry. \"We're doing this,\" she said firmly.\n\nNorman and Denal arrived with a khaki-colored army stretcher, ending further discussion. Henry frowned but helped lift Sam onto the stretcher. Soon they were under way. Henry stopped only to grab the monk's pistol from the weeds and stuff it into his waistband.\n\nWith the four of them, Sam's weight was manageable. Still, the climb up the switchback seemed endless. Maggie's nagging fear and the need for speed stretched time interminably. Once they reached the tunnel, she checked her watch. Only twenty minutes had passed. But even that was too long. The jungle gunfire had grown ominously silent.\n\n\"Hurry,\" Maggie said. \"We need to be out of sight!\"\n\nWith straining arms and legs, they trundled into the gloom of the passage.\n\n\"It's just a nit farther,\" she encouraged. \"C'mon.\"\n\nAhead, the torches still glowed at the entrance to the gold chamber, though now they just sputtered. As they pulled even with the temple, Maggie heard the professor gasp behind her. She turned, helping to lower Sam.\n\nHenry gaped at the chamber, his face a little sick. \"It's el Sangre del Diablo,\" he mumbled, setting Sam down.\n\nMaggie knew enough Spanish to frown at his words. \"The blood of the Devil?\"\n\n\"It's what the abbot's men have come searching for. The mother lode\u2014\"\n\nNorman interrupted, \"We need to get Sam in there. I'm sure there's a time factor involved in this resurrection business.\"\n\nHenry nodded. \"But what do we do? How do we get it to work?\"\n\nThey all looked at each other. No one had an answer.\n\nThe photographer pointed into the chamber. \"I don't have an operator's manual. But there's an altar. I'd say first thing is to get Sam on it.\"\n\nHenry nodded. \"Let's do it.\"\n\nThey hauled Sam up, each person grasping a limb, and eased him onto the gold altar. Maggie's skin crawled as she stepped into the chamber. It was like a thousand eyes were staring at her. Her fingers brushed against the altar's surface as she placed Sam down. She yanked her hand away. The surface had felt warm, like something living.\n\nWith a shudder, she retreated from the room, along with the others. Standing in the passage, they all stared, transfixed, waiting for something to happen, some miracle to occur. It never did. Sam's body just lay on the altar. His blood dripped slowly from his chest wound and down the side of the altar.\n\n\"Maybe we waited too long,\" Maggie finally said, breaking the room's spell.\n\n\"No,\" Norman said. \"I don't think so. Kamapak took half a day to get Pachacutec's decapitated head here, and the temple still grew him a new body.\"\n\n\"Sort of,\" Maggie countered. She turned to Norman. \"What did Kamapak do after bringing the head here? Was there any clue?\"\n\nNorman answered sullenly, \"All he said was that he prayed to Inti, and the god answered.\"\n\nMaggie frowned.\n\nHenry suddenly stiffened beside her. \"Of course!\"\n\nShe turned to the professor.\n\n\"It's prayers! Concentrated human thought!\" Henry stared at them as if this was answer enough. \"This\u2026this gold, Devil's blood, whatever the hell it is\u2026it responds to human thought. It will mold and change to one's will.\"\n\nNow it was Maggie's turn to lift her brows in shock, but she remembered the transformation of Sam's dagger. It had changed as their needs dictated. She remembered how it had transformed in her own hands, when she had been so desperate for a key to the necropolis's gold statue. \"Prayers?\"\n\nHenry nodded. \"All we have to do is concentrate. Ask it\u2026beg it to heal Sam!\"\n\nNorman dropped to his knees, drawing his palms together. \"I'm not above begging.\"\n\nHenry and Maggie followed suit. Maggie closed her eyes, but her thoughts were jumbled. She remembered the pale beasts in the next chamber. What if something like that happened to Sam? She clenched her fists. She would not let that happen. If prayers worked, then she'd let the others pray for healing. She would concentrate on keeping the temple from making any additional \"improvements\" in the man.\n\nBearing down, she willed it to heal Sam's injuries, but only his injuries. Nothing else! She strained, knuckles whitening. Nothing else, damn you! Do you hear me?\n\nDenal suddenly gasped behind her shoulder. \"Look!\"\n\nMaggie cracked open her eyes.\n\nSam still lay upon the altar, unmoving, but the ball of webbed strands above the bed began to unwind, to spread open. Thousands of golden stands snaked and threaded from the nest to weave and twine in the air. Tips of the strands split into even tinier filaments, then these split again. Soon the threads were so fine, the room seemed filled with a golden fog. Then, like a heavy mist settling, the golden cloud descended over Sam's body. In a few seconds, his form was coated from crown to toes with the metal, making him a sculpture in gold. And still the gold seemed to flow. Like some shining umbilical cord, a thick twined rope connected the golden statue of Sam to the node above the altar. The cord writhed and pumped like a living structure.\n\nMaggie felt slightly sickened at the sight. She stood up; Henry and Norman soon followed.\n\n\"What do you make of it?\" Henry asked. \"Will it work?\"\n\nNo one answered.\n\n\"How long it will take is the better question,\" Norman said. \"I don't think the army down there is going to give us all day to hang around.\"\n\nHenry nodded. \"We need to think about setting up a defense. Is there another way out?\" The professor glanced down the tunnel toward the other caldera.\n\n\"Not that way,\" Maggie said.\n\nHenry turned back around and rubbed at his tired eyes. \"Then we'll need weapons,\" he mumbled. \"I spotted an extra case of grenades in the helicopter, but\u2026\" The professor shook his head sourly.\n\nNorman spoke up. \"Grenades sound good to me, Doc. Preferably lots of them.\"\n\n\"No,\" Henry said dismissively. \"It's too risky to go back down there.\"\n\n\"And it's too risky not to,\" Norman argued. \"If I'm quick and careful\u2026\"\n\nDenal added, \"I go, too. I help carry. Box heavy.\"\n\nNorman nodded. \"Together, it'll be a cinch.\" He was already stepping away with the boy.\n\n\"Be careful,\" Maggie warned.\n\n\"Oh, you can count on that!\" Norman said. \"The National Geographic doesn't offer combat pay.\" Then he and the boy were off, hurrying down the corridor.\n\nHenry returned to staring at the temple. He mumbled, \"The structure must be using geothermal heat as its energy source. This is amazing.\"\n\n\"More like horrible. I can see why Friar de Almagro called this thing the Serpent of Eden. It's seductive, but beneath its charms lies something foul.\"\n\n\"The Serpent of Eden?\" Henry furrowed his brows. \"Where did you come by that expression?\"\n\n\"It's a long story.\"\n\nThe professor nodded toward the temple. \"We have the time.\"\n\nMaggie nodded. She tried to summarize their journey, but some parts were especially painful to recount, like Ralph's death. Henry's face grew grim and sober with the telling. At the end, Maggie spoke of the beasts and creatures that haunted the neighboring valley. She explained her theory, finishing with her final assessment. \"I don't trust the temple. It perverts as much as it heals.\"\n\nHenry stared down the long corridor toward the distant sunlight. \"So the friar was right. He tried to warn us of what lay here.\" Now it was Henry's turn to relate his own story, of his time with the monks of the Abbey of Santo Domingo. His voice cracked with the mention of the forensic pathologist, Joan Engel. Another death in the centuries-long struggle to possess this strange gold. But Maggie read the additional pain behind the professor's words, a part of the story left unspoken. She didn't press.\n\nOnce done, Henry wiped his nose and turned to the temple. \"So the Incas built here what the abbot dreamed. A structure large enough to reach some otherworldly force.\"\n\n\"But is it the coin of God?\" she asked, nodding toward Sam. \"Or the blood of the Devil?\" She glanced to the next caldera. \"What is its ultimate goal? What is the purpose of those creatures?\"\n\nHenry shook his head. \"An experiment? Maybe to evolve us? Maybe to destroy us?\" He shrugged. \"Who knows what intelligence guides the temple's actions. We may never know.\"\n\nMuffled voices and the scrape of heel on rock drew their attention around. It was too soon for Norman and Denal to be returning. Flashlights suddenly blinded them from the tunnel's entrance. An order was shouted at them: \"Don't move!\"\n\nMaggie and Henry stood still. What else could they do? There was no escape behind them. But in truth, neither was willing to abandon Sam. They waited for their captors to approach. \"Do whatever they say,\" Henry warned.\n\nLike hell I will! But she remained silent.\n\nA huge man, who from the professor's story could only be Abbot Ruiz, crossed to the professor. Maggie was given only the most cursory glance. \"Professor Conklin, you've proven yourself as resourceful as ever. You beat us here.\" He frowned at Maggie. \"Of course, the tongues you needed to free were a little easier than ours, I imagine. These Incas proved themselves quite stubborn. Ah, but the end result is the same. Here we are!\"\n\nThe abbot stepped past them to view the chamber. He stood, staring for a moment at the sight. Then his large form shuddered, trembling all over. Finally, he fell to his knees. \"A miracle,\" he exclaimed in Spanish, making a hurried sign of the cross. \"The sculpture on the table appears to be Christ himself. Like in our vault at the Abbey. It is a sign!\"\n\nMaggie and Henry glanced at each other. Neither corrected the abbot's misconception.\n\n\"See how it trickles down from the roof. The old Incan tales spoke of the mother lode. How it flowed like water from the mountaintops! Here it is!\"\n\nMaggie edged closer. She knew, sooner or later, the abbot would discover his mistake. She could not let these men interfere with Sam's healing. She cleared her throat. \"This chamber is just a trinket,\" she said softly.\n\nThe abbot, still kneeling, turned to her. His eyes still shone with the gold. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"This is just the temple, the entrance,\" she said. \"The true source lies in the next valley. The Incas call it janan pacha.\"\n\n\"Their heaven?\" the abbot said.\n\nMaggie nodded, glad the man had some knowledge of the Incan culture. She glanced to Henry. He wore a deep frown, clearly guessing her plot. He didn't approve, but he remained silent. Maggie returned her attention to the abbot. \"This temple is just a roadside prayer totem. A gateway to the true wonders beyond.\"\n\nThe abbot shoved to his feet. \"Show me.\"\n\nMaggie backed a step. \"Only for a guarantee of our safety.\"\n\nAbbot Ruiz glanced down the corridor. One eye narrowed suspiciously.\n\n\"Heaven awaits,\" Maggie said, \"but without my help, you'll never find it.\"\n\nThe abbot scowled. \"Fine. I guarantee your safety.\"\n\n\"Swear it.\"\n\nFrowning, Abbot Ruiz touched the small gold cross hanging from his neck. \"I swear it on the blood of Jesus Christ, Our Savior.\" He dropped his hand. \"Satisfied?\"\n\nMaggie hesitated, feigning indecision, then finally nodded. \"It's this way.\" She headed down the corridor.\n\n\"Wait.\" The abbot hung back a moment. He waved to one of his six men. \"Stay here with the good professor.\" He crossed toward Maggie. \"Just to keep things honest.\"\n\nMaggie felt a sick tightness in her belly. She continued down the passage, forcing her legs to stop trembling. She would not give in to her fear. \"Th\u2026this way,\" she said. \"It's not too far.\"\n\nAbbot Ruiz stuck close to her shoulder, all but breathing down her neck. He wheezed, his face as red as a beet. Prayers mumbled from his lips.\n\n\"It's just through there,\" she said, as they neared the exit to the tunnel.\n\nThe abbot pushed her aside, marching forward, determined to be the first through. But when he reached the exit, he hesitated. His nose curled at the stronger stench of sulfur here. \"I don't see anything.\"\n\nMaggie joined him and pointed to the trail in the jungle ahead. \"Just follow the path.\"\n\nThe abbot stared. Maggie feared he would balk. She was sure he could hear her heart pounding in her throat. But she maintained a calm demeanor. \"Janan pacha lies just inside the jungle. About a hundred meters. It is a sight no one could put into mere words.\"\n\n\"Heaven\u2026\" Abbot Ruiz took a step into the caldera, then another\u2014still he was cautious. He waved his five men ahead of him. \"Check it out. Watch for any hostiles.\"\n\nHis men, rifles at shoulders now, scurried ahead. The abbot followed, keeping a safe distance back. Maggie was forced to leave the tunnel to maintain the ruse. She held her breath as she reentered the foul nest of the creatures. Where the hell were the monsters?\n\nShe took a third step away from the entryway when she heard a rasp of rock behind her. She swung around. Perched over the rough entrance to the tunnel was one of the pale beasts. One of the scouts. It clung by claws, upside down. It knew it had been spotted. A hissing scream burst from its throat as it leaped at her.\n\nMaggie froze. Answering cries exploded from the forest's edge. It was a trap, and here was the sentinel. Maggie ducked. But the scout was too quick, lightning fast. The beast hit her. She fell backward and used the attacker's momentum to fling it down the short slope behind her. She did not wait to see what happened. She scrambled to her feet and dived for the tunnel.\n\nBehind her, spats of gunfire exploded; screams of terror and pain accompanied the weapons fire. But over it all, the wail and shriek of the beasts.\n\nIn the safety of the tunnel, Maggie swung around, facing the opening. She saw the abbot level his pistol and fire point-blank into the skull of the beast that had attacked her. It flopped and convulsed on the ground. The abbot glanced to the forest's edge, where his men still fought for their lives. He turned his back on them and ran toward the passageway, toward Maggie. He spotted her; hatred and anger filled his eyes. No one thwarted the Spanish Inquisition.\n\nMaggie backed down the tunnel as the abbot pulled up to the entrance. Heaving heavily, the obese man struggled to breathe. He gasped out, \"You bitch!\" Then he leveled his pistol and stepped inside.\n\nJesus! There was nowhere to run.\n\n\"You will suffer. That I guarant\u2014\" Suddenly the abbot was yanked backward with a squawk of surprise. His gun went off, the shot wild. The bullet ricocheted past Maggie's ear.\n\nA scream of horror erupted from the man as he was dragged from the tunnel and flung around. A hulking pale monster, another pack leader, had his expensive safari jacket snagged in a clawed fist. The other hand grabbed the abbot by the throat. More beasts soon appeared, more razored fists snatching at the choice meal. His gun was knocked from his grip. The abbot's scream became strangled as he was dragged away from the tunnel's entrance. A pale face, mouth bloodied, appeared at the tunnel opening. It hissed at her, then dived to the side, joining in the feeding frenzy.\n\nShe swung away and turned her back on the slaughter.\n\nBehind her, a sharp screech of pain died into a wet gurgle. She hurried farther down the passage, toward the torchlight, away from the howling.\n\nAt the temple's entrance, she saw the lone guard. He stepped toward her, gun pointed. \"Que hiscistes?\" he barked in Spanish, asking her what she had done. She saw the terror in his eyes.\n\nSuddenly, Henry stepped behind him and pressed the barrel of a pistol to the back of the guard's head. It was the weapon the professor had taken from the monk by the helicopter. \"She was taking out the garbage.\" He pressed the barrel more firmly. \"Any problem with that?\"\n\nThe man dropped his rifle and sank to his knees. \"No.\"\n\n\"That's better.\" Henry crossed in front of the man and kicked the rifle toward Maggie. \"You know how to use that?\"\n\n\"I'm from Belfast,\" she said, retrieving the gun. She cocked it, checked the magazine, and lifted it to her shoulder.\n\nHenry turned to his prisoner. \"And you? Do you know how to fly the helicopter?\"\n\nThe man nodded.\n\n\"Then you get to live.\"\n\nSuddenly a groan sounded from the next room. Henry and Maggie swung around. They watched the golden umbilicus spasm and the gold coating begin to slide from Sam's body. Like a large siphon, it drew the metal from his skin, then coiled up on itself, churning and slowly twisting overhead.\n\nAnother groan flowed from Sam.\n\nThe guard stared into the temple, mouth gaped open in surprise. He crossed himself hurriedly.\n\n\"He's breathing,\" Henry said. He stepped toward the entrance.\n\nMaggie grabbed his elbow. \"Be careful. I don't know if we should interfere yet.\" Her words were strained, speaking while holding her breath. Dare she hope\u2026?\n\nSam pushed to one elbow. His eyes were unfocused. His other arm rose to swipe at his face, as if brushing away cobwebs. He moaned slightly, wincing.\n\nHenry reached a hand out. \"Sam?\"\n\nHe seemed to focus on the voice, coughing to clear his lungs. \"Un\u2026Uncle Hank?\" Sam shoved up, weaving slightly. His eyes finally seemed to focus. \"God\u2026my head.\"\n\n\"Move slowly, Sam,\" Maggie urged. \"Take it easy.\"\n\nSam swung his feet to the floor with another groan. \"I could use a bucketful of aspirin.\" He finally seemed to realize where he was. He craned his neck and stared up at the twined ball of golden strands. \"What am I doing here?\"\n\n\"You don't remember?\" Maggie asked, concerned. He sounded lucid, but was there some sustained damage?\n\nSam frowned at his chest. The fingers of his right hand trailed to his bullet-torn vest. He stuck a finger through the hole, then pulled open his vest. There was no wound. \"I was shot.\" His statement had the edge of a question.\n\nMaggie nodded. \"You died, but the temple cured you.\"\n\n\"Died?\"\n\nBoth Maggie and Henry nodded.\n\nSam pushed to his feet, stumbled a step, then caught himself. \"Whoa.\" He moved more slowly, deliberately, concentrating. \"For a dead man, I guess I shouldn't complain about a few aches and pains.\" He crossed toward them.\n\nHenry met Sam at the entrance and pulled his nephew to him. Their embrace was awkward due to the pistol in the professor's right hand. \"Oh, God, Sam, I thought I lost you,\" he said, his eyes welling with tears.\n\nSam hugged his uncle fiercely, deeply.\n\nMaggie smiled. She wiped at her own cheeks, then knelt by the stretcher and retrieved Sam's Stetson.\n\nHenry pulled away, rubbing at his eyes. \"I couldn't face losing you, too.\"\n\n\"And you don't have to,\" Sam said, swiping a hand through his hair.\n\nMaggie held out his hat. \"Here. You dropped something.\"\n\nHe took it, wearing a crooked smile, awkward, half-embarrassed. He slipped it to his head. \"Thanks.\"\n\n\"Just don't die again,\" she warned, reaching and straightening the brim.\n\n\"I'll try not to.\" He leaned toward her as she adjusted his hat, staring into her eyes.\n\nShe didn't pull away from him, but she didn't move closer either. She was too conscious of the professor's presence and the weight of the rifle over her left shoulder. They stared for too long, and the moment began slipping away. Maggie gritted her teeth. To hell with her fears! She reached toward him\u2014but Sam suddenly turned away.\n\nA new voice suddenly barked from the darkness behind them, \"Drop your weapons!\" A figure stepped into the edge of the torchlight. He held Denal in his arms. The boy's mouth was clamped tightly shut, a long military dagger at his throat. The stainless-steel blade reflected the glow of the torches. The boy's eyes were wide with terror.\n\n\"Otera!\" Henry hissed.\n\nNorman fled through the jungle, crashing through the underbrush. His vision was blurred by tears. He attempted halfheartedly to keep his flight quiet, but branches snapped and dried leaves crunched underfoot. Still, he stumbled on\u2014in truth, he did not care who heard him any longer.\n\nAgain he pictured the friar leaping to his feet from the grassy meadow. The bastard had been playing possum, lying in wait for Norman and Denal as the pair had crossed toward the helicopter. The friar had grabbed the boy before Norman could react, twin blades flashing out from wrist sheaths. Norman's response was pure animal instinct. He had leaped away from his attacker, diving into the jungle and racing away.\n\nOnly after his panicked heart had slowed a few beats did Norman recognize the cowardice of his act. He had abandoned Denal. And then he'd not even attempted to free the boy.\n\nLogically, in his mind, Norman could justify his action. He had no weapons. Any attempt at rescue would surely have gotten them both killed. But in his heart, Norman knew better. His flight had been pure cowardice. He recalled the terror in Denal's wide eyes. What had he done?\n\nFresh tears flowed, almost blinding him.\n\nSuddenly the jungle fell away around him. The gloom of the forest broke into brightness. Norman stumbled to a stop, brushing at his eyes. When his vision cleared, he gasped in horror at the sight.\n\nA small clearing had been blasted into the jungle by grenade and gunfire. Bodies lay strewn all around, torn and broken. Both men and women. All Inca. The smell gagged him as he stumbled back: blood and excrement and fear.\n\n\"Oh, God\u2026\" Norman moaned.\n\nFlies already lay thick among the corpses, buzzing and flitting around the clearing.\n\nThen suddenly on his left, a huge shape rose up, looming over him, the dead coming to claim him. Norman spun to face the new threat. He would no longer flee. He could no longer flee. Exhausted and hopeless, he fell to his knees.\n\nHe raised his face as a huge spear was lifted in threat, its golden blade shining in the brightness overhead.\n\nNorman didn't flinch.\n\nI'm sorry, Denal.\n\nHenry stepped toward Otera, gun raised. \"Let him go!\"\n\nThe trapped boy's limbs trembled as the knife was pressed harder to his tender throat. A trickle of blood ran down his neck. \"Don't try it, Professor. Get back! Or I cut this boy open from neck to belly.\"\n\nFighting back a curse, Henry retreated a step.\n\nThe friar's eyes were wild and fierce. \"Do as I say, and everyone lives! I don't care about you or the boy. All I care about is the gold. I take it with me, and you all stay here. A fair bargain, yes?\"\n\nThey hesitated. Henry glanced to Maggie, then to Sam. \"Maybe we should do as he says,\" he whispered.\n\nMaggie's eyes narrowed. She stepped to the side and spoke to the friar, her voice fierce. \"Swear on it! Swear on your cross that you'll let us go.\"\n\nScowling, Otera touched his silver crucifix. \"I swear.\"\n\nMaggie studied the man for a long breath, then carefully placed down her weapon. Henry did the same. The group then backed a few steps away.\n\nOtera crossed to their abandoned weapons, then shoved Denal toward them.\n\nThe boy gasped and flew to Maggie's side.\n\nThe friar returned his long dagger to a hidden wrist sheath. Henry now understood how the man had managed to escape his ropes. He mentally kicked himself. None of them had thought to search the unconscious man.\n\nGrinning, Otera crouched and retrieved his pistol. He passed the rifle to the guard who still knelt to the side of the passage. But the man refused to take it. He just stared numbly into the temple, lips moving in silent prayer.\n\nOtera stood and finally swung to face the room himself. He froze, then stumbled back, overwhelmed. His face glowed in the golden light. A wide smile stretched his lips. \"Dios mio\u2026!\" When he turned back to them, his eyes were huge.\n\n\"Impressive, isn't it?\" Sam said.\n\nThe friar squinted against the torches' glare. He finally seemed to recognize the Texan. \"I\u2026I thought I killed you,\" he said with a frown.\n\nSam shrugged. \"It didn't take.\"\n\nOtera glanced to the cave of gold, then back to them. He leveled his gun. \"I don't know how you survived. But this time, I'll make sure you die. All of you!\"\n\nMaggie stepped between the gunman and Sam. \"You swore an oath! On your cross!\"\n\nOtera reached with his free hand and ripped off the silver crucifix. He tossed it behind him. \"The abbot was a fool,\" he snarled at them. \"Like you all. All this talk of touching the mind of God\u2026pious shit! He never understood the gold's true potential.\"\n\n\"Which is what?\" Henry asked, stepping beside Maggie.\n\n\"To make me rich! For years, I have endured the abbot's superior airs as he promoted others of pure Spanish blood above me. With this gold, I will no longer be half-Indian, half-Spanish. I will no longer have to bow my head and play the role of the lowly mestizo. I will be reborn a new man.\" Otera's eyes shone brightly with his dream.\n\nHenry moved nearer. \"And who do you think you'll become?\"\n\nOtera leveled his pistol at Henry. \"Someone everyone respects\u2014a rich man!\" He laughed harshly and pulled the trigger.\n\nHenry cringed, gasping and falling back.\n\nBut the shot went suddenly awry, striking the roof and casting blue sparks.\n\nAs the gun's blast died away, a new noise was heard. \"Aack\u2026\" Otera choked and reached for his chest. A bloody spearhead sprouted from between his ribs. The friar was lifted off his feet. Gouts of blood poured from his mouth as he moaned, mouth opening and closing like a suffocating fish. His pistol fell with a clatter from his fingers.\n\nThen his head slumped, lolling atop his neck, dead.\n\nHis limp body was tossed aside by the spear-bearer.\n\nFrom behind him, a large figure stepped into view. He wore singed and torn robes.\n\n\"Pachacutec!\" Sam cried.\n\nThe man suddenly stumbled forward, falling to his knees before the Incan temple. Tears streaked his soot-stained face. \"My people\u2026\" he mumbled in English. \"Gone.\"\n\nA second figure appeared out of the darkness behind the man.\n\n\"Norman!\" Maggie ran up to the photographer. \"What happened?\"\n\nNorman shook his head, staring at the impaled form of the friar. \"I ran into Pachacutec on the trail, amid the slaughter. He was coming to the temple, chasing after those who would violate his god. I convinced him to help.\" But there was no satisfaction in the photographer's voice; his face was ashen.\n\nNorman's eyes flicked toward Denal. The photographer wore a look of shame. But the boy crossed to Norman and hugged him tightly. \"You saved us,\" he mumbled into the tall man's chest.\n\nAs Norman returned the boy's embrace, tears rose in his eyes.\n\nOff to the side, Pachacutec groaned. He switched back to his native tongue as he bowed before the temple, rocking back and forth, praying. He was beyond consolation. Blood ran from under his robes and trailed into the golden chamber. He looked near death himself.\n\nHenry crossed closer to the king. If Maggie's story was true, here knelt one of the founders of the Incan empire. As an archaeologist who had devoted his entire lifetime to the study of the Incas, Henry found himself suddenly speechless. A living Incan king whose memories were worth a thousand caverns of gold. Henry turned to Sam, his eyes beseeching. This king must not die.\n\nSam seemed to understand. He knelt beside Pachacutec and touched the king's robe. \"Sapa Inca,\" he said, bowing his head. \"The temple saved my life, as it once saved yours. Use it again.\"\n\nPachacutec stopped rocking, but his head still hung in sorrow. \"My people gone.\" He raised his face toward Sam and the others. \"Maybe it be right. We do not belong in your world.\"\n\n\"No, heal yourself. Let me show you our world.\"\n\nHenry stepped forward, placing a hand on Sam's shoulder, adding his support. \"There is much you could share, Inca Pachacutec. So much you can teach us.\"\n\nPachacutec pushed slowly to his feet and faced Henry. He reached a hand to the professor's cheek and traced a wrinkle. He then dropped his arm and turned away. \"Your face be old. But not as old as my heart.\" He stared into the temple, his face shining. \"Inti now leads my people to janan pacha. I wish to go with them.\"\n\nHenry stared over the king's shoulder to Sam. What could they say? The man had lost his entire tribe.\n\nTears ran down Pachacutec's cheeks as he slid a gold dagger from inside his robe. \"I go to join my people.\"\n\nHenry reached toward the Sapa Inca. \"No!\" But he was too late.\n\nPachacutec plunged the dagger into his breast, bending over the blade like a clenched fist. Then he relaxed; a sigh of relief escaped his throat. He slowly straightened, and his fingers fell away from the blade's hilt.\n\nHenry gasped, stumbling back, as flames jetted out from around the dagger impaled in the king's chest. \"What the hell\u2026?\"\n\nPachacutec stumbled into the temple's chamber. \"I go to Inti.\"\n\n\"Spontaneous combustion,\" Sam whispered, stunned. \"Like the cavern beasts.\"\n\nMaggie nodded. \"His body's the same as the creatures'.\"\n\n\"What's happening?\" Henry asked, staring at the flames.\n\nMaggie explained hurriedly, \"The gold sets off some chain reaction.\" She pointed to Pachacutec. Flames now wound out from the dagger and coursed over his torso. \"Self-immolation.\"\n\nHenry suddenly recalled Joan's urgent message to him in the helicopter. She had warned him of a way to destroy Substance Z. The gift stolen by Prometheus. Fire!\n\nTurning, Henry saw Pachacutec fall to his knees, his arms lifted. Flames climbed his raised limbs.\n\nOh, God!\n\nHenry grabbed Sam and Maggie and shoved them toward the tunnel's exit. \"Run!\" he yelled. He kicked the kneeling guard. \"Go!\"\n\n\"What? Why?\" Sam asked.\n\n\"No time!\" Henry herded them all onward. Denal and Norman ran ahead, while Henry and Maggie helped Sam on his wobbly legs. As they fled, Henry recalled Joan's final warning: Prometheus packs a vicious punch! Like plastic explosive!\n\nHer words proved too true. As they reached the tunnel's end, a massive explosion rocked the ground under their feet. A blast of superheated air rocketed the entire group down the path, tumbling, bruising. The passage behind them coughed out smoke and debris.\n\n\"On your feet!\" Henry called as he bumped to a stop. \"Keep going!\"\n\nThe group obeyed with groaned complaints, limping and racing onward. The trail continued to tremble under their heels. \"Don't stop!\" Henry called.\n\nBoulders crashed down from the volcanic heights. The shaking in the ground grew even worse. Below, hundreds of parrots screeched and flew out of the jungle canopy.\n\nWhat was happening?\n\nAs Henry reached the escarpment below the cliffs, he risked a glance back up. A monstrous crack in the rock face trailed from the tunnel straight up the side of the cone.\n\nSam leaned on Maggie, both catching their breath. The others hovered nearby. Sam's eyes suddenly grew wide. \"Oh, God!\" he yelled. \"Look!\" He pointed across the valley.\n\nHenry stared. The original steam vents had become spewing geysers of scalding water. New cracks appeared throughout the valley, belching more foggy steam and water into the sky. One section of the volcanic cone fell away with a grinding roar. \"It's coming apart!\" Henry realized.\n\nMaggie pointed behind them, toward the volcanic peak to the south. Black smoke billowed skyward. The scent of sulfur and burning rock filled the valley.\n\nSam straightened. \"The explosion must have triggered a fault. A chain reaction. Hurry! To the helicopter!\"\n\nNorman chimed in with even more good news. \"We've got company, folks!\" He pointed to the smoking tunnel.\n\nFrom the heart of the enveloping blackness, pale shapes leaped forth like demons from hell. The creatures piled and writhed from the opening, screeching, bellowing. Claws scrabbled on rock.\n\n\"The explosions must have panicked them,\" Maggie said. \"Overcoming their fear of the tunnel.\"\n\nFrom the heights, black eyes swung in their direction. The keening wail changed in pitch.\n\n\"Run!\" Henry bellowed, terrified at the sight. \"Now!\"\n\nThe group fled across the rough terrain. Chunks of basalt now rattled upon the quaking ground, sounding like the chatter of teeth. It made running difficult. Henry fell, scraping his palms on the jagged stone. Then Sam was there, pulling him to his feet.\n\n\"Can you make it, Uncle Hank?\" he asked, puffing himself.\n\n\"I'm gonna have to, aren't I?\" Henry took off again, but black spots swam across his vision.\n\nSam lent him an arm, and Maggie suddenly appeared on his other side. Together, they helped Henry across the rough terrain to the flat meadow. Ahead, Norman was already pulling Denal and the abbey guardsman into the belly of the chopper. The photographer's eyes met theirs across the meadow. \"Hurry! They're at your heels!\"\n\nHenry made the mistake of looking back. The quicker of the pale creatures already flanked them. Not far behind, larger creatures bearing clubs and stones bore down upon them.\n\nHenry suddenly tripped and almost brought them all down. But as a group, they managed to keep their feet and continued running. Henry found himself beginning to black out here and there. Soon he was being carried between Sam and Maggie.\n\n\"Let me go\u2026save yourselves.\"\n\n\"Yeah, right,\" Sam answered.\n\n\"Who does he think we are?\" Maggie added with forced indifference.\n\nEverything went black for a few seconds.\n\nThen hands were pulling Henry into the helicopter. He felt the rush of wind and realized the helicopter's rotors were already twirling. A loud metallic crash sounded near his head.\n\n\"They're lobbing boulders,\" Norman called out.\n\n\"But they're not coming any closer,\" Maggie added from the doorway. \"The helicopter has them spooked.\"\n\nA second ringing jolt struck the helicopter's fuselage. The whole vehicle shuddered.\n\n\"Well, they're damn close enough!\" Norman turned and hollered to the pilot. \"Get this bird off the ground!\n\nHenry struggled to sit as the door slammed shut. \"Sam\u2026?\"\n\nHe felt a pat on his shoulder as he was hauled into his seat and strapped in. \"I'm here.\" He turned to see Sam smiling at him, Maggie at his shoulder.\n\n\"Thank God,\" Henry sighed.\n\n\"God? Which one?\" Norman asked with a grin, settling into his seat.\n\nThe helicopter suddenly shuddered again\u2014not from the bombardment of boulders, but from a hurried liftoff. The bird tilted, then rose slowly. A final crash on the underside rocked the chopper.\n\n\"A parting kiss,\" Norman said, staring out the window at the cavorting and gamboling throng down below.\n\nThe helicopter then climbed faster, beyond the reach of their stones.\n\nHenry joined the photographer in staring over the valley. Below, the jungle was on fire. Smoke and steam almost entirely obscured the view. Fires lit up patches of the dense fog. A view of Dante's Hell.\n\nAs Henry stared, relief mixed with sorrow in his heart. So much had been lost.\n\nThen they were over the cone's lip and sweeping down and away.\n\nThey had made it!\n\nAs the helicopter dived between the neighboring peaks, Henry stared behind them. Suddenly a loud roar exploded through the cabin; the helicopter jumped, rotors screamed. Henry flew backward. For a few harrowing moments, the bird spun and twisted wildly.\n\nThe pilot swore, struggling with his controls. Everyone else clutched straps in white-knuckled grips.\n\nThen the bird righted itself and flew steady again.\n\nHenry dragged himself up and returned to his observation post. As he looked out, he gasped, not in fright but in wonder. \"You all need to come see this.\"\n\nThe others joined him at the window. Sam leaned over, a palm resting on his uncle's shoulder. Henry patted his nephew's hand, squeezing his fingers for a moment.\n\n\"It's strangely beautiful,\" Maggie said, staring out.\n\nBehind the helicopter, two twin spires of molten rock lit up the afternoon skies, one from each volcano. It was a humbling sight.\n\nHenry finally leaned back in his seat. Closing his eyes, he thought back to Friar de Almagro and all his warnings. The man had given his own life to stop the evil here.\n\nHenry whispered softly to the flaming skies, \"Your dying prayer has been answered, my friend. Rest in peace.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Day Seven",
                "text": "[ Cuzco ]\n\n[ Sunday, August 26, 3:45 P.M. ]\n\n[ Cuzco International Airport ]\n\n[ Peru ]\n\nThe small, single-engine plane, an old Piper Saratoga, dipped toward the tarmac. The city of Cuzco spread below the wings in a tangle of streets, a mix of gleaming high-rises and old adobe homes. Though it was a welcome sight, Sam turned from the window. It had been a long day of flights and plans.\n\nEn route from the volcanic caldera, his uncle had used the helicopter's radio to alert the authorities and to warn the base camp of the erupting volcanoes. Philip had sounded panicked over the radio. It seemed the Quechan Indians were already evacuating. Henry had ordered the Harvard graduate to go with them; their helicopter's fuel was too low for another landing and takeoff. Almost crying, Philip had begged for rescue, but Henry had been adamant about getting back to Cuzco as soon as possible.\n\nHis uncle had then arranged for a change of aircraft at a small commercial airfield near Machu Picchu, hiring the single-engine plane and pilot for the hop to Cuzco.\n\nStill, for all the expedient planning, the flight there had taken almost an entire day.\n\nAs the plane shed altitude for its final approach, Sam sat up straighter in the cramped cabin, careful not to disturb Maggie, who leaned on his shoulder, asleep like everyone else on board. Sam envied their ability to rest. Slumber had been impossible for him. His mind still dwelt on the last twenty-four hours.\n\nHe had died.\n\nIt was a concept that he could not yet fully grasp. As much as he had struggled, he could not recall anything from that missing hour of his life. He recalled no white light nor heavenly choir. All he remembered was blacking out in the field of quinoa, a bullet wound in his chest, then waking atop the gold altar. The rest was a big blank.\n\nSam frowned. He could not begrudge the fates for this small mental lapse. He was alive\u2014and moreover, he had a gorgeous redheaded Irish archaeologist sleeping beside him. He glanced over and gently fingered a loose curl from Maggie's face as she slept. He should wake her. They were about to land. But he hated to do it. It was nice to have her this close to him. Even if he was just a convenient pillow. He let his fingers drop from her hair, dismissing any further thoughts. From here, there was no telling where any of them would end up.\n\nThe small plane landed with a bump onto the tarmac of the airport.\n\nThe jostling and the whine of the hydraulic brakes had the cabin passengers startling awake. Bleary-eyed faces bent to peer out tiny windows.\n\n\"We're already here?\" Maggie said, stifling a yawn. \"I would swear I just fell asleep.\"\n\nSam rolled his eyes. The flight had been interminable for him. \"Yep. Welcome to Cuzco.\"\n\nThe mumble of the pilot to the tower could be heard as they taxied toward the tiny terminal. Uncle Hank unbuckled from his seat, stretched a kink, and worked his way forward between the press of seats.\n\nMore plans and arrangements, Sam thought.\n\nEarlier, Sam had questioned his uncle's urgency in getting to Cuzco, but Sam had been gently rebuked. When he had tried to persist, Maggie had warned him away with a shake of her head. \"Leave him be.\"\n\nSam glanced to Maggie now. She stared at his uncle with pained eyes. What was wrong? What was being left unsaid?\n\n\"Who are all those people out there?\" Norman asked behind them.\n\nSam leaned back to the window. Beside the terminal walkway, a small crowd had gathered. Half wore the khaki uniforms of local police, rifles at their shoulders. A few news cameras were carried on other shoulders, microphones ready. The others were a mixture of locals and men wearing suits too warm for the climate. These last had the stamp of government officials.\n\nIt seemed his uncle's calls had stirred up a hornet's nest of activity.\n\nThe plane pulled near, and the pilot unhooked himself from the cockpit, then crossed to the door. Henry bent his head in discussion with the pilot, then the slender fellow cranked the door open and kicked the latch to release the stairs.\n\nEven from here, Sam heard the machine-gun clicks of camera shutters and the chatter of voices.\n\nHis uncle paused at the opening and turned back to them. \"Time to face the press, folks. Remember what we discussed\u2026how to answer any questions for now.\"\n\n\"No comment,\" Norman quipped.\n\n\"Sin comentario,\" Denal echoed in Spanish.\n\n\"Exactly,\" Henry said. \"Until we get things cleared up, we speak only to those in authority.\"\n\nNods passed all around. Especially Sam. He had no desire to discuss his resurrection with the international press.\n\n\"Then let's go.\" Henry bowed his head, and the others all followed.\n\nAs Henry stepped from the plane, he winced. Even in the brightness of the afternoon, the splash of video lights and the strobe of flashbulbs were near blinding. Voices called to them: English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. The throng was held in check by a line of police.\n\nHenry stumbled forward, eyes searching the crowd. Joan. A part of him had secretly hoped his frantic call to the authorities in Cuzco might have been in time. He had only heard scraps of reports over the radio during the flight there, but they had been sketchy: the military raid on the Abbey, followed by an intense firefight. Many had died, but the details afterward were muddled.\n\nHenry held his hands in clenched fists as he crossed the tarmac. He continued to scan the crowd of reporters, government officials, and onlookers. Not one familiar face.\n\nHenry forced back tears. Please. Not again. As he searched futilely for Joan, an ache grew in his chest, a burn of bile and guilt. It was a familiar pain. He had felt it before\u2014when Elizabeth had died. He had thought he had reconciled his wife's death long ago, but his fear for Joan had awakened it all again. In truth, it had never gone away. He had just walled it off, cemented and bricked it over with his need to care for Sam.\n\nBut what now?\n\nHis heart was ash and cinder.\n\nJoan was not there.\n\nA man in a conservative grey suit stepped forward, blocking his view, hand held out. \"Professor Conklin, I am Edward Gerant, protocol officer with the U.S. embassy. We have much to discuss.\"\n\nHenry forced his fist to relax and raised his hand.\n\nThen a voice rose from the throng, cutting through the background chatter: \"Henry?\"\n\nHe froze.\n\nEdward Gerant reached for the professor's hand, but Henry pulled away, stepping to the side. He saw a slender figure push through the barricade of police.\n\nHenry's voice cracked. \"Joan\u2026?\"\n\nShe smiled and approached, slowly at first, then as tears flowed, more hurriedly. Henry met her with open arms. They fell into each other, lost in their embrace. Never thinking to feel such joy again Henry murmured, \"Oh, God, Joan\u2026I thought you had been killed. But I had prayed\u2026hoped\u2026\"\n\n\"Uncle Hank?\" a voice said behind him. It was Sam. His nephew knew nothing about Joan. Henry had been too guilty to discuss aloud the choice he'd been forced to make earlier. Guilt and fear had kept him silent until he could discover Joan's fate himself.\n\nAs Sam came up to them, Joan and Henry pulled slightly apart, but Henry would not take his eyes from her\u2026never again. Without turning away, he introduced his nephew to Dr. Joan Engel. She smiled warmly and gripped Sam's hand. Once they had shaken hands, Henry again laid claim to her palm. \"But what about you?\" Henry asked. \"What happened?\"\n\nJoan's smile faded a few degrees. \"I escaped just as the police raid began. And lucky I did. As the authorities breached the Abbey, the monks triggered a fail-safe mechanism built into their laboratory. The entire facility was incinerated, including the vault of el Sangre.\" She pointed toward the distant horizon.\n\nHenry stared along with Sam. Smoke as thick as that of another volcano climbed into the sky.\n\n\"The resulting explosion took out the entire Abbey. It's still smoldering. All that remains are the Incan ruins beneath.\"\n\n\"Amazing,\" Sam commented.\n\nHenry leaned closer to Joan. \"But thank God, you escaped. I don't know if I could have lived with\u2014\"\n\nJoan snuggled into his embrace. \"I'm not going anywhere, Henry. You drifted away from me once in my life. I won't let that happen again.\"\n\nHenry grinned and tugged her tighter to him. \"Neither will I.\"\n\nSam stepped away, smiling sadly, giving them their privacy. He had never seen his uncle lose himself so fully in someone else\u2014and clearly the feeling was mutual. While he was happy for his uncle, Sam felt oddly hollow as he backed away from the couple.\n\nNearby, Norman was talking to the jilted embassy official, relating some part of their story. The photographer's boyish laugh carried far over the tarmac. To the side, Denal hung in Norman's shadow. Norman had offered to sponsor the boy as an intern for the National Geographic\u2014and with the death of his mother, Denal had nothing holding him here but a life of poverty. The two had already made plans to return to New York together.\n\nAcross the tarmac, cameras continued to flash.\n\nSam wandered farther back, near the wing of the plane, away from the crowds. He needed a moment to think. Ever since his folks had died, he and Uncle Hank had been inseparable. Their grief had forged bonds that had tied their two hearts together, allowing no one else inside. Sam glanced over to his uncle. That is, until now.\n\nAnd Sam was not sure how he felt about it. Too much had happened. He felt unfettered, loosed from a mooring that had kept him safe. Adrift. Old memories intruded: the screech of tires, crumpled metal, breaking glass, sirens, his mother, one arm dangling, being hauled from the wreckage on an ambulance's backboard.\n\nTears suddenly sprang up in his eyes. Why was he dredging all this up now? He could not stop his tears.\n\nThen he sensed a presence behind him.\n\nHe turned. Maggie stood there, staring up at him.\n\nWhere he expected ridicule or some scathing retort at his reaction, he found only concern. One of the paramedics had given her a bright yellow rescue blanket. Maggie stood wrapped in it against the cool afternoon breeze. She spoke softly. \"It's your uncle and that woman, isn't it? You feel like you're losing him.\"\n\nHe smiled at her and wiped roughly at his eyes. \"I know it's stupid,\" he said, his throat constricted. \"But it's not just Uncle Hank. It's more than that. It's also my parents, it's Ralph\u2026it's everything death steals.\"\n\nSam struggled to put into words what he was feeling, staring up at the sky. He needed someone to listen. \"Why was I allowed to live?\" He waved an arm toward the distant Andes. \"Up there\u2026and back with my parents in the car wreck\u2026\"\n\nMaggie now stood before him, almost touching toes. \"And me in a ditch in Belfast.\"\n\nHe leaned into her and knew that Maggie could understand his pain more than anyone. \"Wh\u2026why?\" he asked quietly, choking back a sob. \"You know what I'm talking about. What's the answer? I even goddamn died and was resurrected! And I still don't have a clue!\"\n\n\"Some questions have no answers.\" Maggie reached up and touched his cheek. \"But in truth, Sam, you didn't escape death. None of us can. It's still out there. Not even the Incas could escape it in the end.\" She drew Sam closer. \"For years, I've tried to run from it, while you stood back-to-back with your uncle against it. But neither way is healthy, because Death always wins in the end. We end up the worse for trying.\"\n\n\"Then what do we do?\" He begged her with his eyes.\n\nMaggie sighed sadly. \"We strive to live as fully as we can.\" She stared up into his face. \"We simply live, Sam.\"\n\nHe felt new tears. \"But I don't understand. How\u2014?\"\n\n\"Sam,\" Maggie interrupted, reaching a finger to his lips. The rescue blanket fell from her shoulder with a soft rustle.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Just shut up and kiss me.\"\n\nHe blinked at her words, then found himself leaning down. Guided by her hands, he discovered her lips. He sank into the softness and heat of her, and he began to understand.\n\nHere is the reason we live.\n\nHe kissed her tenderly at first, then more passionately. His blood rang in his ears. He found his arms pulling her closer to him, while she reached hands to the back of his neck, tangling in his hair and tumbling his Stetson from atop his head. They struggled toward one another, leaving no space between them.\n\nAnd in that moment, Sam's heart soared as he understood.\n\nIn this kiss, there was no grief\u2026no guilt\u2026no death.\n\nOnly life\u2014and that was enough for anyone."
            },
            {
                "title": "Epilogue",
                "text": "[ Two years later ]\n\nThursday, October 19, 10:45 P.M.\n\n[ Institute of Genetic Studies ]\n\n[ Stanford, California ]\n\nThree floors beneath the main research facility, a man wearing a long white lab coat approached the palm pad to a suite of private laboratories. He pressed his hand flat on the blue pad and watched the pressure-sensitive reader flash across his fingers. The light on the panel changed to green. His name appeared in small green letters on the reader: DR. DALE KIRKPATRICK.\n\nThe sound of tumbled bolts announced his acceptance by the computerized monitoring station. He removed his palm and pulled the handle. The vacuum seal cracked with a slight whoosh of air, like a short inhaled breath. The middle-aged scientist had to tug harder to pull the door open against the slight negative pressure of the neighboring rooms, a built-in safeguard to keep biologic contaminants from possibly escaping the lab. No expense had been spared on this project. A government think tank, backed by the Pentagon, had invested close to a billion dollars in this project. A good portion of which, he thought with a wry smile, went directly into his personal salary.\n\nHis shoulder protested with a sharp twinge as he pulled the door fully open. Wincing, he entered the lab and let the door reseal behind him. He rubbed the tender spot alongside his rotator cuff. The bullet wound he had suffered in the halls of Johns Hopkins had required four surgeries to repair. Though he still had occasional pain, he could hardly complain\u2014not only had he survived the attack, he had come away with a small quantity of Substance Z, the test samples used in the electron microscope assay.\n\nOnce word of his find reached the right circles, Dr. Kirkpatrick was allowed to vanish. His death was reported, and he was whisked to the West Coast, to the Institute of Genetic Studies at Stanford. He was granted the lab, and a staff of fourteen with the highest government clearance.\n\nDale continued down to his office, past the rows of laboratories. As he passed the computer suite, he heard the whir of the four in-line Cray computers as they crunched the day's data collected by the gene sequencer. The Human Genome Project was a child's puzzle compared to what his lab was attempting. He estimated it would take four more years to figure out the exact code, but he had the time. Whistling to break the silence of the empty lab, Dale used a keycard to unlock the door and enter his personal office.\n\nShrugging out of his lab coat, he hooked the garment on a coat rack, then loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves. He crossed to his desk and settled into the leather chair with a sigh.\n\nHe wanted to dictate the last of his annual review, so Marcy could type it up tomorrow for his inspection. He opened a drawer and removed his personal dictation device. Thumbing it on, he brought the microphone to his lips.\n\n\"Status Report. Conclusions and Assessments,\" he dictated, then cleared his throat. \"Nanotechnology has always been a theoretical science, more a field of conjecture than hard science. But with the discovery of Substance Z, we are now prepared to bring the manipulation of atoms into the practical sphere of science and manufacturing. For the past two years, we have studied the effects of the 'nanobiotic' units found in Substance Z on early embryonic tissue. We have discovered the manipulation has proven most effective at the blastula stage of the human zygote, during which time the cells are the most undifferentiated and pliable. By observing these nanobots at work, and through a process of reverse engineering, we hope to be able to construct the first prototypes in the near future. But for now, we have made a significant discovery of our own, the first step in making nanotechnology a reality: We now know the programmed goal of the nanobots found in Substance Z.\"\n\nFrowning, Dale switched off the recorder and stretched a kink from his neck. He was proud of his research, but a nagging doubt still itched at his conscience. Carrying the dictation device, he crossed to the sealed window.\n\nOnce there, he pressed a button and louvered blinds swung open, revealing the contents of the incubation chamber in the next lab. A yellowish broth bubbled and swirled. Small sparks of gilt floated like fireflies in the mix. Flakes of nanobot colonies. Substance Z.\n\nBut it was not the special nutrient broth that had drawn Dale here.\n\nHanging from two racks were the twelve developing human fetuses. He leaned slightly forward studying them. The pair in the second trimester were already developing their wing buds. Heads, bulbous and too large for the tiny frames, seemed to swing in his direction. Large black eyes stared back at him, lidless for now. Small arms, doubly jointed, slowly moved. One of the fetuses sucked its tiny thumb. Dale spotted the glint of sharp teeth.\n\nHe raised the recorder again and switched it on. \"I have come to believe that the gold meteors discovered by the Incas were, in fact, some form of extraterrestrial spore. Unable to transport themselves physically, an alien civilization seeded these nanobot probes throughout the stars. Like a dandelion gone to seed, the probes spread through space, hoping to find fertile ground among the countless planets. Responsive to the patterns of sentient life, the gold probes would attract the curious with their shapeshifting nature and lure in their prey. Once caught, the nanobots would manipulate this \"raw material\" at the molecular level, ultimately consuming a planet's sentient biomass and rebuilding their own alien race from it, thus spreading their civilization among the stars.\"\n\nDale clicked off the recorder. \"But not here,\" he muttered.\n\nLeaning forward, Dale studied the largest of the developing fetuses. It seemed to sense his attention and reached tiny clawed fists toward him. Sighing, Dale rested his forehead against the glass tank. What will we learn from each other? What will we discover? The lips of the tiny figure pulled back in a silent hiss, exposing its row of sharp teeth. Dale ignored the infantile display of aggression, content with the success of his handiwork. He rested one palm on the glass.\n\n\"Welcome,\" he whispered to the newcomers. \"Welcome to Earth.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Rogue Angel 43.5) The Babel Codex",
        "author": "Alex Archer",
        "genres": [
            "urban fantasy",
            "action",
            "female protagonist"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Prologue",
                "text": "[ The Great Tower ]\n\n[ Shinar (Mesopotamia) 610 BC ]\n\n\"What you are talking about can get you killed, Joktan. Not only do you defy King Amraphel, but you defy Almighty God. And there are others here who believe in the thing that we are doing, that maybe this is the only way to truly get God's ear. I am surprised you have not already been struck down by God's almighty wrath.\"\n\nStanding in the shade of the pavilion, Joktan glared at Elishah. The man had been a true friend throughout the forty years they had known each other. When they had been boys together, they had thought the graybeards too demanding and too watchful, preventing them from having the many adventures they had dreamed of.\n\nNow they were graybeards themselves, men made lean and brown from long years of labor under the hot sun, with large families of their own. Families that depended on them to keep the wolf from the door and find work for their sons and soon-to-be grandsons. Being head of a family was hard, unrelenting work.\n\n\"I do not wish to defy the king, either, my friend.\" Joktan meant that. \"And if anyone is in defiance of God, it is the king. That tower he builds is sacrilege.\"\n\nSeated on a pillow under the pavilion they had raised near the brick kilns to escape the heat, Elishah shifted uneasily and pulled at his beard the way his father used to. \"See? This is what I'm talking about. You cannot go around saying things like that. What if the king's guard hears you?\"\n\n\"My father, the king, will not have me beheaded. Of that I am sure.\" Joktan reached for a nearby wineskin, brought it to his lips, and drank. Then he offered the skin to Elishah. \"He will not be happy with me, and he will perhaps increase the quota of bricks my workers are supposed to provide for his tower, but he will not harm me.\"\n\n\"You say that, Joktan, but this thing your father the king does drives him like I have never before seen. He is like a man possessed.\"\n\n\"Now who speaks defiance?\" Joktan smiled at his friend.\n\nElishah sighed heavily and spat in disgust. \"Being near you gives me a treacherous tongue. Your father, if he should hear me, would have it cut from my head.\"\n\nThat was possible. His father could be unforgiving these days. The hand of death lay heavily upon the king's shoulder, and this tower was his father's acknowledgment of that.\n\nJoktan stared out across the hot expanse of land. Shimmering heat waves rose from the brown earth. Farther down the hill, the glittering waters of the two rivers looked cool and inviting. Fishermen paddled their boats and dragged their nets in search of a catch. Farmers drove their donkeys to the banks, filled the large water jugs for their crops, then drove the animals back. Toward the east, the watchtowers stood above the walls of his father's city.\n\nOne day, God willing that day not arrive any too soon, the city would be Joktan's. There had been a time when he relished the idea of being king. Then he had seen the king as being the freest man in the land. Now, however, he knew that particular mantle came saddled with many troubles and responsibilities.\n\nMaybe those hardships of the mind were what had driven his father if not mad, then nearly so.\n\nJoktan looked back out at the brick kilns in front of the tower. Armies of workers had been drafted into the construction. They constructed kilns, dug up the earth and made mud bricks, then they baked them to build the tower.\n\nThe structure grew every day. A week ago it was taller than anything Joktan had ever seen. It dwarfed the great pyramids of Egypt, even the Great Pyramid of Giza, which stood over three hundred and sixty rods tall.\n\nThis day the tower was taller still.\n\nMen toiled all along the structure, baking brick, carrying brick, laying brick, building and building and building.\n\n\"Do you think it might collapse under its own weight?\" Elishah asked softly. \"It is not pointed like the Egyptian structures. The weight of the bricks is not dispersed in the same way.\"\n\n\"I do not know.\" Joktan stared at the tower, which was built as a ziggurat, in squares that set one atop the other, each one smaller than the last. It was an immense undertaking, looking dark and primitive against the clear blue sky.\n\n\"Is it wide enough at the base to reach to God?\"\n\nJoktan shook his head. \"I wish I knew.\" No one could say for certain how far away the heavens were.\n\nTwo kiln overseers walked over to join Joktan and Elishah under the tent canopy. Both men were dark-skinned, taller than the men of Shinar, with fierce black beards. They hailed from Mosul, to the north.\n\n\"Prince Joktan.\" The older one bowed deeply, but his eyes never left Joktan's and his hand did not stray far from the sword at his hip.\n\nJoktan struggled to remember the man's name. It was easier in the beginning, when there weren't so many names to remember. These days the names, many of them strange to his tongue, flitted out of reach like horseflies. \"Yes...Umar?\"\n\n\"I would beg a boon.\"\n\n\"If humanly possible, I will grant it.\"\n\n\"I need a physician to visit my men. Some of them have come down with an illness the like of which I have not before seen.\"\n\n\"I will see to it at once.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" Umar bowed again and left.\n\nJoktan waved over one of the young runners seated at another shade. Joktan gave him the message to take to the king and sent him on his way.\n\n\"A sickness?\" Elishah rocked unhappily and spat again.\n\n\"When you have this many men in one place, sickness will happen. They eat like locusts, depleting our stores and emptying our orchards, and they create more foulness than the river can carry away.\" Joktan folded his arms and stared at two men, one from Shinar and one from Mashhad, who were loudly arguing.\n\nThe two men squared off against each other as other men gave way around them. God was called upon, and the man from Shinar drew a curved dagger.\n\nJoktan ran from the pavilion and kicked up a rake into his hands as he went. His father had not only had him trained as a bricklayer and an engineer. Joktan knew the ways of the sword and the spear, as well.\n\nThe Shinar man feinted with the knife. The Mashhad man dodged back. With cool calculation, the Shinar man whipped his arm around, intending to disembowel his foe.\n\nSwinging the rake in an underhanded blow, Joktan struck the aggressor's wrist, eliciting a yelp of surprised pain as he knocked the knife free. Reaching out, Joktan caught the knife by the hilt in his right hand. He tucked the rake under his arm, ready to strike again.\n\nJoktan used his voice as a weapon, striking the two men and getting their attention immediately: \"There will be no fighting! King Amraphel has decreed no blood will be shed on these grounds that does not come from brick work!\"\n\nThe Shinar man debased himself in front of Joktan, dropping to his knees and pressing his forehead against the ground. \"I beg forgiveness, Prince Joktan. I did not mean to offend, but this man\u2014\"\n\n\"Silence. I will acknowledge no reason for taking up arms against a man working alongside you as a brother. Violence against another is not permitted here in this place. It is an abomination in the eyes of God.\" Joktan stared at first one man, then the other. \"Go. Both of you. Find some place to work where you are not in each other's shadow, and pray to God to forgive your transgressions.\"\n\nJoktan watched them go, feeling torn. His father, for all his ambition and possible defiance of God, had created something truly amazing by uniting all these tribes together. No matter how it turned out, Joktan would not allow the project to come to naught.\n\nHe gazed up at the tower, standing in its shadow now, not certain whether he should stand in awe\u2014or in fear."
            },
            {
                "title": "Addis Ababa, Ethiopia",
                "text": "Annja Creed stood in the narrow stone hallway and watched as another skeleton stepped out of the darkness in front of her. Or maybe it was the same one putting in another appearance. She wasn't sure. The small flashlight she carried seemed to turn the bones almost paper white against the black shadows.\n\nThe hallway was in the underground ancient Aksumite Empire trading fort that had been recently discovered by an Italian archaeology team investigating World War I troop movements. Back in the first century CE, the Kingdom of Aksum had been a conduit for trade between the Roman Empire and India. A hundred years after that, it had rivaled China, Persia and Rome in influence and power.\n\nAnnja had been excited about getting to visit the dig so soon after it had been found. Until the arrival of the skeletons. Or multiple arrivals of a skeleton.\n\nShe arched an eyebrow at the thing trotting toward her waving its bony arms. The size told her the skeleton was probably male. \"Seriously?\" she said into the phone.\n\nThe skeleton's jaw worked and he laughed maniacally. Then he raised his arms and rushed her.\n\n\"Seriously, what?\" Doug Morrell, her producer at Chasing History's Monsters, asked from the other end of the phone connection.\n\n\"I'm being attacked by a skeleton.\" She cautiously stepped backward as the thing kept coming.\n\n\"That is so freaking cool!\" Doug was probably on Facebook as he spoke, probably playing Farmville because that was his social media game of choice at the moment. He was younger than Annja, and a lover of pop culture and cryptozoology. He also liked being a producer of a hit cable network show. \"Are we getting any video on this?\"\n\n\"No.\" With the skeleton in her peripheral vision, she looked for something to put between her and it.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because I thought I was coming here to meet your Burris Coronet.\" Doug had sounded pure fanboy every time he talked about the Los Angeles radio talk show host. \"I didn't know I was going to be treated to a lame Halloween episode.\"\n\n\"Is Burris there?\"\n\n\"I haven't seen him.\"\n\n\"Man. Let's hope Burris is late and he's not being attacked by a skeleton. Or already had his brain eaten.\"\n\n\"Zombies eat brains, Doug, not skeletons.\" Annja studied the skeleton, which had stopped a few feet away and appeared to be staring back at her. She couldn't believe she was even having this conversation.\n\n\"Are you running? You don't sound like you're running. If a zombie is attacking you, you should definitely be running.\"\n\n\"I'm not going to run. There's no such thing as an animated skeleton, Doug.\"\n\n\"You know, getting your brain eaten by an animated skeleton is probably the worst time ever to realize you were wrong about their existence.\"\n\n\"I ignored the first two and they went away.\"\n\nThe skeleton growled like a guard dog contesting territory.\n\n\"Wait. The other two? Why didn't you call then?\"\n\n\"I wasn't irritated then. Now I'm irritated.\"\n\n\"What's that growling noise?\"\n\n\"The skeleton.\"\n\n\"It's growling at you? It's close enough that I can hear it growling at you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Then it's too close, Annja! Run!\"\n\n\"Think about it, Doug. The skeleton is growling.\"\n\n\"I hear it. Sounds hungry.\"\n\n\"How does a skeleton growl? It has no lungs. You need lungs and air and vocal chords and lips to growl. The skeleton doesn't have any of those, and it's growling. Does that make any sense to you?\"\n\nThe skeleton's voice was starting to go hoarse from all the growling.\n\n\"Kristie Chatham runs a lot on the episodes of the show she hosts,\" Doug said.\n\n\"She also falls out of her clothes a lot.\"\n\n\"Falling out of her clothes gets her a big fan base.\"\n\n\"I have a big fan base, too. Mine happens to love history and archaeology.\"\n\n\"I know, but your fans also watch Kristie fall out of her clothes. Do you know how big your fan base would be if you crossed over into Kristie's fans?\"\n\nDoug's question exasperated Annja. She tried not to let it. Her cohost position on the popular cable television program didn't take up too much of her time and had provided her an \"in\" for several international events. Regular academics didn't have that star power.\n\nThe voice strain had caused the skeleton's growling to change pitch. Now the skeleton sounded like an emergency room victim. Or a dog whose tail had been stepped on.\n\n\"Is it in pain?\"\n\n\"How could it be in pain? No flesh, no nerve endings, no pain.\" Annja expected the skeleton to disappear back into the darkness like the other two had.\n\nInstead of disappearing, though, the skeleton started cursing in his strained voice, becoming verbally abusive against Annja and women in general. His voice turned almost falsetto as he said, \"You're so stupid. I'm gonna teach you to be afraid.\"\n\nThen he rushed her a second time and, as he came closer, the flashlight revealed that the skeleton was actually a big guy in a black body stocking with bones printed on it. No surprise there. He threw a punch at her, still in full foulmouthed attack, and because he was so hoarse, he sounded like he was sipping on a helium balloon.\n\nDropping the flashlight, Annja stepped to one side, captured the man's wrist in her right hand and twisted viciously before she truly thought about it and before he could do anything to stop her. Stepping behind her attacker, she put her other hand behind the guy's head and shoved, adding her weight and muscle to his headlong plunge as she set herself and pivoted to bring him around.\n\nHe face-planted against the stone wall behind her with a meaty splat. Rebounding, he staggered, then sat awkwardly on the ground. Blood oozed from his nose, seeping through the white skull face.\n\nHe screamed.\n\n\"Now the skeleton's in pain,\" Annja said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "\"I just thought we'd have some fun. You know, take the abandoned trading fort to the next level.\" Burris Coronet was a big, handsome guy in his mid-thirties. He had surfer-boy hair, bronze skin and hazel eyes\u2014not unlike her own\u2014which she could only see after he pushed his sunglasses up on his head. Titanium aviator sunglasses like the ones Brad Pitt favored. Dressed in slim-fit tan chinos, a baby-blue cotton pullover under a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the tails left out and Doc Martens, he could have passed as a beach bum.\n\nExcept that his hundred-watt megasmile\u2014a cross between boyish and a shark's feral grin\u2014was plastered across billboards all over California. Burris Coronet, as Doug had been reminding Annja, was a Big Deal. He was a shock jock of the airwaves, what some were calling the next Howard Stern.\n\nAnnja wasn't a Burris Coronet fan. She'd listened to a few of his taped shows in her hotel room after Doug had called to say Burris wanted to meet her while he was in Ethiopia. Burris was a hatchet man on the airwaves, attacking whomever and whatever he pleased with impunity. She still didn't know why so many people liked his show. Or him.\n\nIn person, at least over the past couple days, he was toned down. More obnoxious than confrontational. Annja thought maybe Burris was still trying to find her hot buttons. She'd been good at deflecting him.\n\nThe skeleton, however, had been a tipping point. Now he was infuriating.\n\n\"Having a drunken skeleton jump me in the dark was your idea of fun?\" With her arms crossed over her heavy, olive-drab T-shirt, Annja stared up at Burris, despite that she herself was a good five foot ten.\n\nBurris held his palms up in a placating gesture. \"Hey, the guy wasn't supposed to jump you.\"\n\n\"He did.\"\n\nThey stood in one of the rooms unearthed in the dig, not far from where she'd had the last encounter with the skeleton, which had been carried out on a gurney. He'd last been heard in his falsetto voice threatening to sue Burris.\n\nTen feet by twenty feet, the room had probably been used for storage when the trading post had been a viable operation several centuries ago. Roots erupted from the walls, and several tendrils that looked like spaghetti stuck down in places. The stink of fresh earth filled the room.\n\nThe dig's location outside Addis Ababa was a building, an abandoned hotel that dated to World War I. Communities tended to build on older cities. People evolved over time, but they didn't move away as long as the resources were there.\n\n\"I know. I heard.\" Burris grinned and nodded, then pulled out an earpiece. \"He was rigged with a body mic. Got the whole thing on tape.\"\n\nThe archaeology team had set up a small desk in this room, which provided enough space for three laptop computers and preliminary identification tools. Recovered items were logged in at the workstation, then transported outside where they were further documented and cataloged. Electrical cords connected to the generator, which throbbed distantly outside, crisscrossed the floor, powering the laptops and the electric lanterns hanging on the walls. And, apparently, enabled Burris to rig \"skeletons\" with body mics.\n\n\"Man, the sound of him hitting that wall is awesome! Splat. Pure gold. That is going to play beautifully when we put this special together.\"\n\nA radio show about Annja's time in Addis Ababa with Burris was, as Doug Morrell had pointed out, advertising Chasing History's Monsters simply couldn't afford to buy. A special segment was supposed to be a gift. Burris's Unacceptable! was a soapbox statement against everything he disagreed with. But what sealed the deal with Doug was Burris's agreement to reciprocate with a cameo on the TV episode Annja was there to film.\n\nShe tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. She'd worn it pulled back off her neck because this meet was supposed to be all about business. Hence her khaki cargo shorts and hiking boots. \"Your friend has a broken nose and a possible concussion.\"\n\nThe skeleton had been loaded up by one of the archaeology students and driven back to the city for treatment.\n\nBurris shook his head and counted off on his fingers as he said, \"First of all, he's not a friend, just some guy I hired out of a bar who fit the skeleton suit. Second, a guy who gets handsy with a woman without her permission gets whatever is coming to him. I'm just glad you were able to take care of yourself.\"\n\nHe sounded so sincere that Annja was tempted to believe him. However, she'd heard him sound sincere on the radio show when he wasn't. He was good at acting innocent. He'd probably been doing it since he was a kid. He was thirty-five going on nine.\n\n\"Third, this whole rooting around in the dirt thing is getting pretty boring.\" He glanced meaningfully around the room. \"Can you imagine me telling my listeners about digging in the dirt?\"\n\n\"Then why did Doug tell me you wanted to do this segment?\"\n\nHe snorted dismissively, ignoring her. \"My gardener, Luis, and his guys could go through this place faster than the people working here.\" He paused as he had a new thought. \"I hope they're not getting paid by the hour. Man, talk about milking it.\"\n\nAnnja made herself count to ten the way she'd been cautioned back in the orphanage in New Orleans where she'd been raised. Around Burris the past few days, she'd been counting to ten a lot.\n\n\"Most of these people are not getting paid. They're college students helping Professor Sordi for college credit or experience they can put on their r\u00e9sum\u00e9s.\"\n\nShaking his head, Burris turned to the nearest graduate student, a spindly guy who reminded Annja of Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory. \"Say, pal...\"\n\nThe grad student looked at Burris, blinked, looked at Annja, blinked again, then looked back at Burris. \"Yes?\"\n\n\"You're not getting paid for digging?\"\n\n\"No. I'm a graduate assistant to Dr. Sordi.\" His English was flawless, but held a hint of Florence.\n\n\"Then why are you here?\"\n\nThe student took a step back and raised his iPad as a barrier between Burris and himself. \"To gain experience, to enhance my r\u00e9sum\u00e9 and to learn what I can of this place. Getting chosen for this dig was a very fortunate thing for me.\"\n\n\"You call reeking of dirt, sweating yourself stupid and being trapped underground fortunate?\"\n\nThe grad student blinked again. \"No, I call discovering this Aksumite trading fort fortunate. You couldn't drive me from this place with all the bulls in Pamplona.\"\n\n\"You ever run with the bulls there?\"\n\nThe grad student shifted uncomfortably. \"No. It was simply a meta\u2014\"\n\n\"Well, I have. Three times.\" Burris hiked up a shirt sleeve to reveal a long scar. \"Got that my second time.\" He reached for his belt buckle. \"Third time, I got gored in the\u2014\"\n\nFace burning with embarrassment, the grad student turned to the artifacts in front of him. \"Please excuse me. I must return to my work.\"\n\nBurris looked at Annja. \"You want to see my scar?\"\n\n\"If you show it to me, you're going to have a bed next to your skeleton and that scar will never look the same.\"\n\nA wide grin split Burris's face as he released his belt buckle. \"Maybe after we get to know each other a little better.\"\n\n\"Trust me, we'll never know each other that well.\"\n\n\"Ouch.\" Burris drew back and frowned. \"Your guy Doogie said you could be difficult.\"\n\n\"Doug.\"\n\n\"Whatever.\"\n\n\"I was told you had something to show me.\"\n\n\"I tried.\" Burris grinned.\n\nAnnja just stared at him.\n\n\"Wow. Total flame-out there, I guess.\" Burris gestured to one of the tunnels. \"I wanted to show you some stuff that's been recovered. Get your take on them for your show.\"\n\n\"What stuff?\"\n\n\"C'mon. You'll see.\" Plucking a flashlight from one of the nearby tables, Burris headed off down the tunnel.\n\nReluctantly, wishing she could get back to helping Professor Sordi and his team, Annja followed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "\"I wanted to do something more interesting than playing in the sandbox with the other kiddies.\" Flashlight in hand, Burris entered another excavated room in the older section of the dig that didn't relate to the original find or the Aksumite discovery. \"Thought maybe I'd show you some artifacts that a few of the local tomb raiders have dug up. Get your take on them.\"\n\nDoug, you so owe me. Annja stepped into the room and felt as if she'd entered a Hollywood set. The earthen walls stood out in sharp relief under the camcorder lights and other lights. The wall to Annja's right was covered with artifacts that looked hundreds of years old but weren't. They were knockoffs that tourists bought in the mercato, the city's large open market.\n\nThick, apelike skulls occupied center stage of the presentation. Given the flaring cheekbones and pronounced canine teeth, Annja felt certain the skulls were based on Lucy and Ramidus, two hominid skeletons recovered from the area.\n\nAround them, fake jewelry, period costumes and stone weapons hung on the wall. A mummified monkey in swaddling clothes sat on the ground beneath them, its glass eyes gleaming. The monkey mummy's feet were perched on a clay brick. Nearby, a bronze lion wearing a crown tipped at a jaunty angle carried a pennant. A small collection of pottery sat on either side.\n\nTwo young male camera operators stood on the other side of the large room filming Annja and Burris as they entered. Part of Burris's entourage, they'd mostly stayed in the bars with their boss.\n\nBurris immediately ratcheted up his showman performance. \"And here she is, folks, your favorite archaeologist, fresh from the historic dig in Addis Ababa where an old site from the Kingdom of Aksum has recently been found by Dr. Vittorio Sordi, of the Universit\u00e0 degli Studi di Milano.\"\n\nThe radio personality's flawless Italian caught Annja by surprise.\n\n\"For those of you who don't know Dr. Sordi, he has uncovered two previous rare digs. He was involved in the discovery of the first complete Etruscan house at Poggiarello Renzetti in Vetulonia, Italy, in 2010, and in the dig site of the vampire skull on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in 2009.\" Burris smiled. \"Ooooh, vampires! Wish we could have been there for that?\" He mugged for the camera. \"Me, too. Dr. Sordi gets around, but not nearly as much as the beautiful Annja Creed.\"\n\nBurris waved Annja forward.\n\nShe folded her arms and frowned at him. She so did not want to be part of whatever freak show the radio personality had planned. \"It would have been nice to have gotten prepped for this.\"\n\nOne of the cameramen looked up. \"Want us to cut, boss?\"\n\n\"No.\" Burris waved a hand in a circular motion and kept his eyes on Annja. \"Keep rolling. We'll edit and clean up later. We can work with this.\"\n\nStruggling to keep from getting angry, knowing that Doug had spoken the truth when he'd said Burris Coronet and his radio show could bring attention to Chasing History's Monsters, Annja forced herself to look around the room.\n\n\"Do you recognize anything, Ms. Creed?\" Burris's tone was singsong, stopping millimeters short of taunting.\n\n\"Other than the fact that most of these artifacts are souvenirs from the market?\" Still, there was something about that clay brick under the mummy's feet that sparked her interest.\n\n\"Hey.\" Burris had lost some of his jokey demeanor. \"These are first-class fake artifacts. The best money can buy. I had guys scrounging the city looking for this stuff.\" He picked up a spear from where it leaned against the wall and brandished it.\n\nThe spear looked like it might have been genuine. It was almost five and a half feet long, and the narrow fluted blade was at least eighteen inches long. At least the spearhead looked like it might be real. The haft was a fairly recent addition.\n\n\"Do you know what this is?\" Burris whipped the blade around theatrically, spinning it end over end with skill that showed martial arts experience.\n\n\"Ethiopian military spear. Probably dates back to the mid- to late 1800s. The government checked them in and out as warriors needed them. Which was often given this country's history. The spearhead looks original, but that haft is a definite new addition. If the spearhead is that old, it probably went missing in the 1990s when an accidental explosion destroyed the government arsenal.\"\n\nBurris halted the spear's spin and gazed more critically at the weapon before shifting his attention back to Annja. \"How do you know the explosion was accidental?\"\n\nIgnoring the question, Annja knelt on the floor and looked at the clay brick beneath the mummified monkey's feet. She set her backpack on the ground within easy reach. The brick was plain and chipped, ancient. It was square instead of rectangular as most modern-day bricks were made. The light tan color showed some wear, but the brick was cleaner and in better shape than Annja would have thought possible.\n\n\"Ah, the monkey got you, right?\" Burris put down the spear and picked up the mummified monkey. \"I thought it might. Who can resist a dead monkey all wrapped up like a baby?\" He prodded one of the exposed feet with a forefinger. \"Looks like he could just reach out and grab your finger, doesn't he?\"\n\nAnnja ignored Burris and took a mini-Maglite from her pocket. She turned on the flash and played the beam over the brick. Spotting writing on the brick's face now that it was revealed, she took out a brush from her shirt pocket and whisked the dust away.\n\n\"You're passing up a dead baby monkey for a rock?\"\n\n\"That monkey isn't a baby, it's an adult.\"\n\n\"It's still little.\" Burris looked the monkey in the face. \"Kind of cute in a dreadful, ugly sort of way. But it's too big to put on a key chain or hang from a rearview mirror. Probably give that taco dog a run for his enchiladas, though.\"\n\nPulling her 35mm camera out of her backpack, Annja took pictures of the brick. \"Where did you get this?\"\n\n\"The brick?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I dunno.\" Burris held the monkey by its hands and made it dance. The cameramen closed in on the sight, cracking up. \"I paid some vendors at the market to bring some stuff over. Can't believe you don't love the monkey more than a paperweight.\"\n\nAfter she put the camera away, Annja gently lifted the brick from the floor.\n\n\"Why are you so interested in the brick?\"\n\n\"Because out of everything here, I think it's real.\" The brick weighed less than it looked like it would. Ancient bricks were made out of soil, water and dried grass. Once they'd been baked, though, they turned out extremely durable, lasting thousands of years.\n\n\"No crap?\" Burris tossed the mummified monkey to one of the cameramen, who scrambled to make a one-handed catch but failed.\n\nThe monkey hit the floor at the same time three men with pistols clenched in their fists stepped through the door at the other end of the room."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "\"Who are you?\" Burris stepped toward the men with his hand raised authoritatively. \"You can't just walk in here. This is a closed set.\"\n\nStill kneeling, Annja looked at the three men and wondered if they had been hired by Burris to make the video more exciting. Because he wasn't acting scared. If he had hired them, he'd cast well.\n\nAll three men looked rough, dressed in cheap cotton suits that made their black skin stand out even more. In their late twenties or early thirties, they were lean and hard.\n\nBurris strode toward the men. \"Get out of here.\" He glanced over his shoulder at the cameramen. \"Keep rolling on this. It'll play great.\"\n\nUncertainly, the cameramen filmed the encounter.\n\nThe man leading the group raised his pistol and fired a shot into the earthen ceiling. The harsh crack of the gunshot filled the room and deafened Annja. Dust drifted down from the baseball-size hole in the ceiling.\n\nThe gunman shifted his aim to Burris's midsection. \"I am Tadesse, American.\" His accent was strong. \"And if you value your life, you will stop where you are.\"\n\nBurris stopped and his hands slowly rose at his sides till he was holding them over his head. He swallowed hard, his bluster gone. \"Sure. No problem. I value my life.\"\n\nTadesse cut his gaze to her. \"Woman, hand me that brick.\"\n\nAnnja bristled. She stood with the brick in her hand, then walked toward him.\n\n\"You're just going to give him my brick?\" Burris sounded as though he couldn't believe it.\n\n\"He has a gun.\"\n\nBurris cursed. \"You can't just take that brick. I paid for it. It's mine.\"\n\nObviously irritated with Burris\u2014Annja could definitely understand that feeling\u2014Tadesse again pointed the pistol at the big American. \"I will not tell you again to shut your mouth.\"\n\nTaking advantage of the man's distraction, Annja snap-kicked him in the crotch, pulled the brick into her chest to protect it, then caught the pistol in her free hand and twisted. She yanked the weapon free.\n\nTadesse squalled as his fingers cracked and cursed vehemently. He threw himself at her, reaching out with both hands. Annja ducked and slid to the side, spinning into a backward kick that caught Tadesse between the shoulder blades and propelled him forward. Off balance, he landed on his face with a smack.\n\nStill moving, Annja flipped the pistol up, caught it in her hand and fired at the two remaining thugs as they opened fire. The pistol bounced in her fist as she squeezed off shots as fast as she could. She didn't choose to kill when she had a choice, but these guys were clearly bent on murder.\n\nOver a brick? She still couldn't figure that out.\n\nThe room filled with thunder and muzzle flashes. Bullets dug divots from the walls, floor and ceiling. The two men weren't crack shots and now lay groaning in the hallway.\n\nThe cameramen were fleeing toward the main dig.\n\n\"Who are those guys?\" Burris asked.\n\nLeft partially deaf from the gunshots, Annja could barely hear him even though he was obviously yelling. She tossed the empty pistol to the floor. \"I don't know. I thought you hired them to spice up the video.\"\n\n\"Why would I hire them?\" Burris gaped at her.\n\n\"Why did you hire the guy in the skeleton costume?\"\n\n\"Skeleton Guy was fun.\"\n\n\"No, he wasn't.\" Annja realized for the first time that Burris hadn't abandoned her. She didn't know if he was brave or had just forgotten to run. She suspected the latter.\n\n\"Who are these guys? Why do they want my brick?\"\n\nAnnja opened her backpack and tucked the brick beside her tablet PC and camera, wrapping it in an extra T-shirt she'd packed in case. You never knew how dirty you'd get at a site.\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\nFootsteps echoed in the tunnel to the outside, rapidly approaching.\n\nAnnja pulled on the backpack and watched as flashlights appeared in the tunnel.\n\n\"Who's that?\" Burris squinted into the dark.\n\n\"Tadesse! Tadesse!\" someone down the tunnel called out.\n\nA shot cracked and a slug skipped across the ceiling before burying into a wall.\n\n\"Not your fan club. Come on.\" Annja grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him into motion, almost yanking him off his feet. He sprinted after her, cursing as more shots spanged off the walls around them and kicked up small dust clouds.\n\nReaching up, she caught hold of the thick electrical cables that supplied power to the naked bulbs hanging along the wall. She yanked, staggering as she pulled herself off balance, then felt the cables come loose from the wall. The bulbs exploded with tiny pops when they struck the ground. Glass crunched under Annja's boots. She was too deaf to hear it, but she felt it.\n\n\"I can't see!\" Burris yelled.\n\n\"Neither can they.\" Annja dragged her left hand along the wall and fixed a map of the dig in her mind.\n\nThe darkness didn't keep their pursuers from shooting as they shined their flashlights down the tunnel. Bullets slammed into the walls and a couple even whizzed by overhead, knocking loose dust that eddied in the shifting flashlight beams.\n\nAnnja felt the opening to the tunnel to the left rather than saw it. She reached back, caught hold of Burris again, and pulled him into the side tunnel with her.\n\nBurris breathed raggedly in the darkness. \"Do you know where you're going?\"\n\n\"This is a ventilation tunnel Dr. Sordi ordered dug.\"\n\n\"I thought you had a flashlight.\"\n\n\"I do. Want to hold it so those guys back there can see you better?\"\n\nBurris cursed but didn't ask for the flashlight.\n\nThe narrow confines forced her to go more slowly. She kept hearing sounds of pursuit. Annja hoped Sordi and his students escaped without being hurt.\n\nTwenty meters farther on, the tunnel came to an abrupt end. She held an arm in front of her face and was able to stop in time.\n\nBurris wasn't so lucky. He hit the end of the tunnel with a thud and a groan, and sank to his knees. He sucked in air. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"We reached the end of the tunnel.\"\n\n\"You couldn't warn me?\"\n\n\"Look out.\"\n\n\"Gee, thanks.\"\n\n\"Don't mention it.\"\n\n\"I think I chipped a tooth.\"\n\n\"Get up.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Those guys are still coming.\"\n\nIn diluted light from some source she couldn't place, Annja spotted another tunnel to the right. This one was part of the metro sewer system and led to the street.\n\nBurris sat with his back to the wall, checking his teeth with a forefinger. \"They missed us,\" he whispered.\n\n\"Stay here if you want.\" Annja stepped into the side tunnel just as their pursuers peered into the tunnel.\n\nBurris cursed and pushed himself to his feet, crowding in behind Annja as bullets slapped into the wall where he'd been. Ahead, Annja could make out daylight seeping in around a manhole cover. She ran."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Rafik Bhalla stood in the sweltering heat outside the mercato. Vendors hawking their wares to the early-morning tourist crowd created a constant current of noise behind him.\n\nFrustrated, Bhalla yanked back the cuff of his Italian jacket and glanced at the Rolex on his wrist. Only minutes had passed since his men had gone down into the dig site across the street, but he was certain too much time had elapsed. They should have been back with the brick now.\n\nThe hotel above the dig site had been abandoned years ago by all but a few freeloaders. Once the Italian archaeology team had gotten the rights to excavate the World War I site below the hotel, police had removed the vagabonds.\n\nEthiopia had been part of Benito Mussolini's Africa Orientale Italiana, which had also included the Italian colonies of Eritrea and Italian Somaliland. Mussolini had been forced to invade twice after then-emperor Menelik II had repulsed the Italian army the first time. It wasn't until they'd invaded with poison gas and other more modern weapons of war that the Second Italo-Abyssinian War was successful.\n\nOnce in control of the country, Mussolini had set about destroying the British supply lines through the Suez Canal.\n\nBhalla hadn't been surprised to learn that the Italian army had put in a secret barracks under the hotel. Even the discovery of the Aksumite Empire trading post hadn't been too surprising. Ethiopia was a country with a long and varied history of conquerors and commerce.\n\nNo, the brick had been the surprising find. It hadn't originated in Ethiopia, and it had existed for thousands of years, just waiting to tell its story.\n\nWalking to the back of his sleek dark gray Jaguar XJ, Bhalla nodded to the man standing guard there. Although the man was responsible for Bhalla's personal security, Bhalla stood half a head taller than him and looked more powerful, like a water buffalo standing next to a cow. Bhalla liked that, but he also liked knowing that the man\u2014and the driver and the other guy at the front of the Jaguar\u2014was there to look after him.\n\n\"Open the boot,\" Bhalla directed.\n\nDiscreetly, the guard opened the car's trunk. People passed by in the street and on the sidewalk, but no one paid much attention.\n\nAn old man lay inside on a plastic tarp with his hands and feet tied behind him. The position looked very uncomfortable, but Bhalla had no compassion for the man, who had tears leaking down a withered face that looked like it had been chipped out of anthracite. His gray hair was in disarray and stubble covered his chin around the gag in his mouth. His lips were parched and cracked. His flesh was bruised dark purple, and there were numerous lacerations from a scalpel. Bhalla had learned how to cut without killing.\n\nSince the morning, the old man had fouled himself, and the odor was almost more than Bhalla could bear. Bhalla put a forefinger to his lips. \"Do not yell or I will kill you, Dawit. Nod if you understand.\"\n\nDawit trembled, squeezed his eyes shut, shedding more tears, then opened them and looked at his tormentor.\n\n\"Good. Now I am going to ask you again about the stone. You will not lie to me.\"\n\nDawit shook his head and made noises against the gag.\n\n\"Quietly, old man. Quietly or you will die.\"\n\nDawit nodded.\n\nBhalla took a surgical glove out of his pocket and pulled it on, then reached down and took the gag from his prisoner's mouth.\n\n\"Tell me about the stone. Where you found it.\"\n\n\"I have told you. I swear by all that is holy, I did not lie to you about this. An American relic hunter I was working for, a very bad man, found the stone in a dig out on the coast. He thought it was worth a lot of money. He contacted you because he knew you looked for such things.\"\n\nBhalla nodded. The American was a man Bhalla did business with. As Dawit had said, the American was a bad man. But he was also a professional, someone Bhalla had done business with before.\n\n\"It is worth a lot of money, Dawit. I had promised to pay him for the stone. Then you killed him and took it.\"\n\nDawit closed his eyes and panted in panic. \"This is true. I was weak. I made a mistake.\"\n\n\"I do not begrudge a man who tries to improve his lot in life. If you had stuck to our deal\u2014\"\n\n\"You would have killed me the instant I handed you the stone.\"\n\n\"Yes, but you would have died quickly, painlessly. Now look at all you have had to endure.\"\n\nDawit shivered and wept. He whimpered unintelligible prayers that held no belief.\n\nBhalla gazed around the street but saw no one worth his undue attention. \"Where is the stone, Dawit?\"\n\n\"In the dig under the hotel as I told you. The big American, the one from the radio, he was looking for things yesterday to play a prank on the woman, Annja Creed. I sold him the stone.\"\n\n\"The stone was still there this morning?\"\n\n\"Yes. I was told I could pick it up this afternoon.\"\n\n\"Mr. Bhalla?\" The security man beside Bhalla tapped his shoulder and pointed.\n\nBhalla watched as a manhole cover shifted to one side and a woman with striking chestnut hair pulled back into a ponytail clambered from under the street. Passersby gave the new arrival a wide berth.\n\nBhalla recognized Annja Creed at once, though their paths had never crossed. He knew her mostly from the scholarly work she did, the books and articles, but he also knew her from Chasing History's Monsters. He had heard that she was at the Italian archaeology site.\n\nDid she have the stone? Or was she simply running for her life?\n\nThe woman turned back to the manhole and offered her hand to a man, helping him climb out of the manhole, as well. Almost immediately, some of the men Bhalla had sent into the dig raced across the street with guns in their hands, yelling as they shoved pedestrians aside to get through the crowd.\n\nBhalla turned to the man beside the car. \"Go! Get her!\"\n\nThe man launched himself in pursuit.\n\nTurning his attention back to the old man, Bhalla fastened his large hand around Dawit's throat and choked the life from him. Then, satisfied the man was dead, Bhalla stripped off the glove as the driver shut the trunk on the corpse and got in the backseat of the Jaguar.\n\nThe driver slid behind the wheel as the other security man took the passenger seat.\n\nBhalla looked into the rearview mirror, catching the driver's eye. \"Follow the woman. She must not get away.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Burris Coronet, for all his surfer-boy good looks, wasn't in shape. Annja listened to the man hoarsely breathing like a bellows as he struggled to keep up with her. He was also larger and less adroit, so he didn't dart through the crowd as easily.\n\nIf he hadn't been with her, Annja was certain she could have outdistanced her pursuers. But he was and they couldn't.\n\nShe peered over the crowd, trying to find the path of least resistance. Once tourists and shoppers figured out that Burris was running at them, they tried to scatter and get out of the way.\n\nGlancing over her shoulder to check his progress, Annja saw that five men had climbed out of the manhole and four more were joining those. Her peripheral vision barely picked up the man in the black suit as he closed on her with a gun in his fist.\n\nAnnja stopped and spun, turning to face the gunman as a bullet split the air where her head had been an instant before. She reached into the otherwhere for her sword and pulled it into her hand. The blade was three feet of razor-sharp, double-edged steel with an unadorned cross hilt. The sword should have been terribly heavy, but in Annja's grip it felt just right, natural.\n\nThe sword had previously been carried by Joan of Arc against the British during the Hundred Years' War. When Joan had been burned at the stake, the sword had been shattered. In some inexplicable way, the two men tasked with Joan's safety had found unprecedented longevity in their failure and her death. One of them, Roux, had spent more than five hundred years in his quest to find all the fragments of her sword and put it back together again. The second man, Garin Braden\u2014a former initiate of Roux's\u2014had tried to prevent his mentor from making the sword whole. But in that, he had also failed.\n\nAnnja had found the last piece of Joan of Arc's sword, and somehow her hand had mended the shards into one, and she'd inherited a legacy she still didn't understand. All she knew for certain was that since she had found the sword, her life had been filled with danger, like a lodestone that pulled her into battle, or brought battles to her.\n\nThe sword wasn't something she could handle inconspicuously, but its appearance had been a surprise to the man trying to kill her. He tried to stop and swivel his weapon at her again.\n\nAnnja flicked the sword out, catching the man's hand with the flat of the blade hard enough to slap the pistol from his fist. Bones snapped and she knew she'd broken most of his fingers. Desperate, he threw himself at her.\n\nMoving forward to meet her opponent, Annja struck the man in the face with her hand around the hilt. His head popped back and he staggered, then she finished him off by driving the hilt into his temple. Unconscious, he crumpled to the ground.\n\nUnfortunately, dealing with him had allowed the other pursuers to gain ground.\n\nBurris looked at the guy on the ground, then back up at Annja. \"Nice sword. Where did you get it?\"\n\n\"One of the tables.\"\n\nBurris started to look around, but the closest thing to them was a wooden cart filled with fresh melons and cabbages. Bullets from the men chasing them split open the melons, shredded the cabbage and dug splinters from the cart.\n\nAnnja grabbed his shirt and jerked him into motion again, shoving him ahead of her. \"Run!\"\n\nShe shoved him, causing him to almost stumble and fall, as bullets ricocheted off the wall beside them and blew holes through shop windows. Burris pounded feverishly along the sidewalk toward an awning-covered market where an old man was scrambling out of the way.\n\nWooden barrels held half a dozen kinds of nuts, oranges, apples and pears. Racks of bright yellow bananas hung under the electric-blue awning that fluttered in the wind. Dried spices hung from strings, already tied off in bags or bundles for sale.\n\nAs Burris reached the end of the awning, a camel shambled from the nearby alley and into his path. Burris slammed into the big animal, which looked at him like he was the most annoying thing it had ever seen.\n\nEven the camels understand Burris.\n\nSquawking, Burris flailed in an effort to keep his balance. The camel's rider reached down and popped Burris on the head with his riding crop. Covering his head with his arms, Burris stepped back and blocked Annja just as their pursuers reached the other end of the long awning.\n\nWhirling around, Annja sliced through the wooden tent pole holding up the heavy awning. The bright blue fabric fell, pulled by the weight of the bananas and other goods tied to the frame. The men fired through the awning.\n\nUnderstanding that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, the camel driver urged his mount into motion. Frightened and motivated, the ungainly animal wobbled out into the street and immediately caused a utility van to veer into an oncoming taxi. The clangor of shrieking metal filled the street and marketplace for a moment, then people began yelling.\n\n\"Holy crap!\" Burris stared out at the confusion as the camel waded through the stalled traffic.\n\nAnnja shoved him into motion again, heading him down the alley toward the next street over. They dodged garbage bins and reached a smaller alley that split off from the main one. The new alley led behind shops that fronted both streets at either end of the alley they'd just quit.\n\nBurris sucked in air like he was about to die.\n\nKnowing the man wasn't going to make it much farther, Annja told him to stop. As he bent over double to catch his breath, she released the sword and it immediately vanished back to the otherwhere.\n\n\"Stop? But they're still chasing us.\" He straightened and leaned against the wall in the narrow alley. If he'd seen her let the sword go, he didn't mention it. \"What are those guys? Track stars? Ethiopia's next Olympic marathon team with guns?\"\n\nAnnja didn't answer. They were still a long way from their hotel, and she wasn't certain that turning themselves over to the police was a good idea, either. She had no idea if the Ethiopian police force could be counted on. Ultimately, she didn't know what was important about the brick that people were willing to kill her to get it. Killers were one thing, but as an archaeologist, she hated mysteries.\n\nActually, it was a love/hate kind of thing. She couldn't imagine a day in her life when she wasn't going to be trying to find out something. There was just too much to learn.\n\nBurris's breathing leveled off a little. \"What are we going to do?\"\n\nA man with a broom in his hand leaned out the back door of one of the small shops. He asked them something, clearly concerned.\n\nBurris immediately figured out what the guy wanted and lifted his shoulders with a smile. \"No heart attack. I'm fine.\" He then patted himself down and appeared slightly startled. \"Hey! I am fine. All that shooting and not one bullet hole!\" He grinned at Annja. \"Man, you cannot beat luck.\"\n\n\"Luck?\" Annja wheeled on him angrily. \"First you set me up with creepy Skeleton Guy, then you nearly get me killed for a brick that you found somewhere in the marketplace. You're an idiot.\"\n\nBurris shrugged. \"Hey. Gimme my brick.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, no?\"\n\n\"I'm not giving you the brick.\"\n\nBurris scowled. \"You can't just take my brick.\"\n\n\"I nearly got killed over it\u2014that makes it mine.\"\n\n\"I nearly got killed over it, too.\"\n\n\"You didn't get killed. I saved you. You owe me your life, so I'm taking the brick.\"\n\nA smile flirted with Burris's lips. \"You think Doogie will approve of the way you're strong-arming me?\"\n\n\"Doogie\u2014Doug isn't here. He doesn't get a vote.\" Annja couldn't believe the nerve of the guy.\n\nBurris took his phone out of his pocket. \"He can call in a vote.\"\n\nAnnja snatched the phone from Burris's hand before he had time to blink. She left him standing there as she walked into the shop the man with the broom had come from.\n\nThe shop catered to the tourist crowd. Racks of souvenir T-shirts and wicker baskets in all shapes and sizes hung on the walls. A stack of dog-eared paperbacks in a half dozen languages occupied a small table in the corner. The little man carried his broom back inside and hung it from a bracket behind the counter. Then he picked up a magazine and pretended to read it, all the while eavesdropping on Annja and Burris. Clearly he spoke English.\n\nBurris joined Annja at one side of the window looking out on the street they'd just quit. \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Trying to figure out what's going on.\"\n\n\"You stand in front of that window, you're gonna get yourself shot.\" Burris took a couple steps away, then studied her. \"Where's the sword?\"\n\n\"I dropped it. It's not exactly something you can carry around.\" During her time with the sword, she had acquired more street smarts. Stay alive while people are trying to kill you, you learn stuff. It was a rule she hadn't picked up from the Catholic nuns in the orphanage or in college.\n\nViolence had a rhythm. Those rhythms showed up in history, too, if a researcher knew where to look for them. Annja did, and she also knew how to look for them in the modern world.\n\nWhen something terrible happened, everyone was a victim. People who got hurt, and the innocents who watched it happen. Even police officers and military personnel reacted to the horror of a violent event. Everybody lost it.\n\nExcept for the perpetrators. They either weren't touched by it, or they enjoyed it.\n\nAnnja watched as the men she'd dropped the awning on spread out along the street. She took her camera out of her backpack and started snapping pictures of them, still standing to one side so she couldn't be seen.\n\nThe men searched quickly, guns still in their hands, menacing everyone around them. At the end of the street, a black Jaguar sat idling, poised to spring into action like its feline namesake. The rear window was down and the man in the backseat sat watching. Anger tightened his features.\n\nAnnja swapped out for her telescopic lens, then refocused on the man in the back of the Jaguar. She snapped the picture."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "\"You think this guy had something to do with us getting jumped down in the dig?\"\n\nSeated at the small desk in the hotel room they'd rented on the other side of Addis Ababa, Annja surveyed the image of the man in the back of the Jaguar. On her tablet PC screen, he appeared more threatening. \"I do.\"\n\nBurris lounged on the queen-size bed. \"Because he was in the area?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Annja flipped through another few images of a couple of the gun-toting men staring back at the luxury car like they were awaiting orders. Then she went back to the best image she had of the man. He didn't look familiar.\n\n\"Even though he doesn't at all look like the guy I bought the brick from?\"\n\n\"You said you couldn't remember who you bought the brick from.\"\n\nBurris waved a hand dismissively. \"Doesn't matter which one I bought the brick from. None of them looked like that guy. He's like a villain you'd see in a Bond film. Kinda creepy.\"\n\n\"Well, it doesn't make sense that he would sell you the brick, then send a gang to shoot up the dig and take it back, does it?\"\n\n\"My point exactly.\"\n\n\"So we have to assume this man somehow knows about the brick\u2014knows more about it than I do at the moment, which is irksome\u2014and wants it back enough to kill to get it.\"\n\n\"Way to sum it up, Captain Obvious.\"\n\nAnnja ignored him because that was getting easier to do now that she had something compelling to focus on.\n\nBurris sighed. \"So what's the game plan? Holing up in a dive hotel isn't working for me.\"\n\n\"I'm going to find out more about this brick.\" Annja picked it up from the desk and examined it once more. \"I've taken pictures of the writing and sent it off to a linguist friend of mine.\"\n\nBurris sat up, swinging his feet off the bed and levering himself up. \"When did you do that?\"\n\n\"While you were working on your hair in the bathroom.\" She frowned at the brick. \"I'm pretty sure it's Ge'ez script.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"It's an abugida language.\"\n\nBurris stared at her. \"You think that's in any way helpful?\"\n\nFeeling momentarily sympathetic toward Burris, something she was certain she would regret, Annja explained. \"An abugida is a segmental writing system.\"\n\n\"Still not helping.\"\n\n\"Think of it as sight writing, not phonetic. Consonants are represented in the language, but vowels are not, except as consonants with additional marks. You have to know what you're doing to read something like this.\"\n\n\"And you don't?\"\n\nAnnja picked up her bottle of green tea and shifted her full attention to him. \"There's a lot to know when it comes to archaeology. Tens of thousands of years of information.\"\n\n\"You should know the field you're working in.\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"But you don't know Ge'ez script.\"\n\n\"I can get around in a dozen or so languages really well, and get my point across in a couple dozen more, but reading them is impossible without dedicating yourself to a language. I would rather dig in the dirt.\"\n\n\"Boring.\" Burris flopped back on the bed. \"Do you think those guys are still looking for us?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Why don't you go look and let me know? That could be your contribution to our fact-finding segment.\"\n\n\"Because you'll take my brick and run.\"\n\n\"It's my brick to run with.\"\n\nBurris blew a strawberry.\n\nAnnja turned back to her Surface Pro tablet PC as her mail client dinged to register an email arrival."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Excellent. The email was from a linguist professor she'd reached out to, Cybele Coelho. Annja couldn't wait to read what the esteemed professor had to say about the brick.\n\n\u2002Hi, Annja!\n\n\u2002So good to hear from you! Are you going to get to come back to Rio anytime soon? Would love to see you again. Especially at Carnivale! I know how you love the holidays.\n\n\u2002As to your mysterious brick, your instincts about the language are correct. This is Ge'ez, but it is a different form of it than I have seen before. It must be really old. How exciting for you! Another fascinating discovery. I can't wait to hear the story of how you came into possession of this.\n\n\u2002From what I've been able to decipher, this inscription talks about a \"small\" tower. Does that make any sense to you? Are you looking for a tower? I know you don't like to fill me in too much because you don't want to influence my interpretation, but I'm certain this passage refers to a \"small\" tower that stands in the shadow of another in the foundation of a purified place. Something like that. I still have some work I want to do on this.\n\n\u2002I also did comparative sampling of the script. As you know, language has a tendency to change over time. Witness current thinking that the cursive language may no longer be necessary since everyone has a portable computer.\n\n\u2002From what I see here, the language is a lot like what was used in the Kingdom of Aksum (Ethiopia). Ge'ez was made Aksum's official language in the first century, but was probably in use well before then. You knew that already, though.\n\n\u2002Maybe you have a friend in Damascus? The Syriac Orthodox Church has quite a collection of documentation on extinct Semitic languages. You might find something there, as well.\n\n\u2002In the meantime, you know me. I'll keep digging! I love mysteries, too.\n\n\u2002Love,\n\n\u2002Cybele Coelho\n\n\u2002Professor of Linguistics\n\n\u2002Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro\n\n\u2002P.S. I appreciate the DVDs you sent of Grimm. I \u2665 Monroe! Thank you again.\n\n\"A tower?\" Burris leaned back from the tablet PC. \"What does that mean?\"\n\nAnnja's mind buzzed with possibilities. She rolled her neck. \"The language dates to 100 CE at least. Maybe farther than that.\"\n\n\"When did people first start building towers?\"\n\nAnnja looked at him.\n\n\"What? It's a legitimate question. I can think of more bridges than I can think of towers. The Leaning Tower of Pisa was built in 1372.\"\n\n\"Actually, it was called the Tower of Pisa, and it was started in 1173. It didn't get finished until 1372.\"\n\nBurris scowled. \"Whatever. You must suck the fun out of Trivial Pursuit. The point is that people have been building towers for a long time, but that was over a thousand years after this brick was supposedly made.\"\n\n\"True, but when you think back about important towers, how many can you think of?\"\n\nScratching his chin, Burris contemplated the question, then counted off towers on his fingers. \"Tower of Pisa. Tower of London...\"\n\n\"Started in 1066 when the Normans took over England. Too late to be the tower mentioned here.\"\n\n\"Tower Records.\"\n\nAnnja grinned. \"Sacramento, California, 1960.\"\n\n\"Yeah, and then there's the Capitol Records Tower. It was featured in The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. The Diceman. I love that building.\"\n\n\"Me, too. And Andrew Dice Clay had his moments.\"\n\n\"Are you kidding me? The Diceman is one of my heroes.\" Burris smiled. \"We found common ground.\" He offered his fist for a bump, then when Annja didn't respond, he ran his fingers through his hair. \"Okay, maybe not.\"\n\nAnnja turned her attention back to the picture of the man on her tablet PC. She wished she knew who he was. Then she hefted the brick once more.\n\nBurris studied her. \"You've got a theory, don't you?\"\n\nAnnja hesitated. \"Let's say this brick was part of a tower that was built over two thousand years ago. Let's say it was built hundreds of years before that. And let's say that most people who have read the Old Testament have heard of the tower it's talking about. What tower comes to mind?\"\n\nFor a moment, Burris sat there. Then he shook his head. \"You're thinking this came from the Tower of Babel?\"\n\nHearing it out loud, from Burris at that, Annja felt certain that the theory was even more ridiculous than she'd thought. She looked away. \"Forget I said anything.\"\n\n\"Forget? Do you realize how cool that would be?\" Burris grinned. \"The find of century, and I didn't even have to dig for it. I just bought it off some guy in the flea market.\"\n\nAnnja made a point of ignoring him. She also didn't mention that artifacts often turned up in stores or shops, family heirlooms that no one remembered the history of anymore. That was the problem with history: it had the ability to disappear in plain sight.\n\nBurris got up and approached the desk. He reached for the brick. Annja slapped his hand away. \"Don't.\"\n\n\"It's my Tower of Babel brick.\"\n\n\"We don't know that it's from the Tower of Babel, and it's not your brick.\"\n\n\"We'll see what my attorneys have to say.\"\n\nAnnja glared at him.\n\n\"But I'm not going to call them until you've had a chance to find out the rest of the story. How does that sound?\"\n\nAnnja didn't reply.\n\n\"Maybe we could discuss it over dinner. We missed lunch while we were running for our lives, and I'm starving.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "\"You're really going to eat that?\" Burris pointed to Annja's side of the table in the small restaurant around the corner from the hotel where they were staying.\n\n\"As much of it as I can. Definitely.\" The spicy aroma of chicken and lamb wat made Annja's mouth water.\n\nThe young female server wore a shama, the hooded wraparound dress many Ethiopian women favored. She served the chicken and lamb stews in large enamel bowls, pouring out servings onto the injera, the sourdough bread that was flat and supple as a pancake.\n\nBurris looked at the server. \"Don't you have a plate?\"\n\nThe young woman looked at Burris timidly.\n\n\"Quiet,\" Annja said to Burris, and then spoke to the server as best she could in her language, reassuring the girl that the meal was perfect.\n\n\"Is that even sanitary?\" Burris wrinkled his nose.\n\nTearing off a piece of injera, Annja rolled the flatbread around some of the chicken stew. \"This is wonderful. You don't know what you're missing.\" She popped the food into her mouth and almost sighed in delight.\n\n\"I've probably eaten out of more sanitary roach coaches, I can tell you that.\"\n\nAnnja ignored him and enjoyed her meal as she tracked her emails on her tablet PC.\n\n\"And I've had more attentive dinner companions.\"\n\n\"I'm attentive. I'm listening to you whine about everything, searching for more information about the brick and the inscription and looking out for anyone who might be trying to kill us.\"\n\nBurris glanced around over his shoulder nervously. \"You don't think that guy and his men are still looking for us, do you?\"\n\n\"They were willing to kill us to get the brick. I don't see them as giving up quickly.\"\n\n\"The police are looking for them.\"\n\n\"The police are looking for us. We haven't been found yet.\"\n\n\"Yeah, about that... I don't quite understand why we didn't call them immediately. Why\u2014\"\n\nThe server returned with a bowl of salad that she started to pour on the injera in front of Burris. He took the bowl out of her hands. \"That's okay. I can serve myself. Can I get a fork?\" He mimed a fork with two fingers.\n\nThe hostess smiled and nodded, went away and came back with a fork.\n\n\"Cool.\" Burris took it. \"Now maybe I could get some ranch dressing.\"\n\nThe hostess looked confused and shook her head.\n\n\"Ranch dressing. For my salad.\" Burris spoke slowly. He turned to Annja. \"How do you say ranch dressing in Ethiopian?\"\n\nAnnja wrapped another serving. \"They don't have ranch dressing.\"\n\n\"How do you know without asking?\"\n\n\"You just did. If they had it, she'd get it. Now eat your lettuce.\" Annja thanked the young woman and she went away.\n\n\"I can't believe they don't have ranch dressing. What kind of country is this?\"\n\n\"A very interesting one that's been around longer than most other countries in the world. I thought I mentioned that.\"\n\n\"Big deal.\" Burris poked at his salad with his fork.\n\n\"Are you always this whiny?\"\n\n\"I'm not whiny.\"\n\n\"You're whiny. You whine on the radio, too.\"\n\n\"You've heard my show.\"\n\n\"Doug made me listen to it.\"\n\n\"Now he's a guy with taste.\"\n\n\"Doug is also a vampire in a clan.\"\n\n\"He's a nut. I did a show about those wannabe Team Edward idiots. Staked 'em right through the heart on the air.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you were spectacular.\"\n\n\"I was awesome.\"\n\n\"And so modest.\"\n\n\"Modesty doesn't get you anywhere. You want to get anywhere in this world, you gotta blow your own horn and show a little skin. Did you see the layout I did in Playgirl?\"\n\n\"No, but I read about it. You were quite the hit with the gay crowd as I recall.\"\n\nBurris actually blushed and broke eye contact. \"Everybody loves me. I don't know what your problem is.\"\n\nThe server returned with two long-necked bottles with yellow liquid in bowl-shaped bottoms. She placed them on the table.\n\nBurris frowned. \"What's this?\"\n\n\"Tej. It's a wine made out of mead or honey.\"\n\n\"Wine.\" Burris looked for the server. \"Don't we get glasses?\"\n\n\"No.\" Annja picked up the bottle and drank.\n\nBurris drank as well and smiled. \"It's kinda sweet, but I like it.\" He took another long drink.\n\n\"You'll want to be careful with that. The alcohol is stronger than you think.\"\n\n\"I can hold my liquor.\"\n\n\"If you get too drunk to walk, I'm not carrying you back to the hotel.\"\n\n\"I'll be carrying you back.\" Burris took another drink.\n\nTwo hours later, Burris was still singing on the bed. Annja had to admit that he had quite a repertoire. He could belt out AC/DC, Billy Idol and even throw in some Clash and Elton John. Every now and again, he warbled out a Willie Nelson tune that was way off-key.\n\nAnnja sat at the desk and sifted through the hits she'd gotten off the alt.histories and alt.archaeology sites. She'd posted the man's image and asked if anyone could identify him. If the man knew about the brick\u2014especially if it was from the Tower of Babel, and Annja didn't let herself dwell on that overly long\u2014then he had to be a player in the antiquity field. She'd felt certain someone would know him.\n\nJust before she was about to take a shower and go to bed in the other room, she got a hit from rascallyobi@ancientthingsinthedust.com.\n\nHis name is Rafik Bhalla, and he's someone you definitely want to stay away from. Guy's a killer."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "\"This is not a request.\" Garin Braden held the muzzle of the .500 Smith & Wesson Magnum against the Somali pirate's head. Garin stood six feet five inches tall and was broad across the shoulders, and looked even bigger squeezed into the black scuba suit. As big as he was, the large-bore revolver still looked massive and deadly in his firm hand. \"It's an order.\"\n\nThe young pirate stank of sour body odor and khat, the mildly narcotic plant many people in the area chewed. His eyes were wide with terror. Blood dripped from his bottom lip, cut halfway through and swollen from the blow Garin had dealt him earlier. The pirate wore khaki pants, an orange T-shirt and military boots that were too big for him.\n\nGarin held his prisoner in the stern of Tequila Blossom, one of the cargo ships he owned under another name. Tequila Blossom sailed under a Panamanian flag. A lot of ships doing illicit business were registered in Panama even if they'd never been there. The country had very relaxed laws.\n\nTequila Blossom carried a shipment of Russian weapons Garin had sold to various mercenary groups working in Africa. Munitions were still a big business for people that could move them. Garin could and did.\n\nAlthough he made more money than he'd ever spend through legitimate businesses, old habits died hard. During the past five-hundred-plus years that he had lived, times had not always been so good. He remembered the bad times, the years he had spent during the French Revolution and the defeat at Waterloo, and he remembered what Germany had been like under Hitler. Garin had loved Germany, still did, but Hitler had been another matter.\n\nYears ago, at the turn of the nineteenth century, Garin had fought the Barbary pirates, as well. Piracy in Africa was an old business. The Somalis had grown desperate and taken up the trade again. Garin understood the lengths desperation could drive men, but a man also had to be strong enough or clever enough or cruel enough to make that desperation pay. Garin had.\n\n\"They won't listen to me.\" The pirate sniffled and shivered. \"I do not give the orders.\"\n\n\"You were giving the orders when I came on board the ship.\" Garin gripped the man's shirtfront, pulling him tighter and screwing the gun barrel into his forehead.\n\n\"I was only giving the orders they were giving me.\"\n\nUnfortunately, Garin knew that was true. It wasn't unfortunate for him. It was unfortunate for the pirate because Garin had to make an example of the man so that the others would understand who they were dealing with.\n\nGarin pulled the trigger. The man had sensed what was about to happen and tried to escape, writhing with all of his strength. That strength left him when the 350-grain bullet shattered his head to bloody fragments.\n\nKnowing that the other pirates were watching him, Garin flung the body over the cargo ship's side. The salt-laced air blew through Garin's wet hair. He gazed fiercely at the Somali boat two hundred yards away on the ocean. Moonlight-kissed waves rolled toward the distant shore.\n\nBending, Garin scooped up the dead man's radio and listened as the sound of running feet approached. He spoke calmly over the earwig he wore.\n\n\"Friedrich, are you there?\"\n\n\"I am.\" The man was one of Garin's private army, DragonTech Security. \"I have them in my sights. How close do you want me to let them get?\"\n\n\"I want them close, but I don't want to get shot.\"\n\nFriedrich laughed. \"Have I ever let you get shot?\"\n\n\"There was that time in Barcelona.\"\n\n\"Bah. The way you handled that, anyone could have shot you. And the Kevlar stopped the bullet.\"\n\nGarin strode to the ship's railing and peered out at the pirates' command vessel. The small powerboat sat in the darkness among the other ships anchored off the Somalia shore. The trade lane was important to several countries. The pirates aboard the small craft didn't know they had been identified. They believed only the eight men holding the ship's crew on Tequila Blossom were exposed.\n\nThey were wrong, and Garin was about to show them.\n\nOut of the corner of his eye, Garin saw the three pirates closing on his position. One of them dropped to his knee on the deck. Garin resisted the impulse to turn to face the man, but his guts churned slightly in anticipation of the bullet he knew would be coming his way. He cursed Friedrich under his breath.\n\nThen the gunman toppled over. The second pirate dropped in a loose-limbed sprawl before the sound of the first rifle shot reached Garin. Friedrich was using a .50-caliber sniper rifle so the carnage was visible and noisy. The third pirate turned to run, but Friedrich took him out before he'd gone two paces.\n\n\"Happy?\" Friedrich asked.\n\n\"Ecstatic.\" Garin grinned, knowing that at least some of the pirates on the boat had binoculars trained on him. He spoke over the confiscated radio. \"My name is Garin Braden.\" He knew that other ships' crews were watching the encounter. \"You have been holding this ship and this crew for three days. You were told to let them go. You didn't and now you're going to pay the price.\"\n\nHe lifted the pistol. None of the men on the boat moved. At two hundred yards, they didn't think he had a chance of hitting them with small-arms fire.\n\nMen hunted big game with the .500 Magnum, though. Two hundred yards was well within the big pistol's range.\n\nDeliberately, Garin fired four times, moving from target to target. The first two pirates jerked back as the bullets took them, before the sound of the shots even reached them, then the other pirates ducked for cover. Garin's third shot caught one of them, but his fourth only struck the ship.\n\nBehind Garin, machine pistol fire signaled an end to the remaining four pirates about Tequila Blossom. Calmly, Garin dumped the empty brass from the big revolver and thumbed in more rounds as the pirates regrouped aboard the boat and brought their weapons to bear.\n\n\"Now, Evander.\" Garin snapped the cylinder closed and watched as a rocket from one of the nearby ships his men had taken up positions on streaked across the water and detonated on the boat, turning it into a roiling mass of orange and black flames.\n\nFiery debris rained down. Gray smoke streaked the black sky, muting the starlight.\n\nApplause broke out on several of the nearby ships as the crews realized what had happened.\n\n\"Well, that went well.\" Garin walked toward the wheelhouse, intending to see to the crew. He knew the captain of this particular ship and wanted to make sure he was all right.\n\n\"Mr. Braden.\" The voice over the earwig was feminine, polite and insistent. It belonged to an efficient woman back in Berlin who watched over some of his other interests.\n\n\"This isn't a good time. I'm basking in my success.\" Garin had wanted the physical release of the encounter, which was why he'd handled it himself instead of simply sending in a team.\n\n\"Understood, sir, but you wanted me to tell you any time I had news of Rafik Bhalla and his project.\"\n\nGarin had crossed paths with Bhalla in the past and promised himself he would kill the man someday. But only after Bhalla found the tower. If Garin didn't find it first. Then killing Bhalla would be at Garin's convenience.\n\n\"Well, I have news. Bhalla's in Addis Ababa, and he appears to have tried to kill Annja Creed.\"\n\nGrowling curses, Garin gave orders to bring a helicopter to him and for a flight to be booked to Addis Ababa. Annja could take care of herself. Garin had learned that and been surprised. However, her presence was problematic. He liked her, but he didn't want to lose the tower to her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Annja stood in the center of the hotel room in sweat pants and a T-shirt, slowly going through t'ai chi exercises to loosen and warm her muscles, and to center her mind. She practiced Wu Chien Chaun today because the style favored form, pushing hands and weapons. She held the horse stance flawlessly, working out her legs.\n\n\"Are you going to get up or continue to lay in bed?\" She pushed both hands to the side slowly, like she was striking an opponent in slow motion.\n\nBurris lay in bed and didn't reply.\n\n\"I know you're awake.\"\n\n*Silence*\n\n\"Your breathing changed ten minutes ago.\"\n\n\"Only because I got excited watching you do monkey fu. This is even better than watching women on the aerobics channel.\" Not bothering to feign sleep anymore, Burris pushed himself up on an elbow and studied her with open interest. \"You should do an exercise show. Charge for it. You'd make more money than you do from archaeology.\"\n\nAnnja finished the form, then plucked a towel from the nearby chair. \"I'm going to take a shower.\"\n\n\"I can do your back. You know, since we have the partnership in the brick and all that.\"\n\n\"If you come in that shower while I'm in there, the next place you're going to be is the emergency room. Rafik Bhalla will find you there.\"\n\n\"Who's Rafik Bhalla?\"\n\n\"The guy in the car yesterday who tried to kill us.\" Annja paused in the bathroom door. \"Now get up. We have to get moving. We don't want him to find us.\"\n\nBurris was hungover and he'd lost his sunglasses sometime yesterday, so he peered out at the morning through slitted fingers over his eyes.\n\n\"Stop that,\" Annja said at his side.\n\n\"My head hurts.\"\n\n\"You're a walking advertisement that screams, Mug me!\"\n\nBurris cursed. \"So who's Bhalla and why should I be afraid of him?\"\n\n\"He used to be a priest at the Syriac Orthodox Tewahedo Church here in the city. Now he's an art dealer and relic hunter supplying well-heeled collectors around the world.\"\n\n\"By relic hunter, you mean thief?\"\n\n\"Yes. And he's a murderer, though he's never been caught.\"\n\n\"Why does Bhalla want the brick?\"\n\n\"Because he believes it will lead him to the Tower of Babel and the treasure he thinks it holds.\"\n\n\"What treasure?\"\n\nAnnja shrugged. \"The usual kind. Gold. Gems. Priceless artifacts. And some kind of device capable of converting all languages into the original language people spoke before God destroyed the Tower of Babel and made the world speak in different tongues.\"\n\nBurris thought about that. \"So this thing, whatever it is, would let you talk to anyone? No matter what the language is?\"\n\n\"That's what Bhalla believes.\"\n\n\"Why does he believe that?\"\n\n\"He's supposed to have found some scroll that mentions a prince named Joktan, the son of the king who first started building the tower, hiding the device somewhere near the original building site.\"\n\nBurris looked thoughtful and he even forgot to squint against the bright sun for a moment. \"If I could talk to everybody in the world, just like I'm talking to you, can you imagine the audience share I would pull in? I would be even more amazing than I am now.\"\n\n\"Contrary to your conceited opinion of yourself, not everyone is a fan.\"\n\nBurris waved away her comment. \"Who told you about Bhalla and this Tower of Babel device?\"\n\n\"One of my contacts in the community.\" Annja walked through the gebeya, picking up fresh fruit and small dishes of food, paying for them as she went. Burris refused her help, and she left him to figure it out on his own.\n\n\"And this person would know how?\"\n\n\"He knew about Bhalla, and he knew about Bhalla's search for the Tower of Babel.\"\n\n\"Do you believe in a device that would let you be understood by everyone?\"\n\n\"That's what you're fixated on? It probably isn't real.\"\n\n\"Then why are you so interested in finding the Tower of Babel if you don't believe in a device that will allow you to talk to anyone in the world?\"\n\nAnnoyed, Annja swallowed a bite of fir-fir, shredded injera stir-fried with spices. \"Aside from the fact that the tower has never been found and was at one time the greatest construction the human race ever undertook?\"\n\n\"Don't mean to break your heart, but you've only got lunatics interested in Atlantis and bigfoot and the Tower of Babel.\"\n\n\"That's good to hear. I was afraid you might want to hang around and I was going to have to dissuade you. This way you can grab a cab and get back to Los Angeles.\"\n\nBurris was quiet for a moment, then shook his head. \"I can't go back yet.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"The only reason I'm out here is so my ex-wife can't get to me.\"\n\n\"Your ex-wife is the only reason you're here?\"\n\nBurris stopped and looked at the food spread on a colorful blanket on the ground. The man minding the space talked with hopeful animation in broken English, hawking his wares with a passion and gleaming eyes. Burris shook his head and started walking again.\n\nAnnja apologized and purchased a cup of coffee from a jebena, the clay coffeepot most Ethiopian coffee was boiled in. She declined the offer of sugar.\n\nBurris fell into step with Annja when she got under way again.\n\n\"I'm not afraid of ex-wives. I've got six. But my fourth one has a new, young attorney who thinks he's in love with her and that she's the most wonderful woman he's ever seen, and that he's gonna win her over raising my alimony payments. He doesn't know her like I know her. By the time he does, he's gonna lose half of everything he has. She's great at getting around prenups.\"\n\nAnnja couldn't believe it. \"You came to Ethiopia to get away from your ex-wife's lawyer boyfriend.\"\n\n\"Not the boyfriend. The boyfriend I could handle. It's the boyfriend's dad. Winston Churchill McArthur Patton IV is a force to be reckoned with. Hollywood studios break out in hives when he goes after them.\"\n\n\"Surely Patton the father would have better things to do than come after you.\"\n\n\"You'd think, wouldn't you?\" Burris looked glum. \"It's a nest of snakes, I tell you. So when Doogie\u2014\"\n\n\"Doug.\"\n\n\"When he called, asked me about doing a piece on Chasing History's Monsters, I thought, Why not? He sounded like a fanboy, and I needed to get out of town. Promised me Kristie Chatham\u2014gave me you.\"\n\n\"It doesn't occur to you that telling me that might be hurtful or disrespectful?\"\n\n\"Think how hurt I am. I figured the way Kristie falls out of her clothes, I had a shot. But you?\" Burris shook his head.\n\n\"I'm glad we're clear about that.\" Annja stopped at another vendor and picked up a serving of fatira, a pancake filled with egg and drizzled with honey. She ate it with gusto.\n\n\"So what's our next move?\"\n\n\"We're going to get you a cab, since you're not interested in breakfast.\"\n\n\"I am interested in breakfast, but I want something edible. Something American. Preferably with avocado.\" Burris blew out a theatrical sigh. \"And I'm sticking with you. I own half of that brick.\"\n\nAnnja thought of ditching Burris then and there. Getting away from him would be child's play. But then he'd be in the city alone and untended. \"It would be better if you left.\"\n\n\"Not leaving.\"\n\n\"You're an idiot.\"\n\n\"I'm an idiot with half ownership in a brick that's gonna take me to a thing that will let me speak to the world.\"\n\nAnnja wanted more than anything to punch him. But that would be about the time Bhalla or his men found them.\n\nShe flagged down a cab for both of them at the corner."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "\"It isn't as big as I thought it would be.\" Burris gazed around in open wonder at the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East as he and Annja got out of the taxi into a courtyard.\n\nChurch buildings built of white stone lined the courtyard on three sides. The main building was four stories tall and wide with a red stone roof. The two smaller buildings on either side across the courtyard from each other shone in the early-morning sun. The church sat well away from the city on the flat plains, but she could see the blue-tinted peaks of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains in the distance.\n\nAnnja stared at Burris as she finished paying the driver. He hadn't even reached for his wallet. \"You see this place...one of the most famous in history, founded by the Apostle Saint Peter. It still uses the Syriac, an Aramaic dialect spoken by Jesus and the Apostles, as its official language, and the Apostles preached here after they were driven out of Jerusalem. It's a church that served in the Councils of Nicaea, Constantinople and Ephesus that created the Nicene Creed, confirmed the divinity of the Holy Spirit and declared Mary's title as Mother of God. And that's all you have\u2014it's not as big as you thought?\"\n\nFrowning, Burris looked around the stone courtyard leading up to the church. \"Did you read that from a plaque?\"\n\n\"It's magnificent, a symbol of so many events that shaped the world.\"\n\n\"I shape parts of the world, too.\"\n\nAnnja found herself at a loss for words. The flight to Damascus, Syria, had been a last-minute scramble and they'd barely caught the connection. Then they'd endured a fifteen-hour flight, and a stay at a hotel so they could get an early start. Security in the country was also tight because of civil unrest. Soldiers armed with assault rifles patrolled constantly.\n\nAnnja had spent her time researching everything she could about the Tower of Babel and Rafik Bhalla, and she'd even gotten a breakthrough on the brick's inscription with Cybele's help.\n\n\"They should put in a plaque. It would be more impressive.\"\n\nDeciding to ignore Burris, Annja passed through the parishioners and tourists headed into the church. She scanned the area for Bhalla and his people, but didn't see anyone suspicious.\n\n\"Where are we going?\"\n\n\"To the Cave of the Seven Sleepers on Mount Qasioun.\"\n\nBurris caught up to her. \"Wait. Why are we at the church when we're looking for a cave?\"\n\n\"There are documents in the church library I need to find the cave.\"\n\n\"The cave has been around for thousands of years. Don't they have a sign or something?\"\n\n\"Well, there's a madressah\u2014a secular school\u2014on the site, which will be a form of sign.\"\n\n\"How do you know this?\"\n\n\"I deciphered part of the inscription on the brick.\"\n\n\"What?\" He stumbled. \"You should have told me.\"\n\nAnnja ignored him and kept walking, growing more excited with each step she took. \"The inscription I figured out was made later, but still in the same language.\"\n\n\"How much later?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"So it said there was a cave that no one has found in two thousand years? In a place where a school has been built?\" Burris shook his head. \"There are guys in L.A. that give fake tours of stars' housing. I'd say your brick was part of a scam.\"\n\n\"Okay, then you can go back to the hotel while I check this out. I'll let you know how it goes.\"\n\nBurris grumbled as he kept pace. \"Who are the Seven Sleepers?\"\n\n\"Who were the Seven Sleepers. They were seven young men who fled persecution from the Romans. Emperor Decius either chased them to the cave and they hid, or he sealed them up in it alive. The stories vary, and so do the locations of the cave. Greece and Turkey each lay claim to it. The Muslims have their version of the cave story, as well, so it spread across religions. It made a big impact.\"\n\n\"We're sure we want the one here?\"\n\n\"It was named and placed in the inscription on the brick. Sometimes they are referred to as the Companions of the Cave.\"\n\n\"And these guys were supposedly sealed up in this cave?\" Burris hesitated. \"We're not gonna be digging through corpses, are we?\"\n\n\"Wouldn't that be more fun than digging in the dirt?\"\n\nBurris scowled at her.\n\nIt took them two hours to get past the administrative staff and gain entry to the church's library, despite Annja's having made previous arrangements by phone. And even then they were assigned two priests as chaperones to walk them through the towering stacks.\n\n\"These people have serious trust issues,\" Burris muttered as he and Annja followed the priests.\n\n\"Of course they have trust issues. For centuries, churches have been looted for artwork and precious metals. It's not the material goods they worry about losing so much. It's the ties back to history, and to their faith. If I didn't know some of the people I do, we wouldn't get in at all.\"\n\nA nondescript room held the antique documents at the back of the library. The two men in the lead stood at the door and let Annja and Burris go in first.\n\n\"What is it you would like to see?\" The young priest spoke flawless English. He also carried an iPhone. Annja had seen him checking it as they'd walked through the library. He'd introduced himself as Father Louay.\n\nThe older priest appeared disdainful and hadn't spoken at all. His disapproving scowl deepened the wrinkles that lined his face.\n\n\"The documents concerning the Cave of the Seven Sleepers and the excavations to find it.\"\n\nLouay nodded and walked to a massive collection of books against the back wall on the left. \"Those will be over here. They do have a school at the cave, you know.\"\n\n\"But the school doesn't have these documents, do they?\"\n\n\"They have studies of all the cave explorations.\"\n\n\"Recent ones. I'm looking for an older document.\"\n\n\"Do you know which one?\"\n\nAnnja did. The inscription had held the information in code that she and Cybele had broken. She named the document.\n\nLouay searched the shelves and pulled down a massive tome with effort, then thumped it down on a nearby table. The sound carried through the room.\n\nAnnja put her backpack down and took out her camera.\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" Louay put a hand on the camera. \"This can't be copied.\"\n\n\"It's okay,\" Burris said. \"She has a photographic\u2014\"\n\nAnnja elbowed Burris in the stomach and his breath exploded out of him. She smiled at Louay. \"That's fine. I just want to look.\" She put the camera away and started leafing through the pages.\n\n\"If I may be so bold,\" Louay said, \"what is it you're hoping to find?\"\n\n\"A map.\"\n\nLouay hesitated. \"Now I must ask, do you know Rafik Bhalla?\"\n\n\"We haven't met, but I know of him. Not a very likable guy.\"\n\n\"That's an understatement,\" Burris said.\n\nAnnja feinted with her elbow so that only Burris could see. He stepped back and shut up.\n\n\"He is a criminal.\" Louay's face tightened with uncertainty. \"The only reason I ask about him is because this is one of the books he frequently consulted while he was here.\"\n\nLooking up at the younger man, Annja smiled. \"I'm not a criminal. I'm not here to steal anything. And I never want to meet Rafik Bhalla.\"\n\nLouay smiled back at her.\n\nTurning back to the book, Annja found a heading that indicated she'd reached the section mentioned in the inscription she and Cybele had translated. She turned the leaf.\n\nSomeone had neatly razored the following pages out."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "\"We don't allow anyone to copy the pages, but we do keep electronic copies of everything we have here.\" Louay sat at the computer terminal in one of the library offices. His hands flew across the keyboard. Although he hadn't said anything, his anxiety showed in every taut line of his body.\n\nThe church officials were in an uproar over the missing pages in the book. Several of them stood at the back of the room, shifting and fidgeting as Louay checked for the electronic backup.\n\nAnnja was glad she hadn't been shown the door. Only the word of the religious studies professors she knew kept her in the room. She was going to owe some huge thank-yous when this was over. Burris was outside the room sulking.\n\nOn the computer screen, Louay flipped through the pages. When he came to the same section in the book Annja was looking for, the pages were blank.\n\nAnnja's heart sank and the mumbling among the older priests at the back of the room escalated.\n\nUndeterred, Louay kept working, speaking in his native tongue to calm the priests. He glanced at Annja. \"It's all right. Whoever tried to erase this file\u2014\"\n\nBhalla. Annja was certain of that.\n\n\"\u2014didn't know we have a backup copy in the cloud.\" Louay made a few final keystrokes and the pages reappeared like magic. The young priest leaned back in his chair and threw his hands in the air.\n\nAnnja's eyes flicked over the pages as Louay turned them. \"Can you give me a translation of those pages?\"\n\n\"An oral one, yes. But I can't allow you to make copies.\"\n\n\"That's fine.\" Annja stared at the pages, memorizing as fast as she could.\n\nBurris wasn't happy after being left cooling his heels for two hours. \"Why did you have the kid read you the book if you were just going to write it all down, anyway?\"\n\nAnnja sat at a back table in the restaurant Burris had chosen, one that featured Americanized food, and diligently wrote everything she'd seen into a notepad. As she finished each page, she used the portable scanner wand to upload them to Cybele Coelho, who was standing by in Rio to translate.\n\nAround them, the small dinner crowd ate quietly, talking in low voices in a half dozen languages. The restaurant attracted what tourists there were, but the civil conflict had definitely driven down business.\n\n\"I had Louay read the section because\u2014\" Annja fed the last sheet into the scanner \"\u2014it takes time to memorize pages in a foreign language.\"\n\n\"So do you think we have what we need?\"\n\n\"I've got enough to make a move. Hopefully Cybele's complete translation might provide more insight.\" She picked up her kebab karaz, a cherry and lamb meatball kebab. She savored the rich flavor. \"The passage talks about studies conducted in secrecy inside a chamber of the Cave of the Seven Sleepers.\"\n\n\"On the Tower of Babel?\"\n\n\"It doesn't say that.\"\n\nFrustrated, Burris leaned back in his seat. \"So you're planning on trekking up Mount Qasioun and you don't even know if what we're looking for is there.\"\n\n\"I believe it's there.\"\n\n\"Oh. Wow. That's different. And that'll probably make all the difference.\" Burris snorted derisively.\n\nAnnja popped another meatball into her mouth. \"I'm leaving in the morning. Early.\"\n\nBurris growled a curse and focused on his plate.\n\nTourist shops had sprung up around the Cave of the Seven Sleepers site over the years, and they had probably been there since the cave was first named and the unique history tied to it. Annja was used to that. Antiquity always brought out the gawkers and the hawkers, people who wanted to assuage their curiosity about oddities and people who wanted to make a buck.\n\nEven with the glaring early sun, the temperature up in the mountains was cool enough that she was glad she brought her light jacket. Still, despite the hour and the blustery wind stirring up dust devils, trade was bustling.\n\nAnnja walked through the market area, passed several shops and open-air eateries and found a man who rented donkeys to travel into the mountains. Military jets from Syria as well as Lebanon blazed through the sky. The location was near the border of the two countries and tensions remained on edge.\n\nAfter demonstrating that she knew how to handle a donkey, Annja was given two for the day. Burris wasn't happy with the arrangement, but he dutifully pulled himself aboard the long-eared beast and they took off for the edge of town.\n\n\"Hey!\" Burris urged his mount to a quick jog and caught up with Annja. \"All the signage says the cave is back that way.\"\n\n\"We're not going to find anything in that tourist trap.\" Annja wrapped a scarf around her lower face to keep out the dust and sand. The scrubby trees and sparse vegetation didn't come close to holding the dry earth down.\n\n\"Then where are we going?\"\n\n\"To find the cave Cybele and I read about in the translation.\"\n\n\"No one else has found it?\" Burris trotted past on the game little donkey.\n\n\"I'm pretty sure Bhalla is aware there's a cave that's off the beaten path. That's why he wants the brick so badly. But how he found his way to the ancient document in the church library without the brick...I have no idea.\"\n\nBurris looked over his shoulder as the donkey kept moving. \"How do you stop this thing?\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it. You're headed in the right direction.\" Annja put her heels to her own donkey's sides. Anticipation vibrated inside her. There was nothing like making a new discovery."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "\"It's not out here.\"\n\nAfter hours of listening to the whining, Annja decided to tune Burris out as she led her donkey over the rugged landscape. Evening was fast approaching and it was at least another hour before they reached the spot where she was pretty sure the Cave of the Seven Sleepers was hidden. They hadn't brought any overnight gear\u2014she hadn't expected it to take this long, but gauging distance by donkey was a somewhat unrefined science, though she knew in a pinch she could sleep anywhere under any conditions. So could the donkeys, she was sure. She'd settle the extra expense with the guy who'd rented them when they got back the next day. Hopefully, he wouldn't send the police looking for them when they didn't make it back the same day.\n\n\"Whatever you and your Rio girl professor friend thought you had, you screwed it up.\"\n\nAnnja scanned the mountain's ridge, focusing on the three peaks mentioned in the translation. At least she hoped these peaks were the ones mentioned.\n\nThe problem with translations was that they could be wrong. Words didn't translate exactly into another language, and then there was the fact that the measurements had been in cubits, which was the distance between the elbow to the tip of the middle finger\u2014and that could differ greatly from individual to individual. She had narrowed the target site to a radius of a quarter-mile.\n\nBurris stopped and drank from his canteen. \"We're going around in circles.\"\n\nThey had enough water and trail food for a couple days. Annja would never have gone into the mountains without those, even if she'd only planned an afternoon expedition.\n\nWhat bothered her wasn't being out here longer than expected with an annoying shock jock. What bothered her was the feeling of being watched. But no matter how hard she looked, she couldn't see anyone.\n\n\"We are going around in circles. That's the whole point of this. You find a central location\u2014ours is that collection of peaks\u2014then you spiral out from it. Hunters track game in the same fashion, and police investigators use similar techniques when looking for fugitives.\"\n\n\"An earthquake could have moved those peaks.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Or filled in the cave you think is out here.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I'm thinking maybe I should just give you my half interest in the brick. I could be somewhere relaxing with a cold drink in my hand.\"\n\n\"I'd bet the donkey knows the way home.\"\n\n\"Then you go and say something like that and I get suspicious that you know something I don't.\"\n\n\"I don't. You know everything I know.\"\n\nBurris blew a raspberry.\n\nFinally pushed past endurance, Annja was about to respond when she spotted an abscess beneath a growth of juniper trees pressing against a shelf of rock about seventy yards farther down the mountain in the direction she'd been headed. She lifted the binoculars hanging around her neck to her eyes and scanned the area.\n\nShe still wasn't certain if what she was looking at was the mouth of a cave until she spotted the worn path leading to the spot. Elated, she dropped the binoculars and prodded the donkey onward.\n\n\"We could just hack the trees out of the way.\"\n\nAnnja moved the juniper easily, not wanting to break the branches or otherwise disturb the growth. Other people had come this way and done the same. \"We could.\" She pressed forward, edging into the narrow cave. \"We could also put up a neon sign announcing the cave.\"\n\n\"Are you sure the donkeys won't leave us here?\"\n\n\"I am.\"\n\n\"They don't strike me as particularly loyal. I think mine was carnivorous.\"\n\n\"We took the supplies, so even if they ran off\u2014which they won't\u2014we'll be fine.\"\n\n\"It would be a long walk back.\" Burris, winded and tired, followed her into the cave.\n\nAnnja played her flashlight over the cave walls. The chamber was roughly fifteen feet tall and thirty feet long. At the back, the level dropped quickly, disappearing beyond the flashlight beam. The rough stone surfaces glared white in some areas from lichen.\n\nThe worn path she'd spotted outside was more pronounced inside. Whoever had been here recently had taken care to wipe away as much evidence of their presence outside as possible. Shoe and boot soles showed up readily in the dust on the cave floor.\n\nHefting the saddlebags of water onto her shoulder again, Annja strode toward the back of the cave. The floor became steeply angled, but there were enough knobby ridges to make the going fairly easy.\n\nShe stepped down and descended into the earth.\n\nAlmost twenty minutes later, she found the intersection of tunnels. They didn't quite make an X, but it was close enough.\n\nBurris played his beam around. \"This was in the translation?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Annja flicked her light toward the tunnel on the right. \"At some point, that leads back to the Cave of the Seven Sleepers, but it has probably collapsed along the way and that's why this system hasn't been found by explorers coming from there.\"\n\n\"That's not our tunnel?\"\n\nAnnja pointed her flashlight to the left. \"That's our tunnel.\" She started forward, excitement growing inside her.\n\n\"What if this tunnel is collapsed, too?\"\n\n\"We don't have much farther to go. We'll know soon enough.\"\n\nTen minutes later, Annja found the tunnel section she'd been searching for. She had to search three times for it, playing her flashlight beam over the uneven surfaces. Only a few tool marks stood out in the stone.\n\nPutting her backpack down, she rummaged through the toolkit she'd brought and took out a stiff-bristled brush. Carefully, she swiped at the northern wall, dislodging dust and debris.\n\n\"What are you looking for?\" Burris peered over her shoulder.\n\n\"Cracks.\"\n\nBurris snorted. \"That wall is full of cracks. How are you going to know when you find the right one?\"\n\n\"Because it looks like this.\" Annja focused the flashlight on a web of cracks three feet off the ground.\n\n\"What is that?\" He studied the shape, about three inches by three inches.\n\n\"A ziggurat. It's the symbol for the Tower of Babel.\"\n\n\"That looks square. I thought we were looking for a tower.\"\n\n\"Some towers are built square or rectangular. Like the ziggurat. The Assyrians, Sumerians and Elamites\u2014to name a few\u2014built towers like these for temples. The Sialk Ziggurat in Kashan, from the third century BC\u2014found and excavated in the 1930s\u2014is still standing.\"\n\nAfter some careful study, she gently pressed on the ziggurat symbol. Nothing happened. Annja pressed harder and the ziggurat appeared to move. They both watched in awe as the image sank inward.\n\nStone rasped against stone, causing a minor tremor to fill the tunnel and dust to sift down from the ceiling.\n\nBurris squawked and dropped into a kneeling ball pressed against one of the tunnel sides.\n\nGradually, a section of the wall slid inward, grating along runners carved into the floor. A minute later, it stopped.\n\nAnnja thrust her flashlight into the darkness, sniffed the air and followed the light inside."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "On the other side of the massive door, Annja followed a short tunnel that led to a much larger chamber, which the flashlight's beam couldn't quite span. When she panned upward, the beam reached twenty feet and disappeared against the blackness.\n\nBurris stumbled to a stop beside her. \"How far down do you think we are?\"\n\nShe estimated the distance they'd come and the angle of the descent. \"Maybe three hundred feet.\"\n\n\"Didn't realize it was that deep.\" He took a long breath and let it out. The light reflecting on his face revealed his worried expression. \"So what are we looking for?\"\n\n\"The tower in the shadow of the tower.\"\n\n\"Sounds like something out of a fortune cookie.\"\n\nAnnja moved forward, flashing her light around. \"The inscription was written for someone who already knew what they would be looking for. It's not a Wikipedia entry.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I got that.\"\n\nAn image blurred through the flashlight beam. Annja backtracked, searching for what she thought she'd seen, moving slowly now.\n\nThat's when she saw the low stone pedestal with the tower on top of it. The pedestal had been cut from a stalagmite jutting up from the cave floor, shaping it into an eight-foot square only two feet off the ground.\n\nThe eight-foot ziggurat took up most of the pedestal. It had been carved from stalagmite, as well, and the craftsmanship was incredible. Annja felt certain if she'd measured the sides that they would have been in perfect mathematical proportion.\n\n\"Oh, man,\" Burris whispered. \"That's...that's...\"\n\n\"Pretty incredible, isn't it?\" Annja placed the saddlebags nearby and fished out her digital camera and six emergency flares. She snapped the chemical flares to activate them, then placed them on the floor away from the ziggurat so the various surfaces caught the cool blue light.\n\nMoving slowly, she photographed the tower from every angle, stopping to stare at a particular spot where a series of cracks seemed unnatural\u2014almost like they were a guidepost of some sort. She quickly studied another area when Burris came over to see what had caught her attention. No point in giving everything away.\n\n\"What was this?\" Burris asked. She didn't know if he'd seen the crisscrossing of hairline cracks or not. \"A model of the real Tower of Babel?\"\n\n\"Maybe.\" Annja took another shot. \"Or maybe it was a reminder of the original tower.\"\n\n\"It was made after the original tower,\" a deep voice boomed.\n\nStartled, Annja turned and discovered Rafik Bhalla and a small army of armed men in the cavern with her and Burris. As Annja stared at them, they turned on flashlights and filled the space with light. She blinked against it.\n\n\"Don't move, Creed.\" Bhalla held up a hand. \"I won't let my men kill you\u2014unless they have to.\" He smiled coldly. \"Your friend there, I don't have any feelings for. He doesn't have your mind or your skills. His fate is immediately in your hands.\"\n\nAnnja placed the camera on the stone pedestal and held up her hands. \"Don't shoot him.\"\n\n\"I am glad you feel that way. Things will go much better if we all get along, I think.\" Bhalla came forward, flanked by four of his men whose rifles never wavered from Annja. \"I respect you a great deal, Ms. Creed. I am quite familiar with your exploits, both on television as well as in your archaeological works.\" He stopped a short distance away from her and clasped his hands behind his back, staring at the tower. \"It is quite beautiful, is it not?\"\n\n\"It is.\" Slowly, Annja put her hands down, trusting that Bhalla wasn't going to shoot. At least not right away.\n\nBhalla stared at the model. \"It was made by a small group of the corepiscopea, the first among the priests, of my church generations ago. They wanted to remember the power of God's wrath, and to protect the secret of the tower. So this place vanished into myth and gradually disappeared almost altogether. I found it three years ago quite by accident\u2014I was looking for something else. But it didn't give me the secret of the tower. For that, I needed a brick that was reputedly from the original tower. I deciphered most of the inscriptions on the model here, you see. I've been searching for it for a long time, and had only just found it when I lost it to you. I mean to have it back.\"\n\n\"What secret are you talking about?\" Burris demanded to know.\n\nBhalla sneered at the California shock jock and then dismissed him to address Annja. \"While doing my research at the church, I found an old scroll that recounted a most fascinating story about the young prince that helped build the Tower of Babel. Do you know the story?\"\n\n\"No.\" Despite her present situation, Annja was intrigued.\n\nThe man studied her for a moment and then his eyes took on a faraway look as he began to speak. \"The young prince was disenchanted by his father's pursuit of reaching heaven to speak directly in God's ear. The prince felt the king was overstepping himself, to use present-day vernacular. So he prayed to God to take mercy on him and his people when the tower was destroyed. Since the prince was so devout and beloved of God, God placed the power of tongues into a device belonging to the prince, and He commanded that the device be forever hidden from the eyes of men.\"\n\nAnnja felt as if she was back in the orphanage, listening to the nun during storytelling hour. But she didn't want to interrupt Bhalla, and took the opportunity as she listened to assess his men's numbers and how well armed they were. And what options she had.\n\n\"God scattered all the men of the Earth at that time, but he did not want to lose the First Language, the language that he had given Adam and Eve to speak in the Garden of Eden.\" Bhalla glanced over at her. \"In all your travails, you have not come across this story?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said, envisioning her sword in the otherwhere, ready to call it up at a moment's notice.\n\n\"I thought it might be on my brick.\"\n\n\"It's not your brick,\" Burris interrupted heatedly. \"I bought that brick and I'm sharing it with\u2014\"\n\nOne of the guards rammed the butt of his weapon into Burris's stomach, dropping him to the stone floor in a gasping heap. Burris cursed and tried to get to his feet only to be knocked down again.\n\n\"Stay down, you idiot,\" Annja said.\n\nBurris held up a hand in surrender. \"Okay. I'm good. I'm just gonna sit here.\"\n\n\"The brick is mine,\" Bhalla said. \"The man I purchased it from was betrayed. Therefore, I was also betrayed.\" His dark eyes reflected the blue light of the flares as he gazed at Annja. His voice was harder and colder when he said, \"Now, Ms. Creed, I want my brick.\"\n\nWearing night-vision goggles, Garin moved quickly down the tunnel. He carried a Heckler & Koch MP3-SD5 in his hands and wore pistols in shoulder leather and at his hip. His security troops ran after him.\n\nHis security network had locked onto Bhalla and followed him to Damascus. Getting into Syria had been a little difficult, but Garin was selling weapons to the Syrian military as well as the Arab Spring rebels. Tape had been cut, palms had been greased and Garin had landed in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains by helicopter only minutes after Bhalla and his people had arrived at the hidden cave.\n\nSpotting the flashlight glare ahead and around a corner, Garin held up and signaled his team to fall into place behind him. He peered around the corner.\n\nSixty feet away, four men stood in front of a hole in the wall that looked too uniform to be a tunnel mouth. Flickering blue-tinted light gleamed from inside the doorway.\n\nSpinning around the corner, Garin opened fire on full-auto. The silenced 9 mm rounds chopped into the four men and took them down, killing them before they had time to cry out in warning.\n\nGarin swapped out magazines and charged down the tunnel. He hadn't heard any gunfire from the other end of this tunnel, so he felt certain Annja would still be alive. Although, as Garin knew, life could be taken just as quickly with a blade. Annja, like Roux, could be a thorn in his side and a definite roadblock to certain plans he had, but he didn't want anything to happen to her.\n\nBhalla on the other hand...\n\nStepping through the blood of the dead men, Garin slid into the doorway, following the machine pistol into the room with his finger on the trigger. When he heard Annja's voice, he relaxed a little, but he maintained a murderous focus and grinned at the thought of killing Bhalla."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "\"I don't have the brick.\" Annja stared into Bhalla's eyes. She reached for the sword in the otherwhere, grabbed the hilt and prepared to yank the weapon into the cave.\n\nBhalla returned her gaze full measure for a moment, then addressed his men. He spoke in English so she could understand. \"If she does not produce the brick in the next moment, kill this man.\"\n\nBurris looked up at her. \"Give him the brick.\"\n\n\"I don't have it,\" Annja said as earnestly as she could. \"I didn't want to bring it all the way out here.\"\n\n\"What? You didn't say anything about that. You're going to get me\u2014\" Burris struggled to sit up and the guard standing over him promptly kicked him in the face. Groaning, Burris fell onto his back, bleeding from his nose.\n\nBhalla stared at her. \"Where is the brick?\"\n\n\"Back in Damascus.\" Annja's grip on the sword felt solid and certain. \"I hid it while Burris was sleeping. He doesn't know where it is.\"\n\n\"Then I do not need him, do I?\" Bhalla turned to his guards and started to speak.\n\nGleaming brightly in the light of the flares and the combined flashlights Bhalla and his men carried, the sword filled Annja's hand. She swept the blade through the man standing over Burris, cutting him from left shoulder to right hip.\n\nThe dead man fell to pieces.\n\nStill on the move, Annja swung backhanded at the next guard and cut through his neck. As he stumbled back, dropping his weapon and grabbing for his throat to stop the blood, muzzle flashes filled the cave near the entrance and a moment later the thundering roll of gunfire echoed within the confined space.\n\nBhalla extinguished his flashlight and stepped backward into the shadows behind the model tower, disappearing almost at once.\n\nThe last guard standing nearby swept his weapon toward Annja. She ducked low as she charged. Bullets cut through the air just above her head as she grabbed the sword hilt in both hands and drove it through the guard's Kevlar and into his chest.\n\nFace-to-face with the dying man, Annja lifted her foot and kicked away his weapon, then kicked him free of her blade. She searched for Burris in the flickering light of the muzzle flashes and the bouncing flashlight beams, but he wasn't where he'd been.\n\nCrouching, Annja surveyed the cave and tried to figure out what was going on. Evidently another group of thieves had followed Bhalla to the cave and intended to kill the man.\n\n\"Annja!\"\n\nEven with all the confusion in the cave, she recognized the voice immediately as she took cover behind a nearby stalagmite. Bullets slammed into the thick rock and flying chips stung her face and neck.\n\n\"Garin?\" She spotted him then in the swirl of lights.\n\nGarin moved so fast, wading through Bhalla's men as if they were in slow motion. Every move he made was fluid, simple, and there was no hesitation as he killed his opponents. He stepped over the body of his latest victim toward Annja just as one of his men crumpled to the ground with shattered night-vision goggles and his face bloody.\n\nIn the next moment, a fusillade of withering fire stuttered across the ground and drove Garin behind a boulder twenty feet away. He crouched with his back to the big rock and calmly changed magazines in his weapon. There was just enough light for Annja to see the smile on his face. It wasn't for her, she knew that. It was the smile he wore whenever he was in battle.\n\n\"Quite the party you have here.\" Garin spoke in German.\n\n\"Not my party.\" Annja replied in the same language.\n\n\"Do you know how to get out of here?\"\n\n\"The same way we got in.\"\n\nGarin looked around. \"There must be another way. Bhalla and his men are fleeing somewhere. My men are covering the door, and yet our opposition grows steadily less.\"\n\nAnnja had noticed that, too. She shifted around the stalagmite and studied the battlefield inside the cave. The two forces had polarized. Garin's team held the front of the cavern, but Bhalla and his men had pulled to the rear. They'd left a trail of dead men.\n\nShe looked at Garin. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"I've got an old score to settle with Bhalla.\" Garin peered around the boulder, then spoke rapidly in what Annja thought was Czech or another Eastern European language.\n\nImmediately, Garin's men stopped firing.\n\nGarin turned to Annja. \"Keep your head down. It's about to get very loud.\" He set his back to the boulder and braced himself.\n\nAnnja wrapped herself into a ball and put her hands over her ears, but even with that, the sudden explosions seemed to ricochet off the inside of her skull.\n\nGarin and his team lunged to their feet at once, firing into the shadows at the other end of the cavern. Bullets sparked from the cave walls, but there was only a little return fire.\n\nOn the other side of the cave, barely revealed in the uncertain light, a section of the cave wall slid into place. Garin must have ordered his men to stop firing, because the shooting stopped. Striding forward, Garin gave orders. He kicked the men on the cave floor as he passed to make certain they were dead. Twice he paused to put a bullet through a man's head.\n\nA man didn't get to live five-hundred-plus years by being gentle and merciful, she supposed, trying not to dwell on his apparent cold-bloodedness. She trailed after him, pausing only long enough to pick up her camera and backpack, both of which had miraculously not been hit by flying bullets.\n\nTwo of Garin's men had Burris in their custody. Burris protested and struggled to get free. Without a word, one of the men wrapped Burris's wrists in disposable cuffs and the other gagged him.\n\nOne of Garin's team sprinted toward the section of the cave wall where Bhalla and his men had disappeared. He turned and spoke rapidly to Garin, pointing to the wall.\n\nGarin nodded and turned to Annja. \"Stay back. He's going to blow that section of the wall.\"\n\nAnnja shook her head, thinking of all the age-old geological formations that might be destroyed, not to mention the model tower. \"Don't do that.\"\n\n\"Bhalla is not getting away today. He's run his course. I'm going to give him the death I promised him when our paths first crossed.\"\n\nBefore Garin's man had time to set up, a series of explosions raced across the ceiling. They were too deliberate to be natural and she guessed that Bhalla had mined the cavern to bury the model tower if it came to that or to bury whoever he lured into his trap. Stalactites and chunks of rock fell like heavy rain, knocking down men unfortunate enough to be under them when they fell.\n\nGarin called out to his men and they began retreating at once. Pausing, Garin helped one of them to his feet, looping an arm across his shoulders.\n\n\"Annja!\" Garin called.\n\nFrozen for just a moment, Annja stared at the tower, watching helplessly as a falling stalactite smashed the model to bits.\n\n\"Annja!\" Garin's voice was sharper, more insistent. He paused with the wounded man draped over his shoulder.\n\nKnowing that Garin would drop the injured man and remove her bodily if he had to, Annja ran after him as the ceiling continued to fall. She followed Garin through the entrance just before tons of rock filled the cavern. The tunnel shook as the mountain settled.\n\nGarin looked at her. \"Where does that tunnel at the back of the cavern go?\"\n\nAnnja shook her head and wiped dust and grit from her eyes. \"I didn't know about it. I'd only just found the one there.\" She pointed at the collapsed entrance.\n\n\"So it's possible Bhalla got away.\"\n\n\"If that tunnel didn't come down when the cavern did, I suppose. Your guess is as good as mine.\"\n\n\"He's not a man to overlook an escape. Whoever built that model would have felt the same way.\" Garin cursed for a moment and adjusted the unconscious man over his shoulder. \"You have the brick Bhalla has been looking for?\"\n\nAnnja knew it wouldn't do any good to lie. Garin knew about the brick. \"I do.\"\n\nMuffled by the gag, Burris Coronet protested loudly and pointed to himself.\n\nGarin nodded to the two who held the struggling man. One of them slapped an adhesive patch on Burris, who continued to fight for a moment, then promptly fell asleep.\n\n\"It's a narcotic,\" Garin said. \"It'll keep him docile while we sort this out. I'm assuming you wanted him alive.\"\n\n\"Uh, yes.\" She rolled her eyes.\n\nGarin grinned. \"Then let's go have a look at that brick you left in Damascus.\" He gave orders to his men and they filed out of the cave system to the mountains where his Land Rovers were waiting alongside Annja's donkeys."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Annja's mind flew as Garin followed her through the marketplace. She didn't want to give the brick to Garin, and she knew him well enough to know that he wouldn't willingly share once he got his hands on it. If he thought he knew as much about the history of the brick as he needed to, he would take it in a heartbeat and disappear.\n\nBeside her, Garin strode confidently, dressed in a dark suit and wearing wraparound sunglasses now, not looking like he'd led an armed assault into an underground cave less than twelve hours ago.\n\n\"You didn't leave the brick at the hotel?\"\n\nAnnja skirted a spice dealer, noticing how two of Garin's men automatically changed their pace to keep up with her, and walked toward a shop that specialized in cooking utensils. Pots and pans hung from ropes beneath the colorful canopy. Some collided occasionally in the thin breeze and it sounded like wind chimes. \"If someone found me, they would find the hotel. Find the hotel, find the brick. That was too easy.\"\n\n\"Plus, you didn't trust your partner not to leave you high and dry.\"\n\n\"I didn't.\" Annja had put Garin off for the night, getting some sleep by telling him she had to wait till morning to recover the brick. That had almost backfired because she hadn't known if she would sleep or not. But she had. The past couple days had caught up with her.\n\nWhen she'd woken up, she had her escape route worked out. And she was going to escape. No matter who claimed the brick\u2014Burris Coronet, Rafik Bhalla or Garin Braden\u2014the brick's secret was hers. She was going to make whatever discovery there was that lay ahead.\n\nIf there was one to make.\n\nShe still didn't believe that a device existed that would allow the world to speak one language.\n\nThen again, she carried Joan of Arc's sword, which was able to conveniently pop into and out of the world.\n\nSo...maybe there was something to the universal-language artifact.\n\nAnnja's chosen course took her by the man who had rented her the donkeys. Thankfully he was there this morning and he remembered Annja. If he hadn't been, she would have had to think of something else. If Garin had given her time. He was the suspicious sort, too.\n\n\"Hey, you!\" The short man walked toward Annja and pointed accusingly. \"Donkey thief! Where are my donkeys?\"\n\nGarin dropped a hand casually inside his jacket. \"Who is this man?\"\n\n\"Remember the donkeys I asked you to bring back with us?\"\n\n\"They'll be fine out in the mountains.\"\n\n\"In the mountains?\" the donkey vendor shrieked.\n\n\"You see,\" said Annja, \"the donkeys belong to this gentleman. I'd say he's a little irate over not getting them back.\" Annja's gaze slid to a small group of Syrian soldiers having coffee at a shop and watching the encounter with keen interest.\n\nCursing in his native tongue and gesturing wildly, the donkey owner came to a stop in front of Annja and demanded that his donkeys be produced immediately or that he receive payment for them.\n\n\"My husband will pay for them,\" Annja said.\n\nBemused, Garin looked at her. \"Husband?\"\n\nAnnja smiled sweetly as the donkey handler turned his full attention to Garin and demanded prompt compensation.\n\nGarin took out his wallet, which was stuffed with currency. He didn't like leaving a digital trail with cards. \"How much do you want for those flea-bitten beasts?\"\n\n\"Sir, those donkeys were of the highest quality,\" the handler protested. \"Seldom have you seen the like of such donkeys. They will be almost impossible to replace.\" He walked closer to examine Garin's wallet, eyes gleaming with avarice.\n\nAnnja kicked the man's forward foot in front of his other foot as he stepped forward. The man tripped and fell, flailing for balance and striking Garin's wallet. Bank notes fluttered into the marketplace, instantly drawing a crowd to fight for the bills.\n\nGarin, figuring out what Annja was up to, lunged for her, but she slipped beneath his grasp and put her shoulder into the donkey handler's back, shoving him into Garin's open arms. By the time Garin extricated himself, the Syrian soldiers had started over and Annja was in full stride.\n\nShe ran for the nearest open-air caf\u00e9, leaping onto a table, then leaping again to catch hold of a nearby canopy's support rope, hoping it held. She swung forward, thrilled that it held her weight, then swung back, pulling herself up out of reach of one of Garin's men and flipped onto the canopy.\n\nBelow, the man she had eluded scrambled onto a table, then froze as a rifle cracked. One of the Syrian soldiers pointed his smoking rifle at Garin's man, who nodded and slowly stepped down from the table with his hands raised.\n\nFighting for balance on the canopy, Annja heard a sharp voice behind her calling out for her to stop in Arabic, one of the words she understood in just about any language. And even in parts of the world where the word wasn't recognizable, the tone always was. She ignored the command and ran toward the building the canopy was attached to.\n\nShots rang out behind her, ripping through the canopy and knocking splinters from the front of the building.\n\nAnnja made herself small, then leaped for the balcony hanging from the second floor. Catching hold of the wrought-iron, she pulled herself up, expecting to be shot, amazed when she wasn't. Balancing on the balcony, she gazed down and saw Garin struggling with the soldiers. One of them pointed his weapon into Garin's face and shouted orders.\n\nGarin stopped, then dropped to his knees and laced his hands behind his head. He glared up at Annja and shouted, \"Well, don't just stand there and let them shoot you!\"\n\nGrinning, Annja leaped for the rooftop and hauled herself up as a few of the soldiers raced down the alleys on either side of the building and two more started climbing the canopy only to have it collapse beneath them.\n\nOn the rooftops, she ran, her heart pumping. She could have the brick in minutes and she would be gone shortly after that.\n\nGarin lay on one of the bunks in the Syrian jail and thought about Annja's escape. Maybe the soldier would have shot her, maybe she would have gotten away. It would have been close. Setting her free would probably cost him the brick and the tower and whatever might be lying in wait there, but he knew he couldn't have stood by and let her be killed.\n\nHe was never quite sure what his feelings were toward her. She was an attractive woman\u2014physically and intellectually. Garin hadn't always appreciated an intelligent woman, and often he didn't look for that in the women he spent time with, but over the centuries he had come to appreciate intelligence.\n\nAnd Annja also carried Joan of Arc's sword, which had changed Garin's life forever. She was bewitching...and dangerous.\n\nHe never knew whether to get closer to her or run. He had never before experienced that and it was infuriating. Indecision could kill a man as surely as making a mistake.\n\n\"Yeah, I've met Lady Gaga. She's hotter in person than you'd imagine.\" Burris Coronet sat over in the corner and talked to three American guys in their twenties that had gotten busted for drunk and disorderly. None of them had dared take the cots from Garin and his men.\n\nFrom what Garin had gathered, two of the young men were from Los Angeles and were familiar with Burris Coronet's radio show. The other man was enamored of Burris's constant storytelling about celebrities.\n\n\"Once you meet Gaga, you are so over Angelina Jolie. I mean, Angelina had her day, but that day is over. Gaga is the new wave.\"\n\nThe men pestered Burris for more stories and he kept spinning the tales. The way he had for the past few hours.\n\nFriedrich, Garin's second-in-command for this operation, blew out an angry breath and glared at Burris. Friedrich was short and squat, a powerful warrior capable of taking off an opponent's head with his bare hands. Garin had seen it done.\n\n\"Allow me and I will go over there and close his big mouth,\" Friedrich said in Czech. \"I grow weary of his constant buzzing. Like a chain saw.\"\n\nSeveral of the other men were in agreement.\n\n\"Leave him.\" Garin levered an arm over his eyes. \"We don't need any more trouble. We'll be released soon, once the bribes are in place.\"\n\nHe hoped his cyberteam watching for Annja had picked up her trail. She would have the brick, but the tower\u2014if that was what she was after\u2014was not in Damascus or anywhere in Syria. All his research indicated that it had been somewhere in Iraq.\n\nPresently, he heard footsteps out in the narrow hallway on the other side of the iron bars. A key rasped in a lock and the door creaked open. \"Jean Sirois!\" That was the cover name he was currently using.\n\nGarin sat up and looked at the jailers. Neither of them looked happy.\n\n\"You and your companions are free to go.\"\n\nGarin stood and walked to the door. His men fell in behind him.\n\n\"Are we getting out of here?\" Burris asked.\n\nOut the corner of his eye, Garin saw the American get to his feet. He ignored him and stepped into the hallway.\n\n\"You can't just leave me here,\" Burris protested.\n\n\"Of course I can. I saved your life yesterday. I owe you nothing.\" Garin peered back at the man through the bars.\n\n\"Do you know where Annja is going?\"\n\nThe jailer started to swing the door shut.\n\n\"Because,\" Burris said quickly, \"if you don't know, I do.\"\n\nGarin caught the door in one big hand and stopped it from closing. He studied Burris. \"Where?\"\n\n\"A place near Babylon.\" Burris tried to grin confidently but he couldn't quite pull it off.\n\n\"How do you know this?\"\n\n\"There was a map on that model tower in the cave. Annja may have a photographic memory, but mine is pretty good, too. I've been looking at maps with her for days. I recognized what I was seeing.\" Burris licked his lips nervously. \"Take me with you and I'll give you half ownership in the brick.\"\n\n\"You're giving your half of the brick to me?\"\n\n\"No, I'm giving you hers. She left me to rot in jail while she goes off to find the tower. In my book, that negates any deal we had.\" Burris sounded a little more confident. \"So you're my new partner. Deal?\" He shoved his hand through the bars.\n\nGarin ignored the hand and turned to the jailer. \"I'm taking him, too.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Eyes stinging from lack of sleep and the dust that cycled endlessly over the valley, Annja drove the secondhand military Jeep south of Baghdad, Iraq. She checked the odometer again. She had come 68.3 miles and was west of Al-Hillah.\n\nShe paused the Jeep and took out her binoculars, scanning the nearby landscape. Some of the heaviest fighting in the Iraqi War had taken place in the area. American tanks and soldiers had once flooded the region, and shelling had reconfigured the land's natural geography.\n\nOnly a few miles away, more than three thousand bodies had been found in a mass grave where Saddam Hussein had buried Shiites who had stood up against him and the Baath Party. For a moment, Annja thought about all the peoples who had fought and died in this area. Al-Hillah had been populated for thousands of years, was in the cradle of life where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flowed.\n\nShe shook those thoughts from her mind and concentrated on her search. On the flight from Damascus to Baghdad, she and Cybele had talked and worked on the brick's inscription, comparing it to the images of the inscription she had found on the model tower.\n\nHer pictures of the model had revealed the map, just as she'd suspected when she'd seen the crisscrossing of fine cracks, but the brick's inscription had provided the key to the location of the map. Both had to be consulted to get an accurate assessment of what Annja believed was the location of the Tower of Babel.\n\nHer satphone rang. Seeing Cybele's name in the caller ID, Annja scooped it from her backpack in the passenger seat and answered. \"Hello.\"\n\n\"Still haven't found it?\"\n\n\"I would have called if I had.\" Annja uncapped a bottle of water and drank deeply. It was hot enough that the fluid seemed to run right through her, providing a moist layer for dust and dirt to crust on her. She was ready for a bath in the worst way.\n\nBut she was more interested in finding the tower.\n\n\"You haven't seen the formation? The one that looks like a perching falcon?\"\n\nAnnja scanned the rolling horizon again, taking in the strands of barbed wire and metal posts that had once been fences around forward military operating bases. \"It's been thousands of years, and when the United States Army rolled tanks through here, they shelled a lot of landscape.\"\n\n\"And we are sure the Tower of Babel was not located in Borsippa?\"\n\nBorsippa lay in ruins around a lake north of Annja's present position, on the east bank of the Euphrates River, closer to Baghdad than to her.\n\n\"If the tower was there, archaeologists would have found it by now.\"\n\n\"I was doing some reading. There is a tower there that the local people believe might have been the Tower of Babel.\"\n\n\"The Tongue Tower. I know. I've seen it and helped with a dig there one summer during grad school. It's not what we're looking for.\" Annja hated sweltering in the heat, but even more she hated the feeling that she wasn't going to find what she was looking for.\n\nShe reached for the brick, picking it up and studying the inscriptions again. Her damp fingers picked up color from it and she quickly put it down, wondering again at how it had survived over two thousand years. Even when it had been lost, it had been cared for and protected.\n\nJust so it could get to this time and place and leave me stumped. But she was close. She could feel it.\n\n\"I've been thinking about the inscription. There's a line, 'Beneath the tower lies the gift of speaking.'\"\n\n\"Like I told you, Annja, that translation is the best I can do under the circumstances.\" Cybele sounded tired and Annja felt badly for involving the woman in the search. Cybele had an active mind and couldn't turn away from a good puzzle, either. Just like her.\n\n\"You did a fine job, Cybele. According to Bhalla, this prince in the legend took something from the tower and hid it somewhere else. What if the inscription isn't talking about the Tower of Babel? What if it's talking about the brick? There was a reason it didn't end up in the tower.\"\n\n\"You're thinking that there's something inside the brick?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nCybele sighed. \"I've been thinking the same thing, but destroying that brick sounds so...\"\n\n\"Wrong. I know.\" Annja's stomach clenched at the thought of it. \"I wish we had time to get this X-rayed back at one of the big archaeology universities. If I could just get past this Bhalla guy and Garin to make it to London...\"\n\n\"Garin?\"\n\nAnnja ignored that question; she wasn't ready to explain Garin Braden to the linguist. \"I haven't verified it yet, but this brick must be over two thousand years old.\"\n\n\"But at the end of the day, it's a brick. Nothing extraordinary.\"\n\n\"Nothing extraordinary would be an excellent hiding place.\"\n\nShe carefully took the brick, holding it with a piece of cloth, then climbed out of the Jeep and picked up her canteen. After pouring water on the brick and letting it soak for a moment, she started wiping at one of the edges of the clay, gently scraping it away. For a few minutes, she questioned herself, forcing herself to go on despite her misgivings.\n\nIt was a brick.\n\nAnd it was a riddle.\n\nAfter sluicing more water over it, Annja spotted something glinting inside. Feeling more certain of herself, she continued wearing away the hard clay, which clearly hadn't been baked all the way through.\n\nOnly a few minutes later, Annja removed a thick, rectangular slab of blue glass with a picture on it. She set the husk of the brick aside to dry.\n\n\"I've found something.\" Annja turned the glass over in her hands, growing more excited as she realized what it was.\n\n\"Well, tell me.\"\n\n\"A piece of blue leaded glass.\"\n\n\"Leaded glass?\" Cybele sounded hesitant. \"That means the brick isn't as old as we thought it was.\"\n\n\"Mesopotamia was the first area to start making glass, and they were making leaded glass as far back as 1400 BC. A fragment of blue glass was tracked back to Nippur, more commonly known as Enlil City, though only ruins remain now. It isn't far from here.\"\n\n\"Why put the glass in the brick?\"\n\n\"Because it's the map.\" Annja held the glass up to the sky and studied the inscription that suddenly showed so much clearer. \"It shows two rivers that have to be the Tigris and Euphrates, and it shows a location marked in a mountain range that is farther south and east of where I am now.\" She couldn't stop grinning as she gently wrapped the leaded glass in a spare shirt. \"Wish me luck.\"\n\n\"Always.\"\n\nAnnja hung up, repacked the brick in a paper bag so it would safely dry, refilled her Jeep's gas tank from the jerry cans she carried in the back and dropped into the driver's seat. She started the engine, got a fresh bottle of water and a couple of energy bars and headed southeast toward the low mountains."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "The glass map was cleverer than Annja had at first thought. It was actually three maps in one, all of them intertwined to the point it took real effort to sort through them. She made sketches of them in her journal to keep from getting confused.\n\nNot more than an hour from where she'd had her epiphany, she recognized the section of the mountain range replicated in glass. She held the glass map up to match against the horizon and, when she got onto the proper approach, she spotted the sweeping wings of the falcon that had been written about in the inscription on the model tower.\n\nShe had to look at the mountainside just right to see the falcon, and she knew that if she hadn't been looking for it, she would have missed it completely. The falcon actually stood out against three different jutting edges that had to be seen from the side to be seen at all. Erosion and time had softened the edges, but it was there.\n\nHowever, sometime in the past, the falcon had been decapitated. Only a jagged stump remained. The heavy artillery scars on the mountainside were testament that the head had probably been taken off during artillery practice. There was no other reason for the range to have been shot up so many times.\n\nShe drove the Jeep up into the mountains until the incline became too dangerous to navigate even with four-wheel drive. Then she hid the Jeep behind a stand of juniper trees, got out, slung her backpack and filled an extra pack with water and energy bars. She started up into the foothills as the sun sank in the west, turning the horizon red and ochre.\n\nThree hundred feet up, where the falcon's right wingtip faded into the mountainside, a miniature cuneiform symbol for God, which looked like a standing golf tee cross by two other golf tees, stood out on the mountainside. The cuneiform was ancient by the time the Tower of Babel was believed to have been built, but Annja thought the mapmaker had wanted something written that most of his peers couldn't translate.\n\nThat meant he was a scholar, which made her even more hopeful.\n\nAnnja wasn't sure if the marking meant the mapmaker thought God was in this holy place. She just hoped she found a cave that corresponded with the location.\n\nUnfortunately, even locating the wingtip left her with an immense area to explore.\n\nLook with the eye of the falcon.\n\nThe line resonated in Annja's mind. She turned and climbed thirty feet to the ridgeline where the head was missing. Standing there, she looked back down at the right wingtip.\n\nFind the seven steps to the resting place that has been made for that which has been hidden.\n\nAt first, Annja missed the \"steps.\" They were ledges that jutted out from under the wingtip and led farther to the right. Four of them had been blasted away, but she made out the scars where the natural formations had been.\n\nJust as she was about to descend, she saw dust from a Land Rover streaking across the hilly terrain toward her location. Annja dropped down into a prone position, hoping the Jeep was safely hidden.\n\nThe Land Rover turned toward her position and rolled up to a dusty stop beside her Jeep. So much for trying to hide it. After a moment, the driver got out and stood there in a khaki shirt and hiking shorts, ankle-high walking shoes and a pith helmet. Dark, round-lensed sunglasses covered his eyes as he stared up the mountainside. He scowled through his white whiskers.\n\n\"Have you found it?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Annja walked down the mountainside, remembering the first time she'd met the old man in France. She'd been searching out the secret of the Beast of G\u00e9vaudan in the Margeride Mountains. Instead, she'd found Roux and the last piece of Joan's sword.\n\nThe old former soldier had a way of turning up in the strangest places at the most unexpected moments.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" Annja called as she descended.\n\n\"You call that a greeting?\"\n\n\"I think it tops 'Have you found it?'\"\n\n\"You're too sensitive. If I didn't care how you were faring, would I be here?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Annja reached the first ledge at the end of the wingtip and stood there. \"Would you?\"\n\n\"For your information, I left in the middle of a simply amazing run of Texas Hold 'em in Dubai to be here. I was having an absolutely wonderful time, and had captured the attentions of a pair of twins. They were quite enamored of me.\"\n\n\"Ewww.\" Hundreds of years old\u2014Roux had already been a seasoned soldier when he was tasked with protecting Joan of Arc\u2014he had no problem attracting the attentions of a woman. Garin was the same. Annja thought maybe their appeal had something to do with living for hundreds of years. Living that long, especially through the times they'd survived\u2014what little she knew of them\u2014a guy accumulated a lot of confidence and know-how.\n\n\"If you don't want to know, don't ask.\"\n\n\"You should have stayed there.\"\n\n\"If I had, you'd be dead very shortly.\"\n\nAnnja folded her arms. She had come to love the old man like a daughter would, but he could be the biggest, most enigmatic pain she could ever imagine. The same, she gathered, as a lot of father figures. \"I would be dead?\"\n\n\"Yes. Garin is en route, and then there is some man named Baller.\"\n\n\"Bhalla.\"\n\nRoux considered that and nodded. \"African name and the Tower of Babel. Makes a lot more sense.\"\n\n\"I left Garin in Damascus, in the hands of the Syrian military, and I don't know if Bhalla survived the last encounter we had. He might be buried in a cave.\"\n\n\"Garin got out of jail and Bhalla is still alive.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\n\"Because I keep tabs on Garin when I can, and I knew he was chasing you, which interested me because it's never good with the two of you. I didn't think I would need to get involved, but as it turns out, this is about the Tower of Babel. I couldn't stay away. As for Bhalla, my information specialist tells me that he and a group of his people are headed this way, as well.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"Evidently they're following Garin, who is following you. Garin's so wrapped up in this Tower of Babel chase he's forgetting one of the first things I taught him about survival\u2014always watch to see who follows you.\"\n\n\"You could have called me to let me know.\"\n\n\"I could have. You would have stayed out here, though.\"\n\n\"What are you doing here?\"\n\nRoux walked to the back of the Land Rover, opened it and took out a large duffel bag. He also took out a staff for walking. \"I thought it was entirely possible that you found some bauble from Babel.\"\n\n\"I will.\"\n\n\"And I thought that if you did, that could be a dangerous thing. The Tower of Babel was filled with raw power, it is said. God's wrath is a potent thing, and has a tendency to hang around. Like as not, if you don't know how to handle whatever you find, it will kill you instead of Garin or Bhalla.\"\n\n\"O ye of little faith.\"\n\nRoux harrumphed. \"You could be more appreciative of the efforts I've gone to.\"\n\n\"No, I couldn't.\"\n\nHe peered up at her. \"You could at least help an old man ease his burden.\"\n\n\"You passed old a long time ago. And I've never seen a day when you weren't able to handle yourself.\" Except for when he'd been wounded on occasional adventures and hospitalized. Those memories still plagued Annja from time to time.\n\nRoux muttered something under his breath and strode up the mountain effortlessly despite the pack he carried and the staff that was supposed to support him. In just a couple minutes more, he joined her on the ledge.\n\n\"What have you found?\"\n\nAnnja quickly related the events that had landed her in possession of the brick, keeping the information concise because Roux didn't always have a long attention span. While she finished her version of the tale, she and Roux made it over to the seventh ledge and began searching the surface.\n\n\"Do you know what we're looking for?\" he asked.\n\n\"No.\"\n\nRoux grunted. \"It would help if you did.\"\n\nAnnja didn't comment. The sun was going down quickly now and the sky was starting to darken. She was also distracted keeping watch for Garin and Bhalla. Still, she worked at the surface with a stiff-bristled brush, hoping to uncover some kind of sign.\n\nAfter a few more minutes, Roux straightened and massaged his back. \"We're wasting our time. It'll be better to get a good night's sleep and try again in the morning.\" He picked up the duffel. \"Or maybe rethink that translation you're working with.\"\n\nAnnja didn't want to leave. She was certain what she was looking for was here, hidden in plain sight. Only she'd looked everywhere....\n\nThen she realized she hadn't looked everywhere. Abandoning the ledge, she scrambled down, knowing then where the entrance trigger would be hidden and hopefully protected.\n\nFind the entrance hidden from God's wrath, in the shadow of His mercy.\n\nBelow the ledge now, she took out her mini-Maglite and switched it on. She wiped at the surface with her brush, and stared till her eyes burned. The image of a fish, the early sign of the Christians, stood out against the stone.\n\nAround the symbol of the fish, she saw lines too straight and clean to be natural.\n\nAnnja put the flashlight aside and pressed on the symbol. At first, nothing happened, giving her a strong sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. Then, slowly, it recessed and she heard a hollow click from within. She stepped back as a section of the mountainside pulled inside, just as it had at the mouth of the tunnel to the hidden cave, and left an open space the size and dimensions of a child's coffin. A chill coursed down Annja's spine at the unintended comparison and she shivered.\n\n\"You found it,\" Roux said. Then he scowled back down the mountain. \"And it appears your opponents have found us.\"\n\nAnnja turned and stared, watching as a small convoy of trucks braked to a halt at the foot of the mountain. She recognized Bhalla as he got out. If she had to be found right now, she wished it would have been by Garin. At least with Garin they would have had something of a chance.\n\nBhalla shouted orders to his men and pointed at her.\n\n\"Come on. You're not going to do any good standing around out here.\" Roux took her by the hand and pulled her into the mountain."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "Bhalla charged uphill, cursing his ill luck. How many times had he been in this very valley? How many times had he stared at these mountains?\n\nAnd the Babel treasure had been here. After he'd lost Annja in Damascus, he'd felt certain she would come here. If she hadn't, he would have lost her. But he had gotten close in his estimations of where the location was. The man who had recovered the brick had sent him part of the inscription, but he hadn't sent it all. The man's lack of knowledge about the brick had almost given him away. If he'd given too much information, Bhalla would not have needed the brick.\n\nHe ran with his men, a big pistol in his fist. \"When we find the woman this time,\" he ordered over the radio tucked into his ear, \"kill her immediately. Kill the old man, too. Take no chances.\"\n\nBhalla still didn't know where Annja Creed had gotten the sword she'd nearly killed him with.\n\nThe tunnel ran for thirty feet and opened into a large chamber with three tunnels at the other end. Annja crossed to the three openings and stared at the symbols carved over them.\n\n\"Which way?\" Roux stopped, dropped the duffel bag and reached inside it.\n\n\"Three symbols. A flaming sword, a calf and a shadow on a rock. The translation says to choose God's mercy.\" Annja stared at the symbols, trying to make sense of them.\n\nOn one knee now, Roux brought out a claymore mine and set it at an angle that would cover the entrance. \"An archangel with a flaming sword drove Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. That's not the one you want.\"\n\n\"A fatted calf could be a sacrifice. In the Old Testament, when the tower was built, sacrifices were often offered to God.\"\n\n\"The man who hid this thing was doing what he believed was God's will.\" Roux shrugged. \"That could be a connection to God's mercy.\"\n\n\"God's mercy wasn't something that was talked about a lot in the Old Testament. In fact, the only time I remember it was the compassion He showed to Moses.\" Annja looked at the third symbol, the shadow on the rock. \"Moses was in the wilderness and the Israelites had made God angry. He talked to God and asked for mercy.\"\n\n\"You might want to hurry this along. Those people aren't waiting.\"\n\nOutside, Annja heard the slap of boots closing in.\n\n\"Moses also asked God to show him His divine nature. So God hid Moses inside a boulder so he would be safe.\" Annja pointed to the third tunnel. \"This has to be the way.\"\n\nRoux had belted on a pistol, and taken two machine pistols from the duffel. He kept one and tossed the other to Annja, who caught it.\n\n\"You know how to use that, right?\"\n\nAnnja worked the action, making sure a round was chambered. \"I do.\"\n\nRoux tossed her four spare magazines and she stored those in the thigh pockets of her cargo pants. He set another claymore mine in the middle tunnel and activated it once he was safely back out of the way.\n\nAnnja raced down the third tunnel and into the darkness with Roux at her heels. She scanned the walls, looking for markings or signs of travel.\n\nSomething ahead of her clicked, and she heard the whoosh of a ponderous weight in motion.\n\nBhalla followed his men into the tunnel. He was the fourth man in line, so when the explosive detonated ahead of him and blasted shrapnel into his men, he was protected. Still, the concussive force knocked him down and deafened him.\n\nStunned, he lay there for a moment, covered in the blood of his men, blind in one eye from it. Then he forced himself to his feet, his senses whirling from the blast, and waved the next man in line forward. The first two men were dead, torn to pieces. The third man had survived but was missing an ear and three fingers of his left hand.\n\nBhalla brushed by the wounded man and ordered more men forward to pursue their quarry. Seeing his men moving more slowly and cautiously now, fearful of another mine, Bhalla cursed Annja Creed and the old man.\n\nHe entered the chamber, almost slipping in the blood pooling from the dead men. For a moment, he gazed at the three tunnels, not knowing what they meant.\n\nAngry and frantic, he ordered his men into them. They couldn't hear him, but they understood him well enough. Only an instant after a couple disappeared into the second tunnel under the calf drawing, they vomited back out of the opening, propelled by another explosive. Their bodies thumped to the cave floor.\n\nBhalla grabbed another and shoved him into the second tunnel. If Annja Creed and the old man had taken time to put an explosive there, then they must have gone that way. Bhalla followed and watched in horror as a huge stone slab sudden dropped and crushed his man to pulp.\n\nIn disbelief, Bhalla stared at the stone and knew the way was a dead end. He retreated to the main chamber again. No one had returned from either the first or the third tunnel.\n\nThen a blast came from the third and an arm came flying out to land in a smoking heap.\n\nTaking a deep breath, Bhalla plunged into the first tunnel and stopped short when he saw two of his men writhing on rods that had pierced their flesh. Even though Bhalla couldn't hear, one still yet lived and cried out for help as blood dribbled down his chin.\n\nBhalla lifted his pistol and shot him in the head, then turned back to pursue the third tunnel. There was nowhere else his quarry could have gone.\n\nAs the sound of gusting wind closed in on her, Annja wheeled around and flung herself at Roux, wrapping the old man in her arms and taking them to the ground as a giant scythe sliced through her right shirtsleeve. Roux's flashlight beam caught the immense blade as it disappeared in the upper reaches of the ceiling.\n\n\"That was close,\" Roux said.\n\nSlowly, Annja crawled off him and stayed almost flat on the ground as she moved forward. \"Maybe we should be a little more humble through this section.\"\n\n\"I don't have a problem with that.\" Roux dug out another claymore and set it up behind them. Then when they'd crawled through the arc of the scythe, he placed another one. He shook the duffel, indicating it was empty. \"I hope that does enough damage. But we can't keep crawling through here. They'll catch us.\"\n\nAt that moment, the first claymore in the tunnel detonated in a crescendo of noise and flashing light.\n\nKnowing they had to move, Annja pushed herself to her feet, listened for the sound of another trap and felt for the displacement of air. Nothing. Moving more cautiously, but moving as fast as she dared, she went forward."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "\"Party's already started.\"\n\nSeated in the military helicopter passenger seat, Garin silently agreed with Friedrich's assessment of the situation. Then he waved at the helicopter pilot to take them down.\n\nThe three helicopters he'd brought with him were filled with DragonTech Security people. Garin held private security contracts with the Iraqi and American governments. He was inside the country and heavily armed\u2014with a license to kill.\n\nBhalla and his people had scrambled to secure weapons. Unfortunately, getting weapons wasn't hard. The irony that Garin was partly at fault for that was not lost on him. Hopefully he'd made a profit from Bhalla before he killed the man.\n\nWhen the helicopter landed, Garin popped the door open, pulled on his NVGs and held his MP5-SD3 at the ready as he raced down the mountainside to the cave. He opened fire as soon as he saw the guards posted at the door.\n\nWhen he stepped inside the tunnel and saw the bodies and the empty husk of the claymore mine in the main chamber, Garin knew Annja wasn't alone.\n\n\"Spread out.\" Garin waved his team forward. \"Find out which one of these tunnels they went down.\"\n\nThe tunnel descended quickly and the cavern walls and floor grew steadily damper. Annja knew they were below sea level, and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers drew groundwater to them, as well. The tunnel also rounded in a spiral, going deeper and deeper as it narrowed.\n\nThe walls revealed tool marks now. At least part of the tunnel had been chopped from the stone. A preexisting fissure or tunnel had been here, but someone had put in a lot of time making the way clear.\n\nA few feet farther, the tunnel opened up to another cave. About forty feet long and nearly that wide, the ceiling was twenty feet overhead. The cave floor had been cleared of stalagmites, but a few stalactites had crashed to the floor and shattered, either from earthquakes in the area or a result of the artillery shelling.\n\nSix columns made from stone cubes a yard to a side were spread out across the chamber. Each exposed facet of the cubes told some of the story of the building of the Tower of Babel. Annja ran her fingers over the nearest one, finding a strange groove that ran along it at the top of the first cube.\n\nA recessed area in the far wall looked like an altar or a puppet theater, a rectangular opening beneath a banner she didn't recognize. Mesmerized, Annja was pulled forward, shining her flashlight across the opening.\n\nOn the altar lay a thick scroll. Two smaller scrolls lay beside it. On either side of the scrolls, partially decomposed baskets held gold and silver coins and a collection of gemstones.\n\n\"Careful,\" Roux said softly as he joined her. \"Things are not always as innocent as we may believe.\"\n\nThe scythe in the tunnel they'd come down was a deadly reminder of that. Still, she wanted so badly to pick up the scroll and see what it held. At the same time, she realized she wouldn't be able to read it.\n\nBut she had found it. Whatever story it contained, whatever lore and history, she would get to know it. She'd opened a door to the past.\n\n\"The inscription above the altar says that only a humble man may receive the story of God's wrath, and that an arrogant man will be divided.\"\n\n\"Split in two with a giant scythe, maybe?\"\n\nRoux shook his head. \"I hate when people try to be clever with these things. It most always means they want to kill you in some vile and nasty way. Whoever put this scroll here, he was setting a trap and he knew it. Do not touch this until we have a chance to look at it more properly.\"\n\n\"We don't have time.\"\n\n\"Then we'll have to be humble, Annja, and trust that what was meant to come to us will.\" Roux looked around. \"Of course, trust would be a little easier to manage if there were another way out of here.\"\n\nFootsteps at the other end of the room drew her around.\n\nBhalla stood behind a dozen men, some of them ragged and bloodied.\n\nAnnja and Roux dove to the sides, taking cover behind two of the cube columns. They readied their weapons and tried to bring them to bear, but Bhalla's men kept them pinned down.\n\n\"Annja Creed, you can hide, but you are not leaving this cave alive. You have cost me too many men, so do not think you can throw yourself on my mercy. I only pray that we take you alive so you can watch me gut the old man.\" Bhalla spoke in his language to one of his men.\n\nThe man, covered in Kevlar, reached the altar while gunfire kept Roux and Annja ducking for cover. Bullets ricocheted off the walls around them and stone splinters stung her face and hands. She shifted and managed to fire a short burst that caught Kevlar Man in the side. He was still able to grab one of the baskets of jewels.\n\nMechanisms clicked behind the wall and the column where Annja took cover shuddered. Vibrations ran through the floor.\n\nAnnja looked at Roux, who called to her at the same moment. \"Humble man!\" he said, and they dropped simultaneously into prone positions.\n\nThe man standing in front of the altar died in the blink of an eye as a thin wire came out of the wall and rocketed across the room. The columns were designed with space between them, two sections anchored to the ground and to the ceiling at the same time. The wire whipped through half of the columns and two more of Bhalla's men before catching for an instant on a column that had shifted slightly over the past two-thousand-plus years. The wire strained for a moment, pulled by the counterweights that propelled it, before snapping. Even then, the whipping wire sliced through another of Bhalla's men.\n\nWhile they were standing there stunned, watching their comrades literally fall to pieces in front of them, Roux rolled to his feet and leveled the machine pistol, opening fire. Two of the remaining men fell, but the others started shooting back.\n\nThe rumbling in the room continued, and Annja realized it wasn't just the hidden gears in motion. The room was spinning, too. She watched as the door to the tunnel leading back to the surface disappeared. She stood with knees bent, her center low to better keep her balance.\n\nOn the other side of the room, Roux reloaded and glanced anxiously at Bhalla and his gunmen. \"I don't suppose that translation mentioned anything about the room spinning, Annja?\"\n\n\"No.\" She watched the walls. \"I'm assuming this isn't good.\"\n\n\"It so rarely is.\" Roux spun around and fired a three-round burst at one of their opponents, dropping him in a loose sprawl.\n\nThe room ground to a stop, and the altar suddenly jumped backward, tipping slightly as it began a descent into a dark tunnel.\n\nAnnja oriented herself by the stalactites shivering above. Even as she watched them, two cracked free of their moorings and dropped. One of them plunged toward Roux's position.\n\n\"Roux!\"\n\nThe old man was already in motion, rolling to the side, but Bhalla and his six remaining gunners opened fire.\n\nStepping from behind the column, Annja trained her machine pistol on the gunners. Bullets caught three of them and knocked them backward.\n\nAnnja reloaded her machine pistol, wishing she didn't have to kill anyone as she listened to the grinding coming from the tunnel where the altar had vanished. She felt certain wherever it was headed was not good.\n\nAnd she wanted the scroll. She wanted the story that had been left.\n\n\"Roux.\"\n\n\"Go.\" Safely behind the column again and facing fewer foes, Roux waved her on. Then he reached into a pocket, took out a grenade and winked at her. He pulled the pin and threw it toward Bhalla.\n\nBhalla yelled a warning and dove to the side, racing along the columns after Annja. She raised the machine pistol, but one of the other gunmen fired at her. Bullets struck the column and knocked the weapon from her hands, leaving her fingers numb from the impact.\n\nThe grenade blew, catching the gunman in the blast and shoving him back against the wall.\n\nAnnja ran, streaking down the tunnel where the altar had vanished. Fishing her mini-Maglite from her pocket, she pointed it ahead of her. The tunnel was just large enough to allow the altar to pass on the grooves in the stone, she realized. Then the passage widened and she spotted the opening that loomed only a short distance away. From her angle, she saw only empty space at the end of the tracks.\n\nShe ran harder, knowing that even as she caught up to the altar she was going to be unable to stop before she plunged over the side after it. She told herself that she was being foolish, that she couldn't make it, that the scroll probably didn't have anything worthwhile on it, anyway....\n\nShe hurled herself after the altar and scroll, anyway, leaping onto it just as the altar tilted back. Her numbed hand caught hold of the scroll just as the gems and gold tumbled into the black void beyond the cliff's edge. She managed to get one foot under her solidly enough to push off the altar as it tumbled and push herself back toward the cliff.\n\nClutching the scroll, she only had one hand to catch the stone edge and save herself from falling. She hadn't been able to get enough out of her jump to get back onto solid ground.\n\nGasping, Annja began to pull herself up with one hand.\n\nThen Bhalla stepped on her fingers and looked down at her. He held a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other. \"Give me the scroll.\"\n\n\"You're just going to kill me, anyway.\" Annja stared up at him, thinking furiously.\n\n\"You do not want the scroll destroyed. I know that about you.\" Bhalla put his flashlight down, kept his weapon leveled and held out his empty hand. \"Give. Me. The. Scroll.\"\n\nShe was out of options. Her arm had already begun to shake. Not certain of the grip her numbed fingers could manage, Annja raised the scroll.\n\nBhalla smiled.\n\nHe stopped smiling when Annja tossed the scroll past him, then slapped her left hand onto the edge while letting go with her right. Bhalla fired and the bullet whipped by her head, burning her cheek. Then the sword was in her right hand and she thrust up, driving it into the man's abdomen, ripping into his rib cage and through his heart.\n\nFace taut with surprise, Bhalla toppled forward and fell into the darkness.\n\nAnnja released the sword to the otherwhere and pulled herself up onto the ledge. Trying to get her breath back, she sat for a moment. Had she heard the altar hit anything on the way down? She didn't think so.\n\n\"Annja!\" Roux was running down the tunnel with his machine pistol and flashlight. \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\"I am.\" She accepted Roux's offer of his arm and let him help her to her feet.\n\nRoux peered over the edge and pointed his flashlight into the darkness. \"Well, I certainly didn't expect that.\" He looked at her. \"Bhalla?\"\n\n\"He wasn't expecting that, either.\"\n\n\"I suppose you lost everything? That's too bad.\"\n\nAnnja picked up the scroll and smiled. \"Not everything.\"\n\n\"But you lost all the valuables.\" Roux smiled back at her. \"That's going to upset Garin. I think he rather counted on getting something for all his trouble.\"\n\nTogether, they walked back into the main chamber. Annja saw that the doorway no longer opened onto the tunnel. She was just about to suggest they look for a way to change the counterweights when a section of the wall collapsed and the sound of a muffled explosion echoed in the room.\n\nAn instant later, Garin stepped into the room with weapons at the ready, blood on his face. He seemed embarrassed as he lifted his machine pistol from the ready position. \"I'm late. We had to make a door.\"\n\n\"It's a great door,\" Annja said.\n\nBurris Coronet, clearly shell-shocked, stumbled through the door after Garin. \"Holy crap!\"\n\nGarin looked around the room. \"So this is it. What did you find?\"\n\nAnnja held up the scroll. \"This.\"\n\nGarin wrinkled his nose. \"Plebian.\"\n\n\"History. I hope.\"\n\n\"What's down the other tunnel?\" Garin pointed to the tunnel at the back of the chamber.\n\n\"Gold, silver, gems,\" Roux said. \"Quite a haul. If you can get to it.\"\n\nWithout another word, Garin headed down the tunnel.\n\nAnnja turned toward the surface. She wanted to see what she'd found. After that, she wanted a bath and a bed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Epilogue",
                "text": "\"Sleep well?\"\n\nAnnja glanced up from her tablet PC and saw Roux at her table in the small restaurant inside the Baghdad hotel. They'd decided to stay here while she worked out delivery of the scroll to the proper authorities. Taking artifacts out of Iraq was a major crime, especially since so many had gone missing during Saddam Hussein's reign and the wars afterward.\n\n\"I did.\" Annja pulled her things out of the way so Roux had space to sit. He looked dapper this morning. \"I'm surprised you're still here.\"\n\nHe shrugged and reached for a menu. \"I've got a flight to Dubai booked this afternoon. I've arranged for another poker game.\"\n\n\"Congratulations.\"\n\n\"There's always a poker game. What did you find out about the scroll you discovered?\"\n\n\"I sent images to a friend of mine in Rio. She believes it's a dictionary of the language the workers who built the Tower of Babel used to communicate with each other.\"\n\nRoux lifted an eyebrow. \"So maybe people were speaking different languages before the tower fell?\"\n\n\"Maybe. Or maybe the regions had so many differences that a common language had to be constructed. After all, British speakers and American speakers don't always understand one another, and they speak the same language.\"\n\n\"People have a tendency to make language their own. Take a look at the rap stars that plague your country?\"\n\n\"Plague?\"\n\n\"Yes. I've heard them.\" Roux frowned. \"Nearly all of it is annoying. Loud, brassy, narcissistic.\"\n\n\"You can say that about a lot of things. And even about old men who have little patience with the rest of the world.\"\n\nRoux harrumphed, but clearly his heart wasn't in the effort. The server returned and he gave the young man his order in Arabic.\n\n\"So you found something special?\"\n\n\"I think so.\"\n\n\"Good. Congratulations.\"\n\n\"What is there to be happy about?\" Garin demanded as he walked over to them. He didn't look so dapper. He was dirty and looked as if he'd been up all night. He sat and picked up Annja's coffee, downing it in one long swallow. \"The hole in that mountain goes down at least a half mile. We found a few gems and some coins, but it's not going to be worth the reclamation effort to find the rest of it.\" He glanced at Annja. \"So you're buying breakfast this morning.\"\n\n\"All right. We're friends again? Because I'm not buying breakfast for people who aren't friends.\"\n\n\"For the moment. Although I don't care for your new friend at all.\"\n\n\"What new friend?\"\n\n\"Burris Coronet. The mouth. He's back at his room talking about the discovery he made.\" Garin took his iPhone from his pocket, laid it on the table and punched an app. \"He's on satellite radio, you know.\"\n\n\"I believe he mentioned that.\"\n\nAn instant later, Burris's voice broadcast from the iPhone. He was talking fast and excitedly. \"And that's how I found the Tower of Babel scroll you people are hearing so much about. From what I know, my discovery is going to set the archaeological community on its collective ear, and you heard it here first. Annja Creed and her grandfather would have missed out on this one if I hadn't\u2014\"\n\nAnnja tapped the iPhone and closed the app. \"I'm trying to enjoy breakfast.\"\n\n\"Grandfather?\" Roux looked like he couldn't believe it. \"Grandfather! Where is that blathering idiot?\" He looked at Garin. \"And why isn't he mentioning you in all of this?\"\n\n\"Because I told him I would kill him if he did.\" Garin took a piece of Annja's toast. \"What does it take to get service around here?\"\n\n\"They're probably still deciding whether to serve you or throw you out,\" she told him.\n\n\"They're not throwing me out on an empty stomach. I'll buy this hotel and fire them all.\" Garin glanced over his shoulder and spoke in fluent Arabic to the server as he thumped a pistol on the table.\n\nThe server nodded quickly, disappeared and just as quickly returned with a carafe of coffee.\n\nAnnja looked at the pistol. \"Or maybe they'll throw you in jail.\"\n\nGarin shook his head. \"That'll never happen. I'm a licensed security consultant in this country.\" He poured coffee all around, then gave his order in Arabic to the server, speaking at length. Roux joined in, then the server went away.\n\nGarin took another piece of toast, put jelly on it, folded it and wedged it into his mouth. He chewed, swallowed, sipped coffee and asked, \"What's next on your to-do list, Annja?\"\n\n\"After I get the scroll delivered?\" She shrugged. \"I'm sure Doug has something lined up for me. There are a half dozen articles I've been asked to write and a couple seminars I could do at any one of a dozen universities.\"\n\nGarin grinned, baring his white teeth. \"Not afraid of getting bored, are you?\"\n\n\"My life is never boring. Especially not around the two of you.\"\n\nGarin picked up another piece of toast. \"Well, maybe I have something you'll be interested in. There's an artifact dealer here in Baghdad right now\u2014I saw him this morning. I've got a history with him, so I can't get close to him, but he likes a pretty face.\"\n\n\"I'm the pretty face?\"\n\n\"You are.\"\n\n\"Why, thank you. And why should I be interested?\"\n\n\"Because supposedly this artifact dealer has a lead on some astronomy manuscripts that were thought lost when the Mongols sacked the House of Wisdom.\"\n\nShe sat back in her seat and stared at him. \"Really? Because they created the first observatory in the Islamic world. Heck, Sind ibn Ali was an astronomer there. You know, the engineer who helped build the canal to al-Ja'fariya? The guy who created the decimal point?\" She shook her head, lost in remembering.\n\nGarin smiled and shared a look with Roux.\n\n\"When the Banu Musa brothers sent Sind ibn Ali away so he couldn't work for Caliph al-Mutawakkil, Al-Farghani\u2014a rival engineer\u2014was appointed lead on the project. Al-Farghani screwed up and made the start of the canal deeper than the end, so the water never got there. Sind ibn Ali saved Al-Farghani's life and the Banu Musa brothers' lives....\"\n\nGarin glanced at Roux again, rolled his eyes. \"She knows more than we've ever forgotten.\"\n\nRoux sipped his coffee. \"Is this artifact dealer Qushji?\"\n\nGarin hesitated.\n\n\"He is,\" Roux said with a scowl. \"He tried to kill me in Dhi Qar province.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it wasn't anything personal.\"\n\nRoux drummed his fingers on the table. \"Probably not. Still, I've never liked that man. Putting him out of business would be a service to the world.\"\n\n\"Exactly, but he knows your face, too.\" Garin switched his attention back to Annja. \"So what about it?\"\n\n\"Astronomy scrolls from the House of Wisdom? Sacked so badly by the Mongols that no one knows exactly what they did there?\"\n\nGarin held up a hand. \"The scrolls might not be real.\"\n\n\"Much of Qushiji's artifacts are not. But he manages to stash some really good stuff,\" Roux added.\n\n\"And he can be very dangerous,\" Garin went on.\n\nAnnja smiled. \"How can I resist?\" More than anything, though, she knew she wanted to hang on to her family just a little longer before they went their separate ways.\n\nShe suspected Roux and Garin felt the same way, though she knew neither of them would admit it.\n\nA local superstition or one of history's monsters come to life?"
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Cotton Malone 1) The Templar Legacy",
        "author": "Steve Berry",
        "genres": [
            "mystery",
            "thriller",
            "adventure"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "PROLOGUE",
                "text": "[ PARIS, FRANCE ]\n\n[ JANUARY 1308 ]\n\nJacques de Molay sought death, but knew salvation would never be offered. He was the twenty-second master of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, a religious order that had existed under God's charge for two hundred years. But for the past three months, he, like five thousand of his brothers, had been a prisoner of Philip IV, king of France.\n\n\"You will stand,\" Guedllaume Imbert ordered from the doorway.\n\nDe Molay remained on the bed.\n\n\"You are insolent, even in the face of your own demise,\" Imbert said.\n\n\"Arrogance is about all I have left.\"\n\nImbert was an impish man with a face like that of a horse who, de Molay had noted, seemed as impassible as a statue. He was France's grand inquisitor and Philip IV's personal confessor, which meant he possessed the king's ear. Yet de Molay had many times wondered what, besides pain, brought joy to the Dominican's soul. But he knew what irritated him. \"I will do nothing you desire.\"\n\n\"You have already done more than you realize.\"\n\nThat was true, and de Molay once more rued his weakness. Imbert's torture in the days after the October 13 arrests had been brutal, and many brothers had confessed to wrongdoing. De Molay cringed at the memory of his own admissions\u2014that those who were received in the Order denied the Lord Jesus Christ and spat upon a cross in contempt of Him. De Molay had even broken down and written a letter calling on the brothers to confess as he'd done, and a sizable lot had obeyed.\n\nBut just a few days ago emissaries from His Holiness, Clement V, had finally arrived in Paris. Clement was known to be Philip's puppet, which was why de Molay had brought gold florins and twelve pack horses laden with silver with him to France last summer. If things went awry, that money would have been used to buy the king's favor. Yet he'd underestimated Philip. The king longed not for partial tributes. He wanted all that the Order possessed. So charges of heresy had been fabricated and thousands of Templar arrests made in a single day. To the pope's emissaries de Molay had reported the torture and publicly recanted his confession, which he knew would bring reprisals. So he said, \"I imagine Philip is presently concerned that his pope may actually have a backbone.\"\n\n\"Insulting your captor is not wise,\" Imbert said.\n\n\"And what would be wise?\"\n\n\"Doing as we wish.\"\n\n\"And then how would I answer to my God?\"\n\n\"Your God is waiting for you, and every other Templar, to answer.\" Imbert spoke in his usual metallic voice, which betrayed no vestige of emotion.\n\nDe Molay no longer wanted to debate. Over the past three months he'd endured ceaseless questioning and sleep deprivation. He'd been placed in irons, his feet smeared with fat and held close to flames, his body stretched on the rack. He'd even been forced to watch while drunken jailers tortured other Templars, the vast majority of whom were merely farmers, diplomats, accountants, craftsmen, navigators, clerks. He was ashamed of what he'd already been forced to say, and he wasn't going to volunteer anything further. He lay back on the stinking bed and hoped his jailer would go away.\n\nImbert motioned, and two guards squeezed through the doorway and yanked de Molay upright.\n\n\"Bring him,\" Imbert ordered.\n\nDe Molay had been arrested at the Paris Temple and held there since last October. The tall keep with four corner turrets was a Templar headquarters\u2014a financial center\u2014and did not possess any torture chamber. Imbert had improvised, converting the chapel into a place of unimaginable anguish\u2014one that de Molay had visited often over the past three months.\n\nDe Molay was dragged inside the chapel and brought to the center of the black-and-white-checkered floor. Many a brother had been welcomed into the Order beneath this star-studded ceiling.\n\n\"I am told,\" Imbert said, \"that this is where the most secret of your ceremonies were performed.\" The Frenchman, dressed in a black robe, strutted to one side of the long room, near a carved receptacle de Molay knew well. \"I have studied the contents of this chest. It contains a human skull, two thighbones, and a white burial shroud. Curious, no?\"\n\nHe was not about to say anything. Instead, he thought of the words every postulant had uttered when welcomed into the Order. I will suffer all that is pleasing to God.\n\n\"Many of your brothers have told us how these items were used.\" Imbert shook his head. \"So disgusting has your Order become.\"\n\nHe'd had enough. \"We answer only to our pope, as servants to the servant of God. He alone judges us.\"\n\n\"Your pope is subject to my liege lord. He will not save you.\"\n\nIt was true. The pope's emissaries had made clear they would convey de Molay's recanting of his confession, but they doubted it would make much difference as to the Templar's fate.\n\n\"Strip him,\" Imbert ordered.\n\nThe smock he'd worn since the day after his arrest was torn from his body. He wasn't necessarily sad to see it go, as the filthy cloth smelled of feces and urine. But Rule forbid any brother from showing his body. He knew the Inquisition preferred its victims naked\u2014without pride\u2014so he told himself not to shrink from Imbert's insulting act. His fifty-six-year-old frame still possessed great stature. Like all brother knights, he'd taken care of himself. He stood tall, clung to his dignity, and calmly asked, \"Why must I be humiliated?\"\n\n\"Whatever do you mean?\" The question carried an air of incredulousness.\n\n\"This room was a place of worship, yet you strip me and stare at my nakedness, knowing that the brothers frown on such displays.\"\n\nImbert reached down, hinged open the chest, and removed a long twill cloth. \"Ten charges have been leveled against your precious Order.\"\n\nDe Molay knew them all. They ranged from ignoring the sacraments, to worshiping idols, to profiting from immoral acts, to condoning homosexuality.\n\n\"The one that is of most concern to me,\" Imbert said, \"is your requirement that each brother deny that Christ is our Lord and that he spit and trample on the true cross. One of your brothers has even told us of how some would piss on an image of our Lord Jesus on the cross. Is that true?\"\n\n\"Ask that brother.\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, he was overmatched by his ordeal.\"\n\nDe Molay said nothing.\n\n\"My king and His Holiness were more disturbed by this one charge than all others. Surely, as a man born into the Church, you can see how they would be angered over your denial of Christ as our Savior?\"\n\n\"I prefer to speak only to my pope.\"\n\nImbert motioned, and the two guards clamped shackles onto both of de Molay's wrists, then stepped back and stretched out his arms with little regard for his tattered muscles. Imbert produced a multi-tailed whip from beneath his robe. The ends clinked and de Molay saw that each was tipped with bone.\n\nImbert lashed the whip beneath the outstretched arms and onto de Molay's bare back. The pain surged through him then receded, leaving behind a sharpness that did not dull. Before the flesh had time to recover, another blow came, then another. De Molay did not want to give Imbert any notion of satisfaction, but the pain overcame him and he shrieked in agony.\n\n\"You will not mock the Inquisition,\" Imbert declared.\n\nDe Molay gathered his emotions. He was ashamed that he'd screamed. He stared into the oily eyes of his inquisitor and waited for what was next.\n\nImbert stared back. \"You deny our Savior, say he was merely a man and not the son of God? You defile the true cross? Very well. You will see what it is like to endure the cross.\"\n\nThe whip came again\u2014to his back, his buttocks, his legs. Blood splattered as the bone tips ripped skin.\n\nThe world drifted away.\n\nImbert stopped his thrashing. \"Crown the master,\" he yelled.\n\nDe Molay lifted his head and tried to focus. He saw what looked like a round piece of black iron. Nails were bound to the edges, their tips angled down and in.\n\nImbert came close. \"See what our Lord endured. The Lord Jesus Christ whom you and your brothers denied.\"\n\nThe crown was wedged onto his skull and pounded down tight. The nails bit into his scalp and blood oozed from the wounds, soaking the mane of his oily hair.\n\nImbert tossed the whip aside. \"Bring him.\"\n\nDe Molay was dragged across the chapel to a tall wooden door that once had led to his private apartment. A stool was produced and he was balanced on top. One of the guards held him upright while another stood ready in case he resisted, but he was far too weak to challenge.\n\nThe shackles were removed.\n\nImbert handed three nails to another guard.\n\n\"His right arm to the top,\" Imbert ordered, \"as we discussed.\"\n\nThe arm was stretched above his head. The guard came close and de Molay saw the hammer.\n\nAnd realized what they intended to do.\n\nDear God.\n\nHe felt a hand clamp his wrist, the point of a nail pressed to his sweaty flesh. He saw the hammer swing back and heard metal clang metal.\n\nThe nail pierced his wrist and he screamed.\n\n\"Did you find veins?\" Imbert asked the guard.\n\n\"Clear of them.\"\n\n\"Good. He is not to bleed to death.\"\n\nDe Molay, as a young brother, had fought in the Holy Land when the Order had made its last stand at Acre. He recalled the feel of a sword blade to flesh. Deep. Hard. Lasting. But a nail to the wrist was something altogether worse.\n\nHis left arm was pulled out at an angle and another nail driven through the flesh at the wrist. He bit his tongue, trying to contain himself, but the agony sent his teeth deep. Blood filled his mouth and he swallowed.\n\nImbert kicked the stool away and the weight of de Molay's six-foot frame was now borne entirely by the bones in his wrists, particularly his right, as the angle of his left arm stressed his right to the breaking point. Something popped in his shoulder, and pain pummeled his brain.\n\nOne of the guards grabbed his right foot and studied the flesh. Apparently, Imbert had taken care in choosing the insertion points, places where few veins coursed. The left foot was then placed behind the right and both feet were tacked to the door with a single nail.\n\nDe Molay was beyond screaming.\n\nImbert inspected the handiwork. \"Little blood. Well done.\" He stepped back. \"As our Lord and Savior endured, so will you. With one difference.\"\n\nNow de Molay understood why they'd chosen a door. Imbert slowly swung the slab out on its hinges, opening the door, then slamming it shut.\n\nDe Molay's body was thrust one way, then another, swaying on the dislocated joints of his shoulders, pivoting off the nails. The agony was of a kind he'd never known existed.\n\n\"Like the rack,\" Imbert said. \"Where pain can be applied in stages. This, too, has an element of control. I can allow you to hang. I can swing you to and fro. Or I can do as you just experienced, which is the worst of all.\"\n\nThe world was blinking in and out, and he could barely breathe. Cramps claimed every muscle. His heart beat wildly. Sweat poured from his skin and he felt as if he had the fever, his body a roaring blaze.\n\n\"Do you mock the Inquisition now?\" Imbert asked.\n\nHe wanted to tell Imbert that he hated the Church for what it was doing. A weak pope controlled by a bankrupt French monarch had somehow managed to topple the greatest religious organization man had ever known. Fifteen thousand brothers scattered over Europe. Nine thousand estates. A band of brothers that had once dominated the Holy Land and spanned two hundred years. The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon were the epitome of everything good. But success had bred jealousy and, as master, he should have fully appreciated the political storms churning around him. Been less stiff, more bending, not so outspoken. Thank heaven he'd anticipated some of what had already occurred and taken precautions. Philip IV would never see an ounce of Templar gold and silver.\n\nAnd he would never see the greatest treasure of all.\n\nSo de Molay mustered his last remaining bits of energy and raised his head. Imbert clearly thought he was about to speak and drew close.\n\n\"Damn you to hell,\" he whispered. \"Damn you and all who aid your hellish cause.\"\n\nHis head collapsed back to his chest. He heard Imbert scream for the door to be swung, but the pain was so intense and swept into his brain from so many directions that he felt little.\n\nHe was being taken down. How long he'd hung he did not know, but the relaxation to his limbs went unnoticed because his muscles had long ago numbed. He was carried some distance and then realized that he was back in his cell. His captors laid him onto the mattress, and as his body sunk into the soft folds a familiar stench filled his nostrils. His head was elevated by a pillow, his arms stretched out at each side.\n\n\"I have been told,\" Imbert quietly said, \"that when a new brother was accepted into your Order, the candidate was draped about the shoulders in a linen shroud. Something about symbolizing death, then resurrecting into a new life as a Templar. You, too, will now have that honor. I have laid out beneath you the shroud from the chest in the chapel.\" Imbert reached down and folded the long herringbone cloth over de Molay's feet, down the length of his damp body. His gaze was now shielded by the cloth. \"I am told this was used by the Order in the Holy Land, brought back here and wrapped around every Paris initiate. You are now reborn,\" Imbert mocked. \"Lie here and think about your sins. I shall return.\"\n\nDe Molay was too weak to respond. He knew that Imbert had most likely been ordered not to kill him, but he also realized that no one was going to care for him. So he lay still. The numbness was receding, replaced by an intense agony. His heart still pounded and he was sweating frightening amounts of moisture. He told himself to calm down and think pleasant thoughts. One that kept coming to mind was what he knew his captors wanted to know above all else. He was the only man alive who knew. That was the way of the Order. One master passed the knowledge to the next in a way that only the next would know. Unfortunately, because of his sudden arrest and the purge of the Order, the passing this time would have to be accomplished another way. He would not allow Philip or the Church to win. They would only learn what he knew when he wanted them to know. What had the Psalm said? Thy tongue deviseth mischiefs like a sharp razor, working deceitfully.\n\nBut then another biblical passage occurred to him, one that brought a measure of comfort to his beleaguered soul. So as he lay wrapped in the shroud, his body pouring forth blood and sweat, he thought of Deuteronomy.\n\nLet me alone, that I may destroy them."
            },
            {
                "title": "COPENHAGEN, DENMARK",
                "text": "[ Thursday, JUNE 22, THE PRESENT 2:50 PM ]\n\nCotton Malone spotted the knife at the same time he saw Stephanie Nelle. He was sitting at a table outside the Cafe Nikolaj, comfortable in a white lattice chair. The sunny afternoon was pleasant and Hfjbro Plads, the popular Danish square that spanned out before him, bristled with people. The cafe was doing its usual brisk business\u2014the mood feverish\u2014and for the past half hour he'd been waiting for Stephanie.\n\nShe was a petite woman, in her sixties, though she never confirmed her age and the Justice Department personnel records that Malone once saw contained only a winking N/A in the space reserved for date of birth. Her dark hair was streaked with waves of silver, and her brown eyes offered both the compassionate look of a liberal and the fiery glint of a prosecutor. Two presidents had tried to make her attorney general, but she'd turned both offers down. One attorney general had lobbied hard to fire her\u2014especially after she was enlisted by the FBI to investigate him\u2014but the White House nixed the idea since, among other things, Stephanie Nelle was scrupulously honest.\n\nIn contrast, the man with the knife was short and stout, with narrow features and brush-cut hair. Something haunted loomed on his East European face\u2014a forlornness that worried Malone more than the glistening blade\u2014and he was dressed casually in denim pants and a blood-red jacket.\n\nMalone rose from his seat but kept his eyes trained on Stephanie.\n\nHe thought of shouting a warning, but she was too far away and there was too much noise between them. His view of her was momentarily blocked by one of the modernistic sculptures that dotted Hfjbro Plads\u2014this one of an obscenely obese woman, lying naked on her belly, her obtrusive buttocks rounded like windswept mountains. When Stephanie appeared from the other side of the cast bronze, the man with the knife had moved closer and Malone watched as he severed a strap that draped her left shoulder, jerked a leather bag free, then shoved Stephanie to the flagstones.\n\nA woman screamed and commotion erupted at the sight of a purse snatcher brandishing a knife.\n\nRed Jacket rushed ahead, Stephanie's bag in hand, and shouldered people out of his way. A few pushed back. The thief angled left, around another of the bronzed sculptures, and finally broke into a run. His route seemed aimed at Kfbmagergade, a pedestrian-only lane that twisted north, out of Hfjbro Plads, deeper into the city's shopping district.\n\nMalone bounded from the table, determined to cut off the assailant before he could turn the corner, but a cluster of bicycles blocked his way. He circled the cycles and sprinted forward, partially orbiting a fountain before tackling his prey.\n\nThey slammed into hard stone, Red Jacket taking most of the impact, and Malone immediately noticed that his opponent was muscular. Red Jacket, undaunted by the attack, rolled once, then brought a knee into Malone's stomach.\n\nThe breath left him in a rush and his guts churned.\n\nRed Jacket sprang to his feet and raced up Kfbmagergade.\n\nMalone stood, but instantly crouched over and sucked a couple of shallow breaths.\n\nDamn. He was out of practice.\n\nHe caught hold of himself and resumed pursuit, his quarry now possessing a fifty-foot head start. Malone had not seen the knife during their struggle, but as he plowed up the street between shops he saw that the man still grasped the leather bag. His chest burned, but he was closing the gap.\n\nRed Jacket wrenched a flower cart away from a scraggly old man, one of many carts that lined both Hfjbro Plads and Kfbmagergade. Malone hated the vendors, who enjoyed blocking his bookshop, especially on Saturdays. Red Jacket flung the cart down the cobbles in Malone's direction. He could not let the cart run free\u2014too many people on the street, including children\u2014so he darted right, grasped hold, and twisted it to a stop.\n\nHe glanced back and saw Stephanie round the corner onto Kfbmagergade, along with a policeman. They were half a football field away, and he had no time to wait.\n\nMalone dashed ahead, wondering where the man was heading. Perhaps he'd left a vehicle, or a driver was waiting where Kfbmagergade emptied into another of Copenhagen's busy squares, Hauser Plads. He hoped not. That place was a nightmare of congestion, beyond the web of people-only lanes that formed the shoppers' mecca known as Strfget. His thighs ached from the unexpected workout, the muscles barely recalling his days with the Navy and the Justice Department. After a year of voluntary retirement, his exercise regimen would not impress his former employer.\n\nAhead loomed the Round Tower, nestled firmly against the Trinity Church like a thermos bound to a lunch pail. The burly cylindrical structure rose nine stories. Denmark's Christian IV had erected it in 1642, and the symbol of his reign\u2014a gilded 4 embraced by a C \u2014glistened on its somber brick edifice. Five streets intersected where the Round Tower stood, and Red Jacket could choose any one of them for his escape.\n\nPolice cars appeared.\n\nOne screeched to a stop on the south side of the Round Tower. Another came from farther down Kfbmagergade, blocking any escape to the north. Red Jacket was now contained in the plaza that encircled the Round Tower. His quarry hesitated, seeming to appraise the situation, then scampered right and disappeared inside the Round Tower.\n\nWhat was the fool doing? There was no way out besides the ground-floor portal. But maybe Red Jacket didn't know that.\n\nMalone ran to the entrance. He knew the man in the ticket booth. The Norwegian spent many hours in Malone's bookshop, English literature his passion.\n\n\"Arne, where did that man go?\" he asked in Danish, catching his wind.\n\n\"Ran right by without paying.\"\n\n\"Anybody up there?\"\n\n\"An older couple went up a little while ago.\"\n\nNo elevator or stairs led to the top. Instead, a spiral causeway wound a path straight to the summit, originally installed so that bulky seventeenth-century astronomical instruments could be wheeled up. The story local tour guides liked to tell was of how Russia's Peter the Great once rode up on horseback while his empress followed in a carriage.\n\nMalone could hear footfalls echoing from the flooring above. He shook his head at what he knew awaited him. \"Tell the police we're up there.\"\n\nHe started to run.\n\nHalfway up the spiraling incline he passed a door leading into the Large Hall. The glassed entrance was locked, the lights off. Ornamented double windows lined the tower's outer walls, but each was iron-barred. He listened again and could still hear running from above.\n\nHe continued ahead, his breathing growing thick and hampered. He slowed his pace when he passed a medieval planet plotter affixed high on the wall. He knew the exit onto the roof platform was just a few feet away, around the ramp's final bend.\n\nHe heard no more footsteps.\n\nHe crept forward and stepped through the archway. An octagonal observatory\u2014not from Christian IV's time, but a more recent incarnation\u2014rose in the center, with a wide terrace encircling.\n\nTo his left a decorative iron fence surrounded the observatory, its only entrance chained shut. On his right, intricate wrought-iron latticework lined the tower's outer edge. Beyond the low railing loomed the city's red-tiled rooftops and green spires.\n\nHe rounded the platform and found an elderly man lying prone. Behind the body, Red Jacket stood with a knife to an older woman's throat, his arm encasing her chest. She seemed to want to scream, but fear quelled her voice.\n\n\"Keep still,\" Malone said to her in Danish.\n\nHe studied Red Jacket. The haunted look was still there in the dark, almost mournful eyes. Beads of sweat glistened in the bright sun. Everything signaled that Malone should not step any closer. Footfalls from below signaled that the police would arrive in a few moments.\n\n\"How about you cool down?\" he asked, trying English.\n\nHe could see the man understood him, but the knife stayed in place. Red Jacket's gaze kept darting away, off to the sky then back. He seemed unsure of himself and that concerned Malone even more. Desperate people always did desperate things.\n\n\"Put the knife down. The police are coming. There's no way out.\"\n\nRed Jacket looked to the sky again, then refocused on Malone. Indecision stared back at him. What was this? A purse snatcher who flees to the top of a hundred-foot tower with nowhere to go?\n\nFootfalls from below grew louder.\n\n\"The police are here.\"\n\nRed Jacket backed closer to the iron railing but kept his grip tight on the elderly woman. Malone sensed the steeliness of an ultimatum forcing some choice, so he made clear again, \"There's no way out.\"\n\nRed Jacket tightened his grip on the woman's chest, then he staggered back, now firmly against the waist-high outer railing, nothing beyond him and his hostage but air.\n\nThe eyes lost their panic and a sudden calm swept over the man. He shoved the old woman forward and Malone caught her before she lost her balance. Red Jacket made the sign of the cross and, with Stephanie's bag in hand, pivoted out over the railing, screamed one word \u2014\"beauseant\"\u2014then slashed the knife across his throat as his body plunged to the street.\n\nThe woman howled as the police emerged from the portal.\n\nMalone let her go and rushed to the rail.\n\nRed Jacket lay sprawled on the cobbles one hundred feet below.\n\nHe turned and looked back to the sky, past the flagpole atop the observatory, the Danish Dannebrog\u2014a white cross upon a red banner\u2014limp in the still air.\n\nWhat had the man been looking at? And why did he jump?\n\nHe gazed back down and saw Stephanie elbowing her way through the growing crowd. Her leather bag lay a few feet from the dead man and he watched as she yanked it from the cobbles, then dissolved back into the spectators. He followed her with his gaze as she plowed through the people and scuttled away, down one of the streets that led from the Round Tower, deeper into the busy Strfget, never looking back.\n\nHe shook his head at her hasty retreat and muttered, \"What the hell?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Stephanie was shaken. After twenty-six years working for the Justice Department, the past fifteen heading the Magellan Billet, she'd learned that if it stood on four legs, had a trunk, and smelled like peanuts, it was an elephant. No need to hang a sign across its torso. Which meant the man in the red jacket was no purse snatcher.\n\nHe was something else altogether.\n\nAnd that meant somebody knew her business.\n\nShe'd watched as the thief leaped from the tower\u2014the first time she'd ever actually witnessed death. For years she'd heard her agents talk about it, but a vast chasm lay between reading a report and seeing someone die. The body had slammed into the cobbles with a sickening thud. Did he jump? Or had Malone forced him over? Was there a struggle? Had he spoken before leaping?\n\nShe'd come to Denmark for a singular purpose and had decided, while there, to visit with Malone. Years ago he'd been one of her original twelve choices for the Magellan Billet. She'd known Malone's father and watched the steady rise of the son, glad to have him when he accepted her offer and moved from Navy JAG to Justice. He eventually grew to be her best agent, and she was saddened when he'd decided last year that he wanted out.\n\nShe'd not seen him since, though they'd talked on the phone a few times. When he'd given chase to the thief, she'd noticed that his tall frame remained muscular and his hair thick and wavy, carrying the same light sienna tint she remembered, similar to the olden stone in the buildings surrounding her. For the dozen years he'd worked for her, he'd always been forthright and independent, which had made him a good operative\u2014one she could trust\u2014yet there was compassion, too. He'd actually been more than an employee.\n\nHe was her friend.\n\nBut that didn't mean she wanted him in her business.\n\nPursuing the man in the red jacket was like Malone, but it was also a problem. Visiting with him now would mean there'd be questions, ones she had no intention of answering.\n\nTime with an old friend would have to await another occasion.\n\nMalone exited the round tower and started after Stephanie. As he'd left the roof, paramedics were tending to the older couple. The elderly man was shaken from a blow to the head, but would be all right. The woman remained hysterical and he'd heard one of the attendants urge that she be taken to a waiting ambulance.\n\nRed Jacket's body still lay on the street, beneath a pale yellow sheet, and police were busy moving people out of the way. Edging through the crowd, Malone watched as the sheet was lifted away and the police photographer went to work. The thief had clearly slit his throat. The bloodied knife lay a few feet away from one arm contorted at an unnatural angle. Blood had poured from the neck gash, settling across the cobbles in a dark pool. The skull was caved in, the torso crushed, the legs twisted as if they contained no bone. The police had told Malone not to leave\u2014they would need a statement\u2014but at the moment he needed to find Stephanie.\n\nHe emerged from the gawkers and glanced back up into the evening sky, where the late-afternoon sun shone with spendthrift glory. Not a cloud loomed in sight. Should be an excellent night to view the stars, but no one would visit the observatory atop the Round Tower. No. That was closed for the evening, as a man had just jumped to his death.\n\nAnd what of that man?\n\nMalone's thoughts were a tangle of curiosity and apprehension. He knew he should go back to his bookshop and forget all about Stephanie Nelle and whatever she was doing. Her business was no longer his. But he knew that wasn't going to happen.\n\nSomething was unfolding, and it wasn't good.\n\nHe spotted Stephanie fifty yards ahead on Vestergade, another of the long lanes that spider-webbed Copenhagen's shopping district. Her pace was brisk, undaunted, then she abruptly veered right and disappeared into one of the buildings.\n\nHe trotted forward and saw HANSEN'S ANTIKVARIAT \u2014a bookshop, its proprietor one of the few people in town who'd not offered Malone a warm welcome. Peter Hansen did not like foreigners, especially Americans, and had even tried to block Malone's induction into the Danish Antiquarian Booksellers Association. Thankfully, Hansen's distaste had not proven contagious.\n\nOld instincts were taking over, feelings and senses that had lain dormant since his retirement last year. Sensations he did not like. But ones that had always driven him forward.\n\nHe stopped short of the front doorway and saw Stephanie inside, talking to Hansen. The two then retreated deeper into the store, which filled the ground floor of a three-story building. He knew the interior layout, having last year studied the Copenhagen bookstores. Nearly all of them were a testament to Nordic neatness, the stacks organized by subject, books carefully shelved. Hansen, though, was more haphazard. His was an eclectic mix of old and new\u2014mainly new, since he was not one to pay top dollar for private acquisitions.\n\nMalone slipped into the dim space and hoped none of the employees called out his name. He'd had dinner a couple of times with Hansen's manager, which was how he'd learned that he was not Hansen's favorite person. Luckily, she was not around and only ten or so people perused the shelves. He quickly moved toward the back where, he knew, there were myriad cubbyholes, each one brimming with shelves. He was not comfortable being here\u2014after all, Stephanie had merely called and said she'd be in town for a few hours and wanted to say hello\u2014but that was before Red Jacket. And he was damn curious to know what that man died wanting.\n\nHe shouldn't be surprised by Stephanie's behavior. She'd always kept everything close to her vest, too close sometimes, which had often generated clashes. One thing to be safe in an Atlanta office working a computer, quite another being out in the field. Good decisions could never be made without good information.\n\nHe spotted Stephanie and Hansen inside a windowless alcove that served as Hansen's office. Malone had visited there once when he'd first tried to make friends with the idiot. Hansen was a heavy-chested man with a long nose that overhung a grizzly mustache. Malone positioned himself behind a row of overloaded shelves and grabbed a book, pretending to read.\n\n\"Why have you come such a long way for this?\" Hansen was saying in his tight, wheezy voice.\n\n\"Are you familiar with the Roskilde auction?\"\n\nTypical Stephanie, answering a question she didn't want to answer with another question.\n\n\"I attend often. Lots of books for sale.\"\n\nMalone, too, was familiar with the auction. Roskilde lay thirty minutes west of Copenhagen. The town's antique-book dealers convened once a quarter for a sale that brought buyers from all over Europe. Two months after opening his shop, Malone had earned nearly two hundred thousand euros there from four books he'd managed to find at an obscure estate sale in the Czech Republic. Those funds had made his transition from salaried government employee to entrepreneur a lot less stressful. But they also bred jealousy, and Peter Hansen had not hidden his envy.\n\n\"I need the one book we spoke about. Tonight. You said there would be no problem buying it,\" Stephanie said, in the tone of someone accustomed to giving orders.\n\nHansen chuckled. \"Americans. All alike. The world revolves around you.\"\n\n\"My husband said you were a man who could find the unfindable. The book I want is already found. I just need it purchased.\"\n\n\"It does go to the highest bidder.\"\n\nMalone winced. Stephanie did not know the perilous territory she was navigating. The first rule of the bargain was never to reveal how badly you wanted something.\n\n\"It's an obscure book that no one cares about,\" she said.\n\n\"But apparently you do, which means there will be others.\"\n\n\"Let's make sure we're the highest bidder.\"\n\n\"Why is this book so important? I've never heard of it. Its author is unknown.\"\n\n\"Did you question my husband's motives?\"\n\n\"What does that mean?\"\n\n\"That it's none of your business. Secure the book and I'll pay your fee, as agreed.\"\n\n\"Why don't you buy it yourself?\"\n\n\"I don't plan to explain myself.\"\n\n\"Your husband was much more agreeable.\"\n\n\"He's dead.\"\n\nThough the declaration carried no emotion, a moment of silence passed.\n\n\"Are we to travel to Roskilde together?\" Hansen asked, apparently getting the message that he was going to learn nothing from her.\n\n\"I'll meet you there.\"\n\n\"I can hardly wait.\"\n\nStephanie bounded from the office and Malone shrank farther into his alcove, his face turned away as she passed. He heard the door to Hansen's office slam shut and took the opportunity to stride back toward the front entrance.\n\nStephanie exited the darkened shop and turned left. Malone waited, then crept forward and watched his former boss weave her way through afternoon shoppers back toward the Round Tower.\n\nHe dropped back and followed.\n\nHer head never turned. She seemed oblivious that anyone might be interested in what she was doing. Yet she should be, especially after what happened with Red Jacket. He wondered why her guard was not up. Granted, she wasn't a field agent, but she wasn't a fool either.\n\nAt the Round Tower, instead of turning right and heading toward Hfjbro Plads where Malone's bookshop stood, she kept straight. After another three blocks, she disappeared inside the Hotel d'Angleterre.\n\nHe watched as she entered.\n\nHe was hurt that she was intent on purchasing a book in Denmark and had not asked him to assist. Clearly, she didn't want him involved. In fact, after what happened at the Round Tower, she apparently didn't even want to speak with him.\n\nHe glanced at his watch. A little after four thirty. The auction started at six PM , and Roskilde was half an hour's drive away. He'd not planned on attending. The catalog sent out weeks ago contained nothing of interest. But that was no longer the case. Stephanie was acting strange, even for her. And a familiar voice deep inside his head, one that had kept him alive through twelve years as a government operative, said she was going to need him."
            },
            {
                "title": "ABBEY DES FONTAINES FRENCH PYRcNcES",
                "text": "[ 5:00 PM ]\n\nThe seneschal knelt beside the bed to comfort his dying master. For weeks he'd prayed that this moment would not come. But soon, after ruling the Order wisely for twenty-eight years, the old man lying on the bed would achieve a well-earned peace and join his predecessors in heaven. Unfortunately for the seneschal, the tumult of the physical world would continue, and he dreaded that prospect.\n\nThe room was spacious, the ancient stone-and-wood walls free of decay, only the pine-hammered ceiling beams blackened by age. A solitary window, like a somber eye, broke the exterior wall and framed the beauty of a waterfall matted by a stark gray mountain. A growing dusk thickened the room's corners.\n\nThe seneschal reached for the old man's hand. The grip was cold and clammy. \"Can you hear me, Master?\" he asked in French.\n\nThe tired eyes opened. \"I am not gone as yet. But soon.\"\n\nHe'd heard others in their final hour make similar statements and wondered if the body simply did exhaust itself, lacking the energy to compel lungs to breath or a heart to beat, death finally conquering where life had once flourished. He gripped the hand tighter. \"I'll miss you.\"\n\nA smile came to the thin lips. \"You have served me well, as I knew you would. That's why I chose you.\"\n\n\"There will be much conflict in the days ahead.\"\n\n\"You are ready. I have seen to it.\"\n\nHe was the seneschal, second only to the master. He'd risen fast through the ranks, too fast for some, and only the master's firm leadership had quelled the discontent. But death would soon claim his protector and he feared open revolt might follow.\n\n\"There is no guarantee I'll succeed you.\"\n\n\"You underestimate yourself.\"\n\n\"I respect the power of our adversaries.\"\n\nA silence washed over them, allowing the larks and blackbirds beyond the window to announce their presence. He stared down at his master. The old man wore an azure smock besprinkled with golden stars. Though the facial features were sharpened by his approaching death, there remained a vigor to the old man's lean form. A gray beard hung long and unkempt, the hands and feet constricted with arthritis, but the eyes continued to glisten. He knew twenty-eight years of leadership had taught the old warrior much. Perhaps the most vital lesson was how to project, even in the face of death, a mask of civility.\n\nThe doctor had confirmed the cancer months ago. As required by Rule, the disease was allowed to run its course, the natural consequences of God's action accepted. Thousands of brothers through the centuries had endured the same end, and it was unthinkable that the master would soil their tradition.\n\n\"I wish I could smell the water's spray,\" the old man whispered.\n\nThe seneschal glanced toward the window. Its sixteenth-century panes were swung open, allowing the sweet aroma of wet stone and verdant greens to seep into his nostrils. The distant water roared in a bubbly tenor. \"Your room offers the perfect venue.\"\n\n\"One of the reasons I wanted to be master.\"\n\nHe smiled, knowing the old man was being facetious. He'd read the Chronicles and knew that his mentor had ascended by being able to grasp each turn of fortune with the adaptiveness of a genius. His tenure had been one of peace, but all that would soon change.\n\n\"I should pray for your soul,\" the seneschal said.\n\n\"Time for that later. Instead, you must prepare.\"\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"The conclave. Gather your votes. Be ready. Do not allow your enemies time to rally. Remember all I taught you.\" The hoarse voice cracked with infirmity, but there was a firmness in the tone's foundation.\n\n\"I'm not sure that I want to be master.\"\n\n\"You do.\"\n\nHis friend knew him well. Modesty required that he shun the mantle, but more than anything he wanted to be the next master.\n\nHe felt the hand within his shiver. A few shallow breaths were needed for the old man to steady himself.\n\n\"I have prepared the message. It is there, on the desk.\"\n\nHe knew it would be the next master's duty to study that testament.\n\n\"The duty must be done,\" the master said. \"As it has been done since the Beginning.\"\n\nThe seneschal did not want to hear about duty. He was more concerned with emotion. He looked around the room, which contained only the bed, a prie-dieu that faced a wooden crucifix, three chairs protected by an old tapestried cushion, a writing desk, and two aged marble statues standing in wall niches. There was a time when the chamber would have been filled with Spanish leather, Delft porcelain, English furniture. But audacity had long been purged from the Order's character.\n\nAs from his own.\n\nThe old man gasped for air.\n\nHe stared down at the man lying in an uneasy slumber of disease. The master gathered his wind, blinked a few times, then said, \"Not yet, old friend. But soon.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "ROSKILDE",
                "text": "[ 6:15 PM ]\n\nMalone waited until after the auction started before slipping into the hall. He was familiar with the setup and knew bidding would not begin before six twenty, as there were preliminary matters of buyer registration and seller agreements that had to be verified before any money began changing hands.\n\nRoskilde was an ancient town nestled beside a slender saltwater fjord. Founded by Vikings, it had served as Denmark's capital until the fifteenth century and continued to exude a regal grace. The auction was held downtown, near the Domkirke, in a building off Skomagergade, where shoemakers had once dominated. Bookselling was an art form in Denmark. There was a nationwide appreciation for the written word\u2014one Malone, as a lifelong bibliophile, had come to admire. Where once books were simply a hobby, a diversion from the pressures of his risky career, now they were his life.\n\nSpotting Peter Hansen and Stephanie near the front, he stayed toward the rear, behind one of the stone pillars supporting the vaulted ceiling. He had no intention of bidding, so it mattered not if the auctioneer could see him.\n\nBooks came and went, some for respectable numbers of kroner. But he noticed Peter Hansen perk up as the next item was displayed.\n\n\"Pierres Gravees du Languedoc, by Eugene Stfcblein. Copyright 1887,\" the auctioneer announced. \"A local history, quite common for the time, printed in only a few hundred copies. This is part of an estate we recently acquired. This book is very fine, leather-bound, no marks, with some extraordinary prints\u2014one is reproduced in the catalog. Not something we normally bother with, but the volume is quite lovely, so we thought there may be some interest. An opening bid, please.\"\n\nThree came fast, all low, the last at four hundred kroner. Malone did the math. Sixty dollars. Hansen then weighed in at eight hundred. No more bids came from the other potential buyers until one of the representatives who worked phones for those unable to attend called out a bid of one thousand kroner.\n\nHansen seemed perturbed by the unexpected challenge, especially from a long-distance bidder, and upped his offer to 1,050. Phone Man retaliated with two thousand. A third bidder joined the fray. Shouts continued until the bid soared to nine thousand kroner. Others appeared to sense there might be something more to the book. Another minute of intense bidding ended with Hansen's offer of twenty-four thousand kroner.\n\nMore than four thousand dollars.\n\nMalone knew Stephanie was a salaried civil servant, somewhere in the seventy-to eighty-thousand-dollar-a-year range. Her husband had died years ago and left her with some assets, but she was not wealthy and certainly not a book collector, so he wondered why she was willing to pay so much for an unknown travel log. People brought them into his shop by the box, many from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when personal accounts of faraway places were popular. Most sported purple prose and were, by and large, worthless.\n\nThis one clearly seemed an exception.\n\n\"Fifty thousand kroner,\" the representative for Phone Man called out.\n\nMore than double Hansen's last bid.\n\nHeads turned and Malone retreated behind the pillar as Stephanie whirled to face the phone bank. He peered around the edge and watched as Stephanie and Hansen conversed, then returned their attention to the auctioneer. A moment of silence passed while Hansen seemed to consider his next move, but he was clearly taking his cue from Stephanie.\n\nShe shook her head.\n\n\"Item is sold to the telephone bidder for fifty thousand kroner.\"\n\nThe auctioneer retrieved the book from the display stand and a fifteen-minute break was announced. Malone knew the house was going to take a look at Pierres Gravees du Languedoc to see what made it worth more than eight thousand dollars. He knew the Roskilde dealers were astute and unaccustomed to treasures slipping past them. But apparently, something had this time.\n\nHe continued to hug the pillar while Stephanie and Hansen remained near their seats. A number of familiar faces filled the hall and he hoped no one called out his name. Most were idling toward the other corner where refreshments were being offered. He noticed two men approach Stephanie and introduce themselves. Both were stocky, with short hair, dressed in chinos and crew-necked shirts beneath loose-fitting tan jackets. As one bent to shake Stephanie's hand, Malone noticed the distinctive bulge of a weapon nestled against his spine.\n\nAfter some discussion, the men withdrew. The conversation had appeared friendly, and while Hansen drifted toward the free beer, Stephanie approached one of the attendants, spoke a moment, then left the hall through a side door.\n\nMalone moved straight for the same attendant, Gregos, a thin Dane whom he knew well.\n\n\"Cotton, so good to see you.\"\n\n\"Always on the lookout for a bargain.\"\n\nGregos smiled. \"Tough to find those here.\"\n\n\"Looked like that last item was a shock.\"\n\n\"I thought it would fetch maybe five hundred kroner. But fifty thousand? Amazing.\"\n\n\"Any idea why?\"\n\nGregos shook his head. \"Beyond me.\"\n\nMalone motioned toward the side door. \"The woman you were just talking to. Where was she headed?\"\n\nThe attendant gave him a knowing look. \"You interested in her?\"\n\n\"Not like that. But I am interested.\"\n\nMalone had been a favorite of the auction house since a few months back when he helped find a wayward seller who'd offered three volumes of Jane Eyre, circa 1847, that turned out to be stolen. When the police seized the books from the new buyer, the auction house had to refund every krone, but the seller had already cashed the house check. As a favor, Malone found the man in England and retrieved the money. In the process, he'd made some grateful friends in his new home.\n\n\"She was asking about the Domkirke, where it is located. Particularly the chapel of Christian IV.\"\n\n\"She say why?\"\n\nGregos shook his head. \"Only that she was going to walk over.\"\n\nHe reached out and shook the man's hand. In his grasp lay a folded thousand-krone note. He saw that Gregos appreciated the offering and casually slipped the money into his pocket. Gratuities were frowned upon by the auction house.\n\n\"One more thing,\" he said. \"Who was the high bidder on the phone for that book?\"\n\n\"As you know, Cotton, that information is strictly confidential.\"\n\n\"As you know, I hate rules. Do I know the bidder?\"\n\n\"He owns the building that you rent in Copenhagen.\"\n\nHe nearly smiled. Henrik Thorvaldsen. He should have known.\n\nThe auction was reconvening. As buyers retook their seats, he made his way toward the entrance and noticed Peter Hansen sitting down. Outside, he stepped into a cool Danish evening, and though nearly eight PM the summer sky remained backlit with bars of dull crimson from a slowly setting sun. Several blocks away loomed the redbrick cathedral, the Domkirke, where Danish royalty had been buried since the thirteenth century.\n\nWhat was Stephanie doing there?\n\nHe was just about to head that way when two men approached. One pressed something hard into his back.\n\n\"Nice and still, Mr. Malone, or I will shoot you here and now,\" the voice whispered in his ear.\n\nHe glanced left and right.\n\nThe two men who'd been talking to Stephanie in the hall flanked him. And in their features he saw the same anxious look he'd seen a few hours ago on Red Jacket's face."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Stephanie entered the Domkirke. The man at the auction had said the building was easy to find and he'd been right. The monstrous brick edifice, far too big for the town around it, dominated the evening sky.\n\nInside the grandiose building she found extensions, chapels, and porches, all topped by a high vaulted ceiling and towering stained-glass windows that lent the ancient walls a celestial air. She could tell the cathedral was no longer Catholic\u2014Lutheran from the decor, if she was not mistaken\u2014with architecture that cast a distinctively French air.\n\nShe was angry that she'd lost the book. She'd thought it would sell for no more than three hundred kroner, fifty dollars or so. Instead, some anonymous buyer paid more than eight thousand dollars for an innocuous account of southern France written over a hundred years ago.\n\nAgain, somebody knew her business.\n\nMaybe it was the person waiting for her? The two men who'd approached her after the bidding had said all would be explained if she would simply walk to the cathedral and find Christian IV's chapel. She'd thought the trip foolish, but what choice did she have? She had a limited amount of time in which to do a great deal.\n\nShe followed the directions provided to her and circled the vestibule. A service was being held in the nave to her right, before the main altar. About fifty people knelt in the pews. Music from a pipe organ banged through the interior with a metallic vibration. She found Christian IV's chapel and entered through an elaborate iron grille.\n\nWaiting for her was a short man with wispy, iron-gray hair that lay flat upon his head like a cap. He had a rugged, clean-shaven face and wore light-colored cotton trousers beneath an open collar shirt. A leather jacket covered his thick chest, and as she drew closer, she noticed that his dark eyes cast a look she immediately thought cold and suspicious. Perhaps he sensed her apprehension because his expression softened and he threw her a disarming grin.\n\n\"Ms. Nelle, so good to meet you.\"\n\n\"How do you know who I am?\"\n\n\"I was well acquainted with your husband's work. He was a great scholar on several subjects that interest me.\"\n\n\"Which ones? My husband dealt in many subjects.\"\n\n\"Rennes-le-Cheteau is my main interest. His work on the so-called great secret of that town and the land surrounding it.\"\n\n\"Are you the person who just outbid me?\"\n\nHe held up his hands in mock surrender. \"Not I, which is why I asked to speak with you. I had a representative bidding but\u2014like you, I'm sure\u2014I was shocked at the final price.\"\n\nNeeding a moment to think, she wandered around the royal sepulcher. Monstrous wall-sized paintings, encased with elaborate trompe l'oeil, sheathed the dazzling marble walls. Five embellished coffins filled the center beneath an enormous arched ceiling.\n\nThe man motioned to the coffins. \"Christian IV is regarded as Denmark's greatest monarch. As with Henry VIII in England, Francis II in France, and Peter the Great of Russia, he fundamentally changed this country. His mark remains everywhere.\"\n\nShe wasn't interested in a history lesson. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"Let me show you something.\"\n\nHe stepped toward the metal grating at the chapel's entrance. She followed.\n\n\"Legend says that the devil himself designed these ironworks. The craftsmanship is extraordinary. It contains the king and queen's monograms and a multitude of fabulous creatures. But look closely at the bottom.\"\n\nShe saw words engraved into the decorative metal.\n\n\"It reads,\" he said, \" Caspar Fincke bin ich genannt, dieser Arbeit binn ich bekannt. Caspar Fincke is my name, to this work I owe my fame.\"\n\nShe faced him. \"Your point?\"\n\n\"Atop the Round Tower in Copenhagen, around its edge, is another iron grating. Fincke designed that, too. He fashioned it low so the eye could see the city rooftops, but it also makes for an easy leap.\"\n\nShe got the message. \"That man who jumped today worked for you?\"\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"Why did he die?\"\n\n\"Soldiers of Christ securely fight the battles of the Lord, fearing no sin from the slaughter of the enemy, nor danger from their own death.\"\n\n\"He killed himself.\"\n\n\"When death is to be given, or received, it has naught of a crime in it but much glory.\"\n\n\"You don't know how to answer a question.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"I was merely quoting a great theologian, who wrote those words eight hundred years ago. St. Bernard of Clairvaux.\"\n\n\"Who are you?\"\n\n\"Why not call me Bernard.\"\n\n\"What do you want?\"\n\n\"Two things. First, the book we both lost in the bidding. But I recognize you cannot provide that. The second, you do have. It was sent to you a month ago.\"\n\nShe kept her face stoic. This was indeed the man who knew her business. \"And what is that?\"\n\n\"Ah, a test. A way for you to judge my credibility. All right. The package sent to you contained a journal that once belonged to your husband\u2014a personal notebook he kept until his untimely death. Did I pass?\"\n\nShe said nothing.\n\n\"I want that journal.\"\n\n\"Why is it so important?\"\n\n\"Many called your husband odd. Different. New age. The academic community scoffed at him, and the press made fun of him. But I called him brilliant. He could see things others never noticed. Look what he accomplished. He originated the entire modern-day attraction with Rennes-le-Cheteau. His book was the first to realert the world to the locale's wonders. Sold five million copies worldwide. Quite an accomplishment.\"\n\n\"My husband sold many books.\"\n\n\"Fourteen, if I'm not mistaken, but none was of the magnitude of his first, The Treasure at Rennes-le-Cheteau. Thanks to him, there are now hundreds of volumes published on that subject.\"\n\n\"What makes you think I have my husband's journal?\"\n\n\"We both know that I would have it now but for the interference of a man named Cotton Malone. I believe he once worked for you.\"\n\n\"Doing what?\"\n\nHe seemed to understand her continued challenge. \"You are a career official with the United States Justice Department and head a unit known as the Magellan Billet. Twelve lawyers, each chosen specially by you, who work under your sole direction and handle, shall we say, sensitive matters. Cotton Malone worked a number of years for you. But he retired early last year and now owns a bookshop in Copenhagen. If not for the unfortunate actions of my acolyte, you would have enjoyed a light lunch with Mr. Malone, bid him farewell, and headed here for the auction, which was your true purpose for coming to Denmark.\"\n\nThe time for pretence was over. \"Who do you work for?\"\n\n\"Myself.\"\n\n\"I doubt that.\"\n\n\"Why would you?\"\n\n\"Years of practice.\"\n\nHe smiled again, which annoyed her. \"The notebook, if you please.\"\n\n\"I don't have it. After today, I thought it needed safekeeping.\"\n\n\"Does Peter Hansen have it?\"\n\nShe said nothing.\n\n\"No. I assume you would not admit to anything.\"\n\n\"I think this conversation is over.\" She turned for the open gate and hurried through it. To her right, back toward the main doors, she spied two more men with short hair\u2014not the same ones from the auction house\u2014but she instantly knew who gave them orders.\n\nShe glanced back at the man whose name was not Bernard.\n\n\"Like my associate today on the Round Tower, there is no place for you to go.\"\n\n\"Screw you.\"\n\nAnd she spun left and rushed deeper into the cathedral."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Malone assessed the situation. He was standing in a public place, adjacent to a crowded street. People were coming and going from the auction hall, while others were waiting for their cars to be brought by attendants from a nearby lot. Clearly his surveillance of Stephanie had not gone unnoticed, and he cursed himself for not being more alert. But he decided that, contrary to the threats made, the two men on either side of him would not risk exposure. He was being detained, not eliminated. Perhaps their task was to give whatever was happening in the cathedral with Stephanie time to unfold.\n\nWhich meant he needed to act.\n\nHe watched as more patrons spilled out from the auction hall. One, a gangly Dane, owned a bookshop in the Strfget, near Peter Hansen's store. He watched as a valet delivered the man's car.\n\n\"Vagn,\" Malone called out, stepping away from the gun to his back.\n\nHis friend heard his name and turned.\n\n\"Cotton, how are you?\" the man answered in Danish.\n\nMalone casually walked toward the car and looked back to see the short-haired man quickly conceal the weapon beneath his jacket. He'd caught the man off his guard, which only confirmed what he already thought. These guys were amateurs. He was ready to bet that they didn't speak Danish, either.\n\n\"Might I trouble you for a ride back to Copenhagen?\" he asked.\n\n\"Certainly. We have room. Climb in.\"\n\nHe reached for the rear passenger door. \"I appreciate it. My ride is going to hang around awhile and I need to get back home.\"\n\nAs he slammed the car door shut, he waved through the window and saw a confused look on the two men's faces as the car eased away.\n\n\"Nothing interest you today?\" Vagn asked.\n\nHe turned his attention to the driver. \"Not a thing.\"\n\n\"Me, either. We decided to leave and take an early dinner.\"\n\nMalone glanced over at the woman next to him. Another man sat in the front. He did not know either, so he introduced himself. The car slowly made its way out of Roskilde's warren of tight streets toward the Copenhagen highway.\n\nHe spied the twin spires and copper roof of the cathedral. \"Vagn, could you let me out? I need to hang around a little longer.\"\n\n\"You sure?\"\n\n\"I just remembered something I need to do.\"\n\nStephanie paralleled the nave and plunged deeper into the cathedral. Past the massive pillars rising to her right, the church service was still in progress. Her low heels clicked off the flagstones, but only she could hear them, thanks to the ponderous organ. The path ahead rounded the main altar, and a series of half walls and memorials divided the ambulatory from the choir.\n\nShe glanced back to see the man calling himself Bernard sauntering forward, but the two other men were nowhere to be seen. She realized that she would soon be heading back toward the church's main entrance, only on the other side of the building. For the first time, she fully appreciated the risks her agents took. She'd never worked in the field\u2014that was not part of her job\u2014but this was not an official assignment. This was personal and she was officially on vacation. No one knew she'd traveled to Denmark\u2014no one besides Cotton Malone. And considering her present predicament, that anonymity was becoming a problem.\n\nShe rounded the ambulatory.\n\nHer pursuer stayed a discreet distance back, surely knowing that she had nowhere to go. She passed a set of stone stairs that dropped down into another side chapel and then saw, fifty feet ahead, the two other men appear in the rear vestibule, blocking her way out of the church. Behind her, Bernard continued his steady advance. To her left was another sepulcher, this one identified as the Chapel of Magi.\n\nShe darted inside.\n\nTwo marble tombs lay within the brilliantly decorated walls, both reminiscent of Roman temples. She retreated toward the farther. Then a wild unreasoning terror seized her as she realized the worst.\n\nShe was trapped.\n\nMalone jogged to the cathedral and entered through the main doors. To his right he spotted two men\u2014stocky, short hair, plainly dressed\u2014similar to the two he'd just evaded outside the auction. He decided not to take any chances and reached beneath his jacket for a Beretta automatic, standard issue to all Magellan Billet agents. He'd been allowed to keep the weapon when he retired and managed to smuggle it into Denmark\u2014owning a handgun here was illegal.\n\nHe palmed the stock, finger on the trigger, and brought out the gun, shielding it with his thigh. He'd not held a weapon in more than a year. It was a feeling he'd thought part of his past, one he hadn't missed. But a man leaping to his death had grabbed his attention, so he'd come prepared. That was what a good agent did, and one of the reasons he'd served as the pallbearer for a few friends instead of being hauled down the center aisle of a church himself.\n\nThe two men were standing with their backs to him, arms at their sides, hands empty. Thunderous organ music masked his approach. He stepped close and said, \"Busy night, fellows.\"\n\nBoth turned and he flashed the gun. \"Let's keep this civil.\"\n\nOver the shoulder of one of the men he caught sight of another man, a hundred feet down the transept, casually striding toward them. He saw the man reach beneath his leather jacket. Malone did not wait for what was next, and dove left into an empty row of pews. A pop echoed over the organ and a bullet tore into the wood pew ahead of him.\n\nHe saw the two other men reach for weapons.\n\nFrom his prone position, he fired twice. The shots exploded through the cathedral, piercing the music. One of the men went down, the other fled. Malone came to his knees and heard three new pops. He dove back down as more bullets found wood near him.\n\nHe sent two more shots in the direction of the lone gunman.\n\nThe organ stopped.\n\nPeople realized what was happening. The crowd started flooding from the pews past where Malone was hiding, seeking safety outside through the rear doors. He used the confusion to peer above the pew and saw the man in the leather jacket standing near the entrance to one of the side chapels.\n\n\"Stephanie,\" he called out over the mayhem.\n\nNo answer.\n\n\"Stephanie. It's Cotton. Let me know if you're okay?\"\n\nStill no answer.\n\nHe belly-crawled forward, found the opposite transept, and rose to his feet. The path ahead rounded the church and led to the other side. Pillars lining the way would make any shot at him difficult, and then the choir would block him completely, so he ran forward.\n\nStephanie heard Malone call her name. Thank goodness she never could mind his own business. She was still in the Magi Chapel, hiding behind a black marble tomb. She heard shots and realized Malone was doing what he could, but he was outnumbered at least three to one. She needed to help him, but what good could she be? She carried no weapon. At least she ought to let him know she was all right. But before she could answer, through another elaborate iron grille that opened into the church, she saw Bernard, gun in hand.\n\nFear seized her muscles and gripped her mind in an unfamiliar panic.\n\nHe entered the chapel.\n\nMalone rounded the choir. People were still rushing from the church, voices excited, hysterical. Surely someone had called the police. He just needed to contain his attackers until help arrived.\n\nHe looped the ambulatory and saw one of the men he'd shot helping the other out the rear doors. The one who'd started the attack was not in sight.\n\nThat worried him.\n\nHe slowed his pace and brought his gun to the ready.\n\nStephanie stiffened. Bernard was twenty feet away.\n\n\"I know you're in here,\" he said in a deep, throaty voice. \"Your savior arrived, so I have no time to deal with you. You know what I want. We shall meet again.\"\n\nThe prospect was not appealing.\n\n\"Your husband was unreasonable, too. He was made a similar offer eleven years ago with regard to the journal and refused.\"\n\nShe was stung by the man's words. She knew that she should remain silent, but there was no way. Not now. \"What do you know of my husband?\"\n\n\"Enough. Let's leave it at that.\"\n\nShe heard him walk away.\n\nMalone saw leather jacket step from one of the side chapels.\n\n\"Stop,\" he called out.\n\nThe man whirled and leveled his gun.\n\nMalone dove toward a set of steps that led to another room jutting from the cathedral and rolled down half a dozen stone risers.\n\nThree bullets smacked off the walls above him.\n\nMalone scampered back up, ready to return fire, but Leather Jacket was a hundred feet away, running toward the rear vestibule, turning for the other side of the church.\n\nMalone came to his feet and trotted forward.\n\n\"Stephanie,\" he called out.\n\n\"Here, Cotton.\"\n\nHe saw his old boss appear at the far side of the chapel. She walked toward him, a stony expression spread over her calm face. Sirens could be heard outside.\n\n\"I suggest we get out of here,\" he said. \"There are going to be a lot of questions and I have the feeling you're not going to want to answer any of them.\"\n\n\"You got that right.\" She brushed by him.\n\nHe was just about to suggest that they use one of the other exits when the main doors were flung open and uniformed police swarmed inside. He still held his gun and they spotted it immediately.\n\nFeet were planted and automatic weapons raised.\n\nHe and Stephanie froze.\n\n\"Hen til den landskab. Nu,\" came the command. To the ground. Now.\n\n\"What do they want us to do?\" Stephanie asked.\n\nMalone dropped his gun and started down to his knees. \"Nothing good.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Raymond de Roquefort stood outside the cathedral, beyond the circle of onlookers, and watched the unfolding drama. He and his two associates had dissolved into the web of shadows cast by the thick trees that rose across from the cathedral plaza. He'd managed to slip out a side door and retreat just as the police stormed the main entrance. No one seemed to notice him. The authorities would, for the moment, be focused on Stephanie Nelle and Cotton Malone. It would be awhile before witnesses described other men with guns. He was familiar with these kinds of situations and knew how calm heads always prevailed. So he told himself to relax. His men must know that he was in control.\n\nThe front of the brick cathedral was awash with strobing red and white light. More police arrived, and he marveled how a town of Roskilde's size possessed so much law enforcement. People were flooding over from the nearby main plaza. The whole scene was quickly turning chaotic. Which was perfect. He'd always found tremendous freedom of movement within chaos, provided he controlled the chaos.\n\nHe faced the two who'd been with him inside the church. \"Are you injured?\" he asked the one who'd been shot.\n\nThe man peeled back his jacket and showed him how the body armor had done its job. \"Just sore.\"\n\nFrom the crowd he saw his remaining two acolytes emerge\u2014the ones he'd sent to the auction. They'd reported through their radios that Stephanie Nelle had not prevailed in the bidding. So he'd ordered them to send her his way. He'd thought perhaps she could be intimidated, but the effort had failed. Worse, he'd drawn a great deal of attention to his activities. But that was thanks to Cotton Malone. His men had spotted Malone at the auction, so he'd instructed them to detain him while he spoke with Stephanie Nelle. Apparently, that effort had failed, too.\n\nThe two approached and one of them said, \"We lost Malone.\"\n\n\"I found him.\"\n\n\"He's resourceful. With nerve.\"\n\nHe knew that to be true. He'd checked out Cotton Malone after learning Stephanie Nelle would be traveling to Denmark to visit with him. Since Malone could have well been a part of whatever she was planning, he'd made a point to learn all he could.\n\nHis given name was Harold Earl Malone. He was forty-six years old, born in the American state of Georgia. His mother was a native Georgian, his father a career military man, an Annapolis graduate, who rose to the rank of navy commander before his submarine sank when Malone was ten years old.\n\nThe son followed in the father's footsteps, attending the Naval Academy and graduating in the top third of his class. He was admitted to flight school, eventually earning high enough marks to choose fighter pilot training. Then, interestingly, midway through, he abruptly sought reassignment and was admitted to Georgetown University Law School, earning his law degree while stationed at the Pentagon. After graduation he was transferred to the Judge Advocate General's corps, where he spent nine years as a staff lawyer. Thirteen years ago he was reassigned to the Justice Department and Stephanie Nelle's newly formed Magellan Billet. He remained there until last year, retiring out early as a full commander.\n\nOn the personal side, Malone was divorced and his fourteen-year-old son lived with his ex-wife in Georgia. Immediately upon retiring, Malone had left America and moved to Copenhagen. He was a confirmed bibliophile and born Catholic, but not noted as overly religious. He was reasonably fluent in several languages, possessed of no known addictions or phobias, and prone to extreme self-motivation and obsessive dedication. He also possessed an eidetic memory. All in all, just the kind of man de Roquefort would rather have in his employ than working against him.\n\nAnd the past few minutes had proven that.\n\nThree-to-one odds had not seemed to bother Malone, especially when he thought Stephanie Nelle was in jeopardy.\n\nEarlier, de Roquefort's young associate had demonstrated loyalty and courage, too, though the man had acted in haste stealing Stephanie Nelle's bag. He should have waited until after her visit with Cotton Malone, when she was on the way back to her hotel, alone and vulnerable. Perhaps he'd been trying to please, knowing the importance of their mission. Maybe it was simply impatience. But when cornered at the Round Tower, the young man had correctly chosen death over capture. A shame, but the learning process was like that. Those with brains and ability rose. Everyone else was eliminated.\n\nHe turned to one of his associates who'd been inside the auction hall and asked, \"Did you learn who was the high bidder for the book?\"\n\nThe young man nodded. \"It cost a thousand kroner to bribe the attendant.\"\n\nHe wasn't interested in the price of weakness. \"The name?\"\n\n\"Henrik Thorvaldsen.\"\n\nThe phone in his pocket vibrated. His second in command knew he was occupied, so the call had to be important. He flipped the unit open.\n\n\"The time is close,\" the voice said in his ear.\n\n\"How close?\"\n\n\"Within the next few hours.\"\n\nAn unexpected bonus.\n\n\"I have a task for you,\" he said into the phone. \"There's a man. Henrik Thorvaldsen. A wealthy Dane, lives north of Copenhagen. I know some, but I need complete information on him within the hour. Call me back when you have it.\"\n\nThen he clicked off the phone and turned to his subordinates.\n\n\"We must return home. But first there are two more tasks we have to complete before dawn.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Malone and Stephanie were transported to a police building on the outskirts of Roskilde. Neither of them spoke on the way, as they both knew enough to keep their mouths shut. Malone fully realized that Stephanie's presence in Denmark had nothing to do with the Magellan Billet. Stephanie never worked the field. She was at the apex of the triangle\u2014everyone reported to her in Atlanta. And besides, when she'd called last week and said she wanted to drop by and say hello, she'd made clear she was coming to Europe on vacation. Some vacation, he thought, as they were left alone in a brightly lit, windowless room.\n\n\"Oh, by the way, the coffee was great at the Cafe Nikolaj,\" he said. \"I went ahead and drank yours. Of course that was after I chased a man to the top of the Round Tower and watched while he jumped.\"\n\nShe said nothing.\n\n\"I did manage to see you snatch your bag from the street. Did you happen to notice the dead man lying next to it? Maybe not. You seemed in a hurry.\"\n\n\"That's enough, Cotton,\" she said in a tone he knew.\n\n\"I don't work for you anymore.\"\n\n\"So why are you here?\"\n\n\"I was asking myself the same thing in the cathedral, but the bullets distracted me.\"\n\nBefore she could say anything further, the door opened and a tall man with reddish blond hair and pale brown eyes entered. He was the Roskilde police inspector who'd brought them from the cathedral and he held Malone's Beretta.\n\n\"I made the call you requested,\" the inspector said to Stephanie. \"The American embassy confirms your identity and status with your Justice Department. I'm awaiting word from our Home Office as to what to do.\" He turned. \"You, Mr. Malone, are another matter. You are in Denmark on a temporary residence visa as a shopkeeper.\" He displayed the gun. \"Our laws do not sanction the carrying of weapons, not to mention discharging it in our national cathedral\u2014a World Heritage Site, no less.\"\n\n\"I like to break only the most important laws,\" he said, not letting the man think he was getting to him.\n\n\"I do love humor, Mr. Malone. But this is a serious matter. Not for me, but for you.\"\n\n\"Did the witnesses mention that there were three other men who started the shooting?\"\n\n\"We have descriptions. But it is unlikely they are around any longer. You, though, are right here.\"\n\n\"Inspector,\" Stephanie said. \"The situation that developed was of my doing, not Mr. Malone's.\" She threw him a glare. \"Mr. Malone once worked for me and thought I required his assistance.\"\n\n\"Are you saying the shooting would not have occurred but for Mr. Malone's interference?\"\n\n\"Not at all. Only that the situation grew out of control\u2014through no fault of Mr. Malone's.\"\n\nThe inspector appraised her observation with obvious apprehension. Malone wondered what Stephanie was doing. Lying was not her forte, but he decided not to challenge her in front of the inspector.\n\n\"Were you in the cathedral on official United States government business?\" the inspector asked her.\n\n\"That I cannot say. You understand.\"\n\n\"Your job involves activities that cannot be discussed? I thought you were a lawyer?\"\n\n\"I am. But my unit is routinely involved in national security investigations. In fact, that's our main purpose for existing.\"\n\nThe inspector did not seem impressed. \"What is your business in Denmark, Ms. Nelle?\"\n\n\"I came to visit Mr. Malone. I haven't seen him in more than a year.\"\n\n\"That was your only purpose?\"\n\n\"Why don't we wait for the Home Office.\"\n\n\"It is a miracle that no one was hurt in that melange. There is damage to a few sacred monuments, but no injuries.\"\n\n\"I shot one of the gunmen,\" Malone said.\n\n\"If you did, he did not bleed.\"\n\nWhich meant they were armored. The team had come prepared, but for what?\n\n\"How long will you be staying in Denmark?\" the inspector asked Stephanie.\n\n\"Gone tomorrow.\"\n\nThe door opened and a uniformed officer handed the inspector a sheet of paper. The man read, then said, \"You apparently have some well-placed friends, Ms. Nelle. My superiors say to let you go and ask no questions.\"\n\nStephanie headed for the door.\n\nMalone stood, too. \"That paper mention me?\"\n\n\"I'm to release you, as well.\"\n\nMalone reached for the gun. The man did not offer it.\n\n\"There is no instruction that I am to return the weapon.\"\n\nHe decided not to argue. He could deal with that issue later. Right now, he needed to speak with Stephanie.\n\nHe rushed off and found her outside.\n\nShe whirled to face him, her features set tight. \"Cotton, I appreciate what you did in the cathedral. But listen to me, and listen good. Stay out of my business.\"\n\n\"You have no idea what you're doing. In the cathedral you walked right into something with no preparation. Those three men wanted to kill you.\"\n\n\"Then why didn't they? There was every opportunity before you arrived.\"\n\n\"Which raises even more questions.\"\n\n\"Don't you have enough to do at your bookshop?\"\n\n\"Plenty.\"\n\n\"Then do it. When you quit last year, you made clear that you were tired of getting shot at. I believe you said that your new Danish benefactor offered a life you always wanted. So go enjoy it.\"\n\n\"You're the one who called me and wanted to stop by for a visit.\"\n\n\"Which was a bad idea.\"\n\n\"That was no purse snatcher today.\"\n\n\"Stay out of this.\"\n\n\"You owe me. I saved your neck.\"\n\n\"Nobody told you to do that.\"\n\n\"Stephanie\u2014\"\n\n\"Dammit, Cotton. I'm not going to say it again. If you keep on, I'll have no choice but to take action.\"\n\nNow his back was stiff. \"And what do you plan to do?\"\n\n\"Your Danish friend doesn't have all the connections. I can make things happen, too.\"\n\n\"Go for it,\" he said to her, his anger building.\n\nBut she did not reply. Instead, she stormed off.\n\nHe wanted to go after her and finish what they'd started, but decided she was right. This was none of his concern. And he'd made enough trouble for one night.\n\nTime to go home."
            },
            {
                "title": "COPENHAGEN",
                "text": "[ 10:30 PM ]\n\nDe Roquefort approached the bookshop. The pedestrians-only street out front was deserted. Most of the district's many cafes and restaurants were blocks away\u2014this part of the Strfget closed for the night. After tending to his two remaining chores, he planned to leave Denmark. His physical description, along with those of his two compatriots, had now most likely been obtained from witnesses in the cathedral. So it was important that they linger no longer than necessary.\n\nHe'd brought all four of his subordinates from Roskilde with him and planned to supervise every detail of their action. There'd been enough improvising for one day, some of which had cost the life of one of his men earlier at the Round Tower. He did not want to lose anyone else. Two of his men were already scouting the rear of the bookshop. The other two stood ready at his side. Lights burned on the building's top floor.\n\nGood.\n\nHe and the owner needed to talk.\n\nMalone grabbed a diet Pepsi from the refrigerator and walked down four flights of stairs to the ground floor. His shop filled the entire building, the first floor for books and customers, the next two for storage, the fourth a small apartment that he called home.\n\nHe'd grown accustomed to the cramped living space, enjoying it far better than the two-thousand-square-foot house he'd once owned in north Atlanta. Its sale last year, for a little over three hundred thousand dollars, had netted him sixty thousand dollars to invest into his new life, one offered to him by, as Stephanie had early chided, his new Danish benefactor, an odd little man named Henrik Thorvaldsen.\n\nA stranger fourteen months ago, now his closest friend.\n\nThey'd connected from the beginning, the older man seeing in the younger something\u2014what, Malone was never sure, but something\u2014and their first meeting in Atlanta one rainy Thursday evening had sealed both of their futures. Stephanie had insisted he take a month off after the trial of three defendants in Mexico City\u2014which involved international drug smuggling and the execution-style murder of a DEA supervisor who happened to be a personal friend of the president of the United States\u2014had resulted in carnage. Walking back to court during a lunch break, Malone had been caught in the crossfire of an assassination, an act wholly unrelated to the trial, but something he'd tried to stop. He'd come home with a bullet wound to his left shoulder. The final tally from the shooting\u2014seven dead, nine injured, one of the dead a young Danish diplomat named Cai Thorvaldsen.\n\n\"I came to speak with you in person,\" Henrik Thorvaldsen had said.\n\nThey were sitting in Malone's den. His shoulder hurt like hell. He didn't bother to ask how Thorvaldsen had located him, or how the older man knew that he understood Danish.\n\n\"My son was precious to me,\" Thorvaldsen said. \"When he joined our diplomatic corps I was thrilled. He asked for the assignment to Mexico City. He was a student of the Aztecs. He would have made a worthy member of our Parliament one day. A statesman.\"\n\nA swirl of first impressions raced through Malone's mind. Thorvaldsen was certainly high bred with an air of distinction, at once elegant and rakish. But the sophistication was in stark contrast to a deformed body, his spine humped in a grotesque exaggeration and stiff, shaped like an egret. A leathery face suggested a lifetime of impossible choices, the wrinkles more like deep clefts, the crow's-feet sprouting legs, liver spots and forked veins discoloring the arms and hands. Pewter-colored hair was piled thick and bushy and matched the eyebrows\u2014dull silver wisps that made the older man look anxious. Only in the eyes was there passion. Gray-blue, strangely clairvoyant, one flawed from a star-shaped cataract.\n\n\"I came to meet the man who shot my son's killer.\"\n\n\"Why?\" he asked.\n\n\"To thank you.\"\n\n\"You could have called.\"\n\n\"I prefer to face my listener.\"\n\n\"At the moment, I prefer to be left alone.\"\n\n\"I understand you were nearly killed.\"\n\nHe shrugged.\n\n\"And you are quitting your job. Resigning your commission. Retiring from the military.\"\n\n\"You know an awful lot.\"\n\n\"Knowledge is the greatest of luxuries.\"\n\nHe was not impressed. \"Thanks for the pat on the back. I have a hole in my shoulder that's throbbing. So since you've said your peace, could you leave?\"\n\nThorvaldsen never moved from the sofa. He simply stared around at the den and the surrounding rooms visible through an open archway. Every wall was sheathed in books. The house seemed nothing but a backdrop for the shelves.\n\n\"I love them, too,\" his guest said. \"My home is likewise full of books. I've collected them all my life.\"\n\nHe could sense that this man, sixty-plus years old, was given to grandiose tactics. He'd noticed when answering the door that he'd arrived via a limousine. So he wanted to know, \"How did you know I speak Danish?\"\n\n\"You speak several languages. I was proud to learn that my native tongue was one.\"\n\nNot an answer, but had he really expected one?\n\n\"Your eidetic memory must be a blessing. Mine has gone the way of age. I can hardly remember much anymore.\"\n\nHe doubted that. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"Have you considered your future?\"\n\nHe motioned around the room. \"Thought I'd open an old-book shop. Got plenty to sell.\"\n\n\"Excellent idea. I have one for sale, if you'd like it.\"\n\nHe decided to play along. What the hell. But there was something about the tight points of light in the old man's eyes that told him his visitor was not joking.\n\nHard flinty hands searched a suit coat pocket and Thorvaldsen laid a business card on the sofa.\n\n\"My private number. If you're interested, call me.\"\n\nThe old man stood.\n\nHe stayed seated. \"What makes you think I'm interested?\"\n\n\"You are, Mr. Malone.\"\n\nHe resented the assumption, particularly when the old man was right. Thorvaldsen shuffled toward the front door.\n\n\"Where is this bookstore?\" he asked, cursing himself for even sounding interested.\n\n\"Copenhagen. Where else?\"\n\nHe remembered waiting three days before calling. The prospect of living in Europe had always appealed to him. Had Thorvaldsen known that, too? He'd never thought living overseas possible. He was a career government man. American, born and bred. But that was before Mexico City. Before seven dead and nine injured.\n\nHe could still see his estranged wife's face the day after he made the call to Copenhagen.\n\n\"I agree. We've had enough separation, Cotton, it's time for a divorce.\" The declaration came with the matter-of-factness of the trial lawyer that she was.\n\n\"Is there someone else?\" he asked, uncaring.\n\n\"Not that it matters, but yes. Hell, Cotton, we've been apart five years. I'm sure you haven't been a monk during that time.\"\n\n\"You're right. It's time.\"\n\n\"You really going to retire from the navy?\"\n\n\"Already have. Effective yesterday.\"\n\nShe shook her head, like she did when Gary needed motherly advice. \"Will you ever be satisfied? The Navy, then flight school, law school, JAG, the Billet. Now this sudden retirement. What's next?\"\n\nHe'd never liked her condescending tone. \"I'm moving to Denmark.\"\n\nHer face registered nothing. He might as well had said he was moving to the moon. \"What is it you're after?\"\n\n\"I'm tired of being shot at.\"\n\n\"Since when? You love the Billet.\"\n\n\"Time to grow up.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"So you think moving to Denmark will accomplish that miracle?\"\n\nHe had no intention of explaining himself. She didn't care. Nor did he want her to. \"It's Gary I need to talk with.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"I want to know if he's okay with that.\"\n\n\"Since when have you cared what we thought?\"\n\n\"He's why I got out. I wanted him to have a father around\u2014\"\n\n\"That's bullshit, Cotton. You got out for yourself. Don't use that boy as an excuse. Whatever it is you're planning, it's for you, not him.\"\n\n\"I don't need you telling me what I think.\"\n\n\"Then who does tell you? We were married a long time. You think it was easy waiting for you to come back from who-knows-where? Wondering if it was going to be in a body bag? I paid the price, Cotton. Gary did, too. But that boy loves you. No, he worships you, unconditionally. You and I both know what he'll say, since his head is screwed on better than either of ours. For all our failures together, he was a success.\"\n\nShe was right again.\n\n\"Look, Cotton. Why you're moving across the ocean is your business. But if it that makes you happy, then do it. Just don't use Gary as an excuse. The last thing he needs is a discontented parent around trying to make up for his own sad childhood.\"\n\n\"You enjoy insulting me?\"\n\n\"Not really. But the truth has to be said and you know it.\"\n\nHe stared around at the darkened bookshop. Nothing good ever came from thinking about Pam. Her animosity toward him ran deep and stemmed back fifteen years to when he was a brash ensign. He'd not been faithful and she knew it. They'd gone to counseling and resolved to make the marriage work, but a decade later he'd returned home one day from an assignment to find her gone. She'd rented a house on the other side of Atlanta for her and Gary, taking only what they needed. A note informed him of their new address and that the marriage was over. Pragmatic and cold, that was Pam's way. Interestingly, though, she'd not sought an immediate divorce. Instead, they'd simply lived apart, remained civil, and spoke only when necessary for Gary's sake.\n\nBut eventually the time came for decisions\u2014across the board.\n\nSo he quit his job, resigned his commission, ended his marriage, sold his house, and left America, all in the span of one long, terrible, lonely, exhausting, but satisfying week.\n\nHe checked his watch. He really should e-mail Gary. They communicated at least once a day, and it was still late afternoon in Atlanta. His son was due in Copenhagen in three weeks to spend a month with him. They'd done the same thing last summer, and he was looking forward to the time together.\n\nHis confrontation with Stephanie still bothered him. He'd seen naefvete like hers before in agents who, though aware of risks, simply ignored them. What was it she always told him? Say it, do it, preach it, shout it, but never, absolutely never, believe your own bullshit. Good advice she should heed. She had no idea what she was doing. But then, did he? Women were not his strong point. Though he'd spent half his life with Pam, he never really took the time to know her. So how could he possibly understand Stephanie? He should stay out of her business. After all, it was her life.\n\nBut something nagged at him.\n\nWhen he was twelve he'd learned that he'd been born with an eidetic memory. Not photographic, as movies and books liked to portray, just an excellent recall of details that most people forgot. It certainly helped with studying, and languages came easy, but trying to pluck one detail from so many could, at times, aggravate him.\n\nLike now."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "De Roquefort tripped the front door lock and entered the bookshop. Two of his men followed him inside. The other two were stationed outside to watch the street.\n\nThey crept past darkened shelves to the rear of the cluttered ground floor and climbed narrow stairs. No sound betrayed their presence. On the top floor, de Roquefort stepped through an open doorway into a lit apartment. Peter Hansen was ensconced in a chair reading, a beer on the table beside him, a cigarette burning in an ashtray.\n\nSurprise flooded the book dealer's face. \"What are you doing here?\" Hansen demanded in French.\n\n\"We had an arrangement.\"\n\nThe dealer sprang to his feet. \"We were outbid. What was I to do?\"\n\n\"You told me there'd be no problem.\" His associates moved to the far side of the room, near the windows. He stayed at the door.\n\n\"That book sold for fifty thousand kroner. An outrageous price,\" Hansen said.\n\n\"Who outbid you?\"\n\n\"The auction will not reveal such information.\"\n\nDe Roquefort wondered if Hansen thought him that stupid. \"I paid you to ensure that Stephanie Nelle was the purchaser.\"\n\n\"And I tried. But no one told me the book would go for such a price. I stayed with the bidding, but she waved me off. Were you willing to pay more than fifty thousand kroner?\"\n\n\"I would have paid whatever it took.\"\n\n\"You weren't there, and she was not as determined.\" Hansen seemed to relax, the initial surprise replaced with a smugness de Roquefort fought hard to ignore. \"And besides, what makes that book so valuable?\"\n\nHe surveyed the tight room, which reeked of alcohol and nicotine. Hundreds of books lay scattered among stacks of newspapers and magazines. He wondered how anyone lived in such disarray. \"You tell me.\"\n\nHansen shrugged. \"I have no idea. She wouldn't say why she wanted it.\"\n\nDe Roquefort's patience was wearing thin. \"I know who outbid you.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"As you well know, the attendants at the auction are negotiable. Ms. Nelle contacted you to act as her agent. I contacted you to make sure she obtained the book so that I might have a copy before you turned it over to her. Then you arranged for a telephone bidder.\"\n\nHansen smiled. \"Took you long enough to figure that one out.\"\n\n\"Actually it took me only a few moments, once I had information.\"\n\n\"Since I now have control of the book and Stephanie Nelle is out of the picture, what is it worth for just you to have it?\"\n\nDe Roquefort already knew what course he would be taking. \"Actually, the question is, how much is the book worth to you?\"\n\n\"It means nothing to me.\"\n\nHe motioned and his two associates grabbed Hansen's arms. De Roquefort jammed a fist into the book dealer's abdomen. Hansen spit out a breath, then slumped forward, held upright by his limbs.\n\n\"I wanted Stephanie Nelle to have the book, after I made a copy,\" de Roquefort said. \"That was what I paid you to do. Nothing more. You once possessed a use to me. That's no longer the case.\"\n\n\"I... have the... book.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"That's a lie. I know exactly where the book is.\"\n\nHansen shook his head. \"You won't... get it.\"\n\n\"You're wrong. In fact, it will be an easy matter.\"\n\nMalone flipped on the fluorescent lights over the history section. Books of every shape, size, and color consumed the black lacquered shelves. But there was one volume in particular he recalled from a few weeks back. He'd bought it, along with several other mid-twentieth-century histories, from an Italian who'd thought his wares worth far more than Malone was willing to pay. Most sellers did not understand that value was a factor of desire, scarcity, and uniqueness. Age was not necessarily important since, just as in the twenty-first century, a lot of junk had always been printed.\n\nHe recalled selling a few of the Italian's books, but was hoping that one of them was still around. He could not remember it leaving the store, though one of his employees might have made a sale. But thankfully the book remained on the second row from the bottom, precisely where he'd first placed it.\n\nNo dust jacket protected the clothbound cover, which was once surely a deep green, now faded to light lime. Its pages were tissue-thin, gilt-edged, and littered with engravings. The title was still visible in patchy gold lettering.\n\nThe Knights of the Temple of Solomon.\n\nThe copyright read 1922 and, when he first saw it, Malone had become interested since the Templars were a subject he'd read little about. He knew they were not mere monks, more religious warriors\u2014a sort of spiritualized special forces unit. But his rather simplistic conception was of white-clad men sporting stylish red crosses. A Hollywood stereotype, surely. And he recalled being fascinated as he'd thumbed through the volume.\n\nHe carried the book to one of several club chairs that dotted the store, settled himself into the soft folds, and started to read. Gradually, a summary began to formulate.\n\nBy AD 1118 Christians once again controlled the Holy Land. The First Crusade had been a resounding success. And though the Muslims were defeated, their lands confiscated, their cities occupied, they'd not been vanquished. Instead, they remained on the fringe of the newly established Christian kingdoms, wreaking havoc on all who ventured to the Holy Land.\n\nSafe pilgrimage to holy sites was one of the reasons for the Crusades, and road tolls were the chief revenue source for the newly formed Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem. Pilgrims were streaming by the day into the Holy Land, arriving alone, in pairs, groups, or sometimes as entire uprooted communities. Unfortunately, the roads in and out were not secure. Muslims lay in wait, bandits roamed freely, even Christian soldiers were a threat since pillage was, to them, a normal course of forage.\n\nSo when a knight from Champagne, Hugh de Payens, founded a new movement consisting of himself and eight others, a monastic order of fighting brothers dedicated to providing safe passage to pilgrims, the concept was met with widespread approval. Baldwin II, who ruled Jerusalem, granted the new order shelter under the al Aqsa mosque, a place Christians believed to be the former Temple of Solomon, so the new order took its name from its headquarters: the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem.\n\nThe brotherhood initially stayed small. Each knight pledged vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. They owned nothing individually. All of their worldly goods became the Order's. They lived in common and took their meals in silence. They cropped their hair, but let their beards grow. Charity supplied their food and clothing and St. Augustine provided the model for their monasticism. The Order's seal was particularly symbolic: two knights riding a single mount\u2014a clear reference to the days when knights could not afford their own horse.\n\nA religious order of fighting men was not, to the medieval mind, a contradiction. Instead, the new Order appealed to both religious fervor and martial prowess. Its creation also solved another problem\u2014that of manpower\u2014since now there existed a constant presence of trusted fighters.\n\nBy 1128 the fellowship had expanded, finding political support in powerful places. European princes and prelates donated land, money, and materials. The pope ultimately sanctioned the Order, and soon the Knights Templar became the only standing army in the Holy Land.\n\nA strict Rule of 686 laws governed them. Hunting was forbidden. No gaming, hawking, or gambling. Speech was practiced sparingly and without laughter. Ornamentation was banned. They slept with the lights on, dressed in shirts, vests, and pantaloons, ready for battle.\n\nThe master was absolute ruler. Next were the seneschals, who acted as deputies and advisers. Marshals commanded troops during battles. Servientes in Latin, sergents in French, were the craftsmen, laborers, and attendants who supported the brother knights and formed the backbone of the Order. By a papal decree in 1148, each knight wore the red cross patee of four equal arms, wide at the ends, atop a white mantle. They were the first disciplined, equipped, and regulated standing army since Roman times. The brother knights participated in each of the subsequent Crusades, being the first into the fray, the last to retreat, and never were they ransomed. They believed service to the Order would clean their slate with heaven and, over the course of two hundred years of constant warring, twenty thousand Templars gained their martyrdom by dying in battle.\n\nIn 1139 a papal bull placed the Order under the exclusive control of the pope, which allowed it to operate freely throughout Christendom, unaffected by monarchs. It was an unprecedented action and, as the Order gained political and economic strength, it amassed a huge reserve of wealth. Kings and patriarchs left great sums in their wills. Loans were made to barons and merchants on the promise that their houses, lands, vineyards, and gardens would pass to the Order at their death. Pilgrims were given safe transport to and from the Holy Land in return for generous donations. By the beginning of the fourteenth century the Templars rivaled the Genovese, the Lombards, and even the Jews as controllers of currency. The kings of France and England kept their treasury in the Order's vaults. Even the Muslims banked with them.\n\nThe Order's Paris Temple became the center of the world's currency market. Slowly, the organization evolved into a financial and military complex, both self-supporting and self-regulating. Eventually Templar property, some 9,000 estates, was wholly exempt from taxation, and that unique position led to conflicts with local clergy since their churches suffered while Templar lands prospered. Competition from other Orders, particularly the Knights Hospitallers, only heightened tension.\n\nDuring the twelfth and thirteenth centuries control of the Holy Land seesawed back and forth between Christian and Arab. The rise of Saladin, as ruler of the Muslims, provided the Arabs with their first great military leader, and Christian Jerusalem finally fell in 1187. In the chaos that followed the Templars confined their activities to Acre, a fortified stronghold close to the Mediterranean shore. For the next hundred years they languished in the Holy Land but flourished in Europe, where they established an extensive network of churches, abbeys, and estates. When Acre fell in 1291, the Order lost both its last base in the Holy Land and its purpose for existence.\n\nIts own rigid adherence to secrecy, which initially set it apart, eventually encouraged slander. Philip IV of France, in 1307, eyeing the vast Templar assets, arrested many of the brothers. Other monarchs followed suit. Seven years of accusations and trials followed. Clement V formally dissolved the Order in 1312. The final blow came on March 18, 1314, when the last master, Jacques de Molay, was burned at the stake.\n\nMalone kept reading. There was still that tug at the back of his brain\u2014something he'd read when he'd first thumbed through the book weeks ago. Paging through, he read about how, before the suppression in 1307, the Order became expert in seafaring, property development, animal husbandry, agriculture, and, most important, finance. While the Church forbade scientific experimentation, the Templars learned from their enemy, the Arabs, whose culture encouraged independent thought. The Templars also secreted away, much as modern banks scatter wealth among so many vaults, a vast amount of assets. There was even a medieval French verse quoted that aptly described the overly solvent Templars and their sudden disappearance:\n\n\u2003The brethren, the masters of the Temple,\n\n\u2003who were well filled and ample\n\n\u2003with gold and silver and with wealth.\n\n\u2003Where are they? How have they fared?\n\n\u2003Who had such power that none dared\n\n\u2003take aught from them, no man so bold:\n\n\u2003forever buying, they never sold.\n\nHistory had not been kind to the Order. Though they captured the imagination of poets and chroniclers\u2014the Knights of the Grail in Parzival were Templars, as were the demonic antiheroes in Ivanhoe \u2014as the Crusades acquired the label of European aggression and imperialism, the Templars became an integral part of their brutal fanaticism.\n\nMalone continued to scan the book until he finally found the passage he recalled from his first perusal. He knew it was there. His memory never failed him. The words talked of how, on the battlefield, the Templars always displayed a vertical banner divided into two blocks\u2014one black to represent the sin that brother knights had left behind, the other white to symbolize their new life within the Order. The banner was labeled in French. Translated it meant a lofty, noble, glorious state. The term also doubled as the Order's battle cry.\n\nBeauseant. Be glorious.\n\nPrecisely the word Red Jacket had uttered as he'd leaped from the Round Tower.\n\nWhat was happening?\n\nOld motivations stirred inside him. Feelings he'd thought a year of retirement had quelled. Good agents were both inquisitive and cautious. Forget either attribute and something was inevitably overlooked\u2014something potentially disastrous. He'd made that mistake once years ago on one of his early assignments, and his impetuousness cost the life of a hired operative. It would not be the last person he felt responsible for getting killed, but it was the first, and he never forgot his carelessness.\n\nStephanie was in trouble. No question. She'd ordered him to stay out of her business, so talking to her again would be useless. But maybe Peter Hansen would prove informative.\n\nHe glanced at his watch. Late, but Hansen was known as a night owl and should still be up. If not, he'd awaken him.\n\nHe tossed the book aside and headed for the door."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "\"WHERE IS LARS NELLE'S JOURNAL?\" DE ROQUEFORT ASKED.\n\nStill in the grasp of the two men, Peter Hansen stared up at him. He knew Hansen had once been closely associated with Lars Nelle. When he'd discovered that Stephanie Nelle was coming to Denmark to attend the Roskilde auction, he'd surmised that she might contact Peter Hansen. Which was why he'd approached the book dealer first.\n\n\"Surely Stephanie Nelle mentioned her husband's journal?\"\n\nHansen shook his head. \"Nothing. Nothing at all.\"\n\n\"When Lars Nelle was alive, did he mention that he kept a journal?\"\n\n\"Never.\"\n\n\"Do you understand your situation? Nothing I wanted has occurred and, worse, you deceived me.\"\n\n\"I know that Lars kept meticulous notes.\" Resignation filled Hansen's voice.\n\n\"Tell me more.\"\n\nHansen seemed to steel himself. \"When I'm released.\"\n\nDe Roquefort allowed the fool a victory. He motioned and his men released their hold. Hansen quickly gulped a deep swallow of beer, then tabled the mug. \"Lars wrote lots of books about Rennes-le-Cheteau. All that stuff about lost parchments, hidden geometry, and puzzles made for great sales.\" Hansen seemed to catch hold of himself. \"He alluded to every treasure he could imagine. Visigoth gold, Templar wealth, Cathar loot. Take a thread and weave a blanket, that's what he used to say.\"\n\nDe Roquefort knew all about Rennes-le-Cheteau, a tiny hamlet in southern France that had existed since Roman times. A priest in the latter part of the nineteenth century spent enormous sums of money remodeling the local church. Decades later, rumors started that the priest financed the decorations with a great treasure he'd found. Lars Nelle learned of the intriguing place thirty years ago and wrote a book about the tale, which became an international bestseller.\n\n\"So tell me what was recorded in the notebook,\" he asked. \"Information different from Lars Nelle's published material?\"\n\n\"I told you, I don't know anything about a notebook.\" Hansen grabbed the mug and savored another gulp. \"But knowing Lars, I doubt he told the world everything in those books.\"\n\n\"And what was it he concealed?\"\n\nA sly smile came to the Dane's lips. \"As if you don't already know. But I assure you, I have no idea. I only know what I read in Lars's books.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't assume anything, if I were you.\"\n\nHansen seemed unfazed. \"So tell me, what's so important about that book tonight? It's not even about Rennes-le-Cheteau.\"\n\n\"It is the key to everything.\"\n\n\"How could a nothing book, more than a hundred and fifty years old, be the key to anything?\"\n\n\"Many times it's the simplest of things that are most important.\"\n\nHansen reached for his cigarette. \"Lars was a strange man. I never could figure him out. He was obsessed with the whole Rennes thing. He loved the place. Even bought a house there. I went once. Dreary.\"\n\n\"Did Lars say if he found anything?\"\n\nHansen appraised him again with a suspicious glare. \"Like what?\"\n\n\"Don't be coy. I'm not in the mood.\"\n\n\"You must know something or you wouldn't be here.\" Hansen bent down to balance the cigarette back onto the ashtray. But his hand kept going, straight into an open drawer in the side table, and a gun appeared. One of de Roquefort's men kicked the pistol from the book dealer's grip.\n\n\"That was foolish,\" de Roquefort said.\n\n\"Screw you,\" Hansen spat out, rubbing his hand.\n\nThe radio clipped to de Roquefort's waist crackled in his ear, and a voice said, \"A man is approaching.\" A pause. \"It's Malone. Coming straight for the shop.\"\n\nNot unexpected, but perhaps it was time to send a clear message that this was not Malone's affair. He caught the attention of his two subordinates. They advanced and again seized Peter Hansen by the arms.\n\n\"Deceit has a price,\" de Roquefort said.\n\n\"Who the hell are you?\"\n\n\"Someone you should not have toyed with.\" De Roquefort made the sign of the cross. \"May the Lord be with you.\"\n\nMalone saw lights in the third-floor windows. The street in front of Hansen's bookshop was empty. Only a few parked cars lined the dark cobbles, which he knew would all be gone by morning, when shoppers once again invaded this part of the pedestrians-only Strfget.\n\nWhat had Stephanie said earlier when she'd been inside Hansen's shop? My husband said you were a man who could find the unfindable. So Peter Hansen was apparently connected to Lars Nelle, and that former association would explain why Stephanie had sought out Hansen, rather than coming to him. But it did not answer the multitude of other questions Malone possessed.\n\nMalone had never met Lars Nelle. He died about a year after Malone joined the Magellan Billet, at a time when he and Stephanie were just getting to know one another. But he'd subsequently read all of Nelle's books, which were mixtures of history, fact, conjecture, and grand coincidence. Lars was an international conspiratorialist who'd thought the region of southern France known as the Languedoc harbored some sort of great treasure. Which was partly understandable. The area had long been the land of troubadours, a place of castles and crusades, where the legend of the Holy Grail was first born. Unfortunately, Lars Nelle's work had not generated any serious scholarship. Instead, his theories only stirred the interest of new age writers and independent filmmakers who expanded on his original premise, ultimately proposing theories that ranged from extraterrestrials, to Roman plunder, to the hidden essence of Christianity itself. Nothing, of course, had ever been proven or found. But Malone was certain the French tourist industry loved the speculation.\n\nThe book Stephanie had tried to buy at the Roskilde auction was titled Pierres Gravees du Languedoc. Inscribed Stones of the Languedoc. An odd title on an even odder subject. What relevance could it have? He knew that Stephanie had always been unimpressed with her husband's work. That dispute was the number one problem in their marriage and eventually led to a continental separation\u2014Lars living in France, she in America. So what was she doing in Denmark eleven years after his death? And why were others intent on interfering with her\u2014even to the point of dying?\n\nHe kept walking and tried to organize his thoughts. He knew Peter Hansen would not be glad to see him, so he told himself to choose his words carefully. He needed to placate the idiot and learn what he could. He'd even pay if he had to.\n\nSomething burst from one of the top-floor windows in Hansen's building.\n\nHe stared up as a body ejected headfirst, flipped in midair, then slammed onto the bonnet of a parked car.\n\nHe raced forward and saw Peter Hansen. He tried for a pulse. Faint.\n\nAmazingly, Hansen opened his eyes.\n\n\"Can you hear me?\" he asked Hansen.\n\nNo response.\n\nSomething whizzed by close to his head and Hansen's chest lurched upward. Another swoosh and the skull ripped apart, blood and sinew splattering his jacket.\n\nHe whirled around.\n\nIn the shattered window three floors above, a man with a gun stood. The same man in the leather jacket who'd started the shooting in the cathedral\u2014the one intent on assaulting Stephanie. In the instant it took the shooter to re-aim, Malone leaped behind the car.\n\nMore bullets rained down.\n\nThe pop of each shot was muffled, like hands clapping. A sound-suppressed weapon. One bullet pinged off the hood next to Hansen. Another shattered the windshield.\n\n\"Mr. Malone. This affair does not concern you,\" the man said from above.\n\n\"Does now.\"\n\nHe wasn't going to stay around and debate the point. He crouched low and used the parked cars as shields while working his way down the street.\n\nMore shots, like pillows fluffing, tried to find a way through metal and glass.\n\nTwenty yards away, he glanced back. The face disappeared from the window. He stood and ran, turning at the first corner. He rounded another, trying to use the labyrinth of streets to his advantage, stacking buildings between him and his pursuers. Blood pounded in his temples. His heart thumped. Damn. He was back in the game.\n\nHe stopped a moment and gulped in the cool air.\n\nRunning footsteps were approaching from behind. He wondered if his pursuers knew their way around the Strfget. He had to assume they did. Around another corner and more darkened shops encased him. Tension built in his stomach. He was running out of options. Ahead was one of the district's many open squares, a fountain churning in the center. All the cafes lining its perimeter were closed for the night. No one was in sight. Hiding places here would be in short supply. Across the empty expanse rose a church. A faint glow was evident through darkened stained-glass windows. In summer, Copenhagen's churches were all left open to midnight. He needed a place to hide, at least for a while. So he raced across to its marble portal.\n\nThe lock clicked open.\n\nHe shoved the leadened door inward, then closed it gently, hoping his pursuers wouldn't notice.\n\nScattered incandescent fixtures lit the empty interior. An impressive altar and sculpted statues cast ghostly images through the sullen air. He searched the darkness toward the altar and spotted stairs and a pallid glow from below. He headed for it and descended, a cold cloud of worry filling him.\n\nAn iron gate at the bottom opened into a three-naved wide space with a low vaulted ceiling. Two stone sarcophagi topped with immense slabs of carved granite stood in the center. The only break in the darkness came from a tiny amber light near a small altar. This seemed like a good place to park for a while. He couldn't go back to his shop. They certainly knew where he lived. He told himself to calm down, but his momentary relief was shattered by a door opening above. His gaze shot to the top of the vault not three feet from the crown of his head.\n\nTwo sets of footsteps bounded across the floor above.\n\nHe moved deeper into the shadows. His mind filled with a familiar panic, which he suppressed with a wave of self-control. He needed something to defend himself with, so he searched the darkness. In an apse twenty feet away he spotted an iron candelabrum.\n\nHe crept over.\n\nThe ornament stood about five feet tall, a solitary wax candle, about four inches thick, rising from its center. He removed the candle and tested the metal stem. Heavy. With the candelabrum in hand, he tiptoed across the crypt and took up a position behind another pillar.\n\nSomeone started down the steps.\n\nHe peered past the tombs, through the blackness, his body alive with an energy that had always, in the past, clarified his thoughts.\n\nAt the base of the stairs appeared the silhouette of a man. He carried a gun, a sound suppressor at the end of the barrel distinctive even in shadow. Malone tightened his grip on the iron stem and cocked his arm. The man was moving toward him. His muscles tensed. He silently counted to five, clenched his teeth, then swung the candelabrum and caught the man square in the chest, propelling the shadow back onto one of the tombs.\n\nHe tossed the iron aside and swung his fist into the man's jaw. The pistol flew away and rattled across the floor.\n\nHis attacker went down.\n\nHe searched for the gun as another set of footsteps bounded into the crypt. He found the pistol and locked his hand on the grip.\n\nTwo shots came in his direction.\n\nDust snowed down from the ceiling as bullets found stone. He dove for the nearest pillar and fired. A muffled retort sent a shot through the darkness, ricocheting off the far wall.\n\nThe second attacker stopped his advance, taking up a position behind the farther tomb.\n\nNow he was trapped.\n\nBetween him and the only way out was an armed man. The first pursuer was starting to come to his feet, groaning from the blows. Malone was armed, but the odds weren't good.\n\nHe stared through the dimly lit chamber and readied himself.\n\nThe man rising from the floor suddenly collapsed back down.\n\nA few seconds passed.\n\nSilence.\n\nOne set of footsteps echoed from above. Then the church door opened and closed. He did not move. The stillness was unnerving. His gaze raked the darkness. No movement anywhere.\n\nHe decided to risk it and crept forward.\n\nThe first assailant lay sprawled on the floor. The other man was likewise prone and still. He checked both men for pulses. Beating, but weak. Then he spotted something at the back of one of the necks. He bent close and plucked out a small dart, the tip a half-inch needle.\n\nHis savior was privy to some sophisticated equipment.\n\nThe two men lying on the floor were the same two from outside the auction earlier. But who'd disabled them? He bent back down and retrieved both guns, then searched the bodies. No identification on either. One man wore a radio beneath his jacket. He removed the unit along with the earpiece and microphone.\n\n\"Anyone there?\" he said into the mike.\n\n\"And who is this?\"\n\n\"You the same man that was in the cathedral? The one who just killed Peter Hansen.\"\n\n\"Half correct.\"\n\nHe realized no one was going to say much over an open channel, but the message was clear. \"Your men are down.\"\n\n\"Your doing?\"\n\n\"Wish I could take credit. Who are you?\"\n\n\"That's not relevant to our discussion.\"\n\n\"How was Peter Hansen a problem for you?\"\n\n\"I detest those who deceive me.\"\n\n\"Obviously. But somebody just caught your two guys by surprise. I don't know who, but I like them.\"\n\nNo response. He waited a moment more and was about to speak when the radio crackled. \"I trust you will take advantage of your good fortune and go back to selling books.\"\n\nThe other radio clicked off."
            },
            {
                "title": "ABBEY DES FONTAINES FRENCH PYRcNcES",
                "text": "[ 11:30 PM ]\n\nThe seneschal awoke. He'd drifted off in a chair beside the bed. A quick glance at the clock on the night table told him that he'd been asleep for about an hour. He glanced over at his sick master. The familiar sound of labored breath was gone. In the scattered rays of incandescent light that washed in from the abbey's exterior, he saw the film of death had gathered in the old man's eyes.\n\nHe felt for a pulse.\n\nThe master was dead.\n\nHis courage forsook him as he knelt and said a prayer for his departed friend. The cancer had won. The battle was over. But another conflict of differing proportion would soon begin. He beseeched the Lord to allow the old man's soul into heaven. No one deserved salvation more. He'd learned everything from the master\u2014his personal failings and emotional loneliness long ago tossed him under the old man's influence. His had been a quick education, and he'd tried never to disappoint. Mistakes are tolerated, so long as they are not made again, he'd been told\u2014only once, since the master never repeated himself.\n\nMany of the brothers took that directness for arrogance. Others resented what they believed to be a condescending attitude. But none ever questioned the master's authority. A brother's duty was to obey. The time for inquiry came only with the selection of the master.\n\nWhich was what the day ahead now promised.\n\nFor the sixty-seventh time since Inception, a point dating back to the early part of the twelfth century, another man would be chosen master. For the sixty-six who'd come before, the average tenure was a mere eighteen years, the contributions varying from nonexistent to beyond compare. Each, though, had served the Order until death. Some had even died fighting, but the days of open warfare were long over. The quest today was more subtle, modern battlegrounds places the Fathers could never have imagined. The courts, the Internet, books, magazines, newspapers\u2014all were venues that the Order regularly patrolled, making sure its secrets were safe, its existence unnoticed. And every master, no matter how inept he might have been, had succeeded in that singular goal. But the seneschal feared that the next tenure would be particularly decisive. A civil war was brewing, one the dead man lying before him had kept in check with an uncanny ability to predict his enemy's thoughts.\n\nIn the silence that engulfed him the rushing water from outside seemed closer. During summer the brothers often visited the falls and enjoyed a swim in the frigid pool, and he longed for such pleasures but knew there'd be no respites anytime soon. He decided not to alert the brotherhood of the master's death until prayers at Prime, which would not be for another five hours. In times past they'd all gathered just after midnight for Matins, but that devotional went the way of many Rules. A more realistic schedule now governed, one that recognized the importance of sleep, geared to the practicalities of the twenty-first rather than the thirteenth century.\n\nHe knew that no one would dare enter the master's chamber. Only he, as seneschal, was granted that privilege, particularly while the master lay ill. So he reached for the comforter and stretched the blanket over the old man's dead face.\n\nSeveral thoughts raced through his mind and he fought the rising temptation. Rule, if nothing else, instilled a sense of discipline, and he was proud that he'd never knowingly committed any violations. But several were now screaming to him. He'd thought about them all day while he watched his friend die. If death had claimed the master while the abbey was alive with activity, it would have been impossible to do what he now contemplated. But at this hour he would have free reign, and depending on what happened over the next day this might be his only chance.\n\nSo he reached down, slid back the blanket, and parted the azure robe, exposing the old man's lifeless chest. The chain was there, precisely where it should be, and he slipped the gold links over the head.\n\nA silver key dangled from the end.\n\n\"Forgive me,\" he whispered as he replaced the blanket.\n\nHe hustled across the room to a Renaissance armoire darkened by countless waxings. Inside lay a bronze box adorned with a silver crest. Only the seneschal knew of its existence, and he'd seen the master open it many times, though he'd never been allowed to study its contents. He carried the container to the desk, inserted the key, and once again begged for forgiveness.\n\nHe was searching for a leather-bound volume that the master had possessed for several years. He knew it was kept inside the strongbox\u2014the master had placed it there in his presence\u2014but when he hinged open the lid, he saw that there was only a rosary, a few papers, and a missal. No book.\n\nHis fear was now a reality. Where before he'd only suspected, now he knew.\n\nHe replaced the strongbox in the armoire and left the bedchamber.\n\nThe abbey was a maze of multistory wings, each added in a differing century, the architecture conspiring to create a jumbled complex that now housed four hundred brothers. There was the obligatory chapel, a stately cloister garth, workshops, offices, a gym, common rooms for hygiene, eating, and entertainment, a chapter house, a sacristy, a refectory, parlors, an infirmary, and an impressive library. The master's bedchamber was situated in a section built originally in the fifteenth century, facing sheer rock precipices that towered over a narrow glen. Lodgings for the brothers were nearby, and the seneschal passed an arched portal that led into the cavernous dormitory where lights burned, as Rule forbid the chamber to ever be totally dark. He noticed no movement and heard nothing except intermittent snores. Centuries ago a guard would have been posted at the door, and he wondered if perhaps that custom would have to be revived in the days ahead.\n\nHe glided down the wide passageway, following the crimson carpet runner that shielded the rough flagstones. On either side paintings, statuary, and scattered memorials recalled the abbey's past. Unlike at other Pyrenean monasteries, no looting had occurred here during the French Revolution, so both its art and message had survived.\n\nHe found the main staircase and descended to ground level. Through more vaulted corridors he passed areas where visitors were schooled in the monastic way of life. There were not many invitees, a few thousand each year, the income a modest supplement to the annual operating expenses, but enough visited that care was taken to ensure the brothers' privacy.\n\nThe entrance he sought stood at the end of another ground-floor corridor. The door, laced with medieval ironwork, was swung open, as always.\n\nHe entered the library.\n\nFew collections could claim to have never been disturbed, yet the innumerable volumes that surrounded him had remained inviolate for seven centuries. Started with only a score of books, the collection had grown through gift, bequest, purchase, and, in the Beginning, production from scribes who labored day and night. The subject matters then and now varied, with emphases on theology, philosophy, logic, history, law, science, and music. The Latin phrase etched into the mortar above the main doorway was fitting. CLAUSTRUM SINE ARMARIO EST QUASI CASTRUM SINE ARMAMENTARIO. A monastery without a library is like a castle without an armory.\n\nHe stopped and listened.\n\nNo one was around.\n\nSecurity was of no real concern, as eight hundred years of Rule had proven more than effective in guarding the stacks. No brother would dare intrude without permission. But he was no brother. He was the seneschal. At least for one more day.\n\nHe navigated his way through the shelves, toward the rear of the massive expanse, and stopped at a black metal door. He raked a plastic card across the scanner affixed to the wall. Only the master, marshal, archivist, and himself possessed the cards. Access to the volumes beyond was gained only with the master's direct permission. Even the archivist had to obtain an okay before entering. Stored inside were a variety of precious books, old charters, title deeds, a register of members, and, most important, the Chronicles, which contained a narrative history of the Order's entire existence. As minutes memorialized what the British Parliament or U.S. Congress accomplished, the Chronicles detailed the Order's successes and failures. Written journals remained, many with brittle covers and brazen clasps, each one looking like a tiny trunk, but the bulk of the data had now been scanned into computers\u2014making it a simple matter to electronically search the Order's nine-hundred-year record.\n\nHe entered, navigated the dimly lit shelving, and found the codex lying in its designated spot. The tiny volume measured eight inches square and an inch thick. He'd come across it two years ago, its pages bound in wooden boards sheathed with blind-stamped calf. Not quite a book, but an ancestor\u2014an early effort that replaced rolled parchment and allowed text to be inscribed on two sides of a page.\n\nHe carefully opened the front cover.\n\nThere was no title page, the cursive Latin script framed by an illuminated border of dull red, green, and gold. He'd learned that it had been copied in the fifteenth century by one of the abbey's scribes. Most of the ancient codices had fallen victim, their parchment used to either bind other books, cover jars, or simply kindle a fire. Thank goodness this one survived. The information it contained was priceless. He'd never told anyone what he'd found within the codex, not even the master, and since he might need the information, and there would be no chances better than the present, he slipped the book into the fold of his cassock.\n\nHe walked an aisle over and found another thin volume, its script also hand-penned, but in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Not a book written for an audience, but instead a personal record. He might need it, as well, so he slipped it into his cassock.\n\nHe then left the library, knowing that the computer that controlled the security door had recorded the time of his visit. Magnetic strips affixed in each of the two volumes would identify that both had been removed. Since there was no other way out except through the doorway lined with sensors, and removing the tags could well damage the books, little choice existed. He could only hope that in the confusion of the days ahead, no one would take the time to examine the computer log.\n\nRule was clear.\n\nTheft of Order property was punishable by banishment.\n\nBut that was a chance he would have to take."
            },
            {
                "title": "11:50 PM",
                "text": "Malone took no chances and departed the church through a rear door, beyond the sacristy. He could not worry about the two unconscious men. Right now, he needed to get to Stephanie, her surly attitude be damned. Clearly, the man from the cathedral, the one who'd killed Peter Hansen, had his own problems. Somebody had taken out his two accomplices. Malone had no idea who or why, but he was grateful, since escaping from that crypt could have proven tough. He cursed himself again for getting involved, but it was too late to walk away now. He was in\u2014whether he liked it or not.\n\nHe took a roundabout path out of the Strfget and eventually made his way to Kongens Nytorv, a typically busy city square encircled by stately buildings. His senses were on maximum alert and he kept a sharp lookout for any tails, but no one was behind him. At this late hour, traffic in the square was light. Nyhavn, just beyond the square's east side, with its colorful harbor promenade of gabled houses, continued to accommodate waterfront diners at outdoor tables lively with music.\n\nHe hustled down the sidewalk toward the Hotel d'Angleterre. The brightly lit seven-story structure faced the sea and stretched an entire city block. The elegant building dated from the eighteenth century, its rooms, he knew, having hosted kings, emperors, and presidents.\n\nHe entered the lobby and passed the desk. A soft melody drifted from the main lounge. A few late-night patrons milled about. A row of house phones dotted a marble counter and he used one to call Stephanie Nelle's room. The phone rang three times before it was answered.\n\n\"Wake up,\" he said.\n\n\"You don't listen well, do you, Cotton?\" The voice still carried the same desultory tone from Roskilde.\n\n\"Peter Hansen is dead.\"\n\nA moment of silence passed.\n\n\"I'm in six ten.\"\n\nHe stepped into the room. Stephanie wore one of the hotel's signature robes. He told her everything that had just happened. She listened in silence, just like in years past when he'd made reports. But he saw a sense of defeat in her tired features, one he hoped signaled a change in attitude.\n\n\"Are you going to let me help you now?\" he asked.\n\nShe studied him through eyes that, he'd often noticed, changed shades as her mood shifted. In some ways she reminded him of his mother, though Stephanie was only a dozen or so years older than him. Her anger from earlier was not out of character. She didn't like making mistakes and she hated having them pointed out. Her talent was not in gathering information but in analyzing and assessing\u2014a meticulous organizer who plotted and planned with the cunning of a leopard. He'd watched her many times make tough decisions without hesitation\u2014both attorneys general and presidents had relied on her cool head\u2014so he wondered about her present quandary and its strange effect on her usually sound judgment.\n\n\"I pointed them to Hansen,\" she muttered. \"In the cathedral, I didn't correct him when he implied Hansen may have Lars's journal.\" She told him about the conversation.\n\n\"Describe him.\" When she did he said, \"That's the same guy who started the shooting and the one who shot Hansen.\"\n\n\"The jumper from the Round Tower worked for him. He came to steal my bag, which contained Lars's journal.\"\n\n\"Then he goes to the same auction, knowing you'd be there. Who knew you were going?\"\n\n\"Just Hansen. The office knows only that I'm on vacation. I have my world phone, but I left word not to be disturbed unless it was a catastrophic emergency.\"\n\n\"Where did you learn about the auction?\"\n\n\"Three weeks ago a package arrived postmarked from Avignon, France. Inside was a note and Lars's journal.\" She paused. \"I hadn't seen that notebook in years.\"\n\nHe knew this would ordinarily be a forbidden subject. Lars Nelle had taken his own life eleven years ago, found hanging from a bridge in southern France, a note in his pocket that merely said GOODBYE STEPHANIE . For an academician who'd penned a multitude of books, such a simple salutation seemed almost an insult. Though she and her husband were separated at the time, Stephanie took the loss hard, and Malone recalled how difficult the months after had been. Never had they spoken about his death, and for her to even mention it now was extraordinary.\n\n\"Journal of what?\" he asked.\n\n\"Lars was fascinated with the secrets of Rennes-le-Cheteau\u2014\"\n\n\"I know. I read his books.\"\n\n\"You never mentioned that before.\"\n\n\"You never asked.\"\n\nShe seemed to sense his irritation. A lot was happening and neither one of them had time for chitchat.\n\n\"Lars made a living expounding theories on what may or may not be hidden in and around Rennes-le-Cheteau,\" she said. \"But he kept many of his private thoughts in the journal, which stayed with him always. After he died, I thought Mark had it.\"\n\nAnother bad subject. Mark Nelle had been an Oxford-educated medieval historian who taught at the University of Toulouse, in southern France. Five years ago he was lost in the Pyrenees. An avalanche. His body never found. Malone knew that tragedy had been accentuated by the fact that Stephanie and her son had not been close. A lot of bad blood flowed in the Nelle family, none of which was any of his business.\n\n\"That damn journal was like a ghost come back to haunt me,\" she said. \"There it was. Lars's handwriting. The note told me about the auction and the availability of the book. I remembered Lars speaking of it, and there were references in the journal, so I came to buy it.\"\n\n\"And danger bells weren't clanging in your head?\"\n\n\"Why? My husband was not involved in my line of work. His was a harmless quest for things that don't exist. How was I to know there were people involved who would kill?\"\n\n\"That man leaping from the Round Tower was clear enough. You should have come to me then.\"\n\n\"I need to do this alone.\"\n\n\"Do what?\"\n\n\"I don't know, Cotton.\"\n\n\"Why is that book so important? I learned at the auction that it's a nondescript account of no importance. They were shocked it sold for so much.\"\n\n\"I have no idea.\" Exasperation returned to her tone. \"Truly, I don't. Two weeks ago I sat down, read Lars's notebook, and I have to say I became fascinated. I'm ashamed to say I never read one of his books until last week. When I did, I began to feel awful about my attitude toward him. Eleven years can add a lot of perspective.\"\n\n\"So what did you plan to do?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"I don't know. Just buy the book. Read it and see what happened from there. While I was over here, I planned to go to France and spend a few days at Lars's house. I haven't been there in a while.\"\n\nShe apparently was trying to make peace with demons, but there was reality to consider. \"You need help, Stephanie. There's more happening here, and this is something I do have experience handling.\"\n\n\"Don't you have a bookshop to run?\"\n\n\"My employees can handle things for a few days.\"\n\nShe hesitated, seemingly considering his offer. \"You were the best I ever had. I'm still mad you quit.\"\n\n\"Had to do what I had to do.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"To have Henrik Thorvaldsen steal you away. Insult to injury.\"\n\nLast year, when he'd retired and told her he planned to move to Copenhagen, she'd been happy for him, until learning about Thorvaldsen's involvement. Characteristically, she'd never explained herself and he knew better than to ask.\n\n\"I have some more bad news for you,\" he said. \"The person who outbid you for the book? On the phone? It was Henrik.\"\n\nShe cast him a look of disdain.\n\n\"He was working with Peter Hansen,\" he said.\n\n\"What led you to that conclusion?\"\n\nHe told her what he learned at the auction and what the man had said to him over the radio. I detest those who deceive me. \"Apparently Hansen was playing both ends against the middle and the middle won.\"\n\n\"Wait outside,\" she said.\n\n\"That's why I came. You and Henrik need to talk. But we need to leave here with caution. Those men may still be out there.\"\n\n\"I'll get dressed.\"\n\nHe moved toward the door. \"Where's Lars's journal?\"\n\nShe pointed to the safe.\n\n\"Bring it.\"\n\n\"Is that wise?\"\n\n\"The police are going to find Hansen's body. It won't take them long to connect the dots. We need to be ready to move.\"\n\n\"I can handle the police.\"\n\nHe faced her. \"Washington bailed you out of Roskilde because they don't know what you're doing. Right now, I'm sure someone in Justice is trying to find out. You hate questions, and you can't tell the attorney general to go to hell when he calls. I'm still not sure what you're doing, but I know one thing, you don't want to talk about it. So pack up.\"\n\n\"I don't miss that arrogance.\"\n\n\"And your ray-of-sunshine personality has left my life incomplete, too. Could you just for once do what I ask? It's tough enough in the field without acting stupid.\"\n\n\"I don't need to be reminded of that.\"\n\n\"Sure you do.\"\n\nAnd he left."
            },
            {
                "title": "Friday, JUNE 23",
                "text": "[ 1:30 AM ]\n\nMalone and Stephanie rode out of Copenhagen on highway 152. Though he'd driven from Rio de Janeiro to the Petropolis and along the sea from Naples to the Amalfi, Malone believed the path north to Helsingfr, along Denmark's rocky east shore, was by far the most charming of the seaside routes. Fishing villages, beech forest, summer villas, and the gray expanse of the tideless dresund all combined to offer an ageless splendor.\n\nThe weather was typical. Rain peppered the windshield, whipped by a torrential wind. Past one of the smaller seaside resorts, closed for the night, the highway wound inland into a forested expanse. Through an open gate, beyond two white cottages, Malone followed a grassy drive and parked in a pebbled courtyard. The house beyond was a genuine specimen of Danish baroque\u2014three stories, built of brick encased in sandstone, and topped with a gracefully curving copper roof. One wing turned inland. The other faced the sea.\n\nHe knew its history. Named Christiangate, the house was built three hundred years ago by a clever Thorvaldsen who'd converted tons of worthless peat into fuel to produce porcelain. In the 1800s the Danish queen proclaimed the glassworks the official royal provider, and Adelgate Glasvaerker, with its distinctive symbol of two circles with a line beneath, still reigned premier throughout Denmark and Europe. The conglomerate's current head was the family patriarch, Henrik Thorvaldsen.\n\nThe manor's door was answered by a steward who was not surprised to see them. Interesting, considering it was after midnight and Thorvaldsen lived as solitary as an owl. They were shown into a room where oak beams, armor, and oil portraits conveyed the appurtenances of a noble seat. A long table dominated the great hall\u2014four hundred years old, Malone remembered Thorvaldsen once saying, its dark maple reflecting a finish that came only from centuries of dedicated use. Thorvaldsen sat at one end, an orange cake and a steaming samovar on the table before him.\n\n\"Please, come in. Take a seat.\"\n\nThorvaldsen rose from the chair with what appeared to be great effort and flashed a smile. His stooped arthritic frame stood no more than five and a half feet, the hump in his spine barely concealed by the folds of an oversized Norwegian sweater. Malone noticed a glint in the bright gray eyes. His friend was up to something. No question about it.\n\nMalone pointed to the cake. \"So sure we'd come you baked us a cake?\"\n\n\"I wasn't sure both of you would make the journey, but I knew you would.\"\n\n\"Why's that?\"\n\n\"Once I learned you were at the auction, I knew it was only a matter of time before you discovered my involvement.\"\n\nStephanie stepped forward. \"I want my book.\"\n\nThorvaldsen appraised her with a tight gaze. \"No hello? Nice to meet you? Just, 'I want my book.'\"\n\n\"I don't like you.\"\n\nThorvadsen retook his seat at the head of the table. Malone decided that the cake looked good, so he sat and cut a slice.\n\n\"You don't like me?\" Thorvaldsen repeated. \"Odd, considering we've never met.\"\n\n\"I know of you.\"\n\n\"Does that mean the Magellan Billet has a file on me?\"\n\n\"Your name turns up in the strangest places. We call you an international person of interest.\"\n\nThorvaldsen's face grimaced, as if he were undergoing some agonizing penance. \"You'd think me a terrorist or a criminal.\"\n\n\"Which one are you?\"\n\nThe Dane stared back at her with a sudden curiosity. \"I was told you possess the genius to conceive great deeds and the industry to see them through. Strange, with all that ability, you failed so utterly as a wife and mother.\"\n\nStephanie's eyes instantly filled with indignation. \"You know nothing of me.\"\n\n\"I know you and Lars had not lived together for years before he died. I know you and he differed on a great many things. I know you and your son were estranged.\"\n\nA flush of rage colored Stephanie's cheeks. \"Go to hell.\"\n\nThorvaldsen seemed unfazed by her rebuke. \"You're wrong, Stephanie.\"\n\n\"About what?\"\n\n\"A great many things. And it's time you know the truth.\"\n\nDe Roquefort found the manor house precisely where the information he'd requested had directed. Once he'd learned who was working with Peter Hansen to buy the book, it had taken his lieutenant only half an hour to compile a dossier. Now he was staring at the stately home of the book's high bidder\u2014Henrik Thorvaldsen\u2014and it all made sense.\n\nThorvaldsen was one of the wealthiest citizens in Denmark, with family roots reaching back to the Vikings. His corporate holdings were impressive. In addition to Adelgate Glasvaerker, he possessed interests in British banks, Polish mines, German manufacturing, and European transportation. On a continent where old money meant billions, Thorvaldsen was at the top of most fortune lists. He was an odd sort, an introvert who ventured from his estate only sparingly. His charitable contributions were legendary, especially to Holocaust survivors, anti-communist organizations, and international medical relief.\n\nHe was sixty-two years old and close with the Danish royal family, especially the queen. His wife and son were dead, the wife from cancer, the son shot more than a year before while working for the Danish mission in Mexico City. The man who'd taken down one of the killers was an American lawyer-agent named Cotton Malone. Even a link to Lars Nelle existed, though not a favorable one, as Thorvaldsen was credited with some unflattering public comments about Nelle's research. A nasty incident fifteen years ago at the Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve in Paris, where the two had engaged in a shouting match, had been widely reported in the French press. All of which might explain why Henrik Thorvaldsen had been interested in Peter Hansen's offer, but not entirely.\n\nHe needed to know it all.\n\nBracing ocean air whipped in off the black dresund and the rain had slackened into a mist. Two of his acolytes stood beside him. The other two waited in the car, parked beyond the property, their heads woozy from whatever drug had been shot into them. He was still puzzled by who'd interfered. He'd sensed no one watching him all day, yet somebody had covertly traced his movements. Somebody with the sophistication to utilize tranquilizing darts.\n\nBut first things first. He led the way across the spongy yard to a row of hedges that fronted the elegant house. Lights burned in a ground-floor room that would, in daylight, offer a spectacular seaside view. He'd observed no guards, dogs, or alarm system. Curious, but not surprising.\n\nHe approached the lighted window. He'd noticed a car parked in the drive and wondered if his luck was about to change. He carefully peered inside and saw Stephanie Nelle and Cotton Malone talking with an older man.\n\nHe smiled. His luck was indeed changing.\n\nHe motioned and one of his men produced a nylon case. He unzipped the pouch and removed a microphone. He carefully affixed its rubber suction cup to the corner of the damp window pane. The state-of-the-art receiver inside the nylon bag could now hear every word.\n\nHe wedged a tiny speaker into his ear.\n\nBefore he killed them, he needed to listen.\n\n\"WHY DON'T YOU SIT?\" THORVALDSEN SAID.\n\n\"So kind of you, Herr Thorvaldsen, but I prefer to stand,\" Stephanie made clear, contempt in her voice.\n\nThorvaldsen reached for the coffee and filled his cup. \"I would suggest calling me anything but herr. \" He set the samovar down. \"I detest all things even remotely German.\"\n\nMalone watched as Stephanie took in the command. Surely, if he was a \"person of interest\" within Billet files, she knew that Thorvaldsen's grandfather, uncles, aunts, and cousins had all fallen victim to the Nazi occupation of Denmark. Even so, he expected her to retaliate, but instead her face softened. \"Henrik it is, then.\"\n\nThorvaldsen dropped one lump of sugar into his cup. \"Your facetiousness is noted.\" He stirred his coffee. \"I learned long ago that all things can be settled over a cup of coffee. A person will tell you more of their private life after one good cup of coffee than after a magnum of champagne or a quart of port.\"\n\nMalone knew Thorvaldsen liked to ease his listener with nonsense while he appraised the situation. The old man sipped from the steaming cup.\n\n\"As I said, Stephanie, it is time you learn the truth.\"\n\nShe approached the table and sat across from Malone. \"Then by all means, destroy all my preconceived notions about you.\"\n\n\"And what would those be?\"\n\n\"I could go on for a while. Here are the highlights. Three years ago you were linked to an art theft syndicate with radical Israeli connections. You interfered last year in the German national elections, funneling money illegally to certain candidates. For some reason, though, both the Germans and Israelis chose not to prosecute you.\"\n\nThorvaldsen made an impatient gesture of assent. \"Guilty on both counts. Those radical Israeli connections, as you call them, are settlers who do not feel their homes should be bargained away by a corrupt Israeli government. To help their cause, we provided funds from wealthy Arabs who trafficked in stolen art. The items were simply stolen back from the thieves. Perhaps your files noted the art was returned to its owners.\"\n\n\"For a fee.\"\n\n\"Which any private art investigator would charge. We merely channeled the money raised to more worthy causes. I saw a certain justice in the act. And the German elections? I financed several candidates who faced stiff opposition from the radical right. With my help, they all won. I saw no reason to allow fascism to gain any foothold. Do you?\"\n\n\"What you did was illegal and caused a multitude of problems.\"\n\n\"What I did was solve a problem. Which is far more than the Americans have done.\"\n\nStephanie seemed unimpressed. \"Why are you in my business?\"\n\n\"How is this your business?\"\n\n\"It concerns my husband's work.\"\n\nThorvaldsen's face stiffened. \"I don't recall you having any interest in Lars's work when he was alive.\"\n\nMalone caught the critical words I don't recall. Which meant a high level of past knowledge concerning Lars Nelle. Uncharacteristically, Stephanie seemed not to be listening.\n\n\"I don't intend to discuss my private life. Just tell me why you bought that book tonight.\"\n\n\"Peter Hansen informed me of your interest. He also told me that another man wanted you to have the book, too. But not before the man made a copy. He paid Hansen a fee to make sure that happened.\"\n\n\"He say who?\" she asked.\n\nThorvaldsen shook his head.\n\n\"Hansen's dead,\" Malone said.\n\n\"Not surprising.\" No emotion claimed Thorvaldsen's voice.\n\nMalone told him what had happened.\n\n\"Hansen was greedy,\" the Dane said. \"He believed the book had great value, so he wanted me to purchase it secretly so he could offer it to the other man\u2014at a price.\"\n\n\"Which you agreed to do, being the humanitarian sort you are.\" Stephanie was apparently not going to cut him any slack.\n\n\"Hansen and I did much business together. He told me what was happening and I offered to assist. I was concerned he would simply go somewhere else for an anonymous buyer. I, too, wanted you to have the book, so I agreed to his terms, but I had no intention of turning the book over to Hansen.\"\n\n\"You don't honestly believe\u2014\"\n\n\"How is the cake?\" Thorvaldsen asked.\n\nMalone realized that his friend was trying to take control of the conversation. \"Excellent,\" he said through a mouthful.\n\n\"Get to the point,\" Stephanie demanded. \"That truth I need to know.\"\n\n\"Your husband and I were close friends.\"\n\nStephanie's face darkened into a look of disgust. \"Lars never mentioned a word of that to me.\"\n\n\"Considering your strained relationship, that's understandable. But, even so, just as in your profession, there were secrets in his.\"\n\nMalone finished his cake and watched as Stephanie contemplated what she clearly did not believe.\n\n\"You're a liar,\" she finally declared.\n\n\"I can show you correspondence that will prove what I am saying. Lars and I communicated often. Ours was a collaborative effort. I financed his initial research and helped him out when times were tough. I paid for his house in Rennes-le-Cheteau. I shared his passion, and was glad to accommodate him.\"\n\n\"What passion?\" she asked.\n\nThorvaldsen appraised her with an even glare. \"You know so little about him. How your regrets must torment you.\"\n\n\"I don't need analyzing.\"\n\n\"Really? You come to Denmark to buy a book you know nothing about that concerns the work of a man dead for more than a decade. And you have no regrets?\"\n\n\"You sanctimonious ass, I want that book.\"\n\n\"You must first listen to what I have to say.\"\n\n\"Hurry up.\"\n\n\"Lars's first book was a resounding success. Several million copies worldwide, though it sold only modestly in America. His next were not as well received, but they sold\u2014enough to finance his ventures. Lars thought an opposing point of view might help popularize the Rennes legend. So I financed several authors who wrote books critical of Lars, books that analyzed his conclusions on Rennes and pointed out fallacies. One book led to another and another. Some good, some bad. I myself even made some rather unflattering public remarks once about Lars. And soon, as he wanted, a genre was born.\"\n\nHer eyes were aflame. \"Are you nuts?\"\n\n\"Controversy generates publicity. And Lars was not writing to a mass audience, so he had to generate his own publicity. After a while, though, it took on a life of its own. Rennes-le-Cheteau is quite popular. Television specials have been made, magazines devoted to it, the Internet is loaded with sites dedicated solely to its mysteries. Tourism is the region's number one draw. Thanks to Lars, the town itself has now become an industry.\"\n\nMalone knew that hundreds of books existed on Rennes. Several shelves in his shop were filled with recycled volumes. But he needed to know, \"Henrik, two people died today. One leaped from the Round Tower and slit his throat on the way down. The other was tossed through a window. This isn't some public relations ploy.\"\n\n\"I would say that today at the Round Tower you came face-to-face with a brother of the Knights Templar.\"\n\n\"Ordinarily I'd say you're nuts, but the man screamed something before he jumped. Beauseant.\"\n\nThorvaldsen nodded. \"The battle cry of the Templars. The screaming of that word by a mass of charging knights was enough to instill absolute fear in an enemy.\"\n\nHe recalled what he read in the book earlier. \"The Templars were eradicated in 1307. There are no knights.\"\n\n\"Not true, Cotton. An attempt was made to eradicate, but the pope reversed himself. The Chinon Parchment absolves the Templars of all heresy. Clement V issued that bull himself, in secret, in 1308. Many thought the document lost when Napoleon looted the Vatican, but recently it was found. No. Lars believed the Order still exists, and so do I.\"\n\n\"There were a lot of references in Lars's books to Templars,\" Malone said, \"but I never recall him writing that they still actually exist.\"\n\nThorvaldsen nodded. \"Intentional on his part. Such a great contradiction they were, and are. Poor by vow, yet rich in assets and knowledge. Introspective, but skilled in the ways of the world. Monks and warriors. The Hollywood stereotype and the real Templar are two different beings. Don't be swept into the romance. They were a brutal lot.\"\n\nMalone was not impressed. \"How have they survived for seven hundred years without anyone knowing?\"\n\n\"How does an insect or animal live in the wild without anyone knowing it exists? Yet new species are cataloged every day.\"\n\nGood point, Malone thought, but he still was not convinced. \"So what's this all about?\"\n\nThorvaldsen leaned back in the chair. \"Lars was looking for the treasure of the Knights Templar.\"\n\n\"What treasure?\"\n\n\"Early in his reign, Philip IV devalued the French currency as a way to stimulate the economy. The act was so unpopular a mob came to kill him. He fled his palace for the Paris Temple and sought protection with the Templars. That was when he first spied the Order's wealth. Years later, when he was desperate for funds, he concocted a plan to convict the Order of heresy. Remember, anything a heretic owned became the property of the state. Yet, after the 1307 arrests, Philip found that not only the Paris vault, but also every other vault in Temples across France was empty. Not an ounce of Templar wealth was ever found.\"\n\n\"And Lars thought that treasure was in Rennes-le-Cheteau?\" he asked.\n\n\"Not necessarily there, but somewhere in the Languedoc,\" Henrik said. \"There are enough clues to warrant that conclusion. But the Templars made finding its location difficult.\"\n\n\"So what does the book you bought tonight have to do with this?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"Eugene Stfcblein was the mayor of Fa, a village close to Rennes. He was highly educated, a musician, and an amateur astronomer. He first penned a travel book about the region, then wrote Pierres Gravees du Languedoc. Inscribed Stones of the Languedoc. An unusual volume that depicts gravestones in and around Rennes. A strange interest, granted, but not uncommon\u2014the south of France is noted for unique tombs. In the book is a sketch of a headstone that caught Stfcblein's eye. That drawing is important because the tombstone no longer exists.\"\n\n\"Could I see what you're talking about?\" Malone asked.\n\nThorvaldsen pushed himself up from the chair and lumbered over to a server table. He came back with the book from the auction. \"Delivered an hour ago.\"\n\nMalone parted the binding to a marked page and studied the drawing.\n\n\"Assuming Stfcblein's sketch is accurate, Lars believed the gravestone was a clue that pointed the way to the treasure. Lars searched for that book for many years. One should be in Paris, as the Bibliotheque Nationale maintains a copy of every printing in France. But, though one is cataloged, no copy is there.\"\n\n\"Was Lars the only one who knew about this book?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"I have no idea. Most believe the book does not exist.\"\n\n\"Where was this one found?\"\n\n\"I spoke with the auction. A railway engineer who built the line from Carcassonne south to the Pyrenees owned it. The engineer retired in 1927 and died in 1946. The book was among his daughter's possessions when she recently died. The grandson placed it for auction. The engineer had been interested in the Languedoc, especially Rennes, and kept an inventory of tombstone rubbings himself.\"\n\nMalone wasn't satisfied with his explanation. \"So who alerted Stephanie to the auction?\"\n\n\"Now, that is the question of the night,\" Thorvaldsen said.\n\nMalone faced Stephanie. \"Back at the hotel, you said a note came with the journal. You have it?\"\n\nShe reached into her bag and retrieved a tattered leather notebook. Tucked within its pages was a folded sheet of taupe-colored paper. She handed the paper to Malone and he read the French.\n\nOn the 22nd of June in Roskilde a copy of Pierres Gravees du Languedoc will be offered at auction. Your husband searched for this volume. Here is an opportunity for you to succeed where he failed. Le bon Dieu soit loue.\n\nMalone silently translated the last line. God be praised. He gazed across the table at Stephanie. \"Where did you think this note came from?\"\n\n\"One of Lars's associates. I just thought one of his cronies wanted me to have the journal and thought I'd be interested in the book.\"\n\n\"After eleven years?\"\n\n\"I agree, it seems odd. But three weeks ago I thought little about it. Like I said before, I always believed Lars's quests were harmless.\"\n\n\"So why did you come?\" Thorvaldsen asked.\n\n\"As you say, Henrik, I have regrets.\"\n\n\"And I do not want to aggravate those. I don't know you, but I did know Lars. He was a good man and his quest was, as you say, harmless. But it was nonetheless important. His death saddened me. I always questioned whether it was suicide.\"\n\n\"So did I,\" she said in a whisper. \"I tried to place blame everywhere to rationalize it, but in my gut I never accepted that Lars killed himself.\"\n\n\"Which explains, more than anything, why you're here,\" Henrik said.\n\nMalone could tell she was uncomfortable, so he offered her emotions a way out. \"Let me see the journal?\"\n\nShe handed him the book and he thumbed through the hundred or so pages, seeing lots of numbers, sketches, symbols, and pages of handwritten text. He then examined the binding with a bibliophile's trained eye and something caught his attention. \"Pages are missing.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nHe showed her the top edge. \"Look here. See those tiny spaces.\" He parted the binding to one. Only a sliver of the original paper remained where it had once adhered to the binding. \"Slit with a razor. I watch for this all the time. Nothing destroys the value of a book like missing pages.\" He restudied the top and bottom and determined that eight pages were gone.\n\n\"I never noticed,\" she said.\n\n\"A lot slipped by you.\"\n\nA hectic flush came to her face. \"I'm willing to concede that I screwed up.\"\n\n\"Cotton,\" Thorvaldsen said, \"this whole endeavor could mean much more. The Templar archives could well be part of any find. The Order's original archives were kept in Jerusalem, then moved to Acre, and finally to Cyprus. History says that after 1312 the archives passed to the Knights Hospitallers, but there's no proof that ever occurred. From 1307 to 1314 Philip IV searched for the archives, but he found nothing. Many say that reserve was one of the medieval world's greatest collections. Imagine what locating those writings would mean.\"\n\n\"Could be the greatest book find ever made.\"\n\n\"Manuscripts no one has seen since the fourteenth century, many surely unknown to us. The prospect of finding such a cache, however remote, is worth exploring.\"\n\nMalone agreed.\n\nThorvaldsen turned to Stephanie. \"How about a truce? For Lars. I'm sure your agency works with many 'persons of interest' to achieve a mutually beneficial goal. How about we do that here?\"\n\n\"I want to see those letters between you and Lars.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"You may have them.\"\n\nStephanie's gaze caught his. \"You're right, Cotton, I do need some help. I'm sorry about my tone earlier. I thought I could do this on my own. But since we're all asshole buddies now, let's you and I go to France and see what's in Lars's house. I haven't been there in some time. There's also a few people in Rennes-le-Cheteau we can talk with. People who worked with Lars. Then we'll go from there.\"\n\n\"Your shadows might come, too,\" he said.\n\nShe smiled. \"Lucky for me I have you.\"\n\n\"I'd like to come,\" Thorvaldsen said.\n\nMalone was surprised. Henrik rarely traveled from Denmark. \"And the purpose of you gracing us with your company?\"\n\n\"I know a bit about what Lars sought. That knowledge might prove useful.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Fine by me.\"\n\n\"Okay, Henrik,\" Stephanie said. \"It'll give us time to come to know one another. Apparently, as you say, I have some things to learn.\"\n\n\"As do we all, Stephanie. As do we all.\"\n\nDe Roquefort fought to restrain himself. His suspicions were now confirmed. Stephanie Nelle was on the trail that her husband had blazed. She also was the custodian of her husband's notebook, along with a copy of Pierres Gravees du Languedoc, perhaps the only copy still in existence. That was the thing about Lars Nelle. He'd been good. Too good. And now his widow owned his clues. He'd made a mistake trusting Peter Hansen. But at the time, the approach seemed the right one. He would not make that mistake again. Too much was riding on the outcome to trust any aspect to another stranger.\n\nHe continued to listen as they finalized what to do once in Rennes-le-Cheteau. Malone and Stephanie would travel there tomorrow. Thorvaldsen would come in a few days. When he'd heard enough, de Roquefort freed the microphone from the window and withdrew with his two associates to the safety of a thick stand of trees.\n\nThere'd be no more killing tonight.\n\nPages are missing.\n\nHe would need that missing information from Lars Nelle's journal. The sender of the notebook had been smart. Dividing the spoils prevented rash acts. Clearly, there was more to this intricate puzzle than he knew\u2014and he was playing catch-up.\n\nBut no matter. Once all of the players were in France, he could easily deal with them."
            },
            {
                "title": "ABBEY DES FONTAINES",
                "text": "[ 8:00 AM ]\n\nThe seneschal stood before the altar and stared at the oak coffin. The brothers were entering the chapel, marching in solemn order, their sonorous voices chanting in unison. The melody was ancient, sung at every master's funeral since the Beginning. The Latin lyrics spoke of loss, sorrow, and pain. Renewal would not be discussed until later in the day, when the conclave would convene to choose a successor. Rule was clear. Two suns could not set without a master and, as seneschal, he must ensure that Rule was maintained.\n\nHe watched as the brothers completed their entrance and positioned themselves before polished oak pews. Each man was cloaked in a plain russet frock, a cowl concealing his head, only his hands visible, folded in prayer.\n\nThe church was formed as a Latin cross with a single nave and two aisles. Little decoration existed, nothing to distract the mind from considering heaven's mysteries, but it was nonetheless majestic, the capitals and columns projecting an impressive energy. The brothers had first gathered here after the Purge in 1307\u2014those who'd managed to escape Philip IV's grasp, retreating to the countryside and stealthily migrating south. Eventually they'd convened here, safe within a mountain fortress, and dissolved into the fabric of religious society, making plans, pledging commitments, always remembering.\n\nHe closed his eyes and allowed the music to fill him. No tinkling accompaniment, no organ, nothing. Just the human voice, swelling and breaking. He sapped strength from the melody and steeled himself for the hours ahead.\n\nThe chanting stopped. He allowed a minute of silence to pass, then stepped close to the coffin.\n\n\"Our most exalted and reverent master has left this life. He hath ruled this Order with wisdom and justice, pursuant to Rule, for twenty-eight years. A place for him is now set within the Chronicles.\"\n\nOne man shoved back his cowl. \"On that I challenge.\"\n\nA shudder swept over the seneschal. Rule granted any brother the right to challenge. He'd expected a battle later, in conclave, but not during the funeral. The seneschal turned to the first row of pews and faced the speaker.\n\nRaymond de Roquefort.\n\nA stump of a man with an expressionless face and a personality of which the seneschal had always been wary, he'd been a brother for thirty years and had risen to the rank of marshal, which placed him third in the chain of command. In the Beginning, centuries ago, the marshal was the Order's military commander, the leader of the knights in battle. Now he was the minister of security, charged with making sure the Order stayed inviolate. De Roquefort had held that post for nearly two decades. He and the brothers who worked under him were allowed the privilege to come and go from the abbey at will, reporting to no one other than the master, and the marshal had made no secret of the contempt he felt for his now dead superior.\n\n\"Speak your challenge,\" the seneschal said.\n\n\"Our departed master weakened this Order. His policies lacked courage. The time has come to move in a different direction.\"\n\nDe Roquefort's words carried not a hint of emotion, and the seneschal knew how the marshal could clothe wrongs in eloquent language. De Roquefort was a fanatic. Men like him had kept the Order strong for centuries, but the master had many times counseled that their usefulness was waning. Others disagreed, and two factions had emerged\u2014de Roquefort heading one, the master the other. Most brothers had kept their choice private, as was the Order's way. But the interregnum was a time of debate. Free discussion was how the collective decided which course it would follow.\n\n\"Is that the extent of your challenge?\" the seneschal asked.\n\n\"For too long the brothers have been excluded from the decision process. We have not been consulted, nor has the counsel we offered been heeded.\"\n\n\"This is not a democracy,\" the seneschal said.\n\n\"Nor would I want it to be. But it is a brotherhood. One based on common needs and community goals. Each of us has pledged his life and possessions. We do not deserve to be ignored.\"\n\nDe Roquefort's voice had a calculating and deflationary effect. The seneschal noted that none of the others stirred the solemnity of the challenge and, for an instant, the sanctity that had for so long loomed within the chapel seemed tainted. He felt as if he was surrounded by men of a different mind and purpose. One word kept ringing through his mind.\n\nRevolt.\n\n\"What would you have us do?\" the seneschal asked.\n\n\"Our master does not deserve the usual respect.\"\n\nHe stayed rigid and made the required inquiry, \"Do you call for a vote?\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\nRule required a vote, when demanded, on all issues during the interregnum. With no master, they governed as a whole. To the remaining brothers, whose faces he could not see, he said, \"A show of hands as to who would deny our master his rightful place in the Chronicles.\"\n\nSome arms went up immediately. Others hesitated. He gave them the full two minutes that Rule required to make their decision. Then he counted.\n\nTwo hundred ninety-one arms pointed to heaven.\n\n\"Greater than the required seventy percent are in favor of the challenge.\" He repressed his anger. \"Our master shall be denied in the Chronicles.\" He could not believe he'd said the words. May his old friend forgive him. He stepped away from the coffin, back toward the altar. \"Since you have no respect for our departed leader, you are dismissed. For those who wish to participate, I will proceed to the Hall of Fathers in one hour.\"\n\nThe brothers filed out in silence until only de Roquefort remained. The Frenchman approached the coffin. Confidence showed on his rugged face. \"It is the price he pays for cowardice.\"\n\nNo need for appearances existed any longer. \"You will regret what you just did.\"\n\n\"The student thinks himself master? I look forward to the conclave.\"\n\n\"You will destroy us.\"\n\n\"I will resurrect us. The world needs to know the truth. What happened all those centuries ago was wrong, and it is time to right that wrong.\"\n\nThe seneschal didn't disagree with that conclusion, but there was another point. \"There was no need to desecrate a good man.\"\n\n\"Good to who? You? I was treated with contempt.\"\n\n\"Which is far more than you deserved.\"\n\nA grim smile spread across de Roquefort's pale face. \"Your protector is no more. It's now just you and me.\"\n\n\"I look forward to the battle.\"\n\n\"As do I.\" De Roquefort paused. \"Thirty percent of the brotherhood did not support me, so I will leave it to you and them to say goodbye to our master.\"\n\nHis enemy turned and paraded from the chapel. The seneschal waited until the doors had closed, then laid a trembling hand on the coffin. A network of hate, treachery, and fanaticism was closing around him. He heard again his words to the master from yesterday.\n\nI respect the power of our adversaries.\n\nHe'd just sparred with his adversary and lost.\n\nWhich did not bode well for the hours ahead."
            },
            {
                "title": "RENNES-LE-CHcTEAU, FRANCE",
                "text": "[ 11:30 AM ]\n\nMalone turned the rental car east off the main highway, just outside Couiza, and started up a twisting incline. The rising road offered stunning vistas of nearby tawny hillsides thick with summer rock roses, lavender, and thyme. The lofty ruins of a fortress, its charred walls standing like gaunt fingers, rose in the distance. The land, as far as the eye could see, oozed the romance of history when marauding knights swooped like eagles from the fortified heights to prey on their foe.\n\nHe and Stephanie had left Copenhagen around four AM and flown to Paris, where they caught the first Air France shuttle of the day south for Toulouse. An hour later they were on the ground and motoring southwest into the region known as the Languedoc.\n\nOn the way Stephanie told him about the village that stood fifteen hundred feet atop the bleak mound they were now climbing. Gauls were the first to inhabit the hilltop, drawn by the prospect of being able to see for miles across the expansive Aude River valley. But it was the Visigoths in the fifth century who built a citadel and adopted the ancient Celtic name for the location\u2014Rhedae, which meant \"chariot\"\u2014eventually developing the place into a trading center. Two hundred years later, when the Visigoths were driven south into Spain, the Franks converted Rhedae into a royal city. By the thirteenth century, though, the town's status had declined, and toward the end of the Albigensian Crusade it was razed. Ownership passed through several wealthy houses of both France and Spain, eventually resting with one of Simon de Montfort's lieutenants, who founded a barony. The family built themselves a cheteau, around which a tiny hamlet sprouted, and the name eventually changed from Rhedae to Rennes-le-Cheteau. Their issue ruled the land and the town until 1781, when the last heir, Marie d'Hautpoul de Blanchefort, died.\n\n\"Before her death, it was said that she passed on a great secret,\" Stephanie had said, \"one that her family kept for centuries. She was childless and her husband died before her, so with no one left, she told the secret to her confessor, the abbe Antoine Bigou, who was the parish priest for Rennes.\"\n\nNow, as Malone stared ahead at the last bend in the narrow road, he imagined what it must have been like to live then in such a remote place. The isolated valleys formed a perfect repository for both fleeing fugitives and restless pilgrims. Easy to see why the region had become a theme park for the imagination, a mecca for mystery buffs and new agers, a place where writers with a unique vision could forge a reputation.\n\nLike Lars Nelle.\n\nThe town came into view. He slowed the car and eased through a gate framed by limestone pillars. A sign warned FOUILLES INTERDITES. Excavating prohibited.\n\n\"They had to post a notice about digging?\" he asked.\n\nStephanie nodded. \"Years ago, people were shoveling dirt in every corner looking for treasure. Even dynamiting. It had to be regulated.\"\n\nDaylight dimmed beyond the town gate. The limestone buildings were packed tight, like books on a shelf, many with pitched roofs, thick doors, and rusted iron verandas. A narrow and flinty grand rue wound up a short incline. People with backpacks and Michelin Green Guides hugged the walls on either side, parading single-file back and forth. Malone saw a couple of stores, a bookshop, and a restaurant. Alleys led off the main rue to nests of buildings, but not many. The entire town was less than five hundred yards across.\n\n\"Only about a hundred people live here full time,\" Stephanie said. \"Though fifty thousand visit each year.\"\n\n\"Lars had quite an effect.\"\n\n\"More than I ever realized.\"\n\nShe pointed ahead and directed him to turn left. They eased past kiosks peddling rosaries, medals, pictures, and souvenirs to more camera-toting visitors.\n\n\"They come by the busload,\" she said. \"Wanting to believe in the impossible.\"\n\nUp another incline and he parked the Peugeot in a sandy lot. Two buses were already there, their drivers milling about smoking. A water tower rose to one side, its tattered stone adorned with a zodiac sign.\n\n\"The crowds come early,\" Stephanie said as they climbed out. \"Here to see the domaine d'Abbe Sauniere. The priest's domain\u2014what he built with all that mysterious treasure he supposedly found.\"\n\nMalone stepped close to a waist-high rock wall. The panorama below, a patchwork of field, forest, valley, and rock, stretched for miles. The silver-green hills were dotted with chestnut and oak. He checked his bearings. The great bulk of the snowcapped Pyrenees blocked the southern horizon. A stiff wind howled from the west, thankfully warmed by the summer sun.\n\nHe glanced to the right. A hundred feet away the neo-Gothic tower, with its crenellated roof and single round turret, had graced the cover of many a book and tourist brochure. It stood on the edge of a cliff, grim and defiant, seemingly clinging to rock. A long belvedere stretched from its far side and rounded back toward an iron glasshouse, then to another cluster of olden stone buildings, each topped with orange-tiled roofs. People milled back and forth on the ramparts, cameras in hand, admiring the valleys below.\n\n\"The tower is the Tour Magdala. Quite a sight, isn't it?\" Stephanie asked.\n\n\"Seems out of place.\"\n\n\"That's what I always thought, too.\"\n\nTo the right of the Magdala rose an ornamental garden that led to a compact Renaissance-style building that also seemed from another locale.\n\n\"The Villa Bethanie,\" she said. \"Sauniere built it, too.\"\n\nHe noted the name. Bethany. \"That's biblical. In the Holy Land. It meant 'house with an answer.'\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Sauniere was clever with names.\" She pointed to more buildings behind them. \"Lars's house is down that alley. Before we head there, I have to do something. As we walk, let me tell you about what happened here in 1891. What I read about last week. What brought this place back from obscurity.\"\n\nThe abbe Berenger Sauniere pondered the daunting task before him. The Church of Mary Magdalene had been built upon Visigoth ruins and consecrated in 1059. Now, eight centuries later, the inside was in ruin, thanks to a roof that leaked as if it weren't there. The walls themselves were crumbling, the foundations slipping away. It would take both patience and stamina to repair the damage, but he thought himself up to the task.\n\nHe was a husky man, muscular, broad-shouldered, with a head of close-cropped black hair. His one endearing feature, which he used to his advantage, was the cleft in his chin. It added a whimsical air to the stiff countenance of his black eyes and thick eyebrows. Born and raised a few miles away, in the village of Montazels, he knew the geography of the Corbieres well. From childhood he'd been familiar with Rennes-le-Cheteau. Its church, dedicated to St. Mary Magdalene, had been in limited use for decades, and he'd never imagined that one day its many problems would be his.\n\n\"A mess,\" the man known as Rousset said to him.\n\nHe glanced at the mason. \"I agree.\"\n\nAnother mason, Babou, was busy shoring up one of the walls. The region's state architect had recently recommended that the building be razed, but Sauniere would never allow that to happen. Something about the old church demanded that it be saved.\n\n\"It will take much money to complete the repairs,\" Rousset said.\n\n\"Enormous amounts of money.\" He added a smile to let the older man know that he understood the challenge. \"But we shall make this house worthy of the Lord.\"\n\nWhat he did not say was that he'd already secured a fair amount of funds. A bequest from one of his predecessors had left six hundred francs especially for repairs. He'd also managed to convince the town council to loan him another fourteen hundred francs. But the bulk of his money had come in secret five years ago. Three thousand francs had been donated by the countess of Chambord, the widow of Henri, the last Bourbon claimant to the defunct French throne. At the time Sauniere had managed to bring a great deal of attention to himself with anti-republican sermons, ones that stirred monarchist feelings in his parishioners. The government reeled from the comments, withdrawing his yearly stipend and demanding that he be fired. Instead the bishop suspended him for nine months, but his actions caught the attention of the countess, who'd made contact through an intermediary.\n\n\"Where do we start?\" Rousset asked.\n\nHe'd given that matter a great deal of thought. The stained-glass windows had already been replaced and a new porch, outside the main entrance, would be completed shortly. Certainly the north wall, where Babou was working, must be mended, a new pulpit installed, and the roof replaced. But he knew where they must start.\n\n\"We will begin with the altar.\"\n\nA curious look came to Rousset's face.\n\n\"The people's focus is there,\" Sauniere said.\n\n\"As you say, Abbe.\"\n\nHe liked the respect his older parishioners showed him, though he was only thirty-eight. Over the past five years he'd come to like Rennes. He was near home, with plenty of opportunities to study Scriptures and perfect his Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He also enjoyed trekking in the mountains, fishing, and hunting. But the time had come to do something constructive.\n\nHe approached the altar.\n\nThe top was white marble pitted by water that had rained down for centuries from the porous ceiling. The slab was supported by two ornate columns, their exteriors adorned with Visigoth crosses and Greek letters.\n\n\"We shall replace the top and the pillars,\" he declared.\n\n\"How, Abbe?\" Rousset asked. \"There is no way we can lift that.\"\n\nHe pointed to where Babou stood. \"Use the sledgehammer. There is no need for delicacy.\"\n\nBabou brought the heavy tool over and surveyed his task. Then, with a great heave, Babou hoisted the hammer and crashed it down onto the center of the altar. The thick top cracked, but the stone did not give way.\n\n\"It's solid,\" Babou said.\n\n\"Again,\" Sauniere said with a flourish.\n\nAnother blow and the limestone shattered, the two halves collapsing into each other between the still standing pillars.\n\n\"Finish,\" he said.\n\nThe two pieces were quickly busted into many.\n\nHe bent down. \"Let's haul all this away.\"\n\n\"We'll get it, Abbe,\" Babou said, setting the sledgehammer aside. \"You pile it for us.\"\n\nThe two men lifted large chunks and headed for the door.\n\n\"Take it around to the cemetery and stack it. We should have use for it there,\" he called out to them.\n\nAs they left, he noticed that both pillars had survived the demolition. With a swipe he cleared dust and debris away from the crown of one. On the other a piece of limestone still lay, and, when he tossed the chunk into the pile, he noticed beneath, in the crown of the pillar, a shallow mortise hole. The space was no bigger than the palm of his hand, surely designed to hold the top's locking pin, but inside the cavity he caught sight of a glimmer.\n\nHe bent close and carefully blew away the dust.\n\nYes, something was there.\n\nA glass vial.\n\nNot much longer than his index finger and only slightly wider, the top sealed with crimson wax. He looked close and saw that the vessel contained a rolled piece of paper. He wondered how long it had been there. He was not aware of any recent work done to the altar, so it must have been secreted there a long time ago.\n\nHe freed the object from its hiding place.\n\n\"That vial started everything,\" Stephanie said.\n\nMalone nodded. \"I read Lars's books, too. But I thought Sauniere was supposed to have found three parchments in that pillar with some sort of coded messages.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"That's all part of the myth others added to the story. This, Lars and I did talk about. Most of the fallacies were started in the fifties by a Rennes innkeeper who wanted to generate business. One lie built on another. Lars never accepted that those parchments were real. Their supposed text was printed in countless books, but no one has ever seen them.\"\n\n\"Then why did he write about them?\"\n\n\"To sell books. I know it bothered him, but he did it anyway. He always said that whatever wealth Sauniere found could be traced to 1891 and whatever was inside that glass vial. But he was the only one who believed that.\" She pointed off to another of the stone buildings. \"That's the presbytery where Sauniere lived. It's a museum about him now. The pillar with the small niche is in there for all to see.\"\n\nThey passed the crowded kiosks and kept to the rough-paved street.\n\n\"The Church of Mary Magdalene,\" she said, pointing at a Romanesque building. \"Once the chapel for the local counts. Now, for a few euros, you can see the great creation of Abbe Sauniere.\"\n\n\"You don't approve?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"I never did. That was the problem.\"\n\nOff to their right he saw a tumbled-down cheteau, its mud-colored outer walls baked by the sun. \"That's the Hautpouls estate,\" she said. \"It was lost during the Revolution to the government and has been a mess ever since.\"\n\nThey rounded the far end of the church and passed beneath a stone gateway that bore what looked like a skull and crossbones. He recalled from the book he'd read last night that the symbol appeared on many Templar gravestones.\n\nThe earth beyond the entrance was littered with pebbles. He knew what the French called the space. Enclos paroissiaux. Parish close. And the enclosure seemed typical\u2014one side bounded by a low wall, the other nestled close to a church, its entrance a triumphal arch. The cemetery hosted a profusion of table tombs, headstones, and memorials. Floral tributes topped some of the graves, and many were adorned, in the French tradition, with photographs of the deceased.\n\nStephanie walked to one of the monuments that displayed neither flowers nor images, and Malone let her go alone. He knew that Lars Nelle had been so liked by the locals that they'd granted him the privilege of being buried in their cherished churchyard.\n\nThe headstone was simple and noted only the name, dates, and an epitaph of HUSBAND, FATHER, SCHOLAR.\n\nHe eased up beside her.\n\n\"They never once wavered in burying him here,\" she muttered.\n\nHe knew what she meant. In sacred ground.\n\n\"The mayor at the time said there was no conclusive evidence he killed himself. He and Lars were close, and he wanted his friend buried here.\"\n\n\"It's the perfect place,\" he said.\n\nShe was hurting, he knew, but to recognize her pain would be viewed as an invasion of her privacy.\n\n\"I made a lot of mistakes with Lars,\" she said. \"And most of them eventually cost me with Mark.\"\n\n\"Marriage is tough.\" His own failed through selfishness, too. \"So is parenthood.\"\n\n\"I always thought Lars's passion silly. I was a government lawyer doing important things. He was searching for the impossible.\"\n\n\"So why are you here?\"\n\nHer gaze stayed on the grave. \"I've come to realize that I owe him.\"\n\n\"Or do you owe yourself.\"\n\nShe turned away from the grave. \"Perhaps I do owe us both,\" she said.\n\nHe let it drop.\n\nStephanie pointed to a far corner. \"Sauniere's mistress is buried there.\"\n\nMalone knew about the mistress from Lars's books. She was sixteen years Sauniere's junior, a mere eighteen when she quit her job as a hatmaker and became the abbe's housekeeper. She stayed by his side for thirty-one years, until his death in 1917. Everything Sauniere acquired was eventually placed in her name, including all of his land and bank accounts, which subsequently made it impossible for anyone, including the Church, to claim them. She continued to live in Rennes, dressing in somber clothes and behaving as strangely as when her lover was alive, until her death in 1953.\n\n\"She was an odd one,\" Stephanie said. \"She made a statement, long after Sauniere died, about how with what he left behind you could feed all of Rennes for a hundred years, but she lived in poverty till the day she died.\"\n\n\"Any one ever learn why?\"\n\n\"Her only statement was, I cannot touch it.\"\n\n\"Thought you didn't know much about all this.\"\n\n\"I didn't, until last week. The books and journal were informative. Lars spent a lot of time interviewing locals.\"\n\n\"Sounds like that would have been double or triple hearsay.\"\n\n\"For Sauniere, that's true. He's been dead a long time. But his mistress lived till the fifties, so there were many still around in the seventies and eighties who knew her. She sold the Villa Bethanie in 1946 to a man named Noebl Corbu. He was the one who converted it into a hotel\u2014the innkeeper I mentioned who made up much of the false information about Rennes. The mistress promised to tell Sauniere's great secret to Corbu, but at the end of her life she suffered a stroke and was unable to communicate.\"\n\nThey trudged across the hard ground, grit crunching with every step.\n\n\"Sauniere was once buried here, too, beside her, but the mayor said the grave was in danger from treasure hunters.\" She shook her head. \"So a few years ago they dug the priest up and moved him into a mausoleum in the garden. Now it costs three euros to see his grave... the price of a corpse's safety, I assume.\"\n\nHe caught her sarcasm.\n\nShe pointed at the grave. \"I remember coming here once years ago. When Lars first arrived in the late sixties, nothing but two tattered crosses marked the graves, overgrown with vines. No one tended to them. No one cared. Sauniere and his lover were totally forgotten.\"\n\nAn iron chain encircled the plot and fresh flowers sprouted from concrete vases. Malone noticed the epitaph on one of the stones, barely legible."
            },
            {
                "title": "HERE LIES BcRENGER SAUNIcRE",
                "text": "[ PARISH PRIEST OF RENNES-LE-CHcTEAU ]\n\n[ 1853\u20131917 ]\n\n[ DIED 22 JANUARY 1917 AGED 64 ]\n\n\"I read somewhere that the marker was too fragile to move,\" she said, \"so they left it. More for the tourists to see.\"\n\nHe noticed the mistress's gravestone. \"She wasn't a target of opportunists, too?\"\n\n\"Apparently not, since they left her here.\"\n\n\"Wasn't it a scandal, their relationship?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"Whatever wealth Sauniere acquired, he spread around. The water tower back at the car park? He built it for the town. He also paved roads, repaired houses, made loans to people in trouble. So he was forgiven whatever weakness he may have possessed. And it was not uncommon for priests of that time to have female housekeepers. Or at least that's what Lars wrote in one of his books.\"\n\nA group of noisy visitors rounded the corner behind them and headed for the grave.\n\n\"Here they come to gawk,\" Stephanie said, a touch of contempt in her voice. \"I wonder if they would act that way back home, in the cemetery where their loved ones are buried?\"\n\nThe boisterous crowd drew close, and a tour guide started talking about the mistress. Stephanie retreated and Malone followed.\n\n\"This is nothing but an attraction to them,\" Stephanie said in a low voice. \"Where the abbe Sauniere found his treasure and supposedly decorated his church with messages that somehow led the way to it. Hard to imagine that anyone buys that crap.\"\n\n\"Isn't that what Lars wrote about?\"\n\n\"To an extent. But think about it, Cotton. Even if the priest found a treasure, why would he leave a map for someone else to find it? He built all of this during his lifetime. The last thing he'd want was for someone to jump his claim.\" She shook her head. \"It all makes for great books, but it's not real.\"\n\nHe was about to inquire further when he noticed her gaze drift to another corner of the cemetery, past a set of stone stairs that led down to the shade of an oak towering above more markers. In the shadows, he spied a fresh grave decorated with colorful bouquets, the silvery lettering on the headstone bright against a crisp gray matte.\n\nStephanie marched toward it and he followed.\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" she said, concern in her face.\n\nHe read the marker. ERNST SCOVILLE. Then he did the math from the dates noted. The man was seventy-three years old when he died.\n\nLast week.\n\n\"You knew him?\" he asked.\n\n\"I talked with him three weeks ago. Just after receiving Lars's journal.\" Her attention stayed riveted on the grave. \"He was one of those people I mentioned who worked with Lars that we needed to speak with.\"\n\n\"Did you tell him what you planned to do?\"\n\nShe slowly nodded. \"I told him about the auction, the book, and that I was coming to Europe.\"\n\nHe couldn't believe what he was hearing. \"I thought you said last night no one knew anything.\"\n\n\"I lied.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "ABBEY DES FONTAINES",
                "text": "[ 1:00 PM ]\n\nDe Roquefort was pleased. His first confrontation with the seneschal had been a resounding victory. Only six masters had ever been successfully challenged, those men's sins ranging from thievery, to cowardice, to lust for a woman, all from centuries ago, in the decades after the Purge, when the brotherhood was weak and chaotic. Unfortunately, the penalty of a challenge was more symbolic than punitive. The master's tenure would still be noted within the Chronicles, his failures and accomplishments duly recorded, but a notation would proclaim that his brothers had deemed him unworthy of memory.\n\nIn recent weeks his lieutenants had made sure the requisite two-thirds percent would vote and send a message to the seneschal. That undeserving fool needed to know how difficult the fight ahead was going to be. True, the insult of being challenged mattered not to the master. He would be entombed with his predecessors no matter what. No, the denial was more a way to deflate the supposed successor\u2014and to motivate allies. It was an ancient tool, created by Rule, from a time when honor and memory meant something. But one he'd successfully resurrected as the opening salvo in a war that should be over by sunset.\n\nHe was going to be the next master.\n\nThe Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon had existed, unbroken, since 1118. Philip IV of France, who'd borne the despicable misnomer of Philip the Fair, had tried in 1307 to exterminate them. But like the seneschal, he'd also underestimated his opponent, and managed only to send the Order underground.\n\nOnce, tens of thousands of brothers manned commanderies, farms, temples, and castles on nine thousand estates scattered across Europe and the Holy Land. Just the sight of a brother knight clad in white and wearing the red cross patee brought fear to enemies. Brothers were granted immunity from excommunication and were not required to pay feudal duties. The Order was allowed to keep all its spoils from war. Subject only to the pope, the Knights Templar was a nation unto itself.\n\nBut no battles had been fought for seven hundred years. Instead, the Order had retreated to a Pyrenean abbey and cloaked itself as a simple monastic community. Connections to the bishops in Toulouse and Perpignan were maintained, and all of the required duties were performed for the Roman Church. Nothing occurred that would draw attention, set the abbey apart, or cause people to question what may be happening within its walls. All brothers took two vows. One to the Church, which was done for necessity. The other to the brotherhood, which meant everything. The ancient rites were still conducted, though now under cover of darkness, behind thick ramparts, with the abbey gates bolted.\n\nAnd all for the Great Devise.\n\nThe paradoxical futility of that duty disgusted him. The Order existed to guard the Devise, but the Devise would not exist but for the Order.\n\nA quandary, for sure.\n\nBut still a duty.\n\nHis entire life had been only the preamble to the next few hours. Born to unknown parents, he was raised by the Jesuits at a church school near Bordeaux. In the Beginning, brothers were mainly repentant criminals, disappointed lovers, outcasts. Today they came from all walks. The secular world spawned the most recruits, but religious society produced its true leaders. The past ten masters all claimed a cloistered education. His had begun at the university in Paris, then been completed at the seminary in Avignon. He'd stayed on there and taught for three years before the Order approached him. Then he'd embraced Rule with an unfettered enthusiasm.\n\nDuring his fifty-six years he'd never known the flesh of a woman, nor had he been tempted by a man. Being elevated to marshal, he knew, had been a way for the former master to placate his ambition, perhaps even a trap whereby he might generate enough enemies that further advancement would be impossible. But he'd used his position wisely, making friends, building loyalties, accumulating favors. Monastic life suited him. For the past decade he'd pored through the Chronicles and was now versed in every aspect\u2014good and bad\u2014of the Order's history. He would not repeat the mistakes of the past. He fervently believed that, in the Beginning, the brotherhood's self-imposed isolation was what hastened its downfall. Secrecy bred both an aura and suspicion\u2014a simple step from there to recrimination. So it must end. Seven hundred years of silence needed to be broken.\n\nHis time had come.\n\nRule was clear.\n\nIt is to be holden that when anything shall be enjoined by the master, there be no hesitation, but the thing must be done without delay, as though it had been enjoined from heaven.\n\nThe phone on his desk gave a low trill and he lifted the receiver.\n\n\"Our two brothers in Rennes-le-Cheteau,\" he was told by his under-marshal, \"have reported that Stephanie Nelle and Malone are now there. As you predicted, she went straight to the cemetery and found Ernst Scoville's grave.\"\n\nGood to know one's enemy. \"Have our brothers merely observe, but be ready to act.\"\n\n\"On the other matter you asked us to investigate. We still have no idea who assaulted the brothers in Copenhagen.\"\n\nHe hated to hear about failure. \"Is everything prepared for this evening?\"\n\n\"We will be ready.\"\n\n\"How many accompanied the seneschal to the Hall of Fathers?\"\n\n\"Thirty-four.\"\n\n\"All identified?\"\n\n\"Every one.\"\n\n\"They shall each be given an opportunity to join us. If not, deal with them. Let's make sure, though, that most join us. Which should not pose a problem. Few like to be part of a losing cause.\"\n\n\"The consistory starts at six PM.\"\n\nAt least the seneschal was discharging his duty, calling the brothers into session before nightfall. The consistory was the one variable in the equation\u2014a procedure specially designed to prevent manipulation\u2014but one he'd long studied and anticipated.\n\n\"Be ready,\" he said. \"The seneschal will use speed to generate confusion. That's how his master managed election.\"\n\n\"He will not take defeat lightly.\"\n\n\"Nor would I expect him to. Which is why I have a surprise waiting for him.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "RENNES-LE-CHcTEAU",
                "text": "[ 1:30 PM ]\n\nMalone and Stephanie made their way across the crowded hamlet. Another bus churned up the central rue, easing its way toward the car park. Halfway down the street Stephanie entered a restaurant and spoke with the proprietor. Malone eyed some delicious-looking fish the diners were enjoying, but realized food would have to wait.\n\nHe was angry that Stephanie had lied to him. Either she didn't appreciate or didn't understand the gravity of the situation. Determined men, willing to die and kill, were after something. He'd seen their likes many times, and the more information he possessed the better the chances of success. Hard enough dealing with the enemy, but worrying about an ally simply compounded the situation.\n\nLeaving the restaurant, Stephanie said, \"Ernst Scoville was hit by a car last week while he took his daily walk outside the walls. He was well liked. He'd lived here a long time.\"\n\n\"Any leads on the car?\"\n\n\"No witnesses. Nothing to go on.\"\n\n\"Did you actually know Scoville?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"But he didn't care for me. He and I spoke rarely. He took Lars's side in our debate.\"\n\n\"Then why did you call him?\"\n\n\"He was the only one I could think of to ask about Lars's journal. He was civil, considering we hadn't spoken in years. He wanted to see the journal. So I planned on making amends while I was here.\"\n\nHe wondered about her. Bad blood with her husband, her son, and friends of her husband. The source of her guilt was clear, but what she planned to do about it remained cloudy.\n\nShe motioned for them to walk. \"I want to check Ernst's house. He owned quite a library. I'd like to see if his books are still there.\"\n\n\"He have a wife?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"A loner. Would have made a great hermit.\"\n\nThey headed down one of the side alleys between more rows of buildings that all seemed built for patrons long dead.\n\n\"Do you really believe there's a treasure hidden around here somewhere?\" he asked.\n\n\"Hard to say, Cotton. Lars used to say that ninety percent of Sauniere's story is fiction. I'd chastise him for wasting his time on something so foolish. But he always countered with the ten percent of truth. That's what captivated him and, to a large degree, Mark. Strange things apparently happened here a hundred years ago.\"\n\n\"You referring to Sauniere again?\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\n\"Help me understand.\"\n\n\"I actually need help with that, too. But I can tell you more of what I know about Berenger Sauniere.\"\n\n\"I cannot leave a parish where my interests keep me,\" Sauniere told the bishop as he stood before the older man in the episcopal palace at Carcassonne, twenty miles north of Rennes-le-Cheteau.\n\nHe'd avoided the meeting for months with statements from his doctor that he was unable to travel because of illness. But the bishop was persistent, and the last request for an audience had been delivered by a constable who'd been instructed to personally accompany him back.\n\n\"Your existence is far grander than mine,\" the bishop said. \"I wish to have a statement as to the origin of your monetary resources, which seem so sudden and important.\"\n\n\"Alas, Monseigneur, you ask of me the only thing I am not able to reveal. Deep sinners to whom, with the aid of God, I have shown the way of penitence have given these considerable amounts to me. I do not wish to betray the secrets of the confessional by giving you their names.\"\n\nThe bishop seemed to consider his argument. It was a good one, and just might work.\n\n\"Then let us talk of your lifestyle. That is not protected by the secrets of the confessional.\"\n\nHe feigned innocence. \"My lifestyle is quite modest.\"\n\n\"That is not what I am told.\"\n\n\"Your information must be faulty.\"\n\n\"Let us see.\" The bishop parted the cover of a thick book that lay before him. \"I had an inventory performed, which was quite interesting.\"\n\nSauniere did not like the sound of that. His relationship with the former bishop had been loose and cordial, and he'd enjoyed great freedom. This new bishop was another matter.\n\n\"In 1891 you started renovations on the parish church. At that time you replaced the windows, built a porch, installed a new altar and pulpit, and repaired the roof. Cost, approximately twenty-two hundred francs. The following year the exterior walls were tended to and the interior floor replaced. Then came a new confessional, seven hundred francs, statuary and stations of the cross, all hewn in Toulouse by Giscard, thirty-two hundred francs. In 1898 a collecting trunk was added, four hundred francs. Then in 1900 a bas-relief of St. Mary Magdalen, quite elaborate I'm told, was placed before the altar.\"\n\nSauniere simply listened. Clearly, the bishop was privy to parish records. The former treasurer had resigned a few years ago, stating that he'd found his duties contrary to his beliefs. Someone had obviously tracked him down.\n\n\"I came here in 1902,\" the bishop said. \"For the past eight years I have tried\u2014in vain, I might add\u2014to have you appear before me to answer my concerns. But during that time, you managed to build the Villa Bethanie adjacent to the church. It is, I am told, of bourgeois construction, a pastiche of styles, all from cut stone. There are stained-glass windows, a dining salon, sitting room, and bedrooms for guests. Quite a few guests, I hear. It is where you entertain.\"\n\nThe comment was surely designed to elicit a response, but he said nothing.\n\n\"Then there is the Tour Magdala, your folly of a library that overlooks the valley. Some of the finest woodwork around, it is reported. This is in addition to your stamp and postcard collections, which are enormous, and even some exotic animals. All costing many thousands of francs.\" The bishop closed the book. \"Your parish income is no more than two hundred fifty francs per year. How was it possible to amass all this?\"\n\n\"As I have said, Monseigneur, I have been the recipient of many private donations from souls who want to see my parish prosper.\"\n\n\"You have been trafficking in masses,\" the bishop declared. \"Selling the sacraments. Your crime is simony.\"\n\nHe'd been warned this was the charge to be leveled. \"Why do you reproach me? My parish, when I first arrived, was in a lamentable state. It is, after all, the duty of my superiors to ensure for Rennes-le-Cheteau a church worthy of the faithful and a decent dwelling for the pastor. But for a quarter century I have worked and rebuilt and beautified the church without asking a centime from the diocese. It seems to me that I deserve your congratulations rather than accusations.\"\n\n\"What do you say was spent on all those improvements?\"\n\nHe decided to answer. \"One hundred ninety-three thousand francs.\"\n\nThe bishop laughed. \"Abbe, that would not have bought the furniture, statues, and stained glass. To my calculation you have spent more than seven hundred thousand francs.\"\n\n\"I am not familiar with accounting practices, so I cannot say what the costs were. All I know is that the people of Rennes love their church.\"\n\n\"Officials state that you receive one hundred to one hundred fifty postal orders a day. They come from Belgium, Italy, the Rhineland, Switzerland, and all over France. They range from five to forty francs each. You frequent the bank in Couiza, where they are converted to cash. How do you explain that?\"\n\n\"All my correspondence is handled by my housekeeper. She both opens and answers any inquiries. That question should be directed to her.\"\n\n\"You are the one who appears at the bank.\"\n\nHe kept to his story. \"You should ask her.\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, she is not subject to my authority.\"\n\nHe shrugged.\n\n\"Abbe, you are trafficking in masses. It is clear, at least to me, that those envelopes coming to your parish are not notes from well-wishers. But there is something else even more disturbing.\"\n\nHe stood silent.\n\n\"I performed a calculation. Unless you are being paid exorbitant sums per mass\u2014and last I knew, the standard rate among offenders was fifty centimes\u2014you would have to say mass twenty-four hours a day for some three hundred years to accumulate the wealth you have spent. No, Abbe, the trafficking in masses is a front, one you concocted, to mask the true source of your good fortune.\"\n\nThis man was far smarter than he appeared to be.\n\n\"Any response?\"\n\n\"No, Monseigneur.\"\n\n\"Then you are hereby relieved of your duties at Rennes and you will report immediately to the parish in Coustouge. In addition, you are suspended, with no right to say the mass or administer the sacraments in church, until further notice.\"\n\n\"And how long is this suspension to last?\" he calmly asked.\n\n\"Until the Ecclesiastical Court can hear your appeal, which I am sure you will forthwith file.\"\n\n\"Sauniere did appeal,\" Stephanie said, \"all the way to the Vatican, but he died in 1917 before being vindicated. What he did, though, was resign from the Church and never left Rennes. He just started saying mass in the Villa Bethanie. The locals loved him, so they boycotted the new abbe. Remember, all the land around the church, including the villa, belonged to Sauniere's mistress\u2014he was clever there\u2014so the Church couldn't do a thing about it.\"\n\nMalone wanted to know, \"So how did he pay for all those improvements?\"\n\nShe smiled. \"That's a question many have tried to answer, including my husband.\"\n\nThey navigated another of the winding alleyways, bordered by more melancholy houses, the stones the color of dead wood stripped of bark.\n\n\"Ernst lived up ahead,\" she said.\n\nThey approached an olden building warmed by pastel roses climbing a wrought-iron pergola. Up three stone stairs stood a recessed door. Malone climbed, peered in through glass in the door, and saw no evidence of neglect. \"The place looks good.\"\n\n\"Ernst was obsessive.\"\n\nHe tested the knob. Locked.\n\n\"I'd like to get in there,\" she said from the street.\n\nHe glanced around. Twenty feet to their left, the lane ended at the outer wall. Beyond loomed a blue sky dotted with billowy clouds. No one was in sight. He turned back and, with his elbow, popped the glass pane. He then reached inside and released the lock.\n\nStephanie stepped up behind him.\n\n\"After you,\" he said."
            },
            {
                "title": "ABBEY DES FONTAINES",
                "text": "[ 2:00 PM ]\n\nThe seneschal swung the iron grille inward and led the cortege of mourners through the ancient archway. The entrance into the subterranean Hall of Fathers was located within the abbey walls, at the end of a long passageway where one of the oldest buildings butted rock. Fifteen hundred years ago monks first occupied the caverns beyond, living in the sullen recesses. As more and more penitents arrived, buildings were erected. Abbeys tended to either dramatically grow or dwindle, and this one had erupted with a burst of construction that had lasted centuries, continued by the Knights Templar, who quietly took ownership in the late thirteenth century. The Order's mother house\u2014maison chevetaine, as Rule labeled it\u2014had first been located in Jerusalem, then Acre, then Cyprus, finally ending here after the Purge. Eventually, the complex was surrounded with battlement walls and towers and the abbey grew to become one of Europe's largest, set high among the Pyrenees, secluded by both geography and Rule. Its name came from the nearby river, the falls, and an abundance of groundwater. Abbey des Fontaines: abbey of the fountains.\n\nHe made his way down narrow steps chipped from rock. The soles of his canvas sandals were slippery on the moist stone. Where oil torches once provided light, electric sconces now lit the way. Behind him came the thirty-four brothers who'd decided to join him. At the bottom of the stairs, he padded forward until the tunnel opened into a vaulted room. A stone pillar rose from the center, like the trunk of an aging tree.\n\nThe brothers slowly gathered around the oak coffin, which had already been brought inside and laid on a stone plinth. Through clouds of incense came melancholy chants.\n\nThe seneschal stepped forward and the chanting stopped. \"We have come to honor him. Let us pray,\" he said in French.\n\nThey did, then a hymn was sung.\n\n\"Our master led us well. You, who are loyal to his memory, take heart. He would have been proud.\"\n\nA few moments of silence passed.\n\n\"What lies ahead?\" one of the brothers quietly asked.\n\nCaucusing was not proper in the Hall of Fathers, but with apprehension looming he allowed a bending of Rule.\n\n\"Uncertainty,\" he declared. \"Brother de Roquefort is ready to take charge. Those of you who are selected for the conclave will have to work hard to stop him.\"\n\n\"He will be our downfall,\" another brother muttered.\n\n\"I agree,\" the seneschal said. \"He believes that we can somehow avenge seven-hundred-year-old sins. Even if we could, why? We survived.\"\n\n\"His followers have been pressing hard. Those who oppose him will be punished.\"\n\nThe seneschal knew that this was why so few had come to the hall. \"Our ancestors faced many enemies. In the Holy Land they stood before the Saracens and died with honor. Here, they endured torture from the Inquisition. Our master, de Molay, was burned at the stake. Our job is to stay faithful.\" Weak words, he knew, but they had to be said.\n\n\"De Roquefort wants to war with our enemies. One of his followers told me that he even intends to take back the shroud.\"\n\nHe winced. Other radical thinkers had proposed that show of defiance before, but every master had quelled the act. \"We must stop him in conclave. Luckily, he cannot control the selection process.\"\n\n\"He frightens me,\" a brother said, and the quiet that followed signaled that the others agreed.\n\nAfter an hour of prayer the seneschal gave the signal. Four bearers, each dressed in a crimson robe, hoisted the master's coffin.\n\nHe turned and approached two columns of red porphyry between which stood the Door of Gold. The name came not from its composition, but from what was once stored behind it.\n\nForty-three masters lay in their own locoli, beneath a rock ceiling, polished smooth and painted a deep blue, upon which gold stars spangled in the light. The bodies had long ago turned to dust. Only bones remained, encased within ossuaries each bearing a master's name and dates of service. To his right were empty niches, one of which would cradle his master's body for the next year. Only then would a brother return and transfer the bones to an ossuary. The burial practice, which the Order had long employed, belonged to the Jews in the Holy Land at the time of Christ.\n\nThe bearers deposited the coffin into the assigned cavity. A deep tranquility filled the semi-darkness.\n\nThoughts of his friend flashed through the seneschal's mind. The master was the youngest son of a wealthy Belgian merchant. He'd gravitated to the Church for no clear reason\u2014simply something he felt compelled to do. He'd been recruited by one of the Order's many journeymen, brothers stationed around the globe, blessed with an eye for recruits. Monastic life had agreed with the master. And though not of high office, in the conclave after his predecessor died the brothers had all cried, \"Let him be master.\" And so he took the oath. I offer myself to the omnipotent God and to the Virgin Mary for the salvation of my soul and so shall I remain in this holy life all my days until my final breath. The seneschal had made the same pledge.\n\nHe allowed his thoughts to drift back to the Order's beginning\u2014the battle cries of war, groans of brothers wounded and dying, the anguished moans born of burying those who'd not survived the conflict. That had been the way of the Templars. First in, last to leave. Raymond de Roquefort longed for that time. But why? That futility had been proven when Church and State turned on the Templars at the time of the Purge, showing no regard for two hundred years of loyal service. Brothers were burned at the stake, others tortured and maimed for life, and all for simple greed. To the modern world, the Knights Templar were legends. A long-ago memory. No one cared if they existed, so righting any injustice seemed hopeless.\n\nThe dead must stay dead.\n\nHe again glanced around at the stone chests, then dismissed the brothers\u2014save one. His assistant. He needed to speak with him alone. The younger man approached.\n\n\"Tell me, Geoffrey,\" the seneschal said. \"Were you and the master plotting?\"\n\nThe man's dark eyes flashed surprise. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Did the master ask you to do something for him recently? Come now, don't lie to me. He's gone, and I'm here.\" He thought pulling rank would make it easier for him to learn the truth.\n\n\"Yes, Seneschal. I mailed two parcels for the master.\"\n\n\"Tell me of the first.\"\n\n\"Thick and heavy, like a book. I posted it while I was in Avignon, more than a month ago.\"\n\n\"The second?\"\n\n\"Sent Monday, from Perpignan. A letter.\"\n\n\"Who was the letter sent to?\"\n\n\"Ernst Scoville in Rennes-le-Cheteau.\"\n\nThe younger man quickly crossed himself, and the seneschal spied puzzlement and suspicion. \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"The master said you would ask those questions.\"\n\nThe information grabbed his attention.\n\n\"He said that when you did, I should tell you the truth. But he also said for you to be warned. Those who have gone down the path you are about to take have been many, but never has anyone succeeded. He said to wish you well and Godspeed.\"\n\nHis mentor was a brilliant man who clearly knew far more than he'd ever said.\n\n\"He also said that you must finish the quest. It's your destiny. Whether you realize that or not.\"\n\nHe'd heard enough. The empty wooden box from the armoire in the master's chamber was now explained. The book he'd sought inside was gone. The master had sent it away. With a gentle wave of his hand he dismissed the aide. Geoffrey bowed, then hustled toward the Door of Gold.\n\nSomething occurred to him. \"Wait. You never said where the first package, the book, was sent.\"\n\nGeoffrey stopped and turned but said nothing.\n\n\"Why don't you answer?\"\n\n\"It is not right that we speak of this. Not here. With him so near.\" The young man's gaze darted to the coffin.\n\n\"You said he wanted me to know.\"\n\nAnxiety swirled in the eyes staring back at him.\n\n\"Tell me where the book was sent.\" Though he already knew, he needed to hear the words.\n\n\"To America. A woman named Stephanie Nelle.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "RENNES-LE-CHcTEAU",
                "text": "[ 2:30 PM ]\n\nMalone surveyed the inside of Ernst Scoville's modest house. The decor was an eclectic collection of British antiques, twelfth-century Spanish art, and unremarkable French paintings. He estimated that a thousand books surrounded him, most yellowed paperbacks and aged hardcovers, each shelf fronting an exterior wall and meticulously arranged by subject and size. Old newspapers were stacked by year, in chronological order. The same was true for periodicals. Everything dealt with Rennes, Sauniere, French history, the Church, Templars, and Jesus Christ.\n\n\"Seems Scoville was a Bible connoisseur,\" he said, pointing to rows of analysis.\n\n\"He spent his life studying the New Testament. He was Lars's biblical source.\"\n\n\"Doesn't seem anyone has searched this house.\"\n\n\"It could have been done carefully.\"\n\n\"True. But what were they looking for? What are we looking for?\"\n\n\"I don't know. All I know is I talked to Scoville, then two weeks later he's dead.\"\n\n\"What would he have known that was worth killing for?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"Our conversation was pleasant. I honestly thought he was the one who'd sent the journal. He and Lars worked closely. But he knew nothing of the journal being sent to me, though he wanted to read it.\" She stopped her perusal. \"Look at all this stuff. He was obsessed.\" She shook her head. \"Lars and I argued about this very thing for years. I always thought he was wasting his academic abilities. He was a good historian. He should have been making a decent salary at a university, publishing credible research. Instead, he traipsed around the world, chasing shadows.\"\n\n\"He was a bestselling author.\"\n\n\"Only his first book. Money was another of our constant debates.\"\n\n\"You sound like a woman with a lot of regrets.\"\n\n\"Don't you have some? I recall you taking the divorce from Pam hard.\"\n\n\"Nobody likes to fail.\"\n\n\"At least your spouse didn't kill herself.\"\n\nShe had a point.\n\n\"You said on the way over here that Lars believed Sauniere discovered a message inside that glass vial found in the column. Who was the message from?\"\n\n\"In his notebook, Lars wrote that it was probably from one of Sauniere's predecessors, Antoine Bigou, who served as the parish priest for Rennes in the latter part of the eighteenth century, during the time of the French Revolution. I mentioned him in the car. He was the priest to whom Marie d'Hautpoul de Blanchefort told her family secret before dying.\"\n\n\"So Lars thought the family secret was recorded in the vial?\"\n\n\"It's not that simple. There's more to the story. Marie d'Hautpoul married the last marquis de Blanchefort in 1732. The de Blanchefort line has a French history all the way back to the time of the Templars. The family took part in both the Crusades and the Albigensian wars. One ancestor was even master of the Templars in the middle of the twelfth century, and the family controlled the Rennes township and surrounding land for centuries. When the Templars were arrested in 1307, the de Blancheforts sheltered many fugitives from Philip IV's men. It's said, though no one knows for sure, that members of the de Blanchefort family were always part of the Templars after that.\"\n\n\"You sound like Henrik. Do you actually think the Templars are still out there?\"\n\n\"I have no idea. But something the man in the cathedral said keeps coming back. He quoted St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century monk who was instrumental in the Templars' rise to power. I acted like I didn't know what he was talking about. But Lars wrote a lot about him.\"\n\nMalone also recalled the name from the book he'd read in Copenhagen. Bernard de Fontaines was a Cistercian monk who founded a monastery at Clairvaux in the twelfth century. He was a leading thinker and exerted great influence within the Church, becoming a close adviser to Pope Innocent II. His uncle was one of the nine original Templars, and it was Bernard who convinced Innocent II to grant the Templars their unprecedented Rule.\n\n\"The man in the cathedral knew Lars,\" Stephanie said. \"Even intimated that he'd spoken to him about the journal, and that Lars challenged him. The man from the Round Tower also worked for him\u2014he wanted me to know that\u2014and that man screamed the Templar battle cry before jumping.\"\n\n\"Could all be a bluff to rattle you.\"\n\n\"I'm starting to doubt it.\"\n\nHe agreed, especially with what he'd noticed on the way over from the cemetery. But for the moment he kept that to himself.\n\n\"Lars wrote in his journal about the de Blancheforts' secret, one supposedly dating from 1307, the time of the Templars' arrest. He found plenty of references to this supposed family duty in documents from the period, but never any details. Apparently he spent a lot of time in the local monasteries poring through writings. It's Marie's grave, though, the one drawn in the book Thorvaldsen bought, that seems to be the key. Marie died in 1781, but it wasn't until 1791 that Abbe Bigou erected a headstone and marker over her remains. Remember the time. The French Revolution was brewing, and Catholic churches were being destroyed. Bigou was anti-republic, so he fled into Spain in 1793 and died there two years later, never returning to Rennes-le-Cheteau.\"\n\n\"And what did Lars think Bigou hid inside that glass vial?\"\n\n\"Probably not the actual de Blanchefort secret, but rather a method for learning it. In the notebook, Lars wrote that he firmly believed Marie's grave held the key to the secret.\"\n\nHe was beginning to understand. \"Which is why the book was so important.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Sauniere stripped many of the graves in the churchyard, digging up the bones and placing them in a communal ossuary that still stands behind the church. That explains, as Lars wrote, why there are no graves there now dated prior to 1885. The locals raised a loud ruckus about what he was doing, so he was ordered by the town councilors to stop. Marie de Blanchefort's grave was not exhumed, but all of the letters and symbols were chipped away by Sauniere. Unbeknownst to him, there was a sketch of the marker that survived, drawn by a local mayor, Eugene Stfcblein. Lars learned of that drawing but could never find a copy of the book.\"\n\n\"How did Lars know Sauniere defaced the grave?\"\n\n\"There's a record of Maria's grave being vandalized during that time. No one attached any special significance to the act, yet who else but Sauniere could have done it?\"\n\n\"And Lars thought all this leads to a treasure?\"\n\n\"He wrote in his journal that he believed Sauniere deciphered the message Abbe Bigou left behind and that he found the Templar hiding place, telling only his mistress, and she died without telling anyone.\"\n\n\"So what were you going to do? Use the notebook and the book to look for it again?\"\n\n\"I don't know what I would have done. I can only say that something told me to come, buy the book, and look around.\" She paused. \"It also gave me an excuse to come, stay in his house for a while, and remember.\"\n\nThat he understood. \"Why involve Peter Hansen? Why not just buy the book yourself?\"\n\n\"I still work for the U.S. government. I thought Hansen would be insulation. That way my name appears nowhere. Of course, I had no idea all of this was involved.\"\n\nHe considered what she'd said. \"So Lars was following Sauniere's tracks, just as Sauniere followed Bigou.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"And it seems someone else is also following those same tracks.\"\n\nHe surveyed the room again. \"We'll need to go through all this carefully to even have a hope of learning anything.\"\n\nSomething at the front door caught his attention. When they'd entered a stack of mail scattered on the floor had been swept close to the wall, apparently dropped in through the door slot. He walked over and lifted half a dozen envelopes.\n\nStephanie came close.\n\n\"Let me see that one,\" she said.\n\nHe handed her a taupe-colored envelope with black script.\n\n\"The note included with Lars's journal was on that color paper and the writing looks similar.\" She found the page in her shoulder bag and they compared the script.\n\n\"It's identical,\" she said.\n\n\"I'm sure Scoville won't mind.\" He tore open the envelope.\n\nNine sheets of paper came out. On one was a penned message, the ink and writing the same as Stephanie had received.\n\nShe will come. Be forgiving. You have long searched and deserve to see. Together, it may be possible. In Avignon find Claridan. He can point the way. But prend garde l'Ingenieur\u2014\n\nHe read the last line again \u2014prend garde l'Ingenieur. \"Beware the engineer. What does that mean?\"\n\n\"Good question.\"\n\n\"No mention in the journal of any engineer?\"\n\n\"Not a word.\"\n\n\"Be forgiving. Apparently the sender knew you and Scoville didn't care for one another.\"\n\n\"That's unnerving. I wasn't aware anyone knew that.\"\n\nHe examined the eight other pieces of paper. \"These are from Lars's journal. The missing pages.\" He checked the postmark on the envelope. From Perpignan, on the French coast. Five days ago. \"Scoville never received this. It came too late.\"\n\n\"Ernst was murdered, Cotton. There's no doubt now.\"\n\nHe concurred, but something else bothered him. He crept to one of the windows and carefully peered past the sheers.\n\n\"We need to go to Avignon,\" she said.\n\nHe agreed, but as he focused out at the empty street and caught a glimpse of what he knew would be there, he said, \"After we tend to one other matter.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "ABBEY DES FONTAINES",
                "text": "[ 6:00 PM ]\n\nDe Roquefort faced the gathering. Rarely did the brothers don vestments. Rule required that, for the most part, they dress without any superfluity and ostentation. But a conclave demanded formality and each member was expected to wear his garment of rank.\n\nThe sight was impressive. Brother knights sported white woolen mantles atop short white cassocks trimmed with crimson orphrey. Silver stockings sheathed their legs. A white hood covered each head. The red cross patee of four equal arms, wide at the ends, adorned every chest. A crimson belt wrapped the waist, and where once a sword hung now only a sash distinguished knights from artisans, farmers, craftsmen, clerks, priests, and aides, who wore a similar ensemble but in varying shades of green, brown, and black, the clerics distinguished by their white gloves.\n\nOnce a consistory convened Rule required that the marshal chair the proceeding. It was a way to balance the influence of any seneschal who, as second in command, could easily dominate the assembly.\n\n\"My brothers,\" de Roquefort called out.\n\nThe room drained of noise.\n\n\"This is our time of renewal. We must choose a master. Before we begin, let us ask the Lord for His guidance in the hours ahead.\"\n\nIn the glow from the bronze chandeliers, de Roquefort watched as 488 brothers bowed their heads. The call had gone out just after dawn, and most of those who served outside the abbey had made the journey home. They'd assembled in the upper hall of the palais, an enormous round citadel that dated from the sixteenth century, built a hundred feet high, seventy feet in diameter, with walls a dozen feet thick. It once had served as the abbey's last line of defense in case of attack, but it had evolved into an elaborate ceremonial center. Arrow slits were now filled with stained glass, the yellow stucco coated with images of St. Martin, Charlemagne, and the Virgin Mary. The circular room, with two railed galleries above, easily accommodated the nearly five hundred men and was blessed with nearly perfect acoustics.\n\nDe Roquefort raised his head and made eye contact with the other four officers. The commander, who was both the quartermaster and treasurer, was a friend. De Roquefort had spent years cultivating a relationship with that distant man and hoped those efforts would soon reap rewards. The draper, who oversaw the Order's clothes and dress, was clearly ready to champion the marshal's cause. The chaplain, though, who supervised all spiritual aspects, was a problem. De Roquefort had never been able to secure anything tangible from the Venetian besides vague generalizations of the obvious. Then there was the seneschal, who stood holding the beauseant, the Order's revered black-and-white banner. He looked comfortable in his white tunic and cape, the embroidered patch on his left shoulder indicating his high office. The sight turned de Roquefort's stomach. The man had no right to be wearing those precious garments.\n\n\"Brothers, the consistory is convened. It is time to nominate the conclave.\"\n\nThe procedure was deceptively simply. One name was chosen from a cauldron that contained all of the brothers' names. Then that man looked out among the assembled and freely choose another. Back to the cauldron for the next name, then another open selection, with the random pattern continuing until ten were designated. The system melded an element of chance coupled with personal involvement, diminishing greatly any opportunity for organized bias. De Roquefort, as marshal, and the seneschal were automatically included, making twelve. A two-thirds vote was needed to achieve election.\n\nDe Roquefort watched as the selections were made. When finished, four knights, one priest, a clerk, a farmer, two artisans, and a laborer had been chosen. Many were his followers. Yet the cursed randomness had allowed several to be included whose allegiance was, at best, questionable.\n\nThe ten men stepped forward and fanned out in a semi-circle.\n\n\"We have a conclave,\" de Roquefort declared. \"The consistory is over. Let us begin.\"\n\nEvery brother shoved back his hood, signaling that the debate could now start. The conclave was not a secret affair. Instead, the nomination, the discussion, and the vote would take place before the entire brotherhood. But Rule mandated that not a sound was to be uttered by the spectators.\n\nDe Roquefort and the seneschal took their place with the others. De Roquefort was no longer the chair\u2014in the conclave each brother was equal. One of the twelve, an older knight with a thick gray beard, said, \"Our marshal, a man who has guarded this Order for many years, should be our next master. I place him in contention.\"\n\nTwo more gave their consent. With the required three, the nominee was accepted.\n\nAnother of the twelve, one of the artisans, a gunsmith, stepped forward. \"I disagreed with what was done to the master. He was a good man who loved this Order. He should not have been challenged. I place the seneschal in contention.\"\n\nTwo more nodded their assent.\n\nDe Roquefort stood rigid. The battle lines were drawn.\n\nLet the war begin.\n\nThe debate was entering its second hour. Rule set no time limit on the conclave, but required that all in attendance must stand, the idea being that the length of the proceeding could well be a factor of the participants' endurance. No vote had yet been called. Any of the twelve possessed the right, but no one wanted to lose a tally\u2014that was a sign of weakness\u2014so votes were called only when two-thirds seemed assured.\n\n\"I'm not impressed with what you plan,\" one of the conclave members, the priest, said to the seneschal.\n\n\"I was not aware that I possessed a plan.\"\n\n\"You will continue the ways of the master. The ways of the past. True or not true?\"\n\n\"I will remain faithful to my oath, as you should, brother.\"\n\n\"My oath said nothing about weakness,\" the priest said. \"It does not require that I be complacent to a world that languishes in ignorance.\"\n\n\"We have guarded our knowledge for centuries. Why would you have us change?\"\n\nAnother conclave member stepped forward. \"I'm tired of the hypocrisy. It sickens me. We were nearly extinguished by greed and ignorance. It's time we return the favor.\"\n\n\"To what end?\" the seneschal asked. \"What would be gained?\"\n\n\"Justice,\" cried another knight, and several other conclave members agreed.\n\nDe Roquefort decided it was time to join in. \"The Gospels say, Let one who seeks not stop seeking until one finds. When one finds, one will be disturbed. When one is disturbed, one will be amazed and will reign over all.\"\n\nThe seneschal faced him. \"Thomas also said, If your leaders say to you, behold, the kingdom is in the sky, then the birds in the sky will get there before you. If they say to you, it is in the sea, then the fish will get there before you.\"\n\n\"We will never go anywhere if we stay the present course,\" de Roquefort said. Heads bobbed in agreement, but not enough to call for a vote.\n\nThe seneschal hesitated a moment, then said, \"I ask you, Marshal. What are your plans if you achieve election? Can you tell us? Or do you do as Jesus, disclosing your mysteries only to those worthy of the mysteries, never letting the left hand know what the right is doing?\"\n\nHe welcomed the opportunity to tell the brotherhood what he envisioned. \"Jesus also said, There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.\"\n\n\"Then what would you have us do?\"\n\nHe surveyed the room, his eyes traveling from floor to gallery. This was his moment. \"Think back. To the Beginning. When thousands of brothers took the oath. These were brave men, who conquered the Holy Land. In the Chronicles, a tale is told of one garrison who lost out to the Saracens. After the battle, two hundred of those knights were offered their lives if they would simply abandon Christ and join Islam. Each one chose to kneel before the Muslims and lose his head. That is our heritage. The Crusades were our crusade.\"\n\nHe hesitated a moment for effect.\n\n\"Which is what makes Friday, October 13, 1307\u2014a day so infamous, so despicable, that Western civilization continues to label it with bad luck\u2014so difficult to accept. Thousands of our brothers were wrongfully arrested. One day they were the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, the epitome of everything good, willing to die for their Church, their pope, their God. The next day they were accused heretics. And to what charge? That they spat upon the Cross, exchanged obscene kisses, held secret meetings, adored a cat, practiced sodomy, venerated some bearded male head.\" He paused. \"Not a word of truth to any of it, yet our brothers were tortured and many succumbed, confessing to falsehoods. One hundred and twenty burned at the stake.\"\n\nHe paused again.\n\n\"Our legacy is one of shame, and we are recorded in history with nothing but suspicion.\"\n\n\"And what would you tell the world?\" the seneschal asked in a calm tone.\n\n\"The truth.\"\n\n\"And why would they believe you?\"\n\n\"They will have no choice,\" he said.\n\n\"And why is that?\"\n\n\"I will have proof.\"\n\n\"Have you located our Great Devise?\"\n\nThe seneschal was pressing his one weak point, but he could not show any weakness. \"It's within my grasp.\"\n\nGasps came from the gallery.\n\nThe seneschal's face remained rigid. \"You're saying that you have found our lost archives after seven centuries. Have you also found our treasury that eluded Philip the Fair?\"\n\n\"That, too, is within my grasp.\"\n\n\"Bold words, Marshal.\"\n\nHe stared out at the brothers. \"I've been searching for a decade. The clues are difficult, but I'll soon possess proof the world cannot deny. Whether any minds change is irrelevant. Rather, the victory is gained by proving that our brothers were not heretics. Instead, each and every one of them was a saint.\"\n\nApplause erupted from the crowd. De Roquefort seized the moment. \"The Roman Church disbanded us, claimed we were idol worshipers, but the Church itself venerates its own idols with great pageantry.\" He paused, then in a loud voice he said, \"I will take back the shroud.\"\n\nMore applause. Louder. Sustained. A violation of Rule, but no one seemed to care.\n\n\"The Church has no right to our shroud,\" de Roquefort yelled over the clapping. \"Our master, Jacques de Molay, was tortured, brutalized, then burned at the stake. And his crime? Being a loyal servant to his God and his pope. His legacy is not their legacy. It's our legacy. We have the means to accomplish that goal. So shall it be, under my tenure.\"\n\nThe seneschal handed the beauseant to the man beside him, stepped close to de Roquefort, and waited for the applause to subside. \"What of those who do not believe as you do?\"\n\n\"Whoever seeks will find, whoever knocks will be let in.\"\n\n\"And for those who choose not to?\"\n\n\"The Gospel is clear on that, too. Woe to you on whom the evil demons act.\"\n\n\"You are a dangerous man.\"\n\n\"No, Seneschal, you are the danger. You came to us late and with a weak heart. You have no conception of our needs, only what you and your master thought to be our needs. I have given my life to this Order. No one save you has ever challenged my ability. I have always adhered to the ideal that I would rather break than bend.\" He turned from his opponent and motioned out to the conclave. \"Enough. I call for a vote.\"\n\nRule dictated that debate was over.\n\n\"I shall vote first,\" de Roquefort said. \"For myself. All those who agree, so say.\"\n\nHe watched as the ten remaining men considered their decision. They'd stayed silent during his confrontation with the seneschal, but each member had listened with an intensity that signaled comprehension. Dr. Roquefort's eyes strafed the group and zeroed tight on the few he thought absolutely loyal.\n\nHands started to rise.\n\nOne. Three. Four. Six."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "He had his two-thirds, but he wanted more, so he waited before declaring victory.\n\nAll ten voted for him.\n\nThe room erupted in cheer.\n\nIn ancient times he would have been swept off his feet and carried to the chapel, where a mass would be said in his honor. A celebration would later occur, one of the rare times the Order engaged in merriment. But that happened no longer. Instead, men began to chant his name and brothers, who otherwise existed in a world devoid of emotion, showed their approval by clapping. The applause turned into beauseant\u2014 and the word reverberated throughout the hall.\n\nBe glorious.\n\nAs the chant continued he stared at the seneschal, who still stood beside him. Their eyes met and, through his gaze, he made it known that not only had the master's chosen successor lost the fight, but the loser was now in mortal danger."
            },
            {
                "title": "RENNES-LE-CHcTEAU",
                "text": "[ 9:30 PM ]\n\nSTEPHANIE WANDERED AROUND HER DEAD HUSBAND'S HOUSE.\n\nThe look was typical for the region. Sturdy timber floors, beam ceilings, stone fireplace, simple pine furniture. Not much space, but enough with two bedrooms, a den, a bath, kitchen, and a workshop. Lars had loved wood turning and earlier she'd noticed that his lathes, skews, chisels, and gouges were all still there, each tool hanging from a Peg-Board and frosted with a thin layer of dust. He'd been talented with the lathe. She still possessed bowls, boxes, and candlesticks he'd crafted from the local trees.\n\nDuring their marriage she'd visited only a few times. She and Mark lived in Washington, then Atlanta. Lars stayed mainly in Europe, the last decade here in Rennes. Neither of them ever violated the other's space without permission. Though they may not have agreed on most things, they were always civil. Maybe too much so, she'd many times thought.\n\nShe'd always believed Lars had bought the house with royalties earned from his first book, but now she knew that Henrik Thorvaldsen had aided in the purchase. Which was so like Lars. He'd possessed little regard for money, spending all of what he earned on travel and his obsessions, the task of making sure the family bills were paid left to her. She'd only recently satisfied a loan used to finance Mark's college and graduate school. Her son had several times offered to assume the debt, especially once they were estranged, but she'd always refused. A parent's job was to educate their child, and she took her job seriously. Perhaps too much, she'd come to believe.\n\nShe and Lars had not spoken at all in the months before his death. Their last encounter was a bad one, another argument about money, responsibility, family. Her attempt at defending him yesterday with Henrik Thorvaldsen had sounded hollow, but she never realized that anyone knew the truth about her marital estrangement. Apparently, though, Thorvaldsen did. Perhaps he and Lars had been close. Unfortunately, she'd never know. That was the thing about suicide\u2014ending one person's suffering only prolonged the agony of those left behind. She so wished to be rid of the sick feeling rooted in the pit of her stomach. The pain of failure, a writer once called it. And she agreed.\n\nShe finished her tour and entered the den, taking a seat across from Malone, who'd had been reading Lars's journal since dinner.\n\n\"Your husband was a meticulous researcher,\" he said.\n\n\"A lot of it is cryptic\u2014much like the man.\"\n\nHe seemed to catch her frustration. \"You want to tell me why you feel responsible for his suicide?\"\n\nShe decided to allow his intrusion. She needed to talk about it. \"I don't feel responsible, I just feel part of it. Both of us were proud. Stubborn, too. I was with Justice, Mark was grown, and there was talk of giving me my own division, so I focused on what I thought was important. Lars did the same. Unfortunately, neither one of us appreciated the other.\"\n\n\"Easy to see that now, years later. Impossible to know then.\"\n\n\"But that's the problem, Cotton. I'm here. He's not.\" She was ill at ease talking about herself, but things needed to be said. \"Lars was a gifted writer and a good researcher. All that stuff I told you earlier about Sauniere and this town? How interesting it is? If I had paid it any mind while he was alive, maybe he'd still be here.\" She hesitated. \"He was such a calm man. Never raised his voice. Never a bad word. Silence was his weapon. He could go weeks and never say a word. It infuriated me.\"\n\n\"Now, that I understand.\" And he added a smile.\n\n\"I know. My quick temper. Lars could never deal with it, either. Finally he and I decided that the best thing was for him to live his life and me mine. Neither of us wanted to divorce.\"\n\n\"Which says a lot about what he thought of you. Deep down.\"\n\n\"I never saw that. All I saw was Mark in the middle. He was drawn to Lars. I have a hard time with emotion. Lars wasn't like that. And Mark possessed his father's religious curiosity. They were so much alike. My son chose his father over me, but I forced that choice. Thorvaldsen was right. For someone so careful with work, I was inept at handling my own life. Before Mark was killed, I hadn't spoken to him in three years.\" The pain from that reality rocked her soul. \"Can you imagine, Cotton? My son and I went three years without saying a word.\"\n\n\"What caused the split?\"\n\n\"He took his father's side, so I went my way and they went theirs. Mark lived here in France. I stayed in America. After a while it became easy to ignore him. Don't ever let that happen to you and Gary. Do whatever you have to, but never let that happen.\"\n\n\"I just moved four thousand miles away.\"\n\n\"But your son adores you. Those miles mean little.\"\n\n\"I've wondered plenty if I did the right thing.\"\n\n\"You have to live your life, Cotton. Your way. Your son seems to respect that, even though he's young. Mine was much older and far tougher on me.\"\n\nHe glanced at his watch. \"Sun's been down twenty minutes. Almost time.\"\n\n\"When did you first notice we were being tailed?\"\n\n\"Right after we arrived. Two men. Both similar to those from the cathedral. They followed us to the cemetery, then around town. They're outside, right now.\"\n\n\"No danger they'll come in?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"They're here to watch.\"\n\n\"I understand now why you got out of the Billet. The anxiety. It's tough. You can never let your guard down. You were right back in Copenhagen. I'm no field agent.\"\n\n\"The trouble for me came when I started to like the rush. That's what'll get you killed.\"\n\n\"We all live a relatively safe existence. But to have people tracing your every move, intent on killing you? I can see how that would wear on you. Eventually, you have to escape from it.\"\n\n\"Training helps with the apprehension. You learn how to deal with uncertainty. But you were never trained.\" He smiled. \"You're just in charge.\"\n\n\"I hope you know that I never intended involving you.\"\n\n\"You made that point quite clear.\"\n\n\"But I'm glad you're here.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't have missed it for the world.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"You were the best agent I ever had.\"\n\n\"I was just the luckiest. And I had enough sense to say when.\"\n\n\"Peter Hansen and Ernst Scoville were both murdered.\" She paused and finally voiced what she'd come to believe. \"Maybe Lars, too. The man in the cathedral wanted me to know that. His way of sending a message.\"\n\n\"That's a big leap in logic.\"\n\n\"I know. No proof. But I have a feeling, and though I may not be a field agent, I've come to trust my feelings. Still, like I used to tell you, no conclusions based on assumptions. Get the facts. This whole thing is bizarre.\"\n\n\"Tell me about it. Knights Templars. Secrets on gravestones. Priests finding lost treasure.\"\n\nShe glanced over at a photo of Mark on the side table, taken a few months before he died. Lars was everywhere in the young man's vibrant face. The same cleft chin, bright eyes, and swarthy skin. Why had she let things become so bad?\n\n\"Strange that's here,\" Malone said, seeing her interest.\n\n\"I set it there the last time I came. Five years ago. Just after the avalanche.\" Hard to believe her only child had been dead five years. Children shouldn't die thinking their parents had not loved them. Unlike with her estranged husband who possessed a grave, Mark lay buried under tons of Pyrenean snow thirty miles to the south. \"I have to finish this,\" she muttered to the picture, her voice faltering.\n\n\"I'm still not sure what this is.\"\n\nNeither was she.\n\nMalone gestured with the journal. \"At least we know where to find Claridon in Avignon, as the letter to Ernst Scoville instructed. He's Royce Claridon. There's a notation and address in the journal. Lars and he were friends.\"\n\n\"I was wondering when you'd find that.\"\n\n\"Anything else I missed?\"\n\n\"Hard to say what's important. There's a lot in there.\"\n\n\"You have to stop lying to me.\"\n\nShe'd been waiting for the scolding. \"I know.\"\n\n\"I can't help if you hold back.\"\n\nShe understood. \"What about the missing pages sent to Scoville? Anything there?\"\n\n\"You tell me.\" And he handed her the eight sheets.\n\nShe decided a little thinking would take her mind off Lars and Mark, so she scanned the handwritten paragraphs. Most of it was meaningless, but there were parts that ripped at her heart.\n\n...Sauniere obviously cared for his mistress. She came to him when her family moved to Rennes. Her father and brother were skilled artisans and her mother maintained the parish presbytery. This was in 1892, a year after much was found by Sauniere. When her family moved from Rennes to take jobs in a nearby factory, she stayed with Sauniere and remained with him until he died, two decades later. At some point he titled every single thing he acquired in her name, which shows the unquestioning trust he placed in her. She was totally devoted to him, keeping his secrets for 36 years after he died. I envy Sauniere. He was a man who knew the unconditional love of a woman and returned that love with unconditional trust and respect. He was by all accounts a difficult man to please, a man driven to accomplish something for which people would remember him. His garish creation in the Church of Mary Magdalene seems his legacy. There is no record of his lover ever once voicing any opposition to what he was doing. All accounts say she was a devoted woman who supported her benefactor in all that he did. Surely there were some disagreements but, in the end, she stood by Sauniere until the day he died and then after, for nearly four decades. There is much to be said for devotion. A man can accomplish much when the woman he loves supports him, even if she believes that what he does is foolishness. Surely, Sauniere's mistress must have shook her head more than once at the absurdity of his creations. Both the Villa Bethanie and the Tour Magdala are ridiculous for their time. But she never let a drop of water fall on his fire. She cared for him enough to let him be what he needed to be, and that result is being seen today by the thousands who come to Rennes each year. Such is Sauniere's legacy. Hers is that his still exists.\n\n\"Why did you give me this to read?\" she said to Malone when she finished.\n\n\"You needed to.\"\n\nWhere had all these ghosts come from? Rennes-le-Cheteau might hold no treasure, but this place harbored demons intent on tormenting her.\n\n\"When I received that journal in the mail and read it, I realized that I had not been fair to Lars or Mark. They believed in what they sought, just as I believed in my job. Mark would say I was nothing but negative.\" She paused, hoping the spirits were listening. \"I knew when I saw that notebook again I'd been wrong. Whatever Lars was after was important to him, so it should have been important to me. That's really why I came, Cotton. I owe it to them.\" She looked over at him with tired eyes. \"God knows I owed it to them. I just never realized the stakes were so high.\"\n\nHe glanced at his watch again, then stared toward the blackened windows. \"Time to find out just how high. You going to be all right here?\"\n\nShe grabbed hold of herself and nodded. \"I'll keep mine occupied. You handle the other.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "Malone left the house through the front door, making no attempt to hide his departure. The two men he'd noticed earlier were stationed at the far end of the street, around a corner near the town wall where they could see Lars Nelle's residence. Their problem was, in order to follow him, they would have to traverse the same deserted street. Amateurs. Professionals would have split up. One at each end, ready to move in any direction. Just like in Roskilde, this conclusion lessened his apprehension. But he remained on edge, his senses alert, wondering who was so interested in what Stephanie was doing.\n\nCould it really be the modern-day Knights Templar?\n\nBack inside, Stephanie's lamenting had made him think of Gary. The death of a child seemed unspeakable. He could not imagine her grief. Maybe after he retired he should have stayed in Georgia, but Gary would not hear of that. Don't worry about me, his son had said. I'll come see you. Fourteen years old and the boy possessed such a level head. Still, the decision haunted him, especially now that he was once again risking his neck for somebody else's cause. His own father, though, had been the same way\u2014dying when the submarine he commanded sank in the North Atlantic during a training exercise. Malone was ten and he remembered his mother taking the death hard. At the memorial service, she'd even refused the folded flag offered her by the honor guard. But he'd accepted it and, ever since, the red, white, and blue bundle had stayed with him. With no grave to visit, that flag was his only physical reminder of the man he barely knew.\n\nHe came to the end of the street. He didn't have to glance back to know that one of the men was following him, the other staying with Stephanie at the house.\n\nHe turned left and headed toward Sauniere's domain.\n\nRennes was clearly not a night place. Bolted doors and shuttered windows lined the way. The restaurant, bookstore, and kiosks were all closed. Darkness sheathed the lane in deep shadow. The wind murmured beyond the walls like a soul in pain. The scene was like something from Dumas, as if life here spoke only in whispers.\n\nHe paraded up the incline toward the church. The Villa Bethanie and presbytery were shut tight, the tree garden beyond illuminated by a half-moon broken by clouds racing past overhead.\n\nThe gate to the churchyard remained open, as Stephanie said it would be. He headed straight for it, knowing that his tail would come, too. Just inside, he used the thickening darkness to slip behind a huge elm. He peered back and saw his pursuer enter the cemetery, the pace quickening. As the man passed the tree, Malone pounced and jammed a fist into the other man's abdomen. He was relieved to feel no body armor. He pounded another blow across the jaw, sending his pursuer to the ground, then yanked him up.\n\nThe younger man was short, muscular, and clean-shaven with close-cropped light hair. He was dazed as Malone patted him down, quickly finding the bulge of a weapon. He reached beneath the man's jacket and withdrew a pistol. A Beretta Bobcat. Italian made. A tiny semi-automatic, designed as a last-resort backup. He'd once carried one himself. He brought the barrel to the man's neck and pressed his opponent firm against the tree.\n\n\"The name of your employer, please.\"\n\nNo response.\n\n\"You understand English?\"\n\nThe man shook his head, as he continued to suck air and orient himself.\n\n\"Since you understood my question, do you comprehend this?\" He cocked the hammer on the gun.\n\nA stiffening signaled that the younger man registered the message.\n\n\"Your employer.\"\n\nA shot rang out and a bullet thudded into the tree trunk just above their heads. Malone whirled to see a silhouetted figure standing a hundred feet away, perched where the belvedere met the cemetery wall, rifle in hand.\n\nAnother shot and a bullet skipped off the ground within inches of his feet. He released his hold and his original pursuer bolted out of the parish close.\n\nBut he was more concerned now with the shooter.\n\nHe saw the figure abandon the terrace, disappearing back onto the belvedere. A new energy swept through him. Gun in hand, he fled the cemetery and ran toward a narrow passageway between the Villa Bethanie and the church. He recalled the geography from earlier. The tree garden lay beyond, enclosed by an elevated belvedere that wrapped U-shaped toward the Tour Magdala.\n\nHe rushed into the garden and saw the figure running across the belvedere. The only way up was a stone staircase. He raced for it and skipped up three steps at a time. On top the thin air slashed his lungs and the stiff wind attacked him without interference, molesting his body and slowing his progress.\n\nHe saw his assailant head straight for the Tour Magdala. He thought about trying a shot, but a sudden gust snatched at him, as if warning against it. He wondered where the attacker was headed. No other staircase led down, and the Magdala was surely locked for the night. To his left stretched a wrought-iron railing, beyond which were trees and a ten-foot drop to the garden. To his right, beyond a low stone wall, was a fifteen-hundred-foot drop. At some point, he was going to come face-to-face with whomever.\n\nHe rounded the terrace, passed through an iron glasshouse, and saw the form enter the Tour Magdala.\n\nHe stopped.\n\nHe'd not expected that.\n\nHe recalled what Stephanie had said about the building's geometry. About eighteen feet square, with a round turret that housed a winding staircase leading up to a crenellated rooftop. Sauniere had once housed his private library inside.\n\nHe decided he had no choice. He trotted to the door, saw it was cocked open, and positioned himself to one side. He kicked the heavy wooden slab inward and waited for a shot.\n\nNothing came.\n\nHe risked a glance and saw that the room was empty. Windows filled two walls. No furniture. No books. Only bare wooden cases and two upholstered benches. A brick fireplace sat dark. Then he realized.\n\nThe roof.\n\nHe approached the stone staircase. The steps were short and narrow. He climbed the clockwise spiral to a steel door and tested it. No movement. He pushed harder. The portal was locked from the outside.\n\nThe door below slammed shut.\n\nHe descended the staircase and discovered that the only other exit was now locked from the outside, too. He stepped to a pair of fixed-pane windows that overlooked the tree garden and saw the black form leap from the terrace, grab hold of a thick limb, then drop to the ground with a surprising agility. The figure ran through the trees and headed for the car park about thirty yards away, the same one where he'd left the Peugeot earlier.\n\nHe stepped back and fired three bullets into the left side of the double windows. The leaded glass shattered, then broke away. He rushed forward and used the gun to clear away the shards. He hopped onto the bench below the sill and squeezed himself through the opening. The drop down was only about six feet. He jumped, then ran toward the car park.\n\nExiting the garden, he heard the rev of an engine and saw the black form atop a motorcycle. The driver whipped the cycle around and avoided the only street leading out of the car park, roaring down one of the side passages toward the houses.\n\nHe quickly decided to use the village's compactness to his advantage and bolted left, rushing down a short lane and turning at the main rue. A downward incline helped, and he heard the motorcycle approaching from his right. There would be but one opportunity, so he raised the gun and slowed his pace.\n\nAs the cyclist popped out of the alley, he fired twice.\n\nOne shot missed, but the other caught the frame in a burst of spark, then ricocheted off.\n\nThe motorcycle roared out the town's gate.\n\nLights began to spring on. Gunshots were surely a strange sound here. He stuffed the gun under his jacket, retreated down another alley, and made his way back toward Lars Nelle's house. He could hear voices behind him. People were coming out to investigate. In a few moments he would be back inside and safe. He doubted that the other two men were still around\u2014or if they were, that they'd be a problem.\n\nBut one thing nagged at him.\n\nHe'd caught a suggestion of it as he'd watched the form leap from the terrace, then race away. Something in the movement.\n\nHard to tell for sure, but enough.\n\nHis assailant had been a woman."
            },
            {
                "title": "ABBEY DES FONTAINES",
                "text": "[ 10:00 PM ]\n\nThe seneschal found Geoffrey. He'd been looking for his assistant since the conclave dissolved and finally learned that the younger man had retired to one of the minor chapels in the north wing, beyond the library, one of many places of repose the abbey offered.\n\nHe entered the room lit only by candles and saw Geoffrey lying on the floor. Brothers many times laid themselves before the altar of God. During induction the act showed humility, a demonstration of insignificance in the face of heaven, and its continued use served as a reminder.\n\n\"We need to talk,\" he quietly said.\n\nHis young associate remained still for a few moments, then slowly came to his knees, crossed himself, and stood.\n\n\"Tell me precisely what you and the master were doing.\" He was not in the mood for coyness, and thankfully Geoffrey seemed calmer than earlier in the Hall of Fathers.\n\n\"He wanted to make sure those two parcels were posted in the mail.\"\n\n\"He say why?\"\n\n\"Why would he? He was the master. I'm but a minor brother.\"\n\n\"He apparently trusted you enough to enlist your aid.\"\n\n\"He said you would resent that.\"\n\n\"I'm not that petty.\" He could sense that the man knew more. \"Tell me.\"\n\n\"I cannot say.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"The master instructed me to answer the question about the mailings. But I am not to say anything further... until more happens.\"\n\n\"Geoffrey, what more needs to happen? De Roquefort is in charge. You and I are practically alone. Brothers are aligning themselves with de Roquefort. What else needs to occur?\"\n\n\"That's not for me to decide.\"\n\n\"De Roquefort cannot succeed without the Great Devise. You heard the reaction in the conclave. The brothers will desert him if he fails to deliver. Is that what you and the master were plotting about? Did the master know more than he said to me?\"\n\nGeoffrey went silent, and the seneschal suddenly detected a maturity in his aide that he'd never noticed before. \"I'm ashamed to say that the master told me the marshal would defeat you in the conclave.\"\n\n\"What else did he say?\"\n\n\"Nothing I can reveal at the moment.\"\n\nThe evasiveness was irritating. \"Our master was brilliant. As you say, he foresaw what happened. He apparently thought ahead enough to make you his oracle. Tell me, what am I to do?\" The plea in his voice could not be disguised.\n\n\"He said for me to answer that inquiry with what Jesus said. Whoever does not hate their father and mother as I do cannot be my disciple.\"\n\nThe words were from the Gospel of Thomas. But what did they mean in this context? He thought of what else Thomas wrote. Whoever does not love their father and mother as I do cannot be my disciple.\n\n\"He also wanted me to remind you that Jesus said, Let one who seeks not stop seeking until one finds\u2014\"\n\n\"When one finds, one will be disturbed. When one is disturbed, one will be amazed, and will reign over all,\" he quickly finished. \"Was everything he said a riddle?\"\n\nGeoffrey did not answer. The younger man was of a much lesser degree than the seneschal, his path to knowledge only just beginning. Order membership was a steady progression toward full Gnosticism\u2014a journey that would normally require three years. Geoffrey had only come to the abbey eighteen months ago from the Jesuit home in Normandy, abandoned as a child and raised by the monks. The master had immediately noticed him and requested that he be included on the executive staff. The seneschal had wondered about that hasty decision, but the old man had merely smiled and said, \"No different than I did with you.\"\n\nHe placed a hand on his aide's shoulder. \"For the master to enlist your help, he surely thought highly of your abilities.\"\n\nA resolute look came to the pale face. \"And I will not fail him.\"\n\nBrothers took differing paths. Some veered toward administration. Others became artisans. Many were associated with the abbey's self-sufficiency as craftsmen or farmers. A few devoted themselves solely to religion. Only about a third were selected as knights. Geoffrey was in line to become a knight sometime within the next five years, depending on his progress. He'd already served his apprenticeship and completed the required elementary training. A year of Scriptures lay ahead before the first fidelity oath could be administered. Such a shame, the seneschal thought, that he could well lose all he'd worked to achieve.\n\n\"Seneschal, what of the Great Devise? Can it be found, as the marshal said?\"\n\n\"That's our one salvation. De Roquefort does not have it, but probably thinks we know. Do we?\"\n\n\"The master spoke of it.\" The words came quickly, as if they were not to be said.\n\nHe waited for more.\n\n\"He told me that a man named Lars Nelle came the closest. He said Nelle's path was the right one.\" Geoffrey's pallid face worked with a nervous excitement.\n\nHe and the master had many times discussed the Great Devise. Its origins were from a time before 1307, but its hiding place after the Purge was a way to deprive Philip IV of the Templars' wealth and knowledge. In the months prior to October 13, Jacques de Molay hid all that the Order cherished. Unfortunately, no mention of its location was recorded, and the Black Death eventually wiped out every soul who knew anything of its whereabouts. The only clue came from a passage noted in the Chronicles for June 4, 1307. Where is it best to hide a pebble? Subsequent masters tried to answer that inquiry and searched until the effort was deemed pointless. But only in the nineteenth century had new clues come to light\u2014not from the Order, but from two parish priests in Rennes-le-Cheteau. Abbes Antoine Bigou and Berenger Sauniere. The seneschal knew that Lars Nelle had resurrected their astonishing tale, writing a book in the 1970s that told the world about the tiny French village and its supposed ancient mystic. Now to learn that he came the closest, that his was the right path, seemed almost surreal.\n\nThe seneschal was about to inquire further when footfalls sounded. He turned as four brother knights, men he knew, marched into the chapel. De Roquefort followed them inside, now dressed in the master's white cassock.\n\n\"Plotting, Seneschal?\" de Roquefort asked, the eyes beaming.\n\n\"Not anymore.\" He wondered about the show of force. \"Need an audience?\"\n\n\"They're here for your benefit. Though I am hoping this can be done in a civilized manner. You are under arrest.\"\n\n\"And the charge?\" he asked, showing not a hint of concern.\n\n\"Violation of your oath.\"\n\n\"You intend to explain yourself?\"\n\n\"In the proper forum. These brothers shall accompany you to your chambers, where you will stay the night. Tomorrow, I will find more appropriate accommodations. Your replacement will, by then, need your chamber.\"\n\n\"That's kind of you.\"\n\n\"I thought so. But be happy. A penitent cell would have been your home long ago.\"\n\nHe knew about them. Nothing more than boxes of iron, too small for standing or lying. Instead, the prisoner had to crouch, and no food or water only added to the agony. \"You plan to resurrect the cell's use?\"\n\nHe saw de Roquefort did not appreciate the challenge, but the Frenchman only smiled. Seldom had this demon ever relaxed into a grin. \"My followers, unlike yours, are loyal to their oaths. There's no need for such measures.\"\n\n\"I almost think you believe that.\"\n\n\"You see, that insolence is the very reason I opposed you. Those of us trained in the discipline of our devotion would never speak to one another in such a disrespectful manner. But men, like you, who come from the secular world think arrogance appropriate.\"\n\n\"And denying our master his due accord was showing respect?\"\n\n\"That was the price paid for his arrogance.\"\n\n\"He was raised like you.\"\n\n\"Which shows we, too, are capable of error.\"\n\nHe was tiring of de Roquefort, so he collected himself and said, \"I demand my right to a tribunal.\"\n\n\"Which you shall have. In the meantime you will be confined.\"\n\nDe Roquefort motioned. The four brothers stepped forward, and though he was frightened he decided to go with dignity.\n\nHe left the chapel, surrounded by his guards, but at the doorway he hesitated a moment and glanced back, catching a final glimpse of Geoffrey. The younger man had stood silent as he and de Roquefort sparred. The new master was characteristically unconcerned with someone so junior. It would be many years before Geoffrey could pose any threat. Yet the seneschal wondered.\n\nNot a hint of fear, shame, or apprehension clouded Geoffrey's face.\n\nInstead, the look was one of intense resolve."
            },
            {
                "title": "RENNES-LE-CHcTEAU Saturday, JUNE 24",
                "text": "[ 9:30 AM ]\n\nMalone squeezed his tall frame into the peugeot. Stephanie was already inside the car.\n\n\"See anybody?\" she asked.\n\n\"Our two friends from last night are back. Resilient suckers.\"\n\n\"No sign of motorcycle girl?\"\n\nHe'd told Stephanie about his suspicions. \"I wouldn't expect that.\"\n\n\"Where are the two amigos?\"\n\n\"In a crimson Renault at the far end, beyond the water tower. Don't turn your head. Let's not spook 'em.\"\n\nHe adjusted the outside mirror so he could see the Renault. Already tour buses and about a dozen cars filled the sandy car park. The clear weather from yesterday was gone, the sky now smeared with pewter storm clouds. Rain was on the way, and soon. They were headed to Avignon, about ninety miles away, to find Royce Claridon. Malone had already checked the map and decided on the best route to lose any tail.\n\nHe cranked the car, and they cruised out of the village. Once beyond the city gate and on the winding path down to ground level, he noticed the Renault staying a discreet distance back.\n\n\"How do you plan to lose them?\"\n\nHe smiled. \"The old-fashioned way.\"\n\n\"Always plan ahead, right?\"\n\n\"Somebody I once worked for taught me that.\"\n\nThey found highway D118 and headed north. The map indicated a distance of twenty miles to A61, the tolled superhighway just south of Carcassonne that led northeast to Avignon. About six miles ahead, at Limoux, the highway forked, one route crossing the Aude River into Limoux, the other continuing north. He decided that would be his opportunity.\n\nRain started to fall. Light at first, then heavy.\n\nHe flipped on the front and rear wipers. The road ahead on both sides was clear of cars. Saturday morning had apparently kept traffic at home.\n\nThe Renault, its fog lamps piercing the rain, matched his speed and then some. He watched in his rearview mirror as the Renault passed the car directly behind him, then sped ahead, paralleling the Peugeot in the opposite lane.\n\nThe passenger window descended and a gun appeared.\n\n\"Hold on,\" he told Stephanie.\n\nHe floored the accelerator and whipped the car tight around a curve. The Renault lost speed and fell in behind.\n\n\"Seems there's been a change in plan. Our shadows have turned aggressive. Why don't you stay down on the floorboard.\"\n\n\"I'm a big girl. Just drive.\"\n\nHe slid around another curve and the Renault closed distance. Holding the tires to the highway was tough. The pavement was coated in a thick veil of condensation and becoming wetter by the second. No yellow lines defined anything and the asphalt's edge was partially obscured by puddles that could easily hydroplane the car.\n\nA bullet shattered the rear windshield.\n\nThe tempered glass did not explode, but he doubted if it could take another hit. He started zigzagging, guessing where the pavement ended on each side. He spotted a car approaching in the opposite lane and returned to his own.\n\n\"Can you fire a gun?\" he asked, not taking his eyes off the road.\n\n\"Where is it?\"\n\n\"Under the seat. I took it off the guy last night. There's a full clip. Make 'em count. I need a little space from those guys behind us.\"\n\nShe found the pistol and lowered her window. He saw her reach out, aim toward the rear, and fire five rounds.\n\nThe shots had the desired effect. The Renault backed off, but did not abort its pursuit. He fishtailed around another curve, working the brake and accelerator as years ago he'd been trained to do.\n\nEnough of being the fox.\n\nHe swerved into the southbound lane and slammed on brakes. Tires grabbed the wet pavement with a screech. The Renault shot past in the northbound lane. He released the brake, downshifted to second, then plunged the accelerator to the mat.\n\nThe tires spun, then shot the car forward.\n\nHe wound the gearshift through to fifth.\n\nThe Renault was now ahead of him. He sent more gas to the engine. Sixty. Sixty-five. Seventy miles an hour. The whole thing was curiously invigorating. He hadn't seen this kind of action in a while.\n\nHe swerved into the southbound lane and came parallel to the Renault.\n\nBoth cars were now doing seventy-five miles an hour on a relatively straight part of highway. Suddenly they crested a knoll and arched off the pavement, tires slamming hard as rubber re-found the soaked asphalt. His body jerked forward then back, rattling his brain, his shoulder harness holding him in place.\n\n\"That was fun,\" Stephanie said.\n\nTo their left and right stretched green fields, the countryside a sea of lavender, asparagus, and grapes. The Renault roared up beside him. He stole another glance to his right. One of the short-hairs was climbing out of the passenger-side window, curling himself up and over the roof for a clear shot.\n\n\"Shoot the tires,\" he told Stephanie.\n\nShe was preparing to fire when he saw a transport truck ahead, filling the Renault's northbound lane. He'd driven enough of Europe's two-laned highways to know that, unlike in America where trucks drove with reckless abandon, here they moved at a snail's pace. He'd been hoping to find one closer to Limoux, but opportunities had to be taken when offered. The truck was no more than a couple of hundred yards ahead. They would be on it in a moment, and luckily his lane ahead was clear.\n\n\"Wait,\" he said to her.\n\nHe kept his car parallel and did not allow the Renault a way out. The other driver would have to either brake, crash into the truck, or veer right into the open field. He hoped the truck stayed put in the northbound lane, otherwise he'd have no choice but to find a field himself.\n\nThe other driver apparently realized his three options and veered off the pavement.\n\nHe sped past the truck down the open road. A glance in his mirror confirmed that the Renault was mired in the tawny mud.\n\nHe swerved back into the northbound lane, relaxed a bit, but kept his speed, eventually leaving the main highway, as planned, at Limoux.\n\nThey arrived in Avignon a little after eleven AM. The rain had stopped fifty miles back and bright sunshine flooded the wooded terrain, the rolling hills green and gold, like a page from an old manuscript. A turreted medieval wall enclosed the city, which had once served as the capital of Christendom for nearly a hundred years. Malone maneuvered the Peugeot through a maze of narrow streets into an underground parking lot.\n\nThey climbed stairs to ground level and he immediately noticed Romanesque churches, framed by sunbaked dwellings, the roofs and walls all the tint of dirty sand, the feel clearly Italian. Being the weekend tourists were out by the thousands, the colorful awnings and plane trees in the Place de l'Horloge shading a boisterous lunch crowd.\n\nThe address from Lars Nelle's notebook led them down one of the many rues. As they walked Malone thought of the fourteenth century, when popes exchanged Rome's Tiber River for the French Rhfne and occupied the huge palace on the hill. Avignon became an asylum for heretics. Jews bought tolerance with a modest tax, criminals lived unscathed, gaming houses and brothels flourished. Policing was lax and roaming after dark could be life threatening. What had Petrarch written? An abode of sorrows, everything breathes lies. He hoped things had changed in six hundred years.\n\nRoyce Claridon's address was an antiques shop\u2014books and furniture\u2014the front window filled with Jules Verne volumes from the early part of the twentieth century. Malone was familiar with the colorful editions. The front door was locked, but a note taped to the glass stated that business was being conducted today on the Cours Jean Jaures, part of a monthly book fair.\n\nThey learned directions to the market, which sat adjacent to a main boulevard. Rickety metal tables dotted the treed square. Plastic crates held French books as well as a smattering of English titles, mostly movie and television picture volumes. The fair seemed to draw a different type of patron. Lots of trimmed hair, glasses, skirts, ties, and beards\u2014not a Nikon or camcorder in sight.\n\nBuses lumbered past with tourists on the way to the papal palace, the groaning diesels drowning out the beat of a steel band playing across the street. A Coke can clattered across the pavement and startled Malone. He was on edge.\n\n\"Something wrong?\"\n\n\"Too many distractions.\"\n\nThey strolled though the market, his bibliophilic eye studying the wares. The good stuff was all wrapped in plastic. A card on top identified a book's provenance and price, which he noticed was high for the low quality. He learned from one of the vendors the location for Royce Claridon's booth, and they found it on the far side, away from the street. The woman tending the tables was short and stout, with bottle-blond hair tied in a bun. She wore sunglasses and any attractiveness was tempered by a cigarette stuck between her lips. Smoking was not something Malone had ever found appealing.\n\nThey examined her books, everything displayed on a tattered home entertainment center, most of the clothbound volumes in ratty condition. He was amazed anyone would buy them.\n\nHe introduced himself and Stephanie. The woman didn't offer her name, she just kept smoking.\n\n\"We went by your shop,\" he said in French.\n\n\"Closed for the day.\" The clipped tone made clear that she did not want to be bothered.\n\n\"We're not interested in anything there,\" he made clear.\n\n\"Then, by all means, enjoy these wonderful books.\"\n\n\"Business that bad?\"\n\nShe sucked another drag. \"It stinks.\"\n\n\"Why are you here then? Why not out in the country for the day?\"\n\nShe appraised him with a suspicious eye. \"I don't like questions. Especially from Americans who speak bad French.\"\n\n\"I thought mine was fair.\"\n\n\"It's not.\"\n\nHe decided to get to the point. \"We're looking for Royce Claridon.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Who isn't?\"\n\n\"Care to enlighten us on who else is?\" This bitch was getting on his nerves.\n\nShe did not immediately answer. Instead, her gaze shifted to a couple of people examining her stock. The steel band from across the street struck up another tune. Her potential patrons wandered off.\n\n\"Have to watch them all,\" she muttered. \"They will steal anything.\"\n\n\"Tell you what,\" he said. \"I'll buy a whole crate if you'll answer one question.\"\n\nThe proposal seemed to interest her. \"What do you want to know?\"\n\n\"Where is Royce Claridon?\"\n\n\"I haven't seen him in five years.\"\n\n\"That's not an answer.\"\n\n\"He's gone.\"\n\n\"Where did he go?'\n\n\"That's all the answers one crate of books will buy.\"\n\nThey clearly were not going to learn anything from her, and he had no intention of giving her any more money. So he tossed a fifty-euro note onto the table and grabbed his crate of books. \"Your answer sucked, but I'll keep my end of the bargain.\"\n\nHe walked over to an open trash bin, turned the container upside down, and dumped the contents inside. Then he tossed the crate back on the table.\n\n\"Let's go,\" he said to Stephanie. They walked off.\n\n\"Hey, American.\"\n\nHe stopped and turned back.\n\nThe woman rose from her chair. \"I liked that.\"\n\nHe waited.\n\n\"Lots of creditors are looking for Royce, but he's easy to find. Check out the sanatorium in Villeneuve-les-Avignon.\" She twirled an extended index finger at her temple. \"Loony, that's Royce.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "ABBEY DES FONTAINES",
                "text": "[ 11:30 AM ]\n\nThe seneschal sat in his chambers. He'd slept little last night as he pondered his dilemma. Two brothers guarded his door and no one was allowed inside except to bring him food. He didn't like being caged\u2014albeit, at least for now, in a comfortable prison. His quarters were not the size of the master's or the marshal's, but they were private, with a bath and a window. Little danger existed that he'd climb through the window, the drop beyond the sill was several hundred feet down a sheer mass of gray rock.\n\nBut his fortunes were sure to change today, as de Roquefort was not going to allow him to roam the abbey at will. He'd probably be held in one of the underground rooms, places long used for cool storage, the perfect spot to keep an enemy isolated. His ultimate fate was anybody's guess.\n\nHe'd come a long way since his induction.\n\nRule was clear. If any man wished to leave the mass of perdition and abandon that secular life and choose communal life, do not consent to receive him immediately, for thus said Saint Paul: Test the soul to see if it comes from God. If the company of the brotherhood is granted, let the Rule be read to him, and if he wishes to obey the commandments of the Rule, let the brothers receive him, let him reveal his wish and desire before all of the brothers and let him make his request with a pure heart.\n\nAll of that had happened and he'd been received. He'd willingly taken the oath and gladly served. Now he was a prisoner. Accused of false charges leveled by an ambitious politico. Not unlike his ancient brethren, who'd fallen victim to the despicable Philip the Fair. He'd always thought the label odd. In truth, the Fair had nothing to do with the monarch's temperament, since the French king was a cold, secretive man who wanted to rule the Catholic Church. Instead, it referred to his light hair and blue eyes. One thing on the outside, something altogether different on the inside\u2014a lot like himself, he thought.\n\nHe stood from his desk and paced, a habit acquired in college. Moving helped him think. On the desk lay the two books he'd taken from the library two nights ago. He realized that the next few hours might be his last opportunity to scan their pages. Surely, once they turned up missing, theft of Order property would be added to the list of charges. Its punishment\u2014banishment\u2014would actually be welcome, but he knew his nemesis was never going to allow him off that easily.\n\nHe reached for the codex from the fifteenth century, a treasure any museum would pay dearly to display. The pages were scripted in the curvy lettering he knew as rotunda, common for the time, used in learned manuscripts. Little punctuation existed, just long lines of text filling every page from top to bottom, edge to edge. A scribe had labored weeks producing it, holed up in the abbey's scriptorium before a writing desk, quill in hand, slowly inking each letter onto parchment. Burn marks marred the binding and droplets of wax dotted many of the pages, but the codex was in remarkably good shape. One of the Order's great missions had been to preserve knowledge, and he'd been lucky to stumble across this reservoir amid the thousands of volumes the library contained.\n\nYou must finish the quest. It is your destiny. Whether you realize that or not. That's what the master had told Geoffrey. But he'd also said, Those who have followed the path you are about to take have been many, and never has anyone succeeded.\n\nBut did they know what he knew? Surely not.\n\nHe reached for the other volume. Its text was also handwritten. But not by scribes. Instead, the words had been penned in November 1897 by the Order's then marshal, a man who'd been in direct contact with Abbe Jean-Antoine-Maurice Gelis, the parish priest for the village of Coustausa, which also lay in the Aude River Valley, not far from Rennes-le-Cheteau. Theirs had been a fortuitous encounter, for the marshal had learned vital information.\n\nHe sat and again thumbed through the report.\n\nA few passages caught his attention, words he'd first read with interest three years ago. He stood and stepped to the window with the book.\n\nI was distressed to learn that the abbe Gelis was murdered on All Saints' Day. He was found fully dressed, wearing his clerical hat, lying in his own blood upon his kitchen floor. His watch had stopped at 12:15 AM , but the time of death was determined to be between 3 and 4 AM . Posing as the bishop's representative, I spoke with villagers and the local constable. Gelis was a nervous sort, known to keep windows closed and shutters drawn, even in summer. He never opened the presbytery's door to strangers, and since there was no sign of forced intrusion, officials concluded that the abbe had known his attacker.\n\nGelis died at age seventy-one. He was beaten over the head with fire tongs then hacked with an ax. Blood was copious, splatters on the floor and ceiling were found, but not one footprint lay among the various pools. This baffled the constable. The body was intentionally laid out on its back, arms crossed on the chest, in the common pose for the dead. Six hundred and three francs in gold and notes, along with another one hundred and six francs, were found in the house. Robbery was clearly not the motive. The only item that could be considered evidence was a pack of cigarette papers. Penned on one was \"Viva Angelina.\" This was significant since Gelis was not a smoker and detested even the smell of cigarettes.\n\nIn my opinion, the true motive for the crime was found in the priest's bedroom. There, the assailant had pried open a briefcase. Papers remained inside but it was impossible to know if anything had been removed. Drops of blood were found in and around the briefcase. The constable concluded that the murderer was searching for something and I may know what that could be.\n\nTwo weeks prior to his murder, I met with Abbe Gelis. A month before that, Gelis had communicated with the bishop in Carcassonne. I appeared at Gelis's home, posing as the bishop's representative, and we discussed at length what troubled him. He eventually requested that I hear his confession. Since in truth I am not a priest, and therefore not bound by any oath of the confessional, I can report what was told me.\n\nSometime in the summer of 1896, Gelis discovered a glass vial in his church. The railing for the choir had required replacing and, when the wood was removed, a hiding place was found that contained a wax-sealed vial holding a single sliver of paper, upon which was the following:\n\nThis cryptogram was a common coding device popular during the last century. He told me that six years earlier the abbe Sauniere, from Rennes-le-Cheteau, found a cryptogram in his church, too. When compared, they were identical. Sauniere believed that both vials had been left by the abbe Bigou, who served at Rennes-le-Cheteau during the French Revolution. In Bigou's time, the church in Coustausa was also served by the priest from Rennes. So Bigou would have been a frequent visitor to Gelis's present parish. Sauniere also thought there was a connection between the cryptograms and the tomb of Marie d'Hautpoul de Blanchefort, who died in 1781. Abbe Bigou had been her confessor and commissioned her headstone and marker, having an assortment of unique words and symbols inscribed thereon. Unfortunately, Sauniere had not been able to decipher anything, but after a year of work Gelis solved the cryptogram. He told me that he was not entirely truthful with Sauniere, thinking his fellow abbe's motives unpure. So he withheld from his colleague the solution he had determined.\n\nAbbe Gelis wanted the bishop to know the complete solution and believed he was accomplishing that act by telling me.\n\nUnfortunately, the marshal did not record what Gelis said. Perhaps he thought the information too important to write down, or maybe he was another schemer, like de Roquefort. Strangely, the Chronicles reported that the marshal himself disappeared a year later, in 1898. He left one day on abbey business and never returned. A search yielded nothing. But thank the Lord he recorded the cryptogram.\n\nThe bells for Sext began to ring, signaling the brothers' noontime gathering. All, except the kitchen staff, would gather in the chapel for Psalm readings, hymns, and prayers until one PM. He decided to have his own time of meditation, but was interrupted by a soft rap at the door. He turned as Geoffrey stepped inside, carrying a tray of food and drink.\n\n\"I volunteered to deliver this,\" the younger man said. \"I was told you skipped breakfast. You must be hungry.\" Geoffrey's tone was strangely buoyant.\n\nThe door remained open and he could see the two guards standing outside.\n\n\"I brought them some drink, too,\" Geoffrey said, motioning outside.\n\n\"You're in a generous mood today.\"\n\n\"Jesus said the first aspect of the Word is faith, the second is love, the third is good works, and from these come life.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"That's right, my friend.\" He kept his tone lively for the two pairs of ears just a few feet away.\n\n\"Are you well?\" Geoffrey asked.\n\n\"As well as can be expected.\" He accepted the tray and laid it on the desk.\n\n\"I have prayed for you, Seneschal.\"\n\n\"I daresay that I no longer possess that title. Surely, a new one was appointed by de Roquefort.\"\n\nGeoffrey nodded. \"His chief lieutenant.\"\n\n\"Woe be unto us\u2014\"\n\nHe saw one of the men outside the door collapse. A second later, the other man's body went limp and joined his partner's on the floor. Two goblets clattered across the flagstones.\n\n\"Took long enough,\" Geoffrey said.\n\n\"What did you do?\"\n\n\"A sedative. The physician provided it to me. Tasteless, odorless, but fast. The healer is our friend. He wishes you Godspeed. Now we must go. The master made provisions, and it's my duty to see they're accomplished.\"\n\nGeoffrey reached beneath his frock and produced two pistols. \"The armory attendant is our friend, too. We may need these.\"\n\nThe seneschal was trained in firearms, all part of the basic education every brother received. He grabbed the weapon. \"We're leaving the abbey?\"\n\nGeoffrey nodded. \"It is required to accomplish our task.\"\n\n\"Our task.\"\n\n\"Yes, Seneschal. I've been training for this a long time.\"\n\nHe heard the eagerness and, though he was almost ten years older than Geoffrey, he suddenly felt inadequate. This supposed junior brother was far more than he appeared. \"As I said yesterday, the master chose well in you.\"\n\nGeoffrey smiled. \"I think he did in both of us.\"\n\nHe found a knapsack and quickly stuffed a few toiletries, some personal items, and the two books he'd taken from the library inside. \"I have no other clothes but for a cassock.\"\n\n\"We can buy some once we're gone.\"\n\n\"You have money?\n\n\"The master was a thorough man.\"\n\nGeoffrey crept to the doorway and checked both ways. \"The brothers will all be in Sext. The way out should be clear.\"\n\nBefore following Geoffrey into the hall, the seneschal took one last look around his quarters. Some of the best times of his life had been spent here, and he was sad to leave those memories behind. But another part of his psyche urged him forward, to the unknown, outside, toward whatever truth the master so obviously knew."
            },
            {
                "title": "VILLENEUVE-LES-AVIGNON",
                "text": "[ 12:30 PM ]\n\nMalone studied royce claridon. The man was dressed in loose-fitting corduroy trousers smeared with what looked like turquoise paint. A colorful sports jersey covered the man's thin chest. He was probably in his late fifties, gangly as a praying mantis, with a comely face full of tight features. Dark eyes were sunk deep into his head, no longer bright with the power of intellect, but nonetheless piercing. His feet were bare and dirty, his fingernails unkempt, his graying hair and beard tangled. The attendant had warned them that Claridon was delusional but generally harmless, and almost everyone at the institution avoided him.\n\n\"Who be you?\" Claridon asked in French, appraising them with a distant, perplexed gaze.\n\nThe sanatorium filled an enormous cheteau that a placard out front announced had been owned by the French government since the Revolution. Wings jutted from the main building at odd angles. Many of the former salons were now converted into patient rooms. They stood in a solarium, surrounded by a broad embrasure of floor-to-ceiling windows that framed out the countryside. Gathering clouds veiled the midday sun. One of the attendants had said Claridon spent most of his days here.\n\n\"Are you from the commandery?\" Claridon asked. \"Did the master send you? I have much information to pass to him.\"\n\nMalone decided to play along. \"We are from the master. He sent us to speak with you.\"\n\n\"Ah, finally. I have been waiting so long.\" The words carried excitement.\n\nMalone motioned and Stephanie backed off. This man obviously thought himself a Templar and women were not part of that brotherhood. \"Tell me, brother, what have you to say. Tell me all.\"\n\nClaridon fidgeted in his chair, then sprang to his feet, shifting his spare frame back and forth on bare feet. \"Awful,\" he said. \"So awful. We were surrounded on all quarters. Enemies as far as the eye could see. We were down to our last few arrows, the food spoiled from heat, the water gone. Many had succumbed to disease. None of us was going to live long.\"\n\n\"Sounds a challenge. What did you do?\"\n\n\"The strangest thing we saw. A white banner was raised from beyond the walls. We all stared at one another\u2014saying with our puzzled expressions the words each of us was thinking. They want to talk.\"\n\nMalone knew his medieval history. Parlays were common during the Crusades. Armies in a stalemate would many times work out terms whereby each could retreat and both claim victory.\n\n\"Did you gather?\" Malone asked.\n\nThe older man nodded and held up four soiled fingers. \"Each time we rode from the wall, out among their horde, they received us warmly and the discussions were not without progress. In the end, we came to terms.\"\n\n\"So tell me. What is your message the master needs to know?\"\n\nClaridon offered a look of annoyance. \"You're an insolent one.\"\n\n\"What do you mean? I have much respect for you, brother. That's why I'm here. Brother Lars Nelle told me you were a man to be trusted.\"\n\nThe inquiry seemed to tax the older man's brain. Then recognition came to Claridon's face. \"I recall him. A courageous warrior. Fought with much honor. Yes. Yes. I do recall him. Brother Lars Nelle. God rest his soul.\"\n\n\"Why do you say that?\"\n\n\"You haven't heard?\" There was incredulousness in the tone. \"He died in battle.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\nClaridon shook his head. \"That I don't know, only that he now dwells with the Lord. We said a mass for him and offered many prayers.\"\n\n\"Did you break bread with brother Nelle?\"\n\n\"Many times.\"\n\n\"He ever speak of his quest?\"\n\nClaridon moved to his right, but kept his gaze on Malone. \"Why do you ask that of me?\"\n\nThe fidgety little man started to circle him, like a cat. He decided to up the ante in whatever game the man's loose mind envisioned. He grabbed Claridon by the jersey, lifting the wiry little man off the floor. Stephanie took a step forward, but he urged her back with a quick glance.\n\n\"The master is displeased,\" he said. \"Most displeased.\"\n\n\"In what way?\" Claridon's face was suffused with a deep blush of shame.\n\n\"With you.\"\n\n\"I've done nothing.\"\n\n\"You will not answer my question.\"\n\n\"What is it you wish?\" More astonishment.\n\n\"Tell me of brother Nelle's quest.\"\n\nClaridon shook his head. \"I know nothing. The brother did not confide in me.\"\n\nFear crept into the eyes staring back at him, accented by utter confusion. He released his grip. Claridon shrank away toward the glass wall and snatched up a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle. He doused the panes and began cleaning glass that displayed not a speck of anything.\n\nHe turned to Stephanie. \"We're wasting our time here.\"\n\n\"What tipped you off?\"\n\n\"I had to try.\" He recalled the note sent to Ernst Scoville and decided to make one last attempt. He fished the paper from his pocket and approached Claridon. Beyond the glass, a few miles west, rose the pale gray walls of Villeneuve-les-Avignon.\n\n\"The cardinals live there,\" Claridon said, never stopping his cleaning. \"Insolent princes, all of them.\"\n\nMalone knew that cardinals once flocked to the hills outside Avignon's town walls and erected country retreats as a way to escape the town's congestion and the pope's constant eye. Those livrees were all gone, but the ancient city remained, still quiet, countrified and crumbling.\n\n\"We are the cardinals' protectors,\" Malone said, keeping up the pretence.\n\nClaridon spat on the floor. \"The pox to them all.\"\n\n\"Read this.\"\n\nThe little man took the paper and raked his gaze over the words. A look of astonishment filled the man's wide eyes. \"I've stolen nothing from the Order. That I swear.\" The voice was rising. \"This accusation is false. I would gladly pledge an oath to my God. I've stolen nothing.\"\n\nThe man was seeing on the page only what he wanted. Malone took back the paper.\n\n\"This is a waste of time, Cotton,\" Stephanie said.\n\nClaridon drew close to him. \"Who is this vixen? Why is she here?\"\n\nHe nearly smiled. \"She is brother Nelle's widow.\"\n\n\"I was not aware that the brother had been married.\"\n\nHe recalled some of what he'd read from the Templar book two nights before. \"As you know, many brothers were once married. But she was an unfaithful one, so the bond was dissolved and she was banished to a convent.\"\n\nClaridon shook his head. \"She looks difficult. What is she doing here?\"\n\n\"She seeks the truth about her husband.\"\n\nClaridon faced Stephanie and pointed with one of his stubby fingers. \"You are evil,\" the man shouted. \"Brother Nelle sought penance with the brotherhood because of your sins. Shame on you.\"\n\nStephanie had the good sense to simply bow her head. \"I seek nothing but forgiveness.\"\n\nClaridon's face softened at her humility. \"And you shall have mine, sister. Go in peace.\"\n\nMalone motioned and they headed for the door. Claridon retreated to his chair.\n\n\"So sad,\" she said. \"And frightening. Losing one's mind is terrifying. Lars often spoke of the malady and feared it.\"\n\n\"Don't we all.\" He was still holding the note found at Ernst Scoville's house. He looked at the writing again and read the last three lines:\n\nIn Avignon find Claridan. He can point the way. But prend garde l'Ingenieur\u2014\n\n\"I wonder why the sender thought Claridon could point the way to anywhere?\" he asked. \"We have zero to go on. This trail may be at a dead end.\"\n\n\"Not true.\"\n\nThe words were spoken in English and came from across the solarium.\n\nMalone turned as Royce Claridon stood from the chair. All confusion was gone from the man's bearded face. \"I can provide that direction. And the advice given in that note should be heeded. You must beware the engineer. She, and others, are the reason I'm hiding here.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "ABBEY DES FONTAINES",
                "text": "The seneschal followed Geoffrey through the warren of vaulted corridors. He hoped Geoffrey's assessment was correct and that all of the brothers were in the chapel for noontime prayers.\n\nSo far they'd seen no one.\n\nThey made their way to the palais that housed the upper hall, administrative offices, and public rooms. When, in times past, the abbey had been sealed from outside contact, no one not of the Order was allowed beyond its ground-floor entrance hall. But when tourism blossomed in the twentieth century, as other abbeys opened their doors, so as not to arouse suspicions the Abbey des Fontaines followed suit, offering visits and informational sessions, many of which occurred in the palais.\n\nThey entered the expansive foyer. Windows filled with coarse greenish glass cast dull shafts of sunlight onto a checkered tile floor. A mammoth wooden crucifix dominated one wall, a tapestry another.\n\nAt the entrance to another passageway, a hundred feet across the lofty expanse, stood Raymond de Roquefort, five brothers behind him, all armed with handguns.\n\n\"Leaving?\" de Roquefort asked.\n\nThe seneschal froze, but Geoffrey raised his weapon and fired twice. The men on the other side dove for the floor as bullets pinged off the wall.\n\n\"That way,\" Geoffrey said, motioning left to another passageway.\n\nTwo shots screamed past them.\n\nGeoffrey sent another bullet across the foyer and they assumed a defensive position just inside the corridor, near a parlor where merchants once brought their wares for display.\n\n\"All right,\" de Roquefort called out. \"You have my attention. Is bloodshed necessary?\"\n\n\"That's entirely up to you,\" the seneschal said.\n\n\"I thought your oath was precious. Is it not your duty to obey your master? I commanded you to stay in your quarters.\"\n\n\"Did you? I forgot that part.\"\n\n\"Interesting how one set of rules apply to you, and another governs the rest of us. Even so, can we not be reasonable?\"\n\nHe wondered about the show of civility. \"What do you propose?\"\n\n\"I assumed you would attempt an escape. Sext seemed the best time, so I was waiting. You see, I know you well. Your ally, though, surprises me. There is courage and loyalty there. I would like you both to join my cause.\"\n\n\"And do what?\"\n\n\"Help us reclaim our destiny, instead of hindering the effort.\"\n\nSomething was wrong. De Roquefort was posturing. Then it hit him. To buy time.\n\nHe whirled around.\n\nAn armed man rounded the corner, fifty feet away. Geoffrey saw him, too. The seneschal fired one shot into the lower part of the man's cassock. He heard the smack of metal tearing flesh and a shriek as the man dropped to the flagstones. May God forgive him. Rule forbid the harming of another Christian. But there was no choice. He had to escape this prison.\n\n\"Come on,\" he said.\n\nGeoffrey took the lead and they bolted forward, leaping over the brother who writhed in pain.\n\nThey turned the corner and kept moving.\n\nFootsteps could be heard behind them.\n\n\"I hope you know what you're doing,\" he said to Geoffrey.\n\nThey rounded another neck in the passageway. Geoffrey stopped at a partially open door and they slipped inside, closing it gently behind them. A second later men ran past, their footfalls fading.\n\n\"The route ends at the gymnasium. It won't take them long to see we're not there,\" he said.\n\nThey slipped back out, breathless with excitement, and headed toward the gym, but instead of heading right at an intersection they went left, toward the dining hall.\n\nHe was wondering why the gunshots had not aroused more brothers. But the music in the chapel was always loud, making it hard to hear anything beyond the walls. Still, if de Roquefort expected him to flee, it would be reasonable to assume that more brothers were waiting around the abbey.\n\nThe long tables and benches in the dining hall were empty. Smells of stewed tomatoes and okra wafted from the kitchen. In the speaker's niche carved three feet up one wall, a robed brother stood, rifle in hand.\n\nThe seneschal dove under a table, using his knapsack for cushion, and Geoffrey sought refuge beneath another table.\n\nA bullet burrowed into the thick oak top.\n\nGeoffrey scampered out and ticked off two shots, one of which found the attacker. The man in the alcove teetered, then dropped to the floor.\n\n\"You kill him?\" the seneschal asked.\n\n\"I hope not. I think I got his shoulder.\"\n\n\"This is getting out of hand.\"\n\n\"Too late now.\"\n\nThey came to their feet. Men bolted from the kitchen, all dressed in food-stained aprons. The cooking staff. Not a threat.\n\n\"Back inside, now,\" the seneschal screamed, and none disobeyed.\n\n\"Seneschal,\" Geoffrey said, anticipation in his tone.\n\n\"Lead on.\"\n\nThey left the dining hall through another passageway. Voices were heard behind them, accompanied by the rapid sound of leather soles slapping stone. The shooting of two brothers would motivate even the meekest among their pursuers. The seneschal was angry that he'd fallen into the snare de Roquefort had laid for him. Any credibility he once possessed had vanished. No one would follow him any longer, and he cursed his foolishness.\n\nThey entered the dormitory wing. A door at the far end of the corridor was closed. Geoffrey ran ahead and tested the latch. Locked.\n\n\"Seems our options are limited,\" the seneschal said.\n\n\"Come,\" Geoffrey said.\n\nThey sprinted into the dormitory, a large oblong chamber with bunk beds standing perpendicular, in military style, beneath a row of lancet windows.\n\nA shout came from the hallway. More voices. Excited. People were headed their way.\n\n\"There's no other way out of here,\" he said.\n\nThey stood halfway down the row of empty beds. Behind them was the entrance, about to be filled with adversaries. Ahead, lavatories.\n\n\"Into the bathrooms,\" he said. \"Let's hope they move on.\"\n\nGeoffrey ran to the far end where two doors led into separate facilities. \"In here.\"\n\n\"No. Let's split up. You go into one. Hide in a stall and stand on a toilet. I'll take the other. If we're quiet, we might get lucky. Besides\u2014\" He hesitated, not liking the reality. \"\u2014it's our only play.\"\n\nDe Roquefort examined the bullet wound. The man's shoulder was bleeding, the brother in agony, but he was showing remarkable control, fighting hard not to go into shock. He'd stationed the shooter in the dining hall thinking the seneschal might eventually make his way there. And he'd been right. What he'd underestimated was his opponents' resolve. Brothers took an oath never to harm another brother. He'd thought the seneschal enough of an idealist that he'd stay true to that oath. Yet two men were now headed to the infirmary. He hoped neither would have to be taken to the hospital in Perpignan or Mont Louis. That might lead to questions. The abbey's healer was a qualified surgeon and possessed a well-equipped operating room, one that had been used many times in years past, but there were limits to its effectiveness.\n\n\"Take him to the physician and tell him to mend them here,\" he ordered a lieutenant. He checked his watch. Forty minutes before prayers at Sext ended.\n\nAnother brother approached. \"The door at the far end, beyond the dorm entrance, is still locked, as you ordered.\"\n\nHe knew they'd not come back through the dining hall. The wounded brother had made no such report. Which left only one alternative. He reached for the man's revolver.\n\n\"Stay here. Allow no one to pass. I'll handle this myself.\"\n\nThe seneschal entered the brightly lit bathroom. Rows of toilet stalls, urinals, and stainless-steel sinks encased by marble counters filled the space. He heard Geoffrey in the adjacent room, positioning himself in a stall. He stood rigid and tried to calm his nerves. He'd never been in a situation like this before. He snatched a few deep breaths then turned back and grasped the door handle, easing it open half an inch and peering through the crack.\n\nThe dormitory was still empty.\n\nPerhaps the search had moved on. The abbey was lined like an ant mound with corridors. All they would need was a few precious minutes to make an escape. He cursed himself again for weakness. His years of careful thought and deliberate intent had all been wasted. He was now a fugitive with more than four hundred brothers about to be his enemy. I simply respect the power of our adversaries. That's what he'd told his master just a day ago. He shook his head. Some respect he'd shown. So far, he'd done nothing smart.\n\nThe door leading from the dormitory swung open and Raymond de Roquefort stepped inside.\n\nHis adversary locked the ponderous bolt on the door.\n\nAny hope the seneschal may have possessed vanished.\n\nThe showdown was to be here and now.\n\nDe Roquefort held a revolver and studied the room, surely wondering where his prey might be. They'd not fooled him. But the seneschal had no intention of risking Geoffrey's life. He needed to draw his pursuer's attention. So he released his grip on the handle and allowed the door to close with a soft thud.\n\nDe Roquefort caught a fraction of movement and heard the sound of a door, hydraulically hinged, gently nudge a metal frame. His gaze shot to the back of the dormitory and one of the lavatory doors.\n\nHe'd been right.\n\nThey were here.\n\nTime to end this problem.\n\nThe seneschal surveyed the bathroom. Fluorescent light illuminated everything in a daylight glow. A long wall mirror above the sink counter made the room appear even larger. The floor was tile, the toilets separated by marble partitions. Everything had been built with care and designed to last.\n\nHe ducked into the second stall and closed the swinging door. He hopped onto the toilet and folded himself over the partition until he could close and lock the doors to the first and third stalls. He then shrunk back, still standing on the toilet, and hoped de Roquefort took the bait.\n\nHe needed something to draw attention. So he freed the toilet paper from its holder.\n\nAir rushed out as the bathroom's door swung open.\n\nSoles swept across the floor.\n\nHe stood on the toilet, gun in hand, and told himself to breathe slow.\n\nDe Roquefort pointed the short-barreled automatic toward the stalls. The seneschal was here. He knew it. But where? Did he dare take a moment to bend down and examine the gap at the bottom? Three doors were closed, three cocked open.\n\nNo.\n\nHe decided to fire.\n\nThe seneschal reasoned it would take only a moment before de Roquefort started shooting, so he flipped the toilet paper holder beneath the partition, into the first stall.\n\nMetal found tile with a clank.\n\nDe Roquefort fired a burst into the first stall and kicked the door inward with his sandal. Marble dust clouded the air. He unleashed another round that obliterated the toilet and the plaster on the wall.\n\nWater flooded out.\n\nBut the cubicle was empty.\n\nIn the instant before de Roquefort realized his mistake, the seneschal fired over the stalls, sending two slugs into his enemy's chest. The gunshots reverberated off the walls, the sound waves racking his brain.\n\nHe watched as de Roquefort fell back across the marble counter and bucked as though punched in the chest. But he noticed no blood flowed from the wounds. The man seemed more dazed than anything. Then he spotted a blue-gray surface beneath tears in the white cassock.\n\nA bulletproof vest.\n\nHe readjusted his aim and fired for the head.\n\nDe Roquefort saw a shot coming and mustered the strength to roll off the counter just as the bullet left the barrel. His body skidded across the wet floor, through the puddled water, toward the outer door.\n\nBits of porcelain and stone crunched beneath him. The mirror exploded, shattering in a clangor then pulverizing onto the counter. The confines of the washroom were tight and his opponent was unexpectedly brave. So he retreated toward the door and slipped out just as a second shot careened off the wall behind him.\n\nThe seneschal jumped from the toilet and burst from the stall. He crept toward the door and prepared himself for an exit. De Roquefort would surely be waiting. But he wasn't going to shy away. Not now. He owed this fight to his master. The Gospels were clear. Jesus came not to bring peace, but a sword. And so did he.\n\nHe steeled himself, readied the gun, and yanked open the door.\n\nThe first thing he saw was Raymond de Roquefort. The next was Geoffrey, his gun firmly nestled to the master's neck, de Roquefort's weapon lying on the floor."
            },
            {
                "title": "VILLENEUVE-LES-AVIGNON",
                "text": "MALONE STARED AT ROYCE CLARIDON AND SAID, \"YOU'RE GOOD.\"\n\n\"I've had lots of practice.\" Claridon looked at Stephanie. \"You are Lars's wife?\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\n\"He was a friend and a great man. So smart. Yet also naefve. He underestimated those who opposed him.\"\n\nThey were still alone in the solarium and Claridon seemed to notice Malone's interest in the door leading out.\n\n\"No one will disturb us. Not a soul wants to listen to my ramblings. I made a point to become quite a nuisance. They all look forward to my retreat here each day.\"\n\n\"How long have you been here?\"\n\n\"Five years.\"\n\nMalone was astonished. \"Why?\"\n\nClaridon paced slowly among the bushy potted plants. Beyond the outer glass, black clouds girted the western horizon, the sun blazing through crevices like fire from the mouth of a furnace. \"There are those who seek what Lars sought. Not openly, or with attention drawn to their quest, but they deal severely with those who stand in their way. So I came here and feigned illness. They feed you well, care for your needs, and, most important, ask no questions. I've not spoken rationally, other than to myself, in five years. And I can assure you, talking to yourself is not satisfying.\"\n\n\"Why are you talking to us?\" Stephanie asked.\n\n\"You're Lars's widow. For him, I would do anything.\" Claridon pointed. \"And that note. Sent by someone with knowledge. Perhaps even by those people I mentioned who don't allow anyone to stand in their way.\"\n\n\"Did Lars stand in their way?\" Stephanie asked.\n\nClaridon nodded. \"Many wanted to know what he learned.\"\n\n\"What was your connection to him?\" Stephanie asked.\n\n\"I had access to the book trade. He required many obscure materials.\"\n\nMalone knew that secondhand-book stores were the haunts of both collectors and researchers.\n\n\"We eventually became friends and I started to share his passion. This region is my home. My family has been here since medieval times. Some of my ancestors were Cathars, burned to death by the Catholics. But then, Lars died. So sad. Others after him also perished. So I came here.\"\n\n\"What others?\"\n\n\"A book dealer in Seville. A librarian in Marseille. A student in Rome. Not to mention Mark.\"\n\n\"Ernst Scoville is also dead,\" Stephanie said. \"Run down by a car last week, just after I spoke to him.\"\n\nClaridon quickly crossed himself. \"Those who seek are indeed made to pay. Tell me, dear lady, do you know anything?\"\n\n\"I have Lars's journal.\"\n\nA look of concern swept across the man's face. \"Then you are in mortal danger.\"\n\n\"How so?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"This is terrible,\" Claridon said, the words coming fast. \"So terrible. It's not right that you be involved. You lost your husband and your son\u2014\"\n\n\"What do you know of Mark?\"\n\n\"It was just after his death that I came here.\"\n\n\"My son died in an avalanche.\"\n\n\"Not true. He was killed. Just like the others I mentioned.\"\n\nMalone and Stephanie stood in silence, waiting for the odd little man to explain.\n\n\"Mark was following leads his father had discovered years before. He was not as passionate as Lars, and it took him years to decipher Lars's notes, but he finally made some sense of them. He traveled south into the mountains to look but never returned. Just like his father.\"\n\n\"My husband hung himself from a bridge.\"\n\n\"I know, dear woman. But I always wondered what truly happened.\"\n\nStephanie said nothing, but her silence signaled that at least part of her wondered, too.\n\n\"You said you came here to escape them. Who's them?\" Malone asked. \"The Knights Templar?\"\n\nClaridon nodded. \"I came face-to-face with them on two occasions. Not pleasant.\"\n\nMalone decided to let that notion simmer a moment. He was still holding the note that had been sent to Ernst Scoville in Rennes-le-Cheteau. He motioned with the paper. \"How can you lead the way? Where are we to go? And who is this engineer we're supposed to be watching out for?\"\n\n\"She, too, seeks what Lars coveted. Her name is Cassiopeia Vitt.\"\n\n\"She good with a rifle?\"\n\n\"She has many talents. Shooting, I'm sure, is one. She lives at Givors, an ancient citadel site. She's a woman of color, a Muslim, who possesses great wealth. She labors in the forest to rebuild a castle using only thirteenth-century techniques. Her cheteau stands nearby and she personally oversees the rebuilding project, calling herself l'Ingenieur. The engineer. Have you met her?\"\n\n\"I think she saved my hide in Copenhagen. Which makes me wonder why someone would warn us to beware of her.\"\n\n\"Her motives are suspect. She seeks what Lars sought, but for different reasons.\"\n\n\"And what is it she seeks?\" Malone asked, tired of riddles.\n\n\"What the brothers of the Temple of Solomon left behind long ago. Their Great Devise. What the priest Sauniere discovered. What the brothers have been searching for all these centuries.\"\n\nMalone didn't believe a word of it, but motioned again with the paper. \"So point us in the right direction.\"\n\n\"It's not that the simple. The trail has been made difficult.\"\n\n\"Do you even know where to start?\"\n\n\"If you have Lars's notebook, you have more knowledge than I possess. He often spoke of the journal, but I was never allowed to see it.\"\n\n\"We also have a copy of Pierres Gravees du Languedoc,\" Stephanie said.\n\nClaridon gasped. \"I never believed that book existed.\"\n\nShe reached into her bag and showed him the volume. \"It's real.\"\n\n\"Might I see the gravestone?\"\n\nShe opened to the page and showed him the drawing. Claridon studied it with interest. The older man smiled. \"Lars would have been pleased. The drawing is a good one.\"\n\n\"Care to explain?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"The abbe Bigou learned a secret from Marie d'Hautpoul de Blanchefort, just before she died. When he fled France in 1793, Bigou realized that he would never return, so he hid what he knew in the church at Rennes-le-Cheteau. That information was later found by Sauniere, in 1891, within a glass vial.\"\n\n\"We know all that,\" Malone said. \"What we don't know is Bigou's secret.\"\n\n\"Ah, but you do,\" Claridon said. \"Let me see Lars's notebook.\"\n\nStephanie handed him the journal. He anxiously shuffled through it and showed them a page.\n\n\"This cryptogram was supposedly inside the glass vial.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"To know that, you must understand Sauniere.\"\n\n\"We're all ears.\"\n\n\"When Sauniere was alive, not a word was ever written about the money he spent on the church or the other buildings. No one outside of Rennes even knew any of that existed. When he died in 1917, he was totally forgotten. His papers and belongings were either stolen or destroyed. In 1947 his mistress sold the entire estate to a man named Noebl Corbu. The mistress died six years later. The so-called tale of Sauniere, about his great treasure find, first appeared in print in 1956. A local newspaper, La Depeache du Midi, published three installments that supposedly told the true story. But the source for that material was Corbu.\"\n\n\"I know this,\" Stephanie said. \"He embellished everything, adding to the story, changing it all around. Afterward, more press accounts came and the story gradually became even more fantastic.\"\n\nClaridon nodded. \"Fiction completely took over fact.\"\n\n\"You talking about the parchments?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"An excellent example. Sauniere never found parchments in the altar pillar. Never. Corbu, and the others, added that detail. Not one person has ever seen those parchments, yet their texts have been printed in countless books, each one supposedly hiding some sort of coded message. It's nonsense, all of it, and Lars knew that.\"\n\n\"But Lars published the texts of the parchments in his books,\" Malone said.\n\n\"He and I spoke of that. All he would say is, People love a mystery. But I know it bothered him to do it.\"\n\nMalone was confused. \"So is Sauniere's story a lie?\"\n\nClaridon nodded. \"The modern rendition is mainly false. Most of the books written also link Sauniere to the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, particularly The Shepherds of Arcadia. Supposedly, Sauniere took the two parchments he found to Paris in 1893 for deciphering and, while there, purchased a copy of that painting, and two more, at the Louvre. They are reported to contain hidden messages. The problem with that is the Louvre did not sell copies of paintings at that time, and there is no record that The Shepherds of Arcadia was even stored at the Louvre in 1893. But the men who promulgated that fiction worried little about errors. They just assumed no one would check the facts, and for a while they were right.\"\n\nMalone motioned to the cryptogram. \"Where did Lars find this?\"\n\n\"Corbu penned a manuscript all about Sauniere.\"\n\nSome of the words from the eight pages sent to Ernst Scoville swept through his mind. What Lars had written about the mistress. At one point she did reveal to Nfel Corbu one of Sauniere's hiding places. Corbu wrote of this in his manuscript I managed to find.\n\n\"While Corbu spent a great deal of time telling reporters the fiction of Rennes, in his manuscript he did a credible job of detailing the true story, as he learned it from the mistress.\"\n\nMore of what Lars had written ran through Malone's mind. What Corbu found, if anything, is never revealed by him. But the wealth of information contained within his manuscript makes one wonder where he could have learned all that he wrote about.\n\n\"Corbu, of course, let no one see the manuscript, since the truth was not nearly as captivating as the fiction. He died in the late sixties from a car crash and his manuscript disappeared. But Lars found it.\"\n\nMalone studied the rows of letters and symbols on the cryptogram. \"So what is this? Some type of code?\"\n\n\"One quite common for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Random letters and symbols, arranged in a grid. Somewhere in all that chaos is a message. Basic, simple, and, for its time, quite difficult to decipher. Still so even today, without the key.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Some numeric sequence is needed to find the right letters to assemble the message. Sometimes, to confuse the matter further, the starting point on the grid was random, too.\"\n\n\"Did Lars ever decipher it?\" Stephanie asked.\n\nClaridon shook his head. \"He was unable. And it frustrated him. Then, in the weeks before he died, he thought he came across a new clue.\"\n\nMalone's patience was wearing thin. \"I assume he didn't tell you what that was.\"\n\n\"No, monsieur. That was his way.\"\n\n\"So where do we go from here? Point the way, like you're supposed to.\"\n\n\"Return here at five PM, on the road just beyond the main building and wait. I'll come to you.\"\n\n\"How can you leave?\"\n\n\"No one here will be sad to see me go.\"\n\nMalone and Stephanie shared a glance. She was surely debating, as he was, if following Claridon's directions would be smart. So far this whole endeavor had been littered with either dangerous or paranoid personalities, not to mention wild speculation. But something was going on, and if he wanted to learn more he was going to have to play by the rules the odd man standing across from him was setting.\n\nStill, he wanted to know, \"Where are we going?\"\n\nClaridon turned to the window and pointed eastward. In the far distance, miles away, on a hilltop overlooking Avignon, stood a palace stronghold with an Oriental appearance, like something from Arabia. Its golden luminosity stood out against the eastern sky with a fugitive brightness and cast the appearance of several buildings piled onto one another, each rising from the bedrock, standing in clear defiance. Just as its occupants had done for nearly a hundred years, when seven French popes ruled Christendom from within the fortress walls.\n\n\"To the palais des popes,\" Claridon said.\n\nThe palace of the popes."
            },
            {
                "title": "ABBEY DES FONTAINES",
                "text": "The seneschal stared into Geoffrey's eyes and saw hatred. He'd never seen that emotion there before.\n\n\"I've told our new master,\" Geoffrey said, nudging the gun deeper into de Roquefort's throat, \"to stand still or I will shoot him.\"\n\nThe seneschal stepped close and poked a finger beneath the white mantle, into the protective vest. \"If we'd not started the gunfire, you would have, right? The idea was for us to be killed while escaping. That way, your problem is solved. I'm eliminated and you're the Order's savior.\"\n\nDe Roquefort said nothing.\n\n\"That's why you came here alone. To finish the job yourself. I saw you lock the dormitory door. You wanted no witnesses.\"\n\n\"We must go,\" Geoffrey said.\n\nHe realized the danger that endeavor would entail, but doubted if any of the brothers would risk the master's life. \"Where are we going?\"\n\n\"I'll show you.\"\n\nKeeping the gun cocked at de Roquefort's neck, Geoffrey led his hostage across the dormitory. The seneschal kept his own gun ready and, at the door, released the latch. In the hall stood five armed men. At the sight of their leader in peril, they raised their guns, ready to fire.\n\n\"Lower your aim,\" de Roquefort ordered.\n\nThe guns stayed pointed.\n\n\"I command you to lower your weapons. I want no more bloodshed.\"\n\nThe gallant gesture stimulated the desired effect.\n\n\"Stand away,\" Geoffrey said.\n\nThe brothers took a few steps backward.\n\nGeoffrey motioned with the gun and he and de Roquefort stepped out into the hall. The seneschal followed. Bells rang in the distance, signaling one PM. Sext prayers would be ending shortly, and the corridors would once again be filled with robed men.\n\n\"We need to move quickly,\" the seneschal made clear.\n\nWith his hostage, Geoffrey led the way down the passageway. The seneschal followed, creeping backward, keeping his attention trained on the five brothers.\n\n\"Stay there,\" the seneschal made clear to them.\n\n\"Do as he says,\" de Roquefort called out, as they turned the corner.\n\nDe Roquefort was curious. How did they expect to flee the abbey? What had Geoffrey said? I'll show you. He decided the only way to discover anything was to go with them, which was why he'd ordered his men to stand down.\n\nThe seneschal had twice shot him. If he'd not been quick, a third bullet would have found his skull. The stakes had clearly been raised. His captors were on a mission, something he believed involved his predecessor and a subject that he desperately needed to know more about. The Denmark excursion had been less than productive. So far nothing had been learned in Rennes-le-Cheteau. And though he'd managed to discredit the former master in death, the old man might have reserved the last laugh.\n\nHe also did not like the fact that two men had been wounded. Not the best way to start off his tenure. Brothers strived for order. Chaos was seen as weakness. The last time violence had invaded the abbey's walls was when angry mobs tried to gain entrance during the French Revolution\u2014but after several died in the attempt, they'd retreated. The abbey was a place of tranquility and refuge. Violence was taught\u2014and sometimes used\u2014but tempered with discipline. The seneschal had demonstrated a total lack of discipline. Stragglers who may have harbored some fleeting loyalty to him would now be won over by his grievous violations to Rule.\n\nBut still, where were these two headed?\n\nThey continued down the hallways, passing workshops, the library, more empty corridors. He could hear footfalls behind them, the five brothers following, ready to act when the opportunity arose. But there'd be hell to pay if any of them interfered until he said so.\n\nThey stopped before a doorway with carved capitals and a simple iron handle.\n\nThe master's quarters.\n\nHis chambers.\n\n\"In there,\" Geoffrey said.\n\n\"Why?\" the seneschal asked. \"We'll be trapped.\"\n\n\"Please, go inside.\"\n\nThe seneschal pushed open the door, then engaged the latch after they entered.\n\nDe Roquefort was amazed.\n\nAnd curious.\n\nThe seneschal was concerned. They were now imprisoned within the master's chamber, the only exit a solitary bull's-eye window that opened to nothing but air. Drops of sweat pebbled his forehead and he swiped the salty moisture from his eyes.\n\n\"Sit,\" Geoffrey ordered de Roquefort, and the man took a seat at the desk.\n\nThe seneschal surveyed the room. \"I see you've already changed things.\"\n\nA few more upholstered chairs hugged the walls. A table now stood where there had been nothing before. The bed coverings were different, as were items on the tables and desk.\n\n\"This is my home now,\" de Roquefort said.\n\nHe noticed the single sheet of paper on the desk, penned in his mentor's hand. The successor's message, left as required by Rule. He lifted the typewritten page and read.\n\nDo you think that what you judge to be imperishable will not perish? You base your hope upon the world, and your god is this life. You do not realize that you will be destroyed. You live in darkness and death, drunk with fire, and full of bitterness. Your mind is deranged because of the smoldering fire within you and you are delighted by the poisoning and beating of your enemies. Darkness has risen over you like the light, for you have exchanged your freedom for slavery. You will fail, that is clear.\n\n\"Your master thought passages from the Gospel of Thomas relevant,\" de Roquefort said. \"And he apparently believed that I, not you, would wear the white mantle once he was gone. Surely those words were not meant for his chosen one.\"\n\nNo, they weren't. He wondered why his mentor had so little faith in him, especially when, in the hours before he died, he'd encouraged him to seek high office.\n\n\"You should listen to him,\" he made clear.\n\n\"His is the advice of a weak soul.\"\n\nPounding came from the door. \"Master? Are you there?\" Unless the brothers were prepared to blast their way inside, there existed little danger of the heavy slabs being forced.\n\nDe Roquefort stared up at him.\n\n\"Answer,\" the seneschal said.\n\n\"I'm fine. Stand down.\"\n\nGeoffrey moved toward the window and stared out at the waterfall across the gorge.\n\nDe Roquefort placed one knee over the other and leaned back in the chair. \"What do you hope to accomplish? This is foolishness.\"\n\n\"Shut up.\" But the seneschal was wondering the same thing.\n\n\"The master left more words,\" Geoffrey said from across the room.\n\nHe and de Roquefort turned as Geoffrey reached into his cassock and produced an envelope. \"This is his true final message.\"\n\n\"Give that to me,\" de Roquefort demanded, rising from the chair.\n\nGeoffrey leveled his gun. \"Sit.\"\n\nDe Roquefort stayed on his feet. Geoffrey cocked the weapon and aimed for the legs. \"The vest will do you no good.\"\n\n\"You would kill me?\"\n\n\"I'll cripple you.\"\n\nDe Roquefort sat. \"You have a brave compatriot,\" he said to the seneschal.\n\n\"He's a brother of the Temple.\"\n\n\"A shame he will never achieve the oath.\"\n\nIf the words were designed to evoke a response in Geoffrey, they failed.\n\n\"You're going nowhere,\" de Roquefort told them.\n\nThe seneschal watched his ally. Geoffrey was again staring out the window, as if waiting for something.\n\n\"I'll enjoy seeing you both punished,\" de Roquefort said.\n\n\"I told you to shut up,\" the seneschal said.\n\n\"Your master thought himself clever. I know he wasn't.\"\n\nHe could tell de Roquefort had something more to say. \"Okay, I'll bite. What is it?\"\n\n\"The Great Devise. It's what consumed him and all of the masters. Each wanted to find it, but none succeeded. Your master spent a lot of time researching the subject, and your young friend over there helped him.\"\n\nThe seneschal shot a glance at Geoffrey, but his partner did not turn from the window. He said to de Roquefort, \"I thought you were close to finding it. That's what you told the conclave.\"\n\n\"I am.\"\n\nThe seneschal did not believe him.\n\n\"Your young friend over there and the late master were quite a team. I've learned that recently they scoured our records with a newfound relish\u2014one that piqued my interest.\"\n\nGeoffrey turned and stomped across the bedchamber, stuffing the envelope back into his cassock. \"You'll learn nothing.\" The voice approached a shout. \"What there is to find is not for you.\"\n\n\"Really?\" de Roquefort asked. \"And what is there to find?\"\n\n\"There will be no triumph for the likes of you. The master was right. You are drunk with fire and full of bitterness.\"\n\nDe Roquefort appraised Geoffrey with a stiff countenance. \"You and the master learned something, didn't you? I know you sent two parcels in the mail, and I even know to whom. I've tended to one of the receivers and will shortly tend to the other. Soon I'll know all that you and he knew.\"\n\nGeoffrey's right arm swung out and the gun he held slammed into de Roquefort's temple. The master teetered, stunned, then his eyes rolled skyward and he collapsed to the floor.\n\n\"Was that necessary?\" the seneschal asked.\n\n\"He should be glad that I didn't shoot him. But the master made me promise I wouldn't harm the fool.\"\n\n\"You and I need to have a serious talk.\"\n\n\"First, we have to leave.\"\n\n\"I don't think the brothers out in the hall are going to allow that.\"\n\n\"They're not our problem.\"\n\nHe could sense something. \"You know the way out of here?\"\n\nGeoffrey smiled. \"The master was quite clear.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "ABBEY DES FONTAINES",
                "text": "[ 2:05 PM ]\n\nDe Roquefort opened his eyes. The side of his head pounded and he swore that brother Geoffrey would pay for his assault. He pushed himself up from the floor and tried to clear the fog. He heard frantic cries from outside the door. He dabbed the side of his head with his sleeve and the cassock came away stained with blood. He stepped into the bathroom and doused a rag with water, cleaning the wound.\n\nHe steeled himself. He must appear in charge. He slowly walked across the bedchamber and opened the door.\n\n\"Master, are you all right?\" his new marshal asked.\n\n\"Come inside,\" he said.\n\nThe four other brothers waited in the hall. They knew better than to step into the master's chamber without permission.\n\n\"Close the door.\"\n\nHis lieutenant complied.\n\n\"I was struck unconscious. How long have they been gone?\"\n\n\"It's been quiet in here for twenty minutes. That's what raised our fears.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nA puzzled look came to the marshal's face. \"Silence. Nothing.\"\n\n\"Where did the seneschal and brother Geoffrey go?\"\n\n\"Master, they were in here, with you. We were outside.\"\n\n\"Look around. They're gone. When did they leave?\"\n\nMore bewilderment. \"They didn't come our way.\"\n\n\"You're telling me those two did not walk out that door?\"\n\n\"We would have shot them if they had, as you ordered.\"\n\nHis head started to hurt again. He lifted the wet rag to his scalp and massaged the throbbing knot. He'd wondered why Geoffrey had come straight here.\n\n\"There's news from Rennes-le-Cheteau,\" the marshal said.\n\nThat revelation piqued his interest.\n\n\"Our two brothers made their presence known and Malone, as you predicted, eluded them on the highway.\"\n\nHe'd correctly deduced that the best way to pursue Stephanie Nelle and Cotton Malone was to let them think they were free of pursuit.\n\n\"And the shooter in the churchyard last night?\"\n\n\"The person fled on a motorcycle. Our men watched as Malone gave chase. That incident, and the attack on our brothers in Copenhagen, are clearly related.\"\n\nHe agreed. \"Any idea who?\"\n\n\"Not yet.\"\n\nHe didn't want to hear that. \"What of today? Where did Malone and Nelle go?\"\n\n\"The electronic surveillance we affixed to Malone's car worked perfectly. They drove straight to Avignon. They've just left the sanatorium where Royce Claridon is a patient.\"\n\nHe was well acquainted with Claridon and did not for one moment believe Claridon was mentally ill, which was why he'd cultivated a source within the sanatorium. A month ago, when the master dispatched Geoffrey to Avignon to mail the package to Stephanie Nelle, he'd thought contact might have then been made. But Geoffrey paid no visit to the asylum. He suspected that the second parcel, the one sent to Ernst Scoville in Rennes, the one he knew little about, was what led Stephanie Nelle and Malone to Claridon. One thing was certain. Claridon and Lars Nelle had worked side by side, and when the son dabbled in the quest after Lars Nelle's death, Claridon had assisted him, too. The master had clearly known all that. And now Lars Nelle's widow had gone straight to Claridon.\n\nTime to deal with that problem.\n\n\"I'll travel to Avignon within the half hour. Prepare a contingent of four brothers. Maintain the electronic surveillance and tell our people not to be tagged. That equipment has a long range, use it to our advantage.\" But there was still another matter and he stared around the room. \"Leave me, now.\"\n\nThe marshal bowed, then retreated from the chamber.\n\nHe stood, his head still woozy, and surveyed the elongated chamber. Two of the walls were stone, the remaining two maple paneling framed out in symmetrical panels. A decorative armoire dominated one wall, a dresser, another chest, and a table and chairs the others. But his gaze stopped on the fireplace. It seemed the most logical location. He knew that in ancient times no room possessed only one way in and out. This particular chamber had housed masters since the sixteenth century, and if he recalled correctly, the fireplace was a seventeenth-century addition, replacing an older stone hearth. Rarely was it used now that central heating was employed throughout the abbey.\n\nHe approached the mantel and studied the woodwork, then carefully examined the hearth, noticing faint white lines stretching perpendicular toward the wall.\n\nHe bent down and gazed into the darkened hearth. With his curled hand, he probed up inside the flue.\n\nAnd found it.\n\nA glass knob.\n\nHe tried to turn it, but nothing moved. He pushed up, then down. Still nothing. So he pulled, and the knob came free. Not far, maybe half an inch, and he heard a mechanical snap. He released his grip and felt a slipperiness on his fingers. Oil. Somebody had been prepared.\n\nHe stared into the fireplace.\n\nA crack ran the height of the rear wall. He pushed, and the stone panel swung inward. The opening was large enough to enter, so he crawled forward. Beyond the portal was a passageway the height of a man.\n\nHe stood.\n\nThe narrow corridor stretched only a few feet to a stone staircase that wound down in a tight spiral. No telling where that led. No doubt there were other entrances and exits scattered throughout the abbey. He'd been marshal for twenty-two years and never had he known of any secret routes.\n\nThe master knew, though, which was how Geoffrey knew.\n\nHe pounded his fist onto the stone and allowed his anger to work itself out. He must find the Great Devise. His entire ability to govern rested on its discovery. The master had possessed Lars Nelle's journal, as de Roquefort had known for many years, but there'd been no way to obtain it. He'd thought that with the old man gone his chance would come, but the master had anticipated his move and sent the manuscript away. Now Lars Nelle's widow and a former employee\u2014a trained government agent\u2014were connecting themselves with Royce Claridon. Nothing good would come of that collaboration.\n\nHe calmed his nerves.\n\nFor years he'd labored in the master's shadow. Now he was master. And he was not going to allow a ghost to dictate his path.\n\nHe sucked a few deep breaths of the dank air and thought back to the Beginning. AD 1118. The Holy Land had finally been wrestled from the Saracens and Christian kingdoms had been established, but a great danger still existed. So nine knights banded together and promised to the new Christian king of Jerusalem that the route to and from the Holy Land would be safe for pilgrims. But how could nine middle-aged men, pledged to poverty, protect the long route from Jaffa to Jerusalem, especially when hundreds of bandits lined the way? Even more puzzling, for the first ten years of its existence no new knights were added, and the Order's Chronicles recorded nothing of the brothers helping any pilgrims. Instead, those original nine occupied themselves with a greater task. Their headquarters was beneath the old temple, in an area that had once served as King Solomon's stables, a chamber of endless arches and vaults, so large that it once housed two thousand animals. There they'd discovered subterranean passages hewn from rock centuries before, many of which contained scriptural scrolls, treatises, writings on art and science, and much about Judaic/Egyptian heritage.\n\nAnd the most important find of all.\n\nThe excavations consumed those nine knights' entire attention. Then, in 1127, they loaded boats with their precious cache and sailed for France. What they found brought them fame, wealth, and powerful allegiances. Many wanted to be a part of their movement and, in 1128, a mere ten years after being founded, the Templars were granted by the pope a legal autonomy unmatched in the Western world.\n\nAnd all because of what they knew.\n\nYet they were careful with that knowledge. Only those who rose to the highest level were privileged to know. Centuries ago, the master's duty was to pass that knowledge along before he died. But that was before the Purge. After, masters searched, all to no avail.\n\nHe pounded his fist again into the stone.\n\nTemplars had first forged their destiny in forgotten caverns with the determination of zealots. He would do the same. The Great Devise was out there. He was close. He knew it.\n\nAnd the answers were in Avignon."
            },
            {
                "title": "AVIGNON",
                "text": "[ 5:00 PM ]\n\nMalone stopped the peugeot. Royce Claridon was waiting on the roadside, south of the sanatorium, exactly where he'd said. The man's scruffy beard was gone, as were the stained clothes and jersey. The face was clean-shaven, the nails trimmed, and Claridon was wearing a pair of jeans and a crew-necked shirt. His long hair was slicked back and tied in a ponytail, and there was vigor to his step.\n\n\"Feels good to get that beard off,\" he said, climbing into the rear seat. \"To pretend to be a Templar, I needed to look like one. You know they never bathed. Rule forbade it. No nakedness among the brothers and all that stuff. What a smelly lot they must have been.\"\n\nMalone shifted the car into first and motored down the highway. Storm clouds filled the sky. Apparently, the weather from Rennes-le-Chateeu was finally making its way eastward. In the distance lightning forked across the rising plumes, followed by growls of thunder. No rain was falling yet, but soon. He exchanged glances with Stephanie and she understood that the man in the rear seat needed interrogating.\n\nShe turned back. \"Mr. Claridon\u2014\"\n\n\"You must call me Royce, madame.\"\n\n\"All right. Royce, could you tell us more of what Lars was thinking? It's important we understand.\"\n\n\"You don't know?\"\n\n\"Lars and I were not close in the years before he died. He didn't confide much in me. But I've recently read his books and the journal.\"\n\n\"Might I ask, then, why are you here? He's been gone a long time.\"\n\n\"Let's just say I'd like to think Lars would have wanted his work finished.\"\n\n\"On that you are right, madame. Your husband was a brilliant scholar. His theories were well founded and I believe he would have been successful. If he'd lived.\"\n\n\"Tell me of those theories.\"\n\n\"He was following the abbe Sauniere's path. That priest was clever. On the one hand, he wanted no one to know what he knew. On the other, he left many clues.\" Claridon shook his head. \"It's said he told his mistress everything, but she died without ever saying a word. Before his death, Lars thought he'd finally made progress. Do you know the full tale, madame? The real truth?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid my knowledge is limited to what Lars wrote in his books. But there were some interesting references in his journal that he never published.\"\n\n\"Might I see those pages?\"\n\nShe thumbed through the notebook, then handed the book back to Claridon. Malone watched in the rearview mirror as the man read with interest.\n\n\"Such wonders,\" Claridon said.\n\n\"Could you enlighten us?\" Stephanie asked.\n\n\"Of course, madame. As I said this afternoon, the fiction Noebl Corbu and others manufactured about Sauniere was mysterious and exciting. But to me, and to Lars, the truth was even better.\"\n\nSauniere surveyed the church's new altar, pleased with the renovations. The marble monstrosity was gone, the old top now rubble in the churchyard, the Visigoth pillars enlisted for other uses. The new altar was a thing of simple beauty. Three months ago, in June, he'd organized an elaborate first communion service. Men from the village had carried a statue of the Virgin in a solemn procession throughout Rennes, ending back at the church where the sculpture was placed atop one of the discarded pillars in the churchyard. To commemorate the event, he'd carved PENITENCE, PENITENCE on the pillar's face to remind the parishioners of humility, and MISSION 1891 to memorialize the year of their collective accomplishment.\n\nThe church roof had finally been sealed, the exterior walls shored. The old pulpit was gone and another one was under construction. Soon a checkerboard tile floor would be installed, then new pews. But prior to that, the floor's substructure required mending. Water seeping from the roof had eroded many of the base stones. Patching had worked in places, but several required replacement.\n\nOutside loomed a wet, windy September morning, so he'd managed to secure the help of half a dozen townspeople. Their job was to bust away several of the damaged slabs and install new ones before the tilers arrived in two weeks. Men were now working in three separate locations throughout the nave. Sauniere himself was tending to a warped stone before the altar steps, which had always wobbled.\n\nHe remained puzzled by the glass vial found earlier in the year. When he'd melted the wax seal and removed the rolled paper, he found not a message but thirteen rows of letters and symbols. When he showed them to Abbe Gelis, a priest in a neighboring village, he was told that the arrangement was a cryptogram, and somewhere among the seemingly meaningless letters lay a message. All one needed was the mathematical key to its deciphering, but after many months of trying he was no closer to solving it. He wanted to know both its meaning and why it had been secreted away. Obviously, its message was of great importance. But patience would be needed. That was what he told himself each night after he again failed to find the answer, and, if nothing else, he was indeed patient.\n\nHe gripped a hammer with a short handle and decided to see if the thick floor stone could be cracked. The smaller the pieces, the easier their removal. He dropped to his knees and slammed three blows into one end of the yard-long slab. Cracks immediately spread down its length. More blows lengthened them into crevices.\n\nHe tossed the hammer aside and used an iron bar to pry the smaller pieces loose. He then wedged the bar underneath a long, narrow fragment and angled the thick chunk out of its cavity. With his foot, he slid it aside.\n\nThen he noticed something.\n\nHe laid down the iron bar and brought the oil lamp close to the exposed subfloor. He reached down and gently swiped away debris and saw that he was staring at a hinge. He bent close and swiped away more dust and debris, exposing more corroded iron, his fingertips stained with rust.\n\nThe shape became clear.\n\nA door.\n\nLeading down.\n\nBut to where?\n\nHe glanced around. The other men were hard at work, talking among themselves. He set the lamp aside and calmly replaced the pieces he'd just removed back into the cavity.\n\n\"The good priest did not want anyone to know what he discovered,\" Claridon said. \"First the glass vial, now a doorway. This church of his was full of wonder.\"\n\n\"A doorway to what?\" Stephanie wanted to know.\n\n\"That's the interesting part. Lars never told me everything. But after reading his notebook, I now understand.\"\n\nSauniere cleared the last of the stone from the iron door in the floor. The church doors were locked, the sun having set hours ago. All day he'd thought about what lay beneath the door, but he'd not said a word to any of the workers, merely thanking them for their labors and explaining that he intended to take a few days' rest, so they wouldn't be needed back until next week. He'd not even told his precious mistress what he'd found, only mentioning after dinner that he wanted to inspect the church before going to bed. Rain now pelted the roof.\n\nIn the light from the oil lamp he calculated that the iron door was just over a yard long and half a yard wide. It lay flush to the floor with no lock. Thankfully its frame was stone, but he worried about the hinges, which was why he'd brought a container of lamp oil. Not the best lubricant, but it was all he could find on short notice.\n\nHe doused the hinges with oil and hoped time's grip would loosen. He then wedged the tip of an iron bar beneath one edge of the door and pried upward.\n\nNo movement.\n\nHe pried harder.\n\nThe hinges started to give.\n\nHe wiggled the bar, working the rusted metal, then applied more oil. After several efforts the hinges screamed and the door pivoted open and froze in place, pointing toward the ceiling.\n\nHe shone the lantern into the dank opening.\n\nNarrow steps led down five yards to a rough stone floor.\n\nA surge of excitement swept through him. He'd heard tales from other priests about things they'd found. Most of it stemmed from the Revolution when churchmen hid relics, icons, and decorations from republican looters. Many of the Languedoc's churches fell victim. But the one in Rennes-le-Chateeu had been in such a state of decay, there was simply nothing to loot.\n\nPerhaps they'd all been wrong.\n\nHe tested the top step and determined that they'd been hewn from the church's rock foundation. Lamp in hand, he crept down, staring ahead into a rectangular space, it, too, chipped from rock. An archway divided the room in half. Then he saw the bones. The outer walls were pocked with oven-like cavities, each one containing a skeletal occupant, along with the remnants of clothing, shoes, swords, and burial shrouds.\n\nHe shone the light near a few of the tombs and saw that each was identified with a chiseled name. All were d'Hautpouls. Dates ranged from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. He counted. Twenty-three filled the crypt. He knew who they were. The lords of Rennes.\n\nBeyond the center arch, a trunk lying beside an iron pot caught his eye.\n\nHe stepped over, lamp in hand, and was startled when something glistened back. He thought at first his eyes were deceiving him, but quickly realized the vision was real.\n\nHe bent down.\n\nThe iron kettle was filled with coins. He lifted one out and saw that they were French gold pieces, many bearing a date: 1768. He knew little of their value but reasoned that it was considerable. Hard to tell how many filled the cauldron, but when he tested its weight he was unable to move the container one millimeter.\n\nHe reached for the trunk and saw that its hasp was not locked. He pushed open the lid and saw that the inside was filled, on one side, with leather-bound journals and, on the other, with something wrapped in an oilskin cloth. Carefully, he poked with his finger and determined that whatever lay inside was many, small, and hard. He laid down the lamp and peeled back the top fold.\n\nThe light again caught a sparkle.\n\nDiamond.\n\nHe laid back the rest of the oilskin and the breath left him. Lying within the trunk was a cache of jewelry.\n\nWithout question, republican looters of a hundred years ago made a mistake when they bypassed the ramshackle church at Rennes-le-Chateeu. Or maybe the person or persons who selected this as their hiding spot simply chose wisely.\n\n\"The crypt existed,\" Claridon said. \"In the notebook you have there, I just read that Lars found a parish register for the years 1694 to 1726 that speaks of the crypt, but the register does not mention its entrance. Sauniere noted in his personal diary that he discovered a tomb. He then wrote in another entry, The year 1891 carries to the highest the fruit of that of which one speaks. Lars always thought that entry important.\"\n\nMalone eased the car to the side of the road and turned back to face Claridon. \"So that gold and those jewels were Sauniere's source of income. That's what he used to finance the church remodeling?\"\n\nClaridon laughed. \"At first. But, monsieur, there is even more to the story.\"\n\nSauniere stood.\n\nNever had he seen so much wealth in one place. What fortune had come his way. But he needed to salvage it without arousing suspicions. To do that, he would need time. And no one could be allowed to discover the crypt.\n\nHe bent down, retrieved the lamp, and decided that he might as well start tonight. He could remove the gold and jewels, hiding both in the presbytery. How to convert them to useful currency could be decided later. He retreated toward the staircase, taking another look around as he walked.\n\nOne of the tombs caught his attention.\n\nHe approached and saw that the niche contained a woman. Her burial dress lay flat, only bones and a skull remained. He held the lamp close and read the inscription beneath:"
            },
            {
                "title": "MARIE D'HAUTPOUL DE BLANCHEFORT",
                "text": "He was familiar with the countess. She was the last of the d'Hautpoul heirs. When she died in 1781, control of both the village and surrounding lands slipped away from her family. The Revolution, which came only a dozen years later, forever eliminated all aristocratic ownership.\n\nBut there was a problem.\n\nHe quickly climbed back to ground level. Outside, he locked the church doors and, through a blinding rain, hustled around the building to the parish close and worked his way through the graves where the tombstones seemed to swim in the living blackness.\n\nHe stopped at the one he sought and bent down.\n\nShining the lamp, he read the inscription.\n\n\"Marie d'Hautpoul de Blanchefort was buried outside, too,\" Claridon said.\n\n\"Two graves for the same woman?\" Stephanie asked.\n\n\"Apparently. But the body was in the crypt.\"\n\nMalone remembered what Stephanie had said yesterday about Sauniere and his mistress molesting the graves in the churchyard, then chiseling away the inscription on the countess's headstone. \"So Sauniere dug up the grave in the churchyard.\"\n\n\"That's what Lars believed.\"\n\n\"And it was empty?\"\n\n\"Again, we'll never know, but Lars felt that to be the case. And history would seem to support his conclusion. A woman of the countess's stature would never have been buried. She would have been laid in a crypt, which is indeed where the body was found. The grave outside was something altogether different.\"\n\n\"The tombstone was a message,\" Stephanie said. \"We know that. That's why Eugene Stfcblein's book is so critical.\"\n\n\"But unless you know the story of the crypt, the grave in the cemetery would generate no interest. Just another memorial, along with all the others. The abbe Bigou was smart. He hid his message in plain sight.\"\n\n\"And Sauniere discovered it?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"Lars believed so.\"\n\nMalone turned back to the wheel and motored the car onto the road. They headed down the last stretch of highway, then turned west and crossed the swift-moving Rhfne. Ahead rose Avignon's fortified walls, the papal palace looming high above. Malone turned off the busy boulevard into the old city, passing the market square containing the book fair they'd visited earlier. He wound a path back toward the palace and parked in the same underground garage.\n\n\"I have a stupid question,\" Malone said. \"Why doesn't somebody just dig beneath the church at Rennes, or use ground radar to verify the crypt?\"\n\n\"The local authorities will not allow it. Think about that, monsieur. If nothing were there, what would happen to the mystique? Rennes lives off Sauniere's legend. The whole Languedoc benefits. The last thing anyone wants is proof of anything. They profit far too well from myth.\"\n\nMalone reached under the seat and retrieved the gun he'd taken from his pursuer last night. He checked the magazine. Three rounds left.\n\n\"Is that needed?\" Claridon asked.\n\n\"I feel a whole better with it.\" He opened his door and stepped out, stuffing the gun beneath his jacket.\n\n\"Why do we have to go inside the palace of the popes?\" Stephanie asked.\n\n\"That's where the information is stored.\"\n\n\"Care to explain?\"\n\nClaridon opened his door. \"Come and I'll show you.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "LAVELANET, FRANCE",
                "text": "[ 7:00 PM ]\n\nThe seneschal stopped the car in the village center. He and Geoffrey had been traveling northward in a meandering route for the past five hours. Intentionally, they'd bypassed the larger communities of Foix, Quillan, and Limoux, opting instead to stop in a tiny hamlet, nestled within a sheltered hollow, where few tourists seemed to venture.\n\nAfter leaving the master's chamber, they'd exited through the secret passages near the main kitchen, the portal cleverly concealed within a brick wall. Geoffrey had explained how the master had taught him the routes, used in centuries past for escape. For the last hundred years they'd been known only to masters and rarely utilized.\n\nOnce out, they'd quickly found the garage and appropriated one of the abbey's cars, leaving through the main gate before the brothers assigned to the motor pool returned from noontime prayers. With de Roquefort unconscious in his chambers and his entourage waiting for someone to open the locked door, they'd bought themselves a solid head start.\n\n\"It's time we talk,\" he said, his tone conveying that there would be no more procrastinating.\n\n\"I'm prepared.\"\n\nThey left the car and walked to a cafe where an older clientele filled outside tables roofed by stately elms. Their robes were gone, replaced with clothes bought an hour ago in a quick stop. A waiter appeared and they placed an order. The evening was warm and pleasant.\n\n\"Do you realize what we did back there?\" he asked. \"We shot two brothers.\"\n\n\"The master told me violence would be inevitable.\"\n\n\"I know what we're running from, but what are we running to?\"\n\nGeoffrey reached into his pocket and produced the envelope he'd displayed to de Roquefort. \"The master told me to give you this, once we were free.\"\n\nHe accepted the envelope and tore it open with a mixture of eagerness and trepidation.\n\nMy son, and in many ways I thought of you as that, I knew that de Roquefort would prevail in the conclave, but it was important that you challenge him. The brothers will recall that when your time truly arrives. For now, your destiny is elsewhere. Brother Geoffrey will be your companion.\n\nI have faith that prior to leaving the abbey you secured the two volumes that have held your attention the past few years. Yes, I was aware of your interest. I, too, read both long ago. Theft of Order property is a serious breach of Rule, but let us not consider it a theft, merely a borrowing, as I'm sure you will return both books. The information they contain, along with what you already know, is supremely potent. Unfortunately, the puzzle is not solved solely by it. There is more to the riddle, and that is what you must now discover. Contrary to what you might think, I do not know the answer. But de Roquefort cannot be allowed to obtain the Great Devise. He knows much, including all of what you have managed to extract from our records, so do not underestimate his resolve.\n\nIt was critical that you leave the confines of our cloistered life. Much awaits you. Though I write these words in the final weeks of my life, I can only assume that your departure was not without violence. Do what is necessary to complete your quest. Masters for centuries have left words for their successors, my predecessor included. Of all who came before me, you alone possess enough of the pieces to reassemble the entire puzzle. I would have liked to have accomplished that goal with you in my lifetime, but it was not to be. De Roquefort would have never allowed our success. With brother Geoffrey's help you can now succeed. I wish you well. Take care of yourself and Geoffrey. Be patient with the lad, for he does only what I have bound him to do by oath.\n\nThe seneschal looked up at Geoffrey and wanted to know, \"How old are you?\"\n\n\"Twenty-nine.\"\n\n\"You bear a lot of responsibility for one so young.\"\n\n\"I was frightened when the master told me what he expected of me. I didn't want the duty.\"\n\n\"Why didn't he tell me directly?\"\n\nGeoffrey did not immediately answer. \"The master said you withdraw in the face of controversy and shy away from confrontation. You do not, as yet, know yourself fully.\"\n\nHe was stung by the rebuke, but Geoffrey's look of truth and innocence stamped great emphasis onto his words. And they were true. He'd never been one to search for a fight and had avoided every one that he could.\n\nBut not this time.\n\nHe'd confronted de Roquefort head-on and would have shot him dead if the Frenchmen had not reacted quickly. This time he planned to fight. He cleared his throat of emotion and asked, \"What am I to do?\"\n\nThe waiter returned with two salads, crusty bread, and cheese.\n\nGeoffrey smiled. \"First, we eat. I'm starved.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Then what?\"\n\n\"Only you can tell us that.\"\n\nHe shook his head at Geoffrey's fervor of hope. Actually, he'd already given their next move thought on the drive north from the abbey. And a comforting resolve formed as he realized there was only one place to go."
            },
            {
                "title": "AVIGNON",
                "text": "[ 5:30 PM ]\n\nMalone stared up at the palace of the popes, which stretched skyward a hundred yards away. He, Stephanie, and Claridon were sitting at an outdoor cafe in a lively square directly adjacent to the main entrance. A north wind swept in from across the nearby Rhfne\u2014the mistral, as the locals called it\u2014and banged through the city unchecked. Malone recalled a medieval proverb that spoke to the foul smells that once filled these streets. Windy Avignon, with the wind loathsome, without the wind poisonous. And what had Petrarch called the place? The most odiferous on earth.\n\nFrom a tour book he'd learned that the mass of architecture rising before him, at once a palace, fortress, and shrine, was in reality two buildings\u2014the old palace built by Pope Benedict XII, begun in 1334, and the new palace erected under Clement VI, finished in 1352. Both reflected the personality of their creators. The old palace was a measure of Romanesque conservatism with little flair, while the new palace exuded a Gothic embellishment. Unfortunately, both buildings had been ravaged by fire and, during the French Revolution, looted, their sculpture destroyed, all of the frescoes whitewashed. In 1810 the palace was turned into a barracks. The city of Avignon assumed control in 1906, but restoration was delayed until the 1960s. Two wings were now a convention center and the rest a grand tourist attraction that offered only fleeting glances of its former glory.\n\n\"Time we enter,\" Claridon said. \"The last tour starts in ten minutes. We must be a part.\"\n\nMalone stood. \"What are we going to do?\"\n\nThunder eased past overhead.\n\n\"The abbe Bigou, to whom Marie d'Hautpoul de Blanchefort told her great family secret, would, from time to time, visit the palace and admire the paintings. That was before the Revolution, so many were still on display. Lars discovered there was one in particular he loved. When Lars rediscovered the cryptogram, he also found a reference to a painting.\"\n\n\"What kind of reference?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"In the parish register for the church at Rennes-le-Chateeu, on the day he left France for Spain in 1793, Abbe Bigou made a final entry that read, Lisez les Regles du Caridad.\"\n\nMalone silently translated. Read the Rules of the Caridad.\n\n\"Sauniere found that particular entry and secreted it away. Luckily, the register was never destroyed, and Lars ultimately found it. Apparently, Sauniere learned that Bigou had visited Avignon often. By Sauniere's time, the late nineteenth century, the palace was nothing but a gutted shell. But Sauniere could have easily discovered that there'd been a painting here in Bigou's time, Reading the Rules of the Caridad, by Juan de Valdes Leal.\"\n\n\"I assume the painting is still inside?\" Malone asked, staring across the expansive courtyard toward the Chapeaux Galo, the palace's central gate.\n\nClaridon shook his head. \"Long gone. Destroyed by fire fifty years ago.\"\n\nMore thunder rumbled.\n\n\"Then why are we here?\" Stephanie asked.\n\nMalone tossed a few euros on the table and let his glance dart to another outdoor cafe two doors away. While others were heading off in anticipation of the coming storm, one woman sat under an awning and sipped from a cup. His gaze lingered only for an instant, enough for him to note well-cut features and prominent eyes. Her skin was the color of creamed coffee, her manner gracious when a waiter delivered her meal. He'd noticed her ten minutes ago, after they first sat, and he'd wondered.\n\nNow for the test.\n\nHe grabbed a paper napkin from the table and balled it into his closed fist.\n\n\"In that unpublished manuscript,\" Claridon was saying, \"the one I told you Nfel Corbu wrote about Sauniere and Rennes, which Lars found, Corbu talked about the painting and knew Bigou referred to it in the parish register. Corbu also noted that a lithograph of the painting was still in the palace archives. He'd seen it. In the week before he died, Lars finally learned where in the archives. We were to go inside for a look, but Lars never returned to Avignon.\"\n\n\"And he didn't tell you where?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"No, monsieur.\"\n\n\"There's no mention in the notebook about a painting,\" Malone said. \"I read the whole thing. Not a word on Avignon.\"\n\n\"If Lars didn't tell you where the lithograph is, why are we going inside?\" Stephanie asked. \"You don't know where to look.\"\n\n\"But your son did, the day before he died. He and I were to go inside the palace for a look when he returned from the mountains. But, madame, as you know\u2014\"\n\n\"He never came back, either.\"\n\nMalone watched as Stephanie suppressed her emotions. She was good, but not that good. \"Why didn't you go?\"\n\n\"I thought staying alive more important. So I retreated to the asylum.\"\n\n\"The man died in an avalanche,\" Malone made clear. \"He wasn't murdered.\"\n\n\"You don't know that. In fact,\" Claridon said, \"you don't know anything.\" He glanced around the plaza. \"We need to hurry. They are particular about the last tour. Most of the employees are older residents from the city. Many are volunteers. They lock the doors promptly at seven. There's no security system or alarms within the palace. Nothing of any real value is displayed there any longer, and besides, the walls themselves are its greatest security. We will drift off from the tour and wait till all is quiet.\"\n\nThey started walking.\n\nDroplets of rain pricked Malone's scalp. With his back to the woman, who should still be seated a hundred feet away eating, he opened his hand and allowed the mistral to sweep the balled napkin away. He whirled and pretended to go after the stray paper as it danced across the cobblestones. As he retrieved the supposed errant piece of trash, he stole a glance toward the cafe.\n\nThe woman was no longer at her table.\n\nShe was strolling their way, toward the palace.\n\nDe Roquefort lowered the binoculars. He stood at the Rocher des Doms, the rock of the doms, the most picturesque spot in Avignon. Men had occupied the summit since the neolithic age. In the days of the papal occupation the great rocky outcrop served as a natural buffer for the ever-present mistral. Today the hilltop, which sat directly adjacent to the papal palace, supported a splendid park with lakes, fountains, statuary, and grottoes. The view was breathtaking. He'd come here many times when he worked at the nearby seminary, in his time before the Order.\n\nHills and valleys stretched to the west and south. The swift Rhfne cleaved a path below, sweeping beneath the famous Pont St. Benezet that once bisected the river and led from the pope's city to the king's on the other side. When, in 1226, Avignon sided with the count of Toulouse against Louis VIII during the Albigensian Crusade, the French king razed the bridge. Rebuilding eventually occurred, and de Roquefort imagined the fourteenth century when cardinals rode their mules across to their country palaces in Villeneuve-les-Avignon. By the sixteenth century rains and floods had cut the restored bridge back to four spans, which were never extended to the far side, so the structure still stood uncompleted. Another failure of will for Avignon, he'd always thought. A place that seemed destined to only half succeed.\n\n\"They're headed into the palace,\" he said to the brother standing next to him. He checked his watch. Nearly six PM. \"Which closes for the day at seven.\"\n\nHe brought the binoculars back to his eyes and stared down five hundred yards at the plaza. He'd traveled north from the abbey and arrived forty minutes ago. The electronic surveillance on Malone's car was still functioning and had revealed a trip out to Villeneuve-les-Avignon, then back to Avignon. Apparently, they'd gone to retrieve Claridon.\n\nDe Roquefort had climbed the tree-lined walkway from the papal palace and decided to wait here, on the summit, which offered a perfect vantage of the old city. Fortune had smiled upon him when Stephanie Nelle and her two companions emerged from the underground parking garage directly below, then took a seat in a clearly visible outdoor cafe.\n\nHe lowered the binoculars.\n\nThe mistral whipped past him. The north wind was howling today, sweeping the quays, swelling the river, pushing storm clouds that scudded the sky ever closer.\n\n\"They apparently intend to stay in the palace after closing. Lars Nelle and Claridon once did that, too. Do we still have a key to the door?\"\n\n\"Our brother here in town keeps it for us.\"\n\n\"Retrieve it.\"\n\nHe'd long ago secured a way to enter the palace through the cathedral after hours. The archives inside had held Lars Nelle's interest, so they'd likewise drawn de Roquefort's. Twice he'd sent brothers to scurry around during the night, trying to ascertain what had attracted Lars Nelle. But the volume of material was intimidating and nothing was ever learned. Perhaps tonight he'd discover more.\n\nHe returned his eyes to the lens. Paper slipped from Malone's grip, and he watched the lawyer chase after it.\n\nThen his three targets vanished beyond view."
            },
            {
                "title": "9:00 PM",
                "text": "An eerie feeling swept over Malone as he strolled through the unadorned rooms. Halfway into the palace tour, they'd slipped away and Claridon had led them to an upper floor. There they'd waited in a tower, behind a closed door, until eight thirty, when most of the interior lights had been doused and no movement could be heard. Claridon seemed to know the procedure, and had been pleased that the staff's routine remained the same after five years.\n\nThe labyrinth of sparse halls, long passages, and barren chambers was now illuminated only by isolated pools of weak light. Malone could only imagine how they were once furnished, the walls sumptuous with colorful frescoes and tapestries, each full of personages gathered to either serve or petition the supreme pontiff. Envoys from the Khan, the emperor of Constantinople, even Petrarch himself and St. Catherine of Siena, the woman who eventually convinced the last Avignon pope to return to Rome, had all come. History was deeply rooted here, yet only remnants remained.\n\nOutside, the storm had finally arrived and rain soaked the roof with violence, while thunder rattled window glass.\n\n\"This palace was once as grand as the Vatican,\" Claridon whispered. \"All gone. Destroyed by ignorance and greed.\"\n\nMalone did not agree. \"Some would say ignorance and greed were what caused it to be built in the first place.\"\n\n\"Ah, Mr. Malone, you're a student of history?\"\n\n\"I've read.\"\n\n\"Then let me show you something.\"\n\nClaridon led them through open portals into more trodden rooms, each identified by placards. They stopped in one cavernous rectangle labeled the Grand Tinel, the chamber topped by a wood-paneled, barrel-vaulted ceiling.\n\n\"This was the pope's banquet hall and could hold hundreds,\" Claridon said, his voice echoing. \"Clement VI hung blue fabric, studded with gold stars, over the ceiling to create a celestial arch. Frescoes once adorned the walls. All of it was destroyed by fire in 1413.\"\n\n\"And never replaced?\" Stephanie asked.\n\n\"The Avignon popes were gone by then, so this palace carried no further significance.\" Claridon motioned to the far side. \"The pope would eat alone, over there, on a dais seated on a throne, under a canopy decked with crimson velvet and ermine. Guests sat on wooden benches that lined the walls\u2014cardinals to the east, others to the west. Trestle tables formed a U and food was served from the center. All quite stiff and formal.\"\n\n\"A lot like this palace,\" Malone said. \"It's like walking through a destroyed city, the building's soul bombed away. A world unto itself.\"\n\n\"Which was the whole idea. The French kings wanted their popes away from everyone. They alone controlled what the pope thought and did, so it wasn't necessary that their residence be an airy place. Not one of those popes ever visited Rome, since the Italians would have killed them on sight. So the seven men who served here as pope built their own fortress and did not question the French throne. They owed their existence to the king, and delighted in this repose\u2014their Avignon Captivity, as the papacy's time here came to be called.\"\n\nInto the next room the space became more confined. The Parement Chamber was identified as where the pope and cardinals would meet in secret consistories.\n\n\"This is also where the Golden Rose was presented,\" Claridon said. \"A particularly arrogant gesture for the Avignon popes. On the fourth Sunday of Lent, the pope would honor one special person, usually a sovereign, with the presentation of a golden rose.\"\n\n\"You don't approve?\" Stephanie asked.\n\n\"Christ had no need for golden roses. Why should popes? Just more of the sacrilege this entire place reflected. Clement VI bought the whole town from Queen Joanna of Naples. Part of a deal she made to obtain absolution for her complicity in her husband's murder. For a hundred years criminals, adventurers, counterfeiters, and smugglers all escaped justice here, provided they paid proper homage to the pope.\"\n\nThrough another chamber they entered what was labeled the Stag Room. Claridon switched on a series of soft incandescent lights. Malone lingered at the doorway long enough to glance back through the previous chamber into the Grand Tinel. A shadow flickered across the wall, enough for him to know they were not alone. He knew who was there. A tall, attractive, athletic woman \u2014 of color, as Claridon had said earlier in the car. The woman who'd followed them into the palace.\n\n\"\u2014this is where the old and new palaces join,\" Claridon was saying. \"Old behind us, new through that other portal. This was Clement VI's study.\"\n\nMalone had read in the souvenir book about Clement, a man who enjoyed paintings and poems, pleasing sounds, rare animals, and courtly love. He was quoted as saying, My predecessors didn't know how to be popes, so he transformed Benedict's old fortress into a lavish palace. A perfect example of Clement's material wants now surrounded him as painted images on the windowless walls. Fields, thickets, and streams, all under a blue sky. Men with nets by a green fishpond littered with swimming pike. Brittany spaniels. A young noble and his falcon. A child in a tree. Grasses, birds, bathers. Greens and brown predominated, but an orange dress, a blue fish, and fruit in the trees added dashes of sharp color.\n\n\"Clement had these frescoes painted in 1344. They were found beneath the whitewash the soldiers applied when the palace became a barracks in the nineteenth century. This room explains the Avignon popes, especially Clement VI. Some actually called him Clement the Magnificent. He possessed no calling for religious life. Satisfaction of penances, reversal of excommunications, remission of sins, even curtailment of years in purgatory for both the dead and living\u2014all was for sale. You notice anything missing?\"\n\nMalone stared again at the frescoes. The hunting scenes were clearly escapism\u2014people doing fun things\u2014with a view that soared and dipped, but nothing particular called out to him.\n\nThen it hit him.\n\n\"Where's God?\"\n\n\"Good eye, monsieur.\" Claridon's arms swept out. \"Not anywhere in this home of Clement VI is there a religious symbol. The omission speaks loudly. This was the bedroom of a king, not a pope, and that was how the Avignon prelates thought of themselves. These were the men who destroyed the Templars. Starting in 1307 with Clement V, who was Philip the Fair's co-conspirator, and ending with Gregory XI in 1378, these corrupt individuals crushed that Order. Lars always believed, and I agree, that this room proves what those men really valued.\"\n\n\"Do you think the Templars survived?\" Stephanie asked.\n\n\"Oui. They're out there. I've seen them. What exactly they are, I do not know. But they're out there.\"\n\nMalone could not decide if the declaration was fact or just the supposition of a man who saw conspiracies where none existed. All he knew was that a woman was stalking them who was expert enough to plant a slug above his head into a tree trunk, from fifty yards, at night, in a forty-mile-per-hour wind. She might even have been the one who saved his hide in Copenhagen. And she was real.\n\n\"Let's get on with it,\" Malone said.\n\nClaridon switched off the light. \"Follow me.\"\n\nThey walked across the old palace to the north wing and the convention center. A placard noted that the facility was recently created by the city as a way to raise revenue for further restoration. The former Conclave Hall, Treasurer's Chamber, and Great Cellar had been equipped with bleacher seats, a stage, and audiovisual equipment. Down more passageways they passed stone effigies of more Avignon popes.\n\nClaridon eventually stopped at a stout wooden door and tested the latch, which opened. \"Good. They still do not lock it at night.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"There's nothing of any value here besides information, and few thieves are interested in that.\"\n\nThey stepped into a pitch-dark space.\n\n\"This was once the chapel of Benedict XII, the pope who conceived and built most of the old palace. In the late nineteenth century, this and the room above were converted into the district's archives. The palace keeps its records here, too.\"\n\nThe light spilling in from the hall revealed a towering room filled with shelving, row after row. More lined the outer walls, one section stacked on top of the other, a railed walkway encircling. Behind the shelves rose arched windows, the black panes peppered by a steady rain.\n\n\"Four kilometers of shelving,\" Claridon said. \"A gracious plenty of information.\"\n\n\"But you know where to look?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"I hope so.\"\n\nClaridon plunged ahead down the center aisle. Malone and Stephanie waited until a lamp came on fifty feet inside.\n\n\"Over here,\" Claridon called out.\n\nMalone closed the hall door and wondered how the woman was going to gain her entrance unnoticed. He led the way toward the light and they found Claridon standing next to a reading table.\n\n\"Lucky for history,\" Claridon said, \"all the palace's artifacts were inventoried early in the eighteenth century. Then, in the late nineteenth century, photographs and drawings were made of what survived the Revolution. Lars and I both became familiar with how the information was organized.\"\n\n\"And you didn't come look after Mark died because you thought the Knights Templar would kill you?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"I realize, monsieur, you don't believe much of this. But I assure you I did the right thing. These records have rested here for centuries, so I thought they could rest quietly awhile longer. Staying alive seemed more important.\"\n\n\"So why are you here now?\" Stephanie asked.\n\n\"A long time has passed.\" Claridon stepped from the table. \"Around us are the palace inventories. It will take me a few minutes to look. Why don't you sit and let me see if I can find what we want.\" He produced a flashlight from his pocket. \"From the asylum. I thought we may need it.\"\n\nMalone slid out a chair, as did Stephanie. Claridon disappeared into the darkness. They sat and he could hear rummaging, the flashlight beam dancing across the vault overhead.\n\n\"This is what my husband did,\" she said in a whisper. \"Hiding out in a forgotten palace, looking for nonsense.\"\n\nHe caught the edge in her voice.\n\n\"While our marriage slipped away. While I worked twenty hours a day. This was what he did.\"\n\nA peal of thunder sent tremors through both him and the room.\n\n\"It was important to him,\" Malone said, keeping his voice low, too. \"And there might even be something to it.\"\n\n\"Like what, Cotton. Treasure? If Sauniere discovered those jewels in the crypt, okay. Luck like that visits people every once in a while. But there's nothing more. Bigou, Sauniere, Lars, Mark, Claridon. They're all dreamers.\"\n\n\"Dreamers have many times changed the world.\"\n\n\"This is a wild goose chase for a goose that doesn't exist.\"\n\nClaridon returned from the darkness and dropped a musty folder on the table. Water stains smeared its outside. Inside was a three-inch stack of black-and-white photographs and pencil drawings. \"Within a few feet of where Mark said. Thank heaven the old men who run this place change little about it over time.\"\n\n\"How did Mark find it?' Stephanie asked.\n\n\"He would hunt for clues on the weekends. He wasn't as dedicated as his father, but he came to the house in Rennes often and he and I dabbled in the search. At the university in Toulouse he came across some information on the Avignon archives. He linked the clues together and here we have the answer.\"\n\nMalone spread the contents out across the table. \"What are we looking for?\"\n\n\"I've never seen the painting. We can only hope it's identified.\"\n\nThey started sifting through the images.\n\n\"There,\" Claridon said, excitement in his voice.\n\nMalone focused on one of the lithographs, a black-and-white drawing time-tinged, edges frayed. A handwritten notation across the top read DON MIGUEL DE MAdARA READING THE RULES OF THE CARIDAD.\n\nThe image was of an older man, with the dusting of a beard and a thin mustache, seated at a table, wearing a religious habit. An elaborate emblem was stitched to one sleeve from elbow to shoulder. His left hand touched a book propped upright and his right hand was extended, palm-up, motioning across an elaborately clothed desk to a little man in a monk's robe perched on a low stool with fingers to his lips, signaling quiet. An open book lay in the little man's lap. The floor, which extended from one side to the other, was a checkerboard arrangement, like a chessboard, and writing appeared on the stool where the little man sat.\n\n\u2002ACABOCE Aba\n\n\u2002DE1687\n\n\"Most curious,\" Claridon muttered. \"Look here.\"\n\nMalone followed Claridon's finger and studied the top left portion of the picture where, in the shadows behind the little man, a table and shelf stood. On top lay a human skull.\n\n\"What does all this mean?\" Malone asked Claridon.\n\n\"Caridad translates to 'charity,' which can also be love. The black habit the man at the table wears is from the Order of the Knights of Calatrava, a Spanish religious society devoted to Jesus Christ. I can tell from the design on the sleeve. Acaboce is 'completion.' The Aba could be a reference to alpha and omega, the first and last letters in the Greek alphabet\u2014the beginning and end. The skull? I have no idea.\"\n\nMalone recalled what Bigou supposedly wrote in the Rennes parish register just before he fled France for Spain. Read the Rules of the Caridad. \"What rules are we to read?\"\n\nClaridon studied the drawing in the weak light. \"Notice something about the little man on the stool. See his shoes. His feet are planted on black squares in the flooring, diagonal to one another.\"\n\n\"The floor resembles a chessboard,\" Stephanie said.\n\n\"And the bishop moves diagonally, as the feet indicate.\"\n\n\"So the little man is a bishop?\" Stephanie asked.\n\n\"No,\" Malone said, understanding. \"In French chess, the bishop is the Fool.\"\n\n\"You are a student of the game?\" Claridon asked.\n\n\"I've played some.\"\n\nClaridon rested his finger atop the little man on the stool. \"Here is the Wise Fool who apparently has a secret that deals with alpha and omega.\"\n\nMalone understood. \"Christ has been called that.\"\n\n\"Oui. And when you add acaboce you have 'completion of alpha and omega.' Completion of Christ.\"\n\n\"But what does that mean?\" Stephanie asked.\n\n\"Madame, might I see Stfcblein's book?\"\n\nShe found the volume and handed it to Claridon. \"Let's look at the gravestone again. This and the painting are related. Remember, it was the abbe Bigou who left both clues.\" He laid the book flat on the table.\n\n\"You have to know the history to understand this gravestone. The d'Hautpoul family dates back to twelfth-century France. Marie married Franeois d'Hautpoul, the last lord, in 1732. One of the d'Hautpoul ancestors penned a will in 1644, which he duly registered and placed with a notary in Esperaza. When that ancestor died, though, that will was not to be found. Then, more than a hundred years after his death, the lost will suddenly reappeared. When Franeois d'Hautpoul went to get it, he was told by the notary that it would not be wise for me to part with a document of such great importance. Franeois died in 1753, and in 1780 the will was finally given to his widow, Marie. Why? No one knows. Perhaps because she was, by then, the only d'Hautpoul left. But she died a year later and it's said she passed the will, and whatever information it contained, to the abbe Bigou as part of the great family secret.\"\n\n\"And that was what Sauniere found in the crypt? Along with the gold coins and the jewels?\"\n\nClaridon nodded. \"But the crypt was concealed. So Lars always believed the false grave of Marie in the cemetery held the actual clue. Bigou must have felt that the secret he knew was too great not to pass on. He was fleeing the country, never to return, so he left a puzzle that pointed the way. In the car, when you first showed me this gravestone drawing, many things occurred to me.\" He reached for a blank pad and pen that lay on the table. \"Now I know this carving is full of information.\"\n\nMalone studied the letters and symbols on the gravestones.\n\n\"The stone on the right lay flat on Marie's grave and does not contain the sort of inscription normally found on graves. Its left side is written in Latin.\" Claridon wrote ET IN PAX on the pad. \"This translates to 'and in peace,' but it has problems. Pax is the nominative case of peace and is grammatically incorrect after the preposition in. The right-hand column is written in Greek and is gibberish. But I've been thinking about that, and the solution finally came to me. The inscription is actually all Latin, written in the Greek alphabet. When you translate into Roman, the E, T, I, N, and A are fine. But the P is an R, the X becomes a K, and\u2014\"\n\nClaridon scribbled on the pad, then wrote his completed translation across the bottom."
            },
            {
                "title": "ET IN ARCADIA EGO",
                "text": "\"And in Arcadia I,\" Malone said, translating the Latin. \"That makes no sense.\"\n\n\"Precisely,\" Claridon noted. \"Which would lead one to conclude that the words are concealing something else.\"\n\nMalone understood. \"An anagram?\"\n\n\"Quite common in Bigou's time. After all, it's doubtful Bigou would have left a message that easy to decipher.\"\n\n\"What about the words in the center?\"\n\nClaridon jotted them onto the pad."
            },
            {
                "title": "REDDIS RcGIS CcLLIS ARCIS",
                "text": "\"Reddis means 'to give back, to restore something previously taken.' But it's also Latin for 'Rennes.' Regis derives from rex, which is 'king.' Cella refers to a storeroom. Arcis stems from arx \u2014a stronghold, fortress, citadel. A lot can be made of each, but together they make no sense. Then there's the arrow that connects p-s at the top with pre-cum. I have no idea what the p-s means. The pre-cum translates as 'pray to come.'\"\n\n\"What is that symbol at the bottom?\" Stephanie asked. \"Looks like an octopus.\"\n\nClaridon shook his head. \"A spider, madame. But its significance escapes me.\"\n\n\"What about the other stone?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"The left one stood upright over the grave and was the most visible. Remember, Bigou served Marie d'Hautpoul for many years. He was extraordinarily loyal to her and took two years to produce this headstone, yet almost every line in it contains an error. Masons of that day were prone to mistakes, but this many? No way the abbe would have allowed them to remain.\"\n\n\"So the errors are part of the message?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"It would seem. Look here. Her name is wrong. She was not Marie de Negre d'Arles dame d'Haupoul. She was Marie de Negri d'Ables d'Hautpoul. Many of the other words are also truncated. Letters are raised and dropped for no reason. But look at the date.\"\n\nMalone studied the Roman numerals."
            },
            {
                "title": "MDCOLXXXI",
                "text": "\"Supposedly her date of death. 1681. And that's discounting the O, since there is no zero in the Roman numeral system, and no number was denoted by the letter O. Yet here it is. And Marie died in 1781, not 1681. Is the O there to make clear that Bigou knew the date was wrong? And her age is wrong, too. She was sixty-eight, not sixty-seven, as noted, when she died.\"\n\nMalone pointed to the sketch of the right stone and the Roman numerals in the bottom corner. LIXLIXL. \"Fifty. Nine. Fifty. Nine. Fifty.\"\n\n\"Most peculiar,\" Claridon said.\n\nMalone glanced back at the lithograph. \"I don't see where this painting figures in?\"\n\n\"It's a puzzle, monsieur. One that has no easy solution.\"\n\n\"But the answer is something I'd like to know,\" a deep male voice said, out of the darkness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "Malone had been expecting contact from the woman, but this voice was not hers. He reached for his gun.\n\n\"Stand still, Mr. Malone. Weapons are trained on you.\"\n\n\"It's the man from the cathedral,\" Stephanie said.\n\n\"I told you we'd meet again. And you, monsieur Claridon. You weren't that convincing in the asylum. Insane? Hardly.\"\n\nMalone searched the darkness. The sheer size of the chamber produced a confusion of noise. But he spotted human forms standing above them, before the upper row of shelving at the wooden railing.\n\nHe counted four.\n\n\"I am, though, impressed by your knowledge, monsieur Claridon. Your deductions about the headstone seem logical. I always believed there was much to be learned from that marker. I, too, have been here before, rummaging through these shelves. Such a difficult endeavor. So much to explore. I do appreciate you narrowing the search. Reading the Rules of Caridad. Who would have thought?\"\n\nClaridon made the sign of the cross and Malone spotted fear in the man's eyes. \"May God protect us.\"\n\n\"Come now, monsieur Claridon,\" the disembodied voice said. \"Do we need to involve heaven?\"\n\n\"You are His warriors.\" Claridon's voice trembled.\n\n\"And what brings you to that conclusion?\"\n\n\"Who else could you be?\"\n\n\"Perhaps we are the police? No. You wouldn't believe that. Maybe we're adventurers\u2014searchers\u2014like you. But no. So, let's say for the sake of simplicity that we are His warriors. How can you three aid our cause?\"\n\nNo one answered him.\n\n\"Ms. Nelle possesses her husband's journal and the book from the auction. She'll contribute those.\"\n\n\"Screw you,\" she spat out.\n\nA pop, like a balloon bursting, sounded over the rain and a bullet careened off the table a few inches from Stephanie.\n\n\"Bad answer,\" the voice said.\n\n\"Give them to him,\" Malone said.\n\nStephanie glared at him.\n\n\"He'll shoot you next.\"\n\n\"How did you know?\" the voice asked.\n\n\"That's what I'd do.\"\n\nA chuckle. \"I like you, Mr. Malone. You're a professional.\"\n\nStephanie reached into her shoulder bag and removed the book and journal.\n\n\"Toss them toward the door, between the shelves,\" the voice said.\n\nShe did as instructed.\n\nA form appeared and retrieved them.\n\nMalone silently added one more man to the list. At least five were now in the archive. He felt the gun wedged at his waist beneath his jacket. Unfortunately, there was no way to retrieve it before at least one of them was shot. And only three bullets remained in the magazine.\n\n\"Your husband, Ms. Nelle, managed to piece together many of the facts, and his deductions as to missing elements were generally correct. He was a remarkable intellect.\"\n\n\"What is it you're after?\" Malone asked. \"I only joined this party a couple of days ago.\"\n\n\"We seek justice, Mr. Malone.\"\n\n\"And it's necessary to run down an old man in Rennes-le-Cheteau to achieve justice?\" He thought he'd jostle the barrel and see what spilled out.\n\n\"And who would that be?\"\n\n\"Ernst Scoville. He worked with Lars Nelle. Surely you knew of him?\"\n\n\"Mr. Malone, perhaps a year of retirement has dulled your skills. I'd hope that you were better at interrogating when you were working full time.\"\n\n\"Since you have the journal and the notebook, don't you have to be going?\"\n\n\"I need that lithograph. Monsieur Claridon, please be so kind as to take it to my associate, there, beyond the table.\"\n\nClaridon clearly did not want to do it.\n\nAnother slap from a sound-suppressed weapon and a bullet thudded into the tabletop. \"I hate repeating myself.\"\n\nMalone lifted the drawing and handed it to Claridon. \"Do it.\"\n\nThe sheet was accepted in a hand that trembled. Claridon took a few steps beyond the spill of the weak lamp. Thunder pounded the air and rattled the walls. Rain continued to burst forth with fury.\n\nThen a new noise erupted.\n\nGunfire.\n\nAnd the lamp exploded in a burst of sparks.\n\nDe Roquefort heard the gunshot and saw the muzzle flash from near the archive's exit. Damn. Somebody else was here.\n\nThe room was plunged into darkness.\n\n\"Move,\" he screamed to his men on the second-floor catwalk, and he hoped they knew what to do.\n\nMalone realized somebody had shot out the light. The woman. She'd found another way in.\n\nAs darkness overtook them, he grabbed Stephanie and they dropped to the floor. He was hoping the men above him had been likewise caught off guard.\n\nHe brought out the gun from beneath his jacket.\n\nTwo more shots exploded from below, and the bullets sent the men above scurrying. Footsteps pounded on the wooden platform. He was more concerned about the man on the ground floor, but he'd heard nothing from the direction where he'd last seen him, nor had he heard anything from Claridon.\n\nThe running stopped.\n\n\"Whoever you are,\" the man's voice said, \"must you interfere?\"\n\n\"I could ask you the same question,\" the woman said in a languid tone.\n\n\"This is not your business.\"\n\n\"I disagree.\"\n\n\"You assaulted two of my brothers in Copenhagen.\"\n\n\"Let's say I ended your attack.\"\n\n\"There will be retribution.\"\n\n\"Come and get me.\"\n\n\"Stop her,\" the man yelled.\n\nBlack shapes rushed across overhead. Malone's eyes had adjusted and he made out a staircase at the far end of the catwalk.\n\nHe handed Stephanie the gun. \"Stay here.\"\n\n\"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"To repay a favor.\"\n\nHe crouched down and hustled forward, weaving through the shelves. He waited, then tackled one of the men as he leaped from the last tread. The size and shape of the man was reminiscent of Red Jacket, but this time Malone was ready. He brought a knee into the man's stomach, then pounded a fist to the back of the neck.\n\nThe man went still.\n\nMalone surveyed the darkness and heard running a few aisles over.\n\n\"No. Please leave me be.\"\n\nClaridon.\n\nDe Roquefort headed straight for the door that led out of the archives. He'd descended from the ramparts and knew the woman would want to make a hasty retreat, but her choices were limited. There was only the exit to the hall and one other, through the curator's office. But his man stationed there had just reported through the radio that all was quiet.\n\nHe now knew she was the same person who'd interfered in Copenhagen and probably the same one from last night in Rennes-le-Cheteau. And that realization spurred him on. He must learn her identity.\n\nThe door leading out of the archives opened, then closed. In the wedge of light that splashed in from the hall he spied two legs lying prone on the floor between the shelves. He darted over and discovered one of his subordinates unconscious, a small dart planted in the neck. This brother had been stationed on the ground floor and had retrieved the notebook, journal, and lithograph.\n\nWhich were nowhere to be seen.\n\nDamn her.\n\n\"Do as I instructed,\" he called out to his remaining men.\n\nHe raced for the door.\n\nMalone heard the man's command and decided to head back to Stephanie. He had no idea what the men had been commanded to do, but he assumed it included them and wasn't good.\n\nHe crouched down and eased his way through the shelves, toward the table.\n\n\"Stephanie,\" he breathed out.\n\n\"Here, Cotton.\"\n\nHe slipped close to her. All he could hear now was the rain. \"There must be another way out of here,\" she mouthed through the darkness.\n\nHe relieved her of the gun. \"Somebody left through the door. Probably the woman. I saw only one shadow. The others must have gone after Claridon and left through another exit.\"\n\nThe door leading out opened again.\n\n\"That's him leaving,\" he said.\n\nThey stood and rushed back across the archives. At the exit Malone hesitated, heard and saw nothing, then led the way out.\n\nDe Roquefort spotted the woman running down the long gallery. She whirled and, not losing a step, fired a shot his way.\n\nHe dove to the floor, and she disappeared around a corner.\n\nHe came to his feet and bolted after her. Before she'd fired, he'd caught sight of the journal and the book in her grasp.\n\nShe had to be stopped.\n\nMalone saw a man, dressed in black trousers and a dark turtleneck, gun in hand, turn a corner fifty feet away.\n\n\"This is going to get interesting,\" he said.\n\nThey both ran.\n\nDe Roquefort kept up his pursuit. The woman was certainly attempting to leave the palace, and she seemed to know the geography. Every turn she took was the right one. She'd deftly obtained what she came for, so he had to assume that her escape would not be left to chance.\n\nThrough another portal, he entered a rib-vaulted hall. The woman was already at the far end, turning a corner. He trotted over and saw a wide stone staircase leading down. The Great Staircase of Honor. Once, lined with frescoes, broken by iron gates, and sheathed with Persian runners, the stairway had lent itself to the solemn majesty of pontifical ceremonies. Now the risers and walls were bare. The darkness at the bottom, some thirty yards away, was absolute. He knew below were exit doors into a courtyard. He heard the woman's footsteps as she descended but could not make out her form.\n\nSo he just fired.\n\nTen shots.\n\nMalone heard what sounded like a hammer repeatedly striking a nail. One sound-suppressed shot after another.\n\nHe slowed his approach to a doorway ten feet ahead.\n\nHinges squealed at the base of the ink-black stairway. De Roquefort recognized the sound of a door groaning open. The storm outside grew louder. Apparently his indiscriminate shots had missed. The woman was leaving the palace. He heard footsteps behind him, then spoke into the mike clipped to his shirt.\n\n\"Do you have what I wanted?\"\n\n\"We do,\" was the reply through his earphone.\n\n\"I'm in the Conclave Gallery. Mr. Malone and Ms. Nelle are behind me. Handle them.\"\n\nHe rushed down the staircase.\n\nMalone saw the man in the turtleneck leave the cavernous hall that stretched out before them. Gun in hand, he ran ahead with Stephanie following.\n\nThree armed men materialized from other portals into the room and blocked their way.\n\nMalone and Stephanie stopped.\n\n\"Please toss the gun aside,\" one of the men said.\n\nNo way he could take them all before either he, Stephanie, or both of them went down. So he allowed the gun to clatter on the floor.\n\nThe three men approached.\n\n\"What do we do now?\" Stephanie asked.\n\n\"I'm open to suggestions.\"\n\n\"There's nothing for you to do,\" another of the short-hairs said.\n\nThey stood still.\n\n\"Turn around,\" came the command.\n\nHe stared at Stephanie. He'd been in tight spots before, a few just like the one they were facing. Even if he managed to subdue one or two, there was still the third man, and all were armed.\n\nA thud was followed by a cry from Stephanie and her body collapsed to the floor. Before he could move toward her, the back of Malone's head was pounded with something hard and everything before him vanished.\n\nDe Roquefort followed his quarry, who rushed through the Place du Palais, quickly fleeing the empty plaza and winding a path through Avignon's deserted streets. The warm rain fell in steady sheets. The heavens suddenly opened, cleft by an immense flash of lightning that momentarily lifted the vault of darkness. Thunder shook the air.\n\nThey left buildings behind and came close to the river.\n\nHe knew, just ahead, the Pont St. Benezet stretched out across the Rhfne. Through the storm he saw the woman navigate a path straight for the bridge's entrance. What was she doing? Why go there? No matter, he had to follow. She possessed the rest of what he'd come to retrieve, and he did not plan to leave Avignon without the book and journal. Yet he wondered what the rain was doing to the pages. His hair was matted to his scalp, his clothes pasted to his body.\n\nHe saw a flash ten meters ahead of him as the woman fired a shot into the door that led to the bridge's entrance.\n\nShe disappeared inside the building.\n\nHe rushed to the door and carefully gazed inside. A ticket counter stood to his right. Souvenirs were displayed in more counters to the left. Three turnstiles led out onto the bridge. The incomplete span had long ago ceased being anything but a tourist attraction.\n\nThe woman was twenty meters away, running down the bridge, out onto the river.\n\nThen she disappeared.\n\nHe rushed forward and leaped over the turnstiles, racing after her.\n\nA Gothic chapel stood at the end of the second pylon. He knew that it was the Chapelle Saint-Nicholas. The remains of St Benezet, who was originally responsible for the bridge being built, were once preserved there. But the relics were lost during the Revolution and only the chapel remained\u2014Gothic on top, Romanesque below. Which was where the woman had gone. Down the stone staircase.\n\nAnother greenish bolt of lightning flashed overhead.\n\nHe shook the rain from his eyes and stopped at the top riser.\n\nThen he saw her.\n\nNot below, but back on top, racing toward the end of the fourth span, which would take her halfway out into the Rhfne with nowhere to go, since the spans to the other side of the river had washed away three hundred years ago. She'd obviously used the stairs to dip beneath the chapel as a way to block any shot he may have wanted to take.\n\nHe dashed after her, rounding the chapel.\n\nHe didn't want to shoot. He needed her alive. Even more important, he needed what she carried. So he sent a bullet to her left, at her feet.\n\nShe stopped and turned to face him.\n\nHe rushed forward, gun leveled.\n\nShe stood at the end of the fourth span, nothing but darkness and water behind her. A clap of thunder violated the air. Wind came in wild gusts. Rain poured across his face.\n\n\"Who are you?\" he asked.\n\nShe wore a black bodysuit that matched her dark skin. She was lean and muscular, her head sheathed in a tight hood, only her face visible. She carried a gun in the left hand, a plastic shopping bag in the other. She extended the shopping back out over the edge.\n\n\"Let's not get hasty,\" she said.\n\n\"I could simply shoot you.\"\n\n\"Two reasons why you won't do that.\"\n\n\"I'm listening.\"\n\n\"One, the bag will drop into the river and what you really want will be lost. And two, I'm a Christian. You don't kill Christians.\"\n\n\"How do you know what I do?\"\n\n\"You are a knight of the Templars, as are the others. You took an oath not to harm Christians.\"\n\n\"I have no idea whether you're a Christian.\"\n\n\"So let's stick with reason one. Shoot me, the books swim in the Rhfne. The swift current will take them away.\"\n\n\"Apparently we seek the same thing.\"\n\n\"You're a quick one.\"\n\nHer arm stayed extended out over the edge and he contemplated where best to shoot her, but she was right\u2014the bag would be gone long before he could traverse the ten feet that separated them.\n\n\"Looks like we have a standoff,\" he said.\n\n\"I wouldn't say that.\"\n\nShe released her grip and the bag disappeared into the blackness. She then used his moment of surprise to raise her gun and fire, but de Roquefort pivoted left and dropped to the wet stones. When he shook the rain from his eyes, he saw the woman leap over the edge. He stood and rushed over, expecting to see the churning Rhfne sweeping by, but instead below him was a stone platform, about eight feet down, part of a pylon that supported the outer arch. He saw the woman yank up the bag and disappear beneath the bridge.\n\nHe hesitated only an instant, then jumped, landing on his feet. His middle-aged ankles rattled from the impact.\n\nAn engine roared and he saw a motorboat shoot out from under the far side of the bridge and speed away, toward the north. He raised his gun to fire, but a muzzle flash signaled she was firing, too.\n\nHe lunged flat to more wet stone.\n\nThe boat dissolved out of range.\n\nWho was that vixen? Clearly, she knew what he was, though not who he was since she'd not identified him. She also apparently understood the significance of the book and the journal. Most important, she knew his every move.\n\nHe came to his feet and stepped beneath the bridge, out of the rain, where the boat had been moored. She'd also planned a clever escape. He was about to climb back up, using an iron ladder affixed to the bridge's exterior, when something in the darkness caught his attention.\n\nHe bent down.\n\nA book lay on the soaked stone beneath the overpass.\n\nHe brought it close to his eyes, straining to see what the damp pages contained, and read a few of the words.\n\nLars Nelle's notebook.\n\nShe'd lost it during her hasty retreat.\n\nHe smiled.\n\nHe now possessed part of the puzzle\u2014not all, but maybe enough\u2014and he knew precisely how to learn the rest."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 44",
                "text": "Malone opened his eyes, tested his sore neck, and determined nothing seemed broken. He massaged the swollen muscles with his open palm and shook off the effects of being unconscious. He glanced at his watch. Eleven twenty PM . He'd been out about an hour.\n\nStephanie lay a few feet away. He crawled toward her, lifted her head, and gently shook her. She blinked her eyes and tried to focus on him.\n\n\"That hurt,\" she muttered.\n\n\"Tell me about it.\" He stared around the expansive hall. Outside, the rain had slackened. \"We need to get out of here.\"\n\n\"What about our friends?\"\n\n\"If they wanted us dead, we would be. I think they're through with us. They have the notebook, the journal, and Claridon. We're unnecessary.\" He noticed the gun lying nearby and motioned. \"That's what kind of threat they think we are.\"\n\nStephanie rubbed her head. \"This was a bad idea, Cotton. I should have never reacted after that notebook was sent to me. If I hadn't called Ernst Scoville, he'd probably still be alive. And I should have never involved you.\"\n\n\"I believe I insisted.\" He slowly came to his feet. \"We need to leave. At some point cleaning personnel have to come through here. And I don't feel like answering any police questions.\"\n\nHe helped Stephanie up.\n\n\"Thanks, Cotton. For everything. I appreciate all that you did.\"\n\n\"You make it sound like this is over.\"\n\n\"It is for me. Whatever Lars and Mark were looking for will just have to be found by somebody else. I'm going home.\"\n\n\"What about Claridon?\"\n\n\"What can we do? We have no idea who took him or where he might be. And what would we tell the police? The Knights Templar have kidnapped an inmate from a local asylum? Get real. I'm afraid he's on his own.\"\n\n\"We know the woman's name,\" he said. \"Claridon mentioned it was Cassiopeia Vitt. He told us where she is. Givors. We could find her.\"\n\n\"And do what? Thank her for saving our hides? I think she's on her own, too, and more than capable of handling herself. Like you say, we're not deemed important any longer.\"\n\nShe was right.\n\n\"We need to go home, Cotton. There's nothing here for either of us.\"\n\nRight again.\n\nThey found their way out of the palace and returned to the rental car. After losing the first tail outside Rennes, Malone knew they'd not been followed to Avignon, so he assumed either men were already waiting in the city, which was unlikely, or some sort of electronic surveillance had been employed. Which meant the chase and shots before he managed to send the Renault into the mud was a dog-and-pony show designed to rock him to sleep.\n\nWhich worked.\n\nBut they were no longer deemed players in whatever game was unfolding, so he decided they would head back to Rennes-le-Cheteau and spend the night there.\n\nThe drive took nearly two hours and they passed through the village's main gate just before two AM. A fresh wind raked the summit and the Milky Way streaked overhead as they walked from the car park. Not a light burned within the walls. The streets were still damp from yesterday's weather.\n\nMalone was tired. \"Let's get a little rest and we'll leave out around noontime. I'm sure there's a flight you can catch from Paris to Atlanta.\"\n\nAt the door, Stephanie opened the lock. Inside, Malone flipped on a lamp in the den and immediately noticed a rucksack tossed into a chair that neither he nor Stephanie had brought.\n\nHe reached for the gun at his belt.\n\nMovement from the bedroom caught his eye. A man appeared in the doorway and leveled a Glock at him.\n\nMalone brought his weapon up. \"Who the hell are you?\"\n\nThe man was young, maybe early thirties, with the same short hair and stocky build that he'd seen in abundance over the past few days. The face, though handsome, was set for combat\u2014the eyes like black marbles\u2014and he handled the weapon with assurance. But Malone sensed a hesitancy, as if the other man was unsure of friend or foe.\n\n\"I asked who you are.\"\n\n\"Lower the gun, Geoffrey,\" came a voice from inside the bedroom.\n\n\"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"Please.\"\n\nThe weapon came down. Malone lowered his, too.\n\nAnother man stepped from the shadows.\n\nHe was long-limbed and squarely built with close-cropped auburn hair. He, too, held a pistol and it took Malone only an instant to register the familiar cleft, swarthy skin, and gentle eyes from the photo that still angled on the table to his left.\n\nHe heard the breath leave Stephanie.\n\n\"My God in heaven,\" she whispered.\n\nHe was shocked, too.\n\nStanding before him was Mark Nelle.\n\nStephanie's body shook. Her heart pounded. For a moment she had to tell herself to breathe.\n\nHer only child was standing across the room.\n\nShe wanted to rush to him, to tell him how sorry she was for all their differences, how glad she was to see him. But her muscles would not respond.\n\n\"Mother,\" Mark said. \"Your son is back from the grave.\"\n\nShe caught the coolness in his tone and instantly sensed that his heart was still hard. \"Where have you been?\"\n\n\"It's a long story.\"\n\nNo shade of compassion tempered his stare. She waited for him to explain, but he said nothing.\n\nMalone came toward her, placed a hand on her shoulder, and broke the awkward pause. \"Why don't you sit.\"\n\nShe felt disconnected from her life, a jumble of confusion violating her thoughts, and she was having a hard time settling her anxiety. But dammit, she was the head of one of the most highly specialized units within the U.S. government. She dealt with crises on a daily basis. True, none was as personal as the one now facing her from across the room, but if Mark wanted their first reception to be a chilly one, then so be it, she'd not give any of them the satisfaction of thinking emotion ruled her.\n\nSo she sat and said, \"Okay, Mark. Tell us your long story.\"\n\nMark Nelle opened his eyes. He was no longer eight thousand feet high in the French Pyrenees, wearing spike shoes and carrying a pick, hiking a rough trail in search of Berenger Sauniere's cache. He was inside a room of stone and wood with a blackened beamed ceiling. The man standing over him was tall and gaunt with gray fuzz for hair and a silver beard as thick as fleece. The man's eyes were a peculiar shade of violet that he could not recall ever having seen before.\n\n\"Careful,\" the man said in English. \"You're still weak.\"\n\n\"Where am I?\"\n\n\"A place that has been for centuries one of safety.\"\n\n\"Does it have a name?\"\n\n\"Abbey des Fontaines.\"\n\n\"That's miles from where I was.\"\n\n\"Two of my subordinates were following and made rescue when the snow began to engulf you. I'm told the avalanche was quite intense.\"\n\nHe could still feel the mountain as it shook, its summit disintegrating like a great cathedral falling apart. An entire ridge had shattered above him and snow had poured down as blood would from an open wound. The chill still gripped his bones. Then he recalled tumbling downward. But had he heard the man standing over him right?\n\n\"Men were following me?\"\n\n\"I ordered it. As with your father before you sometimes.\"\n\n\"You knew my father?\"\n\n\"His theories always interested me. So I made a point to know both him and what he knew.\"\n\nHe tried to sit up from the bed, but his right side jarred with electric pain. He winced and clutched at his stomach.\n\n\"You have broken ribs. I, too, in youth, broke mine once. It hurts.\"\n\nHe lay back down. \"I was brought here?\"\n\nThe old man nodded. \"My brothers are trained to be resourceful.\"\n\nHe'd noticed the white cassock and rope sandals. \"This a monastery?\"\n\n\"It's the place you've been seeking.\"\n\nHe was unsure how to respond.\n\n\"I am master of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon. We are the Templars. Your father sought us for decades. You, too, have sought us. So I decided the time was finally right.\"\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"That's for you to decide. But I am hoping you choose to join us.\"\n\n\"Why would I do that?\"\n\n\"Your life is, I'm sorry to say, in utter chaos. You miss your father more than you could ever voice and he's been dead a long six years now. You're estranged from your mother, which is difficult in more ways than can be imagined. Professionally you're a teacher, but you're not satisfied. You've made some attempts to vindicate your father's beliefs, but have been unable to make much progress. That's why you were in the Pyrenees\u2014searching for the reason Abbe Sauniere spent so much time there when he was alive. Sauniere once scoured the region looking for something. Surely you found the coach and horse rental receipts among Sauniere's papers that evidence the fees he paid to the local vendors. Amazing, isn't it, how a humble priest could afford such luxuries as a private coach and horse.\"\n\n\"What do you know of my father and mother?\"\n\n\"I know much.\"\n\n\"You expect me to believe that you're the master of the Templars?\"\n\n\"I can see how that premise might be hard to accept. I, too, had trouble with it when the brothers first approached me decades ago. Why don't we, for now, concentrate on mending your wounds and take this slow.\"\n\n\"I stayed in that bed for three weeks,\" Mark said. \"After, my movements were restricted to certain parts of the abbey, but the master and I spoke often. Finally, I agreed to stay on and took the oath.\"\n\n\"Why would you do such a thing?\" Stephanie asked.\n\n\"Let's be realistic, Mother. You and I had not spoken in years. Dad was gone. The master was right. I was at a dead end. Dad searched for the Templar treasure, their archives, and for the Templars themselves. One-third of what he'd been looking for had just found me. I wanted to stay.\"\n\nTo calm her growing agitation, Stephanie allowed her attention to stray to the younger man standing behind Mark. An aureole of freshness hovered about him, but she also registered interest, as if he were hearing things for the first time. \"Your name is Geoffrey?\" she asked, recalling what Mark had called him earlier.\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"You didn't know I was Mark's mother?\"\n\n\"I know little of other brothers. It is Rule. No brother speaks of himself to another. We're of the brotherhood. From where we came is immaterial to who we are now.\"\n\n\"Sounds impersonal.\"\n\n\"I consider it illuminating.\"\n\n\"Geoffrey sent you a package,\" Mark said. \"Dad's journal. Did you receive it?\"\n\n\"That's why I'm here.\"\n\n\"I had it with me the day of the avalanche. The master kept it once I became a brother. I discovered it gone after he died.\"\n\n\"Your master is dead?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"We have a new leader,\" Mark said. \"But he's a demon.\"\n\nMalone described the man who'd confronted him and Stephanie in the Roskilde cathedral.\n\n\"That's Raymond de Roquefort,\" Mark said. \"How do you know him?\"\n\n\"We're old friends,\" Malone said, telling them some of what had just happened in Avignon.\n\n\"Claridon is surely de Roquefort's prisoner,\" Mark said. \"God help Royce.\"\n\n\"He was terrified of the Templars,\" Malone said.\n\n\"With that one, he has good reason.\"\n\n\"You still haven't said why you stayed at the abbey for the past five years,\" Stephanie said.\n\n\"What I sought was there. The master became a father to me. He was a kind, gentle man, full of compassion.\"\n\nShe caught the message. \"Unlike me?\"\n\n\"Now is not the time for this discussion.\"\n\n\"And when would be a good time? I thought you were dead, Mark. But you were secluded in an abbey, commingling with Templars\u2014\"\n\n\"Your son was our seneschal,\" Geoffrey said. \"He and the master ruled us well. He was a blessing to our Order.\"\n\n\"He was second in charge?\" Malone asked. \"How'd you rise so fast?\"\n\n\"The seneschal is chosen by the master. He alone determines who is qualified,\" Geoffrey said. \"And he chose well.\"\n\nMalone smiled. \"You have a devoted associate.\"\n\n\"Geoffrey is a wealth of information, though none of us is going to learn a thing from him until he's ready to tell us.\"\n\n\"Care to explain that one?\" Malone asked.\n\nMark spoke, telling them what had happened over the past forty-eight hours. Stephanie listened with a mixture of fascination and anger. Her son talked of the brotherhood with reverence.\n\n\"The Templars,\" Mark said, \"rose from an obscure band of nine knights, supposedly protecting pilgrims on the way to the Holy Land, to a multicontinent conglomerate composed of tens of thousands of brothers spread over nine thousand estates. Kings, queens, and popes cowed to them. No one, until Philip IV in 1307, successfully challenged them. You know why?\"\n\n\"Military prowess, I'd assume,\" Malone said.\n\nMark shook his head. \"It wasn't force that gave them strength, it was knowledge. They possessed information no one else was privy to.\"\n\nMalone sighed. \"Mark, we don't know each other, but it's the middle of the night, I'm sleepy, and my neck is killing me. Could we skip the riddles and get to the point?\"\n\n\"Among the Templar treasure was some proof that related to Christ on the cross.\"\n\nThe room went silent as the words took hold.\n\n\"What kind of proof?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"I don't know. But it's called the Great Devise. The proof was found in the Holy Land beneath the Jerusalem Temple, hidden away sometime between the first century and AD 70, when the Temple was destroyed. It was transported by the Templars back to France and hidden away, known only to the highest officers. When Jacques de Molay, the Templar master at the time of the Purge, was burned at the stake in 1314, the location of that proof died with him. Philip IV tried to obtain the information and failed. Dad believed that the abbes Bigou and Sauniere at Rennes-le-Cheteau succeeded. He was convinced that Sauniere actually located the Templar cache.\"\n\n\"So was the master,\" Geoffrey said.\n\n\"See what I mean?\" Mark glanced back at his friend. \"Say the magic words and we get information.\"\n\n\"The master made clear that Bigou and Sauniere were right,\" Geoffrey said.\n\n\"About what?\" Mark asked.\n\n\"He didn't say. Only that they were right.\"\n\nMark looked toward them. \"Like you, Mr. Malone, I've had my fill of riddles.\"\n\n\"Call me Cotton.\"\n\n\"Interesting name. How'd you get it?\n\n\"Long story. I'll tell you sometime.\"\n\n\"Mark,\" Stephanie said, \"you can't really believe that there exists any definitive proof relating to Christ on the cross? Your father never even went that far.\"\n\n\"How would you know?\" The question carried bitterness.\n\n\"I know how he\u2014\"\n\n\"You don't know anything, Mother. That's your problem. You never knew anything about what Dad thought. You believed everything he sought was a fantasy, that he was wasting his talents. You never loved him enough to let him be himself. You thought he sought fame and treasure. No. He sought the truth. Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again. That's what interested him.\"\n\nStephanie collected her scattered senses and told herself not to react to the rebuke.\n\n\"Dad was a serious academician. His work had merit, he just never talked openly about what he really sought. When he discovered Rennes-le-Cheteau in the seventies and told the world about Sauniere's story, that was simply a way to raise money. What may or may not have happened there is a good tale. Millions of people enjoyed reading about it regardless of the embellishments. You were one of the few who didn't.\"\n\n\"Your father and I tried to work through our differences.\"\n\n\"How? By you telling him he was wasting his life, hurting his family? By telling him he was a failure?\"\n\n\"All right, dammit, I was wrong.\" Her voice was a shout. \"You want me to say it again? I was wrong.\" She sat up from the chair, a desperate resolution vesting her with power. \"I screwed up. That what you want to hear? In my mind, you've been dead five years. Now here you are, and all you want is for me to admit I was wrong. Fine. If I could tell your father that, I would. If I could beg his forgiveness, I would. But I can't.\" The words were coming fast, emotion charging her, and she intended to say it all while she possessed the courage. \"I came here to see what I could do. To try to follow through on whatever it was Lars and you thought important. That's the only reason I came. I thought I was finally doing the right thing. But don't shoot that sanctimonious crap at me anymore. You screwed up, too. The difference between us is that I learned something over the past five years.\"\n\nShe slumped back in the chair, feeling better, if even in a small way. But she realized the gulf between them had just widened and a shudder passed through her.\n\n\"It's the middle of the night,\" Malone finally said. \"Why don't we sleep a little and deal with all this in a few hours.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Sunday, JUNE 25 ABBEY DES FONTAINES",
                "text": "[ 5:25 AM ]\n\nDe Roquefort slammed the door shut behind him. The iron clanged against the metal frame with the retort of a rifle, and the lock engaged.\n\n\"Is all ready?\" he asked one of the assistants.\n\n\"As specified.\"\n\nGood. Time to make his point. He strolled ahead through the subterranean corridor. He was three floors below ground level, in a part of the abbey first occupied a thousand years ago. Endless construction had transformed the rooms surrounding him into a labyrinth of forgotten chambers, now used mainly for cool storage.\n\nHe'd returned to the abbey three hours ago with Lars Nelle's notebook and Royce Claridon. The loss of Pierres Gravees du Languedoc, the book from the auction, weighed heavy on his mind. He could only hope the notebook and Claridon would supply him with enough of the missing pieces.\n\nAnd the dark woman\u2014she was a problem.\n\nHis world was distinctly male. His experience with women minimal. They were a different breed, of that he was sure, but the female he'd confronted on the Pont St.-Benezet seemed almost alien. She'd never shown even a hint of fear, and handled herself with the cunning of a lioness. She'd lured him straight to the bridge, knowing precisely how she planned to make her escape. Her only mistake was in losing the journal. He had to know her identity.\n\nBut first things first.\n\nHe entered a chamber topped by pine rafters that had remained unaltered since the time of Napoleon. A long table spanned the room's center, upon which lay Royce Claridon, prone on his back, his arms and legs strapped to steel spikes.\n\n\"Monsieur Claridon, I have little time and I need much from you. Your cooperation will make everything so much simpler.\"\n\n\"What do you expect me to say?\" Desperation laced the words.\n\n\"Only the truth.\"\n\n\"I know little.\"\n\n\"Come now, let us not start with a lie.\"\n\n\"I know nothing.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"I heard you in the archives. You are a reservoir of information.\"\n\n\"All that I said in Avignon came to me then.\"\n\nDe Roquefort motioned to a brother who stood across the room. The man stepped forward and laid an open tin container on the table. With three extended fingers, the brother scooped out a sticky white glob.\n\nDe Roquefort pulled off Claridon's shoes and socks.\n\nClaridon raised his head to see. \"What are you doing? What is that?\"\n\n\"Cooking grease.\"\n\nThe brother rubbed the grease onto Claridon's bare feet.\n\n\"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Surely you know your history. When the Templars were arrested in 1307, many means were used to extract confessions. Teeth were pulled out, the empty sockets probed with metal. Wedges were driven under nails. Heat was used in a variety of imaginative ways. One technique involved greasing the feet, then exposing the oiled skin to flame. Slowly the feet would cook, the skin falling away like meat from a tenderloin. Many brothers succumbed to that agony. Those who managed to survive all confessed. Even Jacques de Molay fell victim.\"\n\nThe brother finished with the grease and withdrew from the room.\n\n\"In our Chronicles, there's a report of one Templar who, after being subjected to foot burning and confessing, was carried before his inquisitors clutching a bag with his blackened foot bones. He was allowed to keep them as a remembrance of his ordeal. Wasn't that kind of his inquisitors?\"\n\nHe stepped over to a charcoal brazier that burned in one corner. He'd ordered it prepared an hour ago and its coals were now white hot.\n\n\"I would assume you thought this fire was to warm the chamber. Below ground is chilly here in the mountains. But I had this flame forged just for you.\"\n\nHe rolled the cart with the brazier within three feet of Claridon's bare feet.\n\n\"The idea, I'm told, is for the heat to be low and steady. Not intense\u2014that tends to vaporize the grease too quickly. Just as with a steak, a slow flame works best.\"\n\nClaridon's eyes went wide.\n\n\"When my brethren were tortured in the fourteenth century, it was thought God would fortify the innocent to handle the pain, so only the guilty would actually confess. Also\u2014and quite convenient, I might add\u2014any confession extracted from torture was nonretractable. So once a person confessed, that was the end of the matter.\"\n\nHe pushed the brazier to within twelve inches of the bare skin.\n\nClaridon screamed.\n\n\"So soon, monsieur? Nothing has even happened yet. Have you no endurance?\"\n\n\"What do you want?\"\n\n\"A great many things. But we can start with the significance of Don Miguel de Mafara Reading the Rules of the Caridad.\"\n\n\"There's a clue there that relates to the abbe Bigou and the tombstone of Marie d'Hautpoul de Blanchefort. Lars Nelle found a cryptogram. He believed the key to solving it lay in the painting.\" Claridon was talking fast.\n\n\"I heard all that in the archives. I want to know what you failed to say.\"\n\n\"I know nothing more. Please, my feet are frying.\"\n\n\"That's the idea.\" He reached into his cassock and removed Lars Nelle's journal.\n\n\"You have it?\" Claridon said in amazement.\n\n\"Why so shocked?\"\n\n\"His widow. She possessed it.\"\n\n\"Not anymore.\" He'd read most of the entries on the trip back from Avignon. He thumbed through until he found the cryptogram and held the open pages up for Claridon to see. \"Is that what Lars Nelle found?\"\n\n\"Oui. Oui.\"\n\n\"What's the message?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Truly, I don't. Can you not remove the heat? Please, I beg you. My feet are in agony.\"\n\nHe decided a show of compassion might loosen the tongue quicker. He slid the cart a foot back.\n\n\"Thank you. Thank you.\" Claridon was breathing fast.\n\n\"Keep talking.\"\n\n\"Lars Nelle found the cryptogram in a manuscript that Noebl Corbu wrote in the sixties.\"\n\n\"No one has ever found that manuscript.\"\n\n\"Lars did. It was with a priest, whom Corbu entrusted the pages to before he died in 1968.\"\n\nHe knew about Corbu from the reports one of his predecessors had recorded. That marshal, too, had searched for the Great Devise. \"What about the cryptogram?\"\n\n\"The painting was referenced by Abbe Bigou himself, in the parish register, shortly before he fled France for Spain, so Lars believed it held the key to the puzzle. But he died before deciphering it.\"\n\nDe Roquefort did not possess the lithograph of the painting. The woman had taken it, along with the book from the auction. Yet that could hardly be the only recorded image of Reading the Rules of the Caridad. Now that he knew what to look for, he'd find another.\n\n\"And what did the son know? Mark Nelle. What was his knowledge?\"\n\n\"Not much. He was a teacher in Toulouse. He searched as a hobby on weekends. Not all that serious. But he was looking for Sauniere's hiding place in the mountains when he was killed in an avalanche.\"\n\n\"He did not die there.\"\n\n\"Of course he did. Five years ago.\"\n\nDe Roquefort stepped close. \"Mark Nelle has lived here, in this abbey for the past five years. He was pulled from the snows and brought here. Our master took him in and made him our seneschal. He also wanted him to be our next master. But thanks to me, he failed. Mark Nelle fled these walls this afternoon. For the past five years he's scoured through our records, looking for clues, while you hid like a cockroach afraid of the light in a mental asylum.\"\n\n\"You speak nonsense.\"\n\n\"I speak truth. Here is where he stayed, while you cowered in fear.\"\n\n\"You and your brothers were who I feared. Lars feared you, too.\"\n\n\"He had reason to be scared. He lied to me, several times, and I detest deceit. He was given an opportunity to repent, but he chose to offer more lies.\"\n\n\"You hung him from that bridge, didn't you? I always knew that.\"\n\n\"He was a nonbeliever, an atheist. I believe you understand that I'll do what is necessary to achieve my goal. I wear the white cassock. I'm master of this abbey. Nearly five hundred brothers await my orders. Our Rule is clear. The order of the master is as if Christ commanded it, for it was Christ who said through the mouth of David, Ob auditu auris obedivit mihi. He obeyed me as soon as he heard me. That, too, should place fear in your heart.\" He motioned with the journal. \"Now tell me what this puzzle says.\"\n\n\"Lars thought it revealed the location of whatever it was Sauniere found.\"\n\nHe reached for the cart. \"I swear to you, your feet will become nothing but stubs if you don't answer my question.\"\n\nClaridon's eyes went wide. \"What must I do to prove my sincerity? I only know parts of the story. Lars was like that. He shared little. You have his journal.\"\n\nAn element of desperation clothed the words with believability. \"I'm still listening.\"\n\n\"I know Sauniere found the cryptogram in the Rennes church when he was replacing the altar. He also found a crypt where he discovered that Marie d'Hautpoul de Blanchefort was not buried outside in the parish close, but beneath the church.\"\n\nHe'd read all that in the journal, but he what he wanted to know was, \"How did Lars Nelle learn that?\"\n\n\"He found the information about the crypt in old books discovered at Monfort-Lamaury, the fief of Simon de Montfort, which described the Rennes church in great detail. Then he found more references in Corbu's manuscript.\"\n\nHe despised hearing the name Simon de Montfort\u2014another thirteenth-century opportunist who commanded the Albigensian Crusade that ravaged the Languedoc in the name of the Church. If not for him, the Templars would have achieved their own separate state, which would have surely prevented their later downfall. The one flaw in the Order's early existence had been its dependency on secular rule. Why the first few masters felt compelled to link themselves so closely with kingship had always perplexed him.\n\n\"Sauniere learned that his predecessor, the abbe Bigou, erected Marie d'Hautpoul's tombstone. He thought the writing on it, and the reference Bigou left in the parish records about the painting, were clues.\"\n\n\"They are ridiculously conspicuous.\"\n\n\"Not to an eighteenth-century mind,\" Claridon said. \"Most were illiterate then. So the simplest of codes, even words themselves, would have been quite effective. And actually they have been\u2014staying hidden all this time.\"\n\nSomething from the Chronicles flashed through de Roquefort's mind, from a time after the Purge. The only clue recorded to the Great Devise's location. Where is it best to hide a pebble? The answer suddenly became obvious. \"On the ground,\" he muttered.\n\n\"What did you say?\"\n\nHis mind snapped back to reality. \"Can you recall what you saw in the painting?\"\n\nClaridon's head bobbed up and down. \"Oui, monsieur. Every detail.\"\n\nWhich gave the fool some value.\n\n\"And I also have the drawing,\" Claridon said.\n\nHad he heard right? \"The drawing of the gravestone?\"\n\n\"The notes I made in the archive. When the lights went out, I snatched the paper from the table.\"\n\nHe liked what he was hearing. \"Where is it?\"\n\n\"In my pocket.\"\n\nHe decided to make a deal. \"How about a collaboration? We both have certain knowledge. Why don't we pool our efforts.\"\n\n\"And how would that benefit me?\"\n\n\"Having your feet intact would be an immediate reward.\"\n\n\"Quite right, monsieur. I like that a great deal.\"\n\nHe decided to appeal to what he knew the man wanted. \"We seek the Great Devise for reasons different from you. Once it's found, I'm sure a certain monetary remuneration can compensate you for your trouble.\" Then he made his point crystal clear. \"And besides, I'll not let you go. And if you manage to escape, I will find you.\"\n\n\"I seem to have little choice.\"\n\n\"You know they left you to us.\"\n\nClaridon said nothing.\n\n\"Malone and Stephanie Nelle. They made no effort to save you. Instead, they saved themselves. I heard you pleading for help in the archives. So did they. They did nothing.\" He allowed his words to take root, hoping he'd correctly judged the man's weak character. \"Together, Monsieur Claridon, we could be successful. I possess Lars Nelle's journal and have access to an archive you can only imagine. You have the gravestone information and know things I don't. We both want the same thing, so let's both discover it.\"\n\nDe Roquefort gripped a knife lying on the table between Claridon's outstretched legs and severed the bindings.\n\n\"Come, we have work to do.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "RENNES-LE-CHcTEAU",
                "text": "[ 10:40 AM ]\n\nMalone followed mark as they approached the church of Saint Mary Magdalene. Services were not held there during summer. Sunday was apparently too popular a day for tourists, as a crowd was already milling about outside the church, snapping pictures and recording video.\n\n\"We'll need a ticket,\" Mark said. \"Can't enter this church without paying a fee.\"\n\nMalone stepped into the Villa Bethanie and waited in a short line. Back outside, he found Mark standing before a railed garden where the Visigoth pillar and statue of the Virgin that Royce Claridon had told him about stood. He read the words PENITENCE, PENITENCE and MISSION 1891 carved on the pillar's face.\n\n\"The Notre Dame de Lourdes,\" Mark said, pointing at the statue. \"Sauniere was enthralled by Lourdes, which was the premier Marian vision of his time. Before Fatima. He wanted Rennes to become a pilgrimage center, so he built this garden and designed the statue and pillar.\"\n\nMalone gestured at the people. \"He got his wish.\"\n\n\"True. But not for the reason he imagined. I'm sure none of the people here today even knows that the pillar is not the original. It's a copy, put there years ago. The original is difficult to read. Weather took a toll. It's in the presbytery museum. Which is true for a lot of this place. Little is as it was in Sauniere's time.\"\n\nThey approached the church's main door. Beneath the gilded tympanum Malone read the words, TERRIBILIS EST LOCU ISTE. From Genesis. Terrible is this place. He knew the tale of Jacob who dreamed of a ladder on which angels traveled and, after waking from his sleep, uttered the words\u2014 Terrible is this place\u2014then named what he'd dreamed about Bethel, which meant \"house of God.\" Another thought occurred to him. \"But in the Old Testament, Bethel becomes a rival to Jerusalem as a religious center.\"\n\n\"Precisely. One more subtle clue Sauniere left behind. There are even more inside.\"\n\nThey'd all slept late, having risen about thirty minutes ago. Stephanie had taken her husband's bedroom and was still inside with the door closed when Malone suggested that he and Mark head for the church. He wanted to talk to the younger man without Stephanie around, and he wanted to give her time to cool down. He knew she was looking for a fight, and sooner or later her son was going to have to face her. But he thought delaying that inevitability might be a good idea. Geoffrey had offered to come, but Mark had told him no. Malone had sensed that Mark Nelle wanted to speak to him alone, too.\n\nThey entered the nave.\n\nThe church was single-aisled with a high ceiling. A hideous carved devil, crouching low, clothed in a green robe, and grimacing under the weight of a holy water stoup, greeted them.\n\n\"It's actually the demon Asmodeus, not the devil,\" Mark said.\n\n\"Another message?\"\n\n\"You apparently know him.\"\n\n\"A custodian of secrets, if I recall.\"\n\n\"You do. Look at the rest of the fount.\"\n\nAbove the holy water stoup stood four angels, each one enacting a separate part of the sign of the cross. Beneath them was written, PAR CE SIGNE TU LE VAINCRAS. Malone translated the French. By this sign ye shall conquer him.\n\nHe knew the significance of those words. \"That's what Constantine said when he first fought his rival, Maxentius. According to the story, he supposedly saw a cross on the sun with those words emblazoned beneath.\"\n\n\"But there's one difference.\" Mark pointed to the carved letters. \"No him in the original phrase. Only By this sign ye shall conquer.\"\n\n\"Is that significant?\"\n\n\"My father discovered an ancient Jewish legend that told of how the king managed to prevent demons from interfering with the building of the Temple of Solomon. One of those demons, Asmodeus, was controlled by being forced to tote water\u2014the one element he despised. So this fount's symbolism is not out of character. But the him in the quotation was clearly added by Sauniere. Some say the him is simply a reference to the fact that by dipping a finger in the holy water and making the sign of the cross, which Catholics do, the devil\u2014 him\u2014would be conquered. But others have noticed the positioning of the word in the French phrase. Par ce signe tu le vaincras. The word le, 'him,' represents the thirteenth and fourteenth letters. 1314.\"\n\nHe recalled his reading from the Templar book. \"The year Jacques de Molay was executed.\"\n\n\"Coincidence?\" Mark shrugged.\n\nAbout twenty people milled about snapping photographs and admiring the gaudy imagery, which all oozed a cryptic allusion. Stained-glass windows lined the outer walls, lively from the bright sun, and he noticed the scenes. Mary and Martha at Bethany. Mary Magdalene meeting the risen Christ. The resurrection of Lazarus.\n\n\"It's like a theological fun house,\" he whispered.\n\n\"That's one way of putting it.\"\n\nMark motioned to the checkerboard floor before the altar. \"The crypt entrance is there, just before that wrought-iron grille, hidden beneath the tiles. A few years ago some French geographers conducted a covert ground-penetrating radar survey of the building and managed to make a few soundings before the local authorities stopped them. The results showed a subsurface anomaly beneath the altar that could be a crypt.\"\n\n\"No digging was done?\"\n\n\"No way the locals would allow that. Too many risks to the tourist industry.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"That's the same thing Claridon said yesterday.\"\n\nThey settled into one of the pews.\n\n\"One thing is certain,\" Mark said in a hushed tone. \"There's no path to any treasure here. But Sauniere did use this church to telegraph what he believed. And from everything I've read about the man, that act fits with his brazen personality.\"\n\nMalone noticed that nothing around him was subtle. The excessive coloration and overgilding tainted any beauty. Then another point became clear. Nothing was consistent. Each artistic expression, from the statues, to the reliefs, to the windows, was individual\u2014without regard to theme, as if similarity would somehow be offensive.\n\nAn odd collection of esoteric saints stared down at him with listless expressions, as if they, too, were embarrassed by their garish detail. St. Roch displayed a wounded thigh. St. Germaine released a bevy of roses from her apron. St. Magdalene held an odd-shaped vase. Try as he might, Malone could not become comfortable. He'd been inside many European churches and most exuded a deep sense of time and history. This one seemed only to repel.\n\n\"Sauniere directed every detail of the decoration,\" Mark was saying. \"Nothing was placed here without his approval.\" Mark pointed at one of the statues. \"St. Anthony of Padua. We pray to him when searching for something lost.\"\n\nHe caught that irony. \"Another message?\"\n\n\"Clearly. Check out the stations of the cross.\"\n\nThe carvings began at the pulpit, seven along the north wall, then another seven on the south. Each was a colorful bas-relief that depicted a moment in Christ's crucifixion. Their bright patina and cartoonish detail seemed unusual for something so solemn.\n\n\"Strange, aren't they?\" Mark asked. \"When they were installed in 1887, they were common for the area. In Rocamadour, there's a nearly identical set. The Giscard House in Toulouse made those and these. Much has been made of these stations. Conspiratorialists claim they have Masonic origins or are actually some sort of treasure map. None of that's true. But there are messages in them.\"\n\nMalone noticed some of the curious aspects. The black slave boy who held the wash bowl for Pilate. The veil Pilate wore. A trumpet being sounded as Christ fell with the cross. Three silver discs held aloft. The child confronting Christ, wrapped in a Scottish tartan blanket. A Roman soldier throwing dice for Christ's cloak, the numbers three, four, and five visible on the faces.\n\n\"Look at station fourteen,\" Mark said, gesturing toward the south wall.\n\nMalone stood and walked to the front of the church. Candles flickered before the altar and he quickly noticed the bas-relief beneath. A woman, Mary Magdalene, he assumed, in tears, kneeling in a grotto before a cross formed by two branches. A skull rested at the branch base and he immediately thought of the skull from the lithograph last night in Avignon.\n\nHe turned and studied the image of the last station of the cross, number 14, which depicted Christ's body being carried by two men as three women wept. Behind them rose a rocky escarpment above which hung a full moon in the night sky.\n\n\"Jesus being carried to the tomb,\" he whispered to Mark, who'd approached close behind him.\n\n\"According to Roman law, a crucified man was never allowed burial. That form of execution was reserved only for those guilty of crimes against the empire, the idea being for the accused to slowly die on the cross\u2014death taking several days and for all to see, the body left for the carrion birds. Yet supposedly Pilate granted Christ's body to Joesph of Arimathea so that it could be buried. Have you ever wondered why?\"\n\n\"Not really.\"\n\n\"Others have. Remember, Christ was killed on the eve of the Sabbath. He could not, by law, be buried after the sun set.\" Mark pointed at station 14. \"Yet Sauniere hung this representation, which clearly shows the body being carried after dark.\"\n\nMalone still didn't understand the significance.\n\n\"What if instead of being carried into the tomb, Christ is being carried out, after dark?\"\n\nHe said nothing.\n\n\"Are you familiar with the Gnostic Gospels?\" Mark asked.\n\nHe was. They were found along the upper Nile in 1945. Seven Bedouin field hands were digging when they came across a human skeleton and a sealed urn. Thinking it contained gold, they smashed the urn open and found thirteen leather-bound codices. Not quite a book, but a close ancestor. The neatly written, ragged-edged texts were all in ancient Coptic, most likely composed by monks who lived at the nearby Pachomian monastery during the fourth century. They contained forty-six ancient Christian manuscripts, their content dating from the second century, the codices themselves fashioned in the fourth century. Some were subsequently lost, used as kindling or discarded, but by 1947 the remainder were acquired by a local museum.\n\nHe told Mark what he knew.\n\n\"The answer as to why the monks buried the codices came from history,\" Mark said. \"In the fourth century Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, wrote a letter that was sent to all the churches in Egypt. He decreed that only the twenty-seven books contained within the recently formulated New Testament could be considered Scripture. All other heretical books must be destroyed. None of the forty-six manuscripts in that urn conformed. So the monks at the Pachomian monastery chose to hide the thirteen codices rather than burn them, perhaps waiting for a change in church leadership. Of course, no change ever occurred. Instead, Roman Christianity flourished. But thank heaven the codices survived. These are the Gnostic Gospels we now know. In one, Peter's, it is written, And as they declared what things they had seen, again they saw three men come forth from the tomb, and two of them supporting one.\"\n\nMalone stared again at station 14. Two men supporting one.\n\n\"The Gnostic Gospels were extraordinary texts,\" Mark said. \"Many scholars now say the Gospel of Thomas, which was included in them, may be the closest we have to Christ's actual words. The early Christians were terrified of the Gnostics. The word came from the Greek gnosis, which meant 'knowledge.' Gnostics were simply people in the know, but the emerging Catholic version of Christianity eventually eliminated all gnostic thought and teachings.\"\n\n\"And the Templars kept that alive?\"\n\nMark nodded. \"The Gnostic Gospels, and several more that theologians today have never seen, are contained in the abbey's library. The Templars were broad-minded when it came to Scripture. There's a lot to be learned from these so-called heretical works.\"\n\n\"How would Sauniere know anything of those Gospels? They weren't discovered until decades after his death.\"\n\n\"Perhaps he had access to even better information. Let me show you something else.\"\n\nHe followed Mark back to the church's entrance and they stepped out onto the porch. Above the door was a stone-carved box upon which words were painted.\n\n\"Read the writing beneath,\" Mark said.\n\nMalone strained to make out the letters. Many were faded and hard to decipher, and all were in Latin.\n\nREGNUM MUNID ET OMNEM ORNATUM SAECULI CONTEMPSI, PROPTER AMOREM DOMININ MEI JESU CHRISTI:"
            },
            {
                "title": "QUEM VIDI, QUEM AMAVI, IN QUEM CREDIDI, QUEM DILEXI",
                "text": "\"Translated it means, 'I have had contempt for the kingdom of this world, and all temporal adornments, because of the love of my Lord Jesus Christ, whom I saw, whom I loved, in whom I believed, and whom I worshiped.' On its face an interesting statement, but there are some conspicuous errors.\" Mark motioned. \"The words scoeculi, anorem, quen, and cremini are all misspelled. Sauniere spent one hundred and eighty francs for that carving and for the letters to be painted, which was a sizable sum at the time. We know this because his receipts still exist. He went to a lot of trouble to design this entrance, yet he allowed the misspellings to remain. It would have been easy to repair them, since the letters were only painted.\"\n\n\"Maybe he didn't notice?\"\n\n\"Sauniere? He was a type A personality. Nothing slipped by him.\"\n\nMark led him away from the entrance as another wave of visitors entered the church. They stopped in front of the garden with the Visigoth pillar and statue of the Virgin.\n\n\"The inscription above the door is not biblical. It's contained within a responsory written by a man named John Tauler early in the fourteenth century. Responsories were prayers or poems used between scriptural readings and Tauler was well known in Sauniere's time. So it's possible Sauniere simply liked the phrase. But it's pretty unusual.\"\n\nMalone agreed.\n\n\"The misspellings could shed some light on why Sauniere used it. The painted words are quem cremini, 'in whom I believed,' but the word should have been credidi, yet Sauniere allowed the misspelling. Could that mean that he did not believe in Him? And then the most interesting of all. Quem vidi. Whom I saw.\"\n\nMalone instantly saw the significance. \"Whatever he found led him to Christ. Whom he saw.\"\n\n\"That's what Dad thought, and I agree. Sauniere seemed unable to resist sending messages. He wanted the world to know what he knew, but it was almost as if he realized that no one in his time would understand. And he was right. No one did. Not until forty years after he died did anyone ever notice.\" Mark looked over at the ancient church. \"The whole place is one of reversals. The stations of the cross are hung on the wall backward from every other church in the world. The devil at the door\u2014he's the reverse of good.\" Then he pointed to the Visigoth pillar a few feet away. \"Upside down. Notice the cross and the carvings on the face.\"\n\nMalone studied the face.\n\n\"Sauniere inverted the pillar before carving Mission 1891 at the bottom and Penitence, Penitence along the top.\"\n\nMalone noticed a V with a circle at its center in the bottom right corner. He cocked his head around and envisioned the image inverted. \"Alpha and omega?\" he asked.\n\n\"Some think so. Dad did.\"\n\n\"Another name for Christ.\"\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\n\"Why did Sauniere turn the pillar upside down?\"\n\n\"No one has come up with a good reason.\"\n\nMark stepped away from the garden display and allowed others to surge forward for pictures. He then led the way toward the rear of the church, into one corner of the Calvary garden where a small grotto stood.\n\n\"This is a replica, too. For the tourists. World War Two took the original. Sauniere built it with rocks he would bring back from his forays. He and his mistress would travel off for days at a time and return with a hod full of stones. Odd, wouldn't you say?\"\n\n\"Depends on what else was in that hod.\"\n\nMark smiled. \"Easy way to bring back a little gold without arousing suspicion.\"\n\n\"But Sauniere seems a strange sort. He could have just been toting rocks.\"\n\n\"Everybody who comes here is a little strange.\"\n\n\"That include your father?\"\n\nMark appraised him with a serious countenance. \"No question. He was obsessed. He gave his life to this place, loved every square foot of this village. This was his home, in every way.\"\n\n\"But not yours?\"\n\n\"I tried to carry on. But I didn't have his passion. Maybe I realized the whole thing was futile.\"\n\n\"Then why hide yourself away in an abbey for five years?\"\n\n\"I needed the solitude. It was good for me. But the master had bigger plans. So here I am. A fugitive from the Templars.\"\n\n\"So what were you doing in the mountains when that avalanche came?\"\n\nMark did not answer him.\n\n\"You were doing the same thing your mother's doing here now. Trying to atone for something. You just didn't know folks were watching.\"\n\n\"Thank heaven they did.\"\n\n\"Your mother is hurting.\"\n\n\"You and she worked together?\"\n\nHe noticed the dodge. \"For a long time. She's my friend.\"\n\n\"That's a tough nut to crack.\"\n\n\"Tell me about it, but it can be done. She's hurting bad. Lots of guilt and regrets. This could be a second chance for her and you.\"\n\n\"My mother and I parted ways long ago. It was best for both of us.\"\n\n\"Then what are you doing here?\"\n\n\"I came to my father's house.\"\n\n\"And when you arrived you saw that somebody else's bags were there. Both our passports were left with our stuff. Surely you found them? Yet you stayed.\"\n\nMark turned away and Malone thought it an effort to hide a growing confusion. He was more like his mother than he cared to admit.\n\n\"I'm thirty-eight years old and still feel like a boy,\" Mark said. \"I've lived the past five years within the sheltered cocoon of an abbey governed by strict Rule. A man I considered a father was kind to me, and I rose to a level of importance I've never known before.\"\n\n\"Yet here you are. Right in the middle of God-knows-what.\"\n\nMark smiled.\n\n\"You and your mother need to settle things.\"\n\nThe younger man stood somber, preoccupied. \"The woman you mentioned last night, Cassiopeia Vitt. I know of her. She and my father sparred for several years. Should she not be found?\"\n\nHe noticed that Mark liked to avoid answering questions by asking them, much like his mother. \"Depends. She a threat?\"\n\n\"Hard to say. She seemed to always be around, and Dad didn't like her.\"\n\n\"Neither does de Roquefort.\"\n\n\"I'm sure.\"\n\n\"In the archives, last night, she never identified herself and de Roquefort didn't know her name. So if he has Claridon, then he now knows who she is.\"\n\n\"Isn't that her problem?\" Mark asked.\n\n\"She saved my hide twice. So she needs to be warned. Claridon told me she lives nearby, in Givors. Your mother and I were leaving here today. We thought this quest over. But that's changed. I need to pay Cassiopeia Vitt a visit. I think alone would be best, for now.\"\n\n\"That's fine. We'll wait here. Right now I have a visit of my own to make. It's been five years since I paid respects to my father.\"\n\nAnd Mark walked off toward the cemetery's entrance."
            },
            {
                "title": "11:05 AM",
                "text": "Stephanie poured herself a cup of hot coffee and offered more to Geoffrey, but the younger man refused.\n\n\"We're allowed but one cup a day,\" he made clear.\n\nShe sat at the kitchen table. \"Is your entire life governed by Rule?\"\n\n\"It's our way.\"\n\n\"I thought secrecy was important to the brotherhood, too. Why do you speak of it so openly?\"\n\n\"My master, who now resides with the Lord, told me to be honest with you.\"\n\nShe was perplexed. \"How did your master know me?\"\n\n\"He followed your husband's research closely. That was long before my time at the abbey, but the master told me of it. He and your husband spoke on several occasions. The master was your husband's confessor.\"\n\nThe information shocked her. \"Lars made contact with the Templars?\"\n\n\"Actually, the Templars contacted him. My master approached your husband, but if your husband knew that he was of the Templars, he never revealed it. Perhaps he thought saying it might end the contact. But surely he knew.\"\n\n\"Your master sounds like a curious man.\"\n\nThe younger man's face brightened. \"He was a wise man who tried to do good for our Order.\"\n\nShe recalled his defense of Mark hours earlier. \"Did my son help with that endeavor?\"\n\n\"That's why he was chosen seneschal.\"\n\n\"And the fact that he was Lars Nelle's son had nothing to do with that choice?\"\n\n\"On that, madame, I cannot speak. I only learned who the seneschal was a few hours ago. Here, in this house. So I don't know.\"\n\n\"You know nothing of each other?\"\n\n\"Very little, and some of us struggle with that. Others revel in the privacy. But we spend our lives together, close as in a prison. Too much familiarity could become a problem. So we're barred by Rule from any intimacy with our fellows. We keep to ourselves, our silence enforced through the service of God.\"\n\n\"Sounds difficult.\"\n\n\"It's the life we choose. This adventure, though.\" He shook his head. \"My master told me I'd discover many new things. He was right.\"\n\nShe sipped more coffee. \"Your master was sure that you and I would meet?\"\n\n\"He sent the journal hoping you'd come. He also sent a letter to Ernst Scoville, which included pages from the journal that related to you. He hoped that would bring you two together. He knew Scoville once didn't care for you\u2014he learned that from your husband. But he realized your resources are great. So he wanted the two of you, together with the seneschal and myself, to find the Great Devise.\"\n\nShe recalled that term and its explanation from earlier. \"Does your Order truly believe that there's more to the story of Christ\u2014things the world doesn't know?\"\n\n\"I have, as yet, not achieved a sufficient level of training to answer your question. Many decades of service are required before I'll be privy to what the Order actually knows. But death, at least to me and from what I have been taught so far, seems a clear finality. Many thousands of brothers died on the battlefields of the Holy Land. Not one of them ever rose and walked away.\"\n\n\"The Catholic Church would call what you just said heresy.\"\n\n\"The Church is an institution created by men and governed by men. Whatever more is made of that institution is also the creation of man.\"\n\nShe decided to tempt fate. \"What am I supposed to do, Geoffrey?\"\n\n\"Help your son.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"He must complete what his father started. Raymond de Roquefort cannot be allowed to find the Great Devise. The master was emphatic on this point. That's why he planned ahead. Why I was trained.\"\n\n\"Mark detests me.\"\n\n\"He loves you.\"\n\n\"How would you know that?\"\n\n\"My master told me.\"\n\n\"He would have no way of knowing that.\"\n\n\"My master knew all.\" Geoffrey reached into his trouser pocket and withdrew a sealed envelope. \"I was told to give this to you when I thought appropriate.\" He handed her the crinkled packet, then stood from the table. \"The seneschal and Mr. Malone have gone to the church. I'll leave you alone.\"\n\nShe appreciated the gesture. No telling what emotions the message might stir, so she waited until Geoffrey had withdrawn to the den, then opened the envelope.\n\nMrs. Nelle, you and I are strangers, yet I feel I know much about you, all from Lars, who told me what troubled his soul. Your son was different. He kept his torment inside, sharing precious little. On a few occasions I managed to learn some, but his emotions were not as transparent as his father's. Perhaps he inherited that trait from you? And I do not mean to be flippant. What is surely happening at the moment is serious. Raymond de Roquefort is a dangerous man. He is driven by a blindness that has, through the centuries, affected many of our Order. His is a single-mindedness that clouds his vision. Your son fought him for leadership and lost. Unfortunately, Mark does not possess the resolve needed to complete his battles. Starting them seems easy, continuing them even easier, but resolving them has proven difficult. His battles with you. His battles with de Roquefort. His battles with his conscience. All challenge him. I thought that joining the two of you together could prove decisive for you both. Again, I do not know you, but I believe I understand you. Your husband is dead and so much was left unresolved. Perhaps this quest will finally answer all your questions. I offer this advice. Trust your son, forget about the past, think only of the future. That could go a long way to providing peace. My Order is unique among all Christendom. Our beliefs are different, and that is because of what the original brothers learned and passed on. Does that make us less Christian? Or more Christian? Neither, in my opinion. Finding the Great Devise will answer many questions, but I fear that it will raise many more. It will be to you and your son to decide what is best if and when that critical time comes, and hopefully it will, for I have faith in you both. A resurrection has occurred. A second chance has been offered. The dead have risen and now walk again among you. Make good use of that miracle, but a warning: Free your mind from the prejudices in which it has grown comfortable. Open yourself to conceptions more vast, and reason by more certain methods. For only then will you succeed. May the Lord be with you.\n\nA tear streaked down her cheek. A strange feeling, crying. One she could not remember since childhood. She was highly educated and possessed the experience that decades of working in the top levels of the intelligence business offered. Her career had been spent handling one difficult situation after another. She'd made life-and-death decisions many times. But none of that applied here. She'd somehow left the world of good and bad, right and wrong, black and white, and entered a realm where her innermost thoughts were not only known, but actually understood. This master, a man to whom she'd never spoken a word, seemed to precisely comprehend her pain.\n\nBut he was right.\n\nMark's return was a resurrection. A glorious miracle with endless possibilities.\n\n\"Do the words sadden you?\"\n\nShe looked up. Geoffrey stood in the doorway. She swiped the tears away. \"In one way. But in another they bring happiness.\"\n\n\"The master was like that. He knew both joy and pain. Much pain, though, in his final days.\"\n\n\"How did he die?\"\n\n\"Cancer took him two nights ago.\"\n\n\"You miss him?\"\n\n\"I was raised alone, without the benefit of family. Monks and nuns taught me about life. They were good to me, but none ever loved me. So hard to grow up without the love of a parent.\"\n\nThe admission struck her heart.\n\n\"The master showed me great kindness, perhaps even love, but most of all he placed his trust in me.\"\n\n\"Then don't fail him.\"\n\n\"I won't.\"\n\nShe motioned with the paper. \"Is this mine to keep?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I was only the deliveryman.\"\n\nShe grabbed hold of herself. \"Why did Mark and Cotton go to the church?\"\n\n\"I sensed that the seneschal wanted to talk to Mr. Malone.\"\n\nShe stood from the chair. \"Perhaps we, too, should\u2014\"\n\nA knock came at the front door. She tensed as her gaze darted to the unlocked latch. Cotton and Mark would have simply walked in. She saw Geoffrey likewise come alert and a gun appeared in his hand. She stepped toward the door and peered through the glass.\n\nA familiar face stared back.\n\nRoyce Claridon."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 49",
                "text": "De Roquefort was furious. Four hours ago he'd been informed that, on the night the master died, the archival security system had recorded a visit at eleven fifty-one PM. The seneschal had stayed inside twelve minutes, then left with two books. The electronic identification tags affixed to every volume identified the two missing tomes as a thirteenth-century codex he knew well and a marshal's report filed in the latter part of the nineteenth century, which he'd also read.\n\nWhen he'd interrogated Royce Claridon a few hours ago, he'd not made known his familiarity with the cryptogram contained in Lars Nelle's journal. But one was included in the prior marshal's report along with the location where the puzzle had been found\u2014in the abbe Gelis's church located in Coustausa, not far from Rennes-le-Cheteau. He recalled from his reading that the marshal had spoken to Gelis shortly before the priest was murdered and learned that Sauniere had also found a cryptogram in his church. When compared, the two were identical. Gelis apparently solved the puzzle and the marshal was told the results, but the solution was not recorded and was never found after Gelis's death. Both the local police and the marshal suspected that the murderer was after something in Gelis's briefcase. Surely, Gelis's decipher. But was the murderer Sauniere? Hard to say. The crime was never solved. Still, given what de Roquefort knew, the priest from Rennes would have to be included on any suspect list.\n\nNow the marshal's report was gone. Which might not be all bad since he possessed Lars Nelle's journal, which contained Sauniere's cryptogram. Yet was it, as the marshal reported, the same as Gelis's? No way to know without the marshal's report, which was certainly removed from the archives for a reason.\n\nFive minutes ago, while he'd listened through a microphone stuck to a side windowpane as Stephanie Nelle and brother Geoffrey bonded, he'd learned Mark Nelle and Cotton Malone had walked to the church. Stephanie Nelle had even cried after reading what the former master had written. How touching. The master had clearly planned ahead and this whole matter was rapidly spinning out of control. He needed to yank the reins tight and slow the momentum down. So while Royce Claridon dealt with the occupants at Lars Nelle's house, he was going to see about the other two.\n\nThe transponder still attached to Malone's rental car had revealed that Malone and Stephanie Nelle returned to Rennes from Avignon in the wee hours. Mark Nelle must have come straight here from the abbey, which was not surprising.\n\nAfter what happened last night with the woman on the bridge, he'd thought Malone and Stephanie Nelle were no longer important, which was why his men had been instructed only to subdue them. Killing a current and a former American operative would surely bring attention. He'd traveled to Avignon to discover what secrets the palace archives held and to capture Claridon, not to attract the interest of the entire American intelligence community. He'd accomplished all three objectives and managed to obtain Lars Nelle's journal as a bonus. All in all, not a bad night's work. He'd even been willing to let Mark Nelle and Geoffrey go, since away from the abbey they were a far lesser threat. But after learning about the two missing books, that strategy had changed.\n\n\"We're in place,\" a voice said in his ear.\n\n\"Stay still until I call for you,\" he whispered into the lapel mike.\n\nHe'd brought six brothers with him and they were now scattered around the village, blending in with the growing Sunday crowd. The day was bright, sunny, and characteristically windy. While the Aude River's valleys were warm and calm, the summits surrounding them were perpetually raked by mountain winds.\n\nHe strolled up the main rue toward the Church of Mary Magdalene, making no effort to mask his approach.\n\nHe wanted Mark Nelle to know he was there.\n\nMark stood at his father's grave. The memorial was in good condition, as were all the graves, since the cemetery now seemed an integral part of the town's growing tourist industry.\n\nFor the first six years after his father died, he'd personally tended to the grave, visiting nearly every weekend. He'd also tended to the house. His father had been popular with Rennes' residents since he'd treated the village with kindness and Sauniere's memory with respect. That was, perhaps, one reason why his father had included so much fiction about Rennes in his books. The embellished mystery was a money machine for the entire region, and writers who trashed that mystique were not appreciated. Since precious little was known for sure about any aspect of the tale, lots of room for improvisation existed. It also helped that his father was regarded as the man who brought the story to the world's attention, though Mark knew that a relatively unknown French book by Gerard de Sede, Le Tresor Maudit, published in the late 1960s, was what first ignited his father's curiosity. He'd always thought the title\u2014The Accursed Treasure\u2014apt, especially after his father suddenly died. Mark had been a teenager when he'd first read his father's book, but it had been years later, while he was in graduate school, honing his knowledge of medieval history and religious philosophy, that his father told him what was really at stake.\n\n\"The heart of Christianity is the resurrection of physical bodies. It's the fulfillment of the Old Testament promise. If Christians will not one day be resurrected, then their faith is useless. No resurrection means the Gospels are all a lie\u2014the Christian faith is only for this life\u2014there's no more after. It's the resurrection that makes everything performed for Christ worthwhile. Other religions preach about paradise and the afterlife. But only Christianity offers a God who became man, died for His followers, then rose from the dead to rule forever.\n\n\"Think about it,\" his father had said. \"Christians can have a lot of different beliefs on a lot of subjects. But they all agree on the resurrection. It's their universal constant. Jesus rose from the dead for them alone. Death was conquered for them alone. Christ is alive and working toward their redemption. The kingdom of heaven is waiting for them, as they, too, will be raised from the dead to live forever with the Lord. There's meaning in every tragedy, since the resurrection gives hope for a future.\"\n\nThen his father asked the question that had floated in his memory ever since.\n\n\"What if that never happened? What if Christ simply died, dust to dust?\"\n\nIndeed, what if?\n\n\"Think of all the millions who were slaughtered in the name of the risen Christ. During the Albigensian Crusade alone fifteen thousand men, women, and children were burned to death for simply denying the teachings of the crucifixion. The Inquisition murdered millions more. The Holy Land Crusades cost hundreds of thousands of lives. All for the so-called risen Christ. Popes for centuries have used Christ's sacrifice as a way to motivate warriors. If the resurrection never happened, so there's no promise of an afterlife, how many of those men do you think would have faced death?\"\n\nThe answer was simple. Not a single one.\n\nWhat if the resurrection had never happened?\n\nMark had just spent five years searching for an answer to that question within an Order the world thought eradicated seven hundred years ago. Yet he'd come away as perplexed as when he was first brought to the abbey.\n\nWhat had been gained?\n\nMore important, what had been lost?\n\nHe shook the confusion from his mind and refocused on his father's tombstone. He'd commissioned the slab and watched while it had been laid in place one dreary May afternoon. His father had been found a week earlier, hanging from a bridge half an hour to the south of Rennes. Mark had been at home in Toulouse when the call came from the police. He remembered his father's face when he identified the body\u2014the ashen skin, a gaping mouth, dead eyes. A grotesque image he feared would never leave him.\n\nHis mother had returned to Georgia right after the funeral. They'd spoken little during the three days she was in France. He was twenty-seven years old, just starting at the university in Toulouse as a graduate assistant, ill prepared for life. But he wondered now, eleven years later, if he was any more prepared. Yesterday he would have killed Raymond de Roquefort. What happened to all that he'd been taught? Where was the discipline he thought he'd acquired? De Roquefort's failings were easy to understand\u2014a false sense of duty powered by ego\u2014but his own weaknesses were perplexing. In the span of three days, he'd gone from seneschal to fugitive. From security to chaos. From purpose to wandering.\n\nAnd for what?\n\nHe felt the press of the gun beneath his jacket. The reassurance it offered was troubling\u2014just one more new and strange sensation that brought him comfort.\n\nHe stepped from his father's grave and crept across to Ernst Scoville's resting place. He'd known the reclusive Belgian and had liked him. The master had apparently known of him, too, since he'd sent Scoville a letter only last week. What had de Roquefort said yesterday about the two mailings? I've tended to one of the receivers. Apparently so. But what else had he said? And will shortly tend to the other. His mother was in danger. They all were. But there was little that could be done. Go to the police? No one would believe them. The abbey was well respected, and not a single brother would speak out against the Order. All that would be found was a quiet monastery devoted to God. Plans existed for the secretion of all things related to the brotherhood, and not one of the men inside the abbey would fail.\n\nOf that he was sure.\n\nNo, they were on their own.\n\nMalone waited in the calvary garden for mark to return from the cemetery. He'd not wanted to intrude on something so personal since he fully understood the unsettling emotions the man was surely experiencing. He was only ten when his father died, but the sorrow he'd felt at knowing that he would never see his dad again had never faded. Unlike with Mark, there was no cemetery for him to visit. His father's grave had been at the bottom of the North Atlantic inside the crushed hulk of a sunken submarine. He'd tried once to find out the details of what happened, but the entire incident remained classified.\n\nHis father had loved the Navy and the United States\u2014he'd been a patriot who willingly gave his life for his country. And that realization always made Malone proud. Mark Nelle had been lucky. He'd shared many years with his father. They'd grown to know one another and shared life. But in a lot of ways he and Mark were similar. Both of their dads had been committed to their work. Both were gone. Neither death possessed a good explanation.\n\nHe stood by the Calvary and watched as more visitors streamed in and out of the cemetery. Finally, he spotted Mark following a Japanese group out through the gate.\n\n\"That was tough,\" Mark said as he approached. \"I miss him.\"\n\nHe decided to pick up where they'd left off. \"You and your mother are going to have to come to terms.\"\n\n\"There's a lot of bad feelings there, and seeing his grave just brought them into focus again.\"\n\n\"She has a heart. It's encased in iron, I know, but it's still there.\"\n\nMark smiled. \"Appears you know her.\"\n\n\"I've had some experience.\"\n\n\"At the moment, we need to concentrate on whatever the master has concocted.\"\n\n\"You two dodge the issue well.\"\n\nMark smiled again. \"Comes with the genes.\"\n\nHe glanced at his watch. \"It's eleven thirty. I need to head out. I want to pay a visit to Cassiopeia Vitt before nightfall.\"\n\n\"I'll draw you a map. It's not a long drive from here.\"\n\nThey left the Calvary garden and turned toward the main rue. A hundred feet away Malone spotted a short, rugged-looking man, hands stuffed into the pockets of a leather jacket, marching straight for the church.\n\nHe grabbed Mark's shoulder. \"We've got company.\"\n\nMark followed his gaze and saw de Roquefort, too.\n\nMalone quickly assessed their options as he spotted three more short-hairs. Two stood ahead at the Villa Bethanie. Another blocked the alley that led up to the car park.\n\n\"Any suggestions?\" Malone said.\n\nMark stepped toward the church. \"Follow me.\"\n\nStephanie opened the door and Royce Claridon entered the house. \"Where did you come from?\" she asked, motioning for Geoffrey to lower his weapon.\n\n\"They took me from the palace last night and drove me here. They kept me in a flat two streets over, but I managed to slip away a few minutes ago.\"\n\n\"How many brothers are in the village?\" Geoffrey asked Claridon.\n\n\"Who are you?\"\n\n\"His name is Geoffrey,\" Stephanie said, hoping her compatriot understood to offer precious little.\n\n\"How many brothers are here?\" Geoffrey asked again.\n\n\"Four.\"\n\nStephanie stepped toward the kitchen window and gazed out at the street. The cobbles were deserted in both directions. But she was concerned about Mark and Malone. \"Where are those brothers?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I heard them say you were in Lars's house, so I came straight here.\"\n\nShe didn't like that response. \"We couldn't help you last night. We had no idea where they'd taken you. We were knocked unconscious trying to catch de Roquefort and the woman. By the time we woke up, everyone was gone.\"\n\nThe Frenchman held up his palms. \"It is all right, madame, I understand. There was nothing you could do.\"\n\n\"Is de Roquefort here?\" Geoffrey asked.\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"The master. Is he here?\"\n\n\"No names were given.\" Claridon faced her. \"But I heard them say that Mark is alive. Is that true?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"He and Cotton walked to the church, but they should be back shortly.\"\n\n\"A miracle. I thought he was gone forever.\"\n\n\"You and me both.\"\n\nHis gaze raked the room. \"I've not been inside this house in some time. Lars and I spent a lot of time here.\"\n\nShe offered him a seat at the table. Geoffrey positioned himself near the window, and she noticed an edge to his otherwise cool demeanor.\n\n\"What happened to you?\" she asked Claridon.\n\n\"I was bound until this morning. They untied me so I could relieve myself. In the bathroom, I climbed out the window and came straight here. They will surely be looking for me, but there was nowhere else to go. Getting out of this town is quite difficult, since there is but one way in and out.\" Claridon fidgeted in the chair. \"Might I trouble you for some water?\"\n\nShe stood and filled a glass from the tap. Claridon downed it in one swallow. She refilled the glass.\n\n\"I was terrified of them,\" Claridon said.\n\n\"What do they want?\" she asked.\n\n\"They seek their Great Devise, as Lars did.\"\n\n\"And what did you tell them?\" Geoffrey asked, with a hint of scorn in his tone.\n\n\"I told them nothing, but they asked precious little. I was told that my questioning would be later today, after they tended to something else. But they failed to say what that was.\" Claridon stared at her. \"Do you know what they want from you?\"\n\n\"They have Lars's journal, the book from the auction, and the lithograph of the painting. What more could they want?\"\n\n\"I think it's Mark.\"\n\nThe words visibly stiffened Geoffrey.\n\nShe wanted to know, \"What do they want with him?\"\n\n\"I have no clue, madame. But I wonder if any of this is worth bloodshed.\"\n\n\"Brothers have died for nearly nine hundred years for what they believed,\" Geoffrey said. \"This is no different.\"\n\n\"You talk as though you're of the Order.\"\n\n\"I'm only quoting history.\"\n\nClaridon drank his water. \"Lars Nelle and I studied the Order for many years. I have read that history you speak of.\"\n\n\"What did you read?\" Geoffrey asked, amazement in his voice. \"Books written by people who know nothing. They write of heresy and idol worship, of kissing each other on the mouth, of sodomy, and of the denial of Jesus Christ. Not a word of which is true. All lies designed to destroy the Order and take its wealth.\"\n\n\"Now you truly speak like a Templar.\"\n\n\"I speak like a man who cherishes justice.\"\n\n\"Is that not a Templar?\"\n\n\"Should that not be all men?\"\n\nStephanie smiled. Geoffrey was quick.\n\nMalone followed Mark back into the church of mary Magdalene. They hustled down the center aisle, past nine rows of pews and gawkers, toward the altar. There Mark veered right and entered a small anteroom through an open doorway. Three camera-toting visitors stood inside.\n\n\"Could you excuse us?\" Mark said to them in English. \"I'm with the museum and we need this room for a few moments.\"\n\nNone questioned his obvious authority and Mark gently closed the door behind them. Malone looked around. The space was naturally illuminated by the light from a stained-glass window. A row of empty cupboards dominated one wall. The other three were all of wood. No furniture was inside.\n\n\"This was the sacristy,\" Mark said.\n\nDe Roquefort was no more than a minute from being upon them, so he wanted to know, \"I assume you have something in mind?\"\n\nMark stepped toward the cupboard and searched with his fingertips above the top shelf. \"Like I told you, when Sauniere built the Calvary garden, he constructed the grotto. He and his mistress would go down into the valley and collect stones.\" Mark continued to search for something. \"They'd come back with hods full of rocks. There.\"\n\nMark withdrew his hand and grabbed hold of the cupboard, which swung open to reveal a windowless space beyond. \"This was Sauniere's hiding place. Whatever else he brought back with those rocks was stored here. Few know of this addition. Sauniere created it during the church remodeling. Plans for this building, prior to 1891, show it as an open room.\"\n\nMark withdrew an automatic pistol from beneath his jacket. \"We'll wait in here and see what happens.\"\n\n\"Does de Roquefort know of this room?\"\n\n\"We'll find out shortly.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 50",
                "text": "De Roquefort stopped outside the church. Odd that his targets had fled inside. But no matter. He was going to personally tend to Mark Nelle. His patience was at an end. He'd taken the precaution of consulting with his officers before leaving the abbey. He wasn't going to repeat the former master's mistakes. His tenure would at least carry the appearance of a democracy. Thankfully, yesterday's escape and the two shootings had galvanized the brotherhood onto a singular path. All agreed that the former seneschal and his ally must be returned for punishment.\n\nAnd he intended to deliver.\n\nHe surveyed the street.\n\nThe crowd was growing. A warm day had brought out the tours. He turned to the brother standing beside him. \"Go inside and assess the situation.\"\n\nA nod and the man walked off.\n\nHe knew the church's geography. Only one way in and out. The stained-glass windows were all fixed, so they would have to shatter one to escape. He saw no policemen, which was normal for Rennes. Little ever happened here except the spending of money. The commercialization sickened him. If it was his decision, all tours of the abbey would be stopped. He realized the bishop would question that move, but he'd already decided to limit access to only a few hours on Saturdays, citing the brothers' need for more solitude. That the bishop would understand. He fully intended on restoring many of the old ways, practices that had long been abandoned, rituals that once separated the Templars from all other religious orders. And for that he would need the abbey's gates locked far more than they were open.\n\nThe brother he'd sent inside exited the church and walked his way.\n\n\"They're not there,\" the man said as he drew close.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I searched the nave, the sacristy, the confessionals. They're not inside.\"\n\nHe did not want to hear that. \"There's no other exit.\"\n\n\"Master, they're not there.\"\n\nHis gaze locked on the church. His mind swirled with possibilities.\n\nThen the answer was clear.\n\n\"Come,\" he said. \"I know precisely where they are.\"\n\nStephanie was listening to Royce Claridon, not as a wife and mother on a mission important to her family, but as the head of a covert government agency that dealt routinely in espionage and counterespionage. Something was out of place. Claridon's sudden appearance was too convenient. She knew little about Raymond de Roquefort, but she knew enough to realize that either Claridon had been allowed to escape or, worse, the prickly little man sitting across from her was in league with the enemy. Either way she had to watch what she said. Geoffrey, too, had apparently sensed something since he was offering precious little to the Frenchman's many questions\u2014too many inquiries for a man who'd just survived a life-and-death experience.\n\n\"Was the woman last night in the palace Cassiopeia Vitt, the Ingenieur mentioned in the letter to Ernst Scoville?\" she asked.\n\n\"I would assume. A she-devil.\"\n\n\"She may have saved us all.\"\n\n\"How? She interfered, as she did with Lars.\"\n\n\"You're alive right now thanks to her interference.\"\n\n\"No, madame. I am alive because they want information.\"\n\n\"What I wonder is why you're even here,\" Geoffrey said from his position by the window. \"Escaping from de Roquefort is not easy.\"\n\n\"You did.\"\n\n\"And how would you know that?\"\n\n\"They spoke of you and Mark. Apparently there was shooting. Brothers were hurt. They're angry.\"\n\n\"Did they mention attempting to kill us?\"\n\nA moment of uneasy silence passed.\n\n\"Royce,\" Stephanie said. \"What else might they be after?\"\n\n\"I only know that two books are missing from their archive. There was a mention of that.\"\n\n\"You just said a moment ago that you possessed no clue as to why they wanted Madame Nelle's son.\" Suspicion laced Geoffrey's declaration.\n\n\"And I don't. But I know they want the two missing books.\"\n\nStephanie glanced at Geoffrey and saw not a hint of acquiescence in the younger man's expression. If indeed he and Mark possessed the books de Roquefort sought, no admission came from his eyes.\n\n\"Yesterday,\" Claridon said, \"you showed me Lars's journal and the book\u2014\"\n\n\"Which de Roquefort has.\"\n\n\"No. Cassiopeia Vitt stole both from him last night.\"\n\nAnother new piece of information. Claridon knew an awful lot for a man whom his captors supposedly ignored.\n\n\"So de Roquefort needs to find her,\" she made clear. \"As we do.\"\n\n\"It seems, madame, that one of the books Mark took from their archive also contains a cryptogram. De Roquefort wants that book back.\"\n\n\"Is this more of what you overheard?\"\n\nClaridon nodded. \"Oui. They believed me asleep, but I was listening. One of their marshals, from Sauniere's time, discovered the cryptogram and recorded it in the book.\"\n\n\"We have no books,\" Geoffrey said.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Astonishment filled the man's face.\n\n\"We have no books. We left the abbey in a great rush and took nothing with us.\"\n\nClaridon came to his feet. \"You're a liar.\"\n\n\"Bold words. Can you prove the allegation?\"\n\n\"You're a man of the Order. A warrior of Christ. A Templar. Your oath should be enough to prevent you from lying.\"\n\n\"And what prevents you?\" Geoffrey asked.\n\n\"I don't lie. I've been through a difficult ordeal. I hid in an asylum for five years to avoid being a prisoner of the Templars. Do you know what they planned to do to me? Grease my feet and hold them before a hot brazier. Cook my skin from the bone.\"\n\n\"We have no books. De Roquefort is chasing a shadow.\"\n\n\"But that's not so. Two men were shot during your escape, and both said Mark carried a rucksack.\"\n\nShe perked at the information.\n\n\"And how would you know that?\" Geoffrey asked.\n\nDe Roquefort entered the church, followed by the brother who'd just been inside. He walked down the center aisle and entered the sacristy. He had to give Mark Nelle credit. Few knew about the church's secret room. It was not part of any tour, and only Rennes purists would have any inkling the concealed space existed. He'd often thought it curious that the domain's operators did not exploit Sauniere's addition to the church's architecture\u2014secret rooms always added to any mystery\u2014but there were a lot of things about the church, the town, and the story that defied explanation.\n\n\"When you came in before, was the entrance to this room open?\"\n\nThe brother shook his head and whispered, \"Closed, Master.\"\n\nHe gently shut the door. \"Allow no one to enter.\"\n\nHe approached the cupboard and withdrew his gun. He'd never actually seen the secret chamber that lay beyond, but he'd read enough accounts from previous marshals who'd investigated Rennes to know that a concealed room existed. If he recalled correctly, the release mechanism was in the top right corner of the cupboard.\n\nHe reached up and located a metal lever.\n\nHe knew that once he yanked down, the two men on the other side would be alerted and he had to assume they were armed. Malone certainly could handle himself and Mark Nelle had proven he was not a man to underestimate.\n\n\"Prepare yourself,\" he said.\n\nThe brother withdrew a short-barreled automatic and aimed at the cupboard. He popped the latch and quickly stepped back, gun pointed, waiting for what would happen next.\n\nThe cupboard inched open, then stopped.\n\nHe stayed at the far right edge and, with his foot, pivoted the door wide open.\n\nThe secret room was empty.\n\nMalone stood close to mark inside the confessional. They'd waited inside the hidden room for a couple minutes, able to observe the sacristy through a tiny Judas hole strategically placed in the cupboard. Mark had watched as one of the brothers entered the sacristy, saw the room empty, and left. They'd waited a few more seconds, then exited, watching from the doorway as the brother left the church. Seeing no other brothers inside, they'd quickly hustled to the confessional and stepped inside just as de Roquefort and the brother returned.\n\nMark had correctly surmised that de Roquefort would know of the secret room, but that he wouldn't share that knowledge with anyone unless absolutely necessary. When they'd spotted de Roquefort waiting outside, sending another brother inside to investigate, they'd lingered only long enough to buy a couple of minutes to change locations, since once the scout returned and reported they were missing de Roquefort would immediately surmise where they were hiding. After all, there was only one way in and out of the church.\n\n\"Know your enemy and know yourself,\" Mark whispered as de Roquefort and his minion entered the sacristy.\n\nMalone smiled. \"Sun Tzu was a wise man.\"\n\nThe door to the sacristy closed.\n\n\"We'll give it a few seconds, then we're out of here,\" Mark said.\n\n\"Could be more men outside.\"\n\n\"I'm sure there are. We'll take our chances. I've got nine shots.\"\n\n\"Let's don't start a shootout, unless there's no other choice.\"\n\nThe sacristy door stayed closed.\n\n\"We need to go,\" Malone said.\n\nThey exited the confessional, turned right, and headed for the door.\n\nStephanie slowly came to her feet, stepped close to Geoffrey, and calmly took the gun from his grip. She then whirled, cocked the hammer, and rushed forward, pressing the barrel to Claridon's skull. \"You slimy little scum. You're with them.\"\n\nClaridon's eyes went wide. \"No, madame. I swear I am not.\"\n\n\"Open his shirt,\" she said.\n\nGeoffrey ripped away the buttons, exposing a microphone taped to the thin chest.\n\n\"Come. Quick. I need help,\" Claridon screamed.\n\nGeoffrey slammed his fist into Claridon's jaw and sent the impish man to the floor. Stephanie turned, gun in hand, and spotted through the window a short-hair running toward the front door.\n\nA kick and the door swung open.\n\nGeoffrey was ready.\n\nHe'd positioned himself to the left of the entrance and, as the man burst inside, Geoffrey spun the attacker around. Stephanie saw a gun in the short-hair's hand, but Geoffrey deftly kept the barrel pointed down, pivoted on his heel, and kicked the man into the wall. Allowing no time to react, he delivered another kick to the abdomen that brought a yelp. When the man keeled forward, the breath gone from him, Geoffrey propelled him to the floor with a blow to the spine.\n\n\"They teach you that at the abbey?\" she asked, impressed.\n\n\"That and more.\"\n\n\"Let's get out of here.\"\n\n\"Hold one second.\"\n\nGeoffrey darted from the kitchen back toward the bedroom and returned with Mark's knapsack. \"Claridon was right. We have books and I can't leave without them.\"\n\nShe noticed an earpiece on the man Geoffrey had subdued. \"He was listening to Claridon, and is surely in communication with others.\"\n\n\"De Roquefort is here,\" Geoffrey said with conviction.\n\nShe grabbed her world phone from the kitchen counter. \"We need to find Mark and Cotton.\"\n\nGeoffrey approached the open front door and carefully peered in both directions. \"You'd think more brothers would be here by now.\"\n\nShe stepped up behind him. \"Could be they're occupied at the church. We'll head there following the outer wall, through the car park, staying off the main rue. \" She handed the gun back to him. \"You watch my back.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"With pleasure, madame.\"\n\nDe Roquefort stared into the empty secret room. Where were they? There was simply no other place to hide within the church.\n\nHe slammed the cupboard back into place.\n\nThe other brother surely saw the moment of confusion that had passed across his face when they'd discovered the hiding place bare. He washed any doubt from his eyes.\n\n\"Where are they, Master?\" the brother asked.\n\nConsidering the answer, he stepped to the stained-glass window and gazed out through one of the clear segments. The Calvary garden below was still busy with visitors. Then he saw Mark Nelle and Cotton Malone rush into the garden and turn toward the cemetery.\n\n\"Outside,\" he calmly said, stepping toward the sacristy door.\n\nMark thought the trick with the secret room might buy them enough time to make an escape. He was hoping de Roquefort had brought only a small contingent. But three more brothers had been waiting outside\u2014one on the main rue, another blocking the alley to the car park, and a final one positioned outside the Villa Bethanie, preventing the tree garden from becoming an escape route. De Roquefort had apparently not thought the cemetery a threat since it was walled with a fifteen-hundred-foot drop on the other side.\n\nBut that was precisely where Mark was headed.\n\nHe now thanked heaven for the many late-night explorations he and his father had once performed. The locals frowned on people visiting the cemetery after dark, but that was the best time, his father would say. So they'd many times scoured around, looking for clues, trying to make sense of Sauniere and his seemingly inexplicable behavior. On a few forays they'd been interrupted, so they'd improvised another way out than through the skull-and-crossbones gate.\n\nTime to put that discovery to good use.\n\n\"I'm afraid to ask how we're going to get out of here,\" Malone said.\n\n\"It's scary, but at least the sun's shining. Every other time I've done it has been at night.\"\n\nMark turned right and scampered down the stone stairs to the lower part of the cemetery. Fifty or so people were scattered around, admiring the memorials. Beyond the wall the cloudless sky was a brilliant blue and the wind moaned like a stricken soul. Clear days were always breezy in Rennes, but the cemetery air was motionless, the church and presbytery blocking the strongest gusts, which came from the south and west.\n\nHe hustled straight for a monument that lay adjacent to the east wall, beneath a canopy of elms that draped the earth in long shadows. He noticed that the crowd loomed mainly on the upper level, where the grave of Sauniere's mistress sat. He hopped onto a thick tombstone and clambered up onto the wall.\n\n\"Follow me,\" he said as he jumped down on the other side, rolled once, then came to his feet, brushing off grit.\n\nHe looked back as Malone leaped the eight feet down to the narrow track.\n\nThey were standing at the base of the wall, on a rocky footpath that measured about four feet wide. Anomalous beech and pines sustained the downward slope beyond, beaten back by the wind, their branches twisted and interlaced, their roots stuck between clefts in the rock.\n\nMark pointed left. \"This path ends just ahead, beyond the cheteau, with nowhere to go.\" He turned. \"So we have to go this way. It takes us around to the car park. There's an easy way up there.\"\n\n\"No wind here, but when we round that corner\u2014\" Malone pointed ahead. \"\u2014I imagine it'll get breezy.\"\n\n\"Like a hurricane. But we have no choice.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 51",
                "text": "De Roquefort brought one brother with him as he entered the cemetery, the remaining three waited outside. Clever what Mark Nelle had done, using the secret room as a diversion. They'd most likely stayed inside only long enough for his scout to leave the church. Then they hid in the confessional until he'd ensconced himself in the sacristy.\n\nInside the parish close he stopped and calmly surveyed the graves, but did not see his quarry. He told the brother standing next to him to search left and he went right, where he came across Ernst Scoville's grave.\n\nFour months ago, when he'd first learned of the former master's interest in Scoville, he'd sent a brother to monitor the Belgian's activities. Through a listening device installed on Scoville's telephone his spy had learned about Stephanie Nelle, her plans to visit Denmark then France, and her intent to obtain the book. But when it became clear that Scoville did not like Lars Nelle's widow and was merely leading her on, intent on thwarting her efforts, a speeding car on the Rennes incline solved the problem of his potential interference. Scoville was not a player in the unfolding game. Stephanie Nelle was and, at the time, nothing could be allowed to impede her movement. De Roquefort had personally handled Scoville's killing, involving no one at the abbey since he could ill afford to explain why outright murder was necessary.\n\nThe brother returned from the other side of the cemetery and reported, \"Nothing.\"\n\nWhere could they have gone?\n\nHis gaze settled on the tawny gray wall that lined the outer edge. He stepped to a spot where the wall rose only breast-high. Rennes sat on the backbone of a summit with slopes as steep as pyramids on three sides. Objects in the valley below were lost in a grayish haze that blanketed the colorful earth, like some far-off Lilliputian world, the basin, highways, and towns as if seen on an atlas. The wind from beyond the wall washed over his face and dried his eyes. He planted both hands on top, leveraged himself up, and hinged his body forward. He glanced right. The rocky ledge was barren. Then he looked left and caught a glimpse of Cotton Malone turning from the wall's north side to its west.\n\nHe dropped back down.\n\n\"They're on a ledge moving toward the Tour Magdala. Stop them. I'm going to the belvedere.\"\n\nStephanie led the way as she and Geoffrey fled the house. A sunburned lane paralleled the west wall and led northward to the car park and beyond to Sauniere's domain. Geoffrey was clearly alight with anticipation, and for a man who appeared only in his late twenties he'd handled himself with a professional ease.\n\nOnly scattered houses stood in this corner of town. Firs and pines climbed skyward in patches.\n\nSomething whizzed by her right ear and pinged off the limestone of the building just ahead. She whirled to see the short-hair from the house taking aim fifty yards back. She dove behind a parked car that nestled close to the rear of one of the houses. Geoffrey dropped to the ground, rolled, then hinged up and fired two shots from between his outstretched legs. The pop, like a firecracker, was dulled by the howling wind. One of the bullets found its mark and the man cried out in pain, then grabbed at his thigh and fell.\n\n\"Good shot,\" she said.\n\n\"I couldn't kill him. I gave my word.\"\n\nThey came to their feet and rushed ahead.\n\nMalone followed Mark. The rocky escarpment, lined by spikes of brown grass, had narrowed, and the wind, which before was only a nuisance, had now become a hazard, molesting them with gale force, its monotonous murmur masking all other noise.\n\nThey were on the town's west side. The lofty stem of copses from the north slope were gone. Nothing but bare rock plunged downward, gleaming in the fiery afternoon sun, colored by tufts of moss and heather.\n\nThe belvedere Malone had crossed two nights ago, chasing after Cassiopeia Vitt, spanned twenty feet above them. The Tour Magdala stood ahead and he could see people atop the tower admiring the distant valley. He wasn't wild about the view. Heights affected his head like wine\u2014one of those weaknesses that he'd hid from the government psychologists who were once required, from time to time, to evaluate him for duty. He risked one glance down. Scant brushwood dotted the steeply inclined plane for several hundred feet. Then a short ledge leveled, and below that an even steeper drop began.\n\nMark was ten feet ahead of him. He saw him glance back, stop, then turn and level his gun, pointing the barrel his way.\n\n\"Was it something I said?\" he yelled.\n\nThe wind buffeted Mark's arm and shook the weapon. Another hand came up to steady the aim. Malone caught the glare in the man's eye and turned back to see one of the short-hairs coming straight for them.\n\n\"Far enough, brother,\" Mark hollered over the wind.\n\nThe man held a Glock 17, similar to the one Mark gripped.\n\n\"If that weapon comes up, I'll shoot you,\" Mark made clear.\n\nThe man's arm stopped its rise.\n\nMalone did not like his predicament and pressed himself against the wall to give them room for the duel.\n\n\"This is not your battle, brother. I realize you're simply doing what the master ordered. But if I shoot you, even in the leg, you'll go over the edge. Is it worth it?\"\n\n\"I'm bound to follow the master.\"\n\n\"He's leading you into peril. Have you even considered what you're doing?\"\n\n\"That's not my responsibility.\"\n\n\"Saving your life is,\" Mark said.\n\n\"Would you shoot me, Seneschal?\"\n\n\"Without question.\"\n\n\"Is what you seek important enough to harm another Christian?\"\n\nMalone watched as Mark pondered the question\u2014and he wondered if the resolve he noted in the eyes was matched with the courage to follow through. He, too, had faced a similar dilemma\u2014several times. Shooting someone never came easy. But sometimes it simply had to be done.\n\n\"No, brother, it's not worth a human life.\" And Mark lowered his gun.\n\nIn the corner of his eye, Malone saw movement. He turned to see the other man take advantage of Mark's concession. The Glock started to rise as the man's other hand whipped across to meet the weapon, surely to help steady the shot he was about to take.\n\nBut he never fired.\n\nA pop muffled by the wind came from Malone's left and the short-hair was thrown back as a bullet sank into his chest. He couldn't tell if the man was wearing a protective vest or not, but it didn't matter. The close shot scrambled his balance and the man's stocky frame teetered. Malone rushed toward him, trying to prevent a fall, and caught sight of two tranquil eyes. He recalled the look from Red Jacket atop the Round Tower. Two more steps was all he needed to reach him, but the wind swept the brother off the promontory and the body rolled downward like a log.\n\nHe heard a scream from above. Some of the visitors on the belvedere had apparently witnessed the man's fate. He watched as the body continued to roll, finally settling on a ledge far below.\n\nHe turned to Mark, who still held the gun level.\n\n\"You okay?\"\n\nMark lowered the weapon. \"Not really. But we need to go.\"\n\nHe agreed.\n\nThey turned and scampered down the stony track.\n\nDe Roquefort rushed up the stairs that led to the belvedere. He heard a woman scream and saw excitement as people flocked to the wall. He moved close and asked, \"What happened?\"\n\n\"A man fell off the edge. Rolled a long way.\"\n\nHe elbowed his way to the wall. As in the parish close, the stone was nearly a meter wide, making it impossible to see down to the base of the outer wall.\n\n\"Where did he fall?\" he asked.\n\n\"There,\" a man said, pointing.\n\nHe followed the outstretched finger and saw a figure in a dark jacket with light trousers far down the barren slope, lying still. He knew who it was. Damn. He planted his palms on the rough stone and pushed himself up onto the wall. Pivoting on his stomach, he cocked his head left and saw Mark Nelle and Cotton Malone making their way toward a short incline that led up to the car park.\n\nHe dropped back down and retreated to the steps.\n\nHe pressed the SEND button on the radio clipped to his waist and whispered into the lapel mike, \"They're coming your way, at the wall's edge. Contain them.\"\n\nStephanie heard a gunshot. The pop appeared to have come from the other side of the wall. But that made no sense. Why would anyone be out there? She and Geoffrey were a hundred feet shy of the car park\u2014which, she noticed, was filled with vehicles, including four buses nestled close to the stone water tower.\n\nThey slowed their advance. Geoffrey shielded the gun behind his thigh as they calmly walked ahead.\n\n\"There,\" Geoffrey whispered.\n\nShe saw the man, too. Standing at the far end, blocking the alley down to the church. She turned back and saw another short-hair strolling up the lane behind them.\n\nThen she spotted Mark and Malone as they ran up from the other side of the wall and hopped over the knee-high stone.\n\nShe trotted toward them and asked, \"Where have you two been?\"\n\n\"Out for a stroll,\" Malone said.\n\n\"I heard shooting.\"\n\n\"Not now,\" Malone said.\n\n\"We have company,\" she made clear, pointing to the two men.\n\nMark scanned the scene. \"De Roquefort is orchestrating this whole thing. Time to leave. But I don't have the keys to our car.\"\n\n\"I have mine,\" Malone said.\n\nGeoffrey handed over the knapsack.\n\n\"Good job,\" Mark said. \"Let's go.\"\n\nDe Roquefort hustled past the villa BcTHANIE AND IGNORED the many visitors making their way toward the Tour Magdala, the tree garden, and the belvedere.\n\nHe turned right at the church.\n\n\"They're attempting to leave by car,\" a voice said in his ear.\n\n\"Allow them,\" he said.\n\nMalone backed from his parking spot and threaded his way around the other cars to the alley leading to the main rue. He noticed that the short-hairs made no attempt to stop them.\n\nThat worried him.\n\nThey were being herded.\n\nBut to where?\n\nHe crept through the alley, past the souvenir kiosks, and turned right onto the main rue, allowing the car to coast down the incline toward the town gate.\n\nPast the restaurant, the crowd thinned and the street cleared.\n\nAhead, he spotted Raymond de Roquefort, standing in the middle of the lane, blocking the gate.\n\n\"He means to challenge you,\" Mark said from the rear seat.\n\n\"Good, because I can play chicken with the best of them.\"\n\nHe gently rested his foot atop the accelerator.\n\nA couple of hundred feet and closing.\n\nDe Roquefort stayed rooted.\n\nMalone saw no weapon. Apparently the master had concluded his presence alone might stop them. Beyond, Malone saw the road was clear, but a sharp curve lay just outside the gate and he hoped no one decided to come around it in the next few seconds.\n\nHe rammed his foot to the floorboard.\n\nTires grabbed pavement and, with a lurch, the car shot forward.\n\nA hundred feet.\n\n\"You plan to kill him,\" Stephanie said.\n\n\"If I have to.\"\n\nFifty feet.\n\nMalone kept the wheel steady and stared straight at de Roquefort as the man's form grew larger in the windshield. He braced himself for the body's impact and willed his hands to hold tight.\n\nA hurried form leaped from the right and shoved de Roquefort out of the car's path.\n\nThey roared out through the gate.\n\nDe Roquefort realized what had happened and was not happy. He'd fully prepared himself to challenge his adversary, ready for whatever would come, and he resented the intrusion.\n\nThen he saw who'd saved him.\n\nRoyce Claridon.\n\n\"That car would have killed you,\" Claridon said.\n\nHe pushed the man off him and rose to his feet. \"That remained to be seen.\" Then he asked what he really wanted to know. \"Was anything learned?\"\n\n\"They discovered my ruse and I was forced to call for help.\"\n\nAnger seethed through him. Again, nothing had gone right. One salvation, though, rang through his brain.\n\nThe car they'd left in. Malone's rental.\n\nStill equipped with an electronic monitor.\n\nAt least he'd know exactly where they went."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 52",
                "text": "Malone drove as fast as he dared down the twisting incline to ground level. There he turned west for the main highway and half a mile later veered south toward the Pyrenees.\n\n\"Where are we going?\" Stephanie asked him.\n\n\"To see Cassiopeia Vitt. I was going alone, but I think it's time we all get acquainted.\" He needed something to distract him. \"Tell me about her,\" he said to Mark.\n\n\"I don't know much. I heard that her father was a wealthy Spanish contractor, her mother a Muslim from Tanzania. She's brilliant. Degrees in history, art, religion. And she's rich. She inherited lots of the money and has made even more. She and Dad clashed many times.\"\n\n\"Over what?\" Malone wanted to know.\n\n\"Proving that Christ did not die on the cross is a mission of hers. Twelve years ago religious fanaticism was viewed much differently. People weren't all that concerned with the Taliban or al Qaeda. Then, Israel was the hot spot and Cassiopeia resented the way Muslims were always depicted as extremists. She hated the arrogance of Christianity and the presumptiveness of Judaism. Her quest was one of truth, Dad would say. She wanted to strip away the myth and see just how much alike Jesus Christ and Muhammad really were. Common ground\u2014common interests. That kind of thing.\"\n\n\"Isn't that exactly what your father wanted to do?\"\n\n\"Same thing I used to say to him.\"\n\nMalone smiled. \"How far to her cheteau?\"\n\n\"Less than an hour. We turn west a few miles ahead.\"\n\nMalone studied his rearview mirrors. Still no one was following them. Good. He slowed the car as they entered a town identified as St. Loup. Being Sunday, everything was closed except for a gasoline station and convenience store just to the south. He turned in and came to a stop.\n\n\"Wait here,\" he said as he climbed out. \"I have to tend to something.\"\n\nMalone turned off the highway and drove the car down a graveled path, deeper into the thick forest. A sign indicated that GIVORS\u2014A MEDIEVAL ADVENTURE IN THE MODERN WORLD \u2014lay half a mile ahead. The drive from Rennes had taken a little less than fifty minutes. They'd headed west most of the time, passing the ruined Cathar fortress of Montsegur, then turning south toward the mountains where rising slopes sheltered river valleys and tall trees.\n\nThe two-car-wide avenue was well maintained and roofed by leafy beech trees that cast a dreamy stillness in the lengthening shadows. The entrance opened into a clearing matted in short grass. Cars littered the field. Slender columns of pine and fir lined the perimeter. He stopped and they all climbed out. A placard in French and English announced their location."
            },
            {
                "title": "GIVORS ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE",
                "text": "WELCOME TO THE PAST. HERE, AT GIVORS, A SITE FIRST OCCUPIED BY LOUIS IX, A CASTLE IS BEING CONSTRUCTED USING MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES ONLY AVAILABLE TO 13TH-CENTURY CRAFTSMEN. A MASONED TOWER WAS THE VERY SYMBOL OF A LORD'S POWER AND THE CASTLE AT GIVORS WAS DESIGNED AS A MILITARY FORTRESS WITH THICK WALLS AND MANY CORNER TOWERS. THE SURROUNDING ENVIRONS PROVIDED AN ABUNDANCE OF WATER, STONE, EARTH, SAND, AND WOOD, WHICH WERE ALL NEEDED FOR ITS CONSTRUCTION. QUARRIERS, STONE HEWERS, MASONS, CARPENTERS, BLACKSMITHS, AND POTTERERS ARE NOW LABORING, LIVING AND DRESSING EXACTLY AS THEY WOULD HAVE SEVEN CENTURIES AGO. THE PROJECT IS PRIVATELY FUNDED AND THE CURRENT ESTIMATE IS 30 YEARS WILL BE NEEDED TO COMPLETE THE CASTLE. ENJOY YOUR TIME IN THE 13TH CENTURY.\n\n\"Cassiopeia Vitt funds all this herself?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"Medieval history is one of her passions,\" Mark said. \"They knew her well at the university in Toulouse.\"\n\nMalone had decided that the direct approach would be best. Surely Vitt anticipated that he'd eventually locate her.\n\n\"Where does she live?\"\n\nMark pointed east, where the branches of oaks and elms, closed like a cloister, shaded another lane. \"The cheteau is that way.\"\n\n\"These cars for visitors?\" he asked.\n\nMark nodded. \"They give tours of the construction site to raise revenue. I took it once, years ago, right after the work began. It's impressive what she's doing.\"\n\nHe started off toward the lane leading to the cheteau. \"Let's go say hello to our hostess.\"\n\nThey walked in silence. In the distance, on the steep side of a rising slope, he spied the dreary ruin of a stone tower, its layers yellowed with moss. The dry air was warm and still. Purple heather, broom, and wildflowers carpeted the low earth on both sides of the lane. Malone imagined the clash of arms and shouts of battle that centuries ago would have echoed through the valley as men fought for its dominance. Overhead, a murder of screaming crows flew past.\n\nA hundred or so yards down the lane he saw the cheteau. It filled a sheltered hollow that provided a clear measure of seclusion. Dark red brick and stone were arranged in symmetrical patterns over four stories, flanked by two ivy-crowned towers and topped with slanting slate roofs. Greenery spread out across the faeade like rust on metal. Traces of a moat, now filled with grass and leaves, surrounded three sides. Slender trees rose in the rear and hedges of clipped yew guarded its base.\n\n\"Some house,\" Malone said.\n\n\"Sixteenth century,\" Mark noted. \"I was told that she bought the cheteau and the surrounding archaeological site. She calls the place Royal Champagne, after one of Louis XV's cavalry regiments.\"\n\nTwo cars were parked out front. A late-model Bentley Continental GT\u2014about $160,000, Malone recalled\u2014and a Porsche Roadster, cheap by comparison. There was also a motorcycle. Malone approached the cycle and examined the left rear tire and muffler. The shiny chrome was scarred.\n\nAnd he knew precisely how that had happened.\n\n\"That's where I shot.\"\n\n\"Quite right, Mr. Malone.\"\n\nHe turned. The cultured voice had come from the portico. Standing outside the open front door was a tall woman, lean as a jackal, with shoulder-length auburn hair. Her features reflected a leonine beauty reminiscent of an Egyptian goddess\u2014thin brows, brooding cheeks, blunt nose. The skin was the color of mahogany, and she was dressed in a tasteful V-neck tank that exposed her toned shoulders and capped a knee-length, safari-print silk skirt. Leather sandals sheathed her feet. The ensemble was casual but elegant, as if she were off to stroll the Champs-clysees.\n\nShe threw him a smile. \"I've been expecting you.\" Her gaze caught his and he registered determination in the deep pools of her dark eyes.\n\n\"That's interesting, because I only decided to come see you an hour ago.\"\n\n\"Oh, Mr. Malone, I'm sure I've been high on your priority list since at least two nights ago, when you shot my cycle in Rennes.\"\n\nHe was curious. \"Why lock me in the Tour Magdala?\"\n\n\"I was hoping to use the time to leave quietly. But you extricated yourself much too quickly.\"\n\n\"Why shoot at me in the first place?\"\n\n\"Nothing would have been learned from talking to the man you assaulted.\"\n\nHe noticed the melodious tone of her voice, surely designed to be disarming. \"Or perhaps you didn't want me to talk to him? Anyway, thanks for saving my hide in Copenhagen.\"\n\nShe brushed his gratitude away. \"You would have found a way out on your own. I just hastened the process.\"\n\nHe saw her glance over his shoulder. \"Mark Nelle. I am pleased to finally meet you. Glad to see you didn't die in that avalanche.\"\n\n\"I see you still like to interfere in other people's business.\"\n\n\"I don't consider it interfering. Merely monitoring the progress of those who interest me. Like your father.\" Cassiopeia stepped past Malone and extended a hand to Stephanie. \"And I'm pleased to meet you. I knew your husband well.\"\n\n\"From what I hear, you and Lars were not the best of friends.\"\n\n\"I can't believe anyone would say that.\" Cassiopeia looked at Mark with clear mischief. \"Did you tell your mother such a thing.\"\n\n\"No. He didn't,\" Stephanie said. \"Royce Claridon told me.\"\n\n\"Now, he's a man to watch. Placing your trust in that one will bring nothing but trouble. I warned Lars about him, but he wouldn't listen.\"\n\n\"On that we agree,\" Stephanie said.\n\nMalone introduced Geoffrey.\n\n\"You're of the brotherhood?\" Cassiopeia asked.\n\nGeoffrey said nothing.\n\n\"No, I wouldn't expect you to answer. Still, you are the first Templar I've met civilly.\"\n\n\"Not true,\" Geoffrey said, pointing to Mark. \"The seneschal is of the brotherhood and you met him first.\"\n\nMalone wondered about the volunteered information. So far, the young man had been tight-lipped.\n\n\"Seneschal? I'm sure there's quite a story there,\" Cassiopeia said. \"Why don't you come inside. My lunch was being prepared, but when I saw you I told the chamberlain to set more plates. They should be about finished with that.\"\n\n\"Great,\" Malone said. \"I'm starving.\"\n\n\"Then let's eat. We have much to discuss.\"\n\nThey followed her inside and Malone took in the expensive Italian chests, rare armored knights, Spanish torch holders, Beauvais tapestries, and Flemish paintings. Everything seemed a cavalcade for the connoisseur.\n\nThey followed her into a spacious dining room lined with gilded leather. Sunlight poured in through casement windows draped with elaborate lambrequin and doused the white-clothed table and marble floor in verdant shades. A twelve-branched electrified candelabrum hung unlit. Attendants were laying out gleaming silverware at each place setting.\n\nThe ambience was impressive, but what caught Malone's undivided attention was the man sitting at the far end of the table.\n\nForbes Europe ranked him the eighth-wealthiest person on the Continent, his power and influence in direct proportion to his billions of euros. Heads of state and royalty knew him well. The queen of Denmark called him a personal friend. Worldwide charities counted on him as a generous benefactor. For the past year Malone had spent at least three days a week visiting with him\u2014talking books, politics, the world, how life sucks. He came and went from the man's estate as if he were part of the family and, in many respects, Malone felt that he was.\n\nBut now he seriously questioned all that.\n\nHe actually felt like a fool.\n\nBut all Henrik Thorvaldsen could do was smile. \"About time, Cotton. I've been waiting two days.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 54",
                "text": "De Roquefort sat in the passenger seat and concentrated on the GPS screen. The transponder attached to Malone's rental car was working perfectly, the tracking signal transmitting strongly. One brother drove while Claridon and another brother occupied the rear seat. De Roquefort was still irritated with Claridon's interference back in Rennes. He had no intention of dying and would have eventually leaped out of the way, but he'd truly wanted to see if Cotton Malone possessed the resolve to drive through him.\n\nThe brother who'd fallen down the rocky incline had died, shot in the chest before he fell. A Kevlar vest had prevented the bullet from doing any damage, but the fall had broken the man's neck. Thankfully, none of them carried identification, but the vest was a problem. Equipment like that signaled sophistication, but nothing linked the dead man to the abbey. All the brothers knew Rule. If any of them were killed outside the abbey, their bodies would go unidentified. Like the brother who'd leaped from the Round Tower, Renne's casualty would end up in a regional morgue, his remains eventually consigned to a pauper's grave. But before that happened, procedure called for the master to dispatch a clergyman, who would claim the remains in the name of the Church, offering to provide a Christian burial at no cost to the state. Never had that offer been refused. And while arousing no suspicion, the gesture ensured that a brother received his proper internment.\n\nHe'd not rushed leaving Rennes, first searching Lars Nelle's and Ernst Scoville's houses and finding nothing. His men had reported that Geoffrey had carried a rucksack, which was handed over to Mark Nelle in the car park. Surely it contained the two stolen books.\n\n\"Any idea where they went?\" Claridon asked from the backseat.\n\nHe pointed to the screen. \"We'll know shortly.\"\n\nAfter questioning the injured brother who'd eavesdropped on Claridon's conversation inside Lars Nelle's house, he'd learned that Geoffrey had said precious little, obviously suspicious of Claridon's motivations. Sending Claridon in there had been a mistake. \"You assured me you could find those books.\"\n\n\"Why do we need them? We have the journal. We should be concentrating on deciphering what we have.\"\n\nMaybe, but it bothered him that Mark Nelle had chosen those two volumes from the thousands in the archives. \"What if they contain information different from the journal?\"\n\n\"Do you know how many versions of the same information I've come across? The entire Rennes story is a series of contradictions stacked atop one another. Let me explore your archives. Tell me what you know and let's see what, together, we have.\"\n\nA good idea, but unfortunately\u2014contrary to what he'd led the Order to believe\u2014he knew precious little. He'd been counting on the master leaving the requisite message for his successor, in which the most coveted information was always passed from leader to leader, as had been done from the time of de Molay. \"You'll get that opportunity. But first we must take care of this.\"\n\nHe thought again of the two dead brothers. Their deaths would be seen by the collective as an omen. For a religious society heaped in discipline, the Order was astoundingly superstitious. And violent death was not common\u2014yet two had occurred in a matter of days. His leadership could now well be questioned. Too much, too fast would be the cry. And he'd be forced to listen to all objections since he'd openly challenged the last master's legacy, in part because that man had ignored the brothers' wishes.\n\nHe asked the driver for an interpretation of the GPS readout. \"How far to their vehicle?\"\n\n\"Twelve kilometers.\"\n\nHe gazed out beyond the car windows at the French countryside. Once, no stretch of sky had been true to the eye unless a tower rose on the horizon. By the twelfth century Templars had populated this land with well over a third of their total estates. The entire Languedoc should have become a Templar state. He'd read of plans in the Chronicles. How fortresses, outposts, supply depots, farms, and monasteries had all been strategically established, each connected by a series of maintained roads. For two hundred years the brotherhood's strength had been carefully preserved, and when the Order failed to establish a fiefdom in the Holy Land, eventually surrendering Jerusalem back to the Muslims, the aim had been to succeed in the Languedoc. All was well under way when Philip IV struck his death blow. Interestingly, Rennes-le-Cheteau was never mentioned in the Chronicles. The town, in all of its previous incarnations, played no role in Templar history. There'd been Templar fortifications in other parts of the Aude Valley, but nothing at Rhedae, as the occupied summit was then called. Yet now the tiny village seemed an epicenter, and all because of an ambitious priest and an inquisitive American academician.\n\n\"We're approaching the car,\" the driver said.\n\nHe'd already instructed caution. The other three brothers he'd brought to Rennes were returning to the abbey, one with a flesh wound to his thigh after Geoffrey shot at him. That made three wounded men, along with two dead. He'd sent word that he wanted a council with his officers when he returned to the abbey, which should quell any discontent, but first he needed to know where his quarry had gone.\n\n\"Up ahead,\" the driver said. \"Fifty meters.\"\n\nHe stared out the window and wondered about Malone and company's choice of refuge. Odd that they would come here.\n\nThe driver stopped the car, and they climbed out.\n\nParked cars surrounded them.\n\n\"Bring the handheld unit.\"\n\nThey walked and, twenty meters later, the man holding the portable receiver stopped. \"Here.\"\n\nDe Roquefort stared at the vehicle. \"That's not the car they left Rennes in.\"\n\n\"The signal is strong.\"\n\nHe motioned. The other brother searched beneath and found the magnetic transponder.\n\nHe shook his head and stared at the walls of Carcassonne, which stretched skyward ten meters away. The grassy area before him had once formed the town moat. Now it served as a car park for the thousands of visitors who came each day to see one of the last existing walled cities from the Middle Ages. The time-tanned stones had stood when Templars roamed the surrounding land. They'd borne witness to the Albigensian Crusade and the many wars thereafter. And never once were they breached\u2014truly a monument to strength.\n\nBut they said something about cleverness, too.\n\nHe knew the local myth, from when Muslims controlled the town for a short time in the eighth century. Eventually, Franks came from the north to reclaim the site and, true to their way, laid a long siege. During a sally the Moorish king was killed, which left the task of defending the walls to his daughter. She was the clever one, creating an illusion of greater numbers by sending the few troops she possessed running from tower to tower and stuffing the clothing of the dead with straw. Food and water eventually ran out for both sides. Finally, the daughter ordered the last sow be caught and fed the final bushel of corn. She then hurled the pig out over the walls. The animal smashed into the earth and its belly burst forth with grain. The Franks were shocked. After such a long siege, apparently the infidels still possessed enough food to feed their pigs. So they withdrew.\n\nA myth, he was sure, but an interesting tale of ingenuity.\n\nAnd Cotton Malone had shown ingenuity, too, transferring the electronic tag to another vehicle.\n\n\"What is it?\" Claridon asked.\n\n\"We've been led astray.\"\n\n\"This is not their car?\"\n\n\"No, monsieur.\" He turned and started back for their vehicle. Where had they gone? Then a thought occurred to him. He stopped. \"Would Mark Nelle know of Cassiopeia Vitt?\"\n\n\"Oui,\" Claridon said. \"He and his father discussed her.\"\n\nIs it possible that was where they'd gone? Vitt had interfered three times of late, and always on Malone's side. Maybe he sensed an ally there.\n\n\"Come.\" And he started for the car again.\n\n\"What do we do now?\" Claridon wanted to know.\n\n\"We pray.\"\n\nClaridon still had not moved. \"For what?\"\n\n\"That my instincts are accurate.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 55",
                "text": "Malone was furious. Henrik Thorvaldsen had known far more about everything and had said absolutely nothing. He pointed at Cassiopeia. \"She one of your friends?\"\n\n\"I've known her a long time.\"\n\n\"When Lars Nelle was alive. You know her then?\"\n\nThorvaldsen nodded.\n\n\"And did Lars know of your relationship?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"So you played him for a fool, too.\" Anger punctuated his voice.\n\nThe Dane seemed forced to submerge his defensiveness. After all, he was cornered. \"Cotton, I understand your irritation. But one can't always be forthcoming. Multiple angles have to be explored. I'm sure that when you worked for the U.S. government you did the same thing.\"\n\nHe did not rise to the bait.\n\n\"Cassiopeia kept watch on Lars. He knew of her, and in his eyes, she was a nuisance. But her real chore was to protect him.\"\n\n\"Why not just tell him?\"\n\n\"Lars was a stubborn man. It was simpler for Cassiopeia to watch him quietly. Unfortunately, she could not protect him from himself.\"\n\nStephanie stepped forward, her face set for combat. \"This is what his profile warned about. Questionable motives, shifting allegiances, deceit.\"\n\n\"I resent that.\" Thorvaldsen glared at her. \"Especially since Cassiopeia looked after you two, as well.\"\n\nOn that point Malone could not argue. \"You should have told us.\"\n\n\"To what end? As I recall, you both were intent on coming to France\u2014especially you, Stephanie. So what would have been gained? Instead, I made sure Cassiopeia was there, in case you needed her.\"\n\nMalone wasn't going to accept that hollow explanation. \"For one thing, Henrik, you could have provided us with background on Raymond de Roquefort, whom you both obviously know. Instead, we went in blind.\"\n\n\"There's little to tell,\" Cassiopeia said. \"When Lars was alive all the brothers did was watch him, too. I never made actual contact with de Roquefort. That's only happened during the past couple of days. I know as much about him as you do.\"\n\n\"Then how did you anticipate his moves in Copenhagen?\"\n\n\"I didn't. I simply followed you.\"\n\n\"I never sensed you there.\"\n\n\"I'm good at what I do.\"\n\n\"You weren't so good in Avignon. I spotted you at the cafe.\"\n\n\"And your trick with the napkin, dropping it so you could see if I was following? I wanted you to know I was there. Once I saw Claridon, I knew de Roquefort would not be far behind. He's watched Royce for years.\"\n\n\"Claridon told us about you,\" Malone said, \"but he didn't recognize you in Avignon.\"\n\n\"He's never seen me. What he knows is only what Lars Nelle told him.\"\n\n\"Claridon never mentioned that fact,\" Stephanie said.\n\n\"There's a lot I'm sure Royce failed to mention. Lars never realized, but Claridon was far more of a problem for him than I ever was.\"\n\n\"My father hated you,\" Mark said, disdain in his tone.\n\nCassiopeia appraised him with a cool countenance. \"Your father was a brilliant man, but he was not schooled in human nature. His was a simplistic view of the world. The conspiracies he sought, the ones you explored after he died, are far more complicated than either of you could imagine. This is a quest for knowledge that men have died seeking.\"\n\n\"Mark,\" Thorvaldsen said, \"what Cassiopeia says about your father is true, as I'm sure you realize.\"\n\n\"He was a good man who believed in what he did.\"\n\n\"He was, indeed. But he likewise kept many things to himself. You never knew he and I were close friends, and I regret you and I never came to know one another. But your father wanted our contacts confidential, and I respected his desire even after his death.\"\n\n\"You could have told me,\" Stephanie said.\n\n\"No, I couldn't.\"\n\n\"Then why are you talking to us now?\"\n\n\"When you and Cotton left Copenhagen, I came straight here. I realized you would eventually find Cassiopeia. That's precisely why she was in Rennes two nights ago\u2014to draw you in her direction. Originally, I was to stay in the background and you were not to know of our connection, but I changed my mind. This has gone too far. You need to know the truth, so I'm here to tell it to you.\"\n\n\"So good of you,\" Stephanie said.\n\nMalone stared at the older man's hooded eyes. Thorvaldsen was right. He'd played both ends against the middle many times. Stephanie had, too. \"Henrik, I haven't been a player in this kind of game in more than a year. I got out because I didn't want to play anymore. Lousy rules, bad odds. But at the moment I'm hungry and, I have to say, curious. So let's eat, and you tell us all about that truth we need to know.\"\n\nLunch was a roasted rabbit seasoned with parsley, thyme, and marjoram, along with fresh asparagus, a salad, and a currant dessert topped with vanilla cream. While he ate, Malone tried to assess the situation. Their hostess seemed the most at ease, but he was unimpressed with her cordiality.\n\n\"You specifically challenged de Roquefort last night in the palace,\" he said to her. \"Where'd you learn your craft?\"\n\n\"Self-taught. My father passed to me his boldness, and my mother blessed me with an insight into the male mind.\"\n\nMalone smiled. \"One day you may guess wrong.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you care about my future. Did you ever guess wrong as an American agent?\"\n\n\"Many times, and folks died from it occasionally.\"\n\n\"Henrik's son on that list?\"\n\nHe resented the jab, particularly considering she knew nothing of what happened. \"Like here, people were given bad information. Bad information leads to bad decisions.\"\n\n\"The young man died.\"\n\n\"Cai Thorvaldsen was in the wrong place at the wrong time,\" Stephanie made clear.\n\n\"Cotton is right,\" Henrik said as he stopped eating. \"My son died because he was not alerted to the danger around him. Cotton was there and did what he could.\"\n\n\"I didn't mean to imply that he was to blame,\" Cassiopeia said. \"It was only that he seemed anxious to tell me how to run my business. I simply wondered if he could run his own. After all, he did quit.\"\n\nThorvaldsen sighed. \"You have to forgive her, Cotton. She's brilliant, artistic, a cognoscenta in music, a collector of antiques. But she inherited her father's lack of manners. Her mother, God rest her precious soul, was more refined.\"\n\n\"Henrik fancies himself my surrogate father.\"\n\n\"You're lucky,\" Malone said, scrutinizing her carefully, \"that I didn't shoot you off that motorcycle in Rennes.\"\n\n\"I didn't expect you to escape the Tour Magdala so quickly. I'm sure the domain operators are quite upset about the loss of that casement window. It was an original, I believe.\"\n\n\"I'm waiting to hear that truth you spoke about,\" Stephanie said to Thorvaldsen. \"You asked me in Denmark to keep an open mind about you and what Lars thought important. Now we see that your involvement is far more than any of us realized. Surely, you can understand how we'd be suspicious.\"\n\nThorvaldsen laid down his fork. \"All right. What's the extent of your knowledge about the New Testament?\"\n\nAn odd question, Malone thought. But he knew Stephanie was a practicing Catholic.\n\n\"Among other things, it contains the four Gospels\u2014Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John\u2014which tell us about Jesus Christ.\"\n\nThorvaldsen nodded. \"History is clear that the New Testament, as we know it, was formulated during the first four centuries after Christ as a way to universalize the emerging Christian message. After all, that's what catholic means\u2014'universal.' Remember, unlike today, in the ancient world politics and religion were one and the same. As paganism declined, and Judaism retreated within itself, people began searching for something new. The followers of Jesus, who were merely Jews embracing a different perspective, formed their own version of the Word, but so did the Carpocratians, the Essenes, the Naassenes, the Gnostics, and a hundred other emerging sects. The main reason the Catholic version survived, while others faltered, was its ability to impose its belief universally. They grafted onto the Scriptures so much authority that eventually no one could question their validity without being deemed a heretic. But there are many problems with the New Testament.\"\n\nThe Bible was a favorite of Malone's. He'd read it and much historical analysis and knew all about its inconsistencies. Each Gospel was a murky mixture of fact, rumor, legend, and myth that had been subjected to countless translations, edits, and redactions.\n\n\"Remember, the emerging Christian Church existed in the Roman world,\" Cassiopeia was saying. \"In order to attract followers, the Church fathers had to compete not only with a variety of pagan beliefs, but also their own Jewish beliefs. They also needed to set themselves apart. Jesus had to be more than a mere prophet.\"\n\nMalone was becoming impatient. \"What does this have to do with what's happening here?\"\n\n\"Think what finding the bones of Christ would mean for Christianity,\" Cassiopeia said. \"That religion revolves around Christ dying on the cross, resurrecting, and ascending into heaven.\"\n\n\"That belief is a matter of faith,\" Geoffrey quietly said.\n\n\"He's right,\" Stephanie said. \"Faith, not fact, defines it.\"\n\nThorvaldsen shook his head. \"Let's remove that element from the equation for a moment, since faith also eliminates logic. Think about this. If a man named Jesus existed, how would the chroniclers of the New Testament know anything about His life? Just consider the language dilemma. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew. The New was penned in Greek, and any source materials, if they even existed, would have been in Aramaic. Then there's the issue of the sources themselves.\n\n\"Matthew and Luke tell of Christ's temptation in the wilderness, but Jesus was alone when that occurred. And Jesus's prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. Luke says He uttered it after leaving Peter, James, and John a stone's throw away. When Jesus returned He found the disciples asleep and was immediately arrested, then crucified. There's absolutely no mention of Jesus ever saying a word about the prayer in the garden or the temptation in the wilderness. Yet we know its every detail. How?\n\n\"All of the Gospels speak of the disciples fleeing at Jesus's arrest\u2014so none of them was there\u2014yet detailed accounts of the crucifixion are recorded in all four. Where did these details come from? What the Roman soldiers did, what Pilate and Simon did. How would the Gospel writers know any of that? The faithful would say the information came from God's inspiration. But the four Gospels, these so-called Words of God, conflict with each other far more than they agree. Why would God offer only confusion?\"\n\n\"Maybe that's not for us to question,\" Stephanie said.\n\n\"Come now,\" Thorvaldsen said. \"There are too many examples of contradictions for us to simply dismiss them as intentional. Let's look at it in generalities. John's Gospel mentions much that the other three\u2014the so-called synoptic Gospels\u2014completely ignore. The tone in John is also different, the message more refined. John's is like an entirely different testimony. But some of the more precise inconsistencies start with Matthew and Luke. Those are the only two that say anything of Jesus's birth and ancestry, and even they conflict. Matthew says Jesus was an aristocrat, descended from David, in line to be king. Luke agrees with the David connection, but points to a lesser class. Mark went an entirely different direction and spawned the image of a poor carpenter.\n\n\"Jesus's birth is likewise told from differing perspectives. Luke says shepherds visited. Matthew called them wise men. Luke said the holy family lived in Nazareth and journeyed to Bethlehem for a birth in a manger. Matthew says the family was well off and lived in Bethlehem, where Jesus was born\u2014not in a manger, but in a house.\n\n\"But the crucifixion is where the greatest inconsistencies exist. The Gospels don't even agree on the date. John says the day before Passover, the other three say the day after. Luke described Jesus as meek. A lamb. Matthew goes the other way\u2014for him Jesus brings not peace, but the sword. Even the Savior's final words varied. Matthew and Mark say it was, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Luke says, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. John is even simpler. It is finished.\"\n\nThorvaldsen paused and sipped his wine.\n\n\"And the tale of the resurrection itself is completely riddled with contradictions. Each Gospel has a different version of who went to the tomb, what was found there\u2014even the days of the week are unclear. And as to Jesus's appearances after the resurrection\u2014none of the accounts agree on any point. Would you not think that God would have at least been reasonably consistent with His Word?\"\n\n\"Gospel variations have been the subject of thousands of books,\" Malone made clear.\n\n\"True,\" Thorvaldsen said. \"And the inconsistencies have been there from the beginning\u2014largely ignored in ancient times, since rarely did the four Gospels appear together. Instead, they were disseminated individually throughout Christendom\u2014one tale working better in some places than in others. Which, in and of itself, goes a long way toward explaining the differences. Remember, the idea behind the Gospels was to demonstrate that Jesus was the Messiah predicted in the Old Testament\u2014not to be an irrefutable biography.\"\n\n\"Weren't the Gospels just a recording of what had been passed down orally?\" Stephanie asked. \"Wouldn't errors be expected?\"\n\n\"No question,\" Cassiopeia said. \"The early Christians believed Jesus would return soon and the world would end, so they saw no need to write anything down. But after fifty years, with the Savior still not having returned, it became important to memorialize Jesus's life. That's when the earliest Gospel, Mark's, was written. Matthew and Luke came next, around 80 C.E. John came much later, near the end of the first century, which is why his is so different from the other three.\"\n\n\"If the Gospels were entirely consistent, wouldn't they be even more suspect?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"These books are more than simply inconsistent,\" Thorvaldsen said. \"They are, quite literally, four different versions of the Word.\"\n\n\"It's a matter of faith,\" Stephanie repeated.\n\n\"There's that word again,\" Cassiopeia said. \"Whenever a problem exists with biblical texts, the solution is easy. It's faith. Mr. Malone, you're a lawyer. If the testimony of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were offered in a court as proof Jesus existed, would any jury so find?\"\n\n\"Sure, all of them mention Jesus.\"\n\n\"Now, if that same court was required to state which one of the four books is correct, how would it rule?\"\n\nHe knew the right answer. \"They're all correct.\"\n\n\"So how would you resolve the differences among the testimonies?\"\n\nHe didn't answer, because he didn't know what to say.\n\n\"Ernst Scoville did a study once,\" Thorvaldsen said. \"Lars told me about it. He determined that there was a ten to forty percent variation among the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke on any passage you cared to compare. Any passage. And with John, which is not one of the synoptics, the percentage was much higher. So Cassiopeia's question is fair, Cotton. Would these four testimonies have any probative value, beyond establishing that a man named Jesus may have lived?\"\n\nHe felt compelled to say, \"Could all of the inconsistencies be explained by the writers simply taking liberties with an oral tradition?\"\n\nThorvaldsen nodded. \"That explanation makes sense. But what compounds its acceptance is that nasty word faith. You see, to millions, the Gospels are not the oral traditions of radical Jews establishing a new religion, trying to secure converts, recounting their tale with additions and subtractions necessary for their particular time. No. The Gospels are the Word of God, and the resurrection is its keystone. For their Lord to have sent His son to die for them, and for Him to be physically resurrected and ascend into heaven\u2014that set them far apart from all other emerging religions.\"\n\nMalone faced Mark. \"Did the Templars believe this?\"\n\n\"There's an element of Gnosticism to the Templar creed. Knowledge is passed to the brothers in stages, and only the highest in the Order know all. But no one has known that knowledge since the loss of the Great Devise during the 1307 Purge. All of the masters who came after that time were denied the Order's archive.\"\n\nHe wanted to know, \"What do they think of Jesus Christ today?\"\n\n\"The Templars look equally to both the Old and New Testaments. In their eyes, the Jewish prophets in the Old Testament predicted the Messiah, and the writers of the New Testament fulfilled those predictions.\"\n\n\"It is like the Jews,\" Thorvaldsen said, \"of whom I may speak since I am one. Christians for centuries have said that Jews failed to recognize the Messiah when He came, which was why God created a new Israel in the form of the Christian Church\u2014to take the place of the Jewish Israel.\"\n\n\"His blood be upon us and upon our children,\" Malone muttered, quoting what Matthew had said about the Jews' willingness to accept that blame.\n\nThorvaldsen nodded. \"That phrase has been used for two millennia as a reason for killing Jews. What could a people expect from God when they'd rejected His own son as their Messiah? Words that some unknown Gospel writer penned, for whatever reason, became the rally cry of murderers.\"\n\n\"So what Christians finally did,\" Cassiopeia said, \"was separate themselves from that past. They named half the Bible the Old Testament, the other the New. One was for Jews, the other for Christians. The twelve tribes of Israel in the Old were replaced by the twelve apostles in the New. Pagan and Jewish beliefs were assimilated and modified. Jesus, through the writings of the New Testament, fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament, thereby proving His messianic claim. A perfectly assembled package\u2014the right message, tailored to the right audience\u2014all of which allowed Christianity to utterly dominate the Western world.\"\n\nAttendants appeared, and Cassiopeia signaled for them to clear away the lunch dishes. Wineglasses were refilled and coffee was passed around. As the last attendant withdrew, Malone asked Mark, \"Do the Templars believe in the actual resurrection of Christ?\"\n\n\"Which ones?\"\n\nA strange question. Malone shrugged.\n\n\"Those today\u2014of course. With few exceptions, the Order follows traditional Catholic doctrine. Some adjustments are made to conform to Rule, as all monastic societies must. But in 1307? I have no idea what they believed. The Chronicles from that time are cryptic. Like I said, only the highest officers within the Order could have spoken on that subject. Most Templars were illiterate. Even Jacques de Molay could not read or write. So only a few within the Order controlled what the many thought. Of course, the Great Devise existed then, so I assume seeing was believing.\"\n\n\"What is this Great Devise?\"\n\n\"I wish I knew. That information has been lost. The Chronicles speak little of it. I assume it's evidence of what the Order believed.\"\n\n\"Is that why they search for it?\" Stephanie asked.\n\n\"Until recently, they haven't really searched. There's been little information relating to its whereabouts. But the master told Geoffrey that he believed Dad was on the right track.\"\n\n\"Why does de Roquefort want it so bad?\" Malone asked Mark.\n\n\"Finding the Great Devise, depending on what's there, could well fuel the reemergence of the Order onto the world scene. That knowledge could also fundamentally change Christendom. De Roquefort wants retribution for what happened to the Order. He wants the Catholic Church exposed as hypocritical, the Order's name cleared.\"\n\nMalone was puzzled. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"One of the charges leveled against the Templars in 1307 was idol worshiping. Some sort of bearded head the Order supposedly venerated, none of which was ever proven. Yet even now Catholics pray to images routinely, the Shroud of Turin being one of those.\"\n\nMalone recalled what one of the Gospels said about Christ's death\u2014 after they had taken him down they wrapped him in a sheet\u2014 symbolism so sacred that a later pope decreed that mass should always be said upon a linen tablecloth. The Shroud of Turin, which Mark mentioned, was a cloth of herringbone weave on which was displayed a man\u2014six feet tall, sharp nose, shoulder-length hair parted down the center, full beard, with crucifixion wounds to his hands, feet, and scalp, and scourge marks ravaging his back.\n\n\"The image on the shroud,\" Mark said, \"is not of Christ. It's Jacques de Molay. He was arrested in October 1307 and in January 1308 he was nailed to a door in the Paris Temple in a manner similar to that of Christ. They were mocking him for his lack of belief in Jesus as Savior. France's grand inquisitor, Guedllaume Imbert, orchestrated that torture. Afterward, de Molay was wrapped in a linen shroud the Order kept in the Paris Temple for use during induction ceremonies. We now know lactic acid and blood from de Molay's traumatized body mixed with the frankincense in the cloth and etched the image. There's even a modern equivalent. In 1981 a cancer patient in England left a similar trace of his limbs on bedsheets.\"\n\nMalone recalled the late 1980s when the Church finally broke with tradition and allowed microscopic examination and carbon dating on the Shroud of Turin. The results indicated that there were no outlines or brushstrokes. The coloration lay upon the linen. Dating showed that the cloth came not from the first century, but from the late thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth century. But many contested those findings, saying the sample had been tainted, or was from a later repair to the original cloth.\n\n\"The image on the shroud fits de Molay physically,\" Mark said. \"There are descriptions of him in the Chronicles. By the time he was tortured his hair had grown long, his beard was unkempt. The cloth that wrapped de Molay's body was removed from the Paris Temple by one of Geoffrey de Charney's relatives. De Charney burned at the stake in 1314 with de Molay. The family kept the cloth as a relic and later noticed that an image had settled upon it. The shroud initially appeared on a religious medallion that dated to 1338 and was first displayed in 1357. When it was shown, people immediately associated the image with Christ, and the de Charney family did nothing to dissuade that belief. That went on until the late sixteenth century when the Church took possession of the shroud, declaring it acheropita\u2014 not made by human hand\u2014deeming it a holy relic. De Roquefort wants to take the shroud back. It's the Order's, not the Church's.\"\n\nThorvaldsen shook his head. \"That's foolishness.\"\n\n\"It's how he thinks.\"\n\nMalone noticed the annoyed look on Stephanie's face. \"The Bible lesson was fascinating, Henrik. But I'm still waiting for the truth about what's happening here.\"\n\nThe Dane smiled. \"You're such a joy.\"\n\n\"Chalk it up to my bubbly personality.\" She displayed her phone. \"Let me make myself real clear. If I don't get some answers in the next few minutes, I'm calling Atlanta. I've had my fill of Raymond de Roquefort, so we're going public with this little treasure hunt and ending this nonsense.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 56",
                "text": "Malone winced at Stephanie's declaration. He'd been wondering when her patience would run out.\n\n\"You can't do that,\" Mark said to his mother. \"The last thing we need is for the government to be involved.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Stephanie asked. \"That abbey should be raided. Whatever they're doing is certainly not religious.\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" Geoffrey said in a tremulous voice. \"Great piety exists there. The brothers are devoted to the Lord. Their lives are consumed with His worship.\"\n\n\"And in between you learn about explosives, hand-to-hand combat, and how to shoot a weapon like a marksman. A bit of a contradiction, wouldn't you say?\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" Thorvaldsen declared. \"The original Templars were devoted to God and were a formidable fighting force.\"\n\nStephanie was clearly not impressed. \"This is not the thirteenth century. De Roquefort has both an agenda and the might to press that agenda onto others. Today we call him a terrorist.\"\n\n\"You haven't changed a bit,\" Mark spat out.\n\n\"No, I haven't. I still believe that covert organizations with money, weapons, and chips on their shoulders are problems. My job is to deal with them.\"\n\n\"This doesn't concern you.\"\n\n\"Then why did your master involve me?\"\n\nGood question, Malone thought.\n\n\"You didn't understand when Dad was alive, and you don't now.\"\n\n\"Then why don't you clear up my confusion?\"\n\n\"Mr. Malone,\" Cassiopeia said in pleasant tone. \"How would you like to see the castle restoration project?\"\n\nApparently their hostess wanted to speak with him alone. Which was fine\u2014he had some questions for her, too. \"I'd love that.\"\n\nCassiopeia pushed back her chair and stood from the table. \"Then let me show you. That'll give everyone else here time to talk\u2014which, clearly, needs to happen. Please, make yourselves at home. Mr. Malone and I will return in a short while.\"\n\nHe followed Cassiopeia outside into the bright afternoon. They strolled back down the shaded lane, toward the car park and the construction site.\n\n\"When finished,\" Cassiopeia told him, \"a thirteenth-century castle will stand exactly as it did seven hundred years ago.\"\n\n\"Quite an endeavor.\"\n\n\"I thrive on grand endeavors.\"\n\nThey entered the construction site through a broad wooden gate and strolled into what appeared to be a barn with sandstone walls that housed a modern reception center. Beyond loomed the smell of dust, horses, and debris, where a hundred or so people milled about.\n\n\"The entire foundation for the perimeter has been laid and the west curtain wall is coming along,\" Cassiopeia said, pointing. \"We're about to start the corner towers and central buildings. But it takes time. We have to fashion the bricks, stone, wood, and mortar precisely as was done seven hundred years ago, using the same methods and tools, even wearing the same clothes.\"\n\n\"Do they eat the same food?\"\n\nShe smiled. \"We do make some modern accommodation.\"\n\nShe led him through the construction area and up the slope of a steep hill to a modest promontory, where everything could be clearly seen.\n\n\"I come here often. One hundred and twenty men and women are employed down there full time.\"\n\n\"Quite a payroll.\"\n\n\"A small price to pay for history to be seen.\"\n\n\"Your nickname, Ingenieur. Is that what they call you? Engineer?\"\n\n\"The staff gave me that name. I'm trained in medieval building techniques. I've designed this entire project.\"\n\n\"You know, on the one hand, you're an arrogant bitch. On the other, you can be rather interesting.\"\n\n\"I realize my comment at lunch, about what happened with Henrik's son, was inappropriate. Why didn't you strike back?\"\n\n\"For what? You didn't know what the hell you were talking about.\"\n\n\"I'll try not to make any more judgments.\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"I doubt that, and I'm not that sensitive. I long ago developed a lizard skin. You have to in order to survive in this business.\"\n\n\"But you're retired.\"\n\n\"You never really quit. You just stay out of the line of fire more often than not.\"\n\n\"So you're helping Stephanie Nelle simply as a friend?\"\n\n\"Shocking, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Not at all. In fact, it's entirely consistent with your personality.\"\n\nNow he was curious. \"How do you know about my personality?\"\n\n\"Once Henrik asked me to be involved, I learned a great deal about you. I have friends in your former profession. They all spoke highly of you.\"\n\n\"Glad to know folks remember.\"\n\n\"Do you know much about me?\" she asked.\n\n\"Just a thumbnail sketch.\"\n\n\"I have many peculiarities.\"\n\n\"Then you and Henrik should get along well.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"I see you know him well.\"\n\n\"How long have you known him?\"\n\n\"Since childhood. He knew my parents. Many years ago, he told me of Lars Nelle. What Lars was working on fascinated me. So I became Lars's guardian angel, though he thought of me as the devil. Unfortunately, I couldn't help him on the last day of his life.\"\n\n\"Were you there?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"He'd traveled south to the mountains. I was here when Henrik called and told me the body had been found.\"\n\n\"Did he kill himself?\"\n\n\"Lars was a sad man, that was plain. He was also frustrated. All those amateurs who'd seized on his work and twisted it beyond recognition. The puzzle he tried to solve has remained a mystery a long time. So, yes, it's possible.\"\n\n\"What were you protecting him from?\"\n\n\"Many tried to encroach on his research. Most of them were ambitious treasure hunters, some opportunists, but eventually Raymond de Roquefort's men appeared. Luckily, I was always able to conceal my presence from them.\"\n\n\"De Roquefort is now master.\"\n\nShe crinkled her brow. \"Which explains his renewed search efforts. He now commands all the Templar resources.\"\n\nShe apparently knew nothing about Mark Nelle and where he'd been living the past five years, so he told her, then said, \"Mark lost to de Roquefort in the selection of a new master.\"\n\n\"So this is personal between them?\"\n\n\"That's certainly part of it.\" But not all, he thought, as he stared down and watched a horse-drawn cart work its way across the dry earth toward one of the partial walls.\n\n\"The work being done today is for the tourists,\" she said, noticing his interest. \"Part of the show. We'll return to serious building tomorrow.\"\n\n\"The sign out front said it'll take thirty years to finish.\"\n\n\"Easily.\"\n\nShe was right. She did possess many peculiarities.\n\n\"I intentionally left Lars's notebook for de Roquefort to find in Avignon.\"\n\nThat revelation shocked him. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Henrik wanted to talk to the Nelles privately. It's why we're here. He also said that you're a man of honor. I trust precious few people in this world, but Henrik is one I do. So I'm going to take him at his word and tell you some things no one else knows.\"\n\nMark listened as Henrik Thorvaldsen explained. His mother appeared interested, too, but Geoffrey simply stared at the table, hardly blinking, seemingly in a trance.\n\n\"It's time you fully understand what Lars believed,\" Henrik said to Stephanie. \"Contrary to what you may have thought, he was not some crackpot chasing after treasure. A serious purpose lay behind his inquiries.\"\n\n\"I'll ignore your insult, since I want to hear what you have to say.\"\n\nA look of irritation crept into Thorvaldsen's eyes. \"Lars's theory was simple, though it really was not his. Ernst Scoville formulated most of it, which involved a novel look at the Gospels of the New Testament, especially with how they dealt with the resurrection. Cassiopeia hinted at some of this earlier.\n\n\"Let's start with Mark's. His was the first Gospel, written around AD 70, perhaps the only Gospel the early Christians possessed after Christ died. It contains six hundred sixty-five verses, yet only eight are devoted to the resurrection. This most remarkable of events only rated a brief mention. Why? The answer is simple. When Mark's Gospel was written, the story of the resurrection had yet to develop, and the Gospel ends without mention of the fact that the disciples believed Jesus had been raised from the dead. Instead, it tells us that the disciples fled. Only women appear in Mark's version of what happened, and they ignore a command to tell the disciples to go to Galilee so the risen Christ could meet them there. Rather, the women, too, are confused and flee, telling no one what they saw. There are no angels, only a young man dressed in white who calmly announces that He has risen. No guards, no burial clothes, and no risen Lord.\"\n\nMark knew everything Thorvaldsen had just said was true. He'd studied that Gospel in great detail.\n\n\"Matthew's testimony came a decade later. The Romans had by then sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. Many Jews had fled into the Greek-speaking world. The Orthodox Jews who stayed in the Holy Land viewed the new Jewish Christians as a problem\u2014as much of one as the Romans were. Hostility existed between the Orthodox Jews and the emerging Jewish Christians. Matthew's Gospel was probably written by one of those unknown Jewish Christian scribes. Mark's Gospel had left many unanswered questions, so Matthew changed the story to suit his troubled time.\n\n\"Now the messenger who announces the resurrection becomes an angel. He descends in an earthquake, with a face like lightning. Guards are struck down. The stone has been removed from the tomb, and an angel perches upon it. The women are still gripped with fear, but it is rapidly replaced with joy. Contrary to the women in Mark's account, the women here rush out to tell the disciples what's happened and actually confront the risen Christ. Here, for the first time, the risen Lord is actually described. And what did the women do?\"\n\n\"They took hold of His feet and worshiped Him,\" Mark softly said. \"Later, Jesus appeared to His disciples and proclaimed that 'all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.' He tells them he'll always be with them.\"\n\n\"What a change,\" Thorvaldsen said. \"The Jewish Messiah named Jesus has now become Christ to the world. In Matthew, everything is more vivid. Miraculous, too. Then comes Luke, sometime around AD 90. By then the Jewish Christians had moved further away from Judaism, so Luke radically modified the resurrection story to accommodate this change. The women are at the tomb again, but this time they find it empty and go tell the disciples. Peter returns and sees only the discarded burial clothes. Then Luke tells a story that appears nowhere else in the Bible. It involves Jesus traveling in disguise, encountering certain disciples, sharing a meal, then, when recognized, vanishing. There is also a later encounter with all of the disciples where they doubt His flesh, so He eats with them, then vanishes. And only in Luke do we find the story of Jesus's ascension into heaven. What's happened? A sense of rapture has now been grafted onto the risen Christ.\"\n\nMark had read similar Scripture analyses in the Templar archives. Learned brothers had for centuries studied the Word, noting errors, evaluating contradictions, and hypothesizing on the many conflicts in names, dates, places, and events.\n\n\"Then there's John,\" Thorvaldsen said. \"The Gospel written the furthest away from Jesus's life, around AD 100. There are so many changes in this Gospel, it's almost as if John talks of a totally different Christ. No Bethlehem birth\u2014Nazareth is Jesus's birthplace here. The other three talk of a three-year ministry. John says only one. The Last Supper in John occurred on the day before the Passover\u2014the crucifixion on the day the Passover lamb was slaughtered. This is different from the other Gospels. John also moved the cleansing of the Temple from the day after Palm Sunday to a time early in Christ's ministry.\n\n\"In John, Mary Magdalene alone goes to the tomb and finds it empty. She never even considers a resurrection, but instead thinks the body has been stolen. Only when she returns with Peter and the other disciple does she see two angels. Then the angels are transformed into Jesus Himself.\n\n\"Look how this one detail, about who was in the tomb, changed. Mark's young man dressed in white became Matthew's dazzling angel, which Luke expanded to two angels, which John modified to two angels who become Christ. And was the risen Lord seen in the garden on the first day of the week, as Christians are always told? Mark and Luke said no. Matthew, yes. John said not at first, but Mary Magdalene did see Him later. What happened is clear. Over time, the resurrection was made more and more miraculous to accommodate a changing world.\"\n\n\"I assume,\" Stephanie said, \"you don't adhere to the principle of biblical inerrancy?\"\n\n\"There's nothing whatsoever literal within the Bible. It's a tale riddled with inconsistencies, and the only way they can be explained is through the use of faith. That may have worked a thousand years ago, or even five hundred years ago, but that explanation is no longer acceptable. The human mind today questions. Your husband questioned.\"\n\n\"So what was it Lars meant to do?\"\n\n\"The impossible,\" Mark muttered.\n\nHis mother looked at him with strangely understanding eyes. \"But that never stopped him.\" The voice was low and melodious, as if she'd just realized a truth that had long lain hidden. \"If nothing else, he was a wonderful dreamer.\"\n\n\"But his dreams had a basis,\" Mark said. \"The Templars once knew what Dad wanted to know. Even today, they read and study Scripture that's not a part of the New Testament. The Gospel of Philip, the Letter of Barnabas, the Acts of Peter, the Epistle of the Apostles, the Secret Book of John, the Gospel of Mary, the Didache. And the Gospel of Thomas, which is to them perhaps the closest we have to what Jesus may have actually said, since it has not been subjected to countless translations. Many of these so-called heretical texts are eye opening. And that was what made the Templars special. The true source of their power. Not wealth or might, but knowledge.\"\n\nMalone stood under the shade of tall poplars that dotted the promontory. A cool breeze eased past and dulled the sun's rays, reminding him of a fall afternoon at the beach. He was waiting for Cassiopeia to tell him what nobody else knew. \"Why did you allow de Roquefort to have Lars Nelle's notebook?\"\n\n\"Because it's useless.\" A crinkle of amusement slipped into her dark eyes.\n\n\"I thought it contained Lars's private thoughts. Information he never published. The key to everything.\"\n\n\"Some of that is true, but it's not the key to anything. Lars created it just for the Templars.\"\n\n\"Would Claridon have known that?\"\n\n\"Probably not. Lars was a secretive man. He told no one everything. He said once that only the paranoid survived in his line of work.\"\n\n\"How do you know this?\"\n\n\"Henrik was aware. Lars never spoke of the details, but he told Henrik of his encounters with the Templars. On occasion, he actually believed he was speaking to the Order's master. They talked several times, but eventually de Roquefort entered the picture. And he was altogether different. More aggressive, less tolerant. So Lars created the notebook for de Roquefort to focus on\u2014not unlike the misdirection Sauniere himself used.\"\n\n\"Would the Templar master have known this? When Mark was taken to the abbey, he had the notebook with him. The master kept it hidden until a month ago, when he sent it to Stephanie.\"\n\n\"Hard to say. But if he sent the notebook to Stephanie, it's possible the master calculated that de Roquefort would again chase after it. He apparently wanted Stephanie involved, so what better way than to bait her with something irresistible?\"\n\nSmart, he had to admit. And it worked.\n\n\"The master surely felt Stephanie would use the considerable resources at her disposal to aid the quest,\" she said.\n\n\"He didn't know Stephanie. Too stubborn. She'd try it on her own first.\"\n\n\"But you were there to help.\"\n\n\"Lucky me.\"\n\n\"Oh, it's not that bad. We never would have met otherwise.\"\n\n\"Like I said, lucky me.\"\n\n\"I'll take that as a compliment. Otherwise my feelings might be hurt.\"\n\n\"I doubt you bruise so easily.\"\n\n\"You handled yourself well in Copenhagen,\" she said. \"Then again in Roskilde.\"\n\n\"You were in the cathedral?\"\n\n\"For a while, but I left when the shooting started. It would have been impossible for me to help without revealing my presence, and Henrik wanted that kept secret.\"\n\n\"And what if I had been unable to stop those men inside?\"\n\n\"Oh, come now. You?\" She threw him a smile. \"Tell me something. How shocked were you when the brother leaped from the Round Tower?\"\n\n\"Not something you see every day.\"\n\n\"He fulfilled his oath. Trapped, he chose death rather than risk the Order's exposure.\"\n\n\"I assume you were there because of my mention to Henrik that Stephanie was coming for a visit.\"\n\n\"Partly. When I heard of Ernst Scoville's sudden demise, I learned from some of the older men in Rennes that he'd spoken with Stephanie and that she was coming to France. They're all Rennes enthusiasts, spending their days playing chess and fantasizing about Sauniere. Each one of them lives in a conspiratorialist dream. Scoville bragged that he meant to get Lars's notebook. He didn't care for Stephanie, though he'd led her to believe otherwise. Obviously he, too, was unaware that the journal was by and large meaningless. His death aroused my suspicions, so I contacted Henrik and learned of Stephanie's impending Danish visit. We decided that I should go to Denmark.\"\n\n\"And Avignon?\"\n\n\"I had a source at the asylum. No one believed Claridon was crazy. Deceitful, untrustworthy, an opportunist\u2014certainly. But not insane. So I watched until you returned to claim Claridon. Henrik and I knew there was something in the palace archives, just not what. As Henrik said at lunch, Mark never met Henrik. Mark was much tougher to deal with than his father. He only occasionally searched. Something, perhaps, to keep his father's memory alive. Whatever he may have found, he kept totally to himself. He and Claridon connected for a while, but it was a loose association. Then, when Mark disappeared in the avalanche and Claridon retreated to the asylum, Henrik and I gave up.\"\n\n\"Until now.\"\n\n\"The quest is back on, and this time there may well be somewhere to go.\"\n\nHe waited for her to explain.\n\n\"We have the book with the gravestone and we also have Reading the Rules of the Caridad . Together, we might actually be able to determine what Sauniere found, since we're the first to have so many pieces of the puzzle.\"\n\n\"And what do we do if we find anything?\"\n\n\"As a Muslim? I'd like to tell the world. As a realist? I don't know. The historical arrogance of Christianity is nauseating. To it, every other religion is an imitation. Amazing, really. All of Western history is shaped by its narrow precepts. Art, architecture, music, writing\u2014even society itself became Christianity's servants. That simple movement ultimately formed the mold from which Western civilization was crafted, and it could all be predicated on a lie. Wouldn't you like to know?\"\n\n\"I'm not a religious person.\"\n\nHer thin lips creased into another smile. \"But you're a curious man. Henrik speaks of your courage and intellect in reverent terms. A bibliophile, with an eidetic memory. Quite a combination.\"\n\n\"And I can cook, too.\"\n\nShe chuckled. \"You don't fool me. Finding the Great Devise would mean something to you.\"\n\n\"Let's just say that it would be a most unusual find.\"\n\n\"Fair enough. We'll leave it at that. But if we're successful, I look forward to seeing your reaction.\"\n\n\"You're that confident there's something to find?\"\n\nShe swept her arms toward the distant outline of the Pyrenees. \"It's out there, no question. Sauniere found it. We can, too.\"\n\nStephanie again considered what Thorvaldsen had said about the New Testament, and made clear, \"The Bible is not a literal document.\"\n\nThorvaldsen shook his head. \"A great many Christian faiths would take issue with that statement. For them, the Bible is the Word of God.\"\n\nShe looked at Mark. \"Did your father believe the Bible was not the Word of God?\"\n\n\"We debated the point many times. I was, at first, a believer, and I'd argue with him. But I came to think like he did. It's a book of stories. Glorious stories, designed to point people toward a good life. There's even greatness in those stories\u2014if one practices their moral. I don't think it's necessary that it's the Word of God. It's enough that the words are a timeless truth.\"\n\n\"Elevating Christ to deity status was simply a way of elevating the importance of the message,\" Thorvaldsen said. \"After organized religion took over in the third and fourth centuries, so much was added to the tale that it's impossible any longer to know its core. Lars wanted to change all that. He wanted to find what the Templars once possessed. When he first learned of Rennes-le-Cheteau years ago, he immediately believed the Templar's Great Devise was what Sauniere had located. So he devoted his life to solving the Rennes puzzle.\"\n\nStephanie was still not convinced. \"What makes you think the Templars secreted anything away? Weren't they arrested quickly? How was there time to hide anything?\"\n\n\"They were prepared,\" Mark said. \"The Chronicles make that clear. What Philip IV did wasn't without precedent. A hundred years earlier there was an incident with Frederick II, the king of Germany and Sicily. In 1228 he arrived in the Holy Land as an excommunicate, which meant he could not command a crusade. The Templars and Hospitallers stayed loyal to the pope and refused to follow him. Only his German Teutonic knights stood by his side. Ultimately, he negotiated a peace treaty with the Saracens that created a divided Jerusalem. The Temple Mount, which was where the Templars were headquartered, was given by that treaty to the Muslims. So you can imagine what the Templars thought of him. He was as amoral as Nero and universally hated. He even tried to kidnap the Order's master. Finally he left the Holy Land in 1229, and as he made his way to the port at Acre, the locals threw excrement on him. He hated the Templars for their disloyalty, and when he returned to Sicily, he seized Templar property and made arrests. All of which was recorded in the Chronicles.\"\n\n\"So the Order was ready?\" Thorvaldsen asked.\n\n\"The Order had already seen, firsthand, what a hostile ruler could do to it. Philip IV was similar. As a young man he'd applied for Templar membership and had been refused, so he harbored a lifelong resentment toward the brotherhood. Early in his reign, the Templars actually saved Philip when he tried to devalue the French currency and the people revolted. He fled to the Paris Temple for refuge. Afterward, he felt beholden to the Templars. And monarchs never want to owe anyone. So, yes, by October 1307 the Order was ready. Unfortunately, nothing is recorded that tells us the details of what was done.\" Mark's gaze bored into Stephanie. \"Dad gave his life to try to solve that mystery.\"\n\n\"He did love looking, didn't he?\" Thorvaldsen said.\n\nThough answering the Dane, Mark continued to face her. \"It was one of the few things that actually brought him joy. He wanted to please his wife and himself and, unfortunately, he could do neither. So he opted out. Decided to leave us all.\"\n\n\"I never wanted to believe he killed himself,\" she said to her son.\n\n\"But we'll never know, will we?\"\n\n\"Perhaps you may,\" Geoffrey said. And for the first time the young man lifted his gaze from the table. \"The master said you might learn the truth of his death.\"\n\n\"What do you know?\" she asked.\n\n\"I know only what the master told me.\"\n\n\"What did he tell you about my father?\" Anger gripped Mark's face. Stephanie could never recall seeing him vent that emotion on anyone but her.\n\n\"That will have to be learned, by you. I don't know.\" The voice was strange, hollow, and conciliatory. \"The master told me to be tolerant of your emotion. He made clear you're my senior, and I should offer you nothing but respect.\"\n\n\"But you seem to be the only one with answers,\" Stephanie said.\n\n\"No, madame. I know but markers. The answers, the master said, must come from all of you.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 57",
                "text": "Malone followed Cassiopeia into a lofty chamber with a raftered ceiling and paneled walls hung with tapestries that depicted cuirasses, swords, lances, casques, and shields. A black marble fireplace dominated the long room, which was lit by a glittering chandelier. The others joined them from the dining room and he noticed serious expressions on all of their faces. A mahogany table sat beneath a set of mullioned windows, across which were spread books, papers, and photographs.\n\n\"Time we see if there are any conclusions we can reach,\" Cassiopeia said. \"On the table is everything I have on this subject.\"\n\nMalone told the others about Lars's notebook and how some of the information contained within it was false.\n\n\"Does that include what he said about himself?\" Stephanie asked. \"This young man here\u2014\" She pointed at Geoffrey. \"\u2014sent me pages from the journal\u2014pages his master cut out. They talked about me.\"\n\n\"Only you know if what he said was true or more misdirection,\" Cassiopeia said.\n\n\"She's right,\" Thorvaldsen said. \"The notebook is, by and large, not genuine. Lars created it as Templar bait.\"\n\n\"Another point you conveniently failed to mention back in Copenhagen.\" Stephanie's tone signaled she was once again annoyed.\n\nThorvaldsen was undaunted. \"The important thing was that de Roquefort thought the journal genuine.\"\n\nStephanie's back straightened. \"You son of a bitch, we could have been killed trying to get it back.\"\n\n\"But you weren't. Cassiopeia kept an eye on you both.\"\n\n\"And that makes what you did right?\"\n\n\"Stephanie, you've never withheld information from one of your agents?\" Thorvaldsen asked.\n\nShe held her tongue.\n\n\"He's right,\" Malone said.\n\nShe whirled and faced him.\n\n\"How many times did you tell me only part of the story?\" \"And how many times did I complain later that it could have gotten me killed? And what did you say? Get used to it. Same here, Stephanie. I don't like it any better than you do, but I got used to it.\"\n\n\"Why don't we stop arguing and see if we can come to some consensus as to what Sauniere may have found,\" Cassiopeia said.\n\n\"And where would you suggest we start?\" Mark asked.\n\n\"I'd say Marie d'Hautpoul de Blanchefort's gravestone would be an excellent spot, since we have Stfcblein's book that Henrik purchased at the auction.\" She motioned to the table. \"Opened to the drawing.\"\n\nThey all stepped close and gazed at the sketch.\n\n\"Claridon explained about this in Avignon,\" Malone said, and he told them about the wrong date of death \u2014 1681 as opposed to 1781 \u2014 the Roman numerals \u2014MDCOLXXXI \u2014 containing a zero, and the remaining set of Roman numerals \u2014LIXLIXL \u2014 etched into the lower right corner.\n\nMark grabbed a pencil off the table and wrote 1681 and 59, 59, 50 on a pad. \"That's the conversion of those numbers. I'm ignoring the zero in the 1681. Claridon's right, no zero in Roman numerals.\"\n\nMalone pointed at the Greek letters on the left stone. \"Claridon said they were Latin words written in the Greek alphabet. He converted the lettering and came up with Et in arcadia ego. And in Arcadia I. He thought it might be an anagram, since the phrase makes little sense.\"\n\nMark studied the words with intensity, then asked Geoffrey for the rucksack, from which he removed a tightly folded towel. He gently unwrapped the bundle and revealed a small codex. Its leafs were folded, then sewn together and bound\u2014vellum, if Malone wasn't mistaken. He'd never seen one he could actually touch.\n\n\"This came from the Templar archives. I found it a few years ago, right after I became seneschal. It was written in 1542 by one of the abbey's scribes. It's an excellent reproduction of a fourteenth-century manuscript and recounts how the Templars re-formed after the Purge. It also deals with the time from December 1306 until May 1307, when Jacques de Molay was in France and little is known of his whereabouts.\"\n\nMark gently opened the ancient volume and carefully paged through until he found what he was looking for. Malone saw the Latin script was a series of loops and fioriture, the letters joined together from the pen not being lifted from the page.\n\n\"Listen to this.\"\n\nOur master, the most reverend and devoted Jacques de Molay, received the pope's envoy on 6 June 1306 with the pomp and courtesy reserved for those of high rank. The message stated that His Holiness Pope Clement V hath summoned Master de Molay to France. Our master intended to comply with that order, making all preparations, but prior to leaving the island of Cyprus, where the Order hath established its headquarters, our master learned that the leader of the Hospitallers had also been summoned, but hath refused the command, citing the need to remain with his Order in time of conflict. This aroused great suspicion in our master and he consulted with his officers. His Holiness had likewise instructed our master to travel unrecognized and with a small retinue. This raised more questions since why would His Holiness care how our master moved through the lands. Then a curious document was brought to our master titled De Recuperatione Terrae Sanctae. Concerning the Recovery of the Holy Land. The manuscript was written by one of Philip IV's lawyers and it outlined a grand new crusade to be headed by a Warrior King designed to retake the Holy Land from the infidels. This proposal was a direct affront to the plans of our Order and caused our master to question his summons to the King's court. Our master made it known that he greatly distrusted the French monarch, though it would be both foolish and inappropriate for him to voice that mistrust beyond the walls of our Temple. In a mood of caution, being not a careless man and remembering the treachery from long ago of Frederick II, our master laid plans that our wealth and knowledge must be safeguarded. He prayed that he might be in error but saw no reason to be unprepared. Brother Gilbert de Blanchefort was summoned and ordered to take away the treasure of the Temple in advance. Our master then told de Blanchefort, \"We of the Order's leadership could be at risk. So none of us are to know what you know and you must assure that what you know is passed to others in an appropriate manner.\" Brother de Blanchefort, being a learned man, set about to accomplish his mission and quietly secreted all that the Order had acquired. Four brothers were his allies and they used four words, one for each of them, as their signal. ET IN ARCADIA EGO. But the letters are but a jumble for the true message. A rearrangement tells precisely what their task entailed. I TEGO ARCANA DEI.\n\n\"I conceal the secrets of God,\" Mark said, translating the last line. \"Anagrams were common in the fourteenth century, too.\"\n\n\"So de Molay was ready?\" Malone asked.\n\nMark nodded. \"He came to France with sixty knights, a hundred fifty thousand gold florins, and twelve pack horses hauling unminted silver. He knew there was going to be trouble. That money was to be used to buy his way out. But there's something contained within this treatise that is little known. The commander of the Templar contingent in the Languedoc was Seigneur de Goth. Pope Clement V, the man who summoned de Molay, was named Bertrand de Goth. The pope's mother was Ida de Blanchefort, who was related to Gilbert de Blanchefort. So de Molay possessed good inside information.\"\n\n\"Always helps,\" Malone said.\n\n\"De Molay also knew something on Clement V. Prior to his election as pope, Clement met with Philip IV. The king had the power to deliver the papacy to whomever he wanted. Before he gave it to Clement, he imposed six conditions. Most had to do with Philip getting to do whatever he wanted, but the sixth concerned the Templars. Philip wanted the Order dissolved, and Clement agreed.\"\n\n\"Interesting stuff,\" Stephanie said, \"but what seems more important at the moment is what the abbe Bigou knew. He's the man who actually commissioned Marie's gravestone. Would he have known of a connection between the de Blanchefort family secret and the Templars?\"\n\n\"Without a doubt,\" Thorvaldsen said. \"Bigou was told the family secret by Marie d'Hautpoul de Blanchefort herself. Her husband was a direct descendant of Gilbert de Blanchefort. Once the Order was suppressed, and Templars started burning at the stake, Gilbert de Blanchefort would have told no one the location of the Great Devise. So that family secret has to be Templar-related. What else could it be?\"\n\nMark nodded. \"The Chronicles speak of carts topped with hay moving through the French countryside, each headed south toward the Pyrenees, escorted by armed men disguised as peasants. All but three made the journey safely. Unfortunately, there's no mention of their final destination. Only one clue in all the Chronicles. Where is it best to hide a pebble?\"\n\n\"In the middle of a rock pile,\" Malone said.\n\n\"That's what the master said, too,\" Mark said. \"To the fourteenth-century mind, the most obvious location would be the safest.\"\n\nMalone gazed again at the gravestone drawing. \"So Bigou had this gravestone carved that, in code, says that he conceals the secrets of God, and he went to the trouble of publicly placing it. What was the point? What are we missing?\"\n\nMark reached into the rucksack and extracted another volume. \"This is a report by the Order's marshal written in 1897. The man was investigating Sauniere and came across another priest, the abbe Gelis, in a nearby village, who found a cryptogram in his church.\"\n\n\"As Sauniere did,\" Stephanie said.\n\n\"That's right. Gelis deciphered the cryptogram and wanted the bishop to know what he learned. The marshal posed as the bishop's representative and copied the puzzle, but he kept the solution to himself.\"\n\nMark showed them the cryptogram and Malone studied the lines of letters and symbols. \"Some sort of numeric key unscrambles it?\"\n\nMark nodded. \"It's impossible to break without the key. There are billions of possible combinations.\"\n\n\"There was one of these in your father's journal, too,\" he said.\n\n\"I know. Dad found it in Noebl Corbu's unpublished manuscript.\"\n\n\"Claridon told us about that.\"\n\n\"Which means de Roquefort has it,\" Stephanie said. \"But is it part of the fiction of Lars's journal?\"\n\n\"Anything Corbu touched has to be suspect,\" Thorvaldsen made clear. \"He embellished Sauniere's story to promote his damn hotel.\"\n\n\"But the manuscript he wrote,\" Mark said. \"Dad always believed it contained truth. Corbu was close with Sauniere's mistress up until she died in 1953. Many believed she told him things. That's why Corbu never published the manuscript. It contradicted his fictionalized version of the story.\"\n\n\"But surely the cryptogram in the journal is false?\" Thorvaldsen said. \"That would have been the very thing de Roquefort would have wanted from the journal.\"\n\n\"We can only hope,\" Malone said, as he noticed an image of Reading the Rules of the Caridad on the table. He lifted the letter-sized reproduction and studied the writing beneath the little man, in a monk's robe, perched on a stool with a finger to his lips, signaling quiet.\n\n\u2002ACABOCE Aba\n\n\u2002DE1681\n\nSomething was wrong, and he instantly compared the image with the lithograph.\n\nThe dates were different.\n\n\"I spent this morning learning about that painting,\" Cassiopeia said. \"I found that image on the Internet. The painting was destroyed by fire in the late 1950s, but prior to that the canvas had been cleaned and readied for display. During the restoration process it was discovered that 1687 was actually 1681. But of course, the lithograph was drawn at a time when the date was obscured.\"\n\nStephanie shook her head. \"This is a puzzle with no answer. Everything changes by the minute.\"\n\n\"You're doing precisely what the master wanted,\" Geoffrey said.\n\nThey all looked at him.\n\n\"He said that once you combined, all would be revealed.\"\n\nMalone was confused. \"But your master specifically warned us to Beware the engineer.\"\n\nGeoffrey motioned to Cassiopeia. \"Perhaps you should beware of her.\"\n\n\"What does that mean?\" Thorvaldsen asked.\n\n\"Her race fought the Templars for two centuries.\"\n\n\"Actually, the Muslims trounced the brothers and sent them packing from the Holy Land,\" Cassiopeia declared. \"And Spanish Muslims kept the Order in check here in the Languedoc when the Templars tried to expand their sphere south, beyond the Pyrenees. So your master was right. Beware the engineer.\"\n\n\"What would you do if you found the Great Devise?\" Geoffrey asked her.\n\n\"Depends on what there is to find.\"\n\n\"Why does that matter? The Devise is not yours, regardless.\"\n\n\"You're quite forward for a mere brother of the Order.\"\n\n\"Much is at stake here, the least of which is your ambition to prove Christianity a lie.\"\n\n\"I don't recall saying that was my ambition.\"\n\n\"The master knew.\"\n\nCassiopeia's face screwed tight\u2014the first time Malone had seen agitation in her expression. \"Your master knew nothing of my motives.\"\n\n\"And by keeping them hidden,\" Geoffrey said, \"you do nothing but confirm his suspicion.\"\n\nCassiopeia faced Henrik. \"This young man could be a problem.\"\n\n\"He was sent by the master,\" Thorvaldsen said. \"We shouldn't question.\"\n\n\"He's trouble,\" Cassiopeia declared.\n\n\"Maybe so,\" Mark said. \"But he's part of this, so get used to him.\"\n\nShe stayed calm and unruffled. \"Do you trust him?\"\n\n\"Doesn't matter,\" Mark said. \"Henrik's right. The master trusted him and that's what matters. Even if the good brother can be irritating.\"\n\nCassiopeia did not push the point, but on her brow was written the shadow of mutiny. And Malone did not necessarily disagree with her impulse.\n\nHe turned his attention back to the table and stared at the color images taken at the Church of Mary Magdalene. He noticed the garden with the statue of the Virgin and the words MISSION 1891 and PENITENCE, PENITENCE carved into the face of the upside-down Visigoth pillar. He shuffled through close-up shots of the stations of the cross, pausing for a moment on station 10, where a Roman soldier was gambling for Christ's cloak, the numbers three, four, and five visible on the dice faces. Then he paused on station 14, which showed Christ's body being carried under cover of darkness by two men.\n\nHe remembered what Mark had said in the church, and he couldn't help wondering. Was their route into the tomb or out?\n\nHe shook his head.\n\nWhat in the world was happening?"
            },
            {
                "title": "5:30 PM",
                "text": "De Roquefort found the Givors archaeological site, which was clearly denoted on the Michelin map, and approached with a measure of caution. He did not want to announce his presence. Even if Malone and company were not there, Cassiopeia Vitt knew him. So on arriving, he ordered the driver to slowly cruise through a grassy meadow that served as a car park until he found the Peugeot matching the make and color he remembered, with a rental sticker on the windshield.\n\n\"They're here,\" he said. \"Park.\"\n\nThe driver did as instructed.\n\n\"I'll explore,\" he told the other two brothers and Claridon. \"Wait here, and remain out of sight.\"\n\nHe climbed out into the late afternoon, a blood ball of summer sun already fading over the surrounding walls of limestone. He sucked in a deep breath and savored cool, thin air that reminded him of the abbey. They'd clearly risen in altitude.\n\nA quick visual survey and he spotted a tree-shaded lane cast in long shadows and decided that direction seemed best, but he stayed off the defined path, making his way through the tall trees, a tapestry of flowers and heather carpeting the violet ground. The surrounding land had all once been a Templar domain. One of the largest commanderies in the Pyrenees had crowned a nearby promontory. It had been a factory, one of several locations where brothers labored night and day crafting the Order's weapons. He knew that great skill had gone into compacting wood, leather, and metal into shields that could not be easily split. But the sword had been the brother knight's true friend. Barons often loved their swords more than their wives, and tried to retain the same one all of their lives. Brothers cradled a similar passion, which Rule encouraged. If a man was expected to lay down his life, the least that could be done was allow him the weapon of his choice. Templar swords, however, were not like those of barons. No hilts adorned with gilt or set with pearls. No end knobs capped in crystal containing relics. Brother knights required no such talismans, as their strength came from a devotion to God and obedience to Rule. Their companion had been their horse, always one with quickness and intelligence. Each knight was allocated three animals, which were fed, combed, and tricked out each day. Horses were one of the means whereby the Order flourished, and the coursers, the palfreys, and especially the destriers responded to the brother knights' affection with an unmatched loyalty. He'd read of one brother who returned home from the Crusades and was not embraced by his father, but was instantly recognized by his faithful stallion.\n\nAnd they were always stallions.\n\nTo ride a mare was unthinkable. What had one knight said? The woman to the woman.\n\nHe kept walking. The musty scent of twigs and boughs stirred his imagination, and he could almost hear the heavy hooves that had once crushed the tender mosses and flowers. He tried to listen for some sound, but the clicking of grasshoppers interfered. He was mindful of electronic surveillance but had, so far, sensed none. He continued to thread a path through the tall pines, moving farther away from the lane, deeper into the woods. His skin heated, and sweat beaded on his brow. High above him, rock crannies groaned from a wind.\n\nWarrior monks, that's what the brothers became.\n\nHe liked that term.\n\nSt. Bernard of Clairvaux himself justified the Templars' entire existence by glorifying the killing of non-Christians. Neither dealing out death nor dying, when for Christ's sake, contains anything criminal but rather merits glorious reward. The soldier of Christ kills safely and dies the more safely. Not without cause does he bear the sword. He is the instrument of God for the punishment of evildoers and for the defense of the just. When he kills evildoers it is not homicide, but malicide, and he is considered Christ's legal executioner.\n\nHe knew those words well. They were taught to every inductee. He'd repeated them in his mind as he'd watched Lars Nelle, Ernst Scoville, and Peter Hansen die. All were heretics. Men who'd stood in the Order's way. Malice doers. Now there were a few more names to be added to that list. Those of the men and women who occupied the cheteau that was coming into view, beyond the trees, in a sheltered hollow among a succession of rock ridges.\n\nHe'd learned something of the cheteau from the background information he'd ordered earlier, before leaving the abbey. Once a sixteenth-century royal residence, one of Catherine de Medicis' many homes, it had been spared destruction in the Revolution due to its isolation. So it remained a monument to the Renaissance\u2014a picturesque mass of turrets, spires, and perpendicular roofs. Cassiopeia Vitt was clearly a woman of means. Houses such as this required great sums of money to buy and maintain, and he doubted she conducted tours as a way to supplement the income. No, this was the private residence of an aloof soul, one that had three times interfered in his business. One that must be tended to.\n\nBut he also needed the two books Mark Nelle possessed.\n\nSo rash acts were out of the question.\n\nThe day was fast falling, deep shadows already starting to engulf the cheteau. His mind whirled with possibilities.\n\nHe had to be sure they were all inside. His current vantage point was too close. But he spied a thick stand of beech trees two hundred meters away that would provide an unobstructed view of the front entrance.\n\nHe had to assume that they expected him to come. After what happened in Lars Nelle's house, they surely realized Claridon was working for him. But they might not expect him here this soon. Which was fine. He needed to return to the abbey. His officers were awaiting him. A council had been called that demanded his presence.\n\nHe decided to leave the two brothers in the car here to watch. That would be enough for now.\n\nBut he'd be back."
            },
            {
                "title": "8:00 PM",
                "text": "STEPHANIE COULD NOT RECALL THE LAST TIME SHE AND MARK had sat and talked. Perhaps not since he was a teenager. That was how deep the chasm between them ran.\n\nNow they had retreated to a room atop one of the cheteau's towers. Before sitting, Mark had swung open four oriel windows, allowing the keen evening air to wash over them.\n\n\"You may or may not believe this, but I think about you and your father every day. I loved your father. But once he came across the Rennes story, he changed his focus. That whole thing took him over. And at the time, I resented that.\"\n\n\"Which I can understand. Really, I can. What I don't understand is why you made him choose between you and what he thought was important.\"\n\nHis sharp tone bristled through her, and she forced herself to remain calm. \"The day we buried him, I knew how wrong I'd been. But I couldn't bring him back.\"\n\n\"I hated you that day.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"Yet you just flew home and left me in France.\"\n\n\"I thought that was what you wanted.\"\n\n\"It was. But for the past five years I've had a lot of time to reflect. The master championed you, though I'm only now realizing what he meant by a lot of his comments. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, Whoever does not hate their father and mother as I do cannot be my disciple. Then He says, Whoever does not love their father and mother as I do cannot be my disciple. I'm beginning to understand those contradictory statements. I hated you, Mother.\"\n\n\"But do you love me, too?\"\n\nSilence loomed between them, and it tore at her heart.\n\nFinally, he said, \"You're my mother.\"\n\n\"That's not an answer.\"\n\n\"It's all you're going to get.\"\n\nHis face, so much like Lars's, was a study in conflicting emotions. She didn't press. Her chance to demand anything had long passed.\n\n\"Are you still head of the Magellan Billet?\" he asked.\n\nShe appreciated the change in subject. \"As far as I know, but I've probably pushed my luck the past few days. Cotton and I haven't been inconspicuous.\"\n\n\"He seems like a good man.\"\n\n\"The best. I didn't want to involve him, but he insisted. He worked for me a long time.\"\n\n\"It's good to have friends like that.\"\n\n\"You have one, too.\"\n\n\"Geoffrey? He's more my oracle than a friend. The master swore him to me. Why? I don't know.\"\n\n\"He would defend you with his life. That much is clear.\"\n\n\"I'm not accustomed to people laying down their lives for me.\"\n\nShe recalled what the master had said in his note to her, about Mark not possessing the resolve to finish his battles. She told him exactly what the master wrote. He listened in silence.\n\n\"What would you have done if you'd been elected master?\" she asked.\n\n\"A part of me was glad I lost.\"\n\nShe was amazed. \"Why?\"\n\n\"I'm a college professor, not a leader.\"\n\n\"You're a man in the middle of an important conflict. One that other men are waiting to see resolved.\"\n\n\"The master is right about me.\"\n\nShe stared at him with undisguised dismay. \"Your father would be ashamed to hear you say that.\" She waited for his anger to come, but Mark merely sat silent, and she listened to the rattle of insects from outside.\n\n\"I probably killed a man today,\" Mark said in a whisper. \"How would Dad have felt about that?\"\n\nShe'd been waiting for a mention. He'd not said a word about what had happened since they'd left Rennes. \"Cotton told me. You had no choice. The man was given an option and he chose to challenge you.\"\n\n\"I watched the body roll down. Strange, the feeling that goes through you knowing you'd just taken a life.\"\n\nShe waited for him to explain.\n\n\"I was glad the trigger had been pulled, since I survived. But another part of me was mortified, because the other man hadn't.\"\n\n\"Life is one choice after another. He chose wrong.\"\n\n\"You do it all the time, don't you? Make those kinds of decisions?\"\n\n\"They happen every day.\"\n\n\"My heart is not cold enough for that.\"\n\n\"And mine is?\" She resented the implication.\n\n\"You tell me.\"\n\n\"I do my job, Mark. That man chose his fate, not you.\"\n\n\"No. De Roquefort chose it. He sent him out on that precipice, knowing there'd be a confrontation. He made the choice.\"\n\n\"And that's the problem with your Order, Mark. Unquestioned loyalty is not a good thing. No country, no army, no leader has ever survived who insisted on such foolishness. My agents make their own choices.\"\n\nA moment of strained silence passed.\n\n\"You're right,\" he finally muttered. \"Dad would be ashamed of me.\"\n\nShe decided to risk it. \"Mark, your father's gone. He's been dead a long time. For me, you've been dead five years. But you're here now. Is there no room within you for forgiveness?\" Hope laced her plea.\n\nHe stood from the chair. \"No, Mother. There's not.\"\n\nAnd he walked from the room.\n\nMALONE HAD TAKEN REFUGE OUTSIDE THE CHcTEAU, UNDER A shady pergola overgrown with greenery. Only insects disturbed his tranquility, and he watched as bats fluttered across the dimming sky. A little while ago Stephanie had taken him aside and told him that a call to Atlanta, requesting a complete dossier on their hostess, had revealed that Cassiopeia Vitt's name did not appear in any of the terrorist databases the U.S. government maintained. Her personal history was unremarkable, though she was half Muslim and these days that raised, if nothing else, a red flag. She owned a multicontinent conglomerate, based in Paris, involved in a broad spectrum of business ventures with assets in the billion-euro range. Her father started the company and she inherited control, though she was little involved with its everyday operation. She also was the chairwoman for a Dutch foundation that worked closely with the United Nations on international AIDS relief and world famine, particularly in Africa. No foreign government considered her a threat.\n\nBut Malone wasn't sure.\n\nNew threats arose every day and from the strangest places.\n\n\"So deep in thought.\"\n\nHe looked up to see Cassiopeia standing beyond the pergola. She wore a tight-fitting black riding habit that suited her.\n\n\"I was actually thinking about you.\"\n\n\"I'm flattered.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't be.\" He motioned to her outfit. \"I wondered where you disappeared to.\"\n\n\"I try to ride every evening. Helps me think.\"\n\nShe stepped under the enclosure. \"I had this built years ago as a tribute to my mother. She loved the outdoors.\"\n\nCassiopeia sat on a bench opposite him. He could tell there was a purpose to her visit.\n\n\"I saw earlier that you have doubts about all this. Is it because you refuse to challenge your Christian Bible?\"\n\nHe didn't really want to talk about it, but she seemed eager. \"Not at all. It's because you choose to challenge the Bible. Seems everyone involved in this quest has an ax to grind. You, de Roquefort, Mark, Sauniere, Lars, Stephanie. Even Geoffrey, who's a bit different to say the least, has an agenda.\"\n\n\"Let me tell you a few things and maybe you'll see this is not personal. At least, not with me.\"\n\nHe doubted that, but he wanted to hear what she had to say.\n\n\"Did you know that in all of recorded history only one crucified skeleton has ever been found in the Holy Land.\"\n\nHe didn't.\n\n\"Crucifixion was alien to the Jews. They stoned, burned, decapitated, or strangled to accomplish capital punishment. Mosaic law only allowed a criminal who'd already been executed to hang on wood as additional punishment.\"\n\n\"For he that is hanged is accursed by God,\" he said, quoting Deuteronomy.\n\n\"You know your Old Testament.\"\n\n\"We do have some culture back in Georgia.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"But crucifixion was a common form of Roman execution. Varrus in 4 BC crucified more than two thousand. Florus in AD 66 killed nearly four thousand. Titus in AD 70 executed five hundred a day. Yet only one crucified skeleton has ever been found. That was in 1968, just north of Jerusalem. The bones dated from the first century, which excited a lot of people. But the dead man was not Jesus. His name was Yehochanan, about five and a half feet tall, twenty-four to twenty-eight years old. We know because of information inscribed on his ossuary. He'd also been tied to the cross, not nailed, and neither of his legs was broken. Do you understand the significance of that detail?\"\n\nHe did. \"Suffocation was how you died on the cross. The head would eventually droop forward, and oxygen deprivation set in.\"\n\n\"Crucifixion was a public humiliation. Victims weren't supposed to die too soon. So to delay death a piece of wood was attached behind the abdomen that could be sat on, or a piece at the feet that could be stood upon. That way, the accused could support himself and breathe. After a few days, if the victim had not exhausted his strength, soldiers broke the legs. That way he could no longer support himself. Death came quickly after that.\"\n\nHe recalled the Gospels. \"A crucified person couldn't defile the Sabbath. The Jews wanted the bodies of Jesus and the two criminals executed with Him down by nightfall. So Pilate ordered the legs of the two criminals broken.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"But when they came to Jesus, and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. That's from John. Ever wonder why Jesus died so quickly? He'd only been hanging a few hours. It usually took days. And why didn't the Roman soldiers break His legs anyway, just to be sure he died? Instead, John says, they pierced His side with a lance and blood and water poured forth. But Matthew, Mark, and Luke never mention this happening.\"\n\n\"What's your point?\"\n\n\"Of all the tens of thousands who were crucified, only one skeleton has ever been found. And the reason is simple. In Jesus's time, burial was deemed an honor. No greater horror existed than for your body to be left for the animals. Each of Rome's supreme penalties\u2014burned alive, cast to the beasts, or crucifixion\u2014had one thing in common. No body to bury. Crucifixion victims were left hanging until the birds picked their bones clean, then what was left was tossed into a common grave. Yet all four Gospels agree that Jesus died in the ninth hour, three PM , then was taken down and buried.\"\n\nHe began to understand. \"The Romans would not have done that.\"\n\n\"This is where the story gets complicated. Jesus was condemned to death with the Sabbath only a few hours away. Yet He's ordered to die by crucifixion, one of the slowest ways to kill a person. How could anyone think He'd be dead before nightfall? Mark's Gospel says even Pilate was puzzled by such a quick death, asking a centurion if everything was in order.\"\n\n\"But wasn't Jesus mistreated before He was nailed to the cross?\"\n\n\"Jesus was a strong man in the prime of his life. He was accustomed to walking great distances in the heat. Yes, he endured the scourge. According to law, thirty-nine lashes were to be given. But we're not told anywhere in the Gospels if this number was administered. And after his torment, he was apparently strong enough to address His accusers in a forcible way. So little evidence exists of any weakened condition. Yet Jesus dies in a mere three hours\u2014without His legs being broken\u2014His side supposedly pierced by a lance.\"\n\n\"The prophecy from Exodus. John speaks of it in his Gospel. He said all those things happened so Scripture would be fulfilled.\"\n\n\"Exodus speaks of Passover restrictions and that none of the meat may be taken outside the house. It had to be eaten within one house with no broken bones. That has nothing to do with Jesus. John's reference to it was a weak attempt at continuity with the Old Testament. Of course, as I said, the other three Gospels never even mention the lance.\"\n\n\"I assume your point, then, is that the Gospels are wrong.\"\n\n\"None of the information contained within them makes sense. They contradict not only themselves, but history, logic, and reason. We're left to believe that a crucified man, without His legs broken, died within three hours, and was then afforded the honor of being buried. Of course, from a religious standpoint it makes perfect sense. Early theologians were attempting to attract followers. They needed to elevate Jesus from a man to the god Christ. The gospel writers all wrote in Greek and would have known their Hellenic history. Osiris, the consort of the Greek god Isis, died at the hands of evil on a Friday, then was resurrected three days later. Why not Christ, too? Of course, for Christ to physically rise from the dead, there would have to be an identifiable body. No bones picked clean by birds and tossed into a common grave would do. Hence, the burial.\"\n\n\"This is what Lars Nelle was trying to prove? That Christ did not rise from the dead?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"I have no idea. All I know is that the Templars knew things. Important things. Enough to transform a band of nine obscure knights into an international force. Knowledge was what fueled that expansion. Knowledge that Sauniere rediscovered. I want that knowledge.\"\n\n\"How could there be any proof of anything, one way or another?\"\n\n\"There must be. You've seen Sauniere's church. He left a lot of hints, and they all point in one direction. There must be something out there\u2014enough to convince him to keep the Templars looking.\"\n\n\"We're dreaming.\"\n\n\"Are we?\"\n\nHe noticed that evening had finally dissolved into darkness, the surrounding hills and forest a mass of silhouette.\n\n\"We have company,\" she whispered.\n\nHe waited for her to explain.\n\n\"On the ride, I worked my way up one of the promontories. I spotted two men. One to the north, the other south. Watching. De Roquefort found you quickly.\"\n\n\"I didn't think the trick with the transponder would slow him down long. He'd assume we'd come here. And Claridon would show him the way. They spot you?\"\n\n\"I doubt it. I was careful.\"\n\n\"This could get dicey.\"\n\n\"De Roquefort is a man in a hurry. He's impatient, particularly if he feels cheated.\"\n\n\"You mean the journal?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Claridon will know it's riddled with mistakes.\"\n\n\"But de Roquefort found us. We're within his sights.\"\n\n\"He must know precious little. Otherwise, why bother? He'd simply use his resources and search himself. No, he needs us.\"\n\nHer words made sense, as had everything else she'd said. \"You rode out expecting them, didn't you?\"\n\n\"I thought we were being watched.\"\n\n\"You always so suspicious?\"\n\nShe faced him. \"Only when people mean to hurt me.\"\n\n\"I assume you've considered a course of action?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. I have a plan.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "ABBEY DES FONTAINES",
                "text": "[ Monday, JUNE 26 12:40 AM ]\n\nDE ROQUEFORT SAT BEFORE THE ALTAR IN THE MAIN CHAPEL, dressed once more in his formal white cassock. The brothers filled the pews before him, chanting words that dated back to the Beginning. Claridon was in the archives, poring through documents. He'd instructed the archivist to allow the impish fool access to whatever he requested\u2014but also to keep a close watch over him. The report from Givors was that Cassiopeia Vitt's cheteau seemed down for the night. One brother watched the front, another the rear. So while little else could be done, he decided to tend to his duties.\n\nA new soul was about to be welcomed into the Order.\n\nSeven hundred years ago, any initiate would have been of legitimate birth, free of debt, and physically fit to wage war. Most were celibates, but married men had been allowed honorary status. Criminals were not a problem, nor were excommunicates. Both were allowed redemption. Every master's duty had been to ensure that the brotherhood grew. Rule made clear, If any secular knight, or other man, wishes to leave the mass of perdition and abandon this century, do not deny him entry. But it was St. Paul's words that had formed the modern standard for induction. Approve the spirit if it comes from God. And the candidate kneeling before him represented his first attempt to implement that dictate. It disgusted him that such a glorious ceremony was forced to take place in the dead of night behind locked gates. But such was the way of the Order. His legacy\u2014what he wanted noted in the Chronicles long after his death\u2014would be a return to the light.\n\nThe chanting stopped.\n\nHe stood from the oak chair that had served since the Beginning as the master's perch.\n\n\"Good brother,\" he said to the candidate, who knelt before him, hands on a Bible. \"You ask a great thing. Of our Order, you see only the facade. We live in this resplendent abbey, we eat and drink well. We have clothes, medicine, education, and spiritual fulfillment. But we live under harsh commandments. It is hard to make yourself the serf to another. If you wish to sleep, you may be awakened. If you are wakeful, you may be ordered to lie down. You may not want to go where directed, but you must. You will hardly do anything that you wish. Can you suffer well these hardships?\"\n\nThe man, probably in his late twenties, his hair already cropped short, his pale face clean-shaven, looked up and said, \"I will suffer all that is pleasing to God.\"\n\nHe knew that the candidate was typical. He'd been found at university several years ago, and one of the Order's precepts had monitored the man's progress while learning the family tree and personal history. The fewer attachments, the better, and thankfully the world abounded with drifting souls. Eventually, direct contact was made and, being receptive, the initiate was slowly schooled in Rule and asked the questions candidates had been asked for centuries. Was he married? Engaged? Had he ever made a vow or pledge to another religious society? Any debts he could not pay? Any hidden illnesses? Was he beholden to a man or woman for any reason?\n\n\"Good brother,\" he said to the candidate, \"in our company, you must not seek riches, nor honor, nor bodily ease. Instead, you must seek three things. First, renounce and reject the sins of this world. Second, do the service of our Lord. And third, be poor and penitent. Will you promise to God and our Lady that all the days of your life you will obey the master of this Temple? That you will live in chastity, without personal property? That you will uphold the customs of this house? That you will never leave this Order, neither through strength nor weakness, in worse times nor better?\"\n\nThose words had been used since the Beginning, and de Roquefort recalled when they'd been uttered to him, thirty years ago. He still felt the flame that had been ignited within him\u2014a fire that now burned with a raging intensity. To be a Templar was important. It meant something. And he was determined to ensure every candidate who donned the robe during his tenure understood that devotion.\n\nHe faced the kneeling man.\n\n\"What do you say, brother?\"\n\n\"De par dieu.\" For God's sake, I will do it.\n\n\"Do you understand that your life may be required?\" And after what had happened the past few days, this inquiry seemed even more important.\n\n\"Without question.\"\n\n\"And why would you offer your life for us?\"\n\n\"Because my master ordered it.\"\n\nThe correct answer. \"And you would do so without challenge?\"\n\n\"To challenge would be to violate Rule. My task is to obey.\"\n\nHe motioned to the draper, who produced from a wooden chest a long twill cloth.\n\n\"Stand,\" he said to the candidate.\n\nThe young man came to his feet, dressed in a black wool robe that covered his thin frame from shoulder to bare feet.\n\n\"Remove your garment,\" he said, and the robe was lifted over his head. Beneath, the candidate was dressed in a white shirt and black trousers.\n\nThe draper approached with the cloth and stood off to one side.\n\n\"You have removed the shroud of the material world,\" de Roquefort made clear. \"Now we embrace you with the cloth of our membership and we celebrate your rebirth as a brother in our Order.\"\n\nHe motioned and the draper came forward and wrapped the cloth around the candidate. De Roquefort had seen many a grown man cry at this moment. He himself had fought to suppress his own emotions when the same cloth had been wrapped around him. No one knew how old this particular shroud was, but one had reverently remained in the initiation chest since the Beginning. He well knew the tale of one of the early cloths. Used to wrap Jacques de Molay after the master had been nailed to a door in the Paris Temple. De Molay had lain within the linen for two days, unable to move from his wounds, too weak to even rise. While he had, bacteria and chemicals from his body had stained the fibers and generated an image that fifty years later began to be venerated by gullible Christians as the body of Christ.\n\nHe'd always thought that fitting.\n\nThe master of the Knights Templar\u2014the head of a supposed heretical order\u2014became the mold from which all subsequent artists fashioned Christ's face.\n\nHe stared out at the assembly. \"You see before you our newest brother. He wears the shroud that symbolizes rebirth. It's a moment we've all experienced, one that joins us to each other. When chosen as your master I promised a new day, a new Order, a new direction. I told you that no longer would the few know more than the many. I told you that I would find our Great Devise.\"\n\nHe stepped forward.\n\n\"In our archives, at this moment, is a man who possesses knowledge we need. Unfortunately, while our former master did nothing, others, not of this Order, have been searching. I have personally followed their efforts, watched and studied their movements, waiting for a time when we would join that search.\" He paused. \"That time has come. I have brothers beyond the walls searching at this moment, and more of you will follow.\"\n\nAs he spoke, he allowed his gaze to drift across the church to the chaplain. He was an Italian with a solemn countenance, the chief prelate, the Order's highest-ranking ordained cleric. The chaplain headed the priests, about a third of the brothers, men who chose a life devoted solely to Christ. The chaplain's words carried much weight, particularly given that the man spoke sparingly. Earlier, when the council had convened, the chaplain had voiced his concern about the recent deaths.\n\n\"You're moving too fast,\" the chaplain declared.\n\n\"I'm doing what the Order desires.\"\n\n\"You're doing what you desire.\"\n\n\"Is there a difference?\"\n\n\"You sound like the previous master.\"\n\n\"On that point he was correct. And though I disagreed with him on a great many things, I obeyed him.\"\n\nHe'd resented the younger man's directness, especially in front of the council, but he knew that many respected the chaplain.\n\n\"What would you have me do?\"\n\n\"Preserve the brothers' lives.\"\n\n\"The brothers know that they may be called upon to lay down their lives.\"\n\n\"This is not the Middle Ages. We're not waging a crusade. These men are devoted to God and pledged their obedience to you, as proof of their devotion. You have no right to take their lives.\"\n\n\"I intend to find our Great Devise.\"\n\n\"To what end? We've endured without it for seven hundred years. It's unimportant.\"\n\nHe'd been shocked.\n\n\"How can you say such a thing? It's our heritage.\"\n\n\"What could it possibly mean today?\"\n\n\"Our salvation.\"\n\n\"We're already saved. The men here all possess good souls.\"\n\n\"This Order does not deserve banishment.\"\n\n\"Our banishment is self-imposed. We're content within it.\"\n\n\"I'm not.\"\n\n\"Then this is your fight, not ours.\"\n\nHis anger had risen.\n\n\"I don't intend to be challenged.\"\n\n\"Master, less than a week and you've already forgotten from whence you came.\"\n\nStaring at the chaplain, he tried to read the features on the stiff face. He'd meant what he said earlier. He was not going to be challenged. The Great Devise must be found. And the answers lay with Royce Claridon and the people inside Cassiopoia Vitt's cheteau.\n\nSo he ignored the indifferent look from the chaplain and concentrated on the crowd seated before him.\n\n\"My brothers. Let us pray for success.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "1:00 AM",
                "text": "MALONE WAS IN RENNES, STROLLING INTO THE CHURCH OF MARY Magdalene, and the same garish detail gave him the same uncomfortable feeling. The nave was empty, save for a solitary man standing before the altar, dressed in a priestly black robe. When the man turned, the face was familiar.\n\nBerenger Sauniere.\n\n\"Why are you here?\" Sauniere asked in a shrill voice. \"This is my church. My creation. No one's but mine.\"\n\n\"How is it yours?\"\n\n\"I took the chance. No one but me.\"\n\n\"Chance of what?\"\n\n\"Those who challenge the world always face risk.\"\n\nThen he noticed a gaping hole in the floor, just before the altar, and steps leading into blackness.\n\n\"What's down there?\" he asked.\n\n\"The first step along the way to truth. God bless all those who guarded that truth. God bless their generosity.\"\n\nThe church encasing him suddenly dissolved and he was surrounded by a treed plaza that spread out before the American embassy in Mexico City. People rushed by in all directions, and the sounds of horns blaring, tires squealing, and diesel engines grew loud.\n\nThen gunshots.\n\nComing from a car that had ground to a stop. Men emerged. Firing at a middle-aged woman and a young Danish diplomat who were enjoying their lunch in the shade. Marines guarding the embassy reacted, but they were too far away.\n\nHe reached for his gun and fired.\n\nBodies dropped to the pavement. Cai Thorvaldsen's head exploded as bullets meant for the woman found him. He shot two of the men who'd started the melange, then felt his shoulder tear as a bullet pierced through him.\n\nThe pain jarred his senses.\n\nBlood poured from the wound.\n\nHe stammered back, but shot his assailant. The bullet penetrated the dark face, which once again became that of Berenger Sauniere.\n\n\"Why did you shoot me?\" Sauniere calmly asked.\n\nThe walls of the church re-formed and the stations of the cross appeared. Malone spotted a violin lying on one of the pews. A metal plate rested on the strings. Sauniere floated over and scattered sand on the plate. Then he drew a bow across the strings and, as sharp notes rang out, the sand arranged itself into a distinct pattern.\n\nSauniere smiled. \"Where the plate does not vibrate, the sand stands still. Change the vibration and another pattern is created. A different one every time.\"\n\nThe statue of the grimacing Asmodeus came to life, and the devil-like form left the holy water fount at the front door and drifted toward him.\n\n\"Terrible is this place,\" the demon said.\n\n\"You are not welcome here,\" Sauniere screamed.\n\n\"Then why did you include me?\"\n\nSauniere didn't answer. Another figure emerged from the shadows. The little man in the brown monk's robe from Reading the Rules of the Caridad. His finger was still to his lips, signaling quiet, and he carried the stool upon which was written ACABOCE Aba 1681.\n\nThe finger came away and the little man said, \"I am alpha and omega, the beginning and end.\"\n\nThen the little man vanished.\n\nA woman appeared, her face obscured, dressed in dark clothing with no detail. \"You know my grave,\" she said.\n\nMarie d'Hautpoul de Blanchefort.\n\n\"Are you afraid of spiders?\" she asked. \"They'll not hurt you.\"\n\nUpon her chest Roman numerals appeared, bright like the sun. LIXLIXL. A spider materialized beneath the symbols, the same design from Marie's tombstone. Between the tentacles were seven dots. Yet the two spaces near the head were bare. With her finger, Marie traced a line from her neck, down her chest, across the blazing letters to the image of the spider. An arrow appeared where her finger had been.\n\nThe same two-tipped arrow from the tombstone.\n\nHe was floating. Away from the church. Through the walls, out into the courtyard, and into the flower garden where the statue of the Virgin stood upon the Visigoth pillar. The stone was no longer a dingy gray, worn by weather and time. Instead, the words PENITENCE, PENITENCE and MISSION 1891 gleamed.\n\nAsmodeus reappeared. The demon said, \"By this sign you will conquer him.\"\n\nLying before the Visigoth pillar was Cai Thorvaldsen. A patch of oily asphalt lay beneath him, crimson with blood, his limbs stretched at contorted angles, like Red Jacket from the Round Tower. His eyes were frozen open, alight with shock.\n\nHe heard a voice. Sharp, crisp, mechanical. And he saw a television with a mustached man reporting the news, talking about the death of a Mexican lawyer and a Danish diplomat, the reason for the murders unknown.\n\nAnd the aftermath.\n\n\"Seven dead\u2014nine injured.\"\n\nMalone came awake.\n\nHe'd dreamed of Cai Thorvaldsen's death before\u2014many times, in fact\u2014but never in relation to Rennes-le-Cheteau. His mind was apparently filled with thoughts he'd found difficult to avoid when he'd tried, two hours ago, to fall asleep. He'd finally managed to drift off, ensconced in one of the many chambers of Cassiopeia Vitt's cheteau. She'd assured him that their minders outside would be watched and they'd be ready if de Roquefort chose to act during the night. But he agreed with her assessment. They were safe, at least until tomorrow.\n\nSo he'd slept.\n\nBut his mind had continued to play out the puzzle.\n\nMost of the dream faded away, but he recalled the last portion\u2014the television anchor reporting on the attack in Mexico City. He'd learned later that Cai Thorvaldsen had been dating the Mexican lawyer. She was a tough, gutsy lady investigating a mysterious cartel. The local police learned there'd been threats she'd ignored. Police had been in the area, but curiously none of them were around when the gunmen emerged from a roadster. She and the younger Thorvaldsen had been sitting on a bench, eating their lunch. Malone had been nearby, on his way back to the embassy, in town on assignment. He'd used his automatic to take down two attackers before two others realized he was there. He never saw the third and fourth men, one of whom planted a slug in his left shoulder. Before he lapsed into unconsciousness he'd managed to shoot his attacker, and the final man was taken out by one of the marine guards from the embassy.\n\nBut not before a lot of bullets found a lot of people.\n\nSeven dead\u2014nine injured.\n\nHe sat up from the bed.\n\nHe'd just solved the Rennes riddle."
            },
            {
                "title": "ABBEY DES FONTAINES",
                "text": "[ 1:30 AM ]\n\nDE ROQUEFORT SWIPED THE MAGNETIC CARD ACROSS THE SENSOR pad and the electronic bolt released. He entered the brightly lit archives and threaded his way through the restricted shelves to where Royce Claridon sat. On the table before Claridon were stacks of writings. The archivist sat to one side, watching patiently as he'd been ordered to do. He motioned for the man to withdraw.\n\n\"What have you learned?\" he asked Claridon.\n\n\"The materials you pointed me to are interesting. I never realized the extent of this Order's existence after the 1307 Purge.\"\n\n\"There's much to our history.\"\n\n\"I found an account of when Jacques de Molay was burned at the stake. Many brothers apparently watched that spectacle in Paris.\"\n\n\"He walked to the stake on March 13, 1314, with his head held high and told the crowd, It is only right that at so solemn a moment, when my life has so little time to run, I should reveal the deception that has been practiced and speak up for the truth.\"\n\n\"You memorized his words?\"\n\n\"He's a man to know.\"\n\n\"Many historians blame de Molay for the Order's demise. He was said to be weak and complacent.\"\n\n\"And what do the accounts you've read say about him?\"\n\n\"He seemed strong and determined and planned ahead before he traveled from Cyprus to France in the summer of 1307. He actually anticipated what Philip IV had planned.\"\n\n\"Our wealth and knowledge were safeguarded. De Molay made sure of that.\"\n\n\"That Great Devise.\" Claridon shook his head.\n\n\"The brothers made sure it survived. De Molay made sure.\"\n\nClaridon's eyes looked weary. Though the hour was late, de Roquefort functioned best at night. \"Did you read de Molay's final words?\"\n\nClaridon nodded. \"God will avenge our death. Woe will come ere long to those who condemned us.\"\n\n\"He was referring to Philip IV and Clement V, who conspired against him and our Order. The pope died less than a month later, and Philip succumbed seven months after that. None of Philip's heirs produced a male son, so the Capetian royal line extinguished itself. Four hundred and fifty years later, during the Revolution, the French royal family was imprisoned, just like de Molay, in the Paris Temple. When the guillotine finally severed the head of Louis XVI, a man plunged his hand into the dead king's blood and flicked it into the crowd, shouting, Jacques de Molay, thou art avenged.\"\n\n\"One of yours?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"A brother\u2014caught up in the moment. There to watch the French monarchy be eliminated.\"\n\n\"This means a lot to you, doesn't it?\"\n\nHe wasn't particularly interested in sharing his feelings with this stranger, but he wanted to make clear, \"I'm master.\"\n\n\"No. There's more here. More to this.\"\n\n\"Is analysis part of your specialty, too?\"\n\n\"You stood in front of a speeding car, challenging Malone to run you down. Then you would have roasted the flesh from my feet with no remorse.\"\n\n\"Monsieur Claridon, thousands of my brothers were arrested\u2014all for the greed of a king. Several hundred were burned at the stake. Ironically, only lies would have liberated them. The truth was their death sentence, since the Order was guilty on none of the charges leveled against it. Yes. This is intensely personal.\"\n\nClaridon reached for Lars Nelle's journal. \"I've some bad news. I've read a good part of Lars's notes and something is wrong.\"\n\nHe did not like the sound of that statement.\n\n\"There are errors. Dates are wrong. Locations differ. Sources incorrectly noted. Subtle changes, but to a trained eye they're obvious.\"\n\nUnfortunately, de Roquefort was not knowledgeable enough to know the difference. He was actually hoping the journal would increase his awareness. \"Are they merely entry errors?\"\n\n\"At first I thought so. Then, as I noticed more and more, I came to doubt that. Lars was a careful man. A lot of the information in the journal I helped accumulate. These are intentional.\"\n\nDe Roquefort reached for the journal and paged through until he found the cryptogram. \"What of this? Correct?\"\n\n\"I would have no way of knowing. Lars never told me if he learned the mathematical sequence that unravels it.\"\n\nHe was concerned. \"Are you saying the journal is useless?\"\n\n\"What I'm saying is that there are errors. Even some of the entries from Sauniere's personal diary are wrong. I read some of those myself long ago.\"\n\nDe Roquefort was confused. What was happening here? He thought back to the last day of Lars Nelle's life, to what the American had said to him.\n\n\"You couldn't find anything, even if it were right before your eyes.\"\n\nStanding in the trees, he'd resented Nelle's attitude but admired the man's courage\u2014considering a rope was wrapped around the older man's neck. A few minutes earlier he'd watched as the American fastened the rope to a bridge support, then looped the noose. Nelle had then hopped onto the stone wall and stared out into the dark river below.\n\nHe'd followed Nelle all day, wondering what he was doing in the high Pyrenees. The village nearby possessed no connection to either Rennes-le-Cheteau or any of Lars Nelle's known research. Now it was nearing midnight and blackness enveloped the world around them. Only the gurgle of water running beneath the bridge disturbed the mountain stillness.\n\nHe stepped from the foliage onto the road and approached the bridge.\n\n\"I wondered if you were going to show yourself,\" Nelle said with his back to him. \"I assumed an insult would draw you out.\"\n\n\"You knew I was there?\"\n\n\"I'm accustomed to brothers following me.\" Nelle finally turned toward him and pointed at the rope around his neck. \"If you don't mind, I was just about to kill myself.\"\n\n\"Death apparently doesn't frighten you.\"\n\n\"I died a long time ago.\"\n\n\"You fear not your God? He does not allow suicide.\"\n\n\"What God? Dust to dust, that's our fate.\"\n\n\"What if you're wrong?\"\n\n\"I'm not.\"\n\n\"And what of your quest?\"\n\n\"It's brought nothing but misery. And why does my soul concern you?\"\n\n\"It doesn't. But your quest is another matter.\"\n\n\"You've watched me a long time. Your master has even spoken to me himself. Too bad the Order will have to continue the quest\u2014without me leading the way.\"\n\n\"You're aware we were watching?\"\n\n\"Of course. Brothers have tried for months to obtain my journal.\"\n\n\"I was told you're a strange man.\"\n\n\"I'm a miserable man who simply doesn't want to live any longer. A part of me regrets this. For my son, whom I love. And for my wife, who loves me in her own way. But I have no desire to live any longer.\"\n\n\"Are there not quicker ways to die?\"\n\nNelle shrugged. \"I detest guns, and something about poison seems offensive. Bleeding to death wasn't appealing, so I opted for hanging.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Seems selfish.\"\n\n\"Selfish? I'll tell you what's selfish. What people have done to me. They believe that Rennes hides everything from the reincarnated French monarchy to aliens from space. How many searchers have visited with their equipment to desecrate the land? Walls have been torn out, holes dug, tunnels excavated. Even graves opened and corpses exhumed. Writers have postulated every conceivable wild theory\u2014all designed to make money.\"\n\nHe wondered about the strange suicide speech.\n\n\"I've watched while mediums held seances and clairvoyants carried on conversations with the dead. So much has been fabricated, the truth is now actually boring. They forced me to write that gibberish. I had to embrace their fanaticism in order to sell books. People wanted to read drivel. It's ridiculous. I even laugh at myself. Selfish? All those morons are the ones who should be given that label.\"\n\n\"And what is the truth about Rennes?\" he calmly asked.\n\n\"I'm sure you'd love to know.\"\n\nHe decided to try another approach. \"You realize that you're the one person who may be able to solve Sauniere's puzzle.\"\n\n\"May be able? I did solve it.\"\n\nHe recalled the cryptogram he'd seen in the marshal's report filed in the abbey's archives, the one abbes Gelis and Sauniere found in their churches, the one Gelis may have perhaps died solving.\n\n\"Can't you tell me?\" There was almost a plea to his question, one he did not like.\n\n\"You're like all the rest\u2014in search of easy answers. Where's the challenge in that? It took me years to decipher that combination.\"\n\n\"And I assume you wrote little down?\"\n\n\"That's for you to discover.\"\n\n\"You're an arrogant man.\"\n\n\"No, I'm a screwed-up man. There's a difference. You see, all those opportunists, who came for themselves and left with nothing, taught me something.\"\n\nHe waited for an explanation.\n\n\"There's absolutely nothing to find.\"\n\n\"You're lying.\"\n\nNelle shrugged. \"Maybe? Maybe not.\"\n\nHe decided to leave Lars Nelle to his task. \"May you find your peace.\" He turned and walked away.\n\n\"Templar,\" Nelle called out.\n\nHe stopped and turned back.\n\n\"I'm going to do you a favor. You don't deserve it, because all you brothers did was cause me aggravation. But your Order didn't deserve what happened to it, either. So I'll give you a clue. Something to help you along. It's not written down anywhere. Not even in the journal. Only you'll have it and, if you're smart, you might even solve the puzzle. You have a paper and pencil?\"\n\nHe came back close to the wall, fished into his pocket, and produced a small note pad and pen, which he handed to Nelle. The older man scribbled something, then tossed the pen and pad to him.\n\n\"Good luck,\" Nelle said.\n\nThen the American leaped over the side. He heard the rope go taut and a quick pop as the neck snapped. He brought the pad close to his eyes and in the faint moonlight read what Lars Nelle had written."
            },
            {
                "title": "GOODBYE STEPHANIE",
                "text": "Nelle's wife was named Stephanie. He shook his head. No clue. Just a final salutation from husband to wife.\n\nNow he wasn't so sure.\n\nHe'd decided that leaving the note with the body would ensure a determination of suicide. So he'd grabbed hold of the rope, pulled the corpse back up, and stuffed the paper into Nelle's shirt pocket.\n\nBut had the words really been a clue?\n\n\"On the night Nelle died, he told me that he solved the cryptogram and offered me this.\" He grabbed a pencil from the table and wrote GOODBYE STEPHANIE on a pad.\n\n\"How's that a solution?\" Claridon asked.\n\n\"I don't know. I never even thought it was, until this moment. If what you're saying is true, that the journal contains intentional errors, then we were meant to find it. I searched for that journal while Lars Nelle was alive, then after with the son. But Mark Nelle kept it locked away. Then when the son turned up here, at the abbey, I learned he was carrying the journal with him in the avalanche. The master took possession of it and kept it under lock until just a few weeks ago.\" He thought back to Cassiopeia Vitt's apparent misstep in Avignon. Now he knew it was no mistake. \"You're right. The journal's worthless. We were meant to have it.\" He pointed to the pad. \"But maybe these two words have meaning.\"\n\n\"Or maybe they're more misdirection?\"\n\nWhich was possible.\n\nClaridon studied them with clear interest. \"What precisely did Lars say when he gave you this?\"\n\nHe told him exactly, ending with, \"A clue to help you along. If you're smart, you might even solve the puzzle.\"\n\n\"I recall something Lars mentioned to me once.\" Claridon searched the tabletop until he found some folded papers. \"These are the notes I made in Avignon from Stfcblein's book concerning Marie d'Hautpoul's gravestone. Look here.\" Claridon pointed to a series of Roman numerals. MDCOLXXXI . \"This was carved into the stone and is supposedly her date of death. 1681. And that's discounting the O, since there is no such Roman numeral. But Marie died in 1781, not 1681. And her age is in error, too. She was sixty-eight, not sixty-seven, as noted, when she died.\" Claridon gripped the pencil and wrote 1681, 67, and GOODBYE STEPHANIE on the pad. \"Notice anything?\"\n\nHe stared at the writing. Nothing stood out, but he was never good with puzzles.\n\n\"You have to think like a man in the eighteenth century. Bigou was the person who created the gravestone. The solution would be simple in one respect, but difficult in another because of endless possibilities. Break up the date 1681 into two numbers\u201416 and 81. One plus six equals seven. Eight plus one equals nine. Seven, nine. Then look at sixty-seven. You can't invert the seven, but the six becomes a nine when turned over. So, seven, nine again. Count the letters in what Lars wrote to you. Seven for GOODBYE . Nine for STEPHANIE. I think he did leave you a clue.\"\n\n\"Open the journal to the cryptogram and try.\"\n\nClaridon leafed through the pages and found the drawing.\n\n\"There are several possibilities. Seven, nine. Nine, seven. Sixteen. One, six. Six, one. I'll start with the most obvious. Seven, nine.\"\n\nHe watched as Claridon counted across the rows of letters and symbols, stopping at the seventh, then the ninth, jotting down the character displayed. When he finished, there appeared ITEGOARCANADEI.\n\n\"It's Latin,\" he said, seeing the words. \"I tego arcana dei.\" He translated. \"I conceal the secrets of God.\"\n\nDamn.\n\n\"That journal is useless,\" he yelled. \"Nelle planted his own puzzle.\"\n\nBut another thought surged through his brain. The marshal's report. It, too, had contained a cryptogram, one obtained from the abbe Gelis. One supposedly solved by the abbe. One the marshal had noted was identical to the one Sauniere found.\n\nHe must have it.\n\n\"There's another drawing in one of the books Mark Nelle has.\"\n\nClaridon's eyes were aflame. \"I assume you're going to get it.\"\n\n\"When the sun rises.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "GIVORS, FRANCE",
                "text": "[ 1:30 AM ]\n\nMALONE STOOD IN THE SALON, THE SPACIOUS ROOM LIT BY LAMPS, the others crowded around the table. He'd awakened them all a few minutes ago.\n\n\"I know the answer,\" he told them.\n\n\"For the cryptogram?\" Stephanie asked.\n\nHe nodded. \"Mark told me about Sauniere's personality. Bold and brash. And I agree with what you said the other day, Stephanie. The church in Rennes is not a signpost to a treasure. Sauniere would never have telegraphed that information, but he just couldn't resist a little pointing. Trouble is, you need a lot of pieces to assemble this puzzle. Luckily, we have most of them.\"\n\nHe reached for the book Pierres Gravees du Languedoc, still open to Marie d'Hautpoul's gravestones. \"Bigou is the fellow who left the real clues. He was fleeing France, never to return, so he hid cryptograms in both churches and left two carved stones over an empty grave. There's the wrong date of death, 1681, the wrong age, sixty-seven, and look at these Roman numerals at the bottom \u2014 LIXLIXL \u2014 fifty, nine, fifty, nine, fifty. If you add those together you get one hundred sixty-eight. He also made reference to the painting Reading the Rules of the Caridad in the parish register. Remember, in Bigou's time the date was not obscured. So he would have seen 1681, not 1687. There's a pattern here.\"\n\nHe pointed to the drawing of the gravestone.\n\n\"Look at the spider carved into the bottom. Seven dots were intentionally placed between the legs, with two spaces left blank. Why not just include a dot between them all? Then look what Sauniere did in the garden outside the church. He takes the Visigoth pillar, turns it upside down, and carves Mission 1891 and Penitence, Penitence into its face. I know this is going to sound crazy, but I just dreamed the connection among all these.\"\n\nEveryone smiled, but no one interrupted him.\n\n\"Last year, Henrik, when Cai and all the others were killed in Mexico City\u2014I dream about it from time to time. Tough to get those images out of your brain. There were a lot of dead and wounded that day\u2014\"\n\n\"Seven dead. Nine wounded,\" Stephanie muttered.\n\nThe same thought seemed to rush unbidden into each of their minds and he saw understanding, especially on Mark's face.\n\n\"Cotton, you might just be right.\" Mark sat down at the table. \"1681. Add the first two and last two digits. Seven, nine. The carving on the pillar. Sauniere turned it upside down to send a message. He erected it in 1891, but invert that date and you have 1681. The pillar is upside down to lead us in the right direction. Seven, nine again.\"\n\n\"Then count the letters,\" Malone said. \"Seven in Mission . Nine in Penitence. That's more than a coincidence. And the one hundred sixty-eight from the Roman numerals on the gravestone. That total is there for a reason. Add the one to the six and eight and you get seven and nine. The pattern's everywhere.\" He reached for a color image of station 10 from inside the Church of Mary Magdalene. \"Look here. Where the Roman soldier is throwing the dice for Christ's cloak. On the dice face. A three, four, and five. When Mark and I were in the church I wondered why these particular numbers were chosen. Mark, you said Sauniere personally oversaw every detail that went into that church. So he selected these numbers for a reason. I think the sequence is what's important. The three is first, then the four, then five. Three plus four is seven, four plus five is nine.\"\n\n\"So seven, nine solves the cryptogram?\" Cassiopeia said.\n\n\"One way to find out.\" Mark motioned and Geoffrey handed him the rucksack. Mark carefully opened the marshal's report and found the drawing.\n\nHe then started applying the seven, nine sequence, moving through the thirteen lines of letters and symbols. As he did, he wrote each selected character down."
            },
            {
                "title": "TEMPLIERTRESORENFOUIAULAGUSTOUS",
                "text": "\"It's French,\" Cassiopeia said. \"Bigou's language.\"\n\nMark nodded. \"I see them.\"\n\nHe added spaces so the message made sense."
            },
            {
                "title": "TEMPLIER TRESOR EN FOUI AU LAGUSTOUS",
                "text": "\"Templar treasure can be found at lagustous,\" Malone translated.\n\n\"What's lagustous?\" Henrik asked.\n\n\"I have no idea,\" Mark said. \"And I don't remember any mention of such a place in the Templar archives.\"\n\n\"I've lived in this region all my life,\" Cassiopeia said, \"and know of no such locale.\"\n\nMark appeared frustrated. \"The Chronicles specifically say that the carts carrying the Devise came south to the Pyrenees.\"\n\n\"Why would the abbe have made things so easy?\" Geoffrey calmly asked.\n\n\"He's right,\" Malone said. \"Bigou could have built in a safeguard so that just solving the sequence would not be enough.\"\n\nStephanie looked puzzled. \"I wouldn't say this has been easy.\"\n\n\"Only because the pieces are so scattered, some lost forever,\" Malone said. \"But in Bigou's time, everything existed, and he erected the tombstone for all to see.\"\n\n\"But Bigou hedged his bet,\" Mark said. \"The marshal's report specifically notes that Gelis found a cryptogram identical to Sauniere's in his church. During the eighteenth century Bigou served that church, as well as Rennes, so he hid a marker in each.\"\n\n\"Hoping that a person of curiosity would find one of them,\" Henrik said. \"Which is precisely what happened.\"\n\n\"Gelis actually solved the puzzle,\" Mark said. \"We know that. He told the marshal. He also said he was suspicious of Sauniere. Then a few days later he was murdered.\"\n\n\"By Sauniere?\" Stephanie asked.\n\nMark shrugged. \"No one knows. I always thought the marshal might be suspect. He disappeared from the abbey within weeks of Gelis's murder and specifically didn't note in his report the solution to the cryptogram.\"\n\nMalone pointed to the pad. \"Now we have it. But we need to find out what lagustous is.\"\n\n\"It's an anagram,\" Cassiopeia said.\n\nMark nodded. \"Just like on the gravestone where Bigou used Et in arcadia ego as an anagram for I tego arcana dei. He could have done the same thing here.\"\n\nCassiopeia was studying the pad and her gaze beamed with recognition.\n\n\"You know, don't you?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"I think I do.\"\n\nThey all waited.\n\n\"In the tenth century a wealthy baron named Hildemar came to know a man named Agulous. Hildemar's relatives resented Agulous's influence over him, and, in direct opposition to his family, Hildemar turned over all his lands to Agulous, who converted his castle into an abbey that Hildemar himself joined. While kneeling in prayer inside the abbey's chapel, Agulous and Hildemar were slain by Saracens. Both were eventually made Catholic saints. There's a town there still. About ninety miles from here. St. Agulous.\" She reached for the pen and converted lagustous into St. Agulous.\n\n\"There were Templar sites there,\" Mark said. \"A large commandery, but it's gone.\"\n\n\"That castle, which became an abbey, is still there,\" Cassiopeia made clear.\n\n\"We need to go,\" Henrik said.\n\n\"That could be a problem.\" And Malone cut a glance to Cassiopeia. They'd not told the others about the men outside, so he did now.\n\n\"De Roquefort will act,\" Mark said. \"Our hostess, here, allowed him to have Dad's journal. Once he learns the thing is worthless, his attitude will change.\"\n\n\"We need to leave here unnoticed,\" Malone said.\n\n\"There's a lot of us,\" Henrik said. \"Such an exit would be a challenge.\"\n\nCassiopeia smiled. \"I like challenges.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "7:30 AM",
                "text": "DE ROQUEFORT THREADED HIS WAY THROUGH THE FOREST OF tall pines, the ground beneath him silvered with white heather. A honey scent hung in the morning air. The rocky clefts of red limestone surrounding him were shrouded by a wispy fog. An eagle soared in and out of the haze, on the prowl for breakfast. He'd eaten his with the brothers, the meal taken in the traditional silence as Scripture was read to them.\n\nHe had to give Claridon credit. He'd deciphered the cryptogram with the seven, nine combination and unlocked the secret. Unfortunately, the message was useless. Claridon told him that Lars Nelle had found a cryptogram within an unpublished manuscript by Noebl Corbu, the man who'd promulgated much of the fiction about Rennes in the mid-twentieth century. But had Nelle changed the puzzle or had Sauniere? Was the frustrating solution what drove Lars Nelle to suicide? All that effort and when he finally deciphered what Sauniere left, he was told nothing. Was that what Nelle meant when he'd declared There's absolutely nothing to find?\n\nHard to know.\n\nBut he was damn well going to find out.\n\nA horn blared in the distance from the direction of the castle. The workday was probably about to begin. Ahead, he spied one of his sentries. He'd communicated with the man by cell phone on the trip north from the abbey and learned that all was quiet. Through the trees he caught sight of the cheteau, a couple of hundred meters away, bathed in a filtered morning glow.\n\nHe approached the brother who reported that an hour ago a group of eleven men and women had arrived on foot from the construction site. All period-dressed. They'd been inside ever since. The second sentinel had reported that the rear of the building remained quiet. No one had entered or left. Plenty of inside movement came two hours ago\u2014lights on in rooms, servant activity. Cassiopeia Vitt herself emerged at one point and walked to the stables, then back.\n\n\"There also was activity around one AM, \" the brother said to him. \"Bedroom lights came on, then a downstairs room was lit. About an hour later the lights went off. Seems they all woke up for a while, then went back to sleep.\"\n\nPerhaps their night had been as revealing as his own. \"But no one left the house?\"\n\nThe man shook his head.\n\nHe reached for the radio in his pocket and communicated with the team leader for the ten knights he'd brought with him. They'd parked their vehicles half a mile away and were hiking through the forest toward the cheteau. He'd ordered that they quietly ring the building, then await his instruction. He was now informed that all ten were in place. Counting the two already here and himself, thirteen armed men\u2014more than enough to accomplish the task.\n\nIronic, he thought. The brothers were once again at war with a Saracen. Seven hundred years ago, Muslims defeated the Christians and retook the Holy Land. Now another Muslim, Cassiopeia Vitt, had involved herself in Order business.\n\n\"Master.\"\n\nHis attention was diverted to the cheteau and the front entrance, where people were exiting, all dressed in the colorful peasant garb of the Middle Ages. The men in plain brown cottes with cords tied about their waists, legs sheathed in dark hose, feet covered by thin shoes. A few sported cockers tied about their ankles. The women wore long gray gowns and heuks tied around their hips with apron strings. Straw hats, broad-brimmed caps, headrails, and hoods covered the heads. Yesterday, he'd noticed how all of the workers at the Givors site wore authentic clothing, part of the anachronistic atmosphere the place was surely designed to evoke. A couple of the workers started jostling with one another in good humor as the group turned and slowly headed for the lane leading back to the castle site.\n\n\"Perhaps some sort of meeting,\" the brother standing next to him said. \"They came and are returning to the construction site.\"\n\nHe agreed. Cassiopeia Vitt personally oversaw the Givors project, so it was reasonable to assume workers would meet with her.\n\n\"How many went in?\"\n\n\"Eleven.\"\n\nHe counted. The same had exited. Fine. Time to act. He raised the radio to his lips and said, \"Move in.\"\n\n\"What are our orders?\" the voice on the other end of the radio asked.\n\nHe was tired of toying with his opponent.\n\n\"Do what is necessary to contain them until I get inside.\"\n\nHe entered the cheteau through the kitchen, an enormous room loaded with stainless steel. Fifteen minutes had passed since he gave the order to take the house and the siege had proceeded without a shot. In fact, the occupants had been eating their breakfast when the brothers made their way through the ground floor. Men stationed at all the exits and outside the dining room windows had destroyed any hope of escape.\n\nHe was pleased. He did not want to attract any attention.\n\nAs he moved through the many rooms, he admired the walls covered in colorful brocade, the painted ceilings, carved pilasters, glass chandeliers, and furniture sheathed in varying shades of damask. Cassiopeia Vitt possessed taste.\n\nHe found the dining room and prepared himself to face Mark Nelle. The others would be killed, their bodies buried in the forest, but Mark Nelle and Geoffrey would be returned to face discipline. He needed to make an example of them. The death of the brother in Rennes must be avenged.\n\nHe stepped through a spacious foyer and entered the dining room.\n\nBrothers ringed the room, their weapons drawn. His gaze raked the long table and he registered six faces.\n\nNone of which he recognized.\n\nInstead of seeing Cotton Malone, Stephanie Nelle, Mark Nelle, Geoffrey, and Cassiopeia Vitt, the men and women gathered around the table were strangers, all six dressed in jeans and shirts.\n\nWorkers from the construction site.\n\nDamn.\n\nThey'd escaped right before his eyes.\n\nHe contained his rising anger. \"Hold them here until I return,\" he said to one of the knights.\n\nHe left the house and calmly strolled down the treed lane toward the car park. Only a few vehicles present this early. But Cotton Malone's rental, which had been parked there when he arrived earlier, was gone.\n\nHe shook his head.\n\nNow he was at a loss, with no idea where they'd gone.\n\nOne of the brothers he'd left inside the cheteau ran up from behind. He wondered why the man had left his post.\n\n\"Master,\" the man said. \"One of the people inside the cheteau told me that Cassiopeia Vitt asked them to come to the cheteau early today, dressed in their work outfits. Six of them switched clothing and were all told by Vitt to enjoy their breakfast.\"\n\nThat much he'd already surmised. What else?\n\nThe man handed him a cellular phone. \"That same employee said a note was left that indicated you'd be coming. When you did, he was to give you this phone, along with this.\"\n\nHe unfolded and read from a scrap of paper.\n\nThe answer has been found. I will call before the sun sets with information.\n\nHe needed to know, \"Who wrote this?\"\n\n\"The employee said it was left with his change of clothes along with an instruction that it be given directly to you.\"\n\n\"How did you get it?\"\n\n\"When he mentioned your name, I simply told him I was you and he handed it to me.\"\n\nWhat was happening here? Was there a traitor among his enemy? Apparently so. Since he possessed no idea where they'd gone, little choice remained.\n\n\"Withdraw the brothers and return to the abbey.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "10:00 AM",
                "text": "MALONE MARVELED AT THE PYRcNcES, WHICH WERE SO MUCH like the Alps in appearance and majesty. Separating France from Spain, the crests seemed to roll to infinity, each jagged peak crowned with bright snow, the lower elevations a mixture of green slopes and purple crags. Between the summits lay sun-scorched valleys, deep and foreboding, the haunts of Charlemagne, the Franks, Visigoths, and Moors.\n\nThey'd taken two cars\u2014his rental and Cassiopeia's Land Rover, which she kept parked at the construction site. Their exit from the cheteau had been clever\u2014the ruse apparently working, since there'd been no tails\u2014and, once away, he'd given both cars a thorough searching for any electronic trackers. He had to give Cassiopeia credit. She was imaginative.\n\nAn hour ago, before heading up into the mountains, they'd stopped and purchased clothes at a shopping plaza outside Ax-les-Thermes, a thriving spa resort that catered to hikers and skiers. Their colorful tunics and long gowns had won them some strange looks, but they were now dressed in jeans, shirts, boots, and fleece jackets, ready for what lay ahead.\n\nSt. Agulous perched on the rim of a precipice, surrounded by terraced hills, at the end of a narrow highway that corkscrewed a path up through a cloud-dimmed pass. The village, not much larger than Rennes-le-Cheteau, was a mass of time-worn limestone buildings that seemed to have merged with the rock beyond.\n\nMalone stopped short of entering the town, easing off into the trees, down a narrow dirt lane. Cassiopeia cruised in behind him. They climbed out into sharp mountain air.\n\n\"I don't think it's a good idea for all of us to just ride in there,\" he said. \"This doesn't look like a place that receives a whole lot of tourists.\"\n\n\"He's right,\" Mark said. \"Dad always approached these villages cautiously. Let me and Geoffrey do it. Just a couple of guys out hiking. That's not unusual for summer.\"\n\n\"You don't think I'd make a good impression?\" Cassiopeia asked.\n\n\"Making an impression is not your problem,\" Malone said, grinning. \"Getting folks to forget that impression is the problem.\"\n\n\"And who put you in charge?\" Cassiopeia asked.\n\n\"I did,\" Thorvaldsen declared. \"Mark knows these mountains. He speaks the language. Let him and the brother go.\"\n\n\"Then, by all means,\" she said. \"Go.\"\n\nMARK LED THE WAY AS HE AND GEOFFREY STROLLED THROUGH the main gate and into a tight plaza shaded by trees. Geoffrey still carried the rucksack with the two books, so they appeared as a couple of hikers out for the afternoon. Pigeons circled above the jumble of black slate roofs, dueling with a blast of wind that whistled through the clefts, shoving clouds northward over the mountains. A fountain in the center of the plaza trickled with water, green with age. No one was in sight.\n\nA cobbled street radiating from the plaza was well kept and checkered with scattered sunlight. The tap of horned feet announced the appearance of a shaggy goat, which vanished down another side lane. Mark smiled. Like so many in this region, this was not a clock-driven place.\n\nOne vestige of any former glory came from the church, which rose at the end of the plaza. A set of wide narrow steps led up to a Romanesque door. The building itself, though, was more Gothic, its bell tower an odd octagonal shape that immediately arrested Mark's attention. He could not recall seeing another like it in the region. The size and grandeur of the church spoke of a lost prosperity and power.\n\n\"Interesting that a small town like this has a church that size,\" Geoffrey said.\n\n\"I've seen others like it. Five hundred years ago, this was a thriving market center. So a church would have been a must.\"\n\nA young woman appeared. Sun freckles gave her the air of a country girl. She smiled, then entered a small general store. Next door stood what appeared to be a post office. Mark wondered about the strange vagary of fate that had apparently preserved St. Agulous from the Saracens, Spaniards, French, and Albigensian Crusaders.\n\n\"Let's start in there,\" he said, pointing at the church. \"The local priest may be helpful.\"\n\nThey entered a compact nave topped by a star-spangled ceiling of vivid blue. No statuary decorated the plain stone walls. A wooden cross hung above the simple altar. Worn boards, each at least two feet wide, probably hewn centuries ago from the surrounding primeval forest, sheathed the floor and creaked with each step. Where the church at Rennes was animated in obscene detail, an unnatural quiet reigned in this nave.\n\nMark noticed Geoffrey's interest in the ceiling. He knew what he was thinking. The master had worn a robe of blue with gold stars in the last days of his life.\n\n\"Coincidence?\" Geoffrey asked.\n\n\"I doubt it.\"\n\nFrom the shadows near the altar emerged an older man. His crooked shoulders were poorly concealed under a loose brown frock. He walked with a jerky, stooped gait that reminded Mark of a puppet on a string.\n\n\"Are you the abbe?\" he asked the man in French.\n\n\"Oui, monsieur.\"\n\n\"What's the name of this church?\"\n\n\"The Chapel of St. Agulous.\"\n\nMark watched as Geoffrey strolled forward, past where they stood, to the first pew before the altar. \"This is a quiet place.\"\n\n\"Those who live here belong only to themselves. It is indeed a peaceful location.\"\n\n\"How long have you been abbe?\"\n\n\"Oh, for many years. No one else seems to want to serve here. But I do like it.\"\n\nMark recalled what he knew. \"This area was once a hiding place for the Spanish brigands, wasn't it? They would slip into Spain, terrorize the locals, rob farmhouses, then slip back over the mountains, safe here in France, out of reach of the Spanish.\"\n\nThe priest nodded. \"To plunder Spain, they had to live in France. And never once did they touch a Frenchman. But that was a long time ago.\"\n\nHe continued to study the church's austere interior. Nothing suggested that the building harbored any great secret.\n\n\"Abbe,\" he said. \"Have you ever heard the name Berenger Sauniere?\"\n\nThe older man thought for a moment, then shook his head.\n\n\"Is that a name anyone has ever mentioned in this village?\"\n\n\"I'm not accustomed to monitoring my parishioners' conversations.\"\n\n\"Nor did I mean to say that you were. But is it a name you recall anyone mentioning?\"\n\nHe shook his head again.\n\n\"When was this church built?\"\n\n\"In 1732. But the first building was erected here in the thirteenth century. Many came after. So unfortunate, but nothing remains from those early structures.\"\n\nThe older man's attention was diverted to Geoffrey, who was still wandering near the altar.\n\n\"Does he bother you?\" Mark asked.\n\n\"What is he looking for?\"\n\nGood question, Mark thought. \"Perhaps he's in prayer, wanting to be near the altar?\"\n\nThe abbe faced him. \"You don't lie well.\"\n\nMark realized the old man standing before him was far smarter than he wanted his listener to believe. \"Why don't you tell me what I want to know.\"\n\n\"You look just like him.\"\n\nHe fought to repress his surprise. \"You knew my father?\"\n\n\"He came to this area many times. He and I spoke often.\"\n\n\"Did he tell you anything?\"\n\nThe priest shook his head. \"You know better.\"\n\n\"Do you know what I'm to do?\"\n\n\"Your father told me that if you ever made it here, you should already know what it is for you to do.\"\n\n\"You know he's dead?\"\n\n\"Of course. I was told. He took his own life.\"\n\n\"Not necessarily.\"\n\n\"That's fanciful thinking. Your father was an unhappy man. He came here looking but, sadly, found nothing. That frustrated him. When I heard that he took his own life, I was not surprised. There was no peace for him on this earth.\"\n\n\"He spoke to you about those things?\"\n\n\"Many times.\"\n\n\"Why did you lie to me about never hearing the name Berenger Sauniere?\"\n\n\"I didn't lie. I've never heard that name before.\"\n\n\"My father never mentioned him?\"\n\n\"Not once.\"\n\nAnother riddle stood before him, as frustrating and irritating as Geoffrey, who was now walking back toward them. The church surrounding him clearly contained no answers, so he asked, \"What about the abbey of Hildemar, the castle he turned over to Agulous in the tenth century? Is any of that still standing?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. Those ruins still exist. Up in the mountains. Not far.\"\n\n\"It's no longer an abbey?\"\n\n\"Goodness no. It hasn't been occupied in three hundred years.\"\n\n\"Did my father ever mention the place?\"\n\n\"He visited there many times, but found nothing. Which only added to his frustration.\"\n\nThey needed to go. But he wanted to know, \"Who owns the abbey ruins?\"\n\n\"They were bought years ago. By a Dane. Henrik Thorvaldsen.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "ABBEY DES FONTAINES",
                "text": "[ 11:40 AM ]\n\nDE ROQUEFORT STARED ACROSS THE TABLE AT THE CHAPLAIN. THE priest had been waiting for him when he returned to the abbey from Givors. Which was fine. After their confrontation yesterday, he needed to speak with the Italian, too.\n\n\"You will not ever question me,\" he made clear. He possessed the authority to remove the chaplain if, as Rule stated, he caused disturbances or was more a hindrance than an asset.\n\n\"It's my job to be your conscience. Chaplains have served masters in this way since the Beginning.\"\n\nWhat went unsaid was the fact that any decision to remove the chaplain had to be approved by the brotherhood. Which could prove difficult, since this man was popular. So he retreated a bit. \"You'll not challenge me before the brothers.\"\n\n\"I was not challenging you. Merely noting that the deaths of two men weigh heavily on all of our minds.\"\n\n\"And not on mine?\"\n\n\"You must tread carefully.\"\n\nThey were sitting behind the closed door of his chamber, the window open, the distant waterfall a gentle roar. \"That approach has taken us nowhere.\"\n\n\"Whether you realize it or not, those men dying has shaken your authority. There's talk already, and you've only been master a few days.\"\n\n\"I will not tolerate dissension.\"\n\nA sad but tranquil smile came to the chaplain's lips. \"You sound just like the man you so opposed. What's changed? Has the seneschal so affected you?\"\n\n\"He's not seneschal any longer.\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, that's the only name I know him by. You apparently know far more.\"\n\nBut he wondered if the cagey Venetian sitting across from him was being truthful. He'd heard talk, too, his spies reporting that the chaplain was quite interested in what the master was doing. Far more than any spiritual adviser needed to be. He wondered if this man, who professed to be his friend, was positioning himself for more. After all, he'd done the same thing years ago himself.\n\nHe actually wanted to talk about his dilemma, explain what happened, what he knew, seek some guidance, but sharing that with anyone would be foolhardy. Claridon was bad enough, but at least he was not of the Order. This man was altogether different. He had the potential to become an enemy. So he voiced the obvious. \"I'm searching for our Great Devise, and I'm close to locating it.\"\n\n\"But at the price of two dead.\"\n\n\"Many have died for what we believe,\" he said, voice rising. In the first two centuries of our existence, twenty thousand brothers gave their lives. Two more dying now is insignificant.\"\n\n\"Human life has a much greater value now than then.\" He noticed the chaplain's voice had lowered into a whisper.\n\n\"No, the value is the same. What's changed is our lack of dedication.\"\n\n\"This not a war. There are no infidels holding the Holy Land. We're talking about finding something that most likely doesn't exist.\"\n\n\"You speak blasphemy.\"\n\n\"I speak the truth. And you know it. You think finding our Great Devise will change everything. It will change nothing. You must still garner the respect of all who serve you.\"\n\n\"Doing what I promised will generate that respect.\"\n\n\"Have you thought this quest through? It's not as simple as you think. The issues here are far greater than they were in the Beginning. The world is no longer illiterate and ignorant. You have much more to contend with than the brothers did then. Unfortunately for you, there exists not one mention of Jesus Christ in any secular Greek, Roman, or Jewish historical account. Not one reference in any piece of surviving literature. Just the New Testament. That's the whole sum of His existence. And why is that? You know the answer. If Jesus lived at all, He preached His message in the obscurity of Judea. No one paid Him any mind. The Romans couldn't have cared less, provided He wasn't inciting rebellion. And the Jews did little more than argue among themselves, which suited the Romans. Jesus came and went. He was inconsequential. Yet He now commands the attention of billions. Christianity is the world's largest religion. And He is, in every sense, their Messiah. The risen Lord. And nothing you find will change that.\"\n\n\"What if His bones are there?\"\n\n\"How would you know they're His bones?\"\n\n\"How did those nine original knights know? And look at what they accomplished. Kings and queens bowed to their will. How else can that be explained except through what they knew.\"\n\n\"And you think they shared that knowledge? What did they do\u2014show the bones of Christ to each king, each monetary donor, each one of the faithful?\"\n\n\"I have no idea what they did. But whatever their method it proved effective. Men flocked to the Order, wanting to be a part of it. Secular authorities courted its favor. Why can't that be again?\"\n\n\"It can. Only not in the manner you think.\"\n\n\"It galls me. For all we did for the Church. Twenty thousand brothers, six masters, all died defending Jesus Christ. The Knights Hospitallers' sacrifice cannot compare. Yet there is not one Templar saint, and there are many canonized Hospitallers. I want to right that injustice.\"\n\n\"How is that possible?\" The chaplain did not wait for him to answer. \"What is will not change.\"\n\nHe thought again of the note. THE ANSWER HAS BEEN FOUND. And the phone resting in his pocket. I WILL CALL BEFORE THE SUN SETS WITH INFORMATION. His fingers lightly caressed the bulge of the cell phone in his trouser pocket. The chaplain was still talking, murmuring more about \"the quest for nothing.\" Royce Claridon was still in the archives, searching.\n\nBut only one thought raced through his mind.\n\nWhy won't the phone ring?\n\n\"HENRIK,\" MALONE SCREAMED. \"I CAN'T TAKE MUCH MORE OF this.\"\n\nHe'd just listened to Mark's explanation that the ruins of the nearby abbey belonged to Thorvaldsen. They stood in the trees, half a mile from St. Agulous, where they'd parked and waited.\n\n\"Cotton, I had no idea that I own that property.\"\n\n\"We're supposed to believe that?\" Stephanie said.\n\n\"I don't give a damn whether you believe me or not. I knew nothing of this till a moment ago.\"\n\n\"How do you explain it then?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"I can't. I can only say that Lars borrowed a hundred and forty thousand dollars from me three months before he died. He never said what the money was for and I didn't ask.\"\n\n\"You just gave him that much money with no questions?\" Stephanie asked.\n\n\"He needed it, so I gave it to him. I trusted him.\"\n\n\"The abbe in town said the buyer bought the property from the regional government. They were divesting themselves of the ruins and had few takers, as it's up in the mountains and in poor condition. It was sold at auction here in St. Augulous.\" Mark faced Thorvaldsen. \"Yours was the high bid. The priest knew Dad and said he wasn't the one who actually bid.\"\n\n\"Then Lars engaged someone to do it on his behalf, because it was not me. He then placed the title in my name to give him cover. Lars was quite paranoid. If I owned that property and knew it, I would have said something last night.\"\n\n\"Not necessarily,\" Stephanie murmured.\n\n\"Look, Stephanie. I'm not afraid of you or any one of you. I don't have to explain myself. But I consider you all my friends, and if I owned the property and knew it, I'd tell you.\"\n\n\"Why don't we assume Henrik is telling the truth,\" Cassiopeia said. She'd stayed uncharacteristically quiet during the debate. \"And get on up there. Darkness comes quick in the mountains. I for one want to see what's there.\"\n\nMalone agreed. \"She's right. Let's go. We can fight about this later.\"\n\nThe drive up into the higher elevations took fifteen minutes and required strong nerves and good brakes. They followed the abbe's directions and eventually caught sight of the crumbling priory, resting on an eagle's aerie, its shattered square tower flanked by a merciless precipice. The road ended about half a mile from the ruins and the hike up, along a trail of emaciated rock flowered with thyme, beneath a canopy of great pines, took another ten minutes.\n\nThey entered the site.\n\nSigns of neglect lay everywhere. The thick walls were bare and Malone allowed his fingers to slip along the gray-green granite schist, each stone surely quarried from the mountains and worked with faithful patience by ancient hands. A once grand gallery opened to the sky with columns and capitals that centuries of weather and light had tarnished beyond recognition. Moss, orange lichens, and gray wiry grass littered the ground, the stone floor long ago returned to sand. Grasshoppers sang a loud castanet.\n\nThe rooms were hard to delineate, as the roof and most of the walls lay collapsed, but the monk cells were evident, as was a large hall and another spacious room that might have been a library or scriptorium. Malone knew that life here would have been frugal, thrifty, and austere.\n\n\"Quite a place you own,\" he said to Henrik.\n\n\"I was just admiring what a hundred and forty thousand dollars could buy twelve years ago.\"\n\nCassiopeia seemed enthralled. \"You can imagine the monks harvesting a meager crop from the little bit of fertile soil. Summers here were brief, the days short. You can almost hear them chanting.\"\n\n\"This place would have been sufficiently forlorn,\" Thorvaldsen said. \"An oblivion only for themselves.\"\n\n\"Lars titled this property in your name,\" Stephanie said, \"for a reason. He came here for a reason. Something has to be here.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Cassiopeia noted. \"But the abbe in town told Mark that Lars found nothing. This could be more of the perpetual chases he engaged in.\"\n\nMark shook his head. \"The cryptogram led us here. Dad was here. He didn't find anything, but he thought it important enough to buy. This has to be the place.\"\n\nMalone sat atop one of the chunks of stone and stared up at the sky. \"We have maybe five or six hours of daylight left. I suggest we make the most if it. I'm sure it gets pretty cold up here at night, and these fleece-lined jackets aren't going to be enough.\"\n\n\"I brought some equipment and gear in the Rover,\" Cassiopeia said. \"I assumed we could be underground, so I have light bars, flashlights, and a small generator.\"\n\n\"Well, aren't you Johnny-on-the-spot,\" Malone said.\n\n\"Here,\" Geoffrey called out.\n\nMalone glanced farther into the decayed priory. He'd not noticed that Geoffrey had wandered off.\n\nThey all hustled deeper into the ruin and found Geoffrey standing outside what was once a Romanesque doorway. Little remained of its craftsmanship beyond a faint image of human-headed bulls, winged lions, and a palm-leaf motif.\n\n\"The church,\" Geoffrey said. \"They carved it from rock.\"\n\nMalone could see that indeed the walls beyond were not human-made, but were part of the precipice that towered above the former abbey. \"We'll need those flashlights,\" he said to Cassiopeia.\n\n\"No, you won't,\" Geoffrey said. \"There's light inside.\"\n\nMalone led the way in. Bees hummed in the shadows. Dusty shafts of light poured through slits cut through the rock at varying angles, apparently designed to take advantage of the drifting sun. Something caught his eye. He stepped close to one of the rock walls, hewn smooth but now bare of any decoration except a carving about ten feet above him. The crest consisted of a helmet with a swathe of linen dropping on each side of a male face. The features were gone, the nose worn smooth, the eyes blank and lifeless. On top was a sphinx. Below was a stone shield with three hammers.\n\n\"That's Templar,\" Mark said. \"I've seen another like it at our abbey.\"\n\n\"What's it doing here?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"The Catalans who lived in this region during the fourteenth century had no love for the French king. Templars were treated with kindness here, even after the Purge. That's one reason the area was chosen as a refuge.\"\n\nThe ponderous walls rose high to a rounded ceiling. Frescoes surely once adorned everything, but not a remnant remained. Water leaking in through the porous rock had long ago erased all artistic vestiges.\n\n\"It's like a cave,\" Stephanie said.\n\n\"More a fortress,\" Cassiopeia noted. \"This could well have been the abbey's last line of defense.\"\n\nMalone had been thinking the same thing. \"But there's a problem.\" He motioned to the dim surroundings. \"No other way out.\"\n\nSomething else caught his attention. He stepped close and focused on the wall, most of which rose in shadow. He strained hard. \"I wish we had one of those flashlights.\"\n\nThe others approached.\n\nTen feet up he saw the faint remnants of letters roughly hewn on the gray stone.\n\n\"P, R, N, V, I, R,\" he asked.\n\n\"No,\" Cassiopeia said. \"There's more. Another I, maybe an E and another R.\"\n\nHe strained in the dimness to interpret the writing.\n\nPRIER EN VENIR.\n\nMalone's mind came alive. He recalled the words at the center of Marie d'Hautpoul's gravestone. REDDIS RcGIS CcLLIS ARCIS. And what Claridon said about them in Avignon.\n\nReddis means \"to give back, to restore something previously taken.\" Regis derives from rex, which is king. Cella refers to a storeroom. Arcis stems from arx \u2014 a stronghold, fortress, citadel.\n\nThe words had seemed meaningless at the time. But perhaps they simply needed rearranging.\n\nStoreroom, fortress, restore something previously taken, king.\n\nBy adding a few prepositions, the message might be, In a storeroom, at a stronghold fortress, restore something previously taken from the king.\n\nAnd the arrow that stretched down the center of the gravestone, between the words, starting at the top with the letters P-S and ending at PRc-CUM.\n\nPre-cum. Latin for \"pray to come.\"\n\nHe stared again at the letters scratched into the rock."
            },
            {
                "title": "PRIER EN VENIR",
                "text": "French for \"pray to come.\"\n\nHe smiled and told them what he thought. \"The abbe Bigou was a clever one, I'll give him that.\"\n\n\"That arrow on the gravestone,\" Mark said, \"had to be significant. It's dead in the center, in a place of prominence.\"\n\nMalone's senses were now alert, his mind surging through the information, and he started to take notice of the floor. Many of the flagstones were gone, the remaining cracked and misshapen, but he noticed a pattern. A series of squares, framed by a narrow stone line, ran from front to back and left to right.\n\nHe counted.\n\nIn one of the framed rectangles he tallied seven stones across, nine down. He counted another section. The same. Then another.\n\n\"The floor is arranged seven, nine,\" he told them.\n\nMark and Henrik moved toward the altar, themselves counting. \"And there are nine sections from the rear door to the altar,\" Mark said.\n\n\"And seven go across,\" Stephanie said, as she finished finding a final floor section near an outer wall.\n\n\"Okay, we seem to be in the right place,\" Malone said. He thought again about the headstone. Pray to come. He gazed up at the French words scratched into the stone, then down at the floor. Bees continued to buzz near the altar. \"Let's get those light bars and that generator in here. We need to see what we're doing.\"\n\n\"I think we also need to stay tonight,\" Cassiopeia said. \"The nearest inn is in Elne, thirty miles away. We should camp here.\"\n\n\"We have supplies?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"We can get them,\" she said. \"Elne is a fairly good-sized town. We can buy what we need there without drawing any attention. But I don't want to leave.\"\n\nHe could see that none of the others wanted to go, either. An excitement was stirring. He could feel it, too. The riddle was no longer some abstract concept, impossible to understand. Instead, the answer lay somewhere around them. And contrary to what he'd told Cassiopeia yesterday, he wanted to find it.\n\n\"I'll go,\" Geoffrey said. \"Each of you needs to stay and decide what we do next. It's for you, not me.\"\n\n\"We appreciate that,\" Thorvaldsen said.\n\nCassiopeia reached into her pocket and produced a wad of euros. \"You'll need money.\"\n\nGeoffrey took the funds and smiled. \"Just give me a list and I'll be back by nightfall.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 71",
                "text": "MALONE RAKED THE FLASHLIGHT'S BEAM ACROSS THE INSIDE OF the church, searching the rock walls for more clues. They'd off-loaded all of the equipment Cassiopeia had brought and hauled it into the abbey. Stephanie and Cassiopeia were outside, fashioning a camp. Henrik had volunteered to locate firewood. He and Mark had come back inside to see if there was anything they'd missed.\n\n\"This church has been empty a long time,\" Mark said. \"Three hundred years, the priest in town said.\"\n\n\"Must have been remarkable in its day.\"\n\n\"This type of construction isn't unusual. There are subterranean churches all over the Languedoc. At Vals, up near Carcassonne, is one of the most famous. It's in good shape. Still has frescoes. All the churches in this region were painted. That was the style. Unfortunately, little of that art has survived anywhere thanks to the Revolution.\"\n\n\"Must have been a tough life up here.\"\n\n\"Monastics were a rare breed. They had no newspapers, radio, television, music, theater. Only a few books and the frescoes in church as intoxicants.\"\n\nMalone continued to survey the almost theatrical darkness that surrounded him, broken only by a chalky fading light that colored the few details as though snow lay heavy inside.\n\n\"We have to assume the cryptogram in the marshal's report is authentic,\" Mark said. \"There's no reason to think it's not.\"\n\n\"Except the marshal disappeared shortly after he filed the report.\"\n\n\"I always believed that particular marshal was driven like de Roquefort. I think he went after the treasure. He must have known the story of the de Blanchefort family secret. That information, and the fact that Abbe Bigou may have known the secret, has been a part of our Chronicles for centuries. He could have assumed that Bigou left both cryptograms and that they led to the Great Devise. Being an ambitious man, he went to get it himself.\"\n\n\"Then why record the cryptogram?\"\n\n\"What did it matter? He had the solution, which the Abbe Gelis gave him. No one else even had a clue as to what it meant. So why not file the report and show your master that you've been working?\"\n\n\"Using that line of thinking, the marshal could have killed Gelis and simply gone back and recorded what happened afterward as a way to cover his tracks.\"\n\n\"That's entirely possible.\"\n\nMalone stepped close to the letters \u2014 PRIER EN VENIR \u2014 scratched in the wall. \"Nothing else survived in here,\" he muttered.\n\n\"That's true. Which is a shame. There are lots of niches, and those would have all contained statues. Combined with the frescoes, this would have once been a decorated place.\"\n\n\"So how did those three words manage to survive?\"\n\n\"They barely have.\"\n\n\"Just enough,\" he said, thinking maybe Bigou had made sure.\n\nHe thought again of Marie de Blanchefort's gravestone. The double-sided arrow and PRc-CUM. Pray to come. He stared at the floor and the seven\u2013nine arrangement. \"Pews would have once been in here, right?\"\n\n\"Sure. Wooden. Long gone.\"\n\n\"If Sauniere learned the solution to the cryptogram from Gelis or solved it himself\u2014\"\n\n\"The marshal said in his report that Gelis didn't trust Sauniere.\"\n\nMalone shook his head. \"Could be more misdirection by the marshal. Sauniere clearly deduced something, unbeknownst to the marshal. So let's assume he found the Great Devise. From everything we know, Sauniere returned to it many times. You were telling me back in Rennes about how he and his mistress would leave town, then return with rocks for the grotto he was building. He could have come here to make a withdrawal from his private bank.\"\n\n\"In Sauniere's day, that trip would have been easy by rail.\"\n\n\"So he would have needed to be able to access the cache, while at the same time keeping the location secret.\"\n\nHe stared up again at the carving. PRIER EN VENIR. Pray to come.\n\nThen he knelt.\n\n\"Makes sense, but what do you see from there that I don't from here?\" Mark asked.\n\nHis gaze searched the church. Nothing was left inside save the altar, twenty feet away. The stone top was about three inches thick, supported by a rectangular support fashioned from granite blocks. He counted the blocks in one horizontal row. Nine. Then he counted the number vertically. Seven. He shone the flashlight beam onto the lichen-infested stones. Thick wavy lines of mortar were still there. He traced several of the paths with the light, then brought the beam up toward the underside of the granite top.\n\nAnd saw it.\n\nNow he knew.\n\nHe smiled.\n\nPray to come.\n\nClever.\n\nDE ROQUEFORT WAS NOT LISTENING TO THE TREASURER'S PRATTLE. Something about the abbey's budget and overages. The abbey was funded with an endowment that totalled in the millions of euros, funds long ago acquired and religiously maintained so as to ensure that the Order would never suffer financially. The abbey was nearly self-supporting. Its fields, farms, and bakery produced the majority of its needs. Its winery and dairy generated much of their drink. And water was in such abundance that it was piped down to the valley, where it was bottled and sold all across France. Of course, a lot of what was needed to supplement meals and maintenance had to be purchased. But income from wine and water sales, along with visitors' fees, more than provided the necessary sources. So what was all this about overages?\n\n\"Are we in need of money?\" he interrupted and asked.\n\n\"Not at all, Master.\"\n\n\"Then why are you bothering me?\"\n\n\"The master must be informed of all monetary decisions.\"\n\nThe idiot was right. But he didn't want to be bothered. Still, the treasurer might be helpful. \"Have you studied our financial history?\"\n\nThe question seem to catch the man off guard. \"Of course, Master. It's required of all who become treasurer. I'm presently teaching those below me.\"\n\n\"At the time of the Purge, what was our wealth?\"\n\n\"Incalculable. The Order held over nine thousand land estates, and it's impossible to value that acreage.\"\n\n\"Our liquid wealth?\"\n\n\"Again, hard to say. There would have been gold dinars, Byzantine coins, gold florins, drachmas, marks, along with unminted silver and gold. De Molay came to France in 1306 with twelve pack horses loaded with unminted silver, which was never accounted for. Then there is the matter of the items we held for safekeeping.\"\n\nHe knew what the man was referring to. The Order had pioneered the concept of safe depositories, holding wills and precious documents for men of means, along with jewels and other personal items. Its reputation for trustworthiness had been impeccable, which allowed the service to flourish throughout Christendom\u2014all, of course, at a fee.\n\n\"The items being held,\" the treasurer said, \"were lost at the Purge. The inventories were with our archives, which disappeared, too. So there's no way to even estimate what was being held. But it's safe to say that the total wealth would be in the billions of euros today.\"\n\nHe knew about hay carts hauled south by four chosen brothers and their leader, Gilbert de Blanchefort, who'd been instructed first to tell no one of his hiding place, and second to assure that what he knew was passed to others in an appropriate manner. De Blanchefort performed his job well. Seven hundred years had passed, and still the location was a secret.\n\nWhat was so precious that Jacques de Molay ordered its secretion with such elaborate precautions?\n\nHe'd wondered about the answer to that inquiry for thirty years.\n\nThe phone in his cassock vibrated, which startled him.\n\nFinally.\n\n\"What is it, Master?\" the treasurer asked.\n\nHe caught hold of himself. \"Leave me, now.\"\n\nThe man stood from the table, bowed, then withdrew. De Roquefort flipped open the phone and said, \"I hope this is not a waste of my time.\"\n\n\"How can the truth ever be a waste of time?\"\n\nHe instantly recognized the voice.\n\nGeoffrey.\n\n\"And why would I believe a word you say?\" he asked.\n\n\"Because you're my master.\"\n\n\"Your loyalty was to my predecessor.\"\n\n\"While he breathed, that's true. But after his death, my oath to the brotherhood commands that I be loyal to whoever wears the white cassock\u2014\"\n\n\"Even if you don't care for that man.\"\n\n\"I believe you did the same for many years.\"\n\n\"And assaulting your master is part of your loyalty?\" He'd not forgotten the slap to the temple from a gun butt before Geoffrey and Mark Nelle escaped the abbey.\n\n\"A necessary demonstration for the seneschal's benefit.\"\n\n\"Where did you obtain this phone?\"\n\n\"The former master gave it to me. It was to be of use during our excursion beyond the walls. But I decided on a different use.\"\n\n\"You and the master planned well.\"\n\n\"It was important to him that we succeed. That's why he sent the journal to Stephanie Nelle. To involve her.\"\n\n\"That journal is worthless.\"\n\n\"So I am told. But that was new information to me. I only learned yesterday.\"\n\nHe asked what he wanted to know. \"Have they solved the cryptogram? The one in the marshal's report?\"\n\n\"Indeed, they have.\"\n\n\"So tell me, brother. Where are you?\"\n\n\"St. Agulous. At the ruined abbey just to the north of the village. Not far from you.\"\n\n\"And our Great Devise is there?\"\n\n\"This is where all clues lead. They are, at this moment, working to locate the hiding place. I was sent to Elne for supplies.\"\n\nHe was beginning to believe the man on the other end of the phone. But he wondered if that was from desperation or good judgment. \"Brother, I'll kill you if this is a lie.\"\n\n\"I don't doubt that declaration. You've killed before.\"\n\nHe knew he shouldn't, but he had to ask, \"And who have I killed?\"\n\n\"Surely you were responsible for Ernst Scoville's death. Lars Nelle? That's more difficult to determine, at least from what the former master told me.\"\n\nHe wanted to probe further but knew that any interest he showed would be nothing but a tacit admission, so he simply said, \"You are a dreamer, brother.\"\n\n\"I've been called worse.\"\n\n\"What's your motive?\"\n\n\"I want to be a knight. You're the one who makes that determination. In the chapel, a few nights ago, when you arrested the seneschal, you made clear that that wasn't going to happen. I determined then that I'd be taking a different course\u2014one the former master would not like. So I went along. Learned what I could. And waited until I could offer what you really want. In return, I seek only forgiveness.\"\n\n\"If what you say is true, you shall have it.\"\n\n\"I'll be returning to the ruin shortly. They plan to camp there through the night. You've already seen how resourceful they are, both individually and collectively. Though I'd never presume to substitute my judgment for yours, I'd recommend decisive action.\"\n\n\"I assure you, brother, my response will be most decisive.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 72",
                "text": "MALONE STOOD AND MARCHED TOWARD THE ALTAR. IN THE BEAM of his flashlight he'd noticed that there was no mortar joint beneath the top slab. The seven\u2013nine arrangement of the support stones had drawn his attention, and kneeling had allowed him to see the crack.\n\nAt the altar he bent down and shone the light closer. \"This top is not attached.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't expect it to be,\" Mark said. \"Gravity held them in place. Look at it. The thing's what? Three inches thick and six feet long?\"\n\n\"Bigou hid his cryptogram in the altar column in Rennes. I wondered why he chose that particular hiding place. Unique, wouldn't you say? To get to it, he had to lift the slab enough to free the locking pin, then slide the glass vial into the niche. Shift the top back and you have a great hiding place. But there's more to it. Bigou was sending a message by that selection.\" He set the flashlight down. \"We need to move this.\"\n\nMark walked to one end and Malone positioned himself at the other. Grasping each side with his hands, he tested to see if the stone would move.\n\nIt did, ever so slightly.\n\n\"You're right,\" he said. \"It's just sitting there. I don't see any reason for niceties. Shove it off.\"\n\nTogether, they waddled the stone left and right, then worked it enough so that gravity allowed it to crash to the floor.\n\nMalone stared into the rectangular opening they'd exposed and saw loosely packed stones.\n\n\"The thing is full of rocks,\" Mark said.\n\nMalone smiled. \"Sure is. Let's get 'em out.\"\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"If you were Sauniere and didn't want anyone to follow your tracks, that stone top is a good deterrent. But these rocks would be even better. Like you told me yesterday. We need to think like folks thought a hundred years ago. Look around. Nobody would have come here looking for treasure. This was nothing but a ruin. And who would have disassembled this altar? The thing has been standing here for centuries unmolested. But if someone did do all that, why not another layer of defense.\"\n\nThe rectangular support stood about three feet off the floor, and they quickly tossed the stones aside. Ten minutes later the support was empty. Dirt filled the bottom.\n\nMalone hopped inside and thought he detected a gentle vibration. He bent down and probed with his fingers. The parched soil possessed the consistency of desert sand. Mark shone the light while he scooped the earth away with a cupped hand. Six inches deep he hit something. With both hands he cleared away a foot-wide crater and saw wooden planks.\n\nHe looked up and grinned. \"Ain't it nice to be right.\"\n\nDE ROQUEFORT STORMED INTO THE ROOM AND FACED HIS COUNCIL. He'd hastily ordered an assemblage of the Order's officers after finishing his telephone conversation with Geoffrey.\n\n\"The Great Devise has been found,\" he said.\n\nAstonishment crossed the assembled faces.\n\n\"The former seneschal and his allies have located the hiding place. I have a brother embedded with them as a spy. He's reported their success. It's time to reclaim our heritage.\"\n\n\"What do you propose?\" one of them asked.\n\n\"We shall take a contingent of knights and seize them.\"\n\n\"More bloodshed?\" the chaplain asked.\n\n\"Not if the action is handled with care.\"\n\nThe chaplain seemed unimpressed. \"The former seneschal and Geoffrey, who apparently is your ally since we know of no other brother in league with them, have already shot two brothers. There's no reason to suggest that they would not shoot more.\"\n\nHe'd heard enough. \"Chaplain, this is not a matter of faith. Your guidance is not needed.\"\n\n\"The safety of the members of this Order is all our responsibility.\"\n\n\"And you dare to say that I don't have the safety of this Order in mind?\" He allowed his voice to rise. \"Do you question my authority? Are you challenging my decision? Tell me, Chaplain, I want to know.\"\n\nIf the Venetian was intimidated, nothing in his countenance betrayed fear. Instead, the man simply said, \"You're my master. I owe you allegiance... no matter what.\"\n\nHe did not like the insolent tone.\n\n\"But, Master,\" the chaplain continued, \"was it not you who said that we should all be a part of decisions of this magnitude?\" A few of the other officers nodded. \"Did you not tell the brotherhood in conclave that you would chart a new course?\"\n\n\"Chaplain, we are about to embark on the greatest mission this Order has undertaken in centuries. I have not the time to debate with you.\"\n\n\"I thought giving praise to our Lord and God was our greatest mission. And that is a matter of faith, to which I am qualified to speak.\"\n\nHe'd had enough. \"You are dismissed.\"\n\nThe chaplain did not move. None of the others said a word.\n\n\"If you do not leave immediately, I'll have you seized and brought before me later for punishment.\" He paused a moment. \"Which will not be pleasant.\"\n\nThe chaplain stood and tipped his head. \"I will go. As you command.\"\n\n\"And we shall talk later, I assure you.\"\n\nHe waited until the chaplain left then said to the others, \"We have searched for our Great Devise a long time. It's now within our grasp. What that repository contains does not belong to anyone but us. Our heritage is there. I, for one, intend to claim what is ours. Twelve knights will assist me. I will leave it to you to select those men. Have your choices fully armed and assembled in the gymnasium in one hour.\"\n\nMalone called out for Stephanie and Cassiopeia and told them to bring the shovel they'd off-loaded from Cassiopeia's Rover. They appeared with Henrik, and as they entered the church, Malone explained what he and Mark had found.\n\n\"Pretty smart,\" Cassiopeia said to him.\n\n\"I have my moments.\"\n\n\"We need to get the rest of that dirt out of there,\" Stephanie said.\n\n\"Hand me the shovel.\"\n\nHe bailed out the loose soil. A few minutes later three blackened wooden planks were revealed. Half were bound together with metal straps. The other half formed a hinged door that opened upward.\n\nHe bent down and lightly caressed the metal. \"The iron's corroded. These hinges are gone. A hundred years of exposure has worked on them.\" He stood and used the shovel to chip away their remnants.\n\n\"What do you mean, a hundred years?\" Stephanie asked.\n\n\"Sauniere built that door,\" Cassiopeia said. \"The wood is in fairly good shape, certainly not centuries old. And it appears to have been planed to a smooth finish, which is not something you would see in medieval lumber. Sauniere had to have an easy way in and out. So when he found this entrance, he rebuilt the door.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" Malone said. \"Which explains how he handled that heavy stone top. He just slid it halfway off, took out the rocks over the door, climbed down, then put everything back when he was through. From everything I've heard about him, he was in good shape. Damn clever, too.\"\n\nHe wedged the shovel into the gap at the door's edge and fulcrumed the door upward. Mark reached in and grabbed hold. Malone tossed the shovel aside and together they freed the hatch from its frame, exposing a gaping orifice.\n\nThorvaldsen stared into the void. \"Amazing. This might actually be the place.\"\n\nStephanie shone a flashlight into the opening. A ladder stood against one of the stone walls. \"What do you think? Will it hold?\"\n\n\"One way to find out.\"\n\nMalone extended a leg and gently applied weight to the first rung. The ladder was fashioned out of thick lumber, which he hoped was still bound with nails. He could see a few rusted heads. He pressed harder, holding on to the top of the altar support just in case something gave way. But the rung held. He placed his other foot on the ladder and tested more.\n\n\"I think it'll hold.\"\n\n\"I'm lighter,\" Cassiopeia said. \"I'd be glad to go first.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"If you don't mind, I'd like the honor.\"\n\n\"You see, I was right,\" she said. \"You do want this.\"\n\nYes, he did. What lay below was beckoning him, like the search for rare books through obscure shelves. You never knew what might be found.\n\nStill gripping the edge of the altar support, he lowered himself to the second rung. They were about eighteen inches apart. He quickly transferred his hands to the top of the ladder and descended one more rung.\n\n\"Feels okay,\" he said.\n\nHe kept heading down, careful to test each rung. Above him, Stephanie and Cassiopeia were searching the darkness with their lights. In the halo of their combined beams he saw that he'd come to the bottom of the ladder. The ground was the next step. Everything was covered with a fine gravel and stones the size of fists and skulls.\n\n\"Toss me a flashlight,\" he said.\n\nThorvaldsen dropped one of the torches to him. He caught it and focused the beam around him. The ladder rose about fifteen feet from floor to ceiling. He saw that the exit stood in the center of a natural corridor, one that millions of years of rain and melting snow had forged through the limestone. He knew the Pyrenees were riddled with caves and tunnels.\n\n\"Why don't you jump off?\" Cassiopeia asked.\n\n\"It's too easy.\" He was alert to a chill that had settled in the hollow of his back, one that did not come solely from the cold air. \"I'm going to swing around to the back side of the ladder. Drop one of those stones straight down.\" He positioned himself out of the way.\n\n\"You clear?\" Stephanie asked.\n\n\"Fire away.\"\n\nThe rock plunged through the opening. He followed its path and watched as it struck the ground, then kept going.\n\nLight beams probed the impact site.\n\n\"You were right,\" Cassiopeia said. \"That hole was just under the surface, ready for someone to leap off the ladder.\"\n\n\"Drop some more rocks around it and find solid ground.\"\n\nFour more rained down and thudded onto hard earth. He knew where to leap, so he dropped off the ladder and used the flashlight to examine the booby trap. The cavity was about three feet square and at least three feet deep. He reached inside and retrieved some of the wood that had been laid loosely across the top. The edges were tongue-and-grooved, the boards thin enough to shatter away at the weight of a man, but thick enough to shoulder a layer of silt and gravel. At the bottom of the hole were metal pyramids, sharpened to a point, wide at the base, waiting to snare an unsuspecting intruder. Time had dulled their patina, but not their effectiveness.\n\n\"Sauniere was serious about this,\" he said.\n\n\"Those could have been Templar traps,\" Mark noted. \"Is that brass?\"\n\n\"Bronze.\"\n\n\"The Order was expert in metallurgy. Brass, bronze, copper\u2014all were used. The Church forbade scientific experimentation, so they learned things like that from the Arabs.\"\n\n\"The wood on top could not be seven hundred years old,\" Cassiopeia said. \"Sauniere must have repaired the Templar's defenses.\"\n\nNot what he wanted to hear. \"Which means this is probably just the first of many traps.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 73",
                "text": "Malone watched as Stephanie, mark, and Cassiopeia climbed down the ladder. Thorvaldsen stayed on the surface, waiting for Geoffrey to return, ready to hand down tools, if needed.\n\n\"I meant what I said,\" Mark made clear. \"The Templars were pioneers in booby traps. I've read accounts in the Chronicles of techniques they developed.\"\n\n\"Just keep your eyes open,\" Malone said. \"If we want to find whatever there is to find, we have to look.\"\n\n\"It's after three,\" Cassiopeia said. \"The sun will be gone in two hours. It's cold enough down here as it is. Nightfall will be brisk.\"\n\nHis jacket kept his chest warm, but gloves and thermal socks would be welcomed, which were some of the supplies Geoffrey was obtaining. Only the light spilling in from the ceiling illuminated the passageway that stretched in both directions. Without flashlights, Malone doubted if they'd be able to see a finger touch their nose. \"Daylight's not going to matter. It's all artificial light down here. We just need Geoffrey to get back with food and warmer clothes. Henrik,\" he called out. \"Let us know when the good brother returns.\"\n\n\"Safe hunting, Cotton.\"\n\nHis mind swelled with possibilities. \"What do you make of this?\" he asked the others.\n\n\"This could be part of a horreum,\" Cassiopeia said. \"When the Romans ruled this area they established underground storerooms for holding perishable goods. An early version of a refrigerated warehouse. Several have survived. This could have been one.\"\n\n\"And the Templars knew of it?\" Stephanie asked.\n\n\"They had them, too,\" Mark said. \"They learned from the Romans. What she says makes sense. When de Molay told Gilbert de Blanchefort to take away the treasure of the temple in advance, he could have easily chosen a place like this. Beneath a nondescript church, at a minor abbey, with no connection to the Order.\"\n\nMalone pointed his flashlight ahead, then turned around and shone the beam in the other direction. \"Which way?\"\n\n\"Good question,\" Stephanie said.\n\n\"You and Mark go that way,\" he said. \"Cassiopeia and I will go the other.\" He could see that neither Mark nor Stephanie liked that decision. \"We don't have time for you two to fight. Put it aside. Do your jobs. That's what you'd tell me, Stephanie.\"\n\nShe didn't argue with him. \"He's right. Let's go,\" she said to Mark.\n\nMalone watched as they dissolved into the blackness.\n\n\"Clever, Malone,\" Cassiopeia whispered. \"But do you think it wise to send those two out together? Lots of issues between them.\"\n\n\"Nothing like a little tension to make them appreciate one another.\"\n\n\"That true for me and you, too?\"\n\nHe aimed his flashlight into her face. \"Lead the way and let's find out.\"\n\nDe Roquefort and twelve brothers approached the ancient ruined abbey from the south. They'd avoided the village of St. Agulous and parked their vehicles a kilometer back in the thick woods. They'd then hiked through a landscape of scrub and red rock, steadily rising in altitude. He knew the entire area was a magnet for outdoor enthusiasts. Green slopes and purple crags closed around them, but the path was well marked, perhaps used by the local shepherds to herd sheep, and the route brought them to within a kilometer of the torn walls and piles of debris that had once been a place of devotion.\n\nHe stopped the entourage and checked his watch. Nearly four PM. Brother Geoffrey had said that he would return to the site at four. He looked around. The ruins perched on a rocky promontory a hundred meters above. Malone's rental car was parked farther down the slope.\n\n\"Into the trees for cover,\" he ordered. \"And everyone stay down.\"\n\nA few moments later a Land Rover churned its way up the sloping graveled path and stopped by the rental. He saw Geoffrey exit the driver's side and noticed the younger man appraise his surroundings, but de Roquefort did not reveal himself, still not sure if this was a trap.\n\nGeoffrey hesitated at the Land Rover, then opened the rear hatch and removed two boxes. Grasping both, Geoffrey started up the path toward the abbey. De Roquefort waited until he'd passed, then boldly stepped out onto the trail and said, \"I've been waiting, brother.\"\n\nGeoffrey stopped and turned.\n\nA cold pallor engulfed the younger man's pale face. The brother said nothing and simply laid the boxes down, reached beneath his jacket, and brought out a nine-millimeter automatic. De Roquefort recognized the gun. The Austrian-made weapon was one of several brands the abbey's arsenal stocked.\n\nGeoffrey chambered a round. \"Then bring your men and let's get this over with.\"\n\nAn insufferable tension flushed every thought from Malone's mind. He was following Cassiopeia as they inched their way through the underground passage. The path was about six feet wide and eight feet tall, the walls dry and jagged. Fifteen feet of hard earth lay between him and the surface. Tight confines were not his favorite places. Cassiopeia, though, appeared fortified with nerve. He'd seen her kind of courage before in agents who worked best under extreme pressure.\n\nHe was alert for more traps, paying careful attention to the gravel ahead of them. He'd always found it amusing in adventure movies when moving parts made of stone and metal, supposedly hundreds or thousands of years old, still functioned as if they'd been greased yesterday. Iron and stone were vulnerable to air and water, their effectiveness limited. But bronze was a different matter. That metal was enduring, which was precisely why it had been created. So more pointed stakes at the bottom of deep holes could be a problem.\n\nCassiopeia stopped, her light focused ten feet ahead.\n\n\"What is it?\" he asked.\n\n\"Take a look.\"\n\nHe added his beam to hers and saw it.\n\nStephanie hated enclosed spaces, but she was not about to voice that concern, especially to her son, who thought little enough of her. So to take her mind off her uncomfortableness she asked, \"How would the knights have stored their treasure down here?\"\n\n\"Carried in a piece at a time. Nothing would have stopped them, short of capture or death.\"\n\n\"That would have taken some effort.\"\n\n\"All they had was time.\"\n\nThey were both intent on the ground ahead of them as Mark gently tested the surface before each step.\n\n\"Their precautions would not have been sophisticated,\" Mark said. \"But they would have been effective. The Order possessed vaults all over Europe. Most they guarded, along with rigging traps. Here, secretion itself and a few traps had to do the job without guards. The last thing they would have wanted was to draw attention to this place by having knights around.\"\n\n\"Your father would have loved this.\" She had to say it.\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nHer light caught something ahead on the passage wall. She grabbed hold of Mark's shoulder and stopped him. \"Look.\"\n\nCarved into the rock were letters."
            },
            {
                "title": "NON NOBIS DOMINE",
                "text": "[ NON NOBIS SED NOMINE TUO DA GLORIUM ]\n\n[ PAUPERS COMMILITONES CHRISTI TEMPLI QUE SALAMONIS ]\n\n\"What does it say?\" she asked.\n\n\"'Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to Thy name give the glory. Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon.' It's the Templar motto.\"\n\n\"So it's true. This is it.\"\n\nMark said nothing.\n\n\"May God forgive me,\" she whispered.\n\n\"God has little to do with this. Man created this mess and it's up to man to clean it up.\" He motioned farther down the passage with his light. \"Look there.\"\n\nShe stared into the halo and saw a metal grille\u2014a gate\u2014that opened into another passage.\n\n\"Is that where everything is stored?\" she asked.\n\nNot waiting for an answer, she moved around him and had taken only a few steps when she heard Mark cry out, \"No.\"\n\nThen the ground slipped away.\n\nMalone stared at the sight illuminated by their combined lights. A skeleton. Lying prostrate on the cavern floor, the shoulders, neck, and skull propped up against the wall.\n\n\"Let's get closer,\" he said.\n\nThey inched ahead and he noticed a slight depression in the floor. He grasped Cassiopeia's shoulder.\n\n\"I see it,\" she said, stopping. \"It's a long one. Stretches a couple of yards.\"\n\n\"Those damn pits would have been invisible in their time, but the wood beneath has weakened enough to show them.\" They moved around the depression, staying on solid ground, and approached the skeleton.\n\n\"There's nothing left but bones,\" she said.\n\n\"Look at the chest. The ribs. And the face. Shattered in places. He fell into that trap. Those gashes are from spikes.\"\n\n\"Who is he?\"\n\nSomething caught his eye.\n\nHe bent down and found a blackened silver chain among the bones. He lifted it out. A medallion dangled from the loop. He focused the light. \"The Templar seal. Two men on a single horse. It represented individual poverty. I saw a drawing of this in a book a few nights ago. My bet is this is the marshal who wrote the report we've been using. He disappeared from the abbey once he learned the solution to the cryptogram from the priest Gelis. He came, figured out the solution, but wasn't careful. Sauniere probably found the body and just left him here.\"\n\n\"But how would Sauniere have figured anything out? How did he solve the cryptogram? Mark let me read that report. According to Gelis, Sauniere had not solved the puzzle he found in his church and Gelis was suspicious of him, so he told Sauniere nothing.\"\n\n\"That's assuming what the marshal wrote was true. Either Sauniere or the marshal killed Gelis to keep the priest from telling anyone what he'd deciphered. If it was the marshal, which seems likely, then he filed the report simply as a way to cover his tracks. A way for no one to think he left the abbey to come here and find the Order's Great Devise for himself. What did it matter that he recorded the cryptogram? There's no way to solve the thing without the mathematical sequence.\"\n\nHe turned his attention away from the dead man and shone his light farther down the passage. \"Look at that.\"\n\nCassiopeia stood and together they saw a cross with four equal arms, wide at the ends, carved into the rock.\n\n\"The cross patee,\" she said. \"Allowed to be worn only by the Templars thanks to a papal decree.\"\n\nHe recalled more of what he'd read in the Templar book. \"The crosses were red on a white mantle and symbolized a willingness to suffer martyrdom in fighting infidels.\" With his flashlight, he traced the lettering above the cross."
            },
            {
                "title": "PAR CE SIGNE TU LE VAINCRAS",
                "text": "\"By this sign ye shall conquer him,\" he said, translating. \"Those same words are in the church at Rennes, above the holy water fount at the door. Sauniere put them there.\"\n\n\"Constantine's declaration when he first fought Maxentius. Before the battle, he supposedly saw a cross on the sun with those words emblazoned beneath.\"\n\n\"With one difference. Mark said there was no him in the original phrase. Only By this sign ye shall conquer.\"\n\n\"He's right.\"\n\n\"Sauniere inserted le after tu. At the thirteenth and fourteenth position in the phrase. 1314.\"\n\n\"The year Jacques de Molay was executed.\"\n\n\"Seems Sauniere enjoyed a touch of irony in his symbolism, and he got the idea right here.\"\n\nHe searched more of the darkness and saw that the passage ended twenty feet ahead. But before that, a metal grille locked by a chain and hasp blocked a path that led off into another direction.\n\nCassiopeia saw it, too. \"Seems we found it.\"\n\nA rumble came from behind them and someone shouted, \"No.\"\n\nThey both turned."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 76",
                "text": "De Roquefort stopped at the entrance to the ruins and motioned his men to flank out to either side. The site was uncomfortably quiet. No movement. No voices. Nothing. Brother Geoffrey stood beside him. He remained worried that he was being set up. Which was why he'd come with firepower. He was pleased with his council's selection of knights\u2014these men were some of the best in his ranks, experienced fighters of unquestioned courage and fortitude\u2014which he might well need.\n\nHe peered around a pile of lichen-encrusted rubble, deeper into the decayed structure, past billows of standing grass. The bright dome of sky overhead was fading as the sun beat a retreat behind the mountains. Darkness would arrive shortly. And he worried about the weather. Squalls and rain came without warning in the Pyrenean summer.\n\nHe motioned and his men advanced forward, clambering over boulders and collapsed wall sections. He spied a campsite among three partial walls. Wood had been arranged for a fire that had yet to be lit.\n\n\"I'll go in,\" Geoffrey whispered. \"They're expecting me.\"\n\nHe saw the wisdom of that move and nodded.\n\nGeoffrey calmly walked into the open and approached the camp. Still no one was around. Then the younger man disappeared deeper into the ruins. A moment later he emerged and signaled for them to come.\n\nDe Roquefort told his men to wait and only he stepped into the open. He'd already directed his lieutenant to attack if necessary.\n\n\"Only Thorvaldsen is in the church,\" Geoffrey said.\n\n\"What church?\"\n\n\"The monks cut a church into the rock. They've discovered a portal beneath the altar that leads to caves. The others are beneath us exploring. I told Thorvaldsen that I was going to retrieve the supplies.\"\n\nHe liked what he was hearing.\n\n\"I'd want to meet Henrik Thorvaldsen.\"\n\nWith gun in hand, he followed Geoffrey into the dungeon-like cavity carved from the rock. Thorvaldsen stood with his back to them, gazing down into what was once a support for the altar.\n\nThe old man turned as they came close.\n\nDe Roquefort raised his gun. \"Not a word. Or it will be your last.\"\n\nThe earth beneath Stephanie's feet had given way and her legs were collapsing into one of the traps they'd tried so hard to avoid. What had she been thinking? Seeing the words etched into the rock and then the metal gate waiting to be opened, she'd realized that her husband had been right. So she'd abandoned caution and raced forward. Mark had tried to stop her. She heard him scream, but it had been too late.\n\nShe was already heading down.\n\nHer hands went skyward in an attempt to balance and she readied herself for the bronze stakes. But then she felt an arm encase her chest in a tight embrace. Then she was falling backward, to the ground, which she struck, another body cushioning her impact.\n\nA second later, quiet.\n\nMark lay beneath her.\n\n\"You okay?\" she asked, rolling off him.\n\nHer son raised himself off the gravel. \"Those rocks felt lovely on my back.\"\n\nHeavy footsteps sounded in the darkness behind them, accompanied by two orbs of waggling light. Malone and Cassiopeia appeared.\n\n\"What happened?\" Malone asked.\n\n\"I was careless,\" she said, standing, brushing herself off.\n\nMalone shone a light down into the rectangular hole. \"That would have been a bloody fall. It's full of stakes, all in good shape.\"\n\nShe came close, stared down into the opening, then turned and said to Mark, \"Thanks, son.\"\n\nMark was rubbing the back of his neck, working the pain from his muscles. \"No problem.\"\n\n\"Malone,\" Cassiopeia said. \"Take a look.\"\n\nStephanie watched as Malone and Cassiopeia studied the Templar motto she and Mark had found. \"I was headed to that gate when the hole got in the way.\"\n\n\"Two of them,\" Malone muttered. \"At opposite ends of this corridor.\"\n\n\"There's another grille?\" Mark asked.\n\n\"With another inscription.\"\n\nShe listened as Malone told them what they'd found.\n\n\"I agree with you,\" Mark said. \"That skeleton has to be our long-lost marshal.\" He fished a chain from beneath his shirt. \"We all wear the medallion. They're given at induction.\"\n\n\"Apparently,\" Malone said, \"the Templars hedged their bets and separated the cache.\" He motioned to the floor trap. \"And they made it a challenge to find. The marshal should have been more careful.\" Malone faced Stephanie. \"As we all should.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" she said. \"But, as you so often remind me, I'm not a field agent.\"\n\nHe smiled at her sarcasm. \"So let's see what's behind that grille.\"\n\nDe Roquefort aimed the short barrel of his weapon directly at Henrik Thorvaldsen's furrowed brow. \"I'm told you're one of the wealthiest men in Europe.\"\n\n\"And I'm told you're one of the most ambitious prelates in recent memory.\"\n\n\"You shouldn't listen to Mark Nelle.\"\n\n\"I didn't. His father told me.\"\n\n\"His father didn't know me.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't say that. You followed him around enough.\"\n\n\"Which turned out to be a waste of time.\"\n\n\"Did that make it easier for you to kill him?\"\n\n\"Is that what you think? That I killed Lars Nelle?\"\n\n\"Him and Ernst Scoville.\"\n\n\"You know nothing, old man.\"\n\n\"I know you're a problem.\" Thorvaldsen motioned to Geoffrey. \"I know he's a traitor to his friend. And his Order.\"\n\nDe Roquefort watched as Geoffrey absorbed the insult, disdain sweeping into the younger man's pale gray eyes, then just as quickly dissipating.\n\n\"I'm loyal to my master. That's the oath I took.\"\n\n\"So you betrayed us for your oath?\"\n\n\"I don't expect you to understand.\"\n\n\"I don't, and never will.\"\n\nDe Roquefort lowered his gun, then gestured for his men. They swarmed into the church and he motioned for silence. A few hand signals and they instantly understood that six were to position themselves outside and the remaining six to encircle the interior.\n\nMalone stepped around the trap Stephanie had exposed and approached the metal grille. The others followed. He noticed a heart-shaped padlock suspended from a chain. \"Brass.\" He caressed the gate. \"But the gate is bronze.\"\n\n\"The padlock and chain have to be from Sauniere's time,\" Mark said. \"Brass was a rare Middle Age commodity. Zinc was needed to make it and that was hard to come by.\"\n\n\"The lock is a ccur-de-brass,\" Cassiopeia said. \"They were once prevalent all over this region to fasten slave chains.\"\n\nNone of them moved to open the gate and Malone knew why. Another trap could lie in wait.\n\nWith his boot, he gently brushed the soil and gravel beneath his feet and tested the earth. Solid. He used his light and examined the gate's exterior. Two bronze hinges supported the right edge. He shone the light through the grille. The corridor beyond right-angled sharply a few feet inside and nothing could be seen past the bend. Great. He tested the chain and lock. \"This brass is still strong. We're not going to able to pound it away.\"\n\n\"How about cutting it?\" Cassiopeia asked.\n\n\"That would work. But with what?\"\n\n\"The bolt cutters I brought. They're in the tool bag topside, by the generator.\"\n\n\"I'll go get them,\" Mark said.\n\n\"ANYBODY UP THERE?\"\n\nThe words echoed from inside the hollow altar support and startled de Roquefort. Then he quickly realized that the voice was Mark Nelle's. Thorvaldsen moved to answer, but de Roquefort grabbed the crooked old man and clamped a hand across the mouth before he could utter a sound. He then signaled for one of the brothers, who rushed forward and grabbed the kicking Dane, a new hand sheathing Thorvaldsen's mouth. He pointed and the prisoner was dragged to a far corner of the church.\n\n\"Answer him,\" he mouthed to Geoffrey.\n\nThis would be an interesting test of his newfound ally's loyalty.\n\nGeoffrey stuffed his gun between his belt and stepped to the altar. \"I'm here.\"\n\n\"You're back. Good. Any problems?\"\n\n\"None. Bought everything on the list. What's happening down there?\"\n\n\"We found something, but we need bolt cutters. They're in the tool bag by the generator.\"\n\nHe watched as Geoffrey moved toward the generator and removed a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters.\n\nWhat had they found?\n\nGeoffrey tossed the tool down.\n\n\"Thanks,\" Mark Nelle said. \"You coming?\"\n\n\"I'll stay here with Thorvaldsen and keep an eye on things. We don't need any uninvited guests.\"\n\n\"Good idea. Where's Henrik?\"\n\n\"Unpacking what I bought and getting the camp ready for the night. The sun's nearly gone. I'll go help him.\"\n\n\"You might want to get the generator ready and the power cords unraveled for the light bars. We may need those shortly.\"\n\n\"I'll take care of it.\"\n\nGeoffrey lingered a moment more then stepped away from the altar and whispered, \"He's gone.\"\n\nDe Roquefort knew what had to be done. \"Time to take command of this expedition.\"\n\nMalone gripped the bolt cutters and worked the teeth around the brass chain. He then compressed the handles and allowed the spring-action to bite clean through the metal. A snap signaled success and the chain, with hasp, slipped to the ground.\n\nCassiopeia bent down and retrieved them. \"There are museums around the world that would love to have this. I'm sure not many have survived in this condition.\"\n\n\"And we just cut it,\" Stephanie said.\n\n\"There wasn't a whole lot of choice,\" Malone said. \"We're kind of in a hurry.\" He pointed a flashlight through the grille. \"Everybody to the side. I'm going to open this thing slowly. It looks clear, but you never know.\"\n\nHe wedged the bolt cutters into the grille, then stepped to one side, using the rock wall for protection. The hinges were stiff and he had to work the grille back and forth. Finally, the portal opened.\n\nHe was just about to lead the way inside when a voice called down from above.\n\n\"Mr. Malone. I have Henrik Thorvaldsen. I need for you and your companions to come up. Now. I'll give you one minute, then I'm going to shoot this old man dead.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 77",
                "text": "Malone was the last to climb up. When he stepped from the ladder he saw that the church was occupied by six armed men along with de Roquefort. Outside, the sun was gone. Inside was now illuminated from the glow of two small fires, the smoke rushing out into the night through the open window slits.\n\n\"Mr. Malone, we finally meet in person,\" Raymond de Roquefort said. \"You handled yourself well in the Roskilde cathedral.\"\n\n\"Glad to know you're a fan.\"\n\n\"How did you find us?\" Mark asked.\n\n\"Certainly no thanks to that phony journal of your father's, clever though he was. He spoke to the obvious and changed the details just enough to make them worthless. When monsieur Claridon deciphered the cryptogram within it, the message, of course, was of no help. He told us that he concealed the secrets of God. Tell me, since you've been down there, does he conceal those secrets?\"\n\n\"Never got a chance to find out,\" Malone said.\n\n\"Then we should remedy that. But to answer your question\u2014\"\n\n\"Geoffrey betrayed us,\" Thorvaldsen said.\n\nAstonishment clouded Mark's face. \"What?\"\n\nMalone had already noticed the gun in Geoffrey's hand. \"That true?\"\n\n\"I'm a brother in the Temple, loyal to my master. I did my duty.\"\n\n\"Your duty?\" Mark screamed. \"You lying son of a bitch.\" Mark lurched toward Geoffrey, but two brothers blocked the way. Geoffrey stayed rooted. \"You led me on this whole thing just so de Roquefort could win? Is that what our master meant to you? He trusted you. I trusted you.\"\n\n\"I knew you were a problem,\" Cassiopeia declared. \"Everything about you signaled trouble.\"\n\n\"And you should know,\" de Roquefort said, \"as that's what you have been to me. Leaving Lars Nelle's journal for me to find in Avignon. You thought that would occupy me for a while. But you see, mademoiselle, the loyalty of our brotherhood takes precedence. So your efforts have all been for naught.\" De Roquefort faced Malone. \"I have six men here, six outside\u2014and they know how to handle themselves. You have no weapons, or so brother Geoffrey has informed me. But to be safe.\" De Roquefort motioned and one of the men frisked Malone, then moved to the others.\n\n\"What did you do, call the abbey when you left here to get supplies?\" Mark asked Geoffrey. \"I wondered why you volunteered. You haven't let me out of your sight in two days.\"\n\nGeoffrey continued to stand, his face stiff with conviction.\n\n\"You're a disgusting excuse for a man,\" Mark spat out.\n\n\"I agree,\" de Roquefort said, and Malone watched as de Roquefort's gun came level and he fired three shots into Geoffrey's chest. The bullets staggered the younger man back, and de Roquefort finished his assassination with a bullet to head.\n\nGeoffrey's body collapsed to the floor. Blood poured from the wounds. Malone bit his lip. There was nothing he could do.\n\nMark lunged at de Roquefort.\n\nThe gun was aimed at Mark's chest.\n\nHe stopped.\n\n\"He assaulted me at the abbey,\" de Roquefort said. \"Attacking the master is punishable by death.\"\n\n\"Not in five hundred years,\" Mark yelled.\n\n\"He was a traitor. To you and to me. Neither of us has any use for him. That's the occupational hazard of being a spy. He surely knew the risk he was taking.\"\n\n\"Do you know the risks you're taking?\"\n\n\"A strange question coming from a man who killed a brother of this Order. That act is punishable by death, too.\"\n\nMalone realized this show was for the others present. De Roquefort needed his enemy, at least for the moment.\n\n\"I did what I had to,\" Mark spit out.\n\nDe Roquefort clicked the hammer of the automatic into place. \"So will I.\"\n\nStephanie stepped between the two men, her body blocking Mark's. \"And will you kill me, too?\"\n\n\"If need be.\"\n\n\"But I'm a Christian and I haven't harmed any brothers.\"\n\n\"Words, dear lady. Only words.\"\n\nShe reached up and fished out a chain with a medal from around her neck. \"The Virgin. She goes with me wherever I go.\"\n\nMalone knew de Roquefort could not shoot her. She'd sensed the theater, too, and called his bluff before his men. De Roquefort could not afford to be a hypocrite. He was impressed. It took balls to face down a loaded gun. Not bad for a desk jockey.\n\nDe Roquefort lowered the weapon.\n\nMalone rushed toward Geoffrey's bleeding body. One of the men raised a hand to stop him. \"I'd drop that arm if I were you,\" he made clear.\n\n\"Let him pass,\" de Roquefort said.\n\nHe came close to the body. Henrik stood staring down at the corpse. A pained look filled the Dane's face and he saw something he'd not seen in the year he'd known him.\n\nTears.\n\n\"You and I will go back down,\" de Roquefort said to Mark, \"and you'll show me what you found. The others will stay here.\"\n\n\"Screw yourself.\"\n\nDe Roquefort shrugged and aimed his gun at Thorvaldsen. \"He's a Jew. Different rules.\"\n\n\"Don't push it,\" Malone said to Mark. \"Do as he says.\" He hoped Mark understood that there was a time to hold and a time to fold.\n\n\"All right. We'll go down,\" Mark said.\n\n\"I'd like to come,\" Malone said.\n\n\"No,\" de Roquefort said. \"This is a matter for the brotherhood. Though I never considered Nelle one of us, he took the oath, and that counts for something. Besides, his expertise might be needed. You, on the other hand, could become a problem.\"\n\n\"How do you know Mark will behave?\"\n\n\"He will. Otherwise, Christians or no, all of you will die before he could ever climb out that hole.\"\n\nMark descended the ladder, followed by de Roquefort. He pointed left and told de Roquefort about the chamber they'd found.\n\nDe Roquefort slid his gun back into a shoulder holster and aimed his flashlight ahead. \"You lead the way. And you know what happens if there are any problems.\"\n\nMark started walking, his flashlight added to de Roquefort's beam. They eased their way around the staked hole that had almost claimed Stephanie.\n\n\"Ingenious,\" de Roquefort said as he examined the pit.\n\nThey found the open grille.\n\nMark recalled Malone's warning about more traps and took only baby steps forward. The passage beyond narrowed to about a yard wide, then angled sharply right. After only a few feet, another angle back to the left. One step at a time, he inched ahead.\n\nHe made the final turn and stopped.\n\nHe shone his light and saw before him a chamber, perhaps ten yards square with a high rounded ceiling. Cassiopeia's assessment that the subterranean vaults might be of Roman origin seemed correct. The gallery formed a perfect repository, and as his light dissolved the darkness, a multitude of wonders came into view.\n\nHe first saw statuary. Small colorful pieces. Several enthroned Virgins and Child. Gilded pietes. Angels. Busts. All in straight rows, like soldiers, across the rear wall. Then the glint of gold from rectangular chests. Some overlaid with ivory panels, others sheathed in a mosaic of onyx and gilt, a few gilded in copper and decorated with coats of arms and religious scenes. Each was too precious for simple storage. They were reliquary caskets, made for the remains of holy saints, probably commandeered in the rush, anything to hold what they needed to transport.\n\nHe heard de Roquefort slip off the backpack he was wearing, and suddenly the room was engulfed in a bright orange glow from a battery-powered light bar. De Roquefort handed him one. \"These will work better.\"\n\nHe didn't like cooperating with the monster, but knew he was right. He grabbed the light, and they fanned out to see what the room contained.\n\n\"Cover him up,\" Malone said to one of the brothers, motioning at Geoffrey.\n\n\"With what?\" came the question.\n\n\"The power cords for the light bars are wrapped in a blanket. I can use that.\" He motioned across the church, past one of the burning fires.\n\nThe man seemed to consider the inquiry a moment, then said, \"Oui. Do it.\"\n\nMalone stomped across the uneven floor and found the blanket, all the while assessing their situation. He returned and draped Geoffrey's body. Three guards had withdrawn to the other fire. The remaining three were stationed near the exit.\n\n\"He wasn't a traitor,\" Henrik whispered.\n\nThey all stared at him. \"He came in alone and told me that de Roquefort was here. He called him. He had to. The former master made him pledge that, once the Devise was found, de Roquefort would be told. He had no choice. He didn't want to do it, but he trusted the old man. He told me to play along, begged my forgiveness, and said he'd look after me. Unfortunately, I couldn't return the favor.\"\n\n\"That was foolish of him,\" Cassiopeia said.\n\n\"Maybe,\" Thorvaldsen said. \"But his word meant something to him.\"\n\n\"Did he say why he had to tell him?\" Stephanie muttered.\n\n\"Only that the master foretold a confrontation between Mark and de Roquefort. Geoffrey's task was to ensure one.\"\n\n\"Mark's no match for that man,\" Malone said. \"He's going to need help.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" Cassiopeia added, talking through her teeth, her mouth not moving.\n\n\"The odds aren't good,\" Malone said. \"Twelve men armed, and we're not.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't say that,\" Cassiopeia whispered.\n\nAnd he liked the twinkle in her eye.\n\nMark studied the treasure that surrounded him. He'd never seen so much wealth. The reliquary caskets contained a variety of silver and gold, either in coinage or as unminted raw metal. There were gold dinars, silver drachmas, and Byzantine coins, all stacked in neat rows. And jewels. Three chests brimmed with rough stones. Too many to even imagine. Chalices and reliquary vessels caught his gaze, most of ebony, glass, silver, and parcel-gilt. Some were coated with relief figures and dotted in precious stones. He wondered whose remnants they supposedly contained. One he knew for sure. He read the engraving and whispered, \"De Molay,\" as he stared into the reliquary's rock crystal tube.\n\nDe Roquefort came close.\n\nInside the reliquary were bits of blackened bone. Mark knew the tale. Jacques de Molay was roasted alive on an island in the Seine, in the shadow of Notre Dame, shrieking his innocence and cursing Philip IV, who'd dispassionately watched the execution. During the night brothers swam the river and scrounged through the hot ashes. They swam back with the acrid bones of de Molay in their mouths. Now he was staring at one of those mementos.\n\nDe Roquefort crossed himself and mumbled a prayer. \"Look what they did.\"\n\nBut Mark realized an even greater significance. \"This means someone visited this place after March 1314. They must have kept coming back until they all died. Five of them knew about this place. The Black Death surely took them in the mid-1300s. But they never told a soul, and this vault was lost forever.\" A sadness swept over him at the thought.\n\nHe turned and his light revealed crucifixes and statuary of ebonized wood dotting one wall, about forty, the styles varying from Romanesque, to German, to Byzantine, to high Gothic, the intricately carved physical undulations so perfect they seemed to almost breathe.\n\n\"It's spectacular,\" de Roquefort said.\n\nThe tally was incalculable, the stone niches that spanned two walls were packed full. Mark had studied in detail the history and purpose of medieval carving from the pieces that survived in museums, but here before him was a broad, spectacular display of Middle Age craftsmanship.\n\nTo his right, on a stone pedestal, he spotted an oversized book. The cover still gleamed\u2014gold foil, he surmised\u2014and was dotted with pearls. Someone had apparently opened the volume before, as crumbled parchment lay beneath, scattered like leaves. He bent down, brought the light close to the scraps, and saw Latin. He could read some of the script and quickly determined that it had once been an inventory ledger.\n\nDe Roquefort noticed his interest. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"An accounting. Sauniere probably tried to examine it when he found this place. But you have to careful with parchment.\"\n\n\"Thief. That's what he was. Nothing but a common thief. He had no right to take any of this.\"\n\n\"And we do?\"\n\n\"It's ours. Left for us by de Molay himself. He was crucified on a door, yet told them nothing. His bones are here. This is ours.\"\n\nMark's attention was diverted to a partially open chest. He shone his light and saw more parchment. He slowly hinged open the lid, which only slightly resisted. He dared not touch the sheets stacked together. So he strained to decipher what was on the top page. Old French, he quickly concluded. He could read enough to know that it was a will.\n\n\"Papers the Order was safekeeping. This chest is probably full of thirteenth-and fourteenth-century wills and deeds.\" He shook his head. \"To the end, the brothers made sure their duty was done.\" He considered the possibilities that lay before him. \"What we could learn from these documents.\"\n\n\"This is not all of it,\" de Roquefort suddenly declared. \"No books. Not one. Where's the knowledge?\"\n\n\"What you see is it.\"\n\n\"You're lying. There's more. Where?\"\n\nHe faced de Roquefort. \"This is it.\"\n\n\"Don't be coy with me. Our brothers secreted away their knowledge. You know that. Philip never found it. So it has to be here. I can see it in your eyes. There's more.\" De Roquefort reached for his gun and raised the barrel to Mark's brow. \"Tell me.\"\n\n\"I'd rather die.\"\n\n\"But would you rather have your mother die? Or your friends up there? Because that's who I'll kill first, while you watch, until I learn what I want to know.\"\n\nMark considered the possibility. It wasn't that he was afraid of de Roquefort\u2014strangely, no fear coursed through him\u2014it was simply that he wanted to know, too. His father had searched for years and found nothing. What had the master told his mother about him? He doesn't possess the resolve needed to complete his battles. Bullshit. The solution to his father's quest was a short walk away.\n\n\"All right. Come with me.\"\n\n\"It's awful gloomy in here,\" Malone said to the brother who appeared in charge. \"Mind if we get the generator going and fire up those lights?\"\n\n\"We wait for the master to return.\"\n\n\"They're going to need those lights down there, and it takes a few minutes to set things up. Your master may not be inclined to wait when he calls for them.\" He was hoping the prediction might affect the man's judgment. \"What's it going to hurt? We're just rigging up some lights.\"\n\n\"Okay. Go ahead.\"\n\nMalone withdrew back to where the others stood. \"He bought it. Let's set 'em up.\"\n\nStephanie and Malone moved toward one set, while Henrik and Cassiopeia grabbed another. The bars consisted of two halogen flood lamps atop an orange tripod. The generator was a small gasoline-powered unit. They positioned the tripods at opposite ends of the church and angled the bulbs upward. Power cords were connected and run back to where the generator sat, near the altar.\n\nA tool bag lay beside the generator. Cassiopeia was reaching inside when one of the guards stopped her.\n\n\"I need to hot-wire the power cords. Can't use plugs for this kind of ampage. I'm only going to get a screwdriver.\"\n\nThe man hesitated then stepped back, gun at his side, seemingly ready. Cassiopeia reached into the bag and carefully removed the screwdriver. By the light of the fires, she attached the cords to leads on the generator.\n\n\"Let's check out the connections to the lights,\" she said to Malone.\n\nThey casually walked to the first tripod. \"My dart gun is in the tool bag,\" she whispered.\n\n\"I assume those are the same little darlings used in Copenhagen?\" He kept his lips still as a ventriloquist's.\n\n\"They work fast. I just need a few seconds to fire the shots.\"\n\nShe was fiddling with the tripod, not doing anything.\n\n\"And how many shots do you have?\"\n\nShe seemingly finished what she was doing. \"Four.\"\n\nThey headed for the other tripod. \"We have six guests.\"\n\n\"The other two are your problem.\"\n\nThey stopped at the second tripod. He breathed out, \"We'll need a moment of distraction to confuse everybody. I have an idea.\"\n\nShe tinkered with the back of the lights. \"About time.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 78",
                "text": "Mark led the way back down the subterranean passage, past the ladder, toward where Malone and Cassiopeia had first explored. No light seeped down from the church above. As they were leaving the treasure chamber he'd retrieved the bolt cutters, as he assumed the other gate would likewise be chained.\n\nThey came to words etched into the wall.\n\n\"By this sign ye shall conquer him,\" de Roquefort said as he read, then his beam found the second gate. \"That it?\"\n\nMark nodded and motioned at the skeleton propped against the wall. \"He came to see for himself.\" He explained about the marshal from Sauniere's time and the medallion Malone found, which confirmed the identity.\n\n\"Serves him right,\" de Roquefort said.\n\n\"And what you're doing is better?\"\n\n\"I come for the brothers.\"\n\nIn the halo of his light bar, Mark noticed a slight depression in the earth ahead. Without saying a word, he stepped around the liar, toward the wall, avoiding the trap that de Roquefort seemed not to notice, as his focus was on the skeleton. At the gate, with the bolt cutters, Mark severed another brass chain. He recalled Malone's caution and stepped to one side as he worked the grille open.\n\nBeyond the entrance were the same two sharp turns. He inched his way forward. Within the golden glow of his lamp he saw nothing but rock.\n\nHe turned the first corner, then the second. De Roquefort stood behind him and their combined lights revealed another gallery, this one larger than the first treasure chamber.\n\nThe room was dotted with stone plinths of varying shapes and sizes. Atop them were books, all neatly stacked. Hundreds of volumes.\n\nA sick feeling came to Mark's stomach as he realized that the manuscripts would most likely be ruined. Though the chamber was cool and dry, time would have taken a toll on both the leaves and the ink. Much better if they'd been sealed inside another container. But the brothers who had secreted these certainly never imagined that it would be seven hundred years before they'd be retrieved.\n\nHe stepped to one of the stacks and examined the top cover. What was once surely gilded silver atop wood boards had turned black. He studied the engravings of Christ and what appeared to be Peter and Paul, which he knew were formed from clay and wax beneath the gilt. Italian craftsmanship. German ingenuity. He gently lifted the cover and brought the light close. His suspicion was confirmed. He could not make out many of the words.\n\n\"Can you read it?\" de Roquefort asked.\n\nHe shook his head. \"It needs to be in a laboratory. It will take professional restoration. We shouldn't disturb them.\"\n\n\"Looks like somebody already did that.\"\n\nAnd he stared into the spill of de Roquefort's light and saw a pile of books scattered on the floor. Bits and pieces of pages lay about like charred paper from a flame.\n\n\"Sauniere again,\" he said. \"It'll take years to garner anything useful from these. And that's assuming there's anything to find. Beyond some historical value, they're probably useless.\"\n\n\"This is ours.\"\n\nSo what, he thought, for all the good it would do.\n\nBut his mind raced with possibilities. Sauniere had come to this place. No question. The treasure chamber had provided his wealth\u2014it would have been an easy matter to return from time to time and cart off unminted gold and silver. Actual coins would have raised questions. Bank officials or assay clerks might want to know their source. But the raw metal would have been the perfect currency in the early part of the twentieth century when many economies were either gold-or silver-based.\n\nYet the abbe had gone a step farther.\n\nHe'd used the wealth to fashion a church loaded with hints that pointed to something Sauniere clearly believed. Something he was so sure about that he flaunted the knowledge. By this sign ye shall conquer him. Words carved not only here underground, but in the Rennes church as well. He visualized the inscription painted above the entrance. I have had contempt for the kingdom of this world, and all temporal adornments, because of the love of my Lord Jesus Christ, whom I saw, whom I loved, in whom I believed, and whom I worshiped. Obscure words from a ancient responsory? Maybe. Yet Sauniere intentionally chose them.\n\nWhom I saw.\n\nHe fanned the light bar around the room and studied the plinths.\n\nThen he saw it.\n\nWhere to hide a pebble?\n\nWhere, indeed.\n\nMalone walked back to the generator, where Stephanie and Henrik stood. Cassiopeia was still \"working\" on the tripod. He bent down and made sure there was gasoline in the engine.\n\n\"This thing going to make a lot of noise?\" he asked in a low voice.\n\n\"We can only hope. But unfortunately they make these units fairly quiet nowadays.\"\n\nHe did not touch the tool bag, not wanting to draw any attention to it. So far none of the guards had bothered to check inside. Apparently the defensive training at the abbey left a lot to be desired. But how effective could it be? Sure, you could learn hand-to-hand combat, how to shoot, how to handle a blade. But the choice of recruits had to be limited, and only so many silk purses could be crafted from a sow's ear.\n\n\"All ready,\" Cassiopeia said loud enough for all to hear.\n\n\"I need to get to Mark,\" Stephanie whispered.\n\n\"I understand,\" Malone said. \"But we have to take this a step at a time.\"\n\n\"Do you think for one moment de Roquefort is going to allow him to climb back out of there? He shot Geoffrey with no hesitation.\"\n\nHe saw her agitation. \"We're all aware of the situation,\" he muttered. \"Just stay cool.\"\n\nHe, too, wanted de Roquefort. For Geoffrey.\n\n\"I need a second with the tool bag,\" Cassiopeia breathed as she crouched down and stuffed the screwdriver she'd been using back inside. Four of the guards stood across the church, beyond one of the fires. Two more loitered to their left, near the other fire. None seemed to be paying them much attention, confident that the cage was secure.\n\nCassiopeia stayed crouched by the tool bag, her hand still inside, and gave him a slight nod. Ready. He stood and called out, \"We're going to crank the generator.\"\n\nThe man in charge signaled to go ahead.\n\nHe turned back and whispered to Stephanie, \"After I crank it, we're going over to the two men standing together. I'll take one, you the other.\"\n\n\"With pleasure.\"\n\nShe was anxious and he knew it. \"Easy, tiger. It's not as simple as you think.\"\n\n\"Watch me.\"\n\nMark approached one of the stone plinths sitting among the remaining dozen or so. He'd noticed something. While the tops to the others were supported by a variety of pillars, some singular, most in pairs, this one was held aloft by a rectangular-shaped support, similar to the altar above. And what drew his attention was the stone arrangement. Nine compact square blocks across, seven high.\n\nHe bent down and shone his light at the underside. No mortar joint appeared above the top row of block. Just like the altar.\n\n\"These books have to come off,\" he said.\n\n\"You said not to disturb them.\"\n\n\"It's what's inside this thing that's important.\"\n\nHe laid the light bar down and grabbed a handful of the olden manuscripts. Disturbing them churned up a dust storm. He gently laid them on the gravelly ground. De Roquefort did the same. Three loads each and the top was empty.\n\n\"It should slide,\" he said.\n\nTogether they grasped an end and the top moved, much more easily than the altar above since the plinth was half its size. They pushed it free and the chunk of limestone pounded to the ground and split into pieces. Nestled within the plinth Mark saw another container, smaller, about twenty-four inches long, half that wide, and eighteen or so inches tall. Made of gray-beige rock\u2014limestone, if he wasn't mistaken\u2014and in remarkably good condition.\n\nHe grabbed the light bar and thrust it into the support. Just as he suspected, writing appeared on one side.\n\n\"It's an ossuary,\" de Roquefort said. \"Is it identified?\"\n\nHe studied the script and was pleased that it was Aramaic. To be authentic, it would have to be. The custom of laying the dead in underground crypts until all that remained was dry bone, then collecting the bones and depositing them into a stone box was popular with Jews during the first century. He knew that some thousand ossuaries had survived. But only about a quarter of them bore inscriptions that identified their contents\u2014most likely explained by the fact that the vast majority of people from that time were illiterate. Many fakes had appeared through the centuries\u2014one in particular a few years ago had claimed to hold the bones of James, Jesus's half brother. Another test of authenticity would be the type of material used\u2014chalk limestone from quarries near Jerusalem\u2014along with the style of carvings, microscopic examination of the patina, and carbon testing.\n\nHe'd learned Aramaic in graduate school. A difficult language made more complicated by its varying styles, its slang, and the many errors of ancient scribes. How the letters were carved was a problem, too. Most times they were shallow, scratched with a nail. Other times they were scrawled across the face haphazardly, like graffiti. Sometimes, like here, they were engraved with a stylus, the letters clear. Which was why these words were not difficult to translate. He'd actually seen them before. He read from right to left as required, then reversed them in his mind."
            },
            {
                "title": "YESHUA BAR YEHOSEF",
                "text": "\"Jesus, son of Joseph,\" he said, translating.\n\n\"His bones?\"\n\n\"That remains to be seen.\" He spied the top. \"Lift it off.\"\n\nDe Roquefort reached in and grasped the flat lid. He worked it from side to side until the stone released. Then he lifted off the cover and rested it vertically against the ossuary.\n\nMark sucked a breath.\n\nInside the repository lay bones.\n\nSome had turned to dust. Many were still intact. A femur. A tibia. Some ribs, a pelvis. What looked like fingers, toes, parts of a spine.\n\nAnd a skull.\n\nWas this what Sauinere found?\n\nBeneath the skull lay a small book in remarkably good condition. Which was understandable, given it had been sealed within the ossuary, itself sealed within another container. The cover was exquisite, gilded in gold leaf and studded with cut stones arranged in the shape of a cross. Christ lay upon the cross, fashioned also of gold. Surrounding the cross were more stones in shades of crimson, jade, and lemon.\n\nHe lifted out the book and blew away the dust and debris from its cover, then balanced it on the corner of the support. De Roquefort came close with his lamp. He opened the cover and read the incipit, penned in Latin and written in a running Gothic script without punctuation, the ink a mixture of blue and crimson.\n\nHERE BEGINNETH AN ACCOUNT LOCATED BY THE FOUNDING BROTHERS DURING THEIR EXPLORATION OF THE TEMPLE MOUNT CONDUCTED THROUGH THE WINTER OF 1121 THE ORIGINAL BEING IN SUCH A STATE OF DECAY HAS BEEN COPIED EXACTLY AS IT APPEARED IN A LANGUAGE THAT ONLY ONE OF OUR NUMBER COULD UNDERSTAND BY ORDER OF THE MASTER WILLIAM DECHARTRES DATED 4 JUNE 1217 THE TEXT HAS BEEN TRANSLATED INTO THE WORDS OF THE BROTHERS AND PRESERVED FOR ALL TO KNOW.\n\nDe Roquefort was reading over his shoulder and said, \"That book was placed within the ossuary for a reason.\"\n\nMark agreed.\n\n\"See what follows?\"\n\n\"I thought you were here for the brothers? Should this not be returned to the abbey and read to all?\"\n\n\"I'll make that decision after I read it.\"\n\nHe wondered if the brothers would ever know. But he wanted to know, so he studied the script on the next page and recognized the jumble of scribbles and scratches. \"It's in Aramaic. I can only read a few words. That language has been gone for two thousand years.\"\n\n\"The incipit spoke of a translation.\"\n\nHe carefully lifted the pages and saw that the Aramaic spanned four leaves. Then he saw words he could understand. THE WORDS OF THE BROTHERS. Latin. The vellum had survived in excellent condition, its surface the color of aged parchment. The colored ink, too, was still clear. A title headed the text."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE TESTIMONY OF SIMON",
                "text": "He started reading."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 81",
                "text": "Malone approached one of the brothers, a man dressed like the other five in jeans and a woolen coat, a cap atop his short hair. At least six more were outside\u2014that's what de Roquefort had said\u2014but he'd worry about them once the six inside the church were subdued.\n\nAt least then he'd be armed.\n\nHe watched Stephanie as she grabbed a shovel and started to tend one of the fires, shuffling the timbers and reigniting the flames. Cassiopeia was still at the generator with Henrik, waiting for him and Stephanie to position themselves.\n\nHe turned toward Cassiopeia and nodded.\n\nShe yanked the starter cord.\n\nThe generator sputtered, then died. Two more pulls and the piston caught, the engine emitting a low rumble. The lights on the two tripods came to life, their glow intensifying with the growing voltage. The halogen bulbs heated fast and condensation started to rise from the glass in wisps of mist that just as quickly vanished.\n\nMalone saw that the event caught the guards' attention. A mistake. On their part. But they'd need a bit more to give Cassiopeia time to fire four air darts. He wondered about her shooting ability, then remembered her marksmanship at Rennes.\n\nThe generator continued to growl.\n\nCassiopeia remained crouched, the tool bag at her feet, seemingly adjusting the dials on the engine.\n\nThe lights seemed at full intensity and the guards appeared to have lost interest.\n\nOne set of bulbs exploded.\n\nThen the other.\n\nA lightning-white flash mushroomed upward and, in an instant, was gone. Malone used that second to land a punch on the jaw of the brother standing beside him.\n\nThe man teetered, then collapsed to the floor.\n\nMalone reached down and disarmed him.\n\nStephanie scooped a burning ember from the fire and turned to the guard a few feet away, whose attention was on the exploding lights.\n\n\"Hey,\" she said.\n\nThe man turned. She lobbed the ember. The chunk of white-hot timber floated through the air and the guard reached out to deflect the projectile, but the ember struck him in the chest.\n\nThe man screamed and Stephanie slammed the flat side of the shovel into the brother's face.\n\nMalone saw Stephanie toss an ember toward the guard, then pound him with the shovel. His gaze then shot toward Cassiopeia as she calmly fired the air gun. She'd already ticked off one shot, as he saw only three men standing. One of the remaining guards reached for his thigh. Another jerked and groped at the back of his jacket.\n\nBoth collapsed to the ground.\n\nThe last of the short-hairs at the altar saw what was happening to his compatriots and whirled to face Cassiopeia, who was crouched thirty feet away, the air gun aimed directly at him.\n\nThe man leaped behind the altar support.\n\nHer shot missed.\n\nMalone knew she was out of darts. It would only be an instant before the brother fired.\n\nHe felt the gun in his hand. He hated to use it. The blast would certainly alert not only de Roquefort, but also the brothers outside. So he raced across the church, planted the palms of his hands on the altar support, and, as the brother came up, gun ready, he lunged and used his momentum to kick the brother into the floor.\n\n\"Not bad,\" Cassiopeia said.\n\n\"I thought you said you didn't miss.\"\n\n\"He jumped.\"\n\nCassiopeia and Stephanie were disarming the downed brothers. Henrik came close and asked, \"You okay?\"\n\n\"My reflexes haven't had to do that in a while.\"\n\n\"Good to know they still work.\"\n\n\"How'd you do that with the lights?\" Henrik asked.\n\nMalone smiled. \"Just upped the voltage. Works every time.\" He scanned the church. Something was wrong. Why hadn't any of the brothers outside reacted to the exploding lights? \"We should be having company.\"\n\nCassiopeia and Stephanie came close, guns in hand.\n\n\"Maybe they're out in the ruins, toward the front,\" Stephanie said.\n\nHe stared at the exit. \"Or maybe they don't exist.\"\n\n\"I assure you, they existed,\" a male voice said from outside the church.\n\nA man slowly crept into view, his face shrouded in the shadows.\n\nMalone raised his gun. \"And you are?\"\n\nThe man stopped near one of the fires. His gaze, from deep-set serious eyes, locked on Geoffrey's sheathed corpse. \"The master shot him?\"\n\n\"With no remorse.\"\n\nThe man's face clinched tight and the lips mumbled something. A prayer? Then he said, \"I'm chaplain of the Order. Brother Geoffrey called me, too, after he called the master. I came to prevent violence. But we were delayed in arriving.\"\n\nMalone lowered his gun. \"You were part of whatever it was Geoffrey was doing?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"He didn't want to contact de Roquefort, but he gave his word to the former master.\" The tone was tender. \"Now it seems he gave his life, too.\"\n\nMalone wanted to know, \"What's happening here?\"\n\n\"I understand your frustration.\"\n\n\"No, you don't,\" Henrik said. \"That poor young man is dead.\"\n\n\"And I grieve for him. He served this Order with great honor.\"\n\n\"Calling de Roquefort was stupid,\" Cassiopeia said. \"He invited trouble.\"\n\n\"In the final months of his life, our former master set into motion a complex chain of events. He spoke to me about what he planned. He told me who our seneschal was and why he'd taken him into the Order. He told me of the seneschal's father and what lay ahead. So I pledged my obedience, as did brother Geoffrey. We knew what was happening. But the seneschal did not, nor did the seneschal know of our involvement. I was told not to become involved until brother Geoffrey requested my help.\"\n\n\"Your master is below us with my son,\" Stephanie said. \"Cotton, we need to get down there.\"\n\nHe heard the impatience in her voice.\n\n\"The seneschal and de Roquefort cannot coexist,\" the chaplain said. \"They're opposite ends of a long spectrum. For the good of the brotherhood, only one of these men can survive. But my former master wondered if the seneschal could do it alone.\" The chaplain stared at Stephanie. \"Which is why you are here. He believed you'd bring the seneschal strength.\"\n\nStephanie appeared not in the mood for mysticism. \"My son could die thanks to this foolishness.\"\n\n\"For centuries this Order survived through battle and conflict. That was our way. The former master simply forced a confrontation. He knew de Roquefort and the seneschal would war. But he wanted that war to count for something\u2014to end with something. So he pointed them both toward the Great Devise. He knew it was out there, somewhere, but I doubt if he really believed either one of them would find it. He knew, though, that a conflict would erupt, and a winner would emerge. He also knew that if de Roquefort was the winner, he'd quickly alienate his allies, and he has. The deaths of two brothers weigh heavily on us. All agree there will be more deaths\u2014\"\n\n\"Cotton,\" Stephanie said. \"I'm going.\"\n\nThe chaplain did not move. \"The men outside have been subdued. Do what you must. There will be no more bloodshed up here.\"\n\nAnd Malone heard the words that the somber man had not spoken.\n\nBelow us, though, is altogether different."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE TESTIMONY OF SIMON",
                "text": "I have stayed silent, thinking it better for others to preserve a record. Yet none has come forward. So this has been written so that you will know what happened.\n\nThe man Jesus spent many years spreading his message throughout the lands of Judea and Galilee. I was the first of his followers, but our number grew since many believed his words possessed great meaning. We traveled with him, watching as he eased suffering, brought hope, and stirred salvation. He was always himself, no matter the day or event. If the masses lauded him, he faced them. When hostility surrounded him, he showed no rage or fear. What others thought of him, said, or did never affected him. He said once, \"All of us bear God's image, all are worthy to be loved, all can grow in the spirit of God.\" I watched as he embraced lepers and the immoral. Women and children were precious to him. He showed me that all were worthy of love. He would say, \"God is our father. He cares, loves, and forgives all. No sheep will ever be lost from that shepherd. Feel free to tell God all, for only in such openness can the heart gain peace.\"\n\nThe man Jesus taught me to pray. He talked of God, the final judgment, and the end of time. I came to think that he could even control the wind and waves since he stood so afar above us. The religious elders taught that pain, sickness, and tragedy were God's judgment and we should accept that wrath with the sorrow of a penitent. The man Jesus said that was wrong and offered the sick the courage to become well, the weak the ability to grow a strong spirit, and nonbelievers the chance to believe. The world seemed to part at his approach. The man Jesus possessed a purpose, he lived his life to fulfill that purpose, and that purpose was clear to those of us who followed him.\n\nBut in his travels the man Jesus made enemies. The elders found him a threat in that he offered different values, new rules, and threatened their authority. They worried that if the man Jesus was allowed to roam free and preach change, Rome could well tighten its grip and all would suffer, especially the high priest who served at Rome's pleasure. So it happened that Jesus was arrested for blasphemy and Pilate decreed he should ascend the cross. I was there that day and Pilate drew no joy from the decision, but the elders demanded justice and Pilate could not deny them.\n\nIn Jerusalem the man Jesus and six others were taken to a place on the hill and bound by thongs to the cross. Later in the day, the legs of three of the men were broken and they succumbed by nightfall. Two more died the next day. The man Jesus was allowed to linger until the third, when his legs were finally broken. I did not go to him while he suffered. I, and the others who followed him, hid away, afraid that we might be next. After he died, the man Jesus was left on his cross for six more days while birds picked his flesh. He was finally taken from the cross and dropped into a hole dug from the ground. I watched that happen, then fled Jerusalem by way of the desert, stopping in Bethany at the home of Mary called Magdalene and her sister, Martha. They had known the man Jesus and were saddened by his death. They were angry at me for not defending him, for not acknowledging him, for fleeing when he was suffering. I asked them what they would have had me do and their answer was clear. \"Join him.\" But that thought never occurred to me. Instead, to all who asked, I denied the man Jesus and all that he stood for. I left their home, returning days later to Galilee and the comfort of that which I knew.\n\nTwo who had traveled with the man Jesus, James and John, also returned to Galilee. Together we shared our grief over the loss of the man Jesus and resumed our life as fishermen. The darkness we all felt consumed us and time did not ease our pain. As we fished on the Sea of Galilee we talked of the man Jesus and all that he did and all that we witnessed. It was on the lake, years ago, that we first met him as he taught from our boat. His memory seemed everywhere upon the waters, which made our grief even harder to escape. One night, as a storm swirled across the lake and we sat on shore eating bread and fish, I thought I saw the man Jesus upon the mist. But when I waded out I knew that the vision was only in my mind. Every morning we broke bread and ate fish. Remembering what the man Jesus once did, one of us would bless the bread and offer it up in praise of God. This act made us all feel better. One day John commented that the broken bread was so like the broken body of the man Jesus. After that, we all started to associate the bread with the body.\n\nFour months passed and one day James reminded us that the Torah proclaimed that one hung upon a tree is accursed. I told him that could not be true of the man Jesus. That was the first time any of us ever questioned the ancient words. They simply could not apply to one so good as the man Jesus. How would a scribe from long ago know that all who were hung upon a tree were accursed. He could not. In a battle between the man Jesus and the ancient words, the man Jesus was the victor.\n\nOur grief continued to torment us. The man Jesus was gone. His voice was silent. The elders survived and their message lived. Not because they were right, but simply because they were alive and speaking. The elders had triumphed over the man Jesus. But how could something so good be wrong? Why would God allow such good to disappear?\n\nSummer ended and the feast of the Tabernacle came, which was a time to celebrate the joy of the harvest. We thought it safe to travel to Jerusalem and take part. Once there, during the procession to the altar, it was read from the Psalms that the Messiah shall not die, but shall live and recount the deeds of the Lord. One of the elders proclaimed that though the Lord has chastened the Messiah sorely, He has not given him over unto death. But rather, the stone that the builders rejected has become the head of the corner. In the Temple we listened to readings from Zechariah, which told that one day the Lord would come and living waters would flow from Jerusalem and the Lord would become king over all the earth. Then one evening I came upon another reading from Zechariah. He spoke of a pouring out from the House of David and of a spirit of compassion and supplication. It was said that when we look on him whom they have pierced, we shall mourn for him as one weeps over a firstborn.\n\nListening, I thought of the man Jesus and what happened to him. The reader seemed to speak directly to me when he spoke of God's plan to strike the shepherd so that the sheep may scatter. At that moment a love took hold of me that would not let go. That night I journeyed outside Jerusalem to the spot where the Romans had buried the man Jesus. I knelt above his mortal remains and wondered how a simple fisherman could be the source of all truth. The high priest and scribes had judged the man Jesus a fraud. But I knew they were wrong. God did not require obedience to ancient laws in order to achieve salvation. God's love was boundless. The man Jesus had many times said that, and in accepting his death with great courage and dignity, the man Jesus had given one final lesson to us all. In ending life we find life. Loving is to be loved.\n\nAll doubt left me. Grief vanished. Confusion became clarity. The man Jesus was not dead. He was alive. Resurrected within me was the risen Lord. I felt his presence as clearly as when he once stood beside me. I recalled what he said to me many times. \"Simon, if you love me you will find my sheep.\" I finally knew that loving as he loved will allow anyone to know the Lord. Doing as he did will allow us all to know the Lord. Living as he lived is the way to salvation. God had come from heaven to dwell within the man Jesus and through his deeds and words the Lord became known. The message was clear. Care for the needy, comfort the distressed, befriend the rejected. Do those things and the Lord will be pleased. God took the man Jesus's life so that we could see. I was merely the first to accept that truth. The task became clear. The message must live through me and others who likewise believe.\n\nWhen I told John and James of my vision they saw, too. Before we left Jerusalem, we returned to the place of my vision and dug from the earth the remains of the man Jesus. We took him with us and laid him in a cave. We returned the next year and gathered his bones. Then I wrote this account which I placed with the man Jesus, for together they are the Word."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 83",
                "text": "MARK WAS BOTH CONFUSED AND AMAZED. HE KNEW SIMON.\n\nHe was called first Cephas in Aramaic, then Petros, rock, in Greek. Eventually he became Peter and the Gospels proclaimed that Christ said, Upon this rock I shall build my church.\n\nThe testimony was the first ancient account he'd ever read that made sense. No supernatural events or miraculous apparitions. No actions contrary to history or logic. No inconsistent details that cast doubt on credibility. Just the testimony by a simple fisherman of how he'd borne witness to a great man, one whose good works and kind words lived on after his death, enough to inspire him to continue the cause.\n\nSimon certainly did not possess the intellect or ability to fashion the type of elaborate religious ideas that would come much later. His understanding was confined to the man Jesus, whom he knew, and whom God had reclaimed through a violent death. In order to know God, to be a part of Him, it was clear to Simon that he must emulate the man Jesus. The message could only live if he, and others after him, breathed life into it. In that simple way, death could not contain the man Jesus. A resurrection would occur. Not literal, but spiritual. And within the mind of Simon, the man Jesus had arisen\u2014he lived again\u2014and from that singular beginning, during an autumn night six months after the man Jesus was executed, the Christian Church was born.\n\n\"Those arrogant assholes,\" de Roquefort muttered. \"With their grand churches and theologies. Every bit of it is wrong.\"\n\n\"No, it's not.\"\n\n\"How can you say that? There's no elaborate crucifixion, no empty tomb, no angels announcing the risen Christ. That's fiction, created by men for their own benefit. This testimony here has meaning. It all started with one man realizing something in his mind. Our Order was wiped from the face of the earth, our brothers tortured and murdered, in the name of the so-called resurrected Christ.\"\n\n\"The effect is the same. The Church was born.\"\n\n\"Do you think for one minute the Church would have flourished if its entire theology was based on the personal revelation of one simple man? How many converts do you think it would have obtained?\"\n\n\"But that's exactly what happened. Jesus was an ordinary man.\"\n\n\"Who was elevated to the status of a god by later men. And if anyone challenged that determination, they were deemed a heretic and burned at the stake. The Cathars were wiped from the face of the earth right here in the Pyrenees for not believing.\"\n\n\"Those early Church fathers did what they did. They had to embellish in order to survive.\"\n\n\"You condone what they did?\"\n\n\"It's done.\"\n\n\"And we can undo it.\"\n\nA thought occurred to him. \"Sauniere surely read this.\"\n\n\"And told no one.\"\n\n\"That's right. Even he saw the futility of it.\"\n\n\"He told no one because he would have lost his private treasure trove. He had no honor. He was a thief.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. But the information obviously affected him. He left so many clues in his church. He was a learned man and could read Latin. If he found this, which I'm sure he did, he understood it. Yet he placed it back in its hiding place and locked the gate when he left.\" He stared down into the ossuary. Was he looking at the bones of the man Jesus? A wave a sadness swept through him as he realized all that remained of his father were bones, too.\n\nHe locked his gaze on de Roquefort and asked what he truly wanted to know. \"Did you kill my father?\"\n\nMalone watched as Stephanie hustled toward the ladder, a gun from one of the guards in her hand. \"Going somewhere?\"\n\n\"He may hate my guts, but he's still my son.\"\n\nHe understood she had to go, but she wasn't going alone. \"I'm coming, too.\"\n\n\"I prefer to do this alone.\"\n\n\"I don't give a damn what you prefer. I'm coming.\"\n\n\"I am, too,\" Cassiopeia said.\n\nHenrik grabbed her arm. \"No. Let them do it. They need to resolve this.\"\n\n\"Resolve what?\" Cassiopeia demanded.\n\nThe chaplain stepped forward. \"The seneschal and the master must challenge each other. His mother was involved for a reason. Let her be. Her destiny is below with them.\"\n\nStephanie disappeared down the ladder and Malone watched from above as she hopped to one side, avoiding the pit. He then followed her down, lamp in one hand, gun in the other.\n\n\"Which way?\" Stephanie whispered.\n\nHe signaled for quiet. Then he heard voices. From his left, toward the chamber he and Cassiopeia had found.\n\n\"That way,\" he mouthed.\n\nHe knew the path was free of traps until almost to the chamber entrance. Still, they inched ahead slowly. When he spied the skeleton and the words etched into the wall, he knew just ahead they'd have to be cautious.\n\nThe voices were clearer now.\n\n\"I ASKED IF YOU KILLED MY FATHER,\" MARK SAID IN A LOUD TONE.\n\n\"Your father was a weak soul.\"\n\n\"That's not an answer.\"\n\n\"I was there the night he ended his life. I followed him to the bridge. We talked.\"\n\nMark was listening.\n\n\"He was frustrated. Angry. He'd solved the cryptogram, the one in his journal, and it told him nothing. Your father simply lacked the strength to carry on.\"\n\n\"You know nothing of my father.\"\n\n\"On the contrary. I watched him for years. He moved from issue to issue, never resolving a single one. It brought him problems professionally and personally.\"\n\n\"He apparently found enough to lead us here.\"\n\n\"No. Others found that.\"\n\n\"You made no attempt to stop him from hanging himself?\"\n\nDe Roquefort shrugged. \"Why? He was intent on dying, and I saw no advantage in stopping him.\"\n\n\"So you just walked away and let him die?\"\n\n\"I didn't interfere in something that did not concern me.\"\n\n\"You son of a bitch.\" He took a step forward. De Roquefort leveled his gun. He still held the book from the ossuary. \"Go ahead. Shoot me.\"\n\nDe Roquefort seemed unfazed. \"You killed a brother. You know the penalty.\"\n\n\"He died because of you. You sent him.\"\n\n\"There you go again. One set of rules for yourself, another for the rest of us. You pulled the trigger.\"\n\n\"In self-defense.\"\n\n\"Lay the book down.\"\n\n\"And what will you do with it?\"\n\n\"What the masters in the Beginning did. I'll use it against Rome. I always wondered how the Order rose so quickly. When popes tried to merge us with the Knights Hospitallers, over and over we stopped them. And all because of that book and those bones. The Roman Church could not take the chance of either being made public.\n\n\"Imagine what those medieval popes thought when they learned that the physical resurrection of Christ was a myth. Of course, they couldn't be sure. That testimony could be as fictitious as the Gospels. Still, the words are compelling and the bones hard to ignore. There were thousands of relics floating around then. Pieces of saints adorned every church. Everyone believed so easily. No reason to think these bones would have been ignored. And these were the greatest relics of them all. So masters used what they knew, and the threat worked.\"\n\n\"And today?\"\n\n\"Just the opposite. Too many people who believe nothing. Lots of questions exist in the modern mind and few answers in the Gospels. That testimony, though, is another matter. It would make sense to a great many people.\"\n\n\"So you're going to be a modern-day Philip IV.\"\n\nDe Roquefort spit on the ground. \"That's what I think of him. He wanted this knowledge so he could control the Church\u2014so that his heirs could control it, too. But he paid for his greed. Him and his entire family.\"\n\n\"Do you think for one minute you could control anything?\"\n\n\"I have no desire to control. But I would like to see the faces of all those pompous prelates as they explain away the testimony of Simon Peter. After all, his bones rest at the heart of the Vatican. They built a cathedral around his grave and named the basilica for him. He's their first saint, their first pope. How will they explain away his words? Wouldn't you like to listen as they try?\"\n\n\"Who's to say they're his?\"\n\n\"Who's to say Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John's words are theirs?\"\n\n\"Changing everything might not be so good.\"\n\n\"You're as weak as your father. No stomach for a fight. You'd bury this away? Tell no one? Allow the Order to languish in obscurity, tainted by the slander of a greedy king? Weak men like you are why we find ourselves in this situation. You and your master were well suited to one another. He was a weak man, too.\"\n\nHe'd heard enough and, without warning, raised his left hand, which held the lamp, angling the bright bar so that its strongest glow momentarily flashed in de Roquefort's eyes. The instant of discomfort caused de Roquefort to squint, and his hand with the gun dropped as he raised his other arm to shield his eyes.\n\nMark kicked the gun from de Roquefort's grip, then rushed from the chamber. He emerged from the open gate, turned back toward the ladder, but took only a few steps.\n\nTen feet ahead he saw another light and spotted Malone and his mother.\n\nBehind him, de Roquefort emerged.\n\n\"Halt\" came the command, and he stopped.\n\nDe Roquefort stepped close.\n\nHe saw his mother raise a gun.\n\n\"Get down, Mark,\" she yelled.\n\nBut he stayed standing.\n\nDe Roquefort was now directly behind him. He felt the barrel of the gun at the back of his head.\n\n\"Lower your weapon,\" de Roquefort said to her.\n\nMalone displayed a gun. \"You can't shoot us both.\"\n\n\"No. But I can shoot this one.\"\n\nMalone considered his options. He couldn't get a shot at de Roquefort without hitting Mark. But why had Mark stopped? Allowing de Roquefort the opportunity to corral him.\n\n\"Lower the gun,\" Malone said quietly to Stephanie.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"I would do as he says,\" de Roquefort made clear.\n\nStephanie did not move. \"He's going to shoot him anyway.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Malone said. \"But let's not provoke it.\"\n\nHe knew she'd lost her son once through mistakes. She was not about to have him taken from her again. He studied Mark's face. Not a speck of fear. He motioned with his light at the book in Mark's grasp.\n\n\"That what this was all about?\"\n\nMark nodded. \"The Great Devise, along with a lot of treasure and documents.\"\n\n\"Was it worth it?\"\n\n\"That's not for me to say.\"\n\n\"It was,\" de Roquefort declared.\n\n\"So what now?\" Malone asked. \"Nowhere for you to go. Your men are down.\"\n\n\"Your doing?\"\n\n\"Some. But your chaplain is here with a contingent of knights. Seems there's been a revolt.\"\n\n\"That remains to be seen,\" de Roquefort said. \"I'll only say it one more time, Ms. Nelle, lower your gun. As Mr. Malone correctly notes, what do I have to lose by shooting your son?\"\n\nMalone was still assessing the situation, his mind checking off options. Then, in the ambient glow from Mark's lamp, he spotted it. A slight depression in the floor. Hardly noticeable, except if you knew what to look for. Another floor trap spanning the width of the passage and extending from where he stood all the way to Mark. He cut his gaze back and saw in the younger man's eyes the fact that he knew it existed. A slight nod of the head and he realized why Mark had stopped. He'd wanted de Roquefort to come after him. He needed him to come.\n\nApparently it was time to end this.\n\nHere and now.\n\nHe reached out and wrenched the gun from Stephanie's grasp.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" she asked.\n\nBack to de Roquefort, he mouthed, \"The floor,\" and he saw that she registered what he'd said.\n\nThen he faced their dilemma.\n\n\"Wise move,\" de Roquefort said to him.\n\nStephanie went silent, apparently understanding. But he doubted that she really did. He turned his attention back across the passage. His words, meant for Mark, were said to de Roquefort.\n\n\"Okay. Your move.\"\n\nMark knew this was it. The master had written to his mother that he did not possess the resolve needed to complete his battles. Starting them seemed easy, continuing them even easier, but resolving them had always proven difficult. Not anymore. His master had formed the stage and the players had acted out the script. Time for the finale. Raymond de Roquefort was a menace. Two brothers were dead because of him, and there was no telling where it all would stop. No way could he and de Roquefort exist within the Order together. His master had apparently known that. Which was why one of them had to go.\n\nHe knew that just a step ahead was a deep gouge in the floor, the bottom of which he hoped was lined with bronze stakes. In his rage to hurl forward, unconcerned with everything around him, de Roquefort possessed no idea of that danger. Which was precisely how his enemy would administer the Order. The sacrifices that thousands of brothers had made for seven hundred years would be wasted on arrogance.\n\nWhen he'd read Simon's testimony he'd finally been provided a historical affirmation of his own religious skepticism. He'd always been troubled by biblical contradictions and their weak explanations. Religion, he feared, was a tool used by men to manipulate other men. The human mind's need to have answers, even to questions that possessed no answer, had allowed the unbelievable to become gospel. Somehow a comfort came in believing that death was not an end. There was more. Jesus supposedly proved that by physically resurrecting Himself, and offering that same salvation to all who believed.\n\nBut there was no life after death.\n\nNot literally.\n\nInstead, what others made of your life was how you lived on. In remembering what the man Jesus said and did, Simon Peter realized that his dead friend's beliefs were actually resurrected within him. And preaching that message, doing what Jesus had done, became the measure of Simon's salvation. None of us should judge anyone, only ourselves. Life is not infinite. A set time defines us all\u2014then, just as the bones in the ossuary showed, to dust we return.\n\nHe could only hope that his life had meant something and that others would remember him by that meaning.\n\nHe sucked a breath.\n\nAnd tossed the book at Malone, who caught it.\n\n\"Why did you do that?\" de Roquefort asked.\n\nMark saw that Malone knew what he was about to do.\n\nAnd suddenly so did his mother.\n\nHe spotted it in her eyes as they shimmered with tears. He wanted to tell her that he was sorry, that he was wrong, that he shouldn't have judged her. She seemed to read his thoughts and took a step forward, which Malone blocked with his arm.\n\n\"Get out of the way, Cotton,\" she said.\n\nMark used that moment to inch forward, the ground still hard.\n\n\"Go,\" de Roquefort said to him. \"Get the book back.\"\n\n\"Certainly.\"\n\nAnother step.\n\nStill hard.\n\nBut instead of walking toward Malone as de Roquefort ordered, he ducked to avoid the gun barrel at his head and whirled, ramming his elbow into de Roquefort's ribs. The man's muscular abdomen was hard and he knew he was no match for the older warrior. But he owned an advantage. Where de Roquefort was readying himself for a fight, he simply wrapped his arms around the other man's chest and revolved them both forward, propelling his feet off the ground and sending them down to the floor that he knew would not hold.\n\nHe heard his mother scream no, then de Roquefort's gun exploded.\n\nHe'd shoved the hand holding the weapon outward, but there was no telling where the bullet had gone. They crashed into the false floor, their combined weight enough to obliterate the covering. De Roquefort had surely expected to hit hard earth, ready to spring into action. But as they slammed into the hole, Mark released his grip from around de Roquefort's body and freed his arms, which allowed the full force of the stakes to grind into his enemy's spine.\n\nA groan seeped from de Roquefort's lips as he opened his mouth to speak. Only blood gurgled out.\n\n\"I told you the day you challenged the master that you'd regret what you did,\" Mark whispered. \"Your tenure is over.\"\n\nDe Roquefort tried to speak, but the breath left him as blood spilled from his lips.\n\nThen the body went limp.\n\n\"You okay?\" Malone asked from above.\n\nHe raised up. His shifting weight caused de Roquefort to settle farther onto the stakes. Grit and gravel covered him. He leveraged himself out of the cavity, then swiped away the grime. \"I just killed another man.\"\n\n\"He would have killed you,\" Stephanie said.\n\n\"Not a good reason, but it's all I've got.\"\n\nTears streamed down his mother's face. \"I thought you were gone again.\"\n\n\"I was hoping to avoid those stakes, but I didn't know if de Roquefort would cooperate.\"\n\n\"You had to kill him,\" Malone said. \"He never would have stopped.\"\n\n\"What about the gunshot?\" Mark asked.\n\n\"Whizzed by close,\" Malone said. He motioned with the book. \"This what you're after?\"\n\nMark nodded. \"And there's more.\"\n\n\"I asked before. Was it worth it?\"\n\nHe pointed back down the passage. \"Let's go have a look and you tell me.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "ABBEY DES FONTAINES",
                "text": "[ Wednesday, JUNE 28 12:40 PM ]\n\nMark stared out across the circular hall. The brothers were once again adorned in their formal dress, convened in conclave, about to select a master. De Roquefort was dead, laid in the Hall of Fathers last night. At the funeral the chaplain had challenged de Roquefort's memory, and the vote had been unanimous that he be denied. As he'd listened to the chaplain's speech, Mark had realized that what happened over the past few days was all necessary. Unfortunately, he'd killed two men, one with regret, the other without relish. He'd begged the Lord's forgiveness for the first death, but felt only relief that de Roquefort was gone.\n\nNow the chaplain was speaking again, to the conclave.\n\n\"I tell you brothers. Destiny has been at work, but not in the manner in which our most recent master contemplated. His was the wrong way. Our Great Devise is back because of the seneschal. He was the former master's chosen successor. He was the one sent on the quest. He faced down his enemy, placed our well-being above his own, and fulfilled what masters have attempted for centuries.\"\n\nMark saw hundreds of heads bobbing in agreement. Never had he moved men in such a way before. His had been a solitary existence in academia, his weekend forays with his father, then alone, the only adventure he'd ever known until the past few days.\n\nThe Great Devise had been quietly taken from the earth yesterday morning and returned to the abbey. He and Malone had personally removed the ossuary, along with its testimony. He'd shown the chaplain what they'd found and it was agreed that the new master would decide what to do next.\n\nNow that decision was at hand.\n\nThis time Mark did not stand with the Order's officers. He was merely a brother, so he'd taken his place among the somber mass of men. He'd not been selected as one for the conclave, so he watched with all the others as the twelve went about their task.\n\n\"There is no question what must be done,\" one of the conclave members said. \"The former seneschal should be our master. Let it be.\"\n\nSilence gripped the room.\n\nMark wanted to speak in protest. But Rule forbid it, and he'd broken enough for a lifetime.\n\n\"I agree,\" another conclave member said.\n\nThe remaining ten all nodded.\n\n\"Then it shall be,\" the nominator said. \"He that was our seneschal shall now be our master.\"\n\nApplause erupted as more than four hundred brothers signaled their approval.\n\nChanting started.\n\nBeauseant.\n\nHe was no longer Mark Nelle.\n\nHe was master.\n\nAll eyes focused on him. He emerged from the brothers and entered the circle formed by the conclave. He stared at men he admired. He'd joined the Order simply as a means to fulfill what his father had dreamed and to escape his mother. He'd stayed because he'd come to love both the Order and its master.\n\nWords from John came to mind.\n\nIn the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Through him all things were made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.\n\nSimon Peter recognized and received Him, as had all who came after Simon, and their darkness became light. Perhaps thanks to Simon's singular realization, they were all now children of God.\n\nThe shouts subsided.\n\nHe waited until the hall went silent.\n\n\"I had thought perhaps that it was time for me to leave this place,\" he softly said. \"The past few days have brought many difficult decisions. Because of the choices I made, I believed my life as a brother over. I killed one of our number and for that I am sorry. But I was given no choice. I killed the master, but for that I feel nothing.\" His voice rose. \"He challenged all that we believe. His greed and recklessness would have been our downfall. He was concerned with his needs, his wants, not ours. \" A strength surged through him as he again heard the words of his mentor. Remember all that I taught you. \"As your leader, I'll chart a new course. We'll come from the shadows, but not for revenge or justice, but to claim a place in this world as the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon. That's who we are. That's what we shall be. There are great things for us to do. The poor and downtrodden need a champion. We can be their savior.\"\n\nSomething Simon wrote came to mind. All of us bear God's image, all are worthy to be loved, all can grow in the spirit of God. He was the first master in seven hundred years to be guided by those words.\n\nAnd he intended to follow them.\n\n\"Now, good brothers, it's time that we say goodbye to brother Geoffrey, whose sacrifice made this day possible.\"\n\nMalone was impressed with the abbey. He, Stephanie, henrik, and Cassiopeia had been welcomed earlier and given a complete tour, the first non-Templars ever afforded that honor. Their guide, the chaplain, had showed them every recess and patiently explained its history. Then he'd left, saying that the conclave was about to begin. He'd returned a few minutes ago and escorted them into the chapel. They'd come to attend Geoffrey's funeral, allowed there thanks to the integral role they'd played in finding the Great Devise.\n\nThey sat in the first row of pews, directly before the altar. The chapel itself was magnificent, a cathedral in its own right, a place that had harbored the Knights Templar for centuries. And Malone could feel their presence.\n\nStephanie sat beside him, Henrik and Cassiopeia beside her. He heard the breath leave her as the chanting stopped and Mark entered from behind the altar. While the other brothers wore russet cassocks with their heads sheathed, he was dressed in the white mantle of the master. Malone reached over and grasped her trembling hand. She threw him a smile and gripped hard.\n\nMark stepped to Geoffrey's simple coffin.\n\n\"This brother gave his life for us. He kept his oath. For that he will have the honor of being buried in the Hall of Fathers. Before this, only masters were there. Now they will be joined by this hero.\"\n\nNo one said a word.\n\n\"Also, the challenge made to our former master by brother de Roquefort is hereby rescinded. His place of honor is restored in the Chronicles. Let us now say goodbye to brother Geoffrey. Through him we have been reborn.\"\n\nThe service lasted an hour and Malone and the others followed the brothers underground into the Hall of Fathers. There the coffin was placed in the locolus beside the former master's.\n\nThen they headed outside to their cars.\n\nMalone noticed a calm in Mark and a thaw in his relationship with his mother.\n\n\"And what now for you, Malone?\" Cassiopeia asked.\n\n\"Back to bookselling. And my son is coming to spend a month with me.\"\n\n\"A son? How old?\"\n\n\"Fourteen, going on thirty. He's a handful.\"\n\nCassiopeia grinned. \"A lot like his father, then.\"\n\n\"More like his mother.\"\n\nHe'd been thinking about Gary a lot the past few days. Seeing Stephanie and Mark struggle with each other brought back some of his own failings as a father. But you'd never know it from Gary. Where Mark became resentful, Gary was brilliant in school, athletic, and had never once objected to Malone moving to Copenhagen. Instead, he'd encouraged him to go, realizing that his father needed to be happy, too. Malone felt a lot of guilt about that decision. But he looked forward to his time with his son. Last year had been their first summer in Europe. This year they planned on traveling to Sweden, Norway, and England. Gary loved to travel\u2014another thing they had in common.\n\n\"Going to be a good time,\" he said.\n\nMalone, Stephanie, and Henrik would drive to Toulouse and catch a flight to Paris. From there, Stephanie would fly home to Atlanta. Malone and Henrik would travel back to Copenhagen. Cassiopeia was headed to the cheteau in her Land Rover.\n\nShe was standing by her car when Malone walked over.\n\nMountains ringed them on all sides. In a couple of months winter would blanket everything with snow. Part of a cycle. As clear in nature as in life. Good, then bad, then good, then more bad, then more good. He remembered telling Stephanie when he retired that he was fed up with the nonsense. She'd smiled at his naefvete and said that so long as the earth was inhabited, there'd be no calm place. The game was the same everywhere. Only the players changed.\n\nThat was okay. The experience of the past week had taught him that he was a player and always would be. But if anyone asked, he'd tell them he was a bookseller.\n\n\"Take care of yourself, Malone,\" she said. \"I won't be watching your back anymore.\"\n\n\"I have a feeling you and I'll see each other again.\"\n\nShe threw him a smile. \"You never know. It's possible.\"\n\nHe walked back to his car.\n\n\"What about Claridon?\" Malone asked Mark.\n\n\"He begged forgiveness.\"\n\n\"And you graciously granted it.\"\n\nMark smiled. \"He said de Roquefort was going to roast the skin off his feet and a couple of brothers confirmed that. He wants to join us.\"\n\nMalone chuckled. \"Are you guys ready for that?\"\n\n\"Our ranks were once filled with far worse men. We'll survive. I look at him as my personal penance.\"\n\nStephanie and Mark spoke a moment in a quiet tone. They'd already said their goodbyes in private. She appeared calm and relaxed. Apparently their salutation had been amenable. Malone was glad. Peace needed to be made there.\n\n\"What will happen with the ossuary and testimony?\" Malone asked Mark. No brothers were nearby, so he felt safe discussing the point.\n\n\"That will stay sealed away. The world is content with what it believes. I'm not going to mess with that.\"\n\nMalone agreed. \"Good idea.\"\n\n\"But this Order will reemerge.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Cassiopeia said. \"I've already talked to Mark about becoming involved in the charitable organization I head. The worldwide AIDS effort and famine prevention could use an influx of capital, and this Order now has a lot to spend.\"\n\n\"Henrik has lobbied hard, too, for us to get involved with his favorite causes,\" Mark said. \"And I've agreed to help there. So the Knights Templar will be busy. Our skills can be put to great use.\"\n\nHe extended his hand, which Mark shook. \"I believe the Templars are in good hands. The best of luck to you.\"\n\n\"You, too, Cotton. And I still want to know about that name.\"\n\n\"You call me one day and I'll tell you all about it.\"\n\nThey climbed into the rental with Malone driving. As they settled in and buckled their seat belts, Stephanie said, \"I owe you one.\"\n\nHe stared over at her. \"That's a first.\"\n\n\"Don't get accustomed to it.\"\n\nHe smiled.\n\n\"Use it wisely.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nAnd he cranked the car."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Amazonia",
        "author": "James Rollins",
        "genres": [
            "thriller",
            "adventure",
            "action"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Prologue",
                "text": "JULY 25, 6:24 P.M.\n\n[ AN AMERINDIAN MISSIONARY VILLAGE ]\n\n[ AMAZONAS, BRAZIL ]\n\nPadre Garcia Luiz Batista was struggling with his hoe, tilling weeds from the mission's garden, when the stranger stumbled from the jungle. The figure wore a tattered pair of black denim pants and nothing else. Bare-chested and shoeless, the man fell to his knees among rows of sprouting cassava plants. His skin, burnt a deep mocha, was tattooed with blue and crimson dyes.\n\nMistaking the fellow for one of the local Yanomamo Indians, Padre Batista pushed back his wide-brimmed straw hat and greeted the fellow in the Indians' native tongue. \"Eou, shori,\" he said. \"Welcome, friend, to the mission of Wauwai.\"\n\nThe stranger lifted his face, and Garcia instantly knew his mistake. The fellow's eyes were the deepest blue, a color unnatural among the Amazonian tribes. He also bore a scraggled growth of dark beard.\n\nClearly not an Indian, but a white man.\n\n\"Bemvindo,\" he offered in Portuguese, believing now that the fellow must be one of the ubiquitous peasants from the coastal cities who ventured into the Amazon rain forest to stake a claim and build a better life for themselves. \"Be welcome here, my friend.\"\n\nThe poor soul had clearly been in the jungle a long time. His skin was stretched over bone, each rib visible. His black hair was tangled, and his body bore cuts and oozing sores. Flies flocked about him, buzzing and feeding on his wounds.\n\nWhen the stranger tried to speak, his parched lips cracked and fresh blood dribbled down his chin. He half crawled toward Garcia, an arm raised in supplication. His words, though, were garbled, unintelligible, a beastly sound.\n\nGarcia's first impulse was to retreat from the man, but his calling to God would not let him. The Good Samaritan did not refuse the wayward traveler. He bent and helped the man to his feet. The fellow was so wasted he weighed no more than a child in his arms. Even through his own shirt, the padre could feel the heat of the man's skin as he burned with fever.\n\n\"Come, let us get you inside out of the sun.\" Garcia guided the man toward the mission's church, its whitewashed steeple poking toward the blue sky. Beyond the building, a ragtag mix of palm-thatched huts and wooden homes spread across the cleared jungle floor.\n\nThe mission of Wauwai had been established only five years earlier, but already the village had swelled to nearly eighty inhabitants, a mix of various indigenous tribes. Some of the homes were on stilts, as was typical of the Apalai Indians, while others built solely of palm thatch were home to the Waiwai and Tirios tribes. But the greatest number of the mission's dwellers were Yanomamo, marked by their large communal roundhouse.\n\nGarcia waved his free arm to one of the Yanomamo tribesmen at the garden's edge, a fellow named Henaowe. The short Indian, the padre's assistant, was dressed in pants and a buttoned, long-sleeved shirt. He hurried forward.\n\n\"Help me get this man into my house.\"\n\nHenaowe nodded vigorously and crossed to the man's other side. With the feverish man slung between them, they passed through the garden gate and around the church to the clapboard building jutting from its south face. The missionaries' residence was the only home with a gas generator. It powered the church's lights, a refrigerator, and the village's only air conditioner. Sometimes Garcia wondered if the success of his mission was not based solely on the wonders of the church's cool interior, rather than any heartfelt belief in salvation through Christ.\n\nOnce they reached the residence, Henaowe ducked forward and yanked the rear door open. They manhandled the stranger through the dining room to a back room. It was one of the domiciles of the mission's acolytes, but it was now unoccupied. Two days ago, the younger missionaries had all left on an evangelical journey to a neighboring village. The small room was little more than a dark cell, but it was at least cool and sheltered from the sun.\n\nGarcia nodded for Henaowe to light the room's lantern. They had not bothered to run the electricity to the smaller rooms. Cockroaches and spiders skittered from the flame's glow.\n\nTogether they hauled the man to the single bed. \"Help me get him out of his clothes. I must clean and treat his wounds.\"\n\nHenaowe nodded and reached for the buttons to the man's pants, then froze. A gasp escaped the Indian. He jumped back as if from a scorpion.\n\n\"Weti kete?\" Garcia asked. \"What is it?\"\n\nHenaowe's eyes had grown huge with horror. He pointed to the man's bare chest and spoke rapidly in his native tongue.\n\nGarcia's brow wrinkled. \"What about the tattoo?\" The blue and red dyes were mostly geometric shapes: crimson circles, vibrant squiggles, and jagged triangles. But in the center and radiating out was a serpentine spiral of red, like blood swirling down a drain. A single blue handprint lay at its center, just above the man's navel.\n\n\"Shawara!\" Henaowe exclaimed, backing toward the door.\n\nEvil spirits.\n\nGarcia glanced back to his assistant. He had thought the tribesman had grown past these superstitious beliefs. \"Enough,\" he said harshly. \"It's only paint. It's not the devil's work. Now come help me.\"\n\nHenaowe merely shook in terror and would approach no closer.\n\nFrowning, Garcia returned his attention to his patient as the man groaned. His eyes were glassy with fever and delirium. He thrashed weakly on the sheets. Garcia checked the man's forehead. It burned. He swung back to Henaowe. \"At least fetch the first-aid kit for me and the penicillin in the fridge.\"\n\nWith clear relief, the Indian dashed away.\n\nGarcia sighed. Having lived in the Amazonian rain forest for a decade, he had out of necessity learned basic medical skills: setting splints, cleaning and applying salves to wounds, treating fevers. He could even perform simple operations, like suturing wounds and helping with difficult births. As the padre of the mission, he was not only the primary guardian of their souls, but also counselor, chief, and doctor.\n\nGarcia removed the man's soiled clothes and set them aside. As his eyes roved over the man's exposed skin, he could clearly see how sorely the unforgiving jungle had ravaged his body. Maggots crawled in his deep wounds. Scaly fungal infections had eaten away the man's toe-nails, and a scar on his heel marked an old snakebite.\n\nAs he worked, the padre wondered who this man was. What was his story? Did he have family out there somewhere? But all attempts to speak to the man were met only with a garbled, delirious response.\n\nMany of the peasants who tried to eke out a living met hard ends at the hands of hostile Indians, thieves, drug traffickers, or even jungle predators. But the most common demise of these settlers was disease. In the remote wilds of the rain forest, medical attention could be weeks away. A simple flu could bring death.\n\nThe scuff of feet on wood drew Garcia's attention back to the door. Henaowe had returned, burdened with the medical kit and a pail of clean water. But he was not alone. At Henaowe's side stood Kamala, a short, white-haired shapori, the tribal shaman. Henaowe must have run off to fetch the ancient medicine man.\n\n\"Haya,\" Garcia greeted the fellow. \"Grandfather.\" It was the typical way to acknowledge a Yanomamo elder.\n\nKamala did not say a word. He simply strode into the room and crossed to the bed. As he stared down at the man, his eyes narrowed. He turned to Henaowe and waved for the Indian to place the bucket and medical kit down. The shaman then lifted his arms over the bedridden stranger and began to chant. Garcia was fluent in many indigenous dialects, but he could not make out a single word.\n\nOnce done, Kamala turned to the padre and spoke in fluent Portuguese. \"This nabe has been touched by the shawara, dangerous spirits of the deep forest. He will die this night. His body must be burned before sunrise.\" With these words, Kamala turned to leave.\n\n\"Wait! Tell me what this symbol means.\"\n\nTurning back with a scowl, Kamala said, \"It is the mark of the Ban-ali tribe. Blood Jaguars. He belongs to them. None must give help to a ban-yi, the slave of the jaguar. It is death.\" The shaman made a gesture to ward against evil spirits, blowing across his fingertips, then left with Henaowe in tow.\n\nAlone in the dim room, Garcia felt a chill in the air that didn't come from the air-conditioning. He had heard whispers of the Ban-ali, one of the mythic ghost tribes of the deep forest. A frightening people who mated with jaguars and possessed unspeakable powers.\n\nGarcia kissed his crucifix and cast aside these fanciful superstitions. Turning to the bucket and medicines, he soaked a sponge in the tepid water and brought it to the wasted man's lips.\n\n\"Drink,\" he whispered. In the jungle, dehydration, more than anything, was often the factor between life and death. He squeezed the sponge and dribbled water across the man's cracked lips.\n\nLike a babe suckling at his mother's teat, the stranger responded to the water. He slurped the trickle, gasping and half choking. Garcia helped raise the man's head so he could drink more easily. After a few minutes, the delirium faded somewhat from the man's eyes. He scrabbled for the sponge, responding to the life-giving water, but Garcia pulled it away. It was unhealthy to drink too quickly after such severe dehydration.\n\n\"Rest, senhor,\" he urged the stranger. \"Let me clean your wounds and get some antibiotics into you.\"\n\nThe man did not seem to understand. He struggled to sit up, reaching for the sponge, crying out eerily. As Garcia pushed him by the shoulders to the pillow, the man gasped out, and the padre finally understood why the man could not speak.\n\nHe had no tongue. It had been cut away.\n\nGrimacing, Garcia prepared a syringe of ampicillin and prayed to God for the souls of the monsters that could do this to another man. The medicine was past its expiration date, but it was the best he could get out here. He injected the antibiotic into the man's left buttock, then began to work on his wounds with sponge and salve.\n\nThe stranger lapsed between lucidity and delirium. Whenever he was conscious, the man struggled mindlessly for his piled clothes, as if he intended to dress and continue his jungle trek. But Garcia would always push his arms back down and cover him again with blankets.\n\nAs the sun set and night swept over the forests, Garcia sat with the Bible in hand and prayed for the man. But in his heart, the padre knew his prayers would not be answered. Kamala, the shaman, was correct in his assessment. The man would not last the night.\n\nAs a precaution, in case the man was a child of Christ, he had performed the sacrament of Last Rites an hour earlier. The fellow had stirred as he marked his forehead with oil, but he did not wake. His brow burned feverishly. The antibiotics had failed to break through the blood infections.\n\nResolved that the man would die, Garcia maintained his vigil. It was the least he could do for the poor soul. But as midnight neared and the jungle awoke with the whining sounds of locusts and the cronking of myriad frogs, Garcia slipped to sleep in his chair, the Bible in his lap.\n\nHe woke hours later at a strangled cry from the man. Believing his patient was gasping his last breath, Garcia struggled up, knocking his Bible to the floor. As he bent to pick it up, he found the man staring back at him. His eyes were glassy, but the delirium had faded. The stranger lifted a trembling hand. He pointed again to his discarded clothes.\n\n\"You can't leave,\" Garcia said.\n\nThe man closed his eyes a moment, shook his head, then with a pleading look, he again pointed to his pants.\n\nGarcia finally relented. How could he refuse this last feverish request? Standing, he crossed to the foot of the bed and retrieved the rumpled pair of pants. He handed them to the dying man.\n\nThe stranger grabbed them up and immediately began pawing along the length of one leg of his garment, following the inner seam. Finally, he stopped and fingered a section of the cotton denim.\n\nWith shaking arms, he held the pants out to Garcia.\n\nThe padre thought the stranger was slipping back into delirium. In fact, the poor man's breathing had become more ragged and coarse. But Garcia humored his nonsensical actions. He took the pants and felt where the man indicated.\n\nTo his surprise, he found something stiffer than denim under his fingers, something hidden under the seam. A secret pocket.\n\nCurious, the padre fished out a pair of scissors from the first-aid kit. Off to the side, the man sank down to his pillow with a sigh, clearly content that his message had finally been understood.\n\nUsing the scissors, Garcia trimmed through the seam's threads and opened the secret pocket. Reaching inside, he tugged out a small bronze coin and held it up to the lamp. A name was engraved on the coin.\n\n\"Gerald Wallace Clark,\" he read aloud. Was this the stranger? \"Is this you, senhor?\"\n\nHe glanced back to the bed.\n\n\"Sweet Jesus in heaven,\" the padre mumbled.\n\nAtop the cot, the man stared blindly toward the ceiling, mouth lolled open, chest unmoving. He had let go the ghost, a stranger no longer.\n\n\"Rest in peace, Senhor Clark.\"\n\nPadre Batista again raised the bronze coin to the lantern and flipped it over. As he saw the words inscribed on the opposite side, his mouth grew dry with dread.\n\nUnited States Army Special Forces.\n\nAUGUST 1, 10:45 A.M.\n\n[ CIA HEADQUARTERS ]\n\n[ LANGLEY, VIRGINIA ]\n\nGeorge Fielding had been surprised by the call. As deputy director of Central Intelligence, he had often been summoned to urgent meetings by various division heads, but to get a priority one call from Marshall O'Brien, the head of the Directorate Environmental Center, was unusual. The DEC had been established back in 1997, a division of the intelligence community dedicated to environmental issues. So far in his tenure, the DEC had never raised a priority call. Such a response was reserved for matters of immediate national security. What could have rattled the Old Bird--as Marshall O'Brien had been nicknamed--to place such an alert?\n\nFielding strode rapidly down the hall that connected the original headquarters building to the new headquarters. The newer facility had been built in the late eighties. It housed many of the burgeoning divisions of the service, including the DEC.\n\nAs he walked, he glanced at the framed paintings lining the long passageway, a gallery of the former directors of the CIA, going back all the way to Major General Donovan, who served as director of the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II--era counterpart of the CIA. Fielding's own boss would be added to this wall one day, and if George played his cards smartly, he himself might assume the directorship.\n\nWith this thought in mind, he entered the New Headquarters Building and followed the halls to the DEC's suite of offices. Once through the main door, he was instantly greeted by a secretary.\n\nShe stood as he entered. \"Deputy Director, Mr. O'Brien is waiting for you in his office.\" The secretary crossed to a set of mahogany doors, knocked perfunctorily, then pushed open the door, holding it wide for him.\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nInside, a deep, rumbling voice greeted him. \"Deputy Director Fielding, I appreciate you coming in person.\" Marshall O'Brien stood up from his chair. He was a towering man with silver-gray hair. He dwarfed the large executive desk. He waved to a chair. \"Please take a seat. I know your time is valuable, and I won't waste it.\"\n\nAlways to the point, Fielding thought. Four years ago, there had been talk that Marshall O'Brien might assume the directorship of the CIA. In fact, the man had been deputy director before Fielding, but he had bristled too many senators with his no-nonsense attitude and burned even more bridges with his rigid sense of right and wrong. That wasn't how politics were played in Washington. So instead, O'Brien had been demoted to a token figurehead here at the Environmental Center. The old man's urgent call was probably his way of scraping some bit of importance from his position, trying to stay in the game.\n\n\"What's this all about?\" Fielding asked as he sat down.\n\nO'Brien settled to his own seat and opened a gray folder atop his desk.\n\nSomeone's dossier, Fielding noted.\n\nThe old man cleared his throat. \"Two days ago, an American's body was reported to the Consular Agency in Manaus, Brazil. The deceased was identified by his Special Forces challenge coin from his old unit.\"\n\nFielding frowned. Challenge coins were carried by many divisions of the military. They were more a tradition than a true means of identification. A unit member, active or not, caught without his coin was duty-bound to buy a round of drinks for his mates. \"What does this have to do with us?\"\n\n\"The man was not only ex--Special Forces. He was one of my operatives. Agent Gerald Clark.\"\n\nFielding blinked in surprise.\n\nO'Brien continued, \"Agent Clark had been sent under-cover with a research team to investigate complaints of environmental damage from gold-mining operations and to gather data on the transshipment of Bolivian and Colombian cocaine through the Amazon basin.\"\n\nFielding straightened in his seat. \"And was he murdered? Is that what this is all about?\"\n\n\"No. Six days ago, Agent Clark appeared at a missionary village deep in the remote jungle, half dead from fever and exposure. The head of the mission attempted to care for him, but he died within a few hours.\"\n\n\"A tragedy indeed, but how is this a matter of national security?\"\n\n\"Because Agent Clark has been missing for four years.\" O'Brien passed him a faxed newspaper article.\n\nConfused, Fielding accepted the article. \"Four years?\"\n\n\u2002EXPEDITION VANISHES IN AMAZONIAN JUNGLE\n\n\u2002Associated Press\n\nMANAUS, BRAZIL, MARCH 20--The continuing search for millionaire industrialist Dr. Carl Rand and his international team of 30 researchers and guides has been called off after three months of intense searching. The team, a joint venture between the U.S. National Cancer Institute and the Brazilian Indian Foundation, vanished into the rain forests without leaving a single clue as to their fate.\n\nThe expedition's yearlong goal had been to conduct a census on the true number of Indians and tribes living in the Amazon forests. However, three months after leaving the jungle city of Manaus, their daily progress reports, radioed in from the field, ended abruptly. All attempts to contact the team have failed. Rescue helicopters and ground search teams were sent to their last known location, but no one was found. Two weeks later, one last, frantic message was received: \"Send help...can't last much longer. Oh, God, they're all around us.\" Then the team was swallowed into the vast jungle.\n\nNow, after a three-month search involving an international team and much publicity, Commander Ferdinand Gonzales, the rescue team's leader, has declared the expedition and its members \"lost and likely dead.\" All searches have been called off.\n\nThe current consensus of the investigators is that the team either was overwhelmed by a hostile tribe or had stumbled upon a hidden base of drug traffickers. Either way, any hope for rescue dies today as the search teams are called home. It should be noted that each year scores of researchers, explorers, and missionaries disappear into the Amazon forest, never to be seen again.\n\n\"My God.\"\n\nO'Brien retrieved the article from the stunned man's fingers and continued, \"After disappearing, no further contact was ever made by the research team or our operative. Agent Clark was classified as deceased.\"\n\n\"But are we sure this is the same man?\"\n\nO'Brien nodded. \"Dental records and fingerprints match those on file.\"\n\nFielding shook his head, the initial shock ebbing. \"As tragic as all this is and as messy as the paperwork will be, I still don't see why it's a matter of national security.\"\n\n\"I would normally agree, except for one additional oddity.\" O'Brien shuffled through the dossier's ream of papers and pulled out two photographs. He handed over the first one. \"This was taken just a few days before he departed on his mission.\"\n\nFielding glanced at the grainy photo of a man dressed in Levi's, a Hawaiian shirt, and a safari hat. The man wore a large grin and was hoisting a tropical drink in hand. \"Agent Clark?\"\n\n\"Yes, the photo was taken by one of the researchers during a going-away party.\" O'Brien passed him the second photograph. \"And this was taken at the morgue in Manaus, where the body now resides.\"\n\nFielding took the glossy with a twinge of queasiness. He had no desire to look at photographs of dead people, but he had no choice. The corpse in this photograph was naked, laid out on a stainless steel table, an emaciated skeleton wrapped in skin. Strange tattoos marked his flesh. Still, Fielding recognized the man's facial features. It was Agent Clark--but with one notable difference. He retrieved the first photograph and compared the two.\n\nO'Brien must have noted the blood draining from his face and spoke up. \"Two years prior to his disappearance, Agent Clark took a sniper's bullet to his left arm during a forced recon mission in Iraq. Gangrene set in before he could reach a U.S. camp. The limb had to be amputated at the shoulder, ending his career with the army's Special Forces.\"\n\n\"But the body in the morgue has both arms.\"\n\n\"Exactly. The fingerprints from the corpse's arm match those on file prior to the shooting. It would seem Agent Clark went into the Amazon with one arm and came back with two.\"\n\n\"But that's impossible. What the hell happened out there?\"\n\nMarshall O'Brien studied Fielding with his hawkish eyes, demonstrating why he had earned his nickname, the Old Bird. Fielding felt like a mouse before an eagle. The old man's voice deepened. \"That's what I intend to find out.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "The Mission",
                "text": "\u2002CURARE\n\n\u2002family: Menispermaceae\n\n\u2002genus: Chondrodendron\n\n\u2002species: Tomentosum\n\n\u2002common name: Curare\n\n\u2002parts used: Leaf, Root\n\n\u2002properties/actions: Diuretic, Febrifuge,\n\n\u2002Muscle Relaxant, Tonic, Poison"
            },
            {
                "title": "Snake Oil",
                "text": "AUGUST 6, 10:11 A.M.\n\n[ AMAZON JUNGLE, BRAZIL ]\n\nThe anaconda held the small Indian girl wrapped in its heavy coils, dragging her toward the river.\n\nNathan Rand was on his way back to the Yanomamo village after an early morning of gathering medicinal plants when he heard her screams. He dropped his specimen bag and ran to her aid. As he sprinted, he shrugged his short-barreled shotgun from his shoulder. When alone in the jungle, one always carried a weapon.\n\nHe pushed through a fringe of dense foliage and spotted the snake and girl. The anaconda, one of the largest he had ever seen, at least forty feet in length, lay half in the water and half stretched out on the muddy beach. Its black scales shone wetly. It must have been lurking under the surface when the girl had come to collect water from the river. It was not unusual for the giant snakes to prey upon animals who came to the river to drink: wild peccary, capybara rodents, forest deer. But the great snakes seldom attacked humans.\n\nStill, during the past decade of working as an ethnobotanist in the jungles of the Amazon basin, Nathan had learned one important rule: if a beast were hungry enough, all rules were broken. It was an eat-or-be-eaten world under the endless green bower.\n\nNathan squinted through his gun's sight. He recognized the girl. \"Oh, God, Tama!\" She was the chieftain's nine-year-old niece, a smiling, happy child who had given him a bouquet of jungle flowers as a gift upon his arrival in the village a month ago. Afterward she kept pulling at the hairs on his arm, a rarity among the smooth-skinned Yanomamo, and nicknamed him Jako Basho, \"Brother Monkey.\"\n\nBiting his lip, he searched through his weapon's sight. He had no clean shot, not with the child wrapped in the muscular coils of the predator.\n\n\"Damn it!\" He tossed his shotgun aside and reached to the machete at his belt. Unhitching the weapon, Nathan lunged forward--but as he neared, the snake rolled and pulled the girl under the black waters of the river. Her screams ended and bubbles followed her course.\n\nWithout thinking, Nathan dove in after her.\n\nOf all the environments of the Amazon, none were more dangerous than its waterways. Under its placid surfaces lay countless hazards. Schools of bone-scouring piranhas hunted its depths, while stingrays lay buried in the mud and electric eels roosted amid roots and sunken logs. But worst of all were the river's true man-killers, the black caimans--giant crocodilian reptiles. With all its dangers, the Indians of the Amazon knew better than to venture into unknown waters.\n\nBut Nathan Rand was no Indian.\n\nHolding his breath, he searched through the muddy waters and spotted the surge of coils ahead. A pale limb waved. With a kick of his legs, he reached out to the small hand, snatching it up in his large grip. Small fingers clutched his in desperation.\n\nTama was still conscious!\n\nHe used her arm to pull himself closer to the snake. In his other hand, he drew the machete back, kicking to hold his place, squeezing Tama's hand.\n\nThen the dark waters swirled, and he found himself staring into the red eyes of the giant snake. It had sensed the challenge to its meal. Its black maw opened and struck at him.\n\nNate ducked aside, fighting to maintain his grip on the girl.\n\nThe anaconda's jaws snapped like a vice onto his arm. Though its bite was nonpoisonous, the pressure threatened to crush Nate's wrist. Ignoring the pain and his own mounting panic, he brought his other arm around, aiming for the snake's eyes with his machete.\n\nAt the last moment, the giant anaconda rolled in the water, throwing Nate to the silty bottom and pinning him. Nate felt the air squeezed from his lungs as four hundred pounds of scaled muscle trapped him. He struggled and fought, but he found no purchase in the slick river mud.\n\nThe girl's fingers were torn from his grip as the coils churned her away from him.\n\nNo...Tama!\n\nHe abandoned his machete and pushed with his hands against the weight of the snake's bulk. His shoulders sank into the soft muck of the riverbed, but still he pushed. For every coil he shoved aside, another would take its place. His arms weakened, and his lungs screamed for air.\n\nNathan Rand knew in this moment that he was doomed--and he was not particularly surprised. He knew it would happen one day. It was his destiny, the curse of his family. During the past twenty years, both his parents had been consumed by the Amazon forest. When he was eleven, his mother had succumbed to an unknown jungle fever, dying in a small missionary hospital. Then, four years ago, his father had simply vanished into the rain forest, disappearing without witnesses.\n\nAs Nate remembered the heartbreak of losing his father, rage flamed through his chest. Cursed or not, he refused to follow in his father's footsteps. He would not allow himself simply to be swallowed by the jungle. But more important, he would not lose Tama!\n\nScreaming out the last of the trapped air in his chest, Nathan shoved the anaconda's bulk off his legs. Freed for a moment, he swung his feet under him, sinking into the mud up to his ankles, and shoved straight up.\n\nHis head burst from the river, and he gulped a breath of fresh air, then was dragged by his arm back under the dark water.\n\nThis time, Nathan did not fight the strength of the snake. Holding the clamped wrist to his chest, he twisted into the coils, managing to get a choke hold around the neck of the snake with his other arm. With the beast trapped, Nate dug his left thumb into the snake's nearest eye.\n\nThe snake writhed, tossing Nate momentarily out of the water, then slamming him back down. He held tight.\n\nC'mon, you bastard, let up!\n\nHe bent his trapped wrist enough to drive his other thumb into the snake's remaining eye. He pushed hard on both sides, praying his basic training in reptile physiology proved true. Pressure on the eyes of a snake should trigger a gag reflex via the optic nerve.\n\nHe pressed harder, his heartbeat thudding in his ears.\n\nSuddenly the pressure on his wrist released, and Nathan found himself flung away with such force that he half sailed out of the river and hit the riverbank with his shoulder. He twisted around and saw a pale form float to the surface of the river, facedown in midstream.\n\nTama!\n\nAs he had hoped, the visceral reflex of the snake had released both prisoners. Nathan shoved into the river and grabbed the child by the arm, pulling her slack form to him. He slung her over a shoulder and climbed quickly to the shore.\n\nHe spread her soaked body on the bank. She was not breathing. Her lips were purple. He checked her pulse. It was there but weak.\n\nNathan glanced around futilely for help. With no one around, it would be up to him to revive the girl. He had been trained in first aid and CPR before venturing into the jungle, but Nathan was no doctor. He knelt, rolled the girl on her stomach, and pumped her back. A small amount of water sloshed from her nose and mouth.\n\nSatisfied, he rolled Tama back around and began mouth-to-mouth.\n\nAt this moment, one of the Yanomamo tribesfolk, a middle-aged woman, stepped from the jungle's edge. She was small, as were all the Indians, no more than five feet in height. Her black hair was sheared in the usual bowl cut and her ears were pierced with feathers and bits of bamboo. Her dark eyes grew huge at the sight of the white man bent over the small child.\n\nNathan knew how it must look. He straightened up from his crouch just as Tama suddenly regained consciousness, coughing out gouts of river water and thrashing and crying in horror and fright. The panicked child beat at him with tiny fists, still in the nightmare of the snake attack.\n\n\"Hush, you're safe,\" he said in the Yanomamo dialect, trying to snare her hands in his grip. He turned to the woman, meaning to explain, but the small Indian dropped her basket and vanished into the thick fringe at the river's edge, whooping with alarm. Nathan knew the call. It was raised whenever a villager was under attack.\n\n\"Great, just great.\" Nathan closed his eyes and sighed.\n\nWhen he had first come to this particular village four weeks ago, intending to record the medicinal wisdom of the tribe's old shaman, he had been instructed by the chief to stay away from the Indian women. In the past, there had been occasions when strangers had taken advantage of the tribe's womenfolk. Nathan had honored this request, even though some of the women had been more than willing to share his hammock. His six-foot-plus frame, blue eyes, and sandy-colored hair were a novelty to the women of this isolated tribe.\n\nIn the distance, the fleeing woman's distress call was answered by others, many others. The name Yanomamo translated roughly as \"the fierce people.\" The tribes were considered some of the most savage warriors. The huyas, or young men of the village, were always contesting some point of honor or claiming some curse had been set upon them, anything to warrant a brawl with a neighboring tribe or another tribesman. They were known to wipe out entire villages for so slight an insult as calling someone a derogatory name.\n\nNathan stared down into the face of the young girl. And what would these huyas make of this? A white man attacking one of their children, the chieftain's niece.\n\nAt his side, Tama had slowed her panic, swooning back into a fitful slumber. Her breathing remained regular, but when he checked her forehead, it was warm from a growing fever. He also spotted a darkening bruise on her right side. He fingered the injury--two broken ribs from the crushing embrace of the anaconda. He sat back on his heels, biting his lower lip. If she was to survive, she would need immediate treatment.\n\nBending, he gently scooped her into his arms. The closest hospital was ten miles downstream in the small town of Sao Gabriel. He would have to get her there.\n\nBut there was only one problem--the Yanomamo. There was no way he could flee with the girl and expect to get away. This was Indian territory, and though he knew the terrain well, he was no native. There was a proverb spoken throughout the Amazon: Na boesi, ingi sabe ala sani. In their jungle, the Indian know everything. The Yanomamo were superb hunters, skilled with bow, blowgun, spear, and club.\n\nThere was no way he could escape.\n\nStepping away from the river, he retrieved his discarded shotgun from the brush and slung it over his shoulder. Lifting the girl higher in his arms, Nathan set off toward the village. He would have to make them listen to him, both for his sake and Tama's.\n\nAhead, the Indian village that he had called home for the past month had gone deathly quiet. Nathan winced as he walked. Even the constant twitter of birds and hooting call of monkeys had grown silent.\n\nHolding his breath, he turned a corner in the trail and found a wall of Indians blocking his way, arrows nocked and drawn, spears raised. He sensed more than heard movement behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw more Indians already in position, faces daubed with crimson.\n\nNate had only one hope to rescue the girl and himself, an act he was loath to do, but he had no choice.\n\n\"Nabrushi yi yi!\" he called out forcefully. \"I demand trial by combat!\"\n\nAUGUST 6, 11:38 A.M.\n\n[ OUTSIDE SAO GABRIEL DA COCHOERIA ]\n\nManuel Azevedo knew he was being hunted. He heard the jaguar's coughing grunt coming from the forest fringes as he ran along the trail. Exhausted, soaked in sweat, he stumbled down the steep trail from the summit of the Mount of the Sacred Way. Ahead, a break in the foliage opened a view upon Sao Gabriel. The township lay nestled in the curve of the Rio Negro, the northern tributary of the great Amazon River.\n\nSo close...perhaps close enough...\n\nManny slid to a stop and faced back up the trail. He strained for any sign of the jaguar's approach: the snap of a twig, the rustle of leaves. But no telltale sign revealed the jungle cat's whereabouts. Even its hunting cough had gone silent. It knew it had run its prey to exhaustion. Now it crept in for the kill.\n\nManny cocked his head. The buzz of locusts and distant trill of birds were the only sounds. A rivulet of sweat dribbled down his neck. He tensed, ears straining. His fingers instinctively went to the knife on his belt. His other hand settled on the strap of his short whip.\n\nManny searched the dappled jungle floor around him. Chokes of ropy vines and leafy bushes clogged the path to both sides. Where would it come from?\n\nShadows shifted.\n\nHe spun on a heel, crouching. He tried to see through the dense foliage. Nothing.\n\nFarther down the trail, a section of shadow lurched toward him, a sleek mirage of dappled fur, black on orange. It had been standing only ten feet away, lying low to the ground, haunches bunched under it. The cat was a large juvenile male, two years old.\n\nSensing it had been spotted, it whipped its tail back and forth with savage strokes, rattling the leaves.\n\nManny crouched, ready for the attack.\n\nWith a deep growl, the great cat leaped at him, fangs bared.\n\nManny grunted as its weight struck him like a crashing boulder. The pair went rolling down the trail. The wind was knocked out of Manny's thin frame as he tumbled. The world dissolved down to flashes of green, splashes of sunlight, and a blur of fur and teeth.\n\nClaws pierced his khakis as the great cat wrapped Manny in its grip. A pocket ripped away. Fangs clamped onto his shoulder. Though the jaguar had the second strongest jaws of any land animal, its teeth did no more than press into his flesh.\n\nThe pair finally came to a stop several yards down the trail where it leveled off. Manny found himself pinned under the jaguar. He stared into the fiery eyes of his adversary as it gnawed at his shirt and growled.\n\n\"Are you done, Tor-tor?\" He gasped. He had named the great cat after the Arawak Indian word for ghost. Though presently, with the jaguar's bulk seated on his chest, the name did not seem particularly apt.\n\nAt the sound of its master's voice, the jaguar let loose his shirt and stared back at him. Then a hot, coarse tongue swiped the sweat from Manny's forehead.\n\n\"I love you, too. Now get your furry butt off me.\"\n\nClaws retracted, and Manny sat up. He checked the condition of his clothes and sighed. Training the young jaguar to hunt was quickly laying waste his wardrobe.\n\nStanding up, Manny groaned and worked a kink from his back. At thirty-two, he was getting too old to play this game.\n\nThe cat rolled to its paws and stretched. Then, with a swish of the tail, it began to sniff at the air.\n\nWith a small laugh, Manny cuffed the jaguar on the side of its head. \"We're done hunting for today. It's getting late. And I have a stack of reports still waiting for me back at the office.\"\n\nTor-tor rumbled grumpily, but followed.\n\nTwo years back, Manny had rescued the orphaned jaguar cub when it was only a few days old. Its mother had been killed by poachers for her pelt, a treasure that still brought a tidy sum on the black market. At current estimate, the population of wild jaguars was down to fifteen thousand, spread thin across the vast jungles of the Amazon basin. Conservation efforts did little to dissuade peasants who eked out a subsistence-level existence from hunting them for profit. A hungry belly made one shortsighted to efforts of wildlife preservation.\n\nManny knew this too well himself. Half Indian, he had been an orphan on the streets of Barcellos, along the banks of the Amazon River. He had lived hand to mouth, begging for coins from passing tourist boats and stealing when his palm came up empty. Eventually he was taken in by a Salesian missionary and worked his way up to a degree in biology at the University of Sao Paulo, his scholarship sponsored by the Brazilian Indian foundation, FUNAI. As payback for his scholarship, he worked with local Indian tribes: protecting their interests, preserving their ways of life, helping them claim their own lands legally. And at thirty, he found himself posted here in Sao Gabriel, heading the local FUNAI office.\n\nIt was during his investigation of poachers encroaching on Yanomamo lands that Manny discovered Tor-tor, an orphan like himself. The cub's right hind leg had been fractured where he had been kicked by one of the poachers. Manny could not abandon the tiny creature. So he had collected the mewling and hissing cub in a blanket and slowly nursed the foundling back to health.\n\nManny watched Tor-tor pace ahead of him. He could still see the slight tweak to his gait from his injured leg. In less than a year, Tor-tor would be sexually mature. The cat's feral nature would begin to shine, and it would be time to loose him into the jungle. But before that happened Manny wanted Tor-tor to be able to fend for himself. The jungle was no place for the uninitiated.\n\nAhead, the trail curved through the last of the jungled slopes of the Mount of the Sacred Way. The city of Sao Gabriel spread open before him, a mix of hovels and utilitarian cement-block structures bustled up against the Negro River. A few new hotels and buildings dotted the landscape, built within the last half decade to accommodate the growing flood of tourists to the region. And in the distance lay a new commercial airstrip. Its tarmac was a black scar through the surrounding jungle. It seemed even in the remote wilds there was no stopping progress.\n\nManny wiped his damp forehead, then stumbled into Tor-tor when the cat suddenly stopped. The jaguar growled deep in its throat, a warning.\n\n\"What's the matter?\" Then he heard it, too.\n\nEchoing across the blanket of jungle, a deep thump-thump ing grew in volume. It seemed to be coming from all around them. Manny's eyes narrowed. He recognized the sound, though it was seldom heard out here. A helicopter. Most travelers to Sao Gabriel came by riverboat or by small prop planes. The distances were generally too vast to accommodate helicopters. Even the local Brazilian army base had only a single bird, used for rescue and evacuation missions.\n\nAs Manny listened and the noise grew in volume, he realized something else. It was more than just one helicopter.\n\nHe searched the skies but saw nothing.\n\nSuddenly Tor-tor tensed and dashed into the surrounding brush.\n\nA company of three helicopters flashed overhead, sweeping past the Mount of the Sacred Way and circling toward the small township like a swarm of wasps. Camouflaged wasps.\n\nThe bulky choppers--UH-1 Hueys--were clearly military.\n\nCraning up, Manny watched a fourth helicopter pass directly above him. But unlike its brethren, this one was sleek and black. It whispered over the jungle. Manny recognized its characteristic shape and enclosed tail rotor from his short stint in the military. It was an RAH-66 Comanche, a reconnaissance and attack helicopter.\n\nThe slender craft passed close enough for Manny to discern the tiny American flag on its side. Above him, the jungle canopy rattled with its rotor wash. Monkeys fled, screaming in fright, and a flock of scarlet macaws broke like a streak of fire across the blue sky.\n\nThen this helicopter was gone, too. It descended toward the open fields around the Brazilian army base, circling to join the other three.\n\nFrowning, Manny whistled for Tor-tor. The huge cat slunk from its hiding place, eyes searching all around.\n\n\"It's all right,\" he assured the jaguar.\n\nThe thump-thump ing noise died away as the helicopters settled to the fields.\n\nHe crossed to Tor-tor and rested one hand on the great cat's shoulder, which trembled under his touch. The jaguar's nervousness flowed into him.\n\nManny headed downhill, settling a palm on the knobbed handle of the bullwhip hitched to his belt. \"What the hell is the United States military doing here in Sao Gabriel?\"\n\nNathan stood, stripped to his boxers, in the middle of the village's central plaza. Around him lay the Yanomamo shabano, or roundhouse, a circular structure half a football field wide with the central roof cut away to expose the sky. Women and older men lay sprawled in hammocks under the banana leaf roof, while the younger men, the huyas, bore spears and bows, ensuring Nathan did not try to flee.\n\nEarlier, as he had been led at spearpoint back to camp, he had tried to explain about the attack by the anaconda, baring the bite marks on his wrist as proof. But no one would listen. Even the village chieftain, who had taken the child from his arms, had waved his words away as if they offended him.\n\nNathan knew that his voice would not be heard by those around him until the trial was over. It was the Yanomamo way. He had demanded combat as a way to buy time, and now no one would listen until the battle was over. Only if the gods granted him victory would he be heard.\n\nNathan stood barefoot in the dirt. Off to the side, a group of huyas argued over who would accept his challenge and what weapons would be used in the battle. The traditional duel was usually waged with nabrushi, slender, eight-foot-long wooden clubs that the combatants used to beat each other. But in more serious duels, deadly weapons were used, such as machetes or spears.\n\nAcross the plaza, the throng parted. A single Indian stepped forth. He was tall for a tribesman, almost as tall as Nathan, and wiry with muscle. It was Tama's father, Takaho, the chieftain's brother. He wore nothing but a braided string around his waist into which was tucked the foreskin of his penis, the typical garb of Yanomamo men. Across his chest were slash lines drawn in ash, while under a monkey-tail headband his face had been painted crimson. His lower lip bulged with a large tuck of tobacco, giving him a belligerent look.\n\nHe held out a hand, and one of the huyas hurried forward and placed a long ax in his palm. The ax's haft was carved of purple snakewood and ended in a pikelike steel head. It was a wicked-looking tool and one of the most savage dueling weapons.\n\nNate found a similar ax thrust into his own hands.\n\nAcross the way, he watched another huya hurry forward and hold out a clay pot full of an oily liquid. Takaho dipped his axhead into the pot.\n\nNate recognized the mixture. He had assisted the shaman in preparing this batch of woorari, in English curare, a deadly paralyzing nerve poison prepared from a liana vine of the moonseed family. The drug was used in hunting monkeys, but today it was intended for a more sinister purpose.\n\nNathan glanced around. No one came forth to offer a similar pot to anoint his blade. It seemed the battle was not to be exactly even.\n\nThe village chief raised a bow over his head and sounded the call for the duel to begin.\n\nTakaho strode across the plaza, wielding the ax with practiced skill.\n\nNathan lifted his own ax. How could he win here? A single scratch meant death. And if he did win, what would be gained? He had come here to save Tama, and to do that, he would have to slay her father.\n\nBracing himself, he lifted the ax across his chest. He met the angry eyes of his opponent. \"I didn't hurt your daughter!\" he called out fiercely.\n\nTakaho's eyes narrowed. He had heard Nate's words, but mistrust shone in his eyes. Takaho glanced to where Tama was being ministered to by the village shaman. The lanky elder was bowed over the girl, waving a smoking bundle of dried grass while chanting. Nathan could smell the bitter incense, an acrid form of smelling salts derived from hempweed. But the girl did not move.\n\nTakaho faced Nate. With a roar, the Indian lunged forward, swinging his ax toward Nate's head.\n\nTrained as a wrestler in his youth, Nate knew how to move. He dropped under the ax and rolled to the side, sweeping wide with his own weapon and knocking his opponent's legs out from under him.\n\nTakaho fell hard to the packed dirt, smacking his shoulder and knocking loose his monkey-tail headband. But he was otherwise unharmed. Nate had struck with the blunt side of his ax, refusing to go for a maiming blow.\n\nWith the man down, Nate leaped at him, meaning to pin the Indian under his larger frame. If I could just immobilize him...\n\nBut Takaho rolled away with the speed of a cat, then swung again with a savage backstroke of his ax.\n\nNate reared away from the weapon's deadly arc. The poisoned blade whistled past the tip of his nose and slammed into the dirt between his hands. Relieved at the close call, Nathan was a second too late in dodging the foot kicked at his head. Ears ringing from the blow, he tumbled across the dirt. His own ax bounced out of his stunned hand and skittered into the crowd of onlookers.\n\nSpitting out blood from his split lip, Nathan stood quickly.\n\nTakaho was already on his feet.\n\nAs the Indian tugged his embedded ax from the dirt, Nathan noticed the shaman over his shoulder. The elder was now exhaling smoke across Tama's lips, a way of chasing off bad spirits before death.\n\nAround him, the other huyas were now chanting for the kill.\n\nTakaho lifted his ax with a grunt and turned to Nate. The Indian's face was a crimson mask of rage. He rushed at Nate, his ax whirling in a blur before him.\n\nWithout a weapon, Nate retreated. So this is how I die...\n\nNate found himself backed against a wall of spears held by other Indians. There was no escape. Takaho slowed for the kill, the ax high over his head.\n\nNathan felt the prick of spearheads in his bare back as he instinctively leaned away.\n\nTakaho swung his weapon down with the strength of both shoulders.\n\n\"Yulo!\" The sharp cry burst through the chanting huyas. \"Stop!\"\n\nNathan cringed from the blow that never came. He glanced up. The ax trembled about an inch from his face. A dribble of poison dripped onto his cheek.\n\nThe shaman, the one who had called out, pushed past other tribesmen into the central plaza. \"Your daughter wakes!\" He pointed to Nate. \"She speaks of a giant snake and of her rescue by the white man.\"\n\nAll faces turned to where Tama was sipping weakly at a gourd of water held by a tribeswoman.\n\nNathan stared up into Takaho's eyes as the Indian faced him again. Takaho's hard expression melted with relief. He pulled away his weapon, then dropped it to the dirt. An empty hand clamped onto Nate's shoulder, and Takaho pulled him to his chest. \"Jako,\" he said, hugging him tight. \"Brother.\"\n\nAnd just like that, it was over.\n\nThe chieftain pushed forward, puffing out his chest. \"You battled the great susuri, the anaconda, and pulled our tribe's daughter from its belly.\" He removed a long feather from his ear and tucked it into Nate's hair. It was the tail feather of a harpy eagle, a treasured prize. \"You are no longer a nabe, an outsider. You are now jako, brother to my brother. You are now Yanomamo.\"\n\nA great cheer rose all around the shabono.\n\nNathan knew this was an honor above all honors, but he still had a pressing concern. \"My sister,\" he said, pointing toward Tama. It was taboo to refer to a Yanomamo by his or her given name. Familial designations, real or not, were used instead. Tama moaned softly where she lay. \"My sister is still sick. She has suffered injuries that the healers in Sao Gabriel can help mend. I ask that you allow me to take her to the town's hospital.\"\n\nThe village shaman stepped forward. Nathan feared he would argue that his own medicine could heal the girl. As a whole, shamans were a prideful group. But instead, the Indian elder agreed, placing a hand on Nate's shoulder. \"Our little sister was saved from the susuri by our new jako. We should heed the gods in choosing him as her rescuer. I can do no more for her.\"\n\nNathan wiped the poison from his cheek, careful to keep it away from any open cuts, and thanked the elder. The shaman had done more than enough already. His natural medicines had been able to revive the girl in time to save him. Nathan turned next to Takaho. \"I would ask to borrow your canoe for the journey.\"\n\n\"All that is mine is yours,\" Takaho said. \"I will go with you to Sao Gabriel.\"\n\nNathan nodded. \"We should hurry.\"\n\nIn short order, Tama was loaded on a stretcher of bamboo and palm fronds and placed in the canoe. Takaho, now dressed in a tank top and a pair of Nike shorts, waved Nathan to the bow of the dugout canoe, then shoved away from the shore with his oar and into the main current of the Negro River. The river led all the way to Sao Gabriel.\n\nThey made the ten-mile journey in silence. Nathan checked on Tama frequently and recognized the worry in her father's eyes. The girl had slipped back into a stupor, trembling, moaning softly now and then. Nathan wrapped a blanket around her small form.\n\nTakaho wended the small canoe with skill through small rapids and around tangles of fallen trees. He seemed to have an uncanny skill at finding the swiftest currents.\n\nAs the canoe sped downriver, they passed a group of Indians from a neighboring village fishing in the river with spears. He watched a woman sprinkle a dark powder into the waters from an upstream canoe. Nate knew what she was doing. It was crushed ayaeya vine. As it flowed downstream, the dissolved powder would stun fish, floating them to the surface where they were speared and collected by the men. It was an ancient fishing method used throughout the Amazon.\n\nBut how long would such traditions last? A generation or two? Then this art would be lost forever.\n\nNathan settled into his seat, knowing there were certain battles he could never win. For good or bad, civilization would continue its march through the jungle.\n\nAs they continued along, Nate stared out at the walls of dense foliage that framed both banks. All around him, life buzzed, chirped, squawked, hooted, and grunted.\n\nOn either side, packs of red howler monkeys yelled in chorus and bounced aggressively atop their branches. Along the shallows, white-feathered bitterns with long orange beaks speared fish, while the plated snouts of caimans marked nesting grounds of the Amazonian crocodiles. Closer still, in the air around them, clouds of gnats and stinging flies harangued every inch of exposed skin.\n\nHere the jungle ruled in all its forms. It seemed endless, impenetrable, full of mystery. It was one of the last regions of the planet that had yet to be fully explored. There were vast stretches never walked by man. It was this mystery and wonder that had attracted Nathan's parents to spend their lives here, eventually infecting their only son with their love of the great forest.\n\nNathan watched the jungle pass around him, noting the emerging signs of civilization, and knew that they neared Sao Gabriel. Small clearings made by peasant farmers began to appear, dotting the banks of the river. From the shore, children waved and called as the canoe whisked past. Even the noises of the jungle grew muted, driven away by the noisome ruckus of the modern world: the grumble of diesel tractors in the fields, the whine of motor boats that sped past the canoe, the tinny music of a radio blaring from a homestead.\n\nThen, from around a bend in the river, the jungle ended abruptly. The small city of Sao Gabriel appeared like some cancer that had eaten away the belly of the forest. Near the river, the city was a ramshackle mix of rotting wooden shacks and cement government buildings. Away from the water, homes both small and large climbed the nearby hills. Closer at hand, the wharves and jetties were crowded with tourist boats and primer-scarred river barges.\n\nNathan turned to direct Takaho toward a section of open riverbank. He found the Indian staring in horror at the city, his oar clutched tightly to his chest.\n\n\"It fills the world,\" he mumbled.\n\nNathan glanced back to the small township. It had been two weeks since his last supply run to Sao Gabriel, and the noise and bustle were a rude shock to him. What must it be like for someone who had never left the jungle?\n\nNathan nodded to a spot to beach the canoe. \"There is nothing here that a great warrior need fear. We must get your daughter to the hospital.\"\n\nTakaho nodded, clearly swallowing back his shock. His face again settled into a stoic expression, but his eyes continued to flit around the wonders of this other world. He guided the canoe as directed, then helped Nathan haul out the stretcher on which Tama's limp form lay.\n\nAs she was shifted, the girl moaned, and her eyelids fluttered, eyes rolling white. She had paled significantly during the ride here.\n\n\"We must hurry.\"\n\nTogether, the two carried the girl through the waterfront region, earning the gawking stares of the townies and a few blinding flashes from camera-wielding tourists. Though Takaho wore \"civilized\" clothes, his monkey-tail headband, the sprouts of feathers in his ears, and his bowl-shaped haircut marked this fellow as one of the Amazon's indigenous tribespeople.\n\nLuckily, the small single-story hospital was just past the waterfront region. The only way one could tell it was a hospital was the flaking red cross painted above the threshold, but Nathan had been here before, consulting with the doctor on staff, a fellow from Manaus. They were soon off the streets and guiding their stretcher through the door. The hospital reeked of ammonia and bleach, but it was deliciously air-conditioned. The cool air struck Nate like a wet towel to the face.\n\nHe crossed to the nurse's station and spoke rapidly. The pudgy woman's brow wrinkled with a lack of understanding until Nathan realized he had been speaking in the Yanomamo dialect. He switched quickly to Portuguese. \"The girl has been attacked by an anaconda. She's suffered a few broken ribs, but I think her internal injuries might be more severe.\"\n\n\"Come this way.\" The nurse waved them toward a set of double doors. She eyed Takaho with clear suspicion.\n\n\"He's her father.\"\n\nThe nurse nodded. \"Dr. Rodriguez is out on a house call, but I can ring him for an emergency.\"\n\n\"Ring him,\" Nathan said.\n\n\"Maybe I can help,\" a voice said behind him.\n\nNathan turned.\n\nA tall, slender woman with long auburn hair rose from the wooden folding chairs in the waiting room. She had been partially hidden behind a pile of wooden crates emblazoned with the red cross. Approaching with calm assurance, she studied them all intently.\n\nNathan stood straighter.\n\n\"My name is Kelly O'Brien,\" she said in fluent Portuguese, but Nate heard a trace of a Boston accent. She pulled out identification with the familiar medical caduceus stamped on it. \"I'm an American doctor.\"\n\n\"Dr. O'Brien,\" he said, switching to English, \"I could certainly use your help. The girl here was attacked--\"\n\nAtop the stretcher, Tama's back suddenly arched. Her heels began to beat at the palm fronds, then her thrashing spread through the rest of her body.\n\n\"She's seizing!\" the woman said. \"Get her into the ward!\"\n\nThe pudgy nurse led the way, holding the door wide for the stretcher.\n\nKelly O'Brien rushed alongside the girl as the two men swung the stretcher toward one of the four beds in the tiny emergency ward. Snatching a pair of surgical gloves, the tall doctor barked to the nurse, \"I need ten milligrams of diazepam!\"\n\nThe nurse nodded and dashed to a drug cabinet. In seconds, a syringe of amber-colored fluid was slapped into Kelly's gloved hand. The doctor already had a rubber tourniquet in place. \"Hold her down,\" she ordered Nate and Takaho.\n\nBy now, a nurse and a large orderly had arrived as the quiet hospital awakened to the emergency.\n\n\"Get ready with an IV line and a bag of LRS,\" Kelly said sharply. Her fingers palpated a decent vein in the girl's thin arm. With obvious competence, Kelly inserted the needle and slowly injected the drug.\n\n\"It's Valium,\" she said as she worked. \"It should calm the seizure long enough to find out what's wrong with her.\"\n\nHer words proved instantly true. Tama's convulsions calmed. Her limbs stopped thrashing and relaxed to the bed. Only her eyelids and the corner of her lips still twitched. Kelly was examining her pupils with a penlight.\n\nThe orderly nudged Nate aside as he worked on Tama's other arm, preparing a catheter and IV line.\n\nNate glanced over the orderly's shoulder and saw the fear and panic in her father's eyes.\n\n\"What happened to her?\" the doctor asked as she continued examining the girl.\n\nNathan described the attack. \"She's been slipping in and out of consciousness most of the time. The village shaman was able to revive her for a short time.\"\n\n\"She's sustained a pair of cracked ribs and associated hematomas, but I can't account for the seizure or stupor. Did she have any seizures en route here?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Any familial history of epilepsy?\"\n\nNate turned to Takaho and repeated the question in Yanomamo.\n\nTakaho nodded. \"Ah-de-me-nah gunti.\"\n\nNate frowned.\n\n\"What did he say?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"Ah-de-me-nah means electric eel. Gunti is disease or sickness.\"\n\n\"Electric eel disease?\"\n\nNate nodded. \"That's what he said. But it makes no sense. A victim of an electric eel attack will often convulse, but it's an immediate reaction. And Tama hasn't been in any water for hours. I don't know...maybe 'electric eel disease' is the Yanomamo term for epilepsy.\"\n\n\"Has she been treated for it? On medication?\"\n\nNate got the answer from Takaho. \"The village shaman has been treating her once a week with the smoke of the hempweed vine.\"\n\nKelly sighed in exasperation. \"So in other words, she's been unmedicated. No wonder the stress of the near drowning triggered such a severe attack. Why don't you take her father out to the waiting room? I'll see if I can get these seizures to cease with stronger meds.\"\n\nNate glanced to the bed. Tama's form lay quiet. \"Do you think she'll have more?\"\n\nKelly glanced into his eyes. \"She's still having them.\" She pointed to the persistent facial twitches. \"She's in status epilepticus, a continual seizure. Most patients who suffer from such prolonged attacks will appear stuporous, moaning, uncoordinated. The full grand mal events like a moment ago will be interspersed. If we can't stop it, she'll die.\"\n\nNate stared at the little girl. \"You mean she's been seizing this entire time?\"\n\n\"From what you describe, more or less.\"\n\n\"But the village shaman was able to draw her out of the stupor for a short time.\"\n\n\"I find that hard to believe.\" Kelly returned her attention to the girl. \"He wouldn't have medication strong enough to break this cycle.\"\n\nNate remembered the girl sipping at the gourd. \"But he did. Don't discount tribal shamans as mere witch doctors. I've worked for years with them. And considering what they have to work with, they're quite sophisticated.\"\n\n\"Well, wise or not, we've stronger medications here. Real medicine.\" She nodded again to the father. \"Why don't you take her father out to the waiting room?\" Kelly turned back to the orderly and nurses, dismissing him.\n\nNate bristled, but obeyed. For centuries, the value of shamanism had been scorned by practitioners of Western medicine. Nate coaxed Takaho out of the ward and into the waiting room. He guided the Indian to a chair and instructed him to stay, then headed for the door.\n\nHe slammed his way out into the heat of the Amazon. Whether the American doctor believed him or not, he had seen the shaman revive the girl. If there was one man who might have an answer for Tama's mysterious illness, he knew where to find him.\n\nHalf running, he raced through the afternoon heat toward the southern outskirts of the city. In about ten blocks, he was skirting the edge of the Brazilian army camp. The normally sleepy base buzzed with activity. Nate noted the four helicopters with United States markings in the open field. Locals lined the base's fences, pointing toward the novelty of the foreign military craft and chattering excitedly.\n\nHe ignored the oddity and hurried to a cement-block building set amid a row of dilapidated wooden structures. The letters FUNAI were painted on the wall facing the street. It was the local office for the Brazilian Indian Foundation and represented the sole source of aid, education, and legal representation for the local tribes, the Baniwa and Yanomamo. The small building housed both offices and a homeless shelter for Indians who had come in search of the white man's prosperity.\n\nFUNAI also had its own medical counselor, a longtime friend of the family and his own father's mentor here in the jungles of the Amazon.\n\nNate pushed through the anteroom and hurried down a hall and up a set of stairs. He prayed his friend was in his office. As he neared the open door, he heard the strands of Mozart's Fifth Violin Concerto flowing out.\n\nThank God!\n\nKnocking on the door's frame, Nate announced himself. \"Professor Kouwe?\"\n\nBehind a small desk, a mocha-skinned Indian glanced up from a pile of papers. In his mid-fifties, he had shoulder-length black hair that was graying at the temples, and he now wore wire-rimmed glasses when reading. He took off those glasses and smiled broadly when he recognized Nate.\n\n\"Nathan!\" Resh Kouwe stood and came around the desk to give him a hug that rivaled the coils of the anaconda he had fought. For his compact frame, the man was as strong as an ox. Formerly a shaman of the Tirios tribe of southern Venezuela, Kouwe had met Nate's father three decades ago, and the two had become fast friends. Kouwe had eventually left the jungle with his father's help and was schooled at Oxford, earning a dual degree in linguistics and paleoanthropology. He was also one of the preeminent experts in the botanical lore of the region. \"My boy, I can't believe you're here! Did Manny contact you?\"\n\nNathan frowned as he was released from the bear hug. \"No, what do you mean?\"\n\n\"He's looking for you. He stopped by about an hour ago to see if I knew which village you were conducting your current research in.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Nathan's brow wrinkled.\n\n\"He didn't say, but he did have one of those Tellux corporate honchos with him.\"\n\nNathan rolled his eyes. Tellux Pharmaceuticals was the multinational corporation that had been financing his investigative research into the practices of the region's tribal shamans.\n\nKouwe recognized his sour expression. \"It was you who made the pact with the devil.\"\n\n\"Like I had any choice after my father died.\"\n\nKouwe frowned. \"You should not have given up on yourself so quickly. You were always--\"\n\n\"Listen,\" Nathan said, cutting him off. He didn't want to be reminded of that black period in his life. He had made his own bed and would have to lie in it. \"I've got a different problem than Tellux.\" He quickly explained about Tama and her illness. \"I'm worried about her treatment. I thought you could consult with the doctor.\"\n\nKouwe grabbed a fishing tackle box from a shelf. \"Foolish, foolish, foolish,\" he said, and headed for the door.\n\nNathan followed him down the stairs and out into the street. He had to hurry to keep up with the older man. Soon the two were pushing through the hospital's front doors.\n\nTakaho leaped to his feet at the reappearance of Nathan. \"Jako...Brother.\"\n\nNathan waved him back down. \"I've brought someone who might be able to help your daughter.\"\n\nKouwe did not wait. He was already shoving into the ward beyond the doors. Nathan hurried after him.\n\nWhat he found in the next room was chaos. The slender American doctor, her face drenched with sweat, was bent over Tama, who was again in a full grand mal seizure. Nurses were scurrying to and fro at her orders.\n\nKelly glanced over the girl's convulsing body. \"We're losing her,\" she said, her eyes frightened.\n\n\"Maybe I can help,\" Kouwe said. \"What medications has she been given?\"\n\nKelly ran down a quick list, wiping strands of hair from her damp forehead.\n\nNodding, Kouwe opened his tackle box and grabbed a small pouch from one of the many tiny compartments. \"I need a straw.\"\n\nA nurse obeyed him as quickly as she had Dr. O'Brien. Nathan could guess that this was not the first visit Professor Kouwe had made to the hospital here. There was no one wiser on indigenous diseases and their cures.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Kelly asked, her face red. Her loose auburn hair had been pulled back in a ponytail.\n\n\"You've been working under a false assumption,\" he said calmly as he packed the plastic straw with his powder. \"The convulsive nature of electric eel disease is not a manifestation of a CNS disturbance, like epilepsy. It's due to a hereditary chemical imbalance in the cerebral spinal fluid. The disease is unique to a handful of Yanomamo tribes.\"\n\n\"A hereditary metabolic disorder?\"\n\n\"Exactly, like favism among certain Mediterranean families or 'cold-fat disease' among the Maroon tribes of Venezuela.\"\n\nKouwe crossed to the girl and waved to Nathan. \"Hold her still.\"\n\nNathan crossed and held Tama's head to the pillow.\n\nThe shaman positioned one end of the straw into the girl's nostril, then blew the straw's powdery content up her nose.\n\nDr. O'Brien hovered behind him. \"Are you the hospital's clinician? Dr. Rodriguez?\"\n\n\"No, my dear,\" Kouwe said, straightening. \"I'm the local witch doctor.\"\n\nKelly looked at him with an expression of disbelief and horror, but before she could object, the girl's thrashing began to calm, first slowly, then more rapidly.\n\nKouwe checked Tama's eyelids. The sick pallor to her skin was already improving. \"I've found the absorption of certain drugs through the sinus membranes is almost as effective as intravenous administration.\"\n\nKelly looked on in amazement. \"It's working.\"\n\nKouwe passed the pouch to one of the nurses. \"Is Dr. Rodriguez on his way in?\"\n\n\"I called him earlier, Professor,\" a nurse answered, glancing at her wristwatch. \"He should be here in ten minutes.\"\n\n\"Make sure the girl gets half a straw of the powder every three hours for the next twenty-four, then once daily. That should stabilize her so her other injuries can be addressed satisfactorily.\"\n\n\"Yes, Professor.\"\n\nOn the bed, Tama slowly blinked open her eyes. She stared at the strangers around her, confusion and fright clear in her face, then her eyes found Nathan's. \"Jako Basho,\" she said weakly.\n\n\"Yes, Brother Monkey is here,\" he said in Yanomamo, patting her hand. \"You're safe. Your papa is here, too.\"\n\nOne of the nurses fetched Takaho. When he saw his daughter awake and speaking, he fell to his knees. His stoic demeanor shattered, and he wept with relief.\n\n\"She'll be fine from here,\" Nate assured him.\n\nKouwe collected his fishing tackle box and retreated from the room. Nathan and Dr. O'Brien followed.\n\n\"What was in that powder?\" the auburn-haired doctor asked.\n\n\"Desiccated ku-nah-ne-mah vine.\"\n\nNate answered the doctor's confused expression. \"Climbing hempweed. The same plant the tribal shaman burned to revive the girl back at the village. Just like I told you before.\"\n\nKelly blushed. \"I guess I owe you an apology. I didn't think...I mean I couldn't imagine...\"\n\nKouwe patted her on her elbow. \"Western ethnocentrism is a common rudeness out here. It's nothing to be embarrassed about.\" He winked at her. \"Just outgrown.\"\n\nNate did not feel as courteous. \"Next time,\" he said harshly, \"listen with a more open mind.\"\n\nShe bit her lip and turned away.\n\nNathan instantly felt like a cad. His worry and fear throughout the day had worn his patience thin. The doctor had only been trying her best. Knowing he shouldn't have been so hard on her, he opened his mouth to apologize.\n\nBut before he could speak, the front door swung open and a tall redheaded man dressed in khakis and a beat-up Red Sox baseball cap stepped into the lobby. He spotted the doctor. \"Kelly, if you've finished delivering the supplies, we need to be under way. We've a boat that's willing to take us upriver.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said. \"I'm all done here.\"\n\nShe then glanced at Nathan and Kouwe. \"Thank you.\"\n\nNathan recognized the similarities between this newcomer and the young doctor: the splash of freckles, the same crinkle around the eyes, even their voices had the same Boston lilt. Her brother, he guessed.\n\nNathan followed them out of the hospital and into the street. But what he found there caused him to take an involuntary step backward, bumping into Professor Kouwe.\n\nAligned across the road was a group of ten soldiers in full gear, including M-16s with collapsible butt stocks, holstered pistols, and heavy packs. Nate recognized the shoulder insignia common to them all. Army Rangers. One spoke into a radio and waved the group forward toward the waterfront. The pair of Americans joined the departing group.\n\n\"Wait!\" someone called from beyond the line of Rangers.\n\nThe military wall parted, and a familiar face appeared. It was Manny Azevedo. The stocky black-haired man broke through the ranks. He wore scuffed trousers and the pocket of his shirt had been ripped to a hanging flap. His characteristic bullwhip was wound at his waist.\n\nNathan returned Manny's smile and crossed to him. They hugged briefly, patting each other on the back. Then Nathan flicked the torn bit of his khaki shirt. \"Playing with Tor-tor again, I see.\"\n\nManny grinned. \"The monster's gained ten kilos since the last time you saw him.\"\n\nNathan laughed. \"Great. Like he wasn't big enough already.\" Noting that the Rangers had stopped and were staring at the pair, as were Kelly O'Brien and her brother, Nathan nodded to the military party and leaned closer. \"So what's all this about? Where are they heading?\"\n\nManny glanced at the group. By now, a large crowd of onlookers had gathered to gawk at the line of stiff Army Rangers. \"It seems the U.S. government is financing a recon team for a deep-jungle expedition.\"\n\n\"Why? Are they after drug traffickers?\"\n\nBy now, Kelly O'Brien had stepped back toward them.\n\nManny acknowledged her with a nod, then waved a hand to Nathan. \"May I introduce you to Dr. Rand? Dr. Nathan Rand.\"\n\n\"It seems we've already met,\" Kelly said with an embarrassed smile. \"But he never offered his name.\"\n\nNathan sensed something unspoken pass between Kelly and Manny. \"What's going on?\" he asked. \"What are you searching for upriver?\"\n\nShe stared him straight in the eyes. Her eyes were the most striking shade of emerald. \"We came to find you, Dr. Rand.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Debriefing",
                "text": "AUGUST 6, 9:15 P.M.\n\n[ SAO GABRIEL DA COCHOERIA ]\n\nNate crossed the street from Manny's offices at FUNAI and headed toward the Brazilian army base. He was accompanied by the Brazilian biologist and Professor Kouwe. The professor had just returned from the hospital. Nate was relieved to hear that Tama was recuperating well.\n\nFreshly showered and shaved, his clothes laundered, Nathan Rand felt nothing like the man who had arrived here only hours before with the girl. It was as if he had scraped and scrubbed the jungle from his body along with the dirt and sweat. In a few hours, he went from a newly anointed member of the Yanomamo tribe back to an American citizen. It was amazing the transformational power of Irish Spring deodorant soap. He sniffed at the residual smell.\n\n\"After being so long in the jungle, it's nauseating, isn't it?\" Professor Kouwe said, puffing on a pipe. \"When I first left my home in the Venezuelan jungle, it was the bombardment upon my senses--the smells, the noises, the furious motion of civilization--that took the longest to acclimatize to.\"\n\nNathan dropped his arm. \"It's strange how quickly you adapt to the simpler life out in the wilds. But I can tell you one thing that makes all the hassles of modern civilized life worth it.\"\n\n\"What's that?\" Manny asked.\n\n\"Toilet paper,\" Nathan said.\n\nKouwe snorted with laughter. \"Why do you think I left the jungle?\"\n\nThey crossed toward the gate of the illuminated base. The meeting was scheduled to start in another ten minutes. Maybe then he'd have some answers.\n\nAs they walked, Nathan glanced over the quiet city and studied this little bastion of civilization. Over the river, a full moon hung, reflected in the sleek surface, blurred by an evening mist spreading into the city. Only at night does the jungle reclaim Sao Gabriel. After the sun sets, the noises of the city die down, replaced by the echoing song of the nightjar in the surrounding trees, accompanied by the chorus of honking frogs and the vibrato of locusts and crickets. Even in the streets, the flutter of bats and whine of blood-hungry mosquitoes replace the honk of cars and chatter of people. Only as one passes an open cantina, where the tinkling laughter of late-night patrons flows forth, does human life intrude.\n\nOtherwise, at night, the jungle rules.\n\nNathan kept pace with Manny. \"What could the U.S. government possibly need with me?\"\n\nManny shook his head. \"I'm not sure. But it somehow involves your financiers.\"\n\n\"Tellux Pharmaceuticals?\"\n\n\"Right. They arrived with several corporate types. Lawyers, by the look of them.\"\n\nNate scowled. \"Aren't there always when Tellux is involved?\"\n\nKouwe spoke around the stem of his pipe. \"You didn't have to sell Eco-tek to them.\"\n\nNate sighed. \"Professor...\"\n\nThe shaman raised his hands in submission. \"Sorry. I know...sore subject.\"\n\nSore wasn't the word Nathan would have used. Established twelve years ago, Eco-Tek had been his father's brainchild. It was a niche pharmaceutical firm that had sought to utilize shamanic knowledge as the means to discover new botanical drugs. His father had wanted to preserve the wisdom of the vanishing medicine men of the Amazon basin and to insure that these local tribes profited from their own knowledge through intellectual property rights. Not only had it been his father's dream and purpose in life, but also the culmination of a promise to Nate's mother, Sarah. While working as a medical doctor for the Peace Corps, she had dedicated her life to the indigenous people here, and her passion was contagious. Nate's father had promised to continue on in her footsteps and, years later, Eco-Tek was the result, a fusion of razor-sharp business models and nonprofit advocacy.\n\nBut now all that was left of his parents' legacy was gone, dismantled and swallowed by Tellux.\n\n\"Looks like we're getting an escort,\" Manny said, breaking through Nate's thoughts.\n\nAt the gate's guard station, two Rangers in tan berets stood stiffly behind a nervous-looking Brazilian soldier.\n\nNathan eyed their holstered sidearms warily and wondered again at the nature of this meeting.\n\nAs they reached the gates, the Brazilian guard checked their identifications. Then one of the two Rangers stepped forward. \"We're to take you to the debriefing. If you'll please follow.\" He turned sharply on his heel and strode away.\n\nNathan glanced to his friends, then proceeded through the gates. The second Ranger took up a strategic position behind them. Ushered along by their escorts, with a view of the four military helicopters resting on the camp's soccer field, Nathan felt a distinct sense of dread in his belly.\n\nNone of this seemed to concern Professor Kouwe. He simply puffed on his pipe and strode casually after their armed escort. Manny also appeared more distracted than alarmed.\n\nThey were marched past the corrugated Quonset huts that served as barracks for the Brazilian troops and led to a derelict timber-framed warehouse on the far side with the few windows painted black.\n\nThe Ranger in the lead opened the rusted door. Nathan was the first through. Expecting to find a gloomy, spider-infested interior, he was surprised to find the large warehouse brightly lit with halogen poles and overhead fluorescents. The cement floor was crisscrossed with cables, some as thick around as his wrist. From one of the three offices lining the back half of the warehouse, a generator could be heard chugging away.\n\nNathan gaped at the level of sophisticated hardware positioned throughout the room: computers, radio equipment, televisions, and monitors.\n\nAmid all the organized chaos, a long conference table had been set up, strewn with printouts, maps, graphs, even a pile of newspapers. Men and women in both military garb and civilian clothes were busy throughout the room. Several were poring over reams of paper at the table, including Kelly O'Brien.\n\nWhat's going on here? Nathan wondered.\n\n\"I'm afraid there's no smoking inside,\" their escort said to Professor Kouwe, indicating the lit pipe.\n\n\"Of course.\" Kouwe tapped out his pipe's bowl onto the threshold's dirt floor. The Ranger used his boot heel to squash the burning tobacco. \"Thank you.\"\n\nFrom across the way, one of the office doors opened and the tall redheaded man who appeared to be Dr. O'Brien's brother stepped out. At his side was a man Nate knew well enough to dislike immensely. He was dressed in a navy blue suit with the jacket slung over one arm, a coat Nate was sure bore the Tellux logo. As usual, his dark brown hair was oiled and combed into perfect place, as was his smartly trimmed goatee. The smile he wore as he approached Nathan and his two friends was just as oily.\n\nOn the other hand, his redheaded companion crossed with an arm extended and a more genuine expression of welcome. \"Dr. Rand, thank you for coming. I think you know Dr. Richard Zane.\"\n\n\"We've met,\" Nathan said coldly, then shook the redhead's hand. The man had a grip that could crush stone.\n\n\"I'm Frank O'Brien, the head of operations here. You've already met my sister.\" He nodded over to Kelly, who glanced up from the table. She lifted a hand in greeting. \"Now that you're all here we can get this meeting under way.\"\n\nFrank guided Nate, Kouwe, and Manny toward the table, then waved an arm, signaling the others to take their seats.\n\nA hard-faced man with a long pale scar across his throat settled himself across the table from Nathan. At his side sat one of the Rangers, his two silver bars suggesting he was the captain of the military forces here.\n\nAt the head of the table, Richard Zane sat between Kelly and Frank, who remained standing. To the left was another Tellux employee, a small Asian woman in a conservative blue pantsuit. Her eyes glinted with intelligence and seemed to soak in everything around her. Nate caught her gaze. She gave him the faintest of smiles and nodded her head.\n\nOnce everyone else was settled, Frank cleared his throat. \"First, Dr. Rand, let me welcome you to the command center for Operation Amazonia, a joint operation between the CIA's Environmental Center and Special Forces Command.\" He gave a short nod to the silver-barred captain. \"We're also supported by the Brazilian government and are assisted by Tellux Pharmaceutical's research division.\"\n\nKelly interrupted her brother, raising a hand. She clearly read the confusion on Nathan's face. \"Dr. Rand, I'm sure you've many questions. Foremost being, why you've been sought as a partner in this venture.\"\n\nNathan nodded.\n\nKelly stood. \"The main objective of Operation Amazonia is to discover the fate of your father's lost expedition.\"\n\nNate's jaw dropped and his vision blackened at the edges. He felt as if he'd just been sucker-punched. He stammered for half a moment until he found his voice. \"But...but that was over four years ago.\"\n\n\"We understand that, but--\"\n\n\"No!\" He found himself on his feet, his chair skittering across the cement behind him. \"They're dead. All dead!\"\n\nProfessor Kouwe reached to place a restraining hand on his elbow. \"Nathan...\"\n\nHe shook his arm free. He remembered that call as if it were yesterday. He had been finishing up his doctoral thesis at Harvard. He had taken the next plane down to Brazil and joined the search for the vanished team. Memories flowed through him as he stood in the warehouse--the blinding fear, the anger, the frustration. After the searches were called off, he had refused to give up. He couldn't! He had pleaded with Tellux Pharmaceuticals to help continue the search privately. Tellux had been a co-sponsor, along with Eco-tek, in this venture. The ten-year goal: to conduct a census of the current populations of indigenous tribes and begin a systematic cataloging of their medicinal knowledge before such information was lost forever. But Tellux had refused Nate's request for assistance. The corporation had supported the conclusion that the team either had been killed by a tribe of hostile Indians or had stumbled upon a camp of drug traffickers.\n\nNate had not. Over the next year, he spent millions continuing the search, beating the bush for any sign, clue, inkling of what had become of his father. It was a financial black hole into which he poured Eco-tek's assets, further destabilizing his father's company. Eco-tek had already taken a devastating hit on Wall Street, its stock value plummeting after the loss of its CEO in the jungle. Eventually, the well ran dry. Tellux made a run for his father's company in a hostile takeover bid. Nate was too wounded, tired, and heartsore to fight. Eco-tek and its assets, including Nathan himself, became beholden to the multinational corporation.\n\nWhat followed was an even blacker period of his life, a hazy blur of alcohol, drugs, and disillusionment. It was only with the help of friends like Professor Kouwe and Manny Azevedo that he had ever found himself again. In the jungles, he found the pain was less severe. He discovered he could survive a day, then another. He plodded his way as best he could, continuing his father's work with the Indians, financed on a pittance from Tellux.\n\nUntil now. \"They're dead!\" he repeated, sagging toward the table. \"After so long, there's no hope of ever discovering what happened to my father.\"\n\nNathan felt Kelly's penetrating emerald eyes on him as she waited for him to compose himself. Finally, she spoke. \"Do you know Gerald Wallace Clark?\"\n\nOpening his mouth to say no, Nathan suddenly recognized the name. He had been a member of his father's team. Nathan licked his lips. \"Yes. He was a former soldier. He headed the expedition's five-man weapons team.\"\n\nKelly took a deep breath. \"Twelve days ago, Gerald Wallace Clark walked out of the jungle.\"\n\nNate's eyes grew wide.\n\n\"Damn,\" Manny said beside him.\n\nProfessor Kouwe had retrieved Nate's toppled chair and now helped guide him down to his seat.\n\nKelly continued, \"Unfortunately, Gerald Clark died at a missionary settlement before he could indicate where he had come from. The goal of our operation is to backtrack this latest trail to find out what happened. We were hoping that as the son of Carl Rand, you'd be interested in cooperating with our search.\"\n\nA silence descended over the table.\n\nFrank cleared his throat, adding, \"Dr. Rand, not only are you an expert on the jungle and its indigenous tribes, but you also knew your father and his team better than anyone. Such knowledge could prove an asset during this deep-jungle search.\"\n\nNathan was still too stunned to speak or answer. Professor Kouwe was not. He spoke calmly. \"I can see why Tellux Pharmaceuticals is invested in this matter.\" Kouwe nodded to Richard Zane, who smiled back at the professor. \"They were never one to pass up a chance to profit from another's tragedy.\"\n\nZane's smile soured.\n\nKouwe continued, now turning his attention to Frank and Kelly. \"But why is this matter of interest to the CIA's Environmental Center? And what's the rationale for assigning an Army Ranger unit to the mission?\" He turned to the military man, raising a single eyebrow. \"Would either of you two or the captain here wish to elaborate?\"\n\nFrank's brow wrinkled at the quick and piercing assessment from the professor. Kelly's eyes sparked.\n\nShe answered. \"Besides being an ex-soldier and a weapons expert, Gerald Clark was also a CIA operative. He was sent along with the expedition to gather intelligence on the cocaine shipment routes through the rain forest basin.\"\n\nFrank glanced quickly at Kelly, as if this bit of information were given a bit too freely.\n\nShe ignored her brother and continued. \"But any further elaboration will only be given if Dr. Rand agrees to join our operation. Otherwise, additional details will be restricted.\"\n\nKouwe, his eyes bright with warning, glanced to Nathan.\n\nNate took a deep breath. \"If there's any hope of finding out what happened to my father, then I can't pass up this chance.\" He turned to his two friends. \"You both know I can't.\"\n\nNathan stood and faced the table. \"I'll go.\"\n\nManny shoved out of his chair. \"Then I'm going with him.\" He faced the others and continued before anyone could object. \"I've already talked to my superiors in Brasilia. As chief representative of FUNAI here, I have the power at my discretion to place any restrictions or qualifications on this mission.\"\n\nFrank nodded. \"So we were informed an hour ago. It's your choice. Either way, you'll have no objection from me. I read your file. Your background as a biologist could prove useful.\"\n\nNext, Professor Kouwe stood up and placed a hand on Nate's shoulder. \"Then perhaps you could use an expert in linguistics also.\"\n\n\"I appreciate your offer.\" Frank waved to the small Asian woman. \"But we do have that covered. Dr. Anna Fong is an anthropologist with a specialty in indigenous tribes. She speaks a dozen different dialects.\"\n\nNathan scoffed, \"No offense to Dr. Fong, but Professor Kouwe speaks over a hundred and fifty. There is no better expert in the field.\"\n\nAnna spoke up, her voice soft and sweet. \"Dr. Rand is most correct. Professor Kouwe is world renowned for his knowledge of the Amazon's indigenous tribes. It would be a privilege to have his cooperation.\"\n\n\"And it seems,\" Kelly added with a respectful nod toward the older man, \"the good professor is also a distinguished expert on botanical medicines and jungle diseases.\"\n\nKouwe bowed his head in her direction.\n\nKelly turned to her brother. \"As the expedition's medical doctor, I wouldn't mind having him along either.\"\n\nFrank shrugged. \"What's one more?\" He faced Nathan. \"Is this acceptable to you?\"\n\nNathan glanced to his right and left. \"Of course.\"\n\nFrank nodded and raised his voice. \"Let's all get back to work then. Discovering Dr. Rand here in the city has accelerated our schedule. We've a lot to accomplish in order to be under way at the crack of dawn tomorrow.\" As the others began to disperse, Frank turned to Nathan. \"Now let's see if we can't get a few more of your questions answered.\"\n\nHe and his sister led the way toward one of the back offices.\n\nNate and his two friends followed.\n\nManny glanced over his shoulder to the bustling room. \"Just what the hell have we volunteered for?\"\n\n\"Something amazing,\" Kelly answered from ahead, holding open the office door. \"Step inside and I'll show you.\"\n\nNathan clutched the photos of Agent Clark and passed them around to the others. \"And you're telling me this man actually grew his arm back?\"\n\nFrank stepped around the desk and took a seat. \"So it would seem. It's been verified by fingerprints. The man's body was shipped today from the morgue in Manaus back to the States. His remains are due to be examined tomorrow at a private research facility sponsored by MEDEA.\"\n\n\"MEDEA?\" Manny asked. \"Why does that name sound familiar?\"\n\nKelly answered from where she was studying topographic maps tacked on the wall. \"MEDEA's been active in rain forest conservation since its inception back in 1992.\"\n\n\"What is MEDEA?\" Nathan asked, placing the photos on the desk.\n\n\"Back in 1989, there were congressional hearings on whether or not the classified data gathered by the CIA through its satellite surveillance systems might be useful in studying and monitoring global environmental changes. As a result, MEDEA was formed in 1992. The CIA recruited more than sixty researchers in various environmental-related fields into a single organization to analyze classified data in regard to environmental concerns.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Nathan said.\n\nFrank spoke up, \"Our mother was one of the original MEDEA founders, with a background in medicine and hazardous-waste risks. She was hired by my father when he was deputy director of the CIA. She'll be overseeing the autopsy of Agent Clark.\"\n\nManny frowned. \"Your father is the deputy director of the CIA?\"\n\n\"Was,\" Frank said bitterly.\n\nKelly turned from the maps. \"He's now director of the CIA's Environmental Center. A division that was founded by Al Gore in 1997 at the behest of MEDEA. Frank works in this division, as well.\"\n\n\"And you?\" Nathan asked. \"Are you CIA, too?\"\n\nKelly waved away his question.\n\n\"She's the youngest member of MEDEA,\" Frank said with a bit of pride in his voice. \"Quite the distinguished honor. It was why we were chosen to head this operation. I represent the CIA. She represents MEDEA.\"\n\n\"Nothing like keeping it all in the family,\" Kouwe said with a snort.\n\n\"The fewer who know about the mission the better,\" Frank added.\n\n\"Then how does Tellux Pharmaceuticals play a role in all this?\" Nathan asked.\n\nKouwe answered before either of the O'Brien siblings. \"Isn't it obvious? Your father's expedition was financed by Eco-tek and Tellux, which are now one and the same. They own any proprietary intelligence gained from the expedition. If the team discovered some compound out there with regenerative properties, Tellux owns the majority rights to it.\"\n\nNathan glanced to Kelly, who stared at her toes.\n\nFrank simply nodded. \"He's right. But even at Tellux, only a handful of people know the true purpose of our mission here.\"\n\nNate shook his head. \"Great, just great.\" Kouwe placed a sympathetic hand on his shoulder.\n\n\"All that aside,\" Manny said, \"what's our first step?\"\n\n\"Let me show you.\" Kelly turned once again to the maps on the back wall. She pointed to the centermost one. \"I'm sure Dr. Rand is familiar with this map.\"\n\nHe stared at it and did indeed recognize it like the lines on his own palm. \"It's the recorded route my father's team took four years ago.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Kelly said, tracing her finger along the dotted course that led in haphazard fashion from Manaus south along the Madeira River until it reached the town of Porto Velho, where it angled north into the heart of the Amazon basin. From there, the team crisscrossed the area until they bridged into the little-explored region between the southern and northern tributaries of the Amazon. Her finger stopped at the small cross at the end of the line. \"Here is where all radio contact with the team ceased. And where all searches originated--both those sponsored by the Brazilian government and those financed privately.\" She glanced significantly at Nathan. \"What can you tell us about the searches?\"\n\nNate circled around the desk to stare at the map. A familiar creeping despair edged through the core of his being. \"It was December, the height of the rainy season,\" he whispered dully. \"Two major storm systems had moved through the region. It was one of the reasons no one was initially concerned. But when an update from the team grew to be almost a week late and the storms had abated, an alarm went up. At first, no one was really that worried. These were people who had lived their lives in the jungle. What could go wrong? But as search teams began tentatively looking, it was realized that all trace of the expedition was gone, erased by the rains and the flooded forests. This spot\"--Nathan placed a finger on the black X--\"was found to be underwater when the first team arrived.\"\n\nHe turned to the others. \"Another week went by, then another. Nothing. No clues, no further word...until one last frantic signal. 'Send help...can't last much longer. Oh, God, they're all around us.'\" Nate took a deep breath. The memory of those words still haunted him deeply. \"The signal was so full of static that it was impossible to discern who even spoke. Maybe it was this Agent Clark.\" But in his heart, Nathan knew it had been his father. He had listened over and over to that last message. The last words of his father.\n\nNathan stared at the photos and documents strewn across the desktop. \"For the next three months, the searchers swept throughout the region, but storms and floods made any progress difficult. There was no telling in which direction my father's team had headed: east, west, north, south.\" He shrugged. \"It was impossible. We were searching a region larger than the state of Texas. Eventually everyone gave up.\"\n\n\"Except you,\" Kelly said softly.\n\nNathan clenched a fist. \"And a lot of good that did. No further contact was ever heard.\"\n\n\"Until now,\" Kelly said. She gently drew him around and pointed to a small red circle he had not noticed before. She pointed to it. It lay about two hundred miles due south of Sao Gabriel, near the river of Jarura, a branch of the Solimoes, the mighty southern tributary of the Amazon. \"This is the mission of Wauwai, where Agent Clark died. This is where we're heading tomorrow.\"\n\n\"And what then?\" Manny asked.\n\n\"We follow Gerald Clark's trail. Unlike the earlier searches, we have an advantage.\"\n\n\"What is that?\" Manny asked.\n\nNathan spoke up, leaning close to the wall map. \"We're at the end of the dry season. There hasn't been a major storm through here in a month.\" He glanced over his shoulder. \"We should be able to track his movements.\"\n\n\"Hence, the urgency and speed of organizing this mission.\" Frank stood. He leaned one hand on the wall and nodded to the map. \"We hope to follow any clues before the wet season begins and the trail is washed away. We're also hoping Agent Clark was sound enough in mind to leave some evidence of his route--marks on a tree, piles of rock--some way to lead us back to where he had been held these past four years.\"\n\nFrank turned back to the desk and slid out a large folded sheet of sketch paper. \"In addition, we've employed Anna Fong so we can communicate with any natives of the region: peasants, Indians, trappers, whoever. To see if anyone has seen a man with these markings pass by.\" Frank unfolded and smoothed the paper. A hand-sketched drawing was revealed. \"This was tattooed across Agent Clark's chest and abdomen. We hope that we'll find isolated folk who might have seen a man with this marking.\"\n\nProfessor Kouwe flinched.\n\nHis reaction did not go unnoticed by those in the room.\n\n\"What is it?\" Nathan asked.\n\nKouwe pointed to the sketch paper. It delineated a complex serpentine pattern that spiraled out from a single stylized handprint.\n\n\"This is bad. Very bad.\" Kouwe fumbled in his pocket and pulled out his pipe. He lifted a questioning eye at Frank.\n\nThe redheaded man nodded.\n\nKouwe slipped out a pouch and tamped some locally grown tobacco into the pipe, then lit it with a single match. Nathan noted his uncharacteristically trembling fingers.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\nKouwe puffed on his pipe and spoke slowly. \"It's the symbol for the Ban-ali. The Blood Jaguars.\"\n\n\"You know this tribe?\" Kelly asked.\n\nThe shaman blew out a long stream of smoke and sighed, then shook his head. \"No one knows this tribe. It is what's whispered among village elders, stories passed from one generation to another. Myths of a tribe that mates with jaguars and whose members can vanish into thin air. They bring death to all who encounter them. It is said they are as old as the forest and that the very jungle bends to their will.\"\n\n\"But I've never heard of them,\" Nathan said, \"and I've worked with tribes throughout the Amazon.\"\n\n\"And Dr. Fong, the Tellux anthropologist,\" Frank said. \"She didn't recognize it either.\"\n\n\"I'm not surprised. No matter how well you're accepted, a nontribesman will always be considered pananakiri, an alien to the Indians of the region. They would never speak of the Ban-ali to you.\"\n\nNate couldn't help but feel a bit insulted. \"But I--\"\n\n\"No, Nathan. I don't mean to slight your own work or abilities. But for many tribes, names have power. Few will speak the name Ban-ali. They fear to draw the attention of the Blood Jaguars.\" Kouwe pointed to the drawing. \"If you take this symbol with you, it must be shown with care. Many Indians would slay you for possessing such a paper. There is no greater taboo than allowing that symbol into a village.\"\n\nKelly frowned. \"Then it's doubtful Agent Clark passed through any villages.\"\n\n\"If he did, he wouldn't have walked out alive.\"\n\nKelly and Frank shared a concerned look, then the doctor turned to Nathan. \"Your father's expedition was cataloging Amazonian tribes. If he had heard of these mysterious Ban-ali or had found some clue of their existence, perhaps he sought them out.\"\n\nManny folded the sketched drawing. \"And perhaps he found them.\"\n\nKouwe studied the glowing tip of his pipe. \"Pray to God he did not.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "A little later, with most of the details settled, Kelly watched the trio, escorted by a Ranger, cross the room and exit the warehouse. Her brother Frank was already at the portable satellite uplink to report the day's progress to his superiors, including their father.\n\nBut Kelly found her gaze following Nathan Rand. After their antagonistic exchange in the hospital, she was still slightly put off by his demeanor. But he was hardly the same oily-haired, foul-smelling wretch she had seen hauling the girl on a stretcher. Shaved and in clean clothes, he was certainly handsome: sandy-blond hair, dark complexion, steel-blue eyes. Even the way one eyebrow would rise when he was intrigued was oddly charming.\n\n\"Kelly!\" her brother called. \"There's someone who'd like to say hi.\"\n\nWith a tired sigh, Kelly joined her brother at the table. All around the room, final preparations and equipment checks were being finished. She leaned both palms on the table and stared into the laptop's screen. She saw two familiar faces, and a warm smile crossed her face.\n\n\"Mother, Jessie's not supposed to be up this late.\" She glanced to her own wristwatch and did a quick calculation. \"It must be close to midnight.\"\n\n\"Actually after midnight, hon.\"\n\nKelly's mother could have been her sister. Her hair was as deep an auburn as her own. The only sign of her age was the slightly deeper crinkles at the corners of her eyes and the small pair of glasses perched on her nose. She had been pregnant with Kelly and Frank when she was only twenty-two, still in med school herself. Giving birth to fraternal twins was enough of a family for the med student and the young navy surveillance engineer. Kelly's mother and father never had any more children.\n\nBut that didn't stop Kelly from following in her mother's footsteps, getting pregnant in her fourth year of medical school at Georgetown. Yet unlike her mother, who remained married to the father of her children, Kelly divorced Daniel Nickerson when she found him in bed with a fellow residency student. He at least had enough decency not to contest Kelly's demand for custody of their one-year-old daughter, Jessica.\n\nJessie, now six years old, stood at her grandmother's shoulder, dressed in a yellow flannel nightgown with Disney's Pocahontas on the front. Her tousled red hair looked as if she had just climbed out of bed. She waved at the screen. \"Hi, Mommy!\"\n\n\"Hi, sweetheart. Are you having a good time with Grandma and Grandpa?\"\n\nShe nodded vigorously. \"We went to Chuck E. Cheese's today!\"\n\nKelly's smile broadened. \"That sounds like fun. I wish I could've been there.\"\n\n\"We saved a piece of pizza for you.\"\n\nIn the background, her mother's eyes rolled with the exasperation of all grandparents who've had encounters with the giant Chuck E. Cheese's rodent.\n\n\"Did you see any lions, Mommy?\"\n\nThis earned a chuckle. \"No, hon, there are no lions here. That's Africa.\"\n\n\"How about gorillas?\"\n\n\"No, that's Africa, too--but we did see some monkeys.\"\n\nJessica's eyes grew round. \"Can you catch one and bring one home? I always wanted a monkey.\"\n\n\"I don't think the monkey would like that. He has his own mommy here.\"\n\nHer mother placed an arm around Jessica. \"And I think it's time we let your mommy get some sleep. She has to get up early like you do.\"\n\nJessica's face fell into a pout.\n\nKelly leaned closer to the screen. \"I love you, Jessie.\"\n\nShe waved at the screen. \"Bye, Mommy.\"\n\nHer mother smiled at her. \"Be careful, hon. I wish I could be there.\"\n\n\"You've got enough work of your own. Did the...um...\" Her eyes flicked to Jessie. \"...package arrive safely?\"\n\nHer mother's face drifted to a more serious demeanor. \"It cleared customs in Miami about six o'clock, arrived here in Virginia about ten, and was trucked to the Instar Institute. In fact, your father's still over there, making sure all is in order for tomorrow's examination.\"\n\nKelly nodded, relieved Clark's body had arrived in the States safely.\n\n\"I should get Jessie to bed, but I'll update you tomorrow night during the evening uplink. You be careful out there.\"\n\n\"Don't worry. I've got a crack team of ten Army Rangers as bodyguards. I'll be safer than on the streets of downtown Washington.\"\n\n\"Still, you two watch each other's backs.\"\n\nKelly glanced to Frank, who was talking to Richard Zane. \"We will.\"\n\nHer mother swept her a kiss. \"I love you.\"\n\n\"Love you too, Mom.\" Then the screen went dead.\n\nKelly closed the laptop, then slumped to a chair by the table, suddenly exhausted. She stared at the others. Her gear was already packed and stored on the Huey. Free from any responsibilities for the moment, her mind drifted back to the red serpentine tattoo wrapped around a blue palm, the symbol of the Ban-ali, the ghost tribe of the Amazon.\n\nTwo questions nagged her: Did such a tribe exist, a tribe with these mythic powers? And if so, would ten armed Rangers be enough?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "[ The Doctor and the Witch }\n\nAUGUST 6, 11:45 P.M.\n\n[ CAYENNE, FRENCH GUIANA ]\n\nLouis Favre was often described as a bastard and drunkard, but never to his face. Never. The unfortunate sot who had dared now sat on his backside in the alley behind the Hotel Seine, a great decaying colonial edifice that sat on a hill overlooking the capital city of French Guiana.\n\nA moment ago, in the hotel's dark bar, the miscreant at his feet had been hassling a fellow regular, a man in his eighties, a survivor of the dreaded penal colony of Devil's Island. Louis had never spoken to the old man, but he had heard his tale from the barkeep. As with many of the prisoners shipped here from France, he had been doubly sentenced: for every year spent in the island hellhole ten miles off the coast, the fellow was forced to spend an equal number of years in French Guiana afterward. It was a way to ensure a French presence in the colony. And as the government had hoped, most of these pitiable souls ended up staying here. What life did they have back in France after so long?\n\nLouis had often studied this fellow, a kindred soul, another exile. He would watch the man sip his neat bourbons, reading the lines in his aged and despairing face. He valued these quiet moments.\n\nSo when the half-drunk Englishman had tripped and bumped into the old man's elbow, knocking over his drink, and then simply tottered on past without the courtesy of apology or acknowledgment, Louis Favre had gained his feet and confronted the man.\n\n\"Piss off, Frenchie,\" the young man had slurred in his face.\n\nLouis continued to block the man's exit from the bar. \"You'll buy my dear friend another drink, or we'll have it out, monsieur.\"\n\n\"Bugger off already, you drunk wanker.\" The man attempted to shove past.\n\nLouis had sighed, then struck out with a fist, bashing the man's nose bloody, and grabbed him by the lapels of his poor suit. Other patrons turned their attention to their own drinks. Louis hauled the rude young man, still dazed from the blow and a night of heavy drinking, through a back door into the alley.\n\nHe set to work on earning an apology from the man, not that he could really talk with a mouthful of bloody teeth. By the time Louis was done kicking and beating the man, he lay in a ruin of piss and blood in the alley's filth. He gave the man one final savage kick, hearing a satisfying crack of ribs. With a nod, Louis retrieved his white Panama hat from atop a rubbish bin and straightened his linen suit. He stared at his shoes, ivory patent leather. Frowning, he plucked out a pristine handkerchief and wiped the blood from the tip of his shoes. He scowled at the Englishman, thought about kicking him one last time, but then studied his newly polished shoes and decided better.\n\nPositioning his hat in place, he reentered the smoky bar and signaled the barman. He pointed to the old gent. \"Please refresh my friend's drink.\"\n\nThe Spanish barkeep nodded and reached for a bottle of bourbon.\n\nLouis met his gaze and wagged a finger at him.\n\nThe barman bit his lip at the faux pas. Louis always went for the best, even when buying drinks for friends. Duly admonished, the man reached for a bottle of properly aged Glenlivet, the best in the house.\n\n\"Merci.\" With matters rectified, Louis headed for the entrance to the hotel's lobby, almost running into the concierge.\n\nThe small-framed man bowed and apologized profusely. \"Dr. Favre! I was just coming to find you,\" he said breathlessly. \"I have an overseas call holding for your attention.\" He passed Louis a folded note. \"They refused to leave a message and stressed the call was urgent.\"\n\nLouis unfolded the slip and read the name, printed neatly: St. Savin Biochimique Compagnie. A French drug company. He refolded the paper and tucked it into his breast pocket. \"I'll take the call.\"\n\n\"There is a private salon--\"\n\n\"I know where it is,\" Louis said. He had taken many of his business calls down here.\n\nWith the concierge in tow, Louis strode to the small cubicle beside the hotel's front desk. He left the man at the door and sat in the small upholstered chair that smelled of mold and a melange of old cologne and sweat. Louis settled to the seat and picked up the phone's receiver. \"Dr. Louis Favre,\" he said crisply.\n\n\"Bonjour, Dr. Favre,\" a voice spoke on the other end of the line. \"We have a request for your services.\"\n\n\"If you have this number, then I assume you know my pricing schedule.\"\n\n\"We do.\"\n\n\"And may I ask what class of service you require?\"\n\n\"Premiere.\"\n\nThe single word caused Louis's fingers to tighten on the receiver. First class. It meant a payment over six figures. \"Location?\"\n\n\"The Brazilian rain forest.\"\n\n\"And the objective?\"\n\nThe man spoke rapidly. Louis listened without taking notes. Each number was fixed in his mind, as was each name, especially one. Louis's eyes narrowed. He sat up straighter. The man finished, \"The U.S. team must be tracked and whatever they discover must be obtained.\"\n\n\"And the other team?\"\n\nThere was no answer, just the static of the other line.\n\n\"I understand and accept,\" Louis said. \"I'll need to see half the fee in my usual account by close of business tomorrow. Furthermore, any and all details of the U.S. team and its resources should be faxed to my private line as soon as possible.\" He gave the number quickly.\n\n\"It will be done within the hour.\"\n\n\"Tres bon.\"\n\nThe line clicked dead, the business settled.\n\nLouis slowly replaced the receiver in its cradle and sat back. The thoughts of the money and the thousand details in setting up his own team were pushed back for now. At this moment, one name shone like burning magnesium across his mind's eye. His new employer had glossed over it, unaware of the significance. If he had been, St. Savin's offer probably would have been considerably less. In fact, Louis would have taken this job for the cost of a cheap bottle of wine. He whispered the name now, tasting it on his tongue.\n\n\"Carl Rand.\"\n\nSeven years ago, Louis Favre had been a biologist employed by the Base Biologique Nationale de Recherches, the premier French science foundation. With a specialty in rain forest ecosystems, Louis had worked throughout the world: Australia, Borneo, Madagascar, the Congo. But for fifteen years, his specialty had been the Amazon rain forest. He had journeyed throughout the region, establishing an international reputation.\n\nThat is, until he ran into the damnable Dr. Carl Rand.\n\nThe American pharmaceutical entrepreneur had found Louis's methods of research to be a bit suspect, after stumbling upon Louis's interrogation of a local shaman. Dr. Rand had not believed cutting off the man's fingers, one by one, had been a viable way of gleaning information from the stubborn Indian, and no amount of money would convince the simpering American otherwise. Of course, the pile of endangered black caiman carcasses and jaguar pelts found in the village had not helped matters. Dr. Rand seemed incapable of understanding that supplementing one's work with black market income was simply a lifestyle choice.\n\nUnfortunately, Carl and his Brazilian forces had outnumbered his own team. Louis Favre was captured and incarcerated by the Brazilian army. Luckily, he had connections in France and enough money to ply the palms of a few corrupt Brazilian officials in order to slip away with no more than a slap on the wrist.\n\nHowever, it was the figurative slap to his face that had stung worse. The incident had blackened his good name beyond repair. Penniless, he was forced to flee Brazil for French Guiana. There, always resourceful and with previous contacts in the black market, he scrounged together a mercenary jungle force. During the past five years, his group had protected drug shipments from Colombia, hunted down various rare and endangered animals for private collectors, eliminated a troublesome Brazilian government regulator for a gold-mining operation, even wiped out a small peasant village whose inhabitants objected to a logging company's intrusion onto their lands. It was good business all around.\n\nAnd now this latest offer: to track a U.S. military team through the jungle as they searched for Carl Rand's lost expedition and steal whatever they discovered. All in order to be the first one to obtain some regenerative compound believed to have been discovered by Rand's group.\n\nSuch a request was not unusual. In the past few years, the race for new rain forest drugs had become more and more frantic, a multibillion-dollar industry. The search for \"green gold,\" the next new wonder drug, had spurred a new \"gold rush\" here in the Amazon. And in the trackless depths of the forest, where millions of dollars were cast into an economy of dirt-poor farmers and un-schooled Indians, betrayals and atrocities were committed daily. There were no spying eyes and no one to tell tales. Each year, the jungle alone consumed thousands from disease, from attack, from injuries. What were a few more--a biologist, an ethnobotanist, a drug researcher?\n\nIt was a financial free-for-all.\n\nAnd Louis Favre was about to join the game, championed by a French pharmaceutical company. Smiling, he stood up. He had been delighted when he heard about Carl Rand's disappearance four years ago. He had gotten drunk that night, toasting the man's misfortune. Now he would pound the final nail in the bastard's coffin by stealing whatever the man had discovered and laying more lives upon his grave.\n\nUnlocking the salon's door, Louis stepped out.\n\n\"I hope everything was satisfactory, Dr. Favre,\" the concierge called politely from his desk.\n\n\"Most satisfactory, Claude,\" he said with a nod. \"Most satisfactory indeed.\" Louis crossed to the hotel's small elevator, an antique cell of wrought iron and wood. It hardly fit two people. He pressed the button for the sixth floor, where his apartment suite lay. He was anxious to share the news.\n\nThe elevator clanked, groaned, and sighed its way up to his floor. Once the door was open, Louis hurried down the narrow hall to the farthest room. Like a handful of other guests who had taken up permanent residence in the Hotel Seine, Louis had a suite of rooms: two bedrooms, a cramped kitchen, a broad sitting room with doors that opened upon a wrought-iron balcony, and even a small study lined with bookshelves. The suite was not elaborate, but it suited his needs. The staff was discreet and well accustomed to the eccentricities of the guests.\n\nLouis keyed open his door and pushed inside. Two things struck him immediately. First, a familiar and arousing scent filled the room. It came from a pot on the small gas stovetop, boiling ayahuasca leaves that produced the powerful hallucinogenic tea, natem.\n\nSecond, he heard the whine of the fax machine coming from the study. His new employers were certainly efficient.\n\n\"Tshui!\" he called out.\n\nHe expected no answer, but as was customary among the Shuar tribespeople, one always announced one's presence when entering a dwelling. He noticed the door to the bedroom slightly ajar.\n\nWith a smile, he crossed to the study and watched another sheet of paper roll from the machine and fall to the growing stack. The details of the upcoming mission. \"Tshui, I have marvelous news.\"\n\nLouis retrieved the topmost printout from the faxed pile and glanced at it. It was a list of those who would comprise the U.S. search team.\n\n\u200210:45 P.M. UPDATE from Base Station Alpha\n\n\u2002I. Op. AMAZONIA: Civilian Unit Members\n\n\u2002(1) Kelly O'Brien, M.D.- MEDEA\n\n\u2002(2) Francis J. O'Brien-Environmental Center, CIA\n\n\u2002(3) Olin Pasternak-Science and Technology Directorate, CIA\n\n\u2002(4) Richard Zane, Ph.D.- Tellux Pharmaceutical research head\n\n\u2002(5) Anna Fong, Ph.D.- Tellux Pharmaceutical employee\n\n\u2002II. Op. AMAZONIA: Mil. Support: 75th Army Ranger Unit\n\n\u2002CAPTAIN: Craig Waxman\n\n\u2002STAFF SERGEANT: Alberto Kostos\n\n\u2002CORPORALS: Brian Conger, James DeMartini, Rodney Graves, Thomas Graves, Dennis Jorgensen, Kenneth Okamoto, Nolan Warczak, Samad Yamir\n\n\u2002III. Op. AMAZONIA: Locally Recruited\n\n\u2002(1) Manuel Azevedo-FUNAI, Brazilian national\n\n\u2002(2) Resh Kouwe, Ph.D.- FUNAI, Indigenous Peoples Representative\n\n\u2002(3) Nathan Rand, Ph.D.- Ethnobotanist, U.S. citizen\n\nLouis almost missed the last name on the list. He gripped the faxed printout tighter. Nathan Rand, the son of Carl Rand. Of course, it made sense. The boy would not let this team search for his father without accompanying them. He closed his eyes, savoring this boon. It was as if the gods of the dark jungle were aligning in his favor. The revenge he had failed to mete upon the father would fall upon the shoulders of the son. It was almost biblical.\n\nAs he stood there, he heard a slight rustle coming from the next room, the master bedroom. He let the paper slip from his fingers back to the pile. He would have time later to review the details and formulate a plan. Right now, he simply wanted to enjoy the serendipity of the moment.\n\n\"Tshui!\" he called again and crossed to the bedroom door.\n\nHe slipped the door open and found the room beyond lit with candles and a single incense burner. His mistress lay naked on the canopy bed. The queen-sized bed was draped in white silk with its mosquito net folded back. The Shuar woman reclined upon pillows atop the ivory sheets. Her deep-bronze skin glowed in the candlelight. Her long black hair was a fan around her, while her eyes were heavy-lidded from both passion and natem tea. Two cups lay on the small nightstand, one empty, the other full.\n\nAs usual, Louis found his breath simply stolen from him at the sight of his love. He had first met the beauty three years ago in Equador. She had been the wife of a Shuar chieftain, until the fool's infidelity had enraged her. She slew him with his own machete. Though such acts--both the infidelity and the murder--were common among the brutal Shuar, Tshui was banished from the tribe, sent naked into the jungle. None, not even the chieftain's kinsmen, would dare touch her. She was well known throughout the region as one of the rare female shamans, a practitioner of wawek, malevolent sorcery. Her skill at poisons, tortures, and the lost art of tsantza, head-shrinking, was both respected and feared. In fact, the only article of adornment she had worn as she left the village was the shrunken head of her husband, hung on a twined cord and resting between her breasts.\n\nThis was how Louis found the woman, a wild, beautiful creature of the jungle. Though he had an estranged wife back in France, Louis had taken the woman as his own. She had not refused, especially when he and his mercenaries slew every man, woman, and child in her village, marking her revenge.\n\nSince that day, the two had been inseparable. Tshui, an accomplished interrogator and wise in the ways of the jungle, accompanied him on all his missions. She continued to collect trophies from each venture.\n\nAround the room, aligned on shelves on all four walls, were forty-three tsantza, each head no more than a wizened apple--the eyes and lips sewn closed, the hair trailing over the shelf edges like Spanish moss on trees. Her skill at shrinking heads was amazing. He had watched the entire process once.\n\nOnce was enough.\n\nWith the skill of a surgeon, she would flay the skin in one piece from the skull of her victim, sometimes while he or she was still alive and screaming. She truly was an artist. After boiling the skin, hair and all, and drying it over hot ashes, she used a bone needle and thread to close the mouth and eyes, then filled the inside with hot pebbles and sand. As the leathery skin shrank, she would mold its shape with her fingers. Tshui had an uncanny ability to sculpt the head into an amazing approximation of the victim's original face.\n\nLouis glanced to her latest work of art. It rested on the far bedside table. It was a Bolivian army officer who had been blackmailing a cocaine shipper. From his trimmed mustache to the straight bangs hanging over his forehead, the detail of her work was amazing. The collection was worthy of the finest museum. In fact, the staff of the Hotel Seine thought Louis was a university anthropologist, collecting these specimens for just such a museum. If any thought otherwise, they knew to keep silent.\n\n\"Ma cherie,\" he said, finding his breath again. \"I have wonderful news.\"\n\nShe rolled toward him, reaching in his direction. She made a small sound, encouraging him to join her. Tshui seldom spoke. A word here or there. Otherwise, like some jungle cat, she was all eyes, motions, and soft purrs.\n\nLouis could not resist. He knocked off his hat and slipped from his jacket. In moments, he was as naked as she. His own body was lean, muscled, and crisscrossed with scars. He swallowed the draught of natem laid out for him while Tshui lazily traced one of his scars down his belly to his inner thigh. A shiver trembled up his back.\n\nAs the drug swept through him, heightening his senses, he fell upon his woman. She opened to him, and he sank gratefully into her warmth. He kissed her deeply, while she raked his back with sharpened nails.\n\nSoon, colors and lights played across his vision. The room spun slightly from the alkaloids in the tea. For a moment, it seemed the scores of shrunken heads were watching their play, the eyes of the dead upon him as he thrust into the woman. The audience aroused him further. He pinned Tshui under him, his back arching as he drove into her again and again, a scream clenched in his chest.\n\nAll around him were faces staring down, watching with blind eyes.\n\nLouis had one final thought before being consumed fully by his passion and the exquisite pain. A final trophy to add to these shelves, a memento from the son of the man who had ruined him: the head of Nathan Rand."
            },
            {
                "title": "Under the Canopy",
                "text": "\u2002PERIWINKLE\n\n\u2002family: Apocynaceae\n\n\u2002genus: Vinca\n\n\u2002species: Minor, Major\n\n\u2002common names: Periwinkle, Cezayirmeneksesi, Common Periwinkle, Vincapervinc\n\n\u2002parts used: Whole Plant\n\n\u2002properties/actions: Analgesic, Antibacterial, Antimicrobial, Antiinflammatory, Astringent, Cardiotonic, Carminative, Depurative, Diuretic, Emmenagogue, Febrifuge, Hemostat, Hypotensive, Lactogogue, Hepatoprotective, Sedative, Sialogogue, Spasmolytic, Stomachic, Tonic, Vulnerary"
            },
            {
                "title": "Wauwai",
                "text": "AUGUST 7, 8:12 A.M.\n\n[ EN ROUTE OVER THE AMAZON JUNGLE ]\n\nNathan stared out the helicopter's windows. Even through the sound-dampening earphones, the roar of the blades was deafening, isolating each passenger in his own cocoon of noise.\n\nBelow, a vast sea of green spread to the horizon in all directions. From this vantage, it was as if the entire world were just forest. The only breaks in the featureless expanse of the continuous canopy were the occasional giant trees, the emergents, that poked their leafy crowns above their brethren, great monsters of the forest that served as nesting sites for harpy eagles and toucans. The only other breaks were the half-hidden dark rivers, snaking lazily through the forest.\n\nOtherwise, the jungle remained supreme, impenetrable, endless.\n\nNathan leaned his forehead against the glass. Was his father down there somewhere? And if not, were there at least answers?\n\nDeep inside, Nathan felt a seed of anxiety, bitter and sour. Could he handle what he discovered? After four years of not knowing, Nate had learned one thing. Time did indeed heal all wounds, but it left a nasty, unforgiving scar.\n\nAfter his father's disappearance, Nate had isolated himself from the world, first in the bottom of a bottle of Jack Daniel's, then in the embrace of stronger drugs. Back in the States, his therapists had used phrases such as abandonment issues, trust conflicts, and clinical depression. But Nate experienced it as a faithlessness in life. With the exception of Manny and Kouwe, he had formed no deep friendships. He had become too hard, too numb, too scarred.\n\nOnly after returning to the jungle had Nate found some semblance of peace. But now this...\n\nWas he ready to reopen those old wounds? To face that pain?\n\nThe earphone radio clicked on with a rasp of static, and the pilot's voice cut momentarily through the rotor's roar. \"We're twenty klicks from Wauwai. But there's smoke on the horizon.\"\n\nNathan peered ahead, yet all he could see was the terrain below and to the side. Wauwai would serve as a secondary field base for the search team, a launching-off point from which to supply and monitor those trekking through the forest. Two hours ago, the three Hueys, along with the sleek black Comanche, had set off from Sao Gabriel, carrying the initial supplies, gear, armament, and personnel. After the expedition proceeded into the jungle later today, the Hueys would serve as a flying supply chain between Wauwai and Sao Gabriel, ferrying additional supplies, men, and fuel. Meanwhile, the Comanche would remain at Wauwai, a black bird reserved in case of an emergency. Its armament and long-range capabilities would help protect the team from the air if necessary.\n\nThat had been the plan.\n\n\"The smoke appears to be coming from our destination,\" the pilot continued. \"The village is burning.\"\n\nNathan pulled away from the window. Burning? He glanced around the cabin. In addition to the two O'Briens, he shared the space with Professor Kouwe, Richard Zane, and Anna Fong. The seventh and final passenger was the hard-faced man who had sat across the conference table from Nathan during the debriefing, the one with the ugly scar across his neck. He had been introduced this morning as Olin Pasternak, another CIA agent, one associated with the administration's Science and Technology division. He found the man's ice-blue eyes staring right back at him, his face an unreadable stoic mask.\n\nTo his side, he watched Frank pull a microphone up to his lips. \"Can we still land?\"\n\n\"I can't be sure from this distance, sir,\" the pilot answered. \"Captain Waxman is proceeding ahead to survey the situation.\"\n\nNathan watched one of the helicopters break formation and speed forward as their own craft slowed. As they waited, the Huey banked around, and Nathan spotted a column of smoke rising from the blanket of greenery near the horizon. It climbed high into the blue skies. The other passengers shifted closer to peer out the port-side windows.\n\nKelly O'Brien leaned near his shoulder, eyes on the smoke. He watched her lips move, but the noise and the earphones blocked her words. She pulled back and caught him staring at her.\n\nHer eyes flicked away, and a slight blush reddened her cheeks.\n\nThe pilot came on over the radio. \"Folks, it looks like we have an okay to proceed from the captain. The landing field is upwind of the fires. Please ready yourselves for landing.\"\n\nEveryone settled back into their seats and snapped their buckles into place. In short order, the bevy of helicopters was circling the village. Each pilot was careful to keep the wash from his rotor from blowing the smoke toward the landing field. Though still unable to see the source of the flames, Nathan watched a chain of people passing buckets from the river as the helicopter aligned for landing.\n\nAs they descended, a clapboard church with a whitewashed steeple came into view. The source of the fire was on its far side, and someone stood on the church's roof, soaking down its shingles.\n\nThen the skids of the helicopter settled to the ground with a slight bump, and Frank signaled for everyone to disembark.\n\nNathan tugged off his earphones and was assaulted by the growl of the rotors. He unbuckled his shoulder harness and climbed from the helicopter. Once clear of the rotors, he stretched and surveyed the area. The last of the Hueys settled to earth on the far side of the field. The tilled soil and barren rows were telltale signs that the landing field must once have been the village's garden.\n\nAcross the yard, the Rangers were already busy. A handful were off loading gear and supplies, while most of the others trotted toward the front of the church to help with the fires.\n\nSlowly, the noise of the helicopters dissipated, and voices could be heard again: shouted orders, yells from beyond the church, the chatter of soldiers hauling equipment.\n\nKelly stepped to Nathan's side with Frank in tow. \"We should see if we can find the padre who found Agent Clark. Interview him, so we can be on our way.\"\n\nFrank nodded, and the two headed for the rear door of the church. Someone clapped Nate on the shoulder. It was Professor Kouwe. \"Let's go help,\" the older man said, pointing toward the smoke.\n\nNathan followed the professor through the fields and around the side of the church. What he found on the far side was chaos: people running with buckets and shovels, smoke billowing in every direction, flames rampant.\n\n\"My God,\" Nate said.\n\nA village of a hundred or so small homes lay between the church and the river. Three-quarters of them were burning.\n\nHe and the professor hurried forward, adding the strength of their backs to the water brigade. Working around them were a mix of brown-skinned Indians, white missionaries, and uniformed Rangers. After about an hour of laboring, they all looked the same, just soot-covered rescuers choking and coughing on the smoke.\n\nNathan ran with buckets, dousing flames, concentrating on maintaining a fire break around the burning section of the village. It was up to them to hold the flames at bay. Inside the fire zone, the blaze consumed all the palm-thatched structures, turning homes into torches in mere seconds. But with the additional men, the fire was contained at last. The conflagration quickly died down as all the homes were consumed within the fire zone. Only a few glowing embers dotted the smoky ruined landscape.\n\nDuring the crisis, Nate had lost track of the professor and now found himself resting beside a tall, broad-shouldered Brazilian. The man looked close to tears. He mumbled something in Portuguese that sounded like a prayer. Nate guessed he was one of the missionaries.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Nate said in Portuguese, tugging away the scrap of cloth that had been shielding his nose and mouth. \"Was anyone killed?\"\n\n\"Five. All children.\" The man's voice cracked. \"But many others were sickened by the smoke.\"\n\n\"What happened here?\"\n\nThe missionary wiped the soot from his face with a handkerchief. \"It was m...my fault. I should've known better.\" He glanced over his shoulder to the steepled church. Aside from being stained with ash and smoke, it stood unharmed. He covered his eyes, and his shoulders shook. It took him another moment to speak. \"It was my decision to send the man's body to Manaus.\"\n\nNathan suddenly realized to whom he was speaking. \"Padre Batista?\" It was the mission's leader, the one who had found Gerald Clark.\n\nThe tall Brazilian nodded. \"May God forgive me.\"\n\nNate guided Garcia Luiz Batista away from the blackened ruins of the village and into untouched green fields. He quickly introduced himself as he led the man back to his church. En route, he passed one of the Rangers, covered in soot and sweat, and asked him to send the O'Briens to the church.\n\nWith a sharp nod, the Ranger took off.\n\nNate walked the padre up the wooden steps and through the double doors. The interior was dark and cool. Varnished wooden pews lined the way to the altar and giant mahogany crucifix. The room was mostly empty. A few Indians lay sprawled, exhausted, both on the floor and on pews. Nate led the church's leader toward the front and settled him in the first pew.\n\nThe man sagged into his seat, his eyes fixed on the crucifix. \"It's all my fault.\" He bowed his head and lifted his hands in prayer.\n\nNathan remained quiet, giving the man a private moment. The church door swung open, and he spotted Frank and Kelly. Professor Kouwe was with them. All three were covered in ash from head to toe. He waved them over.\n\nThe arrival of the other three drew Padre Batista's attention from his prayers. Nathan made introductions all around. Once done, he sat beside the padre. \"Tell me what happened. How did the fires start?\"\n\nGarcia glanced around at the others, then sighed heavily and looked at his toes. \"It was my own shortsightedness.\"\n\nKelly sat on the man's other side. \"What do you mean?\" she asked softly.\n\nAfter a moment more, the padre spoke again. \"On the night the poor man stumbled out of the forest, a shaman of the Yanomamo tribe scolded me for taking the man into the mission. He warned me that the man's body must be burned.\" The padre glanced to Nathan. \"How could I do that? He surely had family. Maybe he was even a Christian.\"\n\nNathan patted his hand. \"Of course.\"\n\n\"But I should not have so easily dismissed the Indians' superstitions. I had put too much faith in their conversion to Catholicism. They'd even been baptized.\" The padre shook his head.\n\nNate understood. \"It's not your fault. Some beliefs are too ingrained to be washed away in a single baptism.\"\n\nPadre Batista sagged. \"At first, all seemed well. The shaman was still angered at my decision not to burn the body, but he accepted that at least it was gone from the village. This seemed to appease him.\"\n\n\"What changed that?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"A week later, a couple of children in the village developed fevers. It was nothing new. Such ailments are commonplace. But the shaman decided these illnesses were the sign of a curse from the dead man.\"\n\nNate nodded. He had seen firsthand such assessments himself. In most Indian tribes, illness was considered not only due to injury or disease, but often to a spell cast by the shaman of another village. Wars had broken out over such accusations.\n\n\"There was nothing I could do to dissuade him. In another few days, three more children fell ill, one of them from the Yanomamo shabano. The whole village grew tense. In fear, entire families packed up and left. Every night, drums beat and chanting could be heard.\" Garcia closed his eyes. \"I radioed for medical assistance. But when a doctor arrived from Junta four days later, none of the Indians would let the man examine their children. The Yanomamo shaman had won them over. I tried to plead, but they refused any medical help. Instead, they left the little ones in the care of that witch doctor.\"\n\nNathan bristled at this term. He glanced to Professor Kouwe, who gave a small shake of his head, indicating Nate should remain silent.\n\nThe padre continued. \"Then last night, one of the children died. A great wailing consumed the village. To cover up his failure, the shaman declared the village cursed. He warned that all should leave here. I tried my best to calm the panic, but the shaman had the others under his spell. Just before dawn, he and his fellow Yanomamo tribesmen set fire to their own roundhouse, then fled into the jungle.\" Garcia was now openly weeping. \"The...the monster had left the sick children inside. He burned them all alive.\"\n\nThe padre covered his face with his hands. \"With so few still in the village to help fight the fire, the flames spread through the huts. If you all had not come and helped, we could have lost everything. My church, my flock.\"\n\nNathan placed a hand on the man's shoulder. \"Don't despair. We can help you rebuild.\" He glanced over to Kelly's brother for confirmation.\n\nFrank cleared his throat. \"Of course. A contingent of Rangers and researchers are going to remain here after we head into the jungle. As guests here, I'm sure they'll be more than willing to haul in supplies with their helicopters and lend you manpower to rebuild the village out of the ashes.\"\n\nThe man's words seemed to strengthen the padre. \"God bless you.\" He wiped his eyes and nose with his handkerchief.\n\n\"We'll do all we can,\" Kelly assured him. \"But, padre, time is of the essence for us, too. We hope to begin tracking the dead man's trail before it grows any colder.\"\n\n\"Of course, of course...\" Garcia said in a tired voice, and stood. \"I'll tell you all I know.\"\n\nIt was a short talk. The padre explained as he led them past the altar to the common rooms of the church. The dining room had been converted into a makeshift hospital for smoke-inhalation victims, but no one appeared seriously injured. Garcia related how he had convinced a few Indians to track the dead man's trail, in case the fellow had any companions out there. The trail led to one of the tributaries of the Jarura River. No boat was found, but the tracks seemed to follow the offshoot's course, heading west into the most remote sections of the rain forest. The Indian trackers feared going any farther.\n\nKelly leaned on a window overlooking the rear garden. \"Can someone show us this tributary?\"\n\nGarcia nodded. He had washed his face and seemed to have collected himself. Steel had entered his voice and demeanor as the initial shock wore away. \"I can get my assistant, Henaowe, to show you.\" He pointed to a small Indian.\n\nNathan was surprised to see the man was Yanomamo.\n\n\"He was the only one of the tribe who remained behind,\" Garcia said with a sigh. \"At least the love of our Lord Jesus was able to save one of them.\"\n\nThe padre waved his assistant over and spoke rapidly in Yanomamo. Nathan was surprised at how fluent the priest was in the dialect.\n\nHenaowe nodded, agreeing, but Nathan saw the fear in his eyes. Saved or not, deep-seated superstitions still ruled the man.\n\nThe group proceeded back outside, the damp heat falling upon them like a wet wool blanket. They skirted around the helicopters to find the Rangers had been busy. A line of rucksacks, heavily packed, lay in the dirt. A Ranger was positioned behind each one.\n\nCaptain Waxman was inspecting both his men and their gear. He spotted the group and straightened. \"We're ready to head out whenever you give the go.\" Waxman, in his forties, was pure military: stone-faced, broad-shouldered, his field uniform crisp with pressed creases. Even his brown hair had been shaved to a stubble atop his head.\n\n\"We're ready now,\" Frank said. \"We've got someone here to set us on the right trail.\" He nodded to the small Indian.\n\nThe captain nodded and turned sharply. \"Load up!\" he called to his men.\n\nKelly led their group to another row of backpacks, each about half the size of the Rangers' rucksacks. There, Nathan found the last members of the expedition. Anna Fong was in deep conversation with Richard Zane, both in matching khaki outfits with the Tellux logo emblazoned on the shoulders. To their side stood Olin Pasternak, sporting a clean but clearly well-worn set of gray coveralls with black boots. He bent down to pick up the largest of the packs. Nate knew it contained their satellite communication gear. But as he hoisted the pack, the man's attention was not on the fragile gear, but on the expedition's final member...or rather members.\n\nNate smiled. He had not seen Manny since they had left from Sao Gabriel. The Brazilian biologist had been on one of the other Hueys. The reason for the separate flight was clear. Manny waved to Nate, a whip in one hand, the other holding a leather leash.\n\n\"So how did Tor-tor handle the flight?\" Nathan asked.\n\nManny patted the two-hundred-pound jaguar with the side of his whip. \"Like a kitten. Nothing like the wonders of modern chemistry.\"\n\nNathan watched the cat wobble a little from the aftereffects of the tranquilizer. Stretching forward to sniff at Nate's pant leg, Tor-tor seemed to recognize his scent, and nuzzled him half drunkenly.\n\n\"The big fellow's always had a thing for you,\" Manny said with a chuckle.\n\nNate bent to one knee and rubbed the cat's jowls, cuffing him lightly under the chin. This earned him a growled purr of appreciation. \"God, he is so much bigger than the last time I saw him.\"\n\nOlin Pasternak scowled at the beast, then mumbled under his breath and turned away, clearly unimpressed by the newest addition to the team.\n\nNathan straightened. Tor-tor's inclusion had been a hard sell, but Manny had persisted. Tor-tor was close to being sexually mature and needed to log more jungle time. This trek would be of benefit to the cat. Additionally, the jaguar had been well trained by Manny and could prove of use--both in protection and in tracking.\n\nNathan had added his own support. If the team wished to convince any Indians into cooperating, the presence of Tor-tor could go a long way toward winning them over. The jaguar was revered by all Indians. To have one accompany the expedition would give the team instant validity.\n\nAnna Fong had agreed.\n\nSlowly Frank and Captain Waxman had been worn down, and Tor-tor was allowed to join the expedition.\n\nKelly eyed the cat from a safe distance. \"We should gear up.\"\n\nNathan nodded and picked up his own small pack. It contained only the essential supplies: hammock, mosquito netting, a bit of dry rations, a change of clothes, machete, water bottle, and filter pump. He could travel months in the jungle with little else. What with the wealth of the forest readily available--from various fruits and berries to roots and edible plants to abundant game and fish--there was little need to haul additional food.\n\nStill, there was one other essential piece of equipment. Nathan hooked his own short-barreled shotgun overa shoulder. Though the team was backed by the Rangers' weaponry, Nate preferred to have a little firepower of his own.\n\n\"Let's get going,\" Kelly said. \"We've already lost the morning putting out the fires.\" The slender woman hefted her own pack to her shoulders, and Nate couldn't help but stare at her long legs. He forced his gaze upward. Her pack had a large red cross printed on its back, marking the team's medical supplies.\n\nFrank ran down the line of civilian team members, making sure all was in readiness. He stopped in front of Nate, pulled out a faded baseball cap from a back pocket, and tugged it in place.\n\nNate recognized it as the same one from when he had first seen the man at Sao Gabriel's hospital. \"Fan?\" he asked, pointing to the Boston Red Sox logo.\n\n\"And a good-luck charm,\" Frank added, then turned to the group. \"Let's set out!\"\n\nIn short order, the eighteen-man team tromped into the jungle, led for the moment by a small, wide-eyed Indian.\n\nKelly had never been in a jungle. In preparation for this trip, she had scanned books and articles, but the first sight of the rain forest was not what she had expected.\n\nAs she followed the four Rangers in the lead, she craned around in wonder. Contrary to old movies, the un-derstory of the Amazon rain forest was not a clotted mass of clinging vines and overgrown vegetation. Instead, it was more like they were marching through a green cathedral. A dense canopy of woven tree branches arched overhead, absorbing most of the sunlight and casting everything in a greenish glow. Kelly had read that less than 10 percent of the sun's light pierced through the unbroken green tent to reach the jungle floor. Because of this, the lowest level of the forest, where they walked now, was surprisingly clear of vegetation. Here the jungle was a world of shadow and decomposition, the domain of insects, fungi, and roots.\n\nStill, the lack of green vegetation didn't necessarily make trekking through the pathless forest an easy journey. Rotted logs and branches lay everywhere, frosted with yellow mold and white mushrooms. Under her boots, a slick mulch of decaying black leaves threatened her footing, while buttress roots that supported the gigantic trees in the thin soil snaked under the leaves and added to the risk of a twisted ankle.\n\nAnd though the vegetation down at this level was scant, it was not nonexistent. The floor was festooned with fan-tailed ferns, thorny bromeliads, graceful orchids, and slender palms, and everywhere around were draped the ubiquitous ropelike vines called lianas.\n\nThe sound of a slap drew her attention around.\n\nHer brother rubbed at his neck. \"Damn flies.\"\n\nKelly reached into a pocket and passed a plastic bottle of insect repellent to Frank. \"Put more on.\"\n\nHe doused his exposed limbs and rubbed some on his neck.\n\nNathan stepped beside her. He had donned an Australian bush hat, and looked like some cross between Indiana Jones and Crocodile Dundee. His blue eyes sparkled with amusement in the jungle gloom. \"You're wasting your time with that repellent,\" he said to Frank. \"Anything you put on will be sweated off your skin in minutes.\"\n\nKelly couldn't argue with that. After just fifteen minutes of trekking, she felt damp everywhere. The humidity under the canopy had to be close to a hundred percent. \"Then what do you suggest for the bugs?\"\n\nNathan shrugged, wearing a crooked grin. \"You surrender. You ignore them. It's a battle you can't win. Here it's an eat-or-be-eaten world, and sometimes you have to simply pay the price.\"\n\n\"With my own blood?\" Frank asked.\n\n\"Don't complain. That's getting off cheap. There are much worse insects out there, and I don't just mean the big ones, like bird-eating spiders or footlong black scorpions. It's the little ones that'll get you. Are you familiar with the assassin bug?\"\n\n\"No, I don't think so,\" Frank said.\n\nKelly shook her head, too.\n\n\"Well, it has the unpleasant habit of biting and defecating at the same time. Then when the victim scratches the wound, he drives the feces loaded with the protozoan Tripanozoma crusii into the bloodstream. Then in anywhere from one to twenty years you die due to damage to the brain or heart.\"\n\nFrank paled and stopped scratching at the fly bite on his neck.\n\n\"Then there are the blackflies that transmit worms to the eyeball and cause a disease called river blindness. And sand flies that can trigger Leishmaniasis, a leprosy type of disease.\"\n\nKelly frowned at the botanist's attempt to shake her brother. \"I'm well familiar with the transmittable diseases out here. Yellow fever, dengue fever, malaria, cholera, typhoid.\" She hiked her medical pack higher on her shoulders. \"I'm prepared for the worst.\"\n\n\"And are you prepared for the candiru?\"\n\nHer brow crinkled. \"What type of disease is that?\"\n\n\"It's not a disease. It's a common little fish in the waters here, sometimes called the toothpick fish. It's a slender creature, about two inches long, and lives parasitically in the gills of larger fish. It has the nasty habit of swimming up the urethras of human males and lodging there.\"\n\n\"Lodging there?\" Frank asked, wincing.\n\n\"It spreads its gill spines and embeds itself in place, blocking the bladder and killing you most excruciatingly in about twenty-four hours.\"\n\n\"How do you get rid of it?\"\n\nBy now, Kelly had recognized the little fish's description and nasty habits. She had indeed read about them. She turned to her brother and said matter-of-factly, \"The only cure is to cut the victim's penis off and extract the fish.\"\n\nFrank flinched, half covering himself. \"Cut his penis off?\"\n\nNate shrugged. \"Welcome to the jungle.\"\n\nKelly scowled at him, knowing the man was only trying to spook them. But from his grin, she could tell it was mostly all in good fun.\n\n\"Then there are the snakes...\" Nate continued.\n\n\"I think that's enough,\" Professor Kouwe said behind them, rescuing the siblings from Dr. Rand's further lecturing. He stepped forward. \"While the jungle must be respected as Nathan has suggested so eloquently, it's as much a place of beauty as danger. It contains the ability to cure as well as sicken.\"\n\n\"And that's why we're all out here,\" a new voice said behind them.\n\nKelly turned. It was Dr. Richard Zane. Over his shoulder, she noticed Anna Fong and Olin Pasternak deep in conversation. And beyond them, Manuel Azevedo stalked with his jaguar alongside the Rangers at the rear.\n\nShe turned around and saw that the grin on Nate's face had vanished. His expression had hardened at the intrusion by the Tellux representative. \"And what would you know of the jungle?\" Nate asked. \"You've not set foot out of the main offices of Tellux in Chicago in over four years...about the time my father vanished, as I recall.\"\n\nRichard Zane rubbed his small trimmed goatee and maintained his casual countenance, but Kelly had not missed the flash of fire in the man's eyes. \"I know what you think of me, Dr. Rand. It was one of the reasons I volunteered for this expedition. You know I was a friend of your--\"\n\nNathan took a fast step in the man's direction, one hand balled into a fist. \"Don't say it!\" he spat out. \"Don't say you were a friend of my father! I came to you, begged you to continue the search after the government stopped. And you refused. I read the memo you dispatched from Brasilia back to the States: 'I see no further benefit in extending Tellux's financial resources in a futile search for Dr. Carl Rand. Our monies are better spent in new endeavors.' Do you remember those words, words that damned my father! If you had pressed the corporate office--\"\n\n\"The result would've been the same,\" Zane said between clenched teeth. \"You were always so naive. The decision was made long before I gave my report.\"\n\n\"Bullshit,\" Nathan said.\n\n\"Tellux was hit by over three hundred separate lawsuits after the expedition's disappearance. From families, from underwriters, from insurance companies, from the Brazilian government, from the NSF. Tellux was under assault from all sides. It was one of the reasons we had to merge Eco-tek's assets. It helped insulate us from other rapacious pharmaceutical companies. They were circling like sharks around our financially bleeding carcass. We could not continue funding a search that seemed hopeless. We had a bigger fight on our hands.\"\n\nNathan continued to glower.\n\n\"The decision had already been made.\"\n\n\"You'll excuse me if I don't shed tears for Tellux.\"\n\n\"If we had lost our battle, thousands of families would have lost their jobs. Hard decisions had to be made, and I won't apologize for them.\"\n\nNate and Zane continued to stare each other down.\n\nProfessor Kouwe attempted to mediate. \"For now, let the past lie in the past. If we're to succeed here, I suspect we'll all need to work together. I suggest a truce.\"\n\nAfter a pause, Zane held out a hand.\n\nNathan glanced to the open palm, then turned away. \"Let's go.\"\n\nZane shook his head and lowered his hand. He met the professor's eyes. \"Thanks for trying.\"\n\nKouwe watched Nate's departing back. \"Give him time. Though he tries to hide it, he's still in a lot of pain.\"\n\nKelly stared after Nathan. He walked stiffly, shoulders back. She tried to imagine losing her mother, then her father, but it was a loss she could not comprehend. It was a well of pain from which she didn't know if she could have emerged. Especially alone.\n\nShe glanced to her brother, suddenly glad he was here.\n\nA call rang out from far ahead. One of the Rangers. \"We've reached the river!\"\n\nAs the team continued along, paralleling the river, Nathan found himself lagging behind the others. To his right, glimpses of the river peeked from the tangle of vegetation that bordered the small brown tributary. They had been following it now for almost four hours. Nathan estimated they had traveled about twelve miles. The going was slow while one of the Rangers, a corporal named Nolan Warczak, a skilled tracker, kept them on the proper trail.\n\nAn Indian guide could have moved with more assurance and set a faster pace. But after reaching the tributary, the small Yanomamo tribesman from Wauwai had refused to go any farther. He had pointed to clear footprints in the loam that led deeper into the forest, following the watercourse.\n\n\"You go,\" he had mumbled in stilted Portuguese. \"I stay here with Padre Batista.\"\n\nSo they had set off, determined to cover as much distance as possible before nightfall. But Corporal Warczak was a cautious tracker, proceeding at a snail's pace. This left much time for Nathan to review his heated outburst with Richard Zane. It had taken him this long to cool off and consider the man's words. Maybe he had been narrow-minded and had not considered all the factors involved.\n\nOff to his left, the crackle of dead twigs announced Manny's approach. He and Tor-tor had kept a bit of distance between themselves and the rest. When the large cat was nearby the Rangers were edgy, fingering their M-16s. The only one of the unit who showed curiosity about the jaguar was Corporal Dennis Jorgensen. He accompanied Manny now, asking questions about the cat.\n\n\"So how much does he eat in a day?\" The tall corporal took off his slouch hat and swiped the sweat from his brow. He had shockingly white hair and pale blue eyes, clearly of some Nordic descent.\n\nManny patted the cat. \"Somewhere around ten pounds of meat, but he's been living a pretty sedentary life with me. Out in the wild, you almost have to double that amount.\"\n\n\"And how are you going to keep feeding him out here?\"\n\nManny nodded to Nathan as he joined him. \"He'll have to hunt. It was the reason I brought him along.\"\n\n\"And if he fails?\"\n\nManny glanced to the soldiers behind them. \"There's always other sources of meat.\"\n\nJorgensen's face paled a bit, then realized Manny was joking and nudged him with an elbow. \"Very funny.\" He fell back to join the others in his unit.\n\nManny turned his attention to Nate. \"So how're you holding up? I heard about that row with Zane.\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" he said with a long sigh. Tor-tor nudged his leg with a furry muzzle, and Nate scratched the jaguar behind the ear. \"Just feeling damn foolish.\"\n\n\"Nothing to feel foolish about. I trust that guy about as far as it would take Tor-tor to run his sorry ass down. Which, believe me, wouldn't be far.\" He pointed a hand forward. \"Did you see that dandy outfit he's wearing? Has he ever been in the real jungle?\"\n\nNate smiled, cheered by his friend.\n\n\"Now that Dr. Fong. She looks damn fine in her outfit.\" Manny glanced to him with one eyebrow raised. \"I wouldn't kick her out of my hammock for eating crackers. And Kelly O'Brien--\"\n\nA commotion ahead interrupted Manny. Voices were raised, and the group was stopped, gathered near a bend in the river. Manny and Nate hurried forward.\n\nAs Nate stepped into the throng, he found Anna Fong and Professor Kouwe bent near a dugout canoe that had been pulled fully onto the bank and clumsily covered with palm fronds.\n\n\"The trail led here,\" Kelly said.\n\nNathan glanced at her. The doctor's face, covered in a sheen of sweat, was almost aglow. Her hair had been pulled back with a rolled green handkerchief that served as a headband.\n\nProfessor Kouwe stood with a palm frond in his hand. \"These were torn from a mwapu palm.\" He flipped to show the ragged end of the branch. \"Not cut, torn.\"\n\nKelly nodded. \"Agent Clark had no knives with him when he was found.\"\n\nProfessor Kouwe ran a finger along the dried and yellowing tips of the fronds. \"And from the rate of decay, this was torn from the living plant around two weeks ago.\"\n\nFrank bent closer. \"Around the time when Gerald Clark stumbled into the village.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\nKelly's voice grew excited. \"Then there's no doubt he must have used this boat to get here.\"\n\nNathan stared out at the small river. Both banks were thick with dense walls of vegetation: vines, palms, bushes, mosses, stranglers, and ferns. The river itself was about thirty feet across, a featureless silty brown flow. Near the shores, the waters were clear enough to see the muddy, rocky riverbed, but within a few feet visibility vanished.\n\nAnything could be lurking under the water: snakes, caimans, piranhas. There were even catfish so large that they were known to bite the feet off unsuspecting swimmers.\n\nCaptain Waxman shoved forward. \"So where do we go from here? We can airlift boats to our position, but then what?\"\n\nAnna Fong raised a hand. \"I think I might be able to answer that.\" She shoved off more of the palm fronds. Her small fingers ran along the inside of the canoe. \"From the pattern in which this canoe was chopped, and from the painted red edges, this had to come from a Yanomamo tribe. They're the only ones who construct canoes in such a manner.\"\n\nNate knelt down and ran his own hands along the interior of the canoe. \"She's right. Gerald Clark must have obtained or perhaps stolen this canoe from the tribe. If we travel upriver, we can ask any of the Yanomamo Indians if they've seen a white man pass through or if any of their canoes have gone missing.\" He turned to Frank and Kelly. \"From there, we can begin tracking again.\"\n\nFrank nodded and turned to Captain Waxman. \"You mentioned boats.\"\n\nHe nodded sharply. \"I'll radio in our position and have the Hueys airlift in the pontoons. It'll eat up the remaining daylight, so we might as well set up an early camp for today.\"\n\nWith a plan in place, everyone began to busy themselves setting up their homestead a short distance from the river. A fire was started. Kouwe collected a few hogplums and sawari nuts from the nearby forest, while Manny, after sending Tor-tor into the jungle to hunt, used a pole and net to catch a few jungle trout.\n\nWithin the course of the next hour, the roar of helicopters rattled the forest, causing birds and monkeys to screech and holler, flitting and leaping through the canopy. Three large crates were lowered into the water and pulled to shore by ropes. Packed inside were self-inflating pontoons with small outboard motors, what the Rangers called \"rubber raiders.\" By the time the sun had begun to set, the three black boats were tethered to shore-side trees, ready for tomorrow's travel.\n\nAs the Rangers worked, Nathan had set up his own hammock and was now skillfully stretching his mosquito netting around it. He saw Kelly having trouble and went to her aid.\n\n\"You want to make sure the netting is spread so that none of it touches the hammock, or the night feeders will attack you right through the fabric.\"\n\n\"I can manage,\" she said, but her brow was furrowed in frustration.\n\n\"Let me show you.\" He used small stones and bits of forest flotsam to pin her netting away from her hammock, creating a silky canopy around her bed.\n\nOff to the side, Frank was fighting his own netting. \"I don't know why we can't just use sleeping bags. They were fine whenever I went camping.\"\n\n\"This is the jungle,\" Nate answered. \"If you sleep on the ground, you'll find all sorts of nasty creatures sharing your bed by morning. Snakes, lizards, scorpions, spiders. But be my guest.\"\n\nFrank grumbled but continued to wrestle with his own bed site. \"Fine, I'll sleep in the damn hammock. But what's so important about the netting anyway? We've been plagued by mosquitoes all day.\"\n\n\"At night, they're a thousand times worse. And if the bugs don't bleed you dry, the vampire bats will.\"\n\n\"Vampire bats?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"They're all over the place here. At night, you want to be careful even sneaking off to the latrine. They'll attack anything warm-blooded.\"\n\nKelly's eyes grew wide.\n\n\"You're vaccinated against rabies, right?\" he asked.\n\nShe nodded slowly.\n\n\"Good.\"\n\nShe glanced over the bed he had helped make, then turned to him, her face only inches from his as he straightened from his crouch. \"Thanks.\"\n\nNathan was again struck by her eyes, an emerald green with a hint of gold. \"Y...You're welcome.\" He turned to the fire and saw that others were gathering for an early evening meal. \"Let's see what's for dinner.\"\n\nAround the campfire, the flames were not the only thing heating up. Nathan found Manny and Richard Zane in midargument.\n\n\"How could you possibly be against placing constraints on the logging industry?\" Manny said, stirring his filleted fish in the frying pan. \"Commercial logging is the single largest destroyer of rain forests worldwide. Here in the Amazon we're losing one acre of forest every second.\"\n\nRichard Zane sat on a log, no longer wearing his khaki jacket. His sleeves were rolled up, seemingly ready to fight. \"Those statistics are greatly exaggerated by environmentalists. They're based on bad science and generated more by a desire to scare than to educate. More realistic evidence from satellite photography shows that ninety percent of the Brazilian rain forest is still intact.\"\n\nManny was near to blustering now. \"Even if the rate of deforestation is exaggerated as you claim, whatever is lost is lost forever. We're losing over a hundred species of plants and animals every single day. Lost forever.\"\n\n\"So you say,\" Richard Zane said calmly. \"The idea that a cleared rain forest can't grow back is an outdated myth. After eight years of commercial logging in the rain forests of Indonesia, the rate of recovery of both native plants and animals far exceeded expectations. And here in your own forests, the same is true. In 1982, miners cleared a large tract of forest in western Brazil. Fifteen years later, scientists returned to find that the rejuvenated forest is virtually indistinguishable from the surrounding forest. Such cases suggest that sustainable logging is possible, and that man and nature can coexist here.\"\n\nNate found himself drawn into the discussion. How can the jackass actually advocate rain forest destruction? \"What about peasants burning forestland for grazing and agriculture? I suppose you support that, too.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Zane said. \"In the forests of western America, we think it's healthy for fires to burn periodically through a mature forest. It shakes things up. Why is it any different here? When dominant species are removed by either logging or burning, it allows for the growth of what are termed 'suppressed species,' the smaller shrubs and plants. And it is in fact these very plants that are of the most medicinal value. So why not allow a little burning and logging? It's good for all concerned.\"\n\nKelly spoke into the stunned silence. \"But you're ignoring the global implications. Like the greenhouse effect. Aren't the rain forests the proverbial 'lungs of the planet,' a major source of oxygen?\"\n\n\"'Proverbial' is the key word, I'm afraid,\" Zane said sadly. \"Newest research from weather satellites shows that the forests contribute little if any to the world's oxygen supply. It's a closed system. While the greenery of the canopy produces abundant oxygen, the supply is totally consumed by the fire of decomposition below, resulting in no net oxygen production. Again, the only real areas of positive production are in those regions of secondary forest growth, where new young trees are producing abundant oxygen. So in fact, controlled deforestation is beneficial to the world's atmosphere.\"\n\nNathan listened, balanced between disbelief and anger. \"And what of those who live in the forest? In the past five hundred years, the number of indigenous tribes has dwindled from over ten million to under two hundred thousand. I suppose that's good, too.\"\n\nRichard Zane shook his head. \"Of course not. That's the true tragedy here. When a medicine man dies without passing on his experience, then the world loses great volumes of irreplaceable knowledge. It's one of the reasons I kept pushing for funds to finance your own research among the fading tribes. It's invaluable work.\"\n\nNathan narrowed his eyes with suspicion. \"But the forest and its people are intertwined. Even if what you say is true, deforestation does destroy some species. You can't argue against that.\"\n\n\"Sure, but the green movement exaggerates the true number lost.\"\n\n\"Still, even a single species can be significant. Such as the Madagascan periwinkle.\"\n\nZane's face reddened. \"Well, that surely is a rare exception. You can hardly think that such a discovery is common.\"\n\n\"The Madagascan periwinkle?\" Kelly asked, confusion in her eyes.\n\n\"The rosy periwinkle of Madagascar is the source of two potent anticancer drugs--vinblastine and vincristine.\"\n\nKelly's brows rose with recognition. \"Used in the treatment of Hodgkin's disease, lymphomas, and many childhood cancers.\"\n\nNate nodded. \"These drugs save thousands of children every year. But the plant that generated this life-saving drug is now extinct in Madagascar. What if these properties of the rosy periwinkle hadn't been discovered in time? How many children would have needlessly died?\"\n\n\"Like I said, the periwinkle is a rare finding.\"\n\n\"And how would you know? With all your talk of statistics and satellite photography, it comes down to one fact. Every plant has the potential to cure. Each species is invaluable. Who knows what drug could be lost through unchecked deforestation? What rare plant could hold the cure to AIDS? To diabetes? To the thousands of cancers that plague mankind?\"\n\n\"Or perhaps even to cause limbs to regenerate?\" Kelly added pointedly.\n\nRichard Zane frowned and stared into the flames. \"Who can say?\"\n\n\"My point exactly,\" Nate finished.\n\nFrank stepped up to the flames, seemingly oblivious to the heated debate that had been waged over the campfire. \"You're burning the fish,\" the tall man said, pointing to the black smoke rising from the forgotten frying pan.\n\nManny chuckled and pulled the pan off the fire. \"Thank goodness for the practical Mr. O'Brien, or we'd be eating dry rations tonight.\"\n\nFrank nudged Kelly. \"Olin almost has the satellite feed hooked to the laptop.\" He checked his watch. \"We should be able to connect stateside in another hour.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Kelly glanced over to where Olin Pasternak was busy around a compact satellite dish and computer equipment. \"Perhaps we'll have some answers from the autopsy on Gerald Clark's body. Something that will help.\"\n\nNate listened. Maybe it was because he was staring into the flames, but he had a strange foreboding that maybe they all should have heeded the Yanomamo shaman and burned the man's body. As Richard Zane had said just a moment ago, the Indians were wiser than anyone in the ways and dark paths of the jungle. Na boesi, ingi sabe ala sani. In the jungle, the Indian knows everything.\n\nHe glanced to the darkening forest as the sun sank away.\n\nHere, with the jungle awakening in a chorus of echoing hoots and lonely calls, the myths of the deep forest gained substance and form. Anything could be possible in the lost tracts of the jungle.\n\nEven the curse of the Ban-ali."
            },
            {
                "title": "Stem Cell Research",
                "text": "AUGUST 7, 5:32 P.M.\n\n[ INSTAR INSTITUTE, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA ]\n\nLauren O'Brien sat hunched over her microscope when the call came from the morgue. \"Damn it,\" she mumbled at the interruption. She straightened, slipped her reading glasses from her forehead to the bridge of her nose, and hit the speaker phone.\n\n\"Histology here,\" she said.\n\n\"Dr. O'Brien, I think you should come down and see this.\" The voice belonged to Stanley Hibbert, the forensic pathologist from Johns Hopkins and a fellow member of MEDEA. He had been called in to consult on the post mortem of Gerald Clark.\n\n\"I'm somewhat busy with the tissue samples. I've just started reviewing them.\"\n\n\"And was I right about the oral lesions?\"\n\nLauren sighed. \"Your assessment was correct. Squamous cell carcinoma. From the high degree of mitosis and loss of differentiation, I'd grade it a type one malignancy. One of the worst I've ever seen.\"\n\n\"So the victim's tongue had not been cut out. It had rotted away from the cancer.\"\n\nLauren suppressed a nonprofessional shudder. The dead man's mouth had been rank with tumors. His tongue had been no more than a friable bloody stump, eaten away by the carcinoma. And this was not the extent of the man's disease. During the autopsy, his entire body was found to be riddled with cancers in various stages, involving lungs, kidneys, liver, spleen, pancreas. Lauren glanced to the stack of slides prepared by the histology lab, each containing sections of various tumors or bone marrow aspirates.\n\n\"Any estimate of the onset of the oral cancer?\" the pathologist asked.\n\n\"It's hard to say with certainty, but I'd estimate it started between six to eight weeks ago.\"\n\nA whistle of appreciation sounded over the line. \"That's damn fast!\"\n\n\"I know. And so far, most of the other slides I've reviewed show a similar high degree of malignancy. I can't find a single cancer that looks older than three months.\" She fingered the stack before her. \"But then again, I've still got quite a few slides to review.\"\n\n\"What about the teratomas?\"\n\n\"They're the same. All between one to three months. But--\"\n\nDr. Hibbert interrupted. \"My God, it makes no sense. I've never seen so many cancers in one body. Especially teratomas.\"\n\nLauren understood his consternation. Teratomas were cystic tumors of the body's embryonic stem cells, those rare germ cells that could mature into any bodily tissue: muscle, hair, bone. Tumors of these cells were usually only found in a few organs, such as the thymus or testes. But in Gerald Clark's body, they were everywhere--and that wasn't the oddest detail.\n\n\"Stanley, they aren't just terat omas. They're terato carcinomas.\"\n\n\"What? All of them?\"\n\nShe nodded, then realized she was on the phone. \"Every single one of them.\" Teratocarcinomas were the malignant form of the teratoma, a riotous cancer that sprouted a mix of muscle, hair, teeth, bone, and nerves. \"I've never seen such samples. I've found sections with partly formed livers, testicular tissue, even ganglia spindles.\"\n\n\"Then that might explain what we found down here,\" Stanley said.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Like I said when I first called, you really should come and see this for yourself.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" she said with an exasperated sigh. \"I'll be right down.\"\n\nLauren ended the connection and pushed away from the microscope table. She stretched the kink out of her back from the two hours spent stooped over the slides. She considered calling her husband, but he was surely just as busy over at CIA headquarters. Besides, she'd catch up with him in another hour when they conferenced with Frank and Kelly in the field.\n\nGrabbing her lab smock, Lauren headed out the door and descended the stairs to the institute's morgue. A bit of trepidation coursed through her. Though she was a doctor and had worked as an ER clinician for ten years, she still grew queasy during gross necropsies. She preferred the clean histology suite to the morgue's bone saws, stainless steel tables, and hanging scales. But she had no choice today.\n\nAs she crossed down the long hall toward the double doors, she distracted herself with the mystery of the case. Gerald Clark had been missing for four years, then walked out of the jungle with a new arm, undoubtedly a miraculous cure. But contrarily, his body had been ravaged by tumors, a cancerous onslaught that had started no more than three months prior. So why the sudden burst of cancer? Why the preponderance of the monstrous teratocarcinomas? And ultimately, where the hell had Gerald Clark been these past four years?\n\nShe shook her head. It was too soon for answers. But she had faith in modern science. Between her own research and the fieldwork being done by her children, the mystery would be solved.\n\nLauren pushed into the locker room, slipped blue paper booties over her shoes, then smeared a dab of Vicks VapoRub under her nose to offset the smells and donned a surgical mask. Once ready, she entered the lab.\n\nIt looked like a bad horror movie. Gerald Clark's body lay splayed open like a frog in biology class. Half the contents of his body cavities lay either wrapped in redand-orange hazardous-waste bags or were resting atop steel scales. Across the room, samples were being prepped in both formaldehyde and liquid nitrogen. Eventually Lauren would see the end result as a pile of neatly inscribed microscope slides, stained and ready for her review, just the way she preferred it.\n\nAs Lauren entered the room, some of the stronger smells cut through the mentholated jelly: bleach, blood, bowel, and necrotic gases. She tried to concentrate on breathing through her mouth.\n\nAround her, men and women in bloody aprons worked throughout the lab, oblivious to the horror. It was an efficient operation, a macabre dance of medical professionals.\n\nA tall man, skeletally thin, lifted an arm in greeting and waved her over. Lauren nodded and slipped past a woman tilting a hanging tray and sliding Gerald Clark's liver into a waste bag.\n\n\"What did you find, Stanley?\" Lauren asked as she approached the worktable.\n\nDr. Hibbert pointed down, his voice muffled by his surgical mask. \"I wanted you to see this before we cut it out.\"\n\nThey stood at the head of the slanted table holding Gerald Clark's body. Bile, blood, and other bodily fluids flowed in trickles to the catch bucket at the other end. Closer at hand, the top of Gerald Clark's skull had been sawed open, exposing the brain beneath.\n\n\"Look here,\" Stanley said, leaning closer to the purplish brain.\n\nWith a thumb forceps, the pathologist carefully pulled back the outer meningeal membranes, as if drawing back a curtain. Beneath the membranes, the gyri and folds of the cerebral cortex were plainly visible, traced with darker arteries and veins.\n\n\"While dissecting the brain from the cranium, we found this.\"\n\nDr. Hibbert separated the right and left hemispheres of the cerebrum. In the groove between the two sections of the brain lay a walnut-size mass. It seemed to be nestled atop the corpus callosum, a whitish channel of nerves and vessels that connected the two hemispheres.\n\nStanley glanced at her. \"It's another teratoma...or maybe a teratocarcinoma, if it's like all the others. But watch this. I've never seen anything like this.\" Using his thumb forceps, he touched the mass.\n\n\"Dear God!\" Lauren jumped as the tumor flinched away from the tip of his forceps. \"It...it's moving!\"\n\n\"Amazing, isn't it? That's why I wanted you to see it. I've read about this property of some teratomic masses. An ability to respond to external stimuli. There was one case even of a well-differentiated teratoma that had enough cardiac muscle to beat like a heart.\"\n\nLauren finally found her voice. \"But Gerald Clark's been dead for two weeks.\"\n\nStanley shrugged. \"I imagine, considering where it's located, that it's rich with nerve cells. And a good portion of them must still be viable enough to respond weakly to stimulation. But I expect this ability will quickly fade as the nerves lose juice and the tiny muscles exhaust their reserve calcium.\"\n\nLauren took a few deep breaths to collect her thoughts. \"Even so, the mass must be highly organized to develop a flinch reflex.\"\n\n\"Undoubtedly...quite organized. I'll have it sectioned and slides assembled ASAP.\" Stanley straightened. \"But I thought you'd appreciate personally seeing it in action first.\"\n\nLauren nodded. Her eyes shifted from the tumor in the brain to the corpse's arm. A sudden thought rose in her mind. \"I wonder,\" she mumbled.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nLauren pictured how the mass had twitched. \"The number of the teratomas and the mature development of this particular tumor could be clues to the mechanism by which Clark's arm grew back.\"\n\nThe pathologist's eyes narrowed. \"I'm not following you.\"\n\nLauren faced him, glad to find something else to stare at than the ravaged body. \"What I'm saying is--and this is just a conjecture, of course--what if the man's arm is just a teratoma that grew into a fully functioning limb?\"\n\nStanley's brows rose high. \"Like some form of controlled cancer growth? Like a living, functioning tumor?\"\n\n\"Why not? That's pretty much how we all developed. From one fertilized cell, our bodies formed through rapid cellular proliferation, similar to cancer. Only this profusion of cells differentiated into all the proper tissues. I mean, isn't that the goal of most stem cell research? To discover the mechanism for this controlled growth? What causes one cell to become a bone cell and its neighbor a muscle cell and the one after that a nerve cell?\" Lauren stared at the splayed corpse of Gerald Clark, not in horror any longer but in wonder. \"We may be on our way to answering that very mystery.\"\n\n\"And if we could succeed in discovering the mechanism...\"\n\n\"It would mean the end of cancer and would revolutionize the entire medical field.\"\n\nStanley shook his head and swung away, returning to his bloody work. \"Then let's pray your son and daughter succeed in their search.\"\n\nLauren nodded and retreated back across the morgue. She checked her watch. Speaking of Frank and Kelly, it was getting close to the designated conference call. Time to compare notes. Lauren glanced back one last time to the ruin that was left of Gerald Wallace Clark. \"Something's out in that jungle,\" she mumbled to herself. \"But what?\"\n\nAUGUST 7, 8:32 P.M.\n\n[ AMAZON JUNGLE ]\n\nKelly stood off from the others, trying her best to assimilate the news her mother had reported. She stared out into the jungle, serenaded by the endless chorus of locusts and river frogs. Firelight failed to penetrate more than a few yards into the shadowed depths of the forest. Beyond the glow, the jungle hid its mysteries.\n\nCloser at hand, a group of Rangers knelt, setting up the camp's perimeter motion-sensor system. The laser grid, rigged a few feet off the ground and established between the jungle and the camp, was meant to keep any large predator from wandering too near without being detected.\n\nKelly stared beyond their labors to the dark forest.\n\nWhat had happened to Agent Clark out there?\n\nA voice spoke near her shoulder, startling her. \"Grue-some news indeed.\"\n\nKelly glanced over and found Professor Kouwe standing quietly at her side. How long had he been there? Clearly the shaman had not lost his innate abilities to move noiselessly across the forest floor. \"Y...Yes,\" she stammered. \"Very disturbing.\"\n\nKouwe slipped out his pipe and began stoking it with tobacco, then lit it with a fiery flourish. The pungent odor of smoky tobacco welled around them. \"And what of your mother's belief that the cancers and the regenerated arm might be connected?\"\n\n\"It's intriguing...and perhaps not without merit.\"\n\n\"How so?\"\n\nKelly rubbed the bridge of her nose and gathered her thoughts. \"Before I left the States to come here, I did a literature search on the subject of regeneration. I figured it might better prepare me for anything we find.\"\n\n\"Hmm...very wise. When it comes to the jungle, preparation and knowledge can mean the difference between life and death.\"\n\nKelly nodded and continued with her thoughts, glad to express them aloud and bounce them off someone else. \"While conducting this research, I came across an interesting article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Back in 1999, a research team in Philadelphia raised a group of mice with damaged immune systems. The mice were to be used as a model to study multiple sclerosis and AIDS. But as they began working with the immune-compromised creatures, an odd and unexpected phenomenon developed.\"\n\nKouwe turned to her, one eyebrow raised. \"And what was that?\"\n\n\"The researchers had punched holes in the mice's ears, a common way of marking test animals, and discovered that the holes healed amazingly fast, leaving no trace of a wound. They had not just scarred over, but had regenerated cartilage, skin, blood vessels, even nerves.\" Kelly let this news sink in, then continued. \"After this discovery, the lead researcher, Dr. Ellen Heber-Katz, tried a few experiments. She amputated a few mice's tails, and they grew back. She severed optic nerves, and they healed. Even the excision of a section of spinal cord grew back in less than a month. Such phenomenal regeneration had never been seen in mammals.\"\n\nKouwe removed his pipe, his eyes wide. \"So what was causing it?\"\n\nKelly shook her head. \"The only difference between these healing mice and ordinary mice was their defective immune systems.\"\n\n\"And the significance?\"\n\nKelly suppressed a grin, warming to the subject, especially with such an astute audience. \"From the study of animals with the proven ability to regenerate limbs--starfish, amphibians, and reptiles--we do know their immune systems are rudimentary at best. Therefore, Dr. Heber-Katz hypothesized that eons ago, mammals made an evolutionary trade-off. To defend against cancers, we relinquished the ability to regenerate bodily limbs. You see, our complex immune systems are designed specifically to eliminate inappropriate cell proliferation, like cancers. Which is beneficial, of course, but at the same time, such immune systems would also block a body's attempt to regenerate a limb. It would treat the proliferation of poorly differentiated cells necessary to grow a new arm as cancerous and eliminate it.\"\n\n\"So the complexity of our immune systems both protects and damns us.\"\n\nKelly narrowed her eyes as she concentrated. \"Unless something can safely turn off the immune system. Like in those mice.\"\n\n\"Or like in Gerald Clark?\" Kouwe eyed her. \"You're suggesting something turned off his immune system so he was able to regenerate his arm, but this phenomenon also allowed multiple cancers to sprout throughout his body.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. But it has to be more complicated than that. What's the mechanism? Why did all the cancers arise so suddenly?\" She shook her head. \"And more important, what could trigger such a change?\"\n\nKouwe nodded toward the dark jungle. \"If such a trigger exists, it might be found out there. Currently three-quarters of all anticancer drugs in use today are derived from rain forest plants. So why not one plant that does the opposite--one that causes cancer?\"\n\n\"A carcinogen?\"\n\n\"Yes, but one with beneficial side effects...like regeneration.\"\n\n\"It seems improbable, but considering Agent Clark's state, anything might be possible. Over the next few days, at my request, the MEDEA researchers will be investigating the status of Gerald Clark's immune system and examining his cancers more closely. Maybe they'll come up with something.\"\n\nKouwe blew out a long stream of smoke. \"Whatever the ultimate answer is, it won't come from a lab. Of that I'm certain.\"\n\n\"Then from where?\"\n\nInstead of answering, Kouwe simply pointed the glowing bowl of his pipe toward the dark forest.\n\nHours later, deeper in the forest, the naked figure crouched motionless in the murk of the jungle, just beyond the reach of the firelight. His slender body had been painted with a mix of ash and meh-nu fruit, staining his skin in a complex pattern of blues and blacks, turning him into a living shadow.\n\nEver since first dark, he had been spying upon these outsiders. Patience had been taught to him by the jungle. All teshari-rin, tribal trackers, knew success depended less on one's actions than on the silence between one's steps.\n\nHe maintained his post throughout the night, a dark sentinel upon the camp. As he crouched, he studied the giant men, stinking with their foreignness, while they circled around and around the site. They spoke in strange tongues and bore clothing most odd.\n\nStill, he watched, spying, learning of his enemy.\n\nAt one point, a cricket crawled across the back of his hand as his palm rested in the dirt. One eye watched the camp, while the other watched the small insect scratch its hind legs together, a whisper of characteristic cricket song.\n\nA promise of dawn.\n\nHe dared wait no longer. He had learned all he could. He rose smoothly to his feet, the motion so swift and silent that the cricket remained on the back of his steady hand, still playing its last song of the night. He raised the hand to his lips and blew the surprised insect from its perch.\n\nWith a final glance to the camp, he fled away into the jungle. He had been trained to run the forest paths without disturbing a single leaf. None would know he had passed.\n\nMoreover, the tracker knew his ultimate duty.\n\nDeath must come to all but the Chosen."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Amazon Factor",
                "text": "AUGUST 11, 3:12 P.M.\n\n[ AMAZON JUNGLE ]\n\nNate kept one finger fixed to his shotgun's trigger, the muzzle pointed ahead. The caiman had to be almost twenty feet long. It was a huge specimen of Melanosuchus niger, the black caiman, the king of the giant crocodilian predators of the Amazon rivers. It lay atop the muddy bank, sunning in the midafternoon heat. Black armored scales shone dully. Its maw gaped slightly open. Jagged yellow teeth, longer than Nate's own palm, lined the cavity. Its bulging, ridged eyes were solid black, cold and dead, the eyes of a prehistoric monster. Stone still, it was impossible to tell if the great beast even acknowledged the trio of approaching boats.\n\n\"Will it attack?\" Kelly whispered behind him.\n\nNate shrugged without looking back. \"They're unpredictable. But if we leave it alone, it should leave us alone.\"\n\nNate crouched in the prow of the middle pontoon boat. He shared the craft with the two O'Briens, Richard Zane, and Anna Fong. A single soldier, Corporal Okamoto, manned the small outboard engine in the boat's stern. The stocky Asian corporal had developed the habit of whistling almost nonstop, which after four days of motoring up the wide tributary had grown to be excruciating. But at least the giant monster lounging on the bank had squelched the man's tuneless noise.\n\nAhead, the lead boat puttered past the beast, sticking close to the opposite shore. The starboard pontoon bristled with M-16s, all pointing toward the black caiman.\n\nEach boat held a complement of six team members. The lead boat carried three soldiers and the rest of the civilians: Professor Kouwe, Olin Pasternak, and Manny, who lounged with his pet jaguar in the center of the boat. Tor-tor had been on boats before and seemed to enjoy this means of transportation, tail lazily flicking, ears pricked for noises, eyes mostly in a half-lidded drowse.\n\nThe rear boat held the other six Rangers, anchored by Captain Waxman.\n\n\"They should just shoot the damn thing,\" Frank said.\n\nNate glanced to the man. \"It's an endangered species. In the last century, they were poached to near extinction. Only lately have their numbers grown.\"\n\n\"And why does this news not please me?\" Frank muttered, glancing to the waters around them. He tugged the bill of his baseball cap lower as if he were trying to hide behind it.\n\n\"The caimans kill hundreds every year,\" Zane mumbled, hunched down beside his pontoon. \"They've swamped boats, attacking anything. I read about a black caiman found dead with two outboard motors in its belly, swallowed whole. I'm with Mr. O'Brien. A few well-placed shots...\"\n\nBy now, the lead boat was past the beast's sunning spot, and Nate's boat followed next, moving slowly against the sludgy current as it passed the caiman, motor rumbling.\n\n\"Marvelous,\" Nate said. He faced the creature, no farther away than thirty yards. It was monstrous, a creature from another time. \"It's bloody beautiful.\"\n\n\"A male, isn't it?\" Anna Fong asked, staring avidly.\n\n\"From the ridge lines and shape of the nostrils, I'd agree.\"\n\n\"Shh!\" Frank hissed at them.\n\n\"It's moving!\" Kelly yelped, shifting from her seat to the far side of the boat. She was quickly followed by Richard Zane.\n\nThe armored head swung slowly, now following their boat.\n\n\"It's waking up,\" Frank said.\n\n\"It was never asleep,\" Nate corrected as they glided safely past. \"It's just as curious about us as we are about it.\"\n\n\"I'm sure as hell not curious,\" Frank said, clearly glad to be past the monster. \"In fact, it can just kiss my hairy--\"\n\nThe giant caiman suddenly lunged, lightning quick, diving smoothly across the slick mud to vanish under the brown water. The third boat had just been drawing abreast of it. A few shots were fired by the soldiers aboard. But the crocodile's speed and sudden movement had caught them all by surprise. It was already gone by the time the few shots peppered the muddy bank.\n\n\"Stop!\" Nate called out. \"It's just running!\" With nothing to protect, the caiman's first reaction was to flee from the unknown--that is, unless aroused...or threatened.\n\nOne of the Rangers, a tall black corporal named Rodney Graves, stood halfway up in the boat, searching the waters, gun pointed. \"I don't see--\"\n\nIt happened fast. The rear boat jarred about three feet in the air. Nate caught the barest glimpse of the thick scaled tail. The soldier who had been standing tumbled headfirst into the water. The others grabbed rubber hand-holds and held tight. The boat slammed back to the river.\n\nCaptain Waxman crouched by the outboard motor. \"Graves!\"\n\nThe fallen corporal suddenly popped out of the water, ten meters downstream from the trio of boats, carried by the current. The man's hat was gone, but he still had his gun. He began to kick and swim toward the nearest boat.\n\nBehind him, like a submarine rising, the head of the caiman crested the waters, its eyes two periscopes.\n\nThe Rangers scrambled to bring their weapons to bear. But before a single shot was fired, the caiman had sunk away again.\n\nNate imagined the giant creature slashing its thick tail, sweeping through the muddy depths toward the kicking soldier, drawn by the man's thrashing. \"Damn it,\" he said under his breath, then yelled with all his lungs. \"Corporal Graves! Don't move! Stop kicking!\"\n\nHe was not heard. By now, everyone was yelling for the man to hurry. His panicked thrashing grew worse. Captain Waxman motored the boat backward, trying to meet the frantic swimmer.\n\nNate yelled again, \"Stop swimming!\" Finally, more in frustration at not being heard than any true bravery, Nate tossed his gun aside and dove into the river. He glided smoothly, eyes open. But the murky depths hid everything beyond a few feet. He gave one solid kick and sweep of his arms, then simply let his momentum and the current propel him forward. Under the water, he heard the motor of the rear boat pass off to the left.\n\nArching up, his head broke the surface. Rodney Graves was only a yard to his right. \"Corporal Graves! Quit kicking! You've gotta play dead.\" Nate kept his own limbs unmoving. He half floated on his back.\n\nThe soldier turned to him, his eyes wide with panic. \"Fuck...that!\" he screamed between gasping breaths. He continued to thrash and kick. The rescue boat was now only three yards away. Already others were stretching out to grab him up.\n\nNate sensed movement nearby, a sudden surge against the current. It swept between him and the corporal. Something large and swift.\n\nOh, God...\n\n\"Graves!\" he cried out one last time.\n\nOne of the Rangers--Nate recognized him as the swimmer's brother, Thomas Graves--leaned far over the pontoon. He was supported by two others holding his belt. Tom lunged out with both arms, straining with every muscle in his body, his face a mask of fear for his brother.\n\nRodney kicked and reached, fingers scrambling out.\n\nTom caught his hand. \"Got him!\" he yelled. The muscles of his forearm bulged like corded iron.\n\nThe two soldiers yanked Tom back as he hauled Rodney forward. With his free arm, Tom snatched a handful of his brother's soaked field jacket for extra purchase, then fell backward, yanking his brother over the pontoon.\n\nRodney flew up out of the water, landing belly-first onto the pontoon. He laughed in relief. \"Goddamn crocodile!\"\n\nHe twisted to pull his feet out of the water when giant jaws, already gaped wide open, shot out of the water and swallowed both booted legs up to his thighs. The jaws clamped over their captured prey, then fell back into the river. The ton of armored beast could not be fought. Rodney was torn out of his brother's hands, a cry on his lips.\n\nRodney disappeared under the water, but his last scream echoed over the river. Soldiers, on their knees, had rifles pointed toward the river, but no one shot. Any blind round could take out their fellow unit member rather than the caiman. Yet from their expressions, Nate knew they all understood the truth. Corporal Rodney Graves was gone. They all had seen the size of the monster, had seen the jaws snap him away.\n\nAnd Nate knew they were right.\n\nThe caiman would take its prey deep and merely hold it clamped until the waters drowned its victim. Then it would either eat or store the body in the submerged mangrove roots where it would rot and be easier to tear apart.\n\nThere was no way to rescue the man.\n\nNate remained floating in the water, keeping his limbs still. The caiman was probably content with its meal, but where there was one, there might be other predators, especially once the blood flowed down the current. He took no chances. He rolled to his back and floated quietly until he felt hands grab him and haul him back aboard the boat.\n\nHe found himself staring into the stricken face of Tom Graves. The corporal was staring at his hands, as if blaming them for not being strong enough to hold his brother.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Nate said softly.\n\nThe man glanced up, and Nate was shocked to see the flash of anger in the man's eyes, anger that Nate had survived, anger that his brother had been taken instead. Tom turned away stiffly.\n\nAnother of the unit was not so reticent. \"What in God's name were you trying to do?\" It was Captain Waxman, his face almost purple with rage. \"What sort of asinine stunt was that? You trying to get yourself killed, too?\"\n\nNate swept the wet locks of hair out of his eyes. It was the second time in a week he had dived into the Amazon's waters to rescue someone. Without doubt, it was becoming a bad habit. \"I was trying to help,\" he mumbled.\n\nThe fire in Captain Waxman's voice burned down to dull coals. \"We were sent to protect you. Not the other way around.\"\n\nBy now, Nate's own boat had drawn abreast of the Rangers'. He clambered over the pontoons to resume his original seat.\n\nOnce settled, Captain Waxman waved an arm for them to continue forward. The pitch of the motors rose.\n\nNathan heard a protest raised by Tom Graves. \"Captain...my brother...his body.\"\n\n\"Gone, Corporal. He's gone.\"\n\nSo the trio of boats continued on. Nate caught Professor Kouwe's gaze across the waters from the other boat. Kouwe shook his head sadly. In the jungle, no amount of military training or arsenal could completely protect you. If the jungle wanted you, it was going to take you. It was called the Amazon Factor. All who traveled the mighty green bower were at the jungle's mercy and whim.\n\nNate felt a touch on his knee. He turned and saw Kelly seated beside him. She sighed, staring forward, then spoke. \"That was a stupid thing to do. It really was, but\"--she glanced at him--\"I'm glad you tried.\"\n\nAfter the sudden tragedy, Nate didn't have the strength to muster more than a simple nod, but her words helped warm the cold hollowness inside him. She took her hand from his knee.\n\nThe rest of the day's journey was made in silence. There was no more whistling by Corporal Okamoto as he manned the craft's outboard motor. They traveled until the sun was near the horizon, as if trying to put as much distance as possible between them and the death of Rodney Graves.\n\nAs the camp was prepared, the news was passed back to the base at Wauwai. The somber mood stretched through a dinner of fish, rice, and a platter of jungle yams Professor Kouwe had found near the campsite.\n\nThe only topic of discussion was the sugary yams. Nathan had asked from where such an abundance had come. \"It's unusual to find so many plants.\" The professor had returned with an efficiently constructed backpack of palm leaves filled to the brim with wild yams.\n\nKouwe nodded toward the deeper forest. \"I suspect the site where I found these was an old Indian garden. I saw a few avocado trees and stumpy pineapple plants in the same area.\"\n\nKelly straightened with a fork half-raised. \"An Indian garden?\"\n\nFor the past four days, they had not encountered a single soul. If Gerald Clark had obtained his canoe from a Yanomamo village, they had no clue where he got it.\n\n\"It was long abandoned,\" Kouwe said, dashing the hope that had briefly shone in Kelly's eyes. \"Such sites dot the riverways throughout the Amazon. Tribes, especially the Yanomamo, are nomadic. They plant gardens, stay a year or two, then move on. I'm afraid a garden's presence here does not mean anything significant.\"\n\n\"Still, it's at least something,\" Kelly said, refusing to dismiss this bit of hopeful news. \"Some sign that others are out there.\"\n\n\"And besides, these yams are damn good,\" Frank added, munching a mouthful. \"I was already getting sick of the rice.\"\n\nManny grinned, running his fingers through his jaguar's ruff. Tor-tor had feasted on a large catfish and lay stretched by the fire.\n\nThe Rangers had set up a second campfire a short distance away. At sunset, they held a short service for their fallen comrade. Now they were sullen. Only a few muttered words were shared among them. It was unlike the previous nights when the soldiers were full of ribald jokes and loud guffaws before settling to their own hammocks and posts. Not this night.\n\n\"We should all get to sleep,\" Kelly finally said, pushing to her feet. \"We have another long day tomorrow.\"\n\nWith murmured assents and a few groans, the party dispersed to their separate hammocks. When returning from the latrine, Nate found Professor Kouwe smoking near his hammock.\n\n\"Professor,\" Nate said, sensing Kouwe wanted to speak to him in private.\n\n\"Walk with me a moment. Before the Rangers activate the motion sensors.\" The shaman led the way a short distance into the forest.\n\nNate followed. \"What is it?\"\n\nKouwe simply continued until they were deep within the jungle's gloom. The camp's two fires were only greenish glows through the bushes. He finally stopped, puffing deeply on his pipe.\n\n\"Why did you bring me out here?\"\n\nKouwe flicked on a small flashlight.\n\nNate stared around. The jungle ahead was clear of all but a few trees: short breadfruit palms, oranges, figs. Bushes and low plants covered the forest floor, unnaturally dense. Nate realized what he was seeing. It was the abandoned Indian garden. He even spotted a pair of bamboo poles, staked among the plantings and burned at the top. Normally these torches were filled with tok-tok powder and lit during harvest times as a smoky repellent against hungry insects. Without a doubt, Indians had once labored here.\n\nNate had seen other such cultivations during his journeys in the Amazon, but now, here at night, with the patch overgrown and gone wild, it had a haunted feeling to it. He could almost sense the eyes of the Indian dead watching him.\n\n\"We're being tracked,\" Kouwe said.\n\nThe words startled Nate. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\nKouwe led Nate into the garden. He pointed his flashlight toward a passion fruit tree and pulled down one of the lower branches. \"It's been picked bare.\" Kouwe turned to him. \"I'd say about the same time as when we were hauling and securing the boats. Several of the plucked stems were still moist with sap.\"\n\n\"And you noticed this?\"\n\n\"I was watching for it,\" Kouwe said. \"The past two mornings, when I've gone off to gather fruit for the day's journey, I noticed some places that I'd walked the night before had been disturbed. Broken branches, a hogplum tree half empty of its fruit.\"\n\n\"It could be jungle animals, foraging during the night.\"\n\nKouwe nodded. \"I thought so at first, too. So I kept silent. I could find no footprints or definite proof. But now the regularity of these occurrences has convinced me otherwise. Someone is tracking us.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Most likely Indians. These are their forests. They would know how to follow without being seen.\"\n\n\"The Yanomamo.\"\n\n\"Most likely,\" Kouwe said.\n\nNate heard the doubt in the professor's voice. \"Who else could it be?\"\n\nKouwe's eyes narrowed. \"I don't know. But it strikes me as odd that they would not be more careful. A true tracker would not let his presence be known. It's almost too sloppy for an Indian.\"\n\n\"But you're an Indian. No white man would've noticed these clues, not even the Army Rangers.\"\n\n\"Maybe.\" Kouwe sounded unconvinced.\n\n\"We should alert Captain Waxman.\"\n\n\"That's why I pulled you aside first. Should we?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"If they are Indians, I don't think we should force the issue by having an Army Ranger team beating the bushes in search of them. The Indians, or whoever is out there, would simply vanish. If we wish to contact them, maybe we should let them come to us. Let them grow accustomed to our strangeness. Let them make the first move rather than the other way around.\"\n\nNate's first instinct was to argue against such caution. He was anxious to forge ahead, to find answers to his father's disappearance after so many years. Patience was hard to swallow. The wet season would begin soon. The rains would start again, washing away all hopes of tracking Gerald Clark's trail.\n\nBut then again, as he had been reminded today by the caiman's attack, the Amazon was king. It had to be taken at its own pace. To fight, to thrash, only invited defeat. The best way to survive was to flow with the current.\n\n\"I think it's best if we wait a few more days,\" Kouwe continued. \"First to see if I'm correct. Maybe you're right. Maybe it's just jungle animals. But if I'm right, I'd like to give the Indians a chance to come out on their own, rather than scare them away or force them here at gunpoint. Either way, we'd get no information.\"\n\nNate finally conceded, but with a condition. \"We'll give it another two days. Then we tell someone.\"\n\nKouwe nodded and flicked off his flashlight. \"We should be getting to bed.\"\n\nThe pair hiked the short distance back to the glowing campfires. Nate pondered the shaman's words and insight. He remembered the way Kouwe's eyes had narrowed, questioning if it was Indians out there. Who else could it be?\n\nArriving back at the site, Nate found most of the camp already retired to their hammocks. A few soldiers patrolled the perimeter. Kouwe wished him good night and strode to his own mosquito-netted hammock. As Nate kicked out of his boots, he heard a mumbled moan from Frank O'Brien in a nearby hammock. After today's tragedy, Nate expected everyone would have troubled dreams.\n\nHe climbed into his hammock and threw an arm over his eyes, blocking out the firelight. Like it or not, there was no fighting the Amazon. It had its own pace, its own hunger. All you could do was pray you weren't the next victim. With this thought in mind, it was a long time until sleep claimed Nate. His final thought: Who would be next?\n\nCorporal Jim DeMartini was quickly growing to hate this jungle. After four days traveling the river, DeMartini was sick of the whole damned place: the eternal moist air, the stinging flies, the gnats, the constant screams of monkeys and birds. Additionally, closer to home, mold seemed to grow on everything--on their clothes, on their hammocks, on their rucksacks. All his gear smelled like sweaty gym socks abandoned in a locker for a month. And this was after only four days.\n\nPulling patrol, he stood in the woods near the latrine, leaning on a tree, his M-16 resting comfortably in his arms. Jorgensen shared this shift with him but had stopped to use the latrine. From only a few yards away, DeMartini could hear his partner whistling as he zipped down.\n\n\"Fine time to take a shit,\" DeMartini groused.\n\nJorgensen heard him. \"It's the damn water...\"\n\n\"Just hurry it up.\" DeMartini shook out a cigarette, his mind drifting back to the fate of his fellow unit member Rodney Graves. DeMartini had been in the lead boat with a few of the civilians, but he had been close enough to see the monstrous caiman rise out of the river and rip Graves from the other boat. He gave an involuntary shudder. He was no plebe. He had seen men die before: gunshots, helicopter crashes, drowning. But nothing compared to what he had witnessed today. It was something out of a nightmare.\n\nGlancing over his shoulder, he cursed Jorgensen. What's taking the bastard so long? He took a deep drag on the cigarette. Probably jerking off. But then again, he couldn't blame Jorgensen if he was. It was distracting with the two women among them. After setting up camp, he had covertly spied upon the Asian scientist as she had stripped out of her khaki jacket. Her thin blouse beneath had been damp from sweat and clung invitingly to her small breasts.\n\nHe shoved back these thoughts, ground out his smoke, and stood straighter. In the dark, the only light came from the flashlight taped on the underside of his rifle. He kept it pointed forward, toward the nearby river.\n\nDeeper in the woods, past the laser motion sensors, small lights winked and flitted. Fireflies. He had been raised in southern California, where there were no such insects. So the blinking of the bugs kept him further on edge. The flashes kept drawing his eye, while around him the jungle sighed with the rustle of leaves. Larger branches creaked like old men's joints. It was as if the jungle were a living creature and he was swallowed inside it.\n\nDeMartini swung his light all around. He firmly believed in the buddy system--and even more so right now in this cursed black jungle. There was an old adage among the Rangers: The buddy system is essential to survival--it gives the enemy somebody else to shoot at.\n\nSlightly spooked for his buddy's company, he called back to the latrine. \"C'mon, Jorgensen!\"\n\n\"Give me half a break,\" his partner snapped irritably from a few yards away.\n\nAs DeMartini turned back around, something stung his cheek. He slapped at the insect, squashing it under his palm. An even fiercer sting struck his neck, just under the line of his jaw. Grimacing, he reached to brush the fly or mosquito away, and his fingers touched something still clinging to his neck. Startled, he batted it away in horror.\n\n\"What the fuck!\" he hissed, stepping back. \"Goddamn bloodsuckers!\"\n\nJorgensen laughed from nearby. \"At least you aren't bare-assed!\"\n\nStaring around the jungle with distaste, he pulled the collar of his jacket higher, offering less of a target to the bloodthirsty insects. As he turned, the splash of his flashlight revealed something bright in the mud at his feet. He bent to pick it up. It was a tied bunch of feathers around a pointed dart. The tip was wet with blood, his own blood.\n\nShit!\n\nHe dropped into a crouch and opened his mouth to shout a warning, but all that came out was a silent gurgle. He tried to take a deep breath but realized he couldn't seem to get his chest to move. His limbs grew leaden. Suddenly weak, he fell onto his side.\n\nPoisoned...paralyzed, he realized with panic.\n\nHis hand still had enough motor control to scrabble like a spider over the stock of his rifle, struggling to reach the trigger. If he could fire his M-16...warn Jorgensen...\n\nThen he sensed someone standing over him, watching him from the dark jungle. He couldn't turn his head to see, but the prickle of some primal instinct sent warnings through his body.\n\nFurther panicked, he strained for the M-16's trigger, praying, wordlessly begging. His finger finally reaching the trigger guard. If he could have gasped, he would have done so in relief. As darkness blackened the edges of his sight, he fed all his remaining energy into his single finger--and pulled the trigger.\n\nNothing happened.\n\nIn despair, he realized the rifle's safety was still on. A single tear of defeat rolled down his cheek as he lay in the mud. Paralyzed, he could not even close his eyelids.\n\nThe lurker finally stepped over his prone body. In the glow of his weapon's light, he saw a sight that made no sense.\n\nIt was a woman...a naked woman, a sleek creature of wondrous beauty, with long smooth legs, gentle curves leading to full hips, firm and rounded breasts. But it was her large, dark eyes--full of mystery, full of hunger--that held his attention as he slowly suffocated. She leaned over him, a cascading fall of black hair over his slack face.\n\nFor a moment, it felt as if she were breathing into him. He felt something course through him, something warm and smoky.\n\nThen he was gone, darkness swallowing him away.\n\nKelly startled awake. Voices shouted all around her. She sat up too quickly and tumbled out of her hammock, crashing to her knees. \"Damn it!\" She glanced up.\n\nMore branches had been tossed on the two campfires. Flames climbed higher, spreading smoke and a fiery light all around. In the distance, flashlights bobbled through the forests, clearly searching. Shouts and orders echoed out of the jungle.\n\nGaining her feet, Kelly struggled to find her way through the tangled mosquito netting. She spotted Nate and Manny nearby. Both men were barefooted, dressed in boxers and T-shirts. The large jaguar sat between them. \"What's going on?\" she called, finally freeing herself of the netting.\n\nThe other civilians were now all beginning to gather in various states of undress and confusion. Kelly quickly noticed that all the green canvas hammocks of the Rangers were empty. A single corporal stood between the two fires. His rifle was held at ready.\n\nNate answered her question, bending down to tug on his boots. \"One of the soldiers on patrol has gone missing. We're to stay here until the others secure the area.\"\n\n\"Missing? Who? How?\"\n\n\"Corporal DeMartini.\"\n\nKelly remembered the man: slick black hair, wide nose, eyes that constantly squinted with suspicion. \"What happened?\"\n\nNate shook his head. \"No one knows yet. He simply vanished.\"\n\nA sharp shout arose from near the river. Most of the bobbling flashlights converged toward the site.\n\nProfessor Kouwe joined them. Kelly noticed an odd look pass between the two men. Something unspoken, something they shared.\n\nFrank suddenly appeared on the far side of the camp. Flashlight in hand, he rushed toward them. He arrived out of breath, the freckles on his cheeks standing out against his ashen face. \"We've found the missing man's weapon.\" His eyes flicked among Nate, Manny, and Kouwe. \"You all know more about the jungle than anyone. There's something we could use your opinion about. Captain Waxman has asked for you to come take a look.\"\n\nThe whole group of civilians stepped toward Frank, intending to follow.\n\nHe held up a hand. \"Just these three.\"\n\nKelly pushed forward. \"If the man was injured, I may be of help, too.\"\n\nFrank hesitated, then nodded.\n\nRichard Zane moved to follow, his mouth open to protest, but Frank shook his head. \"We don't want the site trampled any more than necessary.\"\n\nWith the matter settled, the group hurried past the fires toward the river. The jaguar kept to its master's side, padding silently with them. They crossed into the dense growth that fringed the tributary. Here was the true mythic jungle: a tangle of vines, bushes, and trees. Single file, the group trekked into the thick growth, approaching the glow of many flashlights ahead.\n\nKelly followed behind Nate. For the first time, she noticed the spread of his shoulders--and how well he moved through the woods. For such a tall man, he slipped under liana vines and around bushes with a casual ease. She trod in his steps and tried to mimic his moves, but she kept stumbling in the dark.\n\nHer heel slid on something slippery. Her feet went out from under her. She fell sideways, hands out to break her fall.\n\nThen Nate's arms were around her, catching her. \"Careful.\"\n\n\"Th...thanks.\" Blushing, she reached toward a vine to pull herself up, but before she could grip it, Nate yanked her away. Only her fingers brushed the vine.\n\n\"What are you--ow!\" Her fingertips began to burn. She rubbed them on her untucked blouse, but the sting grew even worse. It felt as if her fingers were on fire.\n\n\"Hold still,\" Professor Kouwe said. \"Rubbing will spread it.\" He snatched a handful of thick leaves from a slender tree. Crushing them in his hands, he grabbed Kelly's wrist and smeared the oily moisture over her fingers and hand.\n\nInstantly the sting faded. Kelly stared in wonder at the crushed leaves.\n\n\"Ku-run-yeh,\" Nate said behind her. \"Of the violet family. A potent analgesic.\"\n\nKouwe continued to rub her fingers until the pain was gone.\n\nIn the glow of her brother's flashlight, she saw that a couple of blisters had formed on the tips of her fingers.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" Frank asked.\n\nShe nodded, feeling stupid.\n\n\"Keep applying the ku-run-yeh and you'll heal faster,\" Kouwe said, giving her arm a fatherly squeeze.\n\nNate helped her to her feet. He pointed to the grayish vine. \"It's named 'fire liana.' And not without reason.\" The vine draped from a tree and lay tangled near the trunk's base. She would've fallen into the nest of vines if Nate hadn't caught her. \"The vine exudes a potent irritant to keep insects away.\"\n\n\"A form of chemical warfare,\" Kouwe added.\n\n\"Exactly.\" Nate nodded for Frank to continue ahead, then waved an arm. \"It's going on all around you all the time here. It's what makes the jungle such a potent medicinal storehouse. The ingenuity and variety of chemicals and compounds waged in this war far outwit anything human scientists could invent in a lab.\"\n\nKelly listened, not feeling particularly appreciative of being a casualty in this chemical war.\n\nAfter a few more yards, they reached the Rangers, gathered in a ring around one section of forest. A couple of men stood off to the side, weapons on their shoulders, night-vision goggles in place over their faces.\n\nCorporal Jorgensen stood at attention before the unit's captain. \"Like I said, I was just using the latrine. DeMartini was standing guard by a nearby tree.\"\n\n\"And this?\" Captain Waxman held up the butt of a cigarette under the man's nose.\n\n\"Okay, I heard him light up, but I didn't think he left. When I zipped and turned around, he was gone. He didn't say a word that he was going to wander over to the river.\"\n\n\"All for a goddamn smoke,\" Captain Waxman grumbled, then waved an arm. \"Dismissed, corporal.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nAfter taking a deep breath, Captain Waxman crossed to them, fire still in his eyes. \"I need your expertise on this,\" he said, his gaze sweeping over Nate, Kouwe, and Manny. Turning, he swung his light toward an area of trampled jungle grasses. \"We found DeMartini's weapon abandoned here, and this stubbed cigarette, but no sign of what happened to his body. Corporal Warczak has searched for any prints leading from here. There aren't any. Just this trampled and shredded area of grasses that leads back to the river.\"\n\nKelly saw that the disturbed area did indeed lead all the way to the water's edge. The tall green reeds lining the bank were parted and crushed.\n\n\"I'd like to examine this more closely,\" Professor Kouwe said.\n\nCaptain Waxman nodded, passing Kouwe his flashlight.\n\nNate and Kouwe moved forward. Manny followed, but his pet jaguar stopped at the edge of the area, growling deep in the back of his throat as it sniffed at the grasses.\n\nHand on his whip, Manny tried to coax the cat to follow. \"C'mon, Tor-tor.\" The jaguar refused, even retreated a step.\n\nKouwe glanced back to them. The professor had stopped to crouch at a spot, examining something near the reeds. He sniffed at his fingers.\n\n\"What is it?\" Nate asked.\n\n\"Caiman feces.\" He wiped his hand clean on some grasses, then nodded to the growling jaguar. \"I think Tor-tor agrees.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Kelly asked.\n\nManny answered, \"Wild cats have the ability to sense the size of an animal from just the smell of its excrement or urine. In fact, elephant urine is sold throughout the western United States as a repellent against bobcats and cougars. They won't go near a site marked with elephant urine, freaked by the smell of such a huge animal.\"\n\nKouwe clambered through the reeds to the river's edge. He was careful to pluck aside a few broken stalks, then waved Captain Waxman over. Kelly followed.\n\nKouwe shone his light on a spot of muddy bank. Clawed prints were clear in the riverbank mud. \"Caiman.\"\n\nKelly heard an odd note of relief in Kouwe's voice. Again Nate and the professor shared a secretive glance.\n\nStraightening, Kouwe explained, \"Caimans will often hunt the riverbanks, snatching tapir and wild pigs as they come to drink. Your corporal must have come too close to the river and was grabbed.\"\n\n\"Could it be the same one that attacked Corporal Graves?\" Waxman asked.\n\nKouwe shrugged. \"Black caimans are fairly intelligent. After learning that our boats are a source of food, it might have followed the rumble of our motors, then lay in wait until nightfall.\"\n\n\"Goddamn that motherfucker!\" Waxman spat, a fist clenched. \"Two men in one day.\"\n\nStaff Sergeant Kostos stepped forward. The tall swarthy Ranger wore a tight expression. \"Sir, I can call for reinforcements. The Hueys could be here by morning with two more men.\"\n\n\"Do it,\" he snapped. \"And from here on out, I want two patrols every shift. Two men in each patrol! I don't want anyone--civilian or soldier--walking this jungle alone. Ever! And I want the river side of every camp set up with motion sensors, not just the jungle.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nCaptain Waxman turned to them. There was no warmth in his words, only dismissal. \"Thank you for your assistance.\"\n\nThe group wound back through the forest. As they marched, Kelly felt numb. Another man gone...so suddenly. She hiked past the nest of fire liana vines and eyed them warily. It wasn't only chemical warfare going on out here, but a savage feeding frenzy, where the strong consumed the weak.\n\nKelly was glad to reach the campsite with its roaring fires--the warmth, the light. In a small way, the flames were reassuring, temporarily driving back the dark heart of the forest.\n\nShe found the eyes of the other teammates upon them. Anna Fong stood with Richard Zane. Frank's fellow operative, Olin Pasternak, stood near the fires, warming his hands.\n\nManny quickly explained what they had found. As he talked, Anna covered her mouth with her hand and turned away. Richard shook his head. And as usual, Olin remained his stoic self, staring into the flames.\n\nKelly barely noticed their reactions. Standing by the campfire, her attention remained focused on Nate and Kouwe. The pair had moved to the side, near Nate's hammock. From the corner of her eye, she watched them. No words were exchanged between the two men, but she caught the inquiring look on Kouwe's face. An unspoken question.\n\nNate answered with a small shake of his head.\n\nWith some secret settled between them, Kouwe reached to his pipe and moved a few steps away, clearly needing a moment alone.\n\nKelly turned, giving the older man his privacy, and found Nate staring at her.\n\nShe glanced back to the fires. She felt foolish and oddly frightened. She swallowed and bit her lower lip, remembering the man's strong arms catching her, saving her. She sensed Nate still staring at her, his gaze like the sun's heat on her skin. Warm, deep, and tingling.\n\nSlowly the feeling faded.\n\nWhat was he hiding?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Data Collection",
                "text": "AUGUST 12, 6:20 A.M.\n\n[ LANGLEY, VIRGINIA ]\n\nLauren O'Brien was going to be late for work. \"Jessie!\" she called as she nestled an orange beside a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in a lunch box. \"Hon, I need you down here...now.\" The day-care center was a twenty-minute drive out of her way, followed by the usual fight through morning traffic into Langley.\n\nShe checked her watch and rolled her eyes. \"Marshall!\"\n\n\"We're coming,\" a stern voice answered.\n\nLauren leaned around the corner. Her husband was leading their granddaughter down the stairs. Jessie was dressed, though her socks didn't match. Close enough, she thought to herself. She had forgotten what it was like to have a child in the house again. Patterns and schedules had to be altered.\n\n\"I can take her to day care,\" Marshall said, reaching the bottom stairs. \"I don't have a meeting until nine o'clock.\"\n\n\"No, I can do it.\"\n\n\"Lauren...\" He crossed and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. \"Let me help you.\"\n\nShe returned to the kitchen and snapped shut the lunch box. \"You should get into the office as soon as possible.\" She tried to keep the tension out of her voice.\n\nBut Marshall heard it anyway. \"Jessie, why don't you get your sweater?\"\n\n\"'Kay, Grandpa.\" The girl skipped toward the front door.\n\nMarshall turned back to Lauren. \"Frank and Kelly are fine. If there was any change, we would know it right away.\"\n\nLauren nodded, but she kept her back toward him. She did not want Marshall to see the threatening tears. Last night, they had heard about the first Army Ranger being attacked by a crocodile. Then, a few hours past midnight, the phone had rung. From Marshall's tone as he spoke, Lauren had known it was more bad news. A call this late could only mean one thing--something horrible had happened to either Frank or Kelly. She was sure of it. After Marshall had hung up the phone and explained about the second dead soldier, Lauren had cried with selfish relief. Still, deep inside, a seed of dread had been planted that she could not shake. Two dead...how many more? She had been unable to sleep the rest of the night.\n\n\"Another two Rangers are being airlifted to their campsite as we speak. They have plenty of protection.\"\n\nShe nodded and sniffed back tears. She was being foolish. She had spoken with the twins last night. They were clearly shaken by the tragedy, but both were determined to continue onward.\n\n\"They're tough kids,\" Marshall said. \"Resourceful and cautious. They're not going to take any foolish chances.\"\n\nWith her back still turned to her husband, she mumbled, \"Foolish chances? They're out there, aren't they? That's foolish enough.\"\n\nMarshall's hands settled on her shoulders. He brushed aside the hair from the back of her neck and kissed her gently. \"They'll be fine,\" he whispered in her ear calmly.\n\nAt fifty-four, Marshall was a striking man. His black-Irish hair was going to silver at the temples. He had a strong jaw, softened by full lips. His eyes, a bluish hazel, caught her and held her.\n\n\"Kelly and Frank will be fine,\" he said succinctly. \"Let me hear you say it.\"\n\nShe tried to glance down, but a fingertip moved her chin back up.\n\n\"Say it...please. For me. I need to hear it, too.\"\n\nShe saw the glimmer of pain in his eyes. \"Kelly and Frank...will be fine.\" Though her words were muttered, speaking them aloud was somehow reassuring.\n\n\"They will be. We raised them, didn't we?\" He smiled at her, the pain fading in his eyes.\n\n\"We sure did.\" She slipped her arms around her husband and hugged him.\n\nAfter a moment, Marshall kissed her on the forehead. \"I'll take Jessie to day care.\"\n\nShe didn't object. After giving her grandchild a long hug by the front door, she allowed herself to be guided to her BMW. The forty-minute drive to the Instar Institute was a blur. When she arrived, she was glad to grab her briefcase and head through the cipher-locked doors into the main building. After such a disturbing night, it was good to be busy again, to have something to distract her from her worries.\n\nShe crossed to her office, greeting familiar faces in the hall. The complete immunology report was due today, and she was anxious to test Kelly's theory about an alteration to Gerald Clark's immune status. Preliminary results, coming piecemeal, were not terribly helpful. With the degree of cancerous processes ravaging the body, assessment was difficult.\n\nReaching her office, Lauren found a stranger standing by her door.\n\n\"Good morning, Dr. O'Brien,\" the man said, holding out a hand. He was no older than twenty-five, slender, with a shaved head, and dressed in blue scrubs.\n\nLauren, as head of the MEDEA project, knew everyone involved on the research, but not this man. \"Yes?\"\n\n\"I'm Hank Alvisio.\"\n\nThe name rang a bell. Lauren shook his hand while racking her brain.\n\n\"Epidemiology,\" he said, clearly reading her momentary confusion.\n\nLauren nodded. \"Of course, I'm sorry, Dr. Alvisio.\" The young man was an epidemiologist out of Stanford. She had never met him in person. His field of expertise was the study of disease transmission. \"How can I help you?\"\n\nHe lifted a manila folder. \"Something I'd like you to see.\"\n\nShe checked her watch. \"I have a meeting with Immunology in about ten minutes.\"\n\n\"All the more reason you should see this.\"\n\nShe unlocked her office door with a magnetic ID card and ushered him inside. Switching on the lights, she crossed to her desk and offered Dr. Alvisio a seat on the other side. \"What have you got?\"\n\n\"Something I've been working on.\" He fiddled through his folder. \"I've turned up some disturbing data that I wanted to run past you.\"\n\n\"What data?\"\n\nHe glanced up. \"I've been reviewing Brazilian medical records, looking for any other cases similar to Gerald Clark's.\"\n\n\"Other people with strange regenerations?\"\n\nHe grinned shyly. \"Of course not. But I was trying to put together an epidemiological assessment of cancers among those living in the Brazilian rain forests, with particular concentration in the area where Gerald Clark died. I thought maybe, by tracking cancer rates, we could indirectly track where the man had traveled.\"\n\nLauren sat up. This was an intriguing angle, even ingenious. No wonder Dr. Alvisio had been hired. If he could discover a cluster of similar cancers, then it might narrow the search parameters, which in turn could shorten the time Kelly and Frank would need to trek the jungle on foot. \"And what did you find?\"\n\n\"Not what I expected,\" he said with a worried look in his eyes. \"I contacted every city hospital, medical facility, and jungle field clinic in the area. They've been sending me data covering the past decade. It's taken me this long to crunch the information through my computer models.\"\n\n\"And did you discover any trends in cancer rates in the area?\" Lauren asked hopefully.\n\nHe shook his head. \"Nothing like the cancers seen in Gerald Clark. He seems to be a very unique case.\"\n\nLauren hid her disappointment but could not keep a touch of irritation from entering her voice. \"Then what did you discover?\"\n\nHe pulled out a sheet of paper and passed it to Lauren. She slipped on her reading glasses.\n\nIt was a map of northwestern Brazil. Rivers snaked across the region, all draining toward one destination--the Amazon River. Cities and towns dotted the course, most sticking close to channels and waterways. The black-and-white map was dotted with small red X's.\n\nThe young doctor tapped a few of the marks with the tip of a pen. \"Here are all the medical facilities that supplied data. While working with them, I was contacted by a staff doctor at a hospital in the city of Barcellos.\" His pen pointed to a township along the Amazon, about two hundred miles upriver from Manaus. \"They were having a problem with a viral outbreak among the city's children and elderly. Something that sounded like some form of hemorrhagic fever. Spiking temperatures, jaundice, vomiting, oral ulcerations. They had already lost over a dozen children to the disease. The doctor in Barcellos said he had never seen anything like it and asked for my assistance. I agreed to help.\"\n\nLauren frowned, slightly irked. The epidemiologist had been hired and flown here to work specifically and solely on this project. But she kept silent and let him continue.\n\n\"Since I already had a network of contacts established in the region, I utilized them, sending out an emergency request for any other reports of this outbreak.\" Dr. Alvisio pulled out a second sheet of paper. It appeared to be the same map: rivers and red X's. But on this map, several of the X's were circled in blue, with dates written next to them. \"These are the sites that reported similar cases.\"\n\nLauren's eyes widened. There were so many. At least a dozen medical facilities were seeing cases.\n\n\"Do you see the trend here?\" Dr. Alvisio said.\n\nLauren stared, then slowly shook her head.\n\nThe epidemiologist pointed to one X with a blue circle. \"I've dated each reported case. This is the earliest.\" He glanced up from the paper and tapped the spot. \"This is the mission of Wauwai.\"\n\n\"Where Gerald Clark was found?\"\n\nThe doctor nodded.\n\nShe now recalled reading the field report from the expedition's first day. The Wauwai mission had been razed by superstitious Indians. They'd been frightened after several village children had become inexplicably sick.\n\n\"I checked with local authorities,\" Dr. Alvisio continued. He began to tap down the line of blue-circled X's. \"The small steamboat that transported Clark's body stopped at each of these ports.\" The epidemiologist continued to tap the riverside towns. \"Every site where the body passed, the disease appeared.\"\n\n\"My God,\" Lauren mumbled. \"You're thinking the body was carrying some pathogen.\"\n\n\"At first. I thought it was one of several possibilities. The disease could have spread out from Wauwai through a variety of carriers. Almost all transportation through the region is by river, so any contagious disease would've followed a similar pattern. The pattern alone wasn't conclusive evidence that the body was the source of the contagion.\"\n\nLauren sighed, relieved. \"It couldn't be the body. Before being shipped from Brazil, my daughter oversaw the disposition of the remains. It was tested for a wide variety of pathogens: cholera, yellow fever, dengue, malaria, typhoid, tuberculosis. We were thorough. We checked for every known pathogen. The body was clean.\"\n\n\"But I'm afraid it wasn't,\" Dr. Alvisio said softly.\n\n\"Why do you say that?\"\n\n\"This was faxed this morning.\" He slid a final paper out of his folder. It was a CDC report out of Miami. \"Clark's body was inspected in customs at Miami International. Now three cases of the disease have been reported in local children. All of them from families of airport employees.\"\n\nLauren sank into her chair as the horror of the man's words struck her. \"Then whatever the disease is, it's here. We brought it here. Is that what you're saying?\" She glanced over to Dr. Alvisio.\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"How contagious is it? How virulent?\"\n\nThe man's voice became suddenly mumbled. \"It's hard to say with any certainty.\"\n\nLauren knew the man, even at such a young age, was a leader in his field or he wouldn't be here. \"What is your cursory assessment? You have one, don't you?\" He visibly swallowed. \"From the initial study of transmission rates and the disease's incubation period, it's a bug that's a hundredfold more contagious than the common cold...and as virulent as the Ebola virus.\"\n\nLauren felt the blood drain from her face. \"And the mortality rate?\"\n\nDr. Alvisio glanced down and shook his head.\n\n\"Hank?\" she said hoarsely, her voice hushed with fear.\n\nHe lifted his face. \"So far no one has survived.\"\n\nAUGUST 12, 6:22 A.M.\n\n[ AMAZON JUNGLE ]\n\nLouis Favre stood at the edge of his camp, enjoying the view of the river at sunrise. It was a quiet moment after a long night. Kidnapping the corporal from under the other camp's nose had taken hours to prepare and execute, but as usual, his team had performed without fail.\n\nAfter four days, the job of shadowing the other team was reduced to a routine. Each night, runners would slip ahead of the Rangers' team, trekking through the deep jungle to set up spy positions in well-camouflaged roosts in emergent trees that towered above the forest canopy. While spying, they maintained contact with the mercenary team via radio. During the day, Louis and the bulk of his forces followed in a caravan of canoes, trailing ten kilometers behind the others. Only at night had they crept any nearer.\n\nLouis turned from the river and crossed into the deeper wood. Hidden among the trees, the camp was hard to spot until you were on top of it. He stared around while his forty-man team began to break camp. It was a motley group: bronze-skinned Indians culled from various tribes, lanky black Maroons out of Suriname, swarthy Colombians hired from the drug trade. Despite their differences, all the men had one thing in common: they were a hardened lot, marked by the jungle and forged in its bloody bower.\n\nRifles and guns, wrapped in sailcloth, lay in an orderly spread beside sleeping sites. The armament was as varied as his crew: German Heckler, Koch MP5s, Czech Skorpions, stubby Ingram submachine guns, Israeli-manufactured Uzis, even a few obsolete British Sten guns. Each man had his favorite. Louis's weapon of choice was his compact Mini-Uzi. It had all of the power of its bigger brother but measured only fourteen inches long. Louis appreciated its efficient design, small but deadly, like himself.\n\nIn addition to the munitions, a few men were sharpening machetes. The scrape of steel on rock blended with the morning calls of waking birds and barking monkeys. In hand-to-hand combat, a well-turned blade was better than a gun.\n\nAs he surveyed the camp, his second-in-command, a tall black Maroon tribesman named Jacques, approached. At the age of thirteen, Jacques had been exiled from his village after raping a girl from a neighboring tribe. The man still bore a scar from his boyhood journey through the jungle. One side of his nose was missing from an attack by a piranha. He nodded his head respectfully. \"Doctor.\"\n\n\"Yes, Jacques.\"\n\n\"Mistress Tshui indicates that she is ready for you.\"\n\nLouis sighed. Finally. The prisoner had proven especially difficult.\n\nReaching into a pocket, Louis pulled free the dog tags and jangled them in his palm. He crossed to the lone tent set near the edge of the camp. Normally the camouflaged tent was shared by Louis and Tshui, but not this past night. During the long evening, Tshui had been entertaining a new guest.\n\nLouis announced himself. \"Tshui, my dear, is our visitor ready for company?\" He pulled back the flap and bowed his way through the opening.\n\nIt was intolerably hot inside. A small brazier was burning in a corner. His mistress knelt naked before the small camp stove, lighting a bundle of dried leaves. Aromatic smoke spiraled upward. She rose to her feet. Her mocha skin shone with a sleek layer of sweat.\n\nLouis stared, drinking her in. He longed to take her then and there, but he restrained himself. They had a guest this morning.\n\nHe turned his attention to the naked man staked spread-eagle on the bare-earth floor. The only bit of clothing he wore was a ball gag. Louis kept his eyes diverted from the bloody ruin of the corporal's body.\n\nStill holding the man's dog tags, Louis crossed to a folding camp chair and sat down. He glanced to the name etched on the tags. \"Corporal James DeMartini,\" he said in crisp English, reading the name, then looking up. \"I've heard it from good authority that you're ready to cooperate.\"\n\nThe man moaned, tears flowed from his eyes.\n\n\"Is that a yes?\"\n\nThe Ranger, a beaten and tortured dog, nodded with a pained wince. Louis studied the man. What hurt more, he wondered, the torture? Or the actual moment you finally broke?\n\nWith a tired sigh, he pulled the man's gag free. Louis needed information. Over the years, he had learned that the difference between success and failure lay in the details. He had reams of facts on the opposing team--not only information supplied directly by St. Savin, but also timely intelligence gained from a closer source.\n\nStill Louis hadn't been satisfied.\n\nHe had kidnapped the young corporal because his other resources had proved woefully lacking in specific details about the Army Ranger unit: their firepower, their radio codes, their timetables. Furthermore, there was always the unspoken military objective, orders meant only for military ears. And last, Louis had arranged the abduction simply as a challenge, a small test of his forces.\n\nThe maneuver had gone flawlessly. Equipped with night-vision glasses, a small team had snuck in via the river. Once the chance arose, they had poisoned one of the Rangers with a special curare dart prepared by Tshui. Afterward, they had covered their tracks, setting up a false trail beside the river with caiman dung and prints. His mistress had then kept the kidnapped man alive by breathing mouth-to-mouth until he could be revived back at their camp with a special antidote.\n\nBut Tshui's true talents were proven during the long night. Her art of torture was without equal, plying pain and pleasure in a strange hypnotic rhythm until finally her prey's will broke.\n\n\"Please kill me,\" the man begged, hoarse, blood dribbling from his lips.\n\n\"Soon enough, mon ami...but first a few questions.\" Louis leaned back as Tshui walked around the corporal, waving her smoking bundle of dried leaves through the air. He noticed the broken soldier flinch from the woman, his terrified eyes following her every move.\n\nLouis found this extremely arousing, but he kept himself focused. \"Let's first go over a few numbers.\" Over the next few minutes, he extracted all the codes and time schedules of the army unit. He did not have to write any of it down, setting all the frequencies and numbers to memory. The information would greatly facilitate eavesdropping on the other team's communications. Next, he collected the details on the Ranger force's strength: number and types of weapons, skill levels, weaknesses, means of air support.\n\nThe man proved most talkative. He babbled on and on, giving out more information than requested. \"...Staff Sergeant Kostos has a secret stash of whiskey in his rucksack...two bottles...and in Captain Waxman's boat, there's a crate that holds a cradle of napalm minibombs...and Corporal Conger has a Penthouse mag--\"\n\nLouis sat up. \"Hold on, monsieur. Let's back up. Napalm bombs?\"\n\n\"Minibombs...an even dozen...\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nThe corporal looked confused.\n\n\"James,\" he said sternly.\n\n\"I...I don't know. I suppose if we need to clear a section of jungle. Something that blocks our way.\"\n\n\"How large a region would one of those bombs clear?\"\n\n\"I...\" The man choked back a sob. \"I'm not sure...maybe an acre...I don't know.\"\n\nLouis leaned his elbows on his knees. \"Are you telling me the truth, James?\" He wiggled a finger for Tshui, who had grown bored with the conversation and sat cross-legged, busy laying out a new set of tools.\n\nOn his signal, she rose from her work and crawled like some jungle cat toward the naked soldier.\n\n\"No,\" the corporal cried, mewling, \"no, I don't know anything more.\"\n\nLouis shifted back in his seat. \"Do I believe you?\"\n\n\"Please...\"\n\n\"I think I will believe you.\" Standing, he turned to his mistress. \"We're done here, ma cherie. He's all yours.\"\n\nShe slid smoothly to her feet, offering a cheek to be kissed as he passed.\n\n\"No,\" the man on the ground moaned, pleading.\n\n\"Don't dawdle,\" he said to Tshui. \"The sun is almost up, and we'll need to be under way shortly.\"\n\nShe smiled, smoky and full of hidden lusts. As he stepped to the tent's threshold, he saw her bend down and collect her bone needle and thread from the spread of tools. Lately, Tshui had been trying a new approach in preparing her specimens for head-shrinking. She now liked to sew her victims' eyelids closed while they were yet alive. To better capture their essence, he supposed. The Shuar shamans placed special significance in the eyes, a path to the spirit.\n\nA sharp scream arose behind him.\n\n\"Tshui, don't forget the man's gag,\" Louis scolded. He made the mistake of glancing over his shoulder.\n\nTshui squatted above the face of Corporal James, her thighs on either side of his head, holding the squirming man in place as she busied herself with her needle and thread. He lifted an eyebrow in surprise. It seemed Tshui was trying something new.\n\n\"Pardon, ma cherie,\" he said, bowing out of the tent. Apparently he had scolded her too soon. The gag truly wasn't necessary.\n\nTshui was already sewing the corporal's lips shut."
            },
            {
                "title": "Survival of the Fittest",
                "text": "\u2002BRAZIL NUT\n\n\u2002family: Lecythidaceae\n\n\u2002genus: Bertholletia\n\n\u2002species: Excelsa\n\n\u2002common names: Brazil Nut, Castanheiro do Para, Para-Nut, Creamnut, Castana-de-Para, Castana-de-Brazil\n\n\u2002parts used: Nut, Seed Oil\n\n\u2002properties/actions: Emollient, Nutritive, Antioxidant, Insecticide"
            },
            {
                "title": "Village",
                "text": "[ AUGUST 13, NOON ]\n\n[ AMAZON JUNGLE ]\n\nFrowning, Nate caught the line and secured it to a mangrove tree. \"Careful,\" he warned his boat mates. \"It's swampy here. Watch your footing.\" He helped Kelly climb over the pontoon and onto the firmest section of the bank. He himself was muddy up to his knees and soaked everywhere else.\n\nHe lifted his face to the drizzle of rain from the cloudy skies. A storm had blown in overnight, starting with a fierce downpour, then fading into a steady misty drizzle within the last hour. The day's journey so far had been dreary. They had taken turns with a hand pump to bilge the water out of the boat all morning. Nate was glad when Captain Waxman had called a halt for lunch.\n\nAfter helping everyone off their boats, Nate climbed the muddy bank onto higher ground. The jungle wept all around him, dripping, sluicing, and trickling from the leafy canopy overhead.\n\nProfessor Kouwe seemed unperturbed. With a pack hastily constructed of palm leaves, he was already heading out into the forest to forage for edibles, accompanied by a sodden Corporal Jorgensen. From the sour expression on the soldier's face, the tall Swede seemed little interested in a jungle trek. But Captain Waxman insisted that no one, not even the experienced Kouwe, walk the jungles alone.\n\nAround the camp, the mood of the entire group remained sullen. Word of a possible contagion associated with Gerald Clark's body had reached them yesterday. Quarantines had been set up in Miami and around the institute where the body was being examined. Additionally, the Brazilian government had been informed and quarantine centers were being established throughout the Amazon. So far only children, the elderly, and those with compromised immune systems were at risk. Healthy adults seemed resistant. But much was still unknown: the causative agent, modes of transmission, treatment protocols. Back in the States, a Level Four containment had been set up at the Instar Institute to research these questions.\n\nNate glanced over to Frank and Kelly. Frank had his arm around his sister. She was still pale. Their entire family, including Kelly's daughter and the families of other scientists and workers at Instar, had been put into quarantine at the institute. No one was showing any symptoms, but the worry etched in Kelly's face was clear.\n\nNate turned away, giving them their privacy, and continued on.\n\nThe only bright spot in the last forty-eight hours was that no additional members of their party had fallen prey to the jungle. After losing Corporal DeMartini two days ago, everyone had kept alert, minding Nate's and Kouwe's warnings about jungle hazards, respecting their native lore. Now, before disembarking from a boat or bathing, everyone checked the shallows for buried stingrays in the mud or hidden electric eels. Kouwe gave lessons on how to avoid scorpions and snakes. No one put on a boot in the morning without first thoroughly shaking it out.\n\nNate checked the camp, walking the periphery, searching for any other hazards: fire liana, ant nests, hidden snakes. It was the new routine.\n\nHe spotted the two new members of the team, replacements for those lost. They were gathering wood. Both were ranked private first class, newly commissioned Rangers: a battle tank of a man with a thick Bronx accent, Eddie Jones, and, surprisingly, a woman, one of the first female Rangers, Maria Carrera. Special Forces had only started accepting women applicants six months before, after an amendment to Title 10 restrictions had passed Congress. But these new female recruits were still limited from front-line combat, assigned to missions like this one.\n\nThe morning after the nighttime attack, the two soldiers had been flown in from the field base at Wauwai, sliding down ropes from a hovering Huey. Afterward, small tanks of fuel and additional supplies were lowered.\n\nIt was a critical shipment, their last one. From that morning on, the team would be motoring beyond the range of the Hueys, beyond the range of air support. In fact, as of today, they had traveled close to four hundred miles. The only craft with enough range to reach them now was the black Comanche. But the sleek attack helicopter would only be utilized in case of emergency, such as the evacuation of an injured team member or in case an aerial assault was needed. Otherwise from here on out, they were on their own.\n\nFinished with his survey, Nate crossed back to the center of the camp. Corporal Conger was hunched over a pile of twigs. With a match, he was trying to light a pile of dead leaves under a steeple of twigs. A drip of water from overhead doused his flame. \"Damn it,\" the young Texan swore, tossing the match aside in disgust. \"Everything's friggin' waterlogged. I could break out a magnesium flare and try to light it.\"\n\n\"Save them,\" Captain Waxman ordered from a step away. \"We'll just make a cold camp for lunch.\"\n\nManny groaned from nearby. He was soaked to the skin. The only team member who looked even more dejected was Tor-tor. The jaguar stalked sullenly around its master, fur dripping water, ears drooped. Nothing was more piteous than a wet cat, even a two-hundred-pound one.\n\n\"I think I might be able to help,\" Nate said.\n\nEyes glanced to him.\n\n\"I know an old Indian trick.\"\n\nHe crossed back to the forest, searching for a particular tree he had noted during his survey of the campsite. He was followed by Manny and Captain Waxman. He quickly found the tall tree with characteristic bumpy gray bark. Slipping out his machete, he pierced the bark. A thick rusty resin flowed out. He fingered the sap and held it toward Waxman's nose.\n\nThe captain sniffed it. \"Smells like turpentine.\"\n\nNate patted the tree. \"It's called copal, derived from the Aztec word for resin, copalli. Trees in this family are found throughout the rain forests of Central and South America. It's used for a variety of purposes: healing wounds, treating diarrhea, alleviating cold symptoms. It's even used today in modern dentistry.\"\n\n\"Dentistry?\" Manny asked.\n\nNate lifted his sticky finger. \"If you ever had a cavity filled, you have some of this stuff in your mouth.\"\n\n\"And how is this all supposed to help us?\" Waxman asked.\n\nNate knelt and pawed through the decaying leaves at the base of the tree. \"Copal is rich in hydrocarbons. In fact, there has been some research recently into using it as a fuel source. Copal poured into a regular engine will run cleaner and more efficiently than gasoline.\" Nate found what he was searching for. \"But Indians have known of this property for ages.\"\n\nStanding, Nate revealed a fist-sized hardened lump of sap. He speared it atop a sharp stick like a marshmallow. \"Can I borrow a match?\"\n\nCaptain Waxman removed one from a waterproof container.\n\nNate struck the matchhead on the bark and held the flame to a corner of the resin ball. Immediately it ignited into a bright blue flame. He held it out and marched toward the site of the failed campfire. \"Indian hunters have been using this sap for centuries to light campfires during rainstorms. It'll burn for hours, acting as a starter to light wet wood.\"\n\nOther eyes were drawn to the flame. Frank and Kelly joined the group as Nate settled the flaming resin ball into a nest of leaves and twigs. In a short time, the tinder and wood took the flame. A decent blaze arose.\n\n\"Good job,\" Frank said, warming his hands.\n\nNate found Kelly staring at him with a trace of a smile. It was her first smile in the past twenty-four hours.\n\nNate cleared his throat. \"Don't thank me,\" he mumbled. \"Thank the Indians.\"\n\n\"We may be able to do just that,\" Kouwe said suddenly from behind them.\n\nEveryone turned.\n\nThe professor and Corporal Jorgensen crossed quickly toward them.\n\n\"We found a village,\" Jorgensen said, his eyes wide. He pointed in the direction that the pair had gone in search of foodstuffs. \"Only a quarter mile upstream. It's deserted.\"\n\n\"Or appears to be,\" Kouwe said, staring significantly at Nate.\n\nNate's eyes grew wide. Were these the same Indians who had been secretly dogging their trail? Hope surged in Nate. With the rainstorm, he had been worried that any trail left by Gerald Clark would be washed away. This storm was but the first to mark the beginning of the Amazonian wet season. Time grew short. But now...\n\n\"We should investigate immediately,\" Captain Waxman said. \"But first, I want a three-man Ranger team to recon the village.\"\n\nKouwe raised an arm. \"It might be better if we approached less aggressively. By now, the Indians know we're here. I believe that's why the village is deserted.\"\n\nCaptain Waxman opened his mouth to disagree, but Frank held up a hand. \"What do you suggest?\"\n\nKouwe nodded to Nate. \"Let the two of us go first...alone.\"\n\n\"Certainly not!\" Waxman blurted. \"I won't have you going in unprotected.\"\n\nFrank took off his Red Sox cap and wiped his brow. \"I think we should listen to the professor. Swarming in with heavily armed soldiers will only make the Indians fear us. We need their cooperation. But at the same time, I share Captain Waxman's concern about the two of you going in on your own.\"\n\n\"Then only one Ranger,\" Nate said. \"And he keeps his gun on his shoulder. Though these Indians may be isolated, most are well aware of rifles.\"\n\n\"I'd like to go, too,\" Anna Fong said. The anthropologist's long black hair lay plastered to her face and shoulders. \"A woman among the group may appear less hostile. Indian raiding parties don't bring women with them.\"\n\nNate nodded. \"Dr. Fong is right.\"\n\nCaptain Waxman scowled, clearly not keen on letting civilians lead the way into an unknown encampment.\n\n\"Then perhaps I should be the one to go as their backup.\" Gazes turned to Private Carrera, the female Ranger. She was strikingly beautiful, a dark-skinned Latina with short-cropped black hair. She faced Captain Waxman. \"Sir, if women are viewed as less hostile, I would be best suited for this mission.\"\n\nWaxman finally agreed grudgingly. \"Fine. I'll trust Professor Kouwe's assessment for now. But I want the rest of my forces set within a hundred yards of their position. And I want constant radio contact.\"\n\nFrank glanced to Nate and Kouwe.\n\nThey nodded.\n\nSatisfied, Frank cleared his throat. \"Then let's move.\"\n\nKelly watched the camp fracture into various units. Nate, Kouwe, Anna Fong, and Private Carrera were already motoring their pontoon boat into the current, while Captain Waxman selected three of his men and led them to a second rubber raider. They would paddle a hundred yards behind the first boat, keeping a safe distance away yet close enough for a rapid response. Additionally, three more Rangers would travel overland with Corporal Jorgensen in command. This team would take up a position a hundred yards from the village. In preparation, they painted their faces in jungle camouflage.\n\nManny had attempted to join this last party, but he'd been rebuffed by Captain Waxman. \"All other civilians stay here.\"\n\nWith the matter settled, Kelly could only watch as the others set off. Two Rangers--the newly arrived Private Eddie Jones and Corporal Tom Graves--remained at the camp as bodyguards. Once the others were launched and on their way, Kelly overheard Jones grumble to Graves, \"How did we end up minding the friggin' sheep?\"\n\nCorporal Graves did not respond, staring dully into the drizzle, clearly grieving for his brother Rodney.\n\nAlone now, Kelly crossed to Frank's side. As the nominal leader of this operation, her brother had the right to insist on joining either of the departing groups, but he had chosen to remain behind--not out of fear, she knew, but concern for his twin sister.\n\n\"Olin has the satellite link hooked up,\" Frank said, taking his sister under his arm. \"We can reach the States when you're ready.\"\n\nShe nodded. Not far from the fire, under a rain tarp, Olin sat hunched before a laptop and a satellite dish. He tapped busily at the keyboard, his face scrunched in concentration. Richard Zane stood over his shoulder watching him work.\n\nFinally, Olin glanced to them and nodded. \"All set,\" he said. Kelly heard the trace of his Russian accent. It was easy to miss unless one's ears were tuned for it. Olin was ex-KGB, once a member of their computer surveillance department before the fall of the communist regime. He had defected to the States only months before the Berlin Wall tumbled. His background in technology and his knowledge of Russian systems earned him a low-level security position in the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology.\n\nFrank guided Kelly to a camp chair before the laptop computer. Since learning of the contagion, Kelly had insisted they be updated twice daily now. Her excuse was to keep both sides fully apprised, but in reality, she had to know her family was still okay. Her mother, her father, her daughter. All three were at ground zero.\n\nKelly sat on the camp chair, eyeing Olin askance as he moved aside. She was never fully at ease around the man. Maybe because he was ex-KGB and she had grown up with a father in the CIA. Or maybe it was that ropy scar that stretched from ear to ear across his throat. Olin had claimed to be no more than a Russian computer geek for the KGB. But if that were true, how had he obtained that scar?\n\nOlin pointed to the screen. \"We should be uplinked in thirty seconds.\"\n\nKelly watched the small timer on the computer screen count downward. When it reached zero, her father's face blinked onto the screen. He was dressed casually, his tie half undone, no jacket.\n\n\"You look like a drowned rat\" were his first words from the flickering image.\n\nWith a small smile, Kelly lifted a hand to her wet hair. \"The rains have started.\"\n\n\"So I see.\" Her father returned her grin. \"How are things out there?\"\n\nFrank leaned forward into the view. He gave a quick overview of their discovery.\n\nAs he talked, Kelly listened to the echoing whine of Nate's boat. The waters here and the overhanging jungle played tricks with acoustics. It sounded like the boat was still nearby, but then the noise suddenly choked off. They must have reached the village already.\n\n\"Watch out for your sister, Frank,\" her father said, finishing their talk.\n\n\"Will do, sir.\"\n\nNow it was Kelly's turn. \"How're Mother and Jessie?\" she asked, holding her fists clenched in her lap.\n\nHer father smiled reassuringly. \"Both in the pink of health. We all are. The entire institute. So far no cases have been reported in the area. Any risk of contamination has been successfully quarantined, and we've converted the west wing of the institute into temporary family housing. With so many MEDEA members here, we've got around-the-clock doctors.\"\n\n\"How's Jessie handling it?\"\n\n\"She's a six-year-old,\" he said with a shrug. \"At first she was a bit scared at being uprooted. But now she's having a ball with the other staff's children. In fact, why don't you ask her yourself?\"\n\nKelly sat straighter as her daughter's face came into view, a small hand waving. \"Hi, Mommy!\"\n\nTears welled. \"Hi, sweetheart. Are you having fun?\"\n\nHer daughter nodded vigorously, climbing into her grandfather's lap. \"We had chocolate cake, and I rode a pony!\"\n\nChoking back a laugh, her father spoke over the top of his granddaughter's head. \"There's a small farm nearby, in the quarantine zone. They brought a pony over to entertain the kids.\"\n\n\"That sounds like fun, honey. I wish I could've been there.\"\n\nJessie squirmed in her seat. \"And you know what else? A clown is coming over and is gonna make animal balloons.\"\n\n\"A clown?\"\n\nHer father whispered to the side. \"Dr. Emory from histopathology. He's damn good at it, too.\"\n\n\"I'm gonna ask him to make me a monkey,\" Jessie said.\n\n\"That's wonderful.\" Kelly leaned closer, soaking up the view of both her father and her daughter.\n\nAfter a bit more elaboration on clowns and ponies, Jessie was lifted off her grandfather's knee. \"It's time for Ms. Gramercy to take you back to class.\"\n\nJessie pouted but obeyed.\n\n\"Bye, honey,\" Kelly called. \"I love you!\"\n\nShe waved again, using her entire arm. \"Bye, Mommy! Bye, Uncle Frankie!\"\n\nKelly had to restrain herself from touching the screen.\n\nOnce Jessie was gone, her father's face grew grim. \"Not all the news is so bright.\"\n\n\"What?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"It's why your mother isn't here. While we seem to have things contained, the outbreak in Florida is spreading. Overnight, there's been another six cases reported in Miami hospitals, and another dozen in outlying county hospitals. The quarantine zone is being widened, but we don't think we secured the area in time. Your mother and others are monitoring reports from across the country.\"\n\n\"My God,\" Kelly gasped.\n\n\"In the last twelve hours, the number of cases has now climbed to twenty-two. The fatalities to eight. Scenarios calculated by the best epidemiologists in the country have these numbers doubling every twelve hours. In fact, along the Amazon, the death toll is already climbing toward the five hundred mark.\"\n\nAs Kelly calculated in her head, her face blanched. Frank's hand on her shoulder tightened. In just a few days, the number in the U.S. could climb into the tens of thousands.\n\n\"The president has just signed an order to mobilize the National Guard in Florida. The official story is an outbreak of a virulent South American flu. Specifics on how it got here are being kept under wraps.\"\n\nKelly leaned back, as if distance would lessen the horror. \"Has any protocol for treatment been established?\"\n\n\"Not as of yet. Antibiotics and antivirals don't seem to be of any help. All we can offer is symptomatic care--intravenous fluids, drugs to combat fever, and pain relievers. Until we know what is causing the disease, fighting it's an uphill battle.\" Her father leaned closer to the screen. \"That's why your work out in the field is so critical. If you can find out what happened to Agent Clark, you may discover a clue to this disease.\"\n\nKelly nodded.\n\nFrank spoke, his voice a hoarse whisper. \"We'll do our best.\"\n\n\"Then I'd better let you all get back to your work.\" After a sober good-bye, her father signed off.\n\nKelly glanced to her brother. She saw that Manny stood to one side of him, Richard Zane to the other.\n\n\"What have we done?\" Manny asked. \"Maybe someone should have listened to that Indian shaman back in Wauwai. Burned Clark's body after he died.\"\n\nZane shook his head and mumbled, \"It wouldn't have mattered. The disease would've eventually broken out of the forest. It's just like AIDS.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Kelly asked, turning in her seat.\n\n\"AIDS started after a highway was built into the African jungle. We come disturbing these ancient ecosystems, and we don't know what we stir up.\"\n\nKelly pushed out of the camp chair. \"Then it's up to us to stop it. The jungle may have produced AIDS, but it also offered our best treatments against the disease. Seventy percent of AIDS drugs are derived from tropical plants. So if this new disease came out of the jungle, why not the cure, too?\"\n\n\"That's if we can find it,\" Zane said.\n\nOff to the side, Manny's jaguar suddenly growled. The great cat swung around and crouched, ears pricked, eyes fixed on the jungle behind them.\n\n\"What's wrong with him?\" Zane asked, backing a step away.\n\nManny squinted at the shadowed rain forest as Tor-tor continued a deep warning growl. \"He's caught a scent...something's out there.\"\n\nNate crossed down the narrow trail toward the small Indian village, which consisted of a single large roundhouse, open to the sky in the middle. As he approached the structure, he heard none of the usual noises coming from the shabano. No arguing huyas, no women yelling for more plantains, no laughter of children. It was ghostly quiet and unnerving.\n\n\"The construction is definitely Yanomamo,\" Nathan said softly to Kouwe and Anna Fong. \"But small. It probably houses no more than thirty villagers.\"\n\nBehind them marched Private Carrera, her M-16 held in both hands, muzzle pointed at the ground. She was whispering into her radio's microphone.\n\nAnna stared wide-eyed at the shabano.\n\nNate stopped her from continuing through the roundhouse's small doorway and into the village proper. \"Have you ever been among the Yanomamo?\"\n\nAnna shook her head.\n\nNate cupped his mouth. \"Klock, klock, klock,\" he yelled. Then softer to Anna, he explained, \"Whether it seems deserted or not, you never approach a Yanomamo village without first announcing yourself. It's a good way to get an arrow in your back. They have the tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.\"\n\n\"Nothing wrong with that policy,\" Carrera mumbled behind him.\n\nThey stood near the entrance for a full minute, then Kouwe spoke. \"No one's here.\" He waved an arm behind him. \"No canoes by the river, no nets or fishing gear either. No yebis squawking in alarm.\"\n\n\"Yebis?\" their Ranger escort asked.\n\n\"The gray-winged trumpeter,\" Nate said. \"Sort of an ugly chicken really. The Indians use them like feathered guard dogs. They raise a ruckus when anyone approaches.\"\n\nThe Ranger nodded. \"So no chickens, no Indians.\" She turned in a slow circle, surveying the forest around them. The woman refused to let down her guard. \"Let me go first.\"\n\nLifting her weapon higher, she paused near the short entrance. Bowing low, she ducked her head through. After a moment, she slid through the bamboo-framed entrance, sticking close to the banana-leaf wall, then barked to them, \"All clear. But stick behind me.\"\n\nCarrera moved toward the center of the circular structure. She kept her weapon ready, but as Nate had suggested, she kept the rifle's muzzle pointing at the ground. Among the Yanomamo, an arrow nocked and aimed at a fellow tribesman was a call to war. Since Nate didn't know how familiar these particular Indians were with modern weapons, he wanted no misinterpretations on this point.\n\nAs a group, Nate, Kouwe, and Anna entered the shabano.\n\nAround them, the individual family units were sectioned off from their neighbors by drapes of tobacco leaves, water gourds, and baskets. Woven hammocks, all empty, hung from the roof beams. A pair of stone bowls lay toppled in the central clearing beside a grinding stone, manioc flour spilled onto the dirt.\n\nA sudden burst of color startled them all as a parrot took wing. It had been roosting atop a pile of brown bananas.\n\n\"I don't like this,\" Kouwe said.\n\nNate knew what he meant and nodded.\n\n\"Why?\" asked Carrera.\n\n\"When the Yanomamo migrate to a new site, they either burn the old shabano or at least strip it of all useful items.\" Kouwe pointed around him. \"Look at all these baskets, hammocks, and feather collections. They wouldn't leave these behind.\"\n\n\"What could make them leave so suddenly?\" Anna asked.\n\nKouwe slowly shook his head. \"Something must have panicked them.\"\n\n\"Us?\" Anna stared around her. \"Do you think they knew we were coming?\"\n\n\"If the Indians had been here, I'm sure they would've been well aware of our approach. They keep a keen watch on their forest. But I don't think it was our party that made them abandon this shabano so quickly.\"\n\n\"Why do you say that?\" Nate asked.\n\nKouwe crossed around the edge of the living sites. \"All the fires are cold.\" He nudged the pile of bananas upon which the parrot had been feeding. \"They're half rotten. The Yanomamo would not have wasted food like this.\"\n\nNate understood. \"So you think the village was abandoned some time ago.\"\n\n\"At least a week, I'd estimate.\"\n\n\"Where did they go?\" Anna asked.\n\nKouwe stood in place and turned in a slow circle. \"It's hard to say, but there's one other detail that may be significant.\" He glanced to Nate to see if he had noticed it, too.\n\nFrowning, Nate studied the dwellings. Then it dawned on him. \"All the weapons are gone.\" Among the abandoned wares, there was not a single arrow, bow, club, or machete.\n\n\"Whatever spooked them to run,\" Kouwe said, \"they were scared for their lives.\"\n\nPrivate Carrera edged closer to them. \"If you're right, if this place is long deserted, I should call in my unit.\"\n\nKouwe nodded.\n\nShe stepped away, mumbling into her radio.\n\nKouwe silently waved Nate aside so they could speak privately. Anna was busy examining an individual dwelling, picking through the goods left behind.\n\nKouwe whispered. \"It was not these Yanomamo who were tracking our party.\"\n\n\"Then who?\"\n\n\"Some other group...I'm still not sure it was even Indians. I think it's time we informed Frank and Captain Waxman.\"\n\n\"Are you thinking that whatever spooked the Indians is what's now on our trail?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure, but whatever could frighten the Yanomamo from their homes is something we should be wary of.\"\n\nBy now, the constant drizzle had stopped. The cloud banks began to break apart, allowing cracks of afternoon sunlight to pierce through in dazzling rays. After so long in the misty murk, the light was bright.\n\nIn the distance, Nate heard a single engine roar to life. Captain Waxman and his Rangers were coming.\n\n\"You're certain we should tell them?\" Nate asked.\n\nBefore Kouwe could answer, Anna had wandered over. She pointed to the skies off to the south. \"Look at all those birds!\"\n\nNate glanced to where she pointed. With the rains dying away, various birds were rising from the canopy to dry their wings and begin the hunt for food again. But a half mile away, a huge flock of black birds rose from the canopy like a dark mist. Thousands of them.\n\nOh, God. Nate crossed quickly to Private Carrera. \"Let me have your binoculars.\"\n\nThe Ranger's eyes were on the strange dance of black birds, too. She unsnapped a compact set of binoculars from her field jacket and passed them to Nate. Holding his breath, he peered through the glasses. It took him a moment to focus on the birds. Through the lenses, the flock broke down to individuals, a mix of large and small birds. Many were fighting among themselves in the air, tearing at each other. But despite their differences, the various birds all shared one common trait.\n\n\"Vultures,\" Nate said, lowering the binoculars.\n\nKouwe edged nearer. \"So many...\"\n\n\"Turkey vultures, yellow-heads, even king vultures.\"\n\n\"We should investigate,\" Kouwe said. In his eyes, Nate saw the worry shared by all. The missing Indians...the vultures...It was a dire omen.\n\n\"Not until the unit gets here,\" Private Carrera warned.\n\nBehind them, the roaring of the other boat drew abreast of their location and choked out. In a few minutes, Captain Waxman and another three Rangers were entering the shabano. Private Carrera quickly updated the others.\n\n\"I've sent the Rangers stationed in the woods back to camp,\" Captain Waxman said. \"They'll gather everyone here. In the meantime, we'll scout what lies out there.\" He pointed to three of his unit: Private Carrera, Corporal Conger, and Staff Sergeant Kostos.\n\n\"I'd like to go with them,\" Nate said. \"I know this jungle better than anyone.\"\n\nAfter a short pause, Captain Waxman sighed. \"So you've proven.\" He waved them off. \"Keep in radio contact.\"\n\nAs they left, Nate heard Kouwe approach Waxman. \"Captain, there is something I think you should be made aware of...\"\n\nNate ducked out of the shabano's low door, glad to escape. He imagined Captain Waxman would not be pleased that he and Kouwe had kept hushed about the nighttime prowlers around their campsites. Nate was more than happy to leave such explanations to the diplomatic professor.\n\nOut in the woods, the two men, Conger and Kostos, took the point, leaving Private Carrera to dog Nate's steps and maintain a rear guard.\n\nThey half trotted through the wet woods, careful of the slippery mud and dense layers of sodden leaves. A small stream that drained toward the river behind them seemed to be heading in the same direction. They found an old game trail paralleling it and made better time.\n\nNate noticed footprints along the trail. Old prints almost obscured by the rain. Barefooted. He pointed one out to Private Carrera. \"The Indians must've fled this way.\"\n\nShe nodded and waved him onward.\n\nNate pondered this oddity. If panicked, why flee on foot? Why not use the river?\n\nThe scouting party climbed the trail, following the streambed. Despite the hard pace, Nate kept up with the Rangers in the lead. The forest around them was unusually quiet, almost hushed. It was eerie, and suddenly Nate regretted leaving his shotgun back at camp.\n\nSo occupied was he with keeping his footing and watching for any hidden dangers that Nate almost missed it. He stumbled to a stop with a gasp.\n\nPrivate Carrera almost collided into him. \"Damn it. Give some warning.\"\n\nThe other two Rangers, failing to notice the pair had halted, continued up the trail.\n\n\"Need a rest?\" Carrera asked with a bit of playful disdain.\n\n\"No,\" Nate said, panting heavily to catch his breath. \"Look.\"\n\nSoaked and pinned to a small branch was a scrap of faded yellow material. It was small, half the size of a standard playing card and roughly square. Nathan pulled it free.\n\n\"What is it?\" Carrera peered over his shoulder. \"Something from the Indians?\"\n\n\"No, not likely.\" He fingered the material. \"It's polyester, I think. A synthetic.\" He checked the branch upon which the scrap had been impaled. The thin limb had been cut, not naturally broken. As he examined the end, crude markings on the tree's trunk caught his attention. \"What's this?\"\n\nHe reached and brushed rainwater from the trunk. \"My God...\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nNathan stood clear so his escort could see. Deeply inscribed into the bark of the tree's trunk was a coded message.\n\nPrivate Carrera whistled appreciatively and leaned closer. \"This G and C near the bottom...\"\n\n\"Gerald Clark,\" Nathan finished her thought. \"He signed it. The arrow must indicate where he had come from...or at least where his next marker might lie.\"\n\nCarrera checked her wrist compass. \"Southwest. It's pointing the right way.\"\n\n\"But what about the numbers? Seventeen and five.\"\n\nThe Ranger scrunched up her face. \"Maybe a date, done the military way. The day, followed by the month.\"\n\n\"That would make it May seventeenth? That's nearly three months ago.\" Turning, Nate started to question her assessment, but Carrera had a palm raised toward him. Her other hand pressed her radio earpiece more firmly in place.\n\nShe spoke into her radio. \"Roger that. We're on our way.\"\n\nNate raised an inquiring eyebrow.\n\n\"Conger and Kostos,\" she said. \"They've found bodies ahead.\"\n\nNate felt a sickening lurch in his belly.\n\n\"Come on,\" Carrera said stiffly. \"They want your opinion.\"\n\nNodding, Nate continued up the trail. Behind him, as they marched, Private Carrera reported their discovery to her captain.\n\nAs Nate hurried, he glanced down and realized he still held the bit of faded yellow material. He remembered Gerald Clark had stumbled out of the jungle barefoot, wearing only pants. Had the man used the scraps of his own shirt to flag these sites? Like a trail of bread crumbs back to wherever he had come from?\n\nNate rubbed the bit of cloth between his fingers. After four years, here was the first tangible bit of proof that at least some of his father's team had survived. Up to this point, Nate had not entertained any hope that his father was still alive. In fact, he had refused even to contemplate that possibility, not after so long, not after coming to some semblance of peace with his father's death. The pain of losing his father a second time would be more than he could handle. Nate stared at the scrap in his hand for a second longer, then stuffed it into a pocket.\n\nAs he trekked up the trail, he wondered if there were more such flags out there. Though he had no way of knowing, Nate knew one thing for certain. He would not stop looking, not until he discovered the truth of his father's fate.\n\nCarrera swore behind him.\n\nNathan glanced back. Carrera had an arm over her nose and mouth. Only then did Nate notice the stench in the air. Rancid meat and offal.\n\n\"Over here!\" a voice called out. It was Staff Sergeant Kostos. The older Ranger stood only ten yards farther down the trail. In full camouflage, he blended well with the dappled background.\n\nNate crossed to him and was immediately assaulted by a horrible sight.\n\n\"Jesus Christ,\" Carrera gasped behind him.\n\nCorporal Conger, the young Texan, was farther down the trail, a handkerchief over his face, in the thick of the slaughterhouse. He waved off vultures with his M-16 as swarms of flies rose around him.\n\nBodies lay sprawled everywhere: on the trail, in the woods, some draped halfway in the stream. Men, women, children. All Indians from the look of them, but it was difficult to say for sure. Faces had been chewed away, limbs gnawed to bone, entrails ripped from bellies. The carrion feeders had made quick work of the bodies, leaving the rest to flies, other insects, and burrowing worms. Only the diminutive sizes of the corpses suggested they were Yanomamo, the missing villagers. And from the number, probably the entire village.\n\nNathan closed his eyes. He pictured the villagers with whom he had worked in the past: little Tama, noble Takaho. With a sudden burst, he rushed off the trail and hunched over the stream. He breathed deeply, fighting in vain the rising gorge. With a sickening groan, his stomach spasmed. Bile splattered into the flowing water, swelled by the recent rains. Nate remained crouched, hands on his knees, breathing hard.\n\nKostos barked behind him. \"We don't have all day, Rand. What do you think happened here? An attack by another tribe?\"\n\nNate could not move, not trusting his stomach.\n\nPrivate Carrera joined him, placing a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. \"The sooner we get this done,\" she said softly, \"the sooner we can leave.\"\n\nNathan nodded, took a final deep breath, and forced himself to climb back within view of the slaughter. He studied the area from a few steps away, then moved closer.\n\n\"What do you think?\" Carrera asked.\n\nGulping back bile, Nate spoke quietly. \"They must've fled during the night.\"\n\n\"Why do you say that?\" Kostos asked.\n\nNate glanced to the sergeant, then nudged a stick near one of the corpses. \"A torch. Burned to char at the end. The village took flight in full darkness.\" He studied the bodies, recognizing a pattern to the carnage. He pointed an arm as he spoke. \"When the attack came, the men tried to protect the women and children. When they failed, the women were a second line of defense. They tried to run with the children.\" Nate indicated a woman's corpse deeper in the woods. In her arms rested a dead child. He turned away.\n\n\"The attack came from across the stream,\" Nate continued. His hand shook as he pointed to the number of male bodies piled near or in the stream. \"They must have been caught by surprise. Too late to put up an adequate defense.\"\n\n\"I don't care in what order they were killed,\" Kostos said. \"Who the hell killed them?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Nate said. \"None of the bodies are pierced by arrows or spears. But then again, the enemy might have collected their weapons after the attack--to conserve their arsenal and to leave no evidence behind. With the bodies so torn apart, it's impossible to tell which wounds are from weapons and which from the carrion feeders.\"\n\n\"So in other words, you have no damn clue.\" Kostos shook his head and swung around. From a few steps away, he spoke into his radio.\n\nNate wiped his damp forehead and shivered. What the hell had happened here?\n\nFinally, Kostos stepped forward, raising his voice. \"New orders everyone. We're to collect a body for Dr. O'Brien to examine--one that's chewed up the least--and return it to the village. Any volunteers?\"\n\nNo one answered, which earned a mean snicker from the sergeant. \"Okay,\" Kostos said. \"I didn't think so.\" He pointed to Private Carrera. \"Why don't you take our fragile little doctor back to camp? This is men's work.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" Carrera waved Nate to the path, and together they continued down toward the village. Once out of earshot, Carrera grumbled under her breath. \"What an asshole...\"\n\nNate nodded, but truthfully, he was only too glad to leave the massacre site. He couldn't care less what Sergeant Kostos might think. But he understood Carrera's anger. Nate could only imagine the hassles the woman had to endure from the all-male force.\n\nThe remainder of the journey down the trail was made in silence. As they neared the shabano, voices could be heard. Nathan's pace quickened. It would be good to be among the living again. He hoped someone had thought to light a fire.\n\nCircling around the shabano, Nathan approached Private Eddie Jones, who stood guard by the entrance. Beyond him, limned against the water, a pair of Rangers was posted by the river.\n\nAs he and Carrera reached the roundhouse's door, Eddie Jones greeted them and blurted out the news. \"Hey, you guys ain't gonna fuckin' believe what we fished out of the jungle.\"\n\n\"What?\" Carrera asked.\n\nJones thrust a thumb toward the door. \"Go see for yourselves.\"\n\nCarrera waved her rifle's barrel for Nate to go first.\n\nWithin the shabano, a small congregation was clustered in the roundhouse's open central yard. Manny stood somewhat to the side with Tor-tor. He lifted an arm when he spotted Nate, but there was no greeting smile.\n\nThe voices from the others were raised in argument.\n\n\"He's my prisoner!\" Captain Waxman boomed. He stood with three Rangers, who all had their weapons on their shoulders pointing at someone out of sight behind the group of civilians.\n\n\"At least remove the cuffs on his wrists,\" Kelly argued. \"His ankles are still bound. He's just an old man.\"\n\n\"If you want cooperation,\" Kouwe added, \"this is no way to go about it.\"\n\n\"He'll answer our questions,\" Waxman said with clear menace.\n\nFrank stepped in front of Waxman. \"This is still my operation, Captain. And I won't tolerate abuse of this prisoner.\"\n\nBy now, Nate had crossed the yard and joined them. Anna Fong glanced to him, her eyes scared.\n\nRichard Zane stood slightly to the side, a satisfied smirk on his face. He nodded to Nathan. \"We caught him lurking in the jungle. Manny's big cat helped hunt him down. You should have heard him screaming when the jaguar had him pinned against a tree.\"\n\nZane stepped aside, and Nate saw who had been captured. The small Indian lay in the dirt, his ankles and wrists bound in strips of thick plastic zip ties. His shoulder-length white hair clearly marked him as an elder. He sat before the others, mumbling under his breath. His eyes flicked between the rifles pointed at him and Tor-tor pacing nearby.\n\nNate listened to his muttered words. Yanomamo. He moved closer. It was a shamanic prayer, a warding against evil. Nate realized the prisoner must be a shaman. Was he from this village? A survivor of the slaughter?\n\nThe Indian's eyes suddenly flicked to Nate, his nostrils flaring. \"Death clings to you,\" he warned, in his native dialect. \"You know. You saw.\"\n\nNate realized the man must smell the stench of the massacre on his clothes and skin. He knelt nearer and spoke in Yanomamo. \"Haya. Grandfather. Who are you? Are you from this village?\"\n\nHe shook his head with a deep scowl. \"This village is marked by shawari. Evil spirits. I came here to deliver myself to the Ban-ali. But I was too late.\"\n\nAround Nate, the arguing had stopped as they watched the exchange. Kelly whispered behind him. \"He's not spoken a word to anyone, not even Professor Kouwe.\"\n\n\"Why do you seek the Blood Jaguars, the Ban-ali?\"\n\n\"To save my own village. We did not heed their ways. We did not burn the body of the nabe, the white man marked as a slave of the Ban-ali. Now all our children sicken with evil magic.\"\n\nNate suddenly understood. The white man marked by the Ban-ali had to be Gerald Clark. If so, that meant... \"You're from Wauwai.\"\n\nHe nodded and spit into the dirt. \"Curse that name. Curse the day we ever set foot in that nabe village.\"\n\nNate realized this was the shaman who had tried to heal the sick mission children, then burned their village down in an attempt to protect the others. But by his own admission, the shaman must have failed. The contagion was still spreading through the Yanomamo children.\n\n\"Why come here? How did you get here?\"\n\n\"I followed the nabe's tracks to his canoe. I saw how it was painted. I know he came from this village, and I know the trails here. I came to seek the Ban-ali. To give myself to them. To beg them to lift their curse.\"\n\nNate leaned back. The shaman, in his guilt, had come to sacrifice himself.\n\n\"But I was too late. I find only one woman still alive.\" He glanced toward the site of the massacre. \"I give her water, and she tells me the tale of her village.\"\n\nNate sat up straighter.\n\n\"What is he saying?\" Captain Waxman asked.\n\nNate waved off his question. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"The white man was found by hunters three moons ago, sick and bony. They saw his markings. In terror, they imprisoned the man, fearing he would come to their village. They stripped him of all his belongings and tethered him in a cage, deep in the woods, intending to leave him for the Blood Jaguars to collect. The hunters fed and cared for him, fearing to harm what belonged to the Banali. But the nabe continued to sicken. Then, a moon later, one of the hunter's sons grew ill.\"\n\nNate nodded. The contagious disease had spread.\n\n\"The shaman here declared them cursed and demanded the death of the nabe. They would burn his body to appease the wrath of the Ban-ali. But that morning when the hunters reached the cage, he was gone. They thought the Ban-ali had claimed him and were relieved. Only later that day would they discover one of their canoes was missing. But by then it was too late.\"\n\nThe Indian grew quiet. \"Over the next days, the hunter's child died, and more in the village grew ill. Then a week ago, a woman returning from gathering bananas from the garden found a marking on the outer wall of the shabano. No one knew how it got there.\" The Indian nodded to the southwest section of the roundhouse. \"It is still there. The mark of the Ban-ali.\"\n\nNate stopped the story and turned to the others. He quickly recounted what the Indian shaman had told him. Their eyes grew wide with the telling. Afterward, Captain Waxman sent Jorgensen to check that section of the outer wall.\n\nAs they waited for him to return, Nate convinced Captain Waxman to slice the wrist bindings off the prisoner. He agreed, since the man was clearly cooperating. The shaman now sat in the dirt with a canteen in hand, sipping from it gratefully.\n\nKelly knelt beside Nathan. \"His story makes a certain sense from a medical standpoint. The tribe, when they kept Clark isolated in the jungle, almost succeeded in quarantining him. But as Clark's disease progressed, either the man became more contagious...or perhaps the hunter, whose son got sick, had somehow contaminated himself. Either way, the disease leaped here.\"\n\n\"And the tribe panicked.\"\n\nBehind them, Jorgensen ducked back into the shabano, his face grim. \"The old guy's right. There's a scrawled drawing on the wall. Just like the tattoo on Agent Clark's body.\" His nose curled in distaste. \"But the damn thing smells like it was drawn with pig shit or something. Stinks something fierce.\"\n\nFrank frowned and turned back to Nate. \"See if you can find out what else the shaman knows.\"\n\nNate nodded and turned back to the shaman. \"After finding the symbol, what happened?\"\n\nThe shaman scrunched up his face. \"The tribe fled that same night...but...but something came for them.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nThe Indian frowned. \"The woman who spoke to me was near to death. Her words began to wander. Something about the river coming to eat them. They fled, but it followed them up the little stream and caught them.\"\n\n\"What? What caught them? The Ban-ali?\"\n\nThe shaman gulped from the canteen. \"No, that's not what the woman said.\"\n\n\"Then what?\"\n\nThe shaman stared Nate in the eye to show he spoke truthfully. \"The jungle. She said the jungle rose out of the river and attacked them.\"\n\nNathan frowned.\n\nThe shaman shrugged. \"I know no more. The cursed woman died, and her spirit went to join her tribe. The next day, this day, I hear you coming up the river. I go to see who you are.\" He glanced over to Manny's jaguar. \"But I am found. Death scent clings to me, like it does to you.\"\n\nNathan sat back on his heels. He stared over at Manny. The biologist had Tor-tor on a leash, but the cat was clearly agitated, pacing around and around with his hackles raised. Spooked.\n\nKouwe finished translating for the others. \"That's all he knows.\"\n\nWaxman waved for Jorgensen to slice the shaman's ankle restraints, too.\n\n\"What do you make of his story?\" Kelly asked, still kneeling at his side.\n\n\"I don't know,\" he mumbled, picturing the spread of bodies up the trail. He had thought something had attacked from the stream's far side, but if the woman's story was true, the attack had come from the stream itself.\n\nKouwe joined them. \"The story is consistent with the myths of the Ban-ali. They're said to be able to bend the very jungle to their will.\"\n\n\"But what could come from the river and kill all those tribesmen?\" Kelly asked.\n\nKouwe slowly shook his head. \"I can't even imagine.\"\n\nA commotion near the shabano's door drew their attention. Staff Sergeant Kostos pushed inside, dragging a travois behind him. A dead body lay atop it. One of the massacred.\n\nBehind them, the shaman let out a piercing cry.\n\nNate swung around.\n\nThe Indian, his eyes wide with terror, backed away. \"Do not bring the cursed here! You will call the Ban-ali upon us!\"\n\nJorgensen tried to restrain the man, but even at his age, the Indian was wiry with muscle. He slipped out of the Ranger's grip, fled to one of the dwellings, then, using a hammock as a ladder, scrambled to the encircling roof of the shabano.\n\nOne of the Rangers raised his rifle.\n\n\"Don't shoot!\" Nathan called.\n\n\"Lower your weapon, Corporal,\" Waxman ordered.\n\nThe shaman paused atop the roof and turned to them. \"The dead belong to the Ban-ali! They will come to collect what is theirs!\" With these final words, the shaman dove off the roof and into the surrounding jungle.\n\n\"Go fetch him,\" Waxman ordered two of the Rangers.\n\n\"They'll never find him,\" Kouwe said. \"As scared as he is, he'll vanish into these jungles.\"\n\nThe professor's words proved prophetic. The Yanomamo shaman was never found. As afternoon closed toward evening, Kelly ensconced herself in a corner of the shabano and worked to discover what had killed the tribesman. Nate took Captain Waxman and Frank over to the tree with the carved directions left behind by Gerald Clark.\n\n\"He must have written this just before being captured,\" Frank said. \"How awful. He was so close to reaching civilization, then was captured and imprisoned.\" Frank shook his head. \"For almost three months.\"\n\nAs they returned to the shabano, the rest of the team prepared to set up for the night: lighting fires, setting up guard shifts, preparing food. The plan tomorrow was to leave the river and to begin the overland journey, following Gerald Clark's trail.\n\nWith the sun setting and a meal of fish and rice being prepared, Kelly finally left her makeshift morgue. She settled to a camp chair with a long, tired sigh and stared into the flames as she gave her report. \"As near as I can tell, he was poisoned by something. I found evidence of a convulsive death. Tongue chewed through, signs of contracted stricture of spine and limbs.\"\n\n\"What poisoned him?\" Frank asked.\n\n\"I'd need a tox lab to identify it. I couldn't even tell you how it was delivered. Maybe a poisoned spear, arrow, or dart. The body was too macerated by the carrion feeders to judge adequately.\"\n\nWatching the sun set, Nate listened as the discussions continued. He remembered the words of the vanished shaman--they will come to collect what is theirs--and pondered the massacre up the nearby trail and the disease spreading here and through the States. As he did so, Nate could not escape the sinking sensation that time was running out for them all."
            },
            {
                "title": "Night Attack",
                "text": "AUGUST 14, 12:18 A.M.\n\n[ AMAZON JUNGLE ]\n\nKelly woke from a nightmare, bolting up from her hammock. She didn't remember the specifics of her dream, only a vague sense of corpses and a chase. She checked her watch. The glowing dial put the time after midnight.\n\nAll around the shabano, most of the others were asleep. A single Ranger stood by the fire; his partner was guarding the door. Kelly knew another pair patrolled outside the roundhouse. Otherwise, the rest were snuggled in their hammocks after the long, horrible day.\n\nIt was no surprise she had nightmares: the massacre, the ravaged body she had examined, the ongoing tension. All of it overshadowed by the ever-present fear for her family back in Virginia. Her subconscious had plenty of fodder to mull through during her REM sleep.\n\nYesterday's evening report from the States had not been any cheerier than the lunchtime update. Another twelve cases had been reported in the U.S., and another three deaths--two children and an elderly matron from Palm Beach. Meanwhile, across the Amazon basin, disease and death were spreading like fire through dry tinder. People were barricading themselves indoors or leaving cities. Bodies were being burned in the streets of Manaus.\n\nKelly's mother had reported that so far no cases had yet arisen among the research team at Instar. But it was too soon to say they were out of the woods. The newest data, gathered mostly from cases in the Amazon, where the disease had a longer track record, suggested that the incubation period could be as short as three days or as long as seven. It all depended on the initial health of the victim. Children with poorer nutrition or parasitic conditions became sick faster.\n\nAs to the cause of the disease, a bacterial pathogen had been firmly ruled out by the CDC, but various viral assays were still continuing. So far, the culprit had not yet been identified.\n\nStill, even as grim as the report was, there was worse news. Her mother had looked pale as she had spoken over the satellite link. \"We now know that the transmission of the disease can be strictly airborne. It does not require physical contact.\" Kelly knew what this meant. With such ease of transmission, a pathogen like this was one of the hardest to quarantine. And with the mortality rates so high...\n\n\"There's only one hope,\" her mother had said at the end. \"We need a cure.\"\n\nKelly reached to her canteen beside her hammock and took a long slow drink. She sat for a moment and knew sleep would not come. Moving quietly, she climbed from her hammock.\n\nThe guard by the fire noticed her movement and turned toward her. Still in the clothes she had worn yesterday--a gray T-shirt and brown trousers--she simply slipped on her boots. She pointed toward the entrance, wanting to stretch her legs but not wishing to disturb the others sleeping.\n\nThe Ranger nodded.\n\nKelly walked quietly to the shabano's entrance. Ducking through, she found Private Carrera standing guard.\n\n\"Just needed some fresh air,\" Kelly whispered.\n\nThe female Ranger nodded and pointed her weapon toward the river. \"You're not the only one.\"\n\nKelly saw a figure standing a few yards down the path by the river. From his silhouette, Kelly knew it was Nathan Rand. He was alone, except for two Rangers positioned a short distance upriver, easily spotted by their flashlights.\n\n\"Keep a safe distance from the water,\" Private Carrera warned. \"We didn't have enough motion sensors to secure the perimeter and the river.\"\n\n\"I will.\" Kelly remembered too well what had happened to Corporal DeMartini.\n\nWalking down the path from the roundhouse, Kelly listened to the jungle hum of locust song, accompanied by the soft croaking of countless frogs. It was a peaceful sound. In the distance, fireflies danced in the branches and zipped in graceful arcs over the river.\n\nThe lone spectator heard Kelly's approach. Nathan turned. He had a cigarette hanging from his lips, its tip a red spark in the night.\n\n\"I didn't know you smoked,\" Kelly said, stepping next to him and staring at the river from atop the bank.\n\n\"I don't,\" he said with a grin, puffing out a long stream of smoke. \"At least not much. I bummed it from Corporal Conger.\" He thumbed in the direction of the pair on patrol. \"Haven't touched one in four or five months, but...I don't know...I guess I needed an excuse to come out here. To be moving.\"\n\n\"I know what you mean. I came out here for the proverbial fresh air.\" She held out her hand.\n\nHe passed his cigarette.\n\nShe took a deep drag and sighed out the smoke, releasing her tension. \"Nothing like fresh air.\" She passed the cigarette back to him.\n\nHe took one last puff, then dropped it and stamped it out. \"Those things'll kill you.\"\n\nThey stood in silence as the river quietly flowed by. A pair of bats glided over the water, hunting fish, while somewhere in the distance, a bird cried out a long mournful note.\n\n\"She'll be okay,\" Nate finally said, almost a whisper.\n\nKelly glanced to him. \"What?\"\n\n\"Jessie, your daughter...she'll be okay.\"\n\nStunned for a moment, Kelly had no breath to reply.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Nate mumbled. \"I'm intruding.\"\n\nShe touched his elbow. \"No, I'm grateful...really. I just didn't think my worry was so plain.\"\n\n\"You may be a great physician, but you're a mother first.\"\n\nKelly remained quiet for a bit, then spoke softly. \"It's more than that. Jess is my only child. The only child I'll ever have.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nKelly couldn't say exactly why she was discussing this with Nate, only that it helped to voice her fears aloud. \"When I gave birth to Jessie, there were complications...and an emergency surgery.\" She glanced to Nate, then away. \"Afterward, I couldn't bear any more children.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\"\n\nShe smiled tiredly. \"It was a long time ago. I've come to terms with it. But now with Jessie threatened...\"\n\nNate sighed and settled to a seat on a fallen log. \"I understand all too well. Here you are in the jungle, worrying about someone you love deeply, but having to continue on, to be strong.\"\n\nKelly sank beside him. \"Like you, when your father was first lost.\"\n\nNate stared at the river and spoke dully. \"And it's not just the worry and fear. It's guilt, too.\"\n\nShe knew exactly what he meant. With Jessie at risk, what was she doing here, traipsing through the jungle? She should be searching for the first flight home.\n\nSilence again fell between them, but it grew too painful.\n\nKelly asked a question that had been nagging her since she had first met Nate. \"Why are you here then?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"You lost both your mother and your father to the Amazon. Why come back? Isn't it too painful?\"\n\nNate rubbed his palms together, staring down between his toes, silent.\n\n\"I'm sorry. It's none of my business.\"\n\n\"No,\" he said quickly, glancing to her, then away. \"I...I was just regretting stamping out that cigarette. I could use it right now.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"We can change the subject.\"\n\n\"No, it's okay. You just caught me by surprise. But your question's hard to answer, and even harder to put into words.\" Nate leaned back. \"When I lost my father, when I truly gave up on ever finding him, I did leave the jungle, vowing to never come back. But in the States, the pain followed me. I tried to drown it away in alcohol and numb it away with drugs, but nothing worked. Then a year ago, I found myself on a flight back here. I couldn't say why. I walked into the airport, bought a ticket at the Varig counter, and before I knew it, I was landing in Manaus.\"\n\nNathan paused. Kelly heard his breath beside her, heavy and deep, full of emotion. She tentatively placed a hand on his bare knee. Without speaking, he covered it with his own palm.\n\n\"Once back in the jungle, I found the pain less to bear, less all-consuming.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Though my parents died here, they also lived here. This was their true heartland.\" Nate shook his head. \"I'm not making any sense.\"\n\n\"I think you are. Here is where you still feel the closest to them.\"\n\nShe felt Nate stiffen beside her. He remained silent for the longest time.\n\n\"Nate?\"\n\nHis voice was hoarse. \"I couldn't put it into words before. But you're right. Here in the jungle, they're all around me. Their memories are strongest here. My mother teaching me how to grind manioc into flour...my father teaching me how to identify trees by their leaves alone...\" He turned to her, his eyes bright. \"This is my home.\"\n\nIn his face, she saw the mix of joy and loss. She found herself leaning closer to him, drawn by the depth of his emotion. \"Nate...\"\n\nA small explosion of water startled them both. Only a few yards from the bank, a narrow geyser shot three feet above the river's surface. Where it blew, something large hunched through the water and disappeared.\n\n\"What was that?\" Kelly asked, tense, half on her feet, ready to bolt.\n\nNate put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her back down. \"It's nothing to be afraid of. It's just a boto, a freshwater dolphin. They're abundant, but pretty shy. You'll mostly find them in remote areas like this, traveling in small packs.\"\n\nProving his point, another pair of geysers blew, casting spray high into the air. Ready this time, and less panicked, Kelly spotted small dorsal fins arcing through the water, then diving back down. They were moving swiftly.\n\n\"They're fast,\" she said.\n\n\"Probably hunting.\"\n\nAs they settled back to their log, a whole procession of dolphins sped by, arcing, spraying. Frantic clicks and whistles echoed out eerily. Soon it seemed the whole river was full of dolphins racing down the current.\n\nNate frowned and stood.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"I don't know.\" A single dolphin shot through the shallows near their feet. It struck the mud bank, almost beaching itself, then, with a flip of its tail, fled to deeper waters. \"Something's panicking them.\"\n\nKelly got up and joined him. \"What?\"\n\nNate shook his head. \"I've never seen them display this behavior before.\" He glanced over to where the two patrolling Rangers stood guard. They also stared at the parade of dolphins. \"I need more light.\"\n\nNate hurried along the top of the bank toward the soldiers. Kelly followed, her blood beginning to race. The guards were positioned where a small stream emptied into the river.\n\n\"Corporal Conger, could I borrow your flashlight?\" Nate asked.\n\n\"They're just dolphins,\" said the other soldier. It was Staff Sergeant Kostos. The swarthy man scowled at them. \"We've seen lots of the damned things while patrolling at night. But, oh yeah, that was while you all were sleeping in your beds, all tucked away.\"\n\nThe younger Ranger was more cooperative. \"Here, Dr. Rand,\" Corporal Conger said, passing his flashlight.\n\nWith a mumbled thanks, Nathan accepted the light. He moved down the bank, shining the light upriver. Dolphins continued to pass but not in as great a number. As Kelly looked on, Nate widened the cone of the light, splashing it down the river.\n\n\"Damn,\" Nate said.\n\nAlmost at the reach of his light, the river's surface seemed to be churning, like white-water rapids over sharp rocks, frothing and gurgling. Only these rapids were moving toward them, flowing down the current.\n\n\"What is that?\" Kelly asked.\n\nAnother dolphin bumped into the shallows, bellying into the mud, but this one didn't quickly flip away. It rolled against the bank, squealing a high-pitched wail. Nate swung the light. Kelly gasped and took a couple steps back.\n\nThe tail end of the dolphin was gone. Its belly had been ripped open. Intestines trailed. The current rolled the pitiful creature back into the river.\n\nNathan swung his light back upstream. The churning white water was already much closer.\n\n\"What is it?\" Corporal Conger asked, his Texas drawl thicker. \"What's happening?\"\n\nFrom up the river, the piercing squeal of a pig woke the night. Nesting birds took wing. Monkeys, startled awake, barked in irritation.\n\n\"What's going on?\" the Texan repeated.\n\n\"I need your night-vision goggles,\" Nate ordered.\n\nKelly stood behind his shoulder. \"What is it?\"\n\nNate grabbed the Ranger's glasses. \"I've seen rivers churn like this a few times before--but never this much.\"\n\n\"What's causing it?\" Kelly asked.\n\nNate lifted the goggles. \"Piranhas...in a feeding frenzy.\"\n\nThrough the night-vision lenses, the world both brightened and dissolved into a monochrome green. It took Nate a moment to focus on where the waters churned. He fingered the telescopic lenses to bring the image closer. Within the roiling waters, he spotted flashes of large fins--dolphins caught by the razor-toothed predators--and in brief flickers, the silvery flash of the deadly fish themselves as they fought over their meal.\n\n\"What's the threat?\" Kostos said with thick disdain. \"Let the dumb fucks chew up the dolphins. They ain't gonna get us on dry land.\"\n\nThe sergeant was right, but Nate remembered the bodies of the massacred Indians...and their fear of the river. Was this the threat? Were the waters here so thick with piranhas that the Indians themselves feared to travel the rivers at night? Was that why they had fled on foot? And this behavior, attacking dolphins...it made no sense. Nate had never heard of such a slaughter.\n\nMotion at the edge of his goggles drew his eye. He turned from the churning water, and spotted a carcass lying on the bank. It appeared to be a peccary, a wild pig. Was it the same one that had screamed a moment ago? Something smaller, several of them, hopped around the carcass, like huge bullfrogs, except these seemed to be tearing into the dead pig and dragging it toward the water.\n\n\"What the hell...\" Nate mumbled.\n\n\"What?\" Kelly asked. \"What do you see?\"\n\nNate clicked the telescopic lenses up a few notches, zeroing in. He watched more of the bullfroglike creatures leap out of the water and attack the carcass. Others joined it, flying high over the bank to disappear into the riverside foliage. As he watched, a large capybara burst from the jungle and ran along the muddy bank. It looked like a hundred-pound guinea pig racing beside the river. Then it suddenly fell as if tripping over its own feet. Its body began to convulse. From the waters, the creatures flopped and hopped, leaping at this new meal.\n\nNate suddenly knew what he was seeing. It was what the village Indians must have seen. He remembered the shaman's words. The jungle rose out of the river and attacked them. Down the bank, the capybara ceased writhing as death claimed it. Hadn't Kelly mentioned something about the corpse she had examined showing signs of a convulsive event?\n\nHe ripped off the goggles. The line of white water was now only thirty yards away. \"We need to get everyone away from the river! Away from all waterways.\"\n\nSergeant Kostos scoffed. \"What the hell are you talking about?\"\n\nCorporal Conger retrieved his glasses. \"Maybe we should listen to Dr.--\" Something knocked the corporal's helmet askew, hitting with a wet plop. \"Jesus Christ.\"\n\nNathan shone his light down. Sitting in the mud was a strange creature, slightly stunned. It looked like a monstrous tadpole, but in the stage where its muscular hind legs had developed.\n\nBefore anyone could react, the creature leaped again, latching onto Conger's thigh with its jaws. Gasping, the corporal bludgeoned it away with the stock of his rifle and took a few shaky steps away. \"Damn thing has teeth.\"\n\nKostos slammed his boot heel atop the creature, squashing it and shooting entrails down the bank. \"Not any longer it doesn't.\"\n\nAs a group, they scurried away from the river. Conger fingered the pant leg of his fatigues, hopping along. A hole had been torn in the fabric, and when he lifted his hand, Nate spotted blood on the corporal's fingertips. \"Practically tore a chunk out of me,\" Conger said with a nervous laugh.\n\nIn no time, they were back at the shabano's entrance.\n\n\"What's going on?\" Private Carrera asked.\n\nNate pointed back to the river. \"Whatever got the Indians is coming our way. We need to clear out of here.\"\n\n\"For now, maintain your post,\" Kostos ordered Carrera. \"Conger, you get that leg looked at while I go report to Captain Waxman.\"\n\n\"My med pack is inside,\" Kelly said.\n\nConger leaned against a beam of bamboo. \"Sarge, I'm not feeling so good.\"\n\nAll eyes turned to the man.\n\n\"Everything's gone sort of blurry.\"\n\nKelly reached to help him. Nathan saw ropes of drool begin to flow from the corner of the man's lips. Then his head fell back, followed by his body, already convulsing.\n\nSergeant Kostos caught him. \"Conger!\"\n\n\"Get him inside!\" Kelly snapped, ducking through the entrance.\n\nThe Ranger hauled the soldier toward the shabano's door, but was having difficulty as the man thrashed. Private Carrera shouldered her rifle and bent to help. \"Maintain your post, soldier!\" Kostos barked, then turned to Nate. \"Grab his goddamn legs!\"\n\nNate dropped and hooked Conger's ankles under his arms. It was like holding the end of a downed power line as the man's body snapped and seized. \"Go!\"\n\nAs a team, they hauled the soldier through the narrow doorway.\n\nOthers came rushing up, awakened by the yelling.\n\n\"What happened?\" Zane asked.\n\n\"Stand out of the way!\" Kostos hollered, bowling the man over as he ran with the fallen soldier.\n\n\"Over here!\" Kelly called. She already had her pack open and a syringe in hand. \"Lay him down and hold him still.\"\n\nAfter lowering Conger to the dirt, Nate was elbowed aside. Two Rangers took his place, pinning the soldier's legs to the ground.\n\nKostos knelt on the corporal's shoulders, holding him in place. But the man's head continued to bang up and down as if he were trying to knock himself unconscious. Froth foamed from his lips, bloody from where he half chewed through his own lip. \"Jesus Christ! Conger!\"\n\nKelly sliced open the man's right sleeve with a razor blade, then quickly slid a needle into Conger's arm. She injected the syringe's contents and knelt back to watch their effect, holding his wrist clamped in her fingers. \"C'mon...c'mon...\"\n\nSuddenly the man's contorted form relaxed.\n\n\"Thank God,\" Kostos sighed.\n\nKelly's reaction wasn't as relieved. \"Damn it!\" She pounced on his form, checking his neck for a pulse, then pushed the soldiers aside as she began CPR on his chest. \"Someone start mouth-to-mouth.\"\n\nThe Rangers were too stunned for a moment to move.\n\nNathan bumped Kostos aside, wiped the bloody froth from Conger's mouth, then began to breathe in sync with Kelly's labors. Nate's focus narrowed down to the rhythm of their work. He vaguely heard the concerned chatter of the others.\n\n\"Some damn frog thing or fish,\" Kostos explained. \"It hopped out and bit Conger on the leg.\"\n\n\"Poisoned!\" Kelly huffed as she worked. \"It must have been venomous.\"\n\n\"I've never heard of such a creature,\" Kouwe said.\n\nNathan wanted to agree, but was too busy breathing for the dying soldier.\n\n\"There were thousands,\" Kostos continued, \"chewing their way downstream toward here.\"\n\n\"What are we going to do?\" Zane asked.\n\nCaptain Waxman's voice drowned everyone else out. \"First of all, we're not going to panic. Corporal Graves and Private Jones...join Carrera in securing the perimeter.\"\n\n\"Wait!\" Nate gasped between breaths.\n\nWaxman turned on him. \"What?\"\n\nNate spoke in stilted breaths between attempts to resuscitate Conger. \"We're too close to the stream. It runs right past the shabano.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"They'll come for us from the stream...like the Indians.\" Nate was dizzy from hyperventilating. He breathed into Corporal Conger's mouth, then was up again. \"We have to get away. Away from the waterways until daybreak. Nocturnal...\" Down he went to breathe.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nProfessor Kouwe answered. \"The Indians were attacked at night. Now this assault. Nathan believes these creatures may be nocturnal. If we could avoid their path until sunrise, we should be safe.\"\n\n\"But we have shelter and a secure area here. They're just fish or frogs or something.\"\n\nNate remembered the black-and-white view through the night-vision goggles: the creatures leaping from the river, bounding high into the trees. \"We're not secure here!\" he gasped out. He bent down again, but he was stopped by a hand on his shoulder.\n\n\"It's useless,\" Kelly said, pulling him up. \"He's gone.\" She faced the others. \"I'm sorry. The poison spread too quickly. Without an antivenom...\" She shook her head sadly.\n\nNate stared at the still form of the young Texan. \"Damn it...\" He stood up. \"We have to get away. Far away from the waters. I don't know how far from the streams and rivers these creatures can travel, but the one I saw had gills. They probably can't stay out of the water for long.\"\n\n\"What do you suggest?\" Frank asked.\n\n\"We travel to higher ground. Avoid the river and the little stream. I think the Indians believed it was just the river they needed to fear, but the predators followed the stream and ambushed them.\"\n\n\"You're speaking as if the creatures are intelligent.\"\n\n\"No, I can't imagine they are.\" Nate remembered the way the dolphins were fleeing, while none of the larger river fish were bothered. He pictured the attack on the pig and the capybara. A theory slowly jelled. \"Maybe they're simply focused on warm-blooded creatures. I don't know...maybe they can zone in on body heat or something, scouring both the water and the river's edges for prey.\"\n\nFrank turned to Waxman. \"I say we heed Dr. Rand.\"\n\n\"So do I,\" Kelly said, standing. She pointed to Corporal Conger. \"If a single bite can do this, we can't take the risk.\"\n\nWaxman turned on Frank. \"You may be the head of operations, but in matters of security, my word is law.\"\n\nPrivate Carrera ducked her head through the roundhouse's doorway. \"Something's happening out here. The river is frothing something fierce. One of the boats' pontoons just blew.\"\n\nBeyond the walls of the shabano, the jungle awoke with monkey howls and screeching birds.\n\n\"We're running out of options,\" Nate said fiercely. \"If they come up the stream and flank us, cutting us off from higher ground, many more will die like Conger...like the Indians.\"\n\nNate found support in the most unlikely of places. \"The doctor's right,\" Sergeant Kostos said. \"I saw those buggers. Nothing'll stop them from attacking.\" He waved an arm. \"Definitely not this flimsy place. We're sitting ducks in here, sir.\"\n\nAfter a pause, Waxman nodded. \"Load up the gear.\"\n\n\"What about the motion sensors outside?\" Kostos asked.\n\n\"Leave 'em. Right now, I don't want anyone out there.\"\n\nKostos nodded and turned to obey.\n\nIn short order, everyone was shouldering packs. Two Rangers dug a shallow grave for Corporal Conger's body.\n\nCarrera stood crouched by the doorway. She wore night-vision goggles and stared out toward the river and jungle. \"The commotion by the river's died down, but I hear rustling in the brush.\"\n\nBeyond the walls, the jungle had grown silent.\n\nNate crossed to the door and knelt on one knee beside Carrera. He was already packed and ready, his stubby-nosed shotgun clutched in his right hand. \"What do you see?\"\n\nCarrera adjusted her goggles. \"Nothing. But the jungle is too dense to see far.\"\n\nNate leaned out the door. He heard a branch snap. Then a small forest deer, a spotted fawn, shot out of the jungle and dashed past where Nate and the Ranger crouched. Both gasped and ducked inside before realizing there was no danger.\n\n\"Christ,\" Carrera said with a choked laugh.\n\nThe deer paused near the edge of the roundhouse, ears pricked.\n\n\"Shoo!\" the Ranger called, waving her M-16 threateningly.\n\nThen something dropped out of the trees and landed on the fawn's back. The deer suddenly squealed in pain and terror.\n\n\"Get inside!\" Nate ordered Carrera.\n\nAs she rolled through the door, Nate covered her with his shotgun. Another creature pounced from the jungle's edge toward the deer. A third leaped from the underbrush. The fawn skittered a few steps, then fell on its side, legs kicking.\n\nA single motion sensor blared from the direction of the side stream.\n\n\"They're here,\" Nathan mumbled.\n\nBy his side, Carrera had torn off her night-vision goggles and clicked on her flashlight. The brightness spread down the jungle trail to the river. The jungle to either side remained dark, blocking the light. \"I don't see--\"\n\nSomething plopped into the trail, only a few yards away.\n\nFrom this angle, the creature appeared to be all legs with a long finned tail dragging behind it. It took a small hop toward them. From under two globular black eyes, its mouth gaped open. Teeth glinted in the bright light, like some cross between a tadpole and a piranha.\n\n\"What the hell is it?\" Carrera whispered.\n\nIt leaped toward her voice.\n\nNate pulled the trigger of his shotgun. The spray of pellets shredded the creature, blowing it backward. That's what Nate appreciated about a shotgun in the jungle. It didn't require precision aim. Perfect for small threats--poisonous snakes, scorpions, spiders--and apparently against venomous amphibians, too.\n\n\"Get back,\" he said and swung the small door shut. It was no more than a woven flap of banana leaves, but it would temporarily block the creatures.\n\n\"That's the only way out,\" Carrera said.\n\nNate stood and unhooked his machete with his left hand. \"Not in a shabano.\" He pointed the blade toward the far wall, the side opposite both river and stream. \"You can make a doorway wherever you want.\"\n\nFrank and Captain Waxman joined him as he crossed to the central yard. Waxman was folding a field map.\n\n\"They're already out there,\" Nate said. He reached the far wall, raised his machete, and began hacking through the woven palm and banana leaves. \"We have to leave now.\"\n\nWaxman nodded, then shouted and waved an arm in the air. \"We're hauling out! Now!\"\n\nNate cleared a ragged hole through the rear wall, kicking debris aside.\n\nWaxman waved Corporal Okamoto to take the point. Nate saw an unusual weapon in the soldier's hands. \"Flamethrower,\" Okamoto explained, hefting the weapon. \"If necessary we'll burn a way through the bastards.\" He pressed the trigger and a steam of orange fire shot from the muzzle like the flickering tongue of a snake.\n\n\"Excellent.\" Nate patted the corporal's shoulder. After so many days on the river, Nate had grown fond of his boat's motorman, although the Asian corporal's off-tune whistling still drove him crazy.\n\nWith a wink to Nathan, Okamoto ducked through the arch without hesitation. As he passed, Nate spotted the small fuel tank strapped to the corporal's back.\n\nAnother four Rangers followed: Warczak, Graves, Jones, and Kostos. All had outfitted their M-16s with grenade launchers. They spread to the right and left of their point man. New alarms blared as the Rangers tripped the perimeter's motion-sensor lasers.\n\n\"Now the civilians,\" Waxman ordered. \"Stay close. Always keep a Ranger between you and the forest.\"\n\nRichard Zane and Anna Fong hurried through. Next Olin and Manny followed, trailed by Tor-tor. Last, Kelly, Frank, and Kouwe passed.\n\n\"C'mon,\" Kelly said to Nate.\n\nHe nodded, glancing back to the shabano. Waxman oversaw the last of the Rangers, who would guard their rear. Two soldiers were gathered over something in the middle of the yard.\n\n\"Let's move, ladies!\" Waxman ordered.\n\nThe Rangers stood. One, a corporal named Samad Yamir, gave a thumbs-up sign to Waxman. The corporal seldom spoke, and when he did, his voice was thick with a Pakistani accent. There was only one other fact Nate knew about Yamir. He was the unit's demolitions expert.\n\nNate eyed the device left in the yard with suspicion.\n\nWaxman found Nate staring. The captain pointed his rifle toward the opening. \"Waiting for a personal invitation, Dr. Rand?\"\n\nNate licked his lips and followed after Frank and Kelly.\n\nAgain he found Private Carrera marching behind him. She was now outfitted with a flamethrower, too. She studied the dark forest with narrowed eyes. Beyond her, Waxman and Yamir were the last to leave the shabano.\n\n\"Stay close!\" Waxman yelled. \"Frag or fry anything that moves.\"\n\nCarrera spoke at Nate's shoulder. \"We're going to make for a knoll about five klicks ahead.\"\n\n\"How do you know it's there?\"\n\n\"Topographic map.\" Her voice sounded unsure.\n\nNate glanced over his shoulder questioningly.\n\nCarrera lowered her voice and nodded to the side. \"The stream wasn't on the map.\"\n\nKelly glanced over, looking sick, but she remained silent.\n\nNate sighed. He was not surprised at the inaccuracy of the map. The waterways through the deep jungle were unpredictable. While the boundaries of lakes and swamps varied according to the rainfall, the smaller rivers and streams were even more changeable. Most remained unnamed and uncharted. But at least the knoll was on the map.\n\n\"Keep moving!\" Waxman ordered behind them.\n\nAs a group, the team fled into the jungle. Nate stared around him, his ears pricked for any suspicious rustle. In the distance, he heard the babble of the small stream. He imagined the Indian villagers racing up the nearby footpath, unaware of the danger lurking so close, oblivious of the death that lay ahead.\n\nNate tromped after Frank and Kelly. A flicker of flame lit up the jungle ahead as Corporal Okamoto led the way. Few words were shared as the group scaled the gentle slope away from the river. All eyes watched the jungle around them.\n\nAfter about twenty minutes of climbing, Waxman spoke to the soldier at his side. \"Light the candle, Yamir.\"\n\nNate turned. Samad Yamir swung around and faced the way they had come. He shouldered his M-16 and loosened a handheld device.\n\n\"Radio transmitter,\" Carrera explained.\n\nYamir raised the device and pressed a button, triggering a red light to blink rapidly.\n\nNate frowned. \"What is--?\"\n\nA soft boom sounded. A section of forest blew upward in a ball of fire. Flames shot high into the night sky and mushroomed through the surrounding forest.\n\nStunned, Nate stumbled back. Shouts of surprise arose from the other civilians. Nate watched the sphere of flames die away, collapsing in on itself, but leaving a good section of the forest burning. Through the hellish red glow, a scorched hole in the forest was evident, every tree stripped of leaf and branch. At least an acre. There was no sign of the shabano. Even the motion-sensor alarms had gone silent, fried by the explosion.\n\nNate was too dumbstruck to speak--but his eyes, furious, met Waxman's gaze.\n\nThe captain waved them all on. \"Keep moving.\"\n\nCarrera urged Nate forward. \"Fail-safe method. Burning everything behind us.\"\n\n\"What was that?\" Kouwe asked.\n\n\"Napalm bomb,\" the corporal explained dourly. \"New jungle munition.\"\n\n\"Why weren't we told...at least warned?\" Frank asked loudly, walking half backward.\n\nCaptain Waxman answered, marching and waving them on. \"It was my call. My order. I wanted no arguments about it. Security is my priority.\"\n\n\"Which I appreciate, captain,\" Richard Zane called back from up ahead. \"I, for one, commend your actions. Hopefully you've annihilated the venomous bunch.\"\n\n\"That doesn't appear to be the case,\" Olin said with narrowed eyes. Their Russian teammate pointed to the stream, now visible due to the blaze. A section of the waterway on their side of the fires frothed with the leaping, racing bodies of thousands of small creatures. A roiling stampede climbed up the stream, like salmon spawning.\n\n\"Get moving!\" Waxman yelled. \"We need to reach higher ground!\"\n\nThe pace of the party accelerated. They scrambled up the slope, less concerned with watching the forest than with speed. The creatures were flanking them off to the right.\n\nFlashes of fire marked the point man ahead. \"I've got water here!\" Okamoto called.\n\nThe group converged toward him.\n\n\"Dear Lord,\" Kelly said.\n\nFifty yards ahead, another stream cut across their path. It was only ten yards wide, but was dark and still. Beyond it, the land continued to rise toward the knoll, their destination.\n\n\"Is this the same stream?\" Frank asked.\n\nOne of the Rangers, Jorgensen, pushed out of the forest. He had his night-vision glasses in his hand. \"I've scouted down a ways. It's an offshoot of the other stream. This one feeds into the other.\"\n\n\"Fuck,\" Waxman swore. \"This place is a goddamn water maze.\"\n\n\"We should cross while we still can,\" Kouwe said. \"The creatures will surely come this way soon.\"\n\nWaxman stared at the slowly flowing water with clear trepidation. He moved beside Okamoto. \"I need some light.\"\n\nThe Ranger fired his flamethrower across the waters. It did little to reveal what lay in the murky depths.\n\n\"Sir, I'll go across first,\" Okamoto volunteered. \"See if it can be crossed safely.\"\n\n\"Careful, son.\"\n\n\"Always, sir.\"\n\nTaking a deep breath, Okamoto kissed a crucifix around his neck, then stepped into the water. He waded into it, his weapon held chest high. \"Current's sluggish,\" he said softly, \"but deep.\" Halfway across, the waters had climbed to his waist.\n\n\"Hurry up,\" Frank mumbled. He had a fist clenched to his belly.\n\nOkamoto climbed to the far side and out of the water. He turned with a grin. \"It appears to be safe.\"\n\n\"For now,\" Kouwe said. \"We should hurry.\"\n\n\"Let's go!\" Waxman ordered.\n\nAs a group, they splashed through the waters. Frank held Kelly's hand. Nate helped Anna Fong. \"I'm not a good swimmer,\" Anna said to no one in particular.\n\nThe Rangers followed, guns held above their heads.\n\nOn the far side, the party climbed the steep slope. With wet boots and the mud still slick from the rains yesterday, trekking was treacherous. Their progress slowed. The tight group began to stretch apart.\n\nJorgensen appeared out of the gloom, night scope in hand. \"Captain,\" he said, \"I've checked the other stream. The waters seem to have calmed. I don't see any more of the creatures.\"\n\n\"They're out there,\" Nate said. \"They're just not in a frenzy any longer.\"\n\n\"Or maybe now that the fires have died down, they fled back to the main river channel,\" Jorgensen offered hopefully.\n\nWaxman frowned. \"I don't think we should count--\"\n\nA sharp cry interrupted the captain. Off to the left, a body slid down the slick, muddy slope. It was a Ranger. Eddie Jones. His limbs flailed as he tried to break his fall. \"Fuck!\" he screamed in frustration. He tried to grasp a bush, but its roots ripped out of the thin soil. Then he hit a bump in the slope, and went cartwheeling, his weapon flying from his fingers, and landed in the stream.\n\nA pair of Rangers--Warczak and Graves--ran to his aid.\n\nHe popped out, coughing water and choking. \"Goddamn it!\" He clambered to the stream's edge. \"Fuck this jungle!\" As he straightened his helmet, more colorful obscenities flowed. He climbed out of the stream.\n\n\"Smooth, Jones...very smooth,\" Warczak said, running his flashlight up and down the man's soaked form. \"I'd give you a perfect ten in the jungle slalom.\"\n\n\"Cram it up your ass,\" Jones said, bending to finger a rope of sticky algae from his pant leg. \"Ugh.\"\n\nCorporal Graves was the first to spot it: something moving atop the other man's pack. \"Jones...\"\n\nStill half crouched, the man glanced up. \"What?\"\n\nThe creature leaped, latching onto the soft flesh under Jones's jaw. He jerked. \"What the hell!\" He tore the creature from his neck, blood spurting. \"Ahhhhh...\"\n\nThe small stream suddenly frothed and burst forth with another dozen of the creatures. They leaped at the man, attacking his legs. Jones fell backward, his face twisted in agony. He hit the stream with a loud splash.\n\n\"Jones!\" Warczak stepped nearer.\n\nAnother of the creatures leaped from the water and plopped in the wet mud at the corporal's feet, gill flaps vibrating. Warczak scrambled backward, as did Graves.\n\nIn the shallow stream, Jones writhed. It was as if he had been thrown in boiling water. His body jerked and spasmed.\n\n\"Get back!\" Waxman yelled. \"Everyone uphill!\"\n\nWarczak and Graves were already running. From the stream, more of the creatures leaped and bounded in pursuit.\n\nThe group tossed caution aside and scrambled up the slope, some half crawling on hands and knees. Kelly's legs suddenly went out from under her. Her muddy hand slipped out of her brother's grip. She began a deadly slide.\n\n\"Kelly!\" Frank called out.\n\nBut Nate was a couple yards behind her. He caught her one-handed by the waist, falling on top of her, holding his shotgun in his other arm. Manny came to their aid, hauling both back to their feet. Tor-tor paced anxiously back and forth behind him.\n\nThe Brazilian waved the jaguar ahead. \"Move your furry ass.\"\n\nBy now, the three were the last of the group. Frank waited a few yards up.\n\nOnly Private Carrera was still with them. She stood and sprayed a jet of fire behind them, her flamethrower roaring dully. \"Let's pick up the pace,\" she said tensely, backing up the slope, herding them upward.\n\n\"Thanks,\" Kelly said, her eyes swiveling to encompass the entire group.\n\nFrank met them and took his sister in hand. \"Don't do that again.\"\n\n\"I'm not planning on it.\"\n\nNate kept a watch behind them. He met Carrera's gaze. He saw the fear in her eyes. This momentary distraction was all it took. One of the creatures sprang at the Ranger from the surrounding underbrush. It had slipped past her firewall.\n\nCarrera fell backward, fire spitting into the sky.\n\nThe creature had latched onto her belt, but squirmed for a meatier purchase.\n\nBefore anyone else could react, a sharp crack split the night. The creature was flung away, the two halves of its body sailing high. Both Carrera and Nate turned to see Manny snapping his short bullwhip back into ready position.\n\n\"Are you just gonna sit there gawking?\" Manny asked.\n\nCarrera scrambled up with Nate's help. The group sped up the hill. At last they reached the summit. Nate hoped putting the rise between them and the amphibious creatures would be enough.\n\nHe found the others gathered on top.\n\n\"We should keep moving,\" Nate said. \"Keep as much land between us and them as possible.\"\n\n\"That's a good theory,\" Kouwe said. \"But putting it into practice is another thing altogether.\" The shaman pointed down the knoll's far side.\n\nNathan stared. From this height, the stream below shone silver in the moonlight. Groaning, he realized it was the same stream they had been avoiding all along. Nate turned in a slow circle, recognizing their predicament. They had made a fatal error.\n\nThe small waterway they had crossed a few minutes ago was not a feeder draining into the larger stream, but actually a part of the same stream.\n\n\"We're on an island,\" Kelly said with dismay.\n\nNate stared upstream and saw that the flow of the waterway split and ran around both sides of the knoll. Once past the hill, it joined to become a single stream again. The party indeed stood on an island, in the middle of the deadly stream, water all around.\n\nNate felt sick. \"We're trapped.\"\n\n[ 2:12 A.M. ]\n\n[ WEST WING OF THE INSTAR INSTITUTE ]\n\n[ LANGLEY, VIRGINIA ]\n\nLauren O'Brien sat at the small table in the communal galley, hunched over a cup of coffee. At this late hour, she had the place to herself. All the other quarantined MEDEA members were either asleep in their makeshift bedrooms or working in the main labs.\n\nEven Marshall had retired to their room with Jessie hours ago. He had an early morning conference call with the CDC, two Cabinet heads, and the director of the CIA. He had eloquently described the meeting as \"a preemptive strike before the political shitstorm hits the fan.\" Such were the ways of government. Rather than attacking the problem aggressively, everyone was still pointing fingers and running for cover. Marshall's goal tomorrow was to shake things up. A decisive plan of action was needed. So far, the fifteen outbreak zones were being managed fifteen different ways. It was chaos.\n\nSighing, Lauren stared at the reams of papers and printouts spread atop her table. Her team was still struggling with one simple question. What was causing the disease?\n\nTesting and research were ongoing in labs across the country--from the CDC in Atlanta all the way to the Salk facility in San Diego. But the Instar Institute had become scientific ground zero for the disease.\n\nLauren pushed away a report from a Dr. Shelby on utilizing monkey kidney cells as a culture medium. He had failed. Negative response. Up to this point, the contagious agent continued to thwart all means of identification: aerobic and anaerobic cultures, fungal assays, electron microscopy, dot hybridization, polymerase chain reaction. As of today, no progress had been made. Each study ended with similar tags: negative response, zero growth, indeterminate analysis. All fancy ways of saying failure.\n\nHer beeper, resting beside her now-cold cup of coffee, began to buzz and dance across the Formica countertop. She snatched it before it fell off the table.\n\n\"Who the heck is paging me at this hour?\" she mumbled, glancing at the beeper's screen. The Caller ID feature listed the number as Large Scale Biological Labs. She didn't know the facility, but the area code placed it somewhere in northern California. The call was probably just some technician requesting their fax number or submission protocol. Still...\n\nLauren stood, pocketed her beeper, and headed over to the phone on the wall. As she picked up the receiver, she heard a door open behind her. Over her shoulder, she was surprised to see Jessie standing in her pajamas, rubbing at her eyes blearily.\n\n\"Grandma...\"\n\nLauren replaced the receiver and crossed to the child. \"Honey, what are you doing up? You should be in bed.\"\n\n\"I couldn't find you.\"\n\nShe knelt before the girl. \"What's wrong? Did you have another scary dream?\" The first few nights here, Jessie had awoken with nightmares, triggered by the quarantine and the strange environment. But the child had seemed to adjust rapidly, making friends with several of the other kids.\n\n\"My tummy hurts,\" she said, her eyes sheening with threatening tears.\n\n\"Oh, honey, that's what you get for eating ice cream so late.\" Lauren reached out and pulled the girl into a hug. \"Why don't I get you a glass of water, and we'll get you tucked back into--\"\n\nLauren's voice died as she realized how warm the child was. She reached a palm to Jessie's forehead. \"Oh, God,\" she mumbled under her breath.\n\nThe child was burning up.\n\n[ 2:31 A.M. ]\n\n[ AMAZON JUNGLE ]\n\nLouis stood by his tent as Jacques strode up from theriver. His lieutenant carried something wrapped in a sodden blanket under his arms. Whatever it was, it appeared no larger than a watermelon.\n\n\"Doctor,\" the Maroon tribesman said stiffly.\n\n\"Jacques, what did you discover?\" He had sent the man and two others to investigate the explosion that had occurred just after midnight. The noise had woken his own camp mere minutes after they had settled in for the night. Earlier, at sunset, Louis had learned of the discovery of the Indian shabano and the fate of the villagers. Then hours later the explosion...\n\nWhat was going on over there?\n\n\"Sir, the village has been incinerated...as has much of the surrounding forest. We could not get too close due to the remaining fires. Maybe by morning.\"\n\n\"And the other team?\"\n\nJacques glanced to his toes. \"Gone, sir. I dropped Malachim and Toady ashore to scout after them.\"\n\nLouis clenched a fist and cursed his overconfidence. After the successful abduction of one of their soldiers, he had grown complacent with his prey. But now this! One of his team's trackers must have been spotted. Now that the fox had been alerted to the hounds, Louis's mission was far more complicated. \"Gather the other men. If the Rangers are running from us, we don't want them to get too far away.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. But, Doctor, I'm not sure the others are fleeing from us.\"\n\n\"What makes you think that?\"\n\n\"As we paddled up to the fire zone, we saw a body float out from a side stream.\"\n\n\"A body?\" Louis feared it was his mole, dispatched and sent downriver as a message.\n\nJacques unrolled the sodden blanket in his arms and dropped its content to the leafed floor of the jungle. It was a human head. \"We found it floating near the remains.\"\n\nFrowning, Louis knelt and examined the head, what little there was of it. The face had been all but chewed away, but from the shaved scalp, it was clearly one of the Rangers.\n\n\"The body was the same,\" Jacques said, \"gnawed to the bone.\"\n\nLouis glanced up. \"What happened to him?\"\n\n\"Piranhas, I'd say, from the bite wounds.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"Pretty damn sure.\" Jacques fingered the scarred half of his nose, reminding Louis that, as a boy, his lieutenant had had intimate experience with the voracious river predators.\n\n\"Did they feed on him after he was dead?\"\n\nJacques shrugged. \"If he wasn't, I pity the poor bastard.\"\n\nLouis climbed to his feet. He stared out toward the river. \"What the hell is happening out there?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Escape",
                "text": "AUGUST 14, 3:12 A.M.\n\n[ AMAZON JUNGLE ]\n\nAtop the island knoll, Nate stood with the other civilians, ringed by the Ranger team, which was now down to eight members. One for each of the civilians, Nate thought, like personal bodyguards.\n\n\"How about using another of your napalm bombs to clear a path through the buggers?\" Frank asked, standing near Captain Waxman. \"Roll it down the slope, then duck for cover.\"\n\n\"We'd all be dead. If the heat blast didn't fry us, then we'd be pinned down between a burning forest and the poisonous bastards.\"\n\nFrank sighed, staring out into the dark forests. \"How about your grenades? We could lob them in series, creating a swath through them.\"\n\nWaxman frowned. \"It'd be risky to deploy them so close to us, and no guarantee that it would kill enough of the bastards among all these tree trunks. I say we hold the hill, try to last until daybreak.\"\n\nFrank crossed his arms, little pleased with this plan.\n\nAround the knoll, occasional fiery blasts from the flamethrowers ignited the night as Corporal Okamoto and Private Carrera maintained sentry posts on either slope. Though it had been half an hour since sighting one of them, the beasts were still out there. The surrounding forests had gone deathly quiet, no monkey calls, no bird-song. Even the insects seemed to have died down to a whispery buzz and whine. But beyond the reach of their flashlights, the leaves still rustled as unseen lurkers crept through the underbrush.\n\nNight scopes focused on the surrounding waters revealed creatures still hopping into and out of the stream. Nathan's earlier assessment seemed to be accurate. The creatures, gill-breathers, needed to return to the waters occasionally to revive themselves.\n\nNearby, Manny knelt in the leaf-strewn dirt, working by flashlight. Kelly and Kouwe stood behind his shoulder. Earlier, Manny had risked his life to dash into the forest's fringe to collect one of the beasts stunned by a blast of flame. Though partially charbroiled, it was a decent specimen. The creature was about a foot long from the tip of its tail to its razor-toothed mouth. Large black eyes protruded, giving it a nearly 360-degree view of its surroundings. Strong articulated limbs ended in webbed and suckered toes almost as long as the body itself.\n\nAs the others watched, Manny was performing a rapid dissection. The Brazilian biologist worked deftly with a scalpel and forceps from Kelly's med kit.\n\n\"This thing is amazing,\" Manny finally mumbled.\n\nNate joined Kelly and Kouwe as the biologist explained.\n\n\"It's clearly some form of chimera. An amalgam of more than one species.\"\n\n\"How so?\" Kelly asked.\n\nManny shifted aside and pointed with his thumb forceps. \"Nathan was right. Though its skin is not scaled like a fish, it definitely has the breathing system of an aquatic species. Gills, no lungs. But its legs--notice the banding on the skin--are definitely amphibious. The striping pattern is very characteristic of Phobobates trivittatus, the striped poison-dart frog, the largest and most toxic member of the frog family.\"\n\n\"So you're saying it's some mutated form of this species?\" Nate asked.\n\n\"I thought so at first. It looks almost like a tadpole whose growth was arrested at the stage where gills were still present and only its hind legs had formed. But as I dissected further, I became less convinced. First, and most obvious, is that its size is way out of proportion. This thing must weigh close to five pounds. Monstrously gigantic for even the largest species of dart frog.\"\n\nManny rolled the dissected creature over and pointed to its eyes and teeth. \"Additionally, its skull structure is all misshapen. Rather than flattened horizontally like a frog's, the cranium is flattened vertically, more like a fish's. In fact, the skull conformation, jaw, and teeth are almost identical in size and shape to a common Amazonian river predator--Serrasalmus rhombeus.\" Manny glanced up from his handiwork. \"The black piranha.\"\n\nKelly leaned away. \"That's impossible.\"\n\n\"If this thing weren't right in front of me, I'd agree.\" Manny sat back. \"I've worked with Amazonian species all my life, and I've seen nothing like it. A true chimera. A single creature that shares the biological features of both frog and fish.\"\n\nNate eyed the creature. \"How could that be?\"\n\nManny shook his head. \"I don't know. But how does a man regenerate a limb? I think the presence of such a chimera suggests we're on the right trail. Something is out there, something your father's expedition discovered, something with a distinct mutating ability.\"\n\nNate stared at the dissected ruins. What the hell was out there?\n\nA call arose from Private Carrera. Her sentry post faced the northern slope of the knoll. \"They're on the move again!\"\n\nNate straightened. The rustling from her side of the forest had grown louder. It sounded as if the entire jungle were stirring.\n\nCarrera flamed the lower slope. Her fiery jets pushed back the darkness. Reflected in the fire were hundreds of tiny eyes, covering both the forest floor and the trees. One of the creatures sprang from its perch on the limb of a palm tree and bounded into the fire zone. There was a short chatter of automatic rifle fire, and the creature was shredded to a bloody mush.\n\n\"Everybody back!\" Carrera called. \"They're coming!\"\n\nFrom the trees and underbrush, small bodies started to leap and bound toward them, oblivious to the fire and bullets. The creatures were determined to overrun them with their sheer numbers.\n\nNate flashed back on the Indian massacre site. It was happening all over again. He swung his shotgun from his shoulder, aimed, and blasted a creature in midair as it leaped from a branch over Carrera's head. Gobbets of flesh rained down.\n\nAs a group, they were forced to vacate the knoll's summit and retreat down the southern face. Gunfire and flames lit the night. Flashlights danced, making every shadow shift and jerk.\n\nLeading the charge down the southern slope, Corporal Okamoto swathed jets of fire before them. \"It still looks clear this way!\" he called out.\n\nNate risked a peek his way. Distantly through the forest, he could make out the other fork of the stream below as it swept around the southern flank of the hill.\n\n\"Why aren't any of the creatures on this side of the hill?\" Anna asked, her face flushed.\n\nZane answered, his eyes wide as he kept glancing behind him. \"They probably rallied all their numbers on the far side for this final assault.\"\n\nNate stared toward the stream below. It was wide, smooth, and quiet, but he knew better. He remembered the large capybara rodent flushed from the forest and racing along the river, where it was set upon by the predators. \"They're herding us,\" he mumbled.\n\n\"What?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"They want us close to the water. The pack is driving us to the river.\"\n\nManny heard him. \"I think Nate's right. Despite their ability to move on land for short distances, they're basically aquatic. They'd want their meal as close to water as possible before taking it down.\"\n\nKelly looked behind her to the line of Rangers flaming and firing along their back trail. \"What choice do we have?\"\n\nDown the slope, Okamoto slowed as they neared the river, clearly suspicious of the water, too. The corporal turned to Captain Waxman behind him. \"Sir, I'll try to cross first. Like last time.\"\n\nWaxman nodded. \"Careful, corporal.\"\n\nOkamoto headed for the stream.\n\n\"No!\" Nate called. \"I'm sure it's a trap.\"\n\nOkamoto glanced to him, then to his captain, who waved him forward again.\n\n\"We have to get off this island,\" Waxman said.\n\n\"Wait,\" Manny said, stepping forward, his voice pained. \"I...I can send Tor-tor instead.\"\n\nThe others were now all gathered around.\n\nWaxman stared at the jaguar, then nodded. \"Do it.\"\n\nManny guided his jaguar toward the dark waters.\n\nNate's mind spun. It was suicide to enter those waters. He knew this as certainly as he knew the sun would rise tomorrow. But Waxman was right. They had to find a way across. He ran through various scenarios in his head.\n\nA rope bridge over the stream. He quickly ruled that out. Even if they could somehow string a bridge up, the aquatic creatures were adept at leaping great heights. They'd all just be so much bait strung on a line.\n\nMaybe grenades tossed in the water to stun them. But the stream was long. Any creatures killed by the concussion would be quickly replaced by those upstream. They would sweep down the sluggish current, attacking the team as they tried to rush across. No, what was needed was something that could strip this entire fork of the creatures--but what could do that?\n\nThen it dawned on him. He had seen the answer demonstrated just a few days back.\n\nBy now, Manny and Tor-tor were only a couple of yards from the stream. Okamoto was with them, flames lighting the way.\n\n\"Wait!\" Nate called. \"I have an idea!\"\n\nManny paused.\n\n\"What?\" Waxman asked.\n\n\"According to Manny, these things are basically fish.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\nNate ignored the captain's glare and turned to Kouwe. \"You have powdered ayaeya vine in your medicine kit, don't you?\"\n\n\"Certainly, but what--?\" Then the professor's eyes grew rounder with understanding. \"Brilliant, Nate. I should've thought of that.\"\n\n\"What?\" Waxman asked, growing frustrated.\n\nBehind them, up the slope, the line of Rangers held the creatures momentarily at bay with rifles and fire. Down slope, Okamoto stood ready by the river.\n\nNate quickly explained. \"Indians use crushed ayaeya vine to fish.\" He remembered the small fishing scene he had witnessed as he canoed with Tama and Takaho to Sao Gabriel: a woman dusting the river with a black powder, while downstream the men gathered stunned fish with spears and nets. \"The vine contains a potent rotenone, a toxin that literally chokes and suffocates the fish. The effect is almost instantaneous.\"\n\n\"So what are you proposing?\" Waxman asked.\n\n\"I'm familiar with the compound. I'll take the satchel upstream and poison the stream. As the toxin flows down this fork, it should stun any and all of the creatures in the river.\"\n\nWaxman's eyes narrowed. \"This powder will do this?\"\n\nKouwe answered, digging in his pack. \"It should. As long as the creatures are true gill-breathers.\" The professor glanced to Manny.\n\nThe biologist nodded, clear relief in his eyes. \"I'm sure of it.\"\n\nSighing, Waxman waved Okamoto and Manny away from the stream. As the captain turned back to Nate, an explosion sounded behind them.\n\nDirt, leaves, and branches blew high into the air. Someone had fired a grenade. \"They're breaking through!\" Sergeant Kostos yelled.\n\nWaxman pointed to Nate. \"Move!\"\n\nNate turned.\n\nProfessor Kouwe pulled a large leather satchel from his pack and tossed it to Nate. \"Be careful.\"\n\nNate caught the bag of powder one-handed, swinging around with his shotgun in the other.\n\n\"Carrera!\" Waxman called and pointed to Nate. \"Cover him.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" The private backed down the slope with her flamethrower, leaving her post to Okamoto.\n\n\"When you first start to see fish float to the surface,\" Nate instructed the others, \"haul ass across. Though the current here is slow, I'm not sure how long the effect will last before the toxin is swept away.\"\n\n\"I'll make sure we're ready,\" Kouwe said.\n\nNate glanced around the group. Kelly's eyes met his, a fist clutched to her throat. He offered her a small, confident smile, then turned away.\n\nTogether, he and Private Carrera sprinted upstream, keeping a wary distance from the water.\n\nNate trailed behind the soldier as she strafed the way ahead with continual bursts from her flamethrower. They crashed through the smoking underbrush and raced ahead. Nate searched behind. The encampment of his fellow teammates had dwindled down to a green glow in the forest.\n\n\"The buggers must know something's up,\" Carrera said, gasping with exertion. She pointed a free arm toward the stream. A couple splashes marked where creatures were beginning to hop out of the water in pursuit of the pair.\n\n\"Keep moving,\" Nate urged. \"It's not much farther.\"\n\nThey rushed on, accompanied by tiny splashes and the sound of crashing bodies hitting the underbrush.\n\nAt last they reached the place where the main stream forked into the northern and southern branches, encircling the knoll. Here the channel was narrower, the current swifter, rumbling over rocks in a frothy white foam. More of the creatures leapt from the current, slick bodies glistening in the glow of the firelight.\n\nNate stopped as Carrera laid down a protective spray of flame. Creatures sizzled in the muddy bank, some fleeing back into the river, skin smoking. \"Now or never,\" Carrera said.\n\nShouldering his shotgun, Nate slipped in front of her, the satchel of powder in hand. He quickly loosened the pouch's leather tie.\n\n\"Just lob the whole thing in,\" the Ranger recommended.\n\n\"No, I have to make sure it disperses evenly.\" Nate took another step nearer the river.\n\n\"Careful.\" Carrera followed, jetting bursts of flame around them to discourage the predators.\n\nNate reached the edge of the stream, standing now only a foot away.\n\nCarrera half knelt and strafed fire over the water's surface, ready to incinerate anything that dared pop out. \"Do it!\"\n\nWith a nod, Nate leaned over the stream, extending his arm, his fingers clutching the satchel. Attracted by the movement, something sprang from the water. Nate jerked his arm back in time to miss getting bitten. Instead, the creature latched its razored teeth into the cuff of his shirt sleeve, hanging there.\n\nNate whipped his arm back, fabric ripped, and the creature went flying far into the woods. \"Damn it!\" Not waiting, Nate quickly powdered the river with the crushed ayaeya vine, sprinkling it slowly, ensuring a good spread.\n\nBehind him, Carrera was busy protecting their rear. The beasts from the stream were now converging on them.\n\nNate shook the last of the powder from the satchel, then tossed it into the stream. As he watched the pouch drift downstream rapidly, he prayed his plan would work. \"Done,\" he said, turning.\n\nCarrera glanced over to him. Past her shoulder, Nate spotted bodies leaping from branches in the deeper jungle. \"We have a problem,\" the Ranger said.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nThe Ranger lifted her flamethrower and shot a jet of fire toward the jungle. As he watched, the line of fire drizzled back to the weapon's muzzle, like a hose draining after the spigot had been turned off.\n\n\"Out of fuel,\" she said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Frank O'Brien stood by his twin sister, guarding her. At times, he swore that he could read her mind. Like now. Kelly stared at the river, watching with Kouwe and Manny for any sign that Rand's plan might work. But he noticed how she kept peering into the jungle, her eyes drawn to the path the ethnobotanist and soldier had taken. He also saw the glint in her eyes.\n\nAn explosion momentarily drew his attention around. Another grenade. The rain of debris rattled through the canopy. Gunfire was now almost continuous, all around them. The line of Rangers was slowly being driven back to the cluster of civilians. Soon they would have no choice but to retreat toward the stream and closer to whatever skulked in its watery depths.\n\nNearby, Anna Fong stood with Zane, guarded by Olin Pasternak, who stood with a 9mm Beretta pistol in hand. It was a poor weapon against such small, fast-moving targets, but it was better than nothing.\n\nA growl suddenly rumbled behind him, from Manny's jaguar.\n\n\"Look!\" Kelly called out.\n\nFrank turned. His sister stood with her flashlight pointed toward the stream. Then he saw it, too, lit by the reflection of her flashlight. Small glistening objects began to bob up from the water's depths, floating, drifting with the current.\n\n\"Nate did it!\" Kelly said, a smile on her face.\n\nAt her side, Professor Kouwe stepped nearer the streambed. One of the piranha-frogs burst from the water toward him, but landed on its side in the mud. It flopped for a couple seconds, then lay still. Stunned. Kouwe glanced to Frank. \"We must not lose this chance. We must cross now.\"\n\nFrank turned and spotted Captain Waxman a short distance up the slope. He yelled to be heard above the gunfire. \"Captain Waxman! Rand's plan is working!\" Frank waved an arm. \"We can cross! Now!\"\n\nWaxman acknowledged his words with a nod, then his voice boomed. \"Bravo unit! Retreat toward the stream!\"\n\nFrank touched the brim of his lucky baseball cap and stepped to Kelly. \"Let's go.\"\n\nManny hurried past them. \"Tor-tor and I'll still go first. It was my dissection upon which this plan was based.\" He didn't wait for a reply. He and his pet stepped to the stream's edge. He paused for half a breath, then waded into the stream. This fork was clearly deeper. Midstream, the water reached Manny's chest. Tor-tor had to swim.\n\nBut shortly the biologist was climbing out the far side. He turned. \"Hurry! It's safe for the moment!\"\n\n\"Move it!\" Waxman ordered.\n\nThe civilians crossed together, strung along the current.\n\nFrank went with Kelly, holding her hand. By now, hundreds of creatures bobbed in the water. They had to wade through the deadly forms, bumping them aside, avoiding sharp teeth that glistened from slack mouths. Horrified, Frank held his breath, praying for them to remain inert.\n\nThey reached the far side and scrambled, half panicked, out of the water. The Rangers followed next, rushing across in full gear, oblivious to what floated around them. As they clambered up to dry land, the first of the advancing creatures began to appear on the far side of the stream, hurtling out of the jungle. A couple piranha-frogs approached the stream but stopped at the water's edge, gill flaps trembling.\n\nThey must sense the danger, Frank thought. But they had no choice. On land they were suffocating. As if obeying some silent signal, the mass of mutated piranhas fled into the water.\n\n\"Back away!\" Waxman ordered. \"We can't count on the water still being tainted.\"\n\nThe group fled from the stream into the jungle-covered heights. Flashlights remained fixed on the water and banks. But after several minutes, it was clear the pursuit was over. Either the waters were still toxic to the beasts or they had given up their chase.\n\nFrank sighed. \"It's over.\"\n\nKelly remained quietly focused beside him, using her flashlight to scan the far bank of the stream. \"Where's Private Carrera?\" she asked softly, then turned to Frank. \"Where's Nate?\"\n\nUpriver, a blast sounded, echoing through the forest.\n\nKelly's eyes widened as she stared at Frank. \"They're in trouble.\"\n\nNate raised his shotgun and blasted another of the creatures that ventured too close. Carrera had shrugged off her weapon's fuel canister and was bent over it. \"How much longer?\" Nate asked, eyes wide, trying to watch everything at once.\n\n\"Almost done.\"\n\nNate glanced to the stream at his back. In the glow from Carrera's flashlight, he saw that the poison in the water was working. Downstream, bodies floated to the surface, but the current was rapidly carrying them away. The narrow streambed behind them was empty of bodies and could not be trusted. The current, as swift as it was, had surely swept the powdered poison away from here and down the length of the stream. It was not safe. They needed to backtrack along the trailing toxin in the water and seek a secure place to cross, where the current was more sluggish, somewhere where the poison was still active--but between them and safety lay a small legion of the creatures, entrenched in the forest, blocking their way.\n\n\"Ready,\" Carrera said, standing.\n\nShe hauled her handiwork from the jungle floor and tightened the canister's lid, leaving a primer cord draping from it. The tank contained only a bit of fuel, not enough to service the weapon, but enough for their purposes. At least he hoped.\n\nNate held his position with his shotgun. \"Are you sure this will work?\"\n\n\"It had better.\"\n\nHer words were not exactly the vote of confidence Nate was seeking.\n\n\"Point out the target again,\" she said, moving beside him.\n\nHe shifted his shotgun's muzzle and pointed at the gray-barked tree about thirty yards downstream.\n\n\"Okay.\" Carrera lit the end of the primer cord with a butane lighter. \"Get ready.\" She swung her arm back and, using all the strength in her body, lobbed the canister underhanded.\n\nNate held his breath. It arced end-over-end--and landed at the foot of the targeted tree.\n\n\"All those years of women's softball finally paid off,\" Carrera mumbled, then to Nate: \"Get down!\"\n\nBoth dropped to the leafy floor. Nate fell, keeping his shotgun pointed ahead of him. And he was lucky he did. One of the creatures leaped from a bush, landing inches from his nose. Nate rolled and batted it away with the stock of his shotgun. He rolled back to his belly and glanced to the Ranger beside him. \"Varsity baseball,\" he mumbled. \"Senior year.\"\n\n\"Down!\" Carrera reached and smashed his head to the dirt.\n\nThe explosion was deafening, shrapnel ripped through the canopy overhead. Nate glanced over. Carrera's trick had indeed worked. She had transformed the near-empty fuel tank into a large Molotov cocktail. Flames lit the night.\n\nCarrera got to her knees. \"What about--?\"\n\nNow it was Nate's turn to tug her down.\n\nThe second explosion sounded like a lightning strike: splintering wood accompanied by a low boom. The nearby jungle was shredded apart, followed by a rain of flaming copal resin.\n\n\"Damn it!\" Carrera swore. Her sleeve was on fire. She patted it out in the loam.\n\nNate stood, relieved to see that the plan had worked. The tree, their target, was now just a blasted wreck, bluish flames dancing atop the stump. As Nate expected, the sap, rich in hydrocarbons, had acted as fuel, causing the makeshift Molotov cocktail to turn the tree into a natural bomb, and torch the entire riverbank as well.\n\n\"C'mon!\" Nate called, bounding up with Carrera.\n\nTogether, they ran along the flaming and shredded section of the forest, paralleling the stream until they overtook the poison trailing through the water. Bodies of the creatures and other fish filled the channel.\n\n\"This way!\" Nate ran into the river, half swimming, half clawing his way across. Carrera followed.\n\nIn no time, they were scrambling up the far bank.\n\n\"We did it!\" the Ranger said with a laugh.\n\nNate sighed. Off in the distance, he spotted the shine of the others' flashlights. The team had made it across, too. \"Let's go see if everyone else is okay.\"\n\nThey helped each other up and stumbled away from the stream, aiming for the other camp.\n\nWhen they marched out of the forest, a cheer went up. \"Way to go, Carrera,\" Kostos said, a true smile on his lips.\n\nNate's greeting was no less earnest. As soon as he arrived, Kelly threw her arms around his neck and hugged him tight. \"You made it,\" she mumbled in his ear. \"You did it.\"\n\n\"And not a minute too soon,\" Nate said with a nod.\n\nFrank patted him on the back.\n\n\"Well done, Dr. Rand,\" Captain Waxman said stoically, and turned to organize his troops. No one wanted to remain this close to the stream, poisoned or not.\n\nKelly dropped her arms, but not before planting a soft kiss on his cheek. \"Thanks...thanks for saving us. And thanks for returning safely.\"\n\nShe swung away, leaving Nate somewhat bewildered.\n\nCarrera nudged him with an elbow and rolled her eyes. \"Looks like someone made a friend.\"\n\n[ 10:02 A.M. ]\n\n[ AMAZON JUNGLE ]\n\nLouis stood in the center of the blasted region near the river's edge. He could still smell the acrid tang of napalm in the air. Behind him, his team was off loading the canoes and loading up backpacks. From here, the journey would be on foot.\n\nWith the dawn, clouds had rolled in, and a steady drizzle fell from the sky, dousing the few fires that still smoldered. A smoky mist clung to the dead pocket of jungle, ghostly white and thick.\n\nOff to the side, his mistress wandered around the site, a wounded expression on her face, as if the damage to the forest were a personal injury. She slowly circled a pole planted in the ground with a speared creature impaled on it. It was one of the strange beasts that had attacked the other group. Louis had never seen anything of its ilk before. And from Tshui's expression, neither had she. Tshui eyed the beast, cocking her head like a bird studying a worm.\n\nJacques stepped up behind Louis. \"You have a radio call...on your coded frequency.\"\n\n\"Finally,\" he sighed.\n\nEarlier, just before dawn, one of his two scouts had returned, badly frightened and wild-eyed. He had reported that his partner, a squat Colombian who went by the name of Toady, had been attacked by one of these beasts and died horribly. Malachim had barely made it back alive. Unfortunately, the man's report of the other team's whereabouts was thready at best. It seemed the Rangers' group, chased across a tributary stream, had fled these same beasts, and was now heading in a southwesterly direction. But toward where?\n\nLouis had a way of finding out. He accepted the radio from Jacques. It was a direct link to a tiny scrambled transmitter held by a member of the opposing team, a little mole planted under the Rangers' noses at significant expense.\n\n\"Thank you, Jacques.\" Radio in hand, Louis stepped a few yards away. He had already had one previous call this morning, from his financiers, St. Savin Pharmaceuticals in France. It seemed some disease was spreading across the Amazon and the United States, something associated with the dead man's body. Stakes were now higher. Louis had argued to raise his own fee, on the grounds that his work was now more hazardous. St. Savin had accepted, as he knew they would. A cure to this disease would be worth billions to his employer. What were a few more francs tossed his way?\n\nLouis lifted the radio. \"Favre here.\"\n\n\"Dr. Favre.\" The relief was clear in the other's voice. \"Thank God, I reached you.\"\n\n\"I've been awaiting your call.\" A bit of menace entered Louis's tone. \"I lost a good man last night because someone did not have the foresight to inform us of these venomous little toads.\"\n\nThere was a long pause. \"I...I'm sorry. In all the commotion, I could hardly sneak off and place a call. In fact, this is the first chance I've had to slip away to the latrine alone.\"\n\n\"Fine. So tell me about this commotion last night.\"\n\n\"It was horrible.\" His spy blathered in his ear for the next three minutes, giving Louis an overview of what happened. \"If it wasn't for Rand's use of some powdered fish toxin, we would all have surely died.\"\n\nLouis's fingers gripped the radio tighter at the mention of Rand's name. The family name alone bristled the small hairs on his neck. \"And where are you all now?\"\n\n\"We're still heading in a southwesterly direction, searching for Gerald Clark's next marker.\"\n\n\"Very good.\"\n\n\"But--\"\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"I...I want out.\"\n\n\"Pardon, mon ami?\"\n\n\"Last night I was almost killed. I was hoping that you could...I don't know...pick me up if I wandered off. I would be willing to pay for my safe delivery back to civilization.\"\n\nLouis closed his eyes. It seemed his mole was getting cold feet. He would have to warm the little mouse up. \"Well, if you vacate your post, I will certainly find you.\"\n\n\"Th...thank you. I would--\"\n\nHe interrupted. \"And I'd be sure, when I found you, that your death would be long, painful, and humiliating. If you're familiar with my dossier, I'm sure you know how creative I can be.\"\n\nThere was silence on the other end. Louis could imagine his little spy blanching and quivering with fear.\n\n\"I understand.\"\n\n\"Excellent. I'm glad we've settled this matter. Now on to more important matters. It seems our mutual benefactor in France has placed a request upon our services. Something, I'm afraid, you'll have to accomplish.\"\n\n\"Wh...what?\"\n\n\"For security purposes and to ensure their proprietary rights to what lies ahead, they wish to choke off the team's communication to the outside world, preferably as soon as possible without raising suspicion.\"\n\n\"How am I supposed to do that? You know I was supplied the computer virus to degrade the team's satellite uplink, but the Rangers have their own communication equipment. I wouldn't be able to get near it.\"\n\n\"No probleme. You get that virus planted and leave the Rangers to me.\"\n\n\"But--\"\n\n\"Have faith. You are never alone.\"\n\nThe line was silent again. Louis smiled. His words had not reassured his agent.\n\n\"Update me again tonight,\" Louis said.\n\nA pause. \"I'll try.\"\n\n\"Don't try...do.\"\n\n\"Yes, Doctor.\" The line went dead.\n\nLouis lowered the radio and strode to Jacques. \"We should be under way. The other team has a good start on us.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" Jacques retreated to gather and organize his men.\n\nLouis noticed that Tshui still stood by the impaled creature. If he wasn't mistaken, there was a trace of fear in the woman's eyes. But Louis wasn't sure. How could he be? He had never seen such an emotion displayed by the Indian witch. He crossed to her and pulled her into his arms.\n\nShe trembled ever so slightly under his hand.\n\n\"Hush, ma cherie. There is nothing to fear.\"\n\nTshui leaned against him, but her eyes flicked to the stake. She pulled tighter to him, a slight moan escaping her lips.\n\nLouis frowned. Maybe he should heed his lover's unspoken warning. From here, they should proceed with more caution, more stealth. The other team had almost been destroyed by these aquatic predators, something never seen before. A clear sign they were probably on the right path. But what if there are more hidden dangers out there?\n\nAs he pondered this risk, he realized his team possessed a certain inherent advantage. Last night, it had taken all his opponents' cunning and ingenuity to survive the assault--a battle which inadvertently had opened a safer path for Louis's group to follow. So why not again? Why not let the other team flush out any other threats?\n\nLouis mumbled, \"Then we'll waltz in over their dead bodies and collect the prize.\" Pleased once again, he leaned and kissed the top of Tshui's head. \"Fear not, my love. We cannot lose.\"\n\n[ 10:09 A.M. ]\n\n[ HOSPITAL WARD OF THE INSTAR INSTITUTE ]\n\n[ LANGLEY, VIRGINIA ]\n\nLauren O'Brien sat beside the bed, a book forgotten in her lap. Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham, Jessie's favorite. Her grandchild was asleep, curled on her side. Her fever had broken with the rising of the sun. The cocktail of antiinflammatories and antipyretics had done the job, slowly dropping the child's temperature from 102 back to 98.6. No one was sure if Jessie had contracted the jungle contagion--childhood fevers were common and plentiful--but no one was taking any chances.\n\nThe ward in which her granddaughter now slept was a closed system, sealed and vented against the spread of any potential germ. Lauren herself wore a one-piece disposable quarantine suit, outfitted with a self-breathing mask. She had refused at first, fearing the garb would further alarm Jessie. But policy dictated that all hospital staff and visitors wear proper isolation gear.\n\nWhen Lauren had first entered the room, all suited up, Jessie had indeed appeared frightened, but the clear face-plate of the mask and a few reassuring words calmed her. Lauren had remained bedside all morning as Jessie was examined, blood samples collected, and drugs administered. With the resilience of the young, she now slept soundly.\n\nA slight whoosh announced a newcomer to the room. Lauren awkwardly turned in her suit. She saw a familiar face behind another mask. She placed the book on a table and stood. \"Marshall.\"\n\nHer husband crossed to her and enveloped her in his plastic-clad arms. \"I read her chart before coming in,\" he said, his voice sounding slightly tinny and distant. \"Fever's down.\"\n\n\"Yes, it broke a couple of hours ago.\"\n\n\"Any word yet on the lab work?\" Lauren heard the fear in his voice.\n\n\"No...it's too soon to tell if this is the plague.\" Without knowing the causative agent, there was no quick test. Diagnosis was made on a trio of clinical signs: oral ulcerations, tiny submucosal hemorrhages, and a dramatic drop in total white blood cell counts. But these symptoms typically would not manifest until thirty-six hours after the initial fever. It would be a long wait. Unless...\n\nLauren tried to change the subject. \"How did your conference call go with the CDC and the folks in the Cabinet?\"\n\nMarshall shook his head. \"A waste of time. It'll be days until all the politicking settles and a true course of action can be administered. The only good news is that Blaine at the CDC supported my idea to close Florida's border. That surprised me.\"\n\n\"It shouldn't,\" Lauren said. \"I've been sending him case data all week, including what's happening in Brazil. The implications are pretty damn frightening.\"\n\n\"Well, you must have shaken him up.\" He squeezed her hand. \"Thanks.\"\n\nLauren let out a long rattling sigh as she stared at the bed.\n\n\"Why don't you take a break? I can watch over Jessie for a while. You should try to catch a nap. You've been up all night.\"\n\n\"I'll never be able to sleep.\"\n\nMarshall put his arm around her waist. \"Then at least get some coffee and a little breakfast. We have the midday call with Kelly and Frank scheduled in a couple hours.\"\n\nLauren leaned against him. \"What are we going to tell Kelly?\"\n\n\"The truth. Jessie has a fever, but it's nothing to panic about. We still don't know for sure if it's the disease or not.\"\n\nLauren nodded. They remained silent for a bit, then Marshall guided her gently to the door. \"Go.\"\n\nLauren passed through the air-locked doors and crossed down the hall to the locker room, where she stripped out of the suit and changed into scrubs. As she left the locker room, she stopped by the nurses' station. \"Did any of the labs come back yet?\"\n\nA small Asian nurse flipped a plastic case file to her. \"These were faxed just a minute ago.\"\n\nLauren flipped the file open and thumbed to the page of blood chemistries and hematology results. Her finger ran down the long list. The chemistries were all normal, as expected. But her nail stopped at the line for the total white blood cell count:\n\n\u2002TWBC: 2130 (L) 6,000-15,000\n\nIt was low, significantly low, one of the trio of signs expected with the plague.\n\nWith her finger trembling, she ran down the report to the section that detailed the different white blood cell levels. There was one piece of news that the team's epidemiologist, Dr. Alvisio, had mentioned to her late last night, a possible pattern in the lab data that his computer model for the disease had noted: an unusual spike of a specific line of white blood cells, basophils, that occurred early in the disease as the total white blood cell levels were dropping. Though it was too soon to say for certain, it seemed to be consistent in all cases of the disease. It was perhaps a way to accelerate early detection.\n\nLauren read the last line.\n\n\u2002BASOPHIL COUNT: 12 (H) 0-4\n\n\"Oh, God.\" She lowered the chart to the nurses' station. Jessie's basophil levels were spiked above normal, well above normal.\n\nLauren closed her eyes.\n\n\"Are you okay, Dr. O'Brien?\"\n\nLauren didn't hear the nurse. Her mind was too full of a horrifying realization: Jessie had the plague.\n\n[ 11:48 A.M. ]\n\n[ AMAZON JUNGLE ]\n\nKelly followed the line of the others, bone tired but determined to keep moving. They had been walking all night with frequent rest breaks. After the attack, they had marched for a solid two hours, then made a temporary camp at dawn while the Rangers contacted the field base in Wauwai. They had decided to push on until at least midday, when they would use the satellite link to contact the States. Afterward, the team would rest the remainder of the day, regroup, and decide how to proceed.\n\nKelly glanced at her watch. Noon approached. Thank God. Already she heard Waxman grumbling about choosing a site for the day's camp. \"Well away from any waterways,\" she heard him warn.\n\nAll day long, the team had been wary of streams and pools, skirting them or crossing in a mad rush. But there were no further attacks.\n\nManny had offered a reason. \"Perhaps the creatures were local to just that small territory. Maybe that's why the buggers were never seen before.\"\n\n\"If so, good riddance,\" Frank had voiced sourly.\n\nThey had trudged onward, the morning drizzle drying slowly to a thick humid mist. The moisture weighed everything down: clothes, packs, boots. But no one complained about the march. All were glad to put distance between them and the horror of the previous night.\n\nFrom up ahead, a Ranger scout called back. \"A clearing!\" It was Corporal Warczak. As the unit's tracker, his scouting served double duty. He was also watching for any physical evidence of Gerald Clark's passage. \"The spot looks perfect for a campsite!\"\n\nKelly sighed. \"About time.\"\n\n\"Check it out!\" Waxman said. \"Make sure there are no close streams.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir! Kostos is already reconnoitering the area.\"\n\nNate, just a couple steps ahead of her, called forward, \"Be careful! There could be--\"\n\nA pained shout rose from ahead.\n\nEveryone froze, except Nate who rushed forward. \"Damn it, doesn't anyone listen to what I tell them?\" he muttered as he ran. He glanced back to Kelly and Kouwe and waved an arm. \"We'll need your help! Both of you.\"\n\nKelly moved to follow. \"What is it?\" she asked Kouwe. The Indian professor was already slinging his pack forward and working the straps loose. \"Supay chacra, I'd imagine. The devil's garden. C'mon.\"\n\nDevil's garden? Kelly did not like the sound of that.\n\nCaptain Waxman ordered the bulk of his Rangers to remain with the other civilians. He and Frank joined in following Nate.\n\nKelly hurried forward and saw a pair of Rangers on the ground ahead. They seemed to be fighting, one rolling in the dirt, the other striking him with the flat of his hand.\n\nNate ran toward them.\n\n\"Get these goddamn shits off me!\" the Ranger on the ground yelled, rolling through the underbrush. It was Sergeant Kostos.\n\n\"I'm trying,\" Corporal Warczak replied, continuing to slap at the man.\n\nNate knocked the corporal aside. \"Stop! You're only making them angrier.\" Then to the soldier on the ground, he ordered, \"Sergeant Kostos, lie still!\"\n\n\"They're stinging me all over!\"\n\nKelly was now close enough to see that the man was covered with large black ants, each about an inch long. There had to be thousands of them.\n\n\"Quit moving and they'll leave you alone.\"\n\nKostos glanced to Nate, eyes burning and angry, but he did as told. He stopped thrashing in the brush and lay panting.\n\nKelly noticed the blistered welts all over his arms and face. It looked as if he had been attacked with a burning cigarette butt.\n\n\"What happened?\" Captain Waxman asked.\n\nNate held everyone away from Kostos. \"Stand back.\"\n\nKostos trembled where he lay. Kelly saw the tears of pain at the corners of the man's eyes. He must be in agony. But Nate's advice proved sound. As he lay, unmoving, the ants stopped biting and crawled from his arms and legs, disappearing into the leafy brush.\n\n\"Where are they going?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"Back home,\" Kouwe said. \"They were the colony's soldiers.\" He pointed past a few trees. A few yards ahead a jungle clearing opened, so empty and bare it looked as if someone had taken a broom and hedge clippers to the area. In the center stood a massive tree, its branches spread through the space, a solitary giant.\n\n\"It's an ant tree,\" the professor continued to explain. \"The ant colony lives inside it.\"\n\n\"Inside it?\"\n\nKouwe nodded. \"It's just one of the many ways rain forest plants have adapted to animals or insects. The tree has evolved with special hollow branches and tubules that serve the ants, even feeding the colony with a special sugary sap. The tree in turn is serviced by the ants. Not only does the colony's debris help fertilize the tree, but they're active in protecting it, too--from other insects, from birds and animals.\" Kouwe nodded to the clearing. \"The ants destroy anything that grows near the tree, trimming away stranglers or climbers from the branches themselves. It's why such spots in the jungle are called supay chacra, or a devil's garden.\"\n\n\"What a strange relationship.\"\n\n\"Indeed. But the relationship is mutually beneficial to both species--tree and insect. In fact, one cannot live without the other.\"\n\nKelly stared toward the clearing, amazed at how intertwined life was out here. A few days back, Nate had shown her an orchid whose flower was shaped like the reproductive parts of a certain species of wasp. \"In order to lure the insect over to pollinate it.\" Then there were others that traded sugary nectars to lure different pollinators. And such relationships weren't limited to insect and plant. The fruit of certain trees had to be consumed by a specific bird or animal and pass through its digestive tract before it could root and grow. So much strangeness, all life dependent and twined with its neighbors in a complex evolutionary web.\n\nNate knelt beside the sergeant, drawing back her attention. By now, the ants had vacated the soldier's body. \"How many times have I warned you to watch what you lean against?\"\n\n\"I didn't see them,\" Kostos said, his voice pained and belligerent. \"And I needed to take a leak.\"\n\nKelly saw the man's zipper was indeed down.\n\nNate shook his head. \"Against an ant tree?\"\n\nKouwe explained as he rummaged through his pack. \"Ants are tuned to chemical markers. The man's urine would have been taken as an assault on the colony living in the tree.\"\n\nKelly broke out a syringe of antihistamine, while Kouwe removed a handful of leaves from his own pack and began to rub them together. She recognized the leaves and the scent of the oily compound. \"Ku-runyeh?\" she asked.\n\nThe Indian smiled at her. \"Very good.\" It was the same medicinal plant that Kouwe had used to treat her blistered fingers when she had touched the fire liana vine. A potent analgesic.\n\nThe two doctors began to work on their patient. As Kelly injected a combination of an antihistamine and a steroidal antiinflammatory, Kouwe smeared some of the ku-run-yeh extract on the soldier's arm, showing him how to apply it.\n\nThe sergeant's face reflected the immediate soothing relief. He sighed and took the handful of leaves. \"I can do the rest myself,\" he said, his voice hard with embarrassment.\n\nCorporal Warczak helped his sergeant stand.\n\n\"We should skirt around this area,\" Nate said. \"We don't want to camp too near an ant tree. Our food might draw their scouts.\"\n\nCaptain Waxman nodded. \"Then let's get going. We've wasted enough time here.\" His glance toward the limping sergeant was not sympathetic.\n\nOver the next half hour, the group wound again under the forest canopy, accompanied by the hoots and calls of capuchin and wooly monkeys. Manny pointed out a tiny pigmy anteater nestled atop a branch. Frozen in place by fear, it looked more like a stuffed animal with its large eyes and silky coat. And of more menace, but appearing just as artificial due to its fluorescent-green scales, was a forest pit viper, wrapped and dangling from a palm frond.\n\nAt last, a shout arose from up ahead. It was Corporal Warczak. \"I've found something!\"\n\nKelly prayed it wasn't another ant tree.\n\n\"I believe it's a marker from Clark!\"\n\nThe group converged toward the sound of his voice. Up a short hill, they found a large Brazil nut tree. Its bower shaded a great area littered with old nuts and leaves. Upon the trunk, a small strip of torn cloth hung, soaked and limp.\n\nThe others approached, but Corporal Warczak waved them all away. \"I've found boot tracks,\" he said. \"Don't trample them.\"\n\n\"Boot tracks?\" Kelly said in a hushed voice as the soldier slowly circled the tree, then stopped on the far side.\n\n\"I see a trail leading here!\" he called back.\n\nCaptain Waxman and Frank crossed over to him.\n\nKelly frowned. \"I thought Gerald Clark came out of the forest barefooted.\"\n\n\"He did,\" Nate answered as they waited. \"But the Yanomamo shaman we captured mentioned that the Indian villagers had stripped Clark of his possessions. They must have taken his boots.\"\n\nKelly nodded.\n\nRichard Zane pointed toward the tree. \"Is there another message?\"\n\nThey all waited for the okay to enter the area. Captain Waxman and Frank returned, leaving Corporal Warczak crouched by the trail.\n\nThe group was waved forward. \"We'll camp here,\" Waxman declared.\n\nSounds of relief flowed, and the team approached the tree, decaying nuts crackling underfoot. Kelly was one of the first to the trunk. Again, deeply incised in the bark were clear markings.\n\n\"G. C.: Clark again,\" Nate said. He pointed in the direction of the arrow. \"Due west. Just like the boot trail Warczak found. Dated May seventh.\"\n\nOlin leaned against the tree. \"May seventh? That means it took Clark ten days to reach the village from here? He must have been moving damn slowly.\"\n\n\"He probably didn't make a beeline like we did,\" Nate said. \"He probably spent a lot of time searching for some sign of habitation or civilization, tracking back and forth.\"\n\n\"Plus he was getting sick by this time,\" Kelly added. \"According to my mother's examination of his remains, the cancers would've been starting to spread through his body. He probably had to rest often.\"\n\nAnna Fong sighed sadly. \"If only he could've reached civilization sooner...been able to communicate where he'd been all this time.\"\n\nOlin shoved away from the tree. \"Speaking of communication, I should get the satellite uplink set up. We're due to conference in another half hour.\"\n\n\"I'll help you,\" Zane said, heading off with him.\n\nThe rest of the group dispersed to string up hammocks, gather wood, and scrounge up some local fruits. Kelly busied herself with her own campsite, spreading her mosquito netting like a pro.\n\nFrank worked beside her. \"Kelly...?\" From her brother's tone, she could tell he was about to tread on cautious ground.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I think you should go back.\"\n\nShe stopped tugging her netting and turned. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I've been talking to Captain Waxman. When he reported the attack this morning to his superiors, they ordered him to trim nonessential personnel after a safe camp had been established. Last night was too close. They don't want to risk additional casualties. Plus the others are slowing the Rangers down.\" Frank glanced over his shoulder. \"To expedite our search, it's been decided to leave Anna and Zane here, along with Manny and Kouwe.\"\n\n\"But--\"\n\n\"Olin, Nate, and I will continue with the Rangers.\"\n\nKelly turned fully around. \"I'm not nonessential, Frank. I'm the only physician here, and I can travel just as well as you.\"\n\n\"Corporal Okamoto is a trained field medic.\"\n\n\"That doesn't make him an M.D.\"\n\n\"Kelly...\"\n\n\"Frank, don't do this.\"\n\nHe wouldn't meet her eyes. \"It's already been decided.\"\n\nKelly circled to make him look at her. \"You decided this. You're the leader of this operation.\"\n\nHe finally looked up. \"Okay, it was my decision.\" His shoulders sagged, and he swung away. \"I don't want you at risk.\"\n\nKelly fumed, trembling with frustration. But she knew the decision was indeed ultimately her brother's.\n\n\"We'll send out a GPS lock on our current position and leave two Rangers as guards. Then a team will evacuate you as soon as a Brazilian supply helicopter with the range to reach camp can be coordinated. In the meantime, the remaining party--the six Rangers and the three of us--will strike out from here.\"\n\n\"When?\"\n\n\"After a short rest break. We'll leave this afternoon. March until sundown. Now that we're on Clark's trail, a smaller party can travel faster.\"\n\nKelly closed her eyes, huffing out a sigh. The plan was sound. And with the contagion spreading here and in the States, time was essential. Besides, if something was found, a scientific research team could always be airlifted to the site to investigate. \"I guess I have no choice.\"\n\nFrank remained silent, cinching his hammock for his short rest break.\n\nA call broke the tension. Olin, busy establishing the satellite uplink, shouted, \"We're ready here!\"\n\nKelly followed Frank to the laptop, again protected under a rain tarp.\n\nOlin hunched over the keyboard, tapping rapidly. \"Damn it, I'm having trouble getting a solid feed.\" He continued working. \"All this dampness...ah, here we go!\" He sat up. \"Got it!\"\n\nThe ex-KGB agent slid to the side. Kelly crouched with Frank. A face formed on the screen, jittering and pixellating out of focus.\n\n\"It's the best I can manage,\" Olin whispered from the side.\n\nIt was their father. Even through the interference, his hard face did not look pleased. \"I heard about last night,\" he said as introduction. \"It's good to see you're both safe.\"\n\nFrank nodded. \"We're fine. Tired but okay.\"\n\n\"I read the report from the army, but tell me yourselves what happened.\"\n\nTogether Frank and Kelly quickly related the attack by the strange creatures.\n\n\"A chimera?\" her father said as they finished, eyes narrowed. \"A mix of frog and fish?\"\n\n\"That's what the biologist here believes,\" Kelly said pointedly, glancing to Frank, stressing that even Manny had proven useful to the expedition.\n\n\"Then that settles matters,\" her father said, straightening and staring directly at Kelly. \"An hour ago I was contacted by the head of Special Forces out of Fort Bragg and was informed of the revised plan.\"\n\n\"What revised plan?\" Zane asked behind them.\n\nFrank waved away his question.\n\nTheir father continued, \"Considering what's happening with this damn disease, I totally concur with General Korsen. A cure must be found, and time has become a critical factor.\"\n\nKelly thought about protesting her expulsion, but bit her lip, knowing she would find no ally in her father. He had not wanted his little girl to come out here in the first place.\n\nFrank leaned closer to the screen. \"What's the condition in the States?\"\n\nTheir father shook his head. \"I'll let your mother answer that.\" He slid aside.\n\nShe looked exhausted, her eyes shadowed with fatigue. \"The number of cases...\" Lauren coughed and cleared her throat. \"The number of cases has trebled in the last twelve hours.\"\n\nKelly cringed. So fast...\n\n\"Mostly in Florida, but we're now seeing cases in California, Georgia, Alabama, and Missouri.\"\n\n\"What about in Langley?\" Kelly asked. \"At the Institute?\"\n\nA glance was shared between her parents.\n\n\"Kelly...\" her father began. His tone sounded like Frank's from a moment ago, cautionary. \"I don't want you to panic.\"\n\nKelly sat up straighter, her heart already climbing into her throat. Don't panic? Did those words ever calm someone? \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Jessie's sick--\"\n\nThe next few words were lost on Kelly. Her vision darkened at the corners. She had been dreading hearing those words since first learning of the contagion. Jessie's sick...\n\nHer father must have noticed her falling back in her seat, pale and trembling. Frank put his arm around her, holding her.\n\n\"Kelly,\" her father said. \"We don't know if it's the disease. It's just a fever, and she's already responding to medications. She was eating ice cream and chattering happily when we came to make this call.\"\n\nHer mother placed a hand on her father's shoulder, and they exchanged a look. \"It's probably not the disease, is it, Lauren?\"\n\nTheir mother smiled. \"I'm sure it's not.\"\n\nFrank sighed. \"Thank God. Is anyone else showing symptoms?\"\n\n\"Not a one,\" her father assured them.\n\nBut Kelly's eyes were fixed on her mother. Her smile now looked sickly and wan. Her gaze slipped down.\n\nKelly closed her own eyes. Oh, God...\n\n\"We'll see you soon,\" her father concluded.\n\nFrank nudged her.\n\nShe nodded. \"Soon...\"\n\nZane again spoke behind her. \"What did your father mean that he'd see you soon? What's this about revised plans? What's going on?\"\n\nFrank gave Kelly a final squeeze. \"Jessie's fine,\" he whispered to her. \"You'll see when you get home.\" He then turned to answer Zane's question.\n\nKelly remained frozen before the laptop as the arguments began to rage behind her. In her mind's eye, she again saw her mother's smile fade, her eyes lower in shame. She knew her mother's moods better than anyone, possibly even better than her father did. Her mother had been lying. She had seen the knowledge hidden behind the reassuring words.\n\nJessie had the disease. Her mother believed it. Kelly knew this with certainty. And if her mother believed it...\n\nKelly could not stop the tears. Busily arguing about the change in plans, the others failed to notice her.\n\nShe covered her face with her hand. Oh, God...no..."
            },
            {
                "title": "Aerial Assault",
                "text": "AUGUST 14, 1:24 P.M.\n\n[ AMAZON JUNGLE ]\n\nNate could not sleep. As he lay in his hammock, he knew he should be resting for the next leg of the journey. In only another hour, his group was due to depart, but questions still persisted. He stared around the campsite. While half the camp napped, the other half were still quietly arguing about the split-up.\n\n\"We can just follow them,\" Zane said. \"What are they going to do, shoot us?\"\n\n\"We should mind their orders,\" Kouwe said calmly, but Nate knew the older professor was no more pleased with being abandoned than the Tellux rep.\n\nNate turned his back on them, but he understood their frustration. If he had been one of those left behind, they would've had to hog-tie him to stop him from continuing on his own.\n\nFrom this new vantage, he spotted Kelly lying in her hammock. She was the only one who had not protested. Her concern for her daughter was clearly foremost in her mind. As he watched, Kelly rolled over and their gazes met. Her eyes were puffy from tears.\n\nNate gave up trying to nap and slid from his hammock. He crossed to her side and knelt. \"Jessie will be fine,\" he said softly.\n\nKelly stared at him in silence, then spoke through her pain, her voice small. \"She has the disease.\"\n\nNate frowned. \"Now that's just your fear talking. There's no proof that--\"\n\n\"I saw it in my mother's eyes. She could never hide anything from me. She knows Jessie has the disease and is trying to spare me.\"\n\nNate didn't know what to say. He reached through the netting and rested a hand on her shoulder. He quietly comforted her, willing her strength, then spoke with his heart, softly but earnestly, \"If what you say is true, I'll find a cure out there somewhere. I promise.\"\n\nThis earned a tired smile. Her lips moved, but no words came out. Still, Nate read those lips easily. Thank you. A single tear rolled from her eyes before she covered her face and turned away.\n\nNate stood, leaving her to her grief. He noticed Frank and Captain Waxman conferring over a map splayed across the ground and headed toward them. With a glance back at Kelly, he silently repeated his promise. I will find a cure.\n\nThe map the two were surveying was a topographic study of the terrain. Captain Waxman drew a finger across the map. \"Following due west of here, the land elevates as it approaches the Peruvian border. But it's a broken jumble of cliffs and valleys, a veritable maze. It'll be easy to get lost in there.\"\n\n\"We'll have to watch closely for Gerald Clark's signposts,\" Frank said, then looked up to acknowledge Nate's presence. \"You should get your pack ready. We're gonna head out shortly and take advantage of as much daylight as we can.\"\n\nNate nodded. \"I can be ready in five minutes.\"\n\nFrank stood. \"Let's get moving then.\"\n\nOver the next half hour, the team was assembled. They decided to leave the Rangers' SATCOM radio equipment with the remaining party, who needed to coordinate the retrieval effort by the Brazilian army. The group heading out would continue to use the CIA's satellite array to maintain contact.\n\nNate hoisted his shotgun to one shoulder and shifted his backpack to a comfortable spot. The plan was to move swiftly, with few rest breaks, until sunset.\n\nWaxman raised an arm and the group headed off into the forest, led by Corporal Warczak.\n\nAs they left, Nate looked behind him. He had already said good-bye to his friends, Kouwe and Manny. But behind the pair stood the two Rangers who would act as guards: Corporal Jorgensen and Private Carrera. The woman lifted her weapon in farewell. Nate waved back.\n\nWaxman had originally slated Corporal Graves to remain behind, to be evacuated out, on account of the death of his brother Rodney. But Graves had argued, \"Sir, this mission cost my brother's life along with my fellow teammates. With your permission, I'd like to see it through to the end. For the honor of my brother...for all my brothers.\"\n\nWaxman had consented.\n\nWith no further words, the group set off through the jungle. The sun had finally broken through the clouds, creating a steam bath under the damp canopy. Within minutes, everyone's face shone with sweat.\n\nNate marched beside Frank O'Brien. Every few steps, the man slid off his baseball cap and wiped the trickling dampness from his brow. Nate wore a handkerchief as a headband, keeping the sweat from his own eyes. But he couldn't keep the black flies and gnats, attracted by the salt and odor, from plaguing him.\n\nDespite the heat, humidity, and constant buzzing in their ears, they made good progress. Within a couple of hours, Nathan estimated they had covered over seven miles. Warczak was still finding bootprints in the bare soil as they headed west into the jungle. The prints were barely discernable, pooled with water from yesterday's rains.\n\nAhead of him marched Corporal Okamoto, whistling his damn tune again. Nate sighed. Didn't the jungle offer enough aggravations?\n\nAs they continued, Nate kept wary watch for any perils: snakes, fire liana, ant trees, anything that might slow them down. Each stream was crossed with caution. But no sign of the piranha-frogs appeared. Overhead, Nate saw a three-toed sloth amble along a branch high in the canopy, oblivious to the intrusion. He watched its passage, glancing over his shoulder as he walked under it. Sloths seemed slow and amiable, but when injured, they were known to gut those who came too close. Their climbing claws were dagger-sharp. But this great beast just continued its arboreal journey.\n\nTurning back around, Nate caught the barest flicker of something reflecting from high in a tree, about half a mile back. He paused to study it.\n\n\"What is it?\" Frank asked, noticing Nate had stopped.\n\nThe flickering reflection vanished. He shook his head. Probably just a wet leaf fluttering in the sunlight. \"Nothing,\" he said and waved Frank on. But throughout the remainder of the afternoon, he kept glancing over his shoulder. He could not escape the feeling that they were being watched, spied upon from on high. The feeling grew worse as the day wore on.\n\nFinally, he turned to Frank. \"Something's bothering me. Something we neglected to address after the attack back at the village.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Remember Kouwe's assessment that we were being tracked?\"\n\n\"Yeah, but he wasn't a hundred percent sure. Just some picked fruit and bushes disturbed during the night. No footprints or anything concrete.\"\n\nNate glanced over his shoulder. \"Let's say the professor was correct. If so, who's tracking us? It couldn't have been the Indians at the village. They were dead before we even entered the jungle. So who was it?\"\n\nFrank noticed the direction of Nate's stare. \"You think we're still being tracked. Did you see something?\"\n\n\"No, not really...just an odd reflection in the trees a while back. It's probably nothing.\"\n\nFrank nodded. \"All the same, I'll let Captain Waxman know. It wouldn't hurt to be on extra guard out here.\" Frank dropped back to speak with the Rangers' leader, who was marching with Olin Pasternak.\n\nAlone, Nate stared into the shadowy forest around him. He was suddenly less sure that leaving the others behind was such a wise move.\n\n[ 5:12 P.M. ]\n\nManny ran a brush through Tor-tor's coat. Not that the bit of hygiene was necessary. The jaguar did a good enough job with his own bristled tongue. But it was a chore that both cat and human enjoyed. Tor-tor responded with a slow growl as Manny groomed the cat's belly. Manny wanted to growl himself, but not in contentment and pleasure.\n\nHe hated being left behind by the others.\n\nHearing a rustle at his side, Manny glanced up. It was the anthropologist, Anna Fong. \"May I?\" She pointed to the jaguar.\n\nManny lifted an eyebrow in mild surprise. He had noticed the woman eyeing the cat before, but he had thought it was with more fear than interest. \"Sure.\" He patted the spot next to him. She knelt, and he handed her the brush. \"He especially likes his belly and ruff worked over.\"\n\nAnna took the brush and bent over the sleek feline. She stretched her arm, cautiously wary as Tor-tor watched her. She slowly lowered the brush and drew it through his thick coat. \"He's so beautiful. Back at home, in Hong Kong, I watched the cats stalk back and forth in their cages at the zoo. But to raise one of them yourself, how wonderful that must be.\"\n\nManny liked the way she talked, soft with a certain stilted diction, oddly formal. \"Wonderful, you say? He's been eating through my household budget, chewed through two sofas, and shredded I don't know how many throw rugs.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Still...it must be worth it.\"\n\nManny agreed, but he was reluctant to speak it aloud. It was somehow unmanly to express how much he loved the great big lug. \"I'll have to release him soon.\"\n\nThough he tried to hide it, she must have heard the sorrow in his words. Anna glanced up to him, her eyes supportive. \"I'm sure it's still worth it.\"\n\nManny grinned shyly. It sure was.\n\nAnna continued to massage the cat with the brush. Manny watched her from the side. One fall of her silky hair was tucked behind an ear. Her nose crinkled ever so slightly as she concentrated on the cat's grooming.\n\n\"Everyone!\" a voice called out, interrupting them.\n\nThey both turned.\n\nNearby, Corporal Jorgensen lowered the radio's receiver and shook his head. He turned and faced the camp. \"Everyone. I've got good news and bad news.\"\n\nA universal grumbling met the soldier's attempt at joviality.\n\n\"The good news is that the Brazilian army has rousted up a helicopter to fly us out of here.\"\n\n\"And the bad?\" Manny asked.\n\nJorgensen frowned. \"It won't be here for another two days. With the plague spreading through the region, the demand for aircraft is fierce. And for the moment, our evac is a low priority.\"\n\n\"Two days?\" Manny spoke up, accepting the brush back from Anna. Irritation entered his voice. \"Then we could've traveled with the others until then.\"\n\n\"Captain Waxman had his orders,\" Jorgensen said with a shrug.\n\n\"What about the Comanche helicopter stationed at Wauwai?\" Zane asked. He had been lounging in his hammock, quietly fuming.\n\nPrivate Carrera answered from where she was cleaning her weapon. \"It's a two-seater attack chopper. Besides, the Comanche's held in reserve to back up the other team as necessary.\"\n\nManny shook his head and furtively glanced at Kelly O'Brien. She sat in her hammock, eyes tired, dull, defeated. The waiting would be the worst for her. Two more days lost before she could join her sick daughter.\n\nKouwe spoke from near the large Brazil nut tree. He had been examining the crude markings knifed in the bark by Clark, and now had his head cocked questioningly. \"Does anyone else smell smoke?\"\n\nManny sniffed, but the air seemed clear.\n\nAnna crimped her brow. \"I smell something...\"\n\nKouwe swung around the base of the large Brazil nut tree, nose half raised. Though long out of the forests, the professor's Indian senses were still keen. \"There!\" he called out from the far side.\n\nThe group followed after him. Carrera quickly slapped her M-16 back together, hauling it up as she stood.\n\nTo the south of their camp, about a hundred feet into the forest, small flames flickered in the shadows, low to the ground. Through breaks in the canopy, a thin column of gray smoke drifted skyward.\n\n\"I'll investigate,\" Jorgensen said. \"The rest hang back with Carrera.\"\n\n\"I'm going with you,\" Manny said. \"If anyone's out there, Tor-tor will scent them.\"\n\nAs answer, Jorgensen unstrapped the M-9 pistol from his belt and passed it to Manny. Together they cautiously passed into the deeper jungle. Manny signaled with his hand, and Tor-tor trotted ahead of them, taking the point.\n\nBack behind them, Carrera ordered everyone together. \"Keep alert!\"\n\nManny followed after his cat, walking abreast of Corporal Jorgensen. \"The fire's burning on the ground,\" Manny whispered.\n\nAs they neared the spot, the corporal signaled for silence.\n\nBoth men's senses were stretched, watching for any shift of shadows, listening for the telltale snap of a twig, searching for any sign of a hidden threat. But with the twittering of birds and mating calls of monkeys, it was difficult work. Their steps slowed as they neared the smoldering glow.\n\nAhead Tor-tor edged closer, his natural feline curiosity piqued. But once within a few yards of the smoky fire, he suddenly crouched, growling. He stared at the flames and slowly backed away.\n\nThe men stopped. Jorgensen lifted a hand, a silent warning. The jaguar sensed something. He motioned for Manny to sink lower and take up a guard position. Once set, Jorgensen proceeded ahead. Manny held his breath as the corporal moved silently through the forest, stepping carefully, weapon ready.\n\nManny kept watch all around them, unblinking, ears straining. Tor-tor backed to his side, now silent, hackles raised, golden eyes aglow. Beside him, Manny heard the cat chuffing at the air. Manny remembered the cat's reaction to the caiman urine beside the river. He smells something...something that has him spooked.\n\nWith adrenaline doped in Manny's blood, his own senses were more acute. Alerted by the jaguar, Manny now recognized an odd scent to the smoke: metallic, bitter, acrid. It was not plain wood smoke.\n\nStraightening, Manny wanted to warn Jorgensen, but the soldier had already reached the site. As the soldier eyed the burning patch, Manny saw the man's shoulders jerk with surprise. He slowly circled the smoldering fire, rifle pointed outward. Nothing came out of the forest to threaten. Jorgenson maintained his watch for a full two minutes, then waved Manny over.\n\nLetting out his held breath, Manny approached. Tor-tor hung back, still refusing to approach the fire.\n\n\"Whoever set this must have run off,\" Jorgensen said. He pointed at the fire. \"Meant to scare us.\"\n\nManny moved close enough to see the spread of flames on the forest floor. It was not wood that burned, but some thick oily paste painted atop a cleared section of dirt. It cast a fierce brightness but little heat. The smoke rising from it was redolent and cloying, like some musky incense. But it was not the smoke nor the strange fuel of this fire that sent icy chills along Manny's limbs--it was the pattern.\n\nPainted and burning on the jungle floor was a familiar serpentine coiled symbol--the mark of the Ban-ali, burning bright under the canopy's gloom.\n\nJorgensen used the tip of his boot to nudge the oily substance. \"Some combustible paste.\" He then used his other foot to kick dirt over the spot, smothering the flames. He worked along the burning lines, and with Manny's help, they doused the fire. Once they were done, Manny stared up, following the smoke into the late afternoon sky.\n\n\"We should get back to camp.\"\n\nManny nodded. They retreated to the bower under the large Brazil nut tree. Jorgensen reported what they discovered. \"I'll radio the field base. Let them know what we found.\" He crossed to the bulky radio pack and picked up the receiver. After a few moments, the soldier swore and slammed the receiver down.\n\n\"What is it?\" Manny asked.\n\n\"We've missed SATCOM's satellite window by five minutes.\"\n\n\"What does that mean?\" Anna asked.\n\nJorgensen waved an arm at the radio unit, then at the sky overhead. \"The military's satellite transponders are out of range.\"\n\n\"Until when?\"\n\n\"Till four o'clock tomorrow morning.\"\n\n\"What about reaching the other team?\" Manny asked. \"Using your personal radios?\"\n\n\"I already tried that, too. The Sabers only have a range of six miles. Captain Waxman's team is beyond our reach.\"\n\n\"So we're cut off?\" Anna asked.\n\nJorgensen shook his head. \"Just until morning.\"\n\n\"And what then?\" Zane paced nervously, eyes on the forest. \"We can't stay here for two more days waiting for that damned helicopter.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" Kouwe said, frowning deeply. \"The village Indians found the same mark on their shabano the very night they were assaulted by the piranha creatures.\"\n\nPrivate Carrera turned to him. \"What are you suggesting?\"\n\nKouwe frowned. \"I'm not sure yet.\" The professor's eyes were fixed on the smoggy smudge in the sky. The forest still reeked of the bitter fumes. \"But we've been marked.\"\n\n[ 5:33 P.M. ]\n\nFrank was never happier to see the sun sink toward the horizon. They should be stopping soon. Every muscle ached from so many hours of hiking and so little sleep. He stumbled in step with the Ranger ahead of him, Nate marching behind.\n\nSomeone yelled a short distance away. \"Whoa! Check this out!\"\n\nThe straggling team members increased their pace. Frank climbed a short rise and saw what had triggered the startled response. A quarter mile ahead, the jungle was flooded by a small lake. Its surface was a sheet of silver from the setting sun to the west. It blocked their path, spreading for miles in both directions.\n\n\"It's an igapo,\" Nate said. \"A swamp forest.\"\n\n\"It's not on my map,\" Captain Waxman said.\n\nNate shrugged. \"Such sections dot the Amazon basin. Some come and go according to the rainfall levels. But for this region still to be so wet at the end of the dry season suggests it's been here a while.\" Nate pointed ahead. \"Notice how the jungle breaks down here, drowned away by years of continual swamping.\"\n\nFrank indeed noticed how the dense canopy ended ahead. What remained of the jungle here were just occasional massive trees growing straight out of the water and thousands of islands and hummocks. Otherwise, above the swamp, the blue sky was open and wide. The brightness after so long in the green gloom was sharp and biting.\n\nThe group cautiously hiked down the long, low slope that headed toward the swamp. The air seemed to grow more fecund and thick. Around the swamp, spiky bromeliads and massive orchids adorned their view. Frogs and toads set up a chorus, while the chattering of birds attempted to drown out their amphibious neighbors. Near the water's edges, spindly-limbed wading birds, herons and egrets, hunted fish. A handful of ducks took wing at their noisy approach.\n\nOnce within fifty feet of the water's edge, Captain Waxman called a halt. \"We'll search the bank for any sign of a marker, but first we should make sure the water is safe to be near. I don't want any surprises.\"\n\nNate moved forward. \"We may be okay. According to Manny, those predatory creatures were part piranha. Those fish don't like standing water like this. They prefer flowing streams.\"\n\nCaptain Waxman glanced to him. \"And the last time I checked, piranhas didn't chase their prey onto dry land either.\"\n\nFrank saw Nate blush slightly and nod.\n\nWaxman sent Corporal Yamir forward toward the swamp's edge. \"Let's see if anything stirs up.\"\n\nThe Pakistani soldier raised his M-16 and shot a grenade from its attached launcher toward the shallows off to the side. The explosion geysered water high into the air, startling birds and monkeys from their perches. Water and bits of lily pads rained down upon the forest.\n\nThe party waited for ten minutes, but nothing responded. No venomous predators fled the assault or attacked from the water's edge.\n\nCaptain Waxman waved his men forward to begin the search for another tree marker. \"Be careful. Stay away from the water's edge and keep your eyes open!\"\n\nThey didn't have long to wait. Again Corporal Warczak, the team's tracker, raised his voice. \"Found it!\" He stood only ten yards to the right, not far from the sludgy water.\n\nUpon the bole of a palm that leaned over the water was the now familiar strip of polyester cloth, nailed to the tree with a thorn. The markings were almost identical to the last one. The initials and an arrow pointing due west again, right toward the swamp. Only the date was different. \"May fifth,\" Olin read aloud. \"Two days from the last marker.\"\n\nWarczak stood a few paces away. \"It looks like Clark came from this way.\"\n\n\"But the arrow points across the water,\" Frank said. He tipped the bill of his baseball cap to shadow his eyes and stared over the water. Distantly, beyond the swamp, he could see the highlands that Captain Waxman had shown him on the topographic map: a series of red cliff faces, broken with jungle-choked chasms and separated into tall forest-crowned mesas.\n\nAt his side, Corporal Okamoto passed him a set of binoculars. \"Try these.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\" Frank fitted the scopes in place. Nate was also offered a pair. Through the lenses, the cliffs and mesas grew clearer. Small waterfalls tumbled from the towering heights into the swampy region below, while thick mists clung to the lower faces, obscuring the forested chasms that stretched from the swamp and up into the highlands.\n\n\"Those small streams and falls must feed the swamp,\" Nate said. \"Keeping the area wet year round.\"\n\nFrank lowered his glasses and found Captain Waxman studying a compass.\n\nNate pointed to the tree. \"I wager that this marker points to Clark's next signpost. He must have had to circle around the swamp.\" Nate stared at the huge boggy spread of the water. \"It would've taken him weeks to skirt the water.\"\n\nFrank heard the despair in Dr. Rand's voice. To hike around the swamp would take them just as long.\n\nCaptain Waxman lifted his eyes from the compass and squinted across the swamp. \"If the marker lies straight across, that's where we'll go.\" He pointed an arm. \"It'll only take us a day to raft across here, rather than losing a week hiking.\"\n\n\"But we have no rubber raiders,\" Frank said.\n\nWaxman glanced to him condescendingly. \"We're Army Rangers, not Boy Scouts.\" He waved to the forest. \"There are plenty of downed logs, acres of bamboo, and with the rope we have with us and the vines around us, we should be able to lash together a couple of rafts. It's what we're trained to do--improvise with the resources available.\" He glanced to the distant shore. \"It can't be more than a couple miles to cross here.\"\n\nNate nodded. \"Good. We can shave days off the search.\"\n\n\"Then let's get to work! I want to be finished by nightfall, so we're rested and ready in the morning to cross.\" Waxman assembled various teams: to roll and manhandle logs to the swamp's edge, to go out with axes and hack lengths of bamboo, and to strip vines for lashing material.\n\nFrank assisted where needed and was surprised how quickly the building material accumulated on the muddy shore. They soon had enough for a flotilla of rafts. The assembling took even less time. Two matching logs were aligned parallel and topped with a solid layer of bamboo. Ropes and vines secured it all together. The first raft was shoved through the slick mud and into the water, bobbing in the shallows.\n\nAcheer rose from the Rangers. Nate grinned approvingly as he sculpted paddles from bamboo and dried palm fronds.\n\nA second raft was soon finished. The entire process took less than two hours.\n\nFrank watched the second raft drift beside its mate. By now, the sun was setting. The western sky was aglow with a mix of reds, oranges, and splashes of deep indigo.\n\nAround him, the camp was being set up. A fire lit, hammocks strung, food being prepared. Frank turned to join them when he spotted a dark streak against the bright sunset. He pinched his eyebrows, squinting.\n\nCorporal Okamoto was passing Frank with an armful of tinder. \"Can I borrow your binoculars?\" Frank asked.\n\n\"Sure. Grab 'em from my field jacket.\" The soldier shifted his burden.\n\nFrank thanked him and took the glasses. Once Okamoto had continued past, Frank raised the binoculars to his eyes. It took him a moment to find the dark streak rising in the sky. Smoke? It rose from the distant highlands. A sign of habitation? He followed the curling black line.\n\n\"What do you see?\" Nate said.\n\n\"I'm not sure.\" Frank pointed to the sky. \"I think it's smoke. Maybe from another camp or village.\"\n\nNate frowned and took the glasses. \"Whatever it is,\" he said after a moment, \"it's drifting this way.\"\n\nFrank stared. Even without the binoculars, he could see that Nate was correct. The column of smoke was arching toward them. Frank lifted a hand. \"That makes no sense. The wind is blowing in the opposite direction.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Nate said. \"It's not smoke. Something is flying this way.\"\n\n\"I'd better alert the captain.\"\n\nSoon everyone was outfitted with binoculars, staring upward. The ribbon of darkness had become a dense black cloud, sweeping directly toward them.\n\n\"What are they?\" Okamoto mumbled. \"Birds? Bats?\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Nate said. The smoky darkness still appeared to be more cloud than substance, its edges billowing, ebbing, flowing as it raced toward them.\n\n\"What the hell are they?\" someone mumbled.\n\nIn a matter of moments, the dark cloud swept over the campsite, just above tree level, blocking the last of the sunlight. The team was immediately flooded by a high-pitched droning. After so many days in the jungle, it was a familiar sound--but amplified. The tiny hairs on Frank's body vibrated to the subsonic whine.\n\n\"Locusts,\" Nate said, craning upward. \"Millions of them.\"\n\nAs the cloud passed overhead, the lower edges of the swarm rattled the leafy foliage. The team ducked warily from the creatures, but the locusts passed them without pausing, sweeping east.\n\nFrank lowered his binoculars as the tail end of the cloud droned over them. \"What are they doing? Migrating or something?\"\n\nNate shook his head. \"No. This behavior makes no sense.\"\n\n\"But they're gone now,\" Captain Waxman said, ready to dismiss the aerial show.\n\nNate nodded, but he glanced to the east, one eye narrowed. \"Yes, but where are they going?\"\n\nFrank caught Nate's glance. Something did lie to the east: the other half of their party. Frank swallowed back his sudden fear. Kelly...\n\n[ 7:28 P.M. ]\n\nAs the day darkened into twilight, Kelly heard a strange noise, a sharp whirring or whine. She walked around the Brazil nut tree. Squinting her eyes, she tried to focus on its source.\n\n\"You hear it, too?\" Kouwe asked, meeting her on the far side of the trunk.\n\nNearby, the two Rangers stood with weapons raised. Others stood by the camp's large bonfire, feeding more dry branches and bamboo to the flames. With the threat of someone stalking around their camp, they wanted as much light as possible. Stacked beside the fire was a large pile of additional fodder for the flames, enough to last the night.\n\n\"That noise...it's getting louder,\" Kelly mumbled. \"What is it?\"\n\nKouwe cocked his head. \"I'm not sure.\"\n\nBy now, others heard the noise, too. It rose quickly to a feverish pitch. Everyone started glancing to the sky.\n\nKelly pointed to the rosy gloaming to the west. \"Look!\"\n\nCast against the glow of the setting sun, a dark shadow climbed the skies, a black cloud, spreading and sweeping toward them.\n\n\"A swarm of locusts,\" Kouwe said, his voice tight with suspicion. \"They'll do that sometimes in mating season, but it's the wrong time of the year. And I've never seen a swarm this big.\"\n\n\"Is it a threat?\" Jorgensen asked from a few steps away.\n\n\"Not usually. More a pest for gardens and jungle farms. A large enough cloud of locusts can strip leaf, vegetable, and fruit from a spot in mere minutes.\"\n\n\"What about people?\" Richard Zane asked.\n\n\"Not much of a threat. They're herbivorous, but they can bite a little when panicked. It's nothing more than a pinprick.\" Kouwe eyed the swarm. \"Still...\"\n\n\"What?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"I don't like the coincidence of such a swarm appearing after finding the Ban-ali mark.\"\n\n\"Surely there can't be any connection,\" Anna said at Richard's side.\n\nManny approached with Tor-tor. The great cat whined in chorus with the locusts, edgy and padding a slow circle around his master. \"Professor, you aren't thinking the locusts might be like the piranha creatures? Some new threat from the jungle, another attack?\"\n\nKouwe glanced to the biologist. \"First there was the mark at the village, then piranhas. Now a mark here, and a strange swarm rises.\" Kouwe strode over to his pack. \"It's a coincidence that we shouldn't dismiss.\"\n\nKelly felt a cold certainty that the professor was right.\n\n\"What can we do?\" Jorgensen asked. His fellow soldier, Private Carrera, kept watch with him. The front edge of the swarm disappeared into the twilight gloom overhead, one shadow merging with another.\n\n\"First shelter...\" Kouwe glanced up, his eyes narrowing with concentration. \"They're almost here. Everyone into their hammocks! Close the mosquito netting tight and keep your flesh away from the fabric.\"\n\nZane protested. \"But--\"\n\n\"Now!\" Kouwe barked. He began to dig more purposefully in his pack.\n\n\"Do as he says!\" Jorgensen ordered, shouldering his useless weapon.\n\nKelly was already moving. She ducked into her tent of mosquito netting, glad that they had set up camp earlier. She closed the opening and positioned a stone atop the flap to hold the cheesecloth netting in place. Once secure, she clambered onto her hammock, tucking her legs and arms tight around herself, keeping her head ducked from the tent's top.\n\nShe glanced around her. The rest of her party were digging in, too, each hammock a solitary island of shrouded material. Only one member of the camp was still outside.\n\n\"Professor Kouwe!\" Jorgensen called from his spot. The soldier began to clamber out of his netted tent.\n\n\"Stay!\" Kouwe ordered as he rummaged in his pack.\n\nJorgensen froze with indecision. \"What're you doing?\"\n\n\"Preparing to fight fire with fire.\"\n\nSuddenly, from clear skies, it began to rain. The canopy rattled with the familiar sounds of heavy drops striking leaves. But it was not water that cascaded from the skies. Large black insects pelted through the dense canopy and dove earthward.\n\nThe swarm had reached them.\n\nKelly saw one insect land on her netting. It was three inches long, its black carapace shining like oil in the firelight. Trebled wings twitched on its back as it fought to keep its perch. She balled her limbs tighter around herself. She had seen locusts and cicadas before, but nothing like this monstrous bug. It had no eyes. Its face was all clashing mandibles, gnashing at the air. Though blind, it was not senseless. Long antennae probed through the netting's mesh, swiveling like a pair of divining rods. Other of its brethren struck the netting with little smacks, clinging with segmented black legs.\n\nA cry of pain drew her attention to Kouwe. The professor stood five yards away, still crouched by the fire. He swatted a locust on his arm.\n\n\"Professor!\" Jorgensen called out.\n\n\"Stay where you are!\" Kouwe fought the leather tie on a tiny bag. Kelly saw the blood dripping from his arm from the locust's bite. Even from here, she could tell it was a deep wound. She prayed the bugs were not venomous, like the piranhas. Kouwe crouched closer to the fire, his skin ruddy and aglow. But the flames'intense heat and smoke seemed to keep the worst of the swarm at bay.\n\nAll around the forest, locusts flitted and whined. With each breath, more and more filled the space.\n\n\"They're chewing through the netting!\" Zane cried in panic.\n\nKelly turned her attention to the bugs closer at hand. The first attacker had retracted its antennae and was indeed gnashing at the netting, slicing through with its razored jaws. Before it could burrow inside, Kelly struck out with the back of her hand and knocked it away. She didn't kill it, but her netting was protected from further damage. She went to work on the other clinging insects.\n\n\"Smack them loose!\" she yelled back to the others. \"Don't give them a chance to bite through!\"\n\nAnother yelp erupted from nearby. \"Goddamn it!\" It was Manny. A loud slap sounded, followed by more swearing.\n\nKelly couldn't get a good look at his position since his hammock was behind hers. \"Are you okay?\"\n\n\"One crawled under the netting!\" Manny called back. \"Be careful! The buggers pack a vicious bite. The saliva burns with some type of digestive acid.\"\n\nAgain she prayed the insects weren't toxic. She twisted around to get a look at Manny, but all she could make out was Tor-tor pacing at the edge of his master's tent. Clusters of the black insects crawled across the cat's fur, making it look as if his spots were squirming. The jaguar ignored the pests, its dense coat a natural barrier. One landed on the cat's nose, but a paw simply batted it away.\n\nBy now, the area buzzed with wings. The constant whine set Kelly's teeth on edge. In moments, the swarm thickened. It grew difficult to see much outside her tent. It was as if a swirling black fog had descended over them. The bugs coated everything, chewing and biting. Kelly focused her attention on knocking the insects off her netting, but it quickly became a losing battle. The bugs crawled and skittered everywhere.\n\nAs she struggled, sweat dripped down her face and into her eyes. Panicked, she batted and swung at the clinging insects and began to lose hope. Then in her mind's eye, she pictured Jessie in a hospital bed, arms stretched out for her missing mother, crying her name. \"Damn it!\" She fought the insects more vigorously, refusing to give up.\n\nI won't die here...not like this, not without seeing Jessie.\n\nA sharp sting flamed from her thigh. Using the flat of her hand, she crushed the insect with a gasp. Another landed on her arm. She shook it away in disgust. A third scrabbled in her hair.\n\nAs she fought, a scream built like a storm in her chest. Her tent had been breached. Cries arose from other spots in the camp. They were all under assault.\n\nThey had lost.\n\nJessie...Kelly moaned, striking a locust from her neck. I'm sorry, baby. New stings bloomed on her calves and ankles. She futilely kicked, eyes weeping in pain and loss.\n\nIt soon became hard to breathe. She coughed, choking. Her eyes began to sting worse. A sharp smell filled her nostrils, sweet with resins, like green pine logs in a hearth. She coughed again.\n\nWhat was happening?\n\nThrough her tears, she watched the dense swarm disperse as if blown by a mighty gust. Directly ahead, the camp's bonfire grew clearer. She spotted Kouwe standing on the far side of the flames, waving a large palm frond over the fire, which had grown much smokier.\n\n\"Tok-tok powder!\" Kouwe called to her. His body was covered with bleeding bites. \"A headache medicine and, when burned, a powerful insect repellent.\"\n\nThe locusts clinging to her netting dislodged and winged away from the odor. Kelly vaguely remembered Nate telling her how the Indians would stake their gardens with bamboo torches and burn some type of powder as an insect repellent to protect their harvest. She silently thanked the Indians of the forest for their ingenuity.\n\nOnce the locusts had dwindled to only a few stragglers, Kouwe waved to her, to all of them. \"Come here!\" he called. \"Quickly!\"\n\nShe climbed from her hammock, and after a moment's hesitation, she slipped through her netting, now ragged and frayed. Ducking low, she crossed to the fire. Others followed in step behind her.\n\nThe smoke was choking and cloying, but the insects held back. The locusts had not dispersed. The swarm still whined and whirred overhead in a dark cloud. Occasional bombers would dive toward them and away, chased off by the fire's smoke.\n\n\"How did you know the smoke would work?\" Jorgensen asked.\n\n\"I didn't. At least not for sure.\" Kouwe panted slightly and continued to waft his palm frond as he explained. \"The flaming Ban-ali symbol in the jungle...the amount of smoke and the strong scent of it. I thought it might be some sort of signal.\"\n\n\"A smoke signal?\" Zane asked.\n\n\"No, more of a scent signal,\" Kouwe said. \"Something in the smoke drew the locusts here specifically.\"\n\nManny grunted at this idea. \"Like a pheromone or something.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. And once here, the little bastards were bred to lay waste to anything in the area.\"\n\n\"So what you're saying is that we were marked for death,\" Anna commented. \"The locusts were sent here on purpose.\"\n\nKouwe nodded. \"The same could be true with the piranha creatures. Something must have drawn them specifically to the village, maybe another scent trace, something dribbled in the water that guided them to the shabano.\" He shook his head. \"I don't know for sure. But for a second time, the Ban-ali have called the jungle down upon us.\"\n\n\"What are we going to do?\" Zane asked. \"Will the powder last till dawn?\"\n\n\"No.\" Kouwe glanced to the dark swarm around them.\n\n[ 8:05 P.M. ]\n\nNate was tired of arguing. He, Captain Waxman, and Frank were still in the midst of a debate that had been going on for the past fifteen minutes. \"We have to go back and investigate,\" he insisted. \"At least send one person to check on the others. He can be there and back before dawn.\"\n\nWaxman sighed. \"They were only locusts, Dr. Rand. They passed over us with no harm. What makes you think the others are at risk?\"\n\nNate frowned. \"I have no proof. Just my gut instinct. But I've lived all my life in these jungles and something was unnatural about the way those locusts were swarming.\"\n\nFrank initially had been on Nate's side, but slowly he had warmed to the Ranger's logic of wait-and-see. \"I think we should consider Captain Waxman's plan. First thing tomorrow morning, when the satellites are overhead, we can relay a message to the others and make sure they're okay.\"\n\n\"Besides,\" Waxman added, \"now that we're down to six Rangers, I'm not about to risk a pair on this futile mission--not without some sign of real trouble.\"\n\n\"I'll go myself.\" Nate balled a fist in frustration.\n\n\"I won't allow it.\" Waxman shook his head. \"You're just jumping at shadows, Dr. Rand. In the morning, you'll see they're okay.\"\n\nNate's mind spun, trying to find some way past the captain's obstinate attitude. \"Then at least let me head out with a radio. See if I can get close enough to contact someone over there. What's the range on your personal radios?\"\n\n\"Six or seven miles.\"\n\n\"And we traveled roughly fifteen miles. That means I would only have to hike back eight miles to be within radio range of the others. I could be back before midnight.\"\n\nWaxman frowned.\n\nFrank moved a step closer to Nathan. \"Still...it's not a totally foolhardy plan, Captain. In fact, it's a reasonable compromise.\"\n\nNate recognized the pained set to Frank's eyes. It was his sister out there. So far the man had been balancing between fear for his sister and Waxman's reasonable caution, trying his best to be a logical operations leader while reining in his own concern.\n\n\"I'm sure the others are okay,\" Nate pressed. \"But it doesn't hurt to be a little extra wary...especially after the last couple of days.\"\n\nFrank was now nodding.\n\n\"Let me take a radio,\" Nate urged.\n\nWaxman puffed out an exasperated breath and conceded. \"But you're not going alone.\"\n\nNate bit back a shout. Finally...\n\n\"I'll send one of the Rangers with you. I won't risk two of my men.\"\n\n\"Good...good.\" Frank seemed almost to sag with relief. He turned to Nate, a look of gratitude in his eyes.\n\nCaptain Waxman turned. \"Corporal Warczak! Front and center!\"\n\n[ 8:23 P.M. ]\n\nManny and the others stood by the fire, smoke billowing around them. The pall from the powder kept the locusts in check. All around, the swarm swirled, a black cocoon, holding them trapped. Manny's eyes stung as he studied the flames. How long would the professor's tok-tok powder last? Already the smoke seemed less dense.\n\n\"Here!\" Kelly said behind him. She passed him a two-foot length of bamboo from the pile of tinder beside the fire, then returned to work, kneeling with Professor Kouwe. The Indian shaman was packing a final piece of bamboo with a plug of tok-tok powder.\n\nManny shifted his feet nervously. The professor's plan was based on too many assumptions for his liking.\n\nFinished with the last stick of bamboo, Kelly and Kouwe stood. Manny stared around the fire. Everyone had packs in place and was holding a short length of bamboo, like his own.\n\n\"Okay,\" Jorgensen said. \"Ready?\"\n\nNo one answered. Everyone's eyes reflected the same mix of panic and fear.\n\nJorgensen nodded. \"Light the torches.\"\n\nAs a unit, each member reached and dipped the ends of their bamboo in the bonfire's flames. The powder ignited along with the dry wood. As they pulled the bamboo free, smoke wafted in thick curls up from their makeshift torches.\n\n\"Keep them close, but held aloft,\" Kouwe instructed, demonstrating with his own torch. \"We must move quickly.\"\n\nManny swallowed. He eyed the whirring wall of locusts. He had been bitten only twice. But the wounds still ached. Tor-tor kept close to his side, rubbing against him, sensing the fear in the air.\n\n\"Keep together,\" Kouwe hissed as they began to walk away from the sheltering fire and toward the waiting swarm.\n\nThe plan was to use the tiki torches primed with tok-tok powder to breach the swarm while holding the locusts at bay. Under this veil of smoky protection, the team would attempt to flee the area. As Kouwe had explained earlier, \"The locusts were drawn specifically here by the scent from the burning Ban-ali symbol. If we get far enough away from this specific area, we might escape them.\"\n\nIt was a risky plan, but they didn't have much choice. The shaman's supply of powder was meager. It would not keep the bonfire smoking for more than another hour or two. And the locusts seemed determined to remain in the area. So it was up to them--they would have to vacate the region.\n\n\"C'mon, Tor-tor.\" Manny followed after Corporal Jorgensen. Behind and to the side, the group moved in a tight cluster, torches held high. Manny's ears were full of the swarm's drone. As he walked, he prayed Kouwe's assumptions were sound.\n\nNo one spoke...no one even breathed. The group trod slowly forward, heading west, in the direction the other team had taken. It was their only hope. Manny glanced behind him. The comforting light of their bonfire was now a weak glow as the swarm closed in behind them.\n\nUnderfoot, Manny crushed straggling locusts on the ground.\n\nSilently, the group marched into the forest. After several minutes, there was still no end to the cloud of insects. The team remained surrounded on all sides. Locusts were everywhere: buzzing through the air, coating the trunks of trees, scrabbling through the underbrush. Only the smoke kept them away.\n\nManny felt something vibrating on his pantleg. He glanced down and used his free hand to swat the locust away. The bugs were getting bolder.\n\n\"We should be through them by now,\" Kouwe muttered.\n\n\"I think they're following us,\" Anna said.\n\nKouwe slowed, and his eyes narrowed. \"I believe you're right.\"\n\n\"What are we going to do?\" Zane hissed. \"These torches aren't gonna last much longer. Maybe if we ran. Maybe we could--\"\n\n\"Quiet...let me think!\" Kouwe scolded. He stared at the swarm and mumbled. \"Why are they following us? Why aren't they staying where they were summoned?\"\n\nCarrera spoke softly at the rear of the group. She held her torch high. \"Maybe they're like those piranha creatures. Once drawn here, they caught our scent. They'll follow us now until one or the other of us is destroyed.\"\n\nManny had a sudden idea. \"Then why don't we do what the Ban-ali do?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"Give the buggers something more interesting than our blood to swarm after.\"\n\n\"Like what?\"\n\n\"The same scent that drew the locusts here in the first place.\" Words tumbled from Manny in his excitement. He pictured the flaming symbol of the Blood Jaguars. \"Corporal Jorgensen and I doused the flames that produced the smoky pheromone or whatever--but the fuel is still there! Out in the forest.\" He pointed his arm.\n\nJorgensen nodded. \"Manny's right. If we could relight it...\"\n\nKouwe brightened. \"Then the fresh smoke would draw the swarm away from us, keep it here while we ran off.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Manny said.\n\n\"Let's do it,\" Zane said. \"What are we waiting for?\"\n\nJorgensen stepped in front. \"With our torches burning low, time is limited. There's no reason to risk all of us going back.\"\n\n\"What are you saying?\" Manny asked.\n\nJorgensen pointed. \"You all continue on the trail after the others. I'll backtrack and light the fire on my own.\"\n\nManny stepped forward. \"I'll go with you.\"\n\n\"No. I won't risk a civilian.\" Jorgensen backed away. \"And besides, I can travel faster on my own.\"\n\n\"But--\"\n\n\"We're wasting time and powder,\" the corporal barked. He turned to his fellow Ranger. \"Carrera, get everyone away from here. Double time. I'll join up with you after I've lit the motherfucker.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nWith a final nod, Jorgensen turned and began to trot back toward the camp, torch held high. In moments, his form was swallowed away as he dove through the swarm. Just the bobbing light of his torch illuminated his progress, then even that vanished amid the dense mass of swirling insects.\n\n\"Move out!\" Carrera said.\n\nThe group turned and once again headed down the trail. Manny prayed the corporal succeeded. With a final glance behind him, Manny followed the others.\n\nJorgensen rushed through the swarm. With only his single torch protecting him, the swarm grew tighter. He was stung a few times by bolder bugs, but he ignored the discomfort. A Ranger went through vigorous training programs across a multitude of terrains: mountains, jungles, swamps, snow, desert.\n\nBut never this...never a goddamn cloud of carnivorous bugs!\n\nWith his weapon on his shoulder, he shrugged his pack higher on his back, both to make it easier to run and to shield him from the swarm overhead.\n\nThough he should have been panicked, an odd surge of zeal fired his blood. This was why he had volunteered for the Rangers, to test his mettle and to experience balls-out action. How many farm boys from the backwaters of Minnesota had a chance to do this?\n\nHe thrust his torch forward and forged ahead. \"Fuck you!\" he yelled at the locusts.\n\nFocusing on the abandoned campfire as a beacon, Jorgensen worked across the dizzying landscape of whirling bugs. Smoke from his torch wafted around him, redolent with the burning powder. He circled around the Brazil nut tree and headed toward where the Ban-ali's burning signature had been set in the forest.\n\nHalf blind, he ran past the site before realizing it and doubled back. He fell to his knees beside the spot. \"Thank God.\"\n\nJorgensen planted his torch in the soft loam, then leaned over and swept free the dirt and scrabbling bugs from the buried resinous compound. Locusts lay thick over this site. Several bites stung his hand as he brushed them away. Leaning close, the residual fumes from the oil filled his nostrils, bitter and sharp. The professor was right. It certainly attracted the buggers.\n\nWorking quickly, Jorgensen continued to uncover the original marker. He didn't know how much of the black oil should be lit to keep the swarm's attention here, but he wasn't taking any chances. He didn't want to have to return a second time. Crawling on his knees, his hands sticky with the black resin, he worked around the site. He soon had at least half of the serpentine pattern exposed.\n\nSatisfied, he sat back, pulled free a butane lighter, and flicked a flame. He lowered the lighter to the oil. \"C'mon...burn, baby.\"\n\nHis wish was granted. The oil caught fire, flames racing down the twists and curls of the exposed symbol. In fact, the ignition was so fiercely combustible that the first flames caught him off guard, burning his fingers.\n\nJorgensen dropped the lighter and pulled his hand away, his fingers on fire. \"Shit!\" The smattering of sticky oil on his hand had caught the flames. \"Shit!\"\n\nHe rolled to the side and shoved his hands into the loose dirt to stanch the fire. As he did so, his elbow accidentally struck the planted bamboo torch, knocking it into a nearby bush, casting embers in a fiery arc. Jorgensen swore and snatched at the torch--but he was too late. The powder stored in the hollow top of the bamboo had scattered into the dirt and bush, sizzling out. The top of the torch still glowed crimson, but it was no longer smoking.\n\nJorgensen sprang to his feet.\n\nBehind him, the symbol of the Ban-ali flamed brightly, calling the swarm to its meal.\n\n\"Oh, God!\"\n\nKelly heard the first scream, a horrible sound that froze everyone in place.\n\n\"Jorgensen...\" Private Carrera said, swinging around.\n\nKelly stepped beside the Ranger.\n\n\"We can't go back,\" Zane said, shifting further down the trail.\n\nA second scream, bone-chilling, garbled, echoed from the forest.\n\nKelly noticed the swarm of locusts whisk from around them, retreating back toward the original campsite. \"They're leaving!\"\n\nProfessor Kouwe spoke at her shoulder. \"The corporal must have succeeded in relighting the symbol.\"\n\nBy now, the agonized cries were constant, prolonged, bestial. No human could scream like that.\n\n\"We have to go help him,\" Manny said.\n\nCarrera clicked on a flashlight in her free hand. She pointed it back toward the campsite. Fifty yards away, the condensed swarm was so thick, the trees themselves were invisible, swallowed by the black cloud. \"There's not enough time,\" she said softly and lifted her own bamboo torch. It was already sputtering. \"We don't know how long a distraction Jorgensen has bought us.\"\n\nManny turned to her. \"We could at least still try. He might be alive.\"\n\nAs if hearing him, the distant cries died away.\n\nCarrera glanced to him and shook her head.\n\n\"Look!\" Anna called out, pointing her arm.\n\nOff to the left, a figure stumbled out of the swarm.\n\nCarrera pointed her flashlight. \"Jorgensen!\"\n\nKelly gasped and covered her mouth.\n\nThe man was impossible to identify, covered from crown to ankle with crawling locusts. His arms were out, waving, blind. His legs wobbled, and he tripped in the underbrush, falling to his knees. All the while, he remained eerily silent. Only his arms stretched out for help.\n\nManny took a step in the man's direction, but Carrera held him back.\n\nThe swarm rolled back over the kneeling man, swallowing him.\n\n\"It's too late,\" Carrera said. \"And we're all running out of time.\" Punctuating her statement, her own torch cast a final sputter of fiery ash, then dimmed. \"We need to get as far from here as possible before we lose our advantage.\"\n\n\"But--\" Manny began.\n\nHe was cut off by a hard stare from the Ranger. Her words were even harder. \"I won't have Jorgensen's sacrifice be meaningless.\" She pointed toward the deeper wood. \"Move out!\"\n\nKelly glanced back as they headed away. The swarm remained behind them, a featureless black cloud. But at its heart was a man who had given his life to save them all. Tears filled her eyes. Her legs were numb with exhaustion and despair, her heart heavy.\n\nDespite the loss of the corporal, one thought, one face remained foremost in Kelly's mind. Her daughter needed her. Her mind roiled with flashes of her child in bed, burning with fever. I'll get back to you, baby, she promised silently.\n\nBut deep in her heart, she now wondered if it was a pact she could keep. With each step deeper into the forest, more men died. Graves, DeMartini, Conger, Jones...and now Jorgensen...\n\nShe shook her head, refusing to give up hope. As long as she was alive, putting one foot in front of the other, she would find a way home.\n\nOver the next hour, the group forged through the forest, following the path the other half of their team had taken the previous afternoon. One by one, their torches flickered out. Flashlights were passed around. So far, no sign of renewed pursuit by the swarm manifested. Maybe they were safe, beyond the interest of the blind locusts, but no one voiced such a hope aloud.\n\nManny marched close to the Ranger. \"What if we miss the other team?\" he asked softly. \"Jorgensen had our radio equipment. It was our only way of contacting the outside world.\"\n\nKelly hadn't considered this fact. With the radio gone, they were cut off.\n\n\"We'll reach the others,\" Carrera said with a steely determination.\n\nNo one argued with her. No one wanted to.\n\nThey marched onward through the dark jungle, concentrating on just moving forward. As hours ticked by, the tension blended into a blur of bone-weary exhaustion and endless fear. Their passage was marked with hoots and strange cries. Everyone's ears were pricked for the telltale buzz of the locusts.\n\nSo they were all startled when the small personal radio hanging from Private Carrera's field jacket squawked with static and a few scratchy words. \"This is...if you can hear...radio range...\"\n\nEveryone swung to face the Ranger, eyes wide. She pulled her radio's microphone from her helmet to her mouth. \"This is Private Carrera. Can you hear me? Over.\"\n\nThere was a long pause, then... \"Read you, Carrera. Warczak here. What's your status?\"\n\nThe Ranger quickly related the events in a dispassionate and professional manner. But Kelly saw how the soldier's fingers trembled as she held the microphone to her lips. She finished, \"We're following your trail. Hoping to rendezvous with the main team in two hours.\"\n\nCorporal Warczak responded, \"Roger that. Dr. Rand and I are already under way to meet you. Over and out.\"\n\nThe Ranger closed her eyes and sighed loudly. \"We're gonna be okay,\" she whispered to no one in particular.\n\nAs the others murmured in relief, Kelly stared out at the dark jungle.\n\nOut here in the Amazon, they were all far from okay."
            },
            {
                "title": "Blood Jaguars",
                "text": "\u2002HORSETAIL\n\n\u2002family: Equisetaceae\n\n\u2002genus: Equisetum\n\n\u2002species: Arvense\n\n\u2002common name: Field Horsetail\n\n\u2002ethnic names: At Quyroughi, Atkuyrugu, Chieh Hsu Ts'Ao, Cola de Caballo, Equiseto Menor, Kilkah Asb, Prele, Sugina, Thanab al Khail, Vara de Oro, Wen Ching\n\n\u2002properties/actions: Astringent, Antiinflammatory, Diuretic, Antihemorrhagic"
            },
            {
                "title": "Lake Crossing",
                "text": "AUGUST 15, 8:11 A.M.\n\n[ INSTAR INSTITUTE ]\n\n[ LANGLEY, VIRGINIA ]\n\nLauren slid the magnetic security card through the lock on her office door and entered. It was the first chance she'd had to return to her office in the past day. Between stretches in the institute's hospital ward visiting Jessie and meetings with various MEDEA members, she hadn't had a moment to herself. The only reason she had this free moment was that Jessie seemed to be doing very well. Her temperature continued to remain normal, and her attitude was growing brighter with every passing hour.\n\nCautiously optimistic, Lauren began to hope that her initial diagnosis had been mistaken. Maybe Jessie did not have the jungle disease. Lauren was now glad she had kept silent about her fears. She could have needlessly panicked Marshall and Kelly. Lauren may have indeed placed too much confidence in Alvisio's statistical model. But she could not fault the epidemiologist. Dr. Alvisio had indeed warned her his results were far from conclusive. Further data would need to be collected and correlated.\n\nBut then again, that pretty much defined all the current levels of investigation. Each day, as the disease spread through Florida and the southern states, thousands of theories were bandied about: etiological agents, therapeutic protocols, diagnostic parameters, quarantine guidelines. Instar had become the nation's think tank on this contagion. It was their job to ferret through the maze of scientific conjecture and fanciful epidemiological models to glean the pearls from the rubbish. It was a daunting task as data flowed in from all corners of the country. But they had the best minds here.\n\nLauren collapsed into her seat and flicked on her computer. The chime for incoming mail sounded. She groaned as she slipped on a pair of reading glasses and leaned closer to the screen. Three hundred and fourteen messages waited. And this was just her private mailbox. She scrolled down the list of addresses and skimmed the subject lines, searching through the little snippets for anything important or interesting.\n\n- jpcdvm@davis.uc.org - re: simian biosimilarities\n\n- trent_magnus@scriabs.com - call for sample standardization\n\n- systematica@cdc.gov - prog. report\n\n- xreynolds@largebio.com - large scale biological labs\n\n- synergymeds@phdrugs.com - pharmacy question\n\n- gerard@dadecounty.fl.gov - quarantine projection\n\n- hrt@washingtonpost.org - request for interview\n\nAs she scrolled down, one name caught her eye. It was oddly familiar, but she could not remember exactly why. She brought her computer's pointer to the name: Large Scale Biological Labs. She crinkled her nose in thought, then it came to her. The night Jessie's fever developed, she had been paged by this same outfit. Well after midnight, she recalled. But the sick child had distracted her from following up on the page.\n\nIt probably wasn't important, but she opened the e-mail anyway, her curiosity now aroused. The letter appeared on the screen. Dr. Xavier Reynolds. She smiled, instantly recognizing the name. He had been a grad student of hers years ago and had taken a position at some lab in California, perhaps this same lab. The young man had been one of her best students. Lauren had attempted to recruit him into the MEDEA group here at Instar, but he had declined. His fiance had accepted an associate professorship at Berkeley, and he had naturally not wanted to be separated.\n\nShe read his note. As she did, the smile on her lips slowly faded.\n\n\u2002From: xreynolds@largebio.com\n\n\u2002Date: 14 Aug 13:48:28\n\n\u2002To: lauren_obrien@instar.org\n\n\u2002Subject: Large Scale Biological Labs\n\n\u2002Dr. O'Brien:\n\n\u2002Please excuse this intrusion. I attempted to page you last night, but I assume you're very busy. So I'll keep this brief.\n\n\u2002As with many labs around the country, our own is involved in researching the virulent disease, and I think I've come across an intriguing angle, if not a possible answer to the root puzzle: What is causing the disease? But before voicing my findings, I wanted to get your input.\n\n\u2002As head of the proteonomic team here at Large Scale Biological Labs, I have been attempting to index mankind's protein genome, similar to the Human Genome Project for DNA. As such, my take on the disease was to investigate it backward. Most disease-causing agents-bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites-do not cause illness by themselves. It is the proteins they produce that trigger clinical disease. So I hunted for a unique protein that might be common to all patients.\n\n\u2002And I found one! But from its folded and twisted pattern, a new thought arose. This new protein bears a striking similarity to the protein that causes bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Which in turn raises the question: Have we been chasing the wrong tail in pursuing a viral cause for this disease?\n\n\u2002Has anyone considered a prion as the cause?\n\n\u2002For your consideration, I've modeled the protein below.\n\n\u2002Title: unknown prion (?)\n\n\u2002Compound: folded protein w/ double terminal alpha helixes\n\n\u2002Model:\n\n\u2002Exp. Method: X-ray diffraction\n\n\u2002EC Number: 3.4.1.18\n\n\u2002Source: Patient #24-b12, Anawak Tribe, lower Amazon\n\n\u2002Resolution: 2.00 R-Value: 0.145\n\n\u2002Space Group: P21 20 21\n\n\u2002Unit cell:\n\n\u2002dim: a 60.34 b 52.02 c 44.68\n\n\u2002angles: alpha 90.00 beta 90.00 gamma 90.00\n\n\u2002Polymer chains: 156L Residues: 144\n\n\u2002Atoms: 1286\n\n\u2002So there you have the twisted puzzle. As I value your expertise, Dr. O'Brien, I would appreciate your thoughts, opinions, or judgments before promoting this radical theory.\n\n\u2002Sincerely,\n\n\u2002Xavier Reynolds, Ph.D.\n\n\"A prion.\" Lauren touched the diagram of the molecule. Could this indeed be the cause?\n\nShe pondered the possibility. The word prion was scientific shorthand for \"proteinaceous infectious particle.\" The role of prions in disease had only been documented within the last decade, earning a U.S. biochemist the 1997 Nobel Prize. Prion proteins were found in all creatures, from humans down to single-celled yeast. Though usually innocuous, they had an insidious duality to their molecular structure, a Jekyll-and-Hyde sort of thing. In one form, they were safe and friendly to a cell. But the same protein could fold and twist upon itself, creating a monster that wreaked havoc on cellular processes. And the effect was cumulative. Once a twisted prion was introduced into a host, it would begin converting the body's other proteins to match, which in turn converted its neighbors, spreading exponentially through the host's systems. Worse, this host could also pass the process to another body, a true infectious phenomenon.\n\nPrion diseases had been documented both in animals and man: from scabies in sheep to Creutsfeldt-Jacob disease in humans. The most well-known prion disease to date was one that crossed between species. Dr. Reynolds had mentioned it in his letter: bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or more commonly, mad cow disease.\n\nBut these human diseases were more of a degenerative nature, and none were known to be transmitted so readily. Still, that did not rule out prions as a possibility here. She had read research papers on prions and their role in genetic mutations and more severe manifestations. Was something like that happening here? And what about airborne transmission? Prions were particulate and subviral in size, so since certain viruses could be airborne, why not certain prions?\n\nLauren stared at the modeled protein on the computer screen and reached for her desk phone. As she dialed, an icy finger ran up her spine. She prayed her former student was mistaken.\n\nThe phone rang on the other end, and after a moment, it was answered. \"Dr. Reynolds, proteonomics lab.\"\n\n\"Xavier?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"This is Dr. O'Brien.\"\n\n\"Dr. O'Brien!\" The man began talking animatedly, thanking her, thrilled.\n\nShe cut him off. \"Xavier, tell me more about this protein of yours.\" She needed as much information from him as possible, the sooner the better. If there was even a minute possibility that Dr. Reynolds was correct...\n\nLauren bit back a shudder as she stared at the crablike molecule on her computer monitor. There was one other fact she knew about prion-triggered diseases.\n\nThere were no known cures.\n\n[ 9:18 A.M. ]\n\n[ AMAZON JUNGLE ]\n\nNate looked over Olin Pasternak's shoulder. The CIA's communications expert was growing ever more frustrated with the satellite computer system. Beads of sweat bulleted his forehead, both from the morning's steaming heat and his own consternation.\n\n\"Still no feed...goddamn it!\" Olin chewed his lower lip, eyes squinting.\n\n\"Keep trying,\" Frank urged on the other side.\n\nNate glanced to Kelly, who stood beside her brother. Her eyes were haunted and dull. Nate had heard various versions of last night's attack: the strange swarm of giant locusts attracted to the camp by the burning Ban-ali marker. It was too horrible to imagine, impossible, but Jorgensen's death made it all too real.\n\nOnce the entire group had been reassembled at the swamp-side camp last night, the Ranger team had remained on guard. The group kept a posted watch throughout the night, in and around the surrounding forest, alert for any danger, watchful for any flare of flames, ears keened for the whine of locusts. But nothing happened. The few hours until dawn had been uneventful.\n\nAs soon as the communication satellite was in range, Olin had set about trying to reach the States and to relay messages to the Wauwai field base. It was vital to radio the change in plans to all parties. With unknown hunters dogging their trail, it was decided to continue with the goal of rafting across the swamp. Captain Waxman hoped to get a couple of days' jump on his pursuers, leave their trackers traipsing around the swamp on foot. Once across, Waxman would keep a constant watch on the waters for any Ban-ali canoes and keep the group intact on the far shore until the evac helicopter could arrive. He planned to trade each civilian with another Ranger from the field base at the mission. With these new forces, he would continue on Gerald Clark's trail.\n\nThere was only one problem with his plan.\n\n\"I'm gonna have to rip the laptop down to the mother-board,\" Olin said. \"Something is damnably fritzed. Maybe a faulty chip or even a loose one knocked out of place by the manhandling these past two days. I don't know. I'll have to tear it down and check it all.\"\n\nWaxman had been speaking with his staff sergeant, but he overheard Olin. The captain stepped nearer. \"We don't have time for that. The third raft is ready, and it'll take a good four hours to cross the waters. We need to get moving.\"\n\nNate glanced to the swamp's edge and saw four Rangers positioning the newly constructed raft so that it floated beside the two prepared last night. The additional raft was necessary to carry everyone in their expanded party.\n\nOlin hovered over his computer and satellite dish with a small screwdriver. \"But I've not been able to reach anyone. They won't know where we are.\" He wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist. His features were pale.\n\nZane stood, shifting his feet uneasily and rubbing at a Band-Aid on his cheek that covered a locust bite. \"We could send someone back and retrieve Jorgensen's pack with the military radio,\" he suggested.\n\nEveryone began talking at once, arguing both sides.\n\n\"We'd lose another day waiting.\" \"We'd risk more of our people.\" \"We need to reach someone!\" \"Who knows if his radio will even work, what with all those locusts. They could've chewed through the wiring and--\"\n\nWaxman interrupted, his voice booming. \"There is no reason to panic!\" He directed his comment to all of them. \"Even if we can't raise the outside, the field base knows our rough location from yesterday's report. When the Brazilian evac copter comes tomorrow as previously arranged, we'll hear it--even from across the swamp. We can send up orange smoke flares to draw their attention to our new location.\"\n\nNate nodded. He had not participated in the argument. In his mind, there was only one way to go--forward.\n\nWaxman pointed to Olin. \"Pack it up. You can work on the problem once we're on the far side.\"\n\nResigned, Olin nodded. He returned his tiny screwdriver to his repair kit.\n\nWith the matter settled, the others dispersed to gather their own gear, readying for the day's journey.\n\n\"At least we won't have to walk,\" Manny said, patting Nate on the shoulder as he passed on his way to wake Tor-tor. The jaguar was asleep under a palm, oblivious to the world after last night's trek.\n\nNate stretched a kink from his neck and approached Professor Kouwe. The Indian shaman stood near the swamp, smoking his pipe. His eyes were as haunted as Kelly's had been. When Nate and Corporal Warczak had met the fleeing group on the trail, the professor had been unusually quiet and somber, more than could be attributed to the loss of Jorgensen.\n\nNate stood silently beside his old friend, studying the lake, too.\n\nAfter a time, Kouwe spoke softly, not looking at Nate. \"They sent the locusts...the Ban-ali...\" The shaman shook his head. \"They wiped out the Yanomamo tribe with the piranha creatures. I've never seen anything like it. It's as if the Blood Jaguar tribe could indeed control the jungle. And if that myth is true, what else?\" He shook his head again.\n\n\"What's troubling you?\"\n\n\"I've been a professor of Indian Studies for close to two decades. I grew up in these jungles.\" His voice grew quiet, full of pain. \"I should have known...the corporal...his screams...\"\n\nNate glanced to Kouwe and placed a hand on the man's shoulder. \"Professor, you saved everyone with the tok-tok powder.\"\n\n\"Not everyone.\" Kouwe drew on his pipe and exhaled. \"I should've thought to relight the Ban-ali symbol before we left the camp. If I had, the young corporal would be alive.\"\n\nNate spoke sharply, trying to cut through the man's remorse and guilt. \"You're being too hard on yourself. No amount of study or experience could prepare you to deal with the Ban-ali and their biological attacks. Nothing like it has ever been documented before.\"\n\nKouwe nodded, but Nate sensed that the man was hardly convinced.\n\nCaptain Waxman called from near the water's edge. \"Let's load up! Five to a raft!\" He began assigning Rangers and dividing the civilians accordingly.\n\nNate ended up with Kouwe and Manny, along with Tor-tor. Their two mates were Corporal Okamoto and Private Carrera. The group was forced to wade through the shallows to reach the bamboo-and-log constructions. As Nate heaved himself onboard, he appreciated its sturdy construction. Reaching out, Nate helped Manny guide the large cat atop the bobbing raft.\n\nTor-tor was not pleased about getting wet. As the cat shook the swamp water from its pelt, the rest of the group mounted their own boats.\n\nOn the neighboring raft, Kelly and Frank stood with Captain Waxman, along with corporals Warczak and Yamir. The last five teammates climbed onto the farthest raft. Olin was careful to carry his pack with the satellite gear high above his head. Richard Zane and Anna Fong helped him aboard, flanked by a stoic Tom Graves and a scowling Sergeant Kostos.\n\nOnce everyone was mounted, lengths of bamboo were used as poles to push away from shore and through the shallows. But the swamp's banks dropped steeply. Within a hundred feet of the shore, the poles no longer touched bottom, and the paddles were taken up. With four paddles per raft, it allowed one person to rotate out and rest. The goal was to continue straight across without a break.\n\nNate manned the raft's starboard side as the tiny flotilla slowly drifted toward the far bank. Out on the waters, the distant roar of multiple waterfalls, muffled and threatening, echoed over the swamp lake. Nate stared, shading his eyes. The highlands across the way remained shrouded in mist: a mix of green jungle, red cliffs, and a fog of heavy spray. Their goal was a narrow ravine between two towering, flat-topped mesas, a yawning misty channel into the highlands. It had been where Clark's last carved message had pointed.\n\nAs they glided, the denizens of the swamp noted their passage. A snow-white egret skimmed over the water, a hand span above the surface. Frogs leaped from boggy hummocks with loud splashes, and hoatzin birds, looking like some ugly cross between a turkey and a pterodactyl, screeched at them as they circled over their nests atop the palms that grew from the island hummocks. The only inhabitants that seemed pleased with their presence were the clouds of mosquitoes, buzzing with joy at the floating smorgasbord.\n\n\"Damned bugs,\" Manny griped, slapping his neck. \"I've had it with flying insects making a meal out of me.\"\n\nTo make matters even worse, Okamoto began to whistle again, tunelessly and without the vaguest sense of rhythm.\n\nNate sighed. It would be a long trip.\n\nAfter an hour, the little muddy islands vanished around them. In the swamp's center, the water was deep enough to drown away most of the tiny bits of land and jungle. Only an occasional hummock, mostly bare of trees, dotted the smooth expanse of the swamp's heart.\n\nHere the sun, scorching and bright, shone incessantly down on them.\n\n\"It's like a steam bath,\" Carrera said from the raft's port side.\n\nNate had to agree. The air was thick with moisture, almost too heavy to breathe. Their speed across the swamp slowed as exhaustion set in. Canteens were passed around and around the raft. Even Tor-tor lounged in the middle of the bamboo planking, his mouth open, panting.\n\nThe only consolation was being temporarily free of the jungle's snug embrace. Here the horizons opened up, and there was a giddy sense of escape. Nate glanced frequently back the way they had come, expecting to see a tribesman on the bank back there, shaking a fist. But there remained no sign of the Ban-ali. The trackers of the ghost tribe remained hidden. Hopefully the group was leaving them behind and getting a few days head start on their pursuers.\n\nNate was tapped on the shoulder. \"I'll take a shift,\" Kouwe said, emptying his pipe's bowl of tobacco ash into the water.\n\n\"I'm okay,\" Nate said.\n\nKouwe reached and took the paddle. \"I'm not an invalid yet.\"\n\nNate didn't argue any further and slid to the raft's stern. As he lounged, he watched their old campsite get smaller and smaller. He reached back for the canteen and caught movement to the right of their raft. One of the bare hummocks, rocky and black, was sinking, submerging so slowly that not a ripple was created.\n\nWhat the hell?\n\nOff to the left another was sinking. Nate climbed to his feet. As he began to comment on this unusual phenomenon, one of the rocky islands opened a large glassy eye and stared back at him. Instantly Nate knew what he was seeing.\n\n\"Oh, crap!\"\n\nWith his attention focused, he now recognized the armored scales and craggy countenance of a crocodilian head. It was a caiman! A pair of giants. Each head had to be four feet wide from eye to eye. If its head was that big...\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Private Carrera asked.\n\nNate pointed to where the second of the two caimans was just slipping under the surface.\n\n\"What is it?\" the Ranger asked, eyes wide, as confused as Nate had been a moment before.\n\n\"Caimans,\" Nate said, his voice hoarse with shock. \"Giant ones!\"\n\nBy now, his entire raft had stopped paddling. The others stared at him.\n\nNate raised his voice, yelling so all three rafts could hear him. He waved his arms in the air. \"Spread out! We're about to be attacked!\"\n\n\"From what?\" Captain Waxman called from his raft, about fifty yards away. \"What did you see?\"\n\nAs answer, something huge slid between Nate's boat and its neighbor, nudging both rafts and spinning them ever so slightly. Through the swamp's murk, the twin lines of tail ridges were readily evident as the beast slid sinuously past.\n\nNate was familiar with this behavior. It was called bumping. The kings of the caimans, the great blacks, were not carrion eaters. They liked to kill their own food. It was why drifting motionless could often protect someone from the predators. Often they would bump something that they considered a meal, testing to see if it would move.\n\nThey had just been bumped.\n\nDistantly, the third raft suddenly bobbed and turned. The second caiman was also testing these strange intruders.\n\nNate yelled again, revising his initial plan. \"Don't move! No one paddle! You'll attract them to attack!\"\n\nWaxman reinforced his order. \"Do as he says! Weapon up. Grenades hot!\"\n\nManny now crouched beside Nate, his voice hushed with awe. \"It had to be at least a hundred feet long, over three times larger than any known caiman.\"\n\nCarrera had her M-16 rifle in hand and was quickly fitting on her grenade launcher. \"No wonder Gerald Clark circled around the swamp.\"\n\nOkamoto finished prepping his rifle, kissed the crucifix around his neck, then nodded to Professor Kouwe. \"I pray you have another one of your magical powders up your sleeve.\"\n\nThe shaman shook his head, eyes wide, unblinking. \"I pray you're all good shots.\"\n\nOkamoto glanced at Nate.\n\nNate explained, \"With their armored body plating, the only sure kill shot is the eye.\"\n\n\"No, there's also through the upper palate,\" Manny added, pointing a finger toward the roof of his mouth. \"But to take that shot, you'd have to be damn close.\"\n\n\"Starboard side!\" Carrera barked, kneeling with her rifle on her shoulder.\n\nA rippling line disturbed the flat waters, ominous and long.\n\n\"Don't take a shot unless you're sure,\" Nate hissed, dropping beside her. \"You could provoke it. Only shoot if you've got a kill shot.\"\n\nWith everyone dead quiet, Waxman heard Nate's warning. \"Listen to Dr. Rand. Shoot if you have a chance--but make it count!\"\n\nRifles bristled around the periphery of each raft. Nate grabbed up his shotgun with one hand. They all waited, baking in the heat, sweat dripping into eyes, mouths drying. Around and around, the caimans circled, leaving no sign of their passage but ripples. Occasionally a raft would be bumped, tested.\n\n\"How long can they hold their breath?\" Carrera asked.\n\n\"Hours,\" Nate said.\n\n\"Why aren't they attacking?\" Okamoto asked.\n\nManny answered this question. \"They can't figure out what we are, if we're edible.\"\n\nThe Asian Ranger looked sick. \"Let's hope they don't find out.\"\n\nThe waiting stretched. The air seemed to grow thicker around them.\n\n\"What if we shot a grenade far from here?\" Carrera offered. \"As a distraction, something to draw them off.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure it would help. It might just rile them up, get them snapping at anything that moves, like us.\"\n\nZane spoke from the farthest raft, but his words easily reached Nate's boat. \"I say we strap some explosives to that jaguar and push it overboard. When one of the crocodiles goes for the cat, we trigger the bomb.\"\n\nNate shuddered at this idea. Manny looked sick. But other eyes were glancing their way with contemplative expressions.\n\n\"Even if you succeeded in doing that, you'd only kill one of them,\" Nate said. \"The other, clearly its mate, would go into a rampage and attack the rafts. Our best bet is to hope the pair loses interest in us and drifts away, then we can paddle out of here.\"\n\nWaxman turned to Corporal Yamir, the demolition expert. \"In case the crocodiles don't get bored, let's be prepared to entertain them. Prime up a pair of the napalm bombs.\"\n\nThe corporal nodded and turned to his pack.\n\nOnce again, the waiting game began. Time stretched.\n\nNate felt the raft tremble under his knees as one of the pair rubbed the underside of the logs with its thick tail. \"Hang on!\"\n\nSuddenly the raft bucked under them. The stern was tossed high in the air. The group clung like spiders to the bamboo. Loose packs rolled into the lake with distinct splashes. The raft crashed back to the water, jarring them all.\n\n\"Is everyone okay?\" Nate yelled.\n\nMurmurs of assent rose.\n\n\"I lost my rifle,\" Okamoto said, his eyes angry.\n\n\"Better your gun than you,\" Kouwe said dolefully.\n\nNate raised his voice. \"They're getting bolder!\"\n\nOkamoto reached out to one of their floating packs. \"My gear.\"\n\nNate saw what he was doing. \"Corporal! Stop!\"\n\nOkamoto immediately froze. \"Shit...\" He already had the strap of his rucksack in hand, half pulled out of the water.\n\n\"Leave it,\" Nate said. \"Get away from the edge.\"\n\nThe corporal released his pack with a slight splash and yanked his arm back.\n\nBut he moved too slowly.\n\nThe monster lunged up out of the depths, jaws open, water sluicing from its scales. It shot ten feet out of the swamp, a tower of armor plating and teeth as long as a man's forearm. The Ranger was pulled off his feet and shoved high into the air, screaming in shock and terror. The huge jaws clamped shut with an audible crunch of bones. Okamoto's scream changed in pitch to pain and disbelief. His body was shaken like a rag doll, legs flailing. Then the creature's bulk dropped back into the depths.\n\n\"Fire!\" Waxman called.\n\nNate had been too stunned to move. Carrera blazed with her M-16. Bullets peppered the underside of the giant, prehistoric caiman, but its yellowed belly scales were as hard as Kevlar. Even at almost point-blank range, it looked like little harm was done. Its weak points, the eyes, were hidden on the far side of its bulk.\n\nNate swung up his own shotgun, stretched his arm over Manny's head, and fired. A load of pellet sprayed through the empty air as the beast dropped out of range. A wasted, panicked shot.\n\nThe caiman was gone. Okamoto was gone.\n\nEveryone was frozen in shock.\n\nNate's raft bobbed in the wake of the creature's passing. He stared out at the spot where the Ranger had vanished, Okamoto with his damn whistling. A red stain bubbled up from below.\n\nBlood on the water...now the monsters know there's food here.\n\nKelly crouched with her brother in the center of their raft. Captain Waxman and Corporal Warczak knelt with their weapons ready. Yamir was finalizing his prep on two black bombs, each the size of a flat dinner plate with an electronic timer/receiver atop it. The demolitions expert leaned back. \"Done,\" he said with a nod to his captain.\n\n\"Retrieve your weapon,\" Waxman said. \"Be ready.\"\n\nYamir picked up his M-16 rifle and took up watch on his side of the raft.\n\nA splintering crash sounded behind them. Kelly swung around in time to see the third raft in their flotilla knocked high into the air, the same as Nate's raft had done a moment before. But this time, its occupants were not as lucky. Anna Fong, her grip broken, went flying, catapulted through the air by the sudden attack. The anthropologist struck the water at the same time the raft crashed back down. Zane and Olin had managed to cling to the raft, as had Sergeant Kostos and Corporal Graves.\n\nAnna popped to the surface, coughing and choking on water. She was only yards from the raft.\n\n\"Don't move, Anna!\" Nate called. \"Tuck your arms and legs together and float.\"\n\nShe clearly tried to obey, but her pack, waterlogged, dragged her underwater unless she kicked to keep herself afloat. Her eyes were white with panic; both the fear of drowning and the fear of what lurked in the waters shone bright in her eyes.\n\nMovement drew her attention back to the assaulted raft. Sergeant Kostos was leaning out with one of the long bamboo poles that they had used to propel themselves away from shore.\n\n\"Grab on!\" Kostos called to her.\n\nAnna reached to the bamboo, fingers scrabbling for a moment, then clinging.\n\n\"I'm gonna pull you toward the raft.\"\n\n\"No!\" she moaned.\n\nNate again called. \"Anna, it should be okay as long as you don't make any sudden moves. Kostos, pull her very slowly toward you. Try not to raise a ripple.\"\n\nKelly trembled. Frank put his arm around her.\n\nEver so slowly, the sergeant drew Anna back to the raft.\n\n\"Good, good...\" Nate mumbled in a tense mantra.\n\nThen, behind Anna, an armored snout appeared, just the nose, its eyes hidden underwater still.\n\n\"No one shoot!\" Nate called. \"Don't rile it!\"\n\nGuns pointed, but there was no kill shot anyway.\n\nKostos had stopped pulling on the bamboo with the appearance of the caiman. No one moved.\n\nA moan flowed from the woman in the water.\n\nEver so slowly the snout inched forward, rising slightly as its massive jaws yawned open.\n\nKostos was forced to slowly draw Anna toward him, keeping her just a couple of feet ahead of the approaching monster.\n\n\"Careful!\" Nate called.\n\nIt was like some macabre slow-motion chase...and they were losing.\n\nThe snout of the creature was now less than a foot from the woman, the jaws gaping open behind her head. There was no way Anna could be pulled aboard without the creature attacking.\n\nSomeone else came to this same realization.\n\nCorporal Graves ran across their raft and leaped over Anna's head like an Olympic long jumper.\n\n\"Graves!\" Kostos yelled.\n\nThe corporal landed atop the creature's open snout, driving its jaws closed and shoving it underwater.\n\n\"Pull her aboard!\" Graves hollered as he was sucked under by the caiman.\n\nKostos yanked Anna back to the raft and Olin helped haul her on board.\n\nA moment later, the beast reared up out of the water, Graves still clinging to the top of its wide head. The caiman thrashed, trying to dislodge its strange rider. Its jaws reared open, and a bellow of rage escaped from it.\n\n\"Fuck you!\" Graves said. \"This is for my brother!\" Clinging fast with his legs, he yanked something from his field jacket and tossed it down the beast's gullet.\n\nA grenade.\n\nThe massive jaws snapped at the Ranger, but he was out of reach.\n\n\"Everybody down!\" Waxman bellowed.\n\nGraves leaped from his perch, aiming for the raft, a shout on his lips. \"Chew on that, you bastard!\"\n\nBehind him, the explosion ripped through the silent swamp. The head of the caiman blew apart, shredded by shrapnel.\n\nGraves flew through the air, a roar of triumph flowing from his lips.\n\nThen up from the depths shot the other caiman. Jaws wide, it lunged at the flying corporal, snatching him out of midair, like a dog catching a tossed ball, then crashed away, taking its prey with it. It had all happened in seconds.\n\nThe bulk of the slain caiman slowly rose to the surface of the lake, belly up, exposing the gray and yellow scaling of its underside.\n\nThe slack body of the huge creature was nudged from below. Ripples slowly circled it as the large beast was examined by the survivor.\n\n\"Maybe it'll leave,\" Frank said. \"Maybe the other's death will spook it away.\"\n\nKelly knew this wouldn't happen. These creatures had to be hundreds and hundreds of years old. Mates for life, the only pair of its kind sharing this ecosystem.\n\nThe ripples faded. The lake grew quiet again.\n\nEveryone kept eyes fixed on the waters around them, holding their breath or wheezing tensely. Minutes stretched. The sun baked everyone.\n\n\"Where did it go?\" Zane whispered, hovering beside his ashen colleague. Anna, soaked and terrified, just trembled.\n\n\"Maybe it did leave,\" Frank mumbled.\n\nThe trio of rafts, rudderless, slowly drifted alongside the bulk of the dead monster. Nate's boat was on the far side of the body. Kelly met his eye. He nodded, trying to convey calm assurance, but even the experienced jungle man looked scared. Behind him, the jaguar crouched beside its master, hackles raised.\n\nFrank shifted his legs slightly. \"It must have fled. Maybe--\"\n\nKelly sensed it a moment before it struck: a sudden welling of the water under their raft. \"Hang on!\"\n\n\"What--\"\n\nThe raft exploded under them--not just bumped up, but driven skyward. Shattering up from the center of the raft jammed the massive armored snout of the angered caiman.\n\nKelly flew, tumbling through the air. She caught glimpses of the others falling amid the rain of bamboo and packs. \"Frank!\" Her brother splashed on the far side of the monster.\n\nThen she hit the water--hard, on her stomach. The wind was knocked out of her. She spluttered up, remembering Nate's warning to remain as still as possible. She glanced up in time to see a chunk of the raft's log dropping through the air toward her face.\n\nDodging, she missed a fatal blow, but the edge of the flying log clipped the side of her head. She collapsed backward, driven underwater, darkness swallowing her away.\n\nFrom the far side of the dead caiman's bulk, Nate watched Kelly get hit by debris and go under--dead or unconscious, he didn't know. All around the ruined raft, people, packs, and bits of debris floated. \"Float as still as possible!\" Nate called out, frantically searching for what had happened to Kelly.\n\nThe caiman had vanished underwater again.\n\n\"Kelly!\" Frank called.\n\nHis sister bobbed to the surface on the far side of the debris field. She was facedown in the water, limp.\n\nNate hesitated. Was she dead? Then he saw one arm move, flailing weakly. Alive! But for how long? As dazed as she was by the blow, she risked drowning.\n\n\"Damn it!\" He searched for some plan, some way to rescue her. Just beyond her body was one of the small hummocks of land with a single large mangrove tree sprouting up from it. Its thick trunk sprang from a tangle of exposed buttress roots, then fanned out into a branched canopy hanging over the waters. If Kelly could reach there...\n\nA shout arose from the waters, drawing back his attention. The caiman's head appeared, rising like a submarine amid the debris. A large eye studied its surroundings. Shots were fired toward it, but it remained low in the water, blocked by the debris and the people. Then it sank quickly away.\n\nFrank finally spotted his sister. \"Oh, God...Kelly!\" He turned, ready to swim to her aid.\n\n\"Frank! Don't move!\" Nate called. \"I'll get to her!\" He dropped his shotgun to the bamboo planking.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Manny asked.\n\nAs answer, Nate leaped across the gap between the raft and the dead caiman. He landed on its exposed belly, landing in a half crouch, then ran down the length of the beast's slippery bulk, trying to get as close to Kelly as possible.\n\nA scream rose on his right. He watched Corporal Yamir, struggling--then suddenly Yamir was yanked under the water, large bubbles trailing down into the depths. The caiman was picking off the survivors in the water.\n\nTime was running out.\n\nNate ran and leaped from the belly of the floating caiman, flinging his body with all the strength in his legs. Flying out, he dove smoothly for Kelly, reaching her in a heartbeat. He rolled her face out of the water. She struggled weakly against him.\n\n\"Kelly! It's Nate! Lie still!\"\n\nSomething must have registered, for her struggling slowed.\n\nNate kicked strongly toward the nearby hummock. He scrabbled through the debris. His hand hit something: a black dinner plate decorated with blinking red lights. One of the dead corporal's bombs.\n\nInstinctively, Nate grabbed it up in his free hand and continued to kick.\n\n\"Behind you!\" Sergeant Kostos called from across the water.\n\nNate glanced back.\n\nA rippling wake aimed in his direction, then the tip of the snout broke the surface, then more of the bull's black-scaled head. Nate found himself staring eye-to-eye with the beast. He sensed the intelligence behind that gaze. No dumb brute. Playing dead wouldn't work here.\n\nHe turned and kicked and paddled with the napalm bomb toward the swamp island. His feet hit muddy ground.\n\nWith a strength born of fear and panic, he scooped Kelly under his arm and hauled them through the shallows, climbing the banks.\n\n\"It's right on top of you!\"\n\nNate didn't bother to turn. He ran toward the tangle of mangrove roots, shoved Kelly between them, then dove in after her. There was a cramped natural cavity behind the main buttress roots.\n\nKelly groggily awoke, coughing out gouts of water and staring around in panic. Nate fell atop her in the small space.\n\n\"What...?\"\n\nThen, over his shoulder, she must have spotted their pursuer. Her eyes grew large. \"Oh, shit!\"\n\nNate rolled around and saw the monster hurling itself up out of the lake, scrabbling up the short bank. It struck like a locomotive hitting a car on the tracks. The whole tree shook. Nate was sure it would crash atop them. But the tree held. The caiman stared at Nate between the roots, mouth gaping open, teeth glinting with menace. It paused, glaring at him, then backpedaled and slid into the waters.\n\nKelly turned to him. \"You saved me.\"\n\nHe glanced to her, their noses almost touching in the cramped root prison. \"Or almost got you killed. It's all perspective, really.\" Nate pushed to his knees. He grabbed one of the roots to haul himself to his feet. \"And we're not out of the woods yet.\"\n\nNate studied the waters, watching for any telltale ripple. It seemed quiet. But he knew the caiman was still out there, watching. Taking a deep breath, he squeezed back out between the roots.\n\n\"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"There are still others in the water...including your brother.\" Nate shoved the napalm bomb under his shirt and began to climb the mangrove, a plan slowly forming. Once high enough, he picked a good branch, clambered atop it, and slowly crawled down its length to where it hung over the water. As the branch thinned, it began to bend under his weight. He moved more cautiously.\n\nAt last, he could risk going no farther. He glanced down and around his perch. This would have to do.\n\nHe called to the other raft while pulling out the bomb. \"Does anyone know how to arm one of these explosives?\"\n\nSergeant Kostos answered, \"Type in the time delay manually! Then hit the red button!\"\n\nWaxman yelled from where he floated in the water. Nate had to respect how calm the captain's voice was as he added a warning. \"It's got an explosive radius of a couple hundred meters. Blow it wrong and you'll kill us all!\"\n\nNate nodded, staring at the bomb. A simple sealed keyboard glowed atop it, not unlike a calculator. Nate prayed it hadn't been damaged by the dunking or abuse. He set the timer for fifteen seconds. That should be long enough.\n\nNext, Nate cradled the bomb to his chest and snapped free his work knife. Clenching his teeth, he dug the blade into the meat of his thumb and sliced a deep gash. He needed the wound to bleed freely.\n\nOnce done, he used a secondary branch as support and climbed to his feet on the swaying perch. He pulled the bomb out with his bloodied hand and made sure he had a good grip. Stretching out over the water, Nate extended his arm, bomb in hand. Blood dripped over the weapon's surface and down to the waters below, plopping in thick drops and sending out ripples.\n\nHe held steady, his thumb on the trigger button. \"C'mon, damn you.\" In Australia, he had once visited a live animal park and had seen a thirty-foot saltwater crocodile trained to leap after a freshly decapitated chicken on a pole.\n\nNate's plan wasn't much different. Only he was the chicken.\n\nHe slightly shook his arm, scattering more drops. \"Where are you?\" he hissed. His arm was getting tired.\n\nDown below, he watched a small pool of his own blood forming on the surface of the water. A caiman could smell blood in the water from miles away. \"C'mon!\"\n\nSquinting, he risked a peek toward the others still afloat in the debris field. With no way of knowing where the caiman was, neither of the other two rafts dared paddle to their mates' rescue.\n\nDistracted, Nate almost missed the flash of something large heaving through the shallows toward him.\n\n\"Nate!\" Kelly called.\n\nHe saw it.\n\nThe caiman lunged out of the water, blasting straight out of the lake and springing toward him, jaws wide open, roaring.\n\nNate hit the bomb's trigger, then dropped the blood-slick device down the open mouth. He realized at the same time that he had vastly underestimated how high a giant swamp caiman could leap.\n\nNate crouched on his branch, then leaped straight up, propelled by both his legs and the spring in the branch. Crashing through leaves, Nate grabbed a limb overhead. He yanked his feet out of the way just as the monster's jaws snapped shut under the seat of his pants. He felt its huffed breath on his back. Denied its prey, it fell back to the water, shooting spray almost as high as its leap.\n\nStaring down, Nate saw the branch he had been perched on. It was gone, a stump, cleaved clean through by those mighty jaws. If he had still been standing there...\n\nNate saw the caiman again glide from the shallows into the deeper waters, but now it remained floating on the surface, revealing its length. A male, 120 feet if it was an inch.\n\nHanging from the branch, Nate caught a frustrated glower directed up at him. It slowly turned toward where the others were floating, giving up on him for the moment and going after easier prey.\n\nBefore it could complete its turn, Nate saw the beast suddenly shudder. He had forgotten to count the seconds.\n\nSuddenly the belly of the beast swelled immensely. It opened its maw to scream but all that came out were jets of flame. The caiman had become a veritable flaming dragon. It rolled on its side and sank into the murkier depths, then a huge whoosh exploded upward in a column of water, flames, and caiman.\n\nNate clung to his perch with his arms and legs. Down below in the roots, Kelly yelled in shock.\n\nThe blast ended as quickly as it blew. In the aftermath, bits and pieces of flaming flesh showered harmlessly around the swamp. Insulated by the armored bulk of the great giant, the worst of the bomb's effect had been contained.\n\nA shout of triumph arose from the others.\n\nNate climbed down the tree and retrieved Kelly. \"Are you okay?\" he asked her.\n\nShe nodded, fingering a gash at her hairline. \"Head hurts a little, but I'll be fine.\" She coughed hoarsely. \"I must've swallowed a gallon of swamp water.\"\n\nHe helped her down to the water's edge. While Kostos's raft went to collect the swimmers and packs, Nate's own raft, manned by his friends and Ranger Carrera, glided over to the pair to keep them from having to swim.\n\nCarrera helped pull Kelly aboard. Manny grabbed Nate's wrist and hauled him up onto the bamboo planks. \"That was some pretty fast thinking, doc,\" Manny said with a grin.\n\n\"Necessity is the mother of invention,\" Nate said, matching his expression with a tired smile. \"But I'll be damned glad to be on dry land again.\"\n\n\"Could there be more of them out there?\" Kelly asked as the group paddled toward the other raft.\n\n\"I doubt it,\" Manny said with a strange trace of regret. \"Even with an ecosystem this large, I can't imagine there's enough food to support more than two of these gigantic predators. Still, I'd keep a watch out for any off-spring. Even baby giants could be trouble.\"\n\nCarrera kept watch with her rifle as the others paddled. \"Do you think that the Ban-ali sent these after us, like the locusts and piranhas?\"\n\nKouwe answered, \"No, but I would not put it past them to have nurtured this pair as some de facto gatekeepers to their lands, permanently stationed guards against any who dared to enter their territory.\"\n\nGatekeepers? Nate stared at the far shore. The broken highlands were now clear in the afternoon brightness. Waterfalls were splashes of silver flowing down cliffs the color of spilled blood. The jungled summits and valleys were verdant.\n\nIf the professor was right about the caiman being gatekeepers, then ahead of them stretched the lands of the Ban-ali, the heart of their deadly territory.\n\nHe stared at the other raft, counting heads. Waxman, Kostos, Warczak, and Carrera. Only four Rangers remained of the twelve sent out here--and they hadn't even crossed into the true heart of the Ban-ali lands. \"We'll never make it,\" he mumbled as he paddled.\n\nCarrera heard him. \"Don't worry. We'll dig in until reinforcements can be flown here. It can't take more than a day.\"\n\nNate frowned. They had lost three men today, elite military professionals. A day was not insignificant. As he stared at the growing heights of the far shore, Nate was suddenly less sure he wanted to reach dry land, especially that dry land. But they had no choice. A plague was spreading through the States, and their small party was as close to an answer to the puzzle as anyone. There was no turning back.\n\nBesides, his father had taken this route, run this biological gauntlet. Nate could not retreat now. Despite the deaths, the dangers, and the risks, he had to find out what had happened to his father. Plague or not, he could only go forward.\n\nWaxman called as they neared the far shore. \"Stay alert! Once we pull up, move quickly away from the swamp. We'll set up a base camp a short distance into the forest.\"\n\nNate saw the way the captain kept scanning the swamps. Waxman was clearly worried about other caiman predators. But Nate kept his gaze focused on the jungles ahead. In his blood, he knew that was where the true danger lay--the Ban-ali.\n\nAcross the water, Nate heard the captain fall upon Olin Pasternak. \"And you, get that uplink running as soon as possible. We have a three-hour window before the satellites are out of range for the night.\"\n\n\"I'll do my best,\" Olin assured him.\n\nWaxman nodded. Nate caught the look in the captain's eyes: full of grief and worry. Despite his booming confident voice, the leader of the Rangers was as nervous as Nate. And this realization was oddly reassuring. Nervous men kept a keen eye on their surroundings, and Nate suspected that their survival would depend on this.\n\nThe pair of rafts reached the shallows and soon were bumping into solid ground. The Rangers off loaded first, rifles ready. They fanned out and checked the immediate forest. Soon, calls of \"All clear!\" rang out from the dark jungles fringing the swamp.\n\nNate glanced up as he waited for the okay to disembark from the rafts. Around him, the soft roar of countless waterfalls echoed. To either side, towering cliffs framed the narrow defile ahead, choked with jungle. Down the center of the canyon a wide stream flowed, emptying sluggishly into the swamp.\n\nWarczak shouted from near the forest's edge. \"Found it!\" The corporal leaned out of the shadowy fringe and waved to his captain. \"Another of Clark's markers.\"\n\nWaxman motioned with his rifle. \"Everybody on land!\"\n\nNate did not wait. He hurried with the others toward Warczak. A few steps into the forest, a large Spanish cedar had been pegged with a strip of cloth. And under it, another carved marking. Each member stared at it with a growing sense of dread. An arrow pointed up the defile. The meaning was clear.\n\n\"Skull and crossbones,\" Zane muttered.\n\nDeath lay ahead.\n\n[ 3:40 P.M. ]\n\n\"Now that was quite entertaining,\" Louis said to his lieutenant, lowering his binoculars. \"When that caiman exploded...\" He shook his head. \"Resourceful.\"\n\nEarlier that morning, radioed by his mole, Louis had learned of the Rangers' plan to camp near the far shore until reinforcements could be flown in. He imagined the loss of three more men would cement Captain Waxman's plan. The group was now down to four Rangers. No threat. Louis's team could take the other at any time--and Louis didn't want those odds changed.\n\nHe turned to Jacques. \"We'll let them rest until midnight, then rouse the little sleepyheads and get them running forward. Who knows what other dangers they'll prepare us for?\" Louis pointed to the swamp.\n\n\"Yes, sir. I'll have my team suited up and ready by nightfall. We're draining several lanterns now to collect enough kerosene.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Louis turned his back on the swamp. \"Once the others are on the run, we'll follow behind you in the canoes.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, but...\" Jacques bit his lower lip and stared out at the swamp.\n\nLouis patted his lieutenant on the shoulder. \"Fear not. If there had been any other beasties lurking in the swamp, they would've attacked the Rangers. You should be safe.\" But Louis could understand his lieutenant's concern. Louis would not be the one using scuba gear to cross the swamp on motorized sleds, with nothing between him and the denizens of the swamp except a wet suit. Even with the night-vision lamps, it would be a dark and murky crossing.\n\nBut Jacques nodded. He would do as ordered.\n\nLouis crossed back into the jungle, heading to the camp. Like his lieutenant, many others were on edge, the tension thick. They all had seen the remains of the Ranger back in the woods. The soldier looked like he had been eaten alive, down to the bone, eyes gone. A scattering of locusts had still crawled around the site, but most of the swarm had dispersed. Alerted by his mole, Louis had carefully kept burners of tok-tok powder smoldering as they crossed through the forest this morning, just in case. Luckily Tshui had been able to harvest enough dried liana vines to produce the protective powder.\n\nDespite the threats, Louis's plan was proceeding smoothly. He was not so vain as to think his group moved unseen, but so far the Ban-ali were concentrating all their resources on the foremost group, the Rangers.\n\nStill, Louis could not count on this particular advantage lasting much longer, especially once they entered the heart of the secretive tribe's territory. And he was not alone in these thoughts. Earlier, three mercenaries from his party had attempted to sneak off and flee, abandoning their obligations, fearful of what lay ahead. The cowards had been caught, of course, and Tshui had made an example of them.\n\nLouis reached their temporary jungle campsite. He found his mistress, Tshui, kneeling by his tent. Across the way, strung spread-eagle between various trees, was the AWOL trio. Louis averted his eyes. There was surely artistry to Tshui's work, but Louis had only so strong a stomach.\n\nShe glanced up at his approach. She was cleaning her tools in a bowl of water.\n\nLouis grinned at her. She stood, all legs and sinewy muscle. He took her under his arm and guided her toward their tent.\n\nAs Tshui ducked past the flap, she growled deep in her chest and, impatient, tugged his hand to draw him into the dark heat of the tent.\n\nFor the moment, it seemed rest would have to wait."
            },
            {
                "title": "Shadows",
                "text": "AUGUST 15, 3:23 P.M.\n\n[ INSTAR INSTITUTE ]\n\n[ LANGLEY, VIRGINIA ]\n\nLauren knocked on Dr. Alvisio's office door. Earlier this morning, the epidemiologist had requested, rather urgently, a moment with her. But this was the first chance she'd had to break away and meet with him.\n\nInstead, she had spent the entire morning and afternoon in video conference with Dr. Xavier Reynolds and his team at Large Scale Biological Labs in Vacaville, California. The prion protein they had discovered could be the first clue to solving this disease, a contagion that had claimed over sixty lives so far with another several hundred sick. Lauren had arranged for her former student's data to be cross-referenced and double-checked by fourteen other labs. As she waited for confirmation, she had time to meet with the epidemiologist.\n\nThe door opened. The young Stanford doctor looked as if he hadn't slept in weeks. A bit of dark stubble shadowed his cheeks, and his eyes were bloodshot. \"Dr. O'Brien. Thank you for coming.\" He ushered her into the room.\n\nLauren had never been in his office, so she was surprised to see a whole array of computer equipment lining one entire wall. Otherwise, the room was rather Spartan: a cluttered desk, an overflowing bookcase, a few chairs. The only personal touch was a lone Stanford Cardinals banner hanging on the far wall. But Lauren's eye was drawn back to the computer bank. The monitors were full of graphs and flowing numbers.\n\n\"What was so urgent, Hank?\" she asked him.\n\nHe waved her to the computers. \"I need you to see this.\" His voice was grim.\n\nShe nodded and took the seat he offered before one of the monitors.\n\n\"Do you remember when I told you about the possible signature spike of basophils early in the disease process? How this clinical finding might be a way to detect and specify cases more quickly?\"\n\nShe nodded, but since hearing his theory, she had already begun to doubt it. Jessie's basophils had spiked, but the child was recovering very well. There had even been talk of letting her out of the hospital ward as soon as tomorrow. This rise in basophils could be something that occurs with many different fevers and is not specific to this disease.\n\nShe opened her mouth to say just that, but Dr. Alvisio interrupted, turning to his computer keyboard. He typed rapidly. \"It took me a full twenty-four hours to gather data from around the entire country, specifically searching for fever cases in children and the elderly with characteristic basophil spikes. I wanted to run a model for the disease using this new criteria.\"\n\nOn the monitor, a map of the United States appeared in yellow with each state mapped out in black lines. Small pinpoints of red dotted the map, most clustered in Florida and other southern states. \"Here is the old data. Each area of red indicates current documented cases of the contagion.\"\n\nLauren slipped on her reading glasses and leaned closer.\n\n\"But using the basophil spike as the marker for designating cases, here is a truer picture of the disease's present status in the United States.\" The epidemiologist hit a keystroke. The map bloomed brighter with red dots. Florida was almost a solid red, as were Georgia and Alabama. Other states, empty before, now were speckled with red spots.\n\nHank turned to her. \"As you can see, the number of cases skyrockets. Many of these patients are in unquarantined wards due to the fact that the trio of signs designated by the CDC have not shown up yet. They're exposing others.\"\n\nDespite her doubts, Lauren felt a sick churn in her belly. Even if Dr. Alvisio was wrong about the basophils, he had made a good point. Early detection was critical. Until then, all feverish children or elderly should be quarantined immediately, even if they weren't in hot zones like Florida and Georgia. \"I see what you're saying,\" she said. \"We should contact the CDC and have them establish nationwide quarantine policies.\"\n\nHank nodded. \"But that's not all.\" He turned back to his computer and typed. \"Based on this new basophil data, I ran an extrapolation model. Here is what the disease picture will look like in two weeks.\" He pressed the ENTER key.\n\nThe entire southern half of the country went red.\n\nLauren sat back in shock.\n\n\"And in another month.\" Hank struck the ENTER key a second time.\n\nThe red mottling spread to consume almost the entire lower forty-eight states.\n\nHank glanced at her. \"We have to do something to stop this. Every day is critical.\"\n\nLauren stared at the bloodstained screen, her mouth dry, her eyes wide. Her only consolation was that Dr. Alvisio's basis for this model was probably overly grim. She doubted the basophil spike was truly an early marker for the disease. Still, the warning here was important. Every day was critical.\n\nHer pager vibrated on her hip, reminding her that the war against this disease had to be fought with every resource. She glanced down to her pager's screen. It was Marshall. He had followed his numeric code with a 911. Something urgent.\n\n\"Can I use your phone?\" she asked.\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nShe stood and crossed to his desk. Hank returned to his computers and statistical models. She dialed the number. The phone was answered in half a ring.\n\n\"Lauren...\"\n\n\"What is it, Marshall?\"\n\nHis words were rushed, full of fear. \"It's Jessie. I'm at the hospital.\"\n\nLauren clutched the phone tighter. \"What is it? What's wrong?\"\n\n\"Her temperature is up again.\" His voice cracked. \"Higher than it's ever been. And three other children have been admitted. Fevers, all of them.\"\n\n\"Wh...what are you saying?\" she stammered, but she knew the answer to her own question.\n\nHer husband remained silent.\n\n\"I'll be right there,\" she finally said, dropping the phone and scrabbling to replace it in its cradle.\n\nHank turned to her, noticing her reaction. \"Dr. O'Brien?\"\n\nLauren could not speak. Jessie...the basophil spike...the other children. Dear God, the disease was here!\n\nLauren stared glassily at the monitor with the map of the United States mottled entirely in red. The epidemiologist's theory was not a mistake. It wasn't overly pessimistic.\n\n\"Is everything all right?\" Hank asked softly.\n\nLauren slowly shook her head, eyes fixed on the screen.\n\nOne month.\n\n[ 5:23 P.M. ]\n\n[ AMAZON JUNGLE ]\n\nKelly sat hunched with her brother, both flanking Olin Pasternak. The Russian computer expert was screwing down the cover piece to reassemble the satellite communication system. He had been working on it all afternoon, trying to raise the States.\n\n\"This had better work,\" he mumbled. \"I've torn it down to the mother-board and built it back up. If this doesn't work, I don't know what else to try.\"\n\nFrank nodded. \"Fire it up.\"\n\nOlin checked the connections one final time, adjusted the satellite dish, then returned his attention to the laptop computer. He switched on the solar power, and after a short wait, the operating system booted up and the screen hummed to life.\n\n\"We've got a connection to the HERMES satellite!\" Olin said, and sighed with relief.\n\nA cheer went up around Kelly. The entire camp, except for the pair of Rangers on guard by the swamp, was gathered around Olin and his communication equipment.\n\n\"Can you get an uplink established?\" Waxman asked.\n\n\"Keep your fingers crossed,\" Olin said. He began tapping at the keyboard.\n\nKelly found herself holding her breath. They needed to reach someone Stateside. Reinforcements were certainly needed here. But more important to her, Kelly couldn't stand not knowing Jessie's status. She had to find a way to get back to her.\n\n\"Here we go.\" Olin struck a final sequence of keys. The familiar connection countdown began.\n\nRichard Zane mumbled behind her. \"Please, please work...\"\n\nHis prayer was in all their hearts.\n\nThe countdown blipped to zero. The computer screen froze for an interminably long second, then a picture of Kelly's mother and father appeared. The pair looked shocked and relieved.\n\n\"Thank God!\" her father said. \"We've been trying to reach you for the past hour.\"\n\nOlin moved aside for Frank. \"Computer problems,\" her brother said, \"among many others.\"\n\nKelly leaned in. She could not wait a moment longer. \"How's Jessie?\"\n\nHer mother's face answered the question. Her eyes fidgeted, and she paused before speaking. \"She's...she's doing fine, dear.\"\n\nThe image on the screen fritzed as if the computer had become a lie detector. Static and snow ate away the picture. Her mother's next words became garbled. \"Lead on a cure...prion disease...sending data as we speak...\"\n\nHer father spoke, but the interference grew worse. They seemed unaware that their message was corrupted. \"...helicopter on its way...Brazilian army...\"\n\nFrank hissed to Olin, \"Can you fix the reception?\"\n\nHe leaned in and tapped quickly. \"I don't know. I don't understand. We've just received a file. Maybe that's interfering with our downstream feed.\"\n\nBut for each key the man tapped, the signal deteriorated.\n\nStatic whined and hissed with occasional words coming through. \"Frank...losing you...can you...tomorrow morning...GPS locked...\" Then the entire feed collapsed. The screen gave one final frazzled burst, then froze up.\n\n\"Damn it!\" Olin swore.\n\n\"Get it back up,\" Waxman said behind them.\n\nOlin bent over his equipment and shook his head. \"I don't know if I can. I've troubleshot the mother-board and rebooted all the software.\"\n\n\"What's wrong then?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"I can't say for sure. It's almost like a computer virus has corrupted the entire satellite communication array.\"\n\n\"Well, keep trying,\" Waxman said. \"You've got another half hour before the satellite is out of range.\"\n\nFrank stood, facing everyone. \"Even if we can't link up, from what we did hear, it sounds like the Brazilian helicopter may be on its way here. Maybe as soon as tomorrow morning.\"\n\nBeside him, Olin stared at the frozen screen. \"Oh, God.\"\n\nAll eyes turned to the Russian communications expert. He tapped the screen, pointing to a set of numbers in the upper right-hand corner. \"Our GPS signal...\"\n\n\"What's the matter?\" Waxman asked.\n\nOlin glanced over to them. \"It's wrong. Whatever glitched the satellite system must've corrupted the feed to the GPS satellites, too. It sent a wrong signal back to the States.\" He stared back at the screen. \"It places us about thirty miles south of our current position.\"\n\nKelly felt the blood rush from her head. \"They won't know where we are.\"\n\n\"I've got to get this up and running,\" Olin said. \"At least long enough to correct the signal.\" He rebooted the computer and set to work.\n\nFor the next half hour, Olin worked furiously with his equipment. Oaths and curses, both in English and Russian, flowed from the man. As he labored, everyone found busy work to occupy the time. No one bothered to try resting. Kelly helped Anna prepare some rice, the last of their supplies. As they worked, they kept looking over to Olin, silently praying.\n\nBut for all the man's efforts and their prayers, nothing was gained.\n\nAfter a time, Frank crossed and placed a hand on Olin's shoulder. He raised his other arm, exposing his wristwatch. \"It's too late. The communication satellites are out of range.\"\n\nOlin sagged over his array, defeated.\n\n\"We'll try again in the morning,\" Frank said, his encouragement forced. \"You should rest. Start fresh tomorrow.\"\n\nNate, Kouwe, and Manny returned from a fishing expedition by the swamp. Their catch was bountiful, strung on a line between them. They dropped their load beside the fire. \"I'll clean,\" Kouwe said, settling easily to the ground.\n\nManny sighed. \"No argument here.\"\n\nNate wiped his hands and stared at Olin and his computer. He crossed toward the man. \"There was something I was wondering about while fishing. What about that other file?\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" Olin asked blearily.\n\n\"You mentioned something about a file being down-loaded during the feed.\"\n\nOlin scrunched his face, then nodded with understanding. \"Da. Here it is. A data file.\"\n\nKelly and Manny hurried over. Kelly now remembered her mother had mentioned sending something just before the system crashed.\n\nOlin brought up the file.\n\nKelly leaned closer. On the screen appeared a 3-D model of a molecule spinning above pages of data. Intrigued, she settled nearer. Her eyes scanned through the report. \"My mother's work,\" she mumbled, glad to occupy her mind on something other than her own worries. But the topic was troublesome nonetheless.\n\n\"What is it?\" Nate asked.\n\n\"A possible lead on the cause of the disease,\" Kelly added.\n\nManny answered, peering over her shoulder. \"A prion.\"\n\n\"A what?\"\n\nManny quickly explained to Nate, but Kelly's attention remained focused on the report. \"Interesting,\" Kelly mumbled.\n\n\"What?\" Manny asked.\n\n\"It says here that this prion seems to cause genetic damage.\" She quickly read the next report.\n\nManny read over her shoulder. He whistled appreciatively.\n\n\"What?\" Nate asked.\n\nKelly spoke excitedly. \"This could be the answer! Here's a paper from researchers at the University of Chicago, published in Nature back in September of 2000. They hypothesized through the study of yeast that prions may hold the key to genetic mutations, even play a role in evolution.\"\n\n\"Really? How?\"\n\n\"One of the major mysteries of evolution has been how survival skills that require multiple genetic changes could happen so spontaneously. Such changes are termed macroevolution, like the adaptation of certain algae to toxic environments or the rapid development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. But how such a series of simultaneous mutations could be generated was not understood. But this article offers a possible answer. Prions.\" Kelly pointed to the computer screen. \"Here the researchers at the University of Chicago have shown that a yeast's prions can flip an all-or-nothing switch in the genetic code, causing massive mutations to develop in unison, to spark an evolutionary jump start, so to speak. Do you know what this suggests?\"\n\nKelly saw realization dawn in Manny's eyes.\n\n\"The piranha creatures, the locusts...\" the biologist mumbled.\n\n\"Mutations all of them. Maybe even Gerald Clark's arm!\" Kelly said. \"A mutation triggered by prions.\"\n\n\"But what does this have to do with the disease?\" Nate asked.\n\nKelly frowned. \"I don't know. This discovery is a good start, but we're a long way from a complete answer.\"\n\nManny pointed to the screen. \"But what about here in the article where it hypothesizes...\"\n\nKelly nodded. The two began to discuss the article, speaking rapidly, sharing ideas.\n\nBeside them, Nate had stopped listening. He had scrolled back to the spinning model of the prion protein.\n\nAfter a time, he interrupted. \"Does anyone else see the similarity?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Kelly asked.\n\nNate pointed to the screen. \"See those two spiraling loops at either end?\"\n\n\"The double alpha helixes?\" Kelly said.\n\n\"Right...and here the corkscrewing middle section,\" Nate said, tracing the screen with his finger.\n\n\"So?\" Kelly asked.\n\nNate turned and reached to the ground beside him. He picked up a stick and drew in the dirt, speaking as he worked. \"The middle corkscrew...spreading out in double loops at either end.\" When he was done, he glanced up.\n\nStunned, Kelly stared at what Nate had drawn in the dirt.\n\nManny gasped, \"The Ban-ali symbol!\"\n\nKelly stared between the two pictures: one, a high-tech computer map; the other, a crude scrawl in the soft dirt. But there was no disputing the similarity. The corkscrew, the double helixes...It seemed beyond coincidence, even down to the clockwise spin of the molecular spiral.\n\nKelly turned to Nate and Manny. \"Jesus Christ.\"\n\nThe Ban-ali symbol was a stylized model of the same prion.\n\n[ 11:32 P.M. ]\n\nJacques still had an unnerving terror of dark waters, born from the piranha attack that had left him disfigured when he was only a boy. Despite these deep fears, he glided through the swamp with nothing but a wet suit between him and the toothy predators of this marsh. He had no choice. He had to obey the doctor. The price of disobedience was worse than any terrors that might lurk in these waters.\n\nJacques clung to his motorized attack board as the silent fans dragged his body toward the far shore of the swamp. He was outfitted in an LAR V Draeger UBA, gear used by Navy SEALs for clandestine shallow-water operations. The closed-circuit system, strapped to his chest, rather than his back, produced no telltale bubble signature, making his approach undetectable. The final piece of his gear was a night-vision mask, giving him adequate visibility in the murky waters.\n\nStill, the dark waters remained tight around him. His visibility was only about ten yards. He would periodically use a small mirrored device to peek above the water's surface and maintain his bearing.\n\nHis two teammates on this mission trailed behind him, also gliding with tiny motorized sleds held at arms'length.\n\nJacques checked one last time with his tiny periscope. The two bamboo rafts that the Rangers had used to cross the swamp were directly ahead. Thirty yards away.\n\nIn the woods, he spotted the camp's fire, blazing bright. Shadowy figures, even at this late hour, moved around the site. Satisfied, he motioned to his two men to continue on ahead, one to each raft. Jacques would drift behind them, on guard with his scope.\n\nThe trio moved slowly forward. The rafts were tethered to the shore and floating in waters less than four feet deep. They would all have to be even more careful from here.\n\nWith determined caution, the group converged on the rafts. Jacques watched above and below the surface. His men waited in position, hovering in the shadows of their respective rafts. He studied the woods. He suspected that hidden in the dark jungle were guards, Rangers on patrol. He watched for a full five minutes, then signaled his men.\n\nFrom under the rafts, the men produced small squeeze bottles full of kerosene. They sprayed the underside of the bamboo planks. Once each bottle emptied, the men gave Jacques a thumbs-up signal.\n\nAs his men worked, Jacques continued to watch the woods. So far, there was no sign that anyone had noticed their handiwork. He waited a full minute more, then gave the final signal, a slashing motion across his neck.\n\nEach man lifted a hand above the water and ignited a butane lighter. They lifted the tiny flames to the kerosene-soaked bamboo. Flames immediately leaped and spread over the rafts.\n\nWithout waiting, the two men grabbed up their sleds and sped toward Jacques. He turned and thumbed his own motor to high and led his men off in a swooping curve out into the swamp, then back around, aiming for a spot on the shore a half-kilometer from the enemy's camp.\n\nJacques watched behind him. Men appeared out of the wood, outlined by the burning rafts, weapons pointing. Even underwater, he heard muffled shouts and sounds of alarm.\n\nIt had all gone perfectly. The doctor knew the other camp, after the locust attack, would be spooked by fires in the night. They would not likely remain near such a burning pyre.\n\nStill, they were to take no unnecessary chances. Jacques led his men back toward the shallows, and the group slowly rose from the lake, spitting out regulator mouthpieces and kicking off fins. The second part of his mission was to ensure the others did indeed flee.\n\nSlogging out of the water, he breathed a sigh of relief, glad to leave the dark swamp behind. He fingered the un-mangled half of his nose, as if making sure it was still there.\n\nJacques slipped out a pair of night-vision binoculars. He fitted them in place and stared back toward the camp. Behind him, his men whispered, energized from the adventure and the successful completion of their task. Jacques ignored them.\n\nOutlined in the monochrome green of his night scope, a pair of men--Rangers, to judge by the way they carried their weapons--slipped away from the fiery rafts and called back into the forest. The group was pulling back. In the woods, new lights blinked on. Flashlights. Activity bustled around the campfire. Slowly, the lights began to shift away from the fire, like a line of fireflies. The parade marched toward the deeper ravine, up the chasm between the flat-topped highlands.\n\nJacques smiled. The doctor's plan had worked.\n\nStill spying through his scope, he reached for his radio. He pushed the transmitter and brought the radio to his lips. \"Mission successful. Rabbits are running.\"\n\n\"Roger that.\" It was the doctor. \"Canoes heading out now. Rendezvous at their old camp in two hours. Over and out.\"\n\nJacques replaced the radio.\n\nOnce again, the hunt was on.\n\nHe turned to his other men to report the good news--but there was no one behind him. He instantly crouched and hissed their names. \"Manuel! Roberto!\"\n\nNo answer.\n\nThe night remained dark around him, the woods even darker. He slipped his night-vision diving mask back over his face. The woods shone brighter, but the dense vegetation made visibility poor. He backed away, his bare feet striking water.\n\nJacques stopped, frozen between the terrors of what lay behind him and in front of him.\n\nThrough his night-vision mask, he spotted movement. For the barest flicker of a heartbeat, it looked like the shadows had formed the figure of a man, staring back at him, no more than ten yards away. Jacques blinked, and the figure was gone. But now all the jungle shadows flowed and slid like living things toward him.\n\nHe stumbled backward into the waters, one hand scrambling to shove in his regulator mouthpiece.\n\nOne of the shadows broke out of the jungle fringe, outlined against the muddy bank. Huge, monstrous...\n\nJacques screamed, but his regulator was in the way. Nothing more than a wet gurgle sounded. More of the dark shadows flowed out of the woods toward him. An old Maroon tribal prayer rose to his lips. He scrambled backward.\n\nBehind his fear of dark waters and piranhas was a more basic terror: of being eaten alive.\n\nHe dove backward, twisting around to get away.\n\nBut the shadows were faster.\n\n[ 11:51 P.M. ]\n\nWith a flashlight duct-taped to his shotgun, Nate followed near the rear of the group. The only ones behind him were Private Carrera and Sergeant Kostos. Everyone had lights, spearing the darkness in all directions. Despite the night, they moved quickly, trying to put as much distance as possible between them and whoever had set the rafts on fire.\n\nThe plan, according to Captain Waxman, was to seek a more defensible position. With the swamp on one side of them, the jungle on the other, it was not a secure spot to wait for whatever attack the fires would draw down upon them. And none of their group was delusional enough to think another attack wouldn't come.\n\nAlways planning one step ahead, the Rangers had a fallback position already picked out. Corporal Warczak had reported spotting caves in the cliffs a short way up the chasm. That was their goal.\n\nShelter and a defensible position.\n\nNate followed the others. Carrera marched at his side. In her arms was a strange shovel-nosed weapon. It looked like a Dustbuster vacuum attached to a rifle stock. She held it out toward the black jungle.\n\n\"What is that?\" he asked.\n\nShe kept her attention on the jungle. \"With all we lost in the swamp, we're short on M-16s.\" She hefted the strange weapon. \"It's called a Bailey. Prototype weapon for jungle warfare.\" She thumbed a switch and a targeting laser pierced the darkness. She glanced over her shoulder to her superior. \"Demonstration?\"\n\nStaff Sergeant Kostos, armed with his own M-16, grunted. \"Testing weapon fire!\" he barked forward to alert the others.\n\nCarrera lifted her weapon, pivoting it for a target. She centered the red laser on the bole of a sapling about twenty yards away. \"Shine your flashlight here.\"\n\nNate nodded and swung his flashlight up. Other eyes turned their way.\n\nCarrera steadied her weapon and squeezed the trigger. There was no blast, only a high-pitched whistle. Nate caught a flash of silver, followed by a ringing crack. The sapling toppled backward, its trunk sliced cleanly through. Beyond it, a thick-boled silk cotton tree shook with the impact of something slamming into its trunk. Nate's flashlight focused on the distant tree. A bit of silver was embedded deep in the trunk.\n\nCarrera nodded toward her target. \"Three-inch razor disks, like Japanese throwing stars. Perfect for jungle combat. Set to automatic fire, it can mow down all the loose vegetation around you.\"\n\n\"And anything else in its path,\" Kostos added, waving the group onward.\n\nNate eyed the weapon with respect.\n\nThe group continued up the jungle-choked ravine, led by Corporal Warczak and Captain Waxman. They were roughly paralleling the small stream that drained down the chasm, but they kept a respectable distance from the water, just in case. After a half hour of trekking, Warczak led them off to the south, heading for the red cliffs.\n\nSo far, there appeared to be no evidence of pursuit, but Nate's ears remained alert for any warning, his eyes raking the shadowy jungle. At last the canopy began to thin enough to see stars and the bright glow of the moon. Ahead the world ended at a wall of red rock, aproned by loose shale and crumbled boulders.\n\nAt the top of the sloped escarpment, the cliff face was pocked with multiple caves and shadowed cracks.\n\n\"Hang back,\" Captain Waxman hissed, keeping them all hidden in the thicker underbrush that fringed the lower cliffs. He signaled for Warczak to forge ahead.\n\nThe corporal flicked off his flashlight, slipped on a pair of night-vision goggles, and ducked into the shadows with his weapon, vanishing almost instantly.\n\nNate crouched. Flanking him, the two Rangers took firm stances, watching their rear. Nate kept his shotgun ready. Most of the others were also armed. Olin, Zane, Frank, even Kelly had pistols, while Manny bore a Beretta in one hand and his whip in the other. Tor-tor had his own built-in weapons: claws and fangs. Only Professor Kouwe and Anna Fong remained unarmed.\n\nThe professor crept backward to Nate's side. \"I don't like this,\" Kouwe said.\n\n\"The caves?\"\n\n\"No...the situation.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nKouwe glanced back down toward the swamp. Distantly the two rafts still burned brightly. \"I smelled kerosene from those flames.\"\n\n\"So? It could be copal oil. That stuff smells like kerosene and that's abundant around here.\"\n\nKouwe rubbed his chin. \"I don't know. The fire that drew the locusts was artfully crafted into the Ban-ali symbol. This was sloppy.\"\n\n\"But we were on guard. The Indians had to move fast. It was probably the best they could manage.\"\n\nKouwe glanced to Nate. \"It wasn't Indians.\"\n\n\"Then who else?\"\n\n\"Whoever's been tracking us all along.\" Kouwe leaned in and whispered in an urgent hiss. \"Whoever set the flaming locust symbol crept up on our camp in broad daylight. They left no trace of their passage into or out of the area. Not a single broken twig. They were damned skilled. I doubt I could've done it.\"\n\nNate began to get the gist of Kouwe's concerns. \"And the ones who have been dogging our trail were sloppy.\"\n\nKouwe nodded toward the swamp. \"Like those fires.\"\n\nNate remembered the reflected flash high in the treetops as they hiked through the forest yesterday afternoon. \"What are you suggesting?\"\n\nKouwe spoke between clenched teeth. \"We have more than one threat here. Whatever lies ahead--a new regenerative compound, a cure for this plague--it would be worth billions. Others would pay dearly for the knowledge hidden here.\"\n\nNate frowned. \"And you think this other party set those fires? Why?\"\n\n\"To drive us forward in a panic, like it did. They didn't want to risk us being reinforced with additional soldiers. They're probably using us as a human shield against the natural predatory traps set by the Ban-ali. We're just so much cannon fodder. They'll waste our lives until we are either spent on this trail or reach the Ban-ali. Then they'll sweep in and steal the prize.\"\n\nNate eyed the professor. \"Why not mention this before we set off?\"\n\nKouwe stared hard at Nate, and the answer to his question dawned in his own mind. \"A traitor,\" Nate whispered. \"Someone working with the trackers.\"\n\n\"I find it much too convenient that our satellite feed went on the fritz just as we drew close to these Ban-ali lands. Plus it then sends off a false GPS signal.\"\n\nNate nodded. \"Sending our own backup on a wild-goose chase.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"Who could it be?\" Nate eyed the others crouched in the underbrush.\n\nKouwe shrugged. \"Anyone. Highest on the list would be the Russian. It's his system. It would be easy for him to feign a breakdown. But then again both Zane and Ms. Fong have been hovering around the array whenever Olin has stepped away. And the O'Briens have a background tied to the CIA, who have been known to play many sides against one another to achieve their ends. Then, finally, we can't rule out any of the Rangers.\"\n\n\"You're kidding.\"\n\n\"Enough money can sway almost anyone, Nate. And Army Rangers are trained extensively in communications.\"\n\nNate swung back around. \"That leaves only Manny as someone we can trust.\"\n\n\"Does it?\" Kouwe's expression was pained.\n\n\"You can't be serious? Manny? He's a friend to both of us.\"\n\n\"He also works for the Brazilian government. And don't doubt that the Brazilian government would want this discovery solely for itself. Such a medical discovery would be an economic boon.\"\n\nNate felt a sick sense of dread. Could the professor be right? Was there no one they could trust?\n\nBefore he could question Kouwe's assessment further, a scream split the night. Something huge came flying through the air. People scattered out of the way. Nate backpedaled with Kouwe in tow.\n\nThe large object landed in the middle of the crouched group. Flashlights swung toward the crumpled figure in their midst.\n\nAnna cried out.\n\nTransfixed in the spears of light, Corporal Warczak lay on his back, covered in blood and gore. One arm scrabbled up as if he were drowning in the spreading pool of his own blood. He tried to scream again, but all that came out was a croaking noise.\n\nNate stared, frozen. He could not tear his eyes from the sight of the ruined corporal.\n\nFrom the waist down, Warczak's body was gone. He had been bitten in half.\n\n\"Weapons ready!\" Waxman shouted, breaking through the horrified trance.\n\nNate dropped to a knee, swinging his shotgun out to the darkness. Kelly and Kouwe dove to aid the downed corporal, but Nate knew it was a futile gesture. The man was already dead.\n\nHe pointed his weapon. Throughout the jungle, dark shadows flowed and shifted, jiggled by the play of the group's flashlights. But Nate knew it wasn't all illusion. These shadows were all flowing toward the trapped group.\n\nOne of the Rangers shot a flare into the sky. The whistling trail arced high and exploded into a magnesium brightness that cast the jungle in silver and black. The sudden brightness gave those who crept up on them reason to pause.\n\nNate found himself staring into the eyes of a monster, caught in the shine of the flare. It crouched in the lee of a boulder on the cliff's escarpment, a massive creature, the size of a bull, but sleek and smooth. A cat. It studied him with eyes as black and cold as chunks of obsidian. Others lay nestled in the jungle and boulders around them. A pack of the creatures, at least twenty.\n\n\"Jaguars,\" Manny mumbled in shock over his shoulder. \"Black jaguars.\"\n\nNate recognized the physique similar to Tor-tor's, but these creatures were three times as large, half a ton each. Prehistoric in size.\n\n\"They're all around us,\" Carrera whispered.\n\nIn her words, Nate heard the echo of his father's last radioed message: Can't last much longer...oh, God, they're all around us! Had this been his fate?\n\nFor another breath, neither group moved. Nate held his breath, hoping the nighttime prowlers would be intimidated by the flare's brightness and retreat. As if this thought were shared by one of the Rangers, a second flare jetted into the sky and burst with brightness, floating down on a tiny parachute.\n\n\"Hold steady,\" Waxman hissed.\n\nThe impasse stretched. The pack was not leaving.\n\n\"Sergeant,\" Waxman said, \"on my mark, lay a path of grenades up toward the cliffs. Everyone else, keep weapons ready. Haul ass for the centermost cave on my signal.\"\n\nNate's eyes flicked to the yawning cavern in the cliff face. If they could make it there, the group could be attacked from only one direction. It was defensible. Their only hope.\n\n\"Carrera, use the Bailey to cover our--\"\n\nThe sharp crack of a pistol cut off the captain's order. Off to the side, Zane stumbled backward from the recoil of his smoking gun.\n\nOne of the cats spat and leaped in rage. Other jaguars responded, growling low and bounding toward the group.\n\n\"Now!\" Waxman yelled.\n\nKostos dropped to one knee, aimed his M-16 toward the cliffs, and fired. Carrera spun with her new weapon, blasting from her hip, laying down a swath of fire across their rear. A flashing arc of flying silver disks flew out, shredding the jungle.\n\nOne of the jaguars was caught in midleap, its exposed belly sliced open. It howled and collapsed to the jungle, writhing.\n\nIts cries were cut off as Kostos's grenade barrage began booming, echoing off the cliffs, deafening. Rock dust and dirt flumed up.\n\nShots were fired all around. Frank guarded his sister and the professor as they knelt beside the slack form of Corporal Warczak. Manny was on one knee beside Tor-tor, whose eyes were wide, hackles raised. Zane and Olin stood with Anna Fong, firing blindly into the dark.\n\nNate kept his shotgun raised and centered on the giant fellow he had first seen, crouched by the boulder off to the left. Despite the noises and the chatter of rattling rock debris, the creature had remained stone still.\n\nOther shadowy figures fled from the bombarded slope. Others lay unmoving, dead, shredded.\n\n\"Go!\" Waxman barked sharply, his command cutting through the explosions. \"Make for the cave!\"\n\nThe group lurched through the fringe of brush and jungle toward the open rocky landscape at the foot of the towering cliffs. Nate kept his shotgun pointed at the cat, finger tensed on the shotgun's trigger. If it even flicks its tail...\n\nWaxman waved them on, Kostos in the lead. \"Get up there before they regroup!\" The captain dropped beside Carrera. Behind them, the pack converged along their trail. Several limped or sniffed at a dead mate, but they kept a wary distance now.\n\nNate sidled past the silent cat off to the left. Only its eyes followed their passage. Nate suspected this was the leader of the pack. Behind that cold gaze, Nate could almost see the thing weighing these strangers, judging them.\n\nCarrera had switched her weapon off automatic, conserving her ammunition. She fired at a lone cat getting too near. Her aim was off. The silver disk shaved the jaguar's ear and whizzed off into the jungle. The wounded cat dropped to its belly, glowering with pain and anger.\n\n\"Keep moving!\" Waxman yelled.\n\nBy now, the cave was in direct sight. The group's tense pace collapsed into a panicked rout. Kostos led the way. He raised a flare pistol and fired it into the opening. A bright trace flashed out of the pistol's muzzle and exploded with light inside the cavern.\n\nThe deep cave was illuminated all the way to its rocky end.\n\n\"All clear!\" Kostos hollered. \"Move it!\"\n\nOlin, Zane, and Anna were the first to race inside. The sergeant stood at the entrance, M-16 in hand, waving his arm. \"Move, move, move...\"\n\nFrank pushed Kelly ahead of him. Professor Kouwe ran beside him.\n\nAs the flares died out overhead, Nate took up a position on the other side of the entrance, shotgun ready.\n\nManny and Tor-tor followed with Waxman and Carrera on their heels.\n\nThey were going to make it, Nate realized.\n\nThen a jaguar leaped from the deepening shadows, landing atop a boulder right beside the last two Rangers. Carrera dropped and aimed her weapon, but before she could fire, a paw struck out and raked into the chest of the team's captain.\n\nWaxman was yanked off his feet, sailing into the air, claws sunk deep into his field jacket and chest. He bellowed, bringing up his own weapon. He fired over his head, striking the cat in the shoulder. The beast toppled backward, dragging the hooked captain with it. His body flew over the boulder, limbs kicking.\n\nCarrera lunged up and ran around the boulder, going to the aid of her captain. Out of sight, Nate heard the characteristic whir of her weapon. Then suddenly she was backing into sight again. On her trail were a pair of jaguars. They were bleeding, embedded bits of silver decorating their flesh. Carrera was obviously struggling with the cartridge to her weapon, out of ammo disks.\n\nNate leaped away from the cave wall and ran toward her. As he reached her side, he shoved his shotgun to arms' length, the muzzle only a foot away from the snarling face of one of the jaguars. He pulled the trigger, and the beast flew back, howling.\n\nCarrera unholstered her 9mm pistol. She fired and fired at the other jaguar, unloading the clip. It fell back, then collapsed.\n\nThey stumbled up the slope.\n\nAround the other side of the boulder, the captain fell into sight, crawling, one arm gone. His face was a bloody ruin.\n\n\"I...I thought he was dead,\" Carrera said with shock, stepping in his direction.\n\nThe captain crawled half a step, then a paw shot out and dug into the meat of his thigh. He was pulled back toward the hidden shadows. He screamed, fingers digging at the loose shale, finding no purchase.\n\nA shot cracked. The captain's head flew back, then forward, striking the rock hard. Dead. Nate glanced behind him and saw Kostos crouched with his M-16 in hand, eyes fixed to its sniper scope. The sergeant slowly lowered his weapon, his expression pained and ripe with hard guilt.\n\n\"Everyone, get inside!\" he yelled.\n\nThe party had remained clustered near the entrance.\n\nNate and Carrera hurried toward the cavern mouth.\n\nFrank and Kostos flanked the threshold, weapons ready. The men were limned against the glare of the dying flare inside the passage. Frank waved to them. \"Hurry!\"\n\nFrom Nate's position several yards down the escarpment, he spotted a deeper shadow shift along the base of the rocky cliff. To the left of the cave opening. \"Watch out!\"\n\nIt was the largest of the jaguars, the one Nate had first spotted.\n\nIt sprang past the mouth of the cave. Frank was bowled over, flying high into the air and landing on his back. Kostos was slammed into the wall. Then the cat was gone, racing back into the shadows below.\n\nKelly screamed. \"Frank!\"\n\nNate ran with Carrera. Kostos picked himself off the ground, wheezing and holding his chest, dazed.\n\n\"Help me!\" Kelly yelled.\n\nFrank lay writhing in the shale. Kelly's brother hadn't just been knocked off his feet. Both his legs were gone from the knees down. Blood spurted and jetted across the stones. In those few seconds, the giant jaguar had sheared off the limbs, as cleanly as a guillotine.\n\nKouwe fell to Frank's other side. Olin helped drag the moaning man into the cave. Kelly followed, yanking tourniquets from her pack. Plastic vials of morphine tumbled to the floor. Nate retrieved them.\n\nNear the entrance, a shot was fired. Light burst outside. Another flare. Nate held out the vials of morphine, feeling useless, stunned.\n\nKouwe took them. \"Go watch our back.\" He nodded to the entrance.\n\nOlin and Kelly worked on the stricken man. Tears flowed down Kelly's cheeks, but her face was tight with determination and concentration. She refused to lose her brother.\n\nNate turned with his shotgun and joined Kostos and Carrera at the cave's opening. The new flare showed that the jungle still moved with shadows. The bouldered slope offered additional cover for the cats.\n\nManny joined them, pistol in one hand. Tor-tor sniffed at Frank's blood on the rock and growled.\n\n\"I count at least another fifteen,\" Carrera said, face half covered with night-vision goggles. \"They're not leaving.\"\n\nKostos swore. \"If they rush us, we couldn't hope to stop them all. We're down to one grenade launcher, two M-16s, and a handful of pistols.\"\n\n\"And my shotgun,\" Nate added.\n\nCarrera spoke, \"I've fitted a new cartridge into the Bailey. But it's my last.\"\n\nManny crouched with his pistol. \"There's some old debris blown in the back of the cave--branches, leaves, whatnot. We could light a fire at the entrance.\"\n\n\"Do it,\" Kostos said.\n\nAs Manny turned, a long, low growl rumbled up the slope. Everyone froze. Illuminated by the flare, a large shape revealed itself on the rocky slope. Weapons were raised.\n\nNate recognized the shadow as the largest cat.\n\n\"A female,\" Manny mumbled.\n\nIt remained in plain sight, studying them, challenging them. Behind it, the jungle churned with sleek bodies, muscled and clawed.\n\n\"What do we do?\" Carrera asked.\n\n\"The bitch is trying to psych us out,\" Kostos grumbled, lowering his eye to the sight on his rifle.\n\n\"Don't fire,\" Nate hissed. \"If you shoot now, you'll have the whole pack on us.\"\n\n\"Nate's right,\" Manny said. \"Their blood lust is up. Anything could set them off. At least wait until we have a fire going here.\"\n\nThe cat seemed to hear him and let out a piercing yowl. In a surge of pure muscle, she leaped toward them, charging at an astounding speed, a precision machine.\n\nThe Rangers fired, but the she-beast was too fast, gliding with preternatural swiftness. Bullets chewed at the rock, sparking, missing, as if she were a true phantom. A single razored disk whizzed from the Bailey and zinged off a boulder to skitter harmlessly down the slope.\n\nNate dropped to one knee, shotgun pointed. \"Here, kitty-kitty,\" he hissed under his breath. Once she was close enough...\n\nCarrera repositioned her weapon, but before she could fire another shot, she was bumped aside. Tor-tor lunged past her, leaping from his master's side to the slope beyond.\n\n\"Tor-tor!\" Manny called.\n\nThe smaller jaguar bounded a few yards down the slope and stopped, digging in, blocking the path of the larger cat. With a sharp snarl, he crouched low, rear haunches raised and bunched to spring, tail flicking with menace. He bared his long yellow claws and sharp fangs.\n\nThe giant black jaguar rushed at him, prepared to bowl him over, but at the last moment, she pulled up and stopped in front of Tor-tor, matching his stance, snarling. The two cats hissed and challenged each other.\n\nKostos lifted his weapon. \"You're dead, bitch.\"\n\nManny motioned him not to shoot. \"Wait!\"\n\nThe two cats slowly padded around each other, circling, only a yard apart. At one point, the giant female's back was toward them. Nate could tell both Rangers had to restrain themselves not to fire.\n\n\"What are they doing?\" Carrera asked.\n\nManny answered, \"She can't understand why one of her own species, even a small one like Tor-tor, is protecting us. It has her perplexed.\"\n\nBy now, the two had stopped snarling. They cautiously approached one another, now almost nose to nose. Sharing some silent communication, the circling continued. Raised hackles settled back to sleek fur. A soft chuffing sounded as the larger cat took in the scent of this strange little jaguar.\n\nEventually they both stopped their dance, once again back to their original positions. Tor-tor crouched between the cave and the giant cat.\n\nWith a final grunt, the large jaguar leaned forward and rubbed her jowl against the side of Tor-tor's cheek, some understanding reached, a truce. With a blur of black fur, the giant cat spun and slipped back down the slope.\n\nSlowly Tor-tor straightened from his crouch. His eyes glowed golden. With a feline casualness, he licked a patch of ruffled fur back into perfect place and turned to them. He padded back to the entrance as if he'd just come back from a stroll.\n\nCarrera lowered her weapon and shifted her night-vision goggles. \"They're pulling back,\" she said, amazed.\n\nManny hugged his pet. \"You stupid bastard,\" he mumbled.\n\n\"What just happened?\" Kostos asked.\n\n\"Tor-tor's close to being sexually mature,\" Manny said. \"A juvenile male. The female, though huge, appears proportionally to be about the same age. And with all the blood in the air, tensions were high, including sexual tension. From their actions, Tor-tor's challenge was construed as both a threat and a sexual display.\"\n\nKostos scowled. \"So you're saying he was making a play for her ass.\"\n\n\"And she accepted,\" Manny said, patting his jaguar's side proudly. \"Since Tor-tor came out and met her challenge, she probably believes him to be our pack leader. An acceptable mate.\"\n\n\"What now?\" Carrera asked. \"They've pulled back, but haven't left. As a matter of fact, they seem to be massing down the chasm a bit, blocking any retreat back to the swamp lake.\"\n\nManny shook his head. \"I don't know what they're doing. But Tor-tor has bought us some time. I say we use it. Get that fire lit and keep our guard up.\"\n\nNate watched the bulk of the pack flow down into the jungle chasm. What were they doing?\n\n\"We've got company,\" Carrera said, voice tense again.\n\nShe pointed in the opposite direction, deeper up the canyon.\n\nNate turned his attention. In that direction, he saw nothing but the dark jungle and the broken landscape of rock at the foot of the cliff. \"What did you--\"\n\nThen movement caught his eye.\n\nA short way up the chasm, a dark figure stepped more fully out of the jungle fringe and onto the exposed shale. It was a human figure. A man. He was as much a shadow as the cats, black from head to toe. He lifted an arm, then turned and began to walk up the canyon, keeping in plain sight. They watched him, stunned.\n\n\"It must be one of the Ban-ali,\" Nate said.\n\nThe figure stopped, turned their way, and seemed to be waiting.\n\n\"I think he wants us to follow him,\" Manny said.\n\n\"And the jaguars aren't leaving us much choice,\" Carrera said. \"They've settled into the jungle below us.\"\n\nThe distant figure simply stood.\n\n\"What do we do?\" Carrera asked.\n\nNate answered, \"We follow him. It's why we came. To find the Ban-ali. Perhaps this was their last test, the jaguar pack.\"\n\n\"Or it could be another trap,\" Kostos said.\n\n\"I don't see we have much choice,\" Carrera said. \"I have a feeling we go or the pack will finish us off.\"\n\nNate glanced over his shoulder to the deeper depths of the cave. Ten yards back, Kelly, Kouwe and the others were still gathered around Frank, now stripped to his boxers. The man seemed to be sedated. Anna stood, holding an IV bag at shoulder height. Kelly had one of her brother's stumped limbs already wrapped in a bandage and was tying off a vessel in the other. Kouwe knelt beside her, ready with the bandages for his other limb. Around them, empty syringe wrappers and small plastic drug bottles littered the cave floor.\n\n\"I'll see if Frank can be moved.\"\n\n\"We leave no one behind,\" Kostos said.\n\nNate nodded, glad to hear it. He crossed to the others. \"How's Frank doing?\" he asked Kouwe.\n\n\"He's lost a lot of blood. Once he's stable, Kelly wants to transfuse him.\"\n\nNate sighed. \"We may have to move him.\"\n\n\"What?\" Kelly asked, tying off a suture. \"He can't be moved!\" Panic, exhaustion, and disbelief hardened her words.\n\nNate crouched as Kelly and Kouwe began bandaging the second stump. Frank moaned softly as his leg was jarred.\n\nAs they worked, Nate explained what had happened at the cave's entrance. \"We've been contacted by the Ban-ali. Perhaps invited to continue on to their village. I suspect the invitation is a one-time offer.\"\n\nKouwe nodded. \"We must've passed some last challenge, survived some gauntlet,\" the professor said, parroting Nate's early assessment. \"Now we've earned the right to move onward by proving ourselves worthy.\"\n\n\"But Frank...?\" Kelly said.\n\n\"I can rig up a stretcher out of bamboo and palm fronds,\" Kouwe said softly, touching Kelly's hand. \"Knowing these tribesmen, if we don't move him, he'll be killed. We'll all be killed.\"\n\nNate watched the woman's face tighten with fear. Her eyes glazed. First her daughter, now her brother.\n\nNate sank down beside her and put his arm around her. \"I'll make sure he gets where we're going safely. Once there, Olin can get the radio up and running.\" Nate glanced to the Russian.\n\nOlin nodded his head vigorously. \"I know I can at least get the GPS working properly to send out a decent signal.\"\n\n\"And once that's done, help will arrive. They'll airlift your brother out. He'll make it. We all will.\"\n\nKelly leaned into him, softening against him. \"Do you promise?\" she said, her voice soft with tears.\n\nHe tightened his embrace. \"Of course I do.\" But as Nate stared at the pale face of her brother, with blood slowly seeping through the man's new bandages, he prayed it was a promise he could keep.\n\nKelly shifted in his hold, and her voice was stronger when she spoke. \"Then let's go.\"\n\nHe helped her to her feet.\n\nThey quickly began arranging for their departure. Kostos and Manny crossed to the jungle and gathered material to construct the makeshift stretcher, while Kelly and Kouwe stabilized Frank as well as they could. Soon they were ready to head out again into the night.\n\nNate met Carrera at the cave entrance.\n\n\"Our visitor's still out there,\" she said.\n\nIn the distance, the lone shadowy figure stood.\n\nKostos raised his voice, returning to make sure everything was in order. \"Keep together! Keep alert!\"\n\nNate and Carrera separated. The group filed out between them with the sergeant in the lead. Near the end of the line, Manny and Olin carried the stretcher, the patient lashed to the bamboo for extra security. The men in the party would take turns hauling Frank.\n\nAs the stretcher passed, Kelly followed last. Then Nate and Carrera moved in step behind her.\n\nJust past the entrance, the toe to Nate's boot knocked an object from the shale, something dusty and discarded. Nate bent to pick it up and inspected it.\n\nThey couldn't leave this behind.\n\nHe knocked off the dirt and stepped forward. He slipped in front of Manny, wiped the last bit of dust from the brim of Frank's Red Sox cap, and placed it back on the stricken man's head.\n\nAs Nate turned to return to his place in line, he found Kelly's eyes on his, tears glistening. She offered him a shadow of a sad smile. He nodded, accepting her silent gratitude.\n\nNate took his position beside Carrera. He studied the dark jungle and the solitary figure in the distance.\n\nWhere did the path lead from here?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Habitation",
                "text": "AUGUST 16, 4:13 A.M.\n\n[ AMAZON JUNGLE ]\n\nLouis floated in his canoe, awaiting news from his trackers. Dawn was still hours away. Stars shone in the clear sky, but the moon had set, casting the swamp into deep shadows. Through night-vision scopes, Louis watched for any sign of his men.\n\nNothing.\n\nHe grimaced. As he waited in the canoe, he felt his plan crumbling around him. What was going on out there? His ruse to get the Ranger team fleeing had been successful. But what now?\n\nAt midnight, Louis's team had crossed the swamp in their canoes, hauled overland from the river. As the group neared the far shore, flares had blossomed into the sky farther up the chasm, near the southern cliffs. Shots were fired, echoing down to the swamp.\n\nUsing binoculars, Louis had watched a shadowy fireflight. The Ranger team was again clearly under attack. But from his vantage, Louis could not see who or what was attacking them. His attempts to contact Jacques's recon team had failed. His lieutenant had gone mysteriously silent.\n\nNeeding information, Louis had sent a small team ashore, his best trackers, outfitted with night-vision and infrared equipment, to investigate what was happening. He and the others remained a safe distance offshore in the canoes and waited.\n\nTwo hours had passed, and so far, there was no word, not even a radio message from the trackers. Sharing his canoe were three men and his mistress. They all watched the far shore with binoculars.\n\nTshui was the first to spot a man slip from the jungle. She pointed, making a small sound of warning.\n\nLouis swung his glasses. It was the leader of the tracking team. He waved for them to cross to shore. \"At last,\" Louis mumbled, lowering his scopes.\n\nThe convoy of canoes swept to the boggy banks. Louis was one of the first on shore. He silently signaled his men to set up a defensive perimeter, then crossed to the lead tracker.\n\nThe dark-haired man, a German mercenary named Brail, nodded in greeting. He was short, no taller than five feet, painted in camouflage and clad in black clothes.\n\n\"What did you find?\" Louis asked him.\n\nThe man spoke with a thick German accent. \"Jaguars, a pack of fifteen or so.\"\n\nLouis nodded, not surprised. Across the swamp, they had heard the strange growls and cries.\n\n\"But these were no ordinary jaguars,\" Brail continued. \"More like monsters. Three times normal size. There's a body I can show you.\"\n\n\"Go on,\" Louis said, waving this away for now. \"What happened to the others?\"\n\nBrail continued his report, describing how the trackers had been forced to move with care so as not to be spotted. The rest of his four-man team were positioned in trees up the chasm. \"The pack is leaving, heading deeper into the canyon. They appear to be herding the remaining members of the enemy team ahead of them.\"\n\nBrail held out an open palm. \"After the cats left the area, we found these on a mauled corpse.\" The tracker held two silver bars affixed to a scrap of khaki. They were captain's bars. The leader of the Rangers.\n\n\"Why aren't the jaguars attacking the rest?\" Louis asked.\n\nBrail touched his night-vision scope. \"I spotted someone, an Indian from the look of him, leading them from farther up the canyon.\"\n\n\"One of the Ban-ali?\"\n\nThe man shrugged.\n\nWho else could it be? Louis wondered. He pondered this newest information. Louis could not let the others get too far ahead, especially if the Rangers had made successful contact with the strange tribe. With the prize so close, Louis dared not lose them now.\n\nBut the surviving jaguars could prove a difficulty. They stood between his team and the others. The pack would have to be eliminated as quietly as possible without spooking his true prey.\n\nLouis studied the dark forest. The time of slinking in the others' shadows was nearing an end. Once he knew where the village was located and evaluated its defenses, he could take his plan to its final stage.\n\n\"Where are the cats now?\" Louis asked. \"Are they all heading up the canyon?\"\n\nBrail grunted sourly. \"For the moment. If there's any change, my scouts will radio back to us. Luckily, with the infrared scopes, the bastards are easy to spot. Large and hot.\"\n\nLouis nodded, satisfied. \"What about any other hostiles?\"\n\n\"We swept the area, Herr Doktor. No heat signatures.\"\n\nGood. Then at least for the moment, the Rangers were still keeping attention diverted from Louis's team. But this close to the Ban-ali lands, Louis knew such an advantage would not last long. He and his team would have to move quickly from here. But first, for his plan to proceed, the path ahead had to be cleared of the jaguar pack.\n\nHe turned and found Tshui standing at his shoulder, as silent and deadly as any jungle cat. He reached and ran a finger tenderly along her cheekbone. She leaned into his touch. His mistress of poisons and potions.\n\n\"Tshui, ma cherie, it seems once again we must call upon your talents.\"\n\n[ 5:44 A.M. ]\n\nNate's shoulders ached from carrying the stretcher. They had been marching for over two hours. Off to the east, the sky was already glowing a soft rose with the promise of dawn.\n\n\"How much farther?\" Manny huffed from the head of the stretcher. He voiced the question on all their minds.\n\n\"I don't know, but there's no going back from here,\" Nate said, winded.\n\n\"Not unless you want to be someone's morning snack,\" Private Carrera reminded them, maintaining a vigil on their back trail.\n\nAll night long, the jaguar pack had dogged their trail, sticking mostly to the jungles that fringed the cliffs. An occasional bolder individual would stalk the loose shale, a silhouette against the black rock.\n\nTheir presence kept Tor-tor on edge. The jaguar would hiss under his breath and pace around and around the stretcher, on guard. His eyes flashed an angry gold.\n\nFor them all, the only safe path from here was forward, following the lone figure. The tribesman maintained a quarter-mile lead on them, keeping a pace they could follow.\n\nBut exhaustion was quickly setting in. After so many days with so little sleep, everyone was bone tired. The entire team moved at a snail's pace, feet dragging, stumbling often. Still, as hard as the night journey was on all their nerves, one member of their party suffered the most.\n\nKelly never left her brother's side: constantly checking Frank's vital signs and adjusting his bloody bandages as they walked. Her face remained ashen in the starlight, her eyes scared and exhausted. When she wasn't acting as his doctor, she simply held Frank's hand, just a sister at these moments, clearly trying to will him her own strength.\n\nThe only blessing was that the morphine and sedatives were keeping the wounded man in a doped drowse, though he would occasionally moan. Each time this happened, Kelly would tense and her face would twist as if the pain were her own, which Nate suspected was partly true. She clearly suffered as much as her twin brother.\n\n\"Attention!\" Kostos called from up front. \"We're changing direction.\"\n\nNate peered ahead. All night they had been trudging along the hard-packed soil where the jungle met the rocky escarpment of the cliffs. He now watched their guide cross the escarpment toward one of the many shattered cracks in the cliff face. It ran from top to bottom, as wide as a two-car garage.\n\nThe tribesman stepped to the entrance, turned back to stare at them, then, without a signal or any other sign of welcome, he strode into the chasm.\n\n\"I'll check it out first,\" Kostos said.\n\nThe Ranger trotted ahead as they slowed their pace. He had a flashlight secured under his M-16. The light remained steady and fixed on his target. He dashed to the side of the crack's entrance, took a breath, then twisted to shine his light down it. He remained fixed in this position for several seconds, then waved them over with one arm, maintaining his post. \"It's a side chute! A steep one.\"\n\nThe group converged upon the Ranger.\n\nNate squinted up its length. The crack extended the full height of the cliff, open at the top to let starlight shine down it. The way was quite steep, but there appeared to be crude steps climbing the chute.\n\nProfessor Kouwe pointed. \"It looks like there might be another canyon or valley beyond this one.\"\n\nAnna Fong stood beside him. \"Or perhaps it's a switchback of this same canyon, a shortcut to the upper level.\"\n\nIn the distance, the lone tribesman climbed the stone steps, seemingly unconcerned whether they followed or not. But his nonchalance was not shared by all. Behind them, the jaguar pack drew closer, growling and whining.\n\n\"I say we need to make a decision,\" Carrera said.\n\nKostos frowned at the tall walls that framed the crude staircase. \"It could be a trap, an ambush.\"\n\nZane took a step toward the chute. \"We're already in a trap, Sergeant. I for one prefer to take my chances with the unknown rather than with what lies behind us.\"\n\nNo one argued. The memory of the deaths of Warczak and Waxman remained fresh and bloody.\n\nKostos moved on ahead of Zane. \"Let's go. Keep alert.\"\n\nThe chute was wide enough that Manny and Nate could walk side by side, the stretcher between them. This made mounting the steep stairs a bit easier. Still, the climb was daunting.\n\nOlin moved down to them. \"Do either of you need to be relieved?\"\n\nManny grimaced. \"I can last a little longer.\"\n\nNate nodded, agreeing.\n\nSo they began the long climb. As they progressed, Nate and Manny were soon lagging behind the others. Kelly kept near them, her face worried. Carrera maintained the rear guard.\n\nNate's knees ached, his thighs burned, and his shoulders knotted with exhaustion. But he kept on. \"It can't be much farther,\" he said aloud, more to himself than anyone else.\n\n\"I hope not,\" Kelly said.\n\n\"He's strong,\" Manny said, nodding to Frank.\n\n\"Strong will only get you so far,\" she answered.\n\n\"He'll pull through this,\" Nate assured her. \"He's got his lucky Red Sox cap, doesn't he?\"\n\nKelly sighed. \"He loves that old thing. Did you know he was a shortstop for a farm club? Triple A division.\" Her voice lowered to a strained whisper. \"My father was so proud. We all were. There was even talk of Frank going into the majors. Then he got in a skiing accident, screwed up his knee. It ended his career.\"\n\nManny grunted in surprise. \"And that's his lucky hat?\"\n\nKelly brushed the cap's brim, a trace of a smile on her lips. \"For three seasons, he played a game he loved with all his heart. Even after the accident, he was never bitter. He felt himself the luckiest man in the world.\"\n\nNate stared down at the cap, envying Frank his moment in the sun. Had life ever been that simple for him? Maybe the man's cap was indeed lucky. And right now, they needed all the luck they could get.\n\nCarrera interrupted their reminiscing. \"The jaguars...they've stopped following us.\"\n\nNate glanced down the stairs. One of the giant cats stood at the entrance. It was the female leader of the pack. She paced back and forth below. Tor-tor stared down at her, eyes flashing. The female stared at the smaller cat for a moment--then, in a shadowy blur, she fled back into the jungle.\n\n\"The lower valley must be the pack's territory,\" Manny said. \"Another line of defense.\"\n\n\"But what are they protecting?\" Carrera asked.\n\nA call sounded from up ahead. It was Sergeant Kostos. He had stopped ten steps from the end of the chasm and waved them to join him.\n\nAs the group gathered, the eastern skies brightened with dawn. Beyond the stepped chute, a valley opened, thick with dense vegetation and towering trees. Somewhere a stream babbled brightly, and in the distance, a waterfall grumbled.\n\n\"The Ban-ali lands,\" Professor Kouwe said.\n\nOlin approached Manny and Nate. He reached for the stretcher. \"We'll take over from here.\"\n\nNate was surprised to see Richard Zane at the Russian's side. But Nate didn't complain. They passed the stretcher to the new bearers. Relieved of the weight, Nate felt a hundred pounds lighter. His arms felt like they wanted to float up.\n\nHe and Manny climbed up to Kostos.\n\n\"The Indian disappeared,\" the sergeant grumbled.\n\nNate saw that the tribesman had indeed vanished. \"Even so, we know where we have to go.\"\n\n\"We should wait until the sun's fully up,\" Kostos said.\n\nManny frowned. \"The Ban-ali have been tracking us since we first set out into the jungles...night and day. Whether the sun is up or not, we won't see a single soul unless they want us to.\"\n\n\"Besides,\" Nate said, \"we have a man down. The sooner we reach a village or whatever, the better Frank's chances. I say we forge on.\"\n\nKostos sighed, then nodded. \"Okay, but keep together.\"\n\nThe sergeant straightened and led the way from there.\n\nWith each step, the new day grew brighter. Sunrise in the Amazon was often sudden. Overhead, the stars were swallowed in the spreading rosy glow of dawn. The cloudless sky promised a hot day to come.\n\nThe group paused at the top of the chasm. A thin trail led down into the jungle. But where did it go? In the valley below, there was no sign of habitation. No wood smoke rising, no voices echoing.\n\nBefore moving forward, Kostos stood with binoculars, studying the valley. \"Damn it,\" he mumbled.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Zane asked.\n\n\"This canyon is just a switchback of the one we were in.\" He pointed to the right. \"But it appears this canyon is cut off from the one below it by steep cliffs.\"\n\nNate lifted his own binoculars and followed where the sergeant pointed. Through the jungle, he could just make out where a small stream flowed down the canyon's center. He followed its course until it vanished over a steep drop, down into the lower canyon, the one they had been marching through all night, the domain of the giant jaguars.\n\n\"We're boxed in here,\" Kostos said.\n\nNate swung his binoculars in the opposite direction. He spotted another waterfall. This one tumbled down into this canyon from a massive cliff on the far side. In fact, the entire valley was closed in by rock walls on three sides, and the steep cliff on the fourth.\n\nIt's a totally isolated chunk of jungle, Nate realized.\n\nThe sergeant continued, \"I don't like this. The only way up here is this chute.\"\n\nAs Nate lowered his glasses, the edge of the sun crested the eastern skies, bathing the jungle ahead in sunlight, creating a green glow. A flock of blue-and-gold macaws took wing from a rookery near the misty cliffs and sailed past overhead. The spray from the two waterfalls at either end of the valley made the air almost sparkle in the first rays of the sun.\n\n\"Like a bit of Eden,\" Professor Kouwe said in a hushed voice.\n\nWith the touch of light, the jungle awoke with bird-song and the twitter of monkeys. Butterflies as big as dinner plates fluttered at the fringe. Something furry and quick darted back into the jungle. Isolated or not, life had found its way into this verdant valley.\n\nBut what else had made its home here?\n\n\"What are we going to do?\" Anna asked.\n\nEveryone remained silent for several seconds.\n\nNate finally spoke. \"I don't think we have much choice but to proceed.\"\n\nKostos scowled, then nodded. \"Let's see where this leads. But stay alert.\"\n\nThe group cautiously descended the short slope to the jungle's edge. Kostos led once again, Nate at his side with his shotgun. They marched in a tight bunch down the path. As soon as they entered under the bower of the shadowed forest, the scents of orchids and flowering vines filled the air, so thick they could almost taste it.\n\nStill, as sweet as the air was, the constant tension continued. What secrets lay out here? What dangers? Every shadow was suspect.\n\nIt took Nate fifteen minutes of hiking before he noticed something strange about the forest around them. Exhaustion must have dulled his senses. His feet slowed. His mouth dropped open.\n\nManny bumped into him. \"What's the matter?\"\n\nHis brow furrowed, Nate crossed a few steps off the path.\n\n\"What are you doing, Rand?\" Kostos asked.\n\n\"These trees...\" Nate's sense of wonder overwhelmed him, cutting through his unease.\n\nThe others stopped and stared. \"What about them?\" Manny asked.\n\nNate turned in a slow circle. \"As a botanist, I recognize most of the plants around here.\" He pointed and named names. \"Silk cotton, laurels, figs, mahogany, rosewood, palms of every variety. The usual trees you'd see in a rain forest. But...\" Nate's voice died away.\n\n\"But what?\" Kostos asked.\n\nNate stepped to a thin-boled tree. It stretched a hundred feet into the air and burst into a dense mass of fronds. Giant serrated cones hung from its underside. \"Do you know what this is?\"\n\n\"It looks like a palm,\" the sergeant said. \"So what?\"\n\n\"It's not!\" Nate slapped the trunk with his palm. \"It's a goddamn cycadeoid.\"\n\n\"A what?\"\n\n\"A species of tree thought long extinct, dating back to the Cretaceous period. I've only seen examples of it in the fossil record.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Anna Fong asked.\n\nNate nodded. \"I did my thesis on paleobotany.\" He crossed to another plant, a fernlike bush that towered twice his height. Each frond was as tall as he was and as wide as his stretched arms. He shook one of the titanic leaves. \"And this is a goddamn giant club moss. It's supposed to have gone extinct during the Carboniferous period. And that's not all. They're all around us. Glossopterids, lycopods, podocarp conifers...\" He pointed out the strange plants. \"And that's just the things I can classify.\"\n\nNate pointed his shotgun to a tree with a coiled and spiraled trunk. \"I have no idea what that thing is.\" He faced the others, shedding his exhaustion like a second skin, and lifted his arms. \"We're in a goddamn living fossil museum.\"\n\n\"How's that possible?\" Zane asked.\n\nKouwe answered, \"This place is isolated, a pocket in time. Anything could have sheltered here for eons.\"\n\n\"And geologically this region dates back to the Paleozoic era,\" Nate added, excited. \"The Amazon basin was once a freshwater inland sea before changes in tectonics opened the sea to the greater ocean and drained it away. What we have here is a little peek at that ancient past. It's amazing!\"\n\nKelly spoke up from beside the stretcher. \"Amazing or not, I need to get Frank somewhere safe.\"\n\nHer words drew Nate back to the present, back to their situation. He nodded, embarrassed at his distraction in the face of their predicament.\n\nKostos cleared his throat. \"Let's push on.\"\n\nThe group followed his lead.\n\nFascinated by the forest, Nate hung back. His eyes studied the foliage around him, no longer peering at the shadows, but fixed on the jungle itself. As a trained botanist, he gaped in disbelief at the riotous flora: stalked horsetails the size of organ pipes, ferns that dwarfed modern-day palms, massive primitive conifers with cones the size of VW bugs. The mix of the ancient and the new was simply astounding, a merged ecosystem unlike any seen before.\n\nProfessor Kouwe walked beside him now. \"What do you think about all this?\"\n\nNate shook his head. \"I don't know. Other prehistoric groves have been discovered in the past. In China, a forest of dawn redwoods was discovered in the eighties. In Africa, a grotto of rare ferns. And most recently, in Australia, an entire stand of prehistoric trees, long thought extinct, was found in a remote rain forest.\" Nate glanced to Kouwe for emphasis. \"So considering how little of the Amazon has been explored, it's actually more surprising that we've not found such a grove before.\"\n\n\"The jungle hides its secrets well,\" Kouwe said.\n\nAs they walked, the canopy overhead grew denser, the forest taller. The morning sunlight dwindled to a green glow. It was as if they were walking back into twilight.\n\nFurther conversation died as everyone watched the forest. By now, even nonbotanists could tell this jungle was unusual. The number of prehistoric plants began to outnumber the modern-day counterparts. Trees grew huge, ferns towered, strange twisted forms wound among the mix. They passed a spiky bromeliad as large as a small cottage. Massive flowers, as large as pumpkins, grew from vines and scented the air thickly.\n\nIt was a greenhouse of amazing proportion.\n\nKostos suddenly stopped ahead, freezing in place, eyes on the trail, weapon raised and ready. He then slowly motioned them to get down.\n\nThe group crouched. Nate shifted his shotgun. Only then did he notice what had startled the Ranger.\n\nNate stared off to the left, the right, even behind them. It was like one of those computerized pictures that appeared at first to be just a blur of random dots, but when stared at cross-eyed, from a certain angle, a 3-D image suddenly and startlingly appeared.\n\nNate suddenly and startlingly saw the jungle in a new light.\n\nHigh in the trees, mounted among the thick branches, platforms had been built, with small dwellings atop them. The roofs of many were woven from the living leaves and branches, offering natural camouflage. These half-living structures blended perfectly with their host trees.\n\nAs Nate looked closer, what had appeared to be vines and stranglers crisscrossing between the trees and draping to the ground were in fact natural bridges and ladders. One of these ladders was only a few yards to Nate's right. Flowers grew along its length. It was alive, too.\n\nAs he stared around, it was hard to say where manmade structure ended and living began. Half artificial, half growing plant. The blend was so astounding, the camouflage so perfect.\n\nWithout them even knowing it, they had already entered the Ban-ali village.\n\nAhead, larger dwellings climbed even taller trees, multilevel with terraces and patios. But even these were well camouflaged with bark, vine, and leaf, making them difficult to discern.\n\nAs they stared, no one in their party moved. One question was on all their faces: Where were the inhabitants of these treetop homes?\n\nTor-tor growled a deep warning.\n\nThen like the village itself, Nate suddenly saw them. They had been there all along, unmoving, silent, all around. Bits of living shadow. With their bodies painted black, they had melded into the darkness between the trees and under bushes.\n\nOne of the tribesmen stepped from his concealing gloom and onto the path. He seemed undaunted by the weapons in their hands.\n\nNate was certain it was their earlier guide. The one who had led them here. His black hair was braided with bits of leaf and flower in it, adding to the natural camouflage. As he stepped forth, his hands were empty of any weapons. In fact, the tribesman was naked, except for a simple loincloth. He stared at the group, his face hard and unreadable.\n\nThen without a word, he turned and walked down the path.\n\n\"He must want us to follow him again,\" Professor Kouwe said, climbing to his feet. The others slowly stood.\n\nIn the woods, more tribesmen remained silent sentinels, bathed in shadows.\n\nKostos hesitated.\n\n\"If they had wanted to kill us,\" Professor Kouwe added, \"we'd be dead already.\"\n\nKostos frowned, but the Ranger reluctantly continued on after the tribesman.\n\nAs they walked, Nate continued to study the village and its silent inhabitants. He caught occasional glimpses of smaller faces in windows, children and women. Nate glanced to the men half hidden in the forest. Tribal warriors or scouts, he guessed.\n\nTheir painted faces bore the familiar Amerindian bone structure, slightly Asiatic, a genetic tie to their ancestors who had first crossed the Bering Strait from Asia into Alaska some fifty thousand years ago and settled the Americas. But who were they? How did they get here? Where did their roots trace? Despite the danger and silent threat, Nate was dying to learn more about these people and their history--especially since it was tied to his own.\n\nHe stared around the forest. Had his father walked this same path? Considering this possibility, Nate found his lungs tightening, old emotions surfacing. He was so close to discovering the truth about his father.\n\nAs they continued, it soon became apparent that the team was being led toward a sunnier clearing in the distance.\n\nThe forest around the thin track opened to either side as they reached the clearing. A ring of giant cycads and primitive conifers circled the open glade. A shallow-banked stream meandered through the sunny space, sparkling and gurgling.\n\nTheir guide continued ahead, but the team stopped at the threshold, shocked.\n\nIn the center of the clearing, practically filling the entire space, stood a massive tree, a specimen Nate had never seen before. It had to tower at least thirty stories high, its white-barked trunk ten yards in diameter. Thick roots knobbed out of the dark soil like pale knees. A few even spanned the stream beside it before disappearing back into the loam.\n\nOverhead, the tree's branches spread in distinct terraces, not unlike giant redwoods. But instead of needles, this specimen sported wide palmate green leaves, fluttering gently to reveal silver undersides and clusters of husked seed pods, similar to coconuts.\n\nNate stared, dumbstruck. He didn't even know where to begin classifying this specimen. Maybe a new species of primitive gymnospore, but he was far from sure. The nuts did look a bit like those found on a modern cat's claw plant, but this was a much more ancient specimen.\n\nAs he studied the giant, he realized one other thing about the tree. Even this towering hardwood bore signs of habitation. Small clusters of hutlike dwellings rested atop thicker branches or nestled against the trunk. Constructed to mimic the tree's seed pods, Nate realized, amazed.\n\nAcross the way, their tribal guide slipped between two gnarled roots and disappeared into shadow. Stepping to the side for a better look, Nate realized the shadow was in fact an arched opening into the tree's base, a doorway. Nate stared up at the clustered dwellings. There were no vine ladders here. So how did one reach the dwellings? Was there a tunnel winding through the trunk? Nate began to step forward to investigate.\n\nBut Manny grabbed his arm. \"Look.\" The biologist pointed off to the side.\n\nNate glanced over. Distracted by the white-barked giant, he had failed to notice a squat log cabin across the clearing. It was boxy, but sturdily constructed of logs and a thatched roof. It seemed out of place here, the only structure built on the ground.\n\n\"Are those solar cells on its roof?\" Manny asked.\n\nNate squinted and raised his binoculars. Atop the cabin, two small flat black panels glinted in the morning sunshine. They indeed appeared to be solar panels. Intrigued, Nate examined the cabin more thoroughly through his binoculars. The structure was windowless, its door just a flap of woven palm leaves.\n\nNate's attention caught on something beside the door, a familiar object, bright in the sunshine. It was a tall snakewood staff, polished from years of hard use, crowned by hoko feathers.\n\nNate felt the ground shift under his feet.\n\nIt was his father's walking stick.\n\nDropping his binoculars, Nate stumbled toward the cabin.\n\n\"Rand!\" Kostos barked at him.\n\nBut he was beyond listening. His feet began to run. The others followed him, keeping the group together. Zane and Olin grunted as they struggled with the stretcher.\n\nNate hurried to the cabin and then skidded to a stop, his breath caught. His mouth grew dry as he stared at the walking stick. Initials were carved in the wood: C.R.\n\nCarl Rand.\n\nTears rose in Nate's eyes. At the time of his father's disappearance, Nate had refused to fathom the man could be dead. He had needed to cling to hope, lest despair cripple him, leaving him unable to pursue the yearlong search. Even when his financial resources had run dry and he was forced to concede his father was gone, he hadn't cried. Over such a prolonged time, sorrow had devolved into a black depression, a pit that consumed his life these past four years.\n\nBut now, with a tangible bit of evidence that his father had been here, tears flowed freely down his cheeks.\n\nNate did not entertain the possibility that his father was still alive. Such miracles were relegated to novels. The structure here bore evidence of long disuse. Dead leaves, blown from the forest, lay windswept into a pile against the cabin's front, undisturbed by any footprints.\n\nNate stepped forward and pushed open the woven flap. It was dark inside. Grabbing the flashlight from his field jacket, Nate clicked it on. A tailless rat, a paca, skittered from a hiding place and dashed through a crack in the far wall. Dust lay thick, tracked with little paw prints, along with rodent droppings.\n\nNate shone his light around.\n\nInside, near the back wall, four hammocks lay strung from the raftered ceiling, empty and untouched. Closer still, a small wooden bench had been constructed. Atop it was spread a collection of lab equipment, including a laptop computer.\n\nLike the wooden staff on the porch, Nate recognized the tiny microscope and specimen jars. They were his father's equipment. He stepped into the dark space and opened the laptop. It whirred to electronic life, startling Nate. He stumbled backward.\n\n\"The solar cells,\" Manny said from the doorway. \"Still giving it juice.\"\n\nNate wiped spiderwebs from his hands. \"My father was here,\" he mumbled, numb. \"This is his equipment.\"\n\nKouwe spoke a few steps back. \"The Indian is returning...with company.\"\n\nNate stared at the computer for a second more. Dust motes floated in the air, sparkling bright in the morning sunlight streaming through the open flap. The room was aromatic with wood oils and dried palm thatch. But underlying it was an odor of ashes and age. No one had been here for at least half a year.\n\nWhat had happened to them?\n\nWiping his eyes, Nate turned to the doorway. Across the glade, he watched the black-painted tribesman march toward the cabin. At his side strode a smaller man, a tiny Indian. He could be no more than four feet tall. His burnished skin was unpainted, except for a prominent design in red on his belly and the familiar blue palm print centered just above the navel.\n\nStepping back into the sunlight, Nate joined the others.\n\nThe newcomer had pierced ears from which hung feathers, not unlike the typical decorations of the Yanomamo. But he also bore a headband with a prominent beetle decoration in the center. Its black carapace glistened brightly. It was one of the carnivorous locusts that had killed Corporal Jorgensen.\n\nProfessor Kouwe glanced over at Nate. His friend had noticed the odd bit of decoration, too. Here was further evidence that the attack truly had originated from this place.\n\nLike a knife through his gut, Nate felt a surge of anger. Not only had this tribe been instrumental in the deaths of half their party, they had held the survivors of his father's expedition prisoner for four years. Fury and pain swelled through him.\n\nKouwe must have sensed Nate's emotion. \"Remain quiet, Nate. Let us see how this plays out.\"\n\nTheir guide led the newcomer to them, then stepped aside, in clear deference to the smaller man.\n\nThe tiny Indian glanced at the group, studying each of them, eyes narrowing slightly at the sight of Tor-tor. Finally he pointed to the stretcher, then jabbed at Olin and Zane. \"Bring the hurt man,\" the Indian said in stilted English, then waved an arm at everyone else. \"Others stay here.\"\n\nWith these simple commands, the diminutive man turned and headed back to the huge white-barked tree again.\n\nStunned, no one moved. The shock of hearing spoken English cut through Nate's anger.\n\nOlin and Zane remained standing, not budging.\n\nThe taller Indian guide waved an arm angrily, indicating they should follow his fellow tribesman.\n\n\"No one's going anywhere,\" Sergeant Kostos said. Private Carrera moved forward, too. Both had their weapons ready. \"We're not splitting up the group.\"\n\nThe tribesman scowled. He pointed at the retreating tiny figure. \"Healer,\" the man said, struggling with the words. \"Good healer.\"\n\nAgain the spoken English gave them pause.\n\n\"They must have learned the language from your father's expedition,\" Anna Fong mumbled.\n\nOr from my father himself, Nate thought.\n\nKouwe turned to Kelly. \"I think we should obey. I don't think they mean Frank any harm. But just in case, I can go with the stretcher.\"\n\n\"I'm not leaving my brother's side,\" Kelly said, stepping closer to the stretcher.\n\nZane argued, too. \"And I'm not going at all. I'm staying where the guns are.\"\n\n\"Don't worry,\" the professor said. \"I'll take your place. It's my turn anyway.\"\n\nZane was only too happy to be unburdened of the stretcher. Once free, he quickly scooted into the shadow of Sergeant Kostos, who wore a perpetual scowl.\n\nKelly moved to Olin at the head of the stretcher. \"I'll take the other end.\" The Russian started to object but was cut off. \"You get the GPS working,\" she ordered. \"You're the only one who can get the damned thing fixed.\"\n\nHe reluctantly nodded and let her take the bamboo poles of the stretcher. She struggled with the weight for a moment, then with a heave, got her legs under her.\n\nNate shifted forward, going to her aid. \"I can take Frank,\" he offered. \"You can follow.\"\n\n\"No,\" she said harshly, teeth clenched. She tossed her head back toward the cabin. \"See if you can find out what happened here.\"\n\nBefore any other objections could be raised, Kelly lurched forward. Kouwe followed at his end of the stretcher.\n\nThe tribesman looked relieved at their cooperation and hurried ahead, leading them toward the giant tree.\n\nFrom the dirt porch of the cabin, Nate glanced again at the clusters of dwellings nestled high up the white-barked tree, realizing it was a view his father must have seen. As Nate stood, he sought some connection to his dead father. He remained standing until Kelly and Kouwe disappeared into the tree tunnel.\n\nAs the other team members began unhooking packs, Nate returned his attention to the empty cabin. Through the doorway, the laptop's screen shone with a ghostly glow in the dark room. A lonely, empty light.\n\nNate sighed, wondering again what had happened to the others.\n\nStruggling under the weight of her twin brother, Kelly entered the dark opening in the massive trunk of the tree. Her focus remained divided between Frank's weakening state and the strangeness before her.\n\nBy now, Frank's bandages were fully soaked with blood. Flies swarmed and crawled through the gore, an easy meal. He needed a transfusion as soon as possible. In her head, she ran through the additional care needed: a new IV line, fresh pressure bandages, more morphine and antibiotics. Frank had to survive until the rescue helicopter could get here.\n\nStill, as much as horror and fear filled her heart, Kelly could not help but be amazed by what she found beyond the entrance to the tree. She had expected to find a cramped steep staircase. Instead, the path beyond the doorway was wide--a gentle, sweeping course winding and worming its way up toward the treetop dwellings. The walls were smooth and polished to a deep honey color. A smattering of blue handprints decorated the walls. Beyond the entrance, every ten yards down the passage, a thin window, not unlike a castle tower's arrow slit, broke through to the outside, bright with morning sunlight, illuminating the way.\n\nFollowing their guide, Kelly and Kouwe worked up the winding path. The floor was smooth, but woody enough for good traction. And though the grade was mild, Kelly was soon wheezing with exertion. But adrenaline and fear kept her moving: fear for her brother, fear for them all.\n\n\"This tunnel seems almost natural,\" Kouwe mumbled behind her. \"The smoothness of the walls, the perfection of the spiral. It's like this tunnel is some tubule or channel in the tree, not a hewn passage.\"\n\nKelly licked her lips but found no voice. Too tired, too scared. The professor's words drew her attention to the floor and walls. Now that he had mentioned it, the passage showed not a single ax or chisel mark. Only the windows were crude, clearly manmade, hacked through to the outside. The difference between the two was striking. Had the tribe stumbled upon this winding tubule within the tree and taken advantage of it? The dwellings they'd seen on the way here proved that the Ban-ali were skilled engineers, incorporating the artificial with the natural. Perhaps the same was true here.\n\nThe professor made one last observation: \"The flies are gone.\"\n\nKelly glanced over her shoulder. The flock of flies nattering and crawling among her brother's bloody bandages had indeed vanished.\n\n\"The bugs flew off shortly after we entered the tree,\" Kouwe said. \"It must be some repellent property of the wood's aromatic oils.\"\n\nKelly had also noticed the musky odor of the tree. It had struck her as vaguely familiar, similar to dried eucalyptus, medicinal and pleasant, but laced with a deeper loamy smell that hinted at something earthy and ripe.\n\nStaring over her shoulder, Kelly saw how heavily soaked her brother's bandages were. He could not last much longer, not with the continuing blood loss. Something had to be done. As she walked, cold dread iced her veins. Despite her exhaustion, her pace increased.\n\nAs they climbed, openings appeared in the tunnel wall. Passing by them, Kelly noted that the passages led either into one of the hutlike dwellings or out onto branches as wide as driveways, with huts in the distance.\n\nAnd still they were led onward and upward.\n\nDespite her anxiety, Kelly was soon stumbling, dragging, gasping, eyes stinging with running sweat. She desperately wanted to rest, but she could not let Frank down.\n\nTheir guide noticed them drifting farther and farther behind him. He backed down and studied the situation. He moved to Kelly's side.\n\n\"I help.\" He struck a fist on his chest. \"I strong.\" He nudged her aside and took her end of the stretcher.\n\nShe was too weak to object, too winded to mumble a thanks.\n\nAs Kelly stepped aside, the two men now continued upward, moving faster. Kelly kept pace beside the stretcher. Frank was so pale, his breathing shallow. Relieved of the burden, Kelly's full attention focused back on her brother. She pulled out her stethoscope and listened to his chest. His heartbeat thudded dully, his lungs crackled with rales. His body was rapidly giving out, heading into hypovolemic shock. The hemorrhaging had to be stopped.\n\nFocused on her brother's condition, she failed to notice that they'd reached the tunnel's end. The spiraling passage terminated abruptly at an opening that looked identical to the archway at the base of the giant tree. But instead of leading back into the morning sunshine, this archway led into a cavernous structure with a saucer-shaped floor.\n\nKelly gaped at the interior, again lit by rough-hewn slits high up the curved walls. The space, spherical in shape, had to be thirty yards across, a titanic bubble in the wood, half protruding out of the main trunk.\n\n\"It's like a massive gall,\" Kouwe said, referring to the woody protuberances sometimes found on oaks or other trees, created by insects or other parasitic conditions.\n\nKelly appreciated the comparison. But it wasn't insects that inhabited this gall. Around the curved walls, woven hammocks hung from pegs, a dozen at least. In a few, naked tribesmen lay sprawled. Others of the Ban-ali worked around them. The handful of prone men and women were showing various signs of illness: a bandaged foot, a splinted arm, a fevered brow. She watched a tribesman with a long gash across his chest wince as a thick pasty substance was applied to his wound by another of his tribe.\n\nKelly understood immediately what she was seeing.\n\nA hospital ward.\n\nThe tiny-framed tribesman who had ordered them here stood a few paces away. His look was sour with impatience. He pointed to one of the hammocks and spoke rapidly in a foreign tongue.\n\nTheir guide answered with a nod and led them to the proper hammock.\n\nProfessor Kouwe mumbled as they walked. \"If I'm not mistaken, that's a dialect of Yanomamo.\"\n\nKelly glanced over to him, hearing the shock in the professor's voice.\n\nHe explained the significance. \"The Yanomamo language has no known counterparts. Their speech patterns and tonal structures are unique unto themselves. A true lingual isolate. It's one of the reasons the Yanomamo are considered one of the oldest Amazonian bloodlines.\" His eyes were wide upon the men and women in the woody chamber. \"The Ban-ali must be an offshoot, a lost tribe of the Yanomamo.\"\n\nKelly merely nodded, too full of worry to appreciate the professor's observation. Her attention remained focused on her brother.\n\nOverseen by the tiny Indian, the stretcher was lowered, and Frank was transferred onto the hammock. Kelly hovered nervously at his side. Jarred by the movement, Frank moaned slightly, eyes fluttering. His sedatives must be wearing off.\n\nKelly reached down to her med pack atop the abandoned stretcher. Before she could gather up her syringe and bottles of morphine, the tiny healer barked orders to his staff. Their guide and another tribesman began to loosen the bandages over Frank's stumps with small bone knives.\n\n\"Don't!\" Kelly said, straightening.\n\nShe was ignored. They continued to work upon the soaked strips. Blood began to flow more thickly.\n\nShe moved to the hammock, grabbing the taller man's elbow. \"No! You don't know what you're doing. Wait until I have the pressure wraps ready! An IV in place! He'll bleed to death!\"\n\nThe stronger man broke out of her grasp and scowled at her.\n\nKouwe intervened. He pointed at Kelly. \"She's our healer.\"\n\nThe tribesman seemed baffled by this statement and glanced to his own shaman.\n\nThe smaller Indian was crouched by the curved wall at the head of the hammock. He had a bowl in his hand, gathering a flow of thick sap from a trough gouged in the wall. \"I am healer here,\" the small man said. \"This is Ban-ali medicine. To stop the bleeding. Strong medicine from the yagga.\"\n\nKelly glanced to Kouwe.\n\nHe deciphered. \"Yagga...it's similar to yakka...a Yanomamo word for mother.\"\n\nKouwe stared around at the chamber. \"Yagga must be their name for this tree. A deity.\"\n\nThe Indian shaman straightened with his bowl, now half full of the reddish sap. Reaching up, he stoppered the thick flow by jamming a wooden peg into a hole at the top of the trough. \"Strong medicines,\" he repeated, lifting the bowl and striding to the hammock. \"The blood of the Yagga will stop the blood of the man.\" It sounded like a rote maxim, a translation of an old adage.\n\nHe motioned for the tribesman to cut away one of the two bandages.\n\nKelly opened her mouth again to object, but Kouwe interrupted her with a squeeze on her arm. \"Gather your bandage material and LRS bag,\" he whispered to her. \"Be ready, but for the moment, let's see what this medicine can do.\"\n\nShe bit back her protest, remembering the small Indian girl at the hospital of Sao Gabriel and how Western medicine had failed her. For the moment, she would yield to the Ban-ali, trusting not the strange little shaman, but rather Professor Kouwe himself. She dropped to her medical pack and burrowed into it, reaching with deft fingers for her wraps and saline bag.\n\nAs Kelly retrieved what she needed, her eyes flicked over to the nearby sap channel. The blood of the Yagga. The tapped vein could be seen as a dark ribbon in the honeyed wood, extending up from the top of the trough and arching across the roof. Kelly spotted other such veins, each dark vessel leading to one of the other hammocks.\n\nWith her bandages in hand, she stood as her brother's bloodied wrap was ripped away. Unprepared, still a sister, not a doctor, Kelly grew faint at the sight: the sharp shard of white bone, the rip of shredded muscle, the gelatinous bruise of ruined flesh. A thick flow of dark blood and clots washed from the raw wound and dribbled through the hammock's webbing.\n\nKelly suddenly found it difficult to breathe. Sounds grew muted and more acute at the same time. Her vision narrowed upon the limp figure in the bed. It wasn't Frank, her mind kept trying to convince her. But another part of her knew the truth. Her brother was doomed. Tears filled her eyes, and a moan rose in her throat, choking her.\n\nKouwe put his arm around her shoulders, reacting to her distress, pulling her to him.\n\n\"Oh, God...please...\" Kelly sobbed.\n\nOblivious to her outburst, the Ban-ali shaman examined the amputated limb with a determined frown. Then he scooped up a handful of the thick red sap, the color of port wine, and slathered it over the stump.\n\nThe reaction was immediate--and violent. Frank's leg jerked up and away as if struck by an electric current. He cried out, even through his stupor, an animal sound.\n\nKelly stumbled toward him, out of the professor's arms. \"Frank!\"\n\nThe shaman glanced toward her. He mumbled something in his native language and backed away, allowing her to come forward.\n\nShe reached her brother, grabbing for his arm. But Frank's outburst had been as short as it was sudden. He relaxed back into the hammock. Kelly was sure he was dead. She leaned over him, sobbing openly.\n\nBut his lungs heaved up and down, in deep, shuddering breaths.\n\nAlive.\n\nShe fell to her knees in relief. His limb, exposed, stood stark and raw before her. She eyed the wound, expecting the worst, ready with the bandages.\n\nBut they proved unnecessary.\n\nWhere the sap had touched the macerated flesh, it had formed a thick seal. Wide-eyed, she reached and touched the strange substance. It was no longer sticky, but leathery and tough, like some type of natural bandage. She glanced to the shaman with awe. The bleeding had stopped, sealed tight.\n\n\"The Yagga has found him worthy,\" the shaman said. \"He will heal.\"\n\nStunned, Kelly stood as the shaman carried his bowl toward the other limb and began to repeat the miracle. \"I can't believe it,\" she finally said, her voice as small as a mouse.\n\nKouwe took her under his arm again. \"I know fifteen different plant species with hemostatic properties, but nothing of this caliber.\"\n\nFrank's body jerked again as the second leg was treated.\n\nAfterward, the shaman studied his handiwork for a few moments, then turned to them. \"The Yagga will protect him from here,\" he said solemnly.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Kelly said.\n\nThe small tribesman glanced back to her brother. \"He is now Ban-ali. One of the Chosen.\"\n\nKelly frowned.\n\nThe shaman continued, \"He must now serve the Yagga in all ways, for all times.\" With these words, he turned away--but not before adding something in his native tongue, something spoken in a dire, threatening tone.\n\nAs he left, Kelly turned to Kouwe, her eyes questioning.\n\nThe professor shook his head. \"I recognized only one word--ban-yi.\"\n\n\"What does that mean?\"\n\nKouwe glanced over to Frank. \"Slave.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Health Care",
                "text": "AUGUST 16, 11:43 A.M.\n\n[ HOSPITAL WARD OF THE INSTAR INSTITUTE ]\n\n[ LANGLEY, VIRGINIA ]\n\nLauren had never known such despair. Her granddaughter drifted in a cloud of pillows and sheets, such a tiny thing with lines and monitor wires running to machines and saline bags. Even through Lauren's contamination suit, she could hear the beep and hiss from the various pieces of equipment in the long narrow room. Little Jessie was no longer the only one confined here. Five other children had become sick over the past day.\n\nAnd how many more in the coming days? Lauren recalled the epidemiologist's computer model and its stain of red spreading over the United States. She had heard cases were already being reported in Canada, too. Even two children in Germany, who had been vacationing in Florida.\n\nNow she was realizing that Dr. Alvisio's grim model may have been too conservative in its predictions. Just this morning, Lauren had heard rumors about new cases in Brazil, cases now appearing in healthy adults. These patients were not presenting fevers, like the children, but were instead showing outbreaks of ravaging malignancies and cancers, like those seen in Gerald Clark's body. Lauren already had researchers checking into it.\n\nBut right now, she had other concerns.\n\nShe sat in a chair beside Jessie's bed. Her grandchild was watching some children's program piped into the video monitor in the room. But no smile ever moved her lips, no laugh. The girl watched it like an automaton, her eyes glassy, her hair plastered to her head from fevered sweat.\n\nThere was so little comfort Lauren could offer. The touch of the plastic containment suit was cold and impersonal. All she could do was maintain her post beside the girl, let her know she wasn't alone, let her see a familiar face. But she was not Jessie's mother. Every time the door to the ward swished open, Jessie would turn to see who it was, her eyes momentarily hopeful, then fading to disappointment. Just another nurse or a doctor. Never her mother.\n\nEven Lauren found herself frequently glancing to the door, praying for Marshall to return with some word on Kelly and Frank. Down in the Amazon, the Brazilian evacuation helicopter had left from the Wauwai field base hours ago. Surely the rescuers would've reached the stranded team by now. Surely Kelly was already flying back here.\n\nBut so far, no word.\n\nThe waiting was growing interminable.\n\nIn the bed, Jessie scratched at the tape securing her catheter.\n\n\"Hon, leave it be,\" Lauren said, moving the girl's hand away.\n\nJessie sighed, sinking back into her pillows. \"Where's Mommy?\" she asked for the thousandth time that day. \"I want Mommy.\"\n\n\"She's coming, hon. But South America is a long way away. Why don't you try to take a nap?\"\n\nJessie frowned. \"My mouth hurts.\"\n\nLauren reached to the table and lifted a cup with a straw toward the girl, juice with an analgesic in it. \"Sip this. It'll make the ouchie go away.\" Already the girl's mouth had begun to erupt with fever blisters, raw ulcerations along the mucocutaneous margins of her lips. Their appearance was one of the distinct symptoms of the disease. There could now be no denying that Jessie had the plague.\n\nThe girl sipped at the cup, her face scrunching sourly, then sat back. \"It tastes funny. It's not like Mommy makes.\"\n\n\"I know, honey, but it'll make you feel better.\"\n\n\"Tastes funny...\" Jessie mumbled again, eyes drifting back to the video screen.\n\nThe two sat quietly. Somewhere down the row of beds, one of the children began to sob. In the background, the repetitious jingle of the dancing bear sounded tinny through her suit.\n\nHow many more? Lauren wondered. How many more would grow sick? How many more would die?\n\nThe sigh of a broken pressure seal sounded behind her. Lauren turned as the ward door swished open. A bulky figure in a quarantine suit bowed into the room, carrying his oxygen line. He turned, and through the plastic face shield, Lauren recognized her husband.\n\nShe was instantly on her feet. \"Marshall...\"\n\nHe waved her down and crossed to the wall to snap in his oxygen line to one of the air bibs. Once done, he strode to the girl's bedside.\n\n\"Grandpa!\" Jessie said, smiling faintly. The girl's love for her grandfather, the only father figure in her life, was special. It was heartening to see her respond to him.\n\n\"How's my little pumpkin?\" he said, bending over to tousle her hair.\n\n\"I'm watching Bobo the Bear.\"\n\n\"Are you? Is he funny?\"\n\nShe nodded her head vigorously.\n\n\"I'll watch it with you. Scoot over.\"\n\nThis delighted Jessie. She shifted, making room for him to sit on the edge of the bed. He put an arm around her. She snuggled up against him, content to watch the screen.\n\nLauren met her husband's gaze.\n\nHe gave his head a tiny shake.\n\nLauren frowned. What did that mean? Anxious to find out, she switched to the suit's radios so they could speak in whispers without Jessie hearing.\n\n\"How's Jessie doing?\" Marshall asked.\n\nLauren sat straighter, leaning closer. \"Her temperature is down to ninety-nine, but her labs are continuing to slide. White blood cell levels have been dropping, while bilirubin levels are rising.\"\n\nMarshall's eyes closed with pain. \"Stage Two?\"\n\nLauren found her voice cracking. With so many cases studied across the nation, the disease progression was becoming predictable. Stage II was classified when the disease progressed from its benign febrile state into an anemic stage with bleeding and nausea.\n\n\"By tomorrow,\" Lauren said. \"Maybe the day after that at the latest.\"\n\nThey both knew what would happen from there. With good support, Stage II could stretch for three to four days, followed by a single day of Stage III. Convulsions and brain hemorrhages. There was no Stage IV.\n\nLauren stared at the little girl in the bed as she cuddled against her grandfather. Less than a week. That's all the time Jessie had left. \"What of Kelly? Has she been picked up? Is she on her way back?\"\n\nHer suit radio remained silent. Lauren glanced back to Marshall.\n\nHe stared at her a moment more, then spoke. \"There was no sign of them. The rescue helicopter searched the region where they were supposed to be according to their last GPS signal. But nothing was found.\"\n\nLauren felt like a brick had been dropped in her gut. \"How could that be?\"\n\n\"I don't know. We've been trying to raise them on the satellite link all day, but with no luck. Whatever problem they were having with their equipment yesterday must still be going on.\"\n\n\"Are they continuing the air search?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"The helicopter had to turn back. Limited fuel.\"\n\n\"Marshall...\" Her voice cracked.\n\nHe reached out to her and took her hand. \"Once they've refueled, they're sending it back out for a night flight. To see if they can spot campfires from the air using infrared scopes. Then tomorrow, another three helicopters are joining the search, including our own Comanche.\" He squeezed her hand, tight. \"We'll find them.\"\n\nLauren felt numb all over. All her children...all of them...\n\nJessie spoke up from the bed, pointing an arm that trailed an IV line toward the video. \"Bobo's funny!\"\n\n[ 1:05 P.M. ]\n\n[ AMAZON JUNGLE ]\n\nNate climbed down the fifty-foot ladder from the treetop dwelling. The three-story structure rested in the branches of a nightcap oak, a species from the Cretaceous period. Earlier, just after Kelly and the professor had left with Frank, a pair of Ban-ali women had appeared and led the party to the edge of the glade, gesturing and indicating that the dwelling above had been assigned to their group.\n\nSergeant Kostos had resisted at first, until Private Carrera had made an astute observation. \"Up there, it'll be more defensible. We're sitting targets on the ground. If those giant cats should come up during the night--\"\n\nKostos had cut her off, needing no more convincing. \"Right, right. Let's move our supplies up there, then set up a defensive perimeter.\"\n\nNate thought such caution was unnecessary. Since arriving, the Indians had remained curious about them but kept a wary distance, peering from the jungle edges and windows. No hostility was shown. Still, Nate had a hard time balancing these quiet people with the murderous savages who had wiped out half their team by unleashing all manner of beasts upon them. But then again, such duality was the way of many indigenous tribes: hostile and brutal by outside appearances, but once you were accepted, they were found to be a peaceful and open people.\n\nStill, so many of their teammates had died horribly at the indirect hands of this tribe. A burning seed of anger smoldered in Nate's chest. And then there were Clark and maybe others of his father's group, held hostage for all these years. At the moment, Nate found it hard to achieve professional detachment. As an anthropologist, he could understand these strange people, but as a son, resentment and fury colored all he saw.\n\nStill, they were helping Frank. Professor Kouwe had returned briefly from the white-barked tree to announce that the tribal shaman and Kelly were able to stabilize their teammate. It was a rare bit of good news. Kouwe had not stayed long, anxious to return to the giant tree. The professor's eyes had flicked toward Nate. Despite the tribe's cooperation at the moment, Kouwe was clearly worried. Nate had tried to inquire, but the professor had waved him off as he left. \"Later\" was all he had said.\n\nReaching the last rung of the vine ladder, Nate jumped off. Clustered around the base of the tree were the two Rangers and Manny. Tor-tor stood at his master's side. The other members of their dwindling group--Zane, Anna, and Olin--remained secure in their treetop loft, working on their communication equipment.\n\nManny nodded to Nate as he crossed toward them.\n\n\"I'll keep guard here,\" Kostos instructed Carrera. \"You and Manny do a sweep of the immediate area. See what you can discover about the lay of the land.\"\n\nThe private nodded and turned away.\n\nManny followed at her side. \"C'mon, Tor-tor.\"\n\nKostos noted Nate's arrival. \"What are you doing down here, Rand?\"\n\n\"Trying to make myself useful.\" He nodded to the cabin a hundred yards away. \"While the sun's still up and the solar cells are still juicing, I'm going to see if I can discover any information in my father's computer records.\"\n\nKostos frowned at the cabin but nodded. Nate could read his eyes, weighing and calculating. Right now every bit of intel could be vital. \"Be careful,\" the sergeant said.\n\nNate hiked his shotgun higher on his shoulder. \"Always.\" He began the walk across the open glade.\n\nIn the distance, near the clearing's edge, a handful of children had gathered. Several pointed at him, gesturing to one another. A small group trailed behind Manny and Carrera, keeping a cautious distance from Tor-tor. The curiosity of youth. Among the trees, the timid tribe began to reawaken to their usual activities. Several women carried water from the stream that flowed through the glade and around the giant tree in the center. In the treetop abodes, people began to clamber. Small fires flared atop stone hearths on patios, readying for dinner. In one dwelling, an old woman sat cross-legged, playing a flute made out of a deer bone, a bright but haunting sound. Nearby, a pair of men, armed with hunting bows, wandered past, giving Nate the barest acknowledgment.\n\nThe casualness of their manner reminded Nate that, though these folks were isolated, they had lived with white men and women before. The survivors of his father's expedition.\n\nHe reached the cabin, seeing again his father's walking stick by the door. As he stared at it, the rest of the world and its mysteries dissolved away. For the moment, only one question remained in Nate's heart: What truly happened to my father?\n\nWith a final glance to his team's temporary treetop home, Nate ducked through the door flap of the cabin. The musty smell struck him again, like entering a lost tomb. Inside, he found the laptop still open on the workstation, just as he had left it. Its glow was a beacon in the dark.\n\nAs he neared the computer, Nate saw the screen saver playing across the monitor, a tiny set of pictures that slowly floated and bounced around the screen. Tears rose in his eyes. They were photos of his mother. Another ghost from his past. He stared at the smiling face. In one, she was kneeling beside a small Indian boy. In another, a capuchin monkey perched on her shoulder. In yet another, she was hugging a short youngster, a white boy dressed in typical Baniwa garb. It was Nate. He had been six years old. He smiled at the memory, his heart close to bursting. Though his father wasn't in any of the pictures, Nate sensed his presence, a ghost standing over his shoulder, watching with him. At this moment, Nate had never felt closer to his lost family.\n\nAfter a long time, he reached for the mouse pad. The screen saver vanished, replaced with a typical computer screen. Small titled icons lined the screen. Nate read through the files. Plant Classification, Tribal Customs, Cellular Statistics...so much information. It would take days to sift through them all. But one file caught his eye. The icon was of a small book. Below it was the word Journal.\n\nNate clicked the icon. A file opened:\n\n\u2002Amazonian Journal--Dr. Carl Rand\n\nIt was his father's diary. He noted the first date. September 24. The day the expedition had headed into the jungle. As Nate scrolled down, he saw that each day had a typed entry. Sometimes no more than a sentence or two, but something was noted. His father was meticulous. As he once quoted to Nate, \"An unexamined life is not worth living.\"\n\nNate skimmed through the entries, searching for one specific date. He found it. December 16. The day his father's team had vanished.\n\n\u2002December 16\n\n\u2002The storms continued today, bogging us down in camp. But the day was not a total wash. An Arawak Indian, traveling down the river, shared our soggy camp and told us stories of a strange tribe...frightening stories.\n\n\u2002The Ban-ali, he named them, which translates roughly to \"Blood Jaguar.\" I've heard snatches in the past concerning this ghost tribe, but few Indians were willing to speak openly of them.\n\n\u2002Our visitor was not so reluctant! He was quite talkative. Of course, this may have something to do with the new machete and tangle of shiny fishhooks we offered for the information. Eyeing the wealth, he insisted he knew where the Ban-ali tribe hunted.\n\n\u2002Now while my first impulse was to scoff at such a claim, I listened. If there was even a slim chance such a lost tribe existed, how could we not investigate? What a boon it would be for our expedition. As we questioned him, the Indian sketched out a rough map. The Ban-ali appeared to be more than a three-day journey from our location.\n\n\u2002So tomorrow, weather permitting, we'll strike out and see how truthful our friend has been. Surely it's a fool's errand...but who knows what this mighty jungle could be hiding at its heart?\n\n\u2002All in all, a most interesting day.\n\nNate held his breath as he continued reading from there, hunched over the laptop, sweat dripping down his brow. Over the next several hours, he scanned through the file, reading day after day, year after year, opening other files, staring at diagrams and digital photos. Slowly he began piecing together what had happened to the others.\n\nAs he did so, he grew numb with the reading. The horror of the past merged with the present. Nate began to understand. The true danger for their team was only beginning.\n\n[ 5:55 P.M. ]\n\nManny called over to Private Carrera. \"What's that guy doing over there?\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\nHe pointed his arm toward one of the Ban-ali tribesmen who marched along the streambed, a long spear over his shoulder. Impaled upon the weapon were several haunches of raw meat.\n\n\"Making dinner?\" the Ranger guessed with a shrug.\n\n\"But for whom?\"\n\nFor the entire afternoon, he and Carrera had been making a slow circuit of the village, with Tor-tor at their side. The cat drew many glances, but also kept curious tribesmen at a distance. As they trekked, Carrera was jotting notes and sketching a map of the village and surrounding lands. Recon, Manny had been informed, just in case the hostiles get hostile again.\n\nRight now, they were circling the giant, white-barked tree, crossing behind it, where the stream brushed the edges of the monstrous arching roots. It appeared as if the flow of water had washed away the topsoil, exposing even more of the roots' lengths. They were a veritable tangle, snaking into the stream, worming over it, burrowing beneath it.\n\nThe Indian who had drawn Manny's attention was ducking through the woody tangle, squirming and bending to make progress, clearly aiming for a section of the stream.\n\n\"Let's get a closer look,\" Manny said.\n\nCarrera pocketed her small field notebook and grabbed up her weapon, the shovel-snouted Bailey. She eyed the massive tree with a frown, plainly not pleased with the idea of getting any closer to it. But she led the way, marching toward the tangle of roots and the gurgling stream.\n\nManny watched the Indian cross to a huge eddy pool, shrouded by thick roots and rootlets. The water's surface was glassy smooth, with only a slight swirl disturbing it.\n\nThe Indian noticed he was being observed and nodded in the universal greeting of hello, then went back to his work. Manny and Carrera watched from several yards away. Tor-tor settled to his haunches.\n\nCrouching, the tribesman stretched his pole and the flanks of bloody meat over the still pool.\n\nManny squinted. \"What is he--?\"\n\nThen several small bodies flung themselves out of the water toward the meat. They looked like little silvery eels, twitching up out of the water. The creatures grabbed bites from the meat with little jaws.\n\n\"The piranha creatures,\" Carrera said at Manny's side.\n\nHe nodded, recognizing the similarity. \"Juveniles, though. They've not developed their hind legs yet. Still in the pollywog stage. All tail and teeth.\"\n\nThe Indian stood straighter and shook the meat from his spear. Each bloody chunk, as it plopped into the water, triggered a fierce roiling of the still pool, boiling its surface into a bloody froth. The tribesman observed his handiwork for a moment, then tromped back toward the pair who stared at him, stunned.\n\nAgain he nodded as he passed, eyeing the jaguar at Manny's side with a mix of awe and fear.\n\n\"I want to get a closer look,\" Manny said.\n\n\"Are you nuts, man?\" Carrera waved him back. \"We're out of here.\"\n\n\"No, I just want to check something out.\" He was already moving toward the nest of tangled roots.\n\nCarrera grumbled behind him, but followed.\n\nThe path was narrow, so they proceeded in single file. Tor-tor trailed last, padding cautiously through the tangle, his tail twitching anxiously.\n\nManny approached the root-ringed pool.\n\n\"Don't get too close,\" Carrera warned.\n\n\"They didn't mind the Indian,\" Manny said. \"I think it's safe.\"\n\nStill, he slowed his steps and stopped a yard from the pool's edge, one hand resting on the hilt of his whip. In the shadow of the roots, the wide pool proved crystal clear--and deep, at least ten feet. He peered into its glassy depths.\n\nUnder the surface, schools of the creatures swam. There was no sign of the meat, but littering the bottom of the pool were bleached bones, nibbled spotless. \"It's a damn hatchery,\" Manny said. \"A fish hatchery.\"\n\nFrom the branches spanning the pool overhead, droplets of sap would occasionally drip into the water, triggering the creatures to race up and investigate, searching for their next meal. Tricked to the surface, the beasts provided Manny with a better look at them. They varied in size from little minnows to larger monsters with leg buds starting to develop. Not one had fully developed legs.\n\n\"They're all juveniles,\" Manny observed. \"I don't see any of the adults that attacked us.\"\n\n\"We must have killed them all with the poison,\" Carrera said.\n\n\"No wonder there wasn't a second attack. It must take time to rebuild their army.\"\n\n\"For the piranhas, maybe...\" Carrera stood two yards back, her voice suddenly hushed and sick. \"...but not everything.\"\n\nManny glanced back to her. She pointed her weapon toward the lower trunk of the tree, where the roots rode up into the main body. Up the trunk, the bark of the tree bubbled out into thick galls, each a yard across. There were hundreds of them. From holes in the bark, black insects scuttled. They crawled, fought, and mated atop the bark. A few flexed their wings with little blurring buzzes.\n\n\"The locusts,\" Manny said, edging back himself.\n\nBut the insects ignored them, busy with their communal activities.\n\nManny stared from the pool back to the insects. \"The tree...\" he mumbled.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nManny stared as another droplet of sap drew a handful of the piranha creatures to the surface, glistening silver under the glassy waters. He shook his head. \"I'm not sure, but it's almost like the tree is nurturing these creatures.\" His mind began racing along wild tracks. His eyes grew wide as he began to make disturbing connections.\n\nCarrera must have seen his face pale. \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"Oh, my God...we have to get out of here!\"\n\n[ 6:30 P.M. ]\n\nInside the cabin, Nate sat hunched over the laptop computer, numb and exhausted. He had reread many of his father's journal notes, even cross-referencing to certain scientific files. The conclusions forming in his mind were as disturbing as they were miraculous. He scrolled down to the last entry and read the final lines.\n\nWe'll try tonight. May God watch over us all.\n\nBehind Nate, the whispery sweep of the cabin's door flap announced someone's intrusion.\n\n\"Nate?\" It was Professor Kouwe.\n\nGlancing at his wristwatch, Nate realized how long he had been lost in the laptop's records, lost to the world. His mouth felt like dried burlap. Beyond the flap, the sun was sliding toward the western horizon as the afternoon descended toward dusk.\n\n\"How's Frank?\" Nate asked, dragging his attention around.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Kouwe said, seeing his face.\n\nNate shook his head. He wasn't ready to talk yet. \"Where's Kelly?\"\n\n\"Outside, speaking with Sergeant Kostos. We came down here to report in and make sure everything was okay. Then we'll head back up again. How are things down here?\"\n\n\"The Indians are keeping their distance,\" Nate said, standing. He moved toward the door, staring at the sinking sun. \"We've finished setting up the treehouse as our base. Manny and Private Carrera are scouting the area.\"\n\nKouwe nodded. \"I saw them crossing back this way just now. What about communications with the States?\"\n\nNate shrugged. \"Olin says the whole system is corrupted. But he believes he can at least get the GPS to read true and broadcast a signal. Maybe as soon as tonight.\"\n\n\"That's good news,\" Kouwe said tightly.\n\nNate recognized the tension in the other's voice. \"What's the matter?\"\n\nKouwe frowned. \"Something I can't exactly put my finger on.\"\n\n\"Maybe I can help.\" Nate glanced to the laptop, then unplugged the device from the solar cells. With night approaching, juice would not be flowing anyway. He checked the laptop's battery and then tucked it under his arm. \"I think it's time we all compared notes.\"\n\nKouwe nodded. \"It's why Kelly and I came down. We have our own news.\"\n\nAgain, Nate saw the worried look on the professor's face. As Nate stood up, he was sure his own expression mirrored Kouwe's. \"Let's get everyone together.\"\n\nThe pair ducked out of the cabin and into the late afternoon sunshine. Free of the stifling cabin, they felt almost chilled by the slight breezes. Nate crossed over to where Kelly and Sergeant Kostos were talking. Manny and Carrera had joined them.\n\nA few steps away stood one of the Ban-ali tribesmen. It took Nate a moment to recognize him. It was their guide from earlier. He had washed off the black camouflage paint, revealing brown skin and a crimson tattoo on his bare chest.\n\nNate nodded to Kelly as he stopped beside them. \"I heard that Frank is doing better.\"\n\nHer face was pale, distracted. \"For the moment.\" She noticed the laptop under his arm. \"Were you able to learn anything about your father?\"\n\nNate sighed. \"I think everyone should hear this.\"\n\n\"It's time we put a plan together anyway,\" Sergeant Kostos said. \"Night is coming.\"\n\nKouwe pointed to the three-story dwelling in the towering nightcap oak. \"Let's get everyone up to the dwelling.\"\n\nNo one objected. In short order, the group mounted the long ladder and headed up the tree. Tor-tor remained below, on guard. Nate glanced down as he climbed. The jaguar was not alone down there. The Ban-ali tribesman stayed at the foot of the ladder, plainly assigned to their group.\n\nReaching the top of the ladder, Nate climbed onto the decking of the abode. The entire party clustered on the deck or stood inside the doorway to the lowermost level, a communal room. Above, the two other levels were a honeycomb of smaller, more private chambers, each with its own tiny deck or patio.\n\nThe tree house had clearly been some family's domicile, commandeered for their use. Personal touches abounded: bits of pottery and wooden utensils, decorations done in feathers and flowers, abandoned hammocks, tiny carved animal figurines. Even the smell of the place was not the deserted mustiness of the tiny cabin, but the subtle scent of life. Old cooking spices and oils, a hint of bodily odors.\n\nAnna Fong crossed to him. She had a platter of sliced figs. \"One of the Indian women dropped off some supplies. Fruits and cooked yams. Bits of dried meat.\"\n\nNate remembered his thirst and took one of the moist fruits, biting deep into it, juice dribbling down his chin. Wiping his lips with the back of his hand, he asked, \"How's Olin doing with the GPS signal?\"\n\n\"Still working on it,\" she said in a hushed, scared voice. \"But from the amount of swearing, it doesn't sound good.\"\n\nKostos raised his voice from the doorway. \"Everyone gather inside!\"\n\nAs he stepped aside, the party moved into the common room. Inside, Nate saw the other platters of food. Even a few pails of a dark liquid, smelling of fermentation.\n\nProfessor Kouwe examined one pail's contents and turned to Nate in surprise. \"It's cassiri!\"\n\n\"What's that?\" Kostos asked from the doorway as he closed the flap.\n\n\"Cassava beer,\" Nate explained. \"An alcoholic staple of many native tribes.\"\n\n\"Beer?\" the sergeant's eyes brightened. \"Really?\"\n\nKouwe scooped up a ladleful of the dark amber liquid and poured it into a mug. Nate saw bits of slimy cassava root floating in the pail. The professor passed the mug to the sergeant.\n\nHe sniffed it, nose curling in disgust, but he took a deep swig anyway. \"Ugh!\" He shook his head.\n\n\"It's an acquired taste,\" Nate said, scooping a mug for himself and sipping it. Manny did the same. \"Women make it by chewing up cassava root and spitting it into a pail. The enzymes in their saliva aid in the fermentation process.\"\n\nKostos crossed to the pail and dumped the contents of his mug back into the pail. \"I'll take a Budweiser any day.\"\n\nNate shrugged.\n\nAround the room, the others sampled the fare for a bit, then began to settle to woven mats on the floor. Everyone looked exhausted. They all needed a decent night's sleep.\n\nNate set up the laptop on an overturned stone pot.\n\nAs he opened it and turned it on, Olin looked at it hungrily, his eyes red. \"Maybe I can cannibalize some circuitry for the communication array.\" He shifted nearer.\n\nBut Nate held him off. \"The computer is five years old. I doubt you'll find much to use, and right now its contents are more important than our own survival.\"\n\nHis words drew everyone's attention. He eyed them all. \"I know what happened to the other expedition team. And if we don't want to end up like them, we should pay attention to its lessons.\"\n\nKouwe spoke up. \"What happened?\"\n\nNate took a deep breath, then began, nodding to the open journal file on the laptop. \"It's all here. My father's expedition heard rumors of the Ban-ali and met an Indian who said he could take the research team to their lands. My father could not resist the possibility of encountering a new tribe and took the team off course. Within two days, they were attacked by the same mutated species as we were.\"\n\nMurmurs arose from the others. Manny raised his hand as if he were in class. \"I found where they incubate those buggers. At least the locusts and piranhas.\" He described what he and Private Carrera had discovered. \"I've got my own theories about the beasts.\"\n\nKouwe interrupted. \"Before we get into theories and conjectures, let's first hear what we know for sure.\" The professor nodded to Nate. \"Go on. What happened after the attack?\"\n\nNate took another breath. The tale was not an easy one to tell. \"Of the party, all were killed except Gerald Clark, my father, and two other researchers. They were captured by the Ban-ali trackers. My father was able to communicate with them and get them to spare their lives. From my father's notes, I guess the Ban-ali native tongue is close enough to Yanomamo.\"\n\nKouwe nodded. \"It does bear a resemblance. And isolated as the tribe is, the presence of a white man who could speak the tongue of the Ban-ali would surely give them pause. I'm not surprised your father and the survivors were spared.\"\n\nThe little good it did, Nate thought sourly, then continued, \"The remaining party were all badly injured, but once here, their wounds were healed. Miraculously, according to my father's notes: gashes sealed without scarring, broken bones mended in less than a week's time, even chronic ailments, like one team member's heart murmur, faded away. But the most amazing transformation was in Gerald Clark.\"\n\n\"His arm,\" Kelly said, sitting up straighter.\n\n\"Exactly. Within a few weeks here, his amputated stump began to split, bleed, and sprout a raw tumorous growth. One of the survivors was a medical doctor. He and my father examined the change. The growth was a mass of undifferentiated stem cells. They were sure it was some malignant growth. There was even talk of trying to surgically remove it, but they had no tools. Over the next weeks, slow changes became apparent. The mass slowly elongated, growing skin on the outside.\"\n\nKelly's eyes widened. \"The arm was regenerating.\"\n\nNate nodded and turned. He scrolled down the computer journal to the day almost three years ago. He read aloud his father's words. \"'Today it became clear to Dr. Chandler and me that the tumor plaguing Clark is in fact a regeneration unlike any seen before. Talk of escape has been put on hold until we see how this ends. It's a miracle that is worth the risk. The Ban-ali continue to remain accommodating captors, allowing us free run of the valley, but banning us from leaving. And with the giant cats prowling the lower chasm, escape seems impossible for the moment anyway.'\"\n\nNate straightened up and tapped open a new file. Crude sketches of an arm and upper torso appeared on the screen. \"My father went on to document the transformation. How the undifferentiated stem cells slowly changed into bone, muscle, nerves, blood vessels, hair, and skin. It took eight months for the limb to fully grow back.\"\n\n\"What caused it?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"According to my father's notes, the sap of the Yagga tree.\"\n\nKelly gasped. \"The Yagga...\"\n\nKouwe's eyes widened. \"No wonder the Ban-ali worship the tree.\"\n\n\"What's a Yagga?\" Zane asked from a corner, showing the first sign of interest in their discussion.\n\nKouwe explained what he and Kelly had witnessed up in the healing ward of the giant prehistoric tree. \"Frank's wounds almost immediately sealed.\"\n\n\"That's not all,\" Kelly said. She shifted closer to get a better look at the computer screen. \"All afternoon, I've been monitoring his red blood cell levels with a hematocrit tube. The levels are climbing dramatically. It's as if something is massively stimulating his bone marrow to produce new red blood cells for all he lost...at a miraculous rate. I've never seen such a reaction.\"\n\nNate clicked open another file. \"It's something in the sap. My father's group was able to distill the stuff and run it through a paper chromatograph. Similar to the way the sap of copal trees is rich in hydrocarbons, the Yagga's sap is rich in proteins.\"\n\nKelly stared at the results. \"Proteins?\"\n\nManny scooted next to her, looking over her shoulder. \"Wasn't the disease vector a type of a protein?\"\n\nKelly nodded. \"A prion. One with strong mutagenic properties.\" She glanced over her shoulder to Manny. \"You were mentioning something about the piranhas and the locusts. A theory.\"\n\nManny nodded. \"They're tied to this Yagga tree, too. The locusts live in the bark of the tree. Like some type of wasp gall. And the piranhas--their hatchery is in a pond tucked among the roots. There was even sap dripping into it. I think it's the sap that mutates them during early development.\"\n\n\"My father suggested a similar conclusion in his notes,\" Nate said quietly. In fact, there were numerous files specifically on this matter. Nate had not been able to read through them all.\n\n\"And the giant cats and caimans?\" Anna asked.\n\n\"Established mutations, I'd wager,\" Manny said. \"The two species must've been altered generations ago into these oversized beasts. I imagine by now they're capable of breeding on their own, stable enough genetically to need no further support from the sap.\"\n\n\"Then why don't they leave the area?\" Anna asked.\n\n\"Perhaps some biological imperative, a genetic territorial thing.\"\n\n\"It sounds like you're suggesting this tree manufactured these creatures purposefully? Consciously?\" Zane scoffed.\n\nManny shrugged. \"Who can say? Maybe it wasn't so much will or thought as just evolutionary pressure.\"\n\n\"Impossible.\" Zane shook his head.\n\n\"Not so. We've seen versions of this phenomenon already.\" Manny turned to Nate. \"Like the ant tree.\"\n\nNate frowned, picturing the attack on Sergeant Kostos by stinging ants. He remembered how an ant tree's stems and branches were hollow, serving both to house the colony and feed it with a sugary sap. In turn, the ants savagely protected their home against the intrusion of plants and animals. He began to understand what Manny was driving at. There was a distinct similarity.\n\nManny went on, \"What we have here is a symbiosis between plant life and animal, both evolved into a complex shared interrelationship. One serving the other.\"\n\nCarrera spoke up from her post by a window. The sun was slowly setting behind her shoulder. \"Who cares how the beasts came to be? Do we know how to avoid them if we have to fight our way out of the valley?\"\n\nNate answered her question. \"The creatures can be controlled.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\nHe waved to the laptop. \"It took my father years to learn the Ban-ali secrets. It seems that the tribe has developed powders that can both attract and repel the creatures. We ourselves saw this demonstrated with the locusts, but they can do it with the piranhas, too. Through chemicals in the water, they can lure and trigger an aggressive response in the otherwise docile creatures. My father believed it's some type of hormonal compound that stimulates the piranhas' territoriality and makes them attack wildly.\"\n\nManny nodded. \"Then it's lucky we wiped out a majority of the adult horde so quickly. I imagine it takes time for their hatchery to grow a new supply. Just one of the disadvantages of a biological defense system.\"\n\n\"Perhaps that's why the Ban-ali keep more than one type of creature,\" Carrera noted astutely. \"Backup troops.\"\n\nManny frowned. \"Of course. I should've thought of that.\"\n\nCarrera faced Nate. \"Then there are those cats and giant caimans to consider.\"\n\nNate nodded. \"Gatekeepers, like we thought, set up to defend the perimeter. They patrol the entry points to the heart of the territory. But even the jaguars can be made docile by painting a black powder over one's body, allowing the Ban-ali to pass freely back and forth. I imagine the compound must act like caiman dung, a scent repellent to the giant cats.\"\n\nManny whistled. \"So our guide's body paint wasn't all camouflage.\"\n\n\"Where do we get some of this repellent stuff?\" Kostos asked. \"Where does it come from?\"\n\nKouwe spoke up. \"The Yagga tree.\" He had not moved, only grown more pale with the telling of the tale.\n\nNate was surprised by the professor's quick answer. \"They're derived from the Yagga's bark and leaf oils. But how did you guess?\"\n\n\"Everything ties back to that prehistoric tree. I think Manny was quite correct that the specimen behaves like an ant tree. But he's wrong about who the ants are here.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Manny asked.\n\n\"The mutated beasts are just biological tools supplied by the tree for its true workers.\" Kouwe stared around him. \"The Ban-ali.\"\n\nA stunned silence spread over the group.\n\nKouwe continued, \"The tribesmen here are the soldier ants in this relationship. The Ban-ali name the tree Yagga, their word for mother. One who gives birth...a caretaker. Countless generations ago, most likely during the first migration of people into South America, the tribe must have stumbled upon the tree's remarkable healing ability and became enthralled by it. Becoming ban-yin--slaves. Each serving the other in a complex web of defense and offense.\"\n\nNate felt sickened by this comparison. Humans used like ants.\n\n\"This grove is prehistoric,\" the professor finished. \"It might trace its heritage back to Pangaea, when South America and Africa were joined. Its species may have been around when man first walked upright. Throughout the ages, there are hundreds of myths of such trees, from all corners of the world. The maternal guardian. Perhaps this encounter here was not the first.\"\n\nThis thought sank into the others. Nate didn't think even his father had extrapolated the history of the Yagga to this end. It was disturbing.\n\nSergeant Kostos shifted his M-16 to his other shoulder. \"Enough history lessons. I thought we were supposed to be developing an alternate plan. A way to escape if we can't raise someone on the radio.\"\n\n\"The sergeant is right.\" Kouwe turned. \"You never did tell us, Nate. What happened to your father and the others? How did Gerald Clark escape?\"\n\nNate took a deep breath and turned back to the computer. He scrolled down to the last entry and read it aloud.\n\n\"April 18\n\nWe've gathered enough powders to chance an escape tonight. After what we've learned, we must attempt a break for civilization. We dare not wait any longer. We'll dust our bodies black and flee with the setting moon. Illia knows paths that will quickly get us past any trackers and out of these lands, but the trek back to civilization will be hard and not without threat. Still, we have no choice...not after the birth. We'll try tonight. May God watch over us all.\"\n\nNate straightened from the laptop, turning to the others. \"They all attempted to flee, not just Gerald Clark.\"\n\nAcross the many faces, Nate saw the same expression. Only Gerald Clark made it back to civilization.\n\n\"So they all left,\" Kelly mumbled.\n\nNate nodded. \"Even a Ban-ali woman, a skilled tracker named Illia. She had fallen in love and married Gerald Clark. He took her with him.\"\n\n\"What happened to them?\" Anna said.\n\nNate shook his head. \"That was the last entry. There is no more.\"\n\nKelly's expression saddened. \"Then they didn't make it...only Gerald Clark.\"\n\n\"I could ask Dakii for more details,\" Kouwe said.\n\n\"Dakii?\"\n\nKouwe pointed below. \"The tribesman who guided us here. Between what I know of the Ban-ali language and his smattering of English, I might be able to find out what happened to the others, how they died.\"\n\nNate nodded, though he wasn't sure he wanted to know the details.\n\nManny spoke up. \"But what made them flee that night? Why the hint at some urgency in that last note?\"\n\nNate took a deep breath. \"It's why I wanted everyone to hear this. My father came to some frightening conclusions about the Ban-ali. Something he needed to relay to the outside world.\"\n\n\"What?\" Kouwe asked.\n\nNate wasn't sure where to begin. \"It took years of living with the Ban-ali for my father to begin piecing facts together. He noticed that the isolated tribe showed some hints of remarkable advancements over their Indian counterparts in the greater Amazon. The invention of the pulley and wheel. A few of the homes even have crude elevators, using large boulders and counterweights. And other advancements that seemed strange considering the isolated nature of this tribe. He spent much of his time examining the way the Ban-ali think, the way they teach their children. He was fascinated by all this.\"\n\n\"So what happened?\" Kelly asked.\n\n\"Gerald Clark fell in love with Illia. They married during the second year of the group's incarceration here. During the third, they conceived a baby. During the fourth year, Illia gave birth.\" He stared hard at the gathered faces. \"The child was stillborn, rife with mutations.\" Nate recalled his father's words. \"'A genetic monster.'\"\n\nKelly cringed.\n\nNate pointed to the laptop. \"There are more details in the files. My father and the medical doctor of the group began to formulate a frightening conclusion. The tree hadn't just mutated the lower species. It had also been changing the Ban-ali over the years, subtly heightening their cognitive abilities, their reflexes, even their eyesight. While outwardly they appeared the same, the tree was improving the species. My father suspected that the Ban-ali were heading genetically away from mankind. One of the definitions that separates different species is an inability to breed together.\"\n\n\"The stillborn child...\" Manny had paled. Nate nodded. \"My father came to believe that the Ban-ali were near to leaving Homo sapiens behind, becoming their own species.\"\n\n\"Dear God,\" Kelly gasped.\n\n\"It was why their need to escape became urgent. This corruption of mankind in the valley has to be stopped.\"\n\nNo one spoke for a full minute.\n\nAnna's voice, full of horror, whispered, \"What are we going to do?\"\n\n\"We're going to get that damn GPS working,\" Kostos said harshly. \"Then we're gonna bug out of this damn place.\"\n\n\"And in the meantime,\" Carrera added, \"we should gather as much of that repellent powder as possible, just in case.\"\n\nKelly cleared her voice and stood up. \"We're all forgetting one vital thing. The disease spreading across the Americas. How do we cure it? What did Gerald Clark bring out of this valley?\" Kelly turned to Nate. \"In your father's notes, is there any mention of a contagious disease here?\"\n\n\"No, with the inherent healing properties of the Yagga tree, everyone remained incredibly healthy. The only suggestion is the taboo against one of the Chosen, the Ban-ali, leaving the tribe. A shadowed curse upon he who leaves and all he encounters. My father had dismissed this as a myth to frighten anyone from leaving.\"\n\nManny mumbled, \"The curse upon he who leaves and all he encounters...that sounds like our contagion.\"\n\nKelly turned back to Nate. \"But if true, where did the disease come from? What triggered Clark's body to suddenly become riddled with tumors? What made him contagious?\"\n\n\"I wager it has something to do with the Yagga tree's healing sap,\" Zane said. \"Maybe it keeps the disease in check here. When we leave, we need to make sure we collect a generous sample. That's clearly vital.\"\n\nKelly ignored Zane, her gaze unfocused. \"We're missing something...something important,\" she said, low and quiet. Nate doubted anyone else heard her.\n\n\"I can see if Dakii will cooperate,\" Kouwe said. \"See if he has any answers--both to the final fate of the others and about this mysterious disease.\"\n\n\"Good. Then we have a working plan for now,\" Sergeant Kostos said by the door. He pointed around the room and assigned missions for each of them. \"Olin will work on the GPS. At daybreak, Kouwe and Anna, our Indian experts, will act as intel. Gather as much information as possible. Manny, Carrera, and I'll search out where the repellent powder is stored. Zane, Rand, and Kelly will watch over Frank, ready him for a quick evac if necessary. While at the tree, it will be up to you three to collect a sample of the healing sap.\"\n\nSlowly everyone nodded. If nothing else, it would keep them busy, keep their minds off the biological horrors hidden in the pristine valley.\n\nKouwe pushed to his feet. \"I might as well get started. I'll chat with Dakii while he's alone down below.\"\n\n\"I'll go with you,\" Nate said.\n\nKelly moved toward them. \"And I'm going to check on Frank one last time before full night falls.\"\n\nThe trio left the common room and crossed the deck to the ladder. The sun was only a sharp glow to the west. Dusk had rolled like a dark cloud over the glade.\n\nIn silence, the three descended the ladder in the gloom, each in a cocoon of their own thoughts.\n\nNate was the first one down and helped Kouwe and Kelly off the ladder. Tor-tor wandered over and nuzzled Nate for attention. He scratched absently at the tender spot behind the jaguar's ear.\n\nA few yards away, the tribesman named Dakii stood.\n\nKouwe crossed toward him.\n\nKelly stared up at the Yagga, its upper branches still bathed in sunlight. In her narrowed eyes, Nate saw a wary glint.\n\n\"If you'll wait a moment, I'll go with you,\" he said.\n\nShe shook her head. \"I'm fine. I've got one of the Rangers' radios. You should get some rest.\"\n\n\"But--\"\n\nShe glanced over at him, her face tired and sad. \"I won't be long. I just need a few minutes alone with my brother.\"\n\nHe nodded. He had no doubt the Ban-ali would leave her unmolested, but he hated to see her alone with such raw grief. First her daughter, now her brother...so much pain shone in every plane of her face.\n\nShe reached to him, squeezed his hand. \"Thanks for offering, though,\" she whispered, and set off across the fields.\n\nBehind Nate, Kouwe already had his pipe lit and was talking with Dakii. Nate patted Tor-tor's side and walked over to join them.\n\nKouwe glanced back at him. \"Do you have a picture of your father?\"\n\n\"In my wallet.\"\n\n\"Can you show it to Dakii? After four years spent with your father, the tribesmen must be familiar with recorded images.\"\n\nNate shrugged and pulled out his leather billfold. He flipped to a photo of his father, standing in a Yanomamo village, surrounded by village children.\n\nKouwe showed it to Dakii.\n\nThe tribesman cocked his head back and forth, eyes wide. \"Kerl,\" he said, tapping at the photo with a finger.\n\n\"Carl...right,\" Kouwe said. \"What happened to him?\" The professor repeated the question in Yanomamo.\n\nDakii did not understand. It took a few more back-and-forth exchanges to finally communicate the question. Dakii then bobbed his head vigorously, and a complicated exchange followed. Kouwe and Dakii spoke rapidly in a mix of dialects and phonetics that was too quick for Nate to follow.\n\nDuring a lull, Kouwe turned to Nate. \"The others were slain. Gerald escaped the trackers. His background as a Special Forces soldier must have helped him slip away.\"\n\n\"My father?\"\n\nDakii must have understood the word. He leaned in closer to the photograph, then back up at Nate. \"Son?\" he said. \"You son man?\"\n\nNate nodded.\n\nDakii patted Nate on his arm, a broad smile on his face. \"Good. Son of wishwa.\"\n\nNate glanced to Kouwe, frowning.\n\n\"Wishwa is their word for shaman. Your father, with his modern wonders, must have been considered a shaman.\"\n\n\"What happened to him?\"\n\nKouwe again spoke rapidly in the mix of pidgin English and a mishmash of Yanomamo. Nate was even beginning to unravel the linguistic knot.\n\n\"Kerl...?\" Dakii bobbed his head, grinning proudly. \"Me brother teshari-rin bring Kerl back to shadow of Yagga. It good.\"\n\n\"Brought back?\" Nate asked.\n\nKouwe continued to drag the story from the man. Dakii spoke rapidly. Nate didn't understand. But at last, Kouwe turned back to Nate. The professor's face was grim.\n\n\"What did he say?\"\n\n\"As near as I can translate, your father was indeed brought back here--dead or alive, I couldn't say. But then, because of both his crime and his wishwa status, he was granted a rare honor among the tribe.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"He was taken to the Yagga, his body fed to the root.\"\n\n\"Fed to the root?\"\n\n\"I think he means like fertilizer.\"\n\nNate stumbled back a step. Though he knew his father was dead, the reality was too horrible to fathom. His father had attempted to stop the corruption of the Ban-ali by the prehistoric tree, risking his own life to do so, but in the end, he had been fed to the damn thing instead, nourishing it.\n\nPast Kouwe's shoulder, Dakii continued to bob his head, grinning like a fool. \"It good. Kerl with Yagga. Nashi nar!\"\n\nNate was too numb to ask what the last word meant, but Kouwe translated anyway.\n\n\"Nashi nar. Forever.\"\n\n[ 8:08 P.M. ]\n\nIn the jungle darkness, Louis lay in wait, infrared goggles fixed to his head. The sun had just set and true night was quickly consuming the valley. He and his men had been in position for hours.\n\nNot much longer.\n\nBut he would have to be patient. Make haste slowly, he had been taught. One last key was needed before the attack could commence. So he lay on his belly, covered by the fronds of a fern, face smeared in streaks of black.\n\nIt had been a long and busy day. This morning, an hour after sunrise, he had been contacted by his mole. His spy was still alive! What good fortune! The agent had informed him that the Ban-ali village did indeed lie in a secluded valley, only approachable through the side canyon in the cliffs ahead. What could be more perfect? All his targets trapped in one place.\n\nThe only obstacle had been the valley's damned jaguar pack.\n\nBut his darling Tshui had managed to handle that nasty problem. Covered by the early morning gloom, she had led a handpicked team of trackers, including the German commando, Brail, into the valley's heart and planted poisoned meat, freshly killed and dripping with blood. Tshui had tainted each piece with a terrible poison, both odorless and tasteless, that killed with only the slightest lick. The pack, its blood lust already up from the attack upon the Rangers, found these treats too hard to resist.\n\nThroughout the early morning, the great beasts dropped into blissful slumbers from which they would never wake. A few of the cats had remained suspicious and had not eaten. But hunting with the infrared goggles, Tshui and the others had finished off these last stubborn cats, using air guns equipped with poisoned darts.\n\nIt had been a quiet kill. With the way clear, Louis had moved his men into a guard position near the mouth of the side chasm.\n\nOnly one last item was needed, but he would have to be patient.\n\nMake haste slowly.\n\nAt last, he spotted movement in the chasm. Through his infrared goggles, the two figures appeared as a pair of blazing torches. They slipped down the crude steps, alone. This morning, Louis had posted guards at the chasm mouth, ready to silence any tribesman who came down to scout for them. But none of the Ban-ali had shown their heads. Most likely the tribe's attention had remained focused on the strangers in their village, confident that the jaguar pack would keep them protected or alert them of any further intruders.\n\nNot this day, mes amis. Something more predatory than your little pack has come to your valley.\n\nThe figures continued to thread down the chasm. Louis lowered his infrared goggles for a moment. Though he knew the figures were there, the black camouflage was so perfect that Louis could not spot them with his unaided eye. He slipped the goggles back in place and smiled thinly. The figures again blazed forth.\n\nAh, the wonders of modern science...\n\nIn a matter of moments, the two figures reached the bottom of the chasm. They seemed to hesitate. Did they sense something was amiss? Were they wary of the jaguars? Louis held his breath. Slowly the pair set out down the escarpment, ready for the night's patrol.\n\nAt last.\n\nA new blazing figure stepped forth from the jungle, into their path. A slender torch that burned brighter than the other two. Louis lowered his goggles. It was Tshui. Naked. Ebony hair flowed in a silky waterfall to her shapely buttocks. She sidled toward the pair of scouts, a jungle goddess awoken from a slumber.\n\nThe pair of painted tribesmen froze in surprise.\n\nA cough sounded from the bushes nearby. One of the Indians slapped his neck, then slipped to the ground. There was enough poison in each dart to drop a half-ton jaguar. The man was dead before his head hit the rocky ground.\n\nThe remaining scout stared for a moment, then fled as quickly as a snake toward the chasm. But Louis's mistress was even faster, her blood hyped on stimulants, her reflexes sharper. Effortlessly, she danced back into his path, blocking him. He opened his mouth to scream a warning, but again Tshui was quicker. She shot out her arm and tossed a handful of powder into his face, into his eyes, into his open mouth.\n\nReflexively choking, his call was gargled, more a strangled wheeze. He fell to his knees as the drug hit his system.\n\nTshui remained expressionless. She knelt beside her prey as the man toppled to the ground. She then stared over his body toward Louis's hiding place, a ghost of a smile on her lips.\n\nLouis stood. They now had the final piece of the puzzle, someone to inform them about the tribe's defenses. Everything was now in place for the assault tomorrow.\n\n[ 9:23 P.M. ]\n\nKelly sat cross-legged beside her brother's low hammock.\n\nWrapped in a thick blanket, Frank sipped weakly through a reed straw poking from a cantaloupe-sized hollow nut.\n\nKelly recognized it as one of the fruits that grew in clusters along the branches of the Yagga. The nut's content was similar to coconut milk. She had tasted it first when one of the tribesmen in the healing ward had brought it over to her brother. It was sweet and creamy with sugars and fats, an energy boost her brother needed.\n\nShe waited as Frank finished the contents of his natural energy drink and passed it to her, his hand trembling slightly. Though awake, his eyes were still hazy with a morphine glaze.\n\n\"How are you feeling?\" she asked.\n\n\"Like a million bucks,\" he said hoarsely. His eyes twitched to the stumps hidden under the blanket.\n\n\"How's the pain?\"\n\nHis brow furrowed. \"No pain,\" he said with half a laugh, strained joviality. \"Though I swear I can feel my toes itching.\"\n\n\"Phantom sensations,\" she said with a nod. \"You'll probably feel them for months.\"\n\n\"An itch I can never scratch...great.\"\n\nShe smiled up at Frank. The mix of relief, exhaustion, and fear in her own heart was mirrored in her brother's expression. But at least his color had much improved. As horrible as their situation was here, Kelly had to appreciate the healing sap of the Yagga. It had saved her brother's life. His recovery had been remarkable.\n\nFrank suddenly yawned, a true jawbreaker.\n\n\"You need to sleep,\" she said, getting to her feet. \"Miraculous healing or not, your body needs to recharge its batteries.\" She glanced around and tucked in her shirt.\n\nAround the cavernous chamber, only a pair of tribesmen remained in the room. One of them was the head shaman, who glared at her with impatience. Kelly had wanted to spend the night at her brother's side, but the shaman had refused. He and his workers, the tribesman had explained in stilted English, would watch over their new brother. \"Yagga protects him,\" the shaman had said, brooking no argument.\n\nKelly sighed. \"I had better go before I get kicked out.\"\n\nFrank yawned again and nodded. She had already explained to him about tomorrow's plan and would see him at first light. He reached out and squeezed her hand. \"Love you, sis.\"\n\nShe bent and kissed his cheek. \"Love you, too, Frank.\"\n\n\"I'll be fine...so will Jessie.\"\n\nStraightening, she bit her lip to hold back a sudden sob. She couldn't let go of her feelings, not in front of Frank. She dared not, or she'd never stop crying. Over the past day, she had bottled her grief tightly. It was the O'Brien way. Irish fortitude in the face of adversity. Now was not the time to dissolve into tears.\n\nShe busied herself with checking his intravenous catheter, now plugged with a heparin lock. Though he no longer needed fluid support, she kept the catheter in place in case of emergencies.\n\nAcross the way, the shaman frowned at her.\n\nScrew you, she thought silently and angrily, I'll go when I'm good and ready. She lifted the blanket from over her brother's legs and made one final check on his wounds. The sap seal on the stumps remained tenaciously intact. In fact, through the semitransparent seal, she saw a decent granulation bed had already formed over the raw wounds, like the healing tissue under a protective scab. The rate of granulation was simply amazing.\n\nTucking back the blankets, she saw that Frank's eyes were already closed. A slight snore sounded from his open mouth. She very gently leaned over and kissed his other cheek. Again she had to choke back a sob, but couldn't stop the tears. Straightening up, she wiped her eyes and surveyed the room one final time.\n\nThe shaman must have seen the wet glisten on her cheeks. His impatient frown softened in sympathy. He nodded to her, his eyes intent, repeating a silent promise that he would watch closely over her brother.\n\nWith no choice, she took a deep breath and headed toward the exit. The climb back down the tree seemed interminable. In the dark passage, she was alone with her thoughts. Worries magnified and multiplied. Her fears bounced between her daughter, her brother, and the world at large.\n\nAt last, she stumbled out of the tree's trunk and into the open glade. An evening breeze had kicked up, but it was warm. The moon was bright overhead, but already scudding clouds rolled across the spread of stars. Somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbled. They would get rain before the morning.\n\nIn the freshening breeze, she hurried across the wide clearing, heading toward their tree. At its base, she spotted someone standing guard with a flashlight--Private Carrera. The Ranger pegged her with the light, then waved. At her side, Tor-tor lay huddled. The jaguar glanced up at her approach, sniffed the air, then lowered his head back to his curled body.\n\n\"How's Frank?\" Carrera asked.\n\nKelly did not feel like talking but could not dismiss the soldier's concern. \"He seems to be doing well. Very well.\"\n\n\"That's good.\" She jabbed a thumb to the ladder. \"You should try to get as much sleep as possible. We've a long day ahead of us.\"\n\nKelly nodded, though she doubted sleep would come easily. She mounted the ladder.\n\n\"There's a private room on the third level of the dwelling left empty for you. It's the one on the right.\"\n\nKelly barely heard her. \"Good night,\" she muttered and continued her climb, lost in her own worries.\n\nAt the top of the ladder, she found the deck empty, as was the common room. Everyone must have already retired, exhausted by the number of days with so little sleep.\n\nCraning back, she stared at the dark upper stories, then crossed to the longer of the two secondary ladders.\n\nThird level, Private Carrera had said.\n\nGreat...just what I get for being the last one to claim a room.\n\nThe third story was a good deal higher than the other two. Built on its own level of branches, it was more a separate structure, a two-room guest house.\n\nHer legs aching, she mounted the long ladder. The wind began to kick up a bit as she climbed, whispering the branches, swaying the ladder ever so slightly. The gusts smelled of rain. Overhead, the moon was swallowed by dark clouds. She hurried up as the storm swept toward the village.\n\nFrom this height, she saw lightning fork across the sky in a dazzling burst. Thunder boomed and echoed like a bass drum. Suddenly, living in a giant tree did not seem like such a wise choice. Especially the uppermost level.\n\nShe hurried as the first raindrops began pelting through the leaves. Pulling herself up onto the tiny deck, she rolled to her feet. The wind and rain grew quickly. Storms in the Amazon were usually brief, but they often came swiftly and fiercely. This one was no exception. Standing half crouched, she faced the doors that led to the two rooms on this level.\n\nWhich room had Carrera told her was hers?\n\nLightning crackled overhead in small angry spears, while thunder rattled. Rain swept in a sudden torrent, and breezes became fierce gusts. Under her feet, the planking rolled like the deck of a ship at sea.\n\nBeyond caring if she woke someone, Kelly dove toward the nearest opening, half falling through the flap, seeking immediate shelter.\n\nThe room was dark. Lightning burst, shining brightly through a smaller back door to the chamber. The lone hammock in the room was thankfully empty. She stumbled gratefully toward it.\n\nAs she crossed toward the hammock, her feet tripped over something in the dark. She fell to her knees with a sharp curse. Her fingers reached back and discovered a pack on the floor.\n\n\"Who's there?\" a voice asked from beyond the back door. A silhouetted figure stepped into the frame of the doorway.\n\nOn her knees, Kelly felt a moment of sheer terror.\n\nThunder echoed, and a new flicker of lightning revealed the identity of the dark figure. \"Nate?\" she asked timidly, embarrassed. \"It's Kelly.\"\n\nHe crossed quickly to her and helped her to her feet. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\nShe wiped the wet strands of hair from her face, now burning hotly. What a fool he must think I am. \"I...I stumbled into the wrong room. Sorry.\"\n\n\"Are you okay?\" Nate's hands still held her arms, his palms warm through her soaked shirt.\n\n\"I'm fine. Just feeling especially foolish.\"\n\n\"No reason to be. It's dark.\"\n\nLightning crackled, and she found his eyes on hers. They stared at each other in silence.\n\nFinally, Nate spoke. \"How's Frank?\"\n\n\"Fine,\" she said in a hushed voice. Thunder boomed distantly, rolling over them, making the world seem much larger, them much smaller. Her voice was now a whisper. \"I...I never said...I was sorry to hear about your father.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\"\n\nHis single word, softly spoken, echoed with old pain. She moved a step toward him, unwilled, a moth drawn to a flame, knowing she would be destroyed but having no choice. His sorrow touched something inside her. That hard and fast wall around her heart weakened. Tears again welled in her eyes. Her shoulders began to tremble.\n\n\"Hush,\" he said, though she hadn't said a word. He pulled her closer to him, arms wrapping around her shoulder.\n\nThe trembling became sobs. All the grief and terror she had held in her heart released in a blinding torrent. Her knees gave out, but Nate caught her in his grip and lowered her to the floor. He held her tight, his heart beating against hers.\n\nThey remained on the floor in the center of the room as the storm raged outside, swaying the trees, booming with the clash of Titans. At last, she glanced up toward Nate.\n\nShe reached up to him and pulled his lips to hers. She tasted the salt of his own tears, of hers. At first, it was just survival in the face of the intense sorrow, but as their lips opened, an unspoken hunger awoke. She felt his pulse quicken.\n\nHe pulled away for a moment, gasping. His eyes were bright, so very bright in the darkness.\n\n\"Kelly...\"\n\n\"Hush,\" she sighed, using his own word. She pulled him back to her.\n\nWrapped in each other's arms, they lowered themselves to the floor. Palms explored...fingers loosened and peeled away damp clothes...limbs entwined.\n\nAs the storm hammered, their passions grew white hot. Grief faded away, lost somewhere between pain and pleasure, age-old rhythms and silent cries. They found the room too small, falling out onto the back deck.\n\nLightning rode the clouds, thunder roaring. Rain lashed under the awning, sweeping across their bare skin.\n\nNate's mouth was hot on her breast, on her throat. She arched into him, eyes closed, lightning flaring red through her lids. His lips moved to hers, hungry, their breath shared. Under the storm, under him, she felt the exquisite tension build inside her, at first slowly, then ever more rapidly, swelling through and out of her as she cried into his lips.\n\nHe met her cry with his own, sounding like thunder in her ears.\n\nFor an untold time, they held that moment. Lost to the world, lost to the storm, but not lost to each other."
            },
            {
                "title": "Root",
                "text": "\u2002UNA DE GATO, \"CAT'S CLAW\"\n\n\u2002family: Rubiaceae\n\n\u2002genus: Uncaria\n\n\u2002species: Tomentosa, Guianensis\n\n\u2002common names: Cat's Claw, Una de Gato, paraguayo, Garabato, Garbato Casha, Samento, Toro, Tambor Huasca, Aun Huasca, Una de Gavilan, Hawk's Claw\n\n\u2002part used: Bark, Root, Leaves\n\n\u2002properties/actions: Antibacterial, Antioxidant, Antiinflammatory, Antitumorous, Antiviral, Cytostatic, Depurative, Diuretic, Hypotensive, Immunostimulant, Vermifuge, Antimutagenic"
            },
            {
                "title": "Betrayal",
                "text": "AUGUST 17, 7:05 A.M.\n\n[ AMAZON JUNGLE ]\n\nNate woke to find his arms around a naked woman. Her eyes were already open. \"Good morning,\" he said.\n\nKelly inched closer to him. He could still smell the rain on her skin. She smiled. \"It's been morning for some time.\"\n\nHe rose to one elbow, which wasn't easy in a hammock, and stared down into her face. \"Why didn't you wake me?\"\n\n\"I figured you could use at least one full hour of sleep.\" She rolled out of the hammock, setting it swinging, and artfully drew off the single blanket and wrapped it around her.\n\nWith one hand, he grasped for her.\n\nShe stepped out of reach. \"We have a long day ahead of us.\"\n\nWith a groan, he rolled to his feet and pulled his boxers from the pile of hastily discarded clothes as Kelly gathered her things. Through the rear door to the room, he stared out at the jungle.\n\nLast night, he and Kelly had talked into the wee hours of the morning, about fathers, brothers, daughters, lives, and losses. There were still more tears. Afterward they had made love again, slower, with less urgency, but with a deeper passion. Sated, they had collapsed into the hammock to catch a few hours of sleep before dawn.\n\nStepping onto the rear deck, Nate studied the forest. The morning skies were blue and clear, last night's storm long gone, the light sharp and bright. Raindrops still clung to every leaf and blade, glistening like jewels. But that wasn't all. \"You should see this,\" he called back to the room.\n\nKelly, now dressed in her khakis with her shirt half buttoned, joined him. He glanced to her, stunned again by her beauty. Her eyes widened as she stared beyond the deck's edge. \"How marvelous...\"\n\nShe leaned into him, and he instinctively circled her with his arm.\n\nCovering the upper limbs of the tree, drawn by the moisture, were hundreds of butterflies, perched on branches and leaves, fluttering through the bower. Each had wings about a handspan wide, brilliant blue and crystalline green.\n\n\"Morpho species,\" Nate said. \"But I've never seen this color pattern.\"\n\nKelly watched one specimen waft by overhead through a beam of sunlight. It seemed to shine with its own luminescence. \"It's like someone shattered a stained-glass window and showered the slivers over the treetops.\"\n\nHe tightened his arm around her, trying to capture this moment forever. They stood in silence and awe for several minutes. Then distant voices intruded, rising up from below.\n\n\"I suppose we should go down,\" Nate finally said. \"We have a lot to accomplish.\"\n\nKelly nodded and sighed. Nate understood her reluctance. Here, isolated above everything else, it was possible to forget, at least for a while, the heartaches and hardships ahead of them. But they could not escape the world forever.\n\nSlowly, they finished dressing. As they were about to leave, Nate crossed to the rear deck and unhooked the bamboo-and-palm-leaf awning so it fell back across the rear door, returning the room to the way he found it.\n\nKelly noticed what he did and moved nearer, examining the hinges along the top margin of the door. \"Closed, it blocks the doorway...pushed open and stilted, it's a shade cover for the deck. Clever.\"\n\nNate nodded. Yesterday he had been surprised by the ingenuity, too. \"I've never seen anything like it out here. It's like my father mentioned in his notes. An example of the tribe's advancement over other indigenous peoples. Subtle engineering improvements, like their crude tree elevators.\"\n\n\"I could use an elevator right now,\" Kelly noted, stretching a kink from her back. \"It does make you wonder, though,\" she went on, \"about the Yagga--about what it's doing to these people.\"\n\nNate grunted in agreement, then turned to reassemble his own pack. There was much to wonder about here. Once ready, Nate gave the room a final inspection, then crossed to the door where Kelly crouched.\n\nAs Kelly slung her pack to her shoulder, Nate leaned in and kissed her deeply. There was a moment of surprise...then she returned the kiss with a matching passion. Neither of them had spoken of where the two would go from here. Both knew much of their urgency last night had come from a pair of wounded hearts. But it was a start. Nate looked forward to seeing where it would lead. And if her kiss was a clue, so did Kelly.\n\nThey parted, and without another word, they headed to the ladder leading down to the common areas of the dwelling.\n\nAs Nate descended, cooking scents swelled around him. He reached the bottom rung and hopped off. After helping Kelly down, they both walked through the common area to the large front deck. Nate's stomach growled, and he suddenly remembered his hunger.\n\nAround a stone hearth set into the deck, Anna and Kouwe were finishing the final preparations for breakfast. Nate spotted a loaf of cassava bread and a tall stone pitcher of cold water.\n\nAnna swung around with a platter of honest-to-goodness bacon in her arms. She lifted her bounty. \"From wild boar,\" she explained. \"A pair of tribeswomen arrived with a feast at daybreak.\"\n\nNate's mouth watered. There was also more fruit, some type of egg, even what looked like a pie.\n\n\"No wonder your father stayed here for so long,\" Private Carrera mumbled around a mouthful of bacon and bread.\n\nEven this reminder of his father failed to squelch Nate's appetite. He dug in along with the rest.\n\nAs he stuffed himself, Nate realized two of their party were missing. \"Where are Zane and Olin?\"\n\n\"Working on the radio,\" Kostos said. \"Olin got the GPS up and running this morning.\"\n\nNate choked on a piece of bread. \"He got it working!\"\n\nKostos nodded, then shrugged. \"He has it recalibrated, but who knows if anyone's receiving.\"\n\nNate let this information sink in. His eyes flicked to Kelly. If the signal was received with the revised coordinates, they could be rescued as soon as this evening. Nate recognized the glimmer of hope in Kelly's eyes, too.\n\n\"But without the main radio to confirm,\" Kostos continued, \"we may just be spittin' in the wind. And until I get solid confirmation, we proceed with our backup plan. Your mission today--along with Kelly and Zane--will be to make sure Frank is ready for a quick evac if necessary.\"\n\n\"Plus to gather some of the tree's sap,\" Kelly said.\n\nKostos nodded, chewing hard. \"While Olin works on the radio, the others of us will split up and see if we can't find out more from the Indians. Get intel on those damned repellent powders.\"\n\nNate didn't argue with the sergeant's plan. GPS or not, it was safest to proceed as cautiously and expeditiously as possible. The remainder of the meal was finished in silence.\n\nAfterward, the party vacated the dwelling in the nightcap oak and climbed down to the glade, leaving Olin alone in the dwelling with his satellite equipment. Manny and the two Rangers headed in one direction, Anna and Kouwe in another. The plan was to rendezvous back at the tree at noon.\n\nNate and Kelly headed toward the Yagga with Richard Zane in tow. Nate hitched his shotgun higher. The sergeant had insisted every member of the party go armed with at least a pistol. Kelly had a 9mm holstered at her waist. Zane, ever suspicious, had his Beretta in hand, eyes darting all around.\n\nIn addition to the weapons, each of the three teams had been equipped with one of the Rangers' short-range Saber radios, to keep in contact with one another. \"Every fifteen minutes, I want to hear an all-clear from each group,\" Kostos had said dourly. \"No one stays silent.\"\n\nPrepared as well as they could be, the group split up.\n\nAs Nate walked across the glade, he stared up at the giant prehistoric gymnospore. Its white bark glistened with dew, as did its leaves, flickering brightly. Among the tiered branches, the clusters of giant nut pods hung, miniature versions of the manmade huts. Nate was anxious to see more of the giant tree.\n\nThey reached the thick, knobbed roots, and Kelly guided them between the woody columns to the open cavity in the trunk. As Nate approached, he could appreciate why the natives called their tree Yagga, or Mother. The symbolism was not lost to him. The two main buttress roots were not unlike open legs, framing the tree's monstrous birth canal. It was from here that the Ban-ali had been born into the world.\n\n\"It's big enough to drive a truck through,\" Zane said, staring up at the arched opening.\n\nNate could not suppress a small shudder as he entered the shadowy heart of the tree. The musky scent of its oil was thick in the passage. All around the lowermost tunnel, small blue handprints decorated the wood wall, hundreds, some large, others small. Did they represent members of the tribe? Did his own father's palm mark this wall somewhere?\n\n\"This way,\" Kelly said, leading them toward the passage winding up the tree.\n\nAs Nate and Zane followed, the blue prints disappeared eventually.\n\nNate glanced along the plain walls, then back toward the entrance. Something was bothering him, but he couldn't exactly put his finger on it. Something didn't look right. Nate studied the flow channels in the wood, the tubules of xylem and phloem that moved water and nutrients up and down the trunk. The channels ran down in graceful, winding curves around the passage walls. But down below, where the passage bluntly ended, the flow channels were jagged, no longer curving smoothly. Before he could examine this further, the group had passed beyond the tunnel's curve.\n\n\"It's a long climb,\" Kelly said, pointing ahead. \"The healing chamber is at the very top, near the crown of the tree.\"\n\nNate followed. The tunnel looked like some monstrous insect bore. In his study of botany, he was well familiar with insect damage to trees: mountain pine beetle, European elm bark beetle, raspberry crown borer. But this tunnel had not been cored out--he would stake his life on it. It had formed naturally, like the tubules found inside the stems and trunk of an ant tree, an evolutionary adaptation. But even this raised a new question. Surely this tree was centuries older than the first arrival of the Ban-ali to this region. So why did the tree grow these hollowed tubules in the first place?\n\nHe remembered Kelly's muttered words at the end of last night's group discussion. We're missing something...something important.\n\nThey started passing openings through the tree's trunk to the outside. Some led directly into huts, others led out onto branches with huts beyond. He counted as they climbed. There had to be at least twenty openings.\n\nBehind him, Zane reported in on the Saber radio. All was well with the other teams.\n\nAt last, they reached the end of the passage, where it ballooned out into a cavernous space with slits cut high in the walls to allow in the sunlight. Still, the chamber was dim.\n\nKelly hurried over to her brother.\n\nThe small shaman stood across the room, checking on another patient. He glanced up at their approach. He was alone. \"Good morning,\" he said in stiff English.\n\nNate nodded. It was strange knowing these words were most likely taught to the man by his own father. He knew from reading his father's notes that this shaman was also the Ban-ali's nominal leader. Their class structure here was not highly organized. Each person seemed to know his place and role. But here was the tribe's king, the one who communed closest with the Yagga.\n\nKelly knelt at Frank's side. He was sitting up and sucking the contents of one of the tree's nuts through a reed straw.\n\nHe set his liquid meal aside. \"The breakfast of champions,\" he said with his usual good-natured smirk.\n\nNate saw he still wore his Red Sox cap--and nothing else. He had a small blanket over his lower half, hiding his stumped legs. But he was bare-chested, revealing plainly what was painted there.\n\nA crimson serpent with a blue handprint in the center.\n\n\"I woke up with it,\" Frank said, noticing Nate's gaze. \"They must have painted it on me during the night when I was drugged out.\"\n\nThe mark of the Ban-ali.\n\nThe shaman stepped to Nate's side. \"You...son of Wishwa Kerl.\"\n\nNate turned and nodded. Apparently their guide, Dakii, had been telling tales. \"Yes, Carl was my father.\"\n\nThe shaman king clapped him on the shoulder. \"He good man.\"\n\nNate did not know how to respond to this. He found himself nodding while really wanting to rip into the shaman. If he was such a good man, why did you murder him? But from working and living with indigenous tribes throughout the region, he knew there would never be a satisfactory answer. Among the tribes, even a good man could be killed for breaking a taboo--one could even be honored by being turned into plant fertilizer.\n\nKelly finished her examination of Frank. \"His wounds have entirely sealed. The rate of granulation is amazing.\"\n\nHer expression must have been clear to the shaman. \"Yagga heals him. Grow strong. Grow--\" The shaman frowned, clearly struggling to remember a word. Finally, he bent down and slapped his own leg.\n\nKelly stared at the shaman, then at Nate. \"Do you think it's possible? Could Frank's legs really grow back?\"\n\n\"Gerald Clark's arm regenerated,\" Nate said. \"So we know it's possible.\"\n\nKelly crouched. \"If we could watch the transformation in a modern medical facility...\"\n\nZane interrupted her, lowering his voice and keeping his back toward the shaman. \"Remember, we have a mission here.\"\n\n\"What mission?\" Frank asked.\n\nKelly quietly explained.\n\nFrank brightened. \"The GPS is working! Then there's hope.\"\n\nKelly nodded.\n\nBy now, the shaman had wandered off, losing interest in them.\n\n\"In the meantime,\" Zane hissed, \"we're supposed to gather a sample of the sap.\"\n\n\"I know where it comes from,\" Kelly said, nodding toward a channel carved deep into the wall. Shielded by the two men, she picked up the empty nut drained by her brother and pulled out the straw. She crossed to the wall and removed a small wooden plug. A thick red sap began to flow into the channel. She bent the nut's opening into the flow and began collecting the sap. It was slow work.\n\n\"Let me,\" Zane said. \"You look after your brother.\"\n\nKelly nodded and stepped to Nate. \"The stretcher is still here,\" she said, pointing an arm to the makeshift travois. \"When and if we get the signal, we'll have to move fast.\"\n\n\"We should--\"\n\nThe first explosion shocked them all. Everyone froze as the blast echoed away. Nate stared at the open slits high up the curved walls. It was not thunder. Not from blue skies. Then more and more booms followed. Beyond the roar, sharper cries arose.\n\nScreams.\n\n\"We're under attack!\" Nate exclaimed.\n\nHe turned and found a pistol pointed at him.\n\n\"Don't move,\" Zane said, crouching by the wall, a tight and scared expression on his face. He held the nut, now overflowing with sap, cradled in one arm, and the 9mm Beretta in the other. \"No one move.\"\n\n\"What are you--\" Kelly began.\n\nNate interrupted, immediately understanding. \"You!\" He remembered Kouwe's suspicions: other trackers on their trail, a spy among them. \"You goddamn bastard. You sold us out!\"\n\nZane slowly stood. \"Back away!\" The pistol was held rock steady on them.\n\nBeyond the tense room, explosions continued to boom. Grenades.\n\nNate pulled Kelly away from Zane's threatening gun.\n\nBehind them, the shaman suddenly bolted toward the opening, frightened by the explosions, oblivious to the closer threat. A sound of alarm rose on his lips.\n\n\"Stop!\" Zane screamed at the tribesman.\n\nThe shaman was too panicked to listen or to comprehend the stranger's tongue. He continued to run.\n\nZane twitched his gun and fired. In the enclosed space, the blast was deafening. But not so deafening as to drown out the cry of surprise from the shaman.\n\nNate glanced over his shoulder. The shaman fell on his side, clutching his belly, gasping. Blood flowed from around his fingers.\n\nRed with anger, Nate turned on Zane. \"You bastard. He couldn't understand you.\"\n\nThe gun again pointed at them. Zane slowly circled around, keeping his weapon aimed. He even kept a safe distance from Frank's hammock, not taking any chances. \"You were always the gullible fool,\" the Tellux man said. \"Just like your father. Neither of you understood anything about money and power.\"\n\n\"Who are you working for?\" Nate spat.\n\nZane now had his back to the exit. The shaman had rolled into a moaning ball off to the side. Zane stopped and motioned with his pistol. \"Toss your weapons out the window slits. One at a time.\"\n\nNate refused to budge, shaking with rage. Zane fired, blasting wood chips from between Nate's toes.\n\n\"Do as he says,\" Frank ordered from the hammock.\n\nScowling, Kelly obeyed. She freed her pistol from its holster and flung it out one of the windows.\n\nNate still hesitated.\n\nZane smiled coldly. \"The next bullet goes through your girlfriend's heart.\"\n\n\"Nate...\" Frank warned from the bed.\n\nTeeth clenched, Nate edged to the wall, weighing his chances of firing at Zane. But the odds weren't good, not with Kelly's life at risk. He unslung his gun and heaved it through one of the slits.\n\nZane nodded, satisfied, and backed toward the exit. \"You'll have to excuse me, but I have a rendezvous to make. I suggest you three remain here. It's the safest spot in the valley at the moment.\"\n\nWith those snide words, Zane slipped out of the chamber and disappeared down the throat of the tunnel.\n\n[ 8:12 A.M. ]\n\nDeep in the jungle, Manny ran alongside Private Carrera. Tor-tor raced beside them, ears flattened to his skull. Explosions ripped through the morning, smoke wafted through the trees.\n\nKostos ran ahead of them, screaming into his radio. \"Everyone back to home base! Rally at the dwelling!\"\n\n\"Could they be our people?\" Manny asked. \"Responding to the GPS?\"\n\nCarrera glanced back at him and frowned. \"Not this quick. We've been ambushed.\"\n\nAs if confirming this, a trio of men, dressed in camouflage gear and armed with AK-47s and grenade launchers, trotted into view.\n\nKostos hissed and waved them all down.\n\nThey dropped to their bellies.\n\nAn Indian ran at the group with a raised spear. He was nearly cut in half by automatic fire.\n\nTor-tor, spooked by the chattering gunfire, bolted forward.\n\n\"Tor-tor!\" Manny hissed, rising to one knee, reaching for the cat.\n\nThe jaguar dashed into the open, across the path of the gunmen.\n\nOne of them barked something in Spanish and pointed. Another grinned and lifted his weapon, eyeing down the barrel.\n\nManny raised his pistol. But before he could fire, Kostos rose up ahead of him, the M-16 at his shoulder, and popped off three shots, three squeezes of the trigger. Blam, blam, blam.\n\nThe trio fell backward, heads exploding like melons.\n\nManny froze, stunned.\n\n\"C'mon. We need to get back to the tree.\" Kostos scowled at the jungle. \"Why the hell aren't the others responding?\"\n\n[ 8:22 A.M. ]\n\nKouwe kept Anna behind him as he hid behind a bushy fern. Dakii, the tribal guide, crouched beside him. The four mercenaries stood only six yards away, unaware of the eyes watching them. Though Kouwe had heard the sergeant's order to regroup at the nightcap oak, with the marauders so near, he dared not signal his acknowledgment. They were pinned down. The group of mercenaries stood between them and the home tree. There was no way to get past them unseen.\n\nBehind him, Dakii crouched as still as a stone, but the tension emanating from him was fierce. While hidden, he had watched more than a dozen of his tribesmen--men, women, children--mowed down by this group.\n\nFurther in the wood, explosions continued to boom. They heard screams and the crash of dwellings from the treetops. The marauders were tearing through the village. The only hope for Kouwe's party was to flee to some sheltered corner of the jungled plateau, hope to be overlooked.\n\nOne of the soldiers barked into a radio in Spanish. \"Tango Team in position. Killzone fourteen secure.\"\n\nKouwe felt something brush his knee. He glanced over. Dakii motioned for him to remain in place. Kouwe nodded.\n\nDakii rolled from his side, moving swiftly and silently. Not a single twig was disturbed. Dakii was teshari-rin, one of the tribe's ghost scouts. Even without his paint, the tribesman blended into the deeper shadows. He raced from shelter to shelter, a dark blur. Kouwe knew he was witnessing a demonstration of the Yagga's enhancement of its wards. Dakii circled around the band, then even Kouwe lost track of him.\n\nAnna grabbed his hand and squeezed. Have we just been abandoned? she seemed to silently ask.\n\nKouwe wondered, too, until he spotted Dakii. The tribesman crouched across the way. He was in direct sight of Kouwe and Anna, but still hidden from the four guards.\n\nDakii rolled to his back in the loam, aiming the small bow he had found high into the air. Kouwe followed where his arrow pointed. Then back down to the mercenaries.\n\nHe understood and motioned for Anna to be ready with her own weapon. She nodded, staring up, then back down, understanding.\n\nKouwe signaled Dakii.\n\nThe tribesman pulled taut his bowstring and let fly an arrow. A tiny twang was heard, as was the louder rip of arrow through leaf. The mercenaries all turned in Dakii's direction, weapons raised.\n\nKouwe ignored them, his gaze focused above. High in the branches was the ruin of a dwelling, but left intact among the branches was one of the little ingenious inventions of the Ban-ali, one of their makeshift elevators. Dakii's arrow sliced the support rope that held aloft a cradled counterweight, a large chunk of granite.\n\nThe boulder came crashing down, straight at the group of mercenaries.\n\nOne was smashed under its weight, his face crushed as he glanced up a moment too late.\n\nKouwe and Anna were already on their feet. From such close range, they emptied their pistols at the remaining trio, striking chests, arms, and bellies. The group fell. Dakii rushed out, an obsidian dagger in his hand. He ran at the mercenaries and slit the throats of any who still moved. It was quick and bloody work.\n\nWith a hand, Kouwe steadied Anna, who had paled at the display. \"We have to get back to the others.\"\n\n[ 9:05 A.M. ]\n\nFrom the height of the chasm, Louis had a wide view of the isolated valley. A pair of binoculars hung around his neck, forgotten. Across the jungle, smoke rose from countless fires and signal flares. In just over an hour, his team had encircled the village and was now closing slowly toward the center, toward his goal and prize.\n\nBrail, who had been assigned as his new lieutenant after Jacques disappeared, spoke near his feet. The tracker knelt over a map, marking off small X's as his units reported in. \"The net's secure, Herr Doktor. Nothing left now but mopping up.\"\n\nLouis could tell the man was anxious to bag his own limit here.\n\n\"And the Rangers? The Americans?\"\n\n\"Herded toward the center, just as you ordered.\"\n\n\"Excellent.\" Louis nodded to his mistress at his side. Tshui was naked, armed only with a little blowgun. Between her breasts rested the shrunken head of Corporal DeMartini, hung around Tshui's neck by the man's own dog tags.\n\n\"Then it's time we joined the party.\" He lifted his twin pair of snub-nosed mini-Uzis. They felt powerful in his hands. \"It's high time I made the acquaintance of Nathan Rand.\"\n\n[ 9:12 A.M. ]\n\n\"You watch over your brother and the shaman,\" Nathan said, sensing time was running out. \"I'm going after Zane.\"\n\n\"You don't have a weapon.\" Kelly knelt beside the shaman. With Nathan's help, the two had wrangled the tribesman into a hammock. Kelly had shot him full of morphine, quieting his pained thrashing. A belly wound was one of the most agonizing. With no better solution, she was now slathering the entry and exit wounds with Yagga sap. \"What are you going to do if you catch him?\"\n\nNate felt a fire in his own belly, just as agonizing as a bullet wound. \"First he betrayed my father, now he betrayed us.\" His voice choked with anger. He wanted only one thing from the man. Vengeance.\n\nFrank spoke from his hammock. \"What are you going to do?\"\n\nNathan shook his head. \"I have to try.\"\n\nHe headed toward the exit. Distantly the explosions had died down, but gunfire spat sporadically. The fewer the shots, the more obvious it became that the village was being wiped out. Nate knew they would fare no better, not unless something was done. But what?\n\nStalking down the passage, at first cautiously, then faster and faster, around and around, Nate was reminded of the serpentine pattern of the Ban-ali symbol, winding in a spiral. Could this passage be what the symbol represented, or was it what Kelly had conjectured earlier, a crude representation of the twisted protein model, the mutagenic prion? If it represented the Yagga's tunnel, what did the helixes at each end of the spiral mean? Did one depict the healing ward? And if so, what did the other represent? And the blue handprint? Nate recalled the painted handprints decorating the entrance to the passage and shook his head. What did it all mean?\n\nHe ran around a corner and stumbled over a dead Indian lying in the tunnel. Nate fell to his hands, skidding on his knees. Once stopped, he rolled around and saw the bullet hole in the man's chest and a second in the back of his head.\n\nNate looked down and saw another body, just its legs, around the next curve. Another Indian.\n\nZane.\n\nNate scrambled to his feet, his blood on fire. The man was picking off the unarmed stragglers here, healers and aides to the shaman, brutally clearing a bloody path to the tunnel's end. The fucking coward.\n\nNate shoved down the tunnel, counting off the openings on his left. When he reached the last one, he ducked out of the passage and through a small, empty dwelling. He found himself on a branch at least five feet thick. Before continuing, he needed some idea of what was happening below. Smoke billowed and wafted through the open glade.\n\nIn the clearing around the tree, a few Indians retreated toward the Yagga.\n\nBy now, an ominous quiet had settled over the village.\n\nNate edged along the branch, but he couldn't get a good look across the glade toward the nightcap oak and his team's temporary homestead. The branch pointed the wrong way. He couldn't even spy the entrance to the Yagga. Damn it.\n\nPistol fire sounded from below. Zane! A scream erupted from the field on the tree's far side. The coward must be hiding down at the tunnel's end, killing any Indians who neared. Nate knew the bastard had enough ammo to hold them off for a while.\n\nThe Indians in direct sight below fled toward the cover of the thicker wood.\n\nNate stared across the glade. There was no sign of his friends.\n\nAs Nate sidled along the thick limb, his toe nudged a rope coiled atop the branch. He looked closer. Not rope, he realized, but one of the vine ladders.\n\n\"A fire escape,\" he mumbled. An idea flashed into his mind--a plan forming.\n\nBefore he lost his nerve, he shoved the piled vine over the edge.\n\nThe ladder unrolled with a whispery sound until it snapped to its full length, only three feet from the ground. It was a long climb, but if Zane was down there, perhaps Nate could sneak up on him.\n\nWith no more plan than that, Nate mounted the ladder and began a hurried climb earthward. He raced down the rungs. If his group and the remaining Indians could fall back here, they might have a more defensible position. But before that could happen, Zane had to be eliminated.\n\nNate reached the end of the ladder and hopped off.\n\nTall roots rose all around him, and it took Nate a moment to orient himself. The stream was behind and off to the left. That meant he was at about the four o'clock position from the tunnel entrance. He began to wind counterclockwise around the trunk.\n\nThree o'clock...two o'clock...\n\nSomewhere off in the forest, a spatter of automatic gunfire erupted. Another grenade exploded. Clearly the fighting had not entirely ceased in some parts of the village.\n\nUsing the cover of the noise, Nate crawled and edged his way around the tree's base. At last, he spotted one of the tall buttress roots that flanked the entrance. One o'clock.\n\nNate leaned against the trunk. Zane was beyond the obstruction...but how to proceed from here was the tricky part. Another pistol shot rang out from Zane's bunker. Nate frowned down at his empty hands.\n\nWhat plan now, hero boy?\n\n[ 9:34 A.M. ]\n\nZane knelt on one knee, aiming out with his pistol. Tiring, he supported his weapon arm with his other. But he refused to let down his guard, not when victory was so close. He only had to hold out a little longer, then his role in this mission would be over.\n\nOne eye twitched to the nut full of the miraculous sap. It was a fortune worth billions. Though St. Savin Pharmaceuticals had made a sizable deposit in Zane's Swiss account to buy his cooperation, it was the promised bonus of a quarter percentage point of gross sales that had finally sold him on the betrayal. With the potential in the Yagga's sap, there was no limit to the wealth that could flow his way.\n\nZane licked his lips. His role here was almost at an end. Days ago, he had successfully slipped the computer virus into the team's communication equipment. Now all that remained was the final endgame.\n\nLate last night, Favre had instructed Zane to obtain a sample of the sap and protect it with his life. \"If those damn natives pull some jackass stunt,\" Louis had warned, \"like setting fire to their precious tree to protect their secret, then you're our fail-safe.\"\n\nZane had, of course, agreed, but unknown to his murderous partner, Zane had his own backup plan in mind, too. Once secure here, Zane had poured a small sample of the sap from the nut, sealed it in a latex condom, tied it off, and swallowed it. An extra bit of insurance on his own part. Any betrayal and a competing pharmaceutical company, like Tellux, would find itself in possession of the miraculous substance instead of St. Savin.\n\nDistant rifle shots sounded from the woods. He spotted flashes of muzzle fire. Favre's men were cinching the noose. It would not be long.\n\nAs if confirming this, a grenade exploded at the glade's fringe. A dwelling in one of the huge trees blew apart, casting leaf and branch high into the air. Zane smiled--then he heard a voice within the echo of the blast. It sounded close.\n\n\"Watch out! Grenade!\"\n\nSomething hit the trunk of the tree just over his head and bounced into the flanking root. Grenade! his mind echoed.\n\nWith a cry of alarm, he dove away from the entrance and rolled deeper into the shaft, arms shielding his head. He waited several tense seconds, then several more. He panted, ragged from the near escape. The expected explosion never came. Cautiously uncovering his head, he clenched his teeth. Still no blast.\n\nHe sat up, crawled slowly back toward the entrance, and peeked around the corner, where he spotted the small coconut-shaped object resting in the dirt. It was just one of the immature nut pods from the damn tree! It must have fallen from an overhead branch.\n\n\"Goddamn it!\" He felt foolish at his panic.\n\nHe straightened, raising his weapon, and stepped back to his guard position. Getting too damn jumpy...\n\nA blur of motion.\n\nSomething solid struck his wrist. The pistol flew from his fingers as his wrist exploded with pain. He started to fall backward--then his arm was grabbed by someone stepping from the blind side of the entrance. He was yanked out of the entrance and thrown bodily forward.\n\nHis shoulder hit the dirt. He rolled and stared back around. What he saw was impossible. \"Rand? How?\"\n\nNathan Rand towered over him at the entrance to the tunnel, a long, thick section of branch in his hand, which he raised menacingly.\n\nZane crab-crawled backward.\n\n\"How?\" Nate asked. \"A little lesson from our Indian friends. The power of suggestion.\" Rand kicked the immature seed pod toward him. \"Believe something strongly enough, and others will believe, too.\"\n\nZane scrambled to his feet.\n\nNate swung the branch like a bat, striking him on the shoulder and knocking him back down. \"That was for the shaman you shot like a dog!\" Nate lifted the branch again. \"And this is for--\"\n\nZane glanced over Nate's shoulder. \"Kelly! Thank God!\"\n\nNate turned half around.\n\nUsing the moment of distraction, Zane shot to his feet and darted away. He cleared the side root in three steps.\n\nHe heard the blistering protest behind him and smiled.\n\nWhat a...\n\n...fool! Tricked by his own damn ruse! No one stood at the tunnel entrance. Kelly was not there.\n\nNate watched Zane race around the thick buttress. \"No, you don't, you bastard!\" With club in hand, he gave chase.\n\nStill ringing with anger, Nate flew around the tree and spotted Zane fleeing along the base of the trunk, toward a tangle of roots. The traitor could easily get lost among them and escape. Nate thought of going back for the abandoned pistol, but he didn't have the time. He dared not lose sight of the bastard.\n\nAhead, Zane ducked under an arched root and wriggled through agilely. He was one wiry son of a bitch. In this race, Zane's smaller frame and lighter build were advantageous.\n\nRealizing they were matched now fist to fist, Nathan tossed aside his club and pursued Zane. They fought through the snarl, crawling, climbing, leaping, squirming their way through the tangled maze. Zane was making headway on him.\n\nThen the roots opened. They both stumbled onto some path amid the mess. Zane ran, pounding down the trail. Nate swore and went after him.\n\nAhead, water glistened. As they raced along the snaking trail, Nate saw the path ended at a wide pool, blocking the way. A dead end.\n\nNate smiled. End of the line, Zane!\n\nAs they neared the pool, his quarry also realized he had run himself into a blind alley and slowed--but instead of a groan of defeat, Nate heard a snarl of glee.\n\nZane leaped to the side, diving for the ground.\n\nNate closed the distance.\n\nZane swung to face him, a gun in hand. A 9mm Beretta.\n\nIt took Nate a startled moment to fathom this miracle. Then he saw his own shotgun, hanging by its shoulder strap from a rootlet a few steps to his right. The pistol was Kelly's! One of the weapons Zane had made them toss out of the treetop.\n\nNate groaned. The gods were not smiling on him. He took a step toward his shotgun, but Zane clucked his tongue.\n\n\"Move another inch, and you get a third eye!\"\n\n[ 9:46 A.M. ]\n\nKouwe herded Anna ahead of him. The crack of rifle fire was closing all around them. Dakii led the way, expressionless, in scout mode. He wound with calm assurance through his village forest, guiding them back toward the nightcap oak. They needed to rendezvous with the Rangers. Put together some semblance of a plan.\n\nKouwe had been able to contact Sergeant Kostos over the radio and inform him of their status. He had also learned that Olin, left up in the dwelling, had been able to report in, too. The Russian was keeping himself well hidden in the tree. But so far no word had come from Nate's party. He prayed they were okay.\n\nAt last, Kouwe spotted sunlight ahead. The central glade! His team had been circling around from the south, keeping within the jungle cover. According to the sergeant, the Rangers were angling down from the north side.\n\nDakii slowed and pointed from a half crouch.\n\nAnna and Kouwe moved up with him. Through a break in the foliage, Kouwe spotted the small log cabin in the clearing. He was able to orient himself. He followed the tribesman's arm. The nightcap oak, their destination, lay only fifty yards ahead. But that was not what Dakii was pointing out. Beyond the giant oak, Kouwe spotted Tor-tor. The jaguar raced along the clearing's edge. Drawn by the motion, Kouwe was able to see figures moving through the deeper shadows.\n\nThe Ranger team and Manny! They had made it back!\n\nDakii led them onward, speeding deftly through the glade's fringe.\n\nIn a few minutes, the two parties reunited at the base of the tree. Sergeant Kostos clapped Kouwe on the shoulder. Anna and Manny hugged.\n\n\"Any word from Nate?\" Kouwe asked.\n\nThe sergeant shook his head, then waved to the dwelling. \"I've ordered Olin to pack up his GPS and join us.\"\n\n\"Why? I thought the plan was to rendezvous at the tree.\"\n\n\"This is close enough. As near as I can tell, we're boxed in. The tree is no protection.\"\n\nKouwe frowned but understood. The marauders were systematically destroying every dwelling. They'd be trapped up there. \"What then?\"\n\n\"We bug out of here. Find a way through their line as silently as possible. Once past them, we'll seek shelter, somewhere where they can't find us.\"\n\nManny edged closer to them, glancing at his watch. \"The sergeant set one of his napalm bombs back in the woods, timed to explode in another fifteen minutes.\"\n\n\"A distraction,\" Sergeant Kostos said. He hiked his pack on his shoulder. \"And we have more if we need them.\"\n\n\"It's why we can't wait for Nate,\" Manny said, reading his friend's eyes.\n\nKouwe gazed at the Yagga. The sound of gunfire was trickling away...as was their time. If they were going to have any chance, they would have to take it now. Kouwe reluctantly nodded, conceding.\n\nOverhead, the vine ladder shuddered. He glanced up. Olin was climbing down, his radio pack in place.\n\nKostos waved his M-16. \"Let's get ready to--\"\n\nThe blast rocked them all to their knees. Kouwe swung around and watched the roof of the cabin sail high into the air. Bits of debris blew outward with tremendous force. A section of log shot by overhead, a flying battering ram, slicing into the jungle and crashing into its depths. Smoke billowed outward.\n\nThat was no grenade blast.\n\nThrough the smoke, a cadre of soldiers appeared, weapons raised and ready.\n\nKouwe noticed two things simultaneously. First, walking in the lead was a naked woman, hand in hand with a tall gentleman dressed all in white.\n\nBut the second thing Kouwe noted was of more immediate menace, something carried by one of the soldiers. The man dropped to a knee and lifted a long black tube on his shoulder.\n\nKouwe had seen enough Hollywood movies to recognize the weapon.\n\n\"Rocket launcher!\" Carrera screamed behind him. \"Everyone down!\"\n\n[ 10:03 A.M. ]\n\nThe first blast had frozen both Nate and Zane in place. Nate kept focused on his adversary's weapon. From only a few yards away, the pistol was pointing square at his chest. He dared not move. He held his breath.\n\nWhat was going on out there?\n\nAs the second blast sounded, Zane's eyes twitched in the direction of the explosion. Nate knew he wouldn't have another chance. He was dead unless he did something...even something stupid.\n\nNate lunged through the air, not toward Zane, but toward the dangling shotgun. His movement did not go unnoticed. Nate heard the sharp report of Zane's pistol and felt something sting his upper thigh, but he didn't stop.\n\nHis body struck the root, his arms scrambling for the shotgun. He didn't have time to unhook the strap. From where it hung, he just blindly swung the barrel in Zane's general direction and yanked the trigger. Recoil tore the weapon from his hand.\n\nNate ducked and swung around.\n\nHe saw Zane flying backward, his belly bloody, arms flung out. Zane landed in the small pond at the end of the blocked trail. He sputtered to the surface--the water was surprisingly deep, even near shore--and cried in alarm and pain.\n\nZane was now learning the lesson he had taught the unarmed Ban-ali shaman: a belly shot was one of the most agonizing.\n\nNate pushed up and unhooked his shotgun. He pointed it at the floundering man. He had not seen where the pistol had gone and was taking no chances this time.\n\nZane, his face a mask of torment, struggled toward the shore. Then his body suddenly jerked, his eyes widened in shock. His moaning turned to fresh screams. \"Nate! Help me!\"\n\nResponding instinctively, Nate took a step forward.\n\nZane reached toward him, face pleading, terrified--then all around his body, the waters erupted in a fierce churning.\n\nNate caught several flashes of silver bodies. Piranhas. He backed away, realizing where he was: the birthing pool, the hatchery that Manny had described finding.\n\nZane thrashed, jerking and twitching, screeching. He began to sink into the froth. His eyes rolled with panic as he fought to keep his mouth above water. He failed. His head sank away. Only one arm remained above the pool--then even this disappeared under the roiling waters.\n\nNate turned from the pool and crossed down the path, feeling no pity for the man. He briefly checked the stinging burn in his thigh. He found a bullet hole in his pants and a trickle of blood. Just a graze, nothing more. He had been damned lucky.\n\nHe clenched the shotgun in his grip and marched down the trail, praying his luck would hold.\n\n[ 10:12 A.M. ]\n\nManny shifted under a pile of debris, shoving with his shoulders. Smoke choked him. The explosion of the rocket in the treetop still rang in his head. It hurt to move his jaw. He crawled free amid shouts and yells. All commands.\n\n\"Throw down your weapons!\"\n\n\"Show us your hands!\"\n\n\"Move now, or I'll shoot you dead where you lie!\"\n\nThat was incentive enough. Manny groaned and spat out blood. He glanced up into chaos. He saw Anna Fong on her knees, hands on her head. She looked all but unscathed. Professor Kouwe knelt at her side, bearing a scalp gash that dripped blood down his cheek. Dakii was also there, wearing an expression of stunned disbelief.\n\nTurning, Manny saw Tor-tor's spotted face peering out from under a bush. He motioned the jaguar to stay put. Near the same bush, he watched Private Carrera furtively shove her Bailey under a section of the roof thatch from one of the abodes above.\n\n\"You!\" someone barked. \"On your feet!\"\n\nManny didn't know who the man was talking to until he felt the hot barrel of a gun on his temple. He froze.\n\n\"On your feet!\" the man repeated. His words were heavily accented, German perhaps.\n\nManny clambered to his knees, then to his feet. He wobbled, but this seemed to satisfy the mercenary.\n\n\"Your weapon!\" he barked.\n\nManny glanced around him as if searching for a missing shoe or sock. He saw his pistol lying there and nudged it with a toe. \"There.\"\n\nA second soldier appeared out of nowhere and confiscated it.\n\n\"Join the anderen!\" the man said with a shove toward the others.\n\nAs he stumbled toward his kneeling friends, Manny saw Carrera and Kostos escorted by other guards. Their holsters were empty, packs gone. They were all forced to their knees, hands on their heads. The sergeant's left eye was swollen, his nose crooked and bloodied, broken. Kostos had clearly put up more fight than Manny.\n\nSuddenly a distant section of deeper forest blew up into a ball of fire. The soft explosion echoed out to them, along with the smell of napalm.\n\nSo much for Kostos's planned \"distraction.\" Too little, too late.\n\n\"Herr Brail, this one's not moving!\" one of the mercenaries shouted behind them in a mix of German and Spanish.\n\nManny glanced back to the base of the nightcap oak. It was Olin. He lay in a crumpled heap. A spear of wood had pierced through his shoulder and blood flowed brightly across his light khaki shirt. Manny saw he was still breathing.\n\nThe one named Brail tore his gaze from the burning forest and wandered over to check on the Russian. \"Hundefleisch,\" the German said. Dog meat. He lifted his pistol and shot Olin in the back of the head.\n\nAnna jumped at the noise, a sob escaping her.\n\nFrom near the ruins of the log cabin, the two leaders of the attack force casually wandered toward them. The small Indian woman, though naked, moved casually, as if through a garden party, all curves and smooth legs. She wore a talisman resting between her breasts. Manny had first thought it was a leather satchel, but as she neared, he recognized it as a shrunken head. The hair atop the disgusting trinket was shaved.\n\nThe slender man at her side, dressed in white khakis and a rakish Panama hat, noticed his attention. He lifted the necklace for the others' view.\n\nManny spotted the dog tags.\n\n\"May I reintroduce you to Corporal DeMartini.\" He laughed lightly, as if he had made a joke, a party amusement, and dropped the defiled head of their former teammate back to the woman's chest.\n\nSergeant Kostos grumbled a threat, but the AK-47 pointed at the nape of his neck kept him on his knees.\n\nLouis smiled at the line of kneeling prisoners. \"It's good to see you all together again.\"\n\nManny recognized a distinctly French accent. Who was this man?\n\nProfessor Kouwe answered his silent question. \"Louis Favre,\" the professor mumbled under his breath, his expression sickened.\n\nThe Frenchman's gaze swung to Kouwe. \"That's Doctor Favre, Professor Kouwe. Please let's keep this courteous, and we can be done with this unpleasant matter as quickly as possible.\"\n\nKouwe simply glowered.\n\nManny knew the man's name. He was a biologist banned from Brazil for black-market profiteering and for crimes against the indigenous people. The professor, along with Nate's father, had shared an infamous past with this man.\n\n\"Now, we've counted heads here and seem to have come up a few short,\" Favre said. \"Where are the last members of your little troupe?\"\n\nNo one spoke.\n\n\"Come now. Let's keep this friendly, shall we? It's such a pleasant day.\" Favre marched up and down the row of prisoners. \"You don't want this to turn ugly now, do you? It's a simple question.\"\n\nStill no one moved. Everyone stared blankly forward.\n\nFavre shook his head sadly. \"Then ugly it is.\" He turned to the woman. \"Tshui, ma cherie, take your pick.\" He brushed his hands primly as if done with the matter.\n\nThe naked woman stalked before them, and hesitated before Private Carrera, cocking her head, then suddenly sprang two places over to kneel before Anna. Her nose was only an inch from the anthropologist's.\n\nAnna recoiled, but the gun behind her held her in place.\n\n\"My darling has an eye for beauty.\"\n\nMoving as quickly as a striking snake, the Indian woman drew a long, slender bone knife from a sheath hidden in her long tresses. Manny had seen knife sheaths like this braided into the hair of warriors in only one Amerindian tribe: the Shuar, the headhunters of Equador.\n\nThe bleached-white knife pointed into the tender flesh under Anna's chin. The Asian woman trembled. Red blood dribbled down the white blade. Anna gasped.\n\nEnough, Manny thought, reacting reflexively. His right hand dropped to his waist, settling atop the handle of the short bullwhip. He could also move quickly when he wanted, reflexes developed from years of taming a wild cat. With skilled fingers, he snapped out with the whip.\n\nThe tip of the leather struck the bone knife, sending it flying, and nicked a cut under the Shuar woman's eye.\n\nLike a cat, she hissed and rolled away, wounded. A second knife appeared in her hand as if by magic. It seemed this cat had many claws.\n\n\"Leave Anna be!\" Manny yelled. \"I'll tell you where the others are!\" Before he could say anything else, Manny was clubbed from behind, knocked to his face in the dirt and leaves. A foot kicked his whip away, then stomped on the offending hand, snapping a finger.\n\n\"Drag him up!\" Favre barked, all traces of his genteel mannerisms falling away.\n\nManny was hauled up by his hair. He cradled his injured hand to his chest.\n\nFavre stood by the Indian woman and wiped the blood from her cheek. Favre turned to Manny and licked the blood from his fingertip.\n\n\"Now was that necessary?\" he asked, and reached a hand behind him. One of the gunmen placed a snub-nosed rifle in his palm. Some type of miniature Uzi, from the looks of it.\n\nThe fist in Manny's hair twisted hard.\n\n\"Release him, Brail,\" Favre said.\n\nThe hand let go of him. Unsupported, Manny almost sagged to his face again.\n\n\"Where are they?\" Louis asked.\n\nManny bit past the pain. \"In the tree...the last time we saw them...they've not responded to our radios.\"\n\nFavre nodded. \"So I heard.\" He reached his free hand and pulled out a matching radio. \"Corporal DeMartini was gracious enough to lend me his Saber and supply me with the proper radio frequencies.\"\n\nManny frowned. \"If you knew...why...?\" He glanced over to Anna.\n\nA long sigh followed, exasperated and bored. \"Just making sure no one was attempting some deceptive tactic. It seems I've lost contact with my own agent in your party. And that always arouses my suspicious nature.\"\n\n\"Agent?\" Manny asked.\n\n\"Spy,\" Kouwe said from the end of the row of prisoners. \"Richard Zane.\"\n\n\"Indeed.\" Favre turned toward the tree and raised the radio to this mouth. \"Nate, if you can hear me, stay put. We'll be coming over to join you.\"\n\nThere was no answer.\n\nManny hoped somehow Nate had fled with Kelly. But in his heart, he knew Kelly would never leave her brother's side. All of them must still be hiding in the ancient tree.\n\nAs the Frenchman stared at the white-barked giant, his eyes narrowed. After a moment, he swung back and focused on Manny again. \"That leaves me only to address the insult upon my lady here.\"\n\nThe stubby Uzi again was raised in his direction.\n\n\"Not very gentlemanly of you, Monsieur Azevedo.\"\n\nFavre pulled the trigger. Shots rattled and sprayed out.\n\nManny winced, but not a bullet struck him.\n\nA grunt sounded behind him. The guard at his back collapsed into view, his upper body riddled. He lay on the ground, gasping like a beached fish. Blood poured out from his mouth and nose.\n\nFavre lowered his weapon. Manny stared up at the Frenchman. Favre cocked one eyebrow. \"It's not you I blame. Brail should have minded you better. He should never have left that damn whip at your side. Sloppy, sloppy work.\" Louis shook his head. \"Two lieutenants gone in the same number of days.\"\n\nHe turned away and waved his weapon. \"Bring the prisoners.\" He strode toward the Yagga. \"I'm done chasing after Carl's boy. Let's see if we can coax the shy fellow to come out and join us.\"\n\n[ 11:09 A.M. ]\n\nNate hid in the shadow of the Yagga's buttress root. Smoke clouded the glade. He heard intermittent gunfire and muffled shouts from the direction of the nightcap oak. What was going on?\n\nThe only object within sight inside the glade was the cratered husk of his father's log cabin. A mingled sense of dread and despair settled over his body like a shroud. Then, like ghosts from a grave, figures appeared out of the smoke, shadowy and vague.\n\nHe slipped deeper into the root's shadow, leveling his shotgun in their direction. Slowly, with each step, the apparitions took form and substance. He recognized Manny and Kouwe in the lead, guarding Anna between them. Kostos and Carrera flanked them, a step behind. Even the tribesman, Dakii, marched with them.\n\nBlood stained all of them and they walked with their hands behind their backs, stumbling, prodded from behind by shadowy figures. As they approached, the others grew clearer: men in a mix of military and jungle fatigues. They had weapons of every ilk pointed at his friends.\n\nNate aimed down the barrel of his shotgun. A useless weapon against these odds, these numbers. He needed another plan. But for now, he only had stealth and shadows.\n\nHis teammates were drawn to a stop by their guards.\n\nA man dressed all in white lifted a small bullhorn to his lips. \"Nathan Rand!\" he bellowed, aiming for the Yagga's treetop. \"Show yourself! Come out freely or your friends will pay for your absence. I will give you two minutes!\"\n\nHis teammates and the Indian were forced to their knees.\n\nNate lowered himself further into hiding. Without a doubt, the man out there was the leader of these mercenaries, a Frenchman judging from his accent. The man glanced at his watch, then back up to the treetop, tapping a toe impatiently. He clearly thought Nate was still in the upper bowers, relying on the last bit of intelligence from his dead spy.\n\nNate wavered. Show himself or flee? Should he take his chances in the woods? Perhaps try to get around behind the soldiers? Nate mentally shook his head. He was no guerrilla warrior.\n\n\"Thirty seconds, Nathan!\" the man roared through the bullhorn.\n\nA tiny voice echoed down from above. \"Nate's not up here! He left!\"\n\nIt was Kelly!\n\nThe Frenchman lowered his bullhorn. \"Lies,\" he muttered under his breath.\n\nKouwe spoke up from where he knelt. \"Dr. Favre...a word with you, please.\"\n\nNate found his fingers tightening on his shotgun, instantly recognizing the name. He had heard tales from his father about the atrocities attributed to Louis Favre. He was the bogeyman of the Amazon, a devil whispered about among the tribes, a monster banished from the region by his own father. But now here again.\n\n\"What is it, Professor?\" Favre asked with irritation.\n\n\"That was Kelly O'Brien. She's with her injured brother. If she says Nate's not up there, then he's not.\"\n\nFavre frowned and checked his watch. \"We'll see.\" He raised his bullhorn. \"Ten seconds!\" He then held out a palm, and a wicked weapon was handed to him: a curved machete as long as a scythe. Even in the smoky sunshine, it shone brightly--freshly sharpened.\n\nFavre leaned and placed the curve of the blade under Anna Fong's neck, then lifted the bullhorn. \"Time is running out, Nathan! I've been generous giving you an initial two minutes. From here on out, every minute will cost a friend's life. Come out now, and all will be spared! This I swear as a gentleman and a Frenchman.\" Favre counted the last seconds. \"Five...four...\"\n\nNathan struggled for some plan...anything. He knew Louis Favre's sworn word was worthless.\n\n\"Three...two...\"\n\nHe had seconds to come up with an alternative to submission.\n\n\"One...\"\n\nHe found none.\n\n\"Zero!\"\n\nNathan rose out of his hiding place. He stepped out with his shotgun over his head. \"You win!\" he called back.\n\nFavre straightened from his crouch over Anna, one eyebrow raised. \"Oh, mon petit homme, how you startled me! What were you doing down here all along?\"\n\nTears flowed down Anna's stricken face.\n\nNate threw his shotgun away. \"You win,\" he said again. Soldiers trotted around to circle him.\n\nFavre smiled. \"So I always do.\" His lips turned from amused to feral.\n\nBefore anyone could react, Favre twisted from the hip and swung the machete with all the force of his arm and back.\n\nBlood flumed upward.\n\nHis victim's head was shorn clean off at the neck.\n\n\"Manny!\" Nate cried out, falling to his knees, then his hands.\n\nHis friend's body collapsed backward.\n\nAnna screamed, swooning into Kouwe's side.\n\nWith his back to Nate, Favre faced the shock and dismay of the other prisoners. \"Please, did any of you truly think I'd let Monsieur Azevedo strike my love without recourse? Mon Dieu! Where's your chivalry?\"\n\nBeyond the kneeling line, Nate saw the Indian woman touch a gash on her cheek.\n\nFavre then turned back around to face Nate. His white outfit was now decorated with a crimson sash of Manny's blood. The monster tapped his wristwatch and waggled a finger at him. \"And, Nathan, the count did reach zero. You were late. Fair is fair.\"\n\nNathan hung his head, sagging toward the ground. \"Manny...\"\n\nSomewhere in the distance, a feline howl pierced the morning, echoing over the valley."
            },
            {
                "title": "Cure",
                "text": "AUGUST 17, 4:16 P.M.\n\n[ AMAZON JUNGLE ]\n\nLouis surveyed the final preparations in the valley. He carried his soiled field jacket over one arm, his shirt-sleeves rolled up. The afternoon turned out to be a scorcher--but it would get hotter here, much hotter. He smiled grimly, satisfied, as he stared over the ruins of the village.\n\nA Colombian soldier named Mask snapped to attention at his approach. The fellow, standing well over six feet, was as lethal as he was tall. A former bodyguard for the captain of a drug cartel, the swarthy man had taken a face full of acid protecting his boss. His skin was a boiled mass of scar tissue on one side. He had been fired afterward by his ungrateful ward, too ugly and too awful a reminder of how close death had come. Louis, on the other hand, respected the man's show of stalwart loyalty. He made an excellent replacement for Brail.\n\n\"Mask,\" Louis said, acknowledging the man, \"how much longer until all the charges are set in the valley?\"\n\n\"Half an hour,\" his new lieutenant answered sharply.\n\nLouis nodded and glanced at his watch. Time was critical, but everything was on schedule. If that Russian hadn't gotten that damned GPS working and a signal transmitted, Louis would have had more time to enjoy his victory here.\n\nSighing, Louis surveyed the field before him. There were eighteen prisoners in all, on their knees, hog-tied with their hands behind their backs and secured to their crossed ankles behind them. A loop of rope ran from the bindings and encircled their necks. A strangler's wrap. Struggle against your knots and the noose tightened around your neck.\n\nHe watched a few of the prisoners already gasping as the ropes dug deep. The others sat sweating and bleeding under the hot sun.\n\nLouis noticed Mask still standing at his side. \"And the village has been scoured?\" he asked. \"There are no more of the Ban-ali?\"\n\n\"None living, sir.\"\n\nThe village had numbered over a hundred. Now they were just one more lost tribe.\n\n\"How about the valley? Has it been thoroughly scouted?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. The only way onto or off this plateau is the chasm.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" Louis said. He had already known this from torturing the Ban-ali scout last night, but he had wanted to be sure. \"Do one last sweep through all stations. I want to be out of here no later than five o'clock.\"\n\nMask nodded and turned smartly away. He strode swiftly toward the giant central tree.\n\nLouis followed him with his eyes. At the tree, two small steel drums were being rolled out of the trunk's tunnel. After the valley had been secured, men with axes and awls had hiked up inside the tree, set deep taps into the trunk, and drained large quantities of the priceless sap. As the men pushed the drums into the field, Louis studied another team laboring around the base of the giant Yagga tree. His eyes narrowed.\n\nEverything was running with a clockwork precision. Louis would have it no other way.\n\nSatisfied, he strode over to the line of segregated prisoners, the survivors of the Ranger team, baking and burning under the sun. They sat slightly apart from the remaining members of the Ban-ali tribe.\n\nLouis stared at his catch, slightly disappointed that they hadn't offered more of a challenge. The two Rangers glared back at him murderously. The small Asian anthropologist had calmed significantly, eyes closed, lips moving in prayer, resigned. Kouwe sat stoically. Louis stopped in front of the last prisoner in the lineup.\n\nNathan Rand's gaze was as hard as the Rangers', but there was a glint of something more. A vein of icy determination.\n\nLouis had a hard time maintaining eye contact with the man, but he refused to look away. In Nathan's face, he saw a shadow of the man's father: the sandy hair, the planes of the cheek, the shape of his nose. But this was not Carl Rand. And to Louis's surprise, this disappointed him. The satisfaction he had expected to feel at having Carl's son kneeling at his feet was hollow.\n\nIn fact, he found himself somewhat respecting the young man. Throughout the journey here, Nathan had demonstrated both ingenuity and a stout heart, even dispatching Louis's spy. And finally, here at the end, he had proven his loyalty, with a willingness to sacrifice his own life for his team. Admirable qualities, even if they were directed at cross purposes to Louis's own.\n\nBut finally, it was those eyes, as hard as polished stone. He had clearly known inconsolable grief and somehow survived. Louis remembered his elderly friend from the bar back at his hotel in French Guiana, the survivor of the Devil's Island penal system. Louis pictured the old man sipping his neat bourbons. The chap had the same eyes. These were not Carl Rand's eyes, his father's eyes. Here was a different man.\n\n\"What are you going to do with us?\" Nate said. It was not a plea, but a simple question.\n\nLouis removed a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow. \"I swore as a gentleman that I wouldn't kill you or your friends. And I will honor my word.\"\n\nNate's eyes narrowed.\n\n\"I'll leave your deaths to the U.S. military,\" he said sadly, the emotion surprisingly unfeigned.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Nate asked suspiciously.\n\nLouis shook his head and took two steps to reach Sergeant Kostos. \"I think that question should be answered by your companion here.\"\n\n\"I don't know what you're talking about,\" Kostos said with a glower.\n\nLouis bent down at the waist and stared into the sergeant's face. \"Really...are you saying Captain Waxman didn't confide in his staff sergeant?\"\n\nKostos glanced away.\n\n\"What is he talking about?\" Nate asked, directing the question to the sergeant. \"We're well past secrets now, Kostos. If you know something...\"\n\nThe sergeant finally spoke, awkward with shame. \"The napalm minibombs. We were under orders to find the source of the miraculous compound. Once a sample was secured, we were to destroy the source. Total annihilation.\"\n\nLouis straightened, enjoying the shocked expressions on the others' faces. Even the female Ranger looked surprised. It seemed the military liked to keep its secrets to only a select few.\n\nRaising an arm, Louis pointed back to the small group of men gathered around the giant tree. They were his own demolitions team. Against the white bark of the trunk, the Rangers' remaining nine minibombs appeared like flat black eyes peering toward them. \"Thanks to the U.S. government, there's enough firepower here to wipe out even a giant monster of a tree like this one.\"\n\nKostos hung his head, as well he should.\n\n\"So you see,\" Louis said, \"our two missions are not so different. Only who benefits--the U.S. military complex or a French pharmaceutical company. Which in turn raises the question, who would do the greater good with the knowledge?\" He shrugged. \"Who can say? But conversely, we might ask--who would do the greater harm?\" Louis eyed the sergeant. \"And I think we can all answer that one.\"\n\nA distinct quiet settled over the group.\n\nNate finally spoke. \"What about Kelly and Frank?\"\n\nAh, the missing members of the group...Louis was not surprised it was Nate who brought up the question. \"Don't worry about their health. They'll be coming with my party,\" Louis explained. \"I've been in contact with my financiers. Monsieur O'Brien will prove an ideal guinea pig to investigate this regenerative process. The scientists at St. Savin are itching to get their hands and instruments on him.\"\n\n\"And Kelly?\"\n\n\"Mademoiselle O'Brien will be coming along to make sure her brother cooperates.\"\n\nNathan paled.\n\nDuring the discourse, Louis had noticed Nate's gaze flick toward the tree. He waved an arm back to the giant. \"The timers are set for three hours from now. Eight o'clock, to be precise,\" Louis said. He knew everyone here had seen the force of a single napalm bomb. Multiplied by nine, he watched the hopelessness settle into their faces.\n\nLouis continued, \"We've also seeded other incendiary bombs throughout the canyon, including the chasm leading up here, which we'll explode as soon as we vacate the area. We couldn't risk the possibility that we missed an Indian hidden up here who might free you. And I'm afraid, tied up or not, there's no escape. This entire isolated valley will become one mighty firestorm--destroying all remnants of the miracle sap and acting as a bonfire in the night to attract any helicopters winging this way. A fiery diversion to cover our flight.\"\n\nThe utter defeat in their eyes shone dully.\n\nLouis smiled. \"As you can see, it's all well planned.\"\n\nBehind him, Louis's lieutenant approached briskly and stopped at his shoulder. The Colombian ignored the prisoners as if they were mere sheep.\n\n\"Yes, Mask?\"\n\n\"All is in order. We can evacuate at your word.\"\n\n\"You have it.\" Louis glanced again at the line of men and women. \"I'm afraid duty calls. I must bid you all a fond adieu.\"\n\nTurning away, Louis felt a twinge of satisfaction, knowing that it was ultimately the young man's father, Carl Rand, who had truly brought his proud son to his doom. Following in his father's footsteps...\n\nHe hoped the old man was watching from hell.\n\n[ 4:55 P.M. ]\n\nNate knelt with the others, beaten and crushed by the news. He watched dully as the camp organized for their departure.\n\nKouwe spoke at his shoulder. \"Favre has placed all this faith in the Yagga's sap.\"\n\nNate turned his head, careful of the noose around his neck. \"What does it matter now?\"\n\n\"He expects it to cure the contagion, like it does physical wounds, but we've no proof it can.\"\n\nNate shrugged. \"What do you want us to do?\"\n\n\"Tell him,\" Kouwe said.\n\n\"And help him? Why?\"\n\n\"It's not him I'm trying to help. It's all those out in the world dying of the disease. The cure to the contagion lies here. I feel it. And he's going to destroy it, wiping out any chance to stop the curse of the Ban-ali. We must try to warn him.\"\n\nNate frowned. In his mind, he saw Manny's murder...his friend's body falling to the dirt. He understood in his mind what Kouwe was suggesting, but he just couldn't get his heart to go along with it.\n\n\"He won't listen anyway,\" Nate said, seeking some compromise between heart and mind, some justification for remaining silent. \"Favre's operating under a strict timetable. He has another six to eight hours at the most before a military response is mustered. All he can do is plunder what he can and run.\"\n\n\"We must make him listen,\" Kouwe insisted.\n\nRaised voices echoed to them from the Yagga. Both men glanced toward the tunnel in the trunk. A pair of mercenaries strode out with a stretcher between them. Nate recognized their own makeshift travois and Frank tied on top. He was bound like a trussed pig, ready for the spit.\n\nNext came Kelly, walking on her own, her hands tied behind her back. She shuffled beside Favre and his naked Indian mistress. They were all trailed by additional gunmen.\n\n\"You don't know what you're doing!\" Kelly argued loudly. \"We don't know if the sap can cure anything!\"\n\nNate heard their own argument from a moment ago.\n\nLouis shrugged. \"St. Savin will have paid me long before it's ever discovered if you're right or not. They'll look at your brother's legs--or what's left of them--and shovel the contracted millions into my account.\"\n\n\"What about all those dying? The children, the elderly.\"\n\n\"What do I care? My grandparents are already dead. And I have no children.\"\n\nKelly blustered hotly, then her eyes fell on the group of her friends. Her face crinkled in confusion. She glanced ahead to the trail of thirty or so men marching out of the valley, then back at the group of prisoners.\n\n\"What's going on?\" she asked.\n\n\"Oh, your friends...they'll be staying here.\"\n\nKelly stared at the ring of explosives set around the tree, then over to them, her eyes settling on Nate. \"You...You can't just leave them here.\"\n\n\"I can,\" Louis said. \"I certainly can.\"\n\nShe stumbled to a stop, her voice soft with tears. \"At least, let me say good-bye.\"\n\nLouis sighed with dramatic exasperation. \"Fine. But make it quick.\" He took Kelly by the upper arm and guided her out of line, accompanied by his mistress and four armed guards.\n\nLouis shoved her in front of them.\n\nNate's heart ached at seeing her. It would've been better if she had simply continued past them.\n\nTears rolled down her face. Kelly shuffled before each of them and said how sorry she was--as if all this were her fault. Nate barely listened, drinking up the sight of her with his eyes, knowing this would be the last time he ever saw her. She bent and placed her cheek against Professor Kouwe's, then moved to Nate at the end of the line.\n\nShe stared down at him, then dropped to her knees. \"Nate...\"\n\n\"Hush,\" he said with a sad smile, the word a secret reminder of their night together. \"Hush.\"\n\nFresh tears flowed. \"I heard about Manny,\" she said. \"I'm so sorry.\"\n\nNate closed his eyes and bowed his head. \"If you get a chance,\" he said under his breath, \"kill that French bastard.\"\n\nShe leaned into him, sliding her cheek next to his. \"I promise,\" she whispered at his ear, like a lover sharing a secret.\n\nHe turned his face and met her lips, not caring who saw. He kissed her one last time. She met his kiss, gasping between their joined lips.\n\nThen she was torn away, yanked to her feet by Favre. He had a hand clenched around her arm. \"It would seem you two have been sharing more than just a professional relationship,\" he said with a sneer.\n\nFavre whipped Kelly around and kissed her hard on the mouth. She cried out in surprise and shock. Louis released her, throwing her back toward the Indian woman. Blood dripped from his lip.\n\nKelly had bitten him.\n\nHe wiped his chin. \"Don't worry, Nathan. I'll take good care of your woman.\" He glanced back to Kelly and his mistress. \"Tshui and I will make sure her stay with us is an enjoyable one. Won't we, Tshui?\"\n\nThe Indian witch leaned closer to their prisoner and fingered a curl of Kelly's auburn hair, sniffing at it.\n\n\"See, Nathan. Tshui is already intrigued.\"\n\nNate struggled to lunge at the man, fighting his bonds. \"You bastard,\" he hissed, choking as the strangle noose tightened.\n\n\"Calm yourself, my boy.\" Louis stepped back, putting an arm around Kelly. \"She's in good hands.\"\n\nTears of frustration rolled down his face. His breath was a ragged gasp as the noose dug into the flesh of his neck. Still he struggled. He would die anyway. What did it matter if he strangled or burned?\n\nLouis glanced down at him sadly, then dragged Kelly away. The man mumbled as he left, \"A shame...such a nice boy, but so much tragedy in his life.\"\n\nNate began to see stars dancing at the edges of his blackening vision.\n\nKouwe hissed at Nate. \"Stop struggling, Nate.\"\n\n\"Why?\" he gasped.\n\n\"Where there is life, there is hope.\"\n\nNate sagged in his bonds, not so much finding significance in the professor's words as simple defeat. His breathing became incrementally easier. He stared after the retreating mercenary band, but his eyes stayed focused on Kelly. She glanced back one time, just before disappearing into the jungle fringe. Then she was gone.\n\nThe group remained silent, except for a mumbled prayer from Anna. Behind them, a few of the Indian prisoners had begun to sing a mournful melody, while others simply cried. They continued to sit, with no hope, baking under the sun as it trailed toward the western horizon. With each breath or sob, their deaths drew nearer.\n\n\"Why didn't he just shoot us?\" Sergeant Kostos mumbled.\n\n\"It's not Favre's way,\" Professor Kouwe answered.\n\n\"He wants us to appreciate our deaths. A slow torture. It excites the bastard.\"\n\nNate closed his eyes, defeated.\n\nAfter an hour, a huge explosion shattered off to the south. Nate opened his eyes and watched a thick column of smoke and rock dust blast into the sky.\n\n\"They blew the chasm,\" Carrera said at the other end of the line.\n\nNate turned away. The explosion echoed for a few seconds, then died away. All of them now waited for one last explosion, the one that would take their lives and burn through the valley.\n\nAs silence again descended over them, Nate heard a distinctive cough from the forest's edge. A jaguar's cough.\n\nKouwe glanced over to Nate.\n\n\"Tor-tor?\" Nate asked, experiencing a twinge of hope.\n\nFrom the jungle's edge, a jaguar pushed into the open glade. But it was not the spotted face of their friend's pet.\n\nThe huge black jaguar slunk into the open, sniffing, lips pulled back in a silent and hungry snarl.\n\n[ 5:35 P.M. ]\n\nKelly walked beside Frank's stretcher. The two bearers seemed tireless, marching through the jungles of the lower canyon like muscled robots. Kelly, with no burden except for her heavy heart, found her feet stumbling over every root and branch.\n\nFavre had set a hard pace for the group. He wanted to reach the swamp lake and disappear into the forests south of it before the fiery explosion ripped through the upper canyon.\n\n\"After that, the military will be flocking there like flies on shit,\" Favre had warned. \"We must be well gone.\"\n\nKelly had also eavesdropped on the chatter among the mercenary grunts, spoken in a patois of Portuguese and Spanish. Favre had radioed ahead and arranged for motor boats to meet them at a river only a day's march from here. Once there, they would quickly speed away.\n\nBut first they had to get to the rendezvous spot without getting caught--and that meant speed was essential. Favre would brook no laggers, including Kelly. The monster had confiscated Manny's bullwhip, snapping it periodically as he moved through the line, like a slavemaster overseeing his crew. Kelly already had a taste of its stinging touch, when she had fallen to her knees as the chasm had exploded behind them. She had been so wrung with hopelessness, she had not been able to move. Then fire had lit her shoulder. The whip had split her shirt and stung her skin. She knew better than to falter from that point on.\n\nFrank spoke from his stretcher. \"Kelly...\"\n\nShe leaned down toward him.\n\n\"We'll get out of this,\" he said, slurring. Despite her brother's earlier protests, she had given him a jolt of Demerol before being transported from the Yagga's healing ward. She hadn't wanted him to suffer by their manhandling. \"We'll make it.\"\n\nKelly nodded, wishing her arms were untied so she could hold her brother's hand. But under the blanket, even Frank's limbs were secured by ropes to the stretcher.\n\nFrank continued with his bleary attempt at consoling her. \"Nate...and the others...they'll find a way to break free...rescue...\" His words drifted into a morphine haze.\n\nKelly glanced behind them. The sky was mostly blocked by the canopy overhead, but she could still spot the smudge of smoke from the explosion, closing off the upper valley from the lower. She hadn't told her brother about the incendiary devices set throughout the primitive forest. They could expect no help from their old teammates.\n\nKelly eyed Favre's back as he marched ahead.\n\nHer only hope now was for revenge.\n\nShe intended to keep her promise to Nate.\n\nShe would kill Louis Favre...or die trying.\n\n[ 5:58 P.M. ]\n\nNate watched the giant black jaguar stalk into the open glade. It was alone. Nate recognized it as the leader of the pack, the sly female. She must have somehow survived Louis's mass poisoning and instinctively returned to the valley of her birth.\n\nSergeant Kostos groaned under his breath, \"This day just gets better and better.\"\n\nThe great beast eyed the bound prisoners, ready-packed meals. Without the repellent black powder, even the Ban-ali were at risk. The black feline god, created by the Yagga to protect them, had just turned feral.\n\nThe beast crept toward them, low to the ground, tail flicking.\n\nThen a flash of fire drew Nate's attention over the cat's muscled shoulder. Tor-tor loped out of the jungle in its shadow. Showing no sign of fear, Tor-tor raced past the larger cat and rushed at Nate and the others.\n\nNate was knocked on his side by the cat's show of exuberance. With his master dead, Tor-tor was clearly relieved to rejoin them, seeking consolation, reassurance.\n\nNate choked on his tightening noose. \"Th...That's a good boy, Tor-tor.\"\n\nThe large black cat hung back, watching the strange display.\n\nTor-tor rolled against him, wanting a pet, something to let him know all was okay. Nate, tied up, couldn't comply--but an idea formed.\n\nNate rolled around, earning a further twist of his noose, and held the ropes out toward the jaguar. Tor-tor sniffed at his bindings. \"Bite through them,\" Nate urged, shaking his bound wrists. \"Then I'll pet you, you big furry lug.\"\n\nTor-tor licked Nate's hand, then nosed him in the shoulder.\n\nNate groaned with frustration. Nate glanced over his shoulder. The giant black cat padded over to him and nudged Tor-tor aside with a small growl.\n\nNate froze.\n\nThe monster sniffed at the hand that Tor-tor had licked, then gazed up at Nate with those penetrating black eyes. He was sure it could smell the abject fear in the man curled at its feet.\n\nNate remembered how it had torn Frank's limbs off in a single swooping attack.\n\nThe jaguar lowered its head to Nate's arms and legs. A rumble sounded through it. Nate felt a fierce tug and was lifted off the ground, strangling in the noose. For a momentary flash, Nate wondered if he would be strangled before being eaten. He prayed for the former.\n\nInstead, Nate found himself dropped back to the ground. He cringed a moment, then realized his arms were loose. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Nate rolled away with a kick and a twist. He sat up, glancing to the severed ropes dangling from his wrists. The cat had freed him.\n\nNate yanked at the constricting noose.\n\nThe large black jaguar watched him. Tor-tor brushed the giant cat's flank, a clear display of affection, and crossed to Nate.\n\nAfter working free the noose, Nate tossed it aside. His ankles were still bound, but before he could free his legs, he had a friend to thank.\n\nTor-tor shoved into him, bowing his furry head into Nate's chest.\n\nHe scratched that special spot behind both ears, earning a rumbled purr of satisfaction. \"That's a good boy...you did good.\"\n\nA small sad whine flowed from the cat.\n\nNate pulled Tor-tor's head up and stared into those golden eyes. \"I loved Manny, too,\" Nate whispered.\n\nTor-tor nuzzled his face, snuffling.\n\nNate endured it, making small soothing sounds to the cat. Eventually Tor-tor backed a step away. Nate was able to free his ankles.\n\nBeyond Tor-tor, the giant black jaguar sat on its haunches. Tor-tor must have run into the female after Manny's death. He must have directed her here. Manny had been proven right a couple nights back. Some bond must have developed between the two young cats. Perhaps the ties had grown even deeper by their shared grief: Tor-tor for his master, the female for her pack.\n\nNate stood and freed Kouwe. Together they unbound the others. Nate found himself untying the ropes from Dakii's limbs. Here was the Indian scout who had been principally responsible for sending the piranhas and locusts upon their party. But Nate could no longer touch his old anger. The Indian had only been protecting his people--and as it turned out, rightly so. Nate helped Dakii up, staring at the smoky ruins of the village. Who were the true monsters of the jungle?\n\nDakii hugged Nate tightly.\n\n\"Don't thank me yet,\" Nate said. Around the glade, the other Indians were being untied, but Nate focused on the booby-trapped tree with its nine napalm bombs chained around its trunk.\n\nSergeant Kostos passed by, rubbing his chafed wrists. \"I'm going to see about disarming the charges. Carrera's off to see if she can find the weapon she hid.\"\n\nNate nodded. Nearby, the freed Ban-ali gathered around the two jaguars. Both cats were now lounging in the shade, seemingly oblivious to the audience. But Nate noticed the larger female watching everything through slitted eyes. The cat was not letting its guard down.\n\nAnna and Kouwe stepped over to join him. \"We're free, but what now?\" the professor asked.\n\nNate shook his head.\n\nAnna crossed her arms.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Nate asked, noticing her deeply furrowed brow.\n\n\"Richard Zane. If we ever get out of this mess, I'm quitting Tellux.\"\n\nNate smiled despite their situation. \"I'll be right behind you with my own letter of resignation.\"\n\nAfter a bit, Sergeant Kostos strode back to them, wearing his usual scowl. \"The bombs are all hardwired and booby-trapped. I can't stop the detonation sequence or remove the devices.\"\n\n\"There's nothing you can do?\" Kouwe asked.\n\nThe Ranger shook his head. \"I have to give that French bastard's team some credit. They did a great job, damn them.\"\n\n\"How much time?\" Anna asked.\n\n\"Just under two hours. The digital timers are set to blow at eight o'clock.\"\n\nNate frowned at the tree. \"Then we'll either have to find another way out of this valley or seek some type of shelter.\"\n\n\"Forget shelter,\" Kostos said. \"We need to be as fucking far from here as possible when those babies blow. Even without the additional incendiaries placed by Favre's men, those nine napalmers are enough to fry this entire plateau.\"\n\nNate took him at his word. \"Where's Dakii? Maybe he knows another way out of here.\"\n\nKouwe pointed to the entrance to the Yagga. \"He went to check on the status of his shaman.\"\n\nNate nodded, remembering the poor man who had been shot in the gut by Zane. \"Let's go see if Dakii knows anything helpful.\"\n\nKouwe and Anna followed him.\n\nSergeant Kostos waved them on. \"I'll keep examining the bombs. See if I can come up with anything.\"\n\nOnce inside the tree's entrance, Nate again was struck by the scent, musky and sweet. They followed the blue handprints up the tunnel.\n\nKouwe marched at Nate's side. \"I know escape is foremost on everyone's mind, but what about the contagious disease?\"\n\n\"If there's a way out,\" Nate said, \"we'll collect as many plant specimens as time allows. That's all we can do. We'll have to hope we stumble on the correct one.\"\n\nKouwe looked pensive, not satisfied with Nate's answer, but had no other rebuttal. A cure discovered here would do the world no good if they themselves didn't survive.\n\nAs they continued to wend their way up the tree, the sound of footfalls echoed down to them. Nate glanced to Kouwe. Someone was coming.\n\nDakii suddenly appeared around the corner, winded and wide-eyed. He was startled to find them in front of him. He spoke rapidly in his own tongue. Even Kouwe couldn't entirely follow it.\n\n\"Slow down,\" Nate said.\n\nDakii grabbed Nate's arm. \"Son of wishwa, you come.\" He tugged Nate toward the upper tunnel.\n\n\"Is your shaman okay?\"\n\nDakii bobbed his head. \"He live. But sick...very big sick.\"\n\n\"Take us to him,\" Nate said.\n\nThe Indian was clearly relieved. They hurried up at a half trot. In a short time, the group entered the healing ward at the top.\n\nNate spotted the shaman in one of the hammocks. He was alive but did not look well. His skin was yellowish and shone with fever sweat. Very big sick, indeed.\n\nAs they approached, the prone man sat up, though clearly it pained him immensely to do so. The shaman waved to Dakii, ordering him across the room on an errand, then stared at Nate. He was glassy-eyed but lucid.\n\nNate noticed the ropes lying on the floor under the hammock. Even gravely injured, the man had been bound by Favre.\n\nThe shaman pointed at Nate. \"You wishwa...like father.\"\n\nNate opened his mouth to say no. He was certainly no shaman. But Kouwe interrupted. \"Tell him yes,\" the professor urged.\n\nNate slowly nodded, obeying Kouwe's instinct.\n\nThe response clearly relieved the suffering man. \"Good,\" the shaman said.\n\nDakii returned, burdened with a leather satchel and a pair of footlong lengths of reed. He held the gear out to his leader, but the shaman was too weak. He directed Dakii from his hammock.\n\nObeying, Dakii lifted the pouch.\n\n\"A dried jaguar scrotum,\" Kouwe said, pointing to the pouch.\n\n\"All the rage in Paris,\" Nate grumbled.\n\nDakii fingered open the pouch. Inside was a crimson powder. The shaman spoke from the bed, instructing.\n\nKouwe translated, though Nate caught a word here and there. \"He describes the powder as ali ne Yagga.\"\n\nNate understood. \"Blood of the Mother.\"\n\nKouwe glanced at Nate as Dakii tamped some of the powder into the tips of the two straws. \"You know what's about to happen, don't you?\"\n\nNate could certainly guess. \"It's like the Yanomamo drug epena.\" Over the years, he had worked with various Yanomamo tribes and been invited to participate in epena ceremonies. Epena, translated as \"semen of the sun,\" was a hallucinogenic drug Yanomamo shamans used to enter the spirit world. It was strong stuff, fabled to bring the hekura, or little men of the forest, to teach medicine to a shaman. When Nate had tried the stuff, all he had ever experienced was a severe headache followed by swirls of color. Furthermore, he was not particularly fond of the drug's delivery system. It was snuffed up the nose.\n\nDakii handed one of the loaded straws to Nate and one to the shaman. The Ban-ali leader waved Nate to kneel beside the hammock.\n\nNate obeyed.\n\nKouwe cautioned him, \"The shaman knows he's about to die. What he is offering is more than a casual ritual. I think he's passing the mantle of his responsibility to you, for the tribe, for the village, for the tree.\"\n\n\"I can't take that on,\" Nate said, glancing back at Kouwe.\n\n\"You must. Once you're shaman, the tribe's secrets will be open to you. Do you understand what that means?\"\n\nNate took a deep breath and nodded. \"The cure.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\nNate stepped to the hammock and knelt.\n\nThe shaman showed Nate what to do, but it was similar to the Yanomamos' ritual. The small man positioned the drug-loaded end of his reed straw to his own nose. Then motioned for Nate to bring his lips to the other end. Nate's job was to blow the drug up the other's nose. He, in turn, positioned his own straw to his left nostril. The shaman brought the other end to his mouth. Through the straws, the two men would simultaneously blow the drug into each other's sinuses.\n\nThe shaman lifted an arm. They both took a deep breath.\n\nHere we go...\n\nThe Indian brought his arm down.\n\nNate exhaled sharply through the reed, while bracing for the jolt to his own sinuses. Before he even finished blowing on his end of the straw, the drug hit him.\n\nNate fell backward. A burning flame seared into his skull, followed by a blinding explosion of pain. It felt as if someone had blown the back of his head off. He gasped as the room spun. The sense of vertigo overwhelmed him. A pit opened in his mind, and he was falling. He tumbled, spinning away into a darkness that was somehow bright at the same time.\n\nDistantly he heard his name called, but he couldn't find his mouth to speak.\n\nSuddenly his falling body shattered through something solid in this otherworld. The darkness fragmented around him like broken glass. Midnight shards fell away and disappeared. What was left was a shadow shaped into a stylized tree. It appeared to be rising from a dark hill.\n\nNate hovered before it. As he stared, details emerged. The tree developed three-dimensional conformations, tiny midnight leaves, tiered branches, clustered nut pods.\n\nThe Yagga.\n\nThen, from beyond the hill's edge, small figures marched into view, all in a line, heading up the slope to the tree.\n\nThe hekura, Nate guessed dreamily.\n\nBut like the tree, the figures grew in detail as Nate floated nearby, and he realized he was mistaken. Instead of little men, the line was a mix of animals of every ilk--monkeys, sloths, rats, crocodiles, jaguars, and some Nate couldn't identify. Interspersed among these darkly silhouetted animals were men and women, but Nate knew these weren't the hekura. The entire party marched up to the tree--and into it. The shadowy figures merged with the black form of the tree.\n\nWhere had they gone? Was he supposed to follow?\n\nThen, from the other side of the tree, the figures reemerged. But they had transformed. They were no longer in shadow, but glowing with a brilliant radiance. The shining troupe spread to circle the tree. Man and beast. Protecting the Mother.\n\nAs Nate hovered, he sensed the passage of time accelerate. He watched the men and women occasionally wander back to the tree as their radiance dimmed. They would eat the fruit of the tree and shine anew, refreshed to take their place again in the circle of Yagga's children. The ritual repeated over and over again.\n\nLike a worn record, the image began to fade, repeating still, but growing dimmer and dimmer--until there was only darkness again.\n\n\"Nate?\" a voice called to him.\n\nWho? Nate sought the speaker. But all he found was darkness.\n\n\"Nate, can you hear me?\"\n\nYes, but where are you?\n\n\"Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.\"\n\nNate drew toward the voice, seeking it out of the darkness.\n\n\"Good, Nate. Now open your eyes.\"\n\nHe struggled to obey.\n\n\"Don't fight it...just open your eyes.\"\n\nAgain the darkness shattered, and Nate was blinded by brilliance and light. He gasped, sucking in huge gulps of air. His head throbbed with pain. Through tears, he saw the face of his friend leaning over him, cradling his head.\n\n\"Nate?\"\n\nHe coughed and nodded.\n\n\"How do you feel?\"\n\n\"How do you think I feel?\" Nate wobbled up from the floor.\n\n\"What did you experience?\" Kouwe asked. \"You were mumbling.\"\n\n\"And drooling,\" Anna added, kneeling beside him.\n\nNate wiped his mouth. \"Hypersalivation...an alkaloid hallucinogen.\"\n\n\"What did you see?\" Kouwe asked.\n\nNate shook his head. A mistake. The headache flared worse. \"How long have I been out?\"\n\n\"About ten minutes,\" the professor said.\n\n\"Ten minutes?\" It had felt like hours, if not days.\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"I think I was just shown the cure to the disease,\" Nate said.\n\nKouwe's eyes widened. \"What?\"\n\nNate explained what he saw. \"From the dream, it's clear that the nuts of this tree are vital to the health of the humans in the tribe. The animals don't need it, but people do.\"\n\nKouwe nodded, his eyes narrowed as he digested what was said. \"So it's the nut pods.\" The professor pondered a bit longer, then spoke slowly. \"From your father's research, we know the tree's sap is full of mutating proteins--prions with the ability to enhance each species it encounters, making them better protectors of the tree. But such a boon must come with a high cost. The tree doesn't want its children to abandon it, so it built a fail-safe into its enhancements. Animals are probably given some instinct to remain in the area, something to do with territoriality, something that can be manipulated as needed, like the powders used with the locusts and piranhas. But humans, with our intellect, need firmer bonds to bind us to the tree. The humans must eat from the fruit on a regular basis to keep the mutating prions in check. The milk of the nut must contain some form of an antiprion, something that suppresses the virulent form of the disease.\"\n\nAnna looked sick. \"So the Ban-ali have not stayed here out of obligation, but enslavement.\"\n\nKouwe rubbed his temples. \"Ban-yi. Slave. The term was not an exaggeration. Once exposed to the prions, you can't leave or you'll die. Without the fruit, the prion reverts to its virulent form and attacks the immune system, triggering deadly fevers or riotous cancers.\"\n\n\"Jekyll and Hyde,\" Nate mumbled.\n\nKouwe and Anna glanced to him.\n\nNate explained, \"It's like what Kelly reported about the nature of prions. In one form, they're benign, but they can also bend into a new shape and become virulent, like mad cow disease.\"\n\nKouwe nodded. \"The nut milk must keep the prion suppressed in the beneficial form...but once you stop using the milk, it attacks, killing the host and spreading to everyone the host encounters. This again would serve the tree's end. Clearly the tree wants to keep its privacy. If someone flees, anyone the escapee encounters would sicken and die, leaving a trail of death.\"\n\n\"With no one left to tell the tale,\" Nate said.\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\nNate felt well enough to try to stand. Kouwe helped him up. \"But the bigger question is why I dreamed up the answer in the first place. Was it just my own subconscious working out the problem, unfettered by the hallucinogenic drug? Or did the shaman communicate it to me somehow...some form of drug-induced telepathy?\"\n\nKouwe's face tightened. \"No,\" he said firmly and pointed to the hammock. \"It wasn't the shaman.\"\n\nThe Indian lay in his hammock, staring up at the ceiling. Blood dripped from both his nostrils. He was not breathing. Dakii knelt beside his leader, head bowed.\n\n\"He died immediately. A massive stroke from the look of it.\" Kouwe glanced to Nate. \"Whatever you experienced didn't come from the shaman.\"\n\nNate found it hard to think. His brain felt two sizes too big for his skull. \"Then it must have been my subconscious,\" he said. \"When I first saw the pods, I remember thinking that the nuts looked like the fruiting bodies of Uncaria tomentosa. Better known as cat's claw. Indians use it against viruses, bacteria, and sometimes tumors. But I didn't make the correlation until now. Maybe the drug helped my subconscious make the intuitive leap.\"\n\n\"You could be right,\" Kouwe said.\n\nNate heard the hesitation in the professor's voice. \"What else could it be?\"\n\nKouwe frowned. \"I talked with Dakii while you were drugged out. The ali ne Yagga powder comes from the root of this tree. Desiccated and powdered root fiber.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"So maybe what you dreamed wasn't your subconscious. Maybe it was some type of prerecorded message from the tree itself. An instruction manual, so to speak: Consume the fruit of the tree and you will stay healthy. A simple message.\"\n\n\"You can't be serious.\"\n\n\"Considering the setup in this valley--mutated species, regenerating limbs, humans enslaved in service to a plant--I wouldn't put anything beyond this tree's abilities.\"\n\nNate shook his head.\n\nAnna frowned. \"The professor may have a point. I can't even imagine how this tree is able to produce prions specific to the DNA of so many different species. That alone is miraculous. How did it learn? Where did the tree even get genetic material to learn from?\"\n\nKouwe waved an arm around the room. \"This tree traces its roots back to the Paleozoic era, when the land was just plants. Its ancestors must have been around as land animals first evolved, and rather than competing, it incorporated these new species into its own life cycle, like the Amazon's ant tree does today.\"\n\nThe professor continued with his theories, but Nate found himself tuning him out. He was drawn back to Anna's last question. Where did the tree even get genetic material to learn from? It was a good question, and it nagged at Nate. How had the Yagga learned to produce its wide variety of species-specific prions?\n\nNate remembered his dream: the line of animals and people disappearing inside the tree. Where had they gone? Was it more than just symbolic? Did they go somewhere? Nate found his eyes on Dakii, kneeling by the hammock. Maybe it was another intuitive leap, or a residual effect of the drug, but Nate began to get a suspicion where that somewhere might be.\n\nAli nerah. Blood of the Yagga. From the root of the tree.\n\nNate's gaze narrowed on Dakii. He recalled the Indian's description of his father's fate, spoken with gladness. He's gone to feed the root.\n\nNate found his feet stepping toward the tribesman.\n\nKouwe stopped his discourse. \"Nate...?\"\n\n\"There's one piece of the puzzle we're still missing.\" Nate nodded to Dakii. \"And I know who has it.\"\n\nHe crossed to the kneeling tribesman. Dakii glanced up, tears running down his face. The loss of the leader had struck the man hard. He hauled to his feet as Nate stopped before him.\n\n\"Wishwa,\" he said, bowing his head, acknowledging the passing of power.\n\n\"I'm sorry for your loss,\" Nate said, \"but we must speak.\" Kouwe came over and assisted with the translations, but Nate was now becoming skilled at mixing English and Yanomamo words to get his message across.\n\nDakii pointed to the bed, wiping an eye. \"He named Dakoo.\" The native touched a palm to the dead man's chest. \"He father of me.\"\n\nNate bit his lip. He should have guessed. Now that Dakii had mentioned it, he saw the similarities. Nate placed a hand on the man's shoulder. He knew what it was like to lose a father. \"I'm truly sorry,\" he repeated, this time with more feeling.\n\nDakii nodded. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Your father was an amazing man. He will be mourned by all of us, but right now we're in grave danger. We need your help.\"\n\nDakii bowed his head. \"You wishwa. You say...I do.\"\n\n\"I need you to take me to the root of the tree, to where the tree is fed.\"\n\nDakii's head snapped up, his face showing both fear and worry.\n\n\"Gently,\" Kouwe warned him in a whisper. \"You are clearly treading on sacred ground.\"\n\nNate waved away the professor's caution and placed a palm to his own chest. \"I am wishwa now. I must see the root.\"\n\nThe tribesman bobbed his head. \"I go show you.\" He glanced to his dead father in the hammock, then turned toward the exit.\n\nThey began to wind back down the tunnel. Anna and Kouwe whispered behind Nate, leaving him to his own thoughts. He again remembered his comparison of the Ban-ali symbol to the serpentine tunnel through the Yagga's trunk. But did it represent more? Did it also symbolize the essential molecular shape of the mutating prion, as Kelly had suggested? Was there indeed some communication between plant and human? Some shared memory? After what Nate had experienced under the effect of the drug, he was not so sure he could dismiss this last possibility. Perhaps the symbol did indeed represent both. The true heart of the Yagga.\n\nNate and the group continued down.\n\n\"Someone come,\" Dakii said, slowing.\n\nThen Nate heard it, too. Footsteps, trotting or running.\n\nFrom around a corner, a familiar figure appeared.\n\n\"Private Carrera,\" Kouwe said.\n\nShe nodded, hardly out of breath from the steep run up the tunnel. Nate noticed she had recovered her weapon. \"I was sent to fetch you. To see if you found another way off this plateau. Sergeant Kostos had no luck disarming the explosives.\"\n\nNate realized, in all the disturbing revelations, he had failed to ask the most important question. Was there another way out of the valley?\n\n\"Dakii,\" Nate said. \"We need to know if there is a secret path to the lower valley. Do you know one?\" This communication took much gesturing and Kouwe's help.\n\nWhile Kouwe translated, Carrera glanced at Nate with an eyebrow raised. \"You've not already interrogated the man?\" she whispered. \"What have you been doing?\"\n\n\"Doing drugs,\" Nate said, distracted and concentrating on the conversation with the tribesman.\n\nDakii finally seemed to understand. \"Go away? Why? Stay here.\" He pointed to his feet.\n\n\"We can't,\" Nate said with exasperation.\n\nAnna spoke at his shoulder, \"He doesn't understand about the bombs. He doesn't know the valley is going to be destroyed. Such a concept is beyond him.\"\n\n\"We'll have to make him understand,\" Nate said. He turned to Carrera. \"In the meantime, I need you and the sergeant to gather as many of this tree's nuts as you can into packs.\"\n\n\"Nuts?\"\n\n\"I'll explain later. Just do it...please.\"\n\nShe nodded, turning away. \"But remember, guys...tick-tock.\" She glanced significantly at them, then took off.\n\nNate faced Dakii. How to tell the man that his entire homeland was about to be wiped out? It wouldn't be easy. Nate sighed. \"Let's keep heading to the root.\"\n\nAs they continued down, Nate and Kouwe flanked the tribesman and slowly communicated the danger here. Dakii's confused expression slowly twisted into horror as he got the message. The scout's feet stumbled as he walked, as if the knowledge were a physical burden.\n\nBy now they had reached the tunnel exit, surrounded by a gallery of blue palm prints. Beyond the opening, the light in the glade had taken on a dark honey color, suggesting sunset was at hand. Time was running out.\n\n\"Is there another way out of the valley?\" Nate asked again.\n\nDakii pointed to where the tunnel ended at a slightly concave wall covered with the blue prints. \"Through the root. We go through the root.\"\n\n\"Yes, I want to see the root, too, but what about the way out?\"\n\nDakii stared at him. \"Through the root,\" he repeated.\n\nNate nodded, finally understanding. Their two missions had just become one. \"Show us.\"\n\nDakii crossed to the wall, glancing over the prints, then he reached out to one near the innermost wall. He placed his palm over it and pushed with arm and shoulder. The entire wall pivoted on a central axis, opening a new section of passage, winding deeper underground.\n\nNate glanced up, recalling that the flow channels here hadn't exactly matched. A secret door. The answer was before him this entire time. Even the palm prints on the walls--they were like the one on the Ban-ali symbol, guarding the double helix that represented the root.\n\nAnna slipped a flashlight from her field jacket. Nate patted his own jacket, but came up empty. He must have lost his. Anna passed him hers, indicating he should go first.\n\nNate moved to the door. Wafting out was the musk of the tree, humid and thicker, dank like the breath from an open grave. Nate readied himself and pushed through the opening."
            },
            {
                "title": "The Last Hour",
                "text": "[ 7:01 P.M. ]\n\n[ AMAZON JUNGLE ]\n\nAs Louis's band took a rest break, he checked his watch. It was an hour before the explosion would turn the upper valley into a whirling firestorm. He focused his attention on the swamp lake ahead. The setting sun had turned the water a tarnished silver.\n\nThey were making good time. Skirting to the south of the swamp, where the jungle was thickest and the river channels many, they would easily slip away through the dense forest. He had no doubt of that.\n\nHe sighed contentedly, but with a trace of disappointment. Everything was downhill from here. He always felt this way after a successful mission. Some form of post-coital depression, he imagined. He would return to French Guiana a much richer man, but money didn't buy the excitement of the last couple of days.\n\n\"C'est la vie,\" he said. There will always be other missions.\n\nA small ruckus drew his attention back around.\n\nHe saw Kelly being shoved to her knees by two men. A third was on the ground a couple of yards away, rolling, cursing, clutching between his legs.\n\nLouis strode over to them, but Mask was already there.\n\nThe scarred lieutenant pulled the moaning guard to his feet.\n\n\"What happened?\" Louis asked.\n\nMask thumbed at the man. \"Pedro reached a hand down her shirt, and she kneed him in the groin.\"\n\nLouis smiled, impressed. One hand settled to the bullwhip trophy at his waist.\n\nHe sauntered over to Kelly, now on her knees. One of her two captors had his fist tight in her hair, pulling her head back to expose her long neck. She snarled as the two men taunted her with the vilest innuendoes.\n\n\"Let her up,\" Louis said.\n\nThe men knew better than to disobey. Kelly was yanked to her feet.\n\nLouis took off his hat. \"I apologize for the rudeness here. It won't happen again, I assure you.\"\n\nOther men gathered.\n\nKelly fumed. \"Next time I'll kick the asshole's balls into his belly.\"\n\n\"Indeed.\" Louis waved off his men. \"But punishment is my department.\" He tapped the bullwhip on his side. Earlier he had struck the woman as a lesson. Now it was time for another.\n\nHe turned and struck out with the whip, splitting the twilight with a loud crack.\n\nPedro screamed, covering his left eye. Blood spurted through his fingers.\n\nLouis faced the others. \"No one will harm the prisoners. Is that understood?\"\n\nThere was a general sound of agreement and many nods.\n\nLouis replaced his whip. \"Someone see to Pedro's eye.\"\n\nHe turned back around and saw Tshui standing near Kelly, one palm raised to the woman's cheek.\n\nAs he watched, he noticed that Tshui had wrapped her fingers around a curl of fiery auburn hair.\n\nAh, Louis thought, the red hair. A unique trophy for Tshui's collection.\n\n[ 7:05 P.M. ]\n\nIn the flashlight's glow, Nate noticed that the passage beyond the handprinted door was similar to the main tunnel, but the woody surfaces were of a coarser grain. As he walked, the musk of the tree flowed thick and fetid.\n\nWith Dakii at his side, he led Anna and Kouwe down the tunnel. It narrowed rapidly, twisting tighter and tighter, causing the group to crowd together.\n\n\"We must be in the tree's taproot,\" Nate mumbled.\n\n\"Heading underground,\" Kouwe said.\n\nNate nodded. Within a few more twisting yards, the tunnel exited the woody root, and stone appeared underfoot, interspersed with patches of loam. The tunnel headed steeply downward. They now ran parallel to the branching root system.\n\nDakii pointed ahead and continued.\n\nNate hesitated. Strange lichens grew on the walls, glowing softly. The musk was almost overpowering, now rich with a more fecund odor. Dakii pushed on.\n\nNate glanced to Kouwe, who shrugged. It was encouragement enough.\n\nAs they continued forward, the root branch that ran overhead split and divided, heading out into other passageways. From the ceiling, drapes of root hairs hung, vibrating ever so gently, rhythmically swaying as if a wind blew softly through the passage. But there was no wind.\n\nThe top of Nate's head brushed against the ceiling as the tunnel lowered. The tiny root fibrils tangled into his hair, clinging, pulling. Nate wrenched away with a gasp.\n\nHe shone his flashlight overhead, wary.\n\n\"What is it?\" Kouwe asked.\n\n\"The root grabbed at me.\"\n\nKouwe lifted a palm to the root branch. The smaller hairs wrapped around his fingers in a clinging embrace. With a look of disgust, Kouwe tugged his hand away.\n\nNate had seen other Amazonian plants demonstrate a response to stimulation: leaves curling if touched, puff pods exploding if brushed, flowers closing if disturbed. But this felt somehow more malignant.\n\nNate fanned his flashlight across the path. By now, Dakii was waiting several yards down the passage. Nate urged the others to catch up. Once abreast of Dakii, Nate studied the splitting roots that now turned riotous, dividing and cross-splitting in all directions. Small blind cubbyholes dotted the many passages, each choked and clogged with a tangle of roots and waving hairs. The little cubbies reminded Nate of nitrogen bulbs, seen among root balls of many plants, that served as storage fertilizing sites.\n\nDakii stood before one such alcove. Nate shone his light into the space. Something was tangled deep inside the mass of twining branches and churning root fibrils. Nate bent closer. A few wiggling hairs curled out toward him, questing, waving like small antennae.\n\nHe kept back.\n\nDeep in the root pack, wrapped and entwined like a fly in a spider's webbing, was a large fruit bat. Nate straightened in disgust.\n\nKouwe leaned in and grimaced. \"Is it feeding on the bat?\"\n\nAnna spoke behind them. \"I don't think so. Come see this.\"\n\nThey both turned to her. She knelt by an even larger cubby, but one similarly entangled. She pointed into its depths.\n\nNate flashed his light inside. Entombed within was a large brown cat.\n\n\"A puma,\" Kouwe said at his shoulder.\n\n\"Watch,\" Anna said.\n\nThey stared, not knowing what to expect. Then suddenly the large cat moved, breathed. Its lungs expanded and collapsed in a sigh. But the movement did not look natural, more mechanical.\n\nAnna glanced back at them. \"It's alive.\"\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Nate said.\n\nAnna held out her hand. \"Can I see the flashlight?\"\n\nNate passed it to her. The anthropologist quickly surveyed several of the other alcoves, moving through the neighboring, branching passages. The variety of animals was impressive: ocelot, toucan, marmoset, tamarin, anteater, even snakes and lizards, and oddly enough one jungle trout. And each one of them seemed to be breathing or showing some signs of life, including the fish, its small gill flaps twitching.\n\n\"They're each unique,\" Anna said, eyes bright as she stared down the maze of passages. \"And all alive. Like some form of suspended animation.\"\n\n\"What are you getting at?\"\n\nAnna turned to them. \"We're standing in a biological storehouse. A library of genetic code. I wager this is the source of its prion production.\"\n\nNate turned in a slow circle, staring at the maze of passages. The implication was too overwhelming to contemplate. The tree was storing these animals down here, learning from them so it could produce prions to alter and bind the species to it. It was a living, breathing genetics lab.\n\nKouwe gripped Nate's shoulder. \"Your father.\"\n\nNate glanced to him in confusion. \"What about my--?\" Then it hit him like a hammer to the forehead. He gasped. His father had been fed to the root. Not as fertilizer, Nate realized, swinging around, aghast, but to be a part of this malignant laboratory!\n\n\"With his white skin and strange manners, your father was unique,\" Kouwe said in a low voice. \"The Ban-ali or the Yagga would not want to lose his genetic heritage.\"\n\nNate turned to Dakii. He could barely speak, too choked with emotion. \"My...my father. Do you know where he is?\"\n\nDakii nodded and lifted both arms. \"He with root.\"\n\n\"Yes, but where?\" Nate pointed to the closest cubby, one with an enshrouded black sloth. \"Which one?\"\n\nDakii frowned and glanced around the maze of passages.\n\nNate held his breath. There had to be hundreds of passages, countless alcoves. He didn't have time to search them all, not with the clock running. But how could Nate leave, knowing his father was down here somewhere?\n\nDakii suddenly strode purposefully down one passage and waved for them to follow.\n\nThey hurried, winding deeper and deeper into the subterranean maze. Nate found it increasingly difficult to breathe, not because of the sickening musk, but because of his own mounting anxiety. All along this journey, he had held no real hope his father was still alive. But now...he teetered between hope and despair, almost panicked with trepidation. What would he find?\n\nDakii paused at an intersection, then stepped to the left passage. But after two strides, he shook his head and returned to follow the trail to the right.\n\nA scream built up inside Nate's chest.\n\nDakii continued down this new passage, mumbling under his breath. Finally, he stopped beside a large cubby and pointed. \"Father.\"\n\nNate grabbed the flashlight back from Anna. He dropped to his knees, shining his light inside, oblivious to the questing root hairs that wrapped around his wrist.\n\nWithin the mass of roots lay a shadowy figure. Nate moved his light over its form. Curled in a fetal position on the soft loamy floor was a gaunt naked frame, a pale man. His face was covered by a thick beard, his hair tangled with roots. Nate focused on the face hidden beneath the beard. He was not entirely sure it was his father.\n\nAs he stared, the man inhaled sharply, mechanically, and exhaled, wafting root hairs from his lips. Still alive!\n\nNate turned. \"I have to get him out of there.\"\n\n\"Is it your father?\" Anna asked.\n\n\"I...I'm not sure.\" Nate pointed to the bone knife tucked in Kouwe's belt. The professor passed it over to him.\n\nNate stood and hacked into the root mass.\n\nDakii cried out, reaching to stop him, but Kouwe blocked the tribesman. \"Dakii, no! Leave Nate be.\"\n\nNate fought through the outer cords of woody roots. It was like the husk surrounding some nut. Beneath this layer was a mass of finer webbings and draperies of rootlets and thready hairs.\n\nOnce through, Nate saw the roots penetrated the man's body, growing into it as if it were soil. It must be how the Yagga sustained its specimens, feeding them, supporting organ systems, delivering nutrients.\n\nNate hesitated. Would he harm the man, kill him, if he hacked the root's attachments? If this was indeed some type of suspended animation, would its interruption trigger a massive systems failure?\n\nShaking his head, Nate slashed through the roots. He would take his chances. Left alone, the man would surely die a fiery death.\n\nOnce the body was free of the root hairs, Nate tossed the knife aside, grabbed the man by the shoulders, and hauled him into the passage. The last clinging roots broke away, releasing their prey.\n\nIn the tunnel, Nate collapsed beside the man. The naked figure choked and gasped. Many of the tiny rootlets and hairs squiggled from his body, dropping away like leeches. Blood flowed from some spots where larger rootlets had penetrated. Suddenly the man seized, contracting, back arching, head thrown back.\n\nNate cradled the man in his arms, not knowing what to do. The thrashings continued for a full minute. Kouwe helped to restrain the man and prevent further injury.\n\nThe figure jerked into a final convulsion, then collapsed with a mighty gasp.\n\nNate exhaled with relief when the man's chest continued to rise and fall. Then the eyes fluttered open and stared up at him. Nate knew those eyes. They were his own eyes.\n\n\"Nate?\" the figure asked in a dry husky voice.\n\nNate fell atop the figure. \"Dad!\"\n\n\"Am...am I dreaming?\" his father asked coarsely.\n\nNate was too choked to speak. He helped his father, who was light as a pillow, all skin and bones, to sit. The tree had been sustaining him, but just barely.\n\nKouwe bent down to help. \"Carl, how are you feeling?\"\n\nNate's father squinted at the professor, then a look of recognition spread across his face. \"Kouwe? My God, what's going on?\"\n\n\"It's a long story, old friend.\" He helped Nate get his father on his feet. Too frail to move on his own, Carl Rand clung to Nate and Kouwe. \"Right now, though, we have to get you out of this damn place.\"\n\nNate stared at his father, tears streaming down his face. \"Dad...\"\n\n\"I know, son,\" he said hoarsely and coughed.\n\nThere was no time for a proper reunion now, but Nate wasn't going to let another moment go by without saying the words he had regretted withholding the day his father left for this expedition. \"I love you, Dad.\"\n\nThe arm around his shoulder tightened, a small squeeze of affection and love. A familiar gesture. Family.\n\n\"We should fetch the others,\" Anna said. \"And head out of here.\"\n\n\"Nate, why don't you stay with your father here?\" Kouwe suggested. \"Rest. We can collect you both on the way out.\"\n\nDakii shook his head. \"No. We not come back this way.\" He waved his arm. \"Other way to go.\"\n\nNate frowned. \"We should stay together anyway.\"\n\n\"And I can handle myself,\" Carl argued hoarsely. He glanced back to the cubbyhole. \"Besides, I've been resting here long enough.\"\n\nKouwe nodded.\n\nWith the matter settled, they began to climb toward the surface. Kouwe gave a thumbnail sketch of their situation. Nate's father only listened, leaning more and more heavily upon them as they walked. The only words his father spoke during the discourse were at the mention of Louis Favre and what he had done. \"The goddamn bastard.\"\n\nNate smiled, hearing a bit of the old fire in his father's voice.\n\nWhen they reached the surface, it was obvious the two Rangers had been busy. They had all the Ban-ali gathered. Each bore packs full of nuts and weapons.\n\nNate and his father remained in the entrance, while Kouwe explained about the addition to their team and what they had found below. \"Dakii says there's an escape route through the root's tunnel.\"\n\n\"Then we'd best hurry,\" Sergeant Kostos said. \"We have less than thirty minutes, and we want to be as far away from here as possible.\"\n\nCarrera joined them, her weapon on her shoulder. \"All set at our end. We have a couple dozen of those nut pods and four canteens of the sap.\"\n\n\"Then let's haul ass,\" Kostos said.\n\n7:32 P.M,\n\nAs they wound through the root tunnels, Kouwe stayed with Dakii, periodically glancing back at the trail of Indians and Americans. Watching Sergeant Kostos help Nate with his father, Kouwe wished he had had time to rig up a stretcher, but right now every minute was critical.\n\nThough Sergeant Kostos believed the subterranean tunnels would shield them from the worst of the napalm's fiery blast, he clearly feared the maze's integrity. \"The rock here is riddled and weakened by the roots. The explosions could bring the roof down atop our heads or trap us here. We need to be well clear of these tunnels before those bombs go off.\"\n\nSo they hurried. Not only for their own sake, but for the world. Inside their packs, they carried the fate of thousands, if not millions--the nut pods of the Yagga, the suppressant for the virulent human prion. The cure to the plague.\n\nThey could not be trapped down here.\n\nGlancing over a shoulder, Kouwe again checked the party. The dark tunnels, the softly glowing lichens, the dreadful cubbies with their captured specimens...all made Kouwe nervous. This deep in the system, both walls and ceilings ran wild with roots, zigzagging everywhere, crossing, dividing, fusing. Everywhere were the mounds of ubiquitous root hairs, waving and probing toward any passerby. It made the walls look furry, like a living thing, constantly moving and bristling.\n\nBehind Kouwe, the others looked equally wary, even the Indians. The line of men and women ran out of sight around a curve in the twisting passage. Back at the end, pulling up the rear, was Private Carrera. She kept a watch behind them--where Tor-tor and the giant black jaguar followed. It had taken some coaxing to encourage the two cats inside, but Nate had finally been successful in luring Tor-tor. \"I'm not going to leave Manny's cat here to die,\" Nate had argued. \"I owe it to my friend to save him.\"\n\nOnce Tor-tor entered, the large female jaguar had followed.\n\nCarrera remained alert, her weapon ready, in case the wild cat decided it needed a snack while traveling.\n\nDakii paused at the intersection of trails. Sergeant Kostos grumbled, but they dared not force a faster pace. It would be easy to get lost down here. They depended on Dakii's memory.\n\nThe tribesman selected a path and led the others. The tunnel descended steeply. Kouwe stared at the low roof. They must be a hundred yards underground...and going deeper still. But oddly, instead of the air growing more dank, it seemed to freshen.\n\nAfter a few minutes, the tunnel leveled out and made a sharp turn, emptying into a huge cavern. The tunnel opening was halfway up one wall of the chamber. A thin trail continued along the nearest wall, a stony lip high above the bowled floor. Dakii stepped out onto the trail.\n\nKouwe followed, gaping at the room. The chamber had to be a half mile across. Through the center of the chamber, a massive root stalk, as thick around as a giant redwood, penetrated from the roof and continued down through the floor like a great column.\n\n\"It's the Yagga's taproot again,\" Nate said, coming up beside them. \"We must have circled back to it.\"\n\nFrom the main root, thousands of branches spread like tree limbs in all directions, toward other passages.\n\n\"There must be miles and miles of tunnels,\" Kouwe said. He studied the taproot. The giant tree above must be but a tiny fraction of the plant's true mass. \"Can you imagine the number of species encased down here? Suspended in time?\"\n\n\"The tree must have been collecting its specimens for centuries,\" Nate's father mumbled beside his son.\n\n\"Maybe even longer,\" Kouwe warned. \"Maybe as far back as when these lands first formed.\"\n\n\"Back to the Paleozoic,\" Nate murmured. \"If so, what might be out there in that vast biological storehouse?\"\n\n\"And what might still be living?\" Anna added.\n\nKouwe cringed. It was both a wondrous and frightening thought. He waved Dakii onward. The sight was too terrible to stare at any longer, and time was running down for both them and the world.\n\nThey wound along the lip as it circled the chamber. Dakii led them to another opening, back into the tunnel maze again. Though they left the chamber behind, Kouwe's mind dwelled on the mystery there. His feet slowed, and he found himself marching near Nate and Carl. Sergeant Kostos was on the other side.\n\n\"When I studied anthropology,\" Kouwe said, \"I read many myths of trees. The maternal guardian. A caretaker, a storehouse of all wisdom. It makes me wonder about the Yagga. Has man crossed its path before?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Nate asked.\n\n\"Surely this tree wasn't the only one of its kind. There must have been others in the past. Maybe these myths are some collective memory of earlier human encounters with this species.\"\n\nHe recognized the doubt in Nate's eyes and continued, \"Take, for example, the Tree of Knowledge from the Garden of Eden. A tree whose fruit has all the knowledge in the world, but whose consumption curses those who eat of it. You could draw a parallel to the Yagga. Even when I saw Carl trussed up among the roots, it reminded me of another Biblical tale. Back in the thirteenth century, a monk who had starved himself seeking visions from God told a tale of seeing Seth, the son of Adam, returning to Eden. There, the young man saw the Tree of Knowledge, now turned white. It clutched Cain in its roots, some penetrating into his brother's flesh.\"\n\nNate frowned.\n\n\"The parallels here seem particularly apt,\" Kouwe finished.\n\nNoticeably quiet for several yards, Nate was clearly digesting his words. Finally he spoke. \"You could be on to something. The tunnel through the Yagga's trunk is not manmade, but a natural construct. The tunnels had to have formed as the tree grew. But why would the tree do so unless its ancestors had encountered man before and had evolved these features in kind?\"\n\n\"Like an ant tree has adapted for its six-legged soldiers,\" Kouwe added.\n\nNate's father roused. \"And the evolution of the Ban-ali here, their genetic enhancements,\" Carl rasped. \"Have such improvements of the species happened before? Could the tree have played a critical role in human evolution? Is that why we remember it in our myths?\"\n\nKouwe's brow crinkled. He had not extrapolated that far. He stared behind the others to where the giant cat stalked. If the Yagga were capable of enhancing the jaguar's intelligence, could it have done the same to us in the distant past? Could humans owe their own intellect to an ancestor of this tree? A chilling thought.\n\nA silence fell over the others.\n\nIn his head, Kouwe reviewed the history of this valley. The Yagga must have grown here, collecting specimens in its hollow root system for centuries: luring them in with its musk, offering shelter, then capturing them and storing them in its cubbies. Eventually man entered the valley--a wandering clan of Yanomamo--and discovered the tree's tunnels and the wonders of its healing sap. Lured in, they were captured as surely as any other species and slowly changed into the Ban-ali, the Yagga's human servants. Since that time, the Ban-ali must have brought other species to the tree--feeding the root to further expand its biological database.\n\nAnd left unchecked, where would it have led? A new species of man, as Carl had feared after the stillborn birth of Gerald Clark's baby? Or maybe something worse--a hybrid like the piranhas and locusts?\n\nKouwe squinted at the twisting passages, suddenly glad it was all going to burn.\n\nDakii called from up ahead. The tribesman pointed to a side tunnel. From the passage, a slight glow shone. A dull roar echoed back to them.\n\n\"The way out,\" Kouwe said.\n\n[ 7:49 P.M. ]\n\nNate hurried as best he could with his father.\n\nSergeant Kostos growled constantly under his breath on the other side, counting off the minutes until the bombs blew.\n\nIt would be a close call.\n\nThe group sped toward the sheen of moonlight flowing from ahead. The roaring grew in volume, soon thundering. Around a corner, the end of the tunnel appeared, and the source of the noise grew clear.\n\nA waterfall tumbled past the entrance, the rush of water aglow with moonlight and star shine.\n\n\"The tunnel must open into the cliff face that leads to the lower valley,\" Kouwe said.\n\nThey followed Dakii to the tunnel's damp exit. The rushing water rumbled past the threshold. The tribesman pointed down. Steps. In the narrow space between the waterfall and the cliff, a steep, wet staircase had been carved into the stone, winding back and forth in narrow switchbacks, down to the lower valley.\n\n\"Everyone head down!\" the sergeant yelled. \"Move quickly, but when I holler, everyone drop and hold on tight.\"\n\nDakii remained with Sergeant Kostos to guide his own people.\n\nKouwe helped Nate with his father. They scrambled as well as they could down the stairs, balancing between haste and caution. They hurried as the others followed.\n\nNate saw Kostos wave Carrera down the stairs, then followed.\n\nBehind them emerged the two cats. The jaguars hurried out of the opening and onto the stair, clearly glad to be free of the confining tunnels. Nate wished he had their claws.\n\n\"One minute,\" Kouwe said, hobbling under Carl's weight.\n\nThey hurried. The bottom was still a good four stories down. A deadly fall.\n\nThen a sharp call broke through the water's rush. \"Now! Down! Down!\"\n\nNate helped his father to the steps, then dropped himself. He glanced up and saw the entire group flattened to the stone. He lowered his face and prayed.\n\nThe explosion, when it came, was as if hell had come to earth. The noise was minimal--no worse than the dramatic end of a Fourth of July fireworks show--but the effect was anything but insignificant.\n\nOver the top of the cliff's edge, a wall of flame shot half a mile out, and flumed three times that distance into the sky. Currents of rising air buffeted them, swirling eddies of fire moving with them. If it wasn't for the waterfall's insulation, they would've been fried on the stairs. But the waterfall was a mixed blessing. Its flow, shaken by the blast, cast vast amounts of water over them. But everyone held tight.\n\nSoon bits of flaming debris began to tumble over the edge and down the fall. Luckily the swift current cast most of the large pieces of trunk and branch beyond their perch. But it was still terrifying to see entire trees, cracked and blown into the stream, tumble past, on fire.\n\nAs the heat welled up and away from them, Kostos yelled down. \"Keep moving, but watch for falling debris.\"\n\nNate crouched up. Everyone began to climb to their feet, dazed.\n\nThey had made it!\n\nAs the others started down, he reached for his father. \"C'mon, Dad. Let's get out of here.\"\n\nWith his father's hand held in his own, Nate felt the ground vibrate, a tremoring rumble. He instinctively knew this was bad. Oh, shit...\n\nHe dove atop his father, a scream on his lips. \"Down! Everyone back down!\"\n\nThe second explosion deafened them. Nate screamed from the pain. It blew with such force that he was sure the cliff would fall atop them.\n\nFrom the mouth of the tunnel above, a jet of fire belched out, blasting into the fall of water. Scalding steam rolled down over them.\n\nNate craned upward and watched a second belch of fire blow from the tunnel, then a third. Smaller flames shot out of tinier crevices in the cliff face all around, like a hundred flickering fiery tongues. All of them an eerie blue.\n\nAll the while, the ground continued to shake and rumble.\n\nNate kept his father pinned under him.\n\nRocks and dirt shattered outward. Entire uprooted trees shot like flaming missiles through the sky to crash down into the lower valley.\n\nThen this too died down.\n\nNo one moved as smaller rocks tumbled past. Again the waterfall protected them, deflecting most of the debris, or reducing their speed to bruising rather than deadly velocities.\n\nAfter several minutes, Nate raised his head enough to view the damage.\n\nHe spotted Kouwe a step above his father. The professor looked dazed and sickened. He stared back at Nate, face pale with shock. \"Anna...when you yelled...I was too slow...the explosion...I couldn't catch her in time.\" His eyes flicked to the long tumble below. \"She fell.\"\n\nNate closed his eyes. \"Oh, God.\"\n\nHe heard mournful cries flow up around them. Anna had not been alone in falling to her death. Nate pushed to his knees. His father coughed and rolled onto his side, looking ashen.\n\nAfter a time, the group crawled down the stairs, beaten, bloody, and in shock.\n\nThey gathered at the foot of the falls, bathed in cool spray. Three Ban-ali tribesmen had also met their deaths on the stair.\n\n\"What was that second explosion?\" Sergeant Kostos asked.\n\nNate remembered the strange blue flame. He asked for one of the canteens with the Yagga sap. He poured out a grape-sized drop and used Carrera's lighter to ignite it. A tall blue flame flared up from the dollop of sap. \"Like copal,\" Nate said. \"Combustible. The entire tree went up like a roman candle. Roots and all, I imagine, from the way the ground shook.\"\n\nA deep mournful silence spread over the smaller camp.\n\nFinally Carrera spoke. \"What now?\"\n\nNate answered, his voice fierce. \"We make that bastard pay. For Manny, for Olin, for Anna, for all the Ban-ali tribespeople.\"\n\n\"They have guns,\" Sergeant Kostos said. \"We have one Bailey. They outnumber us more than two to one.\"\n\n\"To hell with that.\" Nate kept his voice cold. \"We have a card that trumps all that.\"\n\n\"What's that?\" Kostos asked.\n\n\"They think we're dead.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Midnight Raid",
                "text": "[ 11:48 P.M. ]\n\n[ AMAZON JUNGLE ]\n\nKelly's eyes still stung with tears. With her hands bound behind her back, she couldn't even wipe them away. She was secured to a stake under a lean-to of woven palm leaves that deflected the gentle rain that now fell. The clouds had rolled in as full night had set, which had suited her kidnappers just fine. \"The darker the better,\" Favre had exulted. They made good time and were now enveloped in thick jungle cover well south of the swamp.\n\nBut despite the darkness and the distance, the northern skies glowed a fiery red, as if the sun were trying to rise from that direction. The explosions that had lit up the night had been spectacular, shooting a fireball high into the sky, followed by a scattering of flaming debris.\n\nThe sight had burned all hope from her. The others were dead.\n\nFavre had set a hard pace after that, sure that the government's helicopters would be winging to the fires posthaste. But so far the skies had remained clear. There was no whump-whumping of military air vehicles. Favre kept a constant watch on the skies. Nothing.\n\nMaybe Olin's signal had never made it out. Or maybe the helicopters were still en route.\n\nEither way, Favre was taking no chances. No lights, just night-vision glasses. Kelly, of course, was not given a pair. Her shins were bruised and thorn-scraped from falls and missteps in the dark. Her stumblings had amused the guards. Without her hands to break her fall, each trip bloodied her knees. Her legs ached. Mosquitoes and gnats were attracted to the wounds, crawling and buzzing around her. She couldn't even swat them away.\n\nThe rain was a relief. As was the short break--a full hour. Kelly stared over at the glowing northern skies, praying her friends hadn't suffered.\n\nCloser at hand, the mercenary band celebrated its victory. Flasks of alcohol passed from hand to hand. Toasts were made, and boasts declared amid jovial whispers of how their money would be spent--much of it involving whores. Favre circulated through the group, allowing his men this celebration but making sure it didn't get out of hand. They were still miles from the rendezvous point where the motorboats were waiting.\n\nSo for the moment, Kelly had a bit of relative privacy. Frank was under another makeshift lean-to in the middle of the camp. Her only company here was the single guard: Favre's disfigured lieutenant, the man named Mask. He stood talking with another mercenary, sharing a flask.\n\nA figure approached through the drizzle. It was Favre's Indian woman, Tshui. She seemed oblivious of the rain, still naked, but at least she no longer wore the head of Corporal DeMartini around her neck.\n\nProbably didn't want to get the foul thing wet, Kelly thought sourly.\n\nMask's companion slid away at the approach of the woman. She had that effect on most of the mercenaries. They were clearly frightened of her. Even Mask took a few steps from the lean-to and sheltered under a neighboring palm.\n\nThe Indian woman bent out of the rain and knelt beside Kelly. She carried a rucksack in one hand. She settled it to the dirt and began to rummage silently through it, finally pulling out a tiny clay pot and freeing the lid.\n\nFilling the container was a thick waxy unguent. The witch-woman scooped a dab on a finger, then reached to Kelly.\n\nShe flinched away.\n\nThe Indian woman grabbed her ankle. Her grip was iron. She slathered the material on Kelly's abraded knees. Instantly the sting and burn faded. Kelly stopped fighting and allowed the woman to treat her.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Kelly said, though she was not sure the treatment was solely for her comfort as much as to make sure she could continue to march. Either way, it felt good.\n\nThe Indian woman reached again to her pack and removed a rolled length of woven linen. She carefully spread it open on the soggy ground. Meticulously lined in tiny pouches of cloth were stainless steel tools and others made of yellowed bone. Tshui removed a long sickle-shaped knife, one of a set of five similar tools. She leaned toward Kelly with the knife.\n\nKelly again flinched, but the woman grabbed the hair at the nape of her neck and held her still, pulling her head back. The Indian was damn strong.\n\n\"What are you doing?\"\n\nTshui never spoke. She brought the knife's curved edge to Kelly's forehead, at the edge of her scalp. Then returned the tool to its place and took another of the curved knives and positioned it at the crown of her scalp.\n\nWith horror, the realization hit Kelly. She's measuring me! Tshui was determining which tools would be best to scrape the skin off her skull. The Indian woman continued her measuring, fingering different sharp instruments and testing them against chin, cheek, and nose.\n\nShe began to line up the proper instruments on the ground beside her knee. The row of tools grew: long knives, sharp picks, corkscrewing pieces of bone.\n\nA noise, a throat being cleared, drew both women's attention outside the lean-to.\n\nKelly's head was released. Free, Kelly twisted around, kicking, trying to get as far away as possible from the witch. Her feet sent the line of cruel instruments scattering in the dirt.\n\nFavre stood outside the door. \"I see Tshui has been entertaining you, Mademoiselle O'Brien.\"\n\nHe entered the lean-to. \"I've been trying to gather some information on the CIA from your brother. Information to assist us in escaping now and planning future missions. A valuable commodity that I don't think St. Savin will mind me gleaning from their patient. But I can't have Frank coming to harm. That my benefactors wouldn't appreciate. They're paying well for the delivery of a healthy little guinea pig.\"\n\nFavre knelt next to her. \"But you, my dear, are a different story. I'm afraid I'm going to have to give your brother a little demonstration of Tshui's handiwork. And don't be shy. Let Frank hear your screams--please don't hold back. When Tshui comes over afterward and hands him your ear, I'm sure he'll be more cooperative with his answers.\" He stood. \"But you'll have to excuse me. I don't care to watch myself.\"\n\nFavre made a half bow and departed into the rainy night.\n\nKelly's blood iced with terror. She didn't have much time. In her fingers, Kelly clutched a tiny knife. She had grabbed it a moment ago from among the tools she had scattered. Kelly now worked to cut through the ropes behind her back.\n\nNearby, Tshui picked through her pack and gathered bandage material--to wrap the stump of Kelly's amputated ear. Without a doubt, they would torture her until they had drained every bit of information from her brother. Afterward, she would be tossed aside as unnecessary baggage.\n\nKelly would not let that happen. A quick death would be better than a tortured one. And if she could believe Favre, no harm would come to Frank--at least not until after he was delivered safely to the scientists at St. Savin.\n\nKelly sliced savagely at her bonds, covering her motions with jerky thrashings and moans that were only half faked.\n\nTshui turned back to her, a hooked knife in hand.\n\nThe ropes still held Kelly.\n\nThe witch leaned over her and grabbed her hair again, yanking her head back. She lifted her knife.\n\nKelly struggled with her own blade, tears flowing.\n\nA chilling wail split the night, high and feline, full of fury.\n\nTshui froze with the knife poised at Kelly's ear. The witch cocked her head and glanced to the dark forest.\n\nKelly could not pass up this opportunity. She bunched her shoulders and ripped free the last fibers of the rope that bound her.\n\nAs Tshui turned back to her, Kelly swung around with her knife and planted it into the witch woman's shoulder. Tshui screamed and fell back in surprise.\n\nAdrenaline racing, Kelly burst to her feet and leaped toward the forest. She ran with all the speed in her legs but slammed into a figure who stepped around a tree.\n\nArms grabbed her. She stared up into the leering and twisted face of Mask. She had forgotten in her panic about the guard. She struggled but had no weapon. He yanked her around, lifting her off her feet, an arm around her throat. She was carried, kicking, back into the open.\n\nTshui knelt in the dirt, wrapping her wounded shoulder with the bandages meant for Kelly's ear. The glower the woman shot at Kelly burned with intensity.\n\nKelly stopped kicking.\n\nThen the oddest thing happened--Mask jerked and let her go. Kelly dropped to her knees in the dirt at the sudden release. She turned as the muscled guard fell face forward to the ground.\n\nSomething glittered at the back of his skull, embedded deep into it.\n\nA shiny silver disk.\n\nKelly instantly recognized it. She stared off into the woods as screams began to erupt from all around the camp. She saw men drop where they stood or tumble where they sat. Feathered arrows protruded from necks and chests. Several of the bodies convulsed. Poisoned.\n\nKelly stared again at the limp form of Favre's former lieutenant...and the silver disk.\n\nHope surged.\n\nDear God, the others must still be alive!\n\nKelly turned and found Tshui gone, likely fleeing toward the center of camp, toward Favre, toward where her brother was still held prisoner. By now, the camp was in chaos. Shots began to ring out, orders were yelled, but so far not a single attacker appeared.\n\nIt was as if they were being attacked by ghosts.\n\nMen continued to drop.\n\nKelly grabbed the pistol from Mask's dead body. She could not gamble that the others would reach her brother in time. She darted toward the roiling center of camp.\n\nNate saw Kelly lunge with a gun in hand. Going after her brother, he knew with certainty. They could wait no longer. He signaled to Private Carrera. A sharp whistle blew and an ululating wail arose from the score of Indian throats all around the camp. It was a chilling sound.\n\nNate was already on his feet.\n\nThey had painted themselves all in black.\n\nAs a group, they lunged into the jungle camp, armed only with arrows, blowguns, and bone knives. Those who knew how to use modern weapons confiscated them from the dead.\n\nKostos opened fire with an AK-47 on the left. Off to the right, Carrera switched her Bailey to automatic fire and laid down a swath of death. She emptied her weapon, tossed it aside, then grabbed up a discarded M-16, probably one originally taken from the Rangers.\n\nNate grabbed up a pistol from dead fingers and ran headlong into the main camp. The mercenaries were still in disarray, only now beginning to fall back into a defensive line. Nate raced through the wet shadows, meaning to get behind their lines before they tightened.\n\nAs Nate ran, he was spotted by one frightened man, hiding under a bush, clearly unarmed. The man dropped to his knees at the sight of Nate's gun, hands on his head, in a clearly submissive posture.\n\nNate ran right past him. He had only one goal in mind: to find Kelly and her brother before they came to harm.\n\nOn the other side of camp, Kouwe ran with Dakii, flanked by other Indians. He paused to collect a machete from a dead body and toss it to the tribesman. Kouwe confiscated the rifle for himself.\n\nThey hurried forward. The line of fighting had fallen toward the camp's center.\n\nBut Kouwe suddenly slowed, an instinctual warning tingling through him. He twisted around and spotted an Indian woman slinking from behind a bush. Her skin was dabbed in black like theirs.\n\nKouwe, having been raised among the tribes of the Amazon, was not so easily fooled. Though she might paint herself to look like them, her Shuar features were distinctive to the educated eye.\n\nHe lifted his rifle and pointed it at the woman. \"Don't move, witch!\" Favre's woman had been trying to slip past their lines and escape into the woods. Kouwe would not let that happen. He remembered the fate of Corporal DeMartini.\n\nThe woman froze, turning slowly in his direction. Dakii held back, but Kouwe waved him forward. There was fighting still to be done.\n\nDakii took off with his men.\n\nKouwe was now alone with the woman, surrounded by the dead. He stepped toward her with caution. He knew he should shoot her where she stood--the witch was surely as deadly as she was beautiful. But Kouwe balked.\n\n\"On your knees,\" he ordered in Spanish instead. \"Hands high!\"\n\nShe obeyed, lowering herself with subtle grace, slow and fluid like a snake. She stared up at him from under heavily lidded eyes. Smoldering, seductive...\n\nWhen she attacked, Kouwe was a moment too slow in reacting. He pulled the trigger, but the gun just clicked. The magazine was empty.\n\nThe woman leaped at him, knives in both hands, poisoned for sure.\n\nKelly stared at the two mini-Uzis held by Favre. One was pointed at her brother's head, one at her chest. \"Drop the pistol, mademoiselle. Or you both die now!\"\n\nFrank mouthed to her. \"Run, Kelly.\"\n\nFavre crouched under the lean-to, using her brother's body as a shield.\n\nShe had no choice. She would not leave her brother with the madman. She lowered her pistol and tossed it aside.\n\nFavre quickly crossed to her. He dropped one of the Uzis and pressed the other against Kelly's back. \"We're going to get out of here,\" he hissed at her. He snatched up a pack. \"I've got a backup supply of tree sap, prepared for just such an emergency.\"\n\nHe shouldered the pack, then grabbed Kelly by the back of her shirt.\n\nA shout barked behind them. \"Let her go!\"\n\nThey both turned. Favre twisted around behind her.\n\nNate stood, bare-chested, in his boxers, painted all in black.\n\n\"Gone native, have we, Monsieur Rand?\"\n\nNate pointed a pistol at them. \"You can't escape. Drop your weapon and you'll live.\"\n\nKelly stared at Nate. His eyes were hard.\n\nGunfire sounded all around them. Shouts and screams echoed.\n\n\"You'll let me live?\" Favre scoffed. \"What? In prison? I don't like that proposition. I like freedom better.\"\n\nThe single gunshot, at close range, startled her--more the crack than the pain. She saw Nate fly backward, hit in the hip, his weapon spinning away. Then she felt herself fall to the ground, to her knees, pain registering more as shock. She stared at her stomach. Blood soaked her shirt, welling through the smoking hole.\n\nFavre had shot her through her belly, striking Nate.\n\nThe pure brutality of the act horrified her more than being shot, more than the blood.\n\nKelly looked at Nate. Their eyes met for a brief instant. Neither had the strength to speak. Then she was falling--slumping toward the ground as darkness stole the world away.\n\nKouwe butted the first knife away with his rifle, but the witch was fast. He fell backward under her weight as she leaped on him.\n\nHe hit the ground hard, slamming his head, but managing to catch her other wrist. The second knife jabbed at his face. He tried to throw her off, but she clung to him, legs wrapped around him like a passionate lover.\n\nHer free hand scratched gouges in his cheek, going for his eyes. He twisted his face to the side. The knife lowered toward his throat as she leaned her shoulder into its plunge. She was strong, young.\n\nBut Kouwe knew the Shuar. He knew about their secret arsenal of weapons: braided in the hair, hidden in loincloths, worn as decoration. He also knew women warriors of the tribe carried an extra sheath as a defense against rape--a common attack between the Shuar tribes during their wars.\n\nKouwe used his free hand to snatch between her legs as she straddled him. His fingers reached and found the tiny knobbed hilt hidden there, warm from her body heat. He pulled the blade free of its secret leather scabbard.\n\nA scream rose from her lips as she realized this most private theft. Teeth were bared.\n\nShe tried to roll away, but Kouwe still had her wrist in his grasp. As she spun, he followed, holding her tight and using her strength to pull himself to his feet.\n\nThey crouched at arms' length, Kouwe keeping an iron grip on her wrist.\n\nShe met his eyes. He saw the fear. \"Mercy,\" she whispered. \"Please.\"\n\nKouwe imagined the number of victims who had pleaded with her--but he was no monster. \"I'll grant you mercy.\"\n\nShe relaxed ever so slightly.\n\nUsing this moment, he yanked her to him and plunged the knife to its hilt between her breasts.\n\nShe gasped in pain and surprise.\n\n\"The mercy of a quick death,\" he hissed at her.\n\nThe poison struck her immediately. She shuddered and stiffened as if an electric shock had passed through her from head to toe. He pushed her away as a strangled scream flowed from her lips. She was dead before she hit the ground.\n\nKouwe turned away, tossing aside the poisoned blade. \"And that's more than you deserve.\"\n\nThe gunfire had already died around the camp to sporadic shots, and Louis needed to be gone with his treasure before his defenses completely fell.\n\nGathering up the second Uzi from the ground, he watched Nate struggle to his elbows, a fierce grimace on his face.\n\nLouis saluted him and swung around--then froze in midstep.\n\nStanding a few yards away was a sight that made no sense. A pale, frail figure leaned against a tree. \"Louis...\"\n\nHe stumbled back in fright. A ghost...\n\n\"Dad, get back!\" Nate called in a pained voice.\n\nLouis collected himself with a shudder of surprise. Of course it wasn't a ghost. Carl Rand! Alive! What miracle was this? And what luck?\n\nHe pointed an Uzi at the wraith.\n\nThe weak figure lifted an arm and pointed to the left.\n\nLouis's gaze flicked to the side.\n\nHiding under a bush, a jaguar crouched, spotted and golden, muscles bunched. It leaped at him.\n\nHe swung his weapon up, firing, chewing up dirt and leaves as he slashed toward the flying cat.\n\nThen he was struck from the other side, blindsided, sacked, carried several yards, and slammed into the ground, facefirst. With the wind knocked out of him, he snorted and choked dirt. A large weight pinned him.\n\nWho...what...? He twisted his neck around.\n\nA black feline face snarled down at him. Claws dug into his back, spears of agony.\n\nOh, God!\n\nThe first jaguar stepped into view, padding with menace. Louis struggled to bring his Uzi around, lifting his arm. Before he could fire, his limb exploded with agony. Teeth clamped to bone and ripped backward, tearing off his arm at the shoulder with a crunch of bone.\n\nLouis screamed.\n\n\"Bon appetit,\" Nate mumbled to the two cats.\n\nHe ignored the rest of the attack. He had once watched a documentary of killer whales playing with a seal pup before eating it: tossing it through the air, catching it, ripping it, and tossing it again. Savage and heartless. Pure nature. The same happened here. The two cats showed a pure feline pleasure in killing Louis Favre, not just feeding, but enacting revenge upon the man.\n\nNate turned his attention to more pressing concerns. He dragged himself toward Kelly, crawling with his hands, pushing with his one good leg. His hip flared with agony. His vision blurred. But he had to reach her.\n\nKelly lay crumpled on the ground, blood pooling.\n\nAt last, he fell beside her. \"Kelly...\"\n\nShe shifted at the sound of his voice.\n\nHe moved closer, cradling against her.\n\n\"We did it...right?\" Her voice was a whisper. \"The cure?\"\n\n\"We'll get it to the world...to Jessie.\"\n\nHis father stumbled over to them and knelt beside the pair. \"Help's coming. Hang on...both of you.\"\n\nNate was surprised to see Private Carrera standing behind his father. \"Sergeant Kostos found the mercenary camp's radio,\" she said. \"The helicopters are a half hour out.\"\n\nNate nodded, holding Kelly to him. Her eyes had closed. His own vision darkened as he held her. Somewhere in the distance, he heard Frank call. \"Kelly! Is Kelly all right?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Eight Months Later",
                "text": "[ 4:45 P.M. ]\n\n[ LANGLEY, VIRGINIA ]\n\nNate knocked on the door to the O'Brien residence. Frank was due back from the hospital today. Nate carried a present under his arm. A new Boston Red Sox cap, signed by the entire team. He waited on the stoop, staring across the manicured lawn.\n\nDark clouds stacked the southern skies, promising a storm to come.\n\nNate knocked again. He had visited Frank last week at the Instar Institute. His new legs were pale and weak, but he had been up on crutches, managing pretty well. \"Physical therapy's a bitch,\" Frank had complained. \"Plus I'm a goddamn pincushion to these white-smocked vampires.\"\n\nNate had smiled. Over the past months, the researchers and doctors had been carefully monitoring the regeneration. Frank's mother, Lauren, had said that so far the exact mechanism for her son's prion-induced regeneration remained a mystery. What was known was that while the prions triggered a fatal hemorrhagic fever in children and the elderly--those individuals with immature or compromised immune systems--the opposite was seen in healthy adults. Here, the prions seemed capable of temporarily altering the human immune system, allowing for the proliferative growth necessary for regeneration and rapid healing.\n\nThis miraculous effect was observed in Frank, but not without danger to the man. He had to be maintained on a diluted mix of nut milk to keep the process from running rampant and triggering the devastating cancers that had struck Agent Clark. And now that the regeneration was complete, Frank was under a more concentrated treatment with the milk to rid his body of the prions and return his immune system to normal. Still, despite Frank's status as guinea pig, much about the prions and their method of action remained a mystery.\n\n\"We're a long way from an answer and even longer from replicating the tree's abilities,\" Lauren had said sadly. \"If the tree's history dates back to the Paleozoic era, then it's had a hundred million years'head start on us. One day we might understand, but not today. As much as we might vaunt our scientific skills, we're just children playing in one of the most advanced biological experiments.\"\n\n\"Children who came damn close to burning down their own house this time,\" Nate had added.\n\nLuckily, the nut pods had indeed proved to be the cure to the contagion. The \"antiprion\" compound in the fruit, a type of alkaloid, was found to be easy to replicate and manufacture. The cure was quickly dispatched via a multinational effort throughout the Americas and the world. It was discovered that a month's treatment with the alkaloid totally eradicated the disease from the body, leaving no trace of the infectious prion. This simple fact, unknown to the Ban-ali, had left them enslaved for generations. But luckily, the manufactured nut milk was the immediate cure the world had needed. The plague was all but over.\n\nContrarily, the prion itself had proved beyond current scientific capability to cultivate or duplicate. All samples of the prion-rich sap were considered a Level 4 biohazard and confined to a few select labs. Out in the field, the original source of the sap, the Ban-ali valley, was found to be a blasted ruin. All that was left of the great Yagga were ashes and entombed skeletons.\n\nAnd that's just fine with me, Nate thought as he waited on the stoop and stared at the setting March sun and the brewing storm.\n\nBack in South America, Kouwe and Dakii were still helping the remaining dozen Ban-ali tribesmen acclimate to their new lives. They were the richest Indians in the Amazon. Nate's father had successfully sued St. Savin Pharmaceuticals for the destruction of the tribe's homelands and the slaughter of its people. It seemed Louis Favre had left a clear paper trail back to the French drug company. Though appeals would surely drag on for several more years, the company was all but bankrupt. In addition, its entire executive board faced criminal charges.\n\nMeanwhile, his father remained in South America, helping resettle the Ban-ali tribe. Nate would be rejoining his father in a few more weeks, but he was not the only one heading south. In addition, geneticists were flocking to study the tribe, to investigate the alterations to their DNA, both to understand how it had been achieved and perhaps to discover a way to reverse the species-altering effects of the Yagga. Nate imagined that if any answers ever came, they would be generations away.\n\nHis father was also assisted by the two Rangers, Kostos and Carrera, newly promoted and decorated. The pair of soldiers had also overseen the recovery of the bodies. Difficult and heartbreaking work.\n\nNate sighed. So many lives lost...but so many others saved by the cure their blood had bought. Still, the price was too high.\n\nThe sound of approaching footsteps drew Nate's attention back around. The door opened.\n\nNate found his smile. \"What took you so long? I've been waiting here like five minutes.\"\n\nKelly frowned at him, holding a palm to her lower back. \"You try lugging this belly around.\"\n\nNate placed a palm on his fiancee's bulging stomach. She was due in another couple of weeks with their child. The pregnancy had been discovered while Kelly recuperated from the gunshot wound. It seemed Kelly had been infected with the prions during her examination of Gerald Clark's body back in Manaus. Over the two-week Amazon journey--unbeknownst to her--the prions had healed Kelly's postparturient infertility, regenerating what had been damaged. It was a timely discovery. If the prions had been left unchecked for even a couple more weeks, the ravaging cancers would have started, but as with her brother, the nut milk was administered in time, and the prions were eradicated before they could do harm.\n\nAs a result of this joyous gift, Nate and Kelly had been blessed. During their treetop lovemaking on the eve of Louis's attack, Nate and Kelly had unwittingly conceived a baby--a brother for Jessie.\n\nThey had already chosen a name: Manny.\n\nNate leaned over and kissed his fiancee.\n\nDistant thunder rolled from the skies.\n\n\"The others are waiting,\" she mumbled between his lips.\n\n\"Let 'em wait,\" he whispered, lingering.\n\nThick raindrops began to fall, tapping at the pavement and rooftop. Thunder rumbled again, and the sprinkle blew into a downpour.\n\n\"But shouldn't we--\"\n\nNate pulled her closer, bringing her lips back to his. \"Hush.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Epilogue",
                "text": "Deep in the Amazon rain forest, nature takes its own course, unseen and undisturbed.\n\nThe spotted jaguar nudges its litter of cubs, mewling and whining in the den. His black-coated mate has been gone a long time. He sniffs the air. A whiff of musk. He paces anxiously.\n\nFrom the jungle shadows, a silhouette breaks free and pads over to him. He huffs his greeting to his larger mate. They busily rub and brush against each other. He smells the bad scent on her. Flames, burning, screaming. It triggers warnings along his spine, bristling his nape. He growls.\n\nHis mate crosses to the far side of the glade and digs deep into the soft loam. She drops a knobby seed into the pit, then kicks dirt back over it with her hind legs.\n\nOnce done, she crosses to the litter of cubs--some black, some spotted. She sniffs at them. The cubs cry for milk, rolling over one another.\n\nShe rubs her mate again and turns her back on the freshly dug hole, the planted seed already forgotten. It is no longer her concern. It is time to move on. She gathers her litter and her mate, and the group heads deeper into the trackless depths of the forest.\n\nBehind, freshly turned soil dries in the afternoon sun.\n\nUnseen and undisturbed.\n\nForgotten."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "Forgotten Realms",
        "author": "D&D",
        "genres": [
            "fantasy"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "Ivy punched the camel. It backed out of her tent and stood with its big, shaggy brown head still sticking through the opening. Its large half-closed eyes stared at her, and it opened its mouth and rolled its lips back over huge yellowed teeth. Ivy hit the creature again, square on the nose, and the camel sidestepped\u2014wide-bottomed feet on skinny legs\u2014onto the equally wide feet of its screaming owner.\n\nThe camel's driver took a swipe at Ivy as she emerged from her tent, swinging his open palm to slap the impudent female abusing his camel. He shouted something that Ivy decided was uncivil even if she did not know the dialect. She sighed\u2014a sound only slightly less annoyed than the camel's snorts. After all, she had not hurt the idiot's mount (and the man's bruised toes were not her fault). Ivy lacked the time for a really good fight, a beat-his-head-into-the-dung brawl, especially after spending most of the morning clearing lost dromedaries and their droppings out of her crew's tents. One of Mumchance's strays slipped between her legs. The mangy dog snapped at the man. The camel's owner snarled and threatened the mutt, flipping a small dagger out of his belt to brandish at it.\n\nMaybe there is enough time for a little fight, thought Ivy, as she moved between the stray and the Shaar mercenary foolish enough to swing a knife under her nose.\n\nOne kick from Ivy knocked the dagger into the dirt. A swing of her mailed fist caught the man under his jaw, rocking him back. A second kick landed him flat on his back in a less-than-fragrant pile left behind by his frightened camel. Gasping, his breath knocked out of him, the camel driver lay there, glaring up at her.\n\n\"Go away,\" said Ivy, one booted foot resting on his dagger. \"Take the camel with you.\"\n\nThe camel driver glanced at the sword that Ivy had not bothered to unsheathe. Ivy cocked her hip slightly and grinned. She did not need the blade to keep him down, and\u2014as they were fighters of the same siege force\u2014serious maiming made little sense. The man apparently took her point of view. Rolling up in one fluid and slightly squelchy move, he picked up his dagger, grabbed his camel's halter, and led the beast in the direction of his people's tents. The cur just plopped its bottom in the dust and started scratching for fleas.\n\n\"You're welcome,\" said Ivy to the unconcerned mutt. \"No problem at all defending your scruffy hide.\"\n\nThe camels had slipped out during the night and rampaged through the camp\u2014at least as much as a dromedary could rampage, which was more like a blundering through the tents. It was, Ivy considered, exactly what the Thultyrl deserved for hiring Shaar mercenaries to fill out his siege forces. Except, of course, the camels knew better than to shamble their way through Procampur's neatly ordered pavilions. Instead, mercenaries like Ivy had to spend their morning shifting the smelly, spitting, four-legged, one-humped fleabags out of their gear while the Shaar drivers wailed and moaned and threatened terrible retribution to anyone who harmed their precious mounts. Unless, of course, somebody taught them a well-deserved lesson in manners and kindness to small mongrels.\n\nCursing the loss of time, but not regretting the brief tussle, Ivy swatted the last stray camel out of the camp area. She almost chased off a few of the dogs panting at her heels as she searched the camp for something to eat. But a quick survey of wagging tails, moist noses, and panting tongues led her to the conclusion that every mutt was one of Mumchance's strays, and the dwarf would never forgive her if the whole pack was not there to greet him on his return from the dig. Ivy decided that she should be just thankful that Mumchance and the other Siegebreakers had set off earlier to the dig, leaving the camels to her. If they had stayed, she was certain that the day would have ended with a camel added to the odd menagerie that the Siegebreakers seemed to augment every time they went out on a job.\n\nAs she continued to search for a breakfast that had not been trampled or tasted by camels, Ivy tripped over Kid's pile of odds and ends. Since he almost always stole food as well as any shiny object that attracted his attention, she did a quick shuffle through his little bags and boxes. One leather pouch yielded up a quantity of stale\u2014but still quite chewable\u2014campaign biscuits.\n\nEven as she crammed the first bite into her mouth, a soft cough interrupted her. Just from the tone of the cough, she knew who it was, who it had to be. Nobody coughed that decorously except Captain Sanval, the officer who escorted her every day to the Thultyrl's tent. In the courteous tone he always used, the captain said, \"The Thultyrl requires an audience with you, lady. I am to accompany you.\"\n\nIvy took another bite of the sour biscuit and wondered if he had arrived just in time to see her stealing from Kid's gear, or if he had been standing there long enough to see her roll the Shaar through the camel dung. While contemplating that last thought and avoiding Sanval's patient gaze, she stirred Kid's cache with a toe. Most of it looked worthless: odd scraps, lengths of rope, the purple leather pouch (containing the biscuits she had purloined), and a number of small utensils. There was nothing in Kid's trove that could not be explained or would attract an angry owner seeking to reclaim his property, decided Ivy, but she resolved to remind Kid again that this was a Procampur-controlled camp, and Procampur's officers took a very dim view of thieves.\n\nSanval coughed again. As usual, no emotion showed on his handsome face. He never had any expression, other than polite and attentive interest. The captain looked almost exactly like his fellow officers, so much so that Ivy wondered if the Thultyrl had some clay mold that he used to stamp out row after row of stalwart, polite young men. Like all the other Procampur officials, Sanval wore the cleanest gear that Ivy had ever seen: every cord matched, every buckle gleamed. Even his boot heels were polished. The dust and the stink of the siege camp never seemed to touch him.\n\nToday, although the sun was beating down hard enough to make even a Shaar sweat, Sanval wore his complete armor: from the shining greaves on his long legs to a brilliantly polished breastplate beneath his square shoulders, right up to a well-buffed helmet sitting absolutely straight on the top of his head. Once, and only once, Ivy had seen Sanval pull off his perfectly shined helmet. Then one little black curl had stood straight up on the back of his head, defiantly out of place from the rest of his clipped and well-brushed wavy black locks. Ivy had rather liked that freestanding curl.\n\nWhen they had first met, Ivy guessed that Sanval was one of those that Procampur citizens would call \"born under the silver roof\"\u2014a nobleman in service to his Thultyrl as a matter of duty rather than financial necessity. Besides all the wonderfully well-polished and obviously expensive armor, the full list of his names was much too long for anyone except a noble. Common people made do with one or two names. But Sanval had recited a dozen sonorous sobriquets including, unless she had misunderstood, the rather unlikely name of Hyacinth. After a tongue-twisting moment of trying to repeat back all his names, Ivy had suggested that she just call him Sanval. He had mentioned that \"Captain Sanval\" would be more proper.\n\nOther than the long list of personal names and the fact that he had brought three horses to the siege, Ivy had been unable to pry any personal information out of the discreet captain, despite her best and most congenial efforts at quizzing him. It wasn't easy asking questions of a man who insisted on walking either three paces in front of you (if you were going to the Thultyrl's tent) or three paces behind you (if you were going away from the Thultyrl's tent), but Ivy tried. After a short time (the duration of one walk up the hill to the Thultyrl's tent), Ivy gave up on being congenial and switched to the more familiar and comfortable tactic of being annoying. After all, just because none of her armor matched\u2014or had ever been shined until it reflected sunlight like a silver mirror\u2014did not mean that she lacked pride.\n\n\"I am eating my breakfast,\" she said to the silent captain. \"It took some time this morning to clear the camels out of here.\"\n\nSanval's smooth brown brow creased, very slightly. Ivy waited. She kept waiting. In silence. Two could play that game.\n\n\"The animals,\" said Sanval finally, when it became evident that Ivy was not going to say anything else or even move until he responded, \"did not come into our area.\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" drawled Ivy in a perfect imitation of his even tones. She had been a gifted mimic since childhood and matching the clipped, even cadences of the Procampur accent was a simple trick for her. \"That would have been rude. Even camels have manners around Procampur.\"\n\nOne corner of Sanval's perfect lips almost quirked upward. The possible smile disappeared too quickly for her to be certain, and Ivy decided that it was just a trick of light and shadow playing across those finely chiseled features. The gods only knew what it would take to make the man bend, even for a moment, and indulge in a little camp gossip.\n\nSanval apologized again for interrupting her breakfast but insisted courteously that she make herself ready to meet with the Thultyrl.\n\n\"I can wait while you wash, but we must not take too long,\" said Sanval, with a slight bow. Ivy knew that his quick glance had not missed a single spot of dust on her face, the grime on the mismatched armor that she wore, or the new patch on her unpolished boots. Ivy knew she looked every inch a grubby, uncouth mercenary, and\u2014if she were forced to admit it\u2014she rather enjoyed the dirt. It was certainly easier to maintain than the well-scrubbed look favored by the Procampur officers, especially when living in the middle of a siege camp in the last and hottest month of summer.\n\nIf Sanval had been an aristocrat out of Waterdeep, he might have sneered at her obvious lack of fortune and armor polish. But Sanval was from Procampur. Courteous Procampur officers never sneered. He just stood there, making no fuss at all, while she twisted up her sweat-soaked blonde braid and jammed it under her favorite leather cap.\n\nIvy located her armored gloves and thrust them through her belt. With her bare hands, she dug through Kid's leather pouch and removed as many biscuits as she could. Ivy stuffed them into the top of her tunic, securing them behind her breastplate. Satisfied that she could eat some breakfast later, she rubbed the crumbs off her mouth with her grimy sleeve.\n\n\"All done, and I'm as ready and as clean as I am going to be,\" she said, figuring that this time she would get a response from him. Although she had not been certain about the smile earlier, she had definitely seen him wince when she deliberately smeared extra biscuit crumbs down her front. The crumbs, Ivy reasoned, would shake off in the walk up the hill, or she could brush herself down before she entered the Thultyrl's tent. Annoying Sanval was one thing; revolting the ruler who was going to pay her a lot of gold to end an unprofitable siege was another.\n\nSanval turned to lead her to the Thultyrl's tent, starting out at the regulation three paces in front of her. Ivy quickened her step so she was even with him. They were almost the same height, and her legs were as long as his. She could easily match him stride for stride. He quickened his pace so that he was again three steps in front of her. She wondered if she should push him into a jog this morning, just to see him sweat.\n\nMumchance's mutts decided that Ivy and Sanval were playing a new game. A little brown-and-white shaggy one barked and leaped for Sanval's ankles, apparently intent on slowing him down for Ivy. Sanval neatly sidestepped the dog without even looking. Not even a spot of drool from its lolling tongue touched his highly polished toes. Ivy was impressed. The rest of the mutts came boiling out of whatever patch of shadow they had been panting in and ran toward them. Sanval came to a complete and rock-solid halt. He and the entire pack of dogs looked back at Ivy. She shrugged. This time, Sanval waited until she did what he wanted.\n\nIvy snapped a Dwarvish command at the dogs. The motley troop dropped to the ground with drooping tails. A yellow cur, a three-legged dog Mumchance had brought back yesterday, whined piteously. Ivy dug a biscuit out of her tunic. She broke off a piece and threw it to the yellow dog. The rest of the mongrels whined too. She pulled out the rest of the biscuits and tossed them to the dogs. So much for breakfast\u2014she hoped that the rest of her company had thought to bring food to the dig site.\n\n\"Your dogs seem \u2026 hmm \u2026 better behaved today,\" said Sanval. He was right. None of them had jumped up on him today. Ivy knew that the dogs appalled him, but she could never get the polite captain to yell at them, swear, or even grumble. So she had stopped saying \"jump\" in the Dwarvish dialect that Mumchance used for training his mutts and that Sanval didn't speak.\n\nSo the dogs had failed to annoy him today. He had not reacted to her usual grimy state, no matter how much it contrasted with his own shiny image. And it really was too hot to try to make him trot through the Procampur tents\u2014probably the only person who would end up sweating would be her. Ivy considered other options to tease some human response out of Sanval. Restraint like his, in Ivy's experience of war camps, was not only uncommon, it was positively uncanny. She suspected that it might even be unhealthy.\n\nBut it was typical of a citizen of Procampur, a city so regimented by manners and so enamored of its laws that they had banned the thieves' guild and, even more surprisingly, made the ban stick, keeping the guild permanently out of the city. Like the highly polished officer now leading her through the camp, Procampans made civility seem ordinary and the picking of pockets the height of bad manners.\n\nSuch things weren't natural. Take this war, thought Ivy, which had started because Procampur's ruler decided to honor his treaties. Now, most kingdoms and city-states had treaties with one another, but rarely bothered to read them, let alone act upon them. But Procampur had a treaty with Tsurlagol that they would protect the city from outside invasion or, if invaders managed to take control of Tsurlagol, free the city. When the inevitable happened, and Fottergrim's ramshackle army of orcs and hobgoblins (and a few humans and half-breeds who should have known better) captured Tsurlagol, Procampur's ruler decided to go to war. Unfortunately, the orderly city had only an orderly army\u2014just enough to serve its own needs, but not nearly enough to defeat the forces encamped in Tsurlagol.\n\nTo free Tsurlagol, Procampur needed more than its own citizens. It needed, as its senior nobles and officers had most reluctantly admitted, to hire mercenaries. After a long hot summer of paying the untidy and decidedly disorderly mercenaries, Procampur's Thultyrl desired a quick end to the siege. The Thultyrl was a king who could afford to pay to have the siege broken, and the Siegebreakers had all the technical, practical, and magical expertise needed to make that happen\u2014or so Ivy had spent the last tenday assuring the Thultyrl. The Siegebreakers also badly needed the payment promised by the Thultyrl, but Ivy felt that Procampur's ruler did not need to know that. It might make him inclined to haggle, and she preferred to be the only haggler in a transaction.\n\nNow, all Mumchance and the rest of her Siegebreakers needed to do was collapse a section of Tsurlagol's sturdy walls. All Ivy had to do, and she considered her job the harder of the two, was persuade the impatient Thultyrl to give her friends enough time to complete the task. For the last tenday, she had trudged far too many times up the hill to the Thultyrl's tent to explain once again why the walls could not fall instantly. She wondered if the Thultyrl would believe her this time.\n\nIvy skipped over the ditch that separated Procampur's section of the camp from the mercenaries' tents. Shallow and narrow, the ditch served no defensive purpose. It existed to warn mercenaries returning from the latrines in the dark to head down the hill rather than up the hill.\n\nAs they climbed the hill to the Thultyrl's pavilion, located squarely in the center of Procampur's tents, Ivy paused and turned to the north. From here, she had the clearest view of the city on the opposite hill. As usual, a few mounted troops were trotting back and forth in the valley, well out of range of Fottergrim's archers. The horsemen raised a fine cloud of dust, as the grass and any other vegetation had long ago been trampled. The sun caught a glint of armor along the tops of the walls. Ivy squinted. Tall shadows and bright helmets were clustered thickest along the southern wall. Fottergrim had stationed the bulk of his troops there to watch the horsemen in the fields below. According to reports from the Thultyrl's scouts, another array of orcs and hobgoblins, well mixed with a few bugbears, kept watch along the eastern wall, ready to raise the alarm if any charge came up the harbor road. Looking south and looking east was exactly what Ivy wanted. Let Fottergrim keep his attention fixed in those directions. She had no intention of entering the city through the eastern gates or by a charge up the steep southern hill. Ivy preferred Fottergrim's army to mass their largest numbers where she was not going.\n\n\"Any sign of Fottergrim today?\" she asked Sanval.\n\nHe did not pause in his steady march up the hill, but answered over his shoulder. \"Earlier. Shouting insults as usual and daring us to try the gates.\"\n\n\"Then he's got hot oil, hidden archers, or a good spell set there,\" said Ivy. \"Your Thultyrl's restraint is spoiling all his fun.\"\n\n\"The Thultyrl,\" said Sanval in the faintest rebuke of her casual tone, \"cannot wait forever.\"\n\n\"Your officers are pressing him to go home again?\" It was less of a question than a statement. It was an unpopular war, and costly, and Procampur's nobles and merchants liked to see a profit in their ventures. Since Sanval was apparently willing to talk politics, if nothing else, Ivy wanted to obtain as much information as possible. The more the officers pressed the Thultyrl to end the war quickly, the faster the Siegebreakers had to dig. If the walls of Tsurlagol did not fall soon, the Thultyrl was going to try some other tactic to draw out Fottergrim and engage him in a decisive battle. And that, in Ivy's opinion, would be a disaster. Nobody was going to pay the Siegebreakers for failing to make a wall fall down.\n\n\"Another petition has come from the merchants. They protest the loss of the Thultyrl's leadership and demand that he return to his duties in the city. There are a number of civil cases that need his judgment,\" Sanval said.\n\n\"And none of your green-roof merchants can settle their own disputes?\"\n\nSanval started to say something and then thought better of it. Obviously it went against his personal code of conduct to criticize his fellow citizens. Ivy sighed and wished the gentlemen of Procampur were more like the humans of Waterdeep or the gnomes of Thesk: ready to slander anyone of low or high station. If Ivy knew what the various factions in the camp wanted, she could always bargain in such a manner that made it seem like everyone was going to be satisfied (even if the only ones who really benefited were her Siegebreakers).\n\n\"It is impossible to explain to an outsider,\" began Sanval, apparently responding to the deep sighs that she heaved behind him. \"Our customs and our laws are very ancient and must seem strange to someone like you.\" He stopped and looked over his shoulder at her. Obviously he felt unable to describe what he thought \"someone like you\" meant, but Ivy had a good idea, and she was more than a bit annoyed by his judgment. Looking messy did not mean that she lacked understanding of the way that silver-roof nobles lived. She understood all too well\u2014she just chose to live differently.\n\nIvy began to sing in her crow's voice. Daughter of a bard, she couldn't carry a tune to save her life. But she had the same wicked memory for lyrics that she had for accents. Also, only last night, she had found a minstrel with a goodly collection of bawdy songs favored in the worst parts of Procampur. \"I'm quite the red-roof girl, in fact, all the warriors declare \u2026\"\n\nNow Sanval sighed, turned around, and quickened his pace through Procampur's tents. The Procampur pavilions followed the same straight lines of their city's famous Great Way, not at all like the mercenary section of the camp where the canvas coverings randomly clustered. There, mercenaries pitched their tents in whatever order they liked. Far from the latrine pits was considered a prime location for most mercenaries; other than that, they didn't pay much attention to their surroundings. But in this section of the camp, tents were planted in perfect formations, with the rustling banners and ribbon tent edgings matching the colors of Procampur's famous roof tiles: gold for the Thultyrl's personal enclave, silver for the nobles, yellow for their servants, black for the priests, and so on. The only color not showing was red. That was the symbol for adventurers as well as the areas that housed those adventurers passing through Procampur. That element, as far as the Procampur army was concerned, was already too thoroughly represented by the mercenary camp.\n\nIvy marched behind Sanval, doing her best to uphold the mercenaries' low reputation. She continued the song that was worth every drink that she had bought for the harper's parched throat. By the time she reached the second verse, with the rousing line of \"Once the men lived for my sighs, but now they want a peek of \u2026\" the back of Sanval's neck shone pink beneath the rim of his helmet.\n\nThe Thultyrl's pavilion dominated the center of Procampur's section, much as his palace reigned in the center of the city. One enormous tent, with silk walls dividing the interior into multiple rooms, housed the Thultyrl and his many retainers.\n\nOnly their arrival at the Thultyrl's tent prevented Ivy from completing the ballad. Even she didn't have quite enough nerve to sing the last three lines of I'm Quite the Red-Roof Girl in front of the Thultyrl's stone-faced bodyguards, members of the famous Forty who followed him in every pursuit.\n\nThe two on guard today were standing rigidly at attention and staring into space. The one on the left was very young, and Ivy noticed his cheeks were very flushed under the flanges of his helmet. Her voice may not have had the quality of her mother's, but she could pitch it to be heard over long distances. She must have been singing even louder than she had intended. She glanced at the other bodyguard. He was older, and he was not blushing, but he did wink at her as she passed him.\n\nDuring the day, the canvas outer walls of the Thultyrl's pavilion were rolled up to allow the breezes to blow through the tent; but the gold silk walls were down\u2014probably in a vain attempt to keep the dust from covering the scrolls belonging to the scribes busy working inside the pavilion. The dozen scribes assigned to the Thultyrl's Great Codex fought a constant battle with the grit of the camp, which clogged their inkpots and stained their fine parchments. Still, as far as they were from their cool halls, they continued their mission to copy Procampur's many laws into one great law book. Behind them paced the legal scholars, already debating the exact wording of each law, consulting the original crumbling texts that were being copied, and occasionally leaning over a scribe's shoulder to correct a comma there, a dash here.\n\nAs Ivy stood there, brushing biscuit crumbs onto the canvas floor, she reflected that she had known commanders who went to battle with their entire families, often dragging whole harems of lovers and children to a siege camp. But the Thultyrl was the first that she had known who brought his secretaries and lawyers to the edge of a battle. When she had first heard of the Thultyrl's personal passion\u2014the Great Codex to be placed in a library to eclipse all libraries\u2014she had expected to meet an old man, white-haired and wrinkled, determined to build a monument that would outlast his death.\n\nInstead, this Thultyrl was her own age, an energetic young man who adored hunting so much that he had also brought his hounds, his hawks, and his master huntsman with him. It was the hunting that had led to his present incarceration in bed. While coursing a stag in the hills above Tsurlagol, his party had surprised a troop of mountain orcs coming to reinforce their kin inside the city's walls. During the ensuing dust-up, the Thultyrl had been speared in his leg, breaking the thighbone.\n\nNow the Thultyrl commanded from his camp bed with all the sweetness of temper of a lion tied to a stake. Ivy could hear him roaring as they paused beside the scribes scratching at their scrolls. Sanval conferred with two more members of the Forty, sitting on stools in front of a silk curtain embroidered with flying griffins\u2014the personal symbol of this Thultyrl. A scribe's apprentice pushed past Ivy to pull last night's guttered beeswax stubs from the silver candlesticks. The Thultyrl was rich enough to keep his pavilion lighted all night long for his scribes, but not wasteful enough to allow them to throw away good beeswax. The incense pots were already lit, in a vain attempt to stifle the usual morning stink wafting through a war camp. No one was smiling, and everyone was working in absolute silence, which meant the Thultyrl was in worse humor than usual. After a long whispered conference, Sanval gestured for Ivy to follow him. He lifted aside the gold silk curtain to let them pass into the inner room of the Thultyrl's tent.\n\nThe Thultyrl was clutching a snow white towel to his freshly shaved chin. The barber was crouched on the floor, his bowl clutched to his chest and his forehead pressed against the purple wool rug hiding the canvas floor of the pavilion. The barber appeared frozen in the traditional bow signifying absolute obedience (and terror) that former Thultyrls had instituted in their courts.\n\n\"Oh, for the sweet suffering of every black-roof priest,\" swore this Thultyrl, \"get up, man! You will not be beheaded for nicking the Thultyrl's royal chin. Beriall, pay the poor fellow something extra for his fright.\"\n\nBeriall, the Thultyrl's personal secretary and the camp steward, swept forward with a swish of perfumed robes and whispered to the barber. The man nodded and tentatively smiled, bobbing his head as he retreated backward out of the tent.\n\n\"A man should be able to curse when his chin bleeds without his barber collapsing on the carpet,\" grumbled the Thultyrl, still dabbing at the nick with the towel.\n\n\"If he is a commoner, the barber will swear back at him. If he is a king, the barber will grovel. It is the way of the world,\" answered the Pearl in her deep voice. Behind every Thultyrl stood a Hamayarch, the highest rank of wizard in the court. The Hamayarch ruled the magic users of Procampur as the Thultyrl ruled other citizens. But the Hamayarch always bowed to the Thultyrl and ruled under the Thultyrl's blessing. The Pearl had held the title of Hamayarch for at least three generations. Her true name, her age, and even her race were unknown. Tall and slender, with hair the color of snow and the face of girl barely in her teens, some whispered that the Pearl had elven blood. Others claimed demon ancestors for her.\n\nHaving met many strange inhabitants of the North in a tumultuous childhood spent wandering behind either her bard mother or her druid father (but rarely the two together), Ivy doubted the Pearl of Procampur was either elf or demon. There was something very human about the Pearl's eyes, even though they were a strange aquamarine color and slanted slightly down at the corners.\n\nAccording to camp gossip, the Thultyrl had left the Pearl behind to govern Procampur. But the day that he was speared in the thigh, she had appeared inside his tent and had overseen his physicians as they dressed his wound. Since then, the Pearl remained always close at hand. She seemed to have arrived without servants of her own, coach, horse, or baggage, but she appeared each day in clean linen and silk. Today, the Pearl's white hair was looped up in an elaborate coronet of braids, baring her ears, which were pierced and studded with three diamonds on the left lobe and two rubies on the right. Her hands were covered with rings of both silver and gold, many set with gems. The Pearl favored linen as her undertunic, topped with a layer of embroidered silk displaying white peacocks on a dark blue background. She rustled when she moved, a sound like dead leaves stirred by a cold wind.\n\nIf the Pearl was winter in her dress, then the Thultyrl was all warm summer. A thin silk tunic lay open across his smooth brown shoulders, baring a chest already gleaming with sweat. A light blanket was draped across his lower body, hiding the wounded thigh and preserving the Thultyrl's modesty.\n\nWhen he saw Ivy, the Thultyrl called for his campaign desk. Pressing a hidden spring on the brass-and-wood box, the Thultyrl watched with the satisfaction more typical of a young boy than a king as the campaign desk sprouted shelves and drawers and a long flat surface on top. Beriall rushed forward to pull out a map scroll from one polished drawer; from another drawer, the man unearthed bronze map weights in the shape of rearing griffins with their wings outstretched. With the fluttering of his plump fingers, Beriall unrolled the map and positioned the weights carefully. With a growl of impatience at Beriall's usual fussiness, the Thultyrl beckoned Ivy forward. Beriall stepped back to allow Ivy a clear view of the map, sniffing loudly as Ivy passed him and whisking his silken robes close to his ankles as if he were afraid that her mere presence would stain his beautiful peach-colored skirts. Used to Beriall's sniffs and occasional muttered comments about barbarians in the tent, Ivy examined the map as the Thultyrl had indicated.\n\nIvy loathed the map. She had peered at it at least once a day for the past eight days, always conscious of the Thultyrl watching her. The map showed the walls of Tsurlagol in exquisite detail: every gate, every tower, every turn.\n\n\"Well?\" asked the Thultyrl. \"Do you remain satisfied with your choice?\"\n\n\"Very satisfied, sire. As we expected, the ground is soft and unstable at the base of the western wall,\" said Ivy, who had walked that section of Tsurlagol's walls two nights ago, skulking in shadows, and praying that she didn't twist an ankle in one of the ruts and holes. She had not told the rest of the Siegebreakers that she was checking the walls again (she knew how much they would protest), and it would have been incredibly embarrassing if the sun had come up and caught her lying in full view of Fottergrim's archers, just because she'd put her foot in a rabbit hole.\n\n\"The weakest section is here, the southwest corner, where they joined a new wall to an old wall.\" She tapped that turn on the map with one grimy finger, noting the smudge that she had left yesterday from the same gesture. \"We're already shifting ground water toward that spot, and it is running deep enough that Fottergrim's watchers won't see anything. But water alone won't be enough. We need to tunnel, as we discussed earlier, and crack the foundations from underneath. Then the water can do its work and bring the wall down.\"\n\nWhile Ivy was talking, one of the Thultyrl's officers approached him. Beriall tried to block his way, but the Thultyrl waved the officer closer. The man carried papers for the Thultyrl to stamp with his personal signet. Once that was done, Beriall hustled the man away. No conversation with the Thultyrl went uninterrupted, but the man had a ruler's ability to focus on three things at the same time. Ivy stayed where she was. When the Thultyrl wanted to, he would start asking her questions again. It wasn't as if he didn't already know the answers.\n\n\"Another draft on the treasury,\" the Thultyrl said to the Pearl. \"These mercenaries will drain us dry if we don't end this soon.\" Beriall returned to his position at the Thultyrl's right shoulder, nodding at the last comment and staring directly at Ivy. One of the codex scholars appeared at the Thultyrl's side with a stack of rolled scrolls. The Thultyrl nodded his thanks and dropped the scrolls into an already overflowing basket by his side.\n\n\"Once inside the walls,\" said the Pearl, \"we can recover our expenses from Tsurlagol's treasury. The treaty does allow for that.\"\n\n\"It does,\" sighed the Thultyrl. He popped open a drawer in the campaign table and pulled out an ivory message chit, which he handed over his shoulder to Beriall. The secretary beckoned one of the Forty to him and handed off the chit. That man bowed and rushed away to fetch whomever the chit signified. The Thultyrl ignored the passing of the chit and concentrated on his conversation with the Pearl. \"But we can't bankrupt Tsurlagol\u2014we are supposed to be saving the city after all.\"\n\n\"Once inside the walls,\" repeated the Pearl in her deep voice, \"we can make some equitable arrangement with all concerned. After all, we were not the fools who let Fottergrim dance his army through an open gate, all the way to Tsurlagol's main square.\"\n\nIvy suspected that the fools who had let Fottergrim into the city were long dead. That was the problem with thick walls and high towers: people forgot that such defenses were only as strong as an underpaid gatekeeper's resistance to bribery. Unfortunately, Fottergrim's troops were all that was left of the Black Horde. Having avoided the debacle at Waterdeep, they'd been moving steadily north for the last ten years. Years of constant attacks had made them extremely suspicious of strangers and fanatically loyal to the big orc who had kept them from being slaughtered.\n\nIn their first attempt at breaking the siege, Ivy and Mumchance had disguised themselves as a Gray Forest goblin and orc, as these creatures had been flocking to Fottergrim's banner since the orc commander had arrived back in the North.\n\n\"Won't they notice that I am barely the height of a goblin?\" the dwarf had asked her.\n\n\"And I am no orc,\" Ivy admitted. She was a tall, hard-muscled woman, but still. The orcs were huge. Ivy had added padding and oversized armor until she could barely bend her knees and elbows. \"I'm hoping that when they look down from the wall to identify us, the perspective will confuse them.\"\n\nThe dwarf merely grunted in reply.\n\n\"Also, I am counting on bribery,\" she added.\n\nBut they had been driven back by a hail of arrows before they could even start jingling coins at Fottergrim's sentries. The next morning, at her first meeting with the Thultyrl, Ivy recommended undermining the walls as the most the logical way to enter the city. As she told the rest of the Siegebreakers that night, a rain of arrows tended to make her cranky, and there was no point letting the Thultyrl know that one of their favorite tricks had already failed.\n\nSo far, the Thultyrl of Procampur had agreed with her suggestion, but now he seemed inclined to argue.\n\n\"You have been digging for how many days?\" said the Thultyrl, startling Ivy with the swift change of his attention from the Pearl to her.\n\n\"Only two days, sire,\" she answered, trying to meet his gaze calmly. \"And I need three more days at least. We had to start the tunnel well back from the walls, behind some scrub trees, to avoid Fottergrim's sentries spotting us.\"\n\n\"But you are still aiming for that corner?\" Without looking down, the Thultyrl tapped the map in the exact spot where Ivy had pointed. She wished she knew how he did that trick. It was impressive, she had to admit.\n\n\"Yes, sire,\" said Ivy, risking a quick peek at the map to make sure that she had not suddenly chosen a new corner of Tsurlagol's walls before tapping that section herself. \"The walls are always weakest where there is a turn, especially in this case. It is better than trying to go under a straight section or one of the gates. Besides, it is the southwest corner, and Fottergrim keeps his strongest watch on the eastern wall. He expects you to come up the harbor road.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said the Thultyrl. \"Just as we would like him to come charging straight down that road.\" Procampur's navy had sailed into the harbor at the beginning of the summer siege. Fottergrim had no sailors in his horde and had retreated quickly up the harbor road, shutting himself safely behind Tsurlagol's high walls and well-fortified gates.\n\nAnother officer entered the chamber, led by a member of the Forty. The graybearded man carried the Thultyrl's ivory chit in one hand. He was short and heavy, and his armor gleamed more brightly than Sanval's breastplate. He also had the distinctive bowed legs of a horseman. The man bowed and handed his chit to Beriall. Ivy almost missed the Thultyrl's next question, so distracted was she by the entry of what was obviously a very senior officer of Procampur. \"Can you dig faster?\"\n\n\"We might be able to reach that corner faster, but we still need adequate time to prepare the wall,\" said Ivy, concentrating on the Thultyrl and ignoring the officer so obviously impatient to be noticed by his ruler. \"Making walls fall down is easy, sire. Making them fall down where and when you want is a little harder. Myself, I prefer not to be standing directly underneath when the walls start to fall.\"\n\nThe Thultyrl smiled. \"We understand your point of view,\" he said. \"But we need you to excavate more rapidly. In two days time, Enguerrand will begin the charge that he has been so eager to lead.\"\n\nThe graybeard bowed at the mention of his name. \"Sire,\" he said, \"I promise you that our assault will free the city.\"\n\n\"And you are certain that Archlis is gone again?\" asked the Pearl.\n\nEnguerrand nodded. \"He's not been seen since yesterday.\"\n\n\"So,\" said the Thultyrl to Ivy, \"you understand the need for haste.\" It was a statement and it was obvious that the Thultyrl was not going to listen to any arguments. \"Archlis only disappears for four or five days at the most. We cannot be certain of even that amount of time. We need to strike while he is off the walls.\"\n\nIvy could sympathize with the Thultyrl's desire to rush the walls when the wizard Archlis was gone. According to camp gossip, Fottergrim's personal spellcaster had engineered most of the orc's recent victories, including the successful occupation of Tsurlagol. Most annoyingly for the Procampur troops, Archlis was an expert at throwing fireballs and appeared to own a nearly inexhaustible supply of fire spells.\n\nUnless Archlis was standing on the section that collapsed, and Ivy rather doubted that they would get that lucky, his fireballs would still be a formidable problem. Luckily the wizard had a tendency to disappear for several days at a time. In fact, that was how they'd learned his name, by hearing Fottergrim screaming for him to come up on the walls and attack Procampur's troops.\n\nShe stared at the map and considered the route of Enguerrand's charge. North and south was where the hill was steepest, and it was clearly marked so on the Thultyrl's map. East was the well-watched harbor road.\n\n\"The west is the only approach,\" said the Thultyrl. Keen-eyed as a griffin, the Thultyrl had spotted what she had seen: the faint dotted line that marked an old route leading to Tsurlagol's west gate. \"There's a good road leading north from Procampur, well west of Tsurlagol and out of range of Fottergrim's patrols. We will move our people, south out of the camp, angling toward the road, then turn and come north fast.\"\n\n\"And turn again and come at the wall at sundown, when any sentry looking west might be dazzled by the sun.\" Ivy knew that trick. \"And mercenaries, with their stinking camels, roaring up the harbor road to distract Fottergrim and split his strength.\" Old tricks and half-forgotten tactics\u2014the kind of information that a Thultyrl's scholars might find in the histories of war and ancient maps tucked in the baskets with the legal scrolls. But they were clever tricks and it took a clever man to think of them\u2014a man who went hunting deer on the western side of the city just to see if the ground matched what his maps had shown. No wonder the Thultryl had been so furious to be surprised on his hunt by mountain orcs and so intent on riding them all down before they got to Fottergrim.\n\n\"I walked the length of the western wall,\" said Ivy, \"the day my company came here and two nights ago. There is a gate there.\"\n\n\"We know,\" said Enguerrand. \"It is on the map.\"\n\n\"The map doesn't show the size,\" said Ivy, looking at him with pity. \"It's a nightsoil gate. One horse wide, and barely that. If you breach it, you still need to go in one by one. A big orc with a large axe could hold that gate forever. He will just pile your dead in the doorway.\"\n\n\"Then we will use ladders to scale the walls,\" said Enguerrand.\n\nIvy shook her head. \"There are old holdings on the top of that wall.\" Seeing everyone but the Thultyrl and the Pearl giving her puzzled stares, she sketched in the air the shape of the wooden-roofed balconies that overhung the western wall. \"There will be arrow slits in the floors,\" she explained. \"They shoot straight down on your ladders. It will be bloody fighting to climb over that wall.\"\n\n\"Then what do you suggest, lady?\" asked the Thultyrl, who obviously had considered this drawback. His face was too calm in Ivy's judgment for this setback to be a surprise.\n\n\"Burn the holdings if you can.\"\n\n\"Fire arrows,\" suggested the Pearl.\n\n\"No spells?\" asked the Thultyrl. The Pearl shook her head and spread her hands wide, displaying them as empty. Ivy wondered why so powerful a mage (by reputation if not demonstration) could not throw a little fire here and there. Certainly Archlis had been almost careless with his power over the past few weeks.\n\n\"They may have thought of that and laid some protection into the wood. Then again, they are orcs, never the cleverest at defensive warfare,\" advised Ivy. \"But expect to lose half your force right there. The holdings may burn, but the wall is stone, and it will hold. Also, such a fire will bring everyone running from the other towers. Best to follow the plan we gave you: wait for the wall to fall down and make your charge into Tsurlagol across the fallen broken bodies of your enemies.\" It was a stirring speech, and with luck none of the Procampans would recognize that the last few words came straight from the chorus of one of her mother's favorite ballads.\n\n\"Then bring that wall down,\" said the Thultyrl, sitting straighter and wincing as the movement pulled on his unhealed wound. \"At sunset, in two days time. We have decided.\"\n\nThe Thultyrl has decided. The Thultyrl has decided. The refrain echoed through Ivy's head as she marched back down the hill, trailed by a silent Sanval.\n\n\"The Thultyrl may have decided,\" said Ivy, \"but we're the ones who have to dig! Can't be done. Not that fast. Not safely. But maybe. If Gunderal can speed up the underground water. Mumchance would know. There might be old tunnels on that side. We could use those. If Zuzzara ever finds them. Can't be done. Could be done. The Thultyrl has decided! Oh, blast!\"\n\nShe was arguing with herself because Sanval was not saying a word. In fact, he seemed stunned into even deeper silence than before. He had stayed completely rigid in his burnished armor the whole time they had been in the Thultyrl's tent. Then the Thultyrl had addressed him directly.\n\n\"We regret,\" the Thultyrl had said to him, \"that we must refuse your request to rejoin Enguerrand's regiment. We need your services as assigned for two more days. To bring us word, you understand, of the success or failure of this lady's work.\" The Thultyrl nodded at Ivy.\n\nSanval had bowed, very deeply, to his ruler. Ivy thought that she had heard him sigh, but it had been a very, very soft sigh.\n\nBut it was the Pearl who apparently had mystified Sanval. She waited until they had left the Thultyrl's presence and then stopped them.\n\n\"You will find your glory easier underground than in Enguerrand's company,\" the Pearl said to Sanval. \"If you remember who you are and forget your vanity.\" Sanval stared at the white-haired woman and did not seem to know what to say to her.\n\nThe Pearl turned to Ivy next. She picked up one of Ivy's gauntlets. The armored glove had slipped from where Ivy had tucked it into her belt and had fallen to the ground. The Pearl handed the gauntlet back to her, fingering the little silver token sewn onto the leather cuff. The token felt surprisingly warm to Ivy when she slid the glove back under her belt.\n\n\"You need no prophecy from me. You have always known your way and are wise enough to trust your luck. Continue to believe in your luck when you make your plans,\" said the Hamayarch of Procampur. Then the Pearl glanced down and smiled faintly. \"But I would suggest that you clean your boots.\" The Pearl rustled back inside the silk-draped pavilion.\n\nNow, marching down the hill, Ivy muttered to herself, which meant she was loud enough for only Sanval to hear clearly. \"If she can see the future, I wouldn't mind knowing it. I can take a prophecy as well as the next woman. It's not like my mother or my father wasn't always meddling in some great magic. There were long prophecies, short prophecies, incredibly cryptic prophecies all naming one or the other at some time. But do I get some prediction of glory? Of course not! The woman just tells me to clean my boots. What is wrong with my boots?\"\n\n\"They have camel dung on them,\" said Sanval from behind her. \"On the back.\"\n\nIvy ground to a halt. She pulled up one foot and twisted it to look at the back of her boot. She put her foot down slowly. She pulled up the other leg and looked at the back of that boot. Both of them were liberally splashed with dung. She had walked through the Thultyrl's silk-lined, wool-carpeted, incense-scented pavilion with dung-mired boots. Even for her, that was a bit much. No wonder Beriall had been sniffing so loudly today.\n\n\"I would have told you,\" said Sanval, \"but you kept singing that song.\"\n\nIvy thought about hitting him. But they were still in the Procampur section of the camp, and somebody was sure to make a fuss if she knocked down a Procampur officer and ground his face in the dust.\n\n\"Come on,\" she said. \"I need to tell the others that they have two days to do a tenday job. The Thultyrl has decided.\"\n\nBut even as she hurried toward the tunnel, she wondered if she could make good on her promise. No matter how fast the Siegebreakers dug, she was not at all sure that they could bring down the wall in time to save the Thultyrl's troops from disaster."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Once Ivy arrived at the site of the tunnel, she considered that meeting the Thultryl's deadline might be easier if anyone were actually digging. Instead, the Siegebreakers were resting in the shade of a small grove of trees. Out of the corner of her eye, Ivy caught a glimpse of a slight disturbance on Sanval's handsome features before his face smoothed into its usual stoic expression.\n\n\"So what do you think is wrong?\" huffed Ivy at Sanval, because it was easier to be mad at him than start yelling at her friends.\n\n\"Pardon?\" said Sanval, startled enough to turn his head so she could see his face clearly under the brim of his shining helmet.\n\n\"You disapprove of something. I'm an excellent judge of those non-expressions of yours,\" Ivy replied.\n\n\"Really?\" His tone was as even and bland as his face.\n\n\"Quarter turn down of the left corner of the lips: deep disapproval from Captain Sanval.\"\n\nSanval choked slightly at her retort, and the recently criticized left corner of his lips quirked up for moment. \"They are not in armor,\" he observed. \"This far from camp, that is not well advised.\"\n\n\"They are digging a hole in the ground, which is a little hard to do in full kit,\" said Ivy, ignoring the fact that she had been shouting only last night that they were too close to the walls to fully ignore all precautions. Of course, she never felt comfortable in a war camp without armor. Besides, her gear hid the stains on her shirt and breeches. Sanval was fully armored too, but then he seemed to live in halfplate (and live in it without sweating or feeling the weight, which was most unfair). Ivy suspected that even the shirt underneath the plate was gleaming white.\n\nStill, Sanval was right. So close to the walls, the Siegebreakers should not be lazing about in the shade like they were taking a break on the farm. There was a siege going on only half a field away\u2014even though, like most sieges, it was more often than not an exercise in yelling insults at your opponents from a safe distance, out of range of their weapons and spells.\n\nStripped down to her shirt sleeves and leather waistcoat, sitting on a rock with her legs dangling before her, Zuzzara appeared to have no cares at all. At her feet, the wizard Gunderal was lying on her back, watching the clouds float by, weaving strands of water between her pale fingertips. She was lazily nodding along to Zuzzara's reading of a letter that had arrived yesterday with the latest shipment of supplies from Procampur.\n\nIvy stared at the two women, hoping they would see her wink her right eye toward the Procampur officer standing politely and silently beside her. Gunderal gave her a languid little wave.\n\nZuzzara was squinting too closely at the parchment to notice Ivy's approach. \"Mimeri says that the sundial and the water clock no longer agree.\"\n\n\"Then Mimeri needs to shift the sundial,\" said the dwarf Mumchance. At least he was wearing his helmet and chain mail vest. But, Ivy knew, that was only half-armored for the old dwarf\u2014his big war axe, his full plate, and other more vicious weapons were currently buried under a pile of panting dogs back at the camp. \"I told Mimeri to adjust the clock as soon as the solstice had passed. What about the shingles for the barn roof?\"\n\n\"I think we have more pressing concerns right now,\" said Ivy, sidestepping around Zuzzara's shovel, carelessly propped against a large rock. Sanval sidestepped right with her, saying nothing. She smiled, a friendly showing of teeth directly at the others, in the hope that they would get the message.\n\nWith a vague smile back at Ivy, Zuzzara continued to puzzle over Mimeri's cramped scrawl. \"She says that the carpenter will bring the shingles when we have the payment,\" Zuzzara said.\n\n\"You'd think that man would give us credit by now,\" Mumchance grumbled. Ivy tried a gentle cough to attract his attention, but the dwarf ignored her and Sanval. \"We have replaced that roof often enough.\"\n\n\"Only twice,\" murmured Gunderal. \"And this time was not my fault.\" The wizard rolled over on her stomach with a swish of silken skirts and caused a tiny rain cloud to shower on a nearby weed with a waggle of her right hand.\n\n\"Never said that it was your fault,\" Mumchance stated. \"But it is a good thing that we have got this payment coming.\"\n\n\"Not if the walls of Tsurlagol are still standing,\" interrupted Ivy very loudly. Enough of winks, smiles, and discreet coughs. Subtlety around her friends rarely worked. Very aware of Sanval watching the whole group over her shoulder, Ivy continued, \"Are we not supposed to be digging a tunnel today? Mumchance, I'm surprised at you. Where's that fabled dwarf work ethic?\"\n\n\"Ground is too soft,\" replied the one-eyed dwarf, squinting up at Ivy. The shadows dappling the little glade barely softened the heavy scars on his face. \"Told you yesterday that we needed to shift the entrance.\"\n\n\"We don't have enough time to move it if we want to earn our fee,\" said Ivy, with a quick glance at Sanval and a frown at Mumchance. She did not want the silver-roof noble from Procampur legging it back to the Thultryl's tent with the message, \"Send these foolish farmers home and let us charge the walls like true warriors.\" Of course he would probably be more elegant in his wording as he lost them their payment.\n\nWhen they had first broken ground, the Siegebreakers had been lucky enough to hook into an older passageway that ran under the ruined remains of a former city's wall, probably dug hastily and long ago for the same reason that the Siegebreakers were digging their tunnel. That older siege tunnel had led into a city that had long since vanished. Tsurlagol had been invaded, burned to the ground, and then shifted to a new location so many times that one jester suggested the city's best defense would be to build all the houses as boats on wheels and run them into the sea every time a new invasion force came into view.\n\n\"We need to slow down, not dig faster,\" argued Mumchance. \"We're moving away from the first tunnel, and the ground doesn't feel right.\"\n\n\"Did the roof collapse again?\" asked Ivy.\n\n\"No,\" said Zuzzara. \"Just the usual bits of dirt down the back of my neck. But Mumchance pulled me out and sent Kid in.\"\n\n\"He's smaller than Zuzzara and lighter too,\" explained the dwarf. \"And he has a good feel for the dirt under those hard little hooves of his. It is the ground below, Ivy, not above, that I don't like. Nothing feels right. I wanted Kid's opinion. I left Wiggles with him. She'll bark if anything starts to go wrong.\"\n\n\"Wiggles to the rescue,\" drawled Ivy, who did not have nearly the same faith in Mumchance's favorite mutt. He had picked up the yippy little horror two years ago when they had been in the south. Mumchance always claimed Wiggles had a dwarflike nose for trouble underground.\n\n\"You have never appreciated Wiggles's talents, not even when she saved us under that sorcerer's tower,\" muttered the dwarf.\n\n\"I gave her a bone afterwards,\" said Ivy. \"A lovely bit of ham hock.\" In Ivy's opinion, it was just luck that Wiggles had sounded the warning in time. Wiggles barked almost continuously, so the dog was bound to yap at a strategic moment some day.\n\n\"Which you picked out of the rubble,\" Mumchance reminded her in a sour tone. As if a little dust on a bone had ever stopped Wiggles's enjoyment. The dog loved bones, with meat on them, or without. It did not matter to Wiggles as long she got something to chew.\n\nZuzzara ignored the argument about Wiggles, as the dog never woke her at dawn with her insane barking (Zuzzara snored too loudly to hear it). Instead, she was busy telling Sanval that she always did most of the digging for the Siegebreakers, and even a half-orc of her size could only dig so fast and so far in a day.\n\n\"I could bring more men from the camp,\" offered Sanval. \"And some guards. We must not let this position be overrun.\"\n\nIvy gestured at the scraggly trees surrounding them. \"We have enough cover to hide us from Fottergrim. They are not paying much attention to this side of the wall\u2014that's why we picked this spot!\"\n\n\"Just what we need, more humans!\" huffed Mumchance. \"Doesn't matter how many dig, or how fast. The ground is rotten, Ivy. I know it is.\"\n\nIvy stared at the dwarf. He gave her that one-eyed stare back that said most clearly that he was a dwarf and she was a human, and everyone knew who knew the most about soil conditions and digging. But if the tower did not fall, then there would be no gold for their purses, and that meant a long winter with no roof over the animals sheltering in the barn. Which, Ivy knew, meant every single dog, cat, goat, chicken, pig, mule, and stray bear cub currently sleeping in the barn would end up in the farmhouse's kitchen or, much worse, her room.\n\n\"We have two days or we don't receive a clipped coin from the Thultryl,\" Ivy explained more bluntly than she had intended, her voice rising to a bellow. Her crew knew that voice. Zuzzara stood up and grabbed her shovel, swinging it up to her shoulder. She reached a hand down to Gunderal. The wizard floated daintily to her feet, fluffing her skirts around her. After a couple of quick twists with her fingers, Gunderal's hair obligingly arranged itself into long blue-black ringlets, perfectly framing her pale oval face.\n\n\"Oh, Ivy,\" said Gunderal, her violet eyes widening in disapproval. \"You are wearing that cap again.\"\n\nIvy put up her bare hand and tugged the brim of her leather cap lower on her brow. Just because she had plucked it off that dead man's head\u2014and he certainly did not need it at the time or since\u2014Gunderal had taken the most unreasonable dislike to her current cap. Well, Gunderal said that it was the stains and the reek of the leather when the cap got wet in the rain that she disliked. When Ivy had responded that it did not smell any different from the rest of her gear, Gunderal had given one of her huge sighs and said, \"That is part of the problem.\"\n\nIvy frowned at Gunderal. She was not going to start a discussion about her cap in front of Sanval. After all, she doubted that officers of Procampur wasted time discussing the quality of their leather goods when they could be doing something else. Or, glancing over at the brilliantly polished boots that Sanval wore, maybe they did. But she knew that the Siegebreakers had better things to do. \"It won't rain today,\" Ivy said as firmly as she could.\n\n\"I know, but really that cap! I swear there are teeth marks on the brim.\"\n\n\"Well, if you hadn't thrown it at the dogs and encouraged them to play tug-of-war with it \u2026 Took me forever to get it back!\"\n\n\"I was just trying to discourage you from wearing it.\"\n\n\"Thought you wanted to see what Kid found in the tunnel,\" said Zuzzara, placidly stepping between the two of them. Since she was digging today, Zuzzara's braids were bound back from her face in a neat array, and she was wearing a sturdy leather waistcoat rather than one of the more ornate brocade ones that she favored in peaceful times. Heavily influenced by Gunderal's nagging, Zuzzara's style did not match the many other half-orcs roaming the North\u2014the kind who typically wore rough untreated pelts with the occasional bone jewelry decoration.\n\nIvy, however, refused to heed Gunderal's criticisms. Ivy was a mercenary. Mercenaries wore what they could loot. That was tradition and certainly easier than commissioning matching sets of armor (and cheaper too). When something got too dirty or battered to wear, you grabbed something new or traded with the guy in the next tent over for what you needed. Ivy did not see the point of Gunderal's constant little lectures that inevitably started with \"you would look so nice if only \u2026\"\n\n\"Maybe there is a way around the rotten spot?\" the half-orc suggested, gently steering Gunderal away from Ivy. The wizard followed her with a sad little comment on how nobody really cared about beauty but her.\n\nGrumbling under his breath about how nobody but him really cared about dirt, Mumchance hooked his dark lantern carefully to his belt and checked that his pick was securely fastened. \"Tinderboxes?\" he asked the Siegebreakers.\n\n\"I have mine,\" said Ivy. \"Old fusspot, it's not that deep yet.\" She handed the old dwarf his short sword. As usual, he had taken it off and left it leaning against a tree trunk. He did not like fighting with it, preferring to use pick and hammer when he needed to.\n\n\"Hey, Zuzzara, where's your broadsword?\" Ivy asked the half-orc. If Gunderal was obsessed with clean clothing, Ivy was equally obsessed with weaponry, or the defensive and offensive capabilities of it.\n\n\"Ivy, it's too heavy to lug all the way down here. Don't need it and don't want it today.\"\n\n\"Mumchance is fully armored. I'm fully armored. Captain Sanval\"\u2014she glanced over at the officer whose plate shone like a dozen mirrors in the sun\u2014\"is even wearing his helmet.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" he said, seemingly a little surprised that she had noticed him and said something that could be construed as a compliment. \"It is a requirement that all officers be fully dressed in their armor if they leave the boundary of the camp.\"\n\n\"It's a good rule,\" said Ivy. \"From now on, I want everyone to show up in full gear. We are close enough to the walls that we might be overrun by a raiding party or orc scouts.\"\n\n\"You are just saying that because you don't like to wear anything but your ratty old gear. And Mumchance is always more comfortable in chain mail than anything else,\" muttered Gunderal, who avoided armor whenever she could. Helmets, claimed the wizard, did unattractive things to her hair.\n\n\"Ivy is right,\" said the dwarf to Ivy's surprise. He usually argued with her on the general principle that any right-minded three-hundred-thirty-year-old dwarf knew more than a twenty-five-year-old human. \"And you should all be carrying tinderboxes and extra candles for underground work. It is not like Gunderal could light a candle if we needed it.\"\n\n\"No, but I can use your flint and stone; you always have some with you,\" Gunderal said to the dwarf, unruffled by his comment. Her genasi heritage made all water spells fantastically easy for her\u2014but it also caused fire spells to fail in a puff of damp smoke whenever she tried even the simplest flame tricks. \"And there are other ways to light the dark, that don't need fire.\"\n\n\"Magic,\" grumbled the dwarf, as he led them to the entrance. \"It's not wise to rely too much on magic. I keep telling you girls that, but you never listen to me.\"\n\n\"Yes, Mumchance,\" said Zuzzara and Gunderal together. \"We know.\"\n\nAt the tunnel's entrance, Mumchance cocked his head and listened, then he whistled. A faint shout came back from Kid and a shrill yap from Wiggles.\n\n\"Probably safe,\" Mumchance decided. He jerked a thumb toward the officer from Procampur. \"Is he coming?\"\n\nIvy turned to Sanval. \"Are you coming?\"\n\n\"Perhaps I should stay here,\" said Sanval, looking at the dark entrance to the tunnel. Ivy was sure that he was calculating how long it would take his servant to clean his armor after squeezing through the dirty hole. \"And guard the entrance.\"\n\n\"There's no danger,\" said Ivy, squeezing around Mumchance so she could go first. \"None of Fottergrim's patrols have left the walls for days. And, besides, Gunderal has a potion to hide the entrance.\"\n\nOnce everyone had entered the tunnel, Gunderal extracted a crystal flask from her heavily embroidered belt pouch. She pulled the glass stopper out and carefully let three drops of the flask's contents fall on the ground. A pale smoke rose, darkening as it filled the entrance. \"From the outside, it just looks like a shadow cast by one of the trees,\" Gunderal explained. \"You have to step in it before you can see this hole.\"\n\nIvy shifted her sword from her side to her back and tightened the straps to keep it close to her body. The last thing she needed was to go tripping over her own blade when trying to show the tunnel to Sanval. She wanted to impress him with her explanations of the intricacies involved in undermining walls (and why those intricacies needed more than two days), not stumble about looking like an idiot. After a few awkward paces in she was able to stand upright.\n\nAs they advanced farther into the tunnel, Ivy explained to Sanval how they had used their own timbers to stabilize the roof.\n\n\"So it is safe now?\" Sanval asked, as dirt continued to dribble down the walls, little clods landing behind them with soft puffs.\n\n\"For a rabbit,\" muttered Mumchance. \"Anything heavier \u2026\"\n\n\"Is just fine,\" finished Ivy. \"See, here's Kid and Wiggles.\"\n\nKid greeted her with a fleeting smile and a ducked head. Small and compact, with features almost as pretty as Gunderal, most people thought Kid was \"sweet\" until he dipped his long fingers into their pockets.\n\n\"Well?\" said Ivy as soon as she reached him.\n\nKid stamped one hoof against the dirt and then moved two paces over and stamped again. Both stamps sounded the same to Ivy, and she said so.\n\n\"Little different, my dear,\" explained Kid. \"Like Mumchance, I hear something wrong here.\" His pointed catlike ears were good; he often heard things that the others missed, and that was saying a lot in a group that included a half-orc, a half-genasi, and a full-blooded dwarf.\n\n\"Told you,\" said Mumchance, coming up to them. The others all clustered closely around to hear the discussion.\n\n\"All right,\" said Ivy. \"The ground is a little soft.\" She stamped too. Her foot sank down into the dirt, and a little more dry earth trickled off a tree root above her head and dropped on her nose. Ivy sneezed.\n\n\"Ivy, can you move a little farther down the tunnel?\" asked Gunderal, with a wrinkle of her delicate nose. \"All I can smell is your boots.\"\n\nIvy obediently shifted behind Zuzzara, farther away from Gunderal.\n\n\"Phew!\" said Zuzzara, waving a hand in front of her sensitive orc nose.\n\n\"It's not that bad,\" said Ivy, scraping her boots against a tree root. She had done the same thing earlier when she was leaving the camp, using a rock to rub off the worst of the muck. She guessed she must have missed a spot or two.\n\n\"Hush!\" said Mumchance. A worried look wrinkled his scarred face. The dwarf relied more on his hearing underground than any other sense. He claimed that he could usually hear danger before he saw it. Wiggles whined at his feet, and the dwarf picked up the little dog and popped her into his pocket. It was an old habit, but it startled most people to see the dog's sharp white nose and large pink ears suddenly emerge from the pocket of a stout, graybearded dwarf.\n\n\"Phhstt,\" said Ivy, brushing the dirt off her face and trying to stifle a second sneeze. It came out as a loud snort.\n\nMumchance dropped to one knee to get his head closer to the ground and patted the earth with one gnarled hand. \"There's something here.\"\n\n\"Yes, I smell something below us,\" said Gunderal.\n\n\"What?\" asked Ivy.\n\n\"Water,\" said Gunderal. Another gift from her genasi ancestors, Gunderal's sensitivity to water's proximity was as strong, or stronger than, her ability to detect magic.\n\n\"Water, running fast, and the earth moving with it, unable to hold it, breaking away as old rocks shift,\" Kid's voice echoed eerily in the tunnel. Like Gunderal, Kid often sensed things that the others couldn't see or hear or smell, especially changes created by magic. No one knew what ancestor had given Kid that ability\u2014probably the same one who had left him both the little ivory horns hidden under his dark curls and the fine pair of hooves at his other end.\n\nIvy shuffled her feet. Mumchance was right: the ground did feel soft under her feet, almost like stepping on something rotten. She looked back to the entrance. They could go out, maybe probe for another way into the tunnel. This spot was too soft. Look at Sanval, she thought. The weight of his armor was causing him to sink into the dirt; it was almost to the level of his ankles. The same thing was happening to Zuzzara, trying to sidestep cracks growing in the tunnel's floor. Ivy realized what she was seeing. \"Oh no!\" she yelled. \"Get back! Get back!\"\n\nShe tried to pull Mumchance back from a suddenly appearing crack, and pulled too hard. He stumbled into Gunderal, who grabbed at Zuzzara, who swung around and got her shovel entangled in Sanval's sword, who fell heavily forward, almost crushing Kid beneath him. They all swayed together and began to fall. They kept falling as the tunnel floor collapsed beneath them.\n\nIvy grabbed for all of them, trying to save everyone and failing to get a grip on anyone.\n\nThe ground crumbled below her feet. She plunged into darkness, into the swift, cold water below. She fell fast and hit the water hard. The icy current shocked her silent as the river pulled her under."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Ivy surfaced, coughing and spitting out water that tasted of mud and ice. The strong current surged around her hips. The water was cold, pulled-out-of-the-mountain cold, pulled-out-of-the-heart-of-the-earth cold. It felt cold. It smelled cold. It even sounded cold, the river's hissing whisper running swiftly around her.\n\nShe could barely keep her balance. The sodden leather breeches and damp padded tunic that she wore under her mismatched pieces of armor added to her misery. The weight of her sword on her back was her only comfort. The crisscross of leather straps keeping the scabbard high on her back still held the blade safe. She checked the side of her belt. Her dagger was still secure in its sheath. She thought about loosening the ties on her belt dagger so she could use the knife quickly. But in the water, with her footing so unstable, she decided that she might drop any weapon that she drew.\n\nHer braid lay sodden across the back of her neck. With bare hands she reached up and confirmed that she had lost her leather cap. She swore a little. She liked that cap. Being secondhand, it was nicely softened for the most comfortable fit possible. Now it was gone, and Ivy would have to find another one. Maybe she would get lucky and fall over another dead body wearing a cap.\n\nLuckily, her gauntlets, armored and lined with sheepskin, had survived the fall and were still stuck in her weapons belt. She pulled them on to protect her hands from the cold water. Besides, the scaled armor on the knuckles of her gloves made a formidable weapon if something jumped her before she could draw her blade.\n\nIvy stood in the darkness, with water hissing past her, and blinked. She blinked again. It was still pitch black, and she couldn't see anything. She patted her pouch. She had her tinder and flint but no candles. The icy current hissed past her hips and she heard a faint splashing sound farther down. She tried a hesitant step forward. It felt like she were moving downhill. Ivy lost her footing, slipped, and slid under the water again.\n\nWhen she surfaced, cursing steadily, the water sloshed off her. The sound of her splashing progress made it impossible to judge what direction she was heading. The river was not deep, just bitter cold as if it ran underground from a mountaintop glacier. Freezing to death seemed more likely than drowning. Ivy started moving, deciding it made no sense to stay still and shudder herself into pieces. If she ran into any sort of enemy\u2014a hobgoblin or an orc seemed likely with a city full of them nearby\u2014she wasn't sure how well she could swing her sword while shivering.\n\nWith no light, she relied on her less-than-perfect human hearing to get her bearing. She listened for her friends but could hear nothing save the increasing howl of the river rushing past her. Moving against the current pulled her further off balance, so she decided to wade downstream, hoping to hit some type of bank. She yelled and waited to hear some answer, but her own yells boomed in echoes and confused her sense of direction more. Low ceiling, Ivy guessed, and rock all around her.\n\nHer boots slipped on the rocky bottom, and she half-fell, half-floated. Getting her feet under her, Ivy realized that the water was creeping up her chest. She needed to find dry land fast. Surging forward, she clanged against a metal grate. The shock jarred her through her armor.\n\nWith another curse, Ivy began to feel along the grate. Her armored gloves scraped across the grate with a piercing screech of metal on metal that made her wince. The metal grid rose higher than her head. Knowing that she could not get any wetter, Ivy drew a deep breath and dived. Feeling under the water, she found the grate extended down to the river bottom, leaving only a hand's width of space between it and the stone.\n\nResurfacing, she felt along the grate, all the time whistling as loud as she could past chattering teeth, being half-winded and steadily more chilled by the water. She might not be able to hear her friends, but she knew that if they were in range, they should be able to hear her. Being right-handed, Ivy groped toward the right along the cold metal.\n\nOut of the corner of her left eye, she saw a faint glimmer of light. The light jerked and weaved toward her. Flattening her back against the grate, Ivy drew her sword from her dripping scabbard. She waited where she was, to see if it were friend or foe that advanced upon her.\n\nA high yip-yap-yap sounded from the source of the light. Ivy sighed and one-handedly, over the shoulder, sheathed her sword and sneezed. The bouncing light resolved itself into Mumchance, running clumsily along the bank of the underground river, while Wiggles weaved around his ankles. When he saw her, he stopped running and bent over, breathing heavily. He was an old dwarf, and running in full chain mail and leather, also sodden with water, had left him out of breath.\n\n\"I thought we'd be in the sea before you stopped swimming,\" Mumchance panted. \"Didn't you hear us yelling for you?\"\n\n\"By the time I got my ears out of the river, all I could hear was water,\" grumbled Ivy as she sloshed to the bank, guided by Mumchance's lantern. \"Where were you? Is everyone safe?\"\n\n\"We were directly behind you. You kept swimming downriver, away from us as fast as you could go.\" Mumchance twisted his head up to get a clear look at her with his one good eye. He was trying to look fierce, but the smile pulling his scars askew undercut the attempt to scold her. \"Daft human!\" It was his worst epithet at such times.\n\n\"Wasn't swimming. I was busy trying not to drown.\" Ivy heaved herself inelegantly out of the water, the bank being almost shoulder-high; so she more rolled and flopped than lifted herself out of the river. The hilt of the sword on her back poked into her neck. She lay on the bank, nose to nose with Wiggles, who pranced back from her. The dog obviously considered one unexpected bath enough of a wetting for one day and did not want Ivy dripping on her. Ivy sneezed again and heard, far in the distance, an answering sneeze.\n\n\"Zuzzara,\" said Mumchance. \"She sounds like a trumpet down here, doesn't she. What are you waiting for? Don't expect me to carry you, do you?\"\n\n\"Just getting my breath back,\" sighed Ivy as she shifted into a sitting position. Out of the river, she felt even wetter and colder than she had in the water. To think that only this morning, she had cursed every layer of armor worn in the summer heat. Cold, wet, and surrounded by darkness, she wondered why dwarves liked living underground. Give her the dust, stink, and sweet summer heat of the siege camp over this!\n\n\"Hope Gunderal brought along one of her warming potions,\" the shivering Ivy said as she swung to her feet. Mumchance and Ivy trudged back to the group, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind them.\n\n\"Gunderal's the only one who didn't fall in the river,\" said Mumchance. Ivy looked down at him. It was impossible to see the dwarf's face underneath his helmet from this angle, but his voice sounded worried, which worried her further. \"Hit the rocks hard instead.\"\n\n\"Of course, the one who can breathe underwater and has webbed toes never goes in the water!\" said Ivy, trying to coax a smile out of the old dwarf. Usually misfortune drew a bitter chuckle out of Mumchance, who took the admirable view that if you could not laugh at bad luck, then you would spend your life crying. But the dwarf did not respond to her feeble joke\u2014another bad sign. \"What makes you more sour than an old pickle?\"\n\n\"My belt came loose in the fall. My best hammer and my pick are underwater somewhere down here.\" Mumchance's gloom was blacker than the hole they were in. He adored his tools and took excellent care of all of them. The pick was only a hundred years old or so, but it was a favorite of his. Ivy glanced at him. The dwarf still had his short sword fastened securely to his weapons belt as well as a small spare hammer, but that wouldn't help them dig their way out of the tunnel.\n\n\"Well, I have my sword and dagger,\" said Ivy, doing a mental inventory of what weapons they might have.\n\n\"And I've got my eye.\" In the lantern's light, the diamond under his left eyebrow flashed. When he was young, Mumchance had been caught in a mine fire. The flames scarred his face and ruined his left eye. When he had enough gold, he paid another dwarf to carve him an eye out of a black sapphire. That was the first of his gem eyes, and he had sold it two hundred years ago to join an expedition to the Great Rift. Since then, he had owned several gem eyes\u2014some magical, some not. Keeping a gem in an empty eye socket was as good a place as any to hide his wealth, he once told Ivy. After all, even the most ruthless of tax collectors or the most skillful of thieves did not want to plunge their fingers into the eye socket of an elderly dwarf.\n\nHis current hidden treasure was a gem bomb made from a polished diamond. Although his right eye was a dark green, many people did not realize that the left one was a fake. The advantage of having extremely bushy eyebrows and equally bushy eyelashes, claimed Mumchance.\n\n\"This stayed stuck,\" said the dwarf, popping the fake eye out and then tapping it back into the socket\u2014a gesture that always made Ivy a bit nauseated, \"even when I fell tail over head into the water.\"\n\n\"At least you landed on the hardest part of your anatomy,\" Ivy said. The dwarf snorted. \"No, it's good to see that diamond sparkle. We want you staying pretty.\" It was a running joke between them: that his current fake eye could keep them all pretty in a bad situation. Gem bombs cost a terrific amount, but Ivy had been happy to pay her share of the expense for this particular diamond.\n\n\"Not losing the gem bomb is the only bit of good luck that we have had. You'll see,\" the dwarf pronounced in despondent tones. Mumchance's expression could have won him a prize for the champion pessimist of the Vast.\n\nWhen Ivy reached Zuzzara and Gunderal, she found the wizard looking paler than ever. She was clutching one arm and turning blue-white around the mouth from pain. Ivy knelt by Gunderal's side. In the dim light of Mumchance's lantern, even Ivy could clearly see that the wizard's arm was dappled with bruises. Pulling off her gloves and thrusting them through her belt, Ivy felt along Gunderal's arm with as gentle a touch as she could manage. The wizard bit her lip and didn't say anything while Zuzzara grumbled, \"Don't pull so hard. She's already fainted once.\"\n\n\"At least you smell better,\" joked Gunderal with white-lipped gallantry as Ivy poked and prodded her arm. \"More like cold water than camel.\"\n\n\"I've had a bath since we last talked,\" Ivy quipped. To a worried Zuzzara, she said, \"No breaks.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Ivy with more conviction in her voice than truth. She was no healer, able to sense what lay beneath the skin. She hadn't felt any movement in the bones, but that didn't mean the arm wasn't broken. \"Strap it tight, Zuzzara, so she can't jostle it. Do you have any of your healing potions with you, Gunderal?\"\n\nGunderal nodded her chin toward a smoldering mass of leather and broken glass. Puffs of noxious purple steam rose from it. \"My potions bag is useless. Everything broke and mixed together.\"\n\nIvy hid her dismay with a shrug and a wave of her hand. \"When did you ever need potions for your spells? Can you dry us off a little? Once Zuzzara has your arm tight?\"\n\n\"I can't even make a light,\" sighed Gunderal. \"I'm sorry, Ivy, I tried earlier when we were looking for you. It hurts, and I can't move my hand, and the words run together \u2026\"\n\n\"Just stop trying,\" growled Zuzzara. \"You always try too hard.\"\n\n\"You don't understand,\" Gunderal snapped back, a slight flush of anger warming her wan features. \"Magic is not just waving your hands and shouting some words. It takes concentration. I certainly can't concentrate with you fussing at me.\"\n\n\"Not to worry,\" said Ivy, hoping to avoid an argument between the two. Zuzzara would throw her body between any danger and Gunderal, but then she always turned around and fussed at the little wizard, which always set off Gunderal. This could lead to some odd results when she was spellcasting, like that flood when all they wanted was a little gentle rain. \"Who needs magic?\" Ivy added. \"We can get out of here without your spells. Just rest now.\"\n\nMumchance shook his head at Ivy. \"It's not new spells that should worry you. It's what she started before we fell in here.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Look at the water.\" The dwarf swung his lantern over the river. The river flowed along the very top edge of the bank. \"She's been pulling all the water toward Tsurlagol for the last few days.\"\n\n\"To undermine the wall.\"\n\n\"Well, it's working very nicely,\" said Mumchance. \"It undercut our tunnel and now it's rising higher.\"\n\n\"Can we get out the way that we fell in?\"\n\nMumchance grunted. It was not a happy sound. \"I sent Kid and that Procampur fellow to look. But I doubt it. The ceiling of the tunnel has probably collapsed between here and the entrance. We're buried alive and in danger of drowning.\"\n\nIvy stared into the darkness, listening to the water hissing below her. \"That is a pleasant way to put it,\" she said at last. \"Any bad news?\"\n\nMumchance shook his head. \"It could be worse. I can smell fresh air\u2014well, not too stale air\u2014and so could Kid.\"\n\n\"So another way out?\"\n\nThe dwarf shrugged. \"Hope so.\"\n\nA clatter of hooves against stone announced the return of Kid and Sanval. They shared the party's other light between them, one of Kid's candles stuck in an earthenware bowl. Kid always had candles, bits of string, and a few odd dishes tucked in his clothing. Apparently some of his treasures had survived the fall.\n\n\"Blow it out,\" said Ivy, gesturing at the candle. Kid did as she asked, but Sanval looked like he wanted to protest at the sudden lack of light. With only Mumchance's lantern to hold back the darkness, the humans were at a distinct disadvantage.\n\n\"Why do that?\" Sanval asked. He kept his voice low and polite, just as if they were sitting in the camp. He hadn't shouted, yelled, or screamed, although Ivy would have done all those things, and a bit more, if she had been dropped through somebody else's tunnel into this mess. Since she was the one who had started this tunnel, she was just managing to swallow her temper. After all, it would do her no good to scream at herself and it would worry the others.\n\nFor Sanval, she gave a fuller explanation than usual, mostly because she knew Procampur's forces were predominately human, and he'd probably never fought beside dwarves, half-orcs, half-genasi, and whatever Kid was (one of these days, Ivy meant to figure that out, but she wasn't too sure that she'd like the answer). \"Because we may need that candle later,\" she explained to Sanval. \"And by we, I mean you and me. The others can see in the dark.\"\n\n\"It's not so much seeing,\" explained Zuzzara, as she worked with a quick gentleness to bind Gunderal's arm into a comfortable position. For now, the half-orc seemed content to play nurse rather than nag.\n\n\"It's more like using the other senses. Sometimes a scent can have color and texture,\" said Gunderal.\n\n\"Smell, and sound, and touch, my dear,\" said Kid, with a tilt of his head.\n\n\"Even with one eye, I can see farther in the dark than any human.\" Mumchance snorted.\n\n\"So we can't afford to waste a candle while the lantern still has fuel,\" Ivy concluded. \"We save the light and trust the others\u2014by which I mean everyone who isn't human\u2014to keep watch.\"\n\n\"It is your company, Captain,\" said Sanval, giving Ivy a title that she rarely used. But he was right; she held the high rank in their group, if only because nobody else wanted the title, and it sounded good when negotiating with someone like the Thultyrl. Ivy stared at Sanval. He gave her that straight-ahead, honest gaze that went with the square chin and rigidly straight helmet (she wondered if it had stayed straight during his fall, or if he had shifted the helmet back into its perfect alignment the first chance he got). Still, the level, honest stare was better than that nobleman's down-the-nose look that he wore sometimes when she was being truly obnoxious. Ivy chose to interpret this as meaning he would not openly disagree with her orders\u2014after all, it was her company, not his.\n\n\"Thank all the gods little and small, or heavy and tall, that Procampur is too polite to fight,\" she hummed under her breath. It was another one of the camp songs, a ditty that the mercenaries favored as an explanation as to why Procampur's soldiers rarely got into the kind of camp squabbles that kept life in the mercenary section so interesting on a daily basis.\n\nThe Procampur gentleman acted as though he had not heard her and mused in his usual mild tone, \"Fighting by candlelight or lamplight poses some interesting challenges.\"\n\n\"We will have no need of swords,\" Ivy said. \"There is probably nothing down here but mud and a few rats.\" Or at least she hoped that was the case. They had a job to do, and one of the worst parts of tunneling under other people's walls was the nasty little surprises that you found underground. There were days when Ivy could swear that there was more wildlife below the earth than above it.\n\nMumchance muscled between the two of them.\n\n\"So now where?\" said the dwarf. \"If it would please you, Captain\"\u2014and his emphasis on the title was as dry as his beard was dripping wet\u2014\"to make up your mind while our boots are still out of the water.\" Like all the Siegebreakers, Mumchance took Ivy's title for what it was\u2014a sham meant to fool other people\u2014but he generally listened to her orders before criticizing. \"Humans are never half as clever with their hands as the silliest dwarf child,\" Mumchance once told her. \"But your race is good at the obvious when it comes to survival. Given half a chance, you can wiggle your way out of a bad situation faster than a rat can gnaw through cheese.\"\n\n\"River isn't over our heads yet,\" said Ivy, \"but we're still all soaked and freezing. I want to be dry and I want to be warm before I start any march out of here. Can't use Gunderal's potions. How about that ring of yours, Zuzzara?\"\n\nThe half-orc held up her bare hand, displaying a heavy gold ring with a crystal set within the band. \"There's only one spell left.\" She sneezed. \"Shouldn't we save it?\"\n\nIvy looked them over. Gunderal looked like a carving made of bone, her complexion more yellow-white than its usual pale pearl. The tip of Zuzzara's nose was turning a nice shade of purple to match the deep gray shadows under her eyes. Mumchance huddled down into the collar of his armor like an old turtle trying to disappear into his shell, while Wiggles shivered at his feet, a miserable bundle of soggy fur. Only Sanval and Kid weren't shivering. In Kid's case, the heat of his ruddy skin was causing the water to literally steam off with a smell like wet goat and sulfur combined. Sanval, of course, stood like a carved post, apparently oblivious to the water dripping off his shiny helmet, streaming across his bright breastplate, and pooling around his well-polished bootheels.\n\n\"We need to be dry,\" said Ivy. \"If only to get rid of that stink that Kid is giving off.\" With a little pointed grin, Kid clattered his hooves and flapped his arms to encourage the cloud around him to drift over the others. Zuzzara sneezed again.\n\n\"Zuzzara should save that spell, especially since I can't do anything,\" argued Gunderal, but she shivered as soon as she spoke. \"We may need her ring later.\"\n\nZuzzara shook her head. With a worried glance at Gunderal, she replied, \"No, we'd better use it now. Your magic will come back quick enough.\" The half-orc twisted the ring around on her finger and muttered the words needed to set off the spell.\n\nThe spell smelled like roses and felt like a desert wind, a long warm breath that blew across them. Heat, dry heat, surrounded them. The whole group was caught in a mini-tornado of hot, whirling air.\n\nThe warmth of the spell slid right down into Ivy's bones. She sighed with pleasure. Dry and warm was the best feeling in the world, Ivy decided. And the cleaning that went with the spell was rather nice too. At least one or two layers of grime had disappeared from her armor, not that magic could ever give it a polish to compare with Sanval's breastplate.\n\nThe rest of the group looked as happy as Ivy felt. Kid's curls tightened around his horns, Gunderal looked more pink than white, Zuzzara stopped sneezing, Sanval's armor practically dazzled the eye in the lamplight, and even Mumchance's scanty beard had curled back up around his chin, instead of dripping down his chest. Wiggles danced on her back legs, obviously delighted to be a white fluffy dog again instead of resembling a drowned white rat.\n\n\"Love that spell,\" Ivy said to Zuzzara.\n\n\"Good,\" said Zuzzara, \"you can pay to recharge the ring next time. You know how much fire and air spells mixed together cost?\"\n\n\"What was that?\" asked Sanval, holding up one arm to examine with bemusement the regained brilliance of his armor.\n\n\"Couple of spells, combined, and caught in the gem,\" explained Gunderal. \"One spell dispels the water and dries you off. Another warms you up. And your clothes are cleaned in the process.\" She gazed with satisfaction at her silk skirts, once again swirling like flower petals around her dainty ankles.\n\n\"You only stay warm for a bit,\" said Zuzzara, \"but you stay dry until you fall into another river or snow bank. Gunderal thought it up for a winter campaign.\"\n\n\"It was the most horrible, miserable time of my life,\" murmured the wizard with an exaggerated shudder. \"I was not just wet and cold all the time. My clothes were muddy and stayed dirty. There was no place to take a hot bath or clean your things.\"\n\n\"That wasn't so bad.\" Ivy shrugged. \"But having your feet wet and cold all day and all night is never fun.\"\n\n\"So I thought of a way that we could combine a few spells to clean us all up,\" said Gunderal with a shake of her head at Ivy's usual dismissal of the importance of baths. \"But since I can't cast fire spells, we have to hire someone else to cast them and store them in the ring. Of course, I can't wear the ring either. Something about the fire spell turns my finger bright red!\"\n\n\"So I wear the ring,\" explained Zuzzara.\n\n\"'Dry Boots' is what we ended up calling that combination of spells. Although the wizard who charged the ring used fancier words,\" recalled Ivy.\n\n\"Dry Boots is what it is. Dry boots is what it does,\" said Zuzzara. \"Wizards can be too fancy at times.\"\n\n\"Not me,\" whispered Gunderal. She was still pale from the pain of having her arm strapped, but she used the fingers of her good hand to twist her curls back into their perfect, blue-black ringlets. Her potions were smashed, but her enameled hairpins and shell combs had survived the fall. She made two more twists of her hair, achieving a fetching topknot. \"I just like to be warm, and clean, and well dressed.\"\n\n\"An excellent preference,\" Sanval agreed with a nod of approval at Gunderal. Ivy sighed and shook her head at the pair's mad obsession with cleanliness.\n\n\"Zuzzara was talking about magic,\" said Mumchance with a roll of his good eye at Gunderal's grooming. \"And even you, lovely Gunderal, can get carried away. You can't just make it rain. When you call the rain, it has to rain with black clouds and lightning strikes, and a cold wind rising up from the earth. Has to rain until it floods, and we're all floating away on the barn roof.\"\n\n\"Just that one time,\" said Zuzzara, stepping in front of Gunderal. She might fuss at Gunderal all day and night, but she always defended her when others did the same thing. \"Don't be so hard on her.\"\n\nIvy let them chatter when they should have been moving because she knew the wizard needed time to regain some strength. But the delay still worried her. The water was definitely lapping over the edge of the riverbank.\n\n\"All I'm saying \u2026\" said Mumchance.\n\n\"Is that we had a magnificent rainmaking business until we had too much rain. You humans and demi-humans never learn to control your magic\u2014not like dwarves,\" said Ivy and Zuzzara and Kid all together. Gunderal giggled, a faint flush of color coming back to her cheeks. Mumchance rolled his eyes.\n\n\"It's an old argument,\" said Ivy, \"and it never quite goes away.\" Zuzzara snorted.\n\n\"Well, Gunderal, my lovely wizard,\" said Mumchance, \"you've done even better this time. The river is rising, Ivy.\"\n\n\"I know, I know,\" said Ivy, \"and it's my fault, not Gunderal's, that we're sitting so low underground. If Gunderal feels well enough to move now, we need to find a way out. Mumchance? Kid?\"\n\nThe dwarf nodded at Kid, who nodded back. The dwarf's sense of direction underground was superb, but Kid came a close second. Sanval started to say something, but Ivy laid a finger against her lips. Silence was needed now.\n\nThe dwarf closed his eye and cocked his head. He stomped his feet a bit, his boot heels ringing on the ground; and Kid stomped back, making the high sharp clicks of hooves against stone. Kid's ears swiveled under his glossy curls, forward, back, and then flat to his head. Mumchance nodded left and then nodded right, and clucked his tongue. Kid whistled. The two opened their eyes at the same time and turned in the same direction.\n\n\"That way,\" said Mumchance pointing off to the right. \"There's a tunnel entrance down there.\"\n\n\"Maybe two, my dear,\" said Kid, sniffing the air. \"Big hole and little hole, running close together.\"\n\nIvy nodded. Underground, Mumchance had the best sense of direction, but Kid often surprised them with his unerring instinct for the safest route or the quickest way to the surface.\n\nZuzzara bent down to pick up Gunderal. \"I can walk,\" whispered the wizard. \"It's not my legs that are broken.\"\n\n\"What if you faint again?\"\n\n\"Don't argue,\" said Ivy, \"or argue later. We need to move.\" Even with her human eyes, she could see the water was higher now, almost to the lip of the ledge where they rested. \"No more Dry Boots, remember?\"\n\nGunderal made a face and stood up, following the others away from the river water. Although she was descended from the water genasi on her mother's side and could, with a simple spell, breathe perfectly well underwater, she was not dressed for swimming and was rather relieved that nobody had asked her to try to find a way out through the river. Normally, when Gunderal went swimming, she had a special, magical scaled outfit to wear\u2014one that looked stunning both wet and dry.\n\nThe Siegebreakers felt along the ledge, walking cautiously in the direction that the dwarf had indicated.\n\nUnlike the ledge, which appeared to have been made by men or dwarves, and was part of some ancient canal running into one of the earlier incarnations of Tsurlagol, the new tunnel appeared to have been dug out by some huge animal. Letting Kid lead, Ivy gestured for the others to follow. They fell into their usual pattern for a cramped space, a single file line. Kid clicked away first, Mumchance following with the lantern, and then Gunderal behind him. Ivy swung into her usual place behind Gunderal and felt uneasy. She glanced back to encounter Sanval's cool gaze rather than Zuzzara's \"hurry up\" stare. Zuzzara's bulk loomed behind Sanval. It was the usual order, but with one added. At her back was someone unknown. Would he know the right way to duck if she needed to swing in a cramped space? She would never hit Zuzzara by accident in a fight; the half-orc was used to Ivy, and Ivy was used to her. They knew which way the other would move. Ivy hoped that Sanval could stay out of the way in a fight. She suspected that cutting off one or two of Sanval's limbs might not help her win payment from the Thultyrl.\n\nMore importantly, now that she was not in immediate danger of drowning or freezing to death, Ivy considered the Thultyrl's request. They had to be reasonably close to the city walls, and that meant they still could undercut the foundation. They had water, lots of water, running swiftly behind them. They had magic. Well, they would have magic if Gunderal could ignore the pain of a possibly broken arm and call up a spell or two. In all probability, they could still collapse the southwest corner of Tsurlagol's walls in time. And that meant they could collect their payment. Maybe even pad the bill a little for additional hardship\u2014after all, they would need to pay some wizard to create a new Dry Boots ring, and then there were all those potions that Gunderal had lost. Most likely, the potions could be added under miscellaneous expenses. That sounded fair to Ivy.\n\nThings were not so bad, Ivy thought, but she was too wary to say it out loud. Luck had a way of turning on you, she had found, especially when you believed the worst was over."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "The tunnel branch smelled bad\u2014like something had dragged carrion through it. It was a tight squeeze for Zuzzara. The half-orc bent low, pulled in her shoulders, and used her shovel to dig herself a wider opening at one point. Mumchance kept muttering at them to hurry, that he could smell the water rising behind them.\n\n\"Move then.\" Ivy pitched her voice loud enough for the dwarf to hear her. \"Get those short legs stepping.\" A sharp bark sounded from Mumchance's pocket. \"And stifle that dog. You can hear her for miles.\"\n\nMumchance scratched Wiggles's head. \"Don't mind her, sweetie. Don't mind the bad-tempered lady who didn't listen to us when she should have \u2026\"\n\n\"Just march,\" snapped Ivy. She might not have a dwarf's keen sense of smell, but the rank odor of damp earth surrounded them, evident to even her very human nose. Years of tunneling behind Mumchance had taught her to be wary of such places. Wet earth tended to be unstable, and a collapsing wall or ceiling in this place could leave them buried forever. \"Gods, grant me cremation and not burial in wet earth,\" muttered Ivy as she burrowed like a half-mad rabbit after the others.\n\nBehind her, silence reigned. Sanval, true to his silver-roof dignity, had not uttered one complaint, not even when Zuzzara's digging had cascaded dirt down his back. Ivy wished the half-orc was as restrained. Louder than Wiggles's barks, a steady stream of muttering came from Zuzzara as she tried to squirm through the narrowing hole.\n\nThe tunnel angled steeply upward, and the scent in the air changed. It was no longer quite so rank, but still musty. But a big musty, like a large space, Ivy thought.\n\nThe light from Mumchance's lantern bobbed up and down and then disappeared with a sudden drop.\n\n\"Cave ahead,\" said Gunderal, repeating Mumchance's instructions down the line. \"Small drop.\"\n\nIvy hissed that description back to Sanval and heard him tell Zuzzara.\n\n\"Good, good,\" the half-orc replied in a booming voice that brought down another trickle of dirt from the ceiling, \"my back is aching. Just let me stand up straight, that's all I ask.\"\n\nWhat Ivy dropped into was not a cave, but a huge hall buried completely underground. The walls were too far away to be lit by Mumchance's little lantern. Great columns rose from the floor to support a ceiling lost in the black shadows above. They looked like strong support columns, which was good; but there was no way to see the condition of the high ceiling, which was bad. The air still smelled stale, but there was an older smell, harsh beneath the damp.\n\n\"Ash,\" said Mumchance, stirring up a cloud with his booted foot. \"Floor was burned long ago.\"\n\n\"Bones, too,\" reported Kid, skipping back into the circle of light. \"Old bones, my dears, scorched skulls and blackened ribs.\"\n\n\"Kid, stay away from those,\" Ivy snapped. He ignored her, continuing to poke among the piles.\n\nGunderal walked up to one of the black columns and rubbed her good hand across it. She left a white streak shining in the lamplight. \"Soot,\" she said, displaying the black marks on the ends of her delicate fingers. She frowned at the mess on her fingers and pulled a lace handkerchief out of her pocket to clean off the grime. \"A fire storm inside. It smells like magic, Ivy.\"\n\n\"How long ago? Is it gone now?\" Ivy wondered if it could be a lingering spell or curse, something that could collapse the place on top of them if they touched some forbidden object.\n\nGunderal whispered a few words and tilted her head and gave the slightest of sniffs, as if she were trying to smell a faded perfume in a room long abandoned. \"Before we were born\u2014before our mothers or our grandmothers,\" she said, shrugging and wincing as the gesture pulled at her arm sling.\n\n\"Speak for your own grandparents,\" said Mumchance. \"Mine probably carved these pillars. Look at the fluting on the base, Ivy, that's good clean stonework. Dwarves carved that; humans wouldn't have the patience for it.\"\n\n\"Men can build and carve well, if they desire it,\" said Sanval, coming up to them with a solid rap of hard boot heels against stone. Ivy thought about pointing out that his firm tread was stirring up more ash, which was settling back down on his beautifully polished boots. But she decided not to comment, not until his boots looked exceptionally bad.\n\n\"There were great temples and palaces in Tsurlagol once, before it fell,\" continued Sanval. \"Not all were built by dwarves.\"\n\n\"I still say it is quality work, and that generally means dwarves,\" said Mumchance. \"Tsurlagol was always a steady source of income for those inclined to work with humans. The city's name became another word for 'job available' among dwarves. After all, the humans needed it rebuilt so many times.\"\n\nIgnoring the arguments, Ivy asked the important question. \"So we're in Tsurlagol?\"\n\n\"In the ruins of some earlier Tsurlagol, I think,\" said Sanval slowly, as if he were dredging up an old story from his memory. \"This city has been destroyed and rebuilt so often, it can be hard to know one level from the next. There are tales of fire once destroying Tsurlagol, sweeping through the city. A fire begun by wizards. It burned so wildly and so free that they finally buried the city under the earth to stifle it.\"\n\n\"Earth magic and fire magic,\" said Gunderal. \"I can smell traces of it in this place. But both extinguished now. And something else too, something even older. Something strange, that pulls on the Weave in a way that I do not recognize.\"\n\n\"So how far are we from present day Tsurlagol?\" asked Ivy, whose interest in history had never been strong and tended to be even less when she was trapped underground and had missed her breakfast and had little hope of lunch.\n\n\"Outside the walls still,\" said Mumchance. \"We've been traveling too far to the north to be under the current city. That's what I think, and I'm usually right.\"\n\n\"Yes, and a disgusting habit that is too,\" replied Ivy. She rubbed her eyes\u2014the old ash kicked up by her passage made her itchy\u2014and peered into the gloom. \"Best way out?\"\n\n\"Many ways, my dear,\" said Kid, trotting back and forth like a restless racehorse. \"East, west, south, north. Lots of tunnels going out of here. Bigger than the way we came. Men and dwarves have been down here since this burned and been busy, busy, busy digging away. Others have come since. Animals slithering on bellies, four-foot and two-foot and no-foot, hunting behind the humans and dwarves. Old tracks overlaying older tracks, all hunting one another.\" Kid's tongue flickered in and out of his mouth, as if he tasted all those passages in the air itself.\n\n\"At least there are not any rats,\" said Zuzzara, who had a strong dislike of rodents. It was Gunderal who always had to clean out the rattraps in the barn, unless she could talk somebody else into doing it.\n\n\"Too many reptiles, my dear,\" said Kid, bending over to examine a small pile of bones.\n\n\"Reptiles?\" said Gunderal, who had a bigger dislike of snakes than Zuzzara had of rats. Ivy could not stand either rats or snakes, and so she killed them whenever she met any. Slicing off their little heads always made her feel better.\n\n\"Snakes, lizards, something else, my dear,\" said Kid, still stirring through the skeletons on the floor. \"But these bones are men and halflings and dwarves.\"\n\n\"Treasure hunters,\" explained Sanval. \"The ruins were rumored to be laden with ancient treasures, magical artifacts, and so on. Men came, and dwarves too, and others as well, to dig through the buried cities. Tsurlagol has been many cities\u2014each one destroyed in a siege and then rebuilt.\"\n\n\"And wherever the treasure hunters go, predators follow close behind,\" grumbled Mumchance.\n\nSanval nodded. \"The ruins gained an evil reputation, and most of the entrances were sealed. Then Tsurlagol fell in another battle, and another.\"\n\n\"Until they lost track of their own ruins,\" Mumchance said.\n\n\"Sort of place that my mother would have loved, if it were stacked with treasure,\" observed Ivy. \"She probably could have sung you the city's entire history right back to when the first stone was laid for the first wall. When she wasn't saving the world or singing for some king, she was the most avid treasure hunter, always going underground after some artifact or other. That was one of the things that my father could never understand. He thought all jewels and gems were just worthless sparkly rocks compared to a nice flowering bush or a flourishing oak tree.\"\n\nAs they talked, they all circled slowly around the enormous hall, careful to stay within the small circle of light cast by Mumchance's lantern. Kid ventured the farthest into the dark, reaching into the shadows to feel the walls and better assess their condition.\n\n\"Your parents sound \u2026\" Sanval hesitated. He obviously could not find a polite way to inquire about her ancestry, but he tried. \"They don't seem to have been quite the same as you.\"\n\n\"Not hardly,\" said Ivy with a snort. \"They were heroes. When your Thultyrl finishes his great library, you can find their exploits in a dozen story scrolls. Saved the world from incredible evil a dozen times.\" She always found her parents hard to explain, especially to romantic fools like Sanval who believed in honor, great deeds, and noble acts of sacrifice as much as keeping their boots shined and their armor polished. Nor would he understand that the legacy of their heroics could be a greater burden than a boon to their daughter.\n\nMumchance pulled Wiggles out of his pocket and dropped the dog upon the floor, letting her run loose as he continued to examine the carvings at the bases of the pillars. She pawed at one pile of ash, turning up one of the scorched skulls that Kid had mentioned. Mumchance bent down to look closer at the dog's treasure. Several teeth had been broken out of the jaw. He shooed the dog away from the bones. He never allowed any of his dogs to chew on anything that resembled people, whether it was human, dwarf, or even orc. It made for bad feelings in a mercenary camp and, he believed, was bad for the dogs' teeth.\n\n\"Something came down here and pried the gold teeth out of the jaws,\" he speculated as he held the skull out of Wiggles's whining reach. \"This area has been pretty well looted. There's no treasure left down here. Just ash and bones.\"\n\nKid made a little grunt in agreement as he brushed away the ash covering a headless and armless skeleton. Unlike the other bones scattered nearby, this skeleton glowed an odd phosphorescent green.\n\n\"Blast,\" said Ivy, catching sight of the shimmering green light surrounding the bones. \"Kid, I told you to leave that stuff alone.\"\n\nThe odd skeleton moved, a very slow tentative movement, wiggling through the ash like a worm. Kid skipped neatly out of its way, not particularly frightened but not fool enough to let the skeleton touch him.\n\n\"What is it?\" asked an amazed Sanval. In Procampur, bones did not go crawling around on their own.\n\n\"Skeleton warrior or what is left of one.\" Gunderal sniffed. \"Badly made too. It should have a head, hands, and weapons.\" The thing staggered upright and wobbled on unsteady feet toward them. The Siegebreakers circled out of its way. It tottered after Kid, as if it were playing some grotesque child's game of hide-and-tag.\n\nWiggles spotted the moving skeleton and with a joyous bark started chasing after it. The little white dog wove in and around the skeleton's ankles with little yips, obviously regarding the whole thing as one giant snack. She rose up on her hind legs, dancing like a beggar before the green glowing bones.\n\n\"Oh blast,\" said Ivy seeing Mumchance's frown at Wiggles's actions.\n\nMumchance whistled one high sharp note. With drooping tail, the dog came back to his side. \"It's your fault, Ivy, that she chases after such things,\" scolded the dwarf.\n\nIvy had taught Wiggles to catch bones when she threw them to her. \"Well, she started doing that little dance for bones all on her own,\" Ivy said, defending her earlier actions to Mumchance.\n\n\"She did not. You encouraged her to do that. And it's just not dignified!\"\n\nIvy considered that any dog bearing the unfortunate moniker of \"Wiggles\" already lacked dignity, but she knew better than to say it out loud. Instead, to soothe the dwarf's feelings, she asked him if he thought the skeleton warrior could be of any use to them.\n\n\"Lead us out of here, you mean? No, those things are brainless, and this one is more so than most,\" observed Mumchance as he circled left to avoid the headless skeleton. \"Somebody looted whatever armor and weapons these poor sods had. They just left the bones behind because they're worthless.\" The skeleton seemed to sense that Mumchance was talking about it, because it began its mad lurch toward the dwarf.\n\n\"Let's leave before it bumps into anyone. It looks a bit moldy under that glow,\" said Gunderal, pulling her skirts close with one hand to avoid any contact with the thing. \"Or before it kicks up more dust!\"\n\n\"Shouldn't we kill it?\" asked Sanval, still eyeing the lurching green bones with an uneasy look.\n\n\"Gunderal can knock it over with a spell,\" declared Zuzzara. \"Go on, show him.\"\n\n\"It's a waste of magic,\" answered the wizard with a small frown of her pink lips. \"Why should I do anything to it?\" The skeleton was now reeling back and forth, obviously both attracted and distracted by the sound of their voices.\n\n\"It is harmless,\" agreed Ivy. \"And it is already dead.\"\n\n\"I think we need to go east,\" said Mumchance, still walking in circles to avoid the skeleton. The dwarf ducked around the columns.\n\n\"Hey,\" yelled Ivy, \"don't leave us in the dark.\"\n\nMumchance popped around the column that Gunderal had marked earlier, holding his lantern above his head to cast the widest possible circle of light. \"Kid was right. Several ways out of here. I think we have gone west of the city, so we need to find a tunnel leading east.\"\n\n\"And that will lead us under the walls and then out,\" Ivy concurred. \"Let's start moving. Come on!\"\n\nBut Gunderal and Zuzzara were paying no attention to Ivy. They were still arguing about Gunderal's reluctance to cast a spell.\n\n\"I am not disanimating that skeleton,\" said the wizard, with the suggestion of a pout starting to form on her lower lip.\n\n\"Why not?\" Zuzzara wanted to know. The half-orc's teeth were beginning to show under her upper lip\u2014a sure sign of annoyance.\n\n\"Just because I don't feel like doing it,\" Gunderal replied. The headless skeleton started its weaving wander toward them.\n\n\"You always put down bones when you can. You have lost your magic!\" The last was shrieked by the half-orc. The skeleton made an abrupt about-turn and lurched away from them.\n\n\"Don't be foolish! I can't lose my magic. I'm just tired, and my arm hurts, and you keep screaming at me!\" Gunderal stamped her foot, raising up a cloud of ash. \"Look what you made me do. It will take me forever to clean these skirts.\"\n\n\"You're still in pain. I told you that I should carry you out of those tunnels. You have exhausted yourself,\" said Zuzzara, modulating her voice into something less than an orc shout but still loud enough to make everyone else in the room wince. The skeleton picked up speed away from the half-orc, lurching rapidly toward the nearest tunnel entrance. Ivy watched it go with a mild expression of envy. Once Zuzzara and Gunderal got to the screaming stage, it was difficult to shut their mouths with anything less than an avalanche.\n\n\"I'm not a child,\" Gunderal answered back, her voice going higher, like a stubborn little girl. \"Besides, that tunnel was so narrow, you could barely get yourself through it.\"\n\n\"But you're all white and dizzy.\"\n\n\"Because I'm wasting breath arguing with you. Leave it be, Zuzzara, I'm fine. The arm just aches. I'm not going to die from a sprained arm.\"\n\n\"So why can't you do any spells? You can always do spells.\"\n\n\"Not when I'm in pain and somebody is shouting in my ear!\"\n\nThe skeleton was just a faint green glow, disappearing into the black tunnel.\n\n\"Shut up!\" shouted Ivy, cutting across their words with a parade ground bellow. \"They can hear you all the way back to the Thultyrl's tent. Zuzzara, if Gunderal faints or even starts to faint, sling her over your shoulder. Until then, leave her be!\"\n\n\"Sorry, Ivy,\" muttered Zuzzara.\n\n\"Sorry, Ivy,\" echoed Gunderal.\n\nIvy shook her head at them, a little startled that they had actually paid attention to her. They must both be feeling exceptionally bad. \"You should be sorry. Disgraceful, Zuzzara spending so much time worrying about you, Gunderal. And Gunderal, you should stand up to her more. Just because you're such a shrimp \u2026\"\n\nGunderal squealed an indignant reply. Zuzzara frowned at Ivy. \"She's not a shrimp. That's not a nice thing to say, Ivy. She can't help being short.\"\n\n\"I am not short!\" yelled Gunderal. \"I'm just not oversized!\"\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" said Zuzzara, patting Gunderal on her head.\n\n\"Zuzzara!\" Gunderal ducked out of reach of the half-orc's friendly pats and checked her topknot with her good hand to make sure that it was still straight. Her hair had slid a little to the side. Gunderal pulled a small round silver mirror out of her pouch with a sigh. The mirror, unlike her potions, had survived the fall. She handed it to Zuzzara with a sharp command of \"make yourself useful, hold this for me.\"\n\nIvy rolled her eyes. The world could be ending and Gunderal would still be combing her curls or arguing with Zuzzara. \"Never, ever, go campaigning with a pair of sisters,\" Ivy said to Sanval. \"Just because they are related, they will drive each other crazy as well as everyone else around them.\"\n\n\"They are sisters?\" He nodded toward them, his eyes wide. The half-orc, with her gray-streaked braids caught in iron beads, her sharp-toothed grin, and her large-boned frame, towered above the delicate Gunderal, with her fine features, rose petal skin, violet eyes, and a cloud of blue-black hair sliding out of its enameled pins and shell combs. Ivy could see why he had not caught the family resemblance.\n\nThere were never two women more physically different than Gunderal and Zuzzara, and most of the mercenaries in the camp never even guessed that they were half-sisters\u2014unless they came flirting after Gunderal only to meet the point of Zuzzara's sword. Or picked a fight with the half-orc and suddenly found themselves entangled in one of Gunderal's spells.\n\nAfter a decade of living with them, Ivy sometimes forgot about the physical differences. It was something about the tone of their voices, the quickness in which they could dissolve each other into tears or laughter, or the way that they would both nag her simultaneously. She had a hard time seeing them as anything but sisters.\n\n\"How can they be so different and still be sisters?\" Sanval asked.\n\nIvy shook her head at the Procampur's stodginess.\n\n\"Same human father, very different mothers,\" she said. \"They each take after the maternal side of their family. Look, we don't have time to discuss their family history, because it is extraordinarily complicated. Ask Mumchance some time; he knew their father.\" To everyone else, she shouted, \"Let's get moving!\"\n\n\"Ivy, I hear something,\" Mumchance said. \"Listen. Something is coming. From there.\"\n\nThe dwarf pointed toward the far side of the huge hall in the direction they would have to travel. Ivy shifted her sword off her back, clipping the scabbard on to the side of her weapons belt, so it would be easier to draw. She saw that Sanval already had his blade out. It, of course, gleamed in the light of Mumchance's lantern.\n\nKid pricked up his pointed little ears, swiveling them in the direction that Mumchance was pointing. \"Feet. Many little feet.\" Kid licked his lips with his purple tongue. \"Many little scaly reptile feet running toward us.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Zuzzara pushed her sister behind her, then stood with her shovel raised over her head, obviously listening. She peered through the darkness in the direction that Kid had pointed out. \"He's right, Ivy,\" she said. \"Something is coming\u2014something small and fast!\"\n\nMumchance tapped the remaining hammer in his tool belt to be sure it was in easy reach, then lifted his lantern higher, to light the hall to its fullest extent. Ivy hissed to the dwarf, \"Your sword, don't forget your sword.\" She did not have to remind Sanval or Kid about the importance of edged weapons. Sanval shifted to a position closer to the front, facing where Mumchance had pointed earlier. Two slender stilettos appeared in Kid's hands. In a few moments, even the humans could hear the sounds of hard, scaled little feet pattering quickly toward them.\n\n\"Kobolds,\" groaned Mumchance, a dwarf with far too many centuries of memories of the little lizardfolk that plagued the underground routes of the world. \"Those rotten little pests.\"\n\nKobolds burst through two entrances, attracted by the noise that Zuzzara and Gunderal had been making earlier. A few carried glowing green bones to light their way. Others were bearing flaming torches. Still more were heavily armed with pointed sticks, wooden clubs, and looted weapons. They flowed like a river through the cave\u2014a tumbling, angry river of small, scaly brown creatures. From their horned heads and reptilian snouts to their nasty ratlike tails and long-clawed toes, they shook with the fury of their barking. The Siegebreakers could barely hear one another's warning shouts over the racket.\n\nIvy realized that their ragged line formation was about to be overrun. She bellowed, \"Tight in! Tight in! Form a knot!\" Sanval and Zuzzara shifted closer to her, forming the classic square position taught by military tacticians from Tethyr to Narfell. The smaller members of the party gathered close behind them, to be better shielded from the onslaught. Of course, long shields were normally used in this tactic. Any shield would have helped, but none of them had bothered to carry campaign shields to a tunnel dig. Ivy saw Sanval shift his left arm to the classic shield lock position, grimace when he realized that he was presenting just his forearm and elbow armor to the kobolds, and then use that same armored elbow to deliver a devastating blow to a kobold's vulnerable throat.\n\n\"Back-to-back?\" asked Sanval. It was another classic, especially if fighters lacked shields.\n\n\"Too many,\" said Zuzzara, her half-orc vision allowing her to quickly assess the size of the threat about to overrun them.\n\nThe kobolds swirled out toward the walls of the pillared great hall, then rushed inward, under and over one another. They wore ragged clothing and bits of stolen armor\u2014armbands from humans now wrapped around kobold thighs, a human-sized elbow guard used as a knee guard\u2014and they waved their spears above their heads. It was hard for human sight to separate them; they looked like one big scaly mass of prickly arms and knobby legs. Ivy found that when she swung her sword at the kobolds, she was apt to bring it down on a sudden gap between them and then lift it with several kobolds clinging to the blade. They flew upward from her raised thrust, flying over one another and slamming into Ivy's head and shoulders on the way down.\n\nIvy stumbled and dropped to one knee. The kobolds swept over her in a ceiling of lizard underbellies, tattered shirts, and flashing red eyes. With a death grip on her sword's hilt, Ivy pushed herself upright, jabbing with her elbows and kicking out with her boot heels. The kobolds scrabbled to cling to her. She reached out with her free hand and grabbed a kobold by his ragged collar, swung him around to gain momentum, then tossed him back against the others. That created a momentary gap in the mass of bodies and gave her room to settle into a fighting stance. Once she regained her balance, she pivoted rapidly, her sword circling in a wide arc. The flat of its blade smacked into scaly bodies, clearing her path.\n\nAnother mass of kobold fighters flew toward her. She beat them back with her sword.\n\nSanval fought as Ivy had expected he would\u2014with the absolutely correct posture of a man who had been trained by the very best tutors and then practiced every day as they recommended. The swift strokes of his sword cleaved a clear path through the kobolds. Unlike Zuzzara, Mumchance, or\u2014it must be admitted\u2014herself, Sanval did not scream or yell or curse as the little scaly pests swarmed around them. He just moved in perfect time with Ivy's attacks\u2014backing up a step when she backed up, lunging forward with her when she lunged, his dagger in one hand, his sword in the other, in a perfect fighting stance. The kobolds tried to take advantage of his upright position, ducking beneath his weapons and wrapping their arms around his leather boots. They scratched and clung and tried to climb, curling their fingers around his belt to pull themselves up. He raised his arm, tapped his dagger on the top of his helmet to straighten it, then dropped into a lower position\u2014all the better to hit vulnerable parts of the kobold anatomy with his shining sword and dagger.\n\nThe creatures parted before him, obviously intimidated by the fighter in brilliant armor. Sanval just smiled and dived after them. He seemed much happier now that he was confronting living things. He had lost the consternation evident during the earlier encounter with the glowing skeleton, but he did pause to say over his shoulder, very politely, \"Is it acceptable to kill these creatures?\"\n\n\"Not even their mother will miss them!\" yelled Ivy, slicing a hand off a kobold that was making a grab for Sanval's brightly polished elbow guard.\n\nThe beast fell down with a gurgle of blood gushing over its companions. The other kobolds seemed distracted, obviously trying to decide between looting their injured companion and attacking the warm-blooded humans before them. Two kobolds looked down at the easy prey at their feet and up again at the warrior woman with her sharp sword and stolen spear and the man in the impossibly bright armor. The half-orc was still bashing right and left with her shovel and getting nearer. The two kobolds looked at each other again and broke off from the fight, dragging their screaming former companion to a shadowy corner and snarling at anyone trying to take their prize from them.\n\nWith the kobolds distracted by the scuffle over the wounded member of their tribe, Ivy took advantage of the lull in the fight to glance over her shoulder.\n\nEveryone was knee deep in the short reptilian fighters (except Mumchance, who was nose deep). Like Ivy, the dwarf turned in circles, to protect himself on all sides, keeping the metal lantern as high as possible to give the fighters the most light. He kept jerking his head from side to side to see out of his one good eye.\n\nZuzzara\u2014a mountain in the sea of kobolds\u2014beat down from her height, her neat braids and big gold earrings swinging around her head, her finely tailored leather waistcoat stretched tight. The shovel became a no-nonsense club in Zuzzara's big hands, perfect for smacking heads, breaking spears in half, and sending kobolds flying.\n\nBut for every little brute that they knocked down, more appeared.\n\nIvy screamed at her friends to beat a strategic retreat up the nearest tunnel that was kobold free. \"Knot hold, small fall back,\" she shouted.\n\nMumchance, whose responsibility in such formations was to lead the rear retreat, yelled that he had a tunnel. It was a narrow hole, only two or three kobolds wide and barely tall enough for Zuzzara to stand without bending.\n\nZuzzara was the last to leave the hall. She stopped in the shallow cave in front of the opening and tried to make a door of herself, closing the entry to the kobolds with her width and her slamming shovel. The majority of kobolds, still hungry, tried to rush around Zuzzara to follow them. Zuzzara gave a shout when one of the creatures trying to circle around her attempted to ram its spear into her backside. The spear caught on the long tails of the half-orc's leather waistcoat, proving Gunderal right in her argument that the style was not only fashionable but good protection too. Then Zuzzara swung around and brained the kobold with her shovel.\n\nIvy shoved little Gunderal in front of her as Sanval defended her back. The dainty wizard turned, obviously worried about her sister. Facing the pack of reptilian humanoids, Gunderal brought her uninjured hand up to her face and blew hard, making a high whistling noise. A blue light streaked across a startled kobold's face, and a fine icicle suddenly appeared hanging off the end of its nose. But the creature took no harm from the spell, shaking off the ice and wading back into the attack. \"Go on, go on. Zuzzara is doing fine,\" Ivy shouted at the obviously dismayed wizard. \"Keep up with Kid.\"\n\nMumchance swung flat against the tunnel wall, letting Kid and Gunderal scamper past. A kobold snuck past him as well, and Sanval made as if to follow, but Ivy caught his arm. Kid would keep Gunderal safe. He kicked back with his hooves, catching the kobold smartly on its scaly snout and giving it a flowing bloody nose. Another kick caught the kobold lower down, right below the stomach, and the creature folded into a small ball of whimpers.\n\nMumchance knocked it into its fellows with a hard blow from his fist. Wiggles gave the creature a nip on the tail in passing and then bit the ankle of another kobold trying to sneak up on the dwarf.\n\n\"Good dog!\" said Mumchance, pulling the remaining hammer from his belt and braining the kobold with it.\n\n\"Use your sword!\" Ivy shouted at him. The dwarf always forgot his sword.\n\nMumchance shoved his hammer back in his broad belt and pulled out his sword, waving it wildly. A number of kobolds ended up with sliced ears and nicked toes. The dwarf delayed following Kid. He still carried the Siegebreakers' only lantern, and he knew the humans needed him to light their exit from the tunnel.\n\nIvy whipped around, checking behind her and cutting off a kobold sliding along the tunnel wall. She rammed her sword through the belly of the scaly attacker and grabbed its spear with her other hand. She jabbed back with the spear, just under Sanval's arm, to catch another kobold in the throat.\n\nMumchance's energetic, if less effective, fighting sent the beams of the lantern swinging wildly. To avoid being blinded by the sudden light shining in her eyes, Ivy glanced up. Above them, she saw that one of the old wooden beams holding up the tunnel was clearly cracked.\n\n\"Zuzzara!\" yelled Ivy, and she gestured with her thumb at the beam. The big half-orc glanced in the direction of the beam and then swept her shovel through the kobolds as though she were sweeping dust out the door. The creatures squealed as they went rolling down the tunnel.\n\n\"See it!\" shouted Zuzzara.\n\n\"Come on, Procampur,\" Ivy said, dropping the kobold spear that she still clutched and grabbing Sanval's shiny steel-clad shoulder. She shoved him in front of her, almost ramming his nose into the side of the tunnel as she swung him around. \"Time to run!\"\n\n\"Your friend\u2014\" Sanval sounded a little muffled as he tried to keep his face out of the dirt wall in front of him.\n\n\"Can take care of herself,\" interrupted Ivy. \"Follow the dwarf and stop fighting the kobolds. Zuzzara will get them!\"\n\nFalling farther behind her fleeing friends, the half-orc continued bowling kobolds into their kin using her shovel. The kobolds retreated, a bit intimidated by the tall, screaming half-orc woman with pointed teeth who was swinging an iron-headed shovel.\n\nZuzzara waded right into the group of kobolds. Now she swung the shovel like a scythe, a long, low sweeping motion that mowed through them. The little brown creatures ricocheted off the shovel's flat end, bouncing head over tail onto their fellows. Thunk, whack, thunk. The shovel rang against their scaly hides and horned heads. The kobold's leader\u2014a little taller and greener than the rest of the crew\u2014barked something high and sharp that sounded like Draconic commands, and his guards lowered their spears and tried to overrun Zuzzara. Most of the spear points simply bounced off her thigh guards and her wide leather belt with its big brass buckle. She was far too tall for the kobolds to reach any vulnerable points.\n\n\"Come on,\" said Ivy, still propelling the rest of the group in front of her. \"Run!\"\n\nOnce again, Sanval swung around Ivy, obviously intent on backtracking down the tunnel to join Zuzzara. Ivy grabbed him by his sword arm, disregarding the danger of being skewered by his blade, and pulled him completely around by shifting her weight and digging her feet in.\n\n\"We must help her. What are you doing?\" yelled the captain.\n\n\"No. Keep going,\" Ivy shouted the order, and the tone got through to him. He blinked in confusion at her. \"She'll bring the ceiling down. She knows what she's doing. Run, you idiot hero, run!\"\n\nZuzzara flipped another kobold off the end of her shovel and plunged the blade straight up, catching it against the timber holding up that section of the ceiling. The half-orc bulged her muscles as she levered the shovel against the cracked beam. One brass button pinged off her waistcoat, and the kobold leader screamed as he caught it squarely in the eye.\n\nThe crack widened, and dirt rained down upon the squeaking kobolds. They raced away from the terrible giant who had wreaked such destruction upon them. With a loud splintering sound, the beam split in two. The beam's loose end bounced upon the head of the kobold's leader, cracking his skull.\n\nZuzzara spun around and raced back to her group, scooping up Sanval and Ivy as she ran. She tucked one under each arm, as if they were small children. Her shovel crashed against Ivy's knees as she tightened her grip around Ivy's waist. Ivy hoped that her armor would hold and tried not to think about breathing. \"Let's go,\" Zuzzara cried.\n\nWith a crash, the rest of the ceiling collapsed, sending clouds of dirt through the tunnel. Coughing, choking, and with streaming eyes, the group stumbled out into a large, hollow space. Zuzzara gently set Sanval and Ivy down.\n\n\"Thank you, Zuzzara,\" said Ivy, once she had spat some of the dust out of her throat.\n\nThe gentleman from Procampur lowered his head in a quick bow toward the half-orc. \"I also thank you, Lady Zuzzara, but I am sorry that I was not allowed to aid in your defense.\"\n\n\"Sanval, there was no need to play the hero. Zuzzara can take care of herself. Take care of the rest of us too,\" Ivy said, once she had figured out that he was courteously criticizing her order to retreat.\n\n\"But the thought was sweet,\" said Zuzzara, smiling wide enough to show off her long white canines.\n\n\"Maybe we all need a short rest,\" Ivy said and sat down on the ground with her legs straight out in front of her, her hands on knees, and her back bent. She tried not to gasp too loudly as she endeavored to catch her breath.\n\nSanval stood beside her, but from somewhere under his armor, he had retrieved a cloth and, to no one's surprise, began polishing his sword. \"What are your plans now, Captain?\"\n\nIvy looked up at him, trying not to look too discomposed. She was fairly certain that there were still bits of kobold stuck to parts of her gear. She pulled off her gauntlets and shoved them through her belt. \"We will bring the western wall down for your Thultyrl, just as we discussed. This is just a little detour; but we will end up under the wall, and do a little strategic digging with Zuzzara's shovel. Let the river do its work. And then, plop goes the wall. We just need to be out of the way when the whole thing topples down.\"\n\n\"At least today is still better than that time with the hogs,\" muttered Zuzzara.\n\n\"Oh, definitely better than the hogs,\" Gunderal agreed. The little wizard motioned Zuzzara to sit down and immediately began readjusting her sister's braids\u2014a good sign that their latest spat was over.\n\n\"Hogs?\" Sanval said, watching them with a puzzled frown. Ivy wasn't sure if he were confused by the reference to pork or still trying to figure out how the pair could be sisters.\n\n\"If we had had more time to work on the fuse and to pack those pigs correctly, we would never have had any problem,\" said Mumchance.\n\n\"What pigs?\" said Sanval glancing at the dwarf. So it was definitely the pork that had aroused Sanval's curiosity. Ivy stifled a grin at this evidence of his humanity. Only dead men could keep silent around her friends, once they started one of their rambling tales; and, as she suddenly recalled, even that lich had not been able to resist joining in the conversation once. Oh, that had been a strange campaign!\n\nAs usual, each of the Siegebreakers began talking as fast as they could, trying to beat one another to the end of the pig story.\n\n\"Dead hogs, actually,\" said Mumchance and was immediately interrupted by Zuzzara.\n\n\"Very dead hogs,\" said the half-orc, who had complained unceasingly during that campaign that she had to carry most of the pigs.\n\n\"Absolutely rotten hogs. Bloating,\" added Gunderal, blowing her cheeks out to illustrate. Anyone else who did that would have looked hideous, but Gunderal just appeared even lovelier, if slightly fishlike, with her bloated cheeks.\n\nSanval looked baffled, and then enlightenment dawned. At that point, he looked mildly nauseated.\n\n\"Exactly,\" said Ivy with a chuckle, getting into the conversational game. \"We packed a bunch of these dead hogs under a tower.\"\n\n\"The smell was awful,\" shuddered Gunderal, who had stayed as far away from the dead pigs as she could and kept a perfumed handkerchief over her nose whenever she could not maintain her distance.\n\n\"Then we lit a fire under them, dear sir,\" said Kid, who was wandering in and out of the group as he usually did, too restless to sit still for more than a moment.\n\n\"Nice long fuse, right into dry tinder packed under the hogs,\" said Mumchance. \"Only it burned a little faster than we expected.\"\n\n\"And the tunnel that we were in was a disused part of the dungeons,\" explained Ivy. \"Typical place. Scraps of this and that, stacks of dried-out bones from old prisoners, old spell books that the wizard who owned the place had tossed away.\"\n\n\"Everything caught on fire,\" said Gunderal. \"And Wiggles did warn us, Ivy, when all that smoke started pouring up the tunnel toward us.\"\n\n\"The dog was a hero,\" said Ivy with a roll of her eyes.\n\n\"But the pigs? The dead hogs?\" said Sanval. Ivy liked that about the officer from Procampur\u2014he could stick to a point. Which is more than any of her friends could do.\n\n\"The hogs did exactly what they were supposed to do,\" said Ivy with a grin.\n\n\"The pigs went boom!\" said Zuzzara, with a lot of satisfaction, flinging her hands up in the air and giving a very orclike chuckle.\n\n\"And the tower fell down,\" concluded Mumchance.\n\n\"Served that wizard right for trying to steal that land from those pig farmers,\" pronounced Ivy.\n\n\"An interesting method of destruction,\" Sanval said. \"Why did you not try to do the same here?\"\n\n\"Not enough hogs,\" sighed Mumchance. \"What you've got, you eat. Pity. With a little refinement, more containment of the blast, it could be a very effective technique. But there is water here, so we decided to use that instead.\"\n\n\"At least three underground rivers in the area. I just joined them together to form one large river,\" explained Gunderal. \"Then I sped up the current a little and persuaded that river to change course to run under the western wall. It won't last forever; eventually the rivers will split back into their true courses.\"\n\n\"But it should give us an enormous amount of water to wash out the foundations with. Better than pigs really,\" said Mumchance.\n\n\"If we are not in these tunnels when the river goes through,\" said Ivy and then wished she had kept her mouth shut.\n\n\"My dears,\" said Kid, whose wandering led him to poke his nose down another tunnel, \"there is another buried building here.\"\n\n\"All burned out like the last one?\" asked Ivy, pulling herself upright and walking over to the entrance.\n\n\"No, my dear,\" said Kid. \"Just dusty and smelling of blood.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Mumchance swung his lantern around. The tunnel opened into a room from another long-buried level of the city. Everyone moved cautiously into the dark new space, listening for the sound of kobolds barking or the patter of little skeleton feet. But only silence filled the shadows. None of them feared a fight; but, as Ivy reminded them in her fierce whispers, each battle cost them time. They needed to find a way out so they could complete their mission and collapse the wall before Enguerrand's charge.\n\nAlthough they only had Mumchance's lantern to light the gloom, the ceiling was low enough that they could see a delicate mosaic of shells and blue waves.\n\n\"How pretty,\" said Gunderal. She loved shell patterns and had painted similar waves all around her room at the farm. Then she coughed. \"What is that smell?\" A sharp metallic odor surrounded them like an evil fog. \"It smells like a butcher's shop,\" she said. \"Please tell me it is very old blood.\"\n\n\"Fresh blood,\" said Kid, his nostrils quivering. \"I wonder what died here?\"\n\nThere were no signs of fire, just the awful smell of blood, underlaid by a moist smell of moss and mire. Wiggles whined and then whimpered. Mumchance patted the little dog on the head, trying to quiet her, but finally scooped her out of his pocket and set her down on the tiled floor. Yipping high enough to make Ivy wonder if her ears would start bleeding, Wiggles raced away into the darkness, with Kid trotting quickly behind her.\n\n\"Come quick, come quick, my dears,\" cried Kid. \"Here's a fresh kill.\"\n\n\"More kobolds?\" grumbled Mumchance, swinging the lantern toward the sound of Kid's voice and Wiggles's barking.\n\n\"Bigger. Much bigger,\" said Kid, sounding pleased.\n\nA freshly killed bugbear lay at Kid's feet. The bugbear's head had been chewed off, and one arm was missing. When it had walked upright and had had a head, it had been taller than Zuzzara. Scraps of black leather armor bound together with heavy chains decorated the bugbear's body, but its hairy legs were bare, and rope sandals covered the sole of each hairy foot. The stench rising from the corpse was nauseating.\n\n\"Look at that blood trail,\" Zuzzara said, pointing at a mixture of slime and blood that led into another dark tunnel entrance. \"Something took the missing arm that way!\"\n\n\"Well, they can keep it,\" said Ivy. \"Let's see what else that he's got.\"\n\n\"It's a she, not a he,\" said Zuzzara, looking more closely at the curved leather breastplate and studded leather skirt.\n\n\"Well, whatever it is, it is dead,\" said Ivy, leaning down to search the body. She tried breathing through her mouth to lessen the impact of the mildewed smell. Ivy ran quick hands down the bugbear's bulky body, liberating a leather pouch tied to the creature's weapons belt. She opened it and saw with satisfaction that it held a number of cheap tallow candles, well wrapped against damp. \"More lights,\" she said, and she tied the pouch to her own belt. She fished out a handful of candles, shoving them at Sanval.\n\n\"There's a torch under the body too,\" said Mumchance, pushing at the bugbear. \"Here, Zuzzara, roll it over and let's get that.\" Zuzzara leaned down and flipped the bugbear over.\n\n\"You are looting the dead,\" said Sanval. He sounded troubled and a little disgusted, and was still holding the candles in one armored hand.\n\n\"Of course,\" said Ivy. \"Stow those candles somewhere. If you get separated from us, you'll need them.\" Reluctantly, Sanval tucked the candles behind his breastplate, while Ivy questioned the half-orc. \"Zuzzara, what have you got?\"\n\n\"Torch dropped over here, and two more fastened to its back.\"\n\n\"Excellent. Any food?\"\n\n\"Just a water bottle, and that's almost dry,\" said Mumchance.\n\n\"So the bugbear came down here from the city, do you think?\"\n\n\"It came with others,\" said Kid. \"There are more tracks here, back and forth: human or two-foot at least, my dears.\"\n\n\"Bugbears? Orcs? Humans?\"\n\n\"They all wear boots,\" said Kid. \"But big. No little feet like Gunderal.\"\n\n\"I am not little,\" squeaked Gunderal. \"Ivy, somebody has been casting spells in here.\"\n\n\"Whatever killed the bugbear?\"\n\n\"No.\" Gunderal sounded puzzled. \"It feels more like light or fire. Not my sort of spell. Complicated, arcane, sort of a seeking spell.\"\n\nSanval looked doubtful. \"Can she tell that?\"\n\nIvy nodded. \"It comes from her mother's side of the family. She's got a good sense for magic. When it has been used, how it has been used. She can usually tell if something has been warded or laid with magic traps, which is useful when you're sneaking into places that you don't know.\"\n\nGunderal sighed. \"I can't tell you more than that, Ivy. But whatever it was, it happened not long ago. Not even a day. It is very strong, much stronger than that room that we just left. That was old magic. This is new.\"\n\n\"Wonderful,\" said Ivy. \"That means that there is someone else down here.\" She passed out the candles and the torches, spreading the lights around so that Mumchance could wander off with his lantern and not leave the rest of them stranded in the dark. Zuzzara relit the bugbear's torch and held the light over the blood trail leading off toward the dark entrance of the tunnel.\n\n\"Funny marks in the dirt,\" she said.\n\n\"Footprints,\" speculated Kid. \"Big four-foot with round, flat fleet.\"\n\n\"Hope whatever it was is off enjoying lunch,\" said Ivy, \"and will take a little nap afterwards.\"\n\n\"Just so long as it doesn't wake up hungry for a snack,\" said Mumchance.\n\n\"Lovely thought! Anything else worth taking?\" said Ivy, poking the bugbear's recumbent body with her toe.\n\n\"Nice rope,\" said Zuzzara, unwinding the coil of rope from the bugbear's shoulder.\n\n\"The weapons are trash,\" replied Mumchance with a dwarf's contempt for shoddy metalwork. \"Worse than ours. The sword is blunt, and the knife has a notched blade. The scabbard's not bad\u2014it's better work than the rest, gilt on leather and some nice stitching.\"\n\n\"Loot then, picked up here and there,\" said Ivy, knowing the signs. \"Making do with what the others don't want. Fancy scabbard kept after someone else has taken the good blade.\"\n\n\"Fottergrim's raiders were so armored,\" said Sanval. \"Carrion crows, picking what they can out of other's misery.\" Ivy wondered if he was still describing Fottergrim's troops or delivering a bit of a rebuke. She decided to take his comments as referring to the former.\n\n\"There might be more of Fottergrim's people in the ruins,\" he added.\n\n\"Must be more,\" answered Ivy. \"A bugbear like this wouldn't come down on its own.\"\n\n\"Maybe they were countermining us,\" said Mumchance.\n\n\"Countermining?\" asked Sanval.\n\n\"Digging under where they think we are digging,\" Ivy explained, \"to collapse our tunnel. Except we did such a very good job of collapsing it ourselves and saved them the trouble. Mumchance, they are pretty far off the line if they were looking for our tunnel. And the bugbear doesn't have any shovel or pick.\"\n\n\"Maybe the others took the tools with them,\" suggested the dwarf.\n\n\"And left the weapons and the torches?\"\n\n\"No, my dears, they did not stop to take anything. When this one was killed, the others kept their distance,\" said Kid, who was circling back and forth, peering at the tracks on the tiled floor. \"They started forward, stamp, stamp, stamp, not running, just walking, but then they stopped very quick, shuffle, shuffle back and to the side. Two of the big ones tried to turn back again, but the other one, the one with man-sized feet, drove them away.\"\n\nSilence fell on the group, as they realized what Kid meant.\n\n\"They moved out of range and let whatever it was chew on the poor bastard. Or their officer ordered them not to attempt a rescue,\" said Zuzzara, voicing all their thoughts. \"Remind me not to fight for Fottergrim's pay, if that's the way that they treat their mercenaries.\"\n\n\"A wise decision,\" said Sanval with that little quirk of the lips that indicated he was amused.\n\n\"Especially since we're fighting for Procampur,\" emphasized Ivy with a quick kick at Zuzzara's ankles. She missed her target; Zuzzara could move fast when she chose.\n\n\"Why are they here then, Ivy?\" said Gunderal to cover up her sister's mistake and Ivy's embarrassment.\n\n\"A little quick treasure hunting?\" guessed Mumchance.\n\n\"In the middle of a siege?\" said Ivy. \"Well, it can be boring sitting on the walls waiting for someone to attack.\"\n\n\"Because of this,\" said Mumchance, who had moved from the bugbear's looted corpse. Before him gaped a black square. He swung the lantern forward to reveal an ancient city bath, with marvelous mosaic pictures covering the bottom of what was once a large pool.\n\nWith the use of Mumchance's lantern, they could make out footprints trailing through the dry and dust-filled bath. Kid jumped in the pool and began tracking the tracks, his nose almost brushing the floor.\n\n\"Here a big two-foot knelt,\" sang out Kid. \"Here his four companions waited, jog, jog, jog from one foot to the other. They were impatient. Scared too, most certainly frightened. They kept turning to peer behind them. Why, my dears, why?\"\n\n\"They heard a noise, or thought they heard one,\" speculated Ivy. \"They were expecting an attack. Then they came out of there and were attacked.\"\n\n\"Five at the bottom of the pool?\" asked Sanval.\n\n\"Oh, five, definitely five,\" said Kid. \"Five walked down here, and five went out. But only four ran away from this room.\"\n\n\"Leaving one dead companion behind them,\" said Ivy. \"They were right to be nervous. Something was hunting around here.\"\n\n\"Then why wait for someone to look at pictures in the bottom of a dried out pool?\" asked Gunderal.\n\n\"There are armor scrapes against these tiles. From where the one with man-sized feet knelt,\" said Kid, peering even closer. \"Here's a line a little ways back. Sword, scabbard maybe, brushed the dust behind him?\"\n\n\"Officer then. They had to wait for him,\" said Ivy, sitting down cross-legged on the edge of the bath. When Kid went tracking, he could grow a bit obsessed. From past experience, she had learned to make herself comfortable until he was done. Sanval remained standing, straight as always, shifting slightly from one foot to the other. Ivy reached up with her fist curled and rapped his armored knee. \"Rest now and stand at attention later,\" she said.\n\nSanval nodded and knelt on one knee beside her to watch Kid. Well, sometimes the man displayed sense, thought Ivy.\n\n\"Look at the picture, Ivy, that's a wizard in the center of that picture,\" said Gunderal. \"Zuzzara, can you bring the light closer?\"\n\nZuzzara nodded and jumped down into the bath. She swung her lit torch over the pattern that Gunderal had pointed out.\n\nThe dust had been carefully swept away from the center of the bath, displaying a series of mosaic pictures. The first picture showed a wizard, with runes woven in his azure cloak, standing before a tall tower with flames sprouting from it. More flames played along the walls behind the tower, and behind the walls a hint of rooftops, also engulfed in flames. Men and women ran along the tops of the walls, arms outstretched as if pleading with the wizard to save them. A great jewel, portrayed in tiny crystal tiles, glittered in the wizard's hand.\n\nA trail of more runes, picked out in silver and gold tiles, circled away from the picture and led to a second one. The burning tower was leaning forward, and men fell from its crenellated top to lie on the ground before the wizard. Black lines zigzagged away from the wizard's feet and led to a final picture, which showed men carrying the supine wizard away on a bier, the gleaming gem resting on the center of his chest and portrayed as twice the size of any man's head.\n\n\"And down go the walls of Tsurlagol,\" said Ivy, waving a hand at the center picture. \"Which siege do you suppose that was?\"\n\n\"Long ago,\" guessed Gunderal. \"Look at the runes on his cloak.\"\n\n\"Two or three generations before they built this bath, and the tile work is old to begin with,\" guessed Mumchance. The dwarf dropped over the rim of the bath and stalked toward the picture to examine it more closely.\n\n\"What do you mean? Why two or three?\" asked Sanval.\n\n\"Takes that long for humans to turn something horrible into art,\" said Mumchance with all the authority of a dwarf who had already celebrated his three hundredth birthday. \"Mighty big shock for the folk like me\u2014leave a town with all the humans swearing that they will never forget this or that, come back in ninety years, and it's all a fairy tale to those humans' grandchildren. Or a decoration for their city bath. Why if half the heroes in the world were as tall as their statues \u2026\"\n\n\"They'd all be giants,\" chorused Zuzzara and Gunderal. This was an old, old complaint of Mumchance, and they'd heard it almost as often as his tale of having to earn his first mining tools by shoveling away snow higher than his ears from the mountain entrances of his family's diggings.\n\n\"And dwarves don't do that?\" asked Sanval, and Zuzzara and Gunderal groaned.\n\n\"You shouldn't encourage him,\" translated Ivy when Sanval glanced at the sisters. \"Let's hope this is one of his shorter lectures.\"\n\n\"It takes dwarves longer to lie to themselves,\" admitted Mumchance, ignoring Ivy's comment. \"And we don't do pretty just for pretty's sake. Well, not in pictures. Armor and jewelry\u2014that's metalwork and another story. Elves, now, they have the longest memories. When they make a picture like this, it's to remind other folk, and they hate it when you question what's real and what's not. Everything is real to an elf.\"\n\n\"Some of them just have a finer sense of humor about it than others,\" added Ivy, who got along better with elves than the rest of the Siegebreakers. She appreciated their efforts to seek out her father in Ardeep when he disappeared during his last journey into the forest. It wasn't the elves' fault that he had not wanted to be found after her mother's death. Ivy suspected that he was probably one of the murmuring oaks shading the path there. He had always talked about the simplicity of life as a tree\u2014trees, after all, did not have hearts that could break, or even crack a little.\n\n\"So, is this a real event or not?\" asked Zuzzara, who never could stand much philosophizing and disliked talk about elves because of some bad experiences with one of her stepmothers.\n\n\"Well, it's not an elf-made picture, which makes it a bit tricky to tell,\" started Mumchance.\n\n\"Somebody came down here in the dust and gloom, not to mention risking kobolds and whatever chewed that bugbear, and stopped to look at it,\" said Ivy.\n\n\"Maybe we should discover who that person was,\" suggested Sanval.\n\n\"Or maybe we should look for a way out that keeps us out of their path,\" Ivy said loudly.\n\nNobody was listening to her. They were all carefully puzzling over the picture on the floor. There were times when kobolds were more sensible than her friends. At least kobolds concentrated on the basics like finding food and left mystical patterns written in the floor tiles alone.\n\n\"I don't think that they were just looking at the pictures. I think they stopped to read the runes,\" added Gunderal. \"Look how the dust is cleaned away so carefully.\"\n\n\"Can you read them?\" asked Ivy, because it was obvious that nobody was going to do anything until they had solved this little mystery.\n\nGunderal shook her head. \"Too old. Four hundred years or more, if I had to guess. And it's only a guess.\" She looked at Mumchance where he was bent over the runes, tracing the edges of each shape with a stubby finger.\n\n\"I'm old,\" snorted the dwarf. \"But I'm not that old. Runes change, meanings change. But these \u2026 These might be corruptions of old Netherese symbols.\"\n\n\"That is not possible,\" said Sanval.\n\n\"Even I know that empire was dust long before the first Tsurlagol was built,\" added Ivy, just to stay in the conversation.\n\n\"The empire disappeared long before Tsurlagol was built,\" agreed Mumchance. \"But that doesn't mean all their magic disappeared overnight. Dig deep enough and you run into strange things in the Vast\u2014artifacts, toys, bits of spellbooks that those mad sorcerers left behind. They were human, after all\u2014that meant they bred like rabbits and ran like deer when the disaster finally overtook them.\"\n\n\"Mumchance,\" said Ivy in gentle reproof. \"Both Sanval and I would like to think our race has a few redeeming qualities.\"\n\n\"Many and many,\" said the dwarf. \"You humans are usually nice to dogs and other small furry creatures. But the best of all is that you know when to run to survive. Dwarves can be too stubborn sometimes.\" He fingered the old scars on his face and shook his head at memories of the mine fire that had destroyed his family. He shrugged and continued the discussion of Netheril, because ancient history was always more pleasant than his own memories. \"When the shining cities fell, not everyone died. Some carried mighty magic into exile. There have always been rumors about a fantastic treasure buried beneath Tsurlagol. The story goes that the first time Tsurlagol fell into dust and ruin, it was because of a great magic that men could not control. That sounds like Netheril to me. Then later they started that mad fire that they had to bury under the earth. That was fairly recent history for a dwarf, not much before my grandfather's father's time. And they used some fancy artifact to bury the city, something like what would have come out of Netheril.\"\n\n\"But is there information here that can help us?\" said Ivy, glancing around the shadowed bath.\n\n\"The dwarf is right, my dears. These symbols are not well made, but they do bear great resemblance to those used by Netheril and its sorcerers,\" said Kid, circling back to peer over Mumchance's shoulder. He pursed his lips. \"These are copies of copies, made by men who could only draw what they saw, but could not read.\"\n\n\"And how do you know that, young thief?\" asked Mumchance.\n\n\"Because I had a master once,\" said Kid, very softly. Ivy, who had only paid mild attention to Mumchance's lecture on ancient history, was caught by Kid's depressed tone. He never spoke of his past, and this was the first time that she had heard him mention a master. \"He was not a good man. But he was fond of old things, very old magic. Spellbooks with runes like these and worse.\"\n\n\"Worse?\" asked Ivy. Kid ignored her and trotted away, his nose down to examine the footprints in the dust.\n\n\"So when fire consumed the city, they used a magic jewel to bury it,\" said Gunderal, still discussing the mosaic with Mumchance, pointing at the burning walls before the cloaked wizard.\n\n\"Just one wizard with a fancy gem? Doesn't seem likely,\" said Ivy.\n\nSanval wrinkled his brow. \"I was never that fond of history lessons, but I always heard that it was an earthquake sent by the gods in answer to the people's prayers.\"\n\n\"I doubt it was the gods. That wizard must have caused the earthquake with a spell, maybe something stored in that jewel that he is holding, like we store Dry Boots in our ring,\" said Gunderal, on her knees at the edge of the bath, still staring at the mosaic. \"Why show a spellcaster with a gem if you don't have a gem in the tale? It must have been a wonderful spell. I told you that I could still feel echoes of weird old magic in that hall.\"\n\n\"Fascinating, all of it, but we are not here to go treasure hunting. In fact, if someone is looking for that magic rock, I would rather avoid them,\" said Ivy. \"Kid, which way did they go? Our party of five less one?\"\n\n\"They came from the east, my dear,\" said Kid, trotting to the edge of the bath and flipping himself easily to a handstand on the rim, giving a quick click of his hooves at the top of his handstand, and then somersaulting to a dark archway across the room. \"And they left to the north, through that wide arch there.\"\n\n\"Is he always like this?\" asked Sanval.\n\n\"No,\" said Ivy. \"He's tired, or he would have done a couple of extra cartwheels. We've thought about selling him to a faire once or twice.\" But Kid's actions disturbed her. In more recent years, Kid only did such extravagant show-off gestures when he was in one of his black moods.\n\n\"But we've never found a faire,\" grunted Mumchance. \"Come on, girl, give the short guy a hand up.\" The last was said over his shoulder to Zuzzara, who grabbed his belt with one hand and easily lifted him over the edge. Zuzzara followed with a little hop. She wandered back over to where the bugbear lay, to pick up the extra torch left by the body.\n\n\"So we go east,\" Ivy decided. \"That group came from Tsurlagol. I'm sure of it.\"\n\n\"If we go north, we will learn why they came here,\" said Sanval in polite disagreement, obviously deciding that now was not the time to defer to her status as Captain of the Siegebreakers.\n\nIvy sighed. She knew being in charge without opposition would not last that long\u2014it never did with her friends, and why should Sanval be any different\u2014but she was willing to try. \"Do we care why they are here? They're deserters or treasure hunters or lost fools,\" said Ivy.\n\n\"What if they are planning an ambush?\" Sanval asked.\n\n\"Well, jolly good luck to the Thultyrl, then,\" said Ivy, \"but I'm not his bodyguard. I'm here to bring down a wall, and to do that we need to go east, not north.\" Sanval still looked troubled. \"That sounded a bit crude. Most assuredly, we wish the Thultyrl a long life and much happiness,\" Ivy added.\n\n\"Until we get paid,\" muttered Mumchance and winced when Ivy's elbow connected with his ear.\n\nZuzzara gave a shout. She'd been poking around the bugbear's body, muttering about the smell of moss getting stronger. Suddenly, the half-orc yelped with pain. She spun around, flailing at the air. \"Something is here,\" she screamed. \"It bit me!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Zuzzara stumbled back toward them, one leg angled oddly out in the air, shouting that she could not shake her attacker off her leg. The only problem was that nobody could see anything.\n\nGunderal told Zuzzara to stop playing stupid jokes.\n\nZuzzara screamed, \"Half-orcs never play practical jokes!\"\n\nShe slammed her shovel down on the space near her leg. The shovel hit something with a sickening thud. The smell of rotting mushrooms filled the room. Zuzzara and her invisible attacker tumbled into the empty bath.\n\n\"Look at that!\" said Mumchance, pointing at the dusty tiles of the bath.\n\nThe group could clearly see the signs of four big round feet being dragged after Zuzzara as the half-orc stumbled in circles and continued to beat down with her shovel. Each stroke of the shovel thwacked into something solid that stopped it at the level of Zuzzara's knee. Each stroke also released more fungal stench into the air, so that even Kid was choking a little and covering his nose with one ruddy hand. But Zuzzara's efforts seemed to have no effect on her attacker.\n\nIvy and Sanval leaped into the bath. Both swung their swords at the same time, cutting through the air near Zuzzara. Ivy felt her blade hit something solid and sticky. When she pulled back on the stroke, she could see a gelatinous shimmer drip down her blade.\n\nCloser to Zuzzara, the stench was overpowering and reminiscent of the strange mossy smell that had clung to the dead bugbear's corpse. Ivy gagged and staggered back. She concentrated on breathing through her mouth and sawing away at whatever was attacking Zuzzara.\n\nKid's two stilettos went whistling past Ivy, and thankfully missed Zuzzara. One struck and seemed to stick in whatever was attached to the half-orc's leg. The little stiletto bobbing in the air gave them another reference point for their attacks.\n\nBeside Ivy, Sanval swallowed grimly against the stink and slashed at the invisible creature. Like Ivy, he had trouble with his sword sticking in whatever he struck. His blade was almost wrenched out of his hand, and he overbalanced, dragged to one knee as he wrested the sword free. Sanval rolled to one side to avoid Ivy's next awkward stroke and jumped straight into the air. As he launched himself forward, he brought his blade point down with a two-handed stroke into the space nearest to Zuzzara's ankle, trying to skewer whatever was attacking her. He missed. The sword buried itself into the mosaic floor with a sickening thud. Even Mumchance winced as the big fighter's shoulders and arms took the shock of the misdirected stroke. Sanval simply grimaced, pulled his sword free, and immediately swung around to assault the invisible foe again.\n\nZuzzara's attacker dragged her in a circle. She was pivoting on her right leg with her left leg almost straight out in the air. Ivy danced around her, trying to figure out from the angle of Zuzzara's leg where her attacker was. She slashed down just as Zuzzara pivoted farther right. Ivy stopped the stroke in midair, nearly knocking herself off balance, but she managed to avoid slicing into Zuzzara's knee.\n\n\"Watch her leg! Watch her leg!\" screamed Gunderal, as both Ivy and Sanval continued to swing their swords blindly at the area near her sister's left boot. \"Be careful!\"\n\n\"Get it off me,\" cried Zuzzara, the leather in her boot now starting to visibly shred around the calf. \"Gunderal, do something! It's magic!\"\n\nWith an elegant swirl of silk skirts, Gunderal leaped into the bath. She landed gracefully but with a wince of pain as the movement jarred her sprained arm. With her uninjured hand, Gunderal fumbled loose the canteen at her belt, worked its cap open, and tucked it into her sling. She sprinkled drops of water into her good hand. Her canteen slipped out of the sling and fell onto the floor a thud. Stepping over the canteen, Gunderal muttered the words of a spell as she walked toward her half-sister.\n\n\"Get back!\" screamed Zuzzara, terrified Gunderal would walk into the blades of the fighters or fall victim to whatever was trying to chew off her leg.\n\nGunderal ignored her. She continued to chant, cupping her hand in front of her face, and blowing out her breath.\n\nGunderal's breath sparkled in the air, glittering like crystals. A frost formed on the invisible creature revealing four stumpy legs and a square body, with a cluster of round nodules covering its sides.\n\nNow able to see the creature, Ivy and Sanval hit it on each side with their swords.\n\n\"Go for the head, go for the head,\" cried Gunderal.\n\n\"Where is the head?\" screamed Ivy.\n\n\"Where it is attached to my boot!\" yelled back Zuzzara, giving a mighty kick. The creature hung on. Sanval swiftly spun and sliced away the cluster of nodules on the top of the creature's head, barely missing Zuzzara's foot. The creature gave off an even more noxious puff of stink and collapsed. A mottled green and brown hide became visible underneath the glittering frost that coated it. Although it was not easy to tell head from tail, what appeared to be the attacker's mouth remained locked around the calf of the half-orc's boot.\n\nUsing Zuzzara's shovel as a crowbar, Sanval broke open the creature's jaw and released Zuzzara's leg.\n\nGunderal observed with satisfaction that the creature had not been able to completely bite through Zuzzara's double-dragonhide boots. \"I told her that the expense was worth it,\" she explained to Sanval, who was still looking a little dazed from the stench of the creature. \"Besides looking fantastic, those boots can survive the worst attack. It never pays to wear cheap footwear.\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" Sanval replied courteously. He flicked out a clean cloth from his belt pouch to wipe disemboweled fungus off his sword and the front of his own fine leather boots.\n\n\"But look at that tear,\" said Zuzzara, leaning down to finger the long rent in the top layer of leather.\n\n\"We will just take them back and get them exchanged for a new pair. Probably something in green, that would be nice.\"\n\n\"Do you think that cobbler will do that?\"\n\n\"He gave us a lifetime guarantee,\" said Gunderal with the assurance of a wizard who was always willing to make merchants live up to their promises.\n\nIvy poked the creature with the tip of her sword, just to verify that it was dead. It let out another puff of stink.\n\n\"Ivy, leave it alone,\" said Gunderal, pulling up one of her long silk neck scarves to cover her nose.\n\n\"Poor baby,\" said Mumchance, looking down at the four-legged creature. He snapped at Wiggles. \"Don't touch. Don't roll in it! Bad dog! Wiggles, stay!\" He lunged for the little white dog and scooped Wiggles up into his pocket before she could roll over the corpse.\n\n\"Poor baby!\" said Zuzzara. \"It nearly chewed my leg off.\"\n\n\"Oh, stop making a fuss,\" said her unsympathetic sister. \"I told you that we can get you new boots.\"\n\n\"What is it?\" said Ivy. \"Besides smelly.\"\n\n\"Phantom fungus\u2014you get them in old tunnels and caves. It's a little one though. Full grown, it would have been chewing off Zuzzara's hip, not biting her ankles,\" said Mumchance. \"Good thing you used that frost spell, Gunderal. It is the only thing that could have made it visible. Their invisibility talent is immune to most magical counterspells.\"\n\n\"It should have frozen in place,\" said Gunderal. She sighed from deep in her chest and shook her head. \"Not just sparkled.\"\n\n\"Hey,\" said Zuzzara, \"last time that you did that freeze spell, you turned me into a snow orc. That spell can sting!\"\n\n\"The spell did not work anyway,\" said Gunderal, ignoring her sister's criticisms as she usually did. \"I just can't seem to concentrate long enough.\"\n\n\"The frost was fine,\" consoled Ivy, \"all we needed to do was see it to kill it.\"\n\n\"It was an excellent use of magic,\" agreed Sanval with a slight bow. \"In Procampur, we say that subtlety always takes more talent than brutality.\"\n\n\"Oh, do we say that?\" said Ivy, remembering some of her wilder strokes as she tried to bash Zuzzara's attacker. \"How very refined of us.\"\n\nSanval simply looked puzzled at her tone.\n\n\"So, if this is the baby,\" said Kid, poking at the dead pile of fungus with one shiny hoof, \"where is the mother, dear ones?\"\n\nEveryone glanced around the room.\n\n\"I think it is time to start moving again,\" said Ivy.\n\nFor once, nobody argued with her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Three possible exits from the city bath,\" Ivy pointed out to her friends, ticking them off on her fingers. \"There's the lovely, dank, animal-dug tunnel which that baby phantom fungus came from.\"\n\n\"Where that bugbear's arm has gone, my dear. I'm sure that the mother fungus has it,\" said Kid, sniffing the air in that direction as he retrieved his stilettos.\n\n\"Which may have body parts and bigger phantom fungi,\" agreed Ivy. \"Thank you for reminding us.\"\n\nThe whole group decided against exploring that tunnel.\n\n\"Then there's the northern way,\" said Ivy, gesturing at the line of footprints that indicated where the rest of the unfortunate bugbear's party had apparently fled.\n\n\"That is the way that we should go,\" said Sanval. \"If the bugbear was one of Fottergrim's raiders, then they may be setting up an ambush. They may be aiming for the Thultyrl's camp.\"\n\n\"We don't know that,\" said Ivy. \"All we know is that they were down here, and they are probably not friendly.\"\n\nAs an officer of Procampur, Sanval pointed out that it was his duty to find out what the raiders were doing in these ruins and, if possible, capture or kill them. He was very courteous about it and obviously expected everyone to agree with him.\n\nIvy looked at her friends, and they all rolled their eyes.\n\n\"We were not going that way,\" she told Sanval. \"We need to get under the walls of Tsurlagol and bring the western wall down. As the Thultyrl decided.\"\n\nSanval looked unconvinced. But before he could voice another argument or strike out on his own, following that mysterious trail of footprints, Zuzzara grabbed him from behind in a friendly headlock. He squirmed, but the half-orc was stronger and quite a bit taller than the officer from Procampur. She leaned over his shoulder to look into his face and show him her grin, full of pointy teeth.\n\n\"I owe you my life for being so quick with your blade,\" said Zuzzara, \"so I definitely cannot let you run off and get yourself killed.\"\n\nTo avoid getting his windpipe crushed by Zuzzara's concern, Sanval agreed to stay with the group, but he kept casting glances back at the line of footprints leading away from the bath.\n\n\"I should follow them,\" he said.\n\n\"Sweet,\" said Zuzzara, giving him another hug against her brass-buttoned waistcoat that caused all the breath to leave him with a giant whoosh.\n\n\"She's more dangerous friendly than angry,\" said Ivy, pulling Sanval away. \"But she's right too. Sweet of you to want to do your duty. But not proper behavior for an officer.\"\n\nSanval's dark eyes widened. \"I would never do anything that was inappropriate.\"\n\nIvy gave him her most innocent smile. \"Then you will want to follow the Thultyrl's orders. He ordered you to go with us and stay with us and help us bring down the wall, didn't he?\"\n\nSanval looked as if he had just swallowed something very bitter. The logic of Ivy's argument was inescapable. Yet, she could see a certain doubt crawled across his handsome features. Would it be more fitting to chase after a possible threat to the Thultyrl or to carry out the Thultyrl's orders and stay with the Siegebreakers?\n\n\"It would be best to stay with us,\" Ivy answered his unspoken question. He looked even more troubled that she had guessed what he was thinking.\n\nKid trotted back and forth at the entrance to the eastern tunnel.\n\n\"Are we going or staying, my dear?\" he said to Ivy, clip-clopping a little ways into the darkened entrance.\n\n\"Give me your torch,\" Ivy called to Zuzzara, putting her hand out for it. She took the lit torch from the half-orc and thrust it into the entrance of the tunnel. A long, smooth way ran straight ahead. Strong stone walls and ceiling were clearly visible. It was a tunnel built by humans (or more likely dwarves, added Mumchance). Best of all, it did not look as though it would easily collapse on them.\n\n\"It looks like a passage to Tsurlagol,\" decided Mumchance. \"But it might take us farther east than we want, toward the harbor gate rather than the southwest corner of the wall.\"\n\n\"We'll worry about that when we see where we come out,\" decided Ivy. \"We do not have time to try every tunnel. This one looks the most promising to get us close to the wall.\"\n\nThe tunnel ran in a long curve, at times so narrow that they had to go in single file and at other times so wide that four could walk abreast. Kid led, so he could backtrack on the trail of the bugbear's party.\n\n\"Quick step, quick step,\" he chortled as he followed the faint trace of the footsteps in the dust. \"They march straight, no pause, no doubt. They are hurrying away from where they came.\"\n\n\"Were they pursued?\" asked Ivy.\n\n\"Yes, but much later; other feet have passed through here,\" said Kid. \"But the followers miss the arch where we entered and go farther that way.\" Kid pointed to another tunnel, slanting west and north as far as they could tell.\n\nBending down to examine the floor, Kid seemed puzzled by some of the marks. \"Footprints, here and here, but older tracks too. Tracks of rats on four little feet, tracks of kobolds chasing after the rats, tracks of something with no feet chasing after the kobolds.\"\n\n\"I do not like the sound of that,\" said Gunderal with a delicate shudder.\n\n\"Oh, my dear, these are old, old tracks,\" said Kid, one ear twitching back and forth in thought.\n\nIvy wondered if this tunnel had been a good choice. Still it was better than wandering after whatever party that bugbear came from, no matter how much a certain shiny gentleman kept making longing glances over his shoulder.\n\n\"What are the freshest tracks in this tunnel?\" asked Ivy, convinced that she would not like the answer.\n\n\"Those we also saw in the room behind us, big feet and man-sized feet.\" Kid scratched his nose, obviously mulling over his answer. \"And then there were those tracks that hugged the walls and never went to the center of the room.\"\n\n\"You didn't tell us about those!\"\n\n\"You were in a hurry to leave, my dear. Another group of big feet went tiptoe through the room. The tracks were a little fresher than the dead bugbear that Zuzzara found. Another party of orcs or bugbears perhaps, following the first group. Big hobnailed boots, all of them wore, and there were many treading over the other footsteps.\"\n\n\"Blast.\" Just what they needed: entire troop movements underground. Could Fottergrim be considering an ambush, using these tunnels to sneak some of his horde outside the walls for a quick attack on the camp? Or was it someone else, with their own secret mission in this rotten, mixed-up, tangled ruin of a dead city with its long buried secrets? \"Blast, blast, and blast!\" muttered Ivy as she considered their options. Well, there was no way to go back, and whatever way that the bugbears or other creatures had entered, that had to lead to the outside. Get her above ground and in the open air, and she could work out a strategy. Or let her find the foundation of Tsurlagol's current western wall and she would topple it with great pleasure.\n\n\"Is there a problem?\" As usual, Sanval's tone was courteous and pitched low enough to be discreet.\n\n\"Problem?\" Ivy gave an exaggerated roll of her shoulders. \"No problem at all! Just thinking about the best way to bring down that wall. A good spell blast, maybe.\"\n\n\"Ivy, we found something!\" Zuzzara's bellow echoed through the long, narrow tunnel. An open doorway was carved into the wall. To enter the dark room beyond, they had to step up over a broad stone threshold. From the other side, the Siegebreakers could see the lintel of the door was carved with a procession of men and horses, dragging wagons full of jars behind them. The flare of Zuzzara's torch and the light of Mumchance's lantern revealed a long, narrow room with niches carved into the walls, filling the space from floor to ceiling. Neatly piled bones, three or four skulls resting on the top of each pile, occupied each niche.\n\n\"Funeral procession,\" said Mumchance, glancing up at the carving on the lintel. The carved parade continued across the ceiling, and small flecks of old paint brightened the ribbons carved around the spokes of the cartwheels and in the horses' manes.\n\n\"We are in an ossuary,\" said Sanval. \"We have these in Procampur too. The dead are taken below the streets once their bodies are burned.\"\n\n\"That is what I love about being underground,\" said Ivy, \"the wonderful things that you get to see, like other people's graveyards.\"\n\n\"Look at all the names on the wall,\" said Gunderal, going from niche to niche. \"I can read them; this writing is not that old. There are whole families in some of these niches: mother, father, children.\"\n\n\"Not here,\" said Zuzzara, pausing before another niche. This one had a smaller pile of bones than the others, and only one skull rested on top. The skull looked a little lonely, Ivy thought. Gunderal leaned against her sister's shoulder and recited the epitaph inscribed upon the wall, her voice growing softer and sadder with each line.\n\n\u2003\"As for the name of this warrior, I do not know it,\n\n\u2003Nor do I know from what place he came.\n\n\u2003But he rode to our walls,\n\n\u2003With his banner displayed and flying in the wind.\n\n\u2003At his boasting, the defenders drew their blades.\n\n\u2003We could not resist from beginning the battle.\n\n\u2003Four fellows caught him and beat upon him,\n\n\u2003Each stroke like a hammer upon an anvil.\n\n\u2003His armor split to reveal the treasure beneath.\n\n\u2003The wizards stole his gem, as they steal all.\n\n\u2003When he died, the ground was hard with hoar-frost.\n\n\u2003So we burned his body to keep him warm,\n\n\u2003And stored his bones among our dead.\n\n\u2003But his name we never learned,\n\n\u2003And his family mourns unknowing.\"\n\nWhen Gunderal finished, even Zuzzara gave a little sniff and knuckled her eyes. Mumchance cleared his throat and rubbed Wiggles's ears. The little dog licked his hand.\n\nIvy just shrugged. She would not let such a memorial affect her. \"So died a mercenary. Unknown, unnamed,\" she said.\n\nSanval gave her a peculiar look, almost sympathetic. Ivy ignored him. \"I wonder what his treasure was.\"\n\n\"Probably meant that they cut out his heart,\" said Mumchance.\n\n\"I do not think it was his heart,\" said Gunderal. \"Wizards would not have much use for that.\" She brushed an errant curl back behind her ear, tilting her head to one side in puzzlement. \"There's something else here. Some runes below the bones, like the ones back in the mosaic. See that one\"\u2014she tapped the symbol with one shell pink nail\u2014\"is almost the same as the one written near the big jewel carried by that wizard toppling towers in the picture.\"\n\nDistracted by a clattering sound, Ivy whipped around to see Kid poking through another pile of bones. She snapped an order at him. \"Get away from that!\"\n\nKid just gave her one of his pointed smiles and said, \"No magic here, my dear. No spells. Just dead, cold dead, in their little pots and niches.\" He trotted back to where they stood. He leaned very close to the wall to study the peculiar runes pointed out by Gunderal. \"Beautiful Gunderal is right. These are the same as the ones written in the mosaic. Jewels\u2014these marks may mean jewels. And there are footprints below the niche that are the five that we tracked before. Looking for something, but finding nothing, I think.\" Something about the lone pile of bones discovered by the sisters intrigued him. Kid stuck his long, black-nailed fingers into the pile of bones before them, shifting the skull out of his way as he felt around the niche.\n\n\"I swear if you stir up another pathetic skeleton to attack us, I'm leaving you behind,\" exclaimed Ivy.\n\n\"Do skeletons attack him often?\" asked Sanval, remembering the lurching collection of bones in the hall of ash.\n\n\"With depressing regularity,\" Ivy replied. \"Skeletons, animated corpses, crawling hands of the undead. There's something about him. Like honey to bears. Get away from those bones! We don't have time, and there is nothing there for you to steal!\" Ivy suddenly could not bear to see the lonely mercenary disturbed again. Eventually, everyone should be allowed some peace and rest. She reached out and smacked Kid not too gently across his bottom.\n\n\"I go, I go,\" bleated Kid in mock terror, skipping out of her reach. \"See how swift I run. Can you catch me, my dears?\"\n\nRounding a corner at a quick trot, Kid almost smashed his nose on the stone wall that blocked the tunnel ahead. Ivy swore. They had reached a dead end.\n\n\"Just need to find the handle,\" said Mumchance, running his hands over the smooth marble wall. \"It must open. They did not walk through solid stone.\"\n\nGunderal nodded and passed her hands over the wall as well, making ladylike sniffs, as she tried to divine what type of lock might hold the door closed.\n\n\"So who do you think is down here?\" Sanval asked Ivy as the pair in front of them tried to open the secret door.\n\n\"Treasure hunters, most likely, and not from Procampur's side of the wall,\" Ivy admitted with as much candor as she could spare. She was not going to mention her worries about possible stray troops from Fottergrim's horde. That would be enough to send Sanval dashing off in the darkness to save the day and probably get himself killed. \"You have camels but no bugbears among your mercenaries. It could be deserters, which would be an encouraging sign, but you would think that they would be carrying more gear with them.\"\n\n\"Why are deserters a good sign?\"\n\n\"Now you want to chat? When we are in a hole in the ground with no clear way out?\"\n\n\"Do you have something else to do? Just now?\" And the man even made his comments sound reasonable, much to Ivy's disgust.\n\nMumchance muttered something about missing his good pick and gestured Zuzzara to come forward. He took her shovel and tried to wedge the blade under the secret door. Ivy and Sanval moved farther back down the tunnel to give them room to work.\n\n\"Why are deserters a good sign?\" When Sanval wanted to talk, he evidently wanted to talk.\n\n\"Because you don't desert if you think you're going to win. You leave when the food starts running low, or the water runs out, or the guy in charge turns out to be a raving lunatic with delusions of immortality and world conquest. Which happens far more frequently than you would think sensible. Look at Fottergrim.\"\n\n\"World conquest?\"\n\n\"Well, no, not since the Black Horde was destroyed. But why be such an idiot orc and seize a city? Especially such a city with such a history of bad luck. No one has ever managed to hold onto Tsurlagol. Wandering here and there in the hills, he could survive. Raid a town for a day, carry away the chickens and children, that I can understand.\" Sanval gave her one of those straight down the nose looks that were a specialty of his. \"Not approve, mind you, but understand.\"\n\n\"About the chickens?\" His tone was exceptionally dry.\n\n\"And the children. An orc has to eat, and he has to have somebody to wash out his laundry. A moving horde like Fottergrim's needs slaves to do all the tasks that fighters think are so far beneath them.\"\n\n\"Laundry.\"\n\n\"Cooking, digging latrines, washing socks. Even if you only change your socks once a year, it is nice to have a clean, dry pair.\"\n\n\"So why not take a city and enslave its citizens?\"\n\n\"Because it is too big. Somebody is sure to object, like Procampur, and knock the walls down and take it back. It is strange. Fottergrim has been unusually clever for an orc these past ten years. It is almost as if someone talked him into taking the city. Or he was seized by divine madness. And I will bet you my nonexistent lunch and unlikely dinner, he is up on the walls right now, regretting that he ever invaded Tsurlagol.\"\n\n\"So you think we can win the siege,\" persisted Sanval.\n\n\"Certainly hope so,\" replied Ivy, trying for a nonchalant tone to impress him. \"Because we don't get paid unless Procampur wins. So I would like to bring a wall down before I leave for better places. And nothing is getting done by standing here!\"\n\nThe last was pitched much louder and Mumchance responded with, \"We're trying, Ivy.\" The dwarf dropped to his hands and knees, sniffing along the floor like a hunting hound, obviously trying to scent some stray draft blowing under the door that might reveal an opening. Wiggles ran around him, occasionally giving the dwarf's red nose a big lick. \"Get away, sweetheart,\" muttered Mumchance at the dog. \"Let me do my work.\"\n\n\"Perhaps Enguerrand can succeed without your help,\" suggested Sanval. He probably meant his words as a kindness, but that statement pricked Ivy's pride.\n\n\"Give me pike dwarfs and gnome archers, and I can topple any cavalry charge,\" said Ivy. \"And Fottergrim has much more than that.\"\n\n\"Pikes and arrows would not work against such trained cavalry as Enguerrand leads,\" stated Sanval with calm conviction.\n\n\"Does. Did. That's how I met Mumchance,\" said Ivy.\n\nSanval cocked an eyebrow.\n\n\"In the mud, pinned under a horse, having been on the wrong end of the charge,\" explained Ivy. \"Terrible day, rain pouring down, fresh plowed field all gone to muck. But there were these dwarves and gnomes. Just standing there. Waiting for us. They looked so very short from where we were sitting on top of our great big chargers. So the trumpets sound, the drums beat, and we go racing up hill in full armor in the stupidest charge in the history of horse-mounted warfare. I was one of the lucky ones. The arrows got my horse, and it rolled over on me. That horse's death saved me from being spit on the pikes. Also I fell face up, rather than face down, so I didn't drown in the mud.\"\n\n\"How old were you?\" said Sanval.\n\n\"Fifteen and foolish at that age, like all young humans,\" said Mumchance standing up and brushing off his knees. He hooked his little hammer out of his belt and began tapping on the door, pressing one ear against the stone to listen for echoes. With a roll of his good eye toward Ivy, he added, \"But she was politer than most.\"\n\n\"Keep working,\" said Ivy. \"You don't have time to gossip.\" To Sanval, she said, \"My mother taught me court courtesy.\"\n\n\"Really?\" said Sanval, clearly remembering the song about the red-roof girls and a few other comments.\n\n\"Oh, I can speak like a lady when I need to,\" said Ivy with a blush. She remembered the song too. It lacked elegance. Any Procampur court lady would swoon at the first verse alone, and it was probably just as well that she'd stopped before she'd gotten to the last lyric, because that might have caused a few of the more squeamish Procampur gentlemen to faint too. That boy in the Forty had been extremely pink in the face when she had passed him in front of the Thultyrl's tent. \"And my father was a druid who taught me how to keep my mouth shut. The elves used to call him the Silent Walker. For example, he would never interrupt a good story halfway through. It was one of the things my mother liked best about him whenever his silence wasn't driving her crazy.\"\n\nSanval did not say anything.\n\n\"My manners saved my life,\" Ivy continued. \"There I was, pinned under a dead horse, with this dwarf sitting on top and asking me what I thought I was doing there. I told him the truth. I absolutely didn't know why I was fighting that war, but I would appreciate a little help.\"\n\n\"So I dug her out and dried her off. By then the girls' father had disappeared, and their mothers were gone, and I thought I could use a little extra help at the farm.\" Mumchance pushed Zuzzara's shovel's edge against the bottom of the stone door. Scraping sounds, the high-pitched kind that made the back of Ivy's teeth hurt, filled the tunnel and caused the others to retreat a few steps. With a grunt, Mumchance pulled the shovel out from under the door and returned it to Zuzzara. \"Well, that didn't work. Gunderal, any luck?\"\n\nGunderal muttered something that sounded terribly close to a swear word. Zuzzara looked slightly shocked; Zuzzara's mother had never let her use language like that! But, being a water genasi, Gunderal's mother had possessed a very salty tongue when she was angry. Gunderal's vocabulary was far less delicate than her looks.\n\n\"There is a lock, a magical lock,\" muttered Gunderal. \"I am sure of it. But it is on the other side of the door, and I can't tell you anything more.\"\n\n\"It was the most miserable little war. Neither of us could see any reason to stay,\" Ivy continued talking to Sanval. She never had any luck with magic doors. If Gunderal and Mumchance could not open it, they would have to go back. She kept chattering to distract herself from screaming in frustration. \"So we deserted, Mumchance and I. It was the sensible thing to do.\"\n\n\"And this war?\" asked Sanval with more than polite curiosity.\n\n\"Oh, as miserable as the rest,\" said Mumchance, still staring at the door. The dwarf frowned, the lines crossing his forehead deepening, and the scars across his face more pronounced than ever. With the iron clad toe of his boot, he softly kicked the obstacle facing him\u2014a straight line across the bottom of the door, clang, clang, clang\u2014but nothing rattled or echoed in the stone door. \"But war pays our bills. That is why mercenaries fight, boy. For the money. Not honor, not glory, not history. For loot. Well, except for the odd bad one.\u2026\"\n\n\"The ones that fight because they like it,\" said Ivy. \"And before you ask, we are the good kind of mercenary. The ones who care most for gold.\"\n\nSanval did not look reassured.\n\n\"So why do you fight?\" she asked.\n\n\"Because I am a noble of Procampur, pledged to the service of the Thultyrl. And he is a good king, the wisest we have had for some time. But even if he were the worst of tyrants, I would still answer his call. My family has always served the Thultyrl.\"\n\n\"What sort of family do you have?\"\n\nSanval frowned. \"None now, but I come from people who do their duty. My parents did as their families asked. They were betrothed in their cradles and married at the most auspicious time determined by their parents.\"\n\n\"And were they happy?\"\n\n\"I do not know,\" admitted Sanval. \"I never saw them except at formal gatherings. We send our children to the schools for those of our district, to be raised together by approved tutors. Like most boys, I seldom left my dormitory until I came of age, and by then my parents had perished from the same fever that killed the old Thultyrl.\"\n\nIvy grinned at him. \"Bet you never thought your path would drop you underground with a bunch of mercenaries unsuccessfully trying to break through a door.\" The last sentence was made directly to the dwarf still kicking the door in front of her.\n\n\"Maybe a counterweight, above the door,\" speculated Mumchance, ignoring Ivy. \"Hey, Zuzzara, give me a boost up.\"\n\nZuzzara grabbed the dwarf around the waist and lifted him to her shoulders. His head rapped smartly on the stone ceiling. \"Sorry,\" said Zuzzara with a grunt as she adjusted the dwarf's feet on her shoulders.\n\n\"No,\" said Mumchance feeling along the lintel. \"Nothing here. Let me down. Gently! Gently!\"\n\nZuzzara caught him as he flipped off her shoulders and just prevented him from landing headfirst on the floor. Kid snickered, and even Gunderal looked a little less depressed.\n\nAfter several more attempts to get the door to open, they declared themselves defeated. Mumchance admitted that without the exact knowledge of how the door locked and unlocked, they could not open it.\n\nGunderal, in particular, was very upset by her failure after having such recent improvement with the phantom fungus. Zuzzara told her sister not to worry, that her spells would come back soon.\n\n\"Like you would know anything about magic,\" said Gunderal with a tearful sniff. She fumbled a handkerchief out of her pocket and dabbed her eyes.\n\n\"I know nothing about magic,\" admitted Zuzzara with one of her deep chuckles and a pat on the back that caused Gunderal to stumble. Ever since Gunderal had managed at least the frost spell against the animated fungus, Zuzzara had cheered up. She no longer suggested carrying her little sister or whispered to Ivy about the possibilities of blood poisoning developing from a sprained arm. \"But I know you, little sister. You may be pretty, but you are not dumb.\"\n\nIt was the start of an old family joke, and Gunderal giggled. \"And big and ugly doesn't mean you're stupid.\"\n\n\"Unless you fall down on the way to the outhouse.\" Zuzzara added the obscure punchline that Ivy had never understood.\n\nGunderal started laughing so hard that she had to stop to mop the streaming tears out of her eyes.\n\n\"Sisters,\" moaned Ivy. \"I will never, ever, campaign with sisters again!\"\n\n\"You say that every time,\" said Mumchance. \"Hurry up, you two. No point standing around here now.\"\n\nAs he turned, he bumped into Ivy, who stumbled and thrust out her left hand to catch herself. As she fell against the wall, she felt a stone shift beneath her gloved hand. A grating sound came from the floor beneath them, and the entire room shook.\n\n\"Earthquake?\" asked Sanval in a calm but resigned tone, as he kept his balance on the shifting stone.\n\n\"Wizard work,\" shouted Mumchance over the crunch of rock sliding over rock. The whole room lurched to the left and bumped to a stop. A new door opened in front of them, with a black corridor running before them. The stone door behind them and the entrance to the ossuary before them had disappeared.\n\n\"Shifting passage,\" grumbled Mumchance. \"Sort of stupid thing that wizards put in for short cuts.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Ivy, still determined to be optimistic, \"perhaps this leads straight outside.\"\n\n\"Did you suspect such a possibility?\" Sanval asked Mumchance.\n\n\"I suspect everything, but that never finds the key to a shifting passage. Only a truly lucky or miserably unlucky accident does that,\" the dwarf complained and stamped ahead of them through the opening.\n\n\"And which kind of accident is this, my dear?\" speculated Kid with a soft laugh at the dwarf's grumbling.\n\n\"Won't know until we get there,\" said Mumchance over his shoulder. \"Come on, Wiggles, hurry up.\" The little dog was lagging behind and seemed reluctant to enter the room. The dwarf whistled. Wiggles tucked her tail firmly between her legs and slunk into the passage behind him.\n\nIn the darkness far ahead of the Siegebreakers, the magelord hissed and stopped. He had felt something, like a cold draft across his spell-laden shoulders. The charms attached to his robe murmured to him, giving him advance warning of a new danger. Magic \u2026 Somebody or something had woken up an old magic in these tunnels.\n\n\"Fools.\" He peered back into the blackness outside the yellow light cast by the torches. Fottergrim had set trackers on his trail. He had known that the big orc would do that. Who knew what those idiots had stirred up? If only that foolish orc had done what he had told him to and stayed outside the walls of Tsurlagol, letting him explore these tunnels in peace. No, no, the big stupid oaf had to smash his way into the city and start a war!\n\nThe bugbears surrounding him shuffled their broad feet and voiced their complaints. They had been growing more obnoxious in their objections since they had had to abandon that one female bugbear. As if such a creature mattered to him! A quick snap of the fingers, and a quicker flash of fire lit up the tunnel, turning the bugbears' complaints to sullen but subdued snarls.\n\n\"We are being followed,\" he informed them. After all, it was the bugbears' job to guard him while he went about his business. He had already paid them a half-horse worth of nearly fresh meat that morning. And promised them more in the evening. \"Be alert!\"\n\nBut he decided not to rely on the bugbears alone\u2014they were stupid creatures whose big muscles gave them their only worth in his estimation. Something else slithered through the ruins of buried Tsurlagol, something large and scaled and hungry.\n\nWith a few muttered words, and at the cost of only one charm, the magelord called the creature to him. At his feet was the big hole that they had just climbed out of. It was another dead end for his treasure hunt, but a perfect trap for anyone foolish enough to follow him.\n\nThe new tunnel led the Siegebreakers into another broad room, wider than the first. Like the ossuary, it contained bones\u2014only these were strewn across the floor as well as piled into niches. At the sight and smell of the bones, Wiggles's ears went up. The little dog tentatively wagged her tail. Mumchance snatched at her collar to keep her from grabbing the nearest bone. While hauling Wiggles away, the dwarf noticed that there was one peculiarity about all the skeletons scattered across the floor.\n\n\"There are no heads,\" Mumchance said. \"Where have all the skulls gone?\"\n\n\"Burial rite?\" guessed Ivy.\n\nKid advanced into the center of the room. He glanced at Ivy, waiting for her to tell him not to touch. When she said nothing, he stretched out one little hoof and stirred the bones. An odd grin of amusement spread across his face. \"Perhaps someone took away the skulls for a collection, my dears, or to roll them through the ruins for their pleasure.\"\n\n\"There's something evil here,\" said Gunderal with a shiver at the little thief's suggestions. \"I can feel it.\" She passed Kid, going into the center of the room and looking right and left. \"There's something hiding here. I know it.\"\n\nGunderal peered into the shadowy niches lining the walls, with Zuzzara following directly behind her.\n\n\"Let's just get out of here,\" suggested Ivy.\n\n\"No,\" Gunderal almost snapped at her. \"We have to find it first. If we try to pass before we find it, we'll end up like those skeletons.\"\n\n\"How can you be certain?\"\n\n\"Because I am a wizard,\" said Gunderal with more force than normal. \"Evil was done here.\"\n\n\"Come on, Gunderal,\" said her sister. \"You are just nervous. It has been a bad day.\"\n\nThe wizard heaved a sigh. \"Don't tell me what I'm feeling. This is what I am good at, sensing magic, just as you are good at hitting things.\" Gunderal moved back to the center of the room. Rather than skipping lightly around the bones on the floor, as she would normally do, she kicked her way through a rib cage, sending bits rolling off to one side. \"Show yourself. I know you are there,\" she said.\n\nEveryone looked at Gunderal, then looked around the room, not asking to whom she spoke. She was a wizard, and they respected that. Still, they had never seen her talk to a pile of bones before. When a thin, strange voice answered her, they all became motionless. Ivy liked to think that standing frozen like a statue in the marketplace was a sign of alertness on her part, never fear. She glanced at Sanval. As always when faced with danger, his face was as frozen as the farm pond in midwinter. But he did give the tiniest shrug of inquiry. Ivy raised her eyebrows and shook her head when he started to move forward. She trusted Gunderal's instincts. The little genasi had gotten them out of more than one magical trap. Besides, from the way that Kid's ears were swiveling back and forth in nervous agitation, she was sure that he felt something peculiar in the room too.\n\nA voice said, \"The wizard is clever. Very clever. But is the wizard clever enough to best me?\"\n\nIn an unnoticed niche, a soft green glow began to brighten. As it floated out into the room, they saw the light was a human skull surrounded by a jagged green flame that ringed it much like a lion's head is ringed by its mane. Its eyes glittered, points of green fire. The light increased and reflected off the walls, turning the room into a flickering green grotto.\n\n\"All heads belong to me,\" said the flameskull, apparently untroubled by its lack of a body. The thing had no lips, no flesh at all, just clean jawbones clacking away. Unfortunately, it did have a few teeth\u2014brown and half-rotted\u2014that wobbled in a disgusting manner when it spoke. \"They told me that when they left me here.\"\n\n\"And who would they be?\" Gunderal sounded as if she were making pleasant conversation in her own parlor, but she waved her uninjured hand frantically behind her back, gesturing to the others to gather closer to her.\n\n\"My two friends, my two fond friends, my two cherished dead friends,\" said the flameskull, floating effortlessly in front of Gunderal. \"We had heard that Tsurlagol had fallen and all its treasures were buried in its ruins. So we came to dig them out again. We were wizards too\u2014not insignificant spellcasters or mountebanks, but masters of magnificent magic. We came looking for the glittering gems and the great diamond buried with them.\"\n\n\"Any luck?\" Ivy could not resist asking even as Gunderal made shushing motions.\n\nFor a creature with no face, it was amazingly clear that the flameskull had settled into a sulk. Ivy guessed it had something to do with how the flames writhed in the eyesockets and the tone of voice issuing from its mouth. \"They left me behind,\" it said with a distinct snarl. \"They left me behind and told me to take the skulls of any who followed us. But I cursed them both even as they chopped off my head and arms and hid my body in the ruins.\"\n\n\"There's nothing worse than an argument among thieves, my dear,\" said Kid in a tone laden with bitter experience. \"Especially when they are magical thieves.\"\n\n\"They left me behind,\" the skull repeated. The flames around the bony head died down a little, as if depression dampened the creature's fire.\n\n\"Obviously not the best of friends,\" said Ivy, hoping to keep the skull talking, because she could see that Gunderal was about to cast some type of spell. \"I wouldn't do what they told me to do. Especially if they cut off my head before they told me.\"\n\n\"Huh! As if I have a choice,\" snapped the skull with a click of its rotted teeth. His flames brightened to a wide halo of green fire around his head. \"They have been dead and gone for a generation or more! I am still here! And all have to pay toll to me. Pay me in skulls! Or rot as they rotted!\" The creature's voice rose in anger, its fiery halo brightened, and two bolts of flame shot from its eyesockets.\n\nBefore the fire could touch anyone, Gunderal raised a wall of water between the Siegebreakers and the flameskull. The flames licked out in pointed flickers, tossing a spray of green sparks. They hit the water wall and hissed, spat, and sizzled. The wall shimmered green, and then the flames extinguished themselves in the water.\n\n\"Well done, wizard,\" said the flameskull. \"Quite well done. But what will you do now? Remember, whoever collects the most heads wins. And that is always me, me, me!\"\n\n\"Cheeky thing for a dead head,\" said Mumchance.\n\n\"Does your game have rules?\" Ivy shouted at the flameskull, hoping to keep it talking and distract it from flinging more flame spells at them. Gunderal's wall of water looked very wobbly, and Ivy suspected the spell was not too stable.\n\n\"You've got to smash it,\" Gunderal muttered to Ivy, confirming her worst fears. \"Quickly. The wall won't hold.\"\n\n\"It moves pretty fast,\" Ivy said. The flameskull was zipping back and forth, trying to find a way around the wall, but it was also keeping away from the water. It appeared to not want to get wet.\n\n\"I can hit it,\" said Sanval, sliding his sword out of his scabbard. \"Should I jump through the wall?\"\n\n\"No!\" they all yelled. \"That will just make the wall disappear!\" All the Siegebreakers knew the basic mechanics of Gunderal's spell. They had used the wall of water many times before to shelter from some flame or other, even from fires that they had started themselves.\n\n\"I can make you faster,\" said Gunderal to Sanval, \"but I need to drop the water wall. I can't do two spells at the same time.\" Already the wall was becoming misty around the edges as the water started to fade away. The flameskull bobbed closer, obviously trying to listen to their conversation. It tilted its bony head, and odd sparks shot from its eye sockets.\n\nZuzzara shifted so she was nearer to her sister. \"I'll protect you while you're casting your spell,\" she said to Gunderal, \"but be quick, little sister, be quick.\"\n\n\"Drop the wall, Gunderal,\" commanded Ivy. \"We'll scatter and try to divert its attack. Sanval, you'd better crush that thing on the first try!\"\n\nThe wall vanished, and Ivy flung herself directly under the skull, sliding on her stomach through the bones on the floor. As she had intended, the flameskull spun in place, turning itself upside down as it tried to track her movements. A bolt of energy from the skull's mouth whizzed by her ear and extinguished itself in the floor beside her.\n\nZuzzara swung with her shovel at the back of the flameskull at the same time that Ivy flung herself under the floating flaming head. The half-orc missed, the flameskull shooting up toward the ceiling too quickly for her to connect with. The flameskull twisted around, trying to hit her with blasts of energy. The mane of flame whipped around the skull, long green tendrils hissing through the air. Again, with a howl of frustration, the skull's energy bolt undershot its target as Zuzzara grabbed her sister around the waist and leaped out of the way.\n\nGunderal let out a little squeak as the two of them rolled across the floor, outside the flameskull's range. \"Let me down. Sanval, get over here,\" the wizard called.\n\n\"Missed, missed, missed with your missile,\" yelled Kid, cartwheeling around the skull, which had zipped lower again in an attempt to hit Ivy with a whip of fire. His hooves clicked on the floor, then spun in the air close to the skull as he went into a handstand. The flameskull blasted upward with a whistling screech, dived in a wide arc over Kid's flailing hooves, and aimed itself again at Ivy. In desperation, Ivy grabbed an old shinbone off the floor and lobbed it with her left hand at the skull. One end knocked against the flameskull's bony pate. The skull hit the floor with a thud and rolled to a dazed stop, then slowly drifted upward. Ivy heard a sharp bark and a \"No!\" from Mumchance. Wiggles raced past her, barking wildly and dancing on her back paws, trying to catch the skull floating above her.\n\n\"Crazy dog!\" yelled Ivy, grabbing for Wiggles's collar. \"That's a bad, old bone. You don't want that.\" She scooped the little dog up and tossed Wiggles to Mumchance. The dwarf caught Wiggles and dropped her behind him.\n\n\"Stay!\" said Mumchance sternly in Dwarvish. Wiggles folded her ears back and dropped to a crouch. She kept giving out eager little whines as she watched the flameskull bounce and dip around the room. The little dog started to crawl forward on her front legs, rump high in the air and fluffy tail wagging madly.\n\n\"No!\" said Mumchance again in Dwarvish. \"Bad dog! Settle!\" He picked up a collarbone from the floor and chucked it with a big overhand throw at the flameskull. The undead head bounced out of the way with a jeer.\n\n\"Can't hit me!\" yelled the flameskull and spat another ball of sparks at the dwarf. Mumchance skipped to one side with the lightness of a dwarf half his age, Wiggles dancing at his heels.\n\nKid spun around the flameskull, flipping and cartwheeling to confuse the creature. With one big spin, he managed to clip it with the edge of one hoof, shoving it back against the stone wall. \"You cannot catch us. We are too quick for an old cracked head like you!\" he said.\n\nA spray of green sparks zoomed past Kid. Several settled on the toe of one of Sanval's boots. The smell of burnt polish and leather filled the air. Glaring at the boot, Sanval rubbed the damaged toe against the back of the opposite shin, then glared again as he stamped down his foot. A large scorch mark marred the shiny polished surface of the toe.\n\n\"That does it,\" he muttered. \"Get me there, wizard!\"\n\nSanval slid into place next to Gunderal. With a quickly whispered spell, she slapped Sanval hard between the shoulders, shouting, \"Go, go!\"\n\nScreaming, the skull dived after Kid, spreading a trail of green fire and ignoring Sanval, who charged after it. With magically enhanced speed, Sanval swung his sword down on the skull. The brittle bone shattered, scattering pieces around the room.\n\nIt had only taken a few moments. As quickly as the threat had appeared, it was gone. Ivy sat at the edge of the room, shaking her head. \"Well, that was fun, I think. Good work, Gunderal.\"\n\n\"Oh dear,\" said Gunderal, pointing at the shattered bits of skull scattered through the other bones. Tendrils of green flame were sprouting from each separate piece of the skull. As they all watched, the pale green flames twisted across the room, reaching for each other. \"We should leave now.\"\n\n\"Isn't it dead?\" asked Sanval, straightening his helmet after he sheathed his sword.\n\n\"It was always dead,\" explained Gunderal, pushing them toward the archway at the opposite end of the room. \"But it is one of those dead things that can put itself back together again.\"\n\n\"I hate those types of dead things,\" grumbled Mumchance.\n\n\"Dead should stay dead,\" added Zuzzara, picking up the torch and shovel that she had dropped when she grabbed Gunderal. She thrust the shovel, handle straight down, through her belt and raised the still-lit torch high to illuminate the exit.\n\n\"I could not agree more,\" said Kid, skipping back and forth and watching how the green flames tended to bend toward him whenever he passed too close. \"But perhaps we can break this spell.\" He reached down and scooped up one rotten molar that had been knocked out of the flameskull's jaw. Kid tucked it into one of the many pouches dangling from his belt.\n\n\"Ugh, that is one terrible souvenir,\" commented Zuzzara as they left the room. \"Kid, you should leave it be.\"\n\n\"No, he should take it,\" said Gunderal. \"Such guardians can rarely reassemble themselves if you take away a piece.\"\n\n\"Hope you're right, little sister,\" said Zuzzara. \"That thing nearly burned my britches.\"\n\n\"Of course, I'm right. I told you. Trust me, I know magic.\"\n\nBeyond the room containing the flameskull was a swift, hidden passage back to the place where they fought the phantom fungus. Once they reached that room, the Siegebreakers would have no choice but to follow the northern passageway that Sanval had wanted to take in the first place\u2014the one that sent them on the trail of the other party in the ruins and, possibly, a troop of Fottergrim's raiders. Ivy thought that Sanval looked smug, but when he caught her staring his face smoothed into that irritating bland look that he was so very good at.\n\n\"Gunderal seems pleased,\" said Ivy to Mumchance, watching the little wizard walking in front of them. Although she still cradled her injured arm, the wizard held her head straight, and her long black hair bounced on her shoulders, free at last from its confining topknot.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Mumchance, but there was no elation in his voice.\n\n\"What is wrong?\"\n\n\"Not all her spells worked,\" Mumchance replied with a frown. \"She couldn't throw a decent frost, that wall of water nearly collapsed, and she should have been quicker with slapping that last spell on Sanval. That trick should have been easier for her. And, Ivy, we may need more from her before we are out of here. The river is going to worm its way into these tunnels. I just know it. And the only one of us that has any control over water is Gunderal. But if she has no control over her magic, then we are sunk\u2014way down in the mud sunk.\"\n\n\"You worry too much,\" said Ivy. Gunderal had been slow in the fight\u2014Ivy had never seen her more unsure when casting a spell\u2014but she was not going to give the dwarf the satisfaction of agreeing with his gloomy prognostication. After all, she was the captain of this little company, and a captain should be optimistic even when she was stuck up to her hips in a mucky situation with only one shovel to dig herself out. She tried to cheer the dwarf up. \"After we got away from the river bank, it's been bone dry, even in the ossuary!\"\n\n\"Make jokes if you want. But it doesn't feel dry to me. Just you wait and see.\"\n\nAs they entered the baths, the smell of the dead phantom fungus assaulted their noses. Mumchance glanced down into the dry pool with the mosaic bottom, shifting his head so he was staring straight down with his good eye. He cursed\u2014quiet little curses that made Wiggles whine\u2014and waved his lantern over the edge of the pool. Dry dust had become slimy mud, and water clearly shone in the light of the torch.\n\n\"The river is rising,\" Mumchance said, \"and the water is running through the old pipes that fed the bath.\"\n\n\"Well, that's something less than wonderful,\" observed Ivy before Mumchance could say anything more and upset everyone. Nobody needed to hear \"I told you so\" right now, most especially her.\n\nBut Ivy was more worried than she let her friends see. The water was rising, and they still had no idea how to get out of the ruins of Tsurlagol. Ivy feared they might have to swim to make it out."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "When they passed out of the chamber still stinking of dead bugbear and fungus, the Siegebreakers entered into a network of much broader tunnels. Looking at the ledges running high above them, Mumchance suggested that they were traveling down an ancient and dried-out storm sewer.\n\n\"And,\" he pointed out glumly, \"if it was a storm drain, it means that it had pipes feeding into it\u2014the type of pipes that will carry the rising river water into it.\"\n\n\"We'll worry about that when our feet get wet,\" countered Ivy.\n\nKid picked up new sets of tracks in the tunnel. The four who had fled from the phantom fungus and a larger group following them. \"Wide feet, short legs, iron nails striking sparks on the stone as they march along,\" said Kid, clicking beside the group, still watching for tracks in the dirt. \"And that other thing behind, dragging over their footsteps and wiping some away.\" At one point, he stopped and stooped, tracing the peculiar track with one hand. \"One very large snake moving very fast.\" Satisfied once the mysterious track was identified, Kid wandered out of the circle of lights cast by their torches and lantern, sniffing the air for more tunnel entrances.\n\n\"Fottergrim had hobgoblins and mountain orcs moving in and out of the city until we bottled up the western woods,\" observed Sanval. \"We never could find their tunnel. Maybe this is it.\" He sounded excited and pleased by the prospect of running into an unknown number of adversaries.\n\n\"Maybe these are old tracks,\" said Ivy, with very little hope.\n\n\"New,\" said Kid, rejoining the group. \"A day, not more, perhaps less, my dear.\"\n\nUpon hearing that, Ivy shifted her position to the front, grabbing a torch from Zuzzara in passing. In her opinion, she was the best fighter among them, even if she did not have the shiniest armor.\n\n\"Who is playing hero now?\" whispered Mumchance to her.\n\n\"Hey,\" said Ivy in sharp if not coherent rebuke.\n\nThe dwarf jerked his head back toward Sanval. \"You are mad that he killed the fungus.\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" hissed Ivy. \"Did you smell that thing?\"\n\n\"And smashed that skull.\"\n\n\"He needed Gunderal's help to do that.\"\n\n\"And Zuzzara stopped the kobolds.\"\n\n\"Zuzzara is good with kobolds. I am more than happy to let her bat them around.\"\n\n\"So why are you shoving to the front?\"\n\n\"Because I don't know if it is kobolds, fungus, or more talking skulls around the corner. And you know the rule. It's only a good day \u2026\"\n\n\"\u2026 When everybody gets to go home.\"\n\n\"So far, it has been a very bad day. I want it to be a good one,\" said Ivy. \"Besides, right now, if we run into anything that is not an ally, I would prefer to hit it hard and keep hitting it until I feel better.\"\n\n\"Fair enough,\" agreed Mumchance. The dwarf put Wiggles down to run. She raced past Ivy, yip-yap-yip, except the last yap cut off abruptly.\n\n\"Wiggles!\" yelled Mumchance. The dark way before them was filled with silence and shadows. \"Wiggles!\" The dwarf whistled and whistled again.\n\nKid's sharp ears caught the answering bark. \"Ahead, dear sir, ahead,\" he said. \"And down.\"\n\nAround the next corner, the floor just disappeared. Ivy spotted the darkness half a step short of the edge, her foot raised. She stopped and leaned back, slapping her hand against the wall to balance herself. She raised the torch that she was carrying as high as possible to illuminate the hallway. The hole stretched halfway across the corridor. There was no sign of Wiggles.\n\n\"Stupid, stupid mutt,\" murmured Ivy as she hung over the edge and waved her torch in an attempt to see Wiggles. Ivy's torch barely lit the wall for several feet down, and then the hole went black. \"Dumb, dumb dog.\" But she muttered softly, so Mumchance could not hear. He was too busy whistling and calling to the little dog to pay any attention.\n\n\"Stay, Wiggles, stay!\" the dwarf yelled into the black hole.\n\n\"Truly, truly wonderful,\" said Ivy.\n\n\"I'll go, Ivy,\" said Mumchance. \"I can grab her and get back here fast.\"\n\nIvy stared at the dwarf, who was at least three centuries older than her and never a good climber, and sighed. \"No, I will go down. I will get Wiggles. I will bring her back. You will all stay here and do nothing foolish, like come after me.\"\n\nShe did not hear a chorus of agreement.\n\n\"That was an order,\" she said.\n\nThere was still silence.\n\n\"I am an officer of Procampur\u2014\" Sanval began.\n\nIvy interrupted him. \"Which means that small white dogs are not your responsibility. Protecting my friends, however \u2026\"\n\n\"They will be safe. I will protect them,\" he stated in his quiet manner. Ivy believed him. It had to be, she decided later, the way that he just gleamed in the torchlight. Shiny armor. It just made a man look like a hero, Ivy thought. Something about the way that he stood too. Absolutely straight. Sword drawn and clasped in both hands, point down. She had tried that stance a couple of times when she was younger. It had never worked for her. But Sanval, he made it look natural\u2014like one of those guardian statues in the better class of temple. Although most guardian statues did not have a huge scorch mark running across one shiny boot and a worried frown wrinkling a normally smooth forehead.\n\n\"It will be all right,\" she said, just to make that line disappear. It certainly did not suit Sanval's usual noble and serene demeanor. Ivy handed her torch to Kid, who just stood there looking at her with an eerily similar crease in the middle of his forehead that made the outer edges of his eyebrows tip up even more dramatically. \"Don't worry. Whatever went down there is long gone. Just look after my friends.\"\n\n\"Ivy, I got a rope off that dead bugbear,\" said Zuzzara, uncoiling it from around her waist.\n\n\"See why we loot the dead when we can?\" Ivy said to Sanval. He made no reply.\n\nIvy pulled her gloves off her belt and put them on to protect her hands from the rope. She shifted her sword on her back again, making sure the ties were tight.\n\n\"Now, remember, everyone is going to stay right here,\" she said. Zuzzara found a protruding rock and tied off the rope, dropping it down into the black hole. Ivy grabbed the line and slowly descended into the darkness below.\n\nA torch dropped past her. It lit the bottom of the hole with a faint pool of light. Ivy glanced down. She could not see Wiggles, but she could hear the dog whining below her.\n\nShe hit the sandy bottom of the hole and began to call the dog. \"Come on, Wiggles, come here,\" she cajoled. \"Come on, darling.\"\n\nA sharp bark sounded ahead of her. Ivy picked up the torch and advanced farther into the hole. She spotted the shine of white fur. Wiggles was backed into a crack in the wall, tail between her legs, ears flat back against her head.\n\n\"Come on, Wiggles,\" said Ivy, \"you know me. Nothing to be worried about. Come out, there's a good girl.\"\n\nThe dog remained motionless, her eyes staring at Ivy, and she gave a soft whine.\n\nIntent on the dog cowering away from her, Ivy tripped over the giant black snake slithering across the floor. The creature reared up with a hiss, its mouth open and its fangs gleaming. Its head swung slowly, dipped to the floor of the pit, and led the curve of its body in a circle around her feet. She grabbed for her sword, trying to pull it one-handed out of the scabbard tied on her back while keeping the torch between her and the serpent's bobbing head. The creature lashed out with unbelievable speed, uncoiling its length and circling upward around and around, over her ankles, around her knees, and up her thighs. Ivy lost her grip on the torch, which bounced harmlessly off the snake's back and rolled away.\n\nThe serpent twisted up Ivy's body faster and faster, like lighting striking up from the ground. It pinned her arms in place; her right hand was twisted awkwardly up by her shoulder, still fumbling for her sword hilt. But her armor protected her arm, and, as painful as her pinned arm was, the position also kept the snake off of her throat.\n\nIvy screamed\u2014outraged at the suddenness of the attack, furious at the pain of her twisted arm\u2014and tried to lunge out of the snake's coils. She could not move! The creature's body lapped around her, pressing against her ribs, and little stars danced in front of her eyes as the breath was slowly squeezed out of her. Her pulse beat frantically in her throat, and she knew that soon her heart would be crushed to a stop. The serpent's terrible head brushed against her face. She twisted her face clear, drawing shallow breaths against the overwhelming pressure, desperately trying to think of a way to escape from the crushing grip.\n\nFangs, fangs, the thing had enormous fangs. She remembered the ivory flash in the torch light. Poisonous? Did crushing serpents need poison? Something snagged at the edge of her thick blonde braid and pulled it forward around her neck so that it hung over the front of her shoulder. For a terrible moment, her own hair felt almost like a second serpent around her throat. She could not draw a deep enough breath to scream again, but in her mind she was shrieking.\n\nWhen Ivy screamed, Sanval raced past Mumchance. He leaped straight out and, as gravity grabbed him, disappeared straight down.\n\n\"Sanval, stop! That is the most unbelievably stupid,\" the dwarf yelled as Sanval's brilliantly shined helmet disappeared below the lip of the hole, \"and brave.\u2026 Zuzzara, follow him! Ivy is in trouble!\"\n\nThe Siegebreakers rushed to the edge of the hole. Zuzzara grabbed the rope and swung after the Procampur officer.\n\nWiggles barked hysterically.\n\nLanding on the sandy floor with a thud, Sanval scooped Ivy's still burning torch from the floor. He thrust it toward the serpent's eyes, less than a hand's width from Ivy's face, momentarily blinding the beast. The heat of the torch flared against Ivy's cheek, but the serpent's grip was so tight that she could not even wince. The giant snake hissed and wavered, obviously confused as to whether to bite Sanval or crush Ivy. Sanval ground the torch into one of the serpent's eyes. It popped and sizzled with a sickening smell right under Ivy's offended nose. She gagged. The giant snake tried to twist around and face this new threat with its one remaining eye.\n\nWith a prolonged hiss, the creature struck at Sanval. Its ivory fangs gleamed more brightly than the Procampur captain's sword.\n\nFaster than one of Ivy's thundering heartbeats, Sanval thrust up with his blade, skewering the serpent through the jaw and piercing straight into its brain. The creature collapsed, its coils tightening in one last spasm of cruel strength, then going slack around Ivy's body.\n\nIvy could clearly see her open-mouthed expression in the polished gloss of Sanval's breastplate as he tried to catch her with his free hand. She slid down in front of him until she was kneeling on the floor.\n\n\"That was \u2026 That was \u2026\" She could not think what to say. She remained on her knees, gasping for breath.\n\nA worried Zuzzara dropped from the rope, arriving on the pit's floor with an audible thump of haste. Her shovel was held high, ready to brain any attacker. \"Ivy? Sanval? Are you all right?\"\n\nWiggles crept out of the hole where she was hiding and rushed to Ivy, collapsing by her side with a doggy sigh of relief.\n\nIvy swallowed and tried to speak again. She could feel her ribs creaking when she took a deep breath, but nothing felt broken. She shook herself free of the coils of the dead serpent, as Sanval pulled the weight of it away from her.\n\nSanval caught her elbows and helped her to her feet. Ivy nearly swatted his hands away. After all, she wasn't some weak court lady who needed a hand up every time she tripped over her silk shoes or a giant snake. Then she took a deep breath to clear her mind as well as her lungs, and decided that Sanval would reach down to anyone who needed help, not because that person was weak but just because that was what you did when you lived by the rigid rules of Procampur courtesy. Why not let him be polite for once\u2014it would make the man happy\u2014especially when her knees were wobbling and she was still seeing little stars dancing in front of her eyes.\n\nSanval did not even look winded. Just concerned.\n\n\"Ivy?\" asked Sanval. \"Are you bleeding? Your face, your hair?\"\n\nIt was a trick of the torchlight. Ivy felt the dampness in her hair and a trickle down her face. It was wet, it was cold, and it was water, showering in rapidly increasing drops from the ceiling.\n\n\"Ivy!\" Mumchance leaned far over the edge, head tilted to one side as he strained to see her. \"We need to go! There's a lot of water coming down the tunnel.\"\n\n\"No, no, no!\" Ivy could not prevent the childish sound of mutiny in her voice. The gods knew, she could take falling into a river, getting lost in a maze of dark tunnels, and fighting off kobolds, phantom fungus, and giant snakes. She could even take getting rescued by somebody who acted like he belonged in one of her mother's heroic ballads\u2014though she meant to repay the favor as quickly as she could, because she did have her pride after all. Everything that had happened was just the sort of thing that could happen on the edges of a siege, when you were supposed to be doing a job and were getting lost instead in ruins that stretched on forever. She was serene about all of that. Most assuredly, she had handled anything that had come before. But she absolutely and completely refused to be sanguine about drowning in the dark. If she wanted to panic now, she would panic.\n\nIn the climb out of the hole, pulling herself up the rope slowly, each stretch of Ivy's right arm caused twinges all down her snake-bruised body. Wiggles rode triumphant on her shoulder, barking directly in her ear when she scented Mumchance above them. As soon as Ivy was level with the top of the hole, the dwarf reached out and snagged the little dog, hugging her tight to his chest.\n\nAs she clambered out of the hole, Ivy calmed down a little and decided to wait until they were above ground before she threw the mother of all fits. Right now, she was going to get them out of this dismal, damp disaster of a situation.\n\nWater glimmered in the torchlight, dripping down the walls and flowing from the direction of the old city baths. Right now it was barely deep enough to cover the soles of their boots, and most was pouring down into the hole in the passageway.\n\nIvy glanced at Gunderal. The little wizard shook her head, looking close to tears. \"I just can't stop it,\" she said. \"Maybe slow it down a little.\"\n\n\"Do what you can,\" Ivy said to Gunderal. The moment that Zuzzara and Sanval cleared the hole, she shouted, \"Let's move!\"\n\nTaking the lead, she set off at a fast jog into the black unknown as the river continued to worm its way into the tunnels, water rising fast behind them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Intent on fleeing the water gushing into the underground ruins, the Siegebreakers trotted at increasing speed through the black tunnels. Once again, to Mumchance's distress, they were going down, not up, and the way was broadening before them. The underground road was now wide enough to run three or even four abreast, and the angry mutter of the river continued to follow them.\n\n\"We have to go higher!\" cried Mumchance, gesturing with his lantern and sending the shadows wildly swinging across the wall.\n\n\"Wonderful idea,\" panted Ivy as she lengthened her stride. \"But which way?\"\n\n\"There,\" said Mumchance, pointing at the dark entrance to a tunnel that branched off the main way.\n\n\"More tracks!\" squealed Kid, ears flicking nervously, nostrils wide as he tried to scent possible danger. He stamped his hooves against the dirt. \"Many feet, running past, my dear, and hobnail boots. Smoke ahead too!\"\n\n\"He's right, Ivy.\" Gunderal was breathing hard and looking even paler than before. \"I smell fire and magic.\"\n\n\"Maybe I should go ahead, in case of danger,\" Sanval started to suggest.\n\n\"No! We stay together. It's safer. No more lone rescues\u2014not even from me,\" decided Ivy, straining to smell whatever danger had spooked Kid and Gunderal. Her human nose just reported damp stone and the old sour scent of air trapped too long underground. She saw nothing but blackness beyond the light of their torches and Mumchance's faithfully burning lantern. \"It's probably just another burned part of the ruins. More ash and old spells.\"\n\n\"Water's running fast, Ivy.\" This came from Zuzzara, staring over their heads, looking back along the way that they had come. Her half-orc vision clearly showed her the rising level of the water moving down the ancient sewers.\n\n\"Then we run faster.\" To Sanval, she said, \"We are good at running. You should have seen us clear that tunnel when the hogs started to explode.\" That twitched his worried expression into a half smile. Pleased to have distracted him from any rash lone heroics, Ivy led them into the new tunnel, shouting at the others to turn and go in this new direction. \"Regular formation, single file!\" she yelled. \"Sanval, fall in with Zuzzara, help Gunderal if she needs it! Kid to the back, watch our rear! Mumchance, keep up and don't forget your sword! Everyone stay alert!\"\n\nThey scrambled up the slope. The tunnel turned sharply left. As they hustled around the bend, Ivy heard the clash of fighting\u2014nothing else sounded quite like that. And then she heard shouting. She tried to turn back and warn the Siegebreakers to be quiet until they could assess the situation, but the momentum of the others behind her propelled her into the fight before she could shout a warning.\n\nA man on fire, surrounded by hobgoblins and orcs, stood in the middle of the fight. Ivy slid to a halt, flipping her sword out even before she came to a complete stop. Startled by the sight of the burning man, she blinked and looked again, almost too dazzled by the flames to notice the orcs and hobgoblins yelling at the strangely calm gentleman.\n\nUnperturbed by the flames licking around his body, the wizard (for what else could he be?) leaned on a smooth metal crutch and spat out some arcane command. Squealing hobgoblins and shouting orcs rushed the apparent cripple as a group, only to be deflected by the flames rising hotter and higher off the wizard's cloak. The smell of singed hides filled the air, but it was definitely the acrid stink of well-roasted monster. Flames might be sprouting from the wizard's body, but it was his enemies who burned!\n\nThe wizard's attackers wailed, throwing up their arms to protect their faces from the flames. When they turned aside, they fell afoul of a giant pair of bugbears\u2014all snarls and big muscles and rusty chains holding together well-worn black leather armor. The bugbears fought with glaives, old-fashioned spears with oak shafts and leaf-shaped blades on one end and rough knobs of iron on the other. The bugbears swung the huge glaives around them as if they had no weight at all, slicing through the stomach armor of a hobgoblin or an orc with the sharp end and then braining the creature with the round end.\n\nThe howling hobgoblins and orcs backed away from the wizard and his bugbear guards. They rushed toward the tunnel, trying to escape out of the entrance that Ivy and the others had just stumbled through.\n\nTo avoid being trampled by the creatures, Ivy bent low into a defensive crouch, sword out in the right hand, torch still clutched in her left hand. Sanval settled naturally onto her left side while Zuzzara swung onto her right.\n\n\"I'll take the lead,\" shouted Ivy as she barreled forward, knocking hobgoblins and orcs back into the room, pushing them toward the flaming wizard who frightened them so. At least with a burning man in the center of the room, there was plenty of light. She could clearly see her opponents, and what she saw was trouble. Big, fat, well-seasoned fighters, with good armor and weapons, all bearing the black boar emblem of Fottergrim's horde.\n\n\"Oh blast and blast,\" said Ivy as she swung into the fight. They had stumbled into a dispute of Fottergrim's raiders. Didn't anyone stay above ground these days? Just what she did not need! And this was supposed to have been such an easy, quick job! Drop a wall, collect bags of gold, go home and fix the barn roof. She had a plan, and other people kept messing it up. Snarling louder than the bugbears, Ivy launched herself into the fight that she could not think how to avoid.\n\nHer own torch made a lousy shield, and Ivy wished that she had her half-round buckler, that battered veteran of previous fights. But the buckler was propped up against the brassbound armor chest back at the camp, and wishes made even worse shields than torches. Copying Sanval's earlier trick with the snake, she thrust the torch toward the yellow eyes of a hobgoblin trying to sidle around her from the left. She set its shaggy red eyebrows on fire, and the thing ran screaming.\n\nOnce, several years ago, Ivy had studied swordplay. All the proper stances, the correct swings, the finesse of point versus edge, the elegant way to fight\u2014the sort of thing that Sanval was doing at her side without even thinking about it. Her style in this fight was not like that. It was tavern basic\u2014using the sword as much like a club to stun as like a pointed edged weapon. It was clumsy, it was nasty, and it was supremely satisfying to a woman warrior who was having an exceedingly bad day. Ivy charged into the fight, the heels of her boots banging on the floor, her long limbs swinging, her blonde braid whipping around her shoulders with every turn, her blue eyes glittering with fury and delight. Hobgoblins squeaked like baby pigs and tried to scramble out of her way. Orcs yelled even louder as they stumbled over their own big feet to avoid her. All were taller and much heavier than Ivy, but she was faster. She banged them on their round helmets and whacked them on their armored ankles. She cut high, she cut low, and she cut mean. She plowed into Fottergrim's troops like she meant to make each one personally pay for the absurdly horrible, rotten way that everything had turned out since that idiot camel had blundered into her tent and knocked her out of bed and made her miss breakfast.\n\nSanval and Zuzzara correctly settled into that important pace-and-a-half behind her that gave their rush into the room such nasty consequences to the enemy. What Ivy missed with sword and torch, Sanval skewered with style, or Zuzzara bashed with vigor.\n\nAs Ivy beat off one hobgoblin, only to see him brained by a bugbear coming up from behind him, she wondered just who that flaming wizard was. An enemy of Fottergrim? A good guy? A good guy with big, raggedy, nasty bugbear guards? Or were they all bad guys?\n\nBut there was too much happening all at once, and Ivy fell back on her training and experience. She stopped thinking and started hitting, and found the sound of her sword striking hobgoblins and orcs was a most soothing sound. She swung slightly to the left, and Sanval and Zuzzara adjusted their step to her. It was like dancing with two partners, she thought, as she stepped lightly over an orc rolling on the ground and Sanval hopped over the same beast, instantly taking the proper position to protect her back.\n\nSome of the orcs, seeing the fight going so terribly against them, turned back to the flaming wizard, flinging down their weapons and dropping to their knees, crying for a truce; but a sphere of fire shot from the wizard's hand. Like some demonic toy, the flaming ball bounced twice against a hobgoblin commander trying to whip the orcs back to the fight, setting his fur on fire. The ball passed harmlessly over the bugbears stomping over their opponents with their heavy hobnail boots, before scorching half a dozen orcs across their snouts. The hobgoblin commander rolled on the floor, trying to escape the mysterious sphere. The two bugbears knocked him back and forth between them with their glaives, much like a pair of cats batting mice from one paw to another. The wizard twitched a finger to the left, and the flaming sphere bounced left to fry more orcs. He twitched a finger to the right, and the sphere flew to the right and set another hobgoblin blazing. Smoke filled the room, and that the wizard also controlled. With a small wind, the wizard whipped it into the faces of his attackers, so the creatures gasped and choked and dropped to the ground, smothered by the acrid fumes from their own burning comrades.\n\nFottergrim's raiders were routed. As a body, they rushed to escape the fate of their choking, frying fellows. They burst around Ivy, Sanval, and Zuzzara, streamed past the rest of the startled Siegebreakers, and disappeared down the dark tunnel that led down to the river\u2014out of the fire and into the flood.\n\n\"Oh, blast,\" said Ivy when she saw how spell after spell burst from the wizard's hands in rapid succession. \"This is not good.\"\n\nShe looked around, hoping to see a clear exit. There was no way out that was not clogged with dying or dead hobgoblins and orcs. More worrisome was the fact that the rest of her friends had followed her blindly into the room. Gunderal's violet eyes were round with shock at the easy burst of fire spells that came from the wizard.\n\n\"We need help,\" Zuzzara sputtered over her shoulder to her sister.\n\n\"You know I can't control fire!\" Gunderal sobbed, her uninjured hand protectively crossed over the hand still resting in the sling.\n\n\"I don't mean to nag, sister,\" said Zuzzara as she punched an orc and then slung it over the heads of Gunderal and Mumchance to join its fellows, \"but sometimes you can dampen down flames.\"\n\nThe black smoke still swirled around them. Zuzzara caught a lungful and coughed. At the sound of her sister's hacking distress, Gunderal's face turned even whiter. She muttered a spell, hissing out each word like an angry kitten. A swirl of damp but clean air, smelling pleasantly of evergreen trees and spring flowers, swept through the room. Zuzzara drew in a grateful breath of the healing mist, thumped the last standing orc over the head with her shovel, and gave her sister an enormous pointy-toothed grin.\n\n\"Knew you could do it,\" bellowed Zuzzara.\n\nGunderal acknowledged her with a weak smile and leaned more heavily against the wall. \"That should have been stronger,\" she said, her voice rising barely above a whisper as she drew in her own deep breaths of the mist.\n\nNoticing that the fighting had now completely stopped, Zuzzara added. \"Hey, we did good, didn't we?\"\n\nIvy almost agreed, but then she caught sight of Mumchance and Kid, both of whom still hugged the wall, flanking the more vulnerable Gunderal.\n\nMumchance looked as glum as a one-eyed dwarf could look\u2014in other words well down the scale toward outright miserable\u2014and all that could be seen of Wiggles was the tip of one quivering white ear poking out of Mumchance's pocket. But the expression on Kid's face worried Ivy even more. For the first time since she had plucked the little thief's hand off her purse and slung him over her shoulder to carry him home, Kid looked frightened. His head was pulled down into his shoulders, and his whole body was hunched over, as if he anticipated a blow or a beating.\n\nIvy glanced over her shoulder to see what terrified Kid so. She realized that Kid was staring at the flaming wizard still casually leaning on his big metal crutch. With an impatient snap of his fingers, the wizard plucked a scorched charm off his cloak and threw it to the floor. The flames springing from his clothes vanished.\n\nThe tall, thin man strode toward Ivy's group, confident and with no hesitation. The metal crutch under his left arm swung in perfect time with his legs and lent an odd and menacing thud to each step forward. Even slightly stooped, he still towered above all of them except Zuzzara. His face was young, but deeply lined; grooves of discontent ran from long nose to narrow lips.\n\nHe stared at them with absolute disdain and then smiled with the faintest upward tug of his closed lips. His yellow-green eyes narrowed with the type of pleasure usually seen in the face of a barnyard cat confronting a particularly plump baby bird.\n\n\"How interesting,\" the wizard said. \"Toram's lost little pet goat and a pack of scruffy fighters, led by a fellow in such shiny armor that he has to come from Procampur. It is amazing what you find underground these days.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "In a soft whisper, Kid murmured, \"Archlis.\"\n\n\"Oh, by all the gods great and small,\" swore Ivy. The last person she wanted to meet was Fottergrim's personal spellcaster, the master of Tsurlagol's walls throughout the siege.\n\nThe wizard focused on Sanval, obviously taking the Procampur captain as their leader. The others he had looked over with a disinterested eye and immediately dismissed as unimportant. Ivy kept quiet, wanting to observe without being too closely observed.\n\n\"So what are you hunting in these ruins with Toram's godsight goat?\" Archlis repeated the odd phrase, gesturing with the tip of his metal crutch at Kid, who cringed away as though he expected it to spit fire at him.\n\n\"What do you think we seek?\" Sanval answered question with question, his voice very steady and low, even as he took a half-step in front of Kid, sheltering the little thief behind his well-armored back.\n\n\"I am the magelord Archlis, the terror of Fottergrim's army,\" snapped the wizard. \"Do not play games with me, little captain from Procampur.\"\n\n\"I am Sanval Nerias Moealim Hugerand Filao-Trious Semmenio Illuskia Hyacinth Neme Auniomaro Valorous, a captain of Procampur's army.\" Sanval drew a deep breath after that recital. \"I can say with complete honesty that I did not enter these ruins to capture you.\" Sanval's expression showed no more emotion on his handsome face than he had when confronted with Mumchance's leaping pack of mutts at the camp. His Procampur training in courtesy still held, even as the long-nosed Archlis sneered at him. \"And I never play games with wizards.\"\n\n\"Wizard! Do you think that is all that I am? I, Archlis, who know the ancient secrets of Netheril. A magelord of the arcane arts. I could turn you to ash with a single word.\" Archlis halfraised his Ankh, favoring Sanval with the same close-lipped smile he had given when he recognized Kid. Sanval's hand tightened on his sword hilt.\n\n\"So,\" said Ivy, stepping forward before Sanval could provoke him further, \"noble magelord, how can we help you?\"\n\nThe magelord looked her up and down. He did not seem impressed. \"Mercenary,\" said Archlis as a definition and not a compliment.\n\nIvy nodded. \"Definitely. We did a little detour from the siege and ended up falling down here.\"\n\n\"Do not lie to me. You think\"\u2014Archlis pointed at Kid, who was still half-hidden behind Sanval\u2014\"that will lead you to the crypt. But I still have the book, and without it, you could not hope to find the crypt, not even with the power of that trinket on your glove.\"\n\nIvy glanced down at her gauntlets. The left one bore a battered silver oak leaf, a gift from her long-lost mother. The tarnished token was so much a part of her gear that she rarely gave it any thought. Odd that Archlis should notice so small and insignificant a magical item\u2014just as the Pearl had. On his tabard hung a multitude of charms. Some were forged from iron, others knotted from what looked like elf hair; still more were tarnished silver and yellowed bone. Below the shifting, clinking charms, Ivy saw arcane sigils and runes woven into the very cloth. His hands were studded with rings, and Ivy doubted that those trinkets were only charged with spells to dry out his boots. All in all, his charms and rings were a far more impressive display of magical protection and\u2014most probably\u2014magical destruction than her one lucky silver leaf. Still, Archlis had noticed the token, and he seemed thrown slightly off balance by Kid's presence in their group.\n\n\"Kid is very good at what he does. And I have my protections as well,\" said Ivy in the spirit of pure bluff. After all, if Archlis thought they were more powerful than they appeared, who was she to tell him that appearances were deceptive. And she would question Kid later about his supposed talents, just as soon as she was sure that Archlis was not going to sizzle their bones. \"I could sell you his services. I could sell you mine. Cheap.\"\n\nKid gave an involuntary bleat and cringed farther away from Archlis. Sanval tried to say something, but Ivy stepped hard on his boot. When he started to protest, she gestured at Zuzzara, who clamped a large hand over his mouth.\n\nArchlis looked amused at Sanval's angry eyes glaring at him over the big hand of the half-orc. \"So, was this noble your prisoner, or is he your prisoner now?\" Archlis asked Ivy.\n\n\"At the moment,\" Ivy explained, \"he is our employer. But, as I said, for the right fee, and that fee does not have to be too high, we could terminate that contract. I would rather keep him alive. He is a powerful fighter and we have some \u2026 potions \u2026 that we can use to keep him under control. And, although from Procampur, his own character is none too noble, if you know what I mean.\" Zuzzara smiled her sharp-toothed smile and nodded vigorously in support of Ivy's story. The others were silent\u2014Sanval because he had no choice, and the rest because they trusted her. As always in such moments, she wondered if this were the day that she would be unable to live up to their expectations of her ability to lie her way out of a bad situation.\n\nHaving begun her story of how they came to be wandering in Tsurlagol's ruins, Ivy added a few more details for verisimilitude. \"We were scouting for the Thultyrl and, since we did not make it back to the camp by \u2026 now, we would be subject to discipline. As would this man, who is already under probation for his gambling in the red-roof district and patronage of undesirable, um, females. He won't want to go rushing back to camp, not if there is a chance of treasure.\"\n\nBehind her, Sanval choked, and Zuzzara whispered a hoarse \"hush\" in his ear. Ivy paused to see if Archlis was going to balk at any of the lies she was ladling out as fast as she could. The magelord frowned at the word \"treasure,\" his eyes narrowing as he scanned the group again. His glance lingered longest on Kid and Mumchance. \"You know how it is,\" Ivy concluded hastily. \"Better gold in the purse today than a promise for tomorrow.\"\n\nArchlis did not immediately dismiss her offer. In fact, he seemed more amused then doubting after his second careful examination of the group. He even snickered a little\u2014a grating nasal sound\u2014at Sanval still clutched in Zuzzara's protective embrace. \"Armor or no armor, that one is no threat to me. Your offer is interesting. I have fewer servants than I deserve.\" Archlis gestured toward the bugbears, one of which was picking his teeth with a looted hobgoblin sword. \"These have proved to be more fragile than I assumed.\"\n\n\"And the hobgoblins and the orcs?\" asked Ivy, waving one hand at the bodies littering the floor, still playing the role of one callous mercenary intent on negotiating a good settlement for herself.\n\n\"They had orders to return me to the defenses of Tsurlagol. Which was a waste of my time. Fottergrim never understood. I could have made him a king of the Vast, after I retrieved my treasure,\" said Archlis with no lack of self-confidence. The lines running between his nose and mouth became more pronounced as the magelord brooded. \"I persuaded the fool to come to Tsurlagol. Fottergrim was supposed to have made my access to the ruins easier, not more difficult.\"\n\n\"Except he decided to take the city, rather than just hang around the edges,\" guessed Ivy.\n\n\"Gruumsh must have driven him mad,\" Archlis replied, still obviously peeved. When he named the orc's war god, both the bugbears straightened up and made some gesture, to either appease the angry god or, more likely, to avoid Gruumsh's notice. \"The temptation was too great for Fottergrim. Once he seized the city, he had no idea what to do and refused to listen to my suggestions. Hobgoblins and orcs \u2026 Once they drink the taverns dry and eat all the meat in the butcher shops \u2026 Do they even pause to consider where the next meal is supposed to come from?\"\n\nIvy asked in a sympathetic tone, \"Down to eating the horses?\"\n\n\"Yes. And what could be more foolish? How am I supposed to leave the city if they eat my carriage horses? I recommended that they eat their own mounts or, more practically, the citizens.\"\n\n\"And they refused? How surprising.\"\n\n\"Fottergrim muttered something about worgs tasting bad and wanting the citizens as hostages in case he needed to negotiate.\"\n\n\"Obviously, an unreasonable orc.\"\n\n\"A dim-witted buffoon, all stomach and no brains, like most orcs. He threw away my advice and power.\"\n\n\"And the treasure beneath Tsurlagol?\" She wondered what a magelord of his power could want in these looted ruins.\n\n\"I tell you, not even that creature's powers can find the crypt,\" said Archlis. Again he gestured toward Kid.\n\n\"Actually, we have never heard of \u2026\" began Gunderal, but stopped when Mumchance tapped her on the knee.\n\n\"Let Ivy do the talking,\" whispered the dwarf.\n\nArchlis switched his attention to Mumchance. \"You are a dwarf,\" stated the magelord.\n\n\"Thought that would be obvious.\" Mumchance peered up at Archlis in his usual tilt-headed squint so he could see the magelord clearly out of his one good eye.\n\n\"Do not be insolent. What is that?\" Wiggles had popped her head out of Mumchance's pocket.\n\n\"My dog.\" Mumchance could be very taciturn with humans he did not like.\n\n\"Ah, your familiar. You are a dwarf wizard, then?\"\n\n\"Not a wizard.\" The dwarf put up one hand to rub his fake eye, as if he were tired or trying to clear some grit out of it. Ivy knew what he was doing\u2014preparing to pop out the gem bomb. She shook her head slightly and got an even slighter nod back from Mumchance. The room was too small, and the chances too great that the rest of them might be hurt by the blast. Besides, given that the magelord could apparently set himself on fire and not be burned, she doubted a gem bomb would cause Archlis any serious damage.\n\n\"Then it changes shape? Becomes a creature of unparalleled size and ferocity?\" Archlis was still fixated on Wiggles, who was snarling at him with as much ferociousness as she could manage.\n\n\"No,\" said Mumchance. \"Wiggles stays a dog. A small dog. My dog.\"\n\n\"Wiggles?\"\n\n\"That's her name.\"\n\nArchlis was clearly baffled by someone wasting pocket space carrying anything as useless as Mumchance's fluffy white dog. It was an emotion that Ivy understood. Archlis abandoned his questions about Wiggles as profitless to himself. \"Well, I may have a use for you\u2014a dwarf in armor should be heavy enough.\" With that baffling remark, the magelord turned back to Ivy. \"You will serve me. For now.\"\n\n\"All a matter of fee.\"\n\n\"I will decide the appropriate reward.\"\n\nIvy did not argue. Something about the way that Archlis kept fingering his Ankh and the bugbears kept backing up warned her that further discussion would not be beneficial. Pleased by her silence, Archlis continued. \"A section of these ruins contains a simple trap in the floor, but it takes four at least to pass through safely. We made it through once, but we came upon a complication and were driven back. Then we ran into the hobgoblins.\"\n\n\"And there are only three of you now,\" pointed out Ivy, who knew that two bugbears and one magelord did not add up to four.\n\n\"There are only three,\" admitted Archlis, \"due to the complication. Which I will explain after you take us through the trapped corridor. Four of you are all I need, but I will let the others live as part of your fee.\"\n\nArchlis did not look like he was making idle threats. The stench of burned bodies still filled the chamber where they stood. Of course, they could refuse and fight. She knew the others were just waiting for a signal from her. Mumchance had even remembered to get a good grip on his sword instead of his second-best hammer. Zuzzara was swinging her shovel in idle little circles, drawing patterns in the dust as if she were paying no attention at all to what was happening, and she had definitely loosened her grip on Sanval. Gunderal was looking pale but more determined; her good hand had the fingers spread wide to cast some water spell. But Kid was still cringing behind her and pulling on her weapons belt. Three sharp tugs\u2014the little thief's signal for danger.\n\nIvy knew that they could take the bugbears. But she did not know how fast Archlis could activate that Ankh. He looked just crazy enough to set off a firestorm in a small room, and who knew what protections he had for himself woven into that coat of multiple charms.\n\n\"So,\" said Ivy, \"how far is the corridor with the funny floor?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Archlis led them out of the room and into another tunnel that continued to run uphill, much to Mumchance's relief. The dwarf was still muttering about hearing water moving behind them. Personally, Ivy was just glad to be out of that small room littered with the burned reminders of the magelord's power.\n\nAfter several twisting turns, the magelord called a halt. \"I must consult my book,\" he declared. \"The rest of you sit. Be quiet.\"\n\nThe bugbears slumped against the wall and began hauling out various supplies from their packs. As Ivy knew from past campaigns, if there was ever a creature whose first love was food, and who hated to share, it was a bugbear. And normally she would not annoy anything that big and furry and none too bright. But she was hungry, and so were the rest of her crew. She swaggered over to the biggest bugbear, stuck out her chin, and got her nose as close to his as possible. Like most males, this maneuver made him nervous. He tried to back up, but he had no place to go. She leaned a little closer. He growled, and she snarled back, \"Give me bread! Give me water!\" in the only orc dialect that she knew.\n\nHe answered back in Common, \"Don't have to.\"\n\n\"Have to!\" barked Ivy, relieved to be able to drop out of Orcish and into a language that didn't make her throat hurt. Still, she didn't know how much Common this creature knew. She kept it simple. \"Archlis said!\"\n\n\"Did not!\"\n\n\"Ask him.\" Ivy jerked a thumb at the magelord, his long nose already buried deep in his spellbook and muttering to himself. \"But he won't be happy if you disturb him.\"\n\nThe bugbear rumbled something at his companion, and the other bugbear grumbled back. \"Females,\" the creature said, very pointedly in Common so Ivy would understand, \"are nothing but trouble.\" He handed over a bag of supplies.\n\n\"I would never disagree,\" replied Ivy with a grin as she turned on her heel and headed back to her friends.\n\nOn the top of the bag was fresh bread, still warm, as if it came from Tsurlagol's bakeries only that morning. Under that was some dried meat. Everyone grabbed at the bread as soon as they smelled it. Ivy shrugged and snatched her share. It had been a very long time since breakfast; or, in Ivy's case, since a few bites of dried biscuit.\n\nMumchance offered some of the unidentified meat to Wiggles. The dog whined and turned up her nose at it. After seeing the dog's reaction, the rest of them set the meat aside.\n\nWhile they ate, Archlis carefully turned the crumbling pages of his scorched spellbook. He bent so close to the book that the tip of his narrow nose looked in danger of smudging the ink. The expression on his face grew more sour, as if the spellbook did not yield exactly the answers that he desired. Yet he handled the decaying parchment with judicious care. The bugbears sat with their backs to Archlis and their attention on the group, but nobody did anything overtly hostile.\n\nReleased by Zuzzara with a friendly pat to the back that staggered him, Sanval chose to sit down next to Ivy. She took it as a good sign that he had not minded her more colorful comments about his character when she had been dickering with Archlis. For the first time since he had come to her tent that morning, Sanval stripped off his gauntlets to accept some bread and fresh water from Ivy. She passed the food and drink over to him with a slightly apologetic smile. His own look lightened a little as he took the bread from her. When he took her peace offering, she noticed his big hands bore the usual scars across the knuckles and the backs of his fingers that came from sword practice. Even with wooden weapons, cuts were a common hazard; and no matter how good a cleric a house employed, not everything healed without a trace. Ivy's own hands had a similar pale network of white scars across her skin.\n\n\"Why was Archlis interested in that?\" said Sanval, reaching out and touching the small silver oak leaf worked into the cuff of Ivy's left glove. Her gloves were stuffed, as usual, through her belt.\n\n\"Harper token. I told you my mother was a bard,\" she said with an affectionate glance at her mother's last gift. She still remembered the sting of the wind against her cheeks as she stood on the dock, watching her mother's ship sail away. Over the wind and the sailors' shouts, she had heard her mother's cries of, \"Farewell, farewell, I will return.\" She remembered how warm the token had felt in her hand and how tightly her father's hands had grasped her shoulders as they watched her mother wave good-bye.\n\nShe tapped the little silver leaf. \"This gets me free beer in an amazing number of places.\"\n\nSanval looked a little disappointed at her answer.\n\n\"No, unfortunately, it is not much of spell. Just a tiny bit of extra luck, my mother said. It does keep me from losing whatever it is attached to, which is why I sewed it onto the glove. I hate losing my gloves. Of course, it only keeps one glove with me at all times. So I replace the other one quite frequently. I should have sewn it on my cap. I miss that cap.\" She ran her hand across the top of her head, causing more short bits of blonde hair to escape her braid and trail across her face. She pushed them back with impatient, dusty fingers, ignoring Gunderal gesturing behind Sanval's back with one of her own delicate shell combs. They were in the middle of an underground ruin, surrounded by bugbears, and essentially held prisoner by an unfriendly magelord. Ivy was not about to let Gunderal rebraid her hair now, even if it did give her fussy friend fits to see her braid come undone. Ivy let Gunderal braid her hair once a tenday, after she had washed her hair and bathed, and that was enough as far as Ivy was concerned. If she listened to the vain little wizard's lectures on personal hygiene, she would be bathing every day and twice on holidays.\n\nWith a sigh, Sanval pulled off his metal helmet and ran his own hand across his hair. Ivy checked with a sideways glance. All his curls looked very washed and polished. He probably did bathe once a day, and then let his servants clip and comb his hair into that regulation cut that all of Procampur's officers favored for this particular war. Yet that one curl stood defiantly out of line with its fellows. Ivy smiled at the curl's crooked gallantry, and Sanval gave her an inquiring look. She did not enlighten him.\n\n\"I thought the charm on your glove was something that we could use against Archlis. He seemed disturbed by it,\" Sanval said.\n\nIvy shook her head. \"It's not much of charm. Won't do anything spectacular. Besides, Archlis has a dozen or more charms sewn on that coat of his that are certainly more powerful than this. And look at his hands\u2014a magic ring on each hand. Those are probably protections and spells too.\"\n\n\"But you must have more magic than that,\" said Sanval, tapping the token again.\n\n\"Zuzzara's ring, but we used that already. Gunderal's potions, which we lost in the fall.\"\n\n\"Armor? Weapons?\"\n\n\"Mumchance has full plate with some extra protection hammered in, but he doesn't wear it in the summer. It is too hot, he says, and that's why he just has the chain mail today. All of us have charms against injury from falls, but as you can tell from Gunderal's arm, they are not too powerful.\" She thought about mentioning Mumchance's fake eye, but the secrets that Sanval did not know, he could not let slip to others. Archlis did not seem to be paying any attention to them, but wizards could have ears and eyes in the backs of their head, sometimes quite literally. Better to appear more harmless than they were, especially when they did not have that much magic to spare.\n\n\"But weapons. Magic swords? Spears?\"\n\n\"Do you see any of those things on us? Zuzzara's shovel is most firmly unenchanted. My sword is just that\u2014a sword. Good balance, keen edge, no spells. Mumchance's sword is the same. Better balance than mine, being forged by dwarves and all, but no spells of smiting. In fact, he usually forgets he is carrying it and uses one of his hammers instead. Gunderal never carries weapons, because she usually can cast spells or use her potions, when she hasn't broken all the potion bottles. Kid, do you have anything magical?\"\n\n\"No, my dear. Two sharp little knives, but that is all.\" Kid had pitched his voice loud enough to carry to where Archlis was sitting. Good, thought Ivy, he has figured it out\u2014do not give Archlis any reason to be nervous. Kid had flipped open the collar of his leather tunic to display the two needle-thin blades neatly sheathed there. Sanval seemed disappointed. Of course, he did not know that the stilettos were deadly in Kid's hands. The little thief could throw with frightening speed and accuracy when he wanted to. Kid's knives also had the excellent advantage of being able to double as lock picks on the cruder sort of lock. And, of course, being Kid, he had not shown all his knives. He carried another tucked in the back of his breeches. Gods only knew how he kept from slicing his furry little tail off. Of course, he kept that tucked away out of sight most of the time too.\n\n\"I thought you would have more magic,\" said Sanval.\n\n\"Why did you think that?\"\n\n\"Because in the red-roof district \u2026\" Sanval stopped at Ivy's whistle of surprise and went a little pink across his cheeks. One of the bugbears glanced over at them, shrugged, and went back to eating something that dripped unpleasantly.\n\n\"So you do talk to the red-roof tavern girls. I wondered how you knew the end of that song.\"\n\n\"Everyone goes to a red-roof tavern,\" Sanval admitted, \"when they are young. To hear the stories. You know, about the dragons, and the adventurers, and the great deeds done in the rest of the world. But in all the stories, people like you \u2026 They always own many items of magic that they use to defeat their foes. Great and terrible weapons of power are carried by all the mercenaries. That is what they say in the camp.\"\n\n\"You should never believe camp gossip,\" said Kid, reaching past Sanval to snag another piece of bread and stuff it into his cheek like a berrygobbler.\n\n\"Sound advice. What they always leave out in the ballads and the camp gossip is that magic costs, and red-roof adventurers like me rarely can afford much.\" Ivy looked at Sanval, a man who could afford to bring three horses to a siege camp, along with the necessary servants. He wore full halfplate armor, forged just for him, properly fitted and certainly kitted underneath with leather, silk, cotton padding, and whatever else was deemed necessary for his comfort. He probably even owned more than one shirt although she asked him just to make sure.\n\n\"I brought twelve shirts with me,\" he replied.\n\n\"I have two, one clean and one not,\" she said, but he did not look enlightened. She gave him a basic lesson in economics, the mercenary version of economics. \"Magic costs. Gold. Coin. Gems. It takes wealth to buy the best spells and best enchanted items. We do all right, but we never make that much. And what we earn goes back to the farm. We made a promise to each other\u2014that was what we would do.\"\n\n\"But he has magic,\" said Sanval, nodding toward Archlis.\n\n\"Because he is a wicked wizard!\"\n\n\"Magelord, my dear,\" said Kid. \"He stole that title from my master Toram, when he took Toram's book and Ankh.\"\n\n\"Magelord, magician, whatever he prefers to call himself, I would wager he's not trying to pay for a working farm, with vinestock that needs replacing, and a mule that deliberately goes lame when it doesn't want to haul the wagon (and nobody will let me turn into shoe leather), and more dogs and cats than you can count\u2014or feed\u2014because somebody is always dragging home some poor stray. I will not even try to account for the many expenses of an ill wyvern that ended up destroying our barn roof.\" Ivy subsided. There was no use trying to explain her problems to a man who could afford to bring twelve shirts to a siege camp and had probably never in his life had to sit up all night on a roof beam with a wyvern vomiting some type of acidic sludge.\n\n\"I would prefer your farm to any wizard's wonders,\" said Sanval, and he sounded sincere in his statement. \"But I still wish that you had more magic, like that magelord's charms.\"\n\n\"Do not forget his Ankh,\" whispered Kid. \"That is a weapon paid for by murder.\"\n\n\"Ankh?\"\n\n\"That,\" said Kid, pointing at the metal pole that Archlis leaned against. It was topped by a smooth loop of metal and a crossbar of the same.\n\n\"I though it was a crutch,\" said Ivy.\n\nKid shook his head sadly. \"No, it is the Ankh of Fire that he stole from my master.\"\n\n\"That is a rather large ankh,\" said Ivy, eyeballing the length of the thing. \"I thought ankhs were little things that priests wore on their belts.\"\n\n\"This Ankh was forged for a giant and casts the most terrible and powerful spells. It took Toram years to find the tomb where it was hidden.\"\n\n\"What type of spells?\"\n\n\"Fire spells.\"\n\n\"What sort of fire spell?\" Her father had hated and feared fire as much as any tree in the forest.\n\n\"Many and many, my dear,\" said Kid, his ears drooping down and back, almost flat and hidden among his curls. \"Enough to burn us all. He does not bluff when he claims such power.\"\n\n\"That settles it,\" Ivy said to Sanval. \"You have to stifle any objections to an alliance with Archlis. You did notice how quickly he disposed of those hobgoblins and orcs,\" she continued when Sanval said nothing.\n\n\"But he is the sworn enemy of Procampur,\" protested Sanval.\n\n\"We are his enemies,\" agreed Ivy in soothing tones. What did it take to make one man in shiny armor to see reason? \"And there are more of us, but does he look perturbed? That means he thinks he can beat us and, given the size and the number of fireballs that he was tossing off the walls of Tsurlagol over the last tenday, I think he can too.\"\n\n\"He won't dare try a fireball in here,\" said Gunderal, catching the end of their discussion. \"These tunnels are too narrow. He would burn himself.\"\n\nWhen the others looked skeptical, Gunderal said with a huff, \"Just because I can't do fire spells does not mean that I never studied them.\"\n\nZuzzara shook her head, setting her braids swinging and the iron beads on the ends clicking together. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Flames spread, just like water! Simple enough for you, big sister?\"\n\n\"Temper, temper,\" replied the half-orc. \"You should eat something. You are getting cranky, little sister.\"\n\nGunderal started to reply and then obviously thought better of it. She tore off a small bit of bread and chewed dainty but deliberate bites. Zuzzara smiled to see her sister follow her advice.\n\n\"What about that sphere spell?\" asked Mumchance. \"That fire chased those hobgoblins and orcs precisely enough.\"\n\n\"For all those reasons, we are not going to get into a fight that we cannot win and will not gain us anything,\" Ivy emphasized to Sanval. \"Don't play the hero.\"\n\n\"You always say that,\" said Sanval in a sharper tone than he usually used.\n\n\"Because I know what heroics can bring.\" A drowned mother, a father so torn by grief that he would rather be wood than human. But how could she explain that to a man raised in Procampur, who thought the world was built on straight, narrow, and well-ordered lines. One who believed you could define people by the color of their roof tiles?\n\n\"I will attack him alone,\" decided Sanval, apparently forgetting that she was supposed to be the captain and the one giving the orders. She had known that was going to happen\u2014she had just known it. \"Then you will have time to escape,\" the silver-roof noble concluded with a pleasant smile.\n\n\"And do you think that you would survive such an attack?\"\n\n\"That does not matter.\" Sanval sounded happier than she had ever heard him, which was very bothersome to her peace of mind.\n\n\"What is the Procampur obsession with rushing in against all odds and getting yourself killed?\" asked Ivy. She did not mean to sound harsh, but she did not want to fret about Sanval doing something suicidal. She had so many other things to worry about. \"That is as idiotic as your city's ban of the Thieves Guild.\"\n\n\"What is wrong with our ban of the Thieves Guild?\" said Sanval, distracted by the sudden criticism of the rules of his beloved city, which was exactly what Ivy had wanted.\n\n\"The ban on the Thieves Guild is unnatural, in my opinion,\" Ivy said, warming to her argument on why Procampur's citizens, especially the one sitting next to her, lacked basic good sense. \"It is the same as expecting all the citizens in an entire city to come to an agreement to be honorable and deal fairly with others and not steal their goods.\"\n\n\"You would prefer to be robbed as you walked down the streets?\"\n\n\"Of course not.\"\n\n\"Or to be allowed to rob others.\"\n\n\"Not me personally, at least not friends and family. But governments and rulers are somewhat stingy and should probably be encouraged to share the wealth at times.\"\n\n\"So you are willing to rob others as long as you do not know them.\"\n\n\"And they can afford it. Never steal from the poor, they don't have anything worth taking.\" She waited for some response. Sanval's features had settled back into the impassive, slightly stern expression that she knew so well. He did not speak. \"That was a joke. But, honestly (or dishonestly if you prefer), thieves who are ruled by Thieves Guilds avoid stealing too much too close to home. City officials supplement their pay with some nice bribes, and the world rolls on. Procampur has to be the only city to take the quaint view that all its visitors, as well as its citizens, should be free to wander wherever they want in the city without having their purses cut or their pockets picked.\"\n\n\"And does that make our quaint view wrong, because it is not true in other cities?\" A touch of acid stung beneath his words. And if Sanval's straight spine were any stiffer, Mumchance could have used it as a level. Worst of all, Sanval had gone from his impassive face to that straight-down-the-nose stare that he must have learned in the nursery beneath his mansion's silver roof. It was precisely the look of rebuke that his ancestors must have been giving red-roof adventurers like herself for generations.\n\nIvy could see a large philosophical hole opening before her\u2014one that probably had a snake at the bottom of it. Which was confusing, because she knew that she had a winning argument when she had started out. A quick visual survey of her friends showed them all sitting there, resolutely silent, and waiting to see how she was going to finish the debate. She grimaced at the lack of verbal verification from those that she had expected to agree with her. Mumchance stared back with a very clear \"you dig yourself out of this one\" look. Zuzzara and Gunderal were leaning forward, Gunderal fluttering her eyelashes in some type of signal that puzzled Ivy. Even Kid, that hypocritical thief, looked disapproving of her argument. Wiggles just wagged her tail, obviously hoping that Ivy would shut up and somebody would feed the cute white dog sitting at their feet.\n\n\"Perhaps we could just agree that getting yourself killed is not going to help anyone, even if it is the most honorable thing to do,\" said Ivy, returning to the point that she had wanted to make.\n\n\"I will attempt no action that would endanger any of you,\" promised Sanval, replacing his helmet very slowly and very straight upon his head.\n\nOnly Ivy seemed to notice that he made no promises about his personal safety."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Once he was done with his book, Archlis neatly packed it away into a pouch dangling from his belt. Kid watched him from behind Ivy's back.\n\n\"So he still has it.\" Kid's voice was soft, just loud enough for her to hear.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Toram's book.\"\n\n\"And who was Toram?\"\n\n\"A bad man. An evil man.\" Ivy had never heard Kid, whose own morality was rather questionable, state his disapproval so flatly. \"But a learned one. He spent his life robbing the secrets of others.\"\n\n\"So are there maps in that book?\" The tunnels were twisting round and round. As good as Mumchance's sense of direction was underground, Ivy would have loved to have a map that showed clearly where they were in Tsurlagol's ruins and, more importantly, where they could get out of Tsurlagol's ruins. \"Could you steal it?'\n\nKid fingered the knives beneath his collar. \"He has charms to protect him against theft,\" he reluctantly whispered. \"He would have to be distracted and even then \u2026 I am sorry, my dear, I do not know if I can do it.\"\n\nIvy gave one of his horns a friendly pull. \"Don't worry. There's bound to be some other way to get out of here. I have a plan or two in my back pocket.\"\n\n\"For just such an emergency,\" Kid said, looking more cheerful. \"Well, I will watch and wait for my chance. For I do not like that man, my dear.\" And he continued to watch the magelord's back, fingering his knives in a thoughtful way.\n\nMarching two by two through increasingly narrow tunnels, the group followed Archlis. The magelord strode in front, periodically lighting a finger the way another man would light a candle so he could better see some arcane symbol etched in the walls. He never hesitated, although they passed a myriad of tunnels branching away into the darkness. Of course, Archlis had come this way once before. Still Ivy had to admire a man who remembered directions after having dealt with and avoided some of the most devious traps of place.\n\nOne bugbear walked in front of them, and another walked behind them. So far there had been no opportunity for escape.\n\n\"We've turned east again,\" Mumchance said with the certainty of an elderly dwarf far underground. Wiggles once again rode in his pocket, sleeping off her late lunch. Everyone had slipped her part of their bread because she had looked so sad and hungry. Now the dog was so full, she could barely waddle.\n\n\"Back toward the city? The city wall that we want?\" Ivy asked.\n\n\"Closer than we were.\" Mumchance fingered his fake eye. \"We could still use our little treasure against them.\"\n\n\"And kill whom? The one in front or the one in back?\" hissed Ivy. \"You can't get them all.\" She turned back to her wizard, the one that couldn't light fires but could definitely feel water. \"Where's the river?\"\n\n\"Still running strong behind us,\" Gunderal whispered. \"I can feel it flooding the tunnels.\"\n\n\"There is something else too. Something old and magical behind us,\" said Kid, one ear swiveling forward and one back.\n\n\"Oh, do you feel it too?\" A relieved Gunderal bent down and gave him a quick hug. \"I could not figure out what I was smelling, and it was giving me such a headache\u2014I thought it might be a reaction to my own spell.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about, sister?\" asked Zuzzara. \"Are you ill?\"\n\n\"I'm fine. But whatever the magic is, it is giving me such an itch in my nose. I feel like I'm going to sneeze, but I can't. It's driving me crazy.\"\n\nZuzzara pulled a large silk handkerchief out of her waistcoat pocket. \"Blow.\"\n\nGunderal blew, delicately of course, and sighed. \"Oh, that's better. I felt my ears pop.\"\n\nIvy chewed her lower lip and thought about a possible magical threat following them. Well, it was not treading on her heels like the bugbear, so she decided to ignore it for now.\n\n\"If we are heading back toward Tsurlagol,\" said Zuzzara, who was always the most optimistic of the Siegebreakers (as long as her sisters Mimeri and Gunderal were happy), \"then maybe we can find our wall again. The one that we are supposed to knock down.\"\n\n\"The Thultyrl gave us two days,\" Ivy said. \"And I don't think that we have even finished out half of the first day.\" She thought about the number of fights, wrong turns, and other disasters that had befallen them. \"Well, maybe more than half.\"\n\nSanval answered softly, \"The Thultyrl may not wait. I did not go back to the camp. They would have investigated and found your tunnel collapsed.\"\n\n\"And presume that we are dead?\"\n\n\"Or unable to complete your task.\"\n\n\"What will they do then?\" Ivy asked.\n\n\"Charge the wall without your help.\"\n\n\"Wonderful thought.\" Now she had to worry about an entire troop of Procampur's finest trying to scale the western wall and overrun Fottergrim's orcs in the holdings at the top. Even without Archlis opposing them with his fire spells, it would not take much to turn the charge into a rout.\n\n\"Well, this looks like trouble,\" said Ivy.\n\nA pair of oaken doors blocked the way. The lock had been burned open, and the blasted doors hung half off their hinges.\n\n\"Waste of magic,\" Mumchance said when he saw the condition of the doors.\n\n\"He has magic to waste, dear sir,\" replied Kid with a significant wink toward Archlis. The magelord stood behind them, flanked by his bugbears, and was obviously waiting for them to survey the room beyond.\n\nPeeking through the ruined doors, they could see a corridor with a checkered floor made from huge stone slabs. Some had a fine cross-hatch pattern cut into them. Others were marked with a spiral of stars, and still others with wavy lines. A few squares were polished smooth and blank.\n\n\"Earth, sky, ocean,\" said Mumchance. \"And that which we find on the other side of death.\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" said Ivy, because this was an old lesson, one that her mother had taught when she had taken Ivy hunting for treasure in the wild. She had seen such patterns in ruins before. They invariably led to a tomb or crypt. \"It's a path to the dead.\"\n\n\"A bit more dead than usual, my dears,\" pointed out Kid. For the floor was littered with the bodies of hobgoblins and orcs, a ragged and rather squashed looking troop. Their lifeless, muscular bodies were limp, their blank yellow eyes staring at nothing, their hide and rough hair poking out from breaks in their once bright armor. Shields were as flat as plates, and swords smashed.\n\n\"More of Fottergrim's?\" asked Ivy.\n\n\"They pursued us through this section,\" said Archlis, \"but they did not know the secret of the squares. The ceiling crushed them as it does anyone who does not know the pattern.\"\n\nAt this pronouncement, they all glanced up. The ceiling was low and gleamed with a spectral light, clearly showing a lattice of iron suspended above the floor. A long pointed spike was welded to the corner of each tiny square formed by the ironwork. Some of the spikes were clearly blunted by repeated poundings on the stone floor below. Others still dripped with bits and pieces of the unfortunates who had passed below without the knowledge of the floor's pattern. Chains ran from the lattice into square holes cut into the stone ceiling above.\n\n\"The floor is constructed in such a way that if four people move across the squares in unison, the trap stays in the ceiling. Should one make a misstep, the trap comes crashing down. I have the pattern here,\" Archlis withdrew his spellbook from his pouch and unfolded a page twice as large as the book from its center. The parchment was blotched with terrible stains, but a series of gray-brown lines and rust red symbols could be seen on one side.\n\n\"You and you,\" said Archlis, pointing at Sanval and Zuzzara, \"should go first, as you appear to be about the same weight. Then\"\u2014he nodded toward Ivy and Mumchance\u2014\"you will follow. You must step exactly as I say.\"\n\n\"And then what?\" asked Ivy.\n\nArchlis pointed with the head of his Ankh to the doors visible at the opposite end of the room. \"There is a lever on the left-hand side. Turn it three times to the right. The lock handle must be turned delicately and correctly, but if done right, the trap will remain locked long enough for the rest of us to cross.\"\n\n\"Then it resets itself?\" asked Mumchance.\n\n\"Yes. There is no way to lock it open permanently. But it takes some time for it to reset. After we had left this room, Fottergrim's trackers were able to cross it safely when they followed us. We eluded them in the maze that it is beyond those doors, but were forced back. We locked the trap from that side when we crossed the room again so more than half the trackers escaped with their lives and continued to hunt us into the room where you found us.\"\n\n\"So when the ceiling comes down, it comes down fast,\" said Mumchance with a speculative note in his voice. \"And it probably goes up very slowly.\"\n\n\"Whether it is fast or slow does not matter. I hold the pattern here. We used it to cross once before. Once you have reached the other side, the dwarf will turn the lock and secure the room as I have instructed. That should be within his skills,\" said Archlis. Mumchance snorted. \"Then we will follow you,\" continued Archlis. \"Now take one step right, one step forward, and one step left, and repeat that pattern until you reach the other side.\"\n\n\"It sounds like a court dance,\" said Sanval, readying himself to cross by the usual straightening of his helmet and a quick check of his weapons.\n\nIvy looked across the room and at the corpses that littered many of the squares. She laid one hand on Sanval's arm to keep him from stepping out. \"But there are extra bodies on the floor, and that will make it harder. Hate to trip over someone else's feet as we glide along.\"\n\n\"Or someone's severed head, more likely,\" said Mumchance, eyeing the carnage.\n\n\"Can we do it?\" questioned Zuzzara. \"If one is off count or stumbles \u2026\"\n\n\"All of us die,\" said Ivy, turning to Archlis. \"I don't like this.\"\n\nThe magelord adjusted his grip on his Ankh, one rusty ring on his hand grating unpleasantly against its smooth metal surface. \"If you refuse, you will die faster. Then the others can choose which danger is greater\u2014the floor ahead or myself. I only need four to cross and turn the key.\"\n\n\"If he is so clever, why can't he break the trap's spell?\" Gunderal whispered.\n\n\"It is not a spell,\" Kid whispered back. \"Do you feel any magic here?\"\n\nGunderal's pretty face smoothed into that look of perfect serenity that meant she was feeling along the Weave of magical forces. She slowly shook her head.\n\nMumchance nodded in agreement with Kid. \"It's all mechanical.\"\n\nIvy backed away from Archlis, fingering the hilt of her sword. Sanval also had a firm grip on his weapon. Archlis did not look worried, which was worrisome. The bugbears were a bit too relaxed as well, just leaning on their glaives and watching with interest. They obviously felt no threat.\n\n\"Waste of time,\" said Mumchance, who had been studying the floor and then the ceiling while carrying on a whispered conversation with Kid. He squinted at the little thief, who nodded very firmly this time. \"All that hopping back and forth. Kid, get ready. Come up here, Zuzzara.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Archlis, \"it must be two of almost equal weight who start the pattern.\"\n\n\"Don't care about the pattern.\" Mumchance scratched Wiggles's head as he contemplated the room. \"Zuzzara, how far can you throw a dead hobgoblin?\"\n\n\"Same as a live one,\" she said with grin. \"Halfway across the room without much trouble.\"\n\n\"Should work. Let's get you a little help. Hey, you, big guy,\" Mumchance said, crooking a finger at the nearest bugbear. \"Hook me a hobgoblin with that stick of yours. The little one near the door will work fine. He's almost intact.\"\n\nThe bugbear growled at Mumchance, but he went to the threshold of the room. The hairs on the back of the bugbear's neck were clearly visible just below the line of his battered helmet and just as clearly standing straight out. The bugbear muttered and grumbled, very softly in the back of his throat, as he looked beyond the room to the doors on the far side. Still, he obeyed Mumchance's orders, ignoring the scowling magelord. The bugbear leaned through the doors, carefully keeping his feet out of the room and off the carved pavement. He thrust his glaive into the nearest hobgoblin and dragged it back through the door.\n\n\"You get one end. Zuzzara, you grab the other,\" instructed Mumchance. \"Kid, get ready to jump.\"\n\nKid crouched in the center of the door. Zuzzara and the bugbear swung the body twice and then sent it sailing over Kid's head and into the room. It fell heavily on the tiles. With a screeching of gears above the ceiling, then the clash of unwinding chains, the ironwork grid dropped from above them and crashed to the floor, again impaling the dead hobgoblins and orcs.\n\n\"Go! Go!\" shouted Mumchance at Kid.\n\nKid leaped lightly on top of the ironwork and raced across the grid. A ponderous tick-tick of gears sounded in the ceiling. \"It's starting up again,\" yelled Mumchance. Kid spurted ahead and dropped in front of the doors. He grasped the lever and twisted it savagely around to the right. There was a grinding noise that came from the ceiling and then a distinct sproing sounded through the room. The spiked grid remained where it had landed on the floor.\n\n\"See,\" said Mumchance, hoisting himself on top of the ironwork and strolling straight across. \"Much easier to break it than to go dancing across the floor.\"\n\nIf the magelord was pleased, it did not show in his scowl. The bugbears looked on, expressionless, but then Ivy did not expect any sort of expression on a bugbear's squashed furry face.\n\nWhen they reached the far side of the room, Ivy said to the dwarf, \"That was just too easy. What terrible thing happens next, do you suppose?\"\n\n\"Look, these old tomb builders weren't exactly mechanical geniuses,\" said Mumchance. \"Well, one or two were good at it, and the others just copied them. I would bet you a good night's sleep that the gears are rusted out, the chains have weak links, and a couple more drops would have broken the whole thing. But the most delicate gears are always in the lock mechanism. The magelord was right. It's all about balance and counterbalance, the right pressure at the right time. Archlis had already forced it open twice today, so it was sure to be a bit bunged up.\"\n\n\"And if the ironwork went back into place while Kid was racing across?\"\n\n\"Wouldn't move that fast. Archlis said there was enough time for a bunch of Fottergrim's raiders to follow him through and out once already, which meant some type of gear rotating in the lock and, most likely, the same sort of gear powering the resetting of the trap. Of course, if there had been any magic behind it, that would have been different, but Gunderal didn't smell anything. But, Ivy, that's all done and in the past. You should be worrying about something else.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Whatever chased them back into this room. You heard the magelord. They went through once, doing that hop-jump-hop across the floor. Fottergrim's hounds followed them and then something forced Archlis back across that room one more time. It wasn't those hobgoblins and orcs. He roasted them as soon as they caught up to him.\"\n\nThe dwarf had a point. Ivy just hated that. A magelord unhindered by hobgoblins and unflustered by stray warriors appearing in the middle of his battles (even if those warriors were a battered troupe like Ivy's) would only retreat from something very large and fairly fireproof. And deadly. She doubted that anything short of deadly would stop him. What came next must be far more dangerous than Fottergrim's fighters.\n\n\"I knew this was too easy,\" said a rueful Ivy. Staying next to Mumchance, she squeezed to one side to let Zuzzara, Gunderal, and Sanval pass into the corridor beyond. Archlis and his bugbears followed. \"Well, at least we got through that trap with minimum fuss.\"\n\nKid sidled next to her, stamping from hoof to hoof.\n\n\"Those early tomb builders lacked sophistication.\" Mumchance poked at the broken mechanism that locked the trap into place, wiggling the long brass handle that disappeared into a square hole carved into the stone. Like any dwarf, he never could resist trying to pull something apart just to see how it worked. Ivy almost expected him to pry the mechanism out of the wall, just so he could examine it later. \"Not like today. If I had built that bit back there, there would be some secondary trap or \u2026\"\n\nIvy never heard the rest of the sentence. The stone slab under her feet slid open with a sharp click and the rattle of chains running through a stone channel. She and Kid dropped into the darkness below. As she was falling, she caught a brief glimpse of Mumchance's surprised face, his mouth still open, before the stone trapdoor snapped shut above her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "The day after a fifteen-year-old Ivy had been dug out from under a dead horse by a kindly dwarf, she had wanted to stop at the nearest temple and make a few offerings.\n\nMumchance had dissuaded her.\n\n\"I wouldn't,\" he had said. \"Over the last three hundred years, the one thing that I have learned is that it is best to ignore the gods. Take no notice of them, and they will take no notice of you.\"\n\nIt had seemed like good advice at the time. Now Ivy wondered if she had angered some god somewhere. Nothing else could account for her foul luck.\n\nShe sat up slowly in the darkness beneath the trapdoor, unsure which parts of her body still worked after her fall. Her ribs ached, her back hurt, and the rubble covering the floor was making itself felt through the leather of her breeches. But none of the pains felt fatal, just more bruises on top of the bruises collected in her earlier falls that day, not to mention the buffeting by kobolds, the squeezing of that snake, and\u2014oh now she remembered\u2014a few well-placed blows from the hobgoblins. Once she was free of this tangle of tunnels and traps, Ivy intended to march herself to the largest, most impressive healer's tent that she could find, lie down, and not get up again until every single cut, bruise, and kink in her muscles had been soothed away by some skilled healing hands. Some heroes might go to their temples to give thanks for salvation. Others might drink themselves blind in a victory party, and still others might pursue a new amorous alliance. From nauseous experience, Ivy had learned to avoid long drinking bouts, as they led to more physical misery. She did have a few ideas for possible lusty activities, and she most certainly planned to rethink her opposition to giving thanks in temples (although she supposed she would have to decide what god or goddess would be willing to overlook her long lapse in abstinence from worship). But at this moment, she needed to give herself some special promise to lure herself into standing up.\n\n\"I think I'll find the handsomest cleric, with the most delightfully smooth and strong healing hands,\" she muttered to herself. \"And then add that bill to the long list of payments that I intend to collect from the Thultyrl.\"\n\nA muffled snort of laughter reminded her that she was not alone in the dark. She heard the scratch of Kid's hooves as he climbed across the rubble toward her.\n\n\"Kid,\" Ivy called. \"Are you all right? Where are you?\"\n\n\"Here, my dear,\" his soft voice was right under her ear, causing her to startle like a young colt. Then she felt the exceptional warmth of his hard little hand as he patted her cheek in reassurance. \"I apologize that I am not a handsome cleric.\"\n\nHis hearing was far too sharp at times. Ivy ignored his comment and asked, \"Where are we, do you think?\"\n\nShe could hear the rustling of clothing near her that meant he was searching through one of his many hidden pockets. \"How can you manage to fit so many pockets into that tunic?\" Ivy grumbled, impatient for him to find his candles.\n\n\"I once apprenticed to a tailor, before he objected to my stealing his needles. I do have the candles,\" Kid said, then added, \"but my flint is missing.\"\n\n\"Some day, one of us is going to have to learn fire spells.\" Ivy sighed and handed over her own tinderbox before standing up. She could hear Kid's nails scratching against the lid.\n\nStretching her arms above her head, Ivy could feel the cool, smooth stone of the ceiling. She groped along the ceiling, trying to find some crack or seam that would indicate the location of the trapdoor. Her left hand bumped against something that moved\u2014a handle or rope pull she hoped. She traced a long knobby object under her groping fingers, something that felt like an old tree branch or dried-out root. It kept shifting in her grasp and was attached in a smooth curve to another part, covered with stiff material that crackled like old linen. Ivy continued to walk her hands along the floating object until she felt an unmistakable triangular bump. She grasped it firmly between her left forefinger and thumb. It wiggled slightly with a ripping sound.\n\nAs she stood up, a familiar odor hit her\u2014the type of moldering stench one found too often underground. Ivy screwed up her face and tried to keep her breathing shallow.\n\n\"Kid,\" said Ivy very calmly and slowly. \"Could you hurry with that light?\"\n\n\"Coming, my dear.\" There was a spark, and the sudden illumination of the candle made Ivy blink.\n\nIvy kept her left arm stretched up and her grasp firm on her captured prize as she stared into Kid's startled eyes. She was going to have to turn and look, but for now all the confirmation she needed was in the dumbfounded look on Kid's face. \"So,\" she said pleasantly to him. \"Am I holding a floating corpse by its nose?\"\n\nKid nodded. His brown eyes were wide and round under his curls, giving him the look of a startled deer. It took a lot to disconcert Kid, who would cheerfully loot through the newly dead and the decomposing dead alike.\n\n\"Rotting, is it?\"\n\n\"I think it is past that, my dear. Some time ago.\"\n\n\"How do you think he got up there? And what is keeping him there?\"\n\n\"I am not sure, my dear. Magic most certainly, and very old magic at that, as old as that flameskull that attacked us.\"\n\n\"Maybe it is one of that creature's friends.\"\n\n\"He did say that they were all dead,\" Kid mused.\n\nIvy tightened her grip and felt her gloved fingers slide through the rotted flesh of the nose into the open curve of the skull. She paused, tightened her jaw, and kept her gaze on Kid. She was in no hurry to look upward. Kid shrugged, then reached up also and caught hold of the decayed robe that hung loosely around the corpse. Together they pulled downward, Kid holding cloth, Ivy clutching bone.\n\nThe corpse resisted their efforts to drag it down to the ground. Every time they grabbed it and tugged, it drifted down, seemingly weightless, but then bobbed up again as soon as they let go. Ivy finally looked at the figure to better determine how to handle it. The man, whose flesh was so sunken and dried upon the skeletal frame that gender was not easy to determine, was dressed in some type of hooded linen robes. Thankfully, the hood had flopped forward and hidden the ruined features of his face. Ivy felt particularly bad about breaking off his long nose in her early attempts to pull him off the ceiling.\n\n\"Well, it is not his body that flies,\" Ivy decided. \"The bits that fell off don't go floating away on their own.\"\n\nKid was standing directly under the body, his head tilted all the way back as he contemplated the corpse floating just out of his reach. \"No amulets, no rings on his fingers,\" said Kid, reciting an inventory that made some type of sense to him. \"The robe is rotting, so it cannot be that. It must be the belt, my dear.\"\n\nA long thin belt of scarlet leather encircled the man's waist. The belt buckle was a large elaborate affair of chased silver, styled as a winged serpent eating its own tail. The serpent's wings fit over and under the circle, locking the belt into place. \"The belt,\" repeated Kid firmly.\n\n\"Shall I cut it off him?\" Ivy slid her sword out of its scabbard.\n\n\"No, no, my dear.\" Kid grasped her arm and pulled the blade back. \"You might damage the magic if you cut it. Unlock the buckle, instead. The wings should move.\"\n\nIvy had to stand on tiptoe to get a firm grip on the belt buckle. She waggled the wings left and then right.\n\n\"Gently, gently, my dear.\" Kid was hopping from one hoof to the other, sending little pebbles rolling down the rubble pile with his fidgeting.\n\n\"I'm trying,\" Ivy grunted. The smell of dust, mold, and rot filled her nose, much more noticeable now that they had been hauling on the corpse. With her nose that much closer to the body, Ivy could easily smell the must of a corpse long, long past its prime. The belt buckle was uncommonly stiff and seemed permanently locked in position. She stretched up her left hand, candlelight winking on the harper's token on her glove, and twisted the whole serpent while she hung onto its wings with her right hand. With a snap, the two wings folded back. The belt and the corpse came crashing down on top of her, knocking her back on the pile of rubble.\n\nKid dragged the body off her and helped her to sit up. Ivy gasped a few times until her breath came back. She was not afraid of dead things, not in her line of work, but still. There was something extremely unpleasant about being felled by a rotting corpse.\n\n\"He was heavier than he looked,\" she finally gasped, hunching forward to ease the pressure on her thrice-bruised belly.\n\nThe belt hung limply in her grasp. Ivy shook it. The belt still hung straight down. \"So, you figured how to get it down. Do you know how to make it go up again?\"\n\n\"I think so, my dear.\" Kid ran his clever little fingers round and round the buckle. \"This was wrought in imitation of the belts that the ancient ones used to fly to their floating cities. This man must have been one like Toram, who sought to imitate the great wizards of Netheril. Or perhaps he hoped to fly to one of the lost cities and plunder it. But such ambitions are treacherous.\"\n\n\"And you know this because \u2026\"\n\n\"I was Toram's godsight goat.\" Kid repeated Archlis's earlier words with a bitter, harsh tone quite unlike his normal fluting voice. \"When Toram owned me, he trained me to know such magic as this, artifacts that he found in old tombs and crypts. To sniff such objects out for him. I told you Toram was a great grave robber. And all his magic he stole from others, as Archlis stole his power from him. Toram once said that I had a demon's knack for stealing old magic.\"\n\n\"And here I thought that you would have made a better thief without the horns and hooves,\" Ivy said, but she reached out a hand and ruffled his curls gently as a mute apology.\n\n\"After I ran away, my looks did betray me often, my dear,\" said Kid with a peculiar sound, halfway between a sigh and a laugh. \"People drove me out of their towns with curses. I had no home until I met you.\"\n\nIvy remembered how she had almost broken Kid's hand the first time that they met (the hand had been cutting away her purse, and she had grabbed it and jerked without thinking). As an apology for her actions, she had chucked Kid over her shoulder and carried him back home for a hot meal. Kid had seemed a little surprised by her actions. But, as she told Mumchance later, it was the bad example that the dwarf set\u2014dragging home all those stray dogs\u2014that had made her drag home the cloven-hoofed thief.\n\n\"Well,\" Mumchance had said at the time, looking Kid over from his horns to his hooves. \"You know the rules, Ivy. You made them. If you bring it home, you're responsible for it.\" But the dwarf, for all his casual airs, grew as bad as the rest of them, sneaking food onto Kid's plate when he wasn't looking and muttering about how he was too thin.\n\nIvy had always meant to ask Kid about his past. Perhaps sitting on a pile of rubble with a corpse was not the best time. But the sheer obsessive curiosity that she had inherited from both of her parents loosened her lips. \"So how did you end up being owned by this Toram?\"\n\nKid kept his eyes on the belt, waggling the wings left and right on the buckle, and then running the leather through his hands. He no longer wore his normal, pleasant expression\u2014a slight smile and mildly sinister tilt of the eyebrow. Instead, his face was blank as though he were working harder than usual to hide his emotions from Ivy.\n\n\"When I was so small that I have no earlier memories, the Red Wizards kept me locked in a stone room. Toram came to their temple. He worked as a spy for them from time to time in return for glimpses of their scrolls and magic books. How he learned of me, I do not know, but one night he broke the lock and took me away bundled under his cloak.\"\n\n\"Red Wizards? You mean he stole you from Thay?\" The legendary wrath and sheer terror evoked by even a whisper of Thay meant that the wizard Toram had to be exceptionally brave or, more likely, completely insane. Nobody stole from Thay if they wanted to keep their body intact and their soul out of eternal suffering. Even Ivy's mother, that reckless bard who regarded sea serpents as exceptionally annoying large fish, had warned her daughter specifically against encounters with anyone who even smelled like they might wear the scarlet robes. When she asked her father about Thay, he had simply rolled back his sleeves to show the horrible scars on his forearms left by one chance encounter with those terrible wizards.\n\n\"Toram wished to find the ancient magic,\" explained Kid. \"He said my kind had a greater sensitivity than others to such artifacts, both beneficial and destructive\u2014especially the destructive kind. As I said, he taught me ways to feel out such objects, to know their history and how they work.\"\n\n\"Godsight?\"\n\n\"That is what he and Archlis called it.\" Kid gave another twist of the silver serpent's wings and clicked his tongue when the wings did not move as he expected. \"They were partners once.\"\n\n\"You did not mention that you knew Fottergrim's favorite spellcaster when we took the job.\"\n\n\"Archlis used another name when he worked with Toram. Besides, all humans look a bit alike to me. I did not recognize him until I saw Toram's Ankh in his hands and sniffed his scent. Then I realized how he had been throwing so many fireballs off the walls of Tsurlagol.\"\n\n\"What exactly did Archlis do to Toram?\"\n\n\"He struck him down and left him to die in Anauroch.\" Kid's entire skin shivered, rather like a horse that had an unpleasant bug walk across its hide. \"Archlis thought then that I would serve him as I had served Toram.\"\n\n\"But you didn't stay with him.\"\n\n\"I bit his hand to the bone. You can still see the scar if you look close,\" said Kid with grim satisfaction. \"When he dropped me, I ran away as quickly as I could go.\"\n\nIvy remembered when she caught Kid picking her pockets. \"I guess I'm lucky that you didn't try biting off my hand.\"\n\n\"Oh no, my dear,\" said Kid in his usual gentle voice. He glanced at her, the stony look on his face softening. \"I would never hurt you or the others. I told you, I have a great sensitivity to that which is destructive and that which is not. It is like this light.\" He passed one hand through the candle flame without flinching. \"A warmth and comfort shone from you. It has never dimmed, but only grown stronger over the years.\"\n\nIvy did not know how to respond, and Kid seemed to expect no reply. With a nod of satisfaction, he pulled the wings apart repeatedly and then snapped them back together again. The belt floated toward the ceiling. Ivy grabbed it and pulled it back down again. Kid twisted the wings, and the belt lay still in their grasp.\n\n\"Pull the wings open three times and then shut,\" instructed Kid as he looped the belt around her waist and fastened the buckle. \"And the belt flies. Twist twice to the right and then open to cease the spell.\"\n\n\"Maybe you should wear it.\" Magical items always made her a little nervous. Such objects rarely worked as she expected.\n\n\"No, my dear, it would better for you to have it. Archlis watches me closely, but he ignores you.\"\n\n\"So much for my pride.\"\n\n\"It is because he is a magelord, which means he is even more arrogant than the ordinary wizard,\" said Kid. \"He sees only those who have mastered his brand of magic as a threat. All others are nothing to him. He knows that I knew some of Toram's secrets, but he only sees you as a fighter\u2014someone of no value because they have no magic at all. He is a very foolish man, my dear.\"\n\n\"So, should we see if this works on a live body?\"\n\n\"Open three times and then shut,\" Kid repeated, laying his hands over Ivy's gloved fingers to teach her the move.\n\nSuddenly, her feet were no longer in contact with the floor. Ivy was pulled into a horizontal position, face down to the pile of rubble. She bobbed up in the air so quickly that she smacked the back of her head against the ceiling. The force of that blow bounced her back toward the floor. Kid jumped up and hooked one hand through the belt. Now both of them dangled off the ground, but not quite so high. Kid wiggled, and they bobbed up and down a little. Ivy could not feel her own weight or his. For the first time in her life, she was completely unable to tell where the ground was. Usually the earth was pressed against some part of her anatomy, such as the soles of her feet. She stared down. It was there and she was above it, but she could not sense it. If she closed her eyes, she doubted she could tell which direction was up and which was down. She felt like a cloud, just floating along, but without any wind to move her to the next spot.\n\nIvy bent her chin against her chest to peer cross-eyed at Kid hanging off her belt. \"Now what do we do?\"\n\n\"Try flying, my dear.\"\n\n\"How? Flap my arms?\"\n\n\"Most probably.\"\n\n\"Of all the foolishness!\" Ivy flapped her arms up and down. She kicked her legs. She stroked arm over shoulder like she was trying to swim through a river. Nothing worked. They just hung there, wobbling a bit, but making no noticeable progress in any one direction.\n\n\"There may be some other trick to it,\" said Kid, letting go of the belt and landing lightly on his feet next to the corpse. Without Kid's extra weight hanging off the belt, Ivy floated up to the ceiling. But this time she tucked her head and legs under so the only part that smacked the stone ceiling was her rump. She straightened out and looked down at Kid and the sharp rubble littering the floor.\n\n\"Twist twice to the right and then open to cease the spell,\" Kid reminded her.\n\n\"I'm going to fall hard on that pile of rocks. For the second time today,\" Ivy observed.\n\nAbove her, she could hear the scraping of stone upon stone. A tickle of air hit the back of her neck.\n\n\"They are prying open the trapdoor, my dear,\" Kid said. \"Quick, or they will see you.\"\n\n\"The gods must truly despise me,\" Ivy said as she squeezed her eyes closed. \"All right. Step back so I don't flatten you.\"\n\nTucking her head down on her chest and throwing one arm over her face, she twisted the wings twice to the right with her free hand and squeezed the buckle open. The earth became very evident and very hard as she banged with a teeth-rattling bump into the rubble and rolled across sharp-edged pebbles and potshards.\n\nAbove her, she could hear Mumchance calling, Wiggles yapping, and Kid replying, \"We are here, dear sir, well enough and safe.\"\n\n\"Speak for yourself,\" mumbled Ivy, making sure that the scarlet belt was secure and tucked down under her weapons belt. \"Next time we get to town, remind me to get some extra protection from falling spells.\"\n\n\"That is it!\" said Kid, turning away from the rope that Mumchance had thrown down.\n\n\"What's it?\" Ivy brushed the dust and less pleasant debris from her gloves.\n\n\"The purpose of the belt. It keeps you from falling or sends you falling upward.\"\n\n\"Upward falling?\" Ivy turned that phrase over in her brain and decided it just made her head hurt. \"How about we just say it makes you float in the air.\"\n\n\"And anyone else grasping it! The belt must have been made to hold up more than one man\u2014or maybe a very fat man.\"\n\n\"We'll talk about it later,\" Ivy hushed him. She strode under the trapdoor and looked up at Mumchance.\n\n\"Couldn't bear to leave me behind?\" she called to the dwarf in a mocking tone.\n\n\"Wasn't you,\" replied the dwarf in a much drier tone, his scarred face wrinkled up in a worried frown. \"Archlis wants Kid. But he said we could pull you out too if we were quick about it.\"\n\n\"In that case, I'm going first, and Kid can follow.\" She grabbed the rope with both hands and shimmied out of the hole. Not surprisingly, as she came out of the hole, she saw that Zuzzara had the other end of the rope tied around her waist and was standing there like a stone pillar, unruffled by the tug of Ivy's weight.\n\nSanval reached out and helped steady her as she stepped out of the hole. \"You are well? Is that another scrape on your face?\"\n\n\"I fell through a hole and landed on rock rubble. Mildly uncomfortable. Not dead yet,\" she replied. He started to say something but stopped and just gave her a small bow. She nodded back at him. Stuck underground, surrounded by enemies, his formality never stopped. It must be that gleaming armor that keeps him so stiff and proper, she thought.\n\n\"Anything down there?\" asked Gunderal, watching her sister lean over the hole and haul Kid up on the rope, like a fish through an ice hole.\n\n\"Just rubble and an old dead body. Nothing exciting,\" said Ivy. \"What about up here?\"\n\n\"Archlis says we have to walk very quietly now,\" said Zuzzara. \"And not talk too loudly.\"\n\n\"At least he didn't ask the impossible, like no talking at all.\"\n\n\"No, Ivy, he said that doesn't matter. They will hear us just by our footfalls on the stone when we get close enough,\" Gunderal sounded even more worried than usual.\n\n\"Who would they be?\" Ivy was certain that she would not like the answer.\n\n\"He says that we have to see to understand,\" said Gunderal. \"But, Ivy, whatever it is, I can tell that it troubles him. What could frighten a magelord with as much magic as Archlis has?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Sanval fell behind the Siegebreakers. Though relieved to see Ivy back with them, he also felt a familiar frustration. Why could he not have said anything sensible or even interesting when he helped her out of the hole? Instead, he had just babbled the usual Procampur phrases\u2014completely impersonal, if courteous. He watched Ivy walk ahead of him, her head bent to catch some remark of Kid's. Since the first day he had seen her, striding through the dust of the camp, he had thought that she walked through the world as if she had no cares. No, he corrected himself, not quite that. Rather, she walked as if the world did not own her. Laws, traditions, even the gods themselves, seemed to be unable to constrain that cocky stride and the intelligent, mocking gleam in her eyes. And, Sanval was honest enough to admit to himself, he envied that freedom more than anything else.\n\nOf course, Ivy was nothing like the perfumed ladies of Procampur, the silver-tile court intriguers who whispered secrets behind feather fans, or the red-roof girls who swayed their hips as they sashayed down the street. If there were a contest for the most grubby mercenary, Ivy would probably win. Once, when he had been very young, too young for tutors, he had eluded his nurse and gone out to the stableyard. It had been raining, and the yard was a wonderful, slippery mess of mud, perfect for sliding. Sanval still remembered the pain in his ear as his nurse dragged him upright and held him dangling before her, dripping mud upon her clean white apron. \"You are the muckiest kid,\" she had scolded, slipping into the blue-roof dialect of her sailor father at that moment. \"Dirtiest boy that I have ever seen!\" Mucky was, he felt, a rather apt description of Ivy. Except, and again he had to be honest with himself as he tried to be with others, her collecting of dirt was that same friendly, joyful, defiant roll in the mud that he had enjoyed so much that day. She did it deliberately, he felt, just to tweak the more proper nose of those Procampur officers who were foolish enough to sneer at her as she swaggered up the hill to the Thultyrl's tent.\n\nThose officers\u2014and he had a couple of satisfying duels scheduled with the most discourteous\u2014did not know how very beautiful and courageous and clever Ivy was. She was much finer than any noble lady born under the silver roofs.\n\nSanval sighed, remembering how Ivy had looked two nights ago. She had just come from the canvas bathhouse used by the mercenaries and was joking with the others as Gunderal braided Ivy's hair. As he stood there, outside of that circle of warmth and laughter, she turned and looked directly at him. \"Hey, Sanval, how do you like me clean?\" she yelled. \"Come and join us. We're more fun than anyone sitting up on the top of that hill.\" He almost did it\u2014sat down, had a drink, and shared a joke. But the message from the Thultyrl had been urgent, and he needed to return with an answer immediately. So he had said something polite\u2014stupid and dull, but polite\u2014and gone away again. He had never regretted any action so much.\n\nNow he still had a duty to the Thultyrl. He could not let Archlis succeed in his plans. If he could keep Archlis from returning to Fottergrim, it would give Procampur's army an enormous advantage, perhaps even greater than toppling the western wall. Sanval was convinced Archlis would eventually return to Tsurlagol. He knew that Ivy thought she could safely follow Archlis, but she was wrong. As soon as Fottergrim's troops saw her, they would turn against her and her friends. Even her clever tongue would not be able to talk them out of a quick execution, unless Sanval could come up with a way to keep her safe from Archlis and Fottergrim.\n\nWithout intending to, Sanval dropped back until he was walking in step with the two bugbears trailing the group. The larger one growled at him and pointed at his armor.\n\n\"Your breastplate is very fine,\" said the big bugbear in Common. The creature wore no metal armor at all, just well-worn leather over his torn breeches and a few clanking chains looped over his shoulders. \"A little small for me. But I could wear it. I can trade for it. I have good things, some of Hackermic's things. Poor Hackermic, poor Hackermic.\" The bugbear sighed deeply, a rumble in the center of his chest.\n\nSanval nodded, not to agree but to show his interest in the conversation. The creature seemed surprisingly friendly and he thought he could turn that to his advantage.\n\n\"Or I could hit you on the head,\" the bugbear continued more cheerfully, \"if you do not give me the breastplate.\"\n\nSanval raised one eyebrow but kept silent.\n\nThe other smaller bugbear growled some incomprehensible words.\n\n\"His name is Norimgic, and I am Osteroric,\" said Osteroric, gesturing at his companion. \"And he says that Archlis does not want you hit on the head. Not yet. I am not afraid of the magelord's anger, not like this one.\"\n\nNorimgic snarled, showing off his big yellow fangs. \"You are afraid of Archlis,\" said Osteroric to Norimgic, apparently not too impressed by the display. \"Or you would have eaten him when he made us leave Lorie behind. Lorie was Norimgic's friend, his particular female friend. But something ate her,\" he explained to Sanval.\n\n\"Where was Lorie eaten?\" asked Sanval, although he thought he knew.\n\n\"When we first came into these tunnels, something that we could not see bit off her head and an arm. It was very sad,\" said Osteroric, \"because she was Norimgic's first love. This is the problem of being with a fighting female\u2014they get killed so often. Of course, all our females fight. Which means that we males are often heartbroken. Our lives are tragic.\"\n\nSanval had never contemplated the romantic disasters of bugbears and decided after a few moments of reflection that he would rather not learn more. Still, he could understand the problem presented by fighting females and offered his own observations, made over the last few turbulent days of his life. \"Fighting females,\" he said, keeping his voice down and hoping Ivy would not overhear him, \"can be a very plague upon the heart, making dreams troubled and honorable thoughts difficult.\"\n\n\"You are poet, like us.\" Osteroric thumped Sanval on the shoulder, a friendly thump not much more staggering that the recent pats that he had received from Zuzzara. \"We three brothers (Norimgic is my younger brother, and poor Hackermic was my elder) are all poets. That is why we left our tribe to roam the world. Because in our pack, they did not like poets. Especially after Hackermic broke the chief's jaw when he criticized Hackermic's five-lined verses with the clever triple and double rhymes. The chief thought we should only make verses in the old forms, and Hackermic should not recite his type of verses, especially before his elders,\" explained Osteroric. \"Also, the chief did not approve of Norimgic's poetry\u2014it is all love songs, because he wants to attract the females. Myself, I make the war chant, the kind that makes bugbears bang their heads with clubs or other bugbears. You know, the kind of chant that rouses the blood.\"\n\n\"It sounds very exciting,\" Sanval said.\n\n\"A good thump-thump beat is necessary,\" Osteroric said. \"But Norimgic's songs move the blood as well. With passion of a different sort.\"\n\nNorimgic, who must have understood the Common tongue even if he did not speak it, coughed to clear his throat and then broke into a long, drawn-out caterwaul that caused Archlis to glance over his shoulder. The magelord fingered one of the charms on his cloak, and Norimgic shut his mouth with a snap.\n\n\"That man has no appreciation for the songs of adoration.\" Osteroric sighed. \"That song begins 'love is a nightmare, a thousand sword cuts can never sting so much; a hard heart makes for hard times.' In Fottergrim's camp, they often call for Norimgic to sing another someone-betrayed-someone love song.\"\n\nSanval was now positive that he wanted to know nothing more about the love lives of bugbears, but, always polite, he replied, \"I regret that I do not speak any of the dialects that Norimgic uses for his love songs and thus cannot not fully appreciate his poetry.\" Like most gentlemen of Procampur, Sanval's tutor had tried to drum a little literature into his head between training in the sword and horseback riding. \"I remember something from my lessons about a fashionable form of poetry, very popular with courting gentlemen and ladies, that consisted of one eight-line verse and an answering six-line verse.\"\n\nOsteroric said that sounded fascinating although he continued to argue in favor of Hackermic's style of a five-line verse using rhythms created by two short syllables followed by one long one.\n\nNow that friendly conversation had been established, Sanval began to consider how he might be able to sway the bugbears to his side. With great courtesy, he turned down Osteroric's offer of a bent knife for his breastplate, pointing out that his armor had been most excellently made by the best smiths in Procampur. Such armor had not only the natural strengths of the steel plate to keep its owner safe, but also came with certain standard magical protections against arrows laid into it. Such protection was hard to come by, especially underground, and Sanval would prefer to wear it himself\u2014or so he told Osteroric.\n\n\"You can keep the chain mail,\" said Osteroric. \"It is too small for me.\"\n\n\"Still, I would not trade my armor for something of lesser value,\" said Sanval, in as reasonable a tone as possible, because Osteroric was at least a head taller than him and bulging with muscles clearly visible under his furry skin. Remembering one former tutor's advice to know one's enemy, he added, \"Why would so powerful a being as yourself need more armor?\"\n\n\"You will see,\" said Osteroric with a shiver. Norimgic gave a snarl that almost ended with a whimper. The big bugbear patted his brother on the arm. Norimgic began to chide Osteroric in a series of snarls and growls.\n\n\"He thinks that I am too friendly to humans,\" translated Osteroric. \"Blind trust in the honor of soft-skinned bipeds is what got us here in the first place, he says. By that he means that we should never have listened to Archlis when he promised to fill our bellies with more meat than we had ever tasted. Still, it was better than what Fottergrim offered us. He threatened to take off our heads and stuff them down our throats if we lost Archlis in the ruins one more time.\"\n\nThey turned another corner. Twitching at each footstep, Osteroric slowed his pace. Beneath his helmet, his fuzzy ears were tilted flat back against his skull. Before them, a small round chamber revealed numerous entrances to other tunnels, radiating out from the chamber like spokes on a wheel. Around the arched and empty doorways, hundreds of symbols had been carved: some were elaborately detailed, and others hastily scratched. In the light of his torch, Sanval could pick out one small sentence scratched in Common. \"Here I fought, and here I die. Remember \u2026\" but the name was obliterated by another symbol written over it, in another style. It was as if every treasure hunter and adventurer who had dared the ruins of Tsurlagol had passed through this point and been compelled to try to leave some record of their passage.\n\n\"Better plug your ears,\" Osteroric growled. Wondering what would worry a bugbear that much, Sanval felt the ground beneath his feet begin to shake. Suddenly a terrible sound, like some giant millstone grinding through his brain, echoed through the chamber.\n\nArchlis handed his Ankh to Osteroric, and Sanval observed Ivy watch the transfer with hungry eyes. She looked ready to lunge for the Ankh, but Gunderal plucked her sleeve and whispered in her ear. Ivy glanced up to meet Sanval's gaze. She shook her head just slightly. Warning him off? Wanting him to look away? Disapproving of his presence? Once again, he wished that he had the same unspoken communication with her that she made seem so effortless with her friends. Once or twice, he thought he knew what she wanted\u2014if she had been from Procampur, it would have been easy for him to separate the sincere words from the formal courtesy. Not that Ivy cared all that much about courtesy, considering some of her more outrageous statements in front of such people as the Thultyrl.\n\n\"Do not step through the arch,\" the magelord commanded them.\n\nMaking several complicated passes with his hands, Archlis muttered and spat his way through a series of phrases in an ancient tongue. Both Gunderal and Kid winced as the recitation continued, as if the words themselves were scratching across their skin. Archlis finally pulled another charm from his cloak and ground it between his hands, reducing it to dust. He sprinkled the glittering powder in the air. Something shimmered in the air before them.\n\n\"Watch,\" Archlis instructed them, pointing at the empty chamber beyond the invisible barrier. A trio of huge beasts, light brown and dapple-striped in darker brown, shambled into the room. Hairless and hideous, they resembled nothing that Sanval had ever seen before. Two came through arches leading from different tunnels. The third clawed its way through a hole that opened up in the floor. The monsters jostled for space in the tiny chamber, clambering over each other. Their heads turned to the left and right, blindly questing for the source of the noise that had lured them out there just before Archlis had raised his spell.\n\n\"They have no eyes,\" whispered Gunderal.\n\n\"But look at the size of their raggedy ears,\" replied her sister.\n\n\"I'm noticing the size of those great long claws, myself,\" said Mumchance, putting his hand on Wiggles's head and pushing the little dog deeper into his pocket, as if that would protect her from the beasts. \"And do you see all that ugly muscle in the tails? Must hit like a battering ram.\"\n\n\"What are they?\" asked Ivy, not taking her eyes off the beasts circling in frustration before them. Blind as they were, the great monsters obviously knew that there was prey close.\n\n\"Destrachans,\" said Archlis. \"Watch closely.\"\n\nOne of the creatures lifted its round muzzle to the ceiling. Although they could hear nothing on their side of the invisible wall created by Archlis, a deep vibration shook the ground. The other two beasts also lifted their round, toothless mouths, looking much like a malevolent pack of reptilian hounds howling at the moon. The stone of the ceiling changed almost immediately, melting into a cascade of sand that splattered across the destrachans. Balancing up on their powerful tails, first one and then the next of the beasts used their giant claws to pull themselves into the hole created in the ceiling.\n\nSanval watched Ivy as the last of the creatures disappeared into the hole in the ceiling, a final flick of its big brown tail sending down a small avalanche of pebbles and sand. Ivy chewed on one gloved knuckle\u2014the most obvious sign of nerves that Sanval had seen her display.\n\n\"What did you call them?\" she asked Archlis, as the magelord retrieved his Ankh from Osteroric.\n\n\"Destrachans. They are rare but not entirely unknown in such ruins as these. They probably trailed into the underground passages following a migration of kobolds, a favorite food of the beasts.\"\n\n\"So they are meat-eaters,\" stated Ivy. \"I did notice that they have no teeth.\"\n\n\"That does not matter. They break their food down with waves of sound or pull it apart with those claws. They especially like intelligent food that they can play with before they devour it.\"\n\n\"If you consider kobolds intelligent.\" Zuzzara snorted, but Gunderal shushed her.\n\n\"Why not just hit them with one of those fire spells that you keep threatening us with?\"\n\n\"Their cries can shatter metal,\" admitted Archlis, \"and dissolve stone. Also, they seem to have incredibly tough hides.\"\n\n\"So you tried fire on them?\"\n\n\"Not this group. But I have encountered this breed before. They are the bane of deep ruins.\"\n\n\"And you think they will destroy your Ankh before you have time to destroy them.\" Ivy was back to making statements, as if she were ticking off some mental list of disasters.\n\n\"It is a possibility that I would prefer not to consider,\" Archlis explained. \"The problem with destrachans is that they are sensitive to the slightest sound. Any noise near their lair brings them out hunting.\"\n\nOsteroric whispered to Sanval that was how he lost poor Hackermic, who caught the edge of the destrachan's scream. \"His armor became a cloud of \u2026 what would you call it,\" he asked Norimgic. The bugbear's companion rolled his eyes and hissed back. \"A cloud of scintillating dust,\" continued Osteroric. \"I told you that Norimgic is a great poet. He is very good with words, even if he will not talk to humans. As for Hackermic, what the creatures did next to him was truly awful.\"\n\nIvy's discussion with Archlis was growing louder, which caused Osteroric and Norimgic to back farther away. Norimgic grunted something at Osteroric. \"If she pitches her voice any higher,\" said Osteroric, \"she will bring the shrieking beasties back. She is a very formidable female, says Norimgic.\"\n\n\"He is right,\" said Sanval, watching Ivy cock her head forward so she was standing almost nose to nose with Archlis, her gaze locked with the magelord's. It was a deliberate tactic, he realized\u2014one that she had used to equal effect in the camp on the officers in the Thultyrl's Forty and that camel she had punched out of her tent. If she could get Archlis to back down even one step, she would be on top of him in a flash. But Archlis was more resolute than a Procampur officer or a dromedary. He did not budge.\n\n\"You must lure the destrachans away from their lair,\" Archlis said. \"I am running out of bugbears, and they do not make good decoys. They are too slow and too easily caught.\"\n\n\"Poor Hackermic.\" Osteroric sighed.\n\n\"Why not just use that fancy spell of yours? Why not just sneak around them?\" Ivy demanded.\n\n\"That fancy spell, as you call it, ends as soon as we pass through the barrier,\" Archlis said, waving a hand at the sparkles of light still shimmering in the air.\n\nGunderal gave a little sniff and whispered to her sister, \"And he doesn't have any more charms like the one he just crushed. Have you noticed all his spells use other objects\u2014no magic coming just from him.\"\n\nArchlis frowned but ignored the sisters. \"We are still far from where I need to be, yet the sounds that we just made drew the destrachans immediately.\"\n\n\"They are what forced you back the first time, not Fottergrim's hobgoblins,\" guessed Ivy.\n\n\"I retreated a strategic distance to consider my options,\" Archlis said in dignified tones, looking down his long nose at Ivy.\n\n\"Ran like a hare,\" said Mumchance to Kid, not trying to be quiet. Archlis ignored him too.\n\n\"Why us?\" Ivy pressed the point.\n\n\"I have no more silence charms,\" Archlis admitted in a disgruntled tone.\n\nGunderal poked her sister in the ribs. Zuzzara patted her on the head in acknowledgment of her cleverness. Swatting her sister's hands away, Gunderal pushed her topknot straight and fluffed up her side curls.\n\n\"So I need a distraction\u2014something to lure the destrachans away from this tunnel,\" said Archlis to Ivy. \"You seem more intelligent than those hopeless hobgoblins or my bugbears. Destrachans like to play with their food. If you make the chase interesting, you can lead them a long way from here.\"\n\n\"Which helps you and doesn't help us. I fight for who pays me. Not for who is sure to get me killed. Same for all of us. Offer me something better than what he has.\" To Sanval's surprise, she pointed straight at him. He knew red-roof mercenaries sold their loyalty to the highest bidder, but still he had not expected so blatant an offering of betrayal from Ivy.\n\n\"If you can get the destrachans away from their lair and destroy them while I retrieve my treasure, then I will lead you out of the ruins,\" promised Archlis. \"Which is more than that gentleman can do.\" Not seeing too much enthusiasm on their faces, the magelord added, \"And a reasonable fee. Gems or gold. Whichever you wish. But only if I retrieve my treasure.\"\n\nIvy pointed out that the odds of their success were not great, but she did not question whether Archlis would keep his promise. Sanval wondered at her ability to trust the skinny magelord's word. Perhaps Ivy had lied to him earlier, and she or one of the other Siegebreakers did have some magic concealed about her person that would protect her friends and defeat the creatures. After all, everyone knew that red-roof adventurers had all sorts of fantastic abilities, and maybe she was just intending to run away from the magelord as soon as she and the other Siegebreakers were out of sight.\n\nBut Archlis could not succeed in his mission and return to the walls of Tsurlagol. Sanval knew that it was his duty to stop Archlis, even if it took him away from Ivy. Besides being the right thing to do, it might also be the best way to help Ivy and her friends. If he fought Archlis, the rest could escape. He just had to pick the right time for his ambush.\n\n\"So,\" said Sanval to Osteroric. \"You might have something worth trading for.\"\n\nOsteroric bent closer to Sanval to listen to his whispered instructions. The bugbear pushed back his battered helmet and scratched his fuzzy head. He puckered his lips and blew out a long and stinking breath. \"Hsssh,\" whistled Osteroric. \"This could be big trouble for me. Bigger trouble for you. I wonder what Hackermic would have done.\u2026 He was even smarter than Norimgic.\"\n\n\"Does that matter?\" asked Sanval, loosening the straps on his breastplate.\n\n\"Not really,\" agreed Osteroric. \"Hackermic is dead. We are not.\"\n\n\"Then we trade,\" said Sanval.\n\n\"Then we trade,\" said Osteroric. \"But I think that you will end up the same as poor Hackermic.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "You have no choice,\" stated Archlis. \"You're running out of time. Or didn't you notice the water tricking along the floor there?\"\n\nWith some dismay, Ivy saw that Archlis was right. The telltale silver streaks of water caught the light of the torches. Right now, only little puddles formed along the crack between the wall and floor; but she knew there was more coming.\n\n\"Eventually the river will flood out these ruins,\" Archlis complained. \"There must have been some storm in the mountains to bring this much water into the ruins so late in the summer.\"\n\nIvy decided not to enlighten Archlis about the true cause of the river's sudden rising. It probably would not improve their relationship. \"So,\" she said. \"Any last suggestions on how to draw those beasts out?\"\n\n\"Walk forward until you are on the other side of my spell wall,\" Archlis said to Ivy. \"Then start running. The destrachans will follow you. If you survive, follow us down that tunnel.\" He pointed to an arched and shadowed entrance. \"And if you try to follow us now, I'll burn you where you stand.\"\n\n\"We will do what you asked. But you must keep your part of the bargain as well.\"\n\nArchlis did not respond to her last comment. Instead, he suddenly grabbed Kid by one skinny arm. \"The goat-boy stays with me,\" said Archlis. \"I need his skills.\"\n\n\"That was not part of our bargain,\" Ivy said. She lunged for Kid, but Archlis pulled him out of her way. Zuzzara swung her shovel at the magelord, intent on breaking his hold on Kid. Rather than hitting Archlis, the shovel twisted in her hands and bounced back, striking her on the top of her head. Zuzzara sat down abruptly. Gunderal immediately raced to her sister's side, standing above the dazed half-orc, and raised her hands, her own injury forgotten.\n\n\"Do not even try, little genasi,\" said Archlis. \"My charms make me immune to any and all magical attacks.\"\n\n\"At least my magic comes from me,\" snapped Gunderal. \"It isn't stolen charms and looted trinkets.\"\n\nEyes narrowing at the insult, Archlis began to raise the Ankh. Ivy stepped between them. Chin out, gaze steady, she challenged Archlis, \"Hurt her, and we turn back. You can play games with the destrachans on your own.\"\n\n\"An idle threat,\" returned the magelord, but he lowered the Ankh. \"You have no hope of finding the way out. The tunnels will be flooded within the day. Help me, and you help yourselves. Once you have distracted the beasts, return to this chamber. I will come for you here.\"\n\n\"Go, my dears, go,\" said Kid, wiggling in the magelord's cruel grip. \"I will see you again.\"\n\n\"Course you will, stupid,\" said Zuzzara, climbing shakily to her feet. A trickle of blood ran down her forehead, and she brushed it impatiently aside.\n\n\"If you hurt him, I will find a way around your charms. I promise,\" said Ivy. She could not bear to look at Kid. Stay together\u2014that was the rule of her group, the most basic bond that bound them together, no matter how many tricks that fate played on them. For the last ten years, she had begun every day at the farm hearing the muffled sounds of her friends' voices echoing in her ears\u2014all the little arguments and senseless jokes that old friends told each other. More recently, the click of Kid's hooves had been part of that. She did not know how she could return home and fall asleep each night without the comfort of knowing that they were all safely under one roof.\n\nWhatever Archlis was going to reply was interrupted by a howl from Norimgic. The big bugbear was yelling something in Orcish at Archlis.\n\n\"What do you mean he's gone?\" snapped the magelord. He glared at the two bugbears. Osteroric was now wearing Sanval's breastplate and sporting a \"who me?\" expression. \"I was just trying it on,\" said Osteroric about his new armor. \"And when I looked up, he wasn't here anymore!\"\n\n\"So he did not dare stay and face the beasts.\" Archlis snorted. \"You were right. He is not like the other nobles of Procampur. But he is also doomed. There is no way out of these ruins without my help. And to secure that, you must lead those creatures away from here.\"\n\nIvy hoped Sanval had a better plan than she did. Right now, the only thing that she could think about was running faster than those destrachans. And losing the big guy in armor was not going to make her life easier, especially if what she suspected were true. But no need to make Archlis nervous. Show a brave face\u2014that was her mother's constant advice. Keep quiet and think\u2014that was her father. Time to remember both those lessons.\n\n\"Let's go, then,\" said Ivy to the others. She plunged through the invisible wall that Archlis had raised between them and the destrachans' sensitive ears. She felt a magical prickle on her skin and then just nothing. The wall was gone. She looked back but could see nothing but the burning of the bugbears' torches behind her. Archlis stood watching, one hand gripping the Ankh tightly, the other hard on Kid's shoulder.\n\nStanding directly under the hole created in the ceiling by the destrachans, Ivy could hear nothing. She could see nothing. But she knew that the monsters were out there, just waiting for them.\n\n\"Come on,\" she said, much quieter than she normally would. \"Let's run!\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "Ivy doubted that Sanval had fled blindly into the dark. Silly, stupid man\u2014she was sure that he was intent on some plan involving some great heroic deed that would get himself killed but save everyone else in the world. He was that sort. She'd known too many like him. Besides, hadn't he said something earlier about attacking Archlis on his own?\n\nBut, she was fairly certain that it just was not in his well-polished, honorable soul to do anything so ignoble as leave them defenseless. He must have thought that she could save the others by herself. He had obviously picked what he decided was the more dangerous target\u2014Archlis\u2014and decided to go it alone. Yes, that would be a Procampur type of reasoning. Ivy's own self-confidence bubbled up when she realized that Sanval's Procampur sense of protocol would not have let him abandon the Siegebreakers if he had thought they needed his protection. In a strange sort of way, he had just paid her a compliment. Now, if only she could pay it back\u2014preferably by finding him later and shaking his head until she rattled some sense into his skull.\n\nMumchance trotted up beside her, breaking into her thoughts about the future by worrying her about their present situation. The dwarf pointed at the sidewalls of the tunnel. \"Narrow. Maybe not wide enough for those monsters? Slow down a moment.\"\n\nWas it possible that the sightless destrachans would enter a tunnel too narrow for their enormous bodies and wedge themselves into immobility? If Archlis had lied about going in the other direction and actually planned to leave through this tunnel once she had killed the beasts, it was satisfying to think of him stuck behind those monsters, staring at their huge flailing tails, unable to get past them. Then Ivy remembered the way the destrachans had crumbled the ceiling of the chamber with their weird vibration cry. Nice idea, but it was not going to happen that way, she knew.\n\n\"I don't think that they can get stuck,\" she said out loud and then wondered if something besides her own group had heard her. How loud was too loud? \"Is there any way that we can hear them before they hear us?\"\n\nMumchance shrugged. \"Maybe. They are big and pretty noisy.\" He placed his hand against the ground.\n\n\"Mumchance,\" said Ivy to her friend, \"do you remember why we got into this business?\"\n\nZuzzara answered, because the dwarf had dropped to his knees and then stretched flat on the ground, still trying to hear the approach of the destrachans. He pulled Wiggles out of his pocket and set the little dog down beside him. Wiggles looked ready to take a quick nap, her pointed chin resting on the dwarf's rump. It had been a long day for a small dog\u2014a long day for all of them.\n\n\"We got into siegebreaking because we needed money,\" said Zuzzara, rubbing the bump left on her head by the shovel. \"Especially after we flooded out our last rainmaking customer.\"\n\n\"Besides that,\" Ivy prompted.\n\n\"Because we are good at what we do,\" said Gunderal, looking like a defiant flower as she stepped up to her sister and fingered the bump on Zuzzara's head with gentle hands. \"Ivy, I can hold the river back. I could twist my water-calling spell to keep these tunnels from flooding for a while longer. I'm sure of it.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Ivy very slowly, because she had just had a new idea, but she was not sure how everyone would react. \"We don't want to hold the river back. We want to let the river in. Archlis was right. These tunnels are low and going lower. If we let the water in \u2026\"\n\n\"We all drown,\" pronounced Mumchance standing up and dusting off his knees. Wiggles was staying close by his heels, very quiet, as if the little dog sensed danger was close.\n\n\"Unless \u2026\"\n\n\"We get out first.\"\n\n\"But what about the destrachans?\" asked Gunderal.\n\n\"We hope that they can't swim.\"\n\n\"But what about Kid?\" Gunderal asked. \"Oh, Ivy, you are not going to leave Kid behind?\"\n\n\"Of course not. Everyone gets out. Everyone except Archlis. Don't much care about him, do we?\"\n\nZuzzara giggled\u2014one of those deep orc giggles that made people nervous. \"Are we going after Archlis, Ivy?\"\n\n\"That magelord is just another tower waiting to be toppled,\" said Ivy. \"Let's bury him down here and take down the walls of Tsurlagol!\" She delivered this rousing speech in a low-pitched tone to avoid attracting destrachans, but it got the same reaction as all of her rousing speeches. Everyone looked like they wanted to disagree\u2014Mumchance even opened his mouth and then closed it\u2014and then everyone gave a reluctant nod. If Ivy was crazy enough to think it might work, then they might be crazy enough to go along with it.\n\n\"For once, that idea actually sounds like a plan,\" said Mumchance finally. \"One that isn't completely different from what we discussed before.\"\n\n\"Don't look so surprised.\"\n\n\"No, think about it. The tunnels may be a bit deeper than we intended to dig,\" said the dwarf, \"but we can use them just the same. They all run toward the current city as far as I can tell, or the current city was built up on a corner of these ruins, which is more likely. We have been twisting around a lot, following that magelord, but I think we are pretty close to that southwest corner. If Gunderal could force the water toward the city, we could just wash the walls away. Or\"\u2014as Mumchance became more enthusiastic about the idea, he also became a stickler for precise details describing underhanded ways of engineering destruction\u2014\"we can at least take down that weak corner that we found earlier. The spot where you told the Thultyrl that the wall would fall down.\"\n\n\"That would be good,\" agreed Ivy as they continued to explore the current tunnel. \"Make us look like we know what we are doing. That is so rare.\"\n\n\"I'm serious, Ivy.\" The dwarf stuck out his lower lip and blew a heavy breath. Ivy recognized his don't-sidetrack-me-when-I-am-thinking sigh. \"Look at the cracks running through the walls,\" said Mumchance, pointing left and right. \"I bet those shrieking beasts did that. If they hunt here often, the ground will already be weak above us as well as below. Tsurlagol could end up with a pretty lake on its west side.\"\n\n\"That leaves the problem of how we avoid being crushed,\" said Ivy. \"Or drowned. Or eaten.\"\n\n\"You will figure something out,\" said Mumchance. \"You always do.\"\n\n\"I do, don't I?\" said Ivy with just a little more bounce in her step as she walked down the tunnel. \"Well then, let's speed up the water coming into these tunnels, and let us hope those creatures can't float or swim.\"\n\nGunderal spread out her pale fingers and made a gesture resembling raindrops falling down. Drops of water trickled off her fingers and spattered into the dust at her feet. \"I'm feeling much better,\" she said.\n\n\"Knew you could do it,\" said Zuzzara, \"but don't push your magic too hard. What if you can't do what you want when you want to?\"\n\n\"Sister, I do not even understand that last sentence,\" giggled Gunderal. A small smile brightened her delicate features. A few long ringlets had come loose from her topknot, and she looped one long strand around her finger very slowly. \"Stopping a river is rather boring, but calling one! So much more fun.\"\n\n\"Do you think you can?\" her sister asked.\n\nGunderal's violet eyes gleamed in a way that would be called a glare in a less beautiful woman. \"You never think I can do anything.\"\n\n\"I am only asking.\"\n\n\"Zuzzara, I may not be as strong as you or as clever as Mimeri, but I can cast spells!\"\n\n\"I only said \u2026\"\n\nGunderal stood in the shadow of her half-orc sister and stared up at her. \"Well, don't, Zuzzara. Don't say another word! I know a thing or two about water magic.\"\n\n\"Unless you know how to kill destrachans, keep your voices down,\" Ivy finally intervened. \"We need to think of some place that we could ambush the creatures.\"\n\n\"Those creatures hunt by sound more than anything else,\" Zuzzara said, peering through one archway into the chamber beyond.\n\n\"According to Archlis, they are blind,\" Ivy agreed. \"And you saw the size of those ears.\"\n\n\"So what if we make a lot of noise and draw them into a narrow place like this,\" Zuzzara suggested. \"Someplace where we could get above them. That might help.\"\n\nThey followed Zuzzara into a circular chamber with stairs running in spirals along the walls to higher openings. In the center of the room stood a small fountain with a trickle of water coming out of its cracked marble spouts. The water was very cold to the touch.\n\n\"There's our river,\" said Gunderal with satisfaction. \"Or a branch of it at least.\"\n\n\"Forcing its way in through the old pipes first,\" said Mumchance. \"The dwarves built well when they built this city, every time that they built this city.\"\n\n\"Strange place,\" said Ivy, looking around the tower of ancient Tsurlagol.\n\nGunderal ran up a few stairs and rested her hand against the wall. \"It is some kind of watchtower, sunk by that weird earth magic that I've been feeling throughout the ruins. Remember the mosaic back in the bathhouse?\"\n\n\"Odd or not, Zuzzara is right,\" said Mumchance. \"It's a good place for a trap.\"\n\nZuzzara shrugged. \"I may be ugly, but I'm not dumb.\"\n\nThe old joke made them all laugh a little, and then glance uneasily over their shoulders as the laughs bounced around the room.\n\nMumchance climbed up the stairs after Gunderal, peering here and there through the openings, swinging his lantern before him. Wiggles stopped before one doorway and let out one small sharp bark. Mumchance took a look and then called back down the stairs. \"There's another tunnel. Looks like it runs straight back the way that we came, just higher up.\"\n\n\"Higher is good,\" said Ivy, watching the ancient fountain that bubbled in the center of the room.\n\n\"Now we need to attract the destrachans lower down,\" said Mumchance. \"So the water covers them before it covers us.\"\n\n\"That was what I was thinking,\" Ivy said.\n\n\"Do you want me to use my eye?\" The dwarf fingered his fake eye as if he were going to pop it out of his head. \"An explosion should bring the beasts quick enough.\"\n\n\"Save that eye. We may need it later. I have a better idea,\" said Ivy with a wicked grin. \"Everyone needs to get to higher ground first. Gunderal, go up to that platform where Mumchance is. Get as close to the exit as you can; you may need to run quickly.\"\n\nGunderal climbed to the ledge where Mumchance stood.\n\n\"Maybe you should call from inside that tunnel,\" Ivy suggested. The sound carried perfectly up to Gunderal on the ledge, but she shook her head.\n\n\"I need to see the water, Ivy, just to keep my spell anchored in this room.\"\n\n\"All right. Zuzzara, do you have that rope we found earlier?\"\n\n\"Wound around my waist,\" the half-orc affirmed. \"Do you need it?\"\n\n\"Tie one end to my belt and get ready to haul me up when I yell. Now I am going to wait for the beasts to get here.\" Ivy cut off their anticipated arguments. \"No, I stay on the floor here. I'm the bait. I'm going to keep them down here, and Gunderal is going to get that river to rise faster, so it's over their heads before they know what is happening.\"\n\n\"But what about you?\" worried Zuzzara.\n\n\"I've got a few tricks,\" said Ivy, straightening the red leather belt around her waist so she could easily reach the silver buckle. \"And if my tricks don't work, you are going to haul me up like a fish on line. As fast as you can.\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Zuzzara.\n\n\"And how are you going to get the beasts to come to you?\" queried Mumchance.\n\n\"I am going to sing!\"\n\n\"Oh, Ivy.\" Gunderal shuddered, and even Mumchance winced once they realized what she was intending to do. Both of them were fairly musical. Zuzzara, who had inherited her orc mother's taste for music (which consisted of exactly no opinion at all), just bobbed her head in a quick nod of agreement and began unwinding the rope around her waist. She started to thread one end through Ivy's belt.\n\n\"Don't tie the rope to that skinny red belt,\" Ivy instructed her. \"Around my weapons belt. I don't want to pull the other one off.\" Zuzzara tied the knot where Ivy had pointed.\n\n\"Ivy, are you sure about this?\" Gunderal asked, leaning perilously out so she could see her friend.\n\n\"Absolutely. Kid and I found a little extra magic back in the tunnels that is going to help.\" Ivy pulled off her gloves and secured them in her weapons belt. She placed her bare fingers on the winged serpent clasp of the magic belt that she had retrieved from the floating corpse. If it worked as it had before, she should be able to float right out of the creatures' reach.\n\n\"Wait one moment,\" Gunderal said, leaving the ledge and coming down the stairs with a quick patter of little feet across the stone steps. \"Does anyone have a candle?\"\n\n\"I don't need a candle,\" Ivy said, who had a lit torch in one hand and her sword in the other.\n\n\"But I do. Zuzzara, light this for me.\" Gunderal pulled one of the candles that they had looted from the bugbear out of her robes and handed it to her sister.\n\nAfter Zuzzara had lit the candle, Gunderal held her hand beneath its drips until her fingertip was covered with wax. She reached out, touched Ivy, and said, \"That should do.\"\n\n\"What's that for?\" Ivy asked.\n\n\"We know the destrachans hunt by sound, but how can we know if they have a sense of smell? Perhaps not, but still, I think you will be safer without any smell.\"\n\n\"I have heard of wizards removing odor from smelly beasts and dead bodies, but come on, Gunderal, I don't stink that bad!\" Ivy objected.\n\n\"Most beasts can pick up any scent, no matter how small, and now you have none at all.\"\n\nIvy grinned. \"Great! I'll never have to bathe again!\"\n\nGunderal said sadly, \"It's a weak spell, Ivy. It will only last a short while.\"\n\nIvy shrugged. \"I plan to finish those monsters quickly.\"\n\n\"Well, if you're actually going to sing, that should drive them mad,\" said Mumchance. The dwarf scooped up Wiggles and put the little dog in his pocket. He tugged on Gunderal's hand. \"Come on, girl, you need to call that river.\"\n\nAs they climbed higher on the stairs, Zuzzara followed them, paying out rope as she went.\n\n\"Oh, how I am going to sing!\" Ivy said to her friends' retreating backs. \"I am going to sing every red-roof ballad that I've learned this summer. If those beasts are as sensitive to sound as Archlis said, they should come rushing to devour me before I get to the first chorus!\"\n\nAbove Ivy, Gunderal began chanting, her call to the river echoing around the room The smell of water filled the air. Ivy waited until the river began to bubble faster through the broken spouts of the fountain, filling the basin and frothing over her boots. Then she stood with elbows out and fists on her waist, tilted her head back, took a deep breath, and started to sing.\n\n\"Procampur men are deadly dull, but Procampur girls are fancy loves.\" Ivy had never quite figured out all the more obscure slang in the chorus\u2014a rousing ditty about ladies who switched their roof tiles to suit their loves\u2014but Sanval had blanched the first time that he had heard her sing it and muttered something about \"duels are being fought for lesser insults.\" Now Ivy pitched her voice loud and strong, to send the echoes clashing through the carved rock of the chamber. The sound reverberated even better than singing at the top of her lungs in the bathhouse back at the farm (a favorite trick for keeping the place all to herself and avoiding certain people fussing about whether or not she was rinsing her hair out properly).\n\nGunderal continued to call upon the river to rise. She stood on the ledge above Ivy, her hands held out. Thin glittering strands of light bounced around the chamber, shimmering across her blue-black cloud of hair. Her violet eyes shone in her delicate face. As her gentle genasi mother had taught her so long ago, Gunderal sang the song of water. The lightning scent of the storm became interwoven with the cool, sweet smell of rain falling from the sky to the dusty earth below, the darker tang of an old river carrying that same rain through the heart of a mountain, and\u2014not too far away\u2014the pull of the sharp salt scent of the sea. She sang about how the sea's rich perfume could lure the river out of its old meandering ways and send it hunting, like an elderly blundering hound trailing a fox's scent, into the tunnels and ruins of ancient Tsurlagol.\n\nThe water poured faster out of the fountain, washing against the tops of Ivy's boots, and the bard's tone-deaf daughter continued to shoutsing her way through the many verses of the Procampur song, describing the lovers preferred under each roof. Ivy had sung all the way to the third verse when the floor of the chamber began to shake.\n\nParts of the wall that she was facing began to dissolve into dust as a raggedy-eared, nasty-looking, blind head came pushing through the newly formed hole, a head that was nothing more than an enormous open circle of mouth. There were no teeth, no eyes, and mere breathing slits where the nose should be, with no sort of bone structure to its face that could be bashed with a well-aimed blow. The only large feature on the head, besides the wide-open maw, were the ears. They were shaped a bit like winter-dead tree leaves, folding into three sections with deep indentations and sharp points all around their edges. Each ear twitched wildly in opposite directions.\n\nA second head shoved into the hole above the first one, and a third popped up through a newly formed crack in the floor.\n\nThe first beast clawed at its own ears as Ivy continued to bellow. The echoes in the chamber made it sound like more than a dozen singers were caterwauling in different corners of the room, all completely out of tune, and a beat or two behind each other. The creatures butted and banged against each other as they squeezed into the room.\n\nThe destrachans had found her, and they seemed killing mad about her singing, as Mumchance had predicted."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "As the destrachans came shrieking into the room, the river continued to rise. Each creature was anyone's worst nightmare, almost as large as the hen house at the farm. Worse still were the weird reverberating screams being given by the monsters\u2014howls so ugly that each cry echoed in Ivy's head, making her back teeth ache.\n\nThe lead monster moved in a crouch, its back legs bent, and its front legs reaching out. Muscles rippled from its jaw to its humped back and down past the powerful haunches to its heavy pointed tail. Its thick hide looked waterproof, and Ivy wondered again if destrachans could swim. Or float. That would mess up her plans rather badly. The creature's talons curved out from its feet like blades. That it was blind in no way lessened its powers, and there was no way at all of knowing how sensitive it was to movement. Certainly it was aware of her singing, turning its blind head from side to side as it tried to pinpoint where she was standing. Luckily, its fellows kept bumping into it, and it would break off from its hunting to swipe a talon or tail at the other two.\n\nObviously, Ivy thought, there was some disagreement going on about who would get to eat her first.\n\nAbove her, Gunderal's chanting was adding to the confusion. Her light, high song of the river overlaid Ivy's deeper rough voice booming out her ribald love song. With all that sound swirling through the room and the destrachans' own cries adding to the confusion, the monsters tucked down their flapped ears, flat against their heads, rather like a man might squeeze his eyelids closed against a too-bright light. The beasts fanned out, wildly swinging their talons in the space around Ivy and screeching in a way that made her eardrums ache. Bits of stone shattered as the destrachans' oscillating cries nearly deafened Ivy and the watchers on the stairs above.\n\nAt least Archlis had been truthful about the creatures' senses. It seemed that they were primarily limited to using their hearing to locate her. If the breathing slits gave them an ability to smell, Gunderal's spell should hide her from that betrayal of her location. Now, if only the river would rise faster. The water was barely up to the small of the creatures' backs.\n\n\"Come on,\" Ivy sang, weaving her worries into the lyrics of her song, \"if you find me too quickly, that won't be any fun for you. And ladies of Procampur know blue-roof sailor boys want to roll, roll, roll with the tide!\"\n\nThe tower was small with three destrachans crashing around its base. Ivy hopped up a few stairs to avoid the heavy bodies blundering in the center. When the destrachans collided with each other, little shrieks would come out of their mouths. The biggest one shrieked loudest, and the other two would back off for a bit, and then start hunting for her again. One of the beasts stumbled into the fountain and got its big foot stuck in the basin. It pointed its mouth toward the marble and let out a moaning cry. As the stone turned to dust, a wider hole formed where the fountain had been, and the river rushed faster into the room.\n\n\"Ready?\" Zuzzara called down to her.\n\n\"Let the water rise a bit,\" Ivy called, staggering as a wave caused by a destrachan's thrashing tail rushed past her. Gasping, Ivy spit water out of her mouth, blinked, and tried to push her wet hair out of her eyes. It stuck to the dust and mud that already caked her face. \"I don't want them to turn back and escape.\"\n\nOne of the ears twitched on the nearest destrachans, and it swung its head up, pointing toward Zuzzara. Ivy immediately broke into a new song, an old favorite of her mother. \"In this world is naught but trouble and sorrow, but why walk in shadow, why run in the night, when you can fly, fly, fly away!\"\n\n\"Ivy, what do you want me to do?\" Zuzzara called.\n\n\"Time to fly, time to fly away, time to soar,\" she bellowed in reply, keeping to the rhythm of the song. Gods knew her singing was awful, but it did seem to keep the destrachans from hunting the others. Ivy grasped the winged serpent belt buckle beneath her fingers. \"Pull the wings open three times and then shut,\" Kid had said, and she did. Nothing happened. \"There's nothing but trouble, trouble and sorrow,\" she sang as she grappled with the belt, \"when magic belts won't save you.\"\n\n\"Hey,\" yelled Zuzzara from above. \"That doesn't sound right. I think you have the words wrong.\"\n\nThe beasts circled Ivy, bouncing their cries off the crumbling walls of the chamber, tilting their ears to catch the echoes. Now they were circling together around the base of the tower, each step bringing them closer to where Ivy stood on the first step of the stone staircase. A taloned foot shot out, flashing in front of Ivy's eyes. Its claw was so close to her that she felt the movement of air against her face. She clamped her mouth shut, hoping the sudden silence would confuse the creatures.\n\nThe three mud-colored destrachans prowled, then stopped and raised their wide mouths toward the ceiling of the chamber. Even their ears became motionless. Were they sensing her movements? Could they feel her breathe?\n\nSuddenly all the ears twitched at the same time, and the creatures tilted their heads toward Gunderal, high above them\u2014a frail figure, but calm and concentrated. The creatures let out a hideous howl. Gunderal gracefully placed her fingers in her ears and continued to chant.\n\n\"Run with me, sad screamers, walk in shadow, run in sorrow,\" Ivy sang, and her voice echoed from all the walls. Ivy opened her mouth to sing another verse, and her mind went blank. The words of all the hundreds of songs that she knew tangled in her head and bottled up in her throat. But it was enough. The destrachans had turned toward her again and away from her friends. And the river was over the first step of the stair and rising rapidly. She backed up the spiral a little higher.\n\n\"Pull the wings open three times and then shut,\" she howled at the beasts sloshing toward her, their talons extended like cats looking to play with mice. Her fingers plucked again at the silver buckle. \"One, two, three, shut! Surprise! The magic is busted!\"\n\nEven where she stood on the staircase, the water was up to her waist and sloshing now around the shoulders of the destrachans. She thought about yelling at Zuzzara to haul her up, but being dragged on a rope against the rough stones would hurt. Instead she began to move more quickly up the stairs, her boots echoing on the stone steps.\n\nOne of the destrachans stretched out its neck and directed a wave of sound from its tubular mouth. Behind her, the lower stairs began to crumble. Ivy looked back and saw the smooth slabs of stone treads crash into the water, leaving jagged mounds. Waves shot up beside her, sloshing on the outer side of the stairs and breaking over her legs.\n\n\"Run!\" Mumchance shouted from above.\n\n\"Blast,\" Ivy cried, leaping up the stairs, just ahead of the cracking rock. It was a long staircase, circling the full chamber. Behind her, the biggest beast howled and wallowed in the water, tumbled over, and righted itself. Its neck stretched out. Again it let out a burst of sound.\n\n\"Keep running! Don't look!\" Zuzzara screamed.\n\nShe didn't have to look. She felt the stair tread fall away under her back foot. She dragged on her gauntlets as she ran, throwing her weight forward. She sprawled on the upper steps, both feet on a solid stair. Her gloved hands scraped over the stone stair treads, caught, and held. She had collected a whole new set of bruises across her ribs and stomach, but she was safe.\n\n\"Shall I pull now?\" Zuzzara shouted.\n\nIvy knew how that would go, her body bump-bump-bumping up stone stairs. Which would be worse: face down with her nose scraped raw against the stone, or on her back with every bang on her armor adding more bruises to her much abused body? \"No! Not yet!\"\n\nScrambling to her feet, Ivy continued up the stairs, her feet pounding. The sound and vibrations attracted the beasts, but she knew of no way to run up stone stairs silently. Ivy glanced down at the red belt encircling her waist. Magic! It was never trustworthy\u2014not for her. Balancing herself with one hand against the wall, she caught the wings of the little silver serpent buckle in her left hand.\n\n\"Pull the wings open three times and then shut,\" she sputtered, her gloved fingers clumsy against the buckle's delicate mechanism. \"One, two, three, shut! Oh!\"\n\nShe blinked in surprise as her body drifted upward.\n\n\"How about that?\" she yelled as she floated off the stairs. The section of staircase just below her rising feet now broke apart in another blast of powdered stone, leaving wide gaps. She looked up and saw the chamber's ceiling. There were interesting reflections from the water on it. It was much too close and approaching fast.\n\n\"Now, Zuzzara, now! Pull!\"\n\nA tug on her other belt kept her from zooming up to the ceiling. Twisting around and peering through her dangling feet, Ivy could see Zuzzara braced in the upper doorway, hauling her down like a kite being retrieved on a windy day. Ivy continued to sing loudly, choosing a song about lovers and yellow-roof maids, because no one had yelled at her to shut up yet. Besides, it did seem to distract the destrachans enough to keep them away from Gunderal.\n\nFar below, the beasts were still circling in the center of the room, trying to find her and ignoring the water that was now halfway up their long necks.\n\n\"I love a good audience,\" said Ivy as her boots scraped against the stone stairway. She twisted the winged serpent so the spell shut off and nearly dropped straight back into the chamber as gravity gripped her. Zuzzara's strong hand on her belt hauled her back to safety on the ledge. Ivy grinned at the half-orc.\n\nWith the water now lapping around their ears, the destrachans fell silent. The work of their terrible cries, however, continued. The stairs crumbled away, treads disappearing in showers of powdered stone, and cracks appeared in the walls around them, sending showers of little pebbles splashing in the water below. The destrachans set up a new keening, one that seemed to vibrate into the very bones of the Siegebreakers.\n\nWith hand signals, Ivy tried to indicate that they should fall back into the tunnel. Mumchance shook his head and pointed at Gunderal, waving his hands. Ivy could not tell what he was trying to communicate. Seeing her puzzled face, Zuzzara leaned close to her ear and screamed over the beasts wailing below, \"She has to finish the spell or the water stops.\"\n\nDismayed, Ivy peered over the staircase to check on the location of the destrachans.\n\nThe roar of one beast below was changing again, into some type of weird high-pitched cry that seemed to hum through the metal in her armor. Blind as it was, the biggest and most persistent destrachan seemed to have a better fix on them than the others. Now that she had seen it shatter stone with its cry, she preferred not to learn first hand what it could do to people. It started forward, wading through the water and clambering up on the back of one of the smaller beasts, pushing it completely under the water. The big creature clawed its way onto the broken staircase, its heavy talons actually sinking into the stone as it heaved itself out of the water.\n\n\"You are supposed to stay down there and drown,\" Ivy screamed at it. Her cries bounced around the chamber walls, and the destrachan paused. Then it lurched across a broken gap in the stairs and pulled itself higher.\n\nCursing her luck and wondering why the thing could not stay confused a little longer, Ivy drew her sword and ran down the uneven stairs, hopping over gaps and hoping the remaining stones would hold for a few minutes longer. She continued down until she was only a step or two above the climber. The monster's new howl was causing the blade to hum in her hand. She guessed the metal could only take so much stress before it shattered. Positioning herself on the center of a crumbling stair above the beast, she angled the blade down, gripping the hilt with two hands. Then, with a little promise to find a temple soon and make some type of offering, Ivy flung the sword into the round, upturned mouth of the beast trying to claw its way up the crumbling stairs.\n\nShe knew, even as she flung it with both hands, that it would take unbelievable luck to do any damage to a creature who ignored the stones raining down on its hide as the room disintegrated around it. But light glinted on the little harper's token sewn on her glove, and most incredibly, her luck held. The sword point slid straight into the monster's mouth, and the surprised beast swallowed it with a choking sound. \"Blast, I truly liked that sword,\" Ivy complained.\n\nA talon whipped across the toe of her boot, slashing it open. Ivy glanced down, wondering if she could charge a new pair of boots to the Thultyrl. Then the pain hit her. Blood welled through the cut in the boot.\n\n\"Choke, you misery, choke and die,\" she shrieked at the beast.\n\nThe sword-swallowing destrachan clawed at its own mouth, obviously trying to dislodge the sharp object in its throat. The attempt caused the creature to wobble on the stairs and then lose its balance. It scrabbled and tried to cling to the staircase, its big claws cutting through the stones, then breaking loose. Again and again the destrachan scratched, caught a claw, heaved itself upright.\n\n\"Go on, fall already,\" Ivy shouted, and her voice bounced around the walls of the circular chamber.\n\nThe beast swung his head around, pointing his open mouth toward the ceiling. Some pale pink spit dribbled down from the edge of its toothless maw. It screeched\u2014not its aimed sonic sound but rather a thin cry of pain\u2014and it fell sideways, landing solidly on the heads of the other two below. The impact of the falling destrachan forced all the beasts under the water.\n\nA huge wave rose up, shooting out and showering water over the stairs and the Siegebreakers.\n\n\"Let's get out of here!\" screamed Ivy. When she turned to race back up the stairs, she nearly knocked Mumchance off. He had come down to stand behind her, holding his fake eye ready to throw in one hand. When the destrachan plunged down into the water, the dwarf gave a grunt of satisfaction and popped his gem bomb back into his empty eye socket.\n\nThe destrachans' heads reappeared above the water, but the monsters' weird cries sounded sluggish and hoarse. \"Persistent critters!\" screamed Ivy as she put her hands in front of her to shove Mumchance faster up the stairs toward a worried-looking Zuzzara. The half-orc was still standing guard over her chanting sister, but she leaned down and offered one arm to grab the dwarf and swing him up onto the landing.\n\nThe stress of their flight proved too much for the remaining steps; the stone turned into glittering dust as the staircase below the ledge literally dissolved. \"Good crystal content in these stones,\" yelled Mumchance as Ivy leaped the last few steps to land winded beside Zuzzara.\n\n\"Why won't the lousy shriekers drown?\" Ignoring her throbbing foot, Ivy leaned over the landing to check on the location of the destrachans.\n\nThe dust and rock that had once been the winding staircase avalanched down into the chamber, becoming mud as it mixed with the water. The destrachans were trapped in the thick goop. It began to fill their ears and mouths. The waters rose over the creatures' heads. They stretched their unseeing faces upward, their ears twitching, their mouths open. Their cries continued to loosen the stones above them, but less now\u2014a mere rain of chips that drifted down into the churning mess of water and stone dust. The soupy gray waters rose above the open mouths, filling them, then covering them. The cries of the monsters ended in gurgles.\n\nThe room was finally silent except for the last three notes of Gunderal's sweet chant, echoing above the lapping sound of the river filling the chamber below them. The wizard removed her fingers from her ears and with a pretty smile peered down into the water now steadily rising up the walls.\n\n\"I told you I could call the river,\" Gunderal pronounced with immense satisfaction.\n\n\"Yes, but I told you this chamber would be a good place to trap the beasts,\" Zuzzara said.\n\n\"But you could not have done it, sister mine, without my help,\" said Gunderal, her smile quavering into a lovely but distinct lower lip pout that always signaled an argument. \"I'm the only one who can raise rivers.\"\n\n\"Of course your magic was important, but so was using it in the right place,\" replied Zuzzara, ready to stand still and debate with her younger sister about strategy.\n\n\"Ladies, ladies,\" said Mumchance, peering into what was left of the chamber below and watching the water rise faster up the wall. \"We might want to discuss this later.\" The dwarf called for his dog, and Wiggles's bark echoed out of the tunnel opening off the landing. \"Sounds like Wiggles has found a way out.\"\n\n\"You sisters can argue about who is the cleverest later,\" said Ivy, through the throbbing of her torn toes and the aching of the new bruises on her knees and shins where she had fallen heavily against the landing. \"But we'd better leave before the water is over our heads.\"\n\nThey raced along the tunnel in the direction that Archlis had gone. They hit another branch of the tunnel where another stair led down into the tunnels below. Wiggles stood at the top of those stairs, giving out a worried whine. Grabbing the lantern from Mumchance, Ivy peered down those stairs. At the very edge of the light, she saw the glimmer of water. The floor of the tunnel below was already damp, which meant the river was beginning to fill the ruins. \"I am truly sick of being wet,\" she said.\n\n\"That's tunnels for you,\" the dwarf said. \"Great conduits for water!\" Ivy didn't thank him for the information.\n\nA pair of snakes, thankfully quite small, whipped up the stairs and raced away in front of them.\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" said Mumchance, \"I had not thought of that.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Anything else living in these tunnels is going to need to flee too. Or be drowned.\"\n\nIvy glanced around. Nothing else appeared to shadow them. \"Maybe the destrachans ate everything else living in this part of the ruins?\"\n\n\"Hope so,\" said the dwarf, but he whistled to Wiggles, commanding the small dog to heel close to him.\n\nZuzzara let out a cry. Her sharp eyes had spotted a hoof-shaped footprint in the mud of the floor, overlaid by the mark of a Procampur officer's boot.\n\n\"Sanval is ahead of us. Looks like he is following the magelord and Kid.\"\n\nIvy spotted a light shining ahead of them, and sped up to the faintly illuminated doorway that opened off the ledge. She found another staircase leading down, but this one seemed dry at the bottom. At least no reflective gleam of water showed in the lantern light. On the top step, the stub of a tallow candle flickered. Ivy remembered looting the dead bugbear and pressing some of the candles into Sanval's reluctant hands. She had told him then that he would need the light. Had he used the candle to leave them a marker? Or was it one of Archlis's tricks?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "The stone stairs spiraled away into the darkness. As Ivy stepped forward, her damp boots squelched even louder than before. She looked down. Water was starting to drip down the sides of the walls and cover the floor of the tunnel where they were standing. Some water began dripping down the stairs. It was just a thin film of water, but she knew that the river was pushing behind it, seeking them out just as the destrachans had hunted them through the black tunnels.\n\n\"How can the river be above us now and not below?\" worried Ivy.\n\n\"It is filling up the old canals first,\" answered Gunderal. \"And following the old wells and sewers. But it will spill over into the other tunnels soon enough.\"\n\n\"Don't suppose you could slow it down a little now?\"\n\nGunderal sighed. \"I wish I could, Ivy, but I have only one spell left for today. And that will make more water, not less.\"\n\n\"Save it then. We may need it later.\"\n\n\"Ivy,\" said Mumchance, \"we don't want to go down.\"\n\n\"Water flows downhill,\" added Gunderal\u2014an unnecessary remark in Ivy's opinion.\n\n\"This stair looks dry,\" Ivy said.\n\n\"There may be some solid rock between the river and that tunnel, but it won't hold back the river forever.\"\n\nIvy stared down into the blackness of the stairwell. \"We have no choice. Archlis must have gone this way. We're not leaving Kid behind. We are not leaving Sanval behind either, and I know he's down there too,\" she said. \"I'm not letting Archlis walk out of these ruins with whatever treasure is down there. I'll swim with destrachans if I have to, but we're going down.\"\n\nIvy started to draw her sword and then realized her scabbard was empty. With a shrug, she started down the staircase. For a moment, there was only silence behind her. Then she heard the tap of Gunderal's heels as she entered the spiral behind her, followed by Zuzzara's heavy footsteps and the clump of Mumchance's boots.\n\n\"Told you that she was sweet on him,\" hissed Zuzzara in what she imagined was a whisper.\n\n\"Hush,\" said Gunderal to her sister.\n\nIvy's shoulders dropped an inch as she relaxed her rigid back\u2014of course, she had never doubted that they would follow her; they always followed her. But every now and then, she did wonder if she'd just been too foolish to follow. As for Zuzzara and Gunderal's whispering, which she could hear perfectly well, she decided to ignore the blush that was creeping past her cheeks and turning her ears red. She was going after Kid, because the little thief had followed her into this mess. She would rather be cursed by every god in the Realms before she let that cloven-hoofed piece of mischief be fried by some crazy magelord. Or more likely, considering where they were, drowned in a hole.\n\nAnd if her friends tromping behind her thought she was going after a certain captain from the silver-roof district of Procampur, well she certainly wasn't making any comments. Let them snicker all they want. She knew her duty just as well as Sanval did. And if the gods wanted to snatch away any of her friends, they were going to have to put up with her hanging on with both hands, pulling in the opposite direction, and screaming the whole time. So, even if she had to drag him out by the scruff of his neck, she was set upon getting a certain man safe and sound back to the tents of Procampur. She had quite enough pain going for her, from knees to shins to toes, without adding the troublesome kind of ache that was not physical at all.\n\nNow she was twisting down into a place that would soon become a well to catch a magelord who liked to play with fire. If she were lucky, she would get Kid, Sanval, and the rest of them out of this mess before the tunnels collapsed, bringing the ruins of Tsurlagol on top of them. I am so sick of being underground, thought Ivy, but I know what I need to do.\n\n\"We are going to rescue Kid and anyone else who needs rescuing,\" she told the others over her shoulder.\n\n\"Mind telling us how?\" asked Mumchance.\n\n\"We'll do like we always do. We'll make one plan as we go along,\" Ivy replied. \"And have a spare plan hidden in our back pockets, just in case something goes wrong.\"\n\nAhead of them, Kid pondered the best way to murder a magelord. He knew that humans regarded him as a child and was often amused by their assumption that anything small must be young and harmless. Actually he was quite capable of defending himself and, prior to meeting Ivy, usually found the most lethal response as the easiest and quickest way to get what he wanted. It was the same with thieving. If you desired something, take it, because no one would ever just hand it to you\u2014that he had learned long ago from the red wizards and the magelords.\n\nBut then he had met the Siegebreakers, who gave all the time\u2014food to strays, protection to anyone who asked. They might moan and groan about how they would be bankrupt within days, or bluster about how they were heartless mercenaries only out for profit, but it never stopped them from defending a bunch of hardscrabble pig farmers against a wizard bent on stealing their land and hogs. And collecting no more payment than a few smoked hams.\n\n\"They are all children, dear sir,\" Kid had once told Mumchance, who was the only person on the farm even close to his own age and experience. \"So open with their hearts, so naive.\"\n\n\"Of course, they have only lived a couple of decades, not centuries as you and I,\" said the dwarf. \"Their earliest dreams are still fresh in their heads. That is the most terrifying feature of all those with human blood in their veins. They are capable of so much, simply because they believe that they can accomplish their dreams. Both good and bad. Of course, that is also their most attractive quality\u2014one that can seduce even a centuries-wise dwarf and a cunning thief into believing the same dreams.\" Kid bowed before the old dwarf that day, realizing that Mumchance was right.\n\nIn his earliest decades spent in the dungeons of Thay, Kid had never known that the dreams of humans could be anything other than nightmares. Later, as the slave of Toram, Kid had survived by cringing before the grave-robbing magelord and pretending to be the child that he appeared. But the first flash of joy that he had ever known was the day that he sank his teeth into Archlis's hand and escaped from slavery. Now, Archlis thought he could take Toram's place as his master; but not for long, resolved Kid. He would never be a slave again. He had a home to go to, a barn roof to fix, and an odd assortment of a female fighter, a family of half-humans, and one ancient dwarf to protect. Without his cunning, who knew what trouble the Siegebreakers would encounter?\n\nKid fingered the knives hidden under the collar of his tunic and surreptitiously checked the multitude of charms hanging from Archlis's tabard\u2014he recognized one or two that had formerly belonged to Toram. Such charms protected the magelord from most edged weapons. Still, if he could cut off the charm and then strike with the dagger, he stood a good chance. The bugbears he dismissed with contempt. He knew that he was faster and cleverer than they were.\n\nKid's ears swiveled back and forth as he considered the quickest way to kill Archlis. But what of Ivy and the others? Behind him, Kid could hear the river rising. Perhaps he should wait to kill the magelord\u2014wait until he knew the way out and could lead the others. After all, they would need rescuing, and it was his duty (an odd word for him, and one that he had never used out loud) to save them.\n\nPerhaps he should wait until the magelord had retrieved his prize. The Siegebreakers needed money, and Archlis would not be in this place unless he sought a very great treasure. Kid remembered the magelord's greed was considerable, but so was the mage's cunning. Archlis would not risk losing Fottergrim's patronage for a mere trifle.\n\nSo, wait until the magelord had what he sought in hand and then kill him, Kid decided, glancing up at the long-nosed wizard striding beside him. As Ivy would say, it was a plan. Then Kid's sharp hearing caught another sound coming from behind them\u2014the sound that a pair of well-made bootheels make when their owner thinks he is being stealthy. Kid's eyes slid sideways as he checked the bugbears. They were busy with one of their growling arguments about poetry\u2014love poetry in particular.\n\n\"One could say that a past love drives all chance of other loves out of the heart,\" said Norimgic in a bitter tone.\n\n\"Yet, one could still express desire for the nearest female, even long for her,\" answered Osteroric.\n\n\"True. And how much more moving that would be,\" mused Norimgic. \"I want, I need, but I cannot love.\"\n\n\"Two emotions but never the third.\"\n\n\"Yes, but how to express this, my brother?\"\n\n\"It needs a good strong rhythm, such a love poem.\"\n\nClearly the bugbears were paying no attention at all to anything but their own concerns. Archlis also was concentrated on the way before them, checking the corridor's turns against a page in the spellbook that he had stolen from the unlamented Toram.\n\nKid's right ear twitched back. Yes, that was definitely a pair of proper Procampur boots following them. Which meant a proper Procampur gentleman who believed that such things as duty and loyalty were as real as the crystals studding the walls. Once Kid would have called such a man foolish, but that was before he had met the Siegebreakers. Now he was just pleased that another mad dreamer was following them. Sanval would take care of the bugbears nicely, while Kid found a way around the charms that Archlis wore and slit his throat. Or maybe the charms only worked on metal, Kid suddenly thought, and a good solid rock right to the base of the skull would work.\n\nA pair of golden doors blocked their way.\n\n\"Open this!\" commanded the magelord.\n\n\"Certainly, certainly,\" said Kid, scurrying to where the magelord pointed. He kept his head down so Archlis could not see the malice in his eyes. The door locks were easy to pick and easy to leave open, all the better for any followers who might be coming after them.\n\nAnd once they found the magelord's treasure, Archlis would be distracted and so much easier to kill. It seemed like an excellent plan to Kid.\n\nOnce down the stairs, a quick glance showed Sanval that the crystals lining the corridor generated a magical light, a twilight glow that seemed almost bright after nearly a day of tramping through dark tunnels. It made it easy to see the long scratch on the wall, left by the rake of a bugbear's claws. Osteroric was holding to his bargain, and marking the way for Sanval to follow. Of course, Osteroric thought Sanval was just following them to find a way out. The bugbear wasn't going to be too pleased when Sanval ambushed them, and that worried Sanval a bit. Was it honorable to turn on an ally, even if the ally was essentially helping you for a bright piece of armor and was also a creature not particularly known for its social graces? Sanval tapped his helmet to make sure it was straight and decided to deal with events as they happened.\n\nMoving back up the stairs rapidly and as silently as he could, Sanval left his last candle burning on the top step. He remembered what Ivy had said about the keen eyesight of the dwarf and the others. Surely they would spot that light and understand that he meant them to follow him. Certainly the Siegebreakers would have destroyed the destrachans. If they had not \u2026 Sanval refused to consider that possibility. The beasts were just animals, and Sanval knew that Ivy, Mumchance, Gunderal, and Zuzzara were far cleverer than any animal.\n\nBesides, as much as Gunderal did not fit Sanval's concept of a wizard (he tended to think of all wizards as strange, old, white-bearded men, never mind that the Pearl was the most powerful wizard in Procampur), he had seen her perform magic. Like most of those educated in Procampur\u2014where wizardry was strictly regulated by the Pearl and largely discouraged altogether\u2014Sanval believed that magic could give anyone an overwhelming, and rather unfair advantage in a fight. Which, of course, was why he needed to stop Archlis before the magelord returned to the walls of Tsurlagol and hurled his devastating fireballs against Procampur's troops. And there was that poor little chap, Ivy's friend Kid, who was probably terrified by the magelord. He could not leave a child in the grasp of someone so evil.\n\nSo, all he had to do was ambush Archlis and overpower the magelord. Once the fellow was captured or dead (captured would be preferable and more legal, but one did what one could in times such as these), Sanval knew that they would be able to find a way out. The magelord was obviously carrying maps. And with Kid's truly extraordinary tracking ability, they could also find Ivy and the others (assuming they had not seen his signal at the top of the stairs and followed them).\n\nIt was a plan, Sanval decided, and then he heard an odd scuttling noise. Something was hunting for him. The shadows filled with sounds of scratching, as though an army of insects skittered within the walls. Sanval stopped, stood motionless on the bottom stair, and moved his eyes from side to side then up and down in case a few thousand spiders were dropping toward his head. Nothing there.\n\nHe considered flattening himself against the wall and slipping noiselessly along the corridor, except Sanval was honest enough to admit to himself that sneaking in metal armor and sturdy leather boots might be beyond him. Soundless was not a choice. The crystals studding the stone walls brilliantly lit the corridor stretching before him; so he would be easily spotted if he got too close too quickly. Luckily, he could track Archlis by sound alone. The bugbears were arguing so loudly in their growling language that he could follow them easily.\n\nSanval tapped the top of his helmet to straighten it properly on his head, squared his shoulders, and stepped from the shadow of the stairwell out into the tunnel. Then he heard the sound again. It was just behind him.\n\nGlancing back at the stairs, he saw a crack running up the wall, thick enough at the bottom for a slender man to crawl through. Water oozed out of the crack along the floor. Sanval wondered if the water was making the odd noise, but then he saw long threads, a bit like feather tips, protrude through the crack, vibrating, reaching, touching the stones, shivering away. He leaned closer, trying to see what they were. The two threads reached out, withdrew, disappeared, then shot out, whipping feathery ropes of an odd brown color and a couple of feet long. They quivered as though they were sniffing. Sniffing? Sniffing feathers? The Procampur captain's hand went to his sword hilt.\n\nQuietly, he started to slide the sword out of its scabbard, trying not to make any noise that would attract the attention of Archlis. He was torn. If he delayed too long, the magelord might slip out of his grasp. On the other hand, if this was some type of trap set by the magelord, some type of feathery magical rope, then Ivy and the others might be attacked by it if they followed him down this stair. He could not leave such a danger behind him to threaten them.\n\nSanval crouched down on his boot heels and squinted at the crack in the wall, but beyond the opening was heavy darkness, and he could make out nothing in the way of shape or size. Then, looking like something out of the horrific tales that his nurse once told to keep him in bed at night, a head poked out. It was reddish brown with bug eyes; in fact, the whole head was insect shaped. Yes, it was exactly like the giant bug that his nurse claimed ate little boys who were foolish enough to go wandering outside in their nightshirts.\n\nThe long, twitching, fuzzy things started below the bug's eyes and arched out, moving like feelers, turning and doing that sniffing thing. One shot out toward Sanval. Antennae! A giant bug head with antennae! Sanval fell backward off his heels and sat down hard on the floor, so fast that he gasped with surprise and his armor rattled.\n\nThe antennae swiped in front of him, almost touching him but missing him by inches. They stopped, quivered, and the bug's eyes blinked.\n\nWhile Sanval sat open-mouthed and watched, the creature wiggled slowly through the opening in the wall, scratching along the stones. Sanval kept thinking that must be all, but the thing kept oozing out, a humped body covered with rust-colored lumps that looked a bit like a giant turtle's shell, and peculiarly hinged legs. It was almost as large as a small bear. Trailing behind it was a long tail covered in armadillo-type plates and ending in a prong.\n\nDon't get much uglier than that, Sanval thought and again started to unsheathe his sword.\n\nOne of the antennae whipped forward, catching him by surprise, and slithered rapidly across his metal shoulder guard. Annoyed, thinking the creature had probably trailed some goop that would mar his armor, Sanval scooted back on the floor and then turned his head to look at his shoulder.\n\nHe leaped to his feet and darted to the far corner. The guard wasn't scratched and wasn't covered in goop, but it was rusting as he watched, little flecks of rust dropping onto the floor. The creature's antennae scraped along the stones and caught the loose bits of rust, drew them back to its mouth, and it chewed.\n\n\"Hey, there, that's my armor!\" Sanval howled.\n\nThe creature rolled its bug eyes upward and stared at him.\n\n\"How fast can you run?\" Sanval asked it politely. Its yellow eyes blinked. \"That fast, my friend?\" Sanval glanced down at his sword and knew that pulling it out of its leather scabbard would be the same as handing it to the monster for lunch. He left his sword where it was.\n\nThe yellow eyes rolled upward to stare at the top of Sanval's head, and Sanval could imagine the thing thinking, \"Aaah, a beautifully burnished helmet, how delicious!\" Oddly, in his imagination, the creature spoke in the exact fussy tones of a former tutor who used to warn him about the dangers of the Vast and the folly of leaving an ordered life lived under the silver tiles of his district.\n\nHe tried to think of a plan, because surely a noble of Procampur, even one who had not traveled nearly as much as he wished, should be able to outwit a bug-brained monster. While Sanval considered his options, the monster's antennae made another attack. It snapped toward his helmet, which Sanval had expected. He pivoted and dived away. The antennae hit his elbow, slithered across the metal elbow guard, then whipped back. Sanval reached across with his opposite gloved hand and touched his elbow just in time to feel the guard crumble, crack, and fall to the floor in a pile of rusting metal. The monster lurched forward at surprising speed.\n\nSanval dashed past it to the opposite wall. The monster ignored him, arching its curved back and going at the rusting pieces on the floor. It bent its legs so that the joints stuck out, and hunched itself over the rusting metal and lowered its ugly little mouth. The scrunch scrunch of Sanval's elbow guard being devoured like a hard-crusted loaf was more than annoying.\n\nWhat he needed was a wooden pole, he thought, and scanned the tunnel. But there was nothing, not a crossbeam, not a door that could be dismantled, nothing. And the monster effectively blocked the staircase. If he dashed down the corridor, would the thing follow? Would Archlis hear him coming? What if he ran into one of the magelord's firespells? Sanval glanced down at his scorched boot\u2014his manservant would be in tears when he saw what had happened earlier. Sanval's gleaming boots were the envy of the camp, and his manservant Godolfin made a fair amount taking bribes for his polish recipe (of course, Sanval paid him even more to keep the true recipe off the feet of his rivals). So, rust or fire? Which would be worse? Both would be hard on the outfit that he had left.\n\n\"I was trained to meet worthy adversaries,\" he complained, \"fighters with swords. Even a bugbear has a sword. Or at least a glaive.\" He glanced down at the front of his chest. \"Just as well I gave Osteroric my breastplate. I suppose if you had it to rust off me, you'd keep right on chewing through my body.\"\n\nThe monster tilted its head and looked up at Sanval.\n\n\"Please forget that I suggested such a thing,\" he muttered. He looked again at the crystals studding the wall. Some were as big as a man's head. He reached up and grasped the one that protruded out the most. By swinging his entire weight off the crystal, he was able to force it out of the wall. He hefted it in one hand, then jumped back as an antennae whipped toward him. The gem was heavy for its size. Sanval clutched it, bent his arm back, and aimed the stone at the monster. It bounced off the lumpy back but certainly did no damage. The monster eyed him, then took a step closer.\n\n\"Very well, you disliked that but took no harm from it. Another approach is needed here,\" Sanval said. Was there a weapon he could put together from his gear that did not contain metal? He glanced at his arms, with metal shields still in place on one shoulder and elbow. His gauntlets featured metal cuffs and guards. His body armor lacked the breastplate, but there was still a fair collection of chain mail and smaller plates, with a few bits of banded armor protecting his thighs and knees. All good for nothing except a meal for the monster.\n\nAnd last, there were his beautiful leather boots. He had never liked armored footwear, finding it impossibly clumsy; also when he had tried it, he had been rewarded with blisters. Now, as he considered ways to destroy the creature, he was doubly glad that he had chosen leather boots. Walking out of these ruins in his stockings would be less than dignified.\n\nThe monster shot out its antennae again, and Sanval dodged again, but how long could he keep this up? Furious at the unfairness of a beast that would not fight with proper weapons, the Procampur ripped off one gauntlet and tossed it into a far corner. The creature swung around, caught it with an antennae, rusted it on impact, and\u2014like any other wild animal\u2014hunched over the nice new addition to its meal.\n\nWith the monster busy with its lunch, Sanval pulled off a shiny leather boot. He pried a couple of fist-sized crystals out of the wall, dropped them in, and grabbed another.\n\nThe beast made a disgusting gulping noise and swung toward him. Sanval unbuckled his other elbow guard and tossed it in a high arch. The creature raised its head to watch, tracking the guard's path until it clattered into the far corner. Slither, snap, into rust, crunch, crunch.\n\n\"No sense of a fair fight, and no table manners, either,\" Sanval complained as he grabbed up handfuls of smaller stones and dirt dislodged by his digging of the crystals. He jammed everything into his boot. With foreboding, he pulled off his remaining gauntlet and tucked it into his belt. He had to trust that the creature went for metal before attacking flesh. But what if that were wrong?\n\nBy the time the creature had eaten his elbow guard, Sanval was ready. He had undone the remaining shoulder guard and held it in his hand. As the bug-head swung toward him, Sanval did another arched toss, and the bug-head did another follow-it-with-the-eyes turn. The guard crashed into the corner and was rust almost before it landed\u2014a large pile of rust: a feast for the beast. The rust monster curved its humped back, crouched as close to the floor as possible, and let its wicked tail sag as it chomped away.\n\nThe back was leathery, the tail was hard-as-shell plates, which only left the head and legs. Clutching his boot closed by its cuff, Sanval leaped forward and landed on his stocking-clad foot. The silk of his stocking made his landing a little slippery, but he managed to stay upright. Sanval swung the stone-filled boot down on top of the creature's head while kicking his booted foot at a jutting joint of its back leg. The joint cracked. The monster's head swiveled so that the bug's eyes stared up at him. Sanval saw an antennae quiver, ducked, and was hit by the other one. It slapped across his banded shin guard. Rust flew. He didn't bother to watch it crumble; he could feel the weight dropping away. He stomped down on the beast's front leg with all his weight and held fast while bending over the monster to beat on its head with the stone-filled boot.\n\nAlthough pinned to the floor by his weight, the creature flipped its head to glare up at Sanval. Even as he brought the boot down toward its face, an antennae slithered up, way up, straight to the brim of his beautiful helmet. That helmet had been carefully designed for him. It carried family crests as well as military insignias in its elaborate, etched ornamentation, and he loved it almost as much as he loved his sword. He did not feel the tap, but he felt the disintegration. With the helmet pressed around his ears, he could hear the rust eat through\u2014a sound much like the monster's chomping, crunch, crunch\u2014and the rattle of falling pieces.\n\nSanval thought of himself as a rational man, possessed of self-control as well as courtesy, but even as he tried to remember this he heard himself screaming, \"Do you know how much my armor cost? And how long I had to wait to get a perfect fit? And how much time it takes poor Godolfin to polish each piece? And how much I have to pay him to do that?\"\n\nWith each scream he beat at the monster's head, hitting its eyes until they rolled shut, smacking at the antennae until they shriveled and curled away from him, and finally catching a soft spot between the skull and the first protective plate at the top of its spine. He heard something crack, and the beast gave a horrible gurgle. Sanval continued whacking away until the rust monster slid flat to the floor, its legs stretched out, its tail twitching but unable to lift the fanned tip of spikes. The antennae collapsed, their tips touching the wall in front of the monster's head, then sliding slowly down the stones until they, too, were stretched lifeless across the floor.\n\n\"Very dramatic. You died with style,\" Sanval said to the carcass, trying to regain his self-control. He stepped away from the beast and looked down at it. It was not the sort of battle to go home and brag about\u2014not like besting a dragon or a famous orc warrior. The creature might have been destructive to his gear, yes, but dead it simply looked pathetic.\n\nShaking his head at the pile of rusted armor under the monster, Sanval assessed his remaining equipment. He emptied the crystals and stones from his boot, pounded it to knock loose any small bits, then pulled the tail of his silk undershirt out at his waist, and used it to try to rub his boot clean. Would his boots ever be bright again? Could he even ask Godolfin to polish them? And wasn't that the way it always went\u2014he had used the boot that was not scorched across the toe. Now it, too, was thoroughly scuffed from beating it against the monster.\n\nAt least he had been wearing a linen shirt, padded vest, and leather pants under his armor. He shuddered to think what Ivy would have said if he had been left just standing in his silk underwear. She probably would have made up some song that would never, ever die in the red-roof quarter.\n\nSanval pulled on his leather boot, then brushed stone dust from what little was left of his armor. He finger-combed his dark curls, brushing back damp tendrils from his forehead. He looked in dismay at his hands, now covered with stone dust and rust. Deciding that was the best he could do, he started to march on down the tunnel.\n\nAnd stopped and hopped and cursed as he pulled off his boot again. He muttered words that he would never say if anyone else were present. He had missed a very sharp bit of stone when he had shaken out his boot.\n\nWith his boot and his dignity restored, Sanval paused and listened. He could not hear the bugbears arguing. Had they gotten too far ahead? As quickly and as quietly as he could, Sanval hurried down the corridor. At least he knew that his sword would work just fine against bugbears. As for Archlis, if he put up any resistance, well, Sanval would just brain him with his own Ankh. In his present murderous mood, a full-frontal attack seemed like the most sensible plan that he had ever had."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Ivy emerged from the staircase and blinked as she went from the darkness of the shadowy stair into the glowing corridor.\n\nBehind her, Mumchance let out that soft half-sigh, half-whistle that can only mean one thing coming from a dwarf\u2014that there was a fortune in raw gems surrounding them. He set down his sputtering lantern to better examine the strange corridor where they found themselves. Obviously others had come before them, as various crystals had been pried loose from the walls and littered the floor.\n\n\"Oooh, that is so ugly!\" Gunderal squealed. The dainty wizard had just tripped over a large dead creature, sprawled over a rusty pile of armor.\n\n\"We better hurry, Ivy,\" said Mumchance. \"The ground is getting unstable here.\"\n\n\"How do you know that?\"\n\nThe dwarf pointed at the dead monster. A number of large crystals and smaller stones were scattered around the body. \"Those must have fallen out of the wall and brained the creature while it was eating,\" said the dwarf.\n\n\"Lucky for us. One less thing for us to fight,\" said Zuzzara. \"Hey, doesn't that look like Procampur armor?\"\n\n\"It's too rusty,\" said Gunderal. \"Can you imagine anyone from Procampur letting their armor get into such a state!\"\n\n\"Let's move,\" commanded Ivy. \"That creature may have had friends, and we don't need any more trouble. Let's find Kid and get out of here.\"\n\n\"And what about Sanval?\" Gunderal hopped neatly over the pile of rusted armor and gave Ivy a teasing look.\n\n\"Oh, him too.\"\n\n\"So there is still treasure in the ruins of Tsurlagol,\" said Mumchance, still checking the crystals studding the wall as he walked besides Ivy.\n\n\"Apparently. Funny that nobody ever looted this part.\"\n\n\"I think we are in the oldest bit,\" said Mumchance. \"The most buried bit.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Ivy asked, picking her way carefully along the corridor. Besides the gems studding the walls and ceiling, more were poking up through the floor. It made the way rough, and tripping was a distinct possibility. Worse yet, there weren't enough clear flat bits to show any good tracks. Kid might have been able to see something, but Ivy didn't have his clever eyes and cleverer nose.\n\n\"Look at these tunnels, straight, narrow, and slanting down. This bit isn't some part of the city that sunk below ground. Someone chiseled this bit out of solid stone.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Well, if they had bothered to take the rocks out of the walls, I would have said it was a mine shaft. But, as it is, and seeing what is in front of us, I think this is a tomb shaft,\" Mumchance said, halting before a pair of golden doors, emblazoned with the type of funeral scenes that they had seen earlier in the old city bath and in the ossuary. Only these scenes were much more finely wrought and studded with colored gems. Above the funeral procession, the walls of a long-lost Tsurlagol tumbled down before a solitary figure with upraised arms. Again, the pictures showed a fantastic gem clutched in the man's hand, radiating out lines indicating some type of magical force. And above that were the runes for earth, sky, water, and emptiness that had decorated the floor of that odd trapped room. \"I'd bet that this was the first time they made those pictures,\" said Mumchance, looking up at the doors, \"and all the others in the ruins were just copies\u2014what people remembered about these pictures.\"\n\n\"How about warnings?\" suggested Ivy, still staring at the huge doors. She had never seen that much gold in one place. One door could probably buy an entire mansion in Procampur.\n\n\"Could be,\" said Mumchance, who also looked a little stunned by the sheer amount of gold that somebody had thought made an excellent door.\n\n\"Don't suppose they are just gold foil over wood,\" said Zuzzara, also blinking at the wealth on display. Gunderal was just tilting her head from one side to the other, seeing how her reflection looked in the polished gold panels.\n\n\"It's solid,\" said the dwarf, rapping the door with a heavy fist. \"And too heavy for us to carry out.\"\n\nAt Mumchance's knock, the doors before them creaked half open, the lock neatly sprung. Wiggles jumped forward, squirming through the open doors ahead of the rest of them. \"Charmed and mechanical,\" said Mumchance, stopping to peer at the lock in front of his nose. \"But somebody went through it quick and clean. Must be Kid's work.\"\n\n\"That's why Archlis took him,\" Ivy said. \"He needed Kid's talents to get through this door and any other locks he might encounter.\"\n\n\"Because he has no talents of his own.\" Gunderal sniffed. \"Told you that it was all stolen magic and Kid's just another token to him.\"\n\n\"Still,\" said Ivy. \"If Archlis needs Kid's talents, he should keep Kid alive until we can retrieve him.\" She looked back the way that they had come. Even with her human nose, she could smell river water.\n\n\"Ivy,\" said Gunderal, confirming her fears. \"The river is coming closer. It will be in these tunnels soon.\"\n\n\"Then we go forward,\" Ivy said.\n\n\"And close the doors behind us,\" added Mumchance, clicking his fingers at Wiggles to bring the dog to heel. \"Solid metal, dwarf-made, these should seal tight. That should keep the water out of this section for a while.\"\n\n\"But we can't go back.\" Even as Ivy voiced this objection, she realized that the doors were the least of their problems. With the river filling up the tunnels behind them, returning the way that they had taken into the treasure trove would soon be impossible.\n\nMore gems gleamed on the other side of the door. With Ivy's help, Zuzzara was able to drag the heavy golden doors closed again. With a firm click, the doors locked into place.\n\n\"So now we hope that Archlis has another way out,\" said Gunderal.\n\n\"I'm sure that he always did,\" said Ivy. \"He just wanted to get here, and he couldn't with those destrachans in the way. When we drew them off, he came straight here and straight through. He is moving fast, hunting for one particular treasure, or he'd be chipping out part of these walls, wouldn't he?\"\n\n\"They are good crystals,\" admitted Mumchance, trailing his fingers along the wall. \"Useful for spells\u2014the sort of thing most wizards would want. If it had been me, I'd have slowed down and taken a few with me. Maybe tried to shave a bit of gold off those doors.\"\n\n\"So he's blind to all of this, and set on getting some other treasure out of these ruins,\" Ivy said.\n\n\"Must be. And there's something odd about these walls. Has been since we came down those stairs.\"\n\n\"What?\" Ivy asked.\n\n\"These crystals shouldn't be here at all. Wrong type of rock for such gems. These come from lower down probably. And they weren't set here by somebody. Not like dwarves studded the walls, if you see what I mean. More like the gems just pushed themselves out of the dirt here.\"\n\n\"There's more earth magic here,\" agreed Gunderal. \"Very strong and very close now.\"\n\n\"I just wish I had not lost my sword back there,\" Ivy said, pulling the long knife from her belt. It would work for close fighting, but she most certainly regretted feeding her sword to the destrachan. The corridors still blazed with an internal light, and for the first time since she had fallen into the river, Ivy could see clearly ahead of her\u2014no shadows, no darkness, nothing hiding in front of her. It made her exceedingly nervous. Remembering the phantom fungus, she had the queer feeling that whatever you couldn't see might turn out to be worse than what you could.\n\nZuzzara and Gunderal seemed equally anxious, starting at their own footfalls as they passed through the crystal-studded tunnel. Obviously, they too thought this was just too easy.\n\nOnly Mumchance seemed carefree. He was too intrigued by the gems surrounding them on all sides to notice much else. Turning slowly, his real eye gleamed with appreciation of the stones arrayed in front of him, and even the fake eye appeared to sparkle in the light of the corridor. \"I'm sure that these crystals were pushed straight out of the earth, called out of it as it were. This was done by magic. Then somebody came along later and made those doors and sealed the place off. And who seals off a terrific source of wealth like this?\"\n\n\"Somebody who is afraid of the magic down here,\" said Gunderal with a shudder. \"Whatever is here is what buried Tsurlagol before.\"\n\n\"What was it?\" Ivy asked. Whatever it was, this had to be what Archlis was hunting\u2014an artifact so powerful that he had led Fottergrim to Tsurlagol and plunged an entire city into war just so he could roam around these ruins.\n\n\"Something was hidden here a long time ago,\" Gunderal said. She pushed her dark hair back from her face and closed her eyes, a small worry line marking a perfect crescent between her eyebrows. She waved both hands with palms upturned, like a seer trying to draw scented incense toward her face. Gunderal swayed twice, and Zuzzara stepped forward to steady her sister. Ivy gestured her back. Gunderal sighed and then opened her eyes. \"An object of great power. A gem that calls to other gems and rules the earth beneath it.\"\n\n\"Is it evil?\"\n\nGunderal shrugged. \"No more than any other jewel. It is how it is used that has caused both trouble and sorrow. And fear. It was fear that caused them to build the golden doors and lock this treasure away.\"\n\n\"She is more sensible than she looks sometimes,\" said Mumchance. \"Treasure is never evil. But the spending of it\u2014that can cause great wickedness.\"\n\n\"Well, then,\" said Ivy, \"it would probably be best to keep this treasure away from Archlis. Because I feel that he would be a very careless spender of wealth.\"\n\nThe tunnel branched in two directions ahead of them. Both ways curved off into shadows; neither showed a clear path. There were no boot prints on the gem-studded floor, and no visible archways or flickering lights beyond the branching. Better still, Ivy noted with some relief, no trail of blood or beastly fluids.\n\n\"Right or left?\" queried Zuzzara.\n\n\"Don't see which way.\" Ivy missed Kid more than ever. \"What do you hear, Zuzzara?\"\n\nThe half-orc cupped her hands around her ears. \"Metal striking metal. Somebody in a fight, but no yelling or screaming. Not like a normal fight.\"\n\nIvy grinned with relief. \"Sounds perfectly normal for a man from Procampur who thinks it is uncivilized to insult his opponents. Which direction?\"\n\n\"Left,\" Zuzzara said.\n\nIvy pivoted on her heel and started down the tunnel that Zuzzara indicated. Her fingers tightened around the handle of her dagger. \"Come on, Sanval is down there,\" she said.\n\nWhipping around a corner, Ivy barreled into the melee. Sanval and the magelord's two bugbears were whirling in the middle of the corridor, stuck in an odd three-way fight with each other. The bugbears were snarling softly, but Sanval, as expected, was fighting with his usual silent expertise.\n\nIvy was surprised to spot a new foe\u2014two skeletal arms appeared to be floating through the air and spinning around the other fighters, wielding a rusty sword. There was nothing but empty space between the arms where a body and shoulders should have been. Still, when any of them moved, the upper arms drew slightly toward each other, the elbows shot out, and the hands tightened on the sword hilt, exactly as though the arms were attached to an invisible body. Each arm was polished white bone, from shoulder to elbow to wrist to the ivory hands that clutched the rusty sword. This was a creature created by magic, and one that the Siegebreakers knew, and there was something rather comforting and welcome about facing a danger that you understood, rather than one like the destrachans.\n\n\"Oh dear,\" said Gunderal behind Ivy. \"More undead.\"\n\n\"A dread!\" said Mumchance. \"Lousy, lousy dread. I hate dead things that don't stay dead!\" Wiggles's ears pricked up, and she gave a happy bark as she spotted the flying bones.\n\n\"A skeleton without a head, a head without a skeleton, and now arms without a body. Another undead guardian,\" Ivy agreed. \"Somebody liked to play with bones in old Tsurlagol.\"\n\nThe dread seemed to be guarding a doorway. Each time Sanval or one of the bugbears got too close, the arms would swing the sword. If they backed away, the arms stayed floating in front of the entrance.\n\n\"So where are Archlis and Kid?\" asked Ivy. \"Why didn't that bony thing attack them?\"\n\nGunderal gave a little sniff. She twitched her nose a couple of times to be sure. \"No sword on Archlis.\"\n\n\"Lacking a sword is an advantage? So I can march right past it?\" Ivy asked. When Gunderal did not reply, and continued to stand with her head tilted back, nostrils flared, Ivy added, \"How do you know Archlis doesn't have a sword?\"\n\n\"Keen sense of smell,\" Gunderal said.\n\n\"You can smell that?\" said Zuzzara. \"You are kidding, little sister.\"\n\n\"Of course not. I'm that good. I keep telling you that I can smell magic.\"\n\nZuzzara gave Gunderal a \"big sister\" look. \"You can smell a missing sword on someone who isn't here?\" the half-orc asked.\n\nGunderal giggled and then admitted, \"I can smell an old command spell in this space, and I can see that Archlis and Kid shed their blades.\" She pointed across the floor. Just outside the doorway lay the magelord's slender sword and Kid's three stilettos. \"Kid probably told him how to get around the dread\u2014most likely it has a command on it to attack anyone bearing edged weapons. Kid's good at guessing such things. Remember the dreads that we found under the wizard's tower\u2014the ones that were commanded to attack only dwarves? Besides, watch the arms. Anytime Sanval or the bugbears get near it, it attacks their weapons. It's there as a barrier, but one that would be easy to pass for anyone who knew what its commands were.\"\n\n\"I hate those things,\" muttered Mumchance, who still had a few scars from his previous encounter with the dwarf-activated dread.\n\n\"They're mindless, at least,\" said Gunderal. \"They'll only fight what they are told to fight. Sort of like you, big sister.\"\n\n\"Ha-ha. So what about those three? Do we rescue Sanval first? Or get rid of the dread?\" asked Zuzzara.\n\n\"We really can't afford to lose any more weapons,\" Ivy said. \"Fairly soon, we'll be down to chucking stones. I would rather dismantle the bones than shed any blades that we have left.\" She gave the fight ahead of them a cool look. \"Sanval's doing all right. Let's get rid of the dread first. It's upsetting those bugbears\u2014look at them snarl and whine. And a frightened, upset bugbear is a big, hairy problem.\"\n\nA dread always cast an aura of fear. As Ivy had learned in previous encounters, that fear could be ignored if you knew what was causing it. But if you didn't know what was causing it, that creeping feeling of terror could shake your confidence. The bugbears obviously didn't know why they were feeling so panicked, and that was making them fight all that much harder. Their huge ragged ears twitched, their tiny eyes narrowed to pinpoints, and their bear noses quivered. One of the bugbears had clenched his jaw so tightly he had thrust a pointed fang through his own lip, and a fine line of blood trailed down his chin and dripped over his matted chest. He brushed at it where it fell onto his shiny breastplate, dulling the gleam, and let out a low growl of frustration. In one clawed hand he clutched a glaive, and with the other he pulled his dagger from its scabbard. He hunched forward and swung wildly at the dread with the knife.\n\nThe dread lifted its arms and made a quick downward slice that missed the bugbear's sword but clipped against the loose chains hanging from the bugbear's shoulders. The blow did no harm other than rattle the chains and clang loudly. The bugbear let out a howl of anger; or was that fear? He jerked in a clumsy turn on his clawed feet, and the chains spun out around him, banging against the wall but missing the dread. It floated up and away, then paused beyond the bugbear's reach.\n\n\"Suggestions?\" said Ivy.\n\n\"Break the dread's hold on its sword,\" said Gunderal. \"That should weaken the spell. Might even dispel it.\"\n\nIvy looked at the arm bones floating in front of her. They were very skinny. A slow, wicked grin crept across her face. \"Hey, Wiggles, come on, come on. Let's play fetch!\" Ivy shed her knife, the only edged weapon that she had left, and skipped toward the arm bones, waving the little dog on.\n\n\"Ivy!\" shouted the dwarf as his dog went racing after her, attracted by Ivy's whistle and \"come hither\" gestures.\n\nWiggles danced on her back paws, her fluffy white tail beating back and forth in an eager wag. As neither the dog nor the woman carried any type of edged blade, the dread ignored them. Ivy lunged for the bones and grabbed the nearest forearm. She punched down on the slender bones with her mailed gloves. As with most dreads, the thing was too tough to break, but she forced it near to the ground. Wiggles immediately leaped forward and clamped her sharp little teeth around the nearest wrist bone. She growled, backing away and dragging the dread after her. With no command laid upon it regarding small dogs with sharp teeth, the dread just went bumping after Wiggles, its sword still scraping behind it.\n\nIgnoring the tough old bones, Ivy jumped directly on the rusted blade, landing hard on her boot heels. Unlike the bones, the blade was not magically immune to breakage. It cracked and crumbled under her feet. She stomped a few more times. The bony hand now held only the remnants of a rusted handle, a weapon that posed no danger to anyone. Wiggles still growled and tugged at the bones. She had hooked one paw over the hand bones in an attempt to hold them down for better chewing. With her sharp little teeth, she finally worried free a thumb bone. As soon as it snapped off, the entire dread broke into a shattered pile of bones. Ivy shuffled through the pile, scraping her soles along the floor, and quickly scattered the pieces as far apart as possible. She glared at the bones for a moment, but they remained only broken bits on the floor with no flicker of magic trying to paste them together.\n\nWith the dread no longer attacking him, the largest bugbear, Osteroric, whipped around and tried to brain Sanval with his glaive. Ivy shouted for her knife. Zuzzara grabbed it and flipped it blade over handle to her. Ivy caught it with one mailed hand. She took a running jump and flung herself at the bugbear, kicking with both feet at the creature's knee.\n\nThe impact sent a shock of pain through her injured toe, and Ivy screamed in a mix of anger and aggravation. More startled by the scream than injured by her kick, the bugbear tripped and rolled with Ivy on top of him. She dropped her knife and wrestled the glaive out of his hands. She used the long pole to swing herself upright, turning it again to swing the iron ball hard against Osteroric's chest. The ball rang against the shiny breastplate that Osteroric wore and knocked him flat. The bugbear waved his furry hands in a gesture of surrender.\n\n\"Peace and parley, peace and parley. Don't dent my new breastplate,\" he wheezed. \"Pull your friend off Norimgic before he harms him.\"\n\n\"Sanval!\" Ivy shouted. He ignored her, matching dueling sword against glaive with the snarling Norimgic. \"Hey, Sanval, stop!\"\n\nWhen Sanval ignored her commands and continued to battle Norimgic, Ivy realized the spell of the dread was still upon them, terror driving them to fight with mindless fury. She thrust the glaive between Sanval's legs, tripping him and sending him rolling off to one side. Norimgic tried to follow, but she shoved the glaive's blade against his throat. \"Back off,\" she said, pricking the bugbear's skin enough to draw blood. \"He's mine to kill, if I want to.\"\n\nNorimgic turned his head and looked at the blood pooling in the hair on his shoulder, blinked his tiny eyes, flattened his ears against his skull, and whined in the same tone that Wiggles used when she knew that she had been a bad dog. Ivy eased off on the pressure of the blade balanced against his throat.\n\n\"Fighting females,\" said Osteroric, scrambling upright and dusting off his breastplate with gentle, concerned strokes. \"You should never argue with them.\"\n\nIvy reached past the bugbear, grabbed Sanval by the back of his neck, pulled him upright, and shook him until his feet were firmly planted under him. Then she glared at him. She noticed his dark hair was amazingly mussed\u2014the black curls were dusty, streaked with rust, and sticking up in all directions. She looked him over more carefully and frowned. \"Aren't you missing something? Shiny stuff?\"\n\nSanval managed a growl.\n\nIvy felt like she could stand there all day hanging on to Sanval, but she really had other things to do. She settled on a way to keep him out of trouble until she could get them above ground. She shoved him into the arms of a bugbear.\n\n\"Hang onto him. Tight,\" Ivy instructed Osteroric. \"Now, where's Archlis? I want to get out of here.\"\n\nA little cowed by her tone, Osteroric gestured to the archway in front of them. \"He went into the crypt. He took the other one with him.\"\n\nTurning to Sanval, the bugbear held the Procampur captain at arm's length, stared at him, and said, \"You have nothing much left to trade, you know that?\"\n\nSanval's growl deepened.\n\n\"Good thing I got that breastplate when I did. Did you lose your other stuff? I would not have thought of you as careless.\"\n\nSanval pulled his lips back from his clenched teeth and hissed. The bugbear gave him a wary look and stopped talking.\n\nIvy strode through the archway formerly guarded by the dread and entered the crypt. Its walls shone with the reflected glitter of countless gems, and patterns of light danced across the arched ceiling. Ivy stopped, turned slowly, and stared at her surroundings. It was like being inside a treasure chest. But that wasn't why she was here, she remembered, and she forced her attention back to her job.\n\n\"Never hesitate when going to confront a magelord with a lethal command over fire\" was going to be her new motto. Just stroll on in like you expect to be paid, and see if you can bluff your way out of this mess, she told herself.\n\nOf course, she was a little startled to find herself wading through gems that rolled underfoot like pebbles on a beach.\n\n\"Oooh,\" moaned Mumchance when he spotted the piles of gems that rose higher than his head in some corners of the room. \"Rubies, emeralds, diamonds. Oh, look, puppy, look. It is all our favorite friends.\" Wiggles trotted proudly beside him, tail still wagging and the dread's thumb bone clenched in her jaws.\n\nNorimgic went down on his furry knees, grabbing gems and stuffing them into his pockets. He might have been a bugbear poet, but he was bright enough to recognize portable wealth when he saw it. Osteroric kept one hand clamped tightly around Sanval's wrists and used the other big hand to scoop up jewels and stuff them behind his breastplate. \"I can buy many beautiful new chains with these. Maybe even some fine black leather vests for my brother and I. Females always like that look. You should try that. It is better than that rust you wear in your hair,\" the bugbear said in friendly tones to his prisoner.\n\nThe prisoner's eyes gleamed darkly, and the sound of grinding teeth could be heard, but Sanval remained silent.\n\nKid was on his knees, kneeling on what looked like a pile of black sapphires. The carved chest before him was remarkable for its very plainness after the golden doors and the crystal corridor. It was a sarcophagus carved from gray stone, with a number of strange symbols etched into its side. From the stone box an ululation rose, a moaning cry rather like a wailing kitten trapped in a box. Kid's face was wrinkled in concentration, and he apparently did not notice the tip of the magelord's Ankh pressed into the back of his neck. Ivy, however, was very conscious of the grim and greedy expression on the face of Archlis. His eyes had narrowed to yellow slits; frown lines creased down the sides of his long nose and past his scowl to his jaws. His hand tightened around the shaft of the Ankh. If he leaned forward over Kid or stumbled at all, the Ankh would crack the little thief's neck bones.\n\nIvy hand-signaled for quiet. She did not want to startle Archlis into a sudden attack. Behind her, she could hear the clicking noise of gems being trickled into pockets. She hoped it was just the bugbears and the rest of her friends were paying attention.\n\nKneeling in front of the gray stone box, Kid pointed a finger at the etched markings on its surface. He did not turn his head to look up at the magelord and seemed completely unaware of the threat looming over him. But Kid was clever, and for now she would have to trust his instincts to save himself. He wasn't one to make some rash move, unlike a certain captain from Procampur who was ready to risk his life for a chance to kill Archlis. At least she did not have to worry about that sort of foolishness from Kid. He who saves himself first lives to save the rest of us, she thought, and decided to add it to her growing list of mottos. The list that started with \"The only good day is one where we all walk away\" and Mumchance's old favorite: \"If the wall is falling down, don't stand under it.\"\n\n\"So, my lord, so,\" said Kid to Archlis. \"We press in the pattern of the name. Three times and then three times more. A little tricky, but no great barrier.\"\n\nAs he had with the silver buckle that made the belt float, Kid's quick fingers danced in the perfect rhythm needed to trace the secret code and unlock the chest. He kept his head down, his fingers moving, and played the lock as though it were a musical instrument. Once, twice, tap tap tap. The lid popped open.\n\n\"Mine! Mine at last!\" cried Archlis. He threw his arms up toward the ceiling, the force pulling his tall body to its full height. His sleeves flapped, his stringy blond hair bobbed on his shoulders, and the Ankh lifted off of Kid's neck.\n\nThe shouts of the magelord were drowned beneath a sobbing wave of noise that reminded Ivy of funeral mourners. It crested into a terrible moaning sound, and it issued from the stone sarcophagus.\n\nBehind her, Ivy heard Gunderal cry out, her genasi nature sensitive to any spells or curses near her. Even Ivy could feel the chill prickle of the magic that issued from the granite coffin."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Archlis lowered his Ankh to his side as he knelt to peer into the stone chest. \"I have my treasure now,\" he said. He paused, his long fingers suspended, as though he feared that what he reached for would burn him. Ivy took a step forward, to see for herself what he coveted. Before she could lean over his shoulder to see, Archlis drew out a large diamond from the chest. He held it up in an outstretched hand, and the gem shot out beams of light that glittered off of every bright surface. It was as close to being a living thing as a crystal could be, pulsing with brilliance. From the diamond issued the weird moaning sound that had been evident even when the sarcophagus was closed.\n\nKid backed away from Archlis. Paying no attention at all to Ivy, who was hissing at him to move behind her, Kid stooped and picked up a very large ruby. Rather than dropping it into his pouch, as Ivy expected, Kid drew out a leather slingshot from a hidden pocket. He stared intently at the back of the magelord's head.\n\nJust as Kid dropped the ruby into the slingshot, a cry echoed through the room, a shriek that went higher and became more shrill as the cry went on. \"Thief, thief! There you are! Thief!\"\n\nIvy spun around to confront a flameskull rocketing through the door. \"Oh blast, I thought we'd broken that thing!\"\n\n\"Thief! Give me back my tooth!\" The flameskull darted at a startled Kid, who tumbled out of the way, dropping his slingshot as he dodged. The flameskull's eyes shot sparks; its mane of green flame swirled and flashed with its fury. Ivy grabbed for her sword and then realized her scabbard was still empty. She snatched at her belt. Her dagger was gone too, dropped when she was fighting with Osteroric. But she still had the glaive. She swung at the flameskull, which made a jeering noise and whizzed out of reach.\n\nMumchance gave a shout behind her, and Ivy ducked at the dwarf's warning. He had scooped up a handful of rubies and flung the jewels at the flameskull to distract it from Kid. The gems ricocheted off the flying skull, rattling away into the corners. The flameskull spat a ball of fizzing green sparks at them, but it was turning toward Kid even as the spell left its mouth. Both Ivy and the dwarf rolled out of the way of the spell, which fizzled harmlessly in a pile of loose diamonds.\n\n\"You have my tooth!\" screamed the flameskull. \"You stole my tooth!\" Kid looked around the room.\n\n\"Get rid of that tooth!\" shouted Ivy to Kid. \"Give it to me.\" She was wearing the most armor, and if all the thing could do was spit sparks, she stood the best chance of surviving its attack.\n\nKid shook his head and jumped sideways, clutching at the pouch where he had stashed the flameskull's molar, and drawing the flameskull away from Ivy. The flameskull let out a howl and dived toward him, scorching past Mumchance and almost setting the dwarf's beard alight. Mumchance hopped from foot to foot, cursing undead creatures that wouldn't stay dead. He stooped and gathered another handful of gems, throwing emeralds, sapphires, and one enormous blood red garnet at the flameskull. Each stone hit the bony pate and bounced away. The flameskull barely even glanced at the dwarf before it began to follow Kid around the room again.\n\n\"Give me back my tooth!\" it screamed as it dived after the little thief. Kid wisely decided to shelter behind the stone sarcophagus, curling his body into a small target\u2014head down, hands and hooves tucked neatly beneath himself. The flameskull zipped after him, almost striking Archlis. The astounded magelord, clutching the diamond to his chest with one hand, swiped at the flameskull with his Ankh. The metal staff rang with a clang against the skull but had no other effect.\n\n\"Get it away from me!\" Archlis shouted at Kid.\n\n\"Give me my tooth!\" sobbed the skull and hovered above Kid.\n\nKid whipped out from behind the sarcophagus, the flameskull in hot pursuit behind him.\n\n\"That's it! I've had it with you!\" Ivy was still wearing her armored gloves. When the flameskull went whizzing by her, she reached out both hands and snagged it through the empty eye sockets and jawbone. The green flame licked harmlessly at her heavy gauntlets. The skull was a simple catch for anyone who had grabbed a dread or the head of a floating corpse and felt the nose rot off into her hand. Some things just got easier with practice.\n\n\"Wwwarghts!\" The skull let out a muffled shriek, unable to speak any words with Ivy's left hand wrapped tightly around its jawbone. It tried to tug out of her hands, continuing to make strange gargling noises.\n\n\"Careful, Ivy,\" Gunderal warned. \"It's trying to cast a spell.\"\n\n\"Shut up!\" Ivy yelled at the flameskull. She held it in front of her and stared into its flickering eye sockets, confronting it with her jutting chin almost touching its naked jawbone. The flameskull gave an involuntary tremble. Ivy smiled\u2014and it was not a nice smile\u2014and slung the flameskull into the stone box in front of her. Before the magical creature could recover, she slammed the lid of the sarcophagus down. \"And stay there!\"\n\nMuffled bumps and bangs echoed from inside the box. A puff of smoke came out of the crack between the lid and box. Ivy ignored it. She swaggered up to Archlis, grabbing a stunned Kid by the shoulder and pulled him behind her. The little guy was obviously feeling murderous, but attacking Archlis at this moment might not be the best plan. She thought that she had a better idea.\n\n\"Admirable style, my dear,\" Kid whispered.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Ivy whispered back. \"Now stop trying to play hero. If I tell you to throw me a moldering molar, throw it.\"\n\n\"Yes, Captain.\" Kid sketched a quick bow in her direction. She ignored it, swiveling toward the magelord.\n\n\"You!\" Ivy said, jabbing a finger at Archlis.\n\nThe magelord blinked.\n\n\"All right, we have saved you. Destrachans drowned. Flameskull boxed up. Can't ask for more than that from any mercenary,\" Ivy announced loudly. \"So pay up and lead us out of the ruins.\"\n\nArchlis blinked and slowly turned his head toward her. When he did not reply, she snapped her fingers to be sure she had his attention. Not a flicker. His gaze dropped back to the Moaning Diamond. It was as if the gem were speaking to him, distracting him from more normal concerns and cares.\n\n\"Hurry up,\" Ivy said, pressing Archlis to make his decision\u2014there was a creaking sound coming from the corridor behind them. \"Those golden doors behind us won't hold the water out forever. We need to get out of here before the river breaks into this room.\"\n\n\"The river is no problem.\" Archlis sneered. \"Not while I hold this treasure.\" He fondled the Moaning Diamond in his hands.\n\n\"It's pretty,\" said Ivy. What was the matter with the man? He was like a child with a new toy, aware of nothing else. She wanted to wave both of her hands in front of his eyes to determine if he could see anything besides that stupid diamond. Fighting to keep control, she said, \"But there are bigger ones lying all around here.\"\n\n\"Those are just gems. This artifact toppled the walls of Tsurlagol. Even muffled in that stone box, it called the other gems out of the depths of the earth.\"\n\n\"Knew this stuff didn't come here naturally,\" muttered the dwarf behind Ivy.\n\n\"Now I can use its power to unearth all the hidden treasures of the world!\" Archlis started forward, hurrying, paying little attention to where he stepped. His feet caused a small avalanche of gems, and he stumbled and shot out an arm. To Ivy's regret, he managed to stay upright. She started to reach a hand toward his Ankh, but Mumchance whispered a warning behind her. Archlis had recovered his balance and was glaring at them, the fingers of one hand white around the Ankh's handle. Ivy did not dare to set him off; they had nothing to protect them from his fire spells. With an oath, Archlis strode past her, kicking at the rolling gems.\n\n\"Watch what the Moaning Diamond can do!\" Archlis raised the Moaning Diamond in one hand, holding it high above his head. The magelord began to cry out the words of some spell, using the same grating language that he had used with his charms earlier. The ululations from the gem grew louder with each of his shouts.\n\nOn the edge of her vision, Ivy saw the wall changing. Without turning her head away from Archlis, she slid her eyes to the side to better see what was happening. A part of the wall at one end of the room began to melt away. It did not crumble with roaring dust clouds, as had the stone chamber walls when the destrachans had attacked them. Instead, the material of the wall seemed to evaporate, as though it were no firmer than mist. Within the widening opening she saw a hidden staircase spiraling upwards.\n\nThe smell of clean air was immediately evident to the keener noses in the group.\n\n\"It is headed outside,\" whispered Zuzzara to Ivy.\n\n\"What is?\" Ivy hissed.\n\n\"The diamond. It wants out,\" Zuzzara answered. \"Look! It has found a way out. That staircase leads outside.\"\n\n\"Fresh air,\" explained Gunderal.\n\n\"Even I smell that,\" her sister elaborated.\n\nWith a sweep of his arm, Archlis motioned them all forward to the staircase. His head still bent down to stare into the depths of the Moaning Diamond. The Siegebreakers looked at each other, their eyebrows rising in question. Ivy shrugged and then gave a slight nod. The group silently began the climb upward to daylight. Archlis came behind them, the Moaning Diamond gripped in one hand and the Ankh in the other.\n\n\"I thought we were deeper in the tunnels,\" Zuzzara whispered.\n\n\"Wrong again,\" Gunderal murmured as she drifted ahead of her large half-sister. \"I could tell that we were near the surface.\"\n\n\"So what do you smell now?\" Zuzzara asked.\n\nWith a quick glance over her shoulder, Gunderal whispered, \"Trouble, bloodshed, full-scale, all-out warfare.\"\n\n\"Oh good. All stuff we can handle.\"\n\nIvy reached out a hand and touched Kid's shoulder. She leaned close to his ear to say softly, \"Whatever happens, stay on the far side of me, away from Archlis.\"\n\n\"I can take care of myself, my dear.\"\n\nTo Mumchance, climbing the stairs in front of her, she said, \"Get your eye ready.\" She saw the back of his head nod.\n\nAnd as she passed Sanval, still held between the two bugbears, she whispered, \"Stay alert.\"\n\nHis lips stiff, his face expressionless, he whispered back, \"I am always alert.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "The stairway twisted up, one endless turn after another. They climbed and climbed and continued climbing. The air was no better here, still close and musty; the one whiff of clean air had dissolved into dust. Ivy had hoped for a fresh breeze to indicate that they neared the surface and an escape from the ruins of old Tsurlagol.\n\n\"I guess we were deeper than I thought,\" said Gunderal.\n\n\"Or we're going higher than we should,\" said Mumchance. \"We should be level with the city streets by now.\"\n\n\"Or our knees are so tired we think we've climbed more steps than we have,\" Zuzzara muttered.\n\n\"Quiet!\" whispered Archlis behind them. He was still leaning over the Moaning Diamond in his hands as if the gem were speaking to him in some occult tongue.\n\n\"Look how the stone of the stairs has changed,\" observed the dwarf, ignoring the magelord's command. \"Ivy, I think we are inside the city walls.\"\n\n\"How can we be in the walls?\" Ivy asked.\n\n\"Don't know. But the stair is forming inside the wall. Look. It's the same stone as the outside of the southwest corner. The stuff we surveyed earlier.\" Mumchance trailed his hand over the stone as they passed. Cracks ran up the walls surrounding the staircase. \"It's being shifted from the inside by Archlis. This was all filled with rubble or mortared closed, and he's forcing it open\u2014changing the stones of the wall to make the stair. And I don't think the wall wants to be opened here.\" The stones of the stair creaked and groaned around them.\n\n\"So what does that mean?\" Ivy was not sure that she wanted the answer.\n\n\"Lots of stress on the stone. Stress on stones is good if you want to break a wall.\" Mumchance was talking very softly, almost speaking to himself. Wiggles ran up the stair ahead of him, but the little dog was uncharacteristically silent. Not a yap or yip or whine.\n\nIvy stared at the stocky dwarf climbing in front of her. \"Not so good if you happen to be inside the breaking wall.\"\n\nMumchance squinted over his shoulder at her. His one good eye looked very worried. \"I was thinking the same thing.\"\n\nAhead of them, Zuzzara gave a surprised grunt. Ivy peered past Mumchance's shoulders to see the dazzle of daylight silhouetting the half-orc's head.\n\n\"Hey, we are going outside.\" Even with a crazed magelord, the Moaning Diamond, and a couple of bugbears behind her, Ivy could not help feeling pleased by the sight of sun shining ahead of her.\n\n\"Ivy,\" Zuzzara said sounding unusually worried. Her large frame blocked the exit, a hole in the wall where the stairs ended. It was neither doorway nor arch, but rather a jagged entrance that looked as though some force of magic had blasted away a section of the rock. Zuzzara spread her large hands on either side of the hole and leaned forward. \"I don't think we want to be here.\"\n\n\"Oh dear,\" said Gunderal, peering around her big sister. \"I think she's right.\"\n\nThe press of Siegebreakers pushed behind them, and one of the bugbears hissed out an inquiry, starting to lower his glaive to prod the reluctant half-orc in the back. Sanval stumbled against him and knocked the glaive's blade into the wall with a harsh scraping sound. Zuzzara looked back over her shoulder at them, and her brows drew together in distress, unwillingness clear in her expression. Then she shrugged and stepped through the hole, and Gunderal followed her large sister out into the open. Ivy popped through the hole in the wall to sidestep around Gunderal and Zuzzara, swinging by them on her long legs so that she stood in front of them. If there was an enemy here, she preferred to be in the lead.\n\nIvy found herself standing on the top of one of Tsurlagol's city walls, a flat pathway of stone built to be used by patrolling guards. The view of the fields beyond the wall was magnificent\u2014clear sky, brilliant sunlight, and fresh air best of all. She could see the line and cornering of the wall, the tumble of city buildings on one side, and the slope of hill on the other, falling away to the patchwork of fields trampled into dust by the summer-long siege. If she squinted, she could even make out the dark outline of the forest that the Thultyrl had wanted to use to shield his troops before their charge of the western wall.\n\nBut far closer than the forest were the other troops who occupied the besieged Tsurlagol. Ivy found herself sharing the top of the city wall with a full complement of orcs and hobgoblins, all looking quite stunned to see her and the other Siegebreakers suddenly pop out of a magically appearing hole in their fortifications.\n\nIvy never could decide which she disliked fighting the most, hobgoblins or orcs. Today she thought the orcs were the bigger problem. The hobgoblins were larger, better equipped, and smarter, but there were only four of them.\n\nOn the other hand, there were a lot of orcs on the wall. Short, ugly creatures covered with tufts of stiff black hair, their little red eyes glittered in their mottled gray faces, and sharp tusks protruded from their lower gums. And there were taller ones too\u2014mountain orcs by the look of them, with big pig snouts and even redder, madder eyes than their gray kin. Fottergrim's troops wore armor that was a hodgepodge of stolen bits, which Ivy could not fault as her own gear fell into that category. But at least she cleaned off the dried blood and rust whenever she could. They wore the blood and rust proudly, and added bright orange and purple rags of clothing. They moved in a crouched stance, and those who lacked helmets blinked rapidly, reminding her that bright light bothered the eyes of most orcs. It was one of those facts that might never be useful but was worth noting. In battle, who knew what information was or wasn't useful? She didn't underestimate the orcs. They might not be the smartest fighters, but these orcs carried enormous weapons, and all she had was one empty scabbard.\n\nBoth type of orcs were snarling at each other. But none snarled at the four hobgoblins forming an honor guard around the big orc commander who barreled through them. That puzzled Ivy. Hobgoblin mercenaries usually controlled orcs, not the other way around, but here the hobgoblins pushed back the smaller orcs to allow this one large orc to march toward them.\n\nIvy expected them to rush her. She planted her feet in a wide stance, her arms spread in front of her company so that the line building behind her on the walkway was less visible. Let them think she led an army that snaked down the steps and would emerge in great numbers\u2014at least until she could determine their strength.\n\n\"What is this? What is this!\" An enormous orc was pushing to the front of the troops, shoving past his hobgoblin guards.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" the orc continued. His high forehead slanted beneath his helmet, and his face seemed all big pig snout and enormous jaw. He was almost as tall as the mountain breed but with clearer silver skin. Wiry tufts of chestnut hair sprouted between his lupine ears. Ivy wondered what type of orcs his parents had been\u2014the clever kind or the stupid kind? Because as all the gods knew, there were both in the breed, as Zuzzara always said. Ivy rather hoped that this orc descended from an exceptionally stupid and slow family, because all she had at the moment was a fast tongue and a heart full of regret for her lost sword and missing dagger.\n\nIvy drew herself to her full height, then cheated a little, rising up on her toes so that her eye level was as close to his as possible. With her fists jammed into her waist, she turned her body slightly to the side so that he could not immediately see that she had lost her sword. She jutted her chin forward and challenged the big leader confronting her as belligerently as she could. \"Looking for Fottergrim, sir! Have an important mission! Need to go past immediately, sir!\" She barked out her sentences in a fine loud herald's voice, hoping the troops would part and let the Siegebreakers advance to wherever Fottergrim was encamped in Tsurlagol. With good luck, Fottergrim's headquarters would be a long, long walk from their present location\u2014a long enough walk to allow them time to ambush Archlis, disarm two bugbears, and make a dash for freedom.\n\nIt was, Ivy would have been the first to admit, a fairly shaky plan, but maybe with enough shouting she could bully her way past this big and hopefully stupid orc. What she was going to do about being on the completely wrong side of the besieged city's walls\u2014well, she would figure that out later, gods willing. Right now, she just needed to get past the troops all goggling at her like she had said something extraordinarily surprising.\n\n\"Need to report to Fottergrim, sir!\" Ivy repeated. \"Immediately, sir! Let us pass!\"\n\nThe silver orc stared at her in bewilderment. \"I am Fottergrim! What is this?\"\n\n\"Oh dear,\" whispered Gunderal behind Ivy.\n\nIvy did not even blink. \"Reporting for duty, sir. Glad to find you so quickly. New troops. Returning your magelord as you commanded.\"\n\n\"What!\"\n\nIvy reached behind her and grabbed the magelord as he emerged into the sunlight and blinked. Her strong fingers balled the front of his robe into a knot that just happened to pull the cloth tight around his neck. Archlis sputtered, caught off balance and unable to catch his breath. If he had not kept such a desperate hold on his Ankh with one hand and the Moaning Diamond with the other, he might have been more difficult to handle. Grabbing his shoulder with her other hand, Ivy swung him in front of herself. She pushed him, hard, at Fottergrim. \"Here's Archlis, sir. Just where you wanted him!\"\n\nUpon seeing Archlis, Fottergrim let out a bellow of rage. His boarlike tusks curved from his lower gums over the outer corners of his upper lip. \"Traitor! Where have you been?\"\n\nOsteroric, seeing the supreme commander of the orcs confronting his master, gave a surprised squeak, sounding like a terrified mouse. The bugbear dropped his hold on Sanval and grabbed his brother, whispering something in Norimgic's ear. The two started backing away from Archlis.\n\n\"I bring you victory!\" yelled the magelord, holding up the Moaning Diamond.\n\n\"Some little gem! You abandoned me for that! Look, look! We are under attack!\" Fottergrim pointed to the fields clearly visible from the wall. The silk banners of the Thultyrl's army snapped in the breeze, and the beat of the cavalry drums could be heard on the wind. With a howl of rage, Fottergrim slapped Archlis, sending the Moaning Diamond rolling out of his hand, and screamed, \"Use your magic. Set them on fire! Or I'll toss you down on the first man to reach the wall.\"\n\nWith a howl almost as loud as Fottergrim's, Archlis dived after his Moaning Diamond, snatched it up, and safely stowed it in his shirt. \"You stupid orc!\" he cried. \"I almost lost it! Fire, fire, fire \u2026 Do you think that is all that I am capable of! Well, enjoy my talent!\" He raised the Ankh and shouted a word of command. The bouncing sphere of fire that he had used so effectively against the hobgoblins suddenly appeared, spinning toward Fottergrim. The orc obviously knew the trick, because he picked up one of his lieutenants and used the frightened orc to knock the sphere over the edge of the wall. Tossing away his cringing minion, Fottergrim charged at Archlis with a great shout of rage. He grappled with the magelord, trying to tear the Ankh from his grasp.\n\nSeeing Archlis and Fottergrim locked in each other's grasp, Ivy spun on her heel and ordered the Siegebreakers to run. As she passed Sanval, standing alone and free of the bugbear's clutches, she shouted, \"Pick up your feet, man!\"\n\nShe led them at full speed toward a round tower that anchored one end of the wall. Such towers usually had stairs leading to the guards' rooms and, with a little luck, a door to the outside.\n\n\"Come on,\" Ivy called. \"We'll take this way out!\"\n\nShe skittered to a halt. Out of the tower's doorway boiled fresh troops\u2014big mean orcs with enormous double-bladed swords and huge warhammers. The orcs drove a troop of orange goblins before them. They were small, quick creatures, half the height of a human. Their bodies were twisted and gnarled, their limbs thin and powerful, and their fingers taloned. Their small faces were all features: wide mouths, huge slanted eyes, and wide flat noses. Large pointed ears grew up through their stiff tufts of hair. The goblins' armor was little more than torn bits of leather strapped together.\n\nIvy knew better than to underestimate these fighters who stood only waist high. They were small, yes, but cunning, and as pesky as wasps. Most were carrying modified goblin sticks, nicely sharpened to poke into any soft spot presented to them. A few were whirling rawhide whips to pull down their opponents and make it easier for the small fighters to overrun them. Or perhaps they just meant to use those long lariats on anyone storming over the walls. Such tactics often proved most effective in toppling siege ladders. However, once the orange goblins spotted Ivy and the Siegebreakers, they burst into squeals of their own language. Behind them the orcs screamed, urging the little fiends to fight.\n\n\"Oh blast,\" said Ivy, frantically waving behind her back at the others to retreat.\n\n\"Hey, lads, look what we found.\" Mumchance shifted in front of Ivy and called out to the orcs who led the charge. From both his hands dripped diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and other jewels that he had picked up in the crypt below. A few gems slipped between his blunt fingers and rattled on the stones. The orcs stared at the treasure in the same way that they would eye fresh meat. Beneath the overhang of their helmets, their little pig eyes blinked against the sparkling light of the jewels in the sun, and their mouths widened into ugly grins.\n\nThe orange goblins hung back, darting glances at Mumchance, at the gems, and at the orcs. Obviously, they would love to grab the riches, but they knew that the bigger orcs would quickly overrun them and snatch any treasure away. Fear of their masters warred with greed, and they set up a series of grunting cries, obviously arguing within their own group.\n\n\"A reward for Fottergrim's loyal troops,\" roared the dwarf, throwing the jewels at the feet of the largest orcs. Some even dropped their weapons to free their hands and extended their claws.\n\nAs the orcs grabbed for the jewels, Mumchance shouted the word that ignited the gem bomb that he had concealed among the hoard. It exploded, shooting out sparks and force. The orcs squealed and screamed, blown off their feet. They stumbled into each other, knocking a few off the wall. Their weapons and armor clattered as they crashed onto the walkway and tried to grab at any ledge and at each other. Those who managed to stay on the wall scrambled to their feet, howling their fury and snatching up their weapons.\n\nSparks flamed overhead. The orcs stopped, looked up, and bellowed. The explosion had set the wooden roof above the walkway on fire. The orcs turned and raced away, knocking each other over. Behind them, a group of hobgoblins coming out of the tower automatically raised their shields, and the orcs rushed into them, catching their outflung arms on the spikes. Blood and curses flew.\n\nThe small goblins leaped to the edge of the walkway, then pulled themselves up easily onto the roof. With one last phhtt of outstretched tongues at their former masters, the goblins dashed through the sparks, cutting back and forth, until they reached the stone corner tower. Silently they dropped down to the far walkway beyond the flames and fighting.\n\n\"I am going to miss that eye,\" Mumchance declared, rubbing his empty eyesocket with his fist.\n\n\"Best time to use it. Could not have done it better,\" Ivy congratulated him, slapping him on the back. \"Buy you another one out of the Thultyrl's payment!\" Looking at the pile up of orcs and hobgoblins fighting in the doorway of the watchtower, Ivy swung around.\n\n\"Back, back,\" she yelled at the group.\n\nOnce again, going full speed, she passed Sanval, who looked slightly confused but was doggedly guarding the rear of their group. He spun around to follow her, now becoming the frontguard instead of the rearguard.\n\n\"Ivy, the roof is on fire!\" Gunderal screamed a warning. Ivy looked up. The fire was keeping pace with them. The crude wooden roof was built to shelter archers from stones flung by siege engines. The wood had dried out under the hot summer sun and now burned beautifully. Big roof timbers were starting to sag, and the smaller boards were burning right through and dropping down on the walkway, with an occasional thud as the wood hit the helmet of some hobgoblin or orc below.\n\n\"That's the problem with crude holdings like this,\" Mumchance observed as he trotted at Ivy's side. He sidestepped to the left to avoid a couple of embers dropping from above. \"Too easy to set on fire. A couple of well-placed flame arrows, or a nice little gem bomb, and, whoosh, your defenses go up in smoke.\"\n\n\"Let's discuss defensive strategy later,\" suggested Ivy. \"Gunderal, can you put it out?\"\n\nThe little wizard scanned the skies above them. A lone white cloud floated harmlessly overhead. \"It won't be much,\" Gunderal said, \"but I think I can wring a short burst of rain out of it.\"\n\n\"Well, do it, Sister, do it!\" said Zuzzara, dodging a falling beam and leaping over the body of a stunned orc trapped beneath it.\n\nGunderal concentrated, giving out a series of complicated commands that almost sounded like bird calls. The cloud turned from white to black. There was a rumble of thunder somewhere far overhead.\n\n\"Nothing fancy, no lighting,\" yelled Mumchance. \"This roof won't protect us.\"\n\nGunderal nodded, and the cadence of her call changed. It began to rain. Heavy drops sizzled on the burning roof and formed enormous puddles on the walkway. Ivy watched with satisfaction as one of the orcs charging them with raised sword and spiked shield stepped in the water, slipped, skidded on the wet stones, and bounced over the edge of the wall. The creature tumbled into space, its weapons flying. Its mouth opened with a furious howl, then it disappeared into silence far below them.\n\nThe rain slowed to a dull pattering and then stopped. The roof smoldered above them, letting off damp puffs of black smoke.\n\n\"We won't be barbecued today,\" Ivy said.\n\n\"That's it,\" said Gunderal as the last drop fell gently on her blue-black curls. \"And that is my last spell of the day. I need to rest before I can do any more.\" She paled and swayed.\n\n\"It's enough, little sister. It's more than enough,\" said Zuzzara as she hugged Gunderal, almost lifting her off her feet. Ivy eyed the smoke-smudged Siegebreakers. Sanval was fighting in shirt sleeves, but at least he had a sword, and it had already been bloodied on the wall. Zuzzara still had her shovel\u2014it was a bit dented, but that iron was hard. Kid had grabbed a discarded goblin stick, and he had a wicked gleam in his eye. Mumchance was best protected\u2014his sturdy summer armor had survived their day underground basically intact. For once he had remembered to draw his short sword instead of his hammer.\n\n\"You and you, flank me,\" said Ivy, pointing at Kid and Sanval. \"Mumchance, stay with the sisters and keep anything you can off their backs.\"\n\n\"What are we going to do?\" asked the dwarf, dropping back to the rear as she had commanded.\n\n\"Hit them hard,\" shouted Ivy as she picked up speed again. Sanval and Kid kept a nice half stride behind her; they formed a perfect flying wedge heading toward the battling Archlis and Fottergrim.\n\n\"Hit them low,\" screamed Ivy, not bothering to look back over her shoulder. The Siegebreakers were tight on her heels, and she could hear thuds and screams as they overran any leftover orcs still littering the walkway. She raced along the top of the wall\u2014head down, braid swinging, fists tight, forehead lined, and eyes narrowed\u2014as she tried to turn herself into an one-woman battering ram. Nothing like flying into a fight with an empty scabbard, she thought.\n\nIvy barreled into the magelord and the orc, breaking the two apart. A joyously barking Wiggles dashed through her feet. Ivy teetered. Sanval grabbed her waist and steadied her upright as he twisted her out of danger and skewered one of Fottergrim's startled hobgoblin bodyguards. Ivy leaned around him and caught an answering slash of a sword on her forearm armor.\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Sanval, following her earlier advice and dropping low to slash at the knees of another bodyguard who was trying to scramble out of their way.\n\n\"It was nothing,\" panted Ivy, hoping that the blow had only bruised her arm and not broken anything. \"Where did the dog go?\"\n\nAhead of them, Wiggles zigzagged around a raging Fottergrim, heading straight for Archlis. The little white dog bit the magelord, hard, and her sharp white teeth cut through his suede boots. Like the dread before him, the magelord had obviously not placed a protection against small white dogs among his many clanking, clinking charms. Archlis screamed and tried to hop away, clinging to the Moaning Diamond, then doubled over to slap at the dog with his other hand. The edge of the Ankh hit the rock wall, and he lost his hold on it and dropped it. Wiggles dashed off, scampering toward Mumchance. Fottergrim picked up the magelord's Ankh and retreated up the walkway. The big orc shook it as if he expected it to launch a fireball directly at Archlis. Nothing happened, much to his surprise.\n\n\"You fool,\" screamed Archlis. \"I could have made you a king!\"\n\n\"Traitor! Human!\" the orc screamed insults back at him.\n\nWith another cry of rage, Archlis glared at Fottergrim, raised his hand, and twisted a rusted iron ring on his finger. The bony magelord transformed into an enormous hairy demon, so unlike his narrow-shouldered, skeletal self that for the blink of a moment, no one understood what had happened. Then they all stopped whatever they were doing and stared. The transformed Archlis was so huge that his furry shoulders and giant boar-tusked head broke through the charred, soggy wooden roof above him. Bits of timber rained down on both sides of the wall. Orcs unfortunate enough to be standing near Archlis were pushed over the edge of the wall by his sheer bulk.\n\n\"What is it?\" Ivy asked, staring up at monster.\n\n\"Huge and ugly,\" Zuzzara called. It was certainly that\u2014a beast three times the height of the magelord, covered in fat, muscle and scruffy fur, with taloned fingers that hung on apelike arms, and hands that almost touched the ground. Its ears were wide and notched, its face a scrunched up horror, its body an expanded grotesque imitation of an ape. On its shoulders were black feathery wings, completely out of proportion, appearing much too small to lift that enormous weight.\n\nKid called softly, \"It is a nalfeshnee, my dear, a demon from the Abyss.\"\n\n\"Thanks for the lesson,\" said Ivy. \"How do we kill it?\"\n\n\"We may not have to, my dear,\" said Kid, pulling her back from the crumbling edge of the wall. \"Wait and watch.\"\n\n\"Hey, sister, why don't you have a ring like that?\" shouted Zuzzara over the screams of crushed orcs, caught between the nalfeshnee's bulk and the stone walkway.\n\n\"And turn myself into something that hideous? Never!\" yelled Gunderal.\n\nIvy stuck out her foot and tripped up a fleeing hobgoblin who tried to dash past her. It threw out its arms to maintain its balance, and its halberd\u2014with its axelike head and long handle\u2014cartwheeled into the air. Stretching out a long arm, Ivy caught the halberd, then spun away and let the hobgoblin rush past. The hobgoblin paused for half a step, glanced back at the giant demon, shook his shield at Ivy, but continued running.\n\n\"Look at the magelord,\" crowed Kid. \"He went too large. The nalfeshnee cannot fight on top of this wobbling wall.\"\n\n\"Kid is right,\" Mumchance shouted. \"Look at that wall. It is cracking.\"\n\nBits of the stone crenellations snapped off as Archlis tried to steady himself. The sheer size of his backside, in the beast's form, forced the stones off the wall, following the roof timbers and squashed bodies to the ground below.\n\n\"We need to get out of here now,\" commanded Ivy.\n\nSanval thrust with his sword at an attacking orc. With one swift move, he skewered the creature. It doubled up, its weapons flying out of its hands. Sanval pivoted, the orc still caught on his blade's point. When he twisted his wrists to free the blade, he managed to fling the orc off the wall. While he wiped the blade clean on a fallen orc, he said, \"I knew following you would get us out of the ruins. I know you will find a way out now.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" shouted Ivy, touched by his confidence in her abilities. She ducked under the blow of another pig-snouted fighter, using her stolen halberd to ram the surprised orc between the legs and send it sprawling. Stepping hard on the orc's stomach once it was prone, she retrieved the halberd and jumped to Sanval's side. \"All part of the job, rescuing our friends!\"\n\n\"I thought you did not believe in heroics.\" Sanval slicked his tumbled curls out of his eyes as he skewered another orc one-handed.\n\n\"I lied,\" Ivy admitted. \"Heroics are fine.\" She grinned at Sanval as she reached around him to smack the backside of a startled archer who had wandered into this section of the wall seeking his friends. The barbarian fled with a yell for reinforcements.\n\n\"Watch out!\" Sanval dived past Ivy, ramming another screaming orc over the wall before the trooper could brain Gunderal with his warhammer. The pretty wizard gave Sanval a sparkling smile as she ducked around her big sister to help trip up two orcs attacking Zuzzara.\n\nSwinging his blade at another orc, Sanval sliced it below the knees. The creature lost its balance and toppled into space. Sanval and Ivy pivoted around each other to strike more attacking orcs.\n\n\"Ask me what mercenaries and red-roof girls have in common,\" she said, reaching past him with her stolen halberd to crack an orc across the side of his head.\n\n\"Nothing at all,\" Sanval exclaimed, glancing at her with a most peculiar smile that lit up his dark eyes. He jabbed away at an oncoming hobgoblin.\n\n\"Do too,\" she laughed. \"Both always figuring out every move. Both more fun than an entire room full of proper Procampur ladies. Don't for a moment think that I did not have a plan in my back pocket for everything that happened in the ruins.\"\n\n\"There goes Archlis,\" Zuzzara said, pointing with her shovel. She gave a formidable whack on the top of the head to a poor little goblin sneaking around them, obviously a stray still seeking an escape route off the creaking, groaning wall. Fottergrim had retreated even farther back, so he stood in the doorway of the farthest watchtower, screaming some type of order over his shoulders.\n\n\"Look! He really can fly!\" said Gunderal.\n\nIncredibly for a creature of its bulk, the tiny wings lifted the demon Archlis off the wall. His feet hung no more than a half a man's height above the surface. As he lifted off the wall, Norimgic and Osteroric took one look at the orcs bearing down on them and then leaped after Archlis, each grabbing a long arm. Archlis gave a roar and shook his hands, but the screaming bugbears held tight. Bobbing and weaving, Archlis began a ponderous flight off the wall. The bugbears dangled off his arms, both paddling their big flat feet like swimmers, as though hoping to keep themselves afloat.\n\n\"It would appear that flight is a good choice, with perhaps a touch of magic?\" Kid tugged at her waist, and Ivy realized that rather than pulling her out of the way, he was trying to get her attention by dragging the red magic belt out from where it was tucked down behind her weapons belt.\n\n\"That's a good idea,\" observed Ivy, thrusting the halberd's tip through the breastplate of an orc. She bent her knee and pressed the sole of her boot against the orc's armor to pull the halberd free from the dead creature. With a grunt, she stated, \"Let's follow him down.\"\n\n\"I am pleased that Osteroric escaped,\" said Sanval, close on her heels as she headed for the edge. \"He and his brother were rather civilized for bugbears.\"\n\n\"And their pockets are still stuffed with jewels, which is more than what we got,\" mourned Mumchance.\n\n\"We'll just add it to the Thultyrl's invoice,\" declared Ivy. \"Come on, we need to get out of here.\"\n\nIvy jumped up on the edge of the wall. Looking straight down, she had a clear view of the ground, a long, long way below her. Piles of dead orcs with twisted limbs and shattered heads and bodies testified to the height. Ivy stood on the ledge, teetered forward, then stepped back and beckoned her crew. \"Grab my belt!\" she yelled.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Sanval began.\n\n\"Trust me,\" she said, looking down at Sanval. Despite all the dust and rust and assorted grime that they had picked up that day, his upturned face just shone with honesty, bravery, and all those other fine Procampur qualities. The man did not need highly polished armor to dazzle her. Sanval smiled up at her.\n\n\"Ivy!\" Zuzzara and Mumchance and Kid shouted together, with Kid adding a gentle, \"My dear.\"\n\nStartled, she swung around to look at them, then completed the turn to look in the direction they all pointed.\n\nArchlis as the demon Nalfeshnee beat his wings frantically, trying to distance himself from the battlements. But he was sinking. The huge creature looked like some six-legged, three-headed bat that could not fly very well. The bugbears, dangling from the giant monster's arms, their legs churning, weren't helping. Tossing their considerable weight in their terror, and swinging their weapons and occasionally pricking the demon's hairy body, they howled and screamed and blubbered. The bugbear brothers had been brave fighters when grounded, but flying was not something any bugbear ever yearned to do.\n\n\"We need to get out of here!\" Mumchance had finally caught Wiggles. Tucking the little dog firmly into his pocket, the dwarf nimbly avoided one of the falling orcs who had just been brained by Zuzzara's wildly swinging shovel.\n\n\"Got a plan!\" screamed Ivy. \"Everyone to me! To me!\"\n\n\"Coming, my dear,\" said Kid, as he leaped up and drummed another orc on its snout with his sharp hooves. The creature let out a howl and clapped both hairy hands over its injured proboscis.\n\n\"What are you going to do?\" Sanval asked, backhanding an orc trying to detain him as he climbed up on the edge of the wall next to her. Ivy was holding herself steady by wrapping one arm around a wooden pillar supporting the burned-out roof.\n\n\"Grab my belt!\" Ivy screamed at him over the noise of the fight behind them. There was such confusion that Fottergrim's gray orcs and mountain orcs were busy trying to brain each other\u2014each group was convinced that the others had started the fight that now engulfed the top of the wall. The battered Fottergrim was howling orders at all of them, but nobody could hear him over the general hubbub. The hobgoblins who had come late to the fight, following the orange goblins into the fray, jabbed with their spiked shields. The orcs crouched below them, red eyes gleaming, and thrashed their halberds like scythes. The hobgoblins shouted to each other, closing ranks, occasionally saving each other with a sword thrust, and occasionally overreaching and stabbing one of their own kind.\n\n\"My belt!\" Ivy yelled at Sanval. All the other Siegebreakers had figured it out, but he had not been there for the fight with the destrachans. She could feel Zuzzara's big hand firmly anchored in her weapons belt. The big half-orc had snatched up her little sister and tucked Gunderal under her other arm. Mumchance and Kid each had their hands locked on her legs. Ivy let go of the wooden post and grabbed the silver buckle of the narrow red belt that she wore loosely below her heavy weapons belt. \"Pull the wings open three times and then shut,\" she whispered to herself as her fingers caught the small silver wings. She twisted them and prayed to whatever gods might be listening that the belt's magic would hold them all up. It had worked well underground, lifting her out of the reach of the destrachans, but she had been the only weight to lift. Now there was a lot more weight hanging off her, and she prayed that her weapons belt would hold and that her pants would stay up. That would be all that she needed\u2014to plunge to her death baring her ass to the fighting orcs and screaming hobgoblins behind her. Then again, it wasn't that bad of a final fate, she decided. It would be a way to leave the world with a certain ragged style.\n\nEither way, Ivy just had to trust that her luck (and her belt) would hold.\n\n\"Jump!\" she screamed at Sanval as she snagged his collar with her free hand and pulled him off balance. His booted feet shot out and up, his arms flew up, his fist tightened around his sword hilt, and his dark curls blew every which way.\n\nIvy plunged off the wall."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "The belt's magic was strained, but not broken. Rather than shooting toward the sky, they dropped, jerked level, and then started to gently descend to the ground.\n\nSanval hung straight down from his collar, where Ivy held him in a tight grip, his body rigid, his arms and legs pointing hopefully toward the earth, his face a frozen blank. He made a slight choking sound, and Ivy tried to shift her grip so she would not strangle him before they hit the ground.\n\nZuzzara had let out a single huge bellow when they leaped off the wall. Ivy looked down at the half-orc, dangling from her white-knuckled grip on Ivy's heavy weapons belt. Beads of perspiration popped out on the half-orc's forehead. Zuzzara was as pale as Ivy had ever seen her. Suspended with Zuzzara's arm around her waist, Gunderal looked like some pretty bird, her body perpendicular to the ground, her arms stretched out like wings, her hair and skirts fluttering around her. She seemed to be shaking with soft laughter.\n\nIvy looked past them to the two hanging on her legs. Mumchance was staring at the ground, or was that his good eye that he had squeezed closed? Wiggles was a lump in his pocket, not even an ear sticking up over the edge. Kid clung to her other leg, and it did not surprise Ivy to see him look up at her, wink, then grin at the floating Gunderal.\n\nThey sank slowly, spiraling down in an odd zigzag pattern, and then they all hit the ground in a tumble of legs and arms.\n\n\"Oooh,\" Gunderal moaned, flattened beneath her big sister.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Zuzzara said, rolling off her onto all fours. She pushed herself upright and pulled her little sister into a standing position.\n\n\"It's all right,\" said Gunderal. She smoothed down the front of her skirt and ran her fingers through her hair, pushing it back from her face. Her blue-black curls fluffed obediently into perfect ringlets, with highlighted streaks of blue and aquamarine framing her pearly features. \"Good fighting up there, big sister.\"\n\nZuzzara shrugged. \"It's what I do best!\" Imitating Gunderal, she straightened her waistcoat and shook her head so that her many braids swung out, the iron beads clattered, and the braids fell neatly into place. She smiled weakly and wiped the perspiration from her face with her hand. \"Give me a hundred hobgoblins every day, as long as I never have to fly.\"\n\n\"No, it was wonderful,\" Gunderal said with a little laugh. \"I must get a new spellbook\u2014one with flying spells in it.\"\n\n\"How could you like that? You are water genasi, not air genasi!\" said a surprised Zuzzara.\n\n\"Oh, you remember daddy. He always leaped before he looked. I must have inherited a love of flying from him,\" replied the little sister.\n\n\"Shut up and grab me!\" Ivy shouted, as everyone released his or her hold. What was the stupid spell to make the belt stop, she wondered, as she once more began to drift skyward.\n\n\"Twist twice to the right and then open it, my dear,\" Kid called, grabbing at her leg as she started to float up. A heavy, solid, most welcome weight of steady Procampur hands fell on her shoulders, pushing her back down until her feet touched ground. Ivy glanced around quickly while her fingers worked at the belt buckle.\n\nMumchance had been right about their location. They had landed at the southwest juncture of Tsurlagol's walls\u2014the very point that the Siegebreakers had originally identified as a weak spot. Above them Fottergrim was screaming at a bunch of barbarian archers, driving them into place along the shattered edge of the wall. Across a field were Procampur's forces, obviously readying themselves for a charge against the same wall.\n\n\"I know it hasn't been two days,\" grumbled Ivy as she twisted the clasp of the belt. \"Twice to the right, then open. Twice to the right, then open. Ah, blast. If I wanted to be a bird, I would have grown wings.\"\n\nOnly Sanval's strong grip on her shoulder and Kid's firm clasp on her thigh were keeping her on the ground. The stupid belt was tugging her toward the sky again. She fumbled the buckle and wondered exactly how high she would go without a ceiling to stop her, if their grip slipped.\n\n\"Breathe,\" whispered Sanval in her ear. \"You have won. You have saved us all. Do not panic now.\"\n\nShe rather suspected he used the same murmuring voice to calm his horses, but it worked. Her heart rate slowed, her own hands stopped fumbling at the clasp. She grasped the belt buckle ornament firmly, her fingers tightening on the little silver wings of the serpent, and the ancient metal crumbled under her hand. The narrow red belt slipped from around her waist and shot up into the clouds with a little whistling noise, rather like a child's jeer at adult authority.\n\nThe barbarian archers on the wall saw it, their heads turning and tilting back in unison to track the red whip of belt. They all knelt to a firing position, one knee down, and lifted their crossbows. Their arms snapped back to grab bolts from the quivers strapped between their shoulder blades, and with the speed of a blink, they filled the sky with bolts. Perhaps they thought the belt was some wily mercenary trick, meant to magically bring down the wall. The archers followed the belt's path with flying bolts until it rose beyond their reach and disappeared into the sky.\n\n\"Good riddance,\" panted Ivy, who could feel a whole new set of bruises around her waist where the pull of the belt had crushed her chain mail against her. The cavalry across the field was obviously getting into formation. Banners were raised, snapping in the wind. She could hear the faint echoes of the big war drums being pounded, so the various leaders of the horse-mounted troops would know their position. \"What is Enguerrand trying to do? He can't be charging the gate on this side. That won't work. I told him that wouldn't work.\"\n\nShe glared at Sanval, as though expecting an explanation. He stared at the Procampur cavalry through narrowed eyes. \"I do not think that he has an extra plan in his back pocket,\" worried Sanval.\n\n\"Look,\" Kid whispered, and Ivy felt his hand brush her elbow. Turning to see where Kid pointed, she saw the giant Nalfeshnee do a crash landing, its wings beating. It rolled in a furry tumble with the two bugbears.\n\n\"Any moment now, my dear,\" Kid added.\n\nWhile they watched, the giant demon disappeared. There was no puff of smoke, no shooting sparks, just all at once gone.\n\n\"What happened?\" Ivy asked.\n\n\"Very short term spell, my dear,\" Kid said. \"Another few moments and he would have changed while still in the air.\"\n\n\"Let me guess. Another artifact that he stole from Toram.\"\n\n\"Oh yes,\" said Kid. \"I rather hoped that he would crash.\"\n\n\"But we all would have missed him so much. He kept our day so exciting,\" Ivy said, looking at the magelord running around the field, gathering up his fallen belongings. \"All right, come on. We'd better see what he's up to.\"\n\nBack in his human form\u2014a tall bony creature with dirty yellow hair sticking to his neck, his robes torn and pulled askew\u2014the magelord strode toward the wall, then stood a short distance away from it. He hunched his shoulders, and Ivy could see him raise his arms, hands together. The high-pitched crying began again.\n\n\"Thought we'd heard the last of that,\" Zuzzara complained.\n\n\"You wish,\" her sister said.\n\nThe Moaning Diamond cradled in Archlis's hands increased its eerie noise. It attracted the attention of Fottergrim's archers on the wall above them. A multitude of faces turned from scanning the skies after the belt's surprising flight to searching the ground below. They lowered their bows and held their hands above their eyes to shade them as they looked down and tried to locate the source of the sound.\n\nA cry of \"Archlis! Archlis!\" went up. It was not a happy sound, more like the scream of a cage full of enraged tigers. A bloody and bruised Fottergrim could clearly be seen peering down.\n\n\"Traitor,\" screamed Fottergrim, waving the Ankh in impotent fury at Archlis. The orc commander obviously did not know how to use it, or there would have been nothing but black ash in front of the walls of Tsurlagol. \"Kill the traitor!\"\n\nArchlis appeared to have completely forgotten the Siegebreakers. A tall disheveled figure, the narrow features of his face hard with concentration, his blue eyes blazing, his whole attention was focused now on Fottergrim. He raised the Moaning Diamond in his hand as though it were an offering to a god and began screaming out the activation spell.\n\nIvy commanded her group: \"Run!\"\n\nThey all stared at her for a moment, then she saw understanding widen their eyes as they remembered the disappearing wall in the tunnel\u2014no warning, no fading, just gone.\n\nIvy grabbed Sanval's hand and pulled him after her. Mumchance dropped Wiggles out of his pocket. \"Run, run!\" he cried, stretching his own short legs as he followed her. Cracks opened up in the ground, but the little dog swerved and swerved again, each time avoiding places where the ground was collapsing.\n\nIvy cursed when she saw Kid dart away toward Archlis, but she could not turn back to grab him. If she stopped, all of the Siegebreakers would stop. She opened her mouth to shout his name, then thought better of it. Either he knew what he was doing, or he didn't, but she had to trust that he did not want to be noticed by Archlis, and screaming at him wouldn't help.\n\nSanval started to go after Kid. She tightened her grip on his hand and tugged. He could have twisted loose but didn't.\n\n\"You know what you're doing,\" Sanval said.\n\n\"He's the fastest,\" she yelled and kept running. \"He can catch up.\" Sanval continued at her side, his long strides matching hers.\n\nArchlis shook the Moaning Diamond at Fottergrim. His shouts were even louder than the weird cries of the gem. At the base of the wall, great fissures appeared in the stone. They widened as they spread upward, like some vine twisting up a tree trunk. Rock and dirt and fill and small pebbles popped out of the wall at increasing speed.\n\nIvy yelled, \"The ground is breaking up!\" Everyone picked up their feet and ran faster. Only Kid ignored her, running toward Archlis. Kid reached around the magelord's waist and plucked the purse from his belt. Kid's small horns gleamed in the sunlight where they poked up through his dark hair. Then Kid aimed a deliberate and very hard kick at the magelord's knee. As his sharp little hoof connected, Archlis howled and stumbled forward.\n\n\"I can't believe this,\" Ivy muttered. She was still running as fast as possible away from the wall, but she watched Kid's brazen thievery over her shoulder. Sanval also twisted around to look and nearly tripped over a stone in the field. She caught him and steadied him.\n\n\"I think Kid wants to be a hero,\" Sanval explained as she pulled him upright.\n\n\"But now? When the world is falling on us?\" Ivy panted.\n\n\"Keep moving!\" Mumchance shouted over the rumbling of the earth beneath their feet. \"Come on, Kid. Run, you little goat, run!\"\n\nKid sprinted toward them.\n\n\"Told you,\" said Ivy. \"He's fast.\"\n\nDust was spilling out of cracks in the wall, running down the stone in threads of gray like streams before a flood. The ground before Archlis was also starting to crack and cave in. The magelord had fallen to his knees, but he was still howling out his spell and waving the Moaning Diamond over his head.\n\nKid raced back toward the Siegebreakers, leaping lightly on his small hooves over the widening fissures in the ground, zipping around holes, holding the magelord's purse over his head and waving it.\n\nAs he neared them, he dug into the purse, pulled out a thick object, and held it overhead, laughing and waving his arms. When he reached Ivy's side, Kid waved the object at. It was Toram's spellbook.\n\n\"Don't stop,\" shouted the dwarf again. \"Keep moving!\"\n\nKid raced along at Ivy's side, his upturned face one wide grin.\n\n\"A book? You went back for a book?\" Zuzzara thundered. The half-orc reached out, grabbed her sister's wrist, and rushed away. Gunderal's feet barely touched the ground. Her hair whipped around her head and across her face, enamel pins dropping like rain behind her.\n\n\"Let me go,\" she shrieked, \"I want to see what Archlis is doing.\"\n\nZuzzara shouted, \"He's bringing down that wall. Want to watch while it falls on you?\"\n\nThe group was almost halfway across the field when Mumchance called a halt.\n\nThey stopped, bumping into each other, then turned around. The two bugbears were racing away in the opposite direction, Norimgic obviously limping from the recent landing in the field. The sun glittered on Sanval's former breastplate as Osteroric followed his brother away from the magelord.\n\n\"Look at that!\" exclaimed Mumchance.\n\nThe wall was twisting now, and the goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, and barbarian archers were falling forward\u2014a rain of timbers and screaming soldiers. A deep note sounded, the voice of stone twisted out of the earth, smothering even the ululations of the Moaning Diamond.\n\nThe ground completely crumbled beneath Archlis as the wall tilted out and rained stones and a shrieking Fottergrim down upon the screaming magelord. Archlis tried to roll out of the way, throwing one arm over his head. His other hand, extended and clinging to the Moaning Diamond, held the gem up as though he thought it would protect him.\n\nArchlis dropped down through the widening hole in the ground, down to the twisting tunnels and the flooded levels of the ancient city. His robes whipping around him, and the last they saw of him was his sleeves fluttering above his upraised hands, and a quick flash of light. They heard a shrill scream that could have been Archlis or could have been the Moaning Diamond returning to its underground crypt.\n\nA great roar shook the watchers as the ground in front of the wall caved in. The entire fortifications collapsed on the magelord. An enormous cloud of dust belched out of the fissure, a spiral of smoke twisted up to the sky, and then silence. Then there was another distinct popping sound, and a huge jet of water plumed into the sky and fell back to earth.\n\nFor a moment the Siegebreakers stood speechless, staring in shock. The water cascaded in high arches, like jets in a splendid castle fountain, then ran in spreading circles and grew from a pond into a lake.\n\n\"Not quite how I'd planned to bring that wall down,\" Ivy muttered.\n\n\"Shh,\" said Sanval, holding a finger to his lips. \"I would not tell anyone that. It might make it harder to collect your fee.\" Then he smiled at her.\n\n\"Good plan,\" said Ivy with an answering smile.\n\n\"Told you that we would get a small lake on that side,\" said Mumchance with satisfaction. Gunderal smiled and nodded. Then she turned to look at her sister, lifting one delicate eyebrow in inquiry.\n\nWith a belly-deep orc laugh, Zuzzara shouted, \"You're the best magic show in town, little sister!\"\n\nA shout sounded from the line of Procampur's army on the wooded hillside. Now the rumble of hooves shook the ground as Enguerrand's cavalry swept past them. More men went running after them, lines of mercenaries yelling as they swept over the rubble of the western wall and plunged into Tsurlagol.\n\nIvy shaded her eyes from the midday sun and looked toward Enguerrand's troops. She could see rubble and cavalry and foot soldiers, and in the swirl of dust she glimpsed goblins and the surviving barbarian archers disappearing between the ruins beyond the wall. They were running low, obviously hoping to hide before Enguerrand found them. As quickly as they had appeared, they were gone, and if she knew anything at all, she knew Enguerrand would never find them. But it was not her problem. Somebody had to lose. But today, it was not her.\n\nThe Siegebreakers looked at each other, very pleased. They had accomplished their mission.\n\n\"Just let the Thultyrl try to wiggle out of paying,\" said Ivy. Something like a contented purr underlaid her hoarse voice.\n\nAs the army of Procampur thundered past them to drive Fottergrim's troops out of Tsurlagol, Sanval looked after them longingly.\n\n\"You don't have a horse. And you're missing most of your armor,\" Ivy chided him, but she did it very gently. He appeared so very forlorn standing there in a torn, smoke-smudged shirt, rust-smeared breeches, and indescribably dirty boots, watching someone else ride off to glorious battle. Even his hair was standing up in every which way, dust and rust streaking his dark curls. Of course, Ivy thought he looked wonderful. After all, he was breathing, and he wasn't bleeding. And that was worth paying a temple a visit and giving thanks to any gods who wanted to listen. However, right now she needed to convince Sanval that this was a very good day for them all. \"Look, you are with us,\" she said. \"And when the dust clears, we are going to be the biggest heroes around here. After all, we tumbled the walls of Tsurlagol.\"\n\n\"Actually, it was Archlis who\u2014\" started Zuzzara.\n\n\"He didn't have a contract with the Thultyrl. And he was on the losing side,\" Ivy reminded her.\n\n\"And we are the winners,\" said Zuzzara. Gunderal giggled at her sister and patted her lovingly on the back.\n\n\"Oh yes,\" said Ivy, looking around and realizing that despite all the odds against it, they were all there, even Wiggles. \"It has been a good day \u2026\"\n\nMumchance chimed in, \"We were not standing under that wall \u2026\"\n\n\"When it fell down!\" finished the others with a happy shout.\n\nThen Ivy remembered a promise that she had made to herself, down in the dark. \"And now I am going to find the handsomest healer that I can.\"\n\n\"But we must report to the Thultyrl,\" said Sanval. \"And there are certain prayers and sacrifices that I should make at my family shrine. To give thanks to the gods.\" He gave a deep, gut-wrenching sigh. \"And then I am going to have to go back to my tent and explain to Godolfin about my boots.\" He brightened up a little. \"And get a clean shirt, and a bath.\"\n\n\"Good ideas,\" said Ivy. \"And I have a couple more ideas that I may want to discuss with you later. Tell me. The gods attached to Procampur\u2014are they fussy about attendance to proper times of worship and all that? Or are they just pleased to see you whenever you happen to stop by?\"\n\n\"We have many gods and goddesses beneath the black-roof tiles,\" said Sanval, looking a little puzzled. \"Some for a household, some for an occupation, some for the protection of a district. There are appropriate and inappropriate days to enter the temples, if that is what you are asking.\"\n\n\"And every black-roof Procampur temple probably has long lists of rules and regulations about what else is appropriate and inappropriate,\" guessed Ivy.\n\n\"Certainly. There is a proper order to such things, after all.\"\n\n\"Hmm. I may need to find some place a little less organized. Maybe over there,\" she said, glancing back over her shoulder at the fighters swarming over the broken wall of Tsurlagol. The side with the shiniest armor looked like they were cutting through the remnants of Fottergrim's orcs with the ease of a hot knife through sealing wax.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Sanval said.\n\n\"Wait until we meet with the Thultyrl. I don't suppose he'll have much interest in over there.\"\n\n\"Over there where?\"\n\nIvy shrugged and pointed over her shoulder with her thumb. \"There. What's left of Tsurlagol and what's left underneath. Might even find you better armor.\"\n\nSanval stared down at himself, noting sadly the bits of badly dented leg guards that were all that was left of his once-fine equipment. \"Almost any armor would be better than this.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. Digging rights, I'm thinking,\" Ivy said.\n\nSanval still looked confused, but asked no more questions.\n\nThe Thultyrl was going to be pleased, generous even. Ivy knew it. And his steward, that officious Beriall, would never notice one more little expense tucked into their bill. After all, she had so very many expenses to put down.\n\n\"Going to go find the best-looking healer in the camp,\" repeated Ivy, striding across the fields to the tents of Procampur. Every bone and muscle in her body ached. She had bruises on top of bruises. She did not care. She walked as if the world did not own her\u2014better than that, she strode as if the world owed her one very large payment for a job well done."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Tsurlagol was once again a free city, and Ivy stood before the Thultyrl in clean boots. Actually, extremely well-polished boots. While a terrifically handsome cleric soothed and mended all her aches and pains, the oddest little man by the name of Godolfin had arrived to confiscate all her clothing. He had returned with every item clean, brushed, mended, and polished to a bright gleam where possible. Then he had hustled her off to a private bath (really, it was amazing what Procampur nobles managed to drag to war with them), full of hot water and scented oils, so she felt personally polished. Her blonde hair was a bright golden banner, floating free from a high crest drawn up to the top of her head. And there wasn't a bruise anywhere on her body. The healing that she had gotten from the Procampur cleric with the lovely, lovely hands was worth every single coin that she had donated to his temple. And he had promised to say a couple of prayers for her too, just a few little thanks that she felt she owed the gods.\n\nThe rest of the Siegebreakers were looking equally well-scrubbed, she noticed when she met them outside the Thultyrl's pavilion. Even Wiggles looked like she had been washed and brushed. Sanval, of course, was beautifully turned out in a pure white linen shirt, well-fitted cloth breeches, and a different but gorgeously polished pair of boots. His hair had been combed down into a gleaming mass of black curls, but Ivy was pleased to note that one curl was still defiantly going in the opposite direction of its fellows.\n\nFlanked by an honor guard drawn from the Forty, Ivy was led before the Thultyrl, who immediately chided her for not letting him know sooner about her plans to bring down the western wall of Tsurlagol.\n\nShe told him that they had been a bit busy that day or they would have sent him a message.\n\n\"So everything happened exactly as you planned?\" questioned the Thultyrl.\n\n\"Certainly it did,\" Ivy said. If her plans had swerved off course a bit, what did that matter, and who needed to know? All ended at the desired outcome.\n\n\"Lady, we are most pleased,\" said the Thultyrl.\n\n\"And we are pleased that the Thultyrl is pleased,\" answered Ivy. She was, too. There was enough gold stuffed in the bottom of their bags to pay for a new barn roof and maybe a bit to spare. Still, the farm could use a few more improvements. A bigger kennel for Mumchance's dogs, thought Ivy, set very far from the house. Ivy looked back to the walls of Tsurlagol. The rubble of the western wall formed a ragged gap in the city's defenses. She smiled as she turned to the Thultyrl.\n\n\"Sire, can I assume that the treasury of Tsurlagol will cover the rebuilding of the city's defenses? After all, if the wall is left like that, the first wandering band of brigands or underpaid mercenaries \u2026\"\n\n\"Will dance right through the gap and set up camp in the center of the city,\" said Mumchance.\n\n\"And given the treaties that we hold with the city \u2026\" added Sanval.\n\nThe Thultyrl exchanged a fleeting look with his steward Beriall. It was a glance that said \"this is going to be expensive.\" Ivy smiled very sweetly.\n\n\"This is what you get when you hire mercenaries,\" said Beriall, who had been a bit vocally bitter about the amount of gold that Ivy had already collected from him.\n\n\"Still, they have been most effective in carrying out your wishes,\" added the Pearl with an elegant roll of her shoulders that stopped just short of a shrug. She was dressed all in palest blue today, with her namesake jewels stitched into elaborate patterns on her long robe. Long metal guards of enameled silver covered her fingernails and winked in the sunlight when she gestured with one elegant hand.\n\n\"Quite so,\" said the Thultyrl. \"Do we understand that you are wall builders as well as wall breakers?\"\n\n\"Well, it takes a larger crew, but once we bring the harvest in, we could pull more people from our farm,\" stated Ivy. \"We could hire from the city too. After a siege, there are always people needing work. That way you would be giving some of the wealth of Tsurlagol's treasury back to Tsurlagol's people. A popular thing to do, I would think.\"\n\n\"Does a Thultyrl need to be popular?\" asked the Thultyrl.\n\n\"You already are,\" answered the Pearl. \"But it would be a kindness to give some of Tsurlagol's wealth to those who labor hardest and best with their hands.\"\n\nThe Thultyrl nodded.\n\n\"Mimeri would love to travel,\" suggested Gunderal. \"She is so good with stone spells.\"\n\nSanval cocked an eyebrow at Ivy, and she hissed back, \"Youngest sister. She gets it from her mother's side of the family.\"\n\n\"And her mother was?\"\n\n\"I'll explain to you later.\"\n\n\"I was thinking of flying buttresses on the west side,\" continued Mumchance, drawing plans in the dirt with the tip of his sword.\n\n\"Ground is too flat,\" said Kid, scuffing a few lines with an edge of his hoof.\n\n\"Good thinking. Dry moat,\" replied Mumchance. \"Maybe two. At an angle. To baffle any stonethrower from coming close to the walls.\"\n\n\"Such tricks will not stop a wizard, dear sir,\" said Kid.\n\n\"A couple of glyphs. Something subtle.\" One old dwarf and one cloven-hoofed thief bent their heads together to contemplate the designs etched in the dirt, oblivious of the others watching them.\n\n\"Fascinating,\" said the Thultyrl. \"Truly fascinating. Lady, you may bring Beriall your plans; we shall leave him as steward of Tsurlagol until the city is ready to govern itself. But we think that there are other matters which must be settled first.\"\n\nOne of those matters was a dripping trophy now prominently displayed before the Thultyrl's chair.\n\n\"And what do you want done with that?\" sniffed Beriall. One of the Forty had dug out the big orc's body from the wreckage of the wall and hacked the head off, bringing it back as a trophy.\n\nThe Thultyrl bent forward, wincing a little from his healing wound, and stared into the dead eyes of the creature that had so disrupted his life. For the first time, the two were close enough to touch\u2014the dead leader of the last remnant of the Black Horde, and the man who had never wanted to go to war. In profile, there was a certain grim resemblance between the two. It was, decided Ivy, the bare-toothed smile. Fottergrim's lips were curled up over his big fangs, as if he were still snarling insults from the top of the walls, and the Thultyrl's upper lip curled in an unconscious imitation of his foe.\n\n\"We will display it,\" declared the Thultyrl, straightening up. His face relaxed into the more charming smile that he typically wore. \"A reminder to those who break the peace in Procampur or Tsurlagol.\"\n\nThe Pearl rustled forward. She signaled to a servant to remove the head.\n\n\"I will boil it down to the bone,\" stated the Pearl, as matter of fact as if she were reciting some recipe for stewed chicken, \"and have it plated in silver with eyes of crystal. I will set it on a pillar of stone with a warning inscribed to all who doubt the strength of the treaties that tie Procampur and Tsurlagol.\"\n\n\"Oh very good,\" said the Thultyrl. \"Put it on the side of the road exactly halfway between Procampur and Tsurlagol.\"\n\n\"As you wish,\" she agreed.\n\n\"And,\" he added, his glance sliding across Ivy and her group, \"you'd best place some strong charms around it, or the next red-roof adventurer to pass it by is sure to steal it.\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" said the Pearl.\n\nSo it was done. The head of Fottergrim gleamed atop a pillar with a warning written below: \"Fottergrim watches in vain for his rescue. So fall all who dare to assault Procampur's allies.\" Ivy passed the monument many times during her travels, and she always stopped to give the orc's silver skull a proper salute. If she tested the Pearl's charms against theft, she never admitted it to Sanval.\n\n\"And now there is the matter of the bugbear,\" continued the Thultyrl. Sanval groaned, although not very loudly.\n\n\"I wonder how a bugbear in the service of the enemy ended up wearing a piece of Procampur armor,\" said the Thultyrl.\n\nSanval turned bright red as the captured Osteroric was led forward by the youngest member of the Forty. The oblivious bugbear thanked Sanval for his breastplate, despite Sanval's best efforts to wave him off.\n\n\"It stopped an arrow,\" said Osteroric, displaying the dent. \"That helped save my life!\"\n\n\"Not exactly the use intended for an officer's armor,\" mused the Thultyrl, who pulled out a scroll from the basket beside his chair. Unrolling it, he hummed a little as he scanned its lines. \"According to this section of the Grand Codex of laws,\" said the Thultyrl, \"aiding the enemy is against the law, losing your armor when you are an officer of Procampur's army is against the law, failing to inform your Thultyrl about your plans is most definitely against the law, and so on and so forth.\"\n\nIvy stepped forward. After all, somebody needed to defend Sanval. The Thultyrl was having far too good a time teasing him, and she rather considered that particular form of amusement was reserved for her and her alone.\n\n\"I believe his actions were a credit to Procampur,\" she began and heard the others chorus their agreement.\n\n\"Still,\" said the Thultyrl with a slight smile, \"his appearance when he returned to the camp was far less presentable than is considered proper for an officer of Procampur. Astoundingly so, I was told by several who saw him pass.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, he definitely needs some extra polish, sir. Can't have an officer of Procampur that doesn't actually shine in the sun. Look at him today, not a scrap of shiny armor on him,\" said Ivy, looking Sanval up and down. \"But he's not nearly as scruffy as the mercenaries in the lower camp. Still, I can see that the loss of uniform armor to a bugbear is a grave offense. Yet, he has done us some service, and some service to Procampur; for the defeat of Archlis was very much his doing.\" She gestured with her hands, a scale tipping up and then down again. \"How about we pay his fines for him?\" she concluded.\n\n\"That would be an acceptable solution and most comforting to have a little gold returned to us,\" murmured Beriall, who clutched the long list of claims given to him by Ivy. He kept pulling it out of his sleeve and checking it again. It was the most remarkably detailed document. Beriall intended to have it placed in its own niche in the library when he got home, in the section painted red and labeled \"Fraud.\"\n\n\"Gold is such a common thing and most certainly not worthy of a discerning ruler like the Thultyrl,\" said Ivy. She heard Sanval choke behind her at her insolence, and Beriall give a little moan of disappointment. The Thultyrl only looked amused.\n\nIvy held up the battered spellbook that Kid had stolen from Archlis.\n\n\"It is one of a kind,\" she said. \"A rare volume for one of the greatest libraries ever to be built.\"\n\nBeriall rustled forward and took the book from Ivy's hand. He turned the pages slowly. \"There are some interesting runes here,\" he said slowly. \"Most unusual, sire.\" Pausing, he ran one plump finger down the center of the book. \"And some missing pages.\"\n\n\"Well, it may have been slightly damaged dropping off a wall and so on,\" said Ivy.\n\n\"And what do you ask in return?\" said the Thultyrl.\n\n\"Finely polished and fitted armor is fairly common in your city\u2014the type of thing that every gentleman in Procampur usually has, am I right?\"\n\nThe Thultyrl said nothing, but he looked suspicious.\n\n\"And the book is so very uncommon and thus more costly. And, really, it will have great historical significance in the years to come. Snatched from the villainous magelord, just before the walls fell on him. The sort of thing that bards write ballads about,\" Ivy reasoned. \"Repaying the fine losing common Procampur armor could be seen as a partial payment on such a treasure.\"\n\n\"With the book being so exceptional,\" murmured Mumchance, not looking up from his design for a new wall for Tsurlagol.\n\n\"And gotten with a certain amount of fighting on our part,\" pointed out Zuzzara.\n\n\"And cunning,\" added Kid.\n\n\"It is a tome of magical mysteries,\" added Gunderal.\n\n\"Very old and truly unusual, most illustrious liege,\" finished Ivy, who kept her face serene. She waited. Sometimes, silence was the best bargaining tactic.\n\n\"Not another bill,\" sighed Beriall.\n\n\"We doubt that even the Siegebreakers would be so bold,\" said the Thultyrl with a significant look at the group.\n\n\"Of course not, sire,\" said Ivy, maintaining her poise. \"We were just hoping to obtain some digging rights along with a pardon for Captain Sanval's unfortunate loan of armor to a bugbear.\"\n\nSanval's eyes widened. Ivy smiled at him and laid her finger casually against her lips for a second.\n\n\"Where the wall fell?\" the Thultyrl asked.\n\n\"Yes, just the west fields would be fine,\" said Ivy. \"We are seeking to recover lost gear, that sort of thing. But you know how it is after the end of the siege. Confusion, lawlessness, looting. We would not like to be accused of illegal looting. Just a nice short and simple legal contract, making anything that we recover legally ours. The law being so important and all.\"\n\nThe Thultyrl still looked suspicious, but he nodded and beckoned a scribe to him. A few quick lines were scribbled on a piece of parchment. Hot wax was applied to the bottom of the document and sealed with the Thultyrl's own stamp.\n\nIvy glanced at the oblivious Osteroric, another mercenary but one who had landed on the losing side. Sanval was also staring at the bugbear. That Procampur sensibility probably was pricking him, telling him that he had some type of debt of honor there. After all, the creature had let him escape often enough. Sanval glanced at her. She calculated the costs of feeding a bugbear and sighed. \"And perhaps we could have a detail of prisoners? Like that one and any bugbear that looks like him. To help with the digging?\"\n\n\"As you request,\" said the Thultyrl. \"But the expense of their care shall be your responsibility.\"\n\n\"I assumed so.\" With luck, the stupid creature would run away as soon as they found his brother, but the friendly, eager look on his furry face did not bode well. He looked a lot like Wiggles when she got a new bone.\n\nBeriall took the scroll from the scribe and personally handed it to Ivy. \"Some day,\" he said to her, \"I hope that you will come to Procampur and teach our young scholars about proper accounting. I think it might improve our city's wealth in ways that we never dreamed.\"\n\n\"I am flattered,\" said Ivy. \"I am just a simple mercenary who knows how to make three and three add to six.\"\n\n\"Or even seven and eight.\" Beriall felt the bill tucked safely in his sleeve. It was an astonishing document, most worthy of preservation.\n\n\"You have our invitation to come to Procampur some day,\" said the Thultyrl, signaling forward the next group of petitioners. \"Perhaps when you are done with your digging.\" And, for the first and last time in front of Ivy, he dropped the royal \"we\" and added in the eager tones of a young man who liked hunting as much as law-writing, \"I would be interested in hearing more about your adventures underground.\"\n\n\"You are both generous and kind, sire,\" said Ivy. Then she gave the Thultyrl the most elaborate court bow that her bard mother had taught her, hand on heart in a sincere gesture of respect. When she straightened up, she saw that even Sanval looked impressed. She didn't know why he should stand there blinking like that. It wasn't as if she'd been raised by orcs in the wilderness; she had told him that she knew how to behave when she had to. Restraining the urge to whistle some startling and scandalous tune just to see if she could make the Procampurs' ears turn red, Ivy gracefully drew back and let the next group of petitioners claim the Thultyrl's attention."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "Outside the Thultyrl's pavilion, Ivy paused. The others hurried ahead to collect their shovels, sweeping Sanval away with them as they pulled him along in a swirl of amiable bickering stronger than any iron chain. Mumchance and Zuzzara were already arguing with Gunderal and Kid about the best way to dig down to the crypt full of jewels. Ivy just hoped they didn't say the words \"Moaning Diamond\" or \"buckets of gems\" too loudly or too often. She didn't want anyone else to get the idea that there was still treasure to be found in the ruins of Tsurlagol. Of course, she did have the only royal permit, signed by the Thultyrl himself, to dig and retain anything that she might find in the fields outside Tsurlagol's western wall.\n\nIvy watched them go, lit by that little aura of affection that always surrounded them in her view\u2014even silly, fluffy Wiggles happily dancing around their ankles and doing her yippy best to trip them up and send them tumbling down the hill. She reflected with relief that she had gotten away with everything that she wanted. Truly amazing, she decided, and she wondered if she should waste any more coin on a temple tribute. After all, the gods and goddesses had plenty of worshippers and priests and temples stuffed with gifts, and it seemed silly to distract them from truly needy prayers with her minor concerns.\n\nFrom where she stood, the broken wall of Tsurlagol was clearly visible, as were the swirls of Procampur's army and mixed mercenaries going down the harbor road, out into the wooded hills, and back to Procampur. There would be days of running down what was left of Fottergrim's horde, messages going out to all the little kingdoms in the Vast that another orc threat had been destroyed, and even more messages to dwarf enclaves and human cities that there was once again building work to be done in Tsurlagol.\n\nThe sun glinted on the pretty little lake that had spread out from the destruction of the western wall. In less than a day, the water level had already dropped considerably. Gunderal had speculated that the river was returning to its old course, now that her spell was fading away and no longer pulling it into the underground ruins. Ivy hoped that she was right. It would be easier to find the Moaning Diamond and that treasure-filled crypt if they were not underwater.\n\nThe Pearl rustled up to her. \"You did very well,\" she said, startling Ivy out of her contemplation of treasure hunting beneath Tsurlagol.\n\n\"We took some chances and got lucky.\"\n\n\"Chance is less random than you believe.\"\n\n\"It is odd, you know, that the Thultyrl did not start healing until today,\" said Ivy, trying to fill the silence, glancing at the Pearl. \"There must have been some poison in that wound to keep him so weak. Or maybe it was a spell. I wonder if Fottergrim had Archlis send some curse against the Thultyrl.\"\n\nThe Pearl's face was without expression\u2014a proper face for a Procampur lady\u2014as she watched the hubbub on the plain below. \"The Thultyrl was supposed to die in his twenty-sixth year, after a great duel with Fottergrim at the base of that wall. Dead so young and with so much left unaccomplished. What do I care if Gruumsh wanted to raise another warlord to unite the orcs? My Thultyrl will build a great library. His codex will serve as a model for other cities and their lawmakers.\"\n\nIvy looked at her own hands, the wounds easily vanished by that handsome cleric in Procampur's hospice tent. Every bruise, every ache, even that odd little kink in her left big toe, dismissed by the strong magic held by Procampur's healers. She knew that even better healers would have been tending the Thultyrl throughout the summer. But the best of them probably could not combat the magic of a woman who had ruled the wizards of Procampur for three generations. Especially if they did not suspect what she was doing. \"You kept his wound from healing so he could not take to the field. You changed his destiny.\"\n\n\"I spun his fate as I could,\" said the Pearl. \"I also gave you what luck I could.\"\n\nRemembering the Pearl's tap on her harper's token when the Pearl handed back her glove, Ivy glanced at the gauntlet tucked so carelessly into her belt. Had the Pearl changed the little silver leaf? Enhanced it with a little more luck than it usually carried? While she had been wearing it, a certain floating corpse had drifted into her grasp, and a sword thrown in desperation had lodged in a monster's throat, among other lucky coincidences.\n\n\"I should thank you then?\" asked Ivy. \"For all my luck?\"\n\n\"Luck only goes so far,\" replied the Pearl. \"It takes courage and it takes skill to use luck wisely.\"\n\nIvy bowed, a sincere acknowledgment of gratitude to a woman whose powers she barely comprehended. As far as she knew, very few could dice with destiny and win. \"It takes a great deal of audacity to challenge the gods, even gods like Gruumsh,\" said Ivy, with real admiration in her voice.\n\n\"Oh, I am a red-roof girl,\" sang the Pearl very softly in her funny deep voice and winked at Ivy with a wicked smile.\n\n\"And we red-roof girls do have a soft spot for men from Procampur,\" said Ivy, startled into a moment of enlightenment that was less than polite.\n\n\"It's the armor,\" admitted the Pearl. \"But it is more than that. It is their belief that they should be doing the right thing whenever they can. Their absolute belief in the value of law.\"\n\n\"Of honor.\"\n\n\"Of good,\" the Pearl concluded. \"That is important. To have rulers who believe that good is the natural order of the world. That is what Procampur needs. And I am pledged to Procampur as truly as the Thultyrl.\"\n\n\"Even if good is not the natural order.\"\n\n\"How do you know that?\"\n\nIvy remembered an argument about the Thieves Guilds with Sanval, and she concluded that every citizen of Procampur was just a little bit crazy when it came to topics like law, honor, and general good. It was an insanity that might just be catching. She rather hoped it would, or that at least it caught in places where she wasn't trying to run some scheme or other. If sieges went out of style, she would need to find a new line of work. \"I wish him well, your Thultyrl. A long and a happy life writing laws and building his library.\"\n\n\"He will have it,\" promised the Pearl with the same placid tone that she used to describe how she would boil Fottergrim's head. \"Even if I have to twist fate every day into a new pattern.\"\n\nSanval was waiting for Ivy when she reached her tent. All of their gear was right where they had left it. No thieves had dared disturb the pack of panting dogs that had distributed themselves on top of their bags and boxes. The whole pack greeted her return with thumping tails. Everyone but Sanval was rummaging through their stuff, gathering up tools and looking for food. The Thultyrl's people had fed them, but everyone was packing extra snacks into their clothing. After all, you never knew when you might drop down a hole and feel a little hungry.\n\nIvy started into her tent to look for a tin of sweetmeats that she thought she had left there. Sanval caught her arm as she passed and hastily let go when she stopped. The tips of his ears were slightly pink, but he also had that determined air about him. He was going to ask a question even if the answer was guaranteed to embarrass him. She was beginning to feel quite comfortable with those almost expressions of his.\n\n\"Why did you speak for me in front of the Thultyrl? Why rescue me so many times below ground? Why trade away that spellbook?\"\n\nShe could have told him the truth. About how she could no more leave him behind than she could let Wiggles be eaten by a snake. Except, of course, her feelings for Sanval were even more complicated than that, and she needed some time to unravel them in her own mind. Once, when she was fifteen and setting out to be the most terrible and fearsome fighter in the Realms, she swore that she would never become too fond of anyone\u2014she wasn't going to have some tragic love story turn her into a tree like her father. Except somewhere along the way, she had picked up all these odd attachments\u2014more attachments than the Pearl had pearls. Furthermore, Ivy had a suspicion that her fondness for a certain noble character who owned an unbelievable amount of clean linen would be more troublesome than all those other attachments combined. It might even be the kind of feeling that made you put down roots in one way or another.\n\nStill, Sanval had saved her life more than once, and she did owe him an answer. After all, running away had never got her anything but being stuck under a dead horse, as Mumchance pointed out all too often.\n\n\"Friends are important,\" she finally said.\n\nHe had a new expression on his face, one she hadn't seen before. Sort of pleased, sort of disappointed.\n\n\"It was the right and proper thing to do. You should appreciate that, being from Procampur.\" Ivy noticed that everyone had stopped hunting through their bags, and they were listening very casually to their conversation. \"Anyway, Gunderal could not translate Toram's spellbook\u2014even Kid could not puzzle out what language it was in. Some type of code, we think. Basically worthless to us, except for the maps, and we tore those out before we gave it away.\" Sanval's expression was shifting further toward the disappointed side. Ivy hurried on, wondering why the others were all rolling their eyes at her. \"The Moaning Diamond, on the other hand, would be very useful to us. Certainly it would lower the risk of our trade, seal the deal as Siegebreakers, if you know what I mean. Mumchance is sure that he knows where to dig to recover it. Want to help?\"\n\nOf course, she knew that he would refuse. He was too proper a gentleman to go treasure hunting underground.\n\nHe startled her by nodding. \"Well, why not?\"\n\nZuzzara and Gunderal laughed at Ivy's expression.\n\n\"Pay up, pay up,\" said Zuzzara to Mumchance and Kid. \"Told you that he was going to stick around.\"\n\n\"Just remember the rules, Ivy,\" said Gunderal.\n\n\"You brought him back, my dear,\" said Kid.\n\n\"You're responsible for him,\" added Mumchance.\n\n\"If he makes a mess,\" concluded Zuzzara.\n\n\"Him?\" said Ivy staring at Sanval. All of his bright shining armor might be missing, and he might be wearing his second-best pair of boots, but he still appeared cleaner and neater than any fighter she had ever met. Procampur men!\n\nSanval stared back at her, looking carefully at the free-floating ponytail of golden hair waving on the top of her head and her generally well-groomed appearance. \"How about I keep her cleaned up and looking like that?\" Sanval asked the others.\n\n\"Could you?\" asked Zuzzara.\n\n\"Would you?\" asked Gunderal.\n\n\"It seems like a very fair trade, my dears,\" said Kid with his pointed little smile.\n\n\"I have to agree,\" said Mumchance.\n\n\"Hey!\" said Ivy, because she was their captain, and she occasionally did deserve just a bit more respect (not that she ever got it). Still, she couldn't stop grinning.\n\nZuzzara, Gunderal, Mumchance, and Kid bent their heads together. There was a buzz of whispers.\n\n\"We would appreciate your help in keeping Ivy scrubbed,\" said Mumchance finally. \"There's a spare room at the farm if you want to visit.\"\n\n\"I might,\" Sanval said directly to Ivy. \"If you come to Procampur.\"\n\n\"I might,\" said Ivy with just the same emphasis. She cocked her head forward, got almost nose to nose, but he did not back down. He just narrowed his eyes and gave her that typical Sanval look of noble composure. It was, she had to admit, a very impressive and rather attractive expression. One of these days, she was going to figure out how to do it herself. After all, she was the daughter of a couple of heroes\u2014a bard and a druid who rattled the world in their own way\u2014and in some places that made her just as much a lady as Sanval was a gentleman. Still, she wondered how stuck he was on Procampur's views about people like herself. \"What color are your roof tiles today?\"\n\n\"I think,\" said Sanval with a faint but distinct smile, \"I think that they should be red.\"\n\n\"Humans! This flirting back and forth is going to take forever. Come on,\" said Mumchance to the others. The dwarf whistled for Wiggles and the rest of his dogs. \"Let's go for a run, puppies! We have some digging to do.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Dirk Pitt 12) Inca Gold",
        "author": "Clive Cussler",
        "genres": [
            "adventure"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "Dr. Shannon Kelsey: A respected archaeologist, a woman of fierce independence and beauty, her passion for the great ancient mysteries has brought her to the mountains ofPeru, where she stands on the threshold of an astounding discovery-- and on the verge of death. . .\n\nJoseph Zolar: Within a labyrinth of legitimate business enterprises, he has created a vast international empire built on illegal trade in antiquities. Now he has set his sights on the ultimate prize-golden antiquities worth almost a billion dollars-- and from his lavish headquarters he coolly signs the death warrant of anyone who dares to challenge him. . .\n\nCyrus Sarason: Zolar's brother and partner, he takes a more personal, up-close approach to the family business. And when fortunes are at stake, he prefers to get his hands dirty-- often putting them to lethal use. . .\n\nTupac Amaru: Feared as a revolutionary but driven by greed, he has cut a swath of destruction throughout the hill country of the Amazonas, his cruel black eyes as empty as his heart-- but after a savage encounter with DIRK PITT, Amaru dreams only of vengeance. . .\n\nDavid Gaskill: An agent for U.S. Customs, he specializes in tracking down smugglers of art and artifacts.\n\nLiving only for hot jazz and a hot case, he loves the game and the intrigue-- and now has the opportunity of a lifetime-- a chance to penetrate and smash a powerful crime family. . .\n\nCongresswoman Loren Smith: Stylish and seductive, with knockout violet eyes, she has happily succumbed to the mesmerizing charm of DIRK PITT. But she becomes hostage to Zolar's greedy scheme-- a pawn in a brutal game that threatens to turn deadly. . ."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE MYSTERIOUS INTRUDERS",
                "text": "[ A.D. 1533 ]\n\n[ A Forgotten Sea ]\n\nThey came from the south with the morning sun, shimmering like ghosts in a desert mirage as they slipped across the sun-sparkled water. The rectangular cotton sails on the flotilla of rafts sagged lifelessly under a placid azure sky. No commands were spoken as the crews dipped and pulled their paddles in eerie silence. Overhead, a hawk swooped and soared as if guiding the steersmen toward a barren island that rose from the center of the inland sea.\n\nThe rafts were constructed of reed bundles bound and turned up at both ends. Six of these bundles made up one hull, which was keeled and beamed with bamboo. The raised prow and stern were shaped like serpents with dog heads, their jaws tilted toward the sky as if baying at the moon.\n\nThe lord in command of the fleet sat on a thronelike chair perched on the pointed bow of the lead raft.\n\nHe wore a cotton tunic adorned with turquoise platelets and a wool mantle of multicolored embroidery.\n\nHis head was covered with a plumed helmet and a face mask of gold. Ear ornaments, a massive necklace, and arm bracelets also gleamed yellow under the sun. Even his shoes were fashioned from gold. What made the sight even more astonishing was that the crew members were adorned no less magnificently.\n\nAlong the shoreline of the fertile land surrounding the sea, the local native society watched in fear and wonder as the foreign fleet intruded into their waters. There were no attempts at defending their territory against invaders. They were simple hunters and foragers who trapped rabbits, caught fish, and harvested a few seeded plants and nuts. Theirs was an archaic culture, curiously unlike their neighbors to the east and south who built widespread empires. They lived and died without ever constructing massive temples to a race of gods and now watched in fascination at the display of wealth and power that moved across the water. As one mind they saw the fleet as a miraculous appearance of warrior gods from the spirit world.\n\nThe mysterious strangers took no notice of the people crowding the shore and continued paddling toward their destination. They were on a sanctified mission and ignored all distractions. They propelled their craft impassively, not one head turned to acknowledge their stunned audience.\n\nThey headed straight for the steep, rock-blanketed slopes of a small mountain making up an island that rose 200 meters (656 feet) from the surface of the sea. It was uninhabited and mostly barren of plant life.\n\nTo the local people who lived on the mainland it was known as the dead giant because the crest of the long, low mountain resembled the body of a woman lying in wakeless sleep. The sun added to the illusion by giving it a glow of unearthly radiance.\n\nSoon the lustrously attired crewmen grounded their rafts on a small pebble-strewn beach that opened into a narrow canyon. They lowered their sails, woven with huge figures of supernatural animals, symbols that added to the hushed fear and reverence of the native onlookers, and began unloading large reed baskets and ceramic jars onto the beach.\n\nThroughout the long day, the cargo was stacked in an immense but orderly pile. In the evening, as the sun fell to the west, all view of the island from the shore was cut off. Only the faint flicker of lights could be seen through the darkness. But in the dawn of the new day, the fleet was still snug on shore and the great mound of cargo was unmoved.\n\nOn top of the island mountain much labor was being expended by stone workers assaulting a huge rock. Over the next six days and nights, using bronze bars and chisels, they laboriously pecked and hammered the stone until it slowly took on the shape of a fierce, winged jaguar with the head of a serpent. When the final cutting and grinding were finished, the grotesque beast appeared to leap from the great rock it was carved upon. During the sculpting process the cargo of baskets and jars was slowly removed until there was no longer any trace.\n\nThen one morning the inhabitants looked across the water at the island and found it empty of life. The enigmatic people from the south, along with their fleet of rafts, had disappeared, having sailed away under cover of darkness. Only the imposing stone jaguar/serpent, its teeth curved in a bed of bared fangs and with slitted eyes surveying the vast terrain of endless hills beyond the small sea, remained to mark their passage.\n\nCuriosity quickly outweighed fear. The next afternoon, four men from the main village along the coast of the inland sea, their courage boosted by a potent native brew, pushed off in a dugout canoe and paddled across the water to the island to investigate. After landing on the little beach, they were observed entering the narrow canyon leading inside the mountain. All day and into the next their friends and relatives anxiously awaited their return. But the men were never seen again. Even their canoe vanished.\n\nThe primitive fear of the local people increased when a great storm suddenly swept the small sea and turned it into a raging tempest. The sun blinked out as the sky went blacker than anyone could ever remember. The frightening darkness was accompanied by a terrible wind that shrieked and churned the sea to froth and devastated the coastal villages. It was as though a war of the heavens had erupted. The violence lashed the shoreline with unbelievable fury. The natives were certain the gods of the sky and darkness were led by the jaguar/serpent to punish them for their intrusion. They whispered of a curse against those who dared trespass on the island.\n\nThen as abruptly as it came, the storm passed over the horizon and the wind died to a baffling stillness.\n\nThe brilliance of the sun burst onto a sea as calm as before. Then gulls appeared and wheeled in a circle above an object that had been washed onto the sandy beach of the eastern seashore. When the people saw the unmoving form lying in the tide line, they approached warily and stopped, then cautiously moved forward and peered down to examine it. They gasped as they realized it was the dead body of one of the strangers from the south. He wore only an ornate, embroidered tunic. All trace of golden face mask, helmet, and bracelets was gone.\n\nThose present at the macabre scene stared in shock at the appearance of the corpse. Unlike the dark-skinned natives with their jet black hair, the dead man had white skin and blond hair. His eyes were staring sightless and blue. If standing, he would have stood a good half-head taller than the astonished people studying him.\n\nTrembling with fear, they tenderly carried him to a canoe and gently lowered him inside. Then two of the bravest men were chosen to transport the body to the island. Upon reaching the beach they quickly laid him on the sand and paddled furiously back to shore. Years after those who witnessed the remarkable event had died, the bleached skeleton could still be observed partly embedded in the sand as a morbid warning to stay off the island.\n\nIt was whispered the golden warriors' guardian, the winged jaguar/serpent, had devoured the inquisitive men who trespassed its sanctuary, and no one ever again dared risk its wrath by setting foot on the island. There was an eerie quality, almost a ghostliness about the island. It became a sacred place that was only mentioned in hushed voices and never visited.\n\nWho were the warriors in gold and where did they come from? Why had they sailed into the inland sea and what did they do there? The witnesses had to accept what they had seen, no explanation was possible. Without knowledge the myths were born. Legends were created and nurtured when the surrounding land was shaken by an immense earthquake that destroyed the shoreline villages. When, after five days, the tremors finally died away, the great inland sea had vanished, leaving only a thick ring of shells on what was once a shoreline.\n\nThe mysterious intruders soon wove their way into religious tradition and became gods. Through time, stories of their sudden manifestation and disappearance grew and then eventually faded until they were but a bit of vague supernatural folklore handed down from generation to generation, by a people who lived in a haunted land where unexplained phenomena hovered like smoke over a campfire."
            },
            {
                "title": "CATACLYSM",
                "text": "[ March 1, 1578 ]\n\n[ West Coast of Peru ]\n\nCaptain Juan de Anton, a brooding man with castilian green eyes and a precisely trimmed black beard, peered through his spyglass at the strange ship following in his wake and raised his eyebrows in mild surprise. A chance encounter, he wondered, or a planned interception?\n\nOn the final lap of a voyage from Callao de Lima, de Anton had not expected to meet other treasure galleons bound for Panama, where the king's wealth would be packed aboard mules for a journey across the isthmus, and then shipped over the Atlantic to the coffers of Seville. He perceived a trace of French design in the hull and rigging of the stranger trailing his wake a league and a half astern. If he had been sailing the Caribbean trade routes to Spain, de Anton would have shunned contact with other ships, but his suspicions cooled slightly when he spied an enormous flag streaming from a tall staff on the stern. Like his own ensign, snapping tautly in the wind, it sported a white background with the rampant red cross of sixteenth-century Spain. Still, he felt a trifle uneasy.\n\nDe Anton turned to his second-in-command and chief pilot, Luis Tomes. \"What do you make of her, Luis?\"\n\nTomes, a tall, clean-shaven Galician, shrugged. \"Too small for a bullion galleon. I judge her to be a wine merchantman out of Valparaiso heading for port in Panama the same as we.\"\n\n\"You do not think there is a possibility she might be an enemy of Spain?\"\n\n\"Impossible. No enemy ships have ever dared attempt the passage through the treacherous labyrinth of the Magellan Strait around South America.\"\n\nReassured, de Anton nodded. \"Since we have no fear of them being French or English, let us put about and greet them.\"\n\nTorres gave the order to the steersman, who sighted his course across the gun deck from under a raised trunk on the deck above. He manhandled a vertical pole that pivoted on a long shaft that turned the rudder. The Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion, the largest and most regal of the Pacific armada treasure galleons, leaned onto her port side and came around on a reverse course to the southwest. Her nine sails filled from a swift, easterly offshore breeze that pushed her 570-ton bulk through the rolling swells at a comfortable five knots.\n\nDespite her majestic lines and the ornate carvings and colorful art designs painted on the sides of her high stern and forecastle, the galleon was a tough customer. Extremely rugged and seaworthy, she was the workhorse of the oceangoing vessels of her time. And if need be, she could slug it out with the best privateers a marauding sea nation could throw at her to defend the precious treasure in her cargo holds.\n\nTo the casual eye, the treasure galleon looked to be a threatening warship bristling with armament, but surveyed from the inside she could not conceal her true purpose as a merchant ship. Her gun decks held ports for nearly fifty four-pound cannon. But lulled by the Spanish belief that the South Seas were their private pond, and the knowledge that none of their ships had ever been attacked or captured by a foreign raider, the Concepcion was lightly armed with only two guns to reduce her tonnage so she could carry heavier cargo.\n\nNow feeling that his ship was in no danger, Captain de Anton casually sat on a small stool and resumed peering through his spyglass at the rapidly approaching ship. It never occurred to him to alert his crew for battle just to be on the safe side.\n\nHe had no certain foreknowledge, not even a vague premonition that the ship he had turned to meet was the Golden Hind, captained by England's indefatigable seadog, Francis Drake, who stood on his quarterdeck and calmly stared back at de Anton through a telescope, with the cold eye of a shark following a trail of blood.\n\n\"Damned considerate of him to come about and meet us,\" muttered Drake, a beady-eyed gamecock of a man with dark red curly hair complemented by a light sandy beard that tapered to a sharp point under a long swooping moustache.\n\n\"The very least he could do after we've chased his wake for the past two weeks,\" replied Thomas Cuttill, sailing master of the Golden Hind.\n\n\"Aye, but she's a prize worth chasing.\"\n\nAlready laden with gold and silver bullion, a small chest of precious stones, and valuable linens and silks after capturing a score of Spanish ships since becoming the first English vessel to sail into the Pacific, the Golden Hind, formerly named the Pelican, pounded through the waves like a beagle after a fox. She was a stout and sturdy vessel with an overall length of about 31 meters (102 feet) and a displacement tonnage of 140. She was a good sailor and answered the helm well. Her hull and masts were far from new, but, after a lengthy refit at Plymouth, she had been made ready for a voyage that was to take her 55,000 kilometers (over 34,000 miles) around the world in thirty-five months, in one of the greatest sea epics of all time.\n\n\"Do you wish to cut across her bow and rake the Spanish jackals?\" Cuttill inquired.\n\nDrake dropped his long telescope, shook his head, and smiled broadly. \"The better part of courtesy would be to trim sail and greet them like proper gentlemen.\"\n\nCuttill stared uncomprehending at his audacious commander. \"But suppose they've put about to give battle?\"\n\n\"Not damned likely her captain has a notion as to who we are.\"\n\n\"She's twice our size,\" Cuttill persisted.\n\n\"According to the sailors we captured at Callao de Lima, the Concepcion carries only two guns. The Hind boasts eighteen.\"\n\n\"Spaniards!\" Cuttill spit. \"They lie worse than the Irish.\"\n\nDrake pointed at the unsuspecting ship approaching bow on. \"Spanish ship captains run rather than fight,\" he reminded his feisty subordinate.\n\n\"Then why not stand off and blast her into submission?\"\n\n\"Not wise to fire our guns and run the risk of sinking her with all her loot.\" Drake clapped a hand on Cuttill's shoulder. \"Not to fear, Thomas. If I scheme a crafty plan, we'll save our powder and rely on stout Englishmen who are spoiling for a good fight.\"\n\nCuttill nodded in understanding. \"You mean to grapple and board her then?\"\n\nDrake nodded. \"We'll be on her decks before her crew can prime a musket. They don't know it yet, but they're sailing into a trap of their own making.\"\n\nSlightly after three in the afternoon, the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion came about on a parallel course to the northwest again and ranged toward the Golden Hind's port quarter. Torres climbed the ladder to his ship's forecastle and shouted across the water.\n\n\"What ship are you?\"\n\nNuma de Silva, a Portuguese pilot Drake had appropriated after capturing de Silva's ship off Brazil, replied in Spanish, \"San Pedro de Paula out of Valparaiso.\" The name of a vessel Drake had seized three weeks earlier.\n\nExcept for a few crew members who were dressed as Spanish sailors, Drake had hidden the mass of his men below decks and armed them with protective coats of mail and an arsenal of pikes, pistols, muskets, and cutlasses. Grappling hooks attached to stout ropes were stowed along the bulwarks on the top deck. Crossbowmen were secretly stationed in the fighting tops above the mainyards of the masts.\n\nDrake forbade firearms in the fighting tops where musket fire could easily ignite the sails into sheets of flame. The mainsails were hauled up and furled to give the bowmen an unobscured line of vision. Only then did he relax and patiently wait for the moment to attack. The fact that his Englishmen numbered eighty-eight against the Spanish crew of nearly two hundred bothered him not at all. It was not the first time nor the last he would ignore superior odds. His renowned fight against the Spanish Armada in the English Channel was yet to come.\n\nFrom his view, de Anton saw no unusual activity on the decks of the seemingly friendly and businesslike ship. The crew looked to be going about their duties without undue curiosity toward the Concepcion. The captain, he observed, leaned casually against the railing of the quarterdeck and saluted de Anton. The newcomer seemed deceptively innocent as it unobtrusively angled closer to the big treasure galleon.\n\nWhen the gap between the two ships had narrowed to 30 meters (97 feet), Drake gave an almost imperceptible nod, and his ship's finest sharpshooter, who lay concealed on the gun deck, fired his musket and struck the Concepcion's steersman in the chest. In unison the crossbowmen in the fighting tops began picking off the Spaniards manning the sails. Then, with the galleon losing control of its steerageway, Drake ordered his helmsman to run the Hind alongside the bigger vessel's high sloping hull.\n\nAs the ships crushed together and their beams and planking groaned in protest, Drake roared out, \"Win her for good Queen Bess and England, my boys!\"\n\nGrappling hooks soared across the railings, clattered and caught on the Concepcion's bulwarks and rigging, binding the two vessels together in a death grip. Drake's crew poured onto the galleon's deck, screaming like banshees. His bandsmen added to the terror by beating on drums and blaring away on trumpets. Musket balls and arrows showered the dumbfounded Spanish crew as they stood frozen in shock.\n\nIt was over minutes after it began. A third of the galleon's crew fell dead or wounded without firing a shot in their defense. Stunned by confusion and fear they dropped to their knees in submission as Drake's crew of boarders brushed them aside and charged below decks.\n\nDrake rushed up to Captain de Anton, pistol in one hand, cutlass in the other. \"Yield in the name of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth of England!\" he bellowed above the din.\n\nDazed and incredulous, de Anton surrendered his ship. \"I yield,\" he shouted back. \"Take mercy on my crew.\"\n\n\"I do not deal in atrocities,\" Drake informed him.\n\nAs the English took control of the galleon, the dead were thrown overboard and the surviving crew and their wounded were confined in a hold. Captain de Anton and his officers were escorted across a plank laid between the two ships onto the deck of the Golden Hind. Then, with the characteristic courtesy that Drake always displayed toward his captives, he gave Captain de Anton a personally guided tour of the Golden Hind. Afterward he treated all the galleon's officers to a gala dinner, complete with musicians playing stringed instruments, solid silver tableware, and the finest of recently liberated Spanish wines.\n\nEven while they were dining, Drake's crewmen turned the ships to the west and sailed beyond Spanish sea lanes. The following morning they heaved to, trimming the sails so that the ship's speed fell off but they maintained enough headway to keep the bows up to the seas. The next four days were spent transferring the fantastic treasure trove from the cargo holds of the Concepcion to the Golden Hind. The vast plunder included thirteen chests of royal silver plate and coins, eighty pounds of gold, twenty-six tons of silver bullion, hundreds of boxes containing pearls and jewels, mostly emeralds, and a great quantity of food stores such as fruits and sugar. The catch was to be the richest prize taken by a privateer for several decades.\n\nThere was also a hold full of precious and exotic Inca artifacts that were being transported to Madrid for the personal pleasure of His Catholic Majesty, Philip II, the King of Spain. Drake studied the artifacts with great astonishment. He had never seen anything like them. Reams of intricately embroidered Andean textiles filled one section of the hold from deck to ceiling. Hundreds of crates contained intricately sculpted stone and ceramic figures mingled with highly crafted masterpieces of carved jade, superb mosaics of turquoise and shell, all plundered from sacred religious temples of the Andean civilizations overrun by Francisco Pizarro and succeeding armies of gold-hungry conquistadors. It was a glimpse of magnificent artistry that Drake never dreamed existed. Oddly, the item that interested him most was not a masterwork of three-dimensional art inlaid with precious stones but rather a simple box carved from jade with the mask of a man for a lid. The masked lid sealed so perfectly the interior was nearly airtight. Inside was a multicolored tangle of long cords of different thicknesses with over a hundred knots.\n\nDrake took the box back to his cabin and spent the better part of a day studying the intricate display of cords tied to lesser cords in vibrantly dyed colors with the knots tied at strategic intervals. A gifted navigator and an amateur artist, Drake realized that it was either a mathematical instrument or a method of recording dates as a calendar. Intrigued by the enigma, he tried unsuccessfully to determine the meaning behind the colored strands and the different disposition of the knots. The solution was as obscure to him as to a native trying to interpret latitude and longitude on a navigational chart.\n\nDrake finally gave up and wrapped the jade box in linen. Then he called for Cuttill.\n\n\"The Spaniard rides higher in the water with most of her riches relieved,\" Cuttill announced jovially as he entered the captain's cabin.\n\n\"You have not touched the artworks?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"As you ordered, they remain in the galleon's hold.\"\n\nDrake rose from his worktable and walked over to the large window and stared at the Concepcion.\n\nThe galleon's sides were still wet several feet above her present waterline. \"The art treasures were meant for King Philip,\" he said. \"Better they should go to England and be presented to Queen Bess.\"\n\n\"The Hind is already dangerously overladen,\" Cuttill protested. \"By the time another five tons are loaded aboard, the sea will be lapping at our lower gunports, and she won't answer the helm. She'll founder sure as heaven if we take her back through the tempest of Magellan Strait.\"\n\n\"I don't intend to return through the strait,\" said Drake. \"My plan is to head north in search of a northwest passage to England. If that is not successful, I'll follow in Magellan's wake across the Pacific and around Africa.\"\n\n\"The Hind will never see England, not with her cargo holds busting their seams.\"\n\n\"We'll jettison the bulk of the silver on Cano Island off Ecuador, where we can salvage it on a later voyage. The art goods will remain on the Conception.\"\n\n\"But what of your plan to give them to the queen?\"\n\n\"That still stands,\" Drake assured him. \"You, Thomas, will take ten men from the Hind and sail the galleon to Plymouth.\"\n\nCuttill spread his hands in anguish. \"I can't possibly sail a vessel her size with only ten men, not through heavy seas.\"\n\nDrake walked back to his worktable and tapped a pair of brass dividers on a circle marked on a chart. \"On charts I found in Captain de Anton's cabin I've indicated a small bay on the coast north of here that should be free of Spaniards. You will sail there and cast off the Spanish officers and all wounded crewmen. Impress twenty of the remaining able-bodied seamen to man the vessel. I'll see you're supplied with more than enough weapons to preserve command and prevent any attempt to wrest control of the ship.\"\n\nCuttill knew it was useless to object. Debating with a stubborn man like Drake was a lost cause. He accepted his assignment with a resigned shrug. \"I will, of course, do as you command.\"\n\nDrake's face was confident, his eyes warm. \"If anyone can sail a Spanish galleon up to the dock at Plymouth, Thomas, you can. I suspect you'll knock the eyes out of the queen's head when you present her with your cargo.\"\n\n\"I would rather leave that piece of work to you, Captain.\"\n\nDrake gave Cuttill a friendly pat on one shoulder. \"Not to fear, my old friend. I'm ordering you to be standing dockside with a wench on each arm, waiting to greet me when the Hind arrives home.\"\n\nAt sunrise the following morning Cuttill ordered the crewmen to cast off the lines binding the two ships.\n\nSafely tucked under one arm was the linen-wrapped box that Drake had directed him to personally give to the queen. He carried it to the captain's cabin and locked it inside a cabinet in the captain's quarters.\n\nThen he returned to deck and took command of the Nuestra Senora de la Conception as she drifted away from the Golden Hind. Sails were set under a dazzling crimson sun the superstitious crews on both ships solemnly described as red as a bleeding heart. To their primitive way of thinking it was considered a bad omen.\n\nDrake and Cuttill exchanged final waves as the Golden Hind set a course to the northeast. Cuttill watched the smaller ship until she was hull down over the horizon. He did not share Drake's confidence.\n\nA deep feeling of foreboding settled in the pit of his stomach.\n\nSeveral days later, after dumping many tons of silver ingots and coins off Cano Island to lighten her draft, the sturdy Hind and the intrepid Drake sailed north. . . to what would be known more than two centuries later as Vancouver Island. . . before turning west across the Pacific on their epic voyage.\n\nFar to the south the Conception tacked and headed due east, making landfall and reaching the bay marked on the Spanish chart by Drake sometime late the next evening. The anchor was dropped and the watch lights set.\n\nDaylight brought the sun shining down over the Andes as Cuttill and his crew discovered a large native village of more than a thousand inhabitants, surrounded by a large bay. Without wasting time, he ordered his men to begin ferrying the Spanish officers and their wounded to shore. Twenty of the best seamen among the survivors were offered ten times their Spanish pay to help sail the galleon to England where they were promised to be set free upon landing. All twenty gladly signed on.\n\nCuttill was standing on the gun deck overseeing the landing operation just after midday when the ship began to vibrate as though a giant hand were rocking it. Everyone immediately stared at the long streamlike ensigns tied to the top of the masts. But only the ends of their tails fluttered under a slight whisper of wind. Then every eye turned to shore where a great cloud of dust rose from the base of the Andes and appeared to be moving toward the sea. A frightening thundering sound increased to deafening proportions along with a tremendous convulsion of the earth. As the crew gawked in stunned fascination, the hills east of the village seemed to rise and fall like breakers rolling on a shallow shore.\n\nThe dust cloud descended on the village and swallowed it. Above the uproar came the screams and cries of the villagers and the crashing sounds of their rock and adobe mud houses as they shook apart and crumbled into ruin. None of the crew had ever experienced an earthquake, and few were even aware of such a phenomenon. Half the Protestant English and every one of the Catholic Spaniards on the galleon dropped to their knees and began praying fervently to God for deliverance.\n\nIn minutes the dust cloud passed over the ship and dispersed out to sea. They all stared uncomprehendingly at what had been a thriving village bustling with activity. Now it was nothing but flattened ruins. Cries came from those trapped under the debris. A later estimate would show that less than fifty of the local inhabitants survived. The Spaniards on shore ran up and down the beach in panic, shouting and begging to be brought back to the ship. Collecting his senses, Cuttill ignored the pleas, ran to the railing and scanned the surrounding sea. Beyond showing a mild chop, the water appeared indifferent to the nightmare tragedy in the village.\n\nSuddenly desperate to escape the cataclysm on shore, Cuttill began shouting orders to get the galleon underway. The Spanish prisoners cooperated wholeheartedly, working alongside the English to unfurl the sails and pull in the anchor. Meanwhile, the survivors from the village crowded the beach, imploring the galleon's crew to return and help them rescue their relatives from the shattered wreckage and carry them aboard the ship to safety. The seamen turned deaf ears to the pleas, concerned only with their own preservation.\n\nSuddenly, another earthquake shook the land, accompanied by an even more thunderous roar. The terrain began to undulate as if some monster were shaking a giant carpet. This time the sea slowly rolled back, stranding the Concepcion and exposing the floor of the sea. The seamen, none of whom knew how to swim, possessed an unnatural fear of what was under the water. Now they stared wonderingly at the sight of thousands of fish flipping about like wingless birds amid the rocks and corals where they had been left high and dry by the retreating sea. Sharks, squid, and a rainbow of tropical fish all mingled together in their death throes.\n\nA constant flow of tremors moved the earth as the submarine quake caused crustal fracturing, collapsing the seafloor and creating a vast depression. Then it was the sea's turn to go crazy as it swept in from all sides to fill the hole. The water piled up in a gigantic countersurge with incredible speed. Millions of tons of pure destruction rose higher and higher until its crest reached 40 meters (157 feet) high, a phenomenon that would later become known as a tsunami.\n\nThere was no time for the helpless men to clutch a solid object for support, no time for the devout to pray. Paralyzed and speechless in fear of the green and frothwhite mountain of water rising before their eyes, they could only stand and watch it rush toward them with the ungodly sounds of a thousand hells.\n\nOnly Cuttill had the presence of mind to run under the protecting deck over the tiller and wrap his limbs around its long wooden shaft.\n\nBow on to the colossal wall of water, the Conception arched and soared vertically toward the curling crest. Moments later she was engulfed in a boiling turbulence as nature ran berserk.\n\nNow that the mighty torrent had the Concepcion in its grasp, it hurled the galleon toward the devastated shore at tremendous speed. Most of the crew on the open decks were snatched away and never seen again. The poor souls on the beach and those struggling to free themselves from the wreckage of the village were inundated as if a sudden gush of water had rushed over an ants' nest. One second they were there, the next they were gone, mere bits and pieces of smashed debris being hurled toward the Andes.\n\nBuried under the towering mass of water for what seemed an incredible length of time, Cuttill held his breath until his lungs turned to fire and gripped the tiller as if he were a mutated branch that had grown from it. Then, with every one of her beams howling and creaking at their joints, the tough old ship battled her way back to the surface.\n\nHow long she was swept through the swirling vortex, Cuttill could not remember. The violent surge totally erased what was left of the village. The few drenched men who somehow remained alive on the battered Conception were even further terrorized by the sight of centuries-dead mummies of the ancient Incas rising to the surface and surrounding the ship. Torn by the wave from their graves in some long-forgotten burial ground, the amazingly well-preserved bodies of the dead stared sightlessly at the horrified sailors, who were certain they were being cursed by creatures of the devil.\n\nCuttill attempted to move the tiller as if steering the ship. His was a useless gesture as the rudder had been ripped off its pintles soon after the wave struck. He clung tenaciously to life, his fear heightened by the mummies that swirled around the galleon.\n\nThe worst was far from over. The mad swirl of the tidal current caused a vortex that spun the galleon with such force the masts went crashing over the sides and the two guns broke their lashings and tumbled about the deck in a wild dance of destruction. One by one the fear-crazed seamen were swept away by the gyrating avalanche of water until only Cuttill was left. The enormous surge smashed and ravaged its way 8 kilometers (5 miles) inland, uprooting and shredding trees until over 100 square kilometers (36 square miles) were utterly devastated. Massive boulders were scattered ahead of the wave's force like small pebbles thrown by a boy's sling. Then at last, as the leviathan of death met the foothills of the Andes it began to lose momentum. Its fury spent, it lapped at the foot of the mountains and finally began to recede with a great sucking sound, leaving in its wake a swath of destruction unknown in recorded history.\n\nCuttill felt the galleon become motionless. He stared across the gun deck covered with fallen rigging and timbers, unable to see another living soul. For nearly an hour he huddled under the tiller, fearing a return of the murderous wave, but the ship remained still and silent. Slowly, stiffly, he made his way to the top of the quarterdeck and surveyed the scene of devastation.\n\nAstoundingly, the Conception sat upright, high and dry in a flattened jungle. He judged her to be almost three leagues from the nearest water. Her survival was due to her rugged construction and the fact she was sailing into the wave when it struck. If she had been sailing away the watery force would have smashed into her high sterncastle and ripped her to kindling. She had endured, but she was a wreck that would never feel the sea beneath her keel again.\n\nFar in the distance, the village had disappeared. All that remained was a wide beach of sand swept free of wreckage. It was as if a thousand people and their homes had never existed. Corpses littered the drenched jungle. To Cuttill they seemed to be scattered everywhere, in some places over 3 'meters deep (10 feet). Many were hanging grotesquely in the twisted branches of the trees. Most had been battered into almost unrecognizable shapes.\n\nCuttill could not believe he was the only human to survive the cataclysm, and yet he failed to see another living soul. He thanked God for his deliverance and prayed for guidance. Then he took stock of his situation. Stranded fourteen thousand nautical miles from England, deep in a part of the world controlled by the Spanish, who would gladly torture and execute a hated English pirate should they lay hands on him, his odds of living a long life were slim indeed. Cuttill saw absolutely no hope of returning home by sea. He decided his only course, one with little probability of success, was to trek over the Andes and work east. Once he reached the Brazilian coast there was always the possibility of meeting up with an English marauder that was raiding Portuguese shipping.\n\nThe following morning he made a litter for his sea chest and filled it with food and water from the ship's galley, bedding, two pistols, a pound of gunpowder, a supply of shot, flint, and steel, a sack of tobacco, a knife, and a Spanish Bible. Then with nothing else but the clothes on his back, Cuttill set off with his litter for the mists hovering over the peaks of the Andes, taking one final look at the forlorn Conception and wondering if perhaps the gods of the Incas were somehow responsible for the catastrophe.\n\nNow they had their sacred relics back, he thought, and they were damned welcome to them. The antique jade box with its strange lid came to mind, and he did not envy the next men who came to steal it.\n\nDrake returned triumphantly to England, arriving at Plymouth on September 26, 1580, with the Golden Hind's holds bulging with spoils. But he found no sign of Thomas Cuttill and the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion. His backers received a 4700 percent profit on their investment and the queen's share became the foundation for future British expansion. During a lavish party on board the Hind at Greenwich, Queen Elizabeth conferred knighthood on Drake.\n\nThe second ship to circumnavigate the world was made a tourist attraction. For three generations she remained on view until finally she either rotted away or burned to the waterline. History doesn't know for certain how it happened, but the Golden Hind vanished into the water of the Thames.\n\nSir Francis Drake continued his exploits for another sixteen years. On a later voyage, he seized the city ports of Santo Domingo and Cartagena and became Her Majesty's Admiral-of-the-Seas. He also served as mayor of Plymouth and a member of Parliament. And then there was his bold attack on the great Spanish Armada in 1588. His end came during an expedition to plunder ports and shipping on the Spanish Main in 1596. After succumbing to dysentery he was sealed in a lead coffin and dropped in the sea near Portobelo, Panama.\n\nBefore his death, hardly a day passed when Drake didn't puzzle over the disappearance of the Conception and the enigma of the mysterious jade box and its knotted cords."
            },
            {
                "title": "BONES AND THRONES",
                "text": "[ October 10, 1998 ]\n\n[ Andes Mountains of Peru ]\n\nThe skeleton reclined in the sediment of the deep pool as if resting on a soft mattress, the cold unwinking eye sockets of the skull staring upward through the liquid gloom toward the surface 36 meters (120 feet) away. There was a horrible vindictive grin set in the teeth as a small water snake thrust its evil head from under the rib cage, and then slithered away, leaving a tiny cloud of silt to smudge its trail. One arm was held in an upright position by an elbow imbedded in the muck, the bony fingers of the hand as if beckoning the unwary.\n\nFrom the bottom of the pool to the sun above, the water gradually lightened from a dismal gray-brown to a pea-soup green from the pond scum that flourished under the tropical heat. The circular rim stretched 30 meters (98 feet) across and the sheer walls dropped 15 meters (49 feet) to the water. Once in, there was no way a human or animal could escape without help from above.\n\nThere was an ugliness about the deep limestone sinkhole, or cenote as it was technically called, a repugnant menace that animals sensed, refusing to approach within fifty meters of its perimeter. A grim sense of death hung about the place, and rightly so. The place was more than a sacred well where men, women, and children had been thrown alive into the dark waters as sacrifices during times of drought and harsh storms. Ancient legends and myths called it a house of evil gods where strange and unspeakable events occurred. There were also tales of rare artifacts, handcrafted and sculpted, along with jade, gold, and precious gemstones, that were said to have been cast into the forbidding pool to appease the evil gods who were inflicting bad weather. In 1964 two divers entered the depths of the sinkhole and never returned. No attempt had been made to recover their bodies.\n\nThe sinkhole's early history began in the Cambrian era when the region was part of an ancient sea.\n\nThrough the following geological eras, thousands of generations of shellfish and coral lived and died, their skeletal carcasses forming an enormous mass of lime and sand that compressed into a limestone and dolomite layer two kilometers thick. Then, beginning sixty-five million years ago, an intense earth uplifting occurred that raised the Andes Mountains to their present height. As the rain ran down from the mountains it formed a great underground water table that slowly began dissolving the limestone. Where it collected and pooled, the water ate upward until the land surface collapsed and created the sinkhole.\n\nIn the damp air above the jungle surrounding the cavity, an Andean condor banked in great lazy circles, one emotionless eye fastened on a group of people working around the edge of the cenote. Its long, broad wings, measuring 3 meters (10 feet), arched stiff to catch the air currents. The huge black bird, with its white ruff and bald pinkish head, soared effortlessly as it studied the movement below.\n\nFinally, satisfied that no meal was in the offing, the vulture ascended to a greater height for distant observation and drifted eastward in search of carrion.\n\nA great deal of unresolved controversy had surrounded the sacred pool, and now archaeologists had finally gathered to dive and retrieve artifacts from its enigmatic depths. The ancient site was located on a western slope beneath a high ridge of the Peruvian Andes near a great ruined city. The nearby stone structures had been part of a vast confederation of city-states, known as the Chachapoyas, that was conquered by the renowned Inca empire around A.D.1480.\n\nThe Chachapoyan confederation encompassed almost 400 square kilometers (150 square miles). Its metropolitan spread of farms, temples, and fortresses now lay in mostly unexplored heavily forested mountains. The ruins of this great civilization indicated an incredibly mysterious blend of cultures and origins that were mostly unknown. The Chachapoyan rulers or council of elders, their architects, priests, soldiers, and ordinary working people in the cities and on the farms left virtually no record of their lives.\n\nAnd archaeologists had yet to fathom their government bureaucracy, justice system, and religious practices.\n\nAs she stared down at the stagnant water through big, wide, hazel eyes under raised dark brows, Dr.\n\nShannon Kelsey was too excited to feel the cold touch of fear. A very attractive woman when dressed and made up, she possessed a rather cool and aloof self-sufficiency that most men found irritating, particularly so since she could gaze into their eyes with a teasing boldness. Her hair was straight and soft blond and tied in a ponytail by a red bandanna, and the abundance of skin that showed on her face, arms, and legs was richly tanned. The inside of her one-piece black Lycra swim suit was nicely filled by an hourglass figure with an extra twenty minutes thrown in for good measure, and when she moved it was with the fluid grace of a Balinese dancer.\n\nIn her late thirties, Dr. Kelsey had enjoyed a ten-year fascination with the Chachapoyan cultures. She had explored and surveyed important archaeological sites on five previous expeditions, clearing the invading plant growth from a number of the major buildings and temples of the region's ancient cities. As a respected archaeologist of Andes culture, following in the footsteps of a glorious past was her, great passion. To work where an enigmatic and obscure people had flourished and died was a dream made possible by a grant from the Archaeology Department of Arizona State University.\n\n\"Useless to carry a video camera unless the visibility opens up below the first two meters,\" said Miles Rodgers, the photographer who was filming the project.\n\n\"Then shoot stills,\" Shannon said firmly. \"I want every dive recorded whether we can see past our noses or not.\"\n\nA year shy of forty and sporting luxuriant black hair and a beard, Rodgers was an old pro at underwater photography. He was in demand by all the major science and travel publications to shoot below-the-sea photos of fish and coral reefs. His extraordinary pictures of World War II shipwrecks in the South Pacific and ancient submerged seaports throughout the Mediterranean had won him numerous awards and the respect of his peers.\n\nA tall, slender man in his sixties, with a silver gray beard that covered half his face, held up Shannon's air tank so she could slip her arms through the straps of the backpack. \"I wish you'd put a hold on this until we've finished constructing the dive raft.\"\n\n\"That's two days away. By doing a preliminary survey now we can get a head start.\"\n\n\"Then at least wait for the rest of the dive team to arrive from the university. If you and Miles get into trouble, we have no backup.\"\n\n\"Not to worry,\" Shannon said gamely. \"Miles and I will only do a bounce dive to test depth and water conditions. We won't run our dive time past thirty minutes.\"\n\n\"And no deeper than fifteen meters,\" the older man cautioned her.\n\nShannon smiled at her colleague, Dr. Steve Miller from the University of Pennsylvania. \"And if we haven't touched bottom at fifteen meters?\"\n\n\"We've got five weeks. No need to get antsy and risk an accident.\" Miller's voice was quiet and deep, but there was a noticeable trace of concern in it. One of the leading anthropologists of his time, he had devoted the last thirty years to unraveling the mysteries of the cultures that had evolved in the upper regions of the Andes and spilled down to the jungles of the Amazon. \"Play it safe, make a study of water conditions and the geology of the pool walls, then get back to the surface.\"\n\nShannon nodded and spit into her face mask, smearing the saliva around the inside of the lens to keep it from misting. Next she rinsed the mask from a canteen of water. After adjusting her buoyancy compensator and cinching her weight belt, she and Rodgers made a final check of each other's equipment. Satisfied everything was in place and their digital dive computers properly programmed, Shannon smiled at Miller.\n\n\"See you soon, Doc. Keep a martini on ice.\"\n\nThe anthropologist looped under their arms a wide strap that was attached to long nylon lines, gripped tightly by a team of ten Peruvian graduate students of the university's archaeology program, who had volunteered to join the project. \"Lower away, kids,\" Miller ordered the six boys and four girls.\n\nHand over hand the lines were paid out as the divers began their descent into the ominous pool below.\n\nShannon and Rodgers extended their legs and used the tips of their dive fins as bumpers to keep from scraping against the rough limestone walls. They could clearly see the coating of slime covering the surface of the water. It looked as viscous and about as inviting as a tub of green mucus. The aroma of decay and stagnation was overwhelming. To Shannon the thrill of the unknown abruptly changed to a feeling of deep apprehension.\n\nWhen they were within 1 meter (about 3 feet) of the surface, they both inserted their air regulator mouthpieces between their teeth and signaled to the anxious faces staring from above. Then Shannon and Miles slipped out of their harnesses and dropped out of sight into the odious slime.\n\nMiller nervously paced the rim of the sinkhole, glancing at his watch every other minute while the students peered in fascination at the green slime below. Fifteen minutes passed with no sign of the divers.\n\nSuddenly, the exhaust bubbles from their air regulators disappeared. Frantically Miller ran along the edge of the well. Had they found a cave and entered it? He waited ten minutes, then ran over to a nearby tent and rushed inside. Almost feverishly he picked up a portable radio and began hailing the project's headquarters and supply unit in the small town of Chachapoyas, 90 kilometers (56 miles) to the south.\n\nThe voice of Juan Chaco, inspector general of Peruvian archaeology and director of the Museo de la Nacion in Lima, answered almost immediately.\n\n\"Juan here. That you, Doc? What can I do for you?\"\n\n\"Dr. Kelsey and Miles Rodgers insisted on making a preliminary dive into the sacrificial well,\" replied Miller. \"I think we may have an emergency.\"\n\n\"They went into that cesspool without waiting for the dive team from the university?\" Chaco asked in a strangely indifferent tone.\n\n\"I tried to talk them out of it.\"\n\n\"When did they enter the water?\"\n\nMiller checked his watch again. \"Twenty-seven minutes ago.\"\n\n\"How long did they plan to stay down?\"\n\n\"They planned to resurface after thirty minutes.\"\n\n\"It's still early.\" Chaco sighed. \"So what's the problem?\"\n\n\"We've seen no sign of their air bubbles for the last ten minutes.\"\n\nChaco caught his breath, closed his eyes for a second. \"Doesn't sound good, my friend. This is not what we planned.\"\n\n\"Can you send the dive team ahead by helicopter?\" asked Miller.\n\n\"Not possible,\" Chaco replied helplessly. \"They're still in transit from Miami. Their plane isn't scheduled to land in Lima for another four hours.\"\n\n\"We can't afford government meddling. Certainly not now. Can you arrange to have a dive rescue team rushed to the sinkhole?\"\n\n\"The nearest naval facility is at Trujillo. I'll alert the base commander and go from there.\"\n\n\"Good luck to you, Juan. I'll stand by the radio at this end.\"\n\n\"Keep me informed of any new developments.\"\n\n\"I will, I promise you,\" Miller said grimly.\n\n\"My friend?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"They'll come through,\" offered Chaco in a hollow tone. \"Rodgers is a master diver. He doesn't make mistakes.\"\n\nMiller said nothing. There was nothing more to say. He broke contact with Chaco and hurried back to the silent group of students, who were staring down into the sinkhole with dread.\n\nIn Chachapoyas, Chaco pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his face. He was a man of order.\n\nUnforeseen obstacles or problems irritated him. If the two stupid Americans drowned themselves, there would be a government inquiry. Despite Chaco's influence, the Peruvian news media were bound to make an overblown incident out of it. The consequences might very well prove to be nothing less than disastrous.\n\n\"All we need now,\" he muttered to himself, \"are two dead archaeologists in the pool.\"\n\nThen with shaking hands he gripped the radio transmitter and began sending out an urgent call for help.\n\nOne hour and forty-five minute had passed since Shannon and Miles had entered the sacrificial pool.\n\nAny attempt at rescue now seemed an empty gesture. Nothing could save Shannon and Miles now. They had to be dead, their air used up long ago. Two more victims added to the countless number who had disappeared into the morbid waters through the centuries.\n\nIn a voice frantic with desperation, Chaco had informed him that the Peruvian navy was caught unprepared for an emergency. Their water escape and recovery team was on a training mission far to the south of Peru near the Chilean border. It was impossible for them to airlift the dive team and their equipment to the sinkhole before sundown. Chaco helplessly shared Miller's anxiety over the slow response time. But this was South America and speed was seldom a priority.\n\nOne of the female students heard it first. She cupped her hands to her ears and turned back and forth like a radar antenna. \"A helicopter!\" she announced excitedly, pointing in a westerly direction through the tops of the trees.\n\nIn an expectant hush everyone around the rim of the pool listened. The faint thumping sound of a rotor blade beating the air came toward them, growing louder with each passing moment. A minute later a turquoise helicopter with the letters NUMA painted on its sides swept into view.\n\nWhere had it come from? Miller wondered, his spirits rising. It obviously didn't have the markings of the Peruvian navy. It had to be a civilian craft.\n\nThe tops of the surrounding trees were whipped into a frenzy as the helicopter began its descent into a small clearing beside the sinkhole. The landing skids were still in the air when the fuselage door opened and a tall man with wavy black hair made an agile leap to the ground. He was dressed in a thin, shorty wet suit for diving in warm waters. Ignoring the younger people, he walked directly up to the anthropologist.\n\n\"Dr. Miller?\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm Miller.\"\n\nThe stranger, a warm smile arched across his face, shoved out a calloused hand. \"I'm sorry we couldn't have arrived sooner.\"\n\n\"Who are you?\"\n\n\"My name is Dirk Pitt.\"\n\n\"You're American,\" Miller stated, staring into a craggy face with eyes that seemed to smile.\n\n\"Special Projects Director for the U.S. National Underwater and Marine Agency. As I understand it, two of your divers are missing in an underwater cave.\"\n\n\"A sinkhole,\" Miller corrected him. \"Dr. Shannon Kelsey and Miles Rodgers entered the water almost two hours ago and have failed to resurface.\"\n\nPitt walked over to the edge of the pool, stared down at the stagnant water, and quickly determined that diving conditions were rotten. The pool went from slime green at the outer edges to pitch black in the center, giving the impression of great depth. There was nothing to indicate that the operation would prove to be anything more than a body recovery. \"Not too inviting,\" he mused.\n\n\"Where did you come from?\" queried Miller.\n\n\"NUMA is conducting an underwater geological survey off the coast due west of here. The Peruvian naval headquarters radioed a request to send divers on a rescue mission and we responded. Apparently we're the first to arrive on-site.\"\n\n\"How can oceanographic scientists carry out a rescue and recovery operation in a hellhole?\" Miller snapped, becoming suddenly angry.\n\n\"Our research ship contained the necessary diving equipment,\" Pitt explained unemotionally. \"I'm not a scientist but a marine engineer. I've only had a few training sessions in underwater recovery, but I'm a reasonably good diver.\"\n\nBefore a discouraged Miller could reply, the helicopter's engine died as the rotor blades slowly swung to a stop, and a short man with the broad shoulders and barrel chest of a dock worker squeezed through the exit door and approached. He looked the complete opposite of the tall lean Pitt.\n\nMy friend and associate, Al Giordino,\" Pitt said, introducing him.\n\nGiordino nodded under a mass of dark, curly hair and said simply, \"Hello.\"\n\nMiller looked behind them through the windshield of the aircraft, and seeing the interior held no other passengers, groaned in despair. \"Two of you, only two of you. My God, it will take at least a dozen men to bring them out.\"\n\nPitt wasn't the least bit annoyed by Miller's outburst. He stared at the anthropologist with tolerant understanding through deep green opaline eyes that seemed to possess a mesmeric quality. \"Trust me, Doc,\" he said in a tone that stopped any further argument. \"Al and I can do the job.\"\n\nWithin minutes, after a brief planning session, Pitt was ready to be lowered into the pool. He was wearing a full EXO-26 face mask from Diving Systems International with an exothermic air regulator good for polluted water applications. The earphone sockets were connected to an MK1-DCI Ocean Technology Systems diver radio. He earned twin 100-cubic-foot air tanks on his back and wore a buoyancy compensator with an array of instruments indicating depth, air pressure, and compass direction. As he geared up, Giordino connected a thick nylon Kermantle communications and safety line to Pitt's earphone and an emergency release buckle on a strap cinched around Pitt's waist. The remainder of the safety line wound around a large reel mounted inside the helicopter and connected to an outside amplifier. After a final check of Pitt's equipment, Giordino patted him on the head and spoke into the communication system's microphone.\n\n\"Looking good. Do you read?\"\n\n\"As though you were inside my head,\" Pitt answered, his voice audible to everyone through an amplifier. \"How about me?\"\n\nGiordino nodded. \"Clear and distinct. I'll monitor your decompression schedule and dive time from here.\"\n\n\"Understood.\"\n\n\"I'm counting on you to give me a running account of your situation and depth.\"\n\nPitt wrapped the safety line around one arm and gripped it with both hands. He gave Giordino a wink from behind the lens of the face mask. \"Okay, let's open the show.\"\n\nGiordino motioned to four of Miller's students who began unwinding the reel. Unlike Shannon and Miles who bounced their way down along the sinkhole walls, Giordino had strung the nylon line over the end of a dead tree trunk that hung 2 meters (over 6 feet) beyond the edge of the vertical precipice, allowing Pitt to drop without scraping against the limestone.\n\nFor a man who was conceivably sending his friend to an untimely death, Miller thought, Giordino appeared incredibly calm and efficient. He did not know Pitt and Giordino, had never heard of the legendary pair. He could not know they were extraordinary men with almost twenty years of adventuring under the seas who had developed an unerring sense for assessing the odds of survival. He could only stand by in frustration at what he was certain was an exercise in futility. He leaned over the brink and watched intently as Pitt neared the green surface scum of the water.\n\n\"How's it look?\" asked Giordino over the phone.\n\n\"Like my grandmother's split pea soup,\" replied Pitt.\n\n\"I don't advise sampling it.\"\n\n\"The thought never entered my mind.\"\n\nNo further words were spoken as Pitt's feet entered the liquid slime. When it closed over his head, Giordino slackened the safety line to give him freedom of movement. The water temperature was only about ten degrees cooler than the average hot tub. Pitt began breathing through his regulator, rolled over, kicked his fins, and dove down into the murky world of death. The increasing water pressure squeezed his ear drums and he snorted inside his mask to equalize the force. He switched on a Birns Oceanographics Snooper light, but the hand-held beam could barely penetrate the gloom.\n\nThen, abruptly, he passed through the dense murk into a yawning chasm of crystal clear water. Instead of the light beam reflecting off the algae into his face, it suddenly shot into the distance. The instant transformation below the layer of slime stunned him for a moment. He felt as if he were swimming in air.\n\n\"I have clear visibility at a depth of four meters,\" he reported topside.\n\n\"Any sign of the other divers?\"\n\nPitt slowly swam in a 360-degree circle. \"No, nothing.\"\n\n\"Can you make out details of the bottom?\"\n\n\"Fairly well,\" replied Pitt. \"The water is transparent as glass but quite dark. The scum on the surface cuts the sunlight on the bottom by seventy percent. It's a bit dark around the walls so I'll have to swim a search pattern so I won't miss the bodies.\"\n\n\"Do you have enough slack on the safety line?\"\n\n\"Maintain a slight tension so it won't hinder my movement as I go deeper.\"\n\nFor the next twelve minutes Pitt circled the steep walls of the sinkhole, probing every cavity, descending as if revolving around a giant corkscrew. The limestone, laid down hundreds of millions of years earlier, was mineral stained with strange, abstract images. He planed horizontally and swam in languid slow motion, sweeping the beam of light back and forth in front of him. The illusion of soaring over a bottomless pit was overwhelming.\n\nFinally, he leveled out over the floor of the sacrificial pool. No firm sand or plant life, just one uneven patch of ugly brown silt broken by clusters of grayish rock. \"I have the bottom at slightly over thirty-six meters. Still no sign of Kelsey or Rodgers.\"\n\nFar above the pool, Miller gave Giordino a dazed look. \"They must be down there. Impossible for them to simply vanish.\"\n\nFar below, Pitt kicked slowly across the bottom, careful to stay a good meter above the rocks and especially the silt, which might billow into a blinding cloud and reduce his visibility to zero within seconds.\n\nOnce disturbed, silt could remain suspended for several hours before settling back to the bottom. He gave an involuntary shudder. The water had turned uncomfortably cold as he passed into a cool layer suspended beneath the warmer water above. He slowed and drifted, adding enough lift from his compensator for slight buoyancy, achieving a slight head-down, fins-up swimming position.\n\nCautiously, he reached down and gently sank his hands into the brown muck. They touched bedrock before the silt rose to his wrists. Pitt thought it strange the silt was so shallow. After countless centuries of erosion from the walls and runoff from the ground above, the rocky subsurface should have been covered with a layer at least 2 meters (over 6 feet) deep. He went motionless and floated over what looked like a field of bleached white tree limbs sprouting from the mud. Gripping one that was gnarled with small protrusions, he eased it out of the bed of silt. He found himself staring at a spinal column from an ancient sacrificial victim.\n\nGiordino's voice broke through his earphones. \"Speak to me.\"\n\n\"Depth thirty-seven meters,\" Pitt answered as he flung aside the spinal column. \"The floor of the pool is a bone yard. There must be two hundred skeletons scattered around down here.\"\n\n\"Still no sign of bodies?\"\n\n\"Not yet.\"\n\nPitt began to feel an icy finger trail up the nape of his neck as he spotted a skeleton with a bony hand pointing into the gloom. Beside the rib cage was a rusty breastplate, while the skull was still encased in what he guessed was a sixteenth-century Spanish helmet.\n\nPitt reported the sighting to Giordino. \"Tell Doc Miller I've found a long-dead Spaniard complete with helmet and breastplate down here.\" Then, as if drawn by an unseen force, his eyes followed in the direction a curled finger of the hand pointed.\n\nThere was another body, one that had died more recently. It appeared to be a male with the legs drawn up and the head tilted back. Decomposition had not had time to fully break down the flesh. The corpse was still in a state of saponification, where the meaty tissue and organs had turned into a firm soaplike substance.\n\nThe expensive hiking boots, a red silk scarf knotted around the neck, and a Navajo silver belt buckle inlaid with turquoise stones made it easy for Pitt to recognize someone who was not a local peasant.\n\nWhoever he was, he was not young. Strands of long silver hair and beard swayed with the current from Pitt's movements. A wide gash in the neck also showed how he had died.\n\nA thick gold ring with a large yellow stone flashed under the beam of the dive light. The thought occurred to Pitt that the ring might come in handy for identifying the body. Fighting the bile rising in his throat, he easily pulled the ring over the knuckle of the dead man's rotting finger while half expecting a shadowy form to appear and accuse him of acting like a ghoul. Disagreeable as the job was, he swished the ring through the silt to clean off any remnant of its former owner, and then slipped it onto one of his own fingers so he wouldn't lose it.\n\n\"I have another one,\" he notified Giordino.\n\n\"One of the divers or an old Spaniard?\"\n\n\"Neither. This one looks to be a few months to a year old.\"\n\nDo you want to retrieve it?\" asked Giordino.\n\n\"Not yet. We'll wait until after we find Doc Miller's people-\" Pitt suddenly broke off as he was struck by an enormous force of water that surged into the pool from an unseen passage on the opposite wall and churned up the silt like dust whirling around a tornado. He would have tumbled out of control like a leaf in the wind by the unexpected energy of the turbulence but for his safety line. As it was he barely kept a firm grip on his dive light.\n\n\"That was a hell of a jerk,\" said Giordino with concern. \"What's going on?\"\n\n\"I've been struck by a powerful surge from nowhere,\" Pitt replied, relaxing and allowing himself to go with the flow. \"That explains why the silt layer is so shallow. It's periodically swept away by the turbulence.\"\n\n\"Probably fed by an underground water system that builds up pressure and releases it as a surge across the floor of the sinkhole,\" Giordino speculated. \"Shall we pull you out?\"\n\n\"No, leave me be. Visibility is nil, but I don't seem to be in any immediate danger. Slowly release the safety line and let's see where the current carries me. There must be an outlet somewhere.\"\n\n\"Too dangerous. You might get hung up and trapped.\"\n\n\"Not if I keep from entangling my safety line,\" Pitt said easily.\n\nOn the surface, Giordino studied his watch. \"You've been down sixteen minutes. How's your air?\"\n\nPitt held his pressure gauge in front of his face mask. He could barely read the needle through the maelstrom of silt. \"Good for another twenty minutes.\"\n\n\"I'll give you ten. After that, at your present depth, you'll be looking at decompression stops.\"\n\n\"You're the boss,\" Pitt came back agreeably.\n\n\"What's your situation?\"\n\n\"Feels like I'm being pulled into a narrow tunnel feet first. I can touch the walls closing around me.\n\nLucky I have a safety line. Impossible to swim against the surge.\"\n\nGiordino turned to Miller. \"Sounds as if he may have a lead on what happened to your divers.\"\n\nMiller shook his head in anger. \"I warned them. They could have avoided this tragedy by keeping their dive in shallow depths.\"\n\nPitt felt as though he was being sucked through the narrow slot for an hour when it was only twenty seconds. The silt cloud had faded slightly, most of it remaining in the deep pool behind. He began to see his surroundings more clearly. His compass showed he was being carried in a southeasterly direction.\n\nThen the walls suddenly opened out into one enormous, flooded room. To his right and below he caught the momentary flash of something glinting in the murk. Something metallic vaguely reflecting the silt-dimmed beam of his dive light. It was an abandoned air tank. Nearby was a second one. He swam over and peered at their pressure gauges. The needles were pegged on empty. He angled his dive light around in a circle, expecting to see dead bodies floating in the darkness like phantom demons.\n\nThe cool bottom water had drained away a measure of Pitt's strength and he could feel his motions becoming sluggish. Although Giordino's voice still came through the earphones as clearly as if Pitt was standing next to him, the words seemed less distinct. Pitt switched his mind off automatic and put it on full control, sending out instructions to check data gauges, safety line, and buoyancy compensator as if there were another Pitt inside his head.\n\nHe mentally sharpened his senses and forced himself to be alert. If the bodies were swept into a side passage, he thought, he could easily pass them by and never notice. But a quick search turned up nothing but a pair of discarded swim fins. Pitt aimed the dive light upward and saw the reflective glitter of surface water that indicated the upper dome of the chamber contained an air pocket.\n\nHe also glimpsed a pair of white feet.\n\nTrapped far from the outside world in a prison of perpetual silence, breathing in a small pocket of air millions of years old and lying smothered in total blackness deep under the earth is too alien, too terrible to imagine. The horror of dying under such terrifying conditions can provide nightmares on a par with being locked in a closet full of snakes.\n\nAfter initial panic had passed and a small degree of rationality was retrieved, any hope that Shannon and Rodgers had of surviving vanished when the air in their tanks became exhausted and the final spark of life in the batteries of their dive lights gave out. The air in the small pocket soon became foul and stale from their own breathing. Dazed and lightheaded from lack of oxygen, they knew their suffering would only end when the watery chamber became their tomb.\n\nThe underground current had sucked them into the cavern after Shannon had excitedly dived to the bottom of the sinkhole after glimpsing the field of bones. Rodgers had faithfully followed and exhausted himself in a frantic effort to escape the surge. The last of their air had been used up in a vain attempt to find another passage leading out of the chamber. There was no exit, no escape. They could only drift in the blackness, held afloat by their buoyancy compensators, and wait to die.\n\nRodgers, for all his guts, was in a bad way, and Shannon was just hanging on by a thread when suddenly she noticed a flickering light in the forbidding water below. Then it became a bright, yellow beam stabbing the blackness in her direction. Was her numbed mind playing tricks? Did she dare entertain a glimmer of hope?\n\n\"They've found us,\" she finally gasped as the light moved toward her.\n\nRodgers, his face etched and gray with fatigue and despair, stared blankly down at the approaching light beam without reaction. The lack of breathable air and the crushing blackness had left him in a near comatose state. His eyes were open and he was still breathing, and, incredibly, he still tightly grasped his camera. He felt a vague awareness that he was entering the tunnel of light described by people who returned from death.\n\nShannon felt a hand grab her foot, and then a head popped out of the water less than an arm's length away. The dive light was beamed into her eyes, momentarily blinding her. Then it moved onto Rodgers's face. Instantly recognizing who was the worse off, Pitt reached under one arm and took hold of an auxiliary air regulator that was connected to the dual valve manifold of his air tanks. He quickly slipped the mouthpiece of the regulator between Rodgers's lips. Then he passed Shannon a reserve pony bottle and air regulator that was attached to his waist belt.\n\nSeveral deep breaths later, the revival in mood and physical well-being was nothing short of miraculous. Shannon gave Pitt a big bear hug as a renewed Rodgers pumped his hand so vigorously he nearly sprained Pitt's wrist. There were moments of speechless joy as all three were swept away in a euphoria of relief and excitement.\n\nOnly when Pitt realized that Giordino was shouting through his earphones, demanding a situation report, did he announce, \"Tell Doc Miller I've found his lost lambs. They are alive, repeat, they are alive and well.\"\n\n\"You have them?\" Giordino burst through Pitt's earphones. \"They're not dead?\"\n\n\"A little pale around the gills but otherwise in good shape.\"\n\n\"How is it possible?\" muttered a disbelieving Miller.\n\nGiordino nodded. \"The Doc wants to know how they stayed alive.\"\n\n\"The current swept them into a chamber with an air pocket in its dome. Lucky I arrived when I did.\n\nThey were minutes away from using up the oxygen.\"\n\nThe crowd grouped around the amplifier was stunned by the announcement. But as the news sank in, relief spread across every face, and the ancient stone city echoed with cheers and applause. Miller turned away as if wiping tears from his eyes while Giordino smiled and smiled.\n\nDown in the chamber Pitt motioned that he could not remove his full face mask and converse. He indicated they would have to communicate through hand signals. Shannon and Rodgers nodded, and then Pitt began to describe visually the procedure for their escape.\n\nSince the lost divers had dropped all of their useless dive gear, except for face masks and buoyancy compensators, Pitt felt confident the three of them could be pulled back through the narrow shaft against the current and into the main pool by his phone and safety line without complications. According to the manufacturers' specs, the nylon line and phone cable could support up to almost six thousand pounds.\n\nHe signaled Shannon to wrap one leg and one arm around the line and lead off, breathing through her pony bottle. Rodgers would repeat the step and follow, with Pitt bringing up the rear close enough for the spare regulator to reach Rodgers's mouth. When Pitt was sure they were stable and breathing easy, he alerted Giordino.\n\n\"We're positioned and ready for escape.\"\n\nGiordino paused and stared at the young archaeology students, their hands gripping the safety line, poised as if ready for a tug-of-war. He studied their impatient expressions and quickly realized he would have to keep their enthusiasm and excitement in check or they might haul the divers through the rock passageway like so much meat through a jagged pipe. \"Stand by. Give me your depth.\"\n\n\"I read slightly over seventeen meters. Much higher than the bottom of the sinkhole. We were sucked into a passage that sloped upward for twenty meters.\"\n\n\"You're borderline,\" Giordino informed him, \"but the others have exceeded their time and pressure limits. I'll compute and advise you of decompression stops.\"\n\n\"Don't make them too long. Once the pony bottle is empty, it won't take long for the three of us to use up what air I have left in my twin tanks.\"\n\n\"Perish the thought. If I don't hold these kids by the collar, they'll jerk you out of there so fast you'll feel like you were fired from a cannonball.\"\n\n\"Try to keep it civilized.\"\n\nGiordino held up his hand as a signal for the students to begin pulling. \"Here we go.\"\n\n\"Bring on the jugglers and the clowns,\" Pitt answered in good humor.\n\nThe safety line became taut and the long, slow haul began. The rush of the surge through the shaft was matched by the gurgling of their exhaust bubbles from the air regulators. With nothing to do now but grip the line, Pitt relaxed and went limp, allowing his body to be drawn against the flow of the underground current that gushed through the narrow slot like air through a venturi tube. The lighter silt-clouded water in the pool at the end of the passage seemed miles away. Time had no meaning, and he felt as if he'd been immersed for an age. Only Giordino's steady voice helped Pitt keep his grip on reality.\n\n\"Cry out if we haul too fast,\" ordered Giordino.\n\n\"Looking good,\" Pitt replied, hearing his air tanks grinding against the ceiling of the shaft.\n\nWhat is your estimate of the current's rate of speed?\"\n\n\"Close to eight knots.\"\n\nSmall wonder your bodies are causing severe resistance. I've got ten kids up here, pulling their hearts out.\"\n\n\"Six more meters and we're out of here,\" Pitt informed him.\n\nAnd then a minute, probably a minute and a half, struggling to hold on to the safety line as they were buffeted by the diminishing force of the torrent, and they broke free of the shaft into the cloud of silt swirling around the floor of the sacrificial pool. Another minute and they were pulled upward and clear from the drag of the current and into transparent, unclouded water. Pitt looked up, saw the light filtering through the green slime, and felt a wondrous sense of relief.\n\nGiordino knew they were free of the suction when the tension on the safety line suddenly diminished.\n\nHe ordered a halt to the ascent operation as he rechecked his decompression data on a laptop computer.\n\nOne stop of eight minutes would take Pitt out of any danger of decompression sickness, but the archaeology project divers would need stops of far longer duration. They had been down over two hours at depths ranging from 17 to 37 meters (67 to 122 feet). They would require at least two stops lasting over an hour. How much air was left in Pitt's tanks to sustain them? That was the life-or-death dilemma.\n\nEnough for ten minutes? Fifteen? Twenty?\n\nAt sea level, or one atmosphere, the normal human body contains about one liter of dissolved nitrogen.\n\nBreathing larger quantities of air under the pressure of water depth increases the absorption of nitrogen to two liters at two atmospheres (10 meters, or 30 feet of water depth), three liters at three atmospheres (30 meters, or 90 feet), and so on. During diving the excess nitrogen is rapidly dissolved in the blood, carried throughout the body, and stored in the tissues. When a diver begins to ascend, the situation is reversed, only this time far more slowly. As the water pressure decreases, the overabundance of nitrogen travels to the lungs and is eliminated by respiration. If the diver rises too quickly, normal breathing can't cope and bubbles of nitrogen form in the blood, body tissue, and joints, causing decompression sickness, better known as the bends, a condition that has crippled or killed thousands of divers over the past century.\n\nFinally, Giordino set aside the computer and called Pitt. \"Dirk?\"\n\n\"I hear you.\"\n\n\"Bad news. There isn't enough air left in your tanks for the lady and her friend to make the necessary decompression stops.\"\n\n\"Tell me something I don't know,\" Pitt came back. \"What about backup tanks in the chopper?\"\n\n\"No such luck,\" moaned Giordino. \"In our rush to leave the ship the crew threw on an air compressor but forgot to load extra air tanks.\"\n\nPitt stared through his face mask at Rodgers, still clutching his camera and shooting pictures. The photographer gave him a thumbs up sign as though he'd just cleared the pool table at the neighborhood saloon. Pitt's gaze moved to Shannon. Her hazel eyes stared back at him through her face mask, wide and content as if she thought the nightmare was over and her hero was going to sweep her off to his castle. She had not realized the worst was far from over. For the first time he noticed that she had blond hair, and Pitt found himself wondering what she looked like in only her swim suit without the diving equipment.\n\nThe daydream was over almost as soon as it was begun. His mind came back on an even keel and he spoke into his face mask receiver. \"Al, you said the compressor is on board the chopper.\"\n\n\"I did.\"\n\n\"Send down the tool kit. You'll find it in the storage locker of the chopper.\"\n\n\"Make sense,\" Giordino urged.\n\n\"The manifold valves on my air tanks,\" Pitt explained hastily. \"They're the new prototypes NUMA is testing. I can shut off one independently of the other and then remove it from the manifold without expelling air from the opposite tank.\"\n\n\"I read you, pal,\" said an enlightened Giordino. \"You disconnect one of your twin tanks and breathe off the other. I pull up the empty and refill it with the compressor. Then we repeat the process until we satisfy the decompression schedule.\"\n\n\"A glittering concept, don't you think?\" asked Pitt with dark sarcasm.\n\n\"Fundamental at best,\" grunted Giordino, artfully concealing his elation. \"Hang at six-point-five meters for seventeen minutes. I'll send the tool kit down to you on the safety line. I just hope your plan works.\"\n\n\"Never a doubt.\" Pitt's confidence seemed genuine. \"When I step onto firm ground again, I'll expect a Dixieland band playing 'Waiting for the Robert E. Lee'.\"\n\n\"Spare me,\" Giordino groaned.\n\nAs he ran toward the helicopter, he was confronted by Miller.\n\n\"Why did you stop?\" the anthropologist demanded. \"Good God, man, what are you waiting for? Pull them up!\"\n\nGiordino fixed the anthropologist with an icy stare. \"Pull them to the surface now and they die.\"\n\nMiller looked blank. \"Die?\"\n\n\"The bends, Doc, ever hear of it?\"\n\nA look of understanding crossed Miller's face, and he slowly nodded. \"I'm sorry. Please forgive an excitable old bone monger. I won't trouble you again.\"\n\nGiordino smiled sympathetically. He continued to the helicopter and climbed inside, never suspecting that Miller's words were as prophetic as a lead dime.\n\nThe tool kit, consisting of several metric wrenches, a pair of pliers, two screwdrivers, and a geologist's hammer with a small pick on one end, was tied loosely to the safety line by a bowline knot and lowered by a small cord. Once the tools were in Pitt's hands he gripped the air tank pack between his knees.\n\nNext he adroitly shut off one valve and unthreaded it from the manifold with a wrench. When one air tank came free, he attached it to the cord.\n\n\"Cargo up,\" Pitt announced.\n\nIn less than four minutes, the tank was raised by willing hands on the secondary cord, connected to the throbbing gas-engine compressor and taking on purified air. Giordino was cursing, sweet talking, and begging the compressor to pump 3500 pounds of air per square inch into the 100-cubic-foot steel tank in record time. The needle on the pressure gauge was just shy of 1800 pounds when Pitt warned him that Shannon's pony bottle was dry and his lone tank had only 400 pounds left. With three of them sucking on one tank, that did not leave a comfortable safety margin. Giordino cut off the compressor when the pressure reached 2500 and wasted no time in sending the tank back down into the sinkhole. The process was repeated three more times after Pitt and the other divers moved to their next decompression stop at three meters, which meant they had to endure several minutes in the slime. The whole procedure went off without a hitch.\n\nGiordino allowed an ample safety margin. He let nearly forty minutes pass before he pronounced it safe for Shannon and Rodgers to surface and be lifted to the brink of the sacrificial pool. It was a measure of his complete confidence in his friend that Pitt didn't even bother to question the accuracy of Giordino's calculations. Ladies went first as Pitt encircled Shannon's waist with the strap and buckle that was attached to the safety and communications line. He waved to the faces peering over the edge and Shannon was on her way to dry land.\n\nRodgers was next. His utter exhaustion after his narrow brush with death was forgotten at the sheer exhilaration of being lifted out of the godforsaken pool of death and slime, never, he swore, to return. A gnawing hunger and a great thirst mushroomed inside him. He remembered a bottle of vodka that he kept in his tent and he began to think of reaching for it as though it were the holy grail. He was high enough now to see the faces of Dr. Miller and the Peruvian archaeology students. He had never been as happy to see anyone in his life. He was too overjoyed to notice that none of them was smiling.\n\nThen, as he was hoisted over the edge of the sinkhole, he saw to his astonishment and horror a sight that was completely unexpected.\n\nDr. Miller, Shannon, and the Peruvian university students stepped back once Rodgers was on solid ground. As soon as he had unbuckled the safety line he saw that they all stood somberly with their hands clasped behind their necks.\n\nThere were six in all, Chinese-manufactured Type 56-1 assault rifles gripped ominously by six pairs of steady hands. The six men were strung out in a rough semicircle around the archaeologists, small, blank-faced, silent men dressed in wool ponchos, sandals, and felt hats. Their furtive dark eyes darted from the captured group to Rodgers.\n\nTo Shannon, these men were not simple hill-folk bandits supplementing their meager incomes by robbing visitors of food and material goods that could be hawked in public markets, they had to be hardened killers of the Sendero Luminoso (\"Shining Path\"), a Maoist revolutionary group that had terrorized Peru since 1981 by murdering thousands of innocent victims, including political leaders, policemen, and army soldiers. She was suddenly gripped by terror. The Shining Path killers were notorious for attaching explosives to their victims and blasting them to pieces.\n\nAfter their founder and leader, Abimael Guzman, was captured in September 1992, the guerrilla movement had split into unorganized splinter groups that carried out haphazard car bombings and assassinations by bloodcrazed death squads that achieved nothing for the people of Peru but tragedy and grief. The guerrillas stood around their captives, alert and watchful, with sadistic anticipation in their eyes.\n\nOne of them, an older man with an immense sweeping moustache, motioned for Rodgers to join the other captives. \"Are there more people down there?\" he asked in English with the barest trace of a Spanish accent.\n\nMiller hesitated and cast a side glance at Giordino.\n\nGiordino nodded at Rodgers. \"That man is the last,\" he snapped in a tone filled with defiance. \"He and the lady were the only divers.\"\n\nThe rebel guerrilla gazed at Giordino through lifeless, carbon black eyes. Then he stepped to the sheer drop of the sacrificial pool and peered downward. He saw a head floating in the middle of green slime.\n\n\"That is good,\" he said in a sinister tone.\n\nHe picked up the safety line that descended into the water, took a machete from his belt and brought it down in a deft swing, severing the line from the reel. Then the expressionless face smiled a morbid smile as he casually held the end of the line over the edge for a moment before dropping it into the unescapable sinkhole.\n\nPitt felt like the chump in a Laurel and Hardy movie who yells to be saved from drowning and is thrown both ends of a rope. Holding up the severed end of the safety and communications line, he stared at it, incredulous. Besides having his means of escape dropped around his head, he had lost all contact with Giordino. He floated in the slime in total ignorance of the hostile events occurring above the sinkhole.\n\nHe unbuckled the head straps holding the full face mask securely around his head, pulled it off, and stared up at the rim expectantly. Nobody stared back.\n\nPitt was half a second away from shouting for help when a roaring blast of gunfire reverberated around the limestone walls of the sinkhole for a solid sixty seconds. The acoustics of the stone amplified the sound deafeningly. Then, as abruptly as the automatic weapons' fire cut the quiet jungle, the harsh clatter faded and all went strangely silent. Pitt's thoughts were hurtling around in an unbreakable circle. To say he was mystified was a vast understatement. What was happening up there? Who was doing the shooting, and at whom? He became increasingly apprehensive with each passing moment. He had to get out of this death pit. But how? He didn't need a manual on mountain climbing to tell him it was impossible to climb the sheer ninety-degree walls without proper equipment or help from above.\n\nGiordino would never have deserted him, he thought bleakly. Never-unless his friend was injured or unconscious. He didn't allow himself to dwell on the unthinkable possibility that Giordino was dead.\n\nHeartsick and mad from the desperation welling up inside him, Pitt shouted to the open sky, his voice echoing in the deep chamber. His only answer was a deathly stillness. He couldn't conceive why any of this was happening. It was becoming increasingly obvious that he would have to climb out alone. He looked up at the sky. There was less than two hours of daylight left. If he was to save himself, he had to start now. But what of the unseen intruders with guns? The nagging question was would they wait until he was as exposed as a fly on a windowpane before they blew him away? Or did they figure he was as good as dead? He decided not to wait to find out. Nothing short of the threat of being thrown in molten lava could keep him in that hot, scummy-layered water through the night.\n\nHe floated on his back and examined the walls that seemed to reach to a passing cloud, and tried to recall what he'd read about limestone in what seemed a centuries-old geology course in college.\n\nLimestone: a sedimentary rock composed of calcium carbonate, a sort of blend of crystalline calcite and carbonate mud, produced by lime-secreting organisms from ancient coral reefs. Limestones vary in texture and color. Not bad, Pitt thought, for a student who pulled a B - in the course. His old teacher would be proud of him.\n\nHe was lucky he wasn't facing granite or basalt. The limestone was pockmarked with small hollow cavities and lined with tiny edges. He swam around the circular walls until he was under a small outcropping that protruded from the side about halfway to the top. He removed his air tank pack and the rest of his diving gear, except for the accessory belt, and let it drop to the floor of the sinkhole. All he kept were the pliers and the geologist's pick hammer from the tool kit. If for some unfathomable reason his best friend and the archaeologists above the ledge had been killed or wounded, and Pitt had been left to die in the sacrificial pool with only the ghosts of previous victims for company, he was damned well going to find out why.\n\nFirst, he pulled a dive knife from a sheath strapped to his leg and cut off two lengths of safety line. He tied one section of the line tightly to the narrow section of the pick hammer's handle close to the head so it wouldn't slip over the wider base. Then he tied a step-in loop at the free end of the line.\n\nNext he rigged a hook from the buckle of his accessory belt, bending it with the pliers until it resembled a C. He then fastened the second section of line to the hook with another step-in loop. When he was finished, he had functional, though rudimentary, climbing tools.\n\nNow came the tough part.\n\nPitt's climbing technique was not exactly that of a veteran mountaineer. The sad truth was that he had never climbed any mountain except on a beaten trail by foot. What little he'd seen of experts scaling vertical rock walls came from public service television or magazine articles. Water was his element. His only contact with mountains was an occasional ski trip to Breckenridge, Colorado. He didn't know a piton (a metal spike with a ring in one end) from a carabiner (an oblong metal ring with a springloaded closing latch that hooks the climbing rope to the piton). He vaguely knew rappelling had something to do with descending a rope that wrapped under a thigh, across the body, and over the opposite shoulder.\n\nThere wasn't an expert climber in the business who would have given five hundred to one odds Pitt could make it to the top. The problem with the odds was that Pitt was too stubborn to even consider them. The old diehard Pitt came back on balance. His mind felt clear and sharp as a needle. He knew his life, and perhaps the lives of the others, hung on an unraveling thread. Cold, self-possessed inner resolve took hold as it had so many times in the past.\n\nWith a commitment bred of desperation, he reached up and stuck the belt hook into a small protruding edge of limestone. He then stepped into the loop, grasped the upper end of the line and pulled himself out of the water.\n\nNow he lifted the hammer as high as he could reach, slightly off to one side, and rapped the pick end of the hammer into a limestone pocket. Then he placed his free foot in the loop and pulled himself to a higher stance up the limestone wall."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Crude by professional standards, Pitt mused, but it worked. He repeated the process, first with the C hook, then with the pick hammer, moving up the steep wall with his arms and legs articulating like a spider. It was exhausting effort even for a man in good physical condition. The sun had vanished below the tops of the trees as if jerked to the west by a string when Pitt finally climbed onto the small outcropping halfway up the steep wall. Still no sign from anyone above.\n\nHe clung there, thankful for the resting place, even though it was barely large enough to sit one of his buttocks on. Breathing heavily, he rested until his aching muscles stopped protesting. He could not believe the climb had taken so much out of him. An expert who knew all the tricks, he presumed, wouldn't even be breathing hard. He sat there hugging the sheer side of the sinkhole wall for almost ten minutes. He felt like sitting there for another hour, but time was passing. The surrounding jungle was quickly turning dark once the sun was gone.\n\nPitt studied the crude climbing tool that had taken him this far. The hammer was as good as new, but the C hook was beginning to straighten from the constant strain of supporting the dead weight of a human body. He took a minute to recurl the hook by beating it against the limestone with his pick hammer.\n\nHe had expected the darkness to shroud his vision, forcing him to scale the limestone by feel only. But a strange light was forming below him. He turned and stared down into the water.\n\nThe pool was emitting an eerie phosphorescent green light. No chemist, Pitt could only assume the strange emission was caused by some sort of chemical reaction from the decaying slime. Thankful for the illumination, however dim, he continued his grueling climb upward.\n\nThe last 3 meters (10 feet) were the worst. So near, yet so far. The brink of the sinkhole seemed close enough to touch with his outstretched fingertips. Three meters, no more. Just ten feet. It might as well have been the summit of Mount Everest. A high school track star could have done it in his sleep. But not Pitt. A few months on the low side of forty, he felt like a tired old man.\n\nHis body was hard and lean, he watched his diet and exercised just enough to maintain a steady weight. There were the scars from numerous injuries, including gunshot wounds, but all the joints still functioned in a reasonably satisfactory manner. He'd given up smoking years ago, but still indulged himself occasionally with a glass of good wine or a tequila on the rocks with lime. His tastes had changed through the years from Cutty Sark scotch to Bombay gin to Sauza Commemorativo tequila. If asked why, he had no answer. He met each day as if life-was-a-game and games-were-life, and the reasons for doing certain things were hermetically sealed and buried inside his head.\n\nThen, when he was within reach of the sinkhole's edge, he dropped the loop attached to the C hook.\n\nOne moment stiffening fingers were tugging it from the limestone, the next it was falling toward the water where it entered the weirdly glowing algae layer with hardly a splash to mark its entry. In combination with the pick hammer, he began using the pockets of limestone as toe-and handholds. Near the top he swung the hammer in a circle above his head and hurled it over the edge of the sinkhole in an attempt to implant the pick end into soft soil.\n\nIt took four tries before the sharp point dug in and remained firm. With the final reserve of his strength, he took the line in both hands and pulled his body up until he could see flat ground before him in the growing darkness. He lay quiet and studied his surroundings. The dank rain forest seemed to close in around him. It was dark now and the only light came from the few stars and a crescent moon that breached the scattered clouds and the intertwined branches of the crowded trees. The dim light that filtered down illuminated the ancient ruins with a ghostly quality that was equaled by the sinister, claustrophobic effect of the invading walls of the forest. The eerie scene was enhanced by the almost complete silence. Pitt half expected to see weird stirring and hear ominous rustling in the darkness, but he saw no lights or moving shadows nor heard voices. The only sound came from the faint splatter of a sudden light rain on the leaves.\n\nEnough laziness, he told himself. Get on, get moving, find out what happened to Giordino and the others. Time is slipping away. Only your first ordeal is over. That was physical, now you have to use your brain. He moved away from the sinkhole as fleetingly as a phantom.\n\nThe campsite was deserted. The tents he'd observed before being lowered into the sacrificial well were intact and empty. No signs of carnage, no indications of death. He approached the clearing where Giordino had landed the NUMA helicopter. It was riddled from bow to tail by bullets. Using it to fly for help was a dashed hope. No amount of repair would put it in the sky again.\n\nThe shattered rotor blades hung down like distorted arms twisted at the elbow. A colony of termites couldn't have done a better job on a decaying tree stump. Pitt sniffed the aroma of aviation fuel and thought it incredible the fuel tanks had failed to explode. It was too painfully obvious that a group of bandits or rebels had attacked the camp and blasted the craft into scrap.\n\nHis fears lessened considerably at discovering the gunfire he'd heard in the sinkhole was directed against the helicopter and not human flesh. His boss at NUMA's national headquarters in Washington, D.C., Admiral James Sandecker, wouldn't take kindly to the write-off of one of the agency's fleet of aircraft, but Pitt had braved the feisty little sea dog's wrath on numerous occasions and lived to tell about it. Not that it mattered what Sandecker would say now. Giordino and the archaeology project people were gone, taken captive by some force unknown to him.\n\nHe pushed aside the entry door that sagged drunkenly on one hinge and entered, making his way to the cockpit. He groped under the pilot's seat until he found a long pocket and retrieved a flashlight. The battery case felt undamaged. He held his breath and flicked on the switch. The beam flashed on and lit up the cockpit.\n\n\"Score one for the home team,\" he muttered to himself.\n\nPitt carefully made his way into the cargo compartment. The hurricane of shells had torn it into a jagged mess, but nothing seemed vandalized or removed. He found his nylon carry bag and pulled out the contents. His shirt and sneakers had escaped unscathed but a bullet had pierced the knee of his pants and caused irreparable damage to his brief boxer shorts. Removing the shorty wet suit, he found a towel and gave his body a vigorous rubdown to remove the sinkhole's slime from his skin. After pulling on his clothes and sneakers, he then rummaged around until he came upon the box lunches packed by the chef on board their research ship. His box was splattered against a bulkhead, but Giordino's had survived intact. Pitt wolfed down a peanut butter sandwich and a dill pickle and drained a can of root beer. Now, he felt almost human again.\n\nBack in the cockpit, he unlatched a panel door to a small compartment and pulled out a leather holster containing an old .45-caliber automatic Colt pistol. His father, Senator George Pitt, had carried it from Normandy to the Elbe River during World War II and then presented it to Dirk when he graduated from the Air Force Academy. The weapon had saved Pitt's life at least twice in the ensuing seventeen years.\n\nThough the blueing was pretty well worn away, it was lovingly maintained and functioned even more smoothly than when new. Pitt noted with no small displeasure that a stray bullet had gouged the leather holster and creased one of the grips. He ran his belt through the loops of the holster and buckled it around his waist along with the sheath of the dive knife.\n\nHe fashioned a small shade to contain the beam of the flashlight and searched the campsite. Unlike the helicopter, there was no sign of gunfire except spent shells on the ground, but the tents had been ransacked and any useful equipment or supplies that could be carried away were gone. A quick survey of the soft ground showed what direction the exodus had taken. A path that had been hacked out by machetes angled off through the dense thickets before vanishing in the darkness.\n\nThe forest looked forbidding and impenetrable. This was not an expedition he would have ever considered or undertaken in daylight, much less nighttime. He was at the mercy of the insects and animals that found humans fair game in the rain forest. With no small concern the subject of snakes came to mind.\n\nHe recalled hearing of boa constrictors and anacondas reaching lengths of 24 meters (80 feet). But it was the deadly poisonous snakes like the bushmaster, the cascabel, or the nasty fer-de-lance, or lance-head, that caused Pitt a high degree of trepidation. Low sneakers and light fabric pants offered no protection against a viper with a mean streak.\n\nBeneath great stone faces staring menacingly down at him from the walls of the ruined city, Pitt set off at a steady pace, following the trail of footprints under the narrow beam of the flashlight. He wished he had a plan, but he was operating in the unknown. His chances of dashing through a murderous jungle and rescuing the hostages from any number of hard-bitten bandits or revolutionaries were plain hopeless.\n\nFailure seemed inevitable. But any thought of sitting around and doing nothing, or trying somehow to save himself, never entered his mind.\n\nPitt smiled at the stone faces of long-forgotten gods that stared back in the beam of the flashlight. He turned and took a last look at the unearthly green glow coming from the bottom of the sinkhole. Then he entered the jungle.\n\nWithin four paces the thick foliage swallowed him as if he'd never been.\n\nSoaked by a constant drizzle, the prisoners were herded through a moss-blanketed forest until the trail ended at a deep ravine. Their captors drove them across a fallen log that served as a bridge to the other side where they followed the remains of an ancient stone road that wound up the mountains. The leader of the terrorist band set a fast pace, and Doc Miller was particularly hard pressed to keep up. His clothes were so wet it was impossible to tell where the sweat left off and the damp from the rain began. The guards prodded him unmercifully with the muzzles of their guns whenever he dropped back. Giordino stepped beside the old man, propped one of Miller's arms over his shoulder, and helped him along, seeming oblivious to the pummeling provided by the sadistic guards against his defenseless back and shoulders.\n\n\"Keep that damned gun off him,\" Shannon snapped at the bandit in Spanish. She took Miller's other arm and hung it around her neck so that both she and Giordino could support the older man. The bandit replied by kicking her viciously in the buttocks. She staggered forward, gray-faced, her lips tight in pain, but she regained her balance and gave the bandit a withering stare.\n\nGiordino found himself smiling at Shannon, wondering at her spirit and grit and untiring fortitude. She still had on her swimsuit under a sleeveless cotton blouse the guerrillas had allowed her to retrieve from her tent, along with a pair of hiking boots. He was also conscious of an overwhelming sense of ineffectiveness, his inability to save this woman from harm and degradation. And there was also a feeling of cowardice for deserting his old friend without a fight. He'd thought of snatching a guard's gun at least twenty times since being forced away from the sinkhole. But that would only have gotten him killed and solved nothing. As long as he somehow stayed alive there was a chance. Giordino cursed each step that took him farther and farther away from saving Pitt.\n\nFor hours they fought for breath in the thin Andes air as they struggled to an altitude of 3400 meters (11,000 feet). Everyone suffered from the cold. Although it soared under a blazing sun during the day, the temperature dropped to near freezing in the early hours of morning. Dawn found them still ascending along an ancient avenue of ruined white limestone buildings, high walls, and agricultural terraced hills that Shannon never dreamed existed. None of the structures looked as though they were built to the same specifications. Some were oval, some circular, very few were rectangular. They appeared oddly different from the other ancient structures she had studied. Was this all part of the Chachapoya confederation, she wondered, or another kingdom, another society? As the stone road followed along raised walls that reached almost into the mists rolling in from the mountain peaks above, she was astounded by the thousands of stone carvings of a very different ornamentation than she had ever seen. Great dragonlike birds and serpent-shaped fish mingled with stylized panthers and monkeys. The chiseled reliefs seemed oddly similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics except that they were more abstract. That unknown ancient peoples had inhabited the great plateau and ridges of the Peruvian Andes and constructed cities of such immense proportions came as a thrilling surprise to Shannon. She had not expected to find a culture so architecturally advanced that it erected structures on top of mountains as elaborate or extensive as any in the known ancient world. She would have given the Dodge Viper that she bought with her grandfather's inheritance to have lingered long enough to study these extraordinary ruins, but whenever she paused, she was roughly shoved forward.\n\nThe sun was showing when the bedraggled party emerged from a narrow pass into a small valley with mountains soaring on all sides. Though the rain thankfully had stopped, they all looked like rats who had barely escaped drowning. They saw ahead a lofty stone block building rising a good twelve stories high.\n\nUnlike the Mayan pyramids of Mexico, this structure had a rounder, more conical shape that was cut off at the top. It had ornate heads of animals and birds carved into the walls. Shannon recognized it as a ceremonial temple of the dead. The rear of the structure merged into a steep sandstone cliff honeycombed with thousands of burial caves, all with ornate exterior doorways facing onto a sheer drop.\n\nAn edifice on the top of the building, flanked with two large sculptures of a feathered jaguar with wings, she tentatively identified as a palace of the death gods. It was sitting in a small city with over a hundred buildings painstakingly constructed and lavishly decorated. The variety of architecture was astonishing.\n\nSome structures were built on top of high towers surrounded by graceful balconies. Most were completely circular while others sat on rectangular bases.\n\nShannon was speechless. For a few moments the immensity of the sight overwhelmed her. The identity of the great complex of structures became immediately apparent. If what she saw before her was to be believed, the Shining Path terrorists had discovered an incredible lost city. One that archaeologists, herself included, doubted existed, that treasure seekers had searched for but never found through four centuries of exploration-the lost City of the Dead, whose mythical riches went beyond those in the Valley of the Kings in ancient Egypt.\n\nShannon gripped Rodgers tightly about one arm. \"The lost Pueblo de los Muertos,\" she whispered.\n\n\"The lost what?\" he asked blankly.\n\n\"No talking,\" snapped one of the terrorists, jamming the butt of his automatic rifle in Rodgers's side just above the kidneys.\n\nRodgers gave a stifled gasp. He staggered and almost went down, but Shannon bravely held him on his feet, tensed for a blow that mercifully never came.\n\nAfter a short walk over a broad stone street, they approached the circular structure that towered over the surrounding ceremonial complex like a Gothic cathedral over a medieval city. They toiled up several flights of an extraordinary switchback stairway decorated with mosaics of winged humans set in stone, designs Shannon had never seen before. On the upper landing, beyond a great arched entrance, they entered a high-ceilinged room with geometric motifs cut into the stone walls. The center of the floor was crammed with intricately carved stone sculptures of every size and description. Ceramic effigy jars and elegant ornately painted vessels were stacked in chambers leading off the main room. One of these chambers was piled' high with beautifully preserved textiles in every imaginable design and color.\n\nThe archaeologists were stunned to see such an extensive cache of artifacts. To them it was like entering King Tut's tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings before the treasures were removed by famed archaeologist Howard Carter and put on display in the national museum in Cairo.\n\nThere was little time to study the treasure trove of artifacts. The terrorists quickly led the Peruvian students down an interior stairway and imprisoned them in a cell deep beneath the upper temple.\n\nGiordino and the rest were roughly thrown into a side room and guarded by two surly rebels who eyed them like exterminators contemplating a spider's nest. Everyone except Giordino sank gratefully to the hard, cold floor, fatigue etched in their drawn faces.\n\nGiordino pounded his fist against the stone wall in frustration. During the forced march, he had watched intently for a chance to fade into the jungle and make his way back to the sinkhole, but with at least three guards taking turns training their automatic weapons at his back with cold steadiness the entire trip, the opportunity for escape never materialized. He didn't need any convincing that they were old hands at rounding up hostages and driving them through rugged terrain. Any hope of reaching Pitt now was slim indeed. During the march he had smothered his characteristic defiance and acted meek and subjugated. Except for a doughty display of concern for Doc Miller, he did nothing to invite a torrent of bullets to the gut. He had to stay alive. In his mind, if he died, Pitt died.\n\nIf Giordino had the slightest notion that Pitt had climbed out of the sinkhole and was pounding over the old stone trail only thirty minutes behind, then he might have felt the urge to attend church at his earliest opportunity. Or at the very least, he might have given the idea brief consideration.\n\nWith the flashlight carefully hooded to prevent being seen by the terrorists, and its beam angled down at the indentations in the compost covering the soft earth that traveled into the darkness, Pitt plunged through the rain forest. He ignored the rain with utter indifference. He moved with the determination of a man outside himself. Time meant nothing, not once did he glance at the luminous dial of his watch. The trek through the rain forest in the dead of night became a blur in his mind. Only when the morning sky began to brighten and he could put away the flashlight did his spirits take a turn for the better.\n\nWhen he began his pursuit, the terrorists had more than a three-hour start. But he had closed the gap, walking at a steady gait when the trail ran steeply upward, jogging on the rare stretches where it leveled briefly. He never broke his stride, never once stopped to rest. His heart was beginning to pound under the strain, but his legs still pumped away without any muscle pain or tightness. When he came on the ancient stone road and the going became easier, he actually increased his pace. Thoughts of the unseen horrors of the jungle had been cast aside, and throughout that seemingly perpetual night, all fear and apprehension became strangely remote.\n\nHe paid scant notice to the immense stone structures along the long avenue. He rushed on, now in daylight and on open ground, making little or no attempt at concealment. Only when he reached the pass into the valley did he slow down and stop, surveying the landscape ahead. He spotted the huge temple against the steep cliff approximately a half kilometer (a third of a mile) distant. One tiny figure sat at the top of the long stairway, hunched over with his back against a wide archway. There was no doubt in Pitt's mind this was where the terrorists had taken their hostages. The narrow pass was the only way in and out of the steep-walled valley. The fear and anxiety that he might stumble across the bodies of Giordino and the archaeologists were swept away in a wave of relief. The hunt was ended, now the quarry, who did not yet know they were quarry, had to be quietly canceled out one by one until the odds became manageable.\n\nHe moved in closer, using the fallen walls of old residential homes around the temple as cover. He crouched and ran soundlessly from one shelter to the next until he crawled behind a large stone figure displaying a phallic design. He paused and stared up at the entrance to the temple. The long stairway leading to the entrance presented a formidable obstacle. Unless he somehow possessed the power of invisibility, Pitt would be shot down before he was a quarter of the way up the steps. Any attempt in broad daylight was suicidal. No way in, he thought bitterly. Flanking the staircase was out of the question. The temple's side walls were too sheer and too smooth. The stones were laid with such precision a knife blade could not fit between the cracks.\n\nThen providence laid a benevolent hand on his shoulder. The problem of creeping up the stairs unseen was erased when Pitt observed that the terrorist who was guarding the entrance to the temple had fallen hard asleep from the effects of the exhausting march through the jungle mountains. Inhaling and exhaling a deep breath, Pitt stealthily crept toward the stairway.\n\nTupac Amaru was a smooth but dangerous character, and he looked it. Having taken the name of the last king of the Incas to be tortured and killed by the Spanish, he was short, narrow-shouldered, with a vacant, brown face devoid of expression. He looked as though he never learned how to express the least hint of compassion. Unlike most of the hill-country people whose broad faces were smooth and hairless, Amaru wore a huge moustache and long sideburns that stretched from a thick mass of straight hair that was as black as his empty eyes. When the narrow, bloodless lips arched in a slight smile, which was rare, they revealed a set of teeth that would make an orthodontist proud. His men, conversely, often grinned diabolically through jagged and uneven coca-stained bicuspids.\n\nAmaru had cut a swath of death and destruction throughout the jungle hill country of Amazonas, a department in northeastern Peru that had more than its share of poverty, terrorism, sickness, and bureaucratic corruption. His band of cutthroats was responsible for the disappearance of several explorers, government archaeologists, and army patrols that had entered the region and were never seen again. He was not the revolutionary he seemed. Amaru couldn't have cared less about revolution or improving the lot of the abysmally poor Indians of the Peruvian hinterlands, most of whom worked tiny plots to eke out a bare existence. Amaru had other reasons for controlling the region and keeping the superstitious natives under his domination.\n\nHe stood in the doorway of the chamber, staring stonily at the three men and one woman before him as if for the first time, relishing the defeat in their eyes, the weariness in their bodies, exactly the state he-wanted them.\n\n\"I regret the inconvenience,\" he said, speaking for the first time since the abduction. \"It is good that you offered no resistance or you would have surely been shot.\"\n\n\"You speak pretty good English for a highlands guerrilla,\" Rodgers acknowledged, \"Mr.-?\"\n\n\"Tupac Amaru. I attended the University of Texas at Austin.\"\n\n\"What hath Texas wrought,\" Giordino mumbled under his breath.\n\n\"Why have you kidnapped us?\" Shannon whispered in a voice hushed with fear and fatigue.\n\n\"For ransom, what else?\" replied Amaru. \"The Peruvian government will pay well for the return of such respected American scientists, not to mention their brilliant archaeology students, many of whom have rich and respected parents. The money will help us continue our fight against repression of the masses.\"\n\n\"Spoken like a Communist milking a dead cow,\" muttered Giordino.\n\n\"The old Russian version may well be history, but the philosophy of Mao Tse-tung lives on,\" Amaru explained patiently.\n\n\"It lives on, all right,\" Doc Miller sneered. \"Billions of dollars in economic damage. Twenty-six thousand Peruvians dead, most of the victims the very peasants whose rights you claim to be fighting for-\"\n\nHis words were cut off by a rifle butt that was jammed into his lower back near the kidney. Miller sagged to the stone floor like a bag of potatoes, his face twisted in pain.\n\n\"You're hardly in a position to question my dedication to the cause,\" Amaru said coldly.\n\nGiordino knelt beside the old man and cradled his head. He looked up at the terrorist leader with scorn. \"You don't take criticism very well, do you?\"\n\nGiordino was prepared to ward off a blow to his exposed head, but before the guard could raise his rifle butt again, Shannon stepped between them.\n\nShe glared at Amaru, the pale fear in her face replaced with red anger. \"You're a fraud,\" Shannon stated firmly.\n\nAmaru looked at her with a bemused expression. \"And what brings you to that curious conclusion, Dr.\n\nKelsey?\"\n\n\"You know my name?\"\n\n\"My agent in the United States alerted me of your latest project to explore the mountains before you and your friends left the airport in Phoenix, Arizona.\"\n\n\"Informant, you mean.\"\n\nAmaru shrugged. \"Semantics mean little.\"\n\n\"A fraud and a charlatan,\" Shannon continued. \"You and your men aren't Shining Path revolutionaries.\n\nFar from it. You're nothing more than huaqueros, thieving tomb robbers.\"\n\n\"She's right,\" Rodgers said, backing her up. \"You wouldn't have time to chase around the countryside blowing up power lines and police stations and still accumulate the vast cache of artifacts inside this temple. It's obvious, you're running an elaborate artifact theft ring that has to be a full-time operation.\"\n\nAmaru looked at his prisoners in mocking speculation. \"Since the fact must be patently apparent to everyone in the room, I won't bother to deny it.\"\n\nA few seconds passed in silence, then Doc Miller rose unsteadily to his feet and stared Amaru directly in the eye. \"You thieving scum,\" he rasped. \"Pillager, ravager of antiquities. If it was in my power, I'd have you and your band of looters shot down like--\"\n\nMiller broke off suddenly as Amaru, his features utterly lacking the least display of emotion and his black eyes venting evil, removed a Heckler & Koch nine-millimeter automatic from a hip holster. With the paralyzing inevitability of a dream, he calmly, precisely, shot Doc Miller in the chest. The reverberating blast echoed through the temple, deafening all ears. One shot was all that was required.\n\nDoc Miller jerked backward against the stone wall for one shocking moment, and then dropped forward onto his stomach without a sound, hands and arms twisted oddly beneath his chest as a pool of red oozed across the floor.\n\nThe captives all reflected different reactions. Rodgers stood like a statue frozen in time, eyes wide with shock and disbelief, while Shannon instinctively screamed. No stranger to violent death, Giordino clenched his hands at his sides. The ice-cold indifference of the murderous act filled him with a savage rage that was tempered only by maddening helplessness. There was no doubt in his mind, in anybody's mind, that Amaru intended to kill them all. With nothing to lose, Giordino tensed to leap at the killer and tear out his throat before he received the inevitable bullet through the head.\n\n\"Do not try it,\" said Amaru, reading Giordino's thoughts, aiming the muzzle of the automatic between the eyes that burned with hate. He inclined his head toward the guards, who stood with guns level and ready, and gave them orders in Spanish. Then he stepped aside as one of the guards grabbed Miller around the ankles, and dragged his body out of sight into the main room of the temple, leaving a trail of blood across the stone floor.\n\nShannon's scream had given way to uncontrollable sobbing as she stared with bleak, unwavering eyes at the bloody streak on the floor. She sagged to her knees in shock and buried her face in her hands. \"He couldn't harm you. How could you shoot down a kindly old man?\"\n\nGiordino stared at Amaru. \"For him, it was easy.\"\n\nAmaru's flat, cold eyes crawled to Giordino's face. \"You would do well to keep your mouth closed, little man. The good doctor was supposed to be a lesson that apparently you did not comprehend.\"\n\nNo one took notice of the return of the guard who had dragged away Miller's body. No one except Giordino. He caught the hat pulled down over the eyes, the hands concealed within the poncho. He flicked a glance at the second guard who slouched casually against the doorway, his gun now slung loosely over one shoulder, the muzzle pointing at no one in particular. Only two meters separated them.\n\nGiordino figured he could be all over the guard before he knew what hit him. But there was still the Heckler & Koch tightly gripped in Amaru's hand.\n\nWhen Giordino spoke, his voice wore a cold edge. \"You are going to die, Amaru. You are surely going to die as violently as all the innocent people you've murdered in cold blood.\"\n\nAmaru didn't catch the millimetric curl of Giordino's lips, the slight squint of the eyes. His expression turned curious, then the teeth flashed and he laughed. \"So? You think I'm going to die, do you? Will you be my executioner? Or will the proud young lady do me the honor?\"\n\nHe leaned down and savagely jerked Shannon to her feet, took hold of her flowing ponytail, and viciously pulled her head backward until she was staring from wide, terrified eyes into his leering face. \"I promise that after a few hours in my bed you'll crawl to obey my commands.\"\n\n\"Oh, God, no,\" Shannon moaned.\n\n\"I take great pleasure in raping women, listening as they scream and beg--\"\n\nA brawny arm tightened around his throat and choked off his words. \"This is for all the women you made suffer,\" said Pitt, a macabre look in his intense green eyes, as he cast aside the poncho, jammed the barrel of the .45 Colt down the front of Amaru's pants, and pulled the trigger.\n\nFor the second time the small confines of the room echoed with the deafening sound of gunfire.\n\nGiordino hurled himself forward, his head and shoulder driving into the startled guard, crushing him against the hard wall, causing an explosive gasp of pain. He caught the distorted look of horror and agony on Amaru's face, the bulging eyes, his mouth open in a silent scream, a fleeting glimpse of the Heckler & Koch flying through the air as his hands clutched the mushrooming red stain in his groin. And then Giordino punched the guard in the teeth and tore the automatic rifle from his hands in almost the same movement. He swung around in a crouched firing position, muzzle aimed through the doorway.\n\nThis time Shannon didn't scream. Instead, she crawled into a corner of the room and sat motionless, like a waxen effigy of herself, staring dumbly at Amaru's blood splattered over her bare arms and legs. If she had been terrified earlier, she was now merely numb with shock. Then she stared up at Pitt, lips taut, face pale, specks of blood in her blond hair.\n\nRodgers was staring at Pitt too, with an expression of astonishment. Somehow he knew, recognized the eyes, the animal-like movements. \"You're the diver from the cave,\" he said dazedly.\n\nPitt nodded. \"One and the same.\"\n\n\"You're supposed to be back in the well,\" Shannon murmured in a trembling voice.\n\n\"Sir Edmund Hillary has nothing on me.\" Pitt grinned slyly. \"I scramble up and down the walls of sinkholes like a human fly.\" He shoved a horrified Amaru to the floor as if the terrorist were a drunk on a sidewalk and placed a hand on Giordino's shoulder. \"You can relax, Al. The other guards have seen the light of decency and virtue.\"\n\nGiordino, with a smile as wide as an open drawbridge, laid aside the automatic rifle and embraced Pitt.\n\n\"God, I never thought I'd see your gargoyle face again.\"\n\n\"The things you put me through. . . A damned shame. I can't go away for half an hour without you involving me in a local crime wave.\"\n\n\"Why the delay?\" asked Giordino, not to be outdone. \"We expected you hours ago.\"\n\n\"I missed my bus. Which reminds me, where is my Dixieland band?\"\n\n\"They don't play sinkholes. Seriously, how in hell did you climb a sheer wall and trail us through the jungle?\"\n\n\"Not exactly a fun-filled feat, believe me. I'll tell you over a beer another time.\"\n\n\"And the guards, what happened to the other four guards?\"\n\nPitt gave a negligent shrug. \"Their attention wandered and they all met with unfortunate accidents, mostly concussions or possible skull fractures.\" Then his face turned grim. \"I ran into one pulling Doc Miller's body through the main entrance. Who carried out the execution?\"\n\nGiordino nodded at Amaru. \"Our friend here shot him in the heart for no good reason. He's also the guy who dropped the safety line down around your head.\"\n\n\"Then I won't bother myself with remorse,\" Pitt said, staring down at Amaru, who was clutching his groin and moaning in agony, fearful of looking to ascertain the damage. \"Kind of makes me warm all over knowing that his sex life just went dysfunctional. Does he have a name?\"\n\n\"Calls himself Tupac Amaru,\" answered Shannon. \"The name of the last Inca king. Probably took it to impress the hill people.\"\n\n\"The Peruvian students,\" Giordino said, remembering. \"They were herded down a stairway underneath the temple.\"\n\n\"I've already released them. Brave kids. By now they should have the guerrillas tied up and neatly packaged until the government authorities arrive.\"\n\n\"Not guerrillas, and hardly dedicated revolutionaries. More like professional artifact looters masquerading as Shining Path terrorists. They pillage precious antiquities to sell through international underground markets.\"\n\n\"Amaru is only the base of a totem pole,\" added Rodgers. \"His clients are the distributors who make the bulk of the profits.\"\n\n\"They have good taste,\" observed Pitt. \"From what I glimpsed, there must be enough prime merchandise stashed here to satisfy half the museums and private collectors in the world.\"\n\nShannon hesitated a moment, then stepped up to Pitt, put her hands around his neck, pulled his head down and kissed him lightly on the lips. \"You saved our lives. Thank you.\"\n\n\"Not once but twice,\" Rodgers added, pumping Pitt's hand while Shannon still clung to him.\n\n\"A lot of luck was involved,\" Pitt said with uncharacteristic embarrassment. Despite the damp, stringy hair, the lack of makeup, the dirty and torn blouse over the black swimsuit, and the incongruous hiking boots, he still saw a sensual lustiness about her.\n\n\"Thank God you got here when you did,\" said Shannon with a shiver.\n\n\"I deeply regret I was too late to save Doc Miller.\"\n\n\"Where have they taken him?\" asked Rodgers.\n\n\"I stopped the scum who was disposing of the body just outside the temple entrance. Doc is lying on the landing above the steps.\"\n\nGiordino gazed at Pitt, inspecting him from head to toe, observing the multitude of cuts and scratches on his friend's face and arms from his race through the jungle in the dark, seeing a man who was all but dead on his feet. \"You look like you just finished a triathlon and then fell on a roll of barbed wire. As your resident medicine man, I recommend a few hours rest before we hike back to the sinkhole campsite.\"\n\n\"I look worse than I feel,\" Pitt said cheerfully. \"Time enough for a snooze later. First things first. Me, I don't have the slightest inclination to play Tarzan again. I'm taking the next flight out of here.\"\n\n\"Madness,\" muttered Giordino half in jest. \"A few hours in the jungle and he goes flaky.\"\n\n\"Do you really think we can fly out of here?\" inquired Shannon skeptically.\n\n\"Absolutely,\" Pitt said. \"In fact I guarantee it.\"\n\nRodgers stared at him. \"Only a helicopter could come in and out of the valley.\"\n\nPitt grinned. \"I wouldn't have it any other way. How else do you think Amaru, or whatever his name is, transports his stolen goods to a coastal port for shipment out of the country? That calls for a communications system, so there must be a radio around we can appropriate to send out a call for help.\"\n\nGiordino gave an approving nod. \"Makes sense, providing we can find it. A portable radio could be hidden anywhere in one of the surrounding ruins. We could spend days looking for it.\"\n\nPitt stared down at Amaru, his face expressionless. \"He knows where it is.\"\n\nAmaru fought off the pain and stared back at Pitt with black malignant eyes. \"We have no radio,\" he hissed through clenched teeth.\n\n\"Forgive me if I don't take you at your word. Where do you keep it?\"\n\n\"I will tell you nothing.\" Amaru's mouth twisted as he spoke.\n\n\"Would you rather die?\" Pitt queried dryly.\n\n\"You would do me a service by killing me.\"\n\nPitt's green eyes were as cold as a lake above timberline. \"How many women have you raped and murdered?\"\n\nAmaru's expression was contemptuous. \"So numerous I've lost count.\"\n\n\"You want me to fly into a rage and blow you away, is that it?\"\n\n\"Why don't you ask how many children I've slaughtered?\"\n\n\"You're only kidding yourself.\" Pitt took the Colt .45 and placed the muzzle against the side of Amaru's face. \"Kill you? I fail to see the percentage in that. One shot through both eyes would be more appropriate. You'll still live, but along with your other recent impairment you'll also be blind.\"\n\nAmaru put on a show of arrogance, but there was unmistakable fear in his dead eyes, and there was a noticeable trembling of his lips. \"You're bluffing.\"\n\n\"After the eyes, then the kneecaps,\" Pitt described conversationally. \"Perhaps the ears next, or better yet the nose. If I were you, I'd quit while I was ahead.\"\n\nSeeing that Pitt was stone-cold serious, and realizing he was at a dead end, Amaru caved in. \"You'll find what you're looking for inside a round building fifty meters west of the temple. There is a monkey carved above the doorway.\"\n\nPitt turned to Giordino. \"Take one of the students with you to translate. Contact the nearest Peruvian authorities. Give our location and report our situation. Then request they send in an army unit. There may be more of these characters lurking in the ruins.\"\n\nGiordino looked thoughtfully at Amaru. \"If I send a Mayday over an open frequency, this homicidal maniac's pals in Lima might very well pick it up and send in a force of goons ahead of the army.\"\n\n\"Trusting the army can be touch-and-go,\" added Shannon. \"One or more of their high-ranking officers could be in on this.\"\n\n\"Graft,\" Pitt stated philosophically, \"makes the world go round.\"\n\nRodgers nodded. \"Shannon's right. This is tomb robbery on a grand scale. The profits could easily match the take of any top drug smuggling operation. Whoever the mastermind is, he couldn't conduct business without paying off government officials.\"\n\n\"We can use our own frequency and contact Juan,\" suggested Shannon.\n\n\"Juan?\"\n\n\"Juan Chaco, the Peruvian government coordinator for our project. He's in charge of our supply headquarters at the nearest city.\"\n\n\"Can he be trusted?\"\n\n\"I believe so,\" Shannon replied without hesitation. \"Juan is one of the most respected archaeologists in South America, and a leading scholar on Andean cultures. He's also the government watchdog on illegal diggings and smuggling of antiquities.\"\n\n\"Sounds like our man,\" Pitt said to Giordino. \"Find the radio, call him up and ask for a chopper to airlift us the hell back to our ship.\"\n\n\"I'll go with you and notify Juan of Doc's murder,\" offered Shannon. \"I'd also like a closer look at the structures around the temple.\"\n\n\"Take along weapons and keep a sharp eye,\" Pitt warned them.\n\n\"What about Doc's body?\" asked Rodgers. \"We can't leave him lying around like a road kill.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" said Pitt. \"Bring him inside the temple out of the sun and wrap him in some blankets until he can be airlifted to the nearest coroner.\"\n\n\"Leave him to me,\" Rodgers said angrily. \"It's the least I can do for a good man.\"\n\nAmaru grinned hideously, actually grinned through his agony. \"Fools, crazy fools,\" he sneered. \"You'll never leave the Pueblo de los Muertos alive.\"\n\n\"Pueblo de los Muertos means city of the dead,\" Shannon translated.\n\nThe others glanced in disgust at Amaru. To them he seemed like an impotent rattlesnake too injured to coil and strike. But Pitt still saw him as dangerous and was not about to make the fatal mistake of underestimating him. He didn't care for the eerie expression of confidence in Amaru's eyes.\n\nAs soon as the others hurried out of the room, Pitt knelt beside Amaru. \"You act pretty sure of yourself for a man in your position.\"\n\n\"The last laugh will be mine.\" Amaru's face contorted in a sudden spasm of pain. \"You have blundered into the path of powerful men. Their wrath will be terrible.\"\n\nPitt smiled indifferently. \"I've blundered up against powerful men before.\"\n\n\"By lifting a tiny piece of the curtain you have endangered the Solpemachaco. They will do whatever necessary to prevent exposure, even if it means the elimination of an entire province.\"\n\n\"Not exactly a sweet-tempered group you're associated with. What do you call them again?\"\n\nAmaru went silent. He was becoming weak from shock and the loss of blood. Slowly, with much difficulty, he lifted a hand and pointed a finger at Pitt. \"You are cursed. Your bones will rest with the Chachapoyas forever.\" Then, his eyes went unfocused, closed, and he fainted.\n\nPitt stared at Shannon. \"Who are the Chachapoyas?\"\n\n\"Known as the Cloud People,\" Shannon explained. \"They were a pre-Inca culture that flourished high in the Andes from A.D. 800 to 1480, when they were conquered by the Incas. It was the Chachapoyas who built this elaborate necropolis for the dead.\"\n\nPitt rose to his feet, removed the guard's felt hat from his head and dropped it on Amaru's chest. He turned and walked into the main chamber of the temple and spent the next few minutes examining the incredible cache of Chachapoyan artifacts. He was admiring a large clay mummy case when Rodgers rushed up, looking disturbed.\n\n\"Where did you say you left Doc Miller?\" Rodgers asked, half out of breath.\n\n\"On the landing above the exterior steps.\"\n\n\"You'd better show me.\"\n\nPitt followed Rodgers outside the arched entrance. He stopped and stared down at a bloodstain on the stone landing, then looked up questioningly. \"Who moved the body?\"\n\n\"If you don't know,\" said an equally mystified Rodgers, \"I certainly don't.\"\n\n\"Did you look around the base of the temple? Maybe he fell--\"\n\n\"I sent four of the archaeology students down to search. They found no sign of the Doc.\"\n\n\"Could any of the students have moved him?\"\n\n\"I checked. They're all as bewildered as we are.\"\n\n\"Dead bodies do not get up and walk off,\" said Pitt flatly.\n\nRodgers looked around the outside of the temple, then gave a shrug. \"It looks as if this one did.\"\n\nThe air conditioner whirred and circulated cool dry air inside the long motor home that served as the archaeology project's headquarters in Chachapoya. And the man reclining on a leather sofa was a great deal less fatigued than the men and women in the City of the Dead. Juan Chaco rested languidly while maintaining a firm grip on his well-iced gin and tonic. But he sat up in full wakefulness almost instantly when a voice came over the radio speaker mounted on a wall behind the driver's compartment.\n\n\"Saint John calling Saint Peter.\" The voice came sharp and distinct. \"Saint John calling Saint Peter. Are you there?\"\n\nChaco moved quickly across the interior of the plush motor home and pressed the transmit button on the radio. \"I am here and listening.\"\n\n\"Turn on the recorder. I don't have time to repeat myself or explain the situation in detail.\"\n\nChaco acknowledged and switched on a cassette recorder. \"Ready to receive.\"\n\n\"Amaru and his followers were overpowered and taken prisoner. They are now being held under guard by the archaeologists. Amaru was shot and may be badly wounded.\"\n\nChaco's face suddenly turned grim. \"How is this possible?\"\n\n\"One of the men from NUMA, who responded to your distress call, somehow escaped from the sinkhole and pursued Amaru and his captives to the valley temple where he managed to subdue our overpaid cutthroats one by one.\"\n\n\"What sort of devil could do all this?\"\n\n\"A very dangerous and resourceful devil.\"\n\n\"Are you safe?\"\n\n\"For the moment.\"\n\n\"Then our plan to frighten the archaeologists from our collection grounds has failed.\"\n\n\"Miserably,\" replied the caller. \"Once Dr. Kelsey saw the artifacts awaiting shipment, she guessed the setup.\"\n\n\"What of Miller?\"\n\n\"They suspect nothing.\"\n\n\"At least something went right,\" said Chaco.\n\n\"If you send in a force before they leave the valley,\" explained the familiar voice, \"we can still salvage the operation.\"\n\n\"It was not our intention to harm our Peruvian students,\" said Chaco. \"The repercussions from my countrymen would spell the end to any further business between us.\"\n\n\"Too late, my friend. Now that they realize their ordeal was caused by a looting syndicate instead of Shining Path terrorists, they can't be allowed to reveal what they've seen. We have no choice but to eliminate them.\"\n\n\"None of this would have occurred if you had prevented Dr. Kelsey and Miles Rodgers from diving in the sacred well.\"\n\n\"Short of committing murder in front of the students, there was no stopping them.\"\n\n\"Sending out the rescue call was a mistake.\"\n\n\"Not if we wished to avoid serious inquiry by your government officials. Their drownings would have appeared suspicious if the correct rescue measures hadn't been taken. We cannot afford to expose the Solpemachaco to public scrutiny. Besides, how could we know that NUMA would respond from out of nowhere?\"\n\n\"True, an event that was inconceivable at the time.\"\n\nAs Chaco spoke, his empty eyes gazed at a small stone statue of a winged jaguar that was dug up in the valley of the dead. Finally he said quietly, \"I'll arrange for our hired mercenaries from the Peruvian army to drop in the Pueblo de los Muertos by helicopter within two hours.\"\n\n\"Do you have confidence in the commanding officer to do the job?\"\n\nChaco smiled to himself. \"If I can't trust my own brother, who can I trust?\"\n\n\"I never believed in resurrection of mere mortals.\" Pitt stood gazing down at the pool of crimson on the landing above the near-vertical stairway leading to the floor of the valley. \"But this is as good an example as I've ever seen.\"\n\n\"He was dead,\" Rodgers said emphatically. \"I was standing as close to him as I am to you when Amaru put a bullet through his heart. Blood was everywhere. You saw him lying here. There can be no doubt in your mind Doc was a corpse.\"\n\n\"I didn't take the time to do a postmortem examination.\"\n\n\"Okay, but how do you explain the trail of blood from the interior chamber where Doc was shot?\n\nThere must be a gallon of it spread from here to there.\"\n\n\"Closer to a pint,\" said Pitt thoughtfully. \"You exaggerate.\"\n\n\"How long would you guess the body rested here from the time you knocked out the guard and then released the students who arrived and tied him up?\" asked Rodgers.\n\n\"Four, maybe five minutes at the outside.\"\n\n\"And within that time a sixty-seven-year-old dead man bounds down two hundred tiny, narrow, niched steps laid on a seventy-five-degree angle. Steps that can't be taken more than one at a time without falling, and then he vanishes without shedding another drop of blood.\" Rodgers shook his head.\n\n\"Houdini would have flushed with envy.\"\n\n\"Are you sure it was Doc Miller?\" Pitt asked pensively.\n\n\"Of course it was Doc,\" Rodgers said incredulously. \"Who else do you think it was?\"\n\n\"How long have you known him?\"\n\n\"By reputation, at least fifteen years. Personally, I only met him five days ago.\" Rodgers stared at Pitt as if he were a madman. \"Look, you're fishing in empty waters. Doc is one of the world's leading anthropologists. He is to ancient American culture what Leakey is to African prehistory. His face has graced a hundred articles in dozens of magazines from the Smithsonian to the National Geographic. He has narrated and appeared in any number of public service television documentaries on early man. Doc was no recluse, he loved publicity. He was easily recognizable.\"\n\n\"Just fishing,\" Pitt said in a patient explaining tone. \"Nothing like a wild plot to stir the mind-'\n\nHe broke off as Shannon and Giordino sprinted into view around the circular base of the temple. Even at this height above the ground he could see they appeared agitated. He waited until Giordino was halfway up the stairs before he shouted.\n\n\"Don't tell me, somebody beat you to the radio and smashed it.\"\n\nGiordino paused, leaning against the sheer stairway. \"Wrong,\" he shouted back. \"It was gone.\n\nSnatched by person or persons unknown.\"\n\nBy the time Shannon and Giordino reached the top of the stairs they were both panting from the exertion and glistening with sweat. Shannon daintily patted her face with a soft tissue all women seem to produce at the most crucial times. Giordino merely rubbed an already damp sleeve across his forehead.\n\n\"Whoever built this thing,\" he said between breaths, \"should have installed an elevator.\"\n\n\"Did you find the tomb with the radio?\" Pitt asked.\n\nGiordino nodded. \"We found it all right. No cheapskates, these guys. The tomb was furnished right out of Abercrombie & Fitch. The best outdoor paraphernalia money can buy. There was even a portable generator providing power to a refrigerator.\"\n\n\"Empty?\" Pitt guessed.\n\nGiordino nodded. \"The rat who made off with the radio took the time to smash nearly four sixpacks of perfectly good Coors beer.\"\n\n\"Coors in Peru?\" Rodgers asked dubiously.\n\n\"I can show you the labels on the broken bottles,\" moaned Giordino. \"Someone wanted us to go thirsty.\"\n\n\"No fear of that with a jungle just beyond the pass,\" Pitt said with a slight smile.\n\nGiordino stared at Pitt, but there was no return smile. \"So how do we call in the marines?\"\n\nPitt shrugged. \"With the tomb robbers' radio missing, and the one in our helicopter looking like a lump of Swiss cheese-\" he broke off and turned to Rodgers. \"What about your communications at the sinkhole site?\"\n\nThe photographer shook his head. \"One of Amaru's men shot our radio to junk the same as yours.\"\n\n\"Don't tell me,\" Shannon said resignedly, \"we have to trudge thirty kilometers back through the forest primeval to the project site at the sinkhole, and then another ninety kilometers to Chachapoya?\"\n\n\"Maybe Chaco will become worried when he realizes all contact is lost with the project and send in a search party to investigate,\" Rodgers said hopefully.\n\n\"Even if they traced us to the City of the Dead,\" Pitt said slowly, \"they'd arrive too late. All they'd find would be dead bodies scattered around the ruins.\"\n\nEveryone glanced at him in puzzled curiosity.\n\n\"Amaru claimed we have upset the applecart of powerful men,\" Pitt continued by way of explanation, \"and that they would never allow us to leave this valley alive for fear that we would expose their artifact theft operation.\"\n\n\"But if they intended to kill us,\" Shannon said uncertainly, \"why bring us here? They could have just as well shot everyone and thrown our remains into the sinkhole.\"\n\n\"In order for them to make it look like a Shining Path raid, they may have had it in their mind to play the hostage for ransom game. If the Peruvian government, your university officials in the States, or the families of the archaeological students had paid enormous sums for your release, all the better. They'd have simply considered the ransom money as a bonus to the profits of their illegal smuggling and murdered all of you anyway.\"\n\n\"Who are these people?\" Shannon asked sharply.\n\n\"Amaru referred to them as the Solpemachaco, whatever that translates into.\"\n\n\"Solpemachaco,\" Shannon echoed. \"A combination Medusa/dragon myth from the local ancients.\n\nFolklore passed down through the centuries describes Solpemachaco as an evil serpent with seven heads who lives in a cave. One myth claims he lives here in the Pueblo de los Muertos.\"\n\nGiordino yawned indifferently. \"Sounds like a bad screenplay starring another monster from the bowels of the earth.\"\n\n\"More likely a clever play on words,\" said Pitt. \"A metaphor as a code name for an international looting organization with a vast reach into the underground antiquities market.\"\n\n\"The serpent's seven heads could represent the masterminds behind the organization,\" suggested Shannon.\n\n\"Or seven different bases of operation,\" added Rodgers.\n\n\"Now that we've cleared up that mystery,\" Giordino said wryly, \"why don't we clear the hell out of here and head for the sinkhole before the Sioux and Cheyenne come charging through the pass?\"\n\n\"Because they'd be waiting when we got there,\" said Pitt. \"Methinks we should stay put.\"\n\n\"You really believe they'll send men to kill us?\" Shannon said, her expression more angry than fearful.\n\nPitt nodded. \"I'd bet my pension on it. Whoever made off with the radio most certainly tattled on us. I judge his pals will soar into the valley like maddened hornets in. . .\" he paused to glance at his watch before continuing, \". . . about an hour and a half. After that, they'll shoot down anyone who vaguely resembles an archaeologist.\"\n\n\"Not what I call a cheery thought,\" she murmured.\n\n\"With six automatic rifles and Dirk's handgun I reckon we might discourage a first-rate gang of two dozen cutthroats for all of ten minutes,\" muttered Giordino gloomily.\n\n\"We can't stay here and fight armed criminals,\" Rodgers protested. \"We'd all be slaughtered.\"\n\n\"And there are the lives of those kids to consider,\" said Shannon, suddenly looking a little pale.\n\n\"Before we're swept up in an orgy of pessimism,\" said Pitt briskly, as if he hadn't a care in the world, \"I suggest we round up everyone and evacuate the temple.\"\n\n\"Then what?\" demanded Rodgers.\n\n\"First, we look around for Amaru's landing site.\"\n\n\"For what purpose?\"\n\nGiordino rolled his eyes. \"I know that look. He's hatching another Machiavellian scheme.\"\n\n\"Nothing too contrived,\" Pitt said patiently. \"I figure that after the bushwhackers land and begin chasing around the ruins searching for us, we'll borrow their helicopter and fly off to the nearest four-star hotel and a refreshing bath.\"\n\nThere was a moment of incredulous stillness. They all stared at Pitt as if he'd just stepped out of a Martian space capsule. Giordino was the first to break the stunned silence.\n\n\"See,\" he said with a wide grin. \"I told you so.\"\n\nPitt's estimate of an hour and a half was shy by only ten minutes. The stillness of the valley was broken by the throb of rotor blades whipping the air as two Peruvian military helicopters flew over the crest of a saddle between mountain peaks and circled the ancient buildings. After a cursory reconnaissance of the area, they descended in a clearing amid the ruins less than 100 meters (328 feet) from the front of the conical temple structure. The troops spilled out rapidly through the rear clamshell doors under the beating rotor blades and lined up at rigid attention as though they were standing for inspection.\n\nThese were no ordinary soldiers dedicated to preserving the peace of their nation. They were mercenary misfits who hired themselves out to the highest bidder. At the direction of the officer in charge, a captain incongruously attired in full dress uniform, the two platoons of thirty men each were formed into one closely packed battle line led by two lieutenants. Satisfied the line was straight, the captain raised a swagger stick above his head and motioned for the officers under his command to launch the assault on the temple. Then he climbed a low wall to direct the one-sided battle from what he thought was a safe viewpoint.\n\nThe captain shouted encouragement to his men, urging them to bravely charge up the steps of the temple. His voice echoed because of the hard acoustics of the ruins. But he broke off and uttered a strange awking sound that became a fit of gagging pain. For a brief instant he stiffened, his face twisted in incomprehension, then he folded forward and pitched off the wall, landing with a loud crack on the back of his head.\n\nA short, dumpy lieutenant in baggy combat fatigues rushed over and knelt beside the fallen captain, looked up at the funeral palace in dazed understanding, opened his mouth to shout an order, then crumpled over the body beneath him, the sharp crack of a Type 56-1 rifle the last thing he heard before death swept over him.\n\nFrom the landing on the upper level of the temple, flat on his stomach behind a small barricade of stones, Pitt stared down at the line of confused troops through the sights of the rifle and fired another four rounds into their ranks, picking off the only remaining officer. There was no look of surprise or fear on Pitt's face at seeing the overwhelming mercenary force, only a set look of determination in the deep green eyes. By resisting he was providing a diversion to save the lives of thirteen innocent people. Merely firing over the troops' heads to momentarily slow the assault was a futile waste of time. These men had come to kill all witnesses to a criminal operation. Kill or be killed was a clich\u00e9, but it held true. These men would give no quarter.\n\nPitt was not a pitiless man, his eyes were neither steel hard nor ice cold. For him there was no enjoyment in killing a complete stranger. His biggest regret was that the faceless men responsible for the crimes were not in his sights.\n\nCautiously, he pulled the assault rifle back from the tight peephole between the stones and surveyed the ground below. The Peruvian mercenaries had fanned out behind the stone ruins. A few scattered shots were fired upward at the temple, chipping the stone carvings before ricocheting and whining off into the cliff of tombs behind. These were hardened, disciplined fighting men who recovered quickly under pressure. Killing their officers had stalled but not stopped them. The sergeants had taken command and were concentrating on a tactic to eliminate this unexpected resistance.\n\nPitt ducked back behind the stone barricade as a torrent of automatic weapons fire peppered the outside columns, sending chips of stone flying in all directions. This came as no surprise to him. The Peruvians were laying down a covering fire as they crouched and dashed from ruin to ruin, moving ever closer to the base of the stairs leading up the rounded front of the temple. Pitt moved sideways like a crab and edged into the shelter of the death palace before rising to his feet and running to the rear wall.\n\nHe cast a wary eye out an arched window.\n\nKnowing that the round walls of the temple were too smooth to scale for an attack and too steep for the defenders to escape, none of the soldiers had circled around to the rear. Pitt could easily predict that they were gambling their entire force on a frontal assault up the stairway. What he hadn't foreseen was that they were going to reduce a lot of the palace of the dead on top of the temple to rubble before charging up the stairway.\n\nPitt scurried back to the barricade and let loose a long burst from the Chinese automatic rifle until the final shell spit across the stone floor. He rolled to one side and was in the act of inserting another long, curved ammo stick in the gun's magazine when he heard a whoosh, and a forty-millimeter rocket from a People's Republic of China Type 69 launcher sailed up and burst against one side of the temple 8 meters (26 feet) behind Pitt. It detonated with a thunderous explosion that hurled stone like shrapnel and tore a huge hole in the wall. Within seconds the ancient shrine to the death gods was clogged with debris and the evil stench of high explosives.\n\nThere was a loud ringing in Pitt's ears, the reverberating roar of the detonation, the pounding of his own heart. He was momentarily blinded and his nose and throat were immediately filled with dust. He frantically rubbed his eyes clear and gazed down at the surrounding ruins. He was just in time to see the black smoke cloud and bright flash produced by the rocket's booster. He ducked with his hands over his head as another rocket slammed into the ancient stone and exploded with a deafening roar. The vicious blow pelted Pitt with flying rubble and the concussion knocked the breath out of him.\n\nFor a moment he lay motionless, almost lifeless. Then he struggled painfully to his hands and knees, coughing dust, seized the rifle, and crawled back into the interior of the palace. He took a last look at the mountain of precious artifacts and paid a final call on Amaru.\n\nThe grave looter had regained consciousness and glared at Pitt, his hands clutching his groin, now clotted with dried blood, the murderous face masked in hate. There was a strange coldness about him now, an utter indifference to the pain. He radiated evil.\n\n\"Your friends have a destructive nature,\" said Pitt, as another rocket struck the temple.\n\n\"You are trapped,\" Amaru rasped in a low tone.\n\n\"Thanks to your staged murder of Dr. Miller's imposter. He made off with your radio and called in reinforcements.\"\n\n\"Your time to die has arrived, Yankee pig.\"\n\n\"Yankee pig,\" Pitt repeated. \"I haven't been called that in ages.\"\n\n\"You will suffer as you have made me suffer.\"\n\n\"Sorry, I have other plans.\"\n\nAmaru tried to rise up on an elbow and say something, but Pitt was gone.\n\nHe rushed to the rear opening again. A mattress and pair of knives he had scrounged from living quarters inside the cliff tomb discovered by Giordino and Shannon sat beside the window. He laid the mattress over the lower sill, then lifted his legs outside and sat on it. He cast aside the rifle, gripped the knives in outstretched hands, and glanced apprehensively at the ground 20 meters (65 feet) below. He recalled an occasion when he bungee-jumped into a canyon on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.\n\nLeaping into space, he mused, went against all human nature. Any hesitation or second thoughts abruptly ended when a fourth rocket smashed into the temple. He dug the heels of his sneakers into the steep slope and jammed the knife blades into the stone blocks for brakes. Without a backward glance, he launched himself over the side, and slid down the wall, using the mattress as a toboggan/sled.\n\nGiordino, with Shannon and the students trailing behind him and Rodgers bringing up the rear, cautiously climbed a stairway from an underground tomb where they had been hiding when the helicopters landed. Giordino paused, raised his head slightly over a fallen stone wall, and scanned the landscape. The helicopters were sitting only 50 meters (164 feet) away, engines idling, the two-man flight crews calmly sitting in their cockpits watching the assault on the temple.\n\nShannon moved beside Giordino and looked over the wall just in time to see a rocket bring down the arched entrance of the upper palace. \"They'll destroy the artifacts,\" she said in grief.\n\n\"No concern over Dirk?\" Giordino spared her a brief glance. \"He's only risking his life for us, fighting off an army of mercenaries so we can steal a helicopter.\"\n\nShe sighed. \"It pains any archaeologist to see precious antiquities lost forever.\"\n\n\"Better yesterday's junk than us.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, I want him to escape as much as you. But it all seems so impossible.\"\n\n\"I've known the guy since we were kids.\" Giordino smiled. \"Believe me, he never passed up an opportunity to play Horatius at the bridge.\" He studied the two helicopters that sat in the clearing in a slightly staggered formation.\n\nHe selected the one in the rear as a prime candidate for escape. It was only a few meters from a narrow ravine they could move in without being seen, and more important, it was out of easy view of the crew seated in the forward craft. \"Pass the word,\" he ordered over the sounds of battle, \"we're going to hijack the second chopper in line.\"\n\nPitt shot uncontrollably down the side of the temple, like a plummeting boulder on a path that took him between the stone animal heads protruding from the convex sloping walls with only centimeters to spare.\n\nHis hands gripped the knife handles like vises, and he pushed with all the strength in his sinewy arms as the braking blades began to throw out sparks of protest from the friction of steel against hard stone. The rear edges of the rubber heels on his sneakers were being ground smooth by the rough surface of the wall. And yet he accelerated with dismaying speed. His two greatest fears were falling forward and tumbling head-first like a cannon ball into the ground or striking with such force that he broke a leg. Either calamity and he was finished, dead meat for the Peruvians who wouldn't treat him kindly for killing their officers.\n\nStill fighting grimly but hopelessly to arrest his velocity, Pitt flexed his legs a split second before he struck the ground with appalling force. He let loose of the knives on impact as his feet drove into the ooze of rain-soaked soil. Using his momentum, he rolled over on one shoulder and tumbled twice as required in a hard parachute landing. He lay in the mud for a few moments, thankful he hadn't landed on a rock, before rising experimentally to his feet and checking for damage.\n\nOne ankle slightly sprained, but still in working condition, a few abrasions on his hands, and an aching shoulder appeared to be the only damage. The damp earth had saved him from serious injury. The faithful mattress was in shreds. He took a deep breath, happy at still being intact. Having no time to waste, Pitt broke into a run, keeping as much of the ruins as possible between him and the troops massing for an assault up the temple stairs.\n\nGiordino could only hope that Pitt had survived the rockets and somehow made it safely down the wall of the temple without being spotted and shot. It seemed an impossible act, Giordino thought. Pitt was seemingly indestructible, but the old faceless man with the scythe catches up to us all. That he might catch up with Pitt was a prospect Giordino could not accept. It was inconceivable to him that Pitt could die anywhere but in bed with a beautiful woman or in a nursing home for aged divers.\n\nGiordino crouched and ran into a blind position behind the trailing helicopter as a squad of troops began charging up the precipitous temple steps. The reserve squad remained below while pouring a covering storm of rifle fire at the now shattered palace of the dead.\n\nEvery one of the Peruvians had his attention focused on the attack. No one saw Giordino, clutching an automatic rifle, steal around the tail boom of the helicopter and enter through the rear clamshell doors. He hurried inside and dropped flat, his eyes taking in the empty troop carrier and cargo compartment and the two pilots in the cockpit with their backs turned to him, intently watching the one-sided battle.\n\nWith practiced stealth Giordino moved with incredible quickness for a man built like a compact bulldozer. The pilots did not hear him or feel his presence as he came up behind their seats. Giordino reversed the rifle and clubbed the copilot on the back of the neck. The pilot heard the thud and twisted around in his seat, staring briefly at Giordino more from curiosity than dread. Before he could blink an eye, Giordino rammed the butt of the steel folding rifle stock against the pilot's forehead.\n\nQuickly he dragged the unconscious pilots to the doorway and dumped them on the ground. He frantically waved to Shannon, Rodgers, and the students, who were hiding in the ravine. \"Hurry!\" he shouted, \"for God's sake hurry!\"\n\nHis words carried clearly above the sounds of the fighting. The archaeologists needed no further urging. They broke from cover and dashed through the open door into the helicopter in seconds.\n\nGiordino had already returned to the cockpit and was hurriedly scanning the instruments and the console between the pilots' seats to familiarize himself with the controls.\n\n\"Are we all here?\" he asked Shannon as she slipped into the copilot's seat beside him.\n\n\"All but Pitt.\"\n\nHe did not reply, but glanced out the window. The troops on the stairway, becoming more courageous at encountering no defensive fire, surged onto the landing and inside the fallen palace of the dead. Only seconds were left before the attackers realized they'd been had."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Giordino turned his attention back to the controls. The helicopter was an old Russian-built Mi-8 assault transport, designated a Hip-C by NATO during the Cold War years. A rather ancient, ugly craft, thought Giordino, with twin 1500-horsepower engines that could carry four crew and thirty passengers.\n\nSince the engines were already turning, Giordino placed his right hand on the throttles.\n\n\"You heard me?\" said Shannon nervously. \"Your friend isn't with us.\"\n\n\"I heard.\" With a total absence of emotion, Giordino increased power.\n\nPitt crouched behind a stone building and peered around a corner, hearing the growing whine of the turboshaft engines and seeing the five-bladed main rotor slowly increase its revolutions. An hour previously, it had taken no little persuasion for him to convince Giordino that he must take off whether Pitt arrived or not. The life of one man was not worth the death of thirteen others. Though only 30 meters (98 feet) of open ground, completely devoid of any brush or cover, separated Pitt from the helicopter, it seemed more like a mile and a half.\n\nThere was no longer any need for caution. He had to make a run for it. He leaned down and gave his bad ankle a fast massage to knead out a growing tenseness. He felt little pain, but it was beginning to tighten up and grow numb. No time left if he wanted to save himself. He plunged forward like a sprinter and raced into the open.\n\nThe rotors were beating the ground into dust when Giordino lifted the old Hip-C into a hover. He gave one fast scan of the instrument panel to see if it showed any red lights and tried to sense any strange noises or weird vibrations. Nothing seemed wrong, as the weary engines of an aircraft badly, overdue for an overhaul responded in a businesslike manner as he dipped the nose and increased power.\n\nIn the main compartment, the students and Rodgers saw Pitt launch his dash toward the gaping clamshell doors. They all began shouting encouragement as he pounded over the soft ground. Their shouts turned urgent as a sergeant happened to glance away from the battle scene and saw Pitt chasing after the rising helicopter. He immediately shouted for the men of the reserve squad who were still waiting for the order to advance up the stairway.\n\nThe sergeant's shouts-- they were almost screams carried over the last echoes of the firing from atop the temple. \"They're escaping! Shoot, for the love of Jesus, shoot them!\"\n\nThe troops did not respond as ordered. Pitt was in a direct line of fire with the helicopter. To fire at him meant riddling their own aircraft. They hesitated, unsure of following the frantic sergeant's commands.\n\nOnly one man lifted his rifle and fired.\n\nPitt ignored the bullet that cut a crease in his right thigh. He had other priorities than feeling pain. And then he was under the long tail boom and in the shadow of the clamshell doors, and Rodgers and the Peruvian young people were on their stomachs, leaning out, reaching out to him in the opening between the doors. The helicopter shuddered as it was buffeted by its own downdraft and lurched backward. Pitt extended his arms and jumped.\n\nGiordino bent the helicopter into a hard turn, putting the rotor blades dangerously close to a grove of trees. A bullet shattered his side window and sprayed a shower of silvery fragments across the cockpit, cutting a small gash across his nose. Another round plunked into the rear frame of his seat, missing his spinal cord by a whisker. The helicopter took several more hits before he yanked it over the grove and below the far side, out of the line of fire from the Peruvian assault force.\n\nSoon out of range, he went into a left climbing turn until he had enough altitude to pass over the mountains. At almost 4000 meters (13,000 feet) he had expected to find barren, rocky slopes above a timberline, but was mildly surprised to find the peaks so heavily forested. Once clear of the valley, he set a course to the west. Only then did he turn to Shannon. \"You all right?\"\n\n\"They were trying to kill us,\" she said mechanically.\n\n\"Must not like gringos,\" Giordino replied, surveying Shannon for damage. Seeing no signs of punctures or blood, he refocused on flying the aircraft and pulled the lever that closed the clamshell doors. Only then did he shout over his shoulder into the main cabin. \"Anyone hit back there?\"\n\n\"Just little old me.\"\n\nGiordino and Shannon twisted in their seats in unison at recognizing the voice. Pitt. A rather exhausted and mud-encrusted Pitt, it was true, a Pitt with one leg seeping blood through a hastily tied bandanna. But a Pitt as indefatigable as ever leaned through the cabin door with a devilish smirk on his face.\n\nA vast wave of relief swept over Giordino, and he flashed a smile.\n\n\"You almost missed your bus again.\"\n\n\"And you still owe me a Dixieland band.\"\n\nShannon smiled, knelt in her seat facing backward, threw her arms around Pitt and gave him a big hug.\n\n\"I was afraid you wouldn't make it.\"\n\n\"I damn near didn't.\"\n\nShe looked down and her smile faded. \"You're bleeding.\"\n\n\"A parting shot from the soldiers just before Rodgers and the students pulled me on board. Bless their hearts.\"\n\n\"We've got to get you to a hospital. It looks serious.\"\n\n\"Not unless they were using bullets dipped in hemlock,\" Pitt said facetiously.\n\n\"You should get off that leg. Take my seat.\"\n\nPitt eased Shannon around and pressed her back into the copilot's seat. \"Stay put, I'll sit in coach with the rest of the peasants.\" He paused and looked around the control cabin. \"This is a real antique.\"\n\n\"She shakes, rattles, and rolls,\" said Giordino, \"but she hangs in the air.\"\n\nPitt leaned over Giordino's shoulder and examined the instrument panel, his eyes coming to rest on the fuel gauges. He reached over and tapped the instrument glass. Both needles quivered just below the three-quarter mark. \"How far do you figure she'll take us?\"\n\n\"Fuel range should be in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty kilometers. If a bullet, didn't bite a hole in one of the tanks, I'd guess she'll carry us about two hundred and eighty.\"\n\n\"Must be a chart of the area around somewhere and a pair of dividers.\"\n\nShannon found a navigation kit in a pocket beside her seat and passed it to Pitt. He removed a chart and unfolded it against her back. Using the dividers, careful not to stick the points through the chart paper and stab her, Pitt laid out a course to the Peruvian coast.\n\n\"I estimate roughly three hundred kilometers to the Deep Fathom.\"\n\n\"What's Deep Fathom?\" asked Shannon.\n\n\"Our research ship.\"\n\n\"Surely you don't intend to land at sea when one of Peru's largest cities is much closer?\"\n\n\"She means the international airport at Trujillo,\" explained Giordino.\n\n\"The Solpemachaco has too many friends to suit me,\" said Pitt. \"Friends who have enough clout to order in a regiment of mercenaries at a moment's notice. Once they spread the word we stole a helicopter and sent the pride of their military to a graveyard, our lives won't be worth the spare tire inside the trunk of an Edsel. We'll be safer on board an American ship outside their offshore limit until we can arrange for our U.S. Embassy staff to make a full report to honest officials in the Peruvian government.\"\n\n\"I see your point,\" agreed Shannon. \"But don't overlook the archaeology students. They know the whole story. Their parents are very influential and will see that a true account of their abduction and the pillaging of national treasures hits the news media.\"\n\n\"You're assuming, of course,\" Giordino said matter-of-factly, \"that a Peruvian posse won't cut us off at any one of twenty passes between here and the sea.\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" replied Pitt. \"I'm counting on it. Care to bet the other assault helicopter isn't chasing our tail rotor as we speak?\"\n\n\"So we hug the ground and dodge sheep and cows until we cross over water,\" acknowledged Giordino.\n\n\"Precisely. Cuddling with low clouds won't hurt matters either.\"\n\n\"Forgetting a little something, aren't you?\" said Shannon wearily, as though reminding a husband who neglected to carry out the trash. \"If my math is correct, our fuel tanks will run dry twenty kilometers short of your ship. I hope you aren't proposing we swim the rest of the way.\"\n\n\"We solve that insignificant problem,\" said Pitt calmly, \"by calling up the ship and arranging for it to run full speed on a converging course.\"\n\n\"Every klick helps,\" said Giordino, \"but we'll still be cutting it a mite fine.\"\n\n\"Survival is guaranteed,\" Pitt said confidently. \"This aircraft carries life vests for everyone on board plus two life rafts. I know-- I checked when I walked through the main cabin.\" He paused, turned, and looked back. Rodgers was checking to see all the students had their shoulder harnesses on properly.\n\n\"Our pursuers will be on to us the instant you make contact with your vessel,\" Shannon persisted bleakly. \"They'll know exactly where to intercept and shoot us down.\"\n\n\"Not,\" Pitt replied loftily, \"if I play my cards right.\"\n\nSetting the office chair to almost a full reclining position, communications technician Jim Stucky settled in comfortably and began reading a paperback mystery novel by Wick Downing. He had finally gotten used to the thump that reverberated throughout the hull of the NUMA oceanographic ship, Deep Fathom, every time the sonar unit bounced a signal off the seafloor of the Peru Basin. Boredom had set in soon after the vessel began endlessly cruising back and forth charting the geology 2500 fathoms below the ship's keel. Stucky was in the middle of the chapter where a woman's body is found floating inside a waterbed when Pitt's voice crackled over the speaker.\n\n\"NUMA calling Deep Fathom. You awake, Stucky?\"\n\nStucky jerked erect and pressed the transmit button. \"This is Deep Fathom. I read you, NUMA.\n\nPlease stand by.\" While Pitt waited, Stucky alerted his skipper over the ship's speaker system.\n\nCaptain Frank Stewart hurried from the bridge into the communications cabin. \"Did I hear you correctly? You're in contact with Pitt and Giordino?\"\n\nStucky nodded. \"Pitt is standing by.\"\n\nStewart picked up the microphone. \"Dirk, this is Frank Stewart.\"\n\n\"Good to hear your beer-soaked voice again, Frank.\"\n\n\"What have you guys been up to? Admiral Sandecker has been erupting like a volcano the past twenty-four hours, demanding to know your status.\"\n\n\"Believe me, Frank, it hasn't been a good day.\"\n\n\"What is your present position?\"\n\n\"Somewhere over the Andes in an antique Peruvian military chopper.\"\n\n\"What happened to our NUMA helicopter?\" Stewart demanded.\n\n\"The Red Baron shot it down,\" said Pitt hastily. \"That's not important. Listen to me carefully. We took bullet strikes in our fuel tanks. We can't stay in the air for more than a half hour. Please meet and pick us up in the town square of Chiclayo. You'll find it on your charts of the Peruvian mainland. Use our NUMA backup copter.\"\n\nStewart looked down at Stucky. Both men exchanged puzzled glances. Stewart pressed the transmit button again. \"Please repeat. I don't read you clearly.\"\n\n\"We are required to land in Chiclayo due to loss of fuel. Rendezvous with us in the survey helicopter and transport us back to the ship. Besides Giordino and me, there are twelve passengers.\"\n\nStewart looked dazed. \"What in hell is going on? He and Giordino flew off the ship with our only bird.\n\nAnd now they're flying a military aircraft that's been shot up with twelve people on board. What's this baloney about a backup chopper?\"\n\n\"Stand by, Stewart transmitted to Pitt. Then he reached out and picked up the ship's phone and buzzed the bridge. \"Find a map of Peru in the chart room and bring it to communications right away.\"\n\n\"You think Pitt has fallen off his pogo stick?\" asked Stucky.\n\nNot in a thousand years,\" answered Stewart. \"Those guys are in trouble and Pitt's laying a red herring to mislead eavesdroppers.\" A crewman brought the map, and Stewart stretched it flat on a desk. \"Their rescue mission took them on a course almost due east of here. Chiclayo is a good seventy-five kilometers southwest of his flight path.\"\n\n\"Now that we've established his con job,\" said Stucky, \"what's Pitt's game plan?\"\n\n\"We'll soon find out.\" Stewart picked up the microphone and transmitted. \"NUMA, are you still with us?\"\n\n\"Still here, pal,\" came Pitt's imperturbable voice.\n\n\"I will fly the spare copter to Chiclayo and pick up you and your passengers myself. Do you copy?\"\n\n\"Much appreciated, skipper. Always happy to see you never do things halfway. Have a beer waiting when I arrive.\"\n\n\"Will do,\" answered Stewart.\n\n\"And put on some speed will you?\" said Pitt. \"I need a bath real bad. See you soon.\"\n\nStucky stared at Stewart and laughed. \"Since when did you learn to fly a helicopter?\"\n\nStewart laughed back. \"Only in my dreams.\"\n\n\"Do you mind telling me what I missed?\"\n\n\"In a second.\" Stewart picked up the ship's phone again and snapped out orders. \"Pull in the sonar's sensor and set a new course on zero-nine-zero degrees. Soon as the sensor is secured, give me full speed. And no excuses from the chief engineer that his precious engines have to be coddled. I want every revolution.\" He hung up the phone with a thoughtful expression. \"Where were we? Oh yes, you don't know the score.\"\n\n\"Is it some sort of riddle?\" Stucky muttered.\n\n\"Not at all. Obvious to me. Pitt and Giordino don't have enough fuel to reach the ship, so we're going to put on all speed and meet them approximately halfway between here and the shore, hopefully before they're forced to ditch in water infested with sharks.\"\n\nGiordino whipped along, a bare 10 meters (33 feet) above the tops of the trees at only 144 kilometers (90 miles) an hour. The twenty-year-old helicopter was capable of flying almost another 100 kilometers faster, but he reduced speed to conserve what little fuel he had left after passing over the mountains. Only one more range of foothills and a narrow coastal plain separated the aircraft from the sea. Every third minute he glanced warily at the fuel gauges. The needles were edging uncomfortably close to the red. His eyes returned to the green foliage rushing past below. The forest was thick and the clearings were scattered with large boulders. It was a decidedly unfriendly place to force-land a helicopter.\n\nPitt had limped back into the cargo compartment and begun passing out the life vests. Shannon followed, firmly took the vests out of his hands, and handed them to Rodgers.\n\n\"No, you don't,\" she said firmly, pushing Pitt into a canvas seat mounted along the bulkhead of the fuselage. She nodded at the loosely knotted, blood-soaked bandanna around his leg. \"You sit down and stay put.\"\n\nShe found a first aid kit in a metal locker and knelt in front of him. Without the slightest sign of nervous stress, she cut off Pitt's pant leg, cleaned the wound, and competently sewed the eight stitches to close the wound before wrapping a bandage around it.\n\n\"Nice job,\" said Pitt admiringly. \"You missed your calling as an angel of mercy.\"\n\n\"You were lucky.\" She snapped the lid on the first aid kit. \"The bullet merely sliced the skin.\"\n\n\"Why do I feel as though you've acted on General Hospital?\"\n\nShannon smiled. \"I was raised on a farm with five brothers who were always discovering new ways to injure themselves.\"\n\n\"What turned you to archaeology?\"\n\n\"There was an old Indian burial mound in one corner of our wheat field. I used to dig around it for arrowheads. For a book report in high school, I found a text on the excavation of the Hopewell Indian culture burial mounds in southern Ohio. Inspired, I began digging into the site on our farm. After finding several pieces of pottery and four skeletons, I was hooked. Hardly a professional dig, mind you. I learned how to excavate properly in college and became fascinated with cultural development in the central Andes, and made up my mind to specialize in that area.\"\n\nPitt looked at her silently for a moment. \"When did you first meet Doc Miller?\"\n\n\"Only briefly about six years ago when I was working on my doctorate. I attended a lecture he gave on the Inca highway network that ran from the Colombian-Ecuador border almost five thousand kilometers to central Chile. It was his work that inspired me to focus my studies on Andean culture. I've been coming down here ever since.\"\n\n\"Then you didn't really know him very well?\" Pitt questioned.'\n\nShannon shook her head. \"Like most archaeologists, we concentrated on our own pet projects. We corresponded occasionally and exchanged data. About six months ago, I invited him to come along on this expedition to supervise the Peruvian university student volunteers. He was between projects and accepted. Then he kindly offered to fly down from the States five weeks early to begin preparations, arranging permits from the Peruvians, setting up the logistics for equipment and supplies, that sort of thing.\n\nJuan Chaco and he worked closely together.\"\n\n\"When you arrived, did you notice anything different about him?\"\n\nA curious look appeared in Shannon's eyes. \"What an odd question.\"\n\n\"His looks, his actions,\" Pitt persisted.\n\nShe thought a moment. \"Since Phoenix, he had grown a beard and lost about fifteen pounds, but now that I think of it, he rarely removed his sunglasses.\"\n\n\"Any change in his voice?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"A little deeper perhaps. I thought he had a cold.\"\n\n\"Did you notice whether he wore a ring? One with a large amber setting?\"\n\nHer eyes narrowed. \"A sixty-million-year-old piece of yellow amber with the fossil of a primitive ant in the center? Doc was proud of that ring. I remember him wearing it during the Inca road survey, but it wasn't on his hand at the sacred well. When I asked him why it was missing, he said the ring became loose on his finger after his weight loss and he left it home to be resized. How do you know about Doc's ring?\"\n\nPitt had been wearing the amber ring he had taken from the corpse at the bottom of the sacred well with the setting unseen under his finger. He slipped it off and handed it to Shannon without speaking.\n\nShe held it up to the light from a round window, staring in amazement at the tiny ancient insect imbedded in the amber. \"Where. . .?\" her voice trailed off.\n\n\"Whoever posed as Doc murdered him and took his place. You accepted the imposter because there was no reason not to. The possibility of foul play never entered your mind. The killer's only mistake was forgetting to remove the ring when he threw Doc's body into the sinkhole.\"\n\n\"You're saying Doc was murdered before I left the States?\" she stated in bewilderment.\n\n\"Only a day or two after he arrived at the campsite,\" Pitt explained. \"Judging from the condition of the body, he must have been under water for more than a month.\"\n\n\"Strange that Miles and I missed seeing him.\"\n\n\"Not so strange. You descended directly in front of the passage to the adjoining cavern and were sucked in almost immediately. I reached the bottom on the opposite side and was able to swim a search grid, looking for what I thought would be two fresh bodies before the surge caught me. Instead, I found Doc's remains and the bones of a sixteenth-century Spanish soldier.\"\n\n\"So Doc really was murdered,\" she said as a look of horror dawned on her face. \"Juan Chaco must have known, because he was the liaison for our project and was working with Doc before we arrived. Is it possible he was involved?\"\n\nPitt nodded. \"Up to his eyeballs. If you were smuggling ancient treasures, where could you find a better informant and front man than an internationally respected archaeological expert and government official?\"\n\n\"Then who was the imposter?\"\n\n\"Another agent of the Solpemachaco. A canny operator who staged a masterful performance of his death, with Amaru's help. Perhaps he's one of the men at the top of the organization who doesn't mind getting his hands dirty. We may never know.\"\n\n\"If he murdered Doc, he deserves to be hanged,\" Shannon said, her hazel eyes glinting with anger.\n\n\"At least we'll be able to nail Juan Chaco to the door of a Peruvian courthouse-\" Pitt suddenly tensed and swung toward the cockpit as Giordino threw the helicopter in a steeply banked circle. \"What's up?\"\n\n\"A gut feeling,\" Giordino answered. \"I decided to run a three-sixty to check our tail. Good thing I'm sensitive to vibes. We've got company.\"\n\nPitt pushed himself to his feet, returned to the cockpit and, favoring his leg, eased into the copilot's seat. \"Bandits or good guys?\" he asked.\n\n\"Our pals who dropped in on us at the temple didn't fall for your artful dodge to Chiclayo.\" Without taking his hands from the controls, Giordino nodded out of the windshield to his left at a helicopter crossing a low ridge of mountains to the east.\n\n\"They must have guessed our course and overhauled us after you reduced speed to conserve fuel,\" Pitt surmised.\n\n\"No racks mounting air-to-air rockets,\" observed Giordino. \"They'll have to shoot us down with rifles--\"\n\nA burst of flame and a puff of smoke erupted from the open forward passenger door of the pursuing aircraft, and a rocket soared through the sky, passing so close to the nose of the helicopter Pitt and Giordino felt they could have reached out the side windows and touched it.\n\n\"Correction,\" Pitt called. \"A forty-millimeter rocket launcher. The same one they used against the temple.\"\n\nGiordino slammed the collective pitch into an abrupt ascent and shoved the throttles to their stops in an attempt to throw off the launcher team's aim. \"Grab your rifle and keep them busy until I can reach those low clouds along the coast.\"\n\n\"Tough luck!\" Pitt shouted over the shrill whine of the engines. \"I tossed it away, and my Colt is empty.\n\nAny of you carry a gun on board?\"\n\nGiordino made an imperceptible nod as he hurled the chopper in another violent maneuver. \"I can't speak for the rest of them. You'll find mine wedged in a corner behind the cabin bulkhead.\"\n\nPitt took a radio headset that was hanging on the arm of his seat and clamped it over his ears. Then he struggled out of his seat and clutched both sides of the open cockpit door with his hands to stay on his feet during a sharp turn. He plugged the lead from the headset into a socket mounted on the bulkhead and hailed Giordino. \"Put on your headset so we can coordinate our defense.\"\n\nGiordino didn't answer as he mashed down on the left pedal and skidded the craft around in a flat turn.\n\nAs if he were juggling, he balanced his movements with the controls while slipping the headset over his ears. He winced and involuntarily ducked as another rocket tore through the air less than a meter under the belly of the helicopter and exploded in an orange burst of flame against the palisade of a low mountain.\n\nGrabbing whatever handhold was within reach, Pitt staggered to the side passenger door, undogged the latches, and slid the door back until it was wide open. Shannon, her face showing more concern than fear, crawled across the floor with a cargo rope and wrapped one end around Pitt's waist as he was reaching for the automatic rifle Giordino had used to knock out the Peruvian pilots. Then she tied the opposite end to a longitudinal strut.\n\n\"Now you won't fall out,\" she exclaimed.\n\nPitt smiled. \"I don't deserve you.\" Then he was lying flat on his stomach aiming the rifle out the door.\n\n\"I'm ready, Al. Give me a clear shot.\"\n\nGiordino fought to twist the helicopter so that Pitt would face the blind side of the attackers. Because the passenger doors were positioned on the same side of both helicopters, the Peruvian pilot was faced with the same dilemma. He might have risked opening the clamshell doors in the aft end to allow the mercenary rifleman to blast away with an open line of fire, but that would have slowed his airspeed and made control of the chopper unwieldy. Like old propeller-driven warbirds tangling in a dogfight, the pilots maneuvered for an advantage, hurling their aircraft around the sky in a series of acrobatics never intended by their designers.\n\nHis opponent knew his stuff, thought Giordino, with the respect of one professional for another.\n\nOutgunned by the military mercenaries, he felt like a mouse tormented by a cat before becoming a quick snack. His eyes darted from the instruments to his nemesis, then down at the ground to make certain he didn't pile into a low ridge or a tree. He yanked back the collective and broadened the pitch of the rotor blades to increase their bite in the damp air. The chopper shot upward in a maneuver matched by the other pilot. But then Giordino pushed the nose down and mashed his foot on the right rudder pedal, accelerating and throwing the craft on its side under his attacker and giving Pitt a straight shot.\n\n\"Now!\" he yelled in his microphone.\n\nPitt didn't aim at the pilots in the cockpit, he sighted at the engine hump below the rotor and squeezed the trigger. The gun spat twice and went silent.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" inquired Giordino. \"No gunfire. I run interference to the goal line and you fumble the ball.\"\n\n\"This gun had only two rounds in it,\" Pitt snapped back.\n\n\"When I took it off one of Amaru's gunmen, I didn't stop to count the shells.\"\n\nFurious with frustration, Pitt jerked out the clip and saw it was empty. \"Did any of you bring a gun on board?\" he shouted to Rodgers and the petrified students.\n\nRodgers, tightly strapped in a seat with legs braced against a bulkhead to avoid being bounced around by Giordino's violent tactics, spread his hands. \"We left them behind when we made a break for the ship.\"\n\nAt that instant a rocket burst through a port window, flamed across the width of the fuselage, and exited through the opposite side of the helicopter without bursting or injuring anyone. Designed to detonate after striking armored vehicles or fortified bunkers, the rocket failed to explode after striking thin aluminum and plastic. If one hits the turbines, Pitt thought uneasily, it's all over. He stared wildly about the cabin, saw that they had all released their shoulder harnesses and lay huddled on the floor under the seats as if the canvas webbing and small tubular supports could stop a forty-millimeter tank-killing rocket. He cursed as the wildly swaying aircraft threw him against the doorframe.\n\nShannon saw the furious look on Pitt's face, the despair as he flung the empty rifle out the open door.\n\nAnd yet she stared at him with absolute faith in her eyes. She had come to know him well enough in the past twenty-four hours to know he was not a man who would willingly accept defeat.\n\nPitt caught the look and it infuriated him. \"What do you expect me to do,\" he demanded, \"leap across space and brain them with the jawbone of an ass? Or maybe they'll go away if I throw rocks at them-\"\n\nPitt broke off as his eyes fell on one of the life rafts. He broke into a wild grin. \"Al, you hear me?\"\n\n\"I'm a little busy to take calls,\" Giordino answered tensely.\n\n\"Lay this antique on her port side and fly above them.\"\n\n\"Whatever you're concocting, make it quick before they put a rocket up our nose or we run out of fuel.\"\n\n\"Back by popular demand,\" Pitt said, becoming his old cheerful self again, \"Mandrake Pitt and his deathdefying magic act.\" He unsnapped the buckles on the tiedown straps holding one of the life rafts to the floor. The fluorescent orange raft was labeled Twenty-Man Flotation Unit, in English, and weighed over 45 kilograms (100 pounds). Leaning out the door secured by the rope Shannon had tied around his waist, both legs and feet spread and set, he hoisted the uninflated life raft onto his shoulder and waited.\n\nGiordino was tiring. Helicopters require constant hands-on concentration just to stay in the air, because they are made up of a thousand opposing forces that want nothing to do with each other. The general rule of thumb is that most pilots fly solo for an hour. After that, they turn control over to their backup or copilot. Giordino had been behind the controls for an hour and a half, was denied sleep for the past thirty-six hours, and now the strain of throwing the aircraft all over the sky was rapidly draining what strength he had in reserve. For almost six minutes, an eternity in a dogfight, he had prevented his adversary from gaining a brief advantage for a clear shot from the men manning the rocket launcher.\n\nThe other craft passed directly across Giordino's vulnerable glass-enclosed cockpit. For a brief instant in time he could clearly see the Peruvian pilot. The face under the combat flight helmet flashed a set of white teeth and waved. \"The bastard is laughing at me,\" Giordino blurted in fury.\n\n\"What did you say?\" came Pitt.\n\n\"Those fornicating baboons think this is funny,\" Giordino said savagely. He knew what he had to do.\n\nHe had noticed an almost indiscernible quirk to the enemy pilot's flying technique. When he bent left there was no hesitation, but he was a fraction of a second slow in banking right. Giordino feinted left and abruptly threw the nose skyward and curled right. The other pilot caught the feint and promptly went left but reacted too slowly to Giordino's wild ascending turn and twist in the opposite direction. Before he could counter, Giordino had hurled his machine around and over the attacker.\n\nPitt's opportunity came in just the blink of an eye, but his timing was right on the money. Lifting the life raft above his head with both hands as easily as if it were a sofa pillow, he thrust it out the open door as the Peruvian chopper whipped beneath him. The orange bundle dropped with the impetus of a bowling ball and smashed through one of the gyrating rotor blades 2 meters (about 6 feet) from the tip. The blade shattered into metallic slivers that spiraled outward from the centrifugal force. Now unbalanced, the remaining four blades whirled in ever-increasing vibration until they broke away from the rotor hub in a rain of small pieces.\n\nThe big helicopter seemed to hang poised for a moment before it yawed in circles and angled nose-first toward the ground at 190 kilometers (118 miles) an hour. Pitt hung out the door and watched, fascinated, as the Peruvian craft bored through the trees and crashed into a low hill only a few meters below the summit. He stared at the glinting shreds of metal that flew off into the branches of the trees.\n\nThe big injured bird came to rest on its right side, a crumpled lump of twisted metal. And then it was lost in a huge fireball that erupted and wrapped it in flames and black smoke.\n\nGiordino eased back on the throttles and made a slow circular pass over the column of smoke, but neither he nor Pitt saw any evidence of life. \"This has to be the first time in history an aircraft was knocked out of the sky by a life raft,\" said Giordino.\n\n\"Improvisation.\" Pitt laughed softly, bowing to Shannon, Rodgers, and the students who were all applauding with rejuvenated spirits. \"Improvisation.\" Then he added, \"Fine piece of flying, Al. None of us would be breathing but for you.\"\n\n\"Ain't it the truth, ain't it the truth,\" said Giordino, turning the nose of the craft toward the west and reducing the throttle settings to conserve fuel.\n\nPitt pulled the passenger door closed, redogged the latches, untied Shannon's line from around his waist, and returned to the cockpit. \"How does our fuel look?\"\n\n\"Fuel, what fuel?\"\n\nPitt gazed over Giordino's shoulder at the gauges. Both showed flickering red warning lights. He could also see the drawn look of fatigue on his friend's face. \"Take a break and let me spell you at the controls.\"\n\n\"I got us this far. I'll take us what little distance we have left before the tanks run dry.\"\n\nPitt did not waste his breath in debate. He never ceased to marvel at Giordino's intrepid calm, his glacial fortitude, he could have searched the world and never found another friend like the tough burly Italian. \"Okay, you take her in. I'll sit this one out and pray for a tailwind.\"\n\nA few minutes later they crossed over the shoreline and headed out to sea. A resort with attractive lawns and a large swimming pool encircled a small cove with a white sand beach. The sunbathing tourists looked up at the lowflying helicopter and waved. With nothing better to do, Pitt waved back.\n\nPitt returned to the cargo cabin and approached Rodgers. \"We've got to dump as much weight as possible, except for survival equipment like the life vests and the remaining raft. Everything else goes, excess clothing, tools, hardware, seats, anything that isn't welded or bolted down.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Everyone pitched in and passed whatever objects they could find to Pitt, who heaved them out the passenger door. When the cabin was bare the chopper was lighter by almost 136 kilograms (300 pounds). Before he closed the door again, Pitt looked aft. Thankfully, he didn't see any pursuing aircraft.\n\nHe was certain the Peruvian pilot had radioed the sighting and his intention to attack, blowing Pitt's Chiclayo smokescreen. But he doubted the Solpemachaco would suspect the loss of their mercenary soldiers and helicopter for at least another ten minutes. And if they belatedly totaled the score, and whistled up a Peruvian Air Force fighter jet to intercept, then it would be too late. Any attack on an unarmed American research ship would stir up serious diplomatic repercussions between the United States government and Peru, a situation the struggling South American nation could ill afford. Pitt was on safe ground in assuming that no local bureaucrat or military officer would risk political disaster regardless of any under-the-table payoff by the Solpemachaco.\n\nPitt limped back to the cockpit, slid into the copilot's seat, and picked up the radio microphone. He brushed aside all caution as he pressed the transmit button. To hell with any bought-and-paid-for Solpemachaco cronies who were monitoring the airwaves, he thought.\n\n\"NUMA calling Deep Fathom. Talk to me, Stucky.\"\n\n\"Come in, NUMA. This is Deep Fathom. What is your position?\"\n\nMy, what big eyes you have, and how your voice has changed, Grandma.\"\n\n\"Say again, NUMA.\"\n\n\"Not even a credible effort.\" Pitt laughed. \"Rich Little you ain't.\" He looked over at Giordino. \"We've got a comic impersonator on our party line.\"\n\n\"I think you better give him our position,\" Giordino said with more than a trace of cynicism in his voice.\n\n\"Right you are.\" Pitt nodded. \"Deep Fathom, this is NUMA. Our position is just south of the Magic Castle between Jungleland and the Pirates of the Caribbean.\"\n\n\"Please repeat your position,\" came the voice of the flustered mercenary who had broken in on Pitt's call to Stucky.\n\n\"What's this, a radio commercial for Disneyland?\" Stucky's familiar voice popped over the speaker.\n\n\"Well, well, the genuine article. What took you so long to answer, Stucky?\"\n\nI was listening to what my alter ego had to say. You guys landed in Chiclayo yet?\"\n\n\"We were sidetracked and decided to head home,\" said Pitt. \"Is the skipper handy?\"\n\n\"He's on the bridge playing Captain Bligh, lashing the crew in an attempt to set a speed record.\n\nAnother knot and our rivets will start falling out.\"\n\n\"We do not have a visual on you. Do you have us on radar?\"\n\n\"Affirmative,\" answered Stucky. \"Change your heading to two-seven-two magnetic. That will put us on a converging course.\"\n\n\"Altering course to two-seven-two,\" Giordino acknowledged.\n\nHow far to rendezvous?\" Pitt asked Stucky.\n\n\"The skipper makes it about sixty kilometers.\"\n\n\"They should be in sight soon.\" Pitt looked over at Giordino. \"What do you think?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Giordino stared woefully at the fuel gauges, then at the instrument panel clock. The dial read 10:47",
                "text": "A.m. He couldn't believe so much had happened in so little time since he and Pitt had responded to the rescue appeal by the imposter of Doc Miller. He swore it took three years off his life expectancy.\n\n\"I'm milking her for every liter of fuel at an airspeed of only forty klicks an hour,\" he said finally. \"A slight tailwind off the shore helps, but I estimate we have only another fifteen or twenty minutes of flight time left. Your guess is as good as mine.\"\n\n\"Let us hope the gauges read on the low side,\" said Pitt. \"Hello, Stucky.\"\n\n\"I'm here.\"\n\n\"You'd better prepare for a water rescue. All predictions point to a wet landing.\"\n\n\"I'll pass the word to the skipper. Alert me when you ditch.\"\n\n\"You'll be the first to know.\"\n\n\"Good luck.\"\n\nThe helicopter droned over the tops of the rolling swells. Pitt and Giordino spoke very little. Their ears were tuned to the sound of the turbines, as if expecting them to abruptly go silent at any moment. They instinctively tensed when the fuel warning alarm whooped through the cockpit.\n\n\"So much for the reserves,\" said Pitt. \"Now we're flying on fumes.\"\n\nHe looked down at the deep cobalt blue of the water only 10 meters (33 feet) beneath the belly of the chopper. The sea looked reasonably smooth. He figured wave height from trough to crest was less than a meter. The water looked warm and inviting. A power-off landing did not appear to be too rough, and the old Mi-8 should float for a good sixty seconds if Giordino didn't burst the seams when he dropped her in.\n\nPitt called Shannon to the cockpit. She appeared in the doorway, looked down at him, and smiled faintly. \"Is your ship in sight?\"\n\n\"Just over the horizon, I should think. But not close enough to reach with the fuel that's left. Tell everybody to prepare for a water landing.\"\n\n\"Then we do have to swim the rest of the way,\" she said cynically.\n\n\"A mere technicality,\" said Pitt. \"Have Rodgers move the life raft close to the passenger door and be ready to heave it in the water as soon as we ditch. And impress upon him the importance of pulling the inflation cord after the raft is safely through the door. I for one do not want to get my feet wet.\"\n\nGiordino pointed dead ahead. \"The Deep Fathom.\"\n\nPitt nodded as he squinted at the dark tiny speck on the horizon. He spoke into the radio mike. \"We have you on visual, Stucky.\"\n\n\"Come to the party,\" answered Stucky. \"We'll open the bar early just for you.\"\n\n\"Heaven forbid,\" said Pitt, elaborately sarcastic. \"I don't imagine the admiral will take kindly to that suggestion.\"\n\nTheir employer, chief director of the National Underwater and Marine Agency, Admiral James Sandecker, had a regulation etched in stone banning all alcoholic spirits from NUMA vessels. A vegetarian and a fitness nut, Sandecker thought he was adding years to the hired help's life span. As with prohibition in the nineteen twenties, men who seldom touched the stuff began smuggling cases of beer on board or buying it in foreign ports.\n\n\"Would you prefer a hearty glass of Ovaltine?\" retorted Stucky.\n\n\"Only if you mix it with carrot juice and alfalfa sprouts--\"\n\n\"We just lost an engine,\" announced Giordino conversationally.\n\nPitt's eyes darted to the instruments. Across the board, the needles of the gauges monitoring the port turbine were flickering back to their stops. He turned and looked up at Shannon. \"Warn everyone that we'll impact the water on the starboard side of the aircraft.\"\n\nShannon looked confused. \"Why not land vertically?\" \"If we go in bottom first, the rotor blades settle, strike the water, and shatter on a level with the fuselage. The whirling fragments can easily penetrate the cabin's skin, especially the cockpit, resulting in the loss of our intrepid pilot's head. Coming down on the side throws the shattered blades out and away from us.\"\n\n\"Why the starboard side?\"\n\n\"I don't have chalk and a blackboard,\" snapped Pitt in exasperation. \"So you'll die happy, it has to do with the directional rotation of the rotor blades and the fact the exit door is on the port side.\"\n\nEnlightened, Shannon nodded. \"Understood.\"\n\n\"Immediately after impact,\" Pitt continued, \"get the students out the door before this thing sinks. Now get to your seat and buckle up.\" Then he slapped Giordino on the shoulder. \"Take her in while you still have power,\" he said as he snapped on his safety harness.\n\nGiordino needed no coaxing. Before he lost his remaining engine, he pulled back on the collective pitch and pulled back the throttle on his one operating engine. As the helicopter lost its forward motion from a height of 3 meters above the sea, he leaned it gently onto the starboard side. The rotor blades smacked the water and snapped off in a cloud of debris and spray as the craft settled in the restless waves with the awkward poise of a pregnant albatross. The impact came with the jolt of a speeding car hitting a sharp dip in the road. Giordino shut down the one engine and was pleasantly surprised to find the old Mi-8, Hip-C floating drunkenly in the sea as if she belonged there.\n\n\"End of the line!\" Pitt boomed. \"Everyone the hell out!\"\n\nThe gentle lapping of the waves against the fuselage came as a pleasant contrast to the fading whine of the engines and thump of the rotor blades. The pungent salt air filled the stuffy interior of the compartment when Rodgers slid open the passenger door and dropped the collapsible twenty-person life raft into the water. He was extra careful not to pull the inflation cord too soon and was relieved to hear the hiss of compressed air and see the raft puff out safely beyond the door. In a few moments it was bobbing alongside the helicopter, its mooring line tightly clutched in Rodgers's hand.\n\n\"Out you go,\" Rodgers yelled, herding the young Peruvian archaeology students through the door and into the raft.\n\nPitt released his safety harness and hurried into the rear cabin. Shannon and Rodgers had the evacuation running smoothly. All but three of the students had climbed into the raft. A quick examination of the aircraft made it clear she couldn't stay afloat for long. The clamshell doors were buckled from the impact just enough to allow water to surge in around the seams. Already the floor of the fuselage was beginning to slant toward the rear, and the waves were sloshing over the sill of the open passenger door.\n\n\"We haven't much time,\" he said, helping Shannon into the raft. Rodgers went next and then he turned to Giordino. \"Your turn, Al.\"\n\nGiordino would have none of it. \"Tradition of the sea. All walking wounded go first.\"\n\nBefore Pitt could protest, Giordino shoved him out the door, and then followed as the water swept over his ankles. Breaking out the raft's paddles, they pushed clear of the helicopter as its long tail boom dipped into the waves. Then a large swell surged through the open passenger door and the helicopter slipped backward into the uncaring sea. She disappeared with a faint gurgle and a few ripples, her shattered rotor blades being the last to go, the stumps slowly rotating from the force of the current as if she were descending to the seafloor under her own power. The water surged through her open door and she plunged under the waves to a final landing on the seafloor.\n\nNo one spoke. They all seemed saddened to see the helicopter go. It was as if they all suffered a personal loss. Pitt and Giordino were at home on the water. The others, suddenly finding themselves floating on a vast sea, felt an awful sense of emptiness coupled with the dread of helplessness. The latter feeling was particularly enhanced when a shark's fin abruptly broke the water and ominously began circling the raft.\n\n\"All your fault,\" Giordino said to Pitt in mock exasperation. \"He's homed in on the scent of blood from your leg wound.\"\n\nPitt peered into the transparent water, studying the sleek shape as it passed under the raft, recognizing the horizontal stabilizerlike head with the eyes mounted like aircraft wing lights on the tips. \"A hammerhead. No more than two and a half meters long. I shall ignore him.\"\n\nShannon gave a shudder and moved closer to Pitt and clutched his arm. \"What if he decides to take a bite out of the raft and we sink?\"\n\nPitt shrugged. \"Sharks seldom find life rafts appetizing.\"\n\n\"He invited his pals for dinner,\" said Giordino, pointing to two more fins cutting the water.\n\nPitt could see the beginnings of panic on the faces of the young students. He nestled into a comfortable position on the bottom of the raft, elevated his feet on the upper float, and closed his eyes. \"Nothing like a restful nap under a warm sun on a calm sea. Wake me when the ship arrives.\"\n\nShannon stared at him in disbelief. \"He must be mad.\"\n\nGiordino quickly sized up Pitt's scheme and settled in. \"That makes two of us.\"\n\nNo one knew quite how to react. Every pair of eyes in the raft swiveled from the seemingly dozing men from NUMA to the circling sharks and back again. The panic slowly subsided to uneasy apprehension while the minutes crawled by as if they were each an hour long.\n\nOther sharks joined the predinner party, but all hearts began filling with newfound hope as the Deep Fathom hove into view, her bows carving the water in a spray of foam. No one on board knew the old workhorse of NUMA's oceanographic fleet could drive so hard. Down in the engine room the chief engineer, August Burley, a powerfully built man with a portly stomach, walked the catwalk between the ship's big diesels, closely observing the needles on the rpm gauges, which were hard in the red, and listening for any signs of metal fatigue from the overstressed engines. On the bridge, Captain Frank Stewart gazed through binoculars at the tiny splash of orange against the blue sea.\n\n\"We'll come right up on them at half speed before reversing the engines,\" he said to the helmsman.\n\n\"You don't want to stop and drift up to them, Captain?\" asked the blond, ponytailed man at the wheel.\n\n\"They're surrounded by a school of sharks,\" said Stewart. \"We can't waste time with caution.\" He stepped over and spoke into the ship's speaker system. \"We'll approach the survivors on the port side.\n\nAll available hands prepare to bring them aboard.\"\n\nIt was a neat bit of seamanship. Stewart stopped the ship within 2 meters of the life raft with only a slight wash. Several crewmen stared down and waved, leaning far over the railing and bulwark to shout greetings. The boarding ladder had been lowered and a crewman stood on the lower platform with a boat hook. He extended it, the end was grabbed by Giordino, and the raft was pulled in alongside the platform.\n\nThe sharks were forgotten and everyone began smiling and laughing with unabashed happiness at having survived death without major injuries at least four times since being taken hostage. Shannon stared up at the towering hull of the research ship, took in the ungainly superstructure and derricks, and turned to Pitt with a shrewd twinkle in her eyes.\n\n\"You promised us a four-star hotel and a refreshing bath. Certainly not a rusty old work boat.\"\n\nPitt laughed. \"A rose by any other name. Any port in a storm. So you share my attractive, but homespun stateroom. As a gentleman, I'll give you the lower berth while I suffer the indignity of the upper.\"\n\nShannon looked at him with amusement. \"Taking a lot for granted, aren't you?\"\n\nAs Pitt relaxed and kept a paternal eye on the occupants of the raft, who were climbing the ladder one after the other, he smiled fiendishly at Shannon and murmured, \"Okay, we'll keep a low profile. You can have the upper and I'll take the lower.\"\n\nJaun Chaco's world had cracked and crumbled to dust around him. The disaster in the Valley of Viracocha was far worse than anything he could have imagined. His brother had been the first to be killed, the artifact smuggling operation was in shambles, and once the American archaeologist, Shannon Kelsey, and the university students told their story to the news media and government security officials, he would be thrown out of the Department of Archaeology in disgrace. Far worse, there was every possibility he would be arrested, tried for selling his nation's historical heritage, and sentenced to a very long jail term.\n\nHe was a man wracked with anxiety as he stood beside the motor home in Chachapoya and watched the tilt-rotor aircraft come to a near halt in the air as the twin outboard engines on the end of the wings swiveled from forward flight to vertical. The black, unmarked craft hovered for a few moments before the pilot gently settled the extended landing wheels on the ground.\n\nA heavily bearded man in dirty rumpled shorts and a khaki shirt with an immense bloodstain in its center exited the nine-passenger cabin and stepped to the ground. He looked neither right nor left, the expression on his face set and grim. Without a word of greeting, he walked past Chaco and entered the motor home. Like a chastised collie, Chaco followed him inside.\n\nCyrus Sarason, the impersonator of Dr. Steven Miller, sat heavily behind Chaco's desk and stared icily. \"You've heard?\"\n\nChaco nodded without questioning the bloodstain on Sarason's shirt. He knew the blood represented a fake gunshot wound. \"I received a full report from one of my brother's fellow officers.\"\n\n\"Then you know Dr. Kelsey and the university students slipped through our fingers and were rescued by an American oceanographic research ship.\"\n\n\"Yes, I am aware of our failure.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry about your brother,\" Sarason said without emotion.\n\n\"I can't believe he's gone,\" muttered Chaco, strangely unmoved. \"His death doesn't seem possible. The elimination of the archaeologists should have been a simple affair.\"\n\n\"To say your people bungled the job is an understatement,\" said Sarason. \"I warned you those two divers from NUMA were dangerous.\"\n\n\"My brother did not expect organized resistance by an army.\"\n\n\"An army of one man,\" Sarason said acidly. \"I observed the action from a tomb. A lone sniper atop the temple killed the officers and held off two squads of your intrepid mercenaries, while his companion overpowered the pilots and commandeered their helicopter. Your brother paid dearly for his overconfidence and stupidity.\"\n\n\"How could a pair of divers and a juvenile group of archaeologists scourge a highly trained security force?\" Chaco asked in bewilderment.\n\n\"If we knew the answer to that question, we might learn how they knocked the pursuing helicopter out of the air.\"\n\nChaco stared at him. \"They can still be stopped.\"\n\n\"Forget it. I'm not about to compound the disaster by destroying a U.S. government ship and all on board. The damage is already done. According to my sources in Lima, full exposure, including Miller's murder, was communicated to President Fujimori's office by Dr. Kelsey soon after she boarded the ship.\n\nBy this evening, the story will be broadcast all over the country. The Chachapoyan end of our operation is a washout.\"\n\n\"We can still bring the artifacts out of the valley.\" The recent demise of Chaco's brother had not fully pushed aside his greed.\n\nSarason nodded. \"I'm ahead of you. A team is on its way to remove whatever pieces survived the rocket attack launched by those idiots under your brother's command. It's a miracle we still have something to show for our efforts.\"\n\n\"I believe there is a good possibility a clue to the Drake quipu may still be found in the City of the Dead.\"\n\n\"The Drake quipu.\" Sarason repeated the words with a faraway look in his eyes. Then he shrugged.\n\n\"Our organization is already working on another angle for the treasure.\"\n\n\"What of Amaru? Is he still alive?\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, yes. He'll live the rest of his days as a eunuch.\"\n\n\"Too bad. He was a loyal follower.\"\n\nSarason sneered. \"Loyal to whoever paid him best. Tupac Amaru is a sociopathic killer of the highest order. When I ordered him to abduct Miller and hold him prisoner until we concluded the operation, he put a bullet in the good doctor's heart and threw him in the damned sinkhole. The man has the mind of a rabid dog.\"\n\n\"He may still prove useful,\" said Chaco slowly.\n\n\"Useful, how?\"\n\n\"If I know his mind, he'll swear vengeance on those responsible for his newly acquired handicap. It might be wise to unleash him on Dr. Kelsey and the diver called Pitt to prevent them from being used by international customs investigators as informants.\"\n\n\"We'd be skating on thin ice if we turned a crazy man like him loose. But I'll keep your suggestion in mind.\"\n\nChaco went on. \"What plans do the Solpemachaco have for me? I am finished here. Now that my countrymen will know I have betrayed their trust with regard to our historical treasures, I could spend the rest of my life in one of our filthy prisons.\"\n\n\"A foregone conclusion.\" Sarason shrugged. \"My sources also revealed that the local police have been ordered to pick you up. They should arrive within the hour.\"\n\nChaco looked at Sarason for a long moment, then said slowly \"I am a scholar and a scientist, not a hardened criminal. There is no telling how much I might reveal during lengthy interrogation, perhaps even torture.\"\n\nSarason suppressed a smile at the veiled threat. \"You are a valuable asset we cannot afford to lose.\n\nYour expertise and knowledge of ancient Andean cultures is second to none. Arrangements are being made for you to take over our collection facilities in Panama. There you will direct the identification, cataloguing, and restoration operations on all artifacts we either purchase from the local huagueros or acquire under the guise of academic archaeological projects throughout South America.\"\n\nChaco suddenly looked wolfish. \"I'm flattered. Of course I accept. Such an important position must pay well.\"\n\n\"You will receive two percent of the price the artifacts bring at our auction houses in New York and Europe.\"\n\nChaco was too far down the rungs of the organizational ladder to be privy to the inner secrets of the Solpemachaco, but he well knew the network, and its profits were vast. \"I will need help getting out of the country.\"\n\n\"Not to worry,\" said Sarason. \"You'll accompany me.\" He nodded out a window at the ominous black aircraft sitting outside the motor home, the big threebladed rotors slowly beating the air at idle. \"In that aircraft we can be in Bogota, Colombia, within four hours.\"\n\nChaco couldn't believe his luck. One minute he was a step away from disgrace and prison for defrauding his government, the next he was on his way to becoming an extremely wealthy man. The memory of his sibling was rapidly fading, they were only half-brothers and had never been close anyway.\n\nWhile Sarason patiently waited, Chaco quickly gathered some personal items and stuffed them in a suitcase. Then the two men walked out to the aircraft together.\n\nJuan Chaco never lived to see Bogota, Colombia. Farmers tilling a field of sweet potatoes near an isolated village in Ecuador paused to look up in the sky at the strange droning sound of the tilt-rotor as it passed overhead 500 meters (1600 feet) above the ground. Suddenly, in what seemed a horror fantasy, they caught sight of the body of a man dropping away from the aircraft. The farmers could also clearly see that the unfortunate man was alive. He frantically kicked his legs and clawed madly at the air as if he could somehow slow his plunging descent.\n\nChaco struck the ground in the middle of a small corral occupied by a scrawny cow, missing the startled animal by only 2 meters. The farmers came running from their field and stood around the crushed body that was embedded nearly half a meter into the soil. Simple countryfolk, they did not send a runner to the nearest police station over 60 kilometers (37 miles) to the west. Instead, they reverently lifted the broken remains of the mysterious man who had dropped from the sky and buried him in a small graveyard beside the ruins of an old church, unlamented and unknown, but embellished in myth for generations yet to come.\n\nThe top of Shannon's head was wrapped turban style with a towel, her hair still wet after a hot blissful bath in the captain's cabin. She had allowed the Peruvian female students to go first before luxuriating in the steaming water while sipping wine and eating a chicken sandwich thoughtfully provided by Pitt from the ship's galley. Her skin glowed all over and smelled of lavender soap after washing the sweat and grime out of her pores and the jungle mud from under her nails. One of the shorter crewmen, who was close to her size, lent her a pair of coveralls. The only female crew member, a marine geologist, had used most of her wardrobe to reclothe the Peruvian girls. As soon as Shannon was dressed she promptly threw the swimsuit and the dirty blouse in a trash container. They held memories she'd just as soon forget.\n\nAfter drying and brushing out her hair, she sneaked a bit of Captain Stewart's aftershave lotion. Why is it, she wondered, men never use talcum powder after they shower? She was just tying her long hair in a braid when Pitt knocked on the door. They stood there for a moment staring at each other before breaking into laughter.\n\n\"I hardly recognized you,\" she said, taking in a clean and shaven Pitt wearing a brightly flowered Hawaiian aloha shirt and light tan slacks. He was not what you'd call devilishly good-looking, she thought, but any flaws in his craggy face were more than offset by a masculine magnetism she found hard to resist. He was even more tanned than she was, and his black, wavy hair was a perfect match for the incredibly green eyes.\n\n\"We don't exactly look like the same two people,\" he said with an engaging smile. \"How about a tour of the ship before dinner?\"\n\n\"I'd like that.\" Then she gave him an appraising look. \"I thought I was supposed to bunk down in your cabin. Now I find out the captain has generously offered me his.\"\n\nPitt shrugged. \"The luck of the draw, I guess.\"\n\n\"You're a fraud, Dirk Pitt. You're not the lecher you make yourself out to be.\"\n\n\"I've always believed intimacy should be drifted into gradually.\"\n\nShe suddenly felt uneasy. It was as though his piercing eyes could read her mind. He seemed to sense there was someone else. She forced a smile and wrapped her arm around his. \"Where shall we begin?\"\n\n\"You're speaking of the tour, of course.\"\n\n\"What else?\"\n\nThe Deep Fathom was a state-of-the-art scientific work boat, and she looked it. Her official designation was Super-Seismic Vessel. She was primarily designed for deep ocean geophysical research, but she could also undertake a myriad of other subsea activities. Her giant stern and side cranes, with their huge winches, could be adapted to operate every conceivable underwater function, from mining excavation to deep water salvage and manned and unmanned submersible launch and recovery.\n\nThe ship's hull was painted in NUMA's traditional turquoise with a white superstructure and azure blue crapes. From bow to stern she stretched the length of a football field, berthing up to thirty-five scientists and twenty crew. Although she didn't look it from the outside, her interior living quarters were as plush as most luxurious passenger liners. Admiral James Sandecker, with rare insight given to few bureaucrats, knew his people could perform more efficiently if treated accordingly, and the Deep Fathom reflected his conviction. Her dining room was fitted out like a fine restaurant and the galley was run by a first-rate chef.\n\nPitt led Shannon up to the navigation bridge. \"Our brain center,\" he pointed out, sweeping one hand around a vast room filled with digital arrays, computers, and video monitors mounted on a long console that ran the full width of the bridge beneath a massive expanse of windows. \"Most everything on the ship is controlled from here, except the operation of deep water equipment. That takes place in compartments containing electronics designed for specialized deep sea projects.\"\n\nShannon stared at the gleaming chrome, the colorful images on the monitors, the panoramic view of the sea around the bows. It all seemed as impressive and modern as a futuristic video parlor. \"Where is the helm?\" she asked.\n\n\"The old-fashioned wheel went out with the Queen Mary,\" answered Pitt. He showed her the console for the ship's automated control, a panel with levers and a remote control unit that could be mounted on the bridge wings. \"Navigation is now carried out by computers. The captain can even con the ship by voice command.\"\n\n\"For someone who digs up old potsherds, I had no idea ships were so advanced.\"\n\n\"After lagging as a stepchild for forty years, marine science and technology have finally been recognized by government and private business as the emerging industry of the future.\"\n\n\"You never fully explained what you're doing in the waters off Peru.\"\n\n\"We're probing the seas in search of new drugs,\" he answered.\n\n\"Drugs, as in take two plankton and call me in the morning?\"\n\nPitt smiled and nodded. \"It's entirely within the realm of possibility your doctor may someday actually prescribe such a remedy.\"\n\n\"So the hunt for new drugs has gone underwater.\"\n\n\"A necessity. We've already found and processed over ninety percent of all the land organisms that provide sources of medicine to treat diseases. Aspirin and quinine come from the bark of trees.\n\nChemicals contained in everything from snake venom to secretion from frogs to lymph from pigs' glands are used in drug compounds. But marine creatures and the microorganisms that dwell in the depths have been an untapped source, and might well be the hope of curing every affliction, including the common cold, cancer, or AIDS.\"\n\n\"But surely you can't simply go out and bring back a boatload of microbes for processing at a laboratory for distribution to your friendly pharmacy?\"\n\n\"Not as farfetched as you might think,\" he said. \"Any one of a hundred organisms that live in a drop of water can be cultivated, harvested, and rendered into medicines. Jellyfish, an invertebrate animal called a bryozoan, certain sponges, and several corals are currently being developed into anticancer medicines, anti-inflammatory agents for arthritis pain, and drugs that suppress organ rejection after transplant surgery. The test results on a chemical isolated from kelp look especially encouraging in combating a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis.\"\n\n\"Just where in the ocean are you looking for these wonder drugs?\" asked Shannon.\n\n\"This expedition is concentrating on a ridge of chimneylike vents where hot magma from within the earth's mantle comes in contact with cold seawater and spews through a series of cracks before spreading across the bottom. You might call it a deep-ocean hot spring. Various minerals are deposited over a wide area-copper, zinc, iron, along with water heavy in hydrogen sulfide. Incredibly, vast colonies of giant clams, mussels, huge tube worms, and bacteria that utilize the sulfur compounds to synthesize sugars live and thrive in this dark and toxic environment. It is this remarkable species of sea life that we're collecting with submersibles for laboratory testing and clinical trials back in the States.\"\n\n\"Are there many scientists working on these miracle cures?\"\n\nPitt shook his head. \"Around the world, maybe fifty or sixty. Marine medical research is still in its infancy.\"\n\n\"How long before we see the drugs on the market?\"\n\n\"The regulatory obstacles are staggering. Doctors won't be prescribing many of these medications for another ten years.\"\n\nShannon walked over to an array of monitors that filled an entire panel of one bulkhead. \"This looks impressive.\"\n\n\"Our secondary mission is to map the seafloor wherever the ship sails.\"\n\n\"What are the monitors showing?\"\n\n\"You're looking at the bottom of the sea in a myriad of shapes and images,\" Pitt explained. \"Our long-range, low-resolution side-scan sonar system can record a swath in three-dimensional color up to fifty kilometers wide.\"\n\nShannon stared at the incredible display of ravines and mountains thousands of meters below the ship.\n\n\"I never thought I'd be able to observe the land beneath the sea this clearly. It's like staring out the window of an airliner over the Rocky Mountains.\"\n\n\"With computer enhancement it becomes even sharper.\"\n\n\"Romance of the seven seas,\" she waxed philosophically. \"You're like the early explorers who charted new worlds.\"\n\nPitt laughed. \"High tech takes away any hint of the romance.\"\n\nThey left the bridge, and he showed her through the ship's laboratory where a team of chemists and marine biologists were fussing over a dozen glass tanks teeming with a hundred different denizens from the deep, studying data from computer monitors, and examining microorganisms under microscopes.\n\n\"After retrieval from the bottom,\" said Pitt, \"this is where the first step in the quest for new drugs begins.\"\n\n\"What is your part in all of this?\" Shannon asked.\n\n\"Al Giordino and I operate the robotic vehicles that probe the seafloor for promising organism sites.\n\nWhen we think we've located a prime location, we go down in a submersible to collect the specimens.\"\n\nShe sighed. \"Your field is far more exotic than mine.\"\n\nPitt shook his head. \"I disagree. Searching into the origins of our ancestors can be pretty exotic in its own right. If we feel no attraction for the past, why do millions of us pay homage to ancient Egypt, Rome, and Athens every year? Why do we wander over the battlefields of Gettysburg and Waterloo or stand on the cliffs and look down on the beaches of Normandy? Because we have to look back into history to see ourselves.\"\n\nShannon stood silently. She had expected a certain coldness from a man whom she had watched kill without apparent remorse. She was surprised at the depth of his words, at his easy way of expressing ideas.\n\nHe spoke of the sea, of shipwrecks, and of lost treasure. She described the great archaeological mysteries waiting to be solved. There was mutual delight in this exchange, yet there was still an indefinable gap between them. Neither felt strongly attracted to the other.\n\nThey had strolled out on deck and were leaning over the railing, watching the white foam thrown from the Deep Fathom's bow slide past the hull and merge with the froth from the wake, when skipper Frank Stewart appeared.\n\n\"It's official,\" he said in his soft Alabama drawl, \"we've been ordered to transport the Peruvian young people and Dr. Kelsey to Lima's port city of Callao.\"\n\n\"You were in communication with Admiral Sandecker?\" inquired Pitt.\n\nStewart shook his head. \"His director of operations, Rudi Gunn.\"\n\n\"After we set everyone on shore, I assume we sail back on-site and continue with the project?\"\n\n\"The crew and I do. You and Al have been ordered to return to the sacred well and retrieve Dr.\n\nMiller's body.\"\n\nPitt looked at Stewart as if he were a psychiatrist contemplating a mental case. \"Why us? Why not the Peruvian police?\"\n\nStewart shrugged. \"When I protested that the two of you were vital to the specimen collection operation, Gunn said he was flying in your replacements from NUMA's research lab in Key West. That's all he would say.\"\n\nPitt swung a hand toward the empty helicopter landing pad. \"Did you inform Rudi that Al and I are not exactly popular with the local natives and that we're fresh out of aircraft?\"\n\n\"No to the former.\" Stewart grinned. \"Yes to the latter. American embassy officials are making arrangements for you to charter a commercial helicopter in Lima.\"\n\n\"This makes about as much sense as ordering a peanut butter sandwich in a French restaurant.\"\n\n\"If you have a complaint, I suggest you take it up with Gunn personally when he meets us on the dock in Callao.\"\n\nPitt's eyes narrowed. \"Sandecker's right-hand man flies over sixty-five hundred kilometers from Washington to oversee a body recovery? What gives?\"\n\n\"More than meets the eye, obviously,\" said Stewart. He turned and looked at Shannon. \"Gunn also relayed a message to you from a David Gaskill. He said you'd recall the name.\"\n\nShe seemed to stare at the deck in thought for a moment. \"Yes, I remember, he's an undercover agent with the U.S. Customs Service who specializes in the illicit smuggling of antiquities.\"\n\nStewart continued, \"Gaskill said to tell you he thinks he's traced the Golden Body Suit of Tiapollo to a private collector in Chicago.\"\n\nShannon's heart fluttered and she gripped the handrail until her knuckles turned ivory.\n\n\"Good news?\" asked Pitt.\n\nShe opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She looked stunned.\n\nPitt put his arm around her waist to support her. \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\"The Golden Body Suit of Tiapollo,\" she murmured reverently, \"was lost to the world in a daring robbery at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Seville in 1922. There isn't an archaeologist alive who wouldn't sign away his or her pension to study it.\"\n\n\"What exactly makes it so special?\" asked Stewart.\n\n\"It is considered the most prized artifact to ever come out of South America because of its historic significance,\" Shannon lectured, as if entranced. \"The gold casing covered the mummy of a great Chachapoyan general known as Naymlap, from the toes to the top of the head. The Spanish conquerors discovered Naymlap's tomb in 1547 in a city called Tiapollo high in the mountains. The event was recorded in two early documents but today Tiapollo's precise location is unknown. I've only seen old black-and-white photos of the suit, but you could tell that the intricately hammered metalwork was breathtaking. The iconography, the traditional images, and the designs on the exterior were lavishly sophisticated and formed a pictorial record of a legendary event.\"\n\n\"Picture writing, as in Egyptian hieroglyphics?\" asked Pitt.\n\n\"Very similar.\"\n\n\"What we might call an illustrated comic strip,\" added Giordino as he stepped out on deck.\n\nShannon laughed. \"Only without the panels. The panels were never fully deciphered. The obscure references seem to indicate a long journey by boat to a place somewhere beyond the empire of the Aztecs.\"\n\n\"For what purpose?\" asked Stewart.\n\n\"To hide a vast royal treasure that belonged to Huascar, an Inca king who was captured in battle and murdered by his brother Atahualpa, who was in turn executed by the Spanish conqueror Francisco Pizarro. Huascar possessed a sacred gold chain that was two hundred and fourteen meters long. One report given to the Spaniards by Incas claimed that two hundred men could scarcely lift it.\"\n\n\"Roughly figuring that each man hoisted sixty percent of his weight,\" mused Giordino, \"you're talking over nine thousand kilograms or twenty thousand pounds of gold. Multiply that by twelve troy ounces . .\n\n.\"\n\n\"And you get two hundred and forty thousand ounces,\" Pitt helped out. Giordino's calculating expression suddenly crumbled into blank astonishment. \"Oh my God. On today's gold market that works out to well over a hundred million dollars.\"\n\n\"That can't be right,\" scoffed Stewart.\n\n\"Compute it for yourself,\" muttered Giordino, still stupefied.\n\nStewart did, and his face went as blank as Giordino's. \"Mother of heaven, he's right.\"\n\nShannon nodded. \"That's just the price of the gold. As an artifact it is priceless.\"\n\n\"The Spanish never got their hands on it?\" Pitt asked Shannon.\n\n\"No, along with a vast hoard of other royal wealth, the chain disappeared. You've probably all heard the story of how Huascar's brother Atahualpa tried to buy his freedom from Pizarro and his conquistadors by offering to fill a room that measured seven meters in length by five meters wide with gold. Atahualpa stood on his tiptoes, reached up and drew a line around the room that was almost three meters from the floor, the height to which the gold would top out. Another smaller room nearby was to be filled with silver twice over.\"\n\n\"Has to be a world's record for ransom,\" mused Stewart.\n\nAccording to the legend,\" Shannon continued, \"Atahualpa seized massive numbers of golden objects from palaces, religious temples, and public buildings. But the supply was coming up short, so he went after his brother's treasures. Huascar's agents warned him of the situation, and he conspired to have his kingdom's treasures spirited away before Atahualpa and Pizarro could get their hands on them. Guarded by loyal Chachapoyan warriors, commanded by General Naymlap, untold tons of gold and silver objects, along with the chain, were secretly transported by a huge human train to the coast, where they were loaded on board a fleet of reed and balsa rafts that sailed toward an unknown destination far to the north.\"\n\n\"Is there any factual basis to the story?\" Pitt asked.\n\n\"Between the years 1546 and 1568, a Jesuit historian and translator, Bishop Juan de Avila, recorded many mythical accounts of early Peruvian cultures. While attempting to convert the Chachapoyan people to Christianity, he was told four different stories about a great treasure belonging to the Inca kingdom that their ancestors helped carry across the sea to an island far beyond the land of the Aztecs, where it was buried. Supposedly it is guarded by a winged jaguar until the day the Incas return and retake their kingdom in Peru.\"\n\n\"There must be a hundred coastal islands between here and California,\" said Stewart.\n\nShannon followed Pitt's gaze down to the restless sea. \"There is, or I should say was, another source of the legend.\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Pitt, \"let's hear it.\"\n\n\"When the Bishop was questioning the Cloud People, as the Chachapoyans were called, one of the tales centered on a jade box containing a detailed chronicle of the voyage.\"\n\n\"An animal skin painted with symbolic pictographs?\"\n\n\"No, a quipu,\" Shannon replied softly.\n\nStewart tilted his head quizzically. \"A what?\"\n\n\"Quipu, an Inca system for working out mathematical problems and for record keeping. Quite ingenious, really. It was a kind of ancient computer using colored strands of string or hemp with knots placed at different intervals. The various color-coded strands signified different things -blue for religion, red for the king, gray for places and cities, green for people, and so forth. A yellow thread could indicate gold while a white one referred to silver. The placement of knots signified numbers, such as the passage of time. In the hands of a quipu-mayoc, a secretary or clerk, the possibilities of creating everything from records of events to warehouse inventories were endless. Unfortunately, most all the quipus, one of the most detailed statistical records of a people's history ever kept, were destroyed during the Spanish conquest and the oppression that followed.\"\n\nPitt said, \"And this stringed instrument, if you'll forgive the pun, was used to give an account of the voyage, including time, distances, and location?\"\n\n\"That was the idea,\" Shannon agreed.\n\n\"Any clues as to whatever became of the jade box?\"\n\n\"One story claims the Spaniards found the box with its quipu and not knowing its value, sent it to Spain. But during shipment aboard a treasure galleon bound for Panama, the box, along with a cargo of precious artifacts and a great treasure of gold and silver, was captured by the English sea hawk, Sir Francis Drake.\"\n\nPitt turned and regarded her as he might a classic automobile he'd never seen before. \"The Chachapoyan treasure map went to England?\"\n\nShannon gave a helpless shrug. \"Drake never mentioned the jade box or its contents when he reached England after his epic voyage around the world. Since then, the map has become known as the Drake quipu, but it was never seen again.\"\n\n\"A hell of a tale,\" Pitt muttered quietly. His eyes seemed to turn dreamlike as his mind visualized something beyond the horizon. \"But the best part is yet to come.\"\n\nShannon and Stewart both stared at him. Pitt's gaze turned skyward as a sea gull circled the ship and then winged toward land. There was a look of utter certainty in his eyes as he faced them again, a crooked smile curving his lips, the wavy strands of his ebony hair restless in the breeze.\n\n\"Why do you say that?\" Shannon asked hesitantly.\n\n\"Because I'm going to find the jade box.\"\n\n\"You're putting us on.\" Stewart laughed.\n\n\"Not in the least.\" The distant expression on Pitt's craggy face had changed to staunch resolve.\n\nFor a moment Shannon was stunned. The sudden change from his previous mocking skepticism was totally unexpected. \"You sound like you're on the lunatic fringe.\"\n\nPitt tilted his head back and laughed heartily. \"That's the best part about being crazy. You see things nobody else can see.\"\n\nSt. Julien Perlmutter was a classic gourmand and bon vivant. Excessively fond of fine food and drink, he reveled in sociable tastes, possessing an incredible file of recipes from the renowned chefs of the world and a cellar with more than 4000 bottles of vintage wine. A host with an admirable reputation for throwing gourmet dinners at elegant restaurants, he paid a heavy price. St. Julien Perlmutter weighed in at close to 181 kilograms (400 pounds). Scoffing at physical workouts and diet foods, his fondest wish was to enter the great beyond while savoring a 100-year-old brandy after a sumptuous meal.\n\nBesides eating, his other burning passion was ships and shipwrecks. He had accumulated what was acknowledged by archival experts as the world's most complete collection of literature and records on historic ships. Maritime museums around the world counted the days until overindulgence did him in, so they could pounce like vultures and absorb the collection into their own libraries.\n\nThere was a reason Perlmutter always entertained in restaurants instead of at his spacious carriage house in Georgetown outside the nation's capital. A gigantic mass of books was stacked on the floor, on sagging shelves, and in every nook and cranny of his bedroom, the living and dining rooms, and even in the kitchen cabinets. They were piled head-high beside the commode in his bathroom and were scattered like chaff on the king-size waterbed. Archival experts would have required a full year to sort out and catalogue the thousands of books stuffed in the carriage house. But not Perlmutter. He knew precisely where any particular volume was stashed and could pick it out within seconds.\n\nHe was dressed in his standard uniform of the day, purple pajamas under a red and gold paisley robe, standing in front of a mirror salvaged from a stateroom on the Lusitania, trimming a magnificent gray beard, when his private line gave off a ring like a ship's bell.\n\n\"St. Julien Perlmutter here. State your business in a brief manner.\"\n\n\"Hello, you old derelict.\"\n\n\"Dirk!\" he boomed, recognizing the voice, his blue eyes twinkling from a round crimson face. \"Where's that recipe for apricot saut\u00e9ed prawns you promised me?\"\n\n\"In an envelope on my desk. I forgot to mail it to you before I left the country. My apologies.\"\n\n\"Where are you calling from?\"\n\n\"A ship off the coast of Peru.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid to ask what you're doing down there.\"\n\n\"A long story.\"\n\n\"Aren't they all?\"\n\n\"I need a favor.\"\n\nPerlmutter sighed. \"What ship is it this time?\"\n\n\"The Golden Hind.\"\n\n\"Francis Drake's Golden Hind?\"\n\n\"The same.\"\n\n\"Sic parvis magna,\" Perlmutter quoted. \"Great things have small beginnings. That was Drake's motto.\n\nDid you know that?\"\n\n\"Somehow it escaped me,\" Pitt admitted. \"Drake captured a Spanish galleon--\"\n\n\"The Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion,' \" Perlmutter interrupted. \"Captained by Juan de Anton, bound for Panama City from Callao de Lima with a cargo of bullion and precious Inca artifacts. As I recall, it was in March of 1578.\"\n\nThere was a moment of silence at the other end of the line. \"Why is it when I talk to you, Julien, you always make me feel as if you took away my bicycle?\"\n\n\"I thought you'd like a bit of knowledge to cheer you up.\" Perlmutter laughed. \"What precisely do you wish to know?\"\n\n\"When Drake seized the Concepcion, how did he handle the cargo?\"\n\n\"The event was quite well recorded. He loaded the gold and silver bullion, including a hoard of precious gems and pearls, on board the Golden Hind. The amount was enormous. His ship was dangerously overloaded, so he dumped several tons of the silver into the water by Cano Island off the coast of Ecuador before continuing on his voyage around the world.\"\n\n\"What about the Inca treasures?\"\n\n\"They were left in the cargo holds of the Concepcion. Drake then put a prize crew on board to sail her back through the Magellan Strait and across the Atlantic to England.\"\n\n\"Did the galleon reach port?\"\n\n\"No,\" answered Perlmutter thoughtfully. \"It went missing and was presumed lost with all hands.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry to hear that,\" said Pitt, disappointment in his voice. \"I had hopes it might have somehow survived.\"\n\n\"Come to think of it,\" recalled Perlmutter, \"a myth did arise concerning the Concepcion's disappearance.\"\n\n\"What was the gist of it?\"\n\n\"A fanciful story, little more than rumor, said the galleon was caught in a tidal wave that carried it far inland. Never verified or documented, of course.\"\n\n\"Do you have a source for the rumor?\"\n\n\"Further research will be needed to verify details, but if my memory serves me correctly, the tale came from a mad Englishman the Portuguese reported finding in a village along the Amazon River. Sorry, that's about all I can give you on the spur of the moment.\"\n\n\"I'd be grateful if you dug a little deeper,\" said Pitt.\n\n\"I can give you the dimensions and tonnage of the Concepcion, how much sail she carried, when and where she was built. But a crazy person wandering around a rain forest calls for a source outside my collection.\"\n\n\"If anyone can track down a sea mystery, you can.\"\n\n\"I have an utter lack of willpower when it comes to delving into one of your enigmas, especially after we found old Abe Lincoln on a Confederate ironclad in the middle of the Sahara Desert together.\"\n\n\"I leave it to you, Julien.\"\n\n\"Ironclads in a desert, Noah's Ark on a mountain, Spanish galleons in a jungle. Why don't ships stay on the sea where they belong?\"\n\n\"That's why you and I are incurable lost shipwreck hunters,\" said Pitt cheerfully.\n\n\"What's your interest in this one?\" Perlmutter asked warily.\n\n\"A jade box containing a knotted cord that gives directions to an immense Inca treasure.\"\n\nPerlmutter mulled over Pitt's brief answer for several seconds before he finally said, \"Well, I guess that's as good a reason as any.\"\n\nHiram Yaeger looked as if he should have been pushing a shopping cart full of shabby belongings down a back alley. He was attired in a Levi's jacket and pants, his long blond hair tied in a loose ponytail, and his boyish face half-hidden by a scraggly beard. The only shopping cart Yaeger ever pushed, however, was down the delicatessen aisle of a supermarket. A stranger would have been hard-pressed to imagine him living in a fashionable residential area of Maryland with a lovely artist wife and two pretty, smart teenage girls in private school, and driving a top-of-the-line BMW.\n\nNor would someone who didn't know him guess that he was chief of NUMA's communications and information network. Admiral Sandecker had pirated him away from a Silicon Valley computer corporation to build a vast data library, containing every book, article, or thesis, scientific or historical, fact or theory, ever known to be written about the sea. What St. Julien Perlmutter's archive was to ships, Yaeger's was to oceanography and the growing field of undersea sciences.\n\nHe was sitting at his own private terminal in a small side office of the computer data complex that took up the entire tenth floor of the NUMA building when his phone buzzed. Without taking his eyes from a monitor that showed how ocean currents affected the climate around Australia, he picked up the receiver.\n\n\"Greetings from the brain trust,\" he answered casually.\n\n\"You wouldn't know gray matter if it splashed on your shoe,\" came the voice of an old friend.\n\n\"Good to hear from you, Mr. Special Projects Director. The office topic of the day says you're enjoying a fun-filled holiday in sunny South America.\"\n\n\"You heard wrong, pal.\"\n\n\"Are you calling from the Deep Fathom?\"\n\n\"Yes, Al and I are back on board after a little excursion into the jungle.\"\n\n\"What can I do for you?\"\n\n\"Delve into your data bank and see if you can find any record of a tidal wave that struck the shoreline between Lima, Peru, and Panama City sometime in March of 1578.\"\n\nYaeger sighed. \"Why don't you also ask me to find the temperature and humidity on the day of creation?\"\n\n\"Just the general area where the wave struck will do, thank you.\"\n\n\"Any record of such an event would likely be in old weather and maritime records I gleaned from Spanish archives in Seville. Another remote possibility would be the local inhabitants, who might have handed down legends of such an event. The Incas were good at recording social and religious occasions on textiles or pottery.\"\n\n\"Not a good lead,\" Pitt said doubtfully. \"The Inca empire was smashed by the Spanish conquest nearly forty years earlier. Whatever records they made in recalling the news of the day were scattered and lost.\"\n\n\"Most tidal waves that come inland are caused by seafloor movement. Maybe I can piece together known geological events of that era.\"\n\n\"Give it your best try.\"\n\n\"How soon do you need it?\"\n\n\"Unless the admiral has you on a priority project, drop everything else and go.\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Yaeger, eager for the challenge. \"I'll see what I can come up with.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Hiram. I owe you.\"\n\n\"About a hundred times over.\"\n\n\"And don't mention this to Sandecker,\" said Pitt.\n\n\"I thought it sounded like another one of your shady schemes. Mind telling me what this is all about?\"\n\n\"I'm looking for a lost Spanish galleon in a jungle.\"\n\n\"But of course, what else?\" Yaeger said with routine resignation. He had learned long before never to anticipate Pitt.\n\n\"I'm hoping you can find me a ballpark to search.\"\n\n\"As a matter of fact, through clean living and moral thinking, I can already narrow your field of search by a wide margin.\"\n\n\"What do you know that I don't?\"\n\nYaeger smiled to himself. \"The lowlands between the west flank of the Andes and the coast of Peru have an average temperature of eighteen degrees Celsius or sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit and an annual rainfall that would hardly fill a shot glass, making it one of the world's coldest and driest low altitude deserts. No jungle for a ship to get lost in there.\"\n\n\"So what's your hot spot?\" asked Pitt.\n\n\"Ecuador. The coastal region is tropical all the way to Panama.\"\n\n\"A precision display of deductive reasoning. You're okay, Hiram. I don't care what your ex-wives say about you.\"\n\nA mere trifle. I'll have something for you in twenty-four hours.\"\n\n\"I'll be in touch.\"\n\nAs soon as he put down the phone, Yaeger began assembling his thoughts. He never failed to find the novelty of a shipwreck search stimulating. The areas he planned to investigate were neatly filed in the computer of his mind. During his years with NUMA, he had discovered that Dirk Pitt didn't walk through life like other men. Simply working with Pitt and supplying data information had been one long, intrigue-filled, vicarious adventure, and Yaeger took pride in the fact that he had never fumbled the ball that was passed to him.\n\nAs Pitt was making plans to search for a landlocked Spanish galleon, Adolphus Rummel, a noted collector of South American antiquities, stepped out of the elevator into his plush penthouse apartment twenty floors above Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. A short, stringy man with a shaven head and an enormous walrus moustache, Rummel was in his midseventies and looked more like a Sherlock Holmes villain than the owner of six huge auto salvage yards.\n\nLike many of his extremely wealthy peers who compulsively amassed priceless collections of antiquities from the black market with no questions asked, Rummel was unmarried and reclusive. No one was ever allowed to view his pre-Columbian artifacts. Only his accountant and attorney were aware of their existence, but they had no idea of how extensive his inventory was.\n\nIn the nineteen fifties German-born Rummel smuggled a cache of Nazi ceremonial objects across the Mexican border. The contraband included presentation daggers and knights-cross medals awarded to Germany's greatest World War II heroes, as well as a number of historic documents signed by Adolf Hitler and his maniacal cronies. Selling his hoard to collectors of Nazi artifacts at premium prices, Rummel took the profits and launched an auto junkyard that he built into a scrap metal empire, netting him nearly 250 million dollars over forty years.\n\nAfter a business trip to Peru in 1974, he developed an interest in ancient South American art and began buying from dealers, honest or criminal. Source did not matter to him. Corruption was as common as rain in a jungle among the brotherhood of artifact finders and sellers throughout Central and South America. Rummel gave no thought to whether his acquired pieces were legally excavated but sold out the back door, or stolen from a museum. They were for his satisfaction and enjoyment, and his alone.\n\nHe walked past the Italian marble walls of his foyer and approached a large mirror with a thick gilded frame covered with naked cherubs entwined around a continuous grapevine. Twisting the head of a cherub in one corner, Rummel sprang the catch that unlatched the mirror, revealing a concealed doorway. Behind the mirror a stairway led down into eight spacious rooms lined with shelves and filled with tables supporting at least thirty glass cases packed with more than two thousand ancient pre-Columbian artifacts. Reverently, as if walking down the aisle of a church toward the altar, he moved about the gallery, cherishing the beauty and craftsmanship of his private hoard. It was a ritual he performed every evening before going to bed, almost as if he were a father looking in on his sleeping children.\n\nRummel's pilgrimage finally ended at the side of a large glass case that was the centerpiece of the gallery. It held the crowning treasure of his collection. Gleaming under halogen spotlights, the Golden Body Suit of Tiapollo lay in splendor, arms and legs outstretched, the mask sparkling with emeralds in the eye sockets. The magnificent brilliance of the artistry never failed to move Rummel.\n\nKnowing full well it had been stolen from the national anthropological museum in Seville, Spain, seventy-six years previously, Rummel did not hesitate to pay one million two hundred thousand dollars in cash when he was approached by a group of men who claimed to be connected to the Mafia but were in reality members of a clandestine underground syndicate that specialized in the theft of precious art objects. Where they had come upon the golden suit, Rummel had no idea. He could only assume they had either stolen it themselves or bought it from the collector who had dealt with the original thieves.\n\nHaving had his nightly gratification, Rummel turned off the lights, returned upstairs to the foyer, and closed the mirror. Moving behind a wet bar designed around a two thousand-year-old Roman sarcophagus, he half-filled a small snifter from a bottle of brandy and retired to his bedroom to read before falling asleep.\n\nIn another apartment directly level and across the street from Rummel's building, United States Customs Agent David Gaskill sat and peered through a pair of high-powered binoculars mounted on a tripod as the artifacts collector prepared for bed. Another agent might have been bored after nearly a week of stakeout, but not Gaskill. An eighteen-year veteran of the Customs Service, Gaskill looked more like a football coach than a special government agent, a look he cultivated for his work. His gray hair was curly and combed back. An African American, his skin was more doeskin brown than dark coffee, and his eyes were a strange mixture of mahogany and green. His massive bulldog head seemed to grow out of his shoulders on a stunted, tree-trunk neck. A huge mountain of a man, he was once an all-star linebacker for the University of Southern California. He had worked hard to lose his South Carolina drawl and spoke with practiced diction, occasionally being mistaken for a former British citizen from the Bahamas.\n\nGaskill had been fascinated by pre-Columbian art ever since a field trip to the Yucatan Peninsula during school. When stationed in Washington, D.C., he had handled dozens of investigations involving looted artifacts from the Anasazi and Hohokam cultures of the American Southwest desert. He was working on a case involving the smuggling of carved Mayan stone panels when he received a tip that was passed along to him by Chicago police from a cleaning woman. She had accidentally discovered photographs protruding from a drawer in Rummel's penthouse of what she believed to be a man's body covered in gold. Thinking that someone might have been murdered, she stole a photo and turned it over to the police. A detective who had worked on art fraud cases recognized the golden object as an antiquity and called Gaskill.\n\nRummel's name had always been high on the Customs Service's list of people who collected ancient art without concern about where it came from, but there was never any evidence of illegal dealings, nor did Gaskill have a clue where Rummel kept his hoard. The special agent, who possessed the expertise of an antiquities scholar, immediately recognized the photo supplied by the cleaning lady as the long-lost Golden Body Suit of Tiapollo.\n\nHe set up an immediate round-the-clock surveillance of Rummel's penthouse and had the old man tailed from the time he left the building until he returned. But six days of tight scrutiny had turned up no indication of where Rummel's collection was hidden. The suspect never varied his routine. After leaving for his office at the lower end of Michigan Avenue, where he'd spend four hours, sifting through his investments, it was lunch at a rundown cafe where he always ordered bean soup and a salad. The rest of the afternoon was spent prowling antique stores and art galleries. Then dinner at a quiet German restaurant, after which he would take in a movie or a play. He usually arrived home at eleven-thirty. The routine never varied.\n\n\"Doesn't he ever get tired of drinking the same rotgut in bed?\" muttered Special Agent Winfried Pottle.\n\n\"Speaking for myself, I'd prefer the waiting arms of a beautiful woman oozing supple elegance and wearing a little something black and flimsy.\"\n\nGaskill pulled back from the binoculars and made a dour face at his second-in-command of the surveillance team. Unlike Gaskill in his Levi's and USC football jacket, Pottle was a slim, handsome man with sharp features and soft red hair, who dressed in three-piece suits complete with pocket watch and chain. \"After seeing a few of the women you date, I'd have to say that was wishful thinking.\"\n\nPottle nodded at Rummel's penthouse. \"At least give me credit for not leading a regimented existence.\"\n\n\"I shudder to think how you'd behave if you had his money.\"\n\n\"If I had invested a king's ransom in stolen Indian art, I doubt if I could do as good a job of hiding it.\"\n\n\"Rummel has to conceal it somewhere,\" said Gaskill with a slight trace of discouragement. \"His reputation as a buyer of hot goods with a colorful history comes from too many sources in the antiquities market not to be genuine. Makes no sense for a man to build a world-class collection of ancient artifacts and then never go near it. I've yet to hear of a collector, whether he goes in for stamps, coins, or baseball cards, who didn't study and fondle them at every opportunity. Wealthy art junkies who pay big bucks for stolen Rembrandts and van Goghs are known to sit all alone in hidden vaults, gazing at them for hours on end. I know some of these guys, who started with nothing, got rich and then lusted to collect objects only they could possess. Many of them abandoned families or gladly suffered divorce because their craving became an obsession. That's why someone as addicted to pre-Columbian art as Rummel could never ignore a hoard that's probably more valuable than any in the finest museums in the world.\"\n\n\"Did you ever consider the possibility that our sources might be wrong or highly exaggerated?\" asked Pottle gloomily. \"The cleaning lady who claimed she found the photograph of the gold suit is a confirmed alcoholic.\"\n\nGaskill slowly shook his head. \"Rummel's got it stashed somewhere. I'm convinced.\"\n\nPottle stared across at Rummel's apartment as the lights blinked out. \"If you're right, and if I were Rummel, I'd take it to bed with me.\"\n\n\"Sure you would-\" Gaskill stopped abruptly as Pottle's wit triggered a thought. \"Your perverted mind just made a good point.\"\n\n\"It did?\" muttered a confused Pottle.\n\n\"What rooms do not have windows in the penthouse? The ones we can't observe?\"\n\nPottle looked down at the carpet in thought for a moment. \"According to the floor plan, two bathrooms, a pantry, the short hall between the master and guest bedrooms, and the closets.\"\n\n\"We're missing something.\"\n\n\"Missing what? Rummel seldom remembers to draw his curtains. We can watch ninety percent of his movements once he steps off the elevator. No way he could store a ton of art treasures in a couple of bathtubs and a closet.\"\n\n\"True, but where does he spend the thirty or forty minutes from the time he exits the lobby and steps into the elevator until he sets foot in his living room? Certainly not in the foyer.\"\n\n\"Maybe he sits on the john.\"\n\n\"Nobody is that regular.\" Gaskill stood and walked over to a coffee table and spread out a set of blueprints of Rummel's penthouse obtained from the building's developer. He studied them for what had to be the fiftieth time. \"The artifacts have to be in the building.\"\n\n\"We've checked every apartment from the main floor to the roof,\" said Pottle. \"They're all leased by live-in tenants.\"\n\n\"What about the one directly below Rummel?\" asked Gaskill.\n\nPottle thumbed through a sheaf of computer papers. \"Sidney Kammer and wife, Candy. He's one of those highlevel corporate attorneys who saves his clients from paying a bushel of taxes.\"\n\nGaskill looked at Pottle. \"When was the last time Kammer and his wife made an appearance?\"\n\nPottle scanned the log they maintained of residents who entered and left the building during the surveillance. \"No sign of them. They're no-shows.\"\n\n\"I bet if we checked it out, the Kammers live in a house somewhere in a plush suburb and never set foot in their apartment.\"\n\n\"They could be on vacation.\"\n\nThe voice of agent Beverly Swain broke over Gaskill's portable radio. \"I have a large moving van backing into the basement of the building.\"\n\n\"Are you manning the front security desk or checking out the basement?\" asked Gaskill.\n\n\"Still in the lobby, walking my post in a military manner,\" Swain answered pertly. A smart little blonde, and a California beach girl before joining Customs, she was the best undercover agent Gaskill had on his team and the only one inside Rummel's building. \"If you think I'm bored with watching TV monitors depicting basements, elevators, and hallways, and on my way out the door for a flight to Tahiti, you're half right.\"\n\n\"Save your money,\" replied Pottle. \"Tahiti is nothing but tall palms and exotic beaches. You can get that in Florida.\"\n\n\"Run tape on the front entrance,\" ordered Gaskill. \"Then trot down to the basement and question the movers. Find out if they're moving someone in or out of the building, what apartment, and why they're working at this ungodly hour.\"\n\n\"On my way,\" Swain answered through a yawn.\n\n\"I hope she doesn't meet up with a monster,\" said Pottle.\n\n\"What monster?\" asked Gaskill with raised eyebrows.\n\n\"You know, in all those stupid horror movies, a woman alone in a house hears a strange noise in the cellar. Then she investigates by going down the stairs without turning on the lights or holding a kitchen knife for protection.\"\n\n\"Typical lousy Hollywood direction.\" Gaskill shrugged. \"Not to worry about Bev. The basement is lit like Las Vegas Boulevard and she's packing a nine-millimeter Colt Combat Commander. Pity the poor monster who comes on to her.\"\n\nNow that Rummel's penthouse was dark, Gaskill took a few minutes away from the binoculars to knock off half a dozen glazed donuts and down a thermos bottle of cold milk. He was sadly contemplating the empty donut box when Swain reported in.\n\n\"The movers are unloading furniture for an apartment on the nineteenth floor. They're ticked off at working so late but are being well paid for overtime. They can't say why the client is in such a rush, only that it must be one of those last-minute corporate transfers.\"\n\n\"Any possibility they're smuggling artifacts into Rummel's place?\"\n\n\"They opened the door of the van for me. It's packed with art deco style furniture.\"\n\n\"Okay, monitor their movements every few minutes.\"\n\nPottle scribbled on a notepad and hung up a wall phone in the kitchen. When he returned to Gaskill's position at the window, he had a cagey grin on his face. \"I bow to your intuition. Sidney Kammer's home address is in Lake Forest.\"\n\n\"I'll bet you Kammer's biggest client turns out to be Adolphus Rummel,\" Gaskill ventured.\n\n\"And for the bongo drums and a year's supply of Kitty Litter, tell me who Kammer leases his apartment to.\"\n\n\"Got to be Adolphus Rummel.\"\n\nPottle looked pleased with himself. \"I think we can safely shout Eureka.\"\n\nGaskill stared across the street through an open curtain into Rummel's living room, suddenly knowing his secret. His dark eyes deepened as he spoke. \"A hidden stairway leading-from the foyer,\" he said, carefully choosing his words as if describing a screenplay he was about to write. \"Rummel walks off the elevator, opens a hidden door to a stairway and descends to the apartment below his penthouse, where he spends forty-five minutes gloating over his private store of treasures. Then he returns upstairs, pours his brandy, and sleeps the sleep of a satisfied man. Strange, but I can't help envying him.\"\n\nPottle had to reach up to pound Gaskill on the shoulder. \"Congratulations, Dave. Nothing left now but to obtain a search warrant and conduct a raid on Rummel's penthouse.\"\n\nGaskill shook his head. \"A warrant, yes. A raid by an army of agents, no. Rummel has powerful friends in Chicago. We can't afford a big commotion that could result in a media barrage of criticism or a nasty lawsuit. Particularly if I've made a bad call. A quiet little search by you and me and Bev Swain will accomplish whatever it takes to ferret out Rummel's artifact collection.\"\n\nPottle slipped on a trench coat, a never-ending source of friendly ridicule by fellow agents, and headed for the door. \"Judge Aldrich is a light sleeper. I'll roust him out of bed and be back with the paperwork before the sun comes up.\"\n\n\"Make it sooner.\" Gaskill smiled wryly. \"I'm itching with anticipation.\"\n\nAfter Pottle left, Gaskill called up Swain. \"Give me a status report on the movers.\"\n\nIn the lobby of Rummel's apartment building, Bev Swain sat behind the security desk and stared up at an array of four monitors. She watched as the furniture haulers moved out of camera range. Pressing the buttons on a remote switch, she went from camera to camera, mounted at strategic areas inside the building. She found the movers coming out of the freight elevator on the nineteenth floor.\n\n\"So far they've brought up a couch, two upholstered chairs with end tables, and what looks like boxed crates of household goods, dishes, kitchen and bathroom accessories, clothing. You know, stuff like that.\"\n\n\"Do they return anything to the truck?\"\n\n\"Only empty boxes.\"\n\n\"We think we've figured where Rummel stashes his artifacts. Pottle's gone for a warrant. We'll go in as soon as he returns.\"\n\n\"That's good news,\" Swain said with a sigh. \"I've almost forgotten what the world looks like outside this damn lobby.\"\n\nGaskill laughed. \"It hasn't improved. Sit tight on your trim little bottom for a few more hours.\"\n\n\"I may take that statement as sexual harassment,\" said Swain primly.\n\n\"Merely words of praise, Agent Swain,\" Gaskill said wearily, \"words of praise.\"\n\nA beautiful day dawned, crisp and cool, with only a whisper of breeze coming off Lake Michigan. The Farmers' Almanac had predicted an Indian summer for the Great Lakes region. Gaskill hoped so. A warmer than normal fall meant a few extra days of fishing on the Wisconsin lake beside his getaway cabin. He led a lonely private life since his wife of twenty years died from a heart attack brought on by an iron overload disease known as hemochromatosis. His work had become his love, and he used his leisure time comfortably settled in a Boston Whaler outboard boat, planning his investigations and analyzing data as he cast for pike and bass.\n\nAs he stood next to Pottle and Swain in the elevator rising to Rummel's penthouse, Gaskill skimmed the wording of the warrant for the third time. The judge had allowed a search of Rummel's penthouse, but not Kammer's apartment on the floor below, because he failed to see just cause. A minor inconvenience.\n\nInstead of going directly into what Gaskill was certain were the rooms that held the artifacts, they would have to find a hidden access and come down from the top.\n\nSuddenly he was thinking a strange thought, what if the collector had been sold fakes and forged artworks? Rummel would not be the first greedy collector who had been sold a bill of goods in his unbridled lust to acquire art from any source, legal or not. He swept away the pessimistic thought and basked in a glow of fulfillment. The culmination of long hours of unflagging effort was only minutes away.\n\nSwain had punched in the security code that allowed the elevator to rise beyond the residents' apartments and open directly into Rummel's penthouse. The doors parted and they stepped onto the marble floor of the foyer, unannounced. Out of habit, Gaskill lightly fingered his shoulder-holstered nine-millimeter automatic. Pottle found the button to a speaker box on a credenza and pressed it. A loud buzzer was heard throughout the penthouse.\n\nAfter a short pause, a voice fogged with sleep answered. \"Who's there?\"\n\n\"Mr. Rummel,\" said Pottle into the speaker. \"Will you please come to the elevator?\"\n\n\"You'd better leave. I'm calling security.\"\n\n\"Don't bother. We're federal agents. Please comply and we'll explain our presence.\"\n\nSwain watched the floor lights over the elevator flicker as it automatically descended. \"That's why I'd never lease a penthouse,\" she said in mock seriousness. \"Intruders can rig your private elevator easier than stealing a Mercedes-Benz.\"\n\nRummel appeared in pajamas, slippers, and an old-fashioned chenille robe. The material of the robe reminded Gaskill of a bedspread he'd slept on as a young boy in his grandmother's house. \"My name is David Gaskill. I'm a special agent with the United States Customs Service. I have an authorized federal court warrant to search the premises.\"\n\nRummel indifferently slipped on a pair of rimless glasses and began reading the warrant as if it were the morning newspaper. Up close, he looked a good ten years younger than seventy-six. And although he had just come out of bed, he appeared alert and quite meticulous.\n\nImpatient, Gaskill moved around him. \"Pardon me.\"\n\nRummel peered up. \"Look through my rooms all you want. I have nothing to hide.\"\n\nThe wealthy scrap dealer appeared anything but rude and irritable. He seemed to take the intrusion in good grace with a show of cooperation.\n\nGaskill knew it was nothing but an act. \"We're only interested in your foyer.\"\n\nHe had briefed Swain and Pottle on what to search for and they immediately set to work. Every crack and seam was closely examined. But it was the mirror that intrigued Swain. As a woman she was instinctively drawn to it. Gazing into the reflective backing, she found it free of even the tiniest imperfection. The glass was beveled around the edges with etchings of flowers in the corners. Her best guess was that it was eighteenth century. She could not help but wonder about all the other people who had stood in front of it over the past three hundred years and stared at their reflections. Their images were still there. She could sense them.\n\nNext she studied the intricately sculptured frame, crowded with cherubs overlaid in gold. Keenly observant, she noticed the tiny seam on the neck of one cherub. The gilt around the edges looked worn from friction. Swain gently grasped the head and tried to turn it clockwise. It remained stationary. She tried the opposite direction, and the head rotated until it was facing backward. There was a noticeable click, and one side of the mirror came ajar and stopped a few centimeters from the wall.\n\nShe peered through the crack down the hidden stairwell and said, \"Good call, boss.\"\n\nRummel paled as Gaskill silently swung the mirror wide open. He smiled broadly as he was swept by a wave of satisfaction. This was what Gaskill liked best about his job, the game of wits culminating in ultimate triumph over his antagonist.\n\n\"Will you please lead the way, Mr. Rummel?\"\n\n\"The apartment below belongs to my attorney, Sidney Kammer,\" said Rummel, a shrewd gleam forming in his eyes. \"Your warrant only authorizes you to search my penthouse.\"\n\nGaskill groped about in his coat pocket for a moment before extracting a small box containing a bass plug, a fishing lure he had purchased the day before. He extended his hand and dropped the box down the stairs. \"Forgive my clumsiness. I hope Mr. Kammer doesn't mind if I retrieve my property.\"\n\n\"That's trespassing!\" Rummel blurted.\n\nThere was no reply. Followed by Pottle, the burly Customs agent was already descending the stairway, pausing only to retrieve his bass plug box. What he saw upon reaching the floor below took his breath away.\n\nMagnificent pre-Columbian artworks filled room after room of the apartment. Glass-enclosed Incan textiles hung from the ceilings. One entire room was devoted solely to ceremonial masks. Another held religious altars and burial urns. Others were filled with ornate headdresses, elaborately painted ceramics, and exotic sculptures. All doors in the apartment had been removed for easier access, the kitchen and bathrooms stripped of their sinks, cupboards and accessories to provide more space for the immense collection. Gaskill and Pottle stood overwhelmed by the spectacular array of antiquities. The quantity went far beyond what they expected.\n\nAfter the initial amazement faded, Gaskill rushed from room to room, searching for the piece de resistance of the collection. What he found was a shattered, empty glass case in the center of a room.\n\nDisillusionment flooded over him.\n\n\"Mr. Rummel!\" he shouted. \"Come here!\"\n\nEscorted by Swain, a thoroughly defeated and distraught Rummel shuffled slowly into the exhibition room. He froze in sudden horror as though one of the Inca battle lances on the wall had pierced his stomach. \"It's gone!\" he gasped. \"The Golden Body Suit of Tiapollo is gone.\"\n\nGaskill's face went tight and cold. The floor around the empty display case was flanked by a pile of furniture consisting of a couch, end tables, and two chairs. He looked from Pottle to Swain. \"The movers,\" he rasped in a tone barely audible. \"They've stolen the suit from right under our noses.\"\n\n\"They left the building over an hour ago,\" said Swain tonelessly.\n\nPottle looked dazed. \"Too late to mount a search. They've already stashed the suit by now.\" Then he added, \"If it isn't on an airplane flying out of the country.\"\n\nGaskill sank into one of the chairs. \"To have come so close,\" he murmured vacantly. \"God forbid the suit won't be lost for another seventy-six years.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "IN SEARCH OF THE CONCEPCION",
                "text": "[ October 15, 1998 ]\n\n[ Callao, Peru ]\n\nPeru's principal seaport, Callao, was founded by Francisco Pizarro in 1537 and quickly became the main shipping port for the gold and silver plundered from the Inca empire. Appropriately, the port itself was plundered by Francis Drake forty-one years later. Spain's conquest of Peru ended almost at the spot where it had begun. The last of the Spanish forces surrendered to Simon Bolivar at Callao in 1825, and Peru became a sovereign nation for the first time since the fall of the Incas. Now joined with Lima as one sprawling metropolitan area, the combined cities host a population of nearly 6.5 million.\n\nSituated on the west bank of the Andes along the lowlands, Callao and Lima have an annual rainfall of only 41 millimeters (1.5 inches), making the surrounding land area one of the earth's chilliest and driest deserts in the lower latitudes. Winter fog supports thin ground cover and mesquite and little else. The only water, besides excessive humidity, flows down several streams and the Rimac River from the Andes.\n\nAfter rounding the northern tip of San Lorenzo, the large offshore island that protects Callao's natural maritime shelter, Captain Stewart ordered slow speed as a launch came alongside the Deep Fathom and the harbor pilot jumped onto a boarding ladder and climbed on board. Once the pilot steered the ship safely inside the main channel, Captain Stewart took command of the bridge again and adroitly eased the big research ship to a stop beside the dock of the main passenger terminal. Under his watchful eye the mooring lines were slipped over big, rusty bollards. Then he shut down his automatic control system, rang his chief engineer, and told him that he was through with the engines.\n\nEveryone lining the ship's rail was surprised to see over a thousand people jamming the dock. Along with an armed military security force and a large contingent of police, TV news cameras and press photographers quickly began jockeying for position as the gangway was lowered. Beyond the news media stood a group of smiling government officials, and behind them the happily waving parents of the archaeology students.\n\n\"Still no Dixieland band playing 'Waiting for the Robert E. Lee,' \" Pitt said, feigning a disappointed tone.\n\n\"Nothing like a cheering populace to snap one out of depression,\" said Giordino, gazing at the unexpected reception.\n\n\"I never expected so grand a turnout,\" murmured Shannon in awe. \"I can't believe word spread so fast.\"\n\nMiles Rodgers lifted one of three cameras hung around his neck and began shooting. \"Looks to me like half the Peruvian government turned out.\"\n\nThe dock was filled with an air of excitement. Small children were waving Peruvian and American flags. A roar came from the crowd as the archaeology students climbed out on the bridge wing and began waving and shouting as they recognized their parents. Only Stewart looked uneasy.\n\n\"My God, I hope they all don't expect to storm aboard my ship.\"\n\n\"Too many boarders to repel.\" Giordino shrugged. \"Better to haul down your flag and plead for mercy.\"\n\n\"I told you my students came from influential families,\" said Shannon happily.\n\nUnnoticed by the crowd, a small man wearing glasses and carrying a briefcase expertly squeezed through the milling throng and slipped around the cordon of security guards. He bounded up the still-lowering gangway before anyone could stop him and leaped onto the deck with the elated expression of a running back who has just crossed a goal line. He approached Pitt and Giordino and grinned.\n\n\"Why is it prudence and discretion are beyond your talents?\"\n\n\"We try not to fly in the face of public opinion,\" Pitt said before smiling broadly and embracing the little man. \"Good to see you, Rudi.\"\n\n\"Seems we can't get away from you,\" said Giordino warmly.\n\nRudi Gunn, the deputy director of NUMA, shook Stewart's hand and was introduced to Shannon and Rodgers. \"Will you excuse me if I borrow these two rogues before the welcoming ceremonies?\" he asked graciously.\n\nWithout waiting for an answer, he stepped through a hatch and walked down an alleyway with ease.\n\nGunn had helped design the Deep Fathom and was very familiar with the ship's deck layout. He stopped before the doorway to the conference room, opened it and entered. He went directly to the head of a long table and fished through his briefcase for a yellow legal pad filled with notations as Pitt and Giordino settled into a pair of leather chairs.\n\nThough Giordino and Gunn were both short, they were as unalike as a gibbon and a bulldog. While Gunn was as slight as a girl, Giordino was a huge walking muscle. They also differed in brain power.\n\nGiordino was shrewd and street smart. Gunn was sheer genius. Number one in his class at the Naval Academy, and a former navy commander who could easily have ascended to a top staff job in the Navy Department, he preferred the underwater science of NUMA to the science of warfare. Extremely nearsighted, he peered through heavy hornrimmed glasses, but never missed the slightest movement within two hundred yards.\n\nPitt was the first to speak. \"Why the frenzy to send Al and me back to that rotten sinkhole to retrieve a body?\"\n\n\"The request came from U.S. Customs. They made an urgent appeal to Admiral Sandecker to borrow his best men.\"\n\n\"And that includes you.\"\n\n\"I could have begged off, claiming my present projects would grind to a stop without my presence.\n\nThe admiral would not have hesitated to send someone else. But a canary let slip your little unauthorized mission to find a lost galleon in the wilds of Ecuador.\"\n\n\"Hiram Yaeger,\" Pitt supplied. \"I should have remembered you two are as close as Frank and Jesse James.\"\n\n\"I couldn't resist dumping the routine of Washington to mix a little business with adventure, so I volunteered for the dirty job of briefing and joining you on the Customs project.\"\n\n\"You mean you sold Sandecker a bill of goods and skipped town?\" said Pitt.\n\n\"Mercifully for everyone involved, he doesn't know about the hunt for the galleon. At least not yet.\"\n\n\"He's not an easy man to fool,\" said Giordino seriously.\n\nNot for very long,\" added Pitt. \"He's probably already on to you.\"\n\nGunn waved a hand indifferently. \"You two are on safe ground. Better me than some poor fool unfamiliar with your escapades. Anyone else in the NUMA bureaucracy might overestimate your abilities.\"\n\nGiordino made a surly face. \"And we call him a friend?\"\n\n\"What can NUMA do for Customs that's so special?\" asked Pitt.\n\nGunn spread a sheaf of papers on the table. \"The issue is complex but involves the plunder of ancient art.\"\n\n\"Isn't that a little out of our line? Our business is underwater exploration and research.\"\n\n\"Destruction for the purpose of looting underwater archaeological sites is our business,\" Gunn stated earnestly.\n\n\"Where does recovering Dr. Miller's body enter the picture?\"\n\n\"Only the first step of our cooperation with Customs. The murder of a world-renowned anthropologist is the bedrock of their case. They suspect the killer is a highlevel member of an international looting syndicate, and they need proof for an indictment. They also hope to use the killer as a key to unlock the door leading to the masterminds of the entire theft and smuggling operation. As for the sacred well, Customs and Peruvian authorities believe a vast cache of artifacts was raised from the bottom and has already been shipped to black-market receiving stations around the world. Miller discovered the theft and was terminated to shut him up. They want us, you and Al in particular, to search the floor of the well for evidence.\"\n\n\"And our plan to explore for the lost galleon?\"\n\n\"Complete the job on the well, and I'll authorize a small budget out of NUMA to fund your search.\n\nThat's all I can promise.\"\n\n\"And if the admiral shoots you down?\" asked Giordino.\n\nGunn shrugged. \"He's my boss as well as yours. I'm an old navy man. I follow orders.\"\n\n\"I'm old air force,\" Pitt replied. \"I question them.\"\n\n\"Worry about it when the time comes,\" said Giordino. \"Let's get the sinkhole probe out of the way.\"\n\nPitt took a deep breath and relaxed in his chair. \"Might as well do something useful while Yaeger and Perlmutter conduct their research. They should have some solid leads by the time we stumble out of the jungle.\"\n\n\"There is one more request from the Customs agents,\" said Gunn.\n\n\"What the hell else do they have on their want list?\" demanded Pitt roughly. \"A dive orgy for souvenirs thrown off cruise ships by tourists afraid of Customs inspectors?\"\n\n\"Nothing so mundane,\" Gunn explained patiently. \"They also insist that you return to the Pueblo de los Muertos.\"\n\n\"They must think artifacts sitting in the rain qualify as underwater stolen goods,\" Giordino said with acidic humor.\n\n\"The Customs people are in dire need of an inventory.\"\n\n\"Of the artifacts in the temple?\" Pitt asked incredulously. \"Do they expect an indexed catalogue? There must be close to a thousand items stacked inside whatever is left of the temple after the mercenaries finished blowing it all to hell. They need archaeologists to sort through the hoard, not marine engineers.\"\n\n\"The Peruvian Investigative Police have investigated and reported that most of the artifacts were removed from the temple soon after you escaped,\" explained Gunn. \"International Customs agents need descriptions so they can identify the artifacts should they begin to show up at antique auctions, or in private collections, galleries, and museums in affluent first world countries. They hope that a return trip to the scene of the crime will jog your memories.\"\n\n\"Events were moving too fast for a quick tally.\"\n\nGunn nodded in understanding. \"But certain objects must have stuck in your mind, especially the outstanding pieces. What about you, Al?\"\n\n\"I was busy prowling the ruins for a radio,\" said Giordino. \"I didn't have time to examine the stuff.\"\n\nPitt held his hands to his head and massaged his temples. \"I might be able to recall fifteen or twenty items that stood out.\"\n\n\"Can you sketch them?\"\n\n\"I'm a miserable artist, but I think I can draw reasonably accurate pictures. No need to visit the place again. I can just as well illustrate what I remember while lounging by a swimming pool at a resort hotel.\"\n\n\"Sounds sensible to me,\" Giordino said cheerfully.\n\n\"No,\" Gunn said, \"it's not sensible. Your job goes much deeper. As much as it turns my stomach, you two middle-aged delinquents are Peruvian national heroes. Not only are you in demand with the Customs Service, the State Department wants a piece of you.\"\n\nGiordino stared at Pitt. \"One more manifestation of Giordino's list of laws. Any man who volunteers for a rescue mission becomes a victim.\"\n\n\"What does the State Department have to do with us making a round trip to the temple?\" Pitt demanded.\n\n\"Since the South American Free Trade Treaty, the petroleum and mining industries have been denationalized. Several American companies are currently completing negotiations to help Peru better exploit its natural resources. The country desperately needs foreign investment, and the money is ready to pour in. The catch is that labor unions and the opposition parties of the legislature are against foreign involvement in their economy. By saving the lives of sons and daughters of the local VIPs, you and Al indirectly influenced a number of votes.\"\n\n\"All right, so we give a speech at the local Elks Club and accept a certificate of merit.\"\n\n\"Fine as far as it goes,\" said Gunn. \"But State Department experts and the Congressional Committee on Latin American Affairs think you both should hang around and make the dirty Yankees look good by helping to halt the looting of Peru's cultural heritage.\"\n\n\"In other words, our esteemed government wants to milk our benevolent image for all it's worth,\" said Pitt stonily.\n\n\"Something along those lines.\"\n\n\"And Sandecker agreed to it.\"\n\n\"Goes without saying,\" Gunn assured him. \"The admiral never misses a chance to stroke Congress if it can lead to more funding for NUMA's future operations.\"\n\n\"Who is going in with us?\"\n\n\"Dr. Alberto Ortiz from the National Institute of Culture in Chiclayo will supervise the archaeological team. He'll be assisted by Dr. Kelsey.\"\n\n\"Without reliable protection we'll be asking for trouble.\"\n\n\"The Peruvians have assured us they will send in a highly trained security force to control the valley.\"\n\n\"But are they trustworthy? I don't want an encore by an army of rogue mercenaries.\"\n\n\"Nor me,\" Giordino agreed firmly.\n\nGunn made a helpless gesture. \"I can only pass on what I was told.\"\n\n\"We'll need better equipment than what we took in on our last trip.\"\n\n\"Give me a list and I'll handle the logistics.\"\n\nPitt turned to Giordino. \"Do you get the distinct impression we've been had?\"\n\n\"As near as I can tell,\" said the stocky Italian, \"this makes about four hundred and thirty-seven times.\"\n\nPitt did not look forward to a repeat dive in the sinkhole. There was a haunted aura about it, something evil in its depths. The yawning cavity gaped in his mind as though it were the mouth of the devil. The imagery was so irrational that he tried to erase it from his mind, but the vision would not go away. It clung like the vague memory of a repugnant nightmare.\n\nTwo days later, at about eight in the morning, preparations were completed for the dive to retrieve Doc Miller's body from the sacred well. As Pitt stared down at the surface slime of the sinkhole, all his apprehension evaporated. The loathsome cavity still looked as menacing as when he had first encountered it, but he had survived its deadly surge, climbed its sheer walls. Now that he knew its hidden secrets, it no longer held any threat. The first hurried, planned-on-the-spot rescue was quickly forgotten.\n\nThis was now a state-of-the-art project.\n\nTrue to his word, Gunn had chartered two helicopters and scrounged the necessary gear for the job.\n\nOne whole day was spent ferrying Dr. Kelsey and Miles Rodgers, the dive crew, and their equipment to the site and reestablishing the destroyed camp. Gunn was not known for running sloppy operations.\n\nThere was no deadline, and he took the time to plan every step with precision. Nothing was left to chance.\n\nA fifty-man contingent from Peru's elite special security unit was already in place when Gunn's first helicopter landed. To the taller North Americans the South American men seemed small in stature. They had an almost gentle look on their faces, but they were a tough lot, hardened by years of fighting Shining Path guerrillas in the heavily forested mountain country and barren coastal deserts. They quickly set up defenses around the camp and sent patrols into the surrounding jungle.\n\n\"Wish I was going with you,\" said Shannon from behind Pitt.\n\nHe turned and smiled. \"I can't imagine why. Retrieving a human body that's been decomposing in tropically heated soup is not what I call a fun experience.\"\n\n\"Sorry, I didn't mean to sound cold-hearted.\" There was little expression of sorrow in her eyes. \"I had the deepest admiration for Doc. But the archaeologist in me wants desperately to explore the bottom of the sacred pool.\"\n\n\"Don't get your hopes up of finding a treasure in antiquities,\" Pitt consoled her. \"You'd be disappointed. All I saw was an acre of silt with an old Spaniard growing out of it.\"\n\n\"At least allow Miles to dive with you and make a photo record.\"\n\n\"Why the rush?\"\n\n\"During the recovery, you and Al might disturb the bottom and move artifacts from their original positions.\"\n\nPitt gazed at her through disbelieving eyes. \"You consider that more important than showing respect for Doc Miller?\"\n\n\"Doc is dead,\" she said matter-of-factly. \"Archaeology is an exacting science that deals with dead things. Doc taught that better than anyone. The slightest disturbance could alter significant findings.\"\n\nPitt began to see a side of Shannon that was all business. \"After Al and I bring up Miller's remains, you and your Miles can dive and retrieve artifacts to your heart's content. But mind you don't get sucked into the side cavern again.\"\n\n\"Once is enough,\" she said with a tight smile. Then her expression turned to one of concern. \"Be careful and don't take chances.\"\n\nThen she kissed him lightly on the cheek, turned and hurried off toward her tent.\n\nDropping into the water went smoothly, thanks to a small crane and a motorized winch operated under the watchful eye of Rudi Gunn. When Pitt was about a meter above the water, he released the safety catch holding him on the end of the cable running to the winch. The upper, slime-laden level of the water was as tepid as expected but he did not recall it smelling quite so pungent. He floated lazily on his back, waiting for the cable to return topside before lowering Giordino.\n\nPitt's full face mask was connected to a communications and safety line while Giordino dove free and unencumbered, relying on hand signals from Pitt for instructions. As soon as his diving buddy slid into the muck beside him, Pitt motioned downward, and they rolled forward and dove into the depths of the sinkhole. They stayed close to avoid becoming separated and losing sight of one another in the dismal murk before reaching the incredibly clear water 4 meters (13 feet) below the surface of the pool. The grayish brown of the bottom silt and rocks materialized out of the gloom and came up to meet them.\n\nThey leveled off at 2 meters (6 feet), and Pitt made a motion to stop all movement. Carefully, so he didn't stir up a cloud of silt, he removed a stainless steel shaft that was attached to a reel of nylon cord and shoved it into a pocket of silt.\n\n\"How are you doing?\" Gunn's voice came over the earphones inside Pitt's face mask.\n\n\"We've reached bottom and are beginning a circular search for the body,\" Pitt replied as he began unwinding the line.\n\nPitt obtained bearings from his compass and began sweeping around the shaft that protruded from the silt, enlarging the search pattern while unreeling the line, as if following the path of a pinwheel. He slowly swam above the muck, scanning from side to side with Giordino following slightly to the side and rear of Pitt's fins. In the transparent liquid void they soon spotted the saponified remains of Doc Miller.\n\nIn the few days since he had seen the body it had changed for the worse. Tiny pieces were missing from the exposed skin areas. Pitt was at a loss to explain this until he glimpsed a strange brightly speckled fish with luminous scales dart in and begin nibbling one of Doc's eyes. He brushed away the carnivorous fish, the size of a small trout, and wondered how it came to be stranded in a deep pool in the middle of a jungle.\n\nHe gave a hand signal to Giordino who removed a rubberized body bag from a pack that was strapped to his chest above his weight belt. A decomposing body cannot be smelled underwater. That's what they say. Perhaps it was in their minds, but the smell of death seemed to flow through their breathing regulators as if their air tanks were contaminated with it. An impossibility, to be sure, but tell that to rescue teams who have seen the horror of long-immersed dead.\n\nThey wasted no time in examining the body but moved as fast as their hands would let them, pulling the body bag over the corpse while trying not to stir up a cloud of silt. The silt did not cooperate, billowing up in a dense cloud, cutting off all visibility. They worked blind, carefully zipping up the bag, making sure no flesh protruded from the seam. When the grisly job was completed, Pitt reported to Gunn.\n\n\"We have the body contained and are on our way up.\"\n\n\"Acknowledged,\" Gunn replied. \"We will lower a sling with a stretcher.\"\n\nPitt grabbed Giordino's arm through the silt cloud, signaling for a mutual ascent. They began raising the remains of Doc Miller to the sunlight. After reaching the surface, they gently eased the body onto the stretcher and secured it with buckled straps. Then Pitt advised Gunn.\n\n\"Ready for lift.\"\n\nAs Pitt watched the stretcher rise toward the rim of the sinkhole, he sadly wished he had known the genuine Steve Miller instead of the imposter. The esteemed anthropologist had been murdered without knowing why. No hint was given by the scum that cut his throat. He never knew that his death was an unnecessary act by a sociopathic killer. He was simply a cast-off pawn in the high-stakes game of stolen art and antiquities.\n\nThere was nothing more to be done. Their part of the body retrieval operation was finished. Pitt and Giordino could only float and wait for the winch to lower the cable again. Giordino looked over at Pitt expectantly and removed the breathing regulator from his mouth.\n\nWe still have plenty of air, he wrote on a communications board. Why not poke around while we're waiting for the next elevator?\n\nTo Pitt the suggestion struck a harmonious chord. Unable to remove his head mask and speak, he replied on his own communications board, Stay close to me and grab hold if struck by surge. Then he gestured downward. Giordino nodded and faithfully swam alongside as they jackknifed and kicked once more toward the floor of the sinkhole.\n\nThe puzzle in Pitt's mind was the lack of artifacts in the silt. Bones, yes, there was an overabundance.\n\nBut after probing the sinkhole's floor for half an hour, they found no sign of ancient artifacts. Nothing except the armor on the intact skeleton he had discovered on his first dive, and the dive gear Pitt had cast off before his climb out of the well. Two minutes was all it took to relocate the site. The bony hand was still raised, one finger pointing in the direction where Miller had lain.\n\nPitt slowly drifted around the armor-encased Spaniard, examining every detail, occasionally glancing up and around the dim reaches of the sinkhole, alert to any disturbance in the silt that signaled the approach of the mysterious surge. He felt his every movement was followed from deep within the empty eye sockets of the skull. The teeth seemed frozen in a mocking grin, taunting and baiting him at the same time. The sunlight from above filtered through the slime and painted the bones a ghostly shade of green.\n\nGiordino floated nearby, observing Pitt with detached curiosity. He had no clue to what captivated his friend. The old bones held little fascination for Giordino. The remains of a five-hundred-year-old Spaniard conjured up nothing in his imagination, except possibly the eruption that would occur when Shannon Kelsey discovered that her precious archaeological site had been disturbed before she could investigate it.\n\nNo such thoughts ran through Pitt's mind. He was beginning to sense that the skeleton did not belong here. He rubbed a finger lightly over the breastplate. A thin smudge of rust came away, revealing smooth, unpitted, uncorroded metal beneath. The leather straps that held the armor against the chest were incredibly well preserved. And so were the fasteners that joined the straps. They had the appearance of metal buckles on old shoes that had sat inside a trunk in an attic for one or two generations.\n\nHe swam a few meters away from the skeleton and pulled a bone out of the silt, a tibia by the shape of it. He returned and held it against the Spaniard's protruding forearm and hand. The bone from the silt was much rougher and pitted as well as more deeply stained from the minerals in the water. The bony structure of the skeleton was smooth in comparison. Next he studied the teeth, which were in remarkably good condition. Pitt found caps on two molars, not gold but silver. Pitt was no expert on sixteenth-century dentistry, but he knew that Europeans didn't even begin to fill cavities and cap teeth until the late eighteenth century.\n\n\"Rudi?\"\n\n\"I'm listening,\" answered Gunn.\n\n\"Please send down a line. I want to lift something.\"\n\n\"A line with a small weight attached to the end is on the way.\"\n\n\"Try to drop it where you see our bubbles.\"\n\n\"Will do.\" There was a pause, and then Gunn's voice came back over Pitt's earphones with a slight edge to it. \"Your archaeologist lady is raising hell. She says you can't touch anything down there.\"\n\n\"Pretend she's in Moline, Illinois, and drop the line.\"\n\nGunn replied nervously. \"She's making a terrible scene up here.\"\n\nEither drop the line or throw her over the edge,\" Pitt snapped obstinately.\n\n\"Stand by.\"\n\nMoments later a small steel hook attached to a nylon line materialized through the green void and landed in the silt two meters away. Giordino effortlessly swam over, snagged the line with one hand, and returned. Then, with the finesse of a pickpocket delicately lifting a wallet, Pitt very carefully wrapped the loose end of the line around a strap holding the breastplate to the skeleton and cinched it with the hook.\n\nHe stared at Giordino and made the thumbs-up gesture. Giordino nodded and was mildly surprised when Pitt released the line, allowing it to slacken and leaving the skeleton where it lay.\n\nThey took turns being lifted out of the sinkhole. As the crane raised him by his safety line, Pitt looked down and vowed he would never again enter that odious slough. At the rim, Gunn was there to help swing him onto firm ground and remove his full face mask.\n\n\"Thank God, you're back,\" he said. \"That madwoman threatened to shoot off my testicles.\"\n\nGiordino laughed. \"She learned that from Pitt. Just be thankful your name isn't Amaru.\"\n\n\"What. . . what was that?\"\n\n\"Another story,\" said Pitt, inhaling the humid mountain air and enjoying every second of it.\n\nHe was struggling out of his dive suit when Shannon stormed up to him like a wild grizzly who had her cubs stolen. \"I warned you not to disturb any artifacts,\" she said firmly.\n\nPitt looked at her for a long moment, his green eyes strangely soft and understanding. \"There is nothing left to touch,\" he said finally. \"Somebody beat you to it. Any artifacts that were in your sacred pool a month ago are gone. Only the bones of animals and sacrificial victims are left scattered on the bottom.\"\n\nHer face turned incredulous and the hazel eyes flew very wide. \"Are you certain?\"\n\n\"Would you like proof?\"\n\n\"We have our own equipment. I'll dive into the pool and see for myself.\"\n\n\"Not necessary,\" he advised.\n\nShe turned and called to Miles Rodgers. \"Let's get suited up.\"\n\n\"You begin probing around in the silt and you will surely die,\" Pitt said, with all the emotion of a professor lecturing to a physics class.\n\nMaybe Shannon wasn't listening to Pitt, but Rodgers was. \"I think we had better listen to what Dirk is saying.\"\n\n\"I don't wish to sound nasty, but he lacks the necessary credentials to make a case.\"\n\n\"What if he's right?\" Rodgers asked innocently.\n\n\"I've waited a long time to explore and survey the bottom of the pool. You and I came within minutes of losing our lives trying to unlock its secrets. I can't believe there isn't a time capsule of valuable antiquities down there.\"\n\nPitt took the line leading down into the water and held it loosely in his hand. \"Here is the verification.\n\nPull on this line and I guarantee you'll change your mind.\"\n\n\"You attached the other end?\" she challenged him. \"To what?\"\n\n\"A set of bones masquerading as a Spanish conquistador.\"\n\n\"You're beyond belief,\" she said helplessly.\n\nIt was a long time since a woman had stared at him like that. \"Do you think I'm a head case? Do you think I enjoy this? I damn well don't enjoy spending my time saving your backside. Okay, you want to die and be buried in a thousand bits and pieces, enjoy the trip.\"\n\nUncertainty crept into her expression. \"You're not making sense.\"\n\n\"Perhaps a little demonstration is in order.\" Pitt gently pulled in the line until it became taut. Then he gave it a hard jerk.\n\nFor a moment nothing happened. Then a rumbling came from the bottom of the well, swelling in volume, sending tremors through the limestone walls. The violence of the explosion was electrifying. The underwater blast came like the eruption of a huge depth charge as a seething column of white froth and green slime burst out of the sinkhole, splattering everyone and everything standing within 20 meters (66 feet) of the edge. The thunder of the explosion rolled over the jungle as the spray fell back into the sinkhole, leaving a heavy mist that swirled into the sky and temporarily blocked out the sun.\n\nShannon stood half-drenched and stared down into her beloved sacred well as if she couldn't make up her mind whether or not to be sick. Everyone around the edge stood like statues suddenly frozen in shock. Only Pitt looked as though he'd witnessed an everyday event.\n\nFading incomprehension and the tentative beginnings of understanding appeared in Shannon's eyes.\n\n\"How in God's name did you know. . .\"\n\n\"That there was a booby trap?\" Pitt finished. \"No great deduction. Whoever buried a good forty-five kilograms of high explosive under the skeleton made two major mistakes. One, why clean out every antiquity but the most obvious? And two, the bones couldn't have been more than fifty years old and the armor hasn't rusted enough to have been underwater for four centuries.\"\n\n\"Who would have done such a thing?\" asked Rodgers dazedly.\n\n\"The same man who murdered Doc Miller,\" answered Pitt.\n\n\"The imposter?\"\n\n\"More likely Amaru. The man who took Miller's place didn't want to risk exposure and investigation by Peruvian authorities, not before they cleaned out the City of the Dead. The Solperrzachaco had robbed the sacrificial well of its artifacts long before you arrived. That's why the imposter sent out a call for help when you and Shannon vanished in the sinkhole. It was all part of the plot to make your deaths look like an accident. Although he felt reasonably sure that you'd be sucked into the adjoining cavern by the underwater surge before you could fully search the bottom and realize all artifacts had been removed, he hedged his bets by lowering the phony conquistador into position purely as a red herring to blow you to pieces in the event the surge didn't carry you away.\"\n\nShannon's eyes took on a saddened and disillusioned look. \"Then all antiquities from the sacred well are gone.\"\n\n\"You can take a small measure of cheer in knowing they were removed and not destroyed,\" said Pitt.\n\n\"They'll turn up,\" said Giordino consolingly. \"They can't remain hidden away in some rich guy's collection forever.\"\n\n\"You don't understand the discipline of archaeology,\" Shannon said dully. \"No scholar can study the artifacts, classify or trace them without knowing their exact site of origin. Now we can learn nothing of the people who once lived here and built the city. A vast archive, a time capsule of scientific information, has been irretrievably lost.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry all your hopes and efforts have come to grief,\" Pitt said sincerely.\n\n\"Grief, yes,\" she said, thoroughly defeated now. \"More like a tragedy.\"\n\nRudi Gunn walked back from the helicopter that was transporting Miller's body to the morgue in Lima.\n\n\"Sorry to interrupt,\" he said to Pitt. \"Our job is finished here. I suggest we pack up the helicopter, lift off, and rendezvous with Dr. Ortiz at the City of the Dead.\"\n\nPitt nodded and turned to Shannon. \"Well, shall we move on to the next disaster your antiquity looters have left us?\"\n\nDr. Alberto Ortiz was a lean, wiry old bird in his early seventies. He stood off to one side of the helicopter landing site dressed in a white duck shirt and matching pants. A long, flowing, white moustache drooped across his face, making him look like a wanted poster for an aging Mexican bandido. If flamboyance was his trademark, it was demonstrated by a wide-brimmed panama hat sporting a colorful band, a pair of expensive designer sandals, and a tall iced drink in one hand. A Hollywood casting director searching for someone to play a beachcomber in a South Seas epic would easily have decided that Dr. Ortiz fit the role to perfection. He was not what the NUMA men had pictured as Peru's most renowned expert on ancient culture.\n\nHe came smiling to greet the newcomers, drink in left hand, right extended for shaking. \"You're early,\" he said warmly in almost perfect English. \"I didn't expect you for another two or three days.\"\n\n\"Dr. Kelsey's project was cut short unexpectedly,\" said Pitt, grasping a strong, callused hand.\n\n\"Is she with you?\" asked Ortiz, peering around Pitt's broad shoulders.\n\n\"She'll be here first thing in the morning. Something about using the afternoon to photograph the carvings on an altar stone beside the well.\" Pitt turned and made the introductions. \"I'm Dirk Pitt and this is Rudi Gunn and Al Giordino. We're with the National Underwater and Marine Agency.\"\n\n\"A great pleasure to meet you gentlemen. I'm grateful for the opportunity to thank you in person for saving the lives of our young people.\"\n\n\"Always a joy to play the palace again,\" said Giordino, looking up at the battle-scarred temple.\n\nOrtiz laughed at the distinct lack of enthusiasm. \"I don't imagine you enjoyed your last visit.\"\n\n\"The audience didn't throw roses, that's for sure.\"\n\n\"Where would you like us to set up our tents, Doctor?\" Gunn inquired.\n\n\"Nothing of the sort,\" Ortiz said, his teeth flashing beneath the moustache. \"My men have cleaned up a tomb that belonged to a rich merchant. Plenty of room, and it's dry during a rain. Not a four-star hotel, of course, but you should find it comfortable.\"\n\n\"I hope the original owner isn't still in residence,\" Pitt said cautiously.\n\n\"No, no, not at all,\" replied Ortiz, mistakenly taking him seriously. \"The looters cleaned out the bones and any remains in their frantic search for artifacts.\"\n\n\"We could bed down in the structure used by the looters for their headquarters,\" suggested Giordino, angling for more deluxe accommodations.\n\n\"Sorry, my staff and I have already claimed it as our base of operations.\"\n\nGiordino offered Gunn a sour expression. \"I told you to call ahead for reservations.\"\n\n\"Come along, gentlemen,\" said Ortiz cheerfully. \"I'll give you a guided tour of the Pueblo de los Muertos on our way to your quarters.\"\n\n\"The inhabitants must have taken a page from the elephants,\" said Giordino.\n\nOrtiz laughed. \"No, no, the Chachapoyas didn't come here to die. This was a sacred burial place that they believed was a way station on their journey to the next life.\"\n\n\"No one lived here?\" asked Gunn.\n\n\"Only priests and the workers who built the funeral houses. It was off limits to everyone else.\"\n\n\"They must have had a thriving business,\" Pitt said, staring at the maze of crypts spread throughout the valley and the honeycomb of tombs in the soaring cliffs.\n\n\"The Chachapoyan culture was highly stratified but it did not have a royal elite like the Inca,\" explained Ortiz. \"Learned elders and military captains ruled the various cities in the confederation. They and the wealthy traders could afford to erect elaborate mausoleums to rest between lives. The poor were put in adobe, human-shaped funeral statues.\"\n\nGunn gave the archaeologist a curious look. \"The dead were inserted into statues?\"\n\n\"Yes, the body of the deceased was placed in a crouched position, knees tucked under the chin. Then a cone of sticks was placed around the body as a cagelike support. Next, wet adobe was plastered around the support, forming a casing around the body. The final step was to sculpt a face and head on top that vaguely resembled the person inside. When the funeral receptacle was dry, the mourners inserted it into a previously dug niche or handy crevice in the face of the cliff.\"\n\n\"The local mortician must have been a popular guy,\" observed Giordino.\n\n\"Until I study the city in greater detail,\" said Ortiz, \"I'd estimate that it was under continual construction and expansion as a cemetery between A.D. 1200 and A.D. 1500 before it was abandoned. Probably sometime after the Spanish conquest.\"\n\n\"Did the Inca bury their dead here after they subdued the Chachapoyas?\" asked Gunn.\n\n\"Not to any great extent. I've found only a few tombs that indicate later Inca design and architecture.\"\n\nOrtiz led them along an ancient avenue made from stones worn smooth by the elements. He stepped inside a bottle-shaped funeral monument constructed of flat stones and decorated with rows of diamond-style motifs intermingled with zigzag designs. The workmanship was precise, with refined attention to detail, and the architecture was magnificent. The monument was topped by a narrow, circular dome 10 meters high (33 feet). The entrance was also formed in the shape of a bottle and was a tight fit, allowing only one man to squeeze through at a time. Steps rose from the street to the exterior threshold outside, and then dropped to the floor inside. The interior funeral chamber had a heavy, damp, musty smell that hit like a punch on the nose. Pitt sensed a haunting grandeur and the ghostly presence of the people who performed the final ceremony and closed the crypt for what they thought would be eternity, never envisaging that it would become a shelter for living men not born for another five hundred years.\n\nThe stone floor and the burial niches were empty of funerary objects and swept clean. Curious, smiling faces of carved stone, the size of a serving platter, beamed midway around a corbeled ceiling that stepped up and out from the vertical walls. Hammocks had been strung from sculpted snake heads protruding from the lower walls with wide eyes and open, fanged mouths. Ortiz's workers had also spread straw mats on the floor. Even a small mirror hung from a nail driven into a tight seam between the rows of the masonry.\n\n\"I judge it was built about 1380,\" said Ortiz. \"A fine example of Chachapoyan architecture. All the comforts of home except a bath. There is, however, a mountain stream about fifty meters to the south. As for your other personal needs, I'm sure you'll make do.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Dr. Ortiz,\" said Gunn. \"You're most considerate.\"\n\n\"Please, it's Alberto,\" he replied, raising a bushy white eyebrow. \"Dinner at eighteen hundred hours at my place.\" He gave Giordino a benevolent stare. \"I believe you know how to find your way about the city.\"\n\n\"I've taken the tour,\" Giordino acknowledged.\n\nAn invigorating bath in the icy water of the stream to wash off the day's sweat, a shave, a change into warmer clothes to ward off the cold of the Andes night air, and the men from NUMA trooped through the City of the Dead toward the Peruvian cultural authority's command post. Ortiz greeted them at the entrance and introduced four of his assistants from the National Institute of Culture in Chiclayo, none of whom spoke English.\n\n\"A drink before dinner, gentlemen? I have gin, vodka, scotch, and pisco, a native white brandy.\"\n\n\"You came well prepared,\" observed Gunn.\n\nOritz laughed. \"Just because we're working in difficult areas of the country does not mean we can't provide a few creature comforts.\"\n\n\"I'll try your local brandy,\" said Pitt.\n\nGiordino and Gunn were not as adventurous and stuck with scotch on the rocks. After he did the honors, Ortiz gestured for them to sit in old-fashioned canvas lawn chairs.\n\n\"How badly were the artifacts damaged during the rocket attack?\" asked Pitt, launching the conversation.\n\n\"What few objects the looters left behind were badly crushed by falling masonry. Most of it is shattered beyond restoration, I'm afraid.\"\n\n\"You found nothing worth saving?\"\n\n\"A thorough job.\" Ortiz shook his head sadly. \"Amazing how they worked so fast to excavate the ruins of the temple, remove the salvageable and undamaged antiquities, and escape with a good four tons of the stuff before we could arrive and catch them in the act. What the early Spanish treasure hunters and their sanctimonious missionary padres didn't plunder from the Inca cities and send back to Seville, the damned huagueros have found and sold. They steal antiquities faster than an army of ants can strip a forest.\"\n\n\"Huagueros?\" questioned Gunn.\n\n\"The local term for robbers of ancient graves,\" explained Giordino.\n\nPitt stared at him curiously. \"Where did you learn that?\"\n\nGiordino shrugged. \"You hang around archaeologists, you're bound to pick up a few expressions.\"\n\n\"It is hard to entirely fault the huaqueros,\" said Ortiz. \"The poor farmers of the high country suffer from terrorism, inflation, and corruption that rob them of what little they can take from the earth. The wholesale looting of archaeological sites and the selling of artifacts by these people enable them to purchase a few small comforts to ease their dreadful poverty.\"\n\n\"Then there is the good with the bad,\" observed Gunn.\n\n\"Unfortunately, they leave nothing but a few scraps of bone and broken pottery for scientists like me to study. Entire buildings-temples and palaces-are gutted and demolished for their architectural ornamentation, the carvings sold for outrageously low prices. Nothing is spared. The stones from the walls are taken away and used as cheap building materials. Much of the architectural beauty of these ancient cultures has been destroyed and lost forever.\"\n\n\"I gather it's a family operation,\" said Pitt.\n\n\"Yes, the search for underground tombs has been carried on from one generation to another for hundreds of years. Fathers, brothers, uncles, and cousins all work together. It has become a custom, a tradition. Entire communities band together to dig for ancient treasures.\"\n\n\"Tombs being their primary target,\" Gunn presumed.\n\n\"That is where most of the ancient treasures are hidden. The riches of most ancient empires were buried with their rulers and the wealthy.\"\n\n\"Big believers in you can take it with you,\" said Giordino.\n\n\"From the Neanderthals to the Egyptians to the Incas,\" Ortiz continued, \"they all believed in a continued life in the great beyond. Not reincarnation, mind you. But life as they lived on earth. So they believed in taking their most prized possessions with them into the grave. Many kings and emperors also took along their favorite wives, officials, soldiers, servants, and prized animals as well as treasure. Grave robbing is as old as prostitution.\"\n\n\"A pity U.S. leaders don't follow in their footsteps,\" said Giordino sardonically. \"Just think, when a President dies, he could order that he be buried with the entire Congress and half the bureaucracy.\"\n\nPitt laughed. \"A ritual most American citizens would applaud.\"\n\n\"Many of my countrymen feel the same about our government,\" Ortiz agreed.\n\nGunn asked, \"How do they locate the graves?\"\n\n\"The poorer huaqueros search with picks and shovels and long metal rods to probe for buried tombs.\n\nThe wellfunded theft and smuggling organizations, on the other hand, use modern, expensive metal detectors and lowlevel radar instruments.\"\n\n\"Have you crossed paths with the Solpemachaco in the past?\" asked Pitt.\n\n\"At four other historical sites.\" Ortiz spat on the ground. \"I was always too late. They're like a stench with an unknown source. The organization exists, that much is certain. I have seen the tragic results of their pillage. But I have yet to find hard evidence leading to the bastards who make the payoffs to the huaqueros and then smuggle our cultural heritage into an international underground market.\"\n\n\"Your police and security forces can't put a stop to the flow of stolen treasures?\" asked Gunn.\n\n\"Stopping the huaqueros is like trying to catch mercury in your hands,\" answered Ortiz. \"The profit is too enormous and there are too many of them. As you have found out for yourselves, any number of our military and government officials can be bought.\"\n\n\"You have a tough job, Alberto,\" Pitt sympathized. \"I don't envy you.\"\n\n\"And a thankless one,\" Ortiz said solemnly. \"To the poor hill people, I am the enemy. And the wealthy families avoid me like the plague because they collect thousands of precious artifacts for themselves.\"\n\n\"Sounds as if you're in a no-win situation.\"\n\n\"Quite true. My colleagues from other cultural schools and museums around the country are in a race to discover the great treasure sites, but we always lose to the huaqueros.\"\n\n\"Don't you receive help from your government?\" asked Giordino.\n\n\"Obtaining funding from the government or private sources for archaeology projects is an uphill battle.\n\nA pity, but it seems no one wants to invest in history.\"\n\nThe conversation drifted to other subjects after one of Ortiz's assistants announced that dinner was ready. Two courses consisted of a pungent beef stew accompanied by bowls of locally grown parched corn and beans. The only touches of more refined dining came from an excellent Peruvian red wine and a fruit salad. Dessert consisted of mangos with syrup.\n\nAs they gathered around a warm campfire, Pitt asked Ortiz, \"Do you think Tupac Amaru and his men have totally stripped the City of the Dead, or are there tombs and buildings that are still undiscovered?\"\n\nOrtiz suddenly beamed like a strobe light. \"The huaqueros and their Solpemachaco bosses were here only long enough to loot the obvious, the artifacts easily found on the surface. It will take years to conduct a thorough archaeological excavation of the Pueblo de los Muertos. I fervently believe the bulk of the treasures have yet to be found.\"\n\nNow that Ortiz was in a happy mood, his stomach warmed by numerous glasses of white brandy, Pitt circled around from left field. \"Tell me, Alberto, are you an expert on legends dealing with lost Inca treasure after the Spanish came?\"\n\nOrtiz lit a long, narrow cigar and puffed until the end turned red and smoke curled into the dank and increasingly cold night air. \"I only know of a few. Tales of lost Inca treasure might not be found in abundant lots if my ancestral cultures had made detailed accounts of their everyday existence. But unlike the Mayans and Aztecs of Mexico, the cultures of Peru did not leave behind an abundance of hieroglyphic symbols. They never devised an alphabet or ideographic system of communication. Except for a scattering of designs on buildings, ceramic pots, and textiles, the records of their lives and legends are few.\"\n\n\"I was thinking of the lost treasure of Huascar,\" said Pitt.\n\n\"You've heard of that one?\"\n\n\"Dr. Kelsey recounted it. She described an immense golden chain that sounded a bit farfetched.\"\n\nOrtiz nodded. \"That part of the legend happens to be true. The great Inca king, Huayna Capac, decreed that a huge gold chain be cast in honor of the birth of his son, Huascar. Many years later, after Huascar succeeded his father as king, he ordered the royal treasure to be smuggled from the Inca capital at Cuzco and hidden to keep it out of the hands of his brother Atahualpa, who later usurped the kingdom after a lengthy civil war. The vast hoard, besides the golden chain, included life-size statues, thrones, sun disks, and every insect and animal known to the Incas, all sculpted in gold and silver and set with precious gems.\"\n\n\"I've never heard of a treasure that grand,\" said Gunn.\n\n\"The Incas had so much gold they couldn't understand why the Spanish were so fanatical for it. The craze became part of the El Dorado fable. The Spanish died by the thousands searching for the treasure.\n\nThe Germans and the English, who included Sir Walter Raleigh, all scoured the mountains and jungles, but none ever found it.\"\n\n\"As I understand it,\" said Pitt, \"the chain and the other art treasures were eventually transported to a land beyond the Aztecs and buried.\"\n\nOrtiz nodded. \"So the story goes. Whether it was actually taken north by a fleet of ships has never been verified. It was reasonably proven, however, that the hoard was protected by Chachapoyan warriors who formed the royal guard for Inca kings after their confederation was conquered by Huayna Capac in 1480.\"\n\n\"What is the history of the Chachapoyas?\" asked Gunn.\n\n\"Their name means Cloud People,\" replied Ortiz. \"And their history has yet to be written. Their cities, as you well know from recent experience, are buried in one of the most impenetrable jungles of the world. As of this date, archaeologists have neither the funds nor the means to conduct extensive surveys and excavations on Chachapoyan ruins.\"\n\n\"So they remain an enigma,\" said Pitt.\n\n\"In more ways than one. The Chachapoya people, according to the Incas, were fair-skinned, with blue and green eyes. The women were said to be very beautiful and became highly prized by both the Incas and the Spanish. They were also quite tall. An Italian explorer found a skeleton in a Chachapoyan tomb that was well over two meters.\"\n\nPitt was intrigued. \"Close to seven feet?\"\n\n\"Easily,\" Ortiz answered.\n\n\"Any possibility they might have been descendants of early explorers from the Old World, perhaps the Vikings who might have sailed across the Atlantic, up the Amazon, and settled in the Andes?\"\n\n\"Theories of early transoceanic migration to South America across both the Atlantic and the Pacific have always abounded,\" answered Ortiz. \"The fancy term for pre-Columbian travel to and from other continents is diffusionism. An interesting concept, not well accepted but not entirely ignored either.\"\n\n\"Is there evidence?\" asked Giordino.\n\n\"Mostly circumstantial. Ancient pottery found in Ecuador that has the same designs as the Ainu culture of northern Japan. The Spanish, as well as Columbus, reported seeing white men sailing large ships off Venezuela. The Portuguese found a tribe in Bolivia whose beards were more magnificent than the Europeans', contrary to the fact that most Indians lacked abundant facial hair. Reports of -livers and fishermen finding Roman or Grecian amphorae in the waters off Brazil come up routinely.\"\n\nThe giant stone heads from the Olmec culture of Mexico show definite features of black Africans,\" said Pitt, \"while any number of carved stone faces throughout the Mesoamerican cultures have Oriental characteristics.\"\n\nOrtiz nodded in agreement. \"The serpent heads that decorate many of the Mayan pyramids and temples are the spitting image of dragon heads carved in Japan and China.\"\n\n\"But is there hands-on proof?\" asked Gunn.\n\n\"No objects that can be conclusively proven as manufactured in Europe have yet to be found.\"\n\n\"The skeptics have a strong case in the lack of pottery lathes or wheeled vehicles,\" Gunn added.\n\n\"True,\" agreed Ortiz. \"The Mayans did adopt the wheel for children's toys but never for practical use.\n\nNot surprising when you consider they had no beasts 'of burden until the Spanish introduced the horse and oxen.\"\n\n\"But you would think they could have found a purpose for the wheel, say for hauling construction materials,\" Gunn persisted.\n\n\"History tells us that the Chinese developed the wheelbarrow six hundred years before it found its way to Europe,\" Ortiz countered.\n\nPitt downed the last of his brandy. \"It doesn't seem possible an advanced civilization existed in such a remote region without some kind of outside influence.\"\n\n\"The people living in the mountains today, descendants of the Chachapoyas, many of them still fair-skinned with blue and green eyes, speak of a godlike man who appeared among their ancestors from the eastern sea many centuries ago. He taught them building principles, the science of the stars, and the ways of religion.\"\n\n\"He must have forgotten to teach them how to write,\" quipped Giordino.\n\n\"Another nail in the coffin of pre-Columbian contact,\" said Gunn.\n\n\"This holy man had thick white hair and a flowing beard,\" Ortiz continued. \"He was extremely tall, wore a long white robe, and preached goodness and charity toward all. The rest of the story is too close to that of Jesus to be taken literally-- the natives must have introduced events from Christ's life into the ancient story after they were converted to Christianity. He traveled the land, healing the sick, making the blind see again, working all sorts of miracles. He even walked on water. The people raised temples to him and carved his likeness in wood and stone. None of these portraits, I might add, has ever been found. Almost verbatim, the same myth has come down through the ages from the early Mexican cultures in the form of Quetzalcoatl, the ancient god of old Mexico.\"\n\n\"Do you believe any part of the legend?\" asked Pitt.\n\nOrtiz shook his head. \"Not until I excavate something substantial that I can positively authenticate. We may, however, have some answers quite soon. One of your universities in the United States is currently running DNA tests on Chachapoyan remains removed from tombs. If successful, they will be able to confirm whether the Chachapoyas came from Europe or evolved independently.\"\n\n\"What about Huascar's treasure?\" said Pitt, bringing the conversation back on track.\n\n\"A discovery that would stun the world,\" Ortiz answered. \"I'd like to think the hoard still exists in some forgotten cave in Mexico.\" Then he exhaled a cloud of cigar smoke and stared at the evening stars. \"The chain would be a fabulous discovery. But for an archaeologist, the great finds would be the huge solid gold sun disk and the royal golden mummies that vanished along with the chain.\"\n\n\"Golden mummies,\" echoed Gunn. \"Did the Incas preserve their dead like the Egyptians?\"\n\n\"The preservation process was not nearly as complex as that practiced by the Egyptians,\" explained Ortiz. \"But the bodies of the supreme rulers, or Sapa Incas as they were called, were encased in gold and became cult objects in the people's religious practices. The mummies of the dead kings lived in their own palaces, were frequently reclothed with fresh wardrobes, served sumptuous feasts, and maintained harems of the most beautiful women. Chosen as attendants, I might add, not to indulge in necrophilia.\"\n\nGiordino stared over the shadows of the city. \"Sounds like a waste of taxpayers' money.\"\n\n\"A large body of priests supervised the upkeep,\" Ortiz continued, \"acquiring a lucrative interest in keeping the dead kings happy. The mummies were often carried around the country in great splendor, as if they were still heads of state. Needless to say, this absurd love affair with the dead caused a great drain on Inca financial resources, helping immeasurably to topple the empire during the Spanish invasion.\"\n\nPitt zipped his leather jacket against the cold and said, \"While on board our ship, Dr. Kelsey received a message concerning a stolen suit of gold that was traced to a collector in Chicago.\"\n\nOrtiz looked thoughtful and nodded. \"Yes, the Golden Body Suit of Tiapollo. It covered the mummy of a great general called Naymlap who was the right-hand advisor to an early Inca king. Before leaving Lima, I heard that American Customs agents had tracked it down, only to lose it again.\"\n\n\"Lose it?\" For some reason Pitt didn't feel vastly surprised.\n\n\"The director of our National Cultural Ministry was about to board a plane to the United States to lay claim to the mummy and the body suit when he was informed that your Customs agents were too late.\n\nThieves made off with it while they had the owner under surveillance.\"\n\n\"Dr. Kelsey said that images engraved on the suit depicted the voyage of the fleet that carried the treasure to Mexico.\"\n\n\"Only a few of the images were deciphered. Modern scholars never had a chance to study the suit properly before it was stolen from its case in the museum in Seville.\"\n\n\"It's conceivable,\" suggested Pitt, \"that whoever grabbed the suit this time is on the trail of the golden chain.\"\n\n\"A credible conclusion,\" Ortiz agreed.\n\n\"Then the thieves have an inside track,\" said Giordino.\n\n\"Unless someone else discovers the Drake quipu,\" Pitt said slowly, \"and gets there first.\"\n\n\"Ah yes, the infamous jade box,\" Ortiz sighed skeptically. \"A fanciful tale that has refused to die. So you also know about the legendary rope trick giving directions to the golden chain?\"\n\n\"You sound dubious,\" said Pitt.\n\n\"No hardcore evidence. All reports are too flimsy to take seriously.\"\n\n\"You could write a thick book about the superstitions and legends that were proven to be true.\"\n\n\"I am a scientist and a pragmatist,\" said Ortiz. \"If such a quipu exists, I would have to hold it in my own hands, and even then I wouldn't be fully convinced of its authenticity.\"\n\n\"Would you think me mad if I told you I was going to hunt for it?\" asked Pitt.\n\n\"No madder than the thousands of men throughout history who have chased over the horizon after a nebulous dream.\" Ortiz paused, flicked the ash from his cigar, and then stared heavily at Pitt through somber eyes. \"Be forewarned. The one who finds it, if it really exists, will be rewarded with success and then doomed to failure.\"\n\nPitt stared back. \"Why doomed to failure?\"\n\n\"An amauta, an educated Inca who could understand the text, and a quipu-mayoc, a clerk who recorded on the device, can't help you.\"\n\n\"What are you telling me?\"\n\n\"Simply put, Mr. Pitt. The last people who could have read and translated the Drake quipu for you have been dead for over four hundred years.\"\n\nIn a remote, barren part of the southwest desert, a few kilometers east of Douglas, Arizona, and only 75 meters (246 feet) from the border between Mexico and the United States, the hacienda La princesa loomed like a Moorish castle at an oasis. It was named by the original owner, Don Antonio Diaz, in honor of his wife, Sophia Magdalena, who died during childbirth and was entombed in an ornate, baroque crypt that stood enclosed within a high-walled garden. Diaz, a peon who became a miner, struck it rich and took an immense amount of silver out of the nearby Huachuca Mountains.\n\nThe huge feudal estate rested on lands that were originally granted to Diaz by General, later President of Mexico, Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, for helping to finance the despot's campaigns to subdue Texas and later launch a war against the United States. This was a disaster that Santa Ana compounded by selling the Mesilla Valley in southern Arizona to the United States, a transaction known as the Gadsden Purchase. The border shift left Diaz's hacienda in a new country a stone's throw from the old.\n\nThe hacienda was passed down through the Diaz family until 1978, when the last surviving member, Maria Estala, sold it to a rich financier shortly before she died at ninety-four. The new owner, Joseph Zolar, made no mystery of the fact that he acquired the hacienda as a retreat for entertaining celebrities, high government officials, and wealthy business leaders on a lavish scale. Zolar's hacienda quickly became known as the San Simeon of Arizona. His high-profile guests were flown or bused to the estate and his parties were dutifully reported in all the gossip columns and photographed for the slick magazines around the country.\n\nAn antiquarian and fanatical art collector, Zolar had amassed a vast accumulation of art objects and antiques, both good and bad. But every piece was certified by experts and government agents as having been legally sold from the country of origin and imported with the proper papers. He paid his taxes, his business dealings were aboveboard, and he never allowed his guests to bring drugs into his home. No scandal had ever stained Joseph Zolar.\n\nHe stood on a roof terrace amid a forest of potted plants and watched as a private jet touched down on the estate runway that stretched across the desert floor. The jet was painted a golden tan with a bright purple stripe running along its fuselage. Yellow letters on the stripe read Zolar International. He watched as a man casually dressed in a flowered sport shirt and khaki shorts left the aircraft and settled in the seat of a waiting golf cart.\n\nThe eyes below Zolar's surgically tightened lids glittered like gray crystal. The pinched, constantly flushed face complemented the thin, receding, brushed-back hair that was as dull red as Mexican saltillo tile. He was somewhere in his late fifties, with a face that was fathomless, a face that had rarely been out of an executive office or a boardroom, a face that was tempered by hard decisions and cold from issuing death warrants when he felt they were required. The body was small but hunched over like a vulture about to take wing. Dressed in a black silk jumpsuit, he wore the indifferent look of a Nazi concentration camp officer who considered death about as interesting as rain.\n\nZolar waited at the top of the stairs as his guest climbed toward the terrace. They greeted each other warmly and embraced. \"Good to see you in one piece, Cyrus.\"\n\nSarason grinned. \"You don't know how close you came to losing a brother.\"\n\n\"Come along, I've held lunch for you.\" Zolar led Sarason through the maze of potted plants to a lavishly set table beneath a palapa roof of palm fronds. \"I've selected an excellent chardonnay and my chef has prepared a delicious braised pork loin.\"\n\n\"Someday I'm going to pirate him away from you,\" said Sarason.\n\n\"Fat chance.\" Zolar laughed. \"I've spoiled him. He enjoys too many perks to jump ship.\"\n\n\"I envy your lifestyle.\"\n\n\"And I yours. You've never lost your spirit of adventure. Always skirting death and capture by police in some desert or jungle when you could conduct business out of a luxurious corporate office and delegate the dirty work to others.\"\n\n\"A nine-to-five existence was never in my blood,\" said Sarason. \"I find wallowing in dirty dealings an exciting challenge. You should join me sometime.\"\n\n\"No, thank you. I prefer the comforts of civilization.\"\n\nSarason noticed a table with what looked like four weathered tree limbs about one meter in length lying across its surface. Intrigued, he walked over and studied them more closely. He recognized them as sun-bleached roots of cottonwood trees that had grown naturally into grotesque human-shaped figures, complete with torsos, arms and legs, and rounded heads. Faces were crudely carved in the heads and painted with childlike features. \"New acquisitions?\" he asked.\n\n\"Very rare religious ceremonial idols belonging to an obscure tribe of Indians,\" answered Zolar.\n\n\"How did you come by them?\"\n\n\"A pair of illegal artifact hunters found them in an ancient stone dwelling they discovered under the overhang of a cliff.\"\n\n\"Are they authentic?\"\n\n\"Yes, indeed.\" Zolar took one of the idols and stood it on its feet. \"To the Montolos, who live in the Sonoran Desert near the Colorado River, the idols represent the gods of the sun, moon, earth, and life-giving water. They were carved centuries ago and used in special ceremonies to mark the transition of boys and girls into young adulthood. The rite is full of mysticism and staged every two years. These idols are the very core of the Montolo religion.\"\n\n\"What do you estimate they're worth?\"\n\n\"Possibly two hundred thousand dollars to the right collector.\"\n\n\"That much?\"\n\nZolar nodded. \"Providing the buyer doesn't know about the curse that stalks those who possess them.\"\n\nSarason laughed. \"There is always a curse.\"\n\nZolar shrugged. \"Who can say? I do have it on good authority that the two thieves have suffered a run of bad luck. One was killed in an auto accident and the other has contracted some sort of incurable disease.\"\n\n\"And you believe that hokum?\"\n\n\"I only believe in the finer things of life,\" said Zolar, taking his brother by the arm. \"Come along. Lunch awaits.\"\n\nAfter the wine was poured by a serving lady, they clinked glasses and Zolar nodded at Sarason. \"So, brother, tell me about Peru.\"\n\nIt always amused Sarason that their father had insisted on his sons and daughters adopting and legalizing different surnames. As the oldest, only Zolar bore the family name. The far-flung international trade empire that the senior Zolar had amassed before he died was divided equally between his five sons and two daughters. Each had become a corporate executive officer of either an art and antique gallery, an auction house, or an import/export firm. The family's seemingly separate operations were in reality one entity, a jointly owned conglomerate secretly known as the Solpemachaco. Unknown and unregistered with any international government financial agencies or stock markets, its managing director was Joseph Zolar in his role as family elder.\n\n\"Nothing short of a miracle that I was able to save most of the artifacts and successfully smuggle them out of the country after the blunders committed by our ignorant rabble. Not to mention the intrusion by members of our own government.\"\n\n\"U.S. Customs or drug agents?\" asked Zolar.\n\n\"Neither. Two engineers from the National Underwater and Marine Agency. They showed up out of nowhere when Juan Chaco sent out a distress call after Dr. Kelsey and her photographer became trapped in the sacred well.\"\n\n\"How did they cause problems?\"\n\nSarason related the entire story from the murder of the true Dr. Miller by Amaru to the escape of Pitt and the others from the Valley of the Viracocha to the death of Juan Chaco. He finished by giving a rough tally of the artifacts he had salvaged from the valley, and how he arranged to have the cache transported to Callao, then smuggled out of Peru in a secret cargo compartment inside an oil tanker owned by a subsidiary of Zolar International. It was one of two such ships used for the express purpose of slipping looted and stolen art in and out of foreign countries while transporting small shipments of crude oil.\n\nZolar stared into the desert without seeing it. \"The Aztec Star. She is scheduled to reach San Francisco in four days.\"\n\n\"That puts her in brother Charles's sphere of activity.\"\n\n\"Yes, Charles has arranged for your shipment to be transported to our distribution center in Galveston where he will see to the restoration of the artifacts.\" Zolar held his glass up to be refilled. \"How is the wine?\"\n\n\"A classic,\" answered Sarason, \"but a bit dry for my taste.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you'd prefer a sauvignon blanc from Touraine. It has a pleasing fruitiness with a scent of herbs.\"\n\n\"I never acquired your taste for fine wines, brother. I'll settle for a beer.\"\n\nZolar did not have to instruct his serving lady. She quietly left them and returned in minutes with an iced glass and a bottle of Coors beer.\n\n\"A pity about Chaco,\" said Zolar. \"He was a loyal associate.\"\n\n\"I had no choice. He was running scared after the fiasco in the Valley of Viracocha and made subtle threats to unveil the Solpemachaco. It would not have been wise to allow him to fall into the hands of the Peruvian Investigative Police.\"\n\n\"I trust your decisions, as I always have. But there is still Tupac Amaru. What is his situation?\"\n\n\"He should have died,\" replied Sarason. \"Yet when I returned to the temple after the attack of our gun-happy mercenaries, I found him buried under a pile of rubble and still breathing. As soon as the artifacts were cleared out and loaded aboard three additional military helicopters, whose flight crews I was forced to buy off at a premium, I paid the local huaqueros to carry him to their village for care. He should be back on his feet in a few days.\"\n\n\"You might have been wise to remove Amaru too.\"\n\n\"I considered it. But he knows nothing that could lead international investigators to our doorstep.\"\n\n\"Would you like another serving of pork?\"\n\n\"Yes, please.\"\n\n\"Still, I don't like having a mad dog loose around the house.\"\n\n\"Not to worry. Oddly, it was Chaco who gave me the idea of keeping Amaru on the payroll.\"\n\n\"Why, so he can murder little old ladies whenever the mood strikes him?\"\n\n\"Nothing so ludicrous.\" Sarason smiled. \"The man may well prove to be a valuable asset.\"\n\n\"You mean as a hired killer.\"\n\n\"I prefer to think of him as someone who eliminates obstacles. Let's face it, brother. I can't continue eliminating our enemies by myself without risk of eventual discovery and capture. The family should consider itself fortunate that I am not the only one who has the capacity to kill if necessary. Amaru makes an ideal executioner. He enjoys it.\"\n\n\"Just be sure you keep him on a strong leash when he's out of his cage.\"\n\n\"Not to worry,\" said Sarason firmly. Then he changed the subject. \"Any buyers in mind for our Chachapoyan merchandise?\"\n\n\"A drug dealer by the name of Pedro Vincente,\" replied Zolar. \"He hungers after anything that's pre-Columbian. He also pays a cash premium since it's a way for him to launder his drug profits.\"\n\n\"And you take the cash and use it to finance our underground art and artifact operations.\"\n\n\"An equitable arrangement for all concerned.\"\n\n\"How soon before you make the sale?\"\n\n\"I'll set up a meeting with Vincente right after Sister Marta has your shipment cleaned up and ready for display. You should have your share of the profits within ten days.\"\n\nSarason nodded and gazed at the bubbles in his beer. \"I think you see through me, Joseph. I'm seriously considering retiring from the family business while I'm still healthy.\"\n\nZolar looked at him with a shifty grin. \"You do and you'll be throwing away two hundred million dollars.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Your share of the treasure.\"\n\nSarason paused with a forkful of pork in front of his mouth. \"What treasure?\"\n\n\"You're the last of the family to learn what ultimate prize is within our grasp.\"\n\n\"I don't follow you.\"\n\n\"The object that will lead us to Huascar's treasure.\" Zolar looked at him slyly for a moment, then smiled. \"We have the Golden Body Suit of Tiapollo.\"\n\nThe fork dropped to the plate as Sarason stared in total incredulity. \"You found Naymlap's mummy encased in his suit of gold? It is actually in your hands?\"\n\n\"Our hands, little brother. One evening, while searching through our father's old business records, I came upon a ledger itemizing his clandestine transactions. It was he who masterminded the mummy's theft from the museum in Spain.\"\n\n\"The old fox, he never said a word.\"\n\n\"He considered it the highlight of his plundering career, but too hot a subject to reveal to his own family.\"\n\n\"How did you track it down?\"\n\n\"Father recorded the sale to a wealthy Sicilian mafioso. I sent our brother Charles to investigate, not expecting him to learn anything from a trail over seventy years old. Charles found the late mobster's villa and met with the son, who said his father had kept the mummy and its suit hidden away until he died in 1984 at the ripe old age of ninety-seven. The son then sold the mummy on the black market through his relatives in New York. The buyer was a rich junk dealer in Chicago by the name of Rummel.\"\n\n\"I'm surprised the son spoke to Charles. Mafia families are not noted for revealing their involvement with stolen goods.\"\n\n\"He not only spoke,\" said Zolar, \"but received our brother like a long=lost relative and cooperated wholeheartedly by providing the name of the Chicago purchaser.\"\n\n\"I underestimated Charles,\" Sarason said, finishing off his final morsel of braised pork. \"I wasn't aware of his talent for obtaining information.\"\n\n\"A cash payment of three million dollars helped immeasurably.\"\n\nSarason frowned. \"A bit generous, weren't we? The suit can't be worth more than half that much to a collector with deep pockets who has to keep it hidden.\"\n\n\"Not at all. A cheap investment if the engraved images on the suit lead us to Huascar's golden chain.\"\n\n\"The ultimate prize,\" Samson repeated his brother's phrase. \"No single treasure in world history can match its value.\"\n\n\"Dessert?\" Zolar asked. \"A slice of chocolate apricot torte?\"\n\n\"A very small slice and coffee, strong,\" answered Sarason. \"How much extra did it cost to buy the suit from the junk dealer?\"\n\nZolar nodded, and again his serving lady silently complied. \"Not a cent. We stole it. As luck would have it, our brother Samuel in New York had sold Rummel most of his collection of illegal pre-Columbian antiquities and knew the location of the concealed gallery that held the suit. He and Charles worked together on the theft.\"\n\n\"I still can't believe it's in our hands.\"\n\n\"A near thing too. Charles and Sam barely smuggled it from Rummel's penthouse before Customs agents stormed the place.\"\n\nDo you think they were tipped of?\"\n\nZolar shook his head. \"Not by anyone on our end. Our brothers got away clean.\"\n\n\"Where did they take it?\" asked Sarason.\n\nZolar smiled, but not with his eyes. \"Nowhere. The mummy is still in the building. They rented an apartment six floors below Rummel and hid it there until we can safely move it to Galveston for a proper examination. Both Rummel and the Customs agents think it was already smuggled out of the building by a moving van.\"\n\n\"A nice touch. But what happens now? The images engraved in the gold body casing have to be deciphered. Not a simple exercise.\"\n\n\"I've hired the finest authorities on Inca art to decode and interpret the glyphs. A husband and wife team. He's an anthropologist and she's an archaeologist who excels as a decoding analyst with computers.\"\n\n\"I should have known you'd cover every base,\" said Sarason, stirring his coffee. \"But we'd better hope their version of the text is correct, or we'll be spending a lot of time and money chasing up and down Mexico after ghosts.\"\n\nTime is on our side,\" Zolar assured him confidentially. \"Who but us could possibly have a clue to the treasure's burial site?\"\n\nAfter a fruitless excursion to the archives of the Library of Congress, where he had hoped to find documentary evidence leading to the Concepcion's ultimate fate, Julien Perlmutter sat in the vast reading room. He closed a copy of the diary kept by Francis Drake and later presented to Queen Elizabeth, describing his epic voyage. The diary, lost for centuries, had only recently been discovered in the dusty basement of the royal archives in England.\n\nHe leaned his great bulk back in the chair and sighed. The diary added little to what he already knew.\n\nDrake had sent the Concepcion back to England under the command of the Golden Hind's sailing master, Thomas Cuttill. The galleon was never seen again and was presumed lost at sea with all hands."
            },
            {
                "title": "Beyond that, the only mention of the fate of the Concepcion was unverified. It came from a book Perlmutter could recall reading on the Amazon River, published in 1939 by journalist/explorer Nicholas Bender, who followed the routes of the early explorers in search of El Dorado. Perlmutter called up the book from the library staff and reexamined it. In the Note section there was a she-t reference to a 1594",
                "text": "Portuguese survey expedition that had come upon an Englishman living with a tribe of local inhabitants beside the river. The Englishman claimed that he had served under the English sea dog, Francis Drake, who placed him in command of a Spanish treasure galleon that was swept into a jungle by an immense tidal wave. The Portuguese thought the man quite mad and continued on their mission, leaving him in the village where they found him.\n\nPerlmutter made a note of the publisher. Then he signed the Drake diary and Bender's book back to the library staff and caught a taxi home. He felt discouraged, but it was not the first time he had failed to run down a clue to a historical puzzle from the twenty-five million books and forty million manuscripts in the library. The key to unlocking the mystery of the Concepcion, if there was one, had to be buried somewhere else.\n\nPerlmutter sat in the backseat of the cab and stared out the window at the passing automobiles and buildings without seeing them. He knew from experience that each research project moved at a pace all its own. Some threw out the key answers with a shower of fireworks. Others entangled themselves in an endless maze of dead ends and slowly died without a solution. The Concepcion enigma was different. It appeared as a shadow that eluded his grip. Did Nicholas Bender quote a genuine source, or did he embellish a myth as so many nonfiction authors were prone to do?\n\nThe question was still goading his mind when he walked into the clutter that was his office. A ship's clock on the mantel read three thirty-five in the afternoon. Still plenty of time to make calls before most businesses closed. He settled into a handsome leather swivel chair behind his desk and punched in the number for New York City information. The operator gave him the number of Bender's publishing house almost before he finished asking for it. Then Perlmutter poured a snifter of Napoleon brandy and waited for his call to go through. No doubt one more wasted effort, he thought. Bender was probably dead by now and so was his editor.\n\n\"Falkner and Massey,\" answered a female voice heavy with the city's distinct accent.\n\n\"I'd like to talk to the editor of Nicholas Bender, please.\"\n\nNicholas Bender?\"\n\n\"He's one of your authors.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, sir. I don't know the name.\"\n\n\"Mr. Bender wrote nonfiction adventure books a long time ago. Perhaps someone who has been on your staff for a number of years might recall him?\"\n\n\"I'll direct you to Mr. Adams, our senior editor. He's been with the company longer than anyone I know.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nThere was a good thirty-second pause, and then a man answered. \"Frank Adams here.\"\n\n\"Mr. Adams, my name is St. Julien Perlmutter.\"\n\n\"A pleasure, Mr. Perlmutter. I've heard of you. You're down in Washington, I believe.\"\n\n\"Yes, I live in the capital.\"\n\n\"Keep us in mind should you decide to publish a book on maritime history.\"\n\n\"I've yet to finish any book I started.\" Perlmutter laughed. \"We'll both grow old waiting for a completed manuscript from me.\"\n\n\"At seventy-four, I'm already old,\" said Adams congenially.\n\n\"The very reason I rang you,\" said Perlmutter. \"Do you recall a Nicholas Bender?\"\n\n\"I do indeed. He was somewhat of a soldier of fortune in his youth. We've published quite a few of the books he wrote describing his travels in the days before globetrotting was discovered by the middle class.\"\n\n\"I'm trying to trace the source of a reference he made in a book called On the Trail of El Dorado.\"\n\n\"That's ancient history. We must have published that book back in the early forties.\"\n\n\"Nineteen thirty-nine to be exact.\"\n\n\"How can I help you?\"\n\n\"I was hoping Bender might have donated his notes and manuscripts to a university archive. I'd like to study them.\"\n\n\"I really don't know what he did with his material,\" said Adams. \"I'll have to ask him.\"\n\n\"He's still alive?\" Perlmutter asked in surprise.\n\n\"Oh dear me, yes. I had dinner with him not more than three months ago.\"\n\n\"He must be in his nineties.\"\n\n\"Nicholas is eighty-four. I believe he was just twenty-five when he wrote On the Trail of El Dorado.\n\nThat was only the second of twenty-six books we published for him. The last was in 1978, a book on hiking in the Yukon.\"\n\n\"Does Mr. Bender still have all his mental faculties?\"\n\n\"He does indeed. Nicholas is as sharp as an icepick despite his poor health.\"\n\n\"May I have a number where I can reach him?\"\n\n\"I doubt whether he'll take any calls from strangers. Since his wife died, Nicholas has become somewhat of a recluse. He lives on a small farm in Vermont, sadly waiting to die.\"\n\n\"I don't mean to sound heartless,\" said Perlmutter. \"But it is most urgent that I speak to him.\"\n\n\"Since you're a respected authority on maritime lore and a renowned gourmand, I'm sure he wouldn't mind talking to you. But first, let me pave the way just to play safe. What is your number should he wish to call you direct?\"\n\nPerlmutter gave Adams the phone number for the line he used only for close friends. \"Thank you, Mr.\n\nAdams. If I ever do write a manuscript on shipwrecks, you'll be the first editor to read it.\"\n\nHe hung up, ambled into his kitchen, opened the refrigerator, expertly shucked a dozen Gulf oysters, poured a few drops of Tabasco and sherry vinegar into the open shells, and downed them accompanied by a bottle of Anchor Steam beer. His timing was perfect. He had no sooner polished off the oysters and dropped the empty bottle in a trash compactor when the phone rang.\n\n\"Julien Perlmutter here.\"\n\n\"Hello,\" replied a remarkably deep voice. \"This is Nicholas Bender. Frank Adams said you wished to speak to me.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, thank you. I didn't expect you to call me so soon.\"\n\n\"Always delighted to talk to someone who has read my books,\" said Bender cheerfully. \"Not many of you left.\"\n\n\"The book I found of interest was On the Trail of El Dorado.\"\n\n\"Yes, Yes, I nearly died ten times during that trek through hell.\"\n\n\"You made a reference to a Portuguese survey mission that found a crewman of Sir Francis Drake living among the natives along the Amazon River.\"\n\n\"Thomas Cuttill,\" Bender replied without the slightest hesitation. \"I recall including the event in my book, yes.\"\n\n\"I wonder if you could refer me to the source of your information,\" said Perlmutter, his hopes rising with Bender's quick recollection.\n\n\"If I may ask, Mr. Perlmutter, what exactly is it you are pursuing?\"\n\n\"I'm researching the history of a Spanish treasure galleon captured by Drake. Most reports put the ship lost at sea on its way back to England. But according to your account of Thomas Cuttill, it was carried into a rain forest on the crest of a tidal wave.\"\n\n\"That's quite true,\" replied Bender. \"I'd have looked for her myself if I had thought there was the slightest chance of finding anything. But the jungle where she disappeared is so thick you'd literally have to stumble and fall on the wreck before you'd see it.\"\n\n\"You're that positive the Portuguese account of finding Cuttill is not just a fabrication or a myth?\"\n\n\"It is historical fact. There is no doubt about that.\"\n\n\"How can you be so sure?\"\n\n\"I own the source.\"\n\nPerlmutter was momentarily confused. \"I'm sorry, Mr. Bender. I miss your point.\"\n\n\"The point is, Mr. Perlmutter, I have in my possession the journal of Thomas Cuttill.\"\n\n\"The hell you say?\" Perlmutter blurted.\n\n\"Indeed,\" Bender answered triumphantly. \"Cuttill gave it to the leader of the Portuguese survey party with the request that it be sent to London. The Portuguese, however, turned it over to the viceroy at Macapa. He included it with dispatches he forwarded to Lisbon, where it passed through any number of hands before ending up in an antique bookstore, where I bought it for the equivalent of thirty-six dollars.\n\nThat was a lot of money back in 1937, at least to a lad of twenty-three who was wandering the globe on a shoestring.\"\n\n\"The journal must be worth considerably more than thirty-six dollars today.\"\n\n\"I'm sure of it. A dealer once offered me ten thousand for it.\"\n\n\"You turned him down?\"\n\n\"I've never sold mementos of my journeys so someone else could profit.\"\n\n\"May I fly up to Vermont and read the journal?\" asked Perlmutter cautiously.\n\n\"I'm afraid not.\"\n\nPerlmutter paused as he wondered how to persuade Bender to allow him to examine Cuttill's journal.\n\n\"May I ask why?\"\n\n\"I'm a sick old man,\" Bender replied, \"whose heart refuses to stop.\"\n\n\"You certainly don't sound ill.\"\n\n\"You should see me. The diseases I picked up during my travels have returned to ravage what's left of my body. I am not a pretty sight, so I rarely entertain visitors. But I'll tell you what I'll do, Mr. Perlmutter.\n\nI'll send you the book as a gift.\"\n\n\"My God, sir, you don't have to--\"\n\n\"No, no, I insist. Frank Adams told me about your magnificent library on ships. I'd rather someone like you, who can appreciate the journal, possess it rather than a collector who simply puts it on a shelf to impress his friends.\"\n\n\"That's very kind of you,\" said Perlmutter sincerely. \"I'm truly grateful for your kind generosity.\"\n\n\"Take it and enjoy,\" Bender said graciously. \"I assume you'd like to study the journal as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"I don't want to inconvenience you.\"\n\n\"Not at all, I'll send it Federal Express so you'll have it in your hands first thing tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Mr. Bender. Thank you very much. I'll treat the journal with every bit of the respect it deserves.\"\n\n\"Good. I hope you find what you're looking for.\"\n\n\"So do I,\" said Perlmutter, his confidence soaring over the breakthrough. \"Believe me, so do I.\"\n\nAt twenty minutes after ten o'clock the next morning, Perlmutter threw open the door before the Federal Express driver could punch the doorbell button. \"You must be expecting this, Mr. Perlmutter,\" said the young blackhaired man, wearing glasses and a friendly smile.\n\n\"Like a child waiting for Santa.\" Perlmutter laughed, signing for the reinforced envelope.\n\nHe hurried into his study, pulling the tab and opening the envelope as he walked. He sat at his desk, slipped on his glasses, and held the journal of Thomas Cuttill in his hands as if it were the Holy Grail. The cover was the skin of some unidentifiable animal and the pages were yellowed parchment in a state of excellent preservation. The ink was brown, probably a concoction Cuttill had managed to brew from the root of some tree. There were no more than twenty pages. The entries were written in the quaint Elizabethan prose of the day. The handwriting seemed labored, with any number of misspellings, indicating a man who was reasonably well educated for the times. The first entry was dated March 1578, but was written much later:\n\nMine strange historie of the passte sexteen yeares, by Thomas Cuttill, formerly of Devonshire.\n\nIt was the account of a shipwrecked sailor, cast away after barely surviving the sea's violent fury, only to endure incredible hardships in a savage land in his unsuccessful attempt to return home. As he read the passages, beginning with Cuttill's departure from England with Drake, Perlmutter noted that it was written in a more honest style than narratives of later centuries, which were littered with sermons, romantic exaggerations, and clich\u00e9s. Cuttill's persistence, his will to survive, and his ingenuity in overcoming terrible obstacles without once begging for the help of God made a profound impression on Perlmutter. Cuttill was a man he would like to have known.\n\nAfter finding himself the only survivor on the galleon after the tidal wave carried it far inland, Cuttill chose the unknown horrors of the mountains and jungle rather than capture and torture by the avenging Spanish, who were mad as wasps at the audacious capture of their treasure galleon by the hated Englishman, Drake. All Cuttill knew was that the Atlantic Ocean lay somewhere far to the east. How far, he could not even guess. Reaching the sea, and then somehow finding a friendly ship that might carry him back to England would be nothing short of a miracle. But it was the only path open to him.\n\nOn the western slopes of the Andes the Spanish had already created colonies of large estates, now worked by the once-proud Incas, who were enslaved and greatly reduced in numbers by inhumane treatment and infection from measles and smallpox. Cuttill crept through the estates under cover of darkness, stealing food at every opportunity. After two months of traveling a few short kilometers each night to elude the Spanish and remain out of sight of any Indians who might give him away, he crossed over the continental divide of the Andes, through the isolated valleys, and descended into the green hell of the Amazon River Basin.\n\nFrom that point on, Cuttill's life became even more of a nightmare. He struggled through unending swamps up to his waist, fought his way through forests so thick every meter of growth had to be cut away with his knife. Swarms of insects, snakes, and alligators were a constant peril, the snakes often attacking without warning. He suffered from dysentery and fever but still struggled on, often covering only 100 meters (328 feet) during daylight. After several months, he stumbled into a village of hostile natives, who immediately tied him with ropes and kept him imprisoned as a slave for five years.\n\nCuttill finally managed to escape by stealing a dugout canoe and paddling down the Amazon River at night under a waning moon. Contracting malaria, he came within an inch of dying, but as he drifted unconscious in his canoe he was found by a tribe of long-haired women who nursed him back to health.\n\nIt was the same tribe of women the Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana had discovered during his futile search for El Dorado. He named the river Amazonas in honor of the Amazon warriors of Greek legend because the native women could draw a bow with any man.\n\nCuttill introduced a number of labor-saving devices to the women and the few men who lived with them. He built a potter's wheel and taught them how to make huge intricate bowls and water vessels. He constructed wheelbarrows and waterwheels for irrigation, and showed them how to use pulleys to lift heavy weights. Soon looked upon as a god, Cuttill made an enjoyable life among the tribe. He took three of the most attractive women as wives and quickly produced several children.\n\nHis desire to see home again slowly dimmed. A bachelor when he left England, he was sure there would be no relatives or old shipmates left to greet his return. And then there was the possibility that Drake, a stern disciplinarian, would demand punishment for losing the Concepcion.\n\nNo longer physically capable of suffering the deprivations and hardships of along journey, Cuttill reluctantly decided to spend the remaining years of his life on the banks of the Amazon. When the Portuguese survey party passed through, he gave them his journal, requesting that it be somehow sent to England and placed in the hands of Francis Drake.\n\nAfter Perlmutter finished reading the journal, he leaned back in his swivel chair, removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Any doubts he might have had in the back of his mind about the authenticity of the journal had quickly evaporated. The writing on the parchment showed strong, bold strokes, hardly the work of a madman who was sick and dying. Cuttill's descriptions did not seem fabricated or embellished.\n\nPerlmutter felt certain the experiences and hardships suffered by Francis Drake's sailing master truly occurred, and that the account was honestly set down by someone who lived what he wrote.\n\nPerlmutter went back to the heart of his quest, Cuttill's brief mention of the treasures left on board the Concepcion by Drake. He resettled his glasses on his imposing red nose and turned to the final entry of the narrative:\n\nMe mind is as set as a stout ship before a narth winde. I shalle not retarn to mye homelande. I feare Captaan Drake was maddened for me not bringen the achant tresures and the jaade boxe withe the notted stringe to England soos it cud be preezentid to guude Queen Bess. I left it withe the wraaked ship."
            },
            {
                "title": "I shalle be baryed heer among the peapol who have becume my famly. Writen bye the hande of Thomas Cuttill, sailing mastere of the Golden Hinde this unknown day in the yeare 1594",
                "text": "Perlmutter slowly looked up and stared at a seventeenth-century Spanish painting on his wall, depicting a fleet of Spanish galleons sailing across a sea under the golden orange glow of a setting sun.\n\nHe had found it in a bazaar in Segovia and took it home for a tenth of its real value. He gently closed the fragile journal, lifted his bulk from the chair and began to pace around the room, hands clasped behind his back.\n\nA crewman of Francis Drake had truly lived and died somewhere along the Amazon River. A Spanish galleon was thrown into a coastal jungle by an immense tidal wave. And a jade box containing a knotted cord did exist at one time. Could it still lie amid the rotting timbers of the galleon, buried deep in a rain forest? A four-hundred-year-old mystery had suddenly surfaced from the shadows of time and revealed an enticing clue. Perlmutter was pleased with his successful investigative effort, but he well knew that confirmation of the myth was merely the first enticing step in a hunt for treasure.\n\nThe next trick, and the most perplexing one, was to narrow the theater of search to as small a stage as possible.\n\nHiram Yaeger adored his big supercomputer as much as he did his wife and children, perhaps more, he could seldom tear himself away from the images he projected on his giant monitor to go home to his family. Computers were his life from the first time he looked at the screen on a monitor and typed out a command. The love affair never cooled. If anything it grew more passionate with the passing years, especially after he constructed a monster unit of his own design for NUMA's vast oceans data center.\n\nThe incredible display of information-gathering power at his beck and call never ceased to astound him.\n\nHe caressed the keyboard with his fingers as though it were a living entity, his excitement blossoming whenever bits and pieces of data began coming together to form a solution.\n\nYaeger was hooked into a vast high-speed computing network with the capacity to transfer enormous amounts of digital data between libraries, newspaper morgues, research laboratories, universities, and historic archives anywhere in the world. The \"data superhighway,\" as it was called, could transmit billions of bits of information in the blink of a cursor. By tapping into the gigabit network, Yaeger began retrieving and assembling enough data to enable him to lay out a search grid with a 60 percent probability factor of containing the four-century-old landlocked galleon.\n\nHe was so deeply involved with the search for the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion that he did not notice nor hear Admiral James Sandecker step into his sanctum sanctorum and sit down in a chair behind him.\n\nThe founder and first director of NUMA was small in stature but filled with enough testosterone to fuel the offensive line of the Dallas Cowboys. A trim fifty-eight, and a fitness addict, he ran five miles every morning from his apartment to the imposing glass building that housed two of the five thousand engineers, scientists, and other employees that formed NUMA, the undersea counterpart of the space agency NASA. His head was covered by straight flaming red hair, graying at the temples and parted in the middle, while his chin bristled with a magnificent Vandyke beard. Despite his addiction to health and nutrition, he was never without a huge cigar made from tobacco personally selected and rolled for him by the owner of a plantation in Jamaica.\n\nUnder his direction NUMA had taken the field of oceanography and made it as popular as space science. His persuasive pleas to Congress for funding, supported by twenty top universities with schools in the marine sciences and a host of large corporations investing in underwater projects, had enabled NUMA to take, great strides in deep sea geology and mining, marine archaeology, biological studies of sea life, and studies of the effects of oceans on the earth's climate. One of his greatest contributions, perhaps, was supporting Hiram Yaeger's huge computer network, the finest and largest archive of ocean sciences in the world.\n\nSandecker was not universally admired by all of Washington's bureaucracy, but he was respected as a hard driving, dedicated, and honest man, and his relationship with the man in the Oval Office of the White House was warm and friendly.\n\n\"Making any progress?\" he asked Yaeger.\n\n\"Sorry, Admiral.\" Yaeger spoke without turning around. \"I didn't see you come in. I was in the midst of collecting data on the water currents off Ecuador.\"\n\n\"Don't stroke me, Hiram,\" Sandecker said, with the look of a ferret on a hunt. \"I know what you're up to.\"\n\n\"Sir?\"\n\n\"You're searching for a stretch of coastline where a tidal wave struck in 1578.\"\n\n\"A tidal wave?\"\n\n\"Yes, you know, a big wall of water that barreled in from the sea and carried a Spanish galleon over a beach and into a jungle.\" The admiral puffed out a cloud of noxious smoke and went on. \"I wasn't aware that I had authorized a treasure hunt on NUMA's time and budget.\"\n\nYaeger paused and swiveled around in his chair. \"You know?\"\n\n\"The word is knew. Right from the beginning.\"\n\n\"Do you know what you are, Admiral?\"\n\n\"A canny old bastard who can read minds,\" he said with some satisfaction.\n\n\"Did your Ouija board also tell you the tidal wave and the galleon are little more than folklore?\"\n\n\"If anyone can smell fact from fiction, it's our friend Dirk Pitt,\" Sandecker said inflexibly. \"Now what have you dug up?\"\n\nYaeger smiled wanly and answered. \"I began by dipping into various Geographic Information Systems to determine a logical site for a ship to remain hidden in a jungle over four centuries somewhere between Lima and Panama City. Thanks to global positioning satellites, we can look at details of Central and South America that were never mapped before. Maps showing tropical rain forests that grow along the coastline were studied first. I quickly dismissed Peru because its coastal regions are deserts with little or no vegetation. That still left over a thousand kilometers of forested shore along northern Ecuador and almost all of Colombia. Again, I was able to eliminate about forty percent of the coastline with geology too steep or unfavorable for a wave with enough mass and momentum to carry a five-hundred-and-seventy-ton ship any distance overland. Then I knocked off another twenty percent for open grassland areas without thick trees or other foliage that could hide the remains of a ship.\"\n\n\"That still leaves Pitt with a search area four hundred kilometers in length.\"\n\n\"Nature can drastically alter the environment in five hundred years,\" said Yaeger. \"By starting with antique maps drawn by the early Spaniards, and examining records of changes that occurred in the geology and landscape, I was able to decrease the length of the search grid another hundred and fifty kilometers.\"\n\n\"How did you compare the modern terrain with the old?\"\n\n\"With three-dimensional overlays,\" replied Yaeger. \"By either reducing or increasing the scale of the old charts to match the latest satellite maps, and then overlaying one upon the other, any variations of the coastal jungles since the galleon vanished became readily apparent. I found that much of the heavily forested coastal jungles had been cut down over the centuries for farmland.\"\n\n\"Not enough,\" Sandecker said irritably, \"not nearly enough. You'll have to whittle the grid down to no more than twenty kilometers if you want to give Pitt a fighting chance of finding the wreck.\"\n\n\"Bear with me, Admiral,\" said Yaeger patiently. \"The next step was to conduct a search through historical archives for recorded tidal waves that struck the Pacific coastline of South America in the sixteenth century. Fortunately, the occasions were well documented by the Spanish during the conquest. I found four. Two in Chile in 1562 and 1575. Peru suffered them in 1570 and again in 1578, the year Drake captured the galleon.\"\n\n\"Where did the latter strike?\" Sandecker asked.\n\n\"The only account comes from the log of a Spanish supply ship on its way to Callao. It passed over \u00e0crazy sea' that swept inland toward Bahia de Caraquez in Ecuador. Bahia, of course, means bay.\"\n\n\"'Crazy sea' is a good description of water turmoil above an earthquake on the seafloor. No doubt a seismic wave generated by a movement of the fault that parallels the west coast of the entire South American continent.\"\n\n\"The captain also noted that on the return voyage, a village that sat at the mouth of a river running into the bay had vanished.\"\n\n\"There is no question of the date?\"\n\n\"Right on the money. The tropical rain forest to the east appears to be impenetrable.\"\n\n\"Okay, we have a ballpark. The next question is, what was the wave length?\"\n\n\"A tidal wave, or tsunami, can have a length of two hundred kilometers or more,\" said Yaeger.\n\nSandecker considered this. \"How wide is the Bay of Caraquez?\"\n\nYaeger called up a map on his monitor. \"The entrance is narrow, no more than four or five kilometers.\"\n\n\"And you say the captain of the supply ship logged a missing village by a river?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, that was his description.\"\n\n\"How does the contour of the bay today differ from that period?\"\n\n\"The outer bay has changed very little,\" answered Yaeger, after bringing up a program that depicted the old Spanish charts and the satellite map in different colors as he overlaid them on the screen. \"The inner bay has moved about a kilometer toward the sea due to silt buildup from the Chone River.\"\n\nSandecker stared at the screen for a long moment, then said slowly, \"Can your electronic contraption do a simulation of the tidal wave sweeping the galleon onto shore?\"\n\nYaeger nodded. \"Yes, but there are a number of factors to consider.\"\n\n\"Such as?\"\n\n\"What was the height of the wave and how fast was it traveling.\"\n\n\"It would have to be at least thirty meters high and traveling at better than a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour to carry a five-hundred-and-seventy-ton ship so far into the jungle that she has never been found.\"\n\n\"Okay, let's see what I can do with digital imagery.\"\n\nYaeger typed a series of commands on his keyboard and sat back, staring at the monitor for several seconds, examining the image he produced on the screen. Then he used a special function control to fine-tune the graphics until he could generate a realistic and dramatic simulation of a tidal wave crossing an imaginary shoreline. \"There you have it,\" he announced. \"Virtual reality configuration.\"\n\n\"Now generate a ship,\" ordered Sandecker.\n\nYaeger was not an expert on the construction of sixteenth-century galleons, but he produced a respectable image of one rolling slowly on the waves that was equal to a projector displaying moving graphics at sixty frames per second. The galleon appeared so realistic any unsuspecting soul who walked into the room would have thought they were watching a movie.\n\n\"How does it look, Admiral?\"\n\n\"Hard to believe a machine can create something so lifelike,\" said Sandecker, visibly impressed.\n\n\"You should see the latest computer-generated movies featuring the long-gone old stars with the new.\n\nI've watched the video of Arizona Sunset at least a dozen times.\"\n\n\"Who plays the leads?\"\n\n\"Humphrey Bogart, Lionel Barrymore, Marilyn Monroe, Julia Roberts, and Tom Cruise. It's so real, you'd swear they all acted together on the set.\"\n\nSandecker laid his hand on Yaeger's shoulder. \"Let's see if you can make a reasonably accurate documentary.\"\n\nYaeger did his magic on the computer, and the two men watched, fascinated, as the monitor displayed a sea so blue and distinct it was like looking through a window at the real thing. Then slowly, the water began convulsing into a wave that rolled away from the land, stranding the galleon on the seabed, as dry as if it were a toy boat on the blanket of a boy's bed. Then the computer visualized the wave rushing back toward shore, rising higher and higher, then cresting and engulfing the ship under a rolling mass of froth, sand, and water, hurling it toward land at an incredible speed, until finally the ship stopped and settled as the wave smoothed out and died.\n\n\"Five kilometers,\" murmured Yaeger. \"She looks to be approximately five kilometers from the coast.\"\n\n\"No wonder she was lost and forgotten,\" said Sandecker. \"I suggest you contact Pitt and make arrangements to fax your computer's grid coordinates.\"\n\nYaeger gave Sandecker a queer look indeed. \"Are you authorizing the search, Admiral?\"\n\nSandecker feigned a look of surprise as he rose and walked toward the door. Just before exiting, he turned and grinned impishly. \"I can't very well authorize what could turn out to be a wild goose chase, now can I?\"\n\n\"You think that's what we're looking at, a wild goose chase?\"\n\nSandecker shrugged. \"You've done your magic. If the ship truly rests in a jungle and not on the bottom of the sea, then the burden falls on Pitt and Giordino to go in that hell on earth and find her.\"\n\nGiordino contemplated the dried red stain on the stone floor of the temple. \"No sign of Amaru in the rubble,\" he said with an utter lack of emotion.\n\n\"I wonder how far he got?\" Miles Rodgers asked no one in particular. He and Shannon had arrived from the sacred well an hour before noon on a helicopter piloted by Giordino.\n\n\"His mercenary buddies must have carried him off,\" Pitt surmised.\n\n\"Knowing a sadist like Amaru might still be alive,\" said Rodgers, \"is enough to cause nightmares.\"\n\nGiordino gave a mechanical shrug. \"Even if he survived the rocket attack, he'd have died from loss of blood.\"\n\nPitt turned and stared at Shannon, who was directing a team of archaeologists and a small army of workers. They were numbering the shattered blocks of stone from the temple in preparation for a restoration project. She seemed to have discovered something in the debris and was bending down for a closer examination. \"A man like Amaru doesn't die easily. I don't think we've heard the last of him.\"\n\n\"A grim prospect,\" said Rodgers, \"made worse by the latest news from Lima.\"\n\nPitt raised an eyebrow. \"I didn't know we received CNN this deep in the Andes.\"\n\n\"We do now. The helicopter that landed about an hour ago belonged to the Peruvian News Bureau. It brought in a team of television reporters and a mountain of equipment. The City of the Dead has become international news.\"\n\n\"So what did they have to report?\" pressed Giordino.\n\n\"The military and police have admitted their failure to capture the army renegade mercenaries who flew into the valley to slit our throats and remove the artifacts. Nor have investigators tracked down any of Amaru's grave looters.\"\n\nPitt smiled at Rodgers. \"Not exactly the sort of report that will look good on their resumes.\"\n\n\"The government tried to save face by handing out a story that the thieves dumped the artifacts over the mountains and are now hiding out in the Amazon forests of Brazil.\"\n\n\"Never happened,\" said Pitt. \"Otherwise why would U.S. Customs insist we provide them with an inventory of the artifacts? They know better. No, the loot is not scattered on a mountaintop. If I read the brains behind the Solpemachaco correctly, they're not the kind to panic and run. Their informants in the military alerted them every step of the way, from the minute an assault force was assembled and launched to capture them. They would have also learned the flight plan of the assault transports, and then plotted a safe route to avoid them. After quickly loading the artifacts, they flew to a prearranged rendezvous at an airstrip or seaport where the stolen riches were either transferred aboard a jetliner or a cargo ship. I doubt whether Peru will ever see its historical treasures again.\"\n\n\"A nice tight scenario,\" said Rodgers thoughtfully. \"But aren't you forgetting the bad guys only had one helicopter after we stole their backup?\"\n\n\"And we knocked that one into a mountain,\" added Giordino.\n\n\"I think if we knew the full truth, the gang of second-rate killers ordered in by the boss who impersonated Doc Miller was followed later by a couple of heavy-lift helicopter transports, probably the old model Boeing Chinooks that were sold around the world. They can lift almost fifty troops or twenty tons of cargo. Enough mercenaries were left on the ground to stow the artifacts. They made their getaway in plenty of time after our escape and before we alerted the Peruvian government, who took their time in mounting an aerial posse.\"\n\nRodgers stared at Pitt with renewed admiration. Only Giordino was not impressed. He knew from long years of experience that Pitt was one of that rare breed who could stand back and analyze events as they occurred, down to the finest details. It was a gift with which few men and women are born. Just as the greatest mathematicians and physicists compute incredibly intricate formulas on a level incomprehensible to people with no head for figures, so Pitt operated on a deductive level incomprehensible to all but a few of the top criminal investigators in the world. Giordino often found it maddening that while he was attempting to explain something to Pitt, the mesmeric green eyes would focus on some unseen object in the distance and he would know that Pitt was concentrating on something.\n\nWhile Rodgers was pondering Pitt's reconstruction of events, trying to find a flaw, the big man from NUMA turned his attention to Shannon.\n\nShe was on her hands and knees on the temple floor with a soft-bristled paintbrush, gently clearing away dust and tiny bits of rubble from a burial garment. The textile was woven from wool and adorned with multicolored embroidery in the design of a laughing monkey with hideous, grinning teeth and coiled snakes for arms and legs.\n\n\"What the well-dressed Chachapoyan wore?\" he asked.\n\n\"No, it's Inca.\" Shannon did not turn and look up at him but remained absorbed in her work.\n\n\"They did beautiful work,\" Pitt observed.\n\n\"The Inca and their ancestors were the finest dyers and weavers in the world. Their fabric weaving techniques are too complicated and time-consuming to be copied today. They are still unrivaled in interlocking tapestry construction. The finest tapestry weavers of Renaissance Europe used eighty-five threads per inch. The early Peruvians used up to five hundred threads per inch. Small wonder the Spanish mistakenly thought the finer Inca textiles were silk.\"\n\n\"Maybe this isn't a good time for pursuing the arts, but I thought you'd like to know that AI and I have finished sketching the artifacts we caught sight of before the roof fell in.\"\n\n\"Give them to Dr. Ortiz. He's most interested in what was stolen.\"\n\nThen lost in her project, she turned back to the excavation.\n\nAn hour later, Gunn found Pitt standing beside Ortiz, who was directing several workers in scraping vegetation from a large sculpture of what appeared to be a winged jaguar with a serpent's head. The menacing jaws were spread wide, revealing a set of frightening curved fangs. The massive body and wings were sculpted into the doorway of a huge burial house. The only entrance was the gaping mouth, which was large enough for a man to crawl into. From the feet to the tip of the raised wings, the stone beast stood over 6 meters high (20 feet).\n\n\"Not something you'd want to meet some night in a dark alley,\" said Gunn.\n\nDr. Ortiz turned and waved a greeting. \"The largest Chachapoyan sculpture yet found. I judge it dates somewhere between A.D. 1200 and I300.\"\n\n\"Does it have a name?\" asked Pitt.\n\n\"Demonio del Muertos,\" answered Ortiz. \"The demon of the dead, a Chachapoyan god who was the focus of a protective rite connected with the cult of the underworld. Part jaguar, part condor, part snake, he sank his fangs into whoever disturbed the dead and then dragged them into the black depths of the earth.\"\n\n\"He wasn't exactly pretty,\" said Gunn.\n\n\"The demon wasn't meant to be. Effigies ranged in size from one like this to those no larger than a human hand, depending on the deceased's wealth and status. I imagine we'll find them in almost every tomb and grave in the valley.\"\n\n\"Wasn't the god of the ancient Mexicans some kind of serpent?\" asked Gunn.\n\n\"Yes, Quetzalcoatl, a feathered serpent who was the most important deity of Mesoamerica, beginning with the Olmecs in 900 B. C. and ending with the Aztecs during the Spanish conquest. The Inca also had sculptures of serpents, but no direct connection has yet been made.\"\n\nOrtiz turned away as a laborer motioned for him to examine a small figurine he had excavated next to the sculpture. Gunn took Pitt by the arm and led him over to a low stone wall where they sat down.\n\n\"A courier from the U.S. Embassy flew in from Lima on the last supply copter,\" he said, removing a folder from his briefcase, \"and dropped off a packet that was faxed from Washington.\"\n\n\"From Yaeger?\" Pitt asked anxiously.\n\n\"Both Yaeger and your friend Perlmutter.\"\n\n\"Did they strike pay dirt?\"\n\n\"Read for yourself,\" said Gunn. \"Julien Perlmutter found an account by a survivor of the galleon being swept into the jungle by a tidal wave.\"\n\n\"So far so good.\"\n\n\"It gets better. The account mentions a jade box containing knotted cords. Apparently the box still rests in the rotting timbers of the galleon.\"\n\nPitt's eyes lit up like beacons. \"The Drake quipu.\"\n\n\"It appears the myth has substance,\" Gunn said with a broad smile.\n\n\"And Yaeger?\" Pitt asked as he began sifting through the papers.\n\n\"His computer analyzed the existing data and came up with grid coordinates that put the galleon within a ten-square-kilometer ballpark.\"\n\n\"Far smaller than I expected.\"\n\n\"I'd say our prospects of finding the galleon and the jade box just improved by a good fifty percent.\"\n\n\"Make that thirty percent,\" said Pitt, holding up a sheet from Perlmutter giving the known data on the construction, fittings, and cargo of the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion. \"Except for four anchors that were probably carried away during the impact of the tidal wave, the magnetic signature of any iron on board would be too faint to be detected by a magnetometer more than a stone's throw away.\"\n\n\"An EG&G Geometrics G-8136 could pick up a small iron mass from a fair distance.\"\n\n\"You're reading my thoughts. Frank Stewart has a unit on board the Deep Fathom.\"\n\n\"We'll need a helicopter to tow the sensor over the top of the rain forest,\" said Gunn.\n\n\"That's your department,\" Pitt said to him. \"Who do you know in Ecuador?\"\n\nGunn thought a moment, and then his lips creased in a grin. \"It just so happens the managing director of the Corporacion Estatal Petrolera Ecuatoriana, the state oil company, is indebted to NUMA for steering his company onto significant deposits of natural gas in the Gulf of Guayaquil.\"\n\nThen they owe us big, enough to lend us a bird.\"\n\n\"You could safely say that, yes.\"\n\n\"How much time will you need to put the bite on them?\"\n\nGunn held up his wrist and peered through his glasses at the dial of his trusty old Timex. \"Give me twenty minutes to call and make a deal. Afterward, I'll inform Stewart that we'll drop in and pick up the magnetometer. Then I'll contact Yaeger and reconfirm his data.\"\n\nPitt stared blankly at him. \"Washington isn't exactly around the corner. Are you making conference calls with smoke signals or mirrors?\"\n\nGunn reached into his pocket and held up what looked like a small, portable telephone. \"The Iridium, built by Motorola. Digital, wireless, you can call anywhere in the world with it.\"\n\n\"I'm familiar with the system,\" Pitt acknowledged. \"Works off a satellite enhancement network. Where did you steal a unit?\"\n\nGunn glanced furtively around the ruins. \"Bite your tongue. This is merely a temporary appropriation from the Peruvian television crew.\"\n\nPitt gazed fondly at his little bespectacled friend with deep admiration and wonder. It was a rare event when shy Gunn slipped out of his academic shell to perform a sneaky deed. \"You're okay, Rudi, I don't care what the celebrity gossip columns say about you.\"\n\nIn terms of artifacts and treasures, the looters had barely scratched the surface in the City of the Dead.\n\nThey had concentrated on the royal tombs near the temple, but thanks to Pitt's intrusion, they did not have time to do extensive excavation on most of the surrounding tombs. Many of them contained the remains of high officials of the Chachapoya confederation. Ortiz and his team of archaeologists also found what appeared to be untouched burial houses of eight noblemen. Ortiz was overjoyed when he discovered the royal coffins were in pristine condition and had never been opened.\n\n\"We will need ten years, maybe twenty, to conduct a full excavation of the valley,\" said Ortiz during the customary after-dinner conversation. \"No discovery in the Americas can touch this one for the sheer number of antiquities. We have to go slow. Not even the seed of a flower or one bead of a necklace can be overlooked. We must miss nothing, because we have an unparalleled opportunity to gain a new understanding of the Chachapoyan culture.\"\n\n\"You have your work cut out for you,\" said Pitt. \"I only hope none of the Chachapoya treasures are stolen during shipment to your national museum.\"\n\n\"Any loss between here and Lima is the least of my worries,\" replied Ortiz. \"Almost as many artifacts are stolen from our museums as from the original tombs.\"\n\n\"Don't you have tight security to protect your country's valuable objects?\" asked Rodgers.\n\n\"Of course, but professional art thieves are very shrewd. They often switch a genuine artifact with a skillfully done forgery. Months, sometimes years, can go by before the crime is discovered.\"\n\n\"Only three weeks ago,\" said Shannon, \"the National Heritage Museum in Guatemala reported the theft of pre-Columbian Mayan art objects with an estimated value of eight million dollars. The thieves were dressed as guards and carried off the treasures during viewing hours as if they were simply moving them from one wing to another. No one thought to question them.\"\n\n\"My favorite,\" said Ortiz without smiling, \"was the theft of forty-five twelfth-century Shang dynasty drinking vessels from a museum in Bejjing. The thieves carefully disassembled the glass cases and rearranged the remaining pieces to create the illusion that nothing was missing. Three months passed before the curator noticed the pieces were missing and realized they'd been stolen.\"\n\nGunn held up his glasses and checked for smudges. \"I had no idea art theft was such a widespread crime.\"\n\nOrtiz nodded. \"In Peru, major art and antiquity collections are stolen as often as banks are robbed.\n\nWhat is even more tragic is that the thieves are getting bolder. They have no hesitation in kidnapping a collector for ransom. The ransom is, of course, his art objects. In many cases, they simply murder a collector before looting his house.\"\n\n\"You were lucky only a fraction of the art treasures were plundered from the City of the Dead before the looters were stopped,\" said Pitt.\n\n\"Lucky indeed. But tragically the choice items have already made their way out of the country.\"\n\n\"A wonder the city wasn't discovered by the huaqueros long before now,\" said Shannon, deliberately avoiding any eye contact with Pitt.\n\n\"Pueblo de los Muertos sits in this isolated valley ninety kilometers from the nearest village,\" replied Ortiz. \"Traveling in here is a major ordeal, especially by foot. The native population had no reason to struggle seven or eight days through a jungle to search for something they thought existed only in legends from their dim past. When Hiram Bingham discovered Machu Picchu on a mountaintop the local inhabitants had never ventured there. And though it would not deter a hardened huaquero, descendants of the Chachapoya still believe that all ruins across the mountains in the great forests to the east are protected by a demon god like the one we found this afternoon. They're deathly afraid to go near them.\"\n\nShannon nodded. \"Many still swear that anyone who finds and enters the City of the Dead will be turned to stone.\"\n\n\"Ah yes,\" Giordino murmured, \"the old 'cursed be you who disturb my bones' routine.\"\n\n\"Since none of us feels any stiffening of the joints,\" said Ortiz jovially, \"I must assume the evil spirits that frequent the ruins have lost their spell.\"\n\n\"Too bad it didn't work against Amaru and his looters,\" said Pitt.\n\nRodgers moved behind Shannon and placed a possessive hand on the nape of her neck. \"I understand you're all bidding us goodbye in the morning.\"\n\nShannon looked surprised and made no attempt to remove Rodgers's hand. \"Is that true?\" she said, looking at Pitt. \"You're leaving?\"\n\nGunn answered before Pitt. \"Yes, we're flying back to our ship before heading north into Ecuador.\"\n\n\"You're not going to search in Equador for the galleon we discussed on the Deep Fathom?\" Shannon asked.\n\n\"Can you think of a better place?\"\n\n\"Why Ecuador?\" she persisted.\n\n\"Al enjoys the climate,\" Pitt said, clapping Giordino on the back.\n\nGiordino nodded. \"I hear the girls are pretty and wild with lust.\"\n\nShannon stared at Pitt with a look of interest. \"And you?\"\n\n\"Me?\" Pitt murmured innocently. \"I'm going for the fishing.\"\n\n\"You sure can pick 'em,\" said FBI Chief of Interstate Stolen Art Francis Ragsdale, as he eased into the vinyl seat of a booth in a nineteen-fifties-style chrome diner. He studied the selections on the coin-operated music unit that was wired to a Wurlitzer jukebox. \"Stan Kenton, Charlie Barnett, Stan Getz. Who ever heard of these guys?\"\n\n\"Only people who appreciate good music,\" Gaskill replied sourly to the younger man. He settled his bulk, which filled two-thirds of the seat on his side of the booth.\n\nRagsdale shrugged. \"Before my time.\" To him, at thirty-four, the great musicians of an earlier era were only vague names mentioned occasionally by his parents. \"Come here often?\"\n\nGaskill nodded. \"The food really sticks to your ribs.\"\n\n\"Hardly an epicurean recommendation.\" Clean-shaven, with black wavy hair and a reasonably well-exercised body, Ragsdale had the handsome face, pleasant gray eyes, and bland expression of a soap opera actor automatically reacting to his counterpart's dialogue. A good investigator, he took his job seriously, maintaining the image of the bureau by dressing in a dark business suit that gave him the appearance of a successful Wall Street broker. With a professional eye for detail, he examined the linoleum floor, the round stools at the counter, the period napkin holders and art deco salt and pepper shakers that were parked beside a bottle of Heinz ketchup and a jar of French's mustard. His expression reflected urbane distaste. He would unquestionably have preferred a more trendy restaurant in midtown Chicago.\n\n\"Quaint place. Hermetically sealed within the Twilight Zone.\"\n\n\"Atmosphere is half the enjoyment,\" said Gaskill resignedly.\n\n\"Why is it when I pay, we eat in a class establishment, but when it's your turn we wind up in a geriatric beanery?\"\n\n\"It's knowing I always get a good table.\"\n\n\"What about the food?\"\n\nGaskill smiled. \"Best place I know to eat good chicken.\"\n\nRagsdale gave him a look just shy of nausea and ignored the menu, mimeographed entrees between sheets of plastic. \"I'll throw caution to the winds and risk botulism with a bowl of soup and a cup of coffee.\"\n\n\"Congratulations on solving the Fairchild Museum theft in Scarsdale. I hear you recovered twenty missing Sung dynasty jade carvings.\"\n\n\"Twenty-two. I've got to admit I passed over the least obvious suspect until I drew blanks on all the probables. The seventy-two-year-old director of security. Who would have figured him? He worked at the museum for close to thirty-two years. A record as clean as a surgeon's scrubbed hands. The curator refused to believe it until the old guy broke down and confessed. He had removed the carved figurines one at a time over a period of four years, returning after closing hours, shutting down the alarm system, picking the locks on the cases and lowering the carvings into the bushes beside the building from a bathroom window. He replaced the stolen carvings in the cases with less valuable pieces stored in a basement vault. The catalogue labels were also altered. He even managed to reset the raised stands in their exact positions without leaving telltale dust-free spots on the floor of the cases. Museum officials were more than impressed with his display technique.\"\n\nThe waitress, the archetype of all those who wait on counters and tables in small-town cafes or truck stop restaurants, pencil in funny little cap, jaws furiously grinding gum, and surgical stockings hiding varicose veins, came over, pencil stub poised above a small green pad.\n\n\"Dare I ask what your soup of the day is?\" inquired Ragsdale loftily.\n\n\"Curried lentil with ham and apple.\"\n\nRagsdale did a double take. \"Did I hear you correctly?\"\n\n\"Want me to repeat it?\"\n\n\"No, no, the curried lentil soup will be fine.\"\n\nThe waitress wagged her pencil at Gaskill. \"I know what you want.\" She yelled their orders to an unseen chef in the kitchen in a voice mixed with ground glass and river gravel.\n\n\"After thirty-two years,\" asked Gaskill, continuing the conversation, \"what triggered the museum's security chief to go on a burglary binge?\"\n\n\"A passion for exotic art,\" answered Ragsdale. \"The old guy loved to touch and fondle the figurines when no one was around, but then a new curator made him take a cut in pay as an austerity measure just when he expected a raise. This made him mad and triggered his desire to possess the jade from the exhibits. It seemed from the first the theft could only have been pulled off by a first-rate team of professionals or someone from the inside. I narrowed it down to the senior security director and obtained a warrant to search his house. It was all there on his fireplace mantel, every missing piece, as if they were bowling trophies.\"'\n\n\"Working on a new case?\" asked Gaskill.\n\n\"Just had one laid in my lap.\"\n\n\"Another museum theft?\"\n\nRagsdale shook his head. \"Private collection. The owner went to Europe for nine months. When he returned home, his walls were bare. Eight watercolors by Diego Rivera, the Mexican painter and muralist.\"\n\n\"I've seen the murals he did for the Detroit Institute of Art.\"\n\n\"Insurance company adjusters are foaming at the mouth. It seems the watercolors were insured for forty million dollars.\"\n\n\"We may have to exchange notes on this one.\"\n\nRagsdale looked at him. \"You think Customs might be interested?\"\n\n\"A thin possibility we have a connecting case.\"\n\n\"Always glad to have a helping hand.\"\n\n\"I saw photos of what may be your Rivera watercolors in an old box of Stolen Art Bulletins my sister cleaned out of an old house she bought. I'll know when I compare them with your list. If there is a connection, four of your watercolors were reported missing from the University of Mexico in 1923. If they were smuggled into the United States, that makes it a Customs case.\"\n\n\"That's ancient history.\"\n\n\"Not for stolen art,\" Gaskill corrected him. \"Eight months later, six Renoirs and four Gauguins vanished from the Louvre in Paris during an exhibition.\"\n\n\"I gather you're alluding to that old master art thief, what was his name?\"\n\n\"The Specter,\" replied Gaskill.\n\n\"Our illustrious predecessors in the Justice Department never caught him, did they?\"\n\n\"Never even made an I. D.\"\n\n\"You think he had a hand in the original theft of the Riveras?\"\n\n\"Why not? The Specter was to art theft what Raffles was to diamond thefts. And just as melodramatic.\n\nHe pulled off at least ten of the greatest art heists in history. A vain guy, he always left his trademark behind.\"\n\n\"I seem to recall reading about a white glove,\" said Ragsdale.\n\n\"That was Raffles. The Specter left a small calendar at the scene of his crimes, with the date of his next theft circled.\"\n\n\"Give the man credit. He was a cocky bastard.\"\n\nA large, oval plate of what looked like chicken on a bed of rice arrived. Gaskill was also served an appetizing salad on the side. Ragsdale somberly examined the contents of his bowl and looked up at the waitress.\n\n\"I don't suppose this greasy spoon serves anything but beer in cans.\"\n\nThe grizzled waitress looked down at him and smiled like an old prostitute. \"Honey, we got beer in bottles and we got wine. What'll it be?\"\n\n\"A bottle of your best burgundy.\"\n\n\"I'll check with the wine steward.\" She winked through one heavily mascaraed eye before waddling back to the kitchen.\n\n\"I forgot to mention the friendly service.\" Gaskill smiled.\n\nRagsdale warily dipped a spoon into his soup, suspicion lining his face. He slowly sipped the contents of his spoon as if judging a wine tasting. Then he looked across the booth with widening eyes. \"Good heavens. Sherry and pearl onions, garlic cloves, rosemary, and three different kinds of mushrooms. This is delicious.\" He peered at Gaskill's plate. \"What did you order, chicken?\"\n\nGaskill tilted his plate so Ragsdale could see it. \"You're close. The house specialty. Broiled marinated quail on a bed of bulgur with currants, scallions, puree of roasted carrots, and leeks with ginger.\"\n\nRagsdale looked as if his wife had presented him with triplets. \"You conned me.\"\n\nGaskill appeared hurt. \"I thought you wanted a good place to eat.\"\n\n\"This is fantastic. But where are the crowds? They should be lined up outside.\"\n\n\"The owner and chef, who by the way used to be at the Ritz in London, closes his kitchen on Mondays.\"\n\n\"But why did he open just for us?\" Ragsdale asked in awe.\n\n\"I recovered his collection of medieval cooking utensils after they were stolen from his former house in England and smuggled into Miami.\"\n\nThe waitress returned and thrust a bottle in front of Ragsdale's face so he could read the label. \"Here you go, honey, Chateau Chantilly 1878. You got good taste, but are you man enough to pay eight thousand bucks for the bottle?\"\n\nRagsdale stared at the dusty bottle and faded label and went absolutely numb with surprise. \"No, no, a good California cabernet will be fine,\" he choked out.\n\n\"Tell you what, honey. How about a nice medium weight Bordeaux, a 1988 vintage. Say around thirty bucks.\"\n\nRagsdale nodded in dumb assent. \"I don't believe this.\"\n\n\"I think what really appeals to me about the place,\" said Gaskill, pausing to savor a bit of quail, \"is its incongruity. Who would ever expect to find gourmet food and wine like this in a diner?\"\n\n\"It's a world apart all right.\"\n\n\"To get back to our conversation,\" said Gaskill, daintily removing a bone from the quail with his massive hands. \"I almost laid my hands on another of the Specter's acquisitions.\"\n\n\"Yes, I heard about your blown stakeout,\" Ragsdale muttered, having a difficult time bringing his mind back on track. \"A Peruvian mummy covered in gold, wasn't it?\"\n\n\"The Golden Body Suit of Tiapollo.\"\n\n\"Where did you go wrong?\"\n\n\"Bad timing more than anything. While we were keeping an eye on the owner's penthouse, a gang of thieves acting as furniture movers snatched the mummy from an apartment on a lower floor where it was hidden along with a huge cache of other art and artifacts, all with shady histories.\"\n\n\"This soup is outstanding,\" Ragsdale said, trying to get the waitress's attention. \"I'd better take another look at the menu and order an entree. Have you made up a catalogue yet?\"\n\n\"End of the week. I suspect there may be between thirty and forty items on your FBI wish list of stolen art in my suspect's underground collection.\"\n\nThe waitress wandered over with the wine and Ragsdale ordered seared salmon with sweet corn, shiitake mushrooms, and spinach. \"Good choice, honey,\" she drawled as she opened the bottle.\n\nRagsdale shook his head in wonderment before turning his attention back to Gaskill. \"What's the name of the collector who squirreled away the hot art?\"\n\n\"His name is Adolphus Rummel, a wealthy scrap dealer out of Chicago. His name ring a bell?\"\n\n\"No, but then I've never met a big-time underground buyer and collector who held open house. Any chance Rummel will talk?\"\n\n\"No way,\" said Gaskill regretfully. \"He's already hired Jacob Morganthaler and is suing to get his confiscated art objects back.\"\n\n\"Jury-rig Jake,\" Ragsdale said disgustedly. \"Friend and champion of indicted black market art dealers and collectors.\"\n\n\"With his acquittal record, we should consider ourselves lucky he doesn't defend murderers and drug dealers.\"\n\n\"Any leads on who stole the golden body suit?\"\n\n\"None. A clean job. If I didn't know better, I'd say the Specter did it.\"\n\nNot unless he came back from the dead. He'd have to be well over ninety years old.\"\n\nGaskill held up his glass, and Ragsdale poured the wine. \"Suppose he had a son, or established a dynasty who carried on the family tradition?\"\n\n\"That's a thought. Except that no calendars with circled dates have been left at art robberies for over fifty years.\"\n\n\"They could have branched out into smuggling and forgeries and dropped the cornball theatrics.\n\nToday's professionals know that modern investigative technology could easily comb enough evidence out of those hokey calendars to put a collar on them.\"\n\n\"Maybe.\" Ragsdale paused as the waitress brought his salmon. He sniffed the aroma and gazed in delight at the presentation. \"I hope it tastes as good as it looks.\"\n\n\"Guaranteed, honey,\" the old waitress cackled, \"or your money back.\"\n\nRagsdale drained his wine and poured another glass. \"I can hear your mind clicking from here. Where are you headed?\"\n\n\"Whoever committed the robbery didn't do it to gain a higher price from another black market collector,\" Gaskill replied. \"I did some research on the golden body suit encasing the mummy.\n\nReportedly, it was covered with engraved hieroglyphs, illustrating a long voyage by a fleet of Inca ships carrying a vast treasure, including a huge golden chain. I believe the thieves took it so they can trace a path to the mother lode.\"\n\n\"Does the suit tell what happened to the treasure?\"\n\n\"Legend says it was buried on an island of an inland sea. How's your salmon?\"\n\n\"The best I've ever eaten,\" said Ragsdale happily. \"And believe you me, that's a compliment. So where do you go from here?\"\n\n\"The engravings on the suit have to be translated. The Inca did not have a method of writing or illustrating events like the Mayans, but photographs of the suit taken before its earlier theft from Spain show definite indications of a pictorial graphic system. The thieves will need the services of an expert to decode these glyphs. Interpretation of ancient pictographs is not exactly an overcrowded field.\"\n\n\"So you're going to chase down whoever gets the job?\"\n\n\"Hardly a major effort. There are only five leading specialists. Two of them are a husband and wife team by the name of Moore. They're considered the best in the field.\"\n\n\"You've done your homework.\"\n\nGaskill shrugged. \"The greed of the thieves is the only lead I've got.\"\n\n\"If you require the services of the bureau,\" Ragsdale said, \"you have only to call me.\"\n\n\"I appreciate that, Francis, thank you.\"\n\n\"There's one other thing.\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"Can you introduce me to the chef? I'd like an inside track on a table for Saturday night.\"\n\nAfter a short layover at the Lima airport to pick up the EG&G magnetometer that was flown in from the Deep Fathom by a U.S. Embassy helicopter, Pitt, Giordino, and Gunn boarded a commercial flight to Quito, the capital of Ecuador. It was after two o'clock in the morning when they landed in the middle of a thunderstorm. As soon as they stepped through the gate they were met by a representative of the state oil company, who was acting on behalf of the managing director Gunn had negotiated with for a helicopter.\n\nHe quickly herded them into a limousine that drove to the opposite side of the field, followed by a small van carrying their luggage and electronic equipment. The two-vehicle convoy stopped in front of a fully serviced McDonnell Douglas Explorer helicopter. As they exited the limo, Rudi Gunn turned to express his appreciation, but the oil company official had rolled up the window and ordered the driver to move on.\n\n\"Makes one want to lead a clean life,\" Giordino muttered at the efficiency of it all.\n\n\"They owed us bigger than I thought,\" said Pitt, ignoring the downpour and staring blissfully at the big, red, twin-engined helicopter with no tail rotor.\n\n\"Is it a good aircraft?\" asked Gunn naively.\n\n\"Only the finest rotorcraft in the sky today,\" replied Pitt. \"Stable, reliable, and smooth as oil on water.\n\nCosts about two point seven-five million. We couldn't have asked for a better machine to conduct a search and survey project from the air.\"\n\n\"How far to the Bay of Caraquez?\"\n\n\"About two hundred and ten kilometers. We can make it in less than an hour with this machine.\"\n\n\"I hope you don't plan to fly over strange terrain in the dark during a tropical storm,\" Gunn said uneasily, holding a newspaper over his head as a shield against the rain.\n\nPitt shook his head. \"No, we'll wait for first light.\"\n\nGiordino nodded toward the helicopter. \"If I know only one thing, it's not to take a shower with my clothes on. I recommend we throw our baggage and electronic gear on board and get a few hours sleep before dawn.\"\n\n\"That's the best idea I've heard all day,\" Pitt agreed heartily.\n\nOnce their equipment was stowed, Giordino and Gunn reclined the backrests of two passenger seats and fell asleep within minutes. Pitt sat in the pilot's seat under a small lamp and studied the data accumulated by Perlmutter and Yaeger. He was too excited to be tired, certainly not on the eve of a shipwreck search. Most men turn from Jekyll to Hyde whenever the thought of a treasure hunt floods their brain. But Pitt's stimulant was not greed but the challenge of entering the unknown to pursue a trail laid down by adventurous men like him, who lived and died in another era, men who left a mystery for later generations to unravel.\n\nWhat kind of men walked the decks of sixteenth-century ships, he wondered. Besides the lure of adventure and the remote prospect of riches, what possessed them to sail on voyages sometimes lasting three or more years on ships not much larger than a modest suburban, two-story house? Out of sight of land for months at a time, their teeth falling out from the ravages of scurvy, the crews were decimated by malnutrition and disease. Many were the voyages completed by only ship's officers, who had survived on more abundant rations than the common seamen. Of the eighty-eight men on board the Golden Hind when Drake battled through the Strait of Magellan into the Pacific, only fifty-six were left when he entered Plymouth Harbor.\n\nPitt turned his attention to the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion. Perlmutter had included illustrations and cutaway plans of atypical Spanish treasure galleon that sailed the seas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Pitt's primary interest was in the amount of iron that was on board for the magnetometer to detect. Perlmutter was certain the two cannon she reportedly carried were bronze and would not register on an instrument that measures the intensity of the magnetic field produced by an iron mass.\n\nThe galleon carried four anchors. Their shanks, arms, and flukes were cast from iron, but their stocks were wood and they were secured to hemp lines, not chains. If she had been riding on two anchors, the force of the wave, suddenly striking the ship and hurling it ashore, would have probably snapped the lines. That left a small chance her two spare anchors might have survived intact and still be somewhere in the wreckage.\n\nHe totaled up the rest of the iron that might have been on board. The fittings, ship's hardware, the big gudgeons and pintles that held the rudder and allowed it to turn. The trusses (iron brackets that helped support the yards or spars), any shackles or grappling irons. The cook's kettle, carpenter's tools, maybe a keg of nails, small firearms, swords, and pikes. Shot for the cannon.\n\nIt was an exercise in the dark. Pitt was hardly an authority on sixteenth-century sailing ships. He could only rely on Perlmutter's best guess as to the total iron mass on board the Concepcion. The best estimate ran between one and three tons. Enough, Pitt fervently hoped, for the magnetometer to detect the galleon's anomaly from 50 to 75 meters in the air.\n\nAnything less, and they'd stand about as much chance of locating the galleon as they would of finding a floating bottle with a message in the middle of the South Pacific.\n\nIt was about five in the morning, with a light blue sky turning orange over the mountains to the east, as Pitt swung the McDonnell Douglas Explorer helicopter over the waters of the Bay of Caraquez. Fishing boats were leaving the bay and heading out to sea for the day's catch. The crewmen paused as they readied their nets, looked up at the lowflying aircraft and waved. Pitt waved back as the shadow of the Explorer flickered over the little fishing fleet and darted toward the coastline. The dark, radiant blue of deep water soon altered to a turquoise green streaked by long lines of breaking surf that materialized as the seafloor rose to meet the sandy beach.\n\nThe long arms of the bay circled and stopped short of each other at the entrance to the Chone River.\n\nGiordino, who was sitting in the copilot's seat, pointed down to the right at a small town with tiny streets and colorfully painted boats drawn up on the beach. The town was surrounded by numerous farms no larger than three or four acres, with little whitewashed adobe houses next to corrals holding goats and a few cows. Pitt followed the river upstream for two kilometers where it foamed white with rapids. Then suddenly the dense rain forest rose like an impenetrable wall and stretched eastward as far as they could see. Except for the river, no opening beneath the trees could be seen.\n\n\"We're approaching the lower half of our grid,\" Pitt said over his shoulder to Gunn, who was hunched over the proton magnetometer.\n\n\"Circle around for a couple of minutes while I set up the system,\" Gunn replied. \"Al, can you drop the tow bird for me?\"\n\n\"As you wish.\" Giordino nodded, moving from his seat to the rear of the cabin.\n\nPitt said, \"I'll head toward the starting point for our first run and hang around until you're ready.\"\n\nGiordino lifted the sensor. It was shaped like an air-to-air missile. He lowered it through a floor hatch of the helicopter. Then he unreeled the sensor on its umbilical cable. \"Tow bird out about thirty meters,\" he announced.\n\n\"I'm picking up interference from the helicopter,\" said Gunn. \"Give me another twenty meters.\"\n\nGiordino complied. \"How's that?\"\n\n\"Good. Now hold on while I set the digital and analog recorders.\"\n\n\"What about the camera and data acquisition systems?\"\n\n\"Them too.\"\n\n\"No need to hurry,\" said Pitt. \"I'm still programming my grid lane data into the satellite navigation computer.\"\n\n\"First time with a Geometrics G-8136?\" Giordino asked Gunn.\n\nGunn nodded. \"I've used the model G-801 for marine and ocean survey, but this is my introduction to the aerial unit.\"\n\n\"Dirk and I used a G-8136 to locate a Chinese airliner that crashed off Japan last year. Worked like a woman of virtue-sensitive, reliable, never drifted, and required no calibration adjustments. Obviously, my ideal for a mate.\"\n\nGunn looked at him strangely. \"You have odd taste when it comes to women.\"\n\n\"He has this thing for robots,\" Pitt joked.\n\n\"Say no more,\" Giordino said pretentiously. \"Say no more.\"\n\n\"I'm told this model is good for accurate data on small anomalies,\" said Gunn, suddenly serious. \"If she won't lead us to the Concepcion, nothing will.\"\n\nGiordino returned to the copilot's seat, settled in and stared down at the unbroken carpet of green no more than 200 meters (656 feet) below. There wasn't a piece of ground showing anywhere. \"I don't think I'd like to spend my holidays here.\"\n\n\"Not many people do,\" said Pitt. \"According to Julien Perlmutter, a check of local historical archives came up with the rumor that the local farmers shun the area. Julien said Cuttill's journal mentioned that mummies of long dead Inca were torn from graveyards by the tidal wave before being swept into the jungle. The natives are highly superstitious, and they believe the spirits of their ancestors still drift through the jungle in search of their original graves.\"\n\n\"You can run your first lane,\" declared Gunn. \"All systems are up and tuned.\"\n\n\"How far from the coast are we going to start mowing the lawn?\" Giordino asked, referring to the seventy-five meter wide grid lanes they planned to cover.\n\n\"We'll begin at the three-kilometer mark and run parallel to the shore,\" answered Pitt, \"running lanes north and south as we work inland.\"\n\n\"Length of lanes?\" inquired Gunn, peering at the stylus marking the graph paper and the numbers blinking on his digital readout window.\n\n\"Two kilometers at a speed of twenty knots.\"\n\n\"We can run much faster,\" said Gunn. \"The mag system has a very fast cycle rate. It can easily read an anomaly at a hundred knots.\"\n\n\"We'll take it nice and slow,\" Pitt said firmly. \"If we don't fly directly over the target, any magnetic field we hope to find won't make much of an impression on your gamma readings.\"\n\n\"And if we don't pick up an anomaly, we increase the perimeters of the grid.\"\n\n\"Right. We'll conduct a textbook search. We've done it more times than I care to count.\" Then Pitt glanced over at Giordino. \"Al, you mind our altitude while I concentrate on our lane coordinates.\"\n\nGiordino nodded. \"I'll keep the tow bird as low as I can without losing it in the branches of a tree.\"\n\nThe sun was up now and the sky was clear of all but a few small, wispy clouds. Pitt took a final look at the instruments and then nodded. \"Okay, guys, let's find ourselves a shipwreck.\"\n\nBack and forth over the thick jungle they flew, the air-conditioning system keeping the hot, humid atmosphere outside the aircraft's aluminum skin. The day wore on and by noon they had achieved nothing. The magnetometer failed to register so much as a tick. To someone who had never searched for an unseen object, it might have seemed discouraging, but Pitt, Giordino, and Gunn took it in stride. They had all known shipwreck or lost aircraft hunts that had lasted as long as six weeks without the slightest sign of success.\n\nPitt was also a stickler for the game plan. He knew from experience that impatience and deviation from the computed search lanes usually spelled disaster for a project. Rather than begin in the middle of the grid and work out, he preferred to start at the outer edge and work in. Too often a target was discovered where it was not supposed to be. He also found it expedient to eliminate the open, dry areas so no time was wasted rerunning the search lanes.\n\n\"How much have we covered?\" asked Gunn for the first time since the search began.\n\n\"Two kilometers into the grid,\" Pitt answered. \"We're only now coming into Yaeger's prime target area.\"\n\n\"Then we're about to run parallel lines five kilometers from the 1578 shoreline.\"\n\n\"Yes, the distance the wave carried the galleon, as indicated by Yaeger's computer program.\"\n\n\"Three hours of fuel left,\" said Giordino, tapping the two fuel gauges. He showed no sign of fatigue or boredom, if anything he seemed to be enjoying himself.\n\nPitt pulled a board with a chart clipped to it from a side pocket of his seat and studied it no more than five seconds. \"The port city of Manta is only fifty-five klicks away. They have a good-sized airport where we can refuel.\"\n\n\"Speaking of refueling,\" said Gunn, \"I'm starved.\" Since he was the only one with free hands, he passed around sandwiches and coffee, thoughtfully provided by the oil company's helicopter service crew.\n\n\"Weird tasting cheese,\" muttered Giordino, examining the inside of his sandwich with a cynical eye.\n\nGunn grinned. \"Beggars can't be choosers.\"\n\nTwo hours and fifteen minutes later they had traveled the twenty-eight lanes it took to cover kilometers five and six. They definitely had a problem now as they were beyond Yaeger's estimated target site.\n\nNone of them believed a tidal wave could carry a 570-ton ship more than 5 kilometers (3 miles) over land from the sea. Certainly not a wave with a crest less than 30 meters (98 feet) high. Their confidence ebbed as they worked farther out of the prime search area.\n\n\"Beginning the first lane of the seven-kilometer mark,\" announced Pitt.\n\n\"Too far, way too far,\" Giordino muttered.\n\n\"I agree,\" said Gunn. \"We either missed her, or she lies off the north and south perimeters of our grid.\n\nNo sense in wasting time in this area.\"\n\n\"We'll finish kilometer seven,\" Pitt said, his eyes locked on the navigational instrument displaying his coordinates.\n\nGunn and Giordino knew better than to debate the matter. They were well aware that when Pitt's mind was set there was no moving him. He stubbornly felt the possibility of finding the old Spanish ship was promising despite the density of the jungle growth and the passage of four centuries. Giordino vigilantly kept the helicopter just high enough for the sensor to skim the tops of the trees while Gunn stared at the recording paper and digital readings. They were beginning to feel they had not been dealt a lucky hand and steeled themselves for a long and arduous search.\n\nFortunately, the weather held in their favor. The sky remained clear with an occasional cloud drifting far above them, and the wind stayed steady from the west at only five knots. The monotony was as unchanging as the weather. The forest below unfurled as though it were a continuous sea of algae. No human lived down there. Sunless days without end. The constant damp, warm climate caused the flowers to bloom, the leaves to fall, and the fruits to grow and ripen all through the year. Rare was the spot where sun reached through the branches of the trees and plants to touch the ground.\n\n\"Mark it!\" Gunn burst abruptly.\n\nPitt responded by copying the navigation coordinates. \"Do you have a target?\"\n\n\"I recorded a slight bump on my instruments. Nothing big, but definitely an anomaly.\"\n\n\"Shall we turn back?\" asked Giordino.\n\nPitt shook his head. \"Let's finish the lane and see if we pick up a stronger reading on the next heading.\"\n\nNo one spoke as they completed the lane, made a complete 180-degree turn and headed back on a reverse course 75 meters (246 feet) farther to the east. Pitt and Giordino could not resist stealing a glance downward at the rain forest, hoping to spot a sign of the wreck, but knowing it was next to impossible to see through the thick foliage. It was a wilderness truly terrible in its monotonous beauty.\n\n\"Coming opposite the mark,\" Pitt alerted them. \"Now passing.\"\n\nThe sensor, trailing on an arc behind the helicopter lagged slightly before crossing the site of Gunn's anomaly reading. \"Here she comes!\" he said excitedly. \"Looking good. The numbers are climbing. Come on, sweetheart, give with the big gamma readings.\"\n\nPitt and Giordino leaned out their windows and stared down, but saw only a dense canopy of tall trees rising in tiered galleries. It required no imagination to see the rain forest was a forbidding and dangerous place. It looked quiet and deadly. They could only guess at what perils lurked in the menacing shadows.\n\n\"We have a hard target,\" said Gunn. \"Not a solid mass, but scattered readings, the kind of display I would expect from bits and pieces of iron dispersed around a wrecked ship.\"\n\nPitt wore a big smile as he reached over and lightly punched Giordino on the shoulder. \"Never a doubt.\"\n\nGiordino grinned back. \"That was one hell of a wave to have carried the ship seven kilometers inland.\"\n\n\"She must have crested close to fifty meters,\" Pitt calculated.\n\n\"Can you bring us around on an east/west course so we can bisect the anomaly?\" asked Gunn.\n\n\"At your command.\" Pitt banked the Explorer around to the west in a tight turn that lightened Gunn's stomach. After flying half a kilometer, he sideslipped and set his coordinates to pass over the target from the new direction. This time the readings showed a slight increase and held for a longer duration.\n\n\"I think we passed over her from bow to stern,\" said. Gunn. \"This must be the place.\"\n\n\"This must be the place,\" Giordino repeated happily.\n\nPitt hovered as Gunn gave bearing commands while they probed for the highest readings from the magnetometer, which would show the Explorer was directly over the wreck site. \"Bring her twenty meters to starboard. Now thirty meters astern. Too far. Ten meters ahead. Hold it. That's it. We can drop a rock on her.\"\n\nGiordino pulled the ring on a small canister and casually tossed it out his side window. It fell through the leaves and disappeared. A few seconds later a cloud of orange smoke began to rise above the trees.\n\n\"X marks the spot,\" he said happily. \"I can't say I look forward to the hike.\"\n\nPitt looked at him. \"Who said anything about walking seven kilometers through that botanical nightmare?\"\n\nGiordino gave him a quizzical stare in return. \"How else do you expect to reach the wreck?\"\n\n\"This marvel of aircraft technology has a winch. You can lower me through the trees.\"\n\nGiordino peered at the thick mantle of the rain forest. \"You'd get hung up in the trees. We'd never be able to hoist you out again.\"\n\n\"Not to worry. I checked the tool locker beneath the floor before we left Quito. Someone thoughtfully provided a machete. I can hang from a harness and hack my way down and up again.\"\n\n\"Won't work,\" said Giordino with a trace of concern in his voice. \"We don't have enough fuel to hang around while you play Jungle Jim and still reach the airport in Manta.\"\n\n\"I don't expect you to wait at the curb. Once I'm on the ground, you head for Manta. After you refuel, you come back and pick me up.\"\n\n\"You might have to wander around before you find the wreck. No way you can be spotted from the air. How will we know exactly where to lower the harness?\"\n\n\"I'll take a couple of smoke canisters with me and set them off when I hear you return.\"\n\nThe expression in Giordino's eyes was anything but cheerful. \"I don't suppose I can talk you out of this craziness.\"\n\n\"No, I don't suppose you can.\"\n\nTen minutes later Pitt was secure in a safety harness connected to a cable leading to a winch mounted on the roof of the helicopter's cabin. While Giordino hovered the craft just above the top of the trees, Gunn operated the controls to the winch.\n\n\"Don't forget to bring back a bottle of champagne so we can celebrate,\" Pitt shouted as he stepped through the open door of the ship and hung suspended.\n\n\"We should be back in two hours,\" Gunn yelled back over the sound of the rotors and the engine exhaust. He pushed the descent button and Pitt dropped below the skids of the helicopter and soon disappeared into the dense vegetation as if he had jumped into a green ocean.\n\nAs he hung supported by his safety harness, machete gripped in his right hand, a portable radio in his left, Pitt felt almost as if he were once again dropping into the green slime of the sacrificial well. He could not tell for certain how high he was above the ground, but he estimated the distance from the roof of the forest to its floor to be at least 50 meters (164 feet).\n\nSeen from the air, the rain forest looked like a chaotic mass of struggling plant growth. The trunks of the taller trees were crowded with dense layers of shorter growth, each seeking its share of sunlight. The twigs and leaves nearest the sun danced under the downdraft provided by the helicopter's rotor, giving them the appearance of a restless, undulating ocean.\n\nPitt held an arm over his eyes as he slowly descended through the first tier of the green canopy, narrowly brushing past the limbs of a high mahogany tree that was sprouting clusters of small white flowers. He used his feet to spring without difficulty out of the way of the thicker branches. A draft of rising steam, caused by the sun's heat, wafted up from the still unseen ground. After the air-conditioned cabin of the helicopter, it didn't take long for sweat to flow from every pore. As he frantically pushed aside a branch that was rising between his legs, he frightened a pair of spider monkeys that leapt chattering around to the other side of the tree.\n\n\"You say something?\" asked Gunn over the radio.\n\n\"I flushed a pair of monkeys during their siesta,\" Pitt replied.\n\n\"Do you want me to slow you down?\"\n\n\"No, this is fine. I've passed through the first layer of trees. Now it looks like I'm coming down through what I'd guess is laurel.\"\n\n\"Yell if you want me to move you around,\" said Giordino over the cockpit radio.\n\n\"Maintain your position,\" Pitt directed. \"Shifting around might snag the descent cable and leave me hanging up here till I'm an old man.\"\n\nPitt entered a thicker maze of branches and quickly managed to cut a tunnel with his machete without having to order Gunn to reduce his rate of descent. He was invading a world seldom seen, a world filled with beauty and danger. Immense climbing plants, desperate for light, crawled straight up the taller trees, some clutching their hosts with tendrils and hooks while others twined upward toward the light like corkscrews. Moss draped the trees in great sheets, reminding him of cobwebs in a crypt from a horror movie. But there was beauty too. Vast garlands of orchids circled their way toward the sky as if they were strings of lights on a Christmas tree.\n\n\"Can you see the ground?\" asked Gunn.\n\n\"Not yet. I still have to move through a small tree that looks like some sort of palm with wild peaches growing on it. After that, I have to dodge a snarl of hanging vines.\"\n\n\"I believe they're called lianas.\"\n\n\"Botany wasn't one of my better subjects.\"\n\n\"You could grab one and play Tarzan,\" said Gunn, injecting some humor into a potentially dangerous situation.\n\n\"Only if I saw Jane--\"\n\nGunn tensed at Pitt's sudden pause. \"What is it? Are you okay?\"\n\nWhen Pitt answered, his voice was barely louder than a whisper. \"I almost grabbed what I took to be a thick vine. But it was a snake the size of a drainpipe with a mouth like an alligator.\"\n\n\"What color?\"\n\n\"Black with yellowish brown spots.\"\n\n\"A boa constrictor,\" explained Gunn. \"He might give you a big hug, but he's not poisonous. Pet him on the head for me.\"\n\n\"Like hell,\" Pitt snorted. \"If he so much as looks cross-eyed at me, he meets Madame LaFarge.\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"My machete.\"\n\n\"What else do you see?\"\n\n\"Several magnificent butterflies, a number of insects that look like they belong on an alien planet, and a parrot too shy to ask for a cracker. You wouldn't believe the size of the flowers growing out of nooks in the trees. There are violets the size of my head.\"\n\nConversation dropped off as Pitt chopped his way through a low tree with dense branches. He was sweating like a prizefighter in the last round of a championship match, and his clothes were soaked through from the heavy moisture clinging to the leaves of the trees. As he raised the machete, his arm brushed a vine armored with thorns that shredded his shirt sleeve and sliced his forearm as neatly as claws on a cat. Luckily, the cuts were not deep or painful, and he disregarded them.\n\n\"Stop the winch,\" he said as he felt firm ground beneath his feet. \"I'm down.\"\n\n\"Any sign of the galleon?\" Gunn asked anxiously.\n\nPitt did not immediately answer. He tucked the machete under his arm and turned a complete circle, unclipping the safety harness as he surveyed his surroundings. It was like being at the bottom of a leafy ocean. There was scarcely any light, and what little was available had the same eerie quality a diver would experience at 60 meters (196 feet) beneath the surface of the sea. The dense vegetation blotted out most of the color spectrum from the little sunlight that reached him, leaving only green and blue mixed with gray.\n\nHe was pleasantly surprised to find the rain forest was not impassable at ground level. Except for a soft carpet of decomposing leaves and twigs, the floor beneath the canopy of trees was comparatively free of growth, with none of the heaps of moldering vegetation he had expected. Now that he was standing in the sunless depths he could easily understand why plant life that grew close to the ground was scarce.\n\n\"I see nothing that resembles the hull of a ship,\" he said. \"No ribs, no beams, no keel.\"\n\n\"A bust,\" said Gunn, the disillusionment coming through in his voice. \"The mag must have read a natural iron deposit.\"\n\n\"No,\" Pitt replied, striving to keep his voice calm, \"I can't say that.\"\n\n\"What are you telling us?\"\n\n\"Only that the fungi, insects, and bacteria that call this place home have made a meal out of every organic component of the ship. Not too surprising when you figure that they had four hundred years to devour it down to the keel.\"\n\nGunn went silent, not quite comprehending. Then it struck him like a lightning bolt.\n\n\"Oh, my God!\" he yelped. \"We found it. You're actually standing on the wreck of the galleon.\"\n\n\"Dead center.\"\n\n\"You say all sign of the hull is gone?\" Giordino cut in.\n\n\"All that remains is covered by moss and humus, but I think I can make out some ceramic pots, a few scattered cannon shot, one anchor, and a small pile of ballast stones. The site reads like an old campsite with trees growing through the middle of it.\"\n\n\"Shall we hang around?\" asked Giordino.\n\n\"No, get your tails to Manta and refuel. I'll poke around for the jade box until you get back.\"\n\n\"Can we drop you anything?\"\n\n\"I shouldn't need anything but the machete.\"\n\n\"You still have the smoke canisters?\" Giordino asked.\n\n\"Two of them clipped to my belt.\"\n\n\"Set one off soon as you hear us return.\"\n\n\"Never fear,\" Pitt said blithely. \"I'm not about to try walking out of here.\"\n\n\"See you in two hours,\" said Gunn, his spirits brimming.\n\n\"Try to be on time.\"\n\nIn a different circumstance, at a different time, Pitt might have experienced a fit of depression as the sound of the McDonnell Douglas Explorer died away, leaving behind the heavy atmosphere of the rain forest. But he was energized at knowing that somewhere within a short distance of where he was standing, buried in the ancient pile of debris, was the key to a vast treasure. He did not throw himself into a frenzy of wild digging. Instead, he slowly walked through the scattered remains of the Concepcion and studied her final position and configuration He could almost trace the original outline by the shape of the broken mounds of debris.\n\nThe shaft and one fluke of an anchor that protruded from the humus beneath the more recently fallen leaves indicated the location of the bow. He did not think that sailing master Thomas Cuttill would store the jade box in the cargo hold. The fact that Drake intended it as a gift to the queen suggested that he kept it near him, probably in the great cabin in the stern occupied by the captain of the ship.\n\nAs Pitt walked through the debris field, clearing away small areas with the machete, he found relics of the crew but no bones. Most of them had been swept off the ship by the tidal wave. He spied pairs of moldy leather shoes, hardened bone handles on knives whose blades had rusted away, ceramic eating bowls, and a still blackened iron cooking pot. Dread grew inside him as he realized the meagerness of the debris. He began to fear the wreck might have already been found and looted. He removed a plastic packet from inside his shirt, opened one end and pulled out the illustrations and cutaway plans of a standard treasure galleon Perlmutter had faxed. Using the plans as a guide, he carefully measured off his steps until he estimated he was in the area of the hold where the valuable cargo would have been stored.\n\nPitt went to work clearing what he thought was a heavy layer of compost. It proved to be only 10 centimeters (4 inches) thick. He had only to brush away the decomposing leaves with his hands to reveal several beautifully carved stone heads and full figures of various sizes. He guessed they were religious animal gods. A sigh of relief escaped his lips at discovering that the wreck of the galleon was untouched.\n\nScraping away a length of rotting vine that had fallen from the trees far above, he discovered twelve more carvings, three that were life-size. In the ghostly light their green coating of mold made them look like corpses arising from the grave. A clutter of clay pots and effigies had not fared as well after the damp of four centuries. Those that were relatively intact crumbled when touched. Of the textiles that had been part of the original treasure trove, all had rotted into a few swatches of black mold.\n\nPitt eagerly dug deeper, ignoring torn fingernails and the slime that smeared his hands. He found a cache of jade, elegantly ornate and painstakingly carved. There were so many pieces he soon lost count.\n\nThey were mingled with mosaics made of mother-of-pearl and turquoise. Pitt paused and wiped the sweat from his face with his forearm. This bonanza was bound to open a can of worms, he reflected. He could already envision the legal battles and diplomatic machinations that would occur between Ecuadorian archaeologists and government officials, who would claim the artifacts belonged to them by right of possession, and their counterparts in Peru, who would claim the trove as their original property.\n\nWhatever the legal entanglements, the one certainty was that none of the masterworks of Inca art would end up on a shelf in Pitt's home.\n\nHe glanced at his watch. Over an hour had passed since he dropped through the trees. He left the mass of jumbled antiquities and continued moving toward what had once been the captain's cabin on the stern of the galleon. He was swinging the blade of the machete back and forth to sweep the dead vegetation away from a debris mound when the blade suddenly clanged on a solid metal object. Kicking the leaves to the side he found that he had stumbled on one of the ship's two cannons. The bronze barrel had long since been coated by a thick green patina and the muzzle was filled with compost accumulated through the centuries.\n\nPitt could no longer tell where his perspiration left of and the humid moisture from the forest began. It was like working in a steam bath, with the added annoyance of tiny gnatlike insects that swarmed around his unprotected head and face. Fallen vines wrapped around his ankles, and twice he slipped on the wet plant growth and fell. A layer of clay soil and decayed leaves adhered to his body, giving him the look of some swamp creature from a haunted bog. The steamy atmosphere was slowly sapping his strength, and he fought back an overwhelming urge to lie down on a soft pile of leaves and take a nap, an urge that abruptly vanished at the repulsive sight of a bushmaster slithering across a nearby heap of ballast stones.\n\nThe largest poisonous snake in the Americas, 3 meters (10 feet) long, pink and tan with dark diamond shaped blotches, the notorious pit viper was extremely lethal. Pitt gave it a wide berth and kept a wary eye for its relatives.\n\nHe knew he was in the right area when he uncovered the big pintles and gudgeons, now badly rusted, that once held and pivoted the rudder. His foot accidentally kicked something buried in the ground, an unidentifiable circular band of ornate iron. When he bent down for a closer inspection he saw shards of glass. He checked Perlmutter's illustrations and recognized the object as the stern running light. The rudder fittings and the lamp told him that he was standing over what had been the captain's cabin. Now his search for the jade box began in earnest.\n\nIn forty minutes of searching on his hands and knees, he found an inkwell, two goblets, and the remains of several oil lamps. Without stopping to rest, he carefully brushed away a small heap of leaves and found himself looking into a green eye that stared back through the dank humus. He wiped his wet hands on his pants, took a bandanna from his pocket, and lightly cleaned the features around the eye. A human face became visible, one that had been artistically carved with great care from a solid piece of jade. Pitt held his breath.\n\nKeeping his enthusiasm in check, he painstakingly dug four small trenches around the unblinking face, deep enough to see that it was the lid to a box about the size of a twelve-volt car battery. When the box was totally uncovered, he lifted it from the moist soil where it had rested since 1578 and set it between his legs.\n\nPitt sat in wondrous awe for the better part of ten minutes, afraid to pry off the lid and find nothing but damp rot inside. With great trepidation he took a small Swiss army knife from one pocket, swung out the thinnest blade and began to jimmy the lid. The box was so tightly sealed he had to constantly shift the knife blade around the box, prying each side a fraction of a millimeter before moving on to the next.\n\nTwice he paused to wipe away the sweat that trickled into his eyes. Finally, the lid popped free. Then, irreverently, he clenched the face by the nose, lifted the lid and peeked inside.\n\nThe interior of the box was lined with cedar and contained what looked to him to be a folded mass of multicolored knotted string. Several of the strands had faded but they were intact and their colors could still be distinguished. Pitt couldn't believe the remarkable state of preservation, until he closely studied the antiquity and realized it was made, not from cotton or wool, but twisted coils of tinted metal.\n\n\"That's it!\" he shouted, startling a tree full of macaws, who winged into the depths of the rain forest amid a chorus of shrieking chatter. \"The Drake quipu.\"\n\nClutching the box with the tenacity of an Ebenezer Scrooge refusing to donate to a Christmas charity, Pitt found a reasonably dry fallen tree to sit on. He stared into the jade face and wondered if the quipu's secret could somehow be unriddled. According to Dr. Ortiz, the last person who might have read the knotted strands had died four hundred years ago. He fervently hoped that Yaeger's state-of-the-art computer could cut through time and solve the mystery.\n\nHe was still sitting there amid the ghosts of the English and Spanish seamen, oblivious to a swarm of biting insects, the stabbing pain from his gashed arm, and the clammy dampness, when the returning helicopter came within earshot from somewhere in the shrouded sky.\n\nA small van, marked with the name of a well known express package company, drove up a ramp and stopped at the shipping and receiving door of a sizable one-story concrete building. The structure covered one city block of a huge warehouse complex near Galveston, Texas. There was no company sign on the roof or walls. The only evidence that it was occupied came from a small brass plaque beside the door that read Logan Storage Company. It was just after six o'clock in the evening. Too late for employees to be working on the job but still early enough not to arouse the suspicion of the patrolling security guards.\n\nWithout exiting the van, the driver punched in a code on a remote control box that deactivated the security alarm and raised the big door. As it rose to the ceiling, it revealed the interior of a vast storehouse filled to the roof support girders with seemingly endless racks packed with furniture and ordinary household goods. There was no hint of life anywhere on the spacious concrete floor. Now assured that all employees had left for home, the driver moved the van inside and waited for the door to close. Then he drove onto a platform scale large enough to hold an eighteen-wheel truck and trailer.\n\nHe stepped from the vehicle and walked over to a small instrument panel on a pedestal and pressed a code into a switch labeled Engage Weighin. The platform vibrated and then began to sink beneath the floor, revealing itself to be a huge freight elevator. After it settled onto the basement floor, the driver eased the van into a large tunnel while behind him the elevator automatically returned to the upper storage floor.\n\nThe tunnel stretched for nearly a full kilometer before ending deep beneath the main floor of another huge warehouse. Here in a vast subterranean complex the Zolar family conducted their criminal operations, while operating as a legitimate business on the main floor.\n\nOn the honest business level, regular employees entered a glass entrance to administration offices that ran along one entire wall of the building. The rest of the spacious floor housed thousands of valuable paintings, sculptures, and a great variety of antiques. All had impeccably bona fide origins and were legally purchased and sold on the open market. A separate department at the rear housed the preservation department, where a small team of master craftsmen worked to restore damaged art and ancient artifacts to their original splendor. None of the employees of Zolar International or Logan Storage Company, even those with twenty years of service or more, remotely suspected the great clandestine operation that took place beneath their feet.\n\nThe driver exited the tunnel and entered an enormous sprawling secret sub-basement whose interior floor space was even larger than the main surface level 20 meters (66 feet) above. About two-thirds of the area was devoted to the accumulation, storage, and eventual sale of stolen and smuggled artworks.\n\nThe remaining third was set aside for the Zolar family's thriving artifact forgery and fabrication program.\n\nThis subterranean level was known only to the immediate members of the Zolar family, a few loyal copartners in the operation, and the original construction crew, who were brought in from Russia and then returned when the subterranean rooms were completed, so no outsiders could reveal the facility's existence.\n\nThe driver slipped from behind the steering wheel, walked around to the rear of the van and pulled a long metal cylinder from inside that was attached to a cart whose wheels automatically unfolded once it was pulled free, like an ambulance gurney. When all four wheels were extended, he rolled the cart and cylinder across the huge basement toward a closed room.\n\nAs he pushed, the van driver stared at his reflection in the polished metal of the cylinder. He was of average height with a well-rounded stomach. He looked heavier than his actual weight because of a tight-fitting pair of white coveralls. His medium brown hair was clipped short in a military crew cut, and his cheeks and chin were closely shaven. He found it amusing that his shamrock green eyes took on a silver tint from the aluminum container. Now deceptively dreamy, they could turn as hard as flint when he was angry or tense. A police detective, good at providing accurate descriptions, would have described Charles Zolar, legal name Charles Oxley, as a con man who did not look like a con man.\n\nHis brothers, Joseph Zolar and Cyrus Sarason, opened the door and stepped from the room to affectionately embrace him.\n\n\"Congratulations,\" said Sarason, \"a remarkable triumph of subterfuge.\"\n\nZolar nodded. \"Our father couldn't have planned a smoother theft. You've done the family proud.\"\n\n\"Praise indeed,\" Oxley said, smiling. \"You don't know how happy I am to finally deliver the mummy to a safe place.\"\n\n\"Are you certain no one saw you remove it from Rummel's building or followed you across the country?\" asked Sarason.\n\nOxley stared at him. \"You insult my capabilities, brother. I took all the required precautions and drove to Galveston during daylight business hours over secondary roads. I was especially careful not to break any traffic laws. Trust me when I say I wasn't followed.\"\n\n\"Pay no heed to Cyrus,\" said Zolar, smiling. \"He tends to be paranoid when it comes to covering our tracks.\"\n\n\"We've come too far to make a mistake now,\" Sarason said in a low voice.\n\nOxley peered behind his brothers into the reaches of the vast storage room. \"Are the glyph experts here?\"\n\nSarason nodded. \"A professor of anthropology from Harvard, who has made pre-Columbian ideographic symbols his life's work, and his wife, who handles the computer end of their decoding program. Henry and Micki Moore.\"\n\nDo they know where they are?\"\n\nZolar shook his head. \"They've been wearing blindfolds and listening to cassette players ever since our agents picked them up in a limo at their condo in Boston. After they were airborne in a chartered jet, the pilot was instructed to circle around for two hours before flying to Galveston. They were brought here from the airport in a soundproof delivery truck. It's safe to say they haven't seen or heard a thing.\"\n\n\"So for all they know, they're in a research laboratory somewhere in California or Oregon?\"\n\n\"That's the impression laid on them during the flight,\" replied Sarason.\n\n\"They must have asked questions?\"\n\n\"At first,\" answered Zolar. \"But when our agents informed them they would receive two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash for decoding an artifact, the Moores promised their full cooperation. They also promised to keep their lips sealed.\"\n\n\"And you trust them?\" Oxley asked dubiously.\n\nSarason smiled malevolently. \"Of course not.\"\n\nOxley didn't have to read minds to know that Henry and Micki Moore would soon be names on a tombstone. \"No sense in wasting more time, brothers,\" he said. \"Where do you want General Naymlap's mummy?\"\n\nSarason gestured toward one section of the underground facility. \"We've partitioned a special room.\n\nI'll show you the way while brother Joseph escorts our experts.\" He hesitated, pulled three black ski masks from his coat pocket and flipped one to Oxley. \"Put that on, we don't want them to see our faces.\"\n\n\"Why bother? They won't live to identify us.\"\n\n\"To intimidate them.\"\n\n\"A little extreme, but I guess you have a point.\"\n\nWhile Zolar guided the Moores to the enclosed room, Oxley and Sarason carefully removed the golden mummy from the container and laid it on a table covered with several layers of velvet padding.\n\nThe room had been furnished with a small kitchen, beds, and a bathroom. A large desk was set with note and sketch pads and several magnifying glasses with varied degrees of magnification. There was also a computer terminal with a laser printer loaded with the proper software. An array of overhead spotlights was positioned to accent the images engraved on the golden body suit.\n\nWhen the Moores entered the room, their headsets and blindfolds were removed.\n\n\"I trust you were not too uncomfortable,\" said Zolar courteously.\n\nThe Moores blinked under the bright lights and rubbed their eyes. Henry Moore looked and acted the role of an Ivy League professor. He was aging gracefully with a slim body, a full head of shaggy gray hair, and the complexion of a teenage boy. Dressed in a tweed jacket with leather patches on the sleeves, he wore his school tie knotted under the collar of a dark green cotton shirt. As an added touch he sported a small white carnation in his lapel.\n\nMicki Moore was a good fifteen years younger than her husband. Like him, she had a slender figure, almost as thin as the seventies era fashion model she had once been. Her skin was on the dark side and the high, rounded cheekbones suggested American Indian genes somewhere in her ancestry. She was a good-looking woman, beautifully poised, with an elegance and regal bearing that made her stand out at university cocktail and dinner parties. Her gray eyes focused and then darted from one masked brother to another before coming to rest on the Golden Body Suit of Tiapollo.\n\n\"A truly magnificent piece of work,\" she said softly. \"You never fully described what it was you wanted my husband and me to decipher.\"\n\n\"We apologize for the melodramatic precautions,\" Zolar said sincerely. \"But as you can see, this Inca artifact is priceless, and until it is fully examined by experts such as you, we do not wish word of its existence to reach certain people who might attempt to steal it.\"\n\nHenry Moore ignored the brothers and rushed to the table. He took a pair of reading glasses from a case in his breast pocket, slid them over his nose and peered closely at the glyphs on one arm of the suit.\n\n\"Remarkable detail,\" he said admiringly. \"Except for textiles and a few pieces of pottery, this is the most extensive display of iconography I've ever seen produced on any object from the Late Horizon era.\"\n\n\"Do you see any problem in deciphering the images?\" asked Zolar.\n\n\"It will be a labor of love,\" said Moore, without taking his eyes from the golden suit. \"But Rome wasn't built in a day. It will be a slow process.\"\n\nSarason was impatient. \"We need answers as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"You can't rush me,\" Moore said indignantly. \"Not if you want an accurate version of what the images tell us.\"\n\n\"He's right,\" said Oxley. \"We can't afford faulty data.\"\n\n\"The Moores are being well paid for their efforts,\" Sarason said sternly. \"Misinterpretations will cancel all payment.\"\n\nAnger rising, Moore snapped, \"Misinterpretations indeed! You're lucky my wife and I accepted your proposal. One look at what's on the table, and we're aware of the reasons behind your juvenile hocus-pocus games. Running around with masks over your faces as if you were holding up a bank. Total and utter nonsense.\"\n\n\"What are you saying?\" Sarason demanded.\n\n\"Any historian worth his salt knows the Golden Body Suit of Tiapollo was stolen from Spain in the nineteen twenties and never recovered.\"\n\n\"How do you know this isn't another one that was recently discovered?\"\n\nMoore pointed to the first image of a panel that traveled from the left shoulder to the hand. \"The symbol of a great warrior, a Chachapoyan general known as Naymlap who served the great Inca ruler Huascar. Legend claims he stood as high as any modern star basketball player and had blond hair, blue eyes, and fair skin. Judging from the size of the golden suit and my knowledge of its history, there is no doubt that this is Naymlap's mummy.\"\n\nSarason moved close to the anthropologist. \"You and your wife just do your job, no mistakes, no more lectures.\"\n\nZolar quickly stepped in to defuse what was rapidly developing into a nasty confrontation. \"Please excuse my associate, Dr. Moore. I apologize for his rude behavior, but I think you understand that we're all a little excited about finding the golden suit. You're quite right. This is Naymlap's mummy.\"\n\n\"How did you come by it?\" asked Moore.\n\n\"I can't say, but I will promise you that it is going back to Spain as soon as it has been fully studied by experts such as you and your wife.\"\n\nA canny smile curled Moore's lips. \"Very scrupulous of you, whatever your name is, to send it back to its rightful owners. But not before my wife and I decode the instructions leading to Huascar's treasure.\"\n\nOxley muttered something unintelligible under his breath as Sarason stepped toward Moore. But Zolar stretched out an arm and held him back. \"You see through our masquerade.\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"Shall I assume you wish to make a counterproposal, Dr. Moore?\"\n\nMoore glanced at his wife. She looked strangely withdrawn. Then he turned to Zolar. \"If our expertise leads you to the treasure, I don't think a twenty percent share is out of line.\"\n\nThe brothers stared at one another for several moments, considering. Oxley and Zolar couldn't see Sarason's face behind the ski mask but they could see their brother's eyes blaze with fury.\n\nZolar nodded. \"Considering the potential for incredible riches, I do believe Dr. Moore is being quite generous.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" said Oxley. \"All things considered, the good professor's offer is not exorbitant.\" He held out his hand. \"You and Mrs. Moore have a deal. If we find the treasure, your share is twenty percent.\"\n\nMoore shook hands. He turned to his wife and smiled as if blissfully unaware of their death sentence.\n\n\"Well, my dear, shall we get to work?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "THE DEMON OF DEATH",
                "text": "[ October 22, 1998 ]\n\nWashington, D.C.\n\nShe was waiting at the curb outside the terminal, her windblown cinnamon hair glistening under the morning sun, when Pitt walked out of the baggage area of Dulles airport. Congresswoman Loren Smith lifted the sunglasses that hid her incredible violet eyes, rose from behind the wheel, and perched on top of the car seat. She waved, her hands covered with supple leather driving gloves.\n\nA tall woman with an exquisitely proportioned Sharon Stone body, she was wearing red leather pants and jacket over a black turtleneck sweater. Everyone within twenty meters, male and female, openly stared at her as she sat on top of the bright, fire engine red, 1953 Allard J2X sports car. She and the car were both classic works of stylish elegance, and they made a perfect match.\n\nShe threw Pitt a seductive look and said, \"Hi, sailor, need a ride?\"\n\nHe set his bag and a large metal case containing the jade box on the sidewalk, leaned over the low-slung body of the Allard and gave Loren a hard, quick kiss on the mouth. \"You stole one of my cars.\"\n\n\"That's the thanks I get for playing hooky from a committee hearing to meet you at the airport?\"\n\nPitt stared down at the Spartan vehicle that had won eight of the nine sports car races it had entered forty-five years earlier. There was not enough room for the two of them and his baggage in the small seating area, and the car had no trunk. \"Where am I supposed to put my bags?\"\n\nShe reached down on the passenger's seat and handed him a pair of bungee cords. \"I came prepared.\n\nYou can tie down your baggage on the trunk rack.\"\n\nPitt shook his head in wonderment. Loren was as bright and perceptive as they come. A five-term congresswoman from the state of Colorado, she was respected by her colleagues for her grasp of difficult issues and her uncanny gift for coming up with solid solutions. Vivacious and outgoing in the halls of Congress, Loren was a private woman, seldom showing up at dinner parties and political functions, preferring to stay close to her townhouse in Alexandria, studying her aides' recommendations on bills coming up for a vote and responding to her constituents' mail. Her only social interest outside her work was her sporadic affair with Pitt.\n\n\"Where's A1 and Rudi?\" she asked, a look of tender concern in her eyes at seeing his unshaven face, haggard from exhaustion.\n\n\"On the next flight. They had a little business to clear up and return some equipment we borrowed.\"\n\nAfter cinching his bags on a chrome rack mounted on the rear deck of the Allard, he opened the tiny passenger door, slid his long legs under the low dashboard and stretched them out to the firewall. \"Dare I trust you to drive me home?\"\n\nLoren threw him a wily smile, nodded politely to the airport policeman who was motioning her to move on, shifted the Allard's three-speed gearbox into first gear, and mashed down the accelerator. The big Cadillac V-8 engine responded with a mighty roar, and the car leaped forward, rear tires screeching and smoking on the asphalt pavement. Pitt shrugged helplessly at the policeman as they whipped past him, furiously groping for the buckle of his seat belt.\n\n\"This is hardly conduct becoming a representative of the people,\" he yelled above the thunder of the exhaust.\n\n\"Who's to know?\" She laughed. \"The car is registered in your name.\"\n\nSeveral times during the wild ride over the open highway from Dulles to the city, Loren swept the tachometer needle into the red. Pitt took a fatalistic view. If he was going to die at the hands of this madwoman, there was little else he could do but sit back and enjoy the ride. In reality, he had complete confidence in her driving skills. They had both driven the Allard in vintage sports car races, he in the men's events, she in the women's. He relaxed, zipped up his windbreaker and breathed in the brisk fall air that rushed over and around the little twin windscreens mounted on the cowling.\n\nLoren slipped the Allard through the traffic with the ease of quicksilver running downhill through a maze. She soon pulled up in front of the old metal aircraft hangar, on the far end of Washington's international airport, that Pitt called home.\n\nThe structure had been built during the late nineteen thirties as a maintenance facility for early commercial airliners. In 1980, it was condemned and scheduled for demolition, but Pitt took pity on the deserted and forlorn structure and purchased it. Then he talked the local heritage preservation committee into having it placed on the National Register of Historic Landmarks. Afterward, except for remodeling the former upstairs offices into an apartment, he restored the hangar to its original condition.\n\nPitt never felt the urge to invest his savings and a substantial inheritance from his grandfather into stocks, bonds, and real estate. Instead, he chose antique and classic automobiles, and souvenirs large and small collected during his global adventures as special projects director for NUMA.\n\nThe ground floor of the old hangar was filled with nearly thirty old cars, from a 1932 Stutz towncar and French Avions Voisin sedan to a huge 1951 Daimler convertible, the youngest car in the collection.\n\nAn early Ford Trimotor aircraft sat in one corner, its corrugated aluminum wing sheltering a World War II Messerschmitt ME 262 jet fighter. Along the far wall, an early Pullman railroad car, with Manhattan Limited lettered on the sides, rested on a short length of steel track. But perhaps the strangest item was an old Victorian claw-footed bathtub with an outboard motor clamped to the back. The bathtub, like the other collectibles inside the hangar, had its own unique story.\n\nLoren stopped beside a small receiver mounted on a post. Pitt whistled the first few bars of \"Yankee Doodle\" and sound recognition software electronically shut down the security system and opened a big drive-through door. Loren eased the Allard inside and turned off the ignition.\n\n\"There you are,\" she announced proudly. \"Home in one piece.\"\n\n\"With a new speed record from Dulles to Washington that will stand for decades,\" he said dryly.\n\n\"Don't be such an old grunt. You're lucky I picked you up.\"\n\n\"Why are you so good to me?\" he asked affectionately.\n\n\"Considering all the abuse you heap on me, I really don't know.\"\n\n\"Abuse? Show me your black-and-blue marks.\"\n\n\"As a matter of fact--\" Loren slipped down her leather pants to reveal a large bruise on one thigh.\n\n\"Don't look at me,\" he said, knowing full well he wasn't the culprit.\n\n\"It's your fault.\"\n\n\"I'll have you know I haven't socked a girl since Gretchen Snodgrass smeared paste on my chair in kindergarten.\"\n\n\"I got this from a collision with a bumper on one of your old relics.\"\n\nPitt laughed. \"You should be more careful.\"\n\n\"Come upstairs,\" she ordered, wiggling her pants back up. \"I've planned a gourmet brunch in honor of your homecoming.\"\n\nPitt undid the cords to his baggage and dutifully followed Loren upstairs, enjoying the fluid movement of the tightly bound package inside the leather pants. True to her word, she had laid out a lavish setting on the formal table in his dining room. Pitt was starved and his anticipation was heightened by the appetizing aromas drifting from the kitchen.\n\n\"How long?\" he asked.\n\n\"Just time enough for you to get out of your grimy duds and shower,\" she answered.\n\nHe needed no further encouragement. He quickly stripped off his clothes and stepped into the shower, reclining on the tile floor with his feet propped on one wall as steaming hot water splashed on the opposite side. He almost drifted off to sleep, but roused himself after ten minutes and soaped up before rinsing off. After shaving and drying his hair, he slipped into a silk paisley robe Loren had given him for Christmas.\n\nWhen he entered the kitchen, she came over and gave him a long kiss. \"Ummm, you smell good, you shaved.\"\n\nHe saw that the metal case containing the jade box had been opened. \"And you've been snooping.\"\n\n\"As a congresswoman I have certain inalienable rights,\" she said, handing him a glass of champagne.\n\n\"A beautiful work of art. What is it?\"\n\n\"It,\" he answered, \"is a pre-Columbian antiquity that contains the directions to hidden riches worth so much money it would take you and your buddies in Congress all of two days to spend it.\"\n\nShe looked at him suspiciously. \"You must be joking. That would be over a billion dollars.\"\n\n\"I never joke about lost treasure.\"\n\nShe turned and retrieved two dishes of huevos rancheros with chorizo and refried beans heavy on the salsa from the oven and placed them on the table. \"Tell me about it while we eat.\"\n\nBetween mouthfuls, as he ravenously attacked Loren's Mexican brunch, Pitt began with his arrival at the sacrificial well and told her what happened up to his discovery of the jade box and the quipu in the Ecuadorian rain forest. He rounded out his narrative with the myths, the precious few facts, and finished with broad speculation.\n\nLoren listened without interrupting until Pitt finished, then said, \"Northern Mexico, you think?\"\n\n\"Only a guess until the quipu is deciphered.\"\n\n\"How is that possible if, as you say, the knowledge about the knots died with the last Inca?\"\n\n\"I'm banking on Hiram Yaeger's computer to come up with the key.\"\n\n\"A wild shot in the dark at best,\" she said, sipping her champagne.\n\n\"Our only prospect, but a damned good one.\" Pitt rose, pulled open the dining room curtains and gazed at an airliner that was lifting off the end of a runway, then sat down again. \"Time is our real problem. The thieves who stole the Golden Body Suit of Tiapollo before Customs agents could seize it have a head start.\"\n\n\"Won't they be delayed too?\" asked Loren.\n\n\"Because they have to translate the images on the suit? A good authority on Inca textile designs and ideographic symbols on pottery should be able to interpret the images on the suit.\"\n\nLoren came around the table and sat in Pitt's lap. \"So it's developing into a race for the treasure.\"\n\nPitt slipped his arms around her waist and gave her a tight squeeze. \"Things seem to be shaping up that way.\"\n\n\"Just be careful,\" she said, running her hands under his robe. \"I have a feeling your competitors are not nice people.\"\n\nEarly the next morning, a half hour ahead of the morning traffic rush, Pitt dropped Loren off at her townhouse and drove to the NUMA headquarters building. Not about to risk damage to the Allard by the crazy drivers of the nation's capital, he drove an aging but pristine 1984 Jeep Grand Wagoneer that he had modified by installing a Rodeck 500-horsepower V-8 engine taken from a hot rod wrecked at a national drag race meet. The driver of a Ferrari or Lamborghini who might have stopped beside him at a red light would never suspect that Pitt could blow their doors off from zero to a hundred miles an hour before their superior gear ratios and wind dynamics gave them the edge.\n\nHe slipped the Jeep into his parking space beneath the tall, green-glassed tower that housed NUMA's offices and took the elevator up to Yaeger's computer floor, the carrying handle of the metal case containing the jade box gripped tightly in his right hand. When he stepped into a private conference room he found Admiral Sandecker, Giordino, and Gunn already waiting for him. He set the case on the floor and shook hands.\n\n\"I apologize for being late.\"\n\n\"You're not late.\" Admiral James Sandecker spoke in a sharp tone that could slice a frozen pork roast.\n\n\"We're all early. In suspense and full of anticipation about the map, or whatever you call it.\"\n\n\"Quipu,\" explained Pitt patiently. \"An Inca recording device.\"\n\n\"I'm told the thing is supposed to lead to a great treasure. Is that true?\"\n\n\"I wasn't aware of your interest,\" Pitt said, with the hint of a smile.\n\n\"When you take matters into your own hands on agency time and money, all behind my back I might add, I'm giving heavy thought to placing an advertisement in the help wanted section for a new projects director.\"\n\n\"Purely an oversight, sir,\" said Pitt, exercising considerable willpower to keep a straight face. \"I had every intention of sending you a full report.\"\n\n\"If I believed that,\" Sandecker snorted, \"I'd buy stock in a buggy whip factory.\"\n\nA knock came on the door and a bald-headed, cadaverous man with a great scraggly Wyatt Earp moustache stepped into the room. He was wearing a crisp, white lab coat. Sandecker acknowledged him with a slight nod and turned to the others.\n\n\"I believe you all know Dr. Bill Straight,\" he said.\n\nPitt extended his hand. \"Of course. Bill heads up the marine artifact preservation department. We've worked on several projects together.\"\n\n\"My staff is still buried under the two truckloads of antiquities from the Byzantine cargo vessel you and Al found imbedded in the ice on Greenland a few years ago. 11\n\n\"All I remember about that project,\" said Giordino, \"is that I didn't thaw out for three months.\"\n\n\"Why don't you show us what you've got?\" said Sandecker, unable to suppress his impatience.\n\n\"Yes, by all means,\" said Yaeger, polishing one lens of his granny spectacles. \"Let's have a look at it.\"\n\nPitt opened the case, gently removed the jade box, and placed it on the conference table. Giordino and Gunn had already seen it during the flight from the rain forest to Quito, and they stood back while Sandecker, Yaeger, and Straight moved in for a close look.\n\n\"Masterfully carved,\" said Sandecker, admiring the intricate features of the face on the lid.\n\n\"A most distinctive design,\" observed Straight. \"The serene expression, the soft look of the eyes definitely have an Asian quality about them. Almost a direct association with statuary art from the Cahola dynasty of southern India.\n\n\"Now that you mention it,\" said Yaeger, \"the face does have a remarkable resemblance to most sculptures of Buddha.\"\n\n\"How is it possible for two unrelated cultures to carve similar likenesses from the same type of stone?\" asked Sandecker.\n\n\"Pre-Columbian contact by a transpacific crossing?\" speculated Pitt.\n\nStraight shook his head. \"Until someone discovers an ancient artifact in this hemisphere that is absolutely proven to have come from either Asia or Europe, all similarities have to be classed as sheer coincidence. No more.\"\n\n\"Likewise, no early Mayan or Andean art has ever shown up in excavations of ancient cities around the Mediterranean or the Far East,\" said Gunn.\n\nStraight lightly ran his fingertips over the green jade. \"Still, this face presents an enigma. Unlike the Maya and the ancient Chinese, the Inca did not prize jade. They preferred gold to adorn their kings and gods, living or dead, believing it represented the sun that gave fertility to the soil and warmth to all life.\"\n\n\"Let's open it and get to that thing inside,\" ordered Sandecker.\n\nStraight nodded at Pitt. \"I'll let you do the honors.\"\n\nWithout a word, Pitt inserted a thin metal shaft under the lid of the box and carefully pried it open.\n\nThere it was. The quipu, lying as it had in the cedar lined box for centuries. They stared curiously at it for almost a minute, wondering if its riddle could be solved.\n\nStraight zipped open a small leather pouch. Neatly arrayed inside was a set of tools, several different-sized tweezers, small calipers, and a row of what looked like the picks that dentists use for cleaning teeth. He pulled on a pair of soft white gloves and selected a pair of tweezers and one of the picks. Then he reached in the box and began probing the quipu, delicately testing the strands to see if they could be separated without breaking.\n\nAs if he were a surgeon lecturing to a group of interns over a cadaver, he began explaining the examination process. \"Not as brittle nor as fragile as I expected. The quipu is made from different metals, mostly copper, some silver, one or two gold. Looks like they were hand formed into wire and then wound into tiny coil-like cables, some thicker than others, with varied numbers of strands and colors. The cables still retain a measure of tensile strength and a surprising degree of resilience. There appear to be a total of thirty-one cables of various lengths, each with a series of incredibly small knots spaced at irregular intervals. Most of the cables are individually tinted, but a few are identical in color. The longer cables are linked to subordinates that act as modifying clauses, similar to the diagram of a sentence in an English class. This is definitely a sophisticated message that cries out to be unraveled.\"\n\n\"Amen,\" muttered Giordino.\n\nStraight paused and turned to the admiral. \"With your permission, sir, I will remove the quipu from its resting place.\"\n\n\"What you're saying is that I'm responsible in the event you break the damn thing,\" Sandecker scowled.\n\n\"Well, sir. . .\"\n\n\"Go ahead, man, get with it. I can't stand around here all day staring at some smelly old relic.\"\n\n\"Nothing like the aroma of rotting mulch to put one on edge,\" said Pitt drolly.\n\nSandecker fixed him with a sour stare. \"We can dispense with the humor.\"\n\n\"The sooner we unsnarl this thing,\" said Yaeger anxiously, \"the sooner I can create a decoding program.\"\n\nStraight flexed his gloved fingers like a piano player about to assault Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody Number Two. Then he took a deep breath and slowly reached into the box. He slipped a curved probe very carefully under several cables of the quipu and gently raised them a fraction of a centimeter. \"Score one for our side,\" he sighed thankfully. \"After lying in the box for centuries, the coils have not fused together or stuck to the wood. They pull free quite effortlessly.\"\n\n\"They appear to have survived the ravages of time extremely well,\" observed Pitt.\n\nAfter examining the quipu from every angle, Straight then slipped two large tweezers under it from opposite sides. He hesitated as if bolstering his confidence, then began raising the guipu from its resting place. No one spoke, all held their breath until Straight laid the multicolored cables on a sheet of glass.\n\nSetting aside the tweezers in favor of the dental picks, he meticulously unfolded the cables one by one until they were all spread flat like a fan.\n\n\"There it is, gentlemen,\" he sighed with relief. \"Now we have to soak the strands in a very mild cleaning solution to remove stains and corrosion. This process will then be followed by a chemical preservation procedure in our lab.\"\n\n\"How long before you can return it to Yaeger for study?\" asked Sandecker.\n\nStraight shrugged. \"Six months, maybe a year.\"\n\n\"You've got two hours,\" said Sandecker without batting an eye.\n\n\"Impossible. The metal coils lasted as long as they did because they were sealed in a box that was almost airtight. Now that they're fully exposed to air they'll quickly begin to disintegrate.\"\n\n\"Certainly not the ones spun from gold,\" said Pitt.\n\n\"No, gold is practically indestructible, but we don't know the exact mineral content of the other tinted coils. The copper, for instance, may have an alloy that crumbles from oxidation. Without careful preservation techniques they might decay, causing the colors to fade to the point of becoming unreadable.\"\n\n\"Determining the color key is vital to deciphering the quipu, \" Gunn added.\n\nThe mood in the room had suddenly turned sour. Only Yaeger seemed immune. He wore a canny smile on his face as he gazed at Straight.\n\n\"Give me thirty minutes for my scanning equipment to measure the distances between the knots and fully record the configuration, and you can keep the thing in your lab until you're old and gray.\"\n\n\"That's all the time you'll need?\" Sandecker asked incredulously.\n\n\"My computers can generate three-dimensional digital images, enhanced to reveal the strands as vividly as they were when created four hundred years ago.\"\n\n\"Ah, but it soothes the savage beast,\" Giordino waxed poetically, \"to live in a modern world.\"\n\nYaeger's scan of the Drake quipu took closer to an hour and a half, but when he was finished the graphics made it look better than when it was brand new. Four hours later he made his first breakthrough in deciphering its message. \"Incredible how something so simple can be so complex,\" he said, gazing at the vividly colored simulation of the cables that fanned out across a large monitor.\n\n\"Sort of like an abacus,\" said Giordino, straddling a chair in Yaeger's computer sanctuary and leaning over the backrest. Only he and Pitt had remained with Yaeger. Straight had returned to his lab with the quipu while Sandecker and Gunn went off to a Senate committee hearing on a new underwater mining project.\n\n\"Far more complicated.\" Pitt was leaning over Yaeger's shoulder, studying the image on the monitor.\n\n\"The abacus is basically a mathematical device. The quipu, on the other hand, is a much more subtle instrument. Each color, coil thickness, placement and type of knot, and the tufted ends, all have significance. Fortunately, the Inca numerical system used a base of ten just like ours.\"\n\n\"Go to the head of the class.\" Yaeger nodded. \"This one, besides numerically recording quantities and distances, also recorded a historical event. I'm still groping around in the dark, but, for example. . .\" He paused to type in a series of instructions on his keyboard. Three of the quipu's coils appeared to detach themselves from the main collar and were enlarged across the screen. \"My analysis proves pretty conclusively that the brown, blue, and yellow coils indicate the passage of time over distance. The numerous smaller orange knots that are evenly spaced on all three coils symbolize the sun or the length of a day.\"\n\n\"What brought you to that conclusion?\"\n\n\"The key was the occasional interspacing of large white knots.\"\n\n\"Between the orange ones?\"\n\n\"Right. The computer and I discovered that they coincide perfectly with phases of the moon. As soon as I can calculate astronomical moon cycles during the fifteen hundreds, I can zero in on approximate dates.\"\n\n\"Good thinking,\" said Pitt with mounting optimism. \"You're onto something.\"\n\n\"The next step is to determine what each cable was designed to illustrate. As it turns out, the Incas were also masters of simplicity. According to the computer's analysis, the green coil represents land and the blue one the sea. The yellow remains inconclusive.\"\n\n\"So how do you read it?\" asked Giordino.\n\nYaeger punched two keys and sat back. \"Twenty-four days of travel over land. Eighty-six by sea.\n\nTwelve days in the yellow, whatever that stands for.\"\n\n\"The time spent at their destination,\" Pitt ventured.\n\nYaeger nodded in agreement. \"That figures. The yellow coil might denote a barren land.\"\n\n\"Or a desert,\" said Giordino.\n\n\"Or a desert,\" Pitt repeated. \"A good bet if we're looking at the coast of northern Mexico.\"\n\n\"On the opposite side of the quipu,\" Yaeger continued, \"we find cables matching the same blue and green colors, but with a different number of knots. This suggests, to the computer, the time spent on the return trip. Judging by the additions and shorter spacing between knots, I'd say they had a difficult and stormy voyage home.\"\n\n\"It doesn't look to me as if you're groping in the dark,\" said Pitt. \"I'd say you have a pretty good grasp of it.\"\n\nYaeger smiled. \"Flattery is always gratefully accepted. I only hope I don't fall into the trap of inventing too much of the analysis as I go.\"\n\nThe prospect did not sit well with Pitt. \"No fiction, Hiram. Keep it straight.\"\n\n\"I understand. You want a healthy baby with ten fingers and ten toes.\"\n\n\"Preferably one holding a sign that says 'dig here,' \" Pitt said in a cold, flat voice that almost curled Yaeger's hair, \"or we'll find ourselves staring down a dry hole.\"\n\nHigh on the funnel-shaped peak of a solitary mountain that rises like a graveyard monument in the middle of a sandy desert there is an immense stone demon.\n\nIt has stood there, legs tensed as if ready to spring, since prehistoric times, its claws dug into the massive basalt rock from which it was carved. In the desert tapestry at its feet ghosts of the ancients mingle with the ghosts from the present. Vultures soar over it, jackrabbits leap between its legs, lizards scurry over its giant paws.\n\nFrom its pedestal on the summit, the beast's snakelike eyes command a panoramic vista of sand dunes, rocky hills and mountains, and the shimmering Colorado River that divides into streams across its silted delta before merging with the Sea of Cortez.\n\nExposed to the elements on the top of the mountain, which is said to be mystic and enchanted, much of the intricate detail of the sculpture has been worn away. The body appears to be that of a jaguar or a huge cat with wings and a serpent's head. One wing still protrudes above a shoulder, but the other has long since fallen on the hard, rocky surface beside the beast and shattered. Vandals have also taken their toll, chipping away the teeth from the gaping jaws and digging their names and initials on the flanks and chest.\n\nWeighing several tons and standing as high as a bull elephant, the winged jaguar with the serpent's head is one of only four known sculptures produced by unknown cultures before the appearance of the Spanish missionaries in the early fifteen hundreds. The other three are static crouching lions in a national park in New Mexico that were far more primitive in their workmanship.\n\nArchaeologists who had scaled the steep cliffs were mystified as to its past, They had no way of guessing its age or who carved the beast from one enormous outcropping of rock. The style and design were far different from any known artifacts of the prehistoric cultures of the American Southwest. Many theories were created, and many opinions offered, but the enigma of the sculpture's significance remained shrouded in its past.\n\nIt was said that the ancient people feared the awesome stone beast, believing it to be a guardian of the underworld, but present-day elders of the Cahuilla, Quechan, and Montolo tribes that live in the area cannot recall any significant religious traditions or detailed rituals that pertain to the sculpture. No oral history had been passed down, so they simply created their own myth on the ashes of a forgotten past.\n\nThey invented a supernatural monster that all dead people must pass on their journey to the great beyond. If they led bad lives, the stone beast came to life. It snatched them in its mouth, chewed them with its fangs, and spat them out as maimed and disfigured ghosts doomed to walk the earth forever as malignant spirits. Only those good of heart and mind were allowed to proceed unmolested into the afterworld.\n\nMany of the living made the difficult climb up the sharp walls of the mountain to lay gifts of hand-modeled clay dolls, and ancient seashells etched with the figures of animals, at the feet of the sculpture as tribute, a bribe to ease the way when their time came. Bereaved family members often stood on the desert floor far below the menacing sculpture and sent an emissary to the top while they prayed for the beast to grant their loved one safe passage.\n\nBilly Yuma had no fear of the stone demon as he sat in his pickup truck under the shadow of the mountain and gazed up at the forbidding sculpture far above him. He was hopeful his parents and his friends who had died had been allowed to freely pass the guardian of the dead. They were good people who had harmed no one. But it was his brother, the black sheep of the family, who beat his wife and children and died an alcoholic, that Billy feared had become an evil ghost.\n\nLike most Native Americans of the desert, Billy lived in the constant presence of the hideously deformed spirits who wandered aimlessly and did malicious things. He knew his brother's spirit could rise at any moment and throw dirt on him or tear his clothes, even haunt his dreams with horrible visions of the restless dead. But Billy's greatest worry was that his brother might bring illness or injury to his wife and children.\n\nHe had seen his brother three times. Once as a whirlwind that left behind a trail of choking dust, next as a wavering light spinning around a mesquite, and finally as a shaft of lightning that struck his truck.\n\nThese were ominous signs. Billy and his tribe's medicine man had huddled around an open fire to discuss a way to combat his brother's ghost. If not stopped, the apparition could pose an eternal threat to Billy's family and his future descendants.\n\nEverything was tried, and nothing worked. The tribe's old shaman prescribed eating a mixture of cactus buds and herbs as a measure of protection while fasting for ten days alone in the desert. A cure that failed miserably. Near-starvation induced Billy to see his brother's apparition on a regular basis and hear eerie wails during the lonely nights. Powerful rituals such as ceremonial chanting were tried, but nothing appeased the brother's evil spirit, and his manifestations became more violent.\n\nBilly was not the only one of his tribe with problems. Ever since the tribe's most sacred and secret religious objects were found missing from their hiding place in an isolated ruin belonging to their ancestors, whole villages had suffered ill fortune. Poor crops, contagious sickness among the children, unseasonably hot and dry weather. Fights broke out when men became drunk, and some were killed.\n\nBut by far the worst calamity was the sudden increase of ghost sickness. People who had never before seen or heard an evil spirit began describing haunted visitations. Ghosts of early Montolos suddenly appeared during their dreams, often materializing in broad daylight. Almost everyone, including young children, claimed to have seen supernatural phantoms.\n\nThe theft of the wooden idols that represented the sun, moon, earth, and water shattered the Montolos' religious society. The anguish of not having their presence during the initiation ceremony for entering adulthood devastated the tribe's young sons and daughters. Without the carved deities the centuries-old rituals could not be performed, leaving the young ones in adolescent limbo. Without the sacred religious objects, all worship ceased. To them it was the same as if the world's Christians, Muslims, and Jews woke up one morning and suddenly found that the entire city of Jerusalem had been torn from the earth and carried into deep space. To non-Indians it was a simple case of theft, but to a Montolo it amounted to blasphemy that bordered on atrocity.\n\nAround fires in the underground ceremonial structures, the old religion's priests whispered of how they could hear the mournful pleading of the idols on nocturnal winds, pleading to be returned to the safety of their hiding place.\n\nBilly Yuma was desperate. The medicine man had given him instructions while reading the embers of a dying fire. To send his brother's ghost back to the underworld and save his family from further disaster, Billy had to find the lost idols and return them to their sacred hiding place in the ancient ruins of his ancestors. In a desperate attempt to end the hauntings and avoid more ill fortune he decided to fight evil with evil. He resolved to climb the mountain, confront the demon, and pray for its help in returning the precious idols.\n\nHe was no longer a young man, and the ascent would be perilous without the equipment used by modern rock climbers. But he had set himself to the task and was not about to back down. Too many of his people were counting on him.\n\nAbout a third of the way up the south wall his heart hammered against his ribs and his lungs ached from the grueling, effort. He could have stopped to rest and catch his breath, but he pushed on, determined to reach the peak without pause. He turned and gazed down only once, checking his Ford pickup truck parked at the base of the mountain. It looked like a toy he could reach down and snatch up with one hand. He looked back at the cliff face. It was changing colors under the setting sun, from amber to tile red.\n\nBilly regretted not starting out earlier in the day, but he had chores to complete, and the sun was high when he drove to the mountain and began his ascent. Now the orange ball was creeping below the ridge of the Sierra de Juarez mountains to the west. The climb was more difficult than he had imagined and was taking far longer. He tilted his head, shaded his eyes against the brightness of the sky, and squinted up toward the cone top of the mountain. He still had 85 meters (278 feet) to go, and full darkness was only a half hour away. The prospect of spending the night with the great stone beast filled him with foreboding, but it would have been suicidal to attempt the descent in the dark.\n\nBilly was a small man of fifty-five. But a life spent ranching in the harsh climate of the Sonora Desert had made him as hard and tough as an old cast-iron frying pan. Perhaps his joints were not as flexible as they were the day he won a bronco riding contest in Tucson, nor did he move with the agility of the boy who was once the fastest cross-country runner in the tribe, nor did he have the stamina, but he was still as tough as an aging mountain goat.\n\nThe whites of his eyes were yellowed and the rims reddened from ignoring the onslaught of the desert sun all his life and never wearing sunglasses. He had a round brown face with a strong jaw, straggly gray eyebrows, and thick black hair-the kind of face that seemed expressionless but revealed deep character and an insight into nature rarely understood by anyone who was not a Native American.\n\nA shadow and a cold breeze suddenly passed over him. He shuddered from the unexpected chill. Was it a spirit? Where did they come from, he wondered. Could it be his brother was trying to make him, fall to the rocks far below? Maybe the great stone beast knew he was approaching and was issuing a warning. Beset with foreboding, Billy kept on climbing, teeth clenched, staring only at the vertical rock before his eyes.\n\nFortunately, others who went before him had chiseled foot-and handholds on the steeper face of the wall near the summit. He could see they were very old by the rounded smoothness of their edges. Within 50 meters (164 feet) of his goal, he entered a rock chimney that had split away from the wall, leaving a trail of loose and shattered stone inside a wide crack that slanted a little more gently and made the climb a fraction less tiring.\n\nAt last, just as his muscles were tightening and he was losing all feeling in his legs, the rock wall gave way to an easy incline, and he crawled onto the open surface of the peak. He rose to his feet as the final light of day faded, breathing deeply, inhaling the cool, pure air of the desert He rubbed his hands on the legs of his pants to remove the dirt and grit and stared at the shadow of the demon looming in the growing darkness. Though it was carved from the rock of the mountain, Billy swore that it glowed. He was tired and sore, but strangely he felt no fear of the timeworn effigy, despite the tales about how the restless spirits who were denied entry into the afterworld walked the haunted mountain.\n\nHe saw no sign of fearsome creatures lurking in the dark. Except for the jaguar with the serpent's head, the mountain was empty. Billy spoke out.\n\n\"I have come.\"\n\nThere was no answer. The only sounds came from the wind and the beat from the wings of a hawk.\n\nNo eerie cries from the tormented souls of the underworld.\n\n\"I have climbed the enchanted mountain to pray to you,\" he said.\n\nStill no sign or reply, but a chill went up his spine as he felt a presence. He heard voices speaking in a strange tongue. None of the words were familiar. Then he saw shadowy figures take shape.\n\nThe people were visible but transparent. They appeared to be moving about the mesa, taking no notice d Billy, walking around and through him as if it were he who did not exist. Their clothes were unfamiliar, not the brief cotton loincloths or rabbit-skin cloaks of his ancestors. These people were dressed as gods. Golden helmets adorned with brilliantly colored birds' feathers covered most of the phantoms' heads, while those who went bareheaded wore their hair in strange distinctive fashions. Their bodies were clothed with textiles Billy had never seen. The knotted mantles that draped over their shoulders and the tunics worn underneath were decorated with incredibly ornate and beautiful designs.\n\nAfter a long minute the strange people seemed to dissolve and their voices ceased. Billy stood as still and silent as the rock beneath his feet. Who were these strange people who paraded before his eyes?\n\nWas this an open door to the spirit world, he wondered.\n\nHe moved closer to the stone monster, reached out a trembling hand and touched its flank. The ancient rock felt disturbingly hotter than it should have been from the day's heat. Then, incredibly, an eye seemed to pop open on the serpent's face, an eye with an unearthly light behind it.\n\nTerror stirred through Billy's mind, but he was determined not to flinch. Later, he would be accused of an overactive imagination. But he swore a thousand times before his own death many years later that he had seen the demon stare at him from a sparkling eye. He summoned up his courage, dropped to his knees and spread out his hands. Then he began to pray. He prayed to the stone effigy through most of the night before falling into a trancelike sleep. \u00ccn the morning, as the sun rose and painted the clouds with a burst of gold, Billy Yuma awoke and looked around. He found himself lying across the front seat of his Ford pickup truck on the floor of the desert, far below the silent beast of the mountain that stared sightlessly across the dry waste.\n\nJoseph Zolar stood at the head of the golden suit, watching Henry and Micki Moore huddle over the computer and laser printer. After four days of round-the-clock study, they had reduced the images from symbols to descriptive words and concise phrases.\n\nThere was a fascination about the way they snatched up the sheets as they rolled out onto the printer's tray, excitedly analyzing their conclusions as a wall clock ticked off the remaining minutes of their lives.\n\nThey went about their business as if the men behind the ski masks did not exist.\n\nHenry labored in focused dedication. His world existed in just one narrow hall of academia. Like most university professors of anthropology and archaeology, he labored for prestige, because financial wealth eluded him. He had pieced together potsherds and had written a prodigious number of books that few read and even fewer paid good money to own. Published with small print runs, all his works ended up gathering dust in the basements of college libraries. Ironically, the fame and the honors that he foresaw would be heaped upon him as the interpreter, and perhaps discoverer, of Huascar's treasure meant more to him than mere monetary returns.\n\nAt first the Zolars found Micki Moore sexually appealing. But soon her indifference toward them became imitating. It was obvious that she loved her husband and had little interest in anyone else. They lived and worked together in a world of their own making.\n\nJoseph Zolar would suffer little remorse over their termination. He had dealt with disgusting and despicable sellers and collectors over the years, and hardened criminals as well, but these two people were an enigma to him. He no longer cared what form of execution his brothers had in mind for them. All that mattered now was that the Moores come up with concise and accurate directions to Huascar's golden chain.\n\nWearing the ski masks had been a waste of time, but they kept them on during the entire time they were in the Moores' presence. It was obvious the Moores did not intimidate easily.\n\nZolar looked at Henry Moore and attempted a smile. It wasn't very successful. \"Have you finished decoding the symbols?\" he asked hopefully.\n\nMoore winked foxlike at his wife and gave her a smug grin before turning to Zolar. \"We are finished.\n\nThe story we have deciphered is one of great drama and human endurance. Our unraveling of the images and successful translation greatly expands the current knowledge of the Chachapoyas. And it will rewrite every text ever written on the Inca.\"\n\n\"So much for modesty,\" said Samson sarcastically.\n\n\"Do you know precisely where the treasure is buried?\" Charles Oxley asked.\n\nHenry Moore shrugged. \"I can't say precisely.\"\n\nSarason moved forward, tight-lipped and angry. \"I'd like to ask if our illustrious code breakers have the slightest idea in hell what they're doing?\"\n\n\"What do you want?\" Moore stated coldly. \"An arrow that points to X marks the spot?\"\n\n\"Yes, dammit, that's exactly what we want!\"\n\nZolar smiled condescendingly. \"Let's get down to the hard facts, Dr. Moore. What can you tell us?\"\n\n\"You'll be happy to learn,\" Micki Moore answered for her husband, \"that, incredible as it sounds, the golden chain is only a small part of the treasure's stockpile. The inventory my husband and I have deciphered records at least another forty or more tons of ceremonial ornaments and vessels, headdresses, breastplates, necklaces, and solid gold and silver objects that each took ten men to carry.\n\nThere were also massive bundles of sacred textiles, at least twenty golden-cased mummies, and over fifty ceramic pots filled with precious gems. If given more time we can give you a complete breakdown.\"\n\nZolar, Sarason, and Oxley stared at Micki, their eyes unblinking through the masks, their expressions of insatiable greed well hidden. For several moments there wasn't a sound except their breathing and the whir of the printer. Even for men used to dealing in million-dollar sums, the extent of Huascar's golden wealth went far beyond their wildest imaginings.\n\n\"You paint a glowing picture,\" said Zolar finally. \"But do the symbols on the mummy's case tell us where the treasure is buried?\"\n\n\"It's not buried in the strict sense of the word,\" said Henry Moore.\n\nHe stared at Zolar, waiting for him to react to his statement. Zolar stood there impassively.\n\n\"According to the narrative engraved on the suit,\" Moore explained, \"the hoard was secreted in a cavern on a river--\"\n\nSarason's eyes flashed with sudden disappointment. \"Any cavern by a well-traveled river would have been discovered long before now, and the treasure removed.\"\n\nOxley shook his head. \"It's not likely a golden chain that took two hundred men to lift could have vanished a second time.\"\n\n\"Nor an inventory as vast as the Moores describe,\" added Zolar. \"As an acknowledged expert on Inca antiquities I'd be aware of any artifacts identified as belonging to Huascar that have made their way onto the market. No one who discovered such a cache could keep it secret.\"\n\n\"Maybe we've placed too much trust in the good doctor and his wife,\" said Sarason. \"How do we know they're not leading us down the garden path?\"\n\n\"Who are you to talk about trust?\" Moore said quietly. \"You lock my wife and me inside this concrete dungeon without windows for four days, and you don't trust us? You people must enjoy childish games.\"\n\n\"You have no grounds for complaint,\" Oxley told him. \"You and Mrs. Moore are being paid extremely well.\"\n\nMoore gave Oxley an impassive look. \"As I was about to say, after the Incas and their Chachapoyan guards deposited Huascar's vast store of treasure in the cavern, they covered the entrance to a long passageway that led to it. Then they blended the soil and rocks to make it look natural and planted native plants over the area to make certain the passage to the cavern was never found again.\n\n\"Is there a description of the terrain around the entrance to the cavern?\" Zolar asked.\n\n\"Only that it is on a rounded peak of a steep-sided island in an inland sea.\"\n\n\"Wait a moment,\" snapped Oxley. \"You said the cavern was near a river.\"\n\nMoore shook his head. \"If you had listened, you'd have heard me say, the cavern was on a river.\"\n\nSarason stared angrily at Moore. \"What ridiculous myth are you handing us? A cavern on a river on an island in an inland sea? Took a wrong turn in your translation, didn't you, Doc?\"\n\n\"There is no mistake,\" said Moore firmly. \"Our analysis is correct.\"\n\n\"The use of the word river could be purely symbolic,\" suggested Micki Moore.\n\n\"So could the island,\" Sarason retorted.\n\n\"Perhaps you'd get a better perspective if you heard our entire interpretation,\" offered Henry Moore.\n\n\"Please spare us the details,\" said Zolar. \"We're already familiar with how Huascar smuggled his kingdom's treasury from under the collective noses of his brother Atahualpa and Francisco Pizarro. Our only interest is the direction General Naymlap sailed the treasure fleet and the exact location where he hid the hoard.\"\n\nThe Moores exchanged glances. Micki gave Henry an affirmative nod, and he turned to Zolar. \"A11 right, since we're partners.\" He paused to scan a page rolled out by the printer. \"The pictographs on the suit tell us that the treasure was carried to a coastal port and loaded on a great number of ships. The voyage north lasted a total of eighty-six days. The final twelve days were spent sailing across an inland sea until they came to a small island with high, steep walls that rose out of the water like a great stone temple. There, the Incas beached their ships, unloaded the treasure and carried it down a passageway to a cavern deep inside the island. At this point, however you interpret it, the glyphs claim the gold hoard was stashed beside the banks of a river.\"\n\nOxley unrolled a map of the Western Hemisphere and traced the sea route from Peru past Central America and along the Pacific coast of Mexico. \"The inland sea must be the Gulf of California.\"\n\n\"Better known as the Sea of Cortez,\" added Moore.\n\nSarason also studied the map. \"I agree. From the tip of Baja to Peru it's all open water.\"\n\n\"What about islands?\" asked Zolar.\n\n\"At least two dozen, maybe more,\" replied Oxley.\n\n\"It would take years to search them all.\"\n\nSarason picked up and read the final page of the Moores' translation of the glyphs. Then he stared coldly at Henry Moore. \"You're holding out, my friend. The images on the golden suit have to give exact guidelines to finding the treasure. No map worth the paper it's printed on stops short of pinning down the final step-by-step instructions.\"\n\nZolar carefully examined Moore's expression. \"Is this true, Doctor, that you and your wife have not provided us with a full solution to the riddle?\"\n\n\"Micki and I have decoded all there is to decode. There is no more.\"\n\n\"You're lying,\" said Zolar evenly.\n\n\"Of course he's lying,\" Sarason snapped. \"Any moron can see that he and his wife have held back the vital clues.\"\n\n\"Not a sound course, Doctor. You and Mrs. Moon would be wise to abide by our agreement.\"\n\nMoore shrugged. \"I'm not such a fool as you think,\" he said. \"The fact that you still refuse to identify your selves tells me the three of you don't have the slightest intention of carrying out our bargain. What guarantee do I have that you'll hold up your end? Nobody, not even our friends and relatives, knows where we were taken. Bringing us here wearing blindfolds and holding us virtual prisoners is nothing less than abduction. What were you going to do once the full instructions for finding Huascar's treasure were in your hands? Blindfold us again and fly us home? I don't think so. My guess is Micki and I were going to quietly disappear and become a folder in a missing persons file. You tell me, am I wrong?\"\n\nIf Moore wasn't such an intelligent man, Zolar would have laughed. But the anthropologist had seen through their plan and called their hand. \"All right, Doctor, what will it take for you to release the data?\"\n\n\"Fifty percent of the trove when we find it.\"\n\nThat pushed Sarason over the edge. \"The bastard, he's holding us up.\" He walked over to Moore, lifted him off his feet and slammed him against the wall. \"So much for your demands,\" he shouted. \"We're not taking any more of your crap. Tell us what we want to know or I'll beat it out of you. And believe you me, I'd take great joy in seeing you bleed.\"\n\nMicki Moore stood there, as calm as if she was standing over a stove in a kitchen. Her uncanny coolness did not seem logical to Zolar. Any other wife would have demonstrated fear at a violent threat toward her husband.\n\nIncredibly, Moore smiled. \"Do it! Break my legs, kill me. And you'll never find Huascar's golden chain in a thousand years.\"\n\n\"He's right, you know,\" said Zolar, quietly gazing at Micki.\n\n\"When I'm finished with him, he won't be fit for dog food,\" Sarason said as he pulled back his fist.\n\n\"Hold on!\" Oxley's voice stopped him. \"For efficiency's sake, better that you take your wrath out on Mrs. Moore. No man enjoys watching his wife ravished.\"\n\nSlowly, Sarason let Moore down and turned to Micki, his face taking on the expression of a pillaging Hun. \"Persuading Mrs. Moore to cooperate will be a pleasure.\"\n\n\"You're wasting your time,\" said Moore. \"I did not allow my wife to work on the final translation with me. She has no idea of the key to the treasure's location.\"\n\n\"The hell you say?\"\n\n\"He's telling the truth,\" Micki said, unruffled. \"Henry wouldn't allow me to see the end results.\"\n\n\"We're still left with a winning hand,\" said Sarason coldly.\n\n\"Understood,\" said Oxley. \"You work over Mrs. Moore as proposed until he cooperates,\"\n\n\"Either way, we get answers.\"\n\nZolar stared at Moore. \"Well, Doctor, it's your call.\"\n\nMoore looked at them in cold calculation. \"Do with her what you will. It won't make any difference.\"\n\nA strange silence came over the Zolar brothers. Sarason, the grittiest of them all, stood open-mouthed, disbelieving. What sort of man could calmly, without the slightest hint of shame or fear, toss his wife to the wolves?\n\n\"You can stand by while your wife is beaten and raped and murdered, and not say one word to stop it?\" Zolar asked, studying Moore's reaction.\n\nMoore's expression remained unchanged. \"Barbaric stupidity will gain you nothing.\"\n\n\"He's bluffing.\" Moore needed an acid bath after the look Sarason gave him. \"He'll crumble as soon as he hears her scream.\"\n\nZolar shook his head. \"I don't think so.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" said Oxley. \"We've underestimated his monumental greed and his ruthless mania for becoming a big star in the academic world. Am I right, Doctor?\"\n\nMoore was unmoved by their contempt. Then he said, \"Fifty percent of something beats a hundred percent of nothing, gentlemen.\"\n\nZolar glanced at his brothers. Oxley gave a barely perceptible nod. Sarason clenched his fists so tightly they went ivory-he turned away but the expression on his face gave every indication of wanting to tear Moore's lungs out.\n\n\"I think we can avoid further threats and settle this is an orderly manner,\" said Zolar. \"Before we can agree to your increased demands, I must have your complete assurance you can guide us to the treasure.\"\n\n\"I have deciphered the description of the landmark that leads to the entrance of the cavern,\" said Moore, speaking slowly and distinctly. \"There is no probability of error. I know the dimensions and its shape. I can recognize it from the air.\"\n\nHis confident assertion was met with silence. Zolar walked over to the golden mummy and looked down at the glyphs etched in the gold covering. \"Thirty percent. You'll have to make do with that.\"\n\n\"Forty or nothing.\" Moore said resolutely.\n\n\"Do you want it in writing?\"\n\n\"Would it stand up in a court of law?\"\n\n\"Probably not.\"\n\n\"Then we'll just have to take each other at our word.\" Moore turned to his wife. \"Sorry, my dear, I hope you didn't find this too upsetting. But you must understand. Some things are more important than marriage vows.\"\n\nWhat a strange woman, Zolar thought. She should have looked frightened and humiliated, but she showed no indication of it. \"It's settled then,\" he said. \"Since we're now working partners, I see no need to continue wearing our ski masks.\" He pulled it over his head and ran his hands through his hair.\n\n\"Everyone try to get a good night's sleep. You will all fly to Guaymas, Mexico, on our company jet first thing in the morning.\"\n\n\"Why Guaymas?\" asked Micki Moore.\n\n\"Two reasons. It's centrally located in the Gulf, and a good friend and client has an open invitation for my use of his hacienda just north of the port. The estate has a private airstrip, which makes it an ideal headquarters for conducting the search.\"\n\n\"Aren't you coming?\" asked Oxley.\n\n\"I'll meet you in two days. I have a business meeting in Wichita, Kansas.\"\n\nZolar turned to Sarason, leery that his brother might launch another rampage against Moore. But he need not have worried.\n\nSamson's face had a ghoulish grin. His brothers could not see inside his mind, see that he was happily imagining what Tupac Amaru would do to Henry Moore after the treasure was discovered.\n\n\"Brunhilda has gone as far as she can go,\" said Yaeger, referring to his beloved computer terminal.\n\n\"Together, we've painstakingly pieced together about ninety percent of the stringed codes. But there are a few permutations we haven't figured out--\"\n\n\"Permutations?\" muttered Pitt, sitting across from Yaeger in the conference room.\n\n\"The different arrangements in lineal order and color of the quipu's coiled wire cables.\"\n\nPitt shrugged and looked around the room. Four other men were there-- Admiral Sandecker, Al Giordino, Rudi Gunn, and Hiram Yaeger. Everyone's attention was focused on Yaeger, who looked like a coyote who had bayed nonstop all night at a full moon.\n\n\"I really must work on my vocabulary,\" Pitt murmured. He slouched into a comfortable position and stared at the computer genius who stood behind a podium under a large wall screen.\n\n\"As I was about to explain,\" Yaeger continued, \"a few of the knots and coils are indecipherable. After applying the most sophisticated and advanced information and data analysis techniques known to man, the best I can offer is a rough account of the story.\"\n\n\"Even a mastermind like you?\" asked Gunn, smiling.\n\n\"Even Einstein. Unless he'd unearthed an Inca Rosetta Stone or a sixteenth-century how-to book on the art of creating your very own quipu, he'd have worked in a vacuum too.\"\n\n\"If you're going to tell us the show ends with no grand climax,\" said Giordino, \"I'm going to lunch.\"\n\n\"Drake's quipu is a complex representation of numerical data,\" Yaeger pushed on, undaunted by Giordino's sarcasm, \"but it's not strong on blow-by-blow descriptions of events. You can't narrate visual action and drama with strategically placed knots on a few coils of colored wire. The quipu can only offer sketchy accounts of the people who walked on and off this particular stage of history.\"\n\n\"You've made your point,\" said Sandecker, waving one of his bulbous cigars. \"Now why don't you tell us what you sifted from the maze?\"\n\nYaeger nodded and lowered the conference room lights. He switched on a slide projector that threw an early Spanish map of the coast of North and South America on the wall screen. He picked up a metal pointer that telescoped like an automobile radio aerial and casually aimed it in the general direction of the map.\n\n\"Without a long-winded history lesson, I'll just say that after Huascar, the legitimate heir to the Inca throne, was defeated and overthrown by his bastard half-brother, Atahualpa, in 1533, he ordered his kingdom's treasury and other royal riches to be hidden high in the Andes. A wise move, as it turned out.\n\nDuring his imprisonment, Huascar suffered great humiliation and grief. All his friends and kinsmen were executed, and his wives and children were hanged. Then to add insult to injury, the Spanish picked that particular moment to invade the Inca empire. In a situation similar to Cortez in Mexico, Francisco Pizarro's timing couldn't have been more perfect. With the Inca armies divided by factions and decimated by civil war, the disorder played right into his hands. After Pizarro's small force of soldiers and adventurers slaughtered a few thousand of Atahualpa's imperial retainers and bureaucrats in the square at the ancient city of Caxanarca, he won the Inca empire on a technical foul.\"\n\n\"Strange that the Inca simply didn't attack and overwhelm the Spanish,\" said Gunn. \"They must have outnumbered Pizarro's troops by a hundred to one.\n\n\"Closer to a thousand to one,\" said Yaeger. \"But again, as with Cortez and the Aztecs, the sight of fierce bearded men wearing iron clothes no arrow or rock could penetrate, riding ironclad horses, previously unknown to the Incas, while slashing with swords and shooting matchlock guns and cannons, was too much for them. Thoroughly demoralized, Atahualpa's generals failed to take the initiative by ordering determined mass attacks.\"\n\n\"What of Huascar's armies?\" asked Pitt. \"Surely they were still in the field.\"\n\n\"Yes, but they were leaderless.\" Yaeger nodded. \"History can only look back on a what-if situation.\n\nWhat if the two Inca kings had buried the hatchet and merged their two armies in a do-or-die campaign to rid the empire of the dreaded foreigners? An interesting hypothesis. With the defeat of the Spanish, God only knows where the political boundaries and governments of South America might be today.\"\n\n\"They'd certainly be speaking a language other than Spanish,\" commented Giordino.\n\n\"Where was Huascar during Atahualpa's confrontation with Pizarro?\" asked Sandecker, finally lighting his cigar.\n\nImprisoned in Cuzco, the capital city of the empire, twelve hundred kilometers south of Caxanarca.\"\n\nWithout looking up from the notations he was making on a legal pad, Pitt asked, \"What happened next?\"\n\n\"To buy his liberty, Atahualpa contracted with Pizarro to cram a room with gold as high as he could reach,\" answered Yaeger. \"A room, I might add, slightly larger than this one.\"\n\n\"Did he fulfill the contract?\"\n\n\"He did. But Atahualpa was afraid that Huascar might offer Pizarro more gold, silver, and gems than he could. So he ordered that his brother be put to death, which was carried out by drowning, but not before Huascar ordered the royal treasures to be hidden.\"\n\nSandecker stared at Yaeger through a cloud of blue smoke. \"With the king dead, who carried out his wish?\"\n\n\"A general called Naymlap,\" replied Yaeger. He paused and used the pointer to trace a red line on the map that ran from the Andes down to the coast. \"He was not of royal Inca blood, but rather a Chachapoyan warrior who rose through the ranks to become Huascar's most trusted advisor. It was Naymlap who organized the movement of the treasury down from the mountains to the seashore, where he had assembled a fleet of fifty-five ships. Then, according to the quipu, after a journey of twenty-four days, it took another eighteen days just to load the immense treasure on board.\"\n\n\"I had no idea the Incas were seafaring people,\" said Gunn.\n\n\"So were the Mayans, and like the Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans before them, the Incas were coastal sailors. They were not afraid of open water, but they wisely beached their boats on moonless nights and during stormy weather. They navigated by the sun and stars and sailed with prevailing winds and currents up and down the shoreline, conducting trade with the Mesoamericans in Panama and perhaps beyond. An Inca legend tells of an early king who heard a tale about an island rich in gold and intelligent people, that lay far out beyond the horizon of the sea. With loot and slaves in mind, he built and rigged a fleet of ships, and then sailed off with a company of his soldiers acting as marines to what is thought to be the Galapagos Islands. Nine months later he returned with scores of black prisoners and much gold.\"\n\n\"The Galapagos?\" wondered Pitt.\n\n\"As good a guess as any.\"\n\n\"Do we have any records of their ship construction?\" Sandecker queried.\n\n\"Bartholomew Ruiz, Pizarro's pilot, saw large rafts equipped with masts and great square cotton sails.\n\nOther Spanish seamen reported sailing past rafts with hulls of balsa wood, bamboo and reed, carrying sixty people and forty or more large crates of trade goods. Besides sails, the rafts were also propelled by teams of paddlers. Designs found on pre-Columbian clay pottery show twodecker boats sporting raised stem and sternposts with carved serpent heads similar to the dragons gracing Viking longships.\"\n\n\"So there is no doubt they could have transported tons of gold and silver long distances across the sea?\"\n\n\"No doubt at all, Admiral.\" Yaeger tapped the pointer on another line that traced the voyage of Naymlap's treasure fleet. \"From point of departure, north to their destination, the voyage took eighty-six days. No short cruise for primitive ships.\"\n\n\"Any chance they might have headed south?\" asked Giordino.\n\nYaeger shook his head. \"My computer discovered that one coil of knots represented the four basic points of direction, with the knot for north at the top and the knot for south at the bottom. East and west were represented by subordinate strands.\"\n\n\"And their final landfall?\" Pitt prodded.\n\n\"The tricky part. Never having the opportunity to clock a balsa raft under sail over a measured nautical mile, estimating the fleet's speed through water was strictly guesswork. I won't go into it now, you can read my full report later. But Brunhilda, in calculating the length of the voyage, did a masterful job of projecting the currents and wind during 1533.\"\n\nPitt put his hands behind his head and leaned his chair back on two legs. \"Let me guess. They came ashore somewhere in the upper reaches of the Sea of Cortez, also known as the Gulf of California, a vast cleft of water separating the Mexican mainland from Baja California.\"\n\n\"On an island as you and I already discussed,\" Yaeger added. \"It took the crews of the ships twelve days to stash the treasure in a cave, a large one according to the dimensions recorded on the quipu. An opening, which I translated as being a tunnel, runs from the highest point of the island down to the treasure cave.\"\n\n\"You can conclude all this from a series of knots?\" asked Sandecker, incredulous.\n\nYaeger nodded. \"And much more. A crimson strand represented Huascar, a black knot the day of his execution at the order of Atahualpa, whose attached strand was purple. General Naymlap's is a dark turquoise. Brunhilda and I can also give you a complete tally of the hoard. Believe me when I say the bulk sum is far and away more than what has been salvaged from sunken treasure ships during the last hundred years.\"\n\nSandecker looked skeptical. \"I hope you're including the Atocha, the Edinburgh, and the Central America in that claim.\"\n\n\"And many more.\" Yaeger smiled confidently.\n\nGunn looked puzzled. \"An island, you say, somewhere in the Sea of Cortez?\"\n\n\"So where exactly is the treasure?\" said Giordino, cutting to the heart of the lecture.\n\n\"Besides in a cavern on an island in the Sea of Cortez,\" summed up Sandecker.\n\n\"Sung to the tune of 'My Darlin' Clementine,' \" Pitt jested.\n\n\"Looks to me,\" Giordino sighed, \"like we've got a hell of a lot of islands to consider. The Gulf is loaded with them.\"\n\n\"We don't have to concern ourselves with any island below the twenty-eighth parallel.\" Yaeger circled a section of the map with his pointer. \"As Dirk guessed, I figure Naymlap's fleet sailed into the Gulf's upper reaches.\"\n\nGiordino was ever the pragmatist. \"You still haven't told us where to dig.\"\n\n\"On an island that rises out of the water like a pinnacle, or as Brunhilda's translation of the quipu suggests, the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco.\" Yaeger threw on an enlarged slide of the sea between Baja California and the mainland of Mexico on the screen. \"A factor that narrows the search zone considerably.\"\n\nPitt leaned forward, studying the chart on the screen. \"The central islands of Angel de la Guarda and Tiburon stretch between forty and sixty kilometers. They each have several prominent pinnaclelike peaks.\n\nYou'll have to cut it even closer, Hiram.\"\n\n\"Any chance Brunhilda missed something?\" asked Gunn.\n\n\"Or drew the wrong meaning from the knots?\" said Giordino, casually pulling one of Sandecker's specially made cigars from his breast pocket and igniting the end.\n\nThe admiral glared, but said nothing. He had long ago given up trying to figure out how Giordino got them, certainly not from his private stock. Sandecker kept a tight inventory of his humidor.\n\n\"I admit to a knowledge gap,\" Yaeger conceded. \"As I said earlier, the computer and I decoded ninety percent of the quipu's coils and knots. The other ten percent defies clear meaning. Two coils threw us off the mark. One made a vague reference to what Brunhilda interpreted as some kind of god or demon carved from stone. The second made no geological sense. Something about a river running through the treasure cave.\"\n\nGunn tapped his ballpoint pen on the table. \"I've never heard of a river running under an island.\"\n\n\"I haven't either,\" agreed Yaeger. \"That's why I hesitated to mention it.\"\n\n\"Must be seepage from the water in the Gulf,\" said Pitt.\n\nGunn nodded. \"The only logical answer.\"\n\nPitt looked up at Yaeger. \"You couldn't find any reference to landmarks?\"\n\n\"Sorry, I struck out. For a while there I entertained hopes the demon god might hold a key to the location of the cave,\" answered Yaeger. \"The knots on that particular coil seemed to signify a measurement of distance. I have the impression it indicates a number of paces inside a tunnel leading from the demon to the cave. But the copper strands had deteriorated, and Brunhilda couldn't reconstruct a coherent meaning.\"\n\n\"What sort of demon?\" asked Sandecker.\n\n\"I don't have the slightest idea.\"\n\n\"A signpost leading to the treasure maybe?\" mused Gunn.\n\n\"Or a sinister deity to scare off thieves,\" suggested Pitt.\n\nSandecker rapped his cigar on the lip of a glass cup, knocking off along ash. \"A sound theory if the elements and vandals haven't taken their toll over four hundred years, leaving a sculpture that can't be distinguished from an ordinary rock.\"\n\n\"To sum up,\" said Pitt, \"we're searching for a steep outcropping of rock or pinnacle on an island in the Sea of Cortez with a stone carving of a demon on top of it.\"\n\n\"A generalization,\" Yaeger said, sitting down at the table. \"But that pretty well summarizes what I could glean out of the quipu.\"\n\nGunn removed his glasses, held them up to the light and checked for smudges. \"Any hope at all that Bill Straight can restore the deteriorated coils?\"\n\n\"I'll ask him to begin work on them,\" answered Yaeger.\n\n\"He'll be diligently laboring over them within the hour,\" Sandecker assured him.\n\n\"If Straight's conservation experts can reconstruct enough of the knots and strands for Brunhilda to analyze, I think I can promise to add enough data to put you within spitting distance of the tunnel leading to the treasure cave.\"\n\n\"You'd better,\" Pitt advised, \"because I have ambitions in life other thin going around Mexico digging empty holes.\"\n\nGunn turned toward Sandecker. \"Well, what do you say, Admiral? Is it a go?\"\n\nThe feisty little chief of NUMA stared at the map on the screen. Finally, he sighed and muttered, \"I want a proposal detailing the search project and its cost when I walk in my office tomorrow morning.\n\nConsider yourselves on paid vacation for the next three weeks. And not a word outside this room. If the news media get wind that NUMA is conducting a treasure hunt, I'll catch all kinds of hell from Congress.\"\n\n\"And if we find Huascar's treasure?\" asked Pitt.\n\n\"Then we'll all be impoverished heroes.\"\n\nYaeger missed the point. \"Impoverished?\"\n\n\"What the admiral is implying,\" said Pitt, \"is that the finders will not be the keepers.\"\n\nSandecker nodded. \"Cry a river, gentlemen, but if you are successful in finding the hoard, every troy ounce of it will probably be turned over to the government of Peru.\"\n\nPitt and Giordino exchanged knowing grins, each reading the other's mind, but it was Giordino who spoke first.\n\n\"I'm beginning to think there is a lesson somewhere in all this.\"\n\nSandecker looked at him uneasily. \"What lesson is that?\"\n\nGiordino studied his cigar as he answered. \"The treasure would probably be better off if we left it where it is.\"\n\nGaskill lay stretched out in bed, a cold cup of coffee and a dish with a half-eaten bologna sandwich beside him on the bed stand. The blanket warming his huge bulk was strewn with typewritten pages. He raised the cup and sipped the coffee before reading the next page of a book-length manuscript. The title was The Thief Who Was Never Caught. It was a nonfiction account of the search for the Specter, written by a retired Scotland Yard inspector by the name of Nathan Pembroke. The inspector spent nearly five decades digging through international police archives, tracking down every lead, regardless of its reliability, in his relentless hunt.\n\nPembroke, hearing of Gaskill's interest in the elusive art thief from the nineteen twenties and thirties, sent him the yellowed, dog-eared pages of the manuscript he had painstakingly compiled, one that had been rejected by over thirty editors in as many years. Gaskill could not put it down. He was totally absorbed in the masterful investigative work by Pembroke, who was now in his late eighties. The Englishman had been the lead investigator on the Specter's last known heist, which took place in London in 1939. The stolen art consisted of a Joshua Reynolds, a pair of Constables, and three Turners. Like all the other brilliantly executed thefts by the Specter, the case was never solved and none of the art was recovered. Pembroke, stubbornly insisting there was no such thing as a perfect crime, became obsessed with discovering the Specter's identity.\n\nFor half a century his obsession never dimmed, and he refused to give up the chase. Only a few months before his health failed, and he was forced to enter a nursing home, did he make a breakthrough that enabled him to write the end to his superbly narrated account.\n\nA great pity, Gaskill thought, that no editor thought it worth publishing. He could think of at least ten famous art thefts that might have been solved if The Thief Who Was Never Caught had been printed and distributed.\n\nGaskill finished the last page an hour before dawn. He lay back on his pillow staring at the ceiling, fitting the pieces into neat little slots, until the sun's rays crept above the windowsill of his bedroom in the town of Cicero just outside Chicago. Suddenly, he felt as if a logjam had broken free and was rushing into open water.\n\nGaskill smiled like a man who held a winning lottery ticket as he reached for the phone. He dialed a number from memory and fluffed the pillows so he could sit up while waiting for an answer.\n\nA very sleepy voice croaked, \"Francis Ragsdale here.\"\n\n\"Gaskill.\"\n\n\"Jesus, Dave. Why so early?\"\n\n\"Who's that?\" came the slurred voice of Ragsdale's wife over the receiver.\n\n\"Dave Gaskill.\"\n\n\"Doesn't he know it's Sunday?\"\n\n\"Sorry to wake you,\" said Gaskill, \"but I have good news that couldn't wait.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Ragsdale mumbled through a yawn. \"Let's hear it.\"\n\n\"I can tell you the name of the Specter.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Our favorite art thief.\"\n\nRagsdale came fully awake. \"The Specter? You made an I.D.?\"\n\n\"Not me. A retired inspector from Scotland Yard.\"\n\n\"A limey made him?\"\n\n\"He spent a lifetime writing an entire book on the Specter. Some of it's conjecture but he's compiled some pretty convincing evidence.\"\n\n\"What does he have?\"\n\nGaskill cleared his throat for effect. \"The name of the greatest art thief in history was Mansfield Zolar.\"\n\n\"Say again?\"\n\n\"Mansfield Zolar. Mean anything to you?\"\n\n\"You're running me around the park.\"\n\n\"Swear on my badge.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid to ask--\"\n\n\"Don't bother,\" Gaskill interrupted. \"I know what you're thinking. He was the father.\"\n\n\"Good lord, Zolar International. This is like finding the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle that fell on matching carpet. The Zolars, or whatever cockamamie names they call themselves. It all begins to fit.\"\n\n\"Like bread crumbs to the front door.\"\n\n\"You were right during lunch the other day. The Specter did sire a dynasty of rotten apples who carried on the tradition.\"\n\n\"We've had Zolar International under surveillance on at least four occasions that I can recall, but it always came up clean. I never guessed a connection to the legendary Specter.\"\n\n\"Same with the bureau,\" said Ragsdale. \"We've always suspected they were behind just about every seven figure art and artifact theft that goes down, but we've been unable to find enough evidence to indict any one of them.\"\n\n\"You have my sympathy. No evidence of stolen goods, no search warrant or arrest.\"\n\n\"Little short of a miracle how an underground business as vast as the Zolars' can operate on such a widespread scale and never leave a clue.\"\n\n\"They don't make mistakes,\" said Gaskill.\n\n\"Have you tried to get an undercover agent inside?\" asked Ragsdale.\n\n\"Twice. They were wise almost immediately. If I wasn't certain my people are solid, I'd have sworn they were tipped off.\"\n\n\"We've never been able to penetrate them either. And the collectors who buy the hot art are just as tight-lipped and cautious.\"\n\n\"And yet we both know the Zolars launder stolen artifacts like drug dealers launder money.\"\n\nRagsdale was silent for a few moments. Finally he said, \"I think it's about time we stop meeting for lunch to exchange notes and start working together on a full-time basis.\"\n\n\"I like your style,\" Gaskill acknowledged. \"I'll start the ball rolling on my end by submitting a proposal for a joint task force to my superior as soon as I hit the office.\"\n\n\"I'll do likewise on my end.\"\n\n\"Why don't we set up a combined meeting with our teams, say Thursday morning?\"\n\n\"Sounds like a winner,\" agreed Ragsdale.\n\n\"That should give us time to lay the initial groundwork.\"\n\n\"Speaking of the Specter, did you track down the stolen Diego Riveras? You mentioned over lunch that you might have a lead on them.\"\n\n\"Still working on the case,\" Gaskill replied. \"But it's beginning to look like the Riveras went to Japan and ended up in a private collection.\"\n\n\"What do you want to bet the Zolars set up the buy?\"\n\n\"If they did, there will be no trail. They use too many front organizations and intermediaries to handle the sale. We're talking the superstars of crime. Since old Mansfield Zolar pulled off his first heist, no one in the family has ever been touched by you, by me, by any other law enforcement agency in the world.\n\nThey've never seen the inside of a courtroom. They're so lily white it's disgusting.\"\n\n\"We'll take them down this time,\" Ragsdale said encouragingly.\n\n\"They're not the type to make mistakes we can use to our advantage,\" said Gaskill.\n\n\"Maybe, maybe not. But I've always had the feeling that an outsider, someone not directly connected with you, me, or the Zolars, will come along and short-circuit their system.\"\n\n\"Whoever he is, I hope he shows up quick. I'd hate to see the Zolars retire to Brazil before we can drop the axe on their necks.\"\n\n\"Now that we know Papa was the founder of the operation, and how he operated, we'll have a better idea of what to look for.\"\n\n\"Before we ring off,\" said Ragsdale, \"tell me, did you ever tie an expert translator to the golden mummy suit that slipped through your hands?\"\n\nGaskill winced. He didn't like to be reminded. \"All known experts on such glyphs have been accounted for except two. A pair of anthropologists from Harvard, Dr. Henry Moore and his wife.\n\nThey've dropped from sight. None of their fellow professors or neighbors have a clue to their whereabouts.\"\n\nRagsdale laughed. \"Be nice to catch them playing cozy with one of the Zolars.\"\n\n\"I'm working on it.\"\n\n\"Good luck.\"\n\n\"Talk to you soon,\" said Gaskill.\n\n\"I'll call you later this morning.\"\n\n\"Make it this afternoon. I have an interrogation beginning at nine o'clock.\"\n\n\"Better yet,\" said Ragsdale, \"you call me when you have something in the works for a joint conference.\"\n\n\"I'll do that.\"\n\nGaskill hung up smiling. He had no intention of going into the office this morning. Getting agency sanction for a joint task force with the FBI would be more complicated on Ragsdale's end than Gaskill's.\n\nAfter reading all night, he was going to enjoy a nice, mind-settling sleep.\n\nHe loved it when a case that died from lack of evidence one minute abruptly popped back to life again. He began to see things more clearly. It was a nice feeling to be in control. Motivation stimulated by incentive was a wonderful thing.\n\nWhere had he heard that, he wondered. A Dale Carnegie class? A Customs Service policy instructor?\n\nBefore it came back to him, he was sound asleep.\n\nPedro Vincente set down his beautifully restored DC-3 transport onto the runway of the airport at Harlingen, Texas. He taxied the fifty-five-year-old aircraft down to the front of the U.S. Customs Service hangar and shut down the two 1200-horsepower, Pratt & Whitney engines.\n\nTwo uniformed Customs agents were waiting when Vincente opened the passenger door and stepped to the ground. The taller of the two, with red hair mussed by a breeze and a face full of freckles, held a clipboard above his eyes to shield them from the bright Texas sun. The other was holding a beagle by a leash.\n\n\"Mr. Vincente?\" the agent asked politely. \"Pedro Vincente?\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm Vincente.\"\n\n\"We appreciate your alerting us of your arrival into the United States.\"\n\n\"Always happy to cooperate with your government,\" Vincente said. He would have offered to shake hands, but he knew from previous border crossings the agents steered clear of bodily contact. He handed the redheaded agent a copy of his flight plan.\n\nThe agent slipped the paper onto his clipboard and examined the entries while his partner lifted the beagle into the aircraft to sniff for drugs. \"Your departure point was Nicoya, Costa Rica?\"\n\n\"That is correct.\"\n\n\"And your destination is Wichita, Kansas?\"\n\n\"My ex-wife and my children live there.\"\n\n\"And the purpose of your visit?\"\n\nVincente shrugged. \"I fly from my home once a month to see my children. I'll be flying home the day after tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Your occupation is 'farmer'?\"\n\n\"Yes, I grow coffee beans.\"\n\n\"I hope that's all you grow,\" said the agent with a tight-lipped grin.\n\n\"Coffee is the only crop I need to make a comfortable living,\" said Vincente indignantly.\n\n\"May I see your passport, please?\"\n\nThe routine never varied. Though Vincente often drew the same two agents, they always acted as if he were a tourist on his first visit to the States. The agent eyeballed the photo inside, comparing the straight, slicked back black hair, partridge brown eyes, smooth olive complexion, and sharp nose. The height and weight showed a short man on the thin side whose age was forty-four.\n\nVincente was a fastidious dresser. His clothes looked as if they came right out of GQ-- designer shirt, slacks, and green alpaca sport coat with a silk bandanna tied around his neck. The Customs agent thought he looked like a fancy mambo dancer.\n\nFinally the agent finished his appraisal of the passport and smiled officially. \"Would you mind waiting in our office, Mr. Vincente, while we search your aircraft? I believe you're familiar with the procedure.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" He held up a pair of Spanish magazines. \"I always come prepared to spend some time.\"\n\nThe agent stared admiringly at the DC-3. \"It's a pleasure to examine such a great old aircraft. I bet she flies as good as she looks.\"\n\n\"She began life as a commercial airliner for TWA shortly before the war. I found her hauling cargo for a mining company in Guatemala. Bought her on the spot and spent a goodly sum having her restored.\"\n\nHe was halfway to the office when he suddenly turned and shouted to the agent, \"May I borrow your phone to call the fuel truck? I don't have enough in my tanks to make Wichita.\"\n\n\"Sure, just check with the agent behind the desk.\"\n\nAn hour later, Vincente was winging across Texas on his way to Wichita. Beside him in the copilot's seat were four briefcases stuffed with over six million dollars, smuggled on board just prior to takeoff by one of the two men who drove the refueling truck.\n\nAfter a thorough search of the plane, and not finding the slightest trace of drugs or other illegal contraband, the Customs agents concluded Vincente was clean. They had investigated him years before and were satisfied he was a respected Costa Rican businessman who made a vast fortune growing coffee beans. It was true that Pedro Vincente owned the second largest coffee plantation in Costa Rica. It was also true he had amassed ten times what his coffee plantation made him as he was also the genius behind a highly successful drug smuggling operation known as Julio Juan Carlos.\n\nLike the Zolars and their criminal empire, Vincente directed his smuggling operation from a distance.\n\nDay-to-day activities were left to his lieutenants, none of whom had a clue to his real identity.\n\nVincente actually had a former wife who was living with his four children on a large farm outside of Wichita. The farm was a gift from him after she begged for a divorce. An airstrip was built on the farm so he could fly in and out from Costa Rica to visit the children while purchasing stolen art and illegal antiquities from the Zolar family. Customs and Drug Enforcement agents were more concerned about what came into the country rather than what went out.\n\nIt was late afternoon when Vincente touched down on the narrow strip in the middle of a corn field. A golden-tan jet aircraft with a purple stripe running along its side was parked at one end. A large blue tent with an awning extending from the front had been erected beside the jet. A man in a white linen suit was seated under the awning beside a table set with a picnic lunch. Vincente waved from the cockpit, quickly ran through his postflight checklist, and exited the DC-3. He carried three of the briefcases, leaving one behind.\n\nThe man sitting at the table rose from his chair, came forward and embraced Vincente. \"Pedro, always a delight to see you.\"\n\n\"Joseph, old friend, you don't know how much I look forward to our little encounters.\"\n\n\"Believe me when I say I'd rather deal with an honorable man like you than all my other clients put together.\"\n\nVincente grinned. \"Fattening the lamb with flattery before the slaughter?\"\n\nZolar laughed easily. \"No, no, not until we've had a few glasses of good champagne to make you mellow.\"\n\nVincente followed Joseph Zolar under the awning and sat down as a young Latin American serving girl poured the champagne and offered hors d'oeuvres. \"Have you brought choice merchandise for me?\"\n\n\"Here's to a mutual transaction that profits good friends,\" Zolar said as they clinked glasses. Then he nodded. \"I have personally selected for your consideration the rarest of rare artifacts from the Incas of Peru. I've also brought extremely valuable religious objects from American Southwest Indians. I guarantee objects that have just arrived from the Andes will lift your matchless collection of pre-Columbian art above that of any museum in the world.\"\n\n\"I'm anxious to see them.\"\n\n\"My staff has them displayed inside the tent for your pleasure,\" said Zolar.\n\nPeople who begin to collect scarce and uncommon objects soon become addicts, enslaved by their need to acquire and accumulate what no one else can own. Pedro Vincente was one of the brotherhood who was driven constantly to expand his collection, one that few people knew existed. He was also one of the lucky ones who possessed secret, untaxed funds that could be laundered to satisfy his craving.\n\nVincente had purchased 70 percent of his cherished collectibles from Zolar over twenty years. It did not bother him in the least that he often paid five or ten times the true value of the objects, especially since most of them were stolen goods. The relationship was advantageous to both. Vincente laundered his drug money, and Zolar used the cash to secretly purchase and expand his ever-increasing inventory of illegal art.\n\n\"What makes the Andean artifacts so valuable?\" asked Vincente, as they finished off a second glass of champagne.\n\n\"They are Chachapoyan.\"\n\n\"I've never seen Chachapoyan artwork.\"\n\n\"Few have,\" replied Zolar. \"What you are about to view was recently excavated from the lost City of the Dead high in the Andes.\"\n\n\"I hope you're not about to show me a few potsherds and burial urns,\" said Vincente, his anticipation beginning to dwindle. \"No authentic Chachapoyan artifacts have ever come on the market.\"\n\nZolar swept back the tent flap with a dramatic flourish. \"Feast your eyes on the greatest collection of Chachapoyan art ever assembled.\"\n\nIn his unbridled excitement, Vincente did not notice a small glass case on a stand in one corner of the tent. He walked directly to three long tables with black velvet coverings set up in the shape of a horseshoe. One side table held only textiles, the other ceramics. The center table was set up like an exhibit in a Fifth Avenue jewelry store. The extensive array of precious handcrafted splendor stunned Vincente. He had never seen so many pre-Columbian antiquities so rich in rarity and beauty displayed in one place.\n\n\"This is unbelievable!\" he gasped. \"You have truly outdone yourself.\"\n\n\"No dealer anywhere has ever had his hands on such masterworks.\"\n\nVincente went from piece to piece, touching and examining each with a critical eye. Just to feel the embroidered textiles and gold ornaments with their gemstones took Vincente's breath away. It seemed utterly incongruous that such a hoard of wealth was sitting in a corn field in Kansas. At last he finally murmured in awe, \"So this is Chachapoyan art.\"\n\n\"Every piece original and fully authenticated.\"\n\n\"These treasures all came from graves?\"\n\n\"Yes, tombs of royalty and the wealthy.\"\n\n\"Magnificent.\"\n\n\"See anything you like?\" Zolar asked facetiously.\n\n\"Is there more?\" asked Vincente as the excitement wore off and he began to turn his mind toward acquisition.\n\n\"What you see is everything I have that is Chachapoyan.\"\n\n\"You're not holding back any major pieces?\"\n\n\"Absolutely not,\" Zolar said with righteous resentment. \"You have first crack at the entire collection. I will not sell it piecemeal. I don't have to tell you, my friend, there are five other collectors waiting in the wings for such an opportunity.\"\n\n\"I'll give you four million dollars for the lot.\"\n\n\"I appreciate the richness of your initial offer. But you know me well enough to understand I never haggle. There is one price, and one price only.\"\n\n\"Which is?\"\n\n\"Six million.\"\n\nVincente cleared several artifacts, making an open space on one table. He opened the briefcases side by side, one at a time. All were filled with closely packed stacks of high denomination bills. \"I only brought five million.\"\n\nZolar was not fooled for an instant. \"A great pity I have to pass. I can't think of anyone I'd rather have sold the collection to.\"\n\n\"But I am your best customer,\" complained Vincente.\n\n\"I can't deny that,\" said Zolar. \"We are like brothers. I am the only man who knows of your secret activities, and you are the only one outside my family who knows mine. Why do you put me through this ordeal every time we deal? You should know better by now.\"\n\nSuddenly Vincente laughed and gave a typically Latin shrug. \"What is the use? You know I have more money than I can ever spend. Having the artifacts in my possession makes me a happy man. Forgive my bargaining habits. Paying retail was never a tradition in my family.\"\n\n\"Your reserve supply of cash is still in your aircraft, of course.\"\n\nWithout a word, Vincente exited the tent and returned in a few minutes with the fourth briefcase. He set it beside the others and opened it. \"Six million, five hundred thousand. You said you have some rare religious objects from the American Southwest. Are they included too?\"\n\n\"For the extra five hundred thousand you can have them,\" answered Zolar. \"You'll find the Indian religious idols under the glass case in the corner.\"\n\nVincente walked over and removed the glass dust cover. He stared at the strangely shaped gnarled figures. These were no ordinary ceremonial idols. Although they looked as if they had been carved and painted by a young child, he was aware of their significance from long experience of collecting objects from the American Southwest.\n\n\"Hopi?\" he asked.\n\n\"No, Montolo. Very old. Very important in their ceremonial rituals.\"\n\nVincente reached down and began to pick one up for a closer look. His heart skipped the next three beats and he felt an icy shroud fall over him. The fingers of his hand did not feel as if they came in contact with the hardened root of a long-dead cottonwood tree. The idol felt more like the soft flesh of a woman's arm. Vincente could have sworn he heard it utter an audible moan.\n\n\"Did you hear that?\" he asked, thrusting the idol back in the case as if it had burned his hand.\n\nZolar peered at him questioningly. \"I didn't hear anything.\"\n\nVincente looked like a man having a nightmare. \"Please, my friend, let us finish our business, and then you must leave. I do not want these idols on my property.\"\n\n\"Does that mean you don't wish to buy them?\" Zolar asked, surprised.\n\nNo, no. Spirits are alive in those idols. I can feel their presence.\"\n\n\"Superstitious nonsense.\"\n\nVincente grasped Zolar by the shoulders, his eyes pleading. \"Destroy them,\" he begged. \"Destroy them or they will surely destroy you.\"\n\nUnder an Indian summer sun, two hundred prime examples of automotive builders' art sat on the green grass of East Potomac Park and glittered like spangles under a theatrical spotlight.\n\nStaged for people who appreciated the timeless beauty and exacting craftsmanship of coach-built automobiles, and those who simply had a love affair with old cars, the annual Capital Concours de Beaux Moteurcar was primarily a benefit to raise money for child abuse treatment centers around metropolitan Washington. During the weekend the event was held, fifty thousand enthusiastic old-car buffs swarmed into the park to gaze lovingly at the Duesenbergs, Auburns, Cords, Bugattis, and Packards, products of automakers long since gone.\n\nThe atmosphere was heavy with nostalgia. The crowds that strolled the exhibit area and admired the immaculate design and flawless detailing could but wonder about an era and lifestyle when the well-to-do ordered a chassis and engine from a factory and then had the body custom built to their own particular tastes. The younger onlookers dreamed of owning an exotic car someday while those over the age of sixty-five fondly recalled seeing them driven through the towns and cities of their youth.\n\nThe cars were classified by year, body style, and country of origin. Trophies were awarded to the best of their class and plaques to the runners-up. \"Best of show\" was the most coveted award. A few of the wealthier owners spent hundreds of thousands of dollars restoring their pride and joy to a level of perfection far beyond the car's original condition on the day it rolled out of the factory."
            },
            {
                "title": "Unlike the more conservatively dressed owners of other cars, Pitt sat in an old-fashioned canvas lawn chair wearing a flowered Hawaiian aloha shirt, white shorts, and sandals. Behind him stood a gleaming, dark blue 1936 Pierce Arrow berline (sedan body with a divider window) that was hitched to a 1936",
                "text": "Pierce Arrow Travelodge house trailer painted a matching color.\n\nIn between answering questions from passersby about the car and trailer, he had his nose buried in a thick boater's guide to the Sea of Cortez. Occasionally he jotted notes on a long pad of legal notepaper, yellow with blue-ruled lines. None of the islands listed and illustrated in the guide matched the steeply sided slopes of the monolithic outcropping that Yaeger had gleaned out of the Drake quipu. Only a few showed sheer walls. A number of them inclined sharply from the surrounding water, but instead of rising in the shape of a Chinese hat or a Mexican sombrero, they flattened out into mesas.\n\nGiordino, wearing baggy khaki shorts that dropped to just above his knees and a T-shirt advertising Alkali Sam's Tequila, approached the Pierce Arrow through the crowd. He was accompanied by Loren, who looked sensational in a turquoise jumpsuit. She was carrying a picnic basket while Giordino balanced an ice chest on one shoulder.\n\nI hope you're hungry,\" she said brightly to Pitt. \"We bought half ownership in a delicatessen.\"\n\n\"What she really means,\" Giordino sighed as he set the ice chest on the grass, \"is we loaded up on enough food to feed a crew of lumberjacks.\"\n\nPitt rolled forward out of the lawn chair and stared at a sentence printed across Giordino's shirt. \"What does that say about Alkali Sam's Tequila?\"\n\n\"If your eyes are still open,\" Giordino recited, \"it ain't Alkali Sam's.\"\n\nPitt laughed and pointed toward the open door of the sixty-two-year-old house trailer. \"Why don't we step into my mobile palace and get out of the sun?\"\n\nGiordino hoisted the ice chest, carried it inside, and set it on a kitchen counter. Loren followed and began spreading the contents of the picnic basket across the table of a booth that could be made into a bed. \"For something built during the Depression,\" she said, gazing at the wooden interior with leaded glass windows in the cupboards, \"it looks surprisingly modern.\"\n\n\"Pierce Arrow was ahead of its time,\" Pitt explained. \"They went into the travel trailer business to supplement dwindling profits from the sales of their cars. After two years, they quit. The Depression killed them. They manufactured three models, one longer and one shorter than this one. Except for updating the stove and the refrigerator, I restored it to original condition.\"\n\n\"I've got Corona, Coors, or Cheurlin,\" said Giordino. \"Name your poison.\"\n\n\"What kind of beer is Cheurlin?\" asked Loren.\n\n\"Domaine Cheurlin Extra Dry is a brand name for a bubbly. I bought it in Elephant Butte.\"\n\n\"A champagne from where?\"\n\n\"New Mexico,\" Pitt answered. \"An excellent sparkling wine. Al and I stumbled onto the winery during a canoe trip down the Rio Grande.\"\n\n\"Okay.\" Loren smiled, holding up a flute-stemmed glass. \"Fill it up.\"\n\nPitt smiled and nodded at the glass. \"You cheated. You came prepared.\"\n\n\"I've hung around you long enough to know your solemn secret.\" She fetched a second glass and passed it to him. \"For a price I won't tell the world the big, dauntless daredevil of the dismal depths prefers champagne over beer.\"\n\n\"I drink them both,\" Pitt protested.\n\n\"If she tells the boys down at the local saloon,\" said Giordino in a serious tone, \"you'll be laughed out of town.\"\n\n\"What is it going to cost me?\" Pitt asked, acting subdued.\n\nLoren gave him a very sexy look indeed. \"We'll negotiate that little matter later tonight.\"\n\nGiordino nodded at the open Sea of Cortez boating book. \"Find any likely prospects?\"\n\n\"Out of nearly a hundred islands in and around the Gulf that rise at least fifty meters above the sea, I've narrowed it down to two probables and four possibles. The rest don't fit the geological pattern.\"\n\n\"All in the northern end?\"\n\nPitt nodded. \"I didn't consider any below the twenty-eighth parallel.\"\n\n\"Can I see where you're going to search?\" asked Loren, as she laid out a variety of cold cuts, cheeses, smoked fish, a loaf of sourdough bread, coleslaw, and down-home potato salad.\n\nPitt walked to a closet, pulled out a long roll of paper and spread it on the kitchen counter. \"An enhanced picture of the Gulf. I've circled the islands that come closest to matching Yaeger's translation of the quipu.\"\n\nLoren and Giordino put down their drinks and examined the photo, taken from a geophysical orbiting satellite, that revealed the upper reaches of the Sea of Cortez in astonishing detail. Pitt handed Loren a large magnifying glass.\n\n\"The definition is unbelievable,\" said Loren, peering through the glass at the tiny islands.\n\n\"See anything resembling a rock that doesn't look natural?\" asked Giordino.\n\n\"The enhancement is good, but not that good,\" answered Pitt.\n\nLoren hovered over the islands Pitt had circled. Then she looked up at him. \"I assume you intend to make an aerial survey of the most promising sites?\"\n\n\"The next step in the process of elimination.\"\n\n\"By plane?\"\n\n\"Helicopter.\"\n\n\"Looks to me like a pretty large area to cover by helicopter,\" said Loren. \"What do you use for a base?\"\n\n\"An old ferryboat.\"\n\n\"A ferry?\" Loren said, surprised.\n\n\"Actually a car/passenger ferry that originally plied San Francisco Bay until 1957. She was later sold and used until 1962 by the Mexicans from Guaymas across the Gulf to Santa Rosalia. Then she was taken out of service. Rudi Gunn chartered her for a song.\"\n\n\"We have the admiral to thank,\" Giordino grunted. \"He's tighter than the lid on a rusty pickle jar.\"\n\n\"1962?\" Loren muttered, shaking her head. \"That was thirty-six years ago. She's either a derelict by now or in a museum.\"\n\n\"According to Rudi she's still used as a work boat,\" said Pitt, \"and has a top deck large enough to accommodate a helicopter. He assures me that she'll make a good platform to launch reconnaissance flights.\"\n\n\"When search operations cease with daylight,\" Giordino continued to explain, \"the ferry will cruise overnight to the next range of islands on Dirk's survey list. This approach will save us a considerable amount of flight time.\"\n\nLoren handed Pitt a plate and silverware. \"Sounds like you've got everything pretty well under control.\n\nWhat happens when you find what looks like a promising treasure site?\"\n\n\"We'll worry about putting together an excavation operation after we study the geology of the island,\"\n\nPitt answered.\n\n\"Help yourself to the feast,\" said Loren.\n\nGiordino wasted no time. He began building a sandwich of monumental proportions. \"You lay out a good spread, lady.\"\n\n\"Beats slaving over a hot stove.\" Loren laughed. \"What about permits? You can't go running around digging for treasure in Mexico without permission from government authorities.\n\nPitt laid a hefty portion of mortadella on a slice of sourdough bread. \"Admiral Sandecker thought it best to wait. We don't want to advertise our objective. If word got out that we had a line on the biggest bonanza in history, a thousand treasure hunters would descend on us like locusts. Mexican officials would throw us out of the country in a mad grab to keep the hoard for their own government. And Congress would give NUMA hell for spending American tax dollars on a treasure hunt in another country. No, the quieter, the better.\"\n\n\"We can't afford to be shot down before we've had half a chance of making the find,\" said Giordino in an unusual display of seriousness.\n\nLoren was silent while she ladled a spoonful of potato salad onto her plate, then asked, \"Why don't you have someone on your team as insurance in the event local Mexican officials become suspicious and start asking questions?\"\n\nPitt looked at her. \"You mean a public relations expert?\"\n\nNo, a bona fide, card-carrying member of the United States Congress.\"\n\nPitt stared into those sensual violet eyes. \"You?\"\n\n\"Why not? The Speaker of the House has called for a recess next week. My aides can cover for me.\n\nI'd love to get out of Washington for a few days and see a piece of Mexico.\"\n\n\"Frankly,\" said Giordino, \"I think it's a stellar concept.\" He gave Loren a wink and a toothy smile.\n\n\"Dirk is always more congenial when you're around.\"\n\nPitt put his arm around Loren. \"If something should go wrong, if this thing blows up in our faces while we're in foreign territory and you're along for the ride, the scandal could ruin your political career.\"\n\nShe looked across the table at him brazenly. \"So the voters throw me out on the streets. Then I'd have no choice but to marry you.\"\n\n\"A fate worse than listening to a presidential speech,\" said Giordino, \"but a good idea just the same.\"\n\n\"Somehow I can't picture us walking down the aisle of the Washington Cathedral,\" Pitt said thoughtfully, \"and then setting up housekeeping in some brick townhouse in Georgetown.\"\n\nLoren had hoped for a different reaction, but she knew that Pitt was no ordinary man. She recalled their first meeting at a lawn party nearly ten years before given by some forgotten former secretary of environment. There was a magnetism that had drawn her to him. He was not handsome in the movie star sense, but there was a masculine, no-nonsense air about him that awakened a desire she hadn't experienced with other men. He was tall and lean. That helped. As a congresswoman she had known many wealthy and powerful men, several of them devilishly good-looking. But here was a man who wore the reputation of an adventurer comfortably and cared nothing for power or fame. And rightly so. He was the genuine article.\n\nThere were no strings attached to their off-and-on ten-year affair. He had known other women, she had known other men, and yet their bond still held firm. Any thought of marriage had seemed remote.\n\nEach was already married to his or her job. But the years had mellowed their relationship, and as a woman Loren knew her biological clock did not have too many ticks left if she wished to have children.\n\n\"It doesn't have to be like that,\" she said finally.\n\nHe sensed her feeling. \"No,\" he said affectionately, \"we can make several major improvements.\"\n\nShe gave him a peculiar look. \"Are you proposing to me?\"\n\nA quiet look deepened his green eyes. \"Let's just say I was making a suggestion about things to come.\"\n\n\"Can you put us closer to the dominant peak?\" Sarason asked his brother Charles Oxley, who was at the controls of a small amphibious flying boat. \"The crest of the lower one is too sharp for our requirements.\"\n\n\"Do you see something?\"\n\nSarason peered through binoculars out a side window of the aircraft. \"The island has definite possibilities, but it would help if I knew what sort of landmark to look for.\"\n\nOxley banked the twin turboprop-engined Baffin CZ410 for a better view of Isla Danzante, a steep-sided, 5-square-kilometer (3-square-mile) rock formation that jutted 400 meters (1312 feet) above the Sea of Cortez just south of the popular resort town of Loreto. \"Has the right look about it,\" he commented, staring down. \"Two small beaches to land boats. The slopes are honeycombed with small caves. What do you say, brother?\"\n\nSarason turned and looked at the man in the rear passenger seat. \"I say the esteemed Professor Moore is still holding out on us.\"\n\n\"You'll be alerted to the proper site when I see it,\" Moore said curtly.\n\n\"I say we throw the little bastard out the hatch and watch him try to fly,\" Sarason snapped harshly.\n\nMoore crossed his arms smugly. \"You do, and you'll never find the treasure.\"\n\n\"I'm getting damned sick of hearing that.\"\n\n\"What about Isla Danzante?\" asked Oxley. \"Has it got the right features?\"\n\nMoore snatched the binoculars from Sarason without asking and peered at the broken terrain running across the ridge of the island. After a few moments, he handed them back and relaxed in his seat with an iced shaker of martinis. \"Not the one we're looking for,\" he proclaimed regally.\n\nSarason clasped his hands tightly to prevent them from strangling Moore. After a few moments, he regained a degree of composure and turned the page of the same boater's guide that was being used by Pitt. \"Next search point is Isla Carmen. Size, one hundred and fifty square kilometers. Length, thirty kilometers. Has several peaks rising over three hundred meters.\"\n\n\"That's a pass,\" announced Moore. \"Far too large.\"\n\n\"Your speedy response is duly noted,\" Sarason muttered sarcastically. \"After that we have Isla Cholla, a small flat-topped rock with a light tower and a few fishing huts.\"\n\n\"Skip that one too,\" said Moore.\n\n\"Okay, next up is Isla San Ildefonso, six miles offshore east of San Sebastian.\"\n\n\"Size?\"\n\n\"About two and a half square kilometers. No beaches.\"\n\n\"There has to be a beach,\" said Moore, taking another slug from his martini shaker. He swallowed the last few drops and his face took on an expression of deprivation. \"The Incas could not have landed and unloaded their rafts without a beach.\"\n\n\"After San Ildefonso we come to Bahia Coyote,\" said Sarason. \"There we'll have a choice of six islands that are little more than huge rocks rising from the sea.\"\n\nOxley eased the Baffin amphibian into a slow climb until he reached 700 meters (about 2300 feet).\n\nThen he set a course due north. Twenty-five minutes later the bay and the long peninsula that shield it from the Gulf came into view. Oxley descended and began circling the small rocky islands scattered around the entrance to the bay.\n\n\"Isla Guapa and Isla Bargo are possibilities,\" observed Sarason. \"They both rise sharply from the water and have small but open summits.\"\n\nMoore squirmed sideways in his seat and peered down. \"They don't look promising to me--\" He stopped talking and grabbed Sarason's binoculars again. \"That island down there.\"\n\n\"Which one?\" queried Sarason irritably. \"There are six of them.\"\n\n\"The one that looks like a floating duck looking backward.\"\n\n\"Isla Bargo. Fits the profile. Steep walls on three sides, rounded crest. There is also a small beach in the crook of the neck.\"\n\n\"That's it,\" Moore said excitedly. \"That must be it.\"\n\nOxley was skeptical. \"How can you be so sure?\"\n\nA curious look crossed Moore's face for a fleeting instant. \"A gut feeling, nothing more.\"\n\nSarason snatched back the glasses and studied the island. \"There, on the crown. It looks like something carved in the rock.\"\n\n\"Don't pay any attention to that,\" said Moore, wiping a trickle of sweat from his forehead. \"It doesn't mean a thing.\"\n\nSarason was no fool. Could it be a signpost cut by the Incas to mark the passageway to the treasure, he wondered in silence.\n\nMoore sank back in his seat and said nothing.\n\n\"I'll land and taxi to that little beach,\" said Oxley. \"From the air, at least, it looks like a relatively easy climb to the summit.\"\n\nSarason nodded. \"Take her down.\"\n\nOxley made two passes over the water off the island's beach, making certain there were no underwater reefs or rocks that could tear out the bottom of the aircraft. He came into the wind and settled the plane on the blue sea, striking the light swells and riding them like a speedboat across a choppy lake. The propellers flashed in the sun as they whipped sheets of spray over the wing.\n\nThe plane quickly slowed from the drag of the water as Oxley eased back on the throttles, keeping just enough power to move the plane toward the beach. Forty-six meters (151 feet) from shore, he extended the wheels into the water. The tires soon touched and gripped the sandy shelf that sloped toward the island. Two minutes later the plane rose from a low surf and rolled onto the beach like a dripping duck.\n\nTwo fishermen wandered over from a small driftwood shack and gawked at the aircraft as Oxley turned off the ignition switches and the propellers swung to a stop. The passenger door opened and Sarason stepped down to the white sand beach, followed by Moore and finally Oxley, who locked and secured the door and cargo hatch. As an added security measure, Samson generously paid the fishermen to guard the plane. Then they set off on a scarcely defined footpath leading to the top of the island.\n\nAt first the trail was an easy hike but then it angled more steeply the closer they came to the summit.\n\nGulls soared over them, squawking and staring down at the sweating humans through indifferent beady eyes. Their flight was majestic as they steered by the feathers in their tails, wings outstretched and motionless to catch the warm updrafts. One particularly curious bird swooped over Moore and splattered his shoulder.\n\nThe anthropologist, appearing to suffer from the effects of alcohol and exertion, stared dumbly at his stained shirt, too tired to curse. Samson, a wide grin on his face, saluted the gull and climbed over a large rock blocking the trail. Then the blue sea came into view and he looked across the channel to the white sand beach of Playa el Coyote and the Sierra el Cardonal mountains beyond.\n\nMoore had stopped, gasping for air, sweat flowing freely. He looked on the verge of collapse when Oxley grabbed his hand and heaved him onto the flat top of the summit.\n\n\"Didn't anybody ever tell you booze and rock climbing don't mix?\"\n\nMoore ignored him. Then suddenly, the exhaustion washed away and he stiffened. His eyes squinted in drunken concentration. He brushed Oxley aside and stumbled toward a rock the size of a small automobile that was crudely carved in the shape of some animal. Like a drunk who had witnessed a vision, he staggered around the rock sculpture, his hands fluttering over the rough, uneven surface.\n\n\"A dog,\" he gasped between labored breaths, \"it's only a stupid dog.\"\n\n\"Wrong,\" said Samson. \"A coyote. The namesake of the bay. Superstitious fishermen carved it as a symbol to protect their crews and boats when they go to sea.\"\n\n\"Why should an old rock carving interest you?\" asked Oxley.\n\n\"As an anthropologist, primitive sculptures can be a great source of knowledge.\"\n\nSamson was watching Moore, and for once his eyes were no longer filled with distaste. There was no question in his mind that the drunken professor had given away the key to the treasure's location.\n\nHe could kill Moore now, Samson thought icily. Throw the little man over the edge of the island's west palisade into the surf that crashed on the rocks far below. And who would care? The body would probably drift out with the tide and become shark food. Any investigation by local Mexican authorities was doubtful.\n\n\"You realize, of course, that we no longer require your services, don't you, Henry?\" It was the first time Sarason had uttered Moore's given name, and there was an unpleasant familiarity about it.\n\nMoore shook his head and spoke with an icy composure that seemed unnatural under the circumstances. \"You'll never do it without me.\"\n\n\"A pathetic bluff,\" Samson sneered. \"Now that we know we're searching for an island with a sculpture, an ancient one I presume, what more can you possibly contribute to the search?\"\n\nMoore's drunkenness had seemingly melted away, and he abruptly appeared as sober as a judge. \"A rock sculpture is only the first of several benchmarks the Incas erected. They all have to be interpreted.\"\n\nSamson smiled. It was a cold and evil smile. \"You wouldn't lie to me now, would you, Henry? You wouldn't deceive my brother and me into thinking Isla Bargo isn't the treasure site so you can return later on your own and dig it up? I sincerely hope that little plot isn't running through your mind.\"\n\nMoore glared at him, simple dislike showing where there should have been fear. \"Blow off the top of the island,\" he said with a shrug, \"and see what it gets you. Level it to the waterline. You won't find an ounce of Huascar's treasure, not in a thousand years. Not without someone who knows the secrets of the markers.\"\n\n\"He may be right,\" Oxley said quietly. \"And if he's lying, we can return and excavate on our own.\n\nEither way, we win.\"\n\nSarason smiled bleakly. He could read Henry Moore's thoughts. The anthropologist was playing for time, waiting and scheming to use the ultimate end of the search to somehow claim the riches for himself.\n\nBut Samson was a schemer too and he had considered every option. At the moment he could see no avenue open for Moore to make a miraculous escape with tons of gold. Certainly not unless Moore had a plan that he had not yet fathomed.\n\nLeniency and patience, they were the watchwords for now, Samson decided. He patted Moore on the back. \"Forgive my frustration. Let's get back to the plane and call it a day. I think we could all use a cool bath, a tall margarita, and a good supper.\"\n\n\"Amen,\" said Oxley. \"We'll take up tomorrow where we left off today.\"\n\n\"I knew you'd see the light,\" said Moore. \"I'll show you the way. All you boys have to do is keep the faith.\"\n\nWhen they arrived back at the aircraft, Samson entered first. On a hunch, he picked up Moore's discarded martini shaker and shook a few drops onto his tongue. Water, not gin.\n\nSarason silently cursed himself. He had not picked up on how dangerous Moore was. Why would Moore act the role of a drunk if not to lull everyone into thinking he was harmless? He slowly began to comprehend that Henry Moore was not entirely what he seemed. There was more to the famous and respected anthropologist than met the eye, much more.\n\nAs a man who could kill without the slightest remorse, Sarason should have recognized another killer when he saw one.\n\nMicki Moore stepped out of the blue-tiled swimming pool below the hacienda and stretched out on a lounge chair. She was wearing a red bikini that did very little to conceal her thin form. The sun was warm and she did not dry herself, preferring to let the water drops cling to her body. She glanced up at the main house and motioned to one of the servants to bring her another rum collins. She acted as though she were the mistress of the manor, totally disregarding the armed guards who roamed the grounds. Her behavior was hardly in keeping with someone who was being held hostage.\n\nThe hacienda was built around the pool and a large garden filled with a variety of tropical plants. All major rooms had balconies with dramatic views of the sea and the town of Guaymas. She was more than happy to relax around the pool or in her skylit bedroom with its own patio and Jacuzzi while the men flew up and down the Gulf in search of the treasure. She picked up her watch from a small table. Five o'clock.\n\nThe conniving brothers and her husband would be returning soon. She sighed with pleasure at the thought of another fabulous dinner of local dishes.\n\nAfter the servant girl brought the rum collins, Micki drank it down to the ice cubes and settled back for a brief nap. Just before she drifted off, she thought she heard a car drive up the road from town and stop at the front gate of the hacienda.\n\nWhen she awoke a short time later, her skin felt cool and she sensed that the sun had passed behind a cloud. But then she opened her eyes, and was startled to see a man standing over her, his shadow thrown across the upper half of her body.\n\nThe eyes that stared at her looked like stagnant black pools. There was no life to them. Even his face seemed incapable of expression. The stranger appeared emaciated, as if he been sick for a long time.\n\nMicki shivered as though an icy breeze suddenly swept over her. She thought it odd that he took no notice of her exposed body, but gazed directly into her eyes. She felt as if he were looking inside her.\n\n\"Who are you?\" she asked. \"Do you work for Mr. Zolar?\"\n\nHe did not reply for several seconds. When he spoke, it was with an odd voice with no inflection. \"My name is Tupac Amaru.\"\n\nAnd then he turned and walked away.\n\nAdmiral Sandecker stood in front of his desk and held out his hand as Gaskill and Ragsdale were ushered into his office. He gave a friendly smile. \"Gentlemen, please take a seat and get comfortable.\"\n\nGaskill looked down at the little man who stood slightly below his shoulders. \"Thank you for taking the time to see us.\"\n\n\"NUMA has worked with Customs and the FBI in the past. Our relations were always based on cordial cooperation.\"\n\n\"I hope you weren't apprehensive when we asked to meet with you,\" said Ragsdale.\n\n\"Curious is more like it. Would you like some coffee?\"\n\nGaskill nodded. \"Black for me, thank you.\"\n\n\"Whatever artificial sweetener that's handy in mine,\" said Ragsdale.\n\nSandecker spoke into his intercom, and then looked up and asked, \"Well, gentlemen, what can I do for you?\"\n\nRagsdale came straight to the point. \"We'd like NUMA's help settling a thorny problem dealing with stolen artifacts.\"\n\n\"A little out of our line,\" said Sandecker. \"Our field is ocean science and engineering.\"\n\nGaskill nodded. \"We understand, but it has come to Customs' attention that someone in your agency has smuggled a valuable artifact into the country illegally.\"\n\n\"That someone was me,\" Sandecker shot back without batting an eye.\n\nRagsdale and Gaskill glanced at each other and shifted uneasily in their chairs. This turn of events was not what they had expected.\n\n\"Are you aware, Admiral, that the United States prohibits the importing of stolen artifacts under a United Nations convention that seeks to protect antiquities worldwide?\"\n\n\"I am.\"\n\n\"And are you also aware, sir, that officials at the Ecuadorian embassy have filed a protest?\"\n\n\"As a matter of fact, I instigated the protest.\"\n\nGaskill sighed and visibly relaxed. \"I had a feeling in my bones there was more to this than a simple smuggling.\"\n\n\"I think Mr. Gaskill and I would both appreciate an explanation,\" said Ragsdale.\n\nSandecker paused as his private secretary, Julie Wolff, entered with a tray of coffee cups and set them on the edge of his desk. \"Excuse me, Admiral, but Rudi Gunn called from San Felipe to report that he and Al Giordino have landed and are making final preparations for the project.\"\n\n\"What is Dirk's status?\"\n\n\"He's driving and should be somewhere in Texas about now.\"\n\nSandecker turned back to the government agents after Julie had closed the door. \"Sorry for the interruption. Where were we?\"\n\n\"You were going to tell us why you smuggled a stolen artifact into the United States,\" said Ragsdale, his face serious.\n\nThe admiral casually opened a box of his cigars and offered them. The agents shook their heads. He leaned back in his desk chair, lit a cigar, and graciously blew a cloud of blue smoke over his shoulder toward an open window. Then he told them the story of Drake's quipu, beginning with the war between the Inca princes and ending with Hiram Yaeger's translation of the coiled strands and their knots.\n\n\"But surely, Admiral,\" questioned Ragsdale, \"you and NUMA don't intend to get into the treasure hunting business?\"\n\n\"We most certainly do.\" Sandecker smiled.\n\n\"I wish you'd explain the Ecuadorian protest,\" said Gaskill.\n\n\"As insurance. Ecuador is in bitter conflict with an army of peasant rebels in the mountains. Their government officials were not about to allow us to search for the quipu and then take it to the United States for decoding and preservation for fear their people would think they had sold a priceless national treasure to foreigners. By claiming we stole it, they're off the hook. So they agreed to loan the guipu to NUMA for a year. And when we return it with the proper ceremony, they'll be applauded as national heroes.\"\n\n\"But why NUMA?\" Ragsdale persisted. \"Why not the Smithsonian or National Geographic?\"\n\n\"Because we don't have a proprietary interest. And we're in a better position to keep the search and discovery out of the public eye.\"\n\n\"But you can't legally keep any of it.\"\n\n\"Of course not. If it's discovered in the Sea of Cortez, where we believe it lies, Mexico will cry 'finders keepers.' Peru will claim original ownership, and the two countries will have to negotiate, thereby assuring the treasures will eventually be displayed in their national museums.\"\n\n\"And our State Department will get credit for a public relations coup with our good neighbors to the south,\" added Ragsdale.\n\n\"You said it, sir, not me.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you notify Customs or the FBI about this?\" inquired Gaskill.\n\n\"I informed the President,\" Sandecker replied matter-of-factly. \"If he failed to filter the information from the White House to your agencies, then you'll just have to blame the White House.\"\n\nRagsdale finished his coffee and set the cup on the tray. \"You've closed the door on one problem that concerned us all, Admiral. And believe me when I say we are extremely relieved at not having to put you through the hassle of an investigation. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your viewpoint, you've opened the door to another dilemma.\"\n\nGaskill looked at Ragsdale. \"The coincidence is nothing short of astonishing.\"\n\n\"Coincidence?\" Sandecker asked curiously.\n\n\"That after almost five hundred years, two vital clues to the mystery of Huascar's treasure surfaced from two different sources within five days of each other.\"\n\nSandecker shrugged. \"I'm afraid I don't follow you.\"\n\nIn turn, Gaskill filled the admiral in on the Golden Body Suit of Tiapollo. He finished by giving a brief summary of the case against Zolar International.\n\n\"Are you telling me that another party is searching for Huascar's treasure at this very minute?\"\n\nSandecker asked incredulously.\n\nRagsdale nodded. \"An international syndicate that deals in art theft, antiquity smuggling, and art forgery with annual profits running into untold millions of untaxed dollars.\"\n\n\"I had no idea.\"\n\n\"Regrettably, our government and news media have not seen the benefit in educating the general public on a criminal activity that is second only to the drug trade.\"\n\n\"In one robbery alone,\" explained Gaskill, \"the dollar estimate of the masterpieces stolen from the Gardner Museum in Boston in April 1990 came to two hundred million.\"\n\n\"When you throw in the combined theft, smuggling, and forgery operations taking place in nearly every country of the world,\" Ragsdale continued, \"you can understand why we're looking at a billion-dollar industry.\"\n\n\"The list of art and antiquities stolen over the past hundred years would equal the number of names in the New York phone book,\" Gaskill emphasized.\n\n\"Who buys such a staggering amount of illegal goods?\" asked Sandecker.\n\n\"The demand far exceeds the supply,\" answered Gaskill. \"Wealthy collectors are indirectly responsible for looting because they create a strong market demand. They stand in line to purchase historically significant hot goods from underground dealers. The list of clients reads like a celebrity register. Heads of state, highlevel government officials, motion picture personalities, top business leaders, and even curators of major museums who look the other way while negotiating for black market goods to enhance their collections. If they have a buck, they'll buy it.\"\n\n\"Drug dealers also buy untold amounts of illegal art and antiquities as a fast and easy way of laundering money while building an investment.\"\n\n\"I can see why unrecorded artifacts are lost in the shuffle,\" said Sandecker. \"But surely famous art paintings and sculptures turn up and are recovered.\"\n\nRagsdale shook his head. \"Sometimes we get lucky, and a tip leads us to stolen property.\n\nOccasionally honest art dealers or museum curators will call us when they recognize pieces the thieves are trying to sell. All too often missing art remains lost from lack of leads.\"\n\n\"A tremendous number of antiquities obtained by grave robbers are sold before archaeologists have a chance to study them,\" Gaskill said. \"For example, during the desert war against Iraq in the early nineties, thousands of artifacts, including untranslated clay tablets, jewelry, textiles, glass, pottery, gold and silver coins, and cylinder seals, were plundered from both Kuwaiti and Iraqi museums by anti-Hussein opposition forces and Shiite and Kurdish rebels. Much of it had already passed through dealers and auction houses before any of the pieces could be catalogued as missing or stolen.\"\n\n\"Hardly seems possible that a collector would pay big money for art he knows damn well belongs to someone else,\" said Sandecker. \"He certainly can't put it on display without risking exposure or arrest.\n\nWhat does he do with it?\"\n\n\"Call it a psychological warp,\" replied Ragsdale. \"Gaskill and I can recite any number of cases involving collectors who stash their illegal acquisitions in a secret vault where they sit and view it once a day, or maybe once every ten years. Never mind that none of it is on public display. They get their high by possessing something no one else can own.\"\n\nGaskill nodded in agreement. \"Collector addiction can make people carry out macabre schemes. It's bad enough to desecrate and despoil Indian graves by digging up and selling skulls and mummified bodies of women and children, but certain collectors of American Civil War memorabilia have gone so far as to dig up graves in national cemeteries just to retrieve Union and Confederate belt buckles.\"\n\n\"A sad commentary on avarice,\" mused Sandecker.\n\n\"The stories of grave plundering for artifacts are endless,\" said Ragsdale. \"Bones of the dead from every culture, beginning with the Neanderthal, are smashed and scattered. The sanctity of the dead means little if there is a profit to be made.\"\n\n\"Because of the many collectors' insatiable lust for antiquities,\" said Gaskill, \"they're prime candidates for rip-offs. Their seemingly inexhaustible demand creates a lucrative trade in forgeries.\"\n\nRagsdale nodded. \"Without proper archaeological study, copied artifacts can pass undetected. Many of the collections in respected museums display forged antiquities and no one realizes. Every curator or collector is unwilling to believe he has been screwed by a forger, and few scholars have the guts to state that the pieces they are examining are suspect.\"\n\n\"Famous art is not exempt,\" Gaskill further explained. \"Agent Ragsdale and I have both seen cases where an outstanding masterpiece was stolen, copied by experts, and the forgery returned through channels for the finder's fee and insurance. The gallery and its curator happily hang the fake, never realizing they've been had.\"\n\n\"How are the stolen objects distributed and sold?\" queried Sandecker.\n\n\"Tomb looters and art thieves sell through an underground network of crooked dealers who put up the money and supervise the sales from a distance, acting through agents without revealing their identity.\"\n\n\"Can't they be traced through the network?\"\n\nGaskill shook his head. \"Because the suppliers and their distributors also operate behind closed doors under a heavy veil of secrecy, it is next to impossible for us to penetrate any particular branch of the network with any prospect of following a trail to the top dealers.\"\n\nRagsdale took over. \"It's not like tracing a drug user to his street-corner dealer, and then to his suppliers, and then up the ladder to the drug lords, who are mostly uneducated, seldom go to extremes to hide their identities, and are often drug users themselves. Instead, we find ourselves matching wits with men who are well educated and highly connected in the top levels of business and government. They're shrewd, and they're cunning. Except in rare cases, they never deal with their clients on a direct face-to-face basis. Whenever we get close, they pull into their shells and throw up a wall of expensive attorneys to block our investigations.\"\n\n\"Have you had any luck at all?\" asked Sandecker.\n\n\"We've picked off a few of the small dealers who operate on their own,\" replied Ragsdale. \"And both our agencies have recovered substantial numbers of stolen goods. Some during shipment, some from buyers, who almost never do jail time because they claim they didn't know the pieces they bought were stolen. What we've recovered is only a trickle. Without solid evidence we can't stem the main flow of illegal objects.\"\n\n\"Sounds to me like you fellows are outgunned and outclassed,\" said Sandecker.\n\nRagsdale nodded. \"We'd be the first to admit it.\"\n\nSandecker silently rocked back and forth in his swivel chair, mulling over the words of the government agents seated across the desk. At last he said, \"How can NUMA help you?\"\n\nGaskill leaned across the desk. \"We think you cracked the door open by unknowingly synchronizing your search for Huascar's treasure with the world's largest dealer of hot art and antiquities.\"\n\n\"Zolar International.\"\n\n\"Yes, a family whose tentacles reach into every comer of the trade.\n\n\"FBI and Customs agents,\" said Ragsdale, \"have never before encountered a single group of art forgers, thieves, and artifact smugglers who have operated in so many countries for so many years and have involved such a diverse cast of wealthy celebrities, who have illegally bought literally billions of dollars worth of stolen art and antiques.\"\n\n\"I'm listening,\" said Sandecker.\n\n\"This is our chance to get in on the ground floor,\" revealed Gaskill. \"Because of the possibility of finding fantastic riches, the Zolars have shed all caution and launched a search to locate the treasure and keep it for themselves. If they are successful, this presents us with a rare window of opportunity to observe their method of shipment and trail it back to their secret storehouse . . .\"\n\n\"Where you nab them redhanded with the swag,\" Sandecker finished.\n\nRagsdale grinned. \"We don't exactly use those terms anymore, Admiral, but yes, you're on the right track.\"\n\nSandecker was intrigued. \"You want me to call off my search team. Is that the message?\"\n\nGaskill and Ragsdale looked at each other and nodded.\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" said Gaskill. \"That's the message.\"\n\n\"With your approval, of course,\" Ragsdale hastily added.\n\n\"Have you boys cleared this with your superiors?\"\n\nRagsdale nodded solemnly. \"Director Moran of the FBI and Director Thomas of the Customs Service have given their approval.\"\n\n\"You don't mind if I give them a call and confirm?\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" said Gaskill. \"I apologize that Agent Ragsdale and I didn't go through the chain of command arid request that they deal with you directly, but we felt it was best to present our case from firsthand knowledge and let the chips fall where they may.\"\n\n\"I can appreciate that,\" said Sandecker generously.\n\n\"Then you'll cooperate?\" asked Ragsdale. \"And call off your search team?\"\n\nSandecker stared idly at the smoke curling from his cigar for several moments. \"NUMA will play ball with the bureau and Customs, but I won't close down our search project.\"\n\nGaskill stared at the admiral, not knowing if he was joking. \"I don't think I catch your drift, sir.\"\n\n\"Have you people ever hunted for something that has been lost for almost five hundred years?\"\n\nRagsdale glanced at his partner and shrugged. \"Speaking for the bureau, our search operations are generally confined to missing persons, fugitives, and bodies. Lost treasure is out of our domain.\"\n\n\"I don't believe I have to explain what the Customs Service looks for,\" said Gaskill.\n\n\"I'm quite familiar with your directives,\" Sandecker said conversationally. \"But finding lost treasure is a million-to-one long shot. You can't interview people for leads who have been dead since the fifteen hundreds. All our quipu and your golden mummy have done is given vague references to a mysterious island in the Sea of Cortez. A clue that puts the proverbial needle somewhere within a hundred-and-sixty-thousand-square-kilometer haystack. I'm assuming the Zolars are amateurs at this kind of search game. So the chances of them finding the cavern containing Huascar's golden chain are ten meters this side of nil.\"\n\n\"You think your people have a better chance?\" asked Gaskill testily.\n\n\"My special projects director and his team are the best in the business. If you don't believe me, check our records.\"\n\n\"How do you plan to play ball with us?\" Ragsdale asked, his tone edged with disbelief.\n\nSandecker made his thrust. \"We conduct our search at the same time as the Zolars, but we hang in the shadows. They have no reason to suspect rivals and will assume any NUMA personnel or aircraft they sight are on an oceanographic research project. If the Zolars are successful in discovering the treasure, my team will simply melt away and return to Washington.\"\n\n\"And should the Zolars strike out?\" demanded Ragsdale.\n\n\"If NUMA can't find the treasure, it doesn't want to be found.\"\n\n\"And if NUMA is successful?\" Ragsdale pushed forward.\n\n\"We leave a trail of bread crumbs for the to follow, and let them think they discovered the hoard on their own.\" Sandecker paused, his hard gaze moving from Ragsdale to Gaskill and back. \"From then on, gentlemen, the show belongs to you.\"\n\n\"I keep imagining that Rudolph Valentino is going to ride over the next dune and carry me away to his tent,\" said Loren sleepily. She was sitting on thee front seat of the Pierce Arrow, her legs curled under her, staring at the ocean of sand dunes that dominated the landscape.\n\n\"Keep looking,\" said Pitt. \"The Coachella Dunes, slightly north of here, are where Hollywood used to shoot many of their desert movies.\"\n\nFifty kilometers (31 miles) after passing through Yuma, Arizona, across the Colorado River into California, Pitt swung the big Pierce Arrow left off Interstate Highway 8 and onto the narrow state road that led to the border towns of Calexico and Mexicali. Drivers and passengers in cars that passed, or those coming from the opposite direction, stared and gawked at the old classic auto and the trailer it pulled.\n\nLoren had sweet-talked Pitt into driving the old auto cross-country, camping in the trailer, and then joining a tour around southern Arizona sponsored by the Classic Car Club of America. The tour was scheduled to begin in two weeks. Pitt doubted that they could wrap up the treasure hunt in such a short time but went along with Loren because he enjoyed driving his old cars on extended tours.\n\n\"How much farther to the border?\" Loren asked.\n\n\"Another forty-two kilometers will put us into Mexico,\" he answered. \"Then a hundred and sixty-five klicks to San Felipe. We should arrive at the dock, where Al and Rudi have tied up the ferry, by dinnertime.\"\n\n\"Speaking of edibles and liquids,\" she said lazily, \"the refrigerator is empty and the cupboards are bare.\n\nExcept for breakfast cereal and coffee this morning, we cleaned out the food stock at that campground in Sedona last night.\"\n\nHe took his right hand from the steering wheel, squeezed her knee and smiled. \"1 suppose I have to keep the passengers happy by filling their bellies.\"\n\n\"How about that truck stop up ahead?\" She straightened and pointed through the flat, narrow windshield of the Pierce.\n\nPitt gazed over the ornate radiator cap, a crouched archer poised to fire an arrow. He saw a sign by the side of the road, dried and bleached by the desert sun, and on the verge of collapsing into the sand at any moment. The lettering was so old and faded he could hardly read the words.\n\nIce-cold beer and food a mother would love. Only 2 more minutes to the Box Car Cafe.\n\nHe laughed. \"The cold beer sounds good, but I'm leery of the cuisine. When I was a boy, my mother loved to make dishes that turned me green.\"\n\n\"Shame on you. Your mother is a good cook.\"\n\n\"She is now, but twenty-five years ago, even the starving homeless wouldn't come near our doorstep.\"\n\n\"You're terrible.\" Loren turned the dial of the old tube-type radio, trying to tune in a Mexicali station.\n\nShe finally found one, playing Mexican music, that came in clear. \"I don't care if the chef has the black plague, I'm starved.\"\n\nTake a woman on a long trip, Pitt mused miserably, and they're always hungry or demanding to stop at a bathroom.\n\n\"And besides,\" she threw in, \"you need gas.\"\n\nPitt glanced at the fuel gauge. The needle stood steady at a quarter tank. \"I guess it won't hurt to fill up before we cross the border.\"\n\n\"It doesn't seem as if we've driven very far since the last gas stop.\"\n\n\"A big car that was built sixty years ago, with a twelve cylinder engine and pulling a house trailer, won't win any awards for fuel economy.\"\n\nThe roadside restaurant and gas station came into view. All Pitt saw as they drove closer was a dilapidated pair of old railroad freight cars joined together, with two gas pumps out front and a neon EAT sign barely flickering in the shadow of the Box Car Cafe. A cluster of battered old house trailers was parked in the rear, abandoned and empty. Out front in the dirt parking lot, eighteen to twenty bikers were milling around a small fleet of Harley-Davidsons, drinking beer and enjoying a cool breeze that was blowing in from the Gulf.\n\n\"Boy, you sure can pick 'em,\" said Pitt drolly.\n\n\"Maybe we'd better go on,\" Loren murmured, having second thoughts.\n\n\"You afraid of the bikers? They're probably weary travelers just like you and me.\"\n\n\"They certainly don't dress like us.\" She nodded at the assembly, divided equally between men and women, all wearing black riding gear festooned with badges, patches, and embroidered messages touting America's most famous motorcycle.\n\nPitt turned the outsize steering wheel and the Pierce rolled off the blacktop up to the gas pumps. The big V-12 engine was so whisper-quiet it was hard to tell it had stopped when he turned off the ignition.\n\nHe opened the suicide door that swung outward from the front, put a foot on the high running board and stepped down. \" Hi there,\" he greeted the nearest biker, a bleached blond female with a ponytail, wearing black leather pants and jacket. \"How's the food here?\"\n\n\"Not quite up to the standards of Spago's or Chasen's,\" she said pleasantly. \"But if you're hungry, it's not half bad.\"\n\nA metal sign liberally peppered with bullet holes said Self Service, so Pitt inserted the nozzle of the gas pump inside the Pierce Arrow's tank filler and squeezed the handle. When he had the engine rebuilt, the machine shop modified the valves to burn unleaded gas without problems.\n\nLoren warily hunched down in her seat as the bikers all walked over and admired the old car and trailer. After answering a barrage of questions, Pitt lifted the hood and showed them the engine. Then he pulled Loren from the car.\n\n\"I thought you'd like to meet these nice people,\" he said. \"They all belong to a bike riding club from West Hollywood.\"\n\nShe thought Pitt was joking and was embarrassed half to death as he made introductions. Then she was astounded to discover they were attorneys with their wives on a weekend ride around the Southern California desert. She was also impressed and flattered that they recognized her when Pitt gave them her name.\n\nAfter a congenial conversation, the Hollywood barristers and their spouses bid goodbye, climbed aboard their beloved hogs and roared off, exhaust stacks reverberating in chorus, toward the Imperial Valley. Pitt and Loren waved, then turned and faced the freight cars.\n\nThe rails beneath the rusting wheel-trucks were buried in the sand. The weathered wooden walls had once been painted a reddish tan, and the lettering above the long row of crudely installed windows read Southern Pacific Lines. Thanks to the dry air, the body shells of the antique boxcars had survived the ravages of constant exposure and appeared in relatively good condition.\n\nPitt owned a piece of railroad history, a Pullman car. It was part of the collection housed inside his hangar in Washington. The once-luxurious rail car had been pulled by the famed Manhattan Limited out of New York in the years prior to World War I. He judged these freight cars to have been built sometime around 1915.\n\nHe and Loren climbed a makeshift stairway and entered a door cut into the end of one car. The interior was timeworn but neat and clean. There were no tables, only a long counter with stools that stretched the length of the two attached cars. The open kitchen was situated on the opposite side of the counter and looked as if it was constructed from used lumber that had lain in the sun for several decades.\n\nPictures on the walls showed early engines, smoke spouting from their stacks, pulling passenger and freight trains across the desert sands. The list of records on a Wurlitzer jukebox was a mix of favorite pop music from the forties and fifties and the sounds of steam locomotives. Two plays for twenty-five cents.\n\nPitt put a quarter in the slot and made his selections. One was Frankie Carle playing \"Sweet Lorraine.\"\n\nThe other was the clamor of a Norfolk & Western single expansion articulated steam locomotive leaving a station and coming to speed.\n\nA tall man, in his early sixties, with gray hair and white beard, was wiping the oak counter top. He looked up and smiled, his blue-green eyes filled with warmth and congeniality. \"Greetings, folks.\n\nWelcome to the Box Car Cafe. Travel far?\"\n\n\"Not far,\" Pitt answered, throwing Loren a rakish grin. \"We didn't leave Sedona as early as I planned.\"\n\n\"Don't blame me,\" she said loftily. \"You're the one who woke up with carnal passions.\"\n\n\"What can I get you?\" said the man behind the bar. He was wearing cowboy boots, denim pants, and a plaid shirt that was badly faded from too many washings.\n\n\"Your advertised ice-cold beer would be nice,\" replied Loren, opening a menu.\n\n\"Mexican or domestic?\"\n\n\"Corona?\"\n\n\"One Corona coming up. And you, sir?\"\n\n\"What do you have on tap?\" asked Pitt.\n\n\"Olympia, Coors, and Budweiser.\"\n\n\"I'd like an Oly.\"\n\n\"Anything to eat?\" inquired the man behind the counter.\n\n\"Your mesquite chiliburger,\" said Loren. \"And coleslaw.\"\n\n\"I'm not real hungry,\" said Pitt. \"I'll just have the coleslaw. Do you own this place?\"\n\n\"Bought it from the original owner when I gave up prospecting.\" He set their beer on the bar and turned to his stove.\n\n\"The box cars are interesting relics of railroad history. Were they moved here, or did the railroad run through at one time?\"\n\n\"We're actually sitting on the siding of the old main line,\" answered the diner's owner. \"The tracks used to run from Yuma to El Centro. The line was abandoned in 1947 for lack of business. The rise of truck lines did it in. These cars were bought by an old fella who used to be an engineer for the Southern Pacific. He and his wife made a restaurant and gas station out of them. With the main interstate going north of here and all, we don't see too much traffic anymore.\"\n\nThe bartender/cook looked as if he might have been a fixture of the desert even before the rails were laid. He had the worn look of a man who had seen more than he should and heard a thousand stories that remained in his head, classified and indexed as drama, humor, or horror. There was also an unmistakable aura of style about him, a sophistication that said he didn't belong in a godforsaken roadside tavern on a remote and seldom-traveled road through the desert.\n\nFor a fleeting instant, Pitt thought the old cook looked vaguely familiar. On reflection, though, Pitt figured the man only resembled someone he couldn't quite place. \"I'll bet you can recite some pretty interesting tales about the dunes around here,\" he said, making idle conversation.\n\n\"A lot of bones lie in them, remains of pioneers and miners who tried to cross four hundred kilometers of desert from Yuma to Borrego Springs in the middle of summer.\"\n\n\"Once they passed the Colorado River, there was no water?\" asked Loren.\n\n\"Not a drop, not until Borrego. That was long before the valley was irrigated. Only after them old boys died from the sun did they learn their bodies lay not five meters from water. The trauma was so great they've all come back as ghosts to haunt the desert.\"\n\nLoren looked perplexed. \"I think I missed something.\"\n\n\"There's no water on the surface,\" the old fellow explained. \"But underground there's whole rivers of it, some as wide and deep as the Colorado.\"\n\nPitt was curious. \"I've never heard of large bodies of water running under the desert.\"\n\n\"There's two for sure. One, a really big sucker, runs from upper Nevada south into the Mojave Desert and then west, where it empties into the Pacific below Los Angeles. The other flows west under the Imperial Valley of California before curling south and spilling into the Sea of Cortez.\"\n\n\"What proof do you have these rivers actually exist?\" asked Loren. \"Has anyone seen them?\"\n\n\"The underground stream that flows into the Pacific,\" answered the cook, as he prepared Loren's chiliburger, \"was supposedly found by an engineer searching for oil. He alleged his geophysical instruments detected the river and tracked it across the Mojave and under the town of Laguna Beach into the ocean. So far nobody has proved or disproved his claim. The river traveling to the Sea of Cortez comes from an old story about a prospector who discovered a cave that led down into a deep cavern with a river running through it.\"\n\nPitt tensed as Yaeger's translation of the quipu suddenly flashed through his mind. \"This prospector, how did he describe this underground river?\"\n\nThe diner's owner talked without turning from his stove. \"His name was Leigh Hunt, and he was probably a very inventive liar. But he swore up and down that back in 1942 he discovered a cave in the Castle Dome Mountains not too far northeast of here. From the mouth of the cave, through a chain of caverns, he descended two kilometers deep into the earth until he encountered an underground river rushing through a vast canyon. It was there Hunt claims he found rich deposits of placer gold.\"\n\n\"I think I saw the movie,\" said Loren skeptically.\n\nThe old cook turned and waved a spatula in the air. \"People at the assay office stated that the sand Hunt carried back from the underground canyon assayed at three thousand dollars per ton. A mighty good recovery rate when you remember that gold was only twenty dollars and sixty-five cents an ounce back then.\"\n\n\"Did Hunt ever return to the canyon and the river?\" asked Pitt.\n\n\"He tried, but a whole army of scavengers followed him back to the mountain, hungering for a piece of the River of Gold, as it became known. He got mad and dynamited a narrow part of the passage about a hundred meters inside the entrance. Brought down half the mountain. Neither Hunt nor those who followed him were ever able to dig through the rubble or find another cave leading inside.\"\n\n\"With today's mining technology,\" said Pitt, \"reexcavating the passage should be a viable project.\"\n\n\"Sure, if you want to spend about two million dollars,\" snorted the cook. \"Nobody I ever heard about was willing to gamble that much money on a story that might be pure hokum.\" He paused to set the chiliburger and coleslaw dishes on the counter. Then he drew a mug of beer from a tap, walked around the bar and sat down on a stool next to Pitt. \"They say old Hunt somehow made it back inside the mountain but never came out. He disappeared right after he blew the cave and was not seen again. There was talk that he found another way inside and died there. A few people believe in a great river that flows through a canyon deep beneath the sands, but most think it's only another tall tale of the desert.\"\n\n\"Such things do exist,\" said Pitt. \"A few years ago I was on an expedition that found an underground stream.\"\n\n\"Somewhere in the desert Southwest?\" inquired the cook.\n\n\"No, the Sahara. It flowed under a hazardous waste plant and carried pollutants to the Niger River, and then into the Atlantic where it caused a proliferation of red tides.\"\n\n\"The Mojave River north of here goes underground after running above the surface for a considerable distance. Nobody knows for certain where it ends up.\"\n\nBetween bites of the chiliburger Loren asked, \"You seem convinced that Hunt's river flows into the Sea of Cortez. How do you know it doesn't enter the Pacific off California?\"\n\n\"Because of Hunt's backpack and canteen. He lost them in the cave and they were found six months later, having drifted up on a beach in the Gulf.\"\n\n\"Don't you think that's highly improbable? The pack and canteen could have belonged to anyone. Why would anyone believe they were his?\" Loren questioned the cook as if she was sitting on a congressional investigation committee.\n\n\"I guess because his name was stenciled on them.\"\n\nThe unexpected obstacle did not deter Loren. She simply sidestepped it. \"There could be a good twenty or more logical explanations for his effects being in the Gulf. They could have been lost or thrown there by someone who found or stole them from Hunt, or more likely he never died in the cave and dropped them from a boat himself.\"\n\n\"Could be he lost them in the sea,\" admitted the cook, \"but then how do you explain the other bodies?\"\n\nPitt looked at him. \"What other bodies?\"\n\n\"The fisherman who disappeared in Lake Cocopah,\" replied the cook in a hushed voice, as if he was afraid of being overheard. \"And the two divers that vanished into Satan's Sink. What was left of their bodies was found floating in the Gulf.\"\n\n\"And the desert telegraph sends out another pair of tall tales,\" suggested Loren dryly.\n\nThe cook held up his right hand. \"God's truth. You can check the stories out with the sheriff's department.\"\n\n\"Where are the sink and lake located?\" asked Pitt.\n\n\"Lake Cocopah, the spot where the fisherman was lost, is southeast of Yuma. Satan's Sink lies in Mexico at the northern foot of the Sierra el Mayor Mountains. You can draw a line from Hunt's mountain through Lake Cocopah and then Satan's Sink right into the Sea of Cortez.\"\n\nLoren continued the interrogation. \"Who's to say they didn't drown while fishing and diving in the Gulf?\"\n\n\"The fisherman and his wife were out on the lake for the better part of the day when she wanted to head back to their camper to start dinner. He rowed her ashore and then continued trolling around the lake. An hour later, when she looked for him, all she could see was his overturned boat. Three weeks later a water-skier spotted his body floating in the Gulf a hundred and fifty kilometers from the lake.\"\n\n\"I'm more inclined to believe his wife did him in, dumped his remains in the sea and threw off suspicion by claiming he was sucked into an underground waterway.\"\n\n\"What about the divers?\" Pitt queried.\n\n\"Not much to tell. They dove into Satan's Sink, a flooded pool in an earthquake fault, and never came out. A month later, battered to a pulp, they were also pulled out of the Gulf.\"\n\nPitt stabbed a fork at his coleslaw, but he was no longer hungry. His mind was shifting gears. \"Do you happen to know approximately where Hunt's gear and the bodies were found?\"\n\n\"I haven't made a detailed study of the phenomena,\" answered the diner's owner, staring thoughtfully at the heavily scarred wooden floor. \"But as I recollect most of them were found in the waters off Punta el Macharro.\"\n\n\"What part of the Gulf would that be?\"\n\n\"On the western shore. Macharro Point, as we call it in English, is two or three kilometers above San Felipe.\"\n\nLoren looked at Pitt. \"Our destination.\"\n\nPitt made a wry smile. \"Remind me to keep a sharp eye for dead bodies.\"\n\nThe cook finished off his beer. \"You folks heading for San Felipe to do a little fishing?\"\n\nPitt nodded. \"I guess you might call it a fishing expedition.\"\n\n\"The scenery ain't much to look at once you drop below Mexicali. The desert seems desolate and barren to most folks, but it has countless paradoxes. There are more ghosts, skeletons, and myths per kilometer than any jungle or mountains on earth. Keep that in mind and you'll see them as sure as the Irish see leprechauns.\"\n\n\"We'll keep that in mind,\" Loren said, smiting, \"when we cross over Leigh Hunt's underground River of Gold.\"\n\n\"Oh, you'll cross it all right,\" said the cook. \"The sad fact is you won't know it.\"\n\nAfter Pitt paid for the gas and the meal, he went outside and checked the Pierce Arrow's oil and water. The old cook accompanied Loren onto the dining car's observation platform. He was carrying a bowl of carrots and lettuce. \"Have a good trip,\" he said cheerfully.\n\n\"Thank you.\" Loren nodded at the vegetables. \"Feeding a rabbit?\"\n\n\"No, my burro. Mr. Periwinkle is getting up there in age and can't graze too well on his own.\"\n\nLoren held out her hand. \"It's been fun listening to your stories, Mr. . .\"\n\n\"Cussler, Clive Cussler. Mighty nice to have met you, ma'am.\"\n\nWhen they were on the road again, the Pierce Arrow and its trailer smoothly rolling toward the border crossing, Pitt turned to Loren. \"For a moment there, I thought the old geezer might have given me a clue to the treasure site.\"\n\n\"You mean Yaeger's far-out translation about a river running under an island?\"\n\n\"It still doesn't seem geologically possible.\"\n\nLoren turned the rearview mirror to reapply her lipstick. \"If the river flowed deep enough it might conceivably pass under the Gulf.\"\n\n\"Maybe, but there's no way in hell to know for certain without drilling through several kilometers of hard rock.\n\n\"You'll be lucky just to find your way to the treasure cavern without a major excavation.\"\n\nPitt smiled as he stared at the road ahead. \"He could really spin the yarns, couldn't he?\"\n\n\"The old cook? He certainly had an active imagination.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry I didn't get his name.\"\n\nLoren settled back in the seat and gazed out her window as the dunes gave way to a tapestry of mesquite and cactus. \"He told me what it was.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"It was an odd name.\" She paused, trying to remember. Then she shrugged in defeat. \"Funny thing . . .\n\nI've already forgotten it.\"\n\nLoren was driving when they reached San Felipe. Pitt had stretched out in the backseat and was snoring away, but she did not bother to wake him. She guided the dusty, bug-splattered Pierce Arrow around the town's traffic circle, making a wide turn so she didn't run one side of the trailer over the curb, and turned south toward the town's breakwater-enclosed harbor. She did not expect to see such a proliferation of hotels and restaurants. The once sleepy fishing village was riding the crest of a tourist boom. Resorts appeared to be under construction up and down the beaches.\n\nFive kilometers (3 miles) south of town she turned left on a road leading toward the waters of the Gulf.\n\nLoren thought it strange that an artificial, man-made harbor had been constructed on such an exposed piece of shoreline. She thought a more practical site would have been under the shelter of Macharro Point several kilometers to the north. Oh well, she decided. What did gringos know about Baja politics?\n\nLoren stopped the Pierce alongside an antiquated ferryboat that looked like a ghost from a scrap yard.\n\nThe impression was heightened by the low tide that had left the ferry's hull tipped drunkenly on an angle with its keel sunk into the harbor bottom's silt.\n\n\"Rise and shine, big boy,\" she said, reaching over the seat and shaking Pitt.\n\nHe blinked and peered curiously through the side window at the old boat. \"I must have entered a time warp or I've fallen into the Twilight Zone. Which is it?\"\n\n\"Neither. You're at the harbor in San Felipe, and you're looking at your home for the next two weeks.\"\n\n\"Good lord,\" Pitt mumbled in amazement, \"an honest-to-God steamboat with a walking beam engine and side paddlewheels.\"\n\n\"I must admit it does have an air of Mark Twain about it.\n\n\"What do you want to bet it ferried Grant's troops across the Mississippi to Vicksburg?\"\n\nGunn and Giordino spotted them and waved. They walked across a gangplank to the dock as Pitt and Loren climbed from the car and stood gazing at the boat.\n\n\"Have a good trip?\" asked Gunn.\n\n\"Except for Dirk's snoring, it was marvelous,\" said Loren.\n\nPitt looked at her indignantly. \"I don't snore.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes toward the heavens. \"I have tendonitis in my elbow from poking you.\"\n\n\"What do you think of our work platform?\" asked Giordino, gesturing grandly at the ferryboat. \"Built in 1923. She was one of the last walking beam steamboats to be built.\"\n\nPitt lifted his sunglasses and studied the antique vessel.\n\nWhen seen from a distance most ships tend to look smaller than they actually are. Only up close do they appear huge. This was true of the passenger/car ferries of the first half of the century. In her heyday the 70-meter (230-foot) vessel could carry five hundred passengers and sixty automobiles. The long black hull was topped with a two-story white superstructure whose upper deck mounted one large smokestack and two pilothouses, one on each end. Like most car ferries, she could be loaded and off-loaded from either bow or stern, depending on the direction the ferry was steaming at the time. Even when new, she would never have been called glamorous, but she had supplied an important and unforgettable service in the lives of millions of her former passengers.\n\nThe name painted across the center of the superstructure that housed the paddlewheels identified her as the Alhambra.\n\n\"Where did you steal that derelict?\" asked Pitt. \"From a maritime museum?\"\n\n\"To know her is to love her,\" said Giordino without feeling.\n\n\"She was the only vessel I could find quickly that could land a helicopter,\" Gunn explained. \"Besides, I kept Sandecker happy by obtaining her on the cheap.\"\n\nLoren smiled. \"At least this is one relic you can't get in your transportation collection.\"\n\nPitt pointed to the walking beam mounted above the high A-frame that tilted up and down, one end driven by a connecting rod from the steam cylinder, the other driving the crank that turned the paddlewheel. \"I can't believe her boilers are still fired by coal.\"\n\n\"They were converted to oil fifty years ago,\" said Gunn. \"The engines are still in remarkable shape. Her cruising speed is twenty miles an hour.\"\n\n\"Don't you mean knots or kilometers?\" said Loren.\n\n\"Ferryboat speeds are measured in miles,\" answered Gunn knowledgeably.\n\n\"Doesn't look like she's going anywhere,\" said Pitt. \"Not unless you dig her keel out of the muck.\"\n\n\"She'll be floating like a cork by midnight,\" Gunn assured him. \"The tide runs four to five meters in this section of the Gulf.\"\n\nThough he made a show of disapproval, Pitt already felt great affection toward the old ferry. It was love at first sight. Antique automobiles, aircraft, or boats, anything mechanical that came from the past, fascinated him. Born too late, he often complained, born eighty years too late.\n\n\"And the crew?\"\n\n\"An engineer with one assistant and two deckhands.\" Gunn paused and gave a wide boyish smile. \"I get to man the helm while you and Al cavort around the Gulf in your flying machine.\"\n\n\"Speaking of the helicopter, where have you hidden it?\"\n\n\"Inside the auto deck,\" replied Gunn. \"Makes it convenient to service it without worrying about the weather. We push it out onto the loading deck for flight operations.\"\n\nPitt looked at Giordino. \"Have you planned a daily search pattern?\"\n\nThe stocky Italian shook his head. \"I worked out the fuel range and flight times, but left the search pattern for you.\"\n\n\"What sort of time frame are we looking at?\"\n\n\"Should be able to cover the area in three days.\"\n\n\"Before I forget,\" said Gunn. \"The admiral wants you to contact him first thing in the morning. There's an Iridium phone in the forward pilothouse.\"\n\n\"Why not call him now?\" asked Pitt.\n\nGunn looked at his watch. \"We're three hours behind the East Coast. About now he's sitting in the Kennedy Center watching a play.\"\n\n\"Excuse me,\" interrupted Loren. \"May I ask a few questions?\"\n\nThe men paused and stared at her. Pitt bowed. \"You have the floor, Congresswoman.\"\n\n\"The first is where do you plan to park the Pierce Arrow? It doesn't look safe enough around here to leave a hundred-thousand-dollar classic car sitting unattended on a fishing dock.\"\n\nGunn looked surprised that she should ask. \"Didn't Dirk tell you? The Pierce and the trailer come on board the ferry. There's acres of room inside.\"\n\n\"Is there a bath and shower?\"\n\n\"As a matter of fact, there are four ladies' restrooms on the upper passenger deck and a shower in the crew's quarters.\"\n\n\"No standing in line for the potty. I like that.\"\n\nPitt laughed. \"You don't even have to unpack.\"\n\n\"Make believe you're on a Carnival Lines cruise ship,\" said Giordino humorously.\n\n\"And your final question?\" inquired Gunn.\n\n\"I'm starved,\" she announced regally. \"When do we eat?\"\n\nIn autumn, the Baja sun has a peculiar radiance, spilling down through a sky of strange brilliant blue-white. This day, there wasn't a cloud to be seen from horizon to horizon. One of the most arid lands in the world, the Baja Peninsula protects the Sea of Cortez from the heavy swells that roll in from the dim reaches of the Pacific Ocean. Tropical storms with high winds are not unknown during the summer months, but near the end of October the prevailing winds turn east to west and generally spare the Gulf from high, choppy swells.\n\nWith the Pierce Arrow and its travel trailer safely tied down on the cavernous auto deck, Gunn at the wheel in the pilothouse, and Loren stretched on a lounge chair in a bikini, the ferry moved out of the breakwater harbor and made a wide turn to the south. The old boat presented an impressive sight as black smoke rose from her stack and her paddlewheels pounded the water. The walking beam, shaped like a flattened diamond, rocked up and down, transmitting the power from the engine's huge piston to the shaft that cranked the paddlewheels. There was a rhythm to its motion, almost hypnotic if you stared at it long enough.\n\nWhile Giordino made a preflight inspection of the helicopter and topped off the fuel tank, Pitt was briefed on the latest developments by Sandecker in Washington over the Motorola Iridium satellite phone. Not until an hour later, as the ferry steamed off Point Estrella, did Pitt switch off the phone and descend to the improvised flight pad on the open forward deck of the ferry. As soon as Pitt was strapped in his seat, Giordino lifted the turquoise NUMA craft off the ferry and set a parallel course along the coastline.\n\n\"What did the old boy have to say before we left the Alhambra?\" asked Giordino as he leveled the chopper off at 800 meters (2600 feet). \"Did Yaeger turn up any new clues?\"\n\nPitt was sitting in the copilot's seat and acting as navigator. \"Yaeger had no startling revelations. The only information he could add was that he believes the statue of the demon sits directly over the entrance to the passageway leading to the treasure cavern.\"\n\n\"What about the mysterious river?\"\n\n\"He's still in the dark on that one.\"\n\n\"And Sandecker?\"\n\n\"The latest news is that we've been blindsided. Customs and the FBI dropped in out of the blue and informed him that a gang of art thieves is also on the trail of Huascar's treasure. He warned us to keep a sharp eye out for them.\"\n\n\"We have competition?\"\n\n\"A family that oversees a worldwide empire dealing in stolen and forged works of art.\"\n\n\"What do they call themselves?\" asked Giordino.\n\n\"Zolar International.\"\n\nGiordino looked blank for a moment, and then he laughed uncontrollably.\n\n\"What's so hilarious?\"\n\n\"Zolar,\" Giordino choked out. \"1 remember a dumb kid in the eighth grade who did a corny magician act at school assemblies. He called himself the Great Zolar.\"\n\n\"From what Sandecker told me,\" said Pitt, \"the guy who heads the organization is nowhere close to dumb. Government agents a mate his annual illicit take in excess of eighty million dollars. A tidy sum when you consider the IRS is shut out of the profits.\"\n\n\"Okay, so he isn't the nerdy kid I knew in school. How close do the Feds think Zolar is to the treasure?\"\n\n\"They think he has better directions than we do.\"\n\n\"I'm willing to bet my Thanksgiving turkey we find the site first.\"\n\n\"Either way, you'd lose.\"\n\nGiordino turned and looked at him. \"Care to let your old buddy in on the rationale?\"\n\n\"If we hit the jackpot ahead of them, we're supposed to fade into the landscape and let them scoop up the loot.\"\n\n\"Give it up?\" Giordino was incredulous.\n\n\"Those are the orders,\" said Pitt, resentment written in his eyes.\n\n\"But why?\" demanded Giordino. \"What great wisdom does our benevolent government see in making criminals rich?\"\n\n\"So Customs and the FBI can trail and trap them into an indictment and eventual conviction for some pretty heavy crimes.\"\n\n\"I can't say this sort of justice appeals to me. Will the taxpayers be notified of the windfall?\"\n\n\"Probably not, any more than they were told about the Spanish gold the army removed from Victorio Peak in New Mexico after it was discovered by a group of civilians in the nineteen thirties.\"\n\n\"We live in a sordid, unrelenting world,\" Giordino observed poetically.\n\nPitt motioned toward the rising sun. \"Come around on an approximate heading of one-one-o degrees.\"\n\nGiordino took note of the eastern heading. \"You want to check out the other side of the Gulf on the first run?\"\n\n\"Only four islands have the geological features similar to what we're looking for. But you know I like launching the search on the outer perimeters of our grid and then working back toward the more promising targets.\"\n\nGiordino grinned. \"Any sane man would begin in the center.\"\n\n\"Didn't you know?\" Pitt came back. \"The village idiot has all the fun.\"\n\nIt had been a long four days of searching. Oxley was discouraged, Sarason oddly complacent, while Moore was baffled. They had flown over every island in the Sea of Cortez that had the correct geological formations. Several displayed features on their peaks that suggested man-made rock carvings. But low altitude reconnaissance and strenuous climbs up steep palisades to verify the rock structures up close revealed configurations that appeared as sculpted beasts only in their imaginations.\n\nMoore was no longer the arrogant academic. He was plainly baffled. The rock carving had to exist on an island in an inland sea. The pictographs on the golden mummy suit were distinct, and there was no mistaking the directions in his translation. For a man so cocksure of himself, the failure was maddening.\n\nMoore was also puzzled by Sarason's sudden change in attitude. The bastard, Moore mused, no longer displayed animosity or anger. Those strange almost colorless eyes always seemed to be in a constant state of observation, never losing their intensity. Moore knew whenever he gazed into them that he was facing a man who was no stranger to death.\n\nMoore was becoming increasingly uneasy. The balance of power had shifted. His edge was dulled now he was certain that Sarason saw beyond his credentials as an insolent schoolteacher. If he had recognized the killer instinct in Sarason, it stood to reason Sarason had identified it in him too.\n\nBut there was a small measure of satisfaction. Sarason was not clairvoyant. He could not have known, nor did any man alive know except the President of the United States, that Professor Henry Moore, respected anthropologist, and his equally respected archaeologist wife, Micki were experts in carrying out assassinations of foreign terrorist leaders. With their academic credentials they easily traveled in and out of foreign countries as consultants on archaeological projects. Interestingly, the CIA was in total ignorance of their actions. Their assignments came directly from an obscure agency calling itself the Foreign Activities Council that operated out of a small basement room under the White House.\n\nMoore shifted restlessly in his seat and studied a chart of the Gulf. Finally he said, \"Something is very, very wrong.\"\n\nOxley looked at his watch. \"Five o'clock. I prefer to land in daylight. We might as well call it a day.\"\n\nSarason's expressionless gaze rested on the empty horizon ahead. Untypically, he acted relaxed and quiet. He offered no comment.\n\n\"It's got to be here, \"Moore said, examining the islands he had crossed out on his chart as if he had flunked a test.\n\n\"I have an unpleasant feeling we might have flown right by it,\" said Oxley.\n\nNow that he saw Moore in a different light, Sarason viewed him with the respect one adversary has for another. He also realized that despite his slim frame, the professor was strong and quick. Struggling up the rocky walls of promising islands, gasping from aggravated exhaustion and playing drunk, was nothing more than an act. On two occasions, Moore leaped over a fissure with the agility of a mountain goat. On another, with seemingly little effort, he cast aside a boulder blocking his path that easily equaled his weight.\n\nSarason said, \"Perhaps the Inca sculpture we're looking for was destroyed.\"\n\nIn the rear seat of the seaplane Moore shook his head. \"No, I'd have recognized the pieces.\"\n\n\"Suppose it was moved? It wouldn't be the first time an ancient sculpture was relocated to a museum for display.\"\n\n\"If Mexican archaeologists had taken a massive rock carving and set it up for exhibit,\" said Moore doggedly, \"I'd have known about it.\"\n\n\"Then how do you explain that it is not where it is supposed to be?\"\n\n\"I can't,\" Moore admitted. \"As soon as we land back at the hacienda, I'll review my notes. There must be a seemingly insignificant clue that I missed in my translation of the golden suit.\"\n\n\"I trust you will find it before tomorrow morning,\" Sarason said dryly.\n\nOxley fought the urge to doze off. He had been at the controls since nine o'clock in the morning and his neck was stiff with weariness. He held the control column between his knees and poured himself a cup of coffee from a thermos. He took a swallow and made a face. It was not only cold but tasted as strong as battery acid. Suddenly, his eye caught a flash of green from under a cloud. He pointed out the window to the right of the Baffin flying boat.\n\n\"Don't see many helicopters in this part of the Gulf,\" he said casually.\n\nSarason didn't bother to look. \"Must be a Mexican navy patrol plane.\"\n\n\"No doubt looking for a drunken fisherman with a broken engine,\" added Moore.\n\nOxley shook his head. \"I can't ever recall seeing a turquoise military aircraft.\"\n\nSarason looked up, startled. \"Turquoise? Can you make out its markings?\"\n\nOxley lifted the binoculars and peered through the windscreen. \"American.\"\n\n\"A Drug Enforcement Agency patrol working with Mexican authorities, probably.\"\n\n\"No, it belongs to National Underwater and Marine Agency. I wonder what they're doing in the Gulf?\"\n\n\"They conduct ocean surveys all over the world,\" said Moore unconcernedly.\n\nSarason stiffened as though he'd been shot. \"Two scum from NUMA wrecked our operation in Peru.\"\n\n\"Hardly seems likely there's a connection,\" said Oxley.\n\n\"What operation did NUMA wreck in Peru?\" asked Moore, sniffing the air.\n\n\"They stepped outside their jurisdiction,\" answered Sarason vaguely.\n\n\"I'd like to hear about it sometime.\"\n\n\"Not a subject that concerns you,\" Sarason said, brushing him off. \"How many people in the craft?\"\n\n\"Looks like a model that seats four,\" replied Oxley, \"but I only see a pilot and one passenger.\"\n\n\"Are they approaching or headed away?\"\n\n\"The pilot has turned onto a converging course that will cross about two hundred meters above us.\"\n\n\"Can you ascend and turn with him?\" asked Sarason. \"I want a closer look.\"\n\n\"Since aviation authorities can't take away a license I never applied for--\" Oxley smiled-- \"I'll put you in the pilot's lap.\"\n\n\"Is that safe?\" Moore asked.\n\nOxley grinned. \"Depends on the other pilot.\"\n\nSarason took the binoculars and peered at the turquoise helicopter. This was a different model from the one that had landed at the sacrificial well. That one had a shorter fuselage and landing skids. This one had retractable landing gear. But there was no mistaking the color scheme and markings. He told himself it was ridiculous to think the men in the approaching helicopter could possibly be the same ones who appeared out of nowhere in the Andes.\n\nHe trained the binoculars on the helicopter's cockpit. In another few seconds he would be able to discern the faces inside. For some strange, inexplicable reason his calm began to crack and he felt his nerves tighten.\n\n\"What do you think?\" asked Giordino. \"Could they be the ones?\"\n\n\"They could be.\" Pitt stared through a pair of naval glasses at the amphibian seaplane flying on a diagonal course below the helicopter. \"After watching the pilot circle Estanque Island for fifteen minutes as if he were looking for something on the peak, I think it's safe to say we've met up with our competition.\"\n\n\"According to Sandecker, they launched their search two days ahead of us,\" said Giordino. \"Since they're still taking in the sights, they can't have experienced any success either.\"\n\nPitt smiled. \"Sort of gladdens the heart, doesn't it?\"\n\n\"If they can't find it, and we can't find it, then the Incas must have sold us a wagon load of hocus pocus.\"\n\n\"I don't think so. Stop and consider. There are two different search efforts in the same area, but as far as we know both teams are using two unrelated sets of instructions. We have the Inca quipu while they're following the engravings on a golden mummy suit. At the worst, our separate sets of clues would have led us to different locations. No, the ancients haven't misled us. The treasure is out there. We simply haven't looked in the right place.\"\n\nGiordino always marveled that Pitt could sit for hours analyzing charts, studying instruments, mentally recording every ship on the sea below, the geology of the offshore islands, and every variance of the wind without the slightest sign of fatigue, his concentration always focused. He had to suffer the same muscle aches, joint stiffness, and nervous stress that plagued Giordino, but he gave no indication of discomfort. In truth, Pitt felt every ache and pain, but he could shut it all from his mind and keep going as strongly as when he started in the morning.\n\n\"Between their coverage and ours,\" said Giordino, \"we must have exhausted every island that comes anywhere close to the right geological features.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" said Pitt thoughtfully. \"But I'm convinced we're all on the right playing field.\"\n\n\"Then where is it? Where in hell is that damned demon?\"\n\nPitt motioned down at the sea. \"Sitting somewhere down there. Right where it's been for almost five hundred years. Thumbing its nose at us.\"\n\nGiordino pointed at the other aircraft. \"Our search buddies are climbing up to check us out. You want me to ditch them?\"\n\n\"No point. Their airspeed is a good eighty kilometers per hour faster than ours. Maintain a steady course toward the ferry and act innocent.\"\n\n\"Nice-looking Baffin seaplane,\" said Giordino. \"You don't see them except in the North Canadian lake country.\"\n\n\"He's moving in a bit close for a passing stranger, wouldn't you say?\"\n\n\"Either he's being neighborly or he wants to read our name tags.\"\n\nPitt stared through the binoculars at the cockpit of the plane that was now flying alongside the NUMA helicopter no more than 50 meters (164 feet) away.\n\n\"What do you see?\" asked Giordino, minding his flying.\n\n\"Some guy staring back at me through binoculars,\" replied Pitt with a grin.\n\n\"Maybe we should call them up and invite them over for ajar of Grey Poupon mustard.\"\n\nThe passenger in the seaplane dropped his glasses for a moment to massage his eyes before resuming his inspection. Pitt pressed his elbows against his body to steady his view. When he lowered the binoculars, he was no longer smiling.\n\n\"An old friend from Peru,\" he said in cold surprise.\n\nGiordino turned and looked at Pitt curiously. \"Old friend?\"\n\n\"Dr. Steve Miller's imposter come back to haunt us.\"\n\nPitt's smile returned, and it was hideously diabolic. Then he waved.\n\nIf Pitt was surprised at the unexpected confrontation, Sarason was stunned. \"You!\" he gasped.\n\n\"What did you say?\" asked Oxley.\n\nHis senses reeling at seeing the man who had caused him so much grief, uncertain if this was a trick of his mind, Sarason refocused the binoculars and examined the devil that was grinning fiendishly and waving slowly like a mourner at graveside bidding goodbye to the departed. A slight shift of the binoculars and all color drained from his face as he recognized Giordino as the pilot.\n\n\"The men in that helicopter,\" he said, his voice thick, \"are the same two who wreaked havoc on our operation in Peru.\"\n\nOxley looked unconvinced. \"Think of the odds, brother. Are you certain?\"\n\n\"It's them, there can be no others. Their faces are burned in my memory. They cost our family millions of dollars in artifacts that were later seized by Peruvian government archaeologists.\"\n\nMoore was listening intently. \"Why are they here?\"\n\n\"The same purpose we are. Someone must have leaked information on our project.\" He turned and glared at Moore. \"Perhaps the good professor has friends at NUMA?\"\n\n\"My only connection with the government is on April fifteenth when I file my income tax return,\"\n\nMoore said testily. \"Whoever they are, they're no friends of mine.\"\n\nOxley remained dubious. \"Henry's right. Impossible for him to have made outside contact. Our security is too tight. Your assertion might make more sense to me if they were Customs officials, not scientists or engineers from an oceanographic research agency.\"\n\n\"No. I swear it's the same men who appeared out of nowhere and rescued the archaeologist and photographer from the sacred well. Their names are Dirk Pitt and Al Giordino. Pitt is the most dangerous of the two. He was the one who killed my men and emasculated Tupac Amaru. We must follow them and find out where they're operating from.\"\n\n\"I have only enough fuel to make it back to Guaymas,\" said Oxley. \"We'll have to let them go.\"\n\n\"Force them down, force them to crash,\" Sarason demanded.\n\nOxley shook his head. \"If they're as dangerous as you suggest, they may well be armed, and we're not.\n\nRelax, brother, we'll meet up with them again.\"\n\n\"They're scavengers, using NUMA as a cover to beat us to the treasure.\"\n\n\"Think what you're saying,\" snapped Moore. \"It is absolutely impossible for them to know where to search. My wife and I were the only ones ever to decode the images on the golden mummy suit. Either this has to be a coincidence or you're hallucinating.\"\n\n\"As my brother can tell you,\" said Sarason coldly, \"I am not one to hallucinate.\"\n\n\"A couple of NUMA underwater freaks who roam the world fighting evil,\" muttered Moore sharply.\n\n\"You'd better lay off the mescal.\"\n\nSarason did not hear Moore. The thought of Amaru triggered something inside Sarason. He slowly regained control, the initial shock replaced by malevolence. He could not wait to unleash the mad dog from the Andes.\n\n\"This time,\" he murmured nastily, \"they will be the ones who pay.\"\n\nJoseph Zolar had finally arrived in his jet and was waiting in the dining room of the hacienda with Micki Moore when the searchers entered wearily and sat down. \"I guess I don't have to ask if you've found anything. The look on your faces reflects defeat.\"\n\n\"We'll find it,\" said Oxley through a yawn. \"The demon has to be out there somewhere.\"\n\n\"I'm not as confident,\" muttered Moore, reaching for a glass of chilled chardonnay. \"We've almost run out of islands to search.\"\n\nSarason came over and gave Zolar a brotherly pat on both shoulders. \"We expected you three days ago.\"\n\n\"I was delayed. A transaction that netted us one million two hundred thousand Swiss francs.\"\n\n\"A dealer?\"\n\n\"A collector. A Saudi sheik.\"\n\n\"How did the Vincente deal go?\"\n\n\"Sold him the entire lot, with the exception of those damned Indian ceremonial idols. For some inexplicable reason, they scared the hell out of him.\"\n\nSamson laughed. \"Maybe it's the curse.\"\n\nZolar shrugged impassively. \"If they come with a curse, it simply means the next potential buyer will have to pay a premium.\"\n\n\"Did you bring the idols with you?\" asked Oxley. \"I'd like to have a look at them.\"\n\n\"They're in a packing crate inside the cargo hold of the airplane.\" Zolar glanced admiringly at the quesadilla that was placed in front of him on a plate. \"I had hoped you would greet me with good news.\"\n\n\"You can't say we haven't tried,\" replied Moore. \"We've examined every rock that sticks out of the sea from the Colorado River south to Cabo San Lucas, and haven't seen anything remotely resembling a stone demon with wings and a serpent's head.\"\n\n\"I hate to bring more grim tidings,\" Sarason said to Zolar, \"but we met up with my friends who messed things up in Peru.\"\n\nZolar looked at him, puzzled. \"Not those two, devils from NUMA?\"\n\n\"The same. As incredible as it sounds, I believe they're after Huascar's gold too.\"\n\n\"I'm forced to agree,\" said Oxley. \"Why else did they pop up in the same area?\"\n\n\"Impossible for them to know something we don't,\" said Zolar.\n\n\"Perhaps they've been following you,\" said Micki, holding up her glass as Henry poured her wine.\n\nOxley shook his head. \"No, our amphibian has twice the fuel range of their helicopter.\"\n\nMoore turned to Zolar. \"My wife may have something. The odds are astronomical that it was a chance encounter.\"\n\n\"How do we handle it?\" Samson asked no one in particular.\n\nZolar smiled. \"I think Mrs. Moore has given us the answer.\"\n\n\"Me?\" wondered Micki. \"All I suggested was--\"\n\n\"They might have been following us.\" So.\n\nZolar looked at her slyly. \"We'll begin by requesting our mercenary friends in local law enforcement to begin earning their money by launching an investigation to find our competitor's base of operations. Once found, we'll follow them.\"\n\nDarkness was only a half hour away when Giordino set the helicopter down neatly within the white circle painted on the loading deck of the Alhambra. The deckhands, who simply went by the names of Jesus and Gato, stood by to push the craft inside the cavernous auto deck and tie it down.\n\nLoren and Gunn were standing outside the sweep of the rotor blades. When Giordino cut the ignition switch, they stepped forward. They were not alone. A man and a woman moved out of the shadow of the ferry's huge superstructure and joined them.\n\n\"Any luck?\" Gunn shouted above the diminishing beat of the rotors at Giordino who was leaning out the open window of the cockpit.\n\nGiordino replied with a thumbs-down.\n\nPitt stepped from the helicopter's passenger door and knitted his thick, black eyebrows in surprise. \"I didn't expect to see you two again, certainly not here.\"\n\nDr. Shannon Kelsey smiled, her manner coolly dignified, while Miles Rodgers pumped Pitt's hand in a genuine show of friendliness. \"Hope you don't mind us popping in like this,\" said Rodgers.\n\n\"Not at all. I'm glad to see you. I assume you've all introduced yourselves to each other.\"\n\n\"Yes, we've all become acquainted. Shannon and 1 certainly didn't expect to be greeted by a congresswoman and the assistant director of NUMA.\"\n\n\"Dr. Kelsey has regaled me with her adventures in Peru,\" said Loren in a voice that was low and throaty. \"She's led an interesting life.\"\n\nGiordino exited the helicopter and stared at the newcomers with interest. \"Hail, hail, the gang's all here,\" he said in greeting. \"Is this a reunion or an old mummy hunters' convention?\"\n\n\"Yes, what brings you to our humble ferry in the Sea of Cortez?\" asked Pitt.\n\n\"Government agents requested Miles and me to drop everything in Peru and fly here to assist your search,\" answered Shannon.\n\nPitt looked at Gunn. \"Government agents?\"\n\nGunn made a know-nothing shrug and held up a piece of paper. \"The fax informing us of their arrival came an hour after they showed up in a chartered boat. They insisted on waiting to reveal the purpose of their visit until you returned.\"\n\n\"They were Customs agents,\" Miles enlightened Pitt. \"They appeared in the Pueblo de los Muertos with a highlevel State Department official and played on our patriotism.\"\n\n\"Miles and I were asked to identify and photograph Huascar's treasure after you found it,\" explained Shannon. \"They came to us because of my expertise in Andean culture and artifacts, Miles's reputation as a photographer, and mostly because of our recent involvement with you and NUMA.\"\n\n\"And you volunteered,\" Pitt surmised.\n\nRodgers replied \"When the Customs agents informed us the gang of smugglers we met in the Andes are connected with the family of underground art dealers who are also searching for the treasure, we started packing.\"\n\n\"The Zolars?\"\n\nRodgers nodded. \"The possibility we might be of help in trapping Doc Miller's murderer quickly overcame any reluctance to become involved.\"\n\n\"Wait a minute,\" said Giordino. \"The Zolars are involved with Amaru and the Solpemachaco?\"\n\nRodgers nodded again. \"You weren't told? No one informed you that the Solpemachaco and the Zolar family are one and the same?\"\n\n\"I guess someone forgot,\" Giordino said caustically. He and Pitt looked at each other as understanding dawned. Each read the other's mind and they silently agreed not to mention their unexpected run-in with Doc Miller's imposter.\n\n\"Were you briefed on the instructions we deciphered on the quipu?\" Pitt asked Shannon, changing the subject.\n\nShannon nodded. \"I was given a full translation.\"\n\n\"By whom?\"\n\n\"The courier who hand-delivered it was an FBI agent.\"\n\nPitt stared at Gunn and then Giordino with deceptive calm. \"The plot thickens. I'm surprised Washington didn't issue press kits about the search to the news media and sell the movie rights to Hollywood.\"\n\n\"If word leaks out,\" said Giordino, \"every treasure hunter between here and the polar icecaps will swarm into the Gulf like fleas after a hemophiliac St. Bernard.\"\n\nFatigue began to tighten its grip on Pitt. He was stiff and numb and his back ached. His body demanded to lie down and rest. He had every right to be tired and discouraged. What the hell, he thought, why not share the despair. No good reason why he should bear the cross by himself.\n\n\"I hate to say it,\" he said slowly, staring at Shannon, \"but it looks as if you and Miles made a wasted trip.\"\n\nShannon looked at him in surprise. \"You haven't found the treasure site?\"\n\n\"Did someone tell you we had?\"\n\n\"We were led to believe you had pinned down the location,\" said Shannon.\n\n\"Wishful thinking,\" said Pitt. \"We haven't seen a trace of a stone carving.\"\n\n\"Are you familiar with the symbol marker described by the quipu?\" Gunn asked Shannon.\n\n\"Yes,\" she replied without hesitation. \"The Demonio del Muertos.\"\n\nPitt sighed. \"The demon of the dead. Dr. Ortiz told us. I go to the back of the class for not making the connection.\"\n\n\"I remember,\" said Gunn. \"Dr. Ortiz was excavating a large grotesque rock sculpture with fangs and described it as a Chachapoyan god of the underworld.\"\n\nPitt repeated Dr. Ortiz's exact words. \"Part jaguar, part condor, part snake, he sank his fangs into whoever disturbed the dead.\"\n\n\"The body and wings have the scales of a lizard,\" Shannon added to the description.\n\n\"Now that you know exactly what you're looking for,\" Loren said with renewed enthusiasm, \"the search should go easier.\"\n\n\"So we know the I.D. of the beast that guards the hoard,\" said Giordino, bringing the conversation back to earth. \"So what? Dirk and I have examined every island that falls within the pattern and we've come up empty. We've exhausted our search area, and what we might have missed our competitors have likely checked off their list too.\"\n\n\"Al's right,\" Pitt admitted. \"We have no place left to search.\"\n\n\"You're sure you've seen no trace of the demon?\" asked Rodgers.\n\nGiordino shook his head. \"Not so much as a scale or a fang.\"\n\nShannon scowled in defeat. \"Then the myth is simply that. . . a myth.\"\n\nThe treasure that never was,\" murmured Gunn. He collapsed dejectedly on an old wooden passenger's bench. \"It's over,\" he said slowly. \"I'll call the admiral and tell him we're closing down the project.\"\n\n\"Our rivals in the seaplane should be cutting bait and flying off into the sunset too,\" said Giordino.\n\n\"To regroup and try again,\" said Pitt. \"They're not the type to fly away from a billion dollars in treasure.\"\n\nGunn looked up at him, surprised. \"You've seen them?\"\n\n\"We waved in passing,\" answered Pitt without going into detail.\n\n\"A great disappointment not to catch Doc's killer,\" Rodgers said sadly. \"I also had high hopes of being the first to photograph the treasures and Huascar's golden chain.\"\n\n\"A washout,\" murmured Gunn. \"A damned washout.\"\n\nShannon nodded at Rodgers. \"We'd better make arrangements to return to Peru.\"\n\nLoren sank next to Gunn. \"A shame after everyone worked so hard.\"\n\nPitt suddenly returned to life, shrugging off the exhaustion and becoming his old cheerful self again. \"I can't I speak for the rest of you pitiful purveyors of doom, but I'm going to take a bath, mix myself a tequila on the rocks with lime, grill a steak, get a good night's sleep, and go out in the morning and find that ugly critter guarding the treasure.\"\n\nThey all stared at him as if he had suffered a mental breakdown, all that is except Giordino. He didn't need a third eye to know Pitt was scenting a trail. \"You have the look of a born-again Christian. Why the about-face?\"\n\n\"Do you remember when a NUMA search team found that hundred-and-fifty-year-old steamship that belonged to the Republic of Texas navy?\"\n\n\"Back in 1987, wasn't it? The ship was the Zavala.\"\n\n\"The same. And do you recall where it was found?\"\n\n\"Under a parking lot in Galveston.\"\n\n\"Get the picture?\"\n\n\"I certainly don't,\" snapped Shannon. \"What are you driving at?\"\n\n\"Whose turn is it to cook dinner?\" Pitt inquired, ignoring her.\n\nGunn raised a hand. \"My night in the galley. Why ask?\"\n\n\"Because, after we've all enjoyed a good meal and a cocktail or two, I'll lay out Dirk's master plan.\"\n\n\"Which island have you selected?\" Shannon asked cynically. \"Bali Ha'i or Atlantis?\"\n\n\"There is no island,\" Pitt answered mysteriously. \"No island at all. The treasure that never was, but is, sits on dry land.\"\n\nAn hour and a half later, with Giordino standing at the helm, the old ferry reversed course as her paddlewheels drove her northward back toward San Felipe. While Gunn, assisted by Rodgers, prepared dinner in the ferry's galley, Loren searched for Pitt and finally found him sitting on a folding chair down in the engine room, chatting with the chief engineer as he soaked up the sounds, smells, and motion of the Alhambra's monstrous engines. He wore the expression of a man in the throes of undisguised euphoria.\n\nShe carried a small bottle of blanco tequila and a glass of ice as she crept up behind him.\n\nGordo Padilla smoked the stub of a cigar while wiping a clean cloth over a pair of brass steam gauges.\n\nHe wore scuffed cowboy boots, a T-shirt covered with bright illustrations of tropical birds, and a pair of pants cut off at the knees. His sleek, well-oiled hair was as thick as marsh grass, and the brown eyes in his round face wandered over the engines with the same ardor they would display if beholding the full-figured body of a model in a bikini.\n\nMost ship's engineers are thought to be big ebullient men with hairy chests and thick forearms illustrated with colorful tattoos. Padilla was devoid of body hair and tattoos. He looked like an ant crawling on his great walking beam engines. Diminutive, his height and weight would have easily qualified him to ride a racehorse.\n\n\"Rosa, my wife,\" he said between swallows of Tecate beer, \"she thinks I love these engines more than her. I tell her they better than a mistress. Much cheaper and I never have to sneak around alleys to see them.\"\n\n\"Women have never understood the affection a man can have for a machine,\" Pitt agreed.\n\n\"Women can't feel passionate about greasy gears and pistons,\" said Loren, slipping a hand down the front of Pitt's aloha shirt, \"because they don't love back.\"\n\n\"Ah, but pretty lady,\" said Padilla, \"you can't imagine the satisfaction we feel after seducing an engine into running smoothly.\"\n\nLoren laughed. \"No, and I don't want to.\" She looked up at the huge A-frame that supported the walking beams, and then to the great cylinders, steam condensers, and boilers. \"But I must admit, it's an impressive apparatus.\"\n\n\"Apparatus?\" Pitt squeezed her around the waist. \"In light of modern diesel turbines, walking beam engines seem antiquated. But when you look back on the engineering and manufacturing techniques that were state-of-the-art during their era, they are monuments to the genius of our forefathers.\"\n\nShe passed him the little bottle of tequila and the glass of ice. \"Enough of this masculine crap about smelly old engines. Swill this down. Dinner will be ready in ten minutes.\"\n\n\"You have no respect for the finer things in life,\" said Pitt, nuzzling her hand.\n\n\"Make your choice. The engines or me?\"\n\nHe looked up at the piston rod as it pumped the walking beam up and down. \"I can't deny having an obsession with the stroke of an engine.\" He smiled slyly. \"But I freely confess there's a lot to be said for stroking something that's soft and cuddly.\"\n\n\"Now there's a comforting thought for all the women of the world.\"\n\nJesus dropped down the ladder from the car deck and said something in Spanish to Padilla. He listened, nodded, and looked at Pitt. \"Jesus says the lights of a plane have been circling the ferry for the past half hour.\"\n\nPitt stared for a moment at the giant crank that turned the paddlewheels. Then he gave Loren a squeeze and said briefly, \"A good sign.\"\n\n\"A sign of what?\" she asked curiously.\n\n\"The guys on the other side,\" he said in a cheery voice. \"They've failed and now they hope to follow us to the mother lode. That gives an advantage to our team.\"\n\nAfter a hearty dinner on one of the thirty tables in the yawning, unobstructed passengers' section of the ferry, the table was cleared and Pitt spread out a nautical chart and two geological land survey maps. Pitt spoke to them distinctly and precisely, laying out his thoughts so clearly they might have been their own.\n\n\"The landscape is not the same. There have been great changes in the past almost five hundred years.\"\n\nHe paused and pieced together the three maps, depicting an uninterrupted view of the desert terrain from the upper shore of the Gulf north to the Coachella Valley of California.\n\n\"Thousands of years ago the Sea of Cortez used to stretch over the present-day Colorado Desert and Imperial Valley above the Salton Sea. Through the centuries, the Colorado River flooded and carried enormous amounts of silt into the sea, eventually forming a delta and diking in the northern area of the sea. This buildup of silt left behind a large body of water that was later known as Lake Cahuilla, named, I believe, after the Indians who lived on its banks. As you travel around the foothills that rim the basin, you can still see the ancient waterline and find seashells scattered throughout the desert.\n\n\"When did it dry up?\" asked Shannon.\n\n\"Between 1100 and 1200 A.D.\"\n\n\"Then where did the Salton Sea come from?\"\n\n\"In an attempt to irrigate the desert, a canal was built to carry water from the Colorado River. In 1905, after unseasonably heavy rains and much silting, the river burst the banks of the canal and water poured into the lowest part of the desert's basin. A desperate dam operation stopped the flow, but not before enough water had flowed through to form the Salton Sea, with a surface eighty meters below sea level. Actually, it's a large lake that will eventually go the way of Lake Cahuilla, despite irrigation drainage that has temporarily stabilized its present size.\"\n\nGunn produced a bottle of Mexican brandy. \"A short intermission for spirits to rejuvenate the bloodstream.\" Lacking the proper snifter goblets, he poured the brandy into plastic cups. Then he raised his. \"A toast to success.\"\n\n\"Hear, hear,\" said Giordino. \"Amazing how a good meal and a little brandy changes one's attitude.\"\n\n\"We're all hoping Dirk has discovered a new solution,\" said Loren.\n\n\"Interesting to see if he makes sense.\" Shannon made an impatient gesture. \"Let's hear where all this is going.\"\n\nPitt said nothing but leaned over the maps and drew a circular line through the desert with a red felt-tip pen. \"This is approximately where the Gulf extended in the late fourteen hundreds, before the river's silt buildup worked south.\"\n\n\"Less than a kilometer from the present border between the United States and Mexico,\" observed Rodgers.\n\n\"An area now mostly covered by wetlands and mudflats known as the Laguna Salada.\"\n\n\"How does this swamp fit into the picture?\" asked Gunn.\n\nPitt's face glowed like a corporate executive officer about to announce a fat dividend to his stockholders. \"The island where the Incas and the Chachapoyas buried Huascar's golden chain is no longer an island.\"\n\nThen he sat down and sipped his brandy, allowing the revelation to penetrate and blossom.\n\nAs if responding to a drill sergeant's command, everyone leaned over the charts and studied the markings Pitt had made indicating the ancient shoreline. Shannon pointed to a small snake Pitt had drawn that coiled around a high rock outcropping halfway between the marsh and the foothills of the Las Tinajas Mountains.\n\n\"What does the snake signify?\"\n\n\"A kind of 'X marks the spot,' \" answered Pitt.\n\nGunn closely examined the geological survey map. \"You've designated a small mountain that, according to the contour elevations, tops out at slightly less than five hundred meters.\"\n\n\"Or about sixteen hundred feet,\" Giordino tallied.\n\n\"What is it called?\" Loren wondered.\n\n\"Cerro el Capirote,\" Pitt answered. \"Capirote in English means a tall, pointed ceremonial hat, or what we used to call a dunce cap.\"\n\n\"So you think this high pinnacle in the middle of nowhere is our treasure site?\" Rodgers asked Pitt.\n\n\"If you study the maps closely, you'll find several other small mounts with sharp summits rising from the desert floor beside the swamp. Any one of them matches the general description. But I'm laying my money on Cerro el Capirote.\"\n\n\"What brings you to such an uncompromising decision?\" Shannon queried.\n\n\"I put myself in the Incas' shoes, or sandals as it were, and selected the best spot to hide what was at the time the world's greatest treasure. If I were General Naymlap, I'd look for the most imposing island at the upper end of a sea as far away from the hated Spanish conquerors as I could find. Cerro el Capirote was about as far as he could go in the early fifteen hundreds, and its height makes it the most imposing.\"\n\nThe mood on the passenger deck of the ferry was definitely on the upswing. New hope had been injected into a project that had come within a hair of being written off as a failure. Pitt's unshakable confidence had infected everyone. Even Shannon was belting down the brandy and grinning like a Dodge City saloon hostess. It was as if all doubt had been thrown overboard. Suddenly, they all took finding the demon perched on the peak of Cerro el Capirote for granted.\n\nIf they had the slightest hint that Pitt had reservations, the party would have died a quick death. He felt secure in his conclusions, but he was too pragmatic not to harbor a few small doubts.\n\nAnd then there was the dark side of the coin. He and Giordino had not mentioned that they had identified Doc Miller's killer as one of the other searchers. They both quietly realized that the Zolars or the Solpemachaco, whatever devious name they went under in this part of the world, were not aware that the treasure was in Pitt's sights.\n\nPitt began to picture Tupac Amaru in his mind, the cold, lifeless eyes, and he knew the hunt was about to become ugly and downright dirty.\n\nThey sailed the Alhambra north of Punta San Felipe and heaved to when her paddlewheels churned up a wake of red silt. A few kilometers ahead, the mouth of the Colorado River, wide and shallow, gaped on the horizon. Spread on either side of the murky, salt-laden water were barren mudflats, totally devoid of vegetation. Few planets in the universe could have looked as wretched and dead.\n\nPitt gazed at the grim landscape through the windscreen of the helicopter as he adjusted his safety harness. Shannon was strapped in the copilot's seat and Giordino and Rodgers sat in the rear passenger section of the cabin. He waved at Gunn, who replied with a V for victory sign, and Loren, who appropriately blew him a kiss.\n\nHis hands danced over the cyclic and collective pitch sticks as the rotors turned, gathering speed until the whole fuselage shuddered. And then the Alhambra was falling away, and he slipped the helicopter sideways across the water like a leaf blown by the wind. Once safely free of the ferry, he gently slipped the cyclic forward and the aircraft began a diagonal climb on a northerly course. At 500 meters (1640 feet) Pitt adjusted the controls and straightened out in level flight.\n\nHe flew above the drab waters of the upper Gulf for ten minutes before crossing into the marshlands of the Laguna Salada. A vast section of the flats was flooded from recent rains, and the dead limbs of mesquite rose above the heavily salted water like skeletal arms reaching for salvation.\n\nThe giant slough was soon left behind as Pitt banked the helicopter across the sand dunes that marched from the mountains to the edge of the Laguna Salada. Now the landscape took on the characteristics of a faded brown moon, more substance than color. The uneven, rocky terrain looked fearsome. Beautiful to the eye but deadly to the body that struggled to survive its horror during the blazing heat of summer.\n\n\"There's a blacktop road,\" announced Shannon, motioning downward.\n\n\"Highway Five,\" said Pitt. \"It runs from San Felipe to Mexicali.\"\n\n\"Is this part of the Colorado Desert?\" asked Rodgers.\n\n\"The desert north of the border is called that because of the Colorado River. In fact this is all part of the Sonoran Desert.\"\n\n\"Not very hospitable country. I wouldn't want to walk through it.\"\n\n\"Those who are intolerant of the desert die in it,\" said Pitt thoughtfully. \"Those who respect it find it a compelling place to live.\"\n\n\"People actually live down there?\" Shannon asked in surprise.\n\n\"Mostly Indians,\" replied Pitt. \"The Sonoran Desert is perhaps the most beautiful of all the world's deserts, even though the citizens of central Mexico think of it as their Ozarks.\"\n\nGiordino leaned out a side window for a better view and peered into the distance through the trusty binoculars. He patted Pitt on the shoulder. \"Your hot spot is coming up off to, port.\"\n\nPitt nodded, made a slight course change and peered at a solitary mountain rising from the desert floor directly ahead. Cerro el Capirote was aptly named. Though not exactly conical in shape, there was a slight resemblance to a dunce cap with the tip flattened.\n\n\"I think I can make out an animal-like sculpture on the summit,\" observed Giordino.\n\n\"I'll descend and hover over it,\" Pitt acknowledged.\n\nHe cut his airspeed, dropped, and swung around the top of the mountain. He approached and circled cautiously, on the watch for sudden downdrafts. Then he hovered the helicopter almost nose-to-nose with the grotesque stone effigy. Mouth agape, it seemed to stare back with the truculent expression of a hungry junkyard dog.\n\n\"Step right up, folks,\" hawked Pitt as if he were a carnival barker, \"and view the astounding demon of the underworld who shuffles cards with his nose and deals 'em with his toes.\"\n\n\"It exists,\" cried Shannon, flushed with excitement, as they all were. \"It truly exists.\"\n\n\"Looks like a timeworn gargoyle,\" said Giordino, successfully controlling his emotions.\n\n\"You've got to land,\" demanded Rodgers. \"We must get a closer look.\"\n\n\"Too many high rocks around the sculpture,\" said Pitt. \"I have to find a flat spot to set down.\"\n\n\"There's a small clearing free of boulders about forty meters beyond the demon,\" Giordino said, pointing through the windscreen over Pitt's shoulder.\n\nPitt nodded and banked around the towering rock carving so he could make his approach into the wind blowing across the mountain from the west. He reduced speed, eased back the cyclic stick. The turquoise helicopter hovered a moment, flared out, and then settled onto the only open space on the stone summit of Cerro el Capirote.\n\nGiordino was first out, carrying tiedown lines that he attached to the helicopter and wrapped around rock outcroppings. When he completed the operation, he moved in front of the cockpit and drew his hand across his throat. Pitt shut off the engine and the rotor blades wound down.\n\nRodgers jumped down and offered a hand to Shannon. She hit the ground and took off at a run over the uneven terrain toward the stone effigy. Pitt stepped from the helicopter last, but did not follow the others. He casually raised the binoculars and scanned the sky in the direction of the faint sound of an aircraft engine. The seaplane was only a silver speck against a dome of blue. The pilot had maintained an altitude of 2000 meters (6500 feet) in an attempt to remain unseen. But Pitt was not fooled. His intuition told him he was being tailed the instant he lifted off from the Alhambra. Spotting the enemy only confirmed his suspicions.\n\nBefore he joined the others already gathered around the stone beast, he took a moment and stepped to the edge of the craggy wall and stared down, thankful that he did not have to make the ascent. The unobstructed panorama of the desert was breathtaking. The October sun tinted the rocks and sand in vivid colors that turned drab during the hot summer. The waters of the Gulf sparkled to the south and the mountain ranges on both sides of the marshlands of the Laguna Salada rose majestically through a slight haze.\n\nSatisfaction swelled within him. He had made a good call. The ancients had indeed selected an imposing spot to hide their treasure.\n\nWhen he finally approached the huge stone beast, Shannon was making detailed measurements of the jaguar body while Rodgers busied himself shooting roll after roll of photos. Giordino appeared intent on searching around the pedestal for a trace of the entrance to the passageway leading down into the mountain.\n\n\"Does he have the proper pedigree?\" Pitt asked.\n\n\"Definitely Chachapoyan influence,\" Shannon said, her face flushed with fervor. \"An extraordinary example of their art.\" She stood back as if admiring a painting hanging in a gallery. \"See how the motifs on the scales are exactingly duplicated. They're a perfect match for those on the sculpted beasts in the Pueblo de los Muertos.\"\n\n\"The technique is the same?\"\n\n\"Almost identical.\"\n\n\"Then perhaps the same sculptor had a hand in carving this one.\"\n\n\"It's possible.\" Shannon raised her hand as high as she could reach and stroked the lower part of the serpent's scaled neck. \"It wasn't uncommon for the Incas to recruit Chachapoyan stone carvers.\"\n\n\"The ancients must have had a strange sense of humor to create a god whose looks could sour milk.\"\n\n\"The legend is vague but it contends that a condor laid an egg that was eaten and vomited by a jaguar.\n\nA snake was hatched from the regurgitated egg and slithered into the sea where it grew fish scales. The rest of the mythological account says that because the beast was so ugly and shunned by the other gods who thrived in the sun, it lived underground where it eventually became the guardian of the dead.\"\n\n\"The original ugly duckling fairy tale.\"\n\n\"He's hideous,\" Shannon said solemnly, \"and yet I can't help feeling a deep sadness for him. I don't know if I can explain it properly, but the stone seems to have a life of its own.\"\n\n\"I understand. I sense something more than cold stone too.\" Pitt stared down at one of the wings that had dropped off the body and shattered into several pieces. \"Poor old guy. He looks like he's fallen on hard times.\"\n\nShannon nodded sadly at the graffiti and the gouges from bullet holes. \"The pity is that local archaeologists never recognized the beast for what it is, a remarkable piece of artwork by two cultures that thrived thousands of kilometers from here--\"\n\nPitt interrupted her by abruptly raising a hand for silence. \"You hear something, a strange sound like someone crying?\"\n\nShe cocked an ear and listened, then shook her head. \"I only hear the shutter and automatic winding mechanism on Miles's camera.\"\n\nThe eerie sound Pitt thought he heard was gone. He grinned. \"Probably the wind.\"\n\n\"Or those the Demonio del Muertos is guarding.\"\n\n\"I thought he guaranteed they rest in eternal peace.\"\n\nShannon smiled. \"We know very little about Inca and Chachapoyan religious rites. Our stone friend here may not have been as benevolent as we assume.\"\n\nPitt left Shannon and Miles to their work and walked over to Giordino, who was tapping the rock around the beast's pedestal with a miner's pick. \"See any hint of a passage?\" Pitt asked.\n\n\"Not unless the ancients discovered a method for fusing rock,\" answered Giordino. \"This big gargoyle is carved from an immense slab of solid granite that forms the core of the mountain. I can't find a telltale crack anywhere around the statue's base. If there's a passage, it has to be somewhere else on the mountain.\"\n\nPitt tilted his head, listening. \"There it is again.\"\n\n\"You mean that banshee wail?\"\n\n\"You heard it?\" Pitt asked in surprise.\n\n\"I figured it was just wind whistling through the rocks.\"\n\n\"There isn't a whisper of wind.\"\n\nA curious look crossed Giordino's face as he wetted one index finger with his tongue and tested the air. \"You're right. Nary a stir.\"\n\n\"It's not a steady sound,\" said Pitt. \"I only notice it at intervals.\"\n\n\"I picked up on that too. It comes like a puff of breath for about ten seconds and then fades for nearly a minute.\"\n\nPitt nodded happily. \"Could it be we're describing a vent to a cavern?\"\n\n\"Let's see if we can find it,\" Giordino suggested eagerly.\n\n\"Better it come to us.\" Pitt found a rock that seemed molded to his buttocks and settled in. He leisurely wiped a smudge from one lens of his sunglasses, dabbed his brow with a bandanna that hung from his pocket, then cupped his ears and began turning his head like a radar antenna.\n\nLike clockwork, the strange wail came and went. Pitt waited until he heard three sequences. Then he motioned for Giordino to move along the north side of the peak. No reply was necessary, no words passed between them. They had been close friends since they were children and had maintained close contact during their years together in the Air Force. When Pitt joined NUMA at Admiral Sandecker's request twelve years ago, Giordino went with him. Over time they learned to respond to each other without needless talk.\n\nGiordino moved down a steep slope for about 20 meters (65 feet) before stopping. He paused and listened while awaiting Pitt's next gesture. The dismal wail came stronger to him than it did to Pitt. But he knew that the sound reverberated off the boulders and was distorted. He didn't hesitate when Pitt motioned him away from where it sounded loudest and pointed to a spot where the side of the peak suddenly dropped off in a narrow chute 10 meters (33 feet) deep.\n\nWhile Giordino was lying on his stomach surveying a way down to the bottom of the chute, Pitt came over, crouched beside him, and held out a hand, palm down.\n\nThe wail came again and Pitt nodded, his lips parting in a tight smile. \"I can feel a draft. Something deep inside the mountain is causing air to be expelled from a vent.\"\n\n\"I'll get the rope and flashlight from the chopper,\" said Giordino, rising to his feet and trotting toward the aircraft. In two minutes he was back with Shannon and Miles.\n\nHer eyes fairly sparkled with anticipation. \"Al says you found a way inside the mountain.\"\n\nPitt nodded. \"We'll know shortly.\"\n\nGiordino tied one end of a nylon line around a large rock. \"Who gets the honor?\"\n\n\"I'll toss you for it,\" said Pitt.\n\n\"Heads.\"\n\nPitt flipped a quarter and watched as it clinked and spun to a stop on a small, flat surface between two massive boulders. \"Tails, you lose.\"\n\nGiordino shrugged without complaint, knotted a loop and passed it over and then under Pitt's shoulders. \"Never mind bedazzling me with mountain climbing tricks. I'll let you down, and I'll pull you up.\"\n\nPitt accepted the fact his friend's strength was greater than his own. Giordino's body may have been short but his shoulders were as broad as any man's, and his muscled arms were a match for a professional wrestler. Anyone who tried to throw Giordino, including karate black belt experts, felt as if they were caught up in the gears of an unyielding piece of machinery.\n\n\"Mind you don't get rope burn,\" Pitt cautioned him.\n\n\"Mind you don't break a leg, or I'll leave you for the gargoyle,\" said Giordino, handing Pitt the flashlight. Then he slowly paid out the line, lowering Pitt between the walls of the narrow chute.\n\nWhen Pitt's feet touched the bottom, he looked up. \"Okay, I'm down.\"\n\n\"What do you see?\"\n\n\"A small cleft in the rock wall just large enough to crawl through. I'm going in.\"\n\n\"Don't remove the rope. There could be a sharp drop just inside the entrance.\"\n\nPitt lay on his stomach and wormed through the narrow fissure. It was a tight squeeze for 3 meters (10 feet) before the entryway widened enough so he could stand. He switched on the flashlight and swung its beam along the walls. The light showed he was at the head of a passageway that appeared to lead down into the bowels of the mountain. The floor was smooth with steps hewn into the rock every few paces.\n\nA rush of dank air rushed past him like the steamy breath of a giant. He moved his fingertips over the rock walls. They came away wet with moisture. Driven by curiosity, Pitt moved along the passageway until the nylon became taut and he was stopped from venturing further. He-aimed the light ahead into the darkness. The cold hand of fear gripped him around the neck as a pair of eyes flashed back at him.\n\nThere, upon a pedestal of black rock, seemingly sculpted by the same hand as the demon on the mountain peak above, glaring toward the entrance to the passage, was another, smaller Demonio del Muertos. This one was inlaid with turquoise stone and had white, polished quartz for teeth and red gemstones for eyes.\n\nPitt thought seriously of casting off the rope and exploring further. But he felt it wouldn't be fair to the others. They should all be in on the discovery of the treasure chamber together. Reluctantly, he returned to the crack in the wall and squirmed back into daylight.\n\nWhen Giordino helped him over the edge of the chute, Shannon and Rodgers were waiting in hushed expectation.\n\n\"What did you see?\" Shannon blurted, unable to contain her excitement. \"Tell us what you found!\"\n\nPitt stared at her without expression for a moment, then broke into an elated grin. \"The entrance to the treasure is guarded by another demon, but otherwise the way looks clear.\"\n\nEveryone shouted in elation. Shannon and Rodgers hugged and kissed. Giordino slapped Pitt on the back so hard it jarred his molars. Intense curiosity seized them as they peered over the edge of the chute at the small opening leading inside the mountain. None saw a black tunnel leading downward. They gazed through the rock as if it were transparent and saw the golden treasure far below.\n\nAt least that's what they thought they saw. But not Pitt. His eyes were sweeping the sky. Foresighted, intuitive, maybe just superstitious, he had a sudden vision of the seaplane that had followed them to the demon, attacking the Alhambra. For a moment he could see it as clearly as if he were watching television.\n\nIt was not a pretty sight.\n\nShannon noticed that Pitt was quiet, his face contemplative. \"What's wrong? You look like you've just lost your best girl.\"\n\nI may have,\" Pitt said darkly. \"I very well may have.\"\n\nGiordino returned to the helicopter and retrieved another coil of rope, a second flashlight, and a Coleman lantern from a storage locker. The rope he slung over his shoulder. He gave the flashlight to Shannon and handed the Coleman to Rodgers along with a box of wooden matches.\n\n\"The tank is full of gas, so we should have light for three hours or more.\"\n\nShannon airily took the extra flashlight. \"I think it best if I lead the way.\"\n\nGiordino shrugged. \"Suits me. As long as somebody other than me sets off the Incas' booby traps down in the cave of doom.\"\n\nShannon made a sour face. \"That's a cheery thought.\"\n\nPitt laughed. \"He overdoses on Indiana Jones movies.\"\n\n\"Give me a hard time,\" said Giordino sadly. \"You'll be sorry someday.\"\n\n\"I hope it's not soon.\"\n\n\"How wide is the opening?\" asked Rodgers.\n\n\"Dr. Kelsey might make it through on her hands and knees, but we boys will have to snake our way in.\"\n\nShannon peered over the edge at the bottom of the fissure. \"The Chachapoyas and the Incas could never have hauled several tons of gold up steep cliffs and then lowered it through a rat hole. They must have found a larger passage somewhere around the base of the mountain above the ancient waterline.\"\n\n\"You could waste years looking for it,\" said Rodgers.\n\n\"It must be buried under landslides and the erosion of almost five centuries.\"\n\n\"I'll bet the Incas sealed it off by causing a cave-in,\" Pitt ventured.\n\nShannon was not about to allow the men to go first. Scrambling over rocks and slinking into dark recesses was her specialty. She eagerly slipped down the rope as smoothly as if she did it twice a day and crawled into the narrow aperture in the rock. Rodgers went next, followed by Giordino, with Pitt bringing up the rear.\n\nGiordino turned to Pitt. \"If I get caught in a cave-in, you will dig me out.\"\n\n\"Not before I dial nine-one-one.\"\n\nShannon and Rodgers had already moved out of sight down the stone steps and were examining the second Demonio del Muertos when Pitt and Giordino caught up to them.\n\nShannon was peering at the motifs embedded in the fish scales. \"The images on this sculpture are better preserved than those on the first demon.\"\n\n\"Can you interpret them?\" asked Rodgers.\n\n\"If I had more time. They appear to have been chiseled in a hurry.\"\n\nRodgers stared at the protruding fangs in the jaws of the serpent's head. \"I'm not surprised the ancients were frightened of the underworld. This thing is ugly enough to induce diarrhea. Notice how the eyes seem to follow our movements.\"\n\n\"It's enough to make you sober,\" said Giordino.\n\nShannon brushed away the dust from around the red gemstone eyes. \"Burgundy topaz. Probably mined east of the Andes, in the Amazon.\"\n\nRodgers set the Coleman lantern on the floor, pumped up the fuel pressure and held a lit match against the mantle. The Coleman bathed the passage in a bright light for 10 meters (33 feet) in both directions.\n\nThen he held up the lantern to inspect the sculpture. \"Why a second demon?\" he asked, fascinated by the fact that the well preserved beast looked as if it had been carved only yesterday.\n\nPitt patted the serpent on the head. \"Insurance in case intruders got past the first one.\"\n\nShannon licked a corner of a handkerchief and cleaned the dust from the topaz eyes. \"What is amazing is that so many ancient cultures, geographically separated and totally unrelated, came up with the same myths. In the legends of India, for example, cobras were considered to be semi divine guardians of a subterranean kingdom filled with astounding riches.\"\n\n\"I see nothing unusual about that,\" said Giordino. \"Forty-nine out of fifty people are deathly afraid of snakes.\"\n\nThey finished their brief examination of the remarkable relic of antiquity and continued along the passageway. The damp air that came up from below drew the sweat through their pores. Despite the humidity they had to be careful they didn't step too heavily or their footsteps raised clouds of choking dust.\n\n\"They must have taken years to carve this tunnel,\" said Rodgers.\n\nPitt reached up and ran his fingers lightly over the limestone roof. \"I doubt they excavated it from scratch. They probably hollowed out an existing fissure. Whoever they were, they weren't short.\"\n\n\"How can you tell?\"\n\n\"The roof. We don't have to stoop. It's a good foot above our heads.\"\n\nRodgers gestured at a large plate set on an angle in a wall niche. \"This is the third one of these things I've seen since we entered. What do you suppose their purpose was?\"\n\nShannon rubbed away the centuries-old coating of dust and saw her reflection on a shining surface.\n\n\"Highly polished silver reflectors,\" she explained. \"The same system used by the ancient Egyptians for lighting interior galleries. The sun striking a reflector at the entrance bounced from reflector to reflector throughout the chambers and illuminated them without the smoke and soot given off by oil lamps.\"\n\n\"I wonder if they knew they were paving the way for environmentally friendly technology?\" murmured Pitt randomly.\n\nThe echoing sound of their footsteps spread ahead and behind them like ripples on a pond. It was an eerie, claustrophobic sensation, knowing they were entering the dead heart of the mountain. The stagnant air became so thick and heavy with moisture it dampened the dust on their clothing. Fifty meters (164 feet) later they entered a small cavern with a long gallery.\n\nThe chamber was nothing less than a catacomb, honeycombed with crypts hewn into the walls. The mummies of twenty men, wrapped tightly in beautifully embroidered woolen mantles, lay head to toe.\n\nThey were the mortal remains of the guards who faithfully guarded the treasure, even after death, waiting for the return of their countrymen from an empire that no longer existed.\n\n\"These people were huge,\" said Pitt. \"They must have stood two hundred and eight centimeters or six foot ten inches tall.\"\n\n\"A pity they aren't around to play in the NBA,\" muttered Giordino.\n\nShannon closely examined the design on the mantles. \"Legends claim the Chachapoyas were as tall as trees.\"\n\nPitt scanned the chamber. \"One missing.\"\n\nRodgers looked at him. \"Who?\"\n\n\"The last man, the one who tended to the burial of the guardians who went before.\"\n\nBeyond the gallery of death they came to a larger chamber that Shannon quickly identified as the living quarters of the guardians before they died. A wide, circular stone table with a surrounding bench rose out of the floor that formed their base. The table had evidently been used to eat on. The bones of a large bird still rested on a silver platter that sat on the smoothly polished stone surface along with ceramic drinking vessels. Beds had been chiseled into the walls, some still with woolen covers neatly folded in the middle.\n\nRodgers caught sight of something bright lying on the floor. He picked it up and held it under the light of the Coleman.\n\n\"What is it?\" asked Shannon.\n\n\"A massive gold ring, plain, with no engravings.\"\n\n\"An encouraging sign,\" said Pitt. \"We must be getting close to the main vault.\"\n\nShannon's breath was coming in short pants as the excitement mounted. She hurried off ahead of the men through another portal at the far end of the guardians' living quarters that led into a cramped tunnel with an arched ceiling, similar to an ancient cistern wide enough for only one person to pass through at a time. This passageway seemed to wind down through the mountain for an eternity.\n\n\"How far do you think we've come?\" asked Giordino.\n\n\"My feet feel like ten kilometers,\" Shannon answered, suddenly weary.\n\nPitt had paced the distance they'd traveled down the stone steps since leaving the crypts. \"The peak of Cerro el Capirote is only five hundred meters above sea level. I'd guess we've reached the desert floor and dropped twenty or thirty meters below it.\"\n\n\"Damn!\" Shannon gasped. \"Something fluttered against my face.\"\n\n\"Me too,\" said Giordino with obvious disgust. \"I think I've just been garnished with bat vomit.\"\n\n\"Be happy he wasn't of the vampire variety,\" joked Pitt.\n\nThey descended along the tunnel another ten minutes when Shannon suddenly stopped arid held up a hand. \"Listen!\" she commanded. \"I hear something.\"\n\nAfter a few moments, Giordino said, \"Sounds like someone left a tap on.\"\n\n\"A rushing stream or a river,\" Pitt said softly, recalling the old bartender's words.\n\nAs they moved closer, the sound of the moving water increased and reverberated within the confined space. The air had cooled considerably and smelled pure and less stifling. They rushed forward, anxiously hoping each bend in the passage was the last. And then the walls abruptly spread into the darkness and they rushed headlong into what seemed like a vast cathedral that revealed the mountain as incredibly hollow.\n\nShannon screamed a full-fledged shriek that echoed through the chamber as if intensified by huge rock concert amplifiers. She clutched the first body that was handy, in this case, Pitt's.\n\nGiordino, not one to scare easily, looked as if he'd seen a ghost.\n\nRodgers stood petrified, his outstretched arm frozen like an iron support, holding the Coleman lantern.\n\n\"Oh, good God,\" he finally gasped, hypnotized by the ghostly apparition that rose in front of them and glistened under the bright light. \"What is it?\"\n\nPitt's heart pumped a good five liters (a gallon) of adrenaline through his system, but he remained calm and clinically surveyed the towering figure that looked like a monstrosity out of a science fiction horror movie.\n\nThe huge specter was a ghastly sight. Standing straight, the apparition towered above them, its grisly features displaying grinning teeth, its eye sockets wide open. Pitt judged the horror to be a good head taller than him. High above one shoulder, as though poised in the act of bashing out an intruder's brains, a bony hand held an ornate battle club with a notched edge. The Coleman's light gleamed off the gruesome figure that looked as if it were encased in yellowish amber or fiberglass resin. Then Pitt determined what it was.\n\nThe last guardian of Huascar's treasure had been frozen for all time into a stalagmite.\n\n\"How did he get like that?\" Rodgers asked in awe.\n\nPitt pointed to the roof of the cavern. \"Ground water dripping from the limestone ceiling released carbon dioxide that splattered on the guardian and eventually covered him with a thick coating of calcite crystals. In time, he was encased like a scorpion inside a cheap gift shop acrylic resin paperweight.\"\n\n\"But how in the world could he die and remain in an upright position?\" queried Shannon, coming out of her initial fright.\n\nPitt ran his hand lightly over the crystallized mantle. \"We'll never know unless we chisel him out of his transparent tomb. It seems incredible, but knowing he was dying he must have constructed a support to prop him in a standing position with his arm raised, and then he took his life, probably by poison.\"\n\n\"These guys took their jobs seriously,\" muttered Giordino.\n\nAs if drawn by some mysterious force, Shannon moved within a few centimeters of the hideous wonder and stared up into the distorted face beneath the crystals. \"The height, the blond hair. He was Chachapoya, one of the Cloud People.\"\n\n\"He's a long way from home,\" said Pitt. He held up his wrist and checked the time. \"Two and a half hours to go before the Coleman runs out of gas. We'd better keep moving.\"\n\nThough it didn't seem possible, the immense grotto spread into the distance until their light beams barely revealed the great arched ceiling, far larger than any conceived or built by man. Giant stalactites that came down from the roof met and joined stalagmites rising from the floor, merging and becoming gigantic columns. Some of the stalagmites had formed in the shapes of strange beasts that seemed frozen in an alien landscape. Crystals gleamed from the walls like glittering teeth. The overpowering beauty and grandeur that sparkled and glittered under the rays of their lights made it seem they were in the center of a laser light show.\n\nThen the formations stopped abruptly, as the floor of the cavern ended on the bank of a river over 30 meters wide (100 feet). Under their lights, the black, forbidding water turned a dark emerald green. Pitt calculated the speed of the current at a rapid nine knots. The babbling brook sound they had heard further back in the passageway they now saw was the rush of water around the rockbound banks of along, low island that protruded from the middle of the river.\n\nBut it was not the discovery of an extraordinary unknown river flowing far beneath the floor of the desert that captivated and enthralled them. It was a dazzling sight no ordinary imagination could ever conceive. There, stacked neatly on the level top of the island, rose a mountain of golden artifacts.\n\nThe effect of the two flashlights and the Coleman lantern on the golden hoard left the explorers speechless. Overcome, they could only stand immobile and absorb the magnificent spectacle.\n\nHere was Huascar's golden chain coiled in a great spiral 10 meters (33 feet) in height. Here also was the great gold disk from the Temple of the Sun, beautifully crafted and set with hundreds of precious stones. There were golden plants, water lilies and corn, and solid gold sculptures of kings and gods, women, llamas, and dozens upon dozens of ceremonial objects, beautifully formed and inlaid with huge emeralds. Here also, stacked as if inside a moving van, were tons of golden statues, furniture, tables, chairs, and beds, all handsomely engraved. The centerpiece was a huge throne made from solid gold inlaid with silver flowers.\n\nNor was this all. Arranged row after row, standing like phantoms, their mummies encased in golden shells, were twelve generations of Inca royalty. Beside each one lay his armor and headdresses and exquisitely woven clothing.\n\n\"In my wildest dreams,\" Shannon murmured softly, \"I never envisioned a collection this vast.\"\n\nGiordino and Rodgers were both paralyzed with astonishment. No words came from either one of them. They could only gape.\n\n\"Remarkable they could transport half the wealth of the Americas thousands of kilometers across an ocean on balsa and reed rafts,\" said Pitt in admiration.\n\nShannon slowly shook her head, the awed look in her eyes turning to sadness. \"Try to imagine, if you can. What we see here is only a tiny part of the riches belonging to the last of the magnificent pre-Columbian civilizations. We can only make a rough assessment of the enormous number of objects the Spanish took and melted down into bullion.\"\n\nGiordino's face beamed almost as brightly as all the gold. \"Warms the cockles of your heart, knowing the gluttonous Spaniards missed the cream of the crop.\"\n\n\"Any chance we can get over to the island so I can study the artifacts?\" asked Shannon.\n\n\"And I'll need to get close-ups,\" added Rodgers.\n\n\"Not unless you can walk across thirty meters of rushing water,\" said Giordino.\n\nPitt scanned the cavern by sweeping his light along the barren floor. \"Looks like the Chachapoyas and the Incas took their bridge with them. You'll have to do your study and shoot your pictures of the treasure from here.\"\n\n\"I'll use my telephoto and pray my flash carries that far,\" said Rodgers hopefully.\n\n\"What do you suppose all this is worth?\" asked Giordino.\n\n\"You'd have to weigh it,\" said Pitt, \"figure in the current market price of gold, and then triple your total for the value as rare artifacts.\"\n\n\"I'm certain the treasure is worth double what the experts estimated,\" said Shannon.\n\nGiordino looked at her. \"That would be as high as three hundred million dollars?\"\n\nShannon nodded. \"Maybe even more.\"\n\n\"It isn't worth a good baseball card,\" remarked Pitt, \"until it's brought to the surface. Not an easy job to barge the larger pieces, including the chain, off an island surrounded by a rushing flow of water, and then haul them up a narrow passageway to the top of the mountain. From there, you'll need a heavy transport helicopter just to carry the golden chain.\"\n\n\"You're talking a major operation,\" said Rodgers.\n\nPitt held his light on the great coiled chain. \"Nobody said it was going to be easy. Besides, bringing out the treasure isn't our problem.\"\n\nShannon gave him a questioning stare. \"Oh, no? Then who do you expect to do it?\"\n\nPitt stared back. \"Have you forgotten? We're supposed to stand aside and hand it over to our old pals from the Solpemachaco.\"\n\nThe repulsive thought had slipped her mind after gazing enthralled at the wealth of golden artifacts. \"An outrage,\" Shannon said furiously, her self-esteem blossoming once more, \"a damned outrage. The archaeological discovery of the century, and I can't direct the recovery program.\"\n\n\"Why don't you lodge a complaint?\" said Pitt.\n\nShe glared at him, puzzled. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Let the competition know how you feel.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"Leave them a message.\"\n\n\"You're crazy.\"\n\n\"That observation has been cropping up quite a bit lately,\" said Giordino.\n\nPitt took the rope slung over Giordino's shoulder and made a loop. Then he twirled the rope like a lariat and threw the loop across the water, smiling triumphantly as it settled over the head of a small golden monkey on a pedestal.\n\n\"Ah, ha!\" he uttered proudly. \"Will Rogers had nothing on me.\"\n\nPitt's worst fears were confirmed when he hovered the helicopter above the Alhambra. No one stood on the deck to greet the craft and its passengers. The ferry looked deserted. The auto deck was empty, as was the wheelhouse. The boat was not riding at anchor, nor was she drifting. Her hull was resting lightly in the water only two meters above the silt of the shallow bottom. To all appearances, she looked like a ship that had been abandoned by her crew.\n\nThe sea was calm and there was no pitch or roll. Pitt lowered the helicopter onto the wood deck and shut down the engines as soon as the tires touched down. He sat there as the sound of the turbine and rotor blades slowly died into a morbid silence. He waited a full minute but no one appeared. He opened the entry door and dropped to the deck. Then he stood there waiting for something to happen.\n\nFinally, a man stepped from behind a stairwell and approached, coming to a halt about 5 meters (16 feet) from the chopper. Even without the phony white hair and beard, Pitt easily recognized the man who had impersonated Dr. Steven Miller in Peru. He was smiling as if he'd caught a record fish.\n\n\"A little off your beat, aren't you?\" said Pitt, unruffled.\n\n\"You seem to be my never-ending nemesis, Mr. Pitt.\"\n\n\"A quality that thrills me no end. What name are you going under today?\"\n\n\"Not that it's of use to you, but I am Cyrus Samson.\"\n\n\"I can't say I'm pleased to see you again.\"\n\nSarason moved closer, peering over Pitt's shoulder at the interior of the helicopter. His face lost the gloating smile and twisted into tense concern. \"You are alone? Where are the others?\"\n\n\"What others?\" Pitt asked innocently.\n\n\"Dr. Kelsey, Miles Rodgers, and your friend, Albert Giordino.\"\n\n\"Since you have the passenger list memorized, you tell me.\"\n\nPlease, Mr. Pitt, you would do well not to toy with me,\" Sarason warned him.\n\n\"They were hungry, so I dropped them off at a seafood restaurant in San Felipe.\"\n\n\"You're lying.\"\n\nPitt didn't take his gaze off Sarason to scan the decks of the ferry. Guns were trained on him. That was a certainty he knew without question. He stood his ground and faced Miller's killer as if he didn't have a care in the world.\n\n\"So sue me,\" Pitt retorted, and laughed.\n\n\"You're hardly in a position to be contemptuous,\" Sarason said coldly. \"Perhaps you don't realize the seriousness of your situation.\"\n\n\"I think I do,\" said Pitt, still smiling. \"You want Huascar's treasure, and you'd murder half the good citizens of Mexico to get it.\"\n\n\"Fortunately, that won't be necessary. I do admit, however, two-thirds of a billion dollars makes an enticing incentive.\"\n\n\"Aren't you interested in knowing how and why we were conducting our search at the same time as yours?\" asked Pitt.\n\nIt was Sarason's turn to laugh. \"After a little persuasion, Mr. Gunn and Congresswoman Smith were most cooperative in telling me about Drake's quipu.\"\n\n\"Not very smart, torturing a United States legislator and the deputy director of a national science agency.\"\n\n\"But effective, nonetheless.\"\n\n\"Where are my friends and the ferry's crew?\"\n\n\"I wondered when you'd get around to that question.\"\n\n\"Do you want to work out a deal?\" Pitt didn't miss the predator's eyes staring unblinkingly in an attempt to intimidate. He stared back piercingly. \"Or do you want to strike up the music and dance?\"\n\nSarason shook his head. \"I see no reason why I should bargain. You have nothing to trade. You're obviously not a man I can trust. And I have all the chips. In short, Mr. Pitt, you have lost the game before you draw your cards.\"\n\n\"Then you can afford to be a magnanimous winner and produce my friends.\"\n\nSarason made a thoughtful shrug, raised his hand, and made a beckoning gesture. \"The least I can do before I hang some heavy weights on you and drop you over the side.\"\n\nFour burly dark-skinned men, who looked like bouncers hired from local cantinas, prodded the captives from the passageway with automatic rifles, and lined them up on the deck behind Sarason.\n\nGordo Padilla came first, followed by Jesus, Gato, and the assistant engineer whose name Pitt could not recall ever hearing. The bruises and dried blood on their faces showed that they had been knocked around but were not hurt seriously. Gunn had not gotten off so lightly. He had to be half dragged from the passageway. He had been badly beaten, and Pitt could see the blotches of blood on his shirt and the crude rags wrapped around his hands. Then Loren was standing there, her face drawn and her lips and cheeks swollen and puffed up as though stung by bees. Her hair was disheveled and purplish bruises showed on her arms and legs. Yet she still held her head proudly and shook off the guards' hands as they roughly pushed her forward. Her expression was one of defiance until she saw Pitt standing there. Then it turned to cruel disappointment, and she moaned in despair.\n\n\"Oh, no, Dirk!\" she exclaimed. \"They've got you too.\"\n\nGunn painfully raised his head and muttered through lips that were split and bleeding. \"I tried to warn you, but. . .\" His voice went too soft to be understood.\n\nSarason smiled, unfeeling. \"I think what Mr. Gunn means to say is that he and your crew were overpowered by my men after they kindly allowed us to board your ferry from a chartered fishing boat after begging to borrow your radio.\"\n\nPitt's anger came within a millimeter of driving him to inflict pain on those who had brutalized his friends. He took a deep breath to regain control. He swore under his breath that the man standing in front of him would pay. Not now. But the time would surely come if he didn't try anything foolish.\n\nHe glanced casually toward the nearest railing, gauging its distance and height. Then he turned back to Sarason.\n\n\"I don't like big, tough men who beat up defenseless women,\" he said conversationally. \"And for what purpose? The location of the treasure is no secret to you.\"\n\n\"Then it's true,\" Sarason said with a pleased expression. \"You found the beast that guards the gold on the top of Cerro el Capirote.\"\n\n\"If you had dropped for a closer look instead of playing peekaboo in the clouds, you'd have seen the beast for yourself.\"\n\nPitt's last words brought a flicker of curiosity to the beady eyes.\n\n\"You were aware you were being followed?\" asked Sarason.\n\n\u00cct goes without saying that you would have searched for our helicopter after our chance meeting in the air yesterday. My guess is you checked out landing fields on both sides of the Gulf last night and asked questions until someone it San Felipe innocently pointed the way to our ferry.'\n\n\"You're very astute.\"\n\n\"Not really. I made the mistake of overestimating you. I didn't think you'd act like a reckless amateur and begin mutilating the competition. An act that was completely unwarranted.\"\n\nPuzzlement filled Sarason's eyes. \"What goes on here, Pitt?\"\n\n\"All part of the plan,\" answered Pitt almost jovially. \"I purposely led you to the jackpot.\"\n\n\"A barefaced lie.\"\n\n\"You've been set up, pal. Get wise. Why do you think I let off Dr. Kelsey, Rodgers, and Giordino before I returned to the ferry? To keep them out of your dirty hands, that's why.\"\n\nSarason said slowly. \"You couldn't have known we were going to capture your boat before you came back.\"\n\n\"Not with any certainty. Let's say my intuition was working overtime. That and the fact my radio calls to the ferry went unanswered.\"\n\nA shrewd hyenalike look slowly spread across Sarason's face. \"Nice try, Pitt. You'd make an excellent writer of children's stories.\"\n\n\"You don't believe me?\" Pitt asked, as if surprised.\n\n\"Not a word.\"\n\n\"What are you going to do with us?\"\n\nSarason looked disgustingly cheerful. \"You're more naive than I gave you credit for. You know full well what's going to happen to you.\"\n\n\"Crowding your luck, aren't you, Sarason? Murdering Congresswoman Smith will bring half the United States law enforcement officers down around your neck.\"\n\n\"Nobody will know she was murdered,\" he said impassively. \"Your ferryboat will simply go to the bottom with all hands. An unfortunate accident that is never fully solved.\"\n\n\"There is still Kelsey, Giordino, and Rodgers. They're safe and sound in California, ready to spill the story to Customs and FBI agents.\"\n\n\"We're not in the United States. We're in the sovereign nation of Mexico. The local authorities will conduct an extensive investigation but will turn up no evidence of foul play despite unfounded accusations from your friends.\"\n\n\"With close to a billion dollars at stake, I should have known you'd be generous in buying the cooperation of local officials.\"\n\n\"They couldn't wait to sign on board after we promised them a share of the treasure,\" Sarason boasted.\n\n\"Considering how much there is to go around,\" said Pitt, \"you could afford to play Santa Claus.\"\n\nSarason looked at the setting sun. \"It's getting late in the day. I think we've chatted long enough.\" He turned and spoke a name that sent a shiver through Pitt. \"Tupac, come and say hello to the man who made you impotent.\"\n\nTupac Amaru stepped from behind one of the guards and stood in front of Pitt, his teeth set and grinning like a skull on a pirate's Jolly Roger flag. He had the joyful but clinical look of a butcher sizing up a slab of prime, specially aged beef.\n\n\"I told you I would make you suffer as you made me,\" Amaru said ominously.\n\nPitt studied the evil face with a strangely paralyzed intensity. He didn't need a football coach to diagram what was in store for him. He braced his body to begin the scheme he had formed in the back of his mind right after he had stepped out of the helicopter. He moved toward Loren, but stepped slightly sideways and inconspicuously began to hyperventilate.\n\n\"If you are the one who harmed Congresswoman Smith, you will die as surely as you stand there with that stupid look on your face.\"\n\nSarason laughed. \"No, no. You, Mr. Pitt, are not going to kill anybody.\"\n\n\"Neither are you. Even in Mexico you'd hang if there was a witness to your executions.\"\n\n\"I'd be the first to admit it.\" Sarason surveyed Pitt inquiringly. \"But what witness are you talking about?\" He paused to sweep an arm around the empty sea. \"As you can see, the nearest land is empty desert almost twenty kilometers away, and the only vessel in sight is our fishing boat standing off the starboard bow.\"\n\nPitt tilted his head up and stared at the wheelhouse. \"What about the ferryboat's pilot?\"\n\nAll the heads turned as one, all that is except Gunn's. He nodded unobserved at Pitt and then raised a hand, pointing at the empty pilothouse. \"Hide, Pedro!\" he cried loudly. \"Run and hide.\"\n\nThree seconds were all Pitt needed. Three seconds to run four steps and leap over the railing into the sea.\n\nTwo of the guards caught the sudden movement from the edge of their vision, whirled and fired one quick burst from their automatic rifles on reflex. But they fired high, and they fired late. Pitt had struck the water and vanished into the murky depths.\n\nPitt hit the water stroking and kicking with the fervor of a possessed demon. An Olympic committee of judges would have been impressed, he must have set a new world record for the underwater dash. The water was warm but the visibility below the surface was less than a meter due to the murk caused by silt flowing in from the Colorado River. The blast of the gunfire was magnified by the density of the water and sounded like an artillery barrage to Pitt's ears.\n\nThe bullets struck and penetrated the sea with the unlikely sound of a zipper being closed. Pitt leveled out when his hands scoured the bottom, causing an eruption of fine silt. He recalled learning during his U.S. Air Force days that a bullet's velocity was spent after traveling a meter and a half (5 feet) through water. Beyond that depth, it sank harmlessly to the seafloor.\n\nWhen the light above the surface went dark, he knew he had passed under the port side of the Alhambra's hull. His timing was lucky. It was approaching high tide and the ferryboat was now riding two meters off the bottom. He swam slowly and steadily, exhaling a small amount of air from his lungs, angling on a course astern that he hoped would bring him up on the starboard side near the big paddlewheels.\n\nHis oxygen intake was nearly exhausted, and he began to see a darkening fuzziness creeping around the borders of his vision, when the shadow of the ferry abruptly ended and he could see a bright surface again.\n\nHe broke into air 2 meters (6.5 feet) abaft of the sheltered interior of the starboard paddlewheel.\n\nThere was no question of his risking exposure. It was that or drown. The question was whether Sarason's goons had predicted what his game plan would be and run over from the opposite side of the vessel. He could still hear sporadic gunfire striking the water on the port side, and his hopes rose. They weren't on to him, at least not yet.\n\nPitt sucked in hurried breaths of pure air while getting his bearings. And then he was diving under the temporary safety of the ferry's huge paddlewheels. After gauging the distance, he raised a hand above his head and slowly kicked upward. His hand made contact with an unyielding wood beam. He clutched it and lifted his head above the water. He felt as if he had entered a vast barn with support beams running every which way.\n\nHe looked up at the great circular power train that drove the big ferry through the water. It was a radial type similar in construction and action to the old picturesque waterwheels used to power flour and sawmills. Strong cast-iron hubs mounted on the drive shaft had sockets attached to wooden arms that extended outward to a diameter of 10 meters (33 feet). The ends of the arms were then bolted into long horizontal planks called floats that swung around and around, dipping into the water, pushing backward while driving the ferry forward. The entire unit and its mate on the opposite side were housed in giant hoods set inside the ferry's hull.\n\nPitt hung on to one of the floats and waited as a small school of nosy spotted sand bass circled around his legs. He was not completely out of the woods yet. There was an access door for crewmen to perform maintenance on the paddlewheel. He decided to remain in the water. A sane mind dictated that it would be a big mistake to be caught in the act of climbing up the wooden arms by some tough customer who burst through the access door with an itchy trigger finger. Better to be in a position to duck under the water at the first sound of entry.\n\nHe could hear footsteps running on the auto deck above, accented by an occasional burst of gunfire.\n\nPitt couldn't see anything, but he didn't need a lecture to know what Sarason's men were doing. They were roving around the open decks above, shooting at anything that vaguely resembled a body under the water. He could hear voices shouting, but the words came muffled. No large fish within a radius of 50 meters (164 feet) survived the bombardment.\n\nThe click of the lock on the access door came as he had expected. He slipped deeper into the water until only half his head was exposed but he was still hidden to anyone above by one of the huge floats.\n\nHe could not see the unshaven face that peered downward through the paddlewheel at the water, but this time he heard a voice loud and clear from behind the intruder at the door, a voice he had come to know too well. He could feel the hairs stiffen on the nape of his neck at hearing the words spoken by Amaru.\n\n\"See any sign of him?\"\n\n\"Nothing down here but fish,\" grunted the searcher in the access door, catching sight of the spotted sand bass.\n\n\"He didn't surface away from the ship. If he's not dead, he must be hiding somewhere underneath the ship.\"\n\n\"Nobody hiding down here. A waste of energy to bother looking. We put enough lead into him to use his corpse for an anchor.\"\n\n\"I won't feel satisfied until I see the body,\" said Amaru in a businesslike tone.\n\n\"You want a body,\" said the gunman, pulling back through the access door, \"then drag a grappling hook h rough the silt. That's the only way you'll ever see him again.\"\n\n\"Back to the forward boarding ramp,\" Amaru ordered. \"The fishing boat is returning.\"\n\nPitt could hear the diesel throb and feel the beat of the fishing boat's propellers through the water as it pulled alongside to take off Samson and his mercenary scum. Pitt wondered vaguely what his friends would say to him for running out on them even though it was a desperate measure to save their lives.\n\nNothing was going according to plan. Sarason was two steps ahead of Pitt.\n\nAlready Pitt had allowed Loren and Gunn to suffer at the hands of the art thieves. Already he'd stupidly done nothing while the crew and ferryboat were captured. Already he'd given away the secret to Huascar's treasure. The way he was handling events, Pitt wouldn't have been surprised if Sarason and his cronies elected him chairman of the board of Solpemachaco.\n\nNearly an hour passed before he sensed the sounds of the fishing boat die in the distance. This was followed by the beating rotor of a helicopter lifting off the ferry, indisputably the NUMA helicopter. Pitt cursed. Another gift to the criminals.\n\nDarkness had fallen and no lights reflected on the water. Pitt wondered why the men on the upper decks had taken so long to evacuate the vessel. His absolute conviction was that one or more would be left behind to take care of him in the event the dead came back to life. Amaru and Samson could not kill the others unless they knew with cold certainty that Pitt was dead and could tell no tales to the authorities, especially the news media.\n\nPitt could feel apprehension in his chest like a stone tied to his heart. He was at a distinct disadvantage.\n\nIf Loren and Rudi had been removed from the Alhambra, he had to get ashore somehow and inform Giordino and the Customs officials in the U.S. border town of Calexico of the situation. And what of the crew? Caution dictated that he must be certain Amaru and his friends were no longer on board. If one of them stayed behind to see if he was only playing dead, they could wait him out. They had all the time in the world. He had practically none.\n\nHe pushed away from the float, curled over and dived under the hull. The bottom silt seemed closer to the keel than he remembered from his earlier dive. It didn't seem logical until he passed under a bilge exhaust pipe and felt a strong pull of suction. Pitt didn't have to be told that the seacocks in the bilge had been opened. Amaru was scuttling the Alhambra.\n\nHe turned and swam slowly toward the end of the ferryboat where he had left the helicopter. He took the risk of being seen by surfacing briefly alongside the hull beneath the deck overhang to take another breath. After nearly an hour and a half's immersion, he felt waterlogged. His skin looked like that of a shriveled old man of ninety-five. He did not feel overly fatigued, but he sensed his strength was reduced by a good 20 percent. He slipped under the hull again and made for the shallow rudders fitted on the end. They soon loomed out of the murky water. He reached out and gripped one and slowly raised his face out of the water.\n\nNo leering face stared back, no guns aimed between his eyes. He hung on to the rudder and floated, relaxing and building back his strength. He listened, but no sound came from the auto deck above.\n\nFinally, he pulled himself up far enough to lift his eyes over the raised edge of the entry/exit ramp. The Alhambra was in complete darkness with neither interior nor exterior lights showing. Her decks appeared still and lifeless. As he suspected, the NUMA helicopter was gone. The tingling fear of the unknown traveled up his spine. Like an old fort on the western frontier before a surprise attack by the Apaches, it was far too quiet.\n\nThis wasn't one of his better days, Pitt thought. His friends were captured and held hostage. They might be dead. A thought he refused to dwell on. He'd lost another NUMA aircraft. Stolen by the very criminals he was supposed to entice into a trap. The ferryboat was sinking beneath him and he was dead certain one or more killers were lurking somewhere on board to exact a terrible revenge. All in all he'd rather have been in East St. Louis.\n\nHow long he hung on the rudder he couldn't be sure. Maybe five minutes, maybe fifteen. His eyes were accustomed to the dark, but all he could see inside the big auto deck was the dim reflection of the chrome bumpers and radiator grill of the Pierce Arrow. He hung there waiting to see a movement or hear the faint sound of stealth. The deck that stretched into the gaping cavern looked frightening. But he had to enter it if he wanted a weapon, he thought nervously, any weapon to protect himself from men who intended to turn him into sushi.\n\nUnless Amaru's men had made a professional search of the old Travelodge, they wouldn't have found inventor John Browning's dependable Colt .45 automatic where Pitt kept it in the vegetable drawer of the refrigerator.\n\nHe gripped the deck overhang and heaved himself on board. It took Pitt all of five seconds to run across the deck, sweep the door of the trailer against its stops, and leap inside. In a clockwork motion, he tore open the door to the refrigerator and pulled open the vegetable drawer. The Colt automatic lay where he'd left it. For a brief instant relief washed over him like a waterfall as he gripped the trusty weapon in his hand.\n\nHis feeling of deliverance was short-lived. The Colt felt light in his hand, too light. He pulled back the slide and ejected the magazine. It and the firing chamber were empty. With mushrooming despair and desperation he checked the drawer beside the stove that held the kitchen knives. They were gone, along with all the silverware. The only weapon in the trailer was the seemingly useless Colt automatic.\n\nCat and mouse.\n\nThey were out there all right. Pitt now knew Amaru was going to take his time and toy with his prey before dismembering him and throwing the pieces over the side. Pitt treated himself to a few moments for strategy. He sat down in the dark on the trailer's bed and calmly began planning his next moves.\n\nIf any of the killers were haunting the auto deck, they could easily have shot, knifed, or bashed Pitt with a club during his dash to the trailer. For that matter, there was nothing stopping them from breaking in and ending it here. Amaru was a sly hombre, Pitt grudgingly admitted to himself. The South American had guessed Pitt was still alive and would head for any available weapon at the first opportunity.\n\nSearching the trailer and finding the gun was shrewd. Removing the bullets but leaving the gun in its place was downright sadistic. That was merely the first step in a game of torment and misery before the final deathblow. Amaru intended to make Pitt twist in the wind before he killed him.\n\nFirst things first, Pitt decided. Ghouls were lurking in the dark all right, ghouls who wanted to murder him. They thought he was as defenseless as a baby, and he was on a sinking ship with nowhere to go.\n\nAnd that was precisely what he wanted them to think.\n\nIf Amaru was in no rush, neither was he.\n\nPitt leisurely removed his wet clothes and soggy shoes and toweled himself dry. Next he donned a dark gray pair of pants, a black cotton sweatshirt, and a pair of sneakers. Then he made and calmly ate a peanut butter sandwich and drank two glasses of Crystal Light. Feeling rejuvenated, he pulled open a small drawer beneath the bed and checked the contents of a leather gun pouch. The spare magazine was gone, just as he knew it would be. But a small flashlight was there, and in one corner of the drawer he found a small plastic bottle with a label advertising its contents as vitamin supplement A, C, and beta carotene. He shook the bottle and grinned like a happy camper when it rattled.\n\nHe unscrewed the lid and poured eight .45-caliber bullets into his hand. Things are looking up, he thought. Amaru's cunning fell a notch below perfection. Pitt fed seven bullets into the magazine and one in the firing chamber. Now Pitt could shoot back, and the good old Alhambra was not about to sink above her lower deck overhang once her keel settled into the shallow bottom.\n\nJust one more manifestation of Pitt's law, he thought \"Every villain has a plan with at least one flaw.\"\n\nPitt glanced at his watch. Nearly twenty minutes had passed since he entered the trailer. He rummaged through a clothing drawer until he found a dark blue ski mask and slipped it over his head. Next he found his Swiss army knife in the pocket of a pair of pants thrown over a chair.\n\nHe pulled a 'small ring in the floor and raised a trapdoor he'd built into the trailer for additional storage space. He lifted out the storage box, set it aside and squirmed through the narrow opening left in the floor. Lying on the deck beneath the trailer, he peered into the darkness and listened. Not a sound. His unseen hunters were patient men.\n\nColdly and deliberately, like a methodical man with a decisive purpose, who was in no doubt as to the outcome of his intended actions, Pitt rolled from under the trailer and moved like a phantom through a nearby open hatch down a companion ladder into the engine room.\n\nHe moved cautiously, careful not to make sudden movements or undue sound.\n\nAmaru would not cut him any slack.\n\nWith no one to tend them, the boilers that created heat to make the steam that powered the walking beam engines had cooled to such a degree that Pitt could lay the palm of his bare hand against their thick riveted sides without blistering his skin. He leveled the gun with his right hand and held the flashlight as far to his left as his outstretched arm could allow. Only the unwary aim a beam in front of them. If a cornered man is going to shoot at the person shining a light into his eyes, he unerringly points his weapon where the body is expected to be, directly behind the light.\n\nThe engine room looked deserted, but then he tensed. There was a soft mumbling sound like somebody trying to talk through a gag. Pitt swung the beam of the flashlight up into the giant A-frames that supported the walking beam. Someone was up there. Four of them were up there.\n\nGordo Padilla, his assistant engineer, a man whose name Pitt had not learned, and the two deckhands, Jesus and Gato, all hung upside down, tightly bound and gagged with duct tape, their eyes pleading. Pitt pried open the largest blade of the Swiss army knife and quickly cut them down, freeing their hands and allowing them to pull the tape from their mouths.\n\n\"Muchas gracias, amigo,\" Padilla gasped as the tape tore out a dozen hairs of his moustache. \"Blessed be the Virgin Mary you came when you did. They were going to cut our throats like sheep.\"\n\n\"When did you see them last?\" asked Pitt softly.\n\n\"No more than ten minutes ago. They could return at any second.\"\n\n\"You've got to get away from the boat.\"\n\n\"I can't remember when we dropped the lifeboats.\" Padilla shrugged with a manana display of indifference. \"The davits and motors are probably rusted solid and the boats are rotted.\"\n\n\"Can't you swim?\" Pitt asked desperately.\n\nPadilla shook his head. \"Not very well. Jesus can't swim at all. Sailors do not like to go in the water,\"\n\nThen his face lit up under the beam of the flashlight. \"There is a small six-man raft tied to the railing near the galley.\"\n\n\"You'd better hope it still floats.\" He handed Padilla his knife. \"Take this to cut away the raft.\"\n\n\"What about you? Aren't you coming with us?\"\n\n\"Give me ten minutes to conduct a quick search of the ship for the others. If I've found no sign of them by then, you and your crew get free in the raft while I create a diversion.\"\n\nPadilla embraced Pitt. \"Luck be with you.\"\n\nIt was time to move on.\n\nBefore he traveled to the upper decks, Pitt dropped into the water that was rapidly filling the bilges and turned off the valves of the seacocks. He decided against climbing back up the companion ladder or using a stairway. He had the uneasy feeling that somehow Amaru was following his every move. He climbed up the engine to the top of the steam cylinder and then took a Jacob's ladder to the top of the A-frame before stepping off onto the top deck of the ferry just aft of its twin smokestacks.\n\nPitt felt no fear of Amaru. Pitt had won the first round in Peru because Amaru wrote him off as a dead man after dropping the safety line into the sacred pool. The South American killer was not infallible. He would err again because his mind was clouded with hate and revenge.\n\nPitt worked his way down after searching both pilothouses. He found no sign of Loren or Rudi in the vast passenger seating section, the galley, or the crew's quarters. The search went quickly.\n\nNever knowing who or what he might encounter in the dark, or when, Pitt investigated most of the ship on his hands and knees, scurrying from nook to cranny like a crab, using whatever cover was available. The ship seemed as deserted as a cemetery, but by no stretch of his imagination did he believe for a moment the killers had abandoned the ship.\n\nThe rules had not changed. Loren and Rudi Gunn had been removed from the ferry alive because Sarason had a reasonably good hunch Pitt was still alive. The mistake was trusting the murder to a man fired with vengeance. Amaru was too sick with hate to take Pitt out cleanly. There was too much satisfaction in making the man who took away his manhood suffer the tortures of the damned. Loren and Rudi Gunn had a sword hanging over their heads, but it wouldn't fall until the word went out that Pitt was absolutely and convincingly terminated.\n\nThe ten minutes were up. There was nothing left for him but to cause a distraction so Padilla and his crew could paddle the raft into the darkness. Once he was certain they were away Pitt would try to swim to shore.\n\nWhat saved him in the two seconds after he detected the soft sounds of bare feet padding across the deck was a lightning fall to his hands and knees. It was an obsolete football tackle that no longer worked with more sophisticated training techniques. The movement was pure reflex. If he had swung around, flicked on the flashlight and squeezed the trigger at the dark mass that burst out of the night, he would have lost both hands and his head under the blade of a machete that sliced the air like an aircraft propeller.\n\nThe man that tore out of the dark could not halt his forward momentum. His knees struck Pitt's crouching body and he flew forward out of control as if launched by a huge spring and crashed heavily onto the deck, the machete spinning over the side. Rolling to one side, Pitt beamed the light on his assailant and pulled the trigger of the Colt. The report was deafening, the bullet entering the killer's chest just under the armpit. It was a killing shot. A short gasp and the body on the deck shriveled and went still.\n\n\"A nice piece of work, gringo,\" Amaru's voice boomed through a loudspeaker. \"Manuel was one of my best men.\"\n\nPitt did not waste his breath on a reply. His mind rapidly turned over the situation. It suddenly became clear to him that Amaru had followed his movements once he reached the open decks. The need for stealth was finished. They knew where he was, but he couldn't see them. The game was over. He could only hope Padilla and his men were going over the side unnoticed.\n\nFor effect, he fired three more shots in the general direction Amaru's voice came from.\n\n\"You missed.\" Amaru laughed. \"Not even close.\"\n\nPitt stalled by firing one shot every few seconds until the gun was empty. He had run out of delaying tactics and could do no more. His situation was made even more desperate when Amaru, or one of his men, turned on the ferryboat's navigation and deck lights, leaving him as exposed as an actor on an empty stage under a spotlight. He pressed his back against a bulkhead and stared at the railing outside the galley. The raft was gone-- the lines were cut and dangling. Padilla and the rest had slipped into the darkness before the lights came on.\n\n\"I'll make you a deal you don't deserve,\" said Amaru in a congenial tone. \"Give up now and you can die quickly. Resist and your death will come very slowly.\"\n\nPitt didn't require the services of a mediator to explain the depth of Amaru's intent. His options were somewhat limited. Amaru's tone reminded him of the Mexican bandit who tried to coax Walter Huston, Humphrey Bogart, and Tim Holt from their gold diggings in the motion picture Treasure of the Sierra Madre.\n\n\"Do not waste our time making up your mind. We have other--\"\n\nPitt wasn't in the mood to hear more. He was as certain as he could ever be that Amaru was trying to hold his attention while another of the murderers crept close enough to stick a knife somewhere it would hurt. He did not have the slightest intention of waiting to be made sport of by a gang of sadists. He sprinted across the deck and leaped over the side of the ferry for the second time that evening.\n\nA gold-medal diver would have gracefully soared into the air and performed any number of jackknifes, twists, and somersaults before cleanly entering the water 15 meters (50 feet) below. He'd have also broken his neck and several vertebrae after crashing into the bottom silt only two meters below the surface. Pitt had no aspirations of ever trying out for the U.S. diving team. He went over the side feet first before doubling up and striking the water like a cannonball.\n\nAmaru and his remaining two men ran to the edge of the top deck and looked down.\n\n\"Can you see him?\" asked Amaru, peering into the dark water.\n\n\"No, Tupac, he must have gone under the hull.\"\n\n\"The water is turning dirty,\" exclaimed another voice. \"He must have buried himself in the bottom mud.\"\n\n\"This time we're not taking any chances. Juan, the case of concussion grenades we brought from Guaymas. We'll crush him to pulp. Throw them about five meters from the hull, especially in the water around the paddlewheels.\"\n\nPitt made a crater in the seafloor. He didn't impact hard enough to cause any physical damage, but enough to stir up a huge cloud of silt. He uncoiled and swam away from the Alhambra, unseen from above.\n\nHe was afraid that once he cleared the cover of murk he might still be seen by the killers. This was not to be. A freshening breeze from the south turned the water surface into a light chop that caused a refraction the lights from the ferryboat could not penetrate.\n\nHe swam underwater as far as he could until his lungs began to burn. When he came to the surface, he broke it lightly, trusting in the ski mask to keep his head invisible in the black water. A hundred meters (328 feet) and he was beyond the reach of the lights illuminating the ferry. He could barely distinguish the dark figures moving about on the upper deck. He wondered why they weren't shooting into the water.\n\nThen he heard a dull thud, saw the white water rise in a towering splash and felt a surge of pressure that squeezed the air out of him.\n\nUnderwater explosives! They were trying to kill him with the concussion from underwater explosives.\n\nFour more detonations followed in quick succession. Fortunately, they came from the area amidships, near the paddlewheels. By swimming away from one end of the boat, Pitt had distanced himself from the main force of the detonations.\n\nHe doubled over with his knees in front of his chest to absorb the worst of the impact. Thirty meters closer and he would have been pounded into unconsciousness. Sixty meters (200 feet) and he would have been crushed to putty. Pitt increased the gap between himself and the ferry until the eruptions came with the same sensual squeeze as from a strong woman.\n\nHe looked up at a clear sky and checked the north star for his approximate bearings. At 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) away, the desolate west coast of the Gulf was the closest land. He tore off the ski mask and rolled over. Face toward the carpet of stars across the sky, he began a comfortable backstroke toward the west.\n\nPitt was in no condition to try out for the swimming team either. After two hours, his arms felt as if they were lifting twenty-pound weights with each stroke. After six hours, his muscles protested with aches he didn't believe possible. And then finally, and most thankfully, fatigue began to dull the pain. He used the old Boy Scout trick of removing his pants, tying the ankles into knots and swinging them over his head to catch the air, making a reasonably efficient float for rest stops that became more numerous as the night wore on.\n\nThere was never any question of stopping and letting himself drift in the hope of being spotted by a fishing boat in daylight. The vision of Loren and Rudi in the hands of Sarason was more than an ample stimulus to drive him on.\n\nThe stars in the eastern sky were beginning to fade and blink out when his feet hit bottom, and he staggered out of the water onto a sandy beach where he collapsed and immediately fell asleep.\n\nRagsdale, wearing an armored body suit beneath a pair of workman's coveralls, casually walked up to the side door of a small warehouse with a For Lease sign in the front window. He laid the empty toolbox he carried on the ground, took a key from his pocket, and opened the door.\n\nInside, a combined team of twenty FBI and eight Customs agents had assembled and were making last-minute preparations for the raid on the Zolar International building directly across the street. Advance teams had alerted local law enforcement to the operation and scouted the entire industrial complex for unusual activity.\n\nMost of the men and the four women wore assault suits and carried automatic weapons, while several professional experts in the art and antiquities field wore street clothes. The latter were burdened with suitcases crammed with catalogues and photographs of known missing art objects targeted for seizure.\n\nThe plan called for the agents to split off into specific assignments once they entered the building. The first team was to secure the building and round up the employees, the second was to search out any stolen cache, while the third was to investigate the administration offices for any paper trail that led to theft operations or illegal purchases. Working separately, a commercial business team specializing in art handling was standing by to crate, remove and store the seized goods. The U.S. Attorney's Office, working on the case for both the FBI and Customs, had insisted the raid be carried out in a faultless manner and that confiscated objects be treated with a velvet touch.\n\nAgent Gaskill was standing at an operations board in the center of the command post. He turned at Ragsdale's approach and smiled. \"Still quiet?\"\n\nThe FBI agent sat down in a canvas chair. \"All clear except for the gardener trimming the hedge around the building. The rest of the grounds are as quiet as a churchyard.\"\n\nDamned clever of the Zolars to use a gardener as a security guard,\" said Gaskill. \"If he hadn't mowed the lawn four times this week, we might have ignored him.\"\n\n\"That and the fact our surveillance identified his Walkman headset as a radio transmitter,\" added Ragsdale.\n\n\"A good sign. If they have nothing to hide, why the wily tactics?\"\n\n\"Don't get your hopes up. The Zolar warehouse operations may look suspicious, but when the FBI walked in with a search warrant two years ago, we didn't find so much as a stolen ballpoint pen.\"\n\n\"Same with Customs when we talked agents at Internal Revenue into conducting a series of tax audits.\n\nZolar and his family surfaced as pure as the driven snow.\"\n\nRagsdale nodded a \"thank you\" as one of his agents handed him a cup of coffee. \"All we've got going for us this time around is the element of surprise. Our last raid failed after a local cop, who was on Zolar's payroll, tipped him off.\"\n\n\"We should be thankful we're not walking into a high security armed fortress.\"\n\n\"Anything from your undercover informant?\" asked Gaskill.\n\nRagsdale shook his head. \"He's beginning to think we've put him in the wrong operation. He hasn't turned up the slightest hint of unlawful activities.\"\n\n\"No one in or out of the building except bona fide employees. No illegal goods received or shipped in the past four days. Do you get the feeling we're waiting for it to snow in Galveston?\"\n\n\"It seems that way.\"\n\nGaskill stared at him. \"Do you want to rethink this thing and call off the raid?\"\n\nRagsdale stared back. \"The Zolars aren't perfect. There has to be a flaw in their system somewhere, and I'm staking my career that it's across the street in that building.\"\n\nGaskill laughed. \"I'm with you, buddy, right on down to forced early retirement.\"\n\nRagsdale held up a thumb. \"Then the show goes on in eight minutes as planned.\"\n\n\"I don't see any reason to call a halt, do you?\"\n\n\"With Zolar and two of his brothers running around Baja looking for treasure, and the rest of his family in Europe, we'll never have a better opportunity to explore the premises before their army of attorneys gets wind of the operation and swoops in to cut us off at the pass.\"\n\nTwo agents driving a pickup truck borrowed from the Galveston Sanitation Department pulled up at the curb opposite the gardener who was cultivating a flower bed beside the Zolar building. The man in the passenger seat rolled down the window and called out, \"Excuse me.\"\n\nThe gardener turned and stared questioningly at the truck.\n\nThe agent made a friendly smile. \"Can you tell me if your driveway gutters backed up during the last rain?\"\n\nCurious, the gardener stepped out of the flower bed and approached the truck. \"I don't recall seeing any backup,\" he replied.\n\nThe agent held a city street map out the window. \"Do you know if any of the surrounding streets had drainage problems?\"\n\nAs the gardener leaned down to study the map, the agent's arm suddenly lashed out and tore the transmitter from the gardener's head and jerked the cable leading from the microphone and headphones from its socket in the battery pack. \"Federal agents,\" snapped the agent. \"Stand still and don't wink an eye.\"\n\nThe agent behind the wheel then spoke into a portable radio. \"Go ahead, it's all clear.\"\n\nThe federal agents did not smash into the Zolar International building with the lightning speed of a drug bust, nor did they launch a massive assault like the disaster that occurred years before in the compound in Waco, Texas. This was no high-security, armed fortress. One team quietly surrounded the building's exits while the main group calmly entered through the main entrance.\n\nThe office help and corporate administrators showed no sign of fear or anxiety. They appeared confused and puzzled. The agents politely but firmly herded them out onto the main floor of the warehouse where they were joined by the workers in the storage and shipping section and the artisans from the artifact preservation department. Two buses were driven through the shipping doors and loaded with the Zolar International personnel, who were then taken to FBI headquarters in nearby Houston for questioning. The entire roundup operation took less than four minutes.\n\nThe paperwork team, made up mostly of FBI agents trained in accounting methods and led by Ragsdale, went to work immediately, searching through desks, examining files, and scrutinizing every recorded transaction. Gaskill, along with his Customs people and professional art experts, began cataloguing and photographing the thousands of art and antique objects stored throughout the building.\n\nThe work was tedious and time-consuming and produced no concrete evidence of stolen goods.\n\nShortly after one o'clock in the afternoon, Gaskill and Ragsdale sat down in Joseph Zolar's luxurious office to compare notes amid incredibly costly art objects. The FBI's chief agent did not look happy.\n\n\"This is beginning to have the look of a big embarrassment followed by a storm of nasty publicity and a gigantic lawsuit,\" Ragsdale said dejectedly.\n\n\"No sign of criminal activity in the records?\" asked Gaskill.\n\n\"Nothing that stands out. We'll need a good month for an audit to know for certain if we have a case.\n\nWhat did you dig up on your end?\"\n\n\"So far every object we've studied checks clean. No stolen goods anywhere.\"\n\n\"Then we've performed another abortion.\"\n\nGaskill sighed. \"I hate to say it, but it appears the Zolars are a hell of a lot smarter than the best combined investigative teams the United States government can field.\"\n\nA few moments later, the two Customs agents who had worked with Gaskill on the Rummel raid in Chicago, Beverly Swain and Winfried Pottle, stepped into the office. Their manner was official and businesslike, but there was no hiding the slight upward curl of their lips. Ragsdale and Gaskill had been so absorbed in their private conversation that they hadn't noticed the two younger Customs agents had not entered through the office door, but from the adjoining, private bathroom.\n\n\"Got a minute, boss?\" Beverly Swain asked Gaskill.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"I think our instruments have detected some sort of shaft leading under the building,\" answered Winfried Pottle.\n\n\"What did you say?\" Gaskill demanded quickly.\n\nRagsdale looked up. \"Instruments?\"\n\n\"The ground-penetrating sonic/radar detector we borrowed from the Colorado School of Mines,\" explained Pottle. \"Its recording unit shows a narrow space beneath the warehouse floor leading into the earth.\"\n\nA faint ray of hope suddenly passed between Ragsdale and Gaskill. They both came to their feet.\n\n\"How did you know where to look?\" asked Ragsdale.\n\nPottle and Swain could not contain their smiles of triumph. Swain nodded at Poole who answered, \"We figured that any passageway leading to a secret chamber had to start or end at Zolar's private office, a connective tunnel he could enter at his convenience without being observed.\"\n\n\"His personal bathroom,\" Gaskill guessed wonderingly.\n\n\"A handy location,\" Swain confirmed.\n\nRagsdale took a deep breath. \"Show us.\"\n\nPottle and Swain led them into a large bathroom with a marble floor and an antique sink, commode, and fixtures, with teak decking from an old yacht covering the walls. They motioned to a modern sunken tub with a Jacuzzi that seemed oddly out of place with the more ancient decor.\n\nThe shaft drops under the bathtub,\" said Swain, pointing.\n\nAre you sure about this?\" asked Ragsdale skeptically. \"The shower stall strikes me as a more practical setup for an elevator.\"\n\n\"Our first thought too,\" answered Pottle, \"but our instrument showed solid concrete and ground beneath the shower floor.\"\n\nPottle lifted a long tubular probe that was attached by an electrical cable to a compact computer with a paper printout. He switched on the unit and waved the end of the probe around the bottom of the tub.\n\nLights on the computer blinked for a few seconds and then a sheet of paper rolled through a slot on the top. When the recording paper stopped flowing, Pottle tore it off and held it up for everyone to see.\n\nIn the center of an otherwise blank sheet of paper, a black column extended from end to end.\n\n\"No doubt about it,\" announced Pottle, \"a shaft with the same dimensions as the bathtub that falls underground.\"\n\n\"And you're sure your electronic marvel is accurate?\" said Ragsdale.\n\n\"The same type of unit found previously unknown passages and chambers in the Pyramids of Giza last year.\"\n\nGaskill said nothing as he stepped into the tub. He fiddled with the nozzle, but it simply adjusted for spray and direction. Then he sat down on a seat large enough to hold four people. He turned the gold-plated hot and cold faucets, but no water flowed through the spout.\n\nHe looked up with a big smile. \"I think we're making progress.\"\n\nNext he wiggled the lever that raised and lowered the plug. Nothing happened.\n\n\"Try twisting the spout,\" suggested Swain.\n\nGaskill took the gold-plated spout in one of his massive hands and gave it a slight turn. To his surprise it moved and the tub began to slowly sink beneath the bathroom floor. A reverse turn of the spout and the tub returned to its former position. He knew, he knew, this simple little water spout and this stupid bathtub were the keys that could topple the entire Zolar organization and shut them down for good. He gave a come-hither motion to the others and said gleefully, \"Going down?\"\n\nThe unusual elevator descended for nearly thirty seconds before coming to a stop in another bathroom. Poole judged the drop to be about 20 meters (65 feet). They stepped from the bathroom into an office that was almost an exact copy of the one above. The lights were on but no one was present.\n\nWith Ragsdale in the lead, the little group of agents cracked open the door of the office and peered out onto the floor of an immense storehouse of stolen art and antiquities. They were all stunned by the size of the chamber and the enormous inventory of the objects. Gaskill made a wild guess of at least ten thousand pieces as Ragsdale slipped into the storeroom and made a fast recon. He was back in five minutes.\n\n\"Four men working with a forklift,\" he reported, \"lowering a bronze sculpture of a Roman legionnaire into a wooden crate about halfway down the fourth aisle. Across on the other side, in a closed-off area, I counted six men and women working in what looked to be the artifact forgery section. A tunnel leads through the south wall, I'd guess to a nearby building that acts as a front for the shipping and receiving of the stolen property.\"\n\n\"It must also be used for the covert employees to enter and exit,\" suggested Pottle.\n\n\"My God,\" murmured Gaskill. \"We've hit the jackpot. I can recognize four works of stolen art from here.\"\n\n\"We'd better stay put,\" said Ragsdale softly, \"until we can shuttle reinforcements from above.\"\n\n\"I volunteer to operate the ferry service,\" said Swain with a foxy grin. \"What woman can pass up the opportunity to sit in a fancy bathtub that moves from floor to poor?\"\n\nAs soon as she left, Poole stood guard at the door to the storage area while Gaskill and Ragsdale searched Zolar's underground office. The desk produced little of value so they turned their attention to searching for a storeroom. They quickly found what they were looking for behind a tall sideboard bookcase that swiveled out from the wall on small castors. Pushed aside, it revealed a long, narrow chamber lined with antique wooden cabinets, standing floor to ceiling. Each cabinet held file folders in alphabetical order containing acquisition and sales records of the Zolar family operations as far back as 1929.\n\n\"It's here,\" muttered Gaskill in wonder. \"It's all here.\" He began pulling files from a cabinet.\n\n\"Incredible,\" Ragsdale agreed, studying files from another cabinet that stood in the middle of the storeroom. \"For sixty-nine years they kept a record of every piece of art they stole, smuggled, and forged, including financial and personal data on the buyers.\"\n\n\"Oh, Jesus,\" Gaskill groaned, \"take a look at this one.\"\n\nRagsdale took the offered file and scanned the first two pages. When he looked up his face was marked with disbelief. \"If this is true, Michelangelo's statue of King Solomon in the Eisenstein Museum of Renaissance Art in Boston is a fake.\"\n\n\"And a damned good one, judging by the number of experts who authenticated it.\"\n\n\"But the former curator knew.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said Gaskill. \"The Zolars made him an offer he couldn't refuse. According to this report, ten extremely rare Etruscan sculptures excavated illegally in northern Italy, and smuggled into the United States, were exchanged along with the forged King Solomon for the genuine article. Since the fake was too good to be caught, the curator became a big hero with the trustees and patrons by claiming he had enhanced the museum's collection by persuading an anonymous moneybags to donate the objects.\"\n\n\"I wonder how many other cases of museum fraud we'll find,\" mused Ragsdale.\n\n\"I suspect this may only be the tip of the iceberg. These files represent thousands upon thousands of illegal deals to buyers who turned a blind eye in the direction the objects came from.\"\n\nRagsdale smiled. \"I'd like to be a mouse hiding in the wall when the U. S. Attorney's Office finds out we've laid about ten years' worth of legal work on them.\"\n\n\"You don't know federal prosecutors,\" said Gaskill. \"When they get a load of all the wealthy businessmen, politicians, sports and entertainment celebrities who willfully purchased hot art, they'll think they've died and gone to heaven.\"\n\n\"Maybe we'd better rethink all the exposure,\" cautioned Ragsdale.\n\n\"What've you got cooking?\"\n\n\"We know that Joseph Zolar and his brothers, Charles Oxley and Cyrus Sarason, are in Mexico where we can't arrest and take them into custody without a lot of legal E hassle. Right?\"\n\n\"I follow.\"\n\n\"So we throw a blanket on this part of the raid,\" explained Ragsdale. \"From all indications, the employees on the legitimate side of the operation have no idea what's going on in the basement. Let them go back to work tomorrow as if the raid turned up nothing. Business as usual. Otherwise, if they get wind that we've shut down their operation and federal prosecutors are building an airtight case, they'll go undercover in some country where we can't grab them.\"\n\nGaskill rubbed his chin thoughtfully. \"Won't be easy keeping them in the dark. Like all businessmen on the road, they probably keep in daily communication with their operations.\"\n\n\"We'll use every underhanded trick in the book and fake it.\" Ragsdale laughed. \"Set up operators to claim construction work severed the fiber optic lines. Send out phony memos over their fax lines. Keep the workers we've taken into custody on ice. With luck we can blindside the Zolars for forty-eight hours while we figure a scam to entice them over the border.\"\n\nGaskill looked at Ragsdale. \"You like to play long shots, don't you, my man?\"\n\n\"I'll bet my wife and kids on a three-legged horse if there is the tiniest chance of putting these scum away for good.\"\n\n\"I like your odds.\" Gaskill grinned. \"Let's shoot the works.\"\n\nMany of Billy Yuma's village clan of one hundred seventy-six people survived by raising squash, corn, and beans. Others cut juniper and manzanita to sell for fence posts and firewood. A new source of income was the revival of interest in their ancient art of making pottery. Several of the Montolo women still created elegant pottery that had recently come into demand by collectors, hungry for Indian art.\n\nAfter hiring out as a cowboy to a large ranchero for fifteen years, Yuma finally saved enough money to start a small spread of his own. He and his wife, Polly, managed a good living compared to most of the native people of northern Baja, she firing her pots, and he raising livestock.\n\nAfter his midday meal, as he did every day, Yuma saddled his horse, a buckskin mare, and rode out to inspect his herd for sickness or injury. The harsh and inhospitable landscape with its bounty of jagged rocks, cactus, and steep-sided arroyos could easily maim an unwary steer.\n\nHe was searching for a stray calf when he saw the stranger approaching on the narrow trail leading to his village.\n\nThe man who walked through the desert seemed out of place. Unlike hikers or hunters, this man wore only the clothes on his back-- no canteen, no backpack. He didn't even wear a hat to shade his head from the afternoon sun. There was a tired, worn-to-the-bones look about him, and yet he walked in purposeful, rapid strides as if he was in a hurry to get somewhere. Curious, Billy temporarily suspended his hunt for the calf and rode through a creek bed toward the trail.\n\nPitt had hiked 14 kilometers (almost 9 miles) across the desert after coming out of an exhausted sleep.\n\nHe might still be dead to the world if a strange sensation hadn't awakened him. He blinked open his eyes to see a small rock lizard crouching on his arm staring back. He shook off the little intruder and checked his Doxa dive watch for the time. He was shocked to see that he had slept away half the morning.\n\nThe sun was already pouring down on the desert when he awoke, but the temperature was a bearable 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit). The sweat dried quickly on his body, and he felt the first longing for water. He licked his lips and tasted salt from his swim through the sea. Despite the warmth, a cold self-anger crept through him, knowing he had slept away four precious hours. An eternity, he feared, to his friends enduring whatever misery Sarason and his sadists felt like inflicting on them this day. The core of his existence was to rescue them.\n\nAfter a quick dive in the water to refresh himself, he cut west across the desert toward Mexico Highway 5, twenty, maybe thirty kilometers away. Once he reached the pavement, he could flag a ride into Mexicali, and then make his way across the border into Calexico. That was the plan, unless the local Baja telephone company had thoughtfully and conveniently installed a pay phone in the shade of a handy mesquite tree.\n\nHe gazed out over the Sea of Cortez and took one final look at the Alhambra in the distance. The old ferryboat looked to have settled in the water up to her deck overhang and was resting in the silt at a slight list. Otherwise she seemed sound.\n\nShe also looked deserted. There were no search boats or helicopters in sight, launched by an anxious Giordino and U.S. Customs agents north of the border. Not that it mattered. Any search team flying a reconnaissance over the boat, he figured, wouldn't expect to look for anyone on land. He elected to walk out.\n\nHe maintained a steady 7-kilometer (4.3-mile) an-hour pace across the isolated environment. It reminded him of his trek across the Sahara Desert of Northern Mali with Giordino two years before.\n\nThey had come within minutes of dying under the fiery hell of scorching temperatures with no water. Only by finding a mysterious plane wreck did they manage to construct a land yacht and sail across the sands to eventual rescue. Next to that ordeal, this was a jaunt in the park.\n\nTwo hours into his journey, he came to a dusty footpath and followed it. Thirty minutes later he spotted a man sitting astride a horse beside the trail. Pitt walked up to the man and held up a hand in greeting. The rider gazed back through eyes worn and tired from the sun. His stern face looked like weathered sandstone.\n\nPitt studied the stranger, who wore a straw cowboy hat with a large brim turned up on the sides, a long-sleeved cotton shirt, worn denim pants, and scuffed cowboy boots. The black hair under the hat showed no tendency toward gray. He was small and lean and could have been anywhere between fifty and seventy. His skin was burnt bronze with a washboard of wrinkles. The hands that held the reins were leathery and creased with many years of labor. This was a hardy soul, Pitt observed, who survived in an intolerant land with incredible tenacity.\n\n\"Good afternoon,\" Pitt said pleasantly.\n\nLike most of his people Billy was bilingual, speaking native Montolan among his friends and family and Spanish to outsiders. But he knew a fair amount of English, picked up from his frequent trips over the border to sell his cattle and purchase supplies. \"You know you trespass on private Indian land?\" he replied stoically.\n\n\"No, sorry. I was cast ashore on the Gulf. I'm trying to reach the highway and a telephone.\"\n\n\"You lose your boat?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Pitt acknowledged. \"You could say that.\"\n\n\"We have telephone at our meeting house. Glad to take you there.\"\n\n\"I'd be most grateful.\"\n\nBilly reached down a hand. \"My village not far. You can ride on back of my horse.\"\n\nPitt hesitated. He definitely preferred mechanical means of transportation. To his way of thinking four wheels were better than four hooves any day. The only useful purpose for horses was as background in Western movies. But he wasn't about to look one with a gift in the mouth. He took Billy's hand and was amazed at the strength displayed by the wiry little man as he hoisted Pitt's 82 kilograms (181 pounds) up behind him without the slightest grunt of exertion.\n\n\"By the way, my name is Dirk Pitt.\"\n\n\"Billy Yuma,\" said the horseman without offering his hand.\n\nThey rode in silence for half an hour before cresting a butte overgrown with yucca. They dropped into a small valley with a shallow stream running through it and passed the ruins of a Spanish mission, destroyed by religion-resistant Indians three centuries ago. Crumbling adobe walls and a small graveyard were all that remained. The graves of the old Spaniards near the top of a knoll were long since grown over and forgotten. Lower down were the more recent burials of the townspeople. One tombstone in particular caught Pitt's eye. He slipped to the ground over the rump of the horse and walked over to it.\n\nThe carved letters on the weathered stone were distinct and quite readable.\n\n\u2002Patty Lou Cutting\n\n\u20022/11/24-2/3/34\n\n\u2002The sun be warm and kind to you.\n\n\u2002The darkest night\n\n\u2002some star shines through.\n\n\u2002The dullest morn a radiance brew.\n\n\u2002and where dusk comes,\n\n\u2002God's hand to you.\n\n\"Who was she?\" asked Pitt.\n\nBilly Yuma shook his head. \"The old ones do not know. They say the grave was made by strangers in the night.\"\n\nPitt stood and looked over the sweeping vista of the Sonoran Desert. A light breeze gently caressed the back of his neck. A red-tailed hawk circled the sky, surveying its domain. The land of mountains and sand, jackrabbits, coyotes, and canyons could intimidate as well as inspire. This is the place to die and be buried, he thought. Finally, he turned from Patty Lou's last resting place and waved Yuma on. \"I'll walk the rest of the way.\"\n\nYuma nodded silently and rode ahead, the hooves of the buckskin kicking up little clouds of dust.\n\nPitt followed down the hill to a modest farming and ranching community. They traveled along the streambed where three young girls were washing clothes under the shade of a cottonwood tree. They stopped and stared at him with adolescent curiosity. He waved, but they ignored the greeting and, almost solemnly it seemed to Pitt, returned to their wash.\n\nThe heart of the Montolo community consisted of several houses and buildings. Some were built from mesquite branches that were coated with mud, one or two from wood, but most were constructed of cement blocks. The only apparent influence of modern living was weathered poles supporting electrical and phone lines, a few battered pickup trucks that looked as if they'd barely escaped a salvage yard crusher, and one satellite dish.\n\nYuma reined in his horse in front of a small building that was open on three sides. \"Our meeting house,\" he said. \"A phone inside. You have to pay.\"\n\nPitt smiled, investigated his still soggy wallet, and produced an AT&T card. \"No problem.\"\n\nYuma nodded and led him into a small office equipped with a wooden table and four folding chairs.\n\nThe telephone sat on a very thin phone book that was lying on the tile floor.\n\nThe operator answered after seventeen rings. \"Si, por favor?\"\n\n\"I wish to make a credit card call.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, your card number and the number you're calling,\" the operator replied in fluent English.\n\n\"At least my day hasn't been all bad,\" Pitt sighed at hearing an understanding voice.\n\nThe Mexican operator connected him to an American operator. She transferred him to information to obtain the number for the Customs offices in Calexico and then put his call through. A male voice answered.\n\n\"Customs Service, how can I help you?\"\n\n\"I'm trying to reach Albert Giordino of the National Underwater and Marine Agency.\"\n\n\"One moment, I'll transfer you. He's in Agent Starger's office.\"\n\nTwo clicks and a voice that seemed to come from a basement said, \"Starger here.\"\n\n\"This is Dirk Pitt. Is Al Giordino handy?\"\n\n\"Pitt, is that you?\" Curtis Starger said incredulously. \"Where have you been? We've been going through hell trying to get the Mexican navy to search for you.\"\n\n\"Don't bother, their local commandant was probably bought off by the Zolars.\"\n\n\"One moment. Giordino is standing right here. I'll put him on an extension.\"\n\n\"Al,\" said Pitt, \"are you there?\"\n\n\"Good to hear your voice, pal. I take it something went wrong.\"\n\nIn a nutshell, our friends from Peru have Loren and Rudi. I helped the crew escape on a life raft. I managed to swim to shore. I'm calling from an Indian village in the desert north of San Felipe and about thirty kilometers west of where the Alhambra lies half-sunk in the muck.\"\n\n\"I'll dispatch one of our helicopters,\" said Starger. \"I'll need the name of the village for the pilot.\"\n\nPitt turned to Billy Yuma. \"What do you call your community?\"\n\nYuma nodded. \"Canyon Ometepec.\"\n\nPitt repeated the name, gave a more in-depth report on the events of the last eighteen hours and hung up. \"My friends are coming after me,\" he said to Yuma.\n\n\"By car?\"\n\n\"Helicopter.\"\n\n\"You be an important man?\"\n\nPitt laughed. \"No more than the mayor of your village.\"\n\n\"No mayor. Our elders meet and talk on tribal business.\"\n\nTwo men walked past, leading a burro that was buried under a load of manzanita limbs. The men and Yuma merely exchanged brief stares. There were no salutations, no smiles.\n\n\"You look tired and thirsty,\" said Yuma to Pitt. \"Come to my house. My wife make you something to eat while you wait for friends.\"\n\nIt was the best offer Pitt had all day and he gratefully accepted.\n\nBilly Yuma's wife, Polly, was a large woman who carried her weight better than any man. Her face was round and wrinkled with enormous dark brown eyes. Despite being middle aged, her hair was as black as raven's feathers. She hustled around a wood stove that sat under a ramada next to their cement brick house. The Indians of the Southwest deserts preferred the shade and openness of a ramada for their kitchen and dining areas to the confining and draftless interior of their houses. Pitt noticed that the ramada's roof was constructed from the skeletal ribs of the saguaro cactus tree and was supported by mesquite poles surrounded by a wall of standing barbed ocotillo stems.\n\nAfter he drank five cups of water from a big olla, or pot, whose porous walls let it sweat and keep its contents cool, Polly fed him shredded pork and refried beans with fried cholla buds that reminded him of okra. The tortillas were made from mesquite beans she had pounded into a sweet-tasting flour. The late lunch was accompanied by wine fermented from fruit of the saguaro.\n\nPitt couldn't recall eating a more delightful meal.\n\nPolly seldom spoke, and when she did utter a few words they were addressed to Billy in Spanish. Pitt thought he detected a hint of humor in her big brown eyes, but she acted serious and remote.\n\n\"I do not see a happy community,\" said Pitt, making conversation.\n\nYuma shook his head sadly. \"Sorrow fell over my people and the people of our other tribal villages when our most sacred religious idols were stolen. Without them our sons and daughters cannot go through the initiation of adulthood. Since their disappearance, we have suffered much misfortune.\"\n\n\"Good God,\" Pitt breathed. \"Not the Zolars.\"\n\n\"What, senor?\"\n\n\"An international family of thieves who have stolen half the ancient artifacts ever discovered.\"\n\n\"Mexican police told us our idols were stolen by American pothunters who search sacred Indian grounds for our heritage to sell for profit.\"\n\n\"Very possible,\" said Pitt. \"What do your sacred idols look like?\"\n\nYuma stretched out his hand and held it about a meter above the floor. \"They stand about this high and their faces were carved many centuries ago by my ancestors from the roots of cottonwood trees.\"\n\n\"The chances are better than good that your idols were bought from the pothunters by the Zolars for peanuts, and then resold to a wealthy collector for a fat price.\"\n\n\"These people are called Zolars?\"\n\n\"Their family name. They operate under a shadowy organization called Solpemachaco.\"\n\n\"I do not know the word,\" said Yuma. \"What does it mean?\"\n\n\"A mythical Inca serpent with several heads that takes up housekeeping in a cave.\"\n\n\"Never heard of him.\"\n\n\"I think he may be related to another legendary monster the Peruvians called the Demonio del Muertos, who guards their underworld.\"\n\nYuma gazed thoughtfully at his work-worn hands. \"We too have a legendary demon of the underworld who keeps the dead from escaping and the living from entering. He also passes judgment on our dead, allowing the good to pass and devouring the bad.\"\n\n\"A Judgment Day demon,\" said Pitt.\n\nYuma nodded solemnly. \"He lives on a mountain not far from here.\"\n\n\"Cerro el Capirote,\" Pitt said softly.\n\n\"How could a stranger know that?\" Yuma asked, looking deeply into Pitt's green eyes.\n\n\"I've been to the peak. I have seen the winged jaguar with the serpent's head, and I guarantee you he wasn't put there to secure the underworld or judge the dead.\"\n\n\"You seem to know much about this land.\"\n\n\"No, actually very little. But I'd be most interested in hearing any other legends about the demon.\"\n\n\"There is one other,\" Yuma conceded. \"Enrique Juarez, our oldest tribal elder, is one of the few remaining Montolos who remember the old stories and ancient ways. He tells of golden gods who came from the south on great birds with white wings that moved over the surface of the water. They rested on an island in the old sea for a long time. When the gods finally sailed away, they left behind the stone demon. A few of our brave and curious ancestors went across the water to the island and never returned.\n\nThe old people were frightened and believed the mountain was sacred and all intruders would be devoured by the demon.\" Yuma paused and gazed into the desert. \"The story has been told and retold from the days of my ancestors. Our younger children, who are schooled in modern ways, think of it simply as an old people's fairy tale.\"\n\n\"A fairy tale mixed with historical fact,\" Pitt assured Yuma. \"Believe me when I tell you a vast hoard of gold lies inside Cerro el Capirote. Put there not by golden gods from the south, but Incas from Peru, who played on your ancestors' reverence of the supernatural by carving the stone monster to instill fear and keep them off the island. As added insurance, they left a few guards behind to kill the curious until the Spanish were driven from their homeland, and they could come back and reclaim the treasure for their new king. It goes without saying, history took a different turn. The Spaniards were there to stay and no one ever returned.\"\n\nBilly Yuma was not a man given to extreme emotion. His wrinkled face remained fixed, only his dark eyes widened. \"A great treasure lies under Cerro el Capirote?\"\n\nPitt nodded. \"Very soon men with evil intentions are coming to force their way inside the mountain to steal the Inca riches.\"\n\n\"They cannot do that,\" Yuma protested. \"Cerro el Capirote is magic. It is on our land, Montolo land.\n\nThe dead who did not pass judgment live outside its walls.\"\n\n\"That won't stop these men, believe me,\" said Pitt seriously.\n\nMy people will make a protest to our local police authorities.\"\n\n\"If the Zolars run true to form, they've already bribed your law enforcement officials.\"\n\n\"These evil men you speak of. They are the same ones who sold our sacred idols?\"\n\n\"As I suggested, it's very possible.\"\n\nBilly Yuma studied him for a moment. \"Then we do not have to trouble ourselves with their trespass onto our sacred ground.\"\n\nPitt did not understand. \"May I ask why?\"\n\nReality slowly faded from Billy's face and he seemed to enter a dreamlike state. \"Because those who have taken the idols of the sun, moon, earth, and water are cursed and will suffer a terrible death.\"\n\n\"You really believe that, don't you?\"\n\n\"I do,\" Yuma answered somberly. \"In my dreams I see the thieves drowning.\"\n\n\"Drowning?\"\n\n\"Yes, in the water that will make the desert into the garden it was for my ancestors.\"\n\nPitt considered making a contrary reply. He was not one to deposit his money in the bank of dreams.\n\nHe was a confirmed skeptic of the metaphysical. But the intractable gaze in Yuma's eyes, the case-hardened tone of his voice, moved something inside Pitt.\n\nHe began to feel glad that he wasn't related to the Zolars.\n\nAmaru stepped down into the main sala of the hacienda. One wall of the great room was filled by a large stone fireplace removed from an old Jesuit mission. The high ceiling was decorated with intricate precast plaster panels. \"Please excuse me for keeping you waiting, gentlemen.\"\n\n\"Quite all right,\" said Zolar. \"Now that the fools from NUMA have led us directly to Huascar's gold, we made good use of your tardiness by discussing methods of bringing it to the surface.\"\n\nAmaru nodded and looked around the room. There were four men there besides himself. Seated on sofas around the fireplace were Zolar, Oxley, Sarason, and Moore. Their faces were expressionless, but there was no concealing the feeling of triumph in the air.\n\n\"Any word of Dr. Kelsey, the photographer Rodgers, and Albert Giordino?\" Sarason inquired.\n\n\"My contacts over the border believe Pitt told you the truth on the ferry when he said he dropped them off at the U.S. Customs compound in Calexico,\" answered Amaru.\n\n\"He must have smelled a trap,\" said Moore.\n\n\"That was obvious when he returned to the ferryboat alone,\" Samson said sharply to Amaru. \"You had him in your hands and you let him escape.\"\n\n\"Not forgetting the crew,\" added Oxley.\n\n\"I promise you, Pitt did not escape. He was killed when my men and I threw concussion grenades into the water around him. As to the ferryboat's crew, the Mexican police officials you've paid to cooperate will ensure their silence for as long as necessary.\"\n\n\"Still not good,\" said Oxley. \"With Pitt, Gunn, and Congresswoman Smith gone missing, every federal agent between San Diego and Denver will come nosing around.\"\n\nZolar shook his head. \"They have no legal authority down here. And our friends in the local government would never permit their entry.\"\n\nSamson looked angrily at Amaru. \"You say Pitt's dead. Then where is the body?\"\n\nAmaru stared back nastily. \"Pitt is feeding the fishes. Take my word for it.\"\n\n\"Forgive me if I'm not convinced.\"\n\n\"There is no way he could have survived the underwater detonations.\"\n\n\"The man has survived far worse.\" Sarason walked across the room to a bar and poured himself a drink. \"I won't be satisfied until I see the remains.\"\n\n\"You also botched the scuttling of the ferryboat,\" Oxley said to Amaru. \"You should have sailed her into deep water before opening the seacocks.\"\n\n\"Or better yet, set her on fire, along with Congresswoman Smith and the deputy director of NUMA,\" said Zolar, lighting a cigar.\n\n\"Police Comandante Cortina will conduct an investigation and announce that the ferryboat along with Congresswoman Smith and Rudi Gunn was lost in an unfortunate accident,\" said Sarason.\n\nZolar glared at him. \"That won't solve the problem of interference from American law enforcement officials. Their Justice Department will demand more than a local investigation if Pitt survives to expose the blundering actions of your friend here.\"\n\n\"Forget Pitt,\" Amaru said flatly. \"Nobody had a stronger reason for seeing him dead than me.\"\n\nOxley glanced from Amaru to Zolar. \"We can't gamble on speculation. No way Cortina can hold off a joint investigation by the Mexican and American governments for more than a few days.\"\n\nSarason shrugged. \"Time enough to remove the treasure and be gone.\"\n\nEven if Pitt walks out of the sea to tell the truth,\" said Henry Moore, \"it's your word against his. He can't prove your connection with the torture and disappearance of Smith and Gunn. Who would believe a family of respected art dealers was involved with such things? You might arrange for Cortina to accuse Pitt of committing these crimes so he could grab the treasure for himself.\"\n\n\"I approve of the professor's concept,\" said Zolar. \"Our influential friends in the police and military can easily be persuaded to arrest Pitt if he shows his face in Mexico.\"\n\n\"So far so good,\" said Sarason. \"But what about our prisoners? Do we eliminate them now or later?\"\n\n\"Why not throw them in the river that runs through the treasure cavern?\" suggested Amaru.\n\n\"Eventually, what's left of their bodies will probably turn up in the Gulf. By the time the fish get through with them, about all a coroner will be able to determine is that they died from drowning.\"\n\nZolar looked around the room at his brothers and then to Moore who looked oddly uneasy. After a moment he turned to Amaru. \"A brilliant scenario. Simple, but brilliant nonetheless. Any objections?\"\n\nThere were none.\n\n\"I'll contact Comandante Cortina and brief him on his assignment,\" Sarason volunteered.\n\nZolar waved his cigar and flashed his teeth in a broad smile. \"Then it's settled. While Cyrus and Cortina lay a smoke screen for American investigators, the rest of us will pack up and move from the hacienda to Cerro el Capirote and begin retrieving the gold at first light tomorrow.\"\n\nOne of the hacienda's servants entered and handed Zolar a portable telephone. He listened without replying to the caller. Then he switched off the phone and laughed.\n\n\"Good news, brother?\" asked Oxley.\n\n\"Federal agents raided our warehouse facilities again.\"\n\n\"That's funny?\" asked a puzzled Moore.\n\n\"A common occurrence,\" explained Zolar. \"As usual, they came up dry and stood around like idiots with no place to go.\"\n\nSarason finished his drink. \"So it's business as usual, and the treasure excavation goes on as scheduled.\"\n\nThe great room went silent as each man conjured up his own thoughts of what incredible riches they would find under Cerro el Capirote. All except Samson. His mind turned back to the meeting with Pitt on the ferry. He knew it was ridiculous, but it gnawed at his mind that Pitt had claimed to have led him and his brothers to the jackpot. And what did he mean when he said they had been set up?\n\nWas Pitt merely lying or trying to tell him something, or was it sheer bravado from a man who thought he was going to die? The answers, Sarason decided, were not worth his time to ponder. The warning bells should have been clanging away in the back of his head, but there were more important issues at hand. He swept Pitt from his thoughts.\n\nHe never made a bigger mistake.\n\nMicki Moore stepped carefully down the steep steps into the cellar beneath the hacienda as she balanced a tray. At the bottom, she approached one of Amaru's thugs who was guarding the door of a small storeroom that held the captives. \"Open the door,\" she demanded.\n\n\"No one is allowed in,\" muttered the guard unpleasantly.\n\n\"Step aside, you stupid cretin,\" Micki snarled, \"or I'll cut your balls off.\"\n\nThe guard was startled by the abusive coarseness from an elegant woman. He stepped back a pace. \"I have my orders from Tupac Amaru.\"\n\n\"All I have is food, you idiot. Let me in or I'll scream and swear to Joseph Zolar you raped me and the woman inside.\"\n\nHe peered at the tray and then gave in, unlocking the door and stepping aside. \"You do not tell Tupac of this.\"\n\n\"Don't worry,\" Micki snapped over her shoulder as she entered the dark and stuffy cubicle. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim light. Gunn was lying on the stone floor. He struggled to a sitting position. Loren was standing as if to protect him.\n\n\"Well, well,\" murmured Loren testily. \"This time they sent a woman to do their filthy work.\"\n\nMicki pushed the tray into Loren's hands. \"Here is some food. Fruit and sandwiches, and four bottles of beer. Take it!\" Then she turned and slammed the door shut in the guard's face. When she refaced Loren, her eyes had become more accustomed to the dark. She was stunned at Loren's appearance. She could make out puffy bruises on her lips and around the eyes. Most of Loren's clothing had been torn away and she had knotted what little remained to cover her torso. Micki also saw livid red welts across the top of her breasts and discolorations on her arms and legs. \"The bastards!\" she hissed. \"The no-good sadistic bastards. I'm sorry, if I had known you'd been beaten, I would have brought medical supplies.\"\n\nLoren knelt and set the tray on the floor. She gave one of the bottles of beer to Gunn, but his injured hands could not twist off the cap. She removed it for him.\n\n\"Who is our Florence Nightingale?\" asked Gunn.\n\n\"I'm Micki Moore. My husband is an anthropologist, and I'm an archaeologist hired by the Zolars.\"\n\n\"To help them find Huascar's golden treasure?\" Gunn rightly guessed.\n\n\"Yes, we deciphered the images--\"\n\n\"On the Golden Body Suit of Tiapollo,\" finished Gunn. \"We know all about it.\"\n\nLoren didn't speak for a few moments while she ravenously consumed one of the sandwiches and downed a beer. Finally, feeling almost as if she had been reborn, she stared at Micki curiously. \"Why are you doing this? To build up our spirits before they come back and use us for punching bags again?\"\n\n\"We're not part of your ordeal,\" Micki replied honestly. \"The truth is, Zolar and his brothers are planning to kill my husband and me as soon as they've recovered the treasure.\"\n\n\"How could you know that?\"\n\n\"We've been around people like these before. We have a feel for what's going on.\"\n\n\"What do they plan on doing with us?\" asked Gunn.\n\n\"The Zolars and their bribed cronies with the Mexican police and military intend to make it look as if you drowned while attempting to escape your sinking ferryboat. Their plan is to throw you in the underground river the ancients mentioned that runs through the treasure chamber and empties into the sea. By the time your bodies surface, there won't be enough left to prove otherwise.\"\n\n\"Sounds feasible,\" Loren muttered angrily. \"I give them credit for that.\"\n\n\"My God,\" said Gunn. \"They just can't murder a representative of the United States Congress in cold blood.\"\n\n\"Believe me,\" said Micki, \"these men have no scruples and even less conscience.\"\n\n\"How come they haven't killed us before now?\" asked Loren.\n\n\"Their fear was that your friend Pitt might somehow expose your kidnapping. Now they no longer care. They figure their charade is strong enough to stand against one man's accusations.\"\n\n\"What about the ferryboat's crew?\" asked Loren. \"They were witnesses to the piracy.\"\n\n\"They'll be kept from raising the alarm by local police.\" Micki hesitated. \"I'm sorry to have to tell you why they are no longer concerned about Pitt. Tupac Amaru swears that after you were transported to the hacienda, he and his men crushed Pitt to jelly by throwing concussion grenades at him in the water.\"\n\nLoren's violet eyes were grief-stricken. Until now she had harbored a hope Pitt had somehow escaped. Now her heart felt as though it had fallen into the crevasse of a glacier. She sagged against one wall of the stone room and covered her face with her hands.\n\nGunn pushed himself to his feet. There was no grief in his eyes, only iron-hard conviction. \"Dirk dead?\n\nScum like Amaru could never kill a man like Dirk Pitt.\"\n\nMicki was startled by the fiery spirit of a man so sorely tortured. \"I only know what my husband told me,\" she said as if apologizing. \"Amaru did admit he failed to retrieve Pitt's body, but there was little doubt in his mind that Pitt could not have survived.\"\n\n\"You say you and your husband are also on Zolar's death list?\" asked Loren.\n\nMicki shrugged. \"Yes, we're to be silenced too.\"\n\n\"If you'll pardon me for saying so,\" said Gunn, \"you seem pretty damned indifferent.\"\n\n\"My husband also has plans.\"\n\n\"To escape?\"\n\n\"No, Henry and I can break out any time it's convenient. We intend to take a share of the treasure for ourselves.\"\n\nGunn stared at Micki incredulously. Then he said cynically, \"Your husband must be one tough anthropologist.\"\n\nPerhaps you might better understand if I told you we met and fell in love when working on an assignment together for the Foreign Activities Council.\"\n\n\"Never heard of it,\" said Gunn.\n\nLoren gave Micki a bemused stare. \"I have. FAC is rumored to be an obscure and highly secret organization that works behind the scenes in the White House. No one in Congress has ever been able to come up with solid proof of its existence or its financing.\"\n\n\"What is its function?\" asked Gunn.\n\n\"To carry out covert activities under the direct supervision of the President outside the nation's other intelligence services without their knowledge,\" replied Micki.\n\n\"What kind of activities?\"\n\n\"Dirty tricks on foreign nations considered hostile to the United States,\" replied Loren, studying Micki for some kind of sign. But her expression was aloof and remote. \"As a mere member of Congress I'm not privy to their operations and can only speculate. I have a suspicion their primary directive is to carry out assassinations.\"\n\nMicki's eyes turned hard and cold. \"I freely admit that for twelve years, until we retired from service to devote our time to archaeology, Henry and I had few peers.\"\n\n\"I'm not surprised,\" Loren said sarcastically. \"By passing yourselves off as scientists, you were never suspected of being the President's hired killers.\"\n\n\"For your information, Congresswoman Smith, our academic credentials are not counterfeit. Henry has his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and I have mine from Stanford. We have no misgivings about the duties we performed under three former Presidents. By eliminating certain heads of foreign terrorist organizations, Henry and I saved more American lives than you can imagine.\"\n\n\"Who are you working for now?\"\n\n\"Ourselves. As I said, we retired. We felt it was time to cash in our expertise. Our government service is a thing of the past. Though we were well paid for our services, we weren't considered for a pension.\"\n\n\"Tigers aren't known for changing stripes,\" mocked Gunn. \"You can never achieve your objective without killing off Amaru and the Zolars.\"\n\nMicki smiled faintly. \"We may very well have to do unto them before they can do unto us. But only after enough of Huascar's gold is brought to the surface for us to carry out.\"\n\n\"So the trail will be littered with bodies.\"\n\nMicki passed a weary hand over her face. \"Your involvement in the treasure hunt came as a complete surprise to everybody. Stupidly, the Zolars overreacted when they discovered another party was on the trail to the gold. They ran amok, murdering or abducting everyone their greed-crazed minds saw as an obstacle. Consider yourselves lucky they didn't murder you on the ferryboat like your friend Pitt.\n\nKeeping you alive temporarily is the hallmark of rank amateurs.\"\n\n\"You and your husband,\" murmured Loren caustically, \"you would have--\"\n\n\"Shot you and burned the boat down around your bodies?\" Micki shook her head. \"Not our style.\n\nHenry and I have only terminated those foreign nationals who have indiscriminately gunned down unfortunate women and children or blew them to pieces without blinking an eye or shedding a tear. We have never harmed a fellow American, and we don't intend to start now. Despite the fact your presence has hamstrung our operation, we will do everything in our power to help you escape this affair in one piece.\"\n\n\"The Zolars are Americans,\" Loren reminded her.\n\nMicki shrugged. \"A mere technicality. They represent what is perhaps the largest art theft and smuggling ring in history. The Zolars are world-class sharks. Why should I have to tell you? You've experienced their brutality firsthand. By leaving their bones to bleach in the Sonoran Desert, Henry and I figure to save the American taxpayers millions of dollars that would be spent on a complicated and time-consuming investigation into their criminal activities. And then there are the court and prison costs if they're caught and convicted.\"\n\n\"And once a portion of the treasure is in your hands?\" asked Gunn. \"What then?\"\n\nMicki smiled like a wily shrew. \"I'll send you a postcard from whatever part of the world we're in at the time and let you know how we're spending it.\"\n\nA small army of soldiers set up a command post and sealed off the desert for two miles around the base of Cerro el Capirote. No one was allowed in or out. The mountain's peak had become a staging area with all treasure recovery operations conducted from the air. Pitt's stolen NUMA helicopter, repainted with Zolar International colors, lifted into a clear sky and dipped on a course back to the hacienda. A few minutes later, a heavy Mexican army transport helicopter hovered and settled down. A detachment of military engineers in desert combat fatigues jumped to the ground, opened the rear cargo door and began unloading a small forklift, coils of cable, and a large winch.\n\nOfficials of the state of Sonora who were on the Zolars' payroll had approved all the necessary licenses and permits within twenty-four hours, a process that would normally have taken months and perhaps years. The Zolars had promised to fund new schools, roads, and a hospital. Their cash had greased the palms of the local bureaucracy and eliminated the usual rivers of red tape. Full cooperation was given by an unwitting Mexican government misled by corrupt bureaucrats. Joseph Zolar's request for a contingent of engineers from a military base on the Baja Peninsula was quickly approved. Under the terms of a swiftly drawn up contract with the Ministry of the Treasury, the Zolars were entitled to 25 percent of the treasure. The rest was to be deposited with the national court in Mexico City.\n\nThe only problem with the agreement was that the Zolars had no intention of keeping their end of the bargain. They weren't about to split the treasure with anyone.\n\nOnce the golden chain and the bulk of the treasure had been hauled to the top of the mountain, a covert operation was created to move the hoard under cover of darkness to a remote military airstrip near the great sand dunes of the Altar Desert just south of the Arizona border. There, it would be loaded aboard a commercial jet transport, painted with the markings and colors of a major airline company, and then flown to a secret distribution facility owned by the Zolars in the small city of Nador on the north coast of Morocco.\n\nEveryone had been ferried from the hacienda to the mountaintop as soon as it became daylight. No personal effects were left behind. Only Zolar's jetliner remained, parked on the hacienda's airstrip, ready for takeoff on a moment's notice.\n\nLoren and Rudi were released from their prison and sent over later the same morning. Ignoring Sarason's orders not to communicate with the hostages, Micki Moore had compassionately tended to their cuts and bruises and made sure they were fed a decent meal. Since there was little chance they could escape by climbing down the rocky walls of the mountain, no one guarded them and they were left on their own to wander about as they pleased.\n\nOxley quickly discovered the small aperture leading inside the mountain and wasted no time in directing a military work crew to enlarge it. He stayed behind to oversee the equipment staging while Zolar, Sarason, and the Moores set off down the passageway followed by a squad of engineers, who carried portable fluorescent lights.\n\nWhen they reached the second demon, Micki lovingly touched its eyes, just as Shannon Kelsey had done before her. She sighed. \"A marvelous piece of work.\"\n\n\"Beautifully preserved,\" Henry Moore agreed.\n\n\"It will have to be destroyed,\" said Sarason indifferently.\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" demanded Moore.\n\n\"We can't move it. The ugly beast fills up most of the tunnel. There is no way we can drag Huascar's chain over, around, or between its legs.\"\n\nMicki's face went tense with shock. \"You can't destroy a masterwork of antiquity.\"\n\n\"We can and we will,\" Zolar said, backing his brother. \"I agree it's unfortunate. But we don't have time for archaeological zealotry. The sculpture has to go.\"\n\nMoore's pained expression slowly turned hard, and he looked at his wife and nodded. \"Sacrifices must be made.\"\n\nMicki understood. If they were to seize enough of the golden riches to keep them in luxury for the rest of their lives, they would have to close their eyes to the demolition of the demon.\n\nThey pushed on as Sarason lagged behind and ordered the engineers to place a charge of explosives under the demon. \"Be careful,\" he warned them in Spanish. \"Use a small charge. We don't want to cause a cave-in.\"\n\nZolar was amazed at the Moores' vast energy and enthusiasm after they encountered the crypt of the treasure guardians. If left on their own, they would have spent a week studying the mummies and the burial ornaments before pushing on to the treasure chamber.\n\n\"Let's keep going,\" said Zolar impatiently. \"You can nose around the dead later.\"\n\nReluctantly, the Moores continued into the guardians' living quarters, lingering only a few minutes before Sarason rejoined his brother and urged them onward.\n\nThe sudden sight of the guardian encased in calcite crystals shocked and stunned all of them, as it had Pitt and his group. Henry Moore peered intently through the translucent sarcophagus.\n\n\"An ancient Chachapoya,\" he murmured as if standing before a crucifix. \"Preserved as he died. This is an unbelievable discovery.\"\n\n\"He must have been a noble warrior of very high status,\" said Micki in awe.\n\n\"A logical conclusion, my dear. This man had to be very powerful to bear the responsibility of guarding an immense royal treasure.\"\n\n\"What do you think he's worth?\" asked Sarason.\n\nMoore turned and scowled at him. \"You can't set a price on such an extraordinary object. As a window to the past, he is priceless.\"\n\n\"I know a collector who would give five million dollars for him,\" said Zolar, as if he were appraising a Ming vase.\n\n\"The Chachapoya warrior belongs to science,\" Moore lashed back, his anger choking him. \"He is a visible link to the past and belongs in a museum, not in the living room of some morally corrupt gatherer of stolen artifacts.\"\n\nZolar threw Moore an insidious look. \"All right, Professor, he's yours for your share of the gold.\"\n\nMoore looked agonized. His professional training as a scientist fought a war with his greed. He felt dirtied and ashamed now that he realized that Huascar's legacy went beyond mere wealth. He was overcome with regret that he was dealing with unscrupulous scum. He gripped his wife's hand, knowing without doubt she felt the same. \"If that's what it takes. You've got yourself a deal.\"\n\nZolar laughed. \"Now that's settled. Can we please proceed and find what we came here for?\"\n\nA few minutes later, they stood in a shoulder-to-shoulder line on the edge of the subterranean riverbank and stared mesmerized at the array of gold, highlighted by the portable fluorescent lamps carried by the military engineers. All they saw was the treasure. The sight of a river flowing through the bowels of the earth seemed insignificant.\n\n\"Spectacular,\" whispered Zolar. \"I can't believe I'm looking at so much gold.\"\n\n\"This easily exceeds the treasures of King Tut's tomb,\" said Moore.\n\n\"How magnificent,\" said Micki, clutching her husband's arm. \"This has to be the richest cache in all the Americas.\"\n\nSarason's amazement quickly wore off. \"Very clever of those ancient bastards,\" he charged. \"Storing the treasure on an island surrounded by a strong current makes recovery doubly complicated.\"\n\n\"Yes, but we've got cables and winches,\" said Moore."
            },
            {
                "title": "INCA GOLD",
                "text": "\"Think of the difficulty they had in moving all that gold over there with nothing but hemp rope and muscle.\"\n\nMicki spied a golden monkey crouched on a pedestal. \"That's odd.\"\n\nZolar looked at her. \"What's odd?\"\n\nShe stepped closer to the monkey and its pedestal which was lying on its side. \"Why would this piece still be on this bank of the river?\"\n\n\"Yes, it does seem strange this object wasn't placed with the others,\" said Moore. \"It almost looks as if it was thrown here.\"\n\nSarason pointed to gouges in the sand and calcium crystals beside the riverbank. \"I'd say it was dragged off the island.\"\n\n\"It has writing scratched on it,\" said Moore.\n\n\"Can you decipher anything?\" asked Zolar.\n\n\"Doesn't need deciphering. The markings are in English.\"\n\nSarason and Zolar stared at him with the expressions of Wall Street bankers walking along the sidewalk and being asked by a homeless derelict if they could spare fifty thousand dollars. \"No jokes, Professor,\" said Zolar.\n\n\"I'm dead serious. Somebody engraved a message into the soft gold on the bottom of the pedestal, quite recently by the looks of it.\"\n\n\"What does it say?\"\n\nMoore motioned for an engineer to aim his lamp at the monkey's pedestal, adjusted his glasses and began reading aloud.\n\n\u2002Welcome members of the Solpemachaco to the underground thieves and plunderers annual convention.\n\n\u2002If you have any ambitions in life other than the acquisition of stolen loot, you have come to the right place.\n\n\u2002Be our guests and take only the objects you can use.\n\n\u2002Your congenial sponsors,\n\n\u2002Dr. Shannon Kelsey, Miles Rodgers, Al Giordino, & Dirk Pitt.\n\nThere was a moment of sober realization, and then Zolar snarled at his brother. \"What in hell is going on here? What kind of foolish trick is this?\"\n\nSarason's mouth was pinched in a bitter line. \"Pitt admitted leading us to the demon,\" he answered reluctantly, \"but he said nothing of entering the mountain and laying eyes on the treasure.\"\n\n\"Generous with his information, wasn't he? Why didn't you tell me this?\"\n\nSarason shrugged. \"He's dead. I didn't think it mattered.\"\n\nMicki turned to her husband. \"I know Dr. Kelsey. I met her at an archaeology conference in San Antonio. She has a splendid reputation as an expert on Andean cultures.\"\n\nMoore nodded. \"Yes, I'm familiar with her work.\" He stared at Sarason. \"You led us to believe Congresswoman Smith and the men from NUMA were merely on a treasure hunt. You said nothing of involvement by professional archaeologists.\"\n\n\"Does it make any difference?\"\n\n\"Something is going on beyond your control,\" warned Moore. He looked as if he was enjoying the Zolars' confusion. \"If I were you, I'd get the gold out of here as fast as possible.\"\n\nHis words were punctuated by a muffled explosion far up into the passageway.\n\n\"We have nothing to fear so long as Pitt is dead,\" Sarason kept insisting. \"What you see here was done before Amaru put a stop to him.\" But he was damp with cold sweat. Pitt's mocking words rang in his ears, \"You've been set up, pal.\"\n\nZolar's features slowly altered. The mouth tightened and the set of the jaw seemed to recede, the eyes became apprehensive. \"Nobody discovers a treasure on the magnitude of this one, leaves behind a ridiculous message, and then walks away from it. These people have a method to their madness, and I for one would like to know their plan.\"\n\n\"Any man who stands in our way before the treasure is safely off the mountain will be destroyed,\"\n\nSarason shouted at his brother. \"That is a promise.\"\n\nThe words came forcefully, with the ring of a bullet resistant threat. They all believed him. Except Micki Moore.\n\nShe was the only one standing close enough to see his lips quiver.\n\nBureaucrats from around the world looked the same, Pitt thought. The fabricated meaningless smile betrayed by the patronizing look in the eyes. They must have all gone to the same school and memorized the same canned speech of evasive phrases. This one was bald, wore thick hornrimmed glasses, and had a black moustache with each bristle exactingly trimmed.\n\nA tall, complacent man, whose profile and haughtiness reminded the Americans seated around the conference room of a Spanish conquistador, Fernando Matos was the very essence of a condescending, fence-and-dodge bureaucrat. He stared at the Americans in the Customs building less than 100 meters (328 feet) from the international border.\n\nAdmiral James Sandecker, who had arrived from Washington shortly after Gaskill and Ragsdale flew in from Galveston, stared back and said nothing. Shannon, Rodgers, and Giordino were relegated to chairs against one wall while Pitt sat at Sandecker's right. They left the talking to the chief Customs agent of the region, Curtis Starger.\n\nA veteran of sixteen years with the service, Starger had been around the Horn enough times to have seen it all. He was a trim, handsome man with sharp features and blond hair. He looked more like an aging lifeguard on a San Diego beach than a hardened agent who gazed at Matos with an expression that could scorch asbestos. After the introductions were made, he launched his attack.\n\n\"I'll skip the niceties, Mr. Matos. On matters such as this I'm used to dealing with your elite law enforcement agents, especially Inspector Granados and the chief of your Northern Mexico Investigative Division, Sefior Rojas. I wish you would explain, sir, why a midlevel official from an obscure office of the National Affairs Department was sent to brief us on the situation. I get the feeling that your national government in Mexico City is as much in the dark as we are.\"\n\nMatos made a helpless gesture with his hands. His eyes never blinked, and his smile remained fixed. If he felt insulted, it didn't show. \"Inspector Granados is working on a case in Hermosillo and Sefior Rojas was taken ill.\"\n\n\"Sorry to hear it,\" Starger grunted insincerely.\n\n\"If they were not indisposed or on duties elsewhere, I'm certain they would have been happy to consult with you. I share your frustration. But I assure you, my government will do everything in its power to cooperate on this matter.\"\n\n\"The United States Attorney's Office has reason to believe that three men going under the names of Joseph Zolar, Charles Oxley, and Cyrus Sarason, all brothers, are conducting a massive international operation dealing in stolen art, smuggled artifacts, and art forgery. We also have reason to believe they have abducted one of our respected congressional legislators and an official of our most prestigious marine science agency.\"\n\nMatos smiled blandly behind his bureaucratic defenses. \"Utterly ridiculous. As you very well know, gentlemen, after your fruitless raid on the Zolars' facilities in Texas, their reputation remains untarnished.\"\n\nGaskill smiled wryly at Ragsdale. \"News travels fast.\"\n\n\"These men you seem intent on persecuting have violated no laws in Mexico. We have no legal cause to investigate them.\"\n\n\"What are you doing about securing the release of Congresswoman Smith and Deputy Director Gunn?\"\n\n\"Our finest investigative police teams are working on the case,\" Matos assured him. \"My superiors have already made arrangements to pay the ransom demands. And I can guarantee it is only a question of a few hours before the bandits responsible for this travesty are captured and your people rescued unharmed.\"\n\n\"Our sources claim the Zolars are the criminals who are responsible.\"\n\nMatos shook his head. \"No, no, the evidence proves a gang of thieving bandits is behind the abduction.\"\n\nPitt joined in the fray. \"Speaking of abductions, what about the crew of the ferryboat? Where did they disappear to?\"\n\nMatos gazed at Pitt contemptuously. \"That is of no importance here. As a matter of record, our police officials have four signed statements naming you as the instigator of this plot.\"\n\nResentment surged through Pitt. The Zolars had cunningly planned every contingency, but they had either ignored the fact the crew of the Alhambra were not dead or Amaru had botched the job and lied.\n\nPadilla and his men must have made shore and been put under wraps by the local police.\n\n\"Were your investigators as thoughtful in providing me with a motive?\" asked Pitt.\n\n\"Motives do not concern me, Mr. Pitt. I rely on evidence. But since you brought it up, the crew claims you killed Congresswoman Smith and Rudi Gunn to gain the location of the treasure.\"\n\n\"Your police officials have Alzheimer's disease if they swallow that,\" snapped Giordino.\n\n\"Evidence is evidence,\" Matos said smoothly. \"As an official of the government I must operate within strict legal parameters.\"\n\nPitt took the ridiculous accusation in stride and sneaked in from the side. \"Tell me, Sefior Matos, what percentage of the gold will you take as your share?\"\n\n\"Five--\" Matos caught himself too late.\n\n\"Were you about to say five percent, sir?\" Starger asked softly.\n\nMatos tilted his head and shrugged. \"I was about to say nothing of the sort.\"\n\n\"I'd say your superiors have turned a blind eye to a deep conspiracy,\" said Sandecker.\n\n\"There is no conspiracy, Admiral. I'll take an oath on.\"\n\n\"What you're broadcasting,\" said Gaskill, leaning across the table, \"is that officials of the Sonoran State government have struck a deal with the Zolars to keep the Peruvian treasure.\"\n\nMatos lifted a hand. \"The Peruvians have no legal claim. All artifacts found on Mexican soil belong to our people--\"\n\n\"They belong to the people of Peru,\" Shannon interrupted, her face flushed with anger. \"If your government had any sense of decency, they would invite the Peruvians to at least share in it.\"\n\n\"Affairs between nations do not work that way, Dr. Kelsey,\" replied Matos.\n\n\"How would you like it if Montezuma's lost golden treasure turned up in the Andes?\"\n\n\"I'm not in a position to judge outlandish events,\" Matos answered imperviously. \"Besides, rumors of the treasure are greatly exaggerated. Its true value is really of little consequence.\"\n\nShannon looked flabbergasted. \"What are you saying? I saw Huascar's treasure with my own eyes. If anything, it's far more substantial than anyone thought. I put its potential value at just under a billion dollars.\"\n\n\"The Zolars are respected dealers who have a worldwide reputation for accurately appraising art and antiquities. Their evaluation of the treasure does not exceed thirty million.\"\n\n\"Mister,\" Shannon snapped in cold fury, \"I'll match my credentials against theirs any day of the week in appraising artifacts of ancient Peruvian cultures. I'll put it to you in plain language. The Zolars are full of crap.\"\n\n\"Your word against theirs,\" Matos said calmly.\n\n\"For a small treasure trove,\" said Ragsdale, \"they appear to be mounting a massive recovery effort.\"\n\n\"Five or ten laborers to carry the gold out of the cavern. No more.\"\n\n\"Would you like to see reconnaissance satellite photos that show the top of Cerro el Capirote looking like an anthill with an army of men and helicopters crawling all over it?\"\n\nMatos sat silently, as if he hadn't heard a word.\n\n\"And the Zolars' payoff?\" asked Starger. \"Are you allowing them to remove artifacts from the country?\"\n\n\"Their efforts on behalf of the people of Sonora will not go unappreciated. They will be compensated.\"\n\nIt was an obvious fish story and nobody in the room bought it.\n\nAdmiral Sandecker was the highest American official in the room. He stared at Matos and gave him a disarming smile. \"I will be meeting with our nation's President tomorrow morning. At that time I will brief him on the alarming events occurring in our neighbor to the south, and inform him that your law enforcement officials are dragging their feet on the investigation and throwing up a smoke screen on the kidnapping of our highlevel representatives. I need not remind you, Senor Matos, the free trade agreement is coming up for review by Congress. When our representatives are informed of your callous treatment of one of their colleagues, and how you cooperate with criminals dealing in stolen and smuggled art, they may find it difficult to continue our mutual trade relations. In short, senor, your President wild have a major scandal on his hands.\"\n\nMatos's eyes behind the glasses were suddenly stricken. \"There is no need for so strong a response over a minor disagreement between our two countries.\"\n\nPitt noticed thin beads of perspiration on the Mexican official's head. He turned to his boss from NUMA. \"I'm hardly an expert on executive politics, Admiral, but what do you want to bet the President of Mexico and his cabinet have not been informed of the true situation?\"\n\n\"I suspect you'd win,\" said Sandecker. \"That would explain why we're not talking to a major player.\"\n\nThe color had drained from Matos's face, and he looked positively sick. \"You misunderstand, my nation stands ready to cooperate in every way possible.\"\n\n\"You tell your superiors in the National Affairs Department,\" said Pitt, \"or whoever you really work for, that they aren't as smart as they thought.\"\n\n\"The meeting is over,\" said Starger. \"We'll consider our options and inform your government of our actions this time tomorrow.\"\n\nMatos tried to retrieve a shred of dignity. He stared balefully and when he spoke his voice was quieter. \"I must warn you of any attempt to send your Special Forces into Mexico--\"\n\nSandecker cut him off. \"I'll give you twenty-four hours to send Congresswoman Smith and my deputy director, Rudi Gunn, over the border crossing between Mexicali and Calexico unharmed. One minute later and a lot of people will get hurt.\"\n\n\"You do not have the authority to make threats.\"\n\n\"Once I tell my President your security forces are torturing Smith and Gunn for state secrets, there is no telling how he will react.\"\n\nMatos looked horrified. \"But that is a total lie, an absurd fabrication.\"\n\nSandecker smiled icily. \"See, I know how to invent situations too.\"\n\n\"I give you my word.\"\n\n\"That will be all, Senor Matos,\" said Starger. \"Please keep my office apprised of any further incidents.\"\n\nWhen the Mexican official left the conference room, he looked like a man who had stood by and watched as his wife ran off with the plumber and his dog was run over by a milk truck. As soon as he was gone, Ragsdale, who had sat back and quietly absorbed the conversation, turned to Gaskill.\n\n\"Well, if nothing else, they don't know we knocked over their illegal storage facility.\"\n\n\"Let's hope they remain in the dark for another two days.\"\n\n\"Did you take an inventory of the stolen goods?\" asked Pitt.\n\n\"The quantity was so great, it will take weeks to thoroughly itemize every object.\"\n\n\"Do you recall seeing any Southwestern Indian religious idols, carved from cottonwood?\"\n\nGaskill shook his head. \"No, nothing like that.\"\n\n\"Please let me know if you do. I have an Indian friend who would like them back.\"\n\nRagsdale nodded at Sandecker. \"How do you read the situation, Admiral?\" he asked.\n\n\"The Zolars have promised the moon,\" Sandecker said. \"I'm beginning to believe that if they were arrested, half the citizenry of the state of Sonora would rise up and break them out of jail.\"\n\n\"They'll never allow Loren and Rudi to go free and talk,\" said Pitt.\n\n\"I hate to be the one to mention it,\" Ragsdale said quietly, \"but they could already be dead.\"\n\nPitt shook his head. \"I won't let myself believe that.\"\n\nSandecker rose and began working off his frustration by pacing the floor. \"Even if the President approves a clandestine entry, our special response team has no intelligence to guide them to the location where Loren and Rudi are held captive.\"\n\n\"I have an idea the Zolars are holding them on the mountain,\" said Giordino.\n\nStarger nodded in agreement. \"You might be right. The hacienda they used as a headquarters to conduct the treasure search appears deserted.\"\n\nRagsdale sighed. \"If Smith and Gunn are still alive, I fear it won't be for long.\"\n\n\"We can do nothing but look helplessly through the fence,\" said Starger in frustration.\n\nRagsdale stared out the window across the border. \"The FBI can't launch a raid onto Mexican soil.\"\n\n\"Nor Customs,\" said Gaskill.\n\nPitt looked at the federal agents for a moment. Then he addressed himself directly to Sandecker.\n\n\"They can't, but NUMA can.\"\n\nThey all looked at him, uncomprehending.\n\n\"We can what?\" asked Sandecker.\n\n\"Go into Mexico and rescue Loren and Rudi without creating an international incident.\"\n\n\"Sure you will.\" Gaskill laughed. \"Getting across the border is no trick, but the Zolars have the Sonoran police and military on their side. Satellite photos show heavy security on top and around the base of Cerro el Capirote. You couldn't get within ten kilometers without getting shot.\"\n\n\"I wasn't planning on driving or hiking to the mountain,\" said Pitt.\n\nStarger looked at him and grinned. \"What can the National Underwater and Marine Agency do that Customs and the FBI can't? Swim over the desert?\"\n\n\"No, not over,\" said Pitt in a deadly earnest voice. \"Under.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "NIGHTMARE PASSAGE",
                "text": "[ October 31, 1998 ]\n\n[ Satan's Sink, Baja, Mexico ]\n\nIn the parched foothills on the northern end of the Sierra el Mayor Mountains, almost 50 kilometers (31 miles) due south of Mexicali, there is a borehole, a naturally formed tunnel, in the side of a cliff.\n\nCarved millions of years ago by the turbulent action of an ancient sea, the corridor slopes downward to the bottom of a small cavern, sculpted from the volcanic rock by Pliocene epoch water and more recently by windblown sand. There on the floor of the cavern a pool of water emerges from beneath the desert. Except for a tint of cobalt blue, the water is so clear as to appear invisible and from ground level the sinkhole looks to be bottomless.\n\nSatan's Sink was shaped nothing like the sacrificial pool in Peru, Pitt thought, as he gazed at the yellow nylon line trailing into the transparent depths. He sat on a rock at the edge of the water, his eyes shaded with a look of concern, hands lightly grasping the nylon line whose end was wound around the drum of a compact reel.\n\nOutside, 80 meters (262 feet) above the bottom of the tubular borehole, Admiral Sandecker sat in a lawn chair beside a ravaged and rusting 1951 Chevy half-ton pickup truck with a faded camper in the bed that looked as though it should have been recycled years ago. Another automobile was parked behind it, a very tired and worn 1968 Plymouth Belvedere station wagon. Both had Baja California Norte license plates.\n\nSandecker held a can of Coors beer in one hand as he lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes with the other and scrutinized the surrounding landscape. He was dressed to complement the old truck, having the appearance of any one of thousands of retired American vagabonds who travel and camp around the Baja Peninsula on the cheap.\n\nHe was surprised to find so many flowering plants in the Sonoran Desert, despite scant water and a climate that runs from subfreezing nights in the winter to a summer heat that produces furnace temperatures. Far off in the distance he watched a small herd of horses grazing on bunchgrass.\n\nSatisfied the only life within his immediate area was a red diamondback rattler sunning itself on a rock and a black tailed jackrabbit that hopped up to him, took one look, and leaped away, he rose from his lawn chair and ambled down the slope of the borehole to the pool.\n\n\"Any sign of the law?\" asked Pitt at the admiral's approach.\n\nNothing around here but snakes and rabbits,\" grunted Sandecker. He nodded toward the water.\n\n\"How long have they been down?\"\n\nPitt glanced at his watch. \"Thirty-eight minutes.\"\n\n\"I'd feel a whole lot better if they were using professional equipment instead of old dive gear borrowed from local Customs agents.\"\n\n\"Every minute counts if we're to save Loren and Rudi. By doing an exploratory survey now to see if my plan has the slightest chance of succeeding, we save six hours. The same time it takes for our state-of-the-art equipment to arrive in Calexico from Washington.\"\n\n\"Sheer madness to attempt such a dangerous operation,\" said Sandecker in a tired voice.\n\n\"Do we have an alternative?\"\n\n\"None that comes to mind.\"\n\n\"Then we must give it a try,\" said Pitt firmly.\n\n\"You don't even know yet if you have the slightest prospect of--\"\n\n\"They've signaled,\" Pitt interrupted the admiral as the line tautened in his hands. \"They're on their way up.\"\n\nTogether, Pitt pulling in on the line, Sandecker holding the reel between his knees and turning the crank, they began hauling in the two divers who were somewhere deep inside the sinkhole on the other end of the 200-meter 460(656-foot) line. A long fifteen minutes later, breathing heavily, they brought in the red knot that signified the third fifty-meter mark.\n\n\"Only fifty meters to go,\" Sandecker commented heavily. He pulled on the reel as he cranked, trying to ease the strain on Pitt who did the major share of the work. The admiral was a health enthusiast, jogged several miles a day, and occasionally worked out in the NUMA headquarters health spa, but the exertion of pulling dead weight without a time-out pushed his heart rate close to the red line. \"I see them,\" he panted thankfully.\n\nGratefully, Pitt let go of the line and sagged to a sitting position to catch his breath. \"They can ascend on their own from there.\"\n\nGiordino was the first of the two divers to surface. He removed his twin air tanks and hoisted them to Sandecker. Then he offered a hand to Pitt who leaned back and heaved him out of the water. The next man up was Dr. Peter Duncan, a U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist, who had arrived in Calexico by chartered jet only an hour after Sandecker contacted him in San Diego. At first he thought the admiral was joking about an underground river, but curiosity overcame his skepticism and he dropped everything to join in the exploratory dive. He spit out the mouthpiece to his air regulator.\n\n\"I never envisioned a water source that extensive,\" he said between deep breaths.\n\n\"You found an access to the river,\" Pitt stated., not asked, happily.\n\n\"The sinkhole drops about sixty meters before it meets a horizontal feeding stream that runs a hundred and twenty meters through a series of narrow fissures to the river,\" explained Giordino.\n\nCan we gain passage for the float equipment?\" Pitt queried.\n\n\"It gets a little tight in places, but I think we can squeeze it through.\"\n\n\"The water temperature?\"\n\n\"A cool but bearable twenty degrees Celsius, about sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.\"\n\nDuncan pulled off his hood, revealing the great bush of a red beard. He made no effort to climb from the pool. He rested his arms on the bank and babbled in excitement. \"I didn't believe it when you described a wide river with a current of nine knots under the Sonoran Desert. Now that I've seen it with my own eyes, I still don't believe it. I'd guess anywhere from ten to fifteen million acre-feet of water a year is flowing down there.\"\n\n\"Do you think it's the same underground stream that flows under Cerro el Capirote?\" asked Sandecker.\n\n\"No doubt about it,\" answered Duncan. \"Now that I've seen the river exists with my own eyes, I'd be willing to gamble it's the same stream that Leigh Hunt claimed runs beneath the Castle Dome Mountains.\"\n\n\"So Hunt's canyon of gold probably exists.\" Pitt smiled.\n\n\"You know about that legend?\"\n\n\"No legend now.\"\n\nA delighted look crossed Duncan's face. \"No, I guess not, I'm happy to say.\"\n\n\"Good thing we were tied to a fixed guideline,\" said Giordino.\n\nDuncan nodded. \"I couldn't agree more. Without it, we would have been swept away by the river when we emerged from the feeder stream.\"\n\n\"And joined those two divers who ended up in the Gulf.\"\n\nI can't help but wonder where the source is,\" mused Sandecker.\n\nGiordino rubbed a hand through his curly mop. \"The latest in geophysical ground-penetrating instruments should have no problem tracking the course.\"\n\n\"There is no predicting what a discovery of this magnitude means to the drought-plagued Southwest,\" said Duncan, still aroused by what he'd seen. \"The benefits could result in thousands of jobs, millions of acres brought under cultivation, pasture for livestock. We might even see the desert turned into a Garden of Eden.\"\n\n\"The thieves will drown in the water that makes the desert into a garden,\" Pitt said, staring into the crystal blue pool and remembering Billy Yuma's words.\n\n\"What was that you said?\" asked Giordino curiously.\n\nPitt shook his head and smiled. \"An old Indian proverb.\"\n\nAfter carrying the dive equipment up to the surface entrance of the borehole, Giordino and Duncan stripped off their suits while Sandecker loaded their gear into the Plymouth station wagon. The admiral came over as Pitt drove alongside in the old pickup and stopped.\n\n\"I'll meet you back here in two hours,\" he notified Sandecker.\n\n\"Mind telling us where you're going?\"\n\n\"I have to see a man about raising an army.\"\n\n\"Anybody I know?\"\n\n\"No, but if things go half as well as I hope, you'll be shaking his hand and pinning a medal on him by the time the sun goes down.\"\n\nGaskill and Ragsdale were waiting at the small airport west of Calexico on the United States side of the border when the NUMA plane landed and taxied up to a large Customs Service van. They had begun transferring the underwater survival equipment to the van from the cargo hatch of the plane when Sandecker and Giordino arrived in the station wagon.\n\nThe pilot came over and shook their hands. \"We had to hustle to assemble your shopping list, but we managed to scrounge every piece of gear you requested.\"\n\n\"Were our engineers able to lower the profile of the Hovercraft as Pitt requested?\" asked Giordino.\n\n\"A miraculous crash job.\" The pilot smiled. \"But the admiral's mechanical whiz kids said to tell you they modified the Wallowing Windbag down to a maximum height of sixty-one centimeters.\"\n\n\"I'll thank everyone personally when I return to Washington,\" said Sandecker warmly.\n\n\"Would you like me to head back?\" the pilot asked the admiral. \"Or stand by here?\"\n\n\"Stick by your aircraft in case we need you.\"\n\nThey had just finished loading the van and were closing the rear cargo doors when Curtis Starger came racing across the airstrip in a gray Customs vehicle. He braked to a stop and came from behind the wheel as if shot out of a cannon.\n\n\"We got problems,\" he announced.\n\n\"What kind of problems?\" Gaskill demanded.\n\n\"Mexican Border Police just closed down their side of the border to all U.S. traffic entering Mexico.\"\n\n\"What about commercial traffic?\"\n\n\"That too. They also added insult to injury by putting up a flock of military helicopters with orders to force down all intruding aircraft and stop any vehicle that looks suspicious.\"\n\nRagsdale looked at Sandecker. \"They must be onto your fishing expedition.\"\n\n\"I don't think so. No one saw us enter or leave the borehole.\"\n\nStarger laughed. \"What do you want to bet that after Senor Matos ran back and reported our hard stand to the Zolars, they frothed at the mouth and coerced their buddies in the government to raise the drawbridge.\"\n\n\"That would be my guess,\" agreed Ragsdale. \"They were afraid we'd come charging in like the Light Brigade.\"\n\nGaskill looked around. \"Where's Pitt?\"\n\n\"He's safe on. the other side,\" replied Giordino.\n\nSandecker struck the side of the aircraft with his fist. \"To come this close,\" he muttered angrily. \"A bust, a goddamned bust.\"\n\nThere must be some way we can get these people and their gear back to Satan's Sink,\" said Ragsdale to his fellow federal agents.\n\nStarger and Gaskill matched crafty grins. \"Oh, I think the Customs Service can save the day,\" said Starger.\n\n\"You two got something up your sleeves?\"\n\n\"The Escobar affair,\" Starger revealed. \"Familiar with it?\"\n\nRagsdale nodded. \"The underground drug smuggling operation.\"\n\nJuan Escobar lived just across the border in Mexico,\" Starger explained to Sandecker and Giordino, \"but operated a truck repair garage on this side. He smuggled in a number of large narcotics shipments before the Drug Enforcement Agency got wise to him. In a cooperative investigation our agents discovered a tunnel running a hundred and fifty meters from his house under the border fence to his repair shop. We were too late for an arrest. Escobar somehow got antsy, shut down his operation before we could nail him, and disappeared along with his family.\"\n\n\"One of our agents,\" added Gaskill, \"a Hispanic who was born and raised in East Los Angeles, lives in Escobar's former house and commutes through the border crossing, posing as the new owner of Escobar's truck repair shop.\"\n\nStarger smiled with pride. \"The DEA and Customs have made over twenty arrests on information that came to him from other drug traffickers wanting to use the tunnel.\"\n\n\"Are you saying it's still open?\" asked Sandecker.\n\n\"You'd be surprised how often it comes in handy for the good guys,\" answered Starger.\n\nGiordino looked like a man offered salvation. \"Can we get our stuff through to the other side?\"\n\nStarger nodded. \"We simply drive the van into the repair shop. I'll get some men to help us carry your equipment under the border to Escobar's house, then load it into our undercover agent's parts truck out of sight in the garage. The vehicle is well known over there, so there is no reason why you'd be stopped.\"\n\nSandecker looked at Giordino. \"Well,\" he said solemnly, \"are you ready to write your obituary?\"\n\nThe stone demon stoically ignored the activity around him as if biding his time. He did not feel, nor could he turn his head and see, the recent gouges and craters in his body and remaining wing, shot there by laughing Mexican soldiers who used him for target practice when their officers had disappeared into the mountain. Something within the carved stone sensed that its menacing eyes would still be surveying the ageless desert centuries after the intruding humans had died and passed beyond memory into the afterworld.\n\nA shadow passed over the demon for the fifth time that morning as a sleek craft dropped from the sky and settled onto the only open space large enough for it to land, a narrow slot between two army helicopters and the big winch with its equally large auxiliary power unit.\n\nIn the rear passenger seat of the blue and green police helicopter, Police Comandante of Baja Norte Rafael Corona stared thoughtfully out the window at the turmoil on the mountaintop. His eyes wandered to the malevolent expression of the stone demon. It seemed to stare back at him.\n\nAged sixty-five, he contemplated his coming retirement without joy. He did not look forward to a life of boredom in a small house overlooking the bay at Ensenada, existing on a pension that would permit few luxuries. His square, brown-skinned face reflected a solid career that went back forty-five years.\n\nCorona had never E been popular with his fellow officers. Hardworking, straight as an arrow, he had prided himself on never taking a bribe. Not one peso in all his years on the force. Though he never faulted others for accepting graft under the table from known criminals or shady businessmen seeking to sidestep investigations, neither did he condone it. He had gone his own way, never informing, never voicing complaints or personal moral judgments.\n\nBitterly he recalled how he had been passed over for promotion more times than he could remember.\n\nBut whenever his superiors slipped too far and were discovered in scandal, the civilian commissioners always turned to Corona, a man they resented for his honesty but needed because he could be trusted.\n\nThere was a reason Cortina could never be bought in a land where corruption and kickbacks were commonplace. Every man, and woman too, has a price. Resentfully but patiently Cortina had waited until his price was met. If he was to sell out, he wouldn't come cheap. And the ten million dollars the Zolars offered for his cooperation, above and beyond the official approval for the treasure removal, was enough to ensure that his wife, four sons and their wives, and eight grandchildren would enjoy life in the new and rejuvenated Mexico spawned under the North American Free Trade Agreement.\n\nAt the same time, he knew the old days of looking the other way while holding out an open palm were dying out. The last two presidents of Mexico had waged all-out war against bureaucratic corruption. And the legalization and price regulation of certain drugs had dealt the drug dealers a blow that had cut their profits by 80 percent and their death-dealing volume by two-thirds.\n\nCortina stepped from the helicopter and was met by one of Amaru's men. He remembered arresting him for armed robbery in La Paz and helping obtain a conviction and a five-year prison term. If the freed criminal recognized Corona, there was no indication. He was ushered by the ex-convict into an aluminum house trailer that had been airlifted from Yuma to be used as an office for the treasure recovery project on top of the mountain.\n\nHe was surprised to see modern oil paintings by some of the Southwest's finest artists adorning the walls. Inside the richly paneled trailer, seated around an antique French Second Empire table, were Joseph Zolar, his two brothers, Fernando Matos from the National Affairs Department, and Colonel Roberto Campos, commander of northern Mexico's military forces on the Baja Peninsula.\n\nCortina gave a nod and a slight bow and was motioned to a chair. His eyes widened slightly as a very attractive serving lady brought him a glass of champagne and a plate of smoked sturgeon topped by a small mound of caviar. Zolar pointed to a cutaway illustration of the passageway leading to the interior caverns.\n\n\"Not an easy job, let me tell you. Bringing all that gold across a river deep below the floor of the desert, and then transporting it up a narrow tunnel to the top of the mountain.\"\n\n\"It goes well?\" asked Cortina.\n\n\"Too early to throw confetti,\" replied Zolar. \"The hardest part, dragging out Huascar's chain, is under way. Once it reaches the surface--\" he paused to read the dial of his watch-- \"in about half an hour from now, we will cut it into sections for easier loading and unloading during shipping. After it is safe inside our storage facilities in Morocco, it will be reconnected.\"\n\n\"Why Morocco?\" inquired Fernando Matos. \"Why not your warehouse in Galveston or your estate in Douglas, Arizona?\"\n\n\"Protection. This is one collection of artifacts we don't want to risk storing in the United States. We have an arrangement with the military commander in Morocco who protects our shipments. The country also makes a convenient distribution center to ship the artifacts throughout Europe, South America, and the Far East.\"\n\n\"How do you plan to bring out the rest of the antiquities?\" asked Campos.\n\n\"After they are floated across the underground river on rafts, they will be drawn up the passageway on a train of narrow platforms with ski runners.\"\n\n\"Then the winch I requisitioned has proven useful?\"\n\n\"A godsend, Colonel,\" replied Oxley. \"By six o'clock this evening your men should be loading the last of the golden artifacts onto the helicopters you so graciously provided.\n\nCortina held his glass of champagne but didn't taste it. \"Is there any way of measuring the weight of the treasure?\"\n\n\"Professor Henry Moore and his wife have given me an estimate of sixty tons.\"\n\n\"Good God,\" murmured Colonel Campos, an imposing figure of a man with a great mass of gray hair.\n\n\"I had no idea it was so vast.\"\n\n\"Historical records failed to give a full inventory,\" said Oxley.\n\n\"And the value?\" asked Corona.\n\n\"Our original estimate,\" Oxley lectured, \"was two hundred and fifty million American dollars. But I think it's safe to say it's worth closer to three hundred million.\"\n\nOxley's amount was a total fabrication. The market price of the gold alone had risen close to seven hundred million dollars after the Moores' inventory. Incredibly, the added value as antiquities easily pushed the price well over one billion dollars on the underground market.\n\nZolar faced Corona and Campos, a broad smile on his face. \"What this means, gentlemen, is that we can raise the ante considerably for the people of Baja California Norte.\"\n\n\"There will be more than enough for the public works your government administrators have envisioned,\" added Sarason.\n\nCorona glanced sideways at Campos, and wondered how much the colonel was collecting to look the other way while the Zolars made off with the bulk of the treasure, including the massive golden chain.\n\nAnd Matos was an enigma. He couldn't figure out how the sniveling government official fit into the scheme of things. \"In light of the increased estimated valuation, I believe a bonus should be forthcoming.\"\n\nAn opportunist, Campos instantly picked up on Corona's drift. \"Yes, yes, I agree with my good friend Rafael. For me, it was not an easy matter to seal off the border.\"\n\nIt amused Cortina to hear Campos use his Christian name for the first time in the ten years they had occasionally met to discuss mutual police and military business. He knew how much it would irritate Campos if he did the same, so he said, \"Roberto is quite right. Local businessmen and politicians are already complaining about the loss of tourist revenue and the halting of commercial traffic. Both of us will have to do some heavy explaining to our superiors.\"\n\n\"Won't they understand when you tell them it was to keep American federal agents from making an unauthorized border crossing to confiscate the treasure?\" asked Oxley.\n\n\"I assure you the National Affairs Department will cooperate in every way to back your position,\" said Matos.\n\n\"Perhaps.\" Cortina shrugged. \"Who can say for certain whether our government will buy the story or order Colonel Campos and me tried in court for overstepping our authority.\"\n\n\"Your bonus.\" Zolar put it to Cortina. \"What did you have in mind?\"\n\nWithout batting an eye, Cortina replied, \"An additional ten million dollars in cash.\"\n\nCampos was visibly stunned for an instant, but he jumped right in beside Corona. \"Police Comandante Cortina speaks for both of us. Considering our risk and the added value of the treasure, ten million cash above our original agreement is not too much to ask.\"\n\nSarason entered into the negotiations. \"You realize, of course, that the estimated value is nowhere near the price that we will eventually receive. Comandante Cortina knows that stolen jewels are rarely fenced for more than twenty percent of their true worth.\"\n\nZolar and Oxley maintained serious expressions, all the while knowing there were over a thousand collectors on their client list who were eagerly waiting to purchase portions of the golden artifacts at premium prices.\n\n\"Ten million,\" Cortina repeated stubbornly.\n\nSarason kept up the pretense of hard bargaining. \"That's a lot of money,\" he protested.\n\n\"Protecting you from American and Mexican law enforcement agents is only half our involvement,\"\n\nCortina reminded him. \"Without Colonel Campos's heavy transport helicopters to haul the gold to your transfer site in the Altar Desert, you would end up with nothing.\"\n\n\"And without our involvement in the discovery, you would too,\" said Sarason.\n\nCorona spread his hands indifferently. \"I cannot deny that we need each other. But I strongly believe it would be in your best interests to be generous.\"\n\nSarason looked at his brothers. Zolar gave a barely perceptible nod. After a moment, Sarason turned to Corona and Campos and gestured in apparent defeat. \"We know when we have a losing hand.\n\nConsider yourselves another ten million dollars richer.\"\n\nThe maximum load the winch could tow was five tons, so Huascar's chain was to be cut in the middle and dragged out in two pieces. The soldiers of the Mexican engineering battalion would then fashion a raft from boards requisitioned from the nearest lumber yard to ferry the main mass of the treasure across the subterranean river. Only the golden throne proved too heavy for the raft. Once Huascar's chain was pulled to the mountain peak, the winch cable was to be carried back down and attached to a harness wrapped around the throne. After sending a signal topside, it would be winched across the river bottom until it reached dry ground. From there the engineers, aided by Amaru's men, planned to muscle it onto a sled for the final journey from the heart of the mountain. Once out of the mountain, all of the artifacts would be loaded aboard vessels the Inca artisans who created the golden masterworks could never have visualized birds that flew without wings, known in modern times as helicopters.\n\nOn the island of treasure, Micki Moore busily catalogued and recorded descriptions of the pieces while Henry measured and photographed them. They had to work quickly. Amaru was driving the military engineers to remove everything in a hurry, an effort that reduced the small mountain of golden antiquities at an incredible rate. What had taken the Incas and Chachapoyas six days to cache inside the mountain, modern equipment was about to remove in ten hours.\n\nShe moved close to her husband and whispered, \"I can't do this.\"\n\nHe looked at her.\n\nHer eyes seemed to reflect the gold that gleamed under the bright lights brought in by the engineers. \"I don't want any of the gold.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" he asked her softly.\n\n\"I can't explain,\" she said. \"I feel dirty enough as it is. I know you must have come to feel the same.\n\nWe must do something to keep it out of Zolar's hands.\"\n\n\"Wasn't that our original intent, to terminate the Zolars and hijack the treasure after it was loaded aboard the aircraft in the Altar Desert?\"\n\n\"That was before we saw how vast and magnificent it is. Let it go, Henry, we've bitten off more than we can chew.\"\n\nMoore turned thoughtful. \"This is one hell of time to get a conscience.\"\n\n\"Conscience has nothing to do with it. It's ridiculous to think we could unload tons of antiquities. We have to face facts. You and I don't have the facilities or the contacts to dispose of so large a hoard on the underground market.\"\n\n\"Selling Huascar's chain would not be all that difficult.\"\n\nMicki looked up into his eyes for a long time. \"You're a very good anthropologist, and I'm a very good archaeologist. We're also very good at jumping out of airplanes at night into strange countries and murdering people. Stealing priceless ancient art is not what we do best. Besides, we hate these people. I say we work together in keeping the treasure in one piece. Not scattered inside the vaults of a bunch of scavengers hungry for possessions no one else can own or ever view.\"\n\n\"I have to admit,\" he said wearily, \"I've had my reservations too. What do you suggest we do?\"\n\n\"The right thing,\" she replied huskily.\n\nFor the first time Moore noticed the compassion in her eyes. There was a beauty he had never seen before. She put her arms around him and gazed into his eyes. \"We don't have to kill anymore. This time we won't have to crawl back under a rock when our operation is finished.\"\n\nHe took her head between his hands and kissed her. \"I'm proud of you, old girl.\"\n\nShe pushed him back, her eyes widening as if she remembered something. \"The hostages. I promised them we would rescue them if we could.\"\n\n\"Where are they?\"\n\n\"If they're still alive, they should be on the surface.\"\n\nMoore looked around the cavern and saw that Amaru was overseeing the removal of the mummies of the guardians from inside the crypt. The Zolars were leaving the caverns as bare as when the Incas found them. Nothing of value was to be left.\n\n\"We've got a detailed inventory,\" he said to Micki. \"Let's be on our way.\"\n\nThe Moores hitched a ride on a sled stacked with golden animals being towed up to the staging area.\n\nWhen they came into daylight, they searched the summit, but Loren Smith and Rudi Gunn were nowhere to be found.\n\nBy then, it was too late for the Moores to reenter the mountain.\n\nLoren shivered. Tattered clothing was no protection against the cool dampness of the cavern. Gunn put his arm around her to provide what body warmth he had to give. The tiny cell-like chamber that was their prison was little more than a wide crack in the limestone. There was no room to stand up, and whenever they tried to move about to find a comfortable position or to keep warm, the guard shoved his gun butt at them through the opening.\n\nAfter the two sections of the golden chain had been brought through the passageway, Amaru forced them from the mountain crest down to the little cavity behind the guardian's crypt. Unknown to the Moores, Loren and Rudi had been imprisoned before the scientists made their way out of the treasure cavern.\n\n\"We would appreciate a drink of water,\" Loren told the guard.\n\nHe turned and looked at her blankly. He was an appalling figure, enormous, with an entirely repulsive face, thick lips, flat nose, and one eye. The empty socket he left exposed, giving him the brutal ugliness of Quasimodo.\n\nThis time when Loren shivered it wasn't from the cold. It was the fear that coursed throughout her half-naked body. She knew that to show audacity might invite pain, but she no longer cared. \"Water, you drooling imbecile. Do you understand, agua?\"\n\nHe gave her a cruel look and slowly vanished from their narrow line of vision. In a few minutes he returned and tossed a military canteen of water into the cave.\n\n\"I think you've made a friend,\" said Gunn.\n\n\"If he thinks he's getting a kiss on the first date,\" said Loren, twisting off the cap of the canteen, \"he's got another think coming.\"\n\nShe offered Gunn a drink, but he shook his head. \"Ladies first.\"\n\nLoren drank sparingly and passed the canteen to Gunn. \"I wonder what happened to the Moores?\"\n\n\"They may not know we were moved from the summit down to this hellhole.\"\n\n\"I fear the Zolars intend to bury us alive in here,\" Loren said. The tears came to her eyes for the first time as her defenses began to crack. She had endured the beatings and the abuse, but now that it seemed she and Gunn were abandoned, the faint hope that had kept her going was all but extinguished.\n\n\"There is still Dirk,\" Gunn said gently.\n\nShe shook her head as if embarrassed at being seen wiping away the tears. \"Please stop. Even if he were still alive, Dirk couldn't fight his way into this rotten mountain with a division of Marines and reach us in time.\"\n\n\"If I know our man, he wouldn't need a division of Marines.\"\n\n\"He's only human. He would be the last one to think of himself as a miracle worker.\"\n\n\"As long as we're still alive,\" said Gunn, \"and there is a chance, that's all that matters.\"\n\n\"But for how long?\" She shook her head sadly. \"A few more minutes, a couple of hours? The truth is, we're already as good as dead.\"\n\nWhen the first section of chain was dragged into daylight, everyone on the summit stood and admired it. The sheer mass of so much gold in one place took their breath away. Despite the dust and calcite drippings from centuries underground, the great mass of yellow gold gleamed blindingly under the noon sun.\n\nIn all the years the Zolars had been practicing the theft of antiquities, they had never seen such a masterwork of art so rich in splendor from the past. No treasured object known to history could match it. Fewer than four collectors throughout the world could have afforded the entire piece. The sight was doubly grand when the second section of chain was pulled from the passage opening and laid beside the first.\n\n\"Mother of heaven!\" gasped Colonel Campos. \"The links are as large as a man's wrist.\"\n\n\"Difficult to believe the Incas had mastered such highly technical skills in metallurgy,\" murmured Zolar.\n\nSarason knelt down and studied the links. \"Their artistry and sophistication is phenomenal. Each link is perfect. There isn't a flaw anywhere.\"\n\nCorona walked over to one of the end links and lifted it with considerable effort. \"They must weigh fifty kilos each.\"\n\nThis is truly light-years ahead of any other discovery,\" said Oxley, trembling at the incredible sight.\n\nSarason tore his gaze away and gestured to Amaru. \"Get it loaded on board the helicopter, quickly.\"\n\nThe evil-eyed killer nodded silently and began giving orders to his men and a squad of soldiers. Even Corona, Campos, and Matos pitched in. With help from a straining forklift and plenty of sweat, the two sections of chain were manhandled aboard two army helicopters and sent on their way to the desert airstrip.\n\nZolar watched as the two aircraft became tiny specks in the sky. \"Nothing can stop us now,\" he said cheerfully to his brothers. \"A few more hours and we're home free, with the largest treasure known to man.\"\n\nTo Sandecker, the audacious plan to come in through the back door of Cerro el Capirote in a wild attempt to save Loren Smith and Rudi Gunn was nothing less than suicidal. He knew the reasons Pitt had for risking his life, rescuing a loved one and a close friend from death, evening the score with a pair of murderers, and snatching a wondrous treasure from the hands of thieves. Those were grounds for justification of other men. Not Pitt. His motivation went much deeper. To challenge the unknown, laugh at the devil, and dare the odds. Those were his stimulants.\n\nAs for Giordino, Pitt's friend since childhood, Sandecker never doubted for an instant the rugged Italian would follow Pitt into a molten sea of lava.\n\nSandecker could have stopped them. But he hadn't built what was thought of by many as the finest, most productive, and budget efficient agency in the government without taking his fair share of risky gambles. His fondness for marching out of step with official Washington made him the object of respect as well as envy. The other directors of national bureaus would never consider hands-on control of a hazardous project in the field that might run the risk of censure from Congress and force resignation by presidential order. Sandecker's only regret was that this was one adventure he couldn't lead himself.\n\nHe paused after carrying a load of dive gear from the old Chevy down the tubular bore and looked at Peter Duncan, who sat beside the sinkhole, busily overlaying a transparency of a topographical map onto a hydrographic survey of known underground water systems.\n\nThe two charts were enlarged to the same scale, enabling Duncan to trace the approximate course of the subterranean river. Around him, the others were setting out the dive gear and float equipment. \"As the crow flies,\" Duncan said to no one specifically, \"the distance between Satan's Sinkhole and Cerro el Capirote works out to roughly thirty kilometers.\"\n\nSandecker looked down into the water of the sinkhole. \"What quirk of nature formed the river channel?\"\n\n\"About sixty million years ago,\" answered Duncan, \"a shift in the earth caused a fault in the limestone, allowing water to seep in and carve out a series of connecting caverns.\"\n\nThe admiral turned to Pitt. \"How long do you think it will take you to get there?\"\n\n\"Running with a current of nine knots,\" said Pitt, \"we should make the treasure cavern in three hours.\"\n\nDuncan looked doubtful. \"I've never seen a river that didn't meander. If I were you I'd add another two hours to my estimated time of arrival.\"\n\n\"The Wallowing Windbag will make up the time,\" Giordino said confidently as he stripped off his clothes.\n\n\"Only if you have clear sailing all the way. You're entering the unknown. There is no second-guessing the difficulties you might encounter. Submerged passages extending ten kilometers or more, cascades that fall the height of a ten-story building, or unnavigable rapids through rocks. White-water rafters have a saying-- if there is a rock, you'll strike it. If there is an eddy, you'll get caught in it.\"\n\n\"Anything else?\" Giordino grinned, unshaken by Duncan's dire forecast. \"Like vampires or gluttonous monsters with six jaws of barracuda teeth lurking in the dark to have us for lunch?\"\n\n\"I'm only trying to prepare you for the unexpected,\" Duncan said. \"The best theory I can offer that might give you a small sense of security is that I believe the main section of the river system flows through a fault in the earth. If I'm right, the channel will travel in an erratic path but with a reasonably level depth.\"\n\nPitt patted him on the shoulder. \"We understand and we're grateful. But at this stage, all Al and I can do is hope for the best, expect the worst, and settle for anything in between.\"\n\n\"When you swam out of the sinkhole's feeder stream into the river,\" Sandecker asked Duncan, \"was there an air pocket?\"\n\n\"Yes, the rock ceiling rose a good ten meters above the surface of the river.\"\n\n\"How far did it extend?\"\n\n\"We were hanging onto the fixed guideline for dear life against the current and only got a brief look. A quick sweep of my light failed to reveal the end of the gallery.\"\n\n\"With luck, they'll have an air passage the entire trip.\"\n\n\"A lot of luck,\" said Duncan skeptically, his eyes still drawn to the chart overlays. \"As underground rivers go, this one is enormous. In sheer length, it must be the longest unexplored subterranean water course through a field of karst.\"\n\nGiordino hesitated in strapping on a small console containing pressure gauges, a compass, and a depth meter to his arm. \"What do you mean by karst?\"\n\n\"Karst is the term for a limestone belt that is penetrated by a system of streams, passages, and caverns.\"\n\n\"It makes one wonder how many other unknown rivers are flowing under the earth,\" said Pitt.\n\n\"Leigh Hunt and his river canyon of gold, another source of jokes by California and Nevada state hydrologists, now bear heavy investigation,\" admitted Duncan. \"Because of what you discovered here, I'll guarantee that closed minds will take a second look.\"\n\n\"Maybe I can do my bit for the cause,\" said Pitt, holding up a small waterproof computer before strapping it to his forearm. \"I'll try to program a survey, and plot data on the river's course as we go.\"\n\n\"I'll be grateful for all the scientific data you can bring back,\" acknowledged Duncan. \"Finding a golden treasure under Cerro el Capirote may fire the imagination, but in reality it's incidental to the discovery of a water source that can turn millions of acres of desert into productive farm and ranch land.\"\n\n\"Perhaps the gold can fund the pumping systems and pipelines for such a project,\" said Pitt.\n\n\"Certainly a dream to consider,\" added Sandecker.\n\nGiordino held up an underwater camera. \"I'll bring back some pictures for you.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Duncan gratefully. \"I'd also appreciate another favor.\"\n\nPitt smiled. \"Name it.\"\n\nHe handed Pitt a plastic packet in the shape of a basketball but half the size. \"A dye tracer called Fluorescein Yellow with Optical Brightener. I'll buy you the best Mexican dinner in the Southwest if you'll throw it into the river when you reach the treasure chamber. That's all. As it floats along the river the container will automatically release the dye over regular intervals.\"\n\n\"You want to record where the river outlet emerges into the Gulf.\"\n\nDuncan nodded. \"That will give us an important hydrologic link.\"\n\nHe was also going to ask if Pitt and Giordino might take water samples, but thought better of it. He had already pushed them as far as he dared. If they were successful in navigating the river as far as the hollow interior of Cerro el Capirote, then he and his fellow scientists could mount subsequent scientific expeditions based on the data acquired by Pitt and Giordino.\n\nOver the next ten minutes, Pitt and Giordino geared up and went over the plans for their journey. They had made countless dives together under a hundred different water and weather conditions, but none of this distance through the depths of the earth. Like doctors discussing a delicate brain operation, no detail was left to chance. Their survival depended on it.\n\nCommunication signals were agreed upon, buddy breathing strategies in case of air loss, the drill for inflating and deflating the Wallowing Windbag, who was in control of what equipment-- all procedures were deliberated and jointly approved.\n\n\"I see you're not wearing a pressurized dry suit,\" observed Sandecker as Pitt pulled on his wet suit.\n\n\"The water temperature is a few degrees on the cool side, but warm enough so we don't have to worry about hypothermia. A wet suit gives us more freedom of movement than a dry suit that is pressurized by air tanks. This will prove a dire necessity if we find ourselves struggling in the water to right the Wallowing Windbag after it is flipped over by raging rapids.\"\n\nInstead of the standard backpack, Pitt attached his air tanks to a harness around his hips for easier access through narrow passages. He was also festooned with breathing regulators, air lines leading to dual valve manifolds, pressure gauges, and a small backup bottle filled with pure oxygen for decompression. Then came weight belts and buoyancy compensators.\n\n\"No mixed gas?\" queried Sandecker.\n\n\"We'll breathe air,\" Pitt replied as he checked his regulators.\n\n\"What about the danger of nitrogen narcosis?\"\n\n\"Once we're clear of the bottom of the sinkhole and the lower part of the feeder stream before it upslopes to the river, we'll avoid any further deep diving like the plague.\"\n\n\"Just see that you stay well above the threshold,\" Sandecker warned him, \"and don't go below thirty meters. And once you're afloat keep a sharp eye for submerged boulders.\"\n\nThose were the words the admiral spoke. What he didn't say was, \"If something goes wrong and you need immediate help, you might as well be on the third ring of Saturn.\" In other words, there could be no rescue or evacuation.\n\nPitt and Giordino made a final predive check of each other's equipment by the side of the pool and tested their quick-release buckles and snaps to ensure their smooth removal in an emergency. Instead of divers' hoods, they strapped construction workers' hardhats to their heads with dual-sealed miners' lamps on the front. Then they poised on the edge of the sinkhole and slipped into the water.\n\nSandecker and Duncan hoisted a long, pressure-sealed aluminum canister and struggled to lower one end into the sinkhole. The canister, measuring one meter in width by four in length, was articulated in the middle for easier maneuvering through tight spaces. Heavy and cumbersome on land from the lead ballast required to give it neutral buoyancy, it was easily moved by a diver underwater.\n\nGiordino bit on his mouthpiece, adjusted his mask, and took hold of a handgrip on the forward end of the canister. He threw a final wave as he and the canister slowly sank together below the water surface.\n\nPitt looked up from the water and shook hands with Duncan.\n\n\"Whatever you do,\" Duncan warned him, \"mind you don't let the current sweep you past the treasure chamber. From that position to where the river emerges into the Gulf has to be over a hundred kilometers.\"\n\n\"Don't worry, we won't spend any more time down there than we have to.\"\n\n\"May God dive with you,\" said Duncan.\n\n\"All heavenly company will be warmly welcomed,\" said Pitt sincerely. Then he gripped Sandecker's hand. \"Keep a tequila on ice for me, Admiral.\"\n\n\"I wish there was another way into the mountain.\"\n\nPitt shook his head. \"It can only be done with a diveraft operation.\"\n\n\"Bring Loren and Rudi back,\" replied Sandecker, fighting off a surge of emotion.\n\n\"You'll see them soon,\" Pitt promised.\n\nAnd then he was gone.\n\nThe voice of his radio operator roused Captain Juan Diego from his reverie, and he turned from gazing out his command tent at the cone-shaped mountain. There was an indescribable ugliness about Cerro el Capirote and the bleak desert that surrounded it, he thought. This was a wasteland compared to the beauty of his native state of Durango.\n\n\"Yes, what is it, Sergeant?\"\n\nThe radio operator had his back to him and Diego couldn't see the puzzled look on the soldier's face.\n\n\"I called the security posts for their hourly status reports and received no response from Posts Four and Six.\"\n\nDiego sighed. He didn't need unexpected predicaments. Colonel Campos had commanded him to set up a security perimeter around the mountain and he had followed orders. No reason was given, none was asked. Consumed with curiosity, Diego could only watch the helicopters arrive and depart and wonder what was going on up there.\n\n\"Contact Corporal Francisco at Post Five and have him send a man to check Four and Six.\" Diego sat down at his field desk and duly noted the lack of response in his daily report as a probable breakdown in communications equipment. The possibility there was a real problem never entered his mind.\n\n\"I can't raise Francisco at Post Five either,\" the radioman informed him.\n\nDiego finally turned. \"Are you certain your equipment is working properly?\"\n\n\"Yes, Sir. The transmitter is sending and receiving perfectly.\"\n\n\"Try Post One.\"\n\nThe radioman adjusted his headphones and signaled the post. A few moments later, he turned and shrugged.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Captain, Post One is silent too.\"\n\n\"I'll see to this myself,\" Diego said irritably. He picked up a portable radio and headed from the tent toward his command vehicle. Suddenly, he stopped in his tracks and stared dumbly.\n\nThe army command vehicle was sitting with the left front end jacked up, the wheel and the spare tire both nowhere to be seen. \"What in hell is going on?\" he muttered to himself. Is this some sort of prank, he wondered, or could Colonel Campos be testing him?\n\nHe spun around on his heel and started for the tent but took only two steps. As if conjured up out of nothingness by a spell, three men blocked his way. All held rifles pointed at his chest. The first question that ran through his mind was why were Indians, dressed as if they were on a cattle drive, sabotaging his equipment?\n\n\"This is a military zone,\" he blurted. \"You are not permitted here.\"\n\n\"Do as you're told, soldier boy,\" said Billy Yuma, \"and none of your men will get hurt.\"\n\nDiego suddenly guessed what had happened to his security posts. And yet he was confused. There was no way a few Indians could capture forty trained soldiers without firing a shot. He addressed his words to Yuma, whom he took to be the leader.\n\n\"Drop your weapons before my men arrive or you will be placed under military arrest.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry to inform you, soldier boy,\" Yuma said, taking delight in intimidating the officer in his neatly pressed field uniform and brightly shined combat boots, \"but your entire force has been disarmed and is now under guard.\"\n\n\"Impossible!\" snapped Diego haughtily. \"No mob of sand rats can stand up against trained troops.\"\n\nYuma shrugged indifferently and turned to one of the men beside him. \"Fix the radio inside the tent so it won't work.\"\n\n\"You're crazy. You can't destroy government property.\"\n\n\"You have trespassed on our land,\" said Yuma in a low voice. \"You have no authority here.\"\n\n\"I order you to put those guns down,\" commanded Diego, reaching for his sidearm.\n\nYuma stepped forward, his weathered face expressionless, and rammed the muzzle of his old Winchester rifle deep into Captain Diego's stomach. \"Do not resist us. If I pull the trigger, your body will silence the gunfire to those on the mountain.\"\n\nThe sudden, jolting pain convinced Diego these men were not playing games. They knew the desert and could move through the terrain like ghosts. His orders were to prevent possible encroachment by wandering hunters or prospectors. Nothing was mentioned about an armed force of local Indians who lay in ambush. Slowly, he handed over his automatic pistol to one of Yuma's men, who stuffed the barrel down the waist of his denim pants.\n\n\"Your radio too, please.\"\n\nDiego reluctantly passed over the radio. \"Why are you doing this?\" he asked. \"Don't you know you are breaking the law?\"\n\n\"If you soldier boys are working with the men who are defiling our sacred mountain, it is you who are breaking the law, our law. Now, no more talk. You will come with us.\"\n\nIn silence, Captain Diego and his radioman were escorted half a kilometer (a third of a mile) to a large overhanging rock protruding from the mountain. There, out of sight of anyone on the peak, Diego found his entire company of men sitting nervously in a tight group while several Indians covered them with their own weapons.\n\nThey scrambled to their feet and came to attention, their faces reflecting relief at seeing their commanding officer. Two lieutenants and a sergeant came up and saluted.\n\n\"Is there no one who escaped?\" asked Diego.\n\nOne of the lieutenants shook his head. \"No, sir. They were on us before we could resist.\"\n\nDiego looked around at the Indians guarding his men. Including Yuma, he counted only sixteen. \"Is this all of you?\" he asked unbelievingly.\n\nYuma nodded. \"We did not need more.\"\n\n\"What are you going to do with us?\"\n\n\"Nothing, soldier boy. My neighbors and I have been careful not to harm anyone. You and your men will enjoy a nice siesta for a few hours, and then you'll be free to leave our land.\"\n\n\"And if we attempt to escape?\"\n\nYuma shrugged indifferently. \"Then you will be shot. Something you should think about, since my people can hit a running rabbit at fifty meters.\"\n\nYuma had said all he had to say. He turned his back on Captain Diego and began climbing an almost unrecognizable trail between a fissure on the south wall of the mountain. No words were spoken between the Montolos. As if on silent command, ten men followed Billy Yuma while five remained behind to guard the prisoners.\n\nThe ascent went faster than the last time. He profited from his mistakes and ignored the wrong turns he had taken that curved into blind chutes. He remembered the good handholds and avoided the ones that were badly eroded. But it was still tough going on a trail no self-respecting pack mule would be caught dead on.\n\nHe would have preferred more men to support his assault, but the ten men struggling behind him were the only ones who were not afraid of the mountain. Or that was what they claimed. Yuma was not blind to the apprehension in their eyes.\n\nAfter he reached a flat ledge, he stopped to catch his breath. His heart was beginning to pound, but his body was tensed with the nervous energy of a racehorse ready to burst from the gate. He pulled an old pocket watch from his pants pocket and checked the time. He nodded to himself in satisfaction and held the watch face for the others to see. They were twenty minutes ahead of schedule.\n\nHigh above, on the mountain's summit, the helicopters hovered like bees around a hive. They were loaded with I as much of the treasure as they could lift before struggling into the sky and setting a course for the airstrip in the Altar Desert.\n\nColonel Campos's officers and men were working so fast, and were so awed by the golden hoard, none thought to check the security forces stationed around the base of the mountain. The radio operator on the peak was too busy coordinating the comings and goings of the helicopters to ask for a report from Captain Diego. No one took the time to look over the edge at the deserted encampment below. Nor did they notice the small band of men who were slowly climbing ever closer to the mountaintop.\n\nPolice Comandante Cortina was not a man who missed much. As his police helicopter rose from Cerro el Capirote for the return trip to his headquarters, he stared down at the stone beast and caught something that was missed by all the others. A pragmatic man, he closed his eyes and put it off as a trick of sunlight and shadows, or perhaps the angle of his view. But when he refocused his eyes on the ancient sculpture, he could have sworn the vicious expression had altered. The menacing look was gone.\n\nTo Cortina, just before it slipped out of view of his window, the fang-filled jaws on the guardian of the dead were frozen in a smile.\n\nPitt felt as though he were free-falling down a mammoth soda straw filled with cobalt blue mist. The sides of the vertical shaft of the sinkhole were round and smooth, almost as if they had been polished. If he hadn't been able to see his diving partner through the transparent water a short distance below, the shaft would have seemed bottomless. He cleared his ears as he descended, finning easily until he caught up with Giordino, who was towing their dry transport container past the elbow bend at the bottom of the shaft. Pitt helped by pushing his end through, and then followed in its wake.\n\nHe glanced at his depth-gauge needle. It was holding steady just shy of the 60-meter mark (197 feet).\n\nFrom here on, as the feeder stream sloped up toward the river, the water pressure would decrease, relieving any fear of depth blackout.\n\nThis was nothing like the dive into the sacrificial pool on the jungled slopes of the Andes. There, he had used a strong safety line with communications equipment. And except for the brief foray into the side cavern to rescue Shannon and Miles, he was never out of sight of the surface. This trip, they'd be entering an underworld of perpetual blackness no man or animal had ever seen.\n\nAs they moved their bulky canister through the twists and turns of the feeder stream leading to the river, Pitt recalled that cave diving is one of the most dangerous sports in the world. There was the Stygian blackness, the claustrophobic sensation of knowing you're far beneath the solid rock, the maddening silence, and the constant threat of disorientation if silt is stirred into impenetrable clouds. All this could lead to panic, which had killed scores of divers who were trained and equipped to deal with the perils, and made cave diving a morbid fascination that could not be learned from a book.\n\nWhat was it his instructor from the National Speleological Society had told him before his first dive into a saltwater cave in the Bahamas? \"Anyone can die at any time on a cave dive.\" In that peculiar way a particular fact learned in youth can stick in your mind forever, Pitt remembered that during the year 1974, twenty-six divers had lost their lives in Florida's underwater caves alone, and that the world total of deaths must have been three times that figure.\n\nPitt had never suffered from claustrophobia and fear seldom distracted him, but under hazardous conditions he experienced just enough uneasiness to sharpen his senses to unexpected dangers.\n\nAs it was, he didn't look forward to diving without a fixed guide or safety line. He well knew this operation could quickly turn into an exercise in self-destruction, especially once they became uncontrollably caught up in the river's current. Then there would be no escape until they reached the treasure chamber.\n\nThe horizontal fissure leading to the river expanded and tapered in a series of hourglass shapes. At 100 meters (328 feet) from the sinkhole they lost 90 percent of the outside light. They switched on the lamps attached to their hardhats. Another quick glance at his depth gauge told Pitt they had slowly ascended to within 20 meters (66 feet) of the water surface.\n\nGiordino ceased his forward movement, turned, and waved with one hand. They had reached the outlet into the river system. Pitt answered with the hand signal for OK. Then he slipped his arm through the strap attached to the transport canister so it wouldn't be torn from him by unforeseen turbulence.\n\nGiordino kicked his fins powerfully and angled upstream in a vigorous effort to pull the canister broadside into the river as far as possible before the main flow of the current swung him downstream before Pitt could exit the feeder stream. His timing was near perfect. Just as he lost his momentum and the current caught him in its grip, thrusting him around, Pitt and his end of the canister popped out of the side gallery.\n\nAs previously planned, they calmly inflated their buoyancy compensators, released the lead weights on the canister to make it buoyant, and calmly drifted upward while being carried downriver. After traveling close to 50 meters (164 feet), they broke surface, their lights revealing a large open gallery. The ceiling was covered by a strange black rock that was not limestone. Only when Pitt steadied his light did he recognize it as volcanic. Fortunately, the river's flow was smooth and uninterrupted by rocks, but the walls of the passage rose steeply out of the water, offering them no place to land.\n\nHe spit out his regulator mouthpiece and called to Giordino. \"Be ready to cut to the side when you see an open spot on the bank.\"\n\n\"Will do,\" Giordino said over his shoulder.\n\nThey quickly passed from the volcanic intrusion back into limestone that was covered by an odd gray coating that absorbed their light beams and gave the impression the batteries were giving out on their lamps. A steady, thunderous sound grew and echoed through the passage. Their worst fears-- being swept through unnavigable rapids or going over a waterfall before making a landingsuddenly loomed in the darkness ahead.\n\n\"Keep a tight grip,\" Giordino shouted. \"It looks like we're in for a tumble.\"\n\nPitt angled his head downward so the lights on his hardhat pointed directly to the front. It was a wasted motion. The passage was soon filled with a mist that rose out of the water like steam. Pitt had a sudden vision of going over Niagara Falls without a barrel. The roar was deafening now, magnified by the acoustics of the rocky cavern. And then Giordino passed into the mist and vanished.\n\nPitt could only hold on to the canister and watch with strangely paralyzed fascination as he was enveloped by the spray. He braced himself for an endless fall. But the endless fall never came. The thunder came not from the river plunging downward, but from a furious torrent that crashed down from above.\n\nHe was pummeled by a surging deluge that burst in a great plume from the limestone roof of the cavern. The huge torrent of water barreled down a tributary that fed into the subterranean river from another source. Pitt was baffled by the sight of so much water rushing under an and and thirsty desert no farther away than the distance a good outfielder could throw a baseball. He decided that it must feed into the river by great pressure from a system of underground aquifers.\n\nOnce through the curtain of mist, he could see the walls had spread and the roof sloped upward into a chamber of vast size and proportion. It was a bizarrely decorated cavern filled with grotesquely shaped helictites, a family of stalactites that ignores gravity and grows in eccentric directions. Mineral deposits had also formed beautifully sculpted mushrooms over a meter tall and delicate gypsum flowers with graceful plumes. The spectacular formations would have been described by veteran spelunkers as a showcase grotto.\n\nPitt couldn't but wonder how many other subterranean worlds sprawled through the earth in eternal darkness, waiting to be discovered and explored. It was easy to let the mind run amok and imagine a long-dead and lost race who had lived down here and carved the magnificent calcite sculptures.\n\nNot Giordino. The beauty was lost on him. He turned, gazed back at Pitt with a big I'm-glad-to-be-alive smile and said, \"Looks like a hangout for the Phantom of the Opera.\"\n\n\"I doubt if we'll find Lon Chaney playing the pipe organ down here.\"\n\n\"We have a landing thirty meters ahead to the left,\" Giordino said, his spirits lifting considerably.\n\n\"Right. Start your turn into shallow water and swim like hell to get out of the main current.\"\n\nGiordino needed no urging. He cut his angle sharply, pulling the canister behind him and kicking his fins furiously. Pitt released his grip on the big aluminum tube, swam strongly alongside until he was at its midpoint, and then, using his body as a drag, he heaved it after Giordino.\n\nThe approach worked as Pitt had hoped. Giordino broke free of the current and swam into calmer water. When his fins touched the bottom, he climbed ashore, dragging the canister with him.\n\nNow unhampered, Pitt easily stroked into the shallows, landing ten meters below Giordino. He crawled out of the water, sat down, removed his fins and goggles, and carefully walked back upstream across the smoothly textured rocks as he removed his air tanks.\n\nGiordino did the same before he began dismantling the canister. He looked up at Pitt with a look of profound accomplishment. \"Nice place you've got here.\"\n\n\"Sorry for the mess,\" muttered Pitt, \"but the seven dwarfs are on a break.\"\n\n\"Does it feel as good to you as it does to me that we've come this far?\"\n\n\"I'm not sad to be alive, if that's what you mean.\"\n\n\"How far have we come?\"\n\nPitt tapped in a command on the computer strapped to his arm. \"According to my faithful wonder of technology, we have traveled two kilometers through damnation and dropped another two meters toward hell.\"\n\n\"Twenty-eight to go.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Pitt said, smiling like a magician about to bedazzle an audience. \"But from here on, we go in style.\"\n\nFive minutes later the eight air chambers of the Wallowing Windbag were filled and the hull fully inflated, deployed, and ready to do battle with the river. Known as a water rescue response vehicle, the ungainly Hovercraft could ride on a cushion of air effortlessly over boiling rapids, quicksand, thin ice, and polluted quagmires. Vehicles in use by police and fire departments around the country had saved countless victims from death by drowning. Now this one was going on an endurance trial its builders never conceived.\n\nThree meters (10 feet) in length and 1.5 meters (5 feet) wide, the compact craft mounted a four-cycle, 50-horsepower engine that could propel her over a flat surface at 64 kilometers (40 miles) an hour.\n\n\"Our engineers did a fine job of modifying the height,\" said Giordino.\n\n\"Adopting a horizontal engine and fan was a stroke of genius,\" Pitt agreed.\n\nAmazing how much equipment they crammed inside the canister.\"\n\nBefore they cast off, they stowed and tied down ten reserve air tanks, extra air bottles to reinflate the Hovercraft, a battery of lights including two aircraft landing lights built into waterproof housings, spare batteries, first aid equipment, and three additional breathing regulators.\n\nFrom a watertight container Pitt retrieved his battered, old .45 Colt automatic and two ammo clips. He smiled as he also found a thermos of coffee and four bologna sandwiches. Admiral Sandecker never forgot the details that make for a successful operation. Pitt put the thermos and sandwiches back in the container. There was no time for a picnic. They had to push on if they were to reach the treasure chamber before it was too late to save Loren and Rudi. He inserted the gun and extra ammo clips into a plastic bag and sealed the opening. Then he unzipped the front of his wet suit and slipped the bag inside next to his stomach.\n\nHe stared for a moment at the black collapsible Hovercraft. \"Oh, Circe, who will guide us on this journey,\" he quoted. \"To Hades no man ever went in a black ship.\"\n\nGiordino looked up from coupling a pair of steering oars to their locks. \"Where did you hear that?\"\n\n\"The Odyssey by Homer.\"\n\n\"Verily among the Trojans too there be men that dive,\" Giordino recited glibly. \"The Iliad. I can quote Homer too.\"\n\n\"You never cease to amaze me.\"\n\n\"It's nothing really.\"\n\nPitt climbed aboard. \"Gear stashed?\"\n\n\"All buttoned down.\"\n\n\"Ready to shove off?\"\n\n\"Start her up.\"\n\nPitt crouched in the stern just ahead of the engine fan. He engaged the starter and the air-cooled engine sputtered to life. The small engine was well muffled and the exhaust sounded only as a muted throb.\n\nGiordino took his position in the bow of the craft and turned on one of the landing lights, illuminating the cavern as bright as daylight. He looked back at Pitt and laughed. \"I hope no one fines us for polluting a virgin environment.\"\n\nPitt laughed too. \"A losing proposition for the local sheriff. I forgot my wallet.\"\n\nThe Hovercraft moved off the shoreline, suspended on its self-produced 20-centimeter (8-inch) cushion of air into the mainstream of the river. Pitt held the vertical grips of the control bar in each hand and easily steered an arrow-straight course over the flowing current.\n\nIt seemed strange to be skimming over the water surface without a sensation of contact. From the bow, Giordino could look down into the remarkably transparent water that had turned from the cobalt blue of the sinkhole to a deep aqua green and see startled albino salamanders and small schools of blind cave fish darting amid the spherical boulders that carpeted the river bottom like fallen ornaments. He kept busy reporting the river conditions ahead and snapping photos as Pitt maneuvered and recorded data on his computer for Peter Duncan.\n\nEven with their rapid motion through the large corridors, their sweat and the extreme humidity combined to form a halo like mist around their heads. They ignored the phenomenon and the darkness behind them, never looking back as they continued deeper into the river-carved canyon.\n\nFor the first 8 kilometers (5 miles) it was clear sailing and they made good time. They skimmed over bottomless pools and past forbidding galleries that extended deep into the walls of the caverns. The ceilings in the string of river chambers varied from a high of 30 meters (98 feet) to barely enough room to squeeze the Hovercraft through. They bounced over several small, shallow cascades without difficulty and entered a narrow channel where it took all their concentration to avoid the everpresent rocks. Then they traveled through one enormous gallery that stretched almost 3 kilometers (slightly under 2 miles) and was filled with stunning crystals that glinted and sparkled beneath the aircraft light.\n\nOn two different occasions, the passage became flooded when the ceiling merged with the water surface. Then they went through the routine of deflating the Wallowing Windbag until it achieved neutral buoyancy, returned to breathing from their air tanks, and drifted with the current through the sunken passage dragging the flattened Hovercraft and its equipment behind them until they emerged into an open cavern and reinflated it again. There were no complaints over the additional effort. Neither man expected a smooth cruise down a placid river.\n\nTo relieve the stress they began giving nonsensical names to the galleries and prominent features. The Fun House, the Wax Museum, Giordino's Gymnasium. A small spout from a cavern wall was labeled Postnasal Drip. The river itself they called the Old Sot.\n\nAfter traveling through a second submerged passage and reinflating their boat, Pitt observed that the current's pace had quickened by two knots and the river gradient began dropping at a faster rate. Like leaves through a gutter drain, they rushed into the eternal land of gloom, never knowing what dangers lurked around the next bend.\n\nThe rapids increased frighteningly as the Hovercraft was suddenly swept into a raging cataract. The emerald water turned a boiling white as it cascaded through a passage strewn with boulders. Now the Wallowing Windbag was rearing up like a rodeo bronco as it surged between the rocks and plunged sickeningly into the next trough. Every time Pitt told himself the rapids couldn't possibly get more violent, the next stretch of river slammed the Hovercraft into a seething frenzy that buried it completely on more than one occasion. But the faithful little craft always shook off the froth and fought back to the surface.\n\nPitt struggled like a madman to keep the boat on a straight course. If they swung halfway around broadside to the tumult, all chances for survival would have been lost. Giordino grabbed the emergency oars and put his back into keeping the boat steady. They swept around a sharp curve in the river over massive rocks, some partly submerged and kicking up great waves shaped like rooster tails, others rising above the turbulence like menacing monoliths. Several boulders were skinned by the little vessel. Then one rose out of the trough that seemed certain to crush the boat and its occupants. But the outer hull sideswiped the unyielding stone without a puncture and was carried past.\n\nTheir ordeals never ceased. They were caught in a swirling eddy like a cork being sucked down a drain. Pitt braced his back against an airfilled support cell to stay upright and pushed the throttle to its stop. The howl of the racing engine was lost in the roar of the rapids. All his will and concentration were focused on keeping the Hovercraft from twisting broadside from the force of the speeding current as Giordino assisted by pulling mightily on the oars.\n\nLost when Giordino took up the oars, the landing lights had fallen overboard into the froth. Now the only light came from the lamps on their hardhats. It seemed a lifetime had passed before they finally broke clear of the whirlpool and were hurled back into the rapids.\n\nPitt eased back on the throttle and relaxed his hands on the grips of the control bar. There was no point in fighting the river now. The Wallowing Windbag would go where the surging water threw it.\n\nGiordino peered into the black unknown ahead, hoping to see calmer water. What he saw was a fork in the river that divided the mainstream into two different galleries. He shouted above the tumult, \"We're coming to a junction!\"\n\n\"Can you tell which is the main conduit?\" Pitt yelled back.\n\n\"The one on the left looks the largest!\"\n\n\"Okay, pull to port!\"\n\nThe Hovercraft came terrifyingly close to being smashed against the great mass of rock that split the river and only missed turning turtle by a hair as it was overwhelmed by a giant backwash. The little vessel dug into the turbulence and lurched forward sickeningly, burying its bow under a wall of water. Somehow it regained a level keel before being thrown forward by the relentless current.\n\nFor an instant Pitt thought he'd lost Giordino, but then the burly little man rose out of the deep pool filling the inside of the boat and shook his head to clear the dizziness brought on by being spun around like a ball in a roulette wheel. Incredibly, he cracked a smile and pointed to his ears.\n\nPitt understood. The continuous roar of the rapids seemed to be slackening. The Hovercraft responded to his control again, but sluggishly, because it was half-full of water. The excess weight was making it impossible to maintain an air-cushion. He increased the throttle and yelled to Giordino.\n\n\"Start bailing!\"\n\nThe boat designers had thought of everything. Giordino inserted a lever into a small pump and began shoving it back and forth, causing a gush of water to shoot through a pipe over the side.\n\nPitt leaned over and studied the depths under his headlamps. The channel seemed more constricted, and although the rocks were no longer churning up the water, the river seemed to be moving at a horrifying speed. Suddenly, he noticed that Giordino had stopped bailing and was listening with an apocalyptic look on his face. And then Pitt heard it too.\n\nA deep rumble boomed from the black void downriver.\n\nGiordino stared at him. \"I think we just bought the farm!\" he shouted.\n\nThe vision of going over Niagara Falls returned. This was no spout from above they were approaching. The sound that reverberated through the cavern was that of an enormous volume of water rushing over an immense cascade.\n\n\"Hit the inflator on your buoyancy compensator!\" Pitt roared above the chaos.\n\nThe water was sweeping them along at a good twenty knots and appeared to be funneling into a concentrated surge. A million liters of water sucked them toward the unseen precipice. They rounded the next bend and sailed into a maelstrom of mist. The thunderous rumble became deafening.\n\nThere was no fear, no sense of helplessness, no feeling of despair. All Pitt felt was a strange numbness as if all power of intelligent thought had abruptly evaporated. It seemed to him that he was entering a nightmare where nothing had any shape or form. His final moment of clarity came when the Wallowing Windbag hung suspended for a moment before soaring into the mist.\n\nWith no point of reference, there was no sensation of falling, rather, it seemed as if they were flying through a cloud. Then his hold on the control bar was lost and he was hurled out of the Hovercraft. He thought he heard Giordino shout something, but the voice was lost in the roar of the falls. The drop through the vortex seemed to take forever. And then came the impact. He struck a deep pool at the base of the falls like a meteor. The air was driven from his lungs and he thought at first that he was smashed to bloody pulp on rocks, but then he felt the comforting squeeze of water all around him.\n\nInstinctively holding his breath, he fought to reach the surface. Aided by his inflated buoyancy compensator, he quickly broke clear and was immediately swept away by the torrent. Rocks reached out for him like shrouded predators of the underworld. He was flung down a spill of rapids, colliding, he'd have sworn, with every boulder that protruded from the river. The contact rasped and shredded his wet suit, stripping skin from his legs and outspread arms. He suffered a blow to his chest and then his head struck something hard and ungiving. But for the protection of the hardhat that absorbed 80 percent of the blow, he'd have cracked his skull open.\n\nIncredibly, his buoyancy compensator stayed inflated and he floated half-unconscious through a short spill of rapids. One of the lights on his helmet was smashed by the impact and the other one seemed to cast an indistinct red beam. Gratefully, he felt loose stone beneath his feet and saw he was being spun toward shallows leading to a small open space along the shoreline. He swam until his knees scraped the coarse gravel, struggling to loosen the grip of the murderous current. He extended his hands to pull himself over the slippery stones onto the dry shelf. A groan of pain escaped his lips as one of his wrists exploded in agony. At some point after going over the falls, he had broken something there. His wrist was not all that was broken. He'd also cracked two or more ribs on his left side.\n\nThe rumbling thunder of the falls sounded far in the distance. Slowly his mind came back on track and he wondered how far he'd been swept by the ungodly torrent. Then, as more of the cobwebs cleared, he remembered Giordino. In desperation he shouted Al's name, his voice echoing through the air chamber, hoping but never really expecting to hear a reply.\n\n\"Over here.\"\n\nThe answer didn't come much louder than a whisper, but Pitt heard it as if it came out of a loudspeaker. He rose unsteadily to his feet, trying to get a fix. \"Say again.\"\n\n\"I'm only six meters upstream of you,\" said Giordino. \"Can't you see me?\"\n\nA red haze seemed to block Pitt's field of vision. He rubbed his eyes and found he could focus them again. He also realized the red haze that had been clouding his sight came from blood that was spilling from a gash in his forehead. Now he could clearly discern Giordino lying on his back a short distance away, half out of the water.\n\nHe staggered over to his friend, clutching the left side of his chest in a vain attempt to contain the pain.\n\nHe knelt stiffly beside Giordino. \"Am I ever glad to see you. I thought you and the Windbag had sailed off without me.\"\n\n\"The remains of our trusty boat were swept downstream.\"\n\n\"Are you badly injured?\" Pitt asked.\n\nGiordino smiled gamely, held up his hands and wiggled his fingers. \"At least I can still play Carnegie Hall.\"\n\n\"Play what? You can't even carry a tune.\" Then Pitt's eyes filled with concern. \"Is it your back?\"\n\nGiordino weakly shook his head. \"I stayed with the Windbag and my feet were caught in the lines holding the equipment when she struck bottom. Then she went one way, and I went the other. I think both legs are broken below the knees.\" He explained his injuries as calmly as if he were describing a pair of flat tires.\n\nPitt gently felt Giordino's calves as his friend clenched his fists. \"Lucky you. Simple breaks, no compound fractures.\"\n\nGiordino stared up at Pitt. \"You look like you went through the spin cycle in a washing machine.\"\n\n\"A few scrapes and bruises,\" Pitt lied.\n\n\"Then why are you talking through clenched teeth?\"\n\nPitt didn't answer. He tried to call up a program on the computer on his arm, but it had been knocked against a rock and was broken. He unbuckled the straps and threw it in the river. \"So much for Duncan's data.\"\n\n\"I lost the camera too.\"\n\n\"Tough break. Nobody will be coming this way again soon, certainly not over those falls.\"\n\n\"Any idea how far to the treasure cavern?\" asked Giordino.\n\n\"A rough guess? Maybe two kilometers.\"\n\nGiordino looked at him. \"You'll have to go it alone.\"\n\n\"You're talking crazy.\"\n\n\"I'll only be a burden.\" He was no longer smiling. \"Forget about me. Get to the treasure cavern.\"\n\n\"I can't leave you here.\"\n\n\"Busted bones or not, I can still float. I'll follow you later.\"\n\n\"Take care when you get there,\" said Pitt grimly. \"You may drift, but you can't escape the current.\n\nMind you stay close to shore out of the mainstream or you'll be swept beyond recovery.\"\n\n\"No big deal if I am. Our air tanks went with the Wallowing Windbag. If we meet a flooded gallery between here and the treasure chamber longer than we can hold our breath, we'll drown anyway.\"\n\n\"You're supposed to look on the bright side.\"\n\nGiordino removed a spare flashlight from a belt around one thigh. \"You'll need this. Your headlamp looks like it lost a fight with a rock. Come to think of it, your face is a mess too. You're bleeding all over the shredded remains of your nice clean wet suit.'\n\n\"Another dip in the river will fix that,\" said Pitt, attaching the flashlight around the forearm above his broken left wrist where the computer used to be. He dropped his weight belt. \"I won't be needing this any longer.\"\n\n\"Aren't you taking your air tank?\"\n\n\"I don't want to be hindered any more than I have to.\"\n\n\"What if you come to a flooded chamber?\"\n\n\"I'll have to free dive through as far as I can on my lungs.\"\n\n\"One last favor,\" said Giordino, holding up the empty harness straps that once supported his air tanks.\n\n\"Wrap my legs together to keep them from flopping around.\"\n\nPitt cinched the straps as tight as he dared, conscious of his broken wrist and the need to be gentle.\n\nExcept for a sharp intake of breath, Giordino uttered no sound. \"Rest up for at least an hour before you follow,\" Pitt ordered.\n\n\"Just get a move on and do what you can to save Loren and Rudi. I'll be along as soon as I'm able.\"\n\n\"I'll keep a watch for you.\"\n\n\"Better find a big net.\"\n\nPitt gave Giordino's arm a farewell grip. Then he waded into the river until the current swept him off his feet and carried him into the next cavern.\n\nGiordino watched until Pitt's light vanished around the next bend in the canyon and was lost in the darkness. Two kilometers (1.2 miles), he mused. He hoped to God the final leg of the journey was in airfilled chambers.\n\nZolar drew a long, relieved breath. Things had gone well, better than he'd expected. The project was winding down. The trailer used for the operations office, the forklift, and the winch had been airlifted away along with most of Colonel Campos's men. Only a small squad of army engineers remained behind to load the final lot onto the army transport helicopter that was parked beside the stolen NUMA craft.\n\nZolar looked down at the remaining pieces of the golden treasure, which stood in a neat row. He studied the brilliantly gleaming antiquities with an eye toward their ultimate sale price. The artistry and magnificence of the metalwork of the twenty-eight golden statues of Inca warriors was indescribable.\n\nThey each stood one meter high and provided a rare glimpse into the creative mastery of Inca artisans.\n\n\"A few more and you'd have yourself a chess set,\" said Oxley, admiring the golden display.\n\n\"A pity I won't keep them,\" replied Zolar sadly. \"But I'm afraid I'll have to be content with using the profits from my share of their sale to buy legitimate artifacts for my personal collection.\"\n\nFernando Matos hungrily devoured the sight of the golden army with his eyes while he mentally estimated his 2 percent cut of the spoils. \"We have nothing that can touch this in our National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.\"\n\n\"You can always donate your share,\" said Oxley sarcastically.\n\nMatos shot him a barbed look and started to say something but was cut off by the approach of Colonel Campos. \"Lieutenant Ramos reports from the cavern that no objects remain inside the mountain.\n\nAs soon as he and his men arrive from below, they will load the objects. Then I will be on my way to the airstrip to oversee the transshipment.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Colonel,\" Zolar said politely. He didn't trust Campos as far as he could throw the stone demon. \"If you have no objections, the rest of us will join you.\"\n\n\"But of course.\" Campos looked around the nearly vacated summit. \"And your other people?\"\n\nZolar's deepset eyes took on a cold look. \"My brother Cyrus and his crew will follow in our helicopter as soon as they tie up a pair of loose ends.\"\n\nCampos understood. He smiled cynically. \"It makes me sick to think about all the bandits running loose to rob and murder foreign visitors.\"\n\nWhile they waited for Lieutenant Ramos and his squad to exit the passageway and load the artifacts, Matos walked over and inspected the stone demon. He reached out and laid his hand on the neck and was surprised at the coolness of the stone after it had been absorbing the sun's rays all day. Abruptly, he jerked his hand back. It felt as if the cold stone had suddenly turned pliant and slimy like the scaly skin of a fish.\n\nHe stepped back, startled, and half spun around to hurry away. At that instant he saw a human head rising over the edge of the sharp drop in front of the demon. As a man who grew up in a family of university instructors, he did not believe in superstition and folklore. Matos stood frozen more out of curiosity than fright.\n\nThe head rose and was seen to be attached to the body of a man who wearily climbed onto the surface of the summit. Then the intruder stood unsteadily for a moment and aimed an old rifle at Matos.\n\nYuma had lain on a ledge for nearly a full minute, catching his breath and waiting for his heart to slow.\n\nWhen he lifted his head over the rim, he saw a strange looking little man with a bald head and huge glasses, incongruously dressed in a business suit with shirt and tie, staring back at him. To Yuma, the man reminded him of the government officials who passed through the Montolo village once a year, promising aid in the form of fertilizer, feed and grain, and money, but went on their way and never delivered. After climbing over the rim of the slope he also spotted a group of men standing by the army helicopter 30 meters (100 feet) away. They did not notice him. He had planned the climb to terminate behind the great stone demon out of sight of anyone. Except Matos, who unfortunately happened to be standing nearby.\n\nHe pointed his worn and scarred old Winchester at the man and spoke softly. \"Do not make a sound or you die.\"\n\nYuma did not have to look back to confirm that the first of his neighbors and relatives were scrambling onto the mountaintop. He realized that he desperately needed another minute for all of his tiny force to reach high ground. If the man in front of him gave the alarm, all surprise would be lost and the rest of his people would be caught in an exposed position on the mountainside. He had to stall somehow.\n\nMatters were made even worse by the sudden appearance of an officer and a squad of army engineers who walked from a deep fissure in the rock. They looked neither left nor right and headed straight toward what appeared to Yuma as a staggered row of short, golden men.\n\nAt seeing the approaching engineers, the helicopter pilot started up his engines and set them on idle and engaged the twin rotors of the big transport.\n\nBeside the stone demon, Matos slowly raised his hands.\n\n\"Put your hands down!\" Yuma hissed.\n\nMatos did as he was ordered. \"How did you get through our security?\" he demanded. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"This is my people's sacred ground,\" Yuma answered quietly. \"You are defiling it with your greed.\"\n\nFor every few seconds gained, two more Montolos climbed over the rim of the ledge behind Yuma and formed a group out of sight behind the demon. They had come this far without causing injury or death, and Yuma hated to start now.\n\n\"Walk back toward me,\" he ordered Matos. \"Stand next to the demon.\"\n\nThere was a wild, crazed look in Matos's eyes. His lust for golden wealth slowly began to short-circuit his fear. His share would make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. He couldn't give it up because of a band of superstitious Indians. He glanced nervously over his shoulder at the engineers closing with the helicopter. Dread of losing his dreams created an agonizing knot in his stomach.\n\nYuma could see it coming. He was losing the man in the suit. \"You want gold?\" said Yuma. \"Take it and leave our mountain.\"\n\nAs he saw more men materializing behind Yuma, Matos finally snapped. He turned and began to run, shouting, \"Intruders! Shoot them!\"\n\nWithout lifting his gun and aiming, Yuma fired from the hip, his shot striking Matos in the knee. The bureaucrat jerked sideways, his glasses flew off his head, and he sprawled heavily on his chest. He rolled over on his back, raising his leg and clutching his knee with both hands.\n\nYuma's relatives and neighbors, guns at the ready, fanned out like ghosts in a cemetery as they encircled the helicopter. Lieutenant Ramos, no fool he, instantly took in the situation. His men were engineers and not infantrymen and carried no weapons. He immediately raised his hands in surrender and shouted to his small squad to do likewise.\n\nZolar swore loudly. \"Where in hell did these Indians come from?\"\n\n\"No time to reason why,\" snapped Oxley. \"We're pulling out.\"\n\nHe jumped through the cargo hatch and pulled Zolar in after him.\n\n\"The gold warriors!\" Zolar protested. \"They're not loaded.\"\n\n\"Forget them.\"\n\n\"No!\" Zolar resisted.\n\n\"You damn fool. Can't you see, those men are armed. The army engineers can't help us.\" He turned and yelled to the pilot of the helicopter. \"Lift off! Andale, andale!\"\n\nColonel Campos was slower than the others to react. He stupidly ordered Lieutenant Ramos and his men to resist. \"Attack them!\" he cried.\n\nRamos stared at him. \"With what, Colonel, our bare hands?\"\n\nYuma and his tribal members were only 10 meters (33 feet) from the helicopter now. So far only one shot had been fired. The sight of the sun glinting off the golden warriors momentarily stunned the Montolos. The only pure gold object any of them had ever seen was a small chalice on the altar of the little mission church in the nearby village of Ilano Colorado.\n\nDust began to swirl as the pilot applied the throttles and the rotor blades of the helicopter furiously beat the air. The wheels were lifting off the mountain's summit when Campos finally realized discretion was the better part of greed. He ran four steps and leaped toward the cargo door at the urging of Charles Oxley who reached out for him.\n\nAt that instant the helicopter lurched sharply upward. Campos's upraised hands caught empty air. His momentum carried him under the helicopter and off the edge of the cliff as if he'd taken a running dive into water. Oxley watched the colonel's body grow smaller and smaller as it turned end over end before smashing onto the rocks far below.\n\n\"Good Christ,\" gasped Oxley.\n\nZolar, grimly hanging on to a strap inside the cargo bay, did not witness Campos's plunge to the base of the mountain. His concerns were elsewhere. \"Cyrus is still down in the cavern.\"\n\n\"He's with Amaru and his men. Not to worry. Their automatic weapons are more than a match for a few Indians carrying hunting rifles and shotguns. They'll leave in the last helicopter still on the mountain.\"\n\nOnly then did it occur to Zolar that someone was missing. \"Where's Matos and the colonel?\"\n\n\"The Indians shot Matos and Campos made his move too late.\"\n\n\"He stayed on Cerro el Capirote?\"\n\n\"No, he fell off Cerro el Capirote. He's dead.\"\n\nZolar's reaction was a psychiatrist's dream. His expression went thoughtful for a moment, and then he broke out laughing. \"Matos shot and the good colonel dead. More profits for the family.\"\n\nYuma's prearranged plan with Pitt was accomplished. He and his people had secured the summit and forced the evil ones from the sacred mountain of the dead. He watched as two of his nephews led Lieutenant Ramos and his army engineers down the steep trail to the desert floor below.\n\nThere was no way to carry Matos. His knee was tightly bandaged and he was forced to hobble along as best he could, assisted by a pair of engineers.\n\nCuriosity drew Yuma to the enlarged opening to the interior passageway. He had a nagging ache to explore the cavern and see with his own eyes the river described by Pitt. The water he saw in his dreams.\n\nBut the older men were too frightened to enter the bowels of the sacred mountain, and the gold created a problem with the younger men. They wanted to drop everything and carry it off before armed troops returned.\n\n\"This is our mountain,\" said one young man, the son of Yuma's neighboring rancher. \"The little golden people belong to us.\"\n\n\"First we must see the river inside the mountain,\" countered Yuma.\n\n\"It is forbidden for the living to enter the land of the dead,\" warned Yuma's older brother.\n\nA nephew stared at Yuma doubtfully. \"There is no river that runs beneath the desert.\"\n\n\"I believe the man who told me.\"\n\n\"You cannot trust the gringo, no more than those with Spanish blood in their veins.\"\n\nYuma shook his head and pointed to the gold. \"This proves he did not lie.\"\n\n\"The soldiers will come back and kill us if we do not leave,\" protested another villager.\n\n\"The golden people are too heavy to carry down the steep trail,\" the young man argued. \"They must be lowered by rope down the rock walls. That will take time.\"\n\n\"Let us offer prayers to the demon and be on our way,\" said the brother.\n\nThe young man persisted. \"Not until the golden people are safely below.\"\n\nYuma reluctantly gave in. \"So it is, my family, my friends. I will keep my promise and enter the mountain alone. Take the men of gold, but hurry. You do not have much daylight left.\"\n\nAs he turned and walked through the enlarged opening leading to the passageway, Yuma felt little fear.\n\nGood had come from the climb to the top of the mountain. The evil men were cast down. The demon was at peace again. Now, with the blessing of the demon, Billy Yuma felt confident he could safely enter the land of the dead. And maybe find a trail leading to the lost sacred idols of his people.\n\nLoren sat huddled in the cramped rock cell, sinking into the quicksand of self-pity. She had no more fight left in her. The hours had merged until time lost all sense of meaning. She could not remember when she had last eaten. She tried to recall what it felt like to be warm and dry, but that memory seemed like an event that occurred ages ago.\n\nHer self-confidence, the independence, the satisfaction of being a respected legislator in the world's only superpower, meant nothing in that damp little cave. Standing on the floor of the House of Representatives seemed a million light-years away. She had come to the end, and she had fought as long as she could. Now she accepted the end. Better to die and get it over with.\n\nShe looked over at Rudi Gunn. He had hardly moved at all in the last hour. She didn't have to be a doctor to see that he had slipped, badly in that time. Tupac Amaru, in a storm of sadistic wrath, had broken several of Gunn's fingers by stomping them. Amaru had also injured Gunn severely by kicking him repeatedly in the stomach and head. If Rudi didn't receive medical attention very soon, he might die.\n\nLoren's mind turned to Pitt. Every conceivable road to freedom was blocked unless he could ride to their rescue at the head of the U.S. Cavalry. Not a likely prospect.\n\nShe recalled the other times he had saved her. The first was on board the Russian cruise ship where she was held captive by agents of the old Soviet government. Pitt had shown up and rescued her from a savage beating. The second time was when she was held hostage by the fanatic Hideki Suma in his underwater city off the coast of Japan. Pitt and Giordino had risked their lives to free her and a fellow congressman.\n\nShe had no right to give up. But Pitt was dead, crushed by concussion grenades in the sea. If her countrymen could have sent a group of Special Forces over the border to save her, they would have done so by now.\n\nShe had watched through the cave opening as the golden treasure was hauled past her cell and through the guardians' chamber up to the peak of the hollow mountain. When all the gold was gone, she knew it would be time for her and Rudi to die.\n\nThey did not have to wait long. One of Amaru's foul-smelling henchman walked up to their guard and gave him an order. The ugly slug turned and motioned them out of the cave. \"Salga, salga,\" he commanded them.\n\nLoren shook Gunn awake and helped him rise to his feet. \"They want to move us,\" she told him softly.\n\nGunn looked at her dazedly, and then incredibly, he forced a tight smile. \"About time they upgraded us to a better room.\"\n\nWith Gunn shuffling alongside Loren, her arm around his waist, his over her shoulders, they were led to a flat area between the stalagmites near the shoreline of the river. Amaru was joking with four of his men who were grouped around him. Another man she recognized from the ferryboat as Cyrus Sarason.\n\nThe Latin Americans appeared cool and relaxed, but Sarason was sweating heavily and his shirt beneath his armpits was stained.\n\nTheir one-eyed guard pushed them roughly forward and moved slightly apart from the others. Sarason reminded Loren of a high school coach who was pressed into service as a chaperon at a prom, seeing out a dull and boring duty.\n\nIn contrast, Amaru looked as if he were bursting at the seams with nervous energy. Excitement gleamed in his eyes. He stared at Loren with the same intensity as a man crawling through the desert who suddenly sights a saloon advertising cold beer. He came over and roughly cupped Loren's chin with one hand.\n\n\"Are you ready to entertain us?\"\n\n\"Leave her be,\" said Samson. \"There is no need to prolong our stay here.\"\n\nSomething cold and slimy moved through Loren's stomach. Not this, she thought, God not this. \"If you're going to kill us, get it over with.\"\n\n\"You'll get your wish soon enough.\" Amaru laughed sadistically. \"But not before you pleasure my men.\n\nWhen they are finished, and if they are satisfied, perhaps they will give you a thumbs-up and let you live.\n\nIf not, then a thumbs-down like the Romans judging a gladiator in the arena. I suggest you make them happy.\"\n\n\"This is crazy!\" snapped Sarason.\n\n\"Use your imagination, amigo. My men and I have worked hard helping to transport your gold from the mountain. The least you can do is allow us a small reward for our services before we leave this hellish place.\"\n\n\"You're all getting well paid for your services.\"\n\n\"What is the term you use in your country?\" said Amaru, breathing heavily. \"Fringe benefits?\"\n\n\"I don't have time for prolonged sex games,\" Samson said.\n\n\"You will make the time,\" Amaru hissed, baring his teeth like a coiled snake about to strike. \"Or my men will become most unhappy. And then I may not be able to control them.\"\n\nOne look at the five toughs backing up the Peruvian killer and Samson shrugged. \"She is of no interest to me.\" He stared at Loren for a moment. \"Do with her what you will, but get it over with. We still have work to do and I don't want to keep my brothers waiting.\"\n\nLoren was on the verge of throwing up. She looked at Sarason, her eyes imploring. \"You're not one of them. You know who I am, whom I represent. How can you stand by and allow this to happen?\"\n\n\"Barbaric cruelty is a fact of life where they come from,\" Sarason replied indifferently. \"Every one of these vicious misfits would cut a child's throat as casually as you or I would slice a filet mignon.\"\n\n\"So you'll do nothing while they do their perverted work?\"\n\nSarason gave a detached shrug. \"It might be rather entertaining.\"\n\n\"You're no better than they are.\"\n\nAmaru leered. \"I find great enjoyment in bringing haughty women like you to their knees.\"\n\nThat was the signal to end the talk. Amaru made a gesture to one of his men. \"You may have the honor of going first, Julio.\"\n\nThe others looked disappointed at not being chosen. The lucky one stepped forward, his mouth stretched in a lustful grin, and grabbed Loren by the arm.\n\nLittle Rudi Gunn, grievously injured and barely able to stand, suddenly crouched, launched himself forward, and rammed his head into the belly of the man about to assault Loren. His charge had all the impact of a broomstick against the gate of a fortress. The big Peruvian barely grunted before delivering a passionless backhand that sent Gunn sprawling across the floor of the cavern.\n\n\"Throw the little bastard in the river,\" ordered Amaru.\n\n\"No!\" Loren cried. \"For God's sake, don't kill him.\"\n\nOne of Amaru's men took Gunn by the ankle and began dragging him toward the water.\n\n\"You may be making a mistake,\" cautioned Sarason.\n\nAmaru looked at him queerly. \"Why?\"\n\n\"This river probably enters the Gulf. Instead of providing a floating body for identification, perhaps it might be wiser if they disappear forever.\"\n\nAmaru paused thoughtfully for a moment. Then he laughed. \"An underground river that carries them into the Sea of Cortez. I like that. American investigators will never suspect that they were killed a hundred kilometers away from where they're found. The idea appeals to me.\" He made a motion to the man holding Gunn to continue. \"Heave him as far as you can into the current.\"\n\n\"No, please,\" Loren begged. \"Let him live and I'll do whatever you demand.\"\n\n\"You'll do that anyway,\" Amaru said impassively.\n\nThe guard hurled Gunn into the river with the ease of an athlete throwing the shotput. There was a splash, and Gunn vanished beneath tire black water without a word.\n\nAmaru turned back to Loren and nodded at Julio. \"Let the show begin.\"\n\nLoren screamed and moved like a cat. She sprang at the man who gripped her arm and rammed the long nails of her thumbs deeply into his eyes.\n\nAn agonized cry echoed through the treasure cavern. The man given the go-ahead to ravage Loren clutched his hands to his eyes and squealed like a stuck pig. Amaru and Sarason and the other men were momentarily paralyzed with surprise as they saw blood flow through his fingers.\n\n\"Oh, Mother of Christ!\" Julio cried. \"The bitch has blinded me!\"\n\nAmaru walked up to Loren and slapped her hard across the face. She staggered back but did not fall.\n\n\"You will pay for, that,\" he said with icy calm. \"When you have served your purpose, you shall receive the same treatment before you die.\"\n\nThe fear in Loren's eyes had been replaced with raging anger. If she'd had the strength, she would have fought them tooth and nail like a tiger before being overpowered. But the days of ill-treatment and starvation had left her too weak. She kicked out at Amaru. He took the blows as if they were no more annoying than an attack by a mosquito.\n\nHe caught her flailing hands and twisted them behind her. Thinking he had her helpless, he tried to kiss her. But she spit in his face.\n\nInfuriated, he punched her in her soft belly.\n\nLoren doubled up, choking in agony and at the same time gasping for breath. She sank to her knees and slowly fell on her side, still doubled up and clutching her stomach with her arms.\n\n\"Since Julio is no longer able to function,\" said Amaru, \"the rest of you help yourselves.\"\n\nThe outstretched arms of his men, thick and strong, with their fingers hooked like claws, reached out and seized her. They rolled her over on her back and pinned down her arms and legs. Held down in a spread-eagled position by the combined strength of three men, including One-Eye, Loren cried out in defenseless terror.\n\nThe tattered remains of her clothing were torn away. The smooth, creamy skin shone under the artificial lights left by the army engineers. The sight of her exposed body aroused the attackers' level of excitement even higher.\n\nThe one-eyed Quasimodo knelt down and leaned over her, his breath coming in short pants, his lips drawn back from his teeth in a grimace of animal lust. He pressed his mouth against hers. Her screams were suddenly muffled as he bit her lower lip and she could taste the blood. Loren felt as if she were suffocating in a nightmare. He pulled back and moved rough callused hands over her breasts. They felt like sandpaper to her sensitive skin. Her deep violet eyes were sick with abhorrence. She screamed again.\n\n\"Fight me!\" the hulk whispered huskily. \"I like a woman who fights me.\"\n\nLoren plunged into the depths of humiliation and horror as One-Eye lowered himself onto her. Her screams of terror turned into a shriek of pain.\n\nThen abruptly, her hands were free and she clawed her attacker across the face. He sat back stunned, parallel streaks of red blooming on both cheeks, and stared dumbly at the two men who had suddenly released her arms and hands. \"You idiots, what are you doing?\" he hissed.\n\nThe men who were facing the river fell backward in open-mouthed shock. They crossed themselves as if warding off the devil. Their eyes were not on the rapist or Loren. They were staring into the river beyond. Confused, Amaru turned and peered into the dark waters. What he saw was enough to turn a sane man mad. His mouth dropped open in shock at the sight of an eerie light moving under the water toward him. They all gaped as if hypnotized as the light surfaced and became part of a helmeted head.\n\nLike some hideous wraith rising from the murky abyss of a watery hell, a human form slowly arose from the black depths of the river and moved toward the shore. The apparition, with black seaweedlike shreds hanging from its body, looked like something that belonged not to this world but to the deepest reaches of an alien planet. The effect was made even more shocking by the reappearance of the dead.\n\nClenched under the right arm, as a father might carry his child, was the inert body of Rudi Gunn.\n\nSarason's face looked like a white plaster death mask. Sweat poured down his forehead. For a man who did not excite easily, his eyes were near-crazed with shock. He stood silent, as the monstrosity left him too stunned to speak.\n\nAmaru leaped to his feet and tried to speak, but only a whispered croak came out. His lips quivered as he rasped, \"Go back, diablo, go back to infierno.\"\n\nThe phantom gently lowered Gunn to the ground. He removed his helmet with one hand. Then he unzipped the front of his wet suit and reached inside. The. green eyes could be seen now, cast on Loren's exposed position on the cold, hard rock. They glinted under the artificial lights with a terrible anger.\n\nThe two men who were still pinning Loren's legs stared dumbly as the Colt thundered once, twice in the cavern Their faces went wildly distorted as their heads snapped back and exploded. They collapsed and fell across Loren's knees.\n\nThe others bolted away from Loren as if she had suddenly acquired the black plague. Julio moaned in a far corner unable to see, his hands still over his injured eyes.\n\nLoren was beyond screaming. She stared at the man from the river, recognizing him but convinced she was seeing a hallucination.\n\nThe shock of disbelief, then horror at the realization of who the apparition was, made Amaru's heart turn cold. \"You!\" he gasped in a strangled voice.\n\n\"You seem surprised to see me, Tupac,\" said Pitt easily. \"Cyrus looks a little green around the gills too.\"\n\n\"You're dead. I killed you.\"\n\n\"Do a sloppy job, get sloppy results.\" Pitt cycled the Colt from man to man and spoke to Loren without looking at her. \"Are you badly hurt?\"\n\nFor a moment she was too stunned to answer. Then finally, she stammered, \"Dirk. . . is it really you?\"\n\n\"If there's another one, I hope they catch him before he signs our name to a lot of checks. I'm sorry I didn't get here sooner.\"\n\nShe nodded gamely. \"Thanks to you I'll survive to see these beasts pay.\"\n\n\"You won't have to wait long,\" Pitt said with a voice of stone. \"Are you strong enough to make it up the passageway?\"\n\n\"Yes\"yes,\" Loren murmured as the reality of her salvation began to sink in. She shuddered as she pushed the dead men away from her and rose unsteadily to her feet, indifferent to her nakedness. She pointed down at Gunn. \"Rudi is in a bad way.\"\n\n\"These sadistic scum did this to the two of you?\"\n\nLoren nodded silently.\n\nPitt's teeth were bared, murder glaring out of his opaline green eyes. \"Cyrus here just volunteered to carry Rudi topside.\" Pitt casually waved the gun in the direction of Sarason. \"Give her your shirt.\"\n\nLoren shook her head. \"I'd rather go nude than wear his sweaty old shirt.\"\n\nSarason knew he could expect a bullet, and fright was slowly replaced by self-preservation. His scheming mind began to focus on a plan to save himself. He sagged to the rock floor as if overcome with shock, his right hand resting on a knee only centimeters away from a .38-caliber derringer strapped to his leg just inside his boot. \"How did you get here?\" he asked, stalling.\n\nPitt was not taken in by the mundane question. \"We came on an underground cruise ship.\"\n\n\"We?\"\n\n\"The rest of the team should be surfacing at any moment,\" Pitt bluffed.\n\nAmaru suddenly shouted at his two sound, remaining men. \"Rush him!\"\n\nThey were hardened killers but they had no wish to die. They made no effort to reach for the automatic rifles they had laid aside during the attempt to rape Loren. One look down the barrel of Pitt's .45 beneath the burning eyes was enough to deter anyone who did not cherish suicidal tendencies.\n\n\"You yellow dogs!\" Amaru snarled.\n\n\"Still ordering others to do your dirty work, I see,\" said Pitt. \"It appears I made a mistake not killing you in Peru.\"\n\n\"I vowed then you would suffer as you made me.\"\n\n\"Don't bet your Solpemachaco pension on it.\"\n\n\"You intend to murder us in cold blood,\" said Sarason flatly.\n\n\"Not at all. Cold-blooded murder is what you did to Dr. Miller and God only knows how many other innocent people who stood in your path. As their avenging angel, I'm here to execute you.\"\n\n\"Without the decency of a fair trial,\" protested Sarason as his hand crept past his knee toward the concealed derringer. Only then did he notice that Pitt's injuries went beyond the bloody gash across the forehead. There was a fatigued droop to the shoulders, an unsteadiness to his stance. The skewed left hand was pressed against his chest. Broken wrist and ribs, Samson surmised. His hopes rose as he realized that Pitt was on the thin edge of collapse.\n\n\"You're hardly one to demand justice,\" said Pitt, biting scorn in his tone. \"A pity our great American court system doesn't hand out the same punishment to killers they gave to their victims.\"\n\n\"And you are not one to judge my actions. If not for my brothers and me, thousands of artifacts would be rotting away in the basements of museums around the world. We preserved the antiquities and redistributed them to people who appreciate their value.\"\n\nPitt stopped his roving gaze and focused on Sarason. \"You call that an excuse? You justify theft and murder on a grand scale so you and your criminal relatives can make fat profits. The magic words for you, pal, are charlatan and hypocrite.\"\n\n\"Shooting me won't put my family out of business.\"\n\n\"Haven't you heard?\" Pitt grimly smiled. \"Zolar International just went down the toilet. Federal agents raided your facilities in Galveston. They found enough loot to fill a hundred galleries.\"\n\nSarason tilted his head back and laughed. \"Our headquarters in Galveston is a legitimate operation. All merchandise is lawfully bought and sold.\"\n\n\"I'm talking about the second facility,\" Pitt said casually.\n\nA flicker of apprehension showed in Sarason's tan face. \"There is only one building.\"\n\n\"No, there are two. The storage warehouse separated by a tunnel to transport illegal goods to the Zolar building with a subterranean basement housing smuggled antiquities, an art forgery operation, and a vast collection of stolen art.\"\n\nSarason looked as if he'd been struck across the face with a club. \"Damn you to hell, Pitt. How could you know any of this?\"\n\n\"A pair of federal agents, one from Customs, the other from the FBI, described the raid to me in vivid terms. I should also mention that they'll be waiting with open arms when you attempt to smuggle Huascar's treasure into the United States.\"\n\nSarason's fingers were a centimeter (less than half an inch) away from the little twin-barreled gun.\n\n\"Then the joke's on them,\" he said, resurrecting his blas\u00e9 facade. \"The gold isn't going to the United States.\"\n\n\"No matter,\" Pitt said with quiet reserve. \"You won't be around to spend it.\"\n\nHidden by a knee crossed over one leg, Sarason's fingers met and cautiously began slipping the two-shot derringer from his boot. He reckoned that Pitt's injuries would slow any reaction time by a split second, but decided against attempting a snap, wildly aimed shot. If he missed with the first bullet, Samson well knew that despite Pitt's painful injuries there wouldn't be a chance to fire the second. He hesitated as his mind engineered a diversion. He looked over at Amaru and the two men eyeing Pitt with implacable black anger. Julio was of no use to him.\n\n\"You are the one who doesn't have long to live,\" he said. \"The Mexican military who assisted us in removing the treasure will have heard your shots and will come bursting in here any minute to cut you down.\"\n\nPitt shrugged. \"They must be on siesta or they'd have been here by now.\"\n\n\"If we all attacked him at the same time,\" Sarason said as conversationally as if they were all seated around a dining table, \"he might kill two or even three of us before the survivor killed him.\"\n\nPitt's expression turned cold and remote. \"The question is, who will be the survivor?\"\n\nAmaru did not care who would live or die. His dark mind saw no future without his manhood. He had nothing to lose. His hatred for the man who emasculated him triggered a rage fueled by the memory of pain and mental agony. Without a word, he launched himself at Pitt.\n\nIn a muscled flash of speed, Amaru closed like a snarling dog, reaching out for Pitt's gun hand. The shot took the Peruvian in the chest and through a lung, the report coming like a booming crack. The impact would have stopped the average man, but Amaru was a force beyond himself, driven like a maddened pit bull. He gave an audible grunt as the air was forced from his lungs, and then he crashed into Pitt, sending him reeling backward toward the river.\n\nA groan burst from Pitt's lips as his cracked ribs protested the collision in a burst of pain. He desperately spun around, throwing off Amaru's encircling grip around his gun hand and hurling him aside.\n\nHe brought the butt of the Colt down on his assailant's head, but stopped short of a second blow when he spotted the two healthy guards going for their weapons at the edge of his vision.\n\nThrough his pain, Pitt's hand instinctively held steady on the Colt. His next bullet dropped the grotesque one eyed guard with a quick shot to the neck. He ignored the blind Julio and shot the remaining henchman in the center of his chest.\n\nPitt heard Loren's scream of warning as if it were far off in the distance. Too late he saw Sarason pointing the derringer at him. His body lagged behind his mind and moved a fraction slow.\n\nHe saw the fire from the muzzle and felt a terrible hammer blow in his left shoulder before he heard the blast. It flung him around, and he went down sprawling in the water with Amaru crawling after him like a wounded bear intent on shredding a disabled fox. The current caught him in its grasp and pulled him from shore. He grabbed desperately at the bottom stones to impede the surge.\n\nSarason slowly walked to the water's edge and stared at the struggle going on in the river. Amaru had clenched his arms around Pitt's waist and was trying to drag him under the surface. With a callous grin, Sarason took careful aim at Pitt's head. \"A commendable effort, Mr. Pitt. You are a very durable man.\n\nOdd as it sounds, I will miss you.\"\n\nBut the coup de grace never came. Like black tentacles, a pair of arms circled around Sarason's legs and gripped his ankles. He looked down wildly at the unspeakable thing that was gripping him and began frantically beating at the head that rose between the arms.\n\nGiordino had followed Pitt, drifting down the river. The current had not been as strong as he'd expected upstream from the treasure island and he had been able to painfully drag himself into the shallows unnoticed. He had cursed his helplessness at not being physically able to assist Pitt in fighting off Amaru, but when Sarason unknowingly stepped within reach, Giordino made his move and snagged him.\n\nHe ignored the brutal blows to his head. He looked up at Sarason and spoke in a voice that was thick and deep. \"Greetings from hell, butthead.\"\n\nSarason recovered quickly at the sight of Giordino and jerked one foot free to maintain his balance.\n\nBecause Giordino made no attempt to rise to his feet, Sarason immediately perceived that his enemy was somehow badly injured from the hips down. He viciously kicked Giordino, hitting one thigh. He was rewarded by a sharp groan as Giordino's body jumped in a tormented spasm and he released Sarason's other ankle.\n\n\"From past experience,\" Sarason said, regaining his composure, \"I should have known you'd be close by.\"\n\nHe stared briefly at the derringer, knowing he had only one bullet left, but aware there were four or five automatic weapons lying nearby. Then he glanced at Pitt and Amaru who were locked in a death struggle. No need to waste the bullet on Pitt. The river had taken the deadly enemies in its grip and was relentlessly sweeping them downstream. If Pitt somehow survived and staggered from the water, Sarason had an arsenal to deal with him.\n\nSarason made his choice. He stooped down and aimed the gun's twin barrels between Giordino's eyes.\n\nLoren threw herself at Sarason's back, flinging her arms around him, trying to stop him. Sarason broke her grip as if it were string and shoved her aside without so much as a glance.\n\nShe fell heavily on one of the weapons that had been cast aside, lifted it and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. She didn't know enough about guns to remove the safety. She gave a weak yelp as Sarason reached over and cracked her on the head with the butt of the derringer.\n\nSuddenly he spun around. Gunn, remarkably come to life, had tossed a river stone at Sarason that bounced off his hip with the feeble force of a weakly hit tennis ball.\n\nSarason shook his head in wonder at the fortitude and courage of people who resisted with such fervor. He almost felt sorry they would all have to die. He turned back to Giordino.\n\n\"It seems your reprieve was only temporary,\" he said with a sneer, as he held the gun at arm's length straight at Giordino's face.\n\nIn spite of the agony of his broken legs and the specter of death staring him in the face, Giordino looked up at Sarason and grinned venomously. \"Screw you.\"\n\nThe shot came like a blast from a cannon inside the cavern, followed by the thump sound of lead bursting through living flesh. Giordino's expression went blank as Sarason's eyes gazed at him with a strange confused look. Then Sarason turned and mechanically took two steps onto shore, slowly pitched forward and struck the stone floor in a lifeless heap.\n\nGiordino couldn't believe he was still alive. He looked up and gaped at a little man, dressed like a ranch hand and casually holding a Winchester rifle, who walked into the circle of light.\n\n\"Who are you?\" asked Giordino.\n\n\"Billy Yuma. I came to help my friend.\"\n\nLoren, a hand held against her bleeding head, stared at him. \"Friend?\"\n\n\"The man called Pitt.\"\n\nAt the mention of his name, Loren pushed herself to her feet and ran unsteadily to the river's edge. \"I don't see him!\" she cried fearfully.\n\nGiordino suddenly felt his heart squeeze. He shouted Pitt's name but his voice only echoed in the cavern. \"Oh, God, no,\" he muttered fearfully. \"He's gone.\"\n\nGunn grimaced as he sat up and peered downriver into the ominous blackness. Like the others who had calmly faced death only minutes before, he was stricken to find that his old friend had been carried away to his death. \"Maybe Dirk can swim back,\" he said hopefully.\n\nGiordino shook his head. \"He can't return. The current is too strong.\"\n\n\"Where does the river go?\" demanded Loren with rising panic.\n\nGiordino pounded his fist in futility and despair against the solid rock. \"The Gulf. Dirk has been swept toward the Sea of Cortez a hundred kilometers away.\"\n\nLoren sagged to the limestone floor of the cavern, her hands covering her face as she unashamedly wept. \"He saved me only to die.\"\n\nBilly Yuma knelt beside Loren and gently patted her bare shoulder. \"If no one else can, perhaps God will help.\"\n\nGiordino was heartsick. No longer feeling his own injuries, he stared into the darkness, his eyes unseeing. \"A hundred kilometers,\" he repeated slowly. \"Even God can't keep a man alive with a broken wrist, cracked ribs, and a bullet hole in the shoulder through a hundred kilometers of raging water in total darkness.\"\n\nAfter making everyone as comfortable as he could, Yuma hurried back up to the summit where he told his story. It shamed his relatives into entering the mountain. They fabricated stretchers out of material left by the army engineers and tenderly carried Gunn and Giordino from the river cavern up the passageway.\n\nAn older man kindly offered a grateful Loren a blanket woven by his wife.\n\nOn Giordino's instructions, Gunn and his stretcher were strapped down in the narrow cargo compartment of the stolen NUMA helicopter abandoned by the Zolars. Loren climbed into the copilot's seat as Giordino, his face contorted in torment, was lifted and maneuvered behind the pilot's controls.\n\n\"We'll have to fly this eggbeater together,\" Giordino told Loren as the pain in his legs subsided from sheer agony to a throbbing ache. \"You'll have to work the pedals that control the tail rotors.\"\n\n\"I hope I can do it,\" Loren replied nervously.\n\n\"Use a gentle touch with your bare feet and we'll be okay.\"\n\nOver the helicopter's radio, they alerted Sandecker, who was pacing Starger's office in the Customs Service headquarters, that they were on their way. Giordino and Loren expressed their gratitude to Billy Yuma, his family, and friends, and bid them a warm goodbye. Then Giordino started the turbine engine and let it warm for a minute while he scanned the instruments. With the cyclic stick in neutral, he eased the collective pitch stick to full down and curled the throttle as he gently pushed the stick forward. Then he turned to Loren.\n\n\"As soon as we begin to rise in the air, the torque effect will cause our tail to swing left and our nose to the right. Lightly press the left foot pedal to compensate.\"\n\nLoren nodded gamely. \"I'll do my best, but I wish I didn't have to do this.\"\n\n\"We have no choice but to fly out. Rudi would be dead before he could be manhandled down the side of the mountain.\"\n\nThe helicopter rose very slowly less than a meter off the ground. Giordino let it hang there while Loren learned the feel of the tail rotor control pedals. At first she had a tendency to over control, but she soon got the hang of it and nodded.\n\n\"I think I'm ready.\"\n\n\"Then we're off,\" acknowledged Giordino.\n\nTwenty minutes later, working in unison, they made a perfect landing beside the Customs headquarters building in Calexico where Admiral Sandecker was standing beside a waiting ambulance, anxiously puffing a cigar.\n\nIn that first moment when Amaru forced him beneath the water and he could feel the jaws of the current surround his wrecked body, Pitt knew instantly that there was no returning to the treasure cavern.\n\nHe was doubly trapped-- by a killer who hung on to him like a vise and a river determined to carry him to hell.\n\nEven if both men had been uninjured, it would have been no contest. Cutthroat killer that he was, Amaru was no match for Pitt's experience underwater. Pitt took a deep breath before the river closed over his head, wrapped his good right arm around his chest to protect his fractured ribs and relaxed amid the pain without wasting his strength in fighting off his attacker.\n\nAmazingly, he still kept his grip on the gun, although to fire it underwater would probably have shattered every bone in his hand. He felt Amaru's encircling hold slide from his waist to his hips. The murderer was strong as iron. He clawed at Pitt furiously, still trying for the gun as they spun around in the current like toy dolls caught in a whirlpool.\n\nNeither man could see the other as they swirled into utter darkness. Without the slightest suggestion of light, Pitt felt as though he was submerged in ink.\n\nAmaru's wrath was all that kept him alive in the next forty-five seconds. It did not sink into his crazed mind that he was drowning twice-- his bullet-punctured lung was filling with blood while at the same time he was sucking in water. The last of his strength was fading when his thrashing feet made contact with a shoal that was built up from sand accumulating on the outer curve of the river. He came up choking blood and water in a small open gallery and made a blind lunge for Pitt's neck.\n\nBut Amaru had nothing left. All fight had ebbed away. Once out of the water he could feel the blood pumping from the wound in his chest.\n\nPitt found he was able, by a slight effort, to shove Amaru back into the mainstream of the current. He could not see the Peruvian drift away in the pitch blackness, observe the face drained of color, the eyes glazed in hate and approaching death. But he heard the malevolent voice slowly moving into the distance away from him.\n\n\"I said you would suffer,\" came the words slightly above a hoarse murmur. \"Now you will languish and die in tormented black solitude.\"\n\n\"Nothing like being swept up in an orgy of poetic grandeur,\" said Pitt icily. \"Enjoy your trip to the Gulf.\"\n\nHis reply was a cough and a gurgling sound and finally silence.\n\nThe pain returned to Pitt with a vengeance. The fire spread from his broken wrist to the bullet wound in his shoulder to his cracked ribs. He was not sure he had the strength left to fight it. Exhaustion slightly softened the agony. He felt more tired than he had ever felt in his life. He crawled onto a dry area of the shoal and slowly crumpled face forward into the soft sand and fell unconscious.\n\n\"I don't like leaving without Cyrus,\" said Oxley as he scanned the desert sky to the southwest.\n\n\"Our brother has been in tougher scrapes before,\" said Zolar impassively. \"A few Indians from a local village shouldn't present much of a threat to Amaru's hired killers.\"\n\n\"I expected him long before now.\"\n\n\"Not to worry. Cyrus will probably show up in Morocco with a girl on each arm.\"\n\nThey stood on the end of a narrow asphalt airstrip that had been grooved between the countless dunes of the Altar Desert so Mexican Air Force pilots could hold training exercises under primitive conditions.\n\nBehind them, with its tail section jutting over the edge of the sand-swept strip, a Boeing 747-400 jetliner, painted in the colors of a large national air carrier, sat poised for takeoff.\n\nZolar moved under the shade of the starboard wing and checked off the artifacts inventoried by Henry and Micki Moore as the Mexican army engineers loaded the final piece on board the aircraft. He nodded at the golden sculpture of a monkey that was being hoisted by a large forklift into the cargo hatch nearly 7 meters (23 feet) from the ground. \"That's the last of it.\"\n\nOxley stared at the barrenness surrounding the airstrip. \"You couldn't have picked a more isolated spot to transship the treasure.\"\n\n\"We can thank the late Colonel Campos for suggesting it.\"\n\n\"Any problem with Campos's men since his untimely death?\" Oxley asked with more cynicism than sense of loss.\n\nZolar laughed. \"Certainly not after I gave each of them a one-hundred-ounce bar of gold.\"\n\n\"You were generous.\"\n\n\"Hard not to be with so much wealth sitting around.\"\n\n\"A pity Matos will miss spending his share,\" said Oxley.\n\n\"Yes, I cried all the way from Cerro el Capirote.\"\n\nZolar's pilot approached and gave an informal salute. \"My crew and I are ready when you are, gentlemen. We would like to take off before it's dark.\"\n\n\"Is the cargo fastened down securely?\" asked Zolar.\n\nThe pilot nodded. \"Not the neatest job I've seen. But considering we're not using cargo containers, it should hold until we land at Nador in Morocco, providing we don't hit extreme turbulence.\"\n\n\"Do you expect any?\"\n\n\"No, sir. The weather pattern indicates calm skies all the way.\"\n\n\"Good. We can enjoy a smooth flight,\" said Zolar, pleased. \"Remember, at no time are we to cross over the border into the United States.\"\n\n\"I've laid a course that takes us safely south of Laredo and Brownsville into the Gulf of Mexico below Key West before heading out over the Atlantic.\"\n\n\"How soon before we touch down in Morocco?\" Oxley asked the pilot.\n\n\"Our flight plan calls for ten hours and fifty-five minutes. Loaded to the maximum, and then some, with several hundred extra pounds of cargo and a full fuel load, plus the detour south of Texas and Florida, we've added slightly over an hour to our flight time, which I hope to pick up with a tail wind.\"\n\nZolar looked at the last rays of the sun. \"With time changes that should put us in Nador during early afternoon tomorrow.\"\n\nThe pilot nodded. \"As soon as you are seated aboard, we will get in the air.\" He returned to the aircraft and climbed a boarding ladder propped against the forward entry door.\n\nZolar gestured toward the ladder. \"Unless you've taken a fancy to this sand pit, I see no reason to stand around here any longer.\"\n\nOxley bowed jovially. \"After you.\" As they passed through the entry door, he paused and took one last look to the southwest. \"I still don't feel right not waiting.\"\n\n\"If our positions were reversed, Cyrus wouldn't hesitate to depart. Too much is at stake to delay any longer. Our brother is a survivor. Stop worrying.\"\n\nThey gave a wave to the Mexican army engineers who stood back from the plane and cheered their benefactors. Then the flight engineer closed and secured the door.\n\nA few minutes later the turbines screamed and the big 747-400 rose above the rolling sand dunes, dipped its starboard wing and banked slightly south of east. Zolar and Oxley sat in a small passenger compartment on the upper deck just behind the cockpit.\n\n\"I wonder what happened to the Moores,\" mused Oxley, peering through a window at the Sea of Cortez as it receded in the distance. \"The last I saw of them was in the cavern as the last of the treasure was being loaded on a sled.\"\n\n\"I'll wager Cyrus handled that little problem in concert with Congresswoman Smith and Rudi Gunn,\" said Zolar, relaxing for the first time in days. He looked up and smiled at his personal serving lady as she offered two glasses of wine on a tray.\n\n\"I know it sounds strange, but I had an uneasy feeling they wouldn't be easy to get rid of.\"\n\n\"I have to tell you. The same thing crossed Cyrus's mind too. In fact, he thought they were a pair of killers.\"\n\nOxley turned to him. \"The wife too? You're joking.\"\n\n\"No, I do believe he was serious.\" Zolar took a sip of the wine and made an expression of approval and nodded. \"Excellent. A California cabernet from Chateau Montelena. You must try it.\"\n\nOxley took the glass and stared at it. \"I won't feel like celebrating until the treasure is safely stored in Morocco and we learn that Cyrus has left Mexico.\"\n\nShortly after the aircraft had reached what the brothers believed was cruising altitude, they released their seat belts and stepped into the cargo bay where they began closely examining the incredible golden collection of antiquities. Hardly an hour had passed when Zolar stiffened and looked at his brother queerly.\n\n\"Does it feel to you like we're descending?\"\n\nOxley was admiring a golden butterfly that was attached to a golden flower. \"I don't feel anything.\"\n\nZolar was not satisfied. He leaned down and stared through a window at the ground less than 1000 meters (less than 3300 feet) below.\n\n\"We're too low!\" he said sharply. \"Something is wrong.\"\n\nOxley's eyes narrowed. He looked through an adjoining window. \"You're right. The flaps are down. It looks like we're coming in for a landing. The pilot must have an emergency.\"\n\n\"Why didn't he alert us?\"\n\nAt that moment they heard the landing gear drop. The ground was rising to meet them faster now.\n\nThey flashed past houses and railroad tracks, and then the aircraft was over the end of the runway. The wheels thumped onto concrete and the engines howled in reverse thrust. The pilot stood on the brakes and soon eased off on the throttles as he turned the huge craft onto a taxiway.\n\nA sign on the terminal read Welcome to El Paso.\n\nOxley stared speechless as Zolar blurted, \"My God, we've come down in the United States!\"\n\nHe ran forward and began beating frantically on the cockpit door. There was no reply until the huge plane came to a halt outside an Air National Guard hangar at the opposite end of the field. Only then did the cockpit door slowly crack open.\n\n\"What in hell are you doing? I'm ordering you to get back in the air immediately--\" Zolar's words froze in his throat as he found himself staring down the muzzle of a gun pointed between his eyes.\n\nThe pilot was still seated in his seat, as were the copilot and flight engineer. Henry Moore stood in the doorway gripping a strange nine-millimeter automatic of his own design, while inside the cockpit Micki Moore was talking over the aircraft radio as she calmly aimed a Lilliputian .25-caliber automatic at the pilot's neck.\n\n\"Forgive the unscheduled stop, my former friends,\" said Moore in a commanding voice neither Zolar nor Oxley had heard before, \"but as you can see there's been a change of plan.\"\n\nZolar squinted down the gun barrel, and his face twisted from shock to menacing anger. \"You idiot, you blind idiot, do you have any idea what you've done?\"\n\n\"Why, yes,\" Moore answered matter-of-factly. \"Micki and I have hijacked your aircraft and its cargo of golden artifacts. I believe you're aware of the old maxim: There is no honor among thieves.\"\n\n\"If you don't get this plane in the air quickly,\" Oxley pleaded, \"Customs agents will be swarming all over it.\"\n\n\"Now that you mention it, Micki and I did entertain the idea of turning the artifacts over to the authorities.\"\n\n\"You can't know what you're saying.\"\n\n\"Oh, I most certainly do, Charley, old pal. As it turns out, federal agents are more interested in you and your brother than Huascar's treasure.\"\n\n\"Where did you come from?\" Zolar demanded.\n\n\"We merely caught a ride in one of the helicopters transporting the gold. The army engineers were used to our presence and paid no attention as we climbed aboard the plane. We hid out in one of the restrooms until the pilot left to confer with you and Charles on the airstrip. Then we seized the cockpit.\"\n\n\"Why would federal agents take your word for anything?\" asked Oxley.\"\n\n\"In a manner of speaking, Micki and I were once agents ourselves,\" Moore briefly explained. \"After we took over the cockpit, Micki radioed some old friends in Washington who arranged your reception.\"\n\nZolar looked as if he were about to tear Moore's lungs out whether he got shot in the attempt or not.\n\n\"You and your lying wife made a deal for a share of the antiquities. Am I right?\" He waited for a reply, but when Moore remained silent he went on. \"What percentage did they offer you? Ten, twenty, maybe as high as fifty percent?\"\n\n\"We made no deals with the government,\" Moore said slowly. \"We knew you had no intention of honoring our agreement, and that you planned to kill us. We had planned to steal the treasure for ourselves, but as you can see, we had a change of heart.\"\n\n\"The way they act familiar with guns,\" said Oxley, \"Cyrus was right. They are a pair of killers.\"\n\nMoore nodded in agreement. \"Your brother has an inner eye. It takes an assassin to know one.\"\n\nA pounding came from outside the forward passenger door on the deck below. Moore gestured down the stairwell with his gun. \"Go down and open it,\" he ordered Zolar and Oxley.\n\nSullenly, they did as they were told.\n\nWhen the pressurized door was swung open, two men entered from a stairway that had been pushed up against the aircraft. Both wore business suits. One was a huge black man who looked as if he might have played professional football. The other was a nattily dressed white man. Zolar immediately sensed they were federal agents.\n\n\"Joseph Zolar and Charles Oxley, I am Agent David Gaskill with the Customs Service and this is Agent Francis Ragsdale of the FBI. You gentlemen are under arrest for smuggling illegal artifacts into the United States and for the theft of countless art objects from private and public museums, not excluding the unlawful forgery and sale of antiquities.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" Zolar demanded.\n\nGaskill ignored him and looked at Ragsdale with a big toothy smile. \"Would you like to do the honors?\"\n\nRagsdale nodded like a kid who had just been given a new disk player. \"Yes, indeed, thank you.\"\n\nAs Gaskill cuffed Zolar and Oxley, Ragsdale read them their rights.\n\n\"You made good time,\" said Moore. \"We were told you were in Calexico.\"\n\n\"We were on our way aboard a military jet fifteen minutes after word came down from FBI headquarters in Washington,\" replied Ragsdale.\n\nOxley looked at Gaskill, a look for the first time empty of fear and shock, a sudden look of shrewdness. \"You'll never find enough evidence to convict us in a hundred years.\"\n\nRagsdale tilted his head toward the golden cargo. \"What do you call that?\"\n\n\"We're merely passengers,\" said Zolar, regaining his composure. \"We were invited along for the ride by Professor Moore and his wife.\"\n\n\"I see. And suppose you tell me where all the stolen art and antiquities in your facility in Galveston came from?\"\n\nOxley sneered. \"Our Galveston warehouse is perfectly legitimate. You've raided it before and never found a thing.\"\n\nIf that's the case,\" said Ragsdale craftily, \"how do you explain the tunnel leading from the Logan Storage Company to Zolar International's subterranean warehouse of stolen goods?\"\n\nThe brothers stared at each other, their faces abruptly gray. \"You're making this up,\" said Zolar fearfully.\n\n\"Am I? Would you like me to describe your tunnel in detail and provide a brief rundown on the stolen masterworks we found?\"\n\n\"The tunnel-- you couldn't have found the tunnel.\"\n\n\"As of thirty-six hours ago,\" said Gaskill, \"Zolar International and your clandestine operation known as Solpemachaco are permanently out of business.\"\n\nRagsdale added. \"A pity your dad, Mansfield Zolar, aka the Specter, isn't still alive or we could bust him too.\"\n\nZolar looked as if he were in the throes of cardiac arrest. Oxley appeared too paralyzed to move.\n\n\"By the time you two and the rest of your family, partners, associates, and buyers get out of prison, you'll be as old as the artifacts you stole.\"\n\nFederal agents began filling the aircraft. The FBI took charge of the air crew and Zolar's serving lady while the Customs people unbuckled the tiedown straps securing the golden artifacts. Ragsdale nodded to his team.\n\n\"Take them downtown to the U.S. Attorney's Office.\" As soon as the shattered art thieves were led into two different cars, the agents turned to the Moores.\n\n\"I can't tell you how grateful we are for your cooperation,\" said Gaskill. \"Nailing the Zolar family will put a huge dent in the art theft and artifact smuggling trade.\"\n\n\"We're not entirely benevolent,\" said Micki, happily relieved. \"Henry feels certain the Peruvian government will post a reward.\"\n\nGaskill nodded. \"I think you've got a sure bet.\"\n\n\"The prestige of being the first to catalogue and photograph the treasure will go a long way toward enhancing our scientific reputations,\" Henry Moore explained as he holstered his gun.\n\n\"Customs would also like a detailed report on the objects, if you don't mind?\" asked Gaskill.\n\nMoore nodded vigorously. \"Micki and I will be happy to work with you. We've already inventoried the treasure. We'll have a report for you before it's formally returned to Peru.\"\n\n\"Where will you store it all until then?\" asked Micki.\n\n\"In a government warehouse whose location we can't reveal,\" answered Gaskill.\n\n\"Is there any news on Congresswoman Smith and the little man with NUMA?\"\n\nGaskill nodded. \"Minutes before you landed we received word they were rescued by a local tribe of Indians and are on their way to a local hospital.\"\n\nMicki sank down into a passenger seat and sighed. \"Then it's over.\"\n\nHenry sat on an armrest and took her hand in his. \"It is for us,\" he said gently. \"From now on we'll live the rest of our lives together as a pair of old teachers in a university with vine-covered walls.\"\n\nShe looked up at him. \"Is that so terrible?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said, kissing her lightly on the forehead, \"I think we can handle it.\"\n\nSlowly climbing from the depths of a dead stupor, Pitt felt as if he were struggling up a mud-slick slope, only to slip back every time he reached out and touched consciousness. He tried to retain a grip on these brief moments of awareness, only to fall back into a void. If he could open his eyes, he thought vaguely, he might return to reality. Finally, with a mighty effort, he forced open his eyelids.\n\nSeeing only grave-cold blackness, he shook his head in despair, thinking he had fallen back into the void. And then the pain came rushing back like a burst of fire, and he came fully awake. Rolling sideways and then forward into a sitting position, he swung his head from side to side, trying to shake off the fog that clung to the alcoves of his mind. He renewed his fight with the pounding ache in his shoulder, the stiff hurt in his chest, and the sting from his wrist. Tenderly he felt the gash on his forehead.\n\n\"A hell of a fine specimen of manhood you are,\" he muttered.\n\nPitt was surprised to find that he didn't feel overly weak from loss of blood. He unclipped from his forearm the flashlight that Giordino had given him after their drop over the falls, switched it on, and propped it in the sand so the beam was aimed at his upper torso. He unzipped his wet suit jacket and tenderly probed the wound in his shoulder. The bullet had passed through the flesh and out his back without striking the scapula or the clavicle. The neoprene rubber on his shredded but still nearly skintight wet suit had helped seal the opening and restrict the flow of blood. Relieved that he did not feel as drained as he thought he would, he relaxed and took stock of his situation. His chances of survival were somewhere beyond impossible. With 100 kilometers (62 miles) of unknown rapids, sharp cascades, and extensive river passages that passed through caverns completely immersed with water, he did not need a palmist to tell him that the life line running across his hand would halt long before he reached senior citizenship. Even if he had air passages the entire way, there was still the distance from the opening of the subterranean channel to the surface of the Gulf.\n\nMost other men who found themselves in a Hades of darkness deep within the earth with no hope of escape would have panicked and died tearing their fingers to the bone in a vain attempt to claw their way to the surface. But Pitt was not afraid. He was curiously content and at peace with himself.\n\nIf he was going to die, he thought, he might as well get comfortable. With his good hand he dug indentations in the sand to accommodate his body contour. He was surprised when the flashlight beam reflected from a thousand golden specks in the black sand. He held up a handful under the light.\n\n\"This place is loaded with placer gold,\" he said to himself.\n\nHe shone the light around the cavern. The walls were cut with ledges of white quartz streaked with tiny veins of gold. Pitt began laughing as he saw humor in the implausibility of it all.\n\n\"A gold mine,\" he proclaimed to the silent cave. \"I've made a fabulously rich gold strike and nobody will ever know it.\"\n\nHe sat back and contemplated his discovery. Someone must be telling him something, he thought. Just because he wasn't afraid of the old man with the scythe didn't mean he had to give up and wait for him. A stubborn resolve sparked within him.\n\nBetter to enter the great beyond after an audacious attempt at staying alive than to throw in the towel and go out like a dishrag, he concluded. Perhaps other adventurous explorers would give up everything they owned for the honor of entering this mineralogical sanctum sanctorum, but all Pitt wanted now was to get out. He rose to his feet, inflated the buoyancy compensator with his breath and walked into the water until he was adrift in the current that carried him along.\n\nJust take it one cavern at a time, he told himself, flashing the light on the water ahead. There was no relying on eternal vigilance. He was too weak to fight rapids and fend off rocks. He could only be calm and go wherever the current took him. He soon felt as if he had been cruising from one gallery to another for a lifetime.\n\nThe roof of the caverns and galleries rose and fell with monotonous regularity for the next 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). Then he heard the dreaded rumble of approaching rapids. Thankfully, the first chute Pitt encountered was of medium roughness. The water crashed against his face and he went under churning froth several times before reaching placid water again.\n\nHe was granted a comfortable reprieve as the river turned smooth and ran through one long canyon in an immense gallery. When he reached the end nearly an hour later, the roof gradually sloped down until it touched the water. He filled his lungs to the last crowded millimeter and dived. Able to use only one arm and missing his swim fins, the going was slow. He aimed the flashlight at the jagged rock roof and swam on his back. His lungs began to protest the lack of oxygen, but he swam on. At last the light revealed an air pocket. He shot to the surface and mightily inhaled the pure, unpolluted air that had been trapped deep beneath the earth millions of years ago.\n\nThe small cave widened into a large cavern whose ceiling arched beyond the beam of the flashlight.\n\nThe river made a sweeping turn where it had formed a reef of polished gravel. Pitt crawled painfully onto the dry area to rest. He turned off the light to prolong the life of the batteries.\n\nAbruptly, he flicked the flash on again. Something had caught his eye in the shadows before the light blinked out. Something was there, not 5 meters (16 feet) away, a black form that revealed a straight line aberrant to natural geometrics.\n\nPitt's spirits soared as he recognized the battered remains of the Wallowing Windbag. Incredibly, the Hovercraft had come through the horrific fall over the cataract and had been cast up here after drifting nearly 40 kilometers. At last a gleam of hope. He stumbled across the gravel beach to the rubber hull and examined it under his light.\n\nThe engine and fan had been torn from their mountings and were missing. Two of the air chambers were punctured and deflated, but the remaining six still held firm. Some of the equipment was swept away, but four air tanks, the first-aid kit, Duncan's plastic ball of colored water dye tracer, one of Giordino's paddles, two extra flashlights, and the waterproof container with Admiral Sandecker's thermos of coffee and four bologna sandwiches had miraculously survived.\n\n\"It seems my state of affairs has considerably improved,\" Pitt said happily to nobody but the empty cavern.\n\nHe began with the first-aid kit. After liberally soaking the shoulder wound with disinfectant, he awkwardly applied a crude bandage on it inside his tattered wet suit. Knowing it was useless to bind fractured ribs, he gritted his teeth, set his wrist and taped it.\n\nThe coffee had retained most of its heat inside the thermos, and he downed half of it before attacking the sandwiches. No medium-rare porterhouse steak, doused and flamed in cognac, tasted better than this bologna, Pitt decided. Then and there he vowed never to complain or make jokes about bologna sandwiches ever again.\n\nAfter a brief rest, a goodly measure of his strength returned and he felt refreshed enough to resecure the equipment and break open Duncan's plastic dye container. He scattered Fluorescein Yellow with Optical Brightener into the water. Under the beam of his flashlight he watched until the dye stained the river with a vivid yellow luminescence. He stood and watched until the current swept it out of sight.\n\n\"That should tell them I'm coming,\" he thought aloud.\n\nHe pushed the remains of the Hovercraft out of the shallows. Favoring his injuries, he awkwardly climbed aboard and paddled one-handed into the mainstream.\n\nAs the partially deflated Wallowing Windbag caught the current and drifted downriver, Pitt leaned back comfortably and began humming the tune to \"Up a Lazy River in the Noonday Sun.\"\n\nInformed of up-to-the-minute events from california by Admiral Sandecker and agents Gaskill and Ragsdale in El Paso, the secretary of state decided to sidestep diplomatic protocol and personally call the President of Mexico. He briefed him on the far-reaching theft and smuggling conspiracy engineered by the Zolars.\n\n\"An incredible story,\" said Mexico's President.\n\n\"But true,\" the secretary of state assured him.\n\n\"I can only regret the incident occurred, and I promise my government's full cooperation with the investigation.\"\n\n\"If you'll forgive me, Mr. President, I do have a wish list of requests.\"\n\n\"Let's hear them.\"\n\nWithin two hours the border between Mexico and California was reopened. The government officials who were suckered by the Zolars into jeopardizing their positions by false promises of incredible riches were rounded up.\n\nFernando Matos and Police Comandante Rafael Cortina were among the first to be arrested by Mexican Justice investigators.\n\nAt the same time, vessels of the Mexican navy attached to the Sea of Cortez were alerted and ordered to sea.\n\nLieutenant Carlos Hidalgo peered up at a squawking gull before turning his attention back to the straight line of the sea across the horizon. \"Are we searching for anything special, or just searching?\" he casually asked his ship's captain.\n\n\"Looking for bodies,\" Commander Miguel Maderas replied. He lowered his binoculars, revealing a round, friendly face under long, thick black hair. His teeth were large and very white and almost always set in a Burt Lancaster smile. He was short and heavy and solid as a rock.\n\nHidalgo was a sharp contrast to Maderas. Tall and lean with a narrow face, he looked like a well-tanned cadaver. \"Victims of a boating accident?\"\n\n\"No, divers who drowned in an underground river.\"\n\nHidalgo's eyes narrowed skeptically. \"Not another gringo folktale about fishermen and divers being swept under the desert and disgorged into the Gulf?\"\n\n\"Who is to say?\" Maderas replied with a shrug. \"All I know is that orders from our fleet headquarters in Ensenada directed our ship and crew to patrol the waters on the northern end of the Gulf between San Felipe and Puerto Penasco for any sign of bodies.\"\n\n\"A large area for only one ship to cover.\"\n\n\"We'll be joined by two Class P patrol boats out of Santa Rosalia, and all fishing boats in the area have been alerted to report any sighting of human remains.\"\n\n\"If the sharks get them,\" Hildago muttered pessimistically, \"there won't be anything left to find.\"\n\nMaderas leaned back against the railing of the bridge wing, lit a cigarette, and gazed toward the stern of his patrol vessel. It had been modified from a 67-meter (220 foot) U.S. Navy minesweeper and had no official name other than the big G-21 painted on the bow. But the crew unaffectionately called her El Porqueria (\"piece of trash\") because she once broke down at sea and was towed to port by a fishing boat-- a humiliation the crew never forgave her for.\n\nBut she was a sturdy ship, quick to answer the helm, and stable in heavy seas. The crews of more than one fishing boat and private yacht owed their lives to Maderas and El Porqueria.\n\nAs executive officer of the ship, Hidalgo had the duty of plotting a search grid. When he was finished poring over a large nautical chart of the northern Gulf, he gave the coordinates to the helmsman. Then the dreary part of the voyage began, plowing down one lane and then reversing course as if mowing a lawn.\n\nThe first line was run at eight o'clock in the morning. At two o'clock in the afternoon a lookout on the bow yelled out.\n\n\"Object in the water!\"\n\n\"Whereaway?\" shouted Hildago.\n\n\"A hundred and fifty meters off the port bow.\"\n\nMaderas lifted his binoculars and peered over the blue green water. He easily spotted a body floating face down as it rose on the crest of a wave. \"I have it.\" He stepped to the wheelhouse door and nodded at the helmsman. \"Bring us alongside and have a crew stand by to retrieve.\" Then he turned to Hildago.\n\n\"Stop engines when we close to fifty meters.\"\n\nThe foaming bow wave faded to a gentle ripple, the heavy throb of the twin diesels died to a muted rumble as the patrol vessel slipped alongside the body rolling in the waves. From his view on the bridge wing, Maderas could see the bloated and distorted features had been battered to pulp. Small wonder the sharks didn't find it appetizing, he thought.\n\nHe stared at Hidalgo and smiled. \"We didn't need a week after all.\"\n\n\"We got lucky,\" Hidalgo mumbled.\n\nWith no hint of reverence for the dead, two crewmen jabbed a boat hook into the floating corpse and pulled it toward a stretcher, constructed from wire mesh, that was lowered into the water. The body was guided into the stretcher and raised onto the deck. The ghastly, mangled flesh barely resembled what had once been a human being. Maderas could hear more than one of his crew retching into the sea before the corpse was zipped into a body bag.\n\n\"Well, at least whoever he was did us a favor,\" said Hidalgo.\n\nMaderas looked at him. \"Oh, and what was that?\"\n\nHidalgo grinned unfeelingly. \"He wasn't in the water long enough to smell.\"\n\nThree hours later, the patrol vessel entered the breakwater of San Felipe and tied up alongside the Alhambra.\n\nAs Pitt had suspected, after reaching shore in the life raft, Gordo Padilla and his crew had gone home to their wives and girlfriends and celebrated their narrow escape by taking a three-day siesta. Then, under the watchful eye of Cortina's police, Padilla rounded everyone up and hitched a ride on a fishing boat back to the ferry. Once on board they raised steam in the engines and pumped out the water taken on when Amaru opened the seacocks. When her keel was unlocked by the silt and her engines were fired to life, Padilla and his crew sailed the Alhambra back to San Felipe and tied her to the dock.\n\nTo Maderas and Hidalgo, looking down from their bridge, the forward car deck of the ferry looked like the accident ward of a hospital.\n\nLoren Smith was comfortably dressed in shorts and halter top and exhibited her bruises and a liberal assortment of small bandages over her bare shoulders, midriff, and legs. Giordino sat in a wheelchair with both legs propped ahead of him in plaster casts.\n\nMissing was Rudi Gunn, who was in stable condition in the El Centro Regional Medical Center just north of Calexico, after having survived a badly bruised stomach, six broken fingers, and a hairline fracture of the skull.\n\nAdmiral Sandecker and Peter Duncan, the hydrologist, also stood on the deck of the ferryboat, along with Shannon Kelsey, Miles Rodgers, and a contingent of local police and the Baja California Norte state coroner. Their faces were grim as the crew of the navy patrol ship lowered the stretcher containing the body onto the Alhambra's deck.\n\nBefore the coroner and his assistant could lift the body bag onto a gurney, Giordino pushed his wheelchair up to the stretcher. \"I would like to see the body,\" he said grimly.\n\n\"He is not a pretty sight, senor,\" Hidalgo warned him from the deck of his ship.\n\nThe coroner hesitated, not sure if under the law he could permit foreigners to view a dead body.\n\nGiordino stared coldly at the coroner. \"Do you want an identification or not?\"\n\nThe coroner, a little man with bleary eyes and a great bush of gray hair, barely knew enough English to understand Giordino, but he nodded silently to his assistant who pulled down the zipper.\n\nLoren paled and turned away, but Sandecker moved close beside Giordino.\n\n\"Is it. . .\"\n\nGiordino shook his head. \"No, it's not Dirk. It's that psycho creep, Tupac Amaru.\"\n\n\"Good Lord, he looks as if he was churned through an empty cement mixer.\"\n\n\"Almost as bad,\" said Duncan, shuddering at the ghastly sight. \"The rapids must have beat him against every rock between here and Cerro el Capirote.\"\n\n\"Couldn't happen to a nicer guy,\" Giordino muttered acidly.\n\n\"Somewhere between the treasure cavern and the Gulf,\" said Duncan, \"the river must erupt into a rampage.\"\n\n\"No sign of another body?\" Sandecker asked Hidalgo.\n\n\"Nothing, senor. This is the only one we found, but we have orders to continue the search for the second man.\"\n\nSandecker turned away from Amaru. \"If Dirk hasn't been cast out into the Gulf by now, he must still be underground.\"\n\n\"Maybe he was washed up on a beach or a sandbank,\" offered Shannon hopefully. \"He might still be alive.\"\n\n\"Can't you launch an expedition down the subterranean river to find him?\" Rodgers asked the admiral.\n\nSandecker shook his head slowly. \"I won't send a team of men to certain death.\"\n\n\"The admiral is right,\" said Giordino. \"There could be a dozen cascades like the one Pitt and I went over. Even with a Hovercraft like the Wallowing Windbag, it's extremely doubtful anyone can gain safe passage through a hundred kilometers of water peppered with rapids and rocks.\"\n\n\"If that isn't enough,\" added Duncan, \"there's the submerged caverns to get through before surfacing in the Gulf. Without an ample air supply, drowning would be inescapable.\"\n\nHow far do you think he might drift?\" Sandecker asked him.\n\n\"From the treasure chamber?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nDuncan thought a moment. \"Pitt might have a chance if he managed to reach a dry shore within five hundred meters. We could tie a man on a guideline and safely send him downstream that far, and then pull them back against the current.\"\n\n\"And if no sign of Pitt is found before the guideline runs out?\" asked Giordino.\n\nDuncan shrugged solemnly. \"Then if his body doesn't surface in the Gulf, we'll never find him.\"\n\n\"Is there any hope for Dirk?\" Loren pleaded. \"Any hope at all?\"\n\nDuncan looked from Giordino to Sandecker before answering. All eyes reflected abject hopelessness and their faces were etched with despair. He turned back to Loren and said gently, \"I can't lie to you, Miss Smith.\" The words appeared to cause him great discomfort. \"Dirk's chances are as good as any badly injured man's of reaching Lake Mead outside of Las Vegas after being cast adrift in the Colorado River at the entrance to the Grand Canyon.\"\n\nThe words came like a physical blow to Loren. She began to sway on her feet. Giordino reached out and grabbed her arm. It seemed that her heart stopped, and she whispered, \"To me, Dirk Pitt will never die.\"\n\n\"The fish are a little shy today,\" said Joe Hagen to his wife, Claire.\n\nShe was lying on her belly on the roof of the boat's main cabin, barely wearing a purple bikini with the halter untied, reading a magazine. She pushed her sunglasses on top of her head and laughed. \"You couldn't catch a fish if it jumped up and landed in the boat.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"Just wait and see.\"\n\n\"The only fish you'll find this far north in the Gulf is shrimp,\" she nagged.\n\nThe Hagens were in their early sixties and in reasonably good shape. As with most women her age, Claire's bottom had spread and her waist carried a little flab, but her face was fairly free of wrinkles and her breasts were still large and firm. Joe was a big man who fought a losing battle with a paunch that had grown into a well-rounded stomach. Together they ran a family auto dealership in Anaheim specializing in clean, low-mileage used cars.\n\nAfter Joe bought a 15-meter (50-foot) oceangoing ketch, and named it The First Attempt, out of Newport Beach, California, they began leaving the management of their business to their two sons. They liked to sail down the coast and around Cabo San Lucas into the Sea of Cortez, spending the fall months cruising back and forth between picturesque ports nestled on the shores.\n\nThis was the first time they had sailed this far north. As he lazily trolled for whatever fish took a fancy to his bait, Joe kept half an eye on the fathometer as he idled along on the engine with the sails furled. The tides at this end of the Gulf could vary as much as 7 meters (23 feet) and he didn't want to run on an uncharted sandbar.\n\nHe relaxed as the stylus showed a depression under the keel to be over 50 meters (164 feet) deep. A puzzling feature, he thought. The seafloor on the north end of the Gulf was uniformly shallow, seldom going below 10 meters at high tide. The bottom was usually a mixture of silt and sand. The fathometer read the underwater depression as uneven hard rock.\n\n\"Aha, they laughed at all the great geniuses,\" said Joe as he felt a tug on his trolling line. He reeled it in and discovered a California corbina about the length of his arm on the hook.\n\nClaire shaded her eyes with one hand. \"He's too pretty to keep. Throw the poor thing back.\"\n\n\"That's odd.\"\n\n\"What's odd?\"\n\n\"All the other corbinas I've ever caught had dark spots on a white body. This sucker is colored like a fluorescent canary.\"\n\nShe adjusted her halter and came astern to have a closer look at his catch.\n\n\"Now this is really weird,\" said Joe, holding up one hand and displaying palm and fingers that were stained a bright yellow. \"If I weren't a sane man, I'd say somebody dyed this fish.\"\n\n\"He sparkles under the sun as if his scales were spangles,\" said Claire.\n\nJoe peered over the side of the boat. \"The water in this one particular area looks like it was squeezed out of a lemon.\"\n\n\"Could be a good fishing hole.\"\n\n\"You may be right, old girl.\" Joe moved past her to the bow and threw out the anchor. \"This looks as good a place as any to spend the afternoon angling for a big one.\"\n\nThere was no rest for the weary. Pitt went over four more cataracts. Providentially, none had a steep, yawning drop like the one that almost killed him and Giordino. The steepest drop he encountered was 2 meters (6.5 feet). The partially deflated Wallowing Windbag bravely plunged over the sharp ledge and successfully ran an obstacle course through rocks hiding under roaring sheets of froth and spray before continuing her voyage to oblivion.\n\nIt was the boiling stretches of rapids that proved brutal. Only after they extracted their toll in battering torment could Pitt relax for a short time in the forgiving, unobstructed stretches of calm water that followed. The bruising punishment made his wounds feel as if they were being stabbed by little men with pitchforks. But the pain served a worthy purpose by sharpening his senses. He cursed the river, certain it was saving the worst for last before smashing his desperate gamble to escape.\n\nThe paddle was torn from his hand, but it proved a small loss. With 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of equipment in a collapsing boat in addition to him, it was useless to attempt a sharp course change to dodge rocks that loomed up in the dark, especially while trying to paddle with one arm. He was too weak to do little more than feebly grasp the support straps attached to the interior of the hull and let the current take him where it might.\n\nTwo more float cells were ruptured after colliding with sharp rocks that sliced through the thin skin of the hull, and Pitt found himself lying half-covered with water in what had become little more than a collapsed air bag. Surprisingly, he kept a death grip on the flashlight with his right hand. But he had completely drained three of the air tanks and most of the fourth while dragging the sagging little vessel through several fully submerged galleries before reaching open caverns on the other side and reinflating the remaining float cells.\n\nPitt never suffered from claustrophobia but it would have come easy for most people in the black never-ending void. He avoided any thoughts of panic by singing and talking to himself during his wild ride through the unfriendly water. He shone the light on his hands and feet. They were shriveled like prunes after the long hours of immersion.\n\n\"With all this water, dehydration is the least of my problems,\" he muttered to the dank, uncaring rock.\n\nHe floated over transparent pools that dropped down shafts of solid rock so deep the beam of his lamp could not touch bottom. He toyed with the thought of tourists coming through this place. A pity people can't take the tour and view these crystallized Gothic caverns, he thought. Perhaps now that the river was known to exist, a tunnel might be excavated to bring in visitors to study the geological marvels.\n\nHe had tried to conserve his three flashlights, but one by one their batteries gave out and he dropped them over the side. He estimated that only twenty minutes of light remained in his last lamp before the Stygian gloom returned for good.\n\nRunning rapids in a raft under the sun and blue sky is called white-water rafting, his exhausted mind deliberated. Down here they could call it black-water rafting. The idea sounded very funny and for some reason he laughed. His laughter carried into a vast side chamber, echoing in a hundred eerie sounds. If he hadn't known it came from him, it would have curdled his blood.\n\nIt no longer seemed possible that there could be any place but this nightmare maze of caverns creeping tortuously end on end through such an alien environment. He had lost all sense of direction. \"Bearings\" was only a word from a dictionary. His compass was made useless by an abundance of iron ore in the rock. He felt so disoriented and removed from the surface world above that he wondered if he had finally crossed the threshold into lunacy. The only breath of sanity was fueled by the stupendous sights revealed by the light from his lamp.\n\nHe forced himself to regain control by playing mind games. He tried to memorize details of each new cavern and gallery, of each bend and turn of the river, so he could describe them to others after he escaped to sunlight. But there were so many of them his numbed mind found it impossible to retain more than a few vivid images. Not only that, he found he had to concentrate on keeping the Windbag afloat.\n\nAnother float cell was hissing its buoyancy away through a puncture.\n\nHow far have I come? he wondered dully. How much farther to the end? His fogged mind was wandering. He had to get a grip on himself. He was beyond hunger, no thoughts of thick steaks or prime rib with a bottle of beer flooded through his mind. His battered and spent body had given far more than he expected from it.\n\nThe shrunken hull of the Hovercraft struck the cavern's roof which arched downward into the water.\n\nThe craft revolved in circles, bumping against the rock until it worked off to one side of the mainstream of the river and gently grounded on a shoal. Pitt lay in the pool that half-filled the interior, his legs dangling over the sides, too played out to don the last air tank, deflate the craft, and convey it through the flooded gallery ahead.\n\nHe couldn't pass out. Not now. He had too far to go. He took several deep breaths and drank a small amount of water. He groped for the thermos, untied it from a hook and finished the last of the coffee. The caffeine helped revive him a bit. He flipped the thermos into the river and watched it float against the rock, too buoyant to drift through to the other side.\n\nThe lamp was so weak it barely threw a beam. He switched it off to save what little juice was left in the batteries, lay back, and stared into the suffocating blackness.\n\nNothing hurt anymore. His nerve endings had shut down and his body was numb. He must have been almost two pints low on blood, he figured. He hated to face the thought of failure. For a few minutes he refused to believe he couldn't make it back to the world above. The faithful Wallowing Windbag had taken him this far, but if it lost one more float cell he would have to abandon it and carry on alone. He began concentrating his waning energies on the effort that still lay ahead.\n\nSomething jogged his memory. He smelled something. What was it they said about smells? They can trigger past events in your mind. He breathed in deeply, trying not to let the scent get away before he could recall why it was so familiar. He licked his lips and recognized a taste that hadn't been there before.\n\nSalt. And then it washed over him.\n\nThe smell of the sea.\n\nHe had finally reached the end of the subterranean river system that climaxed in the Gulf.\n\nPitt popped open his eyes and raised his hand until it almost touched the tip of his nose. He couldn't distinguish detail, but there was a vague shadow that shouldn't have been there in the eternal dark of his subterranean world. He stared down into the water and detected a murky reflection. Light was seeping in from the passage ahead.\n\nThe discovery that daylight was within reach raised immensely his hopes of surviving.\n\nHe climbed out of the Wallowing Windbag and considered the two worst hazards he now faced--length of dive to the surface and decompression. He checked the pressure gauge that ran. from the manifold of the air tank. Eight hundred fifty pounds per square inch. Enough air for a run of maybe 300 meters (984 feet), providing he stayed calm, breathed easily, and didn't exert himself. If surface air was much beyond that, he wouldn't have to worry about the other problem, decompression. He'd drown long before acquiring the notorious bends.\n\nPeriodic checks of his depth gauge during his long journey had told him the pressure inside most of the airfilled caverns ran only slightly higher than the outside atmospheric pressure. A concern but not a great fear. And he had seldom exceeded 30 meters of depth when diving under a flooded overhang that divided two open galleries. If faced with the same situation, he would have to be careful to make a controlled 18-meter (60-foot) per-minute ascent to avoid decompression sickness.\n\nWhatever the obstacles, he could neither go back nor stay where he was. He had to go on. There was no other decision to make. This would be the final test of what little strength and resolve was still left in him.\n\nHe wasn't dead yet. Not until he breathed the last tiny bit of oxygen in his air tank. And then he would go on until his lungs burst.\n\nHe checked to see that the manifold valves were open and the low-pressure hose was connected to his buoyancy compensator. Next, he strapped on his tank and buckled the quick-release snaps. A quick breath to be sure his regulator was functioning properly and he was ready.\n\nWithout his lost dive mask, his vision would be blurred, but all he had to do was swim toward the light.\n\nHe clamped his teeth on the mouthpiece of his breathing regulator, gathered his nerve, and counted to three.\n\nIt was time to go, and he dove into the river for the last time.\n\nAs he gently kicked his bare feet he'd have given his soul for his lost fins. Down, down the overhang sloped ahead of him. He passed thirty meters, then forty. He began to worry after he passed fifty meters.\n\nWhen diving on compressed air, there is an invisible barrier between sixty and eighty meters. Beyond that a diver begins to feel like a drunk and loses control of his mental faculties.\n\nHis air tank made an unearthly screeching sound as it scraped against the rock above him. Because he had dropped his weight belt after his near-death experience over the great waterfall, and because of the neoprene in his shredded wet suit, he was diving with positive buoyancy. He doubled over and dove deeper to avoid the contact.\n\nPitt thought the plunging rock would never end. His depth gauge read 75 meters (246 feet) before the current carried him beneath and around the tip of the overhang. Now the upward slope was gradual. Not the ideal situation. He'd have preferred a direct ascent to the surface to cut the distance and save his dwindling air supply.\n\nThe light grew steadily brighter until he could read the numbers of his dive watch without the aid of the dying beam from the lamp. The hands on the orange dial read ten minutes after five o'clock. Was it early morning or afternoon? How long since he dove into the river? He couldn't remember if it was ten minutes or fifty. His mind sluggishly puzzled over the answers.\n\nThe clear, transparent emerald green of the river water turned more blue and opaque. The current was fading and his ascent slowed. There was a distant shimmer above him. At last the surface itself appeared.\n\nHe was in the Gulf. He had exited the river passage and was swimming in the Sea of Cortez. Pitt looked up and saw a shadow looming far in the distance. One final check of his air pressure gauge. The needle quivered on zero. His air was almost gone.\n\nRather than suck in a huge gulp, he used what little was left to partially inflate his buoyancy compensator so it would gently lift him to the surface if he blacked out from lack of oxygen.\n\nOne last inhalation that barely puffed out his lungs and he relaxed, exhaling small breaths to compensate for the declining pressure as he rose from the depths. The hiss of his air bubbles leaving the regulator diminished as his lungs ran dry.\n\nThe surface appeared so close he could reach out and touch it when his lungs began to burn. It was a spiteful illusion. The waves were still 20 meters (66 feet) away.\n\nHe put some strength into his kick as a huge elastic band seemed to tighten around his chest. Soon, the desire for air became his only world as darkness started seeping around the edges of his eyes.\n\nPitt became entangled in something that hindered his ascent. His vision, blurred without a dive mask, failed to distinguish what was binding him. Instinctively, he thrashed clumsily in an attempt to free himself.\n\nA great roaring sound came from inside his brain as it screamed in protest. But in that instant before blackness shut down his mind, he sensed that his body was being pulled toward the surface.\n\n\"I've hooked a big one!\" shouted Joe Hagen joyously, \"You got a marlin?\" Claire asked excitedly, seeing her husband's fishing pole bent like a question mark.\n\n\"He's not giving much fight for a marlin,\" Joe panted as he feverishly turned the crank on his reel.\n\n\"Feels more like a dead weight.\"\n\n\"Maybe you dragged him to death.\"\n\n\"Get the gaff. He's almost to the surface.\"\n\nClaire snatched a long-handled gaff from two hooks and pointed it over the side of the yacht like a spear. \"I see something,\" she cried. \"It looks big and black.\"\n\nThen she screamed in horror.\n\nPitt was a millimeter away from unconsciousness when his head broke into a trough between the waves. He spit out his regulator and drew in a deep breath. The sun's reflection on the water blinded eyes that hadn't seen light in almost two days. He squinted rapturously at the sudden kaleidoscope of colors.\n\nRelief, joy of living, fulfillment of a great accomplishment-- they flooded together.\n\nA woman's scream pierced his ears and he looked up, startled to see the Capri-blue hull of a yacht rising beside him and two people staring over the side, their faces pale as death. It was then that he realized he was entangled in fishing line. Something slapped against his leg. He gripped the line and pulled a small skipjack tuna, no longer than his foot, out of the water. The poor thing had a huge hook protruding from its mouth.\n\nPitt gently gripped the fish under one armpit and eased out the hook with his good hand. Then he stared into the little fish's beady eyes.\n\n\"Look, Toto,\" he said jubilantly, \"we're back in Kansas!\"\n\nCommander Maderas and his crew had moved out of San Felipe and resumed their search pattern when the call came through from the Hagens.\n\n\"Sir,\" said his radioman, \"I just received an urgent message from the yacht The First Attempt.\"\n\n\"What does it say?\"\n\n\"The skipper, an American by the name of Joseph Hagen, reports picking up a man he caught while fishing.\"\n\nMaderas frowned. \"He must mean he snagged a dead body while trolling.\"\n\n\"No, sir, he was quite definite. The man he caught is alive.\"\n\nMaderas was puzzled. \"Can't be the one we're searching for. Not after viewing the other one. Have any boats in the area reported a crew member lost overboard?\"\n\nThe radioman shook his head. \"I've heard nothing.\"\n\n\"What is The First Attempt's position?\"\n\n\"Twelve nautical miles to the northwest of us.\"\n\nMaderas stepped into the wheelhouse and nodded at Hidalgo. \"Set a course to the northwest and watch for an American yacht.\" Then he turned to his radioman. \"Call this Joseph Hagen for more details on the man they pulled from the water and tell him to remain at his present position. We'll rendezvous in approximately thirty-five minutes.\"\n\nHidalgo looked at him across the chart table. \"What do you think?\"\n\nMaderas smiled. \"As a good Catholic, I must believe what the church tells me about miracles. But this is one I have to see for myself.\"\n\nThe fleet of yachts and the many boats of the Mexican fishing fleets that ply the Sea of Cortez have their own broadcast network. There is considerable bantering among the brotherhood of boat owners, similar to the old neighborhood telephone party lines. The chatter includes weather reports, invitations to seaboard social parties, the latest news from home ports, and even a rundown of items for sale or swap.\n\nThe word went up and down the Gulf about the owners of The First Attempt catching a human on a fishing line. Interest was fueled by those who embellished the story before passing it on through the Baja net. Yacht owners who tuned in late heard a wild tale about the Hagens catching a killer whale and finding a live man inside.\n\nSome of the larger oceangoing vessels were equipped with radios capable of reaching stations in the United States. Soon reports were rippling out from Baja to as far away as Washington.\n\nThe Hagen broadcast was picked up by a Mexican navy radio station in La Paz. The radio operator on duty asked for confirmation, but Hagen was too busy jabbering away with other yacht owners and failed to reply. Thinking it was another of the wild parties in the boating social swing, he noted it in his log and concentrated on official navy signals.\n\nWhen he went off duty twenty minutes later, he casually mentioned it to the officer in charge of the station.\n\n\"It sounded pretty loco,\" he explained. \"The report came in English. Probably an intoxicated gringo playing games over his radio.\"\n\n\"Better send a patrol boat to make an inspection,\" said the officer. \"I'll inform the Northern District Fleet Headquarters and see who we have in the area.\"\n\nFleet headquarters did not have to be informed. Maderas had already alerted them that he was heading at full speed toward The First Attempt. Headquarters had also received an unexpected signal from the Mexican chief of naval operations, ordering the commanding officer to rush the search and extend every effort for a successful rescue operation.\n\nAdmiral Ricardo Alvarez was having lunch with his wife at the officers' club when an aide hurried to his table with both signals.\n\n\"A man caught by a fisherman.\" Alvarez snorted. \"What kind of nonsense is this?\"\n\n\"That was the message relayed by Commander Maderas of the G-21,\" replied the aide.\n\n\"How soon before Maderas comes in contact with the yacht?\"\n\n\"He should rendezvous at any moment.\"\n\n\"I wonder why Naval Operations is so involved with an ordinary tourist lost at sea?\"\n\n\"Word has come down that the President himself is interested in the rescue,\" said the aide.\n\nAdmiral Alvarez gave his wife a sour look. \"I knew that damned North American Free Trade Agreement was a mistake. Now we have to kiss up to the Americans every time one of them falls in the Gulf.\"\n\nSo it was that there were more questions than answers when Pitt was transferred from The First Attempt soon after the patrol vessel came alongside. He stood on the deck, partially supported by Hagen, who had stripped off the torn wet suit and lent Pitt a golf shirt and a pair of shorts. Claire had replaced the bandage on his shoulder and taped one over the nasty cut on his forehead.\n\nHe shook hands with Joseph Hagen. \"I guess I'm the biggest fish you ever caught.\"\n\nHagen laughed. \"Sure something to tell the grandkids.\"\n\nPitt then kissed Claire on the cheek. \"Don't forget to send me your recipe for fish chowder. I've never tasted any so good.\"\n\n\"You must have liked it. You put away at least a gallon.\"\n\n\"I'll always be in your debt for saving my life. Thank you.\"\n\nPitt turned and was helped into a small launch that ferried him to the patrol boat. As soon as he stepped onto the deck, he was greeted by Maderas and Hidalgo before being escorted to the sick bay by the ship's medical corpsman. Prior to ducking through a hatch, Pitt turned and gave a final wave to the Hagens.\n\nJoe and Claire stood with their arms around each other's waist. Joe turned and looked at his wife with a puzzled expression and said, \"I've never caught five fish in my entire life and you can't cook worth sour grapes. What did he mean by your great-tasting fish chowder?\"\n\nClaire sighed. \"The poor man. He was so hurt and hungry I didn't have the heart to tell him I fed him canned soup doused with brandy.\"\n\nCurtis Starger got the word in Guaymas that Pitt had been found alive. He was searching the hacienda used by the Zolars. The call came in over his Motorola Iridium satellite phone from his office in Calexico.\n\nIn an unusual display of teamwork, the Mexican investigative agencies had allowed Starger and his Customs people to probe the buildings and grounds for additional evidence to help convict the family dynasty of art thieves.\n\nStarger and his agents had arrived to find the grounds and airstrip empty of all life. The hacienda was vacant and the pilot of Joseph Zolar's private plane had decided now was a good time to resign. He simply walked through the front gate, took a bus into town, and caught a flight to his home in Houston, Texas.\n\nA search of the hacienda turned up nothing concrete. The rooms had been cleaned of any incriminating evidence. The abandoned plane parked on the airstrip was another matter. Inside, Starger found four crudely carved wooden effigies with childlike faces painted on them.\n\n\"What do you make of these?\" Starger asked one of the agents, who was an expert in ancient Southwest artifacts.\n\n\"They look like some kind of Indian religious symbols.\"\n\n\"Are they made from cottonwood?\"\n\nThe agent lifted his sunglasses and examined the idols close up. \"Yes, I think I can safely say they're carved out of cottonwood.\"\n\nStarger ran his hand gently over one of the idols. \"I have a suspicion these are the sacred idols Pitt was looking for.\"\n\nRudi Gunn was told while he was lying in a hospital bed. A nurse entered his room, followed by one of Starger's agents.\n\n\"Mr. Gunn. I'm Agent Anthony Di Maggio with the Customs Service. I thought you'd like to know that Dirk Pitt was picked up alive in the Gulf about half an hour ago.\"\n\nGunn closed his eyes and sighed with heavy relief. \"I knew he'd make it.\"\n\n\"Quite a feat of courage, I hear, swimming over a hundred kilometers through an underground river.\"\n\n\"No one else could have done it.\"\n\n\"I hope the good news will inspire you to become more cooperative,\" said the nurse, who talked sweetly while carrying a long rectal thermometer.\n\n\"Isn't he a good patient?\" asked Di Maggio.\n\n\"I've tended better.\"\n\n\"I wish to hell you'd give me a pair of pajamas,\" Gunn said nastily, \"instead of this peekaboo, lace-up-the-rear, shorty nightshirt.\"\n\n\"Hospital gowns are designed that way for a purpose,\" the nurse replied smartly.\n\n\"I wish to God you'd tell me what it is.\"\n\n\"I'd better go now and leave you alone,\" said Di Maggio, beating a retreat. \"Good luck on a speedy recovery.\"\n\n\"Thank you for giving me the word on Pitt,\" Gunn said sincerely.\n\n\"Not at all.\"\n\n\"You rest now,\" ordered the nurse. \"I'll be back in an hour with your medication.\"\n\nTrue to her word, the nurse returned in one hour on the dot. But the bed was empty. Gunn had fled, wearing nothing but the skimpy little gown and a blanket.\n\nStrangely, those on board the Alhambra were the last to know.\n\nLoren and Sandecker were meeting with Mexican Internal Police investigators beside the Pierce Arrow when news of Pitt's rescue came from the owner of a luxurious powerboat that was tied up at the nearby fuel station. He shouted across the water separating the two vessels.\n\n\"Ahoy the ferry!\"\n\nMiles Rodgers was standing on the deck by the wheelhouse talking with Shannon and Duncan. He leaned over the railing and shouted back. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"They found your boy!\"\n\nThe words carried inside the auto deck and Sandecker rushed out onto the open deck. \"Say again!\" he yelled.\n\n\"The owners of a sailing ketch fished a fellow out of the water,\" the yacht skipper replied. \"The Mexican navy reports say it's the guy they were looking for.\"\n\nEveryone was on an outside deck now. All afraid to ask the question that might have an answer they dreaded to hear.\n\nGiordino accelerated his wheelchair up to the loading ramp as if it were a super fuel dragster. He apprehensively yelled over to the powerboat. \"Was he alive?\"\n\n\"The Mexicans said he was in pretty poor shape, but came around after the boat owner's wife pumped some soup into him.\"\n\n\"Pitt's alive!\" gasped Shannon.\n\nDuncan shook his head in disbelief. \"I can't believe he made it through to the Gulf!\"\n\n\"I do,\" murmured Loren, her face in her hands, the tears flowing. The dignity and the poise seemed to crumble. She leaned down and hugged Giordino, her cheeks wet and flushed red beneath a new tan. \"I knew he couldn't die.\"\n\nSuddenly, the Mexican investigators were forgotten as if they were miles away and everyone was shouting and hugging each other. Sandecker, normally taciturn and reserved, let out a resounding whoop and rushed to the wheelhouse, snatched up the Iridium phone and excitedly called the Mexican Navy Fleet Command for more information.\n\nDuncan frantically began poring over his hydrographic charts of the desert water tables, impatient to learn what data Pitt had managed to accumulate during the incredible passage through the underwater river system.\n\nShannon and Miles celebrated by breaking out a bottle of cheap champagne they had found in the back of the galley's refrigerator, and passing out glasses. Miles reflected genuine joy at the news, but Shannon's eyes seemed unusually thoughtful. She stared openly at Loren, as a curious envy bloomed inside her that she couldn't believe existed. She slowly became aware that perhaps she had made a mistake by not displaying more compassion toward Pitt.\n\n\"That damned guy is like the bad penny that always turns up,\" said Giordino, fighting to control his emotions.\n\nLoren looked at him steadily. \"Did Dirk tell you he asked me to marry him?\"\n\n\"No, but I'm not surprised. He thinks a lot of you.\"\n\n\"But you don't think it's a good idea, do you?\"\n\nGiordino slowly shook his head. \"Forgive me if I say a union between you two would not be made in heaven.\"\n\n\"We're too headstrong and independent for one another. Is that what you mean?\"\n\n\"There's that, all right. You and he are like express trains racing along parallel tracks, occasionally meeting in stations but eventually heading for different destinations.\"\n\nShe squeezed his hand. \"I thank you for being candid.\"\n\n\"What do I know about relationships?\" He laughed. \"I never last with a woman more than two weeks.\"\n\nLoren looked into Giordino's eyes. \"There is something you're not telling me.\"\n\nGiordino stared down at the deck planking. \"Women seem to be intuitive about such things.\"\n\n\"Who was she?\" Loren asked hesitantly.\n\n\"Her name was Summer,\" replied Giordino honestly. \"She died fifteen years ago in the sea off Hawaii.\"\n\n\"The Pacific Vortex affair. I remember him telling me about it.\"\n\n\"He went crazy trying to save her, but she was lost.\"\n\n\"And he still carries her in his memory,\" said Loren.\n\nGiordino nodded. \"He never talks about her, but he often gets a faraway look in his eyes when he sees a woman who resembles her.\"\n\n\"I've seen that look on more than one occasion,\" Loren said, her voice melancholy.\n\n\"He can't go on forever longing for a ghost,\" said Giordino earnestly. \"We all have an image of a lost love who has to be put to rest someday.\"\n\nLoren had never seen the wisecracking Giordino this wistful before. \"Do you have a ghost?\"\n\nHe looked at her and smiled. \"One summer, when I was nineteen, I saw a girl riding a bicycle along a sidewalk on Balboa Island in Southern California. She wore brief white shorts and a soft green blouse tied around her midriff. Her honey-blond hair was in a long ponytail. Her legs and arms were tanned mahogany. I wasn't close enough to see the color of her eyes, but I somehow knew they had to be blue.\n\nShe had the look of a free spirit with a warm sense of humor. There isn't a day that goes by I don't recall her image.\"\n\n\"You didn't go after her?\" Loren asked in mild surprise.\n\n\"Believe it or not, I was very shy in those days. I walked the same sidewalk every day for a month, hoping to spot her again. But she never showed. She was probably vacationing with her parents and left for home soon after our paths crossed.\"\n\n\"That's sad,\" said Loren.\n\n\"Oh, I don't know.\" Giordino laughed suddenly. \"We might have married, had ten kids and found we hated each other.\"\n\n\"To me, Pitt is like your lost love. An illusion I can never quite hold on to.\"\n\n\"He'll change,\" Giordino said sympathetically. \"All men mellow with age.\"\n\nLoren smiled faintly and shook her head. \"Not the Dirk Pitts of this world. They're driven by an inner desire to solve mysteries and challenge the unknown. The last thing any of them wants is to grow old with the wife and kids and die in a nursing home.\"\n\nThe small port of San Felipe wore a festive air. The dock was crowded with people. Everywhere there was an atmosphere of excitement as the patrol boat neared the entrance to the breakwaters forming the harbor.\n\nMaderas turned to Pitt. \"Quite a reception.\"\n\nPitt's eyes narrowed against the sun. \"Is it some sort of local holiday?\"\n\n\"News of your remarkable journey through the earth has drawn them.\"\n\n\"You've got to be kidding,\" said Pitt in honest surprise.\n\n\"No, senor. Because of your discovery of the river flowing below the desert, you've become a hero to every farmer and rancher from here to Arizona who struggles to survive in a harsh wasteland.\" He nodded at two vans with technicians unloading television camera equipment. \"That's why you've become big news.\"\n\n\"Oh, God.\" Pitt groaned. \"All I want is a soft bed to sleep in for three days.\"\n\nPitt's mental and physical condition had improved considerably upon receiving word over the ship's radio from Admiral Sandecker that Loren, Rudi, and Al were alive, if slightly the worse for wear.\n\nSandecker also brought him up to date on Cyrus Sarason's death at the hands of Billy Yuma and the capture of Zolar and Oxley, along with Huascar's treasure, by Gaskill and Ragsdale with the help of Henry and Micki Moore.\n\nThere was hope for the little people after all, Pitt thought stoically.\n\nIt seemed like an hour, though it was only a few minutes before the Porqueria tied up to the Alhambra for the second time that day. A large paper sign was unfolded across the upper passenger deck of the ferryboat, the letters still dripping fresh paint. It read, WELCOME BACK FROM THE DEAD.\n\nOn the auto deck a Mexican mariachi street band was lined up, playing and singing a tune that seemed familiar. Pitt leaned over the railing of the patrol boat, cocked an ear, and threw back his head in laughter. He then doubled over with pain as his merriment caused a burst of fire inside his rib cage.\n\nGiordino had pulled off the ultimate coup.\n\n\"Do you know the song they're playing?\" asked Maderas, mildly alarmed at Pitt's strange display of mirth and agony.\n\n\"I recognize the tune, but not the words,\" Pitt gasped through the hurt. \"They're singing in Spanish.\"\n\n\u2002Miralos andando\n\n\u2002Vealos andando\n\n\u2002Lleva a tu novia favorita, tu companero real\n\n\u2002Bajate a la represa, dije la represa\n\n\u2002Juntate con ese gentio andando, oiga la musica y la cancion\n\n\u2002Es simplemente magnifico camarada, esperando en la represa\n\n\u2002Esperando por el Roberto E. Lee.\n\n\"Miralos andando,\" repeated Maderas, confused. \"What do they mean, 'Go to the dam'?\"\n\n\"Levee,\" Pitt guessed. \"The opening words of the song are, 'Go down to the levee.'\"\n\nAs the trumpets blared, the guitars strummed, and the seven throats of the band warbled out a mariachi version of \"Waiting for the Robert E. Lee,\" Loren stood among the throng that had mobbed on board the ferry and waved wildly. She could see Pitt search the crowd until he found her and happily waved back.\n\nShe saw the dressing wrapped around his head, the left arm in a sling, and the cast on one wrist. In his borrowed shorts and golf shirt he looked out of place among the uniformed crew of the Mexican navy.\n\nAt first glance, he appeared amazingly fit for a man who had survived a journey through hell, purgatory, and a black abyss. But Loren knew Pitt was a master at covering up exhaustion and pain. She could see them in his eyes.\n\nPitt spotted Admiral Sandecker standing behind Giordino in his wheelchair. His wandering eyes also picked out Gordo Padilla with his arm around his wife, Rosa. Jesus, Gato, and the engineer, whose name he could never remember, stood nearby brandishing bottles in the air. Then the gangplank was down, and Pitt shook hands with Maderas and Hidalgo.\n\n\"Thank you, gentlemen, and thank your corpsman for me. He did a first-rate job of patching me up.\"\n\n\"It is we who are in your debt, Senor Pitt,\" said Hidalgo. \"My mother and father own a small ranch not far from here and will reap the benefits when wells are sunk into your river.\"\n\n\"Please make me one promise,\" said Pitt.\n\n\"If it's within our power,\" replied Maderas.\n\nPitt grinned. \"Don't ever let anyone name that damned river after me.\"\n\nHe turned and walked across to the auto deck of the ferry and into a sea of bodies. Loren rushed up to him, stopped, and slowly put her arms around his neck so she would not press her body against his injuries. Her lips were trembling as she kissed him.\n\nShe pulled back as the tears flowed, smiled and said, \"Welcome home, sailor.\"\n\nThen the rush was on. Newsmen and TV cameramen from both sides of the border swarmed around as Pitt greeted Sandecker and Giordino.\n\n\"I thought sure you'd bought a tombstone this time,\" said Giordino, beaming like a neon sign on the Las Vegas strip.\n\nPitt smiled. \"If I hadn't found the Wallowing Windbag, I wouldn't be here.\"\n\n\"I hope you realize,\" said Sandecker, faking a frown, \"that you're getting too old for swimming around in caves.\"\n\nPitt held up his good hand as if taking an oath. \"So help me, Admiral, if I ever so much as look at another underground cavern, shoot me in the foot.\"\n\nThen Shannon came up and planted a long kiss on his lips that had Loren fuming. When she released him, she said, \"I missed you.\"\n\nBefore he could reply, Miles Rodgers and Peter Duncan were pumping his uninjured hand. \"You're one tough character,\" said Rodgers.\n\n\"I busted the computer and lost your data,\" Pitt said to Duncan. \"I'm genuinely sorry.\"\n\n\"No problem,\" Duncan replied with a broad smile. \"Now that you've proven the river runs from Satan's Sinkhole under Cerro el Capirote and shown where it resurges into the Gulf, we can trace its path with floating sonic geophysical imaging systems along with transmitting instrument packages.\"\n\nAt that moment, unnoticed by most of the mob, a dilapidated Mexicali taxi smoked to a stop. A man jumped out and hurried across the dock and onto the auto deck wearing only a blanket. He put his head down and barreled his way through the mass of people until he reached Pitt.\n\n\"Rudi!\" Pitt roared as he wrapped his free arm around the little man's shoulder. \"Where did you fall from?\"\n\nAs if he'd timed it, Gunn's splinted fingers lost their grip on the blanket and it fell to the deck, leaving him standing in only the hospital smock. \"I escaped the clutches of the nurse from hell to come here and greet you,\" he said, without any sign of embarrassment.\n\n\"Are you mending okay?\"\n\n\"I'll be back at my desk at NUMA before you.\"\n\nPitt turned and hailed Rodgers. \"Miles, you got your camera?\"\n\n\"No good photographer is ever without his cameras,\" Rodgers shouted over the noise of the crowd.\n\n\"Take a picture of the three battered bastards of Cerro el Capirote.\"\n\n\"And one battered bitch,\" added Loren, squeezing into the lineup.\n\nRodgers got off three shots before the reporters took over.\n\n\"Mr. Pitt!\" One of the TV interviewers pushed a microphone in front of his face. \"What can you tell us about the subterranean river?\"\n\n\"Only that it exists,\" he answered smoothly, \"and that it's very wet.\"\n\n\"How large would you say it is?\"\n\nHe had to think a moment as he slipped his arm around Loren and squeezed her hip. \"I'd guess about two-thirds the size of the Rio Grande.\"\n\n\"That big?\"\n\n\"Easily.\"\n\n\"How do you feel after swimming through underground caverns for over a hundred kilometers?\"\n\nPitt was always irritated when a reporter asked how a mother or father felt after their house burned down with all their children inside, or how a witness felt who watched someone fall from an airplane without a parachute.\n\n\"Feel?\" stated Pitt. \"Right now I feel that my bladder will burst if I don't get to a bathroom.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "HOMECOMING",
                "text": "[ November 4, 1998 ]\n\n[ San Felipe, Baja California ]\n\nTwo days later, after everyone gave detailed statements to the Mexican investigators, they were free to leave the country. They assembled on the dock to bid their farewells.\n\nDr. Peter Duncan was the first to leave. The hydrologist slipped away early in the morning and was gone before anyone missed him. He had a busy year ahead of him as director of the Sonoran Water Project, as it was to be called. The water from the river was to prove a godsend to the drought-plagued Southwest. Water, the lifeblood of civilization, would create jobs for the people of the desert.\n\nConstruction of aqueducts and pipelines would channel the water into towns and cities and would turn a dry lake into a recreational reservoir the size of Lake Powell.\n\nSoon to follow would be projects to mine the mineral riches Pitt had discovered on his underground odyssey and to build a tourist center beneath the earth.\n\nDr. Shannon Kelsey was invited back to Peru to continue her excavations of the ruins in the Chachapoyan cities. Where she went, Miles Rodgers followed.\n\n\"I hope we meet again,\" said Rodgers, shaking Pitt's hand.\n\n\"Only if you promise to stay out of sacred sinkholes,\" Pitt said warmly.\n\nRodgers laughed. \"Count on it.\"\n\nPitt looked down into Shannon's eyes. The determination and boldness burned as bright as ever. \"I wish you all the best.\"\n\nShe saw in him the only man she had ever met whom she couldn't have or control. She felt an undercurrent of affection toward him she couldn't explain. Just to spite Loren again, Shannon kissed Pitt long and hard.\n\n\"So long, big guy. Don't forget me.\"\n\nPitt nodded and said simply, \"I couldn't if I tried.\"\n\nShortly after Shannon and Miles left in their rented car for the airport in San Diego, a NUMA helicopter dropped out of the sun and touched down on the deck of the Alhambra. The pilot left the engine idling as he jumped down from the cargo hatch. He looked around a moment and then, recognizing Sandecker, approached him.\n\n\"Good morning, Admiral. Ready to leave, or should 1 shut down the engine?\"\n\n\"Keep it running,\" answered Sandecker. \"What's the status of my NUMA passenger jet?\"\n\n\"Waiting on the ground at the Yuma Marine Corps Air Station to fly you and the others back to Washington.\"\n\n\"Okay, we're set to board.\" Sandecker turned to Pitt. \"So, you're going on sick leave?\"\n\n\"Loren and I thought we'd join a Classic Car Club of America tour through Arizona.\"\n\n\"I'll expect you in one week.\" He turned to Loren and gave her a brief kiss on the cheek. \"You're a member of Congress. Don't take any crap from him and see that he gets back in one piece, fit for work.\"\n\nLoren smiled. \"Don't worry, Admiral. My constituents want me back on the job infighting shape too.\"\n\n\"What about me?\" said Giordino. \"Don't I get time off to recuperate?\"\n\n\"You can sit behind a desk just as easily in a wheelchair.\" Then Sandecker smiled fiendishly. \"Now, Rudi, he's a different case. I think I'll send him to Bermuda for a month.\"\n\n\"Whatta guy,\" said Gunn, trying desperately to keep a straight face.\n\nIt was a charade. Pitt and Giordino were like sons to Sandecker. Nothing went on between them that wasn't marked with a high degree of respect. The admiral knew with dead certainty that as soon as they were sound and able, they'd be in his office pressuring him for an ocean project to direct.\n\nTwo dockhands lifted Giordino into the helicopter. One seat had to be removed to accommodate his outstretched legs.\n\nPitt leaned in the doorway and tweaked one of the toes that protruded from the cast. \"Try not to lose this helicopter like all the others.\"\n\n\"No big deal,\" Giordino came back. \"I get one of these things every time I buy ten gallons of gas.\"\n\nGunn placed his hand on Pitt's shoulder. \"It's been fun,\" he said lightly. \"We must do it again sometime.\"\n\nPitt made a horrified face. \"Not on your life.\"\n\nSandecker gave Pitt a light hug. \"You rest up and take it easy,\" he said softly so the others couldn't hear above the beat of the rotor blades. \"I'll see you when I see you.\"\n\n\"I'll make it soon.\"\n\nLoren and Pitt stood on the deck of the ferryboat and waved until the helicopter turned northeast over the waters of the Gulf. He turned to her. \"Well, that just leaves us.\"\n\nShe smiled teasingly. \"I'm starved. Why don't we head into Mexicali and find us a good Mexican restaurant?\"\n\n\"Now that you've broached the subject, I have a sudden craving for huevos rancheros.\"\n\n\"I guess I'll have to do the driving.\"\n\nPitt lifted his hand. \"I still have one good arm.\"\n\nLoren wouldn't heir of it. Pitt stood on the dock and guided her as she competently drove the big Pierce Arrow and its trailer up the ramp from the auto deck of the ferryboat onto the dock.\n\nPitt took one last, longing look at the walking beams of the old paddle steamer and wished he could have sailed it through the Panama Canal and up the Potomac River to Washington. But it was not meant to be. He gave a forlorn sigh and was slipping into the passenger seat when a car pulled up alongside.\n\nCurtis Starger climbed out.\n\nHe hailed them. \"Glad I caught you before you left. Dave Gaskill said to make sure you got this.\"\n\nHe handed Pitt something wrapped in an Indian blanket. Unable to take it with both hands, he looked helplessly at Loren. She took the blanket and spread it open.\n\nFour faces painted on clublike prayer sticks stared hack at them. \"The sacred idols of the Montolos,\"\n\nPitt said quietly. \"Where did you find them?\"\n\n\"We recovered them inside Joseph Zolar's private plane in Guaymas.\"\n\n\"I'd guessed the idols were in his dirty hands.\"\n\n\"They were positively identified as the missing Montolo effigies from a collectors data sheet we found with them,\" explained Starger.\n\n\"This will make the Montolos very happy.\"\n\nStarger looked at him with a crooked smile. \"I think we can trust you to deliver them.\"\n\nPitt chuckled and tilted his head toward the Travelodge. \"They're not nearly as valuable as all the gold inside the trailer.\"\n\nStarger threw Pitt a you-can't-fool-me look. \"Very funny. All the golden artifacts are accounted for.\"\n\n\"I promise to drop the idols of in the Montolo village on our way to the border.\"\n\n\"Dave Gaskill and I never nourished a doubt.\"\n\n\"How are the Zolars?\" Pitt asked.\n\n\"In jail with every charge from theft and illegal smuggling to murder hanging over their heads. You'll be happy to learn the judge denied them bail, dead certain they would flee the country.\n\n\"You people do nice work.\"\n\n\"Thanks to your help, Mr. Pitt. If the Customs Service can ever do you a favor, short of smuggling illegal goods into the country, of course, don't hesitate to give us a call.\"\n\n\"I'll remember that, thank you.\"\n\nBilly Yuma was unsaddling his horse after making the daily rounds of his small herd. He paused to look over the rugged landscape of cactus, mesquite, and tamarisk scattered through the rock outcroppings making up his part of the Sonoran Desert. He saw a dust cloud approaching that slowly materialized into what looked to him to be a very old automobile pulling a trailer, both vehicles painted in the same shade of dark, almost black, blue.\n\nHis curiosity rose even higher when the car and trailer stopped in front of his house. He walked from the corral as the passenger door opened and Pitt stepped out.\n\n\"A warm sun to you, my friend,\" Yuma greeted him.\n\n\"And clear skies to you,\" Pitt replied.\n\nYuma shook Pitt's right hand vigorously. \"I'm real glad to see you. They told me you died in the darkness.\"\n\n\"Almost, but not quite,\" said Pitt, nodding at the arm held by the sling. \"I wanted to thank you for entering the mountain and saving the lives of my friends.\"\n\n\"Evil men are meant to die,\" said Yuma philosophically. \"I'm happy I came in time.\"\n\nPitt handed Yuma the blanket-wrapped idols. \"I've brought something for you and your tribe.\"\n\nYuma pulled back the top half of the blanket tenderly, as if peeking at a baby. He stared mutely for several moments into the faces of the four deities. Then tears brimmed in his eyes. \"You have returned the soul of my people, our dreams, our religion. Now our children can be initiated and become men and women.\"\n\n\"I was told those who stole them experienced strange sounds like children wailing.\"\n\n\"They were crying to come home.\"\n\n\"I thought Indians never cried.\"\n\nYuma smiled as the joyous impact of what he held in his hands washed over him. \"Don't you believe it.\n\nWe just don't like to let anyone see us.\"\n\nPitt introduced Loren to Billy's wife, Polly, who insisted they stay for dinner, and would not take no for an answer. Loren let it slip that Pitt had a taste for huevos rancheros, so Polly made him enough to feed five ranch hands.\n\nDuring the meal, Yuma's friends and family came to the house and reverently looked upon the cottonwood idols. The men shook Pitt's hand while the women presented small handcrafted gifts to Loren. It was a very moving scene and Loren wept unashamedly.\n\nPitt and Yuma saw in each other two men who were basically very much alike. Neither had any illusions left. Pitt smiled at him. \"It is an honor to have you as a friend, Billy.\"\n\n\"You are always welcome here.\"\n\n\"When the water is brought to the surface,\" said Pitt, \"I will see that your village is at the top of the list to receive it.\n\nYuma removed an amulet on a leather thong from around his neck and gave it to Pitt. \"Something to remember your friend by.\"\n\nPitt studied the amulet. It was a copper image of the Demonio del Muertos of Cerro el Capirote inlaid with turquoise. \"It is too valuable. I cannot take it.\"\n\nYuma shook his head. \"I swore to wear it until our sacred idols came home. Now it is yours for good luck.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nBefore they left Canyon Ometepec, Pitt walked Loren up to Patty Lou Cutting's grave. She knelt and read the inscription on the tombstone.\n\n\"What beautiful words,\" she said softly. \"Is there a story behind them?\"\n\n\"No one seems to know. The Indians say she was buried by unknown people during the night.\"\n\n\"She was so young. Only ten years old.\"\n\nPitt nodded. \"She rests in a lonely place for a ten-year-old.\n\n\"When we get back to Washington, let's try to find if she exists in any records.\"\n\nThe desert wildflowers had bloomed and died so Loren made a wreath from creosote bush branches and laid it over the grave. They stood there for a while looking over the desert. The colors fired by the setting sun were vivid and extraordinary, enhanced by the clear November air.\n\nThe whole village lined the road to wish them adios as Loren steered the Pierce Arrow toward the main highway. As she shifted through the gears, Loren looked over at Pitt wistfully.\n\n\"Strange as you might think it sounds, that little village would be an idyllic place to spend a quiet honeymoon.\"\n\n\"Are YOU reminding me that I once asked you to many me?\" said Pitt, squeezing one of her hands on the steering wheel.\n\n\"I'm willing to write it off as a moment of madness on your part.\"\n\nHe looked at her. \"You're turning me down?\"\n\n\"Don't act crushed. One of us has to keep a level head. You're too scrupulous to back out.\"\n\n\"I was serious.\"\n\nShe turned her eyes from the road and gave him a warm smile. \"I know you were, but let's face reality.\n\nOur problem is that we're great pals, but we don't need each other. If you and I lived in a little house with a picket fence, the furniture would only gather dust because neither of us would ever be home. Oil and water don't mix. Your life is the sea, mine is Congress. We could never have a close, loving relationship.\n\nDon't you agree?\"\n\n\"I can't deny you make a strong case.\"\n\n\"I vote we continue just the way we have. Any objections?\"\n\nPitt did not immediately answer. He hid his relief remarkably well, Loren thought. He stared through the windshield at the road ahead for a long time. Finally, he said, \"You know what, Congresswoman Smith?\"\n\n\"No, what?\"\n\n\"For a politician, you're an incredibly honest and sexy woman.\"\n\n\"And for a marine engineer,\" she said huskily, \"you're so easy to love.\"\n\nPitt smiled slyly and his green eyes twinkled. \"How far to Washington?\"\n\nAbout five thousand kilometers. Why?\"\n\nHe pulled the sling off his arm, threw it in the backseat and slid his arm around her shoulder. \"Just think, we've got five thousand kilometers to find out just how lovable I am.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "The Ape Who Guards the Balance",
        "author": "Elizabeth Peters",
        "genres": [
            "historical fiction",
            "mystery"
        ],
        "tags": [
            "Egypt",
            "adventure",
            "1907",
            "female protagonist",
            "archeology"
        ],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "The Ape Who Guards the Balance begins in 1907 in England where Amelia is attending a suffragettes' rally outside the home of Mr. Geoffrey Romer of the House of Commons. It seems Romer is one of the few remaining private collectors of Egyptian antiquities, and a series of bizarre events at the protest soon embroil Amelia in grave personal danger. Suspecting that the Master Criminal, Sethos, is behind their problems, the Emerson Peabody's hasten to Egypt to continue their studies in the Valley of Kings where they soon acquire a papyrus of the Book of the Dead.\n\nAs with past seasons, however, their archaeological expedition is interrupted. The murdered body of a woman is found in the Nile. Ramses, Radcliffe, and Amelia all have their theories as to the origin of the crime, but their own lives might soon be at stake if the cult of Thoth and their ancient book is, indeed, involved."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Students of the life and works of Mrs Amelia P. Emerson will be pleased to learn that the present Editor's tireless research on the recently discovered collection of Emerson papers has yielded additional fruit. Certain excerpts from Manuscript H were included in the most recent volume of Mrs Emerson's memoirs, and other excerpts appear here. The authorship of this manuscript has been determined; it was written by 'Ramses' Emerson, but additions in various hands suggest that it was read and commented upon by other members of the family. The collection of letters herein designated 'B' are signed by Nefret Forth, as she then was. Since the recipient of them is addressed only as 'Dear' or 'Darling,' the Editor was originally in some doubt as to this individual's identity. She has decided to leave the Reader in doubt as well. Speculation is the spice of life, as Mrs Emerson might say.\n\nNewspaper clippings and miscellaneous letters are contained in a separate file (F).\n\nThe present Editor feels obliged to add, in her own defence, that the journals themselves present a number of inconsistencies. Mrs Emerson began them as private diaries. At a later time she determined to edit them for future publication, but (as was typical of her) she went about it in a somewhat slapdash fashion and over a long period of time. Her methodology, if it can be called that, explains the anomalies, errors and anachronisms in the urtext itself. Eventually the Editor hopes to produce a definitive, thoroughly annotated edition, in which these inconsistencies will be explained (insofar as it is possible to explain the way in which Mrs Emerson's agile mind operated).\n\nOf particular interest to Egyptologists will be Mrs Emerson's description of the discovery of KV55, as the tomb found by Ayrton in January 1907 is now called. No proper excavation report was ever published, and the descriptions of the participants disagree in so many particulars that one cannot help suspecting the accuracy of all of them. It is not surprising that none of them mentions the presence of Professor Emerson and his associates. Mrs Emerson's version, though certainly not free of bias, makes it clear that the Professor's suggestions and advice were deeply resented by the excavators.\n\nBeing only too aware of Mrs Emerson's biases, the Editor has gone to the trouble of comparing her version with those of others. She is indebted to Jim and Susan Allen, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for making the unpublished manuscript of Mrs Andrew's diary available to her; to Dennis Forbes, editor of KMT, for allowing her to peruse the galleys of his chapter on KV55 from his forthcoming book, Tombs. Treasures. Mummies; to Mr John Larson of the Oriental Institute for answering innumerable questions about Theodore Davis and the storage jars; and to Lila Pinch Brock, the most recent excavator of KV55, for getting her into the place and telling her all about it.\n\nShe (the Editor) has also read practically every book and article written about the tomb. The (extremely impressive) bibliography will be sent to Readers upon receipt of a SASE. She (the Editor) has come to the conclusion that Mrs Emerson's description is the most accurate, and that she was, as she always was, right."
            },
            {
                "title": "OPENING THE MOUTH OF THE DEAD",
                "text": "Let my mouth be given to me. Let my mouth be opened by Ptah with the instrument of iron with which he opens the mouths of the gods."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "I was inserting an additional pin into my hat when the library door opened and Emerson put his head out.\n\n'There is a matter on which I would like to consult you, Peabody,' he began.\n\nHe had obviously been working on his book, for his thick black hair was dishevelled, his shirt gaped open, and his sleeves had been rolled above the elbows. Emerson claims that his mental processes are inhibited by the constriction of collars, cuffs and cravats. It may be so. I certainly did not object, for my husband's muscular frame and sun-bronzed skin are displayed to best advantage in such a state of dishabille. On this occasion, however, I was forced to repress the emotion the sight of Emerson always arouses in me, since Gargery, our butler, was present.\n\n'Pray do not detain me, my dear Emerson,' I replied. 'I am on my way to chain myself to the railings at Number Ten Downing Street, and I am already late.'\n\n'Chain yourself,' Emerson repeated. 'May I ask why?'\n\n'It was my idea,' I explained modestly. 'During some earlier demonstrations, the lady suffragists have been picked up and carried away by large policemen, thus effectively ending the demonstration. This will not be easily accomplished if the ladies are firmly fastened to an immovable object such as an iron railing.'\n\n'I see.' Opening the door wider, he emerged. 'Would you like me to accompany you, Peabody? I could drive you in the motor car.'\n\nIt would have been difficult to say which suggestion horrified me more \u2013 that he should go with me, or that he should drive the motor car.\n\nEmerson had been wanting for several years to acquire one of the horrid machines, but I had put him off by one pretext or another until that summer. I had taken all the precautions I could, promoting one of the stablemen to the post of chauffeur and making certain he was properly trained; I had insisted that if the children were determined to drive the nasty thing (which they were), they should also take lessons. David and Ramses had become as competent as male individuals of their age could be expected to be, and in my opinion Nefret was even better, though the men in the family denied it.\n\nNone of these sensible measures succeeded in fending off the dreaded results. Emerson, of course, refused to be driven by the chauffeur or the younger members of the family. It had not taken long for the word to get round the village and its environs. One glimpse of Emerson crouched over the wheel, his teeth bared in a delighted grin, his blue eyes sparkling behind his goggles, was enough to strike terror into the heart of pedestrian or driver. The hooting of the horn (which Emerson liked very much and employed incessantly) had the same effect as a fire siren; everyone within earshot immediately cleared off the road, into a ditch or a hedgerow, if necessary. He had insisted on bringing the confounded thing with us to London, but thus far we had managed to keep him from operating it in the city.\n\nMany years of happy marriage had taught me that there are certain subjects about which husbands are strangely sensitive. Any challenge to their masculinity should be avoided at all costs. For some reason that eludes me, the ability to drive a motor car appears to be a symbol of masculinity. I therefore sought another excuse for refusing his offer.\n\n'No, my dear Emerson, it would not be advisable for you to go with me. In the first place, you have a great deal of work to do on the final volume of your History of Ancient Egypt. In the second place, the last time you accompanied me on such an expedition you knocked down two policemen.'\n\n'And so I will do again if they have the audacity to lay hands on you,' Emerson exclaimed. As I had hoped, this comment distracted him from the subject of the motor car. His blue eyes blazed with sapphirine fire, and the cleft, or dimple, in his chin quivered. 'Good Gad, Peabody, you don't expect me to stand idly by while vulgar police officers manhandle my wife!'\n\n'No, my dear, I don't, which is why you cannot come along. The whole point of the enterprise is for ME to be arrested \u2013 yes, and manhandled as well. Having YOU taken in charge for assaulting a police officer distracts the public from the fight for women's suffrage we ladies are endeavouring \u2013'\n\n'Damnation, Peabody!' Emerson stamped his foot. He is given to such childish demonstrations at times.\n\n'Will you please stop interrupting me, Emerson? I was about to \u2013'\n\n'You never let me finish a sentence!' Emerson shouted.\n\nI turned to our butler, who was waiting to open the door for me. 'My parasol, Gargery, if you please.'\n\n'Certainly, madam,' said Gargery. His plain but affable features were wreathed in a smile. Gargery greatly enjoys the affectionate little exchanges between me and Emerson. 'If I may say so, madam,' he went on, 'that hat is very becoming.'\n\nI turned back to the mirror. The hat was a new one, and I rather thought it did suit me. I had caused it to be trimmed with crimson roses and green silk leaves; the subdued colours considered appropriate for mature married ladies have an unfortunate effect on my sallow complexion and jetty-black hair, and I see no reason for a slavish adherence to fashion when the result does not become the wearer. Besides, crimson is Emerson's favourite colour. As I inserted the final pin, his face appeared in the mirror next to mine. He had to bend over, since he is six feet in height and I am a good many inches shorter. Taking advantage of our relative positions (and the position of Gargery, behind him) he gave me a surreptitious pat and said amiably, 'So it is. Well, well, my dear, enjoy yourself. If you aren't back by teatime I will just run down to the police station and bail you out.'\n\n'Don't come round before seven,' I said. 'I am hoping to be thrown into the Black Maria and perhaps handcuffed.'\n\nNot quite sotto voce, Gargery remarked, 'I'd like to see the chap who could do it.'\n\n'So would I,' said my husband.\n\nIt was a typical November day in dear old London \u2013 gloomy, grey and damp. We had come up from Kent only the previous week so that Emerson could consult certain references in the British Museum. Our temporary abode was Chalfont House, the city mansion belonging to Emerson's brother Walter and his wife Evelyn, who had inherited the property from her grandfather. The younger Emersons preferred their country estates in Yorkshire, but they always opened Chalfont House for us when we were obliged to stay in London.\n\nAlthough I enjoy the bustle and busyness of the metropolis, Egypt is my spiritual home, and as I breathed in the insalubrious mixture of coal smoke and moisture I thought nostalgically of clear blue skies, hot dry air, the thrill of another season of excavation. We were a trifle later than usual in getting off this year, but the delay, occasioned principally by Emerson's tardiness in completing his long-awaited History, had given me the opportunity to participate in a cause dear to my heart, and my spirits soared as I strode briskly along, my indispensable parasol in one hand, my chains in the other.\n\nThough I had always been a strong supporter of votes for women, professional commitments had prevented me from taking an active part in the suffragist movement. Not that the movement itself had been particularly active or effective. Almost every year a Women's Suffrage Bill had been presented to Parliament, only to be talked down or ignored. Politicians and statesmen had made promises of support and broken them.\n\nRecently, however, a breath of fresh northern air had blown into London. The Women's Social and Political Union had been founded in Manchester by a Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst and her two daughters. Early in the present year they had decided \u2013 quite sensibly, in my opinion \u2013 to transfer their headquarters to the centre of political action. I had met Mrs Pankhurst on several occasions, but I had not made up my mind about her or the organization until the shocking events of October 23 had aroused my wholehearted indignation. Meeting peacefully to press their views and hopes upon Parliament, women had been forcibly ejected from that bastion of male superiority \u2013 bullied, pushed, flung to the ground, and arrested! Even now Miss Sylvia Pankhurst languished in prison, along with others of her sisters in the cause. When I got wind of the present demonstration I determined to show my support for the prisoners and the movement.\n\nIn fact, I had been guilty of some slight misdirection when I told Emerson my destination was Downing Street. I feared he might become bored or apprehensive for my safety, and follow after me. The WSPU had decided instead to demonstrate in front of the home of Mr Geoffrey Romer, in Charles Street near Berkeley Square.\n\nNext to Mr Asquith, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, this individual was our most vehement and effective opponent in the House of Commons; he was an elegant and eloquent speaker, with an excellent classical education and considerable private wealth. Emerson and I had once been privileged to examine his superb collection of Egyptian antiquities. I had, as I felt obliged to do, made one or two pointed remarks on the subject of female suffrage, but it may have been Emerson's even more pointed comments about the iniquities of private collectors that irritated Mr Romer. We had not been asked to come again. I quite looked forward to chaining myself to his railings.\n\nI had feared I might be late, but when I arrived on the scene I found matters in a shocking state of disorganization. No one was chained to the railings. People were standing about looking confused; at the other end of the street a number of ladies were huddled together, deep in conversation. Evidently it was a conference of the leaders, for I heard the familiar voice of Mrs Pankhurst.\n\nI was about to join them when I beheld a familiar form. It was that of a tall young man impeccably attired in striped trousers, frock coat and top hat. His deeply tanned complexion and heavy dark brows resembled those of an Arab or Indian, but he was neither. He was my son, Walter Peabody Emerson, better known to the world at large by his sobriquet of Ramses.\n\nSeeing me, he broke off his conversation with the young woman next to him and greeted me in the annoying drawl he had acquired when he had spent a term at Oxford reading classics with Professor Wilson, at the latter's invitation. 'Good afternoon, Mother. May I have the honour of presenting Miss Christabel Pankhurst, with whom I believe you are not acquainted?'\n\nShe was younger than I had expected \u2013 in her early twenties, as I later learned \u2013 and not unattractive. Firm lips and a direct gaze gave distinction to her rounded face and dark hair. As we shook hands, with the conventional murmurs of greeting, I wondered how Ramses had got acquainted with her \u2013 and when. She had been smiling and rolling her eyes at him in a manner that suggested this was not their first meeting. Ramses has an unfortunate habit of being attractive to women, especially strong-minded women.\n\n'What are you doing here?' I inquired. 'And where is Nefret?'\n\n'I don't know where she is,' said Ramses. 'My \"sister,\" to give her the courtesy title you insist upon, though it is not justified by legal proceedings or blood relationship \u2013'\n\n'Ramses,' I said sternly. 'Get to the point.'\n\n'Yes, Mother. Finding myself unexpectedly at liberty this afternoon, I determined to attend the present demonstration. You know my sympathy for the cause of \u2013'\n\n'Yes, my dear.' Interrupting others is very rude, but it is sometimes necessary to interrupt Ramses. He was not as perniciously long-winded as he once had been, but he had occasional lapses, especially when he was trying to conceal something from me. I abandoned that line of inquiry for the moment and asked another question.\n\n'What is going on?'\n\n'You can put your chains away, Mother,' Ramses replied. 'The ladies have decided we will picket, and deliver a petition to Mr Romer. Miss Pankhurst tells me they will be distributing the placards shortly.'\n\n'Nonsense,' I exclaimed. 'What makes them suppose he will receive a delegation? He has never done so before.'\n\n'We have had recently a new recruit to the cause who is an old acquaintance of his,' Miss Christabel explained. 'Mrs Markham assures us that he will respond to her request.'\n\n'If she is an old friend, why did she not request an interview through normal channels instead of instigating this... Ramses, don't slouch against that railing. You will get rust on your coat.'\n\n'Yes, Mother.' Ramses straightened to his full height of six feet. The top hat added another twelve inches, and I was forced to admit that he lent a certain air of distinction to the gathering, which consisted almost entirely of ladies. The only other male person present was an eccentrically garbed individual who stood watching the discussion of the leaders. His long, rather shabby velvet cloak and broad-brimmed hat reminded me of a character from one of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas \u2013 the one that satirized the aesthetic movement and its languid poets. As my curious gaze came to rest on him, he turned and addressed the ladies in an affected, high pitched voice.\n\n'Who is that fellow?' I asked. 'I have never seen him before.'\n\nRamses, who sometimes demonstrates an uncanny ability to read my mind, began to sing softly. I recognized one of the songs from the opera in question. '\"A most intense young man, A soulful eyed young man, An ultra-poetical, super-aesthetical, out-of-the-way young man.\"'\n\nI could not help laughing. Miss Christabel gave me a look of freezing disapproval. 'He is Mrs Markham's brother, and a sturdy defender of the cause. If you had deigned to attend our earlier meetings, Mrs Emerson, you would be aware of these facts.'\n\nShe did not give me time to reply that I had not been invited to attend their earlier meetings, but marched off with her nose in the air. I had heard the young lady praised for her wit and sense of humour. The latter appeared to be in abeyance at the moment.\n\n'I believe they are about to begin,' Ramses said.\n\nA rather ragged line formed, and placards were handed out. Mine read 'Free the victims of male oppression!'\n\nA little crowd of spectators had gathered. A hard-faced man in the front ranks glared at me and called out, 'You ought to be 'ome washin' of your 'usband's trousers!'\n\nRamses, following behind me with a placard reading 'Votes for Women NOW!' replied loudly and good-humouredly, 'I assure you, sir, the lady's husband's trousers are not in such sore need of laundering as your own.'\n\nWe proceeded in a straggling line past the gates of Romer's house. They were closed, and guarded by two blue-helmeted constables, who watched us curiously. There was no sign of life at the curtained windows of the mansion. It did not appear likely that Mr Romer was in the mood to accept a petition.\n\nAs we turned to retrace our steps, Miss Christabel hurried up and drew Ramses out of the line. Naturally I followed after them. 'Mr Emerson,' she exclaimed. 'We are counting on you!'\n\n'Certainly,' said Ramses. 'To do what, precisely?'\n\n'Mrs Markham is ready to carry our petition to the house. We ladies will converge upon the constable to the left of the gate and prevent him from stopping her. Could you, do you think, detain the other police officer?'\n\nRamses' eyebrows went up. 'Detain?' he repeated.\n\n'You must not employ violence, of course. Only clear the way for Mrs Markham.'\n\n'I will do my best' was the reply.\n\n'Splendid! Be ready \u2013 they are coming.'\n\nIndeed they were. A phalanx of females, marching shoulder to shoulder, was bearing down on us. There were only a dozen or so of them \u2013 obviously the leaders. The two ladies heading the procession were tall and stoutly built, and both brandished heavy wooden placards with suffragist slogans. Behind them, almost hidden by their persons, I caught a glimpse of a large but tasteful flowered and feathered hat. Could the individual under it be the famous Mrs Markham, on whom so much depended? The man in the velvet cape, his face shadowed by the brim of his hat, marched at her side. The only individual I recognized was Mrs Pankhurst, who brought up the rear.\n\nThey slowed their inexorable advance for neither constable nor sympathizer; I was forced to skip nimbly out of their way as they trotted past. Christabel, her face flushed with excitement, cried, 'Now,' as the marchers surrounded the astonished constable to the left of the gates. I heard a thump and a yelp, as one of the wooden placards landed on his helmeted head.\n\nHis companion shouted, ''Ere now,' and started to the defence of his friend. Ramses stepped in front of him and put a hand on his shoulder. 'I beg you will remain where you are, Mr Jenkins,' he said in a kindly voice.\n\n'Oh, now, Mr Emerson, don't you do this!' the officer exclaimed piteously.\n\n'You two are acquainted?' I inquired. I was not surprised. Ramses has quite a number of unusual acquaintances. Police officers are more respectable than certain of the others.\n\n'Yes,' said Ramses. 'How is your little boy, Jenkins?'\n\nHis voice was affable, his pose casual, but the unfortunate constable was gradually being pushed back against the railing. Knowing Ramses could manage quite nicely by himself, I turned to see if the ladies required my assistance in 'restraining' the other constable.\n\nThe man was flat on the ground, tugging at the helmet which had been pushed over his eyes, and the gate had yielded to the impetuous advance of the delegation. Led by the two large ladies and the poetically garbed gentleman, it reached the door of the house.\n\nI could not but admire the strategy, and the military precision with which it had been carried out, but I doubted the delegation would get any farther. Already the sound of police whistles rent the air; running feet and cries of 'Now, then, what's all this?' betokened the arrival of reinforcements. Mrs Markham had prevaricated or had been deceived; if Romer had agreed to receive a petition, this forceful stratagem would not have been necessary. The door of the mansion would surely be locked, and Romer was not likely to allow his butler to open it.\n\nEven as this thought entered my mind, the portal opened. I caught a glimpse of a pale, astonished face which I took to be that of the butler before it was hidden by the invading forces. They pushed their way in, and the door slammed behind them.\n\nOutside on the street, matters were not going so well. Half a dozen uniformed men had gone to the rescue of their beleaguered colleague. Laying rough hands upon the ladies, they pulled them away and actually threw several to the ground. With a cry of indignation I raised my parasol and would have rushed forwards had I not been seized in a respectful but firm grasp.\n\n'Ramses, let go of me this instant,' I gasped.\n\n'Wait, Mother \u2013 I promised Father \u2013 ' He extended one foot and the constable who had been coming up behind me toppled forwards with a startled exclamation.\n\n'Oh, you promised your father, did you? Curse it,' I cried. But frustration and the compression of my ribs by the arm of my son prevented further utterance.\n\nThe constable Ramses had tripped got slowly to his feet. 'Bleedin' 'ell,' he remarked. 'So it's you, Mr Emerson? I didn't recognize you in that fancy getup.'\n\n'Look after my mother, will you, Mr Skuggins?' Releasing me, Ramses began picking up prostrate ladies. 'Really, gentlemen,' he said, in tones of freezing disapproval, 'this is no way for Englishmen to behave. Shame!'\n\nA temporary lull ensued. The men in blue shuffled their feet and looked sheepish, while the ladies straightened their garments and looked daggers at the constables. I was surprised to see Mrs Pankhurst and her daughter, for I had assumed they had entered the house with the other leaders of the delegation.\n\nThen one of the police officers cleared his throat. 'That's all very well, Mr Emerson, sir, but wot about Mr Romer? Those there ladies forced their way in \u2013'\n\n'An unwarranted assumption, Mr Murdle,' said Ramses. 'Force was not employed. The door was opened by Mr Romer's servant.'\n\nAt that strategic moment the door opened again. There was no mistaking the identity of the man who stood on the threshold. The blaze of light behind him set his silvery hair and beard aglow. Just as unmistakable as his appearance was the resonant voice that had earned him his reputation as one of England's greatest orators.\n\n'My lords, ladies and... er, that is... your attention, please. I have agreed to hear the petition of my old friend Mrs Markham on condition that the rest of you disperse peacefully and without delay. Return your men to their duties, Sergeant.'\n\nBehind him I caught a glimpse of an exuberantly flowered hat before the door closed with a decisive bang.\n\nMrs Pankhurst's was the first voice to break the silence. 'There, now,' she said triumphantly. 'Did I not assure you Mrs Markham would prevail? Come, ladies, we may retreat with honour.'\n\nThey proceeded to do so. The mob, disappointed at this tame ending, followed their example, and before long the only persons remaining were my son and myself and a single constable, who drew the violated gates together again before stationing himself in front of them.\n\n'Shall we go, Mother?' Ramses took my arm.\n\n'Hmmm,' I said.\n\n'I beg your pardon?'\n\n'Did you observe anything unusual about...'\n\n'About what?'\n\nI decided not to mention my strange fancy. If Ramses had observed nothing out of the way I had probably been mistaken.\n\nI ought to have known better. I am seldom mistaken. My only consolation for failing to speak is that even if Ramses had believed me, the constable certainly would not have done, and that by the time I forced someone in authority to heed my advice, the crime would already have been committed.\n\nDarkness was complete before we reached the house, and a thin black rain was falling. Gargery had been looking out for me; he flung the door open before I could ring, and announced in an accusing tone that the other members of the family were waiting for us in the library.\n\n'Oh, are we late for tea?' I inquired, handing him my parasol, my cloak and my hat.\n\n'Yes, madam. The Professor is getting quite restive. If we had been certain Mr Ramses was with you, we would not have worried.'\n\n'I beg your pardon for neglecting to inform you,' said Ramses, adding his hat to the pile of garments Gargery held.\n\nIf he meant to be sarcastic, the effect was lost on Gargery. He had participated in several of our little adventures, and had enjoyed them a great deal. Now he considered himself responsible for us and sulked if he was not kept informed about our activities. A sulky butler is a cursed inconvenience, but in my opinion it was a small price to pay for loyalty and affection.\n\nTaking Gargery's hint, we went straight in without changing, and found the others gathered round the tea table. My devoted husband greeted me with a scowl. 'You are cursed late, Peabody. What kept you?'\n\nNone of us likes to be waited upon when we are en famille, so Nefret had taken charge of the teapot. She was wearing one of the embroidered Egyptian robes she preferred for informal wear, and her red-gold hair had been tied back with a ribbon.\n\nStrictly speaking, she was not our adopted daughter, or even our ward, since she had come of age the previous year and \u2013 thanks to my dear Emerson's insistence on this young woman's rights \u2013 was now in control of the fortune she had inherited from her grandfather. She had no other kin, however, and she had become as dear to Emerson and me as our own daughter. She had been thirteen when we rescued her from the remote Nubian oasis where she had lived since her birth, and it hadn't been easy for her to adjust to the conventions of modern England.\n\nIt hadn't been easy for me either. At times I wondered why Heaven had blessed me with two of the most difficult children a mother has ever encountered. I am not the sort of woman who coos over babies and dotes on small children, but I venture to assert that Ramses would have tried any mother's nerves; he was hideously precocious in some areas and appallingly normal in others. (The normal behaviour of a young boy involves a considerable quantity of dirt and a complete disregard for his own safety.) Just when I thought I had got Ramses past the worst stage, along came Nefret \u2013 strikingly pretty, extremely intelligent, and consistently critical of civilized conventions. A girl who had been High Priestess of Isis in a culture whose citizens go about half-clothed could not be expected to take kindly to corsets.\n\nCompared to them, the third young person present had been a refreshing change. A casual observer might have taken him and Ramses for close kin; he had the same brown skin and waving black hair, the same long-lashed dark eyes. The resemblance was only coincidental; David was the grandson of our foreman, Abdullah, but he was Ramses' closest friend and an important part of our family ever since he had gone to live with Emerson's brother. He was not much of a talker, possibly because he found it difficult to get a word in when the rest of us were present. With an affectionate smile at me he drew up a hassock for my feet and placed a cup of tea and a plate of sandwiches on a table at my elbow.\n\n'Your eyes look tired,' I said, inspecting him. 'Have you been working on the drawings for the Luxor Temple volume by artificial light? I told you over and over you should not \u2013'\n\n'Leave off fussing, Peabody,' Emerson snapped. 'You only want him to be ill so you can dose him with those noxious medicines of yours. Drink your tea.'\n\n'I will do so at once, Emerson. But David should not \u2013'\n\n'He wanted to finish before we left for Egypt,' Nefret said. 'Don't worry about his eyesight, Aunt Amelia, the latest research indicates that reading by electric light is not harmful to one's vision.'\n\nShe spoke with an authority which was, I had to admit, justified by her medical studies. Acquiring that training had been a struggle in itself. Over the violent objections of its (male) medical faculty, the University of London had, finally, opened its degrees to women, but the major universities continued to deny them, and the difficulty of obtaining clinical practice was almost as great as it had been a century earlier. Nefret had managed it, though, with the help of the dedicated ladies who had founded a woman's medical college in London and forced some of the hospitals to admit women students to the wards and the dissecting rooms. She had spoken once or twice of continuing her studies in France or Switzerland, where (strange as it may seem to a Briton) the prejudice against female physicians was not so strong. I believe that she was loath to leave us, however; she adored Emerson, who was putty in her little hands, and she and Ramses really were like brother and sister. That is to say, they were on the best of terms except when they were being rude to one another.\n\n'Why are you wearing those silly clothes?' she now inquired, studying Ramses' elegantly garbed form with contemptuous amusement. 'Don't tell me, let me guess. Miss Christabel Pankhurst was there.'\n\n'Not much of a guess,' said Ramses. 'You knew she would be.'\n\n'What does Miss Christabel have to do with Ramses' attire?' I inquired suspiciously.\n\nMy son turned to me. 'That was Nefret's feeble attempt at a joke.'\n\n'Ha!' said Nefret. 'I assure you, dear boy, you won't think it is a joke if you continue to encourage the girl. Men seem to find conquests of that sort amusing, but she is a very determined young woman, and you won't get rid of her as easily as you do the others.'\n\n'Good Gad!' I exclaimed. 'What others?'\n\n'Another joke,' said Ramses, rising in haste. 'Come and keep me company while I change, David. We will talk.'\n\n'About Christabel,' Nefret murmured in saccharine tones.\n\nRamses was already halfway to the door. This last 'joke' was too much for him; he stopped and turned. 'If you had been at the demonstration,' he said, biting off the words, 'you would have been able to observe my behaviour for yourself. I was under the impression that you meant to attend.'\n\nNefret's smile faded. 'Uh \u2013 I had the chance to watch an interesting dissection.'\n\n'You were not at the hospital this afternoon.'\n\n'How the devil...' She glanced at me and bit her lip. 'No. I went for a walk instead. With a friend.'\n\n'How nice,' I said. 'That explains the pretty colour in your cheeks. Fresh air and exercise! There is nothing like it.'\n\nRamses turned on his heel and stalked out of the room, followed by David.\n\nBy the time we assembled for dinner, the two of them had made it up. Nefret was especially sweet to Ramses, as she always was after one of their arguments. Ramses was especially silent, as he seldom was. He left it to me to describe the demonstration, which I did with my customary vivacity and little touches of humour. However, I was not allowed to finish, for Emerson does not always appreciate my little touches of humour.\n\n'Most undignified and vulgar,' he grumbled. 'Striking constables on the head with placards, pushing rudely into a man's house! Romer is an unmitigated ass, but I cannot believe that such behaviour serves your cause, Amelia. Tactful persuasion is more effective.'\n\n'You are a fine one to talk of tact, Emerson,' I replied indignantly. 'Who was it who tactlessly knocked down two constables last spring? Who was it whose tactless remarks to the Director of Antiquities led to our being refused permission to search for new tombs in the Valley of the Kings? Who was it \u2013'\n\nEmerson's blue eyes had narrowed into slits, and his cheeks were becomingly flushed. He drew a deep breath. Before he could employ it in speech, Gargery, Nefret and David all spoke at once.\n\n'More mint jelly, sir?'\n\n'How is the History coming along, Professor?'\n\nNefret addressed her question to me instead of to Emerson. 'When are Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Walter and little Amelia expected? Tomorrow or the next day?'\n\nEmerson subsided with a grunt, and I replied sedately, 'The following day, Nefret. But you all must remember not to call her \"little Amelia.\"'\n\nRamses scarcely ever smiled, but his expression softened a trifle. He was very fond of his young cousin. 'It will be difficult. She is a dear little thing, and a diminutive suits her.'\n\n'She claims that two Amelias in the family make for confusion,' I explained. 'I suspect, however, that what puts her off is the fact that your father is inclined to call me Amelia only when he is vexed with me. He generally uses my maiden name as a term of commendation and \u2013 er \u2013 affection. Now, Emerson, don't glare at me, you know it is true; I have seen the poor child start convulsively when you bellow \"Curse it, Amelia!\" in that tone of voice.'\n\nAgain Nefret intervened to prevent a profane utterance from Emerson. 'Is it settled then that she is coming out to Egypt with us this year?'\n\n'She has won her parents over, with David's help. Evelyn said his gentle persuasion was irresistible.'\n\nDavid flushed slightly and bent his head.\n\n'She is the only one of their children who is interested in Egyptology,' I went on. 'It would be a pity if she were prevented from developing that interest only because she is female.'\n\n'Ah, so that is how you got round them,' Ramses said, glancing from me to his silent friend. 'Aunt Evelyn would find that argument hard to resist. But Melia \u2013 Lia \u2013 is very young.'\n\n'She is only two years younger than you, Ramses, and you have been going out to Egypt since you were seven.'\n\nIn my enjoyment of the pleasures of familial intercourse I had forgotten my odd foreboding. Yet, had I but known, Nemesis was even then almost upon us. In fact, he was at that very moment in the act of ringing the bell.\n\nWe were about to rise from table when Gargery entered the dining room. His look of frozen disapproval warned me, even before he spoke, that he was displeased about something.\n\n'There is someone from the police to see you, Mrs Emerson. I informed him you were not receiving callers, but he insisted.'\n\n'Mrs Emerson?' my husband repeated. 'Not me?'\n\n'No, sir. Mrs Emerson and Mr Ramses were the ones he asked for.'\n\n'Curse it!' Emerson jumped up. 'It must have something to do with your demonstration this afternoon. Ramses, I told you to restrain her!'\n\n'I assure you, Father, nothing untoward occurred,' Ramses replied. 'Where is the gentleman, Gargery?'\n\n'In the library, sir. That is where you generally receive policemen, I believe.'\n\nEmerson led the way and the rest of us followed.\n\nThe man who awaited us was no uniformed constable but a tall, stout individual wearing evening dress. Emerson came to a sudden stop. 'Good Gad!' he exclaimed. 'It is worse than I thought. What have you done, Amelia, to warrant a visit from the assistant commissioner of Scotland Yard?'\n\nIt was indeed Sir Reginald Arbuthnot, with whom we were well acquainted socially as well as professionally. He hastened to reassure my agitated spouse. 'It is Mrs Emerson's evidence that is wanted, and that of your son, Professor. The matter is of some urgency, or I would not have disturbed you at this hour.'\n\n'Hmph,' said Emerson. 'It had damned well better be urgent, Arbuthnot. Nothing less than cold-blooded murder would excuse \u2013'\n\n'Now, Emerson, you are being rude,' I said. 'It was good of Sir Reginald to come round himself instead of summoning us to his office. You ought to have deduced from his attire that he was called away from a dinner party or evening social event, which would not have eventuated had not the situation been serious. We were about to have coffee, Sir Reginald; take a chair, if you please, and join us?'\n\n'Thank you, Mrs Emerson, but I am rather pressed for time. If you could tell me \u2013'\n\n'Nothing is to be gained by haste, Sir Reginald. I expect the thieves have already got clean away with their loot. I trust Mr Romer was not injured?'\n\nTaking advantage of the thunderstruck silence that followed, I pressed the bell. 'But I believe,' I continued, as Gargery entered with the coffee tray, 'that you would do better to take a glass of brandy, Sir Reginald. Exhale, I beg. Your face has turned quite an alarming colour.'\n\nHis breath came out in a miniature explosion. 'How?' he gasped. 'How did you \u2013'\n\n'I recognized the leader of the gang this afternoon \u2013 or thought I did. I concluded I must have been mistaken, since I had no reason to believe the individual in question was in England. However, your presence here suggests that a crime has taken place, and that that crime is connected with the demonstration this afternoon, since it was Ramses and I whom you wanted to interview. It requires no great stretch of the imagination to reach the only possible conclusion.'\n\n'Ah,' said Sir Reginald. 'The only possible... I think, Mrs Emerson, that I will take advantage of your kind suggestion. Brandy. Please!'\n\nEmerson, whose eyes had been the widest of all, turned and walked with slow, deliberate strides to the sideboard. Removing the stopper from the decanter, he splashed brandy generously into a glass. Then he drank it.\n\n'Our guest, Emerson,' I reminded him.\n\n'What? Oh. Yes.'\n\nSir Reginald having been supplied, Emerson poured another brandy for himself and retreated to the sofa, where he sat down next to Nefret and stared at me. Ramses, his countenance as blank as ever I had seen it, politely carried coffee to the others. Then he sat down and stared at me.\n\nThey were all staring at me. It was very gratifying. Sir Reginald, having imbibed a sufficient quantity of brandy, cleared his throat.\n\n'Mrs Emerson, I came to inform you of a startling piece of news which reached me scarcely an hour ago, and you appear to know all about it. May I ask how you knew?'\n\n'I hope you don't suspect me of being a member of the gang,' I said, laughing.\n\n'Oh \u2013 well \u2013 no, certainly not. Then how \u2013'\n\nIt is better not to commit oneself before one knows all the facts. I said, 'I will be happy to explain, Sir Reginald. But first you had better tell the others precisely what happened this afternoon.'\n\nMr Romer's butler was the key witness, from whom the police had heard the story. He had not opened the door; in fact, his master had ordered him to lock it. He did not know how the lock had been forced. Caught off guard, he was overpowered by two heavy-set muscular women who had borne him to the ground and bound him hand and foot with ropes they took from their reticules. The other invaders had instantly fanned out into the back regions of the house. Not a word had been spoken; the procedure had been planned with the precision of a military operation.\n\nLying helpless on the floor of the hall, he had seen a man wearing a long cloak and slouch hat bound up the stairs. Shortly thereafter another individual, whom he took to be his master, had descended the stairs and gone to the front door. Opening it, he had addressed those without in the words I have reported. It had been his master's look, his master's voice, his master's very garments, but instead of coming to the aid of his unfortunate servant, the soi-disant Mr Romer had gone back up the stairs.\n\nFor the next half hour, only voices and sounds of brisk activity told him of the whereabouts of the invaders. When they reappeared they were carrying luggage of all varieties, including a huge travelling trunk. The bearers were persons dressed in the livery of Mr Romer's footmen, but their faces were not the ones of the footmen he knew. They began carrying the baggage out. They were followed by the man who looked like his master, now wearing Mr Romer's favourite fur-trimmed overcoat. The woman with him was one of the intruders; she was dressed like a lady, in a long mantle and large flowered hat. Arm in arm they left the house, and the door closed behind them.\n\nIt took the poor man over an hour to free himself. Creeping timidly and stiffly from room to room, he found the other servants locked in the cellar. The footmen were attired only in their undergarments. Mr Romer, bound to a chair in his library, was in the same embarrassing state of undress. The cabinets which had contained his lordship's superb collection of Egyptian antiquities were empty.\n\n'In short,' Sir Reginald concluded, 'the individuals who had entered the house assumed the livery of the footmen and carried the trunks, which contained Mr Romer's collection, to a waiting carriage. The constable at the gate suspected nothing. He actually helped the driver load the luggage into the carriage. As for the individual whom the butler took to be his master \u2013'\n\n'He was the man in the slouch hat and the cape,' I said. 'I blame myself, Sir Reginald, for not informing Scotland Yard at once. However, I hope you will do me the justice to admit that none of your subordinates would have believed me.'\n\n'Very possibly not. Am I to take it, Mrs Emerson, that you recognized this person, at a distance, and despite a disguise that deceived his lordship's own butler?'\n\n'Not to say recognized,' I replied: 'The modern fashion of beards and moustaches affected by so many gentlemen makes an impostor's task laughably easy. It was rather an indefinable sense of familiarity in his posture, his gestures \u2013 the same sense of familiarity that had struck me when I saw the individual in the velvet cloak and slouch hat. He is a master of disguise, a mimic of exceptional ability \u2013'\n\n'Amelia,' said Emerson, breathing heavily through his nose, 'are you telling us that this man was \u2013'\n\n'The Master Criminal,' I said. 'Who else?'\n\nOur first encounters with this remarkable individual had occurred when we were working in the ancient cemeteries near Cairo. Tomb robbing and the sale of illegal antiquities are of long standing in Egypt; the former profession has been practised since pharaonic times. However, during the early 1890s there had been a dramatic increase in these activities, and it was obvious that some genius of crime had taken over the iniquitous underworld of antiquities dealing. I should say that this conclusion was obvious to Emerson and me. Police officials are notoriously dim-witted and resistant to new ideas. It was not until we found Sethos' secret headquarters that they were forced to admit the truth of our deductions, and even now, I am told, certain individuals deny that such a man exists.\n\nThough we had foiled several of Sethos' most dastardly schemes, the man himself had always eluded us. It had been some years since we had last seen or heard of him; in fact, we had believed for a time that he was dead. Other miscreants, suffering from the same misapprehension, had attempted to take control of the criminal organization he had created. It now seemed evident that Sethos had rebuilt his organization, not in Egypt but in Europe \u2013 specifically, in England.\n\nI was in the process of explaining this to poor confused Sir Reginald when I was again interrupted. I had been expecting an outburst from Emerson, whose violent temper and command of bad language have won him the affectionate Arabic sobriquet of 'Father of Curses.' However, on this occasion the interruption came from Ramses.\n\n'Something told me by Miss Christabel Pankhurst, though without significance to me at the time, tends to substantiate your theory, Mother. Mrs Markham and her brother did not join the group until after we left London in June. A number of other \"ladies,\" friends of theirs, became active in the movement at the same time. They must have been the ones who entered the house with her. I was struck, at the time, by the fact that Mrs Pankhurst did not form part of the delegation.'\n\n'Yes, but... but...' Sir Reginald stuttered. 'All this is unsubstantiated, unproven.'\n\n'The proof,' said my annoying offspring, anticipating me as he usually did, 'is in the outcome. The thieves were not ordinary burglars; they were after Mr Romer's antiquities, which form one of the finest private collections in the world. The Master Criminal specializes in Egyptian antiquities, and the notion of using a suffragist organization in order to gain entry to the house of a virulent opponent of votes for women is characteristic of Sethos' sardonic sense of humour.'\n\n'But,' said Sir Reginald, like a broken gramophone record, 'but \u2013'\n\n'If it was Sethos you will never catch the bastard,' said Emerson. It was symptomatic of his state of mind that he did not even apologize for bad language \u2013 to which, I must confess, we had all become accustomed. He went on, 'But I wish you luck. Nothing would please me more than to see him in the dock. We have told you all we know, Sir Reginald. Hadn't you better get at it instead of lolling around drinking brandy?'"
            },
            {
                "title": "From Manuscript H",
                "text": "Ramses opened the door of his room.\n\n'You knocked?' he inquired in simulated astonishment. 'Why this deviation from habit?'\n\nNefret swept into the room, the full skirts of her negligee trailing like a royal robe, and flung herself down on the bed. 'Don't try to put me on the defensive, Ramses, I will not let you do it. How dare you spy on me?'\n\nInvoluntarily Ramses glanced at David, who rolled his eyes and shrugged, indicating that he had no intention of getting involved in the argument.\n\n'An unprovoked and unwarranted accusation,' Ramses said.\n\nHis cool response only made Nefret angrier. Colour stained her cheeks. 'The devil it is! You came sneaking round to the hospital to find out whether I was really there. Well, I wasn't, was I?'\n\n'Evidently not.'\n\nThey glared at one another. David decided it was time to intervene, before one of them said something really rude.\n\n'I am sure Ramses only went by to see whether you wanted to accompany him to the suffragist meeting. Isn't that right, Ramses?'\n\nRamses nodded. It was the best he could do; a spoken 'yes' would have stuck in his throat.\n\n'You needn't have brought it up in front of Aunt Amelia and the Professor.'\n\n'You started it.'\n\n'By teasing you about Christabel?' Nefret was never able to stay angry for long. The corners of her mouth quivered.\n\n'You know I don't give a damn about the damned girl!'\n\n'Oh, dear, what an ungentlemanly thing to say. But she \u2013'\n\n'Don't begin again,' David exclaimed. He never knew whether to laugh or swear or sympathize when the two of them got into one of these exchanges; Nefret was one of the few people in the world who could make Ramses lose his temper, and David was probably the only person in the world who knew why. Hoping to distract them, he went on, 'You came at an opportune moment, Nefret; we were discussing the reappearance of the Master Criminal, and Ramses was about to tell me what he knows of that mysterious individual.'\n\nNefret sat up and crossed her legs. 'I'm sorry, Ramses,' she said cheerfully. 'I shouldn't have accused you of spying on me.'\n\n'No.'\n\n'It's your turn to apologize.'\n\n'What for?' He caught David's eye and got a grip on himself. 'Oh, very well. I apologize.'\n\n'All forgiven, then. I am glad I came, for I am dying of curiosity about Sethos. To be honest, I had come to think of him as... well, not exactly a figment of Aunt Amelia's imagination, but an example of her tendency to exaggerate.'\n\n'Her fondness for melodrama, you mean.' Ramses seated himself on the floor, Arab-style.\n\nNefret grinned and took the cigarette he offered her. 'Neither of us is being entirely fair, Ramses. Aunt Amelia doesn't have to exaggerate. Things happen to her. She was holding something back, though. You can always tell because she looks you straight in the eye and speaks briskly and firmly. The Professor was concealing something too. What is the secret about Sethos that neither of them wants known?'\n\n'I have told you some of it.'\n\n'Bits and pieces. It was from him you learned the art of disguise \u2013'\n\n'That is not entirely accurate,' said Ramses. 'I fell heir to Sethos' collection of disguises, after Father forced him to flee from his headquarters, but I had to reason out his methods for myself and improve on them.'\n\n'I beg your pardon,' said Nefret.\n\n'Granted.'\n\n'Ramses,' David began.\n\n'Yes. I have told both of you what I know of the man from my personal encounters with him. On all those occasions he was disguised, and very well, too; his impersonation of a crotchety old American lady was absolutely brilliant. At the end of that particular adventure he succeeded in abducting Mother, and held her prisoner for several hours. I don't know what transpired during that interval. I doubt that even my father knows for certain. That is why the mere mention of Sethos maddens him so.'\n\nNefret's mouth hung open. 'Good Gad,' she gasped. 'Are you saying he \u2013 she \u2013 they \u2013'\n\n'I doubt it,' Ramses said coolly. 'I have never known two people so attached to one another as my parents. It is very embarrassing at times,' he added, scowling.\n\n'I think it's beautiful,' Nefret said with a fond smile. 'No, Aunt Amelia would never be untrue to the Professor, but if she was in that evil man's power \u2013'\n\nRamses shook his head. 'She would not have spoken of Sethos with such forbearance if he had forced himself on her. However, there is no doubt in my mind that he was in love with her, and it is possible that she felt a certain unwilling attraction for him. I saw the letter he sent her after we had got her back; he promised her he would never again interfere with her or anyone she loved. I suspect, though, that she and Father have encountered him again since. There were some very odd aspects about that business a few seasons ago \u2013 you remember, Nefret, when they went out to Egypt alone and we were staying with Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Walter.'\n\nNefret gurgled with laughter. 'Do you remember the night we let the lion out of its cage? Uncle Walter was absolutely furious!'\n\n'With me,' Ramses said. 'Not you.'\n\n'It was your idea,' Nefret pointed out. 'Well, never mind. But the villain in that case wasn't Sethos, it was somebody else. I forget his name.'\n\n'It is difficult to keep track of all the people who have tried to murder Mother and Father,' Ramses agreed. 'This villain was a chap named Vincey, and since Father shot him during their final encounter, we may reasonably conclude he was guilty of something. Father doesn't kill people if he can avoid doing so. But I still think Sethos was involved in that business, in a manner I can't explain.'\n\nNefret scowled. 'It's ridiculous, the way we have to piece things together from bits of miscellaneous information. Why do Aunt Amelia and the Professor try to keep information from us? It's dangerous, for them and for us. Uninformed is unarmed!'\n\nShe gestured vehemently, sprinkling the floor with ashes. Ramses removed the cigarette from her hand and extinguished it in the bowl they used for a receptacle. Its original function had been to contain potpourri. His mother knew he smoked, though he seldom indulged in her presence, since she disapproved. He knew he did it because she disapproved. David did it because he did, and Nefret did it because he and David did.\n\n'I wonder if Sethos knew she would be there this afternoon,' David said.\n\n'I am convinced he did not know,' Ramses said. 'Mother had had very little to do with the WSPU, and her decision to attend this particular demonstration was made on the spur of the moment.'\n\n'He must have seen her there, though.'\n\n'It is difficult to overlook Mother.' They exchanged knowing smiles, and Ramses went on, 'However, by the time she arrived it was too late to cancel the operation. No, David, I'm certain the encounter was accidental. He'll be careful to stay out of her way hereafter.'\n\nHe fell silent. After a moment, Nefret said, 'What does he look like? She's a good observer; if she spent so much time alone with him, she ought to have noticed something.'\n\n'Not a great deal. His eyes are of an indeterminate shade; they can appear black, grey or hazel. The colour of his hair is unknown, thanks to his skilful use of wigs and dyes. The only facts of which we can be relatively certain are his height \u2013 a trifle under six feet \u2013 and his build, which is that of a man in the prime of life and excellent physical condition. Though he speaks a number of languages, Mother is of the opinion that he is an Englishman. Not very useful, you must admit.'\n\n'Yet she recognized him tonight,' Nefret said.\n\n'That was odd,' Ramses admitted. 'I would think she had invented it, but for the fact that something unquestionably struck her at the time. She started to ask me if I had noticed anything unusual, and then thought better of it.'\n\n'You didn't?'\n\n'I had not seen the fellow for years, and \u2013'\n\n'That's quite all right, my boy, you needn't make excuses. Six feet tall, in excellent physical condition... Hmmmm.'\n\n'Just what are you suggesting?' Ramses demanded, stiffening.\n\nShe put a slim hand on his shoulder. 'Calm yourself, my boy. I assure you I meant no insult to Aunt Amelia. But if she was attracted to him, however unwillingly, the counter reaction will be even stronger.'\n\n'What counter reaction?' David asked.\n\nNefret gave him a kindly smile. 'You don't know much about women, either of you. A woman may forgive a man for abducting her, and she certainly will not blame him for falling in love with her. What she will never forgive is being made to look like a fool. That is what Sethos has done to Aunt Amelia.'\n\n'I wish you wouldn't spout aphorisms,' Ramses grumbled. 'You sound like Mother.'\n\n'That is not an aphorism, it is a simple fact! Don't you see \u2013 the way Sethos used the suffragist movement struck a blow at a cause dear to Aunt Amelia's heart. It will give fresh ammunition to those male supremacists who claim women are too naive and childlike to deal with the real world. The WSPU will be mercilessly ridiculed for admitting a pack of criminals into their ranks \u2013'\n\n'That isn't fair,' Ramses protested. 'Sethos has deceived the keenest criminal investigators.'\n\n'Fair, unfair, what difference does that make to the press? And just wait until some enterprising journalist discovers Aunt Amelia was there. \"Mrs Amelia P. Emerson, the noted archaeologist and amateur detective, attacked a constable who was attempting to prevent a gang of thieves from entering the house!\"'\n\n'Oh dear,' David exclaimed, paling visibly. 'They wouldn't!'\n\n'She didn't actually attack the fellow,' Ramses mused. 'But it wasn't for want of trying. Oh dear indeed. Could we find an excuse to leave town for a few days, do you think?'"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "I am a rational individual. My emotions are under firm control at all times. Being only too familiar with the lies and exaggerations of journalists, I knew what to expect from those villains once the story of the robbery got out. I was prepared for the worst and determined not to lose my temper.\n\nNor would I have done if the Daily Yell, London's most prominent proponent of sensational journalism, had not printed a letter from Sethos himself. It had been sent to the newspaper in care of Kevin O'Connell, who was an old acquaintance of ours. At times I considered Kevin a friend. This was not one of those times.\n\n'For once,' Emerson remarked somewhat breathlessly, as I struggled to free myself from the steely arms that had wrapped round me, 'I must come to O'Connell's defence. You could hardly expect him to refrain from printing... Curse it, Peabody, will you please put down that parasol and stop squirming? I will not allow you to leave the house while you are in this agitated state of mind.'\n\nI daresay I could have got away from him, but I would not have got far. Gargery stood before the closed door, arms outstretched and frame stiff with resolve; Ramses and David had been drawn to the scene by Emerson's shouts and my indignant expostulations, and I entertained no illusions as to whose side they were on. Men always stick together.\n\n'I do not know why you are behaving in such an undignified manner, Emerson,' I said. 'Let me go at once.'\n\nEmerson's grip did not relax. 'Give me your word you will come along quietly.'\n\n'How can I not, when there are four of you great bullies against one poor little woman?'\n\nGargery, who is not especially large or muscular, swelled with pride. 'Aow, madam \u2013 ' he began.\n\n'Mind your vowels, Gargery.'\n\n'Yes, madam. Madam, if you want that reporter thrashed you should leave it to the Professor, or to me, madam, or Bob, or Jerry, or \u2013'\n\nEmerson cut him short with a gesture and a nod. 'Come along to the library, Peabody, and we will discuss this calmly. Gargery, pour the whisky.'\n\nA sip of this curative beverage, so soothing to the nerves, restored me to my customary self-possession. 'I suppose you have all read the letter,' I remarked.\n\nObviously they had, including Nefret, who had kept prudently out of the way until then. David said timidly, 'I thought it a very gentlemanly and graceful gesture. An apology, even.'\n\n'A cursed impertinence, rather,' Emerson exclaimed. 'A jeer, a sneer, a challenge; rubbing salt in the wound, aggravating the offence \u2013'\n\n'He has a pretty turn of rhetoric,' said Ramses, who had taken up the newspaper. '\"The honourable and upright ladies of the suffragist moment \u2013 a movement with which I am in complete sympathy \u2013 cannot be blamed for their failure to anticipate my intentions. The police of a dozen countries have sought me in vain. Scotland Yard \u2013 \"' He broke off and looked critically at Nefret. 'You find it amusing?'\n\n'Very.' Nefret's laughter is quite delightful \u2013 soft and low pitched, like sunlit water bubbling over pebbles. On this occasion I could have done without the pleasure of hearing it. Catching my eye, she attempted to contain her mirth, with only partial success. 'Particularly that sentence about being in sympathy with the suffragist movement. Considering that one of his lieutenants is female, one must give him credit for living up to his principles.'\n\n'What principles?' Emerson demanded, conspicuously unamused. 'His reference to your Aunt Amelia proves he is no gentleman.'\n\n'He referred to her in the most flattering terms,' Nefret insisted. She snatched the paper from Ramses and read aloud. '\"Had I known that Mrs Emerson would be present, I would not have proceeded with my plan. I have greater respect for her perspicuity than for that of all Scotland Yard.\"'\n\nEmerson said, 'Ha!' I said nothing. I was afraid that if I unclenched my jaws I would use improper language. Ramses looked from me to Nefret.\n\n'What do you think, Nefret?'\n\n'I think,' said Nefret, 'that Sethos does not know much about women either.'\n\nIt gave me a certain mean satisfaction to find that Sethos had foiled Scotland Yard as effectively as he had fooled me. The inquiry had come to a dead end after Mr Romer's carriage and horses were discovered in a livery stable in Cheapside. The individual who had left it was described, unhelpfully, as a bearded gentleman. The carriage had been empty.\n\nI was in receipt of a courteous note from Mrs Pankhurst wishing me bon voyage and hoping she would have the pleasure of seeing me again after I had returned from Egypt in the spring. Apparently she blamed me for the unpleasant publicity. A most unreasonable attitude, since it was not I who had been taken in by Mrs Markham and her 'brother,' but of course it would have been beneath my dignity to point this out. I forgave Mrs Pankhurst, as was my Christian duty, and did not respond to her message.\n\nThe press surrounded the house, demanding interviews. I was determined to have a little chat with Kevin O'Connell, but it would have been impossible to admit him without arousing the competitive spirit of his fellow villains, so Ramses and Emerson smuggled him into the house after dark, through the coalhole. He was still rather smudgy when Emerson brought him to the library and offered him a whisky and soda.\n\nI was at a loss to understand Emerson's remarkable forbearance with regard to Kevin, whom he had always regarded as an infernal nuisance, but I had come round to his point of view; if Kevin had withheld the letter, Sethos would have sent copies to other newspapers. I therefore accepted Kevin's effusive apologies with only a touch of hauteur.\n\n'Indeed, Mrs Emerson, me dear, I'd never have allowed the letter to be published if I had known you would take it badly,' he protested. 'It seemed to me a gentlemanly and graceful \u2013'\n\n'Oh, bah,' I exclaimed. 'Never mind the excuses, Kevin, I admit that you had little choice in the matter. However, the least you can do to make amends is to tell us everything you know about that impertinent missive.'\n\n'I can do better than that.' Kevin took an envelope from his breast pocket. 'I brought the original.'\n\n'How did you manage to get it back from Scotland Yard?' I asked.\n\n'By bribery and corruption,' said Kevin with a cheeky grin. 'It is only on loan, Mrs E., so make the most of your time. I assured my \u2013 er \u2013 friend that I would return it to him before morning.'\n\nAfter perusing the letter I passed it on to Emerson. 'We might have known Sethos would leave no useful clue,' I said in disgust. 'The paper is of the sort that can be purchased at any stationer's. The message is not even written by hand, but on a typewriting machine.'\n\n'A Royal,' said Ramses, looking over his father's shoulder. 'It is one of the latest models, with a ball bearing one-track rail \u2013'\n\n'That is a safe pronouncement, since none of us can prove you wrong,' I remarked with a certain degree of sarcasm.\n\n'I believe I am not wrong, though,' said my son calmly. 'I have made a study of typewriting machines, since they are already in common use and will eventually, I daresay, entirely replace \u2013'\n\n'The signature is handwritten,' David said, in an attempt, no doubt, to change the subject. Ramses does have a habit of running on and on.\n\n'In hieroglyphs,' Emerson growled. 'What an incredible ego the man has! He has even enclosed his name in a cartouche, a privilege reserved for royalty.'\n\nKevin was beginning to show signs of impatience. 'Forgive me, Mrs E., but I promised my confederate I would get this back to him by midnight tonight. He would be the first to be suspected if it were missing and then I might lose a valuable source of information.'\n\nThere were still a few confounded reporters hanging about the following day, when we expected Evelyn and Walter. Having dispatched the carriage to the railway station in order to meet the train, we waited for an appropriate interval; Emerson then emerged, picked up a reporter at random, carried him across the street into the park, and threw him into the pond. This served to distract the rest of the wretches, so that Evelyn, Walter, and Lia, as I must call her, were able to enter the house unassaulted.\n\nWalter declined tea in favour of whisky and soda, but his reaction to the affair was less outraged than I had feared it would be. As he remarked to his wife, 'We ought to be accustomed to it, Evelyn; our dear Amelia makes a habit of such things.'\n\n'You cannot blame this on Amelia,' Evelyn said firmly.\n\n'I can,' said Emerson, brushing at the muddy splashes on his boots and trousers. 'If she had not taken it into her head to participate in that demonstration \u2013'\n\n'I would have joined her had I been in London,' said Evelyn. 'Come now, Emerson, she could not possibly have anticipated that that \u2013 person \u2013 would be involved.'\n\n'We must give her that,' Walter agreed, with an affectionate smile at me.\n\n'It must have been frightfully exciting,' said little Amelia (whom I must remember to call Lia).\n\nShe was so like her mother! Her smooth skin and soft blue eyes and fair hair recalled happy memories of the young girl I had found fainting in the Forum that day in Rome so long ago. But this young face, thank Heaven, was blooming with health, and the graceful little form was sturdy and straight.\n\nNefret gave her a warning look. 'Don't get your hopes up, dear. Sethos made it clear that the encounter was accidental and that he would have avoided it had he been able. It will be a dull season, I assure you, with no exciting adventures.'\n\n'Quite right,' said David.\n\n'Absolutely,' said Ramses.\n\n'A very dull season,' I agreed, 'if Emerson means to go on with his boring work in the Valley. I wonder that you have put up with it so long, Emerson. It is insulting to us \u2013 us, the finest excavators in the profession \u2013 allowed only to clear tombs other archaeologists have abandoned as unworthy of interest. We might as well be housemaids, cleaning up after our betters.'\n\nEmerson interrupted me with a vehement remark, and Walter, always the peacemaker, interrupted Emerson, asking him how much longer it would be before we departed. I leaned back in my chair and listened with a satisfied smile. I had turned the conversation away from the dangerous subject. Evelyn and Walter would never allow their beloved child to accompany us if they believed there was danger ahead. Nor, of course, would I.\n\nIt was on the following morning that I received another communication from Mrs Pankhurst, inviting me to an emergency meeting of the committee that afternoon.\n\nNefret had taken Lia to the hospital with her, and the boys had gone to the British Museum with Walter. Emerson had announced at breakfast that he meant to work on his book and must not be interrupted. I had looked forwards to a long quiet day with Evelyn, who is my dearest friend as well as my sister-in-law, but after brief consideration I decided I must attend the meeting. Although Mrs Pankhurst made no reference to her earlier note, I took the present invitation to be in the nature of an olive branch. It was quite a businesslike epistle, brief and to the point.\n\nEvelyn, as ardent a suffragist as I, agreed I ought to turn the other cheek for the good of the cause, but I felt I must decline her suggestion that she accompany me.\n\n'This is a business meeting, you see, and it would not be proper to bring a stranger, especially in view of the fact that I am not a member of the committee. Perhaps they mean to propose me this afternoon. Yes, that seems quite likely.'\n\nEvelyn nodded agreement. 'Will you tell Emerson of your plans, or shall I, when he emerges from his lair?'\n\n'He is rather like a bear when he is disturbed,' I agreed with a laugh. 'But I suppose I had better do so. He doesn't like me to go off without informing him.'\n\nEmerson bent over his desk, attacking the page with vehement strokes of his pen. I cleared my throat. He started, dropped the pen, swore, and stared at me.\n\n'What do you want?'\n\n'I am going out for a while, Emerson. I felt obliged to mention it to you.'\n\n'Oh,' said Emerson. He flexed his cramped hands. 'Where are you going?'\n\nI explained. Emerson's eyes brightened.\n\n'I will drive you in the motor car.'\n\n'No, you will not!'\n\n'But, Peabody \u2013'\n\n'You have work to do, my dear. Besides, you were not invited. This is a business meeting. I must do a few errands first, and you know how you hate going to the shops with me.'\n\n'One excuse is sufficient,' said Emerson mildly. He leaned back in his chair and studied me. 'You wouldn't lie to me, would you, Peabody?'\n\n'I will show you the letter from Mrs Pankhurst if you don't believe me.'\n\nEmerson held out his hand.\n\n'Really, Emerson,' I exclaimed. 'I am deeply hurt and offended that you should doubt my word. The letter is on the desk in my sitting room, but if you want to see it you can just fetch it yourself.'\n\n'You are taking the carriage, then?'\n\n'Yes. Bob will drive me. Why the interrogation, Emerson? Are you having premonitions?'\n\n'I never have premonitions,' Emerson growled. 'All right, Peabody. Behave yourself and try not to get in trouble.'\n\nHaving mentioned errands, I felt I must perform a few, since I never lie to Emerson unless it is absolutely necessary. They took some little time, and the early dusk was falling when I directed Bob to take me to Clement's Inn, where the Pankhursts had taken lodgings.\n\nFleet Street was filled with omnibuses, carriages, vans and cycles, each vehicle looking for a break in the traffic. Motor cars darted ahead of all rivals whenever opportunity served, the roaring of their engines adding to the din. Our progress was slow. When one particular delay prolonged itself, I looked out of the window and saw a positive tangle of vehicles ahead. The core of the obstruction appeared to be a coster's barrow and a hansom cab, whose wheels had become entangled. The owners of both were screaming insults at one another, other drivers added their comments, and from somewhere behind us the impatient operator of a motor car sounded a series of frantic blasts on his horn.\n\nI called to Bob. 'I will walk from here. It is only a few hundred yards.'\n\nOpening the door \u2013 with some difficulty, since a railway delivery van had pulled up close on that side \u2013 I started to get out.\n\nMy foot never touched the pavement. I had only a flashing glimpse of a hard, unshaven face close to mine before I was passed like an unwieldy parcel from the grasp of the first man into the even more painful grip of a second individual. Initially I was too astonished to defend myself effectively. Then I saw, behind the second man, something that informed me there was no time to lose. The back doors of the van were open, and it was that dark orifice towards which I was being carried.\n\nThe situation did not look promising. I had dropped my parasol, and my cries were drowned by the incessant hooting of the motor car. As the fellow attempted to thrust me into the interior of the van, I managed to catch hold of the door with one hand. A hard blow on my forearm loosened my grip and wrung a cry of pain from my lips. With a violent oath the villain gave me a shove and I fell, striking the back of my head rather heavily. Half in and half out of the van, giddy and breathless, blinded by the hat that had been tipped over my eyes, I gathered my strength for what I knew must be my final act of resistance. When hands seized my shoulders I kicked out as hard as I could.\n\n'Damnation!' said a familiar voice.\n\nI sat up and pushed the hat away from my eyes. The darkness was almost complete, but the streetlights had come on, and the powerful lamps of a motor car silhouetted a form I knew as well as I had known that beloved voice.\n\n'Oh, Emerson, is it you? Did I injure you?'\n\n'Disaster was avoided by a matter of inches,' said my husband gravely.\n\nHe pulled me out of the van and crushed me painfully to him, completing the destruction of my second-best hat.\n\n'Is she all right?' The agitated voice was that of David, perched atop a cart that had drawn up behind us. Ignoring the curses of the driver he jumped down, accompanied by a rain of cabbages, and hastened to Emerson's side. 'Professor, hadn't we better get her away at once? There may be more of them.'\n\n'No such luck,' Emerson grunted. Scooping me up into his arms he bent over and peered under the van. 'They've got clean away, curse them. I should have hit that bastard harder. It is your fault, Peabody; if you had not winded me with that kick in the \u2013'\n\n'Radcliffe!' Though the voice was distorted by emotion and want of breath, I knew the speaker had to be Walter; no one else employs Emerson's detested first name.\n\n'Yes, yes.' Tightening his grasp, as if he feared I would slip away from him, Emerson carried me towards the motor car. It was our motor car. Behind the wheel, watching with mild interest, was my son, Ramses.\n\n'Premonition be damned,' said Emerson. 'It was cold hard reason that informed me you had been guilty of a serious error in judgement.'\n\n'In fact,' said Evelyn, 'it was I who convinced you, was it not?'\n\nAt one time she would not have ventured to contradict him, but (with my encouragement) she had learned to stand up for herself \u2013 not only with Emerson but with her husband, who had been rather inclined to patronize her. Emerson quite enjoyed her independent manner. His scowling face relaxed into a smile.\n\n'Let us say, my dear Evelyn, that your doubts confirmed my own. After dismissing Peabody so cavalierly, Mrs Pankhurst was not likely to \u2013'\n\n'Oh, curse it,' I exclaimed. 'You had no such suspicions or you would have attempted to prevent me from going.'\n\nEmerson said, 'Have another whisky and soda, Peabody.'\n\nHe had bundled me into the motor car, leaving Bob to extricate the carriage \u2013 not so difficult after all, since the entwined vehicles had untangled themselves with a quickness that might have struck some as highly suspicious. The railway van formed a new obstruction, however. Its driver had disappeared, and so had the individual Emerson had struck senseless. This annoyed him a great deal, for, as he remarked, when he knocked people down he expected them to stay down.\n\nWhen we stopped in front of Chalfont House we were set upon by our agitated friends, including Nefret and Lia, who had returned from the hospital too late to join the rescue expedition. They pulled me out of the vehicle and passed me from one pair of loving arms to the next \u2013 including those of Gargery, who was inclined to forget his station when overcome by emotion. The other servants contented themselves with shouting 'Hurrah!' and embracing one another. We then retired in triumph to the library.\n\nIt was our favourite apartment in that large, pretentious mansion. Rows of books in mellow leather bindings lined the walls, and Evelyn had replaced the ornate Empire furniture with comfortable chairs and sofas. A cozy fire burned on the hearth and the lamps had been lit. Gargery drew the heavy velvet curtains and then sidled off to a corner of the room where, with our tactful cooperation, he pretended to be invisible. I would have invited him to sit down and listen in comfort had I not known he would be shocked at the idea.\n\nI had a few questions of my own. Conversation had been impossible during the return drive; Emerson kept shouting directions and suggestions at Ramses, who ignored them as coolly as he ignored my complaints that he was driving too fast.\n\nNow Ramses said, 'I also found it difficult to believe that Mrs Pankhurst would proffer such an invitation, and at such short notice. However, we might not have acted on such doubtful grounds had not Aunt Evelyn showed me the letter. A single glance informed me that it had been typewritten on the same machine as the one Sethos had used.'\n\nThe only thing I dislike more than being lectured on Egyptology by Ramses is being lectured on detection by Ramses. However, a rational individual does not allow childish pique to interfere with the acquisition of knowledge.\n\n'How?' I asked.\n\n'Individual letters may become worn or scratched or cracked,' Ramses explained. 'These flaws, however minute, are reproduced on the paper when the key strikes it.'\n\n'Yes, I see.' I promised myself I would have a close look at one of the confounded machines. One must keep up with modern advances. 'So you could identify the machine that wrote that letter?'\n\n'If I could find it. That is of course the difficulty.'\n\n'A difficulty indeed, since you have not the slightest idea where to begin looking for it.'\n\n'What difference does it make?' Evelyn demanded. 'You have brought her back safe. Thank heaven you were in time!'\n\n'There was ample time,' said Emerson, who is disinclined to give heaven any credit whatever. 'We went straight to Mrs Pankhurst's rooms in Clement's Inn and learned, as we had expected, that she had sent no message. David wanted to go haring off to look for you, my dear, but I persuaded him of the folly of that.'\n\n'Yes, I know how impetuous David can be,' I said, smiling at the young man. It had been Emerson, of course, who had wanted to drive furiously around London in a futile search for me.\n\n'We had no choice but to wait for you near the designated rendezvous,' Ramses said. 'We had been waiting for a quarter of an hour at least before you came, Mother, and were, I assure you, on the qui vive, but we failed to recognize the significance of the entangled vehicles. It is a common-enough occurrence. I do not doubt that on this occasion it was deliberately engineered, and that the drivers of the coster's cart and the cab were Sethos' confederates, as were the individuals in the railway van. The operation was very neatly planned and executed. They might have got you away if Father had not leaped instantly from the motor car and forced a path through the crowd.'\n\nNefret, who was curled up in a corner of the divan, laughed. 'I would like to have seen that. How many bicyclists did you trample underfoot, Professor darling?'\n\n'One or two,' Emerson said calmly. 'And I seem to recall climbing over a cart filled with some vegetable substance. Potatoes, perhaps?'\n\n'Something squashier,' I said, unable to repress a smile. 'I hope Bob can get those boots clean. You had better go up and change.'\n\n'You too,' said Emerson, his brilliant blue eyes intent on my face.\n\n'Yes, my dear.'\n\nDrawing my arm through his, Emerson led me out.\n\nI assumed, naturally, that he was impatient to express his relief at my deliverance in his usual affectionate manner. On this occasion I was in error. He assisted me with buttons and boots, as he usually did; but once my outer garment had been removed, he turned me round and inspected me more in the manner of a physician than an impatient spouse.\n\n'You look as if you had been over Victoria Falls in a barrel,' he remarked.\n\n'It looks worse than it feels,' I assured him, not entirely truthfully, for the assorted bruises were stiffening and my shoulder ached like fury. I must have landed on it when the rascal tossed me into the van.\n\nEmerson ran his long fingers through my hair and then took me gently by the chin and tilted my face up to the light. 'There is a bruise on your jaw and a lump on the back of your head. Did he strike you on the face, Peabody?'\n\nNot one whit deceived by the unnatural calm of his voice, I strove to reassure him. 'I can't remember, Emerson. It was quite exciting while it lasted, you see. I fought back, of course \u2013'\n\n'Of course. Well, I have seen you in worse condition, but I am going to put you to bed, Peabody, and send for a doctor.'\n\nI had no intention of submitting to this, but after some spirited discussion I agreed to let Nefret have a look at me. The look of shock on her face told me I must present rather a horrid spectacle, so I let her tend to me, which she did as gently and skilfully as a trained physician.\n\n'There are no broken bones,' she announced at last. 'But the brute handled you very roughly.'\n\n'I was fighting back,' I explained.\n\n'Of course.' She smiled affectionately. 'She'll be stiff and sore for a few days, Professor; I know you will make sure she doesn't overdo.'\n\nEmerson was more than pleased to assist me with buttons and ribbons. He insisted on putting on my slippers for me, and as he knelt at my feet he presented such a touching picture of manly devotion that I could not resist brushing the thick black locks from his brow and pressing my lips to it. One thing led to another, and we were a trifle late going down for dinner.\n\nThe children were in excellent spirits, particularly Lia, who could talk of nothing but our forthcoming voyage. I was amused to note that she was wearing one of Nefret's embroidered robes and that she had arranged her hair in the same style as Nefret's. It did not become her quite as well, but she looked very pretty, her cheeks pink with excitement and her eyes sparkling. The boys teased her a bit, warning her of snakes and mice and scorpions, and promising to defend her from those terrors.\n\nThey were so merry together that I did not notice at first that the child's parents were silent and ill at ease. My brother-in-law is a man I truly esteem: a loving husband and father, a loyal brother, and a scholar of exceptional ability. He is not very good at hiding his feelings, however, and I could tell something was bothering him. My dear Evelyn's troubled gaze kept moving from her daughter to me and back again.\n\nThey waited until after we had retired to the library for coffee before they broke the news. Walter began by informing Emerson that he had taken the liberty of reporting the incident to the police.\n\n'What incident?' Emerson demanded. 'Oh. What did you do that for?'\n\n'Upon my word, Radcliffe, you take this very coolly!' Walter exclaimed. 'A brutal attack on your wife \u2013'\n\nEmerson slammed his cup into the saucer. Not much coffee was spilled, since he had drunk most of it, but I heard a distinct crack. 'Curse you, Walter, how dare you suggest I am indifferent to my wife's safety? I will deal with Sethos myself. The police are of no damn \u2013 er \u2013 confounded use anyhow.'\n\nI will summarize the discussion, which became somewhat heated. Emerson does not like to have his judgement questioned, and Walter was in an unusual state of excitability. It culminated as I had begun to fear it would, with Walter's announcement that he could not allow Lia to accompany us that year.\n\nEveryone began talking at once, and Gargery, who had been shaking with indignation ever since Walter accused Emerson of negligence, dropped one of my best demitasse cups. Finding her father adamant, Lia burst into tears and fled from the room, followed by Nefret. I sent Gargery away, since he was wreaking havoc with the Spode, and persuaded Evelyn that she had better go to her daughter. She gave me an appealing look, to which I responded with a smile and a nod; for indeed I understood the dear woman's dilemma. She would have risked her own safety to defend me from danger, but the safety of her child was another matter.\n\nNot that I believed there was danger to me or anyone else. I managed to express this opinion once I had got the men to stop shouting at one another. My arguments were sensible and ought to have prevailed, but I found to my annoyance that he who ought to have been my strongest supporter had turned against me.\n\n'Yes, well, I understand your viewpoint, Walter,' Emerson said, with the affability that usually succeeds his fits of temper. 'The child would not be in the slightest danger if she were with me \u2013 what did you say, Ramses?'\n\n'I said \"with us,\" Father. I beg your pardon for interrupting you, but I felt obliged to emphasize my willingness, and that of David, to lay down our lives if necessary \u2013'\n\n'Don't be so confounded melodramatic,' Emerson snarled. 'As I was saying, little Amelia would be perfectly safe with us, but perhaps this is for the best. I have decided to leave for Egypt as soon as possible. We will return to Kent tomorrow, pack our gear, and sail at the end of the week.'\n\n'Impossible, Emerson,' I exclaimed. 'I have not finished my shopping, and you have not finished your book, and \u2013'\n\n'The devil take your shopping, Peabody,' Emerson said, with an affectionate look at me. 'And the book as well. My dear, I intend to get you out of this bloody damned city at once. There are too many damned people here, including one of the bloodiest. If Sethos follows us to Egypt, so much the worse for him. Now come to bed. I want to get an early start.'\n\nWalter and Evelyn departed next morning with their unhappy child, leaving Mrs Watson, their excellent housekeeper, in charge of shutting up the house and putting the servants on board wages. I expected Emerson would insist on driving the motor car back to Kent, but to my surprise he gave in with scarcely a grumble when I said I preferred the comfort of the train. He ordered Ramses not to drive faster than ten miles per hour and presented Nefret with a preposterous motoring mask. Where he had found it, I cannot imagine. The tinted goggles were set in a frame of leather lined with silk, and it made her look like an apprehensive beetle."
            },
            {
                "title": "From Manuscript H",
                "text": "'Take it off,' Ramses said. 'We're out of sight now.'\n\nNefret, beside him in the front seat, gestured wildly. He couldn't decide whether the muffled noises that emerged from the narrow slit over her mouth were laughter, or an attempt at a reply, or the gasps of a woman who was unable to breathe. 'Get it off her, David,' he ordered in alarm.\n\nDavid, who was in the tonneau, tugged at the straps until they gave way. There was no doubt about the nature of the noises he was making, and as soon as the hideous accoutrement came away from her face, Nefret joined him.\n\n'Bless the dear man,' she gasped, as soon as her laughter was under control. Her loosened hair blew around her face until she captured and hid it under a close-fitting bonnet.\n\nUpon occasion \u2013 egged on by Nefret \u2013 Ramses had got the Daimler up to fifty miles per hour. Such speed was unachievable in the crowded city streets, but still the traffic noises made conversation impossible until they stopped for tea in a village on the outskirts of the city. Nefret made both of them try on the mask \u2013 to the amusement of the other customers \u2013 and then they got down to business. It was the first chance they had had for a private conference since the previous day.\n\n'The situation has become serious,' Nefret announced.\n\n'Good Gad,' said Ramses. 'Do you really think so?'\n\n'Ramses,' David murmured.\n\n'Oh, I don't mind him,' Nefret said. 'He's just trying to be frightfully, frightfully blas\u00e9. You were wrong, weren't you, dear boy? Sethos may not have known Aunt Amelia would be at the meeting, but we have not seen the last of him. He's after her again!'\n\nShe bit into a scone.\n\n'It would appear that that is the case,' Ramses admitted. 'What I fail to understand is what prompted this renewed interest. It's been years since we heard from or about him. Unless...'\n\n'Unless what?' David asked intently.\n\n'Unless she has heard from him in the meantime. She wouldn't be likely to tell us about it.'\n\n'She never tells us anything,' Nefret said indignantly.\n\n'Why don't you ask her?'\n\n'Why don't you? It's those eyes of hers,' Nefret muttered theatrically, rolling her own. 'That stormy grey shade is alarming even when she's in a pleasant mood, and when she's angry they look like \u2013 like polished steel balls.' She gave an exaggerated shudder.\n\n'It isn't funny,' David said.\n\n'No,' Nefret agreed. 'You didn't see the poor darling last night; she was covered with bruises. If the Professor gets his hands on Sethos he'll tear him to pieces, and I wouldn't mind joining in.'\n\n'Father has taken the necessary precautions,' Ramses said. 'Getting her out of London and away from England as soon as is possible.'\n\n'That's not enough,' Nefret declared. 'What if he follows her to Egypt?'\n\n'He isn't likely to.'\n\n'So you say. What if he does? We need to know how to protect her! If she won't give us the necessary information, we must ferret it out! Well, Ramses?'\n\nRamses smiled ruefully. 'Confound it, Nefret, I do wish you wouldn't read my mind. It's nothing to do with Sethos. I was thinking of something else. Did you know Mother once made a list of all the people who held a grudge against her and Father? There were fifteen names on it, and that was several years ago.'\n\n'Fifteen people who have wanted to murder her?' Nefret grinned. 'How typical of her to make a neat, methodical list! Did she show it to you?'\n\n'Not exactly.'\n\nNefret chuckled. 'Good for you, Ramses. I know, it's not nice to pry, but what other choice have we? Who were these people?'\n\nRamses prided himself on his memory, which he had cultivated (along with less acceptable skills) by hours of practise. He reeled off a list of names.\n\nHis companions followed him intently. They had not been with the Emersons during their earlier years in Egypt, but both of them knew the stories. 'The Adventures of Aunt Amelia,' as Nefret called them, had filled in many an idle hour.\n\n'The majority of them are old enemies,' David remarked, when Ramses had finished. 'And some, surely, are out of the picture. Are you suggesting that it wasn't Sethos, but another former adversary, who attacked her yesterday?'\n\n'No. I'm only considering all the possibilities. Most are, in fact, dead or in prison.' Ramses added with a smile, 'Mother made notes.'\n\n'What about the woman who kidnapped me during the hippopotamus affair?' Nefret asked.\n\n'We never knew her name, did we? Another of Mother's little omissions. However, there were only two women among the most recent additions to the list. Bertha was an ally of the villain in the case we were speaking of the other day, but she came over to Mother's and Father's side in the end. So, by a process of elimination, a female designated as Matilda must have been the villainess in the hippopotamus affair. There is no reason to suppose that she has turned up again, after so many years.'\n\n'There's no reason to suppose any of them have turned up again.' Nefret picked up her gloves. 'We must go, it's getting late. I commend your thoroughness, Ramses, but why look for other villains when we know who was responsible for the attack on Aunt Amelia? Sethos has returned! And if the Professor and Aunt Amelia won't tell us what we need to know to protect her, we are entitled to employ any underhanded method we like.'\n\nKevin's informant at Scotland Yard served him well. The Daily Yell was the first to report my little adventure, which Kevin exaggerated in his usual journalistic fashion. I read the story that evening, after Emerson and I had boarded the train at Victoria. Gargery and his cudgel accompanied Emerson and me. He kept the cudgel concealed until after we had taken our seats, but it was not difficult for me to deduce its presence since he walked so close behind me the cursed thing kept jabbing me in the back. I am as democratic as the next man (or woman) and had no objection to sharing a first-class compartment with my butler, but the presence of Gargery (and the cudgel) had a sobering effect on me.\n\nFor Emerson to accept any assistance whatever in looking after me was extraordinary. He was taking the business even more seriously than I had expected. I doubted that Sethos would be bold enough to try again, but if he were so inclined, we would certainly be safer in Egypt than in London. Our loyal men, all of whom had worked for us for many years, would have risked lives and limbs in our defence.\n\nWe were not able to leave England quite as soon as Emerson hoped, but in less than a fortnight we stood at the rail of the steamer waving and blowing kisses to the dear ones who had come to see us off. It did not rain, but the skies threatened, and a cold wind blew Evelyn's veils into grey streamers. Gargery had removed his hat, though I had strictly forbidden him to do so because of the inclement weather. He was looking particularly sulky, for I had refused to allow him to go with us 'to look after you and Miss Nefret, madam.' He made the same suggestion every year, and he always sulked when I refused.\n\nEvelyn was trying to smile and Walter waved vigorously. Lia looked like a little effigy of grief, her face swollen with crying. Her distress had been so great Walter had promised that if nothing further occurred, he and Evelyn would bring her out with them after Christmas. As the ribbon of dark water between the ship and the dock widened, she covered her face with a handkerchief and turned into her mother's arms.\n\nHer visible woe cast a damper over our spirits. Even Ramses seemed downcast. I had not realized he would miss his aunt and uncle so much.\n\nHowever, by the time the boat approached Port Said, we had got back into our old routine, and anticipation had replaced melancholy. After suspiciously inspecting every passenger, particularly the ones who boarded at Gibraltar and Marseilles, Emerson had relaxed his vigilance, to the visible disappointment of several of the older ladies to whom he had been particularly charming. (The younger ladies were disappointed too, but he had not paid them so much attention because even he admitted Sethos would have some difficulty disguising himself as a five-foot-tall female with smooth cheeks and dainty feet.)\n\nAfter the usual bustle and confusion on the quay we got our baggage sorted out and boarded the train for Cairo, where our dahabeeyah was moored. These charming houseboats, once the favourite means of Nile travel for wealthy tourists, had been largely replaced by steamers and the railway, but Emerson had purchased one of them and named it after me because he knew how much I enjoy that means of travel. (And also because we could live on board instead of staying at a hotel while we were in Cairo. Emerson dislikes elegant hotels, tourists, and dressing for dinner.)\n\nI approached the Amelia in a far happier frame of mind than I had ever enjoyed after such a prolonged absence. In previous years we had put Abdullah, our reis, in charge of making certain all was in readiness for our arrival. Abdullah was a man. Need I say more?\n\nAmong the crewmen waiting to greet us, standing modestly behind them all with her face veiled and her head bowed, was the individual who had replaced Abdullah \u2013 his daughter-in-law Fatima.\n\nFatima was the widow of Abdullah's son Feisal, who had passed on the previous year. One of his widows, I should say. The younger of his two wives, who had given him three children, had gone compliantly into the household of the man Abdullah selected for her, as custom decreed. Conceive of my amazement, therefore, when Fatima sought me out and asked for my help. She had loved her husband and he had loved her; he had taken a second wife only because she had begged him to, so that he might have the children she could not give him. She did not want another husband. She would work night and day to the limit of her strength at any position I could offer her so long as it enabled her to be independent.\n\nThe Reader can hardly doubt the nature of my response. To find a little flame of rebellion, a yearning for freedom \u2013 yes, and a marriage as tender and loving as any woman could wish \u2013 in an Egyptian woman thrilled me to the core. I consulted Abdullah, as a matter of courtesy, and was pleased to find that although he was far from enthusiastic, he did not forbid the scheme I had proposed.\n\n'What else was to be expected?' he demanded rhetorically. 'I do not know what the world is coming to, with the women learning to read and write, and the young men going to school instead of to work. I am glad I will not live to see it. Do as you like, Sitt Hakim, you always do.'\n\nAnd he went off, shaking his head and muttering about the good old days. Men always grumble, to make women believe they are reluctant about giving in, but I knew perfectly well Abdullah was delighted to be relieved of his housekeeping duties. He never did things the way I wanted them done and he always looked sour when I failed to register sufficient appreciation. Such encounters were very trying for both of us.\n\nFatima stayed in the background, as was proper, until we had greeted Reis Hassan and the other crewmen. Then I sent the men away so that Fatima could unveil.\n\nShe was a little woman, not as tall as I, with the fine, free carriage Egyptian women acquire from carrying heavy loads on their heads. I had taken her to be in her mid-forties, though she had looked older. The face she now displayed wore such a glow of happiness and welcome that her plain features were transformed.\n\n'So, it is well?' I inquired.\n\n'Yes, Sitt Hakim. All is very well.' She spoke English, and my look of surprise made her beam even more broadly. 'I study, Sitt, all the days I study, and I wash all thing, all thing, Sitt. Do you come and see, you and Nur Misur.'\n\n'Light of Egypt' was Nefret's Egyptian name. Knowing how much of a strain it is to carry on a prolonged conversation in a strange language, she said in Arabic, 'Fatima, will you sometimes speak Arabic with me? I need the practise more than you need practise in English. How hard you have studied!'\n\nShe had done more than study. Every object on the boat that could sparkle or shine did so. The curtains had been washed so frequently they were wearing through in spots. She had sprinkled dried rose petals between the sheets (I looked forwards to hearing Emerson's comments on that). There were vases of fresh flowers everywhere, and rosebuds floated in the water that filled the basins in each bedroom. My praise made her eyes shine, but as Fatima led the way to the saloon, Nefret said out of the corner of her mouth, 'We are all going to smell like a bordello, Aunt Amelia.'\n\n'You are not supposed to know that word,' I replied, as softly.\n\n'I know others even less proper.' With a sudden impulsive movement she threw her arms around Fatima, who had stopped to replace her veil, and gave her a hearty hug.\n\nWhen we entered the saloon a muffled hiss of fury and dismay filtered through Fatima's veil. In less than a quarter of an hour the men had made a mess of the room. The boys were smoking cigarettes and letting the ashes fall on to the floor. Emerson had heaped papers and books on the table; and a vase (which had probably adorned that object of furniture) had been placed on the floor and kicked over, soaking the oriental rug. Emerson's coat was draped over the back of a chair. Ramses' coat lay on the floor.\n\nFatima darted forwards and pushed ash receptacles up against assorted male elbows. Scooping up the battered blossoms she returned them to the vase, collected the discarded garments, and trotted towards the door.\n\n'Oh, er, hmmm,' said Emerson, watching the small black whirlwind warily. 'Thank you, Fatima. Very good of you. Excellent job. The place looks... Is she annoyed about something, Peabody?'\n\nEmerson's reaction to the rose petals was not quite what I had expected. He has a very poetic nature, though few besides myself are aware of it."
            },
            {
                "title": "From Manuscript H",
                "text": "'You look absolutely disgusting,' Nefret said admiringly. 'Thank you.' Ramses added another boil to his neck.\n\n'I still don't see why you won't take me with you.'\n\nRamses turned from the mirror and sat down on a stool in order to slip his feet into his shoes. Like his galabeeyah, they were of expensive workmanship but sadly scuffed and stained \u2013 the attire of a man who can afford the best, but whose personal habits leave a great deal to be desired. He stood up and adjusted the belt that held his heavy knife. 'Are you ready, David?'\n\n'Almost.' David was also dirty, but not so afflicted with skin eruptions. An imposing black beard and moustache gave him a piratical air.\n\n'It's not fair,' Nefret grumbled.\n\nShe was sitting cross-legged on the bed in Ramses' room, stroking the cat whose sizable bulk filled her lap.\n\nThe cat in question, Horus by name, was the only one they had brought with them that season. Anubis, the patriarch of their tribe of Egyptian cats, was getting old, and none of the others had formed an attachment to a particular human. Horus was Nefret's \u2013 or, as Horus' behaviour made clear, Nefret was his. Ramses suspected Horus felt the same about Nefret as he did about his harem of female cats; he abandoned her as cavalierly as Don Juan when he had other things on his mind; but when he was with her, no other male was allowed to approach \u2013 including Ramses and David.\n\nHorus was the only cat Ramses had encountered whom he thoroughly disliked. Nefret accused him of being jealous. He was \u2013 but not because Horus preferred her. Since the death of his beloved Bastet, he had no desire to acquire another cat. Bastet could not be replaced; there would never be another like her. The reason why he was jealous of Horus was much simpler. Horus enjoyed favours he would have sold his soul to possess, and the furry egotist didn't even have the grace to appreciate them.\n\nYears of painful experience had taught Ramses it was best to ignore Nefret's provocative speeches, but every now and then she got past his defences, and the smirk on Horus' face didn't improve his temper.\n\n'You are the one who is being unfair,' he snapped. 'I tried, Nefret \u2013 give me that. You know the result.'\n\nOne night the previous winter he had spent two hours trying to turn her into a convincing imitation of an Egyptian tough. Beard, boils, skin paint, a carefully constructed squint \u2013 the more he did, the more absurd she looked. David had finally collapsed on to the bed, whooping with laughter. As Ramses struggled to keep his own face straight, Nefret had turned back to the mirror, inspected herself closely, and burst into a fit of the giggles. They had all laughed then, so hard that Nefret had to sit down on the floor holding her stomach and Ramses had to pour water over his head \u2013 to keep himself from snatching her up into his arms, beard, boils and all.\n\nSeeing the corners of her mouth quiver in amused recollection he went on in the same brusque voice. 'Mother will be back from that party at the Ministry before we return, and she may take a notion to look in on her dear children. If she finds us gone she'll lecture me long and loud in the morning, but if you are missing too, Father will skin me alive in the morning.'\n\nNefret acknowledged defeat with a rueful grin. 'One of these days I will convince him he mustn't hold you accountable for my actions, as if you were my nursemaid. You can't control me.'\n\n'No,' Ramses said emphatically.\n\n'Where are you going?'\n\n'I'll tell you if you promise not to follow us.'\n\n'Confound you, Ramses, have you forgot our first law?'\n\nDavid had proposed the rule: No one was to go off on his (or her) own without informing one of the others. Ramses had been in wholehearted agreement with the idea insofar as it pertained to Nefret, but she had made it clear that she would not conform unless they did too.\n\n'I don't expect to run into any trouble tonight,' he said grudgingly. 'We are only making the rounds of the coffee shops in the old city to learn what has been going on since last spring. If Sethos is back in business, someone will have heard rumours of it.'\n\n'Oh, all right. But you are to report to me the instant you get home, is that understood?'\n\n'You will be asleep by then,' Ramses said.\n\n'No, I won't.'\n\nThe coffee shop was not far from the ruined Mosque of Murustan Kalaun. Its shutters were raised, leaving the interior open to the night air. Inside, the flames of small lamps twinkled in the gloom, and coils of blue smoke drifted like lazy djinn. The patrons sat on hassocks or stools around low tables, or on the divan at the rear of the room. Since this was an establishment favoured by prosperous merchants, most of those present were well-dressed, their long kaftans silk-striped and their silver seal rings large and ornate. There were no women present.\n\nA man at a table near the front looked up when Ramses and David entered. 'Ah, so you have returned. The police have abandoned the search?'\n\n'Very amusing,' said Ramses, in the hoarse tones of Ali the Rat. 'You know I always spend the summers at my palace in Alexandria.'\n\nA laugh acknowledged this witticism, and the speaker gestured them to join him. A waiter brought small cups of thick sweetened Turkish coffee and a narghileh. Ramses drew the smoke deep into his lungs and passed the mouthpiece to David. 'So, how is business?' he inquired.\n\nAfter a brief conversation their acquaintance bade them good night, and they were left alone at the table.\n\n'Anything?' David asked. He spoke softly and without moving his lips \u2013 a trick Ramses had learned from one of his 'less respectable acquaintances,' a stage magician at the Alhambra Music Hall, and passed on to David.\n\nRamses shook his head. 'Not yet. It will take time. But look over there.'\n\nThe man he indicated was sitting alone on a bench at the back of the room. David narrowed his eyes. 'I can't see... Surely it is not Yussuf Mahmud?'\n\n'It is. Order two more coffees, I'll be right back.'\n\nHe sidled up to a dignified bearded man at another table, who acknowledged his obsequious greeting with a curl of the lip. The conversation was rather one-sided; Ramses did most of the talking. He got only nods and curt answers for his pains, but when he came back he appeared pleased.\n\n'Kyticas doesn't like me,' he remarked. 'But he dislikes Yussuf Mahmud even more. Kyticas thinks he's got something on his mind. He's been squatting on that bench every night for a week, but he hasn't tried to make any of his dirty little deals.'\n\n'Would the Master \u2013 uh \u2013 you know who I mean \u2013 deal with a second-rater like Yussuf Mahmud?'\n\n'Who knows? He's one of the people I meant to talk with \u2013 and I'm beginning to suspect he wants to talk with me. He's carefully not looking at us. We'll take the hint and follow him when he leaves.'\n\nYussuf Mahmud showed no sign of leaving. He sat stolidly drinking coffee and smoking. Unlike most of the others he was shabbily dressed, his feet bare, his turban tattered. His scanty beard did not conceal the scars of smallpox that covered his cheeks.\n\nThey passed another hour in not-so-idle gossip with various acquaintances. Ali the Rat was in a generous mood, paying for drinks and food with coins taken from a heavy purse. Yussuf Mahmud was one of the few who did not take advantage of his hospitality, though he was obviously fascinated by the purse. Ramses was about to suggest to David that they leave when a voice boomed out a hearty 'Salaam aleikhum!'\n\nRamses almost fell off his stool, and David doubled over into an anonymous bundle, ducking his head. 'Holy Sitt Miriam,' he gasped. 'It's \u2013'\n\n'\u2013 Abu Shitaim,' said Ali the Rat, recovering himself in the nick of time. For good measure he added, 'Curse the unbeliever!'\n\nHis father had advanced into the room with the assurance of a man who is at home wherever he chooses to be. He glanced incuriously at Ali the Rat, dismissed him with a shrug, and went to join Kyticas. His sleeve over his face, David whispered, 'Quick. Let's get out of here!'\n\n'That would only attract his attention. Sit up, he's not looking at us.'\n\n'I thought he was at the reception!'\n\n'So did I. He must have crept away while Mother wasn't looking. He hates those affairs.'\n\n'What's he doing here?'\n\n'The same thing we are doing, I suspect,' Ramses said thoughtfully. 'All right, we can go now. Slowly!'\n\nHe tossed a few coins on to the table and rose. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Yussuf Mahmud get to his feet.\n\nThe following night they met by arrangement, and a short time later they were following Yussuf Mahmud into a part of the city which even Ali the Rat would have preferred to avoid. It bordered the infamous Fish Market, an innocuous name for a district where every variety of vice and perversion was for sale at all hours and, by European standards, at extremely reasonable prices. The narrow alley down which he led them was dark and silent, however, and the house they entered was obviously not his permanent address. The windows were tightly shuttered and the sole article of furniture was a rickety table. Yussuf Mahmud lit a lamp. Opening his robe, he loosened a leather strap.\n\nBound to his body by the strap was a bundle approximately sixteen inches long and four inches in diameter, wrapped in cloth and supported by splint-like lengths of rough wood.\n\nRamses knew what it was, and he knew what was going to happen. He dared not protest. Fearing David would let out an involuntary and betraying exclamation, he stamped heavily on his friend's foot as Yussuf Mahmud removed the wrappings and unrolled the object they had concealed. A few yellowed, brittle flakes sifted on to the table.\n\nIt was a funerary papyrus, the collection of magical spells and prayers popularly known as 'The Book of the Dead.' The section now visible showed several vertical columns of hieroglyphic writing and a painted vignette that depicted a woman clad in a transparent linen gown hand in hand with the jackal-headed god of cemeteries. Before he could see more, Yussuf Mahmud drew a piece of cloth over the roll.\n\n'Well?' he said in a whisper. 'You must decide now. I have other buyers.'\n\nRamses scratched his ear, detaching a few flakes of a substance that had been designed to resemble encrusted dirt. 'Impossible,' he said. 'I must know more before I consult my customers. Where did it come from?'\n\nThe other man smiled tightly and shook his head.\n\nIt was the first stage of a process that often took hours, and few Europeans had the patience to go through the intricate pattern of offer and counter-offer, question and ambiguous answer. In this case Ramses knew he must play the game to the best of his skill. He wanted that papyrus. It was one of the largest he had ever seen, and even that brief glimpse had suggested its quality and condition were extraordinary. How the devil, he wondered, had a petty criminal like Yussuf Mahmud come by something so remarkable?\n\nFeigning disinterest, he turned away from the table. 'It is too perfect,' he said. 'My buyer is a man of learning. He will know it is a fake. I could get, perhaps, twenty English pounds...'\n\nWhen he and David left after another hour of bargaining, they did not have the papyrus. Ramses had not expected they would. No dealer or thief would part with the merchandise until the payment was in his hand. But they had come to an agreement. They were to meet again the following night.\n\nDavid had not spoken at all during the discussion. He was not skilled at disguising his voice, so his role was to look large, loyal and threatening. He was fairly bursting with excitement, however, and as soon as the door of the house closed behind them he exclaimed, 'Good God! Did you \u2013'\n\nRamses cut him off with a curt Arabic expletive, and neither of them spoke again until they reached the river. The small skiff was moored where they had left it. David took first turn at the oars. They were some distance from the shore, hidden by darkness, before Ramses had finished the process that transformed him from a shady looking Cairene to a comparatively well-groomed young Englishman.\n\n'Your turn,' he said. They changed places. David peeled off his beard and removed his turban.\n\n'Sorry,' he said. 'I should not have spoken when I did.'\n\n'Speaking educated English in that part of Cairo at that hour is not a sensible thing to do,' Ramses said dryly. 'There's more to this than meets the eye, David. Yussuf Mahmud doesn't deal in antiquities of that quality. Either he is acting as middle man for someone who doesn't want his identity known, or he stole the papyrus from a bigger thief. The original owner may be after him.'\n\n'Ah,' David said. 'I thought he was uncommonly edgy.'\n\n'I think you thought right. Marketing stolen antiquities is against the law, but it wasn't fear of the police that made the sweat pour off him.'\n\nDavid bundled up his disguise and tucked it away under the seat, then bent over the side to splash water on his face. 'The papyrus was genuine, Ramses. I've never seen one as beautiful.'\n\n'I thought so too, but I'm glad to have you confirm my opinion. You know more of these things than I. You missed a wart.'\n\n'Where? Oh.' David's fingers found the protuberance. Softened by water, it peeled off. 'The Egyptians are right when they say you can see in the dark, like a cat,' he remarked. 'Are you going to tell the Professor about the papyrus?'\n\n'You know how he feels about buying from dealers. I admire his principles, just as I admire the principles of pacifism, but I fear they are equally impractical. In the one case you end up dead. In the other, you lose valuable historical documents to idle collectors who take them home and forget about them. How can the trade be stopped when even the Service des Antiquit\u00e9s buys from such people?'\n\nThe little boat came gently to rest against the muddy bank. Ramses shipped the oars and went on, 'In this case I can't see any other way out of what my mother would call a moral dilemma. I want that damned papyrus, and I want to know how Yussuf Mahmud got hold of it. How much money have you?'\n\n'I \u2013 er \u2013 I'm a bit short,' David admitted.\n\n'So am I. As usual.'\n\n'What about the Professor?'\n\nRamses shifted uncomfortably. 'There's no use asking him for the money, he wouldn't give it to me. He'd give me a fatherly lecture instead. I can't stand it when he does that.'\n\n'Then you'll have to ask Nefret.'\n\n'Damned if I will.'\n\n'That's stupid,' David said. 'She has more money than she knows what to do with, and she's eager to share. If she were as good a friend and a man, you wouldn't hesitate.'\n\n'It isn't that,' Ramses said, knowing he was a liar and knowing that David knew it. 'We'd have to tell her why we want the money, and then she'd want to come with us tomorrow night.'\n\n'Well?'\n\n'Take Nefret to el Was'a? Have you lost your mind? Not under any circumstances whatever.'"
            },
            {
                "title": "From Letter Collection B",
                "text": "It surely won't surprise you to learn I had the devil of a time persuading Ramses to let me go with them. The methods I use on the Professor \u2013 quivering lips, tear-filled eyes \u2013 haven't the slightest effect on that cold-blooded creature; he simply stalks out of the room, radiating disgust. So I was forced to resort to blackmail and intimidation, irrefutable female logic, and a gentle reminder that without my signature they couldn't get the money. (I suppose that's another form of blackmail, isn't it? How shocking!)\n\nIf I do say so, I made a very pretty boy! We bought the clothing that afternoon, after we had stopped by the banker's \u2013 an elegant pale blue wool galabeeyah, gold embroidered slippers, and a long scarf that covered my head and shadowed my face. Ramses darkened my eyebrows and lashes and painted kohl round my eyes. I thought it altered my appearance amazingly, but Ramses wasn't pleased.\n\n'There's no way of changing that colour,' he muttered. 'Keep your head bowed, Nefret, and your eyes modestly lowered. If you look directly at Mahmud or utter a single syllable while we are with him, I will \u2013 I will do something both of us might regret.' A fascinating threat, wasn't it? I was tempted to disobey just to see what he had in mind, but decided not to risk it.\n\nI had never been in that part of the Old City at night. I don't recommend that you venture there, darling; you are so fastidious you would be put off by the stench of rotting garbage and the rats scuttling past and the intense darkness. The darkness of the countryside is nothing to it; in Upper Egypt there is always starlight, even when the moon is down. Nothing so clean and pure as a star would dare show itself in that place. The tall old houses seemed to lean towards one another, whispering ugly secrets, and their balconies cut off even the clouded night sky. My heart was beating faster than usual, but I wasn't afraid. I am never frightened when we three are together. It's when they go off on some hare-brained adventure without me that I get into a state of abject panic.\n\nRamses led the way. He knows every foot of the Old City, including some parts which respectable Egyptians avoid. When we got near the house, Ramses made me stay with him while David went ahead to reconnoitre. When he came back he didn't speak, but gestured us to go on.\n\nIt was a tenement or rooming house of the meanest kind. The hallway smelled of decaying food and hashish and the sweat of too many bodies confined in too small a space. We had to feel our way up the sagging stairs, keeping close to the wall. I couldn't see a cursed thing, so I followed David as I had been directed to do, my hand on his shoulder for guidance. Ramses was close behind me, gripping my elbow to keep me from falling when I stumbled \u2013 which I did do once or twice, because the curly toes of my bee-yoo-tiful slippers kept catching on the splintered boards. I hated this part of it. I could feel crawly, slimy things all around me.\n\nOur destination was a room on the first floor, distinguishable only by the slit of pale light at the bottom of the door. Ramses scratched at the panel. It opened at once.\n\nYussuf Mahmud gestured us to come in and then barred the door behind us. I supposed it was Yussuf Mahmud, though no one introduced us. He gave me a long look and said something in Arabic I didn't understand. It must have been something very rude, because David made growling sounds and drew his knife. Ramses just squinted at the fellow and said something else I didn't understand. He and the man laughed. David didn't laugh, but he put the knife back in his belt.\n\nThe only light in the room came from a lamp on the table, dangerously close to the papyrus, which had been partially unrolled to display a painted vignette. I edged closer. The sheer size of it was enough to take one's breath away; I could tell, from the thickness of the unrolled portions, that it must be very long. The miniature scene depicted the weighing of the heart.\n\nBefore I saw more than that, Ramses grabbed hold of me and turned me round to face him. He must have thought I was about to exclaim aloud or move closer to the light \u2013 which I never would have done! I scowled at him and he leered at me. You have no idea how horrible Ali the Rat looks close up, even when he isn't leering.\n\nThe man said, 'A new one, is he? You are a besotted fool to bring him here.'\n\n'He is such a pretty thing I cannot bear to be parted from him,' Ramses muttered, leering even more hideously. 'Go stand in the corner, my little gazelle, until we complete our business.'\n\nThey had reached an agreement on the price the night before, but knowing the way these people operate I fully expected Yussuf Mahmud would demand more. Instead Yussuf Mahmud shoved the ragged bundle at Ramses \u2013 keeping one hand firmly on it \u2013 and said brusquely, 'You have the money?'\n\nRamses stared at him. Then he said \u2013 squeaked, rather \u2013 'Why such haste, my friend? I hope you are not expecting anyone else this evening. I would be... displeased to share your company with others.'\n\n'Not so displeased as I,' the fellow said, with a certain air of bravado. 'But none of us will linger if we are wise. There are those who can hear words that are not uttered and see through windowless walls.'\n\n'Is it so? Who are these magicians?' Ramses leaned forward, smiling Ali's distorted smile.\n\n'I cannot \u2013'\n\n'No?' Ramses took a heavy sack from the folds of his robe and poured a rain of shining gold coins on to the table. We had agreed they would make a more impressive show than banknotes, and they certainly had the desired effect on Yussuf Mahmud. His eyes practically popped out of his head.\n\n'Information is part of the bargain,' Ramses went on. 'You have not told me where this came from, or through what channels it passed. How many people did you cheat or murder or rob to get it? How many of them will transfer their attentions to me once I have possession of it?'\n\nHe gestured unobtrusively to David, who took the papyrus and laid it carefully in the wooden case we had brought with us. The man paid no attention; his greedy eyes were fixed on that shining golden heap. Ramses glanced quickly from the shuttered window to the barred door. He didn't look at me. He didn't have to; the room was so small that the shadowy corner to which he had directed me was within the range of his vision. I didn't see or hear anything out of the way, but he must have done, for he jumped up and reached for me as the flimsy wooden shutters gave way under the impact of a heavy body.\n\nThe body was that of a man, his face covered by a tightly wound scarf that left only his eyes exposed. He hit the floor and rolled upright, agile as an acrobat. I thought there was another one behind him, but before I could be sure Ramses tucked me under one arm and sprang towards the door. David was already there, the case that held the papyrus in one hand, his knife in the other. He flattened himself against the wall on one side of the door; Ramses pulled the bar back and jumped out of the way. The door flew open, and the man who had hurled himself against it stumbled into the room.\n\nDavid kicked him in the ribs and he fell flat. I was tempted to kick Ramses, for handling me like a bundle of laundry instead of letting me join in the defence, but I decided I hadn't better; he and David were operating quite efficiently and it would have been stupid (and possibly fatal) to break their rhythm. The whole business had taken only a few seconds.\n\nThat heap of gold was our second line of defence. Over Ramses' shoulder I saw a writhing tangle of limbs as the newcomers and Yussuf Mahmud fought with teeth and knives and bodies to possess their prize. They fought on a carpet of gold; coins spilled from the table and rolled across the floor.\n\nDavid had gone out the door. Another body fell into the room and David called out to us to come ahead. Ramses pulled the door shut behind us.\n\n'I hope you didn't hit him with the papyrus box,' he remarked in Arabic.\n\n'What do you take me for?' David's voice was breathless but amused.\n\n'Was he the last?'\n\n'Yes. Lock the door and come on.'\n\nRamses set me on my feet. The stairwell was dark as pitch, but I heard the click of a key turning. I doubted it would hold the men inside for long, for the door was a flimsy thing; but by the time they finished fighting over the gold, there might not be anyone left to follow.\n\nWe pelted down the creaking stairs \u2013 first David, then me, then Ramses. When we emerged on to the narrow street I realized that there was light where there had been none before. A door opposite stood open. The form silhouetted in the opening was definitely female; I could see every voluptuous curve through the thin fabric that draped her body. The light glimmered off twists of gold in her hair and on her arms.\n\nDavid had come to an abrupt halt. Seeing the woman, he let out a sigh of relief. I will not repeat what she said, dear, for fear of shocking you; but I am happy to report that David refused the invitation in terms as blunt as those in which it had been couched. He started to turn away. The street was very narrow; a single step brought her close to him. She threw her arms around him \u2013 and I hit her behind her ear with my joined fists, the way Aunt Amelia taught me.\n\nAs that dear lady would say, the result was most satisfactory. The woman dropped the knife and fell to the ground. Another silhouetted shape appeared in the open doorway \u2013 a man this time. There were others behind him. In their haste they blocked one another trying to get through the narrow aperture, which was lucky for us, since both my valiant escorts appeared to be momentarily paralysed. I gave Ramses a shove.\n\n'Run!' I said.\n\nIt isn't difficult to lose pursuers in that maze of filthy alleyways and dark streets, if one knows the area. I didn't, but once Ramses had got his wits back he took the lead, and the sounds of pursuit died away. We were all tired and out of breath, and very dirty, by the time we reached the river, but Ramses wouldn't let me take off my stained, smelly robe until we were in the boat and underway. In case I neglected to mention it, I was wearing my own shirt and trousers under my disguise. The boys weren't, and they made me turn my back while they changed. Men are sometimes very silly.\n\nWhen we reached the other side and the little boat had come to rest, I waited for someone to clap me on the shoulder and say 'Well done!' or 'Jolly good show!' or some such thing. Neither of them spoke. They sat motionless, like a pair of twin statues, gaping at me. The cut at the base of David's throat had stopped bleeding. It looked like a thin dark cord.\n\n'Don't just sit there,' I said in exasperation. 'Let's go back to the dahabeeyah where we can talk in comfort. I want a drink of water and a cigarette and a change of clothing and a nice soft chair and \u2013'\n\n'You'll have to settle for one out of four,' Ramses said, rummaging under the seat. He handed me a flask. 'We must finish our discussion before we go back to the dahabeeyah. Mother is always hanging about, and this is one conversation I don't want her to overhear.'\n\nI drank deeply of the lukewarm water, wishing it were something stronger. Then I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and handed the bottle to David. 'Yussuf Mahmud betrayed us,' I said. 'It was an ambush. You expected it.'\n\n'Don't be an idiot,' Ramses said rudely. 'If I had anticipated an ambush I would not have allowed... That is, I would have acted differently.'\n\n'I don't see how you could have acted any more effectively,' I admitted. 'You and David must have worked out in advance what to do if things went wrong.'\n\n'We always do,' Ramses said. 'Never mind the flattery, Nefret; the fact is, I miscalculated rather badly. We were lucky to get away unhurt.'\n\n'Lucky!' I said indignantly.\n\nRamses started to speak, but for once David beat him to it. 'It wasn't luck that saved my life tonight, it was Nefret's quick wits and courage. Thank you, my sister. I didn't see the knife until it was at my throat.'\n\nRamses shifted position slightly. 'I didn't see it until it fell from her hand.'\n\nIt had taken them long enough to admit it. I couldn't resist. 'That,' I said, 'is because neither of you knows \u2013'\n\n'Anything about women?' Ramses finished.\n\nThe moon was high and bright. I could see his face clearly. It was what I call his stone-pharaoh face, stiff and remote as the statue of Khafre in the Museum. I thought he was angry until he leaned forward and pulled me off the bench and hugged me so hard I could feel my ribs creaking. 'One of these days,' he said in a choked voice, 'you are going to make me forget I am supposed to be an English gentleman.'\n\nWell, my dear, I was pleased! For years I've been trying to shatter that shell of his and get him to act like a human being. Occasionally I succeed \u2013 usually by stirring up his temper! \u2013 but the moment never lasts long. Making the most of that particular moment, I held on to him when he would have drawn away.\n\n'You're trembling,' I said suspiciously. 'Are you laughing at me, curse you?'\n\n'I am not laughing at you. I'm shaking with terror.' I thought I felt his lips brush my hair, but I must have been mistaken, because he returned me to the hard seat with a thump that rattled my teeth. Ramses has the most formidable eyebrows of anyone I know, including the Professor. At that moment they met in the middle of his forehead like lifting black wings. I had been right the first time. He was absolutely furious!\n\n'Hell and damnation, Nefret! Will you never learn to stop and think before you act? You were quick and brave and clever and all that rot, but you were also bloody lucky. One of these days you are going to get yourself in serious trouble if you rush headlong into action without \u2013'\n\n'You're a fine one to talk!'\n\n'I never act without premeditation.'\n\n'Oh, no, not you! You have no more feelings than a \u2013'\n\n'Make up your mind,' said Ramses, between his teeth. 'I can't be both impetuous and unfeeling.'\n\nDavid reached out and took my hand (fist, rather; I admit it was clenched and raised). 'Nefret, he's scolding because he was frightened for you. Tell her, Ramses. Tell her you aren't angry.'\n\n'I am angry. I...' He stopped speaking, drew a long breath and slowly let it out. The eyebrows slipped back into their normal position. 'Angry with myself. I failed you, my brother. I failed Nefret too. She wouldn't have had to take such a hideous risk if I had been more alert.'\n\nDavid took Ramses' outstretched hand. His eyes shone bright with tears. David is as sentimental as Ramses is not. I am all in favour of sentiment \u2013 as you know \u2013 but the reaction had hit me and I was starting to shake too.\n\n'None of that,' I said sternly. 'As usual, you are taking too much on yourself, Ramses. An exaggerated sense of responsibility is a sign of excessive egotism.'\n\n'Is that one of Mother's famous aphorisms?' Ramses was himself again. He released David's hand and smiled sardonically at me.\n\n'No, I made it up myself. You were both at fault this time. You'd have seen the knife, as I did, if your masculine conceit hadn't assumed that there was nothing to be feared from a woman. My suspicions were aroused the instant she appeared; it was too much of a coincidence that a lady of the evening should present herself at that precise moment, when we'd seen no sign of activity in the house earlier. Establishments of that sort aren't so discreet as to \u2013'\n\n'You have made your point,' Ramses said, looking down his nose at me.\n\nSomething rustled through the reeds along the bank. None of us started; even I have learned to know the difference between the movements of a rat and those of a man. I do not much like rats, though, and I wanted to go home.\n\n'Be damned to that,' I said, trying to look down my nose at him (that's not easy when the other person is almost a foot taller). 'Thanks to our combined quick wits and daring we got away unscathed, with the papyrus, but we haven't settled the vital question of how to remain unscathed. What went wrong tonight?'\n\nRamses settled back on the seat and rubbed his neck. (The adhesive itches, even after it has been washed off.) 'There was always a possibility that Yussuf Mahmud meant to cheat us \u2013 to keep the money as well as the papyrus. But he couldn't hope to pull off a swindle like that without murdering both of us, and I doubted he would risk it. Ali the Rat and his taciturn friend have a certain... reputation in Cairo.'\n\n'A fictitious reputation, I hope,' I said.\n\nThe two of them exchanged glances. 'For the most part,' Ramses said. 'Anyhow, I decided the risk was negligible. Yussuf Mahmud has a certain reputation too. He deals in stolen antiquities, and he would cheat his own mother, but he is no killer.'\n\n'Then he must have swindled some other thief to get his hands on the papyrus,' I said. 'That would mean that the men who broke in were after it \u2013 and him. Not us.'\n\n'I would love to be able to believe that,' Ramses muttered. 'The alternative is decidedly unpleasant. Let us suppose that Yussuf Mahmud and his employers, whoever they may be, have worked out an ingenious method of robbery. They offer the papyrus for sale, lure prospective buyers to the house, knock them over the head, steal the money, and walk away with the papyrus. They can repeat the process over and over, since the victims aren't likely to admit participating in an illegal transaction. This time Yussuf Mahmud decided to go into business for himself. He was expecting the others, but not so soon. He hoped to conclude the deal and get away with the money before they arrived. He'd have locked us in \u2013 I noticed he'd left the key on the outside of the door, which ought to have made me more suspicious than it did \u2013 and left us to the tender mercies of the lads. They came early because they didn't trust him. Instead of joining forces against us, the fools let greed get the better of them. Gold, I have been informed, has a demoralizing effect on those of weak character.'\n\n'Must you be so cursed long-winded?' I demanded. 'Do you think that's the explanation for the ambush? A simple swindle?'\n\n'No,' Ramses said. 'The second part of the theory holds, I think \u2013 Yussuf Mahmud hoped to get away with the money before the others came \u2013 but I'm afraid we must consider that unpleasant alternative I mentioned. The woman had every intention of slitting David's throat. And is it only a coincidence that they held off attacking until you were with us?'\n\n'I hope so,' I said honestly.\n\n'So do I, my girl. They couldn't have known you would be there, but they were definitely expecting David and me, and they took extraordinary measures to ensure we would be caught or killed. It can't be a coincidence that Yussuf Mahmud offered the papyrus to us. There are too many other dealers in Cairo who would have snapped it up at the price we paid. I'm afraid we must face the possibility that somehow, some way, someone has discovered our real identities.'\n\n'How could they?' David demanded.\n\nPoor boy, he had been so proud of his clever disguise! Ramses wasn't keen on admitting failure either. He tightened his mouth up in that way he has. When he answered, the words sounded as if they were being squeezed through a crack.\n\n'No scheme is completely foolproof. Several possibilities occur to me... But why waste time in conjecture? It's late, and Nefret should be in bed.'\n\nThe reeds rustled eerily. I shivered. The night wind was cold.\n\nDavid leaned forward and took my hand. He is such a dear! That sweet smile of his softened his face (and a handsome face it is, too). 'Quite right. Come, little sister, you've had a busy night.'\n\nI let him help me out of the boat and up the bank. We went single file, with David leading, finding the easiest and least littered path. The mud squelched under my boots.\n\n'Coincidences do happen,' David said. 'We may be starting at shadows.'\n\n'It's always safest to expect the worst,' said a sour voice behind me. 'What a damned nuisance. We spent three years building up those personae.'\n\nI slipped on something that squashed and gave off a horrible smell. A hand grabbed my shirt-tail and steadied me.\n\n'Thank you,' I said. 'Ugh! What was that? No, don't tell me. Ramses is right, you can't be Ali and Achmet again. If they do know who you really are, the papyrus could have been a means of luring you into that awful neighbourhood. A would-be killer or kidnapper couldn't easily get at you when you're on the dahabeeyah with us and the crew, or in the respectable parts of Cairo, with lots of other people around.'\n\n'There's one positive aspect to this,' Ramses admitted. (He much prefers to look on the dark side.) 'We got the papyrus. That wasn't supposed to happen.'\n\n'All the more reason to stay away from the Old City,' I said. 'Give me your word, Ramses, that you and David won't go back there at night.'\n\n'What? Oh, yes, certainly.'\n\nSo that was the end of that. None of us had to point out that we would soon know the answer to our question. We had got away \u2013 with the papyrus \u2013 and if Whoever-They-Were knew who Ramses and David were, they might come after it. But don't worry, darling, we know how to take care of ourselves \u2013 and each other.\n\n'My dear Emerson,' I said. 'We must call on M. Maspero before we leave Cairo.'\n\n'Damned if I will,' snarled Emerson.\n\nWe were breakfasting upon the upper deck, as is our pleasant custom \u2013 though not as pleasant as it had been before motorized barges and steamers invaded the area. How I yearned to retreat to the bucolic shores of Luxor, where the sunrise colours were undimmed by smoke and the fresh morning breeze was untainted by the stench of petrol and oil!\n\nEmerson had already expressed the same opinion and proposed that we sail that day. That is so like a man! They assume that they need only express a desire to have it immediately fulfilled. As I pointed out to him, a number of matters remained to be done before we could depart \u2013 such as giving Reis Hassan time to collect the crew and get the necessary supplies on board. Calling on M. Maspero was, in my opinion, almost as important. The goodwill of the Director of the Department of Antiquities is essential for anyone who wishes to excavate in Egypt. Emerson did not have it.\n\nFor the past several seasons we had been working on a particularly boring collection of tombs. In all fairness to Maspero it must be admitted that Emerson's stubbornness was chiefly responsible. He had infuriated Maspero by refusing to open the tomb of Tetisheri \u2013 our great discovery \u2013 to tourists. This refusal had been couched in terms that were remarkably rude even for Emerson. Maspero had retaliated by rejecting Emerson's request to search for new tombs in the Valley of the Kings, adding insult to injury by suggesting that he finish clearing the smaller, non-royal tombs, of which there were quite a number in the Valley. Most of these sepulchres had been discovered by other archaeologists and were known to contain absolutely nothing of interest.\n\nIn all fairness to Emerson, we had every right to expect special consideration from Maspero, since, for reasons that have no bearing on the present narrative, we had handed over the entire contents of the tomb to the Cairo Museum, without claiming the usual finder's share. (This had also had a deleterious effect on our relations with the British Museum, whose officials had expected we would donate our share to them. Emerson cared no more for the opinion of the British Museum than he did for that of M. Maspero.)\n\nA sensible man would have backed off and asked for permission to work elsewhere. Emerson is not a sensible man. With grim determination, and a good deal of bad language, he had accepted the project and kept at it until we were all ready to scream with boredom. Over the past years he had investigated a dozen of the tombs in question. There were, I calculated, a dozen more to go.\n\n'I will go alone, then,' I said.\n\n'No, you will not!'\n\nI was pleased to observe that our little disagreement (together with several cups of strong coffee) had roused Emerson from his habitual morning lethargy. He sat up, shoulders squared and fists clenched. A handsome flush of temper warmed his cheeks, and the cleft in his strong chin quivered.\n\nIt is a waste of time to argue with Emerson. I turned to the children. 'And what are your plans for the day, my dears?'\n\nRamses, sprawled on the settee in a position as languorous as Emerson's had been before I stirred him up, started and straightened. 'I beg your pardon, Mother?'\n\n'How lazy you are this morning,' I said disapprovingly. 'And Nefret looks as if she had not slept either. Was it one of your bad dreams that kept you awake, my dear girl?'\n\n'No, Aunt Amelia.' She covered her mouth with her hand to hide a yawn. 'I was up late. Studying.'\n\n'Very commendable. But you need your sleep, and I would like to see you take a little more trouble over your morning toilette. You ought to have put your hair up, the wind is blowing it all over your face. Ramses, finish doing up your shirt buttons. David at least is... What is that mark on your neck, David? Did you cut yourself?'\n\nHe had buttoned his shirt as high as it would go, but eyes as keen as mine cannot be deceived. His hand went to his throat.\n\n'The razor slipped, Aunt Amelia.'\n\n'Now that is just what I mean. Lack of sleep makes one clumsy and careless. Those straight razors are dangerous implements, and you \u2013'\n\nThe engines of a passing tourist steamer made me break off, for it was impossible for me to make myself heard over the racket. Emerson managed to make himself heard, however.\n\n'Damnation! The sooner we leave this cacophonous chaos, the better! I am going to speak with Reis Hassan.'\n\nHassan informed him we could not possibly get off before the Thursday, two days hence, and Emerson had to be content with that. He was still muttering profanely when we started for the museum, where he proposed to spend the morning examining the most recent exhibits.\n\nHis refusal to call on Maspero suited me quite well, in fact, since an encounter between them was sure to make matters worse. I decided to take Nefret with me. She and M. Maspero were on excellent terms. French gentlemen are usually on excellent terms with pretty young women.\n\nWe left Emerson and the boys in the Salle d'Honneur and proceeded to the administrative offices on the north side of the building. Maspero was expecting us. He kissed our hands and paid us his usual extravagant compliments \u2013 which were, honesty compels me to admit, not undeserved. Nefret looked quite the lady in her spotless white gloves and beribboned hat; her elegant frock of green muslin set off her slim figure and golden-red hair. My own frock was a new one and I had put aside my heavy working parasol for one that matched the dress. Like all my parasols it had a stout steel shaft and a rather sharp point, but ruffles and lace concealed its utility.\n\nAfter a servant had served tea, I began by making Emerson's apologies. 'We are to leave Cairo in two days, Monsieur, and he has a great deal of work to do. He asked me to present his compliments.'\n\nMaspero was too intelligent to believe this and too suave to say so. 'You will, I hope, present my compliments to the Professor.'\n\nFrenchmen are almost as fond as Arabs of prolonged and formal courtesies. It took me a while to get to the reason for my visit. I had not counted on a positive answer, so I was not surprised \u2013 though I was disappointed \u2013 when Maspero's face lost its smile.\n\n'Alas, ch\u00e8re Madame, I would do anything in my power to please you, but you must see that it is impossible for me to give the Professor permission to carry out new excavations in the Valley of the Kings. Mr Theodore Davis has the concession and I cannot arbitrarily take it from him, particularly when he has had such remarkable luck in finding new tombs. Have you seen the display of the materials he discovered last year in the tomb of the parents of Queen Tiyi?'\n\n'Yes,' I said.\n\n'But, Monsieur Maspero, it is such a pity.' Nefret leaned forward. 'The Professor is the finest excavator in Egypt. He is wasting his talents on those boring little tombs.'\n\nMaspero gazed admiringly at her wide blue eyes and prettily flushed cheeks \u2013 but he shook his head. 'Mademoiselle, no one regrets this more than I. No one respects the abilities of M. Emerson more than I. It is entirely his decision. There are hundreds of other sites in Egypt. They are at his disposal \u2013 except for the Valley of the Kings.'\n\nAfter chatting a little longer we took our leave, and had our hands kissed again.\n\n'Curse it,' said Nefret, as we made our way towards the Mummy Room, where we had arranged to meet the others.\n\n'Don't swear,' I said automatically.\n\n'That was not swearing. What an obdurate old man Maspero is!'\n\n'It is not altogether his fault,' I admitted. 'He exaggerated, of course, when he said Emerson could have any other site in Egypt. A good many of them have already been assigned, but there are others, even in the Theban area. It is only Emerson's confounded stubbornness that keeps us chained to our boring task. Where the devil has he got to?'\n\nWe finally tracked him down where I might have expected he would be \u2013 brooding gloomily over the exhibit Maspero had referred to. Mr Davis' discovery \u2013 or, to be more accurate, the discovery of Mr Quibell, who had been supervising the excavations at that time \u2013 was that of a tomb that had survived until modern times with its contents almost untouched. The objects were not as fine as the ones WE had found in Queen Tetisheri's tomb, of course. Yuya and Thuya had been commoners, but their daughter was a queen, the chief wife of the great Amenhotep III, and their mortuary equipment included several gifts from the royal family.\n\n'Ah, there you are, my dear,' I said. 'I hope we did not keep you waiting.'\n\nEmerson was in such an evil temper that my sarcasm went unremarked. 'Do you know how long it took Davis to clear this tomb? Three weeks! We spent three years with Tetisheri! One can only wonder \u2013'\n\nI cut his fulminations short. 'Yes, my dear, I am in complete agreement, but I am ready for lunch. Where are Ramses and David?'\n\n'They went to look at papyri,' Emerson said. He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the doorway.\n\nThough M. Maspero's methods of organization left a great deal to be desired, he had gathered most of the papyri together in a single room. Ramses and David were in rapt contemplation of one of the finest \u2013 a funerary papyrus that had been made for a queen of the Twenty-first Dynasty.\n\nThe Book of the Dead is a modern term; ancient collections of spells designed to ward off the perils of the Underworld and lead the dead man or woman triumphantly into everlasting life bore various names: the Book of That Which Is in the Underworld, the Book of Gates, the Book of Coming Forth by Day, and so on. At certain periods these protective spells were written on the wooden coffins or on the walls of the tomb. Later, they were inscribed on papyri and illustrated by charming little paintings showing the various stages through which the deceased passed on his way to paradise. The length of the papyrus and, by extension, its efficacy, depended on the price the purchaser was able to pay. Yes; even immortality could be bought, but let us not sneer at these innocent pagans, dear Reader. The mediaeval Christian church sold pardons and prayers for the dead, and are there not those still among us who endow religious institutions in the expectation of being 'let off' punishment for their sins?\n\nBut I digress. More relevant to the tale I am about to unfold is the origin of certain of these papyri. They were buried with the dead, sometimes at the side or between the legs of the mummy. The particular roll the boys were inspecting had come from the royal cache at Deir el Bahri. The mummies of a miscellaneous lot of royal personages had been rescued from their despoiled tombs and hidden in a cleft in the Theban hills, where they had escaped discovery until the 1880s of the present era. The discoverers were tomb robbers from the village of Gurneh on the West Bank. For several years they had sold objects such as papyri to illegal dealers, but finally the Antiquities Department got wind of their activities and forced them to disclose the location of the tomb. The battered, abused mummies and the remains of their funerary equipment had been removed to the Museum.\n\nNefret went at once to join the lads. She had to nudge Ramses before he moved aside, whereupon she bent over the case and stared as fixedly as he had done.\n\n'It is much darker than... than some I have seen,' she murmured.\n\n'They always darken when they are exposed to the light, especially under conditions like these,' Emerson grumbled. 'The inside of the case is as filthy as the outside. That idiot Maspero \u2013'\n\n'It is Twenty-first Dynasty,' said David. 'They are generally darker than the earlier versions.'\n\nHe spoke with the quiet authority he displayed only when he was talking about his speciality, and we listened with the respect he commanded at such times. He politely made way for me as I approached the case.\n\n'It is very handsome, though,' I said. 'These papyri always remind me of mediaeval manuscripts, with the long rows of elegantly written text and the little paintings. This scene is the weighing of the heart against the symbol of truth \u2013 such a charmingly naive concept! The queen, crowned and dressed in her finest robes, is led by Anubis into the chamber where Osiris sits enthroned. Thoth, the ibis-headed divine scribe, stands with pen poised, ready to record the judgement. Behind him the hideous monster Amnet waits, ready to devour the soul should it fail the test.'\n\n'To whom are you addressing your lecture, Peabody?' Emerson inquired disagreeably. 'There are no tourists here, only those who are as familiar with the subject as you.'\n\nNefret made a tactful attempt to soften this criticism \u2013 unnecessarily, since I never take Emerson's sarcasm to heart. 'This adorable little baboon, perched atop the scales \u2013 that is Thoth too, isn't it? Why does he appear twice in the same scene?'\n\n'Ah well, my dear, the theology of the ancient Egyptians is something of a hodgepodge,' I replied. 'The ape atop the balance, or, as in some cases, beside it, is one of the symbols of Thoth, but I defy even my learned husband to explain what he is doing there.'\n\nEmerson made a growling noise, and Nefret went quickly to take his arm. 'I am very hungry,' she announced. 'Can we go to lunch now?'\n\nShe drew him away, and I followed with the boys. Ramses offered me his arm, a courtesy he seldom remembered to pay. 'That was neatly done,' he remarked. 'I believe he would jump into the jaws of a crocodile if she proposed it. Mother, you really ought not provoke him when he is in a state of aggravation.'\n\n'He started it,' I replied, and then laughed a little because the statement sounded so childish. 'He is always in a state of aggravation when he visits the museum.'\n\n'What did Maspero say?' Ramses asked. 'For I feel certain you and Nefret tried to persuade him to change his mind.'\n\n'He said no. He is in the right, I suppose. Having given the firman to Mr Davis, he cannot cancel it without an excellent reason. I cannot imagine why your father insists on remaining in the Valley. It is tantamount to rubbing salt in his wounds. Every time Mr Davis finds another tomb, Emerson's blood pressure soars. Tetisheri's tomb was accomplishment enough for any archaeologist, but you know your father; it has been quite some time since we came across anything interesting, and he would dearly love another remarkable discovery.'\n\n'Hmmmm,' said Ramses, looking thoughtful."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "I of course reported Maspero's offer to Emerson. 'What about Abusir, Emerson? Or Medum? And there are large areas of Sakkara that cry out for excavation.'\n\n'Are you so ready to abandon our home in Luxor, Peabody? We built the house because we planned to concentrate on that area for years to come. Curse it, I swore I would finish the job, and I resent your attempts...' But then his face softened and he said gruffly, 'I know you still yearn for pyramids, my dear. Just allow me one more season in the Valley, and... Well, then we will see. Is that a satisfactory compromise?'\n\nIn my opinion it was not a compromise at all, for he had promised nothing. However, the affectionate demonstrations that accompanied his speech were satisfactory. I responded with my customary appreciation, and the subject was dropped \u2013 for the time being.\n\nWe were staying at Shepheard's, my favourite hotel in Cairo, when this conversation took place. Emerson had graciously agreed to my suggestion that we spend a few days there before leaving the city My excuse for removing to the hotel was that it would be more convenient for making arrangements for my annual dinner party; but though I was loath to admit the fact, the dear old dahabeeyah was inconveniently small for our enlarged family. It had only four staterooms and a single bath chamber, and with all of us engaged in professional pursuits the saloon was so full of desks and books and reference materials there was no room for a dining table. Fatima could not be expected to sleep on the lower deck with the crewmen, which meant that one of the staterooms had to be given to her. (She had proposed sleeping on a pallet in the corridor, or on the floor in Nefret's room \u2013 both out of the question.) So David and Ramses had to share a bedroom, and I believe I need not describe the condition of that room to any mother of young male persons. One had to wade through books and discarded garments to reach the beds.\n\nWith a mournful sigh I admitted the truth, to myself if not to Emerson (who, being a man, did not even notice the inconveniences I have reported). While the children were with us, the Amelia did not offer adequate living quarters. That state of affairs would not continue indefinitely, though, I reminded myself. David was twenty-one, and already establishing a reputation as an artist and designer. He would strike out on his own one day, as was only proper. Nefret would certainly marry; I was only surprised she had not yet accepted one of the numerous suitors who constantly besieged her. Ramses... It was impossible for any normal human being to predict what Ramses would do. I was fairly certain it was something I would not like, but at least he would eventually go off and do it somewhere else. The prospect ought to have been pleasing. To be alone again with Emerson, without those dear but distracting young persons, would once have been my fondest dream. It still was, of course...\n\nAfter a useful conversation with M. Baehler making arrangements for my dinner party, I had retired to the terrace to wait for Emerson and Nefret to join me for tea. The sun shone from a cloudless sky, brightening the flamboyant tarbooshes and gold-trimmed vests of the dragomen gathered round the steps of the hotel; the scent of roses and jasmine on the carts of the flower vendors was wafted to my appreciative nostrils by a soft breeze. Even the rolling of wheels and the shouts of the cabdrivers, the braying of donkeys and bellowing of camels fell pleasantly on my ears because they were the sounds of Egypt, hallowed by familiarity and affection. Emerson had said he was going to the French Institute. Nefret had said she meant to do some shopping. In deference to what she was pleased to call my old-fashioned principles, she had taken Fatima with her. The boys had gone off somewhere; they no longer accounted to me for their activities, but I had no reason to suppose they were doing anything they ought not. Why then did vague forebodings trouble a mind that ought to have been at ease?\n\nThose forebodings were not prompted by my old adversary and (as he claimed) admirer, the Master Criminal. Emerson had got in the habit of assuming that Sethos was behind every threatening incident or mysterious event. The fact that he was usually wrong had not lessened his suspicions, and I knew (though he had tried to conceal it from me) that he had been prowling the suks and the coffee shops looking for evidence that Sethos had followed us to Egypt.\n\nI had my own reasons for feeling certain this was not the case \u2013 and this certainty, to be entirely candid, was one cause of my discontent. For the first time in many years there was no prospect of an interesting adventure, not even a threatening letter from villains unknown! I hadn't realized how accustomed I had become to that sort of thing. Admittedly our adventures were often more enjoyable in retrospect than in actuality, but if I must choose between danger and boredom I will always choose the former. It was cursed discouraging, especially since our excavations offered no prospect of excitement.\n\nI glanced at my lapel watch. Nefret was not really late, since we had not specified a time, but she ought to have been here by now. I decided to go in search of her.\n\nWhen I knocked at her door I did not receive an immediate reply, and concluded she had not yet returned, but as I was about to turn away the door opened a few inches and Nefret's face appeared. She looked a trifle fussed.\n\n'Oh, it is you, Aunt Amelia. Are you ready for tea?'\n\n'Yes, and have been this past quarter hour,' I replied, standing on tiptoe and trying to see past her into the room, from which I could hear surreptitious sounds. 'Is someone with you? Fatima?'\n\n'Er \u2013 no.' She tried to outstare me, but of course did not succeed. With a little smile she stepped back and opened the door. 'It is only Ramses and David.'\n\n'I don't know why you were making such a mystery of it,' I remarked. 'Good afternoon, boys. Are you joining us for tea?'\n\nThey were standing, but one of them must have been sprawled on the bed, for the spread was crumpled. I forbore comment, however, since they were both properly attired, except for Ramses' tie, which was not around his neck or any place else that I could see.\n\n'Good afternoon, Mother,' said Ramses. 'Yes, we intend to take tea with you, if that is agreeable.'\n\n'Certainly. Where is your tie? Find it and put it on before you come downstairs.'\n\n'Yes, Mother.'\n\n'We will meet you on the terrace, then.'\n\n'Yes, Mother.'\n\n'In half an hour.'\n\n'Yes, Mother.'"
            },
            {
                "title": "From Manuscript H",
                "text": "Nefret closed the door, waited for thirty seconds, and eased it open again just far enough to peer out.\n\n'She's gone.'\n\n'Did you think she would be listening at the door?' David asked.\n\nNeither of the others bothered to answer. Ramses carefully drew back the rumpled counterpane and let out a breath of relief. 'No damage,' he reported. 'But we cannot go on doing this sort of thing.'\n\n'We won't do it again,' Nefret said. 'But we had to have a closer look, and we couldn't risk it while we were on the boat. Our quarters are too cramped and Fatima was always popping in to see if I wanted anything. It was clever of you to persuade Aunt Amelia to book rooms at the hotel.'\n\n'She thinks it was her idea,' Ramses said.\n\nDavid had designed and built a container that displayed one twelve-inch panel at a time, with compartments at either end to hold the unrolled and re-rolled sections. The panel now visible showed the same subject depicted on the papyrus in the museum \u2013 the weighing of the soul \u2013 but this rendering was even surer and more delicate. The suppliant's slender form showed through her robe of sheer white linen. Before her stood the balance, with her heart \u2013 the seat of understanding and conscience \u2013 in one pan, and in the other the feather of Maat, representing truth, justice and order. The fate that followed a guilty verdict was dreadful indeed: to be devoured by Amnet, Eater of Souls, a monster with the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion, and the hind quarters of a hippopotamus.\n\n'Of course that never happened,' Ramses said. 'The papyrus itself assured a successful outcome, not only by affirming it but by \u2013'\n\n'I don't want to hear a lecture on Egyptian religion,' Nefret said. 'This is like the queen's papyrus, but it's much longer and the workmanship is even finer.'\n\n'It is two hundred years older,' David said. 'Nineteenth Dynasty. Papyri of that period are lighter in colour and less brittle than later examples. I don't think we've damaged it but Ramses is right, we must keep it covered and not unroll any more of it.'\n\n'I wonder,' Ramses said.\n\n'What do you mean?'\n\n'Ordinarily I would agree that it ought to be handled as little as possible. I have a feeling, though, that somebody wants it back. We ought to have a copy in case he succeeds.'\n\n'Nonsense,' Nefret scoffed. 'It's been three days and no one has bothered us.'\n\n'Except for the swimmer Mohammed saw the night before last.'\n\n'Mohammed imagined it. Or invented it, to prove he was alert and wakeful, after the Professor caught him sleeping on duty.'\n\n'Possibly. All the same, I think we will have to risk it. David, how long would it take you to photograph the thing?'\n\nDavid stared at him in consternation. 'Hours! Days, if I do a proper job. What would I use for a darkroom? How do we keep Aunt Amelia from finding out? What if I damage it? How \u2013'\n\n'We'll work out the details,' Nefret said, brushing these difficulties aside with her usual nonchalance. 'I'll help you. Where do you suppose it came from? Originally, I mean.'\n\n'Thebes,' Ramses said. 'She was a princess \u2013 one of the daughters of Ramses the Second. Precisely where in Thebes is the question.'\n\n'The Royal Cache?' David suggested.\n\n'Deir el Bahri?' Nefret stared at him. 'But that tomb was cleared out years ago. The mummies and other objects are in the museum.'\n\n'Not all of them.' David replaced the cover of the container. 'You know the story, Nefret. Before they were caught, the Abd er Rassul family sold a number of objects to dealers and collectors. It's possible not all of those objects were reported.'\n\n'It's a virtual certainty that some of them were not,' Ramses said.\n\nThere was a brief silence. Then Nefret said in exasperation, 'Why don't you say what you're thinking? Sethos was in the business when the Abd er Rassuls were clandestinely marketing the objects from the Royal Cache. Let's suppose one of the things he bought was the princess's papyrus \u2013'\n\n'The possibility had occurred to me, of course,' said Ramses.\n\n'Of course!' Nefret's voice was rich with sarcasm. 'Did you think I'd cower and scream at the mention of that dread name?'\n\n'It was a possibility, nothing more. We've fahddled with every dealer in Cairo and found not the slightest hint that the Master, as they called him, has returned. Things like that can't be kept secret; you may not know where the body is hidden, but you can't miss the smell.'\n\n'What an elegant metaphor,' Nefret remarked.\n\n'We couldn't have missed it,' Ramses insisted. 'And yet there is the fact that the papyrus was used to lure us into a trap. If Sethos was responsible, that would mean we weren't his main object. The one he wants is Mother. His attempt to abduct her in London failed, so he tried to get his hands on one or all of us as a means of reaching her.'\n\nNefret nodded. 'That possibility had occurred to me, too, believe it or not. The Professor hasn't let her out of his sight since the attack in London, and even she would have better sense than to go into the Old City alone at night.'\n\n'Unlike us,' Ramses said wryly. 'But she'd march into the fires of hell brandishing that parasol of hers if she thought one of us was in danger.'\n\n'Yes,' David said softly. 'She would.'\n\nA sound outside the door made him start nervously. Nefret laughed and patted his hand. 'It's only the German count who has rooms farther along the corridor; he bellows like a hippopotamus. Were you afraid it was Aunt Amelia come back?'\n\n'She will come back if we don't hurry down,' Ramses said. 'Here, Nefret, give me the box.'\n\n'Put it under the bed. The suffragi never sweeps there.' Nefret went to the mirror and began tucking in strands of loosened hair.\n\n'I'd rather not leave it with you. If someone comes looking for it \u2013'\n\n'They'd look for it in your room, or David's,' Nefret said. 'Even if they had identified you two, they couldn't possibly have known I was your... What was that interesting word?'\n\n'Little gazelle,' said Ramses, unable to repress a smile. 'Never mind the other one.'\n\n'Hmph. Need I change, do you think?'\n\nShe straightened her blouse and smoothed her skirt over her hips, frowning critically at her reflection in the mirror. After a moment Ramses said, 'In my opinion you are properly attired.'\n\n'Thank you. Where is your tie?'\n\nThey found it under the bed, when Ramses knelt to hide the papyrus there. He refused her offer to tie it for him, and after she had put on her hat David opened the door.\n\n'When are you going to tell the Professor and Aunt Amelia?' he asked in a worried voice. 'Strictly speaking, the papyrus is the property of the Foundation, and they are members of the Board. They are going to be furious when they learn we kept this from them.'\n\n'They keep things from us, don't they?' Ramses had fallen behind the other two so that he could indulge himself in the pleasure of watching Nefret walk. She claimed it made her nervous when he stared at her as he sometimes did \u2013 like a specimen under a microscope, as she described it. She'd have been even more unnerved if she had known why he stared. From any angle and in every detail she was beautiful \u2013 the tilt of her head under that absurdly becoming hat, the curls that brushed her neck, the square little shoulders and trim waist and rounded hips and... Good God, it's getting worse every day, he thought in disgust, and forced himself to listen to what David was saying.\n\n'I don't feel right about deceiving them. I owe them so much \u2013'\n\n'Stop feeling guilty,' Ramses said. 'They'll blame me in any case, they always do. Let's not say anything until after we've left Cairo. Father will raise bloody hell with Maspero for failing to shut down the black market in antiquities, and Mother will snatch up her parasol and go looking for Yussuf Mahmud.'\n\n'You haven't been looking for him, have you?' Nefret asked.\n\n'Not as Ali the Rat, no. We agreed it would be advisable for that engaging character to lie low for a time.'\n\nNefret pulled away from David and turned on Ramses. 'Not as Ali? As who, then? Confound it, Ramses, you gave me your word.'\n\n'I've not broken it. But you know perfectly well our only chance of finding out where the papyrus came from is to start with Yussuf Mahmud.'\n\n'Stop goading her, Ramses,' David said. He took Nefret's arm. 'Honestly, you two are enough to drive a sensible person wild. Shouting at one another in a public place!'\n\n'I wasn't shouting,' Nefret said sullenly. She let him lead her on. 'Ramses would try the patience of a saint. And I'm no saint. What have you been up to?'\n\n'Trying to buy antiquities,' David said. 'Ramses as a very rich, very stupid tourist and I as his faithful dragoman.'\n\n'Tourist,' Nefret repeated. Again she stopped and whirled round, so suddenly that Ramses had to rock back on his heels to avoid running into her. She shook her finger under his nose. 'Not the silly-looking Englishman with straw-coloured hair who ogled me through his monocle and said \u2013'\n\n'\"By Jove, but that's a dashed handsome gel,\"' Ramses agreed, in the silly-looking Englishman's affected drawl.\n\nNefret shook her head, but could not help smiling. 'What did you find out?'\n\n'That a tourist with plenty of money and no scruples can find all the antiquities he wants. We've not been offered anything of the same quality as the papyrus, though, despite the fact that I sneered at everything I was shown and kept on demanding something better. Yussuf Mahmud never showed his face. He is usually one of the first to prey on gullible tourists.'\n\n'They murdered him,' Nefret breathed.\n\n'Or he has gone into hiding,' said Ramses. 'Do shut up, Nefret, there is Mother. She can hear a word like \"murder\" a mile away.'\n\nThough the arrangements were all that could be desired, I did not enjoy our annual dinner party as much as usual. So many old friends were gone, into the shadows of eternity or less permanent exile. Howard Carter was not there, nor Cyrus Vandergelt and his wife; the knowledge that we would meet all three in Luxor did not entirely compensate for their absence. As for M. Maspero, I had of course invited him, but was secretly relieved when he pleaded a previous engagement. Though I knew resentment was unreasonable, I could not help feeling that emotion, and listening to the others wax enthusiastic about their pyramids and mastabas and rich cemetery sites, while we contemplated another tedious season among the lesser tombs of the Valley, only increased my vexation with the Director.\n\nMr Reisner very kindly invited me to visit Giza, where he held the concession for the Second and Third Pyramids, but I declined, with the excuse that we were to sail on the next day but one. In fact, I saw no point in tantalizing myself by looking at other people's pyramids when I had none of my own. Emerson, who had overheard the offer, gave me a self-conscious look, but he did not refer to the subject then or later. His demonstrations of affection were particularly engaging that night. I responded with the enthusiasm Emerson's demonstrations always evoke, but a small seed of annoyance prickled my mind. It is so like a man to suppose that kisses and caresses will distract a woman from more serious matters.\n\nThe day after our dinner party Nefret joined us for luncheon at one of the new restaurants. She had been to the dahabeeyah that morning to get some of her things.\n\n'Was that Ramses?' I asked, turning to peer at a familiar form that was retreating at a speed that suggested the individual in question did not wish to be detained. 'Why is he not joining us?'\n\n'He went with me,' Nefret said. 'But he had an appointment, so could not stay.'\n\n'With some young woman, I suppose,' I said disapprovingly. 'There is always some young woman, though I cannot imagine why they follow after him. It isn't Miss Verinder, I hope. She has not a brain in her head.'\n\n'Miss Verinder is no longer in the running,' Nefret said. 'I have taken care of her.' Seeing my expression, she went on quickly, 'Have you seen this, Aunt Amelia?'\n\nThe object she proffered was a newspaper, though not a particularly impressive example of that form. The type was smudged, the paper was thin enough to crumple at a touch, and there were only a few pages. I do not read Arabic as easily as I speak it, but I had no difficulty in translating the name of the newspaper.\n\n'The Young Woman. Where did you get this?'\n\n'From Fatima.' Nefret stripped off her gloves and accepted the menu the waiter handed her. 'I always take time to talk with her and help her with her English.'\n\n'I know, my dear,' I said affectionately. 'It is good of you.'\n\nNefret shook her head so vigorously the flowers on her hat wobbled. 'I don't do it out of kindness, Aunt Amelia, but out of a strong sense of guilt. When I see how Fatima's face lights up when she pronounces a new word \u2013 when I think of the thousands of other women whose aspirations are as high and who have not even her opportunities \u2013 I despise myself for not doing more.'\n\nEmerson patted the little hand that rested on the table. It was clenched into a fist, as if anticipating battle. 'You feel what all decent individuals feel when they contemplate the unfairness of the universe,' he said gruffly. 'You are one of the few who cares enough to act on your feelings.'\n\n'That is right,' I said. 'If you cannot light a lamp, light a little candle! Thousands of little candles can illumine a \u2013 er \u2013 a large space!'\n\nEmerson, regretting his descent into sentimentality, shot me a critical look. 'I do wish you would not spout those banal aphorisms, Peabody. What is this paper?'\n\n'A journal written for and by women,' Nefret explained. 'Isn't it exciting? I had no idea such things were done in Egypt.'\n\n'There have been quite a number of them,' I said.\n\nNefret's face fell. People who relate what they believe to be new and startling information like to have such information received with exclamations of astonishment and admiration. It is a natural human tendency, and I regretted having spoiled the effect.\n\n'It is not surprising that you should not know of them,' I explained. 'Few people do. Most, unfortunately, were short-lived. This one is new to me, though the same name \u2013 al-Fatah \u2013 was employed by a journal published some years ago.'\n\n'Hmph,' said Emerson, who had been perusing the first page. 'The rhetoric is not precisely revolutionary, is it? \"The veil is not a disease that holds us back. Rather, it is the cause of our happiness.\" Bah.'\n\n'One does not reach the mountain top in a single bound, Emerson. A series of small steps can... er, well, you catch my meaning.'\n\n'Quite,' said Emerson shortly.\n\nI deemed it advisable to change the direction of the discussion. 'How did Fatima come by this, Nefret?'\n\n'It was given to her and the other students at her reading class,' Nefret explained. 'Did you know she has been attending classes every night, Aunt Amelia, after she finishes her duties?'\n\n'No,' I admitted. 'I am ashamed to say I did not know. I ought to have inquired. Where are the classes, at one of the missions?'\n\n'They are conducted by a Madame Hashim, a Syrian lady; she is a wealthy widow who does this out of pure benevolence and a desire to improve the lot of women.'\n\n'I would like to meet her.'\n\n'Would you?' Nefret asked eagerly. 'Fatima did not want to ask, she is in such awe of you, but I know she would be pleased if we would attend one of the classes.'\n\n'I fear there will not be time before we leave. This is our last night in Cairo, you know, and I have asked the Rutherfords to dine with us here. I will try to call on the lady next time I am in the city, for as you know I am extremely supportive of such enterprises. Literacy is the first step towards emancipation, and I have heard of other ladies who conduct such small private classes, without encouragement or government support. They are lighting the \u2013'\n\n'You are lecturing again, Peabody,' said my husband.\n\n'Would you mind if I went with Fatima this evening, then?' Nefret asked. 'I would like to encourage her, and find out how the classes are conducted.'\n\n'I suppose it would be all right. Emerson, what do you think?'\n\n'Certainly,' said Emerson. 'In fact, I will indicate my support for the cause of emancipation by accompanying her.'\n\nI knew perfectly well what Emerson was up to. He loathes formal dinner parties and the Rutherfords. The ensuing discussion involved quite a lot of shouting (by Emerson) and I insisted we retire to our sitting room, where Nefret settled the matter by perching on the arm of Emerson's chair and putting her arm around his neck.\n\n'Professor darling, it is sweet of you to offer, but your presence would only make everyone uncomfortable. The classes are for women only; the students would be struck dumb with awe of the Father of Curses, and Madame would have to veil herself.'\n\n'Hmph,' said Emerson.\n\n'You might send a messenger to Madame, telling her you are coming, Nefret,' I said. 'That is only courteous.'"
            },
            {
                "title": "From Letter Collection B",
                "text": "I had told Ramses and David where I was going. It was unnecessary in this case, but I make a point of conforming to our agreement so they won't have any excuse to squirm out of it. Ramses is getting to be as nervous as a little old maiden aunt; he tried to persuade me to abandon the scheme, and when I laughed at him he said he and David would go with me. Really, men can be very exasperating! Between Ramses and the Professor I thought we would never get away.\n\nThe Professor is a dear, though. He sent a cab to fetch Fatima from the dahabeeyah and take us on to her class. The poor little woman was absolutely overcome; when she joined us in the sitting room she could hardly speak coherently as she attempted to thank him.\n\nThe Professor went rather red in the face. He grunted at her the way he does when he is embarrassed or trying to hide his feelings. 'Hmph. If I had known you were coming into the city to attend these classes I would have made arrangements for transportation. You ought to know better than to wander round by yourself.'\n\nSomeone who didn't know him would have thought he was angry. Fatima knows him. Her eyes shone like stars over the black of her veil.\n\n'Yes, Father of Curses,' she murmured. 'I hear and will obey.'\n\nHe escorted us down to the street and put us in the cab and threatened the driver with a number of unpleasant things if he drove too fast or ran into another vehicle or got lost. There was no danger of his losing his way, for Fatima was able to give precise directions.\n\nThe house was on Sharia Kasr el Eini \u2013 a pretty little mansion with a small garden shaded by pepper trees and palms. A servant dressed in galabeeyah and tarboosh opened the door for us and bowed us into a room on the right.\n\nIt was a small room, unoccupied and rather shabbily furnished. We waited for what seemed like a long time before the door opened and Madame entered, with fulsome apologies for having kept us waiting.\n\nShe must have been very beautiful when she was young. Like many Syrians she was fair-skinned, with soft brown eyes and delicately shaped brows. She wore a black silk robe and a habara, or head covering, of the same fabric; but modish strap sandals showed under the ankle-length robe and her white chiffon veil had been lowered so that it framed her face like the wimple of a mediaeval nun. (I may take to wearing one myself when I reach middle age; it looks very romantic, and hides little difficulties like sagging chins and wrinkled necks.)\n\nShe greeted me in French. 'C'est un honneur, mademoiselle. But I had hoped that the so distinguished Madame Emerson would be with you.'\n\nI explained, in my rather stumbling French, that the distinguished Madame Emerson had had a previous engagement, but that she sent her compliments and hoped for a meeting in the future.\n\n'I share that hope,' Madame said politely. 'It is a small thing I do here; the support of Madame Emerson would be invaluable to our cause.' Opening another door, she preceded us into an adjoining room, where several women were seated on the floor. There were only eight of them, including Fatima; they ranged in age from girls of ten or twelve to a wrinkled old lady.\n\nI took the chair Madame indicated and listened with considerable interest while the class proceeded. The textbook was the Koran. The women took turns reading, and I was pleased to find that Fatima was one of the most fluent. Some of the others spoke so low they could scarcely be heard; I suppose the presence of a visitor made them nervous. The elderly woman found the business heavy going, but she persisted, irritably refusing the attempts of the others to help her; and when she got through her verse she gave me a toothless, triumphant grin. I smiled back at her, and I am not ashamed to admit there were tears in my eyes.\n\nThe class lasted only forty minutes. After the students had filed out, I tried to express my admiration. My French ran out, as it does when I am moved; I thanked her for letting me come, and bade her good evening.\n\n'You must not go so soon,' Madame exclaimed. 'You will have a glass of tea and we will talk.'\n\nShe clapped her hands. The servant who entered was a man. Since Madame did not veil herself, I wondered if the poor fellow had been \u2013 how would Aunt Amelia put it? \u2013 rendered incapable of a particular physical function. Such things are now forbidden by law, but they were common enough in the past. He looked to be no older than forty, and there was more muscle than fat on his tall frame.\n\nMadame turned to him and was about to speak when I heard a thunderous knocking at the door of the house. There was no mistaking that knock \u2013 or so I thought.\n\n'Curse \u2013 ' I began. 'Er \u2013 mille pardons, Madame. I am afraid that is Professor Emerson, come to get me. He is not a patient man.'\n\nMadame smiled. 'Yes, I have heard this about Professor Emerson. He is welcome, of course.'\n\nShe gestured at the servant, who bowed and backed out. The white chiffon boukra had golden loops that hooked over the ears. Madame adjusted hers, and the door of the sitting room opened to admit, not the Professor, but Ramses and David.\n\nI wanted to murder them, but I could not help feeling a little proud of my menfolk. They were looking particularly smart. David is always neat and well-groomed, and Ramses was wearing his best tweed suit. I supposed he had forgotten his hat, since his hair was somewhat windblown; it is very wavy and usually too long, since he dislikes taking the time to have it cut. I could tell Madame was favourably impressed, despite the veil that concealed most of her features. She looked them over, slowly and deliberately, and then gestured to Ramses to take a seat beside her on the divan.\n\nRamses shook his head. 'Ma ch\u00e9re Madame, we would not dream of taking up your time. My sister is expected at the hotel for a dinner engagement. I am only pleased to be able to express my admiration and that of my parents for your encouragement of a cause we all support.'\n\nRamses speaks French, as he does many languages, fluently and idiomatically. When Madame replied, I thought she sounded amused. 'Ah. So you too are a believer in the emancipation of women?'\n\n'It could hardly be otherwise, Madame.'\n\n'Naturellement. I had hoped I might persuade your mother to write a little article for our journal. Have you perhaps seen it?'\n\n'Not yet, but I look forward to doing so. I will pass your request on to my mother. I am sure she would be pleased to assist in any way. Now, if you will excuse us...'\n\n'Un moment, s'il vous pla\u00eet.' Her hands went to the back of her neck. After a moment she lowered them and displayed a gold chain from which depended a small carved pendant. 'A small token of esteem for your distinguished mother,' she said. 'It is the insignia of our organization.'\n\nRamses bowed. 'You are most gracious, Madame. Surely this is of ancient Egyptian origin \u2013 the baboon, one of the symbols of Thoth.'\n\n'It is appropriate, n'est-ce pas? The ape who sits beside the balance that weighs the heart. It might be considered a symbol of justice.'\n\n'It might,' said Ramses.\n\nIt was an ungracious response, I thought, and anyhow Ramses had been monopolizing the conversation too long. I reached for the little trinket. 'The justice women deserve, and that they will attain one day! I will give it to her, Madame. I know she will treasure it.'\n\n'Let me put it round your neck so you won't lose it.'\n\nShe insisted on fastening it with her own hands. The pendant was carved of a red-brown stone. It was surprisingly heavy.\n\nShe did not see us to the door. The little garden was a magical place in the night shadows, redolent with the sweet smell of jasmine, but I was not allowed to linger; Ramses had me by the arm, and he shoved me into the carriage with more energy than courtesy. David helped Fatima in and we started off.\n\n'What was the point of that performance?' I demanded.\n\n'I wanted to have a look at the lady,' Ramses replied coolly.\n\n'So I deduced. And what did you think of her?'\n\n'I concluded,' said Ramses, 'that she was no one I had met before.'\n\nI hadn't expected that; I had assumed that Ramses was playing big brother on general principles. 'Good Gad!' I exclaimed. 'Sethos? Ramses, that is the most far-fetched hypothesis \u2013'\n\n'Not so far-fetched. However, it appears my theory was unfounded. Sethos is a master of disguise, but not even he could take eight inches off his height or reduce the size of that prominent aquiline nose. The lady's veil was thin enough for me to make out the outline of her features.'\n\n'And I saw those features unveiled,' I reminded him. 'There can be no doubt of her gender. Her cheeks were smooth, her countenance benevolent and kind.'\n\n'Kind,' said Fatima, who had been following the conversation intently and who had understood that word, at least. 'Kind, good teacher.'\n\nRamses said in Arabic, 'Yes. We will get another teacher for you when we reach Luxor, Fatima. Won't we, Nefret?'\n\n'You mean me, I suppose. By all means, if we can't find someone better than I. Curse it, Ramses, what on earth put it into your head that Sethos might have taken up a teaching career?'\n\nRamses looked a little sheepish. It's hard to tell, I admit, but I have been making a study of his expressions, such as they are. 'Sheepish' is two quick blinks and a slight compression of his lips.\n\n'Father put it into my head. Admittedly he is not entirely reasonable about Sethos, but once he inserted the idea it found fertile ground. You've never seen Sethos in action. The man is a confounded genius, Nefret.'\n\n'Well, you and the Professor were wrong this time.'\n\n'You aren't angry that we came after you, are you?' David asked.\n\nI was annoyed, but not with him. I knew perfectly well whose idea that 'rescue' expedition had been. I leaned forward and brushed the curls back from Ramses' forehead. He hates it when I do that.\n\n'You meant well,' I admitted. 'But I find it difficult to forgive you for bringing me back in time to dine with those boring people.'\n\nIt took us almost two weeks to reach Luxor, despite the assistance of the motorized tug that accompanied us. The delays were only the usual sort of thing, but my intuition, which is seldom in error, assured me that everyone seemed preoccupied and on edge. The boys were particularly restless, prowling the deck all day and half the night. There was no doubt about it, the dear old dahabeeyah was too cramped for such energetic individuals, though Fatima had gone on ahead by train to get the house in order and David was able to reclaim his room.\n\nI attempted to distract my mind with scholarly work, but even I, well disciplined though I am, was unable to settle down to anything. In past years I had made something of a reputation with my translations of little Egyptian fairy tales, but when I looked over the material at hand I could not find anything that caught my interest. I had already done the most entertaining of them: The Tales of the Doomed Prince and the Two Brothers, the Adventures of Sinuhe, the Shipwrecked Sailor. When I voiced my difficulty to Emerson he suggested I turn my attention to historical documents.\n\n'Breasted has published the first volume of his texts,' he added. 'You could correct his translations.'\n\nEmerson was making one of his little jokes. Mr Breasted of Chicago was a linguist whom even Walter respected, and Volume One of his Ancient Records of Egypt had appeared that spring to universal acclamation. I smiled politely.\n\n'I have no intention of treading on Mr Breasted's toes, Emerson.'\n\n'Tread on Budge's toes, then. His translation of the Book of the Dead is riddled with errors.'\n\n'Ramses appears to be working on that,' I said. I had seen the photographs on Ramses' desk and wondered when and where he had acquired them.\n\n'That must be another version, not the one Budge mangled. His is in the British Museum, as you ought to know \u2013 one of Budge's contemptible violations of the laws against purchasing antiquities from dealers. Why the authorities at the Museum continue to countenance that villain...'\n\nI left the room. Emerson's opinions of Mr Budge were only too familiar to me.\n\nWhat with one aggravation or another, I was even more pleased than usual to round the curve in the river and see before me the monumental ruins of the temples of Luxor and Karnak and the buildings of the modern village of Luxor. The village was rapidly becoming a town, with new hotels and government buildings rising everywhere. Tourist steamers lined the bank. There were a few dahabeeyahs among them; certain wealthy visitors, especially those who returned to Egypt every season, preferred the comfort of a private boat.\n\nOur friend Cyrus Vandergelt was one of them. His boat, the Valley of the Kings, was moored on the West Bank, across from Luxor. He was good enough to share his private dock with us, and as the Amelia glided in under the skilful hands of Reis Hassan, I saw the usual reception party awaiting us. Abdullah was there, stately as a high priest in the snowy robes he preferred, and Selim, his beloved youngest son, and Daoud and Ibrahim and Mohammed \u2013 the men who had worked for us so long and who had become friends as well as valued employees.\n\nOver the years Abdullah's once-formal manner towards me had gradually softened; now he took my outstretched hand in both of his and pressed it warmly.\n\n'You look well, Abdullah,' I said. It was true, and I was relieved to see it, for he had suffered a mild heart attack the previous year. Precisely how old he was I did not know, but his beard had been grizzled when I first met him, and that had been over twenty years ago. We had given up trying to persuade him to retire with a well-deserved pension; it would have broken his heart to leave us and the work he loved as much as we did.\n\nAbdullah straightened his shoulders. 'I am well, Sitt. And you \u2013 you do not change. You will always be young.'\n\n'Why, Abdullah,' I said, laughing. 'I believe that is the first compliment you have ever paid me.'\n\nI passed him over to the respectful embrace of his grandson David, and went to Ramses, who was embracing his horse. The beautiful Arabian stallion had been a gift from our old friend Sheikh Mohammed, with whom Ramses and David had lived for a time learning to ride and shoot \u2013 and, I suspected, learning other things they had never admitted to me. High-spirited yet gentle, as intelligent as he was handsome, Risha had won all our hearts, as had his consort Asfur, who belonged to David.\n\nEmerson's amiable curses ended the demonstration and we proceeded to the house. Fatima was waiting for us on the verandah, and I was delighted to see that the vines I had planted the previous year were flourishing. Abdullah had never bothered to water them. Now they twined green arms up the trellises that framed the open window apertures, and blooming roses scattered crimson petals on to the dusty ground.\n\nThe young people immediately went off to the stables, accompanied by Selim; he was an excitable young fellow, and even Ramses was unable to get a word in as Selim reported on the livestock that had been left in his charge. The donkeys had been washed, the goat Tetisheri was fatter than ever, and the filly...\n\nAsfur and Risha had become proud parents the previous year. Nefret, whose claim to the beautiful little creature no one denied, had named her Moonlight; she was a grey, like her sire, but of a paler shade that glowed with a pearl-like lustre. Nefret had a well-nigh uncanny rapport with animals of all kinds; by the time we left Egypt in the spring the filly had taken to following her like a puppy. She had, of course, never known the touch of saddle or bridle.\n\nWhen Nefret came back, her face was alight with pleasure. 'She remembers me!'\n\n'She certainly does,' I said, for Moonlight was at her heels, quite prepared, as it appeared, to join us for luncheon. Frustrated in this purpose she went round to the window opening and poked an inquiring nose at Horus, who was sitting on the ledge. Horus was accustomed to horses, but not on his territory. He sprang up with a hiss, his fur bristling, and the filly began to browse on my roses.\n\nNefret finally persuaded her to go with Selim, and the rest of us sat down to eat. This sort of fraternization, which had become a custom with us, was a source of scandalized gossip among the European community of Luxor. The more 'liberal' of them condescended from time to time to entertain Egyptians of the wealthy, educated class, but none of them would have sat at table with their own workers. Our people were of a superior sort, of course.\n\nNaturally I did not invite Fatima to join us. She would have been as horrified at the idea of sitting with a group of men as the men themselves would have been. She bustled back and forth, superintending the service of the food and drink.\n\nWhen we had caught up on the gossip \u2013 marriages, deaths, illness, new babies \u2013 Emerson pushed his chair back and took out his pipe.\n\n'So, Selim,' he said genially. 'What have your rascally relations in Gurneh been up to lately? Any new tombs?'\n\nA shadow of vexation crossed the imperturbable countenance of my son, who had taken up his favourite position on the window ledge, with his back against a pillar. I thought I understood its cause, for I shared the emotion. Emerson is so direct and forthright he does not understand that inquiries of that sort should not be pursued so directly. Selim was related by blood or marriage to a good many of the Gurnawis, and a good many of the Gurnawis were accomplished tomb robbers. A direct question put all our men, especially Abdullah, in a difficult position; they had to choose between informing on their kin or lying to us.\n\nSelim, sitting on the ledge next to Ramses and David, looked uncomfortable. He was a handsome young man, with the big dark eyes and well-cut features of his handsome family, and he bore a strong resemblance to his nephew David, who was only a few years younger than he. With an apologetic glance at Abdullah, he said, 'No new tombs, Father of Curses. Nothing. Rumours only. The usual rumours...'\n\n'What rumours?' Emerson demanded.\n\n'Now, Emerson, this is not the time for that sort of discussion,' I said, taking pity on the afflicted youth. I knew Emerson had already quizzed Abdullah, but Abdullah had been away from Luxor most of the summer, visiting family in Atiyah near Cairo, so he could not be expected to know as much as Selim about what had been going on in Thebes. At least he had a good excuse for claiming not to know.\n\n'What about the antiquities dealers?' I went on. 'Has anything of unusual interest turned up?'\n\nThat was safer ground, for once a stolen or looted object reached the hands of the dealers it became public knowledge. Brightening, Selim rattled off a list of artefacts which had come on to the market. Even Emerson could find nothing of particular significance among them. It annoyed him a great deal; he had hoped there would be evidence that the Gurnawis had discovered a rich new tomb, which would give him an excuse to look for it.\n\nThe morning after our arrival I tried once again to persuade Emerson to a more sensible course of action. My approach was, as always, subtle and oblique.\n\n'Cyrus and Katherine Vandergelt have asked us to dine this evening,' I remarked, looking through the messages that had awaited us.\n\nEmerson grunted. He had covered half the breakfast table with his notebooks and was looking through them. I removed one of them from his plate, wiped off the buttery crumbs, and tried again. 'Cyrus is planning to excavate in the Asasif this year. I am sure he would appreciate assistance. His staff \u2013'\n\n'... is adequate for the purpose.' Emerson looked up, scowling spectacularly. 'Are you at it again, Amelia? We will start work today on the tombs in that small side valley \u2013 if I can locate the sketch map I made last year. Ramses, have you been borrowing my notes again?'\n\nRamses swallowed \u2013 he had just filled his mouth with the last bite of his porridge \u2013 and shook his head. 'No, Father. Not those notes. I took the liberty \u2013'\n\n'Never mind.' Emerson sighed. 'I suppose you and David won't be joining us.'\n\n'As I told you, sir, we intend to begin copying the inscriptions at the Seti I temple. But if you want us...'\n\n'No, no.' Another deep sigh expanded Emerson's muscular chest. 'Your publication on the Colonnade Hall of the Luxor Temple was a splendid piece of work. You must continue with your copying. A series of such volumes will make your reputations and be an invaluable record.'\n\n'If the boys were to help us we would be done sooner,' I remarked.\n\n'No, Peabody, I will not allow it. Ramses is right, you know.'\n\n'Ramses right?' I exclaimed. 'What about?'\n\n'About the importance of preservation over excavation. As soon as a monument, a temple or a tomb, is uncovered, it begins to deteriorate. There will come a time, in the not too distant future, when the only remainders of vital historical data are copies like the ones the boys are making. What Ramses and David are doing is of greater value to Egyptology than the totality of my work.'\n\nHis voice was low and broken, his brow furrowed. He bowed his head.\n\n'Good Gad, Emerson!' I cried in alarm. 'I have never heard you speak like this. What is wrong with you?'\n\n'I am waiting for someone to contradict me,' said Emerson in his normal tones.\n\nAfter Emerson had enjoyed his little joke at our expense, he admitted his earlier announcement had also been in the nature of a jest.\n\n'We need not begin work for another day or two. I would like to have a general look round the Valley before I decide where to begin. The rest of you may do as you like, of course.'\n\nNot surprisingly, everyone decided that a visit to the Valley was precisely what would suit them. As was our habit, we followed the path that led up the cliffs behind Deir el Bahri and across the plateau. Emerson forged ahead, holding my hand, and the children fell behind. Nefret was encumbered with the cat, who had indicated a desire to accompany her. She treated him like a kitten, which he was not (by a good fifteen pounds), and he took ruthless advantage of her.\n\nThe slanting sunlight of early morning outlined rocks and ridges with blue-black shadows. In a few hours, when the sun was directly overhead, the barren ground would be bleached to pale cream. Blistering hot by day, bitter cold in the winter nights, the desert plateau would have been considered forbidding, even terrifying, by most people. To us it was one of the most exciting places on earth \u2013 and beautiful, in its own fashion. The only signs of life were the marks on the white dust of the path we followed: the footprints of bare and booted feet, the hoofprints of donkey and goat, the slithering curves that marked the passage of snakes. Some of the more energetic tourists came this way, but from the other direction, after visiting the Valley. The only persons we met were Egyptians, all of whom greeted us with the smiling courtesy of their race. The graceful (if tattered) folds of their dusty robes suited the scene.\n\nAs did my spouse. Striding briskly, tall form erect and face alight with anticipation, Emerson was in his natural element here, and his casual attire set off his muscular frame far better than the formal garments convention forced upon him in civilized regions. Bronzed throat and arms bared, black hair blowing in the breeze, he was a sight to thrill the heart of any female.\n\n'You were joking, Emerson, weren't you? I agree with you about the importance of copying the records, but what you are doing is a kind of preservation too. If you had not found Tetisheri's tomb, those wonderful objects would have been stolen or destroyed.'\n\nEmerson looked at me in surprise. Then his well-cut lips curved in a smile. 'My darling Peabody, it is like you to be concerned, but quite unnecessary, I assure you. When have you ever known me to suffer from a deficiency of self-assurance?'\n\n'Never,' I said, returning his smile.\n\n'I am the most fortunate of men, Peabody.'\n\n'Yes, my dear. What do a few boring tombs matter? We are here, where we love to be, with those we love best.' I looked back over my shoulder. 'What a handsome trio they are, to be sure, and how friendly with one another! I always said, Emerson, that they would turn out well.'"
            },
            {
                "title": "From Manuscript H",
                "text": "Nefret was lecturing again. 'You said we would tell them after we left Cairo. Then you put it off until we reached Luxor. What are we waiting for? I agree with David, if we're going to be scolded \u2013'\n\n'There's no if about it,' Ramses said dourly.\n\n'Then let's get it over with! Anticipation is always worse than actuality.'\n\n'Not always.'\n\n'It is for me. When I looked in the mirror this morning I found two new wrinkles! Haven't you noticed how pale and drawn I have become?'\n\nRamses looked down at the golden head near his shoulder. She was absolutely irresistible when she was in this mood, stamping along like a sulky child and scolding him in a voice that always held an undercurrent of laughter.\n\n'No, I hadn't noticed,' he said.\n\n'You wouldn't. I know what it is. You want to prove to the Professor and Aunt Amelia that you can handle a mess like this one with no help from them. You don't want to show them the papyrus until you can tell them where it came from and hand over the thief, dead or alive \u2013'\n\nHe was sure he had not reacted except by a slight break in his stride, but Nefret caught herself with a gasp and turned her head to look up into his face.\n\n'I didn't mean it. I'm sorry. I thought you'd got over it.'\n\n'Over what?'\n\nHe began walking faster. She broke into a trot, keeping pace with him. 'Damn it, Ramses \u2013'\n\n'And don't swear. Mother doesn't like it.'\n\nNefret stopped. 'Hell and damnation!' she shouted.\n\n'Now she's looking back,' Ramses said apprehensively. 'And Father is glowering at me over his shoulder. Could you please stop yelling and try to look pleasant before you get me in serious trouble?'\n\nNefret gave him a calculating look. Then she threw her head back and let out a piercing soprano peal of laughter. It rose to an even more piercing shriek as Horus stuck all his claws into her. He didn't like people to yell in his ear.\n\n'And put the damned cat down!' Ramses' fingers itched with the urge to remove the beast from her arms and find out whether a cat always lands on its feet when it is dropped from a height. He knew better than to try it, though. 'You can't carry him all the way to the Valley, he weighs almost twenty pounds.'\n\n'Would you...' Nefret began.\n\n'I would gladly die to please you, but I draw the line at carrying that lazy carnivore.'\n\nNefret glanced at David, who was staring fixedly at the horizon. He didn't care for Horus either. With a martyred sigh, she lowered Horus gently to the ground. The cat gave Ramses a malevolent look. He knew who was responsible for this indignity, but he had discovered early on that heavy boots were impervious to teeth and claws.\n\nThey went on, with the cat stalking after them. Ramses knew Nefret was angry with herself for probing that old wound, and with him for refusing to talk about it. No doubt she was right, it would have been better to get his feelings out into the open and accept the consolation she was aching to offer; but reticence was an old habit that was hard for him to overcome. A damned annoying habit too, he supposed, to Nefret, who never left anyone in doubt as to how she felt about anything. A little moderation wouldn't do either of them any harm.\n\nShe hadn't meant to upset him. How could she have known it would hurt so much, when he himself had been caught unawares? He seldom thought about that ugly business now, except on the rare occasions when a bad dream brought back every grisly detail of the desperate struggle in the dark and its unspeakable ending \u2013 the sound of bone and brain spattering against stone.\n\nShe remained silent, her face averted, and Ramses took up the conversation at the point it had reached before her unwitting blunder.\n\n'I admit I wouldn't mind showing off a bit, but there's not much hope of our succeeding. We're working in the dark, and in part it's because Mother and Father still treat us like helpless infants who require to be protected \u2013 especially you, Nefret.'\n\nRamses kicked a stone. It missed Horus by a good two feet, but the cat howled and rolled over on to his back. Nefret picked him up, cuddled him, and crooned endearments. Ramses scowled at Horus, who sneered back at him over Nefret's shoulder. One way or another Horus would get what he wanted.\n\nThey were approaching the end of the path and the steep descent from the plateau into the eastern Valley. Nefret's shoulders sagged, probably from the dead weight of Horus, since she sounded quite her old self when she spoke.\n\n'You're right about that, and I intend to take steps to change it. I adore both of them, but they do infuriate me at times! How can they expect us to take them into our confidence when they won't tell us what we need to know?'\n\nThe path leading down into the Valley is steep but not difficult if one is in fit condition, which all of us were. I persuaded Nefret to put the cat down and put her hat on. Horus complained, but even Nefret had better sense than to attempt the descent with her arms full of cat. The tourists were out in full force; this was the height of the season and the tombs closed at 1.00 p.m. Some of them stared impertinently at our party, especially at Horus. Emerson scowled.\n\n'It gets worse every year,' he grumbled. 'They are all over the place, buzzing like flies. Impossible to find a spot remote enough where one can work in peace without being gaped at and subjected to impertinent questions.'\n\n'The side wadi where we worked last year is relatively remote,' I reminded him. 'We were not often interrupted by tourists.'\n\n'That is because we were not finding anything that was worth a damn,' said Emerson. Tourists always put him in an evil humour. Without further ado or further comment, he stamped off along the cleared path that led, not to the rocky ravine I had mentioned, but towards the main entrance to the Valley and the donkey park.\n\n'Where is he going?' Nefret asked.\n\nI knew the answer, and \u2013 of course \u2013 so did Ramses. He has superb breath control and always gets in ahead of me. 'He wants to have a look at numbers Three, Four and Five. He has not given up hope of being allowed to excavate them, especially number Five.'\n\nNot even I can claim to be able to identify all the tombs in the Valley by number, but all of us knew these particular tombs. We had heard Emerson rant about them only too often. All had been known to earlier archaeologists; none had been properly cleared or recorded; no one particularly wanted to clear them; but the terms of Emerson's firman did not permit HIM to investigate them, because they were considered to be royal tombs. Cartouches of Ramses III had been noted in number Three, though that monarch had actually been buried in another, far more elaborate, tomb elsewhere in the Valley. Number Four, attributed to Ramses XI, had been used as a stable by Christian Arabs and was assumed to have been thoroughly ransacked. The name of Ramses II had been seen in number Five, but he also had a tomb elsewhere, and attempts to investigate this tomb \u2013 the latest by our friend Howard Carter five years earlier \u2013 had been frustrated by the hard-packed rubble that filled the chambers.\n\nEmerson would have been the first to admit that the possibility of discovering anything of unusual interest was slight, but it infuriated him to be prevented from making the attempt because of an arbitrary, unfair decree. The firman granting permission to look for new tombs in the Valley of the Kings was held by Mr Theodore Davis and it was strictly enforced, not only by M. Maspero, but by the local inspector, Mr Arthur Weigall.\n\n'We had better catch him up,' I said uneasily. 'If he should encounter Mr Weigall he is sure to say something rude.'\n\n'Or do something rude,' said Nefret with a grin. 'The last time he met Mr Weigall he threatened to \u2013'\n\n'Hurry,' I begged.\n\nMost of the tourists were going in the opposite direction from ours, so our progress was slower than I would have liked. I had to agree with Emerson's assessment; in general they were a silly looking lot, unsuitably attired and vacantly gaping. The men had the advantage, since they were unencumbered by high-heeled shoes and corsets. Men and women alike stared at Nefret, who strode as easily as a slender boy in her sensible boots and trousers. At my insistence she wore a coat, but her shirt was open at the neck and golden-red locks had escaped from her pith helmet and curled round her face. She paid no heed to the impertinent stares \u2013 critical on the part of the women, quite otherwise on the part of the gentlemen.\n\nAs I had expected, we found Emerson planted firmly in front of tomb number Five. Only those tombs containing painted reliefs had been provided with locked gates. The barrier that prevented entrance to this one was equally effective \u2013 heaped-up rubble and miscellaneous trash that concealed all but the outline of a door.\n\nI was sorry to see that my premonition had been accurate. Facing Emerson, his back to the tomb, was a young man wearing a neat tweed suit and a very large pith helmet \u2013 Mr Weigall, who now held our friend Howard's former position of Inspector for Upper Egypt. Neither their postures nor their expressions were combative, and I was about to dismiss my forebodings when Emerson swung his arm and struck Mr Weigall full in the chest. Weigall toppled over backwards, into the half-filled opening."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "We celebrated Christmas in the good old-fashioned way, with a tree and carols and friends gathered round. To be sure, the setting was a trifle unusual \u2013 golden sand instead of snow, a balmy breeze wafting through the open windows instead of sleety rain pounding at the closed panes, a spindly tamarisk branch instead of an ever-green \u2013 but we had spent so many festal seasons in Egypt that it seemed entirely natural to us. Even the spindly tamarisk made a brave show, thanks to David's ingenious decorations. Comical camels, garlands of delicate silvery stars, and innumerable other designs cut from tin or shaped of baked clay filled in the empty spaces and twinkled in the lights of the candles.\n\nMr Weigall and his wife had declined our invitation. They appeared to harbour a grudge, though I could not imagine why; Emerson's prompt action had saved the young man from far more serious injuries than he received when he landed (rather heavily, I admit) on the hard surface, and my heroic husband was still favouring his left leg, which had been badly bruised by the shower of stones dislodged by idiot tourists trying to climb the rocks above the tomb.\n\n'Perhaps,' I had remarked, following the event, 'you need not have pushed him quite so hard, Emerson.'\n\nEmerson gave me a look of hurt reproach. 'There was no time to calculate, Peabody. Do you suppose I would deliberately set out to injure an official of the Antiquities Service?'\n\nNo one could possibly have proved that he had, but I feared relations between ourselves and the Weigalls had not become any warmer. However, the presence of older and better friends made their absence unimportant. Cyrus and Katherine Vandergelt were there, of course; Cyrus was one of our dearest friends, and we had become very fond of the lady he had espoused a few years earlier, despite her somewhat questionable past.\n\nWhen we first met her, Katherine was busily bilking a gullible acquaintance of ours in her then-capacity as a spiritualist medium. She had come round to a right way of thinking and had been on the verge of honourably refusing Cyrus' offer of marriage when I persuaded her to reconsider. I had never regretted my intervention (I seldom do), for they were very happy together, and Katherine's caustic wit and cynical view of humanity made her a most entertaining companion.\n\nPrices had gone up shockingly since my early days in Egypt; despite Fatima's skills in bargaining, the turkey cost almost sixty piastres, four times what it would have cost twenty years ago. After dinner \u2013 including a splendid plum pudding in a blaze of brandy, borne in by Fatima \u2013 we retired to the verandah to watch the sunset. As Katherine sank gratefully into a chair she cast an envious eye upon Nefret, who was wearing one of her loose, elaborately embroidered robes, and declared her intention of acquiring a similar garment herself.\n\n'I ate far too much,' she declared. 'And my corsets are killing me. I ought to have followed your advice, Amelia, and left them off, but I am a good deal stouter than you.'\n\n'You are just right as you are,' Cyrus declared, looking fondly at her.\n\nThe others hastened to express their agreement. We had only two other guests \u2013 Howard Carter and Edward Ayrton, with whom Ramses had struck up a friendship the previous year. Ned, as he had invited me to call him, was the archaeologist in charge of Mr Davis' excavations. He got little credit from Davis, who referred to his discoveries in the first person singular, but since the American was completely ignorant of excavation procedures and disinclined to follow them anyhow, Maspero had required him to employ a qualified person. Ned was a slight young fellow, pleasant-looking rather than handsome. I thought he seemed a little shy with us, so I put myself out to include him in the conversation.\n\n'Your official season begins, I believe, on January the first. You have had remarkable good fortune thus far in finding interesting tombs for Mr Davis. Not that I mean to disparage the archaeological skills which have contributed to your success.'\n\n'You are too kind, Mrs Emerson,' the young man replied in a soft, well-bred voice. 'In fact, we didn't find anything last year that measured up to Yuya and Thuya.'\n\n'Good Gad, how many unrobbed tombs does the bas \u2013 man expect to find in one lifetime?' Emerson demanded.\n\n'He has rather got into the habit of expecting at least one a year.' The comment came from Howard, who had taken a seat a little distance from the rest of us. 'I don't envy you your job, Ayrton.'\n\nThere was a brief, embarrassed silence. Howard had once supervised Davis' excavations, in addition to holding down the post of Inspector for Upper Egypt. Now he had lost both positions, and the bitterness in his voice belied his claim of indifference.\n\nIn the spring of 1905 Howard had been transferred to Lower Egypt in place of Mr Quibell, who had taken over Howard's position as Inspector for Upper Egypt. Not long after Howard moved to Sakkara, a group of drunken French tourists had tried to enter the Serapeum without the necessary tickets. When they were refused entry, they attacked the guards with fists and sticks. Upon being summoned to the scene, Howard ordered his men to defend themselves, and a Frenchman was knocked down.\n\nSince the inebriated individuals had also invaded the house of Mrs Petrie that same morning and behaved rudely to her, there was no doubt that they had been in the wrong \u2013 but for a 'native' to strike a foreigner, even in self-defence, was a greater wrong in the eyes of the pompous officials who controlled the Egyptian government. The French demanded an official apology. Howard refused to give it. Maspero transferred him to a remote site in the Delta, and after several months of brooding Howard resigned. Since then he had been scraping a dubious living by selling his paintings and acting as a guide to distinguished tourists. He had no private means, and the career which had been so promising was now cut short.\n\nIt was Emerson who broke the silence, with the sort of comment he had promised me he would not make. The previous year he had had a major falling-out with Mr Davis \u2013 as opposed to his minor fallings-out with other people. He had sworn he would not disturb the felicity of the day by cursing Davis, but I might have known he would be unable to resist.\n\n'You're well out of it, Carter,' he growled. 'Quibell couldn't stick working with Davis, that's why he got himself transferred back north, and after Weigall took over the inspectorate he persuaded Davis to hire Ayrton because he couldn't stand the old idiot either.'\n\nEmerson's fulminations had a better effect than my attempts at tact. They broke the ice as emphatically as a boulder crashing on to a frozen stream. Everybody relaxed, and even Howard grinned sympathetically at Ned Ayrton. Nevertheless, I felt obliged to utter a gentle remonstrance.\n\n'Really, Emerson, you are the most tactless man alive. I had hoped that on this day of all times we might avoid topics that lead to cursing and controversy.'\n\nCyrus chuckled. 'That would be doggone dull, Amelia dear.'\n\nNefret went to sit on the arm of Emerson's chair. 'Quite right. The Professor only said what we were all thinking, Aunt Amelia. Allow us the pleasure of a little malicious gossip.'\n\n'I never gossip,' said Emerson loftily. 'I am only stating facts. Where are you planning to work this season, Ayrton?'\n\nThis sounded to Ned like a relatively innocent question, and he was quick to answer. 'The area south of the tomb of Ramses IX was what I had in mind, sir. The heaped-up rubble doesn't appear to have been disturbed since...'\n\nAfter a while Cyrus drew up a chair and joined in, so I went to sit beside Katherine, who had been listening with considerable amusement.\n\n'Poor Cyrus,' she said. 'It is no wonder he resents Mr Davis, after all those unproductive years he spent digging in the Valley.'\n\n'He might not be so resentful if Davis didn't swagger and gloat whenever they chance to meet. It really isn't fair. Cyrus was at his dig every day, supervising and assisting; Davis only turns up after his archaeologist has found something interesting.'\n\nA burst of laughter drew our attention back to the group. Ramses must have said something particularly rude (or possibly witty), for they had all turned to him, and Nefret went to sit beside her brother on the ledge. The rays of the setting sun gilded her luxuriant golden-red hair and flushed, laughing face. Katherine drew in her breath.\n\n'She is frighteningly beautiful isn't she? I know, Amelia, I know \u2013 beauty is only skin-deep, and vanity is a sin, and nobility of character is more important than appearance \u2013 but most women would sell their souls to look like that. I had better go and remind Cyrus that he is a happily married man. Only see how he is staring.'\n\n'They are all staring,' I said, with a smile. 'But Nefret is completely without vanity, thank heaven, and it is the qualities within that render her beautiful. Without them she would be only a pretty little doll. She is in tearing high spirits today.'\n\n'There is certainly a glow about her,' Katherine said thoughtfully. 'The sort of glow one sees on the face of a girl who is in the company of an individual who has engaged her affections.'\n\n'It is not like you to employ circumlocutions, Katherine. If you mean that Nefret has fallen in love, I fear your instincts have, for once, led you astray. Her feelings for Howard and Ned Ayrton are friendly at best, and I assure you she would never set her cap for a married man.'\n\nMy little jest brought a smile to Katherine's lips. 'No doubt I am mistaken. I often am.'\n\nThe first star of evening had appeared in the sky over Luxor and I was about to suggest we retire to the parlour when Ramses turned his head. 'Someone is coming,' he said, interrupting his father in mid-expletive.\n\nThe Egyptians call Ramses 'the brother of Demons,' and some of them believe he can see in the dark, like an afreet or a cat. I would not deny that his vision is excellent. Several seconds had passed before I made out the shadowy form of a man on horseback. He dismounted and advanced towards us, and when the dying light illumined his well-cut features I let out an exclamation.\n\n'Good Gad! Is it \u2013 can it be \u2013 Sir Edward? What are you doing here?'\n\nSir Edward Washington \u2013 for it was indeed he \u2013 removed his hat and bowed. 'I am flattered that you remember me, Mrs Emerson. It has been several years since we last met.'\n\nIt had been over six years, to be precise. He had not changed appreciably; his tall form was as trim, his fair hair as thick, and his blue eyes met mine with the same look of lazy amusement. I remembered my manners, which astonishment had made me forget. Astonishment \u2013 and a certain degree of uneasiness. At that last meeting I had bluntly informed Sir Edward that he must give up any hope of winning Nefret and he had informed me, less bluntly but just as unequivocally, that he intended to try again. And here he was, and there was Nefret, smiling and dimpling in a particularly suspicious manner.\n\nI rose and went to meet him. 'It is unlikely that I would forget an individual who worked so diligently with us on Tetisheri's tomb, and who was, moreover, responsible for rescuing me from a particularly awkward situation.'\n\nThis reference reminded Emerson of his manners. At their best they were far from perfect, and he had never been very fond of Sir Edward; but gratitude won out over dislike. 'I suppose being strangled could be described as an awkward situation,' he said dryly. 'Good evening, Sir Edward. I had not expected to see you again, but so long as you are here you may as well sit down.'\n\nSir Edward appeared to be amused rather than offended by this less-than-effusive invitation. His own manners were admirable. His greeting to Nefret was warm but in no way familiar; his comments on how Ramses and David had grown since he had last seen them were only a little condescending. Ramses' reaction was to rise to his full height, an inch or two greater than that of Sir Edward, and shake hands rather more vigorously than courtesy demanded.\n\nAs it turned out, Sir Edward was acquainted with all the others except Katherine.\n\n'I had heard of Mr Vandergelt's good fortune, and am delighted to make the acquaintance of a lady who has been so widely praised,' he said with a graceful bow.\n\n'How very kind,' Katherine replied. 'I had heard of you too, Sir Edward, but was not aware of the remarkable incident to which the Professor referred. Is it a secret, or will you tell us about it?'\n\nSir Edward remained modestly silent, and I said, 'It is no longer a secret. Is it, Emerson?'\n\nEmerson glowered at me. 'People are not infrequently moved to strangle you, Amelia. This \u2013 er \u2013 incident occurred a few years ago, Katherine, when my discreet, prudent wife took a notion to go haring off to confront a suspect without bothering to inform me of her intentions. Had not Sir Edward followed her \u2013 for reasons which were never explained to my entire satisfaction \u2013 she might have been efficiently murdered by \u2013'\n\n'Emerson!' I exclaimed. 'Enough of this morbidity. We were just about to retire to the parlour for refreshment and a bit of carol singing, Sir Edward. You will join us, I hope?'\n\n'I had no intention of intruding,' the gentleman in question exclaimed. 'I came only to wish you the felicitations of the season, and to present you with a small token of my esteem.' He took a small box from his coat pocket and offered it to me. 'It is nothing, really,' he went on, overriding my thanks. 'I happened to come across it in an antiquities shop the other day, and I thought it might appeal to you.'\n\nInside the box was an amulet of blue faience, approximately two inches long. The moulded loop showed that it had been worn on a cord or string as a protective amulet \u2013 almost certainly by a woman, since the protruding muzzle and swollen belly were those of the hippopotamus goddess Taueret, who watched over mothers and children.\n\n'How charming,' I murmured.\n\n'A memento of our last meeting?' Brows elevated, voice harsh, Emerson addressed Sir Edward. 'You exhibit less than your usual tact, Sir Edward; Taueret was for us a symbol of danger and bad luck.'\n\n'But you triumphed over both,' Sir Edward said winsomely. 'I thought it might be a reminder of your success, but if Mrs Emerson does not care for it she must feel free to discard it. It is probably a forgery; some of the Gurnawis produce excellent fakes.'\n\nHe carefully avoided looking at David, but I could not help wondering if the reference had been accidental. Sir Edward had been with us the year we met David, who had been working for one of the best forgers in Gurneh.\n\n'Not at all,' I said quickly. 'That is \u2013 thank you, Sir Edward. I am acquiring quite a collection of nice little amulets; yours will be a welcome addition to the Bastet Ramses gave me some years ago, and this one, which I received only recently.'\n\nI had had the little statue of the baboon added to the chain on which I wore Ramses' cat and the scarab of Thutmose III, which had been Emerson's bridal gift. Sir Edward leaned forward to examine them.\n\n'The baboon is a symbol of the god Thoth, is it not? A handsome piece, Mrs Emerson. What special significance does this amulet have, if I may ask?'\n\n'It symbolizes a cause dear to my heart, Sir Edward \u2013 that of equal rights for women. \"Huquq al ma'ra,\" as they say here. It was given me by a lady who is taking an active part in the movement.'\n\n'I am not surprised that you should wear it, then. But is there really such a movement in Egypt, of all places?'\n\n'The flame of freedom burns in the hearts of all women, Sir Edward.'\n\nEmerson snorted \u2013 not, I felt sure, at the sentiment, but at my manner of expressing it. I took my revenge by delivering a little lecture (or, to be accurate, rather a long lecture) on the history of the women's movement in Egypt, mentioning the periodical we had seen and the literacy classes. Sir Edward was too well-bred to appear bored, but in fact I felt certain he was genuinely interested, as his occasional questions indicated.\n\nEmerson was bored, and soon said so.\n\nAs I had expected, Sir Edward's reluctance to intrude was readily overcome; I led the way into the house and we gathered round the pianoforte. Sir Edward's mellow baritone swelled the chorus and after a while Emerson stopped scowling at him and joined in. Emerson always suspects men of having designs on me. It is a flattering but inconvenient delusion of his, and in this case it was completely without foundation. If Sir Edward had designs on anyone, it was on another; seeing his face soften as he watched Nefret I knew he had not abandoned his hopes. She was careful to avoid his eyes, which was even more suspicious.\n\nThe only one who did not participate was Ramses. As a child he had been prone to croon in a wordless, tuneless fashion that was particularly annoying to my ears. He had abandoned the habit, at my request, and it had taken considerable persuasion by Nefret before he would condescend to join in our little family concerts. To my surprise, I found that his singing voice was not unpleasing, and that in some manner (not from his father) he had learned to carry a tune. He excused himself that evening on the grounds that his throat was a trifle sore. Nefret did not urge him."
            },
            {
                "title": "From Manuscript H",
                "text": "'It's him!' Careless of grammar and the legs of the furniture, Ramses flung himself into a wicker armchair. 'He's the one she was meeting in London.'\n\n'What makes you think that? She always has followers,' David closed the door of Ramses' room and settled himself in another chair.\n\n'She met that fellow on the sly, and lied about it. That isn't like her.'\n\n'Perhaps she's tired of hearing you ridicule her admirers.'\n\n'Most of the victims have made sufficient fools of themselves without any help from me. Well \u2013 not much help.'\n\n'Why don't you tell her how you feel? I know, by your Western standards you are still too young to think of marriage, but if she agreed to an engagement you would at least be sure of her.'\n\n'Oh, yes,' Ramses said bitterly. 'She might just be soft-hearted and soft-headed enough to accept my proposal out of sheer pity, and if once she gave her word she wouldn't break it. Are you suggesting I take advantage of her kindness and affection, and then ask her to remain true to me for four or five years?'\n\n'I hadn't thought of it that way,' David said quietly.\n\n'You aren't fool enough to fall in love with a girl who doesn't love you. I will not admit my feelings until she shows some sign of returning them. So far I don't seem to be making much progress.'\n\n'Someone has to take the first step,' David said sensibly. 'Perhaps she would respond if you took the trouble to demonstrate your feelings.'\n\n'How? Nefret would fall over laughing if I turned up with flowers in my hand and flowery speeches on my lips.'\n\n'She probably would,' David agreed. 'You don't seem to have any difficulty making other women fall in love with you. How many of them have you \u2013'\n\n'That is a question no gentleman should ask, much less answer,' Ramses said, in the same repressive tone his mother would have used, but with a faint smile. 'I wouldn't blame Nefret for \u2013 er \u2013 amusing herself with other men. I'd hate it, but I'm not hypocrite enough to condemn her for it. And I would never stand in her way if she truly cared for a man who was worthy of her.'\n\n'Wouldn't you?'\n\nOnly lovers and deadly enemies look directly into one another's eyes.\n\nWas that one of his mother's famous aphorisms? It sounded like the sort of thing she would say; and as his eyes met those of his friend in a direct unblinking gaze, Ramses felt a chill run through him. David looked away, clasping his arms around his body as if he too felt suddenly cold.\n\nAfter a moment Ramses said, 'You must be getting frightfully bored with my histrionics.'\n\n'Anything that is important to you is important to me, Ramses. You know that. I only wish I could...'\n\n'You look tired. Go to bed, why don't you?'\n\n'I'm not tired. But if you don't want to talk any longer \u2013'\n\n'You've heard it all before. To the point of tedium, I expect.' He forced a smile. 'Good night, David.'\n\nThe door closed softly. Ramses sat without moving for a long time. The suspicion that had entered his mind was despicable and baseless. A single meeting of eyes, an altered note in the voice that had responded to his statement: 'I would never stand in her way if she cared for someone who was truly worthy of her...' David was worthy of her. Not by the false standards of the modern world, perhaps, but Nefret's formative years had been spent in quite a different world. The strange culture of the oasis had not been free of bigotry and cruelty, but its prejudices were based on caste rather than race or nationality. Nefret didn't think of David as an inferior. Neither did Ramses. David was \u2013 might be \u2013 a rival more dangerous than any he had yet encountered. And David, being the sort of man he was, would feel guilty and ashamed at coming between his best friend and the girl his friend wanted.\n\nWe resumed work the following morning. Others of the English community in Luxor might make a festival of Boxing Day, but I had had a hard enough time persuading Emerson to celebrate Christmas, which he considered a heathen festival. 'Why don't we just wreathe mistletoe around our brows and sacrifice someone to the sun?' he had inquired sarcastically. 'That is all it is, you know, the ancient celebration of the winter solstice. Nobody knows what year the fellow was born, much less what day, and furthermore...'\n\nBut I cannot in conscience reproduce Emerson's heretical remarks on Christian dogma.\n\nWhen we started for the Valley Abdullah walked with me, as he often did. He honestly believed he was helping me, so I gave him my hand on the steeper slopes; and when we reached the top I tactfully suggested we rest for a moment before following the others.\n\n'We are not so young as we once were, Sitt,' said Abdullah, subsiding rather heavily on to a rock.\n\n'None of us is. But what does it matter? It may take us a little longer to reach the summit, but never fear, we will get there!'\n\nThe corners of Abdullah's mouth twitched. 'Yours are words of wisdom, as always, Sitt.'\n\nHe did not appear in any hurry to go on, so we sat for a time in silence. The air was cool and clean. The sun had just risen above the eastern cliffs and the morning light spread slowly across the landscape like a wash of watercolour, turning the grey stone to silver-gold, the pale river to sparkling blue, the dull-green fields to vivid emerald. After a while Abdullah spoke.\n\n'Do you believe, Sitt, that we have lived other lives on this earth and will come back to live again?'\n\nThe question startled me, not only because philosophical speculation was not a habit of Abdullah's, but because it was an uncanny reflection of my own thoughts. I had been thinking that the golden palaces of heaven could be no more beautiful than the morning light on the cliffs of Thebes, and that my definition of Paradise would be a continuation of the life I loved with those I loved beside me.\n\n'I do not know, Abdullah. Sometimes I have wondered... But no; our Christian faith does not hold with that idea.'\n\nNeither did the faith of Islam. Abdullah did not mention this. 'I have wondered too. But there is only one way to know for certain, and I am not eager to explore that path.'\n\n'Nor I,' I said, smiling. 'This life holds pleasure enough for me. But I fear we will have a dull season, Abdullah. Emerson is very bored with his little tombs.'\n\n'So am I,' said Abdullah.\n\nWith a grunt he got to his feet and offered a hand to help me rise. We tramped on together in silence and in perfect amity. He was bored, I was bored, Emerson was bored. We were all bored to distraction, and there was nothing I could do about it. Glumly I followed the familiar path into the small side wadi in which we were working.\n\nThe tomb of Amenhotep II was at its far end, and we had been investigating the small pit tombs along the way that led towards the main valley. Most of them had been found by Ned Ayrton in his previous seasons with Mr Davis. He had removed the only objects of interest, and there had not been many of those. Three of the miserable little tombs had contained animal burials. They were certainly curious \u2013 a yellow dog, standing upright, with its tail curled over its back, nose to nose with a mummified monkey, and a squatting ape wearing a pretty little necklace of blue beads \u2013 but I could understand why Ned's patron had not been thrilled by the discoveries of that season.\n\nEmerson of course found objects Ned had overlooked. He always does find things other archaeologists overlook. There were several interesting graffiti (described and translated in our forthcoming publication) and a number of beads and pottery fragments which were to lead Emerson to a remarkable theory concerning the length of the reign of Amenhotep II. These details will be of even less interest to my Reader than they were (candour compels me to admit) to me."
            },
            {
                "title": "From Manuscript H",
                "text": "Ramses sat up with a start. At first he couldn't think what had waked him. The room was quite dark, for vines covered part of the single window, but his night vision was good \u2013 if not as uncannily acute as some of the Egyptians believed \u2013 and he saw only the dim shapes that ought to have been there \u2013 table and chairs, chest of drawers, and the garments hanging on hooks along the wall.\n\nHe threw back the thin sheet. Ever since an embarrassing incident a few years ago he had taken to wearing a pair of loose Egyptian-style drawers to bed. They did not encumber his movements as he went to the door, noiseless on bare feet, and eased it open.\n\nLike the other bedchambers his opened on to a walled courtyard. Nothing moved in the starlight; a spindly palm tree and the potted plants his mother nurtured cast dim, oddly shaped shadows. No lights showed at the windows. His parents' room was at the far end of the wing, then David's, then his, with Nefret's at this end. Like his parents' room, hers had windows on an outer wall as well as the courtyard.\n\nHe took in the peaceful scene without pausing, drawn on by the same indefinable sense of uneasiness that had waked him. He had reached Nefret's door before he heard her cry out \u2013 not a scream, a soft, muffled sound that would have been inaudible a few feet away.\n\nShe hadn't locked her door. It would not have mattered; the hinges gave way when his shoulder hit the panel, and he pushed the door aside. The room was as dark as his had been; something was blocking the outer window, cutting off the starlight. Then the obstruction disappeared and he saw the glimmer of Nefret's white nightdress, motionless on the floor between the bed and the window.\n\n'Curse it!' she gasped, raising herself to a sitting position. 'He got away! Go after him!'\n\nThe full sleeve of her gown fell back as she flung out her arm. It had been slit from elbow to wrist, and the fabric was no longer white.\n\n'Too late,' Ramses said. At least that was what he intended to say. His heart was pounding, trying to compensate for the beats it had skipped before she moved and spoke, and the words caught in his throat. She was wriggling around, trying to stand up, but her movements were slow and unsteady and her long skirts were twisted around her legs. He dropped to his knees and took her by the shoulders. 'Stay still. He's long gone, whoever he was, and you're going to faint.'\n\nNefret said indignantly, 'I've never fainted in my...' Her head fell back, and he gathered her limp body into his arms.\n\nHe was still holding her when a light appeared in the doorway and he looked up to see David, a lamp in one hand, his knife in the other.\n\n'Good Lord! Is she \u2013'\n\n'Half-smothered,' said Nefret in a muffled voice.\n\nShe probably was at that, Ramses thought. He relaxed his grip enough for her to turn her head away from his shoulder, and she gave him a cheerful grin. 'That's better. Close the door, David, and bring the lamp over here. Put me down, Ramses. No, not on the bed, there's no sense in getting blood on the sheets.'\n\nWordlessly Ramses lowered her on to the rug.\n\n'You look as if you are about to faint,' she remarked. 'Sit down and put your head between your knees.'\n\nRamses sat down. He did not put his head between his knees, but he left it to David to clean and bandage the cut. By the time the job was done, his hands and his voice were fairly steady.\n\n'All right,' he said harshly. 'What happened?'\n\nNefret let David help her to her feet and lead her to a chair. 'A man climbed in through the window,' she explained. 'I didn't wake up until he was already in the room. He was after the papyrus.'\n\n'How do you know?' Ramses demanded.\n\n'Because that was when I woke up, when he dragged the case out from under the bed. He let out a sort of hiss, and \u2013'\n\n'And you tried to stop him?' Fury roughened his voice, and Nefret glared back at him.\n\n'I did stop him. He didn't get it. I'd have caught him, too, if you hadn't burst in.'\n\n'Oh, yes, right,' Ramses said. 'What with, a hair ribbon?'\n\n'I had my knife. I always sleep with it under my pillow.' She gestured at the puddle of blood on the floor. 'That's not all mine. I slashed at his arm, to keep him from picking up the case, you know \u2013 I was afraid he'd drop it once we got to fighting \u2013 and then he backed away, and I got out of bed and went after him, and he \u2013'\n\n'Got to fighting?' David stared at her in horror. 'Went after him? For the love of heaven, Nefret! Ramses is right, you are too damned impulsive. Why didn't you call for help?'\n\n'There wasn't time. I blocked his blow, the way Ramses taught me, but I guess I wasn't quite quick enough. It was only a little cut,' she added defensively. 'But I slipped in the blood on the floor. Then Ramses broke the door down, and the man got away.'\n\n'You didn't recognize him?' Ramses asked, ignoring the implied reproof.\n\n'I didn't get a good look at him, it was dark, and he had a scarf wound round his head. It might have been Yussuf Mahmud; his height and build were the same.'\n\n'An ordinary thief,' David began.\n\n'No,' Ramses said. 'Sneak thieves don't carry knives, or use them \u2013 especially on the family of the dread Father of Curses. He went straight for the papyrus. That's another interesting point. How did he know Nefret had it? No proper gentleman would leave such a potentially dangerous object in the hands of a poor little weak woman.'\n\n'Ha,' said Nefret.\n\n'Ha indeed. Nefret, are you sure you didn't tell anyone? Or let slip... No, of course not.'\n\n'Damn right.'\n\nShe might have let something slip, though, without being aware of it \u2013 to a man who asked the right questions. She'd been seeing a lot of Sir Edward in the past few days...\n\nHe knew better than to hint at that theory. 'Get some rest, Nefret. We'll have a look round in the morning.'\n\n'I'll wipe up the blood,' David offered. 'We don't want Aunt Amelia to see it, do we.'\n\n'Don't bother,' Ramses said. 'I cannot imagine why Mother is not already on the scene \u2013 she usually is \u2013 but she'll certainly notice the door being off its hinges and Nefret favouring her arm, and... And we've no right to keep silent, not now.'\n\n'Oh dear,' Nefret murmured. 'The Professor is going to roar.'\n\n'Undoubtedly. And Mother will lecture. On the whole, I prefer Father's roars.'\n\n'We'll confess tomorrow, then.' Nefret stood up. 'Good night.'\n\nShe waved away David's supporting arm and followed them to the door. 'Ramses,' she said.\n\n'Yes?'\n\n'How did you get here so quickly? I didn't cry out until he cut my arm, and you must have been already outside my door.'\n\n'Something woke me. Perhaps he made a sound climbing in the window.'\n\nA window on the opposite wall of her room, with a mudbrick partition between. Luckily she didn't notice the illogic of that. 'I'm sorry if I was rude,' she said.\n\n'No more than usual.'\n\n'Thank you for being there when I needed you, my boy.' She put an affectionate hand on his arm and smiled at him. Ramses stepped back.\n\n'Not at all.'\n\n'Don't be angry. I said I was sorry.'\n\n'I'm not angry. Good night, Nefret.'\n\nLeaving David to deal with the damaged door, he strode towards the back gate and went out. It would have been more in keeping with the Byronic tradition to pace back and forth under her window \u2013 groaning and clutching his brow \u2013 but he didn't want to risk disturbing footprints or other clues; so he sat down with his back against the wall of the house and hugged his knees for warmth, and damned himself for a sentimental fool. The intruder, whoever he had been, would not return that night, and the air was cold. There was no point in going to bed, though. He wouldn't sleep.\n\nSometime later he became aware of movement. The moon had set, but the stars were bright. A form emerged from the shadows. It moved with a swagger, ears pricked and tail swinging. Seeing him, it stopped several feet away and stared at him.\n\nRamses stared back.\n\nSome of the Egyptians believed he could communicate with animals. It required no extra-sensory perception to know where Horus had been and what he had been doing. He had been doing it every night since they arrived in Luxor. Having a vile temper, a well-muscled, well-fed body, and an ego the size of a lion's, he had no difficulty in running off rivals for the affections of the local female felines. The cat Bastet would never have allowed an intruder to get within six feet of Nefret, but this selfish, single-minded beast had been too busy satisfying his appetites to guard her.\n\nHe had a feeling Horus knew exactly what he was thinking, and that Horus didn't give a damn. After a long, silent, supercilious survey, the cat proceeded on his way. He sprang on to Nefret's windowsill and turned for a final contemptuous look before vanishing inside.\n\nFor the first time in his life Ramses was tempted to throw something at an animal. Something hard and heavy. 'Where did this come from?' Emerson asked.\n\nHe spoke in the soft, purring voice his acquaintances had come to know and dread. Nefret met his keen blue eyes without flinching, but I saw her brace herself.\n\n'It is the property of the Foundation,' she replied.\n\n'Ah, yes. The Foundation for the Exploration and Preservation of Egyptian Antiquities.' Emerson sat back, fingering the cleft in his chin. In the same mild voice he added, 'Your Foundation.'\n\n'Ours,' Nefret corrected. 'You are on the Board; so are Ramses and David and Aunt Amelia.'\n\n'Good Gad,' Emerson exclaimed. 'The fact must have slipped my mind. Or is it the fact that the Board gave its approval for this particular purchase? Dear me, I am getting old and forgetful.'\n\n'Enough, Emerson,' I said sharply.\n\nEmerson might have ignored my suggestion, for he really was in a considerable rage. It was the sight of Nefret's face that stopped him. Her rounded chin was quivering and her eyes were luminous with tears. When one crystal drop overflowed the cornflower-blue depths and slid down her cheek, Emerson let out a roar.\n\n'Stop that immediately, Nefret! You are taking unfair advantage, curse it.'\n\nNefret's trembling lips curved into a broad, relieved smile. No one minded Emerson's bellows. She sat down on the arm of his chair and ruffled his hair. 'Professor darling, you let me set up the Foundation when I came into my money \u2013 in fact, you encouraged the idea \u2013 but you have never accepted a penny or allowed anyone else in the family to do so. It has hurt me deeply, though of course I have never complained.'\n\n'You may as well give in, Father,' said Ramses. 'If you don't, she'll start crying again.'\n\n'Hmph,' said Emerson. 'I see she has already got round you and David. If I remember correctly, any major expenditure requires the consent of a simple majority of the Board. You three are a majority. Amelia, why the devil didn't you point this out to me when the papers were drawn up?'\n\n'I didn't think of it either,' I admitted. I had always considered his refusal to accept financial assistance from Nefret absurd \u2013 another example of masculine pride. Why shouldn't she use her money as she liked? And what worthier recipient could there be than the greatest Egyptologist of this or any other age \u2013 Radcliffe Emerson, to be precise?\n\nTactfully I turned Emerson's attention back to the papyrus. 'It is one of the finest I have ever seen,' I said. 'A worthy purchase for the Foundation, for if you had not acquired it \u2013 illegally, I suppose? \u2013 it would have been sold to a private collector and lost to science. Now, Emerson, don't start ranting about the iniquities of buying from the dealers, we have all heard that lecture a thousand times. In this case it had to be done. You do grasp the subtler implications of this discovery, I suppose?'\n\nEmerson glared at me. I was pleased to see that my question had taken his attention away from the children.\n\n'Do you take me for a fool, Peabody? Of course I grasp them. However, I refuse to allow you to waste time in idle speculation until we have ascertained the facts. Pray allow me to conduct this interrogation. I repeat: Where did you get this?'\n\nHis ice-blue gaze swept over the three young persons. Nefret's smile faded; David flinched; and both looked hopefully at Ramses, who was, as I had expected, not unwilling to do the talking.\n\n'From Yussuf Mahmud in Cairo. David and I were \u2013'\n\n'Impossible,' Emerson said. 'Yussuf Mahmud deals in forgeries and second-rate antiquities. How could he lay his hands on something like this?'\n\n'It is a pertinent question,' said Ramses. 'Father, if you will allow me to complete my narrative without interruption...'\n\nEmerson folded his hands. 'That goes for you too, Peabody. Proceed, Ramses.'\n\nAs Ramses' narrative unfolded I found it difficult to repress exclamations of horror, surprise and consternation. I must do Ramses the justice of believing that on this occasion he told not only the truth, but the whole truth. It had to be the whole truth because nothing could have been worse. Emerson's countenance did not change; but his hands gripped one another until the fingers turned white and the tendons stood out like cords.\n\n'We made it back to the boat without further incident,' Ramses concluded.\n\n'Further incident,' Emerson repeated. 'Hmmm, yes. There had been incidents enough. Well, well. It is not the first time you have behaved recklessly, and it will probably not be the last. There is only one thing I fail to understand.'\n\n'Yes, sir?' Ramses said warily. He was not deceived by Emerson's mild tone.\n\n'I do not understand why...' Emerson's voice broke with sheer fury and then rose to a roar that rattled the cups in their saucers. 'Why in the name of God you took your sister with you!'\n\nThe cat Horus shot out from under the table and headed for the door, his ears flattened and his tail straight out. There he encountered Abdullah, who had been waiting for us on the verandah and who had, I supposed, been alarmed by Emerson's shouts and hurried to discover what disaster had prompted them. The cat got entangled in Abdullah's skirts and a brief interval of staggering (by Abdullah), scratching (by Horus) and swearing (by both parties) ensued before Horus freed himself and departed.\n\nSo Ramses had to go over it again, while I applied iodine to Abdullah's shins. Ordinarily he would have objected to this procedure, but the interest of the narrative distracted him; his eyes got rounder and rounder and when Ramses finished he gasped, 'You took Nur Misur with you?'\n\n'They didn't take me,' Nefret said. 'We went together. Abdullah, please don't get excited. It is not good for you.'\n\n'But \u2013 but \u2013 Yussuf Mahmud,' Abdullah exclaimed. 'That crawling snake... Into el Was'a.... At night...'\n\n'If you don't calm down I am going to get my stethoscope and listen to your heart.' She pressed him back into his chair with one small brown hand and offered him a glass of water with the other.\n\nThe threat was sufficient. Abdullah viewed modern medical procedures with deep suspicion, and the very idea of being examined by a young woman filled him with horror.\n\n'If she had not been with us, I might not be here with you now, Grandfather,' David said. 'She is as quick as a cat and as brave as a lion.'\n\nI decided it was time for me to take charge of the discussion, which had degenerated into a series of emotional exchanges. This is often the case when men carry on a conversation.\n\n'Let us hear the rest of it, Ramses,' I said.\n\nEmerson, who had begun to relax, came to attention with an audible snap of muscles. 'There is more?'\n\n'I rather think so. We will have to call Ibrahim to repair the hinges of Nefret's door. Well, Ramses?'\n\n'I'll tell it,' Nefret said.\n\nEmerson must already have reached the pinnacle of outrage, for his only reaction was to twitch a bit. Abdullah sipped his water, watching Nefret suspiciously over the rim of the glass. Nefret did not give either of them the opportunity to comment.\n\n'I admit we ought to have told you about the papyrus earlier,' she said. 'But that's over and done with, and we know how you feel, and you know how we feel, so let us not waste time shouting at one another.'\n\n'Now see here, young lady,' Emerson began.\n\n'Yes, Professor darling, we all know you never shout. The question is, what are we to do now? As I see it,' she continued, without waiting for a reply, 'there are two questions to be answered. First, who was the man who entered my room last night? Second, where did the papyrus originate? Has a new tomb been discovered?'\n\n'Well-reasoned,' I said approvingly. 'I was about to put the same questions myself. You think the intruder was Yussuf Mahmud?'\n\n'It was not an ordinary thief,' Abdullah grunted. 'No man of Thebes would risk the anger of the Father of Curses.'\n\nEmerson growled agreement. 'He left no clue?'\n\nIt was Ramses who answered. 'I searched the area under Nefret's window this morning. The sand had been disturbed, but it does not take footprints. He was not so considerate as to lose an article of clothing or \u2013'\n\n'Yes, yes,' said Emerson, who recognized the start of one of Ramses' lectures. 'I find it difficult to believe that Yussuf Mahmud would have the intestinal fortitude to break into the house. He's a second-rater in every way.'\n\n'He might have summoned up the intestinal fortitude if he feared someone else more than he did us,' Ramses said.\n\n'Hmmm.' Emerson rubbed his chin. 'The individual from whom he got the papyrus, you mean. He was sent here to retrieve it, with the promise that his worthless life would be spared if he succeeded? Possible. Curse it, Ramses, why didn't you tell me this before we left Cairo? I can think of several people who deal in antiquities of exceptional quality and whose scruples are questionable.'\n\n'So can I, Father. I saw no point in pursuing that line of inquiry, however. The guilty person would not admit anything, and questioning the others would only arouse speculation of the sort we want to avoid.'\n\n'I suppose so.' The admission came grudgingly. Emerson would have preferred to call on all his suspects and bully one of them into a confession.\n\nHis eyes returned to the papyrus, which lay on the table in David's ingeniously designed case. One of the charming little painted vignettes had been exposed; it showed the mummy case of the princess being drawn to the tomb by a pair of oxen. Emerson fingered the cleft in his chin, as was his habit when perplexed or in deep thought. Half to himself, he said, 'It's odd, though. The papyrus is very fine, no question of that; but I would not have believed any of the persons I had in mind would go to such lengths to get it back. Attacking a scruffy fellow swindler like Ali the Rat is one thing. Attempting to rob ME requires more audacity than I would have supposed them to possess.'\n\n'Have you any ideas about who such an audacious person might be, sir?' Nefret inquired politely.\n\nEmerson shot her a wary look. 'No. How should I? The question of the origin of this object is equally mysterious. It came from Thebes, obviously, but where in Thebes?'\n\n'It occurred to David,' Ramses said, 'that this papyrus might have come from the Royal Cache. The Abd er Rassul brothers had been looting the tomb of small objects for years before they were \u2013 er \u2013 persuaded to lead Herr Brugsch to the site. Some things were sold to collectors \u2013'\n\n'And other things they concealed in their house in Gurneh,' said Abdullah. 'There were papyri among those things.'\n\nEmerson was smoking furiously. 'There is another possibility. Brugsch could easily have overlooked something, he bundled everything out of the place in such a cursed hurry.'\n\n'Surely it is unlikely that he and the Abd er Rassuls would both overlook something as valuable as this,' I mused. 'However, a proper excavation might yield interesting results.'\n\nEmerson gave me a critical look. 'Bored with our tombs, are you, Peabody? Don't suppose you can distract me from my duty with your tempting suggestions. What we are endeavouring to determine is how the papyrus got to Cairo and where it originated. I see four possibilities. The first, that it came from the undiscovered tomb of the princess, is cursed unlikely. Other objects from that tomb would have surfaced. The second, third and fourth theories assume it was part of the Deir el Bahri cache. It was sold by the thieves either shortly after they discovered the tomb, or later, after having been concealed in their house for an undetermined number of years; or it was found and marketed only recently.'\n\nI opened my mouth to speak. Emerson said in a loud voice, 'Don't begin theorizing, Peabody, I am having difficulty enough controlling my temper. We have not sufficient evidence to construct a theory as yet. Unless our dear dutiful children are concealing evidence from us?'\n\n'We aren't concealing anything,' Nefret said. 'Ramses held nothing back. If I had been telling the story I would have been strongly tempted to omit a few of the more \u2013 um \u2013 interesting details.'\n\n'I suppose I must give him that,' Emerson said. 'Confound it, Ramses, for how long have you and David been prowling the streets of Cairo in those disgusting disguises? \"Curse the unbeliever\" indeed!'\n\n'We established those identities three years ago, Father.'\n\n'Well, you had better dis-establish them. It has occurred to you, I trust, that someone more acute than your father must have penetrated your disguises? I confess,' Emerson added with grudging admiration, 'that you took me in completely.'\n\n'The events of last night confirm that assumption, sir. Though I cannot explain how. We were very careful.'\n\n'Hmph. Well, if we can find Yussuf Mahmud he can answer all our questions. Our first move should be to learn whether he has shown himself in Luxor. I will just have some little chats with the antiquities dealers. Abdullah, you will question your friends and relatives in Gurneh?'\n\nAbdullah nodded. He looked so grim I felt sorry for the friends and relatives. 'It must be made known that the object the thief sought is no longer in Nur Misur's room.'\n\n'It is a good thought, my father.' Ramses switched from English to Arabic. 'But after today it will be my room, and she will occupy mine. Do not speak of this, or of the papyrus. I would be very glad if the man would come back.'\n\nClipping from Al Ahram, December 29, 1906:\n\nThe body of a man was drawn from the Nile yesterday at Luxor, under strange circumstances. The hands and feet had been bound, and the remains were horribly mutilated, apparently by the jaws of a large animal such as a crocodile. There are no longer any crocodiles in the Luxor area."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "The news was all over Luxor next morning. We heard of it from Abdullah, who had heard of it from his cousin Mohammed, who had been told of it by his son Raschid, who had spoken with one of the unfortunate boatmen who had found the remains. I did not doubt that the discovery had been unpleasant enough, but by the time it reached us it had been magnified and exaggerated to an astonishing degree.\n\n'A crocodile,' Abdullah insisted. 'Raschid said Sayed said it could have been nothing else.'\n\n'Nonsense, Abdullah. You know there have been no crocodiles in Egypt since... well, not in our lifetimes.'\n\nAbdullah rolled his eyes. 'Let us hope it was a crocodile, Sitt. For if it was not, it was something worse.'\n\n'What could be worse?' I demanded.\n\nAbdullah leaned forward and planted his hands on his knees. 'There are men who believe the old gods are not dead, but only sleeping. Those who violate the tombs of the dead \u2013'\n\n'Some believe that,' I agreed. 'Surely you are not one of them, Abdullah?'\n\n'Not believing is not the same as not knowing, Sitt.'\n\n'Hmm,' I said, after I had worked my way through the string of negatives. 'Well, Abdullah, if it is true that the old gods resent those who enter the tombs we are all in trouble \u2013 you and I and Emerson. So let us hope it is not true.'\n\n'Yes, Sitt. But there is no harm in protecting oneself against that which is not true.' He gestured at the amulets on the chain round my neck, and then reached into the breast of his robe. 'I have brought you another one.'\n\nLike most of the amulets found in Egypt, it was of blue-green faience, and it had been moulded with a loop on the back so that it could be hung on a cord. I didn't doubt it was genuine. Abdullah had his connections. Smiling, I took the trinket from his hand.\n\n'Thank you,' I said. 'But what of Emerson? Have you brought amulets for him too?'\n\n'He would not wear them, Sitt.'\n\n'No. Abdullah, are you sure that is the reason why you gave this to me and not to Emerson? It couldn't be, could it, that you consider me more in need of protection than he?'\n\nAbdullah's face remained grave, but there was a glint in his black eyes that I had learned to recognize. Had he been teasing me the whole time? He was certainly laughing at me now. 'You are not careful, Sitt. You do foolish things.'\n\n'If I do, you and Emerson will watch over me,' I said cheerfully. 'And now I will have Sobek to protect me too.'\n\nI unfastened the chain and added the little figure of the crocodile god to the others.\n\nRamses went to view the body. The rest of us declined the treat, even Emerson, who remarked \u2013 ostentatiously not looking at Ramses \u2013 that he did not need to prove his manhood by inspecting mangled corpses.\n\nEmerson was out of temper with Ramses. I knew why, of course. He blamed the boy for allowing Nefret to accompany him and David on their midnight foray into the Old City. To be sure, Emerson had taken me into areas of Cairo almost as dirty and dangerous, but he still thought of his adopted daughter as a sweet-faced, golden-haired child. She was no longer a child, as a number of young gentlemen could testify, but fathers are absurdly sentimental about their daughters. (I have been informed that some mothers are just as silly about their sons. This has never been a failing of mine.)\n\nI did not hold Ramses accountable for Nefret's behaviour on that occasion. However, when I found that he had let her go with him to examine the corpse, I discovered I was not so broad-minded as I had believed.\n\nThe rest of us were on the verandah taking tea when she and Ramses rode up, and one look at her face told me she had been doing something other than paying calls in Luxor, as she had said she intended. Ramses' face was set like stone, a certain indication of some strong emotion rigidly controlled. Ignoring his attempt to help her dismount, she slipped out of the saddle, tossed the reins to the stableman, and joined us round the tea table.\n\n'Will you have a slice of cake?' I inquired, offering the plate. The cake was especially rich, stuffed with nuts and dates and thickly iced.\n\nNefret swallowed and turned her head away. 'No, thank you.'\n\n'Ah,' I said. 'So you did go with Ramses. Nefret, I strictly forbade you \u2013'\n\n'No, Aunt Amelia, you didn't. No doubt you would have done if you had thought of it, but you didn't.' She gave me a rather strained smile and reached out a hand to pat Emerson's rigid arm. 'Professor darling, stop sputtering. Recall, if you please, that I am the only one of us who has had medical training.'\n\n'She was sick,' said Ramses. Arms folded, he leaned against the wall and fixed a critical look on his sister.\n\n'Not until afterwards! You were a bit green around the mouth yourself.' She snatched up a bit of cake and thrust it at him. 'Here, have a bite.'\n\n'No, thank you,' said Ramses, averting his eyes.\n\n'That bad, was it?' I inquired.\n\n'Yes.' Nefret replaced the sticky morsel on the plate and wiped her fingers on a serviette.\n\n'Yes.' Ramses had gone to the side table. He came back with two glasses of whisky and soda and handed one to Nefret. 'I trust you do not object, Mother. As you have often said, the medicinal effects of good whisky \u2013'\n\n'Quite,' I agreed.\n\nRamses raised his glass in a salute to Nefret before drinking quite a quantity himself. He settled himself in his favourite place on the ledge and remarked, 'She made a closer examination of the wounds than I would have cared to do. They appeared to be consistent with the assumption that has been made.'\n\n'What, a crocodile?' I exclaimed. 'Ramses, you know perfectly well \u2013'\n\n'Peabody.' Emerson had recovered himself. His tone was calm, his face composed \u2013 except for a certain glitter in his blue eyes. 'Does this strike you as suitable conversation for the tea table?'\n\n'Many of our conversations would not be considered suitable for polite society,' I replied. 'If the young people can put themselves through the discomfort of actually viewing the remains, we can do no less than listen to their description. Er \u2013 you might just get me a whisky and soda too, if you will be so good.'\n\n'Bah,' said Emerson. But he complied with my request and filled a glass for himself. David declined the offer. Except for an occasional glass of wine he did not imbibe. At least not in my presence.\n\nStroking Horus, who had settled himself solidly across her lap, Nefret said, 'I won't go into lurid detail, Professor dear. The wounds were consistent with those that might have been made by the large jaws of an animal with long sharp teeth. Since we know that no such animal is to be found in this area, we must conclude that they were made by some man-made tool. I was reminded of the Iron Maiden we saw in the museum in Nuremberg.'\n\n'Good Gad,' I cried. 'Are you suggesting that someone has imported an instrument of mediaeval torture?'\n\n'Stop that, Peabody,' said Emerson, who had forgot his qualms and was listening with intense interest. 'The Iron Maiden, so called because it was the size and shape of a human body, had spikes protruding from the interior of the back and the lid. When the lid was closed the spikes penetrated the victim's body. The same effect could be produced by a less complex mechanism \u2013 long nails driven into a heavy wooden plank, for instance.'\n\n'Exactly,' said Nefret, finishing her whisky. 'The wounds were confined to the head and torso, and I distinctly saw the gleam of metal in one of them. It was, as I suspected, the broken-off point of a spike or nail.'\n\n'You \u2013 you extracted it?' David asked, swallowing.\n\n'Yes. It is evidence, you know.' She touched her shirt pocket. 'I brought it back with me, since no one at the zabtiyeh seemed to want it. There was only one other extraneous object on the body \u2013 a piece of cord deeply embedded in his neck.'\n\n'A strangling cord,' I breathed. 'The devotees of the goddess Kali \u2013'\n\nAn odd sound from Ramses interrupted me. His lips were so tightly compressed they formed a single narrow line.\n\n'The poor fellow wasn't strangled, Aunt Amelia,' Nefret said. 'The fragment was at the back of his neck, not his throat. It seems more likely that he was wearing a crucifix or amulet round his neck, and that someone or something pulled at the cord until it snapped.'\n\n'I suppose you \u2013 er \u2013 extracted that, too,' Emerson said resignedly.\n\n'Yes. The question is, why would anyone go to such elaborate lengths to kill someone?'\n\n'A new murder cult,' I exclaimed. 'Like the cult of Kali in India. A revival, by insane fanatics, of the worship of the crocodile god, Sobek \u2013'\n\n'Kindly control your rampageous imagination, Peabody,' Emerson snarled. 'The metal jaws of some machine, such as \u2013 er \u2013 some machine or other could cause similar wounds. If he was drunk and stumbled into something of the sort \u2013'\n\n'Headfirst?' I inquired with, I believe, pardonable sarcasm. 'And the operator of the machine, not noticing a pair of protruding legs, started it up?'\n\nDavid, gentle soul that he was, turned a shade paler.\n\nSince the hypothesis was obviously absurd, Emerson did not try to defend it. 'A more important question is: Who was the dead man?'\n\n'The face was unrecognizable,' said Ramses. 'However, Ali Yussuf was missing the first two joints of the third finger of his left hand. The extremities had been nibbled at by smaller predators, but only the ends of the fingers and toes were gone, and that particular finger \u2013'\n\nDavid rose precipitately and hurried away.\n\n'I believe I will just have another whisky and soda, Emerson,' I said.\n\nOn the face of it, the news was cursed discouraging. One cannot interrogate a dead man. To look at it another way \u2013 and I am always in favour of looking on the bright side \u2013 Yussuf Mahmud's murder confirmed our theory that another group of villains was involved, villains more interesting than a seller of second-rate antiquities. Emerson could (and did) jeer all he liked at my theories of mysterious and deadly cults, but I remained convinced that Yussuf Mahmud's death had all the hallmarks of ritual murder \u2013 execution, even. In some way he had betrayed the others, and he had paid a hideous price. But in what way had he betrayed them?\n\nThe answer was obvious. Yussuf Mahmud's desperate attempt to retrieve the papyrus \u2013 for only a desperate man would risk invading the house of the Father of Curses \u2013 was his last hope of saving himself from the vengeance of the cult. I did not doubt that the Followers of Sobek (as I termed them) employed valuable antiquities like the papyrus to lure prospective victims into their murderous hands. Not only had Yussuf Mahmud allowed the victims and the valuable to slip through his hands, but he had selected for the slaughter, not a naive tourist, but the members of a family known the length and breadth of Egypt for its success in tracking down evildoers.\n\nYussuf Mahmud could not have known who Ali the Rat was, or he would not have approached him. Someone undoubtedly was cognizant of the fact now, however. I concluded that the children must have betrayed themselves in some manner during the struggle and ensuing flight. Yussuf Mahmud had been given one last chance to compensate for his fatal error. He had failed \u2013 and he had paid the price.\n\nMy solution was the only one possible, but Emerson dismissed it with an emphatic 'Balderdash, Peabody!' and did not even allow me to finish my explanation.\n\nOf course I knew why. Though he would not admit it, Emerson was still obsessed with Sethos. This was patently ridiculous. Sethos would never become involved with anything so crude as a murder cult.\n\nRamses and Nefret had changed rooms, and I knew my son was bitterly disappointed when no further intrusion took place. I was disappointed too, although I had not expected the cult would risk another man. Our interrogations of the antiquities dealers and the men of Gurneh, though time-consuming, were unproductive. No one had seen Yussuf Mahmud; no one admitted to being a member of a murder cult. I had not really expected that anyone would.\n\nThe week between Christmas and New Year's Day continued to be filled with social activities, and we received a number of invitations from what Emerson referred to as 'the dahabeeyah dining society' \u2013 an increasingly inaccurate term, since the majority of the individuals concerned stayed at the hotels, particularly the elegant new Winter Palace. In social terms they were a glittering group, some titled, all wealthy. In intellectual terms they were deadly bores, and I did not object to Emerson's insistence that we refuse most of the invitations. However, I insisted that we behave civilly to archaeological friends and old acquaintances.\n\nAmong the latter I had to include Mr Davis, who had arrived in Luxor on board his dahabeeyah. Emerson might and did despise the man, but he had become a prominent figure in Egyptological circles and he had always been civil to me. His cousin, Mrs Andrews, who always travelled with him, was an amiable individual. (I will not repeat Emerson's rude speculations concerning the relationship between her and Mr Davis.)\n\nIn point of fact, we did not receive an invitation from Mr Davis. He and Mrs Andrews (his cousin, as I kept telling Emerson) were among the most enthusiastic members of the dining society, hobnobbing not only with favoured archaeologists but with any tourist who had the slightest pretension to social status or distinction. Apparently we were not in either category. This fact did not disturb me; it relieved my mind, rather, for Emerson could not be counted upon to behave properly when he was in the company of Mr Davis. It was inevitable that we should meet, however, and when I received an invitation to a particularly elegant affair at the Winter Palace Hotel, hosted by the manager in honour of several members of the British nobility, I did not press Emerson to accompany the rest of us. I knew Davis would be there, because he doted on the nobility.\n\nTo my surprise and annoyance, Emerson volunteered. Not only that, but he got himself into his evening clothes without argument and with a minimum of grumbling. A strong sense of foreboding filled me.\n\nEveryone who was anyone in Luxor had been invited. We were late in arriving, but though the room was crowded with people, our entrance drew all eyes to us. Emerson, of course, looked magnificent. I cannot complain about the appearance of the boys.\n\nIt had proved impossible to remove all the cat hairs from Nefret's skirt, but they did not show too much against the satin-striped ivory chiffon. The soft shade set off the golden tan of her skin \u2013 a little too much of it, in my opinion. Between leaving the house and arriving at the hotel she must have done something to the neckline, for it looked a good deal lower than it had. At least her elbow-length gloves hid the unladylike scab on her forearm.\n\nEmerson headed straight as a bullet for Mr Davis. He was a little man with a large moustache who thought he was tall. (That was another of the reasons why he and Emerson did not get on; it is difficult to think of yourself as tall when Emerson is looming over you.) I managed to pull Emerson away before he could say anything except, 'Hmph. So you're back, are you?'\n\nThe rest of Davis' party was with him: Mrs Andrews, resplendent in jet-beaded black satin; several young ladies who were introduced as her nieces; and an American couple named Smith, who were staying with the Weigalls. Mr Smith was a painter who had spent a number of seasons in Egypt and had copied for Davis and other archaeologists \u2013 a sprightly, convivial man in his mid-forties.\n\nAs soon as she had passed through the receiving line, every young (and not so young) man in the room converged on Nefret, leaving a number of ladies abandoned and forlorn. I saw my ward led on to the dance floor by the gentleman she had accepted, and turned towards Emerson. However, he had wandered off.\n\n'Would you care to dance, Mother?' Ramses asked.\n\n'Hmmm,' I said.\n\n'I will try not to tread on your feet.'\n\nI presumed he was making one of his peculiar jokes. Truth compels me to admit he is a better dancer than his father. No one waltzes more magnificently than Emerson; the only problem is that he insists on waltzing no matter what sort of music is being played.\n\nI gave Ramses my hand, and as he guided me respectfully around the floor, I explained, 'My momentary hesitation was not occasioned by concern for my feet, but by concern about your father. Someone ought to be with him. He is going to start an argument with someone; I know the signs.'\n\n'We are taking him in turn,' Ramses replied. 'David has the first dance.'\n\nGlancing around the room I saw Emerson near the buffet table, talking with M. Naville. David stood next to them. He looked very handsome in his evening clothes, but he also looked, I thought, a trifle apprehensive.\n\n'My dear boy, David cannot possibly stop your father once he gets to ranting,' I said. 'I had better go and \u2013'\n\n'It's my turn next.' The music stopped, and Ramses offered me his arm to lead me from the floor. He was showing off again, and I wondered which of the young ladies present he was trying to impress with his fine manners.\n\nBefore we reached the chairs along the wall we were intercepted. 'May I beg the honour of the next dance, Mrs Emerson?' said Sir Edward Washington, with an elegant bow.\n\nI had not seen him since Christmas Day, but I suspected Nefret had. We circled the floor in silence for a time. Then he said, 'I suppose, Mrs Emerson, that your detectival talents are busy at work on our latest mystery.'\n\n'Which mystery did you have in mind, Sir Edward?' I countered.\n\n'Is there more than one? I was referring to the mangled body pulled from the Nile recently. The murderer cannot have been a crocodile.'\n\n'No,' I admitted.\n\n'I was informed that you allowed Miss Forth to examine the remains.'\n\n'Good heavens, how gossip spreads in this village! I do not allow Miss Forth to do a good many things, Sir Edward. She does them anyhow.'\n\n'A very spirited young lady,' Sir Edward murmured. His eyes moved to Nefret, who was talking with Mr Davis. Both of them appeared to be enjoying themselves immensely, and it seemed to me her neckline had slipped even lower.\n\n'But what of the murder, Mrs Emerson?' Sir Edward resumed. 'You must have a theory.'\n\n'I always have a theory,' I replied. 'But I will not tell you this one, Sir Edward. You would only laugh at me. Emerson has already informed me that it is balderdash.'\n\n'I would never laugh at you, Mrs Emerson. Please.'\n\n'Well...'\n\nNaturally I omitted any reference to those aspects of the case that concerned us personally. 'What the man was doing here in Luxor we will never know,' I concluded.\n\n'Was he not a Luxor man, then?'\n\nCurse it, I thought. The slip had been so slight, only a very astute individual would have caught it. I kept forgetting that Sir Edward was a very astute individual. Fortunately the music stopped and I sought an excuse to end the discussion.\n\n'I can't recall where I got that impression,' I replied evasively. 'No doubt I misinterpreted some bit of gossip. If you will excuse me, Sir Edward, I must head Emerson off before he \u2013'\n\n'One other question, Mrs Emerson, if I may.' I stopped, perforce. He had taken my arm in quite a firm grip preparatory to escorting me to a chair.\n\n'Once again I am seeking employment,' he went on, and his courteous social smile broadened as he saw my look of surprise. 'Not because I am in need of it \u2013 that little inheritance I mentioned has made me financially independent \u2013 but because I want something to occupy me. Mine is not the sort of temperament that enjoys idleness, and I have always been keen on archaeology. I don't suppose your husband is in need of a photographer, or any other sort of assistant?'\n\nI was not taken in by this disingenuous explanation. Sir Edward was about to make his move! He would get no help from me. I explained, with perfect truth, that we had all the staff we needed at present.\n\n'Yes, I understand.' His raised eyebrow and half-smile made it clear that he did understand. 'If he should change his mind, please let me know.'\n\nI had observed Emerson talking with a lady who was unfamiliar to me. His handsome head was bent attentively and his well-cut lips were wreathed in a smile. The lady was elegantly dressed and extravagantly bejewelled. A diamond ornament as big as my hand crowned the coils of her dark hair. It was shaped like a cluster of roses with the flowers and leaves set en tremblant, so that the slightest movement of her head made the roses sway on the thin wires. They sent off sparks of diamond fire as she tilted her head to gaze up at Emerson.\n\n'Ah,' said Emerson. 'Here is my wife now. Peabody, allow me to introduce Mrs Marija Stephenson. We were talking about cats.'\n\n'A fascinating subject,' I said, bowing politely to the lady. She bowed politely to me. Rainbow fire glittered atop her head. A diamond necklace and matching bracelets glittered too, if not as extravagantly. I blinked.\n\n'Quite,' said Emerson. 'She has one. A cat. Its name is Astrolabe.'\n\n'An unusual name.'\n\n'Your husband tells me you favour Egyptian names for your cats,' said Mrs Stephenson. She had a pleasant voice, marred only by an unfortunate American accent.\n\nWe exchanged conventional questions \u2013 'Is this your first visit to Egypt? How long are you planning to stay? Is your husband with you?' \u2013 and conventional answers \u2013 'Yes, I am enjoying it excessively; two weeks longer in Luxor and then back to Cairo; unfortunately he was unable to get away from his business.' I was conscious throughout this exchange of the lady's dark eyes examining my own simple ornaments. The faience and carved stone amulets did not make much of a show compared with that galaxy of diamonds.\n\nAfter introducing Mrs Stephenson to someone else \u2013 for I hope I have better manners than to leave a stranger alone \u2013 I drew Emerson away.\n\n''Pon my word, Peabody, you were cursed inquisitive,' Emerson remarked. 'Did you have one of your famous premonitions about the lady? I thought her very pleasant.'\n\n'So I observed. You haven't asked me to dance, Emerson. They are playing a waltz.'\n\n'Certainly, my dear.' His strong arm caught me to him and swung me on to the floor.\n\nI looked round for Nefret. I had been pleased to note that the boys had rather monopolized her that evening, taking most of her dances and preventing her from stealing out into the gardens unchaperoned. She was now dancing with Ramses, who was demonstrating more panache than he had with me. Her full skirts swung out as he spun her in a sweeping turn, and she smiled up at him.\n\nEmerson was deep in thought, his manly brow furrowed.\n\n'You are uncommonly taciturn, Peabody. Was it the diamonds? I saw you staring at them. You can have all you want, you know. I didn't think you cared for such things.'\n\nHis sensitive perception and generous offer made me feel ashamed of myself. 'Oh, Emerson,' I murmured. 'You are so good to me.'\n\n'Well, I try to be, curse it. But if you won't tell me what you would like, how am I supposed to know?'\n\n'I don't want diamonds, my dear. You have given me everything I want and more.'\n\n'Ah,' said Emerson. 'Shall we go home, Peabody, so that I can give you \u2013'\n\n'That would be very agreeable, Emerson.'\n\nYou may be certain, dear Reader, that Emerson had not allowed us to neglect our professional activities. I have not reported on them in detail because they produced nothing of interest. While the rest of us toiled in the remote corners of the Valley, Ramses and David worked at the Seti I temple copying inscriptions.\n\nThe weather had turned unusually warm, which did not lighten our labours. Under the burning rays of the solar orb the bare rock walls of the Valley absorb heat as a sponge soaks up water \u2013 a commodity, I might add, that is in exceedingly short supply there. We all felt it excepting Emerson, who appears to be impervious to temperatures hot or cold.\n\nI attempted to find little tasks for Abdullah that would keep him from overexertion, but eventually he saw through my schemes and went at it harder than ever, his aristocratic nose pinched with indignation. I kept a close eye on him, therefore, and so was the first to see him fall.\n\nHe sat up when I ran to him and tried to tell me there was nothing wrong, but he could not summon up enough breath to speak. Nefret was at his side almost as soon as I. From her shirt pocket she took an envelope and reached into it.\n\n'Hold his mouth open,' she ordered, in the tone she would have used to a servant. Naturally I obeyed at once. In went her fingers and out they came; she clamped her small brown hands around Abdullah's bearded jaws and brought her face so close to his that their noses were almost touching.\n\nAbdullah stared as if mesmerized into her intent blue orbs. Gradually his breathing slowed and deepened, and Nefret released her grasp and sat back on her heels. Abdullah blinked. Then he looked at me.\n\nI gave him a reassuring nod. 'It is well, Abdullah. Nefret, go and tell the Professor we are stopping work.'\n\nSo she did, and as soon as Emerson learned what had happened he came out of the tomb and lectured Abdullah, which made him sulk, and sent Selim to ask Cyrus for the loan of his carriage, which made Abdullah swear.\n\n'We are finished for the day,' Emerson said, in the voice that brooked no argument. 'Go home and rest, you stubborn old villain.'\n\n'Why not?' Abdullah said tragically. 'I am old and of no use to anyone. It is a sad way to end, sitting in the sun like a toothless infant...'\n\nDaoud took him by the arm. We watched them walk slowly away, Abdullah irritably swatting at Daoud.\n\n'What the devil am I going to do with him?' Emerson demanded. 'He will drop dead in his tracks one day and it will be my fault.'\n\n'Perhaps he would prefer it that way,' Nefret said. 'Wouldn't you?'\n\nEmerson's worried face softened, and he put an affectionate arm around her. 'You are very wise for such a young creature, my dear. What was it you gave him?'\n\n'I knew he would lose or throw away those nitroglycerine tablets I gave him, so I brought a fresh supply. I always carry them with me.'\n\nThe boys had returned to the house by the time we got there, and when Nefret said she wanted to ride to Gurneh and make sure Abdullah was all right, they went with her."
            },
            {
                "title": "From Manuscript H",
                "text": "The house, one of the largest in Gurneh, was midway up the hill, near the tomb of Ramose. Abdullah shared it with his nephew Daoud and Daoud's wife Kadija, a tall, grey-haired woman with dark brown skin and muscles almost as impressive as Daoud's. Nefret claimed she was a very entertaining conversationalist, with a delightful sense of humour, but Ramses had to take her word for it since Kadija never unveiled in his presence or spoke more than a murmured greeting.\n\nThey had to pretend they had dropped in for a social call while exercising the horses. Kadija served them with cups of dark sweet tea and then retired to a corner. After Nefret had watched Abdullah for a while without seeming to, she joined Kadija and a murmured undercurrent of conversation began, broken at intervals by Nefret's musical chuckles.\n\nThey took their leave without the unpleasant subject of Abdullah's health ever being mentioned. Once outside, David said anxiously, 'He looks better, but he is bound to have more of these attacks. What will happen if you aren't there with your medicine?'\n\n'I gave Kadija a supply and told her what to watch out for. She'll make certain he takes it.'\n\n'She has the strength to do it,' Ramses said. 'But has she the will?\n\n'Of course. She is a very intelligent woman. She told me the most amusing story, about...' Nefret laughed. 'Well, perhaps it is not suitable for delicate masculine ears.'\n\nIt was still early, so at David's suggestion they took a stroll through the village \u2013 'revisiting the scenes of my youth,' as he put it with uncharacteristic irony. The house where he had spent so many miserable years as the apprentice of a forger of antiquities had passed into the hands of Abd el Hamed's cousin, who was carrying on the same trade. In theory the workshop turned out copies which were sold as such, but everyone knew that business was only a cover for the production of fakes.\n\n'He's not as good as my late and unlamented master,' David said. 'I've seen some of his fakes in the antiquities shops, and they are so poor only the most gullible tourist would buy them. I'll wager half the great museums of the world have Abd el Hamed's reproductions.'\n\n'You sound as if you regret his death,' Nefret exclaimed. 'After the way he treated you!'\n\n'It's a pity talent and moral worth don't go together,' David said. A shiver passed through his tall frame and he turned abruptly away from the house. 'Abd el Hamed was a sadistic swine, but he was also a genius. And it was through him that I met you. Come, let's go. I've had enough of nostalgia.'\n\nThey had left the horses at the bottom of the slope. As they made their way down the path single file, Ramses fell behind. The rays of the setting sun did remarkable things to Nefret's hair.\n\nSomething dropped on to the path in front of him with a soft plop. Startled out of his dreamy state, he jumped back and then relaxed when he saw it was only a flower \u2013 a hibiscus blossom, velvety-petalled and bright orange red. He heard a soft laugh. The door of the house he was passing had opened. A woman stood there, leaning against the frame. He knew her at once for what she was; her face was unveiled and she wore only a vest and a pair of diaphanous trousers. Such clothing was worn in the privacy of the harem, but no respectable woman would have appeared in public without an enveloping robe.\n\nOver one ear she had pinned a matching blossom; the vivid colour set off her dark hair. It was difficult to judge her age. She had the body of a young woman but there were threads of silver in her hair and a certain tightness around her full lips.\n\nRamses stooped and picked up the flower. It seemed rude not to do so, though he suspected the gesture might have another significance. 'Thank you, Sitt. May you be well.'\n\n'An offering,' she said, in a low, intimate voice. 'Did not the ancients offer flowers to the king?'\n\n'Alas, Sitt, I am no king.'\n\n'But you bear a royal name. It is not for a humble servant like myself to use it; shall I call you \"my lord?\"'\n\nHer eyes were not brown or black but an unusual shade between green and hazel. She had framed them with powdered malachite.\n\nRamses was rather enjoying the banter \u2013 it was a different approach, at least \u2013 but Nefret and David had stopped to wait for him, and he was reasonably certain that Nefret would not wait long. He saluted the woman and started to turn away.\n\n'You are very like your father.'\n\nShe had spoken English. That, and the astonishing statement, roused his curiosity. 'Not many people think so,' he said.\n\nShe struck a match against the doorframe and lit the cigarette she had taken from somewhere in the folds of the voluminous trousers. Her eyes moved slowly from his face to his feet and then back, even more deliberately. 'Your body is not so heavy as his, but it is strong and tall, and you move in the same way, light as a panther. Your eyes and skin are darker; in that you might almost be one of us, young lord! But the shape of your face, and your mouth...'\n\nRamses felt himself blushing \u2013 something he had not done for years. But then no woman had ever talked to him this way, or examined him as a buyer would examine a horse.\n\nOr as some men examined women.\n\nSauce for the gander, as his mother would say. Wry amusement replaced embarrassment, and he cut off the catalogue of his charms with a compliment on her English. Her vocabulary was certainly extensive.\n\n'It is the new way for women,' was the reply. 'We go to school like obedient children, so that one day we will no longer be children but the rulers of men. Have you not heard of it, young lord? Your lady mother knows. Ask her whether women cannot be as dangerous as men when they \u2013'\n\n'Ramses!'\n\nHe started. Nefret's voice held a note that was unpleasantly reminiscent of his mother's. 'I must go,' he said.\n\nHer closed-lipped smile reminded him of one of the statues in the museum \u2013 the painted limestone bust called 'the White Queen.' This woman's skin was not alabaster pale, but a soft deep brown, lustrous as satin. 'You obey when she summons you? You are more like your father than I thought. My name is Layla, young lord. I will be here, waiting, if you come.'\n\nWhen he joined the others, he realized he was still holding the flower. Offering it to Nefret would probably not be a wise move. He did not toss it away until after they were out of the woman's sight.\n\nNefret waited until they had reached the bottom of the hill. She let him lift her into the saddle and then said coolly, 'Wait a moment. Stand still. I want to look at you.'\n\n'Nefret \u2013'\n\n'I suppose you don't do it deliberately. Or do you?'\n\n'Do what?' He knew why she had mounted before she started on him. Her pose and manner were those of a highborn lady addressing a groom, and it cost him something of an effort to throw his shoulders back and meet her eyes squarely.\n\nNefret nodded. 'Yes. It's very interesting. The Professor has it too, in a different sort of way. David doesn't, though you and he look enough alike to be brothers.'\n\nDavid, already in the saddle, said lightly, 'Is that an insult or a compliment, Nefret?'\n\n'I'm not sure.' She turned back to Ramses, who had taken advantage of her momentary distraction to mount Risha. He knew she wasn't going to let him off so easily, though.\n\n'Who is she?'\n\n'She said her name is Layla. That's all I know.'\n\n'Layla!' David exclaimed. 'I thought she looked familiar. I haven't seen her for five years or more.'\n\n'You knew her, David?' Nefret asked in surprise.\n\n'Not \u2013 not to say know. Not in that way.'\n\n'I don't suppose you could have afforded her,' Nefret conceded.\n\nDavid let out a sputter of laughter. 'Really, Nefret, you ought not to say such things.'\n\n'It's true, though, isn't it?'\n\n'Oh, quite.' They had left the village behind and were riding side by side at an easy walk. David went on, 'Don't you remember her? She was the third wife of Abd el Hamed, my former employer. Hers was rather a remarkable career. They say she started out in the House of the Doves in Luxor \u2013'\n\n'The house of what?' Nefret exclaimed.\n\n'One must assume the name is either euphemistic or ironic,' Ramses murmured. 'I wouldn't care to say which. Would you prefer to drop the subject? Mother would certainly disapprove of our discussing it.'\n\n'Go on,' Nefret said grimly.\n\n'You understand, I am only repeating what I overheard when I was living in Gurneh,' David insisted. 'The place is the best \u2013 uh \u2013 place in Luxor, which isn't saying a great deal. The girls are reasonably well paid, and some of them marry after they \u2013 um \u2013 after a certain time. Layla was one of these. With her help, her husband began dealing in antiquities and stolen goods, and acquired a small fortune. Then he died \u2013 rather suddenly, it was said \u2013 which left Layla a wealthy widow. Later she married that old swine Abd el Hamed, I never understood why. She refused to live in his house, so perhaps you never met her.'\n\n'She had met Father,' Ramses said thoughtfully. 'She commented on the resemblance between us.'\n\nNefret gave him an enigmatic look, but before she could comment, David said in a shocked voice, 'Everyone in Egypt knows the Father of Curses, Ramses. He would never have had anything to do with a \u2013 with a woman like that.'\n\n'No,' Nefret said. 'No decent man would.' She must have seen them exchange glances, for she went on in a voice shaking with indignation. 'Oh, yes, I know some eminently respectable \"gentlemen\" go to prostitutes. At least they call themselves gentlemen! Their gentlemen's laws forbid women to earn a decent living at a respectable profession, and when the poor creatures are forced into a life of disease and poverty and degradation the pious hypocrites visit them and then punish the women for immorality!'\n\nHer eyes swam with tears. David reached out and patted her hand. 'I know, Nefret. I'm sorry. Don't cry.'\n\n'You can't reform the world overnight, Nefret. Don't break your heart about things you can't help.' Ramses knew his voice sounded hard and uncaring, but it tore him apart to see her cry when he couldn't comfort her as he ached to do. If he ever dared hold her close he would give himself away.\n\nAnyhow, he thought, dragging a girl out of her saddle and dumping her on to his would probably be more painful than romantic.\n\nShe wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and gave him a watery but defiant smile. 'I can help. And I will one day, just wait and see.'\n\nSeeing her chin jut out and her mouth set tightly, Ramses understood what his mother meant when she talked about forebodings and premonitions. He was in complete sympathy with Nefret's sentiments, but she had a dangerous habit of rushing in where angels feared to tread, and this particular cause could lead her into real trouble. Somehow, God only knew how, he would have to keep her away from the House of the Doves \u2013 and Layla. Two of Layla's husbands had died suddenly and violently. If he'd ever seen a woman who did not need help and sympathy, it was that one.\n\nWe were dining with Cyrus and Katherine one evening that same week when a casual remark of the latter reminded me of a promise I had not kept. Katherine had asked when we expected the younger Emersons and Lia, and Cyrus had offered to put them up at the Castle. He was a sociable individual and enjoyed company, but though his residence was far more commodious and elegant than our humble abode, I declined the invitation with proper expressions of appreciation.\n\n'They are due to arrive in Alexandria on Monday next, but I don't know how long they will remain in Cairo before coming on.'\n\n'Not long, I expect,' Katherine said. 'They will be anxious to be with you. We hope to see a great deal of them. I believe you mentioned that little Miss Emerson is determined to go to university next autumn. If she wants to keep up her studies this winter, remember that I am a former governess and teacher.'\n\n'Good gracious,' I exclaimed. 'That reminds me \u2013 Fatima! We promised we would find a teacher for her. She is so timid she would not venture to ask again.'\n\n'She has more enterprise than you suppose, Aunt Amelia,' Nefret replied. 'She has already made her own arrangements. It seems there is a lady in Luxor who holds private classes.'\n\nThe reference was of course lost on Katherine, who requested elucidation. She responded to my explanation with the sympathetic enthusiasm I had come to expect of her.\n\n'To think of that humble little woman harbouring such aspirations! She makes me feel thoroughly ashamed of myself. I ought to be conducting such classes myself.'\n\n'Why not start a school?' Cyrus suggested. 'Find a suitable building and hire teachers.'\n\n'Do you mean it?' Her face lit up. Katherine had always reminded me of a pleasant tabby cat, with her grey-streaked hair and rounded cheeks and green eyes. One would never have called her beautiful, but when she looked at her husband as she was looking now, she appeared quite beautiful to my eyes \u2013 and, it was clear, to his. 'Do you mean it, Cyrus? In addition to reading and writing, we could instruct the girls in household management and child care, train those who show ability in a particular area such as typewriting and \u2013'\n\nCyrus burst out laughing. 'And provide college scholarships for the lot! My dear, you may start a dozen schools if it will make you happy.'\n\nAfter dinner we retired to the drawing room, where we were affectionately greeted by the Vandergelts' cat, Sekhmet. She had belonged to us originally; we had brought her to Egypt in the hope that she would compensate Ramses for the loss of his longtime companion, the cat Bastet. He had not taken to Sekhmet, referring to her contemptuously as 'the furry slug.' It is true that Sekhmet was so fatuously and indiscriminately affectionate she did not care whose lap she occupied, but this very trait had endeared her to Cyrus. She now lived like a princess in 'the Castle,' fed on cream and filleted fish by the majordomo when the Vandergelts were in America, and never leaving the walled borders of the estate \u2013 for Cyrus would not allow her to mingle with common cats.\n\nShe settled down on David's knee, purring hysterically, and Nefret went to the pianoforte. Cyrus took me aside.\n\n'Thank you, Amelia, my dear,' he said warmly. 'You have given Katherine a new interest. She was moping a bit before you arrived; missed the kiddies, you know.'\n\n'And so did you, I daresay.'\n\nKatherine's children by her first, unhappy marriage were at school in England. I had not met them, since they spent their holidays in America with their mother and stepfather; but Cyrus, who had always wanted a family of his own, had taken them to his generous heart. He sighed wistfully.\n\n'Yes, my dear, I did. I wish you could persuade Katherine to let them come out with us next season. I've offered to hire tutors, teachers, anything she wants.'\n\n'I will talk to her, Cyrus. It strikes me as an excellent idea. There is no climate so salubrious as that of Luxor in winter, and the experience would be extremely educational.'\n\nHe took my hand and pressed it warmly. 'You are the best friend in the world, Amelia, We could not get on without you. You will \u2013 you will take care of yourself, won't you?'\n\n'I always do,' I said, laughing. 'And so does my dear Emerson. What makes you say that, Cyrus?'\n\n'Well, I just sort of figured you were up to something, since you always are. The quieter things look, the more I expect an explosion. You wouldn't refuse me the chance to help, would you?'\n\n'Dear Cyrus, you are the truest of friends. At the moment, however, I am not up to anything. I only wish \u2013'\n\nBut at that moment Emerson called my name, ostensibly to request that we come join in the singing. Emerson had quite got over his jealousy of Cyrus, but he does not appreciate having other men hold my hand for quite so long or quite so warmly.\n\nI am extremely fond of music, but it was the genial company rather than the quality of the performances that made our little impromptu concerts so enjoyable. Emerson cannot carry a tune at all, but he sings very loud and with great feeling. His rendering of 'The Last Chord' was one of his best. (A good deal of the melody is on the same note, which was all to the good.) We did a few of the jollier choruses of Gilbert and Sullivan, and Nefret badgered Ramses into joining her in a song from the new Victor Herbert operetta. Cyrus always brought the latest American music out with him, and none of us had heard this one.\n\n'It's a duet,' Nefret pointed out. 'I can't sing two parts simultaneously, and you're the only other one who can sight-read.'\n\nRamses had been reading the words over her shoulder. 'The lyrics are even more banal and sentimental than usual,' he grumbled. 'I won't be able to keep a straight face.'\n\nNefret chuckled. 'What's wrong with golden hair and eyes of blue? It's hard to find words that rhyme with \"brown.\" You come in on the chorus: \"Not that you are fair, dear...\"'\n\nI must confess they sounded very well together, even though Ramses could not resist breaking into a tremulous falsetto on the last high note.\n\nAfter the impromptu concert had concluded with Cyrus' rendition of his favourite 'Kathleen Mavourneen' \u2013 making calf's eyes at his wife the whole time, as Emerson inelegantly expressed it \u2013 we went out to the courtyard to wait for the carriage. The night was beautifully cool and the stars blazed as bright as Mrs Stephenson's diamonds. Katherine, all afire with her new scheme, suggested we go to Luxor next day to call on Fatima's teacher.\n\n'Impossible,' said Emerson.\n\n'Why?' I demanded. 'You can certainly spare me for a few hours. That nasty number Fifty-three \u2013'\n\n'We are not going to work at Fifty-three. I have a little surprise for you, Peabody. Great news! Tomorrow we start on tomb Five!'\n\n'How exciting,' I said hollowly. There could be nothing of interest in that rubble-filled tomb, and the labour involved would be monstrous.\n\n'How'd you manage that?' Cyrus asked. There was a note of envy in his voice. He missed the Valley where he had excavated for so many years without success, but with great enjoyment.\n\n'Tact,' said my husband smugly. 'I simply pointed out to Weigall that nobody else would ever bother with the confounded place, especially Davis, who is such an egotistical ignoramus \u2013'\n\n'You didn't say that!' I exclaimed, as a ripple of laughter ran through the group.\n\n'What difference does it make what I said? Weigall has agreed, and he is the man in charge.'\n\n'It was very kind of him to overlook your knocking him down the other day.'\n\n'I did it for his own good,' said Emerson hypocritically. 'Never mind that. We are going to need more men than we have been using with the smaller tombs. I will need Nefret and David as well, for I mean to take quantities of photographs.'\n\nEmerson sent us all off to bed after we got home, since he meant to make an early start next day. After I had brushed and braided my hair I put on my dressing gown and slipped out of the room, leaving him bent over his notes.\n\nNefret responded at once to my soft tap on the door. She was alone except for the cat, who occupied the precise centre of her bed. 'Is something wrong, Aunt Amelia?' she asked.\n\n'Nothing. I am only a little curious. Was it you who persuaded Mr Weigall to give in to Emerson's request? I do hope, my dear, that you did not resort to underhanded means. Mr Weigall is a married man, and \u2013'\n\n'Quite devoted to his Hortense,' said Nefret, trying not to smile. 'I never flirt with married men, Aunt Amelia. I am shocked that you should suggest such a thing.'\n\n'Ah,' I said. 'Mr Davis is not a married man, is he? And Mr Weigall does whatever Mr Davis tells him to do. I noticed the other evening \u2013'\n\nNefret burst out laughing. 'So did Ramses. He accused me of flirting with Mr Davis. Mr Davis is quite harmless, Aunt Amelia, but like many older men he is particularly susceptible to flattery and compliments. I did it for the Professor.'\n\n'Hmmm. Do you have an idea as to why he is so set on working in that part of the Valley?'\n\n'An idea did occur to me. It must have occurred to you as well.'\n\n'Yes.' I sighed. 'We must hope Mr Ayrton does not come across any interesting tombs this season.'\n\nI refer the Reader to my plan of the Valley and invite him to note the relative areas of tomb Five and the area in which Mr Ayrton was working. If there were unknown tombs in the Valley of the Kings, such areas were precisely where one might expect to find them. And if Ned did find such a tomb, Emerson would be there, watching every move he made and criticizing everything he did.\n\nI expected trouble and I was (of course) right. But not even I could have anticipated the magnitude of the disaster that actually occurred."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE GATES OF THE UNDERWORLD",
                "text": "\u2003O great apes who sit before\n\n\u2003the doors of heaven;\n\n\u2003take the evil from me, obliterate my sins,\n\n\u2003guard me, so that I may pass between\n\n\u2003the Pylons of the West."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "The approach to the Valley had changed a great deal since our first days in Egypt. A rough but serviceable road led through the forbidding cliffs and a wooden barrier now barred the entrance to those who lacked the requisite tickets. Our horses were among the first occupants of the donkey park, for the sun had not yet risen over the eastern hills when our caravan left the house. We had taken this longer but less arduous route, instead of the footpath that led over the hill from Deir el Bahri, because tomb Five lay near the entrance, just outside the barrier.\n\nRamses and David were not with us. I had, quite by accident, happened to overhear part of a conversation between them that morning. They were in Ramses' room; the door was slightly ajar and both their voices were rather loud, so inadvertent eavesdropping was unavoidable.\n\nThe first words I heard were David's. 'I am going with you.'\n\n'You can't. Father has asked \u2013 excuse me, demanded \u2013 your help today.'\n\n'He will change his mind if we ask him. You promised you would not \u2013'\n\nRamses cut him off. 'Don't be an old granny. Do you think I can't take care of myself?'\n\nI had never heard him speak so brusquely to David, or sound so angry. Intervention was obviously in order. I tapped lightly at the door before pushing it open.\n\nThey were both on their feet, facing one another in attitudes that could only be described as potentially combative. David's fists were clenched. Ramses appeared unmoved, but there was a set to his shoulders I did not like.\n\n'Now, boys, what is this?' I asked. 'Are you quarrelling?'\n\nRamses turned away and reached for his knapsack. 'Good morning, Mother. A slight difference of opinion, that is all. I will see you this afternoon.'\n\nHe slipped neatly out of the room before I could inquire further, so I turned to David, who was not as quick or as rude as my son. When I questioned him, as I felt obliged to do, he insisted that he and Ramses had not been quarrelling, and that nothing had happened to give him cause for concern.\n\nExcept for Ramses' ungovernable habit of getting himself in trouble, I thought. A stentorian shout from Emerson summoned us to our duty, so I allowed David to depart and followed him into the sitting room in time to overhear another loud exchange. This time it was between Ramses and Nefret, and I must admit that she was doing all the shouting. She broke off when I entered, and I said in exasperation, 'What is wrong with you three? It must be Ramses who is responsible for all the arguing, since \u2013'\n\n'We were not arguing, Aunt Amelia.' Nefret's face had turned a charming shade of rosy brown. 'I was just reminding Ramses of a certain promise he made me.'\n\nRamses nodded. He was wearing what Nefret calls his stone pharaoh face, but his high cheekbones were a trifle darker than usual \u2013 with pure temper, I supposed. 'If you are coming with me, David, let us go.'\n\nHe strode out without waiting for a reply. David and Nefret exchanged one of those meaningful glances, and David hurried out. I decided not to pursue the subject. Even the best of friends have little differences of opinion from time to time, and I would have enough on my mind trying to keep Emerson from harassing poor Ned Ayrton \u2013 for I felt certain that was what he intended to do.\n\nThe young man arrived with his crew shortly after us. He had to pass us in order to reach the area where he had begun work the day before, on the west face of the cliff along the tourist path. As I had expected \u2013 and hoped \u2013 Davis was not with him. The American was not interested in the tedious labour of clearance; he only turned up when his 'tame archaeologist' sent to tell him something interesting had been found.\n\nNed's innocent countenance brightened with surprise and pleasure when he saw Emerson, who had been lying in wait for him.\n\n'Why, Professor \u2013 and Mrs Emerson, good morning to you, ma'am \u2013 I thought you were working at the other end of the Valley. Tomb Five, is it?'\n\n'As you see.' Emerson moved out of the way of a man carrying a basket of rock chippings. 'Weigall kindly gave me permission to investigate it.'\n\n'I don't envy you the job, sir. The fill is packed as hard as cement.'\n\n'As it was in the tomb of Siptah,' said Emerson, 'which you never finished clearing. Left the job half-done. Well, young man, let me tell you \u2013'\n\n'Emerson!' I exclaimed.\n\nNed flushed painfully, and Nefret turned from the camera she was inspecting. 'Don't scold Mr Ayrton, Professor, you know the decision was not his. How are you getting on, Mr Ayrton? Any sign of a tomb?'\n\nThe young man gave her a grateful look. 'Not yet, Miss Forth, but we have only been at it for two days. There is quite a large accumulation of limestone chips along the face of the cliff, probably from another tomb \u2013'\n\n'Ramses VI,' said Emerson.\n\n'Er \u2013 yes, sir. Well, I must be off.'\n\nThe area in which he was working was only a few hundred feet south of us, on the same side of the path, but a shallow spur of rock cut off our view. As the sun rose higher and the first influx of tourists streamed through the barrier, their foolish laughter and babble drowned out the voices of Ned's crew, to the visible annoyance of Emerson, whose ears were practically standing out from his head. (I speak figuratively; Emerson has particularly handsome ears, somewhat large but well-shaped and lying flat against his skull.) He knew, as did I, that a new discovery might be heralded by cries of excitement from the workmen.\n\nThere was really nothing for me to do, since several tons of rock had to be removed before the entrance could be fully exposed. Howard had told us he had done some clearing in 1902, but all evidence of his work had been filled in since by rockfalls and debris. I had leisure therefore to indulge in my favourite occupation of watching my husband. Booted feet wide apart, bare black head shining in the sunlight like a raven's wing, he directed the work with cries of encouragement or advice. My attention being on him, I observed him sidle away and called to ask where he was going.\n\n'I thought I would ask Ayrton to join us for our mid-morning tea,' said Emerson.\n\n'What a kind thought,' I said.\n\nThere may have been just the slightest edge of sarcasm in my voice. Emerson shot me a reproachful look and went on his way. I decided I had better go after him. Not that I was at all curious about what Ned was doing, but I knew Emerson would not proffer the invitation until after he had inspected the excavation and lectured at length on methodology.\n\nThe task the young fellow had undertaken was indeed formidable. The Valley, as I have explained, but will repeat for the benefit of Readers unfamiliar with it, is not a single flat-floored canyon but a complex of smaller wadis running off at all angles from the main path. The paths wind round outcroppings of stone, some natural, some formed by the stone removed from nearby tombs. One such rocky mound formed the western face of the central path, and against it lay a pile almost fifty feet high of limestone chips. It is under such piles of man-made debris that excavators hope to find forgotten tomb entrances.\n\nThe sun, now near the zenith, reflected off the pale rock in a blinding dazzle, unrelieved by vegetation or shadow. The fine dust stirred up by tourist boots resembled pale fog. As I approached the site, the cloud rose into a towering cumulus cloud. Ned's men were hard at work piling the loose rock into baskets and carrying them away to a dump site nearby.\n\nHe had dug a trench straight down the rock face, obviously without result, since he was now in the process of extending it. As I had anticipated, Emerson was giving the young man the benefit of his advice. I put an end to that, and removed both of them. The sweating workers were glad to stop for a while.\n\nI make it a habit to set up a little shelter near our place of work with a rug on the ground and a small folding table, for I see nothing wrong with comfort if it does not interfere with efficiency. On this occasion I had taken advantage of a nearby tomb entrance, that of Ramses II. Choked with rubble and dismissed by Baedeker, it was not approached by tourists, so we could count on a modicum of privacy while we rested and refreshed ourselves.\n\nNed was visibly disappointed to find that Ramses was not with us, but he appeared to enjoy the brief interlude. Emerson behaved himself very well, but when Ned rose to leave, my spouse could not resist a final shot.\n\n'If you find a tomb, Ayrton, do me the favour of clearing the cursed place out completely. I am tired of tidying up after you and the others.'\n\nThere is a saying: 'Take care what you wish, for it may be given unto you.' Emerson got his wish, and he did not like it at all. In later years he was to refer to the business as 'one of the greatest disasters in Egyptological history.'\n\nIt began that same afternoon, when Ned's perspiring workers came upon a niche containing several large storage jars. The discovery was not in itself exciting enough to warrant a shout of triumph from the men who found it; we did not learn of it until Ned came by with his crew on their way home.\n\n'Stopping already?' asked Emerson, advancing to meet them.\n\n'Yes, sir.' Ned removed his hat and pushed the damp hair back from his brow. 'It is very warm, and I have \u2013'\n\n'Any luck?'\n\nSo the news was told. 'They are nothing to be excited about,' Ned added. 'Plain storage jars \u2013 Twentieth Dynasty, I believe. Well, then, I look forward to seeing you all tomorrow.'\n\nEmerson did not even have the decency to wait until he was out of sight. I followed my irritating husband around the rock spur and found him climbing up the rubble. The opening was a good thirty feet above bedrock and when I would have followed he waved me back.\n\nUpon returning he remarked, 'Eighteenth Dynasty.'\n\n'Why are you making such a fuss about it?' I demanded. 'One is always coming across isolated finds of that sort. Rough storage jars cannot contain anything of interest.'\n\n'Hmph,' said Emerson. He turned and looked up the slope.\n\n'Now, Emerson, leave them alone! They are not your jars. I suggest we follow Ned's example and stop work. It is very warm, and I don't want Abdullah having another attack.'\n\nEmerson swore a great deal, but he has the kindest heart in the world and I knew the appeal would have its effect. It was late in the afternoon before we reached the house. The vine-shaded verandah looked very pleasant after our long hot ride. Horus, stretched out on the settee, examined us with a critical eye and began washing himself.\n\nIt seemed an excellent idea. I had a luxurious soak in my nice tin bath and changed into comfortable garments. When I returned to the verandah Fatima had brought tea. Nefret was pacing up and down, looking out.\n\n'They are late,' she said.\n\n'Who? Oh, Ramses and David. Not really. Ramses has no notion of time, he will go on working until it gets too dark for him to see anything. Come and have your tea.'\n\nShe obeyed, but even the bulk of Horus, who promptly spread himself across her lap, did not prevent her from fidgeting. I remembered the exchanges I had heard between the three that morning, and an unpleasant suspicion began to form in my mind. Since I do not allow such things to fester, I brought it out into the open.\n\n'Nefret, are you concealing something from me? You are uncommonly edgy this evening; were the boys planning some expedition that is likely to lead them into danger?'\n\nEmerson banged his cup into the saucer. 'Curse it!' he exclaimed, but did not elaborate since Nefret spoke first.\n\n'So far as I know, they are working at the Seti temple just as they said they would.'\n\n'Oh.' Emerson's rigid form relaxed. 'I do wish, Peabody, you would stop looking for trouble. No one has bothered us since that wretched man's body was found. He was the instigator of the other attacks; now that he has been \u2013 er \u2013 removed, we have nothing to fear.'\n\nI settled back to enjoy myself, for our little detectival discussions are always stimulating. 'You are of the opinion that there is no connection between those attacks and the one against me in London?'\n\n'That was Sethos,' Emerson said. 'He is still in England. I made the rounds of the cafes and coffee shops, as did Ramses. We found no indication that he has returned to his old haunts.'\n\n'Sethos may not have been responsible for the original encounter, Emerson. I have other enemies.'\n\n'You needn't brag about it, Peabody.' Emerson reached for his broken cup, cut his finger, swore, and went to the table. Splashing soda into a glass, he said over his shoulder, 'And don't try to exonerate that bas \u2013 that man. We know it was he. The typewriter, Peabody. Remember the typewriter.'\n\n'I don't believe for a moment in Ramses' egotistical deductions,' I replied, taking the glass Emerson handed me and nodding my thanks. 'It is impossible to tell one machine from another, and furthermore, the incident in Fleet Street lacked Sethos' characteristic touch. He is not so crude or so... My dear Nefret, what are you staring at? Close your mouth, my dear, before an insect flies in!'\n\n'I \u2013 uh \u2013 I had just remembered something, Aunt Amelia. A \u2013 a letter I promised to write.'\n\n'I hope Sir Edward is not your correspondent, Nefret. I do not approve. He is too old for you, and you have seen entirely too much of him lately.'\n\n'Only half a dozen times since Christmas Day,' Nefret protested. 'And once was at the party, with a hundred people present.'\n\nEmerson got to his feet. 'If you are going to gossip I will leave you to it. Call me when dinner is ready.'\n\nThe eastern cliffs shone in the last rays of the setting sun. There is no colour anywhere on earth like that one, nor can words describe it \u2013 pale pinky gold with a wash of lavender, glowing as if lit from within. The lovely dying light lay gently on Nefret's sun-kissed cheeks, but her eyes avoided mine and she cleared her throat nervously before she spoke.\n\n'May I ask you something, Aunt Amelia?'\n\n'Why, certainly, my dear. Is it about Sir Edward? I am glad you want to consult me. I have had a good deal more experience in these matters than you.'\n\n'It is not about Sir Edward. Not exactly. Speaking of experience in such matters \u2013 er \u2013 you seem to believe he \u2013 Sethos \u2013 is sufficiently \u2013 uh \u2013 attached to you that he would not... Oh dear. I didn't mean to offend you, Aunt Amelia.'\n\n'You have not offended me, my dear, but if I understand what you are driving at, and I believe I do, the subject is not one I care to discuss.'\n\n'It is not idle curiosity that prompts me to introduce it.'\n\n'No?'\n\nNefret's slender throat contracted as she swallowed.\n\n'Enough of that,' I said in a kindly manner. 'Goodness, how dark it has become, and the boys not back. I wonder if they decided to spend the night on the dahabeeyah.'\n\n'They would have told me if they had,' Nefret said. 'Damnation! I knew I ought to have gone with them!'"
            },
            {
                "title": "From Manuscript H",
                "text": "The mummy wrappings fitted close around his body, muffling his mouth, blinding his eyes, binding his arms and legs. They had buried him alive, like the miserable man whose mummy his parents had discovered at Drah Abu'l Naga. Someday another archaeologist would find him, his body brown and shrivelled, his mouth open in a silent scream of terror, and...\n\nHe came awake in a desperate spasm that tore at every muscle in his body. It was still dark and he was as incapable of movement as any mummy, but the cloth covered only his mouth. He could breathe. Concentrating on that essential activity, he forced himself to lie still while he drew air in through his nostrils and tried to remember what had happened.\n\nThey had been copying the reliefs in one of the side chambers off the hypostyle hall and were about to stop for the day when they heard the thin, high wailing. It was impossible to tell whether it came from a human or another kind of animal, but the creature was obviously young and obviously in distress. Scrambling over fallen blocks and along shadowy aisles, they followed the pitiful, intermittent cries back into the sanctuary, where shadows lay like pools of dark water... Then nothing. His head ached, but so did every other part of his body. How long had he been unconscious? It must be night now; if the sun were still shining he ought to see streaks of light from windows or door, even if they were shuttered.\n\nWith considerable effort he rolled over on to his side. No wonder he had dreamed of mummy wrappings; they had been extravagant with the rope. His hands were tied behind him and his arms were bound to his sides; the other end of the rope round his ankles must be fastened to some object he couldn't see, since he was unable to move his legs more than a few inches in any direction. Flattering, in a way, he supposed. His father's reputation must have rubbed off on to him. Not even the mighty Father of Curses could burst these bonds. There was nothing for it but to wait until someone came. He didn't doubt that someone would eventually. They hadn't gone to all this trouble in order to leave him to die of hunger and exhaustion.\n\nBut the idea brought him dangerously close to panicking, and he forced himself to lie still and breathe steadily. The gag rasped his lips. There was no saliva left on it or in his mouth, which felt as if it were filled with sand.\n\nThe air was close and hot and the smell... Every culture has its own distinctive collections of odours, varying with social class and personal idiosyncrasies, but easily distinguished by someone who has made a study of them. Cooking odours were particularly distinctive. Even with his eyes closed he could tell whether he was in an English manor house or a cottage kitchen, an Egyptian coffee-house or a German bierstube. This room wasn't a kitchen, but it was a room, not a cave or a storage shed. It held the indefinable but unmistakable smell of Egypt, but at one time it had been occupied by someone with European taste \u2013 expensive taste, at that. He couldn't name the perfume, but he had encountered it before.\n\nThe surface on which he lay was softer than a floor, even one covered by a rug or matting. It gave slightly when he moved and made a faint rustling sound. A bed, then, or at least some kind of mattress.\n\nHe lay quiet and held his breath, listening. There were other sounds, some faint and far off and undistinguishable, some small and near at hand. A mouse, reassured by his stillness, ventured out on little clawed feet and began to gnaw on something. Insects whined and buzzed. The sound he had half-hoped, half-feared to hear, that of another pair of straining human lungs, was not audible. Had they carried David off too, or had they left him dead or wounded on the floor of the temple?\n\nSince there was nothing else he could do, he willed himself to sleep. He hadn't supposed the meditation techniques taught him by the old fakir in Cairo would work under these conditions; but his eyelids were drooping when a new sound brought him to full wakefulness. There was a line of light in front of him, lower down, at what must be floor level. It widened into a rectangle.\n\nShe slipped quickly into the room and closed the door. The lamp she carried was dim and flickering, just a strip of rag floating in oil, but after the darkness it half blinded him. She put the lamp on a table and sat down on the bed next to him. She wore red roses in her hair this time, and silver shone at her wrists.\n\n'I brought you water,' she said softly. 'But you must give me your word you will not call out if I remove the gag. You would not be heard outside these walls, but I would be punished if they knew I had come here.'\n\nShe waited for his nod before she slit the cloth with a knife she took from her sash. The relief was enormous, but his throat was so dry he could not speak until after she had raised his head and dribbled water from a clay cup between his lips.\n\n'Thank you,' he gasped.\n\n'Always the proper English manners!' Her full mouth curved in a sardonic smile. She held the cup to his lips again and then lowered his head on to the mattress.\n\n'You can't replace the gag now that you've cut it,' he said softly. 'Will they blame you? I don't want \u2013'\n\nHer ringed hand left a smarting path across his face. He shook his head dizzily.\n\n'Sorry. Was I talking too...'\n\n'Don't do that!' She bent over him and imprisoned his face between her hands. It was not a caress; her fingertips dug into his aching temples. 'Don't care about me. Why were you fool enough to let them catch you? I tried to warn you.'\n\n'You did?'\n\nShe let go of his head and raised her hand. He braced himself for another slap. Instead she ran the tip of one finger slowly across his lips. 'Do you know what brought me here?' she asked.\n\nSeveral possibilities occurred to him, but it would not have been politic to mention any of them. He said, choosing his words with care, 'The tenderness of your heart, lady.'\n\nShe let out a little sound that might have been a muffled laugh 'That reason will serve as well as another.'\n\nShe reached for the knife and freed him in a series of quick slashes. With equal deftness she unlaced his boots and drew them off. Numb with long confinement \u2013 and sheer astonishment \u2013 he let her rub his hands and feet until they began to tingle with returning circulation.\n\n'Wait in the doorway,' she said. 'When you hear me call out \"Beloved,\" count to ten, then go straight down the stairs. There are two men; you will have to deal with one of them. I think you will have no difficulty. After you have done so, go straight out the door. Do not stop, do not turn back.'\n\n'My friend,' Ramses said. 'Is he here?'\n\nShe hesitated for a moment and then nodded. 'Don't waste time searching for him, it would be too dangerous. Go and bring help.'\n\n'But you \u2013'\n\n'I will be gone when you come back. Inshallah.' She added, with a faint smile, 'You owe me a debt, young lord. When I call on you to make it good, will you come?'\n\n'Yes.'\n\nHer mouth found his. He met it with an appreciation that was not entirely due to gratitude, but when his arm went round her shoulders she twisted away and stood up.\n\n'Another time,' she said. 'Inshallah. Come now.'\n\nShe blew out the lamp and eased the door open. Silent on stockinged feet, he followed. By the time he reached the door she had gone ahead, along a corridor lit only by a glow from below. The house was of good size; there were three other closed doors and a lower floor. He waited until she had started down the stairs before he tried the other doors. None were locked. None of the rooms were occupied. A narrow flight of stairs, hardly more than a ladder, led to an opening through which he saw the glow of starlight. No need to look there, the ladder must go to the open roof.\n\nThe signal came sooner than he had expected. Abandoning caution, he ran for the stairs. He had known what she meant to do. All part of the day's work for her, perhaps, but he couldn't let her do it \u2013 not for him.\n\nThey were in the room opposite the foot of the stairs. The second man had his ear pressed to the flimsy panel of the door \u2013 waiting his turn, as he erroneously believed. He was too absorbed to hear the rush of unshod feet until it was too late. Straightening, he reached for the knife at his belt and opened his mouth to shout a warning. Ramses closed it for him and he fell back against the door, bursting it open. Ramses elbowed the inert body out of his way and went in.\n\nHe hadn't realized how angry he was until after the other man lay sprawled on the floor at his feet. Rubbing his bruised hands, he watched Layla rearrange her clothing and sit up.\n\n'Fool,' she snapped. 'Why don't you go?'\n\n'You first. They'll know it was you who freed me.'\n\nShe swore at him. He laughed aloud, giddy with the dangerous euphoria that follows a winning fight, and as she darted towards the door he swung her into his arms and kissed her.\n\n'Fool,' she whispered against his lips. 'You must hurry! They are coming soon, to move you to another place. If you knew what they plan for you, you would not linger.'\n\n'Where is he?'\n\n'I will show you, but don't think I will stay to help you. The fate meted out to traitors is one I would not face.'\n\nThe man near the door was stirring. There wasn't time to tie him up. Ramses turned him over and hit him again.\n\nLayla had gone up the stairs. She was back immediately, wearing a dark cloak and carrying a loosely tied bundle. She must have got her things together in anticipation of flight before she freed him. A woman of many talents, Ramses thought.\n\nGesturing him to follow, she ran towards the back of the house and unbolted a door that led into a walled courtyard.\n\n'He is there,' she said, indicating a shed against the far wall. 'Ma'as salama, my lord. Do not cheat me of my payment.'\n\nMoonlight framed her for a moment and then she was gone, leaving the gate through which she had fled ajar. Ramses headed for the shed, trying to avoid the squashier debris that litters Egyptian courtyards. Pebbles pressed into the soles of his feet. The euphoria was passing and he was beginning to wonder if he had made the right decision. He had been lucky so far, but the long hours of confinement had taken their toll, and that last blow had been a mistake. He'd been too drunk with imbecile heroism to feel it at the time, but his right hand ached like a sore tooth, and he couldn't bend the fingers. If the door of the shed was locked he would have to go for help before the guards woke up and came looking for him.\n\nThe door had not been locked or barred. As soon as it opened he knew why.\n\nThey hadn't handled David as considerately as they had him. They must have tossed him in and left him to lie as he fell, because his head was bent at an awkward angle and his legs were twisted. Not even a pile of mouldy straw lay between his body and the hard earthen floor, which was littered with ancient animal droppings. They hadn't stinted on the rope, though, and the dirty gag covered his nose as well as his mouth.\n\nThere was a lamp. The guard would have insisted on that.\n\nHe had been sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, and he must have been dozing, for he was slow to react. When he rose, Ramses' stomach twisted. The fellow was as tall as he and twice as broad. His belly rounded the front of his galabeeyah, but not all the weight was fat. And he had a knife.\n\nFor a moment they stared at one another in mutual stupefaction. The guard was the first to recover. It wasn't difficult for Ramses to read his mind; his round sweaty face mirrored every slow-moving idea. No need to call for help against an opponent as wretched looking as this one. Recapturing the prisoner single-handed would win him praise and reward. He drew his knife from its scabbard and started forwards.\n\nRamses wasn't thinking fast either, but the options were too obvious to be overlooked. One backward step would take him out of the door. There was a bar. By the time the guard broke down the door or summoned help, he would be long gone. It was the only sensible course of action. Unarmed and exhausted, he wouldn't last ten seconds against a hulking brute like that one. No one would know he had run away. David was unconscious. Or dead.\n\nHe launched himself forwards and down, at an acute angle that would \u2013 he hoped \u2013 take him under the blade of the knife. The move caught even him by surprise; his chest hit the floor with a force that knocked the breath out of him, but his hands were already where he wanted them to be, gripping the bare ankles under the ragged hem of the galabeeyah. He yanked, with all the strength he could muster.\n\nIt wasn't much. His right hand gave way, but the left was still functioning, and it was enough to pull the man's feet out from under him and get his attention off the knife. He sat down with a thud that must have rumbled up his spine into his skull, and his head hit the wall. The blow only stunned him but it gave Ramses time to finish the job. Then he picked up the knife and crawled through the dung and dust to David.\n\nHe was alive. As soon as his mouth and nose were uncovered he sucked in a long shuddering breath. Ramses heaved him over and began slashing at the ropes. He had freed David's hands and arms before he realized that not all the dark stains on David's shirt were dirt. He breathed out a word even his father seldom employed.\n\n'Ramses?'\n\n'Who else? How badly are you hurt? Can you walk?'\n\n'I'll give it my best try as soon as you free my ankles.'\n\n'Oh. Right.'\n\nAfter he had done so Ramses stuck the knife in his belt and bent over David. 'Put your arm over my shoulders. We're on borrowed time as it is; if you can't walk I'll carry you.'\n\n'I can stumble at least. Help me up.'\n\nAt first he couldn't even stumble. Ramses had to drag him out of the door and across the courtyard to the gate Layla had left open. They weighed about the same, but Ramses could have sworn David had gained ten stone in the past few hours. His lungs were bursting and his knees felt like molasses. He couldn't keep this up much longer.\n\nThen he heard a shout from the house and discovered he could. The rush of adrenaline carried them through the gate and into a patch of shadow. Can't stop now, he thought. Not yet. They were still on borrowed time, time borrowed from Layla. He prayed she had got away. He prayed they would too. Abdullah's house was on the other side of the hill and their captors would expect them to head in that direction, and they would... They would...\n\nSomething strange was happening. The patches of moonlight on the ground shivered like water into which someone has tossed a stone. The trees were swaying as if in a strong wind, but there was no wind. He couldn't catch his breath. He fell to his knees, dragging David down with him.\n\n'Go on. Abdullah \u2013'\n\n'Not there, you fool. Too far.'\n\nHands pulled at him. Layla's? She had called him a fool. He was on his feet, moving, floating, through patches of silver and black, moonlight and shadow, until a burst of sunshine blinded him, and he passed through the light into utter darkness.\n\nI would rather not remember those hours of waiting, but some account of them must be given if my narrative is to be complete. Nefret's distress was harder to bear than my own, for mine was mitigated by familiarity with my son's annoying habits. This would not be the first time he had gone off on some ill-considered and dangerous expedition without bothering to inform me. Delay did not necessarily imply disaster; he and David were full-grown men (physically if not emotionally) and quite adept at various forms of self-defence, including the ancient Egyptian wrestling holds I had shown them.\n\nSo I told myself, at any rate, and attempted to convince Nefret of my reasoning. She was not convinced. They were in trouble, she knew it, and it was her fault for not going with them, and something must be done about it.\n\n'But what?' I demanded, watching her anxiously as she paced up and down. She had not changed from her working clothes, and her boots thudded heavily on the tiled floor. Horus had lost all patience with her because she refused to sit down and provide a lap for him; when she passed him he reached out and hooked his claws into her trouser leg. She detached him without comment and went on pacing.\n\n'There is no sense searching for them,' I insisted. 'Where would we start?'\n\nEmerson knocked out his pipe. 'At the temple. Never mind dinner, none of us has the appetite for it. If I find no sign of them there, I will come straight back, I promise.'\n\n'Not alone,' I said. 'I am coming with you.'\n\n'No, you are not.'\n\nWe were discussing the matter, without the coolness that verb implies, when Emerson raised his hand for silence. In that silence we all heard it \u2013 the pound of galloping hooves.\n\n'There,' said Emerson, his broad breast rising in a great sigh of relief. 'There they are. I will have a few words to say to those young men for frightening you so! That is Risha, or I know nothing of horseflesh.'\n\nIt was Risha, running like the wind. He came to a sudden stop and stood trembling. His saddle was empty, and a broken end of rope hung from his neck.\n\nMy dear Emerson took charge as only he can. In less than ten minutes we were mounted and ready. Nefret wanted to ride Risha, but Emerson prevented her, knowing she would outstrip us. The noble beast would not stay, however. Intelligent and loyal as a dog, he guided us back along the path he had taken in such haste. It led, as we had expected, to the temple of Seti I.\n\nWe found Asfur, Risha's mate, still tied to a tree near the spring north of the temple. In one of the chambers off the hypostyle hall a thin cat sprang hissing into the shadows when the light of our candles appeared. It had been devouring the remains of the food the boys had brought. On the floor were their knapsacks, two empty water bottles, and their coats. Their drawing materials had already been packed, so they must have been about to leave when they were intercepted. There was no sign of them elsewhere in the temple or its surroundings. Lanterns and candles were not bright enough to permit a search for footprints or bloodstains.\n\nThere was nothing we could do but return to the house. Emerson was the one who paced now; Nefret sat quite still, her hands folded and her eyes lowered. Finally Emerson said, 'They did not leave the temple of their own accord. They would not have abandoned the horses.'\n\n'Obviously,' I said. 'I am going to Gurneh to fetch \u2013 no, not Abdullah, worry and exertion would be bad for him \u2013 Selim, and Daoud and \u2013'\n\n'Peabody, you are not going anywhere. And neither are you, Nefret; stay here and try to keep your Aunt Amelia under control. It is a damned difficult job, take my word for it. I will go to the dahabeeyah. It's a far-out chance, but someone may have seen something of them. I will bring Reis Hassan and another of the crewmen back with me, and then we will think what to do next.'\n\nAnother grisly hour dragged by. Emerson did not return. It was Reis Hassan who came instead, with a message from my husband. Someone had claimed to have seen the boys walking towards the ferry landing. If they had gone over to Luxor he would follow the trail. Mahmud was with him, and Reis Hassan would stay with us.\n\nNefret did not react or even look up. For the past hour she had not moved. All at once she started to her feet; Horus, who had been on her lap, rolled off it and bounced on to the floor. Over his yowls of fury, I heard her say, 'Listen. Someone is coming.'\n\nThe individual was on horseback, coming at a gallop, and I assumed it was Emerson. Even at a distance, however, I knew the slighter form could not be his.\n\n'Selim,' said Nefret calmly.\n\nThere could be no doubt. Selim was an excellent horseman and he was waving his arms in a wild manner that would have unseated any rider less skilled. He was shouting too, but it was impossible to make out the words until he stopped.\n\n'Safe!' was the first word I heard. 'They are safe, Sitt, safe with me, and you must come, come at once, and bring your medicines, they are sick and bleeding and I have left Daoud and Yussuf on guard, and they are safe, and they sent me to tell you!'\n\n'Very good,' said Nefret, when the enthusiastic youth had run out of breath. 'I will go with you, Selim. Ask Ali the stableman to saddle Risha.'\n\nShe put her arm round my waist. 'It's all right, Aunt Amelia. Here, take my handkerchief.'\n\n'I do not require it, my dear,' I said with a sniff. 'I believe I may have a slight touch of catarrh.'\n\n'Then you should not go out in the night air. No, Aunt Amelia, I insist you stay here and wait for the Professor. You might send someone to ask Mr Vandergelt for the loan of his carriage, in case they are...'\n\nShe did not give me time to suggest alternatives, but dashed into the house and came back with her bag of medical supplies. It was, I supposed, the most sensible arrangement. I had no fear for her; Selim would be with her, and nothing less than a bullet could stop Risha when he was in full gallop.\n\nAs I had expected, Cyrus and Katherine accompanied the carriage, full of questions, and demanding to be allowed to help. I was explaining when Emerson returned.\n\n'So you're at it again,' Cyrus remarked. 'I thought things had been abnormally quiet this season. Emerson, old pal, you okay?'\n\nEmerson passed his hand over his face. 'I am getting too old for this sort of thing, Vandergelt.'\n\n'Not you,' said Cyrus with conviction.\n\n'Certainly not,' I exclaimed. 'Katherine dear, you and Cyrus must stay here. There won't be room for all of us in the carriage.'\n\n'I will make tea,' Katherine said, pressing my hand. 'What else can I do for you, Amelia?'\n\n'Have the whisky ready,' said Cyrus."
            },
            {
                "title": "From Manuscript H",
                "text": "When Ramses opened his eyes he knew he wasn't dead or delirious, though the face that filled his vision was the one he would have preferred to see under either of those conditions.\n\n'I think I'm supposed to babble about angels and heaven,' he said faintly.\n\n'I might have known you'd try to be clever,' Nefret snapped. 'What's wrong with \"Where am I?\"'\n\n'Trite. Anyhow, I know where I \u2013 hell and damnation! What are you...'\n\nThe pain was so intense he almost blacked out again. Off in the distance he heard Nefret ask, 'Do you want some morphine?'\n\n'No. Where is David?'\n\n'Here, my brother. Safe, thanks to \u2013'\n\n'None of that,' Nefret ordered. 'You two can wallow in sentiment later. We have a lot to discuss and I haven't finished with Ramses yet.'\n\n'I don't think I can stand any more of your tender care,' Ramses said. The worst of the pain had subsided, though, and the hands that wiped the perspiration from his face were sure and gentle. 'What the hell did you do to me?'\n\n'What the hell did you do to that hand? It's swelling up like a balloon, and one of your fingers was dislocated.'\n\n'Just... leave me alone for a minute. Please?'\n\nHis eyes moved slowly around the room, savouring the sense of safety and the reassurance of familiar faces: David, his dark eyes luminous with tears of relief; Nefret, white-faced and tight-lipped; and Selim, squatting by the bed, his teeth bared in a broad grin. If he hadn't been such a fool he would have remembered Abdullah had relatives all over Gurneh. Selim's house was one of the closest. His youngest wife made the best lamb stew in Luxor.\n\nHis eyes went back to David. 'You got me here. God knows how. How bad is it?'\n\n'To put it in technical terms, the knife bounced off his shoulder blade,' Nefret said. 'A bit of sticking plaster was all that was required. Now let's get back to you. I want to make sure nothing else is broken before we move you.'\n\n'I'm all right.' He started to sit up and let out a yelp of pain when she planted her hand firmly against his chest and shoved him back on to the pillow.\n\n'Ah,' she said, with professional relish. 'A rib? Let's just have a look.'\n\n'Your bedside manner could use some improvement,' Ramses said, trying not to squirm as she unbuttoned his shirt.\n\nThere was no warning, not even a knock. The door flew open, and he forgot his present aches and pains in anticipation of what lay in store. The figure that stood in the door was not that of an enemy. It was worse. It was his mother.\n\nI have always believed in the medicinal effects of good whisky, but on this occasion I felt obliged to prescribe something stronger, at least for Ramses. Nefret and I discussed whether his ribs were broken or only cracked; Ramses insisted they were neither, but soon would be if we went on prodding him. So I strapped him up while Nefret dealt as efficiently with his hand, which was as nasty a specimen as I had ever beheld, even on Ramses. I then attempted to administer a dose of laudanum to each lad, for though David's injuries were superficial he was grey-faced with exhaustion and strain. Neither of them would take it.\n\n'I want to tell you what happened,' David said. 'You should know \u2013'\n\n'I'll tell them what happened,' said Ramses. We had had to hurt him quite a lot, but I suspected the unevenness of his voice was due to annoyance as much as pain.\n\nEmerson spoke for the first time. Sitting quietly by the side of the bed, he had not taken his eyes off Ramses, and once, when he thought none of us saw him, he had given his son's arm a surreptitious and very gentle squeeze. 'Let's get them home, Peabody. If they are fit for it, we might certainly profit from a council of war.'\n\nSo we bundled them into the carriage and took them home, with Risha trotting alongside. We retired to the sitting room, where I tried to make Ramses lie down on the settee, but he would not. Katherine moved quietly around the room lighting the lamps and drawing the curtains. Then she came and sat next to me. Her silent sympathy and support were what I needed just then; rallying, I once more took charge.\n\n'You had better tell us what happened, Ramses,' I said.\n\nI had had occasion in the past to complain of my son's verbose and theatrical literary style. This time he went too far in the opposite direction. His concluding sentences were typical of the narrative as a whole. 'The fellow hit his head when he fell. Once David was freed we ran for it. We would not have got away if he had not taken charge and made for Selim's house. I had somehow got it into my head that we must reach Abdullah.'\n\n'Is that all?' I exclaimed.\n\n'No, it is not!' David's expressive countenance had displayed increasing signs of agitation. 'I saw what you did, Ramses. I was dizzy and sick and short of air but I was not unconscious.' His eyes moved round the circle of interested faces. 'The guard had a knife. Ramses did not. He looked as if he could barely stand. When he fell forwards I thought he had fainted, and the guard must have thought the same, but it was that trick he showed us once \u2013 you remember, Nefret, the one he told you not to try unless you had no other choice because it requires split-second timing. You have to go in under the knife and pray it will miss you, and get hold of the other man's feet before he can jump back.'\n\nNefret nodded. 'Split-second timing and long arms and the devil's own luck. That's when he cracked that rib.'\n\n'It is not cracked,' Ramses said indignantly. 'Only bruised. And the damned sticking plaster itches like fury. I don't know which is worse, you or \u2013'\n\n'He tried to carry me,' David said, his voice unsteady. 'I couldn't walk, I was too stiff. He could have left me and gone for help, but \u2013'\n\n'But I didn't have sense enough to think of it,' said Ramses. 'Do you mind shutting up, David?'\n\n'It won't do, Ramses,' Nefret said. The colour rushed into her face and she jumped up. 'You've left out everything of importance. Curse it, don't you understand that we cannot deal effectively with this situation until we have all the facts? Any detail, no matter how small, may be important.'\n\nEmerson, who had listened in silence, cleared his throat. 'Quite right. Ramses, my boy \u2013'\n\nNefret whirled round and shook her finger in his astonished face. 'That applies to you too, Professor \u2013 and you, Aunt Amelia. What happened tonight might have been prevented if you had not kept certain matters from us.'\n\n'Nefret,' Ramses said. 'Don't.'\n\nMy poor dear Emerson looked like a man who has been clawed by his pet kitten. With a little cry of self-reproach Nefret flung herself on to his lap and put her arms round his neck.\n\n'I didn't mean it. Forgive me!'\n\n'My dear, the reproach was not undeserved. No, don't get up; I rather like having you there.'\n\nHe enclosed her in his arms and she hid her face against his broad shoulder, and we all tactfully pretended not to see the sobs that shook her slim body. I had expected she would give way before long. Her temperament is quite unlike my own. She performs as coolly and efficiently in an emergency as I could do, but once the emergency is over, her tempestuous and loving nature seeks an outlet for the emotions she has repressed. So I let her cry for a bit in Emerson's fatherly embrace, and then suggested that some of us ought to retire to our beds.\n\nNefret sat up. The only evidences of tears were her wet lashes and a damp patch on Emerson's shirt. 'Not until we have finished. Ramses, tell it again, from the beginning, and this time don't leave anything out.'\n\nWe had to wring some of it out of him. Perched on Emerson's knee, with his arm around her, Nefret exhibited such skill at interrogation I was not forced to intervene.\n\n'I am not surprised that Layla should be involved in a criminal activity,' I said. 'Apparently her services are for sale to anyone who can meet her price.'\n\n'Criminal activities,' said my son, 'enabled her to escape from a life of misery and degradation. Can one who has never been forced to make such a choice condemn hers?'\n\n'Good gracious, how pompous you sound,' I said. 'I must admit the justice of your remark, however; women have a difficult enough time in this man's world, and moral scruples are luxuries some of them cannot afford.'\n\n'In this case,' said Nefret, her voice smooth as honey, 'Layla's moral scruples were stronger than greed. Or was there another reason why she took the risk of freeing you?'\n\nRamses looked quickly at her and as quickly returned his gaze to his feet, at which he had been staring most of the time. 'Several reasons, I think. Even a woman devoid of ordinary moral scruples may balk at murder. Father \u2013 and Mother too, of course \u2013 have formidable reputations; had we come to harm, they would have exacted retribution. Layla implied that her employers had something particularly unpleasant in mind for me, and possibly David as well. The pronoun \"you\" can be singular or plural, and I did not ask her to elaborate, since my mind was \u2013'\n\n'Stop that,' I said irritably.\n\n'Yes, Mother.'\n\n'You made me forget what I was going to ask next.'\n\n'I beg your pardon, Mother.'\n\n'I know what I was going to ask next,' said Nefret. 'It is a simple question, and vitally important. What do these people want?'\n\n'Us,' Ramses said. 'Both of us, or they would have left the one they didn't want dead in the temple.'\n\n'That's too simple,' Nefret snapped. 'Abduction isn't an end in itself, it is a means to an end. If you hadn't got away, we would have received a demand for \u2013 what? Money? The papyrus? Or... something else?'\n\n'Wait a minute,' Cyrus ejaculated, tugging at his goatee. 'You're getting ahead of me here. What papyrus?'\n\n'The children picked it up in Cairo,' I explained. 'From a dealer \u2013 the same fellow who turned up in the Nile a few days ago, mangled by what appeared to have been a crocodile.'\n\n'But, Amelia,' Cyrus began.\n\n'Yes, I know. There are no crocodiles in Luxor. I will explain it all to you later, Cyrus. Someone does seem to want the papyrus back. Do you think that was the motive behind the boys' little misadventure, Nefret?'\n\n'There is another possibility.'\n\n'Well? It is getting late and \u2013'\n\n'I will be brief,' said Nefret. There was a note in her voice I did not like at all. 'Let us suppose that the attack on Aunt Amelia in London and our subsequent encounters with Yussuf Mahmud are connected. If one person is behind all of them, that person must be the Master Criminal himself. All the clues lead back to him \u2013 the typewritten message, the possibility that the papyrus came from his private collection, even the fact that someone has discovered that Ali the Rat is Ramses. That is a tenuous lead, I admit, but Sethos is one of the few people who knows you found his private laboratory, and if, as I strongly suspect, he has been in touch with you since, he is probably familiar with our habits. Your turn, Aunt Amelia. It is time you told us everything you know about that man. And I mean everything!'\n\nGoodness, but the child had a stare almost as forbidding as that of Emerson at his best! I daresay I could have stared her down, but I could not deny the justice of her charge.\n\n'You are correct,' I said. 'We have encountered Sethos since, and I... Oh dear. There is no doubt that he knows a good deal more about all of us, including Ramses, than he ought.'"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "Our discussion ended at that point, for Ramses' face had turned an unpleasant shade of greyish-green, and Nefret bundled him off to bed. He went protesting, if feebly, so I assured him we would not continue without him.\n\n'I need to collect my thoughts,' I explained. 'And arrange them in a logical sequence. I do not believe I am capable of doing so at this time.'\n\n'Small wonder,' said Emerson. 'It has been a trying evening for you, my dear. Off to bed with you too. We will continue tomorrow morning.'\n\nKatherine cleared her throat. 'Amelia, would you think me rude if I asked whether Cyrus and I might join you? Curiosity killed the cat, you know. You would not want my death on your conscience.'\n\nAt that moment I would have agreed to anything in order to be left alone \u2013 to collect my thoughts, as I have said. Brief reflection assured me that affection as well as curiosity had prompted her request, and that no one could assist us better than these dear friends. Cyrus knew more of our extraordinary history than most people, and his wife's cynical intelligence had served me well in the past. Recollecting that the following day was Friday, the Moslem holy day, when we breakfasted later and more leisurely than on workdays, I invited them to join us for that meal.\n\nMy dear Emerson tucked me into bed as tenderly as a woman might have done, and Fatima insisted on my drinking a glass of warm milk flavoured with cardamom, to help me sleep.\n\n'You are all being kinder to me than I deserve,' I said. 'Come to bed, Emerson, you have been as worried as I.'\n\n'Later, my dear.'\n\n'You don't mean to sit up all night standing guard, do you?'\n\n'Not all night. David and I will take it in turn. He would have struck me, I think, if I had not agreed.' Emerson's hard face softened. 'He's fit enough, Peabody. Selim's young wife stuffed him full of lamb stew, and Nefret assures me the wound is negligible.'\n\n'I meant to examine him again,' I murmured. 'Ramses too. She wouldn't let me...'\n\nEmerson took my hand. His voice seemed to come from a great distance. 'She didn't mean it, you know, Peabody.'\n\n'Yes, she did. Oh, Emerson \u2013 was I in error? I honestly believed I was acting for the best... for their own good...' A great yawn interrupted my speech, and the truth dawned at last. 'Curse it, Emerson! You put laudanum in the milk. How could...'\n\n'Sleep well, my love.' I felt his lips brush my cheek, and felt nothing more.\n\nI woke before the others, rested and ready to take up the reins once more. Emerson was sleeping heavily; he did not stir even when I planted a kiss on his bristly cheek, so I dressed and tiptoed out.\n\nThe others were in the same state as Emerson, even David, whose cousin Achmet had taken over the duties of guard. I stood for a while by Ramses' bed, looking down at him. Nefret must have made him take laudanum, or one of her newfangled medicines, for he was deeply asleep. When I brushed the tangled curls away from his face he only murmured and smiled.\n\nI was on the verandah busily making notes when Cyrus and Katherine rode up, Cyrus on his favourite mare Queenie and Katherine on a placid broad-backed pony. Her straw hat was tied under her chin with a large bow, and she looked more than ever like a pleasant pussycat.\n\nEmerson and the children came in shortly thereafter, and we sat down to breakfast. Conversation was sporadic, and not only because we were eating. One was conscious of a certain air of constraint. I was relieved to see that Ramses' appetite was normal, though he had some little difficulty eating with his left hand. I wondered how Nefret had bullied him into wearing a sling, and whether his injuries were more extensive than I had realized, and whether I ought not to insist on examining him myself...\n\n'The sling is just to protect his hand, Aunt Amelia. His arm is not hurt.'\n\nThey were the first words Nefret had addressed to me since she had uttered those stinging accusations the night before. Her blue eyes were anxious and her smile tentative. I smiled warmly back at her.\n\n'Thank you, my dear, for reassuring me. I have complete confidence in your skill. And thank you for tending to me so efficiently. I slept like a baby and woke refreshed.'\n\n'Oh, Aunt Amelia, I am sorry for what I said last night! I didn't \u2013'\n\n'You are becoming tediously repetitive, Nefret.' Ramses pushed his plate away. 'And you are wasting time. I see that Mother has organized her thoughts in her usual efficient fashion and in writing; shall we ask her to begin?'\n\nI shuffled my papers together and picked them up, wishing I had thought to do so before my son's vulturine stare fell upon them. The pages had a good many lines scratched out and scribbled over. The complexity of my thought processes does not lend itself to written organization. However, I had decided what to say and I proceeded to say it.\n\n'I agree with Ramses; we ought not to waste time in apologies and expressions of regret. If anyone of us has erred, she \u2013 er \u2013 he or she did so with the best of intentions. There is nothing so futile as \u2013'\n\n'Peabody,' said Emerson. 'Please. Abjure aphorisms, if you are able.'\n\nThe glint in his handsome blue eyes was one of amusement rather than annoyance. The same affectionate amusement warmed the other faces \u2013 except, of course, for that of Ramses. His expression was no more rigid than usual, however, so I concluded we were in accord once more, all grievances forgot.\n\n'Certainly, my dear,' I said. 'I begin with the assumption that you are all familiar with the history of our original encounters with Sethos. Ramses has told David and Nefret, and Cyrus has told Katherine? Hmmm, yes, I thought so. I gleaned certain bits of additional information during my \u2013 er \u2013 private interview with him. After long and thoughtful consideration of that interview I have extracted the following facts that may be relevant.\n\n'Sethos does have a private collection of antiquities. What he said \u2013 er...' I pretended to consult my notes. It was not necessary; never would I forget those words, or the look in those strange chameleon eyes when he pronounced them. 'He said: \"The most beautiful objects I take, I keep for myself.\"'\n\nEmerson growled deep in his throat, and Ramses remarked, with greater tact than I would have expected, 'The papyrus certainly meets his criteria. What else did he say?'\n\nI started to shake my head \u2013 caught Nefret's fond but critical eye \u2013 and sighed. 'That Emerson was one of the few individuals in the world who could constitute a danger to him. He did not explain why. He claimed he had never harmed a woman. He promised... No, let me be absolutely accurate. He implied that he would never again interfere with me or injure those I love.'\n\n'It appears you misunderstood that one,' my son said dryly.\n\n'What else?' Nefret demanded inflexibly.\n\n'As to his familiarity with our personal habits and private affairs... Well, let me put it this way. He knows enough about Ramses to suspect that he has become interested in the art of disguise, and that he could easily pass as an Egyptian. Once the suspicion arose, a clever man might be able to deduce the identity of Ali the Rat. For one thing, Ali was seen in Cairo only when we were there. I cannot think of anything else that would help us. That is the truth, Nefret.'\n\nIt was the truth \u2013 or so I honestly believed. It would not be fair or accurate to say I was mistaken, for at that time none of us had the faintest inkling... But excuses do not become me. I was wrong, and the price I paid for my error was one that will haunt me for the rest of my life.\n\nA pensive and (in Nefret's case) somewhat sceptical silence followed. No one questioned my statement, however. Finally Ramses said, 'It doesn't get us any further, does it? There is nothing to suggest Sethos is not behind this business and nothing to prove that he is. If the incident in London is unrelated to the others, we have another unknown foe to contend with, and it may be that he would have exchanged David and me for the papyrus. If Sethos is the mastermind, he only took us prisoner as a means of getting to Mother. Humiliating, isn't it, David? No one wants us for our charming selves.'\n\n'Could I have a look at this famous papyrus?' Cyrus asked. 'It must be something darned remarkable if a fellow is willing to go to such lengths to get it back.'\n\n'It is,' Ramses said.\n\n'As papyri go,' said Emerson, who is not as impressed by papyri as are some people. 'Fetch it here, Ramses.'\n\nRamses did so. Cyrus let out a low whistle. 'It's darned elegant, all right. Mr Walter Emerson is going to go off his head about it.'\n\n'Uncle Walter!' David started to his feet. 'Good heavens! He and Aunt Evelyn and Lia... They mustn't come! They could be in terrible danger.'\n\n'Now, David, don't be so melodramatic,' I said. 'There is no reason to suppose \u2013'\n\n'He's right, though,' Emerson said. 'At the moment we don't know what the devil is going on, much less why. Three more potential victims would complicate the problem even further. We had better head them off.'\n\n'It is too late,' I said hollowly. 'They sailed from Marseilles this morning.'\n\nIt was Katherine who dispelled the Gothic atmosphere with a simple statement. 'Always expect the worst and take steps to prevent it.'\n\n'Just what I was about to say,' I exclaimed. 'Steps! We must take steps! Er \u2013 what steps?'\n\nThere was something very comforting about that calm pink-cheeked face of hers. 'First, take every possible means to protect yourselves. Secure this place and don't go abroad without an escort. Second, postpone or cancel the visit of your family. I don't doubt Evelyn and Walter can take care of themselves, but the girl cannot; she would only be an additional source of anxiety. Third, find out who is responsible for this and stop them.'\n\n'That's a pretty ambitious programme, my dear,' Cyrus said, shaking his head. 'Where do we start?'\n\nIt warmed my heart to hear him say 'we,' but I had expected no less of him.\n\n'In Gurneh, obviously,' said Ramses. 'And, as Mrs Vandergelt has so sensibly suggested, all together.'\n\nI had expected the village would be abuzz with excitement, for the events of the preceding night would certainly be known by now to every inhabitant, spreading rapidly along that web of gossip that is the primary source of news in illiterate societies. However, as we rode along the winding path I saw the place was abnormally quiet. A few people greeted us; others we saw only as a flutter of skirts as the wearers thereof whisked themselves behind a wall.\n\n'That was Ali Yussuf,' I exclaimed. 'What is wrong with him?'\n\nEmerson chuckled. 'An uneasy conscience, my dear Peabody. Even if he had nothing to do with last night's affair, he is afraid we will hold him responsible for what happened to the boys.'\n\n'One cannot help being suspicious, Emerson. How could the miscreants have been so bold as to bring their captives here unless some of the villagers were in league with them?'\n\nRamses was riding ahead, but he can hear a whisper across the Nile, as the Egyptians say. He turned his head. 'This was only a temporary stopover, Mother. They would have moved us under cover of darkness.'\n\nKadija was standing in the doorway when we rode up to Abdullah's house. She informed us that neither Abdullah nor Daoud was at home. 'Curse it,' said Emerson. 'I told Daoud to keep the old rascal out of this. Where have they gone, Kadija?'\n\nDaoud's wife understood English though she never spoke it. Looking as mysterious as only a black veil can make one look, she gave Emerson the answer he had expected.\n\n'Curse it,' Emerson repeated. 'I suppose the whole lot of them have gone there.'\n\n'Not all,' said Kadija in Arabic. 'Some are asking questions, Father of Curses. Many questions of many people. Will you come in and drink tea and wait?'\n\nWe declined with thanks and were about to proceed when Kadija came out of the house, moving with ponderous and dignified deliberation. Her hand, large and calloused as a man's, rested for a moment on David's booted foot before she turned to Ramses and inspected him closely. It was not Ramses whom she addressed, however. 'Will you stay for a moment, Nur Misur?'\n\n'Yes, of course. Go on,' Nefret said to the rest of us.\n\nShe was only a moment. 'Well?' I asked. 'What is so funny?'\n\nNefret got her face under control. 'She told me a very amusing story.'\n\n'Kadija?' I said in surprise. 'What sort of story?'\n\n'Uh \u2013 never mind. What she really wanted was reassurance about the boys. She was too shy to ask them directly how they are feeling.'\n\nWe could have found the house we sought even without David's directions. It was surrounded by a crowd of people, all gesticulating wildly and talking at the top of their lungs. The black robes of the women contrasted with the white and blue and sand-coloured galabeeyahs of the men, and children darted in and out like little brown beetles. The men greeted us without self-consciousness; either their consciences were clear, or they had none.\n\nThis was not the house in which Layla had once lived. I remembered that establishment very well. This was larger and more isolated, with a few dusty tamarisk trees behind it and no other house in sight. The location was well suited to the purpose it had served; a cart loaded with, let us say, sugar cane, could drive through the gates into the walled courtyard without arousing suspicion.\n\nWhen I saw who stood in the open doorway I understood why none of the men had had the temerity to attempt to enter. Daoud's large frame filled the aperture from side to side and from lintel to threshold. He rushed at us with cries of pleasure and relief, embraced David, and was about to do the same to Ramses when Nefret got between them.\n\nAbdullah awaited us inside. His snowy-white beard bristled with indignation, and a ferocious scowl darkened his venerable brow. He addressed Emerson in tones of icy reproof.\n\n'Why did you not tell me? This would not have happened if you had taken me into your confidence.'\n\n'Now, see here, Abdullah,' Emerson began.\n\n'I understand. I am too old. Too old and stupid. I will go sit in the sun with the other senile old men and \u2013'\n\n'You were in our confidence, Abdullah,' I interrupted. 'You knew as much as we did. We were not expecting anything like this either.'\n\n'Ah.' Abdullah sat down on the stairs and scratched his ear. 'Then I forgive you, Sitt. Now what shall we do?'\n\n'It appears to me that you are already doing it,' said Ramses, glancing at the open door of the room on our left. It had once been comfortably furnished, with rugs and tables, a wide divan and several armchairs of European style, and a large cupboard or wardrobe against the far wall. The shutters had been flung open and sunlight streaming through the windows illumined a scene of utter chaos \u2013 rugs rolled up and thrown aside, cushions scattered across the floor, chairs overturned.\n\n'We are searching for clues,' Abdullah explained.\n\n'Trampling them underfoot, most likely,' said Emerson. 'Where is Selim? I told him to... Oh, good Gad!'\n\nA resounding crash from above indicated Selim's presence. Ramses slipped past Abdullah and hurried up the stairs, with the rest of us following.\n\nSelim was not alone. Two of his brothers and one of his second cousins once removed were rampaging through the rooms on the first floor, 'searching for clues,' one presumed. Emerson's roar stopped but did not at all disconcert them; they gathered round, all talking at once as they tried to tell him what they had done.\n\nI left Emerson patiently explaining the principles of searching suspected premises, and joined Ramses, who stood looking into one of the rooms.\n\nIt was a woman's bedchamber. The furnishings were an odd mixture of local and imported luxury \u2013 Oriental rugs of silken beauty, a toilet table draped with muslin, carved chests, and vessels of fine china behind a screen. I deduced that Selim and his crew had not had time to demolish this room, but there was evidence of a hasty search. One of the chests stood open; its contents spilled out in a flood of rainbow-hued fabric. The bedsheet was crumpled and dusty.\n\n'This is where you were confined?' I asked.\n\n'Yes.' Ramses crossed to the bed. He picked up a piece of white cotton, which I had not seen because it was the same colour as the sheet, examined it, and dropped it on to the floor. I did not need to ask what it was.\n\nA search of the room produced nothing except a few lengths of rope, knotted and cut \u2013 and Ramses' boots, which had been kicked under the bed. I was glad to get them back, for he had only the two pairs, and boots are expensive.\n\nNefret and I investigated the chests. They contained women's clothing, some Egyptian, some European \u2013 including a nightdress of transparent silk permeated with a scent that made Nefret wrinkle her nose.\n\n'She must bathe in the cursed stuff,' she muttered.\n\n'She took everything of value with her,' said Emerson, who had overturned the mattress and bedsprings. 'There is no jewellery, no money. And no papers.'\n\nNefret tossed the nightdress back into the chest. 'She left all her clothing, though.'\n\n'There wasn't time to pack a trunk,' said Ramses. 'Nor would she have dared return to get her things. She said others were coming soon.'\n\nKatherine sat down on a hassock. 'If she carried away only what she could put in a smallish bundle, she will have to replenish her wardrobe. We should inquire at the markets and shops.'\n\n'I was about to make that suggestion,' said a voice in pure cultivated English.\n\nHe stood watching us from the doorway, clad in well-cut tweeds and gleaming boots, his hat in his hand, his fair hair as smooth as if he had just passed his brushes over it.\n\n'Sir Edward!' I cried. 'What are you doing here?'\n\n'I have been here for some time, Mrs Emerson. Good morning to you all,' he added with a pleasant smile.\n\n'Daoud was not supposed to admit anyone,' Ramses said.\n\n'Daoud did not include me in that interdict,' said Sir Edward amiably. 'He remembered me as a friend and co-worker. As a friend I could not remain aloof. The news was all over Luxor this morning. I am relieved to find it was exaggerated' \u2013 his cool blue eyes moved over Ramses and spared a glance for David \u2013 'but not entirely inaccurate. How could I not offer my assistance?'\n\n'Unnecessary,' said Emerson. 'We have the matter under control.'\n\n'Ah, but have you? No one who knows you all as I do would doubt your ability to defend yourselves against ordinary enemies. The very fact that these enemies succeeded in abducting Ramses and his servant \u2013'\n\n'David is not my servant,' Ramses said.\n\n'\u2013 and his friend,' Sir Edward corrected smoothly, 'strong young men who were, I do not doubt, on the alert, suggests that they are dangerous and unscrupulous. As I told Mrs Emerson the other evening, I am looking for something to occupy my mind. My archaeological services are not needed, it appears, so I beg you will accept my services as a guard.'\n\n'For \"the ladies,\" you mean?' Nefret inquired, lashes fluttering and lips trembling. 'Oh, Sir Edward, how gallant! How noble! How can we ever thank you?'\n\nIt was such an outrageous parody I was tempted to laugh. Sir Edward was no more taken in than I. He planted his hand upon the approximate region of his heart, and gazed at Nefret with the sickening intensity of a provincial actor playing Sir Galahad. 'The protection of helpless females is an Englishman's sacred duty, Miss Forth.'\n\nEmerson was not amused. 'What nonsense,' he grumbled. 'This is no laughing matter, Sir Edward.'\n\n'I am well aware of that, sir. If I have been informed correctly, the woman who owned this house was the same one Mrs Emerson and I encountered a few years ago. I was able to be of some small service to her then. Dare I flatter myself that I may be again?'\n\nEmerson dismissed the offer with a frown and a peremptory gesture. 'We are wasting time with these empty courtesies. We have not finished searching the place.'\n\nSir Edward was wise enough to refrain from further argument, but he followed at a discreet distance while we examined the remaining rooms and the flat roof. We found nothing of a personal nature except an empty tin that had contained opium, and a nargileh. The kitchen, a separate building near the main house, was a shambles. It reeked of vegetables that had begun to go bad, milk that had curdled, and the thin sour beer of Egypt. The only unusual item was a broken bottle of green glass. Ramses sorted through the fragments till he found one that had part of a label.\n\n'Mo\u00ebt and Chandon,' he said.\n\n'The lady has expensive tastes,' Sir Edward murmured.\n\n'She has the means to indulge them,' I said. 'She has buried two wealthy husbands.'\n\nThe only remaining place to be searched was the shed. It had been painful enough for me to see the room where Ramses had been imprisoned; the gag and the tightly knotted ropes were mute but powerful evidence of those long hours of discomfort and uncertainty. The filthy little shed was even worse. My sympathetic imagination \u2013 a quality with which I am amply endowed \u2013 pictured David lying helpless and wounded on the hard floor, despairing of rescue, fearing the worst, in ignorance of what had befallen the friend he loved like a brother. What would have been his fate, and that of Ramses, if Layla had not come to their aid? Not a clean, quick death, for their attackers could have dispatched them at any time. A number of alternatives came to mind. A shudder ran through my frame.\n\nThere was not room in the horrid little place for all of us, so I left the search to Emerson and Ramses. All they found was an overturned beer jar and a pile of cigarette ends, a rough clay lamp and a thin layer of musty straw.\n\nWe returned to Abdullah's house, hoping that the inquiries he had set in motion had produced more information. Our people had been on the job since dawn, and I must say they had covered the village thoroughly. A crowd of witnesses awaited us, some grumbling and resentful, some curious and cheerful. Abdullah brought them in one by one while we sipped the tea Kadija served.\n\nEveryone had known of Layla's return; it had been a subject of interest, particularly to some of the men. However, when they dropped by to renew old acquaintances they had been turned away. They were indignant but not surprised; Layla had always been unpredictable, as one of them put it, adding philosophically, 'That is what comes of letting women have their own money. They do what they wish instead of what men tell them to do.'\n\n'Damned right,' said Nefret, after this last witness had taken his leave. 'I beg your pardon, Aunt Amelia and Mrs Vandergelt.'\n\n'Granted,' said Katherine with a smile. She had got accustomed to hearing Nefret use bad language, and I had more or less given up hope of stopping Nefret from using it. She had learned a good deal of it from Emerson.\n\nAside from the unhelpful information about Layla, the majority of the witnesses had nothing much to say, though some of them said it at considerable length. Strangers had been seen coming and going from Layla's house; they were unfriendly people who would not stop and fahddle or answer questions. Finally Emerson put a stop to the proceedings with a vehement comment.\n\n'This isn't getting us anywhere. If any of the Gurnawis knew those fellows they won't admit it. Layla is our best lead. We must find her. Where can she have gone?'\n\nSir Edward had come with us, since no one had told him not to. He cleared his throat. 'Doesn't it seem likely that she would have crossed over to Luxor? The villages on the West Bank are small and close-knit; strangers are noticed. There is a certain part of Luxor... Forgive me. I ought not to have referred to it while there are ladies present.'\n\n'Oh, that part of Luxor,' I said. 'Hmmm.'\n\n'The thought had occurred to me,' Ramses said, with a hostile look at Sir Edward, who smiled amiably back.\n\n'Well, you are not to go there,' I declared. 'Nor David.'\n\nI did not forbid Nefret to go, because it would never have occurred to me that she would. Autopsies and mangled bodies, yes; the abodes of hardened criminals, certainly; but a house of illicit affection...\n\nI cannot imagine how I could have been so dense.\n\nSir Edward took leave of us at the place where we had stabled our horses with one of Abdullah's innumerable young relatives. He did not renew his offer of assistance, but the meaningful look he gave me was sufficient assurance that it held and would hold. He looked very well on horseback, and Nefret's eyes were not the only ones that followed his erect figure as he rode off towards the ferry.\n\nWe turned our horses in the direction of home and Cyrus said, 'I don't want to speak out of turn, Emerson, but darned if I can understand why you didn't jump at Sir Edward's offer. He's a husky young fellow and a smart one, too.'\n\n'I won't have him hanging about making eyes at my wife,' Emerson growled. 'Or Nefret.'\n\n'Well, now,' said Cyrus, in his quiet drawl, 'I don't recollect that there's any law against a fellow paying polite attentions to a lady so long as she doesn't object. And I have a feeling that if Miss Nefret did object she'd let him know in no uncertain terms.'\n\n'Damn \u2013 er \u2013 absolutely right,' said Nefret. 'Don't talk like a Victorian papa, Professor darling. We need Sir Edward. Especially if Lia and Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Walter join us.'\n\n'There won't be room in the house,' Emerson muttered. It was the last dying rumble of the volcano; Emerson has his little weaknesses but he is not a fool, and he recognized the inevitable.\n\n'There will be ample room if we can prevent our loved ones from coming,' I said. 'Sir Edward is at the Winter Palace, is he not? We will call on him, or leave a message, accepting his offer.'\n\nFor once there was no argument about what we should do next. It was imperative that we attempt to locate Layla, and the sooner the better. In my opinion Luxor was her most likely destination and it was there we stood the best chance of finding a trace of her. My suggestion that Ramses should go home and rest was met with stony silence on his part and a critical comment from Nefret.\n\n'I wouldn't trust him to stay there, Aunt Amelia. We had better let him come along so we can keep our eyes on him.'\n\nI had not intended to take her with us, but when I came to think of it, I did not trust her either. So we rode directly to the dock and two of our men took us across the river in the small boat we kept for that purpose."
            },
            {
                "title": "From Manuscript H",
                "text": "'How are we going to get away from them?' Nefret demanded.\n\nThey were waiting outside the railway ticket office while the senior Emersons interrogated the station master. The platform, the station house, and the path leading to it were teeming with people waiting to catch the train to Assuan. The sun was high overhead and the air was thick with dust. Nefret had taken off her hat and was fanning herself with it.\n\n'This is a waste of time,' she went on. 'How can the station master possibly remember one veiled woman? They all look alike in those black robes. Anyhow, they knew she had betrayed them, and the railway station is one of the first places they would have looked. If she is as clever as all you men seem to think, she would go into hiding until things quieten down, and there is only one logical place where she would go.'\n\n'Nefret, will you please be reasonable?' Ramses kept his voice low. 'I agree that Layla might have sought refuge among her old \u2013 er \u2013 acquaintances. The only way we can manage a visit to the place is with Father's cooperation. He means to go there himself, which would not be a good idea. David and I may be able to convince him we can be more effective than he, but there is no way on earth he would consent if he thought you were going with us.'\n\n'I wouldn't consent either,' David said. He stood slightly behind Ramses, his eyes moving suspiciously over the hurrying figures that passed.\n\nNefret slapped her hat on to her head and tied the ribbons under her chin. 'We'll see about that. Here they come. What luck, Professor?'\n\n'Better than I had expected,' was the reply. 'A woman purchased a ticket to Cairo early this morning. Her ornaments and clothing were those of a peasant, but the clerk remembered her because she was travelling alone and she paid for a second-class ticket. A woman of that sort would ordinarily travel third class, if she travelled at all. I am going to telegraph Cairo and ask the police to meet the train.'\n\nIt took a good deal of manoeuvring and distraction, and several outright lies, to arrange the matter as Ramses wished. After the telegraph office they went to the Winter Palace. Sir Edward was not there, so they decided to have luncheon at the hotel; and it was while the ladies had retired to freshen up that Ramses had the opportunity to talk with his father. The initial reaction was what he had expected \u2013 a flat, profane refusal.\n\n'You can't mean to go yourself, Father,' Ramses said. 'They wouldn't talk to you.'\n\nEmerson fixed him with an icy stare. 'They would feel more at ease with you?'\n\n'Yes, sir. I believe so.'\n\n'Everyone in Luxor is in awe of you, Professor,' David added. 'They might be afraid to speak freely.'\n\n'Bah,' Emerson said. 'No. No, it is impossible. I shudder to think what your mother would say if she found out I let you boys visit a bordello.'\n\n'What will she say if she finds out you mean to visit one, Father?' Ramses asked.\n\n'Er \u2013 hmph,' said Emerson, stroking his chin and glancing uneasily at the door of the Ladies' Parlour.\n\n'He's got you there, Emerson,' said Vandergelt, grinning. 'You're not a good liar. She'd see through any excuse you gave her, and she'd insist on going along. We sure don't want her traipsing around the \u2013 er \u2013 hmmm. Let the lads handle it.'\n\nRamses had been in an Egyptian brothel only once \u2013 in the course, it should be said, of a criminal investigation. The place had sickened him, though it had been one of the less offensive of its kind, catering as it did to Europeans and wealthy Egyptians. This one was worse. The main room opened directly on to the street and was separated from it by a kind of curtain made of strips of cloth. The shutters were closed and the only light came from a pair of hanging lamps. The room reeked of dirt and sweat and cheap perfume. It swarmed with flies, whose buzzing formed an incessant droning.\n\nTheir appearance produced another sound \u2013 a musical jingle of the ornaments adorning the breasts and ears and hair of the women who reclined on the cushioned divan that was the room's principal article of furniture. Wide dark eyes framed in kohl stared curiously at them, and one of the women rose, smoothing the thin fabic over her hips in a mechanical gesture of seduction. A curt word from another woman made her cringe back. The speaker stood up and came towards them. She was older than the others. Rolls of fat wobbled as she moved, and the coin-like disks that dangled from her headdress and necklace were of gold.\n\nDavid cleared his throat. They had agreed it would be better for him to speak first, but he was hoarse with embarrassment. 'We are looking for a woman.'\n\nA muted chorus of laughter followed this ingenuous remark, and the proprietress chuckled. 'Of course, young masters. Why else are you here?'\n\n'It's a good thing I came,' said a cool voice behind them. 'You had better let me do the talking, David.'\n\nRamses spun round. She had thrown back the hood of her cloak and her hair glimmered in the streaks of sunlight that filtered through the curtained door. She was like a flower that had sprung up in the middle of a cesspool; his first impulse was to snatch her up and carry her out of the foul place. Knowing how she would react \u2013 kicking and screaming would be the least of it \u2013 he took hold of her arm. 'What in the name of God are you doing here?'\n\n'I followed you. Mrs Vandergelt took Aunt Amelia to the shops, and I slipped away. You're hurting me,' she added reproachfully.\n\n'David, get her out of here.'\n\n'Don't you dare touch me, David!'\n\nBy that time they had a fascinated and augmented audience. Several other women had slipped into the room. They were dressed like the others, in flimsy, brightly coloured garments. Their uncovered faces ranged in shade from blue-black to creamy brown, and their hands and feet were stained with henna.\n\nNefret addressed the gaping proprietress in her rapid, simple Arabic.\n\n'We search for a friend, Sitt, a woman who did us a great service and who is in danger because of it. Her name is Layla. She lived in Gurneh, but she ran away from her house last night. We must find her before she comes to harm. Please help us. Have any of you seen her?'\n\nNot a flower, Ramses thought \u2013 a ray of sunlight in a dark cell. No stain of sin or sorrow could touch the shining compassion that filled her, or dim the brightness of her presence.\n\nFor a few seconds not even the sound of a drawn breath broke the stillness. Then someone moved; he couldn't tell which of them it was, only the soft tinkle of her ornaments betrayed the fact that movement had occurred.\n\nThe older woman folded her plump arms. 'Get out,' she said harshly. 'We cannot help you. What sort of men are you, to let one such as she come to this place?'\n\n'Excellent point,' said Ramses, recovering himself. He'd been reading too damned much poetry, that was his trouble. 'Nefret, it's no good. Come away.'\n\nShe stood her ground. 'You know who we are, where we live. If any of you know anything \u2013 if you want to leave this terrible life \u2013 come to us, we will help you escape \u2013'\n\nThe old woman burst into a flood of invective and shook her fists at them. Nefret didn't budge. She raised her voice and went on talking until Ramses and David dragged her out the door.\n\n'That was brilliant,' Ramses said, once they had retreated to a safe distance. 'Nefret, may I venture to suggest once again that you hold your tongue and control your emotions until you've given some little thought to what you are doing? You might have endangered yourself, and us.'\n\n'They wouldn't dare attack us,' Nefret muttered.\n\n'Perhaps not. The women are another matter.'\n\n'But I didn't mean... Oh, good heavens, do you think...'\n\nShe looked so stricken he hadn't the heart to continue scolding her. 'All I'm saying is that we didn't go there on a rescue expedition, admirable as that aim might have been. We were attempting to extract information, and trying to remove the merchandise is not the way to win a merchant's confidence.'\n\n'How can you joke about it?' Her blue eyes shone with tears of rage and compassion.\n\n'The only alternative is to curse God. Neither does any good.' His hands lingered as he adjusted the hood of her cloak over her bright head. 'Let me try once more.'\n\n'You are not going in there alone, Ramses,' David announced.\n\n'You can keep watch. Wait for me here.'\n\n'If you aren't out in five minutes I'll come after you,' Nefret said.\n\nHe was out in less than five minutes. 'Nothing,' he reported. 'No one saw her, no one would admit knowing her.'\n\n'I'll try another place,' David said heroically. His face was pinched with disgust.\n\n'No. I haven't the stomach for more either,' Ramses admitted 'The word will spread now \u2013 and one of the words I mentioned was \"reward.\" I didn't suppose any of them would dare speak up before the others. Come, let's get out of this.'\n\nWhen they reached the riverbank David had found a new source of worry. 'Aunt Amelia will want to know where we were. What shall we tell her?'\n\n'That we went to the Luxor garden for a cup of tea,' Nefret said. 'We'll go there now, so it won't be a lie.'\n\nShe was more composed now, her face pensive instead of angry. After they had found a table and ordered tea, she said, 'I did make a mess of things, didn't I?'\n\n'Not necessarily,' Ramses said. 'One never knows; an impulsive word from you may have had more effect than my methods.'\n\n'I won't ask what methods you used.' She smiled at him and took his bandaged hand gently in hers. 'I've been wanting to ask you about this \u2013 and a few other things. You must have hit someone very hard to do so much damage.'\n\n'There were two of them,' Ramses said, wondering what she was getting at.\n\n'In the house, you mean? You took on both of them at once? That was very brave of you.'\n\n'Not very.'\n\n'And what was Layla doing while you fought two men?'\n\nHer eyes were wide and innocent and as blue as the sea, and that was where she had maneuvered him \u2013 between the devil and the deep blue sea. He tried to think of a convincing lie and failed miserably; he couldn't remember precisely how much he had told them, but he must have said enough to get that quick, intuitive mind of hers on the right track.\n\n'Precisely what you suspect,' he said with a sigh. 'At least that was what she intended to do. Don't despise me, Nefret, I got there in time to prevent it. How the devil do you know these things?'\n\nHer fingers stroked his wrist, sending tremors all the way up his arm. 'I know you, my boy.'\n\n'Don't let your emotions get the better of you, Nefret. There's Mother. I might have known she'd track us down.' His mother was advancing with her usual brisk stride; there was only time for him to add with a faint smile, 'I hadn't much choice, dear. If you ever found out I had slunk away and left her, you'd have used my skin for a rug.'\n\nI have never succumbed to the lazy Eastern habit of sleeping in the afternoon, but I firmly believe that an active mind is in need of brief intervals of relaxation. After we had returned home after our busy, if fruitless, investigations, I lay down on my bed and picked up a book.\n\nI was roused from the meditative state into which I had fallen by sounds that made me start up with heart pounding. Steel ringing on steel \u2013 raised voices \u2013 the sounds of mortal combat! Rushing to the door, as I believed, I found myself tugging at the window shutters, which I had closed against the heat of the afternoon sun.\n\nThis momentary confusion was soon overcome and I emerged into the courtyard, where I stood transfixed. The sight was terrible: Ramses and David, barefooted, stripped to trousers and shirt, striking fiercely at one another with the long knives used by the Touareg. Mute and motionless with horror, I saw Ramses' knife drive home against David's breast.\n\nThe paralysis broke. I shrieked.\n\n'Good afternoon, Mother,' said Ramses. 'I am sorry if we woke you. Confound it, David, you were holding back. Again.'\n\nDavid rubbed his chest. 'Honestly, I was not. Good afternoon, Aunt Amelia. I am sorry if we \u2013'\n\n'Oh, good Gad!' I exclaimed. He was upright and smiling, without so much as a drop of blood spotting the white fabric. On a bench against the wall Nefret and Emerson sat side by side, like spectators at a performance.\n\n'Hello, Peabody,' Emerson said. 'Here, boys, let me have a go.'\n\nHe jumped up and began tugging at his shirt. A button popped off and fell to the ground. Emerson's hasty method of removing his garments makes it necessary for me to spend far too much time sewing on buttons. When I fix them firmly, the fabric tears instead, ruining the shirt.\n\n'Please, Emerson,' I said automatically. 'Not another shirt. What the devil is going on here?'\n\nI saw now that the knives had been blunted by strips of leather bound round the edge and sharp tip. Emerson said cheerfully, 'Ramses wanted some practise at fighting left-handed. It is a useful skill, don't you agree, Peabody?'\n\n'Quite,' I said.\n\nEmerson removed his shirt, losing only one more button in the process, and tossed it on to the bench. 'Let me have your knife, Ramses.'\n\n'Take David's,' said my son. Perspiration beaded his face and trickled down his throat. He had discarded the sling, and I observed that the bandage on his hand was a peculiar shade of green. 'He can't even attack me as hard as he ought; sheer awe of you would paralyze him.'\n\n'But not you, eh?' Emerson grinned. 'Right! Have at you, my boy!'\n\nTaking the knife from David's limp grasp, he stood poised, his knees flexed and his arms outstretched.\n\nI made my way to the bench and sat down next to Nefret. 'Those leather strips... What if they came undone?'\n\n'I fastened them on myself.' Nefret's brow was slightly furrowed. 'Ramses was keen on the idea, so... They look splendid, don't they?'\n\nI suppose they did. Emerson's magnificent muscles slid smoothly under his bronzed skin as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Ramses matched him in height if not in bulk; he was breathing rather quickly, but he was as light on his feet as his father. They circled one another slowly. Ramses was the first to attack; his knife drove at Emerson's ribs. Emerson twisted aside and struck Ramses' arm away. Ramses jumped back, throwing out his other arm to maintain his balance, and his father slashed at his unguarded breast. It was not a hard blow, but Ramses dropped his knife and doubled over, clutching his side.\n\n'Oh, curse it,' Emerson said, hurrying to him. 'Forgive me, my boy. Come and sit down.'\n\nRamses pulled away from his father's affectionate grasp and straightened. The blunted tip of Emerson's knife had caught in the opening of his shirt and pulled it apart. The bruise over his rib cage was the size and colour of a tarnished silver saucer. 'It's quite all right, sir. Shall we try again?'\n\nEmerson began, 'I will not take advantage \u2013'\n\n'The point of this exercise,' said Ramses, breathing hard, 'is learning to deal with an opponent who is delighted to take any advantage he can. I daresay I have had more practise at this than you, Father. Don't be afraid of hurting me again. I won't let you.'\n\n'That's enough,' Nefret said, jumping up. 'Curse you, Ramses, you bloody idiot!'\n\n'More than enough,' said Emerson. 'Ramses, my boy \u2013'\n\n'No harm done, sir, I assure you.' Ramses picked up his knife. 'If you will excuse me, I will go and clean up.'\n\n'If you will excuse me,' said Nefret to us, 'I will go and deal with Ramses. I told him not to take those bandages off!'\n\nEmerson cleared his throat. 'Er \u2013 Nefret, my dear, I know you mean well, but don't you think he might be more amenable if you \u2013 er \u2013 asked him nicely instead of \u2013 er \u2013 calling him names?'\n\n'Hmph,' said Nefret \u2013 but she looked a little self-conscious. 'All right, sir, I will try. Come and help me, David. If gentle persuasion doesn't do the job, you will have to hold him down.'\n\n'What's wrong, Peabody?' Emerson inquired. 'I am a confounded clumsy idiot, but I don't believe he is much hurt.'\n\n'I am sure he is not.'\n\nMy voice was not entirely steady. Emerson put a manly arm round my shoulders and made comforting noises. He seldom gets the chance to treat me like a timid little woman, and he enjoys it very much.\n\nAbsolute nonsense, of course. I am quite accustomed to deadly weapons of all varieties. I carry several myself: pistol and knife, and of course my parasol. Nor had my conscious mind been misled by the mock combat between the two boys; I had seen them practise before, with bare hands and with knives, and I knew either of them would have rather died than harm the other. Why then had I felt a sensation as of icy hands closing over my heart? Could it be that I had beheld not the harmless present but the deadly future \u2013 the portent of an encounter yet to come?\n\nAt dinner that evening David again raised the question of what we were to do about those dear ones who were even then on their way to us. I assured him I had not forgot the matter, but had only postponed it since we had had more pressing problems to deal with.\n\n'They sailed from Marseilles yesterday morning and will not arrive in Alexandria until Monday next,' I explained. 'That gives us two more days.'\n\n'One,' said Ramses. 'The steamer arrives early in the morning, so if we want to head them off one of us should take the train to Cairo on Sunday.'\n\n'I believe we became a bit overexcited the other evening,' I said. 'The danger to them is surely minimal, and they will be disappointed not to come on.'\n\n'Especially Lia,' Nefret said. 'She has looked forward to this so much. She has been studying Arabic all this past winter.'\n\n'They must be warned, at least,' I said. 'I will take the train \u2013'\n\n'Not on any account, Peabody,' said Emerson, glowering at me. 'Do you suppose I don't know what you intend? Your mind is an open book to me. I will not have you perambulating around Cairo interrogating antiquities dealers and harassing the police and \u2013'\n\n'One of the boys could come with me.'\n\n'No,' said Nefret, as emphatically as Emerson. 'Never mind Cairo, the journey itself is too risky. Fourteen hours on the train, with several stops \u2013 good Gad, all it would take is a gun in your ribs or a knife at your back.'\n\n'Then what do you propose?' David asked with unusual heat. 'One of us must go, there is no question of that, and surely I am the most logical person. They won't bother with me.'\n\nI believe the others were as taken aback as I. For a moment the only sound that broke the silence was the fluttering of insects round the lamp. A moth, drawn by the fatal lure of the flame, dropped down the glass chimney and expired in a brief burst of glory.\n\n'Don't talk like a damned fool,' Ramses said brusquely.\n\n'I would not have put it that way, but I endorse the sentiment most emphatically,' I said. 'David, how can you suppose we would be indifferent to a threat directed at you? You are one of us.'\n\n'Quite,' said Emerson. 'None of us is going. I would take on the job myself, but I cannot trust the rest of you to behave yourselves. I am sending Selim and Daoud.'\n\n'Brains and muscle,' I said, smiling. 'That is the ideal solution, Emerson. They can carry a letter from me, explaining the situation and urging Walter to take the next boat back to England. Unless, of course, we can solve the case before then.'\n\n'Before Sunday morning?' Ramses inquired, raising his eyebrows.\n\n'Don't be absurd, Peabody,' Emerson grunted.\n\n'Hmmmm,' said Nefret.\n\n'We can at least make a start,' David said. 'Tomorrow in Luxor \u2013'\n\n'What are you talking about?' Emerson stared at him. 'Tomorrow is a workday.'\n\n'Oh, come, Emerson, you surely don't intend to resume work as if nothing had happened,' I exclaimed.\n\n'I do not intend,' said Emerson, 'to allow anyone, male, female, or fiend in human form, to stop my excavations. What the devil is wrong with you, Peabody? What the devil is wrong with all of you?' He raked our faces with his glittering blue gaze. 'We've been in situations as difficult as this before, and faced enemies as unscrupulous. Riccetti and Vincey and \u2013'\n\n'Never mind the rest,' I said. 'It is a long list, Emerson, I admit. Perhaps you are right. We will not huddle in the house starting at shadows. We will not be intimidated!'\n\n'Bravely spoken, Mother.' Ramses sounded amused, though his countenance did not display that emotion or any other. 'However, I trust you won't object to taking a few precautions.'\n\n'Such as?'\n\n'The same precautions Mrs Vandergelt suggested. Guards, several of them, here at the house by night and by day. None of us is to go anywhere alone, or with only one other person. Keep your eyes open and trust no one.'\n\n'That applies to you and David as well,' said Emerson, studying him keenly. 'You are coming with us tomorrow, to the Valley.'\n\n'Yes, sir.'\n\nEmerson had not expected such ready agreement. His stern face relaxed into a smile. 'You'll enjoy it, my boy. We have cleared the entrance to tomb Five, and Ayrton has found a cache of storage jars!'\n\n'Indeed. That is exciting news, sir.'\n\n'Yes. You know the terrain.' Emerson pushed his plate away and took a handful of fruit from the bowl. 'Here is number Five, this fig is the entrance to Ramses VI...'\n\nNot even a threat of murder can distract Emerson indefinitely from the joy of excavation. I did not object when he poured a pile of sugar on to the table and demonstrated the approximate location of Ned Ayrton's find. His superb self-confidence had restored mine. I felt ashamed of myself for yielding, however briefly, to weakness. And how foolish had been that earlier fantasy of discord! We were utterly devoted to one another. Brothers could not be closer than Ramses and David."
            },
            {
                "title": "From Manuscript H",
                "text": "Sitting on the window ledge he waited for a long time, watching the slits of light that showed through the shuttered window of his parents' room. They must be arguing. Nothing surprising about that. It would end as it always did, but it was taking them devilish long tonight.\n\nThe courtyard lay quiet under the moon. His father had brushed aside his mother's suggestion that it be lighted, and he was in full agreement. The best possible solution was not to deter invaders but to catch them in the act. It wasn't likely that anything of that sort would happen, though. 'They' wouldn't risk entering the house when there were easier ways.\n\nA few of the precautions he had suggested had been taken. There were bars on the outer windows now, those of his \u2013 formerly Nefret's \u2013 room and of his parents'. They could be removed, but not without making a lot of noise. The gates were barred and the glow of a cigarette in one corner betokened the presence of Mustafa, Daoud's second son.\n\nFinally the slits of light at his parents' window disappeared. He waited a little longer before lowering his feet to the ground.\n\nNefret was still awake. She was not alone. The voices were soft, he couldn't make out the words. Was she talking to the damned cat? Somehow he didn't think so.\n\nEavesdropping was a despicable habit. But, as he had once told his mother, cursed useful. I ought not to do this, he thought, as he put his ear against the panel.\n\n'You should tell him, David. It isn't fair not to.'\n\n'I know.' David's voice was so low he could barely make out the words. 'I've tried, but \u2013'\n\nHe was not consciously aware of pressing the latch. The door seemed to open by itself. They were sitting side by side on the bed. Nefret's arm was around David, and he had covered his face with his hands.\n\nDavid lowered his hands. 'Ramses!'\n\n'Excuse me.' He stepped back. 'I didn't know you were here.'\n\n'We were just about to go looking for you,' Nefret said, jumping up. 'Come in and close the door.'\n\n'No. I apologize for intruding. I'll go.'\n\n'What's the matter?' Nefret asked. 'Is your hand bothering you?'\n\n'No, not at all. I \u2013'\n\n'Close the damned door.'\n\nShe did it for him and pushed him into the nearest chair. 'I want to dress your hand again. David, get me a basin of water, will you?'\n\nShe cut through the cloth and guided his hand into the water. A green stain spread out, and Nefret eased the bandage off. 'Amazing,' she murmured. 'The confounded stuff does seem to be effective. The swelling has gone down.'\n\n'It looks horrible,' David said in a smothered voice.\n\n'That's because it's green,' Nefret explained.\n\n'It does rather suggest rotting flesh,' Ramses agreed. 'But it feels considerably better. I suppose Kadija gave you the ointment this morning?'\n\n'She slipped it to me while Aunt Amelia wasn't looking. Daoud got it from her, did you know that? She says the women of her family have handed the recipe down for generations. One of these days I must take a sample home and have it analyzed. Now, this is going to hurt. What shall we talk about that will prove sufficiently distracting? I know! Sir Edward. Do you think he's the Master Criminal in disguise?'\n\nIt did hurt. He set his teeth. 'So that occurred to you, did it?'\n\n'Really, Ramses, you are so exasperating! You might at least look surprised when I announce a startling theory. I've been thinking about the fortuitous appearance of the gallant Sir Edward. The last time we saw him was the year we had all that trouble with Riccetti and the rival gang of antiquities thieves. It was Sir Edward who rescued Aunt Amelia from one of the latter group. He had followed her that day for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained \u2013'\n\n'That was just Father being sarcastic,' Ramses said impatiently. 'He thinks every man Mother meets falls madly in love with her.'\n\n'But Sir Edward wasn't madly in love with her, was he? So why did he follow her that day? Riccetti was trying to reestablish his control over the illegal antiquities game in Egypt. So were other people. Why should not one of them have been the Master Criminal himself?'\n\n'It's an interesting idea,' David said thoughtfully. 'Sir Edward does match her description, doesn't he? Just under six feet tall, well built, athletic. And an Englishman.'\n\n'He's too young,' Ramses objected.\n\n'Too young for what?' David asked. 'He appears to be in his middle to late thirties, but the man is an expert at disguise. And you don't know how old Sethos was when you first met him. A very young man can be brilliant, and be capable of a grand passion.'\n\nRamses stiffened. Nefret paused in the act of winding the bandage round his hand. 'Too tight?'\n\n'No. Get it over with, can't you?'\n\n'Ungrateful brute,' said Nefret without rancour. 'There's another suspicious point about the gentleman. When we first knew him, he called himself a poor relation, a younger son who had to work for a living. You heard what he said the other night, about an inheritance from an uncle that had made him financially independent. So what's he doing in Egypt? He did demonstrate some interest in and talent for archaeology, but if that interest had been sincere he'd have come back before this, wouldn't he? Why has he turned up now? There you are, my boy. All done.'\n\n'Thank you.' He wriggled the fingers she had left protruding. 'Far be it from me to cast cold water on an intriguing theory, but I can think of another reason for Sir Edward's reappearance that has nothing to do with criminal activities.'\n\nNefret sat back on her heels and smiled at him. 'Me.'\n\n'You. Yes.'\n\n'Oh, he's interested,' Nefret said calmly. 'He might be even more interested if I gave him any encouragement.'\n\n'You've flirted outrageously with him!'\n\n'Of course.' Nefret chuckled. 'It's fun. Ramses, you are such an old Puritan! If it will relieve your mind, I am not in love with Sir Edward. He's extremely attractive and utterly charming, but I don't care for him that way.'\n\n'Then he wasn't the man you were seeing in... Sorry. None of my affair.'\n\n'In London?' The soft chuckle deepened into a laugh. 'No, it isn't your affair, but if you hadn't been so confounded inquisitive I'd have told you. He was one of the medical students from Saint Bart's. I thought, innocent creature that I am, that he was interested in my mind. He wasn't. Now can we get back to business?'\n\nRamses nodded. A few days earlier he would have been delighted to learn she wasn't interested in Sir Edward or the unfortunate medical student (he wished he had been on the scene when Nefret dealt with the fellow's advances). Now there was another, far more dangerous rival. Or was there? He wondered if he was losing what was left of his mind.\n\n'I suppose he can't be Sethos,' Nefret admitted. 'It's a pity. Aunt Amelia needs all the protectors she can find. Sethos would die to keep her from harm!'\n\n'My God, you're beginning to romanticize the fellow,' Ramses said in disgust.\n\n'He is romantic,' Nefret said dreamily. 'Suffering from a hopeless passion for a woman he can never have, watching over her from the shadows...'\n\n'You've been reading too many rotten novels,' Ramses said caustically. 'If Sethos is still in love with Mother, he'll be after her himself. If he isn't, he won't bother defending her.'\n\n'Goodness, what a cynic you are!' Nefret exclaimed.\n\n'A realist,' Ramses corrected. 'Disinterested passion is a contradiction in terms. What man outside a romantic novel would risk his life for a woman he can never possess?'\n\n'Didn't you risk yours, for Layla?'\n\nRamses shifted uncomfortably. 'How the devil do we get on to such subjects? What I meant to say was that a second party who has designs on Mother is a complication we don't need. When is Sir Edward joining us?'\n\n'Tomorrow. There's plenty of room if Uncle Walter and the others don't come.'\n\nRamses nodded. 'I only hope...'\n\n'What?'\n\n'That they can be persuaded to return home.' Absently he rubbed his side.\n\nNefret put her hand over his. 'Does it hurt? Let me give you something to help you sleep.'\n\n'It doesn't hurt, it itches. I don't need anything to help me sleep. I think I will turn in, though. It's been rather a long day.'\n\nIt was a longer night. He dreamed again of fighting blindly in the dark, of hands that clawed and pounded at his face, of his own hands fumbling and failing, and finding at last the only hold that might save them. Again his stomach turned at the sound of shattering bone, again the brief flare of a match illumined the dead face. But this time the face was David's."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "When I approached the verandah next morning I heard the murmur of voices and wondered who was up so early. Emerson had been splashing and sputtering over his ablutions when I left the room, so I concluded it must be the children.\n\nI was in error.\n\n'Good morning, Sir Edward,' I said, surprised. 'And \u2013 Fatima?'\n\n'I intended to creep on to the verandah without disturbing anyone,' he explained, rising to his feet. 'But this kind woman found me and brought me tea.'\n\nFatima ducked her head. 'She has been good enough to allow me to practise my Arabic,' Sir Edward went on easily. 'I hope I am not too early? I wanted to be in time to accompany you to the Valley, and I know the Professor's habits.'\n\n'Excellent,' I said. 'The others will be here soon, Fatima; you may serve breakfast. Thank you.'\n\n'She understands English?' Sir Edward laughed ruefully. 'I might have spared her my appalling Arabic had I known.'\n\n'She has been studying English, and learning to read as well. Ambition and intelligence and the love of learning are not limited to the masculine gender, or to a particular race, Sir Edward. We are all brothers and sisters in the eyes of heaven, and if education were available to Egyptians \u2013'\n\n'Lecturing again, Peabody?' said Emerson from the open door. 'Good morning, Sir Edward. Come and have breakfast, we must be off in a quarter of an hour.'\n\nIt was nearer half an hour before we left the house, primarily because Ramses and Nefret got into another argument. She wanted him to wear the sling and he said he would not.\n\n'You will keep hitting your hand,' she insisted.\n\n'It will be my own damned fault if I do,' said Ramses.\n\nI told Ramses not to swear and Nefret said he was a damned stubborn fool, and everyone added his opinion, except Sir Edward, who would have feigned a courteous deafness had that been possible, which it was not, since all their voices were quite loud. Emerson finally put an end to the discussion by shouting louder than anyone else and demanding that we get off at once.\n\nI was especially glad that day that we had got into the habit of hiring horses for the season instead of relying on donkeys and our own feet. One feels \u2013 and is \u2013 much more vulnerable mounted on a little animal not much taller than oneself, which does not take kindly to moving faster than a trot. The boys' splendid steeds could outrun anything on four feet, and even the horses we had hired were in excellent condition, especially after I had attended to them as I always did animals that came under my care.\n\nSir Edward had borrowed one of Cyrus' mounts. It and the other horses were waiting when we emerged from the house. I watched Ramses out of the corner of my eye, wondering how he would manage; he had of course lost the argument and his right arm was enveloped in what appeared to be a bedsheet, for Nefret did nothing by halves. Risha snuffled inquiringly at the fabric, and, with an uncanny appearance of understanding the difficulty, adjusted his hindquarters in the position required for the spectacular flying mount Ramses used when he wanted to show off. Success depended in part on the strength and length of the rider's lower limbs, and Ramses accomplished it without visible effort.\n\nWe left the horses at the donkey park in charge of one of the attendants. The men, headed by Abdullah, were already at work. A cloud of pale dust surrounded the entrance of number Five, from which one of our brave fellows emerged carrying a basket of broken rock. The sound of pickaxes could be heard from within. Cursing, Emerson stripped off his coat and threw it on the ground. 'Late!' he cried, in poignant, generalized accusation, and without further ado plunged into the dark opening. Ramses promptly followed.\n\n'Doesn't the Professor trust Abdullah to direct operations?' Sir Edward asked.\n\n'As much as he trusts anyone. He believes he should be the one to make the decisions and take the risks.'\n\n'Risks?' Sir Edward glanced betrayingly at Nefret, who was helping David with the cameras.\n\n'There are always risks entering a new tomb,' I replied, dusting off Emerson's coat and putting it over my arm. 'And this one is quite nasty \u2013 filled to the ceiling with broken rock and debris.'\n\n'Why bother with it, then?'\n\nEmerson reappeared in time to hear the question. His black hair looked as if it had been powdered. 'Why bother?' he repeated. 'That, sir, is a stupid question from someone who claims to have an interest in Egyptology. However \u2013 ' He turned and shouted, 'Ramses! Come out of there!'\n\nWhen Ramses had done so, Emerson said, 'I am about to explain the interesting features of this tomb to Sir Edward. You and David have not been with us, so you may as well listen too.'\n\nRamses opened his mouth, caught his father's eye, closed his mouth, and nodded.\n\n'Ahem,' said Emerson, removing a sheet of paper from his notebook. 'This tomb is described by Baedeker and other sources as a short corridor tomb without inscriptions. This is not correct. Burton actually entered the place in 1825. His plan shows an arrangement quite unlike any other sepulchre in the Valley: a great sixteen pillared hall, with smaller rooms on all four sides, and an extension of unknown length beyond. Burton couldn't get any farther. However, in two places he found traces of the prenomen of Ramses II. Wilkinson \u2013'\n\n'Emerson,' I said, anticipating the interruption I could see hovering on the lips of my son, 'you needn't go into such detail. You are boring Sir Edward.'\n\n'Not at all,' said that gentleman with a winning smile. 'The Professor is playing a little game with me, I think, or perhaps testing me. This cannot be the tomb of Ramses II, for his lies just across the way. Number Seven, isn't it?'\n\n'Yes,' said Emerson. 'As I was saying before my wife interrupted me, the unusual plan and certain other evidence suggest this was a multiple burial. We have begun the clearance of the first chamber. It is slow going, since the cursed place is packed hard with rubble. I won't be needing you for a while, Ramses; you might \u2013 er \u2013 just go along and say hello to Ayrton. He missed you the other day. And,' he added emphatically, 'we missed him this morning because of being so confounded late.'\n\n'Yes, sir,' said Ramses.\n\nHe and David, who of course accompanied him, were gone quite some time. We were about to stop for our mid-morning tea when they turned up, and Emerson immediately demanded to know what was going on.\n\n'Nothing of interest,' said Ramses, accepting a glass of tea. 'Ned sent off a message to Mr Davis yesterday informing him he had found a tomb, but \u2013'\n\n'What?' Emerson exclaimed. 'Not that niche with the storage jars? That is obviously \u2013'\n\n'Yes, sir,' said Ramses. 'Some feet below that niche was a surface that had been squared off and smoothed, suggesting that a tomb might have been begun. That was why I remained, to see what came of it, but there was no entrance. Ned has just dispatched another messenger to tell Mr Davis it had been a false alarm.'\n\n'What's he done with the jars?' Emerson asked greedily.\n\n'Sent them to his house, I believe. Mr Davis,' said Ramses without expression, 'will want to investigate them himself.'\n\n'Curse it,' said Emerson.\n\nThe day passed without further discoveries by Ayrton or ourselves; there were reliefs on the walls of the first chamber, but not until later in the day, after the dust raised by the feet of the men had settled, were we able to examine them by candlelight. Though damaged, enough remained to arouse the interest of my hypercritical son.\n\n'The scenes are reminiscent of those in the princes' tombs S. Schiaparelli found in the Valley of the Queens,' he remarked. 'We ought to get at them as soon as possible, Father, the plaster is loose and the least vibration \u2013'\n\n'Confound it, Ramses, I am only too well aware of that,' Emerson replied. 'It will have to wait until we have got the place cleared out a bit more. We will need better light. Reflectors might do it, but if I can run an electric wire...'\n\nHe stopped speaking, his face glum. He was remembering the happy days when Howard Carter held the post of Inspector. Emerson's slightest wish had been Howard's command, and Mr Quibell, his successor, had been almost as obliging. It remained to be seen whether Mr Weigall would agree to Emerson's request for a wire to be run from the electric engine in the tomb of Ramses XI. I was not particularly sanguine about it.\n\nWe returned to the house and dispersed in various directions \u2013 the children to the stable with the horses, Emerson to his desk in the sitting room. Sir Edward's luggage had been brought over from the hotel, so I showed him to his room and left him to unpack. After refreshing myself and changing my dusty clothes I told Fatima to serve tea and settled down on the verandah to read the messages that had been delivered.\n\nThere was only one of particular interest. After the others had joined me, I handed it to Emerson, to whom it had been addressed. With a sour look at me, he tossed it on to the table.\n\n'I see you have already read it, Peabody. Why don't you just tell us what it says?'\n\n'Certainly, my dear. It is a telegram from the Cairo police. They met the train, as we requested, but found no woman answering to Layla's description.'\n\nDuring the course of the day I had told Sir Edward about the steps we had taken, so he understood the reference. He shook his head doubtfully.\n\n'She could easily have eluded them. You know what utter confusion reigns at the station \u2013 masses of people shoving and shouting, all trying to get on and off the train at the same time.'\n\nI had requested Nefret to pour. She looked very dainty and ladylike in her white muslin frock, though the bulk of Horus filling her lap and overflowing on to the settee rather spoiled the picture. The cat raised his head and growled at Ramses when he approached the table to take the cup Nefret had filled for him; being accustomed to Horus' little ways, he managed to get hold of it without being clawed. Retreating to the ledge, he said, 'It is possible she never took the train, or intended to do so. She could have purchased the ticket as a blind, to mislead the others.'\n\n'That possibility occurred to me, of course,' I said.\n\n'Of course,' Ramses echoed. He fished something out of his cup. 'Nefret, could you keep that cat from dipping his tail in the tea?'\n\nSir Edward laughed and removed another hair from his upper lip. 'They do shed in warm weather, don't they? That is a very handsome animal, Miss Forth. Yours, I presume?'\n\n'If you are going to blather on about cats I am going to my study,' Emerson grunted.\n\n'I assure you, Emerson, I have more serious topics in mind,' I told him. 'But allow me to remind you that you were the one who complained the other day about conversation unsuitable for the tea table.'\n\n'On that occasion we were discussing mutilated bodies and hideous wounds,' Emerson retorted, animation warming his tanned, well-formed features. 'And murder cults. You were the one who brought up that absurd idea!'\n\n'It has not been disproved. The crocodile god \u2013'\n\n'Has nothing to do with anything! Yussuf Mahmud \u2013'\n\n'Crocodiles!' Sir Edward exclaimed. He took a sandwich from the plate Fatima offered and gave her a smiling nod. 'Forgive me for interrupting, sir, but I presume you are referring to the body drawn from the river last week. Do you believe that that bizarre incident is related to your present difficulties?'\n\n'Not at all,' said Emerson. 'Mrs Emerson is always getting off the track.'\n\nI would have pointed out the injustice of the charge had my mouth not been full of tomato sandwich. Before I could swallow, Ramses said coolly, 'An interesting suggestion, Sir Edward. How much do you know about our present \u2013 er \u2013 difficulties?'\n\n'Only what has occurred since my arrival in Luxor,' was the prompt reply. 'Far be it from me to inquire into matters of a private nature, but I would be better able to serve you if I were made cognizant of the relevant facts.'\n\n'The difficulty,' I admitted, 'is in knowing what facts are relevant. However, certain earlier incidents are almost certainly part of the business, and I agree you are entitled to hear of them.'\n\nI waited for an objection, but there was none, though Emerson scowled and Ramses looked particularly blank. I therefore proceeded to narrate the adventure of the three comrades and the Book of the Dead.\n\n'Good God!' Sir Edward exclaimed. 'You went to el Was'a, Miss Forth?'\n\nNefret banged her cup into her saucer with almost as much force as Emerson would have employed when in a similar state of indignation. 'You may as well get one thing straight, Sir Edward, if you are to join our company. I am an adult, independent woman, and I won't allow any man, including you, to wrap me in cotton wool.'\n\nHe apologized, fulsomely and at length, and at Nefret's request Emerson went and got the papyrus. Sir Edward studied it with the fascinated attention of a true scholar.\n\n'Astonishing,' he breathed. 'What are you going to do with it?'\n\nRamses, who was standing guard over the scroll, replied, 'It will go to a museum eventually, but not until after I have copied and translated it.'\n\n'It appears to be in excellent condition,' Sir Edward reached out his hand. Ramses slid the lid over the box.\n\n'It will not remain in that condition if it is handled repeatedly.'\n\nI resumed my narrative. When I had finished, Sir Edward said, 'As I once mentioned, Mrs Emerson, your narrative style is remarkably vivacious. You believe, then, that the papyrus is the object of the attentions you have received?'\n\n'It is one possibility,' said Ramses.\n\n'Yes, quite. What are your plans, then? For I feel sure you don't mean to sit idly by until something else happens.'\n\n'There is not a great deal we can do,' said Ramses, who had obviously appointed himself spokesman. 'Layla is the only person we know about \u2013 the only one who isn't dead, that is \u2013 and we have not yet succeeded in tracing her. She is not in Gurneh. Abdullah and his people conducted a house-to-house search, and I assure you, they were thorough.'\n\n'Have you questioned her former \u2013 er \u2013 associates?'\n\nHe looked apologetically at Nefret, who said, 'Prostitutes, you mean.'\n\n'Er \u2013 yes.'\n\n'We have already investigated that group,' said Ramses.\n\n'We?' Sir Edward repeated, raising one eyebrow.\n\n'We!' I exclaimed. 'What have you done? Ramses, I strictly forbade you and David to... Where did you go \u2013 and how, if a mere mother may ask, did you know where to go?'\n\n'Now, Peabody, calm yourself,' Emerson began.\n\n'Emerson, how could you allow them to do such a thing?'\n\n'Someone had to,' Emerson insisted. 'Layla might have sought temporary refuge with her \u2013 er \u2013 sisters in misfortune. Don't be such a bloo \u2013 blooming hypocrite, Peabody, you know perfectly well you would have gone yourself if I had given you the chance.'\n\n'None of them admitted knowing anything,' said Ramses. 'But one would not expect them to, in front of the others. I mentioned a reward. We may yet receive information from one of the \u2013 er \u2013 ladies.'\n\n'Girls, you mean,' Nefret muttered. 'Some of them no older than \u2013'\n\nRamses broke into a fit of coughing, and Nefret said hastily, 'I'm sure you would like more tea, Sir Edward. Do bring me your cup.'\n\nHe rose obediently, smiling a little, and approached her.\n\n'And how,' I inquired, 'do you know their ages?'\n\n'Curse it!' said Nefret.\n\n'Damnation!' said Sir Edward, dropping his cup. Tepid tea and bright red blood dripped on to Nefret's skirt. Growling, Horus withdrew the paw that had raked Sir Edward's hand.\n\nI administered first aid and apologies, which Sir Edward accepted with the comment that he was pleased to know Miss Forth had such a faithful guardian. Nefret made good her escape, with the excuse \u2013 which had a certain validity \u2013 that she must change and rinse the blood out before it set. Emerson declared he had work to do before dinner. Sir Edward said he believed he would take a stroll. How the boys eluded me I do not know, but when I looked round I realized I was alone.\n\nI went after Ramses first, but could not locate him or David anywhere in the house. Nefret had barred her door. She pretended not to hear my knock, so I went round to the window and banged on the shutters until she opened them.\n\nWe had a little chat.\n\nWhen I left her I looked for Emerson and found he had gone to earth in a quiet corner of the courtyard. He was smoking his pipe and talking with Ramses. Ramses got to his feet when he saw me. He may have been exhibiting the good manners I had taught him, but his pose strongly suggested that he was about to bolt.\n\n'Don't scold the lad, Peabody,' Emerson said, making room for me on the bench. 'He came to me, in a very manly fashion, and attempted to take full responsibility for Nefret's behaviour. I do not hold him accountable.' He sighed. 'I do not hold anyone accountable for Nefret.'\n\n'I have just talked with her,' I said.\n\n'Ah,' said Emerson hopefully. 'Did she promise she would never do it again?'\n\n'No. She said she would do it again as soon as she could, and as often as possible.' I smiled somewhat ruefully at my son. 'Sit down, Ramses, and don't look so wary. I do not blame you. Nefret is... In a nutshell, she is precisely the daughter I would have chosen! She is determined to help those unfortunate women, and I believe she can and will.'\n\n'She wants to help the whole bloody suffering world,' Ramses said. He appeared to be watching a beetle that was heading purposefully for a bit of bread crust. 'She'll break her heart, Mother.'\n\n'Broken hearts can be mended,' I said. 'A heart that is impervious to pain is also impervious to joy.'\n\nEmerson snorted, and Ramses looked up. 'No doubt that is true, Mother. However, we must also consider the risk to Nefret's \u2013 er \u2013 body. Aside from the other dangers involved in attacking a business enterprise of that sort, there is the strong possibility that some of the women in the House of the Doves are in the pay of our unknown enemy.'\n\n'Damned right,' said Emerson. 'None of you is to go to that quarter again, do you hear?'\n\n'I doubt additional visits would produce useful results,' Ramses replied. 'We have done what we could.'\n\n'Agreed,' I said. 'Now go and find David, Ramses, and tell him it is safe to come out of hiding. Dinner will be ready shortly.'\n\nAfter he had taken a cup of postprandial coffee with us, Sir Edward begged to be excused. 'I have letters to write,' he explained with a smile. 'My dear mother is quite frail; I try to write at least three times a week.'\n\n'If she is that confounded frail, why doesn't he stay with her?' Emerson inquired after the young man had left the room.\n\n'That was only a courteous excuse, Emerson. He does not wish to intrude on our privacy. Speaking of letters, we have messages of our own to write. I will write to Evelyn; will you pen a line to Walter? The rest of you may include messages if you like; remember, we must convince them to return home at once, but avoid alarming them.'\n\n'Not such an easy task,' Ramses murmured.\n\nNor was it. I laboured for some time over my note, rubbing words out and changing them. When at last I was satisfied I had done the best I could, I put down my pencil. His pen poised, David was frowning over the paper on the table before him. The others, including Emerson, were reading.\n\n'I thought you were going to write to Walter, Emerson,' I said.\n\n'I have.'\n\nI picked up the paper he indicated. It read: 'Catch the next boat home. Sincere regards, R.E.'\n\n'Really, Emerson,' I exclaimed.\n\n'Well, why repeat information you have probably given in excruciating detail? You've been at it for hours, Peabody.'\n\n'Hardly so long, my dear. I have given them all the necessary information, however. Nefret, do you want to add anything?'\n\n'That depends on how detailed that information of yours is,' Nefret replied. 'What did you say about Ramses and David? You know how Aunt Evelyn worries.'\n\n'You may read the letter if you like.'\n\nRamses leaned over her shoulder and read with her. 'Hmmm. You have vivid powers of description, Mother. Perhaps I had better add a few lines of reassurance.'\n\n'With your left hand?' Nefret shook her head. 'My dear boy, a scrawl like that would only worry Aunt Evelyn more. I know; I will append a medical report. The facts will be less alarming than the fancies a loving imagination can invent.'\n\nShe was still writing when Selim and Daoud came in. They were to catch the morning train, so Emerson gave them money for expenses and warned them again to be on the alert.\n\n'Stay until you have seen them board the boat,' he instructed 'No matter how long it takes. Curse it,' he added gloomily, contemplating the reduction of his work force by two of its most valuable members.\n\n'What if Mr Walter Emerson will not go?' Selim inquired.\n\n'Knock him on the head and \u2013'\n\n'Now, Emerson, don't confuse the lad,' I said, for Selim's eyes and mouth had gone wide with consternation. 'You must just... Well. What should he do?'\n\n'It is high time someone asked that question,' said Ramses. 'We've been talking about them as if they were parcels to be dispatched at our convenience. I've seen Aunt Evelyn in action, and I assure you she will not take kindly to being ordered about.'\n\n'Walter won't want to go either,' I agreed. 'But there is the child. They cannot send her home unaccompanied, and they surely won't expose her to danger. No loving parent would.'\n\nThe silence that ensued was not precisely uncomfortable. Not precisely. Ramses, who was standing behind Nefret with his hands resting on the back of her chair, stared off into space with a particularly blank expression.\n\n'Hmph,' said Emerson loudly. 'Selim was quite right to raise the point. There is a possibility, I suppose, that Walter will pack Evelyn and the child on to the boat and come on here himself. Evelyn might not like it, but she would accept it. Not even she would expect him to let her come alone, or bring Lia.'\n\n'I wouldn't count on that,' I said. 'If one or all of them insists on coming here, Selim, he \u2013 or she! \u2013 must do as she likes. They are free agents, after all. We can only advise and warn, we cannot command them.'\n\nWe gave the letters to Selim and wished him and Daoud a good journey. Daoud embraced David and wrung Ramses' and Emerson's hands. He was a very silent man, but he had followed every word with extreme interest, and he was obviously pleased and proud to have been selected for such an important mission.\n\nWe dispersed shortly thereafter. Emerson went off arm in arm with Nefret; I knew he would find some transparent excuse to search her room before he let her enter it. I followed Ramses, and caught him up at the door of his room.\n\n'Yes, Mother?' He raised an inquiring eyebrow.\n\n'How is your hand? Would you like me to have a look at it?'\n\n'Nefret changed the bandage before we went to dinner.'\n\n'A little laudanum to help you sleep?'\n\n'No, thank you.' He waited for a moment, watching me. Then he said, 'You didn't expose me to danger, Mother. You did your damnedest to keep me out of it.'\n\n'Don't swear, Ramses.'\n\n'I beg your pardon, Mother.'\n\n'Good night, my dear.'\n\n'Good night, Mother.'\n\nI had long since despaired of persuading my family to attend church services on Sunday. Their religious backgrounds were diverse, to say the least. David's father had been a Christian, in name at least, though, in Abdullah's picturesque words, he had 'died cursing God.' Nefret had been Priestess of Isis in a community where the old gods of Egypt were worshipped, and I had a nasty suspicion she had not entirely abandoned her belief in those heathen deities. Perhaps she shared the views of Abdullah, who was something of a heathen himself: 'There is no harm in protecting oneself from that which is not true!' Emerson's views on the subject of organized religion ranged from the blasphemous to the merely rude, and Ramses never expressed his views, if he had any. So for us the Sabbath was a workday like any other, since we allowed our Moslem workers their day of rest on Friday. We were therefore up bright and early and ready to return to the Valley. It had been a quiet night, without incident.\n\nLater that morning Ned Ayrton joined us for a brief period of refreshment, as he had got into the habit of doing. Let me add that this was in no way a reflection upon his work habits, which were conscientious to a fault. Many excavators do not pause for breakfast until after they have been at work for several hours. We always took a little rest and a cup of tea at around ten in the morning, and so did Ned. I do not believe I will be accused of vanity when I say that he enjoyed our company. In response to Emerson's pointed inquiry he said his men were sinking a pit below the squared-off area they had discovered the day before.\n\n'It has been rather hard going,' he explained. 'The limestone chips have been soaked by water and are fused together like cement.'\n\n'Not a good sign,' said Emerson, stroking his chin.\n\n'No. One can only hope that if there is a tomb entrance below, the rain did not penetrate so far. Well, I have been too long away; it is the pleasure of your company, Mrs Emerson, that is to blame.'\n\nAfter he had gone, I said, 'Mr Davis' expectations are so high they must make Ned very nervous. I cannot suppose he will find anything where he is digging now.'\n\n'Hmmm,' said Emerson.\n\nI am convinced my husband has a sixth sense for such things. It was not until later in the afternoon, just as we were about to stop for the day, that Ned came running back to tell us the news. 'Eureka!' was his first word, and his last for a time; he was too out of breath to continue.\n\n'Ah,' said Emerson. 'So you've found a tomb entrance, have you?'\n\n'Yes, sir. Rock-cut steps, at any rate. I thought perhaps you might want to have a look.'\n\nIt was a polite way of putting it. Wild horses could not have kept Emerson away. The rest of us followed.\n\nThe opening lay directly to the right of the open entrance to the tomb of Ramses IX. Mounds of debris still surrounded it, but the top of a stone-cut stair was clearly visible.\n\nNed's men were still at work shovelling rock into baskets, clearing down the steps. Emerson snatched a shovel from one of them. His eyes were glazed, his lips half parted. Those who have felt that passion for discovery, and have been deprived of it for too long, can comprehend the intensity of his emotion at that moment. I can only compare it with the feelings of a starving individual who sees a platter of rare roast beef. He does not care that it is not his roast beef. If he is hungry enough, he will have it, whatever the consequences.\n\nIt well-nigh broke my heart to stop him, but I knew I must. 'Emerson, my dear, Mr Ayrton's men are shovelling quite nicely. You will only get in their way.'\n\nEmerson started and came out of his trance. 'Er \u2013 hmmm. Yes. It \u2013 er \u2013 certainly looks promising, Ayrton. Good clean fill just here; no water. Typical Eighteenth Dynasty type. Probably undisturbed since the Twentieth Dynasty.'\n\nNed smiled and brushed the damp hair away from his perspiring face. 'I am glad to hear you say so, sir. You see, I rather jumped the gun day before yesterday \u2013 sent Mr Davis a message saying I'd found him a tomb, and then had to take it back. I didn't want to make the same mistake a second time.'\n\n'The place could have been robbed ten times over before the entrance was concealed under the debris,' Emerson said. 'Almost certainly was. Hmph. It shouldn't take more than a few hours to...'\n\nThen, dear Reader, the true mettle of the man I had married was displayed. At that moment there was nothing on earth Emerson desired more than a glimpse of what lay at the bottom of those stone cut steps. If the discovery had been his \u2013 as it ought to have been \u2013 he would have uncovered the entrance that day, with his bare hands if need be, and camped on the spot all night to protect his find. The struggle was intense, but professional honour won out over envy.\n\nEmerson squared his mighty shoulders. 'Stop,' he said.\n\n'Sir?' Ned stared in wonderment.\n\nLike myself, Ramses knew his father had gone as far as he was capable of going. He put a friendly hand on the young man's shoulder. 'You don't want to expose the entrance and leave it open overnight.'\n\n'Good Lord, no, I couldn't do that. Mr Davis will want to be here when we open it.'\n\n'Unless you think he will want to come round this evening, you had better stop, then.' Ramses ran an expert eye over the rough opening. 'It's likely there are not more than a dozen steps, and the fill is loose here.'\n\n'Yes, of course.' Ned smiled apologetically. 'You must think me a blundering fool. I suppose I was a bit excited. It is always rather exciting, isn't it \u2013 a new tomb? Not knowing what might be there?'\n\n'Yes,' said Emerson morosely. 'It is. Rather.'\n\nNed went with us as far as the donkey park and then struck off on foot, heading for the house Davis had had built for him near the entrance to the Valley. No wonder he was pleased. Even if the tomb turned out to be unfinished or completely plundered in ancient times, it was a good sign to find one at all.\n\nWe had been invited to attend one of Cyrus' Sunday-evening soirees that night. He was a sociable individual, and took even greater pleasure in entertaining now that he had Katherine as his hostess.\n\nI was of two minds about going. Ordinarily I take pleasure in respectable social events, and Cyrus' entertainments were always elegant and refined. Many of our friends would be present, including two of the best \u2013 Katherine and Cyrus themselves.\n\nYet I found myself disinclined that evening for pleasure. My thoughts were otherwise engaged, following in imagination the activities of those who were far away. Selim and Daoud were still on the train. They would not arrive in Cairo until later that evening, with the briefer journey to Alexandria still ahead. If it was not delayed, the steamer would soon arrive in the harbour, where it would drop anchor; the passengers would disembark the following morning. We could not expect news until later that same day, for explanations and decisions would take time, and it was possible Walter would decide to go on to Cairo, where we had booked rooms for them at Shepheard's. To take Lia home without a glimpse of even the pyramids and the Sphinx would be too cruel, after her high expectations; a father as fond as Walter would surely be unable to resist her pleas. If they remained in Cairo for a time, perhaps I could just run up to see them, and have a little look round...\n\nToo many ifs! I would have to wait another twenty-four hours, at least, before I knew what they intended.\n\nI came to the logical conclusion that brooding would not be good for us. There was nothing we could do that evening anyhow.\n\nI discovered that the others had expected we would go and that even Emerson was resigned, if not enthusiastic. He gave me the usual argument about wearing formal dress, which, as usual, I won. Cyrus had sent his carriage for us. Since it would have been a bit of a squeeze for our entire party, Sir Edward announced he would ride horseback. Emerson had cast a reproachful glance at me when he found that Sir Edward and the boys were not in evening kit. I was hardly in a position to lecture Sir Edward; when I lectured Ramses, he explained disingenuously that studs and links were too difficult to attach with only one hand.\n\nI decided to let him off this time, but there was another question I wanted to ask. I had feared he might use his damaged hand as an excuse for letting his beard grow; men seem to favour the cursed things. He had remained clean-shaven, however, and as I straightened his cravat and tucked his collar in I asked how he managed it.\n\n'I have been using a safety razor for several years now, Mother,' was the reply. 'I am surprised you did not know.'\n\n'I am not in the habit of searching your personal belongings, Ramses,' I said.\n\n'Of course not, Mother. I didn't mean to imply \u2013'\n\nEmerson interrupted with the remark he always made on such occasions \u2013 'If we must do this, let's get it over with.'\n\nThe electric current, which was notoriously erratic, appeared to be functioning that evening. The windows of the Castle shone hospitably through the darkness, and Cyrus was waiting to greet us. There was only time for his question \u2013 'Anything new?' \u2013 and my brief reply in the negative before the arrival of other guests recalled him to his duties as host.\n\nFamiliar faces and forms filled the great drawing room; familiar voices were raised in laughter and conversation. Yet as I stood a little to one side, sipping my wine, I found myself studying those faces with a new interest. Was there among them a new, unknown enemy \u2013 or an old one?\n\nThere were always a good many strangers in Luxor during the season. Some of them I knew slightly. Emerson was engaged in conversation with one, a certain Lord... for the moment the name escaped me, but I remembered that he had recently come to Egypt for his health and had become interested in excavating. He was tall enough, but since he was a married man I assumed his wife would notice a substitution. Unless she was also...\n\nNonsense, I told myself. Sethos could not be among those present. I had known him in London; I would know him in Luxor, in any disguise he could assume.\n\nAs for unknown enemies \u2013 well, that offered infinite possibilities. Most of the dealers in illegal antiquities were Egyptians or Turks, but as painful experience had taught me, Europeans also engaged in that ugly trade, and they were likely to be more dangerous and unscrupulous than their native counterparts. Since Sethos' retirement a number of people had attempted to take over all or part of his organization. The stout German baron, the elegant young Frenchman who was gazing soulfully at Nefret, the red-faced English squire \u2013 any one of them could be a criminal.\n\nA touch on my arm roused me from my thoughts, and I turned to see Katherine beside me. She was wearing a gown she had had made up in London, incorporating panels of Turkish embroidery and green silk, and the parure of emeralds that had been Cyrus' wedding gift.\n\n'No corsets,' she whispered with a conspiratorial smile. 'Come and sit down for a moment, I have been on my feet for hours.'\n\nWe withdrew into a retired corner, and Katherine said, 'I want to talk with you about my new project, Amelia. I spoke with Miss Buchanan at the American School for Girls a few days ago. It made me feel quite ashamed of my nationality. The Americans have done so much more than we English to improve the lot of Egyptian women \u2013 schools and hospitals all over the country \u2013'\n\n'As well as churches,' I said. 'I would be the last to deny the great good these dedicated persons have done, but they are missionaries and their primary aim is to convert the heathen.'\n\n'Wasn't it Henry the Fourth who remarked that \"Paris is worth a mass\" when his claim to the throne of France was made dependent on his conversion to Catholicism? Perhaps education is worth a prayer.' I smiled wryly in acknowledgement, and Katherine went on, 'However, there is certainly room here for a school that makes no such demands, and that opens education even to those who cannot afford the fees of the Mission School. Miss Buchanan amiably agreed, and offered to assist me in any way she could.'\n\n'Splendid,' I said heartily. 'I am delighted that you are going ahead with your project, Katherine, and I promise I will do my part. I meant some days ago to make the acquaintance of Fatima's teacher, but I have not had the time to do so.'\n\n'I have. Fatima gave me her name, and I called on her yesterday. She is an interesting woman, Amelia \u2013 handsome and well-educated and obviously of a superior class. Admirable as are the methods of the Americans, we can learn something from teachers like Sayyida Amin.'\n\n'Ah, so she prefers the title Sayyida to that of Madame? That suggests she is not in sympathy with Western ideas of emancipation.'\n\n'A good many educated Egyptians, male and female, resent our presence and our ideas,' Katherine said soberly. 'It is not surprising that they should.'\n\n'Quite. Kindly condescension can be as infuriating as outright insult. Not that either of us would fall into those errors! I am sorry I was unable to go with you, Katherine. I have been just a little preoccupied recently.'\n\n'You certainly have!'\n\nI told her of the present progress of the investigation \u2013 or, to be more accurate, the lack of progress. I would not have ventured to tell any other woman of my acquaintance about Nefret's visit to the house of ill fame, but I felt certain Katherine's unorthodox background would make her more tolerant of those who have, often through no fault of their own, strayed beyond the bounds of conventional society. As usual, my judgement was correct.\n\n'She is a remarkable girl, Amelia. One can only admire her courage and compassion \u2013 and fear for her well-being. You are going to have your hands full.'\n\n'They are already full. Ramses is enough to drive any parent over the brink of sanity, and I daresay even David will have his problems.'\n\nI had observed him talking with a girl who was a stranger to me \u2013 one of the recent crop of tourists, I assumed. She was fair-haired and elaborately dressed in a frock of azure blue embroidered with rosebuds that bared plump white shoulders. It was unusual to see David without Ramses or Nefret or both; he was rather shy with strangers, but he appeared to be responding to this young woman, who was flirting with him over her fan.\n\nAt that moment a stocky older lady, whom I took to be the girl's mama, bustled up to them. Taking the girl firmly by the arm, she drew her away, without so much as a nod at David.\n\n'I daresay he already has a good many,' Katherine said thoughtfully. 'He is a handsome young fellow, and those exotic looks of his cannot but be intriguing to the girls; but what responsible mama would allow her daughter to become seriously involved with him?'\n\n'She needn't have been so rude about it. Goodness, Katherine, we sound like a pair of empty-headed gossips.'\n\nAt that point Katherine was called away by guests who were about to take their leave. I remained where I was, observing that Ramses had joined David, and that Emerson had collared Howard Carter and was lecturing him about something, and that Nefret was... Where was she?\n\nMy agitated gaze soon found her, the centre of a group of young gentlemen, but that pang of alarm, brief though it had been, made me decide we had better return home. I do not often suffer from nerves, but I did that night.\n\nI collected my family and Sir Edward and we made our excuses. As we stood waiting for the carriage, Cyrus' gatekeeper, an elderly Egyptian who had been with him for many years, came up to me.\n\n'A person gave me this, Sitt Hakim. She said it was for Nur Misur, but \u2013'\n\n'Then you should give it to me, Sayid,' Nefret exclaimed. She reached for the grubby little packet, barely an inch square, that rested on the gatekeeper's palm.\n\nRamses' hand got there before hers. 'Hold on, Nefret. Who was it who gave you this, Sayid?'\n\nThe old man shrugged. 'A woman. She said \u2013'\n\nWe extracted a description, such as it was. Veiled and robed, the anonymous figure had not lingered or spoken more than a few words. She had not given him money, but he assumed...\n\n'Yes, yes,' said Emerson, handing over a few coins. 'Let me have that, Ramses.'\n\nNefret let out an indignant exclamation.\n\n'I suggest,' said Ramses, closing his fingers tightly over the packet, 'that we wait until we get home. It is too dark to see clearly, and too public.'\n\nThe sense of this could not be gainsaid, but we were all on fire with curiosity by the time we reached the house, and without a moment's delay we hurried into the sitting room. Fatima had lit the lamps and was waiting to see if we wanted anything.\n\nRamses put the packet down on the table in the glow of a nearby lamp. The cheap coarse paper had been folded tightly into multiple layers. It was very dirty, but I thought I saw traces of writing.\n\n'I recommend it be handled with care,' Ramses said. 'Father?'\n\nI felt certain he would not have left it to Emerson if he had had the use of both hands. For once I did not volunteer. The folded paper filled me with a strange revulsion. I did not believe it contained anything dangerous, but I did not want to touch it.\n\nWith the same delicacy of touch he displayed when handling fragile antiquities, Emerson unfolded the paper, placed it on the table and smoothed it out. There was writing on it \u2013 only a few words, in crudely formed Arabic letters.\n\n'\"Sunrise,\"' Emerson read. '\"The Mosque of Sheikh el... Graib,\" is it?'\n\n'Guibri, I think,' Ramses said, bending over the paper. 'There are two more words. \"Help me.\"'\n\nFor a moment no one spoke. The lamplight shone on the strong hands of Emerson, flat on the table, the crumpled paper between them, and on the intent faces bent over the message. Nefret let out a long breath.\n\n'Thank heaven. I hoped she would trust me! Now I can \u2013'\n\n'There were a dozen women there,' Ramses said flatly. 'Which one are you talking about?'\n\n'She was wearing... Oh, never mind, you wouldn't have noticed. It was the way she looked at me.'\n\n'Hmph,' said Ramses.\n\n'Er \u2013 yes,' said Emerson. 'Does it matter which one it is? One of them, it seems, is asking for our help \u2013 and, it may be, offering hers. I will go, of course.'\n\n'My help,' Nefret said. 'It was I to whom she directed the message.'\n\n'Damn it,' said Ramses. 'Excuse me, Mother. Stop and think, all of you. This message cannot have come from one of those women. None of them knows how to write!'\n\n'You don't know that,' Nefret said.\n\n'It is a reasonable assumption, however,' Emerson agreed. He stroked his chin. 'A public letter writer?'\n\n'She wouldn't risk it,' Ramses insisted. 'Anyhow, it's too crudely written.'\n\n'It reminds me,' David began.\n\nHe was not given the opportunity to finish. Emerson declared that someone must keep the assignation. Nefret insisted it must be she. The table shuddered; Horus, returning from one of his nightly strolls, had leaped on to it and was trying to get Nefret's attention. Failing in this, he sniffed curiously at the note.\n\n'Get it away from him, Nefret,' I ordered.\n\nIt was too late. Horus hissed and spat and shredded the paper with his claws.\n\n'I hope,' said Emerson, 'that you won't take this as one of your confounded omens, Peabody.'\n\nIt would have been difficult to interpret Horus' actions as symptomatic of anything in particular. I needed no such portent to make me regard the forthcoming expedition with extreme trepidation. We had agreed it must take place; if the appeal was genuine it could not be ignored. Ramses insisted it must be a trick, but even he admitted the place and time of the assignation were those such a woman might have chosen. The mosque in question was not far from the house they had visited, and early morning, while the others were resting, offered the best opportunity for her to slip away.\n\nWhat with one thing and another I did not enjoy a quiet night's repose. I do not believe Emerson slept at all. When he shook me awake it was still dark outside, and sunrise was several hours away when we assembled in the sitting room for a hasty breakfast. Since we had not been able to agree on which of us should go, we were all going, including Sir Edward.\n\nHe had said very little the night before, and he applied himself to his food in thoughtful silence.\n\n'You have said very little, Sir Edward,' I remarked. 'I have the impression you do not approve of this.'\n\nHe looked up, his brow furrowed. 'I have a number of reservations, Mrs Emerson. I cannot believe one of those women would venture to communicate with you, or be able to do so in writing. What Miss Forth said to them must be known by now to most of the residents of Luxor. A resourceful enemy could make use of it to lure you into a trap.'\n\n'We went over all that last night,' I reminded him. 'And agreed that the chance must be taken.'\n\n'Then there is no use in my trying to dissuade you.'\n\n'None at all,' said Nefret.\n\nHe bowed his head in silent acquiescence, but as we proceeded to mount the horses I saw he was fingering something in his pocket. A pistol? I rather hoped it was. I myself was armed 'to the teeth,' as Emerson caustically remarked: my little pistol in one pocket, my knife in the other, my parasol in my hand. My belt I had left behind, but most of its useful accoutrements had been distributed among my other pockets. One never knows when a sip of brandy will be needed, or the means of striking a light.\n\nThe first faint blush of dawn outlined the eastern mountains when we disembarked on the quay in Luxor. We were not the only early risers; lighted windows in the hotels indicated that the tourists were up and dressing, and shadowy forms in long galabeeyahs moved along the street on their way to work or to prayers. We were in good time, for our destination was not far distant.\n\n'Wait,' Ramses said suddenly.\n\n'Why? What?' I cried, raising my parasol and darting suspicious looks all round.\n\n'Wait until it is light enough to see where we are going,' Ramses elaborated. 'Confound it, this is dangerous enough by daylight.'\n\nIn another ten minutes Emerson decreed it was safe to go on. Though it had fewer than twelve thousand inhabitants, Luxor boasted eight or nine mosques, none particularly distinguished for antiquity or architectural distinction. That of Sheikh el Guibri was less than half a mile from the riverbank. The street on which it was located was no more than a country road, unpaved and dusty. We had not quite reached it when the first call to prayer rose into the clear morning air. The muezzins are individualists, defining the exact moment of sunrise according to their own notions. This earliest call came from one of the mosques farther south, but Nefret quickened her pace and was only restrained from drawing ahead of the boys by Emerson, who held her hand tightly in his. We had her safely surrounded, since Sir Edward and I brought up the rear, but I doubted she would accept this state of things for long.\n\nThe mosque stood back a little from the road. Through the open arch of the entrance we could see into the courtyard with its fountain and surrounding libans. An adjoining structure with a domed roof presumably housed the tomb of the holy man after whom the mosque was named. From the minaret, the muezzin added his voice \u2013 baritone, cracked with age \u2013 to the chorus.\n\nThere were a number of people abroad, walking or riding donkeys, or driving carts loaded with produce. A woman balancing a load of reeds on her head gave us a curious look as she passed. We were certainly conspicuous; few tourists came this way.\n\n'I am going into the courtyard,' Nefret said in a low voice. 'She wouldn't approach me here on the road.'\n\n'Not a good idea,' said Ramses. 'She would be even more conspicuous inside. Women are not encouraged to pray in public. The rest of you go on, towards the tomb. We will wait here.'\n\n'We? Curse it, Ramses, you agreed \u2013'\n\n'I lied,' Ramses said coolly. 'We can't take the chance, there are too many people about. She's seen me and David with you, and if her intentions are honourable she wouldn't expect you to be alone.'\n\nWe waited for another quarter hour, until the last dilatory notes of the call to prayer had died away and the red globe of the sun had lifted over the eastern mountains. Emerson was getting restless. We joined the children, who were \u2013 not surprisingly \u2013 arguing.\n\n'Are you sure this is the right place?' Nefret demanded.\n\n'No.' Ramses kept glancing uneasily around. 'The writing was atrocious, and there are two mosques with similar names. I'd have had another look if the damned cat hadn't ripped the paper to shreds.'\n\n'She's not coming,' Emerson said. 'Or she never meant to come. Or \u2013'\n\n'Or Sir Edward was correct,' I said, glancing at that gentleman, who did not reply. Like Ramses, he was watching the passersby. 'This was a trap that failed. They did not dare attack all of us.'\n\nAt Nefret's urging we stopped by the other mosque \u2013 that of Sheikh el Graib \u2013 on our way back to the quay. It was in a more populous section, closer to the Luxor Temple. The street was teeming with the usual morning traffic by that time, but the mosque itself was quiet, morning prayers being over. Nefret had not given up hope of a message, at least; she walked slowly along the facade of the building, looking from side to side; but it was Ramses, close on her heels, who spotted the small object lying in the dust.\n\nIt was a thin gold disk, pierced by a small hole \u2013 the sort of ornament that hangs from the earrings and headcloths of Egyptian women."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "What was the import of that little golden disk? Most probably nothing. Such ornaments were common, and even if it had belonged to the woman who had written to us, it might have fallen unnoticed from a piece of jewellery. Nefret insisted it had been left deliberately, as a sign that the girl had kept the appointment but had been unable to remain. I considered this unlikely. The woman must have known such a token would not have been left lying in the dust for long. To an indigent peasant the bit of gold represented food for days.\n\nIn my case at least relief won out over disappointment, and I fancy most of the others felt the same. If what we hoped had not occurred, at least that which we feared had not happened either. Studying Nefret's crestfallen face, observing the determined set of her jaw, I decided I had better have another little chat with her. No one admired her courage and compassion more than I, but it would be madness for her to venture again into the house of ill fame.\n\nOn our way back to the riverbank we passed near the telegraph office, but I did not suggest we stop. We could not expect a message from Walter so soon, and Emerson would have objected to any further delay. He had already lost several hours on what he was pleased to call a wild goose chase, and he grudged every minute away from his work.\n\nIt had proved to be more onerous than even he had expected. The debris that filled the first chamber contained hundreds of bits and pieces: fragments of pottery and alabaster jars, beads of all varieties, scraps of wood and scraps of people \u2013 mummified people, that is. By Emerson's meticulous standards every scrap had to be preserved and recorded. Dedicated scholar that he is, he became quite interested in the proceedings and (to my relief) did not even send anyone down the path to spy on poor Ned Ayrton.\n\nEarly in the afternoon I suggested to Emerson that we return to the house. 'We ought to have had a message from Walter by now. I asked him to telegraph at the earliest possible moment.'\n\nEmerson looked blank. So obsessed was he by archaeological matters that it took him a moment to understand my reference. 'I don't know why you are making such a fuss, Peabody. Either Walter has sent a telegram or he has not. What do you expect me to do about it?'\n\n'Send one of the men to the telegraph office. You know how dilatory the clerks are, messages sometimes lie on the desk for days.'\n\n'Oh, bah,' said Emerson. 'I cannot spare another man, Peabody. I am short-handed as it is with Selim and Daoud gone.'\n\nSo I sent Abdullah. It was a very warm day, and I wanted to get him out of the infernal heat and dust of the tomb. After I had given him my instructions and told him to meet us back at the house, Nefret beckoned to me from the rubbish heap in a conspiratorial manner.\n\n'Mr Davis just went past,' she whispered.\n\n'Which way? In or out?'\n\n'Out. He must have got past us earlier without being seen. He was looking very pleased with himself, Aunt Amelia.'\n\n'Oh? Well. Perhaps those steps of Ned's led to something after all. How nice for Mr Davis.'\n\nNefret's conspiratorial smile broadened into a grin. 'Yes, isn't it? Do you mind if I go over there and see?'\n\n'Do as you like, my dear.'\n\n'Don't you want to come with me?'\n\n'Now that you mention it...' I said.\n\nSomehow I was not at all surprised to find Ramses already there. The last time I had set eyes on him he had been in a far corner of the tomb chamber squinting at a cartouche, but he was an expert at eluding people \u2013 especially his mother. He and Ned stood partway down the steps, gazing at what lay below.\n\nThe full length of the stairs was now exposed, though they had not been completely cleared. At the bottom was a wall of rough stones, unmortared and unevenly cut. It filled the neatly cut rectangular space that was undoubtedly the entrance to a tomb.\n\n'Has the wall been breached?' I demanded.\n\n'One can always count on you, Mother, to go straight to the heart of the matter,' said Ramses, reaching up a hand to help me as I scrambled down. The steps were a bit treacherous, littered with smaller pebbles and quite steep. 'It appears it has not been. It's a rather makeshift construction, though; Ned and I have just been discussing the possibility that it may not be the original blockage. We... Nefret, don't come down, there's not room for another person.'\n\n'Then you come up. I want to see.'\n\nAfter she had had her turn, I said, 'How splendid, Ned. I suppose Mr Davis is anxious to have that wall down. Are you going to take photographs this afternoon, or will there be time tomorrow morning?'\n\n'He directed me to have everything prepared for him in the morning.'\n\nIt was a somewhat evasive answer. Ramses caught my eye \u2013 Ned was carefully not looking at either of us \u2013 and said casually, 'I was about to tell Ned we would be happy to take a few photographs for him. We have our equipment here, and it wouldn't take long.'\n\n'That would be good of you,' Ned said, looking relieved. 'I haven't a camera with me, and the light will be fading soon, and \u2013 er \u2013'\n\n'Quite,' I said briskly. 'Nefret?'\n\nShe hurried away. Turning back to Ned, I said, 'Have you notified Mr Weigall? Since this is a new tomb, it becomes the responsibility of the Inspector.'\n\n'He and Mrs Weigall are having tea with Mr Davis. I believe he plans to inform him then.'\n\nWhen Nefret returned, Emerson was with her. I had been afraid he would, but there was nothing I could do about it.\n\nI asked Ned to come back to the house with us and have tea, but he declined, saying he had a great deal of work to do. The truth was, an hour of Emerson's company was about all he could stand. Emerson was not rude \u2013 not by his standards, that is \u2013 but his enormous energy and emphatic lectures are hard on the young and timid.\n\nAbdullah had returned with the longed-for telegram, which the clerk assured him had just that minute arrived. 'Your messages received,' it read. 'Discussions underway. Will wire tonight or tomorrow. Take care.'\n\n'Sent from Cairo,' I said.\n\n'I hope they will make up their minds soon,' Emerson grumbled. 'I cannot spare Daoud and Selim.'\n\nWe were at the dig at our usual hour next morning, shortly after sunrise. It was not until after 10 a.m. that Mr Davis and his entourage appeared.\n\nThere were dozens of them! The Weigalls, Mrs Andrews and her nieces, the Smiths, servants carrying cushions, sunshades, and baskets of food and drink, and several elegantly costumed individuals I did not know \u2013 distinguished visitors who had been invited to watch Mr Davis find a tomb. It looked for all the world like a group of Cook's tourists on a sightseeing jaunt.\n\nMr Davis was attired in his favourite 'professional' garb: riding breeches and buttoned gaiters, tweed jacket and waistcoat, and a broad-brimmed felt hat. He nodded at me, but I doubt he would have stopped had not Emerson hailed him.\n\nThe contrast between them was ludicrous: Mr Davis, dapper and neat, if somewhat ridiculous, in those old-fashioned garments; Emerson, trousers and boots white with dust, shirt open to the waist and sleeves rolled to the elbows. I could see he had determined to be cordial if it killed him. Baring his teeth in a friendly grin, he strode forward and offered his hand. Dripping with a pale paste composed of dust and perspiration, covered with bleeding scratches, it was not the sort of object one would wish to grasp, but Mr Davis could not avoid doing so because Emerson seized his hand before he could back away, and wrung it vigorously. He then congratulated Mr Davis on 'another interesting discovery,' and Weigall, who had watched the performance in mild alarm \u2013 for the sight of Emerson being affable understandably aroused his suspicions \u2013 said they must be getting on.\n\n'May I come and watch?'\n\nNo one would have had the audacity to make a request like that except Nefret. She had not shirked her duties that morning; but she was one of those fortunate young women who looks even prettier when her face glows with exertion and her loosened hair coils in shining tendrils around temples and cheeks. As she spoke she turned the full battery of eyes, smile, curls, and slim brown hands on Mr Davis. As Ramses remarked later, the poor old chap didn't stand a chance.\n\nThey went off arm in arm. 'Emerson,' I said, taking pity on my afflicted spouse, 'why don't you go with them?'\n\n'I was not asked,' said Emerson. 'It was a conspicuous omission. I do not thrust myself in where I am not wanted.'\n\n'Nefret will let us know what is happening,' I said.\n\nIndeed, it was not long before Nefret came running back. 'Bring the plates, David,' she gasped, picking up the camera.\n\n'What is going on?' I demanded.\n\n'They have taken down the wall. There is another behind it, plastered and bearing the official necropolis seals. I \u2013'\n\n'What?' The word burst from Emerson like an explosion.\n\n'I persuaded Mr Davis to wait until I could take a few photographs,' Nefret explained breathlessly.\n\nSir Edward cleared his throat. 'I would be more than happy to assist, Miss Forth.'\n\nShe spared him a quick warm smile. 'I don't doubt you could do the job better, Sir Edward, but Mr Davis doesn't like people interfering. He only gave in to me because I begged and wheedled.'\n\nEmerson's subsequent remarks cannot in decency be reproduced. I caught hold of him and dug in my heels. 'No, Emerson, you cannot go there, not while you are in this state of mind. You know we agreed that tact is our best... Ramses, don't let him get away!'\n\n'I daren't wait, Mr Davis was hopping with excitement.' Nefret hurried off, followed by David.\n\n'Bah!' Emerson exclaimed. 'All right, Ramses, unhand me. I am perfectly composed.'\n\nOf course he was not. I do not know whether I can convey to the Reader the import of Nefret's statement. The outer blockage of rough stones was obviously secondary; the inner wall, stamped with the seals of the necropolis priests, must be the original. That meant that the tomb had been entered at least once in antiquity, presumably by thieves, but it would not have been blocked a second time unless something of value was still there.\n\n'Take heart, Emerson,' I said. 'Now that a new tomb has been located, the Department of Antiquities will take charge. Mr Weigall won't allow Mr Davis to do anything foolish.'\n\n'Ha,' said Emerson. 'If it were Carter... Oh, the devil with it. I am going back to work.'\n\nAfter he had disappeared into his tomb I said casually to Ramses, 'It is almost time for luncheon. I will just go and tell Nefret.'\n\n'How thoughtful you are, Mother,' Ramses said. 'I will just come with you.'\n\nMost of the members of Davis' party had scattered and were sitting in the shade mopping their perspiring faces and looking bored. Some of the men hovered near the steps. Mr Smith gave me a cheery wave, so I went to him.\n\n'Will you be painting in the tomb, then?' I inquired, edging closer to the opening.\n\nDavis and Weigall were down below, getting in the way of the men who were removing the stones from the demolished wall and carrying them up to a dump nearby. The sections of plaster bearing the necropolis seals had been hacked off and tossed into a basket. I could see no more from where I stood.\n\n'That depends on Mr Davis,' Smith replied amiably, mopping his wet forehead with his sleeve. 'And on whether there is anything worth painting. They've just got the wall down, and I don't know what lies beyond. Exciting, isn't it?'\n\nNefret, who had been chatting with Mrs Andrews, joined us in time to hear his last question. 'It certainly is!' she exclaimed. Raising her voice to a piercing soprano scream, she called out, 'Mr Davis, may I see? I am so excited!'\n\n'Later, child, later.' Davis came creaking up the stairs, looking very tired and hot but very pleased. He was not a young man; one had to give him credit for enthusiasm, at least. He patted Nefret on the head. 'We are stopping for lunch now. Come back in a few hours if you like. And,' he added with a smug smile, 'do bring Professor Emerson with you.'\n\nMr Davis' luncheons, which were served in a nearby tomb, were notoriously long and luxurious. We finished our own modest repast in short order, so we were back on the spot well ahead of him. Bareheaded in the boiling sun, Emerson seated himself on a boulder and lit his pipe. Ramses and David went off to talk with Davis' reis, who was sitting in the shade with the other men, awaiting, with the stolid resignation of their class, the return of their employer. I couldn't make out what they were saying, but there was quite a lot of laughter, and David kept blushing.\n\nWhen Mr Davis returned, accompanied by the entourage, he greeted us with unusual warmth. 'I thought you'd want to have a look,' he remarked. 'I've done it again, you see. Found myself another tomb.'\n\nEmerson bit down hard on the stem of his pipe. 'Hmph,' he said. 'Yes. Anything I can do, of course.'\n\n'Not necessary,' Davis assured him. 'We have everything under control.'\n\nI heard something crack and hoped it was only the stem of Emerson's pipe, and not one of his teeth.\n\nIn fact, it was not long before work ended for the day. The ladies of Davis' party were complaining of the heat, and Weigall was looking rather grave. I overheard him say something about the police. Unable to repress my curiosity any longer, I joined the group, which consisted of Weigall, Davis, Ayrton and Nefret.\n\n'What is going on?' I inquired.\n\n'Have a look if you like,' Davis said amiably. His moustache was limp with sweat and his eyes shone.\n\nNed politely gave me a hand down the stairs. The entrance gaped open except for a few courses of stone remaining at the base. The descending passage typical of Eighteenth Dynasty tombs sloped down into darkness. It was filled to within three feet of the rock-cut ceiling with loose rubble, and on top of the rubble was the strangest object I had ever seen in an Egyptian tomb. It filled the passage from wall to wall, and the entire surface shone with gold. I leaned forward, not daring to move, hardly daring to breathe, for even as I looked a golden flake the size of my thumbnail shivered and dropped from the side of the object on to the stones under it.\n\n'What is it?' I whispered.\n\n'A panel covered with gold leaf, possibly from a shrine.' Ned's voice was as soft as mine. 'There is another gilded object lying on top of it \u2013 perhaps a door from the same shrine.'\n\n'And beyond \u2013 at the end of the passage?'\n\n'Who knows? More stairs, another chamber \u2013 perhaps the burial chamber itself. We will find out tomorrow. Weigall is going to run a wire down, so we will have electric lights.'\n\nNow that he had given me a clue I was able to make out a few more details. There appeared to be reliefs and inscriptions on the panel.\n\n'The gold leaf must have been applied over a layer of gesso, which is already loose. You aren't going to let that doddering old idiot climb in over it, are you?'\n\nIn my indignation I spoke almost as bluntly as Emerson would have done (he would have added several other adjectives).\n\n'There is no question of that,' Ned said. 'I'm not entirely certain how we are going to proceed. Perhaps, Mrs Emerson, you will give us the benefit of your advice.'\n\nNaturally I was happy to give it. Mr Weigall had been quite right in suggesting that the police be notified and guards set over the tomb. The mere mention of the word 'gold' was enough to arouse the interest of every thief in Luxor, and before nightfall every thief in Luxor would know of it. I was not surprised to discover that Mr Davis was determined to get into the tomb next day, by one means or another. Weigall's attempts to persuade him to wait until the panel could be stabilized, or at least copied, were half-hearted and soon overcome.\n\n'Ayrton, get the thing out of there before tomorrow morning,' Davis ordered. 'Carefully, of course. Don't want it to be damaged. Come back to dinner, Weigall?'\n\n'Er \u2013 no, thank you, sir, I believe I will camp in the Valley tonight. I would be shirking my responsibility if I left the tomb unguarded.'\n\n'Quite right,' Davis agreed. 'Tomorrow, then. Have everything ready. I want to see what's down there.'\n\nHe walked away without waiting for an answer, since in his estimation only one was possible. I was reminded of one of my favourite Gilbert and Sullivan operas: 'If your Majesty says do a thing, that thing is as good as done. And if it is done, why not say so?'\n\n(I paraphrase, but that is the general idea.)\n\nAyrton and Weigall exchanged glances. They did not get on well, but for the time being, mutual consternation made them allies. Weigall muttered, 'It can't be done. Not without ruining it.'\n\nNed squared his shoulders. 'I will tell him. Unless you prefer to do so.'\n\n'My position with regard to Mr Davis is a delicate one,' Weigall replied stiffly.\n\nIn my opinion Ned's position was even more delicate. This was not the time for argument or recrimination, however. The situation was critical. If Emerson had been in charge, not a stone would have been touched and not a person would have entered until the panel had been examined, photographed (if possible), and copied (by David), and every possible effort made to stabilize the fragile gold. This was obviously not going to be done. My duty, as I saw it, was to suggest ways of minimizing the damage.\n\n'Perhaps it would be possible to arrange a kind of bridge over the panel,' I suggested. 'Our reis, Abdullah, has had considerable experience with that sort of thing.'\n\nWeigall's face brightened. 'I was just about to propose that,' he said. 'I think I know where I can lay my hands on a plank of the right length.'\n\n'I will tell Abdullah,' I said. Weigall did not object, though he must have known I would also tell Emerson.\n\nEmerson behaved better than I had expected \u2013 though I ought to have known that he could be depended upon to act sensibly in a crisis. This was a crisis, in archaeological terms; only one of many, alas, and possibly less disastrous than other horrendous errors in methodology the Valley of the Kings had seen. But on this occasion we were there, on the spot. It would have been impossible to remain aloof.\n\n'Face it, Father,' said Ramses, after Emerson had run out of expletives. 'You cannot keep Mr Davis out of the place. Mr Weigall is the only one who has the authority to prevent him, and it seems he won't exercise it.'\n\nEven Sir Edward, ordinarily so cool, had been infected by the general consternation. 'Have they arranged for a photographer? I will offer my services, if you think they would be accepted.'\n\n'Mr Davis is sending to Cairo for someone,' Nefret replied. 'A Mr Paul, I believe he said. He can't be here for another day or two, though.'\n\nBy the time we left the Valley the job had been done, thanks primarily to Abdullah. The plank was only ten inches wide, but it was long enough to extend from the tomb entrance to the far wall of the corridor, and Abdullah managed to wedge it in such a way that it did not touch the panel. Mr Weigall had strung his wire so we had electric light, and the glimmer of it on the incised gold was enough to stir the feeblest imagination. Imagination was all we were allowed, however; Weigall refused to allow anyone to test the bridge. Emerson did not argue with him. His self-control was terrifying, his face set. He was unnaturally silent during the ride back, and went unresisting when I suggested a bath and a change of clothing.\n\nThough I was sadly in need of freshening myself, I went first to the sitting room to look through the messages that had been delivered that day.\n\n'Curse it,' I said to David, the only member of the group who had come with me. 'There is nothing from Cairo. We ought to have heard again from Walter by now.'\n\n'I'll go over to the telegraph office,' David said. 'You know how slow they are.'\n\nHe looked so serious that I gave him an affectionate pat on the arm. 'Now don't worry, David, I am sure everything is all right. You mustn't go off alone. I will send one of our fellows.'\n\nBy the time I had located Mustafa and given him his instructions it was getting late, so I contented myself with a hasty splash in the washbasin and a rapid change of clothing. Fatima brought the tea tray to the verandah, where Horus was sprawled insolently across the entire length of the settee. I gave him a gentle but emphatic shove, since I had selected that seat for myself, and he jumped on to the floor, swearing and switching his tail. Ramses, who had just emerged from the house, let out an exclamation of surprise.\n\n'How did you do that?'\n\n'Avoid being scratched, you mean? It is a question of mental and moral superiority.'\n\n'Ah,' said Ramses. He took the cup I handed him and settled down on the ledge, lounging comfortably against the square pillar.\n\nA restful silence followed. For once Ramses did not seem inclined towards conversation, and I was happy to sip my tea and enjoy the peace and quiet. How nicely my vines had grown! They hung like draperies of living green, half-veiling the apertures, rustling softly in the evening breeze.\n\nThe others soon joined us, and we were deep in an animated discussion of the day's discoveries when Ramses sat up, parted the curtain of vines next him, and looked out. His soft exclamation drew me to the doorway.\n\nA carriage was approaching \u2013 one of the rather rattletrap conveyances for hire at the boat landing. It drew up before the house and stopped. The vehicle swayed and creaked as a large man descended. Though his long robe was crumpled and stained, it was of fine linen fabric, and a pair of dusty but elegant leather sandals encased his feet. He looked strangely familiar. He resembled... He was...\n\nDaoud! There was barely time for me to assimilate that amazing sight when another equally astonishing vision materialized \u2013 a woman, robed in black, whom Daoud tenderly assisted from the carriage. Holding her hand, he led her to me. His broad, honest face shone with pride.\n\n'I have brought her, Sitt,' he announced. 'Safe and unharmed, as you told me to do.'\n\nCurling fair hair had escaped the scarf that covered her head, and her face was unveiled.\n\n'Evelyn?' I gasped.\n\nIt was not she. It was my niece, my namesake, my little Amelia \u2013 white-faced and hollow-eyed, and most astonishing of all \u2013 here! I looked again at the carriage. No one else was in it.\n\n'Where are your mother and father?' I demanded. 'Good Gad! You didn't come alone, did you? Lia \u2013 Daoud \u2013'\n\nInstead of answering me, the girl held out a trembling hand. Still dazed with disbelief, I took it in mine. She raised sunken blue eyes, and a faint smile touched her white lips. They parted. But before she could speak, Nefret pushed past me and put her strong young arms round the other girl.\n\n'She is exhausted,' Nefret said. 'Leave her to me, Aunt Amelia, I'll take care of her. David, will you help me?'\n\nThe others had hastened to the doorway. For once even Ramses appeared to be struck dumb. Nefret's appeal roused David from his paralysis of astonishment; stepping forward, he lifted the swaying little figure. She nestled in his arms like a kitten and hid her face against his breast. Following Nefret, he carried her into the house.\n\n'If ever there was a time for whisky and soda,' said a deep voice behind me, 'this is that time. Sit down, Peabody, before you fall over.'\n\nDaoud had begun to suspect something was amiss. A look of apprehension rippled slowly across his face, taking several seconds to complete the process because of the size of that countenance. 'Did I do wrong, Sitt Hakim? You said to me, if one wishes to come \u2013'\n\n'You did not do wrong,' Ramses said, glancing at me. 'Mother, get him a cup of tea. Now, Daoud, my friend, sit there and tell us all about it, from the beginning to the end.'\n\nI had been told Daoud was the best story-teller in the family, but I had found it hard to believe; he was usually a silent man. Now, with an audience as rapt as any raconteur could wish, he came into his own. His voice was deep and musical, his metaphors were poetic, the movements of his hands hypnotic. In fact, his metaphors were so poetic I believe I had better summarize the story, and add a few interpretations that had completely eluded the innocent man.\n\nI would never have supposed that inexperienced girl was capable of such cold-blooded, calculating manipulation! While her parents debated and argued, she had instantly determined on a course of action. There was one sure way to get them to go on to Luxor: to go herself. She had had sense enough \u2013 thank God! \u2013 to know she ought not attempt the journey alone, and it had not taken her long to realize she could never convince Selim to take her. Daoud \u2013 poor Daoud, the gentlest and kindest and not the most intelligent of men \u2013 was easy prey. And then there was my own careless statement \u2013 I could have kicked myself when I remembered! 'If any of them decides to come on, he or she...' Ah, yes, I had said it, or something like it, and Daoud had taken it literally. Why not? He had seen me and Nefret, and even Evelyn, make our own decisions and act independently of men. It was not the way of the women of Egypt, but we were a different breed. And how could there be any danger if he was with her?\n\nThe whisky and soda helped a great deal. I settled down to listen with interest to Daoud's animated account of the journey. He had had the return tickets \u2013 first class, for we do not allow our men to suffer unnecessary discomfort \u2013 and plenty of money. Lia had met him outside the hotel, after pretending to retire. Exchanging her muffling cloak for the robe and veil she had asked him to purchase, she had accompanied him to the station and on to the train. It had been a long, tiring trip, but he had done all he could to make her comfortable, purchasing fresh fruit and food at various stops and bringing her water to bathe her hands and face. She had slept a good deal of the time, in the respectful shelter of his arm.\n\n'And so we came,' Daoud concluded, 'like a dove fluttering home to its nest she came, and I watched over her, Sitt Hakim, I let no bird of prey come near her.'\n\nDarkness had fallen by the time he finished. Fatima had brought out the lamps, and had lingered to listen.\n\nEmerson drew a deep breath. 'Well told, Daoud. And \u2013 er \u2013 well done. I understand how it came about, and you are not to \u2013 that is, you acted for the best. You too must be weary. Go home and rest now.'\n\nNefret came out in time to add her thanks, in the form of a hearty hug, and Daoud went off looking as if he had received a medal. 'She is asleep,' Nefret said, before I could ask. 'David is with her; I thought it would be good for her to see a familiar face if she woke and could not remember where she was. Should we not go in? I think dinner is ready; Mahmud is banging his pans around, the way he does when we are late.'\n\nFatima let out a hiss of dismay and darted into the house. I could not blame her for forgetting her duties; we had all forgot everything except the interest of Daoud's narrative.\n\n'Well!' I said, after we had taken our places round the table. 'I had believed myself an excellent judge of character, but I confess Lia has shaken that opinion. To think she is capable of such slyness!'\n\n'And such courage,' Ramses said quietly.\n\n'Yes,' I admitted. 'When I think of that dainty little creature braving the shouting, shoving mob at the train station, and that long, uncomfortable trip \u2013 all of it new and strange and frightening. What did she have to say, Nefret?'\n\n'Not a great deal.' Nefret planted her elbows on the table, a rude habit she had got from Emerson and of which I had been unable to break her. 'She was so tired she kept falling asleep while I bathed her and got her into bed. She kept insisting we were not to blame Daoud, that it was all her doing. She left a note for her parents \u2013'\n\n'Good Gad!' I cried. 'How could I have forgot about them! Poor souls, they must be beside themselves.'\n\n'I expect they are already on their way here,' said Ramses.\n\nThis proved to be the case. We located the messages Mustafa had brought over from the telegraph office; finding us engaged when he returned, he had left them on the table in the parlour. The first had been sent early that morning, after Walter and Evelyn discovered Lia was missing. The second announced that they and Selim were taking the next express. It would arrive in Luxor around midnight. The next question was who would meet them. Emerson settled that at once.\n\n'Ramses and David and I. No, Peabody, contrary to your opinions on the subject, we do not need you to protect us. Need I caution you to remain in the house? Should you receive a message written in blood asking you to rush to my rescue, you may assume it did not come from me.'\n\nThen followed a period of rushing about, as on the eve of Waterloo. Lia had certainly disrupted our plans to an amazing degree; but when I saw the tumbled curls and pale little face I could not find it in my heart to be angry with her. She was curled up in Nefret's bed, sound asleep. David had pulled a chair close to the bed. When I saw how drawn and anxious his face was, I put a reassuring hand on his shoulder.\n\n'Go and have something to eat, David. There is nothing to worry about now, she is safe, and Evelyn and Walter are on their way. Selim is with them. Emerson wants you to go with him to meet the train.'\n\n'Yes, certainly. You won't \u2013 you won't scold her, will you, Aunt Amelia?'\n\n'Perhaps just a little,' I said with a smile. 'Your brotherly affection does you credit, David, but don't be concerned; I am too relieved to be angry. One must admire her courage, if not her good sense.'\n\nAfter observing her colour and listening to her quiet breathing, I concluded there was nothing wrong with the child that rest would not put right. My medical experience informed me that she would sleep through until morning unless she was disturbed, so, leaving the lamp alight and the door ajar, I went in search of the others. The sitting room was deserted except for Fatima \u2013 and Sir Edward, who listened with an expression of intense interest as she spoke.\n\nShe broke off when she saw me and bustled out, muttering about bed linen and towels and water in the basins.\n\n'She has been telling me about your niece,' said Sir Edward. 'I look forward to meeting Miss Emerson; she appears to be as adventurous and independent as the other ladies in the family.'\n\n'A little too independent for a girl of seventeen,' I replied. 'However, all's well that ends well. If you will excuse me, I must go and see that the guest room is got in order.'\n\n'And I will clear my belongings out of my room.'\n\n'There is no hurry about that. Lia will share Nefret's room tonight, and it may be that Walter and Evelyn will turn right round and take her back to Cairo tomorrow.'\n\n'It might be advisable for them to do so. Mrs Emerson \u2013'\n\nBut he was interrupted by Emerson bellowing my name, and I exclaimed, 'Good Gad! He will wake the child. Excuse me, Sir Edward.'\n\nAnother had had the same thought; when I went to Nefret's room I met David coming out. 'She is still sleeping,' he reported.\n\n'Good. Now go along, Emerson is waxing impatient. And don't forget to tell Selim he must not be hard on Daoud.'\n\nEmerson had wanted my assistance in locating his coat, which was hanging on a hook in plain sight. I helped him into it and smoothed the lapels and bade him take care; and indeed, the sober faces of Emerson and the lads more resembled those of a rescue expedition than a group of gentlemen going to meet friends. I suggested Sir Edward might accompany them, but Emerson shook his head.\n\n'He had better stay here with you. Now, Peabody, remember what I told you...'\n\nI cut the lecture short and sent them off with a cheery smile. The train might be late, it often was; but they wanted to be on the platform when it came in. My dear Evelyn would be in a fever of anxiety for her child. She must learn at the earliest possible moment that Lia had arrived safe and sound.\n\nThere would be no sleep for any of us that night. Nefret had gone back to Lia, but I was too restless to settle down. I asked Fatima to make coffee and followed her into the kitchen.\n\n'I see you and Sir Edward have become friendly,' I said casually.\n\n'He is very kind,' Fatima said. She reached for a tray. 'Should I not talk with him, Sitt Hakim?'\n\n'Of course you may. What do you talk about?'\n\n'Many things.' Her busy hands arranged cups and saucers, sugar bowl and spoons. 'What I do, and what my life was like before, and what it is now; about... Oh, all little things, Sitt Hakim; I cannot speak of great matters, but he smiles and listens. He is very kind.'\n\n'Yes,' I said thoughtfully. 'Thank you, Fatima. Why don't you go to bed? It is late.'\n\n'Oh, no, Sitt, I could not do that.' She turned to me, her eyes wide. 'They will want food when they come, and they will be tired, but so happy to see their child. It will make me glad to see their happiness. Will they be very angry with Daoud, Sitt Hakim? He meant no harm. He is a good man.'\n\n'I know.' I patted her shoulder. 'I believe I can make them understand, Fatima. They are both very fond of Daoud.'\n\nMy questions about Sir Edward had not been prompted by suspicion, for even my fertile imagination could not think of any sinister motive for his interest in Fatima. It was unthinkable that her loyalty could be shaken by bribe or threat, and anyhow, she knew nothing that could be used against us. His kindly interest displayed a new side of his character. Perhaps, I mused, it had been his association with us that had broadened and softened that character.\n\nI carried the tray to Nefret's room, where I found her sitting by the bed reading. She said she did not want coffee, and would stay with Lia. I had the distinct feeling that I had been dismissed, though I could not have said why; so I let my restless feet take me to the courtyard, where moonlight spilled through the leaves of the trees and the night breeze cooled my face. I made out the motionless form of the guard, a pale shape in the shadows, and wondered if he had dropped off to sleep. When something stirred along the wall to my right, I started. A soft voice was quick to reassure me.\n\n'Don't be alarmed, Mrs Emerson, it is only I.'\n\nI made my way to the bench where he was sitting. 'I thought you had retired, Sir Edward.'\n\nHe rose and took the tray from my hands. 'One of your valiant guards is already dozing,' he said lightly. 'I could not sleep anyhow. But coffee would be welcome. May I give you a cup?'\n\nI accepted, and watched his well-groomed hands move deftly among the implements on the tray. 'Is there some particular reason why you are wakeful tonight?'\n\nHe was silent for a moment. Then he said, 'I was trying to decide whether to tell you. Far be it from me to add to your concern, but \u2013'\n\n'I prefer facts, however unpalatable, to ignorance,' I replied, taking the cup he offered me.\n\n'I suspected as much. Well, then, I did not tell you the whole truth about my plans for this evening. I did dine at the Winter Palace, but afterwards I paid a visit to a certain establishment of which you have heard. Purely for purposes of inquiry, of course.'\n\nI didn't doubt his assurance. A man of such fastidious tastes would not be tempted by what 'the establishment' in question had to offer.\n\n'I will spare you a detailed description,' he went on. 'Except to say that I was somewhat conspicuous in that ambience, and that my motives were immediately suspect. I came away with my inquiries unanswered; and yet, Mrs Emerson, I sensed that the denials given me were due to fear, not ignorance.'\n\n'What about the girl Nefret mentioned?'\n\nHis lips set in a thin line of distaste. 'Several were very young, but her description was too vague to enable me to identify which one she meant. All in all it was a singularly unpleasant and absolutely unproductive visit. I would not have mentioned it to you if I hadn't felt it necessary to warn you. You see, Mrs Emerson, I know you well, and I know Miss Forth; she must not go there again. Must not!'\n\nSuch vehemence, from a man of his temperament, was strangely disturbing. 'I agree she must not,' I said slowly. 'But aside from the general impropriety of such an act, you seem to feel there is a particular reason \u2013 a particular danger. I beg you will be more specific.'\n\n'Don't you see?' He put his cup down and turned to face me. 'Her first visit there caught them unawares. They had not expected she would come; who would?'\n\n'Presumably they had not expected Ramses and David either.'\n\n'No; but it was her behaviour, her open-hearted, generous appeal to those miserable women, that may have suggested to someone a means of luring her into a trap. I never believed that message was genuine. If you had not intercepted it \u2013 might she not have gone alone to the rendezvous? Might she not respond to another such appeal, or brave the horrors of that place if she believed the writer of the note was threatened? You must convince her such an act would be madness!'\n\nHis voice was tremulous with emotion. Did he care for her that much? Perhaps I had misjudged him.\n\n'Do you care for her that much, Sir Edward?'\n\nAfter a few sounds suggestive of strangulation, Sir Edward remarked, 'I ought to be accustomed to your forthright manners, Mrs Emerson. You warned me once I would never succeed in winning her regard.'\n\n'Was I correct?'\n\n'Yes.' His voice was as soft as a sigh. 'I didn't believe you then, but after observing her this season I know she will never be mine.'\n\nHe had not answered my question. There was no need for me to repeat it. I knew the answer.\n\nThe train was late. It was after three in the morning before the long awaited sounds brought me running to the verandah. Emerson had hired a carriage for the travellers and their luggage (I kept telling him we ought to have one of our own, but he would not listen), and before long I was able to hold Evelyn and Walter in a loving embrace. They were both haggard with fatigue, but neither would rest until they had seen their child with their own eyes.\n\nNefret had dozed off on the mattress we had placed beside the bed, and the two girls made a pretty sight, with the lamplight playing on their loosened hair and their faces flushed with sleep. Nefret woke at once; her first gesture was to place a finger to her lips, so we crept quietly out again, followed by Nefret.\n\nWeary though they were, Evelyn and Walter were too keyed up to sleep. We retired to the sitting room and the heaped-up platters of food Fatima brought. Emotions were too profound and too joyful to be restrained; tears and fond embraces and broken protestations followed.\n\nThe first coherent comment I can recall came from Walter. 'I cannot decide whether to beat Daoud senseless or thank him from the bottom of my heart.'\n\n'The latter,' said Emerson. 'He is twice your size.'\n\n'He would stand still and let you do it, though,' Ramses said. 'It wasn't his fault, Uncle Walter.'\n\n'So everyone keeps telling me.' Walter passed his hand over his eyes. 'Well, at least we are here, and it is wonderful to see you all again. You are looking well, Amelia \u2013 remarkably well, under the circumstances.'\n\n'She thrives on this sort of thing,' Emerson muttered.\n\nEvelyn had made the boys sit with her, one on either side, and was inspecting them with the tender anxiety of her motherly heart. 'And you both look better than I had dared expect. Your hand, Ramses \u2013'\n\n'It's greatly improved,' Ramses assured her. 'Mother and Nefret made a great fuss about nothing.'\n\nShe smiled at him and turning to David, raised her hand caressingly to his brown cheek. 'We worried about you too, dear. If it had not been for Lia we would not have hesitated about coming.'\n\nToo moved to speak, David bowed his head and carried her hand to his lips.\n\nEmerson had begun to fidget. He does not enjoy excessive displays of sentimentality \u2013 public displays, that is. 'You two look like ghosts. Go to bed. We will talk again tomorrow, when you are rested. Say good night, boys, and let's be going.'\n\n'Going?' I exclaimed. 'Where, at this hour?'\n\n'To the Valley, of course. Davis will be wrecking the tomb first thing in the morning, and I mean to get there before him.'\n\n'Emerson, you can't do that!'\n\n'Can't give him the benefit of my advice, and attempt in my most tactful fashion to persuade him to adhere to the basic principles of scientific excavation? What is wrong with that?'\n\n'It is Mr Davis' tomb, my dear, not yours. You should \u2013'\n\n'The tomb,' said Emerson in the sonorous tones he employed when he was making a speech, 'does not belong to Davis, Amelia. It belongs to the Egyptian people, and to the world.'\n\nHe looked so self-righteous I would have laughed if I had not been so filled with horrified apprehension. Walter did laugh. He laughed so hard he had to wipe his eyes, and if there was a slight touch of hysteria in his mirth I could hardly blame him. 'Never mind, Amelia dear,' he gasped. 'Radcliffe told us all about it on the way here. You cannot prevent him; I cannot prevent him; the entire heavenly host could not prevent him. Radcliffe, dear old chap, it is good to be back!'\n\nEmerson flatly refused to take me with him; I was needed at the house, he explained, to make certain everything was safe and in order. I would not have minded so much if he had not yielded to Nefret's demands.\n\n'Hmm, yes, you may be useful. You can get round Davis better than most people. Don't forget the camera.'\n\nFilled with the direst of apprehensions, I took Ramses aside. 'Don't let him strike anyone, Ramses. Especially Mr Weigall. Or Mr Davis. Or \u2013'\n\n'I will do my best, Mother.'\n\n'And take care of Nefret. Don't let her \u2013'\n\n'Wander off on her own? No fear of that.' A glint of what might have been amusement shone in his dark eyes. 'She'll be too busy flirting with Mr Davis.'\n\n'Oh dear,' I murmured.\n\n'It will be all right, Mother. How can an adversary lie in wait for us when even we don't know what the devil Father is going to do next?'\n\nI saw them off and returned to my duties. Fatima had supplied the guest chamber with everything a visitor might need, including rose petals in the wash water; but when I went to Nefret's room to see how Lia was doing, I found her mother lying on the pallet by the bed. Both were asleep. Wiping a tear from my eye, I went to listen at Walter's door and deduced, from the sound of snoring, that he too had succumbed. Sir Edward's door was ajar and lamplight showed within; he had not joined in the joyous reunion, but he was obviously awake and alert.\n\nI sent Fatima to bed and lay down, thinking to snatch a few hours' repose. Repose I did, but sleep was impossible with so many impressions and questions crowding into my head. Sir Edward's solemn warning \u2013 to be honest, it was a theory that had not occurred to me, but knowing Nefret as I did I feared he might be right. Then there was Lia's outrageous behaviour to be considered. Her dear parents' haggard looks had made me angry with her all over again. How thoughtless and self-centered the young can be! I did not doubt her affection for us, but she owed her parents a greater affection, and I knew she had been moved in part by a selfish desire to get her own way.\n\nForemost in my thoughts, as always, was Emerson. Was I concerned for his safety? Well, not really. With all four of them together, on the alert and on horseback, it would have required an attack in force to overcome them \u2013 especially since, as Ramses had pointed out, no one could possibly have expected them to be abroad at that hour. I was more concerned about Emerson's formidable temper. He was already at odds with the entire Department of Antiquities, not to mention Mr Davis. What was he doing to Mr Davis' tomb? What was going on in the Valley in the dark of night? And what the devil was in the tomb? I am not entirely immune to archaeological fever myself."
            },
            {
                "title": "From Manuscript H",
                "text": "Ramses had seen the fever mounting, and had known nothing short of physical violence would keep his father away from Davis' tomb. He had sometimes wondered whether Emerson would interrupt an interesting excavation long enough to interfere if he saw his son being strangled or battered \u2013 and then reproached himself for his doubts. Emerson would remove the attacker, knock him unconscious, inquire, 'All right, are you, my boy?' and go back to work.\n\nIt was different with Nefret, of course. His father had once stated his intention of killing a man just for laying his hands on her, and Ramses didn't doubt he had meant it. He felt precisely the same way.\n\nIt lacked at least an hour till daylight when they reached the entrance to the Valley. The donkey park was deserted except for one of the gaffirs, who had found a quiet corner and a bundle of rags on which to sleep. They answered his sleepy questions with a few coins and left the horses with him.\n\nThe moon had set. Starlight glimmered in Nefret's hair.\n\nThe men who had been left to guard the new tomb were asleep. One of them woke at the crunch of rock under their booted feet and sat up, rubbing his eyes. He responded to Emerson's soft greeting with a mumbled 'It is the Father of Curses. And the Brother of Demons. And \u2013'\n\n'And others,' said Emerson. 'Go back to sleep, Hussein. Sorry I woke you.'\n\n'What are you going to do, Father of Curses?'\n\n'Sit here on this rock,' was the calm response.\n\nThe man lay down and rolled over. Egyptians had long since concluded that the activities of the Father of Curses were incomprehensible. It was an opinion shared by many non-Egyptians.\n\nEmerson took out his pipe and the others settled down beside him. 'Aren't you going to look at the tomb?' Nefret whispered.\n\n'In the dark? Couldn't see a thing, my dear.'\n\n'Then what are you going to do?'\n\n'Wait.'\n\nSunrise was slow to reach the depths of the Valley, but the light gradually strengthened and the guards woke and built a fire to make coffee. Nefret produced the basket of food Fatima had forced on her, and they passed around bread and eggs and oranges, sharing them with the guards, as those courteous individuals shared their coffee. While they were eating, Abdullah and the other men turned up and joined the party. They were all having a jolly time when they heard someone approaching.\n\nThe newcomer was Ned Ayrton, followed by several of his workmen. When he saw them he stopped and stared.\n\n'We dropped in to see if we could lend a hand,' said Emerson jovially. 'Would you care for a boiled egg?'\n\n'Uh \u2013 no, sir, thank you. I haven't time. Mr Davis will be here in a few hours and he will wish \u2013'\n\n'Yes, I know. Well, my boy, we are at your disposal. Tell us what you want us to do.'\n\nWhat Ayrton wanted, above all else, was to have them go away. Since he was too courteous to say so, he stuttered, 'I thought \u2013 I thought I might finish clearing the stairs. Get them \u2013 er \u2013 nice and tidy. Wouldn't want anyone to trip over a rock and \u2013 er.'\n\n'Quite, quite,' Emerson said. With what might have been a smile \u2013 except that it showed altogether too many teeth \u2013 he got up and started for the stairs.\n\n'What's he going to do?' Ayrton whispered, giving Ramses an agonized look.\n\n'God knows. How soon do you expect Mr Davis?'\n\n'Not before nine. He said early, but that is early for him. Ramses, I must have everything ready when he arrives. He will wish \u2013'\n\n'I know.'\n\n'Ramses, what is the Professor going to DO?'\n\n'Would you object to our taking photographs?'\n\n'You can't get anything. The angle is all wrong and the doorway is in shadow, and... Oh, I suppose it's all right, so long as you don't let him see you doing it.'\n\nHe hurried off. Ramses turned to Nefret, who had been listening with a sardonic smile. She shook her head.\n\n'Poor Ned. He hasn't much backbone, has he? He's supposed to be in charge.'\n\n'No, Weigall is the one in charge,' Ramses said. 'Ned is a hired employee and Davis is the one who pays his salary. Two hundred and fifty pounds per annum may not sound much to you, but it's all Ned has.'\n\nHe had spoken rather sharply but instead of snapping back at him she smiled bewitchingly. 'Touch\u00e9, my boy. Who's that coming?'\n\n'Weigall. He and some of the others camped in the Valley last night.'\n\nNo one could resist Nefret. Ramses knew he was infatuated to the point of irrationality, but even Weigall, who had good reason to mistrust the whole Emerson family, thawed under her smiles and dimples.\n\n'We are breakfasting with Mr Davis on his dahabeeyah,' Weigall announced. 'And returning with him. Uh \u2013 what are you doing, Professor?'\n\nEmerson tossed the rock he held aside and began to explain. Watching with considerable amusement, Ramses realized that he had underestimated his father. The most severe critic could not have objected to what he was doing. Davis had wanted to enter the tomb; Emerson was making it possible for him to do so.\n\n'We'll have the place all tidied up when you get back,' he announced, grinning wolfishly. 'Wouldn't want Davis to twist his rickety old ankle scrambling down those littered steps. Ayrton will keep an eye on us, won't you, Ayrton? Yes. Run along and enjoy your breakfast, Weigall.'\n\nHe assisted the Inspector on his way with a hearty slap on the back. As soon as he was out of sight Emerson turned like a tiger on David. 'Get in there and start copying the inscriptions on that panel.'\n\nDavid had half-expected it, but he didn't like it. 'Sir,' he began.\n\n'Do as I say. Ramses, go on down the path and keep watch. Give us a hail if you see anyone I would rather not see.'\n\nNefret started to laugh. 'Don't worry, Mr Ayrton,' she sputtered. 'No one will blame you; they are only too familiar with the Professor's little ways. Anyhow, no one will know unless you tell them.'\n\nAyrton surveyed the interested audience, which consisted of his crew and most of the Emersons' men. After a moment his outraged expression relaxed into a reluctant grin. 'What did you do, bribe them?'\n\n'Bribes and intimidation,' said Nefret cheerfully. 'They think Ramses is closely related to all the afreets in Egypt. Have an orange.'\n\nObeying his father's gesture, Ramses stationed himself where he could see along the path that led to the donkey park. What his father was doing violated every written and unwritten principle of archaeological ethics, not to mention his firman. Ramses \u2013 who never let principle get in his way either \u2013 was in complete sympathy. Every movement across the plank, every breath would dislodge a few more flakes of the gold leaf. Lord only knew how much of the relief would remain after a few more days of such activity. His father had offered Davis the services of Sir Edward as photographer and David as artist. Davis had flatly refused. He wanted to be in complete control of 'his' dig.\n\nRamses flexed his stiff fingers and cursed himself for the stupidity that had made it impossible for him to join in the fun. If he hadn't been so carried away by the image of himself as a romantic rescuer he would have employed some of the dirtier and equally effective blows he had learned in various dark corners of London and Cairo, instead of punching the villain on the jaw in approved public-school style. He could do some things left-handed, but he had never acquired the delicate precision necessary for copying hieroglyphs. Layla had been right when she called him a fool. Well, she had got away, anyhow. At least he prayed she had.\n\nThe sound of someone approaching made him start. It was only Abdullah. He was looking unusually grave.\n\n'There is something you must know, my son.'\n\n'If it's about Daoud, my father, don't be concerned. No one is angry with him. Not very angry.'\n\n'No, it is not that. You must keep it from Nur Misur if you can. There was another body found this morning in the Nile. It was like the other \u2013 torn and mangled. This body was a woman's.'"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "I had not supposed that Emerson would be deterred from his work by such minor details as the arrival of his family, or the danger that hovered over us all, or the urgent necessity of planning what we were to do about both. I determined I would join him in the Valley as soon as was possible. Admittedly I was just a little curious about what was going on there, but my primary motive was the hope that I could persuade Emerson to return home early.\n\nIt would have been rude as well as risky to abandon our guests without a word, however, so I was forced to wait until the weary travellers had had their sleep out. Lia was the first to wake; her cry of surprise roused her mother, and when I went in I found them locked in a fond embrace.\n\nWhen we met for a late breakfast, I was not surprised to find that the alleviation of Walter's concern had been succeeded by extreme annoyance. This is the normal parental reaction. Lia's response was normal too, for a person of her age. One night's sleep had fully restored her, and although she expressed her regret for having worried them I did not suppose she meant a word of it. Her face glowed with happiness and excitement, whereas her parents looked ten years older.\n\nThe appearance of Sir Edward made Walter put an end to his lecture. He and Evelyn were well acquainted with the young man, and expressed their pleasure at seeing him again. He was easily persuaded to join us for coffee. 'I wondered whether you had decided on your plans for the day, Mrs Emerson,' he explained. 'What would you like me to do?'\n\nThis reminder, tactful though it was, had a sobering effect. I explained that we had decided to wait until the others returned before discussing our plans, not only for that day, but for the immediate future. 'So I may as well go on over to the Valley,' I said casually. 'The rest of you stay here.'\n\nThe objections to this reasonable suggestion ranged from Lia's out thrust lip and mutinous look to Walter's indignant protest: 'You certainly are not going off alone, Amelia.'\n\nSir Edward and Evelyn added their remonstrances, so it was decided that the best thing would be for all of us to go. Fatima packed an enormous lunch, and we were in good spirits when we set out. The secret of happiness is to enjoy the moment, without allowing unhappy memories or fear of the future to shadow the shining present. It was a shining day, with bright sunlight and clear air; we were on our way to one of the most romantic spots on earth, with loved ones to welcome us and wonderful sights to see. Lia's excitement was so great she kept urging her little donkey to a quicker pace, and Walter forgot care in his interest in the new tomb. He was a scholar as well as a fond father, and he had excavated in Egypt for many years.\n\nSir Edward was on horseback, but since there were not enough horses for all of us I rode a donkey so that I could chat comfortably with Evelyn \u2013 as comfortably, that is, as the pace of a donkey permits. She had a professional reputation of her own, as an excellent painter of Egyptian scenes; but that day her interest in archaeology was overcome by her affectionate care, not only for her child, but for the rest of us.\n\n'I really do not know what I am to do with you, Amelia! Why can't you and Emerson have a single season of excavation without becoming involved with desperate criminals?'\n\n'Now that is certainly an exaggeration, Evelyn. The 1901\u201302 season... No, that was the Cairo Museum swindle. Or was it that season that Ramses... Well, never mind.'\n\n'It's getting worse, Amelia.'\n\n'Not really, my dear; it is pretty much the same sort of thing. The only difference is that the children are taking a more active role.'\n\nI had never been certain how much Evelyn knew, or suspected, about my encounters with Sethos. There seemed no sense in keeping from her matters the children already knew, so I poured forth the entire story. Over the years I had developed a great respect for Evelyn's acumen. She was surprised \u2013 I thought she would fall off her donkey when I described the seductive garments Sethos had once demanded I assume \u2013 but when I had finished, her first comment was practical and to the point.\n\n'It seems to me, Amelia, that you are jumping to conclusions when you assume it is this person who is responsible for your present difficulties. You have no real evidence.'\n\n'In fact I don't believe he is,' I said. 'It is Emerson who sees Sethos lurking everywhere. I think... But we are almost there. We will talk about it later.'\n\nThe Cook's Tour people were leaving the Valley, and the donkey park was a maelstrom of braying and bustling. We left our steeds in the care of the attendant and walked the short distance to our tomb.\n\nSelim was the first to greet us; he explained that Emerson and the children were with Davis Effendi. I had been afraid they would be. Walter was keen on seeing the new tomb, and I was keen on finding out what mischief Emerson had been up to, so we lingered only long enough to say good morning to Abdullah and the others. At first Daoud was nowhere to be seen. Apparently someone \u2013 most probably Selim \u2013 had explained to him that Lia's parents might be a trifle put out with him. He finally emerged from the tomb looking like a very large, very anxious child. Walter shook his hand and Evelyn thanked him, and Lia gave him an affectionate hug, and he immediately cheered up. Once that was settled, I told Selim to take the baskets to our lunch tomb and we went on down the path.\n\nOur family was there, and to judge by the look of it, so was half the town of Luxor. Davis had brought his usual party. I waved to Mrs Andrews, who was sitting on a rug fanning herself with such vigour that the feathers on her hat fluttered, and went directly to Emerson. I did not at all like the look of him.\n\n'Hello, Peabody,' he said gloomily.\n\n'What is going on?' I asked.\n\n'Disaster, doom and destruction. There would have been a death too,' he added, 'if Nefret hadn't kept me away from Weigall. You won't believe this, Peabody \u2013'\n\n'You ought not to remain here if it annoys you so much, Emerson. What good can you do?'\n\n'Some, I think,' was the response. 'They all know my views on the ethics of excavation, and Weigall pretends to share them. My very presence may have a sobering effect.'\n\nAt that point Mr Davis popped up out of the stairwell, followed by several other men. He did not look as if he were sobered by Emerson's presence. Exultation and excitement had turned his face a frightening shade of red. 'It's her!' he shouted. 'Aha \u2013 there you are, Mrs Emerson. Has your husband told you? It's Queen Tiyi! What a discovery!'\n\n'Not the Queen Tiyi!' I exclaimed.\n\n'Yes, yes! The wife of Amenhotep III, the mother of Khuenaten, the daughter of Yuya and Thuya, whose tomb I found last year, the \u2013'\n\n'Yes, Mr Davis, I know who she was. Are you certain?'\n\n'No question about it. Her name is on the shrine. It was made for her by her son, Khuenaten. She's there, in her coffin, in the burial chamber!'\n\n'You've been into the burial chamber?' I inquired, with an involuntary glance at Emerson. 'You crawled along that ten-inch-wide plank?'\n\n'Of course.' Davis beamed. 'Couldn't keep me out. There's life in the old man yet, Mrs Emerson.'\n\nI had a feeling there wouldn't be life in him much longer if he went on at this rate. If Emerson didn't massacre him, he would have a stroke; he was hopping with excitement and panting like a grampus. I urged him to sit down and rest. Visibly touched at my concern, he assured me he was about to go to lunch.\n\n'You'll want to have a look,' he said generously. 'And the Professor. Later, eh?'\n\nEmerson had not moved or spoken. He was beyond outrage, I believe, and had passed into a kind of coma of disgust. I poked him gently with my parasol.\n\n'Come to luncheon, Emerson. Walter and Evelyn and Lia are here.'\n\n'Who?'\n\nRealizing I was not going to get any sense out of him for a while, I called to the children, and we led Emerson back to our rest tomb, where the others were waiting. Evelyn and Walter were mightily intrigued by the news that the tomb had belonged to Queen Tiyi, the mother of Akhenaton; they had first met at Amarna, the city of the heretic pharaoh (whom Davis referred to by the old reading of Khuenaten).\n\n'I say,' Walter exclaimed. 'I would like to have a look. Do you suppose Mr Davis would allow me to go into the burial chamber?'\n\nThis had the effect of arousing Emerson. 'Why not? He's let a dozen people in already, most of them driven only by idle curiosity. I dare not think of the damage they have done.'\n\n'Haven't you seen the place?' I asked, shooing a fly away from my cucumber sandwich.\n\n'No. I had some foolish notion that abstaining might shame others into emulating me. I sent Ramses instead.'\n\nIt occurred to me then that Ramses had been unusually silent. His back against the wall and his knees drawn up \u2013 for his legs were so long people tended to trip over them if he extended them at full length \u2013 he was staring at his untouched sandwich. I poked him.\n\n'Well?' I said. 'Tell us about it, Ramses.'\n\n'What? Oh, I beg your pardon, Mother. What do you want to know?'\n\n'A complete description, please,' said Nefret. 'I have not yet been allowed in. The ladies' \u2013 I cannot describe the contempt with which this word was pronounced \u2013 'must wait until after the gentlemen have had their turns.'\n\n'There is only one room,' Ramses said obediently. 'Another was begun, but never finished; it exists as a large niche, in which are four canopic jars with beautiful portrait heads. The walls of the chamber were plastered but not decorated. Leaning against the walls and lying on the floor are other parts of the shrine. The floor is several inches deep in debris of all kinds \u2013 part of the fill which slid down from the passageway, plaster fallen from the walls, and the remains of the funerary equipment \u2013 broken boxes, spilled beads, fragments of jars and so on. Against the wall is an anthropoid coffin of a type I have never before seen. The feather pattern that covers most of the lid is formed of glass and stone inlays set in gold. There had been a gold mask; only the upper portion, with inlaid eyes and brows, now remains. There is a uraeus on the forehead and a beard attached to the chin. The arms are crossed over the breast. One may assume that the hands once held the royal sceptres, since three thongs of the whip are still there, though the handle and the other sceptre are not \u2013'\n\n'Uraeus, beard and sceptres,' Emerson repeated slowly.\n\n'Yes, sir.'\n\n'Hmph,' said Emerson.\n\n'Yes, sir,' said Ramses. After a long moment he added, 'The coffin lid has unquestionably undergone modifications from its original state.'\n\n'Ah,' said Emerson.\n\nWearying of these enigmatic exchanges I demanded, 'Is there a mummy in the coffin, or could you tell?'\n\n'There is,' said Ramses. 'The coffin has been damaged, by damp and rock fragments that fell from the ceiling, and by the collapse of the funerary bed on which it lay. The lid shifted and split lengthwise, but it still covers most of the mummy except for the head, which had become separated from the body and is lying on the floor.'\n\nLia shivered with delighted horror. 'Is it very disgusting?' she asked hopefully.\n\n'Never mind that,' said her father. 'No wall decorations, you say? A pity. But if the place is in the state you describe, it will keep Davis happily occupied for weeks.'\n\nRamses did not reply. He had gone back to scowling at his sandwich. Emerson pronounced several bad words, and Nefret said consolingly, 'At least they have agreed not to do anything more until the photographer they sent for arrives.'\n\n'Didn't you offer them your services, or those of Sir Edward?' Walter asked. 'He did a first-rate job with Tetisheri under equally difficult conditions.'\n\nSir Edward smiled reminiscently. 'I will never forget crawling up that ramp to the top of the sarcophagus every day, with camera, tripod and plates strapped to my back. The Professor threatened to murder me if I fell off into his debris.'\n\n'And I would have done, too,' said Emerson.\n\n'I was well aware of that, sir. It made me a good deal unsteadier than I would otherwise have been.'\n\nEmerson grimaced amiably at him. 'You did do an excellent job,' he conceded. 'Davis declined his offer, Walter. Cursed if I know why. He dislikes giving anyone else credit for anything.' He jumped to his feet. 'He can't prevent us from having a look, though. I may as well add my disturbance to the rest. Who will join me?'\n\nEvelyn decided she would not add her disturbance, and suggested she take Lia on a tour of the major tombs. I knew what she was thinking. If they decided to return home, at least the child would have seen the most famous sites in the Valley. David offered to escort them, and I sent Daoud along too.\n\nThe rest of us had our turns in the burial chamber of the new tomb, but not until after all the men in Mr Davis' party, and three or four of the women, had been down and back. It was an astonishing and depressing sight \u2013 the broken, violated coffin, tumbled objects everywhere, and a great golden panel propped against the wall. Chunks of plaster had fallen from the walls or hung ready to fall. There had been damage in the past, from seepage and other causes; but every breath of air, every vibration disturbed the delicate objects again. As I crouched on hands and knees in the doorway, a section of gold-covered gesso fell from the panel and added itself to the pile of flakes already on the floor.\n\nMy conscience would not allow me to penetrate farther into the room. I crawled back along the narrow plank, pausing only long enough for another look at the gilded panel so dangerously close below. The queen was there, offering flowers to the Aton who was her son's sole god; another figure, standing in front of her, had been cut away. It had almost certainly been that of Akhenaton. The heretic's enemies, determined to destroy his memory and his soul, had penetrated into even this forgotten sepulchre.\n\nWhen we started for home, I was still dazed by what I had seen. I do not mind confessing, in the pages of this private journal, that I was filled with the direst of forebodings. The contents of the tomb were so precious and so fragile! They came from one of the most intriguing periods in all Egyptian history; one could only guess what light they might throw on the many unanswered questions about the reign of the heretic pharaoh. They would have to be handled with extreme care, and the proceedings thus far had not given me hope that this would be the case.\n\nRamses had kept to himself most of the afternoon, joining us only when we were starting on the homeward path. He brought up the rear of our little procession. I stopped and waited for him to catch me up.\n\n'A fascinating day, was it not?' I inquired, taking his arm.\n\n'Quite,' said Ramses.\n\n'Very well, Ramses, out with it. What is worrying you? Not the tomb, surely.'\n\nWe had reached the donkey park. The others had gathered round the boys' beautiful Arabians, and Lia was demanding that she be allowed to ride Risha. Everyone appeared to be in a merry frame of mind; even Emerson looked on, smiling, as Walter attempted to dissuade his daughter and Nefret laughed at both of them, and David lifted Evelyn on to his mare. The only gloomy face was that of my son. I was about to repeat my question when he sighed and said, 'There is no keeping anything from you, is there? I don't know why they call me the Brother of Demons.'\n\n'Now that I think about it, that name casts rather rude aspersions on me,' I said. 'Well?'\n\n'I must go over to Luxor this evening. Can you keep Nefret occupied so she won't insist on coming along?'\n\n'Why?'\n\nHe told me. 'Abdullah said I must not let Nefret know. That's impossible, of course, but I don't want her examining this body. The other was bad enough. This would be unbearable.'\n\n'Not pleasant for you either,' I said, concealing my own shock and distress with my customary fortitude. 'Good Gad. No wonder you have been looking so strange all day. You think it may be \u2013 that woman? Layla?'\n\n'It is a possibility. Someone must find out.'\n\n'I will go with you.'\n\n'To hold my hand?' Then the bunched muscles at the corners of his mouth relaxed, and he said quietly, 'I apologize, Mother. It is good of you to offer, but I can deal with this unassisted. You must keep Nefret and the others in the dark, at least until we know for certain.'\n\n'Very well. I'll think of something.'\n\n'I'm sure you will. Thank you.'\n\nBy the time we reached the house I had, of course, come up with a plan. I had no intention of allowing Ramses to go over to Luxor by himself, or even with David. Safety lay in numbers. I proposed my scheme; and everyone agreed that it would be a pleasant diversion to dine at the Winter Palace Hotel. Sir Edward said he would cross over with us, but that he had another engagement. It might have been only a courteous excuse to leave us to ourselves, but I was beginning to wonder whether Sir Edward had found himself a friend \u2013 of the female persuasion, that is. Perhaps he really had abandoned his hope of winning Nefret. She had not given him any encouragement that I had seen \u2013 and it is not difficult for a trained eye like mine to observe the little signs that indicate interest of a romantic nature. Sir Edward was not the man to waste time on a hopeless cause, especially when there were other ladies who found his charming manners and handsome looks irresistible. If such was the case I could only be grateful to him for his disinterested help.\n\nThe others went off to bathe and change. I lingered for a moment on the verandah, admiring my pretty flowers and thinking about the unknown woman who had met such a ghastly fate. What a strange world it is! Beauty and happiness, tragedy and terror inextricably entwined, making up the fabric of life. My offer to Ramses had been sincere, but I was not sorry to be let off that ugly task. I only wished it were possible to spare him. Someone had to do the job, though, and he was the most logical person to do it.\n\nNo one objected when I announced that Daoud and his cousin Mahmud would accompany us, but Walter gave me a sharp look. What he and Evelyn would say when they learned of the latest death \u2013 well, I did not doubt what their reaction would be. It could not be kept from them, but, I reasoned, why not put it off as long as possible so that we could enjoy the evening?\n\nI managed to keep them off the subject during dinner, assisted in no small measure by Lia. She could talk of nothing but her pleasure in being with us, her enjoyment of the visit to the Valley, her admiration of Moonlight. She babbled and laughed and sparkled. Nefret joined in with her customary vivacity, but the others were not much help. The faces of Lia's parents became longer and longer; her delight would make the curtailment of that delight harder to insist upon. Ramses ate almost nothing, and David, who was to accompany him, ate even less.\n\nThey slipped away after dinner, taking (at my insistence) Daoud and Mahmud with them. I managed to distract the others for a while by showing them the amenities of the hotel, but when we returned to the salon for coffee, the questions began. My feeble excuse, that they might be visiting some of the antika dealers, was met with the scepticism it deserved.\n\n'What the devil!' Emerson ejaculated. 'If they have gone off by themselves \u2013 and you knew of it, Peabody \u2013 and did not tell me \u2013'\n\nIndignation stifled his speech. I winced under the power of a pair of furious blue eyes.\n\nThere was no comfort to be found in the other eyes. Nefret's blazed, Lia's were wide with distress, and even Evelyn's reproached me.\n\n'They are in no danger,' I said quickly. 'Daoud and Mahmud are with them, and they have not gone far, or for long. They will soon return, and then we will discuss \u2013'\n\n'Never mind, Amelia.' It was Walter who spoke, and the quiet authority in his voice silenced even his irate brother. 'Evelyn and I have already had our discussion, and I doubt anything will change our minds. I was able, before we left Cairo, to inquire about bookings. There is space on a steamer leaving Port Said on Tuesday next. I will go back to Cairo with Lia and Evelyn, put them on to the boat, and return.'\n\nIf Walter believed this would settle the matter, he did not know his family. Everyone had a different opinion, and did not hesitate to express it. Lia's voice rose to a pitch that forced me to take her by the shoulders and give her a little shake.\n\n'For pity's sake, child, don't make a scene,' I said severely. 'Not in public, at any rate.'\n\n'No,' said Nefret. 'We Emersons do not give way to our feelings in public, do we? Aunt Amelia, how could you?'\n\n'I had hoped to postpone this until later,' Walter said, sounding a trifle rattled. 'But... Lia, child, don't cry!'\n\n'Not in public,' said Nefret between her teeth.\n\nShe looked as if she wanted to take me by the shoulders and shake me. So did Emerson. The only thing that saved me from further recriminations was the return of Ramses.\n\nSo animated had the discussion become that no one saw him come into the room \u2013 except Nefret. She jumped up and would have gone to meet him if I had not caught her arm.\n\n'Not in public,' I said, and was rewarded with a really hateful look. She sat down, however, and folded her hands tightly in her lap.\n\nEyebrows raised, Ramses came to stand by Nefret. 'I could hear you clear out in the street,' he remarked. 'What seems to be the trouble?'\n\nHis pretence of nonchalance might have deceived the others, but the affection of a mother could not miss the signs of perturbation. Meeting my anxious gaze, he shook his head.\n\nI was unable to repress a cry of relief. 'Thank God!'\n\n'You creeping, crawling, despicable traitor,' Nefret said. 'Where is the other one?'\n\n'Coming.' Ramses gestured. I saw David standing near the door. David lacked Ramses' talent for dissimulation; he was probably still trying to get his ingenuous countenance under control. Even if the dead woman was not Layla, the sight must have been dreadful, especially for a sensitive lad like David. I took a closer look at Ramses, and rang the bell for the waiter.\n\n'Be still, Nefret,' I said sharply. 'He wanted to spare you a horrible task, and you may be grateful that he did. Whisky, Ramses?'\n\n'Yes, please.' He dropped heavily into a chair.\n\n'I have a feeling I had better join you,' said Emerson grimly.\n\nBy the time the tale was told Walter had also joined us, and I had prescribed a glass for David. He never drank spirits, but I insisted that he do so on this occasion \u2013 for medicinal purposes.\n\nRamses nodded approval. 'He was sick.' With a glance at Nefret, he added, 'So was I.'\n\nWith one of her graceful, impulsive gestures she took his hand in hers. 'All right, my boy, I forgive you this time. I suppose you didn't really break our rule, since you told Aunt Amelia. So it wasn't Layla?'\n\n'No.'\n\nI wondered how he could be so sure. He had not gone into detail, but remembering the horrible mutilations inflicted on Yussuf Mahmud, I assumed the face had been unrecognizable. I decided perhaps I had better not ask \u2013 at least not in front of Lia.\n\nI might have known Nefret would ask. When she did, I saw Ramses' self-control slip for a moment.\n\n'She was... younger. Much younger.'\n\nIt was decided \u2013 somewhat belatedly, in my opinion \u2013 that we had better go home at once. Even those who had been spared a detailed description of the first mutilated body were horror-struck, and Walter heaped reproaches on Ramses for discussing such a disgusting subject in front of Lia. It seemed to me it had been Walter's responsibility to remove the girl \u2013 who was, in fact, less painfully affected than her elders. She had never encountered violent death, thank heaven, and her very innocence rendered her less vulnerable.\n\nDaoud and Mahmud were waiting, and we went to the quay. It was interesting to observe how people paired off: Walter and Evelyn, talking in low voices, David and Lia behind them, then Emerson and I, with Ramses and Nefret bringing up the rear. Emerson said very little (I suspected he was saving himself for later), so I was able to overhear some of the conversation between Nefret and Ramses.\n\n'When did you find out?' Nefret asked.\n\n'This morning. Abdullah told me.'\n\n'So all day, since this morning, you have been afraid it was Layla. Oh, Ramses!'\n\nThere was no reply from Ramses. After a moment Nefret said, 'I'm glad for your sake it wasn't she.'\n\n'My sake? I assure you, Nefret, that Layla's death would mean no more to me than \u2013'\n\n'Yes, it would. Don't pretend.' Her voice broke. 'If she had been killed, it would have been because she helped you. You would feel guilty. Just as I feel.'\n\n'Nefret \u2013'\n\n'This woman \u2013 this girl \u2013 was a prostitute, wasn't she? Someone must have identified her by now, or at least determined that no... no respectable girl that age is missing. She knew something \u2013 she asked for our help \u2013 and they killed her. I brought that child to her death.'\n\nEmerson had heard too. He heard the little sob, and a wordless murmur from Ramses. He did not stop or turn, but his hand closed over mine with a force that bruised my fingers.\n\nNefret had composed herself, outwardly at least, by the time we reached the house. We had rather taken to avoiding the verandah, especially after dark, so we went to the parlour instead. Evelyn took Lia off to bed, over the latter's strenuous protests, but not even Nefret defended her right to remain. It was clear that there was still a good deal to be said, and since everybody knew what Lia's views were likely to be, there was no sense in allowing another excitable person to join in the conversation.\n\nEmerson made the rounds checking doors, gates and windows. When he returned he reported that Daoud had insisted on remaining on guard.\n\n'He wasn't quite so assiduous before,' he remarked. 'Apparently he has taken Lia under his wing.'\n\n'And a very large wing it is,' I said with a smile. 'She could not be safer than with Daoud.'\n\nMy little attempt at humour did not lighten the atmosphere appreciably, nor did the platters of food Fatima insisted on serving. Sir Edward had returned from wherever he had been, and had joined our council of war.\n\nHe had heard the news about the dead girl and was visibly disturbed by it. Shaking his head, he said, 'Even Daoud is mortal. I hope you will believe I speak as a friend when I urge Mr and Mrs Emerson to take their daughter home as soon as possible.'\n\nIt would have been amusing if it had not been so pathetic to see the indecision on Walter's face. He was at heart a dedicated Egyptologist, and he had been long away from the scene of his work. The day in the Valley had whetted his interest afresh. And, like any true Briton, he was unwilling to abandon loved ones in peril.\n\n'Are we starting at shadows, though?' he asked. 'It sounds to me as if you have got yourself mixed up with some gang of Egyptian thieves, a little better organized and less scrupulous than most, but not as dangerous as some of the villains you have encountered in the past. The people who have been killed were both Egyptians \u2013'\n\n'Does that make their deaths less important?' Emerson inquired softly.\n\nWalter frowned at him. 'Don't try to put me in the wrong, Radcliffe. I didn't mean that, and you know it. The shameful fact is that it is a good deal safer to murder an Egyptian than a European or Englishman. The authorities don't trouble themselves to pursue such cases. The vicious method of murder they used is significant too.'\n\n'You are absolutely right, Walter,' I exclaimed. 'I pointed this out earlier, but no one believed me. A cult! A murder cult, like that of Kali \u2013'\n\nEmerson interrupted me with a loud snort.\n\n'Why not?' Walter asked. 'The Thuggees claim to be sacrificing to their goddess, but they aren't above robbing the victims. A secret organization, with all the appurtenances of a cult \u2013 ritual murder, oaths sworn in blood, and the rest \u2013 is easier to control than an ordinary gang of thieves.'\n\n'It is a point worth considering, Uncle Walter,' Ramses said politely. 'Religious fanaticism has been responsible for a number of hideous crimes.'\n\nWalter looked pleased. It wasn't often that his ideas were received with such approval. Thus encouraged, he proceeded with even greater enthusiasm. 'The leaders of the group need not be \u2013 often are not \u2013 believers themselves. Sordid, cynical gain is their motive, and they employ superstitious terror as a weapon to control their underlings. Don't forget, this business began when you young people walked off with the papyrus. Is it valuable enough to inspire such a reaction?'\n\n'That's right, you haven't seen it.' Ramses got to his feet, and then looked at his father. 'May I get it, Father?'\n\n'Certainly, certainly,' said Emerson, chewing the stem of his pipe and scowling.\n\nWalter was full of admiration, not only for the papyrus, but for the container David had designed. The lad flushed under his praise. 'We are being very careful, sir,' he explained. 'But we felt we ought to make a copy, just in case.'\n\n'Yes, quite,' said Walter. Adjusting his eyeglasses, he bent over the papyrus. I went to have a closer look myself, since the vignette was one I had not seen. Four little blue apes squatted around a pool of water, their paws folded over their rounded bellies.\n\n'The spirits of the dawn,' Walter murmured, his eyes moving down the column of hieroglyphs under the painting. 'Who content the gods with the flames of their mouths.'\n\n'Enough,' Emerson broke in. 'You can have the photographs, Walter, if you want to translate the cursed thing.'\n\n'I'll leave it to Ramses, I think,' Walter said. 'I doubt the text offers any new material. Well. It is a splendid example of its type, but it is certainly not unique. Could it have some particular religious significance for our postulated cult?'\n\nEvelyn came in and joined the group around the table. 'Is this the famous papyrus? What charming little baboons.'\n\n'You look very tired, my dear,' I said. 'Sit down and have a cup of tea.'\n\nShe shook her head. 'It is not so much physical as mental exhaustion. I have had quite a time with Lia. Never have I seen her so unreasonable! And you know, Amelia, that although one becomes extremely exasperated, it is difficult for a mother to refuse a child something she wants so badly.'\n\nEmerson stopped mangling the stem of his pipe and came to life. 'I have a compromise to propose.'\n\nThe word 'compromise,' coming from Emerson, was so astonishing we all stared. Taking this for intense interest, he smiled broadly and elaborated. 'You cannot leave for a few more days, in any case. Suppose we give the child a whirlwind tour \u2013 Medinet Habu, Deir el Bahri, and all the rest. We will wine her and dine her and wear her out, and send her home, if not rejoicing, at least resigned.'\n\nI had a feeling it would not be so easy as that. The word compromise is almost as unknown to the young as it is to Emerson. However, if it were put to the girl in that way she would have less to complain of.\n\n'You mean you would give up two days' work?' Walter asked. 'You? What a sacrifice!'\n\n'I beg you will not be sarcastic, Walter,' said Emerson with offended dignity. 'I certainly don't intend to let you wander around without me. We will travel in a body, like a confounded bunch of Cook's tourists and surrounded by \u2013'\n\n'By Daoud,' I said, laughing. 'Emerson, it is a splendid compromise. We will dine with the Vandergelts \u2013 they would be sorely disappointed not to see you, Walter and Evelyn \u2013 and show Lia the Castle, and the Amelia and \u2013'\n\n'And Abdullah's house,' Ramses said. 'He would be offended if we did not come for a meal. Daoud has already spoken to me about it. Kadija began cooking yesterday.'"
            },
            {
                "title": "From Manuscript H",
                "text": "'... I brought that child to her death!' Nefret's voice broke in a sob. Ramses put his arm round her and she turned her face into his shoulder; but there was no way he could console her, not even by taking his fair share of the blame. God knew it had haunted him ever since he had seen the slight broken body and known whose it must be.\n\n'You cannot be certain it was your appeal that was responsible, Nefret. It might have been the reward, or even some private revenge.'\n\n'Not the last. It's too coincidental and too... too horrible. What sort of people are they?'\n\nShe wiped her eyes with her fingers. Ramses fumbled in his pockets, and that finally won a tremulous laugh from her.\n\n'Never mind, my boy; you never have a handkerchief. Where's my bag?'\n\nIt was an absurd little thing, made of some shiny cloth and hanging from her wrist by a golden cord. She moved away from him and he lowered his arm. He had that to remember, at least, and the gentleness of her voice when she said, 'You don't fool me, Ramses dear; you aren't as hardened as you pretend. Come and talk about it before you go to bed.'\n\nWhen they reached the house Sir Edward was there, bland and smiling as usual. The discussion that followed was typical of their family talks \u2013 full of sound and fury (most of it from his father) but surprisingly productive in the end. Two days of uninterrupted sightseeing and entertainment would have to suffice, and if Lia didn't like it (he was fairly sure she wouldn't) she would have to lump it.\n\nRamses knew why his father was willing to take the time. He would sacrifice two days in order to have them out of the way when he went after the murderers. The girl's death had been the last straw for Emerson. Ramses had seen that look on his father's face before, and he knew what it portended.\n\nOnce they had agreed, his mother ordered them all off to bed. Ramses, putting the papyrus into its container, was the last to leave the room, or so he believed until he saw his father standing in the doorway.\n\n'Yes, sir?' he inquired, wondering if he would ever be old enough to abandon that form of address.\n\n'I thought you might need a bit of help with that,' his father said. 'How is your hand?'\n\n'It's all right, sir. I could leave off the cursed bandage anytime if Nefret would allow me.'\n\n'She takes good care of you boys. And you of her.'\n\n'We try. It is damned difficult. You know how she is.'\n\n'I have had years of experience dealing with determined females,' his father said with a faint smile. 'But we wouldn't \u2013 er \u2013 care so much for them if they were not like that, would we?'\n\n'Love' was the word he meant. Why couldn't he say it? Ramses wondered. Presumably he said it to his wife.\n\n'No,' he agreed.\n\n'Er \u2013 you managed to spare her a most distressing scene tonight. It was \u2013 er \u2013 distressing for you too. And for David. Well done, both of you.'\n\n'Thank you, sir.'\n\n'Good night, my boy.'\n\n'Good night, sir.'\n\nDavid had refused to wait outside the dirty little room where the girl's body lay. He had stood at Ramses' side when the worn sheet was pulled back and he had waited, swallowing down the bile that kept rising in his throat, until Ramses was ready to go.\n\nBut when Ramses went later to Nefret's door, he heard David's voice, low-pitched and intense, and he left without knocking. That night he killed David again, digging his fingers deep into his friend's throat and smashing his head against the stone floor. He woke with a strangled cry and lay sleepless until dawn, with his murderer's hands covering his face.\n\nBreakfast was not a pleasant occasion, despite my efforts to be cheery. Walter kept shooting apologetic glances at his daughter, Ramses looked like a ghost and David like a man with some guilty secret on his conscience \u2013 though I could not imagine what it might be, since the poor boy was one of the most harmless individuals I had ever known. From time to time a spasm of rage distorted Emerson's handsome face, and I knew he was picturing endless processions of Mr Davis' clumsy-footed friends bumbling into the burial chamber of the new tomb. At least our plan would keep Emerson away from the Valley, which was all to the good.\n\nLia had been informed of that plan by her parents in the privacy of their room. According to Evelyn \u2013 who was looking worn and unhappy \u2013 she had taken it more quietly than they had expected. I had my forebodings, however. Lia did not in the least resemble her uncle, but that morning there was something strangely familiar about the set of her chin.\n\nSir Edward put himself out to be charming, however, and between his efforts and mine the atmosphere gradually improved. We were to spend the whole day away, starting at the temples of the Ramesseum and Medinet Habu and working our way back to Gurneh, where we had been invited to lunch with Abdullah and his family.\n\nI will not bore the Reader with descriptions of the sights of Luxor. They can be found, not only in my earlier volumes, but in Baedeker. To say we had become blas\u00e9 about them would not be entirely accurate, for I will never tire of any monument in Egypt; but I believe our pleasure derived primarily from that of Lia. The joy of the present overcame her dread of the future; face flushed, curls bouncing, she took everything in with the appreciation of a dedicated student. I had not realized how intensively she had applied herself to her studies during the past year. Evelyn had told me David had kindly agreed to tutor the child over the past summer. He had been an excellent teacher. She knew the names and the complicated history of the sites; and the glow on her face when she traced the cartouche of Ramses II with a reverent finger, and read off the hieroglyphs, made me regret even more the peculiar circumstances that must curtail her visit. How well I remembered the thrill that had pervaded my entire being when I first beheld the reality of the pyramids and penetrated the dim interiors of those admirable monuments! Well, we would make it up to her another year.\n\nOur visit with Abdullah was an unqualified success all round. The house was decorated as if for a wedding, with flowers and palm branches, and Kadija had prepared enough food for twenty people. Lia ate of every dish and tried to sit cross-legged like Nefret. Her attempts to talk Arabic brought a smile even to Abdullah's dignified face. She treated the dear old fellow with an anxious deference that was very engaging. She was not at all self-conscious about mispronunciations and bad grammar, and managed to make her meaning understood.\n\nAs she had done with Daoud, I thought, glancing at that individual's beaming face. He had a heart as large as his body, and now he had found someone else to love.\n\nAfter we had finished, the men went outside to fahddle, so that we could spend a little time with Kadija. She said very little \u2013 apparently Nefret was the only one to whom she told her jokes! \u2013 but it was evident that she too had enjoyed the visit.\n\nWe stopped on the way home to see a few of the nobles' tombs. Lia would have gone on indefinitely, but I thought Evelyn looked tired, so I reminded the others that we were to dine with Cyrus and Katherine that evening.\n\n'Quite a full day,' said Emerson, drawing me apart.\n\n'In every sense of the word.' I patted my stomach. 'I doubt I will be able to eat a thing tonight. But the child is enjoying herself. What a pity she must leave so soon. Is it really necessary, Emerson?'\n\n'Better safe than sorry, Peabody.' He smiled at me. 'I can quote aphorisms too, you see.'\n\n'What did Abdullah tell you?'\n\n'Curse it, Peabody, I hate it when you read my mind that way.'\n\n'It is your face I read, my dear. I know every lineament of it And yours is not a countenance that lends itself to deception.'\n\n'Hmph,' said Emerson. 'Well, I intended to tell you anyhow. The body has been officially identified, thanks to Ramses' insistence that the police question the \u2013 er \u2013 proprietress of the house. They would not have bothered if he had not demanded it, and she would not have come forward of her own accord.'\n\n'It was the girl Nefret meant?'\n\n'Impossible to determine, Peabody. There were several of a \u2013 a young age.'\n\nHis steed snorted and I saw that his hands were clenched on the reins. 'Sorry,' said Emerson \u2013 to the horse. To me he said, 'The only way of being certain would be for Nefret to inspect the girls.'\n\n'Out of the question, Emerson!'\n\n'I quite agree, my dear. There is at least a strong suspicion that it was the same girl. Was she murdered because she was trying to escape that hellish den, or because she knew something about Layla, or \u2013 for some other reason?'\n\n'We will find out, Emerson.'\n\n'Yes, my dear Peabody, we will.'\n\nIt was a vow, and I knew he would keep it. I also knew I would have to watch him closely once the younger Emersons had departed. My dear Emerson is inclined to be reckless when his emotions are aroused.\n\nThe Vandergelts had hoped to give a large reception in honour of our visitors, but in view of the brevity of their stay the party that evening was small \u2013 only Sir Edward and Howard Carter in addition to ourselves. The others had heard of the latest murder, for news, especially grisly news, spreads quickly, but the topic was avoided out of consideration for the youthful innocence of Lia. (At one time Howard would have extended the same consideration to Nefret, but he had learned better.)\n\nSo we talked of Mr Davis' tomb instead. It is a rare pleasure to be in the company of individuals who are as well informed about and interested in a subject as oneself. Lia was not as well informed as the rest of us, but her eager questions inspired the gentlemen to elaborate and explain, which gentlemen always enjoy doing.\n\nHoward, who had not yet been inside the tomb, was mightily intrigued by our description of the coffin. 'Who else can it be but Akhenaton himself? Oh, yes, I know he had a tomb at Amarna, but his mummy wasn't there; after the city was abandoned, the royal dead may have been moved to Thebes for safekeeping.'\n\n'Possibly,' Emerson agreed. 'But there are a number of pharaohs of that period missing. How is that you haven't been asked to participate in the so-called clearance, Carter? You've worked for Davis before; I would have thought he'd ask you to make drawings or paintings of some of the objects in situ.'\n\n'I'd give a great deal to be allowed to do that,' Howard declared. 'But \u2013 well \u2013 Mr Smith is an artist and a close friend of Mr Davis; I suppose he'll be asked.'\n\n'He hasn't your touch,' Nefret said.\n\n'So long as someone does it,' Emerson muttered. 'Thus far Davis hasn't done a cursed thing about copying or preserving the objects. Supervision is criminally inadequate too. Keep your eye on the antiquities dealers, Carter, I wouldn't be at all surprised if objects from the tomb start turning up in Luxor.'\n\n'Nor would I,' Howard said. 'I was talking with Mohassib the other day...' He broke off long enough to explain, 'He is the most respected of the antiquities dealers in Luxor, Miss Lia, been in business for over thirty years. He asked to be remembered to you, Mrs Emerson. He's been ill, you know, and I think he'd appreciate a visit.'\n\nThough he had concealed his chagrin with gentlemanly courtesy, I thought Howard had been hurt by Mr Davis' employing another artist, one without his experience or his need. I found an opportunity later that evening to speak an encouraging word.\n\n'Do not be discouraged, Howard. Contemplate the future with courage and optimism.'\n\n'Yes, ma'am.' Howard sighed. 'I'm trying. I do get discouraged at times, but I cannot complain when I have friends such as you and the Professor. You know how much I admire him.'\n\n'Er \u2013 quite,' I said. Emerson is the most remarkable of men, but certain of his characteristics are better avoided. Howard's stubbornness during the affair of the drunken Frenchmen had been only too reminiscent of the way Emerson would have behaved under those circumstances.\n\nI patted Howard's hand. 'This is not the end of your career, Howard, it is only a temporary hiatus. Take my word for it. Something is going to turn up!'\n\nWith the tact I had come to expect of him, Sir Edward excused himself as soon as we got home. Yawning in an unconvincing manner, he declared he was excessively fatigued and would retire at once. In my opinion, several of the others looked as though they could do with a rest. Lia was not one of them. She announced she did not intend to waste her few precious hours sleeping.\n\n'You must have some rest,' I said sympathetically but firmly. 'Tomorrow will be another tiring day.'\n\n'I don't want to go to bed,' declared Lia, sounding like a spoiled child and looking, in the chin area, alarmingly like Emerson.\n\n'Come and talk for a while,' Nefret said, slipping her arm through that of the other girl. 'I haven't shown you the new robe I bought in Cairo.'\n\nWith the hour of leave-taking so close upon us I was reluctant to part from my dear Evelyn, and I believe Emerson felt the same about his brother. They were deeply attached to one another, though their British reticence prevented them from saying so. At Walter's request Emerson got out the papyrus again, and they began an animated and amiable argument about the reading of certain words. After a time I noticed that Ramses was not taking part. This was enough to arouse my maternal concern, so I went to him, observing that David had already slipped out.\n\n'You don't look at all well, Ramses,' I said. 'Is your hand bothering you?'\n\n'No, Mother.' He held out the member in question for my inspection. He had removed the bandage. There was still some swelling and discolouration, but when I bent each finger in turn, he endured it without visible signs of discomfort.\n\n'Something to help you sleep?' I inquired. 'You had a particularly unpleasant experience yesterday.'\n\n'Unpleasant,' Ramses repeated. 'You have a talent for understatement, Mother. Thank you for your consideration, but I don't need any of your laudanum. I believe I will go to bed, though. Say good night to the others for me, I don't want to disturb them.'\n\nEvelyn's golden head now rested upon a cushion, and her eyes were closed. I covered her with an afghan and tiptoed out. Though why I bothered to tiptoe I do not know, since Emerson and Walter were talking in loud voices.\n\nFatima was in the kitchen, her chin propped on her hands and her eyes fixed on some object on the table in front of her. So intense was her concentration that she started and squeaked when she realized I had come in. I saw that the object was a book \u2013 the copy of the Koran Nefret had given her.\n\n'You shouldn't read by candlelight, Fatima, it is hard on your eyes,' I said, putting my hand on her shoulder. 'I am ashamed I have not been of more help to you with your studies.'\n\n'All help me, Sitt Hakim. So kind. Shall I read to you?'\n\nI could not refuse. She faltered once or twice, and I supplied the words; then I praised her again and told her to get some sleep.\n\nPeeping into the parlour I saw the men were still at it and that Evelyn was sleeping sweetly. I decided I would check on my other charges. I went down the passageway and into the courtyard. My soft evening slippers made no sound on the dusty ground. I put my ear to Ramses' door, thinking as I listened how quiet and beautiful the place looked in the pale moonlight. My little garden was flourishing, thanks to Fatima's care. The hibiscus plant in the far corner was a good-sized tree now, almost as tall as I and luxuriant with foliage.\n\nThen I realized I was not the only one to enjoy the moonlight. A gust of wind stirred the leaves of the hibiscus and I caught a glimpse of someone standing beside it. No \u2013 not one person \u2013 two persons, so close to one another that they appeared to be a single form. All I could see of her were the slender arms twined round his neck and the flowing lines of a full white skirt. His back was to me, but as the breeze moved the leaves and the pale light shifted across his form I saw the dark head bent over the girl's, and the long length of him, and the way his shirt strained across his back. Nefret had worn emerald-green satin that night. The girl was Lia \u2013 in the ardent embrace of my son!\n\nI don't suppose they would have heard me if I had screamed aloud. I could not have done so, in fact; astonishment \u2013 for I had not had the least notion that any such thing was going on \u2013 kept me mute. I must have made some sound, however, or leaned against the door; for it opened suddenly and I would have toppled over backwards if hands had not caught and steadied me.\n\nThe hands were those of Ramses. There could be no doubt of that, for the rest of him was there too, standing just behind me \u2013 not in the courtyard with Lia in his arms.\n\nHe saw them too. I heard his breath catch and felt his hands tighten painfully on my ribs, and then at last I was able to speak.\n\n'Good Gad!' I cried.\n\nThe guilty parties broke apart. He would have moved away from her, but she caught hold of his arm with both hands and held him fast. My outcry had not been loud; Nefret must have been awake and listening. Her door opened. She looked from me to the miscreants, and then back at me.\n\n'Damn!' she said.\n\n'What is the meaning of this?' I demanded.\n\n'Now, Aunt Amelia, please remain calm,' Nefret said. 'I can explain.'\n\n'You knew of this? For how long, pray tell?'\n\n'Don't be angry with her.' David put the girl's hands gently away and came towards me. 'It is my fault.'\n\n'No, it's mine!' Lia exclaimed. She caught David up and tried to put her arms round him. 'I \u2013 I seduced him!'\n\n'Oh, God,' said Ramses. There was such a strange note in his voice that I swung round to look at him. His face was alive with an emotion as strong as any I had beheld on that enigmatic countenance.\n\n'Did you know?' I demanded.\n\n'No.'\n\nI turned back to David. 'I presume Lia's parents do not suspect this \u2013 this \u2013'\n\n'I am going to tell them now,' David said quietly. 'No, Lia, don't try to stop me; I ought to have done the decent thing long ago.'\n\n'I'm going with you,' Ramses said. He picked me up, as if I had been a life-sized doll, and set me down out of his way.\n\n'No, my brother. Let me have the courage for once to act without your help.'\n\nHe passed into the house. Lia started after him, and Nefret said with a gusty sigh, 'Well, that's done it. We may as well join in, Ramses, family arguments are the favourite form of amusement here and this looks like being a loud one.'"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "Loud it most certainly was. I was ashamed of Walter. He behaved like an outraged papa in a stage melodrama, and I half-expected him to point a quivering finger at David and thunder, 'Never darken my door again!'\n\nDavid had been too nervous to break the news gently \u2013 but then I suppose it would not have mattered how he broke it. 'Lia and I love one another. I know I have no right to love her. I ought to have told you at once. I ought to have gone away. I ought \u2013'\n\nHe was not allowed to say more. Walter caught hold of his daughter, who was clinging to David's arm, and dragged her out of the room. I do not suppose he had ever laid an angry hand on her, or any of his other children; so taken aback was she that she went unprotesting. We all stood like pillars of salt, avoiding one another's eyes, until he returned to announce that he had locked her in her room.\n\n'I must go to her,' said Evelyn.\n\nIt was the first time she had spoken since David had made his announcement. Her pale, silent look of reproach hurt David even more than Walter's angry words. He bowed his head, and Ramses, who had been watching with the strangest expression, went to him and put his hand on David's shoulder.\n\nWalter turned on his wife. 'You are not to go near her. Pack your things. We will take the morning train. As for you, David \u2013'\n\n'That will be enough, Walter,' Emerson said. His pipe had fallen from his mouth when David spoke. He picked it up from the floor, examined it, and shook his head. 'Cracked. A perfectly good pipe ruined. That is what comes of these melodramatic scenes. Young people tend to be overly excitable, but I am surprised, Walter, to see a grown man like you lose your temper.'\n\n'It runs in the family,' said Nefret. She went to David and took his other arm. 'Professor darling, you won't let Uncle Walter \u2013'\n\n'I will not allow any member of this family to behave in a manner unbecoming his or her dignity.'\n\nConsidering its source, this was an outrageous statement, but of course Emerson was sublimely unaware of that. He went on, 'David, my boy, go to your room. Sit quietly and don't do anything foolish. If I discovered that you had polished off your Aunt Amelia's laudanum or hanged yourself with a bedsheet I would be seriously put out with you. Perhaps you had better go with him, Ramses.'\n\n'No, sir,' Ramses said quietly. 'He wouldn't do anything like that.'\n\n'I'm not leaving either,' Nefret announced.\n\n'Do you believe he needs advocates here, to ensure fair play?' Emerson inquired.\n\n'Yes!' Nefret exclaimed passionately.\n\n'Yes,' said Ramses.\n\nNefret's slim shoulders were thrown back and her eyes blazed. Ramses' eyes were half-veiled by his lashes, and his face was no more expressive than usual, but his pose was as defiant as Nefret's. They looked very handsome and very touching and very young. I wanted to shake both of them.\n\n'Thank you, my friends,' David said softly. With a firm stride, not looking back, he left the room.\n\n'Well now,' Emerson began.\n\nHe got no further. Nefret turned on me. I had gone to Evelyn and was sitting beside her, patting her hand.\n\n'What have you got to say, Aunt Amelia? Aren't you going to speak up for them?'\n\n'My dear, it is out of the question. I am sorry.'\n\n'Why?'\n\n'She is only seventeen, Nefret.'\n\n'He would wait.'\n\n'He would wait?' Walter burst out. 'The slyness of it! I welcomed that boy into my home, treated him like a son, and he took advantage of a child who \u2013'\n\n'False!' Nefret's voice pealed like a bugle. She looked like a young Valkyrie as she spun round to face Walter, cheeks flushed, hair as bright as a bronze helmet. 'Lia made the first advance; do you think David would have dared, shy and modest as he is? He wanted to confess but she wouldn't let him. Why are you all behaving as if he has done something shameful? He loves her with all his heart and he wants to marry her \u2013 not now, when she comes of age and he has established himself.'\n\n'They cannot marry,' Walter said. 'Not now or ever.' He passed his hand over his eyes. 'I spoke in the heat of anger, and I regret it. I will tell the boy so, for I don't believe he did anything dishonourable. But marriage...'\n\nRamses had followed David to the door and closed it after him. Lounging against the wall, his hands in his pockets, he said, 'He's Egyptian. A native. That's it, isn't it?'\n\nWalter did not answer. Ramses was not looking at him; he was looking at me.\n\n'Certainly not,' I said. 'You know my feelings on that subject, Ramses, and I am offended you should think me capable of such prejudice.'\n\n'Then what is your objection?' my son inquired.\n\n'Well \u2013 his family. His father was a drunkard and his mother \u2013'\n\n'Was Abdullah's daughter. Is it Abdullah to whom you object? Daoud? Selim?'\n\n'Stop it, Ramses,' Emerson ordered. 'I will not have you addressing your mother in that accusatory tone.'\n\n'I beg your pardon, Mother,' said Ramses, not meaning a word of it.\n\n'This business is too serious to be settled in a single evening of recriminations and accusations,' Emerson went on. 'You may remove your family tomorrow evening, Walter, if you insist, but I will be cursed if I am going to lose another night's sleep getting you to Luxor in time to catch the morning train. No, Nefret, I don't want to hear any more from you either. Not tonight.'\n\n'I was only going to ask,' said Nefret meekly, 'what you think, Professor?'\n\n'I?' Emerson tapped the ashes out of his pipe and rose. 'Good Gad, is someone asking my opinion? Well, then, I do not see what all the fuss is about. David is a talented, intelligent, ambitious young man. Lia is a pretty, spoiled, engaging little creature. They must wait, of course, but if they are of the same mind three or four years from now she could do worse. Now off to bed with you all.'\n\nNefret ran to him and threw her arms around him.\n\n'Hmph,' said Emerson, smiling fondly. 'Bed, young lady.'\n\nWe dispersed in silence. Walter looked rather shamefaced. He was a kind, gentle man, and I could see he regretted his behaviour, but I did not suppose he would change his mind. It was an unfortunate development. Walter had thought of David not only as a gifted pupil but as an adopted son; this disclosure must change that relationship forever. It was even more difficult for Evelyn, who had taken David to her bosom.\n\nShe kissed me good night, looking sad enough to break my heart, and went to Walter. He put a comforting arm round her and led her out. Nefret caught Ramses by the hand. 'Come to David,' she said, and led him out. Neither of them looked at me.\n\n'So, Peabody,' said my husband. 'Another pair of cursed young lovers, eh?'\n\nI believe in the efficacy of humour to relieve awkward situations, but I could not smile at this old joke. 'They will get over it, Emerson. \"Hearts do not break; they sting and ache for...\" I forget the rest.'\n\n'Thank God for that,' said my husband piously. His eyes followed me as I went round the room extinguishing the lamps. 'It's going to be up to you, you know.'\n\n'What do you mean?'\n\n'Evelyn relies on your judgement, and you have Walter firmly under your thumb, along with the rest of us. If you supported the young people...'\n\n'Impossible, Emerson.'\n\n'Is it? I wonder, Amelia, if you yourself know why you are so intransigent.'\n\nI had put out all the lamps but one. Shadows crept into the room. I went to Emerson. He drew me into his arms and I laid my aching head on his breast. It had been an unpleasant scene.\n\n'You'll have to come to grips with it sooner or later, my dear,' Emerson said gently. 'I cannot help you this time. Confound it, I could have done without this! Life is complicated enough, with a maniacal killer on the loose and Davis wrecking that damned tomb!'"
            },
            {
                "title": "From Manuscript H",
                "text": "Holding him firmly by the hand, Nefret led the way to David's room. Ramses was still dazed. If he hadn't been so preoccupied with his own selfish feelings, he might have noticed certain things: the way Lia had clung to David the day she arrived, the look on David's face as he held her; Nefret's efforts to give them some time alone; even the girl's deference towards Abdullah, like that of an expectant bride trying to ingratiate herself with her future father-in-law. No wonder she had trusted so unhesitatingly in Daoud! He had underestimated the child. There wasn't a scrap of false pride in her, and he honoured her for it.\n\nHis mother hadn't noticed anything either. He found that amusing. She prided herself on her perception in romantic matters. Well, this wasn't the only one she had missed.\n\nDavid's gloomy face brightened when he saw who it was. 'What happened?' he asked.\n\n'Just about what you might have expected,' Nefret said. 'Damn, I should have brought the whisky.'\n\n'I don't need it, dear,' David said with an affectionate smile.\n\n'I do.' Nefret dropped on to the bed and kicked off her shoes. 'Give me a cigarette, Ramses, I need something to quiet my nerves. I'm still furious. Why are they acting this way?'\n\n'You don't understand,' David said bitterly. 'It's one thing to take a stray dog off the street and train him to sit and fetch and carry, and boast of his accomplishments; but he's still a dog, isn't he?' He hid his face in his hands. 'I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that.'\n\n'You don't understand,' Ramses said. He couldn't have explained why he was moved to defend his mother; he had criticized her himself, to her face. His mother was wrong and Nefret was right, but... He went on, 'I expect Mother is feeling rather wretched just now. She's come smack up against prejudices she never knew existed because they were buried so deep. The same is true of Uncle Walter and Aunt Evelyn. That sense of superiority isn't so much taught as taken for granted; it would require an earthquake to shake feelings that are the very foundation of their class and nationality. It isn't easy for them.'\n\n'Harder for David,' Nefret snapped.\n\n'At least he has the satisfaction of knowing that he's in the right and they are not,' Ramses said. 'Don't be so self-righteous, Nefret. Have you forgot that the people of your Nubian oasis treated their servant class like animals \u2013 referring to them as \"rats,\" depriving them of the most basic necessities? Prejudice of one sort or another seems to be a universal human weakness. Few individuals are completely free of it, including the ones who pride themselves on being open-minded.'\n\n'The Professor isn't like that.'\n\n'Father despises people quite impartially and without prejudice,' Ramses said.\n\nEven David smiled at that, but he shook his head. 'He is different, Ramses. And so are you.'\n\n'I hope so. How did I fail you, David, that you were unable to tell me?'\n\n'You have never failed me, my brother,' David muttered. 'I tried \u2013 I wanted to \u2013 but...'\n\n'But you feared I would think you unworthy of my cousin? For the love of God, David, you ought to know me better than that!'\n\n'I didn't! I do! I... Damn it, Ramses, don't make me feel more of a worm than I already feel. It was what you said one night, about taking advantage of a girl \u2013 expecting her to keep her promise even if she stopped caring for you \u2013'\n\n'Have a cigarette,' Ramses said.\n\n'Oh. Uh... Thank you.'\n\n'You two certainly have interesting conversations when I'm not around,' Nefret remarked. 'Which one of your numerous conquests were you talking about, Ramses?'\n\n'None of your business.'\n\nShe laughed, as he had expected, and he turned away to light David's cigarette, fearing his face would betray him. He had no right to feel so happy when his friend was miserable, but he couldn't help it.\n\n'Don't feel put upon because David didn't tell you,' Nefret said. 'He didn't confide in me either. It was Lia who told me. Poor little thing, she wanted a confidante so desperately. It's hard to be madly in love and not be able to talk about it.'\n\n'Is it?' Ramses said.\n\n'So I've been told.' Nefret sat up, crossed her legs, and smoothed her skirt. 'Now you understand why she was so determined to come on to Luxor. It wasn't selfishness; she was worried sick about him.'\n\n'And I'm worried about her,' David said soberly. 'It's just as well they are leaving tomorrow. If I never see her again \u2013'\n\n'Don't lose heart, David, we'll talk them round,' Nefret promised. She yawned like a sleepy kitten. 'Goodness, what a day! I'm going to bed. Come along, Ramses, you've got circles under your eyes the size of teacups.'\n\n'In a minute.'\n\n'You aren't angry with me, are you?' David asked, after she had gone, leaving the door pointedly open.\n\n'No. But when I think of how often I whined at you \u2013'\n\n'Now we can take it in turn,' David said, with almost his old smile. 'Do you remember one night \u2013 how long ago it seems! \u2013 the night you first told me how you felt about Nefret, and I said...'\n\n'\"You make such a fuss about such a simple thing.\"'\n\n'Something like that. I wonder you didn't knock me down. If it's any consolation, I've paid dearly for that smug remark.'\n\nRamses extinguished his cigarette and got up. He put his hand on David's shoulder and looked searchingly at him. 'You are all right, aren't you?'\n\n'No.' David smiled faintly. 'But I'm not going to behave like some ass of a Byronic hero. I have too much to be thankful for. And I won't give up hope. I know I'm not worthy of her, but no one would cherish her more than I. If I can win Uncle Walter and Aunt Evelyn over \u2013'\n\n'Don't worry about them. The only one who really counts is Mother.'\n\nThe ancient Egyptians had no word for 'conscience,' but the heart, which was also the seat of the intelligence, was the witness for or against a man when he stood in the Hall of the Judgement. That night I searched my heart in the sonorous phrases of the verses of the Declaration of Innocence, which I had recently translated. I had not driven away the sacred cattle, or stolen milk from the mouth of babes. I had not taken the lives of men (except when they tried to take mine) or been a teller of lies (except when it was absolutely necessary). 'O thou who makest mortals to flourish,' I whispered, 'I do not curse a god. O thou of the beautiful shoulders, I am not swollen with pride...'\n\nWas I, though? Was it false pride and bigotry that made me refuse to consider a marriage between those two? When I believed it was Ramses who held the girl in his arms \u2013 had my indignation been as strong as when I realized the man was David?\n\nYes. No. But that was different.\n\nI turned on to my side and drew closer to Emerson. He did not wake, or put his arm around me. He was sound asleep. There was nothing on his conscience. Nor on mine, I told myself. But it was a long time before I emulated Emerson.\n\nHe was up before me in the morning, which was not the usual thing. I dressed in haste and went to the verandah, where I found Emerson conversing with Sir Edward, and Fatima hovering over them with coffee and tea and sugary cakes, to keep them from starving until breakfast.\n\nI didn't doubt she knew of the most recent development. Servants always do know such things, and none of the participants in the argument had bothered to lower their voices. She was properly veiled, in the presence of the men, but her dark eyes were troubled.\n\n'You look as if you could do with a stimulant, Peabody,' remarked my husband, making room for me on the settee. 'Have a seat and a cup of coffee, and leave the children alone. I have already spoken with all of them, and they have promised... Where are you going, Sir Edward? Sit down.'\n\n'I thought you would prefer to discuss private family matters \u2013'\n\n'There is no such thing around this house,' Emerson said acerbically. 'You have become involved in our affairs, so you may as well leave off being tactful. I do not invite your opinion on the matter, however.'\n\nThe lines of laughter framing Sir Edward's mouth deepened. 'I would never venture to offer it, sir.'\n\nHe was impeccably groomed as always, attired in well-cut tweeds and polished boots, his white shirt spotless. He returned to his chair and picked up his cup, which Fatima had refilled.\n\n'As for other matters,' he began.\n\n'We will discuss those later,' Emerson said. 'After we have got my brother and his family away from here. Curse these distractions! As I was saying, Peabody, the children have agreed not to raise the subject again, so kindly refrain from doing so yourself. We will have a pleasant day seeing the sights as we planned, and put them on the train tonight.'\n\n'Pleasant?' I repeated ironically. 'It can hardly be that, with everyone moping or angry or self-conscious. I trust you did not raise false hopes, Emerson. That would be too cruel.'\n\n'Let them hope, Peabody. One never knows; something may happen to change the situation.'\n\nSomething did happen.\n\nI found nothing to complain of in the manners of my companions. Everyone was excessively polite, and the topic that was foremost in all our minds was never mentioned, but the emotional atmosphere was so thick that it destroyed all comfort. There were awkward silences and sideways glances and downcast eyes and mournful faces. I wished we had put the younger Emersons on the train that morning and got it over with.\n\nLia behaved better than I had dared expect. Not by word or look did she reproach her parents, but she was not very forthcoming with them either. She did not speak to David, or he to her. There was no need. Their eyes were eloquent.\n\nThe attractions of the temple of Karnak, well known to me, were not sufficient to turn my thoughts into happier channels. I therefore sought mental distraction by considering the course of action I meant to take in order to solve our other problem.\n\nWe were in the Hypostyle Hall at the time. The usual clumps of tourists were there, gathered round their guides, and Ramses was lecturing our group. As I stood at a little distance from them, deep in thought, a voice hailed me, and I turned to see a lady approaching. She was rather stout and florid of face and looked familiar, but I could not recall where I had met her until she reminded me.\n\n'Mrs Emerson, is it not? We met at Mr Vandergelt's soiree the other evening.'\n\nIt was the bad-mannered mama who had removed her daughter so precipitately from David. She was quite smartly dressed in a costume of dark green linen and a bonnet-like hat which shaded features that I had not taken particular notice of at the time. Assuming, as people will, that I remembered her name \u2013 which I did not \u2013 she launched into a gushing monologue about the beauties of Egypt and her enjoyment of the country, ending with an invitation to dine with her that evening at the Winter Palace.\n\nUnfortunately, Emerson and I have acquired a certain notoriety, and there are those, I am sorry to say, who seek out well-known persons in order to brag about knowing them. I could only assume that this lady \u2013 whose name I still could not recall \u2013 was moved by that unattractive and, to me, inexplicable, desire.\n\nI expressed polite regrets, therefore, explaining that we were otherwise engaged. She did not take the hint, saying she would not be leaving Luxor for several more days, and that any evening would suit her. Such rude persistence, in my opinion, justifies a firm response. I was about to utter it when she caught hold of my arm.\n\n'There is the native who has been following me demanding money,' she said indignantly. 'Come over here, Mrs Emerson, where he won't see us.'\n\nThe place towards which she was rapidly pulling me, with a grip that numbed my arm, was a doorway, now blocked, that had once admitted visitors to the Southern Precinct.\n\nA thrill of anticipation ran through me. Was this another attempt at abduction? It hardly seemed likely, in such a crowded place, but the doorway was in a far corner and hidden by scaffolding.\n\nEmerson stepped into view from behind an adjoining pillar. 'Where the devil do you think you are going, Peabody?'\n\n'Ah,' said my new acquaintance, releasing my arm. 'It is your husband. A pleasure to see you again, Professor. I was just asking Mrs Emerson if you would do me the pleasure of dining with me one evening.'\n\n'Most unlikely,' said Emerson, looking her up and down. 'But if you will give me your card I will let you know.'\n\nShe produced it, after fumbling in her capacious handbag and then \u2013 her purpose achieved, as she believed \u2013 returned to her group.\n\n'Hmmm,' said Emerson, fingering the little piece of pasteboard.\n\n'Where are the others?' I asked, hoping, though not really expecting, to avoid a lecture.\n\n'There.' Emerson gestured. 'Curse you, Peabody, if you are going to go on doing this sort of thing I will lock you up.'\n\n'What could possibly happen here, with a hundred tourists around? She is only a harmless bore.'\n\n'No doubt.' Emerson glanced at the card. 'Mrs Louisa Ferncliffe. Heatherby Hall, Bastington on Stoke.'\n\n'Nouveau riche,' I said with a little sniff. 'Her accent was quite common. We met her at Cyrus' the other evening.'\n\n'I didn't.'\n\nI took his arm and we started towards the others. 'Things have been tediously quiet of late, Emerson.'\n\n'Nothing is likely to happen if we all stay together, as we have done the past few days.'\n\nAccompanied as it was by a steely blue glare, this sounded like a threat. It was also, I feared, a depressing statement of fact. How were we to find our deadly enemy unless we gave him a chance to get at us?\n\nWe lunched at the Karnak Hotel. The beautiful view across the river, the excellent food, and the valiant attempts of some of us to carry on a cheerful conversation did not have much effect on the general gloom. The hours were passing; too few of them remained. Our dear visitors would not return to the West Bank but would go directly to the train station in time to catch the evening express; their luggage had been packed and would be brought to them there. From time to time Lia's eyes filled with tears and she turned her head, pretending to admire the view so that she could wipe them away. She had wanted to go to Gurneh to say good-bye to Abdullah and Daoud, but I had not thought that advisable.\n\nBy the time we finished luncheon the afternoon was well advanced. Sir Edward had been especially kind, devoting himself to Evelyn and trying to amuse her with reminiscences of the wonderful days in Tetisheri's tomb. The reminders were not as consoling as he hoped. It was during that season that David had come into our lives; I knew Evelyn was remembering the abused, love-starved child who had won her heart \u2013 and whose heart she was now helping to break.\n\nI believe we were all relieved when the time for departure finally arrived. We had wandered through the shops; Walter had showered gifts on his daughter: an embroidered robe, a necklace of gold and lapis beads, trinkets and souvenirs of all kinds. She received them graciously but without enthusiasm. She had behaved admirably. Not until we reached the station and saw who awaited us there did she give way.\n\nAbdullah looked magnificent. He wore his finest robes, of white silk trimmed with gold, and his snowiest turban. His face, framed by the white of beard and turban, had the dignity of a pharaoh's. Daoud was also wearing his best, his long kaftan of striped silk and cotton, his girdle a coloured Kashmir scarf. His face was not at all dignified.\n\nAbdullah held out his hand and addressed Walter. 'May God keep thee and thine in the shelter of his care, Effendi. May it be good until our next meeting.'\n\nWalter took the old man's hand and wrung it vigorously. He did not speak. I don't believe he could.\n\nAbdullah addressed Evelyn and Lia in the formal words of farewell. Then it was Daoud's turn. Instead of taking the hand Lia offered, he placed an object on her palm \u2013 a flat gold case two inches square, covered with ornate Kufic script. It was a charm, containing verses from the Koran \u2013 very old and very precious.\n\n'It is a strong hegab, little Sitt. It will keep you safe until you come again.'\n\nI could not blame her for breaking down. There were tears in my own eyes. They streamed down the girl's face as she threw herself into Daoud's arms.\n\n'We must find our places, darling,' Walter said, gently detaching her.\n\nI do not like to remember that parting. The worst moment came at the end, when, having embraced the rest of us, Lia turned to David and held out a small, trembling hand. She had given her promise and meant to keep it if it killed her, and I am certain at that moment she felt as if it would.\n\n'For God's sake, kiss him,' Ramses said suddenly. 'They can't deny you that much.'\n\nWe stood on the platform waving until the train drew away and the cloud of smoke from the funnel dissipated in the evening breeze. Daoud and Abdullah had withdrawn to a discreet distance, but I supposed they would return to the West Bank with us; it would have been churlish not to offer them places in our boat. I found I was reluctant to face Abdullah, though there was no reason (I assured myself) why I should have been. His immense dignity and intrinsic good manners would prevent him from reproaching me, by so much as a look.\n\nI wasn't keen on facing my children either. Nefret had been shooting me hostile glances all day, and Ramses... Who would have expected Ramses, of all people, to make such a romantic gesture? He had practically pushed them into one another's arms, and no one, not even Walter, had had the heart to forbid it.\n\nWe retraced our steps and, as I had expected, Emerson invited Daoud and Abdullah to return with us. Sir Edward, who had offered me his arm, announced he would remain in Luxor, since he had a dinner engagement. 'With Abdullah and Daoud along, you don't need me,' he added.\n\n'You have been very conscientious and very kind, Sir Edward,' I replied. 'I can only assume it is your sense of British noblesse oblige that moves you, since we owe you nothing.'\n\n'The pleasure of your acquaintance and the honour of your esteem is more than sufficient reward for whatever poor services I have been able to offer.'\n\nIt sounded as artificial as a paragraph out of a novel \u2013 or one of Ramses' more pompous speeches. Sir Edward was aware of this; with a sidelong smile and in a more natural tone he added, 'I haven't been of much use thus far, Mrs Emerson. It is a baffling case, and frustrating as well. Has the Professor any ideas about what to do tomorrow?'\n\n'If I know the Professor, he will be back in the Valley tomorrow. He has lost two days' work and he will be wild to find out what Mr Davis is doing.'\n\nSir Edward laughed. 'Of course. I will obtain a report this evening, Mrs Emerson. The individual with whom I am dining is Mr Paul, the photographer from Cairo. He has been working in the tomb all day, I believe.'\n\n'Indeed? Yes, I believe someone did mention he was to be here today. Have you met him?'\n\n'We have mutual acquaintances \u2013 and, of course, a shared interest in archaeological photography.'\n\nWhen we reached the quay Sir Edward bade us good night and went on down the road towards the Winter Palace, whose lighted windows glowed through the dusk like those of the royal residence after which it had been called. He began to whistle and the length of his stride implied that he was looking forward to the evening. Fellow enthusiasts always have a great deal to talk about.\n\nI felt rather as if I had lost my only partisan \u2013 or at least the only neutral party. I had to assure myself that I had acted for the best, as I always do, and that I had nothing with which to reproach myself. I had thought of suggesting that we dine in Luxor, but the scene at the railway station had convinced me that none of the others would feel there was anything to celebrate.\n\nIt is only with good friends that one can be comfortably silent. I had never been uncomfortable with Abdullah, but that evening I found myself trying to think of topics of conversation. Abdullah too seemed preoccupied. The moon had risen, sending silvery ripples across the water, and we were nearing the west bank before he spoke.\n\n'I am looking for a wife for David.'\n\n'What?' I exclaimed. 'He is still very young, Abdullah.'\n\n'When I was his age I had two wives and four children. Mustafa Karim has a daughter, young, healthy, suitable in all ways.' In a tone of deep gloom Abdullah added, 'She has learned to read and write.'\n\nI dared not laugh. In fact, I was quite touched. Abdullah considered education for women the most pernicious of all modern developments. He was making a great concession to demand literacy for his grandson's bride.\n\n'Have you mentioned this to David?' I asked.\n\n'Mention? No, Sitt. In the old days I would not \"mention,\" I would tell him what I had arranged. Now, I suppose, he will want to meet her first.'\n\nAbdullah sighed. I patted his hand sympathetically. Poor Abdullah! He expected an argument from David, but I feared he underestimated the difficulty.\n\nI didn't doubt Abdullah knew about David and Lia. Strange; it had not occurred to me that he would be opposed to that relationship. I was conscious of a ridiculous feeling of annoyance.\n\nSelim was waiting for us with the horses, and after this changing of the guard \u2013 for that was what it was \u2013 Abdullah and Daoud set off on foot for Gurneh. Selim would not sit down to table with us, claiming he had already eaten. He went off to the kitchen to talk with Fatima.\n\n'He means to stay here tonight,' Ramses said. 'I assured him it was not necessary, but he insisted.'\n\n'They are good friends and honourable men,' said Nefret, glancing at David, who did not respond. He was wrapped in misery so profound one could almost see it around him like a damp black cloud. He had eaten nothing.\n\n'Yes,' said Emerson. 'Very good of Selim. Especially since he has two young, pretty... Er, hmph.'\n\nEmerson's innocent blunder broke the wall of ice my son and daughter had raised between us. Nefret's face dissolved into laughter. 'It must keep Selim very busy.'\n\n'I haven't heard him complain,' said Ramses.\n\nNefret laughed again. Most improper, no doubt, but it was so good to see her smiling again that I decided to overlook these mild indelicacies.\n\n'I cannot understand polygamy, though,' she said, shaking her head. 'I wouldn't want to share the man I loved. I would be madly jealous of every woman he so much as looked at!'\n\n'Jealousy,' I declared, 'is crueller than the grave. It is \u2013 What did you say, Ramses?'\n\n'Nothing.' He pushed his plate away. 'If you will excuse me, I am going to fahddle with Selim.'\n\nNefret and David went with him. I spent the evening looking over the photographs they had taken of the funerary papyrus, for I had decided I would try my hand at a translation. I had fallen sadly behind with my literary activities. It was good to have the children out of the way for once.\n\nWhen we arrived at the Valley next morning I saw Emerson had managed to get an electric wire run from the generator to our tomb. Selim went at once to arrange it and the lights. Abdullah watched him with a curling lip. He did not approve of modern inventions and refused to learn anything about them. Selim had once believed that Emerson and I were great magicians, with the power to read men's minds and control evil spirits. Observing the tactful manner with which he ignored Emerson's helpful suggestions, I rather suspected he no longer cherished those youthful delusions. Selim was of the new generation, young enough to be Abdullah's grandson instead of his son. I dreaded the inevitable day when he would replace his father as our reis, but I did not doubt he would be as able and as devoted.\n\nOnce the lights were arranged, Ramses and David got to work copying the reliefs. Only fragments of them remained, but they were of a high order, delicately carved and retaining some traces of colour. Emerson watched for a while, and then withdrew. He could do nothing more inside for the time being, since every movement stirred up dust that would impede the artists.\n\nSir Edward had not returned the previous night until after we had retired, and he had been late coming in to breakfast. He had seemed tired and preoccupied, and I confess I had wondered whether it was the photographer from Cairo, or someone more entertaining, who had kept him up so late. When Emerson and I came out of number Five, we found him conversing with Nefret.\n\n'If you don't want me for anything just now, Professor, I am going along to see what Mr Ayrton is doing,' she said.\n\nEmerson tried to look as if the idea had not occurred to him until that moment. He did not succeed. 'Hmmm, yes, why not? We may be able to help him.'\n\n'I was just about to ask you about that, sir,' said Sir Edward. 'You know I had dinner last night with Mr Paul \u2013'\n\n'No, I did not know,' said Emerson.\n\n'Oh? I thought perhaps Mrs Emerson had mentioned it.'\n\n'No, she did not,' said Emerson.\n\n'Oh. Well, sir, he suggested I might give him a hand today. The photographs he took yesterday did not turn out as well as he had hoped \u2013'\n\n'You helped him develop them?' I inquired, regretting my suspicions of the young man. Developing plates takes a long time and requires careful attention.\n\n'Not to say help, no. He is a skilled photographer. However, as he pointed out, working in a confined space filled with fragile objects is easier with an assistant \u2013 to hold the equipment, you know, and manipulate the lights.'\n\n'Two assistants would be even better,' said Nefret eagerly.\n\n'That might be pushing Mr Ayrton too far,' Sir Edward said, smiling at her.\n\n'Yes, the fewer people stamping around in the burial chamber the better,' Emerson agreed.\n\n'Then you don't object, Professor?' Sir Edward asked.\n\n'You don't require my permission, you are not on my staff,' said Emerson. 'Go ahead, by all means. I will just go with you and make certain it's all right with Ayrton.'\n\n'What sort of person is this Mr Paul?' I asked, as we started along the path.\n\nSir Edward laughed. 'He's an odd little old chap. Absolutely dedicated to his work. I couldn't get him to talk of anything but photography.'\n\nNed was alone \u2013 that is to say, Davis and his entourage were not there. He greeted us with obvious pleasure. 'I thought you had lost interest, Professor, since you haven't been here for several days. Is Ramses not with you?'\n\nEmerson explained that we had been entertaining guests, and that Ramses and David were now at work in number Five. When Sir Edward mentioned his intention of assisting Mr Paul, Ned nodded. 'Yes, he told me you would be joining him. It's up to him, of course; I don't know much about photography. Go ahead, Sir Edward. I needn't caution you to take care.'\n\n'He's already here, then?' I asked.\n\n'Yes, he arrived at the crack of dawn. Very dedicated man.'\n\nSir Edward descended the steps and disappeared into the tomb. 'Mr Davis decided not to come today,' Ned explained. 'There's not much we can do until Mr Paul finishes the photography.'\n\n'Quite right,' said Emerson. 'We may as well get back to work. Care to come and have a look, Ayrton?'\n\nNed said he would like that. We had quite a nice, restful morning \u2013 all of us, that is, except for Ramses and David. When I called them out for mid-morning tea they were rather sticky and Ramses remarked that it was time they stopped anyhow, since it was hard to keep perspiration from dripping on to the paper. He and Ned got into an animated discussion of his photographic copying method.\n\n'David agrees with Mr Carter, though,' Ramses explained. 'That freehand copying is the best method of capturing the spirit of the original.'\n\n'That depends on the spirit of the copyist,' Ned said somewhat cynically. 'David's work is first-rate. I tried to persuade... Well, never mind.'\n\nWhen Emerson called a halt to the day's work, I went down the path to see whether Sir Edward intended returning with us. I realized that Ned must have left for the day, since the only persons present were a few of the guards. There were lights inside the tomb, however. I was tempted to go in, but my professional conscience intervened; obviously the dedicated photographers were still at work, and it would have been wrong to disturb them. Sir Edward would return when he was ready, as was his right.\n\nOur pleasant teatime on the verandah lacked its usual air of affability that evening. Emerson was brooding over the iniquities of Davis and Weigall, and David was brooding over his broken heart. He even looked thinner than he had the previous day, which was impossible. I wondered if Abdullah had raised the subject of Mustafa Karim's suitable daughter, and decided not to ask.\n\n'Mother, who was that woman with whom you were talking at Karnak yesterday morning?'\n\nIt was Ramses who spoke. The question was unexpected but welcome. At that point in time the topic of murder was less difficult than certain others.\n\n'She claimed to be an innocent tourist,' I said. 'But her behaviour was highly suspicious. If your father had not interfered \u2013'\n\n'She would have lured you behind a pillar, chloroformed you, and had you carried off by her waiting henchmen?' said Emerson. 'Peabody, there are times when I despair of you.'\n\n'You had not met her before?' Ramses asked.\n\n'I saw her at Cyrus' reception, but did not speak to her then. You did, David.'\n\n'What?' David started. 'I beg your pardon?'\n\nI repeated what I had said. 'You were talking with her daughter, or so I suppose the young woman to have been. Fair-haired, rather plump? Mrs Ferncliffe came and drew her away.'\n\n'Oh, yes.' David was not at all interested, but he made an effort to be courteous. 'I didn't realize the older lady was her mother. She didn't speak to me.'\n\nPerched on the ledge with his hands clasping his raised knees, Ramses said, 'I've been thinking about something you said, Mother \u2013 you and Uncle Walter. Perhaps your idea of a murder cult is not so far-fetched as it sounded. Not that it is likely such a thing actually exists, but the suggestion of it, and those horribly mutilated bodies, have cast a spell of superstitious terror over the local people. They are obviously afraid to talk to us. Is it possible that our adversaries are using fear to compensate for a weakness in physical strength? How many of them are there?'\n\n'Good thinking,' Nefret exclaimed.\n\n'Not really,' said Ramses. 'We have encountered only a few members of what may be a large organization. However, we've never seen more than three or four of them at a time, have we? There were only three men at Layla's house. She said more were expected, but that doesn't necessarily imply a large number.'\n\n'There were at least four in Cairo,' Nefret said thoughtfully. 'Two who came in through the window, two in the house across the street.'\n\n'There were three of them in the house,' David said. His hand went unconsciously to his throat. 'And the woman.'\n\nThree simple words, pronounced without emphasis or hidden meaning \u2013 yet their effect on Nefret was remarkable. Her breath caught in a sharp gasp.\n\n'The woman,' she repeated. 'Amazing, isn't it, how we have overlooked the female participants? Yet there have been several of them, and the roles they played were not negligible. A woman who called herself Mrs Markham infiltrated the WSPU and assisted Sethos in the robbery of Mr Romer's antiquities. A woman tried to cut David's throat that night in Cairo. Another woman, Layla, was obviously an important member of the group. Some or all of the women in that abominable house in Luxor are also involved.'\n\n'Nefret,' I exclaimed. 'What are you saying?'\n\nShe cut me off with a peremptory gesture. Her eyes were shining with excitement. 'I had an inkling of the truth a few days ago, when I tried to question you about Sethos, and you refused to discuss the matter. You said that the attempted abduction in London lacked Sethos' characteristic touch. You were right. He would not have planned such a crude, brutal attack or allowed his subordinates to handle you so roughly.\n\n'Yet the clues that led us to suspect Sethos cannot be dismissed, especially the clue of the typewriter. If it was not Sethos who sent that message, it was someone close to him \u2013 someone who had access to his private collection of treasures, who is familiar with the illegal antiquities business and the criminal underworld, who hates Aunt Amelia and wants to harm her. I believe that someone is a woman \u2013 and that you know who she is!'\n\nEmerson's eyes widened. 'Hell and damnation! Can it be \u2013 but it must be! Bertha!'"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "I had to clear my throat before I could speak intelligibly. 'No. Impossible.'\n\n'It can't be coincidental,' Emerson muttered. 'She fits Nefret's criteria in every particular.'\n\n'Not every particular, Emerson. She was not... Oh, good Gad! Do you believe she was?'\n\nNefret's blue eyes glittered like the best Kashmir sapphires. 'I hope you won't think me ill-mannered, Aunt Amelia, if I suggest you tell us what the devil you are talking about \u2013 for a change. Bertha was the woman who was involved in the Vincey affair the year you and the Professor were in Egypt without us. What has she to do with Sethos?'\n\n'Sethos was also involved in that business,' Emerson admitted. 'We were unaware of it until the very end, and once again he managed to elude us.'\n\n'And so did Bertha,' I said numbly. 'We encountered her again the following year, at which time she was actively engaged in the illicit antiquities game.'\n\n'So it was she who abducted Nefret,' Ramses said. 'Then who is Matilda?'\n\n'Bertha's bodyguard and lieutenant. It was she who helped carry Nefret off and... How the devil do you know that name?'\n\nFor once Ramses had no ready reply. His dark-fringed eyes, avoiding mine, locked with those of Nefret, who squared her shoulders and spoke in a firm voice.\n\n'We found your list, Aunt Amelia. What else can we do but eavesdrop and pry when you treat us like infants? Ramses, I forbid you to apologize.'\n\n'I hadn't intended to,' said Ramses.\n\n'No, you were trying to invent a plausible lie. No more of that! We want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Well, Aunt Amelia?'\n\n'You are in the right,' I said numbly, for my brain was still struggling to assimilate this unexpected revelation. 'In some ways Bertha would be a more dangerous adversary than Sethos himself. She is and was a totally unscrupulous, brilliantly clever woman, and she boasted of having formed a criminal organization of women. Layla must have been one of her henchmen \u2013 er \u2013 women. Another fact that may well be relevant is that she \u2013 er \u2013 she appears to harbour a personal grudge against me.'\n\n'Why?' Nefret asked. 'Did she explain?'\n\n'Perhaps \"grudge\" is not the precise word. The precise word she used was \"hate.\" She said she had lain awake at night planning how she would kill me. Some of the methods she had invented were \u2013 again I quote \u2013 very ingenious.'\n\nI had not realized the recollection of that conversation would be so disturbing. I do not believe voice or countenance betrayed me, but Nefret's stony face softened, and Emerson put a supportive hand on my shoulder.\n\n'\"Grudge\" does seem inadequate,' said my son coolly. 'What had you done to annoy her, Mother?'\n\n'I had treated her much more gently than she deserved,' I replied. 'Her antipathy towards me arises from... Emerson, my dear, I am sorry to embarrass you, but \u2013'\n\nEmerson's brows drew together in a scowl. 'Peabody, are you still harbouring that flattering fantasy about Bertha's attachment to me? Her interest in me was transitory and \u2013 er \u2013 specific. And, I hope I need not say, unreciprocated! After the death of her paramour she went looking for another protector, for, as you once said, my dear, discrimination against women makes it difficult for them to succeed in criminal endeavours without a male partner. We now have reason to believe she found that partner.'\n\n'Of course,' Nefret cried. 'It is all coming together. Bertha joined Sethos and fell in love with him. She believed she had captured his heart until the mere sight of you at the demonstration caused him to betray the unaltered intensity of his devotion! Frenzied with jealousy, Bertha sent the message that would have delivered you into her vengeful hands had not your gallant defenders arrived in the nick of time. When Sethos learned of it he flew into a rage, accused her, told her he never wanted to set eyes on her again. If she hated you before, how much greater cause has she now! Cast off by the man she loves \u2013'\n\n'Oh, good Gad,' Emerson exclaimed. 'Nefret, I don't know which offends me most, your sentimental ideas or the language in which you express them. Bertha was incapable of the emotion you mention. Her original profession was \u2013 er \u2013 the same as Layla's, which would explain why she turned to women in the same business when she sought allies. However, the rest of your melodramatic plot makes a certain amount of sense. It would explain how the papyrus got to Cairo. She robbed Sethos before she left him.'\n\n'There's another thing,' Ramses said slowly. 'Something Layla said. \"Your lady mother knows. Ask her whether women cannot be as dangerous as men.\"'\n\n'You might have mentioned that little detail earlier,' I said, not entirely displeased to find someone beside myself guilty of negligence. 'It is highly significant!'\n\n'Only in context,' said Nefret, giving me a critical look.\n\n'She claimed later that she had tried to warn me,' Ramses said. He turned to me with as affable an expression as I had ever seen on his face. If his lips had been curved a fraction of an inch more, I would have said he was smiling. 'A confounded oblique warning, if that is how it was meant. Never mind, Mother; it's all right, you know. Would you like a whisky and soda?'\n\n'Thank you,' I said meekly.\n\nThe atmosphere had lightened appreciably. After Ramses had supplied me with the beverage he had offered, he went on. 'This theory makes better sense than our original assumption that Sethos was once again our secret adversary. If it is true, the terms of the equation have changed \u2013 and not to our advantage. Sethos seems to be bound by a certain code of honour. Obviously no such scruples affect Bertha. She may have decided that the sweetest form of revenge would be to harm, not Mother, but those who are close to her. Viewed in that light, the attacks on us take on quite a different character. Yussuf was not sent to retrieve the papyrus; he was supposed to injure or abduct Nefret.'\n\n'He did try to get the papyrus,' Nefret insisted. 'That was what woke me, when he \u2013'\n\n'Stumbled over the box containing the papyrus,' said Ramses. 'That explains one of the points that troubled me \u2013 how he or any outsider would have known it was in your room. He didn't know, until he saw it or stubbed his toe on it.'\n\n'Damn it, Ramses, are you implying I was careless about hiding it?'\n\n'Or,' said Ramses hastily, 'he was searching for something, anything, worth stealing. Yussuf Mahmud was a thief and a physical coward. Greed overcame him, and when you fought back he fled. The men who attacked David and me could easily have dispatched us. Uncertainty as to our fate would presumably have caused extreme mental anguish to Mother. What could be more painful than to fear for those you love, to know that they are enduring captivity, torture and a prolonged, unpleasant death?'\n\nThe hand Emerson had placed on my shoulder tightened. 'Did Layla tell you that was what they had in mind for you and David?'\n\n'Not in so many words,' was the response. 'But it would have been a reasonable conjecture even if she had not hinted at some such thing.'\n\n'Hell and damnation!' Nefret exclaimed. 'We've got to find the cursed woman! Where can she be hiding? The House of the Doves? How I despise that name!'\n\n'No,' Ramses said firmly. 'A woman who favours expensive French champagne would prefer more elegant accommodations.'\n\n'Of course,' I exclaimed. 'The champagne! That is another piece of confirmatory evidence. Good Gad, she was actually staying at Layla's house!'\n\n'Part of the time,' Ramses said. 'She must have gone off that night to make the arrangements for our \u2013 er \u2013 removal. Another indication, perhaps, that her manpower (if you will excuse the term) is limited.'\n\n'Not limited enough,' Emerson said grimly. 'This isn't getting us anywhere. Damned if I can think what to do next.'\n\n'One never knows,' I said. 'Something may yet turn up!'\n\n'Such as a cobra in my bed,' said Nefret. But she said it lightly, and her smile at me was almost friendly.\n\nA thump and a wild flutter of vines heralded the arrival of Horus. He sat down on the ledge and stared at Ramses, who edged away from him.\n\n'Well, there is your guard against snakes,' I said. 'The sacred cat of Re, who cuts off the head of the Serpent of Darkness.'\n\n'If Re depended on that one to protect him, the sun would never rise again,' said Ramses.\n\nNefret picked up the cat and cuddled him, crooning in a manner most inappropriate for a beast that size. 'He was Nefret's hero, wasn't him?'\n\n'Disgusting,' said Ramses.\n\nI could not but agree.\n\nSince I had been unable to keep the appointment with Miss Buchanan at the Mission School, I had invited her and one of her teachers to dine, along with Katherine and Cyrus, of course. I had intended to ask Mr Paul, the photographer, as well. My motives were entirely charitable; he was a stranger in Luxor, and knew few people. However, Sir Edward informed me he did not accept social invitations. 'He's an odd little chap. Not comfortable in society.'\n\nSir Edward was not with us either. His absences were becoming highly suspicious. I doubted that the odd little Mr Paul was the attraction; Sir Edward must have struck up an acquaintance with one of the lady tourists. Not that it was my affair.\n\nI was acquainted with Miss Buchanan, but had not met her companion, a Miss Whiteside from Boston. Like Miss Buchanan, she had trained as a nurse. Neither lady was a model of fashion; they wore rather severe dark gowns, with nice neat white collars and cuffs. They were amiable and interesting women, though rather given to introducing God into the conversation more often than was strictly necessary. This did not sit well with Emerson, but he behaved like the gentleman he is, confining his objections to an occasional grimace. The subject of education for women was of course the primary topic. My interest in the subject was considerable, but I found my thoughts wandering \u2013 not altogether surprising, after the revelation that had come to me earlier.\n\nWas it indeed Bertha who had returned to torment me? It had been years since I had seen or heard from her, and I had honestly believed she had given up her evil ways.\n\nI had one advantage with her that I had never had with Sethos. I was familiar with her true appearance, for I had been in close contact with her day after day for several weeks. No \u2013 two advantages. She might have learned something of the art of disguise from Sethos, but she had not his natural talents.\n\nAnd yet... No one who has seen a society beauty in the full bloom of her evening toilette and seen that same woman when she wakes in the morning with puffy eyes and sallow cheeks could doubt a female's ability to alter her appearance. Bertha had been young and handsome. Would I recognize her if she had made herself look older and plainer?\n\nMy eyes moved from Miss Buchanan to her assistant. The latter was considerably younger than her superior, but neither could be called handsome. Both had scorned the use of cosmetics. No, I thought. Impossible. Bertha would be a fool to show herself to me or Emerson, who knew her as well as I did (but no better). A crafty villainess would lurk in the shadows, carrying out her evil schemes through intermediaries. If she had to appear in public, what better disguise than one of the ubiquitous black robes worn by middle class Egyptian women? With her fair complexion darkened and only her eyes visible over the face veil, she could pass within a few feet of me unnoticed.\n\nI came back to myself with a start, realizing that Miss Buchanan had asked me a question. I had to ask her to repeat it. After that I forced myself to behave like a proper hostess, but after dinner I took pity on Emerson and allowed the subject to turn to Egyptology.\n\nNo one who lives in Luxor can remain completely indifferent to the subject. Miss Buchanan was acquainted with Mrs Andrews, and she had heard of the new tomb. She asked if we had been inside and requested a description. 'It is true that the queen is wearing a golden crown?' she inquired.\n\nRamses immediately launched into an interminable monologue. Happily, this prevented Emerson from launching into an interminable tirade against all the persons involved with the tomb; but as Ramses went on and on and on, listing every item in the burial chamber, even Emerson stopped scowling and listened open mouthed.\n\n'The so-called crown is in fact a collar or pectoral,' Ramses concluded. 'Why it was placed on the head of the mummy is open to conjecture. It was of thin gold in the shape of a vulture \u2013 the vulture goddess Nekhbet, to be precise \u2013 so it could be bent to fit the contours of the skull. Oh \u2013 I neglected to mention a heap of approximately forty beads which had apparently fallen from a necklace or bracelet.'\n\nCyrus eyed him askance. 'Now see here, young fellow, you can't possibly remember all that. How many times were you in the burial chamber?'\n\nRamses' reply \u2013 'Once, sir, for approximately twenty minutes' \u2013 made Cyrus look even more sceptical. However, I recalled the time Ramses had rattled off the entire inventory of an antiquities storeroom after having been in the place for less time than that. I had forgot about this attribute \u2013 natural talent or acquired skill, as the case may be \u2013 and apparently Emerson had too. He gazed at his son in dawning speculation.\n\n'A word with you later, Ramses,' he said.\n\n'Yes, sir.'\n\nThe ladies from the Mission left early, in order to be safely removed from worldly temptation before midnight, when the Sabbath began. Miss Buchanan repeated her invitation to visit the school, which I promised I would do.\n\nThe Vandergelts were driving the ladies back to the boat landing in their carriage, but I managed to draw Katherine aside for a few words in private.\n\n'We must make a formal appointment, it seems,' I declared. 'I have seen too little of you, and I have much to tell you.'\n\n'I feel the same,' Katherine replied. 'I believe Cyrus means to go to the Valley tomorrow. I will come with him, and perhaps we can find the opportunity for a chat.'\n\nI stood on the verandah waving farewell until the carriage disappeared into the darkness. I hoped the others would have gone to their rooms by the time I returned to the parlour, but they were still there, and I braced myself for additional questions and reproaches.\n\n'We were wondering, Mother, whether you had heard from Uncle Walter.'\n\nRamses was the speaker, but I knew who had prompted him to ask. My reply was directed impartially at them all.\n\n'I am sorry I neglected to mention it. Yes, Walter telegraphed from Cairo this afternoon, and for a wonder the message was promptly delivered. They had a safe journey and they have booked passage on the steamer from Port Said on Tuesday next.'\n\n'All of them?' Nefret exclaimed. 'I thought Uncle Walter intended to return to Luxor.'\n\n'I persuaded him not to do so,' said Emerson, looking particularly smug.\n\nNone of us asked how he had accomplished that. I really did not care how. I did not doubt Walter's courage or his devotion to us, but it would have been deuced awkward to have him underfoot. He was a scholar, not a man of action, and every mention of Lia's name would have been \u2013 well \u2013 awkward.\n\n'Well done, Emerson,' I said.\n\nEmerson looked pleased. David murmured a few words that might have been 'Good night,' and left the room.\n\nEmerson does not brood. He has a happy facility for concentrating on the business of the moment and ignoring the things he can do nothing about. He was up next morning full of energy and ready to go back to work.\n\nBy the time Katherine and Cyrus joined us in the Valley we had put in two good hours' work. Cyrus inspected number Five without great enthusiasm. 'It'll take years to get through that debris, and then the ceiling will probably fall in on you,' he declared.\n\n'It is not like you to be so pessimistic,' I said.\n\n'Well, consarn it, Amelia, I'm getting discouraged. All those years here in the Valley without any luck, and I'm having the same kind of thing over at Dra Abu'l Naga, right near where you all found Tetisheri. Seems as if I should be due for something.'\n\n'I told you, you should have hired Carter,' Emerson said unsympathetically.\n\n'Couldn't let Amherst go, could I? He's doing the best he can. How about having a look at Davis' tomb?' Cyrus added emphatically' 'Darn the fellow!'\n\nSo we all went to have a look. No one was there but Ned, standing guard, or so I assumed, since nothing was going on. He explained that Mr Paul was still photographing, so no visitors were allowed.\n\n'Is Sir Edward with him?' I asked. I had not seen the young man that morning; he had come in late and left early.\n\n'Yes, ma'am, he was here at the break of day,' Ned said poetically. 'It certainly is good of you to spare him.'\n\n'I would have been happy to spare other members of my staff,' said Emerson snappishly. 'Is that fellow Smith painting? Can't imagine why Davis uses him when David and Carter are available.'\n\nHe went on grumbling while Cyrus, at Ned's invitation, descended the steps and peered into the entrance corridor. When he came back his face was alight. Cyrus was a true enthusiast, and very well informed for an amateur. It did seem a pity he had never found anything worthwhile.\n\n'When will you open the coffin?' Cyrus asked greedily. 'Consarn it, I'd give a thousand dollars to be present!'\n\nKatherine gave me an amused smile. 'He would, too,' she said. 'But Mr Ayrton is incorruptible, Cyrus, you cannot bribe him.'\n\n'Now, Katherine, Mr Ayrton knows I didn't mean it that way.'\n\n'Oh, no, sir,' Ned said. 'That is \u2013 yes, sir, I do know. M. Maspero is arriving tomorrow; I'm sure he would give you permission.'\n\nEmerson groaned. 'Maspero? Well, curse it, that will be the end of the tomb. He'll want to go in, and he will invite everybody he knows to go in, and by the time they finish stumbling about there won't be a scrap left in its original place. How much longer will the photography take?'\n\nNed shrugged. 'I don't know, Professor.'\n\n'He doesn't know much, does he?' Emerson said disagreeably \u2013 but not until after we were on our way back to our own tomb.\n\nRamses was quick to defend his friend. 'He is not the one who makes those decisions, Father. Once Maspero gets here he will be officially in charge.'\n\n'We can ask Sir Edward about the photographs,' I suggested. 'This evening, perhaps.'\n\n'Hmm, yes,' Emerson said. 'That young man has been conspicuous by his absence of late. I want to have a talk with him.'\n\nSince the hour was past midday, Cyrus suggested we go back to the Castle for lunch. This was agreeable to all. The only question was what to do with Horus, whom Nefret had brought with her. He had stayed with us, for a change; usually he went off on his own, hunting... something or other... and we always had a hard time collecting him when it was time to go home. Now she asked Cyrus if the invitation included the cat.\n\n'Why, sure, bring him along,' said Cyrus.\n\n'My dear,' Katherine exclaimed. 'Have you forgot that Sekhmet is in \u2013 er \u2013 a delicate condition?'\n\nI knew the cat could not be expecting or Cyrus would have mentioned it, so I concluded that the condition to which Katherine referred was the one that often led to the other.\n\n'We've got her shut up in her room like always,' Cyrus said cheerfully.\n\nI had seen Sekhmet's room. It had mesh screens on the windows and was furnished with cat beds, cat toys and cat dishes. Many human beings do not enjoy quarters as comfortable.\n\n'Don't count on a locked door to keep that feline Casanova out,' said Ramses, giving Horus a hateful look.\n\nHorus gave him one back. All Bastet's descendants are unusually intelligent.\n\nCyrus studied the animal with a new interest. Horus sat at Nefret's feet, his paws together and his head lifted alertly. His resemblance to the felines depicted in the ancient paintings was particularly strong just then; his long ears were pricked, his brindled coat glowed in the sunlight. He might have been the model for the painting of the Cat of Re that illustrated the portion of the papyrus I had recently translated.\n\nCyrus tugged at his goatee. 'Hmmmm,' he said thoughtfully.\n\nWhen the others started back to the Valley after an excellent luncheon, Horus was not with them. Cyrus had assured Nefret he would return the creature next day. I wondered whether Horus would want to be returned, after experiencing all the feline comforts available to him at the Castle, but that was not a subject I particularly wanted to discuss.\n\nI intended to stay and have a comfortable private talk with Katherine. At first Emerson would not hear of it. He finally consented after I agreed to wait there until someone came for me.\n\n'So you are still in danger,' Katherine said soberly. 'Tell me what has been happening.'\n\nCyrus had gone with the others. We were alone in Katherine's charming parlour, which her doting husband had completely redecorated for her. It combined the finest of Middle Eastern ornaments \u2013 rugs, brasswork, carved screens \u2013 with the most comfortable of modern furniture. I always felt hospitably welcomed in that room, and I settled down in an overstuffed chair and told her all about it.\n\nHer plump, pretty face lengthened as I spoke. 'I wish there were something I could do to help, Amelia. It is a desperate situation and I see no way out of it.'\n\n'Something will no doubt occur to me,' I assured her. 'We have been in situations as desperate, Katherine. I didn't expect you to offer a solution, only the comfort of friendly interest, which you have done. Oh, and Evelyn asked me to pass on her fondest regards and her regrets that they were unable to say good-bye in person.'\n\n'We heard they had left,' Katherine said. 'Was there a reason for their sudden departure, or should I not ask?'\n\nSo I told her all about that, too. Her response was limited to a shake of the head and a murmured 'What a pity. I am so sorry.'\n\nI realized I had hoped she would say more. That surprised me, since I am not in the habit of relying on others for advice.\n\n'It will all work out for the best,' I said firmly. '\"Hearts do not break; they sting and ache\" \u2013 uh \u2013'\n\n'\"...for old love's sake, but do not die.\"' Katherine dimpled. 'The Mikado, isn't it?'\n\n'Yes, of course. You know your Gilbert and Sullivan even better than I. Now tell me how your plans for the school are progressing.'\n\nShe accepted the change of subject and we had a very useful discussion. She could not decide whether it would be more sensible to construct a new building or refurbish an old one, and she was still in doubt as to the best location for the school. Luxor seemed the obvious choice, but she hoped to attract girls from the west bank villages and, as she pointed out, there were already two schools in Luxor.\n\n'The Mission School and what other?' I asked.\n\n'The one Fatima attends. She told you about it.'\n\n'Oh, yes. It isn't an actual school, though, is it?'\n\n'Not by our definitions, perhaps, but it has an excellent location, and Sayyida Amin holds several classes each day. She admitted she has not the money to do more.'\n\nIt was a pleasure to get my mind off matters that were temporarily insoluble and concentrate on a subject that could be solved, with time and money and dedication \u2013 all of which Katherine possessed. When the little clock on the mantel chimed I was startled to realize how late it had become.\n\n'I must get back,' I declared, rising.\n\n'You mustn't go, Amelia. Emerson told you to wait until some one came for you.'\n\n'I refuse to sit waiting like a child whose papa is busy elsewhere. It is broad daylight and I will be well-mounted.'\n\nKatherine followed me downstairs, expostulating all the while; but when we reached the courtyard we found Ramses sitting cross-legged on the ground, chatting with the gatekeeper and one of the gardeners. The latter gave Katherine a guilty look and hastened away.\n\n'Why didn't you tell me you were here?' I demanded.\n\nRamses uncoiled himself and rose in a single motion. 'I haven't been here long. Father is still in the Valley, but he said he would leave shortly and that we are to go straight home. Good afternoon, Mrs Vandergelt.'\n\n'Good afternoon,' said Katherine, with one of her catlike smiles. 'Wouldn't you like a cup of tea?'\n\n'No, thank you, ma'am, Father said we were to go at once.'\n\nHe insisted on my riding Risha, and mounted my amiable but plodding mare. 'What is your father up to?' I inquired.\n\n'He is lying in wait for Mr Paul and Sir Edward, I believe. With M. Maspero's dahabeeyah arriving tomorrow, he is increasingly concerned about the contents of the burial chamber.'\n\n'He would be. I do wish I could persuade him not to interfere. Maspero is already vexed with him.'\n\nThe horses were picking their way through the rocky defile that led from the Valley when I heard something that made me look round. It took me a moment to locate the source of the agitated bleating, for the goat's dusty coat was almost the same colour as the surrounding rock.\n\nRisha stopped at a touch. I dismounted and started towards the animal, which appeared to be caught by the leg.\n\n'Damn it, Mother!' Ramses shouted. 'Watch out!'\n\nSince I am not as stupid as my children believe I am, I had immediately realized this might be a ruse, but I was not at all averse to a confrontation. In fact, I had been hoping for some such thing. My hand was in my coat pocket, therefore, when the man appeared from behind a boulder and started towards me. He carried a knife, so I had no compunction about taking out my pistol and firing at him. As I pulled the trigger Ramses flung himself on the fellow and both of them fell to the ground.\n\n'Curse it,' I cried, hastening to them. 'Ramses, what the devil do you mean by... Ramses, are you wounded? Speak to me!'\n\nRamses rolled over and sat up. His eyes were narrowed to slits and his dark brows had drawn together. I had seldom seen a more impressive scowl, even on the face of his father. He drew a deep breath.\n\n'No, don't speak,' I said hastily. 'Compose yourself. Heavens, I do believe I have killed the fellow!'\n\nThere was certainly a bloody hole in the front of the man's robe. His eyes were wide open, in the unseeing stare of the dead. The rest of his face was hidden by a tightly wound scarf.\n\nRamses' lips were moving. I wondered whether he was swearing or praying \u2013 no, not praying, not Ramses \u2013 or perhaps counting to himself, as I had once suggested as a means of controlling one's temper. Whatever he was doing, it achieved the desired result. When he spoke his voice was reasonably calm.\n\n'I doubt it, Mother. This appears to be an exit wound. He was shot in the back, by someone concealed among the rocks. Stay here and stay down.'\n\nBefore I could stop him he was gone, sure-footed as a goat over the tumbled rocks. Within a few seconds I had lost sight of him.\n\nThe dead man was not very good company. I crouched beside him, listening anxiously for the sound of another shot. I heard nothing; even the Judas goat, as I believe I may term it, had stopped complaining. I hoped it was not seriously hurt, but I decided I had better not leave the dubious cover of the rocks in order to find out. If Ramses had not acted so precipitately I would have gone with him, or at least insisted that he take my pistol. Young people are so impulsive. There was nothing I could do now but wait.\n\nIt seemed a long time before Ramses returned, as silently and suddenly as he had vanished. He was carrying a rifle.\n\n'Ah,' I said, as he sat down beside me and placed the rifle on the ground. 'The would-be assassin had fled, I take it.'\n\n'Yes. He was up there.' Ramses folded his arms and rested them on his raised knees. He appeared quite composed and relaxed, except for his hands, which were tightly clasped.\n\n'After shooting this person he dropped his rifle and ran?' I picked up the weapon and examined it. Ramses hastily shifted position.\n\n'Mother, please put that down. There is a bullet in the chamber.'\n\n'So I see. That is odd. Why didn't he fire again?'\n\n'He may have counted on one of us shooting the other,' said Ramses. Slowly and gently he removed the rifle from my hand and put it behind him. Then he lowered his head on to his arms. His shoulders shook.\n\nIt was not like Ramses to yield to weakness, even after the event. I was touched, for I felt sure it had been my danger that had unmanned him. I patted his shoulder. 'Now, now,' I said. 'There, there.'\n\nRamses raised his head. His lashes were wet. Not until then did I identify the peculiar sound he was making.\n\n'Good Gad,' I gasped. 'Are you laughing?'\n\nRamses wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. 'I beg your pardon.'\n\n'Granted,' I said, relieved. 'Your father does that sometimes.'\n\n'I know.' He sobered. 'Laughter is somewhat inappropriate, however. Look here.'\n\nHe pulled the scarf from the man's face, disclosing a nasty sight. The jaw was askew and horribly swollen, the mouth distorted.\n\n'I thought his posture and build looked familiar,' Ramses said. 'This is one of the guards who was at Layla's house.'\n\n'No wonder your hand was hurt. You broke his jaw.'\n\n'Evidently. He's been going around like this for days, without medical attention. Poor devil.' Ramses turned the body over. There was another hole in the man's back, smaller than the one in front. 'He was expendable, injured as he was, and he had failed in his job. Like Yussuf. They gave him another chance \u2013 a slim chance, as he knew, but you might have been alone and unarmed. And if he failed, this was a more merciful death than the... crocodile.'\n\nI shivered. 'What shall we do with him?'\n\nRamses bent over the body and began searching it. Aside from the knife and a packet of tobacco there was nothing on the fellow except a cord around his neck, from which hung a silver amulet.\n\n'Didn't do him much good, did it?' remarked my son. 'We'll notify the police. Nothing more we can do.'\n\n'The goat,' I reminded him, after he had helped me to mount.\n\n'Yes, of course.'\n\nThe goat was not hurt, only pinned by the rock. It went gambolling off as soon as Ramses freed it. I was relieved, because we had enough animals as it was, and this one was of the masculine gender.\n\nEmerson was not pleased when he learned what had occurred. I was prepared to defend Ramses, but I did not have to. Emerson was not angry with Ramses.\n\n'Curse you, Peabody,' he cried heatedly. 'The old wounded animal trick, for God's sake! Will you never learn?'\n\nWe had retired to our room and I was at that moment held tightly in his arms, so my reply was somewhat muffled.\n\n'It is irresistible, Emerson; it can never fail with any of us. Besides, there is a limited range of possibilities open to even the most inventive adversary.'\n\nEmerson was still laughing when he put his hand under my chin and tilted my face up into a more convenient position.\n\nSometime later I sat on the edge of the bed watching while he performed his ablutions.\n\n'I hope you will excuse me for laughing,' he remarked amid his sputtering and splashing. 'But really, Peabody, making excuses for the paucity of imagination of an enemy...'\n\n'Ramses laughed too,' I said.\n\n'Ramses?' Emerson turned and stared at me, water dripping off his chin.\n\n'Yes, I was quite astonished. The alteration of his features was amazing. I had not realized how strongly he resembles you. In fact, he is quite a nice-looking lad.'\n\n'He is a handsome devil,' Emerson corrected. He added, grinning, 'Like his father. I won't ask what you said to provoke Ramses to such an extraordinary reaction, since it wouldn't have struck you as amusing.'\n\n'I don't remember. But I believe Ramses' analysis of the event was correct. She is using up her forces rather callously, isn't she? Three so far, if the girl was one of them.'\n\n'She must have been, willingly or not,' Emerson muttered. 'What did she know that made her so dangerous to them?'\n\n'Come and have your tea, my dear. Perhaps inspiration will come to you.'\n\nThe others were assembled on the verandah when we went out. The only missing member of the party was Sir Edward. His absence was immediately noted by Emerson, but no one could explain it.\n\n'Unless,' I suggested, 'he has gone to Luxor with Mr Paul. As you yourself pointed out, Emerson, he is not in your employ.'\n\n'He does seem to be losing interest in us,' Nefret remarked. 'Has he given us up as a bad job, do you suppose?'\n\nShe was sitting on the ledge next to Ramses, who had politely drawn his feet up to make room for her.\n\n'One could hardly blame him,' said Ramses. 'The only thing we have been able to accomplish is running ourselves into one trap after another.'\n\nThere was, I thought, a decided note of criticism in his voice. 'What else can we do?' I demanded. 'We are walking about blindfolded, with no notion as to where our opponents are hiding. And there is one positive aspect: she has one less ally now.'\n\n'You notified the police?' Emerson asked.\n\nRamses nodded. 'They will collect him eventually, I suppose. If the jackals and the buzzards leave anything.'\n\n'Horrible,' David murmured.\n\n'Yes, it is, rather,' Ramses agreed. 'But I doubt they would be able to identify him in any case. He was not a local man, or I would have recognized him on the occasion of our first meeting.'\n\nA gloomy silence fell. Then Emerson said in a meditative voice, 'I think I may just run over to the Valley for a while.'\n\n'Emerson!' I exclaimed. 'How can you think of such a thing?'\n\n'Well, curse it, Peabody, there is nothing we can do about the other business, is there? Maspero arrives tomorrow, and the tomb \u2013'\n\n'If you attempt to leave this house I will \u2013 I will \u2013'\n\n'What?' Emerson asked interestedly.\n\nMercifully the sight of an approaching rider provided the necessary distraction. 'Here is Sir Edward,' I said. 'He will tell us what has been happening.'\n\nSir Edward was pleased to do so. At Emerson's insistence he described the day's activities in excruciating detail. 'Well,' said my husband grudgingly, 'it appears we will at least have a complete photographic record. How much longer \u2013'\n\n'For pity's sake, Emerson, leave off interrogating the poor man,' I said. 'He hasn't had an opportunity to drink his tea.'\n\n'Thank you, ma'am.' Sir Edward accepted a sandwich from the tray Fatima offered and nodded his thanks. 'I don't want to monopolize the conversation. How was your day?'\n\nSo the story of our little adventure had to come out. Sir Edward appeared shocked. 'I do beg, ma'am,' he said, 'that you will take more care. The old injured-animal trick \u2013'\n\n'I will lecture my wife if lectures are required,' Emerson said, scowling fiercely.\n\n'Will you be here for dinner this evening, Sir Edward?' I inquired.\n\n'Yes, ma'am. I won't be going out this evening. That is... You have no other engagements, do you?'\n\n'I had thought,' Emerson began.\n\n'You are not going to the Valley, Emerson.'\n\nSir Edward choked on his tea. After wiping his chin with his serviette he exclaimed earnestly, 'Please, sir, I beg you won't think of it. It will be dark soon, and the danger \u2013'\n\n'He is right, Emerson,' I said, with a nod of appreciation at Sir Edward. His concern was so sincere I regretted having been suspicious of him. 'We will spend a quiet domestic evening here. You have not kept up your excavation diary as you usually do, and I have a number of notes to be set in order.'\n\n'And I,' said Sir Edward, 'will give David a hand with his photographing of the papyrus. If he will allow me, that is.'\n\nDavid started. He had been in a brown study, and I knew what the subject of it must be. He replied with his usual gentle courtesy that he would be very glad of assistance, and that he had rather fallen behind.\n\n'If you have time, I would like to ask you about some of the objects in the burial chamber, Professor,' Sir Edward added. 'I was struck by the fact that the inscriptions on the coffin appear to have been altered. Can you tell me...'"
            },
            {
                "title": "That sufficed to get Emerson's attention, and that of Ramses as well. Led by Sir Edward's intelligent questions, the two of them talked nothing but tomb throughout dinner. I put in a word or two, and Nefret added her opinions when she could make herself heard. It was a most fascinating discussion, but I will spare the general Reader the details, which are related elsewhere.3",
                "text": "The only one who did not participate was David. He spoke very little as a rule, because he was too polite to interrupt, and that is sometimes the only way to join in our conversations; but formerly his smiling attention had betokened his interest. Now he sat like the skeleton at the feast, picking at his food. I confess I was relieved when Sir Edward and Nefret took him off to the photographic studio.\n\nThe rest of us settled down to work; and very pleasant it was to be occupied with familiar tasks. Emerson muttered and mumbled over his excavation diary, interrupting himself now and then to ask me or Ramses to verify some detail. Ramses, whose hand was almost back to normal, scribbled away at his notes; and I turned again to the Book of the Dead, as it is (erroneously but conveniently) named.\n\nAny scholar would admit the religious texts are difficult. They contain a number of words that are not in the standard vocabulary.\n\nCertainly they were not in mine! I had kept a list of unknown words, meaning to ask Walter about them. It now covered several sheets of paper. I was frowning over one of them when Ramses rose, stretched, and came to lean over my chair.\n\n'The Weighing of the Heart still?' he said. 'You were working on that yesterday. Are you having any difficulty with it?'\n\n'Not at all,' I said, turning my paper over. I had every intention of consulting Walter about my difficulties, at an appropriate moment, but I could not quite bring myself to ask Ramses for assistance. It was a weakness of character, and I admit as much, but no one is perfect.\n\n'This particular scene fascinates me,' I went on. 'The concept itself is quite remarkable for a pagan culture that had never known the teaching of the true faith.'\n\nRamses turned a chair round and sat down, resting his arms on the back. 'I presume you are referring to Christianity.'\n\nCurse it, I thought. Of all things I did not want to get into a theological discussion with Ramses. He could argue like a Jesuit and his opinions, derived from his father, were distressingly unorthodox.\n\nHe took my reply for granted and went on, 'The idea that an individual will be judged by God, or a god, to determine his fitness for eternal life is not unique to Christianity. In some ways I prefer the Egyptian version. One was not dependent on the arbitrary decision of a single entity \u2013'\n\n'Who knows all and sees all,' I interrupted.\n\n'Granted,' said Ramses, lips tightening in his version of a smile. 'But the Egyptians allowed the dead man or woman the formality of a court hearing, with a divine jury and a court reporter and another judge who watched over the balance. And the result of an unfavourable decision was more merciful than the Christian version. Burning in hell for all eternity is worse than quick annihilation in the jaws of...'\n\nHe broke off, staring at the photograph.\n\n'Amnet, the Eater of the Dead,' I said helpfully.\n\n'Yes,' Ramses said.\n\n'Well, my dear, you have made several interesting points, which I will be glad to debate with you \u2013 at another time. It is getting late. Why don't you run along and tell the others to stop? Nefret should go to bed.'\n\n'Yes,' Ramses repeated. 'Good night, Mother. Good night, Father.'\n\nEmerson grunted.\n\nAfter Ramses had gone I looked through the messages that had been delivered that day. I had to agree with Emerson; Luxor was becoming too popular. One could, if one were so inclined, spend every day from morning till night in idle social encounters. There were notes from various acquaintances inviting us to lunch, tea and dinner, and several letters of introduction written by people I had met once or twice on behalf of people I had not met at all and did not wish to meet. The only item of interest was a note from Katherine, saying she planned to visit the school of Sayyida Amin next day, and asking if I would like to accompany her.\n\nI mentioned this to Emerson, whose head was bent over the notes he had spread on the table. 'I really ought to go, Emerson. Katherine's scheme of starting a school deserves encouragement, and I have been remiss in helping her.'\n\n'You may go if you take Ramses and David with you.' After a moment Emerson added, 'And Nefret.'\n\nMy poor dear Emerson is so transparent. 'Leaving you alone?' I inquired.\n\n'Alone? With twenty of our men, several hundred cursed tourists, and Davis' entire entourage?'\n\n'There are remote corners of the Valley where tourists never go, Emerson. There are empty tombs and hazardous chasms.'\n\nEmerson tossed his pen down on to the table and leaned back in his chair. Fingering the cleft in his chin, he fixed amused blue eyes on me. 'Come now, Peabody, you don't suppose I would do anything so foolish as to wander off inviting someone to ambush me?'\n\n'You have done it before.'\n\n'I am older and wiser now,' Emerson declared. 'No. There are more sensible ways of proceeding. I'll tell you what, Peabody; put Katherine off for another day or two, and we will go after the bastards who killed that girl.'\n\n[ They had also kidnapped his son and David and attacked Nefret, but it was the horrible death of the young woman that had driven Emerson into action. He tries to hide his softer side, but like all true Britons he will go to any length to defend or avenge the helpless ]\n\n'What do you have in mind?' I inquired.\n\n'We are still in the dark as to the motive behind this business. The papyrus is the only solid clue we possess. We never did pursue that lead. If we can find out where it came from we may be able to deduce the identity of the individual who was last in possession of it.'\n\n'Bertha,' I said.\n\n'Curse it, Peabody, we don't know that that is so. We've put together a pretty plot, but there is no proof that she is the guilty party. Sethos, on the other hand \u2013'\n\n'You always suspect him. There is no proof of his guilt either.'\n\n'And you always defend the bastard! I intend to get that proof. I made a few inquiries earlier, but only about Yussuf. I did not mention the papyrus. It came originally from Thebes, so it must have passed through the hands of one of the Luxor dealers. Mohammed Mohassib is a likely possibility. He has been in the business for thirty years, and he has handled some of the finest antiquities that ever came out of the Theban tombs. You heard what Carter said about him the other evening. Can it be a coincidence that he asked to see me?'\n\n'Not you, Emerson. Me.'\n\n'Same thing. I will show him the papyrus and promise him immunity and undying friendship if he can give us useful information. We'll leave the Valley early and go over to Luxor.'\n\nI slept peacefully and soundly for most of the night. It was near dawn when I was aroused by a piercing scream.\n\nThere was no question where it had originated or who had voiced it. It shot even Emerson out of bed. Of course he immediately fell over his boots, which he had carelessly left on the floor, so I was the second person on the scene.\n\nThe first was Ramses. The room was extremely dark, but I recognized his outline. He stood by Nefret's bed, looking down at her.\n\n'What is it?' I cried. 'Why are you just standing there? What is wrong?'\n\nRamses turned. I heard the scrape of a match. The flame sprang up and strengthened as he held it to the candlewick.\n\nBy that time the others had hastened to the scene. Never had I been so glad I had insisted on proper sleeping attire. They were all more or less clad, even Emerson, though a good deal of bare skin showed. Sir Edward had not waited to put on a dressing gown, but he was wearing a pair of tasteful blue silk pyjamas.\n\nNefret sat up. 'I am very sorry,' she began; but her voice broke. Helpless with laughter, she bent her head over the enormous bulk clasped in her arms.\n\n'Good Gad,' I exclaimed. 'How did he get here?'\n\nRamses set the candle down on a table. 'Someday I am going to murder that animal,' he said in a conversational voice.\n\n'Now, you know you would never do such a thing,' I said.\n\n'I might, though,' said Emerson, behind me. 'Damnation! My heart is going at twice the normal rate.'\n\n'It was my fault,' Nefret insisted. 'I was sound asleep, and when he jumped on to my stomach he knocked the breath out of me and I thought...' She hugged Horus closer. 'He didn't mean it, did him?'\n\nI managed to get Ramses out of the room before he said very many bad words. Next morning we found one of Cyrus' servants squatting patiently on the verandah, waiting for us to come out. Lifting the hem of his robe to his knees, he demanded some of the stinging water. He meant iodine, and the condition of his shins justified a copious quantity of that medication, which I duly applied. Katherine had a perfectly adequate medicine chest (one of my wedding presents to the pair) but I suppose the fellow preferred my magical powers. He also wanted to air his grievances, which he did at length. I am sure I need not mention that he was the servant assigned to look after Sekhmet."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE WEIGHING OF THE HEART",
                "text": "\u2003Hear ye the judgement.\n\n\u2003His heart has been weighed truly and his soul\n\n\u2003has testified for him. His cause is righteousness\n\n\u2003in the Great Balance."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "When we crossed over to Luxor on Monday afternoon I saw the familiar dahabeeyah of the director of the Service des Antiquit\u00e9s tied up at the dock. So the Masperos had arrived! I would have to call on them, of course. I only hoped I could prevent Emerson from doing so, for in his present state of exasperation he was bound to say something rude.\n\nI had sent a messenger to Mohassib earlier to tell him we would come to see him that afternoon. When we reached his house we saw several men sitting on the mastaba bench beside the gate. They stared in undisguised curiosity, and one of them said with a sly smile, 'Have you come to buy antiquities, Father of Curses? Mohassib charges too much; I will give you a better price.'\n\nEmerson acknowledged this feeble witticism with a grimace. It was well known that he never bought antiquities from dealers. After greeting each of the men by name, he drew me aside. 'I believe I will take advantage of the opportunity to fahddle with these fellows, Peabody, and see what gossip I can pick up. You and Nefret go ahead. Mohassib will be more at ease with you, and I feel sure, my dear, that you can persuade him into indiscretions my presence might inhibit.'\n\nLike Emerson, I knew most of the 'fellows'; several were dealers in fakes and antiquities, and one was a member of the notorious Abd er Rassul family, the most skilled tomb robbers in Thebes.\n\n'Very well,' I said. 'Sir Edward, will you be good enough to take the \u2013 to take that parcel? Ramses, you and David stay with your father.'\n\nEmerson rolled his eyes in evident exasperation, but did not protest. Taking out his pipe, he joined the men on the mastaba.\n\nWe were greeted by Mohassib himself. He led us into a nicely furnished room where tea was set out on a low table. Not until we had taken the seats he offered did I realize David had followed us into the house.\n\n'I told you to stay with the Professor,' I said in a low voice.\n\n'He ordered me to come with you,' David replied. 'Ramses is watching him. We thought \u2013'\n\n'All right, never mind,' I said quickly. Mohassib was watching us, and it would have been rude to continue a whispered conversation.\n\nThe usual compliments and courtesies and pouring of tea took a long time. Mohassib did not glance at my parcel, which I had placed carefully on the floor beside my chair. He left it to me to introduce the reason for our visit, which I did in the conventional oblique fashion.\n\n'We were honoured to learn you wished to see us,' I began. 'My husband had other business; he sends his \u2013'\n\n'Curses, no doubt,' said Mohassib, stroking his beard. 'I know the mind of Emerson Effendi. No, Sitt Hakim, do not apologize for him. He is a man of honour, whom I esteem. I would be of service to him.'\n\n'In what way?' I asked.\n\nThe question was too blunt. I ought to have replied with a compliment and a corresponding offer of friendship. Mohassib courteously overlooked my blunder, but it took him forever to get to the point.\n\n'You were asking, a few days ago, about a certain man from Cairo.'\n\n'Did you know him?' I asked eagerly.\n\n'I knew who he was.' Mohassib's lip curled. 'I do not have dealings with such people. But I heard \u2013 it was after Emerson was here \u2013 I heard he was the one found in the Nile.'\n\n'The man killed by a crocodile,' I said.\n\n'We know, you and I, that no crocodile killed him \u2013 or the girl. Hear my words, Sitt. Do not waste your time looking for these people among the dealers in antiquities. They have nothing to do with us. They are killers. We do not kill.'\n\nI believed him. In acknowledgement and reciprocation \u2013 and because I had meant to do it anyhow \u2013 I unwrapped my parcel and asked David to lift the lid of the box.\n\nMohassib's breath came out in a whistling gasp. 'So. It was said you had an antiquity of value, and that was why Yussuf Mahmud went to your house. But who would have thought it would be this?'\n\n'You have seen it before, then?'\n\n'It never passed through my hands. But I have heard of it. It was one of the first objects Mohammed Abd er Rassul took from the cache at Deir el Bahri.'\n\n'Ah,' I breathed. 'What happened to it after that?'\n\nThe old man shifted position and looked uneasy. 'I will tell you what I know of the papyrus, Sitt Hakim. It is common knowledge. Everyone knew of it, and of certain other things Mohammed hid in his house.'\n\nEveryone except the officials of the Service des Antiquit\u00e9s, I thought to myself. Well, it was not surprising that the men of Luxor and Gurneh should join ranks against the foreign interlopers who tried to interfere with their ancient trade. The tombs and their contents had belonged to their ancestors, and hence belonged to them; most of them were desperately poor, and treasure was of no use to the dead. It made perfectly good sense from their point of view.\n\n'The stolen objects lay in hiding for many years,' Mohassib went on. 'Once the tomb was known to Brugsch and Maspero, no dealer would dare handle them. But later \u2013 a decade later, perhaps \u2013 there came a man who did dare. It was said he took the papyri and the royal ushebtis with him to Cairo, where he had established his headquarters, and what he did with them after that no one knows, but one can guess. You can guess, Sitt, and I think you can guess who this man was.'\n\n'Yes,' I said. 'I think I can.'\n\nMohassib had said all he meant to say. He indicated, by thanking me repeatedly for visiting a sick, tired old man, that the interview was at an end. He had suffered a stroke the previous year and did look ill, but when I took his hand in farewell I could not resist asking a final question.\n\nHe shook his head. 'No, I do not know who they are. I do not wish to know. If you can put a stop to them, good, they dishonour my country and my profession, but I do not want to end up in the jaws of the \"crocodile.\"'"
            },
            {
                "title": "From Manuscript H",
                "text": "As soon as the women had gone into the house, Emerson turned to his son. 'Go with your mother and Nefret.'\n\nRamses began, 'Mother told us \u2013\n\n'I know what your mother told you. I am telling you to accompany her.'\n\nRamses took David by the arm and led him through the open gate. 'You had better do as he said.'\n\n'We ought not to leave him alone, Ramses. What if \u2013'\n\n'I'll keep my eye on him. Hurry.'\n\nShaking his head, David entered the house. One of Mohassib's servants came into the courtyard carrying a chicken by its feet. The chicken was squawking and flapping; it might not know precisely what was in store for it, but it took a dim view of the proceedings. Ramses beckoned urgently. A quick, silent commercial transaction ensued. Grinning, the servant went off sans galabeeyah and turban, and richer by enough money to buy several of each. He was also sans chicken. Instead of heading for the wide open spaces, the feeble-witted bird began pecking at the hardened dirt. Ramses knew he had won it only a temporary reprieve. An unaccompanied food source wouldn't remain free for long in Luxor.\n\nHis father was not a patient man. Ramses had barely finished winding his turban when Emerson rose and took leave of his companions. Tucking the end of the strip of cloth into place, Ramses went in pursuit of the chicken. He had to push the stupid bird before it would move. As he had anticipated, his father looked suspiciously into the courtyard. Seeing only the backside of an inept servant, Emerson proceeded on his way.\n\nAfter addressing a final critical suggestion to the chicken, and rubbing a handful of dirt over his face, Ramses followed his father. It wasn't much of a disguise, but at least he wouldn't stand out in a crowd as he would have done in European clothes.\n\nHe thought he knew where his father was going, and he cursed himself for telling Emerson about the small silver disk. He had found it lying near the abandoned rifle. There was no doubt in his mind it had been deliberately placed there. The idea of a woman, jingling with silver and clad in long robes, scampering around the cliffs of the Valley and accidentally losing one of her ornaments, was absurd.\n\nThe silver disk was meant to lead them back to the House of the Doves. For obvious reasons, he had been careful to conceal it from his mother. Ordinarily Nefret and David would have been his confidantes, but poor David was half out of his mind with romantic frustration and Nefret couldn't be trusted to act sensibly when her feelings were so deeply involved. Someone had to be told, though, because, unlike his mother, he wasn't fool enough to go back there alone. That left his father. Emerson had nodded and mumbled and said he'd think about what they should do. And now he was doing it \u2013 alone, as he believed, and without taking sensible precautions. It would have been hard to say which of them was more difficult, his mother or his father.\n\nThe only question was, had Emerson made an appointment beforehand, or did he plan to drop in without notice? If the latter was the case, he probably wouldn't run into anything he couldn't handle, but if he had been stupid enough to warn them... No, Ramses admitted, Father isn't stupid. It's that bloody awful self-confidence of his that gets him into...\n\nSpeaking of self-confidence, he thought, as a pair of large hands closed round his windpipe and he was slammed up against a wall.\n\n'Damnation!' said Emerson, peering into his face. 'It's you!'\n\n'Yes, sir.' Ramses rubbed his throat. 'What did I do wrong?'\n\n'You were a bit too close on my heels. Thinking of something else, were you?' Emerson pondered the situation. 'I suppose you may as well come along. Follow me at a discreet distance and don't come in the house.'\n\n'People are staring at us, Father.'\n\n'Hmmm, yes.' His father cuffed him across the face. 'How dare you try to rob the Father of Curses!' he shouted in Arabic. 'Thank Allah that I do not beat you to a jelly!'\n\nHe strode off. Ramses skulked along after him 'at a discreet distance.' The carefully calculated blow had looked more painful than it felt, but his cheek stung.\n\nHe had not been mistaken about his father's destination. At this time of day there weren't many customers, but a couple of men stood by the door fahddling and smoking. As Emerson strode briskly towards the entrance, one dropped his cigarette and both stared, first at Emerson, then at one another. As one man they turned and trotted away.\n\nThe curtains flapped wildly as Emerson pushed through them. Ramses stepped back in time to avoid the rush of another man, who bolted out of the house and ran off. Ramses smiled behind his sleeve. 'When the Father of Curses appears, trouble follows.' Daoud had a long collection of such sayings, which were now current in Luxor and surroundings.\n\nHe picked up the cigarette end the other fellow had dropped, but he didn't put it in his mouth. Verisimilitude had its limits, and he was already unhappily aware of the fleas inhabiting his borrowed garments. Scratching absently, he drew nearer to the door and listened. He could hear only a low murmur of voices. One was his father's. The other was that of a woman.\n\nAs the minutes dragged by Ramses became increasingly uneasy. Polite conversation with the ladies was all very well, but it could be a delaying tactic, and there was only one reason he could think of for someone wanting to delay the Father of Curses \u2013 the need to collect enough men to overpower him. The hell with orders, Ramses thought. His mother would kill him if his father came to harm through his negligence \u2013 if he didn't kill himself first.\n\nStripping off the galabeeyah and turban, he ran his fingers through his dishevelled hair and pushed through the curtain. The room was empty except for the proprietress and his father. The latter swung round.\n\n'Curse it, I told you not to come in,' he snarled.\n\nSince the comment was now irrelevant, Ramses ignored it. 'What's going on?'\n\n'I have been requesting permission to search the place. Thus far the lady has been reluctant to give it.'\n\nRamses stared at his father in mingled consternation and amusement. It was like him to politely request permission of the old harridan, and just as like him to contemplate searching a rabbit's warren like this without someone to watch his back. Even if they hadn't expected him, they had had ample time to gather their forces.\n\nThe old woman's kohl-smeared eyes darted from his father to him and back again. Gold tinkled as she lifted her shoulders and arms in a shrug.\n\n'Go, then,' she whined. 'Do as you will. A poor weak woman cannot stop you.'\n\nEmerson thanked her in impeccable Arabic.\n\n'For God's sake, Father,' Ramses exclaimed. 'If you are determined on this, let's do it.'\n\n'Certainly, certainly, my boy. This is the way, I believe.'\n\nThe horrible little cubicles behind the main room, each barely large enough to contain a thin mattress and a few utensils, were unoccupied. Emerson indicated the narrow stairs at the end of the passage.\n\n'The more pretentious apartments are up above, I expect,' he said dryly.\n\n'Be careful, Father. Wait at the top for me. Don't go \u2013'\n\n'Certainly, my boy, certainly.'\n\nHe took the stairs two at a time. Ramses followed, looking over his shoulder. The hair on the back of his neck was practically standing straight up. To his surprise, his father did wait for him. There was more light here, from window apertures at either end of a short corridor, and only four curtained doorways. The place was utterly silent except for the inevitable chorus of flies. The air was still and hot. Dust motes swam in the sunlight.\n\n'Hmph,' said Emerson, not bothering to lower his voice. 'This is beginning to look like a waste of time. We may as well finish, though. I will take this side of the hall, you take the other.'\n\n'Excuse me, sir, but that is not necessarily the wisest procedure.' Ramses' skin prickled. It was too quiet. The house couldn't be completely deserted.\n\n'Perhaps not,' his father conceded graciously. 'Follow me, then.'\n\nHe started for the nearest door, his boots thumping on the bare floor. Walking boldly through a curtained doorway wasn't what Ramses would have done, but obviously it was his father's intention. Ramses caught hold of his sleeve and managed to get in front of him. 'At least let me go first.'\n\nHis father gave him a hard shove. It struck him as an excessively violent reaction until he heard the first shot. The second followed before his body hit the floor. Then his father landed heavily on him. The last of his breath went out in a cry of alarm.\n\n'God! Father \u2013'\n\n'Don't get up,' said Emerson calmly.\n\n'I \u2013 I can't. You're lying on top of me. Damn it, are you \u2013'\n\n'Dead? Obviously not.' He rolled off Ramses and raised himself cautiously to his hands and knees. A third shot rang out.\n\n'Get down,' Ramses gasped. 'Please get down, sir!'\n\n'Hmm,' said Emerson. 'Something odd about that, you know. No bullet.'\n\n'What?'\n\n'That's where the first two hit.' Emerson gestured at the splintered holes in the plastered wall. 'Where did the last go?'\n\n'Through the curtain opposite?'\n\n'It isn't opposite,' Emerson pointed out. 'Her aim doesn't appear to be that bad. We'll just wait a bit, I think.'\n\nThey waited, Ramses still prone, his father leaning negligently against the wall. When Emerson suddenly straightened and whipped through the doorway, he caught Ramses completely by surprise. He had forgot how quickly his father could move, like a cat or a panther, as his mother said. Scrambling to his feet he followed, thinking unfilial thoughts.\n\nBut no shot, no outcry, no sound of any kind followed his father's abrupt entrance into the 'more pretentious apartment.' It was a little larger than the rooms downstairs, and it contained an actual bed instead of a hard pallet, a table and two chairs. Emerson stood by the bed looking down at something that lay on it. The window over the bed was open and uncurtained. There were flies. Hundreds of flies. The whining buzz rasped like a file. As he went slowly to join his father, Ramses saw the tall green bottle on the table, and the empty glass next to it.\n\nThe gun lay by her lax hand. She was dressed in a dark blue garment like the riding habits ladies wore, and she looked neat as a pin, from the velvet facings of the bodice to the elegant buttoned boots. The only mess was on the pillow. She had shot herself through the head.\n\n'Stop fussing, Peabody, the bullet only grazed me.'\n\nIt had cut a long furrow across Emerson's back and upper arm. I added a final strip of sticking plaster and sat down beside him. He gave me a somewhat self-conscious smile. 'Another shirt ruined, eh?'\n\n'It might have been mine if he hadn't knocked me down,' Ramses said. 'How did you know she was about to fire, Father?'\n\nWe were sitting on the verandah, with Fatima hovering and clucking and trying to get us to eat. It was the first moment we had been calm enough to conduct a sensible conversation.\n\nWhen we came out of Mohassib's house and found Emerson gone, I was extremely put out. The amiable villains sitting on the mastaba indicated the direction in which he had gone, which was not of much help. Ramses had not been with him. As one explained, they believed he had accompanied us into the house, and he certainly had not come out of it.\n\nI knew Ramses had not been with us, so I felt fairly sure that he had followed his father in some guise or other \u2013 which was somewhat reassuring. We had no choice but to wait where we were. The villains kindly made room for us on the mastaba and entertained us with speculations as to Emerson's whereabouts. Since these ranged from suggestions that he had gone to raid the antiquities shop of Ali Murad to sly hints that his destination might have been someplace less respectable, they did not entertain me very much. Sir Edward, cradling the papyrus box as if it were a baby, and watching me with evident concern, finally offered to go and look for him.\n\n'Where would you look?' I demanded somewhat peevishly.\n\nHe had no answer to that, of course.\n\nIt was David who first saw the returning wanderers, and his low cry of relief turned all our heads in the direction in which he was looking. From dusty boots to uncovered black heads they appeared no more unkempt than was usual for them, but I observed that Ramses was trying not to limp.\n\nBy the time we got back to the house our most immediate questions had been asked and answered, and I had seen the rent in Emerson's coat, which, like his shirt, was beyond repair. He removed the coat at my request, remarking that it was too cursed hot anyhow, but insisted he was not in need of medical attention. I was therefore forced to conduct these operations on the verandah while Emerson sought refreshment in a whisky and soda.\n\n'You first, Peabody,' he said. 'Did you learn anything from Mohassib?'\n\n'Are you deliberately trying to provoke me, Emerson?' I demanded passionately. 'You sent me to Mohassib in order to get me out of the way while you kept another appointment. You did not expect I would learn anything. In fact, he did tell me something of considerable importance, but it pales into insignificance compared with your experience. How did you know she was there? And why the devil didn't you tell me?'\n\n'Now, Peabody \u2013'\n\n'Why did you go there alone? She might have killed you!'\n\n'I wasn't alone,' Emerson said meekly. 'Ramses \u2013'\n\n'As for you, Ramses,' I began.\n\nEmerson cut me off. 'Ramses, while you are there at the table, will you get your mother a \u2013'\n\nRamses had already done so. He handed me the glass.\n\n'Thank you,' I said. 'Very well, Emerson, I will listen to your explanation. In detail, if you please.'\n\n'Promise you won't interrupt?'\n\n'No.'\n\nEmerson grinned. 'Keep your mother's glass filled, Ramses, my boy.'\n\nThe clue of the silver ornament had only confirmed Emerson's suspicion that the House of the Doves was the place to look for Bertha. Where could she find more willing allies than among the unfortunates who had good reason to despise men and to yearn for greater independence? The consistent failure of her attacks on us, he reasoned, must be rendering her increasingly angry and frustrated. Giving away her whereabouts was a bold step, a calculated risk, but it was the sort of risk a bold, reckless woman might take in order to dispose of one of us.\n\n'I didn't realize she was that desperate, though,' Emerson admitted. 'It may well be that she had used up her resources of money and manpower. The revenge of the crocodile... A good phrase that, eh, Peabody? Almost as literary as one of yours. The revenge of the crocodile was designed to inspire terror in her subordinates, but it may have backfired. People are inclined to resign from positions that repay failure by torture and death.'\n\n'It makes a certain amount of sense now,' I admitted. 'But you couldn't have known that when you went there.'\n\n'No; but I did not suppose there would be any difficulty,' said Emerson. 'I \u2013 what did you say, Ramses?'\n\n'Nothing, sir,' said my son. 'That is \u2013 you didn't answer my question.'\n\n'Excuse me,' said Sir Edward. 'But I have forgot the question.'\n\nHe looked quite bewildered. That is often the case with individuals who are unable to follow the quickness of our mental processes.\n\n'I asked how Father was able to anticipate the precise moment of her attack,' said Ramses. 'The fact that the house appeared to be deserted and unusually quiet had aroused my own suspicions, but to judge by Father's behaviour \u2013'\n\n'That was designed to mislead our adversaries,' said Emerson complacently. 'It was obvious that we were expected. I say we, since she could not have anticipated how many of us would turn up. No doubt our approach was observed; she had time to bundle the girls out of the place, if she had not already done so. Finding no one below, we ascended the stairs, and I announced in a loud voice that I had come to the conclusion no one was there. I did that to put her off guard, you see, so that she would expect me to blunder into a trap.'\n\n'It was very convincing,' said Ramses.\n\nEmerson looked pleased. I had the distinct impression, however, that the statement had not been meant as a compliment. 'Expecting difficulty, I heard the faint click of the gun being cocked. So I pushed Ramses out of the way and got myself out of the line of fire as well. We waited a bit. She had fired three shots, and I thought perhaps she would go on until she had emptied the gun, but after a time I \u2013 uh \u2013'\n\n'Lost patience and went in anyhow,' I said. 'Confound it, Emerson!'\n\n'That was not the way of it, Peabody. As I told Ramses at the time, the third shot came nowhere near us. I assumed it was intended to delay us long enough for Bertha to make her escape via a window. It was something of a shock to see her lying there. There was nothing we could do for her, so we stopped by the police station and reported the incident before returning to Mohassib's house.'\n\n'Then her body is now in the morgue?'\n\n'I presume so. Please don't tell me you want to have a look at it. I assure you, you would not want to.'\n\n'I will spare myself that job, I think. I will always be curious, though, as to what role she had been playing. A tourist, I suppose. I wonder...'\n\n'Do not wonder,' Emerson said firmly. 'Now, then, Peabody, it is your turn. What was this piece of vital information Mohassib gave you?'\n\n'The papyrus came from the Deir el Bahri cache.'\n\n'Ah,' said Emerson. He started to reach for his pipe, but failed to find it since he was wearing neither coat nor shirt. 'Ramses, would you look in my coat pocket for... Thank you. Well, Peabody, we surmised that, didn't we?'\n\n'It was only one of several possibilities, none of which was susceptible to proof. Mohassib was certain. According to him, the Abd er Rassuls kept it hidden for years, until it was taken away by...' I paused for effect.\n\n'Sethos, I suppose,' said Emerson calmly. 'Well, that ties up the last loose end, I think. Nefret's theory was right after all. Bertha and Sethos were in league. She took the papyrus when she left him.'\n\nA thoughtful silence followed. The sun had set, and the rosy flush of the afterglow lit the eastern hills. From the villages scattered across the plain rose the blended musical voices of the muezzins. The evening breeze stirred Nefret's hair.\n\n'Then it is over,' she said. 'I can't seem to take it in. We've been on the defensive so long. To have it end so suddenly and so finally...'\n\n'High bloody time,' Emerson declared. 'Now I can get back to work. We must go to the Valley early. Maspero will want to invade the tomb tomorrow, and I have a few things to say to him.'\n\nI allowed the ensuing discussion to proceed without me, for I was deep in thought. Everyone seemed to believe Bertha's death had ended our troubles. Even Emerson, who was usually the first to suspect the Master Criminal of every crime in the calendar, had dismissed him from consideration. I was not so certain. Bertha had robbed Sethos of at least one valuable antiquity. She might have taken others as well, and I did not think he was the man to accept this complacently.\n\nPerhaps we had not been the only ones on Bertha's trail. Had it been fear, not of us, but of her former master that had prompted her to end her life? Had she ended it? Sethos had once boasted to me that he had never harmed a woman, but there is always a first time. His anger against those who had betrayed him could be a terrible thing.\n\nFatima came to announce that dinner was served. I observed that Ramses was slow to arise and waited for him.\n\n'Did your father break any bones \u2013 your bones, that is \u2013 when he fell on you?' I inquired.\n\n'No, Mother. I assure you, I am not in need of your medical attentions.'\n\n'I am relieved to hear it. Ramses...'\n\n'Yes, Mother?'\n\nI tried to think how best to express it. 'Your father is \u2013 er \u2013 not always the most perceptive of observers when he is in a state of emotional excitability, as I am sure he was at the sight of that unfortunate woman's body. Did you see anything that might suggest she had not taken her own life?'\n\nRamses' eyebrows rose. I had the feeling that he was not so much surprised by the question as by the fact that I had asked it, and the promptness of his reply was another indication that he had already given the matter some thought. 'The revolver was under her hand. There was no sign of a struggle. Her garments were neatly arranged and her limbs straight, except for the arm that had held the weapon. There were powder marks on the glove on her right hand.'\n\n'And the blood was...'\n\n'Wet,' said Ramses, without emphasis.\n\n'It seems to be a clear-cut case, then.'\n\n'Sethos claimed, I believe, that he had never harmed a woman.'\n\n'I cannot imagine why you should suppose I was thinking of Sethos. He is not in Luxor.'\n\n'Unless he is \u2013'\n\n'Sir Edward? Nonsense.'\n\n'The possibility had occurred to you, though.'\n\n'I knew it had occurred to you,' I corrected. 'Do you suppose I could be deceived? I knew Sethos in London, disguised though he was. I would know him in Cairo \u2013 in Luxor \u2013 wherever he happened to be. Sir Edward is not the Master Criminal!'\n\nThe next morning brought a sight one seldom sees in Luxor \u2013 lowering grey skies and wind squalls that blew the branches wildly about. We had risen before sunrise, and Emerson is not at his best in the early morning, so it was not until we gathered for breakfast that he took note of the weather. He started up from his chair.\n\n'Rain!' he cried. 'The tomb will be flooded.'\n\nI knew it was not our poor little tomb number Five that had roused such alarm, and exasperation for what had become Emerson's id\u00e9e fixe made my voice sharper than usual. 'Sit down and finish your breakfast, Emerson. It is not raining, only dark and windy.'\n\nAfter poking his head and shoulders out the window to check on the accuracy of my report, Emerson returned to the table. 'It looks like rain.'\n\n'The tomb to which I presume you refer is not your responsibility, my dear. I am sure Ned and Mr Weigall have taken all necessary precautions.'\n\nEmerson's expression showed what he thought of that optimistic assessment. 'They ought to have had a door in place days ago. Sir Edward, is the photographer... Where the devil is he?'\n\nHe was referring to Sir Edward, not the photographer. Emerson glared wildly round the room, as if expecting to see the young man lurking in the shadows.\n\n'He has probably slept late,' I replied. 'As he is entitled to do, especially on such a day as this. The inclement weather will keep most people away from the Valley today, I expect.'\n\n'Hmmm.' Emerson fingered the cleft in his chin and looked thoughtful. 'Including Maspero and Davis. Hothouse plants, both of them.'\n\n'That is neither fair nor accurate, my dear.'\n\n'Who gives a curse?' Emerson demanded. 'Ramses, haven't you finished?'\n\n'Yes, sir.' Ramses rose obediently, stuffing the last of his toast into his mouth.\n\n'I have not finished,' I declared, reaching for the marmalade.\n\n'Hurry up, then, if you are coming.' Emerson eyed me speculatively. 'Er \u2013 Peabody, why don't you stay at home today? The weather is unpleasant, and I don't need you. Nefret, you stay with her and make certain she is \u2013 er \u2013 kept busy.'\n\nGrey skies over Luxor are so unusual as to amount to a portent. Perhaps it was the weather that affected my nerves. It could not have been Emerson's crude attempt to distract me, for he does that sort of thing all the time. I flung the marmalade spoon down on the table, spattering the cloth with sticky bits.\n\n'If you think I am going to allow you to go to the Valley and meddle with Mr Davis' tomb \u2013'\n\n'Meddle?' Emerson's voice rose to a shout. 'Peabody, I never \u2013'\n\n'Yes, you do! Aren't you in enough trouble with \u2013'\n\n'I consider it my professional duty \u2013'\n\n'Your profession! It is the only thing that matters, isn't it?'\n\nAs soon as the words left my mouth I regretted them. The handsome flush of anger faded from Emerson's face; the lips that had been parted in anticipation of rebuttal closed into a tight line. The children sat like graven images, not daring to speak.\n\n'I am sorry, Emerson,' I said, bowing my head to avoid his reproachful look. 'I don't know what is wrong with me this morning.'\n\n'Delayed reaction,' said Ramses.\n\nI turned on him. 'You have been reading my psychology books again!'\n\nUnlike his father, he was more amused than hurt at my reproof. I deduced this from the slight narrowing of his eyes, since no other feature altered. 'We all feel it, I suppose,' he said. 'As Nefret remarked, the change in our fortunes happened so suddenly and unexpectedly, it was difficult to take it in. A reaction was inevitable.'\n\nEmerson reached for my hand. 'Amelia, if you doubt that I would see every damned tomb in Thebes flooded before \u2013'\n\n'I don't doubt it, my dear.' I pressed his hand. 'I said I was sorry. Run along and \u2013 and try not to do anything of which M. Maspero would disapprove.'\n\n'Try,' Emerson repeated. 'Yes, I can do that. No, but seriously, Peabody, I haven't forgot about that unpleasant business yesterday. There are still a few loose ends to be tied up, and I have every intention of following through on them. I'm not quite sure how to go about it, though. There is even a question of jurisdiction. She was part Egyptian and part European, and how the devil are the authorities to make a positive identification?' He caught my eye, and his old smile curved his well-shaped lips. 'No, Peabody, I did not know her that well.'\n\nI felt I had apologized quite enough, so I said only, 'Very well, my dear. Since I know I can trust your word, I will stay home today. There are a number of little chores to do and little notes to write. I must invite the Masperos to dinner one evening. Have you any preference?'\n\n'I would prefer that they declined,' said Emerson, rising.\n\nI rather hoped they would too, for Emerson was sure to get into another argument with the Director. The invitation had to be proffered, however.\n\nNefret obviously yearned to take part in whatever underhanded scheme Emerson was considering, so I persuaded Emerson to let her go with him. I had to give him my solemn word that I would not 'go haring off to the morgue to inspect that grisly set of remains,' as he put it.\n\nIt was pleasant being by myself for a change. I busied myself with neglected tasks, and wrote a long letter to Evelyn informing her of the happy ending (for everyone except Bertha) to our little difficulty. If I put it in the post this afternoon it would be at Chalfont almost as soon as they were. The postal service had improved greatly under British administration, which was not surprising.\n\nI had meant to say something about the delicate family situation, but for some reason I could not find appropriate words.\n\nThe morning brought the usual messages, most of them hand-delivered. There was nothing from Mme. Maspero. Well, but they had only arrived the previous day, and according to the rules of proper etiquette it was up to me to make the first call. I penned a brief, friendly message, asking them to dine on the Friday.\n\nOne message was of interest, however, and I was perusing it when Fatima came to bring me another pot of coffee and a plate of biscuits.\n\n'You are determined to make me fatter, Fatima,' I said with a smile.\n\n'Yes, Sitt Hakim,' Fatima said seriously. 'Sitt \u2013 is it true your enemy is dead?'\n\nI wasn't surprised that she should know of it. The verbal grapevine operates efficiently in small towns. 'Yes, it is true. The danger is over. But where is Sir Edward? I haven't set eyes on him this morning.'\n\n'He is in his room, Sitt. Do you want I tell him to come?'\n\n'Tell him he is welcome to join me if he likes,' I corrected gently.\n\nShe went off, repeating the words under her breath. Such dedication to learning! I really felt quite ashamed that I had not paid more attention to her studies.\n\nSir Edward promptly appeared, but he refused refreshment. 'I am about to cross over to Luxor,' he explained. 'Unless you or the Professor need me for something.'\n\n'The Professor has already gone to the Valley. I decided to have a lazy day here at home.'\n\n'You are certainly entitled to one. Well, then, I will see you this evening, if that is convenient.'\n\nHe appeared to be in rather a hurry. No, I thought; it is not Mr Paul who inspires such devotion.\n\nThe family returned earlier than I had expected, bringing Abdullah and Selim with them.\n\n'Well, did you accomplish what you hoped?' I asked.\n\n'Yes.' Emerson was looking very shifty. 'Most of it. Why are you wearing that frock, Peabody? I dare not suppose you put on your best for me.'\n\n'I am going out to tea,' I replied, nodding at Fatima, who had hurried in with her usual food offerings. 'I received an invitation this morning from Fatima's teacher.'\n\n'In this weather?' Emerson took a biscuit.\n\n'It is not raining.'\n\n'It will rain,' Abdullah declared. 'But not until tonight.'\n\n'There, you see? I have been meaning to meet the lady for some time, and have always been prevented. She has asked Miss Buchanan and Miss Whiteside as well, so it should be an interesting meeting.'\n\n'Hmph,' said Emerson, fingering the cleft in his chin. 'Very well, Peabody. Ramses and I ought to make a formal statement to the police. May as well get it over.'\n\nWe all went, including Abdullah and Selim. Fortunately we are all good sailors; the water was quite choppy and the boat bounced a good deal. I had to tie my hat down with a long scarf. At first Nefret could not decide whether to accompany me or go with the others. Detective fever won the day. I let her go without lecturing her, since I knew she hadn't a chance of convincing Emerson, not to mention Ramses and David, that she should be allowed to examine the body.\n\nBecause of the blustery weather and the size of my hat, I decided to take a carriage from the quay. Emerson gallantly handed me in, and then got in with me.\n\n'Now what is this?' I demanded. 'Have you kept something from me, Emerson?'\n\n'I have kept nothing from you, my dear,' said Emerson, waving the driver to proceed. 'Have you kept anything from me?'\n\n'Oh, for pity's sake, Emerson, is it Sethos again? You cannot suppose I am in secret communication with him.'\n\n'I wouldn't put it past you.' Seeing my expression, he caught my hand and squeezed it. 'That was just one of my little jokes, sweetheart. I would never doubt your affection, but I do doubt your good sense. You have such damnable self-confidence! If Sethos summoned you to a rendezvous, curiosity and trust in that man's so-called honour would move you to respond. Admit it.'\n\n'Never again,' I said earnestly. 'My reticence has caused us trouble enough. Henceforth, my dearest, I will tell you everything. And the children too.'\n\nEmerson raised my hand to his lips. 'I don't know that I would go as far as that,' he said, his eyes twinkling.\n\nThe school appeared to be closed for the day, but lighted windows shone warmly through the gloomy afternoon air. The streets were virtually deserted; the long skirts of the few pedestrians, male and female, blew out like sails. One guest at least had arrived before me; a closed carriage stood before the door. I wished ours had been of that sort, instead of an open barouche, for the air was foggy with windblown sand.\n\nOur driver drew up behind the other carriage. Emerson helped me out and escorted me to the door. 'I will come back for you in an hour.'\n\nHe was being absurdly overly cautious, but how could I deny him after those loving words? 'An hour and a half would be better. \u00c0 bient\u00f4t, my dear Emerson.'\n\nA neatly garbed male servant opened the door, and just in time too, for my hat was about to leave my head. He waited until I had untied the scarf and straightened my skirts. Then he opened a door, bowed me in, and closed it after me.\n\nThe room was not a sitting room. It was small and scantily furnished and windowless. The only light came from a lamp on a low table. It was sufficient to let me make out the form of a woman who advanced to meet me. I could not see her face clearly, but I recognized her bonnet. I have a very keen eye for fashion.\n\n'Good afternoon, Mrs Emerson. So good of you to come.'\n\n'Mrs Ferncliffe?' I exclaimed.\n\nWith a sudden leap she seized me in a grip as strong as that of a man. I knew her then; I had felt that grip before. It was no wonder I had not recognized Mrs Ferncliffe, a lady of fashion if not of breeding, as Bertha's formidable lieutenant. Matilda had always worn the severe costume of a hospital nurse and her hard face had been bare of cosmetics. It was my last coherent thought. Her hand clamped over the lower portion of my face and her steely arm defeated my struggles until I had breathed in the stifling fumes permeating the cloth she held.\n\nWhen I came to my senses my head ached a bit, but the immediate effects of the chloroform had passed. The room in which I found myself was not the one in which I had been captured. It was larger and appeared to be furnished more comfortably, though I could not see much because only a single lamp relieved the gloom. There was a bed, at least; I lay upon it. Ropes bound my ankles and my hands were pinioned in front of me by something stronger than rope. When I tried to move them, a metallic jangle accompanied the gesture.\n\n'Thank heaven!' a familiar voice exclaimed. 'You have been unconscious since they brought you here some hours ago. How do you feel?'\n\nI turned on to my side. There was enough slack in my bonds to permit that much movement, though little more.\n\nMy companion was in worse condition. Ropes bound him to the chair in which he sat. His hands were behind him, and I doubted he could move so much as a fingertip. His fair hair was disarranged and his coat was torn, and bruises marked his face. Except when he had been working in the heat of the Tetisheri tomb I had never seen Sir Edward Washington so untidy.\n\n'How did you get here?' I croaked.\n\n'Never mind that now. There is a cup of some sort of liquid on the table beside you. Can you reach it?'\n\nI inspected the bonds on my wrists. They were handcuffs, connected by a rigid bar. A chain ran over the bar and up towards the head of the bed, where it was fastened with a padlock. The chain was not long enough to enable me to touch my bound feet, but I could just barely reach the cup.\n\nHe saw me hesitate, and said reassuringly, 'The fellow who trussed you up so effectively took a swig or two before he left, so I doubt the stuff is drugged. Unsanitary, no doubt, but safe.'\n\nThe liquid was beer, thin and sour and warm and not entirely free of flies, but a lady cannot afford to be fastidious when her throat is as dry as a desert. I managed to pick some of the flies out before I drank.\n\n'Amazing consideration,' I remarked, feeling considerably better. (The alcoholic content of the beverage may have had something to do with that.) 'She hasn't been so tender of you. Did you have a change of heart? If so, it was not very sensible to let Matilda know of it.'\n\n'Why, Mrs Emerson, what do you mean? The fact that you do find me in this position \u2013 and a confounded uncomfortable one it is, too \u2013 ought to be sufficient evidence that I am not on good terms with that formidable female, or her mistress.'\n\n'Not at present,' I conceded. 'Or so it would appear. However, as soon as I realized Bertha was our adversary, my suspicions of you revived. It is too much of a coincidence that you should appear on the scene only when she appears, and worm your way into our confidence.'\n\nI had begun inspecting my bonds. Removing one of my hairpins, I stretched out and began probing at the padlock. Sir Edward watched with interest and, I thought, a trifle of amusement.\n\n'That is clever of you, Mrs Emerson. However, you are still mistaken. The game is up, it appears, so I may as well admit the truth. I would not like you to believe that I am an ally of Madame Bertha, as we call her.'\n\nMy fingers lost their grip on the hairpin. I raised myself on one elbow and stared at him. 'Don't try to tell me you are Sethos. I would know him anywhere, in any disguise!'\n\n'Are you certain?' He laughed. 'No, I am not Sethos. But I am closely connected with him, and Mme. Bertha was too, until she incurred his fury by arranging that clumsy attack on you. It was careless of him to let her get away, but he is a bit of a romantic where women are concerned \u2013 as you ought to know.'\n\n'Hmph,' I said, groping for the hairpin. 'I suppose I ought to have suspected that Sethos was your master. Did he send you here?'\n\nA gust of wind rattled the shutters. Sir Edward glanced at the window.\n\n'Since we have nothing better to do at the moment, I may as well answer your questions. Yes, he sent me. But do let us say \"chief,\" shall we? \"Master\" is really a bit much. After Mme. Bertha got away, with quite a lot of cash and several of his most valuable antiquities, he thought it possible she would go after you. He was rather busy disposing of Mr Romer's collection, but please believe, my dear Mrs Emerson, if he had been certain you were in imminent danger he would not have left you to a subordinate, even one as talented as I.'\n\n'Curse him,' I muttered. The hairpin had slipped down out of reach. I extracted another from my hair.\n\n'At first I believed affectionate concern had misled him,' Sir Edward resumed. 'For I failed to find any trace of the lady in our old haunts in Cairo. What I did not know was that she had secretly made arrangements of her own. The people she recruited this time were the dregs of the Cairo underworld. They knew of her connection with Sethos and she swore them to secrecy with threats of his vengeance. They were clumsy fools, however. If our people had laid that ambush in Cairo, your son and his friends would not have got away.'\n\n'I am not so sure of that,' I said.\n\n'Well, perhaps you are right. Ramses is developing into quite an interesting individual, and Miss Nefret... My chief is not easily surprised, but he was struck momentarily speechless when I told him of her part in that affair.'\n\n'You told him? When was that?'\n\nSir Edward smiled. 'You won't catch me out that way, Mrs Emerson. However, as you are aware, I did not know of that business until you informed me of it, and it was not until after I had reached Luxor that I realized Madame was here and up to her old tricks.\n\n'What I failed to realize \u2013 as did you \u2013 was that her crude attacks were feints, designed to focus your attention on criminals and cults, stolen antiquities and \u2013 er \u2013 fallen women. All the while she sat in her harmless-appearing web, waiting for you to come to her. Fatima was the innocent dupe who she hoped would lead you into her hands. One of her tricks almost succeeded. Miss Nefret would never have returned from her visit to the kindly Madame. Hashim if the boys had not called for her. None of them recognized her, naturally. They had never seen her before, and at that time you had no reason to suspect Madame Hashim.'\n\n'No,' I said. 'Why should I have done? There are many women like that, unrecognized and unrewarded, labouring earnestly to light the lamps of learning \u2013'\n\n'Quite,' said Sir Edward. 'I hope it will console you to learn, Mrs Emerson, that my chief and I were also ignorant of Madame Bertha's extracurricular activities. He trusted her, you see. She did not trust him. Oh, she loved him, in that tigerish fashion of hers \u2013 that is why she hated you, because she suspected he would never care for her as he does for you \u2013 but past experiences, I do not doubt, had convinced her no man was completely trustworthy. Several years ago, without his knowledge or mine, she began forming a criminal organization of her own. She found allies, witting or unwitting, in the growing movements for women's rights in England and in Egypt. The school here in Luxor was one of the activities she began at that time.'\n\n'I ought to have known,' I said angrily. 'She used the suffragist movement in England in the same way, cynically and for her own purpose.'\n\n'You don't understand her, Mrs Emerson. In her own twisted fashion she is genuinely dedicated to the cause of women's rights. She hates men, and believes she is helping women to fight back against male oppression. My master, as you are pleased to call him, was the sole exception; but now she considers he has betrayed her, like all the others.'\n\nThe hairpins kept bending. I had used four now, with no perceptible result. My interest in his narrative distracted me, perhaps.\n\n'Then the girl who was murdered was one of her students?'\n\n'I believe that is the case. I don't know whether it was Miss Nefret's charm or your son's offer of a reward that won her over, but she was prepared to betray her mistress. It may have been one of the other girls who betrayed her.' Sir Edward shifted position slightly, trying, as I supposed, to ease the strain on his aching shoulders. 'How are you getting on?' he asked politely.\n\nI tossed another bent hairpin away and flexed my cramped fingers. 'I have plenty of hairpins.'\n\nSir Edward threw his head back, laughing heartily. It was a strange sound in that dismal room. 'Mrs Emerson, you are a woman in a million. You are wasting your time, though, and putting an unnecessary strain on your wrists. I feel certain Madame is still in Luxor. If she wants to maintain the useful persona of a teacher, she'll have to convince your loving family that you left the school of your own free will and \u2013 if I know the Professor \u2013 let them search the place from cellars to roof. It began raining a while ago and she doesn't like to get her dainty feet wet. I doubt she'll turn up until \u2013'\n\n'What!' I cried. 'What did you say? Still in Luxor? Teacher? Dainty feet? It is Bertha of whom you are speaking, not Matilda. But Bertha is dead. She... Oh, good heavens!'\n\n'Forgive me for not being more explicit,' Sir Edward said with great politeness. 'I thought you understood. But, there, Mrs Emerson, your normally quick wits are under something of a strain at present. No, Madame is not dead; she is alive and well and impatient to see you. Not only have I spoken with her quite recently, but it was I who examined the body and realized it could not be hers.'\n\n'How did you do that? Or should I ask?'\n\n'I am surprised at you, Mrs Emerson! You may remember that Bertha has very fair skin. Every square inch of the body was covered, except for the face, and there wasn't much left of that, but if your husband had thought to remove one of her gloves...'\n\n'Good Gad,' I exclaimed. 'She deliberately murdered one of those poor women in order to mislead us. Of all the cold-blooded, vicious \u2013'\n\n'An accurate assessment, I fear. I never believed she had killed herself. If she had been cornered, she would have fought to the end, with teeth and nails if she had no other weapon. So we went round to the morgue and had a look at the body. My friendly conversations with Fatima had aroused my suspicions of her teacher, so, like the fool I am, I trotted round to the school and got myself neatly caught.'\n\nI too had been suspicious of the circumstances surrounding Bertha's presumed demise, but this particular possibility had never occurred to me. How could I have been so dense? I ought to have known, as had Sir Edward, that a woman of her temperament would not surrender to fate so meekly. A little shiver ran through me as I remembered what she had said about 'ingenious' methods of killing me. An even stronger shiver rippled along my limbs when I thought of Emerson. He would be easy prey for her now, his guard down, his suspicions directed elsewhere.\n\n'What are we going to do?' I demanded.\n\nSir Edward tried to shrug. It is not an easy thing to do when hands and arms are tightly bound. 'Wait. I doubt she'll come before morning. Anyhow, she won't harm you until she's tried to collect the other members of the family. As you so intelligently surmised, mental torture is her present aim. She undoubtedly has other plans for me. She didn't have time to finish questioning me earlier, so I expect she'll want to have another go at it. We can only pray he reaches us first.'\n\n'Ah,' I said. 'So Sethos is here, in Luxor.'\n\n'That was what Madame wanted to know.' Sir Edward's voice was noticeably weaker. He had put on a credible show of nonchalance, but I knew he must be in considerable discomfort.\n\n'Does he know where to look?'\n\n'I certainly hope so,' said Sir Edward with genuine feeling.\n\nSir Edward said no more. Gradually his head drooped and his shoulders slumped. The shutters creaked and shook. Rainwater had seeped through them to darken the floor under the window. I continued to probe at the recalcitrant lock with fingers that had grown stiff and aching. It might be \u2013 it almost certainly was \u2013 a futile exercise, but it is not in my nature to wait passively for rescue, even if I had been certain rescue would arrive in time. Emerson would be looking for me too. Where was he now? If he did not know Bertha yet lived, he was in deadly danger.\n\nI had used up most of my hairpins when the shutters creaked \u2013 not with the sounds they had made under the intermittent battering of the wind, but with a steady straining groan.\n\nSir Edward's bowed head lifted. The shutters opened, admitting a burst of wind-driven rain, and a man who climbed over the sill and closed the shutters before turning to face us.\n\nHe was as drenched as if he had just emerged from the river. His flannel shirt and trousers clung to his body and arms. Slowly and carefully he pushed the dripping hair out of his face, and a puddle began to form around his booted feet as he looked quizzically from me to Sir Edward.\n\n'Well, Edward. This is not one of your finer moments.'"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "The voice was Sir Edward's. The admirable frame, defined by the clinging garments, resembled his; the wig was an excellent copy of his fair hair. The only feature that differentiated the two, at least to a casual observer, was the long bushy moustache that concealed the newcomer's upper lip and altered the conformation of his face.\n\n'No, sir,' Sir Edward mumbled. 'It is good to see you.'\n\n'I'll wager it is.' Taking a penknife from his trouser pocket, Sethos cut the ropes that bound the other man to the chair and steadied him as he slumped forwards. 'Where is she?'\n\nSir Edward shook his head. His insouciance had been a gallant attempt to reassure me \u2013 and perhaps himself! Now that rescue had arrived, hope renewed weakened his voice and his body. 'In Luxor, I suppose. Sir \u2013 I am sorry \u2013'\n\n'All right. Hang on a minute.' He crossed to the bed and stood, hands on hips, looking down at me. 'Good evening, Mrs Emerson. May I be so bold...'\n\nI stiffened as his hands went to my waist. With a mocking smile he straightened, and let his arms fall to his sides. 'Forgive me. I failed to observe you were not wearing your usual arsenal. What fond memories I have of that belt of tools!'\n\nHe was taunting me. Sethos did not fail to observe very much. He picked up the cup of beer, sniffed it, and wrinkled his nose fastidiously. 'Not as pleasing to the palate as your brandy, Mrs Emerson, or as effective, but it will have to serve. I trust you will overlook my lack of manners if I suggest Edward is more in need of it than you.'\n\nIt might have been the loathsome liquid, or the relief of rescue, or even the charismatic presence of his chief. After Sir Edward had finished the stuff, Sethos nodded with satisfaction.\n\n'You'll do. Go out the same way I came in. Thanks to the rain, there's no one about. You know where to meet me.'\n\n'Yes, sir. But don't you want me to \u2013'\n\n'I will attend to Mrs Emerson. Off with you now.'\n\nSir Edward rose stiffly to his feet and went to the window. Pausing only long enough to bow gracefully to me, he unfastened the shutters and climbed out into the lashing rain. I had the feeling that if Sethos had ordered him to climb into a volcano he would have obeyed as readily.\n\nSethos used the penknife to cut the ropes around my ankles. Then he sat coolly down on the bed next to me and examined the chain and the padlock. 'Hairpins, Amelia? You will be the death of me yet. Come to think of it, you almost were. Hmmm. What have we here? A primitive lock, but impervious, I think, to hairpins. Never mind the padlock, I will just remove the handcuffs.'\n\nI watched with considerable interest as he unscrewed the heel of his boot and examined the contents of the hollow interior.\n\n'Ramses has developed something of the sort,' I remarked, as his deft fingers removed a narrow steel strip less than four inches long.\n\n'Thanks to me,' Sethos muttered. He inserted the end of the steel strip into the lock of one of the handcuffs. It sprang open. 'Had I but known how that young man would turn out, I would have gone to considerable lengths to prevent him from making use of my equipment. He has become... Ah.'\n\nThe other cuff opened. Sethos' face darkened when he saw the marks on my wrists, but he said only, 'A stage magician's trick, my dear. If young Ramses has not turned to that source for inspiration, I recommend it to him. Now let's be going.'\n\nI started to ask where, but came to the conclusion that almost any alternative would be preferable to my present whereabouts. Disdaining the hand he offered, I swung my feet on to the floor and stood up. The fine effect of this gesture was spoiled by the fact that my numbed limbs would not support me. I would have fallen had he not caught me in his arms.\n\nHe was still extremely wet. The moisture in the fabric of his shirt soaked into my thin frock. For a moment he pressed me close, and I felt his chest rise in a long pent breath. My hands rested on his shoulders, but they were too weak to exert sufficient pressure against the tensed muscles of his arms and breast. I would be helpless to resist if he chose to take advantage.\n\nHe let his breath out and turned his head, pressing his lips to my bruised wrist. 'You will forgive the liberty, I trust, and remember that it is the only one I have ventured to take. This way.'\n\nWith the support of his arm I made my way to the window. 'I will go first,' he said, opening the shutters. 'You will have to lower yourself and drop, I fear; there are footholds, but they are difficult to find in the dark. I will try to break your fall.'\n\nWithout further ado he swung himself out and disappeared into the darkness. Leaning out, I waited for his low-voiced call before I followed. His arms were waiting to catch me, but either he had underestimated my weight or his foot slipped, for we tumbled to the ground together.\n\nSethos scrambled to his feet and pulled me upright. I had the impression that he was laughing. The rain had slackened, but the wind still howled and it was so dark I could barely make out his outline. Like me, he was covered with a coating of slimy mud. A stream of water ran over my feet. I had no idea where I was. The darkness was almost palpable, for heavy clouds hid moon and stars. The only solid objects in the universe were the wall of the house behind me and the hard wet hand that clasped mine and led me forwards.\n\nThe wind was from the north, strong enough to make one stagger, cold enough to chill one's bones. Even the level ground was slippery with mud, and very little of the ground was level. We splashed through a dozen small streams, fought our way up slopes that ran with water, fell and rose and fell again. However, I did not regret leaving the dry, sheltered room I had been in.\n\nBy the time we reached our destination I had identified my surroundings. We had passed scattered houses and seen lighted windows; the very contours of the landscape had begun to he familiar. I marvelled at the woman's audacity. She had taken me back to Gurneh, to the very house that had been her original headquarters in the village. Not so audacious, perhaps; it had been thoroughly searched before, and was now believed to be abandoned. If I had been able to locate myself earlier, I would have broken away from my companion and headed for Selim's house, which was near the other. Where was he taking me? We had been walking \u2013 crawling and scrambling, rather \u2013 for what seemed an eternity.\n\nSethos slithered to a stop and took me by the shoulders. His face was so close to mine I was able to make out the words he uttered, though he had to shout. 'You are as slippery as a fish, my dear, and as cold as a block of ice, so I won't linger over my farewells. There is the door \u2013 do you see it? Don't try to follow after me. Good night.'\n\nFollowing was beyond even my powers. My teeth were chattering violently and my wet garments felt like a skin of ice. I wanted to be warm and dry and clean, to see light and friendly faces. All that and more awaited me within. The house was that of Abdullah. I squelched and staggered to the door and pressed the latch.\n\nThe light, from a pair of smoking oil lamps, was so bright after the utter darkness without that I had to shade my eyes. My sudden appearance \u2013 and such an appearance! \u2013 shocked them into temporary immobility. They were both there \u2013 Daoud and Abdullah \u2013 sitting on the divan drinking coffee and smoking. The stem of the waterpipe fell from Abdullah's hand. As for Daoud, he must have taken me for a night demon, for he shrank back with a cry.\n\n'I must apologize for my appearance,' I said.\n\nI had begun to feel a trifle light-headed or I would not have made such an absurd remark. Abdullah cried out, and Daoud jumped up and ran towards me. I put up my hand to keep him away. 'Don't touch me, Daoud, I am covered with mud.'\n\nUnheeding, he snatched me up and pressed me to his breast. 'Oh, Sitt, it is you! God be thanked, God be thanked!'\n\nAbdullah came slowly towards us. His face was impassive, but the hand he put on my shoulder trembled a little. 'So, you are here. It is good. I was not afraid for you. But I am \u2013 I am glad you are here.'\n\nThey handed me over to Kadija, who fell on me with the loving ferocity of a lioness who has recovered a missing cub. She stripped off my filthy soaked garments and bathed me and wrapped me in blankets and put me to bed and fed me hot broth. At my request she admitted Abdullah after I was properly covered, and between spoonfuls of broth I told him what I felt he should know.\n\n'So it was she,' Abdullah said, tugging at his beard. 'She told us you had gone from the school, she did not know where. We had no reason then to doubt her. We have been searching for you ever since, Sitt. Emerson thought it was Sir Edward who had taken you.'\n\n'Emerson must be warned,' I said urgently. 'At once. He doesn't know that female fiend is still alive. Abdullah, she murdered that woman in cold blood \u2013 drugged her, dressed her in her own clothing, and waited until Emerson was actually outside the door before she... I must get back to the house at once. Perhaps Kadija will be good enough to lend me something to wear.'\n\nAbdullah's lips had tightened. Now they relaxed and he shook his head. 'Kadija's robe would wrap twice around you, Sitt Hakim. Daoud has gone to find Emerson. I do not know where he is. He made us go home when the darkness fell and the rain came.'\n\n'Oh dear,' I murmured. 'Poor Daoud, out in this weather... You shouldn't have sent him, Abdullah.'\n\n'I did not send him. It was his choice. Sleep now. You are safe and I will keep you safe until Emerson comes.'\n\nI looked from his resolute, bearded face to the strong brown fingers of Kadija, holding the bowl and the spoon. Yes. I was safe with them, safe, and suddenly as limp and sleepy as a swaddled baby. My heavy lids fell. I felt Kadija's hands straighten the blanket and another hand, gentle as a woman's, stroking my hair, before sleep overcame me.\n\nDay had come before I woke, to see Kadija beside me. She rose at once and helped me to sit up.\n\n'Were you there all night?' I asked. 'Kadija, you should not have \u2013'\n\n'Where else should I be? It rains hard, Sitt Hakim; stay there and I will bring food. And,' she added, her face breaking into a smile, 'something you will like even better.'\n\nBut he had been listening for the sound of voices and came before she could bring him, pushing through the curtain at the door way and dropping to one knee beside the bed. The joy of that meeting was so intense it was some time before I could speak. In fact, it was Emerson who spoke first.\n\n'Just as well I came without the children,' he said, wrapping me again in the blanket. 'You are in a scandalous and delightful state of undress, Peabody. What happened to your clothes?'\n\n'You know perfectly well that it was Kadija who removed them, Emerson. How long have you been here? What has Abdullah told you? What \u2013'\n\nEmerson stopped my mouth with his. After a brief interval he sat back on his heels and remarked, 'When you badger me with questions I know you are yourself again. I believe Kadija is hovering tactfully outside the door; would you like coffee before you continue the interrogation?'\n\nThe room was warm and rather dark, since the shutters had been closed against the rain and there was only one lamp. It felt quite cozy as we sipped our coffee together and answered one another's questions. Emerson's tale was the shortest. He had no reason to suspect Sayyida Amin's veracity when she insisted I had never entered the house; the other ladies, Miss Buchanan and her teacher, and the false Mrs Ferncliffe, had verified the statement and expressed alarm which, in the former case, was entirely genuine. He concluded that I had been seized by someone waiting in the closed carriage, for it was not there when he returned.\n\nIn fact, it must have been in that vehicle that I was removed, disguised as a roll of rugs. After a period of agitated inquiry, Emerson had found a witness who had seen such a carriage at the quay. He had hastened back to the school to collect Ramses and David, who were conducting a search of the place. Sayyida Amin had not only agreed to a search, she had insisted upon it.\n\n'I was a damned fool not to recognize her,' Emerson declared. 'She was veiled, of course, and she had darkened her face and hands, and \u2013'\n\n'And you believed she was dead. Small blame to you, Emerson. Your persistence prevented her from following me across the river.'\n\n'We barely made it ourselves. The wind was blowing a gale and it had begun to rain heavily. We came back to the house and tended to the horses \u2013 poor creatures, they had been waiting in the open for hours \u2013 and changed clothing and tried to think what to do next. Since I believed it was Sethos who had abducted you, I had no idea where to begin looking. But I would have found you, my darling, if it meant demolishing every house on the West Bank.'\n\nI expressed my appreciation. 'But surely,' I inquired, 'you were not under the misapprehension that Sir Edward was Sethos?'\n\n'I wouldn't put anything past that bastard,' Emerson said darkly. 'And I never entirely trusted Sir Edward. He was too damned noble to be true. Wasn't it you who said everyone has an ulterior motive?'\n\n'I thought his ulterior motive was Nefret,' I admitted. 'It appears I was mistaken. I \u2013 I have been mistaken about quite a number of things these past weeks, Emerson.'\n\n'Good Gad!' Emerson put one big brown hand on my brow. 'Are you feverish, Peabody?'\n\n'Another of your little jokes, I presume. Time is passing, Emerson, and we must be up and doing. Do you want to hear about Sethos?'\n\n'No. I suppose you had better tell me, though.'\n\nThe narrative took longer than it ought to have done because Emerson kept interrupting with muttered expletives and expressions of annoyance. When I finished he permitted himself a final vehement 'Curse the swine!' before making a sensible remark.\n\n'Who do you suppose he is \u2013 was \u2013 has been masquerading as?'\n\n'A tourist, I expect. There are hundreds of them in Luxor. His disguise last night was one of his little jokes, I think. He was the image of Sir Edward, except for the moustache.'\n\nEmerson went to the window and threw open the shutters. 'The rain has stopped. I came last night, as soon as Daoud told me you were here, but the others ought to be along soon. We are rather in need of a council of war.'\n\n'It is foolish for them to come here. Why don't we go back to the house?'\n\n'I doubt the children will wait much longer. They were very anxious about you, my dear. I admit it is difficult to tell with Ramses, but he blinked quite a lot. Nefret was beside herself; she kept saying she had been unkind and unfair to you and that she ought to have gone with you to the school.'\n\n'Nonsense,' I said \u2013 but I confess I was touched and pleased.\n\n'Anyhow,' Emerson said, returning to my side, 'Kadija informed me that frivolous frock you wore yesterday is beyond repair. You can't ride wrapped in a blanket. I could carry you across my saddle, I suppose, like a sheikh fetching home a new acquisition for his harem, but you wouldn't find it comfortable.'\n\nHe stood smiling down at me. His blue eyes shone with sapphirine intensity, his black hair waved over his brow. 'I do love you so much, Emerson,' I said.\n\n'Hmmm,' said Emerson. 'They won't be here for a while yet, I think...'\n\nThey came only too soon for me. There was barely time for Emerson to rearrange the blanket before Nefret burst into the room and flung herself at me. Ramses and David stood in the doorway. David's face broke into a smile, and Ramses blinked twice before Emerson pushed them out and pulled the curtain.\n\nNefret had brought clean clothing for me. Only another woman would have thought of that! She had even brought my belt of tools, and as I buckled it round my waist I swore I would never go out again without it. Then my story had to be retold. Some of it was new to Abdullah and Daoud as well, and so it was long in the telling. Before I finished the sun broke through the clouds, casting a watery light into the room.\n\n'That man again!' Abdullah burst out. 'Will we never be rid of him?'\n\n'It is just as well we weren't rid of him,' Ramses said. 'Forget about Sethos, at least for now. Bertha is the real danger.'\n\n'That may no longer be the case,' I said soberly. 'Sethos knows her present identity, and so does Sir Edward. I cannot believe they have failed to take steps to apprehend her.'\n\n'We had better make certain,' Ramses said.\n\n'Yes, quite,' Emerson agreed. 'She has eluded Sethos, and us, too often. This time...'\n\nHis teeth snapped together. There was no need for him to say more. One should temper justice with mercy, but in this case I could find no pity in my heart for Bertha. She would kill as ruthlessly and remorselessly as a hunter dispatching a harmless deer.\n\nIt was decided that we should cross at once to Luxor. Daoud and Abdullah were determined to accompany us, and when we emerged from the house we saw a half dozen of our other men waiting, obviously with the same intention. Selim was there; he hailed us with a shout and a smile and fell in step with David as we started down the path.\n\nI was distressed to see what devastation the storm had left in its wake. The ground was drying rapidly but the rain had dug deep trenches into the hillside, and several of the poorer houses, built of reeds and sun-dried brick, had subsided into heaps of mud. The residents of Gurneh were out in full force, surveying the damage and discussing it, and even, in some cases, starting to remove the debris.\n\n'I hope no one was injured,' I said to Abdullah, who was walking beside me.\n\n'There was time for them to get out and other places where they could go,' Abdullah said indifferently.\n\n'Yes, but...' I stopped. Next to one pile of shapeless earth a woman crouched, rocking back and forth and keening in a high-pitched wail. 'Good heavens, Abdullah, there must be someone buried under there.'\n\nAbdullah's wordless shout made the others spin round, but it was too late; they were only a few feet away, but they could not have reached her in time to stop her. Her finger was on the trigger as she straightened, and she did not even wait to hurl a final curse at me, she fired three times before she was crushed under the weight of several men.\n\nI heard the sound of the bullets strike \u2013 but I did not feel them, for it was not my body they struck. One step was all there was time for, and there was only one man who could have taken it. He fell back against me and I threw both arms around him as we sank to the ground together. I was aware of raised voices and running forms, but only as a remote irrelevance; my eyes and my whole mind were fixed on the body of the man whose head I cradled in my arms. The white robe was crimson from breast to waist and the stain spread out with hideous quickness. Nefret knelt beside us, her hands pressing hard on the spurting wounds. I did not need to see her ashen face to know there was no hope.\n\nAbdullah's eyes opened. 'So, Sitt,' he gasped. 'Am I dying?'\n\nI held him closer. 'Yes,' I said.\n\n'It is... good.' His eyes were dimming but they wandered slowly over the faces that bent over him, and it seemed to please him to see them there. His gaze returned to me. His lips moved, and I bent my head to hear the whispered words. I thought he was gone, then, but he had one more thing to say.\n\n'Emerson. Watch over her. She is not...'\n\n'I will.' Emerson took his hand. 'I will, old friend. Go in peace.'\n\nIt was he who closed Abdullah's staring eyes and folded his hands on his breast. I gave him over to Daoud and Selim and David; it was their right to care for him now. They were all crying. Nefret wept against Ramses' shoulder, and Emerson turned away and raised his hand to his face. Ramses' grave dark eyes met mine over Nefret's bowed head. He had not shed a tear \u2013 nor had I.\n\nBertha was dead of multiple injuries, including several stab wounds. It would have been difficult to ascertain whose hand had struck the mortal blow.\n\nI have no very clear memory of what happened immediately afterwards. We went back to our house to prepare for the funeral, which would take place that evening. My garments were sticky with blood, but I refused Nefret's offer of assistance. After I had bathed and changed I went to my room. The others were in the parlour. There is often comfort in companionship in cases of bereavement, but I did not want anyone's company then, not even that of Emerson.\n\nMy eyes were still dry. I wanted to cry; my throat was so tight I could hardly swallow, as if the tears were dammed by an unyielding barrier. I sat on the edge of the bed, with my hands folded in my lap, and looked at the bloodstained garments spread across a chair.\n\nHe had not thought much of me, or of any woman, when we first met. The change had come so slowly it was hard to remember a precise moment when suspicion had turned to affection and contempt to friendship, and then to something more. I remembered the day he had led me to the dreadful den where Emerson was held prisoner. When I broke down, he had called me 'daughter' and stroked my hair; and then he had gone back to gather his men and join them in fighting to free the man he loved like a brother. It was not the only time he had risked his life for one or both of us.\n\nI remembered my remote, indifferent father. I remembered my brothers, who had ignored and insulted me until I came into Papa's money \u2013 the only thing he had ever given me. I thought of Daoud's warm embrace and Kadija's loving care and Abdullah's dying words, and I knew that they were my true family, not the uncaring strangers who shared my name and blood. And still the tears would not come.\n\nHe had so enjoyed conspiring with me against Emerson \u2013 and with Emerson against me. I remembered the smug smile on his face when he said, 'You all came to me. You all said, \"Do not tell the others\"'; his theatrical grumble, 'Another dead body. Every year, another dead body!' The way he had tried to wink at me...\n\nIt is the small things, not the great ones, that hurt most. The dam burst and I flung myself face-down on the bed in a flood of tears. I did not hear the door open. I was unaware of another presence until a hand came to rest on my shoulder. It was not Emerson. It was Nefret, her face wet and her lips trembling. We wept together then, our arms round one another. Emerson's arms had comforted me on many occasions, but this was what I needed now \u2013 another woman to grieve as I was grieving, unashamed of tears.\n\nShe held me until my sobs had died to snuffles, and I had soaked my handkerchief and hers. I wiped the remaining tears away with my fingers.\n\n'I am glad it was you,' I said. 'Emerson never has a handkerchief.'\n\n'Are you glad, though?' She knew my little joke was my way of regaining my composure, but her eyes were anxious. 'I didn't know whether I should come in. I waited outside the door for a long time. I didn't know whether you would want me.'\n\n'You are my dearest daughter, and I wanted you.'\n\nThat made her cry again, so I cried a little too, and then I had to rummage through my drawers for another handkerchief. I bathed my red eyes and smoothed my hair and we went together to the sitting room. Ramses and Emerson were there, and David, who put food on a plate and brought it to me. We talked of inconsequential things, since the important things were still too painful.\n\n'It is a pity about the school,' Nefret said. 'I suppose it will be closed now.'\n\n'Mrs Vandergelt might take it over,' Ramses suggested.\n\n'An excellent idea,' I said. 'Do they know... Have Cyrus and Katherine been informed of what has occurred?'\n\nIt was David who replied. His eyes were red-rimmed, but he was quite composed; and I thought he had gained a new maturity and self-confidence. 'I wrote to tell them. They sent a message back \u2013 they want to be there this evening.'\n\n'Good.' I put the untouched food aside and rose. 'David, will you come with me? There is something I want to say to you.'"
            },
            {
                "title": "From Letter Collection B",
                "text": "...so you see, Lia darling, it is going to be all right! Aunt Amelia is writing to your parents, and I don't doubt for a moment that they will do exactly as she tells them.\n\nDon't grieve for Abdullah. If he could have chosen the manner of his death, this is what he would have wanted. Be thankful that you knew him, if only for a short time, and rejoice as we do that he was spared illness and a long slow dying.\n\nYou would have found the funeral moving, I think, despite its strangeness. The cortege was led by six poor men, many of them blind (only too easy to find, unhappily, in this country where ophthalmia is so common) chanting the credo: 'There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his Prophet; God bless and save him!' Abdullah's sons and nephews and grandsons followed, and after them came three young boys carrying a copy of the Koran and chanting in sweet high voices a prayer or poem about the Judgement. The words are very beautiful. I remember only a few verses: 'I extol the perfection of Him who created all that has form. How bountiful is He! How merciful is He! How great is He! Though a servant rebels against Him, he protects.'\n\nThe Professor and Ramses were among those honoured by being permitted to carry the bier, on which the body lay, un-coffined, and wrapped in fine cloths. Fatima and Kadija and the other women of the family were next. The rest of us followed them. The Vandergelts were there, of course, and Mr Carter and Mr Ayrton and even M. Maspero! I thought it was rather sweet of Maspero. Fortunately the Professor was too busy trying to keep a stiff upper lip to start an argument with him. How Abdullah would have laughed!\n\nAfter a prayer service at the mosque we went on to the cemetery and saw him laid to rest in his tomb. I will take you there when you come back to Egypt. It is a handsome tomb, befitting his high status; the vaulted chamber of plastered mudbrick is underground, and above it is a small monument called a shahid. I took Aunt Amelia away before they replaced the roofing stones and filled in the opening.\n\nI don't think she realized how much she cared for him, or he for her, until the end. Hasn't someone said a woman may be known by the men who love her enough to die for her? (If they haven't, I claim the credit myself.) What on earth, then, are we to make of Aunt Amelia?! The Professor (of course), a Master Criminal, and a noble Egyptian gentleman \u2013 for that is what he was, by nature if not by birth.\n\nAnd what of the Master Criminal? you will ask. Well, darling, we haven't found a trace of him. And believe me, the Professor looked everywhere! You ought to have seen his face when Aunt Amelia repeated some of the things Sethos said to her. This time she held nothing back, and a good thing, too; I doubt we've seen the last of Sethos. Frankly, my dear, I would love to meet the man! He behaved like a perfect gentleman. That's what really maddens the Professor, I think. He would much prefer to have Sethos act like a cad so he can despise him.\n\nSir Edward has gone too. He never returned to the house, but he wrote to the Professor. It was a very polite and extremely entertaining letter. At least I found it entertaining. The Professor didn't.\n\n\u2002My dear Professor and Mrs Emerson,\n\n\u2002I do hope you will forgive my rudeness in leaving you so abruptly and without the formality of farewells; but I feel certain you understand my reasons for doing so. I beg you will think it over before you decide to lay a formal complaint against me. You would find it difficult to prove I had committed a crime, but the proceedings would be unpleasant and needlessly time-consuming for all of us.\n\n\u2002Please accept my condolences on the death of Abdullah. I had learned to admire him a great deal, though I fear he did not reciprocate. A certain gentleman of whom you know has asked me to express his regrets as well. He blames himself (you know the delicacy of his conscience) for failing to apprehend the lady in time. The weather being inclement, as you no doubt recall, we were unable to reach Luxor until after she had been warned of your escape and mine. She must have realized the game was up and that our friend was close on her trail \u2013 and, I assure you, he was. We reached Gurneh less than an hour after the unhappy event. My friend has also asked me to tell you that a man can ask no greater happiness than to die for the woman he loves \u2013 and that he is in a position to know. I cannot say I share that sentiment, but I find it admirable.\n\n\u2002Give my regards (I dare offer nothing more) to Miss Forth, and to your son and his friend. I look forward with great anticipation to the possibility that we may meet again one day.\n\n\u2002Believe me, with sincere regards,\n\n\u2002I am (I really am)\n\n\u2002Edward Washington\n\nWe were soon back at work, for there is no better way of overcoming grief than to be busy. I sensed a diminution of Emerson's cheerfully profane ebullience. He missed Abdullah, as did we all; it was hard to imagine going on without him. However, Selim was shaping up well. He had the same air of authority his father had possessed in such large measure, and the men accepted him without argument. They teased him a little, though, and he announced to me quite seriously that he intended to let his beard grow.\n\nLife must go on, as I told Emerson. (I will not record his reply.) It was not one single thing that dimmed his enjoyment of the work, it was an accumulation of them: the laborious effort of clearing tomb number Five; the increase in social activities resulting from the arrival of M. Maspero and a number of other scholars, wanting to see Mr Davis' discovery; and above all, the frustration of watching Mr Davis wreck one of the most important discoveries ever made in the Valley of the Kings.\n\n'Wreck' was Emerson's word, and so was 'important.' He does tend to exaggerate when he is in a temper. How important the discovery might be was questionable as yet, but it certainly had its points of interest, and I had to agree that the clearance of the tomb might have been handled better.\n\nWhen we returned to the Valley on the Thursday, we found Ned Ayrton removing the fill from the entrance corridor. The black scowl on Emerson's face as he stood, hands on hips, surveying the activity, would have thrown anyone into a panic. Ned began to stutter.\n\n'Sir \u2013 Mrs Emerson \u2013 good morning, everyone, I am pleased to see you. We could use Abdullah now, couldn't we? But the panels will be all right, you'll see; I am inserting props as I remove the rubble from under them, and I am being very careful, and I \u2013 uh \u2013'\n\n'Quite,' said Emerson, in a voice like the rumble of thunder. He looked down at the streaked dust on the stairs. 'Water. It rained yesterday. Quite hard.'\n\n'No damage done,' Ned said. His voice cracked, but he squared his shoulders and spoke up bravely. 'Really. M. Maspero was here yesterday, and he \u2013'\n\n'Was he?' Emerson said.\n\nRamses took pity on his unhappy young friend. 'Father, the men will have arrived by now; don't you want to make certain the ceiling in the far corner is properly braced before they begin? Selim hasn't Abdullah's experience.'\n\nDuty, and concern for the safety of his men, always took precedence with Emerson. He allowed himself to be pulled away by David and Nefret.\n\nWith his father's permission Ramses spent most of that day and the next with Ned, though I cannot imagine he was able to do much to assist. His reports were not encouraging. I would not have encouraged him to prevaricate, of course, but I did wish he could equivocate just a little.\n\n'There was some water in the tomb, even before the recent storm,' he said. 'Condensation or rain, through that long crack in the ceiling. Nothing has been done to stabilize the gold foil on the panels. To be fair, one would not know what to use. It is so fragile, and most of it is already loose, just lying on the surface; even a breath disturbs it.'\n\nEmerson put his head in his hands.\n\n'Paraffin wax,' I suggested. 'I have often used it successfully.'\n\n'Ned thought of it, naturally. But it would have to be applied with great care, almost drop by drop, and that would take a long time.'\n\nI looked anxiously at Emerson, whose face was hidden, but from whom issued strange groaning noises. 'Well, never mind,' I said heartily. 'It is time we got cleaned up. Katherine and Cyrus are coming for dinner.'\n\nI had invited the Masperos, but Madame had pleaded a previous engagement. It was just as well, considering Emerson's state of mind, and the fact that we had a number of loose ends to tie up \u2013 matters we could only discuss with our oldest friends.\n\nThe school was Katherine's main interest, and for a while she would talk of nothing else. The owner of the building turned out to be our old friend Mohassib, who had been more than happy to hand over the lease to Katherine.\n\nCyrus was not so happy about having her acquire it. 'Why don't we just build a new house? That one's got some pretty nasty memories connected with it.'\n\n'Pure superstition, my dear,' Katherine said comfortably. 'That woman is dead and her assistant has disappeared. She won't dare show her face in Luxor again. The students can't be left high and dry. None of them knew anything.'\n\n'Except for some of the women from the House of \u2013 from that house,' I said. 'The authorities have assured me it will be closed.'\n\n'For a time, perhaps,' my tactless son said cynically. 'Places like that have a way of surviving, in one form or another.'\n\n'Not if I can help it,' Nefret said fiercely. 'Mrs Vandergelt and I are going to find decent positions for those girls, as housemaids and servants, until they can be trained for better things.'\n\nCyrus' jaw dropped. 'Housemaids? Where? Katherine, did you \u2013'\n\n'Now, Cyrus, don't fuss. The household staff is my responsibility, you know.'\n\nI beckoned to Fatima, who hastened to fill Cyrus' wineglass. 'Fatima will be one of your students, Katherine,' I said, attempting to change the subject. 'It is strange, is it not, that good can come from such great evil? Though it was certainly not her primary aim, Bertha did strike a blow for oppressed womanhood in starting that school and even in arousing aspirations in the most oppressed of our sex.'\n\nEmerson said, 'Hmph!' and Ramses added, 'And murdered them ruthlessly and horribly when it suited her purpose. Even that was a demonstration of her perverse interpretation of justice. Those who had failed her judgement met the fate shown in the Book of the Dead. The monster Amnet had the head of a crocodile.'\n\n'Good Gad, what a fanciful idea,' I exclaimed. 'And yet...'\n\nMy hand went to the amulet hanging round my neck. Ramses nodded. 'Yes. The ape who guards the balance, the symbol she chose for her organization. Justice, which has been achieved. As you say, Mother, it is strange how things work out.'\n\nThe most astonishing news, which I had heard that evening from Fatima, was that Layla had returned to her house in Gurneh.\n\n'Amazing effrontery,' Cyrus ejaculated.\n\n'Not really,' I replied, for I had had time to consider the matter. 'As soon as she heard of Bertha's death \u2013 and such news travels quickly \u2013 she knew it was safe to return. We would not take action against her, for we owe her a considerable debt. Perhaps I ought to call on her and \u2013'\n\nA profane remark from Emerson indicated his disapproval of this idea.\n\n'That would not be advisable, Mother.' Ramses was quick to add his opinion.\n\n'Then \u2013 yes, I think you and David ought to go \u2013 for a brief visit, I mean. Gratitude is more important than propriety, and you owe her your lives. You might take her a nice present.'\n\n'I have every expectation of doing that, Mother,' said my son. And indeed, when I raised the point several days later, he assured me that he had.4\n\nOver the next few days Cyrus rather neglected his own excavations, with which, as he was frank to admit, he had become very bored. He was not the only archaeologically inclined individual who yearned for a view of the burial chamber of Mr Davis' tomb. Our old friend the Reverend Mr Sayce arrived in Luxor, Mr Currelly, M. Lacau \u2013 the stream of visitors was endless, and it was augmented by (to quote Emerson) 'every empty-minded society person who wants in.' Cyrus was one of them \u2013 the former category, not the latter \u2013 to his great delight. Katherine amiably declined the treat, despite her husband's enthusiastic descriptions of the golden crown ('Pectoral,' Ramses interrupted) and gold-covered panels ('What's left of them,' muttered Emerson).\n\nThe entrance corridor had been cleared by then; the poor panel rested on a framework of wood, and one had only to duck one's head and walk under. When I paid my own visit to the burial chamber \u2013 for I saw no reason to decline when every 'empty-minded' visitor to Luxor had already been there \u2013 I was shocked to see how conditions had deteriorated since my first visit. The floor looked as if it were carpeted with flakes of gold, which had fallen from the panels of the shrine. The photographer had placed his tripod up against the mummy case in order to get a close view of the four canopic jars, which were still in the niche. I fear I forgot myself. Turning to Ned, who had accompanied me, I cried, 'The panels! Why didn't you lower the one that is leaning against the wall?'\n\nA few more flakes of gold drifted gently down to the floor, and from under the black hood of the camera came a wordless grumble of protest.\n\n'Yes, sir, at once.' Ned tugged at my sleeve. 'We had better get out of his way, Mrs Emerson, he is very touchy about having people in here when he's about to shoot. You can come back tomorrow, when he's finished.'\n\nSo distraught was I by what I had seen that the meaning of his last sentence did not penetrate my mind until after we had emerged from the tomb. 'Did you say he will finish today?' I inquired. 'But surely he will come back to photograph the mummy itself when you lift the lid of the coffin. When will that be?'\n\n'I'm not sure. It is up to Mr Davis.'\n\n'And M. Maspero.'\n\n'Of course.' Ned added quickly, 'My friend Harold Jones will be here in a few days, to make sketches and paintings.'\n\n'I thought Mr Davis' friend, Mr Smith, was doing that.'\n\n'He was. Um... it's not very pleasant down there, in the heat and dust.'\n\n'No. It isn't.'\n\nFurther inquiry produced the information I had hoped not to hear. Mr Davis had indeed dismissed the photographer, who was returning to Cairo as soon as he finished developing the last of his plates. As all my Readers are surely aware (if they are not, they have failed to pay attention to my remarks about excavation techniques) this meant there would be no photographic record of the clearance of the burial chamber, or the mummy itself. Mr Davis, I was informed, had no intention of hiring another photographer.\n\nThe individual who informed me of this was Mr Weigall. I intercepted him that afternoon as he was leaving the Valley, and since I had him backed up against the cliff face he could not get away from me without knocking me down. I pointed out, in my most tactful manner, that as the representative of the Antiquities Department he could insist on this basic requirement. He obviously had no intention of doing so, or of invoking the authority of M. Maspero. When I offered the services of David and Nefret, Weigall bit his lip and looked shifty and said he would tell Mr Davis of my generous offer.\n\nThe last resort was to plead with Maspero himself. Though I had no great hopes of succeeding, I decided I must try. After we had returned to the house I was about to dispatch a note inviting myself to tea with him and Madame \u2013 for the situation was desperate enough, I believed, to justify this bit of bad manners \u2013 when Fatima handed me a message that changed my intentions. It had arrived that afternoon, and it came from a surprising source \u2013 Mr Paul, the photographer.\n\nThe message was even more surprising. Mr Paul regretted not having had the opportunity to be introduced to me, for of course he knew me by reputation. He had news of vital importance that could be told only to me. He was leaving on the evening train to Cairo; would I meet him at the station, for a brief conversation that would, he felt certain, prove of considerable interest to me?\n\nI am sure I need not repeat the thoughts that passed through my mind. The astute Reader will anticipate them. My decision should be equally easy to anticipate. How could I not go? There was no danger, for the platform would be crowded with tourists and locals waiting for the train. My original notion, of calling on M. Maspero, would serve as an excuse for my absence.\n\nI did take the precaution of assuming my working costume, complete with my belt of tools and my stoutest parasol, instead of the nice frock I had planned to wear. Emerson, the only person I informed of my presumed intention, made no objection; the only condition he exacted was that I allow one of our men to accompany me.\n\nWith Hassan trailing me at a respectful distance, I reached the railroad station approximately fifteen minutes before the train was due to leave. The platform was a melee of bodies, loud voices, pushing and shoving. I took up a position near one of the walls of the station, parasol firmly clasped, eyes moving alertly over the crowd.\n\nI had never seen Mr Paul face-to-face, but when he emerged into sight I knew him instantly. He was wearing gold-rimmed spectacles and a rather vulgar striped flannel suit. Strands of grey hair had been stuck to his balding head. His shoulders were bowed, his walk slow and stiff, like that of a man suffering from rheumatics.\n\nAs he came towards me his stride lengthened, his bent form straightened, his head lifted. It was like the transformations in the fairy tales, when the wand of a magician turns a bent old man into a prince. I sucked in my breath.\n\n'Don't cry out, I beg,' said Sethos. 'For if you attempted to do so I would be forced to silence you in a manner that would please me a great deal but to which you would feel obliged to object. And think of the damage to your reputation. Embracing a stranger on the train platform in full view of fifty people!'\n\nA wall at one's back prevents antagonistic individuals from creeping up on one, but it also prevents one from eluding such individuals when they are standing directly in front of one. Sethos' arms were slightly curved and his flexed hands rested lightly against the wall. I knew what would happen if I tried to raise my parasol or slip aside.\n\n'You couldn't go on kissing me for very long,' I said doubtfully.\n\nSethos threw his head back and let out a muffled whoop of laughter. 'You think not? My darling Amelia, I love the way you go straight to the point. Most women would squawk or faint. I could certainly go on kissing you long enough for my fingers to find a certain nerve that would render you instantly and painlessly unconscious. Don't tempt me. I suggested this rendezvous because I wanted to bid you farewell under circumstances more romantic than those that prevailed at our last meeting, and because I thought you might have a few questions.'\n\n'And because you wanted to show off,' I said disdainfully. 'It is an excellent disguise, but I would have known you if I had ever got a good look at you.'\n\n'Possibly. I took the precaution of spending most of my time in the depths of that tomb.' He smiled mockingly. 'I have learned a great deal about photography these past days.'\n\n'Confound it! The night Sir Edward had dinner with you \u2013'\n\n'He gave me a quick coaching on a subject of which I was totally ignorant,' Sethos agreed amiably. 'I am a man of many talents, but photography is not one of them. The plates I took that first day were absolute disasters. They were so bad, in fact, that we decided Edward had better come and \"assist\" me. He did the real work after that. But I fear Mr Davis is going to be rather disappointed by some of the photographs.'\n\nA hideous foreboding came over me. 'Oh, good Gad! Do you mean there is no photographic record after all?'\n\n'You really do care about your bloody \u2013 excuse me \u2013 about your tombs, don't you?' His smile no longer mocked me; it was fond and kind. I looked away.\n\nThe conductor's whistle sounded. Sethos glanced over his shoulder. 'That is what I wanted you to know, Amelia. I can't give Mr Davis all the photographs Edward took; even a dismal incompetent like him might notice that some of the objects shown in the photographs are no longer in the tomb \u2013 or the coffin.'\n\n'What! How? When?'\n\n'The night before M. Maspero arrived in Luxor.' The strange eyes behind the gold-rimmed spectacles shone. 'It isn't difficult to bribe those poor devils of guards, but your husband may consider himself lucky that Edward was able to persuade him not to go to the Valley that night. Now, dear Amelia, don't look so indignant. Robbing tombs is my profession, you know.'\n\n'What did you take? How did you \u2013'\n\n'I fear there is not time to answer all your questions. Rest assured I did as little damage as possible \u2013 less, I believe, than that heavy-handed pack of so-called professional scholars. I have some of the world's most expert restorers \u2013 or forgers, if you prefer that term \u2013 in my employ, and the artefacts I removed will be well taken care of. The photographic record is complete. One day, after I am past caring about criminal prosecution, it will be made available to the world \u2013 and to you. I did it for you, you know. How true it is that the influence of a noble woman can reform an evil man! Goodbye, darling Amelia. For now.'\n\nThe train had begun to move. He bent his head, and I thought for a moment he would... There was nothing I could have done about it. Instead his lips brushed my forehead, and then he turned and ran. Swinging himself on to the steps of the last car, he blew me a kiss of farewell.\n\nI think the thing I found most flattering was that he had taken it for granted I would not bother telegraphing the authorities in Cairo. By the time the train reached that city, Mr Paul would no longer be on board.\n\nDid I hasten home and tell Emerson all about it? No. I would tell him, and the others, in due course; I had resolved to keep nothing from them. But the time had not come."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "The final catastrophe, as I must call it, took place on the following Friday. Nefret was the only one of us who was allowed to be present when the mummy was finally exposed. How she managed it I do not know, and I prefer not to inquire. Her qualifications were as good or better than those of many of the persons who were there, but I suspect it was not her professional expertise that won her permission from Mr Davis and M. Maspero. We watched them pass: Maspero and Weigall; Ned and Mr Davis, in his absurd gaiters and broad-brimmed hat; the ubiquitous Mr Smith.\n\nIt was late afternoon before she returned. We were waiting for her \u2013 like a flock of vultures, as Ramses remarked \u2013 outside our own tomb, for our mounting curiosity had made work difficult, and we had finally dismissed the men and found places in the shade. Emerson was smoking furiously and I was attempting to distract myself by making additions to my diary. Ramses was scribbling in his notebook, apparently impervious to curiosity; but he was the first on his feet when Nefret came unsteadily up the path. He went to meet her and found her a handy rock, while I uncorked my water bottle.\n\nEmerson removed his pipe from his mouth. 'Is there anything left of the coffin or the mummy?' he inquired.\n\nThe quiet purring voice warned her, but she was too upset to care. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve and gave me the bottle.\n\n'The coffin lid is in three pieces. They've got it on padded trays. The mummy...'\n\nThe head and neck of the mummy had already been exposed. When Maspero and the others raised the lid of the coffin they found that the body was entirely covered with sheets of thick gold. They removed these, and then they lifted the body.\n\nEmerson let out a cry like that of a wounded animal.\n\n'It gets worse,' Nefret said. She was talking very quickly, as if she wanted to get it over with. 'There was water under the mummy. And more gold. One of the sheets was inscribed. M. Maspero said it had one of the epithets of Akhenaton. The body itself was wrapped in linen, very fine, but dark. Mr Davis took hold of the linen and tried to pull it back, and the skin came off with it, exposing the ribs. There was a necklace \u2013 a collar, rather. Mr Davis took it off, and poked around looking for loose beads, and then the rest of the mummy just \u2013 just disintegrated into dust. There's nothing left but bones.'\n\n'What about the head?' Ramses asked. He sounded quite calm, but he took a tin of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. I did not comment.\n\n'Mr Davis removed the pectoral \u2013 he still thinks it's a crown. The face was damaged, but there was some skin remaining. At first. One of the teeth fell out when he... Well, to make a long story short, they all pranced around and congratulated one another, and Mr Davis kept shouting, \"It's Queen Tiyi! We've found her.\" Only they haven't, you know.'\n\n'What do you mean?' I asked. Emerson raised his bowed head.\n\n'They wanted to send for a doctor to look at the bones,' Nefret explained. 'To see if they could determine the sex. There wasn't...' She glanced at me. 'At least I didn't see... But I might not have.'\n\n'No,' I said. 'Not if the body fell apart so completely and so rapidly. But you were there; why did they want to send for another qualified medical person?'\n\n'Don't be absurd, Aunt Amelia. Do you suppose any of them would consider me qualified? A woman? Ned did speak up for me, and Mr Davis consented to allow me to have a look \u2013 chuckling merrily at the very idea. I told him it wasn't a female skeleton, but he just went on chuckling.'\n\n'Are you sure of the sex?' Ramses asked.\n\n'As sure as I can be after such a brief examination. I didn't dare touch anything. The skull was damaged, but the undamaged portions were typically masculine \u2013 the supraorbital ridges, the overall muscular markings, the shape of the jaw. They wouldn't let me measure anything, but the angle of the pubic arch looked \u2013'\n\n'The skeleton was intact, then,' I said.\n\n'Except for the head. It was in bad shape,' Nefret admitted.\n\n'Then it is Akhenaton,' Emerson exclaimed. 'The remains of the most enigmatic of all Egyptian pharaohs, pawed over by a pack of vultures looking for gold!'\n\n'Mr Davis still thinks it's the Queen,' Nefret said. 'He went out looking for a physician \u2013 a real physician.' Her sense of humour overcame her professional chagrin; she began to laugh. 'Can't you picture him dashing through the hordes of tourists yelling, \"Is there a doctor in the house?\" He came back dragging an unhappy American gynaecologist, and stood over the poor man exclaiming, \"We've found Queen Tiyi! It's a female skeleton. Unquestionably female, isn't that right, Doctor?\" Well, what could the man say? He agreed, and made his escape. And so did I. I couldn't stand it any longer.'\n\nRamses shifted position slightly. 'Father, did you get a good look at the hieroglyphic inscription on the coffin?'\n\n'Not good enough,' Emerson said sourly. 'The cartouches had been cut out, but the epithets were those of Akhenaton. \"Living in truth, beautiful child of the Aton,\" and so on.'\n\n'Correct,' said Ramses, looking as enigmatic as Akhenaton.\n\nEmerson shot his son a suspicious look. 'What are you saying?'\n\n'Don't say it,' I exclaimed. 'They are coming. I think I hear Mr Davis' voice. Get hold of your father, Ramses.'\n\nI blame the entire thing on Mr Davis. If he had passed on by with the others, I might have been able to keep Emerson quiet. But of course he had to stop and gloat.\n\n'I hope you appreciate your good fortune, my dear,' he said, patting Nefret on her head. 'To be present on such an occasion!'\n\n'It was good of you to let me be there, sir,' Nefret murmured.\n\n'Yes, congratulations,' I said, tugging at Emerson, who stood like a rock, and looked like one, too, for all the animation on his face. 'We must go. We are very late. Good afternoon M. Maspero, Mr Weigall, Mr \u2013'\n\n'Charming girl,' Davis remarked, beaming at me. 'Charming! You shouldn't let her mess around with mummies, you know. Bless the ladies, they don't have the brains for such things. Can you imagine, she told me it wasn't the Queen!'\n\nM. Maspero cleared his throat. 'Maits, mon ami \u2013'\n\n'And don't you try to tell me any different, Maspero. I know what I found. By Jove, what a triumph!' And then he administered the coup de grace. 'You can all pop down tomorrow if you like and have a look. Just don't disturb anything.'\n\nThat was when the catastrophe occurred. I will not \u2013 I cannot in decency \u2013 reproduce Emerson's remarks. Some of them, in his execrable French, were addressed to M. Maspero, but the majority of them fell on the indignant head of Mr Davis, who, to be fair, had not the least idea why Emerson was being so rude. And after his gracious invitation, too!\n\nIt ended with Davis demanding that Emerson be expelled from the Valley altogether. Only his kindly forbearance had allowed us to work there, since he held the firman. He had tried to be accommodating; he had made greater concessions than could have been expected of him. But, by Jove, there was no reason why he should have to put up with this sort of \u2013 er \u2013 grmph \u2013 thing!\n\nBetween him and Emerson there was a great deal of shouting. A crowd of curious onlookers gathered. Maspero didn't try to get a word in. He stood stroking his beard and looking from one speaker to the other. Obviously he was too craven to take the necessary steps, and was expecting me to take them. I am accustomed to men doing that. Emerson would never have laid a hand on such a feeble old person as Mr Davis, but the latter appeared to be on the verge of a stroke or heart attack, and I did not want Emerson to have that on his conscience. So I raised my voice to the pitch few can ignore, and told him and Emerson to be quiet, and Davis' friends converged on him, and we converged on Emerson.\n\nI managed to get my husband's attention by standing on tiptoe and pulling his head down and whispering directly into his ear. 'I have something to tell you, Emerson. Something important. Come away, where Mr Davis can't overhear.'\n\nEmerson shook his head irritably, but by that time Davis' party had got away from him and he had calmed down a bit. We were able to remove him to our rest tomb and persuade him to take some refreshment.\n\nHe broke out again just as violently when I told him of my meeting with Sethos, and for a time his profane ejaculations prevented a reasoned discussion. Ramses (who did not have his father's prejudices against the Master Criminal) was the first to realize the import of that meeting.\n\n'Do you mean there is a complete photographic record after all?' he demanded. 'Surely not of the mummy, though. How would he manage that?'\n\n'I am sure I do not know,' I replied. 'But he told me that he \u2013 or rather, he and Sir Edward \u2013 had managed it. It is some small consolation, is it not, to know that the record exists? And David's copy of the shrine panel and door in the corridor may be the only record of those objects.'\n\nEmerson shot me a guilty look. 'Now, Peabody, I don't know where you got the idea \u2013'\n\n'It was on your desk, Emerson,' I replied firmly if not altogether truthfully. 'Anyhow, I knew you were up to something that morning you went early to the Valley with the children. You know you will never be able to make it public, don't you? You had no business doing such a thing.'\n\nEmerson said, 'Hmph.'\n\n'A good many of our activities in that tomb can't be made public,' Ramses remarked. 'Not if we ever want to work in Egypt again.'\n\nEmerson deemed it advisable to change the subject. 'Curse it, Amelia, why didn't you tell me this earlier? We might have caught the bas \u2013 the villain!'\n\n'I doubt that,' said Nefret. Laughter brightened her eyes and her voice. 'Anyhow, Professor, would you really have handed him over to the authorities after he saved Aunt Amelia?'\n\nEmerson considered the question. 'I would much rather have had the satisfaction of beating the rascal to a pulp \u2013 and forcing him to return the objects he stole from the tomb. Did he tell you what they were, Peabody?'\n\nI shook my head, and Ramses said thoughtfully, 'We may be able to hazard a reasonable guess by comparing what is now in the burial chamber with the list I made after my first visit.'\n\n'Ned will be able to do the same, won't he?' I asked.\n\n'Possibly,' said Ramses. 'But I daresay his memory is not quite as accurate as mine.'\n\nFalse modesty is not a quality from which Ramses suffers. Since the statement was undoubtedly true, no one contradicted him.\n\n'No suspicion will attach to the photographer,' Ramses went on. 'There have been literally dozens of people in and out of that tomb over the past few days, including Mr Davis' workers. We may owe Sethos a debt of gratitude after all, for preserving objects that would have been damaged or stolen by less skilful thieves. I wouldn't be surprised if certain objects turn up in the antiquities market.'\n\nThis indeed proved to be the case. It was Howard Carter who was shown the bits of gold and fragments of jewellery by a man of Luxor. The fellow offered them to Mr Davis for four hundred pounds and a promise of immunity. Mr Davis, I was told, was deeply wounded by the disloyalty of his workmen."
            },
            {
                "title": "From Manuscript H",
                "text": "'What do you suppose the Professor will do now?' David asked.\n\nIt was the first time they had had a chance for a private conference since the debacle over Davis' tomb. For reasons known only to her, Nefret had decided to make it something of a celebration. She had given up pretending she liked whisky, but there was a bottle of wine and some of Fatima's sugar cakes. They met in Ramses' room, since Horus had taken possession of Nefret's bed and refused to let either of the men into the room.\n\nStretched out in his favourite chair, his feet on a low chest, Ramses shrugged. 'He won't tell us until he's damned good and ready. But I can hazard a guess, I think. He'll let us finish our copying at the Seti temple while he and Mother and Nefret go off selecting another site for next year.'\n\n'Why me?' Nefret demanded. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, with the silk skirts of her blue robe spread around her, like a water nymph in a pool. 'They would be much happier by themselves, and I could help you here.'\n\n'You know better than that,' Ramses said sharply. 'People would talk.'\n\n'You needn't sound so cross. I know they would and I don't care if they do. Goodness, what nuisances \"people\" are.'\n\n'True,' Ramses conceded. 'I expect we'll leave for home earlier than usual. That will make one person happy, at any rate.'\n\nDavid hadn't even been listening. Eyes half closed, lips curved, he was in a happy trance of his own.\n\n'Wake up,' Ramses said affectionately. He stretched out a booted foot and nudged David's shoulder.\n\n'I heard. Do you think we will? Really?'\n\nNefret laughed. 'Leave it to me, David. How many times have you written to her since she left?'\n\n'Every day. But letters aren't very \u2013 ' He broke off, staring. 'Where did you get that?'\n\nNefret struck a match and held it to the end of the long thin cigar she held between her teeth. Her cheeks went in and out like a bellows as she puffed.\n\n'Mr Vandergelt?' Ramses suggested, taking firm hold of the arms of the chair and trying to control his voice.\n\n'I wanted to try it,' Nefret explained, after four matches and a fit of coughing. 'I don't see what's so funny. Mr Vandergelt laughed too, but he swore he wouldn't tell Aunt Amelia. I don't know, though. Why do they smell so much nicer than they taste?'\n\n'You aren't supposed to inhale,' Ramses said.\n\n'Oh, really? Hmm.' She blew out a cloud of smoke. 'I think I've got the hang of it. May I have a glass of wine, please?'\n\n'So you can be thoroughly depraved?' Ramses said. He let David hand her the wine, though. He was afraid to get any closer.\n\n'This isn't depraved, it's nice.' Nefret leaned back against the head of the bed and beamed at them. 'It's glorious. I don't want anything to change. I want it to be like this forever.'\n\n'What, drinking wine and smoking cigars? You'll get painfully drunk if nothing worse,' Ramses said.\n\n'I've never been drunk. I'd like to try it sometime.'\n\n'No, you wouldn't.' A picture formed in his mind, of Nefret laughing and a bit unsteady on her feet, her hair coming down and her lips parted... He gave himself a hard mental kick.\n\n'You know what I mean,' Nefret said. 'I like us the way we are, all of us. I could almost be angry with you, David, for changing things, but I'm not really, because Lia is a darling and she won't take you away from us. It's different for men. They bring their wives home, just as they've always done. Women have to give up everything when they marry \u2013 their homes, their freedom, even their names. So I'm not going to.'\n\nRamses was speechless. It was David who replied, after a nervous look at his friend. 'Not marry? Isn't that a bit \u2013 er \u2013 dogmatic? What if you fall in love with someone?'\n\nNefret waved her cigar. 'Then he'll have to take my name and do what I want to do, and come and live with you and Aunt Amelia and the Professor.'\n\n'I'm not at all sure Mother would agree to that arrangement,' Ramses said. 'She probably looks forward to the day when she can be rid of the lot of us.'\n\n'You'll bring your bride home, won't you?'\n\n'No,' Ramses said. 'Not home to Mother. Not... Can we please talk about something else?'\n\nDavid gave him a quick glance and asked Nefret where she thought they ought to work next season. The cigar was a help too; she was a little green in the face by the time she had finished it, and declared she was ready for bed. David went with her to the door and closed it carefully after her.\n\nRamses was sitting upright, with his head in his hands. David jogged his elbow. 'Have another glass of wine.'\n\n'No. That just makes it worse.' He went to the washbasin and splashed water on his face, then stood dripping over the basin with his hands braced on the table.\n\n'She didn't mean it,' David said.\n\n'She bloody well did.' Ramses swiped at his face with the towel, dropped it on to the floor and went back to his chair. 'She's such a child,' he said helplessly. 'What happened to her, during those years, to make her so \u2013 so unaware? She's never talked about it. Do you suppose someone...'\n\n'Is that what's been tormenting you? No, Ramses. I don't believe she's been hurt, she's too loving and open and happy. She'll come round.' David hesitated and then said tentatively, 'Perhaps you could \u2013'\n\n'No!' Forcing a smile, Ramses added, 'Oh, yes, I could. God knows I'd like to. But it would be taking a chance. I might end up losing what I already have, and it's too precious to risk \u2013 her trust, her companionship. You and she are my best friends, David. I want her love in addition to that, not instead of it.'\n\nDavid nodded wisely. 'You're right, there's no way of forcing it or even predicting it. It can come on like an avalanche. That day in the garden when Lia... But I told you about that, didn't I?'\n\n'Once or twice.' Ramses' smile faded. Abruptly he said, 'I'm going away.'\n\n'What?'\n\n'Not this instant or forever. But I have to be away from her for a while, David. It's got out of control, and I can't \u2013 I can't deal with it.'\n\nDavid's dark eyes were warm with sympathy. 'Where will you go?'\n\n'I don't know. Berlin, Chicago, the Sudan \u2013 some oasis in the middle of the Sahara where I can study asceticism and scratch fleas and learn to control my feelings.'\n\nDavid sat down on the chest. 'Sometimes I think you control them too well.'\n\n'Outwardly, perhaps. It's what goes on inside that frightens me.'\n\n'I understand.'\n\nNo, Ramses thought, you don't. Not all of it. And I hope to God you never do.\n\nI was not keen on the idea of leaving the boys alone in Luxor, and even less willing to leave Nefret. Her argument \u2013 that they wouldn't be so likely to get in trouble if she was there watching over them \u2013 did not at all convince me. She made quite a fuss, though, and when Katherine heard of it she proposed a solution that would solve at least one of the difficulties. Gossiping tongues would be restrained if Nefret stayed with her and Cyrus at the Castle.\n\n'Are you prepared for what that entails, Mrs Vandergelt?' Ramses inquired. 'You will have to take Horus too. Nefret wouldn't leave him with us even if we would have him.'\n\nKatherine assured him she and Cyrus \u2013 and presumably Sekhmet \u2013 would be delighted to have Horus. Ramses shook his head.\n\nSo I agreed. The fact that Emerson and I would be alone in our ramblings did not affect my decision in the least. It was just as he said: we would have to trust the children sometime, why not now?\n\nThere was plenty of room for two on our dear dahabeeyah, even though Emerson soon filled the saloon with his notebooks and the bits and pieces he collected from various sites. Naturally he went about this in the most meticulous fashion, keeping detailed notes of their provenance. Perhaps the best part of the trip was the week we spent at Amarna. We tramped the plain from end to end and side to side, visiting all the nobles' tombs and venturing one day into the remote wadi where the king's deserted tomb was located. What fond memories that arduous but exhilarating stroll awakened! Amarna had been the scene of some of our most thrilling adventures. In the Royal Tomb Emerson's arms had enclosed me for the first time. They enclosed me again as we stood that day in the shadowy entrance; his embrace was as strong and ardent as it had ever been, and when we began the return journey, the three-mile walk seemed long only because it delayed the expression of the emotions aroused in us both. We did not engage in the customary professional discussion that night.\n\nHowever, at breakfast the following morning, Emerson shook his head regretfully when I suggested we return to Amarna the following season. 'There is certainly a great deal to be done here, but the same is true of every other site in Egypt. I am thinking seriously of removing to the Cairo area. The ancient cemeteries stretch for miles, and most have been only cursorily excavated. Even at Giza and Sakkara there are large stretches unexplored and unassigned. We'll have to give the matter more thought.' He filled his pipe and leaned back. 'We might stop at Abydos on our way back to Thebes. Are you up to another week of strenuous exercise, Peabody?'\n\n'I believe I have demonstrated my fitness, Emerson.'\n\n'You certainly have, my dear. I cannot recall ever seeing you in finer condition.'\n\nThe tone of his voice and the sparkle in his handsome blue eyes gave the words a meaning that made me blush like a schoolgirl. 'Now, Emerson,' I began \u2013 and then I remembered. The dear children were hundreds of miles away. Discretion was not necessary.\n\nI will not record my reply, but it made Emerson laugh a good deal. He lifted me from my chair on to his knee, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a flutter of skirts as Mahmud beat a tactful retreat with the fresh coffee he had intended to deliver. At that moment I realized fully how necessary it is for a fond mother to accept the departure of her children from the nest. It would be a blow, but I thought I could bear up under it.\n\nI was glad to see them, though, when we returned to Luxor several weeks later. They all commented on how fit and rested we looked. I returned the compliment, though privately I was not pleased with Ramses' appearance. Physically he was much the same; it was a certain look in his eyes. I said nothing at the time, but the day before we were to leave Luxor, I took him aside.\n\n'I have a final visit to make, Ramses. Will you come with me? Just you, I don't want the others.'\n\nHe accompanied me, of course. I think he suspected where I meant to go.\n\nThe cemetery was deserted. It was a desolate place, with the wind blowing fine sand across the bare ground, and not a flower to be seen. I had not brought flowers. I had brought a small trowel.\n\nI laid them one by one in the hole I dug \u2013 the little figures of Isis with the child Horus, and Anubis, who leads the dead to the Judgement, and Hathor and Ptah and the others. Last of all I unfastened the chain from round my neck and detached the figure of the baboon, the ape who watches over the scales of the Judgement. After I had placed it with the others I gave Ramses the trowel. He filled in the little hole and smoothed the sand over it. Neither of us had spoken. We did not speak now. In silence he helped me to my feet, and held my hand a little longer than was necessary before we turned away. I hoped this would help him. I had known he would understand.\n\nThere is no harm in protecting oneself from that which is not true; and who can say what eternal truths are preserved in the mysteries of the ancient faith?\n\n'I am yesterday, today and tomorrow, for I am born again and again. I am he who comes forth as one who breaks through the door; and everlasting is the daylight which His will has created.'"
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Sigma Force 2) Map of Bones",
        "author": "James Rollins",
        "genres": [
            "thriller",
            "adventure",
            "mystery"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "\u2002'The holy relics were granted to Rainald von Dassel, Archbishop of Cologne (1159\u201367), following Emperor Barbarossa's sacking of the city of Milan. Such a treasure was granted to the German Archbishop for his aid and chancellorship in service to the current Emperor. Not all were content to see such a treasure leave Italy\u2026not without a struggle.' \u2014From L'histoire de la Sainte Empire Romaine (The History of the Holy Roman Empire), 1845, HISTOIRES LITT\u00c9RAIRES\n\n[ Prologue ]\n\n[ MARCH 1162 ]\n\nThe archbishop's men fled into the shadows of the lower valley. Behind them, atop the winter pass, horses screamed, arrow-bit and cleaved. Men shouted, cried, and roared. The clash of steel rang as silvery as a chapel's bells.\n\nBut it was not God's work being done here.\n\nThe rear guard must hold.\n\nFriar Joachim clutched the reins of his horse as his mount slid on its haunches down the steep slope. The loaded wagon had reached the bottom of the valley safely. But true escape still lay another league away.\n\nIf only they could reach it\u2026\n\nWith his hands clenched on the reins, Joachim urged his stumbling mare down to the valley's bottom. He splashed across an icy brook and risked a glance behind him.\n\nThough spring beckoned, winter still ruled the heights. The peaks shone brilliantly in the setting sun. Snow reflected the light, while a billow of rime-frost flagged off the peaks' razored tips. But here in the shadowed gorges, snowmelt had turned the forest floor into a muddy bog. The horses slogged up to their fetlocks and threatened to break a bone with every step. Ahead the wagon was mired just shy of its axles.\n\nJoachim kicked his mare to join the soldiers at the wagon.\n\nAnother team of horses had been hitched to the front. Men pushed from behind. They must reach the trail coursing along the next ridgeline.\n\n\"Ey-ya!\" yelled the wagon master, snapping a whip.\n\nThe lead horse threw its head back and then heaved against the yoke. Nothing happened. Chains strained, horses chuffed white into the cold air, and men swore most foully.\n\nSlowly, too slowly, the wagon dragged free of the mud with the sucking sound of an open chest wound. But it was moving again at last. Each delay had cost blood. The dying wailed from the pass behind them.\n\nThe rear guard must hold a little longer.\n\nThe wagon continued, climbing again. The three large stone sarcophagi in the open wagon bed slid against the ropes that lashed them in place.\n\nIf any should break\u2026\n\nFriar Joachim reached the foundering wagon.\n\nHis fellow brother, Franz, moved his horse closer. \"The trail ahead scouts clear.\"\n\n\"The relics cannot be taken back to Rome. We must reach the German border.\"\n\nFranz nodded, understanding. The relics were no longer safe upon Italian soil, not with the true pope exiled to France and the false pope residing in Rome.\n\nThe wagon climbed more quickly now, finding firmer footing with each step. Still, it trundled no faster than a man could walk. Joachim continued watching the far ridge, staring over his mount's rump.\n\nThe sounds of battle had settled to groans and sobbing, echoing eerily across the valley. The ring of swords had died completely, signaling the defeat of the rear guard.\n\nJoachim searched, but heavy shadows steeped the heights. The bower of black pines hid all.\n\nThen Joachim spotted a flash of silver.\n\nA lone figure appeared, limned in a patch of sunlight, armor glinting.\n\nJoachim did not need to see the red dragon sigil painted on the man's chestplate to recognize the black pope's lieutenant. The profane Saracen had taken the Christian name Fierabras, after one of Charlemagne's paladins. He stood a full head taller than all his men. A true giant. More Christian blood stained his hands than any other man's. But baptized this past year, the Saracen now stood beside Cardinal Octavius, the black pope who took the name Victor IV.\n\nFierabras stood in the patch of sunlight, making no attempt to chase.\n\nThe Saracen knew he was too late.\n\nThe wagon crested the ridge at last and reached the rutted, dry trail atop it. They would make good speed now. German soil lay only a league from here. The Saracen's ambush had failed.\n\nMovement drew Joachim's attention.\n\nFierabras drew a great bow from over a shoulder, black as the shadows. He slowly set arrow to string, notched it, and then leaned back and drew a full pull.\n\nJoachim frowned. What did he hope to win with one feathered bolt?\n\nThe bow sprang, and the arrow flew, arching over the valley, lost for a moment in the sunlight above the ridgeline. Joachim searched the skies, tense. Then, as silent as a diving falcon, the arrow struck, shattering into the centermost casket.\n\nImpossibly, the sarcophagus's lid cracked with the sound of a thunderbolt. Ropes broke free as the crate split, scattering open. Loosed now, all three crates slid toward the open rear of the wagon.\n\nMen ran forward, attempting to stop the stone sarcophagi from crashing to the ground. Hands reached. The wagon was halted. Still, one of the crates tilted too far. It toppled and crushed a soldier beneath, breaking leg and pelvis. The poor man's scream christened the air.\n\nFranz hurried, dropping from his saddle. He joined the men in attempting to lift the stone crate off the soldier\u2026and more importantly back into the wagon.\n\nThe sarcophagus was lifted, the man dragged free, but the crate was too heavy to raise to the wagon's height.\n\n\"Ropes!\" Franz yelled. \"We need ropes!\"\n\nOne of the bearers slipped. The sarcophagus fell again, on its side. Its stone lid fell open.\n\nThe sound of hoofbeats rose behind them. On the trail. Coming fast. Joachim turned, knowing what he'd find. Horses, lathered and shining in the sun, bore down on them. Though a quarter league off, it was plain all the riders were dressed in black. More of the Saracen's men. It was a second ambush.\n\nJoachim merely sat his horse. There would be no escape.\n\nFranz gasped\u2014not at their predicament, but at the contents of the spilled sarcophagus. Or rather the lack thereof.\n\n\"Empty!\" the young friar exclaimed. \"It's empty.\"\n\nShock drove Franz back to his feet. He climbed atop the wagon's bed and stared into the crate shattered by the Saracen's arrow.\n\n\"Nothing again,\" Franz said, falling to his knees. \"The relics? What ruin is this?\" The young friar found Joachim's eyes and read the lack of surprise. \"You knew.\"\n\nJoachim stared back at the rushing horses. Their caravan had all been a ruse, a ploy to draw off the black pope's men. The true courier had left a day ahead, with a mule team, bearing the true relics wrapped in rough-spun cloth and hidden inside a hay bundle.\n\nJoachim turned to stare across the vale at Fierabras. The Saracen might have his blood this day, but the black pope would never have the relics.\n\nNever.\n\n[ PRESENT DAY ]\n\n[ JULY 22, 11:46 P.M. ]\n\n[ COLOGNE, GERMANY ]\n\nAs midnight approached, Jason passed his iPod to Mandy. \"Listen. It's Godsmack's new single. It's not even released in the States yet. How cool is that?\"\n\nThe reaction was less than Jason hoped. Mandy shrugged, expressionless, but she still took the proffered earphones. She brushed back the pink-dyed tips of her black hair and settled the phones to her ears. The movement opened her jacket enough to reveal the press of her applesized breasts against her black Pixies T-shirt.\n\nJason stared.\n\n\"I don't hear anything,\" Mandy said with a tired sigh, arching an eyebrow at him.\n\nOh. Jason turned his attention back to his iPod and pressed Play.\n\nHe leaned back on his hands. The two were seated on a thin grass sward that framed the open pedestrian plaza, called the Domvorplatz. It surrounded the massive gothic cathedral, the K\u00f6lner Dom. Perched on Cathedral Hill, it commanded a view over the entire city.\n\nJason gazed up the length of the twin spires, decorated with stone figures, carved in tiers of marble reliefs that ranged from the religious to the arcane. Now, lit up at night, it held an eerie sense of something ancient risen from deep underground, something not of this world.\n\nListening to the music leaking from the iPod, Jason watched Mandy. Both were on summer holiday from Boston College, backpacking through Germany and Austria. They were traveling with two other friends, Brenda and Karl, but the other two were more interested in the local pubs than attending tonight's midnight mass. Mandy, though, had been raised Roman Catholic. Midnight masses at the cathedral were limited to a few select holidays, each attended by the Archbishop of Cologne himself, like tonight's Feast of the Three Kings. Mandy had not wanted to miss it.\n\nAnd while Jason was Protestant, he had agreed to accompany her.\n\nAs they waited for the approach of midnight, Mandy's head bopped slightly to the music. Jason liked the way her bangs swept back and forth, the way her lower lip pouted out as she concentrated on the music. Suddenly he felt a touch on his hand. Mandy had shifted her arm closer, brushing her hand atop his. Her eyes, though, remained fixed on the cathedral.\n\nJason held his breath.\n\nFor the past ten days, the two had found themselves thrown together more and more often. Before the trip, they had been no more than acquaintances. Mandy had been Brenda's best friend since high school, and Karl was Jason's roommate. Their two respective friends, new lovers, hadn't wanted to travel alone, in case their budding relationship soured while traveling.\n\nIt hadn't.\n\nSo Jason and Mandy often ended up sightseeing alone.\n\nNot that Jason minded. He had been studying art history back at college. Mandy was majoring in European studies. Here their dry academic textbooks were given flesh and girth, weight and substance. Sharing a similar thrill of discovery, the two found each other easy traveling companions.\n\nJason kept his own eyes averted from her touch, but he did move one finger closer to hers. Had the night just gotten a tad brighter?\n\nUnfortunately the song ended too soon. Mandy sat straighter, pulling away her hand to remove the earphones.\n\n\"We should be getting inside,\" she whispered, and nodded toward the line of people flowing through the open door of the cathedral. She stood up and buttoned her jacket, a conservative black suit coat, over her flamboyant T-shirt.\n\nJason joined her as she smoothed her ankle-length skirt and combed the pink tips of her hair behind her ears. In a breath, she transformed from a slightly punk college student into a staid Catholic schoolgirl.\n\nJason gaped at the sudden transformation. In black jeans and a light jacket, he felt suddenly underdressed to attend a religious service.\n\n\"You look fine,\" Mandy said, seeming to read his worry.\n\n\"Thanks,\" he mumbled.\n\nThey gathered their things, threw their empty Coke cans into a nearby trashcan, and crossed the paved Domvorplatz.\n\n\"Guten Abend,\" a black-frocked deacon greeted them at the door. \"Willkommen.\"\n\n\"Danke,\". Mandy mumbled as they climbed the stairs.\n\nAhead, candlelight flowed through the cathedral's open doorway, flickering down the stone steps. It enhanced the feeling of age and ancientness. Earlier in the day, while taking a cathedral tour, Jason had learned that the cathedral's cornerstone had been laid back in the thirteenth century. It was hard to fathom such a breadth of time.\n\nBathed in candlelight, Jason reached the massive carved doors and followed Mandy into the front foyer. She dabbed holy water from a basin and made the sign of the cross. Jason felt suddenly awkward, acutely aware that this was not his faith. He was an interloper, a trespasser. He feared a misstep, embarrassing himself and in turn Mandy.\n\n\"Follow me,\" Mandy said. \"I want to get a good seat, but not too close.\"\n\nJason stepped after her. As he entered the church proper, awe quickly overwhelmed unease. Though he had already been inside and learned much about the history and art of the structure, he was again struck by the simple majesty of the space. The long central nave stretched four hundred feet ahead of him, bisected by a three-hundred-foot transept, forming a cross with the altar at the center.\n\nYet it was not the length and breadth of the cathedral that captured his attention, but its impossible height. His eyes were drawn up and up, guided by pointed archways, long columns, and the vaulted roof. A thousand candles trailed thin spirals of smoke, sailing heavenward, flickering off the walls, redolent with incense.\n\nMandy led him toward the altar. Ahead, the transept areas to either side of the altar had been roped off, but there were plenty of empty seats in the central nave.\n\n\"How about here?\" she said, stopping midway up the aisle. She offered a small smile, half thanks, half shyness.\n\nHe nodded, struck dumb by her plain beauty, a Madonna in black.\n\nMandy took his hand and pulled Jason down to the end of the pew, by the wall. He settled to his seat, glad for the relative privacy.\n\nMandy kept her hand in his. He felt the heat of her palm.\n\nThe night certainly was brightening.\n\nFinally, a bell sounded and a choir began to sing. The Mass was beginning. Jason took his cues from Mandy: standing, kneeling, and sitting in an elaborate ballet of faith. He followed none of it, but found himself intrigued, becoming lost in the pageantry: the robed priests swinging smoking globes of incense, the processional that accompanied the arrival of the archbishop with his tall miter hat and gold-trimmed vestments, the songs sung by both choir and parishioners, the lighting of the Feast candles.\n\nAnd everywhere the art became as much a part of the ceremony as the participants. A wooden sculpture of Mary and baby Jesus, called the Milan Madonna, glowed with age and grace. And across the way, a marble statue of Saint Christopher bore a small child in his arms with a beatific smile. And overlooking all were the massive Bavarian stained-glass windows, dark now, but still resplendent with reflected candlelight, creating jewels out of ordinary glass.\n\nBut no piece of art was more spectacular than the golden sarcophagus behind the altar, locked inside glass and metal. While only the size of a large trunk and constructed in the shape of a miniature church, the reliquary was the centerpiece of the cathedral, the reason for the construction of such a massive house of worship, the focal point of faith and art. It protected the church's most holy relics. Constructed of solid gold, the reliquary had been forged before the cathedral had even broken ground. Designed by Nicolas of Verdun in the thirteenth century, the sarcophagus was considered to be the best example of medieval goldwork in existence.\n\nAs Jason continued his study, the service wound slowly toward the end of the Mass, marked by bells and prayers. At last, it came time for Communion, the breaking of the Eucharistic bread. Parishioners slowly filed from their pews, traveling up the aisles to accept the body and blood of Jesus Christ.\n\nWhen her time came, Mandy rose along with the others in her pew, slipping her hand from his. \"I'll be right back,\" she whispered.\n\nJason watched his pew empty and the slow procession continue toward the altar. Anxious for Mandy's return, he rose to stretch his legs. He used the moment to study the statuary that flanked a confessional booth. Now standing, he also regretted that third can of Coke he had consumed. He glanced back toward the cathedral's vestibule. There was a public restroom outside the nave.\n\nGlancing longingly back there, Jason was the first to spot a group of monks entering the rear of the cathedral, filing through all the back doors. Though in full-length black robes, hooded and belted at the waist, something immediately struck Jason as odd. They moved too quickly, with an assured military precision, slipping into shadows.\n\nWas this some final bit of pageantry?\n\nA glance around the cathedral revealed more cloaked figures at other doors, even beyond the roped transept beside the altar. While keeping their heads bowed piously down, they also seemed to be standing guard.\n\nWhat was going on?\n\nHe spotted Mandy near the altar. She was just accepting her Communion. There were only a handful of parishioners behind her. Body and blood of Christ, Jason could almost lip-read.\n\nAmen, he answered himself.\n\nThe Communion finished. The last parishioners returned to their seats, including Mandy. Jason waved her into the pew, then sat next to her.\n\n\"What's with all the monks?\" he asked, leaning forward.\n\nShe had knelt down with her head bowed. Her only answer was a shushing sound. He sat back. Most of the parishioners were also kneeling, heads bowed. Only a few like Jason, those who had not taken Communion, remained seated. Ahead, the priest finished tidying up, while the elderly archbishop sat atop his raised dais, chin to chest, half dozing.\n\nThe mystery and pageantry had died to embers in Jason's heart. Maybe it was just the pressure of his bladder, but all he wanted to do was get out of here. He even reached to Mandy's elbow, ready to urge her to leave.\n\nMotion ahead stopped him. The monks on either side of the altar pulled weapons from beneath folds of cloth. Gunmetal shone with oil in the candlelight, snub-nosed Uzis, mounted with long black silencers.\n\nA chatter of gunfire, no louder than a chain-smoker's staccato cough, spat across the altar. Heads rose along the pews. Behind the altar, the priest, garbed in white, danced with the impacts. It appeared as if he were being pelted with paintballs\u2014crimson paintballs. He fell atop the altar, spilling the chalice of wine along with his own blood.\n\nAfter a stunned silence, cries rose from the parishioners. People sprang up. The elderly archbishop stumbled from his dais, drawing to his feet in horror. The sudden motion knocked his miter hat to the floor.\n\nMonks swept up the aisles\u2026from the rear and the sides. Orders were shouted and barked in German, French, and English.\n\nBleiben Sie in Ihren Sitzen\u2026Ne bouge pas\u2026\n\nThe voices were muffled, the faces beneath the hoods obscured by half-masks of black silk. But the raised weapons punctuated their orders.\n\nStay seated or die!\n\nMandy sat back with Jason. Her hand reached for his. He clutched her fingers and glanced around, unable to blink. All the doors were closed, guarded.\n\nWhat was going on?\n\nFrom the pack of armed monks near the main entrance, a figure appeared, dressed like the others, only taller, seeming to rise as if called forth. His cloak was more like a cape. Clearly some leader, he carried no weapon as he strode boldly down the central aisle of the nave.\n\nHe met the archbishop at the altar. A heated argument ensued. It took Jason a moment to realize they were speaking in Latin. The archbishop suddenly fell back in horror.\n\nThe leader stepped aside. Two men came forward. Guns blazed. The aim was not murder. They fired upon the faceplate that sealed the golden reliquary. Glass etched and pocked, but held. Bulletproof.\n\n\"Thieves\u2026\" Jason mumbled. This was all an elaborate robbery.\n\nThe archbishop seemed to draw strength from the stubbornness of the glass, standing taller. The leader of the monks held out his hand, speaking still in Latin. The archbishop shook his head.\n\n\"Lassen Sie dann das Blut Ihrer Schafe Ihre H\u00e4nde beflecke,\" the man said, speaking German now.\n\nLet your sheep's blood be upon your hands.\n\nThe leader waved another two monks to the front. They flanked the sealed vault and lifted large metal disks to either side of the casement. The effect was instantaneous.\n\nThe weakened bulletproof glass exploded outward as if shoved by some unseen wind. In the flickering candlelight, the sarcophagus shimmered. Jason felt a sudden pressure, an internal popping of his ears, as if the walls of the cathedral had suddenly pushed inward, squashing all. The pressure deafened his ears; his vision squeezed.\n\nHe turned to Mandy.\n\nHer hand was still clasped tightly to his, but her neck was arched back, her mouth stretched open.\n\n\"Mandy\u2026\"\n\nFrom the corner of his eye, he saw other parishioners fixed in the same wracked poses. Mandy's hand began to tremble in his, vibrating like a speaker's tweeter. Tears ran down her face, turning bloody as he watched. She did not breathe. Her body then jerked and stiffened, knocking his hand free, but not before he felt the bite of an electrical shock arc from her fingertips to his.\n\nHe stood up, too horrified to sit.\n\nA thin trail of smoke rose from Mandy's open mouth.\n\nHer eyes were rolled back to white, but already they were smoldering black at the corners.\n\nDead.\n\nJason, muted by terror, searched the cathedral. The same was happening everywhere. Only a few were unscathed: a pair of young children, pinned between their parents, cried and wailed. Jason recognized the unaffected. Those who had not partaken of the Communion bread.\n\nLike him.\n\nHe fell back into the shadows by the wall. His motion had gone momentarily unnoticed. His back found a door, one unguarded by the monks. Not a true door.\n\nJason pulled it open enough to slip inside the confessional booth.\n\nHe fell to his knees, crouching down, hugging himself.\n\nPrayers came to his lips.\n\nThen, just as suddenly, it ended. He felt it in his head. A pop. A release of pressure. The walls of the cathedral sighing back.\n\nHe was crying. Tears ran cold over his cheeks.\n\nHe risked peeking out a hole in the confessional door.\n\nJason stared, finding a clear view of the nave and the altar. The air reeked of burnt hair. Cries and wails still echoed, but now the chorus came from only a handful of throats. Those still living. One figure, from his ragged garb apparently a homeless man, stumbled out of the pew and ran down a side aisle. Before taking ten steps, he was shot in the back of the head. One shot. His body sprawled.\n\nOh God\u2026oh God\u2026\n\nBiting back sobs, Jason kept his eyes focused toward the altar.\n\nFour monks lifted the golden sarcophagus from its shattered case. The slain priest's body was kicked from the altar and replaced by the reliquary. The leader slipped a large cloth sack from beneath his cloak. The monks opened the reliquary's lid and upended the contents into the bag. Once empty, the priceless sarcophagus was toppled to the floor and abandoned with a crash.\n\nThe leader shouldered his burden and headed back down the central aisle with the stolen relics.\n\nThe archbishop called to him. Again in Latin. It sounded like a curse.\n\nThe only response was a wave of the man's arm.\n\nAnother of the monks stepped behind the archbishop and raised a pistol to the back of the man's head.\n\nJason slunk down, wanting to see no more.\n\nHe closed his eyes. Other shots rang out across the cathedral. Sporadic. Cries suddenly silenced. Death stalked the cathedral as the monks slaughtered the few remaining survivors.\n\nJason kept his eyes closed and prayed.\n\nA moment before, he had spotted the coat of arms upon the leader's surcoat. The man's black cloak had parted as he'd lifted his arm, revealing a crimson sigil beneath: a coiled dragon, the tail wrapped around its own neck. The symbol was unknown to Jason, but it had an exotic feel to it, more Persian than European.\n\nBeyond the confessional door, the cathedral had grown stone silent.\n\nThe tread of booted footsteps approached his hiding place.\n\nJason squeezed his eyes tighter, against the horror, against the impossibility, against the sacrilege.\n\nAll for a sack of bones.\n\nAnd though the cathedral had been built around those bones, and countless kings had bowed before them, even this very mass was a Feast to those long-dead men\u2014the Feast of the Three Kings\u2014one question rose foremost in Jason's mind.\n\nWhy?\n\nImages of the Three Kings were found throughout the cathedral, done in stone, glass, and gold. In one panel, the Wise Men led camels across a desert, guided by the Star of Bethlehem. In another, the adoration of the Christ child was depicted, showing kneeling figures offering of the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.\n\nBut Jason closed his mind to all of this. All he could picture was Mandy's last smile. Her soft touch.\n\nAll gone.\n\nThe boots stopped outside his door.\n\nHe silently cried for an answer to all this bloodshed.\n\nWhy?\n\nWhy steal the bones of the Magi?\n\n[ DAY ONE ]"
            },
            {
                "title": "BEHIND THE EIGHT BALL",
                "text": "[ JULY 24, 4:34 A.M. ]\n\n[ FREDERICK, MARYLAND ]\n\nThe saboteur had arrived.\n\nGrayson Pierce edged his motorcycle between the dark buildings that made up the heart of Fort Detrick. He kept the bike idling. Its electric engine purred no louder than a refrigerator's motor. The black gloves he wore matched the bike's paint, a nickel-phosphorous compound called NPL Super Black. It absorbed more visible light, making ordinary black seem positively shiny. His cloth body suit and rigid helmet were equally shaded.\n\nHunched over the bike, he neared the end of the alley. A courtyard opened ahead, a dark chasm framed by the brick-and-mortar buildings that composed the National Cancer Institute, an adjunct to USAMRIID, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Here the country's war on bioterrorism was waged across sixty thousand square feet of maximum-containment labs.\n\nGray cut the engine but stayed seated. His left knee rested against the satchel. It held the seventy thousand dollars. He remained in the alley, avoiding the open courtyard. He preferred the dark. The moon had long set, and the sun would not rise for another twenty-two minutes. Even the stars remained clouded by the shredding tail of last night's summer storm.\n\nWould his ruse hold?\n\nHe subvocalized into his throat mike. \"Mule to Eagle, I've reached the rendezvous. Proceeding on foot.\"\n\n\"Roger that. We've got you on satellite.\"\n\nGray resisted the urge to look up and wave. He hated to be watched, scrutinized, but the deal here was too big. He did manage to gain a concession: to take the meeting alone. His contact was skittish. It had taken six months to groom this contact, brokering connections in Libya and the Sudan. It hadn't been easy. Money did not buy much trust. Especially in this business.\n\nHe reached down to the satchel and shouldered the money bag. Wary, he walked his bike over to a shadowed alcove, parked it, and hooked a leg over the seat.\n\nHe crossed down the alley.\n\nThere were few eyes awake at this hour, and most of those were only electronic. All of his identification had passed inspection at the Old Farm Gate, the service entrance to the base. And now he had to trust that his subterfuge held out long enough to evade electronic surveillance.\n\nHe glanced to the glowing dial on his Breitling diver's watch: 4:45. The meeting was set for fifteen minutes from now. So much depended on his success here.\n\nGray reached his destination. Building 470. It was deserted at this hour, due for demolition next month. Poorly secured, the building was perfect for the rendezvous, yet the choice of venue was also oddly ironic. In the sixties, spores of anthrax had been brewed inside the building, in giant vats and tanks, fermenting strains of bacterial death, until the toxic brewery had been decommissioned back in 1971. Since then, the building had been left fallow, becoming a giant storage closet for the National Cancer Institute.\n\nBut once again, the business of anthrax would be conducted under this roof. He glanced up. The windows were all dark. He was to meet the seller on the fourth floor.\n\nReaching the side door, he swiped the lock with an electronic keycard supplied by his contact at the base. He carried the second half of the man's payment over his shoulder, having wired the first half a month before. Gray also bore a foot-long plastic, carbonized dagger in a concealed wrist sheath.\n\nHis only weapon.\n\nHe couldn't risk bringing anything else through the security gate.\n\nGray closed the door and crossed to the stairwell on the right. The only light on the stairs came from the red EXIT sign. He reached to his motorcycle helmet and toggled on the night-vision mode. The world brightened in tones of green and silver. He mounted the stairs and climbed quickly to the fourth floor.\n\nAt the top, he pushed through the landing's door.\n\nHe had no idea where he was supposed to meet his contact. Only that he was to await the man's signal. He paused for a breath at the door, surveying the space before him. He didn't like it.\n\nThe stairwell opened at the corner of the building. One corridor stretched straight ahead; the other ran to the left. Frosted glass office doors lined the inner walls; windows slitted the other. He proceeded directly ahead at a slow pace, alert for any sign of movement.\n\nA flood of light swept through one of the windows, washing over him.\n\nDazzled through his night-vision, he rolled against one wall, back into darkness. Had he been spotted? The sweep of light pierced the other windows, one after the other, passing down the hall ahead of him.\n\nLeaning out, he peered through one of the windows. It faced the wide courtyard that fronted the building. Across the way, he watched a Humvee trundle slowly down the street. Its searchlight swept through the courtyard.\n\nA patrol.\n\nWould the attention spook his contact?\n\nCursing silently, Gray waited for the truck to finish its round. The patrol vanished momentarily, crossing behind a hulking structure that rose from the middle of the courtyard below. It looked like some rusting spaceship, but was in fact a million-liter steel containment sphere, three stories tall, mounted on a dozen pedestal legs. Ladders and scaffolding surrounded the structure as it underwent a renovation, an attempt to return it to its former glory when it was a Cold War research facility. Even the steel catwalk that had once circumnavigated the globe's equator had been replaced.\n\nGray knew the giant globe's nickname at the base.\n\nThe Eight Ball.\n\nA humorless smile creased his lips as he realized his unlucky position.\n\nTrapped behind the eight ball\u2026\n\nThe patrol finally reappeared beyond the structure, slowly crossed the front of the courtyard, and rolled away.\n\nSatisfied, Gray continued to the end of the corridor. A set of swinging double doors blocked the passage, but their narrow windows revealed a larger room beyond. He spotted a few tall, slender metal and glass tanks. One of the old labs. Windowless and dark.\n\nHis approach must have been noted.\n\nA new light flared inside, incandescent, bright enough to require Gray to flick off his night-vision. A flashlight. It blinked three times.\n\nA signal.\n\nHe stepped to the door and used a toe to push open one of the swinging sides. He slid through the narrow opening.\n\n\"Over here,\" a voice said calmly. It was the first time Gray had heard his contact's voice. Prior to this moment, it had always been electronically muffled, a paranoid level of anonymity.\n\nIt was a woman's voice. The revelation piqued his wariness. He didn't like surprises.\n\nHe followed through a maze of tables with chairs stacked on top. She sat at one of the tables. Its other chairs were still stacked atop it. Except for one. On the opposite side of the table. It shifted as she kicked one of the legs.\n\n\"Sit.\"\n\nGray had expected to find a nervous scientist, someone out for an extra paycheck. Treason for hire was becoming more and more commonplace among the top research facilities.\n\nUSAMRIID was no exception\u2026 only a thousandfold more deadly. Each vial for sale had the capability, if properly aerosolized in a subway or bus station, to kill thousands.\n\nAnd she was selling fifteen of them.\n\nHe settled into his seat, placing the satchel of money on the table.\n\nThe woman was Asian\u2026no, Eurasian. Her eyes were more open, her skin deeply tanned to a handsome bronze. She wore a black turtlenecked bodysuit, not unlike the one he wore, hugging a slim, lithe frame. A silver pendant dangled from her neck, bright against her suit, bearing a tiny curled-dragon charm. Gray studied her. The Dragon Lady's features, rather than taut and wary like his own, appeared bored.\n\nOf course, the 9mm Sig Sauer pointed at his chest and equipped with a silencer might be the source of her confidence. But it was her next words that truly iced his blood.\n\n\"Good evening, Commander Pierce.\"\n\nHe was startled to hear his name.\n\nIf she knew that\u2026\n\nHe was already moving\u2026and already too late.\n\nThe gun fired at near-point-blank range.\n\nThe impact kicked his body backward, taking the chair with him. He landed on his back, tangled in the chair legs. Pain flattened his chest, making it impossible to breathe. He tasted blood on his tongue.\n\nBetrayed\u2026\n\nShe stepped around the table and leaned over his sprawled form, gun still pointing, taking no chances. The silver dragon pendant dangled and flashed brightly. \"I suspect you're recording all this through your helmet, Commander Pierce. Perhaps even transmitting to Washington\u2026to Sigma. You won't mind if I borrow a little airtime, will you?\"\n\nHe was in no position to object.\n\nThe woman leaned closer over him. \"In the next ten minutes, the Guild will shut down all of Fort Detrick. Contaminate the entire base with anthrax. Payback for Sigma's interference with our operation in Oman. But I owe your director, Painter Crowe, something more. Something personal. This is for my sister in the field, Cassandra Sanchez.\"\n\nThe gun shifted to his faceplate.\n\n\"Blood for blood.\"\n\nShe pulled the trigger.\n\n[ 5:02 A.M. ]\n\nWASHINGTON, D.C.\n\nForty-two miles away, the satellite feed went dead.\n\n\"Where's his backup?\" Painter Crowe kept his voice firm, biting back a litany of curses. Panic would not serve them.\n\n\"Still ten minutes out.\"\n\n\"Can you re-establish the link?\"\n\nThe technician shook his head. \"We've lost main feed from his helmet cam. But we still have the bird's-eye of the base from the NRO sat.\" The young man indicated another monitor. It showed a black-and-white overshot of Fort Detrick, centered on a courtyard of buildings.\n\nPainter paced before the array of monitors. It had all been a trap, one directed at Sigma and aimed at him personally. \"Alert Fort Detrick's security.\"\n\n\"Sir?\" The question rose from his second-in-command, Logan Gregory.\n\nPainter understood Logan's hesitation. Only a handful of those in power knew of Sigma and the agents it employed: the President, the Joint Chiefs, and his immediate supervisors over at DARPA. After last year's shake-up among the top brass, the organization was under intense scrutiny.\n\nMistakes would not be tolerated.\n\n\"I won't risk an agent,\" Painter said. \"Call them in.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" Logan crossed to a phone. The man appeared more a California surfer than a leading strategist: blond hair, tanned, fit but going a bit soft in the belly. Painter was his darker shadow, half Native American, black hair, blue eyes. But he had no tan. He didn't know the last time he had seen the sun.\n\nPainter wanted to sit down, lower his head to his knees. He had assumed control of the organization only eight months ago. And most of that time had been spent restructuring and shoring up security after the infiltration of the group by an international cartel known as the Guild. There had been no telling what information had been gleaned, sold, or spread during this time, so everything had to be purged and rebuilt from scratch. Even their central command had been pulled out of Arlington and moved to a subterranean warren here in Washington.\n\nIn fact, Painter had come in early this morning to unpack boxes in his new office when he had received the emergency call from satellite recon.\n\nHe studied the monitor from the NRO satellite.\n\nA trap.\n\nHe knew what the Guild was doing. Four weeks ago, Painter had begun to put operatives into the field again, the first in more than a year. It was a tentative test. Two teams. One over in Los Alamos investigating the loss of a nuclear database\u2026and the other in his own backyard, over at Fort Detrick, only one hour from Washington.\n\nThe Guild's attack sought to shake Sigma and its leader. To prove that the Guild still had knowledge to undermine Sigma. It was a feint to force Sigma to pull back again, to regroup, possibly to disband. As long as Painter's group was out of commission, the Guild had a greater chance to operate with impunity.\n\nThat must not happen.\n\nPainter stopped his pacing and turned to his second, the question plain on his face.\n\n\"I keep getting cut off,\" Logan said, nodding to the earpiece. \"They're having intermittent communication blackouts throughout the base.\"\n\nCertainly the handiwork of the Guild too\u2026\n\nFrustrated, Painter leaned on the console and stared at the mission's dossier. Imprinted atop the manila file was a single Greek letter.\n\nIn mathematics, the letter, sigma represented \"the sum of all parts,\" the unification of disparate sets into a whole. It was also emblematic of the organization Painter directed: Sigma Force.\n\nOperating under the auspices of DARPA\u2014the Department of Defense's research and development wing\u2014Sigma served as the agency's covert arm out in the world, sent forth to safeguard, acquire, or neutralize technologies vital to U.S. security. Its team members were an ultrasecret cadre of ex\u2013Special Forces soldiers who had been handpicked and placed into rigorous fast-track doctoral programs, covering a wide range of scientific disciplines, forming a militarized team of technically trained operatives.\n\nOr in plainer language, killer scientists.\n\nPainter opened the dossier before him. The team leader's file fronted the record.\n\nDr. and Commander Grayson Pierce.\n\nThe agent's photograph stared up at him from the upper right corner. It was the man's mug shot from his year of incarceration at Leavenworth. Dark hair shaved to a stubble, blue eyes still angry. His Welsh heritage was evident in the sharp cheekbones, wide eyes, and strong jaw. But his ruddy complexion was all Texan, burnt by the sun over the dry hills of Brown County.\n\nPainter didn't bother glancing over the inch-thick file. He knew the details. Gray Pierce had joined the Army at eighteen, the Rangers at twenty-one, and served to distinction off and on the field. Then, at twenty-three, he was court-martialed for striking a superior officer. Painter knew the details and the back history of the two in Bosnia. And considering the events, Painter might have done the same. Still, rules were codified in granite among the armed forces. The decorated soldier spent one year in Leavenworth.\n\nBut Gray Pierce was too valuable to be cast aside forever.\n\nHis training and skill could not be wasted.\n\nSigma had recruited him three years ago, right out of prison.\n\nNow Gray was a pawn between the Guild and Sigma.\n\nOne about to be crushed.\n\n\"I've got base security!\" Logan said, relief ringing in his voice.\n\n\"Get them over\u2014\"\n\n\"Sir!\" The technician leapt to his feet, still tethered to his console by the headset's cord. He glanced to Painter. \"Director Crowe, I'm picking up a trace audio feed.\"\n\n\"What\u2014?\" Painter stepped closer to the technician. He raised a hand to hold off Logan.\n\nThe technician turned up the feed on the speakers.\n\nA tinny voice reached them though the video feed remained fritzed.\n\nOne word formed.\n\n\"Goddamnmotherfuckingpieceofshit\u2026\"\n\n[ 5:07 A.M. ]\n\n[ FREDERICK, MARYLAND ]\n\nGray kicked out a heel, catching the woman in the midriff. He felt a satisfying thud of flesh, but heard nothing. His ears rang from the concussion of the slug against his Kevlar helmet. The shot had spider-webbed his faceshield. His left ear burned as the electronic bay shorted with a burst of static.\n\nHe ignored it all.\n\nRolling to his feet, he slipped the carbonized dagger from its wrist sheath and dove under a neighboring row of tables. Another shot, sounding like a loud cough, penetrated the ring of his ears. Wood splintered from the edge of the table.\n\nHe cleared the far side and kept a wary crouch while searching the room. His kick had caused the woman to drop her flashlight, which rolled on the floor, skittering shadows everywhere. He fingered his chest. The body blow of the assassin's first shot still burned and ached.\n\nBut no blood.\n\nThe woman called to him from the shadows. \"Liquid body armor.\"\n\nGray dropped lower, attempting to pinpoint the woman's location. The dive under the table had jarred his helmet's internal heads-up display. Its holographic images flickered incoherently across the inside of his faceshield, interfering with his sightlines, but he dared not abandon the helmet. It offered the best protection against the weapon still in the woman's hand.\n\nThat and his body suit.\n\nThe assassin was right. Liquid body armor. Developed by U.S. Army Research Laboratory in 2003. The fabric of his body suit had been soaked with a shear-thickening fluid\u2014hard microparticles of silica suspended in a polyethylene glycol solution. During normal movement, it acted like a liquid, but once a bullet struck, the material solidified into a rigid shield, preventing penetration. The suit had just saved his life.\n\nAt least for now.\n\nThe woman spoke again, coldly calm, as she slowly circled toward the door. \"I rigged the building with C4 and TNT. Easy enough since the structure's already scheduled for demolition. The Army was nice enough to have it all prewired. It just took a minor detonator modification to change the building's implosion to one that will cause an explosive updraft.\"\n\nGray pictured the resulting plume of smoke and debris riding high into the early morning sky. \"The vials of anthrax\u2026\" he mumbled, but it was loud enough to be heard.\n\n\"It seemed fitting to use the base's own demolition as a toxic delivery system.\"\n\nChrist, she had turned the entire building into a biological bomb.\n\nWith the strong winds, it was not only the base at risk, but the entire town of nearby Frederick.\n\nGray moved. She had to be stopped. But where was she?\n\nHe edged toward the door himself now, wary of her gun, but he couldn't let that stop him. Too much was at stake. He tried flicking on his night-vision mode, but all he earned was another snap of flame by his ear. The heads-up display continued its erratic flashing, dazzling and confusing to the eye.\n\nScrew it.\n\nHe thumbed the catch and yanked the helmet off.\n\nThe fresh wash of air smelled moldy and antiseptic at the same time. Staying low, he carried the helmet in one hand, the dagger in the other. He reached the back wall and hurried toward the door. He could see well enough to tell the swinging door hadn't moved. The assassin was still in the room.\n\nBut where?\n\nAnd what could he do to stop her? He squeezed the handle of his knife. Gun against dagger. Not good odds.\n\nWith his helmet off, he spotted a shift of shadows near the door. He stopped, going dead still. She was crouched three feet from the door, shielded by a table.\n\nWatery light filtered from the hallway, glowing through the windows of the swinging doors. Dawn neared, brightening the passage beyond. The assassin would have to expose herself to make her escape. For the moment, she clung to the shadows of the windowless lab, unsure if her opponent was armed or not.\n\nGray had to stop playing this Dragon Lady's game.\n\nWith a roundhouse swing, he threw his helmet toward the opposite side of the lab. It landed with a crash and tinkle of glass, shattering one of the old tanks.\n\nHe ran toward her position. He only had seconds.\n\nShe popped from her hiding place, swiveling to lay down fire in the direction of the noise. At the same time, she leaped gracefully toward the door, seeming to use the recoil from her gun to propel her.\n\nGray could not help but be impressed\u2014but not enough to slow him.\n\nWith his arm already cocked, he whipped his dagger through the air. Weighted and balanced to perfection, the carbonized blade flew with unerring accuracy.\n\nIt struck the woman square in the hollow of her throat.\n\nGray continued his headlong rush.\n\nOnly then did he realize his mistake.\n\nThe dagger bounced harmlessly away and clattered to the floor.\n\nLiquid body armor.\n\nNo wonder the Dragon Lady knew about his body suit. She was wearing the same.\n\nThe attack, though, threw off her leap. She landed in a half crash, plainly turning a knee. But ever the skilled assassin, she never lost sight of her target.\n\nFrom a step away, she aimed the Sig Sauer at Gray's face.\n\nAnd this time, he had no helmet.\n\n[ 5:09 A.M. ]\n\nWASHINGTON, D.C.\n\n\"We've lost all contact again,\" the technician said needlessly.\n\nPainter had heard the loud crash a moment before, then all went deadly silent on the satellite feed.\n\n\"I still have base security,\" his second said by the phone.\n\nPainter tried to piece together the cacophony he had heard over the line. \"He tossed his helmet.\"\n\nThe other two men stared at him.\n\nPainter studied the open dossier in front of him. Grayson Pierce was no fool. Besides his military expertise, the man had first come to Sigma's attention because of his aptitude and intelligence tests. He was certainly above the norm, well above, but there were soldiers with even higher scores. What had been the final factor in the decision to recruit him had been his odd behavior while incarcerated at Leavenworth. Despite the hard labor of the camp, Grayson had taken up a rigorous regimen of study: in both advanced chemistry and Taoism. This disparity in his choice of study had intrigued Painter and Sigma's former director, Dr. Sean McKnight.\n\nIn many ways, he proved to be a walking contradiction: a Welshman living in Texas, a student of Taoism who still carried a rosary, a soldier who studied chemistry in prison. It was this very uniqueness of his mind that had won him membership into Sigma.\n\nBut such distinctiveness came with a price.\n\nGrayson Pierce did not play well with others. He had a profound distaste for working with a team.\n\nLike now. Going in alone. Against protocol.\n\n\"Sir?\" his second persisted.\n\nPainter took a deep breath. \"Two more minutes.\"\n\n[ 5:10 A.M. ]\n\n[ FREDERICK, MARYLAND ]\n\nThe first shot whistled past his ear.\n\nGray was lucky. The assassin had shot too fast, before being properly set. Gray, still in motion from his lunge, just managed to duck out of the way. A head shot was not as easy as the movies made it seem.\n\nHe tackled the woman and pinned her gun between them. Even if she fired, he would still have a good chance of surviving.\n\nOnly it would hurt like hell.\n\nShe fired, proving this last point.\n\nThe slug slammed into his left thigh. It felt like a hammer blow, bruising to the marrow. He screamed. And why the hell not? It stung like a motherfucker. But he didn't let go. He used his anger to slam an elbow into her throat. But her body armor stiffened, protecting her.\n\nDamn it.\n\nShe pulled the trigger again. He outweighed her, outmuscled her, but she didn't need the strength of fist and knee. She had the might of modern artillery at her disposal. The slug sucker-punched into his gut. Pounded all the way to his spine, his breath blew out of him. She was slowly maneuvering her gun upward.\n\nThe Sig Sauer had a fifteen-round magazine. How many shots had she fired? Surely she still had enough to pound him into a pulp.\n\nHe needed to end this.\n\nHe lifted his head back and slammed his forehead into her face. But she was no novice to brawling. She turned her head, taking the blow to the side of her skull. Still, it bought him enough time to kick out at a cord trailing from the nearby table. The library lamp attached to it came crashing to the floor. Its green glass shade shattered.\n\nBear-hugging the woman, he rolled her over the lamp. It was too much to hope that the glass would penetrate her body suit. But that wasn't his goal.\n\nHe heard the pop of the lamp's bulb under their combined weight.\n\nGood enough.\n\nFrogging his legs under him, Gray leaped outward. It was a gamble. He flew toward the light switch beside the swinging door.\n\nA cough of a pistol accompanied a slam into his lower back.\n\nHis neck whiplashed. His body struck the wall. As he bounded off, his hand palmed the electrical box and flipped the switch. Lights flickered across the lab, unsteady. Bad wiring.\n\nHe fell back toward the assassin.\n\nHe couldn't hope to electrocute his nemesis. That only happened in the movies, too. That wasn't his goal. Instead, he hoped whoever had last used the desk had left the lamp switched on.\n\nKeeping his feet, he pivoted around.\n\nThe Dragon Lady sat atop the broken lamp, arm outstretched toward him, gun pointing. She pulled the trigger, but her aim was off. One of the windows in the swinging door shattered.\n\nGray stepped around to the side, moving farther out of range. The woman could not track him. She was frozen rigidly in place, unable to move.\n\n\"Liquid body armor,\" he said, repeating her earlier words. \"The liquid does make for a flexible suit, but it also has a disadvantage.\" He stalked up to her side and relieved her of her gun. \"Propylene glycol is an alcohol, a good conductor of electricity. Even a small charge, like from a broken lightbulb, will flow over a suit in seconds. And as with any assault, the suit reacts.\"\n\nHe kicked her in the shin. The suit was as hard as a rock.\n\n\"Goes rigid on you.\"\n\nHer own suit had become her prison.\n\nHe searched her rapidly as she strained to move. With effort, she could make slow progress, but no more than the rusted Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz.\n\nShe gave up. Her face reddened from her strain. \"You won't find any detonator. It's all on a timer. Set for\u2014\" Her eyes glanced down to a wristwatch. \"Two minutes from now. You'll never deactivate all the charges.\"\n\nGray noted the number on her watch drop below 02:00.\n\nHer life was tied to that number, too. He saw the flicker of fear in her eyes\u2014assassin or not, she was still human, afraid of her own mortality\u2014but the rest of her face only hardened to match her rigid suit.\n\n\"Where did you stash the vials?\"\n\nHe knew she wouldn't tell him. But he watched her eyes. For a moment, the pupils shifted slightly up, then centered on him.\n\nThe roof.\n\nIt made sense. He needed no other confirmation. Anthrax\u2014Bacillus anthracis\u2014was sensitive to heat. If she wanted the bloom of toxic spores to spread outward from the blast, the vials would have to be up high, caught in the initial concussive blast and jettisoned skyward. She couldn't risk the heat of the explosion incinerating the weaponized bacterium.\n\nBefore he could move, she spat at him, hitting him on the cheek.\n\nHe didn't bother wiping it off.\n\nHe didn't have the time.\n\n01:48.\n\nHe straightened and ran for the door.\n\n\"You'll never make it!\" she called after him. Somehow she knew he was going for the bio-bomb, not fleeing for his own life. And for some reason, that pissed him off. Like she knew him well enough to make that assumption.\n\nHe ran down the outer corridor and skidded into the stairwell. He pounded up the two flights to reach the roof door. The exit had been modified to meet OSHA standards. A panic bar gated the door, made for quick evacuation in case of a fire.\n\nPanic pretty much defined this moment.\n\nHe struck the bar, initiating an alarm Klaxon, and pushed out into the dark gray of early dawn. The roof was tar and paper. Sand crunched underfoot. He scanned the area. There were too many places to hide the vials: air vents, exhaust pipes, satellite dishes.\n\nWhere?\n\nHe was running out of time.\n\n[ 5:13 A.M. ]\n\nWASHINGTON, D.C.\n\nHe's on the roof!\" the technician said, jabbing a finger at the monitor from the NRO satellite.\n\nPainter leaned closer and spotted a tiny figure stepping into view. What was Grayson doing on the roof? Painter searched the immediate area. \"Any sign of pursuit?\"\n\n\"None that I can detect, sir.\"\n\nLogan spoke from the phone. \"Base security reports a fire alarm going off in Building 470.\"\n\n\"Must've tripped the exit alarm,\" the tech interjected.\n\n\"Can you get us any closer?\" Painter asked.\n\nThe technician nodded and toggled a switch. The image zoomed down atop Grayson Pierce. His helmet was gone. His left ear appeared stained, bloody. He continued to stand by the doorway.\n\n\"What is he doing?\" the tech asked.\n\n\"Base security is responding,\" Logan reported.\n\nPainter shook his head, but a cold certainty iced through him. \"Tell base security to stay away. Have them evacuate anyone near that building.\"\n\n\"Sir?\"\n\n\"Do it.\"\n\n[ 5:14 A.M. ]\n\n[ FREDERICK, MARYLAND ]\n\nGray scanned the roof one more time. The emergency Klaxon continued to wail. He ignored it, drawing inward. He had to think like his quarry.\n\nHe crouched low. It had rained last night. He imagined the woman had only planted the vials recently, after the downpour. He looked carefully and noted where the sand washed smooth by the rain had been disturbed. It wasn't too difficult, as he knew she had to have passed through this door. It was the only roof access.\n\nHe trailed her steps.\n\nThey led across the roof to a hooded exhaust vent.\n\nOf course.\n\nThe exhaust flume would serve as the perfect chimney to expel the spores as the lower levels of the building imploded, creating a toxic blowgun.\n\nKneeling, he spotted where she had tampered with the hood, disturbing an old layer of rust. He didn't have the time to check for booby traps. He yanked the vent off with a grunt.\n\nThe bomb rested inside the duct. The fifteen glass vials were arrayed in a starburst around a central pellet of C4, just enough to shatter the containers. He stared at the white powder filling each tube. Biting his lower lip, he reached down and carefully lifted the bomb out of the duct's throat. A timer counted down.\n\n00:54.\n\n00:53.\n\n00:52.\n\nFree of the ductwork, Gray straightened. He did a fast check of the bomb. It was rigged against tampering. He had no time to decipher the wires and electronics. The bomb was going to go off. He had to get it away from the building, away from the blast zone, preferably away from him.\n\n00:41.\n\nOnly one chance.\n\nHe tucked the bomb into a nylon ditty pouch over one shoulder and stalked to the front of the building. Headlights aimed toward the building, drawn by the alarm. Base security would never reach here in time.\n\nHe had no choice.\n\nHe had to get clear\u2026no matter his own life.\n\nRetreating several steps from roof's edge, he took a deep breath, then sprinted back toward the front of the building. Reaching the roof's edge, he bounded up and leaped over the brick parapet.\n\nHe sailed out over the six-story drop.\n\n[ 5:15 A.M. ]\n\nWASHINGTON, D.C.\n\n\"Christ almighty!\" Logan exclaimed as Grayson made the leap off the roof.\n\n\"He's numb-nuts crazy,\" the tech appended, jerking to his feet.\n\nPainter simply watched the man's suicidal ploy. \"He's doing what he must.\"\n\n[ 5:15 A.M. ]\n\n[ FREDERICK, MARYLAND ]\n\nGray kept his legs under him, arms out for balance. He plummeted earthward. He prayed the laws of physics, velocity, trajectory, and vector analysis didn't betray him.\n\nHe readied for the impact.\n\nTwo stories below and twenty yards out, the spherical roof of the Eight Ball rose up to meet him. The million-liter steel containment globe glistened with morning dew.\n\nHe twisted in midair, struggling to keep his plunge feetfirst.\n\nThen time sped up. Or he did.\n\nHis booted feet hit the surface of the sphere. The liquid body armor cemented around his ankles, protecting against a break. Momentum slammed him forward, facedown, spread-eagled. But he had not reached the center of the sphere's roof, only the curved shell closest to Building 470.\n\nFingers scrabbled, but there was no grip, no traction.\n\nHis body slid down the dew-slick steel, twisting slightly askew. He spread his legs, toes dragging for friction. Then he was past the point of no return, free-falling down the sheer side.\n\nWith his cheek pressed to the steel, he didn't see the catwalk until he struck it. His left leg hit, then his body tumbled after it. He landed on hands and knees atop the metal scaffolding that had been built around the equator of the steel globe. He shoved to his feet, legs wobbling from the strain and the terror.\n\nHe couldn't believe he was still alive.\n\nHe searched the curve of the sphere while freeing the bio-bomb from his ditty bag. The surface of the containment globe was pocked with portholes, once used by scientists to observe their biological experiments inside. In all the years of its regular use, no pathogen had ever escaped.\n\nGray prayed the same held true this morning.\n\nHe glanced to the bomb in his hand: 00:18.\n\nWith no time to curse, he ran along the exterior catwalk, searching for an entry hatch. He found it half a hemisphere away. A steel door with a porthole. He sprinted to it, grabbed the handle, and tugged.\n\nIt refused to budge.\n\nLocked.\n\n[ 5:15 A.M. ]\n\nWASHINGTON, D.C.\n\nPainter watched Grayson tug at the hatch on the giant sphere. He noted the frantic strain, recognized and understood the urgency. Painter had seen the explosive device retrieved from the exhaust duct. He knew the mission objective of Grayson's team: to lure out a suspected trafficker in weaponized pathogens.\n\nPainter had no doubt what form of death lay inside the bomb.\n\nAnthrax.\n\nPlainly, Grayson could not defuse the device and sought to safely dispose of it.\n\nHe was having no luck.\n\nHow much time did he have?\n\n[ 5:15 A.M. ]\n\n[ FREDERICK, MARYLAND ]\n\n00:18\n\nGrayson ran again. Maybe there was another hatch. He clomped around the catwalk. He felt like he was running in ski boots, his ankles still cemented in his body suit.\n\nHe circled another half a hemisphere.\n\nAnother hatch appeared ahead.\n\n\"YOU! HOLD RIGHT THERE!\"\n\nBase security.\n\nThe fierceness and boom of the bullhorn almost made him obey.\n\nAlmost.\n\nHe kept running. A spotlight splayed over him.\n\n\"STOP OR WE'LL FIRE!\"\n\nHe had no time to negotiate.\n\nA deafening rattle of gunfire pelted the side of the sphere, a few rounds pinging off the catwalk. None were near. Warning shots.\n\nHe reached the second hatch, grabbed the handle, twisted, and tugged.\n\nIt stuck for a breath, then popped open. A sob of relief escaped him.\n\nHe pitched the device into the hollow interior of the sphere, slammed the door secure, and leaned his back against it. He slumped to his seat.\n\n\"YOU THERE! STAY WHERE YOU ARE!\"\n\nHe had no intention of going anywhere. He was happy right where he was. He felt a small jolt on his back. The sphere rang like a struck bell. The device had blown inside, safely contained.\n\nBut it was only the primer cord of greater things to come.\n\nLike the clash of titanic gods, a series of jarring explosions rocked the ground.\n\nBoom\u2026boom\u2026boom\u2026\n\nSequential, timed, engineered.\n\nIt was the wired demolitions of Building 470.\n\nEven insulated on the far side of the sphere, Gray felt the slight suck of air, then a mighty whoosh of displacement as the building took its last deep breath and expelled it. A dense wall of dust and debris washed outward as the building collapsed. Gray glanced up in time to see a mighty plume of smoke and dust bloom upward, seeding high and spreading out with the wind.\n\nBut no death rode this breeze.\n\nA final explosion thundered from the dying building. A rumble of brick and rock sounded, a stony avalanche. The ground bumped under him\u2014then he heard a new sound.\n\nThe screech of metal.\n\nShoved by the explosion, its foundations shaken, two of the Eight Ball's support legs popped and bent, as if the sphere were attempting to kneel. The whole structure tilted away from the building, toward the street.\n\nMore legs popped.\n\nAnd once started, there was no stopping it.\n\nThe million-liter containment sphere toppled toward the line of security trucks.\n\nWith Gray directly under it.\n\nHe shoved up and scrabbled along the tilting catwalk, struggling to get clear of the impact. He ran several steps, but the way quickly grew too steep as the sphere continued its plummet. Catwalk became ladder. He dug his fingers into the metal framework, kicked his legs at the support struts of the railings. He fought to get out from beneath the shadow of the crushing weight of the globe.\n\nHe made one final desperate lunge, grabbing a handhold and digging in his toes.\n\nThe Eight Ball struck the front lawn of the courtyard and pounded into the rain-soaked loam. The impact traveled up the catwalk, slamming Gray from his perch. He flew several yards and landed on his back on the soft lawn. He had only been a few yards from the ground.\n\nSitting up, he leaned on one elbow.\n\nThe line of security trucks had retreated as the ball fell toward them.\n\nBut they would not stay gone. And he must not get caught.\n\nGray gained his feet with a groan and stumbled back into the pall of smoke from the collapsed building. Only now did he hear the alarms ringing throughout the base. He shed out of his body suit as he moved, transferring his identification tags to his civilian clothes beneath. He hurried to the far side of the courtyard, to the next building, to where he had left his motorcycle.\n\nHe found it intact.\n\nThrowing a leg over the seat, he keyed the ignition. The engine purred happily to life. He reached for the throttle, then paused. Something had been hooked around his handlebar. He freed it, stared at it for a moment, then shoved it in a pocket.\n\nDamn\u2026\n\nHe throttled up and edged his bike to a neighboring alleyway. The path appeared clear for the moment. He hunched down, gunned the engine, and shot between the dark buildings. Reaching Porter Street, he made a sharp left turn, coming around fast, leaning out his left knee for balance. Only a couple cars shared the street. None of them appeared to be MP vehicles.\n\nHe zigzagged around them and sped off toward the more rural section of the base that surrounded Nallin Pond, a parkland region of gently rolling hills and patches of hardwood forest.\n\nHe would wait out the worst of the commotion, then slip away. For now, he was safe. Still, he felt the weight of the object in his pocket, left as decoration on his bike.\n\nA silver chain\u2026with a dangling dragon pendant.\n\n[ 5:48 A.M. ]\n\nWASHINGTON, D.C.\n\nPainter stepped back from the satellite console. The technician had caught Grayson's escape by motorcycle as he appeared out of the cloud of smoke and dust. Logan was still on the phone, passing information down a series of covert channels, sounding the all-clear. Whitewashed from on high, the trouble at the base would be blamed on miscommunication, faulty wiring, decomposing munitions.\n\nSigma Force would never be mentioned.\n\nThe satellite tech held his earpiece in place. \"Sir, I have a telephone call from the director of DARPA.\" \"Switch it over here.\" Painter plucked up another receiver. He listened as the scrambled communication was routed.\n\nThe tech nodded to him as the dead air over the line seemed to breathe to life. Though no one spoke, Painter could almost sense his mentor and commander. \"Director McKnight?\" he said, suspecting the man was calling to get a mission debrief.\n\nHis suspicion proved wrong.\n\nHe heard the stress in the other's voice. \"Painter, I just received some intel out of Germany. Strange deaths at a cathedral. We need a team on the ground there by nightfall.\"\n\n\"So soon?\"\n\n\"Details will follow within the quarter hour. But we're going to need your best agent to head this team.\"\n\nPainter stared over at the satellite monitor. He watched the motorcycle skim through the hills, flickering through the sparse canopy of trees.\n\n\"I may have just the man. But may I ask what the urgency is?\"\n\n\"A call came in early this morning, requesting Sigma to investigate the matter in Germany. Your group has been specifically summoned.\"\n\n\"Summoned? By whom?\"\n\nTo have Dr. McKnight this rattled, it had to be someone as high up as the President. But once again, Painter's supposition proved wrong.\n\nThe director explained, \"By the Vatican.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "THE ETERNAL CITY",
                "text": "[ JULY 24, NOON ]\n\n[ ROME, ITALY ]\n\nSo much for making her lunch date.\n\nLieutenant Rachel Verona climbed down the narrow stairs that led deep under the Basilica of San Clemente. The excavation below the church had been under way for two months, overseen by a small team of archaeologists from the University of Naples.\n\n\"Lasciate ogni speranza\u2026\"Rachel muttered.\n\nHer guide, Professor Lena Giovanna, the project leader, glanced back at her. She was a tall woman, mid-fifties, but the permanent crook in her back made her seem older and shorter. She offered Rachel a tired smile. \"So you know your Dante Alighieri. And in the original Latin no less. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate! Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.\"\n\nRachel felt a twinge of embarrassment. According to Dante, those words were written on the gates of Hell. She had not meant her words to be heard, but the acoustics here left little privacy. \"No offense intended, Professore.\"\n\nA chuckle answered her. \"None taken, Lieutenant. I was just surprised to find someone in the military police with such fluency in Latin. Even someone working for the Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale.\"\n\nRachel understood the misconception. It was fairly typical to paint all the Carabinieri Corps with the same brush. Most civilians only saw the uniformed men and women guarding streets and buildings, armed with rifles. But she had entered the Corps not as a military soldier, but with a graduate degree in psychology and art history. She had been recruited into the Carabinieri Corps right out of the university, spending an additional two years at the officers' training college studying international law. She had been handpicked by General Rende, who ran the special unit involved with the investigation of art and antiquity thefts, the Tutela Patrimonio Culturale.\n\nReaching the bottom of the stairs, Rachel stepped into a pool of dank water. The storm of the past few days had flooded the subterranean level. She glanced down sourly. At least it was only ankle-deep.\n\nShe wore a borrowed set of rubber boots that were too large, meant for a man. She carried her new Ferragamo pumps in her left hand, a birthday gift from her mother. She dared not leave them on the stairs. Thieves were always about. If she lost her shoes or got them soiled, she'd never hear the end of it from her mother.\n\nProfessor Giovanna, on the other hand, wore a utilitarian coverall, an attire more fitting for exploring waterlogged ruins than Rachel's navy slacks and silk flowered blouse. But when Rachel's pager had gone off a quarter hour ago, she had been heading over to a lunch date with her mother and sister. She'd had no time to return to her apartment and change into her carabiniere uniform. Not if she was going to have any chance of still making that lunch.\n\nSo she had come directly here, meeting up with a pair of local carabinieri. Rachel had left the military policemen up in the basilica while she performed the initial investigation into the theft.\n\nIn some regards, Rachel was glad for the temporary reprieve. She had put off for too long letting her mother know that she and Gino had broken up. In fact, her ex-boyfriend had moved out more than a month ago. Rachel could already picture the knowing disappointment in her mother's eyes, accompanied by the usual noises that implied I told you so without coming out and actually saying it aloud. And her older sister, three years married, would be pointedly twisting that diamond wedding band on her finger and nodding her head sagely.\n\nNeither had been pleased with Rachel's choice of profession.\n\n\"How are you to keep a husband, you crazy girl?\" her mother had intoned, throwing her arms toward heaven. \"You cut your beautiful hair so short. You sleep with a gun. No man can compete with that.\"\n\nAs a consequence, Rachel rarely left Rome to visit her family in rural Castel Gandolfo, where their family had settled after World War II, in the shadow of the pope's summer residence. Only her grandmother understood her. The two had shared a love of antiquities and firearms. While growing up, Rachel had listened avidly to her stories of the war: gruesome tales laced with graveyard humor. Her nonna even kept a Nazi P-08 Luger in her bedside table, oiled and polished, a relic stolen from a border guard during her family's flight. There was no knitting booties for that old woman.\n\n\"It's just up ahead,\" the professor said. She splashed forward toward a glowing doorway. \"My students are keeping watch on the site.\"\n\nRachel proceeded after her guide, reached the low doorway, and ducked through. She straightened into a cavelike room. Illuminated by carbide lanterns and flashlights, the vault of the roof arched overhead, constructed of hewn blocks of volcanic tufa sealed crudely with plaster. A man-made grotto. Plainly a Roman temple.\n\nAs Rachel waded into the room, she was all too conscious of the weight of the basilica overhead. Dedicated to Saint Clement in the twelfth century, the church had been built over an earlier basilica, one constructed back in the fourth century. But even this ancient church hid a deeper mystery: the ruins of a first-century courtyard of Roman buildings, including this pagan temple. Such overbuilding was not uncommon, one religion burying another, a stratification of Roman history.\n\nRachel felt a familiar thrill course through her, sensing the press of time as solidly as the weight of stone. Though one century buried another, it was still here. Mankind's earliest history preserved in stone and silence. Here was a cathedral as rich as the one above.\n\n\"These are my two students from the university,\" the professor said. \"Tia and Roberto.\"\n\nIn the semidarkness, Rachel followed the professor's gaze and looked down, discovering the crouching forms of the young man and woman, both dark haired and similarly attired in soiled coveralls. They had been tagging bits of broken pottery and now rose to greet them. Still grasping her shoes in one hand, Rachel shook their hands. While of university age, the two appeared no older than fifteen. Then again, maybe it was because she'd just celebrated her thirtieth birthday, and everyone seemed to be growing younger except her.\n\n\"Over here,\" the professor said, and led Rachel to an alcove in the far wall. \"The thieves must have struck during last night's storm.\"\n\nProfessor Giovanna pointed her flashlight at a marble figure standing in a far niche. It stood a meter tall\u2014or would have if the head weren't missing. All that remained was a torso, legs, and a protruding stone phallus. A Roman fertility god.\n\nThe professor shook her head. \"A tragedy. It was the only piece of intact statuary discovered here.\"\n\nRachel understood the woman's frustration. Reaching out, she ran her free hand over the stump of the statue's neck. Her fingers felt a familiar roughness. \"Hacksaw,\" she mumbled.\n\nIt was the tool of the modern-day graverobber, easy to conceal and wield. With just such a simple instrument, thieves had stolen, damaged, and vandalized artwork across Rome. It took only moments for the theft to occur, done many times in plain sight, often while a curator's back was turned. And the reward was well worth the risk. Trafficking in stolen antiquities had proved a lucrative business, surpassed only by narcotics, money laundering, and arms dealing. As such, the military had formed the Comando Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale, the Cultural Heritage Police, back in 1992. Working alongside Interpol, they sought to stem this tide.\n\nRachel crouched before the statue and felt a familiar burn in the pit of her stomach. By bits and pieces, Roman history was being erased. It was a crime against time itself.\n\n\"Ars longa, vita brevis,\" she whispered, a quote from Hippocrates. One of her favorites. Life is short, art eternal.\n\n\"Indeed,\" the professor said in a pained voice. \"It was a magnificent find. The chisel work, the fine detail, the work of a master artisan. To mar it so savagely\u2026\"\n\n\"Why didn't the bastards just steal the whole statue?\" asked Tia. \"At least it would've been preserved intact.\"\n\nRachel tapped the statue's phallic protuberance with one of her shoes. \"Despite the convenient handle here, the artifact is too large. The thief must already have an international buyer. The bust alone would be easier to smuggle across the border.\"\n\n\"Is there any hope of recovery?\" Professor Giovanna asked.\n\nRachel did not offer any false promises. Of the six thousand pieces of antiquity stolen last year, only a handful had been recovered. \"I'll need photographs of the intact statue to post with Interpol, preferably concentrating on the bust.\"\n\n\"We have a digital database,\" Professor Giovanna said. \"I can forward pictures by e-mail.\"\n\nRachel nodded and kept her focus on the beheaded statue. \"Or Roberto over there could just tell us what he did with the head.\"\n\nThe professor's eyes darted to the young man.\n\nRoberto took a step back. \"Wh-what?\" His gaze traveled around the room, settling again on his teacher. \"Professore\u2026truly, I know nothing. This is crazy.\"\n\nRachel kept staring at the beheaded statue\u2014and at the one clue available to her. She had weighed the odds of playing her hand now or back at the station. But that would've meant interviewing everyone, taking statements, a mountain of paperwork. She closed her eyes, thinking of the lunch to which she was already late. Besides, if she had any hope of recovering the piece, speed could prove essential.\n\nOpening her eyes, she spoke to the statue. \"Did you know that sixty-four percent of archaeological thefts are abetted by workers at the site?\" She turned to the trio.\n\nProfessor Giovanna frowned. \"Truly you don't think Roberto\u2014\"\n\n\"When did you discover the statue?\" Rachel asked.\n\n\"T-two days ago. But I posted our discovery on the University of Naples website. Many people knew.\"\n\n\"But how many people knew the site would be unguarded during last night's storm?\" Rachel kept her focus on one person. \"Roberto, do you have anything to say?\"\n\nHis face was a frozen mask of disbelief. \"I\u2026no\u2026I had nothing to do with this.\"\n\nRachel unsnapped her radio from her belt. \"Then you won't mind if we search your garret. Perhaps to turn up a hacksaw, something with enough trace marble in its teeth to match the statue here.\"\n\nA familiar wild look entered his eyes. \"I\u2026I\u2026\"\n\n\"The minimum penalty is five years in prison,\" she pressed. \"Obbligatorio.\"\n\nIn the lamplight, he visibly paled.\n\n\"That is, unless you cooperate. Leniency can be arranged.\"\n\nHe shook his head, but it was unclear what he was denying.\n\n\"You had your chance.\" She raised her radio to her lips. The squawk of static echoed loudly in the arched space as she pressed the button.\n\n\"No!\" Roberto raised his hand, stopping her as she suspected he would. His gaze dropped to the floor.\n\nA long silence stretched. Rachel did not break it. She let the weight build.\n\nRoberto finally let out a soft sob. \"I\u2026had debts\u2026gambling debts. I had no choice.\"\n\n\"Dio mio,\" the professor swore, raising a hand to her forehead. \"Oh Roberto, how could you?\"\n\nThe student had no answer.\n\nRachel knew the pressure placed on the boy. It was not unusual. He was only a tiny tendril in a much larger organization, so widely spread and embedded that it could never be fully rooted out. The best Rachel could hope was to keep picking at the weeds.\n\nShe lifted the radio to her lips. \"Carabiniere Gerard, I'm heading up with someone who has additional information.\"\n\n\"\u2014capit\u00f2, Tenente\u2014\"\n\nShe clicked the radio off. Roberto stood with his hands over his face, his career ruined.\n\n\"How did you know?\" the professor asked.\n\nRachel did not bother explaining that it was not uncommon for members of organized crime to ply, petition, or coerce cooperation among site workers. Such corruption was rampant, catching up the unsuspecting, the naive.\n\nShe turned away from Roberto. It was often only a matter of discerning who in the research team was the weak spot. With the young man, she had made an educated guess, then applied pressure to see if she was correct. It had been a risk playing her hand too soon. What if it had been Tia instead? By the time Rachel was done chasing the wrong lead, Tia could have passed a warning on to her buyers. Or what if it had been Professor Giovanna, padding her university salary by selling her own discovery? There were so many ways it could've all gone sour. But Rachel had learned it took risk to win reward.\n\nProfessor Giovanna continued staring at her, the same question in her eyes. How had she known to accuse Roberto?\n\nRachel glanced to the statue's stone phallus. It had taken only one clue\u2014but a prominent one at that. \"It's not only the top head that sells well on the black market. There's a huge demand for ancient art of the erotic nature. It outsells more conservative pieces almost fourfold. I suspect neither of you two women would've had any problem sawing off that prominent appendage, but for some reason, men are reluctant. They take it so personally.\"\n\nRachel shook her head and crossed to the stairs leading up to the basilica. \"They won't even neuter their own dogs.\"\n\n[ 1:34 P.M. ]\n\nStill so very, very late\u2026\n\nChecking her watch, Rachel hurried across the stone piazza in front of the San Clemente Basilica. She stumbled on a loose cobble, bobbled a few steps, but managed to keep her feet. She glanced back at the stone, as if it were at fault\u2014then down to her toes.\n\nMerda!\n\nA wide scuff marred the outer edge of her shoe.\n\nRolling her eyes heavenward, she wondered which saint she had offended. By now, they must be lining up to take a number.\n\nShe continued across the plaza, avoiding a covey of bicyclists that scattered around her like frightened pigeons. She moved more cautiously, reminding herself of the wise words of Emperor Augustus.\n\nFestina lente. Make haste slowly.\n\nThen again, Emperor Augustus didn't have a mother who could nag the hide off a horse.\n\nShe finally reached her Mini Cooper parked at the edge of the plaza. The midday sun cast it in blinding silver. A smile formed, the first of the day. The car was another birthday present. One to herself. You only turned thirty once in your life. It was a bit extravagant, especially upgrading to leather and opting for the S-convertible model.\n\nBut it was the joy of her life.\n\nThat might be one of the reasons Gino left her a month ago. The car inspired her far more than the man sharing her bed. It had been a good trade. The car was more emotionally available.\n\nAnd then again\u2026it was a convertible. She was a woman who appreciated flexibility\u2014if she couldn't get it from her man, she'd get it from her car.\n\nThough today it was too hot to go topless.\n\nA shame.\n\nShe unlocked the door, but before she climbed inside, her cell phone chimed at her belt.\n\nNow what?\n\nIt was probably Carabiniere Gerard, into whose care she had just left Roberto. The student was on his way to be interrogated at Parioli Station. She squinted at the incoming phone number. She recognized the international telephone prefix\u201439-06\u2014but not the number.\n\nWhy was someone from the Vatican calling her?\n\nRachel flipped her cell phone to her ear. \"Lieutenant Verona here.\"\n\nA familiar voice answered. \"How is my favorite niece doing today\u2026besides aggravating her mother?\"\n\n\"Uncle Vigor?\" A smile formed. Her uncle, better known as Monsignor Vigor Verona, headed the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology. But he was not calling from his university office.\n\n\"I called your mother, thinking you were with her. But it seems a carabiniere's work follows no clock. A fact, I think, that your dear mother does not appreciate.\"\n\n\"I'm on my way to the restaurant right now.\"\n\n\"Or you would be\u2026if not for my call.\"\n\nRachel leaned a hand against her car. \"Uncle Vigor, what are you\u2014\"\n\n\"I've already passed on your regrets to your mother. She and your sister will see you for an early dinner instead. At Il Matriciano. You'll be paying, of course, due to the inconvenience.\"\n\nNo doubt Rachel would pay\u2014and in more ways than just in euros. \"What's this all about, Uncle?\"\n\n\"I need you to join me here at the Vatican. Immediately. I'll have a pass waiting for you at the St. Anne's Gate.\"\n\nShe checked her watch. She would have to cross half of Rome. \"I'm supposed to meet with General Rende back at my station to follow up on an open investigation.\"\n\n\"I've already spoken with your commander. He's approved your excursion here. In fact, I have you for a full week.\"\n\n\"A week?\"\n\n\"Or more. I'll explain all when you get here.\" He gave her directions to where he wanted to meet. Her brow crinkled, but before she could ask more, her uncle signed off.\n\n\"Ciao, my bambina.\"\n\nShaking her head, she climbed into her car.\n\nA week or more?\n\nIt seemed when the Vatican spoke, even the military listened. Then again, General Rende was a family friend, going back two generations. He and Uncle Vigor were as close as brothers. It wasn't pure chance that Rachel had been brought to the general's attention and recruited from the University of Rome. Her uncle had been watching over her since her father had died in a bus accident fifteen years before.\n\nUnder his tutelage, she had spent many summers exploring Rome's museums, staying with the nuns of Saint Brigida, not far from the Gregorian University, better known as il Greg, where Uncle Vigor had studied and still taught. And while her uncle might have preferred she had entered the convent and followed in his footsteps, he had recognized she was too much of a hellion for such a pious profession and encouraged her to pursue her passion. He had also instilled in her one other gift during those long summers: the respect and love of history and art, where the greatest expressions of mankind were cemented in marble and granite, oil and canvas, glass and bronze.\n\nAnd now it seemed her uncle was not done with her yet.\n\nSlipping on a pair of blue-tinted Revo sunglasses, she pulled out onto Via Labicano and headed toward the massive Coliseum. Traffic congested around the landmark, but she crisscrossed through some backstreets, narrow and lined with crookedly parked vehicles. She zipped, slipping between the gears with the skill of a Grand Prix racer. She downshifted as she approached the entrance to a roundabout where five streets converged into a mad circle. Visitors considered Roman drivers ill-tempered, short of patience, and heavy of foot. Rachel found them sluggish.\n\nShe lunged between an overloaded flatbed and a boxy Mercedes G500 utility vehicle. Her Mini Cooper appeared to be no more than a sparrow flitting between two elephants. She flicked around the Mercedes, filled the tiny space in front of it, earned the blare of a car horn, but she was already gone. She whisked off the roundabout and onto the main thoroughfare that headed toward the Tiber River.\n\nAs she raced down the wide street, she kept an eye fixed to the flow of traffic on all sides. To move safely through Roman streets required not so much caution as it did strategic planning. As a result of such particular attention, Rachel noted her tail.\n\nThe black BMW sedan swung into position, five cars back.\n\nWho was following her\u2014and why?\n\n[ 2:05 P.M. ]\n\nFifteen minutes later, Rachel pulled into the entrance of an underground parking garage just outside the walls of the Vatican. As she descended, she searched the street behind her. The black BMW had vanished shortly after she had crossed the Tiber River. There was still no sign of it.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said into her cell phone. \"The car is gone.\"\n\n\"Are you secure?\" It was the warrant officer from her station house. She had called in the tail and kept the line open.\n\n\"It appears to be.\"\n\n\"Do you want a patrol sent out?\"\n\n\"No need. There are carabinieri on guard on the Square. I'll be fine from here. Ciao.\"\n\nShe felt no embarrassment for calling in the false alarm. She would earn no ridicule. The Carabinieri Corps fostered a certain level of healthy paranoia among its men and women.\n\nShe found a parking space, climbed out, and locked her car. Still, she kept her cell phone in hand. She would've preferred her 9mm.\n\nAt the top of the ramp, she stepped out of the car park and crossed toward St. Peter's Square. Though she approached one of the architectural masterpieces of the world, she kept a watch on the nearby streets and alleys.\n\nThere continued to be no sign of the BMW.\n\nThe car's occupants had probably just been tourists, surveying the city's landmarks in air-conditioned luxury rather than on foot in the blaze of the midday heat. Summer was high season, and all visitors eventually headed to the Vatican. It was most likely the very reason she thought she was being followed. Was it not said that all roads lead to Rome?\n\nOr at least in this case, all traffic.\n\nSatisfied, she pocketed her cell phone and crossed St. Peter's Square, heading toward the far side.\n\nAs usual, her eyes were drawn down the length of the piazza. Across the travertine square rose St. Peter's Basilica, built over the tomb of the martyred saint. Its dome, designed by Michelangelo, was the highest point in all of Rome. To either side, Bernini's double colonnade swept out in two wide arcs, framing the keyhole-shaped plaza between. According to Bernini, the colonnade was supposed to represent the arms of Saint Peter reaching out to embrace the faithful into the fold. Atop these arms, one hundred and forty stone saints perched and stared down upon the spectacle below.\n\nAnd a spectacle it was.\n\nWhat had once been Nero's circus continued to be a circus.\n\nAll around, voices babbled in French, Arabic, Polish, Hebrew, Dutch, Chinese. Tour groups congregated in islands around guides; sightseers stood with arms around shoulders, wearing false grins as photographs were taken; a few pious stood in the sun, Bibles open in hands, heads bowed in prayers. A tiny cluster of Korean supplicants knelt on the stones, all dressed in yellow. Throughout the square, vendors worked the crowd, selling papal coins, scented rosaries, and blessed crucifixes.\n\nShe gratefully reached the far side of the square and approached one of the five entrances to the main complex. Porta Sant'Anna. The gate nearest to her destination.\n\nShe stepped to one of the Swiss Guards. As was traditional for this gate, he was dressed in a uniform of dark blue with a white collar, topped by a black beret. He took her name, checked her identification, and glanced up and down her slender frame as if disbelieving she was a Carabinieri lieutenant. Once satisfied, he perfunctorily directed her off to the side, to one of the Vigilanza, the Vatican Police, where a laminated pass was handed to her.\n\n\"Keep it with you at all times,\" the policeman warned.\n\nArmed with her pass, she followed the line of visitors through the gate and down Via del Pellegrino.\n\nMost of the city-state was off-limits. The only public spaces were St. Peter's Basilica, the Vatican Museums, and the Gardens. The rest of the hundred acres were restricted without special permission.\n\nBut one section was truly forbidden territory to all but a few.\n\nThe Apostolic Palace, the home of the pope.\n\nHer destination.\n\nRachel marched between the yellow-brick barracks of the Swiss Guard and the gray cliffs of St. Anne Church. Here was none of the majesty of the holiest of the holy states, just a crowded sidewalk and a congested line of cars, a gridlock inside Vatican City. Passing the papal printing office and post office, she crossed toward the entrance to the Apostolic Palace.\n\nAs she approached, she studied the gray-brick structure. It appeared more a utilitarian government building than the seat of the Holy See. But its looks were deceptive. Even the roof. It appeared drab and flat, unremarkable. But she knew atop the Apostolic Palace lay a hidden garden, with fountains, trellis-lined paths, and neatly manicured shrubs. All was masked behind a false roof, sheltering His Holiness from the casual eye below and from any assassin's high-powered scope out in the city.\n\nTo her, it represented the Vatican at large: mysterious, secret, even slightly paranoid, but at its heart, a place of simple beauty and piety.\n\nAnd perhaps the same could be said of her. While she was mostly a lapsed Catholic, only attending mass on holidays, she still had a core of faith that remained true.\n\nReaching the security station before the palace, Rachel showed her pass three more times to the Swiss Guards. As she did, she wondered if this was some nod back to Peter's thrice denial of Christ before the cock crowed.\n\nAt last, she gained admission to the palace proper. A guide awaited her, an American seminary student named Jacob. He was a wiry man in his mid-twenties, his blond hair already balding, dressed in black linen slacks and a white shirt, buttoned to the top.\n\n\"If you'll follow me, I've been directed to take you to Monsignor Verona.\" He did a comical double take at her visitor's pass and stuttered with surprise. \"Lieutenant Verona? Are\u2026are you related to the monsignor?\"\n\n\"He's my uncle.\"\n\nA rapid nod as he collected himself. \"I'm sorry. I was only told to expect a Carabinieri officer.\" He waved her to follow him. \"I am a student and aide for Monsignor Verona at the Greg.\"\n\nShe nodded. Most of her uncle's students revered the man. He was deeply devoted to the Church but still maintained a strong scientific outlook. He even had a placard on the door to his university office, bearing the same inscription that once graced Plato's door: Let no one enter who does not know geometry.\n\nRachel was led through the entrance to the palace. She quickly lost her way. She had only been here once before, when her uncle was being promoted to the head of the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology. She had attended the private papal audience. But the place was gigantic, with fifteen hundred rooms, a thousand staircases, and twenty courtyards. Even now, rather than heading up toward the pope's residence on the top floor, they were headed down.\n\nShe did not understand why her uncle asked her to meet him here, rather than at his university office. Had there been a theft? If so, why not tell her on the phone? Then again, she was well aware of the Vatican's strict Code of Silence. It was written into canon law. The Holy See knew how to keep its secrets.\n\nAt last they reached a small, nondescript door.\n\nJacob opened it for her.\n\nRachel stepped through into an odd Kafkaesque chamber. Sterilely lit, the chamber was long and narrow, but its ceilings were high. Against the walls, gray steel filing cabinets and drawers climbed from floor to ceiling. A tall library ladder leaned against one wall, necessary to reach the highest drawers. Though spotlessly clean, the space smelled dusty and old.\n\n\"Rachel!\" her uncle called from a corner. He stood with a priest at a desk in a corner. She was waved over. \"You made good time, my dear. Then again, I've driven with you before. Any casualties?\"\n\nShe smiled at him and crossed to the desk. She noted that her uncle was not wearing his usual outfit of jeans, T-shirt, and cardigan, but was dressed more formally, suiting his station, in a black cassock with purple piping and buttons. He'd even oiled the curls of his salt-and-pepper hair and trimmed his goatee tight to his face.\n\n\"This is Father Torres,\" her uncle introduced. \"Official keeper of the bones.\"\n\nThe elderly man stood. He was short and stocky, dressed all in black with a Roman collar. A hint of smile ghosted his face. \"I prefer the title 'rector of the reliquiae.'\"\n\nRachel studied the towering wall of file cabinets. She had heard of this place, the Vatican's relic depository, but she had never been here before. She fought back a chill of revulsion. Catalogued and stored in all the drawers and shelves were bits and pieces of saints and martyrs: finger bones, snips of hair, vials of ash, scraps of garments, mummified skin, nail clippings, blood. Few people know that, by canon law, each and every Catholic altar must contain a holy relic. And with new churches or chapels being erected worldwide regularly, this priest's job was to box and FedEx bits of bone or other earthly remains of various saints.\n\nRachel had never understood the Church's obsession with relics. It simply gave her the creeps. But Rome was chock-full of them. Some of the most spectacular and unusual were found here: Mary Magdalene's foot, the vocal cords of Saint Anthony, the tongue of Saint John Nepomucene, the gallstones of Saint Clare. Even the entire body of Pope Saint Pius X lay up in St. Peter's, encased in bronze. The most disturbing, though, was a relic preserved in a shrine in Calcata: the supposed foreskin of Jesus Christ.\n\nShe found her voice. \"Was\u2026was something stolen here?\"\n\nUncle Vigor lifted an arm to his student. \"Jacob, perhaps you could fetch us some cappuccinos.\"\n\n\"Certainly, Monsignor.\"\n\nUncle Vigor waited until Jacob left, closing the door. His eyes then settled to Rachel. \"Have you heard of the massacre in Cologne?\"\n\nRachel was taken off guard by his question. She had been running all day long and had had little chance to watch the news, but there had been no way to avoid hearing about the midnight murders up in Germany last night. The details remained sketchy.\n\n\"Only what's been reported on the radio,\" she answered.\n\nHe nodded. \"The Curia here has been receiving intelligence in advance of what's being broadcasted. Eighty-four people were killed, including the Archbishop of Cologne. But it is the manner of their deaths that is being kept from the public for the moment.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"A handful were shot, but the greater majority seemed to have been electrocuted.\"\n\n\"Electrocuted?\"\n\n\"That is the tentative analysis. Autopsy reports are still pending. Some of the bodies were still smoking when authorities arrived.\"\n\n\"Dear God. How\u2026?\"\n\n\"That answer may have to wait. The cathedral is swarming with investigators of every ilk: criminologists, detectives, forensic scientists, even electricians. There are teams with the German BKA, terrorist experts from Interpol, and agents with Europol. But as the crime took place in a Roman Catholic cathedral, sanctified territory, the Vatican has invoked its Omerta.\"\n\n\"Its Code of Silence.\"\n\nHe grunted the affirmative. \"The Church is cooperating with German authorities, but it is also limiting access, trying to keep the scene from becoming a circus.\"\n\nRachel shook her head. \"But what does all this have to do with you calling me here?\"\n\n\"From the initial investigation, there seems to be only one motive. The golden reliquary at the cathedral was broken into.\"\n\n\"They stole the reliquary.\"\n\n\"No, that's just it. They left behind the solid gold box. A priceless artifact. They only stole its contents. Its relics.\"\n\nFather Torres interjected, \"And not just any relics, but the bones of the biblical Magi.\"\n\n\"Magi\u2026as in the Three Wise Men from the Bible?\" Rachel couldn't keep the incredulity out of her voice. \"They steal the bones, but leave the gold box. Surely the reliquary would fetch a better price on the black market than the bones.\"\n\nUncle Vigor sighed. \"At the secretary of state's request, I came down here to evaluate the provenance of those relics. They have an illustrious past. The bones came to Europe through the relic-collecting verve of Saint Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine. As the first Christian emperor, Constantine had sent his mother on pilgrimages to collect holy relics. The most famous being, of course, the True Cross of Christ.\"\n\nRachel had visited the Basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, out on Lateran Hill. In a back room, behind glass, were the most famous relics collected by Saint Helena: a beam of the True Cross, a nail used to crucify Christ, and two thorns from his painful crown. There persisted much controversy as to the authenticity of these relics. Most believed Saint Helena had been duped.\n\nHer uncle continued, \"But it is not as well known that Queen Helena traveled further than Jerusalem, returning under mysterious circumstances with a large stone sarcophagus, claiming to have recovered the bodies of the Three Kings. The relics were kept in a church in Constantinople, but following the death of Constantine, they were transferred to Milan and interred in a basilica.\"\n\n\"But I thought you said Germany\u2014\"\n\nUncle Vigor held up a hand. \"In the twelfth century, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa of Germany plundered Milan and stole the relics. The circumstances surrounding this are clouded with a mix of rumors. But all stories end with the relics in Cologne.\"\n\n\"Until last night,\" Rachel added.\n\nUncle Vigor nodded.\n\nRachel closed her eyes. No one spoke, leaving her to think. She heard the door open to the depository. She kept her eyes closed, not wanting to lose her train of thought.\n\n\"And the murders?\" she said. \"Why not steal the bones when the church was empty? The act must have been meant also as a direct attack upon the Church. The violence against the congregation suggests a secondary motive of revenge\u2014not just thievery.\"\n\n\"Very good.\" A new voice spoke from the doorway.\n\nStartled, Rachel opened her eyes. She immediately recognized the robes worn by the newcomer: the black cassock with shoulder cape, the wide sash worn high around the hips, scarlet to match the skullcap. She also recognized the man inside the clothes. \"Cardinal Spera,\" she said, offering a bow of her head.\n\nHe waved her up, his gold ring flashing. The ring marked him as a cardinal, but he also wore a second ring, a twin of the first, on his other hand, representative of his station as the Vatican's secretary of state. He was Sicilian, dark haired and complexioned. He was also young for such an esteemed position, not yet fifty years old.\n\nHe offered a warm smile. \"I see, Monsignor Verona, that you were not wrong about your niece.\"\n\n\"It would've been improper of me to lie to a cardinal, especially one who happens to be the pope's right-hand man.\" Her uncle crossed over, and rather than chastely kissing either of the man's two rings, he gave him a firm hug. \"How is His Holiness handling the news?\"\n\nThe cardinal's face tightened with a shake of his head. \"After we met this morning, I contacted His Eminence in St. Petersburg. He will be flying back tomorrow morning.\"\n\nAfter we met\u2026Rachel now understood her uncle's formal attire. Hehad been in consultation with the secretary of state.\n\nCardinal Spera continued, \"I'll be arranging for his official papal response with the Synod of Bishops and the College of Cardinals. Then I have to prepare for tomorrow's memorial service. It's to be held at sundown.\"\n\nRachel felt overwhelmed. While the pope was the head of the Vatican, its absolute monarch, the true power of the state rested with this one man, its official prime minister. She noted the weary glaze to his eyes, the way he held his shoulders too tightly. He was plainly exhausted.\n\n\"And has your research turned up anything here?\" the cardinal asked.\n\n\"It has,\" Uncle Vigor said dourly. \"The thieves don't possess all the bones.\"\n\nRachel stirred. \"There are more?\"\n\nHer uncle turned to her. \"That's what we came down here to ascertain. It seems the city of Milan, after the bones were plundered by Barbarossa, spent the past centuries clamoring for their return. To finally settle the matter, a few of the Magi bones were sent back to Milan in 1906, back to the Basilica of Saint Eustorgio.\"\n\n\"Thank the Lord,\" Cardinal Spera said. \"So they aren't entirely lost.\"\n\nFather Torres spoke up. \"We should arrange for them to be sent here immediately. Safeguarded at the depository.\"\n\n\"Until that can be arranged, I'll have security tightened at the basilica,\" the cardinal said. He motioned to Uncle Vigor. \"On your return trip from Cologne, I'll have you stop off and collect the bones in Milan.\"\n\nUncle Vigor nodded.\n\n\"Oh, I was also able to arrange an earlier flight,\" the cardinal continued. \"The helicopter will take you both to the airfield in three hours.\"\n\nBoth?\n\n\"All the better.\" Uncle Vigor turned to Rachel. \"It looks like we must disappoint your mother once again. No family dinner, it seems.\"\n\n\"I'm\u2026we're going to Cologne?\"\n\n\"As Vatican nuncios,\" her uncle said.\n\nRachel tried to keep pace in her head. Nuncios were the Vatican's ambassadors abroad.\n\n\"Emergency nuncios,\" Cardinal Spera corrected. \"Temporary, covering this particular tragedy. You are being presented as passive observers, to represent Vatican interests and report back. I need keen eyes out there. Someone familiar with thefts of antiquities.\" A nod to Rachel. \"And someone with a vast knowledge of those antiquities.\"\n\n\"That is our cover, anyway,\" Uncle Vigor said.\n\n\"Cover?\"\n\nCardinal Spera frowned, a warning tone entering his voice. \"Vigor\u2026\"\n\nHer uncle turned to the secretary of state. \"She has a right to know. I thought that had already been decided.\"\n\n\"You decided.\"\n\nThe two men stared each other down. Finally, Cardinal Spera sighed with a wave of an arm, relenting.\n\nUncle Vigor turned back to Rachel. \"The nuncio assignation is just a smoke screen.\"\n\n\"Then what are we\u2014?\"\n\nHe told her.\n\n[ 3:35 P.M. ]\n\nStill stunned, Rachel waited for her uncle to finish a few private words with Cardinal Spera outside the doorway. Off to the side, Father Torres busied himself with shelving various volumes that had been piled on his desk.\n\nFinally, her uncle returned. \"I had hoped to grab a brioche with you, but with the timetable accelerated, we must both get ready. You should grab an overnight bag, your passport, and whatever else you might need for a day or two abroad.\"\n\nRachel stood her ground. \"Vatican spies? We're going in as Vatican spies?\"\n\nUncle Vigor lifted his brows. \"Are you really that surprised? The Vatican, a sovereign country, has always had an intelligence service, with full-time employees and operatives. They've been used to infiltrate hate groups, secret societies, hostile countries, wherever the concerns of the Vatican are threatened. Walter Ciszek, a priest operating under the alias Vladimir Lipinski, played a cat-and-mouse game with the KGB for years, before being captured and spending over two decades in a Soviet prison.\"\n\n\"And we've just been recruited into this service?\"\n\n\"You've been recruited. I've worked with the intelligence service for over fifteen years.\"\n\n\"What?\" Rachel almost choked on the word.\n\n\"What better cover for an operative than as a well-respected and knowledgeable archaeologist in humble service to the Vatican?\" Her uncle waved her out the door. \"Come. Let's see about getting everything in order.\"\n\nRachel stumbled after her uncle, trying to see him with new eyes.\n\n\"We'll be meeting up with a party of American scientists. Like us, they'll be investigating the attack in secret, concentrating more on the deaths, leaving us to handle the theft of the relics.\"\n\n\"I don't understand.\" That was a vast understatement. \"Why all this subterfuge?\"\n\nHer uncle stopped and pulled her into a small side chapel. It was no larger than a closet, the air stagnant with old incense.\n\n\"Only a handful of people know this,\" he said. \"But there was a survivor to the attack. A boy. He is still in shock, but slowly recovering. He is at a hospital in Cologne, under guard.\"\n\n\"He witnessed the attack?\"\n\nA nod answered her. \"What he described sounded like madness, but it could not be ignored. All the deaths\u2014or rather those that succumbed to the electrocution\u2014occurred in a single moment. The dying collapsed where they sat or knelt. The boy had no explanation for how it occurred, but he was adamant about the who.\"\n\n\"Who killed the parishioners?\"\n\n\"No, who succumbed, which members of the congregation died so horribly.\"\n\nRachel waited for an answer.\n\n\"The ones who were electrocuted, for lack of a better word, were only those who took the Holy Eucharist during the Communion service.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"It was the Communion host that killed them.\"\n\nA chill passed through her. If word spread that the Communion wafers were somehow to blame, it could have repercussions around the world. The entire holy sacrament could be in jeopardy. \"Were the wafers poisoned, tainted somehow?\"\n\n\"That's still unknown. But the Vatican wants answers immediately. And the Holy See wants them first. And without the resources necessary for this level of clandestine investigation, especially on foreign soil, I've called in a chit owed to me by a friend deep within U.S. military intelligence, someone I trust fully. He will have a team on site by tonight.\"\n\nRachel could only nod, struck dumb by the last hour's revelations.\n\n\"I think you were right, Rachel,\" Uncle Vigor said. \"The murders in Cologne were a direct attack against the Church. But I believe this is just an opening gambit in a much larger game. But what game is being played?\"\n\nRachel nodded. \"And what do the bones of the Magi have to do with any of this?\"\n\n\"Exactly. While you collect your things, I'm going off to the libraries and archives. I already have a team of scholars sifting through all references to the Three Kings. By the time the helicopter lifts off, I'll have a full dossier on the Magi.\" Uncle Vigor reached to her, hugged her tight, and whispered in her ear. \"You can still refuse. I would think no less of you.\"\n\nRachel shook her head, pulling back. \"As the saying goes, fortes fortuna adiuvat.\"\n\n\"Fortune does indeed favor the brave.\" He kissed her gently on her cheek. \"If I had a daughter like you\u2014\"\n\n\"You'd be excommunicated.\" She kissed his other cheek. \"Now let's go.\"\n\nHer uncle led her out of the Apostolic Palace, then they parted ways, he toward the Libraries, she toward St. Anne's Gate.\n\nBefore long and with barely any note of the passage of time, Rachel reached her parked car and climbed into the Mini Cooper. She sped out of the underground car park and squealed around a tight corner into traffic. She ticked off all she would need, while trying to keep any speculation to a minimum.\n\nShe raced over the Tiber River and headed toward the center of town. With her mind on autopilot, she failed to note when she had regained her tail. Only that it was back there again.\n\nHer heartbeat quickened.\n\nThe black BMW kept five car lengths behind her, matching her every move around slower cars and even-slower pedestrians. She made a couple of fast turns, not enough to alert her tail that he had been spotted, just her usual controlled recklessness. She needed to know for sure.\n\nThe BMW kept pace.\n\nNow she knew.\n\nDamn.\n\nShe fought her way into the narrower byways and alleys. The roads were congested. It became a slow-motion car chase.\n\nShe pulled up on a sidewalk to squeeze past a stall of traffic. Edging to the next cross street, a pedestrian alley, she turned into it. Startled strollers leaped out of her way. Shopping carts spilled. Obscenities flew. A loaf of bread hit her back window, thrown by a particularly irate matron.\n\nAt the next thoroughfare, she punched into second and sped a block, then made another turn, then another. This section of Rome was a maze of alleyways. There was no way for her tail to keep up with her.\n\nStreaming out Via Aldrovandi, she raced around the edge of the Giardino Zoological Park. She kept a watch on her rearview mirrors. She had escaped her pursuit\u2026at least for now.\n\nAble to free up a hand, she snatched her cell phone. She hit the speed dial for Parioli Station. She needed backup.\n\nAs the connection dialed through, she left the main thoroughfare and ducked into the backstreets again, not taking any chances. Who had she pissed off? As a member of the Cultural Heritage Police, she had a number of enemies among the organized-crime families who trafficked in stolen antiquities.\n\nThe phone line clicked, buzzed, then all she heard was dead air. She checked the phone's screen. She had hit a patch of poor reception. The seven hills of Rome and its marble-and-brick canyons wreaked havoc on signal strength.\n\nShe hit the Redial button.\n\nAs she prayed to the patron saint of cell reception, she used the time to debate returning home and decided against it.\n\nShe would be safer at the Vatican until she left for Germany.\n\nMerging onto Via Salaria, the old Salt Road, a main artery through Rome, she finally heard the line connect.\n\n\"Central desk.\"\n\nBefore she could respond, Rachel spotted a blur of black.\n\nThe BMW whipped up alongside her Mini Cooper.\n\nA second car appeared on her other side.\n\nIdentical, except this one was white.\n\nShe'd had not the one tail\u2026but two. Fixed on the conspicuous black car, she had failed to spot the white one. A fatal mistake.\n\nThe two cars slammed into her, pinning her between them with a screech of metal and paint. Their back windows were already lowered. The blunt noses of submachine guns poked out.\n\nShe slammed on her brakes, metal screamed, but she was wedged tight. There was no escape."
            },
            {
                "title": "SECRETS",
                "text": "[ JULY 24, 10:25 A.M. ]\n\nWASHINGTON, D.C.\n\nHe had to get out of here.\n\nIn the gym locker room, Grayson Pierce pulled on a pair of black biker's shorts, then slipped a loose-fitting nylon soccer jersey over his head. He sat on the bench and tied on a pair of sneakers.\n\nBehind him, the locker room door swung open. He glanced back as Monk Kokkalis entered, a basketball under one arm and a baseball cap on backward. Standing only three inches over five feet, Monk looked like a pit bull wearing sweats. Still, he proved to be a fierce and agile ballplayer. Most people underestimated him, but he had an uncanny talent to read an opponent, to outfox any guard, and few of his layups ever missed.\n\nMonk tossed the basketball into the equipment bin\u2014again making a perfect shot\u2014then crossed to his locker. He stripped off his sweatshirt, balled it up, and shoved it inside.\n\nHe eyeballed Gray. \"That's what you're wearing to meet Commander Crowe?\"\n\nGray stood. \"I'm heading over to my folks'.\"\n\n\"I thought the ops manager told us to stick to campus?\"\n\n\"Screw that.\"\n\nMonk raised an eyebrow. The bushy brows were the only hair on his shaved head. He preferred to stick to the look drilled into him by the Green Berets. The man carried other physical attributes from his former military life: puckered bullet wound scars, three of them, shoulder, upper leg, and chest. He had been the only one of his team to survive an ambush in Afghanistan. During his recovery Stateside, Sigma had recruited him because of his genius-level IQ and retrained him through a doctoral program in forensic medicine.\n\n\"Have you already been cleared by medical?\" Monk asked.\n\n\"Just contusions and a couple bruised ribs.\" Along with a wounded ego, he added silently, fingering the tender spot below his seventh rib.\n\nGray had already given his videotaped debriefing. He had secured the bomb but not the Dragon Lady. The one lead into a major pipeline of bioweapons trafficking had escaped. He had sent her dragon-charm pendant down to forensics for any trace or fingerprint evidence. He didn't expect anything to be found.\n\nHe grabbed his backpack from the bench. \"I'll have my beeper with me. I'm only fifteen minutes away by Metro.\"\n\n\"And you're going to leave the director waiting?\"\n\nGray shrugged. He'd had enough: the postmission debriefing, the in depth medical exam, and now this mysterious summons by Director Crowe. He knew he was due for a dressing-down. He shouldn't have gone in alone to Fort Detrick. It had been a bad call. He knew it.\n\nBut still riding the adrenaline surge from this morning's near disaster, Gray couldn't sit idle and simply wait. Director Crowe had gone off to a meeting over at DARPA headquarters in Arlington. There was no telling when he'd be back. In the meantime, Gray needed to move, to let off some steam.\n\nHe pulled on his small riding backpack.\n\n\"Have you heard who else has been summoned to the meeting with the director?\" Monk asked.\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Kat Bryant.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\nA nod.\n\nCaptain Kathryn Bryant had entered Sigma only ten months ago, but she had already completed a fast-track program in geology. There were rumors that she was also completing an engineering discipline. She would be only the second operative with a dual degree. Grayson was the first.\n\n\"Then it can't be a mission assignation,\" Gray said. \"They wouldn't send someone so green out into the field.\"\n\n\"None of us is that green.\" Monk grabbed a towel and headed for the showers. \"She did come out of the intelligence branch of the Navy. Black ops, they say.\"\n\n\"They say a lot of things,\" Gray mumbled and crossed to the exit.\n\nDespite the number of high IQs, Sigma was no less a rumor mill than any corporation. Even this morning's summons had followed a flurry of memos and a recall of operatives. Of course, some of this activity was the direct result of Gray's mission. The Guild had attacked one of their members. Speculation abounded. Was there a new leak, or had the ambush been planned based on old intel, prior to Sigma's move to Washington from DARPA's headquarters in Arlington and the purging of its operations there?\n\nEither way, another rumor persisted in the halls of Sigma: a new mission was being planned, one commanded high up the chain, one of vital national interest. But nothing else was known.\n\nGray refused to play the rumor game. He would wait to hear from the commander himself. Besides, it's not like he would be going anywhere soon. He'd be warming the bench for some time.\n\nSo he might as well meet his other obligations.\n\nCrossing out of the gym, Gray strode through the labyrinth of hallways toward the elevator bay. The space still smelled of fresh paint and old cement.\n\nThe subterranean stronghold of Sigma central command was once an underground bunker and a fallout shelter. It had been a place to secure an important think tank during World War II, but it had long been abandoned and closed off. Few knew of its existence, buried beneath the mecca of Washington's scientific community: the campus of museums and laboratories that made up the Smithsonian Institution.\n\nNow the underground warren had new tenants. To the world at large, it was just another think tank. Many of its members worked at laboratories throughout the Smithsonian, doing research and utilizing the resources at hand. The new site for Sigma had been chosen because of its proximity to all the research labs, covering a wide range of disciplines. It would have been too expensive to duplicate all the varied facilities. So Sigma had been buried at the heart of Washington's scientific community. The Smithsonian Institution became both a resource and a cover.\n\nGray pressed his hand on the elevator door's security pad. A blue line scanned his palm print. The doors whooshed open. He climbed inside and pressed the top button, marked LOBBY. The cage rose silently, climbing up from the fourth level.\n\nHe sensed more than felt the scan over his body, a proprietary search for hidden electronic data. It helped aid in the prevention of information being stolen out of the command center. It had its drawbacks. During the first week here, Monk had set off a system-wide alert after absentmindedly carrying in an unauthorized MP3 digital player after an afternoon run.\n\nThe doors opened into an ordinary-looking reception area, manned by two armed guards and a female receptionist. It could pass as a bank lobby. But the amount of surveillance and state-of-the-art countermeasures rivaled those at Fort Knox. A second entrance to the bunker, a large service access, equally guarded, lay hidden in a private garage complex, half a mile away. His motorcycle was over there, being repaired. So he was hoofing it to the Metro station where he had a mountain bike stored for emergencies.\n\n\"Good morning, Dr. Pierce,\" the receptionist said.\n\n\"Hello, Melody.\"\n\nThe young woman was unaware of what truly lay below, believing the fabricated story of the think tank, also named Sigma. Only the guards knew the truth. They nodded to Gray.\n\n\"Are you leaving for the day?\" Melody asked.\n\n\"Only for an hour or so.\" He slid his holographic ID card into the reader by the desk, then pressed his thumb on the screen, signing out of the command center. He had always thought the security countermeasures here were overkill. Not any longer.\n\nThe outer door's lock unhitched.\n\nOne of the guards opened the door, stepped out, and held it open for Gray. \"Good day, sir,\" the guard said as Gray exited.\n\nGood hardly described his day so far.\n\nA long paneled corridor stretched ahead, followed by a single flight of stairs that led up into the public regions of the building. Entering a large hall, he passed a touring group of Japanese visitors led by a translator and guide. No one gave him a second glance.\n\nTalk about hiding in plain sight.\n\nAs he crossed the tiled floor, he heard the tour leader's speech, spoken in rote, given a thousand times. \"The Smithsonian Castle was completed in 1855, with the cornerstone being laid by President James Polk. It is the largest and oldest of the Institution's structures and once housed the original science museum and research laboratories, but now it serves as the administrative office and Information Center for the Institution's fifteen museums, the National Zoo, and many research sites and galleries. If you'll follow me, next\u2026\"\n\nGray reached the outer doors, a side exit to the Smithsonian Castle, and pushed to freedom. He squinted at the bright sun, shielding his eyes. As he lifted his arm, he felt a twinge of protest from his ribs. The Tylenol with codeine must be wearing off.\n\nReaching the edge of the manicured gardens, he glanced back to the Castle. Nicknamed for its red-brick parapets, turrets, spires, and towers, it was considered one of the finest Gothic Revival structures in the United States and formed the heart of the Smithsonian Institution. The bunker had been tunneled out beneath it, built when the southwest tower had burned to the ground in 1866, requiring it to be rebuilt from the ground up. The secret labyrinth had been incorporated in the renovation, eventually becoming the subterranean fallout shelter, meant to protect the brightest minds of its generation\u2026or at least those in Washington, D.C.\n\nNow it hid Sigma's central command.\n\nWith a final glance at the U.S. flag flying over the highest tower, Gray headed across the Mall, aiming for the Metro station.\n\nHe had other responsibilities besides keeping America safe.\n\nSomething he had neglected for too long.\n\n[ 4:25 P.M. ]\n\n[ ROME, ITALY ]\n\nThe two BMWs continued to pin the Mini Cooper. No matter how Rachel struggled, she could not pull free.\n\nThe guns in the back seats swung forward.\n\nBefore the assailants could open fire, Rachel shoved the car into park and yanked her emergency brake. The car jolted with a scream of tearing metal. Her rearview mirror shattered. The effort threw off the gunmen's aim, but it was not enough to free her trapped car.\n\nThe BMWs continued to drag her car forward.\n\nWith her Mini Cooper now dead weight, Rachel dove for the car's floor well, gouging her left side on the gearshift knob. A spate of gunfire shattered through the driver's-side window, passing through where she had been sitting.\n\nShe wouldn't be so lucky a second time.\n\nAs their speed slowed, Rachel hit the controls to her convertible roof. The windows began to lower and the cloth roof folded back. Wind whistled inside.\n\nShe prayed the momentary distraction would buy her the time she needed. Bunching her legs under her, she leaped off the center console and used the lip of the passenger door to hurdle herself through the half-open roof. The white sedan was still crammed against the passenger side. She landed atop its roof and rolled into a half crouch.\n\nBy now, their speed had slowed to less than thirty kilometers per hour.\n\nBullets blasted from below.\n\nShe threw herself off the roof and flew toward a line of cars parked at the edge of the road. She struck the long roof of a Jaguar and slid belly-first off its edge and landed in a teeth-jarring tumble on the far side.\n\nDazed, she lay still. The bulk of parked cars shielded her from the open road. Half a block away, unable to brake fast enough, the BMWs suddenly roared and, with a squeal of tires, sped off.\n\nIn the distance, Rachel heard the wha-wha of police sirens.\n\nRolling onto her back, she searched her belt for her cell phone. The holster was empty. She had been making a call when the attackers swiped into her.\n\nOh God\u2026\n\nShe struggled up. She had no fear that the assassins would return. Already multiple cars were stopping, blocked by her Mini Cooper stalled in the road.\n\nRachel had a larger concern. Unlike the first time, she had caught a glimpse of the black BMW's license plate.\n\nSCV 03681.\n\nShe didn't need a registration search to know where the car had originated. The special plates were only issued by one agency.\n\nSCV stood for Stato della Citt\u00e0 del Vaticano.\n\nVatican City.\n\nRachel struggled up, head aching. She tasted blood from a split lip. It didn't matter. If she was attacked by someone with connections to the Vatican\u2026\n\nShe gained her feet with her heart pounding. A driving fear fueled her strength. Another target was surely in danger.\n\n\"Uncle Vigor\u2026\"\n\n[ 11:03 A.M. ]\n\n[ TAKOMA PARK, MARYLAND ]\n\n\"Gray! Is that you?\"\n\nGrayson Pierce hitched his bike over one shoulder and climbed the steps of the porch of his parents' home, a bungalow with a wooden porch and a wide overhanging gable.\n\nHe called through the open screen door. \"Yeah, Mom!\"\n\nHe leaned the bike against the porch railing, earning a protest from his ribs. He had phoned the house from the Metro station, giving his mother fair warning of his arrival. He kept a Trek mountain bike locked up at the local station here for times like this.\n\n\"I have lunch almost ready.\"\n\n\"What? You're cooking?\" He swung open the screen door with a pained cry of its spring hinges. It snapped closed behind him. \"Will wonders never cease?\"\n\n\"Don't give me any of your lip, young man. I'm fully capable of making sandwiches. Ham and cheese.\"\n\nHe crossed through the living room with its oak Craftsman furniture, a tasteful mix of modern and antique. He did not fail to note the fine coating of dust. His mother had never been much of a homemaker, spending most of her time teaching, first at a Jesuit high school back in Texas and now as an associate dean of biological sciences at George Washington University. His parents had moved out here three years ago, into the quiet historical district of Takoma Park, with its quaint Victorian homes and older shingle cottages. Gray had an apartment a couple of miles away, on Piney Branch Road. He had wanted to be close to his parents, to help out where he could.\n\nEspecially now.\n\n\"Where's Dad?\" he asked as he entered the kitchen, seeing his father was not present.\n\nHis mother closed the refrigerator door, a gallon of milk in hand. \"Out in the garage. Working on another birdhouse.\"\n\n\"Not another one?\"\n\nShe frowned at him. \"He likes it. Keeps him out of trouble. His therapist says it's good for him to have a hobby.\" She crossed with two plates of sandwiches.\n\nHis mother had come straight from her university office. She still wore her blue blazer over a white blouse, her blond-gray hair pulled back and bobby-pinned. Neat, professorial. But Gray noted the haggard edge to her eyes. She looked more drawn, thinner.\n\nGray took the plates. \"Dad's woodworking may help him, but does it always have to be birdhouses? There are only so many birds in Maryland.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Eat your sandwiches. Do you want any pickles?\"\n\n\"No.\" It was the way they always were. Small talk to avoid the larger matters. But some things couldn't be put off forever. \"Where did they find him?\"\n\n\"Over by the 7-Eleven on Cedar. He got confused. Ended up heading the wrong way. He had enough presence of mind to call John and Suz.\"\n\nThe neighbors must have then telephoned Gray's mother, and she in turn had called Gray, worried, half-panicked. But five minutes later, she had called again. His father was home and fine. Still, Gray knew he had better stop by for a short visit.\n\n\"Is he still taking his Aricept?\" he asked.\n\n\"Of course. I make sure he does every morning.\"\n\nHis father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, the very early stages, shortly after his parents had moved out here. It had started with small bouts of forgetfulness: where he had placed his keys, telephone numbers, the names of neighbors. The doctors said the move from Texas might have brought forth symptoms that had been latent. His mind had a difficult time cataloging all the new information after the cross-country move. But stubborn and determined, he had refused to go back. Eventually along with the forgetfulness came spats of frustrated anger. Not that such a line was ever hard for his father to cross.\n\n\"Why don't you take his plate out to him?\" his mother asked. \"I have to call in to the office.\"\n\nGray reached and took the sandwiches, letting his hand rest atop hers for a moment. \"Maybe we need to talk about that live-in nurse.\"\n\nShe shook her head\u2014not denying the need so much as simply refusing to discuss it. She pulled her hand from his. Gray had hit this wall before. His father would not allow it, and his mother felt it was her responsibility to care for him. But it was wearing on the household, on his mother, on their entire family.\n\n\"When was the last time Kenny came by?\" he asked. His younger brother ran a computer start-up just across the border in Virginia, following in his father's footsteps as an engineer\u2014electrical, though, not petroleum.\n\n\"You know Kenny\u2026\" his mother said. \"Let me get you a pickle for your father.\"\n\nGray shook his head. Lately Kenny had been talking of moving to Cupertino, California. He had excuses for why the move was necessary, but beneath it all, Gray knew the truth. His brother merely wanted to escape, to get away. At least Gray understood that sentiment. He had done that himself, joining the Army. It must be a Pierce family trait.\n\nHis mother passed him the pickle jar to open. \"How is everything at the lab?\"\n\n\"Going fine,\" he said. He cracked the lid, fished out a dill, and placed it on the plate.\n\n\"I was reading about a bunch of budget cuts over at DARPA.\"\n\n\"My job's not at risk,\" he assured her. Neither of his folks knew of his role with Sigma. They thought he simply did low-level research for the military. They did not have the security clearance for the truth.\n\nWith the plate in hand, Gray headed for the back door.\n\nHis mother watched him. \"He'll be glad to see you.\"\n\nIf only I could say the same\u2026.\n\nGray headed for the garage out back. He heard the twangs of a country music station flowing from the open door. It brought back memories of line dancing at Muleshoes. And other less pleasant recollections.\n\nHe stood at the entrance of the garage. His father crouched over a vise-gripped piece of wood, hand-planing an edge.\n\n\"Pop,\" he said.\n\nHis dad straightened and turned. He was as tall as Grayson, but built stocky, wider shoulders, broader back. He had worked the oil fields while putting himself through college, earning a good practical degree in petroleum engineering. He had done well until an industrial accident at a well sheared away his left leg at the knee. The settlement and disability allowed him to retire at forty-seven.\n\nThat had been fifteen years ago.\n\nHalf of Grayson's life. The bad half.\n\nHis father turned toward him. \"Gray?\" He wiped the sweat from his brow, smearing sawdust. A scowl formed. \"There was no need to come all the way out here.\"\n\n\"How else would these sandwiches get to you?\" He lifted the plate.\n\n\"Your mother made those?\"\n\n\"You know Mom. She tried her best.\"\n\n\"Then I'd better eat them. Can't discourage the habit.\"\n\nHe pushed away from the workbench and hobbled stiff-legged on his prosthesis to a small fridge in the back. \"Beer?\"\n\n\"I have to go back to work in a bit.\"\n\n\"One beer won't kill you. I've some of that Sam Adams swill you like.\"\n\nHis father was more of a Budweiser-and-Coors man. But the fact that he stocked his fridge with Sam Adams was about the equivalent of a pat on the back. Maybe even a hug.\n\nHe couldn't refuse.\n\nGray took the bottle and used the opener built into the edge of the worktable to pop it open. His father sidled over and leaned a hip on a stool. He lifted his own bottle, a Budweiser, in salute. \"It sucks to get old\u2026but there's always beer.\"\n\n\"So true.\" Gray drank deeply. He wasn't sure he should be mixing codeine and alcohol\u2014then again, it had been a long, long morning.\n\nHis father stared at him. The silence threatened to become quickly awkward.\n\n\"So,\" Gray said, \"can't find your way home any longer.\"\n\n\"Fuck you,\" he responded with false anger, weakened by a grin and a shake of his head. His father appreciated honest talk. Straight shooting, as he used to say. \"At least I was no goddamn felon.\"\n\n\"You can't let go of my stint in Leavenworth. That you keep remembering!\"\n\nHis father tipped his beer bottle at Gray. \"I will as long as I damn can.\"\n\nTheir eyes met. He saw something glint behind his father's banter, something he had seldom seen before. Fear.\n\nThe two had never had an easy relationship. His father had taken to heavy drinking after the accident, accompanied by severe bouts of depression. It was hard for a Texas oilman to suddenly become a housewife, raising two boys while his spouse went to work. To compensate, he had run the household like a boot camp. And Gray had always pushed the envelope, a born rebel.\n\nUntil at last, at eighteen, Gray had simply packed his bags and joined the Army, leaving in the middle of the night.\n\nAfterward the two did not speak for a full two years.\n\nSlowly his mother had brought them back together. Still, it had remained an uncomfortable d\u00e9tente. She had once said, \"You two are more alike than you are different.\" Grayson had not heard scarier words.\n\n\"This goddamn sucks\u2026\" his father said softly, breaking the silence.\n\n\"Budweiser certainly does.\" Grayson lifted his beer bottle. \"That's why I only drink Sam Adams.\"\n\nHis father grinned. \"You're an asshole.\"\n\n\"You raised me.\"\n\n\"And I suppose it takes one to know one.\"\n\n\"I never said that.\"\n\nHis father rolled his eyes. \"Why do you even bother coming over?\"\n\nBecause I don't know how long you'll remember me, he thought, but dared not say it aloud. There remained a tight spot behind his sternum, an old resentment that he could not completely let go. There were words he wanted to say, wanted to hear\u2026and a part of him knew he was running out of time.\n\n\"Where did you get these sandwiches?\" his father asked, taking a bite and speaking around the mouthful. \"They're pretty good.\"\n\nGray kept his face passive. \"Mom made 'em.\"\n\nA flicker of confusion followed. \"Oh\u2026yeah.\"\n\nTheir eyes met again. Fear flared brighter in his father's gaze\u2026and shame. He had lost a part of his manhood fifteen years ago and now he faced losing his humanity.\n\n\"Pop\u2026I\u2026\"\n\n\"Drink your beer.\" He heard an edge of familiar anger, and Gray reflexively shied from it.\n\nHe drank his beer, sitting silently, neither able to speak. Maybe his mother was right. They were too much alike.\n\nHis beeper finally went off at his waist. Gray grabbed it too quickly. He saw the Sigma number.\n\n\"That's the office,\" Gray mumbled. \"I\u2026I have an afternoon meeting.\"\n\nHis father nodded. \"I should get back to this damn birdhouse.\"\n\nThey shook hands, two uneasy adversaries conceding no contest.\n\nGray returned to the house, said his good-byes to his mother, and collected up his bike. He mounted it and quickly pedaled toward the Metro station. The phone number on his beeper had been followed by an alphanumeric code.\n\n911.\n\nAn emergency.\n\nThank God.\n\n[ 5:03 P.M. ]\n\n[ VATICAN CITY ]\n\nThe search for the truth behind the Three Magi had turned into a painstaking archaeological dig\u2014but instead of hauling dirt and rock, Monsignor Vigor Verona and his crew of archivists were digging through crumbling books and parchments. The crew of scrittori had done the initial spadework in the main Vatican Library; now Vigor sifted for clues about the Magi in one of the most guarded areas of the Holy See: the Archivio Segretto Vaticano, the infamous Secret Archives of the Vatican.\n\nVigor strode down the long subterranean hall. Each lamp clicked on as he approached and switched off as he left it behind, maintaining a pool of illumination around him and his young student, Jacob. They crossed the length of the main Manuscript Depository, nicknamed the carbonile, or bunker. Built in 1980, the concrete hall rose two stories high, each level separated by a mesh metal floor, connected by steep stairs. On one side, miles of steel shelves contained various archival regestra: bound reams of parchments and papers. On the opposite wall stood the same metal shelves, only sealed and locked behind wire doors, protecting more-sensitive material.\n\nThere was a saying about the Holy See: the Vatican had too many secrets\u2026and not enough. Vigor doubted the latter as he strode through the vast depository. It kept too many secrets, even from itself.\n\nJacob carried a laptop, maintaining a database on their subject. \"So there were not just three Magi?\" he said as they headed toward the exit to the bunker.\n\nThey had come down here to digitize a photograph of a vase currently residing at the Kircher Museum. It had depicted not three kings, but eight. But even that number varied. A painting in the cemetery of Saint Peter showed two, and one at a crypt in Domitilla illustrated four.\n\n\"The Gospels were never specific on the number of Magi,\" Vigor said, feeling the exhaustion of the long day setting in. He found it useful to talk through much of his thoughts, a firm believer in the Socratic method. \"Only the Gospel of Matthew directly refers to them, and even then only vaguely. The common assumption of three comes from the number of gifts borne by the Magi: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. In fact, they might not even have been kings. The word magi comes from the Greek word magoi, or 'magician.'\"\n\n\"They were magicians?\"\n\n\"Not as we might think. The connotation of magoi does not imply sorcery, but rather practitioners of hidden wisdom. Hence the 'wise men' reference. Most biblical scholars now believe they were Zoroastrian astrologers out of Persia or Babylon. They interpreted the stars and foresaw the coming of a king to the west, portended by a single celestial rising.\"\n\n\"The Star of Bethlehem.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Despite all the paintings, the star was not a particularly dramatic event. According to the Bible, no one in Jerusalem even noted it. Not until the Magi came to King Herod and brought it to his attention. The Magi had figured a newborn king, as heralded by the stars, must be born to royalty. But King Herod was shocked to hear of this news and asked them when they saw the star rise. He then used Hebrew holy books of prophecy to point out where this king might've been born. He directed the Magi to Bethlehem.\"\n\n\"So Herod told them where to go.\"\n\n\"He did, sending them as spies. Only on the way to Bethlehem, according to Matthew, the star reappeared and guided the Magi to the child. Afterward, warned by an angel, they left without telling Herod who or where the child was. Thence began the slaughter of the innocents.\"\n\nJacob hurried to keep pace. \"But Mary, Joseph, and the newborn child had already fled to Egypt, warned by an angel as well. So what became of the Magi?\"\n\n\"What indeed?\" Vigor had spent most of the last hour chasing down Gnostic and Apocryphal texts with references to the Magi, from the Protevangelium of James to the Book of Seth. If the bones were stolen, was there motivation beyond pure profit? Knowledge could prove their best weapon in that case.\n\nVigor checked his watch. He was running out of time, but the Prefect of the Archives would continue the search, building the database with Jacob, who would forward their findings via e-mail.\n\n\"What about the historical names of the Magi?\" Jacob said. \"Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar?\"\n\n\"Supposition only. The names first appeared in Excerpta Latina Barbari in the sixth century. Further references follow that one, but I think they're more fairy tales than factual accounts; still, they may be worth following. I'll leave that for you and the Preffeto Alberto to research.\"\n\n\"I'll do my best.\"\n\nVigor frowned. It was a daunting task. Then again, did any of this really matter? Why steal the Magi bones?\n\nThe answer eluded him. And Vigor was unsure if the truth would be found among the thirty miles of shelves that made up the Secret Archives. But one consensus had begun to form from all the clues. Factual or not, the stories of the Magi hinted at some vast wealth of hidden knowledge, known only to a certain sect of magi.\n\nBut who were they really?\n\nMagicians, astrologers, or priests?\n\nVigor passed the Parchment Room, catching a fresh whiff of insecticide and fungicide. The caretakers must have just sprayed. Vigor knew that some of the rare documents in the Parchment Room were turning purple, succumbing to a resistant violet fungus and leaving them in grave danger of being lost forever.\n\nSo much else here was also threatened\u2026and not just from fire, fungus, or neglect, but from sheer volume. Only half of the material stored here had ever been indexed. And more was added each year, flooding in from Vatican ambassadors, metropolitan sees, and individual parishes.\n\nIt was impossible to keep up.\n\nThe Secret Archives themselves had spread like a malignant cancer, metastasizing out from its original rooms into old attics, underground crypts, and empty tower cells. Vigor had spent half a year researching the files of past Vatican spies, those who came before him, agents placed in government positions around the world, many written in code, reporting on political intrigue spanning a thousand years.\n\nVigor knew that the Vatican was as much a political entity as a spiritual one. And enemies of both sought to undermine the Holy See. Even today. It was priests like Vigor who stood between the Vatican and the world. Warriors in secret, holding the line. And while Vigor might not agree with everything done in the past or even the present, his faith remained solid\u2026like the Vatican itself.\n\nHe was proud of his service to the papacy.\n\nEmpires might rise and fall. Philosophies might come and go. But in the end, the Vatican persisted, abided, remained stolid and steadfast. It was history, time, and faith all preserved in stone.\n\nEven here, many of the greatest treasures of the world were protected in the Archive's locked vaults, safes, closets, and dark wooden cabinets called armadi. In one drawer was a letter from Mary Stuart on the day before she was beheaded; in another, the love letters between King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. There were documents pertaining to the Inquisition, to witch trials, to the Crusades, to letters from a khan of Persia and a Ming empress.\n\nBut what Vigor sought now was not so guarded.\n\nIt required only a long climb.\n\nHe had one more clue he wanted to investigate before he left for Germany with Rachel.\n\nVigor reached the small elevator to the upper rooms of the Archives, called the piani nobli, or the noble floors. He held the door for Jacob, closed it, and punched the button. With a shudder and bounce, the small cage rose.\n\n\"Where are we headed now?\" Jacob asked.\n\n\"To the Torre dei Venti.\"\n\n\"The Tower of the Winds? Why?\"\n\n\"There is an ancient document kept up there. A copy of the Description of the World from the sixteenth century.\"\n\n\"Marco Polo's book?\"\n\nHe nodded as the elevator shuddered to a stop. They exited down a long corridor.\n\nJacob hurried to keep up. \"What do Marco Polo's adventures have to do with the Magi?\"\n\n\"In that book, he relates myths out of ancient Persia, concerning the Magi and what became of them. It all centers on a gift given to them by the Christ child. A stone of great power. Upon that stone, the Magi supposedly founded a mystical fraternity of arcane wisdom. I'd like to trace that myth.\"\n\nThe corridor ended at the Tower of the Winds. The empty rooms of this tower had become incorporated into the Secret Archives. Unfortunately, the room Vigor sought was at its very top. He cursed the lack of elevator and entered the dark stair.\n\nHe abandoned further lecturing, saving his breath for the long climb. The spiral stair wound round and round. They continued in silence until at last the stairs emptied into one of the Vatican's most unique and historic chambers.\n\nThe Meridian Room.\n\nJacob craned at the frescoes adorning the circular walls and ceilings, depicting scenes from the Bible with cherubs and clouds above. A single spear of light, admitted through a quarter-sized hole in the wall, pierced the dusty air and spiked down atop the room's marble slab floor, which was carved with the signs of the zodiac. A line marking the meridian cut across the floor. The room was the sixteenth-century solar observatory used to establish the Gregorian calendar and where Galileo had attempted to prove his case that the Earth revolved around the sun.\n\nUnfortunately he had failed\u2014certainly a low point between the Catholic Church and the scientific community. Ever since, the Church had been trying to make up for its shortsightedness.\n\nVigor took a moment to slow his breathing after the long climb. He wiped sweat from his brow and directed Jacob to a neighboring chamber off the Meridian Room. A massive bookshelf covered its back wall, crammed with books and bound regestra.\n\n\"According to the master index, the book we seek should be on the third shelf.\"\n\nJacob stepped through, tripping the wire that ran across the threshold.\n\nVigor heard the twang. No time for warning.\n\nThe incendiary device exploded, blowing Jacob's body out the doorway and into Vigor.\n\nThey fell backward as a wall of flames roared outward, rolling over them, like the brimstone breath of a dragon."
            },
            {
                "title": "DUST TO DUST",
                "text": "[ JULY 24, 12:14 P.M. ]\n\nWASHINGTON, D.C.\n\nThe mission had been assigned crimson priority, black assignation, and silver security protocols. Director Painter Crowe shook his head at the color-coding. Some bureaucrat had visited a Sherwin-Williams store one too many times.\n\nAll the designations boiled down to one bottom line: Do not fail. When matters of national security were involved, there was no second place, no silver medal, no runner-up.\n\nPainter sat at his desk and reviewed his ops manager's report. All seemed in order. Credentials established, safe-house codes updated, equipment checks completed, satellite schedules coordinated, and a thousand other details arranged. Painter ran a finger down the projected cost analysis. He had a budget meeting next week with the Joint Chiefs.\n\nHe rubbed his eyes. This had become his life: paperwork, spreadsheets, and stress. It had been a grueling day. First the Guild ambush, now an international operation to launch. Still, a part of him thrilled at the new challenges and responsibilities. He had inherited Sigma from its founder, Sean McKnight, now director of all of DARPA. Painter refused to disappoint his mentor. All morning, the two had discussed the ambush at Fort Detrick and the upcoming mission, strategizing like old times. Sean had been surprised by Painter's choice of team leader, but it was ultimately his decision.\n\nSo the mission was a go.\n\nAll that was left was to brief the operatives. Flight time was set for 0200. There was not much time. A private jet was already being fueled and loaded at Dulles, courtesy of Kensington Oil, a perfect cover. Painter had arranged this last himself, calling on a favor from Lady Kara Kensington. She had been amused to be helping Sigma again. \"Can't you Americans do anything by yourselves?\" she had chided him.\n\nThe intercom buzzed on his desk.\n\nHe hit the button. \"Go ahead.\"\n\n\"Director Crowe, I have Drs. Kokkalis and Bryant here.\"\n\n\"Send them in.\"\n\nA chime sounded at the door as the lock released. Monk Kokkalis pushed in first, but he held the door for Kathryn Bryant. The woman stood a head taller than the stocky former Green Beret. She moved with a leonine grace of constrained power. Her auburn hair, straight to the shoulder, was braided and as conservative as her attire: navy blue suit, white blouse, leather pumps. Her only flash of color was a jeweled pin on her lapel, a tiny frog. Gold enameled in emerald. A match to the flash of her green eyes.\n\nPainter knew why she wore the golden pin. The frog had been a gift from an amphibious team she had once joined during a marine recon operation for naval intelligence. She had saved two men, proving her prowess with a dagger. But one teammate never came back. She wore the pin in his memory. Painter believed there was more to the story, but her files did not elaborate further.\n\n\"Please take a seat,\" Painter said, acknowledging them both with a nod. \"Where's Commander Pierce?\"\n\nMonk shifted in his seat. \"Gray\u2026Commander Pierce had a family emergency. He just arrived back. He'll be up in a moment.\"\n\nCovering for him, Painter thought. Good. It was one of the reasons he had chosen Monk Kokkalis for this mission, pairing him up with Grayson Pierce. They complemented each other's skills\u2014but more importantly, they suited each other's personalities. Monk could be a tad staid, by-the-book, while Grayson was more reactionary. Still, Grayson listened to Monk, more so than any other member of Sigma. He tempered the steel in Gray. Monk had a way of joking and humoring that proved as convincing as any well-debated argument. They made a good pair.\n\nOn the other hand\u2026\n\nPainter noted how stiffly Kat Bryant sat, still at attention. She was not nervous, more wary with an edge of excitement. She exuded confidence. Maybe too much. He had decided to include her on this mission due to her intelligence background, more than her current study of engineering. She was experienced with protocols in the EU, especially around the Mediterranean. She knew microelectronic surveillance and counterintelligence. But more importantly, she had dealings with one of the Vatican operatives who would be jointly overseeing this investigation, Monsignor Verona. The two had worked together on an international art theft ring.\n\n\"We might as well get the paperwork out of the way while we await Commander Pierce.\" Painter passed out two thick dossiers in black file jackets, one each to Bryant and Kokkalis. A third waited for Pierce.\n\nMonk glanced at the silver \u03a3 emblazoned on the folder.\n\n\"That'll fill in all the finer details for this op.\" Painter tapped the touch screen built into his desktop. The three Sony flat-panel screens\u2014one behind his shoulder, one to the left, and one to the right\u2014changed from panoramic views of mountain landscapes rendered in high definition to the same silver \u03a3. \"I'll be doing the mission briefing myself, rather than the usual ops manager.\"\n\n\"Compartmentalizing the intel,\" Kat said softly, her Southern accent softening the edges of her consonants. Painter knew she could make all trace of her accent disappear when she needed too. \"Due to the ambush.\"\n\nPainter nodded. \"Information is being restricted in advance of a system-wide check of our security protocols.\"\n\n\"Yet we're still going ahead with a new mission?\" Monk asked.\n\n\"We have no choice. Word from\u2014\"\n\nThe buzz of the intercom interrupted. Painter hit the button.\n\n\"Director Crowe,\" his secretary announced, \"Dr. Pierce has arrived.\"\n\n\"Send him in.\"\n\nThe door chimed open, and Grayson Pierce strode inside. He wore black Levi's dressed up with black leather shoes and a starched white shirt. His hair was slicked down, still wet from a shower.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Grayson said, stopping between the two other agents. A certain hardness in his eyes belied any real sorrow. He kept a stiff posture, ready for reprimand.\n\nAnd he deserved it. After the security breach, now was not the time to be thumbing his nose at command. However, a certain modicum of insubordination had always been tolerated at Sigma command. These men and women were the best of the best. You couldn't ask them to act independently out in the field, then expect them to bend to totalitarian authority here. It required a deft hand to balance the two.\n\nPainter stared at Grayson. With the increased security, Painter was well aware the man had received an urgent call from his mother and had checked out of the command center. Behind the stolid stare of the other, Painter noted a glassy-eyed fatigue. Was it from the ambush or his home situation? Was he even fit for this new assignment?\n\nGrayson did not break eye contact. He simply waited.\n\nThe meeting had a purpose beyond just a briefing. It was also a test.\n\nPainter waved to a seat. \"Family is important,\" he said, releasing the man. \"Just don't let your tardiness become a habit.\"\n\n\"No, sir.\" Grayson crossed and sat, but his eyes flicked from the emblazoned flat-screen monitors to the dossiers on his fellow agents' laps. A crease formed between his brows. The lack of reprimand had unsettled him. Good.\n\nPainter slid the third folder toward Grayson. \"We were just starting the mission briefing.\"\n\nHe took the folder. A look of wary bewilderment narrowed his eyes, but he kept silent.\n\nPainter leaned back and tapped the screen on his desk. A Gothic cathedral appeared on the left screen, an exterior shot. An interior view appeared on the right. Bodies lay sprawled everywhere. Behind his shoulder, he knew a picture of a chalked outline marked off an altar, still bloodstained, outlining the sprawl of a murdered priest. Father Georg Breitman.\n\nPainter watched the agents' gazes travel over the images.\n\n\"The massacre in Cologne,\" Kat Bryant said.\n\nPainter nodded. \"It occurred near the end of a midnight mass celebrating the feast day of the biblical Wise Men. Eighty-five people were killed. The motive appears to be simple robbery. The cathedral's priceless reliquary was broken into.\" Painter flicked through additional images of the golden sarcophagus and the shattered remains of its security cage. \"The only items stolen were the shrine's contents. The supposed bones of the biblical Magi.\"\n\n\"Bones?\" Monk asked. \"They leave behind a crate of solid gold and take a bunch of bones? Who would do that?\"\n\n\"That remains unknown. There was only one survivor of the massacre.\" Painter brought up an image of a young man being carried out in a stretcher, another of the same man in a hospital bed, eyes open but glazed with shock. \"Jason Pendleton. American. Age twenty-one. He was found hiding in a confessional booth. He was barely coherent when first discovered, but after a regimen of sedatives, he was able to give a tentative report. The party involved were robed and cloaked as monks. No faces were ID'd. They stormed the cathedral. Armed with rifles. Several people were shot, including the priest and archbishop.\"\n\nMore pictures flashed across the screens: bullet wounds, more chalked outlines, a web of red yarns marking the trajectory of shots. It looked like a typical crime scene, just with an unusual backdrop.\n\n\"And how does this involve Sigma?\" Kat asked.\n\n\"There were other deaths. Inexplicable deaths. To break into the security vault, the assailants employed some device that not only shattered the metal and bulletproof cage, but also, at least according to the survivor, triggered a wave of death across the cathedral.\"\n\nPainter reached out and hit a key. Across all three screens, views of various corpses appeared. The agents' expressions remained passive. They had all seen their share of death. The bodies were contorted, heads thrown back. One image was a close-up of one of the faces. Eyes were open, corneas gone opaque, while black trails of bloody tears leached from the corners. Lips were stretched back, frozen in a rictus of agony, teeth bared, gums bleeding. The tongue was swollen, cracked, blackened at the edges.\n\nMonk, with his medical and forensic training, shifted straighter, eyes pinched. He might play the absentminded clown, but he was a keen observer, his strongest suit.\n\n\"Full autopsy reports are in your folders,\" Painter said. \"The initial conclusion from the coroners is that the deaths were due to some manifestation of an epileptiform seizure. An extreme convulsive event coupled with severe hyperthermia, spiking core temperature and resulting in the complete liquefaction of the outer surfaces of the brain. All died with their hearts in a contracted state, so intensely squeezed that no blood could be found in the chambers. One man's pacemaker had exploded in his chest. A woman with a metal pin in a femur was found with her leg still on fire, hours later, smoldering from the inside out.\"\n\nThe agents kept their faces stoic, but Monk narrowed one eye and Kat's complexion seemed to have blanched to a pale white. Even Grayson stared a bit too fixedly at the images, unblinking.\n\nBut Gray was the first to speak. \"And we're sure the deaths are connected to the device employed by the thieves.\"\n\n\"As sure as we can be. The survivor reported feeling an intense pressure in his head as the device was turned on. He described it like descending in an airplane. Felt in the ears. The deaths occurred at this time.\"\n\n\"But Jason lived,\" Kat said, taking a deep breath.\n\n\"Some others did, too. But the unaffected were subsequently shot by the perpetrators. Slaughtered in cold blood.\"\n\nMonk stirred. \"So some people succumbed, others did not. Why? Was there any commonality between the victims of the seizures?\"\n\n\"Only one. A fact even noted by Jason Pendleton. The only ones to suffer the seizures appear to be those who had partaken of the Communion service.\"\n\nMonk blinked.\n\n\"It is for this reason that the Vatican made contact with U.S. authorities. And the chain of command dropped this into our laps.\"\n\n\"The Vatican,\" Kat said.\n\nPainter read the understanding in her eyes. She now understood why she had been handpicked for this mission, interrupting her doctoral program in engineering.\n\nPainter continued, \"The Vatican fears repercussions if it becomes widely known that some group may be targeting the Communion service. Possibly poisoning its wafers. They want answers as soon as possible, even if it means bending international law. Your team will be working with two intelligence agents in association with the Holy See. They'll be targeting why all this death seemed aimed to cover the theft of the bones of the Magi. Was it purely a symbolic gesture? Or was there more to the theft?\"\n\n\"And our end goal?\" Kat asked.\n\n\"To find out who perpetrated the crime and what device they employed. If it could kill in such a specific and targeted manner, we need to know what we're dealing with and who controls it.\"\n\nGrayson had remained quiet, staring at the gruesome images with more of a clinical stare. \"Binary poison,\" he finally mumbled.\n\nPainter glanced to the man. Their eyes matched, mirroring each other, both a stormy blue.\n\n\"What was that?\" Monk asked.\n\n\"The deaths,\" Grayson said, turning to him. \"They were not triggered by a single event. The cause had to be twofold, requiring an intrinsic and extrinsic factor. The device\u2014the extrinsic factor\u2014triggered the mass seizure. But only those who had participated in the Communion service responded. So there must be an intrinsic factor as yet unknown.\"\n\nGrayson turned back to Painter. \"Was any wine passed out during the service?\"\n\n\"Only to a handful of the parishioners. But they also consumed the Communion bread.\" Painter waited, watching the strange gears shift in the man's head, seeing him come to a conclusion that had taken experts even longer to reach. There was a reason beyond brawn and reflex for why Grayson had caught Painter's eye.\n\n\"The Communion bread must have been poisoned,\" Grayson said. \"There is no other explanation. Something was intrinsically seeded into the victims through the consumption of the hosts. Once contaminated, they were susceptible to whatever force was generated by the device.\" Grayson's eyes met Painter's again. \"Were the host wafers examined for any contamination?\"\n\n\"There was not enough left in the victims' stomach contents to analyze properly, but there were wafers left over from the service. They were sent to labs throughout the EU.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\nBy now, the glassy fatigue had vanished from the man's eyes, replaced by a laser-focused attention. He was plainly still competent for duty. But the test was not over.\n\n\"Nothing was found,\" Painter continued. \"All analyses showed nothing but wheat flour, water, and the usual bakery ingredients for making unleavened bread wafers.\"\n\nThe crease deepened between Grayson's brows. \"That's impossible.\"\n\nPainter heard the stubborn edge to his voice, almost belligerent. The man remained firmly confident in his assessment.\n\n\"There must be something,\" Grayson pressed.\n\n\"Labs at DARPA were also consulted. Their results were the same.\"\n\n\"They were wrong.\"\n\nMonk reached out a restraining arm.\n\nKat crossed her arms, settled on the matter. \"Then there must be another explanation for\u2014\"\n\n\"Bullshit,\" Grayson said, cutting her off. \"The labs were all wrong.\"\n\nPainter restrained a smile. Here was the leader waiting to come out in the man: sharp of mind, doggedly confident, willing to listen but not easily swayed once his mind was set.\n\n\"You're right,\" Painter finally said.\n\nWhile Monk's and Kat's eyes widened in surprise, Grayson merely leaned back in his seat.\n\n\"Our labs here did find something.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"They carbonized the sample down to its component parts and separated out all the organic components. They then removed each trace element as the mass spectrometer measured it. But after everything was stripped away, they still had a quarter of the dry weight of the host remaining on their scales. A dry whitish powder.\"\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Monk said.\n\nGrayson explained. \"The remaining powder couldn't be detected by the analyzing equipment.\"\n\n\"It was sitting on the scales, but the machines were telling the technicians nothing was there.\"\n\n\"That's impossible,\" Monk said. \"We have the best equipment in the world here.\"\n\n\"But still they couldn't detect it.\"\n\n\"The powdery substance must be totally inert,\" Grayson said.\n\nPainter nodded. \"So the lab boys here tested it further. They heated it to its melting point, 1,160 degrees. It melted and formed a clear liquid that, when the temperature dropped, hardened to form a clear amber glass. If you ground the glass in a mortar and pestle, it again formed the white powder. But in every stage it remained inert, undetectable by modern equipment.\"\n\n\"What can do that?\" Kat asked.\n\n\"Something we all know, but in a state that was only discovered in the last couple decades.\" Painter flicked to the next picture. It showed a carbon electrode in an inert gas chamber. \"One of the technicians worked at Cornell University, where this test was developed. They performed a fractional vaporization of the powder coupled with emission spectroscopy. Using an electroplating technique, they were able to get the powder to anneal back to its more common state.\"\n\nHe tapped up the last picture. It was a close-up of the black electrode, only it was no longer black. \"They were able to get the converted substance to adhere to the carbon rod.\"\n\nThe black electrode, plated now, shone under the lamp, brilliant and unmistakable.\n\nGrayson leaned forward in his seat. \"Gold.\"\n\n[ 6:24 P.M. ]\n\n[ ROME, ITALY ]\n\nThe car's siren wailed in Rachel's ears. She sat in the passenger seat of the Carabinieri patrol, bruised, aching, head throbbing. But all she could feel was an icy certainty that Uncle Vigor was dead. Fear threatened to strangle her, shortening her breath and narrowing her vision.\n\nRachel half-heard the patrolman speaking into his radio. His vehicle had been the first on the scene of her ambush on the streets. She had refused medical care and used her authority as a lieutenant to order the man to take her to the Vatican.\n\nThe car reached the bridge spanning the Tiber River. Rachel continued to stare toward her destination. Across the channel, the shining dome of St. Peter's appeared, rising above all else. The setting sun cast it in hues of silver and gold. But what she saw rising behind the basilica lifted her from her seat. Her hands grabbed the edge of the dashboard.\n\nA sooty column of black smoke coiled into the indigo sky.\n\n\"Uncle Vigor\u2026\"\n\nRachel heard the sounds of additional sirens echoing up the river. Fire engines and other emergency vehicles.\n\nShe grabbed the patrolman's arm. She itched to shove the man out of the way and drive herself. But she was still shaken up. \"Can you go any faster?\"\n\nCarabiniere Norre nodded. He was young, new to the force. He wore the black uniform with the red stripe down the legs and silver sash across his chest. He twisted the wheel and rode up onto a sidewalk to clear past a knot of traffic. The closer they got to the Vatican, the worse the congestion became. The convergence of emergency vehicles had snarled all traffic in the area.\n\n\"Aim for St. Anne's Gate,\" she ordered.\n\nHe wheeled around and managed to cut down an alley to get them within three blocks of Porta Sant' Anna. Directly ahead, the source of the fire became clear. Beyond the walls of Vatican City, the Tower of the Winds was the second-highest point of all of Vatican City. Its top floors blazed with flames, becoming a stone torch.\n\nOh no\u2026\n\nThe tower housed a part of the Vatican Archives. She knew her uncle had been searching the libraries of the Holy See. After her attack, the fire couldn't be a mere accident.\n\nThe car suddenly braked sharply, throwing Rachel forward in her seat restraints. Her eyes were torn away from the blazing tower.\n\nAll traffic forward was blocked.\n\nRachel could not wait any longer. She yanked on the door handle and began to roll out.\n\nFingers gripped her shoulder, restraining her. \"Tenente Verona,\" Carabiniere Norre said. \"Here. You may need this.\"\n\nRachel stared down at the black pistol, a Beretta 92, the man's service weapon. She took it with a nod of thanks. \"Alert the station. Let General Rende of the TPC know that I've returned to the Vatican. He can reach me through the Secretariat's Office.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Be careful, Tenente.\"\n\nWith sirens wailing from every direction, Rachel set off on foot. She shoved the pistol into the waistband of her belt and tugged her blouse free so it hung over and hid the Beretta. Out of uniform, it would not be good to be seen running toward an emergency situation with an exposed weapon.\n\nCrowds filled the sidewalks. Rachel took to shimmying between the cars stalled in the streets, and even slid across the hood of one to continue forward. Ahead she spotted a red municipal fire engine edging through St. Anne's Gate. It was a narrow fit. A contingent of Swiss Guards formed a barricade to either side, on high alert. No ceremonial halberds here. Each man had an assault rifle in hand.\n\nRachel pushed toward the guard line.\n\n\"Lieutenant Verona with the Carabinieri Corps!\" she yelled, arms up, ID in hand. \"I must reach Cardinal Spera!\"\n\nExpressions remained hard, unbending. Clearly they had been ordered to block all entrance to the Holy See, closing it off to all but emergency personnel. A Carabinieri lieutenant had no authority over the Swiss Guards.\n\nBut from the back of the line, a single guard pushed forward, dressed in midnight blue. Rachel recognized him as the same guard to whom she had spoken earlier. He shoved through the line and met her.\n\n\"Lieutenant Verona,\" he said. \"I've been ordered to escort you inside. Come with me.\"\n\nHe turned on a heel and led her away.\n\nShe hurried to keep up as they crossed through the gate. \"My uncle\u2026Monsignor Verona\u2026\"\n\n\"I know nothing except to escort you to the eliport.\" He directed her to an electric groundskeeper's cart parked just past the gate. \"Orders from Cardinal Spera.\"\n\nRachel climbed inside. The lumbering fire engine rolled ahead of them and entered the wide yard that fronted the Vatican Museums. It joined the other emergency vehicles, including a pair of military vehicles mounted with submachine guns.\n\nWith clearance now, the guardsman turned their cart to the right, skirting the emergency traffic jam in front of the museums. Overhead, the tower continued to blaze. From somewhere on the far side, a jet of water exploded upward, trying to reach the fiery top levels. Flames lapped from windows of the top three floors. Clouds of black smoke billowed and churned. The tower was a tinderbox, stoked with masses of books, parchments, and scrolls.\n\nIt was a disaster of vast scale. What fire didn't destroy, water and smoke would ruin. Centuries of archives, mapping Western history, gone.\n\nStill, Rachel found all her fears centered on one concern.\n\nUncle Vigor.\n\nThe cart zipped past the city's garage and continued down a paved road. It paralleled the Leonine Wall, the stone-and-mortar cliff that enclosed Vatican City. They circled the museum complex and reached the vast gardens covering the back half of the city-state. Fountains danced in the distance. The world was painted in shades of green. It seemed too pastoral for the hellish landscape behind them of smoke, fire, and siren wails.\n\nThey continued in silence to the very back of the grounds.\n\nTheir destination appeared ahead. Tucked into a walled alcove was the Vatican heliport. Converted from old tennis courts, the airfield was little more than a vast acre of concrete and some outbuildings.\n\nOn the tarmac, a single helicopter rested on its skids, isolated from the tumult. Its blades were slowly beginning to spin, gaining speed. The engine whined. Rachel knew the solid white aircraft. It was the pope's private helicopter, nicknamed the \"Holycopter.\"\n\nShe also recognized the black robe and red sash of Cardinal Spera. He stood at the open door to the passenger compartment, ducked slightly from the spinning blades. One hand held his scarlet skullcap in place.\n\nHe turned, drawn by the motion of the cart, and lifted an arm in greeting. The motor cart braked a short distance away. Rachel hardly waited for it to stop and leapt out. She hurried toward the cardinal.\n\nIf anyone knew the fate of her uncle, it would be the cardinal.\n\nOr one other\u2026\n\nFrom the back of the helicopter, a figure stepped out and hurried toward her. She rushed to meet him and hugged him tight under the whirling blades of the helicopter.\n\n\"Uncle Vigor\u2026\" Tears ran down her face, hot, melting through the ice around her heart.\n\nHe pulled back. \"You're late, child.\"\n\n\"I was distracted,\" she answered.\n\n\"So I heard. General Rende passed on word of your attack.\"\n\nRachel glanced back to the flaming tower. She smelled the smoke in his hair. His eyebrows were singed. \"It seems I wasn't the only one attacked. Thank God you're okay.\"\n\nHer uncle's face darkened, his voice tightened. \"Unfortunately, not all were so blessed.\"\n\nShe met his eyes.\n\n\"Jacob was killed in the blast. His body shielded mine, saved me.\" She heard the anguish in his words, even over the roar of the helicopter. \"Come, we must get away.\"\n\nHe directed her to the helicopter.\n\nCardinal Spera nodded to her uncle. \"They must be stopped,\" he said cryptically.\n\nRachel followed her uncle into the helicopter. They strapped themselves in as the door was shoved closed. The thick insulation muffled a good portion of the engine noise, but Rachel heard the helicopter rev up. It immediately lifted from its skids and rose smoothly into the air.\n\nUncle Vigor settled against his seatback, head bowed, eyes closed. His lips trembled, speaking a silent prayer. For Jacob\u2026perhaps for themselves.\n\nRachel waited until he opened his eyes. By then, they were winging away from the Vatican and out over the Tiber. \"The attackers,\" Rachel began, \"\u2026they were driving vehicles with Vatican license plates.\"\n\nHer uncle nodded, unsurprised. \"It seems that the Vatican not only has spies abroad, but is also spied against within its own midst.\"\n\n\"Who\u2014?\"\n\nWith a groan, Uncle Vigor cut her off. He sat straighter, reached into his jacket, and removed a folded slip of paper. He passed it to her. \"The survivor of the Cologne massacre described this for a sketch artist. He saw it embroidered on the chest of one of the attackers.\"\n\nRachel unfolded the slip of paper. Drawn in surprising detail was the coiled figure of a red dragon, wings blazed out, tail twisted and serpentine, wrapped around its own neck.\n\nShe lowered the drawing and glanced to her uncle.\n\n\"An ancient symbol,\" her uncle said. \"Dating back to the fourteenth century.\"\n\n\"Symbol of what?\"\n\n\"The Dragon Court.\"\n\nRachel shook her head, not recognizing the name.\n\n\"They are a medieval alchemical cult created by a schism in the early Church, the same schism that saw the rise of popes and antipopes.\"\n\nRachel was familiar with the reign of Vatican antipopes, men who sat as head of the Catholic Church but whose election was later declared uncanonical. They arose for a variety of reasons, the most common being the usurpation and exile of the legitimately elected pope, usually by a militant faction backed by a king or emperor. From the third to fifteenth century, forty antipopes had risen to sit on the papal throne. The most tumultuous era, though, was during the fourteenth century, when the legitimate papacy was driven out of Rome and into France. For seventy years, popes reigned in exile, while Rome was governed by a series of corrupt antipopes.\n\n\"What does such an ancient cult have to do with the situation now?\" she asked.\n\n\"The Dragon Court is still active today. Its sovereignty is even recognized by the EU, similar to the Knights of Malta, who hold observer status at the United Nations. The shadowy Dragon Court has been linked to the European Council of Princes, the Knights Templar, and the Rosicrucians. The Dragon Court also openly admits to having members within the Catholic Church. Even here in the Vatican.\"\n\n\"Here?\" Rachel could not keep the shock from her voice. She and her uncle had been targeted. By someone inside the Vatican.\n\n\"A few years back, there was quite a scandal,\" Uncle Vigor continued. \"A former Jesuit priest, Father Malachi Martin, wrote of a 'secret church' within the Church. He was a scholar who spoke seventeen languages, authored many scholarly texts, and was a close associate of Pope John XXIII. He worked here in the Vatican for twenty years. His last book, written just before he died, spoke of an alchemical cult within the Vatican itself, performing rites in secret.\"\n\nRachel felt a sickening lurch in her stomach that had nothing to do with the helicopter banking in the direction of the international airport in nearby Fiumicino. \"A secret church within the Church. This is who may have been involved in the Cologne massacre? Why? What's their purpose?\"\n\n\"For stealing the bones of the Magi? I have no clue.\"\n\nRachel allowed this revelation to filter through her mind. To catch a criminal required first knowing them. Ascertaining motive often proved more informative than physical evidence.\n\n\"What else do you know about the Court?\" she asked.\n\n\"Despite their long history, not much. Back in the eighth century, Emperor Charlemagne conquered ancient Europe in the name of the Holy Church, smashing pagan nature-cult religions and replacing their beliefs with Catholicism.\"\n\nRachel nodded, well acquainted with the brutal tactics of Charlemagne.\n\n\"But tides turn,\" Uncle Vigor continued. \"What was once unfashionable becomes fashionable again. By the twelfth century, a resurgence in Gnostic or mystical belief began to arise, taken up in secret by the same emperors who had once beaten it down. A schism slowly formed as the Church moved toward the Catholicism we know today, while the emperors continued their Gnostic practices. The schism came to a head during the end of the fourteenth century. The exiled papacy in France had just returned. To make peace, Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg backed the Vatican politically, even outwardly abolishing Gnostic practices among the lower classes.\"\n\n\"Only the lower classes?\"\n\n\"The aristocracy was spared. While the emperor beat down mystical beliefs among commoners, he created a secret society among the royal families of Europe, one dedicated to alchemical and mystical pursuits. The Ordinis Draconis. The Imperial Royal Dragon Court. It continues to this day. But there are many sects in different countries; some are benign, merely ceremonial or fraternal, but others have sprouted up that are led by vitriolic leaders. I would wager if the Dragon Court is involved, it is one of these rabid subsects.\"\n\nRachel slipped instinctually into interrogation mode. Know your enemy. \"And what's the goal of these nastier sects?\"\n\n\"As a cult of aristocracy, these extreme leaders believe they and their members are the rightful and chosen rulers of mankind. That they were born to rule by the purity of their blood.\"\n\n\"Hitler's master-race syndrome.\"\n\nA nod. \"But they seek more. Not just kingship. They seek all forms of ancient knowledge to further their cause of domination and apocalypse.\"\n\n\"To tread where even Hitler feared to go,\" Rachel mumbled.\n\n\"Mostly they've maintained an austere air of superiority while manipulating politics behind a screen of secrecy and ritual, working with such elite groups as Skull and Bones in America and the Bilderburg think tank in Europe. But now someone is showing their hand, brazenly, bloodily.\"\n\n\"What does it mean?\"\n\nUncle Vigor shook his head. \"I fear this sect has discovered something of major importance, something that draws them out of hiding and into the open.\"\n\n\"And the deaths?\"\n\n\"A warning to the Church. Like the attacks upon ourselves. The simultaneous murder attempts today couldn't be coincidence. They had to have been ordered by the Dragon Court, to slow us, to scare us. It couldn't be coincidence. This particular Court is flexing its muscles, growling for the Church to back off, shedding the skin it's worn for centuries.\"\n\n\"But to what end?\"\n\nUncle Vigor leaned back with a sigh. \"To achieve the goal of all madmen.\"\n\nRachel continued to stare at him.\n\nHe answered with one word. \"Armageddon.\"\n\n[ 4:04 P.M. EST ]\n\n[ AIRBORNE OVER THE ATLANTIC ]\n\nGray shook his tumbler, clinking the ice.\n\nKat Bryant glanced from her seat across the plush cabin of the private jet. She didn't say anything, but her furrowed brow spoke volumes. She had been concentrating on the mission dossier\u2014for the second time. Gray had already read it from cover to cover. He saw no need to peruse it again. Instead, he had been studying the gray-blue slate of the Atlantic Ocean, trying to figure out why he had been pegged as mission leader. At forty-five thousand feet, he still had no answer.\n\nSwiveling his chair, he stood and crossed to the antique mahogany bar at the back of the cabin. He shook his head again at the opulence here: Waterford crystal, burled walnut, leather seating. It looked like an upscale English pub.\n\nBut at least he knew the bartender.\n\n\"Another Coke?\" Monk asked.\n\nGray placed his glass on the bar. \"I think I've reached my limit.\"\n\n\"Lightweight,\" his friend mumbled.\n\nGray turned and faced the cabin. His father had once told him that acting the part was halfway to becoming that part. Of course, he had been referring to Gray's stint as a rig hand at an oil field, one overseen by his engineer father. He had been only sixteen, spending a summer in the hot sun of East Texas. It had been brutal work, when other of his high school friends had been summering on the beaches of South Padre Island. His father's admonishment still rang in his head. To be a man, you first have to act like one.\n\nPerhaps the same could be said for being a leader.\n\n\"Okay, enough with hitting the books,\" he said, drawing Kat's eyes. He glanced to Monk. \"And I think you've explored the depth of this flying liquor cabinet long enough.\"\n\nMonk shrugged and came around into the main cabin area.\n\n\"We have less than four hours of flight time,\" Gray said. With their jet, a custom Citation X, traveling just under sonic speeds, they would be landing at two A.M. German time, the dead of night. \"I suggest we all try to get some sleep. We'll be hitting the ground running once we're there.\"\n\nMonk yawned. \"You don't have to tell me twice, Commander.\"\n\n\"But first let's compare notes. We've had a lot thrown at us.\"\n\nGray pointed to the seats. Monk dropped into one. Gray joined them, facing Kat across a table.\n\nWhile Gray had known Monk since joining Sigma, Captain Kathryn Bryant remained a relative unknown. She was so steeped in study that few at Sigma knew her well. She was mostly defined by her reputation since being recruited. One operative described her as a walking computer. But her reputation was also clouded by her former role as an intelligence operative. Overseeing black ops, it was rumored. But no one knew for sure. Her past was beyond the classification of even her fellow Sigma members. Such secrecy only isolated her further from men and women who had risen through the ranks in units, teams, and platoons.\n\nGray had his own problems with her past. He had personal reasons for disliking those in the intelligence field. They operated aloof, far from the battlefield, farther than even bomber pilots, but more deadly. Gray bore blood on his hands because of poor intel. Innocent blood. He could not shake a certain level of distrust.\n\nHe stared at Kat. Her green eyes were hard. Her whole body seemed starched. He pushed aside her past. She was his teammate now.\n\nHe took a deep breath. He was her leader.\n\nAct the part\u2026\n\nHe cleared his throat. Time to get to business. He lifted one finger. \"Okay, first, what do we know?\"\n\nMonk answered, his face dead serious. \"Not much.\"\n\nKat maintained a fixed expression. \"We know the perpetrators are somehow involved with the cult society known as the Royal Dragon Court.\"\n\n\"That's as good as saying they're involved with Hari Krishnas,\" Monk countered. \"The group is as shadowy and weedy as crabgrass. We don't have a clue who is truly behind all this.\"\n\nGray nodded. They had been faxed this information while en route. But more disturbingly, news had reached them of an attack upon their counterparts in the Vatican. It had to be the work of the Dragon Court again. But why? What sort of clandestine war zone were they flying into? He needed answers.\n\n\"Let's break this down then,\" Gray said, realizing he sounded like Director Crowe. The other two looked at him expectantly. He cleared his throat. \"Back to the basics. Means, motive, and opportunity.\"\n\n\"They had plenty of opportunity,\" Monk said. \"Striking after midnight. When the streets were mostly empty. But why not wait until the cathedral was empty, too?\"\n\n\"To send a message,\" Kat answered. \"A blow against the Catholic Church.\"\n\n\"We can't make that assumption,\" Monk said. \"Look at it more broadly. Maybe it was all sleight of hand. Meant to misdirect. To commit a crime so bloody that all attention would be pulled from the rather insignificant theft of some dusty bones.\"\n\nKat didn't look convinced, but she was difficult to read, playing her cards close to the chest. Like she had been trained.\n\nGray settled the matter. \"Either way, for now, exploring opportunity offers no inroads into who perpetrated the massacre. Let's move on to motive.\"\n\n\"Why steal bones?\" Monk said with a shake of his head and sat back. \"Maybe they mean to ransom them back to the Catholic Church.\"\n\nKat shook her head. \"If it was only money, they would've stolen the golden reliquary. So it must be something else about the bones. Something we have no clue about. So maybe it's best we leave that thread to our Vatican contacts.\"\n\nGray frowned. He was still uncomfortable working jointly with an organization like the Vatican, an establishment built on secrets and religious dogma. He had been raised Roman Catholic, and while he still felt strong stirrings of faith, he had also studied other religions and philosophies: Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism. He had learned much, but he never could answer one question from his studies: What was he seeking?\n\nGray shook his head. \"For now, we'll mark the motivation for this crime with another big question mark. We'll pursue that in more depth when we meet with the others. That leaves only means to discuss.\"\n\n\"Which goes back to the whole financial discussion,\" Monk said. \"This operation was well planned and swiftly executed. From the manpower alone, this was an expensive operation. Money backed this theft.\"\n\n\"Money and a level of technology that we don't understand,\" Kat said.\n\nMonk nodded. \"But what about that weird gold in the Communion bread?\"\n\n\"Monatomic gold,\" Kat mumbled, creasing lines around her lips.\n\nGray pictured the gold-plated electrode. They had been given reams of data in their dossier on this strange gold, culled from labs around the world: British Aerospace, Argonne National Laboratories, Boeing Labs in Seattle, the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.\n\nThe powder had not been ordinary gold dust, the flaky form of metallic gold. It had been an entirely new elemental state of gold, classified as m-state. Rather than its usual metallic matrix, the white powder was gold broken down into individual atoms. Monatomic, or m-state. Until recently, scientists had no idea that gold could transmute, both naturally and artificially, into an inert white powder form.\n\nBut what did it all mean?\n\n\"Okay,\" Gray said, \"we've all read the files. Let's round-robin that topic. See if it leads anywhere.\"\n\nMonk spoke up. \"First, it's not just gold that does this. We should keep that in mind. It seems any of the transitional metals on the periodic table\u2014platinum, rhodium, iridium, and others\u2014can also dissolve into a powder.\"\n\n\"Not dissolve,\" Kat said. She glanced down to the dossier with its photocopied articles from Platinum Metals Review, Scientific American, even Jane's Defense Weekly, the journal of the UK's Ministry of Defense. It appeared as if she itched to open the folder.\n\n\"The term is disaggregate,\" she continued. \"These m-state metals break down into both individual atoms and microclusters. From a physics standpoint, this state arises when time-forward and time-reverse electrons fuse around the nucleus of the atom, causing each atom to lose its chemical reactivity to its neighbor.\"\n\n\"You mean they stop sticking to each other.\" Monk's eyes danced a bit with amusement.\n\n\"To put it crudely,\" Kat said with a sigh. \"It's this lack of chemical reactivity that makes the metal lose its metallic appearance and disaggregate into a powder. A powder undetectable to ordinary lab equipment.\"\n\n\"Ah\u2026\" Monk muttered.\n\nGray frowned at Monk. He shrugged. Gray knew his friend was playing dumb.\n\n\"I think,\" Kat went on, oblivious of the exchange, \"that the perpetrators knew about this lack of chemical reactivity and trusted the gold powder would never be discovered. It was their second mistake.\"\n\n\"Their second?\" Monk asked.\n\n\"They left alive a witness. The young man. Jason Pendleton.\" Kat opened her dossier folder. It seemed she couldn't resist the temptation after all. \"Back to the matter of the gold. What about this one paper on superconductivity?\"\n\nGray nodded. He had to give Kat credit. She had zeroed in on the most intriguing aspect of these m-state metals. Even Monk sat straighter now.\n\nKat continued, \"While the powder appears inert to analyzing equipment, the atomic state is far from low-energy. It was as if each atom took all the energy it used to react to its neighbor and turned it inward on itself. The energy deformed the atom's nucleus, stretching it out to an elongated shape, known as\u2026\" She searched the article at her fingertips. Gray noted it had been marked up with a yellow highlighter.\n\n\"An asymmetrical high-spin state,\" she said. \"Physicists have known that such high-spin atoms can pass energy from one atom to the next with no net energy loss.\"\n\n\"Superconductivity,\" Monk said with no dissembling.\n\n\"Energy passed into a superconductor would continue to flow through the material with no loss of power. A perfect superconductor would allow this energy to flow infinitely, until the end of time itself.\"\n\nSilence settled over them as they all pondered the many perplexities here.\n\nMonk finally stretched. \"Great. We've ground the mystery down to the level of the atomic nucleus. Let's pull back. What does any of this have to do with the murders at the cathedral? Why poison the wafers with this weird gold powder? How did the powder kill?\"\n\nThey were all good questions. Kat closed her dossier, conceding that no answers would be found there.\n\nGray was beginning to understand why the director had given him these two partners. It went beyond their backgrounds as an intelligence specialist and a forensics expert. Kat had a focused ability to concentrate on minutiae, to pick out details others might miss. But Monk, no less sharp, was better at looking at the bigger picture, spotting trends across a broader landscape.\n\nBut where did that leave him?\n\n\"It seems we still have much to investigate,\" he finished lamely.\n\nMonk lifted one eyebrow. \"As I said from the start, we don't have a lot to go on.\"\n\n\"That's why we've been called in. To solve the impossible.\" Gray checked his watch, stifling a yawn. \"And to do that, we should grab as much downtime as we can until we land in Germany.\"\n\nThe other two nodded. Gray stood and crossed to a seat a short distance away. Monk grabbed pillows and blankets. Kat closed the shades on the windows, dimming the cabin. Gray watched them.\n\nHis team. His responsibility.\n\nTo be a man, you first have to act like one.\n\nGray accepted his own pillow and sat down. He did not recline his seat. Despite his exhaustion, he did not expect to get much sleep. Monk toggled down the overhead lights. Darkness descended.\n\n\"Good night, Commander,\" Kat said from across the cabin.\n\nAs the others settled, Gray sat in the darkness, wondering how he got here. Time stretched. The engines rumbled white noise. Still, any semblance of sleep escaped him.\n\nIn the privacy of the moment, Gray reached into the pocket of his jeans. He slipped out a rosary, gripping the crucifix at the end, hard enough to hurt his palm. It was a graduation gift from his grandfather, who had died only two months after that. Gray had been in boot camp. He hadn't been able to attend the funeral. He leaned back. After today's briefing, he had called his folks, lying about a last-minute business trip to cover his absence.\n\nRunning again\u2026\n\nFingers traveled down the hard beads of his rosary.\n\nHe said no prayers.\n\n[ 10:24 P.M. ]\n\n[ LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND ]\n\nCh\u00e2teau Sauvage crouched in the mountain pass of the Savoy Alps like a stone giant. Its battlements were ten feet thick. Its single foursquare tower crested its walls. The only access to its gates was over a stone bridge spanning the pass. While it was not the largest castle of the Swiss canton, it was certainly one of the oldest, constructed during the twelfth century. Its roots were even older. Its battlements were built on the ruins of a Roman castra, an ancient military fortification from the first century.\n\nIt was also one of the oldest privately owned castles, belonging to the Sauvage family since the fifteenth century, when the Bernese army wrested control of Lausanne from the decadent bishops during the Reformation. Its parapets overlooked Lake Geneva far below and the handsome cliff-side city of Lausanne, once a fishing village, now a cosmopolitan town of lakeside parks, museums, resorts, clubs, and caf\u00e9s.\n\nThe castle's current master, Baron Raoul de Sauvage, ignored the lamp-lit view of the dark city and descended the stairs that led below the castle. He had been summoned. Behind him, a huge wooly dog, weighing a massive seventy kilos, followed his steps. The Bernese mountain dog's black-and-brown shaggy coat brushed the ancient stone steps.\n\nRaoul also had a kennel of pit-fighting dogs, massive hundred-kilo brutes from Gran Canaria, short-haired, thick-necked, tortured to a savage edge. He bred champions of the blood sport.\n\nBut right now, Raoul had matters even bloodier to settle.\n\nHe passed the dungeon level of the castle with its stone caves. The cells now housed his extensive wine collection, a perfect cellar, but one section harkened back to the old days. Four stone cells had been updated with stainless steel gates, electronic locks, and video surveillance. Near the cells, one large room still housed ancient torture devices\u2026and a few modern ones. His family had helped several Nazi leaders escape out of Austria after World War II, families with ties to the Hapsburgs. They had been hidden down here. As payment, Raoul's grandfather had taken his share, his \"toll\" as he called it, which had helped keep the castle within the family.\n\nBut now, at the age of thirty-three, Raoul would surpass his grandfather. Raoul, born a bastard to his father, had been given title to both estate and heritage at the age of sixteen, when his father died. He was the only living male offspring. And among the Sauvage family, genetic ties were given precedence over those of marriage. Even his birth had been conceived by arrangement.\n\nAnother of Grandfather's tolls.\n\nThe Baron of Sauvage climbed down even deeper into the mountainside, hunching away from the roof, followed by his dog. A string of bare electrical lights illuminated his way.\n\nThe stone steps became natural hewn rock. Here Roman legionnaires had tread in ancient times, often leading a sacrificial bull or goat down to the cave below. The chamber had been converted into a mithraeumby the Romans, a temple to the god Mithra, a sun god imported from Iran and taken to heart by the empire's soldiers. Mithraism predated Christianity yet bore uncanny similarities. Mithra's birthday was celebrated on December 25. The god's worship involved baptism and the consumption of a sacred meal of bread and wine. Mithra also had twelve disciples, held Sunday sacred, and described a heaven and a hell. Upon his death, Mithra was also buried in a tomb, only to rise again in three days.\n\nFrom this, some scholars claimed Christianity had incorporated Mithraic mythology into its own ritual. It was not unlike the castle here, the new standing on the shoulders of the old, the strong surpassing the weak. Raoul saw nothing wrong with this, even respected it.\n\nIt was the natural order.\n\nRaoul descended the last steps and entered the wide subterranean grotto. The roof of the cave was a natural stone dome, crudely carved with stars and a stylized sun. An old Mithraic altar, where young bulls had been sacrificed, stood on the far side. Beyond it ran a deep cold spring, a small river. Raoul imagined the sacrificed bodies had been dumped into it to be carried away. He had disposed of a few of his own that way, too\u2026those not fed to his dogs.\n\nAt the entrance, Raoul shed his leather duster. Beneath the coat, he wore an old rough-spun shirt embroidered with the coiled dragon, the symbol of the Ordinis Draconis, his birthright going back generations.\n\n\"Stay, Drakko,\" he ordered the dog.\n\nThe Bernese mountain dog dropped to its haunches. It knew better than to disobey.\n\nAs did the dog's owner\u2026\n\nRaoul acknowledged the cave's occupant with a half bow, then proceeded forward.\n\nThe Sovereign Grand Imperator of the Court waited for him before the altar, dressed in the black leathers of a motorcycle outfit. Though he was two decades older than Raoul, the man matched his height and breadth of shoulder. He showed no withering of age, but remained stolid and firm of muscle. He kept his helmet in place, visor down.\n\nThe leader had entered through the secret back entrance to the Grotto\u2026along with a stranger.\n\nIt was forbidden for anyone outside the Court to view the Imperator's face. The stranger had been blindfolded as an extra precaution.\n\nRaoul also noted the five bodyguards at the back of the cavern, all armed with automatic weapons, the elite guard of the Imperator.\n\nRaoul strode forward, right arm across his chest. He dropped to a knee before the Imperator. Raoul was head of the Court's infamous adepti exempti, the military order, an honor going back to Vlad the Impaler, an ancient ancestor of the Sauvage family. But all bowed to the Imperator. A mantle Raoul hoped to one day assume for himself.\n\n\"Stand,\" he was ordered.\n\nRaoul gained his feet.\n\n\"The Americans are already under way,\" the Imperator said. His voice, muffled by the helmet, was still heavy with command. \"Are your men ready?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I handpicked a dozen men. We only await your order.\"\n\n\"Very good. Our allies have lent us someone to assist on this operation. Someone who knows these American agents.\"\n\nRaoul grimaced. He did not need help.\n\n\"Do you have a problem with this?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"A plane awaits you and your men at the Yverdon airfield. Failure will not be tolerated a second time.\"\n\nRaoul cringed inwardly. He had led the mission to steal the bones in Cologne, but he had failed to purge the sanctuary. There had been one survivor. One who had pointed in their direction. Raoul had been disgraced.\n\n\"I will not fail,\" he assured his leader.\n\nThe Imperator stared at him, an unnerving gaze felt through the lowered visor. \"You know your duty.\"\n\nA final nod.\n\nThe Imperator strode forward, passing Raoul, accompanied by his bodyguards. He was headed for the castle, taking over the chateau here until the end game was completed. But first Raoul had to finish clearing the mess he had left behind.\n\nIt meant another trip to Germany.\n\nHe waited for the Imperator to leave. Drakko trotted after the men, as if the dog scented the true power here. Then again, the leader had visited the castle often during the last ten years, when the keys to damnation and salvation had fallen into their laps.\n\nAll due to a fortuitous discovery at the Cairo Museum\u2026\n\nNow they were so close.\n\nWith his leader gone, Raoul finally faced the stranger. What he saw, he found lacking, and he let his scowl show it. But at least the stranger's garb, all black, was fitting.\n\nAs was the bit of silver decoration.\n\nFrom the woman's pendant, a silver dragon dangled.\n\n[ DAY TWO ]"
            },
            {
                "title": "FRANTIC",
                "text": "[ JULY 25, 2:14 A.M. ]\n\n[ COLOGNE, GERMANY ]\n\nFor Gray, churches at night always held a certain haunted edge. But none more so than this house of worship. With the recent murders, the Gothic structure exuded a palpable dread.\n\nAs his team crossed the square, Gray studied the Cologne cathedral, or the Dom, as it was called by the locals. It was lit up by exterior spotlights, casting the edifice into silver and shadow. Most of the western fa\u00e7ade was just two massive towers. The twin spires rose close together, jutting up from either side of the main door, only meters apart for most of their lengths until the towers tapered to points with tiny crosses at the tips. Each tier of the five-hundred-foot structures had been decorated with intricate reliefs. Arched windows climbed the towers, all aiming toward the night sky and the moon far above.\n\n\"Looks like they left the light on for us,\" Monk said, gaping at the spotlighted cathedral. He hitched his backpack higher on his shoulder.\n\nThey were all dressed in dark civilian clothes, meant not to stand out. But beneath, each team member wore a clinging undergarment of liquid body armor. Their rucksacks, black Arcteryx backpacks, were stuffed with tools of the trade, including weapons from a CIA contact who had met them at the airport: Glock M-27 compact pistols, chambered in .40-caliber hollowpoints, fitted with tritium night sights.\n\nMonk also had a Scattergun-built shotgun, strapped to his left thigh, hidden under a long jacket. The weapon had been custom-designed for such service, snub-nosed and compact, like Monk himself, with a Ghost Ring sight system for riflelike accuracy in low light. Kat went more lowtech. She managed to hide eight daggers on her body. A blade lay only a fingertip away, no matter her position.\n\nGray checked his Breitling dive watch. The hands glowed a quarter after two o'clock. They had made excellent time.\n\nThey crossed the square. Gray searched the dark corners for anything suspicious. All seemed quiet. At this hour on a weekday, the place was nearly deserted. Only a few stragglers. And most of those weaved a bit as they walked, the pubs having let out. But there were signs of earlier crowds. Piles of flowers from mourners littered the square's edges, along with the discarded beer bottles of gawkers. Mounds of melted wax candles marked memorial shrines, some with photos of relatives who had died. A few tapers still burned, tiny flickers in the night, lonely and forlorn.\n\nA full candlelit vigil was under way at a neighboring church, an all-night memorial service, with a live feed from the pope. It had been coordinated to empty the square this night.\n\nStill, Gray noted that his teammates kept a wary watch on their surroundings. They were not taking any chances.\n\nParked in front of the cathedral was a panel truck with the municipal Polizei logo on its side. It had served as the main base of operation for the forensic teams. Upon landing, Gray had been informed by the ops manager of this mission, Logan Gregory, Sigma's second-in-command, that all local investigative teams had been pulled out by midnight but would be returning in the morning. Zero-six-hundred. Until then, they had the church to themselves.\n\nWell, not entirely to themselves.\n\nOne of the flanking side doors to the cathedral opened as they neared. A tall, thin figure stood limned against the light inside. An arm lifted.\n\n\"Monsignor Verona,\" Kat whispered under her breath, confirming the identity.\n\nThe priest crossed to the police cordon that had been placed around the cathedral. He spoke to one of the two guards on duty, posted to keep the curious away from the crime scene, then motioned the trio through the barricade.\n\nThey followed him to the open doorway.\n\n\"Captain Bryant,\" the monsignor said, smiling warmly. \"Despite the tragic circumstances, it's wonderful to see you again.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Professor,\" Kat said, returning an affectionate grin. Her features softened with genuine friendship.\n\n\"Please call me Vigor.\"\n\nThey entered the cathedral's front vestibule. The monsignor pulled the door closed and locked it. He scrutinized Kat's two companions.\n\nGray felt the weight of his study. The man was nearly his height, but more wiry of build. His salt-and-pepper hair had been combed straight back, curling in waves. He wore a neatly trimmed goatee and was dressed casually in midnight-blue jeans and a black V-neck sweater, revealing the Roman collar of his station.\n\nBut it was the steady fix of his gaze that most struck Gray. Despite his welcoming manner, there was a steely edge to the man. Even Monk straightened his shoulders under the priest's attention.\n\n\"Come inside,\" Vigor said. \"We should get started as soon as possible.\"\n\nThe monsignor led the way to the closed doors of the nave, opened them, and waved the group inside.\n\nAs he entered the heart of the church, Gray was immediately struck by two things. First by the smell. The air, while still redolent with incense, also wafted an underlying stench of something burnt.\n\nStill, that was not all that caught Gray's attention. A woman rose from a pew to greet them. She looked like a young Audrey Hepburn: snowy skin, short ebony hair parted and swept behind her ears, caramel-colored eyes. She offered no smile. Her gaze swept over the newcomers, settling a moment longer on Gray.\n\nHe recognized the familial resemblance between her and the monsignor, more from the intensity of her scrutiny than any physical features.\n\n\"My niece,\" Vigor introduced. \"Lieutenant Rachel Verona.\"\n\nThey finished their introductions quickly. And though there was no outward animosity, their two camps still remained separate. Rachel kept a wary distance, as if ready to go for her gun if necessary. Gray had noted a holstered pistol under her open vest. A 9mm Beretta.\n\n\"We should get started,\" Vigor said. \"The Vatican was able to gain us some privacy, demanding time to sanctify and bless the nave after the last body was removed.\"\n\nThe monsignor led the way down the central aisle.\n\nGray noted sections of the pews had been marked off with masking tape. Place cards had been affixed to each with the names of the deceased. He stepped around the chalked outlines on the floor. Blood had been wiped up, but the stain had seeped into the mortar of the stone floor. Yellow plastic markers fixed the positions of shell casings, long gone to forensics.\n\nHe glanced across the nave, picturing how it must have looked upon first entering. Bodies sprawled everywhere; the smell of burnt blood, richer. He could almost sense an echo of the pain, trapped in the stone as much as the reek. It shivered over his skin. He was still enough of a Roman Catholic to find such murder disturbing beyond mere violence. It was an affront against God. Satanic.\n\nHad that been part of the motivation?\n\nTo turn a feast into a Black Mass.\n\nThe monsignor spoke, drawing his attention back. \"Over there was where the boy was found hiding.\" He pointed to a confessional booth against the north wall, halfway up the long nave.\n\nJason Pendleton. The lone survivor.\n\nGray took some degree of grim satisfaction that not all had died that bloody night. The attackers had made a mistake. They were fallible. Human. He centered himself with this thought. Though the act was demonic, the hand that committed it was as human as any other. Not that there weren't demons in human form.\n\nBut humans could be caught and punished.\n\nThey reached the raised sanctuary with the slab-marble altar and the tall-backed cathedra, the bishop's seat. Vigor and his niece made the sign of the cross. Vigor dropped to one knee, then got up. He led them through a gate in the chancel railing. Beyond the railing, the altar was also marked in chalk, the travertine marble stained. Police tape cordoned off a section to the right.\n\nCrashed onto the floor, cracking the stone tile, a golden sarcophagus lay on its side. Its top rested two steps down. Gray shrugged off his backpack and lowered to one knee.\n\nThe golden reliquary, when whole, plainly formed a miniature church, carved with arched windows and etched scenes done in gold, rubies, and emeralds, depicting Christ's life, from his adoration by the Magi to his scourging and eventual crucifixion.\n\nGray donned a pair of latex gloves. \"This is where the bones were enshrined?\"\n\nVigor nodded. \"Since the thirteenth century.\"\n\nKat joined Gray. \"I see they've already dusted it for prints.\" She pointed to the fine white powder clinging to cracks and crevices in the reliefs.\n\n\"No prints were found,\" Rachel said.\n\nMonk glanced across the cathedral. \"And nothing else was taken?\"\n\n\"A full inventory was conducted,\" Rachel continued. \"We've already had a chance to interview the entire staff, including the priests.\"\n\n\"I may want to speak to them myself,\" Gray mumbled, still studying the box.\n\n\"Their apartments are across a cloistered yard,\" Rachel responded, voice hardening. \"No one heard or saw anything. But if you want to waste your time, feel free.\"\n\nGray glanced up at her. \"I only said I may want to speak to them.\"\n\nShe met his gaze without shrinking. \"And I was under the impression that this investigation was a joint effort. If we're going to recheck each other's work at every step, we'll get nowhere.\"\n\nGray took a steadying breath. Only minutes into the investigation, and already he had stepped on jurisdictional toes. He should have interpreted her earlier wariness and trodden more lightly.\n\nVigor placed a hand on his niece's shoulder. \"I assure you the interrogation was thorough. Among my colleagues, where prudence of tongue often surpasses good sense, I doubt you'd gain any further details, especially when being interviewed by someone not wearing a clerical collar.\"\n\nMonk spoke up. \"That's all well and good. But can we get back to me?\" All eyes turned to him. He wore a crooked grin. \"I believe I was asking if anything else was taken.\"\n\nGray felt the attention shift from him. As usual, Monk had his back. A diplomat in body armor.\n\nRachel fixed Monk with her uncompromising gaze. \"As I said, nothing was\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, thank you, Lieutenant. But I was curious if any other relics are kept here at the cathedral. Any relics that the thieves didn't take.\"\n\nRachel frowned in confusion.\n\n\"I figured,\" Monk explained, \"that what the thieves didn't take may be as informative as what they did.\" He shrugged.\n\nThe woman's face relaxed a touch, contemplating this angle. The anger bled away.\n\nGray inwardly shook his head. How did Monk do that?\n\nThe monsignor answered Monk. \"There's a treasure chamber off the nave. It holds the reliquaries from the original Romanesque church that once stood here: the staff and chain of Saint Peter, along with a couple of pieces of the Christ's cross. Also a Gothic bishop's staff from the fourteenth century and a jewel-encrusted elector's sword from the fifteenth.\"\n\n\"And nothing was stolen from the treasure chamber.\"\n\n\"It was all inventoried,\" Rachel answered. Her eyes remained pinched in concentration. \"Nothing else was stolen.\"\n\nKat crouched down with Gray, but her eyes were on those still standing. \"So only the bones were taken. Why?\"\n\nGray turned his attention to the open sarcophagus. He slipped a penlight from his nearby backpack and examined the interior. It was unlined. Just flat gold surfaces. He noted a bit of white powder sifted over the bottom surface. More latent powder? Bone ash?\n\nThere was only one way to find out.\n\nHe turned back to his pack and pulled out a collection kit. He used a small battery-powered vacuum to sniff up some of the powder into a sterile test tube.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Rachel asked.\n\n\"If this is bone dust, it may answer a few questions.\"\n\n\"Like what?\"\n\nHe sat back and examined the test tube. There was no more than a couple grams of gray powder. \"We might be able to test the dust for age. Find out if the stolen bones were from someone who lived during Christ's time. Or not. Maybe the crime was to recover the family bones of someone in the Dragon Court. Some old lord or prince.\"\n\nGray sealed the test tube and packed the sample away. \"I'd also like to get samples of the broken glass from the security vault. It might give us some answers as to how the device shattered bulletproof glass. Our labs can examine the crystalline microstructure for fracture patterns.\"\n\n\"I'll get on that,\" Monk said, slinging off his pack.\n\n\"What about the stonework?\" Rachel asked. \"Or other materials inside the cathedral?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"Whatever triggered the deaths among the parishioners might have affected the stone, marble, wood, plastic. Something that could not be seen with the naked eye.\"\n\nGray had not considered that. He should have. Monk met his eyes and shrugged his brows. The carabiniere lieutenant was proving herself to be more than a pretty package.\n\nGray turned to Kat to organize a collection methodology. But she seemed preoccupied. From the corner of his eye, he had noted her interest in the reliquary, all but ducking her head inside to investigate. She now crouched on the marble floor, bent over something she was working on.\n\n\"Kat\u2014?\"\n\nShe held up a tiny mink-haired brush. \"One moment.\" In her other hand, she held a small butane pistol-lighter. She squeezed the trigger and a tiny blue flame hissed from the end. She applied the flame to a pile of powder, plainly whisked from the reliquary with the brush.\n\nAfter a couple seconds, the gray powder melted, bubbling and frothing into a translucent amber liquid. It dribbled over the cold marble and hardened into glass. The sheen against the white marble was unmistakable.\n\n\"Gold,\" Monk said. All eyes had been drawn to the experiment.\n\nKat sat back, extinguishing her torch. \"The residual powder in the reliquary\u2026it's the same as in the tainted wafers. Monatomic, or m-state, gold.\"\n\nGray remembered Director Crowe's description of the lab tests, how the powder could be melted down to a slag glass. A glass made of solid gold.\n\n\"That's gold?\" Rachel asked. \"As in the precious metal?\"\n\nSigma had provided the Vatican with cursory information on the tainted wafers, so their bakeries and supplies could be examined for further tampering. Its two spies had also been informed, but plainly they had their doubts.\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Rachel asked.\n\nKat was already busy proving her assertion. She had an eyedropper in hand and dribbled its contents onto the glass. Gray knew what filled the eyedropper. They had all been supplied it by the labs back at Sigma for just this purpose. A cyanide compound. For years, miners had been using a process called heap leach cyanide recovery to dissolve gold out of old tailings.\n\nWhere the drop touched, the glass etched as if burned by acid. But rather than frosting the glass, the cyanide carved a trail of pure gold, a vein of metal in glass. There was no doubt.\n\nMonsignor Verona stared, unblinking, one hand fingering his clerical collar. He mumbled, \"And the streets of New Jerusalem will be paved with gold so pure as to be transparent glass.\"\n\nGray glanced quizzically at the priest.\n\nVigor shook his head. \"From the Book of Revelations\u2026don't mind me.\"\n\nBut Gray saw the way the man drew inward, turning half away, lost in deeper thoughts. Did he know more? Gray sensed the priest was not so much holding back as needing time to dwell on something.\n\nKat interrupted. She had been leaning over her sample with a magnifying lens and an ultraviolet lamp. \"I think there might be more than gold here. I can spot tiny pools of silver in the gold.\"\n\nGray shifted closer. Kat allowed him to peer through her lens, shadowing the glass with her hand so the blue sheen of the ultraviolet light better illuminated the sample. The veins of metallic gold did indeed seem pocked with silvery impurities.\n\n\"It might be platinum,\" Kat said. \"Remember that the monatomic state occurs not just in gold but any of the transitional metals on the periodic table. Including platinum.\"\n\nGray nodded. \"The powder might not be pure gold, but a mix of several of the platinum series. An amalgam of various m-state metals.\"\n\nRachel continued to stare at the etched glass. \"Could the powder just be from the wearing down of the old sarcophagus? The gold crumbling with age or something?\"\n\nGray shook his head. \"The process to turn metallic gold into its m-state is complicated. Age alone won't do this.\"\n\n\"But the lieutenant might be onto something,\" Kat said. \"Maybe the device affected the gold in the reliquary and caused some of the gold to transmute. We still have no idea by what mechanism the device\u2014\"\n\n\"I may have one clue,\" Monk said, cutting her off.\n\nHe stood by the shattered security case, where he had been collecting shards. He stepped to a bulky iron cross resting in a stanchion not far from the case.\n\n\"It looks like one of our forensic experts missed a shell,\" Monk said. He reached out and plucked a hollow casing from beneath the feet of the crucified Christ figure. He took a step back again, held the casing out toward the cross, and let it go. It flew through six inches of air, and with a ping, stuck again to the cross.\n\n\"It's magnetized,\" Monk said.\n\nAnother ping sounded. Louder. Sharper. The cross spun half a turn in its stanchion.\n\nFor half a second, Gray did not comprehend what had happened.\n\nMonk dove for the altar. \"Down!\" he screamed.\n\nOther shots rang out.\n\nGray felt a kick to his shoulder, throwing him off kilter, but his body armor saved him from real injury. Rachel grabbed his arm and yanked him into a row of pews. Bullets chewed wood, sparked off marble and stone.\n\nKat ducked with the monsignor, shielding him with her body. She took a glancing shot to the thigh, half collapsing, but they fell together behind the altar with Monk.\n\nGray had only managed a quick glimpse of their attackers.\n\nMen in hooded robes.\n\nA sharp pop sounded. Gray glanced up to see a fist-sized black object arc across the breadth of the church.\n\n\"Grenade!\" he screamed.\n\nHe scooped up his pack and shoved Rachel down the pew. They scrambled low and ran for the south wall.\n\n[ 3:20 A.M. ]\n\nMonk barely had time to react when Gray yelled. He grabbed Kat and the monsignor and flattened himself against them behind the stone altar.\n\nThe grenade hit the far side and exploded, sounding like a mortar blast. A cascade of marble shattered upward and outward, pelting the wooden pews. Smoke rolled and billowed up.\n\nHalf deafened by the blast, Monk simply hauled Kat and Vigor to their feet. \"Follow me!\"\n\nIt was death to stay out here in the open. Toss one grenade behind the altar, and they were all hamburger. They needed a more defensible position.\n\nMonk dashed toward the north wall. Behind him, gunfire remained fierce. Gray was striking for the opposite wall. Just as well. Once in position, they could set up a crossfire across the center of the church.\n\nClear of the altar, Monk pounded across the sanctuary. He aimed for the nearest shelter, spotting a wide wooden door. The gunmen finally noted their escape. Shots spattered against the marble floor, ricocheted off a column, and tore into pews. The shots came from all directions now. More of the assailants had taken up positions deeper in the church, coming in other doors, cutting off escape, surrounding them.\n\nThey needed cover.\n\nMonk yanked his own weapon from its straps. The snub-nosed shotgun. On the fly, he lifted the barrel in the crook of his left elbow and pulled the trigger. Along with the blast, he heard a sharp grunt from several pews away. Accuracy was not necessary with a Scattergun.\n\nShoving the barrel forward, he took crude aim at the door handle. It was too much to hope it was an exit to the outside, but it would at least get them clear of the central nave. From a few steps away, he pulled the trigger as he heard a faint protest from Monsignor Verona.\n\nBut there was no time for debate.\n\nThe blast punched a fist-sized hole through the door, taking the entire handle and lock with it. Still running, Monk hit the door. It banged open under his shoulder. He fell inside, followed by Kat and the monsignor. Kat turned, limping, and shoved the door closed.\n\n\"No,\" the priest said.\n\nMonk now understood the reason for his protest.\n\nThe vaulted room was the size of a single-car garage. He stared at the glass cases crowded with old robes and insignia, bits of sculpture. Gold shone from some of the cases.\n\nIt was the cathedral's Treasure Chamber.\n\nThere was no exit.\n\nTrapped.\n\nKat took up position, Glock in hand, and peered out the blasted hole. \"Here they come.\"\n\n[ 3:22 A.M. ]\n\nRachel reached the end of the pew, out of breath, heart thundering in her ears. Shots continued to pound their position, coming from all sides, gouging out chunks of wood from the flanking pews.\n\nThe grenade blast still echoed in her head, but her hearing was returning. Surely the priests and staff in the rectory had heard the explosion and had called the police.\n\nThe gunfire relented momentarily as the robed assailants repositioned themselves, closing up the center aisle.\n\n\"Make for that wall,\" Gray urged. \"Behind the pillars. I'll cover you.\"\n\nRachel spotted the nest of pylons that supported the vaulted roof. It offered better shelter than being pinned between a row of seats. She glanced back to the American.\n\n\"On my signal,\" he said, crouching down. Their eyes met. She saw a thread of healthy fear, but also a determined concentration. He nodded to her, shifted around, readied himself, then shouted, \"Go!\"\n\nRachel dove out the end of the pew as gunfire erupted behind her, louder than their assailants'. The commander's guns had no silencers.\n\nShe hit the marble floor and rolled behind the trio of pillars. She gained her feet immediately, back to the giant pillar. Carefully peeking around the curve, she spotted Commander Pierce backpedaling toward her, both pistols blazing.\n\nA robed man down the end of the same pew fell backward, punched by the impacts. Another down the center aisle cried out and grabbed his neck as a spat of red arced out. The others had ducked from the American's attack. Across the church, Rachel spotted five or six men converging on the door to the cathedral's Treasure Chamber, firing almost nonstop.\n\nAs Commander Pierce reached her position, panting, Rachel swung to check the other side of her pillar, peering along the wall. So far no one had circled this way yet. But she had to assume they would soon.\n\n\"What now?\" she asked, removing her pistol from a shoulder holster, the Beretta given to her by the Carabinieri driver back in Rome.\n\n\"This line of columns parallels the wall. We stick to cover. Shoot anything that moves.\"\n\n\"And our goal?\"\n\n\"To get the hell out of this death trap.\"\n\nRachel frowned. What about the others?\n\nThe American must have noted her worry. \"We'll head for the streets. Draw off as many of the bastards as we can.\"\n\nShe nodded. They would play decoy. \"Let's go.\"\n\nThe pillars along the south wall were spaced only two meters apart. They proceeded briskly, staying low, using the rows of neighboring pews out in the nave as additional cover. Commander Pierce fired high, while Rachel discouraged any assailants from entering the alleyway between the wall and the pillars, picking off any shadows that moved.\n\nThe ploy worked. More gunfire concentrated on their position. But it also slowed them down, putting them at risk of a second grenade attack. They had only made it halfway down the nave, and it became impossible to leap from pillar to pillar.\n\nThe American took a blow to the back, splaying him out on the ground. Rachel gasped. But he pushed back up.\n\nRachel shifted down the alley, sticking close to the wall, pointing her gun back and forth. With her concentration fixed outward, she made the same mistake as the assailants had the prior night.\n\nThe door to the confessional swung open behind her. Before she could move, an arm lashed out and wrapped around her neck. Her weapon was knocked from her fingers. The cold steel of a gun barrel pressed against her neck.\n\n\"Don't move,\" a deep bass voice ordered as the commander swung around. The attacker's arm felt like a tree trunk, strangling her breathing. He was tall, a giant of a man, practically hauling her to her toes. \"Drop your weapons.\"\n\nThe gunfire died out. It was clear now why a second grenade hadn't been lobbed toward them. While the two of them thought they were escaping, the gunmen had been merely driving them into this trap.\n\n\"I'd do as he says,\" a new voice said silkily, coming from the penitent's booth neighboring the priest's confessional. The door opened and a second figure stepped out, dressed in black leather.\n\nIt was no monk, but a woman. Slender, Eurasian.\n\nShe lifted her pistol, a black Sig Sauer. She pointed it at Gray's face. \"D\u00e9j\u00e0 vu, Commander Pierce?\"\n\n[ 3:26 A.M. ]\n\nThe door was a problem. With the lock blown off, every strike of a bullet threatened to pop the door open. And they dared not keep it shouldered closed. Most of the rounds were stopped by the wood planks, but a few still found weak spots and cracked through, making Swiss cheese out of the door.\n\nMonk kept one boot against the frame, anchoring the door with his heel, while keeping his body off to the side. Bullets pounded against the door, the impacts rattling up to his knee.\n\n\"Hurry it up back there,\" he urged.\n\nHe pointed his shotgun out the hole in the door and fired blindly. The smoking shell casing ejected out of the weapon's chamber, hit one of the long glass treasure cases, and bounced off of it. Beyond the door, the spray of the Scattergun kept the assailants wary, firing from a distance. It seemed the attackers knew their prey was trapped.\n\nSo what were they waiting for?\n\nMonk expected a grenade to be lobbed against the door at any moment. He prayed the insulation of the stone wall would keep him alive. But what then? With the door blown away, they had no chance at all in here.\n\nAnd rescue was unlikely. Monk had heard the chatter of Gray's weapon echo across the church. It sounded like he was retreating toward the main doors. Monk knew that the commander was helping to draw the fire off their location. It was the only reason they were still alive.\n\nBut now Gray's weapon had gone silent.\n\nThey were on their own.\n\nA fresh barrage struck the door, rattling the frame, jarring his anchored leg. His thigh burned from the effort and had begun to tremble. \"Guys, now or never!\"\n\nA rattle of keys drew his eye. Monsignor Verona had been struggling with a key ring, given to him by the cathedral's caretaker. He fought to get the third bulletproof case open. Finally, with a cry of relief, he found the right key, and the front of the case swung open like a gate.\n\nKat reached over his shoulder and grabbed a long sword from the case. A fifteenth-century decorative weapon with a gold and jeweled hilt. But the blade, three feet long, was polished steel. She yanked it free and hauled it across the chamber. She kept out of the direct line of fire and stabbed the sword between the door and its frame, jamming and securing the door.\n\nMonk pulled back his leg, rubbing his sore knee. \" 'Bout time.\" He again shoved his shotgun through the hole in the door and fired\u2014more in irritation than any hope of hitting anyone.\n\nWith the scatter of shot driving the attackers back a step, Monk risked a fast glance out. One of the assailants lay sprawled on his back, head half gone, blood pooled. One of his blind shots had found a target.\n\nBut now his attackers were finished taking potshots.\n\nA black smooth pineapple bounced down the pew, aimed right at their door. Monk flung himself flat against the stone.\n\n\"Fire in the hole!\"\n\n[ 3:28 A.M. ]\n\nThe explosion across the church drew all eyes\u2014except Gray's. There was nothing he could do for the others.\n\nA grim smile creased the tall man's face. \"It seems your friends\u2014\"\n\nRachel moved. With the momentary distraction, her captor must have loosened his grip, perhaps underestimating the slim woman. Rachel dropped her head and snapped it back briskly, smacking the man's lower jaw hard enough to hear his teeth crack together.\n\nMoving with surprising speed, she struck the encircling arm with the heel of her hand and dropped at the same time. She elbowed her assailant a sharp blow to the midriff, then twisted and punched a fist into the man's crotch.\n\nGray swung his pistol toward the Dragon Lady. But the woman was quicker, stepping forward and placing her gun between his eyes, an inch away.\n\nTo the side, the tall man crumpled around his waist, falling to a knee. Rachel kicked his gun aside.\n\n\"Run!\" Gray hissed at her, but he kept his eyes on the Dragon Lady.\n\nThe Guild operative met his gaze\u2014then did the oddest thing. She flicked the muzzle of her gun in the direction of the exit and motioned with her head.\n\nShe was letting him go.\n\nGray stepped back. She didn't fire, but she kept her gun focused on him, ready if he tried to make a move against her.\n\nRather then ponder the impossibility, Gray swung around and fired at the nearest monks, dropping the two closest. They had been distracted by the grenade blast and missed the lightning-fast change in power here.\n\nGray grabbed Rachel by the arm and hauled ass toward the exit doors.\n\nA pistol shot sounded directly behind him. He was struck in the upper arm and spun slightly, skipping steps. The Dragon Lady's pistol smoked. She had shot Gray as she helped the tall man up. Blood dribbled down her face. A self-inflicted wound, covering her subterfuge. She had purposefully missed her shot.\n\nRachel steadied him and ducked behind the last pillar. The door to the outer vestibule lay directly ahead. No one stood in their way.\n\nGray risked a glance toward the gunfire at the back of the cathedral. Smoke billowed from the blasted doorway. The handful of gunmen fired a continual barrage through the opening, making sure no one escaped this time. Then one of the men tossed a second grenade\u2014right through the blasted doorway.\n\nThe other gunmen ducked as it blew.\n\nSmoke and debris shattered outward.\n\nGray turned away. Rachel had also witnessed the attack. Tears welled in her eyes. He felt her sag against him, legs weakening. Something deep inside him ached at her grief. He had lost teammates in the past. He was trained to mourn later.\n\nBut she had lost family.\n\n\"Keep moving,\" he said gruffly. It was all he could do. He had to get her to safety.\n\nShe glanced to him and seemed to gain strength from his hard countenance. It was what she needed. Not sympathy. Strength. He had seen it in the field before, men under fire. She stood straighter.\n\nHe squeezed her arm.\n\nShe nodded. Ready.\n\nTogether they ran and slammed through the outer doors.\n\nA pair of assassins manned the foyer, posted over the dead bodies of two men in German police uniforms. The guards at the cordon. The pair of monks was not caught by surprise. One of the men fired immediately, driving Rachel and Gray to the side. They would not make it to the outer doors, but another doorway lay to their immediate left.\n\nWith no choice, they dodged through it. The second man raised his weapon. A wall of fire cascaded toward them. He had a goddamn flamethrower. Gray slammed the door, but flames licked under the jamb. Gray danced back. There was no lock on the door.\n\nHe glanced behind him.\n\nSteps spiraled up.\n\n\"The tower stair,\" Rachel said.\n\nGunshots struck the door.\n\n\"Go,\" he said.\n\nHe pushed Rachel ahead of him, and they fled up the stairs, winding around and around. Behind and below, the door crashed open. He heard a familiar voice, yelling in German. \"Get the bastards! Burn them alive!\"\n\nIt was the tall man, the leader of the monks.\n\nFootsteps pounded on the stone steps.\n\nWith the twist of the staircase, neither party had a clear shot at the other, but that still put the advantage with their pursuers. As Gray and Rachel ran, a fountain of flames chased them, sputtering up after them, whisking around the bend in the tower stairs.\n\nAround and around they ran. The steps grew more narrow as they climbed the constricting throat of the steepled tower. Tall stained-glass windows dotted the way, but they were too thin to climb through, no more than arrow slits.\n\nAt last the steps reached the belfry of the tower. A massive free-swinging bell hung over the tower's steel-grated well. A deck lay around the bell.\n\nHere at least the windows were wide enough to climb through and held no glass to muffle the mighty bell's peals\u2014but the way through them was sealed by bars.\n\n\"A public observation deck,\" Rachel said. She kept a gun, one borrowed from Gray, fixed on the opening to the stairs.\n\nGray hurried around. There was no other way out. The city views opened around him: the Rhine River sparkled, spanned by the arched Hohenzollern Bridge; the Ludwig Museum was lit up brilliantly, as were the blue sails of the Cologne Musical Dome. But there was no escape to the streets below.\n\nDistantly he heard police sirens, a forlorn and eerily foreign wail.\n\nGray raised his eyes, calculating.\n\nA shout rose from Rachel. Gray turned as a jet of flames erupted from the stairwell. Rachel fled back, joining him.\n\nThey had run out of time.\n\n[ 3:34 A.M. ]\n\nBelow, in the cathedral, Yaeger Grell entered the blasted chamber, gun in hand. He had waited until the smoke from the second grenade had cleared out. His two partners had gone to join the others in setting up the final incendiary bombs near the entrance to the church.\n\nHe would join them\u2014but first he wanted to see the damage done to those who had killed Renard, his brother-in-arms. He stepped through, readying himself for the stench of bloody flesh and burst bowel.\n\nThe remains of the door made the footing treacherous. He led with his gun. As he took a second step, something struck his arm. He backed a step, stunned, not comprehending. He stared down at the severed stump of his wrist as blood spurted. There was no pain.\n\nHe glanced up in time to see a sword\u2014a sword!\u2014swinging through the air. It reached his neck before the surprise faded from his features. He felt nothing as his body pitched forward, his head impossibly thrown back.\n\nThen he kept falling, falling, falling\u2026as the world went black.\n\n[ 3:35 A.M. ]\n\nKat stepped back and lowered the jeweled sword. She bent, grabbed an arm, and dragged the body out of direct view of the doorway. Her head still rang from the grenade blast.\n\nShe whispered to Monk\u2014at least she hoped she whispered. She couldn't even hear her own words. \"Help the monsignor.\"\n\nMonk stared from the decapitated body back to the bloody sword in her hand, his eyes wide with a shock, but also grudging respect. He stepped over to one of the treasure cases and manhandled the monsignor free of one of the displays. All three of them had hidden inside a bulletproof case after the first grenade blast, knowing a second grenade would follow.\n\nIt had.\n\nBut the security cases had done their job, protecting the most valuable treasure of all: their lives. The shrapnel had cut through the room, but shielded behind the bulletproof glass, they had survived.\n\nIt had been her idea.\n\nAfterward, with the concussion still echoing in her head, Kat had rolled out of her case and found the jeweled sword on the floor. It proved a more circumspect weapon than her pistol. She had not wanted a blast to alert the other gunmen.\n\nStill, her hand shook. Her body remembered the last knife fight she had been in\u2026and the aftermath. She tightened her grip on the sword's hilt, drawing strength from the hard steel.\n\nBehind her, Monsignor Verona stumbled to his feet. He glanced to his limbs as if surprised to find them still attached.\n\nKat returned to the door. Except for their dead comrade, none of the other gunmen seemed to be paying attention. They were massed by the entrance.\n\n\"We should move.\" Kat motioned them out. Sticking to the wall, she led them away from the front exits, away from the guards. She reached the corner where the nave crossed with the transept. Kat waved them around the corner of the intersection.\n\nOnce out of the direct view of the gunmen, the monsignor pointed down the length of the transept. \"That way,\" he whispered.\n\nThere was another set of doors back there. Another exit. Unguarded.\n\nWith the fifteenth-century sword clutched in her fist, Kat hurried them forward. They had survived.\n\nBut what about the others?\n\n[ 3:38 A.M. ]\n\nRachel fired her gun down the throat of the spiral staircase, counting down the rounds in the second clip. Nine bullets. They had more ammunition, but no time to load another magazine. Commander Pierce was too busy.\n\nWith no other recourse, she shot blindly, sporadically, keeping the attackers at bay. Spouts of flame continued to harass her, licking forth like the tongue of a dragon.\n\nThe stalemate could not last much longer.\n\n\"Gray!\" she yelled, skipping the formalities of rank.\n\n\"Another second,\" he answered from around the far side of the bell.\n\nAs the flames faltered from the stairwell, Rachel aimed and squeezed the trigger. She had to hold them off. The bullet struck the stone wall and ricocheted down the staircase.\n\nThen her pistol's slide locked open.\n\nOut of bullets.\n\nShe backed away and circled the bell to the far side.\n\nGray had his pack off and had tied a rope around one of the window bars. He had the other end wrapped around his waist and the slack over one arm. He had used a hand jack in a tool kit to pry apart two of the window's bars, just wide enough to climb through.\n\n\"Hold the slack,\" he said.\n\nShe took the nylon rope, about five meters in length. Behind her, a fresh billow of flame jettisoned from the stairwell. The others were testing again, moving forward.\n\nGray grabbed his pack and squeezed between the bars. Once out on the stone parapet, he donned the backpack and turned back to her. \"The rope.\"\n\nShe passed it to him. \"Be careful.\"\n\n\"A little late for that.\"\n\nHe stared down between his toes. Not a wise thing to do, Rachel thought. The hundred-meter drop would weaken anyone's knees\u2026and strength of leg was most important now.\n\nGray faced forward from the ledge of the cathedral's south spire.\n\nFour meters away, over a fatal drop, stood the north spire, a twin to this one. Off limits to the public, there were no bars across the far window. But there was also no hope of jumping from window to window, not from a standing position. Instead, Gray planned to dive straight out and grab whatever handhold he could on the decorated fa\u00e7ade of the opposite tower.\n\nThe risk was great, but they had no other recourse.\n\nThey had to jump ship.\n\nGray bent his knees. Rachel held her breath, one hand fisted at the hollow of her neck.\n\nWithout a second's hesitation, Gray simply leaned out and leapt, arching the length of his body, flinging away the coil of slack rope. He flew across the gap and struck just below the window ledge. He lunged out with both arms and grabbed ahold of the sill, miraculously catching it. But the impact bounced him back. His arms could not hold him. He began to fall.\n\n\"Your left foot!\" she yelled to him.\n\nHe heard her. His left toe scrambled against the stone surface and found the demon-faced gargoyle on the lower tier. He planted his foot atop its head.\n\nWith his plummet stopped, he regained a handful of ledge above and found another toehold for his right leg, clinging like a fly to a wall. He took a deep breath, steadying himself, then climbed and manhandled himself through the window.\n\nRachel risked a glance behind her, ducking to peer under the bell. The flames had stopped. She knew the others understood the significance of her sudden cease-fire.\n\nRachel could wait no longer. She shimmied through the bars. The ledge was slick with pigeon guano, the winds gusting and treacherous.\n\nAcross the gap, Gray had secured his end of the rope, forming a bridge. \"Hurry! I have you.\"\n\nShe met his eyes across the gap and found firm assurance.\n\n\"I have you,\" he repeated.\n\nSwallowing, she reached out. Don't look down, she thought, and grabbed the rope. Hand over hand. That's all she needed to do.\n\nShe leaned out, both fists white-knuckled to the rope, toes still on the ledge. She heard the bell ring behind her. Startled, she glanced over a shoulder and watched a dumbbell-shaped silver cylinder bounce across the stone deck.\n\nShe didn't know what it was\u2014but it certainly wasn't good.\n\nNeeding no other encouragement, Rachel swung out on the rope and quickly scrambled across the bridge, legs kicking, hand over hand. Gray caught her around the midriff.\n\n\"Bomb,\" she gasped out, tossing her head back to indicate the far tower.\n\n\"What\u2014?\"\n\nThe blast cut off any further words. Buffeted from behind, Rachel was shoved through the casement and into Gray's chest. They both fell in a tangle to the floor of the bell tower. A wall of blue flame rolled over them through the window, blast-furnace hot.\n\nGray held her tight, shielding her with his own body.\n\nBut the flames quickly dissipated in the gusty winds.\n\nGray rolled aside as Rachel elbowed up. She stared back toward the south tower. The spire was aflame. Spats of fire licked and roiled from the four windows. The bell clanged within the conflagration.\n\nGray joined her. He hauled in the rope. The knot on the far side had burned away, severing the bridge. Across the gap, the window bars glowed a fiery red.\n\n\"Incendiary device,\" he said.\n\nThe flames rippled in the strong winds, like a candle in the night. A final memorial to those killed, both last night and tonight. Rachel pictured the rakish smile of her uncle. Dead. Grief welled through her\u2026along with something hotter and sharper. She stumbled back, but Gray caught her.\n\nPolice sirens wailed across the city, echoing up to them.\n\n\"We must go,\" he said.\n\nShe nodded.\n\n\"They'll think us dead. Let's keep it that way.\"\n\nShe allowed herself to be led to the stairwell. They hurried down, winding around and around. Sirens grew even louder\u2014but closer, an engine coughed to life, revving gutturally, followed by a second.\n\nGray checked the window. \"They're fleeing.\"\n\nRachel stared out. Three stories below, a pair of black vans pulled away, racing across the pedestrian square.\n\n\"C'mon,\" Gray said. \"I have a bad feeling about this.\"\n\nHe hurried down, skipping steps. Rachel rushed after him, trusting his instinct.\n\nThey hit the foyer at a dead run. One of the doors to the nave had been left ajar. Rachel glanced into the church\u2014toward where her uncle had been killed. But something drew her eye, closer, on the floor, draped down the center aisle.\n\nSilver barbells.\n\nA dozen or more. Daisy-chained with red wires.\n\n\"Run!\" she yelled, turning on a heel.\n\nTogether they hit the main doors and flew into the square.\n\nWithout a word, they fled toward the only shelter. The panel truck of the German Polizei sat on the square. They dove behind it just as the devices exploded.\n\nIt sounded like fireworks going off, one after the other, in succession.\n\nA shatter of glass accompanied, loud enough to be heard above the popping explosions. Rachel glanced up. The giant Bavarian stained-glass window above the main door, dating from the Middle Ages, blew out in a brilliant cascade of fire and jeweled glass.\n\nShe tucked tight to the truck as the shower of glass pelted the square all around them in a rain of death.\n\nSomething hit the far side of the truck with a resounding crash. Rachel bent and stared past the wheels. On the far side, one of the massive wooden doors of the cathedral lay on the street, aflame.\n\nThen a new noise intruded. Surprised voices. Muffled. Coming from inside the truck. Rachel glanced to Gray. He suddenly had a knife in hand, making it appear as if by magic.\n\nThey circled around the back of the van.\n\nBefore they could touch the handle, the door popped open.\n\nRachel stared in disbelief as Gray's stocky team member stumbled out. He was followed by his female partner, bearing a longsword in hand. And lastly by a familiar, welcome figure.\n\n\"Uncle Vigor!\" Rachel clasped him in a bear hug.\n\nHe returned her embrace. \"Why is it,\" he asked, \"that everyone seems determined to blow me up?\"\n\n[ 4:45 A.M. ]\n\nAn hour later, Gray paced the hotel room, still edgy, nerves stretched thin. They had taken up the room here using false identification, determining it was best to get off the streets as soon as possible. Hotel Cristall on Ursulaplatz was located less than half a mile from the cathedral, a small boutique establishment with an oddly Scandinavian d\u00e9cor of primary colors.\n\nThey had gone to ground here to regroup, establish a plan of action.\n\nBut first they needed more intel.\n\nA key scuffled in the door lock. Gray placed a palm on his pistol. He wasn't taking any chances. But it was only Monsignor Verona returning from a scouting expedition.\n\nVigor pushed into the room. His expression had gone very grim.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The boy's dead,\" the monsignor said.\n\nThe others gathered closer.\n\nVigor explained, \"Jason Pendleton. The boy who survived from the massacre. It's just been reported on the BBC. He was killed in his hospital room. Cause of death is still unknown, but foul play is highly suspected. Especially coinciding with the firebombing of the cathedral.\"\n\nRachel shook her head sadly.\n\nEarlier, Gray had been relieved to find everyone alive, only bruised and shaken. He had failed to consider the survivor of the first massacre. But it made a certain horrible sense. The cathedral attack had obviously been a whitewash operation, to erase any residual trail. And of course, that would include silencing the only witness.\n\n\"Did you learn anything else?\" Gray asked.\n\nHe had sent the monsignor down to the lounge after they had checked into the hotel, to investigate the state of affairs at the cathedral. The monsignor was best suited. He spoke the language fluently, and his clerical collar would place him above suspicion.\n\nEven now, Klaxons and sirens wailed across the city. Out the window, they had a view of Cathedral Hill. A bevy of fire engines and other emergency vehicles gathered there, flashing their blues and reds. Smoke clouded the night sky. The streets were crowded with spectators and news vans.\n\n\"I learned nothing more than we already know,\" Vigor said. \"The fire is still raging inside the church. It hasn't spread. I saw an interview with one of the priests from the rectory. No one was harmed. But they're reporting concern about the whereabouts of myself and my niece.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Gray said, earning a glance from Rachel. \"As I said before, they think we were eliminated for the moment. We should maintain that ruse for as long as possible. As long as they don't know we're alive, they'll be less likely to be looking over their shoulders.\"\n\n\"And less likely to be gunning for us,\" Monk said. \"I especially like that part.\"\n\nKat was working on a laptop wired to a digital camera. \"The photos are uploading now,\" she said.\n\nGray stood and stepped to the desk. Monk and the others had sought not only a hiding place in the van after their escape, but also a vantage to get some photographs of the assailants. Gray was impressed with their resourcefulness.\n\nBlack-and-white thumbnail images filled the screen.\n\n\"There,\" Rachel said, pointing to one. \"That's the guy who grabbed me.\"\n\n\"The leader of the group,\" Gray said.\n\nKat double-clicked the image and brought up a full-scale photo. He was frozen in mid-stride as he exited the cathedral. He had dark hair, cut long, almost to the shoulder. No facial hair. Aquiline features. Rocky and expressionless. Even in the photo, he gave off an air of superiority.\n\n\"Look at that smug bastard,\" Monk said. \"The cat who ate the canary.\"\n\n\"Does anyone recognize him?\" Gray asked.\n\nHeads shook.\n\n\"I can uplink it to Sigma's facial-recognition software,\" Kat said.\n\n\"Not yet,\" Gray said. He answered her frown. \"We need to stay incommunicado.\"\n\nHe glanced around the room. While normally he preferred to operate on his own, free from Big Brother watching over his shoulder, he could no longer play lone wolf. He had a team now, a responsibility beyond his own skin. His eyes found Vigor and Rachel. And it wasn't even just his own team any longer. They were all looking to him. He suddenly felt overwhelmed. He desired nothing more than to check in with Sigma, consult with Director Crowe, pawn off his responsibility.\n\nBut he couldn't\u2026at least not yet.\n\nGray gathered his thoughts and his resolve. He cleared his throat. \"Someone knew we were alone in the cathedral. Either they were already spying on the church or they had prior intel.\"\n\n\"A leak,\" Vigor said, rubbing the beard under his lower lip.\n\n\"Possibly. But I can't say for sure where it might have originated.\" Gray glanced to Vigor. \"From our end or yours.\"\n\nVigor sighed and nodded. \"I fear we may be to blame. The Dragon Court has always claimed members inside the Vatican. And with the ambush here following on the heels of the attacks against Rachel and myself, I can't help but think the problem may lie at the Holy See itself.\"\n\n\"Not necessarily,\" Gray answered. He turned back to the laptop and pointed to another thumbnail picture. \"Bring that one up.\"\n\nKat double-clicked. An image of a slender woman climbing into the back of one of the two vans swelled across the monitor. Her face was only in silhouette.\n\nGray glanced to the others. \"Anyone know her?\"\n\nMore shakes.\n\nMonk leaned closer. \"But I wouldn't mind knowing her.\"\n\n\"This is the woman who attacked me at Fort Detrick.\"\n\nMonk backed away, suddenly finding the woman less appealing. \"The Guild operative?\"\n\nVigor and Rachel wore confused expressions. Gray didn't have time to go into the full history of the Guild, but he gave a brief overview of the organization: its terrorist-cell structure, its ties to Russian mafiya, and its interest in new technologies.\n\nOnce he was finished, Kat asked, \"So you think the problem might be at our end?\"\n\n\"After Fort Detrick\u2026?\" Gray frowned. \"Who can tell where the security leak lies? But the fact that the Guild is here, operating alongside the Dragon Court, I can't help but think that they've been drawn in because of our involvement. But I think they're as late to the game as we are.\"\n\n\"Why do you say that?\" Rachel asked.\n\nGray pointed at the screen. \"The Dragon Lady let me escape.\"\n\nStunned silence followed.\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Monk asked.\n\n\"Damn sure.\" Gray rubbed his bruised upper arm where she had shot him as he fled.\n\n\"Why would she do that?\" Rachel asked.\n\n\"Because she's playing the Dragon Court. Like I said, I think the only reason the Guild has been called into this venture is because Sigma became involved. The Court wanted the Guild's assistance to capture or eliminate us.\"\n\nKat nodded. \"And if we were dead, then the Guild would no longer be needed. The partnership would end, and the Guild would never find out what the Dragon Court knows.\"\n\n\"But now the Court thinks we were killed,\" Rachel said.\n\n\"Exactly. And that's another reason to keep that ruse going for as long as possible. If we're dead, the Court will sever its ties with the Guild.\"\n\n\"One less opponent,\" Monk said.\n\nGray nodded.\n\n\"What do we do next?\" Kat asked.\n\nThat was a mystery. They had no leads\u2026except one. Gray glanced over to his pack. \"The powder we recovered from the reliquary. It must hold a key to all this. But I don't know what lock it fits. And if we can't send it to Sigma to test\u2026\"\n\nVigor spoke up. \"I think you're right. The answer lies in the powder. But a better question than 'What is it\u2014'\"\n\nThe monsignor suddenly halted, his eyes narrowed. He placed a hand on his forehead. \"What is it\u2026\" he mumbled under his breath.\n\n\"Uncle?\" Rachel asked with concern.\n\n\"Something\u2026it's right at the corner of my brain.\"\n\nGray remembered a similar expression of intense internal concentration when the monsignor had quoted a verse from the Book of Revelations.\n\nThe priest balled a fist. \"I can't put it together. Like trying to catch a soap bubble in your palm.\" He shook his head. \"Maybe I'm too tired.\"\n\nGray sensed the man was being truthful\u2026for the most part. But he was holding something back, something triggered by the words what is it. For a flicker, Gray saw fear shine behind the confusion.\n\n\"So, what's the better question?\" Monk asked, returning to the original train of thought. \"You started to say something about a better question than what the powder might be.\"\n\nVigor nodded, focusing back. \"Right. Maybe we should be asking how the powder got there. Once every few years, the bones are carefully taken from the reliquary and the sarcophagus is cleaned. I'm sure they dusted and wiped out the interior.\"\n\nKat sat straighter. \"Before the attack, we were wondering if the device somehow altered the gold of the sarcophagus, transmuted the lining into the white powder.\"\n\n\"That's how it got there?\" Rachel asked.\n\n\"Could be,\" Monk said. \"Remember the magnetized cross back at the church. Something weird happened in there, and it affected metals. So why not gold, too?\"\n\nGray wished he had had more time to collect samples, to perform more tests. But with the cathedral firebombed\u2014\n\n\"No,\" Kat said, sighing in exasperation. \"Remember. The powder was not just gold. We also spotted other elements. Maybe platinum or something else in that transitional group of metals that can also disaggregate into m-state powdery form.\"\n\nGray slowly nodded, remembering the silvery inclusions in the molten gold.\n\n\"I don't think the powder came from the sarcophagus case,\" Kat said.\n\nMonk frowned. \"But if it's not coming from the gold in the case and if the box is Windexed every couple of years\u2026then where else could it be coming from?\"\n\nGray's eyes widened with understanding. He understood Kat's consternation. \"It came from the bones.\"\n\n\"There is no other explanation,\" Kat agreed.\n\nMonk balked, shaking his head. \"That's easy to say. We have no bones to test your hypothesis. They have them all.\"\n\nRachel and Vigor exchanged a sudden glance.\n\n\"What?\" Gray asked.\n\nRachel met his gaze. He read the excitement in her expression. \"They don't have all the bones.\"\n\nGray's brow furrowed. \"Where\u2014?\"\n\nVigor answered. \"In Milan.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "DOUBTING THOMAS",
                "text": "[ JULY 25, 10:14 A.M. ]\n\n[ LAKE COMO, ITALY ]\n\nGray and the others fell out of the rented Mercedes E55 sedan and stumbled onto the pedestrian plaza of the lakeside town of Como. Morning strollers and window-shoppers dotted the cobblestone square that led down to a promenade bordering the still blue waters.\n\nKat yawned and stretched, a cat slowly waking. She checked her watch. \"Three countries in four hours.\"\n\nThey had driven all night. Across Germany to Switzerland, then over the Alps into Italy. They had traveled by car, rather than by train or plane, to maintain their anonymity, passing borders with false identification. They did not want to alert anyone that their group had survived the attack in Cologne.\n\nGray planned on contacting Sigma command after they had secured the bones from the basilica in Milan and had reached the Vatican. Once ensconced in Rome, they would regroup and strategize with their respective superiors. Despite the risk of a leak, Gray needed to debrief Washington on the events in Cologne, to reevaluate the mission's parameters.\n\nIn the meantime, the plan was to rotate drivers while en route from Cologne to Milan, to let everyone get a bit of shut-eye. It hadn't worked out that way.\n\nOut of the car, Monk stood at the edge of the plaza, bent over, hands on his knees, slightly green in the face.\n\n\"It's her driving,\" Vigor said, patting Monk on the back. \"She goes a bit fast.\"\n\n\"I've been on fighter planes, doing goddamn loopty-loops,\" he grumbled. \"This\u2026this was worse.\"\n\nRachel climbed out of the driver's seat and closed the door to the rental car. She had driven the entire way at breakneck speed, flying down the German Autobahn and taking the hairpin turns of the Alpine roads at physics-defying velocities.\n\nShe pushed her blue-tinted sunglasses to her forehead. \"You just need some breakfast,\" she assured Monk. \"I know a nice bistro along the Piazza Cavour.\"\n\nDespite some reservations, Gray had agreed to stop for food. They needed gas, and the place was remote. And with the attack only six hours old, confusion still reigned back in Cologne. By the time it was known that their bodies were not among the dead at the cathedral, they would be in Rome. In a few more hours, the necessity for maintaining the ruse of their deaths would be over.\n\nIn the meantime, they were all road-weary and famished.\n\nRachel led the way across the plaza toward the banks of the lake. Gray followed her with his eyes. Despite the overnight drive, she moved with no sign of fatigue. If anything, she seemed enlivened by her Alpine racing, like it was her form of yoga. The haunted look in her eye from the night of terror had faded with each passing mile.\n\nHe found himself both relieved at her resilience and somewhat disappointed. He remembered her hand squeezing his as they ran. The worry in her eyes as she straddled the ledge of the cathedral's tower. The way her eyes fixed on him at that moment, trusting him, needing him.\n\nThat woman was gone.\n\nAhead, the view opened up, drawing his eye. The lake was a blue jewel set within the rugged green peaks of the lower Alps. A few of the mountains were still tipped with snow, reflected in the placid waters.\n\n\"Lago di Como,\" Vigor said, striding beside Gray. \"Virgil once described this as the world's greatest lake.\"\n\nThey reached a gardened promenade. The path was fringed with sprawls of camellias, azaleas, rhododendrons, and magnolias. The cobbled walkway continued along the edge of the lake, lined by chestnut trees, Italian cypresses, and white-barked laurels. Out in the waters, tiny sailboats skimmed along with the mild morning breezes. Up in the green hills, clusters of homes perched precariously atop cliff faces, shaded in hues of cream, gold, and terra-cotta red.\n\nGray noted the beauty and fresh air seemed to be reviving Monk, or at least the solid footing was. Kat's eyes also took in the sights.\n\n\"Ristorante Imbarcadero,\" Rachel said, pointing across the piazza.\n\n\"A drive-through restaurant would've been fine,\" Gray said, checking his watch.\n\n\"Maybe for you,\" Monk said dourly.\n\nVigor stepped next to him. \"We made good time. We'll reach Milan in another hour.\"\n\n\"But the bones\u2014\"\n\nVigor silenced him with a frown. \"Commander, the Vatican is well aware of the risk to the relics in the Basilica of Sant'Eustorgio. I was already under orders to stop in Milan to collect them on my way back to Rome. In the meantime, the Vatican has secured the bones in the basilica's safe, the church has been locked down, and the local police have been alerted.\"\n\n\"That won't necessarily stop the Dragon Court,\" Gray said, picturing the devastation in Cologne.\n\n\"I doubt they'd strike in full daylight. The group skulks in shadows and darkness. And we'll be in Milan before noon.\"\n\nKat added, \"It won't delay us much to place a take-out order and be back on the road.\"\n\nThough far from satisfied, Gray conceded the point. The group needed to refuel as much as their automobile.\n\nReaching the restaurant, Rachel opened a gate to a bougainvillea-adorned terrace overlooking the lake. \"The Imbarcadero serves the best local dishes. You should try the risotto con pesce persico.\"\n\n\"Golden perch with risotto,\" Vigor translated. \"It is wonderful here. The fillets are rolled in flour and sage, shallow fried, and served crisp on a thick bed of risotto, soaking in butter.\"\n\nRachel guided them to a table.\n\nSomewhat mollified, Gray allowed himself to appreciate Rachel's enthusiasm. She spoke rapidly in Italian to an older man in an apron who came out to greet them. She smiled easily, making small talk. They hugged afterward.\n\nRachel turned back and waved to the seats. \"If you want something lighter, try the courgette flowers stuffed with bread and boraggine. But definitely have a small plate of agnolotti.\"\n\nVigor nodded. \"A ravioli with aubergine and bufala mozzarella.\" He kissed his fingertips in appreciation.\n\n\"So I take it you've eaten here a few times,\" Monk said, dropping heavily into a seat. He eyed Gray.\n\nSo much for anonymity.\n\nVigor patted Monk's shoulder. \"The owners are friends of our family, going back three generations. Rest assured, they know how to be discreet.\" He waved to a rotund server. \"Ciao, Mario! Bianco Secco di Montecchia, per favore!\"\n\n\"Right away, Padre! I also have a nice Chiaretto from Bellagio. Came by ferry last night.\"\n\n\"Perfetto! A bottle of each then while we wait!\"\n\n\"Antipasti?\"\n\n\"Of course, Mario. We are not barbarians.\"\n\nTheir order was placed with much bravado and laughter: salmon salad with apple vinegar, barley stew, breaded veal, tagliatelle pasta with whitefish, something called pappardelle.\n\nMario brought out a platter as large as the table, piled with olives and an assortment of antipasti\u2026along with two bottles of wine, one red, one white.\n\n\"Buon appetito!\" he said loudly.\n\nIt seemed Italians made a feast out of every meal\u2014even take-out orders. Wine flowed. Glasses lifted. Bits of salami and cheese were passed around.\n\n\"Salute, Mario!\" Rachel cheered as they finished the platter.\n\nMonk leaned back, attempted to stifle a belch and failed. \"That alone overfilled the tank.\"\n\nKat had eaten just as much, but she was now studying the dessert menu with the same intensity with which she had read the mission dossier.\n\n\"Signorina?\" Mario asked, noting her interest.\n\nShe pointed to the menu. \"Macedonia con panna.\"\n\nMonk groaned.\n\n\"It's only fruit salad with cream.\" She glanced at the others, eyes wide. \"It's light.\"\n\nGray sat back. He didn't suppress the bravado. He sensed they all needed this momentary respite. Once under way, the day would be a blur. They'd blow into Milan, grab the relic bones, and then take one of the hourly high-speed trains into Rome, getting there before nightfall.\n\nGray had also used the time to study Vigor Verona. Despite the festivities, the monsignor seemed lost to his own thoughts again. Gray could see the gears churning in the man's head.\n\nVigor suddenly focused on him, matched his gaze. He pushed back from the table. \"Commander Pierce, while we're waiting on the kitchen, I wonder if I might have a private word. Perhaps we could stretch our legs on the promenade.\"\n\nGray settled his glass and stood. The others glanced to them curiously, but Gray nodded for them to remain there.\n\nVigor led the way off the terrace and onto the main promenade that bordered the lake. \"There's something I'd like to discuss with you and perhaps get your opinion.\"\n\n\"Certainly.\"\n\nThey walked down a block, and Vigor stepped to a stone railing that abutted an empty dock. They had privacy here.\n\nVigor kept his view on the lake, tapping one fist on the railing. \"I understand that the Vatican's role in all of this is centered on the theft of the relics. And once we return to Rome, I suspect you plan on cutting ties and pursuing the Dragon Court on your own.\"\n\nGray considered vacillating, but the man deserved an honest answer. He could not risk further endangering this man and his niece. \"I think it's best,\" he said. \"And I'm sure both our superiors will agree.\"\n\n\"But I don't.\" A bit of heat entered his words.\n\nGray frowned.\n\n\"If you're right about the bones being the source for the strange amalgam powder, then I believe our roles here are more deeply entwined than either organization suspected.\"\n\n\"I don't see how.\"\n\nVigor glanced to him again with that focused intensity that seemed to be a Verona family trait. \"Then let me convince you. First, we know the Dragon Court is an aristocratic society involved in the search for secret or lost knowledge. They've concentrated on ancient Gnostic texts and other arcana.\"\n\n\"Mystical mumbo jumbo.\"\n\nVigor turned to him, cocking his head. \"Commander Pierce, I believe you yourself have undergone a study of alternate faiths and philosophies. From Taoism to some of the Hindi cults.\"\n\nGray flushed. It was easy to forget that the monsignor was an experienced field operative for the Vatican intelligenza. Clearly a dossier had been gathered on him.\n\n\"To seek spiritual truth is never wrong,\" the monsignor continued. \"No matter the path. In fact, the definition of gnosis is 'to seek truth, to find God.' I can't even fault the Dragon Court in this pursuit. Gnosticism has been a part of the Catholic Church since its inception. Even predates it.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" Gray said, unable to keep a trace of irritation out of his voice. \"What does any of this have to do with the massacre at Cologne?\"\n\nThe monsignor sighed. \"In some ways, the attack today could be traced back to a conflict between two apostles. Thomas and John.\"\n\nGray shook his head. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"In the beginning, Christianity was an outlaw religion. An upstart faith like none other in its time. Unlike other religions that collected dues as a required part of their faith, the young Christian family contributed money voluntarily. The funds went to feed and house orphans, bought food and medicine for the sick, paid for coffins for the poor. Such support of the downtrodden attracted large numbers of people, despite the risks of belonging to an outlawed faith.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know. Christian good works and all that. Still, what does\u2014\"\n\nGray was cut off by a raised palm. \"If you'll let me continue, you might learn something.\"\n\nGray bridled but kept silent. Besides being a Vatican spy, Vigor was also a university professor. He plainly didn't like his lectures being interrupted.\n\n\"In the early years of the church, secrecy remained paramount, requiring surreptitious meetings in caves and crypts. This led to different groups being cut off from one another. First by distance, with major sects in Alexandria, Antioch, Carthage, and Rome. Then, with such isolation, individual practices began to diverge, along with differing philosophies. Gospels were popping up everywhere. The ones collected in the Bible: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But also others. The Secret Gospel of James, of Mary Magdalene, of Philip. The Gospel of Truth. The Apocalypse of Peter. And many others. With all these gospels, different sects began to develop around them. The young church began to splinter.\"\n\nGray nodded. He had attended the Jesuit high school where his mother had taught. He knew some of this history.\n\n\"But in the second century,\" Vigor continued, \"the bishop of Lyons, Saint Irenaeus, wrote five volumes under the title Adversus Haereses. Against Heresies. Its full title was The Destruction and Overthrow of Falsely So-called Knowledge. It was the moment where all early Gnostic beliefs were sifted out of the Christian religion, creating the fourfold Gospel canon, limiting the Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. All others were deemed heretical. To paraphrase Irenaeus, just as there are four regions of the universe, and four principal winds, the church needed only four pillars.\"\n\n\"But why pick those four gospels out of all the others?\"\n\n\"Why indeed? Therein lies my concern.\"\n\nGray found his attention focused more fully. Despite his irritation at being lectured, he was curious where all this was leading.\n\nVigor stared out across the lake. \"Three of the Gospels\u2014Matthew, Mark, and Luke\u2014all tell the same story. But the Gospel of John relates a very different history, even events in Christ's life don't match the chronology in the others. But there was a more fundamental reason why John was included in the standardized Bible.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because of his fellow apostle, Thomas.\"\n\n\"As in Doubting Thomas?\" Gray was well versed on the story of the one apostle who refused to believe Christ had resurrected, not until he could see it with his own eyes.\n\nVigor nodded. \"But did you know that only the Gospel of John tells the story of Doubting Thomas? Only John portrays Thomas as this dull-witted and faithless disciple. The other Gospels revere Thomas. Do you know why John tells this disparaging account?\"\n\nGray shook his head. In all his years as a Roman Catholic, he had never noticed this imbalance in viewpoint.\n\n\"John sought to discredit Thomas, or more specifically, the followers of Thomas, who were numerous at that time. Even today you can still find a strong following of Thomas Christians in India. But in the early church, there was a fundamental schism between the gospels of Thomas and John. They were so different that only one gospel could survive.\"\n\n\"What do you mean? How different could they be?\"\n\n\"It goes back to the very beginning of the Bible, to Genesis, to the opening line. 'Let there be light.' Both John and Thomas identify Jesus with this primordial light, the light of creation. But from there, their interpretations widely diverge. According to Thomas, the light not only brought the universe into being but still exists within all things, especially within mankind, who was made in the image of God, and that the light is hidden within each person, only waiting to be found.\"\n\n\"And what about John?\"\n\n\"Now, John took a totally different view of matters. Like Thomas, he believed the primordial light was embodied by Christ, but John declared that only Christ held this light. The rest of the world remained forever in darkness, including mankind. And that the path back to this light, back to salvation and God, could only be found through the worship of the divine Christ.\"\n\n\"A much narrower view.\"\n\n\"And more pragmatic for the young church. John offered a more orthodox method for salvation, of coming into the light. Only through the worship of Christ. It was this simplicity and directness that appealed to the church leaders during this chaotic time. Contrarily Thomas suggested everyone had an innate ability to find God, by looking within, requiring no worship.\"\n\n\"And that had to be squashed out.\"\n\nA shrug.\n\n\"But which is right?\"\n\nVigor grinned. \"Who knows? I don't have all the answers. As Jesus said, 'Seek and you shall find.'\"\n\nGray pinched his brows. That line sounded pretty Gnostic to him. He glanced out to the lake, watching the sailboats scud past. Light shone brilliantly off the waters. Seek and you shall find. Had that been the path he had been on himself by studying so many philosophies? If so, he had come to no satisfactory answers.\n\nAnd speaking of unsatisfactory answers\u2026\n\nGray turned back to Vigor, realizing how far off track they had gotten. \"What does all this have to do with the massacre in Cologne?\"\n\n\"Let me tell you.\" He held up one finger. \"First, I think this attack harkens back to the age-old conflict between John's orthodox faith and Thomas's ancient Gnostic tradition.\"\n\n\"With the Catholic Church on one side and the Dragon Court on the other?\"\n\n\"No, that's just it. I've been pondering this all night. The Dragon Court, while it seeks knowledge through Gnostic mysteries, does not ultimately seek God, only power. They want a new world order, a return to feudalism, with themselves at the helm, confident that they are genetically superior to lead mankind. So no, I don't think the Dragon Court represents the Gnostic side of this ancient conflict. I think they are perverters of it, power-hungry scavengers. But they definitely have roots back to that tradition.\"\n\nGray grudgingly conceded the point, but he was far from swayed.\n\nVigor must have sensed this. He lifted a second finger. \"Point two. In the Gospel of Thomas, there's a story that tells of how Jesus pulled Thomas aside one day and told him three things in secret. When the other apostles asked him what was told to him, he answered, 'If I tell you even one of the things, you will pick up stones and throw them at me; and a fire will come out of the stones and burn you up.'\"\n\nVigor stared at Gray, waiting, as if it were a test.\n\nGray was up for it. \"A fire from stones that burns. Like what happened to the parishioners at the church.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I've thought of that quote since I first heard of the murders.\"\n\n\"That's a pretty thin connection,\" Gray said, unconvinced.\n\n\"It might be if I didn't have a third historical point to make.\" Vigor lifted a third finger.\n\nGray felt like a lamb being led to the slaughter.\n\n\"According to historical texts,\" Vigor explained, \"Thomas went on to evangelize in the East, all the way to India. He baptized thousands of people, built churches, spread the faith, and eventually died in India. But in that region, he was most famous for one act, one act of baptism.\"\n\nGray waited.\n\nVigor concluded with great emphasis. \"Thomas baptized the Three Magi.\"\n\nGray's eyes widened. His mind whirled with the threads here: Saint Thomas and his Gnostic tradition, secrets whispered by Christ, deadly fire cast from stones, and all of it tied back to the Magi again. Did the connection extend further? He pictured the photographs of the dead in Germany. The wracked bodies. And the coroner's report of the liquefaction of the outer layers of the victims' brains. He also remembered the smell of seared flesh in the cathedral.\n\nSomehow the bones were tied to those deaths.\n\nBut how?\n\nIf there was a historical trail leading to any clues, it was beyond his scope of experience and knowledge to follow. He recognized this and faced the monsignor.\n\nVigor spoke, confident of his argument. \"As I said from the start, I think there is more to the deaths at the cathedral than technology. I think whatever happened is entwined intimately with the Catholic Church, its early history, and possibly even before its founding. And I am certain I can be a continuing asset to this investigation.\"\n\nGray bowed his head in thought, slowly won over.\n\n\"But not my niece,\" Vigor finished, revealing at last why he had pulled Gray aside. He held out his hand. \"Once we return to Rome, I will send her back to the Carabinieri. I will not risk her again.\"\n\nGray reached out and shook the monsignor's hand.\n\nFinally something the two of them could agree on.\n\n[ 10:45 A.M. ]\n\nRachel heard a step behind her, expecting it to be Mario returning with their order. Glancing up, she almost fell out of her seat as she gazed at the elderly woman who stood there, leaning on a cane, dressed in navy slacks and a blue summer frock with a daffodil pattern. Her white hair was curled, her eyes flashing in amusement.\n\nMario stood behind the visitor, a broad smile on his face. \"Surprise, no?\"\n\nRachel gained her feet as Gray's two partners looked on. \"Nonna? What are you doing here?\"\n\nHer grandmother patted Rachel on a cheek, speaking in Italian. \"Your crazy mother!\" She fluttered her fingers in the air. \"She goes off to see you in Rome. Leaves me alone with that Signore Barbari to watch over me. Like I need such care. Besides, he always smells of cheese.\"\n\n\"Nonna\u2026\"\n\nA wave of a hand held her off. \"So I come to our villa. I took the train. And then Mario calls me to tell me that you and Viggie are here. I tell him not to tell you.\"\n\n\"It's a good surprise, no?\" Mario repeated, glowing proudly. He must have been biting his thumb the entire time not to say anything.\n\n\"Who are your friends?\" her nonna asked.\n\nRachel introduced them. \"This is my grandmother.\"\n\nShe shook each of their hands and switched to English. \"Call me Camilla.\" She eyed Monk up and down. \"Why do you cut off all your hair? A shame. But you have nice eyes. Are you italiano?\"\n\n\"No, Greek.\"\n\nShe nodded sagely. \"That's not too bad.\" She turned to Kat. \"Is Signor Monk your boyfriend?\"\n\nKat crinkled her brow in surprise. \"No,\" she said a tad too tartly. \"Certainly not.\"\n\n\"Hey,\" Monk interjected.\n\n\"You make a nice couple,\" Nonna Camilla declared, stating it as if it were set in stone. She turned to Mario. \"A glass of that wonderful Chiaretto, per favore, Mario.\"\n\nHe whisked off, still beaming.\n\nRachel settled to her seat and spotted Gray and her uncle returning from their private meeting. As they crossed toward her, she noted that Gray would not meet her eye. She knew why her uncle had walked off with Commander Pierce. And from the man's avoidance, she could guess the outcome.\n\nRachel suddenly had no interest in her wine.\n\nUncle Vigor noticed the additional guest at their table. Shock shattered his grim expression.\n\nThe surprise was again explained, along with further introductions.\n\nAs Gray Pierce was introduced, her grandmother glanced askance at Rachel, one eyebrow raised, before fixing her gaze on the American. She clearly liked what she saw: stubbled dark chin, storm-blue eyes, lanky black hair. Rachel knew her grandmother had a strong matchmaking streak, a genetic trait in all Italian matrons.\n\nHer grandmother leaned toward Rachel. \"I see beautiful babies,\" she whispered, her eyes still on Gray. \"Bellissimo bambini.\"\n\n\"Nonna,\" she warned.\n\nHer grandmother shrugged and raised her voice. \"Signore Pierce, are you italiano?\"\n\n\"No, I'm afraid not.\"\n\n\"Would you like to be? My granddaughter\u2014\"\n\nRachel cut her off. \"Nonna, we don't have much time.\" She made a show of checking her wristwatch. \"We have business in Milan.\"\n\nThe grandmother brightened. \"Carabinieri work. Tracking stolen art?\" She eyed Uncle Vigor. \"Something taken from a church?\"\n\n\"Something like that, Nonna. But we can't talk about an open investigation.\"\n\nHer grandmother crossed herself. \"Horrible\u2026stealing from a church. I read about the murders up in Germania. Terrible, just terrible.\" She glanced around the table, taking in the strangers. Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly, settling on Rachel.\n\nRachel noted the sharp-eyed realization in her grandmother's gaze. Despite her outward appearance, nothing slipped past her nonna. The theft of the Magi bones was all over the newspapers. And here they were traveling with a group of Americans, near the border of Switzerland, heading back into Italy. Had her nonna guessed their real purpose?\n\n\"Terrible,\" her grandmother repeated.\n\nA server arrived laden with two heavy bags of food. A loaf of bread poked from each like a pair of baguette masts. Monk rose to accept the burden with a broad smile.\n\nUncle Vigor spoke, leaning forward to kiss both her cheeks. \"Momma, we'll see you back home in Gandolfo in a couple of days. Once this business is finished.\"\n\nAs Gray stepped past, Nonna Camilla took his hand and pulled him down closer. \"You watch after my granddaughter.\"\n\nGray looked up to Rachel. \"I will, but she takes pretty good care of herself.\"\n\nRachel felt a sudden flush of heat as his eyes met hers. Feeling ridiculous, she glanced aside. She wasn't a schoolgirl. Far from it.\n\nHer nonna gave Gray a peck on the cheek. \"We Verona women always take care of ourselves. You remember that.\"\n\nGray smiled. \"I will.\"\n\nShe patted him on his backside as he stepped away. \"Ragazzo buono.\"\n\nAs the others headed out, her grandmother motioned Rachel to stay. She then reached out, turned back the corner of Rachel's open vest, and exposed the empty holster. \"You lost something, no?\"\n\nRachel had forgotten she was still wearing the empty shoulder belt. She had left her borrowed Beretta back at the cathedral. But her nonna had noticed.\n\n\"A woman should never leave the house naked.\" Her grandmother reached down and collected her purse. She opened it and pulled out the matte-black handle of her prized Nazi P-08 Luger. \"You take mine.\"\n\n\"Nonna! You shouldn't be carrying that around.\"\n\nHer grandmother dismissed her concern with a wave. \"The trains are not that safe for a woman alone. Too many Gypsies. But I think you maybe need this more than me.\"\n\nHer grandmother's gaze weighed heavily on her, making it plain she understood the danger of Rachel's mission.\n\nRachel reached out and closed her purse with a snap. \"Grazie, Nonna. But I'll be fine.\"\n\nHer grandmother shrugged. \"Terrible business up in Germania,\" she said with a significant roll of her eyes. \"Best to be careful.\"\n\n\"I will, Nonna.\" Rachel began to turn away, but her wrist was grabbed.\n\n\"He likes you,\" her grandmother said. \"Signore Pierce.\"\n\n\"Nonna.\"\n\n\"You would make bellissimo bambini.\"\n\nRachel sighed. Even with danger threatening, her grandmother knew how to stay focused. Babies. The true treasures of nonne everywhere.\n\nShe was saved by Mario arriving with the bill. She stepped aside and paid it in cash, leaving enough to cover her nonna's lunch. She then gathered up her things, kissed her grandmother, and headed out to the piazza to join the others.\n\nBut she carried her grandmother's spirit with her. Verona women certainly did know how to take care of themselves. She met her uncle and the others at the car. She fixed Gray with her best poisonous stare. \"If you think you're going to kick me off this investigation, you can walk to Rome.\"\n\nKeys in hand, she rounded the Mercedes, satisfied by the surprised look on the man's face as he glanced back to Uncle Vigor.\n\nShe had been ambushed, shot at, and firebombed. She wasn't about to be left at the side of the road.\n\nShe pulled her door open, but she kept the other doors locked. \"And that goes for you, too, Uncle Vigor.\"\n\n\"Rachel\u2026\" he tried to argue.\n\nShe slid into the driver's seat, slammed her door, and keyed the ignition.\n\n\"Rachel!\" Her uncle knocked on the window.\n\nShe shifted into gear.\n\n\"Va bene!\" her uncle yelled to her over the supercharged engine, agreeing. \"We stay together.\"\n\n\"Swear it,\" she called back, keeping her palm on the gear knob.\n\n\"Dio mio\u2026\" He rolled his eyes heavenward. \"And you wonder why I became a priest\u2026.\"\n\nShe revved her engine.\n\nUncle Vigor placed a palm on the window. \"I submit. I swear. I should never have tried to go against a Verona woman.\"\n\nRachel twisted and locked eyes on Gray. He had remained silent, his face hard. He looked ready to hotwire a car and take off on his own. Had she overplayed her hand? But she sensed she needed to make a strong stand now.\n\nSlowly Gray's blue eyes shifted with a glacial coolness to her uncle, then back to Rachel. As they faced each other, at that moment, Rachel felt how deeply she wanted to remain, down to the marrow of her bones. Maybe he understood. Gray ever so slowly nodded, a barely perceptible movement.\n\nIt was enough of a concession.\n\nShe unlocked the doors. The others climbed in.\n\nMonk was last. \"I was fine with walking.\"\n\n[ 11:05 A.M. ]\n\nFrom the backseat, Gray watched Rachel.\n\nShe had donned her blue-tinted sunglasses, which made her expression all but unreadable. Her lips, though, were pressed tightly. The muscles of her long neck remained taut as bowstrings as she glanced around for traffic. Despite the fact they had relented, she was still angry.\n\nHow had Rachel even known what had been decided between her uncle and himself? Her intuitive capacity was impressive, along with her no-nonsense approach to conflict. But he also remembered her vulnerability in the tower, her eyes meeting his across the gap between the two spires. Yet, even then, among the bullets and flames, she had not crumbled.\n\nFor a moment, he caught a glance from Rachel in the rearview mirror, her eyes shaded by her glasses. Still, he knew she was studying him. Too conscious of the scrutiny, he glanced away.\n\nHe balled a fist on a knee at his reaction.\n\nGray had never met a woman who so confounded him. He'd had girlfriends before but nothing that lasted more than six months, and even that relationship had been in high school. He'd been too hotheaded in his youth, then too devoted to his career in the military, first in the Army, then in the Rangers. He never called one place home for longer than six months, so romance was usually no more than a long weekend leave. But in all his dalliances, he had never met a woman who was as frustrating as she was intriguing: a woman who laughed easily over lunch, but who could turn hard as a polished diamond.\n\nHe leaned back as the countryside flashed past. They left behind the lake country of Northern Italy and descended the foothills of the Alps. The journey was a short one. Milan lay only a forty-minute drive away.\n\nGray knew enough about himself to understand part of his attraction to Rachel. He was never fascinated by the middle of the road, the mundane, the undecided. But neither was he a fan of extremes: the brash, the strident, the discordant. He had preferred harmony, a merging of extremes where balance was achieved but uniqueness was not lost.\n\nBasically the Taoist yin-and-yang view of the cosmos.\n\nEven his own career reflected this\u2014the scientist and the soldier. His field of disciplines sought to incorporate biology and physics. He had once described this choice to Painter Crowe. \"All chemistry, biology, mathematics boil down to the positive and the negative, the zero and the one, the light and the dark.\"\n\nGray found his attention drifting back to Rachel. Here was this same philosophy in shapely flesh.\n\nHe watched Rachel lift a hand and knead a kink from her neck. Her lips were slightly parted as she found the sweet spot and rubbed. He wondered what those lips would taste like.\n\nBefore he let this thought drift further, she whipped the Mercedes around a tight curve, throwing Gray against the door frame. She dropped her hand, downshifted, gassed the engine, and took the turn even faster.\n\nGray hung on. Monk groaned.\n\nRachel merely wore a ghost of a smile.\n\nWho wouldn't be fascinated by this woman?\n\n[ 6:07 A.M. ]\n\nWASHINGTON, D.C.\n\nEight hours and no word.\n\nPainter paced the length of his office. He had been here since ten o'clock the prior night\u2014as soon as the news reached him about the explosion at the Cologne Cathedral. Since then, information had been filtering in slowly.\n\nToo slowly.\n\nThe source of the incineration: bombs filled with black powder, white phosphorus, and the incendiary oil LA-60. It had taken three hours until the fire was contained enough to attempt entry. But the interior was a smoky, toxic shell, burned down to the stone walls and floors. Charred skeletal remains were discovered.\n\nWas it his team?\n\nAnother two hours passed until a report came in that the slag remains of weapons had been found with two of the bodies. Unidentified assault rifles. No such weapons had been deployed with his team. So at least some of the bodies had been unknown assailants.\n\nBut what about the others?\n\nSatellite surveillance out of NRO proved useless. No eyes in the skies had been sampling the area at that hour. On the ground, business and municipal cameras in the vicinity were still being canvassed. Eyewitnesses were few. One homeless man, sleeping near Cathedral Hill, reported seeing a handful of people fleeing the burning cathedral. But his blood alcohol level was over .15. Stumbling drunk.\n\nAll else was quiet. The safe house in Cologne hadn't been breeched. And so far, not a word from the field.\n\nNothing.\n\nPainter could not help but fear the worst.\n\nA knock at his half-open door interrupted him.\n\nHe turned and waved Logan Gregory into the office. His second-in-command had reams of paper tucked under his arm and dark circles under his eyes. Logan had refused to go home, sticking at his side all night long.\n\nPainter looked on expectantly, hoping for a good word.\n\nLogan shook his head. \"Still no hits on their aliases.\" They had been checking hourly at airports, train stations, and bus lines.\n\n\"Border crossings?\"\n\n\"Nothing. But the EU is pretty much an open sieve. They could have crossed out of Germany any number of ways.\"\n\n\"And the Vatican still hasn't heard anything?\"\n\nAnother shake of his head. \"I spoke to Cardinal Spera just ten minutes ago.\"\n\nA chime sounded from his computer. He strode around his desk and tabbed the key to initiate the video-conferencing feature. He faced the plasma screen hanging on the left wall. A pixilating image appeared of his boss, the head of DARPA.\n\nDr. Sean McKnight was at his office in Arlington. He had abandoned his usual suit jacket and had the cuffs on his shirt rolled up. No tie. He ran a hand through his graying red hair, a familiar tired gesture.\n\n\"I got your request,\" his boss started.\n\nPainter straightened from where he had been leaning on his desk. Logan had retreated to the door, staying out of camera view. He made a move to step out, to offer privacy, but Painter motioned him to stay. His request wasn't a matter of security.\n\nSean shook his head. \"I can't grant it.\"\n\nPainter frowned. He had asked for an emergency pass to go to the site himself. To be on hand in Germany during the investigation. There might be clues others missed. His fingers curled into a fist in frustration.\n\n\"Logan can oversee things here,\" Painter argued. \"I can be in constant communication with command.\"\n\nSean's demeanor hardened. \"Painter, you are command now.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"You're no longer a field operative.\"\n\nThe pain must have been evident in his expression.\n\nSean sighed. \"Do you know how many times I've sat in my office waiting to hear from you? How about your last operation in Oman? I thought you were dead.\"\n\nPainter glanced down to his desk. Binders and papers were piled everywhere. There was no relief to be found among them. He had never suspected how agonizing this job had been for his boss. Painter shook his head.\n\n\"There is only one way of handling matters like this,\" his boss said. \"And believe me, they'll happen on a regular basis.\"\n\nPainter faced the screen. An ache had settled behind his breastbone, throbbing and hot.\n\n\"You have to trust your agents. You put them into the field, but once they're let loose, you have to have confidence. You picked the team leader for this op and his support. Do you trust they are capable of handling a hostile situation?\"\n\nPainter pictured Grayson Pierce, Monk Kokkalis, and Kat Bryant. They were some of the best and brightest in the force. If anyone could survive\u2026\n\nPainter slowly nodded. He did trust them.\n\n\"Then let them run their game. Like I did you. A horse runs best with only the lightest touch of the reins.\" Sean leaned forward. \"All you can do now is wait for them to contact you. That is your responsibility to them. To be ready to respond. Not to run off to Germany.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" he said, but it didn't offer much solace. The ache continued inside his rib cage.\n\n\"Did you get that package I sent you last week?\"\n\nPainter glanced up, a half-smile forming. He had gotten a care package from his director. A crate of Tums antacids. He had thought it was a gag gift, but now he wasn't so sure.\n\nSean settled back into his chair. \"That's all the relief you'll ever get in this business.\"\n\nPainter recognized the truth in his mentor's words. Here was the true burden of leadership.\n\n\"It was easier in the field,\" he finally mumbled.\n\n\"Not always,\" Sean reminded him. \"Not always by a long shot.\"\n\n[ 12:10 P.M. ]\n\n[ MILAN, ITALY ]\n\n\"Locked up tight,\" Monk said. \"Just like the monsignor said.\"\n\nGray could not argue. It all looked good. He itched to get inside, grab the bones, and head out of here.\n\nThey stood on a shaded sidewalk bordering the unassuming fa\u00e7ade of the Basilica of Saint Eustorgio, near one of the side doors. The front was humble adorned red brick; behind it rose a single clock-tower steeple, surmounted by a cross. The tiny sun-baked square was empty for the moment.\n\nA few minutes ago, a municipal patrol car had looped past, going slow, keeping watch. All seemed quiet.\n\nFollowing Kat's recommendation, they had searched the entire church's periphery from a circumspect distance. Gray had also used a set of telescoping lenses to peer discreetly through several windows. The five side chapels and central nave appeared deserted.\n\nSunlight blazed off the pavement. The day had grown hot.\n\nBut Gray still felt cold, unsure.\n\nWould he be less cautious if it were only himself?\n\n\"Let's do this,\" he said.\n\nVigor stepped to the side door and reached for the large iron knocker, a ring containing a simple cross.\n\nGray stayed his hand. \"No. We've kept our approach quiet. Let's keep it that way.\" He turned to Kat and pointed to the lock. \"Can you get it open?\"\n\nKat dropped to a knee. Monk and Gray shielded her work with their bodies. While Kat studied the lock, her fingers fished through a lockpicking kit. With the meticulous skill of a surgeon, she set to work on the door's lock.\n\n\"Commander,\" Vigor said. \"To violate a church\u2026\"\n\n\"If you were already invited entry by the Vatican, it's no violation.\"\n\nA snick of a latch ended the matter. The door opened an inch.\n\nKat gained her feet and shouldered her pack.\n\nGray waved the others back. \"Monk and I will go in alone. Scout the terrain.\" He reached to his collar and secured an earpiece in place. \"Radio up while we have a chance. Kat, stay here with Rachel and Vigor.\"\n\nGray taped on a throat mike for subvocalization.\n\nVigor stepped forward. \"Like I said before, priests are more likely to speak to someone wearing a collar. I'll go with you.\"\n\nGray hesitated\u2014but the monsignor made sense. \"Stay behind us at all times.\"\n\nKat did not protest being left holding the door, but Rachel's eyes sparked fire.\n\n\"We need someone to cover our backs if things go south,\" he explained, speaking directly to Rachel.\n\nHer lips tightened, but she nodded.\n\nSatisfied, he turned and opened the door enough to slip through. The dark foyer was cool. The doors to the nave were closed. He saw nothing amiss. The quiet of the sanctuary felt heavy, like being underwater.\n\nMonk closed the outer door and flipped his long coat aside to rest a hand on his shotgun. Vigor obeyed his instructions and shadowed Monk.\n\nGray moved to the central door of the inner nave. He pushed it open with the palm of his hand. He had his Glock in the other.\n\nThe nave was brighter than the foyer, full of natural light from the basilica's windows. Its polished marble floor reflected the illumination, appearing almost wet. The basilica was much smaller than the cathedral in Cologne. Rather than cross-shaped, it was just a single long hall, a straight nave that ended at the altar.\n\nGray froze and watched for movement. Despite the ample light, there were plenty of places for people to hide. A line of pillars supported the arched roof. Five tiny chapels jetted out from the right wall, sheltering the tombs of martyrs and saints.\n\nNothing moved. The only noise was the distant rumble of traffic, sounding as if coming from another world.\n\nGray entered and moved down the center of the nave, pistol ready.\n\nMonk stepped wide, positioning himself to keep the entire nave covered. They crossed the hall in silence. There was no sign of the church's staff.\n\n\"Perhaps they all went out for a late lunch,\" Monk subvocalized into his radio.\n\n\"Kat, can you hear me?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"Loud and clear, Commander.\"\n\nThey reached the end of the nave.\n\nVigor pointed to the right, to the chapel closest to the altar.\n\nTucked into the chapel's corner, a gigantic sarcophagus lay half in shadow. Like the reliquary in Cologne, the Shrine of the Magi here was shaped like a church, but rather than gold and jewels, the sarcophagus had been carved out of a single block of Proconnesio marble.\n\nGray led the way toward it.\n\nThe shrine stood over twelve feet tall from its base to pitched roof and stretched seven feet wide by twelve long. The only access to the interior was through a small barred window low in the front face.\n\n\"Finestra confessionis,\" Vigor whispered, pointing to the window. \"So one can observe the relics while kneeling.\"\n\nGray approached. Monk stood guard. He still didn't like this situation. He bent and peered through the small window. Behind glass, a white silk-lined chamber opened.\n\nThe bones had been removed, just as the monsignor had described. The Vatican was taking no chances. And neither would he.\n\n\"The rectory is located off the church's left side,\" Vigor said, a bit too loudly. \"That's where the offices and apartments are. It's connected through the sacristy.\" He pointed across the church.\n\nAs if responding to his signal, a door smacked open across the nave. Gray dropped to a knee. Monk yanked the monsignor behind a pillar, swinging up his shotgun.\n\nA single figure strode out, oblivious of the intruders.\n\nIt was a young man dressed in black with a clerical collar.\n\nA priest.\n\nHe was alone. He crossed and began lighting a set of candles on the far side of the altar.\n\nGray waited until the man was only two yards away. Still, no others appeared. Slowly he gained his feet, coming into view.\n\nThe priest froze when he spotted Gray, his arm half-raised in lighting another candle. His expression turned to shock when he spotted the pistol in Gray's hand. \"Chi sei?\"\n\nStill, Gray hesitated.\n\nVigor stepped out of hiding. \"Padre\u2026\"\n\nThe priest jumped, and his eyes flicked to the monsignor. He immediately noted the matching collar; confusion surpassed fear.\n\n\"I am Monsignor Verona,\" Vigor introduced, stepping forward. \"Do not be afraid.\"\n\n\"Monsignor Verona?\" Worry etched the man's features. He backed a step.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Gray asked in Italian.\n\nThe priest shook his head. \"You can't be Monsignor Verona.\"\n\nVigor stepped forward and showed him his Vatican ID.\n\nThe man glanced from it back to Vigor.\n\n\"But a\u2026a man came here early this morning, just after dawn. A tall man. Very tall. With identification as Monsignor Verona. He bore papers with proper seals from the Vatican. To take the bones.\"\n\nGray exchanged a look with the monsignor. They had already been outmaneuvered. Instead of brute force, the Dragon Court had slipped in more slyly this time. By necessity. Because of the increased security. With the real Monsignor Verona believed dead, the Court had assumed his role. Like everything else, they must have known about Vigor's side mission here to collect the relics. They had used the intelligence to slip the last bones through the intensified security here.\n\nGray shook his head. They continued to be a step behind.\n\n\"Damn it,\" Monk said.\n\nThe priest frowned at him. Clearly he understood enough English to find affront at the man's language in a house of God.\n\n\"Scusi,\" Monk responded.\n\nGray understood Monk's frustration, doubly so as mission leader. He bit back his own curse. They had moved too slowly, played too cautiously.\n\nHis radio buzzed.\n\nKat came on the line. She must have overheard enough of the conversation. \"Is it all clear, Commander?\"\n\n\"Clear\u2026and too late,\" he answered back sourly.\n\nKat and Rachel joined them. Vigor introduced the others.\n\n\"So the bones are gone,\" Rachel said.\n\nThe priest nodded. \"Monsignor Verona, if you'd like to see the paperwork, we have it in the safe in the sacristy. Maybe that would help.\"\n\n\"We could check it for fingerprints,\" Rachel said tiredly, the exhaustion finally hitting her. \"They may have been careless. Not expecting we'd be on their heels. It might flush out whoever betrayed us in the Vatican. It could be our only new lead.\"\n\nGray nodded. \"Bag it up. We'll see what we can find here.\"\n\nRachel and Monsignor Verona headed across the nave.\n\nGray turned away and strode over to the sarcophagus.\n\n\"Any ideas?\" Monk asked.\n\n\"We still have the gray powder we collected from the golden reliquary,\" he said. \"We'll regroup in the Vatican, alert everyone of what's happened, and test the powder more thoroughly.\"\n\nAs the sacristy door closed, Gray knelt down by the tiny window again, wondering if praying would help. \"We should vacuum out the interior,\" he said, struggling to remain clinical. \"See if we can confirm the presence of the amalgam powder here, too.\"\n\nHe leaned closely, cocking his head, not sure what he was looking for. But he found it anyway. A mark on the silk-lined roof of the reliquary chamber. A red seal pressed into the white silk. A tiny curled dragon. The ink looked fresh\u2026too fresh.\n\nBut it was not ink\u2026.\n\nBlood.\n\nA warning left behind by the Dragon Lady.\n\nGray straightened, suddenly knowing the truth."
            },
            {
                "title": "ROLLING THE BONES",
                "text": "[ JULY 25, 12:38 P.M. ]\n\n[ MILAN, ITALY ]\n\nOnce inside, the priest closed the door to the sacristy. It was the chamber where the clergy and altar boys robed themselves prior to Mass.\n\nRachel heard the lock click behind her.\n\nShe half turned and found a pistol leveled at her chest. Held in the hand of the priest. His eyes had gone as cold and hard as polished marble.\n\n\"Don't move,\" he said firmly.\n\nRachel backed a step. Vigor slowly raised his hands.\n\nTo either side were closets hung with clerical garments and vestments, used daily by the priests to say Mass. A table held a row of silver chalices, haphazardly arranged for the same. A large gilded silver crucifix, mounted on a wrought-iron pole, leaned against one corner, meant to lead a processional.\n\nThe door on the opposite end of the sacristy opened.\n\nA familiar bull of a man entered, filling the doorway. It was the man who attacked her in Cologne. He carried a long knife in one hand, the blade wet and bloody. He stepped into the room and used a blessed stole hanging in a closet to wipe it clean.\n\nRachel felt Vigor wince next to her.\n\nThe blood. The missing priests. Oh God\u2026\n\nThe tall man no longer wore a monk's garb, but ordinary street clothes, charcoal khakis and a black T-shirt, over which he wore a dark suit jacket. He carried a pistol in a shoulder holster beneath it and wore a radio headset over one ear, the mike at his throat.\n\n\"So you both survived Cologne,\" he said, his eyes traveling up and down Rachel's form, as if sizing up a prized calf at a country fair. \"How very fortunate. Now we can become better acquainted.\"\n\nHe tipped his throat mike up and spoke into it. \"Clear the church.\"\n\nBehind her, Rachel heard doors slam open in the nave. Gray and the others would be caught off guard. She waited for a spate of gunfire or the blast of a grenade. But all she heard was the patter of boots on marble. The church remained silent.\n\nThe same must have been noted by their captor.\n\n\"Report,\" he ordered into his mike.\n\nRachel did not hear the reply, but she knew from the darkening of his face that the news was not good.\n\nHe shoved forward, passing between Vigor and Rachel.\n\n\"Watch them,\" he growled to the fake priest. A second gunman had taken up post by the back exit to the sacristy.\n\nTheir captor yanked open the door to the nave. An armed figure strode over to him, accompanied by the Eurasian woman, holding her Sig Sauer pistol at her side.\n\n\"No one's here,\" the man reported.\n\nRachel spotted other gunmen searching the main nave and side chapels.\n\n\"All exits have been guarded.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"At all times.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nThe giant's eyes settled on the Asian woman.\n\nShe shrugged. \"They might have found an open window.\"\n\nWith a grumble, he cast a final search around the basilica, then swung around with a sweep of his suit jacket. \"Keep searching. Send three men to canvass the outside. They can't have gotten far.\"\n\nAs the giant turned, Rachel made her move.\n\nReaching behind her, she snatched the ceremonial pole with the silver crucifix and rammed its butt end square into the man's solar plexus. He grunted and fell back into the priest. She yanked the pole back, under her elbow, and slammed the cross end into the gunman's face behind her.\n\nHis pistol blasted, but the shot went wild as he fell back out the door.\n\nRachel followed him, tumbling out the back exit into a narrow hallway, her uncle on her heels. She slammed the door and propped the pole against it, jamming it against the hallway's far wall.\n\nBeside her, Uncle Vigor smashed a heel on the fallen gunman's hand. Bones cracked. He then kicked the man square in the face. His head bounced against the stone floor with a thud, then his form went slack.\n\nRachel bent down and grabbed his pistol.\n\nCrouched, she searched both ways down the windowless hall. No other men were about. The additional forces must have been placed to ambush Gray and his team. A large crash rattled the door in its frame. The Bull was trying to break through.\n\nShe dropped flat to the floor and searched beneath the jam. She watched the play of light and shadow. She aimed for darkness and fired.\n\nThe bullet sparked off the marble floor, but she heard a satisfying bellow of surprise. A little hotfoot should slow the Bull.\n\nShe rolled to her feet. Uncle Vigor had crossed down the hall a few steps.\n\n\"I hear someone groaning,\" he whispered. \"Back here.\"\n\n\"We don't have time.\"\n\nIgnoring her, Uncle Vigor continued deeper. Rachel followed. Without a frame of reference, one way was no worse than the other. They reached a door cracked open. Rachel heard a moan from inside.\n\nShe shouldered in, gun ready.\n\nThe room had once been a small dining hall. But now it was a slaughterhouse. One priest lay facedown in a pool of blood on the floor, the back of his head a pulp of brain, bone, and hair. Another black-robed figure lay sprawled on one of the tables, spread-eagled, tied to the bench legs. An older priest. His robes had been stripped to the waist. His chest was a pool of blood. His head was missing both ears. There was also the smell of burned flesh.\n\nTortured.\n\nTo death.\n\nA sobbing moan sounded to the left. On the floor, tied hand and foot, was a young man, stripped to boxer shorts, gagged. He had a black eye and blood dribbled from both nostrils. From his half-naked form, it was plain where the clerical garb for the fake priest had come from.\n\nVigor came around the table. When the man spotted him, he struggled, eyes wild, frothing around his gag.\n\nRachel held back.\n\n\"It's all right,\" Vigor soothed.\n\nThe man's eyes fixed on Vigor's collar. He stopped struggling, but he was still wracked with sobs. Vigor reached out to free the gag. The man shook and spat it out. Tears flowed down his cheeks.\n\n\"Molti\u2026grazie,\" he said, his voice weak with shock.\n\nVigor cut the plastic ties with a knife.\n\nAs he worked, Rachel locked the door to the dining room and jammed a chair under the knob for good measure. There were no windows, only a door leading deeper into the rectory. She kept her gun pointed that way and crossed to a phone on the wall. No dial tone. The phone lines had been cut.\n\nShe fished out Gray's cell phone and dialed 112, the universal EU emergency number. Once connected, she identified herself as a Carabinieri lieutenant, though she didn't give her name, and called for an immediate medical, police, and military response.\n\nWith the alarm raised, she pocketed her phone.\n\nOutgunned, it was all she could do.\n\nFor herself\u2026and for the others.\n\n[ 12:45 P.M. ]\n\nFootsteps approached Gray's hiding place. He held perfectly still, not breathing. The steps stopped nearby. He strained to listen.\n\nA man spoke. A familiar voice, angry. It was the leader of the monks. \"The Milan authorities have been alerted.\"\n\nThere was no reply, but Gray was certain two people had approached.\n\n\"Seichan?\" the man asked. \"Did you hear me?\"\n\nA bored voice answered. It was equally recognizable. The Dragon Lady. But now she had a name. Seichan.\n\n\"They must have gone out a window, Raoul,\" she said, returning the favor and naming the leader. \"Sigma is slippery. I warned you as much. We've secured the remaining bones. We should be gone before Sigma returns with reinforcements. The police may already be on the way.\"\n\n\"But that bitch\u2026\"\n\n\"You can settle matters with her later.\"\n\nThe footsteps departed. It sounded like the heavier of the two was limping. Still, the Dragon Lady's words remained with Gray.\n\nYou can settle matters with her later.\n\nDid that mean Rachel had escaped?\n\nGray was surprised at the depth of his relief.\n\nA door slammed on the far side of the church. As the sound echoed away, Gray strained his ears. He heard no more footsteps, no tread of boots, no voices.\n\nTo be cautious, he waited a full minute longer.\n\nWith the church silent, he nudged Monk, who lay spooned next to him. Kat lay scrunched on Monk's other side. They rolled with a sickening crunch of desiccated bone and reached overhead. Together they shifted the stone lid to the sepulcher.\n\nLight spilled into the tomb, their makeshift bunker.\n\nAfter spotting the Dragon Lady's warning in blood, Gray had known they'd been ensnared. All exit doors would be guarded. And with Rachel and her uncle vanished into the sacristy, there was nothing he could do to help.\n\nSo Gray had led the others into the neighboring chapel, to where a massive marble sepulcher rested on twisted Gothic columns. They had shifted its lid enough to climb inside, then pulled the lid back over them just as doors crashed open all across the church.\n\nWith the search ended, Monk climbed out, shotgun in hand, and shook his body with a disgusted grumble. Bone dust shivered from his clothes. \"Let's not do that again.\"\n\nGray kept his pistol ready.\n\nHe saw an object on the marble floor, a few steps away from where they had been hidden. A copper coin. Easy to miss. He picked it up. It was a Chinese fen, or penny.\n\n\"What is it?\" Monk asked.\n\nHe closed his fingers over it and stood, pocketing it. \"Nothing. Let's go.\"\n\nHe headed across the nave toward the sacristy, but he glanced back to the crypt. Seichan had known.\n\n[ 12:48 P.M. ]\n\nRachel kept guard as Vigor helped the priest stand.\n\n\"They\u2026they killed everyone,\" the young man said. He needed Vigor's arm to keep his feet. The man's eyes avoided the bloody figure on the table. He covered his face with one hand and groaned. \"Father Belcarro\u2026\"\n\n\"What happened?\" Vigor asked.\n\n\"They came an hour ago. They had papal seals and papers, identification. But Father Belcarro had a faxed picture.\" The priest's eyes widened. \"Of you. From the Vatican. Father Belcarro knew the lie immediately. But by that time, the monsters were already here. The phone lines were severed. We were locked inside, cut off. They wanted the combination to Father Belcarro's safe.\"\n\nThe man turned from the bloody form, guiltily. \"They tortured him. He would not speak. But they did worse things then\u2026so much worse. They made me watch.\"\n\nThe young priest grabbed her uncle's elbow. \"I couldn't let it continue. I\u2026I told them.\"\n\n\"And they took the bones from the safe?\"\n\nThe priest nodded.\n\n\"Then all is lost,\" Vigor said.\n\n\"Still, they wanted to be sure,\" the priest continued, seemingly deaf, babbling on. He glanced to the tortured figure, knowing he had been destined to share the same fate. \"Then you arrived. They stripped me, gagged me.\"\n\nRachel pictured the fake priest who had worn the man's cassock. The subterfuge must have been devised to lure Rachel and Kat off the street and into the church.\n\nThe priest stumbled to the body of Father Belcarro. He folded back the older man's robe, covering the mutilated face as if hiding his own shame. Then the priest reached into a pocket of the bloody robe. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes. It seemed the elderly father had not shed all his vices\u2026nor had the young priest.\n\nFingers shaking, the man peeled back the top and shook out the contents. Six cigarettes\u2014and a broken stub of chalk. The man dropped the cigarettes and held out the ochre bit.\n\nVigor took it.\n\nNot chalk. Bone.\n\n\"Father Belcarro feared sending away all the holy relics,\" the young priest explained. \"In case something happened. So he kept a bit aside. For the church.\"\n\nRachel wondered how much of this subterfuge was motivated by a selfless desire to preserve the relics and how much was due to pride, and the memory of the last time the bones had been stolen from Milan. Carted off to Cologne. Much of the basilica's fame was centered on those few bones. But either way, Father Belcarro had died a martyr. Tortured while hiding the holy relic on his own body.\n\nA loud blast made them all jump.\n\nThe priest fell back to the floor.\n\nBut Rachel recognized the gauge of the weapon.\n\n\"Monk's shotgun\u2026\" she said, eyes widening with hope.\n\n[ 2:04 P.M. ]\n\nGray reached through the smoking hole in the sacristy door.\n\nMonk shouldered the shotgun. \"I'm really going to owe the Catholic Church a month's salary for carpentry repair.\"\n\nGray shoved aside the pole blocking the way and opened the door. After the shotgun blast, there was no further need for subterfuge. \"Rachel! Vigor!\" he called as he entered the rectory hall.\n\nA scuffle sounded from down the hall. A door opened. Rachel stepped out, pistol in hand. \"Over here!\" she urged.\n\nUncle Vigor led a half-naked man out into the hallway. The man looked pale and haunted, but he seemed to gain strength from their presence.\n\nOr maybe it was the sound of the approaching sirens.\n\n\"Father Justin Mennelli,\" Vigor said in introduction.\n\nThey quickly compared notes.\n\n\"So we have one of the bones,\" Gray said, surprised.\n\n\"I suggest we get the relic back to Rome as soon as possible,\" Vigor said. \"They don't know we have it, and I want to be behind the Leonine Walls of the Vatican before they do.\"\n\nRachel nodded. \"Father Mennelli will let the authorities know what happened here. He'll leave out the details of our presence\u2014and of course, about the relic we have.\"\n\n\"There's an ETR train leaving for Rome in ten minutes.\" Vigor checked his watch. \"We can be in Rome by six o'clock.\"\n\nGray nodded. The more under-the-radar they operated, the better. \"Let's go.\"\n\nThey headed out. Father Mennelli led them to a side exit not far from where they had parked. Rachel climbed into the driver's seat as usual. They sped off as sirens converged.\n\nAs Gray settled back, he fingered the Chinese coin in his pocket. He sensed he had missed something.\n\nSomething important.\n\nBut what?\n\n[ 3:39 P.M. ]\n\nAn hour later, Rachel crossed from the bathroom to the first-class compartment in the ETR 500 train. Kat accompanied her. It was decided no one would leave the group by themselves. Rachel had wet her face, combed her hair, and brushed her teeth while Kat waited outside the door.\n\nAfter the horrors in Milan, she had needed a personal moment in the cubicle. For a full minute, she had simply stared at herself in the mirror, teetering between fury and a need to cry. Neither won out, so she had washed her face.\n\nIt was all she could do.\n\nBut it did make her feel better, a private absolution.\n\nAs she strode down the hall, she barely felt the tremble of the tracks under her heels. The Elettro Treno Rapido was Italy's newest and fastest train, connecting a corridor from Milan to Naples. It traveled at a blistering three hundred kilometers per hour.\n\n\"So, what's the story on your commander?\" Rachel asked Kat, taking advantage of the time alone with the woman. Also, it felt good to talk about a subject outside of murder and bones.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Kat did not even look over.\n\n\"Is he involved with anyone back home? A girlfriend maybe?\"\n\nThis question earned a glance. \"I don't see how his personal life\u2014\"\n\n\"What about you and Monk?\" Rachel said, cutting her off, realizing how her original question sounded. \"With all your professions, do you have time for personal lives? What about the risks?\"\n\nRachel was curious how these people balanced their regular lives with all the cloak-and-dagger. She had a hard enough time finding a man who could handle her position as a lieutenant in the Carabinieri Force.\n\nKat sighed. \"It's best not to get too involved,\" she said. Her fingers had wandered to a tiny enameled frog pinned to her collar. Her voice grew stiffer, but it sounded more like bolstering than true strength. \"You form friendships where you can, but you shouldn't let it go any further. It's easier that way.\"\n\nEasier for whom? Rachel wondered.\n\nShe let the matter drop as they reached their compartments. The team had booked two cabins. One was a sleeping compartment to allow them to take short catnaps in shifts. But no one was sleeping yet. Everyone had gathered in the other cabin, seated on either side of a table. The shades had been drawn across the windows.\n\nRachel slid in next to her uncle, Kat next to her teammates.\n\nGray had unboxed an assortment of compact analyzing equipment from his backpack and wired it to a laptop. Other tools were neatly aligned in front of him. In the center of the table, resting on a stainless steel sample tray, was the relic from one of the Magi.\n\n\"It was lucky that this bit of finger bone escaped their net,\" Monk said.\n\n\"Luck had nothing to do with it,\" Rachel bristled. \"It cost good men their lives. If we hadn't come when we did, I suspect we would've lost this bit of bone, too.\"\n\n\"Luck or not,\" Gray grumbled, \"we have the artifact. Let's see if it can solve any mysteries for us.\"\n\nHe slipped on a pair of glasses outfitted with a jeweler's magnifying loupe and donned a pair of latex gloves. With a tiny trepanning drill, he cored a thin sliver through the center of the bone, then used a mortar and pestle to grind the sample to a powder.\n\nRachel watched his meticulous work. Here was the scientist in the soldier. She studied the movements of his fingers, efficient, no wasted effort. His eyes focused fully on the task at hand. Two perfectly parallel lines furrowed his brow, never relaxing. He breathed through his nose.\n\nShe had never imagined this side of him, the man who leapt between fiery towers. Rachel had a sudden urge to tip his chin up, to have him look at her with that same intensity and focus. What would that be like? She pictured the depth of his blue-gray eyes. She remembered his touch, his hand in hers, both strength and tenderness, somehow at the same time.\n\nWarmth swelled through her. She felt her cheeks flush and had to glance away.\n\nKat stared up at her, expressionless but still somehow making her feel guilty, her words too fresh. It's best not to get too involved. It's easier that way.\n\nMaybe the woman was right\u2026.\n\n\"With this mass spectrometer,\" Gray finally mumbled, drawing back her attention, \"we can determine if any of the m-state metal is in the bones. Attempt to rule out, or in, the possibility that the Magi bones were the source of the powder found in the gold reliquary.\"\n\nGray mixed the powder with distilled water, then sucked the silty liquid into a pipette and transferred it to a test tube. He inserted the sample tube into the compact spectrometer. He prepared a second test tube of pure distilled water and held it up.\n\n\"This is a standard to calibrate,\" he explained, and placed the tube into another slot. He pressed a green button and turned the laptop screen toward the group so all could see. A graph appeared on the screen with a flat line across it. A few tiny barbs jittered the straight line. \"This is water. The intermittent spikes are a few trace impurities. Even distilled water is not a hundred percent pure.\"\n\nNext, he switched a dial so it pointed to the slot with the silty sample. He pressed the green button. \"Here is the breakdown of the pulverized bone.\"\n\nThe graph on the screen cleared and refreshed with the new data.\n\nIt looked identical.\n\n\"It hasn't changed,\" Rachel said.\n\nWith his brow pinched, Gray repeated the test, even taking out the tube and shaking it up. The result was the same each time. A flat line.\n\n\"It's still reading like distilled water,\" Kat said.\n\n\"It shouldn't,\" Monk said. \"Even if the old magi had osteoporosis, the calcium in the bone should be spiking through the roof. Not to mention carbon and a handful of other elements.\"\n\nGray nodded, conceding. \"Kat, do you have some of that cyanide solution?\"\n\nShe swung to her pack, fished through it, and came up with a tiny vial.\n\nGray soaked a cotton-tipped swab, then pinched the bone between his gloved fingers. He rubbed the wet swab across the bone, pressing firmly, rubbing as if he were polishing silver.\n\nBut it was not silver.\n\nWhere he rubbed, the brownish-yellow bone turned a rich gold.\n\nGray glanced up at the group. \"This isn't bone.\"\n\nRachel could not keep the awe and shock from her voice. \"It's solid gold.\"\n\n[ 5:12 P.M. ]\n\nGray spent half the train trip disproving Rachel's statement. There was more than just gold in these bones. Also it wasn't heavy metallic gold, but that strange gold glass again. He attempted to backward engineer the exact composition.\n\nWhile he worked, he also grappled another problem. Milan. He went over and over again the events at the basilica. He had walked his team into a trap. He could forgive last night's ambush up in Germany. They had been caught with their pants down. No one could have anticipated such a savage attack at the cathedral in Cologne.\n\nBut the close call in Milan could not be so easily dismissed. They had gone into the basilica prepared\u2014but still came close to losing everything, including their lives.\n\nSo where did the fault lie?\n\nGray knew the answer. He had fucked up. He should never have stopped at Lake Como. He should not have listened to Kat's words of caution and wasted so much time canvassing the basilica, exposing themselves, giving the Court time to spot them and prepare a trap.\n\nKat was not to blame. Caution was part and parcel of intelligence work. But fieldwork also required swift and certain action, not hesitation.\n\nEspecially in its leader.\n\nUp until now, Gray had been going by the book, staying overly cautious, being the leader that was expected of him. But maybe that was the mistake. Hesitation and second-guessing were not Pierce family traits. Not in the father, not in the son. But where was the line between caution and foolhardiness? Could he ever achieve that balance?\n\nSuccess on this mission\u2014and possibly their lives\u2014would depend on it.\n\nFinished with his analysis, Gray leaned back. He had blistered his thumb, and the cabin reeked of methyl alcohol. \"It's not pure gold,\" he concluded.\n\nThe others glanced to him. Two were working, two drowsing.\n\n\"The fake bone is a mixture of elements across the platinum group,\" Gray explained. \"Whoever crafted this, they mixed a powdery amalgam of various transitional metals and melted it down to glass. As it cooled, they molded the glass and roughed up the surfaces to a chalky complexion, making it appear like bone.\"\n\nGray began putting away his tools. \"It's predominantly composed of gold, but there's also a large percentage of platinum and smaller amounts of iridium and rhodium, even osmium and palladium.\"\n\n\"A regular potpourri,\" Monk said with a yawn.\n\n\"But a potpourri whose exact recipe may be forever unknown,\" Gray said, frowning at the abused piece of bone. He had preserved three-quarters of the artifact untouched and put the remaining quarter through the battery of tests. \"With the m-state powder's stubborn lack of reactivity, I don't think any analyzing equipment could tell you the exact ratio of metals. Even testing alters the ratio in the sample.\"\n\n\"Like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle,\" Kat said, feet up on the opposite bench, her laptop on her thighs. She tapped as she spoke. \"Even the act of looking changes the reality of what's being observed.\"\n\n\"So if it can't be completely tested\u2014\" Monk's words were cut off by another jaw-popping yawn.\n\nGray patted Monk on the shoulder. \"We'll be in Rome in another hour. Why don't you catch some sleep in the next room?\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" he said, stifling another yawn.\n\n\"That's an order.\"\n\nMonk stood with a long stretch. \"Well, if it's an order\u2026\" He rubbed his eyes and headed out the door.\n\nBut he paused in the doorway. \"You know,\" he said bleary-eyed, \"maybe they had it all wrong. Maybe history misinterpreted the words the Magi's bones. Rather than referring to the skeleton of those guys, maybe it meant the bones were made by the Magi. Like it was their property. The Magi's bones.\"\n\nEveryone stared at him.\n\nUnder the combined scrutiny, Monk shrugged and half fell out the door. \"Hell, what do I know? I can hardly think straight.\" The door closed.\n\n\"Your teammate might not be so far off base,\" Vigor said as silence settled around the cabin.\n\nRachel stirred. Gray glanced up. Until the recent exchange, Rachel had been leaning against her uncle and had napped for a short while. Gray had watched her breathing from the corner of his eye. In slumber, all hard edges softened in the woman. She seemed much younger.\n\nShe stretched one arm in the air. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nVigor worked on Monk's laptop. Like Kat, he was connected to the DSL line built into the new train's first-class cabins. They were searching for more information. Kat concentrated on the science behind the white gold, while Vigor searched for more history connecting the Magi to this amalgam.\n\nThe monsignor's eyes remained on his screen. \"Somebody forged those fake bones. Somebody with a skill barely reproducible today. But who did it? And why hide them in the heart of a Catholic cathedral?\"\n\n\"Could it be someone connected to the Dragon Court?\" Rachel asked. \"Their group traces back to the Middle Ages.\"\n\n\"Or someone within the Church itself?\" Kat said.\n\n\"No,\" Vigor said firmly. \"I think there is a third group involved here. A brotherhood that's existed before either group.\"\n\n\"How can you be certain?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"In 1982, some of the Magi burial cloths were tested. They dated to the second century. Well before the Dragon Court was founded. Before even Queen Helena, mother of Constantine, discovered the bones somewhere in the East.\"\n\n\"And no one tested the bones?\"\n\nVigor glanced to Gray. \"The Church forbade it.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"It takes a special papal dispensation to allow bones to be tested, especially relics. And the relics of the Magi would require extraordinary dispensation.\"\n\nRachel explained, \"The Church doesn't want its most precious treasures to be ruled fake.\"\n\nVigor frowned at Rachel. \"The Church places much weight on faith. The world certainly could use more of it.\"\n\nShe shrugged, closed her eyes, and settled back down.\n\n\"So if not the Church or the Court, who forged the bones?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"I think your friend Monk was correct. I think an ancient fraternity of mages fabricated them. A group that may predate Christianity, possibly going back to Egyptian times.\"\n\n\"Egyptians?\"\n\nVigor clicked the mouse on his laptop, bringing up a file. \"Listen to this. In 1450 B.C., Pharaoh Tuthmosis III united his best master craftsmen into a thirty-nine-member group called the Great White Brotherhood\u2014named from their study of a mysterious white powder. The powder was described as forged from gold, but shaped into pyramidal cakes, called 'white bread.' The cakes are depicted at the temple of Karnak as tiny pyramids, sometimes with rays of light radiating out.\"\n\n\"What did they do with them?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"They were prepared only for the pharaohs. To be consumed. Supposedly to increase their powers of perception.\"\n\nKat sat straighter, lowering her feet from the opposite bench.\n\nGray turned to her. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"I've been reading some of the properties of high-spin-state metals. Specifically gold and platinum. Exposure through ingestion can stimulate endocrine systems, creating heightened senses of awareness. Remember the articles on superconductors?\"\n\nGray nodded. High-spin atoms acted as perfect superconductors.\n\n\"The U.S. Naval Research Facility has confirmed that communication between brain cells cannot be explained by pure chemical transmission across synapses. Brain cells communicate too quickly. They've concluded that some form of superconductivity is involved, but the mechanism is still under study.\"\n\nGray frowned. He had, of course, studied superconductivity in his doctoral program. Leading physicists believed the field would lead to the next major breakthroughs in global technologies, with applications across the board. Also, from his dual degree in biology, he was well familiar with the current theories on thought, memory, and the organic brain. But what did any of this have to do with white gold?\n\nKat leaned toward her laptop. She tapped up another article. \"Here. I did a search for platinum-group metals and their uses. And I found an article about calf and pig brains. A metal analysis of mammalian brains shows that four to five percent of the dry weight is rhodium and iridium.\" She nodded to the sample on Gray's table. \"Rhodium and iridium in their monatomic state.\"\n\n\"And you think these m-state elements might be the source of the brain's superconductivity? Its communication pathway? That the pharaohs' consumption of these powders juiced it up?\"\n\nKat shrugged. \"Hard to say. The study of superconductivity is still in its infancy.\"\n\n\"Yet the Egyptians knew about it,\" Gray scoffed.\n\n\"No,\" Vigor countered. \"But perhaps they learned some way of tapping into it by trial and error or by accident. However it came about, this interest and experimentation with these white powders of gold appears throughout history, passed from one civilization to the next, growing stronger.\"\n\n\"How far forward can you trace it?\"\n\n\"Right back to there.\" Vigor pointed to the artifact on Gray's table.\n\nGray's interest piqued. \"Really?\"\n\nVigor nodded, up for the challenge. \"As I said, we start first in Egypt. This white powder went by many names. The 'white bread' I mentioned, but also 'white nourishment' and 'mfkzt.' But its oldest name can be found in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The substance is named hundreds of times along with its amazing properties. It is simply called 'what is it.'\"\n\nGray remembered the monsignor stumbling on those same words earlier, when they first turned the powder into glass.\n\n\"But in Hebrew,\" Vigor went on, \"'what is it' translates to Ma Na.\"\n\n\"Manna,\" Kat said.\n\nVigor nodded. \"The Holy Bread of the Israelites. According to the Old Testament, it fell down from the heavens to feed the starving refugees fleeing Egypt, led by Moses.\" The monsignor let that sink in and fiddled with his gathered files. \"While in Egypt, Moses showed such wisdom and skill that he was considered a potential successor to the Egyptian throne. Such esteem would entitle him to participate in the deepest level of Egyptian mysticism.\"\n\n\"Are you saying Moses stole the secret to make this powder? The Egyptian white bread?\"\n\n\"In the Bible, it went by many names. Manna. Holy Bread. Shrew-bread. Bread of Presence. It was so precious that it was stored in the Arc of the Covenant, alongside the tablets bearing the Ten Commandments. All stored in a golden box.\"\n\nGray did not miss the suggestive lift of the monsignor's eyebrow, emphasizing the parallel to the Magi's bones being preserved in a golden reliquary. \"It seems a stretch,\" Gray mumbled. \"The name 'manna' might just be a coincidence.\"\n\n\"When was the last time you read the Bible?\"\n\nGray didn't bother answering.\n\n\"There are many things that have perplexed historians and theologians in regards to this mysterious manna. The Bible describes how Moses set fire to the golden calf. But rather than melting into a molten slag, the gold burned down to a powder\u2026which Moses then fed to the Israelites.\"\n\nGray's brows pinched. Like the pharaoh's white bread.\n\n\"Also, who does Moses ask to make this Holy Bread, this manna from heaven? In the Bible, he doesn't ask a baker to prepare it. He asks Bezalel.\"\n\nGray waited for an explanation. He was not current on his biblical names.\n\n\"Bezalel was the Israelites' goldsmith. He was the same person who constructed the Arc of the Covenant. Why ask a goldsmith to bake bread unless it was something other than bread?\"\n\nGray frowned. Could it be true?\n\n\"There are also texts from the Jewish Kabbalah that speak directly of a white powder of gold, declaring it magical, but a magic that could be used for good or evil.\"\n\n\"So what became of this knowledge?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"According to most Jewish sources, it was lost when the Temple of Solomon was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth century B.C.\"\n\n\"Where did it go after that?\"\n\n\"To find hints of it, we skip forward two centuries, to another famous figure in history, who also spent much of his life in Babylon, studying with scientists and mystics.\" Vigor paused for emphasis. \"Alexander the Great.\"\n\nGray sat straighter. \"The Macedonian king?\"\n\n\"Alexander conquered Egypt in 332 B.C., along with a vast part of the world. The man was always interested in esoteric knowledge. Throughout his conquests, he sent Aristotle scientific gifts from around the world. He also collected a series of Heliopolitan scrolls, concerning Old Egypt's secret knowledge and magic. His successor, Ptolemy I, gathered these into the Library of Alexandria after his death. But one Alexandrian text tells a story about an object called the Paradise Stone. It was said to have mystical properties. When solid, it could surpass its own weight in gold, yet when crushed into a powder, it weighed less than a feather and could float.\"\n\n\"Levitation,\" Kat said, interrupting.\n\nGray turned to her.\n\n\"Such a property of superconducting material is well documented. Superconductors will float in strong magnetic fields. Even these m-state powders demonstrate superconducting levitation. In 1984, laboratory tests in both Arizona and Texas showed that rapid cooling of monatomic powders could raise their tested weight fourfold. Yet if heated again, the weight vanished to less than zero.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, less than zero?\"\n\n\"The pan weighed more without the substance on it, as if the pan were levitating.\"\n\n\"The Paradise Stone rediscovered,\" Vigor declared.\n\nGray began to sense the truth. A secret knowledge passed down through the generations. \"Where does the powdery trail lead next?\"\n\n\"To the time of Christ,\" Vigor answered. \"In the New Testament, there continue to be hints of a mysterious gold. From Revelations, chapter two: 'Blessed be the man who will overcome for he shall be given the hidden manna, the white stone of the purest kind.' Also the Book of Revelations describes the houses of New Jerusalem as being constructed of 'gold so pure as to appear like transparent glass.'\"\n\nGray remembered Vigor mumbling that verse when the puddle of molten glass had hardened on the cathedral floor back in Cologne.\n\n\"Tell me,\" Vigor continued, \"when does gold ever appear like glass? It makes no sense unless you consider the possibility of m-state gold\u2026this 'purest of all golds' described in the Bible.\"\n\nVigor pointed to the table. \"Which brings us back to the biblical Magi. To a tale related by Marco Polo out of Persia. It tells the story of the Magi receiving a gift from the Christ child, and this is probably allegorical, but I think it's important. Christ gave the Magi a dull white stone, a Holy Stone. The story goes that it represented a call to the Magi to remain firm in their faith. During their journey home, the stone burst forth with fire that could not be extinguished, an eternal flame, which often symbolizes higher enlightenment.\"\n\nVigor must have noted Gray's confusion. He continued, \"In Mesopotamia, where this story arises, the term 'high fire-stone' is called shemanna. Or shortened to just 'fire-stone'\u2026manna.\"\n\nVigor leaned back and crossed his arms.\n\nGray slowly nodded. \"So we've come full circle. Back to the manna and the biblical Magi.\"\n\n\"Back to the age when the bones were crafted,\" Vigor said with a nod to the table.\n\n\"And does it stop there?\" Gray asked.\n\nVigor shook his head. \"I need to do more research, but I think it continues beyond this point. I think what I've just described is not isolated rediscoveries of this powder, but an unbroken chain of research conducted by a secret alchemical society that has been purifying this process throughout the ages. I think the mainstream scientific community is only now beginning to discover it anew.\"\n\nGray turned to Kat, their scientific web crawler.\n\n\"The monsignor is right. There are incredible discoveries being made about these m-state superconductors. From levitation to the possibility of trans-dimensional shifting. But more-practical applications are being explored right now. Cis-platinum and carbono-platinum are already being used to treat testicular and ovarian cancers. I expect Monk, with his forensic training, could go into more detail. But there are even more intriguing discoveries just in the past few years.\"\n\nGray motioned her to continue.\n\n\"Bristol-Meyers Squibb has reported success with monatomic ruthenium to correct cancer cells. Same with platinum and iridium, according to Platinum Metals Review. These atoms actually make the DNA strand correct itself, rebuilding without drugs or radiation. Iridium has been shown to stimulate the pineal gland and appears to fire up 'junk DNA,' leading to the possibility of increased longevity and reopening aging pathways in the brain.\"\n\nKat leaned forward. \"Here's one from August 2004. Purdue University reports success in using rhodium to kill viruses with light from inside a body. Even West Nile virus.\"\n\n\"Light?\" Vigor asked, his eyes narrowing.\n\nGray glanced to him, noting the monsignor's intensified interest.\n\nKat nodded. \"There are a slew of articles about these m-state atoms and light. From turning DNA into superconducting strands\u2026to light-wave communication between cells\u2026to tapping into zero field energies.\"\n\nRachel finally spoke up. She still kept her eyes closed. She'd been listening all along, eavesdropping. \"It makes one wonder.\"\n\n\"What?\" Gray turned to her.\n\nShe slowly opened her eyes. They were bright and alert. \"Here scientists are now talking about heightening awareness, levitation, transmutation, miraculous healing, anti-aging. It sounds like a list of miracles from biblical times. It makes me wonder why so many miracles happened back then, but not now. In the past few centuries, we're lucky to see an image of the Virgin Mary on a tortilla. Yet now, science is rediscovering these larger miracles. And much of it traces back to a white powder, a substance known better back then than today. Could such secret knowledge have been the source for the epidemic of miracles back in biblical times?\"\n\nGray pondered this, meeting her gaze. \"And if these ancient magi knew more than we know now,\" he extrapolated, \"what has this lost fraternity of wise men done with this knowledge, to what level have they refined it?\"\n\nRachel continued the thread. \"Maybe that's what the Dragon Court is after! Maybe they found some clue, something tied to the bones that could lead them to whatever this purified end product might be. Some final plateau reached by the mages.\"\n\n\"And along the way, the Court learned that murderous trick back in Cologne, a way to use the powder to kill.\" He remembered the monsignor's words about the Jewish Kabbalah, that the white powder could be used for good or ill.\n\nRachel's face sobered. \"If they should attain even greater power, gaining access to the inner sanctum of these ancient wise men, they could change the world, remake it in their own sick image.\"\n\nGray stared around at the others. Kat wore a calculating expression. Vigor seemed lost in his own thoughts, but the monsignor noted the sudden silence.\n\nHis eyes focused back on them.\n\nGray faced him. \"What do you think?\"\n\n\"I think we have to stop them. But to do that, we're going to have to search for clues to these ancient alchemists. That means following in the footsteps of the Dragon Court.\"\n\nGray shook his head. He recalled his concern that they were proceeding too cautiously, too timidly. \"I'm done following the bastards. We need to pass them. Let them eat our dust for a change.\"\n\n\"But where do we begin?\" Rachel asked.\n\nBefore anyone could answer, a programmed announcement came over the train's intercom.\n\n\"Roma\u2026Stazione Termini\u2026quindici minuti!\"\n\nGray checked his watch. Fifteen minutes.\n\nRachel was staring at him.\n\n\"Benvenuto a Roma,\" she said as he looked up. \"Lasci i giochi cominciare!\"\n\nGray translated, a ghost of a smile forming. It was as if she read his mind. Welcome to Rome\u2026. Let the games begin!\n\n[ 6:05 P.M. ]\n\nSeichan slipped on a pair of black and silver Versace sunglasses.\n\nWhen in Rome\u2026\n\nShe stepped out onto Piazza Pia from the express bus. She wore a breezy white summer dress and nothing else except for a pair of stiletto-heeled Harley-Davidson boots with silver buckles, a match to her necklace.\n\nThe bus pulled away. Behind her, cars jammed the road, a honking, belching line of traffic, headed down Via della Conciliazone. The heat and reek of petrol struck her simultaneously. She faced to the west. Down the street, St. Peter's Basilica rose, silhouetted against the setting sun. The dome shone like gold, a masterpiece of design by Michelangelo.\n\nUnimpressed, Seichan turned her back on Vatican City.\n\nIt was not her goal.\n\nBefore her stood a structure that rivaled the great St. Peter's. The massive drum-shaped building filled the skyline, a fortress overlooking the Tiber River. Castel Sant'Angelo. Atop its roof, a mammoth bronze statue of the Archangel Michael bore aloft an unsheathed sword. The sculpture blazed in the sun. The stone structure beneath was blackened soot, stained in rivulets, like a flow of black tears.\n\nHow fitting, Seichan thought.\n\nThe place had been built in the second century as a mausoleum to Emperor Hadrian, but shortly thereafter, it had been taken over by the papacy. Still, the castle had developed an illustrious and ignoble history. Under Vatican rule, it had served as a fortress, a prison, a library, even as a brothel. It had also been a secret rendezvous spot for some of the more notorious popes, who kept concubines and mistresses within its walls, often imprisoned there.\n\nSeichan found it amusing to make her own rendezvous here. She crossed the gardens to the entrance and passed through the twenty-foot-thick walls to enter the first floor. It was dark and cool inside. This late in the day, tourists were dribbling out. She headed in, climbing up the wide curved Roman steps.\n\nOff the main staircase, the castle spread out in a warren of rooms and halls. Many visitors got lost.\n\nBut Seichan was only going up to the middle level, to a terrace restaurant that overlooked the Tiber. She was to meet her contact there. After the firebombing, it was deemed too risky to meet in the Vatican itself. So her contact was going to cross down the Passetto del Borgo, a covered passageway atop an old aqueduct that connected the Apostolic Palace to the castle fortress here. The secret passage had been originally constructed in the thirteenth century as an emergency escape route for the pope, but over the centuries, it was more often used for amorous trysts.\n\nThough today, there was nothing romantic about this meeting.\n\nSeichan followed the signs to the terrace caf\u00e9. She checked her watch. She was ten minutes early. Just as well. She had a call to make.\n\nShe slipped out her cell phone, pressed the scramble feature, and tapped in the speed-dial code. A private, unlisted number. She leaned on a hip, phone to her ear, and waited for the international connection to be made.\n\nThe line buzzed, clicked, and a firm, no-nonsense voice answered.\n\n\"Good afternoon. You've reached Sigma command.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "CRYPTOGRAPHY",
                "text": "[ JULY 25, 6:23 P.M. ]\n\n[ ROME, ITALY ]\n\n\"I need pen and paper,\" Gray said, his satellite phone in hand.\n\nThe group waited at a sidewalk trattoria across from Rome's central train station. Upon arriving, Rachel had called for a pair of Carabinieri vehicles to collect and escort the team to Vatican City. While they waited, Gray had decided it was time to break his silence with central command. He'd been passed immediately to Director Crowe.\n\nAfter a short debriefing of events in Cologne and Milan, the director had his own surprising bit of news.\n\n\"Why would she call you?\" Gray asked the director as Monk fished in his pack for pad and pen.\n\nPainter answered, \"Seichan is playing our two groups off one another to further her own end. She is not even trying to hide it. The intel she passed to us was stolen from the Dragon Court's field operative, a man named Raoul.\"\n\nGray scowled, remembering the man's handiwork back in Milan.\n\n\"I don't think she can decipher the intel on her own,\" Painter continued. \"So she passed it to us\u2014both to solve it for her and to keep you on the tail of the Court. She's no fool. Her skill at manipulation must be masterful to be picked by the Guild to oversee this assignment\u2026plus you two have a past. Despite her help in Cologne and Milan, don't trust her. She will eventually turn on you and attempt to even the score.\"\n\nGray felt the weight of the metal coin in his pocket. He didn't need the warning. The woman was ice and steel.\n\n\"Okay,\" Gray said as he had pen and paper in hand, holding the phone with his shoulder. \"I'm ready.\"\n\nAs Painter passed on the message, Gray wrote it down.\n\n\"And it's broken into stanzas, like a poem?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"Exactly.\" The director continued reciting as Gray jotted each line.\n\nOnce finished, Painter said, \"I have codebreakers working on it here and at the NSA.\"\n\nGray frowned at the pad. \"I'll see what I can make of it. Perhaps using some of the resources at the Vatican, we can make some headway here.\"\n\n\"In the meantime, keep on your toes,\" Painter warned. \"This Seichan character may be more dangerous than the entire Court.\"\n\nGray didn't argue with this last statement. With a few final clarifications, he signed off and stored the phone away. The others looked on expectantly.\n\n\"What was that all about?\" Monk asked.\n\n\"The Dragon Lady called Sigma. She passed on a mystery for us to solve. It seems she has no idea what the Court is going to do next, and while they prepare, she wants us to be nipping at their heels. So she leaked some archaic passage, something discovered two months ago by the Dragon Court in Egypt. Whatever its content, she says it initiated the current operation.\"\n\nVigor stood up from one of the trattoria's outdoor tables. With a tiny espresso cup balanced in one hand, he leaned over to read the passage along with the others.\n\n\u2002When the full moon mates with the sun,\n\n\u2002It is born eldest.\n\n\u2002What is it?\n\n\u2002Where it drowns,\n\n\u2002It floats in darkness and stares to the lost king.\n\n\u2002What is it?\n\n\u2002The Twin waits for water,\n\n\u2002But will be burned to bone by bone upon the altar.\n\n\u2002What is it?\n\n\"Oh, that helps,\" Monk grumbled.\n\nKat shook her head. \"What does any of this have to do with the Dragon Court, high-spin metals, and some lost society of alchemists?\"\n\nRachel glanced along the street. \"The scholars at the Vatican may be able to help. Cardinal Spera has promised his full support.\"\n\nGray noted Vigor had only glanced once at the sheet of paper, then turned away. He sipped his espresso.\n\nGray had had enough of the man's silences. He was done with polite respect of each other's boundaries. If Vigor wanted to be on this team, it was high time he acted like it.\n\n\"You know something,\" Gray accused.\n\nThe others turned to them.\n\n\"So should you,\" Vigor answered.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I already described this back on the train.\" Vigor turned and tapped a finger on the pad. \"The cadence of this passage should be familiar. I described a book with a similar pattern of text. The repetition of the phrase 'what is it.'\"\n\nKat remembered first. \"From the Egyptian Book of the Dead.\"\n\n\"The Papyrus of Ani, to be exact,\" Vigor continued. \"It is broken into lines of cryptic description followed by the one line repeated over and over again: 'what is it.'\"\n\n\"Or in Hebrew, manna,\" Gray said, remembering.\n\nMonk rubbed a hand over the stubble poking from his shaved scalp. \"But if this passage is from some well-known Egyptian book, why would it light a fire under the Court now?\"\n\n\"The passages aren't from the Book of the Dead,\" Vigor answered. \"I'm familiar enough with the Papyrus of Ani to know these passages are not found among the others.\"\n\n\"Then where did they come from?\" Rachel asked.\n\nVigor turned to Gray. \"You said the Dragon Court discovered this in Egypt\u2026only months ago.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\nVigor turned to Rachel. \"I'm sure as a part of the Carabinieri TPC that you were informed of the recent chaos at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The museum sent out an alert through Interpol.\"\n\nRachel nodded and explained to the others. \"Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities began a painstaking process in 2004 of emptying the basement to the Egyptian Museum, prior to renovation. But upon opening the basement, they discovered over a hundred thousand pharaonic and other artifacts among its maze of corridors, an archaeological dumping ground that was all but forgotten.\"\n\n\"They estimate it will take five years to catalogue it all,\" Vigor said. \"But as a professor of archaeology, I've heard tidbits of discoveries. There was an entire room of crumbling parchments that scholars suspect may have come from the lost Library of Alexandria, a major bastion of Gnostic study.\"\n\nGray recalled Vigor's discussion about Gnosticism and the pursuit of secret knowledge. \"Such a discovery would surely attract the Dragon Court.\"\n\n\"Like moths to flame,\" Rachel said.\n\nVigor continued, \"One of the items catalogued came from a collection of Abd el-Latif, an esteemed fifteenth-century Egyptian physician and explorer who lived in Cairo. In his collection, preserved in a bronze chest, was a fourteenth-century illuminated copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a complete rendering of the Papyrus of Ani.\" Vigor stared hard at Gray. \"It was stolen four months ago.\"\n\nGray felt his pulse quicken. \"By the Dragon Court.\"\n\n\"Or someone in their employ. They have fingers everywhere.\"\n\n\"But if the book is just a bootleg of the original,\" Monk said, \"what's the significance?\"\n\n\"The Papyrus of Ani has hundreds of stanzas. I wager someone forged this copy and hid these specific stanzas\"\u2014Vigor tapped Gray's pad\u2014\"among the more ancient ones.\"\n\n\"Our lost alchemists,\" Kat said.\n\n\"Hiding needles in a haystack,\" Monk said.\n\nGray nodded. \"Until some scholar in the Dragon Court was wise enough to pick them out, decipher the clues, and act on it. But where does that leave us?\"\n\nVigor turned to the street. \"You mentioned on the train a desire to catch up and pass the Dragon Court. Now is our chance.\"\n\n\"How so?\"\n\n\"We decipher the riddle.\"\n\n\"But that could take days.\"\n\nVigor glanced over his shoulder. \"Not if I've already solved it.\"\n\nHe waved for the pad of paper and flipped to a new blank page. \"Let me show you.\"\n\nThen he did the oddest thing. He wet his finger in his espresso and dampened the bottom of his tiny cup. He pressed the cup upon the paper, leaving a perfect ring of coffee stain on the blank page. He repeated it again, applying a second ring, this one overlapping the first, forming roughly a snowman shape.\n\n\"The full moon mating with the sun.\"\n\n\"What does this prove?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"Vesica Pisces,\" Rachel said, her face dawning with understanding.\n\nVigor grinned at her. \"Did I ever tell you how proud I am of my niece?\"\n\n[ 7:02 P.M. ]\n\nRachel didn't like abandoning their Carabinieri escort, but she understood Uncle Vigor's excitement. Her uncle had insisted they take alternate transportation to investigate the new lead.\n\nSo she had called in to the station and recalled the patrol cars. She had left a cryptic message with General Rende that they all had an errand to run. This last was upon Gray's suggestion. He thought it best not to broadcast their destination. Not until they could investigate further.\n\nThe fewer people who knew of their discovery, the better.\n\nSo they sought alternate transportation.\n\nRachel followed Gray's broad back down to the rear of the public bus. Kat and Monk held a row of seats open. The air conditioning clanked, and the engine rattled the floorboards as the bus left the curb and shouldered into traffic.\n\nRachel climbed into a seat with Gray. Their row of seats faced Monk, Kat, and Uncle Vigor. Kat looked especially stern. She had argued for proceeding to the Vatican and securing an escort first. Gray had overruled her. She looked unsettled by this decision.\n\nRachel eyed Gray beside her. Some new resolve seemed to have hardened in him. It reminded her of his attitude atop the fiery spire in Cologne, a certainty of manner. His eyes shone with a determination that had disappeared after the first attack. It was back now\u2026and it scared her slightly, made her heart beat faster.\n\nThe bus rumbled into traffic.\n\n\"Okay,\" Gray said, \"I've taken you at your word that this side excursion is necessary. Now how about a bit of elaboration?\"\n\nUncle Vigor raised a palm, conceding. \"If I had gone into detail, we would've missed our bus.\"\n\nHe opened the pad again. \"This shape of overlapping circles can be seen throughout Christendom. In churches, cathedrals, and basilicas around the world. From this one shape, all of geometry flows. For example.\" He turned the picture horizontal and shaded the lower half with the edge of his palm. He then pointed to the intersection of the two circles. \"Here you can see the geometric shape of the pointed arch. Almost all Gothic windows and archways bear this shape.\"\n\nRachel had been given the same lecture as a child. One couldn't be related to a Vatican archaeologist without knowing the importance of those two joined circles.\n\n\"It still looks like a couple of doughnuts smashed together to me,\" Monk said.\n\nVigor righted the picture back around.\n\n\"Or like a full moon mating with the sun,\" her uncle said, bringing up the stanza from the cryptic text. \"The more I consider those lines, the more layers I keep coming across, like peeling an onion.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"They buried this clue within the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The very first book to refer to manna. Later Egyptian texts begin to refer to it as 'white bread' and such. It's as if to find whatever the alchemists hid, you had to start at the beginning. Yet the very answer to this first clue also traces back to the first era of Christianity. Multiple beginnings. Even the answer itself implies multiplication. The one becoming many.\"\n\nRachel understood what her uncle meant. \"The multiplication of the fishes.\"\n\nVigor nodded.\n\n\"Is anyone going to explain it to us novices?\" Monk asked.\n\n\"This conjoining of circles is called Vesica Pisces, or Vessel of the Fishes.\" Vigor leaned down and shaded the intersection to reveal the fishlike shape rested between the two circles.\n\nGray peered closer. \"It's the fish symbol that represents Christianity.\"\n\n\"It is the first symbol,\" Vigor said. \"'When the full moon mates with the sun, it is born.'\" Her uncle tapped the fish. \"Some scholars believe the fish symbol was used because the Greek for fish, ICHTHYS, was an acronym for Iesous Christos Theou Yios Soter, or Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Savior. But the truth lies here, between these circles, locked in sacred geometry. You'll often find these locked circles in early paintings with the Christ child resting in the center junction. If you turn the form over on its side, the fish becomes a representation of female genitalia and a woman's womb, where the baby Jesus is painted.\n\n\"It is for this reason that the fish represents fertility. To be fruitful and multiply.\" Vigor glanced around the group. \"As I said, there are layers upon layers of meaning here.\"\n\nGray leaned back. \"But how does this lead us anywhere?\"\n\nRachel was curious, too. \"There are fish symbols all over Rome.\"\n\nVigor nodded. \"But the second line that reads, 'It is born eldest.' Plainly it's directing us to the oldest representation of the fish symbol. That would be found in the Crypt of Lucina in the Catacombs of Saint Callistus.\"\n\n\"That's where we're heading?\" Monk asked.\n\nVigor nodded.\n\nRachel noted Gray was not satisfied. \"What if you're wrong?\" he asked.\n\n\"I'm not. The other stanzas in the text hint at it, too\u2026once you solve the Vesica Pisces riddle. Look at the next line. 'Where it drowns, it floats in darkness.' A fish can't drown, not in water, but it can in earth. And the mention of darkness. It all points to a crypt.\"\n\n\"But there are many crypts and catacombs throughout Rome.\"\n\n\"But not many with two fishes, twins to each other,\" Vigor said.\n\nGray's eyes brightened with understanding. \"Another clue, from the last stanza. 'The Twin waits for water.'\"\n\nVigor nodded. \"All three stanzas point to one place. The Catacombs of Saint Callistus.\"\n\nMonk settled back to his seat. \"At least it's not a church this time. I'm tired of getting shot at.\"\n\n[ 7:32 P.M. ]\n\nVigor sensed they were on the right track.\n\nFinally.\n\nHe guided the others through Porta San Sebastiano, one of the city wall's most striking gates. It also served as the gateway to the parklands that surrounded the Appian Way, a preserved section of the famous ancient Roman road. Immediately past the gates, however, stood a series of dilapidated mechanics' workshops.\n\nVigor dismissed the ugliness of these junkyards by directing attention ahead. At a fork in the road rose a small church. \"The Chapel of Domine Quo Vadis,\" he said.\n\nHis only real audience was Kat Bryant. She strode alongside him. Kat and Gray seemed to have had a falling-out. The others followed behind. It was good to have this moment with Kat. It had been three years since they had shared a role in cataloguing evidence against a Nazi war criminal, living in rural New York. The target had been trading in stolen artwork in Brussels. It was a long, convoluted investigation, requiring subterfuge on both their parts. Vigor had been most impressed with the young woman's ability to slide into any role as easily as changing shoes.\n\nHe also knew the pain she had experienced recently. Though she was a good actress, hiding her feelings well, Vigor had spent enough time serving his flock as priest, confessor, and counselor to recognize someone still grieving. Kat had lost someone close to her heart and had not healed yet.\n\nHe pointed to the stone church, knowing there was a message for Kat within those walls. \"The chapel here was built at the site where Saint Peter, fleeing the persecution of Nero, beheld a vision of Jesus. Christ was heading into Rome, while Peter was running out. He asked those famous words, Domine, quo vadis. 'Lord, where are you going?' Christ replied he was heading back into Rome to be crucified again. Peter then turned back to face his own execution.\"\n\n\"Ghost stories,\" Kat said without malice. \"He should've run.\"\n\n\"Ever the pragmatist, Kat. But you of all people should know that sometimes one's own life is less important than the cause. We all have a terminal disease. We can't escape death. But as the good works in our life celebrate our time here, so too can our deaths. To lay one's life down in sacrifice should be honored and remembered.\"\n\nKat glanced to him. She was sharp enough to understand the tack of the conversation.\n\n\"Sacrifice is a final gift we mortals can give in life. We should not squander such a generous gift with misery, but with respectful appreciation, even joy for a life fully lived to its end.\"\n\nKat took a deep breath. They crossed before the small chapel. Her eyes studied it\u2014though Vigor suspected she looked just as intently inward.\n\n\"There can be lessons even in ghost stories,\" Vigor finished, and guided the group down the fork to the left.\n\nHere the road turned to cobbles of volcanic stone. Though the stones were not original to the Roman road that once led out from the gates of the city all the way to Greece, it was a romantic approximation. Slowly the way opened around them. Green swards of hillsides opened in parklands, dotted with occasional sheep and shaded by umbrella pines. Crumbling lines of walls crisscrossed the landscape, along with the occasional tomb.\n\nAt this hour, with most of the attractions closed and the sun near to setting, they had the Appian Way to themselves. An occasional stroller or bicyclist nodded to him, noting his collar. \"Padre,\" they would mumble and continue past, glancing back at the road-weary group of backpackers he led.\n\nVigor also noted a few scantily clad women lounging at roadside spots, along with some seemlier-looking figures. After dark, the Appian Way became a roost to prostitutes and their ilk, and often proved dangerous to the average tourist. Brigands and robbers still prowled the ancient road, as they had the original Appian Way.\n\n\"It's not much farther,\" Vigor promised.\n\nHe headed through an area of vineyards, green vines tied to wood and wire, that traversed the gently sloping hills. Ahead appeared the courtyard entrance to their destination: the Catacombs of Saint Callistus.\n\n\"Commander,\" Kat asked, dropping back, \"shouldn't we at least scout the area first?\"\n\n\"Just keep your eyes open,\" he answered. \"No more delays.\"\n\nVigor noted the firmness in the man's voice. The commander listened, but he seemed less willing to bend. Vigor was unsure if this was good or bad.\n\nGray waved for them to proceed.\n\nThe subterranean cemetery had closed at five o'clock, but Vigor had called the caretaker and arranged this special \"tour.\" A petite snowymaned gentleman in gray coveralls stepped out of a sheltered doorway. He hobbled over, using a wooden shepherd's crook as a cane. Vigor knew him well. His family had been sheepherders of the surrounding campagna going back generations. He held a pipe firmly between his teeth.\n\n\"Monsignor Verona,\" he said. \"Come va?\"\n\n\"Bene grazie. E lei, Giuseppe?\"\n\n\"I'm fine, Padre. Grazie.\" He waved toward the small cottage that served as his homestead while watching over the catacombs. \"I have a bottle of grappa. I know how you like a bit of the grape. From these hills.\"\n\n\"Another time, Giuseppe. The day grows late and we must be about our business with much haste, I'm afraid.\"\n\nThe man eyed the others as if they were to blame for the rush, then his eyes caught on Rachel. \"It cannot be! Piccola Rachel\u2026but she is not so little anymore.\"\n\nRachel smiled, clearly delighted to be remembered. She hadn't visited here with Vigor since she was nine years old. Rachel quickly hugged him, kissing him on the cheek. \"Ciao, Giuseppe.\"\n\n\"We must raise a cup to piccola Rachel, no?\"\n\n\"Perhaps when we finish our business below,\" Vigor pressed, knowing the man, lonely here in his cottage, only wanted a bit of company.\n\n\"Si\u2026bene\u2026\" He waved his crook toward the doorway. \"It is open. I will lock after you. Knock when you come up and I will hear.\"\n\nVigor led them to the gateway to the catacombs. He pulled open the door. He waved the others through the threshold, noting that Giuseppe had left the string of electric lights lit. The staircase descended ahead of them.\n\nAs Monk stepped through with Rachel, he glanced back to the caretaker. \"You should introduce that guy to your grandmother. They'd hit it off, I bet.\"\n\nRachel grinned and followed the stocky man inside.\n\nVigor closed the door behind him and took the lead again, heading down the stairs. \"This catacomb is one of Rome's oldest. It was once a private Christian cemetery, but it spread out when some of the popes chose to be buried at this site. It now covers ninety acres and descends in four levels.\"\n\nBehind him, Vigor heard the door lock snap closed. The air grew danker as they descended, rich with the smell of loam and seeping rain-water. At the foot of the stairs, they reached a vestibule with loculi cut into the walls, horizontal niches for bodies to be laid to rest. Graffiti etched the walls, but it was not the work of modern vandals. Some of the inscriptions dated back from the fifteenth century: prayers, laments, testimonials.\n\n\"How far in do we have to go?\" Gray asked, stepping next to Vigor. There was barely room for two to walk side by side as the way narrowed from here. The commander eyed the low ceilings.\n\nIn here, even those who didn't suffer from claustrophobia found these crumbling subterranean necropolises unnerving. Especially now. Deserted and empty.\n\n\"The Crypt of Lucina lies much deeper. It's located in the most ancient area of the catacomb.\"\n\nGalleries branched off from here, but Vigor knew the way and headed to the right. \"Stay close,\" he warned. \"It's easy to get lost in here.\"\n\nThe way narrowed even more.\n\nGray turned. \"Monk, keep a watch on our rear. Ten paces. Stay in sight.\"\n\n\"Got it covered.\" Monk freed his shotgun.\n\nAhead, a chamber opened. Its walls were pocked with larger loculi and elaborate arcsololia, arched gravesites.\n\n\"The Papal Crypt,\" Vigor announced. \"It is here sixteen popes were laid to rest, from Eutychianus to Zephyrinus.\"\n\n\"From E to Z,\" Gray mumbled.\n\n\"The bodies were removed,\" Vigor said, delving deeper, passing through the Crypt of Cecelia. \"From about the fifth century, the outskirts of Rome were plundered by a series of forces. Goths, Vandals, Lombards. Many of the most important personages buried here were moved into churches and chapels inside the city. In fact, the catacombs were so emptied out and abandoned that by the twelfth century they were completely forgotten, and were not rediscovered until the sixteenth century.\"\n\nGray coughed. \"It seems that timeline keeps crossing itself.\"\n\nVigor glanced back.\n\n\"Twelfth century,\" Gray explained. \"That was also when the bones of the Magi were moved out of Italy into Germany. It's also when you mentioned there was a resurgence in Gnostic belief, creating a schism between emperors and the papacy.\"\n\nVigor slowly nodded, contemplating this angle. \"It was a tumultuous time, with the papacy run out of Rome by the end of the thirteenth century. The alchemists may have sought to protect what they had learned, driven into deeper hiding as they were leaving behind clues in case of their demise, breadcrumbs for other Gnostic believers to follow.\"\n\n\"Like this sect of the Dragon Court.\"\n\n\"I don't think they imagined such a perverse group to be enlightened enough to seek such higher truths. An unfortunate miscalculation. Either way, I think you're right. You may have pegged the date when these clues were placed. I'd say sometime in the thirteenth century, during the height of the conflict. Few at that time knew about the catacombs. What better place to hide the clues to a secret society?\"\n\nPondering this, Vigor piloted them through a successive series of galleries, crypts, and cubicula. \"It's not far. Just past the Sacramental Chapels.\" He waved an arm to a gallery of six chambers. Peeling and faded frescoes displayed intricate biblical scenes interspersed with depictions of baptism and the celebration of Eucharistic meals. They were treasures of early Christian art.\n\nAfter hiking through a few more galleries, their goal appeared ahead. A modest crypt. The ceiling was painted with a typical early Christian motif: the Good Shepherd, Christ with a lamb carried on his shoulders.\n\nTurning from the ceiling, Vigor instead pointed to two neighboring walls. \"Here is what we came to find.\"\n\n[ 8:10 P.M. ]\n\nGray approached the nearest wall. A fresco of a fish had been painted against a green background. Above it, almost appearing to be carried on the back of the fish, was a basket of bread. He turned to the second wall. This fresco seemed a mirror image of the first, except the basket also bore a bottle of wine.\n\n\"It's all symbolic of the first Eucharistic meal,\" Vigor said. \"Fish, bread, and wine. It also represents the miracle of the fishes, when Christ multiplied a single basket of fish and bread to feed the multitude of followers who had come to hear his sermon.\"\n\n\"Again the multiplication symbolism,\" Kat said. \"Like the geometry of the Vesica Pisces.\"\n\n\"But where do we go from here?\" Monk asked. He stood with his shotgun on his shoulder, facing back into the crypt.\n\n\"Follow the riddle,\" Gray answered. \"The second stanza reads, 'Where it drowns, it floats in darkness and stares to the lost king.' We found where it floats in darkness, so we follow where it stares.\" He pointed in the direction the first fish was facing.\n\nIt led further into the galleries.\n\nGray strode in that direction, searching around him. It did not take long to find a clear depiction of kings. Gray stopped before a fresco illustrating the adoration of the Magi. It was faded, but the details were plain enough. The Virgin Mary sat on a throne with the Christ child on her lap. Bowed before her were three robed figures, offering gifts.\n\n\"The Three Kings,\" Kat said. \"The Magi again.\"\n\n\"We keep running into these guys,\" Monk replied from a few paces down the passage.\n\nRachel frowned at the wall. \"But what does it mean? Why lead us here? What did the Dragon Court learn?\"\n\nGray let all the events of the past day trickle through his head. He didn't fight for order, but simply let his mind roam. Connections formed, dissolved, reconfigured. Slowly he began to understand.\n\n\"The real question is, why did these ancient alchemists lead us here?\" Gray said. \"To this particular depiction of the Magi. As Monk mentioned, you can't turn a corner in Italy without running into these kings. So why this fresco in particular?\"\n\nNo one had an answer.\n\nRachel offered a possible avenue to pursue. \"The Dragon Court went after the Magi bones. Maybe we need to look at it from that perspective.\"\n\nGray nodded. He should've thought of that. They didn't need to reinvent the wheel. The Dragon Court had already solved the riddle. All they had to do was backtrack. Gray considered this and found one possible answer.\n\n\"Maybe the fish is staring toward these particular kings because they are buried. In a graveyard. Under the earth, where a fish would drown. The answer to the clue is not living Magi, but dead and buried ones, in a crypt once filled with bones.\"\n\nVigor made a small sound of surprise.\n\n\"So the Dragon Court went after the bones,\" Rachel said.\n\n\"I think the Dragon Court already knew the bones were not bones,\" Gray said. \"They've had their nose to this trail for centuries. They must've known. Look what happened at the cathedral. They used the powder of white gold in some way to kill. They're well ahead of the game.\"\n\n\"And they want more power,\" Rachel said. \"The final solution of the Magi.\"\n\nVigor's eyes narrowed in concentration. \"And if you're right, Commander\u2014about the significance of the Magi bones being taken out of Italy to Germany\u2014maybe the transfer was not plunder as history attests, but was done by arrangement. To safeguard the amalgam.\"\n\nGray nodded. \"And the Dragon Court let them remain in Cologne\u2026safely in sight. Knowing they were significant, but not knowing what to do with them.\"\n\n\"Until now,\" Monk said from a few paces away.\n\n\"But in the end,\" Gray continued, \"what do all these clues ultimately point to? Right now only to relics in a church. It doesn't tell what to do with them, what they're used for.\"\n\n\"We're forgetting,\" Kat said. She had remained silent this entire time, focused on the fresco. \"The stanza from the passage states the fish 'stares to the lost king.' Not 'kings,' plural. There are three kings here. I think we're missing another layer of meaning or symbolism.\" She turned to the others. \"What 'lost king' is the clue hinting about?\"\n\nGray struggled for an answer. There were riddles upon riddles.\n\nVigor had dropped his chin into his hand, concentrating. \"There is a fresco in a neighboring catacomb. The Catacomb of Domatilla. The fresco is painted with not three Magi, but four. Because the Bible was never specific on the number of Magi, early Christian artists varied the number. The lost king could mean another Magi, the one missing here.\"\n\n\"A fourth Magi?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"A figure representative of the lost knowledge of the alchemists.\" Vigor nodded, raising his head. \"The second stanza's message hints that the Magi bones can be used to find this fourth Magi. Whoever he may be.\"\n\nRachel shook her head, drawing both Gray and Vigor's attention. \"Don't forget this clue is buried in a crypt. I bet it's not the fourth Magi that we're supposed to find, but his tomb. One set of bones used to find another. Possibly another cache of amalgam.\"\n\n\"Or something even greater. That would certainly excite the Dragon Court.\"\n\n\"But how can the Magi bones help find this lost tomb?\" Monk asked.\n\nGray headed back to the Crypt of Lucina. \"The answer has to be in the thirds tanza.\"\n\n[ 2:22 P.M. ]\n\nWASHINGTON, D.C.\n\nPainter Crowe woke to a knock on his door. He had fallen asleep in his chair, tilted back. Damn ergonomics\u2026\n\nHe cleared the sleep from his throat. \"Come in.\"\n\nLogan Gregory entered. His hair was wet and he wore a fresh shirt and jacket. It looked like he'd just come in for the day, rather than being here 24/7.\n\nLogan must have noted his attention and ran a hand down his starched shirt. \"I went down to the gym for a run. I keep a second set of clothes in my locker.\"\n\nPainter had no reply, flabbergasted. Youth. He didn't think he could climb out of his chair, let alone run a few miles. But then again, Logan was only five years his junior. Painter knew it was stress more than age that weighed him down.\n\n\"Sir,\" Logan continued, \"I received word from General Rende, our liaison with the Carabinieri Corps in Rome. Commander Pierce and the others have gone to ground again.\"\n\nPainter leaned forward. \"Another attack? They were supposed to be at the Vatican by now.\"\n\n\"No, sir. After your call to them, they waved off the Carabinieri escort and took off on their own. General Rende wanted to know what was relayed to them. His field operative, Lieutenant Rachel Verona, informed him that you passed on some bit of intel. General Rende was not happy to be kept out of the loop.\"\n\n\"And what did you tell him?\"\n\nLogan raised both eyebrows. \"Nothing, sir. That is official Sigma policy, is it not? We know nothing.\"\n\nPainter smiled. It sometimes felt that way.\n\n\"What about Commander Pierce, sir? What do you want to do next? Should we post an alert?\"\n\nPainter remembered Sean McKnight's earlier admonishment. Trust your agents. \"We'll wait for his next call. There's no evidence of foul play. We'll give him room to run his own game.\"\n\nLogan did not seem satisfied with this answer. \"What do you want me to do then?\"\n\n\"I suggest, Logan, that you get some rest. I imagine that when Commander Pierce gets going, we're going to get very little sleep over here.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" He headed for the door.\n\nPainter leaned back in his chair and covered his eyes with his arm. Damn, but this chair was comfortable. He drifted away, but something troubled him, keeping him from sleep. Something nagged. Something Gray had said. Not trusting Sigma. A leak.\n\nCould it be?\n\nThere was only one person besides himself with full intel on this operation up until now. Not even Sean McKnight knew everything. He slowly tilted forward, eyes open.\n\nIt couldn't be.\n\n[ 8:22 P.M. ]\n\n[ ROME, ITALY ]\n\nBack at the Crypt of Lucina, Gray stood by the second fresco with the fish. They needed to solve this third riddle.\n\nMonk asked a good question. \"Why didn't the Dragon Court just firebomb the hell out of these catacombs? Why leave them for others to find?\"\n\nRachel stood next to him. \"With the forged copy of the Book of the Dead still in the Court's possession, what would they have to fear? If Seichan hadn't stolen the riddle map, nobody would know to look here.\"\n\nKat added, \"Maybe the Court wasn't so sure of their interpretation. Maybe they wanted this story in stone to be kept intact until they were certain they had the correct translation.\"\n\nGray weighed this, sensing a greater press of time. He turned back to the fresco. \"Then let's see what they found. The third stanza has the fish waiting for water. Like the first fish, I think we're supposed to follow where it's facing.\"\n\nGray motioned to a different gallery branching off from the crypt. The second fish pointed that way.\n\nBut Vigor continued his study of the two fishes, looking at one and then the other, mirror images. \"Twins,\" he mumbled.\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\nVigor waved a hand between the two fish. \"Whoever devised this game of riddles loved to layer it with symbolism. Choosing these two fish. Nearly identical in appearance. Referring to the second fish as 'twin' cannot be insignificant.\"\n\n\"I don't see the connection,\" Gray said.\n\n\"You just don't know your Greek, Commander.\"\n\nGray frowned.\n\nMonk, surprisingly enough, chimed in, proving his Greek heritage extended beyond a fondness for ouzo and bad dancing. \"'Twin' translates to didymus.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" Vigor said. \"And in Hebrew, 'twin' translates to Thomas. As in Didymus Thomas. One of the twelve apostles.\"\n\nGray remembered the discussion at Lake Como with the monsignor. \"Thomas was the apostle in conflict with John.\"\n\n\"And the one who baptized the Magi,\" Vigor reminded them. \"Thomas represented Gnostic belief. I think using the word twin here is a tribute back to the Gospel of Thomas. By acknowledging Thomas, I wonder if these alchemists might not have been Thomas Christians themselves\u2026churchgoers who followed Rome but still continued their Gnostic practices in secret. There were always whispers of such a church within the Church. A Thomas Church hiding within and alongside the canonical Church. This may be the proof.\"\n\nGray heard the growing excitement in the other's voice.\n\n\"Perhaps this society of alchemists, which traced its roots to Moses and Egypt, merged with the Catholic Church. Continued forward in history wearing the cross and bending a knee to the Church, finding common ground with those who held sacred the secret Gospel of Thomas.\"\n\n\"Hiding in plain sight,\" Monk said.\n\nVigor nodded.\n\nGray followed this line of logic. It might be worth pursuing, but for now, they had another riddle to solve. He pointed down the gallery. \"Whoever left these clues, they left us a third challenge.\"\n\nThe Twin waits for water\u2026\n\nGray led the way down the new gallery. He searched for some fresco with water in it. He passed various biblical scenes, but none depicting water. There was a painting of a family gathered around a table, but it looked like wine was being served. Next there was a fresco with four male figures lifting their arms to heaven. None of them held a flask of water.\n\nVigor called behind him. He turned.\n\nThe others were gathered by one niche. He went back to them. He had searched that one already. It showed a man in a robe striking a stone with a stick. Not a drop of water.\n\n\"This is an illustration of Moses in the desert,\" Vigor said.\n\nGray waited for elaboration.\n\n\"According to the Bible, he struck a rock in the desert and a fresh spring burst forth to quench the thirst of the fleeing Israelites.\"\n\n\"Like our old fish back there,\" Monk said.\n\n\"This must be the fresco indicated by the stanza,\" Vigor said. \"Remember, Moses knew about manna and these miraculous white powders. It would be appropriate to acknowledge him.\"\n\n\"So what clue does this crumbling painting hold?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"'The Twin waits for water, but will be burned to bone by bone upon the altar,'\" Vigor quoted. \"'Burned to bone by bone.' Think backward. Like Rachel recommended before. What did the Dragon Court do, in Cologne? The parishioners were burned somehow, a massive electrical storm in the brain. And it involved white gold. And possibly the amalgam in the Magi bones.\"\n\n\"Is that the message?\" Rachel asked, looking uneasy. \"To kill? To curse an altar site, like in Cologne, with blood and murder?\"\n\n\"No,\" Gray answered. \"The Dragon Court ignited the bones and seemingly learned nothing, since they continued on the same trail afterward. Maybe Cologne was just a test or a trial run. Maybe the Dragon Court was not sure of their interpretation of the riddle, like your uncle suggested. Either way, they were plainly aware of some of the white powder's capabilities. With their device, they proved they can activate and crudely manipulate the energy in these high-spin superconductors. They used it to kill. But I don't think that is what the alchemists originally intended.\"\n\nRachel still looked ill at ease.\n\n\"The true answer is here,\" Gray finished. \"If the Dragon Court solved it, so can we.\"\n\n\"But they had months after stealing the text from Cairo,\" Monk said. \"And they know a lot more about this stuff than we do.\"\n\nSobering nods passed around the group. Running on too little sleep, they were all razor-edged on adrenaline. The riddles were taxing what little mental reserve they still had, leaving a pall of defeat hanging over them.\n\nRefusing to weaken, Gray closed his eyes, concentrating. He considered all he'd learned. The amalgam was composed of many different metals in the platinum group, the exact recipe of which was impossible to determine, even with current laboratory tests. The amalgam was then shaped into bones and secured in a cathedral.\n\nWhy? Did the alchemists really belong to a secret church within the Church? Is that how they managed to hide the bones during that tumultuous time, an era of antipopes and strife?\n\nNo matter the history, Gray was sure the Dragon Court's device had somehow tapped into the power in the m-state amalgam. Perhaps the tainting of the Communion wafers was only a way to test the breadth and range of that power. But what was the primary use for such a power? A tool, a weapon?\n\nGray mulled over the indecipherable codex of chemicals, one hidden for centuries, left behind as a series of clues to a possible storehouse of ancient power.\n\nAn indecipherable codex\u2026\n\nAbout to give up, the answer came to him, sudden and sharp, a pain behind the eyes.\n\nNot a codex.\n\n\"It's a key,\" he mumbled aloud, knowing it to be true. He faced the others. \"The amalgam is an indecipherable chemical key, impossible to duplicate. Within its unique chemistry must be the power to unlock the location of the tomb of the fourth Magi.\"\n\nVigor started to speak, but Gray held him off with a hand.\n\n\"The Dragon Court knows how to ignite that power, to turn that key on. But where's the lock? Not in Cologne. The Dragon Court failed there. But they must have a second-best guess. The answer is here. In this fresco.\"\n\nHe stared around the group.\n\n\"We've got to solve this,\" he said. He turned and pointed to the fresco. \"Moses is striking a rock. Altars are usually made of stone. Does that mean anything? Are we supposed to go out to the Sinai desert and search for Moses's stone?\"\n\n\"No,\" Vigor said, stirring out of the fog of defeat. He reached and touched the painted rock. \"Remember the layers of symbolism in the riddle. This is not Moses's stone. At least not his alone. The fresco is actually titled 'Moses-Peter Striking the Rock.'\"\n\nGray frowned. \"Why two names? Moses and Peter?\"\n\n\"Throughout the catacombs, Saint Peter's image was often superimposed upon Moses's acts. It was a way of glorifying the apostle.\"\n\nRachel looked closer at the painted face. \"If this is Saint Peter's rock\u2026?\"\n\n\"'Rock' in Greek is petros,\" Vigor said. \"This is why the apostle Simon Bar-Jona took the name Peter, eventually Saint Peter. From Christ's words, 'You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.'\"\n\nGray attempted to put this together. \"Are you suggesting that the altar named in the riddle is the altar inside St. Peter's Basilica?\"\n\nRachel suddenly twisted around. \"No. We've got the symbolism backward. In the stanza, the word altar is used, but the painting replaces it with the word rock. It's not an altar we're looking for, it's a rock.\"\n\n\"Great,\" Monk said. \"That really narrows our search parameters.\"\n\n\"It does,\" Rachel said. \"My uncle quoted the most significant biblical passage that connects Saint Peter to a rock. Peter would be the rock upon which the Church would be built. Remember where we are now. In a crypt.\" She tapped the stone on the fresco. \"A rock underground.\"\n\nRachel faced them all, her eyes so excited they almost glowed in the dark. \"What site was St. Peter's Basilica built atop? What rock is buried under the foundations of the church?\"\n\nGray answered, eyes widening. \"Saint Peter's tomb.\"\n\n\"The Rock of the Church,\" Vigor echoed.\n\nGray sensed the truth. The bones were the key. The tomb was the lock.\n\nRachel nodded. \"That's where the Dragon Court will be heading next. We should contact Cardinal Spera immediately.\"\n\n\"Oh no\u2026\" Vigor stiffened.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"Tonight\u2026at dusk\u2026\" Vigor checked his watch, his face ashen. He turned and headed away. \"We must hurry.\"\n\nGray followed with the others. \"What?\"\n\n\"A memorial service for the tragedy in Cologne. The mass is scheduled for sunset. Thousands will be in attendance, including the pope.\"\n\nGray suddenly realized what Vigor feared. He pictured the massacre in the cathedral in Cologne. All eyes would be turned away from the Scavi, the necropolis below St. Peter's Basilica, where the tomb of the apostle had been excavated.\n\nThe Rock of the Church.\n\nIf the Dragon Court ignited the Magi bones down there\u2026\n\nHe imagined the crowds packed inside the church, massed outside on the square.\n\nOh God."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE SCAVI",
                "text": "[ JULY 25, 8:55 P.M. ]\n\n[ ROME, ITALY ]\n\nThe summer day ran long.\n\nDusk was just settling over the Appian Way as Gray climbed out of the catacombs. He shaded his eyes with a hand. After the gloom of the catacombs, the slanting rays of the setting sun glared.\n\nThe caretaker, Giuseppe, held the door for the exiting group, then closed it behind him, locking it. \"Is everything all right, Monsignor?\" The old man must have noted the strain in them as they all piled out through the doorway.\n\nVigor nodded. \"I just need to make a phone call.\"\n\nGray handed Vigor his sat-phone. The Vatican needed to be alerted and the alarm raised. Gray knew the monsignor was the best person to reach someone in authority over there.\n\nA step away, Rachel already had her cell phone out, dialing her station house.\n\nA crack of a bullet stopped them all. It struck the flint paving of the courtyard, sparking brightly in the descending gloom.\n\nGray responded immediately, half surprised, half not.\n\n\"Go!\" he yelled, and pointed to the caretaker's cottage that flanked one side of the courtyard. Giuseppe had left the door to his home open.\n\nThey bolted toward the shelter. Gray helped the old caretaker, supporting him, with Rachel on his other side.\n\nBefore they could reach the cottage, the doorway exploded with a gout of flame, throwing them all back. Gray tumbled in a pile with Giuseppe and Rachel. The rigged door, blown off its hinges, skittered across the paving stones. Glass shattered across the courtyard.\n\nGray dropped to a knee, sheltering Rachel and the caretaker. Kat covered Vigor in the same manner. Gray had his pistol out, pointing, but he had no target. No cloaked figures came running.\n\nThe surrounding landscape of vineyards and umbrella pines lay steeped in shadows and gloom. Silent.\n\n\"Monk,\" Gray said.\n\nHis partner already had his shotgun out. He peered through the night-vision scope fixed to the top of the barrel.\n\n\"I can't pick anything out,\" Monk said.\n\nA phone rang. All eyes flicked to Vigor. He crouched with Gray's satellite phone. It rang again in his hands.\n\nGray motioned for him to answer it.\n\nVigor obeyed, raising the sat-phone to his ear.\n\n\"Pronto,\" he said. He listened for a moment, then lowered and held out the phone toward Gray. \"It's for you.\"\n\nGray knew they had been purposefully pinned down. No further shots were fired at them. Why? He took the phone.\n\nBefore he could speak, a voice greeted him. \"Hello, Commander Pierce.\"\n\n\"Seichan.\"\n\n\"I see you received my message from Sigma command.\"\n\nSeichan had somehow tracked them here, followed them and set up the ambush. And he knew the reason. \"The riddle\u2026\"\n\n\"From the frantic way you and your friends vacated the catacomb, I can only assume you solved the mystery.\"\n\nGray remained silent.\n\n\"Raoul didn't wish to share his knowledge either,\" Seichan said calmly. \"It seems the Dragon Court wants to keep the Guild at the sidelines, only playing defensive. That won't do. So if you'd be so kind as to share what you've learned, I'll let you all live.\"\n\nGray covered the phone's receiver. \"Monk?\"\n\n\"Still nothing, Commander,\" he whispered back.\n\nSeichan had taken up a sniping position with a clear view of the courtyard. The vineyards, trees, and shadowed slopes hid her well. She must have snuck down here while they were in the catacombs, and booby-trapped the cottage, forcing them to stay in the open.\n\nThey were at her mercy.\n\n\"From your urgency,\" Seichan said, \"time must be a factor. And I can wait all night, picking you off one at a time until you talk.\" To emphasize this, a bullet cracked a stone at his toe, stinging him with shards. \"So be a good boy.\"\n\nMonk whispered at his side. \"She must be using an exhaust-suppression device on her rifle. I didn't even pick up a flicker out there.\"\n\nTrapped, he had no choice but to bargain. \"What do you want to know?\" he asked, stalling.\n\n\"The Dragon Court is moving on a target tonight. And I believe you have discovered where that will be. Tell me and you all go free.\"\n\n\"How do I know you'll keep your word?\"\n\n\"Oh, you don't. You don't have much choice either. I thought that was obvious, Gray. May I call you Gray?\" She continued, not missing a beat. \"As long as I find you useful, I'll keep you around, but I certainly don't need all of you around. I'll make an example of your companions if I must.\"\n\nGray had no choice. \"Fine. Yes. We solved the goddamn riddle.\"\n\n\"Where will the Dragon Court strike?\"\n\n\"At a church,\" he bluffed. \"Near the Coliseum, there is\u2014\"\n\nA whistle sped by his left ear and at the same time a startled cry rose from the caretaker. Gray turned to see the old man clutching his shoulder. Blood oozed between his fingers as he fell to his backside on the stones. Rachel went immediately to his aid.\n\n\"Monk, help them,\" Gray said, cursing silently.\n\nHis teammate had a med pack and the training. Still, Monk hesitated, his shotgun ready, reluctant to give up his search.\n\nGray waved him over more forcibly. Seichan would not make the mistake of exposing herself. Monk lowered his gun and went to the caretaker's aid.\n\n\"You get one free pass,\" Seichan said in his ear. \"Another lie and it will cost more than a little blood.\"\n\nGray's fingers tightened on the phone.\n\n\"I have my own intel,\" the woman continued. \"So I'll know if your answer makes sense or not.\"\n\nGray sought some way to throw her off track, but the caretaker's groans made it hard to focus on strategy. And he had no time\u2014and no choice. He had to tell her the truth. She had kept him in the game up until now, and now he had to return the favor. Like it or not, he and the Guild were in bed together. This would have to be settled another time. And for that to happen, they had to live.\n\n\"If you're right about the timetable,\" Gray said, \"the Dragon Court will assault the Vatican tonight.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"Below the basilica. At the tomb of Saint Peter.\" Gray gave a brief overview of the riddle's solution as proof of the truth.\n\n\"Clever work,\" she said. \"I knew there was a reason I kept you around. Now if you'd all be so kind as to dispose of all your cellular phones. Toss them into the burning cottage. And no tomfoolery, Commander Gray. Don't assume I'm ignorant of exactly the number of phones you and your team are carrying.\"\n\nGray obeyed. Kat collected all the phones, then showed each one as she tossed them through the doorway into the growing conflagration.\n\nExcept for the phone at Gray's ear.\n\n\"Arrivederci for now, Commander Gray.\"\n\nThe phone suddenly exploded at his ear, ripped from his fingers, shot from afar. His ear rang. Blood ran down his neck.\n\nGray tensed, waiting for another parting shot. Instead, he heard an engine ignite with a throaty roar, then settle to a rumble. A motorbike. It headed away, staying below the ridgeline. The Dragon Lady was heading out with the information she needed.\n\nGray turned.\n\nMonk had the caretaker's shoulder bandaged. \"Only a graze. Lucky.\"\n\nBut Gray knew luck had nothing to do with it. The woman could've put a round through any of their eyes.\n\n\"How's your ear?\" Monk asked.\n\nGray shook his head, angry.\n\nMonk came forward anyway. He reached, not particularly gently, and inspected the damage on his ear. \"Just a skin lac. Hold still.\" He dabbed the wound, then sprayed it from a tiny bottle.\n\nIt stung like a son of a bitch.\n\n\"Liquid bandage,\" Monk explained. \"It dries in seconds. Even faster if I blow on it. But I don't want to get you too excited.\"\n\nBehind them, Rachel and Vigor helped the caretaker to his feet. Kat recovered the old man's shepherd crook. His eyes remained on his cottage. Flames now licked from the shattered windows.\n\nVigor placed a hand on the man's shoulder. \"Mi dispiace\u2026\" he apologized.\n\nThe man shrugged, his voice surprisingly firm. \"I still have my sheep. Houses can be rebuilt.\"\n\n\"We must reach a phone,\" Rachel said softly to Gray. \"General Rende and the Vatican have to be alerted.\"\n\nGray knew that cutting their lines of communication had only been a delaying tactic, to buy the Dragon Court and thus the Guild a bit more time. He glanced to the western skies.\n\nThe sun was gone. Only a crimson glow marked its passage.\n\nThe Dragon Court was surely already on the move.\n\nGray spoke to the caretaker. \"Giuseppe, do you have an automobile?\"\n\nThe old man slowly nodded. \"Around back.\" He led the way. Behind the burning cottage stood a stone-shingle detached garage, more a shack. It had no door.\n\nThrough the opening, a shape filled the space, covered by a tarp.\n\nGiuseppe waved his crook. \"The keys are inside. I filled it with gas last week.\"\n\nMonk and Kat went ahead to clear the car. Together they pulled the tarpaulin aside, revealing a classic '66 Maserati Sebring, black as obsidian. It reminded Gray of the early Ford Mustang fastbacks. Long hood, muscular, meaty tires, bred for speed.\n\nVigor glanced to Giuseppe.\n\nHe shrugged. \"My aunt's car\u2026barely driven.\"\n\nRachel walked toward it in a happy daze.\n\nThey quickly climbed inside. Giuseppe agreed to wait for the fire department, continuing his post as caretaker of the catacombs.\n\nRachel slid into the driver's seat. She knew the streets of Rome the best. But not all were happy with this choice of driver.\n\n\"Monk,\" Rachel said as she turned the key and the engine roared.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Maybe you'd better close your eyes.\"\n\n[ 9:22 P.M. ]\n\nAfter a brief stop at a bank of public telephones, Rachel pulled away from the curb. She sped into traffic, earning an irritated beep from an angry driver. What was his problem? A full handspan stretched between her car and the Fiat behind her. Plenty of room\u2026\n\nThe Maserati's headlights speared ahead. Full night had descended. A line of brake lights wound toward the center of the city. She raced around and between the other cars, mere obstacles. She dove into the oncoming-traffic lane at times. The empty stretches on the far side were a shame to waste.\n\nA groan echoed from the backseat.\n\nShe sped faster.\n\nNo one voiced a real complaint.\n\nBack at the phones, Rachel had attempted to contact General Rende, while her uncle had called Cardinal Spera. Neither had been successful. Both men were at the memorial service, already under way. General Rende was personally overseeing the Carabinieri force that guarded St. Peter's Square. Cardinal Spera was in attendance at the service. Messages had been left, the alarm raised. But would it be in time?\n\nEveryone was at the memorial mass, only steps from where the Dragon Court would strike. The crowds of people acted as the perfect cover.\n\n\"How much longer?\" Gray asked from the passenger seat. He had his pack open on his lap and worked rapidly. Too busy with the road, she had no time to see what he was doing.\n\nRachel sped past Trajan's Market, the ancient Roman equivalent of a shopping mall. The crumbling semicircular building was set into the Quirinal Hill. It was a good landmark. \"Two miles,\" she answered Gray.\n\n\"With the memorial crowds, we'll never reach the front entrances,\" Vigor warned, leaning forward from the backseat. \"We should try for the railway entry into the Vatican. Aim for Via Aurelia along the south wall. We can cross the grounds behind the basilica. Go in the back way.\"\n\nRachel nodded. Already the traffic congested as the flow bottlenecked toward the bridge over the Tiber River.\n\n\"Tell me about the excavations under the basilica,\" Gray said. \"Are there any other entrances to it?\"\n\n\"No,\" Vigor said. \"The Scavi region is self-contained. Just under St. Peter's lies the Sacred Grottoes, accessed through the basilica. Many of the most famous crypts and papal tombs reside there. But in 1939, sampietrini workers were digging a tomb site for Pope Pius XI and discovered another layer beneath the Grottoes, a huge necropolis of ancient mausoleums dating back to the first century. It was named simply the Scavi, or Excavation.\"\n\n\"How extensive is the area? What's the lay of the land?\"\n\n\"Have you ever been down to the underground city in Seattle?\" Vigor asked.\n\nGray glanced over his shoulder to the monsignor.\n\n\"I once went to an archaeological conference there,\" Vigor explained. \"Beneath modern Seattle lies its past, a Wild West ghost town, where you can see intact shops, streetlamps, wooden walkways. The necropolis is like that, an ancient Roman cemetery buried beneath the Grottoes. Excavated by archaeologists, it's a maze of gravesites, shrines, and stone streets.\"\n\nRachel finally reached the bridge and fought her way across the Tiber River. Once on the far side, she left the main flow of traffic, circled out, and headed away from St. Peter's Square. She swung to the south.\n\nAfter a few serpentine turns, she found herself running alongside the towering Leonine Walls of the Vatican. It was dark here, with few streetlamps.\n\n\"Just ahead,\" Vigor said, pointing an arm.\n\nThe railway spanned the road atop a stone bridge. It was here that the Vatican's railroad line exited the Holy See and joined Rome's system of tracks. Popes throughout the century had toured by train, leaving from the Vatican's own railroad depot within the walls of the papal state.\n\n\"Take that turn before the bridge,\" Vigor said.\n\nShe almost missed it in the dark. Rachel yanked the wheel, fishtailing off the main avenue and onto a gravel service road that climbed steeply. Tires spat rooster tails of gravel as she fought her way to the top. The road hit a dead end at the tracks.\n\n\"That way!\" Vigor pointed to the left.\n\nThere was no street, only a narrow sward of grass, weeds, and chunky rocks that paralleled the railroad tracks. Rachel twisted the wheel, bumped off the service road and onto the side of the tracks.\n\nShe shifted gears and rattled her way toward the archway through the Leonine Wall. Her headlights bobbled up and down. Reaching the wall, she manhandled the Maserati through the opening, traversing the gap between the wall and the tracks.\n\nAhead, her headlights splashed across the side of a midnight-blue service van that blocked the way. A pair of Swiss Guards, in blue night uniforms, flanked the van. They had rifles out, pointing at the intruder.\n\nRachel braked, arm already out the window, waving her Carabinieri identification. She yelled. \"Lieutenant Rachel Verona! With Monsignor Verona! We have an emergency!\"\n\nThey were waved forward, but one of the guards kept his rifle at his shoulder, pointed at Rachel's face.\n\nHer uncle quickly showed his own Vatican papers. \"We must reach Cardinal Spera.\"\n\nA flashlight searched the car, passing over the other occupants. Luckily all their weapons were hidden from direct view. It was no time for questions.\n\n\"I vouch for them,\" Vigor said sternly. \"As will Cardinal Spera.\"\n\nThe van was directed out of the way, clearing the path into the Vatican grounds.\n\nVigor still leaned his head out the window. \"Has word reached you here? Of a possible attack?\"\n\nThe guard's eyes widened. He shook his head. \"No, Monsignor.\"\n\nRachel glanced to Gray. Oh no\u2026 As they had feared, in all the confusion surrounding the memorial service, word was traveling too slowly up the chains of command. The Church was not known for its swift response\u2026to change or emergency.\n\n\"Do not let anyone else through here,\" Vigor ordered. \"Lock this entry down.\"\n\nThe guardsman responded to the command in the monsignor's voice and nodded.\n\nVigor settled back into the car and pointed. \"Take the first road after the depot.\"\n\nRachel did not have to be told to hurry. She raced through a small parking lot that fronted the quaint two-story depot and took the first right. She crossed in front of the Mosaic Studio, the Vatican's only industry, then tore between the Tribunal Palace and the Palazzo San Carlo. Here the buildings grew denser as the dome of St. Peter's filled the world ahead of them.\n\n\"Park at the Hospice of Santa Marta,\" her uncle ordered.\n\nRachel ran her car up to the curb. The Sacristy of St. Peter rose on her left, connected to the giant basilica. The papal hospice was on her right. A covered walkway joined the sacristy to the hospice. Rachel cut her engine. They would have to continue from here on foot.\n\nTheir destination\u2014the entrance to the Scavi\u2014lay on the other side of the sacristy.\n\nAs they climbed out, muffled singing reached them. The Pontifical Choir singing \"Ave Maria.\" The Mass was under way.\n\n\"Follow me,\" Uncle Vigor said.\n\nHe led the way through the covered archway to the open yard on the far side. The grounds were oddly deserted. All attention and focus of the Vatican had turned inward on itself, to the basilica, to the pope. Rachel had witnessed this before. Great services, like this special memorial, could empty the entire city-state, leaving few about.\n\nOn the far side of the sacristy, a low sonorous noise joined the choral singing. It came from ahead of them, through the Arch of Bells that led out to St. Peter's Square. It was the murmur of a thousand voices, rising from the crowd gathered out in the piazza. Through the arch's narrow gateway, Rachel caught a glimpse of candles glowing among the dark throng.\n\n\"Over here,\" Vigor said, pulling free a large ring of keys. He led them to a nondescript door at the edge of the tiny yard. Solid steel. \"This leads down to the Scavi.\"\n\n\"No guards,\" Gray noted.\n\nThe only security was a pair of Swiss Guards posted by the Arch of Bells. They were armed with rifles as they studied the crowd. They didn't even glance back toward the newcomers.\n\n\"At least it's locked,\" Vigor said. \"Maybe we've beat them here after all.\"\n\n\"We can't count on that,\" Gray warned. \"We know they have contacts inside the Vatican. They may have keys.\"\n\n\"Only a few people have these keys. As head of the Pontifical Institute of Archaeology, I have a set.\" He turned to Rachel and held out two other keys. \"These open the lower door\u2026and the tomb site of Saint Peter.\"\n\nRachel refused to take them. \"What\u2014?\"\n\n\"You know the lay of the Scavi better than anyone. I must reach Cardinal Spera. The pope must be removed from harm's way, and the basilica emptied without creating panic.\" He touched his clerical collar. \"There's no one else who can get there fast enough.\"\n\nRachel nodded and took the keys. It would take someone of her uncle's stature to quickly gain audience to the cardinal, especially during such an important mass. It was probably why the alarm had yet to be raised. Roadblocks of procedure. Even General Rende did not have jurisdiction upon Vatican soil.\n\nVigor gave Gray a sharp stare before turning away. Rachel interpreted it. Watch after my niece.\n\nRachel closed her fingers over the keys. At least her uncle was not trying to send her away. He recognized the danger. Thousands of lives hung in the balance.\n\nHer uncle turned and headed for the sacristy's main door. It was the fastest way to reach the heart of the basilica.\n\nGray turned to the group and had them all don their radios, even securing an extra for her, taping the microphone to her throat himself and showing her how the barest whisper could be heard. Subvocalizing was the word he used. It was eerie, so quiet yet perfectly understandable.\n\nShe practiced as Monk cracked the door open. The way down to the basement was dark.\n\n\"There's a light switch just inside,\" she whispered, surprised at the loudness of the audible pickup on the microphone.\n\n\"We go in dark,\" Gray said.\n\nMonk and Kat nodded. They pulled goggles over their eyes. Gray handed Rachel a pair. Night-vision. She was familiar enough with them from her military training. She donned them. The world brightened into shades of green and silver.\n\nGray led the way; she followed with Kat. Monk silently closed the door behind him. The way became dark, even with the scopes. Night vision required some light. Gray clicked on a handheld flashlight. It flared bright in the gloom. He secured it below his pistol.\n\nRachel tilted up her goggles. The way ahead went pitch dark again. Gray's flashlight must be emitting ultraviolet light, visible only through the scopes.\n\nShe reseated her goggles.\n\nThe otherworldly light illuminated an anteroom at this level. A few displays and models dotted the space, used in tours. One was a model of Constantine's first church, built on the site here in 324 B.C. The other was a model of an aedicula, a burial shrine shaped like a tiny two-level temple. It was such a temple that had marked Saint Peter's gravesite. According to historians, Constantine had constructed a cube made out of marble and porphyry, a rare stone imported from Egypt. He encased the aedicula shrine and built his original church around it.\n\nSoon after the excavation of the necropolis began, the original Constantinian cube was rediscovered, positioned directly under the main papal altar of St. Peter's. A wall of the original temple remained, scratched and scrawled with Christian graffiti, including the Greek letters spelling out Petros eni, or \"Peter is within.\"\n\nAnd indeed, inside a cavity in that graffiti wall, bones and cloth were found that matched a man of Saint Peter's stature and age. Now they were sealed in bulletproof plastic boxes made, oddly enough, by the U.S. Department of Defense and secured back into the wall cavity.\n\nThat was their goal.\n\n\"This way,\" Rachel whispered, and pointed to a steep, circular stair that led below.\n\nGray took the lead.\n\nThey wound down below the basement and even deeper.\n\nA chill settled through Rachel's clothes. She felt almost naked. The goggles narrowed her vision, triggering a twinge of claustrophobia.\n\nAt the bottom of the stairs, a small door blocked the way. Rachel squeezed next to Gray, bodies touching, and noted his musky scent before she fished out the key and unlocked the door.\n\nHe held her hand against opening the door and gently but firmly pushed her behind him. He then pulled the door open a few centimeters and stared through. Rachel and the others waited.\n\n\"All clear,\" he said. \"Dark as a tomb in there.\"\n\n\"Funny,\" Monk grumbled.\n\nGray pulled open the door.\n\nRachel readied herself for a blast, gunfire, or some sort of attack, but found only silence.\n\nAs they all pushed inside, Gray turned to the group. \"I think the monsignor was right. For once, we've got the jump on the Dragon Court. It's about time we set up the ambush.\"\n\n\"What's the plan?\" Monk asked.\n\n\"No chances. We set the trap and get the hell out of here.\" Gray pointed to the door. \"Monk, stand guard at the door. It's the only way out or in. Guard our exit and our backs.\"\n\n\"Not a problem.\"\n\nGray handed what looked like two small egg cartons to Kat. \"Sonic grenades and flash bombs. I expect they'll come in dark like we did, with their ears up. Let's see if we can blind and deafen them. Distribute these as we cross to the tomb. Full coverage.\"\n\nKat nodded.\n\nHe turned next to Rachel. \"Show me Saint Peter's tomb.\"\n\nShe headed out into the dark necropolis, walking along an ancient Roman road. Family crypts and mausoleums lined the path, each six meters square. Walls were covered with ultrathin bricks, a common building material during the first century. Frescoes and mosaics decorated many of the tombs, but such details were murky under night-vision. There remained a few bits of statuary, appearing to move in the eerie illumination. The dead come to life.\n\nRachel mapped out the route to the center of the necropolis. A metal walkway led up to a platform and rectangular window. She pointed through it.\n\n\"The tomb of Saint Peter.\"\n\n[ 9:40 P.M. ]\n\nGray pointed his pistol and shone his UV spot into the gravesite.\n\nTen feet beyond the window, a brick wall rose alongside a massive cube of marble. A hole near the base of the wall had an opening in it. Bending down, he aimed his light. Within the opening, he could see a clear box with a blob of white claylike material.\n\nBone.\n\nFrom Saint Peter.\n\nGray felt the hairs on his arms stand a bit on end, a shiver of awe and fear. He felt like an archaeologist, delving into a dark cave, out in some lost continent, not a couple floors below the heart of the Roman Catholic Church. Then again, maybe here was its true heart.\n\n\"Commander?\" Kat asked. She rejoined them, having lagged a bit behind to plant her charges.\n\nGray straightened. \"Can we get closer?\" he asked Rachel.\n\nShe pulled out the second key her uncle had given her and unlocked a gate that led into the inner sanctum.\n\n\"We must be quick,\" Gray said, sensing time was running short. Then again, maybe it wasn't. Maybe the Dragon Court wouldn't strike until after midnight, like in Cologne. But he was taking no chances.\n\nHe pulled out the gear he had been calibrating on the way here. He searched the space and found an inconspicuous spot. He fixed the tiny video camera within a crevice of a neighboring mausoleum and positioned it to face Saint Peter's tomb. He took a second camera and turned it the opposite way, making sure it faced back out through the window to cover the approach.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Rachel asked.\n\nFinished with the cameras, Gray waved them back out. \"I don't want to spring the trap too soon. I want them to get comfortable in here, set up their apparatus. Then we'll strike. I don't want to leave them any room to bolt with the Magi bones or their device.\"\n\nAfter they exited, Rachel relocked the gate.\n\n\"Monk,\" Gray said into his radio, \"how are you doing?\"\n\n\"All quiet.\"\n\nGood.\n\nGray crossed to a nearby crumbling mausoleum, one open at the front. The bones had long been cleared out. He freed the laptop from his pack and hid it inside the mausoleum, attaching a portable boost-transmitter to its USB port. A green light flashed a positive connection. He flicked a switch, sending the apparatus into dark mode. No light shone from computer or transmitter. Good.\n\nGray straightened and explained as they headed back out. \"The video cameras are not strong enough to transmit very far. The laptop will pick up the signal and boost it. It'll have enough range to reach the surface. We'll monitor it on another laptop. Once the Court is down here, trapped, we blast them with the sonic and flash charges, then sweep below with a whole barrack of Swiss Guards.\"\n\nKat nodded and eyed him. \"If we had been too cautious back at the catacombs, delayed too long, we wouldn't have had this chance.\"\n\nGray nodded.\n\nFinally luck was with them. A bit of boldness had\u2014\n\nThe explosions cut off his thought. They were not loud, more muffled, sounding like depth charges exploding far underwater. They echoed throughout the necropolis, accompanied by a louder crash of stone.\n\nGray crouched as small holes were punched through the roof from above. Rock and earth blasted downward, crashing into the mausoleums and crypts below. Before the debris could even settle, ropes snaked through the smoky openings, followed by one man after another.\n\nA full assault team.\n\nThey dropped into the necropolis and vanished.\n\nGray immediately recognized what was happening. The Dragon Court was entering from the floor above, the Sacred Grottoes. That level was accessed from inside the basilica. The Dragon Court must have come to the memorial service\u2014then through their contact here, snuck below into the papal crypts of the Sacred Grotto. Their gear had probably been smuggled in over the course of a couple days and hidden among the shadowy tombs of the Grotto. Then, under the cover of the service, they regained their tools, bored specially shaped charges, and quietly punched their way down here.\n\nThe assault team would escape the same way, disappearing back among the thousands gathered here.\n\nThat must not happen.\n\n\"Kat,\" Gray whispered, \"take Rachel to Monk. Don't engage. Get back above. Find the Swiss Guard.\"\n\nKat grabbed Rachel's elbow. \"What about you?\" she asked.\n\nHe was already moving, heading back toward Saint Peter's tomb. \"I'm staying here. I'll monitor from the laptop. Delay them if need be. Then signal you by radio once I spring the ambush.\"\n\nPerhaps all was not yet lost.\n\nMonk came on over the radio. Even subvocalizing, his words were faint. \"No go here. They blasted a hole right above the exit. Practically cracked my skull with a chunk of rock. The bastards are riveting the goddamn door shut.\"\n\nGray heard the machine-gun pops of an air gun echoing from the rear of the necropolis.\n\n\"No one's going in or out this way,\" Monk finished.\n\n\"Kat?\"\n\n\"Roger that, Commander.\"\n\n\"Everyone go to ground,\" he ordered. \"Wait for my signal.\n\nGray crouched low and ran down the cemetery street.\n\nThey were on their own.\n\n[ 9:44 P.M. ]\n\nVigor entered St. Peter's Basilica through the sacristy door, flanked by two Swiss Guards. He had shown his identification three times to gain access. But at least word was slowly filtering through the screens and checks. Maybe he hadn't been forceful enough when he'd placed the call twenty minutes ago, hedging that he didn't know for certain when the Dragon Court would assault the tomb.\n\nBut now things were moving in the right direction.\n\nVigor passed the monument to Pius VII and entered the nave near the middle of the church. The basilica was shaped like a giant cross, covering twenty-five thousand square meters, so cavernous two soccer teams could play a game within the confines of the nave alone.\n\nAnd presently it was full. Every pew was crowded, from nave through transept. The space glowed with thousands of candles and the illumination of eight hundred chandeliers. The Pontifical Choir was in mid-song, Exaudi Deus, fitting for a memorial, but amplified and echoing as loud as any rock concert.\n\nVigor hurried, but forced himself not to run. Panic would kill. There were only a limited number of exits. He waved the two Swiss Guards to sweep right and left and alert their brothers-in-arms. Vigor had to get the pope clear first and alert the presiding clerical staff to slowly evacuate the parishioners.\n\nStepping into the nave, he had a clear view to the papal altar.\n\nOn the far side of the altar, Cardinal Spera was seated with the pope. The pair sat under Bernini's bronze baldacchino, a canopy of gilded bronze that covered the center altar. It rose eight stories, supported by four massive twisted bronze columns, decorated with gilded gold olive and laurel branches. The canopy itself was topped by a golden sphere surmounted by a cross.\n\nVigor worked his way surreptitiously forward. He had no time to change into proper vestments and was still shoddily attired. A few wealthy parishioners glanced at him, frowning, then noted his Roman collar. Still their glances were disdainful. A poor parish priest, they must think, awed by the spectacle.\n\nReaching the front, Vigor edged to the left. He would circle toward the rear of the altar, where he could speak to Cardinal Spera in private.\n\nAs he pushed past the statue of Saint Longinus, a hand reached out from a shadowed doorway. He glanced over as his elbow was gripped. It was a lanky man his own age, silver-haired, someone he knew and respected, Preffetto Alberto, the head prefect of the Archives.\n\n\"Vigor?\" the prefect said. \"I heard\u2026\"\n\nHis words were lost to an especially loud refrain from the chorus.\n\nVigor leaned closer, stepping into the alcove that sheltered the doorway. It led down to the Sacred Grottoes. \"I'm sorry, Alberto. What\u2014?\"\n\nThe grip tightened. A pistol shoved hard into his ribs. It had a silencer.\n\n\"Not another word, Vigor,\" Alberto warned.\n\n[ 9:52 P.M. ]\n\nHidden inside the crypt, Gray lay on his belly, out of view of the opening. His pistol rested beside the open laptop. He had its display turned to dark mode, glowing in UV. Two images split the screen\u2014one feed from the camera facing Saint Peter's tomb, the other from the camera facing the main necropolis.\n\nThe assault team had divided into two groups. While one set patroled the necropolis in darkness, the other had broken out flashlights to expedite their work by the tomb. They worked quickly and efficiently, each man knowing his job. They had already opened the gate that blocked access to Saint Peter's tomb. Two men flanked the famous crypt, bent to a knee. They were fixing two large plates to either side.\n\nThe third man was immediately recognizable by his size.\n\nRaoul.\n\nHe carried a steel case. He opened it and removed a clear plastic cylinder, full of a familiar grayish powder. The amalgam. They must have pulverized the bone down to its powdery form. Raoul slid the cylinder through the low opening into Saint Peter's tomb.\n\nPlugging in the battery\u2026\n\nWith everything in place, Gray could wait no longer. The apparatus was set. It was their one chance to catch the Court off guard, perhaps to drive them off, abandoning their gear behind.\n\n\"Ready to go blackout,\" Gray whispered. His hand moved to the transmitter that controlled the sonic and flash bombs. \"Take out as many as you can while they're stunned, but don't take any needless chances. Keep moving. Stay out of sight.\"\n\nAffirmatives answered him. Monk was holed up near the door. Kat and Rachel had found another crypt to hide themselves inside. The assault team remained unaware of their presence.\n\nGray watched the trio of men exit the tomb area, trailing wires that led to the device. Raoul closed the gate, shielding himself from any danger. Atop the metal platform, he pressed one hand against his ear, plainly communicating the okay to proceed.\n\n\"Blackout on the count of five,\" Gray whispered. \"Earplugs in place, goggles blinkered closed. Here we go.\"\n\nGray counted down in his head. Five, four, three\u2026 Blind, he rested one hand on his pistol and the other on the laptop. Two, one, zero.\n\nHe hit the button on the laptop.\n\nThough deafened by his earplugs, he could feel the deep whump of the sonic charges behind his sternum. He waited a three-count for the strobing flash grenades to expire. He blinkered open his goggles, then yanked out the earplugs. Shots echoed across the necropolis. Gray rolled to the entrance to the crypt.\n\nDirectly ahead, the metal platform was empty.\n\nNo one was in sight.\n\nRaoul and his two men were gone.\n\nWhere?\n\nThe sound of gunfire intensified. A firefight waged in the dark necropolis. Gray remembered Raoul had received some communiqu\u00e9 just before he had ignited the sonic and flash charges. Had it been a warning? From whom?\n\nGray searched the vicinity. The world had receded to shades of green. He climbed the steps to the platform. He had to take the risk to secure the apparatus and the amalgam.\n\nAs he reached the top, he kept low, edging on his toes, one hand on the platform for support, his pistol swiveling to cover all directions.\n\nLight suddenly blazed through the window ahead. It revealed Raoul standing on the far side, a few steps from the tomb. Upon the attack, the man must have dodged back through the gate. He met Gray's eyes and lifted his arms. In his hands, he held the control device to ignite the amalgam.\n\nToo late.\n\nFutilely, Gray aimed and fired.\n\nBut the bulletproof glass repelled the slug.\n\nRaoul smiled and twisted the handle on the control device."
            },
            {
                "title": "TOMB RAIDER",
                "text": "[ JULY 25, 9:54 P.M. ]\n\n[ VATICAN CITY ]\n\nThe first quake threw Vigor into the air. Or maybe it was the ground that had dropped below his feet. Either way, he went airborne.\n\nCries rose across the basilica.\n\nAs he fell back down, he took advantage of the moment to plant an elbow square into the nose of the traitor Alberto, who had tumbled back with the first tremor. He swung next and punched Alberto a solid blow to the Adam's apple.\n\nThe man fell heavily. The pistol tumbled from his fingers. Vigor grabbed it just as the next tremor followed the first. He was knocked to his knees. By now, screams and yells erupted all around. But beneath it all, a deep, hollow thrum vibrated, as if a bell as large as the basilica had been struck and they were all trapped inside.\n\nVigor remembered the description given by the witness to the Cologne survivor. A pressure as if the walls squeezed in on themselves. It was the same here. All noises\u2014cries, pleas, prayers\u2014were perfectly discernible but muted nevertheless.\n\nWhile he climbed to his feet, the floor continued trembling. The polished marble surface seemed to ripple and shiver, appearing watery. Vigor shoved the pistol under his belt.\n\nHe turned to go to the aid of the pope and Cardinal Spera.\n\nAs he stepped forward, he felt it before he saw it. A sudden increase in pressure, deafening, squeezing inward. Then it let loose. Up from the base of the four bronze columns of Bernini's baldacchino, fiery cascades of electrical energy spiraled upward, spitting and crackling.\n\nThey rushed up the columns, across the canopy's roof, and met at the gold globe. A crack of thunder erupted. The ground jolted again, shattering fissures in the marble floor. From the canopy's globe, a brilliant fork of lightning erupted. It blasted upward, striking the underside of Michelangelo's dome and dancing across it. The ground bumped again, more violently.\n\nCracks skittered across the dome. Plates of plaster rained.\n\nIt was all coming down.\n\n[ 9:57 P.M. ]\n\nMonk picked himself up off the floor. Blood ran into one eye. He had landed face-first into the corner of a crypt, cracking his goggles, slicing his eyebrow.\n\nBlind now, he crouched and fished for his weapon. The shotgun's built-in night scope would help him see.\n\nAs he searched, the ground continued to vibrate under his fingertips. All gunfire had stopped after the first quake.\n\nMonk reached forward, sweeping the ground near the crypt. His shotgun couldn't have gone far.\n\nHe felt something hard at his fingertips.\n\nThank God.\n\nHe reached forward and realized his mistake. It was not the butt of his weapon. It was the toe of a boot.\n\nBehind him, he felt the hot barrel of a rifle press against the base of his skull.\n\nShit.\n\n[ 9:58 P.M. ]\n\nGray heard the crack of a rifle blast across the necropolis. It was the first shot since the quakes began. He had been thrown off the metal platform and had landed near the mausoleum where he'd hid his laptop. He had rolled into a ball, taking a blow to his shoulder, keeping his goggles and pistol in place. But he had lost his radio.\n\nShattered shards of glass littered the stone street, blown out of the platform window with the first violent quake.\n\nHe searched around him. Up the few steps to the metal platform, the wash of light still radiated from the tomb area. He had to know what was going on in there. But he couldn't assault the gate by himself. At least not without knowing the lay of the land.\n\nMaking certain no eyes were upon him, he dove back into the mausoleum. The planted cameras should still be transmitting.\n\nAs he lay flat on his belly, one arm covering the entrance with the pistol, he engaged the laptop. The split-screen image bloomed. The camera pointing into the main necropolis revealed nothing but darkness. No further shots were heard. The necropolis had gone deathly silent again.\n\nWhat had happened to the others?\n\nWith no answers, he focused on the opposite side of the screen. Nothing seemed to have changed. Gray spotted two men with rifles pointed back toward the gate, Raoul's guards. But there was no sign of the big man. The tomb seemed unchanged. But the image, the entire image on the screen, pulsed slightly, in tune with the vibration in the stone floor. It was as if the cameras were picking up some emanation given off by the charged device, a field of energy radiating out.\n\nBut where was Raoul?\n\nGray reached out and rewound the digital recorder back a full minute, stopping at the spot where Raoul stood near the tomb and twisted the control handle to his device.\n\nOn the screen, Raoul turned to watch the result. Green lights flared on the two plates fixed to either side of the tomb. Movement caught his attention. Gray used a toggle to zoom in on the tomb's small opening. The cylinder of amalgam powder vibrated\u2014then rose off the floor.\n\nLevitating.\n\nGray began to understand. He remembered Kat's description of how the m-state powders demonstrated an ability to levitate in a strong magnetic field, acting as superconductors. He recalled Monk's discovery of a magnetized cross back in Cologne. The plates with the green lights. They must be electromagnets. The Court's device apparently did nothing more than create a strong electromagnetic field around the amalgam, activating the m-state superconductor.\n\nHe now understood the energy pulsing outward.\n\nHe knew what had killed the parishioners.\n\nOh God\u2026\n\nSuddenly the image jolted with the first quake. The view fritzed completely for a second, then settled, the perspective slightly askew now as the camera shifted. On the screen, Raoul backed away from the tomb.\n\nGray didn't understand why. Nothing seemed to be happening.\n\nThen he spotted it, half hidden in the glare of the flashlights. At the base of the tomb, a section of the stone floor slowly tilted downward, forming a narrow ramp that led beneath the tomb. From below, a cobalt light flickered. Raoul stepped in front of the camera, blocking the view. He headed down the ramp, leaving only the two guards.\n\nThat's where he had disappeared.\n\nGray sped up the video back to the present. He now watched a few brilliant flashes erupt from below, blinding bursts of white light. Camera flashes. Raoul was recording whatever he found down there.\n\nA few seconds later, Raoul climbed back up the ramp.\n\nThe bastard wore a grimace of satisfaction.\n\nHe had won.\n\n[ 9:59 P.M. ]\n\nLying flat atop the mausoleum roof, Kat had managed to get one shot off, taking out the gunman holding a rifle to Monk's head. But another quake threw off her next shot. The remaining opponent did not hesitate. From the direction his comrade's body had fallen, he must have guessed where she hid.\n\nHe dove down and clubbed Monk with the metal hilt of a hunting knife, then pulled him up as a shield. He pressed the blade to Monk's neck.\n\n\"Come out!\" the man called in heavily accented English, sounding Germanic. \"Or I will remove this one's head.\"\n\nKat closed her eyes. It was Kabul all over again. She and Captain Marshall had gone in to save two captured soldiers, teammates. Decapitation had been threatened. But they had no choice. Though the odds were stacked against them three-to-one, they had made an assault, going in quiet, with knives and bayonets. But she had missed one guard, hidden in an alcove. A crack of a rifle, and Marshall went down. She had dispatched the last guard with a fling of a dagger, but it was too late for the captain. She had held his body as he gasped his last breath, thrashing in pain, eyes on her, pleading, knowing, disbelieving\u2026then nothing. Eyes gone to glass. A vital man, a tender man, gone like smoke.\n\n\"Come out now!\" the man yelled across the necropolis.\n\n\"Kat?\" Rachel subvocalized to her, touching her elbow. The Carabinieri lieutenant lay flat next to her on the roof.\n\n\"Stay hidden,\" Kat said. \"Try to make it to one of the ropes that lead out of here.\" That had been their original plan, to leap from rooftop to rooftop, to gain one of the scaling ropes that still hung down from the level above, to raise the alarm and gather reinforcements. That plan must not fail.\n\nRachel knew this, too.\n\nKat had her own duty. She rolled off the mausoleum roof and landed lithely on her toes. She glided over two rows to hide her former position, leaving some room for Rachel to escape, then stepped out into the open, ten yards from the man who held Monk. Kat lifted her hands and tossed her pistol aside. She laced her fingers and put them atop her head.\n\n\"I surrender,\" she said coldly.\n\nDazed and blind, Monk struggled, but the man restraining him had enough training to keep him subdued, on his knees, knife point digging into his neck. Kat studied Monk's eyes as she strode forward.\n\nThree steps.\n\nThe combatant relaxed. Kat noted his knife point shift away.\n\nGood enough.\n\nShe dove forward, pulling the dagger from her wrist sheath. She used her momentum to fling the blade. It sailed and struck the man in the eye. He fell backward, carrying Monk with him.\n\nKat twisted, yanking a blade from her boot. She flipped it in the direction Monk had indicated, catching the barest flicker of shadow. A third combatant. A short cry followed. A man fell out of the shadows, pierced through the neck.\n\nMonk struggled to his feet, fingers scrabbling and finding the other's knife. But he had lost his goggles, and Kat didn't have a spare pair. She would have to guide him.\n\nShe helped Monk up and placed his hand on her shoulder.\n\n\"Stay with me,\" she whispered.\n\nShe turned as a flashlight flared ahead of her. Amplified by her night-vision scopes, the sudden brightness seared into the back of her head, blinding, painful.\n\nA fourth combatant.\n\nSomeone she missed.\n\nAgain.\n\n[ 10:02 P.M. ]\n\nGray had noted the bloom of light on his computer screen, deep in the necropolis. That couldn't be good. It proved not to be. On one side of the split-screen image, he watched Raoul press his radio to his ear, his smile broadening. On the other side, he watched Kat and Monk being marched out at gunpoint, arms secured behind their backs with yellow plastic fast-ties.\n\nThey were shoved up the steps to the top of the platform.\n\nRaoul remained by the tomb. The ground continued to tremble. One of his bodyguards stood beside him; the other had gone down the ramp.\n\nRaoul raised his voice. \"Commander Pierce! Lieutenant Verona! Show yourselves now or these two die!\"\n\nGray remained where he was. He didn't have the force to overpower this situation. Rescue was hopeless. And if he gave in to the demands, he would just be handing his own life over. Raoul would kill them all. He closed his eyes, knowing he was dooming his teammates.\n\nA new voice drew his eyes back open.\n\n\"I'm coming!\" Rachel stepped into view on the second camera. She had her hands in the air.\n\nGray watched Kat shake her head. She, too, knew the foolishness of the lieutenant's act.\n\nTwo armed gunmen collected Rachel and drove her to join the others.\n\nRaoul stepped forward and pointed a meaty pistol into Rachel's shoulder. He bellowed at her ear, \"This is a horse pistol, Commander Pierce! Fifty-six caliber! It will rip her arm right off! Show yourself or I'll start removing limbs! On the count of five!\"\n\nGray saw the flash of terror in Rachel's eyes.\n\nCould he watch his friends brutally torn apart? And if he did, what would he gain? As he hid, Raoul and his men would surely take or destroy whatever clue had been hidden here. The others' deaths would be for nothing.\n\n\"Five\u2026\"\n\nHe stared at the laptop, at Rachel\u2026\n\nNo choice.\n\nSuppressing a groan, he wiggled out of his pack and grabbed one item from an inner pocket, palming it.\n\n\"Four\u2026\"\n\nGray switched the laptop into dark mode and clicked it closed. If he didn't live, he would have to trust that the computer would serve as witness to the events down here.\n\n\"Three\u2026\"\n\nGray crawled out of the mausoleum but remained hidden. He circled to hide his position.\n\n\"Two\u2026\"\n\nHe ducked back onto the main street.\n\n\"One\u2026\"\n\nHe laced his hands atop his head and stepped into sight. \"I'm here. Don't shoot!\"\n\n[ 10:04 P.M. ]\n\nRachel watched Gray march up to them at gunpoint.\n\nFrom the hard look on Gray's face, she recognized her error. She had hoped her surrender would buy Gray time to act, to do something to save them, or at least himself. She had not wanted to be the one left alone out in the necropolis, to stand by and watch the others be killed.\n\nAnd while Kat had given herself up for Monk, the woman had had a rescue plan in place, botched though it may have ended. Rachel, on the other hand, had acted on faith alone, placing all her trust in Gray.\n\nThe Dragon Court leader shoved her aside, meeting Gray as he climbed atop the platform. Raoul raised the massive horse pistol, pointing it at Gray's chest.\n\n\"You've caused me a hell of a lot of trouble.\" He cocked the gun. \"And no amount of body armor will stop this slug.\"\n\nGray ignored him.\n\nHis eyes were on Monk, Kat\u2026then Rachel.\n\nHe parted his fingers atop his head, revealing a matte-black egg, and said one word.\n\n\"Blackout.\"\n\n[ 10:05 P.M. ]\n\nGray counted on the full attention of Raoul and his men as the flash grenade exploded above his head. With his eyes squeezed closed, the strobing flare still burned through his lids, a crimson explosion.\n\nSightless, he dropped and rolled to the side.\n\nHe heard the thunderous bark of Raoul's horse pistol.\n\nGray reached to his boot and pulled free his .40-caliber Glock.\n\nAs the strobe ended, Gray opened his eyes.\n\nOne of Raoul's men lay at the foot of the steps, a fist-sized hole through his chest, taking the slug meant for Gray.\n\nRaoul roared and dove off the platform, twisting in midair, shooting blindly back at the platform.\n\n\"Down!\" Gray yelled.\n\nMajor-caliber slugs tore holes through steel.\n\nThe others dropped to their knees. Monk's and Kat's hands were still secured behind their backs.\n\nGray rolled and clipped one dazzled gunman in the ankle, toppling him off the platform. He shot another down at the foot of the steps.\n\nHe searched for Raoul. For such a giant of a man, he moved fast. Raoul had landed out of sight, but still blasted at them from below, tearing holes through the meshed floor of the platform.\n\nThey were sitting ducks.\n\nGray had no way of judging how long the flash grenade's effects would last. They had to move.\n\n\"Get back!\" Gray hissed to the others. \"Through the gate!\"\n\nGray fired a volley, covering their retreat, then followed.\n\nRaoul had stopped firing for the moment, reloading. But no doubt he would come at them again with deadly fury.\n\nShouts arose from deeper in the necropolis. Other gunmen. They were rushing to the aid of their compromised comrades.\n\nWhat now? He had only one magazine of ammo.\n\nA cry rose behind him.\n\nGray glanced back. He watched Rachel flailing backward. She must have been half dazzled by the flash bomb. In the darkness, she missed seeing the ramp in front of the tomb and back-stepped into it. She grabbed for Kat's elbow, trying to stop her fall.\n\nBut Kat was equally caught off-guard.\n\nBoth women tumbled down the ramp and rolled below.\n\nMonk met Gray's eyes. \"Shit.\"\n\n\"Down,\" Gray said. It was the only shelter. And besides, they had to protect whatever clue lay below.\n\nMonk went first, stumbling with his arms behind his back.\n\nGray followed as a new barrage began. Chunks of rock were torn from the surface of the tomb. Raoul had reloaded. He meant to keep them away.\n\nTwisting around, Gray's eyes caught on the green light glowing from one of the two plates attached to the tomb. Still activated. He thought quickly and made a choice. He pointed his pistol and fired.\n\nThe slug severed the knot of wires running to the plate. The green light winked out.\n\nGray ran down the stone ramp, noting the immediate cessation of the trembling in the ground. Both ears popped with a sudden release of pressure. The device had shorted.\n\nImmediately a loud grinding sounded underfoot.\n\nGray dove forward and landed inside a small cavern at the foot of the ramp, a natural pocket, volcanic in origin, common in the hills of Rome.\n\nBehind him, the ramp swung back up, closing.\n\nGray rolled to his feet, keeping his gun pointed up. As he had hoped, the device's activation had opened the tomb, and likewise its deactivation was closing it. Outside, the barrage by Raoul continued, tearing into rock.\n\nToo late, Gray thought with satisfaction.\n\nWith a final grate of stone on stone, the ramp sealed above them.\n\nDarkness settled\u2014but it was not complete.\n\nGray turned.\n\nThe others had gathered around a slab of metallic black rock that rested on the floor. It was lit by a tiny pyre of blue flame atop its surface, rising like a small flume of electrical fire.\n\nGray approached. There was barely room for the four of them to circle it.\n\n\"Hematite,\" Kat said, identifying the rock from her background in geology. She glanced from the sealed ramp to the slab. \"An iron oxide.\"\n\nShe bent down and studied the silver lines etched into its surface, tiny rivers against a black background, which were illuminated by the blue flames.\n\nAs Gray watched, the fire slowly expired, fading to a flicker, then winked out.\n\nMonk drew their attention to a more immediate concern. Another glowing object.\n\n\"Over here,\" he said.\n\nGray joined him. Resting in a corner of the blind cavern was a familiar silver cylinder, shaped like a barbell. An incendiary grenade. A timer counted down in the dark.\n\n04:28.\n\n04:27.\n\nGray remembered one of Raoul's bodyguards ducking down here after their leader was done taking photographs. He had been planting the bomb.\n\n\"Looks like they intended to destroy this clue,\" Monk said. He dropped down to one knee, studying the device. \"Damn thing's booby-trapped.\"\n\nGray glanced to the sealed ramp. Maybe Raoul's barrage a moment ago hadn't been meant to drive them off\u2014but to trap them.\n\nHe stared back to the bomb.\n\nWith the fiery star on the hematite slab extinguished, the only light in the cavern glowed from the LCD timer on the incendiary grenade.\n\n04:04.\n\n04:03.\n\n04:02.\n\n[ 10:06 P.M. ]\n\nVigor had felt the sudden release. The wash of electrical fire that had been tearing plaster from the cupola dispersed in seconds. Its energy skittered away like ghostly cerulean spiders.\n\nStill, chaos reigned inside the basilica. Few noted the cessation of the fireworks. Half the parishioners had managed to flee to safety, but the logjam at the entrances had slowed further evacuation. The Swiss Guard and Vatican Police were doing their best to assist.\n\nSome people hid under pews. Dozens of other parishioners had been struck by falling plaster and sat with bloody fingers pressed to scalp wounds. They were being helped and consoled by a handful of brave individuals, true Christians.\n\nThe Swiss Guard had come to the rescue of the pope. But he had refused to abandon the church, acting as the captain of this sinking ship. Cardinal Spera remained at his side. They had evacuated out from under the fiery baldacchino and taken shelter in the Clementina Chapel off to the side.\n\nVigor strode over to join them. He glanced back across the basilica. The chaos was slowly subsiding. Order was being restored. Vigor stared up at the assaulted dome. It had held\u2014whether through the mercy of God or through the engineering genius of Michelangelo.\n\nAs Vigor approached, Cardinal Spera broke through the ranks of the Swiss Guard. \"Is it over?\"\n\n\"I\u2026I don't know,\" Vigor said honestly. He had a larger concern.\n\nThe bones had been ignited. That was plain.\n\nBut what did that mean for Rachel and the others?\n\nA new voice intruded, shouted with familiar command. Vigor turned to find a wide-shouldered, silver-haired man striding toward him, dressed in a black uniform, hat under his arm. General Joseph Rende, family friend and head of the local Parioli Station. Vigor now understood why order was being restored. The Carabinieri had responded in full force.\n\n\"What is His Holiness still doing here?\" Rende asked Vigor, nodding to the pope, who remained ensconced among a clot of black-robed cardinals.\n\nVigor had no time to explain. He grabbed the general's elbow. \"We have to get below. To the Scavi.\"\n\nRende frowned. \"I just heard word from the station\u2026from Rachel\u2026something about a robbery down there. Then this all happened.\"\n\nVigor shook his head. He wanted to scream his panic, but he spoke firmly and steadily. \"Gather as many men as you can. We have to get down there. Now!\"\n\nTo his credit, the general responded immediately, barking crisp commands. Black-uniformed men swiftly ran up, armed with assault weapons.\n\n\"This way!\" Vigor said, heading to the sacristy door. The entrance to the Scavi was around back, not far. Still, Vigor could not move fast enough.\n\nRachel\u2026\n\n[ 10:07 P.M. ]\n\nGray knelt with Monk. He had freed both his teammates' wrists with a knife hidden on Kat. Monk had borrowed Gray's night-vision scopes to aid in his study.\n\n\"Are you sure you can't defuse it?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"If I had more time\u2026better tools\u2026some goddamn decent light\u2026\" Monk glanced to him and shook his head.\n\nGray watched the timer count down in the darkness.\n\n02:22.\n\n02:21.\n\nGray gained his feet and stepped to Kat and Rachel on the other side. Kat had been studying the ramp mechanism with the eyes of a trained engineer. She noted Gray's approach without turning.\n\n\"The mechanism is a crude pressure plate,\" she said. \"Sort of like a deadman's switch. It takes weight to hold the ramp closed. But lift the weight off and the ramp opens by gears and gravity. But it doesn't make sense.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"As well as I can tell, the trigger plate lies under the tomb over our heads.\"\n\n\"Saint Peter's tomb?\"\n\nKat nodded and directed Gray to the side. \"Here is where they pulled the stabilizing pin after weighing down the plate with the tomb. Once set, the only way to open this ramp is to move Saint Peter's tomb off the plate. But that didn't happen when the Dragon Court activated their device.\"\n\n\"Maybe it did\u2026.\" Gray pictured the cylinder containing the superconducting amalgam, how it had levitated. \"Kat, do you remember your description of the test done in Arizona\u2014the test on these m-state powders? How, when these superconductors were charged, they weighed less than zero?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Because the powder was actually levitating the pan it held.\"\n\n\"I think that's what happened here. I saw the amalgam cylinder levitate when the device was turned on. What if the field around the amalgam affected the tomb, too, like the pan in the experiment. While not actually lifting the massive structure, it simply made the stone structure weigh less.\"\n\nKat's eyes widened. \"Triggering the pressure plate!\"\n\n\"Exactly. Does that offer any clue on how to reopen the ramp?\"\n\nKat stared a moment at the mechanism. She slowly shook her head. \"I'm afraid not. Not unless we can move the tomb.\"\n\nGray glanced to the timer.\n\n01:44.\n\n[ 10:08 P.M. ]\n\nVigor rushed down the spiral stairs that led to the Scavi. He saw no evidence of trespassing. The narrow door appeared ahead.\n\n\"Wait!\" General Rende said behind him. \"Let one of my men go in first. If there are hostiles\u2026\"\n\nVigor ignored him and rushed to the door. He hit the latch. Unlocked. Thank God. He didn't have a spare key.\n\nHis weight struck the door. But it held.\n\nHe bounced back, shoulder bruised.\n\nFlipping the latch, he shoved again.\n\nThe door refused to budge, as if blocked or bolted on the far side.\n\nVigor stared back at General Rende.\n\n\"Something's wrong.\"\n\n[ 10:08 P.M. ]\n\nRachel stared unblinking as the timer ticked below one minute. \"There must be another way out,\" she mumbled.\n\nGray shook his head against such wishful thinking.\n\nStill, Rachel refused to give up. She may not know engineering, nor the art of defusing a bomb. But she did know Rome's history. \"No bones,\" she said.\n\nGray stared at her as if she had slipped a gear.\n\n\"Kat,\" she said, \"you mentioned that someone had to pull the stabilizing pin when the mechanism was first set, locking the ramp. Right?\"\n\nKat nodded.\n\nRachel glanced at the others. \"Then he would've been trapped down here. Where are his bones?\"\n\nKat's eyes widened.\n\nGray clenched a fist. \"Another way out.\"\n\n\"I think I just said that.\" Rachel pulled a book of matches from one of her pockets. She struck a flame. \"All we have to do is find an opening. Some secret tunnel.\"\n\nMonk joined them. \"Pass those around.\"\n\nIn seconds, each member held a flickering flame. They searched for some sign of a freshening breeze, a telltale sign of a hidden exit.\n\nRachel spoke out of nervousness. \"Vatican Hill was named after the fortune-tellers that used to gather here. Vates is Latin for 'seer of the future.' Like many oracles of the time, they hid in caves like this and voiced prophecies.\"\n\nShe studied her flame as she searched the wall.\n\nNo flicker.\n\nRachel tried not to glance at the timer, but failed.\n\n00:22.\n\n\"Maybe it's sealed too tight,\" Monk mumbled.\n\nRachel lit a fresh match.\n\n\"Of course,\" she continued nervously, \"most of the oracles were chalatans. Like turn-of-the-century s\u00e9ances, the soothsayer usually had an accomplice hidden in a secret niche or tunnel.\"\n\n\"Or under the table,\" Gray said. He had squatted by the slab of hematite. He held his match low to the ground. His flame flickered, dancing shadows on the walls. \"Hurry.\"\n\nThere was no need to goad them.\n\n00:15.\n\nThat was incentive enough.\n\nMonk and Gray grabbed the edge of the slab, bending with their knees. They heaved up, legs straining.\n\nKay had dropped to her hands and held a match out. \"There's a narrow tunnel,\" she said with relief.\n\n\"Get inside,\" Gray ordered.\n\nKat waved Rachel down.\n\nRachel slid feetfirst through the hole, discovering a stone well. She squiggled down its throat. It took no effort with the steep incline. She slid on her butt. Kat followed next, then Monk.\n\nRachel craned around, counting in her head. Four seconds remained.\n\nMonk braced the slab with his back. Gray dove headfirst between the man's planted legs.\n\n\"Now, Monk!\"\n\n\"Don't have to tell me twice.\"\n\nDropping, Monk let the slab's weight push him into the chute.\n\n\"Down! Down!\" Gray urged. \"Get as much\u2014\"\n\nThe explosion cut out further words.\n\nRachel, still half turned, saw a wash of orange flames lick around the edges of the slab, searching for them.\n\nMonk cursed.\n\nRachel ignored caution and slid down the chute. It grew steeper and steeper. Soon she was bobsledding down a dank tunnel on her rear end, uncontrolled.\n\nDistantly a new noise intruded.\n\nA rumbling rush of water.\n\nOh no\u2026\n\n[ 10:25 P.M. ]\n\nFifteen minutes later, Gray helped Rachel climb out of the Tiber River. They shivered on the bank. Her teeth chattered. He hugged her close and rubbed her shoulders and back, warming her as best he could.\n\n\"I\u2026I'm okay,\" she said, but she didn't move away, even leaned a bit further into him.\n\nMonk and Kat slogged out of the river, wet and muddy.\n\n\"We'd better keep moving,\" Kat said. \"It'll help offset hypothermia until we can get into dry clothes.\"\n\nGray set out, climbing the bank. Where were they? The escape chute had dumped into an underground stream. Blind, they had had no choice but to hold tight to one another's belts and follow the flow of the channel, hoping it would dump them somewhere safe.\n\nGray had felt some stonework as they proceeded, his arm held out to avoid obstacles. Possibly an ancient sewer line or drainage canal. It had emptied into a maze of channels. They had continued following the downward flow, until at last they had reached a glowing pool, plainly illuminated by reflected light from beyond the underground tunnel. Gray had investigated the pool and discovered a short stone passage that emptied into the Tiber River.\n\nThe others had followed, and soon they were all back under the stars with a full moon shining down on the river. They had made it.\n\nMonk squeezed river water from his shirtsleeves, glancing back at the channel. \"If they had a goddamn back door, why all the business with the Magi bones?\"\n\nGray had considered the same question and had an answer. \"No one could find that back door by chance. I doubt I could even find my way back through that maze. These ancient alchemists hid the next clue in such a manner that the seeker not only had to solve the riddle, but also had to have a basic understanding of the amalgam and its properties.\"\n\n\"It was a test,\" Rachel said, shivering in the slight breeze. Clearly she had also pondered this matter. \"A trial of passage before you could move onward.\"\n\n\"I would've preferred a multiple choice test,\" Monk said sourly.\n\nGray shook his head and climbed the bank. He kept his arm around Rachel, helping her. Her continuous shivering slowly subsided to occasional chilled shudders.\n\nThey reached the top and found themselves at the edge of a street. A park lay beyond. And farther up the hill, St. Peter's Basilica glowed golden against the night sky. Up there, sirens blared and emergency lights flickered in hues of red and blue.\n\n\"Let's find out what happened,\" Gray said.\n\n\"And find a hot bath,\" Monk grumped.\n\nGray didn't argue.\n\n[ 11:38 P.M. ]\n\nAn hour later, Rachel sat wrapped in a warm, dry blanket. She still wore her damp clothes, but at least the trek here and the heated arguments with a series of stubborn guards had warmed her considerably.\n\nThey were all ensconced in the offices of the Holy See's Secretary of State. The room was decorated with frescoes and outfitted with plush chairs and two long divans that faced each other. Seated around the room were Cardinal Spera, General Rende, and a very relieved uncle.\n\nUncle Vigor sat beside Rachel, her hand in his. He hadn't let go since they had broken through the cordon and gained access to this inner sanctum.\n\nThey had gone over a preliminary account of events.\n\n\"And the Dragon Court is gone,\" Gray asked.\n\n\"Even the bodies,\" Vigor said. \"It took us ten minutes to break through the lower door. All we found were some discarded weapons. They must've left the way they came in\u2026through the roof.\"\n\nGray nodded.\n\n\"At least the bones of Saint Peter are safe,\" Cardinal Spera said. \"The damage to the basilica and the necropolis can be repaired. If we had lost the relics\u2026\" He shook his head. \"We owe you all a large debt.\"\n\n\"And no one in attendance at the memorial service died,\" Rachel said, equally relieved.\n\nGeneral Rende held up a folder. \"Cuts and bumps, bruises, a few broken bones. More damage was done by the trampling crowd than from the series of quakes.\"\n\nCardinal Spera absently twisted the two gold rings of his station, one on each hand, switching back and forth, a nervous gesture. \"What about the cavern below the tomb? What did you find?\"\n\nRachel frowned. \"There was\u2014\"\n\n\"It was too dark to see clearly,\" Gray said, cutting her off. He met her eyes, apologetic but firm. \"There was a large slab that had some writing on it, but I suspect that the firebomb will have scorched the surface clean. We may never know what was there.\"\n\nRachel understood his reluctance to speak plainly. The head prefect of the Archives had vanished during the confusion, disappearing with the Dragon Court. If Preffetto Alberto worked with the Court, who else might be a part of the conspiracy? Cardinal Spera had already promised to investigate Alberto's room and private papers. Maybe it would lead somewhere.\n\nIn the meantime, discretion was important.\n\nGray cleared his throat. \"If this debriefing is finished, I appreciate the Vatican's hospitality in offering us a suite of rooms.\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" Cardinal Spera stood. \"I'll have someone show you there.\"\n\n\"I'd also like to take another look around the Scavi myself. See if anything was missed.\"\n\nGeneral Rende nodded. \"I can send you with one of my men.\"\n\nGray turned to Monk and Kat. \"I'll see you back up in the rooms.\" His eyes flicked to include Rachel and Vigor.\n\nRachel nodded, understanding the silent command.\n\nSpeak to no one.\n\nThey would talk together later in private.\n\nGray headed out with General Rende.\n\nRachel watched him leave, remembering those arms around her. She tightened the blanket about her shoulders. It was not the same.\n\n[ 11:43 P.M. ]\n\nGray searched the mausoleum where he had hidden his gear. He found his pack where he had left it, unmolested.\n\nBeside him, a young carabiniere stood as stiffly as his uniform was starched. The red stripes down the edges of his suit ran as straight as plumb lines, the white sash a perfect ninety-degree angle across his chest. The silver emblem on his hat looked spit-polished.\n\nHe eyed the pack as if Gray had just stolen it.\n\nGray did not bother to explain. He had too much on his mind. Though his backpack was still here, his laptop was gone. Someone had taken it. Only one person would steal the computer and leave the pack behind, someone conspicuously absent during the evening's events.\n\nSeichan.\n\nAngry, Gray stalked back up out of the necropolis. As he was escorted, he barely noted the courtyards, stairs, and hallways. His mind worked feverishly. After five minutes of hiking and climbing, he pushed inside the team's suite of rooms, leaving his escort outside.\n\nThe main room was opulent with gold leaf, embroidered furniture, and rich tapestries. A massive crystal chandelier filled a coved ceiling painted with clouds and cherubs.\n\nCandles flickered in wall sconces and tabletop candelabras.\n\nKat sat in one of the chairs. Vigor in another. They had been in conversation as he entered. They had changed into thick white robes, as if this were a suite at the Ritz.\n\n\"Monk's in the bath,\" Kat said, nodding to one side.\n\n\"As is Rachel,\" Vigor added, pointing an arm toward the other side. All their rooms shared this common living space.\n\nKat noted his pack. \"You found some of our gear.\"\n\n\"But not the laptop. I think Seichan nabbed it.\"\n\nKat raised one eyebrow.\n\nGray felt too filthy to sit in any of the chairs, so he paced the room. \"Vigor, can you get us out of here unseen in the morning?\"\n\n\"I\u2026guess. If need be. Why?\"\n\n\"I want us off the map again as soon as possible. The less anyone knows of our whereabouts, the better.\"\n\nMonk entered the room. \"We going somewhere?\" He dug in an ear with a finger. A butterfly bandage closed the cut over his eye. He wore a white robe, too, which he had left open. At least there was a towel around his waist.\n\nBefore Gray could answer, the door on the opposite side opened. Rachel entered barefooted and robed, with her sash tied snugly. But as she strode toward the group, her robe still showed calf and much of her upper thigh. Her hair was freshly shampooed, wet and tousled. She finger-combed it into submission, but Gray liked it better wild.\n\n\"Commander?\" Monk asked, dropping heavily into a chair. He kicked his legs up, adjusting his towel appropriately.\n\nGray took a deep swallow. What was I saying?\n\n\"Where are we going?\" Kat prompted him.\n\n\"To find the next clue on this journey,\" Gray said, clearing his throat, tightening his voice. \"After what we saw this evening, do we want the Dragon Court to gain whatever knowledge lies at the end of this treasure hunt?\"\n\nNo one argued.\n\nMonk picked at his bandage. \"What the hell did happen tonight?\"\n\n\"I may have some idea.\" Gray's words drew all their full attention. \"Is anyone familiar with Meissner fields?\"\n\nKat raised a hand halfway. \"I've heard that term used in reference to superconductors.\"\n\nGray nodded. \"When a charged superconductor is exposed to a strong electromagnetic field, a Meissner field develops. The strength of this field is proportional to the intensity of the magnetic field and the amount of power in the superconductor. It is a Meissner field that allows superconductors to levitate in a magnetic field. But other, stranger effects have been seen when manipulating superconductors, postulating other effects from Meissner fields. Inexplicable energy bursts, true antigravity, even distortions in space.\"\n\n\"Is that what happened in the basilica?\" Vigor asked.\n\n\"The activation of the amalgam, both here and in Cologne, was accomplished with nothing more than a pair of large electromagnetic plates.\"\n\n\"Big magnets?\" Monk asked.\n\n\"Tuned to a specific energy signature to release the power laying dormant in the m-state superconductor.\"\n\nKat stirred. \"And the released energy\u2014this Meissner field\u2014levitated the tomb\u2026or at least made it weigh less. But what about the electrical storm inside the basilica?\"\n\n\"I can only guess. The bronze and gold canopy over the papal altar lies directly above Saint Peter's tomb. I think the metal columns of the canopy acted like giant lightning rods. They siphoned some of the energy given off below and blasted it upward.\"\n\n\"But why would these ancient alchemists want to harm the basilica?\" Rachel asked.\n\n\"They wouldn't,\" Vigor answered. \"They didn't. Remember, we estimated that these clues were laid sometime during the thirteenth century.\"\n\nGray nodded.\n\nVigor paused, then rubbed his beard. \"In fact, it would've been easy to construct the secret chamber during that same time period. The Vatican was mostly empty. It did not become the seat of papal power until 1377, when the popes returned from their century-long exile in France. Prior to that, the Lateran Palace in Rome had been the papal seat. So the Vatican was unimportant and unwatched during the thirteenth century.\"\n\nVigor turned to Rachel. \"So the electrical storm could not be the alchemists' fault. Bernini's baldacchino wasn't installed until the 1600s. Centuries after the clues had been laid here. The storm had to be an unfortunate accident.\"\n\n\"Unlike what happened in Cologne,\" Gray countered. \"The Dragon Court purposefully tainted those Communion wafers with m-state gold. I think they used the parishioners as guinea pigs in some vile experiment. Their first field test. To judge the strength of the amalgam, to validate their theories. The ingested m-state gold acted like the bronze canopy here. It absorbed the energy of the Meissner field, electrocuting the parishioners from the inside out.\"\n\n\"All those deaths,\" Rachel said.\n\n\"Nothing more than an experiment.\"\n\n\"We must stop them,\" Vigor asserted, his voice brittle.\n\nGray nodded. \"But first we have to figure out where to go next. I memorized the drawing. I can sketch it out.\"\n\nRachel glanced to him, then to her uncle.\n\n\"What?\" Gray asked.\n\nVigor shifted and pulled forth a folded piece of paper. He leaned forward and smoothed it on the table. It was a map of Europe.\n\nGray frowned.\n\n\"I recognized the line drawing on the rock,\" Rachel said. \"The tiny river delta gave it away, especially if you live along the Mediterranean. Watch.\"\n\nRachel leaned forward and made a square box of her fingers, as if she were sizing up a photo shot. She laid it atop the eastern end of the map.\n\nGray stared down, as did the others. The enclosed section of the coastline was a rough match to the etched line drawing on the hematite slab.\n\n\"It's a map,\" he said.\n\n\"And the glowing star\u2026\" Rachel met his eyes.\n\n\"There must've been a tiny deposit of m-state gold imbedded in the slab. It absorbed the Meissner field energy and ignited.\"\n\n\"Marking a spot on the map.\" Rachel placed a finger on the paper.\n\nGray leaned closer. A city lay at her fingertip, at the mouth of the Nile, where it drained into the Mediterranean.\n\n\"Alexandria,\" Gray read. \"In Egypt.\"\n\nHe lifted his eyes, his face inches from Rachel's. Their eyes locked as he looked down upon her. Both froze for a heartbeat. Her lips parted slightly as if she were going to say something but forgot her words.\n\n\"The Egyptian city was a major bastion of Gnostic study,\" Vigor said, breaking the spell. \"Once the home of the famed Library of Alexandria, a vast storehouse of ancient knowledge. Founded by Alexander the Great himself.\"\n\nGray straightened. \"Alexander. You mentioned he was one of the historical figures who knew about the white powder of gold.\"\n\nVigor nodded, eyes bright.\n\n\"Another magi,\" Gray said. \"Could he be the fourth Magi we were instructed to seek?\"\n\n\"I can't say for sure,\" Vigor answered.\n\n\"I can,\" Rachel replied, her voice certain. \"The verse in the riddle\u2026it specifically refers to a lost king.\"\n\nGray remembered the riddle about the fish. Where it drowns, it floats in darkness and stares to the lost king.\n\n\"What if it wasn't just allegorical?\" Rachel insisted. \"What if it was literal?\"\n\nGray didn't understand, but Vigor's eyes widened.\n\n\"Of course!\" he said. \"I should have thought of that.\"\n\n\"What?\" Monk asked.\n\nRachel explained, \"Alexander the Great died at a young age. Thirty-three. His funeral and internment were well documented in the historical record. His body was laid in state in Alexandria.\" She tapped the map. \"Only\u2026only\u2026\"\n\nVigor finished for her, too excited. \"His tomb vanished.\"\n\nGray stared down at the map. \"Making him the lost king,\" he mumbled. His gaze swept the room. \"Then we know where we have to go next.\"\n\n[ 11:56 P.M. ]\n\nThe image on the laptop played through once again, without sound, video only. From the appearance of the Dragon Court, through the escape of the Sigma team. There continued to be no answers. Whatever lay below in Saint Peter's tomb remained a mystery.\n\nDisappointed, he closed the laptop and leaned back from his desk.\n\nCommander Pierce had not been entirely forthcoming at the debriefing. His lie had been easy to read. The commander had discovered something in the tomb.\n\nBut what had he found? How much did he know?\n\nCardinal Spera leaned back, twisting the gold ring around his finger.\n\nIt was time to end all this.\n\n[ DAY THREE ]"
            },
            {
                "title": "ALEXANDRIA",
                "text": "[ JULY 26, 7:05 A.M. ]\n\n[ OVER THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA ]\n\nThey'd be in Egypt in two hours.\n\nAboard the private jet, Gray inventoried his pack. Director Crowe had managed to outfit them with new supplies and weapons. Even laptops. The director had also had the foresight to move their rented Citation X plane down from Germany to Rome's Leonardo da Vinci International Airport.\n\nGray checked his watch. They had taken off half an hour ago. The two hours remaining until they landed in Alexandria was all the time the group had to strategize. The few hours of downtime in Rome had at least helped revive the group. They had left before dawn, sneaking out of Vatican City without alerting anyone of their departure.\n\nDirector Crowe had arranged additional cover at his end, setting up a dummy flight plan to Morocco. He had then used his contacts with National Reconnaissance Office to change their call signs in mid-flight as they turned for Egypt. It was the best they could do to cover their tracks.\n\nNow there remained only one detail to iron out.\n\nWhere to begin their search in Alexandria?\n\nTo answer this, the Citation X's cabin had been turned into a research think tank. Kat, Rachel, and Vigor all hunched over workstations. Monk was up in the cockpit, coordinating transportation and logistics once on the ground. The man had already taken apart and inspected his new Scattergun. He kept it with him. As he stated, \"I feel naked without it. And trust me, you wouldn't want that.\"\n\nIn the meantime, Gray had his own investigation to pursue. Though it was not directly related to the immediate question, he intended to research further into the mystery of these m-state superconductors.\n\nBut first\u2026\n\nGray stood and crossed to the trio of researchers. \"Any headway?\" he asked.\n\nKat answered, \"We've divided our efforts. Scouring all references and documents beginning before Alexander's birth and continuing through his death and the eventual disappearance of his tomb.\"\n\nVigor rubbed his eyes. He'd had the least sleep of any of them. A single hour nap. The monsignor had taken it upon himself to do some further research among the stacks at the Vatican Archives. He was sure that the head prefect of the libraries, the traitor Dr. Alberto Menardi, was the mastermind behind solving the riddles for the Dragon Court. Vigor had hoped to track the prefect's footsteps, to gain some additional insight. But little had been discerned.\n\nKat continued, \"Mystery still surrounds Alexander. Even his parentage. His mother was a woman named Olympias. His father was King Philip II of Macedonia. But there's some disagreement here. Alexander came to believe his father was a god named Zeus Ammon, and that he himself was a demigod.\"\n\n\"Not exactly humble,\" Gray said.\n\n\"He was a man of many contradictions,\" Vigor said. \"Prone to drunken rages, but thoughtful in his strategy. Fierce in his friendships, but murderous when crossed. He dabbled with homosexuality, but married both a Persian dancer and the daughter of a Persian king, this last in an attempt to unite Persia and Greece. But back to his parentage. It was well known that his mother and father hated each other. Some historians believe Olympias may have had a hand in assassinating King Philip. And what's interesting is that one writer, Pseudo-Callisthenes, claimed Alexander was not the son of Philip, but instead was the son of an Egyptian magician to the court, named Nectanebo.\"\n\n\"A magician\u2026as in magi?\" Gray understood the implication.\n\n\"Whoever his parents truly were,\" Kat continued, \"he was born on July 20, 356 B.C.\"\n\nVigor shrugged. \"But even that might not be true. On that same date, the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus burned down. One of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. The historian Plutarch wrote that Artemis herself was 'too busy taking care of the birth of Alexander to send help to her threatened temple.' Some scholars believe the choice of date might be propaganda, the true date of Alexander's birth moved to match this portentous event, portraying the king as a phoenix rising from the ashes.\"\n\n\"And a rise it was,\" Kat said. \"Alexander lived only to thirty-three, but he conquered most of the known world during his short life. He defeated King Darius of Persia, then went on to Egypt, where he founded Alexandria, then on to Babylonia.\"\n\nVigor finished, \"Eventually he moved east into India, to conquer the Punjab region. The same region where Saint Thomas would eventually baptize the Three Magi.\"\n\n\"Uniting Egypt and India,\" Gray noted.\n\n\"Connecting a line of ancient knowledge,\" Rachel said, stirring from her own laptop. She didn't raise her eyes, still focused on her research, but she did work a kink from her back.\n\nGray liked the way she stretched, slow, unhurried.\n\nMaybe she noticed his study. Without turning her head, just her eyes flicked toward him. She stuttered a moment, glancing away. \"He\u2026Alexander even sought out Indian scholars, spending a significant amount of time in philosophical discussions. He was very interested in new sciences, having been taught by Aristotle himself.\"\n\n\"But his life was cut short,\" Kat continued, drawing back Gray's attention. \"He died in 323 B.C. In Babylon. Under mysterious circumstances. Some say he died of natural causes, but others believe he was poisoned or contracted a plague.\"\n\n\"It is also said,\" Vigor added, \"that upon his deathbed in the royal palace of Babylon, he gazed out upon the city's famous Hanging Gardens, a tower of sculpted terraces, rooftop gardens, and waterfalls. Another of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.\"\n\n\"So his life began with the destruction of one and ended at another.\"\n\n\"It may just be allegorical,\" Vigor conceded. He scratched at the beard under his chin. \"But Alexander's history seems strangely tied to the Seven Wonders. Even the first compilation of the Seven Wonders was made by an Alexandrian librarian named Callimachus of Cyrene in the third century B.C. The towering bronze statue in Rhodes, another of the Wonders, the ten-story Colossus that spanned the island's harbor and held up a fiery torch, like your Statue of Liberty, was modeled after Alexander the Great. Then there's the Statue of Zeus in Olympia, a glowering four-story figure of gold and marble. By Alexander's own claim, possibly his real father. And there can be no doubt that Alexander visited the Pyramids of Giza. He spent a full decade in Egypt. So Alexander's fingerprints seem to be all over these masterpieces of the ancient world.\"\n\n\"Can this be significant?\" Gray asked.\n\nVigor shrugged. \"I can't say. But Alexandria itself was once home to another of the Seven Wonders, the last to be built, though it no longer stands. The Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria. It rose from a spit of land extending into the harbor of Alexandria, splitting the bay into two halves. It was a three-tiered tower of limestone blocks, held together by molten lead. It rose taller than your Statue of Liberty, some forty stories. At its top, a fire burned in a brazier, amplified by a gold mirror. Its light guided boat pilots from as far away as fifty kilometers. Even today, the very name lighthouse harkens back to this Wonder. In French, phare. In Spanish and Italian, faro.\"\n\n\"And how does this connect to our search for Alexander's tomb?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"We were pointed to Alexandria,\" Vigor said. \"Chasing clues left by an ancient society of magi. I can't help but think that the lighthouse, this shining symbol of a guiding light, would be significant to this group. There's also a legend surrounding the Pharos Lighthouse\u2014that its golden light was so potent that it could burn ships at a distance. Perhaps this hints back to some unknown source of power.\"\n\nVigor finally sighed and shook his head. \"But how this all hangs together, I don't know.\"\n\nGray appreciated the monsignor's intellect, but he needed more concrete information, something to pursue once they arrived in Alexandria. \"Then let's go directly to the heart of the mystery. Alexander died in Babylon. What happened after that?\"\n\nKat spoke up, leaning over her laptop. She ran a finger down a list she had compiled. \"There are many historical references to the parade of his body from Babylon to Alexandria. Once entombed in Alexandria, it became a shrine for visiting dignitaries, including Julius Caesar and the emperor Caligula.\"\n\n\"During this time,\" Vigor added, \"the city itself was ruled by one of Alexander's former generals, Ptolemy, and his descendants. They would go on to establish the Library of Alexandria, turning the city into a major site of intellectual and philosophical study, bringing scholars from around the known world.\"\n\n\"And what happened to the tomb?\"\n\n\"That's what's intriguing,\" Kat said. \"The tomb was supposedly a massive sarcophagus made of gold. But in other references, including the major historian of the time, Strabo, the tomb is described as being made of glass.\"\n\n\"Perhaps golden glass,\" Gray said. \"One of the states of the m-state powder.\"\n\nKat nodded. \"In the early third century A.D.; Septimus Severus closed the tomb from viewing, out of concern for its safety. It's also interesting to note that he placed many secret books into the vault. Here's a quote.\" She leaned forward to the laptop. \"'So none could read the books nor see the body.'\" She pushed back and glanced to Gray. \"This plainly supports that something of great importance was hidden at this tomb site. Some storehouse of secret arcana that Septimus feared would be lost or stolen.\"\n\nVigor elaborated, \"There were many attacks upon Alexandria from the first through third centuries. They grew worse and worse. Julius Caesar himself burned a large portion of the Alexandrian library to ward off attack at the harbor. These attacks would continue, leading to the eventual destruction and dissolution of the library by the seventh century. I can understand why Septimus would want to protect a portion of the library by hiding it. He must have hidden the most important scrolls there.\"\n\n\"It wasn't just military aggressors that threatened the city,\" Kat added. \"A series of plagues struck. Frequent earthquakes damaged significant parts of Alexandria. A whole section of the city fell into the bay in the fourth century, destroying the Ptolemaic Royal Quarters, including Cleopatra's palace, and much of the Royal Cemetery. In 1996, a French explorer, Franck Goddio, discovered sections of this lost city in the East Harbor of Alexandria. Another archaeologist, Honor Frost, believes that perhaps this might be the fate of Alexander's tomb, sunk into a watery grave.\"\n\n\"I'm not convinced of that,\" Vigor said. \"Rumors abound on the location of that tomb, but most historical documents place the tomb in the center of the city, away from the coastline.\"\n\n\"Until, like I said, Septimus Severus closed it off,\" Kat argued. \"Maybe he moved it.\"\n\nVigor frowned. \"Either way, throughout the subsequent centuries, treasure hunters and archaeologists scoured Alexandria and its vicinity. Even today, there's a gold-rush-like fervor to find this lost tomb. A couple of years ago, a German geophysics team used ground-penetrating radar to show that the subsoil throughout Alexandria is riddled with anomalies and cavities. There are plenty of places to hide a tomb. It could take decades to search them all.\"\n\n\"We don't have decades,\" Gray said. \"I don't know if we have twenty-four hours.\"\n\nFrustrated, Gray paced the narrow cabin. He knew the Dragon Court had the same intel as they did. It would not take them long to realize the hematite slab under Saint Peter's tomb was a map with Alexandria marked on it.\n\nHe faced the trio. \"So where do we look first?\"\n\n\"I may have one hint,\" Rachel said, speaking for the first time in a while. She had been furiously typing at her keyboard and squinting at the screen periodically. \"Or two.\"\n\nAll attention turned to her.\n\n\"There is a reference back in the ninth century, testimony from the emperor of Constantinople, that some, and I quote, 'fabulous treasure' was hidden within or under the Pharos Lighthouse. In fact, the caliph who ruled Alexandria at the time dismantled half of the lighthouse searching for it.\"\n\nGray noted that Vigor stirred at her words. He remembered the monsignor's interest in the lighthouse. Rachel must have been swayed by her uncle and gone in search of clues.\n\n\"Others periodically continued the search, but the lighthouse served a strategic role for the harbor.\"\n\nVigor nodded, his eyes glowing with excitement. \"What better place to hide something you don't want dug up than under a structure too important to tear down?\"\n\n\"Then it all ended on August 8, 1303, when a massive quake shook the eastern Mediterranean. The lighthouse was destroyed, toppling into the same harbor where the Ptolemaic ruins fell.\"\n\n\"What became of the original site?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"It varied over the centuries. But in the fifteenth century, a Mamluk sultan built a fort on the peninsula. It still stands today, the Fort of Qait Bey. Some of its construction includes the original limestone blocks that made up the lighthouse.\"\n\n\"And if the treasure was never found,\" Vigor continued, \"then it must still be there\u2026beneath the fort.\"\n\n\"If it ever existed,\" Gray warned.\n\n\"It's a place to start looking,\" Vigor said.\n\n\"And what do we do? Knock on the door and ask them if it's okay to dig under their fort?\"\n\nKat offered a more practical solution. \"We contact NRO. They have access to satellites with ground-penetrating radar capability. Have them do a pass over the site. We can look for any abnormalities or cavities like the German geophysicists did in the city. It might help pinpoint our search.\"\n\nGray nodded. It wasn't a bad idea. But it would take time. He had already checked. It would be eight hours until the next pass of a surveillance satellite.\n\nRachel offered an alternative. \"Remember the back door into the cavern under Saint Peter's tomb? Maybe we don't have to go in the front door of the Fort of Qait Bey. Maybe there's a back entrance. One underwater like in Rome.\"\n\nGray liked her idea.\n\nRachel seemed to take strength from the approval in his face. \"There are tour groups that dive on the sites near Qait Bey and the Ptolemaic ruins. We could easily blend in and search the underwater coastline of the harbor.\"\n\n\"It might not lead to anything,\" Kat said, \"but it would allow us to do something until a GPR satellite could make a pass over there.\"\n\nGray nodded slowly. It was a start.\n\nMonk pushed into the cabin from the cockpit. \"I have a van and a hotel already booked under our aliases, and customs has already been cleared through some cooperation with Washington. I think that should take care of everything.\"\n\n\"No.\" Gray turned to him. \"We're also going to need a boat. Preferably something fast.\"\n\nMonk's eyes widened. \"Okay,\" he dragged out. His gaze settled on Rachel. \"But she's not going to be driving the damn thing, is she?\"\n\n[ 8:55 A.M. ]\n\n[ ROME, ITALY ]\n\nThe heat of the morning did not help Raoul's mood. It was only midmorning and already the temperature spiked. Sunlight baked the stone square outside and glared too brightly. His naked body gleamed with sweat as he stood at the doors out to his room's balcony. The doors were open but no breeze moved.\n\nHe hated Rome.\n\nHe despised the stupefying herds of tourists, the black-draped locals smoking continually, the constant chatter, yells, the honking cars. The air reeked of petrol.\n\nEven the whore he had picked up in Travastere, her hair smelled of cigarettes and sweat. She stank of Rome. He rubbed his raw knuckles. At least the sex had been satisfactory. No one had heard her screams through the ball gag. He had enjoyed the way she squirmed under his knife as he dragged the tip around the wide brown nipples and corkscrewed down her breast. But he had found greater satisfaction pounding her face with his fist, flesh to flesh, as he rutted into her.\n\nUpon her body, he beat out his frustration with Rome, with the bastard American who had nearly blinded him, ruining his chance to make their deaths slow. And now he had learned that the others had somehow again escaped certain doom.\n\nHe turned from the window. The whore's body was already wrapped in the bedsheets. His men would dispose of the corpse. It meant nothing to him.\n\nAt the bedside table, the phone rang. He had been expecting this call. It was what had really soured his mood.\n\nHe crossed and picked up the cell phone.\n\n\"Raoul,\" he said.\n\n\"I received the report from last night's mission.\" As expected, it was the Imperator of his Order. His voice was stiff with fury.\n\n\"Sir\u2014\"\n\nHe was cut off. \"I won't accept any excuse. Failure is one thing, but insubordination will not be tolerated.\"\n\nRaoul frowned at this last. \"I would never disobey.\"\n\n\"Then what about the woman, Rachel Verona?\"\n\n\"Sir?\" He pictured the black-haired bitch. He remembered the smell of the nape of her neck as he clutched her and threatened her with a knife. He had felt her heartbeat in her throat as he squeezed and lifted her to her toes.\n\n\"You were instructed to capture her\u2026not kill her. The others were to be eliminated. Those were your orders.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. Understood. But three times now, I've been restrained from using full brutal force against the American team because of this caution. They are still in this matter only because of such restraint.\" He hadn't been planning on excusing his failures, but here was one handed to him. \"I need better clarification. Which is more important: the mission or the woman?\"\n\nA long silence stretched. Raoul smiled. He poked the dead body on the bed with the tip of his finger.\n\n\"You do make a good point.\" The edge of fury had faded from the other's voice. \"The woman is important, but the mission must not be jeopardized. The wealth and power at the end of this trail must be ours.\"\n\nAnd Raoul knew why. It had been drilled into him since childhood. The ultimate goal of their sect. To bring about a New World Order, one led by their Court, descendants of kings and emperors, genetically pure and superior. It was their birthright. For generations, going back centuries, their Court had hunted for the treasure and arcane knowledge of this lost society of mages. Whoever possessed it would hold the \"keys to the world,\" or so it was written in an ancient text in the Court's library.\n\nNow they were so close.\n\nRaoul spoke, \"Then I have the go-ahead to proceed forward without concern for the woman's security?\"\n\nA sigh came through. Raoul wondered if the Imperator was even aware of it. \"There will be disappointment in her loss,\" he answered. \"But the mission must not fail. Not after so long. So to clarify, the opposition must be destroyed by any and all means. Is that plain enough?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Good. But I will also ask that if the opportunity should arise where the woman could be captured, all the better. Still, take no needless risks.\"\n\nRaoul tightened a fist. He had a question that had been bothering him. He had never asked it before. He had learned it best to keep such curiosities to himself, to obey without question. Still, he asked it now. \"Why is she so important?\"\n\n\"The Dragon blood runs strongly through her. Back all the way to our Austrian Hapsburg roots. In fact, she had been chosen for you, Raoul. To be your mate. The Court sees great value in strengthening our lines through such a blood tie.\"\n\nRaoul stood straighter. He had been denied offspring until now. The few women who took his seed were forced to abort or were killed. It was forbidden to sully their royal bloodlines by producing mud children.\n\n\"I hope this information encourages you to seek out an opportunity to secure her. But as I stated, even her blood is expendable if the mission is threatened. Is that understood?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" Raoul found his breath shortened. He again pictured the woman clutched in his arms, held at knifepoint. The smell of her fear. She would make a good baroness\u2026and if not that, then at least an excellent brood mare. The Dragon Court hid a few such women across Europe, caged away, kept alive only to produce children.\n\nRaoul grew hard thinking about such an opportunity.\n\n\"Everything has been arranged in Alexandria,\" the Imperator finished. \"The endgame nears. Get what we need. Slay all who stand in your way.\"\n\nRaoul slowly nodded, though the Imperator could not see it.\n\nHe pictured the black-haired bitch\u2026and what he would do to her.\n\n[ 9:34 A.M. ]\n\nRachel stood behind the wheel of the speedboat, one knee on the bucket seat behind her to support her. Once past the No Wake buoy, she gunned the throttle and shot across the bay. The boat skimmed the flat water, bucking over the occasional wake of another boat.\n\nWind whipped her hair. Spray cooled her face. Sunlight glinted brightly off the sapphire blue waters of the Mediterranean. Her every sense rang and tingled.\n\nIt helped awaken her after the plane ride and the hours spent in front of the computer. They had landed forty minutes ago. They had breezed through customs, greased by Monk's calls, and had found the boat and gear already waiting for them at the pier to the East Harbor.\n\nRachel glanced behind her.\n\nThe city of Alexandria rose from the arc of the blue bay, a modern sprawl of high-rise apartments, hotels, and time-share properties. Palm trees dotted the garden median dividing the city from the water. There was little evidence of the city's ancient past. Even the famed Alexandrian library, lost centuries ago, had arisen anew as a massive complex of glass, steel, and concrete, decorated with reflecting pools and serviced by a light-rail station.\n\nBut now, out in the water, some of the past came alive again. Old wooden fishing boats dotted the bay, painted in vibrant jeweled hues: ruby reds, sapphire blues, emerald greens. Some sails were raised, square-shaped, the skiff's direction guided by two oars, an ancient Egyptian design.\n\nAnd ahead rose a citadel right out of the Middle Ages, the Fort of Qait Bey. It crested a spit of land that divided the bay into halves. A stone causeway joined the fortress to the mainland. Along its length, fishermen with long poles relaxed and shouted among themselves, as their ancestors probably had for centuries into the past.\n\nRachel studied the Fort of Qait Bey. Built solely of white limestone and marble, it shone starkly against the deep-blue waters of the bay. The main citadel was built atop a foundation of stone, raised twenty feet. There, towering walls, topped with arched parapets, were guarded by four towers and circled a central higher keep. A flagpole jutted from the inner castle, flapping the Egyptian colors, striped bands of red, white, and black, along with the golden eagle of Saladin.\n\nSquinting, Rachel pictured what had once stood atop this foundation: the forty-story-tall Pharos Lighthouse, built in tiers like a wedding cake, decorated with a giant statue of Poseidon, and tipped by a giant fiery brazier, flaming and smoking.\n\nNothing remained of this Wonder of the ancient world, except perhaps for a few limestone blocks, rebuilt into the citadel here. French archaeologists had also discovered a tumble of blocks in the East Harbor, along with a twenty-foot section of statue, believed to be the sculpture of Poseidon. It was all that was left of the Wonder since the earthquake devastated the region.\n\nOr was it? Could there be another treasure, one dating even further back in time, hidden below the foundations?\n\nThe lost tomb of Alexander the Great.\n\nThat's what they had come to find out.\n\nBehind her, the others were gathered over the pile of scuba gear, checking tanks, regulators, and weight belts.\n\n\"Do we really need all this gear?\" Gray asked. He picked up a full-face mask. \"Thick dry suits and all this special head gear?\"\n\n\"You'll need it all,\" Vigor said. Her uncle was an experienced diver. Being an archaeologist in the Mediterranean, there was no way not to be. Many of the region's most exciting discoveries were found underwater, including here in Alexandria, where the lost palace of Cleopatra had recently been discovered, sunk under the waves of this same bay.\n\nBut there was a reason these underwater treasures had remained hidden for so long.\n\nHer uncle explained. \"The pollution here in the East Harbor, coupled with the sewage, has made these waters dangerous to explore without proper protection. The Egyptian tourist board has floated concepts for opening a marine archaeological park here, serviced by glass-bottomed boats. Some unscrupulous tour operators already offer dive trips. But exposure to heavy-metal toxins and the risk of typhoid is real for those entering the water.\"\n\n\"Great,\" Monk said. He already looked a tad green around the gills. He clutched the starboard rail, teeth clenched. He kept his head a bit over the side, like a dog hanging his head out a window. \"If I don't drown, I'll end up catching some flesh-melting disease. You know, there's a reason I joined the Army Special Forces versus the Navy or Air Force. Solid ground.\"\n\n\"You could stay on the boat,\" Kat said.\n\nMonk scowled at her.\n\nIf they were going to find some underwater tunnel leading to a secret treasure chamber under the fort, they would need everybody. They were all certified divers. They would search in shifts, rotating one person out to rest and guard both boat and gear.\n\nMonk had insisted on the first shift.\n\nRachel sped their boat along the eastern edge of the spit of land. Ahead, the citadel of Qait Bey grew in size, filling the horizon. It hadn't looked so massive from the pier. It would be a daunting task to explore the depths surrounding the fort.\n\nA worry began to nag her. It had been her idea to attempt this search. What if she was wrong? Maybe she had missed a clue pointing somewhere else.\n\nShe slowed the boat, nervous energy growing.\n\nThey had mapped out the regions into quadrants for a systematic exploration of the bay around the fort. She throttled down, approaching the first dive spot.\n\nGray stepped next to her. He rested one hand on the seatback. His fingertips brushed her shoulder. \"This is quadrant A.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"I'll drop anchor here and raise the orange flag warning of divers in the water.\"\n\n\"Are you all right?\" he asked, leaning down.\n\n\"I just hope this isn't a wild-goose chase, as you Americans say.\"\n\nHe smiled, determination warming into reassurance. \"You gave us a start. It was more than we had going into the matter. And I'd rather be chasing wild geese, as we Americans say, than doing nothing.\"\n\nWithout realizing it, she shifted her shoulder so it pressed against his hand. He didn't pull away.\n\n\"It's a good plan,\" he said, his voice softer.\n\nShe nodded, at a loss for words, and glanced away from those damn eyes of his. She cut the engine and thumbed the release for the anchor. She felt the shudder under her seat as the chained rope dropped.\n\nGray turned to the others. \"Let's suit up. We'll drop here, check our marine radios, then begin the search.\"\n\nRachel noted that he kept his hand at her shoulder.\n\nIt felt good there.\n\n[ 10:14 A.M. ]\n\nGray fell backward into the sea.\n\nWater swamped over him. Not an inch of skin was exposed to the potential pollution and sewage. The seams of the full-body suit were double-taped and double-sewed. The neck and wrist seals were heavy-duty latex. Even his AGA mask completely covered his face, sealing the Viking hood over his head. The regulator was built into its faceplate, freeing his mouth.\n\nGray found the spread of peripheral vision through the mask worth the extra time it took to suit up, especially since visibility was poor here in the harbor. Silt and sediment clouded the view to a range of ten to fifteen feet.\n\nNot bad. It could be worse.\n\nHis BC buoyancy vest bobbed him back to the surface, full of air, compensating for the weight belt. He watched Rachel and Vigor drop into the sea on the other side of the boat. Kat was already in the water on his side.\n\nHe tried the radio, a Buddy Phone, ultrasonically transmitting on an upper single sideband. \"Can everyone hear me?\" he asked. \"Check in.\"\n\nHe got positive responses all around, even from Monk, who was taking up the first guard shift on the boat. Monk also had an Aqua-Vu marine infrared video system to monitor the group below.\n\n\"We'll drop to the bottom here and sweep toward shore in a wide spread. Everyone knows their positions.\"\n\nAffirmatives answered.\n\n\"Down we go,\" he said.\n\nHe vented the air in his BC vest and lowered into the water, dragged down by his weight vest. This was the point where many novice divers experienced a panicked claustrophobia. Gray never had. Instead, he felt the opposite, a total freedom. He was weightless, flying, capable of all sorts of aerial acrobatics.\n\nHe spotted Rachel dropping on the opposite side of the boat. She was easy to spot by the broad red stripe across the chest of her black suit. They each had a different color for ease of identification. His was blue, Kat's pink, Vigor's green. Monk had already climbed into his suit, too, ready for his shift. His stripe was yellow, somehow fitting considering his attitude toward diving.\n\nGray watched Rachel. Like him, she seemed to enjoy the freedom below the waves. She twisted and flew, spiraling down with a minimal flicker of fins. He took a moment to enjoy the curves of her form, then concentrated on his own descent.\n\nThe sandy bottom rose up, cluttered with debris.\n\nGray adjusted his buoyancy to keep him drifting just above the seabed. He searched right and left. The others settled into similar postures.\n\n\"Can everyone see each other?\" he asked.\n\nNods and affirmatives all around.\n\n\"Monk, how's the underwater video camera working?\"\n\n\"You look like a bunch of ghosts. Visibility is crap. I'll lose you once you head out.\"\n\n\"Keep in radio contact. Any problems, you raise the alarm and haul ass over to us.\" Gray was pretty confident that they had the jump on the Dragon Court, but he was not taking any chances with Raoul. He didn't know how much of a head start they had gained. But there were plenty of other boats about. It was broad daylight.\n\nStill, they needed to act quickly.\n\nGray pointed an arm. \"Okay, we'll head to shore, keep no greater distance than fifteen feet apart. Visual contact with each other at all times.\"\n\nThe four of them could sweep a swath of about twenty-five yards across. Once at shore, if nothing was detected, they would shift down the coastline another twenty-five yards and swim back toward the waiting boat. Back and forth, quadrant by quadrant, they would comb the entire coastline around the fort.\n\nGray set out. He had a dive knife attached to a sheath on the back of his wrist and a flashlight on the other. With the sun directly overhead and the water only forty feet deep, there was no need for the extra illumination, but it would come in handy to explore nooks and crannies. He had no doubt that the passage they sought would not be plain or it would have already been discovered.\n\nIt was another riddle to solve.\n\nAs he swam, he pondered what they had missed. There must have been more of a clue to the map drawn on the stone than merely pointing to Alexandria. It must have also held some clue embedded about the location here. Had they missed something? Had Raoul stolen a clue out of the cave below Saint Peter's tomb? Did the Dragon Court already have the answer?\n\nUnconsciously he had begun to swim faster. He lost sight of Kat on his right. He was last in line on this side. He slowed and she reappeared. Satisfied, he moved onward. A shape appeared ahead, jutting from the sandy bottom. A rock? A ridge of reef?\n\nHe kicked forward.\n\nOut of the silty gloom, it appeared.\n\nWhat the hell\u2026?\n\nThe stone face stared back at him, human, worn by the sea and time, but its features were surprisingly clear, the expression stoic. Its upper torso rode atop the squat form of a lion.\n\nKat had noted his attention and swept slightly closer. \"A sphinx?\"\n\n\"Another one over here,\" Vigor announced. \"Broken, on its side. Divers have reported dozens of them littered around the seabed in the shadow of the fort. Some of the decorations from the original lighthouse.\"\n\nDespite the urgency, Gray stared at the statue, amazed. He studied the face, sculpted by hands two thousand years old. He reached one arm out and touched it, sensing the immense breadth of time between himself and that sculptor.\n\nVigor spoke out of nowhere. \"Fitting that these masters of riddles should be guarding this mystery.\"\n\nGray pulled back his hand. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nA chuckle. \"Don't you know the story of the Sphinx? The monster terrorized the people of Thebe, eating them if they couldn't solve its riddle. 'What has one voice, and is four-footed, two-footed, and three-footed?'\"\n\n\"And the answer?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"Mankind,\" Kat said next to him. \"We crawl on all fours as babes, then upright on two feet as adults, and lean upon a staff in old age.\"\n\nVigor continued. \"Oedipus solved the riddle and the Sphinx threw herself off a cliff and died.\"\n\n\"Toppling from a height,\" Gray said. \"Like these sphinxes.\"\n\nHe pushed away from the stone statue and swam onward. They had their own riddle to solve. After another ten minutes of silent searching, they reached the rocky coastline. Gray had come across a tumble of giant blocks, but no passage, no opening, no clues.\n\n\"Back again,\" he said.\n\nThey shifted down the coast and set out again, swimming away from the shoreline toward the boat.\n\n\"Everything quiet up there, Monk?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"Getting a nice suntan.\"\n\n\"Make sure you use SPF 30. We'll be down here a while.\"\n\n\"Aye, aye, Captain.\"\n\nGray continued for another forty minutes, sweeping to the boat, then back again. He came across a sunken husk of a rusted ship, more chunks of stone blocks, a broken pillar, even an inscribed chunk of obelisk. Fish in a rainbow of hues danced away.\n\nHe checked his air gauge. He was breathing conservatively. He still had half a tank left. \"How's everyone's air holding up?\"\n\nAfter comparing, it was decided to go topside in twenty minutes. They'd take a half-hour break, then back into the water.\n\nAs he swam, he went back to his original pondering. He kept sensing they had missed something critical. What if the Dragon Court had taken some object from the cave, a second clue? He kicked harder. He had to let that fear go. He had to proceed as though he had the same intel as the Court, an equal playing field.\n\nThe silence of the deep pressed on him. \"This just doesn't seem right,\" he mumbled.\n\nThe radio transmitted his voice.\n\n\"Did you find something?\" Kat asked. Her shadowy form drifted closer.\n\n\"No. That's just it. The longer I'm down here, the more I'm convinced we're doing this wrong.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Rachel said from out of nowhere, sounding hopeless. \"I probably put too much emphasis\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\" Gray remembered her worry topside. He kicked himself for rekindling it. \"Rachel, I think you've targeted the correct place to search. The problem is my plan. This whole searching quadrant by quadrant. It just doesn't feel right.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, Commander?\" Kat asked. \"It may take some time, but we'll get the area covered.\"\n\nThat was just it. Kat had clarified it for him. He wasn't one for systematic, dogged methodology. While some problems were best solved that way, this mystery wasn't one of them.\n\n\"We've missed a clue,\" he said. \"I know it. We recognized the map in the tomb, realized it pointed to Alexander's tomb, then flew here. We searched records, books, and files, trying to solve a riddle that has baffled historians for more than a millennium. Who are we to solve it in one day?\"\n\n\"So what do you want us to do?\" Kat asked.\n\nGray settled to a stop. \"We go back to square one. We've based our search on historical records available to anyone. The only advantage we have over all the treasure hunters of the past centuries is what was discovered under Saint Peter's tomb. We missed a clue down there.\"\n\nOr one was stolen, Gray thought. But he did not speak this worry aloud.\n\n\"Maybe we didn't miss a clue at the tomb,\" Vigor said. \"Maybe we didn't look deep enough. Remember the catacombs. The riddles were multilayered, multifathomed. Could there be another layer to this riddle?\"\n\nSilence answered him\u2026until an unexpected voice solved it all.\n\n\"That goddamn fiery star,\" Monk swore. \"It wasn't just pointing down at the city of Alexandria\u2026it was pointing down at the stone slab.\"\n\nGray felt the ring of truth in Monk's words. They had been so focused on the inscribed map, the fiery star, the implication of it all, but they had ignored the unusual medium of the artist.\n\n\"Hematite,\" Kat said.\n\n\"What do you know about it?\" Gray asked, trusting her background in geology.\n\n\"It's an iron oxide. Large deposits have been found throughout Europe. It is mostly iron, but sometimes it contains a fair amount of iridium and titanium.\"\n\n\"Iridium?\" Rachel said. \"Isn't that one of the elements in the amalgam? In the Magi bones?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Kat said, voice suddenly sounding strained over the radio. \"But I don't think that's the significant part.\"\n\n\"What?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Commander. I should have thought of it. The iron in hematite is often weakly magnetic, not as strongly as magnetite, but it's sometimes used as a lodestone.\"\n\nGray realized the implication. Magnetism had also opened the first tomb. \"So the star wasn't just pointing to Alexandria, it was pointing to a magnetized stone, something we're supposed to find.\"\n\n\"And what did the ancient world do with lodestones?\" Vigor asked, excitement growing in his voice.\n\nGray knew the answer. \"They made compasses!\" He fed air into his BC vest and rose toward the surface. \"Everyone topside!\"\n\n[ 11:10 A.M. ]\n\nIn a matter of minutes, they were shedding tanks, vests, and weight belts. Rachel climbed into the pilot's seat, glad to sit down. She pressed the button to raise the anchor. It chugged upward.\n\n\"Go slow,\" Gray said. He had taken up a post at her shoulder.\n\n\"I second that,\" Monk said.\n\n\"I'll watch the compass,\" Gray continued. \"You keep us on a snail-paced circuit around the fort. Any twitch on the compass needle and we drop anchor and search below.\"\n\nRachel nodded. She prayed that whatever magnetized stone lay down there, it was strong enough for their shipboard compass to detect.\n\nWith the anchor retracted, she eased the throttle to the barest chop of her propellers. Motion forward was barely detectable.\n\n\"Perfect,\" Gray whispered.\n\nOnward they glided. The sun slowly rose into the sky overhead. They pulled up the boat's canopy to shade the group as the day's heat climbed. Monk lay sprawled on the portside bench, slightly snoring. No one spoke.\n\nWorry grew in Rachel with each slow turn of the boat's propeller.\n\n\"What if the stone isn't out here?\" she whispered to Gray, who kept a vigil on the compass. \"What if it's inside the fort?\"\n\n\"Then we'll search there next,\" Gray said, squinting toward the stone citadel. \"But I think you're right about a secret entrance. The hematite slab sat over a secret tunnel to the cavern that led down to a river channel. Water. Perhaps that's another layer of the riddle.\"\n\nKat heard them, a book open on her lap. \"Or we're reading too much into it,\" she said. \"Trying to force what we want to match the riddle.\"\n\nUp in the bow end, Vigor massaged a sore calf muscle from the swim. \"I think the ultimate question of where the stone might lie\u2014on land or in the water\u2014depends on when the alchemists hid the clue. We estimated the clues were hidden sometime around the thirteenth century, maybe a little before or a little after, but that's the critical era of conflict between Gnosticism and orthodoxy. So, did the alchemists hide their next clue before or after the Pharos Lighthouse collapsed in 1303?\"\n\nNo one had an answer.\n\nBut a few minutes later, the compass needle gave a shaky twitch.\n\n\"Hold it!\" Gray hissed.\n\nThe needle steadied again. Kat and Vigor glanced to them.\n\nGray placed a hand on Rachel's shoulder. \"Go back.\"\n\nRachel tweaked the throttle into neutral. Forward momentum stopped. She let the waves bob them backward.\n\nThe needle pitched again, swinging a full quarter turn.\n\n\"Drop anchor,\" Gray ordered.\n\nShe pressed the release, hardly breathing.\n\n\"Something's down there,\" Gray said.\n\nEveryone began to move at once, grabbing for fresh tanks.\n\nMonk woke with a start, sitting up. \"What?\" he asked blearily.\n\n\"Looks like you're going on guard duty again,\" Gray said. \"Unless you want to take a dip?\"\n\nMonk scowled his answer.\n\nOnce the boat was secure and the orange flag raised, the same four divers fell back into the water.\n\nRachel bubbled out her buoyancy and sank under the waves.\n\nGray's voice reached her through the radio. \"Watch your wrist compasses. Zero in on the anomaly.\"\n\nRachel studied her compass as she descended. The water was fairly shallow here. Less than ten meters. She reached the sandy bottom quickly. The others dropped around her, hovering like birds.\n\n\"Nothing's here,\" Kat said.\n\nThe seabed was a flat expanse of sand.\n\nRachel stared at her compass. She kicked a body length away, then back again. \"The anomaly is right here.\"\n\nGray lowered to the bottom and swept his wrist over the floor. \"She's right.\"\n\nHe reached to his other wrist and unsheathed his knife. With the blade in hand, he began stabbing into the soft sand. The blade sank to the hilt each time. Silt stirred up, clouding the view.\n\nOn his seventh stab, the knife plainly jarred, failing to penetrate more than a few centimeters.\n\n\"Got something,\" Gray said.\n\nHe sheathed the knife and began digging in the sand. The view grew quickly murky, and Rachel lost sight of him.\n\nThen she heard him gasp.\n\nRachel moved closer. Gray swept back. The disturbed sand dispersed and settled.\n\nProtruding from the sand was a dark bust of a man.\n\n\"I think that's magnetite,\" Kat said, studying the stone of the sculpture. She swept her wrist compass over the bust. The needle twirled. \"Lodestone.\"\n\nRachel edged closer, staring at the face. There was no mistaking the features. She had seen the same countenance a couple of times today.\n\nGray recognized it, too.\n\n\"It's another sphinx.\"\n\n[ 12:14 P.M. ]\n\nGray spent ten minutes clearing the shoulders and upper torso, reaching the lion's shape below. There was no doubt it was one of the sphinxes, like the others littered on the seabed.\n\n\"Hiding it among the others,\" Vigor said. \"I guess that answers the question of when the alchemists hid their treasure here.\"\n\n\"After the lighthouse collapsed,\" Gray said.\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\nThey hovered around the magnetic sphinx, waiting for the disturbed silt and sand to settle.\n\nVigor continued, \"This ancient society of mages must have known the location of Alexander's tomb after Septimus Severus hid it in the third century. They left it undisturbed, letting it safeguard the most valuable scrolls from the lost library. Then perhaps the quake in 1303 not only brought down the lighthouse, but exposed the tomb. They took the opportunity to hide more down there, using the chaotic time after the earthquake to plant their next clue, bury it, and allow the centuries to cover it up again.\"\n\n\"And if you're right,\" Gray said, \"that pinpoints the date when these clues were planted. Remember, we'd already estimated that the clues were laid around the thirteenth century. We were off by only a few years. It was 1303. The first decade of the fourteenth century.\"\n\n\"Hmm\u2026\" Vigor drifted closer to the statue.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"It makes me wonder. In that same decade, the true papacy was chased out of Rome and exiled in France. The antipopes ruled Rome for the next century.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"Similarly, the Magi bones were moved from Italy to Germany in 1162, another time when the true pope was chased out of Rome and an antipope sat on the papal seat.\"\n\nGray followed this train of thought. \"So these alchemists hid their stuff whenever the papacy was in jeopardy.\"\n\n\"So it would seem. This would suggest that this society of mages had ties to the papacy. Perhaps the alchemists did indeed join the Gnostic Christians of those turbulent times, Christians open to the quest for arcane knowledge, the Thomas Christians.\"\n\n\"And this secret society merged with the orthodox church?\"\n\nVigor nodded in the murky water. \"When the overall church came under threat, so did the secret church. So they sought safeguards. First moving the bones to safety in Germany during the twelfth century. Then during the embattled years of the exile, they hid the true heart of their knowledge.\"\n\n\"Even if this is true, how does this help us find Alexander's tomb?\" Kat asked.\n\n\"Just as the clues that led to Saint Peter's tomb were buried in the stories of Catholicism, the clues here might be tied to the mythologies of Alexander. Greek mythologies.\" Vigor ran a gloved finger down the face of the statue. \"Why else mark the gateway with a sphinx?\"\n\n\"The riddle masters of the Greeks,\" Gray mumbled.\n\n\"And the monsters killed you outright if you didn't answer them correctly,\" Vigor reminded them. \"Perhaps choosing this symbol is a warning.\"\n\nGray studied the sphinx as the sand cleared, its expression enigmatic. \"Then we'd better solve this riddle.\"\n\n[ 12:32 P.M. ]\n\n[ FINAL DESCENT INTO ALEXANDRIA ]\n\nThe Gulfstream IV private jet received clearance from the tower to land. Seichan listened to the chatter of the cockpit crew through the open doorway. She sat in the seat nearest the door. Sunlight blazed through the window on her right.\n\nA large form stepped to her left.\n\nRaoul.\n\nShe continued to stare out the window as the jet tilted on a wing over the violet-blue of the Mediterranean and lined up for the final approach to the runway.\n\n\"What's the word from your contact on the ground?\" Raoul asked, biting off each word.\n\nHe must have noted her using the jet's air-phone. She fingered the dragon charm on her necklace. \"The others are still in the water. If you're lucky, they may solve this mystery for you.\"\n\n\"We won't need them for that.\" Raoul stepped back to join his men, a team of sixteen, including the Court's master adept.\n\nSeichan had already met the esteemed Vatican bibliophile, Dr. Alberto Menardi, a lanky silver-haired man with a pocked complexion, thick lips, narrow eyes. He sat in the back of the plane, nursing a broken nose. She had a full dossier on him. His ties to a certain Sicilian criminal organization ran deep. It seemed even the Vatican could not keep such weeds from taking root in their soil. Then again, she could not discount the keen edge to the man's mind. He had an IQ three points above Einstein.\n\nIt had been Dr. Alberto Menardi who, fifteen years ago, had discerned from the Dragon Court's library of Gnostic texts the ability of electromagnetism to unlock the energy of these superconducting metals. He had overseen the research project in Lausanne, Switzerland, and tested the effects on animal, vegetable, and mineral. And who would miss the occasional lone Swiss backpacker? These last experiments would turn the stomach of even the worst Nazi scientists.\n\nThe man also had a disturbing fetish for young girls.\n\nBut not for sex.\n\nFor sport.\n\nShe had seen some of the pictures and wished she hadn't. If she hadn't already been instructed by the Guild to eliminate the man, she would have done so on her own.\n\nThe plane began its final descent.\n\nSomewhere far below, the Sigma team labored.\n\nThey were no threat.\n\nIt would be as easy as shooting fish in a barrel."
            },
            {
                "title": "RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX",
                "text": "[ JULY 26, 12:41 P.M. ]\n\n[ ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT ]\n\n\"Remember that damn fish,\" Monk radioed from the boat above.\n\nTwelve feet down, Gray frowned up at the bobbing keel overhead. They had spent the last five minutes ruling out various options. Maybe the sphinx sat atop a tunnel. But how would they move a ton of stone? Levitation was discussed, using the amalgam, like back at St. Peter's. Gray had a test tube of the powder from his research on the Milan bones. But to activate it would require electricity of some sort\u2026not wise in water.\n\n\"What fish are you talking about, Monk?\" Gray asked. He had seen enough fish down here to turn him off seafood.\n\n\"From the first riddle,\" Monk answered. \"You know. The painted fish in the catacombs.\"\n\n\"What about it?\"\n\n\"I can see you guys and the statue through the Aqua-Vu camera. The sphinx is facing toward that big fort.\"\n\nGray stared at the statue. From here, where visibility was no greater than five yards, it was hard to get the bigger picture. Monk had the better perspective. And the bigger picture was his area of expertise, seeing the forest through the trees.\n\n\"The catacombs\u2026\" Gray mumbled, understanding Monk's intent.\n\nCould it be that easy?\n\n\"Remember,\" Monk continued, \"how we had to follow the direction the fish was facing to find our next clue? Maybe the sphinx is facing toward the tunnel opening.\"\n\n\"Monk could be right,\" Vigor said. \"These clues were planted in the early fourteenth century. We should be considering the problem from the perspective of that era's level of technology. They didn't have scuba gear at the time. But they did have compasses. The sphinx may be nothing but a magnetic road marker. You use your compass to find it. Swim down to take a peek at where it's facing and move onto shore.\"\n\n\"There's only one way to find out,\" Gray said. \"Monk, keep the boat anchored here until we're sure. We'll swim toward shore.\"\n\nGray kicked away from the statue. He waited until he was far enough away to get a good compass fix without the magnetic interference of the lodestone. \"Okay, let's see where this leads.\"\n\nHe set off. The others trailed behind him. They stuck close together.\n\nThe shore was not far. The spit of land rose steeply. The sandy bottom ended abruptly at a tumbled maze of stone blocks. Man-made.\n\n\"Must have once been a section of the Pharos Lighthouse,\" Vigor said.\n\nBarnacles and anemones had taken over the area, forming it into their own reef. Crabs scrabbled and tiny fish darted.\n\n\"We should spread out,\" Kat said. \"Search the area.\"\n\n\"No.\" Gray intuitively understood what needed to be done. \"It's like the magnetic sphinx hidden among the other sphinxes.\" He kicked off the bottom, traveling up the reefscape. He kept one arm fixed in front of him, watching the wrist compass.\n\nIt didn't take long.\n\nPassing over one block, his compass needle pitched and rolled. He was only four yards from the surface. The front of the block was about two feet square.\n\n\"Here,\" he said.\n\nThe others joined him.\n\nKat took a blade and scraped off the accumulation of sealife. \"Hematite again. Less strongly magnetic. You'd never notice it unless you were looking for it.\"\n\n\"Monk,\" Gray said.\n\n\"Yeah, boss.\"\n\n\"Bring the boat over here and drop anchor.\"\n\n\"On my way.\"\n\nGray searched the edges of the block. It was cemented to its neighbors\u2014above, below, and to the sides\u2014by coral, sand, and dense accumulations of rough-shelled mussels.\n\n\"Everyone pick a side and dig the edges clear,\" he ordered. He pictured the hematite slab under Saint Peter's tomb. It had covered a secret tunnel. He had no doubt that they were on the right track.\n\nFor once.\n\nIn a couple of minutes, the block was cleared.\n\nThe beat of a propeller echoed leadenly through the water.\n\nMonk approached the shoreline slowly. \"I can see you guys,\" he said. \"A bunch of striped frogs sitting on a rock.\"\n\n\"Lower the anchor,\" Gray said. \"Slowly.\"\n\n\"Here it comes.\"\n\nAs the prong of heavy steel dropped from the keel, Gray swam over and helped guide it to the hematite block. He jammed a corner into a gap between the block and its neighbor.\n\n\"Winch it up,\" Gray ordered.\n\nMonk retracted the anchor line. It grew taut.\n\n\"Everybody back,\" Gray warned.\n\nThe block rocked. Sand billowed from it. Then the chunk of stone tipped loose. It had only been about a foot thick. It rolled down the cliff face, bouncing with muffled crashes, then landed heavily on the sandy floor.\n\nGray waited for the silt to clear. Pebbles continued to rain down the wall of rock. He moved forward. In the gap-toothed opening left by the dislodged stone, a dark space loomed.\n\nGray flicked on the flashlight on his wrist. He pointed it into the opening. The light illuminated a straight tunnel, angled slightly upward. It was a tight squeeze. No room for air tanks.\n\nWhere did it lead?\n\nThere was only one way to find out.\n\nGray reached to the buckles securing his air tank. He shimmied out of them.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Rachel asked.\n\n\"Someone's got to go take a look.\"\n\n\"We could unrig the boat's Aqua-Vu camera,\" Kat said. \"Use a fishing pole or an oar to push the camera inside.\"\n\nIt wasn't a bad plan\u2014but it would take time.\n\nTime they didn't have.\n\nGray settled his tank to a shelf of rock. \"I'll be right back.\" He took a deep breath, unhooked the regulator hose from his mask, then turned to face the tunnel.\n\nIt would be snug.\n\nHe remembered the riddle of the Sphinx. How it described the first stage of man. Crawling on all fours. It was a fitting way to enter.\n\nGray ducked his head, arms forward, flashlight leading. He kicked off and sailed into the cramped tunnel.\n\nAs the tunnel swallowed him up, he remembered Vigor's earlier warning about the riddle of the Sphinx.\n\nGet it wrong\u2026and you were dead.\n\n[ 1:01 P.M. ]\n\nAs gray's flippers vanished into the tunnel, Rachel held her breath.\n\nIt was foolhardy madness. What if he got stuck? What if a section of the tunnel collapsed? One of the most dangerous forms of scuba diving was cave diving. Only those with a death wish enjoyed that sport.\n\nAnd they had air tanks.\n\nShe clutched the edge of the rockface with her gloved fingers. Uncle Vigor shifted to her side. He placed his hand over hers, urging confidence.\n\nKat crouched by the opening. The woman's flashlight pierced the dark tunnel. \"I can't see him.\"\n\nRachel's grip on the rock tightened.\n\nHer uncle felt her flinch. \"He knows what he's doing. He knows his limits.\"\n\nDoes he?\n\nRachel had recognized the edge of wildness about him in the last few hours. It both thrilled her and scared her. She had spent enough time with him. Gray did not think like other people. He operated at the fringes of common sense, trusting his quick thinking and reflexes to pull him out of tight scrapes. But the sharpest mind and fastest reflexes would not help you if a wall of rock dropped on top of your head.\n\nA chop of words reached her. \"\u2014can\u2014clear\u2014okay\u2014\"\n\nIt was Gray.\n\n\"Commander,\" Kat said loudly, \"you're breaking up.\"\n\n\"Hang\u2014\"\n\nKat glanced at them. Through her mask, her frown was clear.\n\n\"Is this better?\" Gray said, the reception steadier.\n\n\"Yes, Commander.\"\n\n\"I was out of water. Had to duck my head back down.\" His voice sounded excited. \"The tunnel is short,\" he said. \"A straight shot angled up. If you take a deep breath and kick a bit with your fins, you'll pop right up here.\"\n\n\"What did you find?\" Uncle Vigor asked.\n\n\"Some stone tunnels. Looks solid enough. I'm going to push forward and explore.\"\n\n\"I'm going with you,\" Rachel blurted out. She struggled with the buckles on her vest.\n\n\"First let me make sure it's safe.\"\n\nRachel shrugged out of her air tank and vest and propped them into a crevice. Gray wasn't the only bold one. \"I'm coming up.\"\n\n\"Me too,\" her uncle said.\n\nRachel took a breath and undid her hose. Free, she swam to the tunnel opening and ducked through. It was pitch dark. In her haste, she had forgotten to turn on her flashlight. But as she flicked her legs and pushed deeper, a ripple of light appeared only three meters ahead. Her buoyancy helped propel her. The light grew. The tunnel widened to either side.\n\nIn a matter of moments, she popped out into small pool.\n\nGray frowned at her. He stood on the stone bank that lipped the circular pool. A drum-shaped chamber opened around her. A man-made cave. The roof was corbeled in narrowing rings, giving it the appearance of being inside a tiny step pyramid.\n\nGray held out an arm for her. She didn't refuse, gawking at the chamber. He helped haul her out.\n\n\"You shouldn't have come,\" he said.\n\n\"And you shouldn't have gone,\" she countered, but her eyes were still on the blocks of stone around her. \"Besides, if this place has withstood an earthquake that toppled the Pharos Lighthouse, I think it can handle my footsteps.\"\n\nAt least, she hoped so.\n\n[ 1:04 P.M. ]\n\nA moment later, Vigor appeared, splashing up into the pool.\n\nGray sighed. He should've known better than to try to keep these two away.\n\nRachel shed her mask and pushed back her hood. She shook loose her hair, then bent to help the monsignor out of the water.\n\nGray kept his mask in place and ducked his head under the water. The radio worked best with water contact.\n\n\"Kat, maintain a post by the tunnel exit. Once we're out of the water, we'll lose communication pretty quickly. Monk, if there's any trouble, relay it to Kat, so she can fetch us.\"\n\nHe received affirmatives from both. Kat sounded irritated.\n\nMonk was glad to stay where he was. \"You go ahead. I've pretty much had my fill of crawling around in tombs.\"\n\nGray straightened and finally pulled away his own mask. The air smelled surprisingly fresh, if not a tad crusty with algae and salt. There must be a few crevices to the surface.\n\n\"A tumulus,\" Vigor said, free of his own mask. He eyed the stone ceiling. \"An Etruscan tomb design.\"\n\nTwo tunnels led out from here, angled apart. Gray was anxious to explore. One was taller than the other, but narrower, barely wide enough for one man to pass through. The other was low, requiring one to hunch a bit, but it was wider.\n\nVigor touched the blocks that made up one wall. \"Limestone. Cut and fitted tightly, but feel\u2026the blocks are cemented with lead.\" He turned to Gray. \"According to the historical record, this is the same design as the Pharos Lighthouse.\"\n\nRachel stared around her. \"This might be part of the original lighthouse, perhaps a subfloor or basement cellar.\"\n\nVigor headed for the closest tunnel, the shorter of the two. \"Let's see where this leads.\"\n\nGray blocked him with an arm. \"Me first.\"\n\nThe monsignor nodded his head, a bit apologetic. \"Of course.\"\n\nGray leaned down, pointed his flashlight. \"Conserve your flashlight's batteries for now,\" he instructed. \"We don't know how long we'll be down here.\"\n\nGray took a step forward, hunched beneath the low roof. A twinge pricked his back from one of the bruising slugs he had taken back in Milan. He felt like an old man.\n\nHe froze.\n\nCrap.\n\nVigor bumped into him from behind.\n\n\"Back, back, back\u2026\" he urged.\n\n\"What?\" Vigor asked but obeyed.\n\nGray retreated into the pool chamber.\n\nRachel eyed him oddly. \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"You ever hear of the story about the man who had to choose between two doors, behind one hid a tiger, the other a lady?\"\n\nRachel and Vigor nodded.\n\n\"I could be wrong, but I think we're faced with a similar dilemma. Two doors.\" Gray pointed to each dark tunnel. \"Remember the riddle of the Sphinx, marking the ages of man? Crawling, upright, and bent over. It took crawling to get into here.\" Gray recalled thinking that when he entered the tunnel.\n\n\"Now two ways lead forward,\" he continued. \"One where you can walk upright, another which requires you to hunch. Like I said, I could be wrong, but I'd prefer we take that other tunnel first. The one where you walk upright, the second stage of man.\"\n\nVigor eyed the tunnel they had been about to enter. In his profession as an archaeologist, he must know all about booby-trapped tombs. He nodded. \"No reason to be hasty.\"\n\n\"No reason at all.\" Gray circled the pool to the other tunnel.\n\nHe shone his flashlight and led the way. It took about ten steps until he breathed again.\n\nThe air grew a bit musty. The tunnel must be leading into the depths of the peninsula. Gray could almost sense the weight of the fort above him.\n\nThe passage made a series of sharp jags, but eventually his light revealed the tunnel's end. A larger space opened ahead. The glow of his flashlight reflected off something beyond.\n\nGray continued more slowly.\n\nThe others crowded behind him.\n\n\"What do you see?\" Rachel asked at the end of the line.\n\n\"Amazing\u2026\"\n\n[ 1:08 P.M. ]\n\nOn the monitor of the Aqua-Vu camera, Monk watched Kat cooling her heels by the tunnel entrance. She sat perfectly still, hovering with minimal effort, a conservation of energy. As he spied, she shifted ever so subtly, underwater tai chi. She stretched a leg, turning a thigh, accentuating the long curve of her body.\n\nHe trailed a finger down the screen of a monitor.\n\nA perfect S.\n\nPerfect.\n\nHe shook his head and turned away. Who was he fooling?\n\nHe searched the flat expanse of blue water. He wore polarized sunglasses, but by now, the constant noonday glare made his eyes ache.\n\nAnd the heat\u2026\n\nEven in the shade, it had to be over a hundred degrees. His dry suit chafed. He had unzipped and peeled down the upper section of suit, and stood bare-chested. But all the sweat seemed to have pooled in his crotch.\n\nAnd now he had to take a leak.\n\nHe'd better cut off the diet Cokes.\n\nMotion caught his eye. Coming around the far side of the peninsula. A large sleek ship, midnight blue. Thirty-footer. He read the lines. Not an ordinary ship. Hydrofoil. It raced over the waters, slightly raised on its surface-piercing skids. It flew unimpeded over the slight waves, skimming like a sled on ice.\n\nCrap, it was fast.\n\nHe followed its curve around the spit of land, a quarter klick out. It aimed toward the East Harbor. It was too small for a ferry shuttle. Maybe some rich A-rab's private yacht. He raised a pair of binoculars and searched for the ship. It took an extra moment to pin down the boat.\n\nIn the bow, he spotted a pair of girls in bikinis. No burka-wrapped modesty here. Monk had already surveyed a few of the other boats around the harbor, fixing them in place in his mental chessboard. One mini-yacht had a party in full swing, champagne flowing. Another houseboat-like craft had an older couple lounging about buck naked. Apparently Alexandria was the Fort Lauderdale of Egypt.\n\n\"Monk,\" Kat called from the radio.\n\nHe wore a headset connected to the underwater transceiver. \"What is it, Kat?\"\n\n\"I'm picking up a pulsing note of static over the radio. Is that you?\"\n\nHe lowered the binoculars. \"It's not me. I'll run a diagnostic on the transceiver. You might be picking up someone's fish finder.\"\n\n\"Roger that.\"\n\nMonk glanced across the water. The hydrofoil slowed and settled deeper into the water. It had drifted to the far side of the harbor.\n\nGood.\n\nMonk fixed its berth among the other boats in his head, one more piece to the chessboard. He turned his attention to the Buddy Phone transceiver. He twisted the amplitude control, earning a feedback whine in his ear, then reset the channel.\n\n\"How's that?\" he asked.\n\nKat answered. \"Better. It's gone now.\"\n\nMonk shook his head. Damn rental equipment\u2026\n\n\"Let me know if it returns,\" he said.\n\n\"Will do. Thanks.\"\n\nMonk eyed the length of her form on the camera screen and sighed. What was the use? He picked up his binoculars. Where were those two bikini-clad girls?\n\n[ 1:10 P.M. ]\n\nRachel stepped last into the chamber. The two men parted to either side in front of her. Despite Gray's warning to conserve their batteries, Uncle Vigor had flicked on his own flashlight.\n\nThe spears of light illuminated another drum-shaped room, domed above. The ceiling plaster had been painted black. Silver stars glowed brightly against the dark background. But the stars had not been painted onto the ceiling. They were metallic inlays.\n\nThe ceiling was reflected in a still pool of water that covered the entire floor. It looked knee-deep. The effect of the mirrored image in the water created a mirage of a perfect sphere of stars, above and below.\n\nBut that still wasn't the most amazing sight.\n\nResting in the middle of the chamber, rising from the pool of water, stood a giant pyramid of glass, as tall as a man. It seemed to float in the center of the phantom sphere.\n\nThe glass pyramid glinted with a familiar golden hue.\n\n\"Could it be\u2026?\" Uncle Vigor muttered.\n\n\"Gold glass,\" Gray said. \"A giant superconductor.\"\n\nThey spread out along the narrow lip of stone that surrounded the pool. Four copper pots rested in the water at the edges of the pools. Her uncle inspected one, then moved on. Ancient lamps, Rachel guessed. But they had brought their own illumination.\n\nShe studied the structure in the middle of the pool. The pyramid was square-bottomed, four-sided, like the pyramids of Giza.\n\n\"Something's inside it,\" Rachel said.\n\nThe reflection off the glass surfaces of the pyramid made details inside difficult to discern. Rachel hopped into the water. It was a little deeper than her knees.\n\n\"Careful,\" Gray said.\n\n\"Like you'd take that advice,\" she shot back, wading toward the pyramid.\n\nSplashes behind her announced the others were following. They crossed to the glass structure. Her uncle and Gray repositioned their lamps to penetrate the pyramid.\n\nTwo shapes appeared.\n\nOne stood in the exact center of the pyramid. It was a bronze sculpture of a giant finger, raised and pointing up. So large, she doubted she could get her arms around it. The detail work was masterful, from the trimmed fingernail down to the wrinkles at the knuckles.\n\nBut it was the shape below the raised finger that drew most of her attention. A figure, crowned and masked in gold, robed in a flow of white gown, lay atop a stone altar. The arms outstretched to either side, Christlike. But the golden face was distinctly Greek.\n\nRachel turned to her uncle. \"Alexander the Great.\"\n\nHer uncle stepped slowly around, getting a view from all angles. His eyes glistened with tears. \"His tomb\u2026the historical record mentioned his last resting place was in glass.\" He reached to touch one of the outstretched hands, buried only a few centimeters into the glass, then thought better of it and lowered his arm.\n\n\"What's with the bronze finger?\" Gray asked.\n\nUncle Vigor stepped back to them. \"I\u2026I think it's from the Colossus of Rhodes, the giant statue that spanned the island's harbor. It represented the god Helios but was modeled after Alexander the Great. No part of the statue was thought to still exist.\"\n\n\"Now this last remnant has become Alexander's headstone,\" Rachel said.\n\n\"I think all of this is a testament to Alexander,\" her uncle said. \"And to the science and knowledge he helped foster. It was at the Library of Alexandria that Euclid discovered the rules of geometry. All around here are triangles, pyramids, circles.\"\n\nUncle Vigor then pointed up and down. \"The reflected sphere split by water harkens to Eratosthenes, who at Alexandria calculated the diameter of the Earth. Even the water here\u2026it must be fed through small channels to keep this pool full. It was at the library that Archimedes designed the first screw-shaped water pump, which is still in use today.\"\n\nHer uncle shook his head at the wonder. \"All of this is a monument to Alexander and the lost Library of Alexandria.\"\n\nThat reminded Rachel of something. \"Weren't there supposed to be books down here? Didn't Septimus bury the most important scrolls of the library down here?\"\n\nVigor searched around. \"They must have been cleared out after the quake. When the clues were planted here. The knowledge must've been taken and sent to whatever hidden vault we seek. We must be close.\"\n\nRachel heard the quaver in her uncle's voice. What else might they discover?\n\n\"But before we move on,\" Gray said, \"we first must solve this riddle.\"\n\n\"No,\" Uncle Vigor said. \"The riddle is not even exposed yet. Remember at St. Peter's. We must pass some test. Prove our knowledge, like the Dragon Court did with their understanding of magnetism. Only after that was the secret revealed.\"\n\n\"Then what are we supposed to do?\" Gray asked.\n\nUncle Vigor stepped back, his eyes on the pyramid. \"We have to activate this pyramid.\"\n\n\"And how do we go about doing that?\" Gray asked.\n\nVigor turned to Gray. \"I need some soda.\"\n\n[ 1:16 P.M. ]\n\nGray waited for Kat to ferry up the last of the cans of Coke. They needed two more six-packs. \"Does it matter if it's diet Coke or regular?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"No,\" Vigor said. \"I just need something acidic. Even citrus juice would work, or vinegar.\"\n\nGray glanced to Rachel. She just shook her head and shrugged.\n\n\"Would you care to explain now?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"Remember how magnetism opened the first tomb,\" Vigor said. \"We know that the ancients were well aware of magnetism. Lodestones were widely distributed and used. Chinese compasses date back to 200 B.C. To move forward, we had to prove our understanding of magnetism. It even led us here. A magnetic marker left underwater.\"\n\nGray nodded.\n\n\"So another scientific wonder must be demonstrated here.\"\n\nVigor was interrupted by the arrival of Kat. She rose up into the entry pool, bearing aloft two more six-packs, making it a total of four.\n\n\"We're going to need Kat's help for a few minutes,\" Vigor said. \"It'll take four people.\"\n\n\"How are things topside?\" Gray asked Kat.\n\nShe shrugged. \"Quiet. Monk fixed a radio glitch. That was the extent of any excitement.\"\n\n\"Let him know you'll be off the air for a couple minutes,\" Gray said, uneasy, but they needed whatever was hidden here.\n\nKat dunked under, passing on the message. She then quickly climbed out and they all returned to Alexander's tomb.\n\nVigor waved for them to disperse. He pointed to a copper urn at the pool's edge. There were four of the pots. \"Each of you take a six-pack of soda and take up a post by the jars.\"\n\nThey spread out.\n\n\"Care to tell us what we're doing?\" Gray asked as he reached his copper jar.\n\nVigor nodded. \"Demonstrating another scientific wonder. What we must show here is the knowledge of a force known even to the Greeks. They called it electrikus. A name for the static charge of a cloth rubbed over amber. They witnessed it in the form of lightning and along the masts of their sailing ships as Saint Elmo's fire.\"\n\n\"Electricity,\" Gray said.\n\nVigor nodded. \"In 1938, a German archaeologist named Wilhelm Koenig discovered a number of curious clay jars in the National Museum of Iraq. They were only fifteen centimeters tall. They were attributed to the Persians, the homeland of our biblical Magi. The odd thing about the tiny jars was that they were plugged with asphalt, and from the top protruded a copper cylinder with an iron rod inside. The conformation was familiar to anyone with knowledge of voltaic sciences.\"\n\nGray frowned. \"And for those not familiar?\"\n\n\"The jars\u2026they were the exact conformation of battery cells, even earning the name 'the Baghdad Batteries.'\"\n\nGray shook his head. \"Ancient batteries?\"\n\n\"Both General Electric and Science Digest magazine in 1957 replicated these jars. They primed them with vinegar, and the jars gave off significant volts of electricity.\"\n\nGray stared down at the jars at his feet, remembering the monsignor's request for soda, another acidic solution. He noted the iron rod sticking out of the top of the solid copper jar. \"Are you saying these are batteries? Ancient Duracell Coppertops?\"\n\nHe stared at the pool. If the monsignor was correct, Gray understood now why jars were resting in the seawater pool. Whatever shock was generated by the batteries would flow through the water to the pyramid.\n\n\"Why don't we just jump-start the pyramid?\" Kat said. \"Bring down a marine battery from the boat?\"\n\nVigor shook his head. \"I think the activation is tied to the amount of current and the position of the batteries. When it comes to the magnitude of power in these superconductors\u2014especially one this size\u2014I think we should stick to the original design.\"\n\nGray agreed. He remembered the quake and the destruction inside the basilica. That had been with only a single cylinder of m-state powder. He eyed the giant pyramid and knew they'd better heed the monsignor's recommendation.\n\n\"So what do we do?\" Gray asked.\n\nVigor popped the top to one of his sodas. \"On my count, we fill up the empty batteries.\" He stared around the group. \"Oh, and I suggest we stand well back.\"\n\n[ 1:20 P.M. ]\n\nMonk sat behind the boat's wheel, tapping an empty can of soda on the starboard rail. He was tired of all this waiting. Maybe scuba diving wasn't so bad. The water looked inviting as the day's heat rose.\n\nThe loud rumble of an engine drew a glance across the harbor.\n\nThe hydrofoil, which had seemed to drop anchor, was on the move again. He listened to the engine throttle up. There seemed to be a bit of commotion on the deck.\n\nHe reached for his binoculars. Better safe than sorry.\n\nAs he raised the binoculars, he glanced to the monitor of the Aqua-Vu camera. The tunnel continued to be unmanned.\n\nWhat was taking Kat so long?\n\n[ 1:21 P.M. ]\n\nGray emptied his third can into the cylinder core of his jar. Soon Coke was bubbling down the copper side of the battery. Full.\n\nHe stood up and took the last swig from his soda can.\n\nUgh\u2026diet\u2026\n\nThe others finished about the same time, standing and moving back.\n\nA bit of carbonation frothed out the tops of all the cylinders. Nothing else happened. Maybe they had done it wrong, or the soda wouldn't work\u2014or even more likely, the monsignor's idea was simply full of crap.\n\nThen a spark danced from the tip of the iron rod of Gray's jar and cascaded down the copper surface to fizzle out in the seawater.\n\nSimilar weak pyrotechnics drizzled from the other batteries.\n\n\"It may take a few minutes for the batteries to build and discharge a proper voltage.\" Vigor's voice had lost its confident edge.\n\nGray frowned. \"I don't think this is going to\u2014\"\n\nSimultaneously from all four batteries, brilliant arcs of electricity crackled through the water, fire in the deep. They struck the four sides of the pyramid.\n\n\"Back against the wall!\" Gray yelled.\n\nHis warning was not needed. A blast of force thumped outward from the pyramid, throwing him bodily against the wall. The pressure made it feel like Gray was on his back, the drum-shaped chamber circling over him, the pyramid above him, a topsy-turvy amusement ride.\n\nYet Gray knew what held him.\n\nA Meissner field, a force that could levitate tombs.\n\nThen the true fireworks began.\n\nFrom all surfaces of the pyramid, crackling bursts of lightning shattered to the ceiling, seeming to strike the silver stars imbedded there. Jolts also lanced into the pool, as if attempting to attack the reflected stars in the water.\n\nGray felt the image burning into his retina, but he refused to close his eyes. It was worth the risk of blindness. Where the lightning struck the water, flames erupted and danced across the pool's surface.\n\nFire from water!\n\nHe knew what he was witnessing.\n\nThe electrolysis of water into hydrogen gas and oxygen. The released gas then ignited, set to flame by the play of energies here.\n\nTrapped by force, Gray watched the fire above and below. He could barely comprehend the power being unleashed here.\n\nHe had read theoretical studies on how a superconductor could store energy, even light, within its matrix for an infinite span of time. And in a perfect superconductor even the quantity of energy or light could be infinite.\n\nWas that what he was witnessing?\n\nBefore he could grasp it fully, the energies suddenly died away, a lightning storm in a bottle, brilliant but brief.\n\nThe world swung back upright as the Meissner field expired and his body was released. Gray stumbled a step forward. He caught himself from falling into the pool. Fires died back into the water. Whatever energy had been trapped inside the pyramid had been expended.\n\nNo one spoke.\n\nThey silently gathered together, needing the company of others, the physicality of one another.\n\nVigor was the first to make coherent motion. He pointed to the ceiling. \"Look.\"\n\nGray craned. The black paint and stars persisted, but now strange letters glowed in a fiery script across the dome of the roof.\n\n\"It's the clue,\" Rachel said.\n\nAs they stared, the letters faded rapidly. Like the fiery pyre atop the black hematite slab at St. Peter's, the revelation only lasted a brief time.\n\nGray hurried to free his underwater camera. They needed a record.\n\nVigor stayed his hand. \"I know what it says. It's Greek.\"\n\n\"You can translate?\"\n\nThe monsignor nodded. \"It's not difficult. It's a phrase attributed to Plato, describing how the stars affect us and are in fact a reflection of us. It became the foundation for astrology and the cornerstone for Gnostic belief.\"\n\n\"What's the phrase?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"'As it is above, so it is below.'\"\n\nGray stared at the starry ceiling and at the reflection in the water. Above and below. Here was the same sentiment expressed visually. \"But what does it mean?\"\n\nRachel had wandered from the group. She slowly made a complete circuit of the room. She called from the far side of the pyramid. \"Over here!\"\n\nGray heard a splash.\n\nThey hurried over to her. Rachel waded toward the pyramid.\n\n\"Careful,\" Gray warned.\n\n\"Look,\" she said, and pointed.\n\nGray made it around the edge of the pyramid and saw what had excited her. A tiny section of the pyramid, six inches square, had vanished midway up one face, dissolved away, consumed during the firestorm. Resting inside the hollow lay one of Alexander the Great's outstretched hands, closed in a fist.\n\nRachel reached for it, but Gray motioned her away.\n\n\"Let me,\" he said.\n\nHe reached to touch the hand, glad he was still wearing his diving gloves. The brittle flesh felt like stone. Between the clenched fingers, a bit of gold glinted.\n\nTeeth gritted, Gray broke off one of the fingers, earning a gasp from Vigor.\n\nIt couldn't be helped.\n\nFrom the fist, Gray removed a three-inch-long gold key, thick toothed, one end forged into a cross. It was surprisingly heavy.\n\n\"A key,\" Kat said.\n\n\"But to what lock?\" Vigor asked.\n\nGray stepped away. \"To wherever we must go next.\" His eyes wandered to the ceiling to where the letters had faded away.\n\n\"As it is above, so it is below,\" Vigor repeated, noting the direction of his gaze.\n\n\"But what is the significance?\" Gray mumbled. He pocketed the key into his thigh pouch. \"Where does it tell us to go?\"\n\nRachel had moved a step away. She slowly turned in a circle, surveying the room. She stopped, her gaze fixed on Gray. Her eyes shone brightly. He knew that look by now.\n\n\"I know where to start.\"\n\n[ 1:24 P.M. ]\n\nIn the raised pilot compartment of the hydrofoil, Raoul zipped into his wet suit. The boat was owned by the Guild. It had cost the Dragon Court a small fortune to rent it, but there could be no mistakes today.\n\n\"Bring us in along a sweeping curve as near as possible without raising suspicion,\" he ordered the captain, a dark-skinned Afrikaner with a pattern of pinpoint scars over his cheeks.\n\nTwo young women, one black, one white, flanked the man. They were dressed in bikinis, their equivalent of camouflage gear, but their eyes glinted with the promise of deadly force.\n\nThe captain didn't acknowledge Raoul, but he shifted the wheel and the craft angled to the side.\n\nRaoul turned away from the captain and his women. He headed out to the ladder to the lower deck.\n\nHe hated being aboard a craft not directly under his authority. He clambered down the ladder to join the twelve-man team that would undertake the dive. His other three men would operate the strafing guns cleverly engineered into the bow and both flanks of the stern. The last member of his team, Dr. Alberto Menardi, was ensconced in one of the cabins, preparing to unravel the riddles here.\n\nAnd there was one unwelcome addition to the team.\n\nThe woman.\n\nSeichan stood with her wet suit half-unzipped, down to her belly button. Her breasts were barely concealed behind the neoprene. She stood by her tanks and her Aquanaut sled. The tiny one-person sleds were propelled by twin propulsion jets. They would skim a diver through the water at breakneck speeds.\n\nThe Eurasian woman glanced up to him. Raoul found her mixed heritage repellent, but she served her purpose. His eyes traveled along the length of her bare midriff and chest. Two minutes alone with her, and he'd have that constant disdainful smirk smashed off her face.\n\nBut for now, the bitch had to be tolerated.\n\nThis was Guild territory.\n\nSeichan had insisted on accompanying the assault team. \"Only to observe and offer advice,\" she had purred. \"Nothing more.\"\n\nStill, he spotted the speargun among her stack of diving gear.\n\n\"We evac in three minutes,\" Raoul said.\n\nThey would go overboard as the hydrofoil slowed to turn around the peninsula, just sightseers getting a closer look at the old fort. They would swim into position from there. The hydrofoil would hang back, ready to intercede with its guns if necessary.\n\nSeichan tugged on her zipper. \"I've had our radio man intermittently jamming their communications. So when their radios go fully out, they'll be less suspicious.\"\n\nRaoul nodded. She had her uses. He'd give her that much respect.\n\nWith a final check of his watch, he lifted an arm and made a circling gesture with a finger. \"Mount up,\" he said.\n\n[ 1:26 P.M. ]\n\nBack in the tunnel entrance to Alexander's tomb, Rachel knelt down on the stone floor. She worked on her project, preparing to prove her point.\n\nGray spoke to Kat. \"You'd better get back out in the water. Check in with Monk. It's been longer than the couple minutes we had told him. He'll be getting edgy.\"\n\nKat nodded, but her eyes glanced around the room, settled on the tomb pyramid. Reluctantly, she turned and headed back down the tunnel toward the entry pool.\n\nVigor finished his own inspection of the tomb chamber. His face was still aglow with wonder. \"I don't think it will fire like that again.\"\n\nGray nodded at Rachel's side. \"The gold pyramid must have acted like a capacitor. It stored its energy, perfectly preserved within its superconducting matrix\u2026until the charge was released by the shock, creating a cascade reaction that emptied the pyramid.\"\n\n\"That means,\" Vigor said, \"that even if the Dragon Court discovers this chamber, they'll never be able to raise the riddle.\"\n\n\"Or gain the gold key,\" Gray said, patting his thigh pouch. \"We're finally a full step ahead of them.\"\n\nRachel heard the relief and satisfaction in his voice.\n\n\"But first we have to solve this riddle,\" she reminded him. \"I have an inkling of where to begin, but no answer yet.\"\n\nGray came over to her. \"What are you working on?\"\n\nShe had a Mediterranean map spread on the stones, the same map she had used to demonstrate that the inscription on the hematite slab depicted the coastline of the eastern Mediterranean. With a black felt marker, she had carefully drawn spots on the map and assigned names to each.\n\nSitting back, she waved an arm to the tomb chamber. \"The phrase\u2014'as it is above, so it is below'\u2014was originally meant to bring the star's positions into our own lives.\"\n\n\"Astrology,\" Gray said.\n\n\"Not exactly,\" Vigor argued. \"The stars truly ruled ancient civilizations. Constellations were the timekeepers of seasons, the guideposts for travel, the home of the gods. Civilizations honored them by building their monuments as a reflection of the starry night. A new theory about the three pyramids of Giza is that they were aligned as such to match the three stars of Orion's belt. Even in more modern times, every Catholic cathedral or basilica is built along an east-west axis, to mark the rising and setting of the sun. We still honor that tradition.\"\n\n\"So we're supposed to look for patterns,\" Gray said. \"Significant positions of something in the sky or on the Earth.\"\n\n\"And the tomb is telling us what to pay attention to,\" Rachel said.\n\n\"Then I must be deaf,\" Gray said.\n\nHer uncle had figured it out by now, too. \"The bronze finger of the Colossus,\" he said, staring out at the tomb. \"The giant pyramid, perhaps representative of the one at Giza. The remnants of the Pharos Lighthouse above us. Even the drum-shaped tomb might hearken back to the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Gray said with a frown. \"The mausoleum of what?\"\n\n\"It was one of the Seven Wonders,\" Rachel said. \"Remember how closely Alexander was tied to them all.\"\n\n\"Right,\" Gray said. \"Something about his birth coinciding with one and his death another.\"\n\n\"The Temple of Artemis,\" Vigor said with a nod. \"And the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. They're all connected to Alexander\u2026to here.\"\n\nRachel pointed to the map she was working on. \"I've marked all their locations. They are spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean. They are all localized in the same region mapped out on the hematite slab.\"\n\nGray studied the map. \"Are you saying we're supposed to be looking for a pattern among the seven of them?\"\n\n\"'As it is above, so it is below,'\" Vigor quoted.\n\n\"Where do we even begin?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"Time,\" Rachel said. \"Or rather the progression of time, as hinted at by the Sphinx's riddle. Moving from birth to death.\"\n\nGray's eyes narrowed, then widened with understanding. \"Chronological order. When the Wonders were built.\"\n\nRachel nodded. \"But I don't know the order.\"\n\n\"I do,\" Vigor said. \"What archaeologist in the region wouldn't?\"\n\nHe knelt down and took the felt marker. \"I think Rachel is right. The first clue that started this all was hidden in a book in Cairo, near Giza. The pyramids are also the oldest of the Seven Wonders.\" He placed the tip of the marker on Giza. \"I find it interesting that this tomb lies under the Pharos Lighthouse.\"\n\n\"Why's that?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"Because the lighthouse was the last of the Wonders to be built. From first to last. This might also indicate that wherever we go next might be the end of the road. The last stop.\"\n\nUncle Vigor leaned down and carefully drew lines, connecting the Seven Wonders in order of their construction. \"From Giza to Babylon, then on to Olympia, where the statue of Zeus towered.\"\n\n\"Alexander's supposed real father,\" Rachel reminded.\n\n\"From there, we go to Artemis's Temple at Ephesus, then Halicarnassus, then the island of Rhodes\u2026until at last we reach our own spot on the map. Alexandria and its famous lighthouse.\"\n\nHer uncle leaned back. \"Is anyone still wondering if we're not on the right track?\"\n\nRachel and Gray stared at his handiwork.\n\n\"Christ\u2026\" Gray swore.\n\n\"It forms a perfect hourglass,\" Rachel said.\n\nVigor nodded. \"The symbol for the passage of time itself. Formed by two triangles. Remember that the Egyptian symbol for the white powder fed to the pharaohs was a triangle. As a matter of fact, triangles were also symbolic for the benben stone of the Egyptians, a symbol of sacred knowledge.\"\n\n\"What's a benben stone?\" Gray asked.\n\nRachel answered. \"They're the caps placed over the tips of Egyptian obelisks and pyramids.\"\n\n\"But they're mostly represented by triangles in art,\" her uncle added. \"In fact, you can see one on the back of your own dollar bill. American currency shows a pyramid with a triangle hovering over it.\"\n\n\"The one with the eye inside it,\" Gray said.\n\n\"An all-seeing eye,\" Vigor corrected. \"Symbolic of that sacred knowledge I was talking about. It makes one wonder if this society of ancient mages didn't have some influence on the early fraternities of your forefathers.\" This last was said with a smile. \"But certainly for the Egyptians, there seems to be an underlying theme of triangles, sacred knowledge, all tying back to the mysterious white powder. Even the name benben makes this connection.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Rachel said, intrigued.\n\n\"The Egyptians implied significance to the spelling of their words. For instance, a-i-s in ancient Egyptian translates to 'brain,' but if you reversed the spelling to s-i-a, that word means 'consciousness.' They used the very spelling of the words to connect the two: consciousness to the brain. Now back to benben. The letters b-e-n translate to 'sacred stone,' as I mentioned, but do you know what you get if you spell it backward?\"\n\nRachel and Gray shrugged at the same time.\n\n\"N-e-b translates to 'gold.'\"\n\nGray let out a breath of surprise. \"So gold is connected to sacred stone and sacred knowledge.\"\n\nVigor nodded. \"Egypt is where it all began.\"\n\n\"But where does it end?\" Rachel asked, staring down at her map. \"What is the significance of the hourglass? How does it point to the next location?\"\n\nThey all stared out at the pyramidal tomb.\n\nVigor shook his head.\n\nGray knelt down. \"It's my turn at the map.\"\n\n\"You have an idea?\" Vigor said.\n\n\"You don't have to sound so shocked.\"\n\n[ 1:37 P.M. ]\n\nGray set to work, using the back of his knife as a straight edge. He had to get this right. With the felt marker in hand, he spoke as he worked, not looking up.\n\n\"That big bronze finger,\" he said. \"See how it's in the exact center of the room, positioned under the dome?\"\n\nThe others glanced out to the tomb. The water had settled to a flat sheen again. The arched starscape on the ceiling was again reflected perfectly in the water, creating an illusion of a starry sphere.\n\n\"The finger is positioned like the north-south pole of that spherical mirage. The axis around which the world spins. And now look at the map. What spot marks the center of the hourglass?\"\n\nRachel leaned closer and read the name there. \"The island of Rhodes,\" she said. \"Where the finger came from.\"\n\nGray smiled at the wonder in her voice. Was it from the revelation or the fact that he had discovered it?\n\n\"I think we're supposed to find the axis through the hourglass,\" he said. He took the felt marker and drew a line bisecting the hourglass vertically. \"And that bronze finger points toward the north pole.\" He continued, using his knife blade as a guide, and extended the line north.\n\nHis marker stopped at a well-known and significant city.\n\n\"Rome,\" Rachel read off the map.\n\nGray sat back. \"The fact that all this geometry points right back to Rome must be significant. It must be where we have to go next. But where in Rome? The Vatican again?\"\n\nHe stared around at the others.\n\nRachel's brow had bunched up.\n\nVigor slowly knelt down. \"I think, Commander, that you're both right and wrong. Can I see your knife?\"\n\nGray handed it over, glad to let the monsignor usurp his position.\n\nHe played with the knife's edge on the map. \"Hmm\u2026two triangles.\" He tapped the hourglass pattern.\n\n\"What about it?\"\n\nVigor shook his head, eyes focused. \"You were right about the fact that this line hits Rome. But it's not where we're supposed to go.\"\n\n\"How do you know that?\"\n\n\"Remember the multiple layers of riddles here. We have to look deeper.\"\n\n\"To where?\"\n\nVigor dragged his finger along the edge of the blade, extending the line past Rome. \"Rome was only the first stop.\" He continued the imaginary line farther north, into France. He halted at a spot just a bit north of Marseilles.\n\nVigor nodded and smiled. \"Clever.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nVigor passed back the knife and tapped the spot. \"Avignon.\"\n\nA gasp arose from Rachel.\n\nGray failed to see the significance. His confused expression made that plain.\n\nRachel turned to him. \"Avignon is the place in France to which the papacy was exiled in the early fourteenth century. It became the papal seat of power for almost a full century.\"\n\n\"The second seat of papal power,\" Vigor stressed. \"First Rome, then France. Two triangles, two symbols of power and knowledge.\"\n\n\"But how can we be sure?\" Gray said. \"Maybe we're reading too much into it.\"\n\nVigor waved away his concern. \"Remember, we already had pinpointed the date when we thought the clues were planted, when the papacy left Rome. The first decade of the fourteenth century.\"\n\nGray nodded, but he was not totally convinced.\n\n\"And these crafty alchemists left us another layer to the riddle to help firmly establish this location.\" Vigor pointed to the shape on the map. \"When do you think the hourglass was first invented?\"\n\nGray shook his head. \"I assumed it was at least a couple thousand years\u2026maybe older.\"\n\n\"Oddly enough, the hourglass's invention matched the time of the first mechanical clocks. Only seven hundred years ago.\"\n\nGray calculated in his head. \"That would place it back to the start of the thirteen hundreds again. The beginning of the fourteenth century.\"\n\n\"Marking time, as all hourglasses should do, back to the founding of the French papacy.\"\n\nGray felt a thrill chase through him. Now they knew where they needed to go next. With the gold key. To Avignon, to the French Vatican. He sensed a similar excitement in Rachel and her uncle.\n\n\"Let's get out of here,\" Gray said, and led them quickly down the tunnel to the entry pool.\n\n\"What about the tomb?\" Vigor said.\n\n\"The announcement of the discovery will have to wait for another day. If the Dragon Court comes calling, they'll find out they're too late.\"\n\nGray hurried into the far chamber. He knelt, slid his mask over his features, and ducked his head underwater, preparing to let the others know the good news.\n\nAs soon as his head hit the water, his radio buzzed, irritating and loud. \"Kat\u2026Monk\u2026can anyone hear me?\"\n\nThere was no answer. Gray recalled Kat mentioning some glitch with the Buddy Phones. He listened for a moment longer. His heartbeat thudded more loudly in his chest.\n\nShit.\n\nHe shoved out of the water.\n\nThat white noise wasn't static. They were being jammed. \"What?\" Rachel asked. \"The Dragon Court. They're already here.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "BLOOD IN THE WATER",
                "text": "[ JULY 26, 1:45 P.M. ]\n\n[ ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT ]\n\nKat bobbed in the gentle waves.\n\nHer radio had completely died ten seconds ago. She had popped up to check with Monk. She found him with binoculars fixed to his face.\n\n\"The radio\u2014\" she started.\n\n\"Something's fucked,\" he said, cutting her off. \"Get the others.\"\n\nShe reacted instantly, flipping down, kicking her legs high. The weight shoved her in a vertical dive. She emergency-flushed the air from her BC vest and plummeted straight down.\n\nDiving for the tunnel, she reached her other hand to free the buckle straps that held her vest and tank. Movement at the entrance stayed her fingers.\n\nThe sleek form of a diver jettisoned out of the tunnel. A streak of blue across the black suit identified the swimmer as Commander Pierce. A perpetual whine filled her ears. No way to communicate the urgency.\n\nBut there proved to be no need.\n\nOn the commander's heels, two other forms fled the tunnel.\n\nVigor and Rachel.\n\nKat twisted back upright. Clicking off her Buddy Phone to end the whine, she kicked toward Gray. He must have realized the radio fritz meant trouble. He simply stared hard at her through his face mask and pointed an arm up questioningly.\n\nWas it clear above?\n\nShe gave him an okay signal. No hostiles above. At least not yet.\n\nGray did not bother with securing their abandoned tanks. He waved the others up. They kicked off the rocks and aimed for the keel of the boat.\n\nTo the side, Kat noted the anchor being raised.\n\nMonk was readying for an immediate departure.\n\nKat filled the buoyancy vest and kicked upward, fighting the drag of her tank and weight belt. Above, the others were already breaching the surface.\n\nA new humming whine filled her hearing.\n\nIt wasn't the radio this time.\n\nShe searched the waters for the source, but the visibility in the polluted harbor was poor. Something was coming\u2026coming fast.\n\nAs a Navy intelligence officer, she had spent plenty of time aboard all manner of watercraft, including submarines. She recognized the steady hum.\n\nTorpedo.\n\nLocked on the speedboat.\n\nShe thrashed upward, but knew she'd never reach them in time.\n\n[ 1:46 P.M. ]\n\nMonk engaged the boat's engine while maintaining a watch for the hydrofoil through his binoculars. It had just vanished behind the tip of the peninsula. But he had watched it slow suspiciously a few seconds ago, two hundred yards out. There had been no telltale activity on the stern deck, but he had noted a rippling line of bubbles in the craft's wake as it glided slowly away.\n\nThen he'd heard the whine over the radio.\n\nKat appeared a few seconds after that.\n\nThey needed to get out of here. He knew it in his gut.\n\n\"Monk!\" a voice called. It was Gray, surfacing to the port side.\n\nThank God.\n\nHe began to lower his binoculars when he spotted a streaking object racing through the water. A fin cleaved through the waves. A metal fin.\n\n\"Fuck\u2026\"\n\nDropping the binoculars, Monk shoved the throttle to full. The boat bucked forward with a scream of the engine. He twisted the wheel to starboard. Away from Gray.\n\n\"Everybody down!\" he screamed, and shoved his mask over his face. He had no time to zip his suit.\n\nWith the boat canting away under him, he ran for the stern, stepped on the back seat, and catapulted into the water.\n\nThe torpedo struck behind him. The force of the explosion flipped him feet over head. Something punched him in the hip, rattling all the way to his teeth. He struck the water, rolling across the surface, chased by a wash of flames.\n\nBefore it could reach him, he sank into the cool embrace of the sea.\n\nRachel had surfaced just as Monk yelled. She watched him run for the stern of the boat. Reacting to his panic, she shoved back down and twisted to dive.\n\nThen the explosion hit.\n\nThe concussion through the water stabbed her ears, even through her thick neoprene hood. All the air slammed out of her. Her mask's seals broke. Seawater rushed in.\n\nShe scrambled back to the surface, blind, eyes stinging.\n\nWith her head out of water, she emptied her mask, coughing and gagging. Debris continued to rain down into the water. Smoking flotsam steamed and rocked. Flaming rivers of gasoline skimmed the waves.\n\nShe searched the waters.\n\nNo one.\n\nThen to her left, a flailing shape burst out of the water. It was Monk, dazed and choking.\n\nShe paddled over to him and grabbed an arm. His face mask had been turned half around his head. She steadied him as he gagged.\n\n\"Goddamn,\" he wheezed out, and tugged his mask around.\n\nA new noise traveled over the water. Both turned.\n\nRachel watched a large hydrofoil swing around the fort, tilted up on skids. It circled out toward them.\n\n\"Down!\" Monk urged.\n\nThey fled together under the water. The explosion had stirred the sand, closing visibility down to a few feet.\n\nRachel pointed in the general direction of the tunnel entrance, lost in the murk. They needed to reach the abandoned scuba tanks, a source of much-needed air.\n\nReaching the pile of rocks, she searched around her for the tunnel entrance, for the others. Where was everyone else?\n\nShe scrambled along the tumble of boulders. Monk kept with her, but he struggled with his suit. He had only been half zipped up. The upper section flapped and tangled.\n\nWhere were the tanks? Had she gotten turned around?\n\nA dark shape passed overhead, further away from shore. The hydrofoil. From Monk's reaction, it was the source of their trouble.\n\nA burning pressure built in Rachel's lungs.\n\nIllumination bloomed in the gloom ahead. She moved instinctually toward it, hoping to find her uncle or Gray. Out of the murk, a pair of divers swept into view, leaning on motorized sleds. Silt spiraled behind them.\n\nThe divers swung out to trap them against the shore.\n\nLit by their lamps, steel arrowheads glinted. Spearguns.\n\nTo emphasize the threat, a popping zip sounded. A lance of steel streaked at Monk. He jerked aside. The spear pierced the loose half of his suit, shredding through.\n\nRachel held her palms up, toward the divers.\n\nOne of them pointed a thumb, ordering them to the surface.\n\nCaught.\n\nGray helped Vigor.\n\nThe monsignor had knocked into him when the boat had exploded. He had taken a chunk of fiberglass to the side of his head, slicing through his neoprene suit. Blood flowed from the cut. Gray had no way of judging the damage, but the older man was dazed.\n\nGray had managed to reach the air tanks and now helped hook the monsignor up. Vigor waved him off as the air flowed. Gray swung to a second tank and rapidly reconnected his regulator.\n\nHe took several deep breaths.\n\nHe eyed the tunnel opening. There was no refuge to be found in there. The Dragon Court would certainly come here. Gray would not be trapped in another tomb.\n\nGrabbing up his tank, Gray pointed away.\n\nVigor nodded, but his face searched the clouded waters.\n\nGray read his fear.\n\nRachel.\n\nThey had to survive to be of any help. Gray headed out, leading Vigor. They would find a niche among the fall of boulders and debris to hide in. Earlier, he had noted a sunken rusted skiff about ten yards off, overturned and tilted against the rocks.\n\nHe guided Vigor along the cliff. The scuttled boat appeared. He settled the monsignor in its shadow. He motioned for Vigor to stay, then slipped on his tank, freeing his arms.\n\nGray pointed outward and made a circling motion.\n\nI'm going to search for the others.\n\nVigor nodded, trying, it seemed, to look hopeful.\n\nGray headed back toward the tunnel, but he kept close to the seabed. The others, if able, would make for the air tanks. He glided from shadow to shadow, keeping to the boulders.\n\nAs he neared the tunnel entrance, a glow grew. He slowed. Individual lights differentiated, splashing over the rocks and pointed outward.\n\nHe moved into the darkness behind a chunk of stone and spied.\n\nBlack-suited divers clustered around the tunnel opening. They wore minitanks, containing less than twenty minutes of air, made for short dives.\n\nGray watched one diver duck through the opening and vanish.\n\nAfter a few seconds, some confirmation must have been passed along. Another five divers swept one after the other into the tunnel. Gray recognized the last sleek shape to disappear into the tomb shaft.\n\nSeichan.\n\nGray swung away. None of his teammates would come here now.\n\nAs he moved out of hiding, a shape welled up in front of him, appearing from nowhere. Large. The razored tip of a speargun pressed into the flesh of his belly.\n\nLights flared around him.\n\nBehind the mask, Gray recognized the heavy countenance of Raoul.\n\nRachel helped free Monk. The spear shaft had pinned a flap of his suit to the seabed. She tugged him loose.\n\nTwo yards away, the two divers hovered on their sleds, like surfers on broken surfboards. One motioned them to the surface. Now.\n\nRachel didn't need the urging.\n\nAs she obeyed, a dark shadow swept up and behind the pair of divers.\n\nWhat\u2026?\n\nTwo flashes of silver flickered.\n\nOne diver clutched his air hose. Too late. Through the man's mask, Rachel saw his gasped breath draw in a wash of seawater. The second was even less lucky. He was ripped clean off his sled, torn away by a knife lodged in his throat.\n\nBlood spread in a cloud.\n\nThe attacker wrenched the blade free and the cloud thickened.\n\nRachel spotted the pink stripe against the attacker's black suit.\n\nKat.\n\nThe first diver choked and writhed, drowning in his mask. He attempted to flee to the surface, but Kat was there. Knives in both hands dispatched him with brutal efficiency.\n\nKat kicked his form away. Weighted down by tank and belt, his body drifted into the depths.\n\nFinished, Kat dragged his sled to Rachel and Monk. She pointed up to the surface and motioned to the sled.\n\nTo make a fast getaway.\n\nRachel had no idea how to operate the vehicle\u2014but Monk did. He mounted the half-board and grabbed the handlebar-like controls. He waved for Rachel to climb atop him and ride piggyback.\n\nShe did so, throwing her arms around his shoulders. Lights now danced across the edges of her vision.\n\nKat swam for the other sled, a speargun in hand.\n\nMonk twisted the throttle, and the sled dragged them away, upward, toward safety, toward fresh air.\n\nThey burst from the surf like a breaching whale, then slammed back down. Rachel was jarred, but she kept her grip tight. Monk raced them across the smooth waters, zigzagging through the flaming debris field. Oil lay thick over the water.\n\nRachel risked freeing a hand to rip up her mask, sucking in air.\n\nShe tugged Monk's mask up, too.\n\n\"Ow,\" he said. \"Watch the nose.\"\n\nThey passed the overturned bulk of their speedboat\u2014only to find the long form of the hydrofoil waiting for them on the left.\n\n\"Maybe they haven't seen us,\" Monk whispered.\n\nGunfire chattered, strafing across the water, aiming right for them.\n\n\"Hang on!\" Monk yelled.\n\nThe point of Raoul's spear dug Gray out of his hiding place. Another diver raised a second spear to the side of Gray's throat.\n\nAs Gray moved, a knife slashed at him, wielded by Raoul.\n\nHe flinched, but the blade only cut the straps to his tank. The heavy cylinder dropped toward the bottom. Raoul waved for him to unhook the regulator. Did they mean to drown him?\n\nRaoul pointed to the nearby tunnel entrance.\n\nApparently they meant to interrogate him first.\n\nHe had no choice.\n\nGray swam to the entrance, flanked by guards. He dove through, trying to think of some plan. He sailed up to the entry pool and found the chamber ringed with other men in wet suits. Their minitanks were small enough to allow them to traverse the tunnel. Some were shedding out of their vests and tanks. Others pointed spearguns, alerted by Raoul.\n\nGray climbed out of the pool and removed his mask. Every move was tracked by the point of a spear.\n\nHe noted Seichan leaning against one wall, seeming oddly relaxed. Her only acknowledgment was the raise of a single finger.\n\nHello.\n\nAt Gray's other side, a shape plowed upward into the entry pool. Raoul. In a single movement, the large man one-armed his way out of the pool and to his feet, a gymnastic demonstration of power. His frame must have barely fit through the tunnel. He had abandoned his minitanks outside.\n\nDragging off his mask and peeling back his hood, he strode to Gray.\n\nIt was the first time Gray had a good look at the man. His features were craggy, nose long and thin, aquiline. His coal black hair hung to his shoulders. His arms were massed with muscle, as thick around as Gray's thigh, plainly grown from steroids and too much time spent in the gym, not from real-world labor.\n\nEurotrash, Gray thought.\n\nRaoul towered over him, trying to intimidate.\n\nGray just lifted an eyebrow quizzically. \"What?\"\n\n\"You're going to tell us everything you know,\" Raoul said. His English was fluent, but it was heavily accented with disdain and something Germanic.\n\n\"And if I don't?\"\n\nRaoul waved an arm as another form splashed up into the entry pool. Gray immediately recognized Vigor. The monsignor had been found.\n\n\"There's not much a side-scanning radar can't detect,\" Raoul said.\n\nVigor was dragged bodily from the pool, not gently. Blood from his scalp wound dribbled down one side of his face. He was shoved toward them, but he tripped from exhaustion and fell hard to his knees.\n\nGray bent down to go to his aid, but a spearhead drove him back.\n\nAnother diver surfaced in the pool. He was clearly weighted down. Raoul stepped over and unburdened the man. It was another of those barbell-shaped charges. An incendiary grenade.\n\nRaoul slung the device over a shoulder and stepped back to them. He raised his own speargun and pointed it at Vigor's crotch. \"As the monsignor has sworn off using this part of his anatomy anyway, we'll start here. Any missteps and the monsignor will be able to join the castrato choir of his church.\"\n\nGray straightened. \"What do you want to know?\"\n\n\"Everything\u2026but first, show us what you found.\"\n\nGray lifted an arm toward the tunnel to Alexander's tomb, then swung it around to the other tunnel, the shorter of the two, the one that required one to hunch over to traverse it. \"It's that way,\" he said.\n\nVigor's eyes widened.\n\nRaoul grinned and lifted his speargun. He waved a group of men into the tunnel. \"Check it out.\"\n\nFive darted away, leaving three men with Raoul.\n\nSeichan, leaning near the tunnel entrance, watched the group disappear. She stepped to follow.\n\n\"Not you,\" Raoul said.\n\nSeichan glanced over a shoulder. \"Do you and your men want to leave this harbor?\"\n\nRaoul's face reddened.\n\n\"The escape boat is ours,\" she reminded him, and ducked away.\n\nRaoul clenched a fist but stayed silent.\n\nTrouble in paradise\u2026\n\nGray turned. Vigor's gaze was hard upon him. Gray motioned with his eyes. Dive away at the first opportunity.\n\nHe faced the tunnel again. He prayed he was correct about the Sphinx's riddle. It was death to solve it wrongly. And that certainly was about to be proven here, one way or the other.\n\nThat left only one mystery to be answered.\n\nWho would die?\n\nMonk raced the bullets. His jet sled skidded across the water. Rachel clung to him from behind, half choking his airway.\n\nThe harbor was in chaos. Other watercraft fled from the fighting, scattering like a school of fish. Monk hit the wake of a crabbing boat and sailed high into the air.\n\nGunfire chewed into the wave below.\n\n\"Grab tight!\" he cried.\n\nHe flipped the sled on its side just as they hit the water. Under they went. He straightened their course and dove deeper, speeding through the water at a depth of three feet.\n\nAt least that's what he hoped.\n\nMonk had squeezed his eyes closed. Without his mask, he couldn't have seen much anyway. But before diving under, he caught a glimpse of an anchored sailboat directly ahead.\n\nIf he could get under it\u2026put it between him and the hydrofoil\u2026\n\nHe counted in his head, estimating, praying.\n\nThe world went momentarily darker through his eyelids. They were under the shadow of the sailboat. He did an additional four-count and canted back upward toward the surface.\n\nThey burst back into sunlight and air.\n\nMonk craned back. They had more than cleared the sailboat. \"Fuck, yeah!\" The hydrofoil had to swing around the obstacle, losing ground.\n\n\"Monk!\" Rachel yelled in his ear.\n\nHe faced forward to see a boxy wall of boat in front of him, the naked houseboat couple's. Crap! They were flying right toward its port side. There was no shying from it.\n\nMonk slammed his weight forward and tipped the nose of the sled straight down. They dove in a steep dive\u2026but was it steep enough to duck under the houseboat, like he had the sailboat?\n\nThe answer was no.\n\nMonk slammed into the keel with the tip of his sled. The sled flipped ass-end up. Monk clutched an iron grip to the handles. The sled skittered against the wood side, barnacles ripping at his shoulder. He gunned the throttle and shot deeper.\n\nHe finally cleared the underside of the boat and sped back into clear water.\n\nHe jetted upward, knowing he had little time.\n\nRachel was gone, knocked off with the first collision.\n\nGray held his breath.\n\nA commotion immediately sounded from down the low tunnel. The first of the men must have reached the end of the passage. It must have been short.\n\n\"Eine Goldt\u00fcr!\" he heard shouted. A gold door.\n\nRaoul hurried forward, dragging Gray with him. Vigor was kept pinned at the pool's edge by a diver with a speargun.\n\nThe tunnel, lit up by the explorers' flashlights, extended only some thirty yards and was slightly curved. The end could not be seen, but the last two men in line\u2014and Seichan\u2014were limned against the glow, all focused forward.\n\nGray had a sudden fear that perhaps they'd been wrong about the gold key they had found. Maybe it was meant for this door.\n\n\"Es wird entriegelt!\" a shout called. Unlocked!\n\nFrom where Gray stood, he heard the click as the door was opened.\n\nIt was too loud.\n\nSeichan must have noted it, too. She spun around and leaped back toward them. She was too late.\n\nFrom all walls, sharpened poles of steel shot out of crevices and shadowed nooks. They skewered across the passage, piercing through flesh and bone, and embedded into holes drilled on the opposite side. The deadly tangle started deep and swept outward in a matter of two seconds.\n\nLights bobbled. Men screamed, impaled and pinned.\n\nSeichan made it within two steps of the exit, but the tail end of the booby trap caught her. A single sharpened pole lanced out and impaled through her shoulder. She jerked to a stop, legs going out from under her.\n\nA pained gasp was the only sound she made, hung up and skewered on the bar.\n\nShocked, Raoul weakened his grip on Gray.\n\nTaking advantage, Gray wrested free and flung himself toward the pool. \"Go!\" he shouted to Vigor.\n\nBefore he could take a second step, something struck the back of his head. Hard. He went down on one knee. He was clubbed again, on the side of the head, pistol-whipped with the butt of a speargun.\n\nHe had underestimated the speed of the giant.\n\nA mistake.\n\nRaoul kicked Gray onto his face and pressed a boot on his neck, bearing down with full weight.\n\nGasping, Gray watched Vigor fished back out of the pool. The monsignor had been caught by the ankle and denied escape.\n\nRaoul leaned down, leering into Gray's view.\n\n\"A nasty little trick,\" he said.\n\n\"I didn't know\u2014\"\n\nThe boot pressed harder, squeezing off his words.\n\n\"But you have eliminated a bit of a problem for me,\" he continued. \"Taking that bitch out of the picture. But now we have some work to do\u2026the two of us.\"\n\nRachel clawed back to the surface of the water, hitting her head again on the side of the boat. She choked on a mouthful of water and broke through to open air. She coughed and gagged repeatedly, reflexively, unable to stop. Her limbs floundered.\n\nA gate suddenly dropped and she saw a naked middle-aged man standing there, bare-assed to the world. \"Tudo bem, Menina?\"\n\nPortuguese. Asking if she was okay.\n\nShe shook her head, still coughing.\n\nHe bent down and offered an arm. Taking it, she allowed herself to be hauled up and stood shakily. Where was Monk?\n\nShe watched the hydrofoil banking away, heading out toward deeper waters. The reason soon became apparent. A pair of Egyptian police cruisers sped out from the far pier, revving up, gaining speed, finally responding. The chaos in the harbor must have delayed them, but better late than never.\n\nRelief flooded through her.\n\nRachel turned to find the man's wife or companion, equally naked.\n\nExcept for the gun.\n\nMonk surfed around the stern of the houseboat, searching for Rachel. Further out in the harbor, a police cruiser wailed across the waters. Lights flashed an angry red and white. The hydrofoil raced away, picking up speed, lifting to the full extent of its skids.\n\nEscaping.\n\nThere was no way for the police to catch it. The hydrofoil headed out\u2026to international waters or to some other hidden berth.\n\nMonk turned his full attention to his search for Rachel. He feared to find her floating facedown, drowned in the polluted water. He edged around the stern, staying close to the boat.\n\nHe spotted motion on the rear deck of the houseboat.\n\nRachel\u2026she had her back to him, but looked unsteady. The naked middle-aged man supported her with one arm.\n\nHe slowed. \"Rachel\u2026are you o\u2014\"\n\nShe glanced back, eyes panicked. The man raised his other arm. He held a snub-nosed automatic rifle, pointed at Monk's face.\n\n\"Oh\u2026I guess not,\" Monk muttered.\n\nGray's neck was about to break.\n\nRaoul knelt atop him, one knee square on the middle of his back, the other on the back of his neck. One hand twisted into Gray's hair, yanking his head back. The man's other hand held the speargun straight-armed toward Vigor's left eye.\n\nThe monsignor was on his knees, flanked by two divers with additional guns. A third looked on, scowling with a knife balanced in his hand. All eyes were narrowed with raw hatred. Gray's trick had slain five of their men, comrades-in-arms.\n\nMoans still echoed from the bloody tunnel, but there would be no rescue for them. Only revenge.\n\nRaoul leaned closer. \"Enough games. What did you learn in\u2014\"\n\nA zinging thwack cut off his words.\n\nThe speargun clattered from Raoul's grip. A roaring howl erupted from him as he fell off Gray.\n\nReleased, Gray rolled across the floor, snatched up the abandoned speargun, and shot one of the men holding Vigor.\n\nThe shaft pierced through the diver's neck, knocking him back.\n\nThe other man straightened, turning his weapon on Gray, but before he could fire, a spear flashed through the air from the pool and spitted the man through the belly.\n\nHis weapon fired reflexively, but the shot went wild as he tumbled backward.\n\nVigor slapped the one unfired speargun toward Gray, then flung himself low.\n\nGray grabbed it and swung it toward Raoul.\n\nThe giant ran for the nearby tunnel, the one that led to Alexander's tomb. Raoul clutched a hand to his other wrist, his palm pierced through by a length of steel spear.\n\nKat's shot had been precise, disarming and disabling.\n\nThe last of the Court's men, the one with the dagger, was the first into the tunnel and led the way. Raoul followed.\n\nGray gained his feet, took aim at Raoul's back, and fired.\n\nThe spear flew down the tunnel. Raoul would not reach the first turn in time. The shaft struck the large man in the back and clanged.\n\nThe spear clattered harmlessly to the stone floor.\n\nGray cursed his luck. He had hit the incendiary grenade still slung over Raoul's shoulder. Saved by his own damn bomb.\n\nThe giant vanished around the first turn of the passage.\n\n\"We have to go,\" Kat said. \"I killed the two guards outside, slipping in on one of their own sleds, caught them by surprise. But I don't know how many more are out there.\"\n\nGray eyed the tunnel, hesitating.\n\nVigor was already in the water. \"Rachel\u2026?\"\n\n\"I sent her off with Monk on another sled. They should be at shore by now.\"\n\nVigor hugged Kat quickly, his eyes bright with tears of relief. He pulled down his mask.\n\n\"Commander?\"\n\nGray considered going after Raoul, but a cornered dog was the most dangerous. He didn't know if Raoul had a dry-wrapped pistol or some other weapon stashed, but the bastard definitely had a bomb. Raoul could lob it here on a short fuse and take them all out.\n\nHe turned away.\n\nThey had what they needed.\n\nOne hand patted the thigh pouch and the hidden gold key.\n\nIt was time to go.\n\nGray pulled on his mask and joined the others. On the stone floor, the man he'd shot through the throat was already dead. The other moaned, pierced fully through the belly. Blood pooled under him. Shot through the kidney. Or maybe his aorta had been nicked. He'd be dead in minutes.\n\nGray felt no pity. He remembered the atrocities in Cologne and Milan. \"Let's get the hell out of here.\"\n\nRaoul yanked the spear from his hand. Steel ground on bone. Fire lanced through his arm to his chest, emptying his breath in an angry hiss. Blood poured. He pulled his glove off and tied the neoprene around his palm, stanching and putting pressure on the wound.\n\nNo broken bones.\n\nDr. Alberto Menardi had the medical background to patch him up.\n\nRaoul stared across the room, illuminated by his flashlight on the floor. What the hell was this place?\n\nThe glass pyramid, the water, the starry dome\u2026\n\nThe last surviving man, Kurt, returned from the passageway. He had gone to reconnoiter the entry pool. \"They left,\" he reported. \"Bernard and Pelz are dead.\"\n\nRaoul finished his first aid and considered the next step. They would have to evacuate quickly. The Americans could send the Egyptian police straight here. The original plan had been to lure the local authorities away with the hydrofoil, leaving Raoul and his team to do a full investigation down here in secret, then make their escape in the clunky, nondescript houseboat.\n\nNow matters had changed.\n\nCursing, Raoul bent to his pack on the ground. It held a digital camera. He would get a visual record, get it to Alberto, and hunt down the Americans.\n\nIt wasn't over yet.\n\nAs Raoul dug out his camera, his foot nudged the sling holding the incendiary grenade. A fold of sealcloth fell away. He ignored it until he noted a slight red glow on the neighboring wall.\n\nFuck\u2026\n\nDropping to a knee, he snatched the bomb and rolled it digital face forward.\n\n00:33.\n\nHe spotted the deep ding in the casing near the timer. Where the American bastard had struck it with the speargun.\n\n00:32.\n\nThe impact must have shorted something, activated the timer.\n\nRaoul tapped the abort code. Nothing.\n\nHe shoved up, the sudden motion making his hand ache.\n\n\"Go,\" he ordered Kurt.\n\nThe man's eyes were fixed on the bomb. But he glanced up, nodded, and ran for the tunnel.\n\nRaoul retrieved his digital camera, took several rapid flash pictures, sealed the camera in a pocket, then strode away.\n\n00:19.\n\nHe retreated back to the entry room. Kurt was already gone.\n\n\"Raoul!\" a voice called to him.\n\nHe spun, startled, but it was only Seichan. The bitch was still trapped in the other tunnel.\n\nRaoul waved to her. \"It was nice doing business with you.\"\n\nHe pulled down his mask and dove cleanly into the pool. He snaked down the tunnel and found Kurt waiting beyond. The diver was examining two other bodies, two more of their men. Kurt shook his head.\n\nA savage fury swelled inside Raoul.\n\nThen a rumbling reverberation trembled through the water, sounding like a passing freight train. The tunnel behind him flashed with a dull orange glow. He glanced back as it rapidly subsided. The trembling faded.\n\nAll gone.\n\nRaoul closed his eyes. He had nothing to show. The Court would have his balls\u2026and probably more. He considered simply swimming away, disappearing. He had money stashed in three different Swiss bank accounts.\n\nBut he'd still be hunted.\n\nRaoul's radio buzzed in his ear. \"Seal One, this is Slow Tug.\"\n\nHe opened his eyes. It was his pick-up boat. \"Seal One here,\" he responded leadenly.\n\n\"We report two additional passengers aboard.\"\n\nRaoul frowned. \"Please clarify.\"\n\n\"A woman you know and an American.\"\n\nRaoul clenched his wounded fist. Saltwater burned with a cleansing agony. The fire spread through him.\n\nPerfect.\n\n[ 3:22 P.M. ]\n\nGray stalked across the length of the hotel suite, the one Monk had prebooked for the group. They were on the top floor of the Corniche Hotel, having arrived twenty-five minutes ago. The balcony windows overlooked the glass-and-steel sweep of the new Alexandria Library. The harbor beyond shone like dark blue ice. Boats and yachts seemed imbedded in place. Calm had quickly returned to the harbor.\n\nVigor had watched the local news station and listened as an Egyptian newsman reported on a confrontation among a group of drug smugglers. The police had failed to subdue them. The Court had escaped.\n\nGray also knew the tomb had been destroyed. He and the others had used air tanks and two of the abandoned sleds to flee to the far side of the harbor, where they shed their gear under a pier. But while crossing, Gray had heard a muffled thump through the water behind him.\n\nThe incendiary grenade.\n\nRaoul must have blown it as he made his escape.\n\nOnce Gray, Kat, and Vigor had climbed out of the harbor, stripped to trunks and swimsuits, they had blended into a crowd of sunbathers and crossed a seaside park to their hotel. Gray had expected to find Monk and Rachel already here.\n\nBut there continued to be no sign of the pair.\n\nNo messages, no calls.\n\n\"Where could they be?\" Vigor asked.\n\nGray turned to Kat. \"And you saw them leave with one of the motorized sleds?\"\n\nShe nodded, face taut with guilt. \"I should've made sure\u2026\"\n\n\"And we'd both be dead,\" Gray said. \"You made a choice.\"\n\nHe couldn't fault her.\n\nGray rubbed his eyes. \"And she has Monk with her.\" He took a measure of comfort in that.\n\n\"What do we do?\" Vigor asked.\n\nGray lowered his arms and stared out the window. \"We have to assume they've been captured. We can't count on our security here lasting much longer. We'll have to evacuate.\"\n\n\"Leave?\" Vigor said, standing up.\n\nGray felt the full weight of his responsibility. He faced Vigor, refusing to look away. \"We have no choice.\"\n\n[ 4:05 P.M. ]\n\nRachel climbed into the terry-cloth robe. She snugged it around her naked form while glaring at the cabin's other occupant.\n\nThe tall, muscular blonde woman ignored her and stepped to the cabin doorway. \"All finished in here!\" she called out to the passageway.\n\nThe door opened to reveal a second woman, a twin to the first but auburn-haired. She entered and held the door for Raoul. The large man ducked through the hatch.\n\n\"She's clean,\" the blonde reported, peeling off a pair of latex gloves. She had performed a full body-cavity search on Rachel. \"Nothing hidden.\"\n\nCertainly not any longer, Rachel thought angrily. She turned her back slightly and knotted the robe's sash, tight, under her breasts. Her fingers trembled. She squeezed her fingers on the knot. Tears threatened, but she resisted, refusing to give Raoul the satisfaction.\n\nRachel stared out the tiny porthole, attempting to discern some landmark, something to pinpoint where she was. But all she saw was featureless sea.\n\nShe and Monk had been transferred from the houseboat. The ponderous craft had trundled out of the harbor, met a speedboat, and the pair were tied, hooded, and gagged by a foursome of thick-necked men. They were shoved into the smaller boat, then whisked away, bouncing over the waves. They had traveled for what seemed like half a day but was probably only a little more than an hour. Once the hood was tugged off her face, Rachel had found the sun had hardly moved across the sky.\n\nIn a small cove, hidden by a tumble of rock, the familiar hydrofoil waited like a midnight-blue shark. Men worked the ropes, preparing to ship out. She'd spotted Raoul at the stern, arms crossed over his chest.\n\nManhandled aboard, Rachel and Monk were separated.\n\nRaoul had taken charge of Monk.\n\nRachel still didn't know what had become of her teammate. She had been hustled below deck to a cabin, guarded by the two Amazon women. The hydrofoil had immediately edged out of the cove and sped away, heading straight out into the Mediterranean.\n\nThat had been more than half an hour ago.\n\nRaoul came forward and grabbed her upper arm. His other hand was bandaged. \"Come with me.\" His fingers dug hard, to bone.\n\nShe allowed herself to be led out into the wood-paneled hallway, lit by sconces. The passageway crossed from stern to bow, lined by doors to private cabins. There was only one steep stairway, more like a ladder, to the main deck.\n\nInstead of going up, Raoul marched her toward the bow.\n\nRaoul knocked on the door to the last cabin.\n\n\"Entri,\" a muffled voice said.\n\nRaoul pulled the door open and dragged Rachel inside. The cabin was larger than her prison cell. It held not only a bed and chair, but also a desk, sidetable, and bookshelves. On every flat surface, texts, magazines, even scrolls were stacked. One corner of the desk supported a laptop computer.\n\nThe room's occupant straightened and turned. He had been leaning over his desk, glasses perched on the tip of his nose.\n\n\"Rachel,\" the man said warmly, as if they were the best of friends.\n\nShe recognized the older man from the days when she had accompanied Uncle Vigor to the Vatican Libraries. He had been the head prefect of the Archives, Dr. Alberto Menardi. The traitor stood a few inches taller than she, but he had a perpetual hunch to his posture, making him seem shorter.\n\nHe tapped a sheet on his desk. \"From this fresh handwriting\u2014a woman's, if I'm not mistaken\u2014this map must have been embellished by your own hand.\"\n\nHe waved her over.\n\nRachel had no choice. Raoul shoved her forward.\n\nShe tripped over a stack of books and had to grab the edge of the desk to keep from falling. She stared down at the map of the Mediterranean. The hourglass was drawn upon it, as were the names of the Seven Wonders.\n\nShe kept her face stoic.\n\nThey had found her map. She had sealed it in a pouch of her dry suit. Now she wished she'd burned it.\n\nAlberto leaned closer. His breath reeked of olives and sour wine. He drew a fingernail along the axis line that Gray had scribed. It stopped at Rome. \"Tell me about this.\"\n\n\"It's where we're supposed to go next,\" Rachel lied. She was relieved her uncle had not drawn on the map in ink himself. He had simply extended the line with his finger and the straight edge of Gray's knife.\n\nAlberto turned his head. \"Now, why is that? I'd like to hear all about what went down in that tomb. In great detail. Raoul has been good enough to supply digital snapshots, but I think a firsthand account would be of more value.\"\n\nRachel kept silent.\n\nRaoul's fingers tightened on her arm. She winced.\n\nAlberto waved Raoul away. \"There's no need for that.\"\n\nThe pressure relented, but Raoul did not let go.\n\n\"You have the American for that, don't you?\" Alberto asked. \"Maybe you'd better show her. We could all use a little fresh air, no?\"\n\nRaoul grinned.\n\nRachel felt a knot of terror tighten around her heart.\n\nShe was led out of the cabin and forced up the steps. As she climbed, Raoul reached and slid a palm up her robe, along her thigh, fingers kneading. She scrambled upward.\n\nThe stairs led to the open stern of the hydrofoil. Sunlight glared off the white decking. Three men lounged on side benches, casually carrying assault rifles.\n\nThey eyed her.\n\nShe cinched her robe tighter, shuddering, still feeling Raoul's fingers on her. The large man climbed up, followed by Alberto.\n\nShe stepped around a short wall that separated the stairwell from the deck. She found Monk.\n\nHe was lying on his stomach, naked except for boxers, his wrists bound behind him and his legs hog-tied at the ankle. It looked like two of his fingers had been broken on his left hand, bent back at impossible angles. Blood smeared the deck. He opened one swollen eye when she stepped out.\n\nHe had no quip for her.\n\nThat scared her more than anything.\n\nRaoul and his men must have taken their anger out on Monk, the only target.\n\n\"Untie his arms,\" Raoul ordered. \"Get him on his back.\"\n\nThe men responded quickly. Monk groaned as his arms were freed. He was flipped onto his back. One of the guards held a rifle at Monk's ear.\n\nRaoul grabbed a fire-ax from a stanchion.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Rachel hurried to stand between the large man and Monk.\n\n\"That depends on you,\" Raoul said. He hefted the ax to his shoulder.\n\nOne of the men responded to some discreet signal. Rachel's elbows were grabbed and pinned behind her back. She was carted backward.\n\nRaoul pointed his ax, one-armed, at the third man. \"Sit on his chest, hold his left arm down at the elbow.\" Raoul strode forward as the man obeyed. He glanced back to Rachel. \"I believe the professore asked you a question.\"\n\nAlberto stepped forward. \"And don't leave out any details.\"\n\nRachel was too horrified to respond.\n\n\"He has five fingers on this side,\" Raoul added. \"We'll start with the broken ones. They're not of much use anyway.\" He raised the ax.\n\n\"No!\" Rachel choked out.\n\n\"Don't\u2026\" Monk groaned to her.\n\nThe guard with the rifle kicked Monk in the head.\n\n\"I'll tell you!\" Rachel blurted out.\n\nShe spoke rapidly, explaining all that had happened, from the discovery of Alexander's body to the activation of the ancient batteries. She left out nothing, except for the truth. \"It took us some time, but we solved the riddle\u2026the map\u2026the Seven Wonders\u2026it all points back to the beginning. A complete circle. Back to Rome.\"\n\nAlberto's eyes glowed with the telling, asking a few pertinent questions, nodding every now and then. \"Yes, yes\u2026\"\n\nRachel finished. \"That's all we know.\"\n\nAlberto turned to Raoul. \"She's lying.\"\n\n\"I thought so.\" He swung the ax down.\n\n[ 4:16 P.M. ]\n\nRaoul enjoyed the woman's scream.\n\nHe pulled his ax head from where it had embedded in the deck. He had missed the captive's fingertips by the breadth of a hair. He yanked the ax to his shoulder and turned to the woman. Her face had paled to a shiny translucency.\n\n\"Next time, it's for real,\" he warned.\n\nDr. Alberto stepped forward. \"Our large friend here was good enough to get an angled flash on that center pyramid. It shows a square hole in its surface. Something you failed to mention. And a sin of omission is as good as a lie. Is that not so, Raoul?\"\n\nHe raised the ax. \"Shall we try again?\"\n\nAlberto leaned closer to Rachel. \"There's no need for your friend to come to harm. I know something must have been taken from the tomb. It makes no sense to blindly point to Rome without an additional clue. What did you take from the pyramid?\"\n\nTears rolled down her face.\n\nRaoul read the tortured agony in every line of her face. He grew hard, remembering a few moments ago. Through a one-way mirror, he had spied as one of the captain's bitches had fingered through all the woman's private places. He had wanted to perform the body-cavity search himself, but the captain had refused. His boat, his rule. Raoul hadn't pressed. The captain was in a sour enough mood upon learning of Seichan's demise, lost with so many of Raoul's men.\n\nBesides, he would soon be performing his own private inspection of the woman\u2026but he planned on being much less gentle.\n\n\"What was taken?\" Alberto pressed.\n\nRaoul widened his stance, hefting the ax higher over his head. His freshly sutured hand ached, but he ignored it. Maybe she wouldn't tell\u2026maybe this could be stretched out\u2026.\n\nBut the woman cracked. \"A key\u2026a gold key,\" she whimpered, then sank to her knees on the deck. \"Gray\u2026Commander Pierce has it.\"\n\nBehind her tears, Raoul heard a trace of hope in her voice.\n\nHe knew a way to squash that.\n\nHe brought the ax down in a steady hard swing. The ax severed the man's hand at the wrist.\n\n[ 4:34 P.M. ]\n\n\"It's time to go,\" Gray said.\n\nHe had given Vigor and Kat an additional forty-five minutes to call all the local hospitals and medical centers, even discreet calls to the municipal police. Maybe they had been injured, unable to contact them. Or they were cooling their heels in a jail cell.\n\nGray stood up as his sat-phone rang from his pack.\n\nAll eyes turned.\n\n\"Thank God,\" Vigor gasped.\n\nOnly a handful of people had the phone's number: Director Crowe and his teammates.\n\nGray grabbed his phone and swung up its antenna. He moved closer to the window. \"Commander Pierce,\" he said.\n\n\"I will keep this brief, so there's no confusion.\"\n\nGray stiffened. It was Raoul. That could only mean one thing\u2026\n\n\"We have the woman and your teammate. You'll do exactly as we say or we'll be mailing their heads to Washington and Rome\u2026after we're done playing with their bodies, of course.\"\n\n\"How do I know they're still\u2014?\"\n\nA shuffle sounded at the other end. A new voice gasped. He heard the tears behind the words. \"They\u2026I\u2026they cut off Monk's hand. He\u2014\"\n\nThe phone was taken away.\n\nGray tried not to react. Now was not the time. Still, his fingers clenched hard to the phone. His heart climbed into his throat, constricting his words.\n\n\"What do you want?\"\n\n\"The gold key from the tomb,\" Raoul said.\n\nSo they knew about it. Gray understood why Rachel had revealed the secret. How could she not? She must have traded the information for Monk's life. They were safe as long as the Court knew Gray retained the key. But that didn't mean worse mutilations would not be performed if he didn't cooperate. He remembered the condition of the tortured priests in Milan.\n\n\"You want a trade,\" he said coldly.\n\n\"There is an EgyptAir flight leaving Alexandria at 2100 hours for Geneva, Switzerland. You will be on that flight. You alone. We will have false papers and tickets in a locker, so no computer searches will trace your flight.\" Directions to the locker followed. \"You will not contact your superiors\u2026either in Washington or Rome. If you do, we'll know. Is that understood?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he bit off. \"But how do I know you'll stick to your end of the bargain?\"\n\n\"You don't. But as a gesture of goodwill, when you land in Geneva, I'll contact you again. If you follow our directions precisely, I'll free your man. He'll be sent to a local Swiss hospital. We will pass on satisfactory confirmation of this for you. But the woman will remain in custody until you give over the gold key.\"\n\nGray knew the offer to free Monk was probably sincere, but not out of goodwill. Monk's life was an advance on the deal, a token to lure Gray into cooperating. He tried to shut out Rachel's earlier words. They had cut off Monk's hand.\n\nHe had no choice.\n\n\"I'll be on the flight,\" he said.\n\nRaoul was not done. \"The others on the team\u2026the bitch and the monsignor\u2026are free to go as long as they stay quiet and out of the way. If either sets foot in Italy or Switzerland, the deal is off.\"\n\nGray frowned. He understood keeping the others out of Switzerland\u2026but why Italy? Then it struck him. He pictured Rachel's map. The line he had drawn. Pointing to Rome. Rachel had revealed much\u2014but not all.\n\nGood girl.\n\n\"Agreed,\" Gray said, his mind already wheeling out in various scenarios.\n\n\"Any sign of subterfuge and you'll never see the woman or your teammate again\u2026except for body parts mailed out daily.\" The connection ended.\n\nGray lowered the phone and turned to the others. He repeated the conversation verbatim, so all would understand. \"I will be on that flight.\"\n\nVigor's face had drained of blood, his worst fears realized.\n\n\"They could ambush you at any point,\" Kat said.\n\nHe nodded. \"But I believe as long as I keep moving toward them, they'll let me. They'll not risk losing the key in a failed attempt.\"\n\n\"And what about us?\" Vigor asked.\n\n\"I need you both in Avignon. Working on the mystery there.\"\n\n\"I\u2026I can't,\" Vigor said. \"Rachel\u2026\" He sank to the bed.\n\nGray firmed his voice. \"Rachel has bought us a slim chance in Avignon, some leeway. Paid with Monk's blood and body. I won't let their efforts be squandered.\"\n\nVigor looked up at him.\n\n\"You have to trust me.\" Gray's demeanor hardened. \"I'll get Rachel. You have my word.\"\n\nVigor stared at him, attempting to read something there. Whatever he found, he seemed to gain some resolve from it.\n\nGray hoped it was enough.\n\n\"How do you\u2014?\" Kat began.\n\nGray shook his head, stepping away. \"The less we know of each other's movements from here, the better.\" He crossed and gathered up his pack. \"I'll contact you when I have Rachel.\"\n\nHe headed out.\n\nWith one hope.\n\n[ 5:55 P.M. ]\n\nSeichan sat in the dark, holding a broken bit of knife.\n\nThe spear through her shoulder still held her pinned to the wall. The inch-thick lance had sheared up under her collarbone and out the top of her shoulder, missing major blood vessels and her scapula. But she remained hooked in place. Blood seeped continually down the inside of her wetsuit.\n\nEvery movement was agony.\n\nBut she was alive.\n\nThe last of Raoul's men had gone quiet about the time the last flashlight had died. The firebomb Raoul had set to destroy the far chamber had barely reached this room. The heat had come close to parboiling her, though, but now she wished for that heat again.\n\nA chill had set in, even through her suit. The stone surfaces leached the warmth from her. The blood loss didn't help.\n\nSeichan refused to give up. She fingered the broken blade in her hand. She had been picking at the stone block, where the sharpened end of the spear had embedded. If she could dig it free, loosen the shaft\u2026\n\nRock chips littered the floor. Down there was also the broken hilt to her dagger. It had shattered shortly after she'd started.\n\nAll she had left was a three-inch remnant of blade. Her fingers were bloody from the blade and the coarse rock. It was a futile effort.\n\nCold sweat oiled her face.\n\nOff to the side, a glow grew. She thought it was her imagination. She turned her head. The entry pool was shining. The illumination grew.\n\nThe water stirred. Someone was coming.\n\nSeichan clutched the bit of knife\u2014both fearful and hopeful.\n\nWho?\n\nA dark shape splashed up. A diver. The flashlight blinded her as the figure climbed out.\n\nShe shadowed her eyes against the sudden brightness and glare.\n\nThe diver lowered the flashlight.\n\nSeichan recognized a familiar face as he yanked back his mask and approached. Commander Gray Pierce.\n\nHe stepped toward her and lifted a hacksaw. \"Let's talk.\"\n\n[ DAY FOUR ]"
            },
            {
                "title": "GOTHIC",
                "text": "[ JULY 27, 6:02 P.M. ]\n\nWASHINGTON, D.C.\n\nDirector painter Crowe knew he was in for another sleepless night. He had heard the reports out of Egypt of an attack at the East Harbor of Alexandria. Had Gray's team been involved? With no eyes in the sky, they had been unable to investigate through satellite surveillance.\n\nAnd still no word had been passed from the field. The last messages had been exchanged twelve hours ago.\n\nPainter regretted not relating his suspicions to Gray Pierce. But at that point, they had only been suspicions. Painter had needed time to finesse some further intelligence. And still he wasn't certain. If he proceeded more boldly, the conspirator would know he'd been discovered. It would put Gray and his teammates in further jeopardy.\n\nSo Painter worked his end alone.\n\nA knock on his office door drew his eyes from the computer screen.\n\nHe turned off his computer monitor to hide his work. He buzzed the lock. His secretary was gone for the day.\n\nLogan Gregory entered. \"Their jet is in final approach.\"\n\n\"Still headed into Marseilles?\" Painter asked.\n\nLogan nodded. \"Due to land in eighteen minutes. Just after midnight local time.\"\n\n\"Why France?\" Painter rubbed his tired eyes. \"And they're still maintaining a communication blackout?\"\n\n\"The pilot will confirm their destination, but nothing else. I was able to worm out a manifest through French customs. There are two passengers aboard.\"\n\n\"Only two?\" Painter sat straighter, frowning.\n\n\"Flying under diplomatic vouchers. Anonymous. I can attempt to dig through that.\"\n\nPainter had to work carefully from here. \"No,\" he said. \"That might raise some alarm bells. The team wants to keep their activity cloaked. We'll give them some room. For now.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I also have requests from Rome. The Vatican and the Carabinieri have not heard anything and are getting anxious.\"\n\nPainter had to offer them something or the EU authorities might react harshly. He considered his options. It would not take long for the authorities in Europe to ascertain the jet's destination. It would have to do.\n\n\"Be cooperative,\" he finally said. \"Let them know of the flight to Marseilles, and that we'll pass on further intel as we learn more.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nPainter stared at his blank computer screen. He had a narrow window of opportunity. \"Once you contact them, I'll need you to run an errand for me. Out to DARPA.\"\n\nLogan frowned.\n\n\"I have something that I need personally couriered over to Dr. Sean McKnight.\" Painter slid over a sealed letter in a red pouch. \"But no one must know you're headed over there.\"\n\nLogan's eyes narrowed quizzically, but he nodded. \"I'll take care of it.\" He took the pouch, tucked it under his arm, and turned away.\n\nPainter spoke to him. \"Absolute discretion.\"\n\n\"You can trust me,\" Logan said firmly, and closed the door with a click of the lock.\n\nPainter switched back on his computer. It showed a map of the Mediterranean basin with swaths of yellow and blue crisscrossing it. Satellite paths. He laid his pointer over one. NRO's newest satellite, nicknamed Hawkeye. He double-clicked and brought up trajectory details and search parameters.\n\nHe typed in Marseilles. Times came up. He cross-referenced with NOAA's weather map. A storm front swept toward southern France. Heavy cloud cover would block surveillance. The window of opportunity was narrow.\n\nPainter checked his watch. He picked up the phone and spoke to security. \"Let me know when Logan Gregory has left the command center.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nPainter hung up the phone. Timing would be critical. He waited out another fifteen minutes, watching the storm front track over Western Europe.\n\n\"C'mon,\" he mumbled.\n\nThe phone finally rang. Painter confirmed that Logan was gone, then stood up and left his office. The sat-recon was down one floor, neighboring Logan's office. Painter rushed down there to find a lone technician jotting in a logbook, nestled in the arced bank of monitors and computers.\n\nThe man was surprised by the sudden appearance of his boss and jerked to his feet. \"Director Crowe, sir\u2026how can I help you?\"\n\n\"I need a tap feed into NRO's H-E Four satellite.\"\n\n\"Hawkeye?\"\n\nPainter nodded.\n\n\"That clearance is beyond my\u2014\"\n\nPainter placed a long alphanumeric sequence in front of him. It was valid for only the next half hour, obtained by Sean McKnight.\n\nThe technician's eyes widened, and he set to work. \"There was no need to come down here yourself. Dr. Gregory could've patched the feed to your office.\"\n\n\"Logan is gone.\" Painter placed a palm on the technician's shoulder. \"Also I need all record of this tap erased. No recording. No word that this tap ever occurred. Even here in Sigma.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nThe technician pointed to a screen. \"It'll come up on this monitor. I'll need GPS coordinates to zero in on.\"\n\nPainter gave them.\n\nAfter a long minute, the dark airfield bloomed onto the screen.\n\nMarseilles Airport.\n\nPainter directed the feed to zoom down onto a certain gate. The image jittered, then smoothly swelled. A small plane appeared, a Citation X. It sat near the gate, door open. Painter leaned forward, obscuring the view from the technician.\n\nWas he too late?\n\nMovement pixilated. One figure, then another stepped into view. They hurried down the stairs. Painter didn't need to magnify their faces.\n\nMonsignor Verona and Kat Bryant.\n\nPainter waited. Maybe the manifest had been false. Maybe they all were aboard.\n\nThe screen shuddered with a wave of blocky pixels.\n\n\"Bad weather coming in,\" the technician said.\n\nPainter stared. No other passengers left the jet. Kat and the monsignor vanished through the gate. With a worried frown, Painter waved for the feed to be cut. He thanked the technician and stepped away.\n\nWhere the hell was Gray?\n\n[ 1:04 A.M. ]\n\n[ GENEVA, SWITZERLAND ]\n\nGray sat in the first-class cabin of the EgyptAir jet. He had to give the Dragon Court credit. They didn't spare expense. He glanced around the small cabin. Eight seats. Six passengers. One or more were probably spies for the Court, keeping an eye on him.\n\nIt didn't matter. He was cooperating fully\u2026for now.\n\nHe had picked up his plane tickets and false ID from a bus locker, then proceeded to the airport. The four-hour flight was interminable. He ate the gourmet meal, drank two glasses of red wine, watched some movie with Julia Roberts, even power-napped for forty-two minutes.\n\nHe turned to the window. The gold key shifted against his chest. It rested on a chain around his neck. His body heat had warmed the metal, but it still hung heavy and cold. Two people's lives weighted it down. He pictured Monk, easy mannered, sharp-eyed, bighearted. And Rachel. A mix of steel and silk, intriguing and complicated. But the woman's last call haunted him, so full of pain and panic. He ached to the marrow, knowing she had been captured under his watch.\n\nGray stared out the window as the jet made a steep approach, necessary for landing in the city nestled among the towering Alps.\n\nThe lights of Geneva glittered. Moonlight silvered the peaks and lake.\n\nThe plane swept over a section of the Rh\u00f4ne River that split the city. Landing gear engaged with a whine. Moments later they were touching down at the Geneva International Airport.\n\nThey taxied to their gate, and Gray waited for the cabin to empty before gathering up his one carefully packed bag. He hoped he had everything he would need. Slinging his bag over his shoulder, he headed out.\n\nAs he exited the first-class cabin, he searched for any sign of danger.\n\nAnd one other. His traveling companion.\n\nShe had been in the coach seats. She wore a blonde wig, a conservative navy blue business suit, and heavy black eyeglasses. She carried herself with a subdued demeanor, her left arm in a sling, half hidden under her jacket. The disguise would not pass close inspection. But no one was expecting her.\n\nSeichan was dead to the world.\n\nShe exited ahead of him without a glance.\n\nGray followed a few passengers behind her. Once in the terminal, he queued up for customs, showed his false papers, had them stamped, and was on his way. He hadn't checked any baggage.\n\nHe strode out to the well-lit street, which was still crowded. Late travelers scurried for cars and taxies. He had no idea what was expected of him from here. He had to wait for some contact from Raoul. He shifted closer to the taxi line.\n\nSeichan had vanished, but Gray sensed she was near.\n\nHe had needed an ally. Cut off from Washington, from his own teammates, he had made a pact with the devil. He had freed her with his hacksaw after exacting a promise from her. They would work together. In return for her freedom, she would help Gray free Rachel. Afterward, they would part ways. All debts forgiven, past and present.\n\nShe had agreed.\n\nAs he treated and bandaged her wound, she had looked on him most oddly, stripped to the waist, breasts bared, unabashed. She studied him like a curiosity, a strange bug, with an intensity of focus. She said little, exhausted, perhaps in slight shock. But she recovered smoothly, a lioness slowly waking, cunning and amusement lighting her eyes.\n\nGray knew that her cooperation was less out of obligation than fury at Raoul. Cooperation suited her immediate need. She had been left for dead, a slow agonizing end. She wanted to make Raoul pay. Whatever contract had been agreed upon between the Court and the Guild was over for her. All that was left was vengeance.\n\nBut was that all?\n\nGray remembered her eyes upon him and her dark curiosity. But he also remembered Painter's earlier warning about her. It must have been plain on his face.\n\n\"Yes, I am going to betray you,\" Seichan had said plainly as she pulled on her shirt. \"But only after this is over. You will attempt the same. We both know this. Mutual distrust. Is there a better form of honesty?\"\n\nGray's sat-phone finally rang. He freed it from his bag. \"Commander Pierce,\" he said tersely.\n\n\"Welcome to Switzerland,\" Raoul said. \"There are train tickets waiting for you at the city-center terminal, under your false name, headed to Lausanne. It leaves in thirty-five minutes. You'll be on it.\"\n\n\"What about my teammate?\" Gray said.\n\n\"As arranged, he's on his way to the hospital in Geneva. You'll have confirmation by the time you board the train.\"\n\nGray headed to the taxis. \"Lieutenant Verona?\" he asked.\n\n\"The woman is being well accommodated. For now. Don't miss your train.\"\n\nThe line went dead.\n\nGray climbed into a taxi. He didn't bother searching for Seichan. He had piggybacked a chip on his phone, tied to her cell phone. She had overheard the conversation. He trusted her skill to keep up with him.\n\n\"Central train station,\" he told the driver.\n\nWith a curt nod, the cabby sailed out into traffic and headed toward downtown Geneva. Gray sank back into his seat. Seichan had been right. Upon learning of his summons to Switzerland, she had told him where she suspected Rachel was being kept. Some castle up in the Savoy Alps.\n\nAfter ten minutes, the taxi swept alongside the lake. Out in the water, a giant fountain sprayed more than a hundred yards into the air. The famous Jet d'Eau. It was lit up by lamps, a fairy-tale sight. Some festival was under way near the piers.\n\nGray heard an echo of singing and laughter.\n\nIt sounded like it was coming from another world.\n\nIn another couple of minutes, the taxi offloaded him in front of the train terminal. He crossed to the ticket counter, gave his false name, and showed his papers. He was given tickets to the lakeside city of Lausanne.\n\nHe strode toward his gate, keeping a wary watch for anyone nearby. He saw no sign of Seichan. A worry nagged. What if she simply took off? What if she double-crossed him to Raoul? Gray drove down such worries. He had made a choice. It was a calculated risk.\n\nHis phone rang again.\n\nHe pulled it free and adjusted the antenna.\n\n\"Commander Pierce,\" he said.\n\n\"Two minutes to satisfy yourself.\" Raoul again. A click and hiss of a transfer sounded. The next voice was more distant, echoing a bit, but familiar.\n\n\"Commander?\"\n\n\"I'm here, Monk. Where are you?\" Gray was sure the conversation was being eavesdropped on by more than just Seichan. He had to be careful.\n\n\"They dumped me at some hospital with this cell phone. Told me to expect your call. I'm in the emergency room. Doctors are all speaking goddamn French.\"\n\n\"You're in Geneva,\" Gray said. \"How are you doing?\"\n\nA long pause.\n\n\"I know about your hand,\" Gray said.\n\n\"Goddamn bastards,\" Monk said with an edge of fury. \"They had a doctor on board their ship. Drugged me, IVs, sutured my\u2026my stump. The docs here want X-rays and such, but they seem satisfied with the other doctor's umm\u2026handiwork, so to speak.\"\n\nGray appreciated Monk's attempt at levity. But his voice was hard-edged.\n\n\"Rachel?\"\n\nPain intensified his words. \"I haven't seen her since they drugged me. I have no idea where she's at. But\u2026but, Gray\u2026\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"You have to get her away from them.\"\n\n\"I'm working on that. But what about you? Are you safe?\"\n\n\"Seem to be,\" he said. \"I was told to keep my mouth shut. That I've done, playing dumb. The doctors, though, have called the local police. Security is posted.\"\n\n\"For now, do as they ordered you,\" Gray said. \"I'll get you out of there as soon as I can.\"\n\n\"Gray,\" Monk said, voice strained. Gray recognized his tone. He wanted to communicate something, but he also knew the others were eavesdropping. \"They\u2026they let me go.\"\n\nThe connection fritzed again. Raoul came back on the line.\n\n\"Time's up. As you can see, we honor our word. If you want the woman freed, you'll bring the key.\"\n\n\"Understood. What then?\"\n\n\"I'll have a car waiting for you at the Lausanne station.\"\n\n\"No,\" Gray said. \"I won't put myself into your custody until I know Rachel is safe. When I arrive in Lausanne, I want confirmation that she is alive. Then we'll make arrangements.\"\n\n\"Don't press your hand,\" Raoul growled. \"I'd hate to have to chop it off, like your friend's. We'll continue this conversation when you're here.\"\n\nThe connection ended.\n\nGray lowered the phone. So Raoul was in Lausanne.\n\nHe waited for the train. It was the last train heading out. The deck was sparsely crowded. He studied his fellow travelers. No sign of Seichan. Were any spies for the Court here?\n\nFinally the train arrived, clattering up the track. It glided to a stop with a piercing sigh of air. Gray climbed into the middle car, then hurriedly moved between cars toward the rear, hoping to shake any tail.\n\nIn the gap between the last two cars, Seichan waited.\n\nShe did not acknowledge him, except to hand him a long leather duster. She turned and shouldered out an emergency exit that opened on the opposite side of the track, away from the deck.\n\nHe followed, dropping down. He tugged on the jacket and pulled up the collar.\n\nSeichan hurried across another track and up onto a neighboring deck. They left the station, and Gray found himself at the edge of a parking lot.\n\nA bmw motorcycle, black and yellow, stood a step away.\n\n\"Climb on,\" Seichan said. \"You'll have to drive. My shoulder\u2026\" She had abandoned the sling to ride here from the rental office, but it was another fifty miles to Lausanne.\n\nGray hopped in front, kicking back the tail of his jacket. The bike was still warm.\n\nShe climbed behind him and put her good arm around his waist.\n\nGray gunned the engine. He had already memorized the roads from here to Lausanne. He raced out of the parking lot and throttled up once out on the street. He zipped toward the highway that led out of Geneva and into the mountains.\n\nHis headlights speared ahead.\n\nHe chased the light, faster and faster, winds whipping his jacket edge. Seichan leaned tighter against him, arm around him, hand under his jacket. Fingers clutched his belt.\n\nHe resisted the urge to force her arm away. Wise or not, he had made this bed. He blasted up the narrow highway. They needed to reach Lausanne a half hour ahead of the train. Would it be enough time?\n\nAs he wound up into the heights that bordered the lake, Gray's mind drifted back to his conversation with Monk. What had Monk been trying to tell him? They let me go. That was plain enough. But what had Monk been implying?\n\nHe considered his earlier assessment, back in Egypt. He had known the Court would let Monk go. The release was done to ensure and lure Gray's cooperation. And Raoul still had Rachel as a bargaining chip.\n\nThey let me go.\n\nWas there more to his release? The Court was ruthless. They were not known to give away potential assets. They had used Monk's torture to ply Rachel into talking. Would they give up such an asset so readily? Monk was right. Not unless the Court had an even better hold on Rachel.\n\nBut what?\n\n[ 2:02 A.M. ]\n\n[ LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND ]\n\nRachel sat in her cell, numb and exhausted.\n\nAny time she closed her eyes, she again relived the horror. She saw the ax swinging down. Monk's body jerking up. His chopped hand flopping across the deck like a landed fish. Blood spraying.\n\nAlberto had yelled at Raoul for his action\u2014not for his brutality, but because he wanted the man still alive. Raoul had waved away his concern. A tourniquet had been applied. Alberto had Raoul's men drag Monk down to the ship's galley.\n\nLater, she had been informed by one of the Guild women that he still lived. Two hours later, the hydrofoil had sailed up to an island in the Mediterranean. They were transferred to a small private jet.\n\nRachel had spotted Monk, groggy, his severed wrist bandaged to the elbow, strapped to a stretcher. She was then locked in a back compartment. Alone. No windows. Over the course of another five hours, they landed twice. She was finally let out.\n\nMonk was gone.\n\nRaoul had blindfolded and gagged her. She was transferred from plane to truck. Another half hour of twisty driving and they arrived at their final destination. She heard the wheels bumping over wooden planks. A bridge. The truck braked to a stop.\n\nDragged out, she heard a cacophony of growling and barking, loud, angry, large. A kennel of some sort.\n\nShe was led by the elbow through an opening and down steps. A door closed behind her, shutting off the barking. She smelled cold stone and dampness. She had also felt the pressure elevation as the truck drove up here.\n\nMountains.\n\nFinally she was shoved forward and tripped over a sill. She landed hard on hands and knees.\n\nRaoul grabbed her rear with both hands and laughed. \"Already begging for it.\"\n\nRachel leapt away and crashed her shoulder into something solid. Her soggy gag and hood were pulled off. Rubbing her shoulder, she stared around the small stone cell. Again no windows. Her sense of time was beginning to slip. The only furniture in the cell was a steel cot. A thin mattress rolled up on one end. A pillow rested on top. No sheets.\n\nThe cell had no bars. One wall was a solid sheet of glass, except for a rubber-sealed door and fist-sized ventilation holes. But even the holes had tiny lids that could be swung over the openings, for soundproofing or a way to slowly suffocate the prisoner.\n\nShe had been left down here for over an hour.\n\nNot even any guards. Though she did hear voices down the hall, probably posted at the stairwell.\n\nA commotion sounded. She lifted her face and stood. She heard Raoul's coarse voice, orders barked. She backed from the glass wall. Her clothes had been returned to her on the boat, but she had no weapons.\n\nRaoul appeared, flanked by two men.\n\nHe did not look happy.\n\n\"Get her out of there,\" he spat.\n\nA key opened the door. She was dragged out.\n\n\"This way,\" Raoul said. He led her down the hallway.\n\nShe spotted other cells, some sealed like hers, others open and stacked with wine bottles.\n\nRaoul marched her to the stairs and up to a dark moonlit courtyard. Stone walls towered on all sides. An archway, sealed by a portcullis, led out to a narrow bridge that spanned a gorge.\n\nShe was in a castle.\n\nA row of trucks lined the wall nearest the gateway.\n\nAlong a neighboring wall, a long row of twenty chain-link cages stretched. Low grumbles rose from that corner. Large shadows shifted, muscular, powerful.\n\nRaoul must have noted her attention. \"Perro de Presa Canario,\" he said with a note of savage pride. \"Fighting dogs, an ancestral line from the 1800s. Perfection of breeding. Pure pit fighter. All muscle, jaws, and teeth.\"\n\nRachel wondered if he was also describing himself.\n\nRaoul led her away from the gate and toward the central keep. Two tiers of stairs led up to a thick oak door. It was brightly lit by sconces, almost inviting. But they didn't go that way. A side door led to a level beneath the stairs.\n\nUsing a touchpad, he unlocked the lower door.\n\nAs the door swung open, Rachel caught a whiff of antiseptic and something darker, more fetid. She was forced into a square room, brightly lit with fluorescent bulbs. Stone walls, linoleum floor. A single guard stood before the one door that led away.\n\nRaoul crossed and opened it.\n\nBeyond stretched a long, sterile hallway. A series of rooms opened off it. She glanced into a few as she was marched down the passage. Stainless-steel cages filled one. Banks of computers tied to rows of plates occupied another. Electromagnets, she guessed, used to experiment with the m-state compounds. A third chamber held a single steel table, shaped in a rough X. Leather straps indicated that the table was meant to hold a man or woman spread-eagled. A surgical lamp hung above it.\n\nThe sight chilled her to the bone.\n\nAnother six rooms stretched beyond. She had seen enough and was happy to stop alongside a door on the opposite wall.\n\nRaoul knocked and pushed inside.\n\nRachel was surprised by the contrast. It was like stepping into the turn-of-the-century parlor of a distinguished Royal Society scholar. The room here was all polished mahogany and walnut. Underfoot spread a thick Turkish rug patterned in crimson and emerald.\n\nBookshelves and display cabinets lined all the walls, filled with neatly arranged texts. Behind glass, she noted first-edition copies of Principia by Sir Isaac Newton, and beside it, Darwin's Origin of Species. There was also an illuminated Egyptian manuscript spread open in one case. Rachel wondered if it was the one that had been stolen from the Cairo museum, the forged text with the encrypted stanzas that had started this whole murderous adventure.\n\nEverywhere she looked there was artwork. Etruscan and Roman statuary decorated the shelves, including a two-foot-tall Persian horse, the head broken off, a masterpiece stolen from Iran a decade ago, supposedly representing Alexander the Great's famous horse, Bucephalus. Paintings stood above cabinets. She knew one was a Rembrandt, another a Raphael.\n\nBut resting in the center of the room was a massive carved mahogany desk. It rested near a stacked-stone, floor-to-ceiling fireplace. Small flames flickered in the hearth.\n\n\"Professore!\" Raoul called, closing the door behind them.\n\nThrough a back door leading to other private rooms, Dr. Alberto Menardi entered. He wore a black smoking jacket trimmed in crimson. He had the gall to be still wearing his clerical Roman collar above a black shirt.\n\nHe carried a book under one arm and shook a finger at Rachel. \"You haven't been totally honest with us.\"\n\nRachel felt her heart stop beating, her breath became trapped.\n\nAlberto turned to Raoul. \"And if you hadn't distracted me with the need to mend that American's wrist, I would've discovered this sooner. Both of you, come here.\"\n\nThey were waved to the cluttered desk.\n\nRachel noted her map of the Mediterranean spread out on the top. New lines had been added, circles, meridians, degree marks. Tiny arcane numbers were inscribed along one edge of the map. A compass and T square rested beside it, along with a sextant. Plainly, Alberto had been working on this puzzle, either not trusting Rachel or figuring she and her uncle were too obtuse.\n\nThe prefect tapped the map. \"Rome is not the next place.\"\n\nRachel forced herself not to flinch.\n\nAlberto continued, \"All the subtext to this geometric design signifies forward motion in time. Even this hourglass, it segments time, marching forward one grain at a time, to the inevitable end. For this reason, the symbol of the hourglass has always represented death, the end of time. To have an hourglass show up here can only mean one thing.\"\n\nRaoul's frown deepened, indicating his lack of understanding.\n\nAlberto sighed. \"Obviously, it signifies the end of this journey. I'm sure that wherever this clue points, it marks the last stop.\"\n\nRachel felt Raoul stir beside her. They were close to their end goal. But they didn't have the gold key, and for all Alberto's intelligence, he hadn't solved the complete riddle yet. But he would.\n\n\"It can't be Rome,\" Alberto said. \"That's moving backward, not forward. There is another mystery to solve here.\"\n\nRachel shook her head, feigning exhausted disinterest. \"That's all we could calculate before we were attacked.\" She waved around his room. \"We didn't have your resources.\"\n\nAlberto studied her as she spoke. She stared, unflinching.\n\n\"I\u2026I believe you,\" he said slowly. \"Monsignor Vigor is quite sharp, but this riddle is layered in mystery.\"\n\nRachel kept her features dull, allowing some fear to show, acting cowed. Alberto worked alone. He'd plainly ensconced himself in here to solve the Court's mysteries. Trusting no one else, conceited in his own superiority. He would not understand the value of the wider perspective, a diversification of viewpoint. It had taken the entire team's expertise to piece the mystery together, not the work of one man.\n\nBut the prefect was no fool. \"Still,\" he said, \"we should be sure. You kept hidden the discovery of the gold key. Maybe there's more you kept hidden.\"\n\nFear edged higher. \"I've told you everything,\" she swore with mustered conviction. Would they believe her? Would they torture her?\n\nShe swallowed hard, trying to hide it. She would never talk. Too much was at stake. She had seen the power displayed in Rome and Alexandria. The Dragon Court must never possess it.\n\nEven Monk's life would be forfeit from here. They were both soldiers. Back on the hydrofoil, she had given the information about the gold key not only to spare Monk, but also to engage Gray, to give him a chance to do something. It had seemed a reasonable risk. Like now, the Court had still been missing a vital piece of the puzzle. She had to hold on to the discovery of Avignon and the French papacy.\n\nOr all would be lost.\n\nAlberto shrugged. \"There's only one way to find out if you know more. It's time we ensured the complete truth from you. Take her next door. We should be ready.\"\n\nRachel's breathing grew quicker, but she could not seem to get enough air. She was manhandled by Raoul back out the door. Alberto followed, shedding his jacket, ready to get down to work.\n\nRachel pictured again Monk's hand flopping on the ship's deck. She had to gird herself for worse. They must not know. Not ever. No reason would be good enough for her to reveal the truth.\n\nAs Rachel stepped out into the hall, she saw that the far room, the one that held the strange X-shaped table, was lit up much brighter. Someone had turned on the overhead surgical lamp.\n\nRaoul partially blocked the view. She spotted an IV bottle on a stand. A tray of long surgical instruments, sharp-edged, corkscrewed, and razor-toothed. A figure was strapped to the table.\n\nOh God\u2026Monk\u2026?\n\n\"We can stretch this interrogation all night long,\" Alberto promised, stepping past to enter the room first. He crossed and donned a pair of sterile latex gloves.\n\nRaoul finally dragged her forward into the suite of surgical horrors.\n\nRachel finally saw who was strapped to the table, pinioned, limbs stretched and tied, nose already dripping blood.\n\n\"Someone came snooping where they shouldn't have,\" Raoul said with a hungry smile.\n\nThe captive's face turned toward her. Their eyes met with recognition. And at that moment, all will left her.\n\nRachel lunged forward. \"No!\"\n\nRaoul grabbed a fistful of her hair and dragged Rachel to her knees. \"You'll watch from here.\"\n\nAlberto picked up a silver scalpel. \"We'll start with the left ear.\"\n\n\"No!\" Rachel screamed. \"I'll tell you! I'll tell you everything!\"\n\nAlberto lowered the blade and turned to her.\n\n\"Avignon,\" she sobbed. \"It's Avignon.\"\n\nShe felt no guilt in the telling. She had to trust Gray from here. All hope rested on him. Rachel stared into the terrified eyes of the bound prisoner.\n\n\"Nonna\u2026\" Rachel moaned.\n\nIt was her grandmother.\n\n[ 2:22 A.M. ]\n\n[ AVIGNON, FRANCE ]\n\nThe city of Avignon glowed, shouted, sang, and danced.\n\nThe annual Summer Theater Festival ran each July, the world's largest showcase of the music, drama, and art. Youth crowded into the city, camping in parks, flooding hotels and youth hostels. It was an around-the-clock party. Even the lowering skies did not discourage the festival-goers.\n\nVigor turned from a couple in full fellatio on a secluded park bench. The woman's long hair hid most of her effort at pleasuring her male companion. Vigor hurried past with Kat at his side. They had chosen to pass through the high park to reach the Place du Palais, the Palace Square. The pope's castle sat atop a spur of rock overlooking the river.\n\nAs they passed a lookout spot, a curve of the river appeared below. Jutting out into it was the famous bridge of French nursery rhymes, Le Pont d'Avignon, or St. Benezet Bridge. Built in the late twelfth century, it was the only bridge to span the Rh\u00f4ne River\u2026though after so many centuries, only four of its original twenty-two arches remained. The partial span was lit up brilliantly. Partiers danced atop it, traditional folk dancers from the look of it. Music trailed up to them.\n\nIn Avignon, the past and present mingled as they did in few other cities.\n\n\"Where do we begin?\" Kat asked.\n\nVigor had spent the flight here in research, trying to answer that exact question. He spoke as he led them away from the river and toward the city. \"Avignon is one of the oldest townships of Europe. It can trace its roots back to Neolithic times. It was settled by the Celts, then the Romans. But what Avignon is most famous for today is its Gothic heritage, which flourished during the century of the French papacy. Avignon boasts one of the largest ensembles of Gothic architecture in all of Europe. A true Gothic town.\"\n\n\"And the significance of that would be what?\" Kat asked.\n\nVigor recognized the stiffness in her voice. She was worried about her teammates, cut off from them, sent here. He knew she felt a deep-seated responsibility for the capture of his niece and Monk. She carried that burden despite her own commander's insistence that she had done the right thing.\n\nVigor felt an echo of her concern. He had dragged Rachel into this adventure. Now she was in the hands of the Dragon Court. But he knew that guilt would do them no good. He had grown up with faith. It was the cornerstone of his being. He found some solace in placing his faith in Rachel's safety into the hands of God\u2014and Gray.\n\nBut that didn't mean he couldn't be proactive himself. God helps those who help themselves. He and Kat had their own duty here.\n\nVigor answered her question. \"The word 'Gothic' comes from the Greek word 'goetic.' Which translates to 'magic.' And such architecture was considered magical. It was like none seen at the time: the thin ribbing, the flying buttresses, the impossible heights. It gave an impression of weightlessness.\"\n\nAs Vigor stressed this last word, Kat understood. \"Levitation,\" she said.\n\nVigor nodded. \"The cathedrals and other Gothic structures were almost exclusively built by a group of masons who named themselves the Children of Solomon, a mix of Knights Templar and monks of the Cistercian Order. They retained the mathematical mysteries to build these structures, supposedly gained when the Knights Templar discovered the lost Temple of Solomon during the Crusades. The Knights grew rich\u2026or rather richer, as it was said they had already discovered King Solomon's vast treasure, possibly even the Ark of the Covenant, which was said to have been hidden at the Temple of Solomon.\"\n\n\"And supposedly the Ark is where Moses stored his pots of manna,\" Kat said. \"His recipe for m-state metals.\"\n\n\"Don't discount that possibility,\" Vigor said. \"In the Bible, there are many references to strange powers emanating from the Ark. References to it levitating. Even the word levitate is derived from the caretakers of the Ark, the Levite priests. And the Ark was well known for being deadly, killing with bolts of light. One fellow, a carter named Uzzah, sought to stabilize the Ark when it tipped a bit. He touched it with his hand and was struck down. Scared poor King David enough that he at first refused to take the Ark into his city. But the Levite priests showed him how to approach it safely. With gloves, aprons, and divesting oneself of all metal objects.\"\n\n\"To keep from getting shocked.\" Kat's voice had lost some of its stiffness, the mystery drawing her out.\n\n\"Maybe the Ark, with the m-state powders stored inside, acted like an electrical capacitor. The superconducting material absorbed ambient environmental energy and stored it like the gold pyramid had. Until someone mishandled it.\"\n\n\"And got electrocuted.\"\n\nVigor nodded.\n\n\"Okay,\" Kat said. \"Let's say these Knights Templar rediscovered the Ark and possibly these m-state superconductors. But can we know if they understood its secrets?\"\n\n\"I may have an answer. Commander Gray originally challenged me to trace historical references for these strange monatomic powders.\"\n\n\"From Egypt to the biblical Magi,\" Kat said.\n\nVigor nodded. \"But I wondered if it stretched further. Past the age of Christ. Were there more clues left to find?\"\n\n\"And you found them,\" Kat said, reading his excitement.\n\n\"These m-state powders went by many names: white bread, the powder of projection, the Paradise Stone, the Magi Stone. To my surprise, looking forward from biblical times, I found another mysterious stone of alchemical history. The famous Philosopher's Stone.\"\n\nKat frowned. \"The stone that could turn lead into gold?\"\n\n\"That is a common misconception. A seventeenth-century philosopher, Eiranaeus Philalethes, a well-respected Royal Society Fellow, set the record straight in his treatises. To quote him, the Philosopher's Stone was 'nothing but gold digested to its highest degree of purity\u2026called a stone by virtue of its fixed nature\u2026gold, more pure than the purest\u2026but its appearance is that of a very fine powder.'\"\n\n\"The gold powder again,\" Kat said, surprised.\n\n\"Can there be any clearer reference? And it wasn't only Eiranaeus; a fifteenth-century French chemist, Nicolas Flamel, described a similar alchemical process with the final words, and I quote, 'It made a fine powder of gold, which is the Philosopher's Stone.'\"\n\nVigor took a breath. \"So clearly some scientists at the time were experimenting with a strange form of gold. In fact, the entire Royal Society of scientists was fascinated by it. Including Sir Isaac Newton. Many don't know that Newton was a fervent alchemist and also a colleague of Eiranaeus.\"\n\n\"Then what became of all their work?\" Kat asked.\n\n\"I don't know. Many probably reached dead ends. But another colleague of Newton, Robert Boyle, also researched alchemical gold. But something disturbed him, something he discovered. He stopped his research and declared such studies dangerous. So dangerous, in fact, that he said its misuse could 'disorder the affairs of mankind, turning the world topsy-turvy.' It makes one wonder what scared him. Could he have touched upon something that drove our lost alchemical society deep underground?\"\n\nKat shook her head. \"But what does the Philosopher's Stone have to do with Gothic architecture?\"\n\n\"More than you'd think. An early-twentieth-century Frenchman named Fulcanelli wrote a bestselling treatise titled Le Myst\u00e8re des Cath\u00e9drales. It elaborated on how the Gothic cathedrals of Europe were coded with arcane messages, pointing to a vein of lost knowledge, including how to prepare the Philosopher's Stone and other alchemical secrets.\"\n\n\"A code in stone?\"\n\n\"Don't be surprised. It was what the Church was doing already. Most of the populace at the time was illiterate. The decorations of the cathedrals were both instructional and informative, biblical storytelling in stonework. And remember who I said built these massive Gothic story-books.\"\n\n\"The Knights Templar,\" Kat said.\n\n\"A group known to have gained secret knowledge from the Temple of Solomon. So perhaps, besides telling biblical stories, they incorporated some additional coded messages, meant for their fellow Masonic alchemists.\"\n\nKat wore a doubtful expression.\n\n\"One only has to look closely at some of the Gothic artwork to raise an eyebrow or two. The iconography is full of zodiac symbols, mathematical riddles, geometric mazes right out of alchemical texts of the time. Even the author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo, spent a whole chapter decrying how the artwork of Notre Dame was contrary to the Catholic Church. Describing its Gothic art as 'seditious pages' in stone.\"\n\nVigor pointed ahead, through the trees. The park ended as they neared the Palace Square. \"And Fulcanelli and Hugo weren't the only ones who believed something heretical was involved with the Knights Templar's artwork. Do you know why Friday the thirteenth is considered unlucky?\"\n\nKat glanced to him and shook her head.\n\n\"October 13, 1307. A Friday. The king of France, along with the pope, declared the Knights Templar to be heretics, sentencing them to death, and crucifying and burning their leader. It is well believed that the real reason the Knights were outlawed was to wrest power from them and gain control of their riches, including the secret knowledge they possessed. The king of France tortured thousands of Knights, but their storehouse of riches was never discovered. Still, it marked the end of the Knights Templar.\"\n\n\"Truly an unlucky day for them.\"\n\n\"The end of an unlucky century, really.\" Vigor led the way out of the park and along the treelined street that led toward the center of town. \"The division between the Church and the Knights started a hundred years earlier when Pope Innocent III brutally wiped out the Cathars, a sect of Gnostic Christians with ties to the Knights Templar. It was really a century-long war between orthodoxy and Gnostic belief.\"\n\n\"And we know who won that,\" Kat said.\n\n\"Do we? I'm wondering if it wasn't so much a victory as an assimilation. If you can't beat them, join them. An interesting paper turned up in September 2001, titled the Chinon Parchment. It was a scroll dated a year after that bloody Friday the thirteenth, signed by Pope Clement V, absolving and exonerating the Knights Templar. Unfortunately, King Philippe of France ignored this and continued his country-wide massacre of the Knights. But why this change of heart by the Church? Why did Pope Clement build his Avignon palace here in the Gothic tradition, constructed by the same heretical masons? And why did Avignon become in fact the Gothic center of Europe?\"\n\n\"Are you suggesting the Church did an about-face and took the Knights into their fold?\"\n\n\"Remember how we'd already come to conclude that some aspects of the Thomas Christians, Christians of Gnostic leanings, were already hidden inside the Church. Perhaps they convinced Pope Clement to intervene to protect the Knights from King Philippe's rampage.\"\n\n\"To what end?\"\n\n\"To hide something of great value\u2014to the Church, to the world. During the century of the Avignon papacy, a great surge of building occurred here, much of it overseen by the Children of Solomon. They could have easily buried away something of considerable size.\"\n\n\"But where do we begin looking?\" Kat said.\n\n\"To the work commissioned by that wayward pope, built by the hands of the Knights, one of the largest masterworks of Gothic architecture.\"\n\nVigor waved forward, where the street emptied into a large square, populated by merrymakers from the festival. Colored lights framed a dancing area, a rock band on a makeshift stage pounded out a riff, and young people writhed, laughed, and yelled. Along the fringes, tables had been set up, crowded with more festival participants. A juggler tossed flaming brands into the night sky. Clapping encouraged him. Beer flowed, along with paper cups of coffee. Cigarette smoke billowed, along with special hand-rolled herbs.\n\nBut backdropped against this party rose an immense, dark, and looming structure, framed by square towers, fronted by massive archways of stone, and set off by a pair of conical spires. Its stone face was a sober contrast to the merriment below. History weighed it down\u2026and an ancient secret.\n\nThe Palace of the Popes.\n\n\"Somewhere within its structure lies some seditious page of stone,\" Vigor said, stepping closer to Kat. \"I'm sure of it. We must find it and decode it.\"\n\n\"But where do we begin looking?\"\n\nVigor shook his head. \"Whatever had frightened Robert Boyle, whatever terrible secret finally forged an alliance between heretical Knights and the orthodox church, whatever mystery required a Mediterranean-wide treasure hunt to solve\u2026the answer is hidden here.\"\n\nVigor felt a sharp wind blow up from the river. Avignon was named after the constant breezes off the river, but he sensed the true storm to come. Overhead, the stars were gone. Dark clouds lowered.\n\nHow much time did they have left?\n\n[ 2:48 A.M. ]\n\n[ LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND ]\n\nThat's how we calculated it was Avignon,\" Rachel finished. \"The French Vatican. That's the next and last stop.\"\n\nShe was still on her knees on the linoleum. Her grandmother remained strapped to the table. Rachel had told them everything, leaving out no detail. She had answered every one of Alberto's questions. She had attempted no prevarication. She could not risk the prefect testing her veracity upon the flesh of her grandmother.\n\nMonk and Rachel were soldiers. Her nonna was not.\n\nRachel would not let any harm come to the old woman. It was up to Gray now to keep the gold key from the Court. She had turned all hope and trust over to him. She had no other choice.\n\nDuring her dissertation, Alberto had jotted notes, stepping back into his office to get pen and pad, along with Rachel's map. He nodded once she was done, obviously convinced.\n\n\"Of course,\" he said. \"So simple, so elegant. I would've eventually figured this out, but now my efforts can best be put to unraveling the next mystery\u2026in Avignon.\"\n\nAlberto turned to Raoul.\n\nRachel stiffened. She remembered what had happened last time. Even though she had told them the truth about the gold key, Raoul had still chopped off Monk's hand.\n\n\"Where are Monsignor Verona and the other American now?\" Alberto asked.\n\n\"Last I heard, they were heading to Marseilles,\" Raoul said. \"In their private jet. I thought they were following orders. Staying close, but clear of Italy.\"\n\n\"Marseilles is only twenty minutes from Avignon,\" Alberto said with a scowl. \"Monsignor Verona must already be en route to work on the mystery. Find out if his plane has landed.\"\n\nRaoul nodded and passed the order to one of his men, who ran down the hall.\n\nRachel slowly gained her feet. \"My grandmother\u2026\" she said. \"Can you let her go now?\"\n\nAlberto waved a hand, as if he had forgotten about the old woman. Clearly he had grander things on his mind.\n\nAnother of the men stepped forward and ripped free the leather straps that held her grandmother. With tears streaming down her face, Rachel helped her nonna from the table.\n\nRachel silently sent out a prayer to Gray. Not just for herself and Monk, but now also for her grandmother.\n\nHer nonna shakily gained her feet, leaning one hand on the table for support. She reached out and wiped Rachel's tears. \"There, there, child\u2026enough with the crying. It was not all that awful. I've been through worse.\"\n\nRachel almost laughed. Her grandmother was attempting to console her.\n\nWaving Rachel aside, her grandmother stalked toward the prefect. \"Alberto, you should be ashamed of yourself,\" she scolded, as if speaking to a child.\n\n\"Nonna.\u2026no\u2026\" Rachel warned, reaching out an arm.\n\n\"Not believing my granddaughter was capable of keeping secrets from you.\" She hobbled over and gave Alberto a kiss on the cheek. \"I told you Rachel was too clever for even you.\"\n\nRachel's outstretched arm froze. The blood iced in her veins.\n\n\"You must trust an old lady sometimes, no?\"\n\n\"You are right as ever, Camilla.\"\n\nRachel could not breathe.\n\nHer grandmother motioned for Raoul to give her his arm. \"And you, young man, maybe now you see why such strong Dragon's blood is worth protecting.\" She reached up and patted the bastard's cheek. \"You and my granddaughter\u2026you two will make bellissimo bambini. Many beautiful babies.\"\n\nRaoul turned and weighed Rachel with those cold, dead eyes.\n\n\"I will do my best,\" he promised."
            },
            {
                "title": "HUNTING",
                "text": "[ JULY 27, 3:00 A.M. ]\n\n[ LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND ]\n\nGray followed Seichan up the pine-studded mountainside. They had abandoned the motorbike at the bottom of a narrow gorge, hiding it among some flowering Alpine rose shrubs. Prior to that, they had ridden the last half-mile in the dark, headlamp off. The extra caution had slowed them down, but it couldn't be helped.\n\nSeichan led the way now on foot, no lights, climbing up a slope of loose scree toward a sheer rockface. Gray tried to pierce the weave of pine branches. Earlier, he had caught a glimpse of the castle as they rode up out of Lausanne and into the surrounding mountains. The chateau had sat like a hulking granite gargoyle, square faced, eyes glowing with lamplight. Then it had disappeared as they passed under a bridge that spanned far overhead.\n\nGray stepped up beside Seichan. She held a GPS device before her as she climbed. \"Are you sure you can find this back entrance?\"\n\n\"They had me hooded the first time here. But I had a GPS tracker hidden\"\u2014she glanced to Gray\u2014\"somewhere private. I recorded the approach's position and elevation. It should lead us to the entrance.\"\n\nThey continued to the towering cliff face.\n\nGray studied Seichan. What was he doing trusting her? In the dark forest, worries mounted. And not just about his choice of teammate. He began to doubt his own judgment. Was this the action of a true leader? He was risking everything in this rescue attempt. Any tactician would have weighed the odds and gone straight to Avignon with the key. He was placing the entire mission in jeopardy.\n\nAnd if the Dragon Court won\u2026\n\nGray pictured the dead in Cologne, the tortured priests in Milan. Many more would die if he failed.\n\nAnd for what?\n\nAt least he knew the answer to that.\n\nGray continued up the hillside, lost in his own thoughts.\n\nSeichan checked her GPS unit, then moved to the left. A crack in the cliff appeared, half hidden by a tilted slab of granite, covered in moss and tiny white snowbell flowers.\n\nShe ducked under it and led the way up into a narrow tunnel. She clicked on a penlight. A short way inside, an old grate blocked the way. Seichan quickly picked the lock.\n\n\"Any alarms?\" Gray asked.\n\nSeichan shrugged and pushed open the gate. \"We'll find out.\"\n\nGray searched the walls as they entered. Solid granite. No wires.\n\nTen yards past the gate, a set of crude stairs led upward. Gray took the lead from here. He checked his watch. The train from Geneva should be pulling into the Lausanne station in another few minutes. His absence would be noted. Time was running out.\n\nHe sped faster up the stairs, but he kept a watch for any surveillance or alarm devices. He climbed the equivalent of fifteen stories, tension mounting with each step.\n\nFinally the tunnel dumped into a wider room, a domed cavity in the rock. At the back wall, a natural spring spattered and flowed down into a cut in the rock, flowing toward the roots of the mountain. But in front of the spring stood a large slab of cut stone. An altar. Stars were painted on the ceiling. It was the Roman temple Seichan had described. So far, her intel was spot-on accurate.\n\nSeichan stepped into the room behind him. \"The stairs up into the castle are over there,\" she said and pointed an arm toward another tunnel leading out.\n\nHe took a step toward it when the darkness at the mouth of the tunnel shifted. A large shape stepped into the meager light.\n\nRaoul.\n\nHe bore a submachine gun in his hands.\n\nLight flared to his left. Two other gunmen rose from hiding behind the slab. Behind Gray, a steel door slammed shut across the lower passageway.\n\nBut worse, he felt the cold barrel of a gun at the base of his skull.\n\n\"He's carrying the gold key around his neck,\" Seichan said.\n\nRaoul strode forward. He stopped in front of Gray. \"You should be wiser in your choice of companions.\"\n\nBefore Gray could respond, a meaty fist slammed into his belly.\n\nGray coughed out his air and fell to his knees.\n\nRaoul reached to his throat and grabbed the chain. He yanked the key free, ripping the pendant from Gray's neck with a snap. He held it up to the light.\n\n\"Thank you for delivering this to us,\" Raoul said. \"And yourself. We have a few questions for you before we leave for Avignon.\"\n\nGray stared up into Raoul's face. He could not hide his shock. The Court knew about Avignon. How\u2026?\n\nBut he knew.\n\n\"Rachel\u2026\" he mumbled.\n\n\"Oh, don't worry. She's alive and well. Catching up with family at the moment.\"\n\nGray didn't understand.\n\n\"Don't forget about his teammate at the hospital,\" Seichan said. \"We don't want to leave any loose ends.\"\n\nRaoul nodded. \"That's already being taken care of.\"\n\n[ 3:07 A.M. ]\n\n[ GENEVA, SWITZERLAND ]\n\nUnable to sleep, Monk watched television. It was in French. He didn't speak French, so he was not really paying attention. It was white noise as he thought. The morphine fogged the edges of his mind.\n\nHe kept his eyes off his bandaged stump.\n\nFury kept the pain reliever's sedation at bay. Not only for his mutilation, but for being the fall guy in this operation. Pulled out of the fight. Used as a goddamn bargaining chip. The others were in danger, and he was locked down in a private room, guarded by hospital security.\n\nStill, he couldn't deny a hollow pain deep inside him, one that morphine could not touch. He had no right to feel sorry for himself. He lived. He was a soldier. He had seen buddies pulled off the field in far worse condition than him. But the ache persisted. He felt violated, abused, less a man, certainly less a soldier.\n\nLogic would not soothe his heart.\n\nThe television droned on.\n\nA commotion outside his door drew his eye. Arguing. Raised voices. He shifted higher in his bed. What was going on?\n\nThen the door burst open.\n\nHe stared in shock as a figure strode past the security guards.\n\nA familiar figure.\n\nMonk could not keep the shock from his voice. \"Cardinal Spera?\"\n\n[ 3:08 A.M. ]\n\n[ LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND ]\n\nRachel had been returned to her cell, but she was not alone.\n\nA guard stood outside the bulletproof glass.\n\nInside, her grandmother sank to the cot with a sigh. \"You may not understand now, but you will.\"\n\nRachel shook her head. She stood against the far wall, confused, dazed. \"How\u2026how could you?\"\n\nHer grandmother stared up at her with those sharp eyes of hers. \"I was once like you. Only sixteen when I first came to this castle from Austria, escaping as the war ended.\"\n\nRachel remembered her grandmother's tales of her family's flight to Switzerland, then eventually Italy. She and her father were the only members of her family to survive. \"You were escaping from the Nazis.\"\n\n\"No, child, we were Nazis,\" her nonna corrected her.\n\nRachel closed her eyes. Oh God\u2026\n\nHer grandmother continued, \"Papa was a party leader in Salzburg, but he also had ties to the Imperial Dragon Court of Austria. A very powerful man. It was through that fraternity that we made our escape, underground through Switzerland, through the generosity of the Baron of Sauvage, Raoul's grandfather.\"\n\nRachel listened with growing horror, though she wanted to cover her ears and deny it.\n\n\"But such safe passage required a payment. My father granted it. My virginity\u2026to the baron. Like you, I resisted, not understanding. My father held me down the first time, for my own good. But it would not be the last. We were hidden here at the castle for four months. The baron bedded me many nights, until I was heavy with his bastard child.\"\n\nRachel found herself sinking down the wall, settling to the cold stone floor.\n\n\"But bastard or not, it was a good crossing, mixing a noble Austrian line of Hapsburgs with a Swiss Bernese line. I grew to understand as the child grew in my belly. It was the way of the Court, strengthening pure lines. My father pressed it upon me. I grew to understand that I carried a noble bloodline back to emperors and kings.\"\n\nSitting on the floor, Rachel tried to comprehend the brutality done to the young girl who would become her grandmother. Had her grandmother validated that cruelty and abuse by couching it in a grander scheme? Brainwashed at that fragile age by her father. Rachel sought to find sympathy for the old woman but failed.\n\n\"My father took me to Italy, to Castel Gondolfo, the home of the pope's summer palace. I gave birth to your mother there. A shame. I was beaten for it. A male child had been hoped for.\"\n\nHer grandmother shook her head sadly. She continued, relating an alternate history of their family. How she was married off to another member of the Dragon Court, one with ties to the Church in Castel Gondolfo. It was a marriage of convenience and deceit. Their family had been assigned to seed their children and grandchildren into the Church, as unwitting spies for the Court, blind moles. To maintain their secrecy, Rachel's mother and Uncle Vigor were kept unaware of their blasted heritage.\n\n\"But you were meant for so much more,\" her grandmother said with hard pride. \"You proved your Dragon blood. You were noticed and chosen to be drawn back into the full fold of the Court. Your blood was too valuable to waste. The Imperator chose you personally to cross our family line back upon the ancient Sauvage line. Your children will be kings among kings.\"\n\nHer nonna's eyes shone with the wonder of it. \"Molti bellissimo bambini. All kings of the Court.\"\n\nRachel had no strength now to even raise her head. She covered her face with her hands. Every moment of her life flashed past her. What was real? Who was she? She thought back on the number of times she had taken her grandmother's side over her mother, even her nonna's advice on her love life. She had revered and emulated the old woman, respecting her hard, no-nonsense edge. But did such solidity come from toughness or psychosis? What did that imply about herself? She shared this bloodline\u2026with the grandmother\u2026dear God, with that bastard Raoul.\n\nWho was she?\n\nAnother concern arose. Fear pushed her to speak. \"What\u2026what about Uncle Vigor\u2026your son?\"\n\nHer grandmother sighed. \"He has served his role in the Church. Celibacy ended his bloodline. Now he is no longer needed. Our family's legacy will carry forth through you, gloriously into the future.\"\n\nRachel heard a trace of pain behind these last words and glanced up. She knew her grandmother loved Vigor\u2026in fact, more than Rachel's own mother. She wondered if her grandmother had resented that daughter she had given birth to, a child of rape. And was that same trauma carried down to the next generation? Rachel and her own mother had always had a strained relationship, an unspoken pain that neither could surmount, neither understood.\n\nAnd where would it stop?\n\nA shout drew her attention to the door. Men were coming. Rachel climbed to her feet, as did her grandmother. So alike\u2026\n\nDown the hall, a troop of guards marched past. Rachel stared in despair at the second in line. Gray, hands bound behind his back, trudged past. He glanced into her cell. Spotting her, his eyes widened in surprise. He tripped a step.\n\n\"Rachel\u2026\"\n\nGray was shoved forward by Raoul, who leered into the cell and held up something on a chain as he passed.\n\nA gold key.\n\nDespair settled completely over Rachel.\n\nNothing now stood between the Court and the treasure at Avignon. After centuries of manipulation and machination, the Dragon Court had won.\n\nIt was over.\n\n[ 3:12 A.M. ]\n\n[ AVIGNON, FRANCE ]\n\nKat did not like any of this. There were too many civilians around. She marched up the steps toward the main entrance to the Pope's Palace. There was a flow of people into and out of the gateway.\n\n\"It's a tradition to hold the play inside the palace,\" Vigor said. \"Last year, they did Shakespeare's The Life and Death of King John. This year it's a four-hour production of Hamlet. The play and party lasts well into the morning. They hold it in the Courtyard of Honor.\" He pointed ahead.\n\nThey fought their way through a group of German tourists exiting the palace and crossed through the arched entry. Coming from ahead, voices echoed off the stone wall in a mix of languages.\n\n\"It will be hard to conduct a thorough search with all these people,\" Kat said with a frown.\n\nVigor nodded as a snare-beat of thunder rumbled across the sky.\n\nLaughter and clapping echoed.\n\n\"The play should be nearly over,\" Vigor said.\n\nThe long gateway ended at an open-air courtyard. It was dark, except for the large stage on the far side, framed by curtains and decorated like the throne room to a great castle. The backdrop was in fact the very wall of the far courtyard. To either side rose lighting towers, casting spots upon the actors, and towering speakers.\n\nA crowd gathered below the stage in seats or sprawled on blankets on the stone floor. From the stage, a few figures stood amid a pile of bodies. An actor spoke in French, but Kat was fluent.\n\n\"I am dead, Horatio. Wretched queen, adieu!\"\n\nKat recognized one of the last lines of Hamlet. The play was indeed rounding toward the end.\n\nVigor drew her to the side. \"The courtyard here divides two different sections of the palace\u2014the new and the old. The back wall and the one to the left are a part of the Palais Vieux, the old palace. Where we stand and to the right is the Palais Neuf, the section built later.\"\n\nKat leaned closer to Vigor. \"Where do we begin?\"\n\nVigor pointed to the older section. \"There is a mysterious story connected to the Pope's Palace. Many historians of the time report that at dawn on September 20, 1348, a great column of fire was seen above the old section of the palace. It was noted by the entire town. Many of the superstitious believed the flame heralded the Great Plague, the Black Death, which started about the same time. But what if it wasn't? What if it was some manifestation of the Meissner field, a flux of energy being released when whatever secret was sealed here? The appearance of the flame might mark the exact date the treasure was buried.\"\n\nKat nodded. It was something to follow.\n\n\"I pulled down a detailed map from the Internet,\" Vigor said. \"There's an entrance into the old palace near the Gate of Our Lady. One seldom used.\"\n\nVigor led the way to the left. An archway opened. They ducked inside as a great peal of lightning split the sky overhead. Thunder boomed. The actor on the stage stopped in mid-soliloquy. Nervous laughter tinkled through the audience. The storm might end the play early.\n\nVigor motioned to a stout door off to the side.\n\nKat dropped and set to work with her lockpicks, while Vigor shielded her work with his body. It did not take long to free the latch. Kat clicked it open.\n\nAnother flash of lightning drew Kat's eye back to the courtyard. Thunder cracked and the skies opened. Rain fell heavily from the low clouds. Cries and cheers erupted from the audience. A mass exodus began.\n\nKat shouldered open the door, held it for Vigor, then closed it behind them.\n\nIt bumped closed with a solid snap of the latch. Kat relocked it.\n\n\"Do we have to be worried about security?\" she asked.\n\n\"Sadly, no. As you'll see, there's nothing really to steal. Vandalism is the greater concern. There might be a night watchman. So we should be cautious.\"\n\nNodding, Kat kept her flashlight off. Enough light filtered through the high windows to illuminate a ramp leading up toward the next level of the castle.\n\nVigor led the way up. \"The private apartments of the pope lie in the Tower of Angels. The rooms were always the most secured area of the palace. If something was hidden, we should probably wind our way there.\"\n\nKat pulled out a compass and kept it fixed in front of her. A magnetic marker had led them to Alexander's tomb. It might here, too.\n\nThey traversed several rooms and halls. Their footsteps echoed hollowly through the vaulted spaces. Kat now understood the lack of real security. The place was a stone tomb. Denuded of almost any decoration or furniture. There was no evidence of the opulence that must have once frilled the palace. She tried to picture the flow of velvet and fur, the rich tapestries, the lavish banquets, the gilt and the silver. Nothing remained but stone and timbered rafters.\n\n\"After the popes left,\" Vigor whispered, \"the place fell into disrepair. It was ransacked during the French Revolution, serving eventually as a garrison and barracks for Napoleon's troops. Much of the place was whitewashed and destroyed. Only a few areas still retain some of the original frescoes, such as the papal apartments.\"\n\nAs Kat walked, she also sensed a strange conformation to the place: halls that ended too abruptly, rooms that seemed oddly small, staircases that dropped to levels without doors. The thickness of walls varied from a few feet to some eighteen feet thick. The palace was a true fortress, but Kat sensed hidden spaces, passages, rooms\u2014features common among medieval castles.\n\nThis was confirmed when they entered a room Vigor designated as the treasury. He pointed to four places. \"They buried their gold under the floor. In subterranean rooms. It was always rumored that other such vaults were yet to be discovered.\"\n\nThey crossed other rooms: a large wardrobe, a former library, an empty kitchen whose square walls narrowed down to an octagonal chimney over a central firepit.\n\nVigor finally led them into the Tower of Angels.\n\nKat's compass had not twitched a beat, but she concentrated more fully now. Worry mounted. What if they didn't find the entrance? What if she failed? Again. The hand holding the compass began to shake. First her failure with Monk and Rachel\u2026\n\nAnd now this.\n\nShe gripped her compass tighter and willed her hand steady. She and Vigor would solve this. They must. Or all the sacrifice by the others would be for nothing.\n\nDetermined, she climbed from one level to the next of the papal apartments. With no sign of any caretaker, Kat risked switching on a small penlight to help illuminate their search.\n\n\"The pope's living room,\" Vigor said at the entrance to one room.\n\nKat crisscrossed the length of it, studying her compass. The walls here were decorated with swirls of peeling paint, and a large corner fireplace dominated the room. Thunder echoed through the thick walls.\n\nOnce finished with her pass, she shook her head.\n\nNothing.\n\nThey moved on. One of the most spectacular rooms came next: the Room of the Stag. Its frescoes depicted elaborate hunting scenes, from falconry, to bird nesters, to frolicking dogs, to even a rectangular fish-breeding pond.\n\n\"A piscarium,\" Vigor said. \"Fish again.\"\n\nKat nodded, remembering the significance of fish to their own hunt. She searched this room with an even tighter pattern of surveillance. Her compass refused to budge. With no clue, she waved Vigor onward.\n\nThey climbed another level.\n\n\"The pope's bedroom,\" Vigor said, sounding disappointed and worried now, too. \"This is the last of the rooms in the apartments.\"\n\nKat entered the chamber. No furniture. Its walls were painted a brilliant blue.\n\n\"Lapis lazuli,\" Vigor said. \"Prized for its luster.\"\n\nThe rich decoration depicted a nighttime forest, hung with birdcages of every shape and size. A few squirrels scrambled among the limbs.\n\nKat searched the room, from one end to the other.\n\nStill nothing.\n\nShe lowered her compass. She turned to find the same understanding in Vigor's eyes. They had failed.\n\n[ 3:36 A.M. ]\n\n[ LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND ]\n\nGray was shoved into a stone cell. It was sealed with Lexan glass, bulletproof and an inch thick. The door slammed shut. He had spotted Rachel in a cell two spaces down\u2026along with her grandmother.\n\nIt made no sense.\n\nRaoul growled at his men and headed away, gold key in hand.\n\nSeichan stood at the door, smiling at him. With his hands still bound behind his back by plastic ties, he threw himself bodily at her, crashing into the glass wall.\n\n\"You goddamn bitch!\"\n\nShe only smiled, kissed her fingertips, and pressed them to the glass. \"Bye, loverboy. Thanks for the ride here.\"\n\nGray fell away from the door, turning his back, cursing under his breath, calculating. Raoul had confiscated his pack, given it to one of his underlings. He'd been patted down, his weapons taken from his shoulder and ankle holsters.\n\nHe overheard talk by Rachel's cell. A door was opened.\n\nRaoul growled to one of his guards, \"Take Madame Camilla up to the trucks. Have all the men ready. We'll be leaving for the airport in a few minutes.\"\n\n\"Ciao, Rachel, my bambina.\"\n\nNo response to her grandmother. What was going on?\n\nFootsteps marched away.\n\nGray still sensed a presence by the other door.\n\nRaoul's voice spoke again. \"If only I had more time,\" Raoul whispered icily. \"But orders are orders. It all comes to an end in Avignon. The Imperator will be returning here with me. He wants to watch as I take you for the first time. After that, it's just the two of us\u2026for the rest of your life.\"\n\n\"Fuck you,\" Rachel spat back at him.\n\n\"Exactly right.\" Raoul laughed. \"I'm going to teach you how to scream and properly pleasure your superior. And if you don't bend to everything I demand, you won't be the first bitch Alberto lobotomized for the Court. I don't need your mind to fuck you.\"\n\nHe stalked away with a final order to a guard. \"Keep a watch down here. I'll radio when I'm ready for the American. We'll have a short bit of fun before we leave.\"\n\nGray listened as Raoul's footsteps faded.\n\nHe didn't wait any longer. He kicked the toe of his boot hard against the solid rock wall. A three-inch blade sprang from the heel. He crouched and sliced free the ties that bound his wrist. He moved quickly. Timing was everything.\n\nHe reached into the front of his pants. Seichan had shoved a thin canister past his belt buckle when he'd thrust himself against the glass wall. Her left hand had passed through an air vent, while her other hand distracted with her feigned kiss of good-bye.\n\nGray pulled the canister free, stepped to the door, and sprayed the hinges. The steel bolts began to dissolve. He had to give it to the Guild. They had cool toys. While Gray could not contact his superiors, nothing had stopped Seichan from coordinating equipment from hers.\n\nGray waited a full minute, then yelled to the guard stationed a few steps down the hall. \"Hey! You! Something's wrong over here.\"\n\nFootsteps approached.\n\nGray retreated back from the door.\n\nThe guard came forward.\n\nGray pointed to the smoky sizzle billowing by the door. \"What the hell?\" he yelled. \"Are you assholes trying to gas me?\"\n\nWith a crinkled brow, the guard stepped closer to the door.\n\nGood enough.\n\nGray leapt forward, slammed into the door, popping the hinges. The plate of hard glass slammed into the guard. He crashed against the far wall, striking his head hard. As he slumped, he tried to free his pistol.\n\nGray shoved aside the door and pivoted off it to swing around. He planted his boot-heel blade into the man's throat, then ripped it free, taking out most of the man's neck.\n\nBending, he liberated the pistol from the guard's holster and a set of keys. He ran to Rachel's cell.\n\nShe was already up and at the door. \"Gray\u2026!\"\n\nHe keyed the lock. \"We don't have much time.\"\n\nHe yanked the door open\u2014and she was in his arms. She wrapped tight to him, lips at his ears, breath on his neck.\n\n\"Thank God,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Actually, thank Seichan,\" he said. Despite the urgency to keep moving, he held the embrace a bit longer, sensing she needed it.\n\nAnd maybe he did, too.\n\nBut finally they both separated. Gray pointed his pistol toward the end of the hall. He checked his watch. Two minutes.\n\n[ 3:42 A.M. ]\n\nSeichan stood at the foot of the stairs that led up to the main keep. She knew the only escape was out the front door. Steel blast doors sealed the back exit under the castle.\n\nIn the brilliantly lit courtyard, a caravan of five SUVs was being loaded. Men yelled orders. Crates were shoved into the backs of the trucks. Dogs barked in kennels.\n\nSeichan studied it all from the corner of her eye, tracking one man among the throng. Maximum mayhem would be needed. She had already confiscated a set of keys to the last Mercedes SUV. A silver one. Her favorite color.\n\nBehind her, a door opened. Raoul stepped out, along with an old woman.\n\n\"We'll take you as far as the airport. A plane will get you back to Rome.\"\n\n\"My granddaughter\u2026\"\n\n\"She'll be taken care of. I promise.\" This last was said with an icy smile.\n\nRaoul noted Seichan. \"I don't believe we'll be needing the Guild's services any longer.\"\n\nSeichan shrugged. \"Then I'll head out with you and be on my way.\" She nodded to the silver SUV.\n\nRaoul helped the old woman down the steps and strode toward the lead vehicle, where Dr. Alberto Menardi waited. Seichan continued to track her target. Motion along one wall of the courtyard drew her eye.\n\nA door opened. She spotted Gray. He had a pistol. Good.\n\nAcross the courtyard, Raoul lifted a radio to his mouth. Most likely calling down to the cells. She could wait no longer. The man she'd been tracking wasn't as close to Raoul as she'd hoped\u2014but he was still in the thick of things.\n\nShe fixed her eyes on the soldier who still carried Gray's pack over one shoulder. It was always easy to count on avarice among the foot soldiers. The fellow was not letting his booty out of his sight. The pack was stuffed with weapons and expensive electronic gear.\n\nUnfortunately for the soldier, the bottom lining of the pack also had a quarter kilo of C4 sewn into it. Seichan pressed the transmitter in her pocket, hopping over the balustrade of the front staircase.\n\nThe explosion blew out the center of the caravan.\n\nMen and body parts flew into the dark sky. Gas tanks ignited on two of the cars. A ball of fire rolled upward. Flaming debris scattered to all corners of the courtyard.\n\nSeichan moved quickly. Waving to Gray, she pointed her pistol at the silver SUV. Its windshield was cracked, but it was otherwise intact. Gray and the woman dashed out. The three zeroed in on the vehicle.\n\nA pair of soldiers tried to stop them. Gray took out one, Seichan the other. They reached the SUV.\n\nThe rev of an engine drew her eye toward the castle gate. The lead truck jumped forward. Raoul was making his escape. Gunfire pelted toward them as soldiers tumbled into a second truck. Its engine was already running.\n\nRaoul popped up out of the sunroof of the lead truck, facing back toward them. He raised a massive horse pistol in his fist.\n\n\"Down!\" Seichan barked, dropping flat.\n\nThe gun sounded like a cannon. She heard the windshield collapse and the back window blow out. The thick slug passed completely through the vehicle. In plain sight, she rolled toward the rear, keeping the truck between her and Raoul.\n\nGunfire spat from the other side. Gray, on his belly, in a better position to snipe, shot at Raoul as the lead truck fishtailed toward the exit. The second truck followed.\n\nRaoul continued to shoot, fearless of the hostile fire.\n\nA slug slammed through the front grille of the SUV.\n\nShit.\n\nThe bastard was taking out their truck.\n\nThe front headlamp exploded. From her viewpoint on the ground, Seichan watched a stream of oil flow out of the engine compartment and pool on the stones.\n\nThe slide of Gray's pistol popped open. Out of ammo.\n\nSeichan crab-crawled to join him, but it was too late.\n\nOne truck, then the other, shot out of the gate. Raoul's laughter carried back to them. The portcullis gate dropped behind the last vehicle, its teeth slamming into the stone notches, sealed tight.\n\nA trundling noise penetrated the echo in her ears.\n\nShe rose to a crouch. Steel shutters dropped over all the windows and doors to the castle. Modern fortification. The Court took their security seriously. They were trapped in the courtyard.\n\nA new sound followed.\n\nThe click of a series of heavy latches.\n\nSeichan turned along with Gray and Rachel. She now understood the trailing laughter by the escaping bastard.\n\nThe gates to the line of twenty kennels rose up on motorized wheels.\n\nMonsters of muscle, leather, and teeth stalked out, snarling, frothing, driven mad by the thunder and blood. Each pit-dog stood chest-high, massing close to a hundred kilos, twice the weight of most men.\n\nAnd the dinner bell had just rung.\n\n[ 3:48 A.M. ]\n\n[ AVIGNON, FRANCE ]\n\nKat refused to concede defeat. Holding despair at bay, she stalked the length of the blue bedroom atop the Tower of Angels. \"We're looking at this the wrong way,\" she said.\n\nUnlike her, Vigor remained stock-still in the room's center. His eyes were somewhere else, calculating. Or was it worry for his niece? How focused was he on the task at hand?\n\n\"What do you mean?\" he mumbled.\n\n\"Maybe there's not a magnetic marker.\" She held up the compass, drawing his eye, attempting to engage him fully.\n\n\"Then what?\"\n\n\"What about all that talk earlier? The Gothic history of the town and this place?\"\n\nVigor nodded. \"Something built into the structure of the building. But without a magnetic marker, how are we to find it? The palace is huge. And considering the state of disrepair, the clue might have been destroyed or removed.\"\n\n\"You don't believe that,\" Kat said more firmly. \"This secret society of alchemists would've found a way to preserve it.\"\n\n\"Still, how do we find it?\" Vigor asked.\n\nLightning crackled out the nearby window. It lit up the gardens below the tower and the spread of city below the hill. The dark river snaked past below. The rain had begun to fall harder. Another fork of lightning scintillated across the belly of the black clouds.\n\nKat watched the display and slowly turned to Vigor, conviction firming with sudden insight. She pocketed her compass, knowing it was no longer needed.\n\n\"Magnetism opened Saint Peter's tomb,\" she said, stepping back to him. \"And it was magnetism that led us to Alexander's tomb. But once there, it was electricity that ignited the pyramid. The same might lead us to the treasure here.\" She waved a hand at the dazzle of the storm. \"Lightning. The palace was built atop the largest hill, the Rocher des Doms, the Rock Dome.\"\n\n\"Attracting lightning strikes. A flash of light that illuminates darkness.\"\n\n\"Is there some depiction of lightning that we missed?\"\n\n\"I don't recall.\" Vigor rubbed his chin. \"But I think you've struck a significant chord. Light is symbolic of knowledge. Enlightenment. It was the primary goal of Gnostic faith, to seek the primordial light mentioned in Genesis, to reach out for this ancient font of knowledge and power that flows everywhere.\"\n\nVigor ticked off on his fingertips. \"Electricity, lightning, light, knowledge, power. They're all related. And somewhere there is a symbol of this, built into the design of the palace.\"\n\nKat shook her head, at a loss.\n\nVigor suddenly stiffened.\n\n\"What?\" She stepped closer.\n\nVigor quickly knelt and drew in the dust. \"Alexander's tomb was in Egypt. We can't forget to carry that forward, one riddle to the next. The Egyptian symbol for light is a circle with a dot in the center. Representing the sun.\n\n\"But sometimes it's flattened into an oval, forming an eye. Representing not only the sun and light, but also knowledge. The burning eye of insight. The all-seeing eye of Masonic and Templar iconography.\"\n\nKat frowned at the drawings. She had seen no such markings. \"Okay, but where do we begin looking for it?\"\n\n\"It's not going to be found\u2014but formed,\" Vigor said, standing up. \"Why didn't I think of this before? A feature of Gothic architecture is the mischievous play of light and shadow. The Templar architects were masters of this manipulation.\"\n\n\"But where can we\u2014?\"\n\nVigor cut her off, already heading out the door. \"We have to go back down to the first floor. To where we already saw the potential for a flaming eye within a circle of light.\"\n\nKat followed Vigor. She didn't recall any such depiction. They hurried down the stairs and out of the Tower of Angels. Vigor led the way across a banquet hall and ended up in a room they'd already explored.\n\n\"The kitchen?\" she asked, surprised.\n\nKat stared again at the square walls, the central raised hearth, and overhead, the octagonal chimneypiece. She didn't understand and began to say so.\n\nVigor reached out a hand and cupped it over her penlight. \"Wait.\"\n\nA brilliant bolt of lightning shattered outside. Enough illumination traveled down the open chimney to shine a perfect oval upon the fire pit. The silver light flickered, then went dark.\n\n\"As it is above, so it is below,\" Vigor said in a hushed voice. \"The effect is probably more evident when the noon sun climbs directly overhead or lies at some precise angle.\"\n\nKat pictured the firepit ablaze, bright with flames. A fire within a circle of sunlight. \"But how can we be sure this is the right place?\" Kat asked, circling the hearth.\n\nHe frowned. \"I'm not entirely sure, but Alexander's tomb was under a lighthouse topped by a fiery flame. And considering the usefulness of both a lighthouse and a kitchen, it makes sense to bury something beneath a location that serves a good function. Successive generations would preserve it for its utility.\"\n\nUnconvinced, Kat bent down and slipped a knife free to examine the central hearth. She dug at the rock that lined the firepit, exposing an orange-hued stone at the base. \"It's not hematite or magnetite.\" If it had been either one, she might be convinced. \"It's just bauxite, an aluminum hydroxide ore. A good thermal conductor. Makes sense for a fireplace. Nothing unusual.\"\n\nShe glanced over to Vigor. He wore a large grin.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I walked right past it,\" Vigor said, joining her. \"I should have considered that another stone would point the way. First hematite, then magnetite, now bauxite.\"\n\nKat stood, confused.\n\n\"Bauxite is mined right here in this area. In fact, it's named after the Lords of Baux, whose castle lies only ten miles from here. It sits atop a hill of bauxite. This stone points a finger back at them.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"The Lords of Baux had an uneasy relationship with the French popes, their new neighbors. But they were best known for an odd claim they asserted most vehemently. They claimed to be descended from a famous biblical figure.\"\n\n\"Who?\" Kat asked.\n\n\"Balthazar. One of the Magi.\"\n\nKat's eyes widened. She turned back to the hearth. \"They sealed the opening with stones from the Magi's descendants.\"\n\n\"Do you still doubt we've found the right spot?\" Vigor asked.\n\nKat shook her head. \"But how do we open it? I don't see any keyhole.\"\n\n\"You already told us. Electricity.\"\n\nAs if emphasizing the point, thunder boomed through the thick walls.\n\nKat shed out of her pack. It was worth a try. \"We don't have any of those ancient batteries.\" She pulled out a larger flashlight. \"But I have some modern Duracell Coppertops.\"\n\nShe cracked open her flashlight and used the tip of a knife to tease loose the positive and negative wires. With the power switch off, she twisted them together, then lifted her handiwork.\n\n\"You'd better stand back,\" Kat warned.\n\nReaching out, she brought the flashlight's wires into contact with the bauxite stone, a weakly conductive ore. She flicked the flashlight's switch.\n\nAn arc of electricity stabbed to the stone. A deep bass tone responded as if a large drum had been struck.\n\nKat darted back as the tone faded. She joined Vigor by the wall.\n\nAlong the edges of the stone hearth, a fiery glow spread, scribing the entire firepit.\n\n\"I think they've cemented the blocks with molten m-state glass,\" Kat mumbled.\n\n\"Like the ancient Egyptian builders used molten lead to cement the Pharos Lighthouse.\"\n\n\"And now the electricity is releasing the stored power in the glass.\"\n\nOther traceries of fire jittered across the face of the hearth, outlining each and every stone. It flared brighter, searing a crisscrossed pattern onto her retina. Heat washed out toward them.\n\nKat shielded her eyes. But the effect didn't last long. As the glow faded, the stone blocks of bauxite began to fall away, no longer cemented, tumbling down into a pit hidden below the hearth.\n\nKat heard the crash of stone on stone. A rattling continued as the blocks tumbled deeper. No longer able to restrain her curiosity, she stepped forward and shone her penlight. The edges of the hearth now outlined a dark staircase leading down.\n\nShe turned to Vigor. \"We've done it.\"\n\n\"Heaven help us,\" he said.\n\n[ 3:52 A.M. ]\n\n[ LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND ]\n\nA quarter mile from his castle, Raoul lowered his cell phone and stalked away from his truck. Fury narrowed his vision to pinpoints. Blood dripped from a scalp wound. That Asian bitch had betrayed him. But he would get his satisfaction. His dogs would make short work of all of them.\n\nAnd if not\u2026\n\nHe crossed to the second truck. He pointed to two men. \"You and you. Return to the chateau. On foot. Stand guard at the portcullis. Shoot anyone you see move. No one leaves that courtyard alive.\"\n\nThe pair piled out of the truck and set a fast pace back to the castle.\n\nRaoul returned to the lead vehicle.\n\nAlberto waited for him. \"What did the Imperator say?\" he asked as Raoul climbed into the front passenger seat.\n\nRaoul pocketed his cell phone. The Guild betrayal had surprised their leader as much as it did Raoul. But Raoul had left out his own treachery back in Alexandria, leaving the bitch to die and lying about it. He should've expected something. He pounded a fist on his knee. When she handed the American to him, he had let his guard down.\n\nStupid.\n\nBut matters would be rectified.\n\nIn Avignon.\n\nRaoul answered Alberto, \"The Imperator will be joining us in France, along with more forces. We push ahead as planned.\"\n\n\"And the others?\" Alberto glanced back toward the chateau.\n\n\"They no longer matter. There's nothing they can do to stop us.\"\n\nRaoul waved the driver forward. The truck headed for the Yverdon airfield. He shook his head at his losses here. Not the men. The bitch. Rachel Verona. He had such bloody plans for her\u2026.\n\nBut at least he had left her a little parting gift.\n\n[ 3:55 A.M. ]\n\nRachel gathered with Gray and Seichan on the steps to the main castle, their backs to the metal shutters over the doors. Moving stealthily, they had retreated from the pack of dogs to this relative shelter.\n\nThey still only had the one gun. Six bullets.\n\nGray had attempted to scrounge another weapon amidst the fiery carnage in the courtyard, but all he found were two damaged rifles. Gray carried Seichan's weapon. She was busy with a GPS unit, concentrating fully, trusting Gray to watch her back.\n\nWhat was she doing?\n\nRachel kept a step away from the woman, closer to Gray. One hand clutched his shirttail. She didn't know when she had grabbed it, but she didn't let go. It was all that was keeping her on her feet.\n\nOne of the pit-dogs padded silently past the bottom of the stairs. It dragged a limb of one of the dead soldiers. Twenty of the monsters roamed the yard, tearing at bodies, snarling and spitting at one another. A few fights broke out, savage, lightning-fast tussles.\n\nIt wouldn't be long before their pig-eyed attention turned to them.\n\nAny noise drew the beasts. The moaning injured died first. They all knew that once the first shot was fired, the entire pack would be upon them.\n\nSix bullets. Twenty dogs.\n\nOff to the side, movement\u2026\n\nThrough the oily smoke, a thin figure rose among the debris, wobbly, unsteady. A breeze blew the haze away, and Rachel recognized the shape, teetering on thin legs.\n\n\"Nonna\u2026\" she whispered.\n\nBlood caked the old woman's hair on the left side.\n\nRachel had thought her grandmother had escaped with Raoul.\n\nHad the explosion knocked her down?\n\nBut Rachel supposed otherwise. Raoul must have pistol-whipped her out of the way, leaving her behind, useless baggage.\n\nA moan rose from the old woman. She lifted a hand to the side of her head. \"Papa!\" she called feebly in a strained voice.\n\nThe blow, the confusion, the looming castle must have dislocated her grandmother, drawing her into the past.\n\n\"Papa\u2026\" Pain beyond her head injury keened in her voice.\n\nBut Rachel wasn't the only one to hear the pain.\n\nA few meters away, a dark shape rose from behind a flaming tire, stalking out of the smoke, drawn by the frail cry.\n\nRachel let go of Gray's belt and stumbled a step down.\n\n\"I see it,\" Gray said, stopping her with a hand.\n\nHe raised his gun, aimed, and squeezed the gun. The pop was explosive in the silent yard, but the yelp of the target was louder as the dog pitched over and rolled. Howls rose from it. It gnashed at its wounded back leg, attacking the pain. Other dogs swooped down upon it. Drawn by the blood. Lions on a wounded gazelle.\n\nRachel's grandmother, startled by the beast, had fallen on her backside, mouth frozen in an O of surprise.\n\n\"I have to get to her,\" Rachel whispered. It was an instinctive reaction. Despite the treachery, her nonna still had a place in her heart. She didn't deserve to die like this.\n\n\"I'll go with you,\" Gray said.\n\n\"She's dead already,\" Seichan said with a sigh, lowering her GPS unit. But she followed them down the stairs, sticking close to the only gun.\n\nIn a tight knot, they traversed the edge of the courtyard. Pools of flaming oil lit the way.\n\nRachel wanted to run, but one massive brindled beast eyed them, hunched over a headless body, hackles raised, teeth bared, guarding its catch. But Rachel knew if she ran, the brute would be upon her in seconds.\n\nGray covered it with his pistol.\n\nHer grandmother scooted away from the trio of dogs fighting over their injured brethren, ripping and tearing at each other to the point it was impossible to tell which beast Gray had shot. Her movement was tracked by another two beasts, coming at her from opposite sides.\n\nThey would be too late.\n\nAnother two shots and one beast collapsed, sliding on its face. The other bullet only grazed the second dog. The injury seemed to pique its bloodlust. It lunged at the fallen woman.\n\nRachel ran forward.\n\nGray's gunshots had drawn more dogs. But committed now, there was no choice. He shot as he ran, dropping another two dogs, the last from only a yard away.\n\nBefore Rachel could reach her grandmother, the lunging dog struck. It snatched her grandmother's arm, raised in defense. It bit clean through thin bone and withered flesh and tugged the old woman to the ground.\n\nThere was no cry.\n\nThe dog slammed on top of her, striking for the throat.\n\nGray fired near Rachel's ear, half deafening her. The impact knocked the beast aside, off the old woman's chest. The dog's body writhed and convulsed, a clean head shot\u2026also their last.\n\nThe slide on Gray's pistol jacked open.\n\nRachel dropped to her knees, reaching her grandmother. Blood pumped from the old woman's severed arm. Rachel cradled the body.\n\nGray crouched with her. Seichan dropped too, lowering their silhouette.\n\nDogs fought all around them, and they were out of bullets.\n\nHer grandmother stared up at her and spoke weakly in Italian, eyes glazed. \"Mama\u2026I'm sorry\u2026hold me\u2026\"\n\nA crack of a rifle and her grandmother jerked in her arms, shot through the chest. Rachel felt the bullet exit, grazing a line of fire under her own arm.\n\nShe stared up.\n\nThirty yards away, two gunmen stood beyond the iron portcullis gate.\n\nThe new blast drew off a few of the dogs.\n\nGray sought to use the distraction to retreat to the castle wall. Rachel followed, not letting go of her grandmother, dragging her along.\n\n\"Leave her,\" Gray urged.\n\nRachel ignored him, tears flowing, angry. Another rifle blast and a slug sparked off the stone a few feet away. Seichan reached down and helped carry her grandmother. Working together, they retreated faster.\n\nAt the gate, a pair of dogs struck the bars, gnashing at the gunmen, blocking their aim. But it wouldn't last for long.\n\nReaching the relative shelter of the castle's wall, Rachel collapsed over her grandmother's body. They were still in direct view of the gate\u2026but the entire courtyard was exposed. One of the dogs was blasted away from the portcullis. Another bullet pinged off the metal shutter of a window overhead.\n\nRachel, bent over her grandmother, finally freed the purse still hooked over her nonna's shoulder, a permanent fixture to the old woman. Rachel snapped the clasp, reached inside, and felt the butt of cold steel.\n\nShe pulled out her grandmother's heirloom.\n\nThe Nazi P-08 Luger.\n\n\"Grazie, Nonna.\"\n\nRachel aimed toward the gate. She fixed her stand and let cold anger steady her grip. She squeezed the trigger\u2026followed the recoil and fired again.\n\nBoth men fell.\n\nHer focus widened\u2014too late to stop the slavering beast leaping out of the smoke, muzzle snarled, teeth bared, going for her throat.\n\n[ 4:00 A.M. ]\n\nGray stiff-armed Rachel to the side, knocking her down. He faced the monster and lifted his other arm. In his hand, he clutched a tiny silver canister.\n\n\"Bad dog\u2026\"\n\nHe sprayed the beast point-blank in the nose and eyes.\n\nThe dog's weight struck him, flattening him on his back.\n\nThe beast howled\u2014not in bloodlust, but searing agony. It rolled off Gray and writhed across the stone, grinding its face into the cobbles, pawing at its eyes.\n\nBut its sockets were already empty. Eaten away by the acid.\n\nIt rolled another two times, mewling.\n\nGray felt a twinge of discomfort. The dogs had been tortured into this savage state. It wasn't their fault. Then again, perhaps any death was better than being under the thumb of Raoul.\n\nThe dog finally quieted and collapsed to the pavement.\n\nBut its tumult drew the eyes of a dozen others.\n\nGray glanced to Rachel.\n\n\"Six more shots,\" she answered.\n\nGray shook his canister. Not much left.\n\nSeichan had her eyes on the skies. Then Gray heard it, too.\n\nThe thump-thump of a helicopter.\n\nIt winged up over the ridge and castle walls. Lights blazed down. Rotorwash stirred a whirlwind.\n\nDogs scattered in fear.\n\nSeichan spoke above the roar. \"Our ride's here!\"\n\nA nylon ladder tumbled out an open door and struck the stones only a few yards off.\n\nGray didn't care who it was as long as they were free of this bloody courtyard. He raced forward and waved Rachel up the ladder. One hand held the flailing ladder steady, the other took Rachel's Luger.\n\n\"Up!\" he ordered, leaning close to her. \"I'll hold 'em off.\"\n\nRachel's fingers trembled as he freed her gun. His eyes met hers. He recognized a well of horror and sorrow that went beyond the bloodshed here.\n\n\"You'll be okay,\" he said, making it sound like a promise.\n\nOne he meant to keep.\n\nShe nodded, seeming to draw strength, and mounted the ladder.\n\nSeichan went next, scrambling up behind her like a trapeze artist, even with her injured shoulder.\n\nGray followed last. He hadn't needed to use the gun again. He shoved the Luger into the back of his belt and fled up the rope ladder. In moments, he was clambering into the cabin of the helicopter.\n\nAs the door was slammed behind him, Gray straightened to thank the person who had given him an arm and helped him inside.\n\nThe man wore a shit-eating grin. \"Hi, boss.\"\n\n\"Monk!\"\n\nGray grabbed him in a bear hug.\n\n\"Watch the arm,\" his partner said.\n\nGray let him loose. Monk's left arm was strapped to his body, and a leather guard sheathed the bandaged stump of his wrist. He looked well enough, but paler. Dark circles shadowed his eyes.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" Monk said, motioning him to sit and strap in as the helicopter sped away. \"Just try keeping me out of the action.\"\n\n\"How\u2026?\"\n\n\"We locked on to your emergency GPS signal,\" he explained.\n\nGray pulled his seat harness over his shoulder and snapped it in place.\n\nHe stared at the other occupant of the cabin.\n\n\"Cardinal Spera?\" Gray said, confusion in his voice.\n\nSeichan sat next to him and answered, \"Who do you think hired me?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "THE DAEDALUS MAZE",
                "text": "[ JULY 27, 4:38 A.M. ]\n\n[ AVIGNON, FRANCE ]\n\nAs thunder boomed beyond the palace, Kat waited for Vigor. The monsignor had gone down the firepit's dark stairs fifteen minutes ago.\n\nTo take a peek, he had said.\n\nShe shone her light down the stairs.\n\nWhere was he?\n\nShe considered following him, but caution kept her at her post. If he was in trouble, he would've yelled. She remembered the ramp sealing and trapping them under Saint Peter's tomb. What if that happened here? Who would know where to look for them?\n\nShe maintained her post, but she dropped to a knee and called below, trying to keep her voice soft at the same time. \"Vigor!\"\n\nFootsteps answered her, hurried, coming up from below. A glow suffused, then focused down into a flashlight. Vigor climbed to within a half-dozen stairs. He waved to her.\n\n\"You must see this!\"\n\nKat took a deep breath. \"We should wait for Gray and the others to call.\"\n\nVigor climbed another stair with a frown. \"I'm as concerned as you, but there are surely other mysteries to solve down here. That is our purpose in being sent as an advance team. That is how we help the others. The Dragon Court, Gray, and the others are all in Switzerland. It will be hours before they can get here. We should put the time to good use and not squander it.\"\n\nKat considered his argument. She checked her watch again. She also remembered Gray's admonishment about being too cautious. But she was also damn curious.\n\nShe nodded. \"But we check back up here every quarter hour for any contact from Gray.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nKat shouldered her pack and waved him down. She left one of her cell phones by the firepit, to pick up any call coming in\u2014and to leave at least one breadcrumb to follow if they became sealed and trapped below.\n\nWhile she'd bend about being too cautious, she wasn't foolhardy.\n\nShe left that to Gray.\n\nKat ducked below, following Vigor. The stairs led straight down for a fair shot, then turned upon themselves and headed even deeper. Oddly, the air smelled dry, rather than dank.\n\nThe steps ended at a short tunnel.\n\nVigor's pace hurried.\n\nFrom the hollow echo of the monsignor's footsteps, Kat sensed that a larger cavern lay beyond. It was confirmed a moment later.\n\nShe stepped out onto a three-meter stone ledge. Their two lights cast wide swaths across the domed and vaulted space, stretching above and below. It must have once been a natural cavity in the granite, but a great undertaking had transformed it.\n\nKneeling, Kat ran her fingers along the stonework underfoot, precisely fitted blocks of raw marble. Straightening, Kat shone her flashlight to the sides and down.\n\nSkilled craftsmen and engineers had built a series of twelve bricked tiers, descending from their perch and on down toward the distant floor. The space was roughly circular in shape. Each level below was smaller than the next, like a vast amphitheater\u2026or an upside-down step pyramid.\n\nShe shone her light across the yawning space contained within these tiers.\n\nIt wasn't empty.\n\nThick arches of granite spanned out from the tiered footings in a corkscrew pattern, supported by giant columns. Kat recognized the arches. Flying buttresses. Like those that supported Gothic cathedrals. In fact, the entire interior space had that lofty, weightless feeling of a church.\n\n\"This had to have been built by the Knights Templar,\" Vigor said, moving along the tier. \"Nothing like this has ever been seen. A sonata of geometry and engineering. A poem in stone. Gothic architecture at its most perfect.\"\n\n\"A cathedral underground,\" Kat mumbled, awed, reverential.\n\nVigor nodded. \"But one built to worship history, art, and knowledge.\" He swept his arm out.\n\nBut there was no need.\n\nThe stone framework served only one purpose, to support a convoluted maze of timber scaffolding. Shelves, rooms, ladders, and stairs. Glass glittered. Gold shone. It all held a storehouse of books, scrolls, texts, artifacts, statuary, and strange brass contraptions. Each step around seemed to open new vistas, like some vast M. C. Escher painting, impossible angles, dimensional contradictions supported by stone and timber.\n\n\"It's a huge library,\" Kat said.\n\n\"And museum, and storehouse, and gallery,\" Vigor finished. He hurried to the side.\n\nA stone table, like an altar, sat not far from the entry tunnel.\n\nA leather-bound book spread open under glass\u2026gold glass.\n\n\"I was afraid to touch it,\" Vigor said. \"But you can see fairly well through it.\" He shone his light down upon the exposed pages.\n\nKat peered at the book. It was heavily decorated in oils. An illuminated manuscript. Tiny script flowed down the page. It appeared to be a list.\n\n\"I think this is the codex for the entire library,\" Vigor said. \"A ledger and filing system. But I can't be sure.\"\n\nThe monsignor's palms hovered over the glass case, plainly fearful of touching it. They had seen the effects of such superconducting material. Kat stepped back. She noted that the entire complex glittered with similar glass. Even the walls of the tiers had plates of the glass dotted along them, embedded like windows, set like jewels.\n\nWhat did it mean?\n\nVigor still bent over the book. \"Here it lists in Latin 'the Holy Stone of Saint Trophimus.'\"\n\nKat glanced back to him for explanation.\n\n\"He was the saint who first brought Christianity to this area of France. It is said he had a visitation of Christ during a secret meeting of early Christians in a necropolis. Christ knelt on a sarcophagus and his imprint remained. The sarcophagus lid became a treasure, supposedly invoking the knowledge of Christ upon those who beheld it.\" Vigor stared out at the vaulted cathedral of history. \"It was thought lost forever. But it's here. Like so much else.\"\n\nHe waved back to the book. \"Complete texts of forbidden gospels, not just the tattered fragments of those found near the Dead Sea. I saw four gospels listed. One I had never even heard before. The Brown Gospel of the Golden Hills. What might it contain? But most of all\u2026\" Vigor lifted his flashlight. \"According to the codex, somewhere out there is stored the Mandylion.\"\n\nKat frowned. \"What's that?\"\n\n\"The true burial shroud of Christ, an artifact that predates the controversial Turin Shroud. It was taken from Edessa to Constantinople in the tenth century, but during periods of marauding, it vanished. Many suspected it ended up in the treasury of the Knights Templar.\" Vigor nodded. \"Out there lies the proof. And possibly the true face of Christ.\"\n\nKat felt the weight of ages\u2026all suspended in perfect geometry.\n\n\"One page,\" Vigor mumbled.\n\nKat knew the monsignor was refering to the fact that all these wonders were listed on just one page of the leather-bound book\u2014which appeared to have close to a thousand pages.\n\n\"What else might be found here?\" Vigor said in a hushed voice.\n\n\"Have you explored all the way to the bottom?\" Kat asked.\n\n\"Not yet. I went back up to fetch you.\"\n\nKat headed to the narrow stairs that led from one tier to the next. \"We should at least get a general layout of the space, then head back up.\"\n\nVigor nodded, but he seemed reluctant to leave the book's side.\n\nStill, he followed Kat as she wound back and forth down the switch-backing stairs. She gazed up at one point. The entire edifice hung above her, suspended as much in time as space.\n\nAt last they reached the top of the last tier. A final set of stairs led to a flat floor, hemmed in by the last tier. The library did not extend below. All the treasure piled above, held suspended by a pair of giant arches, footed on the last tier.\n\nKat recognized the stone of these arches.\n\nNot granite or marble.\n\nMagnetite again.\n\nAlso, directly beneath the crossing of the arches, rising from the center of the floor, stood a waist-high column of magnetite, like a stone finger pointing up.\n\nKat descended more cautiously to the floor below. A lip of natural granite surrounded a thick glass floor. Gold glass. She didn't step out on it. The brick walls around it also were embedded with mirrored plates of gold glass. Twelve she counted, the same as the number of tiers.\n\nVigor joined her.\n\nLike Kat, he took in all these details, but both their focuses fixed to the lines of silver\u2014probably pure platinum\u2014that etched the floor. The image somehow fit as an ending to this long hunt. It depicted a twisted maze leading to a central rosette. The stubby pillar of magnetite rose from its center.\n\nKat studied the space: the maze, the arches of magnetite, the glass floor. It all reminded her of the tomb of Alexander, with its pyramid and reflective pool.\n\n\"It looks like another mystery to solve.\" She stared at the treasures hanging above her head. \"But if we already opened this ancient storehouse of the mages, what's left to find?\"\n\nVigor stepped closer. \"Don't forget Alexander's gold key. We didn't need it to open anything here.\"\n\n\"That means\u2026\"\n\n\"There's more than just this library.\"\n\n\"But what?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Vigor said. \"But I recognize this maze pattern.\"\n\nKat turned to him.\n\n\"It's the Labyrinth of Daedalus.\"\n\n[ 5:02 A.M. ]\n\n[ OVER FRANCE ]\n\nGray waited to interrogate the others until they were airborne again. The helicopter had flown them all to the Geneva International Airport, where Cardinal Spera had a private Gulfstream jet fueled and cleared for immediate takeoff to Avignon. It was surprising what a high-ranking official in the Vatican could accomplish.\n\nWhich posed Gray's first question.\n\n\"What is the Vatican doing hiring a Guild operative?\" he asked.\n\nThe five of them had swung their seats around to face one another.\n\nCardinal Spera acknowledged the question with a nod. \"It was not the Holy See itself that hired Seichan.\" He motioned to the woman seated beside him. \"It was a smaller group, acting independently. We heard of the Dragon Court's interest and activity. We had already used the Guild to investigate the group peripherally.\"\n\n\"You hired mercenaries?\" Gray accused.\n\n\"What we sought to protect required less-than-official means. To fight fire with fire. The Guild's reputation might be ruthless, but they're also efficient, honor their contracts, and get the job accomplished by any means.\"\n\n\"Yet they didn't stop the massacre in Cologne.\"\n\n\"It was an oversight on my part, I'm afraid. We were unaware of the significance of their theft of the Cairo text. Or that they would act so swiftly.\"\n\nThe cardinal sighed and twisted one of his gold rings, then another, back and forth, a nervous gesture. \"So much bloodshed. After the murders, I approached the Guild again, to directly plant an operative among them. It was easy to do once Sigma had been called into play. The Guild offered its services, Seichan had had a run-in with you already, and the Court took the bite.\"\n\nSeichan spoke up. \"My orders were to discover what the Court knew, how far their operation had progressed, and to thwart them however I saw fit.\"\n\n\"Like standing by while they tortured priests,\" Rachel said.\n\nSeichan shrugged. \"I came late to that little party. And once under way, there's no discouraging Raoul.\"\n\nGray nodded. He still had her coin from Milan. \"And you helped us escape then, too.\"\n\n\"It suited my purpose. By helping you, I was serving my mission to keep the Court challenged.\"\n\nGray studied Seichan as she spoke. Whose side was she really playing on? With all her double and triple crosses, was there more she kept hidden? Her explanation sounded good, but all her efforts could merely be a ruse to serve the Guild.\n\nThe Vatican was naive to trust them\u2026or her.\n\nBut either way, Gray owed Seichan another debt.\n\nAs planned, she had arranged to have Monk whisked out of the hospital before Raoul's goons struck. Gray had assumed she would employ some of her Guild operatives\u2014not call Spera, her employer. But the cardinal had got the job done, declaring Monk a Vatican ambassador and shuffling him out of there.\n\nAnd now they were on their way to Avignon.\n\nStill, one thing bothered Gray.\n\n\"Your group at the Vatican,\" he said, eyeing Spera. \"What's their interest in all this?\"\n\nSpera had folded his hands on the table. Clearly he was reluctant to speak further, but Rachel reached across to him. She took his hands and splayed them out. She leaned forward to study them.\n\n\"You have two gold rings with the papal seal,\" she said.\n\nThe cardinal pulled his hands back, covering one hand over the other. \"One for my station as cardinal,\" he explained. \"And one for my position as secretary of state. Matching rings. Its traditional.\"\n\n\"But they don't match,\" she said. \"I hadn't noticed until you folded your fingers together like that. With the rings on each hand side by side. They aren't the same ring. They're mirror images of the other. Exact reflected copies.\"\n\nGray frowned.\n\n\"They're twins,\" Rachel said.\n\nGray asked to see the rings himself. She was right. Reverse images of the papal seal. \"And Thomas means 'twin,'\" Gray mumbled, staring up at the cardinal. He remembered Spera's comment about how only a small group within the Vatican had hired the Guild. Gray now knew which group.\n\n\"You're a part of the Thomas Church,\" he said. \"That's why you've been trying to stop the Court in secret.\"\n\nSpera stared for a long breath, then slowly nodded. \"Our group has been an accepted, if not promoted, part of the Apostolic Church. Despite beliefs to the contrary, the Church is not beyond science or research. Catholic universities, hospitals, and research facilities advocate forward thinking, new concepts and ideas. And yes, a certain part is steadfast and slow to respond, but it also contains members who do challenge and keep the Church malleable. That is a role we still serve.\"\n\n\"And what about in the past?\" Gray asked. \"This ancient society of alchemists we're hunting? The clues we've been following?\"\n\nCardinal Spera shook his head. \"The Thomas Church of today is not the same as before. That church vanished during the French papacy, disappearing along with the Knights Templar. Mortality, conflict, and secrecy separated it even further, leaving only shadows and rumors. The true fate of that Gnostic church and its ancient lineage remains unknown to us.\"\n\n\"So you're as in the dark about all this as we are,\" Monk said.\n\n\"I'm afraid so. Except we knew that the old church existed. It was not mythology.\"\n\n\"So did the Dragon Court,\" Gray said.\n\n\"Yes. But we've sought to preserve the mystery, trusting in the wisdom of our forefathers, believing it was hidden for a reason and that such knowledge would reveal itself when the time was right. The Dragon Court, on the other hand, has sought to uncover its secrets through bloodshed, corruption, and torture, seeking nothing more than a power to dominate and rule all. We've opposed them for generations.\"\n\n\"And now they are so close,\" Gray said.\n\n\"And they have the gold key,\" Rachel reminded them, shaking her head.\n\nGray rubbed his face in exhaustion. He had handed it over himself. He'd needed the key to convince Raoul of Seichan's renewed loyalty. It had been a gamble certainly, but so had the whole rescue plan. Raoul was supposed to have been captured or killed at the castle\u2014but the bastard had escaped.\n\nGray stared at Rachel. Feeling guilty, he wanted to say something, to explain everything, but he was saved as the pilot came over the radio.\n\n\"You all might want to secure your seatbelts. We're coming up onto some bumpy weather ahead.\"\n\nLightning flashed across the clouds below.\n\nThunderclouds stacked higher ahead, lit up momentarily by the crackling bolts, then vanishing into darkness. They were flying into the teeth of a real storm.\n\n[ 5:12 A.M. ]\n\n[ AVIGNON, FRANCE ]\n\nVigor walked along the stone lip that circled the glass floor\u2014and its etched labyrinth. He had been studying it for a full minute in silence, fascinated by the mystery here.\n\n\"Notice how it's not truly a maze,\" he finally said. \"No blind corners or dead ends. It's just one long, continuous, sinuous path. You can find this exact same maze done in blue and white stones at the Chartres Cathedral outside Paris.\"\n\n\"But what's it doing down here?\" Kat asked. \"And why did you call it the Labyrinth of Daedalus?\"\n\n\"The Chartres labyrinth went by many names. One was le Dedale. Or 'The Daedalus.' Named after the mythological architect who constructed the maze for King Minos of Crete. The labyrinth was the home of the Minotaur, a bull-like beast that the warrior Theseus eventually defeated.\"\n\n\"But why put such a maze inside the Chartres cathedral?\"\n\n\"It wasn't just Chartres. During the height of church-building in the thirteenth century, when Gothic construction was at its most ardent, different mazes were placed in many cathedrals. Amiens, Rheims, Arras, Auxerre\u2026all had mazes as you entered their naves. But centuries later the Church destroyed them all, deeming them pagan artifacts, except for the one at Chartres.\"\n\n\"Why spare Chartres?\"\n\nVigor shook his head. \"That cathedral has always been the exception to the rule. Its roots in fact are pagan, built atop the Grotte des Druides, a famous pagan pilgrimage site. And to this day, unlike any other cathedral, not a single king, pope, or famous personage is buried beneath its stones.\"\n\n\"But that doesn't answer why the maze was repeated down here,\" Kat said.\n\n\"I can imagine a few explanations. First, the Chartres maze was based on a drawing from a second-century Greek text of alchemy. Fitting symbol for our lost alchemists. But the labyrinth at Chartres was also representative of journeying from this world to paradise. Worshippers in Chartres would crawl on hands and knees along this tortuous path from the outside until they reached the center rosette, representing symbolically a pilgrimage from here to Jerusalem, or from this world to the next. Hence the maze's other names. Le Chemin de Jerusalem. 'The Road to Jerusalem.' Or le Chemin du Paradis. 'The Road to Paradise.' It was a spiritual journey.\"\n\n\"Do you think it's hinting that we must make this journey ourselves, follow the alchemists to solve their last great mystery?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"But how do we do that?\"\n\nVigor shook his head. He had an idea, but he needed more time to think about it. Kat seemed to recognize that he was not speaking freely, but she respected him enough and didn't press.\n\nInstead, she checked her watch.\n\n\"We should head back up. See if Gray has attempted to make any contact.\"\n\nVigor nodded. He stared back one more time, pointed his flashlight across the space. It reflected off the glass surfaces: the floor and the embedded plates in the wall. He pointed it up. More reflections glittered, jeweled ornaments in a giant tree of knowledge.\n\nThere was an answer here.\n\nHe needed to find it before it was too late.\n\n[ 5:28 A.M. ]\n\n[ OVER FRANCE ]\n\nWhy aren't they answering?\n\nGray sat with the jet's air-phone fixed to his ear. He was trying to raise Kat. But so far with no luck. Maybe it was the storm, interfering with the signal. The plane bucked and rolled through spats of lightning and sonorous rumbles of thunder.\n\nHe sat near the back of the cabin for privacy. The others, strapped to their seats, were still deep in discussion.\n\nOnly Rachel glanced back periodically, concerned to hear about her uncle. But maybe it was more. Since their rescue in Lausanne, she'd never been more than a step away from him. She still refused to discuss in detail what had happened at the castle. A haunted quality hung about her. And since then, it was as if she sought some solidity from him. Not to cling to\u2014that wasn't her. It was more simple reassurance, grounding herself in the moment. No words were needed.\n\nAnd while Monk had also been severely traumatized, Gray knew they'd eventually talk. They were soldiers-in-arms, best friends. They would work through it.\n\nBut Gray didn't have that patience with Rachel. A part of him wanted an immediate solution and answer to what troubled her. Any attempt to discuss what had happened at Lausanne had so far been rebuffed, gently but firmly. Still, he read the pain in her eyes. And as much as his heart ached, all he could do was stand beside her, wait until she was ready to speak.\n\nAt his ear, the phone's incessant ring finally stopped as the other line was picked up. \"Bryant here.\"\n\nThank God. Gray sat straighter. \"Kat, it's Gray.\"\n\nThe others in the cabin turned toward him.\n\n\"We have Rachel and Monk,\" he said. \"How is everything over there?\"\n\nKat's voice, usually so stoic, rang with relief. \"We're fine. We've found the secret entry.\" She went on to briefly explain all they'd discovered. Occasionally the transmission broke up and he missed a word here and there, due to the storm.\n\nGray noted Rachel's intense stare at him and nodded his head to her. Her uncle was fine.\n\nShe closed her eyes in gratitude and sank back to her seat.\n\nOnce Kat was finished, Gray gave a short account of events in Lausanne. \"Barring any delay from the storm, we'll be landing at Avignon Caumont Airport in about thirty minutes. But we don't have much lead time on the Court. Maybe half an hour if we're lucky.\"\n\nSeichan had given them intel on the Court's means of transportation. Raoul had a pair of planes stored in a small airfield half an hour outside of Lausanne. Calculating the airspeed of the Court's planes, Gray knew they had a small lead on the Court. One he meant to keep.\n\n\"With all teammates secure again,\" Gray told Kat, \"I'm going to break the silence with central command. Contact Director Crowe. I'll have him coordinate ground support with the local authorities. I'll call again as soon as we land. In the meantime, watch your back.\"\n\n\"Roger that, Commander. We'll be waiting for you.\"\n\nGray hung up. He dialed the access number to Sigma command. It rang through a series of scrambled switchboards and finally connected.\n\n\"Logan Gregory.\"\n\n\"Dr. Gregory, it's Commander Pierce.\"\n\n\"Commander\u2014\" The irritation rang in the one word.\n\nGray cut off an official scolding for his lack of communication. \"I must speak to Painter Crowe immediately.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid that's not possible, Commander. It's nearly midnight here. The director left command about five hours ago. But no one knows where he went.\" Aggravation clipped his words again, even harder-edged than his irritation at Gray.\n\nAt least Gray understood the man's frustration. What was the director doing leaving central command at a time like this?\n\n\"He may have gone over to DARPA, to coordinate with Dr. McKnight,\" Logan continued. \"But I'm still ops leader for this mission. I want a full debriefing on your whereabouts.\"\n\nGray suddenly felt uncomfortable speaking. Where had Painter Crowe gone? Or was he even gone? Ice chilled through him. Was Gregory blocking him from reaching the director? Somewhere there was a leak at Sigma. Who could he believe?\n\nHe weighed the odds\u2014and did the only thing he could. Perhaps it was rash, but he had to go with his gut.\n\nHe hung up the phone, disconnecting the line.\n\nHe couldn't risk it.\n\nHe had a jump on Dragon Court. He wouldn't give it away.\n\n[ 5:35 A.M. ]\n\nEighty air miles away, Raoul listened to his contact's report over his plane's radio. A grin slowly spread. \"And they're still in the Pope's Palace?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" his spy said.\n\n\"And you know where they are inside.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nRaoul had called from his castle upon learning of Avignon. He had coordinated with some local talent on the ground in Marseilles. They had been sent to Avignon to hunt down the two operatives: the monsignor and that Sigma bitch who had speared his hand. They had been successful.\n\nRaoul checked the plane's clock. They would be landing in forty-four minutes.\n\n\"We can take them out anytime,\" his spy said.\n\nRaoul saw no need to delay. \"Do it.\"\n\n[ 5:39 A.M. ]\n\n[ AVIGNON, FRANCE ]\n\nKat's life was saved by a penny.\n\nStanding beside the firepit, she had been using the coin to pry open the battery compartment on her penlight. It flipped out of her fingers and to her toes. She bent to pick it up.\n\nThe crack of the pistol coincided with a shatter of stone from the wall beside her head.\n\nSniper.\n\nStill bent over, Kat shoulder-rolled to the floor, pulling out her holstered Glock. She landed on her back and fired between her knees toward the dark doorway where the shots had come from.\n\nShe shot four times, a splay of fire to cover all angles.\n\nShe heard a satisfying grunt and the clatter of a gun to stone. Something heavy followed with a thud.\n\nRolling across the floor, she reached Vigor. The monsignor crouched near the top of the firepit tunnel. She handed him her gun. \"Down,\" she ordered. \"Shoot anybody that comes into view.\"\n\n\"What about you?\"\n\n\"No, don't shoot me.\"\n\n\"I mean where are you going?\"\n\n\"Hunting.\" Kat had already extinguished their flashlights. She unhooked her night-vision goggles and pulled them over her eyes. \"There might be more.\" She freed a long steel blade from her belt.\n\nWith Vigor tucked down his hole, Kat moved to the door and checked the passage. The world was all shades of green. Even the blood. It was the only movement in the hallway, spreading in a pool from the prone body.\n\nShe sidled up to the man dressed in camouflage gear.\n\nMercenary.\n\nHer shot had been lucky, clipping the man through the throat. She didn't bother checking for a pulse. She grabbed his gun and crammed it into her own holster.\n\nStaying low, she worked from passage to hall to room, circling the kitchen area. If there were any others, they'd be near. The aborted gunplay would've sent them into hiding. Foolish. They placed too much faith in firepower, counting on the sniper to do the work for them.\n\nKat worked the circuit efficiently. She came across no one.\n\nRight.\n\nShe reached behind to the side pocket of her pack and removed the heavy plastic-wrapped package. She broke the seal with her thumb and lowered her hand to her hip.\n\nTwisting around a corner, she stepped into the single hallway that funneled back to the kitchen. She stood taller and strode confidently, marching ahead.\n\nBait.\n\nShe balanced the blade in her right hand. Her left emptied the contents of the package across the floor behind her.\n\nRubberized ball bearings, coated with NPL Super Black.\n\nInvisible to night-vision.\n\nThey littered the floor behind her, bouncing and rolling silently.\n\nShe headed to the kitchen, her back to the bulk of the palace. She didn't hear the second man's approach, but she heard his tumbled step behind her.\n\nDropping and twisting, she pivoted on a knee and threw her dagger with all the strength of her shoulder and skill of her wrist. It flew with deadly accuracy, piercing straight through the man's mouth, open in surprise as his right heel slipped on one of the rubber bearings. His gun went off, the shot high, digging into the timbered rafters.\n\nThen he was on his back, convulsing, pithed through the base of his skull.\n\nKat crossed to him, staying low, skating through the ball bearings.\n\nBy the time she reached him, he lay still. She yanked out her knife, confiscated his weapon, and retreated back to the kitchen. She waited another two full minutes for any sign of a third or fourth assassin.\n\nThe palace remained quiet.\n\nThunder rumbled in greater intensity beyond the walls. A series of blinding lightning flashes came through the high windows. The full brunt of the storm crashed across the high hill.\n\nFinally confident they were alone, Kat called the all-clear to Vigor. He climbed back into view.\n\n\"Stay there,\" she warned in case she was wrong.\n\nShe crossed back to the first body and searched it. As she feared, she found a cell phone.\n\nDamn.\n\nShe sat there a moment, his cell phone in her hand. If the kill order had been given to the assassins, she knew for sure that their position in the palace must have been already relayed.\n\nKat returned to Vigor. She checked her watch.\n\n\"The Court knows where we are,\" Vigor said, also assessing the situation.\n\nKat saw no reason to acknowledge the obvious. She freed her own cell phone. Commander Pierce needed to know. She dialed the number he had left, but she failed to pick up a signal. She tried closer to the window. No luck.\n\nThe storm had knocked out reception.\n\nAt least to the jet in the air.\n\nShe pocketed the phone.\n\n\"Maybe once they land,\" Vigor said, recognizing her failed attempt. \"But if the Dragon Court knows we're here, our headway just got narrower.\"\n\n\"What do you propose?\" Kat asked.\n\n\"We gain it back.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\nVigor pointed to the dark stairs. \"We still have twenty minutes until Gray and the others get here. Let's put it to use. We'll solve the riddle below, so once they arrive, we're ready to act.\"\n\nKat nodded at the logic. Plus it was the only way to make up for her lapse. She should never have allowed the spies to get so close.\n\n\"Let's do it.\"\n\n[ 6:02 A.M. ]\n\nGray hurried with the others across the storm-swept tarmac. They had landed at the Avignon Caumont Airport only five minutes ago. He had to give Cardinal Spera credit\u2026or at least his Vatican influence. Customs was cleared in the air, and a BMW sedan waited to ferry them to the Pope's Palace. The cardinal had also left and gone into the terminal, to raise the local authorities. The Pope's Palace had to be locked down.\n\nThat is, after they reached there, of course.\n\nGray ran with his cell phone, attempting to reach Kat and Vigor.\n\nNo answer.\n\nHe checked his signal strength. Free of the plane, the reception was another bar stronger. So what was the problem?\n\nHe let it ring and ring.\n\nFinally he gave up. The only answer lay at the palace. Drenched, they all climbed into the waiting sedan as a brilliant display cracked across the sky, illuminating Avignon, nestled along a silver stretch of the Rh\u00f4ne. The Pope's Palace was visible, the highest point in the city.\n\n\"Any luck?\" Monk asked, nodding to the cell phone.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"It could be the storm,\" Seichan said.\n\nNo one was convinced.\n\nGray had attempted to get Seichan to stay behind at the airport. He wanted only those he fully trusted at his side. But Cardinal Spera had insisted she go, placing full faith in his contract with the Guild. And Seichan reminded Gray of his own contract between them. She had agreed to rescue Monk and Rachel in order to exact her revenge upon Raoul. She had met her end of the bargain. Gray had to meet his.\n\nRachel took the driver's seat.\n\nNot even Monk objected.\n\nBut his partner kept his shotgun on his lap, pointed at Seichan. Taking no chances either. The weapon had been recovered by Cardinal Spera in the Scavi below St. Peter's. Monk seemed relieved to have it returned, more than his own hand.\n\nWith everyone seated, Rachel whipped the car around and headed away from the airport, aiming for the city. She took the narrow streets at breakneck speeds. At this early hour with a fierce storm blowing, there was little other traffic. They flew up some steep grades that had become rivers and planed around corners.\n\nA few minutes later, Rachel wheeled them into the square before the palace. She side-swiped into a pile of chairs. Streamers of lights, now dark, draped the plaza. It looked like an abandoned party, waterlogged and deserted.\n\nThey piled out of the vehicle.\n\nRachel led the way to the main entrance, having been here before. She rushed them through a gateway, to a courtyard, then to a side door, the one Kat had mentioned.\n\nGray found the latch sawed off and the locking mechanism ripped out.\n\nNot the fine handiwork of a former intelligence officer.\n\nSomeone else had broken inside.\n\nGray waved everyone back. \"Stay here. I'll check it out.\"\n\n\"Not to be insubordinate,\" Monk said. \"But I'm not into the whole separating thing again. That didn't work out so well last time.\"\n\n\"I'm coming,\" Rachel said.\n\n\"And I don't believe you have authority over my comings and goings,\" Seichan said.\n\nGray didn't have time to argue\u2014especially if he couldn't win.\n\nThey set off into the palace. Gray had memorized the layout. He scouted ahead in a series of steps, cautious but swift. After coming upon the first body, he slowed. Dead. Already cooling.\n\nHe checked. Okay, this was the handiwork of a former intelligence officer. He moved on and almost landed on his face as his heel slipped on a rubber ball bearing. He caught himself with a hand against the wall.\n\nDefinitely Kat toys.\n\nThey continued, shuffling through the bearings.\n\nAnother body lay near the entrance to the kitchen. They had to step through the pool of blood to get inside.\n\nVoices reached him. He held the others to the hallway and eavesdropped.\n\n\"We're already late,\" a voice said.\n\n\"I'm sorry. I had to be sure. All the angles needed to be checked.\"\n\nKat and Vigor. In mid-argument. Their voices echoed up from a hole in the center of the kitchen. A glow grew brighter, bobbling a bit.\n\n\"Kat,\" Gray called out, not wanting to startle his teammate. He had seen enough of her skill splayed in the halls here. \"It's Gray.\"\n\nThe light went out.\n\nKat appeared a moment later, gun ready, pointed toward him.\n\n\"It's safe,\" Gray said.\n\nKat climbed out. Gray waved the others into the room.\n\nVigor emerged next from the hole.\n\nRachel rushed to him. He opened his arms and hugged her tight.\n\nKat spoke first and nodded to the bloody hallway. \"The Dragon Court knows about this location.\"\n\nGray agreed. \"Cardinal Spera is rousing the local authorities right now. They should be here soon.\"\n\nVigor kept one arm around his niece. \"Then we may have just enough time.\"\n\n\"For what?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"To unlock the true treasure below.\"\n\nKat nodded. \"We solved the riddle here.\"\n\n\"And what's the answer?\" Gray asked.\n\nVigor's eyes brightened. \"Light.\"\n\n[ 6:14 A.M. ]\n\nHe couldn't wait any longer.\n\nFrom the terminal concourse of the tiny airport, Cardinal Spera had spied on the group as they departed in the BMW sedan. He waited five minutes as the commander had requested, giving the team time to reach the palace. He stood up and crossed to one of the armed security personnel, a blond young man in uniform.\n\nIn French, he asked to be taken to the man's on-duty superior. He showed him his Vatican identification. \"It is a matter of utmost urgency.\"\n\nThe guard's eyes widened, recognizing who stood before him.\n\n\"Of course, Cardinal Spera. Right away.\"\n\nThe young man led him off the concourse and through a card-coded security gate. Down at the end of a hall lay the office of the head of airport security. The guard knocked and was gruffly called inside.\n\nHe pushed the door, holding it open. Looking back to the cardinal, the guard failed to see the pistol with a silencer raised toward the back of his head.\n\nCardinal Spera lifted a hand. \"No\u2026\"\n\nThe gunshot sounded like a firm cough. The guard's head snapped forward, followed by his body. Blood sprayed into the hallway.\n\nA door off to the side opened.\n\nAnother gunman appeared. A pistol jabbed into Cardinal Spera's stomach. He was forced into the office. The guard's body was dragged inside behind him. Another man scooted a towel over the floor with his foot, sopping up the gore.\n\nThe door shut.\n\nAnother body already decorated the room, lying crumpled on its side.\n\nThe former security chief.\n\nBehind his desk, a familiar figure stood.\n\nCardinal Spera shook his head in disbelief. \"You're part of the Dragon Court.\"\n\n\"It's leader in fact.\" A pistol rose into sight. \"Clearing the way here for the rest of my men to arrive.\"\n\nThe gun lifted higher.\n\nThe muzzle flashed.\n\nCardinal Spera felt a kick to his forehead\u2014then nothing.\n\n[ 6:18 A.M. ]\n\nRachel stood with the other four around the etched glass floor.\n\nKat stood guard up above, equipped with a radio.\n\nThey had descended the tiers to the bottom level in almost reverential silence. Her uncle had offered commentary about the massive museum nested within this subterranean cathedral, but few questions were posed.\n\nIt truly felt like a church, engendering whispers and awe.\n\nAs they had climbed down, Rachel gaped at the myriad wonders that must be stored here. She had spent all of her adult life protecting and collecting stolen art and antiquities. Here was a collection that dwarfed any museum's. To catalogue it would take decades and a university full of scholars. The immensity of age contained within this space made her life feel small and insignificant.\n\nEven her recent trauma, the revelation of her family's dark past, seemed trivial, a minor blotch against the long history held suspended here.\n\nAs she descended deeper, her burden grew lighter. Its hold loosened around her heart. A certain weightlessness enveloped her.\n\nGray dropped to a knee to stare at the glass floor and the labyrinth drawn in platinum upon it.\n\n\"It's Daedalus's maze,\" her uncle said, and briefly explained its history and ties to Chartres Cathedral.\n\n\"So what are we supposed to do here?\" Gray asked.\n\nVigor walked around the circular floor. He had cautioned them to remain on the lip of granite that surrounded the glass labyrinth. \"Plainly this is another riddle,\" he said. \"Besides the maze, we have a double arch of lodestone above us. A pillar of the same in the center. And these twelve m-state gold plates.\" He indicated the windows of glass that pocked the wall around them, formed by the last tier.\n\n\"They are positioned along the periphery like the markings on a clock,\" Vigor said. \"Another timepiece. Like the hourglass that led us here.\"\n\n\"So it would seem,\" Gray said. \"But you mentioned light.\"\n\nVigor nodded. \"It's always been about light. A quest for the primordial light of the Bible, the light that formed the universe and everything in it. That is what we must prove here. Like magnetism and electricity before, now we must demonstrate an understanding of light\u2026and not just any light. Light with power. Or as Kat described it, coherent light.\"\n\nGray frowned, standing up. \"You mean a laser.\"\n\nVigor nodded. He pulled free an object from his pocket. Rachel recognized it as a laser-targeting scope from one of the Sigma weapons. \"With the power of these superconducting amalgams coupled with jewels like diamonds and rubies, the ancients might have developed some crude form of projecting coherent light, some type of ancient laser. I believe knowledge of that craft is necessary to open the final level.\"\n\n\"How can you be sure?\" Gray said.\n\n\"Kat and I measured these twelve plates of mirrored glass. They are very subtly angled to reflect and bounce light from one to the other in a set pattern. But it would take a powerful light to complete the entire circuit.\"\n\n\"Like a laser,\" Monk said, eyeing the plates with concern.\n\n\"I don't think it would take a strong amount of coherent light,\" Vigor said. \"Like the weak Baghdad batteries used to ignite the gold pyramid in Alexandria, only some small force is necessary, some indication of an understanding of coherence. I think the energy stored in the plates will do the rest.\"\n\n\"And it might not even be energy,\" Gray said. \"If you're right about light being the base of the mystery here, superconductors not only have the capability of storing energy for an infinite period of time, they can also store light.\"\n\nVigor's eyes widened. \"So a little coherent light might free the rest?\"\n\n\"Possibly, but how do we go about starting this chain reaction?\" Gray asked. \"Point the laser at one of the glass plates?\"\n\nVigor stepped around and motioned to the lodestone pillar, about two feet thick, resting in the middle of the floor. \"The pedestal out there stands the same height as the plate windows. I suspect whatever device the ancients used was meant to rest atop it while aimed at one particular window. Our proverbial twelve o'clock marker.\"\n\n\"And which one's that?\" Monk asked.\n\nVigor stopped beside the far window. \"True north,\" he said. \"It took a bit of fancy footwork to calculate with all this lodestone around. But this is the one. I think you set the laser down, point it at this plate, then get clear.\"\n\n\"Seems simple enough,\" Monk said.\n\nGray began to step out toward the central pedestal when his radio buzzed. He placed a hand over his ear, listening. Everyone stared at him.\n\n\"Kat, be careful,\" Gray said into his radio. \"Approach cautiously. Let them know you're not hostile. Keep silent about us until you're sure.\"\n\nHe ended the call.\n\n\"What's the matter?\" Monk asked.\n\n\"Kat's spotted a patrol of French police. They've entered the palace. She's going to investigate.\" Gray waved the group toward the stairs. \"This will have to wait till later. We'd better head back up.\"\n\nThey filed out from around the glass pool. Rachel waited for her uncle. He looked reluctantly toward the glass floor.\n\n\"Maybe it's best,\" she said. \"Maybe we shouldn't fool with what we barely understand. What if we did it wrong?\" Rachel nodded to the massive library of ancient knowledge already contained here. \"If we're too greedy, we could lose it all.\"\n\nHer uncle nodded, put an arm around her as they climbed up, but his eyes still occasionally glanced below.\n\nThey worked their way up four tiers when a commanding voice bullhorned down to them from above.\n\n\"TOUT LE MONDE EN LE BAS L\u00c0! SORTEZ AVEC VOS MAINS SUR LA T\u00caTE!\"\n\nEveryone froze.\n\nRachel translated. \"They're calling for us to exit with our hands on our heads.\"\n\nA new voice bellowed through the bullhorn in English. It was Kat. \"COMMANDER! THEY CONFISCATED MY RADIO, BUT IT IS THE FRENCH POLICE. I'VE VERIFIED THEIR LEADER'S IDENTIFICATION.\"\n\n\"Must be the guard sent by Cardinal Spera,\" Monk said.\n\n\"Or someone called in a burglary, noting the lights in here,\" Rachel added. \"Or the broken door lock.\"\n\n\"SORTEZ TOUT DE SUITE! C'EST VOTRE DERNIER AVERTISSEMENT!\"\n\n\"They certainly don't sound happy,\" Monk said.\n\n\"What do you expect with all the dead bodies upstairs?\" Seichan said.\n\n\"Okay,\" Gray ordered. \"Up we go. We need to prepare them for the arrival of Raoul and his buddies.\"\n\nThey all marched up the remaining tiers. Gray had them holster or set aside their weapons. Not wanting to spook the police, they obeyed the command and went upstairs with their hands on their heads.\n\nThe kitchen, empty before, was now crowded with uniformed men. Rachel spotted Kat, back to one wall, hands on her head, too. The French police were taking no chances. Guns were raised.\n\nGray attempted to explain in stilted French, but they were separated and made to stand against the wall. The leader shone his light down the passageway, nose crinkled with distaste.\n\nA commotion by the hallway marked the arrival of a newcomer, someone with authority. Rachel watched a familiar family friend enter the kitchen, out of place here, but welcome. Had Cardinal Spera called him?\n\nHer uncle brightened, too. \"General Rende! Thank God!\"\n\nIt was Rachel's boss, the head of her Carabinieri unit. He cut a striking figure, even out of uniform.\n\nUncle Vigor tried to step forward but was forced back. \"You must get the gendarmes to listen. Before it's too late.\"\n\nGeneral Rende eyed her uncle with an uncharacteristic sneer of disdain. \"It's already too late.\"\n\nOut from behind him marched Raoul."
            },
            {
                "title": "THE GOLD KEY",
                "text": "[ JULY 27, 7:00 A.M. ]\n\n[ AVIGNON, FRANCE ]\n\nGray seethed as his wrists were secured behind his back and snugged tight with plastic fast-ties. The other mercenaries, masquerading as French police, stripped weapons and secured the rest of them. Even the bastard Raoul wore a policeman's uniform.\n\nThe giant stepped in front of Gray. \"You're damn tough to kill,\" Raoul said. \"But that's going to end. And don't hope for a rescue call from the cardinal. He ran into an old friend at the airport.\" He nodded to General Rende. \"It seemed our leader here decided the poor cardinal was of no further use to the Court.\"\n\nGray's heart clenched.\n\nRaoul grinned, a savage and bloody expression.\n\nGeneral Rende marched up to them, dressed in civilian clothes, an expensive black suit and tie, polished Italian shoes. He had been in discussion with another man, one wearing a clerical collar. It had to be the prefect, Alberto Menardi, the Court's resident Rasputin. He had a book tucked under one arm and a satchel in hand.\n\nThe general stepped to Raoul. \"Enough.\"\n\n\"Yes, Imperator.\" Raoul backed a step.\n\nRende pointed down to the tunnel. \"We don't have time to gloat. Take them below. Find out what they've learned. Then kill them.\" Rende stared around the room, his blue eyes icy, his silver hair slicked back. \"I will make no pretensions of your survival. Your only choice is to make your deaths slow or quick. So make your peace in whatever manner you see fit.\"\n\nVigor spoke by the far wall. \"How could you?\"\n\nRende strode over to him. \"Fear not, my old friend, we will spare your niece,\" he said. \"That I promise you. You've both served your duty by keeping the Court abreast of archaeological and art history treasures. You've served the Court well these many years.\"\n\nVigor's face went cold, realizing how he'd been used and manipulated.\n\n\"Now that role comes to an end,\" Rende said. \"But your niece's bloodline goes back to kings and will produce kings to come.\"\n\n\"By mating me with that bastard?\" Rachel spat back.\n\n\"It is not the man or the woman,\" Raoul answered. \"It's always been the blood and the future. The purity of our lineage is as much a treasure as what we seek.\"\n\nGray stared at Rachel, trussed up next to her uncle. Her face was pale, but her eyes flashed with fury. Especially when Raoul grabbed her by the elbow. She spat in his face.\n\nHe cuffed her hard across the mouth, knocking her head back and splitting her lip.\n\nGray lunged forward, but a pair of rifles shoved him back.\n\nRaoul leaned closer to her. \"I like a little fire in my bed.\" He dragged her forward. \"And this time, I'm not letting you out of my sight.\"\n\n\"Get what we came here for,\" Rende said, his face unperturbed by the violence. \"Then we'll start unloading as much as we can before the storm ends. The trucks will be arriving in another fifteen minutes.\"\n\nGray now understood the uniforms. The masquerade would buy them time to clear a good section of the treasure below. He didn't fail to note the barrow full of silver incendiary grenades wheeled into the room as they were tied up. Anything that the Court couldn't carry away would be destroyed.\n\nAlberto joined Raoul.\n\n\"Bring the axes, the electric drills, and the acid,\" Raoul said, and waved his men forward.\n\nGray knew the tools were not meant for heavy construction.\n\nThey were tools of a true sadist.\n\nProdded by guns, separated by soldiers, the group was led back down into the tunnel. Once below, even the guards, smirking and hard-edged, grew quiet, eyes widening.\n\nRaoul stared at the spread of Gothic arches and the treasure. \"We'll need more trucks.\"\n\nAlberto walked in a daze. \"Amazing\u2026simply amazing. And according to the Arcadium, this is just the dregs left at the true doorstep to a greater treasure.\"\n\nDespite the danger, Vigor glanced over to the prefect in shock. \"You have Jacques de Molay's last testament?\"\n\nAlberto clutched his book tighter to his chest. \"A seventeenth-century copy. The last known to exist.\"\n\nGray stared at Vigor, meeting his eyes questioningly.\n\n\"Jacques de Molay was the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, tortured by the Inquisition for his refusal to reveal the location of their treasure. He was burned at the stake. But there were rumors of a Templar text, a final treatise by de Molay before he was captured.\"\n\n\"The Arcadium,\" Alberto said. \"In the possession of the Dragon Court for centuries. It hinted at a treasure. One independent of the mass of gold and jewels of Knights Templar. A greater treasure. One that would put the very keys to the world into its discoverer's hand.\"\n\n\"The lost secret of the mages,\" Vigor said.\n\n\"It's here,\" Alberto said, eyes almost aglow.\n\nThey descended the tiers toward the glass floor.\n\nUpon reaching the bottommost tier, the soldiers spread out atop it, taking up positions all along the rim. Gray and the others were forced to their knees. Alberto went down alone to the glass floor, studying its labyrinth.\n\n\"One last riddle,\" he mumbled.\n\nRaoul stood with Rachel near the top of the last terrace's stairs. He turned to face the group on their knees. \"I think we'll start with the women,\" Raoul said. \"But which one?\"\n\nSwinging to the side, he grabbed a fistful of Rachel's hair, at the back of her neck. He bent over her and kissed her hard on the mouth. Rachel squirmed, gasping, but tied up, there was little she could do.\n\nFire narrowed Gray's vision. He knelt down and stamped the toe of his boot against the stone. He felt the hidden blade snick out of the heel, the same one he had used to free himself in the castle cell. He hid the knife behind his tied wrists. With minimal movement, he cut the ties on the razored edge. Though free, he kept his hands behind his back.\n\nRaoul pulled back from his embrace. His lower lip bled. Rachel had bitten him, but he simply grinned. He shoved her hard in the center of her chest. Off balance, she fell to her backside with a teeth-jarring impact.\n\n\"Stay,\" Raoul said, palm out, as if commanding a dog.\n\nA rifle at Rachel's skull firmed the order.\n\nRaoul turned back to the group. \"I'll save my fun for her later. So we'll need another woman to start with.\" He strode over to Seichan, stared down at her, then shook his head. \"You'd probably enjoy it too much.\"\n\nHe turned next to Kat and waved to the guards that flanked her to drag her in front of the others. Raoul bent down and picked up the ax and a power drill. He stared between the two, then lowered the ax. \"Already did that.\"\n\nHe lifted the drill and pressed the trigger. The buzz of its motor echoed across the chamber, hungry with the promise of pain.\n\n\"We'll start with an eye,\" Raoul said.\n\nOne of the guards yanked Kat's head back. She tried to fight, but the other kicked her hard in the belly, knocking out her breath. As they held her in place, Gray saw the tear roll from the corner of Kat's eye. Not scared. Angry.\n\nRaoul lowered the drill toward her face.\n\n\"Don't!\" Gray yelled. \"There's no need for this. I'll tell you what we know.\"\n\n\"No,\" Kat said, and was punched in the face by one of the guards.\n\nGray understood her warning. If the Dragon Court gained the power here, the \"keys to the world,\" it would mean Armageddon. Their own lives here, their own blood, were not worth that price.\n\n\"I'll tell you,\" Gray repeated.\n\nRaoul straightened a bit.\n\nGray hoped to lure him closer.\n\nBut Raoul remained where he was. \"I don't seem to recall asking any questions yet.\" He bent over again. \"This is only a demonstration. When it comes to the question-and-answer period of this conversation, we'll get more serious.\"\n\nThe drill growled louder.\n\nGray could wait no longer. He would not sit idle as another teammate was maimed by this madman. Better to die in a firefight. He leapt to his feet, driving an elbow into the groin of the soldier guarding him. With the man's attention fixed to the torture, Gray caught his rifle, pointed it at Raoul, and pulled the trigger.\n\nClick.\n\nNothing happened.\n\n[ 7:22 A.M. ]\n\nRachel watched Gray be clubbed to the ground by a soldier behind him, using the butt of a rifle.\n\nRaoul laughed, revving his drill.\n\n\"Take his boots off,\" Raoul ordered. He stalked up to Gray as he was manhandled around. \"You don't think I failed to have the security tapes reviewed after your escape, do you? When I didn't hear from the two men I sent back to assassinate you at the castle, I sent another team to investigate. Nothing but dogs in the yard. They found out how you escaped and radioed it to me.\"\n\nGray's laces were sliced and the boots tugged off.\n\n\"So I let you have your little hope,\" Raoul said. \"It's always best to know an enemy's secret. Keeps surprises to a minimum. I figured you'd eventually go for a gun\u2026but I'd hoped you'd have a bit more stomach. Waited until things got really bloody.\" Raoul lifted the drill and turned away. \"Now, where were we?\"\n\nRachel stared as Gray was trussed up again. His face was hollow and hopeless. This scared her more than the threat of torture.\n\n\"Leave the others alone,\" Gray said. He struggled to his feet. \"You're wasting time. We know how to open the gate. Harm a single one of us and you'll learn nothing.\"\n\nRaoul eyed him. \"Explain and I'll consider your offer.\"\n\nGray searched the others, looking forlorn. \"It's light,\" he said.\n\nKat groaned. Vigor hung his head.\n\n\"He's right,\" a voice called up from the floor below. Alberto climbed a few steps. \"The mirrors on the wall are reflective and angled.\"\n\n\"It takes laser light,\" Gray continued, revealing all. He went on to explain what Vigor had related.\n\nAlberto joined them. \"Yes, yes\u2026it makes perfect sense.\"\n\n\"Well, we'll just see,\" Raoul said. \"If he's wrong, we'll start chopping limbs.\"\n\nGray turned to Rachel and the others. \"They would've found out eventually. They already have the gold key.\"\n\nRaoul ordered his men: \"Bring the prisoners down below. I don't want to take any chances. Stand them against the lower wall. The rest of you\"\u2014he eyed the ring of soldiers that stood guard atop the tier\u2014\"keep a constant bead on each of them. Shoot anyone that moves.\"\n\nRachel and the other five were led below and forced to separate, to spread out along the wall. Gray stood only three steps from her side. She longed to reach out to him, to hold his hand, but he seemed lost in his own misery.\n\nAnd she dared not move.\n\nSoldiers lay flat on the tier above, rifles aimed at them.\n\nGray mumbled, staring at the glass floor. His words reached only her own ears. \"The Minotaur's maze.\"\n\nHer brow crinkled. Standing in place, he glanced at her, then back to the floor. What was he trying to indicate?\n\nThe Minotaur's maze.\n\nGray was referring to one of the names for the labyrinth. Daedalus's maze. The mythic labyrinth that was home to the bullish Minotaur, a deadly monster in a deadly maze.\n\nDeadly.\n\nRachel remembered the trap at Alexander's tomb. The deadly passageway. To solve these riddles didn't require just the technology. You had to know your history and mythology. Gray was trying to warn her. They may have solved the technology, but not the entire mystery.\n\nShe now understood Gray's hope. He had only told Raoul enough to hopefully get the man killed.\n\nRaoul freed a laser scope and stepped toward the central pedestal. Then he seemed to think better of it. He pointed the scope to Gray.\n\n\"You,\" he said, plainly suspicious. \"You take it out there.\"\n\nGray was forced away from the wall, away from her side. His arms were cut free. But he was hardly free. Rifles tracked his every step.\n\nRaoul shoved the laser into Gray's hand. \"Set it up. Like you described.\"\n\nGray glanced to Rachel, then headed across the glass floor in his socks.\n\nHe had no choice.\n\nHe had to enter the Minotaur's maze.\n\n[ 7:32 A.M. ]\n\nGeneral rende checked his watch. Thunder rumbled beyond the walls of the palace. What he had sought for so long was about to come true. Even if they failed to open whatever secret vault lay below, he had taken a brief look. That storehouse alone was a treasure to dwarf all others.\n\nThey would escape with as much as they could and destroy the rest.\n\nHis demolition expert was already going over the incendiary charges.\n\nAll that was left was to wait for the trucks.\n\nHe had arranged for a caravan of three heavy-duty Peugeot trucks. They would run in shifts to a huge warehouse at the outskirts of town near the river, unhooking their load, mounting an empty container, and returning.\n\nBack and forth for as long as they could.\n\nThe general frowned at his watch. They were running late. He had had a call from the lead driver five minutes ago. The roads were a mess, and even though dawn had already broken, it remained a perpetual twilight under the thunderclouds and torrents of rain.\n\nDespite the delay, the storm served to shelter them, to cover their actions, to keep any interest here to a minimum. Outlying guards were ready to eliminate anyone who became too curious. Bribes had been paid.\n\nThey should have half a day.\n\nA call came through on the radio. He answered it.\n\n\"First truck is climbing the hill now,\" the driver reported. Thunder boomed in the distance.\n\nNow it began.\n\n[ 7:33 A.M. ]\n\nScope in hand, Gray crossed to the short pillar of magnetite. Overhead, double arches of the same stone stretched. Even without touching anything, Gray sensed the power that lay dormant.\n\n\"Hurry up!\" Raoul called from the edge.\n\nGray stepped to the pedestal. He placed the scope atop the pillar, balanced it, and pointed it toward the twelve o'clock window. He paused to take a deep breath. He had tried to warn Rachel to be ready for anything. Once this was activated, they were all in danger.\n\n\"Turn on the laser!\" Raoul barked. \"Or we begin shooting out kneecaps.\"\n\nGray reached to the power switch and thumbed it on.\n\nA fine beam of red light shot out and struck the gold glass plate.\n\nGray remembered the batteries at Alexander's tomb. It took a moment for whatever charge or electrical capacitance to build, then the fireworks began.\n\nHe had no intention of standing here when that happened.\n\nHe turned and strode rapidly back to the wall. He didn't run, no rash actions, or he'd be shot in the back. He regained his spot on the wall.\n\nRaoul and Alberto stood at the base of the stairs.\n\nAll eyes were on the single strand of red fire that linked scope to mirror.\n\n\"Nothing's happening,\" Raoul growled.\n\nVigor spoke from the other side. \"It may take a few seconds to build enough energy to activate the mirror.\"\n\nRaoul raised a pistol. \"If it doesn't\u2014\"\n\nIt did.\n\nA deep tonal note sounded and a new ray of laser shot out from the twelve o'clock plate and struck the five o'clock one. There was a half-second dazzle.\n\nNo one spoke.\n\nThen another beam of red fire blazed out, slamming into the ten-o'clock marker. It reflected immediately, springing from mirror to mirror.\n\nGray stared at the spread before him, forming a fiery star, waist high. He and the others stood between points of the display, knowing better than to move.\n\nThe symbolism was plain.\n\nThe Star of Bethlehem.\n\nThe light that had guided the Magi.\n\nThe humming note grew louder. The star's fire blazed brighter.\n\nGray turned his head, squinting.\n\nThen he felt it, some threshold crossed. Pressure slammed outward, shoving him to the wall.\n\nThe Meissner field again.\n\nThe star seemed to bow upward from the center as if shoved up from the floor. It reached the cross of magnetite arches overhead.\n\nA burst of energy crackled across the vaulted archways.\n\nGray felt a tug on the metal buttons of his shirt.\n\nThe magnetic charge of the arches had grown tenfold.\n\nThe star's energy was repelled by the new field and slammed back down, striking the glass floor with a loud metallic chime, the strike of a giant bell.\n\nThe central pillar blasted upward as if jarred by the collision. It struck the center of the crossed arches\u2014and stuck there, two electromagnets clinging tight.\n\nAs the chime faded, Gray felt a pop in his ears as the field broke. The star winked out, though a ghost of its blaze still shone across his vision. He blinked away the afterburn.\n\nOverhead, the short column still clung to the intersection of the archways, pointing downward now. Gray followed the stone finger.\n\nIn the middle of the floor, where the column had stood before, lay a perfect circle of solid gold. A match to the key. At its center\u2014the center of everything\u2014was a black slot.\n\n\"The keyhole!\" Alberto said. He dropped his book, opened his satchel, and pulled out the gold key.\n\nGray caught a hard glance from across the floor, from Vigor. At that moment, Gray had handed them not just the gold key, but the key to the world.\n\nAlberto must have suspected the same. In his excitement, he stepped out onto the glass floor.\n\nBolts of electricity shot upward from the surface, piercing through the man, lifting him off his feet and holding him suspended. He screamed and writhed as fire licked into him. Skin blackened; his hair and clothes caught fire.\n\nRaoul tripped back to the stairs in horror, landing on his backside.\n\nGray turned to Rachel. \"Get ready to run.\"\n\nNow might be their only chance.\n\nBut she didn't seem to hear him, transfixed like the others.\n\nAlberto's cry finally cut out. As if knowing its prey was dead, a final bolt of energy tossed the man's corpse to the shoreline of the glass pool.\n\nNo one moved. The smell of burnt flesh wafted.\n\nEveryone stared at the deadly labyrinth.\n\nThe Minotaur had arrived.\n\n[ 7:35 A.M. ]\n\nGeneral rende retreated back up the steps to the kitchen. He had been called down by one of his soldiers when the brilliant star had ignited below. He wanted to see what was happening\u2014but from a safe distance away.\n\nThen the light had expired.\n\nDisappointed, he had turned away as a tortured wail erupted.\n\nIt stood the small hairs on his neck on end.\n\nHe fled back up to the kitchen. One of his men, wearing a French uniform, rushed up to him. \"The first truck is here!\" he said hurriedly.\n\nRende shook off the momentary anxiety.\n\nHe had a job to do.\n\n\"Radio everyone who's not on guard duty. It's time to empty the vault.\"\n\n[ 7:36 A.M. ]\n\nRachel knew they were in trouble.\n\nRaoul roared back to his feet, swinging toward Gray. \"You knew this!\"\n\nGray backed a step down the wall. \"How could I know he'd be fried?\"\n\nRaoul lifted his pistol and pointed it. \"Time to learn a lesson.\"\n\nBut the gun was not pointed at Gray.\n\n\"No!\" Rachel moaned.\n\nThe pistol blasted. Across the floor, Uncle Vigor clutched his belly with a shocked groan. His feet slid out from under him, and he sank to the floor.\n\nSeichan moved to his side, slipping to him like a black cat. She kept Vigor's feet from touching the glass.\n\nBut Raoul wasn't done with them. He pointed his pistol next toward Kat. She was only three meters away. The gun pointed at her head.\n\n\"Don't!\" Gray said. \"I had no idea that would happen! But I now know the mistake Alberto made!\"\n\nRaoul turned to him, anger in every muscle. But Rachel recognized his fury was not at the loss of Alberto, but due to the fact that the sudden and dramatic death had frightened him. And he didn't like being scared.\n\n\"What?\" Raoul growled.\n\nGray pointed to the labyrinth. \"You can't just walk out to the keyhole. You have to follow the path.\" He waved to the twisted maze.\n\nRaoul's eyes narrowed, the fire ebbed. Understanding lessened the fear.\n\n\"Makes sense,\" Raoul said. He crossed to the corpse, bent down and broke the fire-contorted fingers, still clutched around the key. He freed the length of gold and wiped the charred flesh from its surface.\n\nHe waved one of his men down from above. He pointed out to the center. \"Take this out there,\" he ordered, and held out the gold key.\n\nThe young soldier balked. He had seen what had happened to Alberto.\n\nRaoul pointed his pistol at the man's forehead. \"Or die here. Your choice.\"\n\nThe man reached out and took the key.\n\n\"Get going,\" Raoul said. \"We're on a timetable here.\" He kept his pistol pointed at the man's back.\n\nThe soldier crossed to the entry point of the maze. Leaning back, he placed one toe on the glass, then yanked it back. Nothing happened. More confident, but wary, he reached again and placed his foot down on the surface.\n\nStill no electrical display.\n\nClenching his teeth, the soldier stepped fully out onto the glass floor.\n\n\"Stay away from the platinum etchings,\" Gray warned.\n\nThe soldier nodded, glancing appreciatively toward Gray. He took another step.\n\nWithout warning, a stab of crimson fire jetted out of a pair of windows. The star flickered into existence, then died again.\n\nThe soldier had frozen in place. Then his legs sagged under him. He fell backward out of the maze. As he struck the ground, his body split in halves, sheared across the waist by the laser. A tangled nest of intestines snaked out from the upper half.\n\nRaoul backed away, eyes flashing fire. The pistol again lifted. \"Any more bright ideas?\"\n\nGray remained stock-still. \"I\u2026I don't know.\"\n\n\"Maybe it's a timing thing,\" Monk called over. \"Maybe you have to keep moving. Like that movie Speed.\"\n\nGray glanced to his teammate, then back again, unconvinced.\n\n\"I've had enough with losing my own men,\" Raoul said, fury building. \"And I'm done waiting while you piece this puzzle together. So you'll have to simply show me how it's done.\"\n\nHe motioned Gray forward.\n\nGray stood in place, obviously attempting to find some answer.\n\n\"I can always begin shooting your friends again. I know it helps my stress.\" Raoul pointed the gun again at Kat.\n\nGray finally moved, stepping over the prone body.\n\n\"Don't forget the key,\" Raoul said.\n\nGray bent to pick it up.\n\nIt then struck Rachel. Of course.\n\nGray straightened and moved to the entry point of the maze. He began to step out, bunching up a bit to run, ready to follow Monk's advice.\n\n\"No!\" Rachel called out. She hated to help Raoul reach his goal. She had been prepared to die to keep the Court from gaining what lay hidden here. But she couldn't watch Gray die either, cut in half or electrocuted.\n\nShe remembered Gray's whisper about the Minotaur. He refused to give up. As long as they still lived, there was hope. She believed him. And more importantly, she trusted him.\n\nGray turned to her.\n\nIn his eyes, she saw the same trust shining there.\n\nFor her.\n\nThe weight of it silenced her.\n\n\"What?\" Raoul barked.\n\n\"It's not speed,\" Rachel said, startled. \"Time is valued by these alchemists. They left clues, from an hourglass to this mirrored clockface. They would not use time to kill.\"\n\n\"Then what?\" Gray asked, eyes still heavy upon her. But it was a burden she was willing to bear.\n\nRachel spoke quickly. \"The mazes in all the cathedrals. They represented symbolic journeys. From this world to the next. To spiritual enlightenment in the center.\" She pointed to the dead body, cut in half at the waist, the height of the mirrored windows. \"But to reach there, pilgrims crawled. On hands and knees.\"\n\nGray nodded. \"Below the level of these windows.\"\n\nAcross the floor, her uncle groaned, seated on the floor, blood seeping between his fingers. Seichan sat with him. Rachel knew it wasn't the pain that elicited the moaned response. She saw it in her uncle's eyes. He had already figured out this last riddle, too. But he had kept silent.\n\nBy speaking, Rachel had betrayed the future, risking the world.\n\nHer eyes found Gray. She had made her choice. With no regret.\n\nEven Raoul believed her.\n\nHe waved for Gray to hand over the key. \"I'll take it there myself\u2014but you're going first.\"\n\nPlainly Raoul did not have full trust in her idea. Gray passed him the key.\n\n\"As a matter of fact,\" Raoul said, pointing his gun at Rachel, \"since it's your idea, why don't you come along, too? To help keep your man honest.\"\n\nRachel stumbled forward. Her hands were cut free. She crouched down with Gray. He nodded to her, transmitting a silent message.\n\nWe'll be okay.\n\nShe had little reason to feel confident, but she nodded back.\n\n\"Let's get going,\" Raoul said.\n\nGray went first, crawling out onto the maze without hesitation, fully trusting in Rachel's assessment.\n\nShe was held back by Raoul until Gray was a full body-length away.\n\nThe glass floor remained quiet.\n\n\"Okay, now you,\" she was ordered.\n\nRachel set out, following Gray's path. She felt a vibration through her palms. The face of the glass was warm. As she moved, she heard a distant hum, not mechanical or electric, more like the murmur of a vast crowd across a distance. Maybe it was the blood rushing through her ears, pounded by her worried heart.\n\nRaoul yelled behind her to his men. \"Shoot any of the others if they move! The same goes for the two out here. Upon my orders, take them out.\"\n\nSo if the maze didn't kill them, Raoul would.\n\nRachel continued onward. With only one hope.\n\nGray.\n\n[ 7:49 A.M. ]\n\nRende placed a hand on the demolition expert's shoulder. \"Are the charges primed?\"\n\n\"All sixteen of them,\" the man answered. \"Just tap this button three times. The grenades are daisy-chained on a ten-minute fuse.\"\n\nPerfect.\n\nHe turned to the row of sixteen men. Other wheelbarrows stood out in the hall, waiting to be loaded. Five handtrucks also stood ready. The first truck had been carefully backed to the main gate, and the second was on its way. It was time to empty the vault.\n\n\"Get to work, men. Double time.\"\n\n[ 7:50 A.M. ]\n\nGray's knees ached.\n\nThree-quarters around the maze, it became torture on his kneecaps. The smooth glass now felt like rough concrete. But he dared not stop. Not until he reached the center.\n\nAs he made his turns around the circuit, he crossed alongside the neighboring paths with Rachel and Raoul. It would only take a hip check to knock Raoul off his path. Even Raoul suspected this, pointing his gun at Gray's face as they passed.\n\nBut there was no need for the caution. Gray knew if he crossed the platinum etched lines with even a hand or a hip, he'd be killed as quickly as Raoul. And with the glass face activated, Rachel would probably be electrocuted, too.\n\nSo he let Raoul pass unmolested.\n\nWhen he crossed paths with Rachel, their eyes remained fixed upon each other. Neither spoke. A bond had grown between them, one built on danger and trust. Gray's heart ached with every pass: to hold her, to comfort her. But there was no stopping.\n\nAround and around they went.\n\nA droning grew inside his head, vibrating up the bones of his arms and legs. He also heard a commotion above. In the cathedral. Soldiers involved in some activity up there.\n\nHe ignored it all and crawled onward.\n\nAfter a final turn, a straight shot led to the center rosette. Gray hurried forward, glad to reach home base at last. With his knees on fire, he lunged the last distance and sprawled onto his back.\n\nThe droning grew into a murmuring just beyond the range of the audible. He sat up, his hairs vibrating with the noise. What the hell\u2026?\n\nRachel appeared and crawled toward him. Staying low, he helped her into the center. She slipped into his arms. \"Gray\u2026what are we\u2014?\"\n\nHe knelt with her and squeezed her silent.\n\nThere was only one hope.\n\nA slim one.\n\nRaoul appeared and crawled over to them. He wore a huge grin. \"The Dragon Court owes you both for your generous service.\" He pointed his gun. \"Now stand up.\"\n\n\"What?\" Gray asked.\n\n\"You heard me. Stand up. Both of you.\"\n\nWith no choice, Gray tried to pull himself out of Rachel's arms, but she clung to him. \"Let me first,\" he whispered.\n\n\"Together,\" she answered.\n\nGray met her eyes and saw her determination.\n\n\"Trust me,\" she said.\n\nGray took a deep breath, and the two of them stood up. Gray expected to be cut in half, but the floor remained quiet.\n\n\"A safe zone,\" Rachel said. \"In the center of the star. The lasers never crossed this part.\"\n\nGray kept his arm around Rachel. It fit like it belonged there.\n\n\"Keep back or you'll be shot,\" Raoul warned. He stood up next, stretched a kink, and reached into a pocket. \"Now to see what prize you delivered to us.\"\n\nRaoul pulled out the key, bent down, and shoved it into the keyhole.\n\n\"A perfect fit,\" Raoul mumbled.\n\nGray pulled Rachel tighter into his arms, fearful of what would happen next, certain of only one thing.\n\nIn her ear, he whispered the secret he had been holding from everyone since Alexandria.\n\n\"The key's a fake.\"\n\n[ 7:54 A.M. ]\n\nGeneral rende had come down to oversee the first load of treasure. They could not take everything, so someone had to perform triage, pick the choicest bits of antiquity, art, and ancient texts. He stood near the landing with inventory pad in hand. His men crawled along the topmost tier of the massive structure.\n\nThen a strange rumble vibrated through the cavern.\n\nIt wasn't an earthquake.\n\nMore like something shook all his senses at once. His balance shifted a few degrees off kilter. His hearing roared. His skin chilled like someone had just walked over his grave. But worst of all, his vision shimmered. It was like the world became a bad television picture tube, fritzing the screen image, playing with perspective. Three dimensions dissolved to a flat two.\n\nRende fell back to the stairwell.\n\nSomething was happening. Something wrong.\n\nHe felt it down to his bones.\n\nHe fled up the stairs.\n\n[ 7:55 A.M. ]\n\nRachel clung to Gray as the vibration worsened. The floor under them pulsed with white light. With each beat, arcs of electricity raced outward along the lines of platinum, crackling and flaring. In seconds, the entire labyrinth shone with an inner fire.\n\nGray's words echoed in her ears. The key's a fake.\n\nAnd the labyrinth responded.\n\nA deep tone chimed beneath them, ominous and foreboding.\n\nPressure again built, closing and squeezing.\n\nA new Meissner field grew, strangely skewing perception.\n\nOverhead, the entire complex seemed to vibrate, like a flickering filament of a lightbulb.\n\nReality bent.\n\nA meter away, Raoul straightened from where he crouched over the inserted key, unsure of what was happening. But he must have sensed it, too. An overwhelming sense of wrongness. It nauseated the senses.\n\nRachel clung to Gray, glad for the support.\n\nRaoul swung toward them and brought his pistol up. He came to the truth too late. \"Back at the castle. You gave us the wrong goddamn key.\"\n\nGray stared at him. \"And you lose.\"\n\nRaoul pointed his gun.\n\nAround them, the fiery star shattered back into existence, blasting forth from all the windows simultaneously. Raoul crouched lower, fearful of being cut in half.\n\nOverhead the stone pedestal broke free from its magnetic attachment to the lodestone arches. It plummeted back to the ground. Raoul looked up too late. The edge of the stone caught him in the shoulder and crushed him to the floor.\n\nAs the pillar struck, the glass shattered like ice under them, skittering out in all directions. From the cracks, a blinding brilliance erupted.\n\nGray and Rachel remained standing.\n\n\"Hold tight,\" Gray whispered.\n\nRachel sensed it, too. A rising vibration of power, under them, around them, through them. She needed to be closer. He responded, turning her to face him, arms crushing her to his chest, leaving no space. She pulled hard to him, feeling his heart beat through his rib cage.\n\nSomething was rushing up from below.\n\nA bubble of black energy. It was about to strike.\n\nShe closed her eyes as the world exploded with light.\n\nOn the floor, Raoul's shoulder flamed with white-hot agony. Crushed bones ground together. He fought to escape, panicked.\n\nThen a supernova exploded under and through him, so bright it penetrated to the back of his skull. It spread through his brain. He fought its penetration, knowing it would undo him.\n\nHe felt violated, splayed open, every thought, action, desire bared.\n\nNo\u2026\n\nHe could not shut it out. It was larger than him, more than him, undeniable. All his being was drawn out along a shining white thread. Stretched to the point of breaking, agonized, but it left no room for anger, self-hatred, shame, loathing, fear, or recrimination. Only a purity. An unadulterated essence of being. This is who he could be, who he was born to be.\n\nNo\u2026\n\nHe didn't want to see this. But he could not turn away. Time stretched toward the infinite. He was trapped, aflame in a cleansing light, far more painful than any Hell.\n\nHe faced himself, his life, his possibility, his ruin, his salvation\u2026\n\nHe saw the truth\u2014and it burned.\n\nNo more\u2026\n\nBut the worst was still to come.\n\nSeichan clutched the old man to her chest. Both kept their heads bowed from the blinding eruption of light, but Seichan caught glimpses from the corner of her eyes.\n\nThe fiery star blasted skyward on a fountain of light, rising from the center of the labyrinth and spinning upward into the dark cathedral above. Other glass mirrors, embedded in the vast library, caught the starshine and reflected it back a hundredfold, feeding the rising maelstrom. A cascade reaction spread through the entire complex. In a heartbeat, the two-dimensional star unfolded into a giant three-dimensional sphere of laser light, spinning within and around the subterranean cathedral.\n\nEnergy scintillated and crackled out from it, sweeping the tiers.\n\nScreams bellowed and rang.\n\nOver her head, one soldier leapt from the tier above, trying to get to the floor below. But there was no sanctuary for him. Bolts struck him before he ever hit the ground, burning him to bone by the time he crashed to the labyrinth floor.\n\nBut most disturbing of all, something had happened to the arched cathedral itself. The view seemed to flatten, losing all sense of depth. And even this image shimmered, as if what hung above her was merely a reflection in water, not real, a mirage.\n\nSeichan closed her eyes, afraid to watch, terrified to the core.\n\nGray held Rachel. The world was pure light. He sensed the chaos beyond, but here it was just the two of them. The droning hum again rose around them, coming from within the light, a threshold he could not cross or comprehend.\n\nHe remembered Vigor's words.\n\nPrimordial light.\n\nRachel lifted her face. Her eyes were so bright in the reflected light that he could almost sense her thoughts. She seemed to read him, too.\n\nSomething in the character of the light, a permanence that could not be denied, an agelessness that made everything small.\n\nExcept for one thing.\n\nGray leaned down, lips brushing hers, breaths shared.\n\nIt wasn't love. Not yet. Just a promise.\n\nThe light flared brighter as Gray deepened his kiss, tasting her. What once droned, now sang. His eyes closed, but he still saw her. Her smile, her flash of eye, the angle of her neck, the curve of her breast. He felt that permanence again, that ageless presence.\n\nWas it the light? Was it the two of them?\n\nOnly time would tell.\n\nGeneral rende fled with the first screams. He didn't need to investigate further. As he clambered out of the stairwell into the kitchen, he had seen the sheen of energies reflected up from below.\n\nHe had not gotten this far in the Court from being foolhardy.\n\nThat he left to lieutenants like Raoul.\n\nFlanked by two soldiers, he retreated out of the palace, winding toward the main courtyard. He would commandeer the truck, return to the warehouse, regroup there, and strategize a new plan.\n\nHe needed to be back in Rome before noon.\n\nAs he exited the door, he noted that the exterior guard, still in police uniforms, maintained the gate. He also noted the rain had slowed to a drizzling mist.\n\nGood.\n\nIt would hasten his retreat.\n\nNear the truck, the driver and another four uniformed guards noticed his approach and came forward to meet him.\n\n\"We must leave immediately,\" Rende ordered in Italian.\n\n\"Somehow I don't see that happening,\" the driver said in English, pulling back his cap.\n\nThe four uniformed guards raised weapons at his group.\n\nGeneral Rende took a step back.\n\nThese were real French police\u2026except for the driver. From his accent, he was obviously an American.\n\nRende glanced back to the gateway. More French policemen stood guard. He'd been betrayed by his own ruse.\n\n\"If you're looking for your men,\" the American said, \"they're already secured in the back of the truck.\"\n\nGeneral Rende stared at the driver. Black hair, blue eyes. He didn't recognize him, but he knew the voice from conversations over the phone.\n\n\"Painter Crowe,\" he said.\n\nPainter spotted a flash of muzzle fire. From the second-story window of the palace. A lone sniper. Someone they had missed.\n\n\"Back!\" he yelled to the patrol around him.\n\nBullets chewed across the wet pavement, strafing between Painter and the general. The police scattered to the side.\n\nRende fled back, yanking out his pistol.\n\nIgnoring the automatic fire, Painter dropped to one knee, lifting two weapons, one in each fist. Aiming instinctively, Painter pointed one pistol toward the upper window.\n\nPop, pop, pop\u2026\n\nThe general dropped to the ground.\n\nA cry sounded from the second story. A body tumbled out.\n\nBut Painter noted it only from the corner of his eye. His full focus was on General Rende. They both pointed guns at the other, both kneeling, weapons almost touching.\n\n\"Back away from the truck!\" Rende said. \"All of you!\"\n\nPainter stared hard at the man, judging him. He read the raw fury in the other's eyes, everything falling apart around him. Rende would shoot, even if it meant forfeiting his life.\n\nThe man offered him no choice.\n\nPainter dropped his first pistol, then lowered the second gun away from Rende's face, pointing it at the ground.\n\nThe general grinned triumphantly.\n\nPainter squeezed the trigger. An arc of brilliance shot out from the tip of the second pistol. The taser barbs struck the puddle at the general's knee. The jolt of electricity blew Rende off his legs, slamming him onto his back, gun flying.\n\nHe screamed.\n\n\"Hurts, doesn't it?\" Painter said, snatching up his regular pistol and covering the general.\n\nThe police swarmed around the fallen man.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" one of the patrolman asked Painter.\n\n\"Fine.\" He stood. \"But damn\u2026I really miss fieldwork.\"\n\n[ 7:57 A.M. ]\n\nDown in the cavern, the fireworks had only lasted a little over a minute.\n\nVigor lay on his back, staring up. The screaming had stopped. He had opened his eyes, sensing at the primitive level of his brain that it was over. He caught the last spin of the sphere of coherent light, then watched it collapse inward on itself like a dying sun.\n\nAbove stretched empty space.\n\nThe entire cathedral had flickered and vanished with the star.\n\nSeichan stirred from where she had sheltered beside him. Her eyes were also fixed above. \"It's all gone.\"\n\n\"If it was ever there,\" Vigor said, weak from blood loss.\n\n[ 7:58 A.M. ]\n\nGray broke the embrace with Rachel, the acuity of his senses fading with the light. But he still tasted her on his lips. That was enough.\n\nFor now.\n\nSome of the shine remained in her eyes as she searched around. The others were stirring from where they had flattened themselves against the ground. Rachel spotted Vigor, struggling to sit up.\n\n\"Oh God\u2026\" she said.\n\nShe slipped out of Gray's arm to check on her uncle. Monk headed in the same direction, ready to employ his medical training.\n\nGray kept guard, staring at the heights around him.\n\nNo shots rang out. The soldiers were gone\u2026along with the library. It was as if something had cored out the center, leaving only the amphitheater-like rings of ascending tiers.\n\nWhere had it all gone?\n\nA moan drew his attention to the floor.\n\nRaoul lay crumpled nearby, curled around his trapped arm, crushed under the fallen pillar. Gray stepped over and kicked his pistol aside. It skittered across the glass floor, now a cracked and scattered jigsaw.\n\nKat came over.\n\n\"Leave him for now,\" Gray said. \"He's not going anywhere. We'd best collect as many weapons as we can. There's no telling how many others might be up there.\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\nRaoul rolled onto his back, stirred by Gray's voice.\n\nGray expected some final curse or threat, but Raoul's face was twisted in agony. Tears rolled down his cheeks. But Gray suspected it wasn't the crushed arm that was triggering this misery. Something had changed in Raoul's face. The perpetual hard edge and glint of disdain had vanished, replaced with something softer, more human.\n\n\"I didn't ask to be forgiven,\" he keened out in anguish.\n\nGray frowned at this statement. Forgiven by whom? He remembered his own exposure to the light a moment ago. Primordial light. Something beyond comprehension, beyond the dawn of creation. Something had transformed Raoul.\n\nHe recalled the naval research done on superconductors, how the brain communicated via superconductivity, even maintained memory that way, stored as energy or possibly light.\n\nGray glanced to the shattered floor. Was there more than light stored in the superconducting glass? He remembered his own sensation during that moment. A sense of something greater.\n\nOn the floor, Raoul covered his face with one hand.\n\nHad something rewired the man's soul? Could there be hope for him?\n\nMovement drew Gray's eye. He saw the danger immediately.\n\nHe moved to stop her.\n\nIgnoring him, Seichan lifted Raoul's gun. She pointed it at the trapped man.\n\nRaoul turned to face the barrel. His expression remained anguished, but now a flicker of raw fear lit his eyes. Gray recognized that shine of black terror in the man\u2014not for the gun, nor for the pain of death, but for what lay beyond.\n\n\"No!\" Gray called.\n\nSeichan pulled the trigger. Raoul's head snapped back to the glass with a crack as loud as the pistol shot.\n\nThe others froze in shock.\n\n\"Why?\" Gray asked, stunned, stepping forward.\n\nSeichan rubbed her wounded shoulder with the butt of her pistol. \"Payback. Remember we had a deal, Gray.\" She nodded to Raoul's body. \"Besides, like the man said, he wasn't looking for forgiveness.\"\n\n[ 7:59 A.M. ]\n\nPainter heard the echo of the gunshot through the palace. He motioned the French patrol to pause. Someone was still fighting in here.\n\nWas it his team?\n\n\"Slowly,\" he warned, waving them forward. \"Be ready.\"\n\nHe continued deeper into the palace. He had come to France on his own. Not even Sean McKnight knew he had undertaken this assignment, but Painter's Europol credentials had gotten him the field support he needed in Marseilles. It had taken the entire length of a transatlantic trip to track General Rende, first to a warehouse outside Avignon, then to the Pope's Palace. Painter remembered his mentor's warning that a director's position was behind a desk, not out in the field.\n\nBut that was Sean.\n\nNot Painter.\n\nSigma was now his organization, and he had his own way of solving problems. He gripped his gun and led the way.\n\nUpon first hearing of a possible leak from Gray, Painter made one decision. To trust his own organization. He had put the new Sigma together from the ground up. If there was a leak, it had to be an unintentional one.\n\nSo he had done the next logical thing: followed the trail of intel.\n\nFrom Gray\u2026to Sigma\u2026to their Carabinieri liaison out in Rome.\n\nGeneral Rende had been kept abreast of every detail of the operation.\n\nIt had taken some careful prying to follow the man's tracks, which included suspicious trips to Switzerland and back. Eventually Painter had discovered one thin tie back to the Dragon Court. A distant relative of Rende who had been arrested two years ago for trafficking in stolen antiquities, in Oman of all places. The thief had gained his freedom from pressure by the Imperial Dragon Court.\n\nAs he'd investigated deeper, Painter had kept Logan Gregory out of the loop, so the man could continue his role as Sigma liaison. He hadn't wanted to spook Rende, not until he could be sure.\n\nNow that his suspicions had been verified, Painter had another concern.\n\nWas he too late?\n\n[ 8:00 A.M. ]\n\nRachel and Monk secured her uncle's temporary belly wrap, using Gray's shirt. Uncle Vigor had lost a fair amount of blood, but the bullet had passed clean through. According to Monk, nothing major seemed to have been hit, but he needed immediate medical attention.\n\nUncle Vigor patted her hand once she was finished, then Monk helped him to his feet and half carried him.\n\nRachel hovered alongside them. Gray joined her, putting an arm around her waist. She leaned a bit into him, drawing strength from him.\n\n\"Vigor will be fine,\" Gray promised. \"He's tough. He's come this far.\"\n\nShe smiled up at him, but she was too tired to put much emotion behind it.\n\nBefore they even reached the first tier, a booming voice echoed down to them, using a bullhorn again. \"SORTEZ AVEC VOS MAINS SUR LA T\u00caTE!\" The command echoed away, to come out with their hands up.\n\n\"D\u00e9j\u00e0 vu,\" Monk sighed. \"Pardon my French.\"\n\nRachel lifted her rifle.\n\nA second command in English followed. \"COMMANDER PIERCE, WHAT'S YOUR STATUS?\"\n\nGray turned to the others.\n\n\"Impossible,\" Kat said.\n\n\"It's Director Crowe,\" Gray confirmed, shock in his voice.\n\nHe turned and cupped his mouth and yelled back.\n\n\"ALL CLEAR DOWN HERE! WE'RE COMING UP!\"\n\nGray then turned to Rachel, eyes bright.\n\n\"Is it over?\" she asked.\n\nAs answer, he pulled her to him and kissed her. There was no mysterious light this time, only the strength of his arms and sweetness of his lips. She sank into him.\n\nHere was all the magic she needed.\n\n[ 8:02 A.M. ]\n\nGray led the way up.\n\nMonk helped Vigor, carrying him under his good arm. Gray kept an arm around Rachel. She leaned heavily against him, but she was a burden he was happy to bear.\n\nThough relieved, Gray kept them armed this time. He was not walking into another ambush. Rifles and pistols in hand, they began the long trek up to the kitchen. Bodies, burned or electrocuted, littered the tiers.\n\n\"Why were we spared?\" Monk asked.\n\n\"Maybe that lower level sheltered us,\" Kat said.\n\nGray didn't argue with her, but he suspected it was something more than that. He remembered the suffusing glow of the light. He sensed something more than random photons. Maybe not an intelligence. But something beyond raw power.\n\n\"And what happened to the treasure house?\" Seichan asked, staring out at the empty expanse. \"Was it all a hologram of some sort?\"\n\n\"No,\" Gray answered as they climbed. He had a theory. \"Under powerful conditions, flux tubes can be generated within a Meissner field. Affecting not only gravity, like the levitation we've already seen, but also distorting space. Einstein showed that gravity actually curves space. The flux tubes create such a vortex in gravity that it bends space, possibly even folding it on itself, allowing movement across.\"\n\nGray noted the looks of disbelief. \"Research is already being done on this at NASA,\" he pressed.\n\n\"Smoke and mirrors,\" Monk grumbled. \"That's what I think it was.\"\n\n\"But where did it all go?\" Seichan asked.\n\nVigor coughed. Rachel stepped toward him. He waved her away, only clearing his throat. \"Gone where we can't follow,\" he said hoarsely. \"We were judged and found wanting.\"\n\nGray felt Rachel begin to speak, to mention the false key. He squeezed her and nodded to her uncle, urging her to let him speak. Maybe it wasn't all the fake key. Could Vigor be right? Had they brushed against something they weren't ready for?\n\nThe monsignor continued, \"The ancients sought the source of primordial light, the spark of all existence. Maybe they found a doorway into or a way to ascend up to it. The white bread of the Pharaohs was said to have helped these Egyptian kings shed mortal flesh and rise as a being of light. Maybe the ancient alchemists finally achieved this, moving out of this world and into the next.\"\n\n\"Like traveling along the labyrinth,\" Kat said.\n\n\"Exactly. The maze may be symbolic for their ascension. They left this gateway here for others to follow, but we came\u2014\"\n\n\"Too early,\" Rachel suddenly blurted, interrupting.\n\n\"Or too late,\" Gray added. The words had just popped into his head, like the flash of a camera bulb, leaving him dazed.\n\nRachel glanced to him. She lifted a hand to rub her forehead.\n\nHe saw a similar confusion in her eyes, as if the words had come unbidden to her, too. He glanced over the lip of the tier down to the shattered glass floor, then back to her.\n\nPerhaps Raoul was not the only one affected by the light.\n\nHad an echo been left inside them? An understanding, a final message?\n\n\"Too late\u2026or too early,\" Vigor continued with a shake of his head, drawing back Gray's attention. \"Wherever the ancients fled with their treasures\u2014into the past, into the future\u2014they have left us with only the present.\"\n\n\"To create our own heaven or hell,\" Monk said.\n\nThey continued in silence, climbing tier after tier. Reaching the top level, a group of French police waited, along with a familiar face.\n\n\"Commander,\" Painter said. \"It's good to see you.\"\n\nGray shook his hand. \"You have no idea.\"\n\n\"Let's get all of you topside.\"\n\nBefore they could move, Vigor stirred from Monk's arm. \"Wait.\" He stumbled away, one hand on the wall.\n\nGray and Rachel stepped after him.\n\n\"Uncle\u2026\" she said, concerned.\n\nA short distance away stood a stone table. It seemed everything had not vanished with the library. A leather-bound book rested on the table. Its glass case, though, was gone.\n\n\"The ledger,\" Vigor said, tears welling. \"They left the ledger!\"\n\nHe attempted to pick it up, but Rachel motioned him aside and collected it herself. She shut it and tucked it under an arm.\n\n\"Why leave that behind?\" Monk asked, helping the monsignor again.\n\nVigor answered, \"To let us know what awaits us. To give us something to seek.\"\n\n\"Dangling the proverbial carrot before the mule,\" Monk said. \"Great. They couldn't leave a chest of gold\u2026okay, maybe not gold\u2026I'm damn sick of gold. Diamonds, a chest of diamonds would be fine.\"\n\nThey hobbled toward the stairs.\n\nGray glanced back one more time. With the space empty, he noted the cavern's shape, a cone-shaped pyramid balanced on its tip. Or the upper half of an hourglass, pointing down toward the glass floor.\n\nBut where was the lower half?\n\nAs he stared, he suddenly knew.\n\n\"As it is above, so it is below,\" he mumbled.\n\nVigor glanced back to him, rather sharply. Gray saw the understanding and knowledge in the old man's eyes. He had already figured it out, too.\n\nThe gold key was meant to open a gateway. To the lower half of the hourglass. But where? Was there a cavern directly beneath this one? Gray didn't think so. But somewhere the cathedral of knowledge waited. What had hung here was a mere reflection from another place.\n\nLike Monk said. Smoke and mirrors.\n\nVigor stared at him. Gray remembered Cardinal Spera's mission: to preserve the secret of the Magi, trusting that the knowledge would reveal itself when the time was right.\n\nMaybe that's what life's journey was all about.\n\nThe quest.\n\nTo seek the truth.\n\nGray placed a hand on Vigor's shoulder. \"Let's go home.\"\n\nWith Rachel under his arm, Gray climbed the stairs.\n\nOut of darkness and toward the light.\n\n[ EPILOGUE ]\n\n[ AUGUST 18, 11:45 A.M. ]\n\n[ TAKOMA PARK, MARYLAND ]\n\nGray pedaled down Cedar Street, passing by the Takoma Park Library. It felt good to feel the rush of air and the bright sunshine on his face. It seemed like the last three weeks had been spent underground at Sigma command, in meeting after meeting.\n\nHe had just come from a final debriefing with Painter Crowe. The meeting had centered on Seichan. The Guild operative had vanished like a ghost as they'd left the Pope's Palace, stepping around a dark corner and disappearing. But Gray had found a token from her in his pocket.\n\nHer dragon pendant.\n\nAgain.\n\nAnd while the first pendant left at Fort Detrick had plainly been meant as a threat, this one felt different to Gray. A promise. Until they met again.\n\nKat and Monk had been at the debriefing, too. Monk had sat fiddling with his new state-of-the-art prosthesis, not so much uncomfortable with his new hand as he was anxious about the coming evening. Kat and Monk were going out on their first real date. The two had grown close after returning to the States. And oddly enough, it was Kat who had moved things forward and asked Monk out on tonight's dinner date.\n\nAfterward, alone, Monk had pulled Gray aside, half giddy. \"It's got to be the mechanical hand. Comes with a two-stroke vibration mode. What woman wouldn't want to date me?\"\n\nDespite the flippancy, Gray saw the genuine affection and hope in his friend's eyes. And also a little terror. Gray knew that Monk still bore some trauma from his mutilation, some insecurity.\n\nGray hoped that Monk would call him tomorrow, tell him how everything had turned out.\n\nHe shifted his weight to one pedal, knee out, and skimmed low around the corner onto Sixth Street. His mother had asked him to come to lunch.\n\nAnd while he could've refused, he had been putting off something for too long. He glided past the rows of Victorian and Queen Anne cottages, dapple-shaded by a canopy of elms and maples.\n\nHe made a final turn onto Butternut Avenue, hopped the curb, and braked into the driveway of his parents' Craftsman bungalow. He snapped off his helmet and carried his bike onto the porch.\n\nHe called through the screen door. \"Mom, I'm home!\"\n\nHe leaned the bike against the railing and opened the door.\n\n\"I'm in the kitchen!\" his mother said.\n\nGray smelled something burning. A bit of smoke hung about the rafters.\n\n\"Is everything all right?\" he asked, crossing down the short hall.\n\nHis mother wore jeans, a checkered blouse, and an apron snugged around her waist. She had dropped her hours at the university to part-time, two days a week. To help care for things at home.\n\nSmoke filled the kitchen.\n\n\"I was making grilled cheese sandwiches,\" she said, fluttering her hands. \"I got a phone call from my TA. Left them on the griddle too long.\"\n\nGray eyed the pile of sandwiches on a plate. Each was charred on one side. He fingered one. The cheese hadn't even melted. How did his mother do that? Burn the sandwiches yet still keep them cold. It had to be a skill.\n\n\"They look fine,\" Gray said.\n\n\"Call your father.\" She waved her dishtowel, trying to waft out the smoke. \"He's out back.\"\n\n\"More birdhouses?\"\n\nHis mother rolled her eyes.\n\nGray crossed to the open back door and leaned out. \"Pop! Lunch is ready.\"\n\n\"Be right there!\"\n\nGray returned as his mother set out some plates.\n\n\"Could you pour some orange juice?\" she asked. \"I need to get a fan.\"\n\nGray stepped to the refrigerator, found the carton of Minute Maid, and began filling the tumblers. With his mother gone, he set the carton down and removed a small glass vial from his back pocket.\n\nA gray-white powder filled it halfway. The last of the amalgam.\n\nWith Monk's assistance, he had done some research into the m-state powders, how the compounds stimulated endocrine systems and seemed to have a strong ameliorative affect on the brain, increasing perception, acuity\u2026and memory.\n\nGray dumped the contents of the vial into one of the glasses of orange juice and used a teaspoon to stir it.\n\nHis father entered through the back door. Sawdust speckled his hair. He wiped his boots on the rug, nodded to Gray, and dropped heavily into a chair.\n\n\"Your mother tells me you're heading back to Italy.\"\n\n\"Only for five days,\" Gray answered, nesting all three glasses between his palms and carrying them over. \"Another business trip.\"\n\n\"Right\u2026\" His father eyed him. \"So who's the girl?\"\n\nGray startled at the question and bobbled some of the orange juice. He hadn't told his father anything about Rachel. He wasn't sure what to say. After their rescue, the two had spent a night in Avignon together as matters were sorted out, curled in front of a small fire while the storm exhausted itself. They hadn't made love that night, but they had talked. Rachel had explained about her family's history, haltingly, with some tears. She still could not balance her feelings about her grandmother.\n\nFinally, they had fallen asleep in each other's arms.\n\nIn the morning, circumstance and duty had pulled them apart.\n\nWhere would it lead now?\n\nHe was heading back to Rome to find out.\n\nHe still called daily, sometimes twice daily. Vigor was healing well. Following the funeral for Cardinal Spera, he had been promoted to the position of prefect at the Archives, to oversee the repair of the damage done by the Court. Last week, Gray had received a note of thanks from Vigor but also discovered a message hidden within the text. Below the monsignor's signature lay two inked seals, papal insignia, mirror images of each other, the twin symbols of the Thomas Church.\n\nIt seemed the secret church had found a new member to replace the lost cardinal.\n\nUpon learning this, Gray had shipped Alexander's gold key to Vigor, the real gold key, from a safe deposit box in Egypt. For safekeeping. Who better to secure it? The fake key, the one used to trick Raoul, had been fashioned at one of the many shops in Alexandria known for their skill at counterfeiting antiquities. It had taken less than an hour, performed while Gray had freed Seichan from Alexander's watery tomb. He hadn't dared transport the real key to France, to the Dragon Court.\n\nGeneral Rende's testimony and confession while in custody proved how dangerous that would have been. The litany of atrocities and deaths stretched back decades. With Rende's confession, his sect of the Dragon Court was slowly being rooted out. But how thoroughly or completely would never be known.\n\nMeanwhile, closer to Gray's heart and mind, Rachel continued to sort out her life. With Raoul's death, she and her family had inherited Chateau Sauvage, a bloody inheritance to be sure. But at least the curse had died along with Rachel's grandmother. No other Verona family members had been aware of the grandmother's dark secret. To settle matters further, plans were already under way to sell the chateau. The proceeds would go to the families of those killed in Cologne and Milan.\n\nSo lives slowly healed and moved forward.\n\nToward hope.\n\nAnd possibly more\u2026\n\nGray's father sighed and tipped back in his kitchen chair. \"Son, you've been in an awfully good mood lately. Ever since your return from that business trip last month. Only a woman puts that kind of shine on a man.\"\n\nGray settled the tumblers of orange juice on the table.\n\n\"I may be losing my memory,\" his father continued. \"But not my eyesight. So tell me about her.\"\n\nGray stared at his father. He heard the unspoken addendum.\n\nWhile I can still remember.\n\nHis father's casual manner hid a deeper vein. Not sorrow or loss. He was reaching out for something now. In the present. Some connection to a son he'd perhaps lost in the past.\n\nGray froze by the table. He felt a flare of old anger, older resentment. He didn't deny it, but he let the heat wash through him.\n\nHis father must have sensed something, because he settled his chair to the floor and changed the subject. \"So, where are those sandwiches?\"\n\nWords echoed in Gray's head. Too early\u2026too late. A last message to live in the present. To accept the past and not rush the future.\n\nHis father reached for the spiked glass of orange juice.\n\nGray blocked him, covering the cup with his hand. He lifted the tumbler away. \"How about a beer? I think I saw a Bud in the fridge.\"\n\nHis father nodded. \"That's why I love you, son.\"\n\nGray stepped to the sink, dumped the orange juice down the drain, and watched it swirl away.\n\nToo early\u2026too late.\n\nIt was time he lived in the present. He didn't know how much time he had with his father, but he would take what he could get and make the very best of it.\n\nHe crossed to the fridge, grabbed two beers, popped the lids on the way back, pulled out one of the kitchen chairs, sat down, and placed a bottle in front of his father.\n\n\"Her name is Rachel.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "First Blood",
                "text": "[ May 23, 7:32 A.M. ]\n\n[ New Orleans ]\n\nThe Bronco crushed through the debris left by the hurricane and bounced off yet another hole. Lorna nearly hit the roof of the cabin. The car slid to the left on the wet road. She eased off the accelerator as she fought for control.\n\nThe storm had stripped vegetation, sent creeks overflowing their banks, and even floated an alligator into someone's swimming pool. Luckily the worst of the dying hurricane had struck further west. Still, with such downpours, Mother Nature seemed determined to turn Orleans Parish back into swamplands.\n\nAs Lorna sped along the river road, all she could think about was the phone call. It had come in twenty minutes ago. They'd lost power at ACRES. The generators hadn't kicked in, and a hundred research projects were threatened.\n\nAs she rounded a final oxbow in the Mississippi River, the compound appeared ahead. The Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species occupied over a thousand acres downriver from New Orleans. Though associated with the city's zoo, ACRES was not open to the public. Sheltered within a hardwood forest, the grounds included a few outdoor pens, but the main facility was a thirty-six-thousand square-foot research building that housed a half-dozen laboratories and a veterinary hospital.\n\nThe latter was where Dr. Lorna Polk worked since completing her postgraduate residency in zoo-and-wildlife medicine. She oversaw the facility's frozen zoo, twelve tanks of liquid nitrogen that preserved sperm, eggs, and embryos from hundreds of endangered species: mountain gorillas, Sumatran tigers, Thompson's gazelles, colobus monkeys, cape buffalo.\n\nIt was a big position to fill, especially for someone only twenty-eight and just out of her residency. Her responsibility\u2014the frozen genetic bank\u2014held the promise of pulling endangered species from the brink of extinction through artificial insemination, embryo transfer, and cloning. Yet, despite the weight of her responsibility, she loved her work and knew she was good at it.\n\nAs she raced down the long entry road toward the main facility, her cell phone chimed from the cup holder. She grabbed it and cradled it to her ear while driving one-armed.\n\nThe caller must have heard the line pick up and spoke rapidly. \"Dr. Polk. It's Gerald Granger from engineering. I thought you should know. We've got the generators working and isolated the power loss to a downed line.\"\n\nShe glanced to the truck's clock. The power had been down for close to forty-five minutes. She calculated in her head and let out a sigh of relief.\n\n\"Thanks, Gerald. I'll be there in another minute.\"\n\nShe flipped the phone closed.\n\nReaching the employee lot, she parked and rested her head on the steering wheel. The relief was so palpable she almost cried, almost. After taking a moment to collect herself, she straightened and stared down at the hands on her lap, suddenly aware of what she wore. She had fled the house in a pair of wrinkled jeans, an old gray turtleneck, and boots.\n\nNot exactly the professional appearance she usually maintained.\n\nTwisting to exit the Bronco, she caught her reflection in the rearview mirror.\n\nOh, dear God...\n\nHer blond hair\u2014normally primly braided\u2014had been pinned back into a rough ponytail this morning. Several flyaways only added to her already disheveled appearance. Even her black-framed glasses sat askew on the bridge of her nose. At the moment, she looked like a drunken college student returning from a Mardi Gras party.\n\nIf she looked the part, she might as well go all the way. She pulled out the pin holding her hair and let it fall around her shoulders, then climbed out of the truck, and crossed toward the main entrance.\n\nBefore she could reach the facility's main doors, a new noise drew her attention: a heavy wump-wumping. She turned toward the Mississippi. A white helicopter skimmed over the treeline and headed in her direction. It was coming in fast.\n\nAs she frowned, a hand settled on her shoulder from behind. She jumped slightly, but fingers squeezed in reassurance. A glance back revealed her boss and mentor, Dr. Carlton Metoyer, the head of ACRES. Covered by the noise of the helicopter, she had not heard his approach.\n\nThirty years her senior, he was a tall, wiry black man with bushy white hair and a trimmed gray beard. His family had been here in the region for as long as Lorna's, tracing their roots back to the Cane River Creole colony, a blend of French and African heritage.\n\nDr. Metoyer shielded his eyes as he stared at the sky.\n\n\"We got company,\" he said.\n\nThe helicopter was definitely headed toward ACRES. It swept toward an adjacent field and began to descend. She noted it was a small A-Star helicopter equipped with floats instead of the usual landing skids. She also recognized the slash of green across the white shell of the aircraft. After Katrina, most people in New Orleans knew that insignia. It was one of the Border Patrol helicopters; fleets of such choppers had been vital to the rescue operations and security following the disaster.\n\n\"What are they doing here?\" she asked.\n\n\"They've come for you, my dear. They're your ride.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Lorna's stomach sank as the helicopter lifted off\u2014not so much from the motion as from sheer panic. She clutched the armrests as she sat next to the pilot. The growing roar of the rotors penetrated her bulky headphones. It felt like rising in an elevator. An elevator strapped to a rocket.\n\nShe was never a fan of heights, hated air travel in general, and considered riding an airborne lawnmower the height of madness. She had only flown once in a helicopter, during an externship in South Africa conducting a census of African elephants in the lands bordering a preserve. Back then, she had prepared for that flight by downing a pair of Xanax tablets before the trip. Still, her legs had felt like warm pudding for hours afterward.\n\nAnd today she'd had no warning.\n\nDr. Metoyer had only filled her in on the sketchiest of details as the helicopter landed. He had not even given her time to go inside and inspect her project's liquid nitrogen tanks. Staff is already on it, he had promised, adding that he'd check them himself and radio the details later.\n\nRadio...\n\nThey were flying beyond any cell signal.\n\nShe risked a glance through the side window. The helicopter banked, giving her a birds-eye view of the Mississippi. They were traveling downriver, roughly following the Big Muddy's course. The name was particularly apt following the storm. The river was a chocolate brown, rich with silt, eddying and churning as it flowed toward the Gulf of Mexico.\n\nThey were headed out over the river's delta, where all that alluvium\u2014silt, clay, sand, and soil\u2014deposited and pushed out into the Gulf, forming over three million acres of coastal wetlands and salt marshes. Not only was the region environmentally significant, home to a vast and complicated ecosystem that traced its roots back to the Jurassic period, it was also commercially significant. The area supplied the United States with a large percentage of its seafood, and almost 20 percent of its oil.\n\nIt was also a weak link in the nation's border. The maze of islands, twisting waterways, and isolated fishing docks made the delta a sieve for smugglers and traffickers of all sorts. The Department of Homeland Security had designated the region a high-level threat and reinforced the New Orleans station of the Border Patrol.\n\nAccording to her boss, the Border Patrol had been searching the area following last night's storm surge. It was common for smugglers to work under the cover of storms to bring in drugs, guns, even human cargo. Early this morning, a team had discovered a trawler beached on one of the outlying islands. After investigating the ship, they'd made a call to ACRES.\n\nMuch of that call remained a mystery, even to Dr. Metoyer. He had not been informed about the nature of the request, nor why Lorna in particular had been asked to make this trip.\n\nDespite her trepidation about air flight, a smoldering anger was building. She had projects in jeopardy over at ACRES. What was she doing flying out into the middle of nowhere? Her anger grew, stoked by her anxiety. What was going on? Why ask for her in particular? She knew no one in the Customs and Border Protection service.\n\nThe only answers lay at the end of this flight.\n\nThe radio built into her earphones crackled. The pilot pointed toward the horizon. He wore a green uniform with shoulder patches marking him as part of the Border Patrol's Air and Marine unit. He had introduced himself, but she hadn't caught his name.\n\n\"Dr. Polk, we'll be landing in a few moments.\"\n\nShe nodded and stared forward. The dense emerald of the swampy marshes broke apart below into a tangle of islands and peninsulas ahead. Farther out into the Gulf, a dark line near the horizon marked a row of larger barrier islands that helped protect the fragile marshes and coastal swamps.\n\nBut they weren't going that far.\n\nShe spotted a shiny white boat moored by one of the small islands. Finally. As they descended toward it, she also noted an old fishing trawler rammed into the beach. It had struck hard enough to topple a few trees and ride halfway up onto the island. It plainly had been shoved there by the storm surge.\n\nThe helicopter dropped fast. Her grip tightened on the armrests. She had read that a majority of air crashes occurred during takeoffs and landings. Not a statistic she wanted to bear in mind at the moment.\n\nWithin a few yards of the water, their descent slowed. The rotorwash beat the waves flat. Then, as gently as a goose landing on a still pond, the chopper's floats settled to the water. A few flicks of some switches and the whine of the rotors began to slow.\n\n\"Please stay seated,\" the pilot said. \"They're sending a Zodiac out for you.\"\n\nHis nod out the window drew her attention to a small rubber pontoon boat that pushed off from the island and shot toward them. Moments later, a crewman dressed in the same Border Patrol green helped her out of the helicopter and into the Zodiac.\n\nShe dropped onto a bench of the pontoon boat, both relieved yet still carrying a hot coal in her belly. She shaded her eyes as they headed toward shore, searching for some answer for the mysterious and sudden summons.\n\nThe morning was already growing warm as the sun broke apart the clouds and opened blue skies. The day promised to grow into one of Louisiana's steam baths. And she was okay with that. She took deep breaths to steady herself, taking in the brackish odor of leafy decay, wet moss, and muddy saltwater.\n\nTo her, it was the smell of home.\n\nHer family had lived in Louisiana going back to the nineteenth century. Like all the old families of New Orleans, her history was as deeply ingrained as the lines on her palms. Ancestors' names and stories were as familiar as if they'd died only yesterday.\n\nDuring the War of 1812, her great-great grandfather, only seventeen at the time, had abandoned the British army during the Battle of New Orleans and made his home in the new burgeoning frontier city. He met and married the daughter of the de Tr\u00e9pagnier family and quickly made a small fortune by growing sugarcane and indigo on a hundred-acre plantation given as a dowry. Over the years, that fortune continued to grow, and the Polk family was one of the first to build in the oak-shadowed glen of New Orleans's Garden District. After selling the plantation, the family settled permanently in the district. Over the generations, the Polk mansion became respected as a gathering place for military generals, legal scholars, and countless men of science and letters.\n\nThe Italianate mansion still stood, but like the city, the Polk family had begun a slow decline during the twentieth century. Only Lorna and her brother still bore the family name. Her father had died of lung cancer when Lorna was a child; her mother passed away a year ago, leaving the siblings a mansion in ill repair and a pile of debt.\n\nBut the tradition of valuing education continued. She had gone into medicine and science. Her brother, younger by a year, was an oil engineer working for the state. For the moment, brother and sister, both single, shared the family estate.\n\nA grind of wet sand on rubber pulled her back to the present.\n\nThe small island, one of a series forming a chain back to the dense coastal marshes, was covered in cypress trees matted together by Spanish moss. It looked impenetrable beyond the edge of the beach.\n\nBut that's not where she was going.\n\n\"This way,\" the Zodiac pilot said. He offered a hand to help her out of the boat, but she ignored him and climbed out herself. \"The FOS is waiting to speak to you.\"\n\n\"FOS?\"\n\n\"Field Operations Supervisor.\"\n\nShe didn't understand the command structure of the Border Patrol, but it sounded like this was the guy in charge of the investigation. Maybe the one who had summoned her away from ACRES. Wanting answers, she followed the pilot toward the beached trawler. Having grown up along the river, she knew boats. The trawler was a small one, a forty-footer. Its starboard booms had been shattered by the collision, but on the port side, the long poles still pointed crookedly toward the sky. The shrimp nets were still tied down to the booms.\n\nA handful of men, all in rough duty uniforms of the Border Patrol, gathered on the beach alongside the trawler. Some wore tan Stetsons, others green baseball caps. She also noted the holstered sidearms. One man had a Remington shotgun resting on a shoulder.\n\nWhat was going on?\n\nThe men fell silent as she approached. A few pairs of eyes traveled up and down her form, looking little impressed. She kept her face fixed into something resembling a stern expression, but she felt her cheeks heat up in irritation. She resisted the urge to flip them all off.\n\nDefinitely a boy's club here.\n\nThe agents parted to reveal a tall man similarly attired in dark green trousers and a matching long-sleeved work shirt, casually rolled to the elbows. He finger-combed his black hair, damp with sweat, and secured a black baseball cap in place. But not before his blue-gray eyes also examined her from head to foot. Unlike the others, she sensed nothing lascivious in his attention, only sizing her up.\n\nStill, she was glad when the bill of his cap shadowed those eyes.\n\nHe crossed to close the distance between them. He stood well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and muscular without looking bulky. His carriage was of someone who knew how to lead with no need to dominate. Confidence, along with a feral edge, flowed from him.\n\nHe held out a large hand as he reached her.\n\n\"Dr. Polk, thank you for coming.\"\n\nShe shook his hand and noted a long scar down his forearm, from elbow to wrist. Glancing up, she met his gaze. His complexion was a tanned olive, further darkened by black stubble over his chin and jaw. Her ear picked up his slight French Cajun accent.\n\nSo he was local to the area. In fact, there was something naggingly familiar about him\u2014and then it struck her. She was about to demand an answer as to why she was brought here.\n\nInstead, a different question stumbled out.\n\n\"Jack?\"\n\nHis lips, full but definitely masculine, shifted to a harder line as he gave the barest nod. Her image of him similarly transformed in a sudden shift of perspective. The anger drained out of her, replaced with something colder and more uncomfortable. It had been over ten years since she'd last seen him. She had only been a sophomore in high school; he had been a senior.\n\nThough she hadn't really known him well back then\u2014in high school, two years was an insurmountable social gulf\u2014they had darker ties that bound them together. A connection she had wanted forever left in her past.\n\nFrom the expression passing like a cloud over his face, he possibly wished the same. Either way, now was not the time to reopen those old wounds.\n\n\"Dr. Polk,\" he said stiffly. His accent grew thicker, more husky. \"I called you here because...because I didn't know who else had the expertise to offer guidance about what we found.\"\n\nShe straightened her back, going equally professional. Maybe that was best. She swallowed and stared toward the trawler, glad for an excuse to look away. \"What did you find?\"\n\n\"You'd best see for yourself.\"\n\nHe turned and led the way to the trawler. A rope ladder led up to the deck. He climbed first, clambering easily up. She was all too conscious of the hard strength in his legs and back. Once he vanished over the gunwale, one of his men secured the ladder's lower end, making it easier for her to climb.\n\nAt the top, Jack helped pull her to the deck. Two other men stood guard by a door that led to the lower holds. One of them passed Jack a flashlight.\n\n\"Sir, we've run a portable lamp down into the hold, but it's still damn dark down there.\"\n\nJack thumbed on his flashlight and waved for her to follow. \"Careful of the blood on the stairs.\"\n\nHis light revealed a dark stain along one side of the steps. Like something had been dragged down into the hold.\n\nShe suddenly did not want to go down there.\n\n\"We found no bodies,\" Jack said, as if sensing her discomfort. Or maybe he was merely filling her in on the details of the case.\n\nShe followed him down the steps and along a narrow passageway.\n\n\"They kept them caged in the main hold.\"\n\nShe didn't bother to ask what was caged. She already smelled the familiar musk of a rank kennel. She heard the shuffle of bodies, a rustling, a mewling cry, a sharp screech of a bird.\n\nShe began to understand why she had been summoned. Exotic animal smuggling was a billion-dollar-a-year industry, ranking just behind drug and gun trafficking. And unfortunately the United States was one of the leading consumers of such smuggled cargo, accounting for 30 percent of such sales.\n\nShe had read just last week about the bust of a major trafficking ring dealing in rare tigers. In that case, the Missouri couple wasn't bringing in the big cats for pets, but for parts. They were smuggling in tigers, then butchering them. Hides of leopards, tigers, and lions could fetch upwards of twenty thousand dollars. But that wasn't all. Like some bloody chop shop, they were selling off all parts: tiger penises to be ground into aphrodisiacs, bones for arthritis cures. No part went to waste. Gallbladder, liver, kidneys, even teeth. In the end, such large cats were worth far more dead than alive.\n\nShe felt anger building as she followed Jack into the main hold.\n\nA tall pole lamp lit the low-roofed space. Stainless steel cages lined both sides of the long hold; larger pens in the back were still in shadows. She gaped at the size of the smuggling operation, certain now why she was needed here, a veterinarian specializing in exotic animals.\n\nJack turned and shone his flashlight into the nearest cage.\n\nShe stared inside\u2014and knew she was wrong about everything."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Jack Menard studied the woman's reaction.\n\nShock and horror widened Lorna's eyes. She covered her mouth with a hand. But only for a moment. After the initial surprise, he also recognized a glint of concern. Her eyes narrowed again, her lips drawn tight in thought. She moved closer to the cage.\n\nHe joined her and cleared his throat. \"What type of monkeys are they?\"\n\n\"Cebus apella,\" she answered. \"Brown capuchin monkeys, native to South America.\"\n\nJack stared at the two who shared the small cage, squatting in their own filth, huddled and scared at the back of the cage. Their limbs and backsides were a deep chocolate brown, their faces and chests a softer tan, their heads capped in black. They were so small he could have cupped one in the palm of his hand.\n\n\"Are they babies?\" he asked.\n\nShe shook her head. \"I don't think so. The fur coloring suggests they're adults. But you're right. They're way too small. Pygmy versions of the breed.\"\n\nBut Jack knew that wasn't the most shocking aberration. With a quiet cooing noise, Lorna coaxed the pair to move toward the bars. Her coldly professional manner seemed to melt away, her face softening, relaxing. The pair of monkeys responded to her. Still hugging each other, they crept forward, clinging tightly. Not that they could ever truly be apart.\n\n\"Siamese twins,\" Lorna said.\n\nThe two were joined at the hip\u2014literally\u2014fused together, sharing three legs but bearing four arms.\n\n\"Poor things,\" she whispered. \"They look half starved.\"\n\nThey came to the bars, plainly needing reassurance as much as sustenance. Their eyes were huge, especially in such small faces. Jack sensed their hunger and fear and also a trace of hope. He reached into a pocket and removed a granola bar. He ripped it open with his teeth, broke off a piece, and handed it to Lorna.\n\nShe gently passed it through the bars. One of them took it with its tiny fingers\u2014then the pair retreated to share the prize, huddled around it, nibbling from both sides. But their eyes never left Lorna.\n\nShe glanced to Jack. For a moment, he saw the girl he remembered from his school days, before he left for the Marines. She had dated his younger brother Tom during their sophomore year\u2014and the summer thereafter. He shied away from that memory.\n\nLorna must have sensed that well of pain. Her face hardened, going professional again. She nodded to the other cages. \"Show me.\"\n\nHe led her along the rows of cages, shining his flashlight into the shadowy recesses. Each enclosure held a different animal, some familiar, some exotic. But like the monkeys, they all bore some twisted abnormality. They stopped next at a large glass-walled terrarium that held a fifteen-foot Burmese python curled around a clutch of eggs. The snake looked ordinary enough until its coils slid more tightly around the eggs and revealed two pairs of folded vestigial legs, scaled and clawed, remnants of its lizard-like evolutionary origin.\n\n\"It looks like a severe form of atavism,\" Lorna said.\n\n\"And that would be what in English?\"\n\nShe offered him a small apologetic smile. \"Atavism is where a genetic trait, lost for generations, reappears in an individual.\"\n\n\"A genetic throwback?\"\n\n\"Exactly. In this case, a throwback to a time before snakes lost their limbs.\"\n\n\"That's a mighty long throw, isn't it?\"\n\nShe shrugged and moved on. \"Most atavism is caused by the accidental recombination of genes. But I don't think it was accidental here, not with these many cases.\"\n\n\"So you're saying someone bred them this way on purpose. Is that even possible?\"\n\n\"I can't rule it out. Genetic science has come a long way and continues to push boundaries. At ACRES, we've successfully cloned wild cats. We've even merged a fluorescent protein from a jellyfish to produce a cat that glows in the dark.\"\n\n\"Mr. Green Genes. I read about that,\" he said. \"In fact, it's one of the reasons why I called for you. I needed an expert on genetics and breeding. Someone to tell me who could have produced this bizarre cargo.\"\n\nHe led her through the hold. A wire cage held a mass of winged bats the size of footballs.\n\n\"Vampire bats,\" Lorna said. \"But they're ten times the size they should be. May be a form of primordial gigantism.\"\n\nSimilarly a caged fox down the row was the size of a bear cub. It hissed and growled and threw itself against the bars. They quickly moved past, stopping briefly at a tall cage that held an ordinary-sized parrot, but it had no feathers.\n\nIt cawed loudly, leaped to the front bars, and studied them while cocking its head back and forth. Jack had a hard time hiding his disgust. There was something so alien and wrong about its appearance.\n\nLorna just moved closer. \"When baby parrots first hatch, they're featherless or covered only with a light down. I don't know if this one's stunted into an infantile state, or if it's a throwback, too. In fact, it's theorized that birds are the closet living relatives of dinosaurs.\"\n\nJack didn't argue. The creature\u2014leather-skinned and beaked\u2014 definitely had a prehistoric look to it. But what really got him unnerved was the sharpness of its attention.\n\nThe bird leaped back to its perch, spouting a garble of Spanish. That aspect of the parrot\u2014the ability to mimic\u2014remained intact. It began to screech a string of numbers in English, its pronunciation and diction sounding perfectly human, if pitched slightly sharper.\n\n\"...three one four one five nine two six five...\"\n\nThey continued onward, then Lorna stopped in mid-step. She stared back at the cage as the bird continued to screech out numbers. It went on and on without stopping.\n\n\"What is it?\" he asked.\n\n\"That parrot... those first numbers... I can't be sure...\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Three one four one five. Those are the first five digits of the mathematical constant pi.\"\n\nJack remembered enough from high school geometry to know about pi, represented by the Greek letter \u03c0. He pictured the number in his head.\n\n3.1415...\n\nAwe filled Lorna's voice as the parrot continued its numerological tirade. \"Pi has been calculated to trillions of digits. I'd love to find out if the numbers the bird is mimicking are sequentially correct. And if so, how long of a sequence the parrot has memorized.\"\n\nAs the bird continued without pause, Jack noted a hush fall over the hold. The mewling, growling, even shuffling of the other animals grew quiet, as if they too were listening. Eyes, reflecting the light, seemed to stare toward them from the dark cages.\n\nWith a shake of his head, he moved on. He had a crime to investigate.\n\n\"What I really wanted to show you is back here.\"\n\nHe led her to the larger pens at the stern end of the hold. One pen held a nursing lamb and its mother. But rather than curly wool, the animals' coats hung straight to the ground, more like a yak's pelt than a sheep's. But that's not what Jack wanted to show Lorna.\n\nHe tried to urge her on, but she paused at the next cage. The occupant of that pen lay stiffly on its side atop the hay floor, legs straight out, eyes wide and fixed, dead. It looked like a miniature pony, but the creature was no larger than a cocker spaniel.\n\n\"Look at its hooves,\" Lorna said. \"They're cloven. Four toes in front, three in back. The earliest ancestor of the modern horse\u2014Hyracotherium\u2014was only the size of a fox and had the same digital division.\"\n\nShe crouched to examine the dead body. The hoof of one toe had been torn away. Its head bore signs of fresh concussions, as if it had panicked and thrashed against the bars before it died.\n\n\"Looks like something scared it to death,\" she assessed.\n\n\"I can guess what that might have been.\" Jack headed toward the very back of the hold. \"This way.\"\n\nShe followed. Irritation entered her voice, along with a thread of deeper anger. \"What were these people doing? For that matter, how did they do it?\"\n\n\"That's what I hoped you could answer. But we have a bigger and more immediate problem.\" They reached the last pen. It was large and heavily barred. Hay covered the floor, but no animal was in sight. \"We found the door dented and broken open when we came down here.\"\n\n\"Something escaped?\" Lorna glanced from the empty pen back toward the passageway and stairs, clearly recalling the blood trail.\n\n\"We need you to tell us what it was,\" he said.\n\nShe frowned at him. \"How?\"\n\nHe pointed as something buried beneath the hay shifted. A weak mewling followed.\n\nLorna glanced to him, her face shining with curiosity. He pulled the door and held it open for her to enter.\n\n\"Be careful,\" he warned."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Rogue Angel 52) Death Mask",
        "author": "Alex Archer",
        "genres": [
            "urban fantasy",
            "adventure",
            "action"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Prologue",
                "text": "Late-night traffic roared along Madrid's Gran V\u00eda. These cars were status symbols driven by men in the throes of their midlife crises. Overpowered engines strained in the chassis of superlight metal. Beautiful people stumbled in and out of bars. There was no room for ugliness or poverty in this make-believe world that pretended not to be in turmoil. They partied hard and loud, the constant babble of noise disguising the rotors of the approaching helicopter.\n\nIt was a quarter to midnight, not quite the magical hour when the luxury sports cars would turn into pumpkins and the men behind the wheel into the rats they were deep down.\n\nThe men on board the helicopter paid no attention to the world below. They had their mission objectives and wouldn't be distracted from them by little black dresses. They had the job timed down to the second. They had covered every possible parameter and were prepared for every eventuality. They would be long gone before the first alarm sounded.\n\nThe helicopter circled what passed for one of the only skyscrapers in the downtown area, giving the six men on board time to confirm they were good to go, and then they pulled ski masks down over their faces. This was a well-drilled team, used to dealing with high-risk ops, infiltrations and extractions, scenarios which could turn on a dime. That killed complacency before it could get a foothold in their ranks. Every op carried danger. Planning minimized the risk but never truly took it away.\n\nThe first man jumped out seconds before the skids had settled on the roof of the office block. Head down, he ran hard, arms and legs pumping, toward the infiltration point. The arrogance of money had made their job so much easier. A helipad on the roof of an office block? It was like taking candy from a baby.\n\nNine seconds after the initial breach lines were tethered to the building, the first three men stepped off the edge of the roof, beginning to rappel down the side. The second trio was nine seconds behind them. The building's panoramic windows were made from high-tensile glass, essentially bulletproof. The men drew level with the target's floor, pulling off to pause on either side of his office. The front three men attached devices right, left and top-center on the huge window. Bullets were one thing, concentrated explosives quite another. A hand went up, each finger closing one second after the other, counting down to the detonation. Noise-reduction earbuds saved their hearing as the charges blew, and the men turned their faces away to protect their eyes as the glass shattered.\n\nThe window blew inward, showering the three men deadlocked in a late-night meeting in the Rojo International offices with deadly rain that cut through their designer threads as if they were paper.\n\nLess than a minute had passed since the team had rolled out of the helicopter. Fifty-five seconds, to be precise.\n\nAll six team members swung inside the gaping wound in the side of the skyscraper before the last glass fragments had started their downward spiral to the street below.\n\nA hail of gunfire tore into the ceiling, meant purely to terrify.\n\nIt had the desired effect.\n\nA second volley of gunfire had two of the suits dancing in jerky rhythm as their bodies were riddled with bullets. Blood spattered the wall behind them, leaving silhouettes of the dying clearly visible.\n\nThe third man sat motionless in the midst of the carnage. Well, not quite motionless, the team leader realized, seeing the man's eyes dart to the Mark Rothko painting on the wall that had caught some of the blood spray. The arc of red was incongruous with the blocks of color. The man seemed more concerned about the damage to his painting than he was about the two men bleeding out on the expensive silk rug.\n\nHe said nothing.\n\nThe boardroom door burst open and another man\u2014broad, burly and dead before he took his first step inside the room\u2014managed a single shot before a hail of bullets took him down. The bullets cut through his torso, the impact driving him back through the doorway.\n\n\"Two more,\" the leader said, motioning left and right for two of his men to go on the hunt while the other three followed him.\n\nThe man at the table didn't so much as flinch as cable ties were slipped around his wrists and cinched so tightly they drew blood. He looked up at the security camera high in the corner of the room, making sure it saw everything. The red light winked back. It was recording.\n\n\"You,\" the leader said to one of his men, who crossed the room quickly and blacked out the lens with spray paint.\n\nNinety seconds had passed since the helicopter had touched down.\n\nEverything was on schedule. Clockwork precision. The silent alarm would have been tripped the second the window shattered. Police response times were fast when it was big money they were protecting, but there was no sign of any kind of armed response yet. The leader had it timed to two minutes twenty-five for the first siren. Anything after that was sloppy, and he wasn't about to let sloppiness carry the day. He'd planned for two twenty-five; he'd stick with the plan. More gunfire ripped through the office, followed by the crash of furniture being tipped over.\n\nThere was a single shot after that, then silence.\n\nThe two men sent on patrol returned to the boardroom as a harness was being strapped to their target's chest. One of them gave a single nod, confirming that everything had been taken care of.\n\nNo one had imagined an \"unbreakable\" window on the thirty-second floor posed a substantial security risk. Not the architects. Not the men who had taken up residence in the high castle of Rojo International's offices. And most importantly, not the man being strapped into the harness by his team.\n\n\"Move,\" the team's Number Two barked, hauling their captive to his feet.\n\nThe man resisted, but that only resulted in pain as Number Two delivered a punishing blow to his gut that doubled him up, and as his head came down, a crunching right uppercut that sent him staggering sideways. \"Move,\" Number Two repeated, and this time the man did as he was told.\n\n\"You are going to pay for this,\" he snarled. Rather than another blow, his defiance was paid back with silence\u2014a wad of tissues forced into his mouth and a strip of gaffer tape slapped across it. Number Two dragged him to the window and stood only inches from the edge, grabbing a fistful of his hair and forcing him to look down.\n\nThe drop was dizzying.\n\n\"A spectacular view, I'm sure you'll agree, Mr. Braden?\" the team leader said, bracing himself against the window frame. \"An entire city quite literally at your feet. Look at it. Drink it in. It could well be the last thing you ever see. I'd hate for you to forget it.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "GARIN BRADEN WASN'T used to people treating him like this. He wasn't a victim. He'd lived his entire long life by one simple credo: \"Do unto others before they can do unto you.\" A man didn't get to Garin's age by being a victim. He pushed back against the hand on his head, but the man didn't relinquish his grip. Garin felt the air rush into his face. It was all too easy to imagine the sidewalk rushing toward him. He swallowed. He wasn't in control. He didn't like that. He tried to run through his options, but with the harness pinning his arms, and the assassin's fingers tangled in his hair, there was little he could do. Sadly, learning how to fly wasn't possible, though it was looking increasingly like a necessity. Lacking wings, Garin felt hands on the center of his spine and then he was kicking against nothing, falling.\n\nFor a second\u2014the silence between terrified heartbeats\u2014he was suspended in the air thirty-two stories above the Madrid streets before the line hooked through his harness snapped taut and stopped his plunging descent. And then he was rising as he was hoisted toward the roof.\n\nLess than a minute later, a battered and bloody Garin Braden was secure in the helicopter, the last of the team clambering in to join him; another thirty seconds and they were airborne.\n\nThey were more than half a mile away before they heard the sirens of the first responders.\n\nAll the money in the world hadn't been able to keep Garin Braden safe.\n\nThe clock was ticking."
            },
            {
                "title": "24:00 \u2014Madrid",
                "text": "The drumming vibration of her cell phone on the nightstand dragged Annja Creed out of sleep. For a moment the noise had been part of the surreal landscape of her imagination, but as she opened her eyes she completely forgot what she'd been dreaming. Annja had been in Valencia for a week working on a piece on gargoyles for Chasing History's Monsters, and now she was in Madrid, recharging her batteries. There was nothing like the mix of modernity and history as a backdrop for a little R & R. She looked at the alarm clock and saw it was ungodly early, for a vacation day. Who in their right mind would be calling? Then she realized it was probably Doug Morrell, completely forgetting she'd booked the next few days off. Her producer could be a pain when she was overseas, always wanting an update, querying her expense claim or just reminding her the show needed to be sexy. That was the nature of the beast, after all. Sexy television. Sexy history. Sexy monsters. Sexy claims of links between the two. She'd just turned the latest segment in. Doug could wait. She rolled over and closed her eyes again, but a second and a third call came in quick succession.\n\nShe gave in and picked up.\n\n\"What do you want, Doug? It's the middle of the night.\"\n\nThat wasn't quite true. The morning sun filtered through the too-thin hotel curtains, picking out the cigarette-smoke discolorations on the fabric.\n\nIt wasn't Doug. \"Check your email. Click on the link. I will wait,\" the voice said. She couldn't place it.\n\n\"Who is this?\" Annja heard another voice in the background but couldn't catch what was being said. The line went dead. She checked her recent calls, but the number had been blocked. Annja pushed the covers back and sat up. It was almost seven, and the cleaners were already moving around outside her room, no doubt wishing she'd go down for breakfast so they could do their jobs.\n\nShe got out of bed reluctantly and headed through to the bathroom. She'd check her email, but not before taking a hot shower to help wake her up.\n\nWhen she emerged, one towel wrapped around her and another making a turban around her wet hair, she crossed the floor to her laptop on the dressing table and powered it up.\n\nShe had a single new email.\n\nThe subject line said Urgent, and the sender was Garin Braden.\n\nBut it hadn't been Garin's voice on the phone.\n\nIf you want to see Mr. Braden alive again, follow this link.\n\nAnnja clicked.\n\nA window opened on her screen and a few seconds later the image resolved into what looked like a live video feed. The sole image on the screen was a digital clock that read 23:52:27. It took her a couple seconds to realize it was counting backward from 24:00:00.\n\n\"Hello, Annja, so glad you could finally join us,\" a voice said. It sounded different through the tinny speakers than it had on the phone. There was no sign of the male speaker on the screen. \"Time is precious. You have already wasted seven and a half minutes of it.\"\n\nWasted?\n\nShe didn't know what was going on, and the steaming-hot water had only dragged her so far from sleep. \"Stop messing around, Garin. I'm tired and in no mood for your stupid jokes.\"\n\nThe camera zoomed out, gradually revealing that the clock was in the middle of a man's chest. He was slumped in a chair, his hands tied behind his back. He was breathing, but he was bloodied and bruised, and Annja couldn't tell if he was conscious. Wires ran from the clock to a box beneath the chair he was tied to. Water was thrown from off camera, soaking his blood-streaked shirt. The man lifted his head slowly, staring at the camera through one swollen eye. His mouth was smeared with red. Still, he was immediately recognizable.\n\n\"Garin!\" Annja said, his name catching in her throat.\n\nHis eyes didn't seem to register his name or Annja's voice. He was dazed and confused and clearly had no idea what was going on.\n\n\"What do you want?\" Annja asked.\n\n\"I like that,\" said the off-camera voice. \"Straight down to business. No pretense of bargaining. No bluster or demands that I let him go. We can work together, Miss Creed.\"\n\n\"What do you want?\" Annja repeated.\n\n\"The Mask of Torquemada.\"\n\n\"The what?\" She knew exactly what the voice had said, and had a good idea what it had meant. But that didn't mean she'd be able to meet this person's demands.\n\n\"Do you really want to waste time pretending you don't know what I am talking about, Miss Creed?\" the voice said. \"Nine minutes. Ticktock. Ticktock. The more time you waste now, the less you will have to save your friend. Find the mask or your friend dies. Is that incentive enough for you? Twenty-three hours, fifty-one minutes.\"\n\n\"You can't expect me to find something that's been lost for centuries in a single day. That's impossible.\"\n\n\"You better hope not, for Mr. Braden's sake.\"\n\n\"This is insane! I don't have the first idea where to start looking...or what I'm even looking for. You can't just say 'Find it.' I'm not a miracle worker!\"\n\n\"Well, there's one man here who is desperately hoping you are, Miss Creed. His life depends upon it. I will call you again in a few hours to see how you're getting on. Godspeed, Annja Creed. Ticktock. Ticktock.\" The camera zoomed in to focus on the clock in the middle of Garin's chest, then panned up to his face. \"Just in case you need reminding.\"\n\nAnnja couldn't look away.\n\nGarin looked at her with dead eyes.\n\nShe wondered if he had been drugged or just beaten so badly he couldn't focus.\n\nHis head slumped forward again. This time it stayed down.\n\nAnnja watched as the clock ticked down another minute. She had less than a day to save Garin, with no idea where to begin, no clue as to where he might be. Normally there was one man she'd turn to if she needed technology to help her find someone\u2014Garin. He wasn't going to be able to help her now.\n\nShe continued to stare at the screen, trying to learn as much as she could about the place he was being held, but there was precious little to be gleaned from it. The light was artificial, the walls behind him were bare brick. It could have been, quite literally, anywhere in the world.\n\nAnother minute passed by and she knew she had to do something; anything.\n\nShe'd wasted ten minutes of his life already.\n\nTicktock. Ticktock."
            },
            {
                "title": "23:45 \u2014Madrid",
                "text": "\"Annja? As much as I adore you, my dear, I adore my sleep much more.\"\n\n\"This is work,\" Annja said.\n\n\"A four-letter word,\" Roux said. She could imagine the smile playing across his lips as he grumbled. He could be a crank at the best of times. \"And not one of the more amusing ones.\"\n\n\"Have you heard from Garin?\"\n\n\"Not recently. Last week. Why?\"\n\n\"I was just sent a link to a video chat. Garin was on the other end. There was a clock strapped to his chest and a bomb under his chair. He was in a bad way. Beaten bloody.\"\n\n\"Couldn't happen to a nicer chap.\"\n\n\"This is serious,\" she said. \"In less than twenty-four hours that clock hits zero and the bomb detonates, taking Garin with it. That's the threat.\"\n\n\"I assume this is a kidnapping? So what do they want?\"\n\nShe heard him moving around the ch\u00e2teau, talking with her as he made his way to his study.\n\n\"They're asking for the Mask of Torquemada,\" she said. It came out in a more matter-of-fact way than she'd expected. Everyone knew who Torquemada was\u2014a Dominican zealot who rose up to become the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, rabidly anti-Semitic, the scourge of the Moors\u2014but in all the stories she'd heard of his vile purge, there had never been anything about a mask.\n\n\"Good luck with that,\" Roux said dismissively. \"It's been missing for more years than I can remember.\"\n\n\"So there is a mask. But you were there, weren't you? You and Garin.\"\n\n\"I may have been,\" Roux said, not giving anything away. \"But I had other things on my mind than a mad Dominican obsessed with religious purity. I'd already had a lifetime of that. I was in France. It's not like we had CNN giving us hourly updates as the atrocities rolled on, but yes, you heard things, obviously. It was easy to throw accusations around, and you know the old adages about mud sticking, no smoke without fire. People were willing to believe anything if it meant they were safe from the worst of it, that it couldn't happen to them. Torquemada was a Christian zealot. He was the driving force behind maybe as many as two hundred thousand Jews fleeing Spain. His priests encouraged another fifty thousand to convert to Christianity. Though I use the term encouraged in its most liberal sense.\"\n\n\"And the mask?\"\n\n\"If it ever existed, buried with him.\"\n\n\"So we're just talking about a little tomb-robbing here. I guess I can deal with that. Wouldn't be the first time. Where's he buried? Do we know?\" She had already forwarded the email to Roux, along with the link.\n\n\"Yes. It's a matter of public record. Unfortunately, his grave was ransacked only a couple of years before the Inquisition was disbanded.\" Meaning the task had already become exponentially more difficult than she'd thought it would be in the matter of a few seconds. \"They took everything in the tomb. Burned his bones, mask, everything destroyed in an auto-da-f\u00e9. An act of faith.\" He fell silent and she knew he was waiting for her, giving her the chance to respond and draw her own conclusions.\n\n\"Okay. Well... If it was destroyed, then that's a death sentence for Garin, so I'm going to ignore that option for now and assume that the mask was stolen and is still intact. People are greedy. If it was worth something, someone might have taken it.\" She took the old man's silence as agreement. \"Where was he buried?\" It was a starting point. Nothing more than that. But it was better than sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike. Five hundred years was a long time, but Annja hoped the normal logic of a search would hold true: the best place to start looking for something that had been lost was the last place it had been seen.\n\n\"The Monastery of Saint Thomas Aquinas in \u00c1vila,\" he said. \"I'll join you there as soon as I can, but first I think I shall pay a visit to Seville.\"\n\n\"What has Seville got, apart from a barber and some oranges?\"\n\nThe old man chuckled down the long-distance line. \"It's where so much of it began, my dear. As you say, for want of a better place, why not start at the beginning? Seville is where the first of these so-called acts of faith of the Inquisition took place in a particularly grisly sacrifice. Six people were burned alive.\"\n\n\"That's barbaric.\" The history of the Inquisition was fascinating in and of itself, but she'd never considered it for the show. There were plenty of human monsters from that time, without the need to invent others for public edification. Using religion and ethnicity as a means of population control turned her stomach. It didn't matter if it was five hundred years ago in Spain, sixty years ago in Germany or twenty years ago in Rwanda. Genocide was one of the few horrors that didn't lessen with time.\n\n\"Yes, it was. Just as all forms of human sacrifice are,\" Roux agreed. There was a pause. He was obviously thinking. \"I won't touch down for at least three hours, even if I get airborne in the next thirty minutes. I'll contact you as soon as I land. In the meantime, I'll make a call. Garin isn't the only one with a little black book. I know a guy...he might be able to pinpoint the IP address from the webcam. See if we can't find a source. You look at finding the mask, I'll try to find Garin\u2014hopefully, we'll meet somewhere in the middle. Twenty-four hours is a long time.\"\n\n\"In politics, maybe. In kidnap and ransom? I'm not so sure.\"\n\n\"Just concentrate on getting to \u00c1vila. I'll give my guy your details and have him meet you there.\" Roux hung up without waiting for her response. There was no \"good luck.\" He was all business, which was exactly what she needed from him right now. There wasn't a moment to lose. She pillaged the hotel room of anything useful, throwing a change of clothes into a backpack, then zipped herself into her motorbike leathers and headed down to the hotel's underground garage.\n\nThe Triumph Rocket III Roadster was where she'd left it.\n\nIt was a beast of a machine. She loved it. Annja slipped her bag from her shoulder and stowed it inside one of the panniers, then straddled the bike. It was bigger and heavier than she was used to, but the Roadster had so much pent-up power as she gunned the engine, she couldn't help but grin at the thrill when it roared to life beneath her. There were perks to being a celebrity of sorts: companies bent over backward in exchange for a little publicity. She was a great ad for the bike. As Doug said, there was something inherently powerful about a great bike and a leather-clad rider. He would have called it sexy. She liked to think of it as iconic. Giving the Roadster up when she left Spain was going to be tough. She intended to hit the open road and see as much of the countryside as she could before then.\n\nThe bike roared up the ramp and out of the garage, banking sharply as she took the turn into the street. She was strong, but still, the muscles in her shoulders and forearms tightened as she leaned to keep the bike upright. She opened up the throttle, slipping into the early-morning city traffic. In a car, the congestion would have been a problem, bumper-to-bumper impatient drivers trying to cut in and out of lanes. But even though the Roadster was designed for the open road, it was maneuverable enough to weave in and out of the snarl of vehicles.\n\nShe accelerated ahead of the traffic jam, hitting the lights just as they changed from red to green, and left the line of cars trailing in her wake. They couldn't match the bike's speed in these conditions.\n\nA few minutes later, she was more than a mile outside of the city, but the road ahead was blocked by a pair of trucks struggling uphill side by side, slowly losing momentum as the incline increased, neither one prepared to slow down or change lanes in case they couldn't make it to the top of the hill. A snake of frustrated drivers had built up behind them.\n\nAnnja didn't have time to waste.\n\nShe leaned to the left, letting her weight steer the bike into the narrow space between the lanes, and raced toward the gap between the two trucks. Drivers vented their frustration at her gambit, but that voice and its damned \"ticktock, ticktock\" was all she could hear. Annja twisted the throttle hard. Her grip tightened as she leaned forward, and the rush of air battered her. Still, she accelerated, surging past the barely moving cars. A chorus of horns bade her farewell as she disappeared between the trucks, her shoulder blades inches from the high-paneled sides of both. The huge vehicles drifted closer together as she sped between them.\n\nShe caught a glimpse of one of the drivers in his wing mirror. There was no mistaking the panic in his eyes. She grinned, but realized there was no way he'd be able to see the expression through her helmet's black visor, which, all things considered, was probably for the best. He veered away suddenly, widening the gap for Annja, who surged ahead of the trucks and into the freedom of the open road.\n\nShe hit a hundred and thirty-six miles an hour in a few seconds, topping out the engine. The landscape blurred in her peripheral vision. Annja kept her head down. Speed limits didn't matter. She'd take the ticket, if the cops could keep up with her. Ticktock. Ticktock. It was just her and the road, but she didn't have time to enjoy it. She only had eyes for the dashed line leading all the way to the horizon.\n\nShe could feel the heat of the engine through the leathers on the inside of her right leg by the time she pulled up outside the high stone walls of the Royal Monastery of Saint Thomas Aquinas in \u00c1vila.\n\nShe'd ridden as if the devil was on her tail.\n\nThe journey hadn't even taken an hour.\n\nShe checked her phone. There was a message from Roux's hacker giving her the name of a caf\u00e9\u2014Giorgio's\u2014and instructions to meet her there in forty-five minutes. The message was fifteen minutes old. That gave her half an hour to unlock the secrets of the Grand Inquisitor's shrine.\n\nTicktock."
            },
            {
                "title": "23:00 \u2014\u00c1vila",
                "text": "\u00c1vila, the City of Stones and Saints.\n\nThat was how the place was described in the tourist brochure Annja picked up from the dispenser just inside the monastery walls. Footsteps echoed deeper inside the medieval building. She thumbed through the leaflet. It was the standard tourist fodder, ready to guide her to all kinds of attractions inside the city. She was only interested in the monastery. She handed over five euros at the glass window and put the change in a tip jar for renovations. Annja couldn't tell whether the look the young museum worker gave her was admiring or disapproving, but the way his eyes lingered was most certainly lacking piety.\n\nShe gave him a smile that raised the color in his cheeks and followed the sign that led inside.\n\nThe monastery consisted of two floors built over three cloisters, and according to the floor plan, the initial building had begun in 1482 but only been completed in 1493. She skipped through much of what came next, looking for the name Tom\u00e1s de Torquemada. It would be too much to expect any kind of reference to a mask in the literature, but she found plenty of the usual tourist facts broken down for easy consumption. A simple engraving showed him in profile, bearing the familiar tonsure of a Dominican friar. He looked...ordinary. It was hard to believe she was looking at the man behind one of the most ruthless religious purges of all time. There were a few cursory details about the Inquisition and the fact that Torquemada had lived out his final days here, being buried within the grounds of the monastery five years after its completion.\n\nTwo elderly washerwomen busied themselves with mops, sluicing them across the stone floor of the cloister of Silencio. They worked in silence and Annja had no intention of making them uncomfortable by asking questions. She walked quickly across the wet floor, shrugging in apology to the women. There was no sign of anyone remotely official, which would have made asking questions easier. She worked her way slowly around the room, looking for any kind of visual clue in the decor.\n\n\"It's quite plain compared to the Reyes cloister,\" a man said behind her. She hadn't heard his footsteps on the tiled floor.\n\nAnnja turned, expecting to come face-to-face with a monk. He wasn't. Or at least he wasn't dressed like one. He wore a lightweight charcoal suit with a matching shirt. \"Sorry?\"\n\n\"The Cloister of the King. You were looking at the ceiling?\"\n\nShe glanced up at the vaulted Gothic-style ceiling above her, surprised that it hadn't been the first thing to catch her attention when she entered the cloister.\n\n\"There was a beautiful mosaic in the dome, the work of a Mud\u00e9jar\u2014a Moor who remained in Spain after the country began to be reclaimed for Christians\u2014but it's long gone now, I'm afraid. Lost to time and vandals. The Mud\u00e9jars kept their faith even though they couldn't make their devotions publicly. Such a sad time for our country. Our great shame. And yes, I say that with no hint of irony, given who is buried next door.\" He offered her a wry smile. \"The word Mud\u00e9jar also refers to the style of architecture, but in this case the ceiling was the work of a single man, or so we have come to believe. Sadly, as I said, it has long since been lost. Of course, not all Moors remained faithful\u2014many converted to Christianity. They were called Moriscos, but that was a title that came loaded with contempt and mistrust.\"\n\nSo many Moors and Jews had been driven out of the country or forced to renounce their own faith under fear of death, and yet others were allowed to continue with their lives. But why? The cynical side of Annja wanted to say money. So often it came down to money. People bought their freedom with it. Was that what had happened all those years ago? The Mud\u00e9jars had paid off the Inquisition?\n\n\"Might I ask, are you planning on making a program about us?\"\n\n\"Sorry?\" she said again, running about three steps behind the man as he moved from subject to subject.\n\n\"You are Annja Creed, aren't you? I may be speaking out of turn, but I rather hope you aren't planning on featuring Friar Torquemada in an episode of your Chasing History's Monsters. He was one, of course, but he was a very human one,\" he said, holding out a hand. \"Francesco Maffrici. I am the curator here.\"\n\nShe smiled, shaking his hand. His palm was soft against hers. \"No, no, this isn't exactly work, more a personal interest.\"\n\n\"Excellent, then anything I can do to help, I am at your service.\"\n\n\"Well, obviously, I am interested in Torquemada, but not for the show.\"\n\nThe man nodded, offering her a wry smile. \"The man and the Inquisition. They provide our daily bread.\"\n\n\"I can well imagine. Actually, I'm interested particularly in the Mask of Torquemada. I understand that it was buried with him?\" She offered it as a question rather than a statement, inviting him to correct her.\n\n\"That rather depends on which version of the legend you want to believe.\"\n\nAnnja was intrigued. Two legends meant a mystery. Not that she had time for one.\n\n\"It wasn't uncommon for a death mask to be made to capture the features of the recently deceased. Generally they would use wax and plaster. And perhaps that was so with Torquemada, but then you have to ask yourself\u2014why would something like that be buried with him? That's not so much a legend as a rationalization. The second hypothesis suggests that a mask was cast in metal some time before his death so that others could act in his place while he was ill. It would have meant that anyone could have overseen the tortures of the Inquisition, making it clear that they were acting in his name. Of course, once he was dead there was no need for it. None of his successors found the need to follow his example. Perhaps they were not quite so driven to inspire fear or could more easily hide the delight they took in their work?\"\n\n\"You think he enjoyed it?\"\n\n\"Oh, absolutely. Without doubt. His interests lay far beyond driving non-Christians out of Spain. It might have begun that way, a means of driving Jews and Muslims out of our land, but it lit a fire in the dark places of his soul. In the earliest days of the Inquisition, the Moors and Jews were given the option to convert, which meant they were able to remain in the country as second-class citizens. Later, their conversion offered no protection. The Inquisition turned on them and on other minorities that were considered to be outside the teachings of the Bible.\"\n\n\"If only they'd been the last ones to take that approach,\" she said. She hadn't meant to say it aloud.\n\n\"We never learn the lessons of the past, despite the threat of being doomed to repeat it,\" he said. \"But I suppose you know that as well as anyone.\"\n\nThey both fell silent for a moment as they considered the wider implications of what they'd been saying. It was a comfortable silence, interrupted only by the clatter of metal buckets and the spilling of water. The two women seemed to bicker rapidly, but the words quickly turned to laughter and they set about mopping up again.\n\n\"We should leave them to it,\" the curator said, turning his back on the women. \"I have something interesting you might like to see.\"\n\nMaffrici led the way out of the cloister toward the church that stood inside the monastery walls. He opened the door for her to follow. Annja noticed he was wearing white gloves, and assumed he was being careful not to leave greasy fingerprints on the relics here. It was a good precaution, with so many enzymes secreted by even carefully washed human skin. Years and years of handling would damage just about anything, and why risk making a further impact?\n\nAnnja was only half listening as Maffrici talked her through the architecture of the building. Garin was still sitting in that chair somewhere, battered and bloody and needing her help...help that, right now, she was in no position to give. She needed help of her own to find the mask before the seconds ran out.\n\nThat meant being direct, even if it felt rude. \"Is there any more you can tell me about the mask?\"\n\n\"Not really. I'm afraid that there are no pictures of it, not even a drawing from the time, as far as I am aware.\"\n\n\"But you are sure it was buried with his body?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Assuming it actually existed, yes, but you know how it is\u2014stories get passed down from generation to generation, records get lost. A lot of truth becomes legend, but much more legend becomes truth. What we believe has a tendency to change over the generations. There is almost always a kernel of truth at the core of any enduring story, but it is so much harder to identify it among the embellishments that come later.\"\n\nAnnja tried to read between the lines. \"Are you suggesting Torquemada might have not been as bad as he's currently portrayed?\"\n\n\"Quite the reverse, actually\u2014that he was perhaps not as pious and devout as he is now remembered to be. For a man who was a scourge on nonbelievers and heretics, isn't it peculiar that he carried what he believed to be the horn of a unicorn for protection?\"\n\n\"No more crazy than the zealots who think they're carrying a piece of the True Cross,\" she said.\n\n\"Ah, perhaps not, but does a man wielding supernatural protections\u2014the objects of witchcraft\u2014strike you as someone who believes absolutely in the protection of his God?\" The curator came to a halt. \"His tomb was broken into in the 1830s, his bones removed and burned here, on this spot, mimicking an auto-da-f\u00e9, the kind of act of faith Torquemada would have ordered during his lifetime. It was something in the nature of poetic justice. The Inquisition had fallen out of favor and the people were no longer afraid of the Church in the way they had been for hundreds of years. So much of the monastery was destroyed thanks to those revolutionary hammers. Which is of course how we lost that wonderful Mud\u00e9jar ceiling.\"\n\n\"And that was when the mask was removed?\" Or more likely destroyed, she thought.\n\n\"There is no record of anything other than his remains having been removed from the tomb, but that was not the first time his rest had been disturbed.\"\n\n\"The tomb had been broken into before?\"\n\n\"Indeed, yes. Only a couple of years after his death, in fact. Records indicate that a ring was taken from the remains. It was recovered and returned to the corpse. The thief was given the same treatment as many of Torquemada's own victims. Of course, that doesn't mean something else wasn't taken and never returned.\"\n\nAnnja was already running the permutations in her head. If the mask had remained in the tomb until the 1830s, then it had almost certainly been destroyed in the desecration or fallen into the possession of some rich private collector with a penchant for the macabre. The latter possibility would only make the treasure hunt more difficult. Theft a few years after the dead man's burial was preferable, since it meant there was much more time for the mask to have become lost and ultimately forgotten. But its chances of survival increased markedly if it had been stolen in the nineteenth century. The question was, where was it most likely to have gone next?\n\n\"There is a plaque,\" the curator said. \"Let me show you.\"\n\nThe man led her through to what remained of Torquemada's tomb. It was little more than a symbolic plaque.\n\n\"'Here Lies the Reverend Tom\u00e1s de Torquemada, One of the Holy Cross, the Inquisitor General. This House's Founder. Died 1518, on 16 September,'\" Annja translated from the Latin inscription.\n\n\"Very impressive,\" said the curator. \"It's rare to find a\u2014\" he checked himself before saying woman \"\u2014person these days with a fair grasp of Latin.\"\n\n\"I'm all about the dead languages.\" She laughed, spotting another inscription on the wall. \"They look great on the dating profiles.\" That confused the poor guy for a moment, reminding her that they were communicating in what was obviously his second or even third language.\n\nShe mouthed the next words without actually making a sound. May This Plague of Heretics Pass.\n\n\"I don't think he really wanted to be buried here. It was more of a political decision than anything else,\" Maffrici said. \"He was born in Valladolid and never really severed ties with the city. He established a tribunal for the Inquisition there and remained connected to the Convent of San Francisco until his dying day. The strange thing is...\" He broke off suddenly, as if not sure he should be speculating so freely in front of her. Annja waited patiently while he considered whatever it was he was about to say\u2014or not say.\n\n\"What is it?\" she asked eventually, breaking into his private world.\n\n\"There's a novel,\" he said. \" El hereje. The Heretic by Miguel Delibes, one of our most celebrated novelists. Perhaps you've heard of it? The inscription there reminds me of it. The book is set in Valladolid and describes something called the path of the heretic, or the pass. But that is not what I just realized...what...stopped me. I haven't really thought about this before, but it has been staring me in the face for such a very long time.\" He rubbed his white-gloved hands together as though in appreciation or greed. \"The ceiling, the one that's missing from the dome...that depicted Valladolid, too.\"\n\n\"So what you're saying is, in terms of Torquemada at least, all roads lead to Valladolid,\" she said, grinning. It was too much for this all to be coincidence. Of course, there was no guarantee that the mask had been taken there, but there was a strong connection between this place, the Grand Inquisitor and the city of Valladolid. She checked her watch. She could make the ride in an hour, ignoring speed limits, but first she had to meet Roux's hacker."
            },
            {
                "title": "22:30 \u2014\u00c1vila",
                "text": "Annja had to ask for directions to Giorgio's. It wasn't on the main drag, but rather tucked away on a quaint side street that, as she walked down it, gave her the distinct impression of time travel. Each step seemed to take her back a decade until she was somewhere around the fifteenth or sixteenth century, surrounded by amazing buildings that had withstood the Inquisition and the civil war and the ravages of change. Giorgio's was one of those hip spots where the beautiful people went and made sure that everyone else knew just how hip it was.\n\nAnnja checked her reflection in the Roadster's side mirror, the bike helmet in her hand, long hair spilling over bike leathers. She grinned. She certainly didn't resemble some young, upwardly mobile stockbroker, or a woman in search of one.\n\nShe opened the door, and even before she'd taken her first step inside, she received a mixture of looks from the clientele that could have frozen a penguin on an ice floe. The women scowled in disapproval, sneering at the skintight leathers, while the men leaned forward, interested, engaged. She ignored both. She was used to being stared at. It was part of being a celebrity. Even if she wasn't a big star, there was always someone on the street who would do a double take, obviously thinking, Aren't you the woman from the TV show?\n\nShe scanned the room. There were at least a dozen guys sitting alone in different parts of the caf\u00e9. A few had shot a glance\u2014or more than a glance\u2014in her direction, but none of them had raised a hand in recognition. She didn't hold any of their gazes, and it didn't take long for most of them to look away, drawn back to their computer screens and cell phones. As she walked toward the counter at the far side of the caf\u00e9, she noticed that one man was still watching her. There was a paperback copy of Howard Fast's Torquemada next to his untouched cappuccino. That was enough to convince Annja he was her guy.\n\nShe walked to his table and sat down.\n\n\"Annja,\" the young man said. He didn't rise to shake her hand. And unlike the rest of the men in the vicinity, he didn't appear to be mentally stripping her leathers. \"You made good time. I'm Oscar.\"\n\nShe sat down across from him. He was barely old enough to be out of university, but when it came to tech wizardry it was a case of \"the younger, the better\" these days. His tousled, sun-bleached hair was stylishly unkempt. He fit in here far more than she did. His olive skin was offset against a white cotton shirt. Not that she was one to judge a book by its cover, but this kid was the polar opposite of every computer nerd she'd ever met. She didn't know what to make of that, but Roux trusted him with Garin's life. She knew that much.\n\n\"So, the old man said you needed to trace the source of a video stream, right? Shouldn't be too difficult.\" He held his hand out across the table. For a weird second she thought he was asking her to dance, but then she realized he wanted her phone. She handed it over. \"You go order a drink,\" he said. \"I'll see what I can do.\"\n\nShe watched as he connected the phone to his laptop via USB cable. As soon as the jack went in, Oscar was lost in concentration. Stylish or not, he was definitely a tech nerd.\n\nAnnja ordered herself a latte from the barista. Drink in hand, she rejoined him at the table, but didn't say a word. The meeting wasn't about social niceties; it was about helping Garin, plain and simple. And in any case, the kid was absolutely oblivious to the rest of the world, his entire focus zoned down to the screen in front of him. The coffee was hot but good and went down creamy.\n\n\"Okay,\" Oscar said after a few seconds, though he wasn't talking to her. \"Good. Yes. Okay...no. Not good.\" He looked up at her across the top of the laptop. \"Whoever wrote this code knows their stuff. And they're determined to stay hidden. The signal is being bounced through half a dozen countries, via anonymous routers, and each connection in the chain is changing its IP addresses every minute or so. It's not impossible to trace, but it's not easy. For a start, it's going to take time to crack the algorithm they're using to cycle through IP addresses, so we can predict where they're going to switch to next and keep the line open long enough to trace it all the way back to source.\"\n\nAnnja had a decent idea what he was talking about, but there was a huge difference between a decent idea and the kind of understanding the hacker obviously had.\n\n\"But you can trace it?\" she asked.\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"Good. That's all I needed to hear.\"\n\nHis fingers moved quickly across the keyboard, picking out commands in rapid-fire succession, then pausing a beat as he waited for responses to come back to him.\n\nOscar swore under his breath, suddenly working faster.\n\n\"There's a worm embedded in the file,\" he said. \"It's trying to take over my system. It's got the processor going crazy, and the core temp is rising. I think it's trying to blow my battery. Ingenious bastard. Well, at least this is going to be fun now.\"\n\nHe turned the machine slightly so Annja could see what was happening\u2014not that she knew what she was looking at beyond a guy hammering out what seemed to be random letters on a keyboard.\n\n\"I'm just making sure I've got a backup of everything here. Assume the worst,\" he said, but even as he spoke, streams of numbers and letters filled the screen, superimposed with picture after picture. The deepening furrow in the hacker's brow worried her. So much for \"shouldn't be too difficult.\"\n\nHe swore again and killed the Net connection, disabling the Wi-Fi. That didn't slow the virus now that it was in his hard drive, and it continued chewing up data and spitting it out again, faster and faster until trying to focus on it hurt Annja's eyes. The fan whined as the first faint whiff of smoke curled up from beneath the laptop.\n\nOscar acted quickly, closing the lid and flipping the machine over.\n\nIt took two hands to release the catch and pop the battery, but the second he did it heads turned, drawn by the stench of burning.\n\nHe dropped the battery, staring at the smoldering plastic housing as if his entire understanding of the world had just been betrayed.\n\n\"What the hell just happened?\" Annja asked.\n\n\"Some serious piece of code. Some seriously serious piece of code. The virus overloaded the system resources, then created a surge back into the battery. That's not an easy thing.\"\n\n\"So we're up against someone who knows what they're doing\u2014IP masking, making computers burn up...\"\n\n\"Yep, we're not talking spotty teenagers in their bedroom, that's for sure.\"\n\n\"Is there anything you can do?\"\n\nHe looked at the sorry state of the battery. \"This thing's fried, but there's always something that can be done if you're resourceful enough,\" he said, fishing inside his laptop bag for a small device that he connected to her phone. \"I'm going to make an image of your phone\u2014basically clone it\u2014and see if I can trick the code into thinking it's your phone that's trying to access the file, not my laptop. It could take me a while, but sooner or later I'll crack it.\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, time's the one thing I don't have.\"\n\n\"This is personal now. Trust me. I'll get you what you need. There's something I can tell you right now, though.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"You were watching a recording. It wasn't a video chat.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "21:05 \u2014Valladolid",
                "text": "Plaza Mayor was already a hive of early-morning activity, bustling with tourists and locals when Annja reached Valladolid.\n\nEven with the steady hubbub, the huge plaza still felt like a wide-open space in the claustrophobic Old Town. The city wasn't what she'd been hoping to find, even if she wasn't entirely sure what that had been. The buildings might not have been as thoroughly modern as many of the cities she'd visited around the world\u2014all glass, concrete and steel\u2014but everything here was still far too new to be hiding any ancient secrets. Almost all of the buildings appeared to have been built in the past hundred and fifty years. There was absolutely nothing amid all of the banks, gift shops, caf\u00e9s and restaurants that could have been standing even two hundred years after Torquemada's death, never mind the early days of the Inquisition.\n\nAnnja slammed down the kickstand and parked the bike up. She walked around the outskirts of the plaza, taking a closer look at each building, but no matter how desperately she willed it, she found nothing of interest. Feeling her mood darkening, she realized she hadn't eaten all day. She didn't want to stop the search, not when time was so short, but she wasn't going to be any use to Garin if she starved herself, so she went inside the nearest caf\u00e9 and ordered a coffee and a Caesar salad. It would be enough to keep her going.\n\nThere were a dozen metal tables and chairs outside the caf\u00e9, so she picked one and, like a tourist, stretched out her legs to ease the cramped muscles and soak up the sun while she waited for her meal. On any other day, she could have happily wasted a couple of hours just drinking in the ambience, but today wasn't a day like any other. Today she had a job to do. She pulled out her phone and called Roux. She knew he'd be in the air. All she wanted to do was leave a voice mail he could check as he landed. Her message was to the point. \"I'm in Valladolid. Following leads I picked up at \u00c1vila. Everything points to this place being central to Torquemada's tale. I'm not sure what I'm looking for. I'm just hoping I'll recognize it when I see it.\" She killed the call.\n\nA flyer on the table caught her eye. She picked it up. The flyer showed the same image as the billboard outside a theater on the opposite side of the square\u2014a woman dressed in nothing but black underwear, smoking a cigarette from a long holder, obviously advertising some kind of burlesque show. It seemed out of place among the restrained buildings. It took Annja a moment to realize that the woman was actually a man. That brought a smile to her lips; clearly things weren't always what they seemed to be. There was a good lesson there. First impressions could be deceptive. She flipped the leaflet over and read the small blurb that explained the show was taking place at the Teatro Zorrilla.\n\n\"It's very good, even if you can't speak Spanish.\" Annja looked up to see a waitress clearing plates from one of the neighboring tables. She was surprised that the waitress spoke to her in English until she realized she must have overheard at least part of the message she left for Roux.\n\n\"I'm afraid I'm not going to be around long enough to take in a show.\"\n\n\"Ah, that's a shame.\"\n\nThe girl smiled and started back toward the door, balancing a tray of dirty cups.\n\n\"I know this might seem like a stupid question,\" Annja said. \"But I don't suppose you know where the Convent of San Francisco used to be?\"\n\nThe girl shrugged. \"Sorry. Was it around here?\"\n\n\"I was really hoping so, but I can't see anything to even suggest where it might have been.\"\n\n\"Well, it depends how old it is. Most of the buildings around the plaza were built in the 1800s, I think, and some of it is more modern than that. A lot of the old buildings that were here before that were demolished to make way for the new. There's some kind of plaque on the theater\u2014one of those historic-landmark things\u2014but I can't remember what it says. Sorry.\"\n\n\"That's okay. Thanks, anyway,\" Annja said. \"I'll go take a look.\"\n\nThe theater was closed, its front doors locked and everything inside dark. Even the box office. The plaque was on the wall beside the main door. It detailed how the Zorrilla had been built on the original site of the Convent of San Francisco.\n\nA dead end, Annja thought miserably, realizing how much time she'd wasted only to reach a standstill.\n\nShe was already three hours down and all she had to show for it was a burlesque theater built on the site of an old convent. That wasn't going to help Garin.\n\nOr was it?\n\nThat very much depended upon what had happened to the convent and whether the theater had been constructed in its place or on top of its partial remains. She'd seen enough buildings that had been built directly on top of previous ones to know that there was a chance the foundations and any lower levels might\u2014just might\u2014have survived beneath the new one. There was an entire city beneath Chicago, for instance, not that you could access it. Annja had no guarantee that there was anything of the convent left, not even a few broken stones. There was a chance, though, and in the absence of any other leads, she was going to take it and hope the old builders had simply chosen to bury the convent, or the cellars and mausoleum level at least, rather than waste time and resources demolishing it. Hell, it was even possible the lower levels had been used in the construction of the theater's foundations, but she doubted she'd be that lucky. Given the way her day had been going thus far, the place had probably burned to the ground.\n\nHammering on the front door brought no response.\n\nShe headed around the side of the building in search of the stage door, hoping there'd be someone inside the building who'd let her in, assuming she could make herself understood\u2014though how convincing her Spanish would be was anyone's guess.\n\nUnsurprisingly, though, the side door was locked, as were some larger doors at the rear where stage equipment was likely delivered.\n\nHaving exhausted her options at ground level, Annja looked up. There was a small window ajar more than twenty feet above her, so she couldn't simply make a jump for it, but there was an inviting drainpipe that would take her up to a ledge from which she could probably reach it. The drainpipe flaked paint and rust when she tested it, but she thought it might just hold her weight. She glanced back down the alleyway and into the plaza to be sure no one was watching her, then she shimmied up the pipe. A small boy turned in her direction, an ice cream in one hand, his mother holding the other one. He gave her a white-smeared smile and then disappeared, dragged out of sight by Mom.\n\nAnnja hauled herself up, finding her first foothold in the grouting as she scrambled upward. Less than thirty seconds later, she was inching along the ledge. She pressed up against the glass and reached inside to open the window wide enough to flop inside.\n\nShe found herself in a janitor's cupboard, full to overflowing with the clutter of cleaning supplies\u2014buckets, brushes and disinfectants all promising the reek of summer forests and autumn meadows, and enough toilet rolls to keep a small army clean and fresh. Annja managed to negotiate the obstacle course without sending the precarious piles of chemicals and cleaning fluids sprawling. The door opened\u2014mercifully, it wasn't locked\u2014to reveal a heavily carpeted hallway. The carpet was one of those old red faux-Chinese patterns that cinemas and theaters around the world loved so much in the seventies. She wasn't going to find anything ancient on this floor, so her first job was to locate the stairs. She followed a sign for the emergency exit, figuring it would offer the most direct route down. The stairwell was undecorated, showing the weeping brickwork of the old theater. It opened up onto the front of the auditorium, stage left.\n\nThe auditorium was in near-absolute darkness; only a strip of low-level security lights was on, giving enough of a glow for Annja to approach the stage without falling over.\n\nShe was certain there would be a space beneath the stage, and with luck, that would lead into the bowels of the theater, where she'd find the remains of the previous building...if they even existed. The curtain was down, so thick it gave no hint of the burlesque backdrop it hid.\n\nA door with a glowing sign displaying the word Salida took her in the right direction.\n\nAnother door led her to the backstage area, where a flight of wooden stairs led down into the darkness below.\n\nNo one challenged her as she moved through the old theater.\n\nShe'd been reluctant to turn on additional lights in case they alerted anyone connected to the theater, inside or out, but once she started descending she had no such reservations about turning on the first light she found.\n\nAnnja detected the faintest odor of damp as she reached the bottom of the staircase.\n\nThe glow of the strip lighting failed to illuminate much beyond the stairs, but she saw a flashlight standing upright on a small desk close by. It didn't take long to sweep the entire area with the beam. She made her way back among the scenery boards, playing the flashlight beam between them, searching for a sign, anything, that hinted at another way down, deeper. Cobwebs clawed at her face as she made her way into the gloom. Annja peered behind stacked boards, moving them so she could see behind them properly.\n\nThe shadows gathered around her feet masked the step. Her heel caught, but she stopped herself before she went sprawling to the ground. She took more care as she moved on. There was another step only a few feet away. And another beyond that, turning slightly. She followed the spiraling steps, descending into a space below the theater's storeroom.\n\nHer heart raced as she realized this space was much older than the Zorrilla itself\u2014which had to be a good thing. Surely that meant the theater had been built on top of the old convent, didn't it? The room before her extended far beyond the walls of the theater. Annja tried to orient herself with the world above. As best she could tell, the vast chamber seemed to lead away from the plaza, running beneath other buildings that now occupied the land where the convent had once stood. Meaning she was standing in whatever remained of the ancient building.\n\nPlaying the light around the room, she spotted a passage. It was the only one. She followed it, but before she had moved too far along it, her way was blocked by a stone wall with a stout iron-banded wooden door set into it. A heavy iron ring hung as a handle.\n\nShe pushed against the door. It didn't give.\n\nLocked, or bolted from the other side? She put her shoulder against it and pushed again, harder this time. The door gave a little, the creak echoing through the low-ceilinged passage to the cavernous room behind her.\n\nAnnja held her breath, sure the noise would summon someone, and counted to ten before she pushed again. No one came. She put all of her strength behind the next push. This time the rotten wood splintered and the rusted metal snapped, the entire frame giving way under the force. The door scraped open into the room beyond, releasing a rush of air that hadn't been breathed for probably two hundred years or more.\n\nAnnja paused on the threshold, shining the flashlight inside.\n\nThe beam illuminated dust-and-cobweb-covered shapes that made no sense at first.\n\nThen Annja realized she was looking at bones covering every inch of wall from floor to ceiling. On and on, as far as the light shone, bones. Annja had visited the catacombs beneath Rome and other ossuaries in and around Vienna and Prague, but they never ceased to take her breath away.\n\nShe paused while the dust of centuries\u2014which she'd shaken up simply by breaking the seal of the door\u2014settled again before she entered. It was an unconscious act of reverence. She lived for places like this and had no desire to disturb the dead if she could help it.\n\nShe took a deep breath before she entered the chamber of bones.\n\nThe long, narrow passage stretched deep inside this new\u2014or rather, much older\u2014section of building, reaching at least thirty feet ahead of her before another corridor crossed it. The walls of this second corridor were shored up with bones, as well. It was as if the entire catacombs had been constructed from bones, but of course there must have been stones somewhere beneath the skeletal remains, now yellowed and calcified with age.\n\nAnnja's footsteps echoed back to her as she advanced slowly through the passageway. She kept one hand held out in front of her face, brushing away the strands of cobweb before they smothered her face. So many bones, so many bodies piled atop one another, all of them becoming one in death, abandoned and long forgotten. She was sure no one even knew that they were still down there.\n\nThe tunnel stretched far beyond the flashlight's beam. She continued on, one step at a time, checking every inch of the damned place for a clue, for something that would link to the mask and give her a chance to save Garin. That was all she wanted. She'd already done the impossible and found the Convent of San Francisco, a building that hadn't existed for the best part of two hundred years, but that wasn't enough. She needed to find the mask. And if not the mask itself, something that would lead her to it. She was wasting her time. There was nothing here.\n\nShe walked on, her boots grinding dust and grit into the stone floor with each step.\n\nShe passed another intersection and another and she began to grasp the sheer scale of what lay down here.\n\nShe was tempted to try one of the many passages branching off the main corridor, but knew that if she ventured off the central path, she risked walking into a labyrinth of bone and becoming disoriented. So she continued going forward, trying not to think about how many thousands of people must have died to make these walls.\n\nA few minutes later, Annja was grateful she hadn't deviated from the main passageway.\n\nBones gave way to rows of stone coffins set in alcoves in the walls.\n\nCoffins meant a more important kind of dead. She walked down the line, fingers lingering on the crosses and tracing the inscriptions that told the briefest stories of the lives they contained. The coffins held the remains of women who had held office within the convent. But the farther along the line she went, the more male names she encountered, until she realized she was standing before the tombs of men who had served the Inquisition.\n\nOne coffin stood out because it didn't bear the cross or any Christian blessing meant to serve the deceased in the next life.\n\nIt bore only a single word: Morisco.\n\nThat was the word the curator had used at the monastery in \u00c1vila, the term for the Moors who'd converted to Christianity rather than fleeing the country from the Inquisition.\n\nBut why would a Muslim, even one who'd changed his religion\u2014in public at least\u2014be buried in such an obviously Christian place? The curator had said the word was an insult, hadn't he? She lingered in front of the stone sarcophagus. There was definitely something wrong about its presence here, amid the tombs of the Inquisitors and the sisters of the convent. It fairly screamed at her.\n\nAnnja wasn't going to learn its secrets just by staring at it, though. She needed to look inside. She placed the flashlight on top of the stone lid, then took a deep breath before pushing hard. She was rewarded with the sound of stone grinding on stone until it had opened a crack.\n\nShe picked up the flashlight once more and shone it into the coffin.\n\nShe could never have imagined what its beam revealed."
            },
            {
                "title": "20:30 \u2014Seville",
                "text": "Roux stepped onto the tarmac and into the sudden heat. It was fierce enough to drive the breath from his lungs after the unnatural cool of the air-conditioned private jet. He was glad to have something solid beneath his feet even though the flight had been relatively short. It certainly hadn't been smooth. Long ago, he'd realized that as luxurious as the Gulfstream was, it was still just a tin can hurtling through the sky. It didn't matter whether he owned it or an airline did, the plane was still going to get battered around by the elements on any given flight.\n\nThe old man was a frequent flier.\n\nAlthough he kept an overnight bag on board, packed with the essentials of modern living, he left it behind. Sleep wasn't on the schedule. Walking across the landing strip, he listened to Annja's message. He returned her call, but it went straight to voice mail.\n\n\"It's Roux,\" he said. \"I'm in Seville. I'll give you a call when I have news. Check in when you can.\"\n\nHe slipped the phone back into his pocket and pulled out his passport, ready to present it to the immigration officer. There would be no complications; there never were when you paid the kind of money he had to arrange this short-haul flight. A car would be waiting for him when he stepped out of the terminal. Money made the world go round.\n\nHe wasn't disappointed. Less than ten minutes after the cabin door had depressurized, Roux was sitting comfortably in the back of a chauffeur-driven black Mercedes Benz. He could have rented a car and driven himself, but it was just easier to take the driver.\n\n\"Where to, sir?\" the driver asked in flawless English. The company Roux had contracted had offered a selection of drivers able to speak a wide range of languages, anything to suit his needs. He learned forward, checking the man's name against his license. Mateo.\n\n\"First stop, the remains of the Castillo de San Jorge, Mateo, there's a good man,\" Roux said, assuming that the driver knew where it was.\n\n\"Of course, sir. Is your interest in the Inquisition?\" The driver had struck on the connection straightaway, but then no doubt everyone who visited the place had that particular interest.\n\n\"One of many,\" he said. \"Do you know it well?\"\n\n\"I worked there as a tour guide during my studies. Unsurprisingly, people only ever wanted to hear the goriest details of tortures.\"\n\nRoux smiled. \"Human nature, my friend. And, you must admit, there's plenty to keep them entertained.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, but it was always more fun to make up something particularly awful, just to watch them squirm.\" He laughed.\n\nRoux liked the man. Sometimes there was too much truth in the world. A guide having a little bit of fun at the expense of a few tourists wasn't that big a crime...all things considered.\n\n\"You're more than welcome to come inside and revive your fledgling career as a tour guide,\" he offered.\n\n\"It's your dime, boss,\" the man said. \"Doesn't matter to me if I'm kicking back in the car waiting for you to come back, or if I'm giving you the grand tour of the ruins. Costs the same for you. But are you sure you want me making stuff up?\" He grinned in the rearview mirror as he pulled into traffic.\n\nThe journey was short, the private landing strip only a few minutes outside of town. The driver didn't take any risks, waiting patiently for the lights to change before indicating and turning right, going against the flow. The entrance to what remained of the Castillo de San Jorge lay next to the market in the center of Seville, though the remains themselves were buried beneath the \"new\" market, close to the river Guadalquivir. New was a relative term. There'd been a market on the spot for over a century. Roux could remember what it had been like before. Sometimes his longevity weighed heavily on him. He could look at the ever-changing world and realize just how little of it was actually permanent, and no matter how much it changed, none of those changes lasted all that long.\n\nIt was going to be damp in the ruins, moist and clammy, especially where they butted up against the riverbed. There was no guarantee he'd even be able to get that far. He couldn't remember what the Castillo de San Jorge had been like in the late 1800s when he'd last been there. There certainly hadn't been a visitors' center, though, or tour guides to answer his questions.\n\nMateo dropped him at the entrance, then went to park the car.\n\nBy the time he returned, Roux had worked his way through the selection of brochures without finding what he needed.\n\nThe driver slipped his phone back into his jacket pocket as he approached. Roux nodded, assuming the man had taken a few minutes to chat with his employers or the significant other in his life. In the past fifty years or so, the world had changed so much he didn't even automatically think \" woman in his life\" when he looked at a handsome guy like the driver.\n\n\"Everything okay, boss?\" Mateo asked. \"You look...troubled.\"\n\n\"I'm reading about how the trials actually took place in the Town Hall.\"\n\n\"The Ayuntamiento? That's right. But this is where the first auto-da-f\u00e9 took place, making it very much the birthplace of the Inquisition. The first executions happened in Seville. Those poor souls who fell foul of the Inquisition were burned alive on a platform designed just for the purpose.\"\n\nRoux sighed deeply. \"There's no end to the ingenuity of men who want to make others suffer.\"\n\n\"Spoken like a man who knows his stuff,\" Mateo said. \"Do you want to know what the real irony is?\"\n\n\"Go on, amaze me,\" said Roux, expecting to hear one of those little lies the driver had used to spice up his guided tours.\n\n\"The guy who designed the burning tables they called the quemadero was a Jew. He became a victim of the Inquisition himself.\"\n\n\"So his ingenuity bought him no favors with the men in power.\"\n\n\"None.\"\n\nIt was no different from Joan of Arc's France, Roux knew. There, the executioner might have had mercy on the \"witch\" and snapped her neck before she burned. It was barbaric and brutal, and the horrors he'd seen over the centuries still lived on inside his head.\n\nThey moved through the room, toward a display that showed a reproduction of a painting by Goya along with sketches of suspects wearing pointed hats and tabards bearing a cross that marked them as being under investigation by the Inquisition. Roux had seen the original many times, and not only on the walls of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, where it hung. He had spent almost a year in the artist's company after he fled to Paris. The last time they talked had been only days before Goya suffered his fatal stroke. It brought back so many memories, some of which he would much rather forget.\n\n\"You think it was really like that?\" Mateo asked.\n\n\"Not at the beginning,\" Roux said. \"But by the end, certainly.\" He spoke with more certainty than the driver could have expected. But then, the man could never have guessed the old man he was talking to had witnessed many of the Inquisition's horrors firsthand.\n\n\"There are some more of his drawings here in Seville,\" Mateo said. \"Some of them are studies that may have led to this painting.\"\n\n\"Are there?\" Roux had thought the artist had destroyed everything related to his dark pieces. This was news to him. But did it matter? Was this the important thing he'd been hoping to find? A few sketches by a lost friend?\n\n\"They are in the Museum of Fine Arts. Fifteen minutes' walk from here, not even half that in the car.\"\n\n\"Then what are we waiting for?\"\n\n\"They aren't on display\u2014they're only brought out for special exhibitions.\"\n\n\"There are always ways and means,\" Roux said.\n\nHe suddenly had a hunch and was curious to see what of his old friend's art had survived. He remembered Goya's fascination with the darkest days of his country. The man was a scholar with a passion for learning and a habit of hiding those things he had discovered in his art\u2014especially in the sketches that formed the foundations of the finished paintings. There was no telling what he might have hidden on those charcoals. Roux hadn't planned on this detour, but the few minutes it would add to the search could prove invaluable in the long run.\n\nRoux didn't waste his time calling some petty bureaucrat in the museum. He cut to the chase, speed-dialing one of the movers and shakers in the country. The woman was on the board of a number of museums and art galleries and could pull strings quickly. She was also an ex-lover, which made the first sixty seconds or so of the conversation a little awkward. It had been more than thirty years since they'd spoken, and although she sounded much the same, she couldn't be the young woman she had been, even if he was exactly the same man he was that last time he'd lain down beside her. The phone line was like the dark, though. It hid the truth of the years between them.\n\nShe promised the pictures would be waiting for him when he arrived. He promised to come visit her soon. One of them was lying and they both knew it.\n\nThe traffic made the journey slower than Mateo had suggested, but only by a few minutes, and it gave the curator time to set up a private room with the sketches displayed for Roux's viewing. The curator, a short, balding man, met them at the door as they arrived, a hand held out in welcome as if they were old friends.\n\n\"Welcome,\" he said, ushering Roux inside. \"I was given to understand you only have a limited amount of time, and with the very short notice, well, the space we've been able to make available for viewing...isn't optimal. The lighting, et cetera... I hope you understand.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Roux said, waving away the apologies. \"I'm sorry it was such short notice and appreciate your efforts to accommodate a demanding old man.\" He smiled wryly.\n\n\"Please, please,\" the little man said, \"let's just forgive each other, then. This way, gentlemen.\" He offered a mildly disapproving glance in Mateo's direction as the driver climbed out of the car to follow them.\n\n\"It might be better if you wait with the car, Mateo,\" Roux said, deciding he'd rather not have a witness. There was a chance money might well need to change hands, if the curator was holding out on anything, and a man was always more susceptible to a bribe if he wasn't being watched.\n\nOnce they were inside the room it was clear why the curator had been reluctant to have the extra body inside. The private viewing room was barely larger than a broom cupboard\u2014a particularly small one, at that\u2014and was obviously set up for restoration work rather than viewing. A woman Goya would have dearly loved to have painted waited for them inside the room.\n\n\"Our collection of Goya drawings is really quite remarkable, the pride of our humble little museum,\" the woman said. \"We were incredibly fortunate to have these willed to us in a patron's estate many years ago. They are by far the most precious treasure we have in our care.\" She waved an open hand toward a folio on a workbench that had been cleared. \"Please.\" She slipped on a pair of cotton gloves before she opened it. \"Just let me know when you are ready, and I'll turn them over.\"\n\nRoux was momentarily disappointed he wasn't going to be able to touch the drawings himself, but then they were the property of the nation, and she had no idea Roux's own face could be hidden away inside one of them, just another one of the artist's little jokes.\n\nShe opened the folder to reveal the first of the pictures.\n\nIt was a study of a man's face beneath a pointed hat.\n\nThe second was the face of a monk.\n\nThe third was of a row of officials sitting in judgment.\n\nNone of them were significantly different from the final pictures he'd seen in Milan.\n\nBut as the woman revealed the fourth picture, Roux's breath caught.\n\nThe sketch was of a mask, or rather, a face wearing a mask.\n\nThis was what he'd been hoping against hope to find. He'd half expected it not to be here. His friend had been obsessed with the Inquisition, and it was no surprise that Tom\u00e1s de Torquemada figured into this. Still, he hadn't dared to hope Goya had known anything about a mask because there was no way for him to reach across the years and ask him. Francisco Goya, though, had reached across the years to talk to Roux the only way he knew how\u2014through his art.\n\n\"What can you tell me about this?\" Roux asked, trying not to make the inquiry sound as urgent as it felt. He wanted to hear it from their lips, but it was hard not to jump to conclusions. It had to be the Mask of Torquemada.\n\n\"Ah, this one. Quite...haunting, isn't it? Certainly one of his darker studies. There is, of course, the possibility this study has nothing to do with his Inquisition sketches,\" the curator began, but the woman cut him off.\n\n\"There were stories, none of them written down at the time, sadly\u2014at least none that have been recovered\u2014and many of them conflict, but it is believed that the Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada himself, wore a mask when he witnessed interrogations.\" The woman pursed her lips, clearly not comfortable bringing anything as sordid as torture into the conversation. The art was all that mattered to her. \"There is one school of thought that believes he wore it chiefly to terrify, but there is another that believes it was to hide his own fear.\"\n\n\"From what I know of the man, that doesn't seem likely,\" Roux said. The many religious zealots he'd encountered in his life had all relished their work. It was the one thing they all had in common.\n\n\"As I was saying,\" she continued as if he hadn't spoken. \"There is an alternative theory, that the mask was actually a torture device itself.\"\n\n\"Interesting.\"\n\n\"Indeed. It may even have been the inspiration for Alexander Dumas's The Man in the Iron Mask.\"\n\n\"Or Dumas's mask might have helped create some of the myth around Torquemada himself,\" the curator suggested.\n\nIt was possible, of course. And from what Roux remembered about Goya in his final years, it was likely the artist would have made that kind of connection, too. In 1847, Dumas had popularized the story of Eustache Dauger, held in jail in 1669. Roux had never particularly liked the man. Dauger was a poseur, but then, by the time they had rubbed shoulders in the royal court of Versailles, Roux was long past the part of his life where he'd craved any sort of notoriety. He was a creature of shadows by then, moving silently, obsessed with the search for the lost fragments of Joan of Arc's shattered blade.\n\n\"When do you think these were drawn?\" he asked.\n\n\"Goya started work on The Inquisition Tribunal in 1812, so these sketches must date from earlier than that.\"\n\nMore than a decade before he'd first met the man. \"The mask did not make it into that painting,\" Roux noted.\n\n\"Which is not particularly unusual for an artist like Goya. He made hundreds of preliminary sketches, working on countless details that didn't make it into the final works for whatever reason.\"\n\nWhat she said was quite true, but there was something about the drawing that made Roux think the artist had other reasons for not including it in the final painting. Certainly this wasn't something conjured from his imagination. Goya was quite grounded in his studies of the Inquisition pieces. He wasn't given to flights of fancy. No, the old man couldn't shake off the feeling that Goya had drawn this from life, right down to the ribbon that tied the mask in place.\n\n\"Is there any way I could have a copy of this?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, that's quite out of the question,\" the woman said, but this time it was the curator's turn to step in, not wanting their unhelpfulness to get back to the board member who'd facilitated Roux's visit. She was that powerful in this world.\n\n\"I'm sure there's some way we can accommodate you, sir.\"\n\nThe woman gritted her teeth, determined to put herself in between the man and her treasure. \"These cannot just be placed in the photocopier, you know.\"\n\nRoux had no idea if that was what the curator had in mind, but he had a simple enough solution and one that would be far more efficient, while leaving the drawings untouched. He fished his phone out of his pocket and held it up like a flag of truce. They both looked at him as if they couldn't quite comprehend what he was thinking. He spelled it out for them.\n\n\"If I could just take a photograph? That would be quite incredible. I would be forever in your debt.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" the curator said, fussing around to make sure that Roux had enough room.\n\nRoux glanced at the woman. While she didn't seem enamored by his request, she didn't object.\n\nHe captured a single image of the sketch. There was nothing else he was likely to learn here, so he gave his thanks and made his farewells, promising to put in a good word with his friend when he saw her next.\n\nThe curator couldn't hide his pride. \"Our pleasure.\"\n\nThe woman forced a smile. She clutched the portfolio close to her breast. It would be hidden away again, lost to the world until the next exhibition. There was something sad about that, but it was equally wonderful that new generations would discover these treasures and keep on discovering them as long as there was someone like her to cherish them. He smiled his thanks and followed the curator back out through the warren of corridors to the main glass doors.\n\nStepping outside, Roux had to look up and down the street several times before he spotted the car, and Mateo standing beside it. The driver waved and slid back behind the wheel, driving up to him. As he got in and closed the door, Roux heard the sound of an engine starting up close by.\n\n\"Did you find what you were looking for?\"\n\n\"I think perhaps I did,\" Roux said, studying the picture on the phone's screen.\n\nHe forwarded the photograph to Annja, then tried to call her, but it went straight to voice mail again. He hung up without leaving a message. Roux put the phone back into his pocket. He glanced through the rear window, taking one last look at the museum. All this time, it had held a secret without even knowing it. Annja would appreciate that.\n\nRoux was still looking out the rear window as the car took a slow right turn. The driver in the car behind them was staring back at him far too intensely for comfort.\n\nThis wasn't the old man's first time at the rodeo.\n\nHe was being followed."
            },
            {
                "title": "20:00 \u2014Valladolid",
                "text": "Annja had expected bones. Bones or dust. Or fragments of one and a gathering of the other. A few rags, perhaps, untouched for generations.\n\nDeep down, there'd been a tiny part of her that had hoped it'd be easy, that she'd push back the lid and see a silver mask lying on some moldering cushion, just waiting to be found. That would have been all of her lottery-ticket, late-running-for-a-train and traffic-lights-in-her-favor luck for the rest of her life all rolled into one.\n\nBut it wasn't to be.\n\nShe wasn't that lucky.\n\nWhich was bad news for Garin.\n\nThe flashlight beam played across the only thing the stone casket contained: a key. A small brass key with worn teeth.\n\nAnnja reached inside for it.\n\nShe assumed the metal would feel rough, pitted with corrosion given its obvious age, but it was surprisingly smooth. There was the obvious coarseness associated with something made so long ago, but it had weathered the passage of time relatively unharmed, no doubt because of the near-vacuum seal the sarcophagus lid provided. It had been hidden for a reason. More than that, it had been hidden here for a reason. Why, though, had it been placed in an empty coffin marked for a Moor and surrounded by tombs of the Inquisition's most faithful? That only opened a nest of questions, the most immediate being: What did it unlock?\n\nShe heard a sound originating from the direction she'd come. The unexpectedness of it caused her heart to skip a beat.\n\nSomeone was heading her way.\n\nHad she been followed down here?\n\nShe could make herself known, avoiding an unpleasant confrontation\u2014but that would mean having to explain herself, and it wasn't as though she had a right to be down here. It would eat up valuable time she couldn't spare. Or, to be blunt, time Garin couldn't spare.\n\nShe turned off the flashlight and did her best to slide the lid of the sarcophagus back into place without making enough noise to wake the rest of the dead down here. Even so, the grating of stone-on-stone echoed through the chamber.\n\nA voice cried out.\n\nShe didn't like the sound of it.\n\nAnnja crept deeper into the catacombs, not wanting to be discovered by whoever was down there with her. She could only hope she'd be able to find another way out of this charnel house, but the odds weren't in her favor.\n\nShe edged forward in the dark, trying not to make a sound.\n\nShe was lucky the avenue was straight and that the person moving toward her was carrying a hooded lantern, which spread its glow across the floor without lighting the entire tunnel. She was going to have to get out of there, though. There was no way her luck was going to hold. Annja crept along the passageway, trying to time her footsteps to those of the newcomer. It wasn't easy, but thankfully, the other person wasn't trying to be quiet.\n\nAnnja almost missed the narrow flight of stairs\u2014old stone steps with well-worn edges leading upward.\n\nShe held her breath as the lantern swung in the darkness.\n\nA muffled voice called out, too indistinct for her to make out any words.\n\nShe stopped moving.\n\nShe could wait and hope the newcomer missed her, or trust to whatever god looked after reckless explorers in ancient crypts, and take the stairs, praying they'd lead her out of there and not into trouble. Fortune favors the brave, she thought. She took the first few stairs as fast as she could, making sure that she got her body out of the line of sight in case the hooded lantern's light got too close too quickly. When she was high enough up the staircase, Annja turned on the flashlight. The time for stealth was over. She broke into a run, her boots clattering on the stone.\n\n\"\u00bfQui\u00e9n es?\" the newcomer shouted from below. Annja took no notice. She needed to get out, fast, and hang on to the key. That was the most important thing right now. That key opened something, somewhere. A Moorish tomb in a Christian burial ground\u2014that had to mean something. She wasn't far enough down the path to know what, yet, but she would. Did it have anything to do with the mask she was looking for? Impossible to say. She couldn't worry about that now. All she could do was run. And she did, clutching the flashlight in one hand, the key in the other. She wasn't about to risk it falling out of her pocket.\n\nAn icy thrill of fear coursed through Annja when she saw the heavy wooden door blocking her way at the top of the stairs. She hit it hard, expecting it to bounce her back, but it swung open easily. Without hesitating, she stepped through and slammed it closed behind her. There was a key in the lock. She turned it, locking it on the person in the crypt.\n\nIt took a moment for Annja to realize where she was. She hadn't emerged in the Zorrilla Theater, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, in a church.\n\nHer phone rang almost as soon as she took her first steps down the aisle toward the door that would take her outside. The only worshipper, a woman kneeling at the altar, turned and offered her a withering glance. Annja was getting a lot of those these days. She hurried down the aisle and out into the fresh air before she checked her phone.\n\nNumber withheld.\n\n\"Hello,\" she said.\n\n\"Well, well, well... Am I to take it you have found religion?\" the voice in her ear mocked.\n\nIt took her a moment to realize she was speaking to Garin's kidnapper, the voice from the video feed. The fact that he knew where she was located was unnerving, to say the least. Were they watching her? Using satellites to track her like Garin had in the past? GPS on her phone? She glanced back inside the cool confines of the church. The woman had returned to her devotions and had absolutely no interest in Annja. There was a priest in the chancel now, lighting candles. Assuming it hadn't been the priest himself, there was no sign of the person she'd heard in the catacombs.\n\n\"It's rather a plain church, don't you think?\"\n\nShe glanced around, looking for someone who stood out, someone who was obviously watching her, who had a phone to his ear. The street was quiet. She couldn't see anyone. But they knew where she was.\n\n\"Is this a social call?\" she asked, still looking up and down the street.\n\n\"No. Definitely not. I like to think of it as incentivizing.\" He laughed. It wasn't a maniacal sound, not the mwahahaha of a cartoon villain. It was filled with genuine mirth. In the background, she heard a cry of pain. Garin. Why were they doing this to him? Why torture him? If he knew where the mask was, he would have told them. He wasn't a hero. There was only one thing Garin Braden valued above and beyond the possession of beautiful things, and that was self-preservation. He would have given them what they wanted if he thought it would buy his freedom. Once he knew he was safe, then he'd figure out how to get it back. That was the kind of man he was.\n\n\"There's someone here who wants to talk to you,\" the voice said.\n\nThere was a pause. A second. Two. It felt like forever.\n\nA weak and mumbling voice spoke. \"Don't do it...don't give them what they want. Even if you find it...\" It was Garin. The phone was snatched away before he could finish speaking. The next thing she heard was a grunt and the sound of flesh slapping flesh.\n\n\"Garin!\" Annja called, unable to stop herself.\n\n\"You've wasted four hours, Miss Creed. Ticktock. Ticktock. Don't waste any more.\" The kidnapper killed the connection.\n\nAnnja looked around again, phone still pressed to her ear.\n\nShe tried to think. Yes, they knew where she was, but she couldn't see anyone watching her. There was no obvious tail. Her first thought when the phone rang had been that they were close, maybe even behind the light in the catacombs, but there was no proof, only paranoia. Her phone hadn't worked down there, which meant the kidnapper's couldn't, either. It was much more likely they were using the same kind of technology that Garin would have. They had her phone number. Maybe they had a way of monitoring her SIM? She thought about pulling the battery out of the phone, but she needed to stay in contract with the old man.\n\nShe called Roux.\n\nHe answered on the third ring. \"I've been trying to reach you.\"\n\n\"I went on a little trip. Underground.\"\n\n\"Find anything?\"\n\n\"Maybe. The old Convent of San Francisco is gone, but the builders got lazy. They just leveled the land out and built over the old foundations. I found a way down into the catacombs. In among all of the tombs of the sisters and the good Christian servants of the Inquisition, I found a single sarcophagus that was out of place. It was marked Morisco.\"\n\n\"Interesting. A Moorish grave hidden in the heart of a Christian shrine.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"I'm assuming you opened it?\"\n\n\"I did.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"No bones. No body.\"\n\n\"It was empty?\"\n\n\"I didn't say that. There was a key inside.\"\n\n\"A key? That seems like a lot of trouble to hide a key, don't you think?\"\n\n\"I do. Which makes it important. I don't know what it opens or why it was hidden, or even who did the hiding, but I'll work it out. That's what I do. How about you?\"\n\n\"If you check your texts you'll find a picture of a preliminary sketch by Goya. Like your key, it has been hidden away, this time in the archives of a gallery here. It's a drawing of a mask. I'm sure it's the one we're looking for. I'm also sure it was drawn from life.\"\n\n\"Which would be proof that the mask exists.\"\n\n\"Or at least existed,\" he agreed.\n\n\"Well, it's a start.\"\n\n\"Indeed it is. The other thing that makes me think I'm on to something here is the fact that I'm being followed.\"\n\nAnnja felt the fine hairs on the nape of her neck prickle.\n\nIt was one thing for the kidnappers to know where she was and what she was doing, but they were keeping tabs on Roux, too? That meant they knew about them, how they worked. Knowing their enemy, knowing how they'd act and react, gave them a distinct advantage over Annja and the old man.\n\n\"Funny you should say that,\" she said.\n\n\"Are you being followed?\"\n\n\"As good as. I just had a call from the kidnappers. They knew where I was. Pretty much described the church I'd just walked out of.\" She looked back at the woman who was still kneeling in prayer, but it was the reredos that caught her attention, an ornate altarpiece depicting Saint James killing Moors. The image was enough to trigger a thought inside her head. The sarcophagus, and by extension the key, was a Moorish relic hidden away beneath a Christian church. What if that was the clue itself?\n\nShe was going to have to think about that. And she wasn't going to risk saying it over an unsecure phone line, not if the kidnappers were as tech-savvy as she feared.\n\n\"Don't tell me where you're going,\" she said. \"Don't tell me what you're planning to do next.\"\n\n\"You think we've got unwanted ears listening in?\"\n\n\"It's not worth the risk.\"\n\nShe pictured him nodding. \"Look after yourself, kiddo.\"\n\n\"I always do,\" she said, hanging up.\n\nShe already had an idea fermenting inside her brain.\n\nThe curator back in \u00c1vila had said that Torquemada had founded a church here in Valladolid. That had to be her next port of call.\n\nAnnja crossed the city to find the church. Without a map it wasn't easy, as Valladolid was a city seemingly constructed on the foundations of faith, with spires every few streets denoting yet another place of worship. It was like looking for a particularly sanctified needle in an already consecrated haystack. But after fifteen minutes of driving around and several stuttering conversations with helpful locals, she found herself standing outside the incredible building, wondering how she could possibly have taken so long to find it. The great Gothic frontage was imposing. It wasn't difficult to imagine how the people of Valladolid would have reacted to its construction at the time: with awe. The church was built to the glory of God.\n\nShe was glad she hadn't come straight here, even though it was a more logical starting point for her search. She wouldn't have discovered the key if she had, and there was no way of telling how important that key might turn out to be before the day had run its course.\n\nAnnja retrieved the flashlight from her panniers. She wasn't going to pass up the chance to take a look at what lay beneath this church if the opportunity arose.\n\nThere were more than a dozen people milling around inside, most of whom appeared to be tourists rather than worshippers. Beside a box inviting donations, several piles of leaflets provided information for visitors in a variety of languages. Annja skimmed the English one. It was crammed with tiny print and facts about the church and other religious buildings in the area. As she pocketed it, her attention was captured by an information board that gave a brief history of the church.\n\nThe first line sent a shiver up her spine.\n\nShe was wasting her time.\n\nThe San Pablo church had indeed been commissioned by Torquemada, but not Tom\u00e1s. She could have screamed in frustration. This church was founded by Cardinal Juan de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor's uncle.\n\nShe was already looking in the wrong place.\n\nShe felt like banging her head against a brick wall.\n\nBut she didn't stop reading. Hoping. She didn't want to give up. She closed her fist around the key. The information board went on to explain how the facade, the final element of the church, hadn't been completed until the year 1500, even though the cardinal had died in 1468.\n\nIt seemed like an easy mistake for someone unfamiliar with the two men to make, but the curator must have known better, surely? He wouldn't have simply assumed the familial name meant the same man was behind the construction. Annja stared at the information, absorbing it, thinking, and made a connection; the building was completed two years after the Inquisitor's death.\n\nThe same year that his tomb had been broken into for the first time.\n\nPerhaps there was a connection, after all.\n\nJust not the obvious one.\n\nWhen she read that the church had been built on the ruins of a Moorish palace, abandoned and destroyed after the town had been taken from the Moors, it was hard not to see parallels with the Moorish sarcophagus hidden beneath what had once been a Christian convent. A church on top of a Moorish palace. A convent on top of a Moorish sarcophagus. One thing on top of another, or one thing hiding beneath another, depending on how you looked at it.\n\nOther than that, the display offered little more than a floor plan of the church.\n\nThere was nothing to indicate where the entrance to any crypt might lie.\n\nNow Annja was convinced that if there was anything to be found here, it would lie beneath this Christian building, down in the ruins of the old Moorish palace, assuming the builders had built upon the foundations of that place as they had with the theater on the other side of the city.\n\nIt didn't take long to find an area that had been sectioned off by red velvet rope. It wasn't exactly high security. A priest was busy placing fresh candles in sconces close by. She would have to wait for him to finish what he was doing before she could slip under the rope and disappear down into the crypts. In the meantime, she decided to take a proper look around, just in case there was something she'd missed.\n\nThe transept displayed two paintings by Bartolom\u00e9 de C\u00e1rdenas. According to a small plaque on the wall, he had died in Valladolid in 1628. No direct link with either of the Torquemadas, but what was interesting was the fact that one of the paintings depicted the Conversion of Saint Paul. Cardinal Torquemada was a defender of the conversos in Valladolid\u2014Jews who had adopted the Christian faith rather than be forced to leave Spain. Paul of Tarsus was a Jew who converted. More connections, more hints and clues. Her gut instinct was that she was looking in all the right places, but it was hard to know what was actually relevant and what was a case of her making connections where none existed.\n\nThe church included several side chapels, according to the floor plan. One was the funerary chapel of Alonso de Burgos, who had died in 1499. The date was so close to the death of the inquisitor that it had to be worth investigating while she waited for the priest to finish with his candles. It offered no immediate revelations from the outside. She stepped through the arch into the chapel proper. Although there were no doors between it and the body of the church, it was markedly quieter. The archway was obviously acting as some kind of baffle, which meant sound would almost certainly not travel out of here, either. That could prove useful if she had to hide.\n\nThere didn't seem to be anything of great interest inside the chapel, so Annja took a moment to check out the picture Roux had sent.\n\nThe sketch certainly looked as if it could be the mask they were looking for. The additional detail of the ribbon suggested that the artist might actually have seen the artifact. Of course, it was possible he had just used his imagination in deciding how the mask might be fastened around the Grand Inquisitor's head. There was no way of knowing if Goya had in fact seen the mask, or even confronted a figure wearing it, during his studies. But if he had, that meant she was looking at as near-perfect a rendition of it as she could possibly have hoped. That made it feel more real to her.\n\nShe pocketed the phone again.\n\nThe moment of peace gave her the opportunity to examine the key properly, as well. She held it in one hand and rubbed the ancient metal between the thumb and forefinger of the other. A few flakes of rust fell away, but no more than that. It was in incredible condition, almost perfectly preserved. It was hard to imagine it could be as much as five hundred years old. She could feel the weight of history in it as the key stretched across her palm, extending beyond the width of her hand. It was sturdy, not delicate, but it was also beautifully crafted. Judging from its size and weight, the key was designed to fit a heavy-duty lock. What did that lock protect? Something valuable, surely? Something the world wasn't intended to discover by chance. The key represented a secret. There would have been a few who protected that secret through the years, but they must all be dead now. What was that secret? The Mask of Torquemada? She wasn't sure that artifact, no matter how compelling a treasure for someone like her, was actually valuable enough to warrant such extreme measures\u2014a Moorish grave in a Christian crypt, a Moorish palace beneath a Christian church? That had to be about more than just a mask. But if that was true, then she was just wasting time chasing it, wasn't she? This was all about the mask. It had to be.\n\nAnnja was about to leave the chapel when she noticed an inconsistency in the design on the wall. She would have dismissed it, but she realized that the repeated pattern in the mosaic matched that of the bow of the key\u2014latticework entwined around a crucifix. And then it struck her: it was a combination of Moorish and Christian design. She was in the right place. It wasn't a design she'd encountered elsewhere.\n\nIt tied the key and the chapel together.\n\nShe ran her fingers over the distortion.\n\nThe crucifix in one repetition of the pattern was missing, replaced by something that looked, on closer inspection, like an arched doorway. There was a chance it was a flaw in the design, maybe a problem in the manufacture or a mistake made by whoever had assembled the mosaic, but that changed nothing. The pattern on the key was the pattern in the floor.\n\nShe ran her eyes around the room, searching for a repetition of the error somewhere in case it had been deliberately mirrored. There was nothing.\n\nAnnja squatted down, putting the distorted design at eye level.\n\nShe placed the tip of a fingernail against the arch. The surface was softer than she'd expected. She had mistakenly assumed that the image had been part of the tile, but as she teased away at the arch, she discovered that it was the accumulated dirt and grime of centuries that had built up in a hollow, perhaps even a hole inside the tile.\n\nThat got her heart pumping.\n\nAnnja brushed at the dirt, scraping it away until it became an obvious indentation in the ceramic. She felt in her pocket, searching for something thin and sharp that she could use to dig it out. She found her bike's ignition keys; they'd do the trick. After a minute of careful work, scraping away at the grime around the hole, it was obvious that it was actually large enough to allow the old key she'd found in the Moorish coffin to slide inside.\n\nShe took a deep breath and turned the key slowly, gently, trying not to force the mechanism, which had rusted with age.\n\nThe key turned.\n\nShe heard a click from behind the wall.\n\nA panel of the wall had been released. It had widened a crack. Annja worked it open carefully. Finally, the crack was large enough for her to walk through, though she had to stoop.\n\nShe turned on her flashlight, shining the beam into the darkness beyond."
            },
            {
                "title": "19:50 \u2014Seville",
                "text": "Mateo didn't break pattern. He turned through a series of lefts, circling around his original position, just to be sure that the car behind them really was on their tail.\n\nThe old man noticed a tattoo on the back of Mateo's hand.\n\nHe hadn't noticed it before, but now that he had, he couldn't help but be intrigued by it.\n\nHis instinct was to ask what it meant, but given the fact they were being followed, and escaping their pursuers was very much dependent upon Mateo's concentration and driving skills, distracting him with questions didn't feel particularly smart. It wasn't as if a remark about his tattoo couldn't wait a few moments, after all.\n\nInstead, he watched the driver through the rearview mirror, well aware that his eyes kept darting up to meet the old man's gaze.\n\nRoux didn't like being followed.\n\nHe decided to force a confrontation, rather than risk his pursuer tagging along to whatever discovery was next. Of course, the easiest option was just to give them the slip, but easier wasn't anywhere near as effective. Or permanent. \"We're going to make an unscheduled stop, Mateo.\"\n\n\"You're the boss.\"\n\n\"Indeed I am. Things could get a little interesting if I'm right about our tail.\"\n\n\"I like interesting.\"\n\n\"Me, too.\"\n\n\"Turn in here,\" Roux said, directing Mateo into a dead end. The driver did as he was told, no questions asked.\n\nRoux looked behind them again. The other car had followed them. So much for the benefit of the doubt, Roux thought bitterly. Roux checked for the reassuring shape of the gun inside his jacket. It was always a last resort, but when options were quickly whittled down by circumstance, it was always better to have the choice than not.\n\n\"This will be fine,\" he said. \"Stay in the car. You don't have to get involved in this.\" Mateo nodded and pulled over. On cue, the other car stopped, riding their tailgate.\n\nRoux climbed out of the car.\n\nHe started to walk toward the other vehicle as four men emerged, their eyes firmly fixed on him. They were keyed up, on edge, ready for action. Not a good sign. He stood his ground, not moving beyond the length of his own car.\n\nThe man who'd been driving started toward him, swinging a semiautomatic by his side.\n\nThere was no pointing, no shouting. No grandstanding. These men were professional, organized, disciplined. Roux's first thought was ex-paramilitary. They were a team. A death squad.\n\nHe'd been willing to think things weren't as bad as they could be when he noticed the tattoo on the back of the man's gun hand. It was the same tattoo Mateo had.\n\nThe old man didn't believe in coincidences.\n\nHe turned slightly and in the corner of his eye saw that Mateo had climbed out of the car. So, five of them instead of four, not that it made a massive difference. The odds were stacked against him. The only thing in his favor was that he was Roux. They'd never encountered anyone as resourceful or stubbornly determined to stay alive as he was.\n\n\"This isn't for you. You're not wanted, understood?\" the man with the gun said.\n\n\"Not wanted by who?\" Roux asked. It was a straightforward question. He was buying time. Trying to think. Had he seen that tattoo before? What did it mean?\n\n\"Doesn't matter,\" said the man.\n\n\"I think it does. I think it goes right to the heart of the matter.\"\n\n\"You talk too much, old man. Don't make me hurt you. Just turn around and go home.\"\n\n\"I can't do that.\"\n\n\"You can. Mateo will drive you back to the airport. All you need to do is get back on your plane and we can all go on with our lives.\"\n\nRoux shook his head. \"There's someone counting on me.\"\n\n\"And now I'm counting on you. Mateo's counting on you. My friends here are counting on you. We don't want this to become messy.\"\n\n\"And if I refuse?\"\n\n\"Then it becomes messy. Go back to Paris.\" The man was obviously well-informed, Roux realized. \"Live out the rest of your life in peace. That sounds like a good deal to me.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it does,\" Roux said. He thought about going along with their request. It had a lot going for it, truth be told. Garin was a big boy. He had Annja working hard to save his life. Roux had pretty much exhausted all avenues of inquiry here in Seville and, more importantly, got his findings out to Annja. She'd find the mask if it was here to be found. All things considered, it wouldn't have been difficult to walk away. But the simple fact that these people wanted him to do that meant he wouldn't. He wasn't that kind of man. Garin always said he was an ornery bastard. He wasn't wrong. That they didn't want him here meant this was exactly where he wanted to be.\n\n\"You want me gone, tell me what you're so afraid of me finding. Then I'll think about your offer.\"\n\n\"I'm not afraid at all, my friend, because there is nothing for you to find.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Really. We don't like foreigners coming here and poking their noses in our business. Get back in the car and we'll say no more about it. That is my final word.\"\n\nFive against one.\n\nHe could improve on those odds pretty quickly.\n\nRoux nodded and climbed back into the car without saying another word. He waited for Mateo to ease himself in behind the wheel.\n\nBefore the driver could start the engine, though, Roux had the muzzle of his gun pressed against the back of his head. That was the joy of private jets, small private airports and lax security. He'd revised his opinion on the team he was facing\u2014they weren't professionals. They were fanatics. They were still dangerous, obviously, but the fact that they hadn't patted him down was a dead giveaway that their history of violence was short, if it existed at all.\n\n\"All right, Mateo, you are going to tell me what this is about, or I am going to put a bullet in your brain. It'll be quick, it'll be painless\u2014you'll be dead before your body realizes it. Then I'll go after your friends. I am not a man to give second chances. This is a one-shot deal. I highly encourage you to take it.\"\n\nThe man tried to turn his head, but Roux pressed the gun harder, making sure he knew exactly what would happen if he continued to try to turn around. \"Don't.\" He saw the fear in the man's eyes through the rearview mirror. \"All you need to do is tell me what this is all about.\"\n\n\"I can't,\" Mateo said.\n\nRoux drew in a sharp breath. \"Can't or won't?\" It didn't really matter which it was. Even if the driver was afraid of him, he was more afraid of the men out there. Mateo didn't say anything. \"Okay, get us out of here.\"\n\n\"Where to?\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter. Just turn the car around and get out. I'll decide where we're going when I know myself.\"\n\nMateo didn't need telling twice. He started the engine and pulled the car away from the curb. There were three other cars and a delivery van parked inside the dead-end alleyway. He swung the car into the parking space for an apartment block. As he did, he leaned forward and reached for something under his seat. \"Idiot,\" Roux grumbled and hit him hard on the back of the head with the butt of his pistol. \"I said no second chances.\" He shook his head as the driver slumped forward on the wheel, his foot still pressed down on the gas.\n\nThe car lurched forward, hitting the back of the delivery van hard enough to deploy the air bag as the horn blared.\n\nMoving fast, Roux slid out of the far side of the car and hit the ground hard as gunfire strafed the Mercedes's bodywork. The sound of bullets punching into metal was torturous. The fact he was still alive to hear it was wonderful.\n\nHe rolled across the asphalt.\n\nFour against one.\n\nTwenty percent improvement in less than a minute. He intended to improve on that substantially in the next sixty seconds.\n\nBullets rained down, ripping into the passenger door, shredding the metal as if it were cardboard. Glass shattered. A million tiny fragments rained down across the backseat and the street around the car. Roux had made it out by the skin of his teeth. In that moment, coming up on his elbows and knees, the years peeled away and he felt young.\n\nHe felt alive.\n\nAnd he was going to stay that way.\n\nUnseen by the other gunmen\u2014all of whom were out of their car again, looking for him\u2014Roux scrambled behind the van, taking full advantage of the cover it offered. He watched as the leader barked out orders in Spanish, sending one man around the two cars to try to flank him while the others laid down covering fire. It was a basic maneuver. They had no idea where he was. That uncertainty bought him a few precious seconds. He used them to release a single shot of his own. The bullet caught the scout in the knee, taking him out. He went down screaming. Three against one. He had to admit, things were looking brighter all the time.\n\nUntil a woman appeared at an upstairs window overlooking the scene. She let out a scream and hastily backed away. He didn't need any superpowers to know what was going to happen now. She was going to call the police. It would only be a matter of minutes, and not very many of them at that, before the sirens would signal that the authorities were on their way.\n\nHe needed to work fast. He needed a way out of this. He couldn't be caught here.\n\nHe heard sirens in the distance.\n\nIt had taken less than twenty seconds for a response\u2014which meant the first call couldn't have come from the woman. Too soon even for a rapid-response unit.\n\nThe leader of the gunmen ushered his team back to the car, abandoning their fallen comrades to their own fate. So much for no man left behind.\n\nRoux watched them run.\n\nBefore the sixty seconds was out, he was the last man standing. Their car was surging out onto the main street, clipping the rear of the van as it fishtailed away and sending a trash can flying as it took the corner too tightly.\n\nThe van rocked with the impact, pushing Roux back.\n\nMateo hadn't moved. He was still slumped behind the wheel of the Mercedes and showed no signs of coming around soon. Roux had seen the same kind of absolute stillness several times before. He knew what it meant. He hoped the driver wasn't dead because of him, but the signs weren't good. He hadn't intended to hit him so hard. Everything had happened so quickly. He couldn't dwell on it. Mateo had made his own metaphorical bed, choosing to go for his gun rather than get them out of there as Roux had told him.\n\nThe fallen gunman gave out another groan.\n\nHe clutched at his knee, stubbornly trying to get to his feet. He wasn't going anywhere. His kneecap was absolutely destroyed and his leg wouldn't hold his weight. He was bleeding and in agony. It was only shock that had him half-standing, supporting himself against the bullet-riddled car.\n\nRoux ran to the Mercedes and started to pull Mateo from the driver's seat. His body was heavy and it took Roux longer than he would have liked to heave the man out of the car. He didn't so much as groan as Roux dumped him into the road.\n\nRoux gunned the engine, stepping hard on the gas. He wasn't quick enough. Sirens screamed. Tires shrieked. Cars slewed across the alleyway, blocking him in. There wasn't enough distance for him to get up to speed and ram his way through.\n\nArmed police officers moved into place behind the makeshift car barricade, their weapons trained on him. The odds had turned very much against him. He was good, but he wasn't that good.\n\nHe climbed out of the Mercedes, keeping his hands high above his head.\n\n\"Hit the ground! Now! On your knees! Down!\"\n\nHe did as he was told.\n\nThere was nothing else he could do."
            },
            {
                "title": "19:15 \u2014Valladolid",
                "text": "The flashlight's beam, as intense as it was, barely penetrated the darkness.\n\nIt was as if the blackness swallowed the light whole, and no matter how brightly it burned, the darkness was desperate to keep its secrets safe. Below her, a steep stairway led down into the crypts beneath the church. She couldn't make out the bottom step from where she was. It didn't make sense that this would be a hidden passage, yet still feed into the same crypt-space the cordoned-off staircase led to.\n\nAnnja placed a foot on the first stone step\u2014a step that almost certainly hadn't been trodden on since the door was locked and hidden away behind the new chapel's facade.\n\nShe descended into history.\n\nWith every step she took deeper down into the cold and damp, she became more certain that she'd found the remains of the Moorish palace.\n\nMuch of the stonework was crumbling, the integrity of the stone itself fighting a losing battle against the all-pervading damp. When she reached the bottom, Annja allowed herself a little time to shine the light around her. She didn't have long. Someone\u2014most likely a tourist\u2014would discover the panel she'd left open up there. She'd tried to ease it closed, but there was no obvious way of closing or locking it from the inside. The keyhole hadn't been constructed with that intention.\n\nShe was standing in a place where the Inquisition and the Moors had come together, just as they had in the intertwined pattern around the crucifix\u2014two cultures existing one on top of the other. It was obvious that this space had been used long after the Moors had abandoned it. The beam of her flashlight illuminated intricate mosaics and plasterwork that had long decayed beyond the point of restoration, but as she worked her way around the room, she spotted more and more compelling evidence of Christians having been there before her. Crosses had been daubed on the walls to claim the place for the Church, as if ritual were enough to banish the religion of the foreigners, superimposing one belief system on top of the other.\n\nShe caught her breath when the light finally reached the far end of the room.\n\nHanging on the wall, trapped in the middle of the beam, was a life-size statue with its arms held wide.\n\nIt was a sculpture of the crucifixion. The look of suffering on Christ's carved face perfectly captured the agony of the moment. It was a work of art. Of all the images and iconography, this was the one object that claimed these remains for the Church above all else, just as the Church had claimed the ground above her head. She moved toward the statue. Most of the evidence from the first faith that had been observed here had long since been defiled, destroyed or simply left to disintegrate.\n\nEven the statue was showing signs of damage; a crack cut through one of Christ's outstretched arms.\n\nAnnja shone her flashlight around the rest of the room once more before she noticed that there was something off about the statue. She moved closer, running the light slowly over every inch of the Son of God's body, not sure what it was about it that had called her back. She took another step toward it, raising the light to the crack that ran through the Savior's arm. It was perfectly straight, which was peculiar enough, but it continued as a fissure through the background fresco.\n\nSometimes a crack was just a crack. But it just felt too straight, too perfect.\n\nShe placed her hands on one of Christ's knees and pushed.\n\nThe statue swung back a fraction, the split growing wider, leaving behind one arm still attached to the wall. A hidden space within a hidden space, perfect for keeping secrets from the world.\n\nStone ground against stone.\n\nA shower of dust fell from the wall as the darkness opened up.\n\nAnnja's heart was thumping, excitement surging through her system. This was what she lived for, the thrill of discovery, that moment when she opened something that hadn't been opened in centuries, bringing it back to life; that moment when it was just her and the past; that moment when she bridged the now and the then, bringing them together with her bare hands.\n\nCould this be where the Mask of Torquemada had lain hidden for so long?\n\nIt had to be, didn't it?\n\nShe couldn't believe it had only taken her a few hours to find something that had been lost for centuries.\n\nDoubt niggled at the back of her mind.\n\nIt all seemed too easy.\n\nShe pressed herself close to the narrow opening and directed the flashlight's beam while she reached inside with her free hand."
            },
            {
                "title": "18:30 \u2014 Seville",
                "text": "\"I'm going to ask you again\u2014who were they?\" Roux's interrogator asked.\n\nIt wouldn't be the last time the detective across the table asked it, either.\n\nRoux had been taken to a police station and bundled forcefully into an interview room. He'd taken a number of carefully disguised blows in the process\u2014they'd delivered a couple rabbit punches to his kidneys, cracked his head against the doorframe of the car as they'd pushed him into the backseat and shoved him across the polished floor of the interview room, cuffed, so he couldn't reach out to break his fall. It was all fair game as far as they were concerned. He had been left there to stew, the clock in the room ticking on. He assumed they were gathering information for the interrogation, but they weren't going to learn anything useful from traditional sources. He'd always been careful about what information made it out into the public domain, even on back channels. They'd stumble into a Roux-shaped wall of silence. That in itself wouldn't help much today. It'd just make him look guilty, where for once he was actually innocent. There was an irony to the whole thing he would have appreciated if it had been someone else taking the beating.\n\nSo they asked their questions, and it was soon obvious they were on a fishing expedition. They didn't have a clue who he was, who the gunmen were or how the two parties had ended up on a collision course. So he told the truth.\n\n\"I have no idea.\"\n\nIt wasn't what they wanted to hear.\n\nRoux could stall them here for as long as he wanted. It wasn't as if the traditional interrogation techniques of the Inquisition were available to the men on the other side of the table, after all. But as much fun as a game of cat-and-mouse might have been, it was just wasting more time, and even if he wasn't particularly worried about Garin, he was worried about Annja. He should be out there helping her, not in here staring at a Spanish cop with a bad complexion, feigning ignorance whenever they got close to asking something interesting.\n\n\"So, what you are trying to say is your attackers came out of nowhere, started shooting at you for no reason and then ran away?\"\n\n\"More or less, yes.\"\n\n\"Which is it, more or less?\"\n\n\"I noticed that we were being followed. I instructed my driver to stop so that I could address whoever it was and square away whatever perceived problem they had. Then they started shooting. From that moment on, I was only interested in getting away from a potentially lethal situation.\" Again, the truth. Unnuanced, perhaps, lacking context, but still the kind of thing that would pass a polygraph.\n\n\"Why are you here? What is your business in Seville?\"\n\n\"Sightseeing,\" he said. No point telling the whole truth. It wouldn't help matters. \"It truly is a beautiful city. So much history. Amazing architecture. Sometimes it's good to just slow down for a minute and take a look at the world around you. Visit the galleries and monuments and experience all that a city like yours has to offer.\"\n\n\"And one of the men who tried to kill you was your driver?\"\n\n\"Yes. We'd never met before today. My people arranged for a car to pick me up from the airport, and he came as part of the package. I couldn't even tell you which company provided the service. I have people for that. Still, he seemed like a good man.\"\n\n\"Tell me, do you hire a chauffeur wherever you go?\"\n\n\"I can afford it,\" Roux said. \"Wealth isn't something I'm ashamed of.\" He knew he was in danger of antagonizing the policemen, but his patience wasn't limitless. Roux checked his watch against the clock on the wall, emphasizing how much time he was wasting. \"Is this going to take much longer?\"\n\n\"It is going to take as long as it takes. I don't think you realize just how serious your situation is. Let me spell it out for you, just in case something has been lost in translation between us. I've got two dead bodies and I have you. There is a definite connection between you and one of the victims. Let me tell you what will happen next\u2014ballistics will match your gun with the bullets we've pulled from the bodies, and you'll be going to jail.\"\n\n\"Interesting theory, but for the fact that the only bullet of mine you'll find is in the kneecap of the man who was lying in the street.\"\n\nThe interrogator raised an eyebrow. \"And what about the one in his head?\"\n\n\"He didn't have a bullet in the head when I last saw him.\"\n\n\"You're saying that he was shot by his own men? Or maybe it was one of my men? Is that what you're saying?\"\n\nRoux struggled to keep the smile off his face. \"More like his own people, but it isn't inconceivable that one of them is also one of you. It's about loose ends. He was a loose end. Leaving him behind alive meant leaving a living, breathing link back to them in your hands. Why would they do that? In their position, I wouldn't. Would you?\"\n\nThe policeman leaned back in his chair and gave Roux a long, cold stare.\n\n\"How about my phone call?\" the old man asked.\n\n\"Phone call? What do you think this is? You have no rights here. You are not the victim, no matter what you want me to believe, so you will get a phone call if and when I say you do. That won't be for a long time yet.\"\n\n\"How about an attorney?\"\n\n\"You will be given court-approved representation when the time comes.\"\n\n\"I'd rather use my own, if it's all the same. I find you get what you pay for, and as we've already established, I'm not averse to paying for the very best.\"\n\nThe policeman opened a manila folder and spilled out a collection of photographs across the table between them. Some were the dead men's faces, others were of their hands.\n\n\"What can you tell me about this?\" the interrogator asked, jabbing a finger at a picture of the tattoo on the back of what he assumed was Mateo's hand. Roux picked up the photograph to take a closer look.\n\n\"Very little. I've never seen it before today. And now it's on the back of two men's hands.\"\n\n\"And you don't think it's strange that two dead men have the same tattoo?\"\n\n\"Oh, very much so, but thinking it is peculiar sadly doesn't mean I know anything about its origins. I assume it is some kind of gang mark?\" It was a reasonable conclusion. He had nothing else to offer. It meant nothing to him.\n\n\"What do you know about the Fraternidad de la Quema?\"\n\n\"Ferdinand what?\"\n\n\"The Brotherhood of the Burning.\" The interrogator spoke slowly, enunciating each word very precisely.\n\nRoux made a moue. Shook his head. \"Sorry. Nothing. Alas, I am not up on the gang culture of Spain.\"\n\nThe policeman said nothing for a moment, weighing his next words. He obviously knew something about the tattoo's origins but wasn't sure he wanted to reveal it. Finally, he said, \"They have been behind a series of hate crimes both here and in other cities across the country.\"\n\n\"Hate crimes?\" That was unexpected. Roux leaned forward in his chair, interested now.\n\n\"They've been targeting Muslims. It started with little more than graffiti and threats, but has escalated recently to a number of severe beatings. Now, it would appear, they have managed to get their hands on weapons and escalated to attempted murder. Am I correct in thinking that you are not a Muslim?\" Roux nodded. \"Then that would be a flaw in my understanding. I do not like making mistakes or working on misunderstandings.\"\n\nRoux could hazard a few reasonable guesses that might connect the men with his visit to the museum, but he wasn't about to share them. It wasn't his job to solve the policeman's puzzle. Right now, he needed to get out of here before the detective started asking better questions.\n\n\"And your understanding would be what? That this Brotherhood is drawing some kind of inspiration from the Inquisition?\"\n\n\"I didn't say that, but it's interesting that you did. Why would that be your first conclusion?\"\n\n\"Pure luck. Now how about my phone call?\"\n\n\"There is something I don't like about you, something that doesn't ring true. I will find out how you are involved in this, because I don't for a minute believe you are as innocent as you'd have me think.\" The interrogator slipped the photos back into the folder, then took a cell phone from his pocket and handed it across to Roux.\n\nIt looked as if he was going to get his call, though he knew the detective had given him his own phone so that the number would be stored in its memory.\n\n\"It's an international call,\" he said. \"Sorry. I don't suppose I could have a little privacy?\"\n\nThe interrogator shook his head. \"I don't think so. But that's fine, isn't it? It's not like you have anything to hide.\"\n\n\"Nothing at all,\" Roux said, punching in the number.\n\nThe call was answered on the second ring.\n\nThere was no need to exchange names. Roux was the only one who called this number, and the man on the other end the only one who answered.\n\n\"I'm in a police station in Seville,\" Roux began, giving the address to make sure there was no confusion about which one. The voice on the other end read it back to confirm its accuracy. \"I need you to get me out of here,\" Roux continued. \"I don't care how much it costs, do you understand?\"\n\n\"Understood,\" the man on the other end said, killing the call.\n\nAll he could do now was wait and trust his man to do what needed to be done.\n\n\"This isn't Rome, you know,\" the interrogator said, shaking his head. \"You can't just buy your way out of a murder charge.\"\n\n\"Oh, I know that, but my lawyer is quite...creative.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "18:15 \u2014Valladolid",
                "text": "Of course it had been too much to hope for. Life wasn't like that. It didn't just give you what you needed when you needed it. It made you work for it.\n\nThere was no mask hidden in the secret compartment.\n\nBut it wasn't empty.\n\nAnnja's fingers closed on something. She fished it out carefully, fingertips brushing against what felt like oilskin. Slowly, not wanting to risk damaging whatever lay inside, she unwrapped the skin. The ribbon that had secured it all those years crumbled into decay and fell away as she tried to release the bow. The only thing that didn't simply turn to powder was the red wax seal. The wrapping itself was in better condition. It creaked and strained as she peeled it back, but it had done its job protecting the contents. She held a book in her hands. It appeared to be in excellent condition, but she wasn't about to take any risks with it.\n\nCarefully, the flashlight between her teeth, Annja opened the heavy boards of the cover and turned over the first few pages one at a time.\n\nThe script wasn't easy to decipher, but even so, it didn't take Annja long to realize she had to be looking at some kind of ledger. On the left-hand side of the page there was what seemed to be a list of items, and on the right a column of numbers. But that was as deep as her understanding went. Even without knowing what the ledger contained, someone had thought it was important enough to keep it so well hidden. This was not the place to try to examine it, though. Not with the secret chapel door still ajar upstairs. Still, she couldn't resist taking a look at a few more of the pages in case something leaped out at her.\n\nSomewhere in those fragile pages was a clue to the whereabouts of the mask.\n\nShe needed to believe that.\n\nBut it didn't help if she couldn't read it.\n\nAt first glance, she'd thought that the details in the ledger were in some sort of medieval Spanish, but they weren't. The unusual hand the script had been written in was deceptive, she realized, recognizing a few words of Latin as she skimmed over the page. The names set above the list of items were not. She could have been mistaken, but her gut instinct was that the ledger contained a list of Moorish names and Latinized notations, but what did any of it mean?\n\nShe ran a finger down one page after another, looking for words she might recognize.\n\nAll she wanted was a single red thread she could unpick in search of the truth, whatever that might be.\n\nShe found her answer in the date that ran along the far left-hand side. The first was shortly after Torquemada's rise to power and the last entry was made months before his death.\n\nAnnja knew that more than a million Moors and Jews had been driven out of the Iberian Peninsula or put to death during the course of the Inquisition. A million people. Did this ledger represent a fraction of those? She thought about the treasures that had been seized by the Nazis during the Second World War, only to be rediscovered more than a generation later, hidden in the vaults of Swiss banks. The Germans had kept meticulous records about many things. It was a shot in the dark, but Annja began to wonder if there were similarities, if this ledger contained a list of assets seized by the Inquisition. If it was, it was unlikely the Mask of Torquemada would be recorded as such an asset. And right now, as tempting as this treasure and the truth it represented were, she didn't have time for distractions. When this was over, though, she promised the dead men listed in the ledger, she would solve the riddle she held in her hands. But until then, she could only think about one thing. The mask.\n\nShe carefully wrapped the book back in the oilskin, then slipped it and the fragments of decayed ribbon into her pocket before closing the compartment and easing the statue of Christ back into place.\n\nIf the ledger was a record of a vast amount of confiscated treasure\u2014probably only the tiniest fraction of the amount collected over the years\u2014it could be one of the most important finds of her career. The book had been kept safe all of these years... Did that mean the treasure was hidden somewhere? It was possible, wasn't it? She was getting ahead of herself, but it was hard not to. If any such horde had been discovered, even centuries ago, she would have heard about it.\n\nWith that in mind, she retraced her steps back up to the church.\n\nShe needed to get out of there.\n\nTicktock. Ticktock.\n\nThe one nagging thought she had was that everything had pointed to the mask being hidden here, and yet she had found the book instead.\n\nThe two had to be connected somehow.\n\nThis couldn't just be some random discovery; she was still on the right track; her Grail Quest was progressing, even if it didn't feel like it right now. She was one step closer to finding the mask. One step closer to saving Garin Braden."
            },
            {
                "title": "17:00 \u2014Seville",
                "text": "\"Okay, time to face the music,\" the interrogator said. Roux still didn't know his name. He hadn't announced himself for the recording in the interview room and hadn't repeated it since he introduced his team in mumbling Spanish deliberately intended to mask their names. He'd been given a cup of weak coffee and left alone for a while to think about what would happen next. It was a fairly basic technique\u2014rather than keep hammering away at an intractable object, sometimes it was more effective to just let the sea of doubts lap up around it, chipping away at the edges until something worried free.\n\n\"You taking me to the ball?\"\n\n\"Sorry, Cinderella, we're off to the courthouse.\"\n\nThat caught Roux by surprise. So much for due process. \"My attorney hasn't arrived yet.\" He glanced at his watch, for the first time that day worried that too little time had passed.\n\nThe interrogator shrugged. \"There'll be plenty of time for that later. Think of it this way\u2014it just gives you longer to make up a convincing cover story. We're not in the habit of holding suspects in custody without charging them. Maybe that's how they do it in France, but here we believe in the rule of law. So, we can do this nice and quietly, or we can make a big song and dance out of it. I would say your choice, but it's not. It's mine. Look lively. The magistrate doesn't like to be kept waiting.\"\n\n\"I'm not going anywhere until I've spoken to my attorney,\" Roux said.\n\n\"You're going to make this as difficult as possible, aren't you? If your legal representative is unavailable, the court will supply you with one. Now, I have had to pull a number of strings to make sure that a magistrate will be ready for us, and to keep you off the front page. Best not make this any more uncomfortable than it already is.\"\n\nReluctantly, Roux rose. He was cuffed hand and foot, so any ideas of making a break for it had to be kept on hold for now. The opportunity would arise, though; he was sure of that.\n\n\"Fine, let's get this over with, then, shall we?\"\n\n\"That's the spirit.\"\n\n\"I am going to take great pleasure in suing your ass off when you realize just how badly you've screwed this up.\"\n\n\"I'd expect no less.\" The interrogator smiled and led him out by the rear of the station house.\n\nAn armed escort was waiting for them.\n\nRoux hadn't expected such blatant heavy-handedness; it was a declaration from the police that they'd got their man and he was dangerous. It was grandstanding. Despite what the detective had said, he had almost certainly tipped off the media and intended to try Roux in the most public way possible. Maybe he was trying to shake the tree and see what came spilling out. It wasn't how Roux would have done it, but there was always more than one way to win a battle of wits.\n\nThe drive was only a matter of a few minutes. He should have been grateful they hadn't decided to frog-march him through the streets.\n\nHis lawyer still hadn't arrived by the time the entourage reached the courthouse steps. He was bundled out of the car and led inside. He didn't struggle against them. That wasn't how he'd win this. He needed to be sharp and to know his surroundings, so as they pushed him toward the courtroom, he took the time to look around and fix key geography points in his mind\u2014staircases, doorways, windows, areas of ingress and egress, the balcony that swept around the foyer, giving the armed court officers above a panoramic view of the marble floor, the security scanners and X-ray machine that wouldn't have looked out of place at Homeland Security, and the cameras. Roux was always interested in the cameras. Someone who lived an unreasonable span of years needed to be. It didn't do him any favors to turn up at crime scenes decades apart looking exactly the same. Someone always noticed, then came looking and needed to be taken care of.\n\nThe bailiff led him into the courtroom, releasing his cuffs. Roux stretched, working the tight, aching muscles in his back, then turned to face the front. There were no spectators in the gallery. The magistrate's chair was empty, and there was no sign of his representative, though the state prosecutor was already shuffling paper earnestly at his desk. The bailiff knocked twice and called \"All rise\" as a side door opened and the magistrate entered the room.\n\nHe motioned for those assembled to sit. \"Do we have a list of charges?\"\n\n\"Your Honor,\" the bailiff said, reciting a list of charges grievous enough to see Roux locked up for several lifetimes at least. Before the final counts of murder in the first degree had been read out, his attorney came barreling into the courtroom, face flushed and panting as he struggled to catch his breath. He set his briefcase down beside the wall, beneath the room's only window, and mopped at his brow with a dirty white handkerchief before addressing the bench.\n\n\"This is outrageous.\" He shook his head as if he couldn't quite believe what was happening. \"What kind of kangaroo court is this? You have no evidence to link my client to any of the events today. You have a list of spurious charges and are looking to bury him rather than risk justice being done. He is the victim here.\"\n\n\"This isn't the time for opening arguments, counsel. How does your client plead?\"\n\n\"He doesn't.\" He took a sip of water from a glass that stood on the table in front of him.\n\nThe magistrate wasn't amused. \"Your client must enter a plea. Am I to assume it will be one of 'not guilty'?\"\n\n\"No, Your Honor. My client will not be offering any such plea. I move that the case against him be dismissed.\" He looked at the clock on the wall, then back to the magistrate. Roux watched him, wondering what the man had in mind. \"This entire thing is a sham. An outrage. My client's detention is unlawful, lacking in sufficient cause or evidence.\"\n\n\"Be careful, counsel. I do not know how you do things where you come from, but in my city, we adhere absolutely to the letter of the law.\"\n\n\"I object, Your Honor!\"\n\nThat made Roux smile. He was impressed how convincing his man had been up until that moment. The magistrate, however, was far from impressed. He slammed his gavel down, about to demand order, when all hell broke loose.\n\nThe first explosion shook the building savagely, bringing down a rain of plaster on the proceedings. There was a moment of shocked silence before the air filled with shouts and screams. Beyond the doors, people struggled to stay calm in the midst of the whirlwind, fear overwhelming them as the foundations of the building shook again and it became obvious they were under attack.\n\nRoux remained motionless, letting it happen.\n\nHis attorney was the only other man in the room not to betray his fear. He looked at Roux and nodded. This was what the old man would pay so handsomely for. A third explosion rocked the place. The quality of the screams changed. People were hurting out there. Smoke and debris filled the air as more plaster came raining down. The bailiff moved to secure Roux's chains. The old man wasn't about to let that happen. He planted an elbow in the man's throat. He went down hard, gagging. Roux looked around the courtroom as doors burst open. Guards came streaming in, bringing with them the stench of explosives and a wave of dust. Roux identified the window at the far end of the room as the weak point. The guards moved toward him, but before they were halfway across the floor, another explosion shook the room, this one much closer to home.\n\nRoux crouched down, covering his ears a moment too late for it to make any difference. His ears rang. Daylight streamed in where the window had been seconds before, and two men dressed in black stood in the opening. He had a choice to make and he had to make it fast. He let the two men raise hell and hurled himself over the railing, rolling and scrambling across the floor as the smoke and dust thickened. Chaos was his friend. He ran toward the main doors while the guards yelled behind him. By the window the men in black opened fire, shooting not to kill but to add to the confusion.\n\nRoux's attorney came charging after him.\n\nTogether, they emerged from the courtroom into the foyer. The security gates had been abandoned, guards trying desperately to help with the wounded and fallen. Roux walked straight out of the courthouse, his attorney two steps behind him.\n\nAn unmarked van was parked at the bottom of the steps, the side panel open and waiting for them. Both men clambered inside. The doors slammed behind them, plunging them into darkness. The engine gunned, and the van peeled away from the curbside.\n\n\"This is it, old man, quits,\" the attorney said. \"As far as I'm concerned, we're even now. Agreed?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure it'll ever be even, my friend. But for now, if there's a debt, I think it's from me to you. I expect you to call it in at some point. I'm grateful.\"\n\n\"Whatever you say,\" his companion said.\n\nFor the next minute they sat in silence, the van slowing, stopping, accelerating with the traffic lights, turning quickly through the city streets. They could hear sirens seemingly in every direction, but the driver didn't increase his speed. There was no need to. It would be a while before the law-enforcement guys coordinated resources and even figured out what kind of vehicle they were looking for. Right now, he doubted they even realized he was gone. The courthouse had been transformed into a bloody war zone in a matter of seconds, and those two gunmen had made it seem like a terror attack. It would take considerably longer for anyone to find out his attorney wasn't qualified to do much except blow things up.\n\nThe man held out a hand and Roux reached out to shake it, before seeing he was being offered his watch, wallet and phone.\n\n\"I thought you might want these.\"\n\n\"I owe you.\"\n\n\"You do. I'll send you the bill.\"\n\nIt wasn't easy to hold back the smile. Roux returned his wallet to his jacket pocket and slipped the watch back onto his wrist. The timepiece held sentimental value. It had been a gift from the inventor of the seconds chronograph, Nicolas Mathieu Rieussec, watchmaker to the king of France, what felt like a long, long time ago. He hadn't felt dressed without it. He was glad to have it back. Roux turned the phone on and waited for it to connect to the network.\n\nHe needed to get out of the city\u2014and ideally, the country\u2014as quickly as possible, but right now he was at the mercy of the man who had extricated him from that courtroom drama. Roux could only trust he'd thought of everything.\n\nThe van kept turning left, left and left, and Roux could sense they were climbing an incline. Not mountains, he realized. A high-rise parking lot. They came to a halt. He heard the driver's-side door open and close. A hand thumped on the side of the van before the doors were flung open to let in the light and a familiar, unmistakable, sound.\n\nThe driver held a hand out to help him out of the van.\n\n\"We ready to roll?\"\n\nRoux stepped out into the light, appreciating his man's thoroughness. A helicopter waited for him, blades turning slowly in readiness. All things considered, he couldn't have hoped for much more. \"All set,\" Roux said.\n\n\"Then we'll leave you to it. Good luck.\"\n\nEven before he was in the air, the white van had started its descent toward street level.\n\nBy the end of the day it would be resprayed, fitted with new plates or burned somewhere out of town. Either-or, didn't matter. There would be no evidence left to tie him to the van or the bombing. That was what did matter.\n\n\"Where to, boss?\" the pilot asked as the helicopter rose steadily into the air.\n\n\"As far away from here as possible. I need to make a call, so don't go too high. Don't want to risk losing cell reception.\" The phone displayed four bars. That was more than enough. It didn't seem to be the wisest course of action to call someone in the police when he was on the run from them, but he'd never been one for playing it safe. There was someone in Europol he needed to talk to. She answered on the second ring.\n\n\"Roux? It's been a while.\"\n\n\"Too long, Elise.\"\n\n\"Are you in town?\"\n\n\"Alas, no. I'm not even in the same country.\"\n\n\"That's a shame,\" she said. \"For a minute I thought you were going to try to make it up to me.\" He didn't need to ask what he was supposed to be making amends for. No doubt she'd written him up on her list of heartbreakers.\n\n\"Next time,\" he promised.\n\n\"So if it's not my body you want me for, it's got to be my connections.\"\n\nShe knew him too well.\n\n\"The Brotherhood of the Burning, what can you tell me about them?\"\n\nHe heard a sharp intake of breath down the long-distance line. \"Nasty, racist bunch, Spanish neo-Fascists, anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish. Until a couple years ago, they were contained within two or three cities, but their influence is starting to spread. They're attracting the worst elements of society, giving them something to focus their anger on.\"\n\n\"And the name? Mean anything?\"\n\n\"Most certainly does. They identify with the Spanish Inquisition like it's something to be proud of. They think that the Jews and the Muslims should be driven out of their country or, better still, burned alive.\"\n\nRoux said nothing for a moment. He should have seen the connection himself; it had been staring him in the face. But for some reason, he hadn't joined the dots. \"So they're interested in some kind of ethnic cleansing?\"\n\n\"That's all that most of them are interested in, yes. It's what attracts most of their membership to the cause.\"\n\n\"Most? But not all of them? What motivates the rest, any ideas?\" He knew she was holding back on something, a piece of the jigsaw that he still wasn't seeing.\n\n\"There are a few who are just as interested in the Inquisition itself as they are in the violence.\"\n\n\"I don't suppose you've got a watch list? Names? Something that might give me somewhere to start?\"\n\n\"You really are pushing your luck, aren't you, sweetheart? Is there something you should be telling me?\"\n\n\"I would if I could.\"\n\n\"Everything I've told you so far has come off the top of my head. If you want more than that, I'm going to have to go into the system. Going into the system is going to leave a trail. So I'd want to know what I'm getting myself into.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Elise. Really. But I can't say.\"\n\n\"Sounds ominous.\"\n\n\"Quite.\"\n\n\"There's a guy who seems to be one of those who calls the shots. We've never been able to pin anything on him, but he's guilty. We know that absolutely. The guy is scum. Dangerous scum.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"His name is Enrique Mart\u00ednez.\"\n\n\"Okay. Mart\u00ednez. Got it. Last known whereabouts?\"\n\n\"He's not an easy man to keep tabs on, but there's no report of him having left the country, so he should be there somewhere.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" Roux said. \"I owe you.\"\n\n\"Yes, you do,\" she said. \"And I won't let you forget about it.\"\n\nShe gave the briefest of goodbyes, then hung up.\n\nHe had another call to make.\n\nThe pilot kept looking across at him, waiting for instructions. He still didn't have a destination. \"Don't worry, whatever they're paying you, I'll double it, just keep circling the city for now.\"\n\n\"You're the boss.\"\n\nHe called up another number and listened to it ring.\n\n\"Hey, Roux,\" Oscar said, picking up.\n\n\"What have you got for me?\" No small talk.\n\n\"Well, I'm not sure I've got anything... It's a dead zone. Nothing from any scans, no infrared, nothing.\"\n\n\"Then maybe that's our boy. Where?\"\n\n\"The Alhambra.\"\n\nHe repeated the name to the pilot, who adjusted his heading, banking low over the rooftops of the city before speeding away.\n\n\"Anything else?\"\n\n\"Not a lot. I've got a list of the places around the world where the feed was being rerouted, but that's not important. I'm still looking for the source.\"\n\n\"There's one more thing,\" Roux said. \"A favor.\"\n\n\"Another one?\" The hacker laughed.\n\n\"I need you to find out whatever you can about an outfit called the Brotherhood of the Burning.\"\n\n\"Never heard of them.\"\n\nRoux filled him in, realizing how little he actually knew about them. With luck, Oscar would be able to dig up a lot more.\n\n\"Sounds like a fun little club,\" the man said.\n\n\"I've got a name, too,\" Roux said. \"Enrique Mart\u00ednez. It might be nothing, but maybe it's a case of find him, find the source of the signal.\"\n\n\"Leave it with me.\"\n\nRoux hung up and pressed himself back into his seat, content to take in the view for a few hours.\n\nNext stop, the Alhambra."
            },
            {
                "title": "14:45 \u2014Valladolid",
                "text": "Annja clutched the oilskin-wrapped book as she reemerged into the chapel.\n\nThe panel had remained tantalizingly open while she'd undertaken the search for secrets beneath its ancient protection. She pushed it back into place now and used the key to lock it. Within a few seconds, it was as though she'd never been there. The only difference between the old chapel an hour ago and now was that there was nothing she could do to disguise the keyhole. Someone would discover it, sooner rather than later, but now there was nothing remarkable down there waiting to be found, save for a statue of the Savior.\n\nBy that time, though, she would be long gone.\n\nIn the meantime, she didn't want to draw any unnecessary attention to herself.\n\nShe dusted herself down, brushing away dirt and cobwebs, before making her way back into the body of the great church.\n\nThe cleric who had been standing near the roped-off entrance to the crypt gave her the briefest of glances, without seeming to register the book in her hand. He offered her a slight smile. Annja inclined her head in acknowledgment. It was a dance of silent communication. Anything else would have been memorable, but a smile and a nod between strangers? Was there anything more everyday than that?\n\nA child who had escaped from her mother and grandmother tested the acoustics of the great ceiling by squealing with laughter. It drew every eye in the place to her and was more than enough of a distraction for the priest, who sent the mother a disapproving look that suggested a dozen Hail Marys wouldn't square it away with the Boss.\n\nAnnja left them to it.\n\nOutside, in the sunlight, she breathed deeply, sucking in the air and relishing its freshness. Ticktock. Ticktock. She wanted a look at the book in the light, so she set it down on the bike's seat and unwrapped it. It truly was a thing of exquisite beauty. A real treasure. But she didn't know how to decode its secrets. She fished out her phone. It was time she touched base with Roux.\n\n\"Where are you?\" Roux asked.\n\n\"Valladolid,\" Annja said.\n\n\"What have you got?\"\n\n\"A book. A ledger, actually. I found it in a chamber behind a Morisco mosaic in the church. The key opened the way.\"\n\n\"A ledger?\"\n\n\"I'm convinced that it's a record of confiscated wealth.\"\n\n\"Interesting. And it would make sense,\" Roux said. \"If I were a gambling man, I'd say it was a pointer toward the Alhambra. Or rather another one.\"\n\n\"Why do you say that?\"\n\n\"That video file you were sent seems to be streaming from there.\"\n\n\"You think Garin is there?\"\n\n\"It's possible, but at the very least, the people I suspect are behind his kidnapping are located there.\"\n\n\"You've made inroads?\"\n\n\"Butted heads might be closer to the truth. They call themselves the Brotherhood of the Burning. The police think they're a bunch of dangerous racists, while Europol suspect they're more extreme than that. Given my run-in with them, I'm inclined to side with Europol on this one. They draw some kind of inspiration from the Inquisition. It's all about religious and racial purity, keeping Spain for the Spanish and all that. No Jews or Muslims allowed.\"\n\n\"Sound like a charming bunch.\"\n\n\"Indeed. Thankfully, they're arrogant enough to ink themselves with their precious gang tattoo. Keep your eyes peeled for anyone with a tattoo of flames on the back of their hand.\"\n\n\"Roger that. And you think these are the people who have Garin.\"\n\n\"I'm not at the point of staking my life on it, but I'd risk Garin's.\" She heard the grin in the old man's voice.\n\n\"Well, that almost sounds positive,\" Annja said, trying to work out how far away she was and how long a journey to the Alhambra was likely to be. Time was being eaten up quickly, and running from one end of the country to the other wasn't an option. Or at least not a good one. \"So what makes you think the ledger is pointing that way, too?\"\n\n\"The Alhambra was one of the last strongholds of the Moors in Spain, and yet, curiously, it was given up without the fortress and palace coming under attack. The last Moorish sultan of Granada was driven out in 1492, so we are talking about the right kind of date again. How much of the sultan's wealth remained when his family fled is impossible to say,\" Roux continued, \"but if the Inquisition were holding on to some Moorish treasures, then his would have been their greatest cache. Much of his palace was vandalized, of course, rubbing defeat in his face. Another case of destruction in the name of religion. It may lead us to the mask. It may not. If I'm wrong and it doesn't, but Garin is there, then finding the mask is no longer imperative.\"\n\nIt was logical, of course. Annja felt a pang of guilt. For a moment, she'd completely forgotten that Garin was the reason they had been caught up in this. In her head, finding the Mask of Torquemada had started to become an end in itself. But now, reminded of its position in the scheme of things, she was painfully reminded of the stakes.\n\n\"Okay, let's think about this. Is there anything that links this Brotherhood of the Burning to the Alhambra?\" she asked.\n\n\"As I said, some of their leadership appears to be obsessed with the Inquisition. Remember more Moors were executed at the Alhambra than at any other single place.\"\n\n\"Which would make it interesting in and of itself to people like that. Especially if they were looking to re-create something like the Inquisition. Where better to stage a modern-day auto-da-f\u00e9?\"\n\n\"Now you're using your head, girl,\" Roux said approvingly.\n\n\"It will take me a few hours to get there,\" Annja said.\n\n\"I can be there sooner. Be sure you've explored absolutely every avenue there before you head south. We don't have time to turn back once we're committed to a course of action.\"\n\n\"Will do.\"\n\n\"I'll call you if I find anything that points to a different destination.\"\n\nAnnja slipped the phone back into her pocket as a car drove past. The turbulent air turned over a couple of the ledger's pages. The script seemed to dance as the pages moved. She spotted something she hadn't noticed before. Nine or ten pages of entries clearly related to wealthy men, and the list of items beneath each name was long and detailed, some going over more than one page. She carefully counted the number of people this covered. Six men. Even though she had no idea what the items meant, there was no doubt that each of the six had been worth a substantial amount. It wasn't the wealth that drew her attention, though, but rather the fact that all six men came from the same place: Calahorra.\n\nNow she had a decision to make. Roux had basically said to leave no stone unturned, but even a few minutes' delay could be the minutes that cost Garin his life. Was Calahorra the answer or just another question? She needed to consider and reassess. That was better than charging on blindly, hoping she was going to miraculously find the answers she needed. Roux was going to get to the Alhambra long before she would. If it was a bust, they were both in the same place, whether she was with him or not. If all he found there was another clue that pointed elsewhere, then it was better she was mobile.\n\nShe looked at the list of names again.\n\nOne entry stood out from the others: Abdul bin Soor. There were far fewer entries beneath his name than the other five. The three words that sent a shiver up her spine were printed beneath his name: Faber Argentarius Persona. The first two were words she had come across before, meaning silversmith. The third stumped her for a moment, but then her pulse sped up as she realized that it referred to a mask, not the modern-day persona. Surely that meant she'd found the man who had made Torquemada's mask.\n\nIn the absence of anything else, it was always a good move to follow the money.\n\nOr in this case, the silver.\n\nThere was nothing to say she'd find any record of Abdul bin Soor outside of the ledger, but that didn't matter; this felt like the first bit of proof of the mask's existence, and it was linked to a physical place. Calahorra.\n\nThat was where she was going next.\n\nTicktock. Ticktock."
            },
            {
                "title": "12:00 \u2014Calahorra",
                "text": "\"Ticktock. Ticktock,\" the voice at the other end of the line mocked. \"Half your time has gone and the clock ticks mercilessly on.\"\n\n\"You're a poet and you don't know it,\" Annja snapped back. She wasn't in the mood for games. \"I want proof of life, simple as that. Prove Garin is still alive. If you can't do that, I'm going to find you and I'm going to kill you,\" Annja said.\n\nShe had been on the outskirts of Calahorra when her cell phone vibrated in her jacket pocket. She'd been expecting Roux.\n\n\"You want proof of life? My, my, I'm almost insulted. You don't believe me? My word isn't good enough for the famous Annja Creed?\" The man let out a cruel laugh and the line went dead. He'd hung up on her. Annja's skin crawled. Was that it? Was it over?\n\nShe was shaking when she felt another vibration from her phone. It was a video file, only a few seconds long. She opened the file and any doubts that they were prepared to kill Garin were washed away.\n\nAt first it was impossible to be sure who the body lying on the ground was.\n\nThen a boot came into view, kicking the man in the ribs, forcing a groan from his bloody lips.\n\nHands reached down and pulled him from the ground, hauling him up into a chair.\n\nThere was no mistaking that it was Garin despite the severe swelling and dark bruises that altered his features. One bloodshot eye managed to open slowly. A trickle of blood oozed from the cut above his brow.\n\n\"Hope this is proof enough for you, Miss Creed,\" the voice said as the image zoomed in on Garin's face, which was etched with pain. His eye had been blinking furiously. She could only imagine the torment they'd inflicted on him to break his will. Garin was tough, but even he couldn't withstand relentless torture.\n\n\"What the hell have you got yourself involved in?\" she asked the picture of her friend. It didn't matter that he couldn't answer her.\n\nThe screen went blank.\n\nShe held the phone in her hand, waiting for the kidnapper to call back and continue mocking her. The call never came.\n\nThere was no point trying to reach Roux; he'd still be airborne, on route to the Alhambra. Would Oscar be able to confirm anything she didn't already know? It seemed like a stretch. He had already identified the source of the broadcast as somewhere inside the Alhambra. She wasn't sure what he'd be able to glean from this new video, and anything he could find out would probably come too late to be of any use.\n\nShe called him anyway.\n\n\"It's Annja.\"\n\n\"Ah, to what do I owe this pleasure? I've already given Roux everything I've got.\"\n\n\"I've been sent another video.\"\n\n\"You want to send it to me?\"\n\n\"You willing to risk another laptop?\"\n\n\"Forewarned is forearmed,\" he said. \"Send it over. I'll get right on it.\"\n\nAnnja hung up and emailed the file to him.\n\nHer first stop was Calahorra's tiny tourist information office, though she didn't expect to find anything about the silversmith there. A middle-aged woman behind the counter spoke to her in Spanish, but seeing her confusion, instantly switched to English. Annja smiled her thanks. The woman had a pair of tortoiseshell glasses hanging around her neck from a thin gold chain. She toyed with them as she talked.\n\n\"Good afternoon,\" she said, reminding Annja that the time was ticking away. \"How can I help you?\"\n\n\"I'm doing some research,\" she said, fishing out a business card for the station, along with the network's corporate logo and Chasing History's Monsters on it. She handed it to the woman. \"For a possible television program.\" It wasn't exactly the truth, but given the way the search was developing, it wasn't exactly a lie, either. The woman's smile widened, but Annja caught the momentary panic in her eyes as she glanced around to be sure there wasn't a camera filming them.\n\n\"How can I help?\"\n\n\"Well, I'm hoping to get some information as to where some of the victims of the Inquisition were buried,\" she began. The smile on the woman's face began to slip. No doubt the majority of her visitors asked the same or similar questions.\n\n\"I'm afraid that there's very little to see here,\" she began. \"It's true that the Inquisition held its court here, but only for a very short time before it moved thirty miles down the road to Logro\u00f1o.\" She slipped the pair of glasses on, pushing them up the bridge of her nose, and opened the drawer of a small filing cabinet. She retrieved a well-worn folder from inside.\n\n\"Here we go,\" she said, running a finger down the top sheet. \"The Inquisition only held a court here from 1521 to 1570. Very little evidence of it remains, I'm afraid. Were you hoping to find something in particular?\"\n\nAnnja pulled a piece of paper from her pocket.\n\nShe had written the names of the six men onto it to avoid having to remove the ledger from the bike's panniers. The woman frowned as she tried to read Annja's hasty scrawl.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Annja said, suspecting that it was the handwriting that was giving her trouble. \"I think I was a doctor in another life. This is the man I'm hoping to find out more about.\" She pointed at Abdul bin Soor.\n\nThe woman pursed her lips. \"I can't say I recognize the name. Was he important?\" She slipped off her glasses again and looked up at her.\n\n\"Probably not in the grand scheme of things. I know very little about him,\" Annja admitted. \"I think he either lived or was executed here. The same goes for the rest of them. I understand that they were all probably quite wealthy men.\"\n\n\"And all Moors,\" the woman added.\n\n\"There is that. I don't suppose you'd have any idea where they might have been buried, assuming they were killed here?\"\n\nThe woman shook her head. \"Victims were usually placed in unmarked graves,\" she said. \"It is not a period of our history that we celebrate.\"\n\nSo, no easy solutions here, either. But was it a brick wall? It wouldn't be the first time she'd been led to believe something was a dead end because people were reluctant to bring bad publicity to a town. As the woman had said, the execution of innocent people wasn't something Calahorra celebrated, but was it something they'd sweep under the rug? Maybe a little coaxing would help.\n\n\"Perhaps they'd know at the church?\"\n\n\"They wouldn't be buried there,\" the woman said, just a little too quickly. \"Things have changed a lot since those times. Back then, there's no way they would have buried Moors in a Christian cemetery.\" That made sense. But Annja was reminded that, so far, every major find she'd made on this hunt had been a case of a Moorish relic hidden away in a Christian shrine.\n\nIf what Roux had told her about the Brotherhood of the Burning was right, a growing number of people wanted those darker days to return, even if their motivations were racial rather than religious. Of course, the irony was that if the Inquisition actually made a comeback, a great many of those right-wing racists would no doubt find themselves on the receiving end of persecution for their own lifestyles. In a society driven by religious fervor, having no faith could be just as dangerous as having the wrong one.\n\n\"I know it's naive of me, but I'd been hoping there would be some kind of evidence that might prove these six men had lived here. Never mind, I'm sure we can use some footage of the church, a few of the older buildings that would have been here at the time, that kind of thing. They'll set the tone we're looking for.\"\n\n\"Did you say six?\" the woman asked, her interest suddenly piqued.\n\nAnnja nodded. She turned the piece of paper so the woman could see it again.\n\n\"I'm sorry, dear. The names mean nothing to me, but there is a story...\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"When the Inquisition moved from here to Logro\u00f1o, the Church took more than just their documents and\u2014\" she paused for a moment, obviously searching for a word that wasn't part of her usual vocabulary \"\u2014equipment.\"\n\nAnnja waited.\n\n\"They took some of their victims with them,\" she added.\n\n\"You mean the people that were awaiting trial?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"No, they took the remains of some of the men who had been executed. The bones of six men were supposed to have been taken from the ground and moved to a new resting place.\"\n\nSix men? Annja could hear Roux's voice in the back of her mind: there's no such thing as coincidence.\n\nShe felt a shiver up her spine. It was more than just the air-conditioning. This was the thrill of the hunt. She was on the right track. The mystery was unraveling for her. So much history, so many secrets and ultimately a new truth that no one else had discovered in five centuries. This was why she did her job. This was what she'd fallen in love with, this connection between the past and the present, this single moment when everything crystalized and became one single, compelling story.\n\n\"They wanted to keep their treasures close to them,\" the woman continued.\n\n\"Treasures? That's a curious choice of words to describe six dead men.\"\n\n\"The six gave their confession freely. That set them apart from the other victims here. They didn't suffer torture. They willingly gave the statement that condemned them. Even when others around them were claiming their innocence, even up on the scaffold, these six men did not. They would not deny their God.\"\n\n\"So the remains of the truly guilty were important to the Inquisition,\" Annja said, thinking aloud.\n\n\"The court moved to the cathedral there. If there are records pertaining to the six, they should have them.\"\n\n\"You've been really helpful, thank you,\" Annja said. She could only hope that they were talking about the same six men.\n\nTicktock. Ticktock.\n\nThere's no such thing as coincidence.\n\nThe woman's smile returned. She had been happy enough to see Annja arrive, but seemed much happier to see her leave."
            },
            {
                "title": "11:45 \u2014Calahorra",
                "text": "The bike roared into life again, like a caged beast finally released.\n\nThe road to Logro\u00f1o was barely thirty miles, and the traffic was light. The temptation to really open up the throttle and unleash the power of the Roadster was impossible to resist.\n\nAnnja adjusted her grip and felt the surge of acceleration as the tires gripped the tarmac. She pulled out from the slipstream of a delivery truck and shifted up through the gears. The rush of speed, the adrenaline coursing through her, reminded her of what it meant to be alive. It was primal. The Roadster flew through the curves and switchbacks.\n\nFrom somewhere behind her, she heard a siren.\n\nShe gave a silent curse.\n\nShe couldn't afford to be pulled over by the police\u2014or worse, be taken to some backwater police station and forced to waste a couple of hours explaining herself. Even somewhere like this, there was the remote chance the officer might recognize her and let her off with a slap on the wrist, but she couldn't risk the chance that this wasn't her audience. Not while Garin's life hung in the balance. She was close. Getting closer. She couldn't afford to blow it.\n\nAs far as Annja could tell, she had two choices. She could either stop and hope she could talk herself out of a ticket, or trust to the fact that the Roadster was an ungodly machine and try to outrun the cops. What would Garin do? Without question, ride...ride like the wind. She dropped a gear again and twisted the throttle hard, finding power even the Roadster itself hadn't known it possessed. The engine complained desperately. A car horn blared as she pulled back in front of it in order to overtake the next vehicle on the inside. She wove in and out of traffic without a second thought for her safety, relying on her reflexes. She focused on the road, shutting out everything else, even as the siren grew louder. It was just her and the road. The cars ahead of her began to slow in response. She didn't. She pushed the Roadster harder.\n\nAnd then she was at the point of no return. A glance at the speedometer, and the dial was already nudging toward the hundred-miles-per-hour mark. It was too late to play dumb and pretend she was getting her miles and kilometers mixed up. A car had slowed, its blinker indicating it was about to pull over, but the traffic had already built up around it, trapping it in the fast lane. That meant the police car wouldn't be able to get through. That was all Annja needed. She seized the moment and pulled into the middle of the road, squeezing between the slowing car and the line of seemingly stationary traffic.\n\nShe clipped the car's side mirror, snapping it off and sending it clattering and spinning to the ground. The impact caused the bike to wobble, but she was strong enough to steady it. As an angry horn shrieked, Annja unleashed every remaining ounce of power in the bike's engine and leaned forward to cut down the drag.\n\nThe Roadster continued to pick up speed and she fought to keep it under control as she rode along in the slipstream of a semi. Then she was out, in the middle of the lane divider and flying past the truck while the turbulence battled her.\n\nShe pulled in front of the semi and eased off the throttle, out onto clear road, but she didn't relax her grip.\n\nThe trucker sounded his horn, venting a short, sharp blast.\n\nShe checked her mirror to see that the cop car was, impossibly, closing the gap.\n\nThe driver was stubborn, she'd give him that. That, or he had a death wish. She wasn't about to slow down now.\n\nShe made out the sound of brakes and the squeal of rubber as wheels locked.\n\nAnnja risked another glance in the mirror to see what was happening behind her.\n\nThe semi completely blocked the road, tipping onto its side.\n\nNow there was no way the cop could follow her.\n\nThe sign ahead proclaimed that she'd just breached the city limits of Logro\u00f1o.\n\nShe followed the road into the city, slowing but not too much, knowing she needed to get off the road as soon as possible if she didn't want more of the local law enforcement coming after her. Her description was out on the wire, for sure.\n\nIt didn't take her long to find what she was looking for\u2014the Cathedral of Santa Mar\u00eda de la Redonda. The name of the place had been nagging at the back of her brain all the way here. She knew it should mean something to her, but it wasn't until she stood in front of the cathedral itself that she started to remember why it was significant.\n\nWhen the Inquisition had turned its attention away from the Jews and the Moors, it had turned its attention toward women accused of witchcraft.\n\nSo many innocent women had been dragged before the court to answer charges.\n\nIt had been male-dominated oppression, an easy way to silence the rising female voices of the day.\n\nAnother town, another visitors' center standing opposite the cathedral, another middle-aged woman sitting behind another desk.\n\nThis one didn't have the same smile, though. She didn't have a smile at all. Her attention was taken by a magazine spread open in front of her. The array of brochures on display showed that Logro\u00f1o wasn't afraid to play on its connections with the Inquisition. Geographically, it may have only been thirty miles from Calahorra, but it was half a world away in terms of attitude. Logro\u00f1o was making the most of its history. Annja pulled an English leaflet from the rack and smiled at the woman behind the desk. She didn't respond. On the television behind her, a news report was showing footage of a courtroom explosion in Seville where a number of civilians had been badly injured. Miraculously, it didn't appear that anyone had died. The ticker across the bottom said that Spanish police were looking for an old Frenchman in connection with the events. Roux. She shouldn't have been surprised. The man had an unnerving ability to get into the kind of trouble that wound up on the national news.\n\n\"Hi,\" Annja said, producing the list of names from her pocket again and placing it on the desk.\n\n\"Hola,\" the woman said.\n\nAnnja ran through the same introduction she had given earlier, adding that the woman's colleague in Calahorra had suggested that the remains of the six men might have been moved to Logro\u00f1o.\n\n\"Ah, yes, Mar\u00eda telephoned me and said you might come in, but I was not expecting you to get here so quickly.\"\n\n\"I had a bit of luck with the traffic,\" Annja offered.\n\n\"As I am sure she told you, people were brought here from all over the region,\" the woman said. She reeled off a list of places, many of which meant nothing to Annja, but she listened intently in case the woman said anything that would provide some obvious missing connections. Even a single piece of the puzzle, an extra link in the chain, would move her closer to solving the mystery of the mask, and in turn secure Garin's freedom.\n\n\"Navarre, \u00c1lava, Guip\u00fazcoa, Biscay...\" The list seemed to go on and on. The woman didn't even draw a breath. Annja wondered how many times she'd reeled off these towns and cities, like a waitress running down the day's specials. Annja resisted the temptation to tell her to cut to the chase.\n\n\"It was not only women, of course. There were many men and children, too, including priests.\"\n\n\"Priests?\"\n\n\"Yes. There were thirty-one priests who faced the Inquisition on charges of using n\u00f3minas, amulets with the names of saints engraved upon them.\"\n\n\"I had no idea,\" Annja said.\n\n\"Oh, yes, even the holy men were not immune as the Inquisition progressed. It spread its net far and wide,\" she said. \"And it didn't matter which God you worshipped.\"\n\n\"I'm trying to find out about one particular victim.\"\n\n\"There were thousands of people who died here, tens of thousands, and almost all were buried in unconsecrated ground. Mass nameless graves. Many were transferred from other places. May I see your list?\"\n\nAnnja gave it to her, and for the first time since she'd walked into the tourist center, the woman began to look excited. Her head bobbed up and down as she read.\n\n\"I recognize these names. These were not common victims of the Inquisition. Far from it. These were powerful men, in their own way.\"\n\n\"Do you know where I would find their graves?\"\n\n\"Heretic's Yard, but I'm afraid you have made a wasted journey. The yard is closed to the public.\" Before Annja could ask why, the woman explained, \"The walls are being repaired. After the storms last summer, the entire yard has been under threat from subsidence. They could collapse at any time, bringing half the cathedral down on top of anyone in there. It has taken the workmen forever to shore up the foundations.\"\n\nShe gave Annja directions that would take her behind the cathedral. Annja's thanks fell on deaf ears, as the woman had already returned to her seat and the magazine that had been captivating her when Annja had arrived.\n\nLeaving the information center, Annja peered around the corner to where she'd parked her bike. A police car had pulled up next to it, and an officer was speaking into a radio, reading out the license-plate number. The ledger and her change of clothes were locked in the panniers. She'd have to recover them later, but for now she had a grave to find. She had less than twelve hours to find the mask and turn it over to Garin's kidnappers. She could worry about the Roadster and the ledger and squaring away the incident with the authorities after that, once Garin was safe.\n\nIf..."
            },
            {
                "title": "11:15 \u2014Logro\u00f1o",
                "text": "A signpost shaped into the unconvincing likeness of a finger pointed the way. One of the knuckles had been broken, another was chipped and peeling paint. The letters were long faded.\n\nAnnja followed the narrow path between overgrown trees and encroaching bramble hedges that hid the sun. As the woman had promised, the path took her beyond the cathedral proper and around to an enclosed cemetery garden. The high stone wall was dwarfed by the scaffolding rising on the other side of it. There was no sign of any workers on the site.\n\n\"Hello?\" she called out tentatively, in case there was someone on the other side she couldn't see. \"Anyone there?\"\n\nThere was no response.\n\nAnnja followed the wall. If she stretched up, she could just about reach the top with her fingertips. She approached a heavy wooden door set with iron studs. There was a notice on the wall beside it, an historic-interest plaque giving details about the number of people who had been executed and buried in Heretic's Yard as part of the Inquisition.\n\nAnnja tried the door handle. It wouldn't budge. She had no idea if the workers were on siesta or just not on the site at all, meaning she had no idea how long she'd have in there undisturbed if she broke in. She walked a little farther along the wall until she reached the corner and turned right, out of sight of the main thoroughfare in front of the cathedral, and continued following the perimeter. This section of wall edged onto the backyards of other buildings, and she risked being seen if she hung around too long. People tended to notice things that didn't belong. Had the workers been there, her presence might not have been so remarkable, but alone she stood out like a sore thumb.\n\nThere was no sign of another entrance.\n\nShe doubled back along the path until she reached the most sheltered stretch of wall, and took one last glance in either direction before taking a couple quick steps back, then running and leaping at the wall, planting her foot as high as she could and boosting herself up. Annja's fingers clawed at the old stone, scratching against loose grit as she scrambled up. She kicked out, one toe finding enough purchase to push herself up until she folded across the top of the wall. She lay flat for a second, adjusting her balance before swinging her legs up and over one at a time and dropping down on the other side.\n\nShe stumbled as she landed, because of a buildup of dirt beside the wall that she hadn't expected, but she caught her balance and looked around.\n\nSomehow she had expected more.\n\nOnce the scaffolding and the builders' equipment were removed, there'd be nothing here but a patch of well-tended grass and the stone walls that surrounded it. It didn't feel like a particularly fateful spot. Unsurprisingly, there was nothing marking any individual graves. But it was obvious that there weren't thousands of dead in the Heretic's Yard, even if they were buried ten deep.\n\nShe looked up to the skies, but it wasn't as if a lucky break was just going to land in her lap.\n\nShe scoured the ground, not sure what she was hoping to spot...some kind of stone or plaque that might denote a grave, maybe. But even if she examined every single blade of glass, there was no guarantee she'd find any indication of who was buried where.\n\nShe started to pace, one hand brushing against the stone, watching where she put her feet. There was nothing here; she was only wasting more time. She was beginning to doubt herself. Why had she ever thought this mission could lead to anything but a dead end?\n\nTo find the mask, if it was even here, she'd need a powerful metal detector. The chances of finding one lying around in a place like this were slim to none. A minute later, she was scrambling up the scaffold, hoping the improved view would make a difference.\n\nHer eyes were drawn to the farthest corner, where the grass seemed to stop short of the wall.\n\nShe scanned the rest of the space from her perch, but saw nothing particularly out of the ordinary.\n\nIf there was any sort of marker stone in the grass, it was there.\n\nShe clambered down and made her way quickly to investigate, hoping that she'd just made her own luck.\n\nBy the time she was within a dozen paces of the corner, she was sure that the gray patch of ground where grass wasn't growing was a slab of stone. It could just be builder's rubble, of course, but the way the grass had receded around it made her think it hadn't been moved for years.\n\nGrass grew close to the great stone slab and licked over its edges, while moss and lichen maintained a grip on its surface.\n\nShe dropped to her knees.\n\nThe stone appeared unmarked, nothing to indicate what it might be commemorating or covering. But this corner was the farthest part of the Heretic's Yard from the cathedral proper, possibly even distant enough to not be considered part of the holy ground. If she had to guess what lay beneath, she'd say it was something that the Church was afraid of and yet wanted to keep in its sight.\n\nShe couldn't pry the stone up with her bare hands; she needed something she could use as a lever. The builders had left plenty of equipment lying around. Something ought to work. As she started to walk toward the blue-topped work huts, she heard the sound of voices on the cathedral side of the wall. She felt a sharp stab of panic, sure it was the builders returning, but as she listened to the soft tones, she realized that they weren't the usual gruff tradesmen on the other side. Clergy, then, come to inspect the builders' handiwork, or young lovers looking to consecrate the age-old sex-in-a-graveyard rite of passage. She hoped for the latter, expecting the former. If she made any noise, the clergy would be drawn to investigate, while the young couple would likely be scared off.\n\nShe walked softly, glad that she only had grass beneath her feet. She had to be quick and quiet. She couldn't risk the first alternative.\n\nShe ransacked the builders' hut, coming away with a long iron bar, most likely used for breaking up the ground. If she could work the bar beneath the slab, then maybe she could pry it up. Assuming the six men had been buried deep, at least six feet under, she grabbed a spade, too. She might not have time to dig, but it was always better to be prepared.\n\nShe was about to head back to the slab when she heard what could only be feet scrabbling against the other side of the wall.\n\nFellow trespassers, then.\n\nGreat.\n\nAnnja dropped to the ground, pressing herself up against the wall, hoping they'd just go away. She held her breath and waited, still clutching the metal bar. She heard gasping, then the scrabbling stopped and whoever it was dropped heavily to the ground, still on the outside of the yard. For what seemed like an eternity, the couple\u2014it was two people, now Annja was sure\u2014attempted to climb up, kicking and cursing before bursting into laughter and walking away.\n\nShe noticed a crate of tools pushed against the wall.\n\nAnnja didn't dare touch anything until she was sure the would-be lovers, or whoever they were, had moved on, but in among the hammers, chisels and screwdrivers she spotted something that might be of use. As the voices receded, she reached into the crate, her fingers closing around a black oblong box. She slid it out from its resting place. Just as she'd hoped, it was a pipe and cable detector, a small metal detector designed for locating and avoiding electrical wiring and plumbing that ran within walls to prevent them from being drilled into inadvertently. It was unlikely to work at any great depth, but surely it would be enough to tell her if there was something in the ground\u2014if she could get the slab lifted.\n\nShe went back over to the stone and punched the end of the bar into the ground, forcing it beneath the stone until it was deep enough to provide leverage when she pushed her weight down on the other end. It took all of Annja's considerable strength to work the stone free, with the earth fighting her every inch of the way, not wanting to give up the prize it had spent centuries absorbing. But once the slab was up a couple of inches, it was easier to deal with.\n\nShe leaned on the bar, forcing the gap another couple of precious inches wider, then slid the spade in, jamming the blade into the earth to prop up the stone and give her a moment to catch her breath. Then she took a grip on the edge of the slab.\n\nAnnja strained every muscle, feeling her temples bulge and her face burn red as she lifted. It was a backbreaking effort. She felt like Sisyphus, but she couldn't imagine having to move this massive hunk of rock more than a few feet before collapsing, never mind up a hill. And once she had her weight under it, she couldn't let it fall. She braced the stone with her legs, then heaved up, straightening, her feet threatening to slip on the grass, until the stone was upright. One last push sent it falling into the wall so hard she thought it or the wall would crack.\n\nThe densely compacted earth crawled with bugs and worms scurrying to find shelter from the burning sun. After a lifetime in the dark, this must have been a rude awakening for them. Amid the insects, Annja noticed a strange raised pattern in the soil. It took her a moment to realize it was an imprint from something carved into the stone. She brushed the slab with one hand, delicately removing the dust and dirt to read two letters. Those two letters were enough to convince her she was on the right track. V and I, the roman numerals for the number six. It was a simple acknowledgment of what was in the soil beneath the stone, wasn't it? No names, nothing so personal, just a number to mark six bodies. The six men who'd been moved from Calahorra to this place.\n\nShe wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, grateful as ever that she spent so much time in the gym building core muscle strength. Even so, the combination of the physical effort and the high sun was punishing.\n\nAnnja unboxed the cable detector, then powered it up, moving the head close to the iron bar to make sure that it actually worked. A red light blinked on as soon as the head came within a few inches of it. As she suspected, the detector was far too precise to alert her to anything buried well below the surface, but it was all she had, and if it meant she didn't have to waste an hour digging, then it was a godsend.\n\nShe ran the detector over the earth. Despite the constant motion of the insects, or maybe because of it, the light blinked on and off.\n\nIt was all the promise she needed.\n\nAnnja tossed the cable detector aside and grabbed the spade.\n\nAs she forced the blade into the compacted earth, Annja had to remind herself that just because there was something metallic down there didn't mean that it was the mask.\n\nBut it could be...\n\nShe scraped away a thin sliver of dirt that held together like a slice of clay, then another and another.\n\nGradually, she peeled back the surface layer by layer, aware that digging too deep too quickly could damage whatever was hidden in the ground. As she struck the earth again, the corner of the blade nicked something. She stopped digging immediately. It could have been a stone, but it she wasn't about to risk it. She cast the spade aside and knelt on the edge of the shallow hole to better see what her digging had revealed.\n\nCarefully, Annja brushed aside the dirt with her fingers, flicking away the soil and a bloated earthworm to reveal a few fibers of old sacking. She teased at it, unsure whether it could be the remains of the wrapping that would have been used to keep the bones together during transportation, or whether it was protecting something else entirely. She kept brushing. The sack had long since rotted away, leaving barely a few fragments, and those were more dirt than burlap. She peeled the last few fragments away, heart in mouth.\n\nPushed into the earth, a little bent and flattened by the pressure of five hundred years' worth of weight resting on it, robbed of any luster, was the thing she had been looking for. She'd found it, she was absolutely sure. She lifted the Mask of Torquemada out of the silversmith's unmarked grave.\n\nAs Annja gently held the mask in her hands, she heard the sound of men's voices moving closer\u2014deep jovial voices, the sound of working men returning. Siesta was over. She had to move fast. Annja set the mask to one side and with one colossal effort heaved the slab back into place. It hit the ground with a dull thud. She realized too late that she hadn't replaced the earth she'd removed from the hole. She didn't have time to worry about it. She just had to hope they weren't paying attention. She snatched up the tools and ran back to the hut, trusting that it wouldn't matter if she put them back exactly where she'd found them. She doubted the workmen would notice that any tools were out of place. She was banking on the fact that by the time anyone realized the burial plot had been disturbed she'd be long gone.\n\nAnnja heard the men cursing at the door to the yard, struggling with the old lock, then she took the first step up onto the scaffolding.\n\nWith the mask tucked into her leathers, she hauled herself up, climbing hand over hand, legs swinging beneath her as she rose, the entire scaffolding rocking with her movement. She reached the top as the door in the wall swung open.\n\nAnnja lay flat on the wooden platform, sliding slowly onto the wall. The motion worried the mask loose from her leathers. It fell, clattering against the outside of the wall before hitting the ground below. She dropped down after it, the toes of her boots scraping against the stone as she did.\n\nAnnja rolled as she landed, springing to her feet and snatching up the mask.\n\nShe couldn't believe she'd found it. The mask of the Grand Inquisitor. She could feel the contours of his face in her hand. She was so close to saving Garin, and with time on her side. It was a miracle. She needed to make contact with the kidnappers, to arrange the handover and release.\n\nFirst, though, she needed to make sure she still had transport.\n\nShe jogged alongside the wall, going the long way around the cathedral to avoid the door to the Heretic's Yard. She didn't want to risk stumbling into any workers who were too curious for their own good and had followed the sound of the mask hitting the wall. When she was far enough away to be sure she wasn't being watched, she looked at the mask in her hand.\n\nShe rubbed the silver with her thumbs, feeling that familiar tingle of history thrill through her veins. This was a true treasure, something both ancient and irreplaceable in her hands.\n\nSo this was what you looked like, she thought, taking in the features described in the soft metal. She had seen an engraving of Torquemada's profile, and while this was similar, the twist in the metal gave the Grand Inquisitor an air of cruelty that couldn't be denied. It was easy to study this sexless, emotionless, alien rendition of the man's face and imagine he must have enjoyed his work. She turned it over. The inside of the mask wasn't what she had expected; instead of being smooth metal that fit against the skin, it was scoured with signs and sigils, swirls and symbols. She had no idea what they meant, but this wasn't simply tarnishing at work. There was a grand design here. It was a deliberate pattern.\n\nShe pulled out her phone and made the call.\n\nOscar might have identified what he thought was the source of the video feed as the Alhambra, but she wasn't convinced that wasn't just another layer of subterfuge. It was just as likely the kidnappers were still in Madrid, close to Garin's offices. If they were clever enough to hide their tracks, they were clever enough to send a hacker on a wild-goose chase if they wanted to.\n\n\"I've got it,\" she said.\n\n\"Indeed. Interesting that it was in Logro\u00f1o all along,\" the voice said.\n\n\"I don't appreciate being spied on, however you're doing it,\" Annja said, resenting the intrusion. The idea that they were watching her every move, even if it was from a distance, was disturbing to say the least.\n\nThe only response was laughter.\n\n\"You look quite pretty when you're angry, Miss Creed,\" the man said.\n\n\"Do you want the mask or not?\"\n\n\"Of course. I suggest you make haste. Ticktock. Ticktock. It is a long way to the Alhambra,\" he said. \"Even on that bike of yours.\"\n\n\"I've got the mask for you,\" she snapped. \"Stop the clock. It's over.\"\n\n\"It doesn't work that way. You've got what's left of the twenty-four hours I gave you to get it into my hands if you want to see Mr. Braden alive. Otherwise, boom.\"\n\nHe hung up.\n\nEven if she could ride out of the city without police interference, the bike would take too long to get her there. It was more than half the length of the country away. She needed to call the old man and make alternate arrangements.\n\n\"I've got it,\" she said as soon as Roux picked up. \"You were right. They're based in the Alhambra. I have to get down there. The clock's still ticking.\"\n\n\"What's it like?\" Roux asked.\n\n\"Remarkable,\" she admitted. \"A little bent and battered, but all things considered, wouldn't you be, if you were that age?\"\n\n\"I am that age, dear girl,\" he said, but there was no malice in his response. \"We have time on our side now, so we need to work out why they want it. Tell me, is there anything unusual about the mask?\"\n\nShe thought about it for a moment. She and Roux had already amassed a wealth of information that might or might not be relevant. One thing was for sure, though\u2014the kidnappers didn't want the mask for itself. It was just part of the bigger picture. But what was that picture? Was she already looking at it without seeing it? Everything she and Roux had found so far had to be linked, didn't it?\n\n\"There are engravings on the inside. I'm not sure if they're patterns... In a few places it looks like it might be writing, but I have no idea what any of it means.\"\n\n\"Send me a picture.\"\n\n\"Will do. I'm going to need you to sort out transport. I don't have time to ride across the country. And anyway, the bike's out of action\u2014if it hasn't been impounded already, it's only a matter of time.\"\n\n\"I won't ask,\" he said. She resisted the temptation to point out she'd seen his latest get-out-of-jail-free exploits on TV. \"Get yourself to the airport. My pilot already has my plane in the air, so I'll get him to make a diversion and pick you up at the nearest airstrip. It shouldn't take him more than quarter of an hour to get there, so mush, mush.\"\n\nHe hung up.\n\nShe needed to recover the ledger if she could. It was unlikely she'd be able to ride the Roadster to the airport, so she'd need to flag down a taxi, too. But the ledger was the most important thing.\n\nShe worked her way back to the main square where she'd parked.\n\nThe police car was gone, but there was a clamp in the front wheel of the Roadster.\n\nAnnja felt an element of relief, glad that it was just her parking the officers had been addressing rather than the speeding, reckless endangerment and overturned semi. It could have been a lot worse. It wouldn't take long for them to put two and two together, but for now she slipped the ticket into her pocket. She'd give it to Roux, let him smooth the whole mess out later. At least the bike was still there. She unlocked the panniers and removed the ledger along with the backpack that contained her change of clothes. She put the mask into the bag and headed back to the information office.\n\nThe unsmiling woman looked up from her gossip magazine.\n\n\"Where can I get a taxi?\"\n\nThe woman held up a hand and picked up the phone.\n\nA couple of minutes later, a cab pulled up in front of the building."
            },
            {
                "title": "11:00 \u2014The Alhambra",
                "text": "The helicopter circled around the magnificent fortress.\n\nRoux had never seen it from the air before. It was a sight to behold, even after centuries of misuse and abuse, civil war and hostility. He looked for obvious weaknesses in the defenses\u2014an old habit, and those old ones really did die hard. The Moors would have been able to hold out against the Catholics for a long time before the aggressors could have forced their way in. With any kind of military mind behind the defense of the Alhambra, the Catholics would have lost far more men than the Moors in any confrontation, and attempts to starve them out would have been futile. The fortress had everything it needed to be self-sufficient.\n\nDown there, somewhere in that ancient warren, Roux was certain he'd find the home of the Brotherhood of the Burning. They wouldn't be able to hide from him in the walled city. He'd leave no stone unturned. That Annja had been told to bring the mask here just reinforced his certainty. With luck, though, he was ahead of the game. Even if they knew he was still an active player, that didn't mean they knew where he was or even if he was on the move. He was banking on the fact that they couldn't expect him to be here already. \"How long till we land?\"\n\n\"Two minutes,\" the pilot said. He had time.\n\n\"Keep us low. I need to make another call.\"\n\n\"Roger that.\"\n\nRoux had given Oscar as long as possible to discover everything he could about the Brotherhood of the Burning. He placed the call, imagining the hacker sitting behind an array of computer screens, headset on, probably playing dumb computer games in between working for him. He picked up.\n\n\"Well?\" Roux asked.\n\n\"Interesting stuff. This Brotherhood has its roots going way back to the days of the Inquisition,\" Oscar began. \"We're talking medieval cult, secret brotherhood, sworn in blood, all that fun stuff. Their sole aim seems to have been to recover treasure that was taken from them by the Church.\"\n\n\"Which fits with what's happening,\" Roux said, more to himself than the hacker.\n\n\"As far as I can see, they were never able to get any of it back. Not that any records are readily available. And what I have managed to find proves they were still active until the late 1700s, but then they went off the map. Obviously, that could just mean that later records have been destroyed. You can never be sure with this stuff. Books burn, after all.\"\n\n\"Well, if they were banging their heads against a brick wall, maybe each subsequent generation just lost a little more hope, and they finally gave up,\" Roux said, thinking out loud. After all, how many generations would it take before people stopped searching for heirlooms and treasures taken by the Nazis? \"Anything else?\"\n\n\"The Brotherhood was started by a group of Mud\u00e9jars. A Mud\u00e9jar was a Moor who did...\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, I'm well aware what a Mud\u00e9jar was,\" Roux interrupted.\n\n\"Well, anyway, one of these Mud\u00e9jars was a man who had been commissioned to create the ceiling in Torquemada's tomb, another worked on frescos and the third was a silversmith. They all had skills that were sought after by the Church, even though they saw these men as heretics and wanted them banished from Spain. They were all wealthy men. They kept themselves close to the Church, making themselves indispensable. Keep your enemies close, I guess. They seemed to think that it would give them the best chance of finding out where the treasures of dispossessed Moors had been hidden.\"\n\n\"Indeed. You said there was a silversmith? Do you have any names?\"\n\n\"Hang on a second. Let me call up the list.\"\n\nRoux knew who he was going to name. There was no chance it was going to be anyone but Abdul bin Soor, the Moor who had fashioned the mask and whose remains had lain with it for five centuries.\n\nRoux was right.\n\n\"How many names have you got?\" Roux asked.\n\n\"Nine. Seems like the Church did its best to round them up, but some of them evaded capture and managed to get out of the country. The rest were taken for trial.\"\n\n\"Six,\" Roux said.\n\n\"How the hell did you know that?\"\n\n\"You've just confirmed something, that's all. What about our current Brotherhood?\"\n\n\"It's all a bit sketchy. I've got to admit I thought they were just a bunch of right-wing nutjobs at first\u2014there's plenty of those sprouting up all over Europe these days, and all that made them special was that they knew a bit of their nation's history, adopting the name to hold up the Inquisition as an example for achieving their own aims. I was wrong. It's more than that. The more I dug, the more I realized it stinks. The whole thing stinks. Someone is using them as a front. For one, the most obvious link to the past is that the people seemingly behind this are Muslims from North Africa, descendants of families who were supposed to have been driven from Spain.\"\n\n\"That doesn't make any sense,\" Roux said. \"They have been behind a number of racist attacks. More specifically, attacks against Muslims. Why would they do that? Why attack their own people? What about the name I gave you? You find anything on him?\"\n\n\"Plenty. I'm sure it won't surprise you to know that Enrique Mart\u00ednez is not his real name.\"\n\n\"Nothing would surprise me right now. Go on.\"\n\n\"Until a couple of years ago, Enrique Mart\u00ednez didn't exist. He's a brand-new man. I like this kind of stuff. It makes life interesting. That's why I like you, old man. It's like Mart\u00ednez sprang into life fully formed, complete with bank account, tax identification, passport, the works.\"\n\n\"Interesting.\" What Roux found even more interesting was that his contact at Europol didn't seem to be aware of Mart\u00ednez's spontaneous incarnation, or had chosen not to tell him. \"And his real name?\"\n\n\"That's all I've got at the moment.\"\n\n\"Find out what his name is.\"\n\n\"I will. Trust me. This guy's got my attention now. Oh, and just a heads-up\u2014that latest video Annja sent me, it came through a different route, but all roads lead back to the same dead zone.\"\n\n\"The Alhambra,\" Roux said, looking down on the fortress as they began their descent.\n\nLess than five minutes later, Roux was on the ground, watching the helicopter take off.\n\nThe pilot was going to the airport at Granada to refuel and wait for Annja.\n\nEven if they had the mask, the clock was still ticking."
            },
            {
                "title": "10:00 \u2014The Alhambra",
                "text": "There were security cameras everywhere.\n\nIt was impossible to tell if they were merely for show, if the fortress's security and maintenance crew had access, or if the Brotherhood of the Burning had tapped into the feeds and was using them as an early-warning system. He figured it was best to assume a worst-case scenario, given the sophistication with which they'd rerouted the video stream and covered their tracks. They were tech-savvy. And realistically, if there was this much security on the outside, what was he going to be up against once he got inside?\n\nThe complex was made up of a maze of buildings behind the defensive walls. It could take forever to find where the Brotherhood was situated, even after Roux had breached the front wall.\n\nA number of the buildings within the public area bore signs that explained they were closed to the public for repairs and renovations, but there were still plenty of visitors milling around. They were convenient. He didn't want to stand out from the crowd, so he followed the flow of bodies and listened to a guide who was leading the party through the complex. As exotic as the ancient palace was, it was a much more mundane set of buildings that interested Roux.\n\nScaffolding had been erected along the outside of one such building. There was no sign of any workmen, but Roux heard hammering coming from another building not too far away. Men were back at work, but not here. Why? Sometimes it wasn't what was there that was wrong, but what wasn't there. Scaffolding without workers? A false front? Cover for something behind the wall? Almost certainly.\n\n\"Here is the altar of the open-air chapel,\" the guide said, waving her arms as if to accentuate the fact that there was no roof. A few of the tourists took the opportunity to turn their cameras to where she was pointing and grab a few extra shots. It never ceased to amuse Roux\u2014tourists living life through a lens so they could look at it all again when they got home, but forgetting to actually soak it in unfiltered when they were right there, standing in the presence of such beauty.\n\n\"And here, forming the part of the floor, we have the tombstones of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. But before you get excited, neither of them is actually buried here. Their bodies were laid to rest in the mausoleum in the royal chapel in Granada, which obviously we'll be visiting later during your stay here in Andaluc\u00eda.\" There were a few nods in the crowd. Roux noticed a man in a lightweight suit and sunglasses push his way carefully through the crowd without speaking so much as a word of apology as he eased gawkers out of his way.\n\nThe guide gave him no more than a brief glance, but Roux stared. And for good reason. The man placed his hand on the shoulder of a tourist in front of him, and Roux saw the flame tattoo on the back of it. He had to force himself to look away before the man inevitably glanced back at him, feeling the intensity of his stare. Roux scanned the rest of the crowd for familiar faces, anyone he might have seen since his arrival in Spain, but it was difficult. The sun was high, dazzling off the sandstone walls and the mirrored shades. Any one of these people could have been at the courthouse or any step along the way from there; he wouldn't have been able to tell. No one appeared to be regarding him strangely or trying desperately not to look at him, either.\n\nHe watched the man enter the small building surrounded by scaffolding.\n\nThe guide waited until he had closed the door behind him before she pointed the building out to the group.\n\nCuriouser and curiouser, Roux thought.\n\n\"Over there is the indoor chapel. It is very small inside and no doubt would only have been used on rare occasions, given the beautiful weather we enjoy here in Andaluc\u00eda. Unfortunately, as you can see, the building is undergoing renovation, so I am unable to show you inside today.\"\n\nThe average age of the group, Roux figured, was probably pushing late sixties, early seventies. A fair few of them looked older than he did, which he appreciated.\n\nThe group moved on, the guide urging them toward another landmark building. Roux hung back in the shadows. He really wanted to get inside that chapel. The guy in the suit was a member of the Brotherhood. He'd gone through that door. That meant Roux was going through that door, too. Simple as that.\n\nHe fished out his phone to check in with Annja, hoping to get an idea of how far behind him she was.\n\nNo signal.\n\nHe'd forgotten what Oscar had said about this being a dead zone. The fact that the kidnappers had been able to broadcast from here\u2014even for a moment\u2014meant that they had to be using some kind of jamming device to keep them hidden from modern surveillance techniques.\n\nIt also meant that no one would be able to call for help if the need arose.\n\nThat suited Roux just fine.\n\nHe slipped the phone back into his pocket.\n\n\"Showtime,\" he muttered, but he had no intention of charging inside, gate-crashing whatever party they had going on.\n\nUnfortunately, there was no other obvious entrance to the chapel, and no windows that offered easy line of sight from the ground.\n\nBut the scaffolding would at least give him the opportunity to look inside without being seen.\n\nHe walked past the door, resisting the temptation to ease it open, even a fraction, to peer inside. The security cameras on the chapel were much newer than any of the others he had seen. And they were trained on the door. Even from here, he could see that the black cables hadn't been bleached by the sun yet, and the plastic clips that pinned them in place were still pristine white. These cameras weren't just newer; they were brand-new. The Brotherhood had increased the level of security around the chapel. It was as if they knew he was coming. He was touched.\n\nHe glanced around again to be sure no one was paying attention to him, then took a step onto the ladder that led to the scaffold's first platform. He was already in the shadow of adjacent buildings and out of sight of tourists, but he wanted to be sure he was hidden from the many cameras in the area. He couldn't be sure, but he thought he was good. That would have to be enough.\n\nThe first window was filthy with the grime of building work. It clearly hadn't been cleaned since long before the scaffolding had been erected. Roux pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his brow before applying the cloth to the glass. There were people inside, but a balcony running along the inside of the upper floor prevented him from figuring out how many. He tried the window, but it wouldn't budge, obviously locked from the inside. He cast his gaze downward in case he'd been spotted before working his way around the scaffolding and into the sun. The second window was locked, too, but a third was more promising. As he worked at it, he realized it was loose around the latch. Not necessarily unlocked, but a bit of give allowed him to work his pocketknife into the gap and worry at the latch.\n\nThe latch slipped off easily and\u2014most importantly\u2014without making a sound.\n\nRoux could hear chanting. There was a steady rhythm to it. The voices didn't skip a beat. He eased the window open slowly and climbed inside, the chanting masking any noise he made. He pulled the window closed behind him, not wanting to risk any ambient noise from the street outside to register with the men down there. He waited, not moving, just listening, a hand on the butt of his pistol in case someone tried to blindside him. Drawing it would mean escalating any confrontation. He wasn't going to do that until he absolutely had to. And then he'd be every bit as ruthless as he needed to be to make sure he walked out of there, preferably with Garin.\n\nThe tempo of the chant shifted, as did the tone, and the voices swelled to fill the dome of the ceiling.\n\nIt echoed all around him.\n\nRoux crouched lower, moving closer to the edge of the balcony. He risked a glance down through a cutout section of the balustrade to the floor below. The chanting should have been a clue. It seemed that some kind of religious or pseudoreligious rite was taking place, but the longer he watched and listened, the more sure he became that there was something strange about it.\n\nHe couldn't make out the words, but the chant seemed to have more in common with a black-magic mass than a liturgy. There were at least a dozen armed men in the throng, but none of them looked vigilant. They held their rifles as a medieval knight might have held his sword in a similar rite.\n\nThere was a serious amount of firepower down there.\n\nBut looking at them, their pretend-knight posturing, left Roux wondering how many of the guards were able to use their weapons. He could probably have taken out half of them from the gallery before they'd even brought their guns to bear, but that wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. Not until he knew where Garin was.\n\nRoux weighed the odds.\n\nIf he'd had any backup he wouldn't have hesitated. He pulled out his gun as he made his decision, picked out which of the men down there was marked for death, imagining the collapses and working out what would happen as they fell, like dominos, trying to foresee all the possible consequences.\n\nThe chanting stopped. The room fell eerily silent as a curtain at the back parted. Two men joined the congregation, dragging a third man between them. There was a hood over his head.\n\nIt had to be Garin.\n\nFish in a barrel.\n\nRoux took aim, drawing a deep, steadying breath, ready to fire, only to hear the telltale sound of a gun's mechanism ratchet a heartbeat before he felt the cold steel of its barrel press against the back of his head.\n\n\"Give me an excuse to pull the trigger,\" the voice said."
            },
            {
                "title": "09:35 \u2014En route to Granada",
                "text": "Annja took the chance to shower and change into clean clothes, ditching the leathers. Roux's plane was more like a flying hotel than a cramped economy shuttle, with every convenience imaginable and a bunch that weren't. She emerged refreshed and awake, more alive. The first few minutes in the plane's air-conditioning were bliss. The call from Roux came, telling her he had a helicopter waiting for her at the airport. The old man was always one step ahead of the game. But then, he'd been playing it for a very long time. She was still new to this, really, despite the incredible things she'd seen and done since her hand first closed around the sword in the otherwhere. That felt like so long ago now.\n\nThe pilot didn't emerge once from the cabin or waste his time with small talk over the intercom. He just did his job moving her from point A to point B at Roux's request.\n\nShe sat back in the supple leather armchair and pulled the mask out of her backpack. She wanted to see what she could decipher, if anything, before they landed. She was searching for an edge. If she could work out what this was all about, she'd be a step ahead of all of them, and a step closer to getting Garin out of the mess he'd gotten himself into. And she had no doubts that Garin had walked into this with his eyes wide open. Knowing something was a bad idea had never stopped him before. She was going to need help, though. The plane was equipped with a satellite phone, meaning she was still hooked up to everything that made the world tick. Annja made a couple of calls, getting a referral from an old associate in Bonn to a colleague in Bern who just happened to know exactly who she should be talking to: a history professor in Rome, an expert in the field, having spent more than twenty years researching the fate of the Moors during the Inquisition.\n\nA couple of minutes after making the first call, she had him on the phone.\n\n\"Miss Creed,\" the man said in a soft voice.\n\n\"Professor Zanetti,\" she said. \"Thank you so much for this. I can't begin to tell you how much I appreciate it.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" the man said. She could hear the smile in his voice. \"I am always happy to talk about things that captivate me. I understand that you are interested in discussing the Moriscos?\"\n\n\"Actually, I want to talk about their treasure.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" There was a moment of silence on the other end of the phone as the professor reassessed the conversation. His tone shifted slightly. \"Are you a treasure hunter, Miss Creed? I was led to believe you were a serious student of archaeology, no?\"\n\nShe took a deep breath. \"Today, technically, I'm a treasure hunter, I guess. But every other day of my life I'm a serious student of history and archaeology. And yes, I can well imagine that a lot of people would be interested in finding the Morisco treasure if they knew it existed, but honestly, I'm not one of them.\"\n\n\"Then what are you trying to accomplish here, Miss Creed?\"\n\n\"I'm purely helping out a friend.\"\n\n\"Well, I'll tell you this much\u2014advice, if you like, so take it or leave it as you will. Even if this treasure still exists, no matter that it would make the finder as rich as Croesus, rich beyond the dreams of avarice, it's not a road you want to be following. And you are the second person I have said the same to in as many months.\"\n\n\"The second?\"\n\n\"Yes. Perhaps it was someone else associated with your television program? I must admit, I suddenly feel like one of the cool kids. I don't think I've been this popular since I was in high school.\"\n\n\"I'll check with my producer,\" she said, wondering who Zanetti had been talking to. She could already hear Roux's voice in her ear banging on about there being no coincidences. \"Can I ask you, Professor Zanetti, do you have a personal theory on what happened to the confiscated wealth?\"\n\n\"I do indeed. Of course, a lot depends on the nature of this wealth. The Moors held a tremendous amount of riches, and while those who fled the country often retained theirs\u2014or at least what they could carry with them\u2014as did the Moors who converted to the Christian faith, some treasures were confiscated by the Church. These weren't obvious treasures. Many wouldn't even see value in them. They seized thousands of books\u2014of course, many of them had jeweled bindings that were of value in themselves\u2014but of even greater value was the information inside them. Many of them were religious tracts, but perhaps surprisingly, others contained a vast amount of scientific knowledge. We are talking about a tremendous wealth of learning, destroyed and denied to scholars. Certain books on medicine were retained, though others likewise were considered to be heresy and destroyed. You could draw parallels with today, when even some enlightened people believe that the words in the Bible carry more weight than the discoveries of generations of scientists. If it doesn't come from the mouth of some God via a burning bush, they don't want to know.\"\n\n\"No actual money, then? No jewels? These were wealthy people, weren't they? What happened to their belongings once they were executed?\"\n\n\"Ah, now we are back into the world of the treasure hunter, Miss Creed. And there we are confronted on all sides by supposition, presumption and, to be honest, make-believe. Yes, material wealth was certainly lost, particularly when the Moors abandoned the Alhambra. But was there ever enough to make up a great horde like something out of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves? Would it have been gathered, or would light-fingered enforcers have made off with it? Lots of variables we have no answers for. Tell me, have you heard of the Moor's Last Sigh?\"\n\n\"The book?\"\n\n\"No, though Rushdie's novel is in some small part inspired by the events of the time. When Muhammad XII, the last sultan of Granada, led his people from the Alhambra and through the Puerto del Suspiro del Moro\u2014the Pass of the Moor's Sigh\u2014he was supposed to have looked back at what he was leaving behind and wept. It is my belief they abandoned far more than books. But is that your missing treasure? I do not claim to know.\"\n\n\"Can you remember the name of the man who contacted you?\"\n\n\"Not off the top of my head, I'm afraid. Something Hispanic. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the subject matter. He had an American accent, though, I think. Hernandez?\"\n\nAnnja felt the chill certainty that she was following in the Brotherhood's footsteps. \"Mart\u00ednez? Enrique Mart\u00ednez?\"\n\n\"It could well have been. Like I said, it was a couple months ago, and names aren't really my thing.\"\n\n\"Do you remember what you talked about?\"\n\n\"The same as you. The treasure. He was most interested in the Alhambra itself, but\u2014and I found this interesting, given that its existence isn't well-known\u2014he asked a lot of questions about the Mask of Torquemada.\"\n\nThe words sent a shiver up her spine.\n\nThe Brotherhood already knew she had the mask. Likewise, they knew she was on her way to Granada. She had a choice to make. And not long to make it. This professor could be one of them, testing her. She decided to play a game of you-show-me-yours-and-I'll-show-you-mine.\n\n\"Professor, I know this might be one of the strangest requests you've ever had, but would you mind showing me the backs of your hands?\"\n\n\"On the telephone?\"\n\n\"Take a photograph of your hands, with your face in the shot, then send it to my email. I'll wait for it to arrive, then we'll talk.\"\n\n\"How very mysterious, Miss Creed. Very well, I'll play along.\"\n\nA moment later, she was looking at a photograph of his face and his hands, sleeves pulled back to reveal his forearms. There was no sign of the telltale tattoo Roux had warned her about. She decided to trust him.\n\n\"Would you mind telling me what that was all about?\" he asked. \"Worried that I might have something up my sleeve?\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" she said. \"I'd like to show you something, and I just needed to know I could trust you. Let's take this conversation over to video chat.\"\n\n\"You really are quite...different...Miss Creed. Again, I'll humor you, mainly because I'm curious now.\"\n\nIt took a couple of minutes for them to connect over video, but they were face-to-pixelated-face soon enough.\n\n\"I want to show you something, Professor, but this stays between us, understand?\"\n\n\"Pinky swear,\" the Italian said, smiling. He saw just how serious Annja's expression was and added, \"You have my word.\"\n\nShe said nothing. She reached for the mask and held it up in front of her face.\n\nShe watched the professor's expression through Torquemada's eyes.\n\nHe gasped. \"Is that...? Are you telling me...? Is that thing... genuine?\"\n\n\"Very much so.\"\n\n\"Where on earth did you find it? How...? Do you have any idea what this means?\" The questions came tumbling out in an avalanche of words.\n\n\"I'd rather not say just yet,\" she said. \"I intend to get it tested properly so we know exactly what we're dealing with before we make it public, but basically, from what you can see here, do you think it could be the real thing?\"\n\n\"Impossible to say without examining it properly, but look at it... You can't rule it out, can you? The likeness\u2014even though it's clearly been damaged over the years\u2014is remarkable.\"\n\nShe turned the mask around to reveal the inside, the swirls and signs engraved in the discolored silver. \"And my second question.\" She moved it closer to the webcam. \"Do you have any idea what this might be?\"\n\nThe professor made a face as he inclined his head. He licked his lips, then chewed on the bottom one, but didn't say anything for the longest time. So protracted was the silence that Annja thought for a moment the video chat had frozen. Eventually, he said, \"Could you send me pictures of this?\"\n\n\"Does it mean anything to you?\"\n\n\"Possibly. Part of it looks like it could be Mozarabic.\"\n\n\"Mozarabic?\"\n\n\"A dead language. It was spoken among Muslims until the fourteenth century.\"\n\n\"But if this is the Mask of Torquemada, surely the language would already have been dead for a century by the time of its manufacture?\"\n\n\"It wouldn't have been in common usage, I agree, but that doesn't mean that it was lost completely at that point in time. Indeed, it could even have become a way for like-minded people to pass messages without the Church interpreting them. Send the pictures to me as soon as you can, and assuming the script is Mozarabic, I'll get them translated for you.\"\n\nHe ended the call, leaving Annja staring at the screen.\n\nThis changed things.\n\nNot everything, but enough.\n\nShe had thought that the treasure had been taken and hidden by the Inquisition, but what if she'd been coming at this from the wrong angle? What if the Moors had been hiding their secrets from the Church before the Inquisition could lay their hands on them?\n\nShe was still lost in her thoughts when she heard the warning sound and saw the fasten-seat-belts light come on.\n\n\"We'll be starting to descend in a moment,\" the pilot said over the intercom. \"Landing in ten minutes.\"\n\nShe felt the plane start to bank and turn, losing altitude slowly.\n\nShe stashed everything away, ready to move on to the next leg of her journey.\n\nShe tried to reach Roux, but his phone went straight to voice mail. Maybe he was already in that dead zone. She left a message, telling him she was touching down, then settled in for the landing.\n\nFifteen minutes later, she disembarked. The afternoon heat hit her, almost making it impossible to breathe after the cool comfort of the plane. There was a large plane sitting on the tarmac along with a cluster of smaller private jets, including one not unlike Roux's. She'd flown on his Gulfstream often enough to recognize the shape of it. That was one expensive toy some billionaire playboy had parked up by the hangars.\n\nAcross the hardstand she saw the helicopter waiting for her. It was a fair distance away, nestled on the far side of the solitary terminal building. She started walking toward it when her phone rang.\n\nShe answered it without even looking at the screen.\n\n\"Annja.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "09:15 \u2014The Alhambra",
                "text": "Roux knelt with his hands held up in surrender.\n\nThe man kicked his pistol out of reach as Roux interlaced his fingers behind his head. There was nothing he could do but go along with it. Even if, by some freakish gymnastic feat, he could have thrown himself out of the window, he would have been cut down before he reached the ground. So he surrendered. He was where he'd wanted to be, in the belly of the beast. Assuming they didn't kill him straightaway, he'd just have to wait and seize whatever opportunity presented itself. They hadn't killed Garin, after all, so the odds were on his side. It would be too much to hope they didn't know who he was, though. The Brotherhood was organized. They'd done their due diligence. And he knew that because they'd tried to take him out once before. They wanted Annja, though. Not him. Their interest in him started and ended with not letting him help her. She was the one they'd sent on the treasure hunt. They'd put Garin's life in her hands, not his.\n\n\"On your feet.\"\n\nRoux reached for the edge of the balcony, no sudden moves, and started to pull himself up, rubbing his knee with his free hand as he rose. He winced, playing up the old-bones angle without making it obvious that he was faking it. He had just scaled a scaffold and climbed through a window, so he could hardly be a frail pensioner. But maybe the man with the gun would underestimate an old man.\n\n\"Move it,\" the gunman said, prodding him in the base of the spine with his weapon. The gunman bent down to retrieve Roux's gun. The moment the cold steel wavered, Roux struck.\n\nHe swiveled and kicked out at the man's hand, knocking the gun from it. The semiautomatic clattered toward the window. Even before his foot had landed, Roux whipped his other leg out, taking his assailant's legs out from under him. The man sprawled backward, flailing out at Roux. Roux drove the heel of his hand into the man's nose, then rolled him over the gallery railing. The gunman fell. All element of surprise was gone by the time he hit the ground, dead. That put the cat amid the pigeons.\n\nThey were coming for Roux, but he was ready.\n\nHeavy footsteps sounded on the stairs.\n\nRoux snatched up his gun and, in the silence between heartbeats, took in his surroundings. That was all the time he needed. A door burst open along the balcony. A heavily armed man filled the opening. The gunman saw him and swung around to take aim: shoot first and ask questions later\u2014or never. Hesitation killed better men than him. Roux didn't hesitate. He fired a single shot at the man in the doorway, taking him square in the chest. The impact of the bullet slammed him back into the men coming behind him.\n\nIt bought Roux a moment.\n\nHe sprung onto the top of the balcony railing, a sitting target for those below, and took three sure-footed steps before they could gather their wits and send the first volley of gunfire toward him. Bullets strafed through the air, embedding themselves in the wall behind him, the ancient stone spitting dust. Those same walls had survived five hundred years of conflict unscathed. They didn't withstand more than a few minutes of the old Frenchman. He didn't smile. He ran along the gallery with perfect balance, oblivious to the danger of the drop.\n\nHe needed to cut down on the number of guns trained on him.\n\nThere were eight bullets left in his weapon.\n\nThere were more than eight men who wanted him dead.\n\nHe needed to improvise.\n\nA chandelier hung below the level of the balcony.\n\nIt was an inviting means of evading at least the closest of the gunmen.\n\nHe leaped from the rail like a gymnast, arcing his body and grasping the chain that supported the gilt construction. The metal links strained and stretched under the sudden pull of his weight, threatening to send him crashing to the ground. A shower of plaster fell, raining down on his head. Below him, two of the men dragged Garin out of the room while another offered covering fire. His aim was poor. Two rapid shots from Roux saw him crumple to the ground, a pool of blood slowly spreading out around him.\n\nSix bullets.\n\nAnother shooter appeared on a lower balcony, directly in Roux's path as he swung.\n\nThat was unlucky for him.\n\nRoux fired again, still one-handed, swinging on the huge chandelier. This time his shot took the man low in the gut. His screams as he crumpled up and fell were brutal. His weapon tumbled over the balcony rail, going off as it hit the floor.\n\nThere was no respite. More bullets whizzed by, too close for comfort, coming from above. One struck the chain supporting the chandelier. The link opened where the bullet clipped it, and Roux felt the change in the chain's integrity. The only way was down. And he wasn't in control of his descent.\n\nOne of the gunmen on the upper gallery looked over the barrier, letting off two shots in quick succession\u2014not at Roux. Both hit the chandelier.\n\nHe felt the link finally sheer, and as it did he launched himself into the air, kicking out, arms windmilling frantically as he fell.\n\nIt was a long way down.\n\nRoux reached out with his free hand and grabbed for the rail of the balcony where the gunman had been standing a moment before.\n\nWood and plaster splintered again as a bullet thudded into the balustrade. Another brother leaned over the gallery behind Roux as he tried to pull himself up with one hand. His feet flailed wildly trying to snag on to anything to stop him from falling. He kicked hard, arcing his back\u2014once, twice, three times\u2014and then his toes connected with something solid.\n\nRoux leaned back, one hand on the balcony railing, one foot on the stanchion supporting it, and released two shots back in the direction of the gunman. Two shots. That left him with three more. Far from ideal, but better than dead.\n\nThe chandelier crashed to the ground, cracking the tiled floor as it hit. That mosaic had survived a diaspora\u2014generations of worshippers driven out of their homeland\u2014and the Christians who had come after them. It didn't survive the chandelier. The man Roux had shot at followed it to the ground a heartbeat later.\n\nThe odds were evening up.\n\nHe almost felt sorry for them.\n\nRoux hauled himself up with one hand, using the support of the stanchion to take his weight, and rolled over the railing. The man he'd shot in the gut was on his back. He wasn't dead, but he was in a bad way. His face was ashen, sweat peppering his forehead. He was panting hard, struggling to suck in a breath. He wasn't about to get up and fight. Roux stepped over him, looking for a door and a flight of stairs that would take him down to the ground level. He had to focus on what was important: getting Garin out of here. He found the door. It had a bolt, which he slid. He wasn't sure how long it would buy him, but any extra second was one he wanted.\n\nThe stairwell was noticeably cooler than the gallery. There were no windows in here. Nothing to stir the air save the echoes of his feet as Roux ran down the stairs.\n\nFrom somewhere he heard the sound of an engine starting. It was followed by the heavy metallic slam of a vehicle's doors. They were trying to get Garin out of there. He charged down the stairs, but before he'd reached the bottom he heard the shriek of rubber spinning on stone. They were gone. So close. But they'd gotten Garin out while he'd been fighting for his life. Roux punched the wall in frustration. So close. So damn close.\n\nHe could only hope that meant they were taking him to the rendezvous with Annja, ready to trade for the mask, not out into a dusty field to put a bullet in the back of his head and drop his body into a shallow grave they made Garin dig himself.\n\nRoux went back up to the gallery and the bleeding man.\n\nHe stood over him, not saying a word, letting panic seep in as the blood seeped out.\n\nThe man looked up at him with fear in his eyes. His gaze darted from Roux's face to the gun in his hand and back again. Roux raised the pistol, allowing himself a moment to smile as if this was a part of the proceedings that he enjoyed. The man looked as though he was about to cry.\n\n\"Please,\" he begged, the word coming between wet, sucking breaths.\n\n\"You're asking me to spare you? I could,\" Roux said agreeably. \"But you weren't going to give me the chance to beg, were you? You wouldn't have spared me. Given the chance, you'd have put me down like a rabid dog. So give me a reason not to pull the trigger.\"\n\n\"I'm...\"\n\n\"What, sorry? That hardly feels adequate, certainly not enough to spare your life.\"\n\nThe man squirmed. He knew he was about to die. He was frightened. That surprised Roux. Normally, zealots welcomed the chance to be martyred. Roux wanted to make that pay. And if it didn't, then he'd pull the trigger and put the man out of his misery.\n\n\"What can I say?\"\n\n\"You can tell me who is behind all this.\"\n\n\"I can't,\" the man sobbed.\n\n\"Well, that is disappointing,\" Roux said, crouching down beside him. He put his face no more than a few inches from the other man's, and the barrel of the gun closer. \"But let me check something, because words are important. Is that can't or won't?\"\n\n\"Can't,\" the brother said, his eye fixed on the black hole of the barrel. Roux pressed the gun against the man's cheek.\n\nThe last dregs of color drained from his face.\n\n\"Want to try again?\" Roux asked.\n\n\"El Zogoybi,\" the man said through clenched teeth.\n\n\"El Zogoybi?\"\n\nHe nodded desperately. \"Yes...that's...the name...he uses.\"\n\n\"What else?\"\n\nThe man shook his head wildly. \"It's all I know. Please.\"\n\nRoux dropped the gun to his side. He had a name. El Zogoybi, the unfortunate. It was the name given to the last sultan of Granada. Boabdil, better known as Muhammad XII. El Zogoybi was the man who had been driven out of the Alhambra by the Inquisition.\n\n\"What else?\" Roux repeated.\n\n\"That's all I know.\"\n\n\"Can I believe you?\"\n\n\"I'm begging you.\"\n\n\"Mercenary?\"\n\nThe man nodded, grimacing against the pain.\n\n\"Stomach wounds are bad. Chances are you're not going to make it through this. I can put you out of your misery if you want, make the pain go away?\"\n\n\"I want to live.\"\n\nThere was a hammering on the door\u2014whoever was left standing coming to clean up the mess\u2014and then a shot was fired, followed by another.\n\nThey were shooting at the lock as if that was what was keeping the door closed, not the body of their fallen brother.\n\n\"Looks like it's your lucky day,\" Roux said.\n\nHe sent a shot of his own back through the door and they stopped firing. Two bullets.\n\nHe started to make good his own escape."
            },
            {
                "title": "08:30 \u2014The Alhambra",
                "text": "\"Annja here,\" she said into the phone.\n\nIt wasn't Roux. It was the kidnappers.\n\n\"Welcome to Granada,\" the voice said. \"I trust you had an enjoyable flight?\"\n\n\"What next?\" she asked. \"Where are we meeting? I've got the mask. You've got my friend. Let's get this over with and get out of each other's lives.\"\n\n\"Tetchy, aren't we? There's a car in the parking lot,\" the voice said, ignoring her question just as she had ignored his. \"A red Alfa Romeo. The keys are tucked in the sun visor. Take the road to the Alhambra. I'll give you instructions as you drive.\"\n\n\"I want to know where I'm going,\" she said.\n\n\"And you will. In time. Now get in the car and start driving. Ticktock. Ticktock.\"\n\nAnnja headed out into the parking lot. Part of her was surprised that the man hadn't mentioned the helicopter, but she took that as a sign that she had at least a few secrets from the kidnappers. She didn't know if she'd be able to use that to her advantage, but it was always good to have an ace in the hole.\n\nThe bright red car was easy enough to find.\n\nFrom the outside, it appeared to be in near-pristine condition. As she slid inside, she was hit by the new-leather smell. The dash still carried that sheen of showroom-fresh polish. The keys fell into her lap as she pulled the sun visor down. Annja put them in the ignition and felt as much as heard the roar as the engine burst into life. The odometer registered less than a thousand miles.\n\nShe pulled out of the parking lot, onto the airport-centric ring of roads that eventually pointed the way to the Alhambra. She kept the phone beside her on the seat, ready to answer the moment it rang.\n\nShe didn't have to wait long.\n\n\"Next left,\" the voice said, then hung up without waiting for her acknowledgment. She did as she was told. A few miles later, another call came, instructing her to take the next left to leave the main road and drive a few miles on another. This time the kidnapper didn't kill the call. He directed her through a series of turns until she found herself in the middle of nowhere. In the distance she could make out the fortress city of the Alhambra bathed in the final rays of the setting sun, the light picking out some of the gilt-laden decorations.\n\n\"Look for the sign\u2014it's a parking lot. Pull in there and wait. Kill the engine.\" She followed his directions and then waited.\n\nTrees lined one side of the parking lot, making it feel like a viewing platform. She could hear the man's breathing through the phone. It prevented her from enjoying the view that the Moors had left behind.\n\nThe light faded far faster than she had expected, shifting from gloom to near-darkness in what seemed like a matter of minutes.\n\nShe heard the approaching vehicle long before she saw it as it swept into the deserted parking lot. A black van, headlights off.\n\n\"Now get out of the car,\" the voice on the phone said. She'd almost forgotten the call was still live.\n\nShe climbed out, leaving the mask on the passenger seat with the window down so she would be able to reach inside for it when she needed it. The van's lights turned on, blinding her for a moment. The glare forced her to shield her eyes. She heard men getting out of the back of the van; a panel door slammed and feet crunched on gravel as the men moved toward her.\n\n\"Where is he?\" she said, not sure which of the shapes belonged to the man who had been calling her.\n\n\"In good time,\" one of the silhouettes said. Two figures moved forward, dragging a third between them. His feet dragged in the gravel. They dropped him. He fell forward, not even reaching out to break his fall.\n\nGarin\u2014it had to be him\u2014was stripped to the waist with his hands tied behind his back. Even with the sack on his head, stained with dark patches of blood, it was obvious that he was in a bad way.\n\n\"Garin!\" she cried, unable to stop herself.\n\nShe started to move toward him.\n\n\"Not so fast, Miss Creed.\"\n\nShe stopped, fighting every instinct to run to his side. She could hear the ragged flare of his breathing, so she knew he was alive, but that was it. The two men who had dragged him out of the van stood in her way.\n\nShe faced them down.\n\nThe van's headlights lowered from the dazzling high beams, revealing a little more than just the silhouettes of the men. They were like something fresh out of a nightmare, all of them dressed in black, all of them wearing silver masks.\n\nThey looked inhuman in the hazy glare of the headlights.\n\nThe silver masks were obviously intended to serve duel purposes\u2014to intimidate and to hide their identities. Annja was face-to-face with the Brotherhood of the Burning.\n\nShe considered her options for a moment.\n\nThere had to be at least eight or nine men standing in front of her, all of them armed to the teeth with too much firepower\u2014Steyr TMPs. Even in the bad light, the shape of the handheld machine pistols was distinctive. Joan of Arc's sword was only an arm's length away, and with it Annja was more than a match for the masked men, but all it took was one stray bullet, no matter how good she was or how unlucky they were. One bullet. That was how much a human life weighed at a time like this. She flexed her fingers, picturing the hilt of the sword, but stopped short of drawing it back from the otherwhere. It wasn't worth taking the risk when she was this close to securing Garin's freedom. They could stop the Brotherhood after he was safe.\n\n\"The mask,\" one of the men said. His voice was muffled, but Annja recognized it as the one from the phone calls.\n\n\"It's in the car,\" she said.\n\n\"Get it.\"\n\n\"Take that thing off his head first.\"\n\n\"Very well. Do it,\" the voice told one of his cronies.\n\nOne of the masked men bent down and pulled the sack from Garin's head.\n\n\"There you go. See, no tricks.\"\n\nIn the harsh blaze of the van's headlights, Garin looked even worse than he had on the video stream. Shadows played on the cuts and bruises, distorting his features even more, making them almost monstrous. But there was no doubting that it was him. He coughed once, doubling up in pain, and spat blood. He didn't try to struggle to his feet. He just lay there on the ground, breathing hard, blinking. He was alive. That was all that mattered.\n\nAnnja backed toward the car. Without turning her back on the masked men, she reached in through the window to retrieve the Mask of Torquemada and held it up for all to see.\n\n\"Is this what it's all been about?\" she asked.\n\nWhat they didn't know\u2014couldn't know\u2014was that she'd photographed the relic from every possible angle, recording as much of it as she could. She and her colleagues could render those photographs and use them together with a 3-D printer to reconstruct the mask. It wouldn't be the same, but if the mask itself was lost to the world here, a replica would be better than nothing. Still, losing the mask would be a pretty dramatic failure on her part, and she wasn't in the habit of failing. She'd hand it over, yes, but Zanetti was already working on the mysterious swirls and text, trying to decipher them, and she'd do her damnedest to get the real thing back.\n\nContrary to what the kidnappers might think, it didn't end here.\n\nOne of the brothers walked toward her. The others kept their Steyrs trained on her.\n\nThere was no going back.\n\nLike it or not, she had to hand the mask over. Even then, she couldn't be sure they intended to let her and Garin walk away from this little showdown. She looked down at him. He was in bad shape. He wouldn't be able to do anything fast.\n\nThe man, the apparent leader, held his hand out. \"The mask. Give it to me.\"\n\nShe held on to it for a moment longer than necessary, mentally connecting with the sword in the otherwhere. A mistake now could be fatal for more than one of them. Right now it was all about staying alive.\n\nHe took the mask from her.\n\nShe could sense him smiling behind his own mask.\n\nBefore the night was out, she'd wipe that smile from his face. She promised herself that.\n\nHe turned the mask over in his hands, running his fingers over the curious swirls and symbols and debossed letters, then turned his back on her and started to walk toward the van.\n\nAnd for a fraction of a second\u2014less\u2014she thought he'd given her the moment she wanted. It was too early, though. If she reached into the otherwhere now and struck him down, it wouldn't end well. Different scenarios flashed through her mind. She could cut him down in a single slash, then grab him as he fell and turn his body into a shield. It would absorb a lot of the damage from the Steyrs, but at such close proximity, with so many of them trained on her, it wouldn't be enough. This wasn't her moment.\n\nShe watched him walk away, feeling lost and hopeless, as the other men climbed back inside the black van behind him. The door slammed, and seconds later, the tires spat gravel as it drove away, leaving Garin on the ground and Annja staring at their taillights, red spots disappearing down the road.\n\nAnnja ran to Garin's side.\n\n\"Sight...sore...eyes.\" He tried to grin.\n\n\"Shh, save your breath. We've got to get out of here.\" She knelt down beside him and untied the cord binding his wrists. Without the headlights to show the complexities of the knot, it took a few seconds longer than it might have. \"Then we'll get you to a hospital. Get you checked out.\"\n\n\"No hospital,\" he mumbled.\n\n\"Yes, hospital. You're a mess.\"\n\n\"No...\"\n\n\"We'll argue about it in the car,\" she said, not exactly conceding the point as she helped him to his feet. He leaned on her every step of the way as they walked gingerly back to the waiting Alfa Romeo. It wasn't the ideal car for transporting the weak and the wounded, but it was better than trying to walk the miles back to civilization.\n\n\"Not so fast,\" a voice called from the darkness.\n\nShe felt her heart sink.\n\nThe Brotherhood had no intention of letting them walk away from here, after all.\n\nShe took a deep breath, steadying herself.\n\nShe was never comfortable around death, unlike Roux and Garin. She hoped she never would be, either. If there was another way, she'd always seek it out, even if the sword was only ever a thought away, waiting for her to draw it from the ether. It was a last resort, never a first option.\n\n\"You don't have to do this,\" she said. But of course they did. They were acting under orders. The boss had the mask, and now it was time to tidy up the loose ends. And that was exactly what Annja and Garin had always been to the Brotherhood.\n\nAnd that meant she had no choice. Not everyone was going to walk away from this ambush.\n\n\"Step away from the car.\"\n\nShe did as she was told. One step, and another, holding her hands out away from her body. It looked like a sign of meek surrender. It wasn't. She was doing what was needed to be ready to defend herself. She could almost feel the familiar weight of the sword in her hand. Her breathing quickened.\n\nShe stared into the darkness.\n\nShe could make out three distinct shapes.\n\nThey were spread out a few feet from one another.\n\nThis was only going to happen one way, and there was no use pretending she'd be able to talk her way out of it. Her hand closed around the hilt of her mystical blade, and in an instant it was there, forging a connection between Annja and the saint, blazing white in her hand as her would-be assassins unleashed the first burst of bullets. The sword was a weapon of justice as well as death. And for as long as she could, she'd use it to stay alive, not to kill. Metal ricocheted against metal as the blade intercepted the shots, deflecting them harmlessly away. The bullets, more than a dozen, clattered onto the hood of the Alfa Romeo in a chorus of steel rain. More shots. Her muscles burned. She went with instinct over sight, picking each one harmlessly out of the air as she stepped forward to meet the deadly hail of bullets. One of the Steyrs stuttered.\n\nAnnja hurled herself to the ground, hitting it hard with her right shoulder, rolling out of the dive and rising in front of them. The maneuver had taken her out of the line of sight with the Alfa, minimizing the risk that a stray bullet would puncture the shell and hit Garin while he was unable to defend himself.\n\n\"Do you really want to die out here, boys?\" she called, hoping to strike a chord of fear inside them. It came down to who they feared the most\u2014her with the otherworldly blade in her hand, the devil they didn't know, or their leader, the devil they most definitely did.\n\nShe was answered by a spray of bullets.\n\n\"You're slow learners, aren't you?\"\n\nMore gunfire.\n\nShe moved fast, scrambling across the gravel. Bullets tore up the ground around her feet. Shots plunged into a tree beside her, splintering the bark.\n\nToo close for comfort.\n\nShe moved between the trees, using them to conceal her as she ran along the side of the parking lot. Muzzle flare and the bark of gunfire filled the night. She didn't slow down. Bullets ripped chunks out of the trees on either side of her. Annja took one on the length of the blade, sending the bullet high and wide in a shower of sparks.\n\nShe burst out of cover, running head-on at the gunmen. Three guns became two as one of the Steyrs fell silent. The brother lost his nerve and dropped his gun, realizing that the bullets weren't up to the task.\n\nHe turned and ran.\n\nAnnja closed the gap between her and the remaining men, her blade still slicing through the night in a deathly arc of silver. One bullet ricocheted against its length, spinning away in the direction of the shooter. It took the brother in the shoulder. His cry of pain had barely left his lips when the man beside him fell to his knees, blood leaking from a gaping wound in the middle of his chest. He pitched forward, his breathing almost nonexistent. He wasn't going to be long for this world, and he knew it.\n\nAnother hail of bullets almost caught her unaware. The last gunman was a stubborn one.\n\n\"Okay, sunshine, you had your chance,\" Annja said, dropping to her knees as a bullet took the dying man in the back of the head and put him out of his misery. She heard another staccato burst of gunfire. Then a grunt and the sound of stumbling feet followed by collapse.\n\nIn that moment, the gunman with the bullet in his shoulder turned and ran.\n\nAnd he moved like a jackrabbit, bolting for the anonymity of the dark.\n\nShe had to move quickly, while she could still make out the fleeing gunman's position. He wasn't getting away from here. She needed the Brotherhood to think these men were dead.\n\nAnother shot came in her direction, wide of its intended target.\n\nMuzzle flash gave her something to aim for, and the briefest glimpse of the man behind the trigger. He was firing blindly.\n\nShe started after him. She was faster. Fitter. He stumbled, sensing her behind him, fired wildly again, high over Annja's right shoulder. She was no more than a couple yards from him when he realized how close she was. The brother was caught half-turned, and he went down in an ungainly tangle of legs. He landed on his back, the Steyr pointing up at her face, so close he could not possibly miss.\n\nIn that second, Annja Creed felt regret for the things she hadn't done far more than for the things she had as she thrust the sword into his chest. His death was accompanied by the unmistakable sound of the Steyr clicking on an empty chamber.\n\nAnnja sank to her knees, breathing heavily, her heart racing.\n\nShe couldn't have known that the gun was empty, and the man beside her, whose life was draining into the parking lot's gravel, couldn't have known, either. Annja stood up and began to make her way back toward Garin and the car when she heard the crack of another gunshot.\n\n\"Garin!\"\n\nShe ran, cursing herself for leaving him alone and not suspecting there would be a fourth gunman. The sword was light in her hand. It gave her strength. Power from that ancient connection to the maid flowed through her veins, filling her body and soul. She was ready to cleave the gunman's head from his shoulders and end this here, praying every step of the way that Garin was still alive.\n\nShe reached the car. Garin stood above one of the masked brothers. He leaned on the car to support himself. The brother was dead, a bullet hole in the middle of his silver mask.\n\n\"He came back for more,\" Garin said simply.\n\nShe stepped in close, taking his weight. He was rank, reeking of stale sweat.\n\n\"Did he say anything?\"\n\n\"Only that El Zogoybi will kill us for this.\"\n\n\"El Zogoybi?\"\n\n\"Their leader,\" Garin said. \"Damn, it's good to see you, Annja. About time you saved me for once.\"\n\nShe laughed at that, relief flooding through her system. She could feel herself shaking as the adrenaline abandoned her.\n\n\"I heard them say his name a few times, like he was some sort of divine master, one of these holier-than-holy nutjobs. I never saw him. At least I don't think I did. It was hard to tell who was who behind those creepy masks.\"\n\nAnnja bent down and pulled the masks off the dead men, but she'd never seen any of them before. She'd hoped one of them might have seemed familiar, a face she'd seen tailing her and reporting back about her movements over the past day. But they were strangers. Each of the dead men had the tattoo of flames on the backs of their hands.\n\n\"The Brotherhood of the Burning,\" Annja said as she got back to her feet.\n\n\"I'm not with you?\"\n\n\"Let's get in the car,\" she said. \"We can talk while I drive. Sticking around here's not good for our health. I'll tell you what's been going on while you've been out of action.\"\n\n\"Sure, where's Roux?\"\n\n\"Taking care of business,\" Annja said. \"We'll catch up with him and work out where we go from here. But first, let's get you patched up.\"\n\n\"I'm good. I just need to sleep. I could kill for a hot bath.\"\n\nHe clambered into the back and was asleep within minutes of his battered body sinking down onto the leather seats. She drove in the direction of the airport.\n\nIt was a lonely road."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "As Roux left the tiny chapel, his phone lit up with notifications of missed calls and voice mails.\n\nThe dead-zone effect.\n\nThe vast majority of the messages were increasingly frantic calls from Oscar demanding that he call him back. He'd found something, but he wasn't going to just leave it on Roux's answering service\u2014which meant it was something important. Roux walked through the streets, hurrying away from the chapel. The surviving brothers would come after him soon enough; his best hope was to lose himself among the tourists. Safety in numbers.\n\nNot that he'd recognize the men when they came, unless he could spot the distinctive tattoo on their hands. So, from that moment on, everyone was a prospective threat. Thinking that way made staying alive easier. Trust no one. The man beside him in the crowd could have been one of them. The man leaning against the wall smoking a thin licorice-paper cigarette and seemingly admiring the female tourists could have been one of them. Or neither of them. Or both.\n\nRoux looked left and right, knowing his own furtiveness marked him out as suspicious, but there was nothing he could do about it.\n\nHe needed to get away from there.\n\nThe clock was ticking, but Garin was still alive, and he wasn't here anymore. That made Roux's role in this less urgent. That could change at the drop of a hat, but for now he had to move about unseen. It didn't help that his face was all over the national news, wanted in connection with the bombing of the courthouse in Seville. They'd released his name, too. Of course, it wasn't his real name, though it did mean that that identity was dead to him now, which was inconvenient.\n\nBut Oscar sounded desperate for him to call back. That much was obvious, but it didn't change the fact that it was going to have to wait. Annja was on her way to secure Garin's release and Roux was a rat in a maze with a bunch of trigger-happy men on his tail. Nothing the hacker had turned up would alter the outcome of the meet or the chase.\n\nAt the moment, it was all about priorities. He'd get out of there, find somewhere safe and then make contact. It came down to trust. He trusted Annja. He trusted Oscar. They would do what they had to. If the kid's info was that vital to the outcome, he'd reach out to Annja\u2014he wasn't dumb. Besides, given the number of missed calls, he'd probably try Roux again before he was halfway out of the complex.\n\nHe moved quickly, following the last of the visitors. Only a handful of staff remained, cleaning up before they closed the site for the day.\n\nHis phone rang again.\n\nHe took it out of his pocket, turning the corner and moving quickly down a narrow set of steps, taking them two and three at a time as he answered.\n\nIt was Oscar.\n\nRoux slipped into a narrow passageway between buildings and emerged into a courtyard.\n\n\"What is it?\" he rasped, still moving.\n\n\"Finally. I thought you were dead.\"\n\n\"Not yet. So something's got you wound up?\"\n\n\"You've been in that dead zone, haven't you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You're one crazy SOB, you know that, old man? Do you have any idea how much trouble you might have been walking into?\"\n\nRoux drew in a sharp breath. \"I do now, put it that way. You were desperate to talk\u2014I assume that wasn't because you wanted to berate me on my lack of caution?\"\n\nThe hacker grunted. \"Now I know you're safe, it's not so urgent.\"\n\n\"Tell me, anyway. Let me be the judge.\"\n\n\"I've been monitoring the dead zone, like you asked. I might have missed it if I hadn't been looking for it.\"\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"It's not always dead. I mean, it bursts into life, only for a few seconds at a time, never at set intervals, never for the same length of time, but never longer than a minute. I set up a lurker in case they came on again.\"\n\n\"A lurker? In English, please?\"\n\n\"It's a Trojan that just hangs around, waiting for the system to go online, then it embeds itself.\"\n\n\"Let's pretend that means something to me.\"\n\n\"The code gathers information and creates images of the entire drive when the system is online. Even if the network is shut down and restarted, the Trojan will pick up again where it left off. It's much easier than trying to hack into the network in the bursts when it's online. It also means I get to dig around properly without fear of setting off any security. Score one for the good guys. I haven't managed to get everything yet, but I've found something very interesting. Actually, it's more than just interesting\u2014it's weird.\"\n\n\"I'm not paying you by the word. Spit it out,\" Roux said.\n\n\"How's this\u2014while I was waiting to download stuff, I decided to take a look at the CCTV footage from the kidnapping at Garin Braden's offices. Some of it was missing.\"\n\n\"What do you mean? The kidnap footage?\"\n\n\"No. That's all there. Every second of it. It's the twenty minutes or so immediately before the kidnappers crashed through the window. It's been erased.\"\n\n\"Okay, strange, I'll give you that. How does it help? What are you thinking?\" Roux couldn't see how footage from before the kidnapping was going to reveal a great deal, but he humored the man. \"Maybe he was in there with a client? Some of the people he deals with are very private. Maybe they didn't want any record of their meeting.\"\n\n\"I thought of that. Big-business, late-night clandestine meetings, all very cloak-and-dagger. Not worth losing sleep over. Until I found it.\"\n\n\"Mystery solved, then?\"\n\n\"Very much not. The footage wasn't on the company servers. I found it stored on the system in the Alhambra. It was in the first burst of data that came through from my lurker. The Trojan is designed to send me the most recent files first. And there it was.\"\n\n\"I'm not getting it. Why would the Brotherhood have footage from Garin's office that wasn't on his own system?\" Roux was thinking on his feet. \"Okay...maybe they were on there? One of them wasn't wearing his mask? So they wanted to wipe out anything linking them to the kidnapping? But then why keep a copy of their own?\"\n\n\"Weird, isn't it? I know you like weird, so I figured I'd let you know.\"\n\n\"I appreciate it,\" Roux said, his mind racing. This was important. Somehow. \"Send it to me.\"\n\n\"Will do. Watch it. Tell me if you see what I see. I had to watch it a few times before I worked out what it was that someone was trying to hide, but I figured it out. I'm a smart guy, and I didn't see it straightaway. But you...well, you just might. I don't want to color your reaction, though, so I'm saying nothing. Take a look, then tell me what you see.\"\n\nRoux hung up and waited for the video clip to arrive. He could hear people in the distance, but no one was approaching, so he stayed where he was, in the deepest of the courtyard's shadows.\n\nThe phone vibrated and he opened the video file.\n\nLooking at the image, Roux realized that he had never been inside the office in Madrid. But he'd been in a dozen like it across the world. Garin was predictable in his taste. The room was well-appointed, the furniture comfortable and functional, but very definitely fashionable. It was a classic case of style at considerable cost, the kind of comfort that could only be achieved when money was no object. It was ostentatiously chic.\n\nThere were a couple of men in the room with him, behaving as if they were at home. That marked them as bodyguards. They were relaxed. A little too relaxed, but that was unsurprising, given the seeming impregnability of the office. It was essentially a fortress hundreds of feet above the city. Any threat of danger there was minimal.\n\nGarin said something to one of the guards and got to his feet. There was no sound on the footage and Roux couldn't read his lips. The man stood, as well, and slid the sofa he'd been sitting on forward a couple of feet.\n\nGarin stepped behind it and removed a picture from the wall.\n\nRoux had seen the style before. He was reasonably sure it was a Mark Rothko, and knowing Garin, it was an original, meaning it was valuable. Like everything else in the room.\n\nGarin studied the painting for a moment, holding it out to the light.\n\nHe spoke again, then left the room, taking the picture with him.\n\nThe two remaining men continued to chat, clearly relaxing even more now that their employer was out of the room.\n\nGarin returned a few minutes later, still carrying the canvas.\n\nHe replaced it on the wall.\n\nThe sofa was pushed back into position and drinks were poured for everyone.\n\nGarin checked his watch a couple of times while they drank.\n\nThen the clip ended. Roux wasn't quite sure what he'd just seen.\n\nThoughts ran through his minds like cogs and wheels in a gradually accelerating machine. He weighed everything in the clip. There was something important in that short piece of security footage. Something fundamental to everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours.\n\nIt made him uneasy.\n\nThe uneasiness quickly changed to anger as things started to fall into place.\n\nIt took a moment to piece it all together, but when he did, that changed his perception of everything he'd just witnessed and everything that had happened since.\n\nHe'd caught the look on Garin's face as he sat there sharing a drink with those two men. Two men who would soon be dead. He had checked his watch because he knew what was coming.\n\nHe had known to the minute when the kidnappers would shatter the huge bulletproof window and come rappelling in. There was no surprise. He had known he'd be the only one of the three leaving the room alive. That was what the drink was about. It was a toast. A send-off. It was the Rothko original that gave it away, though. He hadn't just taken it out and then returned to rehang it. Garin had known what was coming. He knew there would be gunfire. He'd known it would get messy. He had switched the picture, replacing it with a print of the same image so no one studying the security footage would notice anything amiss. That was Garin's weakness. He loved beautiful things. Roux stared at the small screen, feeling sick. Betrayed. He should have known. He was well aware how venal his friend was. He'd always known how duplicitous the little snake could be\u2014after all, he'd spent centuries avoiding Garin's elaborate attempts at murder. Even so, the sight of him taking his seat and waiting for the kidnappers to arrive sent a shiver down the old man's spine one bone at a time.\n\nGarin wasn't the victim here.\n\nRoux needed to warn Annja before she walked into the cross fire."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "The hotel was almost full.\n\nAnnja had passed it on the way from the airport. It was business-class, not a tourist trap, which meant an added layer of anonymity, plus decent food. She was starving. She headed straight for the hotel rather than waste time looking for something else. They needed to freshen up, regroup, think. They needed to get that mask back.\n\nGarin stood beside her, the only colors in his face the red-brown of the cuts and grazes and the blue-black of the bruises that bore testament to the beating he'd taken. He wasn't his usual talkative self. He didn't try to flirt with the woman behind the reception desk. There was no dazzling smile. That, more than anything else, convinced Annja that he was in worse shape than he was letting on.\n\nSo Annja pasted the smile on her face and leaned across the desk. \"Two rooms, please. As close to each other as possible if you can manage that?\"\n\nThe receptionist looked down her nose at Garin. Annja had to admit the only fashion statement he was making in his bloody jeans and torn T-shirt was how drugs still screwed you up. He had Annja's leather jacket draped over his shoulders and was shivering. Either shock or cold. Or both.\n\n\"Certainly, madam. Unfortunately, the only rooms we have available are on different floors.\"\n\n\"That's fine,\" Annja said. She likely wouldn't get to use hers for a few hours, anyway. She'd be fretting over Garin, making sure he was settled and resting properly. Then she'd have to track down Roux, wherever he was. The old man had been out of contact for longer than she would have liked, but that was him all over\u2014not exactly selfish, but easily preoccupied with his own thing. He'd be in touch when he needed something, and now that they'd made the handover and Garin was safe... Well, for the first time since she'd woken up in Valencia, there wasn't a little voice in her head going \"Ticktock.\"\n\nShe handed over her credit card. The receptionist ran it and handed it back along with two sets of keys. If the numbers were any indication, their rooms were almost one above the other. She waved away the bellhop. They didn't have any bags to carry.\n\nAnnja took Garin to the lower of the two rooms and helped him inside, leading him across to the bed, where he sprawled out. The room was like any one of a hundred hotel rooms she'd stayed in around the world. They weren't designed for visits of more than a couple days. That was just fine. They wouldn't be staying that long. Garin wasn't in any condition to complain. He rested on the bed for ten minutes. She thought he'd fallen asleep but he was just staring at the ceiling. Finally, he said, \"I need a shower. I stink.\"\n\nShe couldn't argue with that.\n\n\"Do that. You want anything from room service? I'm so hungry I could eat a horse.\" She picked up the menu.\n\n\"Anything bloody,\" he said, pushing himself up from the mattress. He hobbled toward the bathroom. \"Not that I can promise to stay awake long enough to eat it.\"\n\nShe ordered a steak and fries for each of them, making sure hers would be sent to her room. They promised to have it with her in twenty minutes. She listened to the water run, trying not to imagine Garin's bruised and battered body standing under it.\n\n\"Make sure you eat something,\" she called to him. \"And then get yourself into bed. I'm going to go freshen up. Give me a call when you're awake. I'll go out and get you a change of clothes. I can't imagine there'll be much available in the gift shop apart from a nice touristy T-shirt. I'll leave my spare key on the nightstand.\"\n\nHe laughed at that. Maybe there was a little bit of Garin Braden that hadn't been battered out of him. She smiled and headed up to her own room.\n\nIt had the same layout as Garin's, the same decor, the same pictures on the wall, identical down to the smallest detail. That was part of the appeal to the traveling businessmen. All she wanted to do was kick off her boots and stretch out on the bed, but she knew if she did that she wouldn't be moving until the sun rose. Besides, room service would be knocking on her door in a few minutes. She punched in Roux's number. The call went straight to voice mail.\n\n\"Roux, it's Annja. I'm at the...\" She glanced at the key, realizing she didn't even know the name of the hotel. \"The Alhambra Sol Hotel. It's near the airport. Garin is here. He's safe. Call me when you get this. We need to put our heads together. They've got the mask. They tried to take us out, so right now the Brotherhood is probably working under the misapprehension that we're dead. That buys us a bit of time, but someone will find their bodies soon enough. I'm not leaving here without the mask, so call me. Doesn't matter what time you get this, okay?\"\n\nShe hung up.\n\nShe knew that the Alhambra, or at least the part of it they were interested in, was a dead zone. Roux had warned her he'd be incommunicado. She wasn't worried about him. He'd check in when he could. She looked at her watch. It was late. They were only a few hours from the imposed deadline the kidnappers had set, meaning she'd been running on adrenaline for one long, seemingly endless day. Now the reality of the situation was beginning to sink in and exhaustion was catching up with her fast. The Brotherhood didn't have Garin. She was off the clock. She could afford to relax for a few hours. But she'd eat first. And shower. Then she'd worry about what was going to happen in the morning.\n\nHer phone rang.\n\nShe snatched it up from the bed. \"Roux?\"\n\n\"This is Aldo Zanetti. We talked earlier today? About the mask?\"\n\n\"Sorry, yes, of course, Professor,\" Annja said, pulling herself together. \"I was expecting someone else.\"\n\n\"No need to apologize. I shouldn't be calling at such an ungodly hour, but I thought you would want to hear as soon as I finished the translation.\"\n\n\"Absolutely. What have you got for me?\"\n\n\"It's a map,\" he said.\n\n\"A map? I didn't see any... How...?\"\n\n\"Actually, to be more precise, it's a treasure map. Yes, you heard me correctly. Assuming I'm not mistaken, what you have in your possession is a map that purports to lead to the Moorish wealth hidden from the Inquisition and kept safe until such time as the Moors\u2014or their descendants\u2014would be able to return to recover it.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Annja said slowly. \"But how can that be? The map was engraved on the inside of the Mask of Torquemada? He was the Inquisition. It doesn't make sense. Surely he was the one they were hiding it from?\"\n\n\"Ah, but there's the ingenuity of a dead language guarding your secrets. The man who engraved the mask, Abdul bin Soor, was one of the men who hid the treasure. Part of it was his. It belonged to him and the five men from Calahorra who died with him. They knew that the Inquisition would never find out where or what it led to, and they were sure that by hiding the truth amid complex patterns and Mozarabic script, their enemies would never be able to translate it. A wonderful irony, don't you think? The treasure the Church sought hidden right in front of the Grand Inquisitor's eyes. Wonderful. Just wonderful.\"\n\n\"Devious,\" Annja said appreciatively. \"And you're certain?\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\"\n\n\"Incredible...\" A thought struck her. \"Was there any reference to something called the Brotherhood of the Burning?\" She tried to remember what Roux had called it the first time he'd mentioned it. \"I think it would be something like Fraternidad de la Quema in Spanish? That won't help you at all, will it?\"\n\n\"Well, there were several symbols engraved on the interior of the mask that I haven't been able to decipher, ones I took to be somewhat elemental in nature\u2014earth, air, water and, yes, a flame. But there was no specific mention of a brotherhood.\"\n\nThere was one obvious question she hadn't asked. She couldn't help herself. \"I have to ask,\" she said. It was obvious he knew what was coming. He didn't try to hurry her along. \"The map itself...were you able to work out where the Moors hid their treasure?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, and this is where the strangest of coincidences arises. You recall we talked about Boabdil's regret, looking back from the Pass of the Moor's Sigh on everything he had abandoned?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"As far as I can tell, that's where the treasure is. I haven't been able to decipher a precise location, but I suspect it is hidden within the iconography rather than the Mozarabic text. I'll work it out, I have no doubt about that. For now, if you were a treasure hunter, I think the Pass of the Moor's Sigh would be the best place to start looking.\"\n\n\"You are an absolute legend, Professor. Thank you,\" she said.\n\n\"My pleasure, Miss Creed. Just one thing, a small request. If you ever find yourself this way, I would dearly love to see the mask for myself. To touch something that has sat against the Grand Inquisitor's face, to look through its eyes as he must have done so many times... Perhaps we could even arrange for it to be exhibited here in Rome?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" she said warmly. She hoped she could make good on that promise.\n\nAnnja's medium-well steak arrived, along with a healthy selection of dips and sauces to accompany the fries. She took a soda from the minibar to wash it down and watched the news while she ate. There were no stories about the bodies she'd left behind. That was something. There was, however, plenty about the suspected act of terrorism in Seville that had seen the courthouse bombed earlier in the day. The police were looking for a man whose photofit was a perfectly grainy likeness of the old man. Roux would be delighted that they'd burned one of his identities. That was what they were for, she supposed.\n\nAnnja decided she would give him another twenty minutes, taking it up to the hour, and then she hit the shower.\n\nShe emerged feeling half-human again.\n\nShe dressed and decided to check in on Garin.\n\nThe tray of food she'd ordered for him was sitting outside his door.\n\nShe assumed he'd crashed out and tapped gently on the door, then used her copy of the room key to enter. The room was dark, the thick curtains drawn, but in the dim light from the hall she could see that the bed hadn't been slept in. Something felt wrong.\n\n\"Garin,\" she called softly as the door swung shut behind her. \"Garin,\" she called again, a little louder this time. There was nowhere he could hide in the room. She felt the stir of a breeze. He'd opened the window. She went to check the bathroom, terrified he'd blacked out in the shower and that she'd find him slumped against the ceramic wall tiles.\n\nDamp towels were strewn over the floor but there was no sign of Garin.\n\nHe was gone."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "Annja took the stairs two at a time.\n\nThe lobby was only a couple of floors down, and the elevators were clogged with new arrivals from a late flight. She reached the ground floor much quicker than she would have if she'd waited. The receptionist who'd checked them in was still on duty. She glanced up as Annja approached, still half running, and pasted a too-friendly smile on her face.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" Annja said. \"Have you seen my friend? The man I checked in with?\"\n\nShe nodded. \" S\u00ed. He left a little while ago.\"\n\nThat didn't make any sense. \"Left?\"\n\n\"S\u00ed. He met a man here in reception. They left together.\"\n\n\"Did you see which way they went?\"\n\n\"No, madam. Once people step out our front doors, I have no idea what they do.\" She shrugged.\n\nAnnja looked toward the huge glass doors. There was no sign of Garin out on the curb.\n\n\"Perhaps when he returns you could suggest he change his clothes?\" The receptionist paused for a moment as if she was searching for the right word. \"It is a little unsettling for the other guests, you understand.\"\n\nThe same bellhop that had offered to carry their bags up to the rooms emerged from the elevator as Annja was digesting what the receptionist had just said.\n\n\"The man who came for him gave him a sweater,\" the receptionist continued, lifting her nose a fraction. \"But he still had no shoes.\"\n\n\"What did this man look like?\"\n\nHer first thought was that it was Roux. That the old man had come to collect Garin and whisked him off with some harebrained scheme to get the mask back by themselves. Would they have returned to the Alhambra? But then why hadn't Roux phoned her?\n\n\"Tall, dark, late thirties, early forties, maybe. He was Spanish.\"\n\nDefinitely not Roux, then. The bellhop spoke rapidly in Spanish. Annja thought she caught some of it, but his accent was too strong for her to understand more than the occasional snippet. The receptionist responded more slowly, only to get another rapid response. Annja could pick out individual words, but not enough to make sense of what they were saying.\n\n\"It seems that you are in luck. Franco saw your friend leave with this other man.\"\n\nThe boy nodded rapidly. \" S\u00ed, s\u00ed, I saw him get into a car.\"\n\n\"Do you know which way they went?\"\n\nThe boy's expression became puzzled and the receptionist intervened on their behalf. \"He says that he thinks they were heading toward the Alhambra.\"\n\n\"S\u00ed, s\u00ed, Alhambra,\" the boy repeated.\n\nAnnja reached into her pocket and pulled out a twenty-euro note. It was less than the information was worth, but the bellhop smiled gratefully and pocketed it without a word.\n\n\"Thank you, both of you,\" Annja said.\n\n\"We are here to serve you,\" the receptionist said, that same fake smile in place.\n\nShe'd left the keys to the Alfa Romeo in her room. She cursed the lost minutes, even though she knew they were unlikely to make any significant difference. She was behind Garin now, playing catch-up. She really didn't like playing catch-up.\n\nShe rode up in the elevator and was sliding the key card into the lock of her door when she heard her phone ringing on the other side. By the time she reached it, the call had gone to voice mail.\n\nOne missed call: Roux.\n\nShe called him back as she grabbed her jacket and keys, and was already halfway out of the door when he picked up.\n\n\"Have you made the exchange yet?\"\n\n\"Yes, nearly an hour ago.\"\n\n\"Damn. You've already handed the mask over?\"\n\n\"How else was I supposed to get Garin released?\"\n\nThe old man sighed in her ear. \"There's no easy way to say this, my dear, but we've been played. Garin is part of it.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"It was a charade, smoke and mirrors. A scam. Whatever the hell you want to call it, he was part of it. A willing accomplice. Who knows, maybe the bastard was even the brains behind the whole thing.\"\n\n\"But his injuries? His bodyguards?\"\n\n\"Collateral damage. And he obviously thought more of his damned paintings than he did of them.\"\n\n\"What? I don't understand what you're saying, Roux. This doesn't make sense. Garin couldn't have been part of it. He wouldn't do that. Innocent people died!\"\n\n\"Trust me, Annja. I'm not wrong about this. I've seen the evidence with my own eyes.\"\n\n\"What evidence?\"\n\n\"Security footage from the Madrid office. Minutes before the kidnappers stormed the conference room and killed Garin's bodyguards, he had the foresight to exchange a priceless work of art hanging on the wall and replace it with a worthless print. He knew what was going to happen in there. He took steps to protect the only thing he has ever cared about. His beautiful possessions.\"\n\nShe couldn't believe it. \"You're kidding me. This has to be some kind of mistake. Surely?\"\n\n\"I only wish it was. That selfish piece of shit is as much to blame for the deaths of those men as the men who fired the shots. He's always been a magpie, attracted to shiny things, but I never thought he'd do something like this\u2014use us...put you at risk.\"\n\n\"But why would he do it?\" Even before the question had left her lips, Annja knew the answer. This was all about the mask\u2014not as a treasure itself, but as a key to a bigger haul. Garin had figured out that the mask was the one thing he needed to get to the Moorish wealth. As always with Garin, this was about greed.\n\n\"Do you need me to spell it out for you?\" Roux asked.\n\n\"No, I get it. He's a scorpion. It's in his nature. I'd just forgotten who he really is.\"\n\n\"So where is he?\"\n\n\"On his way back to the Alhambra,\" she said, though she wasn't completely sure. There were other places he could have turned off the main road. Theoretically, he could be anywhere by now, but her money was on him going back there, especially given what Zanetti had said about the Pass of the Moor's Sigh being at the heart of the mystery. \"Where are you?\"\n\n\"I'm already here,\" he said. \"Our hacker friend was right about this being the Brotherhood's base. They set up their operations in a tiny chapel here. There's scaffolding up against the outside wall, but it's the only building not being worked on. It's the center of the dead zone. You'll be alone, no cell phone, no gadgets. There's some sort of dampening field in operation. You'll know it when you see it. I'm going to take a quick peek around before he gets here. See what I can find now that I'm looking with a different set of eyes. Knowing he's not the victim means I'm looking for completely different stuff.\"\n\n\"True. How on earth did you find that footage?\"\n\n\"I didn't. Oscar did. He found it on the Brotherhood's computer network. We got lucky.\"\n\n\"I still can't believe it,\" Annja said.\n\n\"He's played us, Annja, and that sticks in my craw. We're going to get that mask back one way or another. I would rather destroy it than have it become yet another one of his beautiful treasures hidden away in his offices, lost to the world.\"\n\n\"It's not the mask he's interested in,\" Annja said. \"It's never been about some wonderful artifact from the past. It's all about greed. Those engravings on the inside of the mask are basically a treasure map. It's not even riches that the Church took from the Moors, like I thought at first. This leads to the real treasures of the Moors, the objects so precious to them they couldn't risk them ever falling into the Inquisitors' hands.\"\n\n\"So the ledger was their own record of what they had hidden away for safekeeping,\" Roux said, piecing it together. He didn't sound the least bit surprised by the revelation.\n\n\"Okay, but it doesn't explain why the ledger was recorded in Latin,\" Annja said.\n\n\"Unless there was someone in the Church who was helping them.\"\n\n\"Would they have done that?\"\n\n\"There were enough people, good people, who didn't approve of what was happening, even though they were part of the Church. Remember, Torquemada's uncle was unhappy about the way the Moors were being treated. He was not alone.\"\n\nSometimes it was easy to forget just how long the old man had been around. He delivered that last statement with absolute certainty. She knew he'd been alive during the Inquisition, but he'd brushed over it. Suddenly, she was struck by all the things he must have seen\u2014and all the things he must have done in order to stay alive. She'd never considered the possibility that he might have known some of the people caught up in it.\n\nIf there was someone in the Church helping the Mud\u00e9jars smuggle belongings away, making sure that their wealth was preserved for the next generation, that would have demanded absolute trust, absolute faith.\n\n\"Who could they have trusted that completely? Given everything that was happening all around them. Who could they have believed in?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Roux admitted. \"All I know is that I'm not having that son of a bitch Braden undo their sacrifice. He's not getting his hands on a penny of their treasure. Come here. I need you to help me stop him.\"\n\n\"I've got a car,\" Annja said, turning the keys in her hand as she made her way back to the door. \"I'll be with you as soon as I can.\"\n\nShe hung up, still not quite believing that Garin could sink so low.\n\nYes, he had caused enough problems in the past that now she didn't trust him, not completely, and that went all the way back to their first meeting, when Garin and Roux had been at each other's throats, Garin trying to kill him before he could find the last piece of Joan of Arc's shattered sword and put it together again. That had been about staying alive. That had been Garin's fear that once the blade was re-formed, it would undo whatever curse it was that had kept them breathing for six hundred years. Self-preservation was a powerful instinct.\n\nThis was different.\n\nThis felt like a step too far, even for Garin Braden."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "Roux didn't have much time.\n\nGarin was already on his way back\u2014and he wasn't alone\u2014and there was a good chance that he only had minutes to spare.\n\nHe needed to be ready for them.\n\nRoux checked his gun. One shot wasn't going to get him far.\n\nHe was already regretting not taking one of the fallen brother's weapons. Of course, it was unlikely anyone had been into the chapel to clean up, so realistically there was a wealth of firepower just lying around waiting for him to pick it up. The problem was he didn't know how many men might still be in there.\n\nRoux could handle himself\u2014that wasn't what he was worried about. The chapel was the heart of the Brotherhood's operations. If Garin came back to the Alhambra, he'd be headed to the chapel for sure. Roux would be in there, waiting for him. It was crazy enough that the Brotherhood had been able to take over a part of the Alhambra and remain undetected under the cover of building work. It was unthinkable that they could have occupied two sites. If Garin wanted somewhere private to examine the Mask of Torquemada and decipher the map it contained, then the chapel was the perfect place for him and his accomplice to work in peace.\n\nWhat Garin wouldn't suspect was that Roux had breached the Brotherhood's security and that he knew he wasn't an innocent victim in all of this.\n\nGarin wouldn't be expecting Roux.\n\nThe sound of boots running on cobbles made him glance back over his shoulder. The Brotherhood was still looking for him. They had no idea where he was, though. They seemed to be conducting a grid search of the streets, running from one block to the next, keeping to the pattern. All he had to do was get behind their lines and they'd never find him. The Alhambra was full of shadows and empty buildings to hide inside, though many would be locked once the staff had finished their cleanup.\n\nHe slid back into the alley, pressing himself close to the brickwork as he saw one man running past the outside of the building.\n\nThe brothers were panicking. They wanted to track him down and deal with him before their paymaster returned.\n\nThey'd never think of looking for him in their chapel. So that was where he needed to be. It was as simple as that.\n\nStaying tight to the sides of buildings, moving only in shadow, Roux made his way back toward the chapel. The lights were still blazing in there while almost every other building was shrouded in darkness.\n\nSecurity lights illuminated the cobbles, spearing through the gaps between buildings. Even so, there was more shadow than light on the narrow streets.\n\nFootsteps rang out, echoing against stone, making it hard to know which direction they were coming from.\n\nRoux had to be careful.\n\nHe crept along, running when he needed to, hiding in the recesses when it sounded as if the search cordon was drawing in.\n\nThe final few yards would put him out in the open. There was nothing he could do but step out of the shadows. He paused before making the dash, drawing his gun. One shot was better than none. He rushed across the stones, sprinting lightly on his toes and barely making a sound. Almost too late, he saw the door to the chapel open. Roux changed his direction and reached the side of the chapel before the guard saw him. He hit the wall hard and hugged it, not moving, calming himself before he did anything else.\n\nHe edged forward and peered around the corner.\n\nThe door had been closed behind the man who was more intent on enjoying his cigarette than keeping an eye out for Roux. The brother was lax, assuming Roux was long gone. He should have been on high alert, but instead he was lighting up a cigarette. Roux was going to use that to his advantage. There were times for brute force, and there were times for stealth.\n\nHe was four strides from the door. Five at most.\n\nThe man leaned back, one shoulder against the wall. He had his back to Roux. His Steyr submachine pistol was slung over his shoulder. Even if he heard Roux approaching, he wouldn't have enough time to turn, slip the shoulder strap from its resting place, bring the Steyr to bear and shoot. That certainty was all Roux needed. That was his edge. He wouldn't even need to waste his one shot.\n\nHe reversed his grip, feeling the weight of the butt in his palm.\n\nAccuracy was more important than force. He needed to do this as silently as possible.\n\nHe watched as the man took another draw on the cigarette. Then he flicked it away, sending the glowing tip end over end. Now. The man had no idea Roux was there until the butt of the pistol was swinging toward his head. A fraction of a second sooner and he might have missed, might have cracked the butt off the guard's temple or cheek instead of behind the ear. He crumpled. Roux caught him with one arm as he fell, the handgun still in his grip. He reached around with his free hand, took hold of the brother's head and gave it a single sharp twist.\n\nRoux supported the dead man's weight, knowing that if he let him slip to the ground it would make moving the body much more difficult.\n\nHe glanced around quickly, checking both directions to be sure that no one was watching, and backed up against the door, pushing it inward.\n\nHis entire plan rested on a single gamble: that every other brother was out there hunting him and that the dead man in his arms had been the only one left to monitor the chapel itself.\n\nRoux dragged the body inside, the heels scraping against the mosaic floor as he pulled the corpse into an alcove at the bottom of the stairs, hiding it from view. That would do for now, but the man was hardly well-hidden. At least he wouldn't be the first thing someone saw when they walked through the door.\n\nThe other bodies were still lying where they had fallen.\n\nRoux didn't move them.\n\nHe didn't have the time.\n\nHe heard the sound of an engine in the night.\n\nRight now, speed was everything."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "The Alfa Romeo growled to life.\n\nAnnja roared out of the parking lot next to the hotel.\n\nShe'd placed her cell phone on the passenger seat, ready to snatch it up if Roux called again. She floored the gas, knowing she had no hope of catching Garin before he reached the Alhambra. It was all about making up lost ground. She was so angry with him she could have spat bullets. She couldn't believe what he'd put her through, how he'd lied to her face. And she knew how angry Roux was, too. She didn't know what would happen if the two of them came face-to-face without her in the middle. She wouldn't put anything past either of them right now. As angry as she was, she was the reasonable one of the trio\u2014which wasn't a reassuring thought, given that she could put Garin's lights out right now.\n\nShe gripped the wheel too tightly. The muscles in her shoulders knotted. She concentrated fiercely on the road ahead, not wanting to think. She turned the music up loud. The streets became less regular, and soon she couldn't see beyond the long reach of the car's headlights. The road twisted and turned. She was taking the bends too quickly, and she knew it. Tires squealed as she yanked down on the wheel, hard.\n\nSomething ran out in front of her.\n\nA dog? A fox?\n\nShe couldn't tell. It was small and fast.\n\nShe slammed on the brakes, sending her phone spinning off the seat and into the foot well, out of reach. She pulled up just in time for the critter to disappear into the undergrowth on the other side of the road.\n\nHer heart was racing.\n\nAnnja took a deep breath, forcing herself to relax, slow down. There were no other cars on the road. She turned the radio down and pushed the stick shift into First again, setting off a little more cautiously.\n\nBetter to arrive a few minutes later than not at all.\n\nThe Alhambra was in near-darkness as she approached. Annja knew that her headlights would stand out like a beacon as she crested the horizon. While the Brotherhood might not be able to recognize the car from its headlights alone, anyone looking would know they had a visitor.\n\nHoping to retain some element of surprise, she killed the lights and slowed her speed, taking her foot off the gas as she descended silently toward the site. She was all too aware of how little she could see. A single mistimed turn could prove fatal if taken too quickly. As the shadowy outline of the palace fortress loomed larger through the windshield, she picked out a handful of lights in the darkness.\n\nAnnja pulled the car over to the side of the road. She fished her phone out of the foot well and climbed out, leaving the keys in the ignition in case she needed to make a quick getaway.\n\nShe was never truly unarmed, even if the only weapon she appeared to have was her Maglite. The sword was only a heartbeat away, so close she could almost feel it in her hand now, just because she was thinking about it.\n\nShe didn't dare use the flashlight as she made the slow trek toward the ancient buildings.\n\nEven before she reached the gate to the ancient palace-fortress, she spotted a few lights dotted along the wall with CCTV cameras alongside them.\n\nShe was used to being watched. Someone had been monitoring her every single step of the way. But right now she was sure she was being scrutinized, the cameras tracking her every move. It couldn't be helped. Even if she backed off and tried to find a blind spot to scale the wall, it wouldn't help; it would only slow her down. Garin had to assume she'd follow him, even if she wasn't supposed to know he was a deceitful sack of garbage. If he was watching, he'd expect her to walk right through the front gate. That was her style. He'd expect a full-on, frontal assault on the Brotherhood's base of operations, so that was what she decided to give him.\n\nShe put on a show for the cameras, pulling the sword out of the otherwhere and making sure the lens picked it up.\n\nAnnja approached the gateway. She didn't duck into the shadows, didn't break her stride. She stared straight into one of the cameras. She wanted their attention. The sword blazed in her hand, lighting her face as she stepped into the Alhambra.\n\nGarin and his accomplice knew she was coming. The sight of the sword on their security screens would, she hoped, distract them from the mask. If they couldn't crack the riddle it presented, that would buy Roux time to close in, and maybe, just maybe, they'd get the mask back before Garin could cause more trouble.\n\nRoux had told her to make for the chapel. There was no guarantee that they would still be there, but Roux was expecting her to head that way. He'd be basing his movements on her being there. She wasn't about to hang him out to dry. But first she had to find it, and all she had to go on was Roux's mention of scaffolding.\n\nShe moved deeper into the dark warren of crumbling buildings, the blade lighting the way.\n\nThere were few lights in the streets, and only the occasional security camera. Roux had said the chapel was well monitored. The more cameras watching her, she felt sure, the closer she was to her goal.\n\nShe didn't bother trying to hide. Let them come.\n\nShe heard the sound of running feet.\n\nIt was impossible to tell where they were coming from. The acoustics of the cramped ancient streets were utterly disorienting.\n\nIt wasn't Roux. The footsteps were too heavy\u2014boots on cobbles, not the old man's style. Despite his appearance, he was still lithe and athletic. She had seen him run, part gymnast and part ballet dancer, barely touching the ground.\n\nRunning from building to building, shadow to shadow, she scoured the area for any signs of life.\n\nThe whole place appeared to be deserted, and yet she knew Roux was here.\n\nSo was the running man.\n\nShe would also stake everything she had on Garin and the mystery man being here, too. Five of them. There could be more. Garin wouldn't run this operation without a small army at his disposal. She remembered the first time he'd exploded into her life. He'd turned a quiet French town into a war zone in a handful of seconds. That was how he did battle, and it seemed that was how he'd set this up so far\u2014as a battle. He'd sacrificed four men out in the deserted parking lot. Roux had almost certainly neutralized the same number when he'd gone into the dead zone. She had counted a dozen in the parking lot, give or take, including the men who had driven away.\n\nNo matter how many brothers there were, Annja realized, Garin wasn't likely to keep them around much longer, given the way he'd sacrificed the rest of his team. Garin wasn't the kind of man who left himself vulnerable to outsiders. He didn't like leaving behind anyone who knew his secrets. That would explain why he'd returned here: to tidy up loose ends before he went after the treasure.\n\nIt made sense.\n\nIn fact, given everything she knew about Garin Braden, it made perfect sense.\n\nAnnja put the sword away.\n\nShe had no intention of doing his dirty work for him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Roux passed through the curtain behind the altar and stepped away from the remnants of medieval culture and into the brave new technological world.\n\nAn array of screens showed the video feed from the security cameras outside the building along with images from all around the complex. The images shifted every few seconds into another angle on the rotation. From where he stood, it looked as though these screens captured every inch of the Alhambra, so the Brotherhood was obviously tapping into the feeds of other cameras along with their own. One image caught his eye. It showed the road leading to the main gate. In the distance, he could just make out two pinpricks of light approaching. Headlights. It had to be Garin. It was too soon to be Annja, but she couldn't be too far behind. He just hoped he'd get some alone time with Garin. They had stuff to talk about.\n\nHe scanned the room.\n\nA door at the far end looked as if it would lead outside. That meant the place had two exits. Good. He liked options. A heavy brass key was set in the lock. He went across and twisted it\u2014better to be prepared.\n\nThe old man had spent the past few decades avoiding many of the technological advances, preferring to outsource his needs, but he wasn't completely ignorant. You couldn't exist in this world of Twitter and Facebook without knowing something about how it was all connected, but unlike Garin, Roux wasn't anywhere near the cutting edge. The equipment in this room was state-of-the-art. There was stuff in here that wouldn't have been out of place at NASA's Ground Control in Houston. Actually, there were machines and instruments here that NASA wouldn't even be getting for a couple of years, knowing the stranglehold Garin Braden had on certain lines of trade. Billionaire playboy, two-faced, backstabbing mercenary, uneasy friend\u2014Garin was all of these and more. Their lives had been spent intertwined, with so much time devoted to trying to kill each other. It was almost like old times.\n\nThe old man smiled.\n\nHe recognized a couple of the labels on the bits of tech as one of Garin's shell companies. He had his fingers in so many pies it was difficult to keep track, but those little stickers reinforced everything his hacker had claimed. The evidence was stacking up. Roux had been willing to give Garin the benefit of the doubt for a while, assuming he was some sort of unwitting accomplice in this mess, that he'd gotten himself in over his head and was desperately trying to get out again. But this wasn't a case of in-too-deep. Garin was involved in this up to his neck. At best, the most innocent version of events was that someone had come to him with this plan, hoping he'd finance it. At worst, it was his own plan. Roux tried to think. Assuming Garin hadn't come up with the whole thing himself, whoever was the brains behind it knew he'd be unable to resist those shiny, unique objects like the thieving little magpie he was at heart. That meant they knew him. And Garin was careful. He didn't leave a trail. So knowing him was tough.\n\nRoux ran his hands across the various pieces of expensive tech, trying to find something that might be functioning as a signal jammer, but truthfully, he didn't have a clue what he was looking for. A box was a box\u2014be it hard drive, router or jammer\u2014and they all looked the same to him. Assuming the dead zone originated in this room, the best thing he could do was take out the lot of it rather than worry about trying to pinpoint a specific piece of equipment, and the best way to do that was pull the plug. That or torch the stuff, which would be ironic, given the Brotherhood of the Burning motif. But smoke and flames would almost certainly bring attention to his presence.\n\nRoux checked the screens again. Garin was almost at the gate. Two minutes away at best. The obvious hunter's move was to lie in wait, then spring an ambush on the duplicitous SOB. He had the guard's Steyr, which would cause some serious damage. He didn't need anything else to make Garin's life a living hell. And yes, the old man decided, that was exactly what he was going to do. Garin was going to pay for every little betrayal he'd countenanced over the years. Roux was done being his fool.\n\nAnger dulled the senses.\n\nHe'd been so engrossed in elaborate thoughts of revenge on Garin that he hadn't heard the chapel door opening. Now footsteps echoed in the vestibule.\n\nHe checked the screen again. The car was still passing through the gate. This newcomer couldn't be Garin. Maybe one of the men he'd taken down had decided to play Lazarus.\n\n\"Javier?\" a voice called.\n\nRoux held his breath. He eased the machine pistol from his shoulder silently.\n\nJavier was lying under the stairs. He wouldn't be answering the call any time soon.\n\n\"Javier,\" the voice called again, closer now.\n\nThe edge of the curtain moved.\n\nRoux felt like the Wizard of Oz waiting to be exposed as a fraud.\n\nHe waited until he had the confirmation he needed\u2014a hand with a flame tattoo parting the curtain\u2014before pulling the trigger. Roux unleashed a short burst, the bullets shredding the curtain and ripping into the man behind it. The brother went down, still clutching the ruined fabric as he fell. The brass rings broke away from the rail under his weight.\n\nThere would be no hiding now.\n\nWhich, to be perfectly honest, suited Roux just fine.\n\nHe was ready for Garin to walk through the chapel door.\n\nAnd he'd made up his mind. He wasn't going to let the bastard charm his way out of this one.\n\nRoux checked the screen again. The car was gone. Almost two minutes had elapsed. He should be here any second. Roux smiled. It was all coming together.\n\nThere were no headlights on any of the screens.\n\nRoux toggled through a few different views, using a little joystick on the console to pan the camera angles wider, but there was no sign of Garin. There should have been. He should have been pulling up outside the chapel by now. Roux ran through the feeds again, but there was absolutely no sign of Garin's car in any of them.\n\nA vaguely familiar sound filtered through from outside. It took him a second to place it because it was so unexpected. It grew louder gradually, until the old windows seemed to vibrate in time with it.\n\nWhen he realized what it was, he cursed himself for being so slow and headed outside."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Annja heard the noise before she saw the light in the sky.\n\nShe needed to get to a position where she could see the chopper touch down. There was no obvious landing site that she remembered. That meant she had to find higher ground. The rooftops. Plenty of buildings were fronted by scaffolding, so she ran to the nearest, eyes on the sky, trying to follow the helicopter. She climbed quickly, hand over hand, and leaped from the platform to the rooftop proper.\n\nShe kicked herself. Of course Garin had more than one reason for wanting to return to the Alhambra. It wasn't just about deciphering the mask, and it wasn't even about tying up loose ends. Garin was more than capable of walking away from carnage with a grin on his face. She'd seen it before. He had no problem avoiding responsibility for his actions. The one option she hadn't considered was that he already knew what was on the mask and the ancient fortress was only a rendezvous point.\n\nShe raced across the flat roof, then launched herself into the air, catapulting across the gap between buildings, and came down in a front roll, rising again, still running, with the moon picking out her silhouette.\n\nThe helicopter was already descending.\n\nShe raced across the rooftops, leaping nimbly onto a perimeter wall that skirted a dry soil bed between houses, then scaling another high point, never once looking down.\n\nShe heard footsteps.\n\nTwo sets.\n\nThese weren't the heavy boots of the first man, either.\n\nGarin and his accomplice? It had to be.\n\nThe helicopter made its descent and she ran toward it, covering the distance quickly. She was fast. But she had no idea if she was going to be fast enough. She could hear Garin running through the streets below. He made no pretense at stealth. She needed to stop him from boarding. It wasn't exactly the confrontation she wanted, but she couldn't afford to let him get on that helicopter.\n\nOnce he was in the air, there'd be no catching him, even if she knew where he was going.\n\nThe helicopter touched down in a courtyard. She stood on the tiled roof, watching helplessly as two shapes emerged from the shadows, oblivious to her presence.\n\nThere was no mistaking Garin.\n\nShe called his name.\n\nBoth men stopped for a moment, their faces illuminated by the glare of one of the security lights.\n\n\"Wait,\" she said, running hard, arms and legs pumping furiously as the tiles cracked beneath her feet.\n\nGarin looked so much more alive than he had less than an hour ago.\n\nHis bruises had already begun to fade in the strange, harsh light. He was a fast healer, but not that fast.\n\nBut it was the other man she stared at, and the other man who stared back at her. There was a moment of recognition. Panic. Then he tugged at Garin's sleeve to urge him toward the chopper.\n\nShe'd seen him before.\n\nBack when this nightmare day began.\n\nShe hadn't expected to ever see him again.\n\nBut there was no mistaking the easy style of Francesco Maffrici, the curator of the Monastery of Saint Thomas Aquinas in \u00c1vila.\n\nHere.\n\nNow.\n\nWith Garin.\n\nThey had been tracking her the whole time. They'd known every single move she'd taken from that very first step. How many more of the people she'd met in the past twenty-four hours were up to their necks in this conspiracy? Had they been feeding her what she needed to get here drip by drip, manipulating her into thinking she was solving some ancient riddle?\n\nHer phone rang. She couldn't take her eyes off the pair of them. And she couldn't reach them. Garin broke into a sprint, breaking the spell. He gave a cry, drawing a guard from one of the alleyways. The brother had a Steyr machine pistol in his hand, but he wasn't as quick on the draw as she was. Annja threw herself forward in a combat roll and rose with the sword already in her hand, drawn from the otherwhere in time to stop the first bullet, sending a shower of sparks flying in the dark night as metal struck metal. The brother kept his finger on the trigger until the hail of bullets stopped coming, ripping up the tiles beneath her feet. By the time the gun dry-fired it was too late for him to save himself. Annja spun on her heel and hurled the otherworldly blade, sending it scything through the air in a vicious arc.\n\nThe brother fell, his last breath caught on his lips.\n\nHis head hit the ground a moment later and rolled away across the cobbles as the sword reappeared in her hand.\n\nAnnja saw Garin duck into the waiting helicopter, Maffrici a second behind him. She was too far away to stop them. She could have hurled the sword at the rotors as the helicopter started to rise...but she didn't want to kill him. He was gone.\n\nUnless she could catch up with the helicopter as it rose, somehow snag one of the runners before it was out of reach...\n\nShe bolted across the roof that ringed the courtyard, trying to get as close as she could before launching herself through the air, stretching with all of her will for the runner.\n\nShe caught it with one hand, clinging on for dear life as the helicopter surged upward.\n\nShe could see the horror on Garin's face as the downdraft from the rotors pummeled her.\n\nShe swung her second arm up, kicking her legs desperately. Her fingers slipped on the slick metal of the runner. There was no way she could hold on without getting her second hand around the stanchion, which meant relinquishing her grip on the blade. It didn't help. As she reached up, Maffrici leaned out of the cockpit and stamped down on her hand. Then she was falling, battered toward the ground by the fierce windstorm.\n\nIt was a long way down.\n\nShe hit the cobbles hard in what would have been a backbreaking fall for anyone else. The impact drove every ounce of breath from her body. She thought her spine was going to shatter. The pain was blinding. It sent a sunburst of agony through every nerve and fiber. The sword flickered in her grip as she clenched her hands, gritting her teeth, but she couldn't hold on to it. She stared up at the belly of the helicopter.\n\nGarin was gone and there wasn't a damn thing she could do about it.\n\nShe tried to sit up, but the pain was unbearable, so she gave up and lay on her back, unmoving, watching the helicopter as it banked and flew away in the direction of the mountains.\n\nHer phone rang again.\n\nShe didn't want to move.\n\nIt didn't stop ringing.\n\n\"There's a helicopter coming in to land.\"\n\n\"Too late,\" she said into the phone. \"The only thing coming in to land is me...and not gracefully.\" She didn't elaborate.\n\nRoux cursed, a stream of French that would have turned the air a vivid shade of sacre bleu if they'd lived in a cartoon world.\n\n\"I know where they're going. At least I think I do. But we're on the back foot now. Garin's with a guy called Francesco Maffrici.\"\n\n\"You know him?\"\n\n\"The curator from the Torquemada tomb in \u00c1vila.\"\n\n\"Strange bedfellows. Did it look like Garin was going willingly? Or did Maffrici have him at gunpoint?\" Meaning, was Garin complicit. She tried to remember exactly what she'd witnessed. Could she have misinterpreted some aspect of the scene? Maffrici had been behind Garin, not leading the way. Could the curator have been running the situation? She hadn't seen a gun, but that didn't mean he didn't have one. She realized what Roux was asking. He wanted her to say definitively that Garin Braden had betrayed them, or give them an out so they could still believe he wasn't the devious, conniving, unfaithful, backstabbing, two-faced liar he was. And the truth was, she didn't know. Maybe he had been at Maffrici's mercy.\n\n\"I can't say for sure. And to be honest, I don't want to think about it right now. I hurt all over. Get to the gate. Follow the road maybe three hundred yards. You'll find a red Alfa Romeo parked by the side of the road. The keys are in the ignition.\"\n\n\"Right. And once I get there, where am I going? I can't read your mind, girl.\"\n\nShe was still on her back. She wasn't entirely sure she could sit up. She should have been dead. Any normal person would have been. But since she'd first laid hands on Joan of Arc's sacred sword, she'd been anything but normal. \"Turn the car around, and head away from the Alhambra. Drive half a mile, and you should see a dirt road on the right. It'll take you up into the mountains. You're aiming for a V in the skyline. A pass. That's where he's heading. The car won't get all the way to the top. I'll see you there.\"\n\n\"What are you going to do?\" he asked.\n\n\"Me? I guess I'm going to haul my battered ass up there the old-fashioned way.\"\n\nShe watched as the helicopter disappeared into the distance, its searchlights spearing ahead, pointing toward the Pass of the Moor's Sigh.\n\nShe needed to run.\n\nWhich was going to be difficult, because she could barely stand."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "The car was exactly where Annja had promised it would be.\n\nRoux slid behind the wheel and turned the ignition.\n\nOn another day, in another place, in a better frame of mind, he'd have loved to take the Alfa out onto a long straight road and unleash the full power of the horses under the hood, maybe hit the coast road from Saint-Tropez to Monte Carlo and onward into Italy, top down, wind in his hair, enjoying the view and looking like a walking, talking midlife crisis. Today, though, he had to find a way around the side of a mountain in the dark. At least he didn't have to do it on foot. Leave that kind of stupid exertion for the young.\n\nHe followed Annja's directions, keeping an eye out for the side road she'd mentioned, almost missing it because it wasn't lit or signposted. It looked too narrow and too steep to be a real road, but there was nothing else for miles around, so this had to be what she meant. Four-wheel drive would have been better, being a sheep or goat, perfect. But he trusted Annja.\n\nAs the road wound up the hillside, he caught sight of the helicopter's searchlights far off to his right. They were moving faster and more directly than he could, but they gave him something to follow. It seemed as if Annja's hunch was right. So she'd solved some other part of the mystery. It would have been good to have been able to spend a few minutes with her before setting off on this wild-goose chase, but time was a luxury they didn't have right now. Still, he wished they were together. Being separate had made sense when they needed to be in different parts of the country, but now, this close, maybe two was better than one. Attack the problem head-on, face Garin down, find out if he'd played them...\n\nIt wasn't an \"if,\" though, was it? As much as Roux wanted to believe it was, he'd seen the evidence with his own eyes. Garin was not purely a victim in all this. And Roux knew full well Annja would be too soft on him, that she'd swallow whatever sob story he put in front of her. She'd do that because she always wanted to see the good in people. Roux was old enough to know that sometimes there just wasn't any.\n\nRoux's phone rang. He grabbed it, steering one-handed.\n\n\"Roux?\"\n\n\"Kinda busy right now.\"\n\n\"I'm sending you some stuff,\" Oscar said. \"You'll want to read it as soon as you can.\"\n\n\"Want to summarize for me?\"\n\n\"No, it's best you read it.\"\n\nHe hung up. Roux tossed the phone aside, but not before he'd taken a bend a little faster than intended, tires crunching on the hard dirt of the shoulder. He felt the car pull to the right and adjusted. He reached for the phone and checked the screen, one eye still on the road as he eased up on the gas.\n\nHe looked up as the headlights picked out eyes staring at him from the scrub along the roadside.\n\nThe Steyr machine pistol he'd appropriated from the brother slid off the passenger seat, hitting the side of the foot well hard and coming to rest with the muzzle pointing up at his face. Roux ignored it. He wasn't about to allow himself to be distracted\u2014not by the gun or the local fauna or anything else around him. He had a job to do. People were counting on him. And right now that meant concentrating on the god-awful road he was trying to navigate and keeping track of the helicopter in the distance.\n\nAnything else was just getting in the way, including the hacker's information.\n\nHe climbed higher and higher, the road becoming even more unnerving as he rose, with not so much as a guardrail to stop him from overshooting a turn and doing a Thelma and Louise off the side of the mountain.\n\nA glance back the way he'd come revealed a handful of lights in the distance. They had to be the spotlights of the Alhambra. And looking forward, beyond the hills, the sky was starting to lighten. It was just the slightest tinge of red, but dawn couldn't be that far away, and it wouldn't be long before the fortress was teeming with visitors. And that would mean someone would discover the bodies in the chapel. How long until that happened? When it did, it would change everything.\n\nThey said that the only thing worse than bad publicity was no publicity, but with the Seville courthouse and now the Alhambra murders, Roux had become a one-man crime spree. They'd be locking him up and throwing away the key if they caught him here. He needed to get this out of the way quickly and be back on his plane before the police pulled their act together.\n\nThere would be rain before the day was over, but he'd be back in the ch\u00e2teau in France long before the first fat drops fell. He promised himself that much.\n\nBut first, before he could think about any of that, he had to take care of Garin.\n\nThe helicopter started to descend, dropping out of sight over the far side of the mountain.\n\nThe road began to meander off in the opposite direction, with no sign of doubling back on itself. Annja had warned him he wouldn't be able to make it all the way to the top in the Alfa. It was time to start walking. Long before he reached the V carved between the peaks, it would be daylight. Garin had a decent head start, whatever he was intending to do here. That didn't mean he couldn't stop him, though. Roux recovered the machine pistol and clambered out of the car. He left the keys in the ignition, just as Annja had, although he'd already decided he wouldn't be driving back to town. Instead of calling Oscar back straightaway, he put in a call to make sure they would have a ride when this was all over, then he slung the Steyr over his shoulder and allowed his mind to wander back to when all this had begun\u2014a time when Garin had still been his apprentice and little more than a boy."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "Annja ran.\n\nShe'd spent far too many of the past twenty-four hours hunched over the handlebars of the bike, in a car and\u2014as luxurious as it was\u2014Roux's jet. Her muscles were cramped, her joints stiff. Still, considering she'd just fallen thirty feet from the runners of a helicopter and landed on her back, she felt brilliant. Alive. She powered across the dusty desert, eyes always on the prize: the V in the mountains that marked the Pass of the Moor's Sigh.\n\nHer phone vibrated against her side.\n\nAnnja fished it out of her pocket.\n\nIt was the professor; obviously, he was every bit as much an insomniac as she was. She didn't answer, assuming he'd leave a message. She'd check it at the top. She didn't want him to think the heavy breathing was for his benefit.\n\nThe gradient increased.\n\nAnnja had to dig a little deeper to maintain momentum as the path rose sharply.\n\nSheep grazing on the mountainside watched her progress with detached interest. Their stares were disconcerting, but they didn't dip their heads in preparation to charge her, which was a plus. The absolute silence out here was eerie, but it felt good. Special. Almost magical. It was the kind of silence you could never hear in a city. But she couldn't afford to savor it. She gritted her teeth and pushed on, feeling the burn as she raced up the mountainside.\n\nDead earth crunched beneath her feet.\n\nOverhead, she saw the first birds of the morning. They were big, wheeling in the sky and scattering, only to re-form into a solid, seething mass of wings and settle in the high branches of a distant tree.\n\nHer cell phone vibrated again, one short, sharp shiver. Zanetti had left a message. She spotted a path that wound around the mountain. It was a well-worn shepherds' trail, and it promised to be the easiest route up to the pass. Annja pushed on. She wasn't slowing down.\n\nGradually, the going became easier as the terrain leveled out. Her stride lengthened and she began to cover the ground more quickly until she was running freely into the morning red sky.\n\nShe pulled the phone from her pocket without breaking her stride.\n\n\"Hi, Annja,\" the message began. \"Aldo Zanetti here. You're going to want to hear this, I think. I've had a breakthrough. There was a piece of the map that I was struggling to decipher, where the metal was bent out of shape.\" He sounded breathless, as though he were the one running up a mountain. \"I think I've managed to work out what it means. Everything I suspected about the secret being hidden in the Pass of the Moor's Sigh still stands, but the extra information from the buckled segment of the mask seems to suggest that the opening will only be revealed at the start of the day. I'm not entirely sure how this will work, but it says that you must face the doorway, then turn to face Mecca, say the prophet's name three times, then turn back to the door. I know, it's probably hokum, but do what it says. The door's supposed to open then. There are also some fairly dire warnings about traps or challenges lying beyond. The language is nowhere near as precise as modern ones, though, so I can't be sure which. You'll need to overcome these once the door opens. Okay, that's everything I've got. I don't know if that helps, but without the mask itself, it's the best I can do. I'm afraid I remain skeptical as to there being any actual treasure to find, but I'd love to be proven wrong. Maybe there still are mysteries left to be solved in this world. If so, I hope you're the woman to solve this one, at least. Give me a call sometime and tell me how it went. And if you're ever in Rome, lunch is on me. It's been a pleasure.\"\n\nThe message ended.\n\nOnly at the start of the day.\n\nAnnja's mind was filled with questions. How could a door be hidden? It had to be shadow, she thought, the angle of the sun at sunrise revealing the door for a brief moment. In that case, the entrance\u2014whatever it was\u2014faced east. That didn't help much, but every little bit of knowledge she could gain before trying to find a way into the mountain was a good thing. The sky was growing lighter. She lowered her head and leaned into the sprint.\n\nThe helicopter had dropped out of sight, but she could still hear its rotors.\n\nAnnja glanced to her left. The narrow track rose up from the main road and wound up into the highest points of the hills. In the gloom that still clung to these last few moments before dawn, Annja could see the lights of a single car. Roux. She did a quick mental calculation, trying to work out how far behind her he was and how quickly she'd have backup. Not soon enough. She'd have much rather done this next bit with the old man at her side. Still, beggars couldn't be choosers. She crested a ridge and saw two men duck low and hurry away from the blur of rotor blades. The helicopter hovered a couple of feet above the uneven ground, rocking slightly in the air before the engine sound changed and the chopper rose, peeling away from the peaks. There wasn't a good place to set down. That didn't mean that the pilot wouldn't be returning as reinforcement once he'd found a spot, though.\n\nAlways consider the worst-case scenario, expect it to happen and avoid disappointment when it does. That was one of the old man's many rules to live by. Normal people might have added: and be grateful if it doesn't. Not Roux. He expected the worst because, when he was around, the worst had a habit of happening.\n\nBut despite that, it was hard to believe Garin was behind all of this, no matter what Roux said about him switching out the painting in the office before the kidnappers smashed through his windows. He was a jerk some of the time, sure, but he was Garin. He was one of the good guys. It had to be the curator. Maffrici. She didn't know anything about him, so it was easy to blame him. She couldn't be sure what she'd seen back in the courtyard. When she thought about it, Garin had looked...what? Scared? Had he seemed scared when he saw her up there on the roof? She wanted to believe that he did. Because that would mean the seed Roux had planted in her mind was right, that there was another explanation for what was going on. He was caught up in this; that was impossible to deny. He might even be responsible for some of it. But Annja wasn't ready to accept that he was the instigator. And she remembered his bruises. He'd taken a battering. Garin wasn't the kind of guy who'd subject his body to that type of punishment willingly. He was too vain for that. Maybe it was Stockholm syndrome? His abusers had treated him so badly he'd come to see any little kindness as a kind of salvation. Maybe that was why he'd led Francesco Maffrici into the helicopter. That would explain why he wasn't acting like a captive.\n\nAnnja heard birds chirping nearby. It would only be a matter of minutes before the sun rose above the hills. And if Zanetti was right about what was engraved on the mask, then the hiding place of the Moors' treasure would be visible, and anyone who turned to Mecca and said the prophet Muhammad's name three times would open the door. She needed to hurry. She scrambled up the loose shale, skidding as she climbed toward the V in the skyline above her. There was no catching Garin and the curator. They'd reach the doorway before her. Assuming they could find it. Zanetti's information might give her a badly needed advantage.\n\nShe slowed down as she reached the V, knowing she was completely exposed. She kept low, almost on her hands and knees, as she reached the Pass of the Moor's Sigh, trying not to be spotted from below.\n\nThe helicopter was long gone.\n\nThe ground was strewn with boulders that had fallen down the hillside over generations. There were hundreds of them, all different shapes and sizes, offering countless places to hide and throwing shadows across the terrain as the sun came up. She turned. Through the mountain pass she saw the majesty of the Alhambra as it must have been centuries ago. The first light of the sun struck the incredible gold ornamentation on the building, transmuting it into an almost molten form. It came alive in the sun. Annja understood in that single moment why the Moor had sighed when he had looked back at what he had abandoned. The loss must have been visceral.\n\nShe turned her back on the Alhambra and scanned the mountainside for Garin.\n\nThere was no sign of him or Maffrici.\n\nPanic overtook her. They had to be close by. But she couldn't see them. If they'd found the way into the mountain, she might never find them, not in time. She had to think. They could not have left this narrow valley without her knowing\u2014it was impossible. That meant they were still here somewhere. She scoured the eastern-facing hillside, still half-bathed in shadow, searching for something that would show where they had gone, some darker shadow or bare cleft in the rock. The slope was covered in rocks and boulders, many of which were precariously balanced and threatened to come tumbling down at the slightest breeze. But nothing seemed even remotely out of place.\n\nShe tried to think like Garin.\n\nWhat would he have done?\n\nIf nothing was out of place, she had to look for the obvious, something that didn't belong...but what?\n\nSomething in the shadows?\n\nA shape?\n\nShe scanned the slopes again, shading her eyes. This time she saw a flash of light, barely above the shadow line. It hadn't been there a second ago. It glinted again. The newly risen sun was reflecting off something\u2014or someone. Maybe it was a gun, a pair of sunglasses, a cigarette lighter, a watch face, even a belt buckle. It didn't matter. There was definitely someone in the shadows between rocks, and they were moving. Could it be Garin trying to tell her where he was being taken? Giving her a bread-crumb trail to follow?\n\nOr was it a goon waiting at the doorway, intent on stopping her from getting inside the mountain?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "Roux picked out the silhouette of a woman running along the ridge, the light of the rising sun behind her. She was vulnerable out there. A hostile sniper could have brought her down without difficulty. He didn't like it. But she was moving fast. She streaked across the horizon, a primal force at one with the world, her powerful stride eating up the ground much more swiftly than his could, even though she'd been running for miles already and he'd had the luxury of a sports car at his disposal. The woman was incredible. He never ceased to marvel at the sheer physical strength she possessed, or the mental fortitude that accompanied it. She didn't think twice about racing headlong into danger if it was the right thing to do. She truly was a worthy heir of Joan's sword. That made the twist of the knife that was Garin's exploitation all the more painful.\n\nShe dropped out of sight as she moved between two hills. This V carved into the peaks had to be Puerto del Suspiro del Moro. Nothing else around here fit its description. Roux had heard the story of the last emir, who had deserted his beautiful city rather than stand up to the demands of the Catholic monarchs. It was a beautiful place for a coward to come to terms with his failings. Even now, Roux couldn't help but be cowed by the natural gravitas of this spot. No man could ever compete.\n\nThe only sign of the modern world was the distant hum of the helicopter. The sound of the engine echoed through the narrow valley in the stillness of the morning.\n\nFor the second time in a few hours, Roux found himself transported back to a much simpler time, when he and Garin had been so much younger, before the bitterness between them had really had a chance to develop. Roux wanted to believe they had both been good men once, before life shaped them. But sometimes it was hard to remember what they had been, though.\n\nThe hacker had sent him an email, providing details of financial transactions. Roux studied the documents for a moment, trying to make sense of them. There were a lot of numbers, but when he stripped them away, what he held in his hands proved beyond a shadow of doubt that Garin Braden was not an innocent victim in this mess. He was linked to the activity in ways that Roux had desperately hoped he wouldn't be. These were Garin's financials, and they exposed everything he'd been doing. Everything. The amount of information Oscar had uncovered was overwhelming\u2014and deeply disturbing. There was no way this had all come from the server at the Alhambra. The kid had gone to town, tearing into every company and shell corp that Garin was tied to, no matter how loosely, looking for anything incriminating. And he'd found it in spades. Most telling were a couple of documents he'd singled out for Roux's attention: details of a helicopter lease, payments for a pilot's contract, invoices for his Gulfstream for bays in Granada, shipping details, car rental. It just went on and on. He didn't have the time now to study the paper trail in detail, but he would. He'd pore over it all. He'd digest everything. And he'd act on it. For now, the important thing was that this was irrefutable proof. Garin was a self-serving son of a bitch, and he was no one's victim. That was all Roux needed to know. Garin had cost those men their lives. There would be a reckoning.\n\nRoux shook his head. It wasn't as though he hadn't expected it. He'd known somewhere deep down since all of this began that something was rotten. But having it spelled out to him so bluntly...well, it undermined so many of the inroads he thought they'd made over the past few years. He should have known better than to trust his young apprentice. So what was the end game here? What did Garin want out of this? Surely it wasn't just money? He had accumulated enough of that over the centuries. He always had a deeper plan. That was one reason he'd always been so much more successful in modern business than Roux had. He was ruthless. He was made for this cutthroat world. It was a long time since he'd stopped being Roux's apprentice, that was for sure. He was his own man. Garin only did what Garin wanted to do. And he had grown very rich with that philosophy.\n\nThe sounds of the helicopter changed.\n\nA moment later it was rising into the air again, cresting the hillside less than twenty feet above Roux's head and banking away. Roux caught the briefest of glances inside the cabin before he felt the force of the downdraft from the rotor blades. There was only one man inside, and that was the pilot. He'd left Garin and his coconspirator on the mountain. Roux crouched, hands flat against the dusty ground to maintain his balance while he struggled to catch his breath. I'm getting too old for this, he thought bitterly, tempted to take a shot at the helicopter as it passed overhead, just to put a spanner in Garin's plans. But unlike his former apprentice, he did think about the collateral damage his actions caused. It would have been different if Garin Braden had been on board, though. Then he wouldn't have hesitated.\n\nAs Roux crested the hill, he looked into the pass. They'd all come to the right place. More than that, though, he was struck by a sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. He'd been here before. He couldn't remember when. That was one of the drawbacks of living six centuries. They all started to blur into one another. The changes were subtle\u2014the wind had eroded a sliver of the mountain, the rain had washed stone into dust and the valley floor had gathered more rocks and boulders. But he wasn't seeing it for the first time, he was certain. He'd been here before.\n\nHe scanned the slope, hoping to catch a sign of either Annja or Garin.\n\nThere was no sign of Garin or any of the men he likely had out here with him. He wouldn't have risked going it alone. He wasn't that kind of man. No doubt their pay stubs were in the bundle of files Oscar had sent him. They hadn't disappeared into thin air, he was damned sure of that. Garin was a lot of things, but he wasn't a magician.\n\nRoux spotted Annja. She was climbing up the side of the narrow valley, gradually moving across his line of sight until she swung down into shadows again and disappeared. One second she was there, the next she wasn't. She'd found a way into the mountain. He resisted the urge to yell at her to wait; he didn't want to show their hand too early. Any shout loud enough for Annja to hear would be loud enough for Garin to hear, too.\n\nLikewise, he could call her cell, but without knowing how close she was to Garin's crew, he couldn't risk betraying her presence with a ringtone. The last thing he wanted was to let Garin know just how close they were to stopping him.\n\nAnnja was smart. She would have seen the Alfa's lights as he made his approach, so she would know he wasn't too far behind her. She wouldn't do anything reckless in the meantime.\n\nAt least he hoped not."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "Annja skirted around the crack in the rocks, doing her utmost to remain out of the sight line of the guard Garin had left at the entrance to the underworld.\n\nActually, it was more of a fold than a crack.\n\nThe guard stood just inside the opening, almost completely in shadow. The glint she'd seen earlier hadn't been Garin or Maffrici, but this man. Which was lucky; she never would have found the fold otherwise. It was so subtle, almost invisible to the untrained eye, that it was no wonder it had gone undetected for so many years.\n\nThe sun drifted lazily into the sky, turning night to day in its own sweet time. She edged along, keeping boulders between her and the guard. The broken stones were large enough to offer cover and break up the monotony of the landscape, meaning there was less chance of him spotting her movement as long as she kept herself out of his eye line. She'd be in trouble if he emerged from the fold, though. Then she'd be on her own, exposed. But like any good soldier, he wasn't moving from his post. Sometimes discipline could be someone's undoing.\n\nShe dashed from boulder to boulder and more than once lost sight of the fold in the rock face and ended up drawing closer to it than she had intended. The natural camouflage was incredibly effective. Stones skittered down the mountain as her boots caught on the loose ground. More than once she had to grasp scrubby clumps of grass to stop herself from sliding down after them.\n\nIn the stillness of the morning, even that soft sound of shifting scree could be enough to rouse the guard's suspicion. She worked her way closer, holding her breath when she reached a ledge above the opening. She'd managed to circle up and around the fold to a point almost directly above it without alerting the guard to her presence. She adjusted her feet, scuffing up a shower of dust and grit. Granules fell in front of the opening, a fine, dry rain.\n\nThe guard took a half step forward, craning his neck to look up, expecting to see a mountain goat grazing on the narrow ledge.\n\nAnnja seized the moment.\n\nShe dropped down, landing with a leg on each of his shoulders. His knees buckled under her. He staggered, reaching out with one hand to try to keep himself upright, but it was a losing battle. Annja had the better of him and they both knew it. She tucked her ankle behind the knee of her other leg and squeezed, clamping both hands over the man's mouth as he kicked and struggled, flailing about. He dropped his gun, a machine pistol, and clawed at her hands, but there was no dislodging her grip. He couldn't shake her off, and the more desperately he struggled, the more strength she put into her stranglehold. She tensed her thighs, choking him. The guard threw himself backward, slamming Annja against the stone wall. It was a desperate move. The impact knocked the air out of her for a second, but she clung on, her vicelike grip tightening relentlessly, until the fight began to leave him. The pressure on his vagus nerve took effect.\n\nThe man crumpled, unconscious, and fell to the ground.\n\nHe wasn't going to be moving for a while.\n\nShe checked his pulse. It was still strong.\n\nShe picked up his Steyr machine pistol and felt the weight in her hand. She'd never felt particularly comfortable around guns. They weren't her thing. But she didn't want to leave it behind. There was no telling who might follow her into the dark. Yes, Roux was out there, but how many more of the Brotherhood of the Burning were working their way toward the cave? She didn't want to risk arming them if she didn't have to.\n\nAnnja stepped deeper into the shadows, reaching out as the opening turned through ninety degrees and feeling around for a way in. She felt wood beneath her fingertips. She pulled out her flashlight and shone the beam on a door. There was a rust-pitted ring that served as a handle, but it didn't matter if she twisted or turned it; it wasn't budging. There was no sign of a lock, but there was obviously some kind of hidden mechanism securing the door. She recalled Zanetti's instructions\u2014face Mecca, turn back to face the door and say the name of the prophet three times. She didn't see how it could work, but as she turned to face west, she realized that the ground beneath her feet was shifting. She played the light across her feet, revealing a circle of stone set into the rock floor.\n\nAnnja smiled.\n\nShe faced the door again and took hold of the handle before making the turn again.\n\nThe circle of stone moved with her.\n\n\"Muhammad...Muhammad...Muhammad,\" she said, and this time when she turned the handle there was an audible click as the door was released.\n\nThe prophet's name was a timing device.\n\nShe turned the flashlight into the space as she entered, lighting up the space beyond.\n\nShe stepped inside. The door started closing behind her. Almost too late, she realized she had no idea how to get back out. Not only that, she hadn't told Roux how to get in. Thinking fast, she dropped to her knees and wedged the door open with the only thing she had to hand\u2014the fallen brother's Steyr machine pistol. It couldn't be helped. And if Roux was unarmed, it'd level things up once he entered the mountain.\n\nHappy she had an escape route, Annja took one final breath of fresh air and headed into the mountain.\n\nShe hadn't gone more than fifty feet before she saw the glow of a naked flame up ahead."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "Roux tried not take his eyes off the point where Annja had disappeared, picking out enough features on the rock face to be sure he didn't lose the spot as he made his way toward it. Even so, it was difficult. With every step he took, the shadows shifted, casting an entirely new facade to the stone wall. Without knowing the precise location of this portal into the mountain, it would be virtually impossible to find. It wasn't the kind of thing a wandering tourist could just stumble upon. Then again, part of Roux really wanted to walk into that cave and find it had been picked clean. That kind of irony would serve Garin right. The look on his face would be as priceless as the treasure he'd lost.\n\nTotal humiliation might be the one thing that saved Garin from the old man's wrath.\n\nAs he inched his way through the stones and boulders, Roux kept glancing up toward the faint scar in the mountainside, making sure that he could still distinguish it from the countless shadows conjured by the rising sun.\n\nIn the last few strides, he slipped the machine pistol from his shoulder, ready to use it if he had to. He had no qualms about pulling the trigger. The guys he was facing were being paid well to make sure he didn't interfere with their paymaster's plans. They made themselves legitimate targets by taking Garin's dime.\n\nBut that dime wasn't anywhere near enough compensation for going up against Annja Creed.\n\nPity they didn't know that before they cashed the checks.\n\nRoux approached what appeared, as he drew closer, to be a fold in the rock. In the shadows in the hollow, he almost stumbled over a body propped up awkwardly against the cold stone. Even in the limited light, he recognized the unconscious man as one of the brothers from the chapel inside the Alhambra.\n\nThe man was alive, which made him luckier than he had any right to be. Had Roux been leading the charge, he wouldn't have left a single enemy combatant alive behind him. But that was the old soldier ingrained in him. Annja wasn't a soldier, and he had to admit he admired her no-nonsense approach. She hadn't wasted a bullet, nor had she felt the need to call upon the sword. The tunnel beyond the door would likely be tight, and he could see the sword being cumbersome. She was resourceful. In this case, it was obvious she'd used her body as the weapon.\n\nRoux stepped over the fallen brother and slid through the doorway, which had been held open by a Steyr machine pistol just like the one in his hand. No doubt Garin had ordered a bulk shipment of arms, probably from some Russian dealer with an aversion to questions.\n\nStepping into the darkness without the benefit of a flashlight, Roux moved slowly and stealthily, one hand trailing lightly across the rock wall to guide him. Even in the dark, the old man was light on his feet. It was impossible to tell in the dark just how sound or unsound the passage was, or what the integrity of the walls was like, especially since it likely hadn't been visited for hundreds of years. He could feel the weight of the mountain above him, though. He hated being underground. It was akin to being buried alive. Who in their right mind wanted to spend more time than they had to out of the sun and the wide-open spaces? He moved forward, careful not to kick any scattered stones, placing each foot slowly so it didn't crunch on the grit that had accumulated over all that time.\n\nWhoever had found\u2014or made\u2014this vault inside the mountain had chosen the site well.\n\nIt was secure.\n\nUp ahead, Roux saw the glow of an orange flame.\n\nIt grew brighter.\n\nRoux stayed tight to the wall, feeling his way along it another few paces, painfully aware that the tunnel was crushing in on all sides without needing to reach out and prove it to himself. He shuddered. The ground beneath his feet sloped slightly upward, no doubt to ensure drainage rather than risk flooding out the entire subterranean complex. That slight incline meant a lot of careful thought had gone into the engineering of this place, too. He shouldn't have been surprised. The Moorish builders were among the world's premier architects in their day. This narrow path wasn't easy to walk, and deliberately so. The construction was intended to protect the treasure in the mountain's heart.\n\nThere was no way those Moorish architects would have left the protection of their greatest treasures to a door in a hidden fold of the rock, no matter how complicated it was to unlock.\n\nThey would have taken other measures to protect their wealth.\n\nHe was absolutely sure of it.\n\nAnd his conviction was proven right.\n\nThe flickering flame cast shadows across the passage. Seeing what it was, Roux crept toward it: a torch burning in a sconce set into the wall.\n\nHe almost walked into a spear that had been fired from a hidden mechanism set into the tunnel's ceiling.\n\nBy the light of the torch, he saw the trap had been sprung by a careless footfall pressing down on an uneven slab set into the floor. There was a dark smear on the spear tip. Blood. Meaning that whoever sprung it hadn't come away unharmed. He hoped, grimly, that it stung more than just Garin's pride.\n\nHe peered into the darkness, feeling the heat of the flame against his face.\n\nHe couldn't hear anything ahead of him.\n\nHe should have been able to hear something.\n\nThe silence was almost more unnerving than the bloody spear tip.\n\nComing, ready or not, he thought."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "The beam from the flashlight picked out the spear before she stumbled into it.\n\nAnnja had been moving carefully long before she reached that point, though, wary of where she put her feet. She'd been half expecting a similar trap since she stepped into the tunnel. One misstep was all it would take if there were any more weighted traps or pitfalls. Professor Zanetti's warning had been crystal clear. He'd been spot-on with everything he'd deciphered thus far, so she had no reason to doubt what he'd said about the challenges between her and the waiting treasure. It only made sense to proceed with extreme caution. The sophistication of the door's locking mechanism had suggested a level of craftsmanship that wasn't necessarily easy to figure out, either. So why risk it?\n\nYes, Garin and Maffrici had taken this path before her, but they could have been lucky and avoided any number of other traps. Not for the first time, she wondered how it was that Garin had first heard of this place. Had it been Maffrici who had come to him, knowing the secrets the Mask of Torquemada carried? Garin could have known the language inscribed on the mask, as he was born before it died out, but still, it was unlikely. So was it Maffrici? The curator was the variable in all of this. She just didn't know enough about him. Was he Garin's translator? Or was his role something else entirely?\n\nShe looked at the tiny black spot in the ceiling where the spear had thrust down, and then at the bloody spear tip. It had clearly done some damage\u2014but how much? And to whom?\n\nSomeone had lit a torch and set it into a sconce on the wall, no doubt lighting the way for their return.\n\nShe shone the beam of her flashlight along the floor. She didn't expect there to be signs of another trap so close to this one, but she couldn't afford to take any chances. All she found, though, was a trail of dark splashes that couldn't have been anything other than blood.\n\nLess than thirty paces later, Annja caught sight of two men standing close to another blazing torch. They didn't see her\u2014or at least they acted as if they didn't. She killed the flashlight. Even without being able to see their faces, she could tell that Garin wasn't one of them. They didn't seem to be particularly on edge. Hadn't Garin warned them to expect visitors? Surely he would have if he'd set them as guards. Maybe he didn't want them knowing what the stakes were in this search, in case they got ideas of their own.\n\nShe needed to neutralize them quickly and quietly.\n\nAnnja reached out, willing the sword into her grasp even as she closed her fingers into a fist around its hilt and drew it from the otherwhere.\n\nThe tunnel was cramped, and the blade emitted an eerie glow that made her appear to be some fatal revenant coming charging out of the darkness. Still, it was subtler than the machine pistol.\n\n\"Raul?\" one of the two men called, mistaking her for the unconscious guard she'd left back in the doorway. She closed half of the gap in silence.\n\nIt was already too late when the man realized his mistake. She stepped into the circle of light cast by the flame. No matter how desperately they struggled to raise their weapons, they did not stand a chance.\n\nAnnja danced to one side and pulled the sword back behind her, wielding it like she would a golf club, its edge cutting through the air. The blade caught the first man below his belt buckle, biting through metal and leather. The sword cut clean through him, slicing deep into his flesh and through internal organs in a single stroke. The man's expression betrayed his surprise. There was no pain or fear. He glanced down at the ruination of his flesh as he sank to his knees, clutching at his stomach as if he could stem the flow of blood with his fingers and force the contents of his body back inside the gaping wound as his life spilled out onto the floor.\n\nAnnja heaved the sword away from him just as the second man leveled his machine pistol, finally grasping the threat she posed. He swung the muzzle toward her, point-blank. But before he could squeeze the trigger and riddle her flesh with steel, Annja pushed the barrel of the gun to one side, slamming it into the stone wall with dexterity and speed that defied thought or counter. His brain simply couldn't think that fast. Annja fought on pure instinct. She thrust the sword deep into his chest, ramming it all the way in, until the tip of the blade emerged blood-slicked on the other side.\n\nBlood frothed from his mouth, his lips moving but not making a sound as he collapsed at her feet.\n\nThey were both still alive when Annja stepped over them, but they wouldn't be for long.\n\nThe torch burned on.\n\nAt least they would not die in darkness."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "Only too aware of how close she might be to the men in front of her, Annja kept the flashlight pointed at the ground, with one hand over the beam. Ideally, she'd have done without it, but she needed to see where she was treading. The ground was uneven and any protruding edge could have been the trigger for an elaborate trap.\n\nShe crept forward, listening for the slightest sound, anything to warn her that Garin and the curator had come to a stop or that they were coming back her way.\n\nThe corridor bent ahead of her, the rock illuminated by another torch set in a sconce beyond the curve. She killed the flashlight for as far as the burning torch lit the way. As she reached the turn she paused, again straining to hear, before she risked peering out around the corner. Annja pressed herself tight to the wall. As the tunnel straightened out it widened, leading into a cavern. She could see the bright colors of the first few tiles of a floor decorated with a complicated Morisco mosaic. A genuine work of art filled the space.\n\nThe sight was engrossing, and part of her wanted to rush forward and see exactly what it was, to revel in its simple existence after all these years. But in the center of the masterpiece, she saw Garin and Maffrici along with half a dozen heavily armed guards. One man sat propped up against a wall, his legs splayed out in front of him, to help keep him from toppling. He clutched at a dark patch in his side, his face white in the artificial light. The spear trap's victim.\n\nThe presence of the gunmen was almost enough to convince her that Garin had been brought to this place against his will. Almost. She recognized the avarice in his face. Yet Garin was part of what she did, of who she was. She couldn't imagine it any other way. Garin was as much a part of her world as Roux was, and without him and his place in it, everything would be off-kilter.\n\nShe desperately wanted to believe that Roux was wrong, that she was wrong.\n\nAnd she almost managed it.\n\nGarin held the mask, turning it over and over in his hands. He traced the inside of it with his fingers, feeling the silversmith's craftsmanship. He handed it to Maffrici, who had a jeweler's glass wedged to his eye. She'd guessed right; Maffrici was Garin's translator. But instead of examining the smooth face or the inside of the mask, the curator tipped it on its side, moving the edge closer to his face as he shone a penlight along it.\n\nAnnja hadn't even considered the possibility that there could be more instructions engraved into the edge of the metal. She kicked herself for being sloppy.\n\nMaffrici knew more about what lay ahead of them than she did.\n\nBut if he had known about the spear trap, why did he let one of their men walk into it? She shuddered as she remembered what Roux's hacker had found, evidence that Garin had willingly sacrificed his bodyguards to sell the lie of his kidnapping. He had no regard for life, she realized. Or no regard for the lives of those around him. His own, he was incredibly fond of. Of course he had sent one of his guards ahead to trigger the trap. It was expedient. Set it off rather than spend time searching for it. A sprung trap couldn't hurt anyone else.\n\nSo what was on the mask's edge?\n\nWhat other message could the silversmith have engraved?\n\nMaffrici looked up, a satisfied smile spreading slowly across his torch-lit face as he took in the ceiling. He returned his gaze to the mask and nodded, then pointed to something on the ceiling and drew Garin's attention to the mask. They were partners. The man wasn't giving Garin instructions; he was seeking his approval. Annja strained, trying to make out the words that passed between them. Voices echoed around the chamber, but the strange acoustics made it impossible for her to understand what was being said. It was obvious from their body language that Garin was the one giving orders.\n\nHe counted the tiles, his gait awkward. She realized that he was stepping over certain tiles in the mosaic. No doubt they were part of the traps Zanetti had identified. Garin appeared to have a good idea of where it was and, more importantly, what was likely to trigger it. All she could do was watch and wait. Without knowing what was written on the edge of the mask, she was in the dark, both literally and metaphorically.\n\nTwo of his men tied a length of rope around the legs of the man who had been gored by the spear trap.\n\nAnnja had only taken her eyes off the injured man a minute or two. In that time, everything about him had changed. The hand that had clutched at his wound had slipped away and lay limp in his lap. His head leaned to one side. He'd lost the fight. Garin rattled off a string of instructions, pointing at the spaces where it was safe to walk, shouting warnings when one of his men veered off the path.\n\nThis time his voice carried.\n\n\"Move to the edge.\" The two men who had tied the rope around the dead man's legs made their way around the cavern until they stood opposite where the corpse was slumped. \"Yes, yes, now! Pull!\"\n\nThey did as they were told, without question, taking up the slack until the body began to move. The dead man's head hit the tiled floor with a sickening thump. Annja gritted her teeth. She'd remember this. This was wrong. This wasn't the Garin she knew. This was someone else. She knew exactly what they were doing. She couldn't bear to watch, but she couldn't look away.\n\nThe pair dragged the body slowly but surely across the mosaic.\n\nIts movement was jerky and erratic, each handful of rope the two men hauled drawing it a foot or so across the ground.\n\nA smear of blood trailed in the dead man's wake, marking his passage.\n\nWhen the body reached the center of the room, they stopped.\n\nThey were all waiting.\n\nSomething was supposed to happen.\n\nShe could sense the anticipation in the chamber.\n\nAll eyes were on the corpse.\n\nShe held her breath and counted silently, marking the passage of time.\n\nShe hadn't even reached five before the rumbles began deep in the belly of the mountain.\n\nBy the time she reached eleven, the floor had begun to shake.\n\nAt fifteen, dust and grit began to sprinkle from the ceiling.\n\nTwenty, and the men in the middle of the chamber were on their knees, heads in hands as the mountain began to fall upon them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "The walls around Roux began to shake.\n\nFar below, it sounded as though the world had sheered in two, two great hemispheres of stone separating. The deep basso profundo rumble told another story. The passage was collapsing. The Moorish builders had left the ultimate trap to protect their treasure, preferring it to be lost to the world rather than fall into the hands of their persecutors. He liked their style.\n\nFighting every instinct to get the hell out of there before the place came down around him, Roux ran into the collapsing tunnel. Annja was in there. He wasn't leaving her. He choked back the dust and dirt that filled the air. Another rumble, this time followed by the unmistakable sound of falling rock. He ran on, stumbling as the ground lurched beneath him. He had to get to Annja, to be sure she was all right. He heard a colossal thunder crack of stone tearing apart and was hit by a sudden, sinking dread that the mountain was robbing him of his revenge.\n\nHe saw two bodies in the passage ahead. They lay with their weapons out of reach. Even with the debris around them, it was obvious they hadn't been hurt by the rockfall. They'd been taken from this world with deadly precision. The corpses bore the hallmarks of Annja's handiwork. The men hadn't stood a chance against her ruthless ferocity. She was capable of controlled violence beyond anything Roux or Garin could ever muster\u2014she could become a pure killing machine if it was the only way. Annja Creed, mercifully, was on the side of the angels. It was where she belonged.\n\nHe followed the tunnel deeper still, placing his feet carefully, not because he feared more traps but because a turned ankle now would be disastrous\u2014even fatal. Everywhere he trod seemed to carry an element of danger. A light shone farther along the corridor, another torch, where the tunnel started to bend. There was another rumble. The ceiling above him shivered. The ground beneath his feet groaned. A huge cloud of dust billowed toward him, swelling to fill the passageway with choking, cloying white. The flaming torch snuffed out, stifled by the dust. He was in absolute darkness.\n\nHe couldn't breathe for the choking dust clawing its way into his lungs.\n\nRoux held one arm across his mouth, trying desperately to keep from swallowing or inhaling too deeply. He kept his eyes closed, dragging his free hand along the wall as he moved. There was no turning back. Not now. Each step took him closer to Annja, closer to Garin. They were in there\u2014in with the worst of the collapse, where the heart of the mountain had given out.\n\nHe needed to see them both, but for very different reasons.\n\nRoux could not live without certainty; he needed to be sure of what had become of both of them. His apprentices. Turning around without finding out would leave him even more lost than coming across either of them in the rubble would."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "Stone and rubble from the ceiling came crashing down all around them, jagged spurs driving into and cracking the mosaic's tiles and burying the body of the dead man they'd used to spring the trap.\n\nAnnja looked at Garin, reading his mind. It wasn't difficult to read, either: better him than me, his expression said. And he was right. If he'd been under that ceiling when it collapsed it would have taken more than the miracle of the curse to keep him breathing. He might, for all intents and purposes, be immortal, but that didn't mean he couldn't die. At least she didn't think it did, though Roux might want to put that theory to the test before they were out of this place.\n\nThe air was full of dust and grit. It billowed out to fill every expanse of the subterranean complex. She could see rather than feel the draft that drew the dust cloud toward the outside world.\n\nAs the air started to clear, Annja saw that a huge section of the floor had fallen away.\n\nBlinking back the sting of dust, she realized she was wrong\u2014it hadn't collapsed. Rather, it had sunk, or most of it had, with the tiles forming a spiral staircase that led down. She couldn't see where it led.\n\n\"Move,\" Garin called to the rest of the men. \"We don't have time to waste. In and out. There are enough bodies in our wake that someone is going to alert the authorities. We don't want to be here when they do.\"\n\nAnnja knew that someone he was referring to had to be her, and she wanted to slap him silly. He was so conceited.\n\nWhat would happen if she stepped out of the shadows and faced him down? Would he try to kill her? Could he, even if he tried? He was resourceful, but with the bit between her teeth, she'd sure as hell test his immortality. Was she expendable? He'd used her up to this point... Would he cash her in like a pile of chips in a casino now that he was done playing with her? As hard to swallow as that was, it felt like the truth.\n\nThe two men who had hauled their dead comrade across the floor were still holding on to the rope.\n\n\"I said, move!\"\n\nThey jumped to attention, casting the rope aside, and started for the staircase.\n\nThere were fewer guards now, she noted. A few had perished beneath the great slabs of ceiling.\n\nThe odds were starting to even up, but it still wasn't a fight she wanted to have unless it was absolutely necessary.\n\nGarin and Maffrici started to descend with the three remaining guards following behind them.\n\nShe needed to stay close, but did not dare move until the last of them had disappeared from view. Even then, she took the time to be certain none of the men had stayed behind to stand guard.\n\nAnnja made her way across the floor.\n\nShe saw bodies and broken limbs in the debris. She picked a path through the devastation, one eye on the ceiling above in case there were still chunks of rock yet to fall.\n\nGarin's voice rose up from below.\n\nIt sounded as if he were in the grip of a heated argument, but then Roux had said more than once that Garin was capable of causing an argument when he was the only person in a room. She dropped to her hands and knees and crept to the edge, peering down the spiral stairs to a floor more than thirty feet below. Garin was shoving Maffrici, the flat of his hand on the curator's chest to drive home whatever point he was making. The curator looked frightened.\n\nThe space that had been hidden below the mosaic floor almost took her breath away.\n\nIt was flooded with light as high-intensity lanterns were turned on.\n\nThe light bounced off every surface of the hidden room.\n\nEvery inch of the chamber was a testament to the incredible skills the Moors possessed. They understood the nature of beauty and were capable of harnessing it. The walls were covered with too many patterns to distinguish one from the other, some picked out in silver and others gold. It was a treasure beyond imagining, a time capsule. And yet it wasn't enough for Garin.\n\nWas this the treasure they had left behind, this secret shrine to their God?\n\nA place of worship rather than material possessions... That would have been in keeping with their faith, and a vast amount of wealth must have been needed to create this wondrous chapel in the mountain. Did it have to be anything more than this, a room dedicated to their God so close to the heart of the Inquisition?\n\nAnnja drank the place in.\n\nMore than five hundred years must have passed since this place of exaltation had been completed, and yet it looked as fresh as the day it had been created.\n\nIt could have been tended to every day, polished by loving hands for generations, but it hadn't been. It had been sealed from the world for all this time.\n\nThis great, great secret...\n\nAnnja's heart was racing. She couldn't have imagined a greater treasure waiting at the end of her quest. This was how Howard Carter must have felt when he broke into the tomb of Tutankhamen. This was a find for the ages. This was wealth beyond any dreams of avarice, a work of art in the glory of God. She didn't know where to look, trying to take it all in, trying to imagine how the world would react to such an incredible find.\n\nGarin, on the other hand, looked as though someone had taken a leak in his cornflakes and expected him to eat them.\n\n\"Is this it?\" Garin yelled, holding his arms out wide. \"This worthless room? Is this it? We've moved heaven and earth...for this?\"\n\n\"Don't you see the beauty of this place, the artwork, the skill and craftsmanship?\" Maffrici asked with more than a touch of incredulity in his voice. \"This place is a national treasure. Just standing in here makes everything we have done worthwhile.\"\n\n\"But where are the jewels, the gold and the silver?\"\n\n\"Look all around you,\" Maffrici said. \"It is all here. Just as I promised.\"\n\nThe curator picked up one of the lanterns and turned it to face the wall, pointing out individual features, tracing patterns with his fingertips. \"Gold and silver, rubies and emeralds, amethyst and jade. Use your eyes. Every inch of these walls represents immense wealth. You could buy a small country with the contents of this room.\"\n\nGarin pushed him aside and pulled a knife from his pocket. He slid the blade behind one of the stones and prized it from its setting in the wall, pocketing it.\n\n\"What the hell do you think you are doing?\" Maffrici said, pushing Garin's knife away from the wall before he could pry a second stone free. \"Vandalism. Sheer, wanton vandalism. This treasure has survived intact for centuries. I will not stand by and watch you break it up. It needs to be saved for the nation. The Brotherhood of the Burning was founded to protect this place from the Catholic Church. I'll die before I let you tear it apart.\"\n\n\"That can be arranged,\" Garin said coldly. \"And give me a break...the Brotherhood of the Burning? That's a joke. They may have stood for something once upon a time. Now they are nothing. Less than nothing. This is it, these three men. Do they look like they care what happens here?\"\n\nGarin took his knife to the wall again.\n\nThis time, Maffrici pulled his hand away more forcefully. \"I said no!\" the curator shouted, the man's aggression taking Garin by surprise. He stumbled, losing his footing, and before he could right himself he staggered backward, dropping the knife in the process. It clattered to the jeweled floor.\n\nAnnja saw the rage on his face, saw him wrestling to maintain control, and knew his grip was slipping.\n\nGarin flung himself at the Spaniard. His fist slammed square into the middle of Maffrici's face, snapping his head backward. He stumbled back a step. As he brought his head up, Annja could see the red rose of blood that had bloomed in the harsh light of the electric lanterns. His nose was a mess.\n\n\"Do we understand each other?\" Garin asked. It was a rhetorical question. The man nodded, clutching at his ruined face, no longer protesting as Garin set about the wall with a vengeance. \"Get to it,\" he told his men. \"Strip this damned place. Anything shiny, it comes out. Anything that looks like it's worth money, it comes out.\" The brothers set to the task with greedy abandon.\n\nBut...surely this wasn't Garin.\n\nHe wasn't simply a thief...\n\nWas he?\n\nAnnja could almost understand him doing this for some great work of art, some incredible thing of beauty he felt he needed to possess...but just money, just jewels? That didn't feel right. It felt...cheap.\n\nThere was no doubt that Garin was the dominant man down there. Any influence the curator had possessed entering the mountain was gone, crushed by one punch. It was notable that none of the armed men had moved to intervene. They knew which side their bread was buttered. That didn't mean they worked for Garin, though, only that they respected his power in this new dynamic. What was the name Oscar had turned up during his digging into the Brotherhood...Enrique Mart\u00ednez? Did they work for Mart\u00ednez? Was he the power behind this particular throne or just another one being deceived by Garin Braden? All that was certain was that the guards had no allegiance to Maffrici. So that meant the curator had been used every bit as much as she had.\n\nShe edged closer to the top of the stairwell, unwilling to put even a first foot on it until she was sure of her next move.\n\nShe was still leery about charging in to confront Garin, even though she knew she should. She'd rather wait for Roux before she did that. He couldn't be more than a few minutes behind her now, assuming he hadn't been caught in the collapse.\n\nAnd then there was the risk of a trigger-happy soul down there. If she was seen making her way down, even if she shouted out a warning, there was no predicting what a nervous guard could do. Yes, she could use the sword to deflect the shots, assuming she could see the bullets coming. Every bullet was a risk. Every bullet was a possible checkout.\n\nShe needed to get down onto the same level, to get close to them, if her attack was going to be effective.\n\nAs she watched, she noticed something that seemed so strange, so out of place, that she knew it had to be the key to the treasure, to the reason why the Brotherhood of the Burning had started building this chapel in the first place.\n\nAnd Garin had missed it.\n\nIn almost all of the places she had visited in the past twenty-four hours, there had been things that did not belong, Moorish artifacts hidden away in Catholic shrines, Christian emblems in the heart of Islamic places of worship. This was another one of them, so utterly familiar it couldn't possibly be what she thought it was. And even when she was sure it was, she didn't understand. She'd seen it before.\n\nAnd that was impossible.\n\nIt had an exquisite beauty of its own.\n\nAnd if this shrine had been sealed up for as long as she thought it had, as she knew it had, then it couldn't be a fake.\n\nIn fact, it could be the original, carved even earlier than the one she had seen.\n\nThe marble statue sat on a plinth at the far end of the room, as though on an altar. Garin ignored it while he tried to prize every last jewel from the walls. The carving was almost identical to the Madonna of Bruges, the only sculpture by Michelangelo to have left Italy during his lifetime.\n\nWas it really possible that there had been a second?\n\nAnnja had only seen the other version of the sculpture once in person, but she had studied it in countless photographs. The depiction of Mary and the child Jesus had been a radical change from all previous representations. Earlier images and statues had almost always shown the infant as still a babe-in-arms while his mother looked on him adoringly, but Michelangelo had chosen to capture Christ as a child, almost able to stand upright, ready to slide from her lap and step out on his own. Instead of smiling at the child, Mary is looking away with sadness on her face, as if she already knows what fate has in store for her son.\n\nThe statue Annja was looking at now was so similar it was virtually indistinguishable\u2014at least from the memory she had of it\u2014from Michelangelo's masterpiece.\n\nIn this one place, the Moors had created things of great beauty that represented the pinnacle of both Islamic and Christian art. Neither seemed out of place, as if the two religions should be able to exist side by side rather than competing for hearts and minds, forcing people into a position where they had to choose.\n\nThe statue enthralled her.\n\nShe wanted to go down there to take a closer look, to run her hands over marble that hadn't been touched since the master had carved it.\n\n\"Help me move this,\" Garin barked.\n\nAnnja wanted to shout down to stop him, to tell him to leave everything where it was, but even as she opened her mouth, her cry was silenced by a hand placed over it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "\"Shh,\" Roux whispered into her ear. \"Don't go doing anything stupid, girl.\"\n\nHe slowly removed his hand from her mouth.\n\nAnnja wasn't entirely sure she would have called out, but she was grateful to Roux that she would never know.\n\n\"For a moment, I thought you were dead. Actually, I thought you both were. Not that I'd have missed him. You, on the other hand, I'm just getting to know, and I still rather like you.\"\n\nAnnja grinned, sharing his relief. \"Goes both ways, old man. Glad you're not flat. We're all alive and kicking,\" she whispered.\n\n\"For now.\"\n\nThey pulled back from the opening to make sure they were out of sight of the men below, not that anyone was looking up. They were utterly engrossed in the act of desecrating the shrine.\n\n\"If you need proof, I can give you proof,\" Roux said. \"Garin is El Zogoybi. He's the head of the Brotherhood of the Burning. The hacker managed to find a hell of a lot more about the things that Garin has been getting up to than either of us could have imagined. I'm going to see about putting a spanner in a few works with his help. Someone needs to bring our boy down a peg or two.\"\n\n\"But how is that possible?\"\n\n\"With Garin, almost anything is possible.\"\n\n\"But to become their leader? Why on earth would they trust an outsider?\"\n\n\"Because he isn't an outsider. He didn't join an organization\u2014he founded one. He must have found out about the name somehow and then went out of his way to recruit a few far-right fanatics. Almost all of the Brotherhood's early attacks\u2014aimed at striking fear in the public\u2014were on his own buildings. But the movement grew beyond him, and now it's getting so out of hand that even Europol has to commit manpower to try to bring the rampant spread of racism through this country under control.\"\n\nA string of questions was starting to form inside her head, but before she could voice any of them, she was distracted by the sound of stone grinding on stone.\n\nAnnja eased her way forward again to see Garin instructing two of the guards to move the statue of the Madonna from its plinth.\n\nGarin had realized that this was the shrine's true treasure.\n\nThe sound wasn't just coming from the movement of the statue against the base; it was coming from all around her. Survival instinct screamed that she should run, but where could she go? How could she possibly seek safety if the whole cavern came tumbling down? And how could she leave Garin down there, no matter what he had done? He was one of them.\n\nShe had to speak up. \"Garin! No! Don't move it! Don't move the statue!\"\n\nBut it was too late. The two men struggled to keep hold of the Madonna, its weight too much for them. Garin shot a glare in her direction. He'd expected her. Before he had the chance to say anything else, the bottom step of the spiral stairway fell away from its position, cracking as it hit the floor. An instant later, the second step did the same, then the third and the next and the next. The whole staircase folded in on itself like a house of cards coming down, each dropping to the ground when it no longer had the support of the one below.\n\nGarin rushed forward as they fell, trying to reach up and grab a handhold before it disappeared.\n\nIn less than half a minute, the entire miraculous construction had fallen away and lay shattered on the ground around his feet.\n\nGarin stared at the remains, picking up two sections as if he could fit them together like an elaborate jigsaw, but there was nothing to hold them together. He was trapped down there. This was the last trap that the mask had warned them about.\n\nAnnja stood on the ledge, looking at the men stuck down there.\n\n\"Ah, good to see you again, Annja. I was counting on you to get here sooner,\" Garin said as if they were catching up over coffee, two friends who hadn't seen each other for a while. \"I don't suppose you'd do a guy a solid? There's a rope up there. Would you mind throwing one end down so we can get out of here?\"\n\n\"Difficult, old boy,\" Roux called down, making his presence known. \"Given that it's tied around a dead man. But I'll see what I can do.\"\n\n\"Ah, Roux, my old friend. Even better. It's like a family reunion. Just the three of us. Though I have to admit, I'm a little disappointed in you. I thought you would have worked this all out a long time ago. Or is your memory not what it used to be?\"\n\nRoux said nothing for a moment, then walked over and grabbed the corpse by the collar and dragged him to the edge. Garin stared up at him as he pushed the dead man into the chamber, the rope tumbling after him. \"You didn't say which end,\" the old man said, then turned to Annja. \"Let's get out of here.\" He took hold of Annja's arm and led her away from the crumbled staircase.\n\n\"We can't just leave him here,\" she said.\n\n\"Oh, my dear, not only can we, that's exactly what we are going to do. We leave him here to rot along with the treasure that he used us to get his hands on. He deserves it. He can sit there and enjoy the beauty of it for the rest of his life. Which could be a very long time. We both know that he wouldn't hesitate to do the same to either of us if the positions were reversed.\"\n\nHe wouldn't listen to her arguments.\n\nHe led her out into daylight, where his helicopter was already circling. There was no sign of the guard she'd left slumped against the wall, but he had at least had the foresight to leave a rock jammed in place to stop the huge door from closing in case someone made it out of there alive. Roux kicked the rock away as he let the door slam behind them.\n\nThe only other thing he said all the way back to the hotel was that everything came down to greed over beauty. Had Garin simply been content to savor the beauty of Michelangelo's masterpiece, he'd be in the helicopter with them, bruised and battered but there just the same. His obsession with owning beautiful things had been his downfall."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "Annja lay in the darkness of the hotel room, the curtains drawn against the brightness of the day.\n\nHer body told her that she should sleep, but her mind refused to relax.\n\nLeaving Garin behind in that tomb was eating away at her. Roux could rationalize it all he wanted, and yes, maybe the old man was correct, maybe they were only doing to him what he would have done to them. But that didn't make it right.\n\nIt just made them as bad as he was.\n\nNow all she could do was lie on the hotel bed and turn the events over and over in her mind.\n\nIn the darkness, she heard the soft creak of her door opening.\n\nShe didn't need to look at who had entered, didn't need even the smallest amount of light to know who it was. She recognized his breathing.\n\n\"Hello, Garin,\" she said.\n\n\"Am I that predictable?\" He laughed.\n\nShe didn't bother to answer. All she did was reach for the switch to turn the bedside lamp on.\n\n\"I suppose I should thank you,\" he said.\n\n\"Thank me?\" That surprised her. She'd done nothing worthy of his thanks. Then again, she thought bitterly, when she'd thought his life was at risk, she'd raced halfway across Spain searching for a relic that had been lost for centuries. He should thank her. He should also get down on his knees and beg for her forgiveness. \"Why would you want to thank me?\"\n\n\"For being there. If you hadn't, I don't think Roux would have hesitated in pulling the trigger. You being there probably saved my life. Hell, even if I hadn't tried to take the Madonna, he would have found a way to trip that staircase. He's a resourceful old bastard.\"\n\n\"And yet you managed to get out, anyway.\"\n\n\"Only because you are you.\"\n\n\"Will you please stop talking in riddles? I've had a long day. I'm tired. Just tell me what you mean.\"\n\n\"You didn't kill the brother I left guarding the door. Again, if it had been Roux, he'd have been dead. You let him live. That's the kind of person you are. That's why I owe you. Compassion. He wasn't trying to kill you. None of them were. You just did what you had to do to get past him and make sure that he wasn't a threat.\"\n\nAnnja wondered if that was really true. She hadn't shown the two guards in the corridor any compassion. She had moved swiftly to eliminate a threat, but what if she could have found a less permanent solution to the problem they presented?\n\n\"What about Maffrici?\"\n\nGarin shook his head. \"He didn't make it out.\"\n\n\"You killed him?\"\n\n\"Not me. He fell when it was his turn to climb up the rope. There was nothing we could do for him. He wasn't exactly athletic, alas. All those years wasted hunched over books instead of hitting the gym.\"\n\nAnnja wasn't sure that she believed him.\n\nShe wasn't sure if she believed anything that came out of his mouth any longer.\n\n\"So you just left him there.\" It was a statement, not a question, and it was obvious that Garin didn't intend to grace her with an answer. He acted as if none of his actions needed defending. Maybe in his world they didn't.\n\n\"You used us, Garin. You used me and you used Roux. How many more people did you take advantage of to get what you wanted?\"\n\n\"Me? I was trying to protect you, Annja.\"\n\n\"Don't make me laugh.\"\n\n\"You don't believe me?\"\n\n\"Okay, tell me, how was anything you did supposed to protect me? I'm curious.\"\n\nHe shook his head. She needed to remember he was good. He was very good. She'd never met a more accomplished liar. The nuns would have said he had the gift of the gab, that one, could charm the birds from the trees. He licked his lips. Another sure sign he was stalling, working out his lies. \"I made a mistake, Annja, and I was in too deep before I knew it. When I tried to pull out, they said they would kill you if I didn't follow through on my promises. You know me, always shouting my mouth off, writing checks my body can't cash. They said if I walked, I might be able to disappear, but you couldn't. They'd always be able to find you. I did it for you. I did it all for you.\"\n\n\"Who are they?\"\n\nShe felt sick to her stomach, listening to him as he came out with lie after lie, each one almost plausible. That word again\u2014 almost.\n\n\"Fraternidad de la Quema.\"\n\nShe shook her head.\n\n\"They call themselves the Brotherhood of the Burning.\"\n\n\"I've heard the name,\" she said. She was going to let him keep digging until he could dig no deeper. Once she could prove that he was lying, she would tell him, put him out of his misery, and then she would remember this moment. Every time he said he needed her, she would think of this and try to remind herself not to get caught up in his lies. As far as she was concerned, he'd just become the boy who cried wolf.\n\n\"The guy in charge, the real power player, he makes Roux look like a pussycat. I couldn't let him hurt you, Annja. You have to believe me. I was doing everything I could to protect you.\"\n\n\"What was his name?\"\n\n\"Name?\"\n\n\"Yes, the man in charge of this Brotherhood.\"\n\n\"Mart\u00ednez. Enrique Mart\u00ednez. Why? Does it matter what his name was? They won't bother us anymore, Annja. We've beaten them\u2014you, me, even the old man. We stood up to them and we won. We should be celebrating here. Today is a good day, Annja.\"\n\n\"It really isn't,\" she said. Annja never trusted a man who kept using her name, even less so when it was out of character. Garin only ever used her name when he wanted something. In this case, it was for her to buy the lies he was selling. She wasn't having any of it. She picked up her phone and scrolled through the information that Roux had sent to her.\n\n\"I know the name,\" she said. \"Funny, it seems like he didn't exist until two years ago. I could show you, if you want? Someone made him up and gave him a whole life story, a proper background so that Europol would have someone to go looking for.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" he asked uncertainly. He didn't like the way the conversation was going, that much was clear.\n\n\"Of course I am, Garin.\" She stressed his name, wondering whether he'd pick up on the sarcasm. \"I've even got a copy of his driver's license.\"\n\nShe held out her cell phone so he could see it. The license featured a photograph of Garin's face.\n\n\"Fair enough.\" He shrugged and held his hands up. \"Guess I'm busted.\"\n\n\"You used me, Garin. I don't know if I'll ever be able to forgive you for that. I came running because I thought you were in trouble. I thought you needed me. I won't come running next time. That was your last chance, and you blew it.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm sure you'll forgive me. It might take time, but you love me, really. I'm a lovable rogue. It's just who I am. It's my nature. And the thing is, I can wait as long as it takes. I've got all the time in the world.\"\n\n\"Not if Roux has his way,\" Annja said. Garin inclined his head slightly, acknowledging that he'd misjudged that one, at least. \"So why did you come back?\"\n\n\"Ah, I almost forgot.\" He reached inside his jacket and pulled out the mask. \"I thought you might like this.\" He held it out for her to take, but she didn't move, no matter how much they both knew she wanted to hold it.\n\n\"No use to you any longer, then?\" she asked.\n\n\"Something like that.\"\n\n\"Tell me the truth, just for once. How did you know about it? About there being a map engraved on the back? No one else did.\"\n\n\"Not true. But that's my girl. Always seeking the answers to everything. Nothing changes.\" He smiled. \"There was a man I knew a long time ago. He told me about it, said that it led to something worth more than rubies. And he was right, wasn't he?\"\n\n\"Do you think he was talking about the statue or the shrine itself?\"\n\n\"If you ask me, the Madonna. You saw her. But I think he probably meant the shrine. He was quite the religious sort. There was a group of them, the first Brotherhood of the Burning, if you like.\"\n\n\"Abdul bin Soor,\" she said, the name springing to her lips before the thought had fully formed.\n\n\"I knew you'd dig right to the heart of the matter,\" he said, sounding delighted that she'd pieced it all together on her own. \"He told me that he took great pleasure in placing the whereabouts of the Moorish treasures under Torquemada's nose. You'd have liked him, I think. Clever. Quick-witted, with a wicked sense of humor. He never told me what the treasure was or where it was hidden, but I always knew it would be somewhere close to the Alhambra. It was in keeping with the games he liked to play. So now you know. Keep the mask. You earned it. And believe me, I really am sorry. If I could have found it without you, I would have.\"\n\nHe got back to his feet and walked to the door.\n\n\"What about the Madonna?\"\n\n\"Beautiful, isn't she?\"\n\nAnd with that he closed the door, leaving her in the dark."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "Roux was already on the flight home when Annja's call came through.\n\nIt had been a long day. His old bones were aching. He wanted to be in his own bed, in the ch\u00e2teau, a glass of wine in his hand, cigar tapped out on the ashtray. Content, in peace. He'd been expecting her call. He knew full well she was about to tell him Garin had escaped. He knew his former apprentice far too well to imagine a hole in the ground, no matter how deep, could thwart him.\n\n\"He's been here,\" Annja said. She didn't need to say anything else.\n\n\"Ah,\" he said. \"And?\"\n\n\"He gave me the mask.\"\n\n\"Did he, now? Fancy that. Seems like small reward for the things you've been through today, though. Is that all?\"\n\n\"He knows that we know he was behind everything, that he used us and lied to us. I told him not to call again.\"\n\n\"Good for you. I'm sure he'll do as he's been told, too. Until he needs something from you. What are you planning to do with the mask?\"\n\n\"There's a professor in Rome, Aldo Zanetti. I promised to show it to him in person. I think he's earned the right to look at it. Plus, he wants to buy me lunch. After that, I don't know.\"\n\n\"Sounds like a fair exchange. For the professor, anyway.\"\n\n\"Without him, we would still be scratching our heads in Logro\u00f1o. Garin would have been long gone with whatever he chose to plunder from the shrine.\"\n\n\"So what do we do about him?\" Roux asked.\n\n\"We can't let him hide those things away, especially not the statue. It needs to be somewhere that people can see it, not hidden in some private collection. It should be there for everyone. That's the nature of great art.\"\n\n\"Leave it with me,\" Roux said, glad that she had given that response. \"And enjoy your trip to Rome.\"\n\n\"Look after yourself,\" she said and hung up.\n\n\"You, too,\" he said to the empty long-distance line.\n\nHe knew what he had to do.\n\nHe brought up another name on his phone and made the call.\n\n\"Elise,\" he said when the woman answered, full of charm.\n\n\"Roux? As I live and breathe. Twice in as many days. To what do I owe this honor? No...wait...let me guess, another favor? I'm still explaining the last one.\" She wasn't laughing.\n\n\"Not this time. This one's on me. I figure I owed you.\"\n\n\"You do indeed, you old rogue. So how do you intend to pay me back?\"\n\n\"In kind.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"You forget, I know exactly what you're like.\"\n\n\"Oh, believe me, I may be old, but I never forget. I've got some information for you. Might divert some of the flak if people notice you were digging into the Brotherhood of the Burning for me.\"\n\n\"Go on, make my day.\"\n\n\"There's a container leaving out of the port of Almer\u00eda on a cargo ship tomorrow. Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies.\"\n\n\"Should I be listening to this? This conversation isn't breaking any laws, is it?\"\n\n\"Quite possibly. Here's the important thing. The container is registered in the name of Enrique Mart\u00ednez.\"\n\n\"Ah, now, that's interesting. Any idea what's inside?\"\n\n\"Absolutely, but I don't want to spoil the surprise. I'll say this much\u2014the Spanish will love you. The Italians, too, I should imagine.\"\n\n\"That sounds very vague. Are you sure about this?\"\n\n\"I can send you shipping logs, as long as they can't be traced back to me. They give the ship, date, time and the container number.\"\n\n\"Ah, an anonymous tip-off. No problem, if that's how you want to play it, but you could just have rung customs.\"\n\n\"I could have, but I owe you. I don't owe anyone in Spanish customs. Though I must admit, I rather like the idea of being in your debt.\"\n\nShe laughed. He liked the sound of it. Maybe he wasn't so tired, after all. It wouldn't be a lot of effort to reroute the plane to an airport not a million miles away from The Hague. \"And you really won't tell me what we're going to find when we open the container?\"\n\n\"That would only lead to more questions I can't answer. Trust me, you want to do this.\"\n\n\"Okay, I can live with that. Send whatever you have to me and I'll put something into action. I don't suppose you've got anything on Mart\u00ednez's whereabouts?\"\n\nHe thought about telling her and giving Garin something else to worry about, but ended up saying, \"Sorry, I wish I did.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Epilogue",
                "text": "[ 00:00: The Port of Almer\u00eda ]\n\nThe port swarmed with customs officers and armed police.\n\nThe threat was considered high enough to warrant extra support being drafted in. Once Elise had put the word out to Europol, everything had happened so quickly. Wheels that would usually have taken months to grease were in motion without a single squeak within moments of the alert going out. People took new leads on the activities of the Brotherhood of the Burning seriously, especially now that links to the fascist group and the courthouse bombing in Seville had been found. It was surprising the army wasn't present, too, with orders to shoot to kill. The government wanted this cancer excised from Spain at all costs.\n\nEnrique Mart\u00ednez was public enemy number one.\n\nAs the first wave of officers boarded the ship, demanding to see the manifest, a helicopter circled overhead, an eye in the sky to keep watch for anyone attempting to flee. If Mart\u00ednez was here, they were bringing him in or gunning him down.\n\nThe crew was assembled on the foredeck while the offending container was located and a crane used to lift it from the cargo vessel. The ship wasn't going to be allowed to leave the port until the container had been searched and the captain had made a statement for the police. The same went for the customs officers who had checked the seals and overseen its loading.\n\n\"What's this all about?\" an irritable captain demanded, but the customs officers were there to carry out their instructions, not to engage in conversation. He would have to wait his turn. The crane lifted the metal container and carried it out over the water, moving slowly, since even the officials weren't sure what they were dealing with. Eventually, the container was lowered onto the quayside, the scarred blue metal seemingly innocuous among the other thousands of containers that would pass through the port that day alone.\n\n\"Okay, let's crack this bad boy open,\" one man said.\n\nIn an office in The Hague, Elise just prayed that the container wasn't empty. That wasn't so much to ask, was it?\n\nBolt cutters were applied and at last the end of the container swung open. The contents of the simple wooden crate inside left them all breathless when it was finally prized open for all to see.\n\nThere was a knock at Elise's door.\n\n\"You've got a visitor, ma'am,\" her assistant said.\n\n\"Show him in,\" Elise told her. \"I think he'd like to see this.\"\n\nShe heard a phone ringing. It wasn't hers. Her visitor answered on the second ring.\n\n\"Well played, you old bastard\" was all the caller said before hanging up."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Uncharted) The Fourth Labyrinth",
        "author": "Christopher Golden",
        "genres": [
            "adventure",
            "video games"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "Tropical birds scattered as Drake veered the Jeep onto an old rutted track, snapping branches and tearing away vines, plowing through the rain forest with killers in pursuit, bullets flying, a gorgeous but pouty girl in the passenger's seat, and a bitch of a headache. With only one of his arms on the wheel, the Jeep slewed to the left, and the pouty girl screamed as he forced the vehicle back onto the trail just before they would have crashed into a felled tree.\n\nNathan Drake was beginning to hate the jungle.\n\nHe glanced in the rearview mirror an instant before a bullet shattered it, forcing him to risk glancing back over his shoulder. There were three vehicles in pursuit, a lumbering truck that had fallen to the rear and two Jeeps just like the one he was driving; which made sense considering that this one had been parked next to them when he'd stolen it.\n\nThe jungle had closed in around them, a wild tangle of rain forest the people of Ecuador called El Oriente, which seemed to him a pretty ordinary-sounding name for a place full of things that could kill you\u2014like brutal sons of bitches employed by pissed-off South American drug lords.\n\nThe rutted track he'd taken forced the three vehicles into single file; which was good since it meant only one carload of them could be shooting at him at any given time. Bullets tore at leaves and cracked branches, the Jeep juddered up and down, rattling his teeth, and Drake kept his head down.\n\n\"This is your idea of a rescue?\" the girl shouted.\n\nHe glanced at her wide eyes and her pretty mouth and her soft skin the color of cinnamon and decided he didn't like cinnamon. It ruined a good piece of toast as far as he was concerned.\n\n\"What the hell makes you think this is a rescue?\" he snapped.\n\nShe blanched a little at that, and then her eyes narrowed. \"Maybe the fact that here you are, rescuing me.\"\n\nDrake laughed, but then his smile vanished as he heard bullets plink into the metal rear of the Jeep. The spare tire bolted to the back blew, but that was a damn sight better than losing one of the tires he was actually using.\n\n\"Does this look like a rescue?\" he asked. \"You're along for the ride by accident, sweetheart.\"\n\nIn truth, it hadn't been entirely by accident. He'd infiltrated the rain forest compound where Ram\u00f3n Valdez tended to hide out from the rest of the world, running his drug cartel from a place so remote that nobody wanted to go hunting for him there. No one with half a brain, Drake thought. That hadn't stopped him from tracking Valdez down twice in three years.\n\nHe didn't like jobs that involved outright theft, for reasons that were best explained by the situation unfolding around him that very moment. But in the case of Ram\u00f3n Valdez, he'd made an exception because he had a prior claim on the item he'd been hired to steal. He'd stolen it once before.\n\nThe girl had been a wrinkle in his plan. He'd found her trussed up in Valdez's bedroom and had intended to leave her there until her efforts to free herself gave him the idea that maybe she wasn't a willing participant in her bondage. That had complicated matters significantly, because timing was vital to his plan. For a few seconds he had tried to persuade himself that he wouldn't regret leaving her there\u2014that her struggle was some kind of playacting she'd rehearsed for Valdez's benefit\u2014but as he had started to walk away, he'd known he was lying to himself. Drake knew a prisoner when he saw one.\n\n\"What were you doing there, anyway?\" he asked, jerking the wheel to the right.\n\n\"Vacation,\" she said bitterly in that aren't-you-a-dumbass tone young women seemed to perfect so early. \"What do you think?\"\n\n\"Not really the question,\" Drake said.\n\nA burst of gunfire tore up the trees to his left; the last few bullets stitched the side of the Jeep and then blew out a taillight. A macaw exploded in midflight in a bullet-riddled burst of blood and feathers.\n\n\"Maybe you should focus on driving?\" the girl asked, panic in her eyes as she ducked lower in her seat. \"How can you be so calm?\"\n\n\"Oh, this isn't calm,\" Drake said, twisting the wheel to veer around a felled tree. The Jeep rumbled over brush and roots and sideswiped a giant kapok tree. \"This is me terrified. I can tell by the white knuckles and the way my jaw hurts from clenching.\"\n\nThe girl glanced at his hands on the wheel. She must have noted the whiteness of his knuckles, because she went a shade paler than before.\n\n\"You going to tell me who you are?\" Drake demanded.\n\n\"My father really didn't send you?\" she asked.\n\nHer disappointment softened him as much as a guy driving through the jungle pursued by people trying to kill him could be softened. He saw the split-trunk tree he'd been watching for, the only kind of landmark that could be expected out here, and cut the wheel to the left, crashing the Jeep through a curtain of hanging vines and onto a trail that had been trodden by hooves but rarely by tires. The Jeep bucked like crazy; it felt like it would shake apart in his hands, leaving him sitting on the driver's seat and holding the steering wheel with no car around him.\n\n\"Sorry, kid. I don't have a clue what you're talking about.\"\n\nShe lifted her chin, trying too late to hide her withered hope. \"My name is Alex Munoz. My father is mayor of Guayaquil. He's been fighting a war against drugs in the city, and he can't be bought.\"\n\nShe said this proudly, and Drake didn't blame her. For the mayor of a major South American city to take on the drug cartels, he had to be either courageous as hell or absolutely nuts. Alex didn't have to tell him the rest of the story, either. Beautiful girl, no more than nineteen, bound and gagged in a drug lord's bedroom? She had been a hostage, a negotiating tactic, and probably about to become the victim of something worse.\n\nHow do I get into these things? Drake thought.\n\nBut then, it wasn't Alex Munoz's fault that he was being shot at. Sure, untying her and getting her out of the compound had given him away and slowed him down, but it had been a risky plan to begin with, and in his experience risky plans almost always ended up in him being shot at\u2014and sometimes actually shot.\n\n\"So if Papa didn't send you, who are you?\" Alex asked, her pouty look returning. \"What are you going to do with me?\"\n\nDrake ignored the second question. If there was anything he'd learned over the years, it was that while running for his life with a woman at his side, it was best never to tell her you didn't have a plan. \"My name's Drake. Nate Drake.\"\n\nIf she got the James Bond reference in his delivery, she didn't let on. \"What is this?\" Alex asked. \"What did you do to make Valdez so angry?\"\n\nDrake gestured to the backseat. \"See that?\"\n\nWhen Alex glanced into the back, Drake knew what she would see. The staff was wrapped in burlap kept tight by strips of duct tape. The burlap had come from the poppy farm on the other side of the compound from Valdez's house. Drake had brought the duct tape himself. He'd managed to get the display case in Valdez's study open without setting off any alarms, had bagged and tagged the staff, and had been making his exit when he glanced into the bedroom and saw the girl with the cinnamon skin. The rest was dumbass history.\n\n\"I see it,\" Alex said.\n\n\"Have you heard of the Dawn Tavern?\"\n\n\"Are you talking about a bar or Pacariqtambo? The place of origin? Or are you talking about the lost colony?\"\n\n\"You know the story?\" Drake said, glad he didn't have to explain. Just the fact that they were having this conversation was absurd enough, but he figured it was better than her screaming at him not to let her die or him cursing himself out for coming down here in the first place.\n\n\"Of course,\" Alex sniffed. \"I go to university.\"\n\nGreat, Drake thought. The only brat in the jungle, and she's in my Jeep.\n\nIn Incan myth, Pacariqtambo was a cave from which the first people had emerged into the world. One of those brothers and sisters was a guy named Ayar Manco who carried a golden staff that was supposed to indicate where his people should build the first Incan city. Legend said that he'd changed his name and founded the city of Cuzco, that he and his sisters had built the first Incan homes with their bare hands. To many people in the region, the story was more history than legend, which meant that the discovery three years ago of the ruins of a lost colony\u2014supposedly an offshoot of those original Incans, going all the way back to Ayar Manco\u2014had stirred up a serious controversy. A local tribe whose people claimed to have known about the lost colony all along insisted that the ruins were the real and actual Pacariqtambo, that after being betrayed by his siblings, Ayar Manco had returned to the cave of his birth with his wife and children and founded this hidden village. The public argument about what was real and what was myth had been raging ever since.\n\n\"Three years ago, Valdez hired me to lead a team into Pacariqtambo and bring back whatever artifacts we could find. But what he really wanted was the golden staff of Ayar Manco. After I brought it to him, he decided he'd rather kill me than pay me. I barely got out of Ecuador with my life.\"\n\nAlex looked at him like he was crazy. \"So you decided to steal it back?\"\n\nDrake laughed. \"Are you nuts? Valdez eats guys like me for breakfast. No, I figured I was lucky to still be breathing. But the Cuiqawa\u2014the tribe that made those claims about Ayar Manco? They figure they're probably his closest descendants, so the staff should be theirs. They hired me to get it back.\"\n\n\"And you took the job? After Valdez almost killed you?\"\n\n\"A guy's gotta work,\" Drake said. \"And hey, Valdez went back on a deal. That just doesn't sit right, y' know? I figured the least I could do was annoy him a little.\"\n\nThey held on as the Jeep dropped into a streambed, splashed through, and roared up the other side. The guns had gone quiet, and Drake took a moment to hope Valdez's goons had given up the chase. Then one of the pursuing Jeeps burst through the vines behind them, and he realized he should have known better. It was never that easy.\n\n\"Hey,\" Drake said, glancing at Alex as he drove, a fresh burst of gunfire blasting the trees off to his left. \"Do you think your father's offering a reward for your safe return?\"\n\nShe stared at him. \"You said this wasn't a rescue.\"\n\n\"No,\" Drake replied, \"I don't think I did. And anyway, it's a moot point, isn't it? I mean, once a guy's actually done the rescuing\u2014\"\n\n\"You haven't rescued me!\" she shouted as a bullet shattered the rearview mirror on her side, showering her hair in shards of glass and metal.\n\n\"Well,\" Drake said. \"Not yet.\"\n\nHe aimed the Jeep at a gap in the trees that looked too narrow, but they roared through with inches to spare on either side. Alex swore at him and covered her head, then looked up in blinking astonishment that they had not crashed even as Drake floored the gas pedal and the tires spun clods of damp earth into their wake. For a few seconds the clatter of gunfire ceased again, and as they passed through a strangely uniform alley of trees and vines, the hush of the rain forest embraced them, muffling their engine noise.\n\nThe Jeep hit a rise, then topped it, and the tires spun without traction for a heartbeat before touching down in a small clearing. Stiff-armed, Drake kept the wheel steady over the rough terrain, but they had run out of room. Thick brush bordered the clearing, and trees grew close and leaned together, conspiratorially close. The only way out was the way Drake had driven in, and Valdez's gunmen were right behind them.\n\n\"Oh, my God, we're dead!\" Alex cried.\n\nDrake drove full tilt toward the far side of the clearing, the trees rushing toward them. At the last second, he cut the wheel to the right and hit the brake, causing the Jeep to fishtail and then shudder to a stop. The engine kicked and died, ticking with the heat of its exertion.\n\n\"Put your hands up,\" he said.\n\nAlex glanced at him in confusion. \"What?\"\n\nDrake threw his gun on the floor of the Jeep and climbed out, raising his arms in surrender. \"If you don't want to get shot, put your damn hands up!\"\n\nThe first of the pursuing vehicles roared into the clearing. Several shots rang out, but Drake started shouting out his surrender in both English and Spanish, lifting his hands higher to show he meant it. He stepped away from the Jeep as Alex finally put up her hands and slipped out, imitating him as best she could. She had started to cry.\n\nDrake thought it was a bad idea to smile, but he had to struggle to keep a straight face. Fear did that to him. He figured Valdez had ordered his thugs to retrieve the girl and the staff of Ayar Manco, and it seemed pretty damn likely that he'd ordered them to kill the thief who had stolen both\u2014which would be him\u2014but he thought surrender would confuse them. Hoped it would, anyway.\n\nThe second carload of killers arrived in the clearing as the first came to a shuddering stop twenty feet away from him, their weapons trained on him and Alex. The big truck would be lumbering along somewhere behind. In one of those vehicles would be the guy in charge, some bastard smarter than the other bastards, and in their moment of confusion the killers would wait for him to make the call. If Drake was surrendering, did that mean they should take him back to Valdez alive, or were they still supposed to shoot him?\n\nWhile they were waiting, they climbed out of the two Jeeps, all of them shouting, spreading out in a circle around Drake and the crying girl, who didn't seem to understand that they would take her alive to preserve her value as a hostage. Or maybe that was why she was crying, Drake thought. Maybe being taken alive scared her more than dying.\n\nOr maybe you're just being melodramatic, he thought. The killers gestured with the barrels of their guns, shouting in Spanish for Drake to get down on his knees. He complied, and Alex did, too, even though nobody had asked her. A short, slender, deadly-looking guy with a mustache that looked like it had been drawn on with a marker jumped down from the back of the second Jeep and walked toward Drake with his gun held down at his side like he was trying to sneak up on them, even though they were all watching him expectantly. This would be the guy, then. Drake waited for him to give the order to fire.\n\nStencil-mustache man didn't say a word, though. If his buddies were waiting for orders, they were going to have to keep waiting, because he was a hands-on kind of guy. He pulled a pistol from an armpit holster and strode over, lifted the gun, and pointed it at Drake's forehead.\n\n\"Any time now!\" Drake called out, his voice shaking.\n\nThe little commandant frowned in surprise, apparently assuming that Drake was trying to rush him into pulling the trigger.\n\n\"What are you\u2014\" Alex began.\n\nA single shot rang out, sending a flurry of colorful birds shooting skyward from the trees around the clearing. The little man with the ridiculous mustache staggered backward, glanced down in confusion and maybe a little regret at the hole in his chest, and then collapsed into the grass.\n\nOnly the fact that Drake and Alex had their hands thrust into the air and so obviously empty kept them alive in that moment. The baffled killers spun around, aiming into the trees, trying to figure out who they were supposed to shoot. One of them even fired a few rounds at nothing.\n\nThen the shadows moved, branches swaying as dozens of guns and faces appeared in the trees. Some were above and some below, some were dressed in the style of local tribesmen and others in the plain garb of migrant workers, but they were all armed. There were guns as well as bows with arrows strung and even some knives ready to be thrown. Other than the cocking of the weapons and the rustle of the trees, they made no sound.\n\nOne of Valdez's men started shouting at the others to fire, as if he needed to have someone else pull the trigger so he didn't have to go first. An arrow thunked into the ground inches away from his mud-crusted left boot. He stared at the arrow for a second or two and then threw his gun into the grass.\n\nA moment later, the rest of the killers started discarding their weapons and the Cuiqawa tribe swiftly emerged from the trees and surrounded them. Several of the tribesmen hurried to Drake's stolen Jeep, and one of them lifted the burlap-wrapped staff from the backseat, shook it in triumph, and nodded his thanks. Drake hoped the guy realized he hadn't gone in after the staff just to win the tribe's gratitude.\n\nHe stood and went over to Alex. The girl still looked terrified, staring at the Cuiqawa as though they might be a new threat. Drake helped her to her feet.\n\n\"How 'bout now?\" he asked. \"Does this count as a rescue?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Drake spent most of the flight from Guayaquil to Chicago catching up on his sleep. After the adrenaline rush of days spent trying not to die, he felt completely spent, yet at the same time he was filled with a rare contentment. He'd set right a wrong Valdez had done him, restored a cultural artifact to its rightful owner\u2014granted, he'd been the one to steal it in the first place\u2014and now was going home with more real money in his pocket than he'd had in a long while.\n\nThe tribe had paid his fee for retrieving the golden staff, but the mayor of Guayaquil had paid even more for the pleasure of getting his daughter back alive. The fact that the latter deed had been purely, if somewhat irritatingly, accidental only made the reward that much sweeter. It was the kind of luck that didn't come his way often, and he couldn't wait to share the story of his good fortune with Victor Sullivan, his best friend and sometime partner in ventures like this one.\n\nThere were several squalling children on the flight, and the sumo-size passenger in the seat behind him didn't seem very happy about Drake reclining his seat, but he felt impervious to the world's attempts to disrupt his contentment. With in-flight music quietly piped into his brain through the free headphones, he managed to sleep through the movie, waking up just long enough for the gooey chicken and broccoli dish that might have been dinner or maybe some kind of breakfast omelet if the congealed stuff around the chicken and veggies turned out to be egg.\n\nThe flight landed almost fifteen minutes early\u2014just before ten o'clock in the morning\u2014and when Drake unbuckled his seat belt and stood up, obviously content and well rested, he thought he caught several envious glances from other passengers. Most of them looked pale and weary, but he felt good as he retrieved his backpack from under the seat and his duffel from the overhead compartment. The sumo who'd been unhappy about his reclined seat was still trying to unwedge himself from 17D when Drake filed off the plane.\n\nAs he traveled from one terminal to another, he smelled cinnamon rolls, and his stomach rumbled. He had managed to keep down the hideous concoction the airline had fed its passengers, but he was definitely hungry again, and cinnamon rolls were one of his lifelong weaknesses. Like kryptonite\u2014if kryptonite was soft and warm and covered in sugar and Superman liked to eat it. Or something, he thought.\n\nWhile waiting in line for his cinnamon roll and looking forward to American coffee, he reached into his pocket and took out his cell phone, which had been off for the duration of the flight. He turned it on and saw that he'd missed some calls during the flight and had some messages. The first one consisted of a woman's drunken rambling, and he decided it must be a wrong number. The second message was from Vivian, the woman who operated as his travel agent whenever he needed to make a journey that kept his movements off the grid. Drake did a little too much improvising for Vivian's taste and she often chided him for not using her services more often, but this call was to admonish him for flying from Ecuador to the USA using his own passport. He didn't like to do it, afraid to draw any scrutiny from Homeland Security, but he was just a guy visiting South America, not some jihadist taking flying lessons and then spending a few weeks training to blow himself up in some secret mountain stronghold in Afghanistan.\n\nThe third message was from Sully.\n\n\"Nate, it's me. Call me as soon as you get this. Something's up, and I could use a second set of eyes. Another brain wouldn't hurt ei\u2014\"\n\nThe phone beeped, and he glanced at it, surprised to see that it was Sully calling again. He thumbed the button to switch over to the incoming call.\n\n\"Sully,\" he said, frowning. \"What's so important?\"\n\nMotion out of the corner of his eye drew his attention, and he flinched, on edge after the last few days, but it was just the girl behind the counter handing him a bag that exuded the delightful aroma of cinnamon.\n\n\"You on U.S. soil, Nate?\" Sully asked.\n\n\"I've got a layover in Chicago,\" Drake said as he made his way to a small table where he could sit with his back to the corner.\n\nHe could hear Sully pausing and thought he heard the man exhale. Smoking a cigar, Drake thought. Sully quit about once a month and spent a lot of time chewing the end of an unlit Cuban, as if daring himself to light it. This morning, he had obviously needed a smoke.\n\n\"Chicago,\" Sully said, his gruff voice even raspier than usual. \"How fast can you get to New York?\"\n\nNate paused with the sticky cinnamon bun halfway to his mouth.\n\n\"What's in New York?\"\n\nHe could hear Sully blow out another lungful of cigar smoke before answering.\n\n\"Murder.\"\n\nJust after three-thirty in the afternoon, Drake sat in the back of a New York City taxicab, breathing in smoke from the incense the cabbie had been burning and watching the green street signs go by on the way to Grand Central Station. He could have taken a shuttle bus directly from JFK International Airport in Queens to Grand Central in the heart of Manhattan, but Sully's urgency had been clear, and for once Drake was flush with cash.\n\nHe wished only that Sully had been more forthcoming over the phone. Drake had spent his whole life learning how to roll with the punches, and a big part of that had been Sully's tendency to spring things on him at the last minute. But he didn't think Sully's reluctance to go into detail had anything to do with the aging treasure hunter's usual games. Just before Sully had rushed off the phone, Drake had heard a woman crying in the background. If his old friend and mentor didn't want to talk about murder, he figured it was because someone else in the room was grieving. Sully would never be accused of being the sensitive type, but neither was he heartless.\n\nA grieving friend also would explain why Sully hadn't come to the airport to meet him when his plane landed. If he needed Drake for backup for some reason, normally Sully would have wanted to brief him as soon as possible. Instead, he had just asked Drake to meet him under the clock on the main concourse of Grand Central Station.\n\nThe cab dropped him off in front of a restaurant called Pershing Square that was practically hidden beneath the elevated Park Avenue Viaduct. Drake paid the cabbie but barely looked at the man, his thoughts running ahead of him. He'd been lucky enough to catch a flight from Chicago within half an hour of talking to Sully on the phone, and throughout the nearly two and a half hours in the air and the duration of the cab ride, he had mostly been able to let his mind drift or focus on other things. But now that he had arrived, he couldn't help being worried.\n\nVictor Sullivan had practically raised him from his early teens and taught him everything\u2014or nearly everything\u2014he knew about staying alive in the \"hard-to-find-acquisitions\" business. They'd been all over the world hunting for treasure and antiquities for pretty much anyone who could afford to pay the tab. And in all that time he had never heard Sully sound as grim and weary as he had on the phone.\n\nA taxi driver laid on the horn as Drake hustled across the street. A chilly October wind blasted him, and he shivered, wishing he had a coat. He had left his bags in a locker at JFK, figuring he would be headed back to the airport on his way out of the city, but nothing in there would have helped. Ecuador had been warm and humid. Drake had spent too much time in hot and sticky locales in his life, so he didn't mind the chilly autumn wind, but it was a rapid shift, like stepping through a door to the other end of the world.\n\nWouldn't that make my life easy? he thought. But of course that kind of stuff happened only in science fiction and fantasy stories, where the heroes were all noble and dead wasn't always forever. Real life had less convenient rules.\n\nDrake hauled open the heavy glass-and-brass door and walked up the pebbled incline between the outer and inner doors. A man with a long, filthy, matted beard and sunken eyes stood to one side wearing a sign announcing the arrival of the End Times, but there was no way to tell if he was celebrating or regretting the moment.\n\nWhen he stepped into the main concourse\u2014the enormous, ornate chamber that came immediately to mind when he thought of Grand Central Terminal\u2014he made a beeline for the huge clock. He spotted Sully standing beneath it, but the older man was turned away, watching the stairs across the terminal, probably thinking about the baby carriage scene in De Palma's Untouchables, a homage to the Russian flick Battleship Potemkin. They'd passed through Grand Central together a few times, and every time Sully had to tell him about those stairs. Sully saw him coming and perked up, shaking off whatever he'd been thinking about. From the haunted look in his eyes, Drake decided maybe it wasn't old gangster movies, after all.\n\n\"Nate,\" Sully said. \"Thanks for coming.\"\n\n\"I was already traveling. Just had to take a detour,\" Drake replied. Their rapport mostly consisted of banter, but for once he thought maybe the lighthearted approach wasn't appropriate. \"What's going on, Sully? You said 'murder.' One look at you and I'm guessing this isn't some cozy mystery.\"\n\nSully frowned, smoothing his gray mustache. \"I'm not my usual jovial self, huh? I guess not. But you look more than a little like crap yourself, so maybe you shouldn't judge.\"\n\nDrake raised his eyebrows. \"Great to see you, too.\"\n\nA tired smile touched Sully's face and a bit of the usual mischievous twinkle lit his eyes, but then the smile faded and his gaze turned dark. He nodded his head toward the row of arched doorways that led through into the train tunnels and platforms.\n\n\"Come on. This way,\" he said.\n\nDrake followed without asking any more questions. If Sully had a particular way he wanted the answer to unfold, Drake would indulge him. He'd earned that, and far more, in the years they'd been friends. He studied Sully as they reached a staircase and started down to a lower level. A drinker and an inveterate ladies' man, he looked, as always, as if he would have been more at home gambling in 1950s Havana than dealing with twenty-first-century America. His graying hair looked a bit unruly, and dark circles under his eyes implied he hadn't gotten a lot of sleep the night before. He wore a brown leather bomber jacket over one of his guayaberas\u2014linen shirts that were most popular in Latin America and the Caribbean. Both the shirt and the khaki pants he was wearing were rumpled, indicating that whatever sleep he had gotten, he'd been wearing the same clothes since the day before.\n\nIt had been almost two months since Drake had seen Sully, but they'd spoken on the phone less than a week ago, and at the time there'd been no indication that anything was amiss. But murder gave no warning.\n\nSully led him through the lower-level concourse and past the arched entrances to a warren of underground railway tunnels until at last he turned through one of those archways and walked down a dozen steps to a train platform. Lights flickered unreliably in the darkness of the ceiling above them. The rumble of trains both near and distant made it feel like at any moment the world might shake itself apart. The noise reminded Drake of counting the seconds between thunder strikes as a child, trying to figure out how far away the storm might be and if the lightning might be coming his way.\n\nNo train awaited them at the platform. Drake had half expected that they were about to embark on a journey, but if they were, it apparently wouldn't be by train. The tracks were empty, and other than themselves, the platform looked abandoned\u2014except for the yellow line of police tape that had been used to cordon off the end of the platform from the public. Drake didn't have to ask; he knew where they were headed now.\n\nTwo platforms over, a train clanked and hissed, waiting as a few stragglers hurried alongside it. A conductor stood outside the door, ushering them along. The man glanced at Drake and Sully. Once upon a time he would have minded his own business\u2014New York had been that kind of town\u2014but after 9/11 all that had changed. Sully knew it, too, because he stopped at the crime scene tape, making no move to go beyond it. They were suspicious enough just being down here without any obvious reason. Drake thought maybe the conductor would think they were plainclothes detectives, but then he realized they were probably underdressed for that. And if he had caught a glimpse of the guayabera under Sully's bomber jacket, the man would know right off the bat they weren't cops. Most police kept their quirks on the inside.\n\nStanding by the police tape, Sully withdrew a cigar from inside his jacket pocket. He wasn't much for rules, but he didn't light it, just stuck it between his lips and rolled it around in his teeth for a minute, thinking. Drake had never known him to be a man prone to rumination.\n\n\"You're starting to freak me out a little, Sully. How about you start by telling me who died?\"\n\nSully stared at a spot beyond the police tape for a moment longer, then took the cigar from his mouth and turned to Drake.\n\n\"This platform's been closed since last night. A train came in from Connecticut\u2014plenty of stops along the way\u2014and when it left, there was an old steamer trunk on the platform. Mostly people were getting on, leaving the city, but there were some arriving, too. One of the conductors remembered the trunk and that two men were sitting near it. He assumed they had carried it on but didn't look too closely at them. Dark coats; that's all he remembers.\"\n\nSully shook his head, eyes narrowed in frustration. \"Think about that, Nate. Anything in the world could have been in that trunk. The whole thing could have been full of Semtex or something. Can you imagine explosives in that kind of volume detonating under the city? We're so obsessed with planes, but nobody's paying attention to \u2026\"\n\nHe trailed off, taking a breath. He looked more angry than grieving, but Drake knew Sully well enough to see that he was both.\n\n\"So, this trunk wasn't filled with explosives?\" Drake ventured.\n\nSully shot him a hard look. \"I was making a point. But no, it wasn't. Place reacted like it could've been, though. Hundreds of trains were prevented from coming in, thousands of people evacuated. Transportation Authority brought in counterterrorism agents, and NYPD had a bomb squad down here. Bomb-sniffing dogs didn't get a read on it, but they were still treating it like it was going to explode. A couple of the guys who wrangle those dogs\u2014one of them used to train them to sniff for corpses, and he knows the smell pretty well. He said he thought there was a body in the trunk. Turned out he was right.\"\n\nDrake put a hand on his shoulder, hating to see his friend in pain. \"Sully\u2014\"\n\n\"It was Luka,\" Sully said, his jaw working, eyes flashing with anger. \"But not all of him, Nate. No arms and no legs. Just his torso. They'd cut his head off, too, but at least that was in the trunk. Whoever killed him, they didn't amputate his limbs to make it harder to ID him or they wouldn't have put his\u2014\"\n\nSully faltered. Sneering, he jammed the cigar back into his mouth and stared again at the area beyond the yellow tape. The train two platforms away pulled out, clanking loudly, and Drake wondered if the conductor was still watching them. He wondered why the cops or the FBI weren't on top of them already, wondering what they were doing there. If the trunk had been filled with explosives instead of Sully's dead friend, they would never have been able to come down here without being stopped. But murder didn't get the same attention.\n\nIn his life, Luka Hzujak had been an archaeologist, a college professor, and a collector of antiquities. He had also been one of Victor Sullivan's oldest and dearest friends, a man who saw the modern understanding of history as just as much a mystery as the unfolding of tomorrow. Luka was known for pissing off his colleagues and employers because he refused to settle for the currently accepted versions of historical episodes, particularly from ancient times. In recent years he had established himself as a successful author of controversial histories written in language accessible to the general public. Drake had met Luka perhaps a dozen times and had liked him a great deal. He could picture the man's mischievous face and the way he'd always stroked his goatee like some cartoon devil. Luka had never condemned Sully for the work he and Drake did, mostly because he thought the most significant evidence available to challenge historians' version of the past came from tomb raiders and treasure hunters.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Sully,\" Drake said. \"Something like that\u2014it shouldn't happen to anyone, never mind someone like Luka. Have the cops turned up anything?\"\n\nDrake didn't bother asking where Sully had gotten his information about the discovery of the body. It seemed clear he had a source in the NYPD, which really came as no surprise. Sully seemed to have a drinking buddy or a gambling compadre just about everywhere. Six years past, they had spent a few rainy weeks in Bhutan searching for ancient demon and animal masks. The first day, they had gone to the marketplace to find something to keep the rain off them, and a man selling goat cheese and wine had clapped Sully on the back and hugged him like a long-lost brother. When the guy had stepped back, Drake had seen the wary suspicion in the merchant's eyes. He and Sully were friends, but they didn't trust each other. That seemed to be a common dynamic, and it extended from Bhutan to the United States to Easter Island. Drake trusted Sully, at least most days, but one of the first things the man had taught him was that a certain amount of mistrust was healthy and would keep him alive.\n\nBut Sully's NYPD contact hadn't been much help.\n\n\"They've got squat,\" Sully said.\n\nDrake frowned, turning to look up at the flickering lights. \"Seriously? It's Grand Central. They've got to have cameras everywhere.\"\n\n\" 'Course they do. Doesn't mean they all work. When the budget's tight, choices have to be made. Some things fall by the wayside,\" Sully said, turning to look at him again. \"But we've got something the cops don't.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\nThe look in Sully's eyes was a mixture of pain and pride. \"We have Jada.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "Drake and Sully took the subway train that shuttled passengers between Grand Central and Times Square, then boarded another subway car, this one headed north. They sat quietly together, Sully warily watching other passengers. The lights flickered on and off, making strange scars out of the scratches some vandals had put on the windows. The seat beneath Drake had been sliced open, but that didn't bother him as much as the smell that permeated the air, trace aromas of sweat and urine, like the ghost of someone else's stink. The car rattled on the tracks, rocking back and forth in a lulling motion that might have put Drake to sleep on a day without murder in it.\n\nSully glanced around, more paranoid than Drake had ever seen him.\n\n\"What's going on, Sully?\" Drake said, voice low. He glanced around to see if anyone was paying attention to them, his friend's paranoia contagious. But it was the New York subway; as a rule, people tended to pretend they were the only ones on the train. \"How come you've got Jada hidden away?\"\n\n\"It wasn't my idea,\" Sully muttered, glancing sharply at Drake. \"She won't talk to the cops 'cause she's afraid of ending up just as dead as her father.\"\n\n\"She knows who did it?\" Drake asked, intrigued.\n\n\"No. But she might know why. Now shut your trap. We'll be there soon enough.\"\n\nDrake didn't argue. He could see Luka's murder had Sully spooked. If he wanted to be overcautious because he feared Jada might also be in danger, Drake wouldn't blame him. Sully was the girl's godfather, and he took the role seriously. With Luka dead, he would do whatever he had to in order to make sure the girl was taken care of.\n\nThough she wasn't really a girl anymore, was she? The last time Drake had seen Jadranka Hzujak, she had been eleven or twelve years old. In the intervening years, he had been vaguely aware that the girl had been growing up, but it had been happening so far off his radar that it was difficult to imagine Jada as an adult. Five or six years ago, he and Sully had gotten together with Luka and had dinner in a little dive in Soho that looked like it hadn't changed in decades. Over dinner, Luka had mentioned that Jada had been enjoying college, which meant she had to be in her mid-twenties now. But he couldn't shake the image of the little girl she'd been out of his mind.\n\nAs the train pulled into the 79th Street station, Sully tapped Drake on the knee and got up, slipping through the standing passengers. Drake followed, smiling as he made his way around a prodigiously pregnant young woman.\n\nOn the platform, Sully leaned up against the side of a newsstand and waited for the train to close its doors and pull away. Drake thought he was being overly cautious, but he had altered his travel plans and come to New York and been in motion since he had gotten off the plane at JFK. A couple of minutes just standing still was welcome. Besides, he knew this game. Sully wanted to wait for the platform to clear to make it more difficult for anyone who might be trying to follow them to remain inconspicuous.\n\nWhen the disgorged passengers had scattered and the train was gone, Sully fell into step beside Drake and the two of them went up the stairs in silence. Outside, the chilly autumn breeze swept along the sidewalk and the afternoon shadows had grown longer. Sully turned uptown, and Drake waited patiently until they were half a block from the subway station entrance before speaking again.\n\n\"Come on, Sully,\" Drake said. \"Patience is a virtue, but it's never been one of mine. You dragged me halfway across the country\u2014\"\n\n\"You were in Chicago. That's not even close to halfway.\"\n\nDrake frowned. \"I was never good at fractions. And that's not the point. Luka is dead, and from the way you're acting, it's obvious you think whoever killed him isn't going to stop there. If you're gonna drag me into a situation where I might end up in a trunk with some of my pieces missing, I'd at least like to know what I'm getting myself into.\"\n\nSully shot him a hard look. \"So would I.\"\n\nHe let out a long breath, relenting, and glanced around to make sure no one was paying them any extra attention, then shoved his hands in his pockets and kept his gaze forward, talking quietly.\n\n\"Here's the lowdown,\" Sully began. \"Maybe you remember that Jada's mother died when she was a kid.\"\n\n\"Breast cancer, wasn't it?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"Lungs,\" Sully corrected. \"Luka remarried a couple of years back, a woman named Olivia. Jada called her the 'wicked stepmother.' Olivia Hzujak works for a company called Phoenix Innovations. CEO is a guy called Tyr Henriksen\u2014Norwegian, I think. Phoenix is mainly a weapons manufacturer, with business partners around the world, but they have a research division that keeps things pretty hush-hush.\"\n\n\"Why does the name ring a bell?\" Drake asked, wary as a car slowed in his peripheral vision. It turned out to be a taxi letting off a passenger, but Sully had him jumping at shadows. \"Tyr Henriksen, not the corporation.\"\n\n\"Thought you'd catch that,\" Sully replied. \"Henriksen's an antiquities collector, and he doesn't mind acquiring things in a shady fashion if the aboveboard approach doesn't work.\"\n\n\"He'll hire smugglers and thieves if he has to,\" Drake clarified.\n\nSully arched an eyebrow. \"I know. Can you imagine? Rogues and villains.\"\n\nDrake said nothing. Sully was joking, but Drake didn't think it was funny. He bent the rules and sometimes he broke them, and his line of work put him into contact with some pretty unsavory characters, but he didn't consider himself one of them.\n\n\"Three months ago, Henriksen reached out to Luka through Olivia, trying to get him involved in a private project,\" Sully went on. \"Luka had a bad feeling about Henriksen's proposal, I guess. He did some poking, started doing the research Henriksen wanted, and stumbled across something that worried him enough that he quit. Only he didn't really quit. He kept working on the project, but for himself instead of for Tyr Henriksen.\"\n\n\"This is all pretty vague.\"\n\nThey'd walked a couple of blocks and now came to a stop at the corner of 81st Street and Broadway, waiting for the light to change. There was a Starbucks at the southeast corner of the intersection and Drake found himself craving coffee, but he kept his focus on Sully and the people around them. A young professional woman, he guessed Indian or Pakistani, walked a tiny mincing dog. Two men crossed at the light, carrying Starbucks cups and laughing together. Drake didn't see any threat, but he felt it, though he figured that was mostly the picture the day had painted thus far.\n\n\"At first, all Luka would tell Jada was that Henriksen had wanted him to solve a mystery for him and that there was treasure at the heart of it. Something priceless,\" Sully said. \"Something\u2014\"\n\n\"Worth killing for,\" Drake finished.\n\n\"Looks that way, doesn't it?\" Sully asked.\n\nThe light changed, and they continued north along Broadway.\n\n\"So Luka wanted the treasure for himself,\" Drake said.\n\n\"It doesn't feel right to me. Luka wouldn't have put himself on the line like that. He loved his work and he loved his daughter, and I always had the impression he was content with that.\"\n\n\"No offense, Sully, but you saw Luka once every couple of years. People change. And even if Luka didn't change, you can't climb inside someone's head and see the world the way they see it.\"\n\nBut Sully was shaking his head. \"No way. I knew him as well as I know you. And Jada's with me. She says her dad wasn't excited the way someone who thought they were going to get their hands on something special would be. She says her old man just seemed afraid. When she pressed him about it, he told her Henriksen's project was dangerous and the only way to stop him was to find the treasure before he did.\"\n\nThey turned on 82nd Street. An old man passed them, his long wool coat too large for his age-shrunken frame, and Sully waited until they were a dozen paces beyond him before he paused and faced Drake.\n\n\"Look, Nate, here's what it comes down to. Luka\u2014he was one of the good guys. I want to make sure whoever killed him pays the price. Beyond that, Jada wants to finish this project. It cost her father his life, and she intends to see it through for him. I plan to be a part of that. I'm not as young as I used to be, and she's not used to people trying to kill her, so we could use your help. If you end up in a shallow grave somewhere, at least you'll know you went out doing something good.\"\n\nDrake arched an eyebrow, unable to hide his wry smile. \"Well, when you put it that way, how could I resist?\"\n\nSully clapped him on the shoulder. \"Thanks. It means a lot.\"\n\n\"Don't get all mushy, Sully. You'll make me blush.\"\n\nSully rolled his eyes and turned away, cutting diagonally across the street toward a five-story building that took up half the block, which consisted of a row of apartment houses. Drake waited for a messenger on an old moped to buzz past and then followed. The Upper West Side of Manhattan seemed like a nice place to live, with trees planted along the sidewalk and waist-high wrought-iron gates in front of short pathways that led to front doors. The apartment building had red doors, dormers on either end and a little chalet-style peak in the center. Sully went all the way to the last door at the end of the block, where 82nd Street met West End Avenue.\n\nDrake followed him into the foyer. Sully hit a button labeled Gorinsky, and they were buzzed in immediately.\n\nTheir destination turned out to be an apartment on the fourth floor at the rear of the building. According to Sully, it belonged to an old college friend of Jada's who was studying overseas and had left her a key and an invitation to use the place any time she was in the city. If there was an elevator, Drake didn't see it, and he was impressed by how little difficulty Sully had with the stairs. Not that he expected his old friend to collapse halfway up, but Sully wasn't getting any younger, and smoking cigars wasn't exactly the athlete's number one hobby.\n\nThe apartment door opened before they reached it. The woman who stood just across the threshold could have passed for a teenager at first glance. She wore a long-sleeved cream-colored top, tight black pants, and plain black boots, useful instead of trendy. Her hair was black, but the long bangs that framed her face had been dyed a vivid magenta. But with a second look, Drake saw the power in her five-foot-three frame and the intelligence glinting in her hazel eyes.\n\nJada Hzujak was definitely not a kid anymore.\n\n\"What the hell are you doing?\" Sully asked quietly, hustling her back into the apartment. \"You didn't even ask who it was before you buzzed us in.\"\n\nJada lifted her chin, ready for a fight. \"I'm not stupid, Uncle Vic. There's a camera in the foyer, remember? I watched for you.\"\n\nShe jerked a thumb at the intercom panel by the door. Drake couldn't see it from out in the hall, but he figured Sully was getting a look at a screen where someone in the apartment could see who was buzzing from down below and feeling pretty sheepish. That made Drake smile. He didn't get to see Sully put in his place very often.\n\nThen Jada looked at him. \"Are you just gonna stand in the hallway, smiling like an idiot, or are you coming in?\"\n\n\"I wasn't sure myself for a minute,\" Drake replied, \"but I guess I'm coming in.\"\n\nJada stood back to let him enter, then shut and locked the door behind him. Drake glanced at Sully.\n\n\"Cat got your tongue, 'Uncle Vic'?\"\n\n\"Shut up,\" Sully snarled.\n\nThe apartment was neat to the point of being spartan, decorated in bland colors by someone without a lot of imagination. The few pieces of art on the walls all seemed to have been chosen to match the decor instead of the other way around. The only signs of habitation were the throw pillows in disarray on the sofa and the mess of papers and books on the floor and coffee table nearby.\n\n\"Jada, you may not remember Nate\u2014\" Sully began.\n\n\"I remember him just fine,\" Jada said, tucking a magenta lock behind her ear as she regarded Drake coolly. \"Though in my memory you're taller.\"\n\nDrake smiled. \"Well, to be fair, you were shorter back then.\"\n\n\"You were cuter, too.\"\n\nHis smile vanished. \"So were you. In a bossy ten-year-old girl kinda way.\"\n\n\"I was twelve.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nJada laughed, then immediately sobered, as if she felt guilty for feeling any levity at all in a world where her father had been brutally murdered. She managed a small, melancholy smile, just the slightest acknowledgment that she'd enjoyed the sparring, and then turned back to Sully.\n\n\"I kept working while you were out,\" she said. \"I wanted to have something to show you when you got back.\"\n\nSully followed her over to the sofa and sat on the edge as she started to arrange the papers on the coffee table, then lifted a few of them off the floor. From where he stood, Drake saw that many of the papers were drawings of what looked like mazes, but they were fully rendered illustrations, not a crude puzzle maker's doodling.\n\n\"How much did you tell him?\" Jada asked Sully.\n\n\"Just about Henriksen, and Luka being afraid. I didn't get into any of the historical stuff,\" Sully replied.\n\n\" 'He' is standing right here,\" Drake said, then looked from Jada to Sully. \"And I thought she didn't know what this mysterious project was.\"\n\n\" 'She' knew a little and is trying to figure out the rest,\" Jada said, cocking her head and studying him. \"What do you know about alchemy?\"\n\nDrake shrugged. \"What's to know? Crazy people thought they could turn random other metals into gold. And how cool would that be? Although treasure hunters would be out of work.\"\n\nJada picked up an old book, its dust jacket yellowed and torn at the edges. He could barely make out the title, Science, Magic & Society.\n\n\"You don't look like the homework type,\" she said. \"But if you want to read up, it might not be a bad idea. There were a lot of men through the ages\u2014almost always men\u2014who presented themselves as alchemists and claimed to be able to make gold. They claimed all kinds of other things, too. St. Germain told all of Europe he was immortal. Fulcanelli had a reputation as a sorcerer. Nicholas Flamel supposedly unlocked the secrets of the philosopher's stone.\"\n\nDrake picked up the book and flipped a few pages. \"Actually, my favorite was always Ostanes the Persian. You know, the guy who was with Xerxes during the invasion of Greece? Apparently introduced the black arts into the Hellenic world? Quite a rascal, that one.\"\n\nJada gave him an appreciative nod.\n\n\"The crack about homework?\" she said. \"I take it back.\"\n\nDrake sat on the sofa, attentive as a schoolboy.\n\n\"Don't be impressed,\" Sully sniffed. \"You can't be in the business of acquiring antiquities without knowing the major alchemists.\"\n\n\"I collect all the trading cards,\" Drake put in.\n\nSully shot him a withering glance. Drake wondered if it was meant to stop him from making jokes or from flirting. Not that he meant anything by the flirting. It was a nervous habit he'd developed when he was around women who intrigued him, and Jada definitely intrigued him. Stunning, smart, and fierce, she still managed to have a sense of mischief that he admired. However, Sully was obviously protective of her, and Drake had no intention of testing that.\n\n\"I've been taking notes, trying to make sense of the things I remember my father saying in the past few weeks,\" Jada explained, gesturing to the papers. \"Uncle Vic and I went to the library this morning after he called you, and I tried to find the books I remembered my dad was so fascinated by late in the summer. A couple of them I couldn't find, but I tried to get things that seemed the most similar.\"\n\n\"What interests me the most is what I didn't find,\" she went on, turning to Drake. \"One of the last things I remember my father saying about all of this was that he'd found some connection between all of what he called 'the great alchemists' and King Midas.\"\n\n\"Not much of a stretch,\" Sully said. \"Midas was supposed to be able to turn things to gold just by touching them.\"\n\nDrake leaned forward, reaching for one of the maze drawings. \"Maybe I missed something, but last I checked, Midas was just a myth.\"\n\nJada nodded. \"Maybe. But my father always said that every legend has at least a little history at its core.\"\n\n\"What are all these?\" Drake asked, holding up the maze drawing.\n\nShe took it from his hand. \"My dad had been doing tons of research, but his inquiries were split pretty evenly on two subjects. The first was alchemy. The other one was labyrinths.\"\n\n\"What's the connection?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"We don't know yet,\" Sully said, sifting through the illustrations. \"Jada dug up references this morning on some of the more famous labyrinths.\"\n\n\"Sketching helps me think,\" Jada said. \"Most of the ancient labyrinths only exist as ruins and foundations, but archaeologists think they've got some of them figured out. There are diagrams. I tried drawing them, trying to find design connections, that kind of thing.\"\n\n\"Any luck?\" Drake asked.\n\nJada's expression turned contemplative. \"A little,\" she said, reaching for a larger book from the coffee table. \"But the biggest piece of luck was right in front of me from the second we found this book in the library, and it took me until about twenty minutes ago to realize it.\"\n\nShe tapped the cover, drawing their attention to the author's name: Maynard P. Cheney.\n\n\"You know him?\" Sully asked.\n\n\"No,\" Jada said. \"But my father had been talking to the guy constantly in the last few weeks. Cheney is working on a new exhibit for the Museum of Natural History. Want to guess the subject?\"\n\nDrake held up the labyrinth illustration in his hand and raised his eyebrows.\n\n\"Exactly,\" Jada said, nodding.\n\n\"The museum's only a few blocks from here,\" Sully said as he stood.\n\n\"Let's go have a talk with Mr. Cheney,\" Drake replied, setting the illustration aside.\n\nJada rose, and they both turned to look at her. She seemed confused for a moment, and then her eyes flashed with anger.\n\n\"Oh, hell no,\" she said, glancing back and forth between them. \"My father is dead, and this guy might help us figure out why. If you want some girl who's going to lock the door and hide behind the sofa, then you've got the wrong damsel in distress.\"\n\nSully looked like he might argue, the thought of Jada in danger making him go pale, but one look from her and he didn't put up an argument. Drake liked her more and more.\n\nAs Jada opened the door and led the way into the hall, he glanced at Sully. \"I guess she's coming along.\"\n\nSully gave a wan smile. \"You want to try to stop her?\"\n\nDrake followed Jada out the door. \"Not in the least.\"\n\nAs they walked down 81st Street, Drake hung back a ways, keeping an eye on Sully and Jada but also keenly aware of their surroundings. He checked every pedestrian and every vehicle but saw no sign that they were being followed. On the way uptown, he had considered Sully's paranoia excessive, but now he wasn't so sure. They had only the edges of the puzzle surrounding Luka's murder, but if he had made some huge discovery involving alchemy, that likely meant gold. Maybe a lot of gold. And there were a great many people who would do just about anything for such treasure. He scanned the windows and rooftops but realized that it had become his turn to be overly paranoid. Even if Luka's killers\u2014and logic suggested there was more than one, considering how much effort it required to sneak a steamer trunk with a corpse inside it onto a train platform without anyone noticing\u2014had found out where Jada had been hiding, they could not have predicted which route Drake and Sully and Jada would take when leaving the apartment.\n\nStill, he was worried. As they walked, he turned the whole thing over in his mind. Luka's wife had made the introductions between her husband and her employer. Drake wasn't sure what her position was at Phoenix Innovations, but it stood to reason that she knew at least some of the details of the secret project Henriksen wanted Luka to work on. When Luka turned him down and started working on it himself, that would have put Olivia in a difficult position. Would she have told Henriksen what her husband was up to?\n\nJada referred to Olivia as her \"wicked stepmother.\" It might be a family joke, but Drake doubted it. The question was whether Olivia Hzujak valued her job more than she did her marriage. And if she had told Henriksen what Luka had been up to, would this billionaire CEO have gone so far as to have the man murdered?\n\nDrake didn't know. But someone had killed Luka, and to do it in such an odd and gruesome fashion\u2014well, the killers hadn't tried to hide their work. On the contrary, they had virtually assured that the whole world would know of it. By now, details of the discovery of Luka's body would be on every news channel and all over the Internet.\n\nSomething didn't click there. If Henriksen had wanted Luka dead, would he have made such a spectacle of the crime? It seemed far too great a risk for a man with so much to lose.\n\nRuminating on it, he picked up his pace as Sully and Jada passed the museum on the right and reached the corner of Central Park West. They looked comfortable together, like father and daughter. Sully spent most of his time focusing on his own fortunes, so it was fascinating to watch him become so wrapped up in someone else's. He had no children of his own, but Jada was his goddaughter, and it was pretty clear he would do anything to protect her. Even if Drake hadn't wanted to help Jada\u2014which he did both for her own sake and because the puzzle intrigued him\u2014he would have been on board just because Sully had asked.\n\nIt was the one thing that Drake and Jada had in common. As of this morning, Sully was the closest thing either one of them had to family. Drake hustled up the museum steps and through the door, finding Sully and Jada waiting for him just inside.\n\n\"Anything?\" Sully asked.\n\n\"Not that I saw,\" Drake replied, \"but I'm no detective, so what do I know?\"\n\nSully frowned. \"Nah. If they knew where Jada was, they'd have tailed us from the apartment.\"\n\nJada looked relieved as Sully headed off toward the information desk. For a person who had learned of her father's murder only half a day before, she was holding together well.\n\nBy the time they caught up to Sully, he already had spoken to the neatly attired man behind the desk, who had picked up a phone and was having a conversation while half turned away from them. A moment later he hung up the phone and informed them that someone from Dr. Cheney's team would be down to fetch them momentarily. Drake fought the temptation to make a crack about anyone \"fetching\" them and joined Sully and Jada in standing around an enormous plant, trying not to look awkward.\n\nAn attractive young woman arrived to fetch them, introducing herself as a graduate student working with Dr. Cheney. She wore her hair up in a loose bun, artfully disarrayed, and though her dark red sweater and gray skirt were fashionable and neat, Drake thought she looked more like a movie superspy masquerading as a museum employee than an actual graduate student. She made him want to enroll in classes or become a museum curator, and though Jada and Sully asked her questions while she let them up to the second floor, Drake missed the initial bits of conversation.\n\n\"\u2014honestly surprised that the board went along with it,\" the woman said as she marched up the stairs ahead of them. \"Whitney Memorial Hall has been used for special exhibits numerous times, but in this case, they actually relocated the oceanic birds exhibit to the Akeley Gallery. Most of the birds, I should say. The Akeley is a smaller space, so some had to be put into storage. In any case, it underscores how enthusiastic they are about Dr. Cheney's work that they're willing to go to that extent. He's been working night and day for weeks in preparation.\"\n\nThey reached the top of the stairs in a wide rotunda. Through a huge entryway behind him, Drake saw elephants, and the sight saddened him. He had seen the real thing, up close and personal and on their own territory, and encountering them here felt almost grotesque.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he said, tearing his attention away from the elephant. \"I zoned out for a second. What's this exhibit Mr. Cheney's working on?\"\n\nThe question earned him a look of scorn from their guide. \"Dr. Cheney's exhibit is called 'Labyrinths of the Ancient World.' His research into historical records and the physical evidence has been groundbreaking.\"\n\n\"And he's the curator of the exhibit?\" Jada asked.\n\n\"Of course,\" the graduate student sniffed, growing impatient and visibly irritated at their ignorance.\n\nWithout another word, all courtesy forgotten, she strode from the rotunda and down a short corridor past restrooms and a coatroom. A velvet rope blocked the huge rollaway doors at the end of the corridor. A small brass stand bore a sign that asked patrons to pardon the museum for its appearance while a new exhibit was being installed.\n\n\"They should switch her to public relations,\" Drake muttered to Sully and Jada. \"Doesn't she just exude a welcoming warmth?\"\n\nSully shot him a remonstrative glance, but Jada said nothing. She wore a hopeful expression as they followed their guide past the velvet rope. The graduate student used a key to unlock the large doors and slid one side open just wide enough for them to pass through.\n\n\"Dr. Cheney's locked in here?\" Jada asked.\n\n\"There's an employee entrance as well. This was just the most convenient way to bring you in. And Maynard has a key, of course.\"\n\nDrake tried to hide his smile. Oh, it's Maynard now. Someone had a little crush on her boss. It would have been adorable if she hadn't been such a condescending witch.\n\nThey entered the exhibit after she and Drake nearly collided with Sully and Jada, who had stopped to admire Dr. Cheney's work. Drake's eyes widened as he took in their surroundings. Just ahead of them were two massive stones engraved with ancient languages: Greek on one side and Egyptian hieroglyphics on the other. A banner hung on the wall to the right, trumpeting the name of the exhibit\u2014\"Labyrinths of the Ancient World\"\u2014along with the tagline \"Can You Find Your Way Out?\"\n\n\"No way,\" Jada whispered.\n\n\"Actually, I kinda think 'way,' \" Drake replied.\n\nThe graduate student slid the door shut behind them but didn't bother with the lock. Apparently she didn't think they would be there very long.\n\n\"If you'll follow me,\" she said, \"I'll take you through the labyrinth. Please don't touch anything, and no photographs, of course.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Sully said drily.\n\nThe labyrinth exhibit had been constructed as a maze, with information imparted along the way through diagrams and scale models. Monitors had been installed in the walls to show animated recreations of the construction of the labyrinths, and at regular intervals there were cutouts in the walls where ancient artifacts had been placed behind thick glass. Some of the plaques identifying those objects were not yet in place and some of the cutouts were still empty, but Drake had the idea that the time was not far off when the exhibit would make its debut. And what a debut it would be. He felt certain that crowds would flock to the museum to lose themselves in the labyrinth Dr. Cheney had built.\n\nWhat the irritated graduate student led them through was not a full-size labyrinth but only a tiny fragment created to give visitors the illusion that they were lost in a vast, sprawling maze. As they turned sharply angled corners and then doubled back again, Drake decided that Dr. Cheney had done an excellent job. In fact, being lost was no illusion at all. He imagined that when the exhibit was completed, there would be arrows or some other indicator to let people know if they were headed in the right direction, but he would have been lost without their guide, and he thought the same must be true of Sully and Jada.\n\n\"Is there a Minotaur?\" Jada asked.\n\nThe graduate student glanced back at them over her shoulder and smirked. \"No. But there will be a false turn that will be very dark, and you'll hear a roar coming from it. Then the lights go out, and there's a whole display about the legend of the Minotaur. We're supposed to focus on history, not myth, but people who come to an exhibit on labyrinths are going to expect something on the legend.\"\n\nJada started to reply but never got the words out. Whatever she might have said was interrupted by a horrible scream that echoed through the labyrinth, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. A man's voice, in panic and pain.\n\n\"What the hell\u2014\" Sully growled.\n\nThe graduate student froze. \"Maynard?\" she called, panic in her eyes.\n\nDrake and Jada exchanged a glance, and he could tell by the way she stood that they were doing the same thing: listening, trying to figure out the source of the scream. In the labyrinth, it might be impossible to pinpoint.\n\n\"This way,\" Drake said, taking a left turn.\n\n\"No,\" their guide said, grabbing his arm. \"That's a dead end.\"\n\nShe walked straight ahead, and for a heartbeat Drake thought she would collide with the wall. Only when she passed through it did he see the opening; an optical illusion had made it seem like an unbroken surface. Dr. Cheney had outdone himself in creating his labyrinth exhibit, but the time to appreciate it had passed.\n\nDrake, Sully, and Jada followed her through the opening and around a sharp turn that brought them to a fork.\n\n\"Which way?\" Jada asked.\n\nThe graduate student seemed about to go right, but then there came a crash of glass and the thump of a heavy impact against the walls. Drake darted past the woman, down the corridor to the left. The sound had been close, and with the thud on the wall, there was no question about direction now.\n\nDrake darted around a floor display, brushed the fake stone wall, and took a jag to the right. It felt like he'd reversed direction; for a second he thought the maze had misled him, but then it split into two narrow passages, one in either direction, and he turned left again, rushing in the direction of the crash. He heard Sully, Jada, and their guide pursuing him but didn't slow. That scream had been one not of fear but of pain. And more than pain. He had heard men scream like that only in the worst of circumstances, when blood had been shed and life was fleeting.\n\n\"Nate, watch your ass!\" Sully shouted.\n\nDrake slowed, taking heed of the warning. They'd heard no gunshots, but he had no way of knowing what waited for them ahead. He dashed past a yawning darkness to his right and wondered if that was where the Minotaur's roar eventually would be heard. Then he reached a turn where the ceiling sloped downward to an arched entryway. He ducked through and nearly tripped over a man sprawled on the floor.\n\n\"Damn it,\" he muttered, regaining his footing.\n\nA quick glance at the man's dull, vacant eyes\u2014and the stab wounds in his chest and the blood staining his clothes and pooling under him\u2014was enough to tell Drake he wasn't going to make it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Blood bubbled from Dr. Cheney's lips as he tried to breathe, and his whole body shook.\n\nDrake surveyed the scene in an instant. A display case had been shattered in the man's struggle with the murderer. Blood smeared on the wall showed where the dying man had crashed into it, trying to keep himself from falling.\n\nSully, Jada, and their guide ducked through the low passage, and when the graduate student saw the dying man, she screamed his name.\n\n\"Maynard!\" she cried, and rushed to kneel at his side, murmuring denials and prayers in a torrent of heartbreak.\n\n\"Don't touch him,\" Sully warned as she went to try to lift his head.\n\nThe woman glanced up in confusion, but Drake saw in her eyes that she understood Sully's caution. The police would not want the crime scene disturbed. She wanted to help the curator, but anyone could see there was nothing she could do.\n\nDrake turned away from her anguish. He ran to the next bend in the corridor and peered around the corner, listening for retreating footfalls. They were no more than thirty seconds behind the killer, but that could be an eternity if the bastard knew where he was going. He was about to give chase anyway but hesitated.\n\n\"Hey,\" he said, rushing back to the others, realizing he didn't know the graduate student's name. \"Which way is the staff entrance you were talking about?\"\n\nShe blinked, lifted her gaze from the dying Dr. Cheney, and looked at him. \"Back there,\" she said, glancing the way they'd come. \"Through the Minotaur's alcove. It's the dark area on the left as you\u2014\"\n\nBut Drake had stopped listening. He remembered. They had just passed it, probably only a second or two before the killer had gone into that darkness. He might even have been hiding there in the shadows, waiting as they went by so as not to make any noise.\n\n\"Stay with her,\" he told Sully.\n\nSully nodded, though he didn't look happy about it.\n\nDrake ran through the passage in a crouch, standing as he emerged in the corridor. He heard Jada following, wished she would wait with Sully, but didn't take the time to argue with her. A couple of hours with the adult Jada Hzujak and he knew she wasn't the sort of woman who was going to sit idly by when it came time for action.\n\nThey raced through two turns of the labyrinth, retracing their steps, and came to the Minotaur's alcove. Drake didn't slow, plunging into the darkness, hands in front of him. He stumbled over loose cables on the floor but caught himself on the wall at the rear of the alcove.\n\n\"Watch your step, Jada,\" he said, his eyes adjusting as he found a doorknob and twisted it, bursting through into a narrow, dimly lit corridor that looked nothing like the interior of the labyrinth.\n\nSound equipment and a workbench blocked the way to the right, so they went left, hurtling down the narrow hall created by the hollow backs of the labyrinth's walls. Plywood and two-by-fours and bare bulbs made him think of being backstage in a theater.\n\nWhat the hell am I doing? Drake thought. Luka had been murdered, and now Dr. Cheney, who apparently had helped him in his labyrinth research, was dying. Whatever Luka had discovered, someone didn't want anybody talking about it. If the killers thought that Jada's father might have shared his secrets with her, she would be a target as well, just as she had feared, and yet here they were chasing after one of the very people who would want her dead.\n\nThe corridor cut diagonally to the right, and he followed it. It zigzagged in between turns in the labyrinth, a hidden space, a maze within the maze. He could hear Jada's footfalls right behind him, her breathing so close that he practically could feel it, and he knew they were being foolish taking this risk. But he also knew that she wanted answers and would never stop just to save herself.\n\nThe maze ended abruptly. The walls on either side cut away, the halls of the labyrinth turning, but their narrow corridor arrived at a pair of double metal doors with an exit sign glowing above them and a warning placard stating the door was for the use of staff only.\n\nDrake slammed through the door and found himself on a stairwell landing. Jada skidded to a halt beside him, looking first up and then down.\n\n\"Which way?\" she asked, her hazel eyes alight with fierce determination, her magenta bangs framing her face.\n\n\"No way to tell,\" Drake said. \"And we'd be fools to try guessing. We've gotta get back to Sully and get out of here.\"\n\n\"What?\" Jada snapped, turning on him. \"Dr. Cheney's our one lead, and he's back there dying. If we catch this guy, we could make him tell us\u2014\"\n\nDrake shook his head. \"We're not gonna catch him. He's got a head start, and we don't know where he is or what he looks like. Whether he went up or down, by now he's mixed in with employees or with visitors and is on his way out of this place. Best thing to do right now is get you the hell out of here.\"\n\nJada's eyes narrowed. \"You think I'm in danger?\"\n\n\"You were hiding out in a friend's apartment because you thought you were in danger,\" Drake reminded her. \"It's just that now I believe you.\"\n\n\"Nice,\" Jada said. \"Didn't you used to be charming?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Strangely, I'm not in the mood today.\"\n\nJada's flinty exterior gave way, and for a moment he saw the pain and vulnerability beneath.\n\n\"Come on,\" she said. \"Let's move.\"\n\nShe ran back down the sawdust-smelling corridor. Drake followed, wondering where it would all lead. He and Sully weren't bodyguards or private detectives, and they sure as hell weren't cops. This wasn't a job for them, but Sully would never see it that way, and Drake had the feeling that he himself was already in too deep to walk away.\n\nJada had left the door to the Minotaur's alcove partway open, but when they went back through it, Drake closed it tightly and wiped the knobs on both sides, his mind racing ahead. The police would be there any minute, and then all their options would be taken away from them. Whatever happened after that would be decided by the detectives running the case.\n\nThey ducked and went through the low-ceilinged passage, emerging just a few feet from where two security guards stood by Dr. Maynard Cheney's body, one of them on his cell phone, reporting the crime, and the other just scratching his head in dismay.\n\nWhen Drake and Jada came in, the guards turned and one of them reached for the Taser at his side.\n\n\"Whoa!\" Drake said, putting his hands up. \"We're with them, pal.\"\n\nThe guards looked over to Sully and the graduate student, who sat against the wall a short way down the corridor.\n\n\"It's okay,\" the woman said. \"They were with me when I found him.\"\n\nThe guards ignored Drake and Jada after that. They looked quite shaken, and Drake thought they would be very relieved when the police arrived.\n\nHe glanced over at the body. Dr. Cheney lay in the same position, still bleeding, flesh turning paler as the blood drained from him. The man's chest had ceased to rise and fall. One glance at the graduate student's red-rimmed eyes and her tears and the way Sully held her\u2014self-conscious and awkward at the intimacy of her grief and the comfort he offered\u2014and it was clear no ambulance would be needed. Not that Drake had needed confirmation. The moment he had seen the extent of Cheney's wounds, he had known the man's fate was sealed.\n\n\"Uncle Vic,\" Jada said softly, her eyes beginning to well up at the sight of the dead man. \"We need to go.\"\n\nSully gave a shake of his head, cautioning them to be wary of what they said around the guards. He leaned in and spoke to the graduate student in gentle tones Drake rarely had heard from him.\n\n\"Gretchen,\" he said quietly, \"tell them what you told me. And quickly, please. We don't have a lot of time.\"\n\nApparently the graduate student had a name, and Drake thought it fit her well. Drake and Jada drew nearer, and he glanced over his shoulder to make sure the guards weren't making any effort to overhear them.\n\nGretchen looked at Jada. \"You're Luka Hzujak's daughter?\"\n\nJada nodded.\n\n\"And he's really dead?\"\n\nJada took a deep breath, wiping away a tear, visibly fighting her grief. \"Yeah. Murdered. And whoever killed him probably killed Dr. Cheney, too.\"\n\n\"What's the connection, Gretchen?\" Drake asked quietly, glancing again at the guards, wondering how long before the police pulled up in front of the museum. \"Jada's father was studying labyrinths. He made some kind of discovery, figured out some kind of mystery that had him excited.\"\n\n\"I don't know everything,\" Gretchen said. \"It's just\u2014my God, it's just history. But I know that Maynard told Professor Hzujak about a connection he'd found between the labyrinthine tomb from Egypt's Twelfth Dynasty and the labyrinth of Knossos\u2014the one with the Minotaur\u2014\"\n\n\"I thought that was just a legend,\" Drake interrupted.\n\n\"So did I,\" Gretchen said, nodding. \"But the historical record says there was something being shown there in the first century A.D. It's accepted that the labyrinth of Knossos existed, but the question is how much of the story is real and how much is myth.\n\n\"Maynard thought he had found part of the answer. The museum is running an archaeological dig near the City of Crocodiles in Egypt right now\u2014my brother Ian is one of the managers on the project\u2014and they've found some amazing things.\"\n\n\"My father was in Egypt just a few weeks ago,\" Jada said in a hushed voice.\n\nGretchen nodded. \"Yes. He visited the dig. You didn't know why he traveled there?\"\n\nJada hugged herself. \"Research was all he told me.\"\n\n\"Maynard had been translating the writing on the artifacts that have been coming back from the dig,\" Gretchen went on. \"He found references to three different labyrinths, all in use at the same time and all designed by Daedalus.\"\n\n\"Another myth,\" Drake said.\n\n\"Based on a real person,\" Gretchen said.\n\n\"Come on, Nate,\" Sully put in. \"How many times have we proven that most legends have at least a kernel of truth?\"\n\nDrake nodded. There was no arguing with their own experiences.\n\n\"What about Midas?\" Drake asked, thinking of Luka's research into alchemy.\n\nGretchen shook her head. \"No. As far as Maynard knew, all of that 'Midas touch' stuff, turning things to gold, was just a story. It meant something, but he hadn't figured out what just yet.\"\n\n\"Dr. Cheney thought he had proven the rest, though?\" Jada asked.\n\n\"He was sure of it,\" Gretchen said, a bit breathless now, wiping at her tears as she glanced at the guards. She had no reason to believe their story except that she saw Jada's grief reflecting her own and must have felt how vital this information was to them.\n\n\"There were even references to the Minotaur,\" she went on. \"Not just the one in Crete, but in Egypt, too. Both labyrinths had monsters in them, according to the writing at the Egyptian dig. There's more than a kernel of truth to this stuff, and he had the evidence. As soon as he started accumulating all of that, he got the go-ahead from the museum to proceed with this exhibit.\"\n\nSully began to rise. Gretchen reached for him, as if fearing to be left alone, though the security guards were there. Sully took her hand and helped her stand as well.\n\n\"Jada,\" Sully said, \"Dr. Cheney told Gretchen that he thought whatever your father was searching for must be at the center of the third labyrinth.\"\n\n\"Where was that one?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"That's the thing,\" Gretchen said, glancing back and forth between Drake and Jada. \"It's a mystery. But your father called Maynard a couple of days ago, and when they got off the phone, Maynard was so excited. Your father thought he'd worked out the location of the third labyrinth. He wouldn't say where it was until he'd confirmed it, but Maynard believed in him. He said if anyone could find it, Luka Hzujak could.\"\n\nThe two young women exchanged a look of shared sorrow, and Drake lowered his eyes, feeling like he and Sully were intruders. But then Jada touched his arm, and he looked up at her.\n\n\"This has to be it,\" she said, but she was staring at Sully. \"This is why they killed him, Uncle Vic.\"\n\n\"To keep the secret?\" Gretchen asked, doubtful.\n\n\"Or to keep Luka from getting there first,\" Sully said, turning to Drake.\n\n\"Henriksen?\" Drake said. \"He was already our best guess.\"\n\nThe security guards' radios crackled with voices and static. The police were on their way up. They would be upstairs in moments.\n\n\"We need to go,\" Sully said, looking at Jada.\n\n\"Gretchen, listen,\" Drake said, staring at her intently. \"You said your brother's working on that dig in Egypt. If we can get there, can you put in a word for us? We need access to that site.\"\n\n\"What?\" Jada asked. \"Egypt?\"\n\nBut Sully was nodding, looking at Gretchen expectantly. \"It's the only way we're going to find out who's really behind this.\"\n\nGretchen glanced at the corpse of Dr. Cheney. Then she nodded. \"I'll call him.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Sully said. \"I'm sorry, but we've got to go. When this is all over, you'll hear from me. We'll make sure you get the truth.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said, her expression crumbling as they walked away and she was forced to contend once more with the murder of a man she so obviously had admired and loved.\n\n\"Where do you think you're going?\" one of the security guards asked.\n\n\"The police are coming up, aren't they?\" Drake said in the most reasonable tone he could muster. \"They'll never find their way through all of this. We're gonna meet them and guide them through.\"\n\n\"Right,\" the guard said. \"Should've thought of that.\"\n\n\"Hey, don't sweat it,\" Sully replied. \"None of us is thinking straight right now. What a horrible day.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" the guard said.\n\nAs soon as Drake, Jada, and Sully were through the crouching passage, they bolted along the twisting corridor to the Minotaur's alcove. They could hear voices and the crackling of police radios coming their way as they slipped silently through the door at the back of the alcove and then hurried along the narrow \"backstage\" hallway to the staff exit.\n\n\"How the hell are we going to get to Egypt?\" Sully asked Drake.\n\n\"We'll figure it out.\"\n\n\"We can't go yet,\" Jada said as they raced down the employee stairwell. \"Not until after my father's funeral.\"\n\nSully stopped and turned to her, taking her by the hands. \"Jada, listen. The way he died\u2014it's going to be days before the coroner releases his body for burial. If Henriksen is behind this, he's been working on it for a while. Whatever secrets Luka discovered, Henriksen either knows them or he's trying to crack them right now. If we're gonna get to the bottom of it, we can't let him beat us to them.\"\n\nJada looked frustrated and confused. \"What if they're ready to release him and I'm not back?\"\n\n\"We'll leave word,\" Drake promised. \"We'll make sure either someone is there to claim him or the coroner's office holds on to his remains until you can do it yourself. But the other problem is that if your father's killers really are looking for you, a funeral would put you out in public, make you vulnerable.\"\n\nJada narrowed her eyes. \"Once they find out you're helping me, you guys will be targets, too.\"\n\n\"Nah,\" Drake said, smiling. \"Who'd want to hurt a guy as charming as me?\"\n\n\"Sometimes I do,\" Sully said. \"Come on.\"\n\nThey hurried down to the first floor, took a moment to compose themselves, and opened the door. No one tried to stop them. Drake had considered security cameras, but he figured that if these staff doors were under video surveillance, either the killer had disabled them to avoid being seen\u2014in which case they had nothing to worry about\u2014or the cops would scan the video as far as the killer and stop there. He hoped.\n\nThey had to answer a few questions and be patted down by police officers as they were leaving the museum and provide their names. Then they were on the street again and walking back toward the apartment where Jada had been staying.\n\n\"We need to go to Luka's place,\" Drake said.\n\nSully shot him a look. \"Not a good idea.\"\n\n\"The cops will already have searched it,\" Drake argued. \"And they won't be looking for the same things we'll be looking for. If there are any notes or computer files about this stuff, we want them. We need all the information we can get on this. Until we find out what Henriksen is really after and get our hands on it\u2014\"\n\n\"And expose him,\" Jada put in.\n\n\"\u2014Jada will never be safe.\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Sully said. \"Maybe we should talk to Olivia.\"\n\nJada flipped her hair back and stared at him. \"No way. That bitch is involved in this somehow. I know it. It's the only thing that makes sense.\"\n\n\"You can't really know that,\" Sully replied.\n\n\"But I do,\" Jada insisted, reaching into her pocket and pulling out her slim red cell phone. She flipped it open and turned it on, waiting a moment while it powered up. \"Huh, look at that. No messages. The cops had to have told her hours ago that they found her husband murdered and\u2014\" Her voice broke. \"\u2014and stuffed into an old trunk. But she hasn't tried to get in touch with me? His daughter? Her stepdaughter?\"\n\n\"You're right,\" Sully said, throwing up his hands. \"I'll buy it. We'll go to Luka's place. But we've gotta watch our asses. If it is Henriksen, he's likely to have people watching the place.\"\n\n\"We have to risk it,\" Drake said. \"And if they come after us, maybe we can grab one of them and confirm what we're all thinking about Phoenix Innovations.\"\n\nIn agreement, they walked in silence for more than a block before Sully flagged down a taxi, preparing themselves for whatever trouble awaited them at Luka Hzujak's apartment.\n\nBy the time they got there, the whole building was in flames.\n\nBefore someone had decapitated and mutilated him and put most of his pieces in an old steamer trunk that smelled of low tide and mothballs, Professor Luka Hzujak had lived in a four-story brick building on 12th Street, just west of Abingdon Square Park, in the West Village. Slender trees grew from slots in the narrow sidewalk. With the stone lintels above the windows, the dormers on top, and the small smokestacks on the roof, the building might have looked like something out of Oliver Twist if not for the fact that it was on fire.\n\nDrake spotted the smoke out the window of the taxi from several blocks away. A few seconds later, Sully frowned, sniffing the air. The smell of a fire that large never presaged anything positive.\n\n\"Pull over here,\" Drake said.\n\nThe cabbie obliged, and Sully and Jada climbed out while Drake paid the man, including a generous tip mostly because he didn't have time to wait for his change. He slammed the door and shoved his hands in his pockets as he hurried along the sidewalk after Sully and Jada. None of them had said anything as yet, but he felt sure they all knew which building was on fire.\n\nWhen they reached the corner of West 12th Street, there were no surprises awaiting them, but Jada looked like she had been punched in the gut. She hugged herself tightly and took a step back from the sight of her father's burning apartment building.\n\nSirens wailed, and a police car pulled up at the other end of the street. The firemen were already at work, hoses twisting along the pavement and over the curb. An old woman sat on a gurney behind an ambulance, staring at the building in shock as an EMT put an oxygen mask over her face. Several other people\u2014apparently residents\u2014stood across from the building in various stages of undress, most of them at the very least shoeless, while a pair of police officers questioned them.\n\nDrake wondered how long Luka had lived there and if there were remnants of his life stored anywhere else. Otherwise, Jada had lost not only her father but all of his papers and photographs, all of the mementos of his life. He watched her cover her mouth with shaking hands, and his heart broke for her. She looked like she wanted to scream or run or hit someone, but she didn't know what to do next.\n\n\"This is all happening damn fast,\" Drake whispered to Sully.\n\nSully narrowed his eyes and nodded in agreement, then went to Jada and slipped an arm around her.\n\n\"Listen, kid,\" Sully rasped, \"we're not going to get anything useful here. We stick around and we're just asking for trouble, especially if whoever did this is on the lookout for you.\"\n\nJada spun on him, curtains of magenta hair flying across her face. \"We know who did this!\" she shouted. \"And I'm not going to hide anymore.\"\n\nThanks to streetlights and New York traffic, the taxi that had just left them off hadn't gotten very far. As the cabbie accelerated across the intersection, bending to glance at the burning building and all the emergency vehicles, Jada rushed into the street and flagged him down.\n\n\"You don't think\u2014\" Sully began.\n\n\"Phoenix Innovations,\" Drake said.\n\nSully swore. \"This is a really bad idea,\" he said as he ran after Jada.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Drake agreed. \"But are you gonna stop her?\"\n\nSully ignored the question, but they both knew the answer. With the kind of pain Jada was in, they didn't blame her for wanting to confront the man she suspected was responsible for killing her father or the stepmother she thought had betrayed him. But that didn't make it a good idea. Drake doubted they would have been able to talk her out of going to Tyr Henriksen's office, which meant the best thing they could do was protect her.\n\n\"Fifty-ninth Street and Broadway,\" Jada said, practically hurling herself into the backseat of the taxi.\n\n\"I just dropped you off,\" the cabbie said, mystified.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Sully growled. \"Change of plans.\"\n\nSully paused before getting into the cab and looked back at Drake.\n\n\"Whatever goes on, it's gotta be as public as possible,\" he said. \"Make sure security cameras pick us up, that people see us going to Henriksen's office. It goes against every rule we've ever had\u2014\"\n\n\"No, you're right,\" Drake said. \"If we're going in there, we have to make sure Jada gets noticed. No matter how much they want to silence her, they're not going to kill her in the office if a hundred people saw her go in.\"\n\nGlass shattered behind them, and they turned to see black smoke and bright fire billowing out of the exploding upper-story windows. The building was going to be a total loss, and you didn't get that hungry a fire without some kind of accelerant. The investigators would know right off it had been arson, but that didn't matter if they couldn't figure out the identity of the arsonist.\n\nSully climbed in beside Jada. Drake glanced at the baffled-looking cabbie, but the man seemed focused on the spectacle of the firefighters at work. Then an ambulance rolled up behind them and gave a blast of its siren, urging them out of the way, and the cabbie looked irritated and motioned for Drake to get in.\n\nAs Drake ducked his head to get into the backseat, the window of the open door exploded in a shower of glass shards.\n\n\"What the\u2014\" Sully began.\n\nA bullet punched through the roof and lodged in the seat behind Jada's head.\n\n\"Down!\" Drake shouted as another shot plinked the outside of the cab.\n\nWith a loud roar, a black SUV sped past the ambulance and slid to a shuddering halt beside the taxi. Its glass was tinted, but the passenger window started to glide down, and Drake knew that one way or another they were dead. If the sniper on the roof across the street didn't kill them\u2014only that would explain the angle of the first shots\u2014these bastards in the SUV would make their deaths look like a gangster drive-by.\n\n\"Drive!\" he screamed to the cabbie.\n\nThe guy behind the wheel of the ambulance smartened up, putting the vehicle in reverse, and it sped backward in retreat. Down West 12th Street people had started to tear their attention from the fire, hearing the gunshots.\n\n\"Damn it, drive the car!\" Drake shouted, banging the partition to get the terrified cabbie's attention.\n\nThe man had ducked down, hiding behind the dashboard. Something\u2014Drake's command or his own sense of self-preservation\u2014made him realize that if they just sat there, they were dead, and he sat up and threw the cab into gear.\n\nA sniper's bullet punched through the windshield and took him in the chest. He jerked against the seat and then started to slide sideways, his hands twitching on the wheel.\n\n\"Son of a bitch!\" Sully snapped. \"I need a gun, Nate!\"\n\nBut they didn't have any guns. Not yet. They were damn well going to get them, but for now, running was the only choice. Drake popped the rear passenger door, staying low as he yanked open the one in front. The cab had started to roll but hadn't picked up any speed.\n\nHe spotted a gun jutting from the open window of the SUV as he threw himself into the front seat. With both hands, he grabbed the cabbie and hauled the man toward him, then started climbing over him.\n\nBullets punched the side of the cab, shattering front and back windows and plinking through the metal doors. One caught the driver in the thigh. Drake had time enough to think that what he was doing was insane, that it was suicide to put himself in the way of the bullets. But he knew that doing nothing would also be suicide.\n\nHe got his hands on the wheel, kept his head to the side, and was about to hit the gas when a loud, crunching impact filled the air. He risked looking up and saw that the ambulance driver had purposely rammed the back of the SUV.\n\n\"Crazy bastard!\" Sully whooped appreciatively.\n\n\"Bought us a couple of seconds,\" Drake said.\n\nJada cried out as another bullet punched a hole in the roof, a new attack from the sniper, letting daylight in.\n\nDrake gritted his teeth. They had to get away from both attacks, the sniper and the SUV, and there was only one direction open to them that he knew would accomplish that. He slammed it into reverse, backed the taxi up thirty feet, then put it back in drive, cranked the steering wheel to the right, and skidded into a turn down West 12th Street.\n\n\"Are you nuts?\" Sully shouted.\n\n\"You're going to hit the fire truck!\" Jada warned.\n\nKnuckles white on the wheel, Drake drove straight for the closest fire truck. Firefighters shouted and tried to wave him off. Survivors of the burning building scurried out of the way. The two cops on the sidewalk pulled their guns, but not fast enough, as Drake shot the taxi through the gap between fire truck and ambulance and careened down the street toward the police cars waiting there.\n\nGunfire punched the air, echoing off the buildings, but he didn't slow down.\n\n\"Jada, are they following?\" Drake asked.\n\nShe spun in the backseat and looked out the rear window. \"Yes!\"\n\n\"Are you kidding?\" Sully said. \"Who the hell are these guys?\"\n\n\"We'll be out of range of the sniper as soon as we turn the corner,\" Drake told them.\n\n\"What about these nutjobs in the SUV?\" Sully barked.\n\nDrake smiled. He gunned the taxi past the two police cars parked diagonally at the curb, grazing a parked Mercedes, tearing off the taxi's sideview mirror, and then accelerated even more. At the intersection, he hit the brake, turned into the skid, and slung the taxi into a right turn, driving the wrong way up Washington Street. Car horns blared, and a white box truck swerved to avoid a head-on collision.\n\nHe glanced over his shoulder and saw one of the two police cars pulling out to block the road. Two officers on the street had their guns drawn and were rushing up to the SUV as it skidded to a halt.\n\n\"We're clear!\" Sully said.\n\n\"For how long?\" Jada asked, leaning forward, looking at Drake in the mirror. \"They'll have cops crawling all over us in a minute.\"\n\nDrake hung a quick left on Jane Street, no longer heading into oncoming traffic. He glanced over his shoulder at Sully.\n\n\"What do you think? Chelsea Piers?\" he asked.\n\n\"No choice,\" Sully agreed.\n\n\"What's at Chelsea Piers?\" Jada said.\n\nDrake smiled, glancing at her in the rearview mirror. \"Same thing you generally find at piers. Boats.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "The High Line elevated park had started its life as a freight train track built above the city to keep the trains away from public streets. The elevated platform that ran through the Meatpacking District all the way to 34th Street had been converted to a long green oasis. Drake had never walked the park, but he had read an article about it in some in-flight magazine or other, describing it as a hidden gem of New York City. Someday he hoped to get a closer look at the High Line, but today he needed it only for cover.\n\nHe pulled the taxi to the curb on Little West 12th Street and let it roll into the shadows under the High Line. In the backseat, Jada was still shaking.\n\n\"Oh, my God,\" she said. \"What the hell are we going to do?\"\n\nSully took her hand, forcing her to meet his eyes. \"We're gonna improvise, sweetheart. Don't worry. If there's one thing Nate and I know how to do, it's improvise.\"\n\nDrake watched the rearview mirror for cars. The street was one way, so at least they had that going for them. He waited for a red Accord to buzz past them, hoping their shattered windows would earn no more than a quick glance. The Accord slowed and the driver gave him an odd look, but Drake glared at him and the guy accelerated, minding his own business. He might be on his cell phone to the cops in a second, but they had at least a couple of minutes.\n\nHe popped his door.\n\n\"Get out,\" he said. \"Let's go.\"\n\nSully opened the back door and climbed out, with Jada hurrying after him. As Drake stepped from the taxi, she looked at him and then bent to peer through the open driver's door at the dead cabbie. His blood had started to pool on the seat.\n\n\"We can't just leave him here,\" Jada said.\n\n\"We sure as hell can't take him with us,\" Sully grumbled.\n\nDrake glanced back at the dead man. \"The police will take better care of him than we could. And if we stick around, they might end up burying us right next to him.\"\n\nHe shut the cab door, then noticed Sully staring at him.\n\n\"What?\" Drake asked.\n\nSully pointed at his chest. \"There's blood on your jacket.\"\n\nDrake stripped off the coat, but he couldn't leave it in the cab. There was enough evidence of their presence already. If they were lucky, no one had gotten a good look at their faces and they would never be connected to the gunfire or the dead taxi driver, and so the police would never have a reason to test their DNA against any hair fibers found in the cab. He thought that probably would work out in their favor. His larger concern had to do with the museum. If Gretchen talked about them and helped the police make the connection between Dr. Cheney's murder and the burning of Luka Hzujak's apartment building, eventually he and Sully and Jada would get caught in the net.\n\nThey had to rely on Gretchen's discretion, and Drake didn't like that. Not that he didn't trust strangers easily. He tended to go with his instincts; it was just that there had been times when his instincts had been dangerously wrong.\n\nDrake turned the jacket inside out and used it to brush broken glass off Sully and Jada's coats.\n\n\"Let's move,\" he said, carrying the coat bunched under his arm in a bundle.\n\nThey crossed the street and headed west, and by the time a battered gray Mercedes came growling along the road, they were far enough from the abandoned cab that no one would have made an instant connection between this trio of pedestrians and the damaged taxi. But Drake kept them moving at a swift pace, knowing that the police would not make any presumption of innocence.\n\nThey turned north, six short blocks from where the Chelsea Piers complex was situated. It was mostly sports and recreation now, though it still had a private marina. Despite the autumn chill and the lengthening shadows of the fading day, he felt a circle of heat in the center of his back, as if a target had been painted there.\n\n\"Jada, where's the wicked stepmother right now?\" Drake asked.\n\nSully shot him a glance. \"You planning to pay her a visit? I'm not sure I like that plan. Or did you forget the guys with the guns and how eager they were to kill us?\"\n\n\"It's not a plan,\" Drake said. \"I have no plan. Well, not much of one, and the one I do have doesn't involve Jada's stepmother. I'd just like to know what we're dealing with here.\"\n\nAs they turned into a small oval park, cutting diagonally across from Tenth Avenue to Eleventh, Jada pulled out her cell phone.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Sully asked.\n\n\"Getting an answer to Nate's question,\" she said, punching a couple of buttons before she put the phone to her ear. She listened a moment, and then her eyes narrowed. \"Hi, Brenda, it's Jada Hzujak. Is Olivia there?\"\n\nDrake saw a momentary confusion furrow her brow.\n\n\"Sorry, Miranda,\" Jada said, glancing down at her feet as she walked. \"I expected Brenda to pick up, and I'm\u2014well, I've got a lot on my mind. Listen, I know you're just covering the desk, but I didn't realize this was the week Olivia was going to be out of town, and I was hoping to take her out to lunch. Do you have any idea when she'll be back?\"\n\nJada smiled thinly, but there was no amusement in it. She thanked Miranda and ended the call, then immediately began placing another.\n\n\"What's going on?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"If Olivia's regular assistant hadn't been at lunch, we probably wouldn't even know this, but my stepmother's away on business. Yeah, in her grief, instead of planning her husband's funeral, she's skipped town. I gathered from the way Miranda was talking that she doesn't even know my father's dead. Olivia hasn't told her coworkers that her husband's been murdered.\"\n\nSully grunted. \"Yeah, that's not weird or suspicious.\"\n\n\"So where did she go?\" Drake asked.\n\nJada held up a finger to forestall him, turning her attention to her current phone call. She gave her name and cell phone number and then answered a couple of other questions, and it quickly became plain that she was calling her cellular service provider.\n\n\"Yes, I hope you can help me,\" she said once she had proved her identity to the satisfaction of the AT&T rep on the line. \"I'm not at home, but I'm desperately seeking a phone number. Last month, my father was in Egypt and I called him several times at a hotel there. I know it's a strange request, but I'm hoping you can just glance at my bill from late September and give me that number. I need to get in touch with him and it'll be awhile before I'm home and I don't remember the name of the\u2014Yes, that'd be great. Thanks so much.\"\n\nShe paused, waiting for the information.\n\nAs they emerged from the park, where they could see the river across several lanes of traffic, she covered the phone with her hand for a second and looked at Sully and Drake.\n\n\"I'll give you two guesses where Olivia is right now.\"\n\n\"She's in Egypt?\" Sully asked.\n\n\"Look at that,\" Drake said. \"You didn't even need your second guess.\"\n\nSully shoved his hands into his jacket pockets. \"Guess that answers our question about whether or not Olivia's in on it with Henriksen.\"\n\n\"For me it was never a question,\" Jada said.\n\nDrake cocked an eyebrow. \"You know we're jumping to a lot of conclusions, right? Henriksen is chasing the same mystery Luka was working on, and it sure looks like Olivia's been working behind her husband's back, but none of this is proof that they killed him or sent those nice men with the guns after us.\"\n\nJada waved him to silence, focused on her phone call again.\n\n\"Yes, I'm still here. That's perfect, thanks.\" She looked around and realized she had nothing to write with or on. \"Actually, if you could do me one other small favor? Could you e-mail me that number? I know it's probably not what you're supposed to do, but\u2014\"\n\nShe paused again, listening, and then smiled. \"Even better. Thanks again.\"\n\nJada ended the call and slipped the phone into her pocket. \"He's just going to e-mail me the whole bill. Should've asked for that in the first place.\" She glanced at Sully. \"So now we know where to start when we get to Egypt\u2014at the hotel where my father stayed. But how the hell are we going to get there?\"\n\n\"One step at a time,\" Sully said as they turned north again, the vast Chelsea Piers complex in view up ahead. \"First we get a boat.\"\n\n\"You're just going to walk into the marina and take one?\" she asked.\n\nDrake gave a small shrug. \"Maybe not walk so much as skulk. Or slink. Possibly just a good old-fashioned sneak. What we lack in stealth we make up for in brazen stupidity and desperation.\"\n\n\"Come on,\" Jada said, turning to Sully. \"Is this really going to work?\"\n\nSully grinned his most rakish grin. \"Seriously, kid. You don't think we've never stolen a boat before?\"\n\nJada seemed to ponder that for a moment, then let out a breath. \"Actually, after the past few hours, that doesn't surprise me at all.\"\n\nDrake glanced at Sully. \"You know, I'm not sure if I should be flattered or insulted.\"\n\nThey stole the boat on a Tuesday just as the sun was going down. As they walked onto the dock, a guard eyed them warily, trying to figure out if they were trespassers. Drake took Jada's hand and then turned and gave her a radiant smile, and she went right along with the charade, snuggling up against him. They were pretending, but it was a nice sort of make-believe, and Drake had to remind himself that the girl was Sully's goddaughter.\n\n\"Hey, there,\" Sully said, sauntering up to the guard as if he belonged there.\n\nThe guard frowned at Sully, taking in the bomber jacket over the guayabera and the neatly trimmed mustache, clearly wondering if this was somebody he was supposed to know. Sully drew him aside, lowering his voice so that only the guard could hear, but Drake knew the gist of what he was saying. They had discussed it moments before, and it was a ruse they'd used more than once.\n\n\"Listen, amigo, here's the deal. I'm working for Theresa Fonseca. I'm brokering the sale of some of the assets she's received in her divorce settlement. I've got this couple on the hook, but they're a little skittish because the divorce is turning ugly, and they're looking for an excuse not to buy. They keep making noises about security down here, so what I need from you is to act like you're busting my chops. Be a hardass\u2014\"\n\nThe guard looked confused, glanced at Drake and Jada, and then shook his head. \"I don't know any Theresa\u2014what was the name?\"\n\n\"Fonseca. She\u2014\"\n\n\"Nah,\" the guard said. \"No Fonseca down here.\"\n\nSully turned to Drake and Jada and put his hands up in a see-what-I-mean gesture, as if trying to show them just how tight security was at the marina.\n\n\"That's good, man. Perfect,\" Sully said.\n\nThe guard narrowed his eyes. \"I'm not playacting here, pal. There's no one named Fonseca.\"\n\nSully bopped his palm against the side of his head. \"Right, right. Divorce, remember? Crap, what's the husband's name? Starts with a K, I think. Keller? Kramer?\"\n\n\"Kurland?\" the guard suggested.\n\nSully pointed a finger at him, pistol-style. \"That's it. Yeah. Look, I just need to walk them down and show them the boat and I'll be out of your hair. If I do my job right, Miss Fonseca\u2014Mrs. Kurland, I guess\u2014gets a decent price for the thing, and it'll serve the son of a bitch right for making babies with his girlfriend on the side.\"\n\nThe guard's face twisted in deep disapproval. \"Babies?\"\n\n\"I know. Awful stuff. Imagine finding out your husband was having an affair for, what, six years? Bad enough, right? But the guy fathered two children with the other woman. How does a lady pick herself up after getting kicked like that?\"\n\nBy then the guard was nodding in agreement.\n\n\"What an ass,\" the guard said.\n\n\"Fortunately, the judge agreed,\" Sully said, smiling conspiratorially. \"Now, look, do me a favor? Tell me we've got thirty minutes, no more. I have another appointment before I can go home tonight, so I don't want to be hemming and hawing with these folks for hours.\"\n\nThe guard did better than that. He walked Sully over to Drake and Jada, looking as though he were doing them a mighty favor.\n\n\"I'm sorry, but the marina has strict policies about visitors,\" he said. \"Without the owner present, I can only give you half an hour. You'll have to sign in and show your ID. Please respect the privacy of the other owners and see me on your way out.\"\n\nJada squeezed Drake's arm, apparently concerned about having to show her ID.\n\n\"Not a problem,\" he said. \"We wouldn't have it any other way, especially if we might be owners ourselves.\"\n\n\"I\u2014um\u2014left my purse in the car,\" Jada said.\n\nThe guard furrowed his brow.\n\nDrake only smiled wider. \"I've got it, sweetie. I'll sign us in.\"\n\nThe guard glanced at Sully, clearly trying to decide whether to push the ID issue, but then he let it go. Apparently, he didn't want to make trouble for Mrs. Kurland, because he led the three of them to a small guard booth not far from the marina entrance and barely glanced at the false identification Drake and Sully showed him as they signed the guest book.\n\nDrake still had his bloodstained coat folded under his arm, and the guard shot a quizzical glance at it as Drake signed in, as if he thought he might be hiding something inside.\n\n\"What've you got there?\" the guard asked.\n\nDrake sighed in regret. \"Not a damn thing. I spilled juice all over myself like an idiot. Ruined my coat.\"\n\nCareful to show only the inside of the coat, he unfurled it to show that there was nothing wrapped inside it and then draped it carefully over his arm.\n\n\"Thanks, amigo,\" Sully said, giving a private little nod to the guard that Jada and Drake weren't supposed to see. \"Say, what's the slip number again?\"\n\nHe patted at his pants pockets as if looking for the piece of paper where he'd written the number down.\n\n\"One forty-seven,\" the guard replied.\n\nDrake felt sorry for him. It wasn't the guard's fault he was dumb enough to fall for their hustle. He probably was going to get into serious trouble over this, maybe even lose his job. But if Drake had to choose between getting shot or thrown in jail and causing problems for this guy, well, it was really no choice at all.\n\nSully thanked the guard, pressing a twenty into his palm as they shook hands\u2014a tiny fraction of the reward money Drake had brought back from South America. Then they were walking along the dock, the boats swaying on either side of them, rocked by the river.\n\nCompared to some of the luxury crafts that were docked at the marina, the boat in the Kurlands' slip wasn't much to speak of\u2014a thirty-five-foot Chris Craft with a fiberglass deep V-hull, maybe twelve feet at the beam\u2014but that was all right. They didn't want anything huge or ostentatious. Even better, the Chris Craft was moored in a slip at the outside edge of the marina.\n\nThey boarded as if they belonged there, Sully behaving as if he were giving them a tour. Then Sully ducked out of sight, working the key switch off the ignition and pulling at the wires, figuring out which ones were for the starter. Drake kept watch out of the corner of his eye until the guard got a phone call at the booth. He was one of those people who paced while they were on the phone, and as he talked, he strolled back and forth between his security booth and the walkway that led from the dock to the marina club.\n\nThe third time he strolled up the walk, Drake gave a nod and Sully twisted the wires together. The motor growled to life, and Sully grinned up at Drake.\n\n\"You guys are a little too good at this,\" Jada said.\n\n\"Our line of work requires a lot of improvising,\" Drake said.\n\nJada gave him a dubious smile. \"Right.\"\n\nSully backed the boat out of the slip. Just as he throttled forward, pulling away from the dock, the guard came running toward them, shouting and waving at them to pull back into the slip. Drake knew that even then the man wouldn't know exactly what to make of it all. If he had believed Sully's story\u2014and it was clear he had\u2014Mrs. Kurland might have just given her broker the key so he could take the prospective buyers for a spin. The guard would suspect, certainly. But he wouldn't be sure, and he wouldn't do anything drastic until he was.\n\nAs they sped upriver, the boat whipping over the water, Drake watched the guard growing smaller in the distance.\n\n\"That guy is having a bad day,\" he said.\n\n\"Could be worse for him,\" Jada said. \"He could be with us.\"\n\nDrake and Sully both glanced at her, saw the sarcastic glint in her eyes, and laughed. She was right. Her father had been murdered, and they had encountered two other dead men today. Someone had sent men with guns to fire lots of bullets at them in hopes of making them very dead. Another someone\u2014or maybe the same someone\u2014had burned down Jada's father's apartment building.\n\nThey were having a day far worse than the guard's.\n\n\"Still,\" Drake said. \"When we get back into the country, I'll send him something. Wine of the month, maybe.\"\n\n\"Cigars,\" Sully said, as if wine had been the stupidest suggestion Drake could have made. \"Maybe steaks.\"\n\n\"Steaks?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"Man's gotta eat. And did you get a look at him? You don't get that big eating Brussels sprouts.\"\n\n\"You guys are unbelievable,\" Jada said, raising her voice to be heard over the wind whipping past them as Sully throttled up and the boat went even faster.\n\nDrake nodded. \"That is actually not the first time we've heard that.\"\n\nJada whacked his arm. \"It wasn't a compliment.\"\n\nBut she couldn't quite erase her smile, and Drake was glad. After all she had been through since the discovery of her father's remains, she needed all the distraction she could get. Now that they had a moment's respite, though, he watched her amusement quickly fade until she gazed at the city passing on their right\u2014lights coming on as evening arrived\u2014her expression solemn and somehow lost.\n\nHe hoped her stepmother wasn't involved in her father's death, but he had a terrible feeling that Olivia Hzujak was exactly as wicked a stepmother as Jada suspected.\n\nTroubled, Drake reached into the inside pocket of his ruined coat and pulled out the slim leather case that held a good portion of the reward money he'd earned in Ecuador. There was more in his bags, which were safe in a locker at JFK, and some in his wallet. The rest had been put into an account he sometimes used in the Cayman Islands. For now, what he had on him would be all they had at their disposal, so it would have to be enough.\n\nHe dropped the coat overboard and watched it floating, soaking in the water as they swiftly left it far behind.\n\nSo far, so good. They would ditch the stolen Chris Craft just north of the 79th Street Boat Basin\u2014Jada's suggestion\u2014and stop by the apartment where she'd been hiding out just long enough for her to pack a small bag. Drake and Sully would have to improvise. They would pick up a couple of go phones\u2014cell phones that could be loaded with as many minutes as they wanted, used, and then thrown away, all without creating an account that could be traced. Sully had suggested they call the marina and let them know where the boat would be, and both Drake and Jada had given the idea a thumbs-up. If they were ever caught, they would still be arrested, but a joyride would go over a hell of a lot better with a judge than outright theft.\n\nFrom the apartment, they would head north. They needed to get out of the city fast but as under the radar as they could manage. Grand Central was no good just in case there had been cameras that had picked up their faces at the marina. So they would take a cab to 125th Street station in Harlem and board a Metro North train to New Haven, Connecticut, where they could rent a car. The ID they had used at the marina would be no good now, but Drake was counting on Sully traveling with more than one set of false identification.\n\nOnce they were in a car, he thought they would be all right. Drake knew a guy in Boston who could whip up passports and other ID for all three of them. They would take the ferry to Nova Scotia and then a boat over to mainland New Brunswick rather than face the greater scrutiny of crossing the Canadian border in a car. From there, another rental car would bring them into Quebec. Montreal-Mirabel International Airport was used almost exclusively for cargo flights, and he and Sully had friends there. They had needed to sneak themselves\u2014and various acquisitions\u2014in and out of North America on numerous occasions. He expected that it would all go off without a hitch.\n\nEven so, he knew he would be on edge until they were in the air and on their way to Egypt and the archaeological dig at the City of Crocodiles. In Drake's experience, the closer he got to the source of a secret\u2014or a treasure\u2014the easier it became to sense an imminent threat or perceive an enemy. People tended to reveal their true colors when things as valuable as treasure and secrets were at stake. He didn't like snipers taking shots at him from rooftops or thugs hiding behind dark windows.\n\nIf someone wanted to kill him, he liked to know who it was.\n\nIt made it a hell of a lot easier to fight back.\n\nOn Tuesday night none of them got more than a few hours' sleep in the back of the rental car before they arrived in Boston, where the forger had Drake and Sully's new identities waiting for them. The forger was a third-generation professional they called Charlie, though they all assumed it wasn't really his name. He'd had Drake and Sully's photos on file, which allowed him to prep their passports in advance, but he had to create Jada's on the spot, along with various other items\u2014everything from an American Express platinum card to a library ID.\n\nOn Wednesday morning they stopped in Portland, Maine, where Drake and Sully bought small duffel bags and several changes of clothes. By midnight they found themselves in a shabby motel near the cargo airport in Montreal, with one double bed for the three of them. Drake took an extra pillow and blanket from the closet and made a nest on the floor while Jada and her godfather took the bed.\n\nThey watched television, waiting to see if there might be some report of the violence in New York, but Montreal was a world away from Manhattan. That night Drake barely dozed, kept awake by the anticipation of the morning's departure, after which he would finally feel like they had gotten away safely. Jada lay awake as well. Several times he noticed her curled up on her side, watching him with eyes that gleamed in the darkened room, but neither of them spoke.\n\nOnly Sully managed to sleep. He always seemed able to doze, no matter how terrible the circumstances. He snored deeply, sometimes exhaling loudly, his mustached upper lip trembling with the noise.\n\nOn Thursday morning, the flight they thought they had arranged left without them. Desperate hours passed before they were promised another. At last, late that afternoon, they were airborne, comfortably ensconced in a small compartment behind the cockpit.\n\nFinally, Drake slept.\n\nWhen he woke, with the muffled thump of Irish punk rock coming from the cockpit, he found Sully gone and knew his old friend must be up front with the crew. He lay quietly, watching Jada sleep. With the magenta streaks that framed her face, she usually had an air of confidence even in the middle of her grief. But now in the peace of sleep, she seemed vulnerable, and he had to wonder about the wisdom of their journey. Drake had known plenty of capable women\u2014had had his ass kicked by more than one of them. They had been skilled fighters, survivors, totally able to take care of themselves.\n\nJada, in contrast, was a question mark. He hoped that she would prove just as tough and capable for her own sake and for Sully's\u2014and for his, as well. He didn't want to see her hurt any more than she already had been. At the same time, he knew he would have to keep an eye out for Sully. The old man clearly thought it was his job to protect Jada instead of letting her protect herself. That kind of thinking could distract him enough to be fatal.\n\n\"What are you thinking?\" she said, her voice a hush, barely audible over the loud airplane engines.\n\n\"Have you ever been in a fight?\" he asked. \"A real one, I mean.\"\n\nJada frowned. \"Not a real one, if you mean blood and bruises. Like a beatdown. But I hold my own in the dojo pretty well.\" He arched an eyebrow. \"Dojo? What do you study?\"\n\n\"Aikido, mostly. Why?\"\n\nDrake smiled softly. Another woman who could kick his ass.\n\n\"You know, if we find it\u2014this treasure, whatever it is\u2014I already told Sully we can share it. Even split, three ways,\" she said.\n\nDrake would have been offended if the idea hadn't appealed to him so much. Even so, he didn't want her to think the potential for personal gain had been his motivation for helping her.\n\n\"Treasure's always nice,\" he said. \"But that's not why I'm along for this ride.\"\n\n\"No?\" She studied him as if trying to see behind his eyes. \"Why, then?\"\n\nFor the first time, it occurred to Drake how close they were. Reclined in their chairs, facing each other, only a couple of feet separated them. He could have reached out and touched her face. If he had been any closer, he could have felt her breath on his cheek.\n\n\"Your father was a good guy,\" he said quickly. \"I liked him. And Sully's my best friend, so it's not as if I could really say no.\"\n\n\"You have before,\" Jada reminded him. \"Uncle Vic told me there was no guarantee.\"\n\n\"Someone tried to shoot me. I take that personally. Historically, I'm not a fan of people who point guns at me, never mind pulling the trigger.\"\n\n\"And that's it?\" she asked. \"Those are the reasons you're on this trip?\"\n\nDrake nodded, frowning. She was fishing for a different reply. What else did she want him to say?\n\n\"Pretty much,\" he said.\n\nOnly when he saw the disappointment in her eyes did he realize where he'd gone wrong. Jada had been hoping he had also come along because of her\u2014because he didn't want to say goodbye to her just yet. The look in her eyes lasted for only a second before she hid her reaction from him, but he had seen it, and she knew he had seen it.\n\n\"Uncle Vic said you like the mystery, too,\" she said.\n\n\"What do you mean, 'the mystery'?\"\n\n\"History. Digging up bits of the past that have been hidden for ages.\"\n\nDrake smiled. \"Yeah. That, too. Archaeologists think they've got it all figured out. They write books and papers explaining the ancient world as if there's nothing more to learn. It's arrogant and foolish, and every time we find something that proves them wrong\u2014proves there are things about the past they don't understand or never imagined\u2014that makes me happy.\"\n\nJada curled up a bit tighter in her chair. \"It is kind of exciting. I've been hearing this sort of thing from my father all my life. And it was his\u2014well, his last mystery, really. I want to know what it was he discovered, and I like that you want to know almost as much as I do.\"\n\nThis time Drake said nothing. The urge to touch her cheek, to push back her hair, was almost too much to resist, but he did. It wasn't meant to be. He wasn't here for that, and his life was way too complicated and unsettled to get involved with Jada Hzujak.\n\nBut damn, she was beautiful.\n\n\"Plus, there's the treasure,\" he said.\n\nShe narrowed her gaze, looking both amused and irritated all at once. He often had that effect on women.\n\n\"Yeah. The treasure. Whatever it is.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Drake stepped off the cargo plane onto the tarmac of Cairo International Airport, stiff and parched from the long flight. He had slept at least seven hours, more than half the journey, but he still felt tired. Though he had been there multiple times, Egypt had not lost its magic for him. Its cities were modern, full of car exhaust, loud music, and stressed-out people just like everywhere else, but you could feel the ancientness in the air. There were places just miles outside of any city\u2014Cairo included\u2014where it felt as if he'd stepped back in time.\n\nHe dropped his duffel on the tarmac and stretched, glad to be off the plane and able to breathe fresh air. The reasons for the journey were grim, but it felt good to be in motion and trying to do something to solve the puzzle of Luka's death. He figured it would be nice if they could accomplish that before someone started shooting at them again.\n\n\"I need something to drink,\" Jada said, hefting her duffel as she followed him off the plane.\n\nSully had been the first one off. He had walked around, doing a visual reconnaissance of the little corner of the airport where the cargo plane had taxied to a stop.\n\nNow Sully turned at the sound of Jada's voice and arched an eyebrow.\n\n\"I like a drink as much as the next guy, but don't you think it's a little early? It may be past noon here, but it's barely sunrise back in New York.\"\n\n\"Water, Uncle Vic,\" Jada said, smirking. \"Just a bottle of water. I'm dried out from the flight.\"\n\nDrake grinned at Sully's chagrined expression.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Sully said, pulling a cigar from his jacket and pinching it between his teeth. \"I could use some water, too. Flying always makes the inside of my mouth feel like steel wool.\"\n\nWhen Jada went to thank the pilot for the ride and for delivering them safely to Egypt, Drake sidled over to Sully.\n\n\"Maybe you want to dial down the protective parent vibe a little.\"\n\nSully gnawed on his cigar. \"You'd love that, wouldn't you, Romeo?\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"You know what I'm talking about.\"\n\nDrake waved him away with both hands. \"Look, Sully, I don't have any interest in romancing this girl. But I'd like to keep us all alive, and if you keep thinking of her like she's some kid you have to protect, you're liable to get us all killed. She seems capable of taking care of herself. Let's focus, okay?\"\n\nSully's expression turned to stone. \"I'm reading you loud and clear. I'm not her father. You think I don't know that? But Luka is dead, and I couldn't live with myself if anything happened to Jada.\"\n\n\"The best way for you to make sure that doesn't happen is to stay alive yourself,\" Drake countered, lowering his voice as Jada strode back toward them. \"Just try to stop worrying about her long enough to not get shot, okay?\"\n\nA thin, humorless smile touched Sully's face. Whatever retort he might have come up with\u2014and Drake had no doubt he had been formulating one\u2014he let it pass and turned to face Jada.\n\n\"You done playing Little Miss Sunshine with the flight crew?\" Sully muttered.\n\nJada smiled. \"Don't be such a cantankerous old man. I know you didn't sleep well, but when you're trying to travel without anyone knowing you've left the country or thinking you're a terrorist, you take whatever accommodations are available. Maybe if you speak up, they'll give you a nice soft pillow next time.\"\n\nSully seemed about to bark at her, but then he just muttered something under his breath and marched off toward a small hut outside the cargo terminal. Beads of sweat already had popped out on his skin, and Drake watched him wipe a hand across his forehead.\n\n\"He hates Egypt this time of year,\" Drake said, hefting his duffel.\n\n\"Yeah?\" Jada said as they fell into step side by side, leaving the plane behind. \"What time of year is better?\"\n\n\"He doesn't mind the second week of January. Usually the Wednesday, around three in the afternoon, you can actually breathe for a minute,\" Drake said.\n\nJada laughed. \"Actually, I don't mind the heat. Better this than winter back home.\"\n\n\"Don't let Sully hear you say that,\" Drake replied.\n\n\"What about you?\" she asked. \"What's your take on Egypt?\"\n\n\"Sultry and mysterious. I need a little of that in my life.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Listen to you. If I didn't know better, I'd think you were a romantic instead of a sarcastic.\"\n\n\"I could be a sarcastic romantic.\"\n\nJada arched an eyebrow. \"I like that. I think I'm going to steal it.\"\n\n\"I give it freely and of my own will.\"\n\n\"Aw, it's no fun if it's not stealing.\"\n\nThey both faltered then. Drake figured they had taken their flirting to its natural conclusion and any more would be strained and awkward, so he let silence fall between them. Jada didn't object. Their shared quiet was comfortable, as if their brief encounters years ago had built a foundation for a friendship now. Getting shot at had contributed to their budding friendship, too. Drake knew all too well how quickly a bond could form between people who were in danger.\n\n\"So, what is it with you and Uncle Vic?\" Jada said, switching gears. \"You guys have friends everywhere.\"\n\nA pair of cargo trucks rumbled past, their engines almost as loud as the planes coming in and out of the airport.\n\n\"Not friends,\" Drake said. \"Connections. We know who to call when we need something: information, equipment, transport\u2014\"\n\n\"A new identity,\" Jada added.\n\nDrake nodded. \"And weapons when we need them. But knowing who will take your money to do something that might not be strictly legal isn't the same as having friends. A connection who'll sell information about a treasure hunter to me is just as likely to sell info about me to the competition.\"\n\n\"I thought you were an 'antiquities acquisition consultant,' \" Jada said.\n\n\"That, too,\" Drake replied.\n\n\"So you trust your friends not to sell you out?\" she asked. \"I mean, everybody has a price, right?\"\n\n\"Almost everyone. As for friends\u2014I choose carefully.\"\n\nJada nodded, but a cloud seemed to pass over her face, and he knew she must be thinking about her father.\n\n\"What is it?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"My dad always gave advice like that,\" she said. Switching the weight of her duffel from one hand to the other, she gazed off into some middle distance, as if she could peer into her own memory. \"He always had these great quotes about choosing your friends wisely and all that, but I guess he was a pretty crappy judge of character, considering he married Olivia.\"\n\n\"I don't know about that,\" Drake said. \"Sully may smoke the smelliest cigars in creation\u2014sometimes I think he buys tobacco scented with manure or something just to aggravate me\u2014but I've never known anyone more loyal. Luka picked him as a friend, so he had to have at least some idea who to trust.\"\n\n\"Then why did my father marry the wicked witch?\"\n\n\"To some men, women are a mystery. We don't understand how their minds work. Which makes it a lot harder to avoid a knife in the back.\"\n\nJada smiled. \"Oscar Wilde said a friend is someone who stabs you in the front. And by the way, women have the same problem with men. We can see the treachery in other women easily enough, but guys might as well be from another planet for all we understand them.\"\n\nDrake glanced sidelong at her. \" 'Treachery'?\"\n\n\"It's a good word,\" she protested.\n\n\"Yeah. I like saying it. 'Treachery.' You don't get to say that word enough in life.\" He frowned. \"Actually, that's probably a good thing.\"\n\nUp ahead, Sully had reached the little hut on the tarmac. Drake wasn't sure if it was a security booth or a spot for incoming crews to check in with their cargo manifests, maybe some kind of traffic office. A skinny man in khaki pants and a loose shirt of blue cotton stood leaning against the side of the hut, smoking a cigarette. He wore sunglasses too large for his face, but he smiled as Sully approached him, and the two men shook hands.\n\n\"Not a friend?\" Jada said, keeping her voice low as they neared the hut.\n\n\"A connection,\" Drake confirmed.\n\nBy the time they reached Sully and the thin Egyptian man, Sully was in the middle of lighting his cigar, which Drake took to mean things were going well. Sully's cigars were a form of communication all their own, and sometimes lighting up could be a sign of frustration, but not this time. Sully looked pleased.\n\n\"This is Chigaru,\" he said, and the Egyptian gave a little bow of his head. \"Chigaru, meet Jada Hzujak and Nathan Drake, the closest thing I've got to a family in this world. I take their health and well-being very personally.\"\n\n\"Not to mention your own,\" Chigaru said in British-accented English.\n\nSully laughed, and it turned into a short cough. He frowned and looked at his cigar. \"Gotta give these damn things up.\" Then he leveled his gaze at Chigaru. \"Yeah, I take my well-being pretty personally, too.\"\n\n\"Not to worry, Sully. You have friends in Egypt.\"\n\nAt \"friends,\" Drake glanced at Jada and saw her raise her eyebrows at the word.\n\n\"The best friends money can buy,\" Sully said.\n\nChigaru grinned and nodded sagely. \"Absolutely.\" He regarded the three of them, obviously taking note of their meager complement of luggage. \"Shall we go?\"\n\n\"It was a long flight,\" Drake said. \"And it's a long ride to Fayoum. We were hoping for something to drink.\"\n\nChigaru's expression blossomed into a brilliant smile. \"My friends, do you think me so poor a host? I have Coca-Cola, beer, and sparkling water on ice in the car. If you like, I will stop at a market and pick up some takeaway food before we leave Cairo.\"\n\n\"That would be fantastic,\" Jada said happily.\n\nDrake couldn't disagree. Chigaru might only be a connection, but at the moment Drake felt pretty friendly toward him. A meal and a cold Coke sounded like heaven.\n\nChigaru started to lead the way toward a Volvo station wagon with tinted windows parked between the hut and the cargo terminal. Just before they reached the car, Sully spoke in a low voice so that no one else would hear.\n\n\"What about the weapons we talked about?\" Sully asked.\n\n\"Didn't I tell you not to worry?\" Chigaru said. \"Our first stop is for guns.\"\n\nHe opened the driver's door and slid behind the wheel. Sully smiled at Drake and Jada like it was Christmas morning.\n\n\"That's more like it. We run into any more trouble, I wanna be able to give some back,\" he said before climbing into the passenger seat.\n\nDrake opened the rear door and held it for Jada.\n\n\"Looks like we've got everything covered,\" she said, strained amusement in her voice. The idea of guns and more shooting obviously did not appeal to her any more than it did to Drake.\n\n\"For the moment,\" Drake agreed.\n\nBut even as he climbed into the back of the Volvo with her and heard the clink of ice as she drew a bottle of sparkling water from a cooler, he couldn't suppress a shiver and the temptation to look back over his shoulder.\n\nHe'd just had the strangest feeling they were being watched. It was a sensation he'd had before, and far too often he'd been right.\n\nThe Auberge du Lac had been built as a hunting lodge for King Farouk, the last monarch of Egypt. Drake thought it looked more like the kind of place where Sinatra might have appeared in the early days of Las Vegas, with its whitewashed walls and palm trees. The hotel stood on the shore of a lake that was part of the Fayoum Oasis, not far from Fayoum City, which was modern and industrial by local standards.\n\nAn hour in any direction and the whole world changed. The Valley of the Whales was within that radius\u2014quiet endless desert where the sand hid fossils of ancient sea life\u2014but so were off-the-tourist-path pyramids, as well as the waterfalls that were a part of the Fayoum Oasis. Some of them had been part of an irrigation plan that went back as far as Ptolemy, diverting water from the Nile for agriculture, but others\u2014the Wadi el Rayan\u2014were part of a modern hydro project. The area had little tourism, but from what he'd learned, it had been growing.\n\nAnd all of it, the whole damn area, was a part of what had once been called Crocodilopolis. The City of Crocodiles had taken its name from the reptiles that had been plentiful around the lakes in ancient times. Like Kom Ombo, which had come later, Crocodilopolis had been a center of worship for the Egyptian crocodile god, Sobek. The cult of Sobek had built an enormous temple where a single crocodile would be chosen to represent their god and encrusted with gold and gems.\n\nArchaeologists had found the ruins of the Temple of Sobek decades ago. Though legends of a labyrinth in Crocodilopolis persisted, that part of the temple had never been unearthed\u2014until more than a year into the Wadi el Rayan hydro project, when spill-off water from the Fayoum Oasis was being diverted into man-made lakes. Two of the lakes were still in use, but the third had dried up without explanation. Upon investigation, the engineers had discovered that the water had not evaporated; it had drained into the remains of the labyrinth of Sobek.\n\nThe final mystery of the cult of Sobek had been located purely by accident. But to learn the secrets of the labyrinth, the archaeological expedition's first task would be to draw the water back out of the ground. More than a year had passed before the team had been able to begin mapping and doing further excavations, and Luka Hzujak had been consulting with the dig's director\u2014Hilary Russo\u2014since day one.\n\nAll this, Drake and Sully had learned from Jada during the final hours of the flight from Montreal to Cairo. They knew all there was to know, at least until they could make contact with Ian Welch, whose sister Gretchen was the grad student who'd been working with Maynard Cheney on the labyrinth project at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Gretchen had promised to enlist her brother's help. If she couldn't deliver on that promise, they had come a very long way for nothing.\n\nFor the moment, their most vital task was trying not to melt.\n\nPlumes of dust rose from the tires as Chigaru drove the Volvo up the driveway in front of the Auberge du Lac and pulled the car into a parking space in the small lot beside the hotel.\n\n\"You are not as close to downtown Fayoum City as you might wish,\" Chigaru said in his mannered accent. \"But this is a beautiful hotel. Certainly you would not find a hotel like this in the city.\"\n\nDrake thought he detected some slight resentment, as though Chigaru felt put out that they hadn't arranged their accommodations with him. He wondered if the skinny Egyptian would have gotten a cut of their room fees. He might be able to acquire guns and vehicles and information, which were higher-ticket items, but Drake suspected Chigaru would not have minded taking a commission on just about anything. Like the tour guides who received kickbacks from souvenir shops if they directed tourists there, Chigaru wanted his percentage\u2014a chance, as Sully often put it, to \"dip his beak.\"\n\n\"It looks nice,\" Jada agreed, popping open the door. \"I'll be happy just to lie down.\"\n\nDrake slid from the backseat and dragged his duffel with him. They had stopped in the middle of nowhere\u2014and nowhere might have been exaggerating its significance\u2014to divvy up the guns Chigaru had acquired for them. Sully and Drake each had tucked Belgian FN Five-sevens in clip holsters at the small of their backs. An armpit holster would have been too conspicuous, and so would a jacket worn in the Egyptian heat. With their shirttails out, the guns would be hidden but easily accessible.\n\nJada had taken the SIG P250, a smaller, more compact weapon that carried a few rounds less. Her father had taught her to shoot at a range in upstate New York, but she had never even pointed a gun at another human being, so though she reluctantly accepted the weapon, she kept it in her duffel.\n\nWith a cold Coke in hand, the glass bottle dripping, Sully climbed out and leaned on the roof, looking over the top as Chigaru got out of the car.\n\n\"You know how to romance a guy, Chigaru,\" Sully said. \"You always take me to the nicest places.\"\n\nChigaru smiled and patted his pockets, digging out his cigarettes and a lighter.\n\n\"You are on your own from here, my friends,\" he said, glancing around at the three of them. \"The car is yours. Leave it at the airport in Cairo when you're done or text me and let me know where you've abandoned it and I'll send someone to get it. You have my number should you require anything else.\"\n\nSully grabbed his duffel and walked around to shake Chigaru's hand. \"I think we've got it as under control as we're ever going to. I'll see to it that the second half of your money is wired into your account before my head hits the pillow tonight.\"\n\nDrake fished another bottle of water out of the cooler in the car. The ice had melted almost completely by now, but the drinks were still cold enough to be sweet relief.\n\nChigaru gave a small bow, then dropped the car keys into Sully's hand. \"Good hunting, my friend.\"\n\nJada and Drake thanked him as well and then fell into step with Sully, headed for the hotel. Chigaru remained by the car, leaning against the trunk of the car with his sunglasses glinting in the late afternoon sunlight.\n\n\"What, he's just going to hang around out here?\" Jada asked, her voice low.\n\n\"A guy that suave? I'm sure someone'll be along to pick him up,\" Drake said.\n\n\"You're just jealous that you're not that suave.\"\n\n\"Suave is overrated and very last century. I'm rugged and sometimes adorably awkward,\" Drake replied.\n\nBefore Jada could fill the obvious opening with good-natured mockery, Sully pushed between them, shouldering them apart like a teacher worried that his young charges were dancing a little too close at a junior high school mixer.\n\n\"Can you two cut it out with the cute banter?\" Sully said. \"You're making me nauseous.\"\n\nDrake smiled innocently. He would have liked to tell Sully that he was just trying to keep Jada's mind off her father's death and the reason they were in Egypt to begin with, but he didn't want to talk about it with Jada right beside them.\n\n\"I'm sure Chigaru's arranged for transport,\" Sully told Jada. \"I figure he'll be gone within the hour.\"\n\nDrake glanced over his shoulder at Chigaru, who leaned against their car, smoking, as if he hadn't a care in the world. Even at a distance, the man looked in control of the world around him. He might have been little more than a minion for hire, but it was clear he didn't see it that way.\n\n\"As soon as it gets dark, I'll sweep the car,\" Drake muttered to Sully.\n\n\"Sweep for what?\" Jada asked.\n\n\"Bugs,\" Sully said. \"Maybe explosives.\"\n\nShe paled. \"We just drove more than two hours in that car.\"\n\n\"He wouldn't blow it up with himself inside. He's an entrepreneur, not a suicide bomber.\"\n\nJada narrowed her eyes and glanced back at the parking lot. They were almost to the hotel door, but they could still see Chigaru leaning against the car. She pressed her lips together in irritation.\n\n\"It just seems wrong. You paid him.\"\n\nSully laughed softly. \"There's always somebody willing to pay more, darlin'. Remember that. Money can't buy more than a minute's worth of loyalty.\"\n\nDrake glanced over the lake\u2014visible to him now only through the fronds of a young palm\u2014and despite the glare off the water, he saw a silver go-fast boat jet into view. It must have cut its engines a moment later, for it seemed to stop short in the water, rising and falling on its own wake as it settled and drifted, the nose turning to point toward the hotel like an arrow. Or a bullet.\n\nNarrowing his gaze, he saw a second, apparently identical boat about a hundred yards farther out, also drifting with its nose pointing toward the Auberge du Lac. The sudden arrival of the second boat couldn't have anything to do with them\u2014he knew that would be too much of a coincidence\u2014but both of the crafts seemed to have an air of purpose around them, as if they were there on business rather than pleasure.\n\nThen Sully called his name, breaking his train of thought, and he saw that Jada was holding the interior door open for them. Drake followed them in, basking in the cool, air-conditioned interior of the hotel, and the go-fast boats were forgotten.\n\nAs late as the 1940s, political figures from around the world had met and stayed at the Auberge du Lac for minisummits that helped determine the fate of global relations. The hotel still had the flavor of that bygone era, with its lazy ceiling fans and huge round arched windows and the woodwork in the lobby that seemed to hint at the architect's love of Swiss ski chalets. It seemed to Drake like the sort of place that Rick and Ilsa would have escaped to for a romantic tryst if only Casablanca had ended differently.\n\nSully glanced right, then split off to the left, taking up a position with his back to a pillar. From there he could watch them at the checkin counter and still watch the door and most of the lobby. Drake fought the temptation to wisecrack. The time for digressions had passed. Once they had stepped into the lobby, they had entered the territory of mystery. Somewhere here there were clues as to why Luka Hzujak had been cut up and dumped on a train platform in an old steamer trunk, and Drake's usually mischievous nature was tempered by the weight of the man's death.\n\nDrake and Jada approached the front desk. The man who greeted them gave only the hint of a smile. His red jacket was neatly pressed, and his gray hair and seamless features seemed to have undergone the same process.\n\n\"Good afternoon, sir,\" the man said, nodding first to Drake and then to Jada. \"Madam. How may I help you?\"\n\n\"We have reservations. This is Mr. Merrill,\" Jada said, indicating Drake as she gave the name on his fake passport. \"You'll have mine under Hzujak.\"\n\nShe spelled her last name for him. Drake was glad she had remembered to grab her real passport when they had stopped at the apartment she'd been hiding out in back in New York. She had traveled under her new, false identification\u2014just as Drake and Sully had\u2014but here it was important that she be Jada Hzujak.\n\nThe clerk tapped keys on a computer keyboard and studied his monitor, frowning. He'd seen something in the reservation he didn't like. He took their passports\u2014Jada's real one and Drake's fake\u2014and set them beside his computer. A few more taps, some sleight of hand, and then he was handing Drake a small envelope containing a pair of plastic key cards.\n\n\"There are two booked into your room, Mr. Merrill. You are traveling with a Mr. David Farzan?\"\n\n\"Right here,\" Sully said, his gruff voice carrying though he had spoken in a sort of stage whisper. He waved a hand as he strode up to the desk to join them and slipped his fake passport onto the counter.\n\nThe clerk smiled and nodded. \"Excellent,\" he said, taking Sully's fake passport, keying in the passport number, and then handing it back. \"You gentlemen are in Room 137. I trust you'll find everything to your liking, but if you need anything at all, just ring the front desk.\"\n\nHe frowned as he realized they didn't have any luggage other than the duffels but did not comment. Instead, he handed another envelope to Jada with her single key card inside and returned her passport.\n\n\"Miss Hzujak, you'll be in Room 151.\"\n\nJada stiffened, then shook her head. \"No, that's wrong.\"\n\nDrake and Sully exchanged a look, realizing what was happening.\n\n\"I spoke to someone on the phone,\" Jada said emphatically. \"I'm supposed to have Room 213.\"\n\nThe red-jacketed man narrowed his eyes. \"Yes, I see there is a note in the computer system to that effect. But that room is unavailable.\"\n\n\"You mean it's taken by someone else?\" Drake asked. He didn't like the vibe he was getting off the clerk. The whole situation felt strangely tense and awkward, and not just because the hotel employee didn't want to upset his customers.\n\n\"Not precisely.\"\n\n\"What does 'not precisely' mean?\" Sully asked. \"If the room isn't occupied, you have no reason not to give it to her.\"\n\nThe clerk seemed at a loss for words, itchy and nervous, and he glanced around as if he were hoping a supervisor would come to his rescue.\n\n\"Why don't we talk to your manager?\" Drake suggested. \"If you can't explain this, get us someone who can.\"\n\nOffended, the clerk sniffed in irritation. He glanced around, but this time he spoke in a surreptitious fashion, not wishing to be overheard.\n\n\"The room is not available because it is being refurbished. There has been a little bit of damage since it was last occupied.\"\n\nNow Drake got it, and he didn't like it. A trickle of ice ran down his back.\n\n\"So one of your guests trashed the room?\" he asked.\n\n\"Certainly not,\" the clerk said, even more insulted, but this time on behalf of the hotel. \"Room 213 was vandalized. Repairs are being made but if you please, it is not something the hotel wishes its other guests to learn. It isn't good for our reputation, you understand?\"\n\n\"We do,\" Sully said. \"But she still needs that room. And if you want us to keep quiet about your troubles, you'll give it to her.\"\n\nFor the first time, the clerk's expression turned from irritation to anger. Then his smile returned, forced and insincere.\n\n\"Sir, I have explained that this is quite impossible.\"\n\nDrake moved up against the counter and leaned in close so that he could speak as quietly as possible.\n\n\"Listen. We don't want to make some kind of spectacle, here. Maybe the person who arranged this for Miss Hzujak didn't explain the circumstances to you, but here they are. Several weeks ago, her father stayed in Room 213. Soon after his return to New York, he passed away.\"\n\nA flicker of sympathy in the clerk's eyes. That was good. Drake forged ahead.\n\n\"This is her goodbye to him, understand? And she's going to have it. I'm sure most of the damage in the room has been cleaned up. Are the windows broken?\"\n\n\"No, but I\u2014\"\n\n\"Everything else is cosmetic. Send a maid up there to put fresh sheets on the bed and give her the damn key to 213. You can charge us twice the normal rate. Call it a surcharge, whatever you want. But she's going to have that room before the next hour expires or things are going to get really messy.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "It was closer to twenty minutes when they escorted Jada to Room 213. The maid had come and gone. There were clean sheets on the bed and fresh toiletries in the bathroom, but the entertainment center had a gaping hole where the television ought to have been and the lid was missing from the toilet tank. The in-room safe had been forced open and not yet replaced. A single piece of art\u2014a piece of papyrus covered with a primitive painting of a hunting scene\u2014hung from the wall. Two other hooks were conspicuously bare, with squares of paint around them that didn't match the rest of the walls, which had faded in the sunlight. Other art obviously had hung there, keeping the paint from being bleached by the sun.\n\n\"I've stayed in worse,\" Jada said, tossing her duffel onto the bed and then flopping beside it. She seemed to have forgotten the gun she carried, but Drake thought it was a bad time to remind her.\n\nSully made a circuit of the room while Drake went straight to the windows. The room had a water view, and he could still see the go-fast boats out there, drifting. He opened the French doors and stepped onto the small balcony, searching the railings and beneath the chairs and the little round table for anything Luka might have left behind.\n\nWhen he reentered the room, Jada was by the door, fiddling with the knob that controlled the old ceiling fan. It began to rotate slowly, making him realize just how hot it was in the room. He went to the small air-conditioning unit in the corner and found that it was broken. More accurately, someone had taken it apart and it hadn't been properly put back together again.\n\n\"Whoever ransacked the place, they did a job on the AC. It's screwed. You're going to be sweating tonight,\" he told Jada.\n\n\"The fan will help,\" she said. \"I'll open the windows. With a breeze off the water, it'll be fine once the sun goes down.\"\n\nSully stood back with his hands on his hips, staring at the bureau. He had pulled the drawers out and set them on the floor, working much more neatly than whoever had broken in and searched the room before they arrived.\n\n\"Get the bed, will you?\" Sully asked.\n\nDrake dropped to his knees, searching underneath, then stood and stripped the fresh bedclothes, checking under the mattress. They both knew there was no point to the search. If there had been anything here, whoever had ransacked the place would have found it already. But he looked just the same, checking the seams of the mattress to see that nothing had been cut and re-sewn. If they were going to look, they might as well be thorough.\n\nWhile Drake went over the bed, Sully moved the bureau and then the entertainment center, then went into the bathroom. Jada watched the proceedings with fascination at first and then with growing amusement.\n\n\"I hope you're going to remake the bed,\" she said, pushing her magenta hair behind her ears.\n\nDrake frowned at her. \"We're looking for\u2014\"\n\n\"Anything my father might have left behind,\" Jada finished for him. She kneeled on the mattress, hands defiantly on her hips. \"Do you think I'm stupid, Nate? If someone tossed this room, they were looking for something. Stands to reason that there's something to look for. Whoever Henriksen has working for him, they must know a lot of things we don't. My father came here, he figured something out.\"\n\n\"We knew that part already,\" Sully said.\n\nThey both looked up to see him standing in the bathroom door with his arms crossed.\n\n\"Yeah, but if they're searching, it doesn't just mean he was on to something,\" Jada continued. \"It means they knew it, and he knew\u2014or at least suspected\u2014that someone was going to try to take those secrets from him. They think he was worried enough to hide something.\"\n\nDrake looked around the room. \"The question is, Did they find it? Whatever 'it' is.\"\n\nJada threw the sheets back on the bed, not bothering to make it up, and flopped onto the mattress again, staring at the ceiling. She crossed her ankles, making herself right at home.\n\n\"My father was a pretty smart guy,\" she said. \"If he had something important, something he was afraid other people might try to take away, he'd find a way to get it home safely.\"\n\nSully chuckled and rapped his knuckles on the door frame as if for luck. \"You can say that again. He did it more than once. But if Henriksen, or whoever killed Luka, thinks it's here \u2026\"\n\nHe trailed off, thinking, then nodded to himself. \"Maybe they burned his apartment to destroy records or notes he made since he got home, but if they're still looking, they must be damn sure Luka didn't bring whatever it is home with him. So let's assume he did leave something here. Why would he do that? And where would he hide it?\"\n\nDrake had kept walking while they spoke, feeling the door and window frames, checking the curtains, testing the floor with his shoes. Now he paused and looked at Sully.\n\n\"He made it home alive,\" Drake said, trying to infuse himself with the kind of fear and paranoia they believed Luka must have been feeling. \"But if he thought he might not make it home\u2014if he thought he might not make it out of Egypt alive \u2026\"\n\nSully nodded, pointing at him. \"Yeah. That makes sense. Okay, so let's say he did hide something, but like Jada says, he's smarter than they give him credit for. Would he really hide it in this room? I'm going to say no.\"\n\n\"Which puts us exactly nowhere,\" Drake said. He ran a hand over his stubbled chin, confused and frustrated. Luka's killers were way ahead of them, had so many more pieces of the puzzle. He and Sully and Jada were essentially starting from scratch, and they'd already nearly been murdered once.\n\nJada laughed softly.\n\nDrake frowned and stared at her.\n\n\"What's funny?\" Sully asked.\n\nShe propped herself up in the bed, staring at the ceiling. She barely seemed to notice they were still in the room.\n\n\"Jada?\" Drake said.\n\n\"This place is old. Faded glory, right?\" she said. \"But the ceiling fan\u2014that's pretty new. Quiet. You can barely hear it except for the swish of the air. No rattling or anything.\"\n\nDrake shot Sully a worried glance, then turned back to her. \"And?\"\n\nJada crawled onto her knees and then rose unsteadily to her feet on top of the bed. She bounced a little, smiling at them.\n\n\"Uncle Vic, turn off the fan.\"\n\nSully made a beeline to the knob by the door, not stopping to ask why. It was clear Jada thought she was on to something.\n\n\"I talked to my dad the night before he came home from Egypt. I heard the\u2014the fear in his voice, I guess. But at the time I just thought he was tired, y' know? Wiped out. He was getting too old to be running all over the world at a moment's notice. I told him I was worried about him, and he told me I had nothing to be afraid of, that he'd be okay as long as he didn't dry up and blow away in a sandstorm. He didn't like the heat.\"\n\n\"Do you think he was trying to tell you something?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"I didn't notice it then, but yes, I think he was. In his way, without saying it, I think he was trying to warn me that he\u2014that he might not make it back.\"\n\nShe'd stopped bouncing, lost in the memory, her sadness painful to see. Sully moved to the edge of the bed and reached out, taking her hand. Drake said nothing, not wanting to interfere with a moment so intimate. This grief was between family members.\n\nJada looked down at Sully. \"He kept complaining about the fan, Uncle Vic. I'd forgotten all about it, but now that we're here\u2014I've been trying to imagine I'm my dad, and I'm afraid and alone and talking to my daughter on the phone. I was watching the fan and thinking how quiet it is, and then I remembered.\"\n\nDrake looked up at the fan, its rotations slowing now that Sully had shut it off. He wanted to check it out, but this was Jada's to do.\n\nTears had started to slip down her cheeks. She wiped at them, smiling sheepishly.\n\n\"He said\u2014\"\n\n\"What, Jada?\" Sully prodded.\n\n\"He said he hated having the AC on, but the fan rattled so much, it was like having someone in the room that wouldn't shut up. He said, 'This damn thing's got a lot to say.'\"\n\nJada turned to Drake, excitement building in her now. \"Those weren't the exact words, but something like that. I know it's not much, but it's weird, right?\"\n\nDrake nodded to her. \"Go ahead. Look.\"\n\nShe took a deep breath, reached up, and began to run her hands over the tops of the fan blades, one at a time. On the third one, she froze, her breath catching in her throat. Drake heard the sound as she peeled off a scrap of paper that had been taped to the top of the fan blade.\n\n\"What does it say?\" Sully asked.\n\nJada stared down at it, and a smile blossomed on her face. She handed the paper to Sully, who glanced at it and then passed it on to Drake.\n\nOn the tiny scrap of paper, inside a hastily scrawled heart, Luka Hzujak had written the number 271.\n\nDrake glanced up at Sully. \"Room 271?\"\n\nJada laughed, drying her eyes. \"They were searching the wrong room.\"\n\nThey raced one another to the door.\n\nIntimidation didn't work on the front desk clerk a second time. Drake and Sully explained that the accommodations they had been given simply wouldn't do and that Room 271 would be significantly preferable, but the clerk did not seem interested in cooperating. It had been one thing for Jada to claim she wanted to stay in the same room her father had been in, but the little man in the red jacket clearly thought that now the Americans were just being difficult or they were up to something. Not to mention that they hadn't exactly endeared themselves to him by bullying him when they'd first arrived.\n\nMoney solved it all. Once again, Drake had reason to be grateful for his trip to Ecuador, though the money he had made on that job seemed to be vanishing faster than a magician's assistant. The clerk kept a stern, suspicious look on his face all through their transaction but eventually produced a pair of key cards for 271 and handed them to Drake.\n\nThe little man patted the pocket of his red jacket, in which Drake's money made a little crinkling noise.\n\n\"A pleasure doing business with you, sir,\" the clerk said. He smiled, his yellow teeth like dark kernels of corn under his mustache.\n\n\"You're a walking clich\u00e9, buddy,\" Drake told him.\n\nJada grabbed him by the arm, tugging him away, in a hurry to get back upstairs. The clerk was taking a reservation as they departed, but he spared a glance at Drake and smiled, patting his pocket again. He gave Drake a thumbs-up.\n\n\"Bastard has my money,\" Drake muttered as they hurried up the stairs. \"I liked that money.\"\n\n\"You'll have a lot more than that when we track down this treasure,\" Jada said quietly. \"You can take your expenses off the top.\"\n\nHer tone held nothing bitter, but just hearing her say the words made him remember why they were there. This gig was costing him a lot of money and he did want to recoup whatever he could, but he felt like a jerk focusing on the money.\n\n\"Sorry,\" he said as they reached the top of the stairs.\n\nJada touched his arm. \"Don't be,\" she said, glancing first at Drake and then at Sully. \"Thank you. Both of you. Whatever comes of this, I wouldn't even have gotten this far without you.\"\n\nThey passed a man wheeling a room service cart in the second floor corridor. At a bend in the hall there were floor-to-ceiling windows with a beautiful view of the lake. The late afternoon sun had turned golden, and a single sailboat moved slowly across the surface. The sight of it reminded Drake of the two cigarette boats he'd noticed earlier, but if the pair of silver bullets was still on the water, they must have moved to another part of the lake.\n\nAt Room 271, Sully held out a hand and Drake slipped him a key card. They glanced up and down the corridor. Luka's killers had not known about whatever secrets he'd hidden in this room\u2014they couldn't have without finding the note on top of the ceiling fan\u2014but Drake was feeling cautious, anyway.\n\n\"Pretty lucky this room wasn't booked for tonight, right?\" Sully asked, as if their good fortune had some other significance.\n\n\"Sometimes luck is just luck,\" Jada said.\n\nDrake nodded. \"True. But we don't usually have the good kind.\"\n\nSully ran a hand over his face, smoothing his mustache, and then slipped the key card through the lock. Drake felt the weight of his gun against the small of his back but wouldn't draw it without an immediate threat. The door clicked, and Sully opened it, nodding to Drake even as he held out a hand to indicate that Jada should remain in the hall. She looked as if she might burst with anticipation, but she crossed her arms and waited while they entered and did a quick check to be sure nobody was lying in wait.\n\n\"Okay, you can come in,\" Sully said.\n\nJada strode into the room, letting the door swing shut behind her. As Sully started to speak again, she stiff-armed him, shoving him back onto the bed, and Drake burst out laughing.\n\n\"That's the last time you treat me like the damsel in frickin' distress,\" she said, looking fierce despite her diminutive stature.\n\n\"That ain't what it's about, kid,\" Sully said. \"Nate and I\u2014we've been in situations like this before.\"\n\nHe started to rise, an apologetic look on his face, and she shoved him down again. Drake laughed, but he shut up when Jada shot him a bristling look. Then she drew her gun, and none of it was funny anymore.\n\n\"I know how to fight, Uncle Vic. And I know how to shoot. He might have been your friend, but he was my father. As far as I'm concerned, this little trip is my mission, not yours. I don't work for you. I don't take orders from you. Yes, I'll defer to your experience, especially if whoever wants us dead takes another crack at us. But for the last time, don't protect me. I'm not a goddamn liability, I'm an asset.\"\n\nDrake leaned against the bureau, trying not to smirk as he studied Sully. \"I tried to tell you, but noooo\u2014\"\n\nSully glared at him. Drake shrugged.\n\nJada glanced back and forth between them. \"We're a team on this, or the two of you should just wish me luck and move on to your next bit of thievery for hire.\"\n\nSully stared at the gun in her hand. Drake couldn't blame him. She hadn't pointed it at Sully\u2014the barrel was aimed at the headboard\u2014but any time an unholstered gun was in the room, you wanted to know what it would hit if someone pulled the trigger.\n\n\"Admit it,\" Drake said. \"We're just so damn charming that you can't bear the idea of being parted from us.\"\n\nJada started to grin, then looked even more irritated that he had succeeded in defusing her righteous fury.\n\n\"You're a couple of scoundrels,\" she said.\n\n\"But charming scoundrels,\" Drake replied.\n\nWhen it was clear that Jada didn't plan to shoot him, Drake started searching the room, whistling the Seven Dwarves' work song from Snow White. Jada laughed and returned the small gun to the holster she wore under her flowing beige blouse.\n\n\"Is it safe to get up now?\" Sully asked, hands raised as if he were under arrest.\n\n\"Shut up and get to work,\" Jada said, wearing half a grin.\n\nSully stood, but as she moved away, he reached out and grabbed her, pulled her in close, and kissed the top of her head.\n\n\"It's not that I don't think you're capable,\" he said, his voice a rough whisper Drake could barely make out.\n\n\"I know,\" Jada replied.\n\nDrake thought of half a dozen wisecracks but said nothing. The mirror above the bureau was bolted to the wall, but he had run his fingers around it. Now he was searching the drawers, down on his knees so he could see if Luka had taped anything to the bottoms. It didn't seem likely. If he really had expected Jada to be suspicious enough to come looking or send someone to investigate, he wouldn't have hidden anything someplace that could easily be discovered by accident.\n\nSully checked the closet and then went into the bathroom. Drake heard him moving around, heard the scrape of the toilet tank lid being removed and replaced. Jada busily stripped the bed and then started to shove the mattress aside. Drake couldn't check under the bureau\u2014there was no room even to slide his fingers beneath it\u2014but he dragged it out to look behind it.\n\nAs Sully emerged from the bathroom and he and Jada started going over the nightstands, Drake worked on the entertainment center. He had his hands behind the television when he realized the others had stopped working. He glanced over to see Jada and Sully staring up at the ceiling fan, but when Jada climbed onto the bed to search, she found nothing.\n\n\"He'd have been in a hurry,\" Drake said, glancing around. \"Nothing too elaborate. Somehow he snuck into this room. He'd have put whatever it is somewhere it wouldn't be found easily or quickly, but he'd have known that nobody would be searching this room, so it might be he'd put it somewhere he could be sure it would be found eventually.\"\n\n\"Not the safe,\" Jada said. \"I'm sure it's left open before a new guest checks in.\"\n\nSully narrowed his eyes, then turned to look at the air-conditioning unit beside the window. He hurried over to it and knelt down, prying the face panel off the machine. When he removed it, a small bundle fell to the floor.\n\n\"Bingo,\" Sully said.\n\nHe picked it up and tugged off the thick rubber bands around it, and the bundle separated out into a small sheaf of folded pages and a shabby journal of the sort sold in any office supply store in the world. A piece of hotel stationery fluttered to the ground, and Sully snatched it up, gave it a quick, grim scan, and then handed it to Jada, who climbed down from the bed.\n\nHer hand trembled a bit as she took it, but when she read, her voice was steady.\n\n\" 'To whom it may concern. Upon your discovery of these documents, please contact my daughter, Jadranka Hzujak, and arrange to see them delivered to her.' \" Jada glanced up at Drake. \"He's got my address here. Nothing more.\"\n\nSully had unfolded one of the papers and now laid it on the bed. The three of them stared down at the map of Crocodilopolis on which Luka had drawn the location of the labyrinth of Sobek and what he suspected were its dimensions and basic design. There were scribblings on the map as well, most of them apparently references to the lengths of corridors but some evidently comparisons to the labyrinth at Knossos on the island of Crete.\n\n\"Here. You should be the one,\" Sully said, handing Jada the journal.\n\nShe opened it and began to read, but immediately her expression turned to disappointment.\n\n\"What is it?\" Drake asked.\n\nJada frowned, turning and scanning pages. \"Notes, mostly. I was kind of hoping it was a real journal, y' know? Something that would lay it all out for us. But it's his notes to himself.\"\n\nShe moved between them, turning so that Drake and Sully could peruse the pages with her. Drake saw what she meant. There were drawings of labyrinths, some larger and some with more intricate details.\n\n\"Is that a trap?\" Sully asked, indicating one sketch. \"Like something from the pyramids?\"\n\n\"Looks like,\" Drake agreed.\n\nThere were scribbles about Daedalus. \"Knossos first,\" Luka had written. \"Then Croc City\u2014and then, where's number three?\"\n\n\"So he's confirming that Daedalus designed three labyrinths?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Jada said, flipping two pages back. \"It's right here. 'Fundamental design of Cretan labyrinth used three times. Honey a constant.'\"\n\n\"Honey?\" Sully grumbled. \"What the hell does he mean?\"\n\nNone of them replied. Jada flipped a few more pages, pausing only momentarily to study the small maps Luka had drawn in the journal. They depicted the progress of the dig on the labyrinth of Sobek. One of the maps had another reference to honey: a design that seemed to indicate four separate routes that led into a single location in the labyrinth. Beside it, with an arrow, Luka had scrawled the words \"Honey Chamber location differs from Knossos, but command is the same\u2014Mistress of the Labyrinth must be given an amount equivalent to all other gods put together.\"\n\nLuka had drawn an arrow to indicate that his thoughts were continued on the next page, one of his habits, if this journal was any indication. With a dry rustle of paper the only sound in the room, Jada flipped the page.\n\n\"Amazing,\" Luka had written. \"In Temple of Sobek\u2014labyrinth of Sobek\u2014but Sobek's worshippers give Mistress of the Laby. greater tribute than they give to their god? Why?\"\n\n\"Damn good question,\" Sully growled.\n\n\"Even better question if we knew what honey he's referring to,\" Drake replied.\n\n\"You don't think he just means regular honey?\" Jada asked.\n\nDrake glanced at her. \"Do you? I mean, all jokes about anything called a 'honey chamber' aside\u2014okay, it sounds like a special room Elvis would take his babes in Graceland\u2014but if the other gods are being offered this honey, too, it's probably not the Winnie-the-Pooh variety.\"\n\nSully gave him a sidelong glance but ignored the babble. \"Jada, didn't you say the worshippers of Sobek actually decorated living alligators with gold and gems?\"\n\nJada nodded.\n\n\"So they've got gold and gems,\" Sully said. \"Enough gold that they can make new\u2014what, armor?\u2014for generations of alligators to represent their god. The gems they can maybe pry off, use again, but if they're making gold plating for the gators, they might be making a new one each generation.\"\n\n\"How did they get that much gold?\" Drake said. \"This place isn't exactly El Dorado.\"\n\nJada sighed. \"We're not getting any answers from this thing,\" she said, flipping another page.\n\n\"Maybe not,\" Drake said. \"But at least we're getting a better idea of what the questions should be.\"\n\nJada turned another page and hesitated. A note had been scrawled hastily there, and when she quickly flipped ahead, she found that the rest were empty. She went back to the final scribble in the journal. It had been written weeks ago, but in a way it was her father's last message to her.\n\n\"Talk to Welch,\" Luka had written. \"Golden touch? Maybe Daedalus. Where'd he go? That's the question. Henriksen doesn't care about the Three Labyrinths, he's after the treasure of the Fourth.\"\n\n\"Fourth?\" Drake read aloud. \"Didn't he say, right at the beginning, that Daedalus designed three labyrinths?\"\n\n\"Welch,\" Jada said. \"That's got to be Ian Welch, Gretchen's brother.\"\n\n\"Call him, Sully,\" Drake said. \"We need to see this guy tonight. Henriksen's trying to kill everyone who might know whatever it is Luka found out.\"\n\n\"There's no big secret in here,\" Jada protested, waving the journal. \"They trashed his room looking for it, but whatever he found, it's not here.\"\n\n\"Henriksen must think it is,\" Sully said, going to sit at the edge of the bed and picking up the phone.\n\n\"Jada,\" Drake said softly, \"we might not have it figured out, but your father wouldn't have hidden this stuff if he didn't think there was something important in what he's written.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" she said, crouching down to smooth out the map Sully had opened on the bed. Jada shook her head. \"But whatever it is, we'd better figure it out before Henriksen does.\"\n\n\"If he hasn't already,\" Drake said. \"It could be that he already has all the secrets and wants to make sure nobody else does.\"\n\nSully dialed the phone, referring to a scrap of paper he'd pulled from his wallet.\n\nJada flipped open the journal, turning again to that last page. Drake didn't like the furrow of her brow.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" he asked.\n\n\"Just reading it again. 'Talk to Welch.' Is that a message to me? An instruction? Or is it a note to himself, like his one-task to-do list? If so, then whatever mystery he unraveled, he might've told Ian Welch. It would've been right before he left Egypt to head back to New York to continue his research.\"\n\nSully had a quick conversation on the phone, and Jada kept her voice low.\n\nDrake frowned. \"You're saying maybe we can't trust Welch?\"\n\n\"I'm saying my father seems to have trusted him, and now he's dead. I'm saying we should be careful.\"\n\nSully hung up the phone. They turned to look at him.\n\n\"Guess we'll find out soon enough whose side Welch is on,\" Sully rasped. \"We're meeting him for a drink in Fayoum City in two hours.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "The sun went down as Drake drove them into Fayoum City, the sky becoming a vast indigo field of stars. They passed the ancient waterwheels that kept the narrow canals moving in the city, then crossed a bridge into the city proper.\n\nDrake tapped the brake when he spotted a police car parked beside a building that resembled an upside-down pyramid. In some parts of Egypt it was customary for Westerners to be accompanied by police in the larger cities. Chigaru had assured them that the insignias he had pasted on the bumper and the dashboard would keep most cops away. Either he had been as good as his word or this particular cop didn't feel like rousting Westerners. The police car remained where it was, and Drake kept driving.\n\nThe desk clerk at Auberge du Lac had given them directions, which meant Drake wasn't sure if they would end up in the right place until he actually had pulled into the parking lot. He had half expected the little man in the red jacket to send them the wrong way on purpose, but the directions turned out to be impeccable. The only distraction was the small black van that had picked them up as they passed the waterwheels and stuck with them as they drove through the city.\n\n\"You see it?\" Drake asked.\n\nSully, in the passenger seat, glanced back. \"Got it.\"\n\n\"Keep an eye on it.\"\n\nJada stole a quick glance as well. Though she said nothing, her body language spoke volumes, and when they turned onto Halma Street and the van kept going, she visibly exhaled. Drake felt the same relief but couldn't shake the feeling that they had been observed almost from the moment of their arrival in Egypt. It was impossible, of course. They had driven across wide expanses of nothing where a pursuing vehicle would have been impossible to miss. Even so, he felt the pressure of malign eyes on them as he drove.\n\nThe restaurant was tucked into the corner of the lobby of the Queen's Hotel, whose general shabbiness was a persuasive argument for why Luka had chosen to stay outside the city. Despite the dingy interior of the hotel, the restaurant seemed almost cheerful. The rich aroma of spices and cooking meat filled the place, and Drake found his stomach rumbling as he realized how long it had been since he had had a proper meal.\n\n\"I could eat a horse,\" Sully murmured as they entered, scanning the place for Ian Welch.\n\n\"From the looks of the place, change that to camel and you might get your wish,\" Jada muttered.\n\nDrake spotted a thin, edgy-looking man\u2014one of the few Westerners they'd seen thus far in the city\u2014sitting by himself at a corner table, his clothing and overall mien giving him away as American. Welch had chosen a table set apart from most of the dining room, the better to discuss things they would all rather not have overheard.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Drake whispered to the others. \"Add enough spices and camel might be pretty tasty.\"\n\nA uniformed waiter walked toward them, but Sully waved him off, making a beeline for Welch. Drake and Jada followed, and Drake noticed her glancing about the restaurant uneasily.\n\n\"Feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone,\" she said into his ear, her hot breath on his neck. \"Lilting Middle Eastern music and an entire restaurant of people staring at me.\"\n\n\"This isn't Cairo,\" Drake said. \"And it's no tourist destination. They don't see a lot of Westerners here and even fewer pretty young women with streaks of magenta in their hair.\"\n\nEven with the dim lighting of the restaurant, he could see Jada blush.\n\n\"It's not very manly to even know the word 'magenta,' never mind being able to recognize the color,\" she said.\n\n\"I'm a new breed,\" Drake assured her.\n\nThey arrived at the table smiling, but Ian Welch's grim expression sobered them both. He looked nothing like his younger sister with an unruly mop of dark hair, round spectacles, and a deep tan acquired from months in the desert. Wiry and intense, Welch shook hands with all three of them as introductions were made, but his focus was on Jada.\n\n\"I'm so sorry to hear about your father,\" the archaeologist said. \"When Gretchen told me about his murder\u2014and then Dr. Cheney \u2026\"\n\nWelch trailed off, then shook his head, at a loss for words. He gestured to the chairs. \"Please, sit. I've ordered some tahini and pita to start. The waiter will bring water as well. But, tell me, please\u2014what can I do for you?\"\n\nSully slid his chair back to give himself the best view of the restaurant. Welch had taken the corner seat, but Drake knew Sully would be on guard and let them know if trouble might be coming. The shooting in Manhattan had left them on edge, and the constant feeling of being observed gnawed at Drake, but he would let Sully worry about that for the moment. His focus had to be on Welch.\n\n\"There are two things, Mr. Welch,\" Jada said, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. \"First, we have some questions and we're hoping you can enlighten us. There's so much we don't know.\"\n\n\"I'll do my best,\" Welch said, nodding.\n\n\"Second,\" Jada began, \"well, we'd like to get in and have a look at the dig, but with as few people knowing we're there as possible.\"\n\nWelch started to reply, brow furrowed, ready to shake his head. Then he stopped himself, perhaps thinking of the murders of Luka Hzujak and Maynard Cheney. He glanced at Drake, then back at Jada.\n\n\"You really think this all has to do with something your father figured out after he came here?\"\n\nJada nodded. \"We do.\"\n\nWelch took a deep breath. \"Okay,\" he said, exhaling. \"I'll see if I can make it happen. In the meantime, what can I tell you about the work we're doing?\"\n\nThe waiter arrived with glasses of water for all of them, and then a second appeared and set the tahini and pita on the table. Drake would have rather had nachos, but as hungry as he was, the sesame paste and soft bread would do just fine.\n\n\"All right,\" Drake said before taking a bite. \"Tell us about Daedalus and the three labyrinths.\"\n\nWelch sipped his water. \"That's the biggest thing to come out of the dig so far. How much do you already know?\"\n\nDrake chewed, trying to swallow so he could reply. Jada jumped in.\n\n\"My father talked about his work a lot,\" she said. \"The way I understand it, he believed that Daedalus was an actual person, not a mythological character, and that he designed not only the labyrinth at Knossos\u2014as most stories tell it\u2014but also two others, including the one you're excavating right now.\"\n\nWelch nodded all through her statement. \"Oh, there's no doubt about it now. Look, most scholars will agree that the most enduring myths eventually prove to have had some real-life antecedent. The ancient Greeks, for instance, believed that the Trojan War had taken place and that Troy was an actual place. In modern times, historians had basically decided the whole thing had been made up, that it was just a story, right up until a German archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann actually discovered the ruins of Troy in 1870. So much for the people who dismiss myth as just stories.\n\n\"The thing about ancient Greece is that the people who tried to write the histories tended to pull from a variety of sources. A Mycenaean ruler might be confused with a figure in some older Phoenician story, and two pieces of truth might get jammed together, through oral tradition and exaggeration and superstition, into something else. My job as an archaeologist is to try to unravel the threads that time has wound together.\"\n\nDrake glanced at Sully, whose attention was on the other guests and the waitstaff. To someone who didn't know him, he would look bored and disinterested, just a guy hungrily anticipating his dinner instead of a guy ready for a fight. Sully had Luka's journal and maps stuffed into the rear waistband of his pants, right next to his gun. They had agreed it would be unwise to leave it back at the hotel, but Drake felt constantly aware of its presence among them. More than anything, it explained why Sully was so on guard. But Welch didn't seem put off by Sully's ignoring him at all.\n\n\"All right, so\u2014Daedalus?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"He was real?\" Jada said.\n\nWelch took a breath, reached up and removed his glasses, and began to clean them with the hem of the tablecloth.\n\n\"In the late Bronze Age, there was an inventor and builder considered to be one of the cleverest men in the world. Stories were told about him in many languages and cultures under many different names, but the one that seems to have stuck is Daedalus. He was a craftsman, an artisan, and the labyrinth of Knossos was long considered his greatest achievement.\n\n\"There is a great deal of disagreement in academic circles about whether or not the palace discovered at Knossos in the 1870s is actually the labyrinth Daedalus designed,\" Welch went on, replacing his glasses and reaching for his water glass. He looked intent now, lost in the history inside his mind. \"The structure contains thousands of interlocking rooms, but many, myself included, have maintained that it was not the labyrinth itself, that the actual maze was located somewhere nearby.\"\n\nThe waiter arrived, interrupting him, and they all gave their orders. Welch waited only moments after the waiter's departure, eager now that his story had begun.\n\n\"What you have to understand is that our current excavation\u2014the labyrinth of Sobek\u2014essentially proves that theory. The main palace of Crocodilopolis, the Temple of Sobek, has been a given for decades. But the labyrinth is a separate structure, not far from the temple. The Cretan labyrinth at Knossos must have been the same.\"\n\nDrake shook his head. \"Wait,\" he said, holding up a hand. \"You're saying they've never found the labyrinth at Knossos? The one with the Minotaur? King Minos, the whole thing?\"\n\nWelch smiled, scraping a bit of tahini onto a piece of pita. \"Amazing, isn't it? This stuff is legend, but it gets mixed up in the public consciousness. People don't know what's real and what isn't. So here's what is real.\"\n\nHe took a bite, chewed a few times, and swallowed, barely conscious of the action.\n\n\"The palace at Knossos is there. But an English gentleman, Sir Arthur Evans\u2014an amateur, because there weren't a lot of professionals in those days\u2014oversaw the excavation of the palace. During the process, he hired people to 'restore' the place.\" Welch made little air quotes with his fingers. \"Some of that restoration included taking entire rooms and having artists paint frescoes on the walls in what he claimed was the style of the Minoan civilization\u2014Minoan for King Minos, right?\u2014only it was all bullshit. Instead of restoring what was there, Evans's restoration team covered it all up, ruining a huge opportunity. A lot of what might have been learned was lost, which is part of the reason no consensus has been able to be formed about whether or not the palace at Knossos and the labyrinth of King Minos are one and the same.\n\n\"But our dig\u2014well, it makes a pretty persuasive argument that there's a separate building somewhere at Knossos. Not only that, but every day we're finding more and more evidence connecting the labyrinth of Sobek to the labyrinth at Knossos and to a third, as yet unidentified labyrinth. We've found tablets with writing and markings in sacred chambers, most of them written in Linear B, that establish pretty firmly that Daedalus designed three of them and Knossos and Crocodilopolis were two of the three.\"\n\n\"Not four?\" Sully asked, startling them all by speaking.\n\nWelch frowned, turning to him. \"I'm sorry?\"\n\n\"My father left some notes,\" Jada said. \"We got the impression he thought there was a fourth labyrinth.\"\n\n\"That's the first I've heard of it,\" Welch said. \"No, all of the writings we've found talk about 'Three Labyrinths of the Master Builder.' Notations elsewhere make it pretty clear Daedalus is the Master Builder, and we've been going on that theory.\"\n\nMovement caught Drake's attention out of the corner of his eye, but it was only the waiter bringing a plate of oven-fried cheese that Sully had ordered and a glass of Coke for Jada.\n\n\"Luka's notes talked about 'honey,' \" Drake said when the waiter departed. \"Something about 'the Mistress of the Labyrinth' getting the most.\"\n\nFor the first time, Welch lit up with real excitement. All of his sympathy about Luka's murder and his concern were thrust aside by enthusiasm.\n\n\"That's both one of the greatest finds of our dig and one of the biggest mysteries as well,\" Welch said, eyes bright behind his spectacles. He looked almost like a little boy in that moment, his grin beatific. \"A tablet found during the original excavation at Knossos referred to the Mistress of the Labyrinth. Yes, there's the legend of the Minotaur, but set that aside for a second. The tablet told of honey being brought as an offering to the gods in the temple at Knossos but also said that worshippers brought some to the labyrinth as an offering to its mistress. She received enough to equal that given to all of the other gods combined.\n\n\"We've found the same thing here in the labyrinth of Sobek. The people feared crocodiles, and Sobek was the crocodile god, so offerings to him were plentiful. But the rule about the honey and the Mistress of the Labyrinth existed here as well. And in the third labyrinth, wherever that was. Each labyrinth had a mistress who had to be propitiated.\"\n\nDrake stole a bite of Sully's fried cheese. The lights had been dimmed a little and the lilting music turned up as the evening wore on.\n\n\"But we're not talking about ordinary honey,\" Drake said.\n\n\"I agree,\" Welch replied. \"Though my whole team's been arguing for weeks about what it might have been. Of course it might have been honey, but it might have been some concoction, even a drinkable opiate or some similar drug. On the other hand, I lean toward the other extreme, which is that it was something far more tangible.\"\n\nThe archaeologist had a strange weight to his words, as if he had just reached the point in the story that he had been building up to all along, some turning point that he presented as a riddle, as if he expected them to be able to fill in the rest on their own. But Drake was too tired for riddles, and he knew his companions were as well.\n\n\"Such as?\" Drake said.\n\nWelch swirled the ice in his water glass, glanced around to be sure no one was listening, and leaned over the table, forcing a new intimacy into the conversation. Even Sully pulled in nearer.\n\n\"Gold,\" Welch whispered. His eyes were still bright, but he was no longer smiling. There could be no doubting his sincerity.\n\nJada stiffened, glancing at Sully and then Drake. She said nothing, but she did not have to. Luka Hzujak had written that Henriksen was after the treasure of the fourth labyrinth. Welch might not know anything about a fourth labyrinth, but here was at least a theory about treasure.\n\n\"Have you found gold in the dig?\" Sully asked quietly.\n\n\"Not as much as I'd expected,\" Welch said. \"The cult of Sobek used it in their worship, even in decoration of their sacred chambers and the crocodiles. But there's little of it in the labyrinth.\"\n\n\"So where's the connection?\" Jada asked.\n\nWelch sipped his water. \"Back up a second. You need to understand that many scholars believe that Minos might not have been the name of the king but a title, the way that Caesar became a title for the emperors of Rome. So the king for whom Daedalus built the labyrinth at Knossos, the king who was the father of Ariadne, whom Daedalus loved, might not have been named Minos at all.\"\n\nDrake shrugged. \"Okay. So?\"\n\n\"We've found evidence that he had another, more familiar name. That his sons and grandsons scattered to Anatolia and Phrygia and Thracia and Macedonia, all taking his name, causing historians a massive amount of confusion. But there's a tablet in my boss's office at the excavation site that tells a familiar story with a different setting and gives a name to the king of Crete, the founder of Minoan civilization.\"\n\nSully snapped. \"For God's sake, man, just spit it out!\"\n\nGlasses clinked. Conversations stopped. People paused in their dinner to stare at the rude Americans. Drake smiled awkwardly and gave a friendly wave to the people at the nearest occupied table, a pair of silver-haired Arab businessmen, maybe Saudi or Bahrainian.\n\nWelch looked hurt.\n\nJada reached across the table to put her hand over his. \"Mr. Welch, I appreciate your excitement. My father shared it, I have no doubt\u2014\"\n\n\"He did,\" Welch agreed, nodding.\n\n\"\u2014but we're trying to find out who killed him, and your sister's boyfriend, Dr. Cheney, as well. Before we left New York, someone tried to kill us, too. So I hope you'll forgive us if we're not in the mood for any additional suspense.\"\n\nDrake stared at her, wondering if he'd had half her poise at the age of twenty-four. He seriously doubted it.\n\n\"Of course,\" Welch said. \"Sorry. I was just trying to lay a foundation for what at first blush you might find a bit astonishing.\"\n\nDrake leaned in and lowered his voice, just as Welch had done. \"Astonish us.\"\n\nWelch smiled, and the four of them became conspiratorial again. \"We have evidence to suggest that King Minos of Crete and King Midas were one and the same.\"\n\nDrake stared at him. The music seemed to grow louder, and the susurrus of conversation in the restaurant ebbed and flowed. He tore his gaze from Welch's face only to glance at Sully and Jada and saw surprise and disbelief that mirrored his own.\n\n\"That's\u2014\" Sully began.\n\n\"Remember, Mr. Sullivan,\" Welch said, \"most legends have a core of historical fact, some precedent. I'm not suggesting a man existed who could turn base metals to gold with the touch of a finger, but there was a King Midas, well known for his hoarding of gold. Stories in different cultures refer to him, though we now believe most of them are references to his sons and grandsons of the same name, and that the patriarch of the family, Midas the First, if you will, was the father of Ariadne, the monarch of Cretan civilization\u2014Minoan civilization\u2014at the time the labyrinth was constructed by Daedalus.\"\n\nJada had gone pale, her gaze lost and distant. Welch seemed about to go on but then noticed the look on her face.\n\n\"Look, I know it's hard to accept the idea that something so widely viewed as a myth could be real\u2014\" he began.\n\n\"It's not that,\" Drake interrupted, a frisson of excitement making the hairs rise on his arms. He glanced at Jada. \"Tell him.\"\n\nSully had lost several seconds just gaping at Welch, but now Drake saw his mind working behind his eyes as if puzzle pieces were falling together inside his skull. Drake thought that was exactly what it felt like. They didn't have all the pieces, not by a long shot, but suddenly the puzzle had a little more shape than it had had even a few moments before.\n\n\"Mr. Welch,\" Jada started.\n\n\"Ian, please.\"\n\n\"Ian, then,\" she said. \"My father's research style was pretty immersive. You could even say obsessive. At the time of his murder, he had buried himself in research on two subjects that were obviously related, but when I went through his notes and things, I could never figure out how. One of those was obviously labyrinths. He had been here, and he had been talking frequently to Dr. Cheney in New York.\n\n\"The other subject was alchemy.\"\n\nWelch nodded. \"That's perfect, yes. That makes sense.\"\n\n\"Luka thought there was some connection between Midas and the great alchemists of history,\" Sully put in.\n\n\"There may be,\" Welch said. This time he looked almost nervous as he glanced around. Drake figured he was worried that the wrong people, overhearing him, might think there was treasure up for grabs at the dig and that could lead to theft and violence.\n\n\"Alchemy is impossible,\" Jada said, her frustration showing. \"Gold is what it is. It doesn't start as something else.\"\n\n\"You know that, and I know that,\" Welch said. \"But there have obviously been times in history when people believed in alchemy and some pretty charismatic individuals who claimed to be alchemists.\"\n\n\"The trick was in having the gold to back it up,\" Drake said.\n\n\"Exactly,\" Sully agreed, scanning the restaurant, talking to them while at the same time acting as their sentry. \"All of those guys\u2014St. Germain, Fulcanelli, young Nathan's friend Ostanes\u2014their claims would never have been believed if they hadn't had gold to show for their efforts. Enough to be amazing.\"\n\nWelch raised his eyebrows appreciatively. \"It seems I won't need to educate you all on the history of alchemy.\"\n\n\"Back to Midas,\" Sully prodded.\n\n\"And to the labyrinths,\" Welch agreed. \"On the tablets we've translated so far, there's a story that establishes that the designer of the labyrinth of Sobek\u2014obviously Daedalus, though he's not named\u2014paid the workers in gold and was said to have been able to transform stone into gold with a touch.\"\n\nDrake frowned. \"Wait, it says Daedalus had the touch, not Midas\u2014not the king?\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Welch replied, smiling thinly. \"It's written that the designer had a great stockpile of gold at the center of the labyrinth, that the workers built from the inside out, and that they would have to go and see him to get paid. He never left the labyrinth, but he paid them their wages in gold.\"\n\nThe archaeologist looked at Jada. \"Your father helped me translate that tablet. He and I both believed this story referred to Daedalus. It went on to say that thieves attempted to steal from him constantly, even after the labyrinth had been completed. There are references to the Mistress of the Labyrinth and her honey and to a monster as well.\"\n\n\"A monster?\" Jada asked. \"This is here in Egypt, not on Crete?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Welch replied, clearly enjoying his revelations. \"There are references to all three labyrinths having guardians. Monstrous men. Maybe scarred and certainly huge, but obviously not man-bulls like in the myth. It seems that Daedalus lived in the labyrinth here, and the mistress and the monster were also living inside it. But at some point, a group of builders banded together and attacked the cult of Sobek, killing many people and invading the labyrinth. The would-be thieves found no trace of gold or of Daedalus. Both had apparently vanished. Maybe when we figure out the location of the third labyrinth, we'll solve that mystery, too.\"\n\nJada started to ask him more, but then the waiter arrived with their dinner and the conversation halted while he served them. When he'd gone, Drake turned again to Welch.\n\n\"I can see why this would be like Christmas for you, Ian,\" Drake said. \"This dig has turned up more information about the ancient world than anything found in a century. You and your boss will have your careers made by this. You'll write books and go on talk shows. You'll be set. But as cool as a lot of this is\u2014and believe me, to someone like me, it is extremely cool\u2014I haven't heard anything yet worth killing over.\"\n\nWelch shot Jada an apologetic look. \"Whatever your father discovered, whatever connection he made that put him in danger, I have no idea what it is. And maybe it makes me a coward, but I confess I'm glad I don't know.\"\n\nSully slid his chair nearer to Welch. \"Be careful, Dr. Welch. Cheney didn't know, either\u2014or at least your sister didn't think Cheney knew whatever secret Luka had discovered. But Cheney's still dead. You've gotta be on guard until we figure it all out.\"\n\nFor the first time, Welch looked frightened. \"But I don't know the secret, either. If there is some kind of treasure and we don't find it during this dig, I have no idea where it could be.\"\n\n\"Just be careful,\" Sully said, taking a bite of his koshari.\n\n\"Maybe we'll find some answers at the dig tomorrow,\" Jada suggested. \"If we can put this puzzle together and prove who killed my father and why, then you'll be safe.\"\n\nWelch nodded. \"Let's hope so,\" he said, but he had gone rather pale and seemed to have lost much of his appetite.\n\nAs soon as he could get away without seeming rude, Welch excused himself and left his dinner half eaten at the table. He didn't even wait to have coffee with them after the meal. For several minutes after he departed, the three of them said nothing, finishing up their dinner, lost in their own ruminations.\n\nDrake's first hint that something was wrong came when Sully started choking.\n\n\"Uncle Vic?\" Jada asked, worried.\n\nSully coughed, taking a sip of water to wash down whatever it was he had swallowed wrong. But Drake knew him too well to think the food had been the only problem. He saw the worry in Sully's eyes and the way Sully had sat up, making sure the journal was hidden under the tail of his shirt but that he could reach his gun if he needed it.\n\nDrake glanced at the entrance to the restaurant and saw a woman walking toward them. A beautiful creature, she had blond hair to her shoulders, stylishly cut, and Drake put her in her early forties, though she could have passed for younger with less makeup. Her dress was long enough not to offend the Egyptians, but there was no mistaking the allure of the body beneath it.\n\n\"Jada,\" Sully whispered behind his water glass. \"Your stepmother just walked in.\"\n\nChair legs shrieking, Jada slid back from the table and stood, barely controlled fury on her face. Drake snatched her wrist and held on tight, forcing her to look at him.\n\n\"You're in public, in Egypt, and we're all carrying guns,\" he whispered through his teeth.\n\nShe took a deep breath, wet her lips, and gave a single sharp nod. Sully stood slowly and took up a position beside her, providing her with moral support. Drake stole Jada's Coke and took a long gulp, but he didn't rise. Anyone in the restaurant would think they were greeting the new arrival to their party despite the distress on the faces of both Jada and her stepmother.\n\n\"Oh, I'm so glad I found you,\" Olivia Hzujak said as she threw her arms around her stepdaughter.\n\nJada stood frozen, her gaze cold, as she endured her stepmother's embrace. Olivia took a step back and looked at her at arm's length.\n\n\"When I found out you were here, I just thought\u2014my God, it's like fate,\" Olivia said. Her lower lip trembled, and she brought a hand up to halfway cover her face as tears began to spill down her cheeks. \"Jada, I can't believe he's gone. I don't know what I'm going to do without him.\"\n\nHer voice shook with grief. Drake stared at the woman. Whatever he had expected from Olivia Hzujak, this was not it. A glance at Sully told him that his old friend had had the same reaction. Yes, the woman fit the mold of classic older femme fatale, but life didn't follow the rules of old Humphrey Bogart movies. If this woman's pain wasn't real, she was a damn fine actress.\n\nJada, though, did not seem convinced.\n\n\"What are you doing here, Olivia?\" she asked.\n\nOlivia flinched at the steel and ice in her stepdaughter's voice. She let go of Jada's arm and retreated a step, pushing her bleached hair away from her face. The older woman searched the eyes of the younger for understanding.\n\n\"I know what you must think,\" Olivia said.\n\n\"Really? I'm not sure you do,\" Jada replied.\n\nOlivia glanced at Sully. \"Victor. Thank you for taking care of her.\"\n\nSully arched an eyebrow. \"Somebody had to.\"\n\nAgain Olivia flinched. She nodded slowly, wiping at her tears, but Drake saw the effort it took for her to get herself under control and still thought her grief had to be genuine.\n\n\"I couldn't stay in New York, Jada,\" she said. \"Your father\u2014when he first turned up missing, I suspected the worst. But when the police called to say they'd found him and\u2014how they'd found him\u2014I feared for my own life.\"\n\n\"Come again?\" Sully said. \"Why would you think you were in danger?\"\n\nOlivia shot him a hard look. \"Don't be obtuse, Victor. I know why you're here. You and Jada and Mr. Drake.\" She glanced at Drake. \"I assume this is your friend Nathan.\"\n\nDrake raised Jada's Coke glass in a toast. \"Hey.\"\n\nThe woman turned back to Jada and Sully and lowered her voice. \"Please, let's work together on this. Tyr is here in Egypt as well. His men have been following me. I'm afraid they'll kill me like they did Luka. I came here in the first place because I thought the only way I would be safe is if I could figure out what he was trying to keep secret and make it public. If it's out there, if it's not a secret anymore, there'd be no point in killing to keep it quiet.\"\n\nSully tilted his head, studying her, stroking his mustache. \"You're not working with Henriksen on this?\"\n\nOlivia paled, looking stunned. \"Luka was my husband.\"\n\n\"Oh, please,\" Jada snorted. \"You treated him like a dog who messed on your rug.\"\n\n\"That's awful,\" Olivia said, her lip trembling again. She shook her head. \"I know you never liked me, Jada, but you weren't in our home. You didn't see our relationship the way it was, only the way it inconvenienced you.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Jada said, her voice low. One of the waiters had started to approach but thought better of it and retreated. \"That's the story you're sticking to? The loving and misunderstood wife?\"\n\n\"Jada,\" Sully said warily.\n\n\"No, Uncle Vic,\" Jada snapped, raising her voice just a little, trying to control herself. \"Don't tell me you're buying any of this crap. How did she find us, huh? That's what I want to know. We're in a restaurant in a random hotel in Fayoum City. How the hell did she know where to even start looking for us?\"\n\nOlivia stared at her. \"I'm staying in the same hotel. It's where Luka stayed. I was out most of the day, but when I got back, the desk clerk mentioned there was another guest named Hzujak, and what a strange coincidence. You asked for directions to get here, which is how he knew where you were going.\"\n\n\"You couldn't have waited for us to get back to the hotel?\" Sully asked.\n\n\"I couldn't know when you'd be back,\" Olivia argued. \"And I told you, I think I'm being followed. Now, are you going to invite me to sit so we can talk about this, or should we all just stand here looking more and more conspicuous.\"\n\nDrake watched Jada's face, then glanced at Sully. He saw the hesitation there, and he understood it, but Olivia's explanations seemed at least halfway believable, and he didn't like the attention they were drawing.\n\n\"She should sit down,\" Drake said, looking at Sully. \"We've got too many eyes on us right now.\"\n\nJada swung around to stare at him. \"You can't be serious.\"\n\nDrake returned her gaze. \"We can't do this here, Jada. Or do the words 'international incident' mean nothing to you? We don't have an exit strategy. So please, sit down.\"\n\nJada turned and stared at her stepmother. Olivia's expression was almost pitiful, even more so in a woman who seemed so practiced at projecting an air of aloof sophistication.\n\n\"Not a chance in hell,\" Jada said. She glared at Drake and then turned to Sully. \"You want to make nice with her, have a blast. But don't be surprised if you're the next one who turns up dead.\"\n\nShe turned on her heel and made a beeline for the exit. Sully and Olivia called after her, but Jada didn't look back. When Sully started to follow, Drake stood up quickly and grabbed his shoulder.\n\n\"No. You stay with her,\" he said, indicating Olivia. \"I'll get Jada back. Whether she likes it or not, there's a conversation that needs to happen here.\"\n\nDrake took off after Jada, all too aware of the eyes on him. Most of the people were watching his quarry, however. An attractive young American woman with magenta streaks in her hair would have gotten a lot of attention even if she hadn't been storming off like a spoiled teenager.\n\nThat's not fair, Drake thought, catching himself. If their positions were reversed and he truly believed Olivia had had a hand in killing Sully, he wouldn't stand there and listen to her spin lies, either. But Jada had hated Olivia even while her father was alive, so Drake had to make her see that she might not be viewing things objectively. He had to make her see that if there was a chance she was wrong, they'd be leaving an innocent woman alone in the path of a killer.\n\nAs he emerged from the restaurant into the lobby, he caught sight of Jada leaving the hotel. There were lights outside the doors, but their glow did not reach very far into the darkness, and he quickened his pursuit.\n\nPushing out into the night, he paused outside the door, squinting at the night.\n\n\"Jada!\" he called, wondering in which direction she'd gone.\n\nBack to the car, he thought. She was stubborn, but she wasn't stupid. That meant to the left, where the parking lot was three-quarters full. He picked up his pace, scanning the cars, and caught sight of the people struggling beside a dark sedan.\n\nHis eyes adjusted to the starlight, and he saw magenta.\n\nJada screamed and struck one of the dark-suited men, trying to break free, and then Drake saw the glint of a gun barrel. Reaching for his gun, he started to run."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "Drake crouched behind a dented Sahin sedan and took aim.\n\n\"Leave the girl or I drop you right here!\" he shouted.\n\nOne of the thugs spun and took a shot at him, blowing out the Sahin's rear window. Drake pulled the trigger twice, and the grim-eyed man danced backward, one bullet taking him in the shoulder and the other in the chest. His gun flew, clattering to the ground.\n\nJada punched the goon who was holding her in the throat, and he let go, gasping for air. She launched herself full-out after the gun and skidded on the pavement on her belly, hands reaching. One of the remaining men went after her, the other two drawing their guns.\n\nDrake fired again and missed, the shot echoing off parked cars and the side of the hotel. The two armed men opened fire, bullets punching the flimsy body of the sedan and bursting the rest of the windows. Drake threw himself to the right, counting on the night to veil his movements. He scuttled behind a red Tata minitruck and stood up, looking through the driver's window. The parking lot was on the side of the hotel and poorly lit, but the men were out in the open and the glow of the city was enough for him to make out some details. The two still standing were in dark suits like the one he'd shot, and though one had the olive complexion of the Middle East and northern Africa, the other was Caucasian.\n\nTheir car was a dark gray BMW, and it was still running, a low growl coming from the engine. Three of the doors were open. They'd been trying to force Jada into the car when he had come out, which meant that they had been lying in wait for her and that they were quick and well organized. This wasn't some random tourist abduction; that much was clear.\n\nHe heard Jada scuffling with the third one, and he wanted to intervene, but rushing in now would only get him killed and it seemed clear they wanted her alive. However, the men who'd come after them in New York hadn't seemed all that concerned about whether she lived or died, and if these bastards were working for the same employer, they wouldn't hesitate to kill her if it came to that.\n\nOne of the standing thugs gestured for the other to circle around to their left\u2014Drake's right. They were a few cars away, but if they split up now, they would flank him in moments. He'd have to try to take them down from cover, which would mean revealing his precise location.\n\nHe took a breath, finger resting on the trigger. He'd shoot the one who seemed to be giving the orders first.\n\nA single gunshot split the air, and Drake flinched, thinking they'd found him. But then he realized that the shot had come from the gun Jada and the third thug were fighting over, and ice twisted in his gut.\n\n\"Son of a bitch,\" he muttered.\n\nThrowing caution to the wind, he ran between the truck and the bullet-riddled sedan, taking aim at the broad-shouldered white guy. The thug had been waiting and started to take aim, when a shot came from off to the left. It sang through the air and shattered glass but missed its target.\n\nSully stood at the edge of the parking lot, pistol clutched in both hands. Olivia was behind him, pressed against the hotel, looking frantic, like she wanted to bolt. The black-suited linebacker dropped behind a car; he was smarter than he looked. If he'd taken the time to aim at one of them, the other would have shot him, though it looked like Sully needed target practice.\n\n\"Nate, watch your three o'clock!\" Sully shouted.\n\nDrake spun, saw the olive-skinned goon appear between two rows of cars, and squeezed off a shot. A bullet screamed past his ear, close enough that he felt the displacement of air against his cheek. He swore and took cover, glanced over at Sully, and saw that his old friend had done the same thing, hidden behind the corner of the hotel with his gun barrel pointed heavenward like a cop about to break down a perp's door.\n\nOr James Bond without the suave, Drake thought. Sully would love that. Or maybe shoot him.\n\nOlivia stood ten feet behind him, well out of range of the shooters. She was trapped there unless she wanted to go back into the hotel and deal with the chaos that would bring. The guests and restaurant patrons would be freaking out now, some under tables and others at the windows, trying to figure out what was going on. They weren't alone in that.\n\n\"Jada, you alive?\" Drake shouted.\n\nIn answer, she struggled to her feet. For a second he thought all would be well, but then he saw that she wasn't alone. The third guy held her tightly from behind. White, early thirties, ex-military by the way he carried himself. But he didn't look well, and the bullet hole in his shoulder probably had something to do with it. He'd been the only guy not in a suit. His shirt had been gray or blue, but a stain had spread out from the wound Jada had given him, the blood looking black in the dark.\n\nDrake twisted and took aim, but there would be no way for him to take the guy down without shooting Jada. He was only a half-decent shot, not some kind of marksman.\n\nThe guy winced in pain but didn't make himself a target. Jada might have shot him in the struggle, but he'd gotten the gun back. Now he jammed it against her skull like he was trying to drill a hole.\n\n\"Back off or she's dead!\" the gunman snapped.\n\nDrake didn't move, gun still leveled at Jada and her would-be abductor, but without a safe shot.\n\n\"Drop the damn gun, Drake,\" the man snarled. \"You and Sullivan both.\"\n\nDrake glanced at Sully and Olivia. Sully still had his back against the corner of the hotel, hidden from sight, gun still aimed at the sky. He saw the frown on Sully's face and knew it reflected his own. These guys knew their names. If they worked for Henriksen, the boss had done his homework. Of course, Olivia had known Sully was with Jada, and she could have guessed that Drake was the other man with her on the basis of descriptions from the attack in New York. But Henriksen might have figured that out himself.\n\n\"I will kill her right now!\" the gunman said.\n\nDrake started to lower his gun, then darted behind a battered, dusty Jeep. He'd give up his gun if he had to, but he wasn't going to stand there and wait to get shot.\n\n\"Dimitri, drive the car!\" the gunman said.\n\nThe one Drake had thought Middle Eastern turned out to be Dimitri\u2014a Greek. He kept his weapon aimed at the Jeep and hustled over to their BMW and slid behind the wheel. He kept the door open, ready to shoot again.\n\nThe linebacker didn't need to be told what to do. He went to the man Drake had shot dead and lifted the corpse under the arms, starting to drag him around the back of the car.\n\n\"Open the boot!\" he shouted to Dimitri. \"The police will be here in moments.\"\n\nThe Greek popped the trunk of the BMW, and it started to rise.\n\nDrake took several deep breaths, waiting for the moment when the guy holding Jada would try to muscle her into the backseat. He had seen the fear in her eyes, but he had seen the determination as well. She would fight him if she had the chance, and if she tried to break free again, Drake would be ready. He would shoot the son of a bitch the second he had a target, and he knew Sully was waiting for the same thing.\n\nDistant sirens reached them. The police were on the way. He tried not to think what might happen to an American with a gun and a fake passport in an Egyptian jail.\n\nHe heard a new scuffle, and a man cried out in pain.\n\nGo, Jada, he thought, figuring she had tried to fight back. He swung out from behind the Jeep, aiming at the spot right beside the BMW where Jada and the wounded thug had been a moment before. They were still there, but they weren't alone.\n\nA darker figure had risen up behind the gunman. Hooded, clad in flowing black, the new arrival gripped the wounded thug by the hair and cut his throat with a long, wickedly curved blade. Jada had tried to twist free, had gotten her hand on the gunman's wrist and forced the gun barrel away from her skull. Now she held on to the man's wrist and watched him slump to the pavement, dead.\n\nOthers emerged from the darkness between cars, four, then six, then eight more of the hooded figures. Two of them fell upon the linebacker, killing him in near silence. Another appeared from the backseat of the BMW, flowing like liquid darkness over the seat and murdering Dimitri, who pounded the car horn\u2014but only for a moment.\n\nSully had stepped out from the corner of the hotel and taken aim, but he watched in astonishment that mirrored Drake's as the shadowed figures made short work of Jada's would-be abductors. For her part, Jada staggered backward in shock.\n\nHooded figures put the linebacker in the trunk with the man Drake had killed. Others tossed the one Jada had wounded into the backseat of his own car. One of the assassins shoved Dimitri over and took his place behind the wheel of the BMW. Drake kept swinging the barrel of his gun back and forth, wondering if he ought to be shooting at them, though they hadn't made any attempt to attack him or his friends.\n\nThen one of them darted at Jada so swiftly that when Drake pulled the trigger, he had no chance of hitting the man. The assassin whispered something into her ear and then retreated into the shadows between cars. The BMW's engine roared, and Drake moved aside as it shot from the parking lot, skidding into the road and vanishing up the street.\n\nWhen he glanced back at the scene of the melee, Jada was alone. Sully ran toward her, and so Drake did the same thing. Of Olivia, there was no sign. She had vanished.\n\n\"Get the car,\" Sully snapped at him.\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"The cops!\" Sully barked.\n\nDrake ran for the car, digging out his keys. He was behind the wheel and had it started in a matter of seconds, slammed it into gear, and pulled up beside Sully and Jada, who quickly piled in.\n\n\"What about Olivia? We can't just leave her for the police,\" Drake said.\n\nBeside him in the passenger seat, Jada shot him a withering glance. \"Are you kidding me? She took off. You still think she didn't set us up? Let's go!\"\n\nDrake didn't have to be told twice. He hit the gas and tore out of the parking lot, raced along the street, and slowed at the corner, taking the turn just as a police car barreled toward the hotel from the other direction.\n\nHeart hammering, he kept his speed down until they were out of the city and the desert sky had opened up above them.\n\n\"Who the hell were those guys?\" Drake muttered.\n\n\"The guys who tried to take me or the guys who killed them?\" Jada asked.\n\n\"Either one,\" Sully said.\n\n\"Jada, what did that guy whisper to you right before they did their disappearing act?\" Drake asked.\n\nShe glanced at him as if deciding whether to tell. Then she exhaled. \"Go home,\" she said.\n\n\"Wow,\" Drake said. \"Y' know, maybe this is me going out on a limb here, but I'm going to say I think we're officially screwed.\"\n\nNobody argued with him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Drake woke on Saturday morning surprised not to have been rousted by the police during the night. He was even more amazed when he turned on the television and saw nothing about the violence outside the Queen's Hotel on the news. Sully had spent the night in Jada's room, presumably sleeping in a chair\u2014though he might have taken a pillow into the bathtub and curled up there; it wouldn't have been the first time\u2014and when Drake phoned the room, he answered on the first ring.\n\n\"Any cops or reporters down your way?\" Drake asked him.\n\n\"None. Weird, don't you think?\"\n\nDrake did think. \"Does Tyr Henriksen have enough money to pay a restaurant full of people to keep their mouths shut?\"\n\n\"Either that or pay off the Fayoum City police,\" Sully agreed.\n\n\"Why would he do that?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"It's pretty clear he thinks we know something he doesn't want anyone knowing. If the cops question us, we might tell them.\"\n\n\"We wouldn't. Unless we had to,\" Drake replied.\n\n\"He doesn't know that.\"\n\n\"True.\"\n\n\"How you doing on your morning beauty regimen?\" Sully growled. \"Jada's feeling pretty vulnerable. She doesn't want to spend a minute here she doesn't have to.\"\n\n\"Just Jada?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"You ready?\" Sully replied, ignoring the question. \"I've got some dates and fuul down here.\"\n\n\"Watch what you're calling me.\"\n\n\"Funny,\" Sully said drily.\n\n\"I just woke up. Give me twenty minutes. We should check out. Whatever happens today, tonight we find a hotel in Cairo.\"\n\n\"Agreed.\"\n\nDrake didn't actually make it downstairs until a little more than half an hour later, but Sully and Jada must have only been a few minutes ahead of him because they were at the front desk when he walked up. Once they had checked out and settled the bill, they headed outside to the car, all of them blinking back the sunlight and glancing around for the cadre of local cops they expected to descend on them. Still, nothing happened. It was as if the events of the night before had never taken place.\n\n\"Did you ask about Olivia?\" Drake said, glancing at Sully and ignoring the sharp look the question earned him from Jada.\n\n\"She's registered. We couldn't exactly ask if she came back to her room last night, and it's not likely the same clerk on duty, anyway,\" Sully said. \"I rang her room, but no answer, and we didn't feel like knocking on the door.\"\n\nDrake nodded. There had been too many surprises lately, and he wouldn't have wanted to knock on Olivia's door this morning, either. The way she'd vanished, she was either in on it or in even more trouble than they were.\n\n\"So, I take it we're not going to take spooky-ninja-assassin's advice and go home?\" Drake asked.\n\nJada glanced at him. \"No one's keeping you here, Nate.\"\n\n\"Hey,\" Drake said, holding up his hands in surrender. \"We can't pretend those guys weren't intimidating. I'd feel better if I knew who they were and what the hell they were doing saving our asses.\"\n\n\"If that's what they were doing,\" Sully said. \"Looked to me like they were killing Henriksen's guys. Was that to save Jada or just because they were Henriksen's guys?\"\n\n\"If they were Henriksen's guys,\" Drake said.\n\n\"Please,\" Jada said, waving a dismissive hand. \"Olivia may have confused you guys with her damsel-in-distress thing, but I know her. She's a part of this.\"\n\n\"Even if she isn't, she put the blame on Henriksen, too,\" Sully reminded them. \"Either she was really afraid of him, which means he's behind it all, or she's in on it with him, which still means he's behind it all.\"\n\n\"I guess we're in agreement on Henriksen being behind it all,\" Drake said.\n\nJada punched him in the arm.\n\nHe said, \"ow.\"\n\n\"Just drive the car, would you?\" Sully said, sighing. \"It's not the morning for goofing around.\"\n\nDrake frowned. \"People tried to kill us again last night. There were hooded assassins\u2014and I mean really, really skilled hooded assassins. As freaked as I am, I think it's the perfect morning for goofing around.\"\n\nJada stopped short ten feet from the Volvo wagon.\n\nSully glanced at her. \"Hey. You okay?\"\n\nShe turned to Drake, stood on tiptoe, and kissed his cheek. \"I thanked Sully last night. I don't think I thanked you. For saving my life, I mean.\"\n\nDrake wanted to remind her that she'd done a pretty good job of helping save her own life, but he didn't want to ruin the moment.\n\nSully smiled. \"Well, that shut him up, at least.\"\n\nThe clock in the Volvo had given up attempting to tell time sometime before they acquired the car, but Drake guessed it was around half past nine when they arrived in a cloud of dust at the Temple of Sobek. Though the temple had been partially excavated years ago, their interest lay beyond it, on a stretch of crenellated desert that seemed at first glance indistinguishable from any other patch of Egyptian dirt.\n\nOnly as they drove past the temple excavation and continued toward the site of the labyrinth dig did the idiosyncrasies of the land become plain. A field of tents had been erected in what looked more like a military operation than a scientific encampment. Jeeps and other vehicles suited for the desert were parked in neat rows, though not a single line delineated appropriate parking spaces. Beyond the vehicles and tents there was a great depression in the land where the desert had settled down on top of the ruins of the labyrinth. The depression hinted at the large circular design.\n\nOn the eastern edge of the excavation site, a portion of the labyrinth's walls had been dug out. Another work in progress had been covered by an awning, but Drake could make out what appeared to be the formidable stone entrance to the labyrinth. A small swarm of workers did the delicate work of slowly revealing the outer wall, but from both of the open sections of the labyrinth, buckets of earth were being carried out one by one and sifted through. Other workers carried wooden beams in through the openings, presumably to bolster the walls and ceilings that were being exposed for the first time in eons.\n\n\"It's bigger than I expected,\" Jada said.\n\n\"The operation or the labyrinth?\" Sully asked.\n\n\"Both.\"\n\nDrake studied the outline of the labyrinth again. \"That may not even be all of it. There are probably lower levels, shafts and traps, other twists. These things are never as simple as they seem.\"\n\nJada glanced at the strange ripples of the desert on top of the labyrinth, indicating its basic design. \"It doesn't seem simple at all.\"\n\nSully agreed. \"When they were trying to dig out for the lake they were going to put in\u2014\" He pointed at the initial excavation point, the broken wall. \"\u2014probably right there, the sand started to pour down into the labyrinth. Looks like the level of the desert sank above it; otherwise we wouldn't even be seeing this much. But most of the ceilings are still intact, so the dig team isn't going to assume that the design they're seeing on top is the actual map of the maze.\"\n\n\"That's what I'm saying,\" Drake replied. \"As complicated as it looks, that's only the start.\"\n\nMost of the workers ignored them as they parked the car behind the row of others and got out. There were several vehicles there that obviously didn't belong: luxury vehicles among the faded old trucks and vans of the workers and the Jeeps of the foremen and archaeologists. Drake took note, but then he saw a pair of men in long blue shirts and loose cotton trousers. One had a beige and blue turban, but neither wore the traditional outer robe, the galabeya, so common among the desert dwellers.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" Drake said. \"Can you tell us where to find Ian Welch?\"\n\nThe man in the turban went on as if they were invisible and had not spoken, but the other man stopped and studied them, perhaps wondering if they worked for his employers. He chose to be careful about who he ignored, smiling and nodding and gesturing them onward toward a row of tents.\n\n\"Dr. Welch the little tent,\" he said.\n\nHis English was functional at best, but Drake didn't judge. How could he, when he knew barely a dozen words in Arabic?\n\nThey thanked the man and hurried on, cognizant of the sun crawling overhead, the morning burning away. They found Welch in a small tent, drinking from a canteen. The heat was brutal, and the archaeologist already had started to sweat. Drake thought the skinny archaeologist, with his mess of hair and his antic, nervous energy, might be the kind of guy who did a lot of sweating.\n\n\"I'm glad you're here,\" Welch said, standing to greet them. He had his glasses slipped into the crook of his shirt collar, but now he slipped them on. \"I couldn't put off going into the dig much longer.\"\n\n\"Did you see anything strange when you left the restaurant last night?\" Sully asked him. \"Or anyone?\"\n\nWelch frowned. \"No, why? Did something happen?\"\n\nSully shook his head. \"Never mind.\"\n\nDrake studied Welch. \"You're a little twitchy this morning, Ian. What's troubling you?\" Twitchier than normal, Drake had wanted to say, but he chose his words carefully.\n\n\"Oh, just a small thing,\" Welch said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. \"The dig's got a new sponsor as of last night. Care to guess who it might be?\"\n\nJada blanched. \"Phoenix Innovations.\"\n\nWelch pointed at her. \"Got it in one try.\"\n\n\"Henriksen,\" Sully growled, looking around. \"Is he here?\"\n\n\"I'm surprised you didn't cross paths,\" Welch said.\n\nHe snatched up a canvas hat and perched it on his head, then led the way out of the tent, leaving them to follow. Drake glanced at Sully, not liking this turn of events at all. Henriksen here? He had figured they would cross paths with the man eventually but had been hoping to get in and out of the dig with Welch before that happened.\n\n\"It might not be the worst thing,\" Jada said as she followed Drake out of the tent. \"He can't kill us in front of this many witnesses.\"\n\nOutside the tent, with sand blowing around them and the sun glaring, Sully had to shield his eyes to give her a surprised look.\n\n\"What?\" Jada said. \"I'm just looking on the bright side.\"\n\n\"Your bright side is pretty dark,\" Drake muttered. Then he smiled. \"It's strangely appealing.\"\n\nJada jabbed him with her elbow as they walked after Welch. The archaeologist led them between a pair of tents and into a place where they could see the entire dig while remaining mostly hidden. A group of men and women were making their way around the outer circle of the depression, a man with a camera filming a woman who was gesturing toward the implied outline of the labyrinth and talking to the camera. The others trailed behind them, including a dark-haired woman in loose clothing and a tall, broad-shouldered blond man in a crisp white shirt and gray trousers. He looked like a politician attempting and failing to dress casually. A man constantly campaigning even if he was not running for office, Drake thought.\n\n\"Is that Henriksen?\" he asked.\n\nJada mumbled her assent, staring at the group. She had gone pale despite the flush of the heat, and when he touched her arm to comfort her, she flinched. Her skin was cold.\n\n\"The tall woman with the dark hair is Hilary Russo. She's the director of the expedition, in charge of the whole dig,\" Welch said. \"I take it you know the blonde.\"\n\nDrake said nothing. They did indeed know the woman trailing the rest of the group. Her golden hair had been tied back in a ponytail, and she looked more suited for a safari than an archaeological dig, her clothing the female equivalent of Henriksen's Lands' End perfection.\n\n\"I guess she's a better actress than you thought, huh, kid?\" Sully muttered, glancing at Drake.\n\n\"What the hell are they doing here?\" Jada whispered, hugging herself now as if she were in an icebox instead of the desert.\n\n\"I told you, Henriksen's taking over funding the dig,\" Welch replied, hands fluttering up to tug at his hat and adjust his glasses, squirrelly as ever. \"Phoenix is the sole sponsor now. He's financing this dig and the next three that Hilary undertakes\u2014years of funding for her and her team, which includes me if you being here doesn't get me fired\u2014but in exchange he gets control of the disposition of the relics, all media rights, and rights to museum exhibits. All of that. The documentary team is supposedly putting together some footage to prepare for a TV series he wants to make about all of this. Last night you mentioned how big a discovery this is, and you weren't wrong.\"\n\nDrake paced back and forth between the tents. Jada kept staring at the group across the depression from them, but he caught Sully looking at him.\n\n\"We've gotta get down there before they do,\" Sully said.\n\nDrake nodded. He turned to Welch. \"What you said about your job. Are you going to bail on us, Ian? We need to know. Luka and your sister's boyfriend are dead, and we think Henriksen is the guy behind it. But it sounds to me like you're having second thoughts about helping us.\"\n\nJada turned to watch the exchange, her eyes wide with hurt. It had not occurred to her that Welch might go back on his word.\n\nWelch hesitated, squirming, a man caught between the points of his moral compass. After a few seconds, he gave a small shrug. \"Gretchen would kill me if I didn't help.\"\n\nDrake thought how fortunate the man was that Henriksen's goons had been after Jada the night before and not him. His sister would kill him if he didn't help, and Henriksen might have him killed if he did. They had to warn him what kind of danger he was in\u2014as soon as he showed them the labyrinth.\n\n\"So, how do we beat Henriksen into the labyrinth?\" he asked. \"They'll be going inside any minute now.\"\n\nWelch smiled, nodding to himself. \"Hilary wants to give them the whole tour, make a show of it. They're supposed to be filming, right? She wants to impress, which means she is going to take them in through the front.\"\n\nDrake stared at him. \"You're saying we go through the side door?\"\n\nJada pointed at the larger excavation, the original part of the dig, where the wall of the labyrinth had collapsed. \"Can we get in that way? Is it clear?\"\n\n\"Not only is it clear, it's a hell of a lot closer to the worship chambers and the anteroom we just started digging out. One of the grad students working down there told me this morning that they've started to unearth clay jars and tablets that might be connected to whatever rituals were performed there by the Mistress of the Labyrinth.\"\n\n\"No one's going to stop us?\" Sully asked.\n\nWelch frowned thoughtfully, then shook his head. \"For today, all three of you work for the Smithsonian.\"\n\n\"We're already traveling under false identities,\" Sully said. \"You can use those names.\"\n\nIf Welch thought this odd, he barely frowned at the revelation. \"All right. Hilary's the only one who'd know we don't have any visitors from the Smithsonian, and if we play our cards right, we won't even cross paths with her.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't mind crossing paths with Henriksen,\" Jada said.\n\nHer hand fluttered toward the small of her back as if she were about to tap the gun she had hidden there to reassure herself of the solidity of its presence and its mortal promise. She hesitated and dropped her hand, but Drake had seen her reaching and found himself hoping they didn't run into Henriksen at all. Even if Jada managed to kill him, she would only be assuring herself a prison sentence, and the secrets her father had died over might never see the light of day.\n\nThey watched as Hilary Russo led the group from Phoenix Innovations under the awning and in through the entrance to the labyrinth of Sobek.\n\n\"Let's move out,\" Sully said.\n\nThey hustled out from between the tents and across a patch of desert toward the excavation of the collapsed outer wall of the labyrinth. It was a brisk walk so that they would not draw undue attention, but the men working at the dig frowned and wiped their brows as they stared at the newcomers.\n\nThere were ladders in the ditch beside the excavated wall, but Drake was surprised to find that the expedition had installed temporary stairs as well, leading down from the edge of the dig to the remaining rubble just outside the shattered wall. He wondered how many tons of sand already had been removed in the excavation. In a dig like this, archaeologists would uncover certain sections, map and photograph and study them, retrieve artifacts, and then fill in the areas they had excavated to prevent them from being damaged by the elements and by entropy trying to catch up with them. But the way Welch had described it to them, much of the labyrinth was being excavated from within instead of uncovered from above; so as long as they shored up the ceilings, they might be able to explore a great deal of the interior maze without ever having to fill it in.\n\nThey descended the stairs quickly. A pair of enormous generators growled, one on either side of the entrance. Canvas tarps had been pulled aside from the breach in the wall, and he imagined that at night they hung across the opening to keep sand from blowing back into the labyrinth tunnels. During the day, Drake presumed they needed the breeze too much to worry about the sand.\n\nAs they entered the labyrinth, he heard Jada inhale deeply, as if she could breathe in the ancient history in the air. Drake had no such romantic illusions, but even so, he could feel the age of the place. It made him feel like an intruder, but he was used to such a feeling. He had, in fact, made a career of ignoring it, though sometimes it was harder than others. The past held as many secrets as the future\u2014more, in fact\u2014and people would pay incredible amounts of money to unravel those mysteries and maybe own a piece of the ancient world.\n\nHell, he loved it himself. When he had been a boy, he had read stories of adventure, of archaeological discoveries that stunned the world. He had loved old movies full of mummies or chariot races. But unlike in those antique films, the mummies he had encountered in real life had never come to life. There had been one time, in Karpathos, Greece, when he had been sure one of them moved, but nothing before or since. Still, he found it fascinating to learn how people had lived hundreds or thousands of years earlier.\n\nSo though his breath did not hitch as they entered the labyrinth of Sobek, his pulse did quicken a bit.\n\nThe walls were a shade of orange, like clay. The line of lights that hung from pegs on the wall explained the generators growling outside. Bulbs inside plastic cages were strung along the tunnel, vanishing around the corners in either direction. A quick glance showed that they were plugged into one another like strands of Christmas lights.\n\n\"This way,\" Welch said, turning left.\n\nJada glanced at Sully as if hoping to share the excitement that seemed to have allowed her to forget her grief a moment, but he didn't notice. When she turned to Drake, he returned her smile and nodded, a confession that yes, he understood. Then they were hurrying along the tunnel, moving from pools of light to pools of shadow, and the orange walls seemed to close in around them, the dry breath of history soft on their faces.\n\nDrake had questions he wanted to ask Welch about the construction of the labyrinth, but they were moving fast and he decided all such questions could wait. They had come here for a single purpose: to find clues to the secrets that had gotten Jada's father killed before Tyr Henriksen could do the same thing. If there was a fourth labyrinth, with or without treasure inside it, they had to get there first. More important, whatever mysteries were unraveled, they had to let the world know that Luka Hzujak had been the first to discover the truth and that he had died for it.\n\nAnd if there was treasure along the way, that would be a nice bonus.\n\nThe maze turned in upon itself time and again, offering false paths and optical illusions, but the hard work of solving this part of the labyrinth had been done already. The dead ends had been roped off, the correct tunnels given away by the strings of lights, so they never slowed, even when the floor of the tunnel sloped downward or the maze took them through a door with a massive stone lintel overhead that threatened to come crashing down atop them. In many places, wooden beams had been put into place to support the ceilings and walls, hammered together hastily, and left, as if a construction crew had begun to build something and then walked out on the job.\n\nTwice, they had to go around open shafts in the floor that went down forty feet or more into darkness.\n\n\"What's this for?\" Jada asked as they circumvented the first one, a flickering lightbulb casting ghostly shadows into the hole.\n\n\"It's a trap,\" Welch replied.\n\nDrake smiled but did not give voice to the obvious Star Wars reference. He doubted any of his companions would get it, even Sully, who he knew had seen the movies.\n\nThey passed a pair of archaeology grad students who were carrying a large plastic container in which Drake could see things wrapped in cotton batting.\n\n\"Dr. Welch,\" one of them\u2014a stout Australian with bright eyes\u2014said in surprise. \"Melissa said you didn't feel well. I figured we wouldn't see you today.\"\n\nHe looked curiously at Drake, Sully, and Jada, but Welch trotted out his Smithsonian charade and the grad students seemed duly impressed. If they ran into anyone who was part of the upper hierarchy on the project, it might not fly so easily, but Drake hoped they wouldn't be that unlucky.\n\nTime seemed to stretch inside the labyrinth. Drake wondered how long they had been inside, realizing they must be beneath the sand now, with thousands of tons of desert on top of them, not to mention the ceilings of the labyrinth. How far behind was Henriksen now? Still pretending to be putting together a documentary? Or would he have hurried Hilary Russo along? Drake thought the latter and began to get anxious. The only thing they had going for them was that it would take Henriksen just as long to make his way through the maze as it was taking them.\n\n\"I have no idea where we are,\" Jada whispered.\n\nSully growled. \"Ain't that the point?\"\n\n\"Seriously,\" Jada said. \"I tried to keep my bearings, figure out what direction we were pointing in and whether or not we were moving nearer the center or away, but I've totally lost track.\"\n\n\"I didn't even try,\" Drake admitted.\n\n\"It would be hopeless without some kind of mapping or a GPS that could transmit through the ground,\" Welch said. \"Daedalus was smarter than any of us. Probably smarter than all of us combined. From this point, if you tried to make it back to the entrance and the lights weren't there, there are more than a hundred combinations of turns in the maze. Unless you were very lucky, you would be lost for hours. And we've postulated that we've only been able to access an eighth of the labyrinth. From the center, you might be lost for days. You could die of starvation and thirst before getting out unless you fell down a shaft or were crushed in a trap first.\"\n\n\"The places you haven't been able to access,\" Drake said. \"Did the ceiling collapse?\"\n\n\"It buckled in a couple of places, allowing sand in from above. In other spots there are places where what appears to be a dead end is actually a continuation of the labyrinth, but with secret doors to hidden passages. There are portcullis blocks in the walls, but the granite framing is cracked, so the series of weights and levers that would have raised those doors are not sufficient. Essentially, they're stuck. But we'll get them open.\"\n\nDrake and the others said nothing. They were all familiar enough with ancient Egyptian builders to know that the great pyramids were replete with hidden chambers and secret passages. Only recently Drake had been having a drink with an old friend in Thailand and discussing the work being done at the Great Pyramid of Giza to confirm the existence of a hidden corridor beneath the Queen's Chamber there.\n\n\"You've gotta be careful with that stuff,\" Sully said, reaching into his shirt pocket and pulling out a half-smoked cigar. \"Those things are made to be tricky. One of them closes, you don't want to be caught on the other side.\"\n\n\"You can't smoke that in here,\" Welch said. \"Poor ventilation.\"\n\nJada frowned. \"Not that I want to smell the stinky thing, but actually, the air is moving a little.\"\n\n\"There is some sifting through cracks,\" Welch admitted. \"But still.\"\n\n\"I'm not smoking it, Ian,\" Sully growled. \"Don't get your panties in a bunch.\"\n\nWelch adjusted his glasses, trying and failing to hide his irritation. Drake just smiled. Sully had his charms when he felt like using them. They were all fortunate that he had foregone the typical guayabera today. When he was clothed in his usual wardrobe, nobody would have believed for a second that he worked for the Smithsonian. The Rat Pack museum, maybe, Drake thought.\n\nThey heard activity up ahead, and Welch gave them a warning look. Drake was surprised when they turned the next corner and saw that the lights that were wired together had been split off so that one strand went along the tunnel to the left and one jagged to the right and then continued on ahead. They followed the right-hand path and the echoes of work in progress grew louder as the tunnel sloped downward.\n\nIf not for the noise, and the lights, and Welch leading them, Drake would have assumed they were heading for a dead end. The tunnel kept going for twenty feet or so past the opening in the wall on the right, a little zigzag that looked as if it went nowhere. The walls narrowed in the zag, and the illusion that there was no passage there at all was very effective.\n\nWhen they stepped through, they found themselves in a large octagonal chamber, perhaps thirty feet across. Unlike the main tunnels of the labyrinth, which had very few hieroglyphics, the walls here were covered with paintings and raised images and symbols. Three stairs led down to the sunken floor of the chamber. A stone altar\u2014also octagonal\u2014stood at the center of the room. To the left was a narrow doorway capped with a line of ankhs engraved in the stone.\n\nA camera flash came from beyond the doorway, followed by voices.\n\n\"All right, Guillermo, put that aside with the others,\" a woman said. \"Let's start brushing the sand away so we can free that vase.\"\n\n\"Melissa?\" Welch said.\n\nSome shifting of equipment and clothing could be heard, and then a woman popped her head out of the side room. She had coppery ginger hair and elfin features with bright, intelligent eyes, and her face lit up with pleasure at the site of Ian Welch.\n\n\"Ian!\" she said, coming out into the worship chamber. \"I'm so glad you're feeling better.\"\n\n\"Much better,\" Welch lied. He looked like he might be about to become sick for real, perpetuating the fiction of their identities. \"Melissa, meet Dave Farzan and Nathan Merrill from the Smithsonian.\"\n\nDrake stepped forward to shake her hand. \"Nate Merrill. Nice to meet you.\"\n\nSully shook her hand as well, taking the cigar stub from his mouth in an attempt at courtesy.\n\n\"And this is Jada Hzujak, Dr. Luka Hzujak's daughter. You might've heard that he passed away not long ago.\"\n\nMelissa's face crinkled in sympathy. \"Oh, God, no. I hadn't heard.\" She looked at Jada. \"I'm so sorry. Your father was here not long ago. He was such a character, he kept us all laughing and fascinated at the same time.\"\n\nJada let out a shuddery breath and nodded. \"Yeah. He had that effect on people.\"\n\nDrake had been surprised that Welch had chosen to use Jada's real name, but now he understood why. Melissa would pay less attention to the fact that they were supposed to be from the Smithsonian if she was distracted by Jada's identity and the tragedy of her father's death. It was a crass ploy, but it worked.\n\nA skinny, unshaven man with olive skin and dark bags under his eyes stepped out of what Welch had called the anteroom, glancing at them curiously. New introductions were made. Melissa Corrigan was an archaeologist from Colorado, lower than Welch on the ladder of command but above the grad students, including the slender Guillermo and Alan, a baby-faced black man who turned out to be the dig's photographer.\n\n\"Since Nate and Dave are visiting, I thought I'd get a consult on the whole mistress/Minotaur question,\" Welch told Melissa. \"As you know, it was something Luka had a real passion for, and Jada was curious as well. She's sort of retracing her father's steps.\"\n\n\"A kind of farewell tour,\" Jada said, and didn't have to feign the distress the words brought her.\n\n\"Of course,\" Melissa said, turning back to Welch. \"Do your thing, Ian. We won't get in your way.\"\n\nAs Melissa and her team went back to work in the anteroom, Welch showed them the worship chamber. Drake went directly to the altar. Its surface was rough and stained by blood or dye spilled thousands of years before. The base was covered with paintings, many showing crocodiles, the god Sobek, and people kneeling before a robed woman, offering her golden chalices. One painting showed the woman\u2014the Mistress of the Labyrinth, apparently\u2014standing by an altar quite like this one with her hands spread, as if intoning a ritual chant over an array of offerings.\n\n\"No doubt about the use of this chamber,\" Drake said.\n\n\"Look at this,\" Jada said.\n\nShe had bent over the altar for a closer look at a grouping of lines on the surface. At first glance, Drake had thought it nothing but dirt and a trick of the light, but now he realized there were designs engraved in the stone: three linked octagons, each inside a circle. Drake thought the octagonal shape was very unusual for Egyptian builders, but he didn't dare ask about it for fear of giving their ignorance away.\n\n\"Fascinating,\" was all he managed.\n\n\"Three octagons,\" Jada said, \"three labyrinths.\" She could get away with such things because no one had claimed she was an expert.\n\n\"That was our thinking as well,\" Welch agreed.\n\nSully had been working his way through the room, studying the angles of the joints between stones, searching for any indication of a hidden chamber. This was precisely the sort of place where the Egyptians might have put one\u2014the burial chamber of the Mistress of the Labyrinth, perhaps.\n\n\"The mistress\u2014she was a sort of high priestess, then?\" Drake asked.\n\nHe glanced at the anteroom and saw Melissa moving in there and the flash of Alan's camera, but no one seemed to think his question absurd.\n\n\"We believe so,\" Welch agreed. \"And yet if she was a priestess of Sobek, what of the other two labyrinths, which had to have been dedicated to other gods? The labyrinths represent the vision of someone thinking much more broadly than a single kingdom or a single theology, but the labyrinth is clearly dedicated to Sobek.\"\n\n\"Quite a dilemma,\" Sully rumbled, cigar stub clenched between his teeth. If these people thought he was some kind of archaeologist or museum curator, they had to be thinking he was a fairly eccentric one.\n\nDrake leaned into the anteroom. \"Mind if we take a quick look in here?\"\n\nMelissa smiled. \"Of course not. Frankly, we were just waiting for the right opportunity to show Dr. Welch our most recent find. But there's no time like the present, considering the subject matter.\"\n\nWelch perked up. \"What is it?\"\n\nGuillermo stepped back out into the worship chamber to make room. Alan protected his camera as if it were more fragile and valuable than any artifact they might discover, stepping out of the anteroom as well. When Welch, Drake, Sully, and Jada filed in, Melissa had a stone tablet in her hands.\n\n\"We found two of these,\" she began, looking to Welch for approbation. \"Just this morning, in fact. This antechamber seems to have been accessible only to the Mistress of the Labyrinth. So while the paintings and tablets in the worship chamber indicate that the honey was brought to her as an offering\u2014as does the jar we found\u2014these tablets tell a different story.\"\n\nWelch took the tablet from her and studied it, surprise dawning on his features.\n\n\"What does it say?\" Jada asked.\n\n\"We'd wondered, my friends,\" he said, turning to them with a smile. \"And now we know. The honey may have been brought to the mistress, but the offering wasn't for her. She\u2014I'm not sure if this indicates that she served it, as with a meal, or administered it in some medical fashion to the protector of the labyrinth.\"\n\n\"That one says something like 'protector,' \" Melissa said. \"But the other tablet is explicit. The protector was a monster, hidden from the cult of Sobek, known only to those who dared the 'secret heart' of the labyrinth and who would never return because the monster would kill them.\"\n\n\"I take it the 'monster' has horns?\" Sully asked.\n\n\"Like a bull,\" Melissa said, nodding happily. \"Yes, it does.\"\n\nWhile they continued to marvel over the tablets and translate certain bits, Drake turned to the other side of the antechamber. A single stone block had given way, but given that each one weighed about fifteen hundred pounds, putting it back in place would be a great deal of work. Sand from above had filled in that corner of the room, and he saw the brushes and other implements that Melissa and Guillermo had been using to free the tablets and other artifacts that had been discovered in this antechamber. The walls were covered with glyphs and paintings here as well, but what drew Drake's full attention was the vase caught in the packed sand.\n\nMelissa and Guillermo had unearthed about half the vase. It was intricately painted, and he knew that without a doubt, the contents of the labyrinth would constitute one of the greatest historical finds of the modern era\u2014perhaps the greatest. The vase was incredibly well preserved.\n\nHe picked up a brush and took a closer look. A figure had been partially revealed\u2014that of the Mistress of the Labyrinth, he thought, since it matched the figure on the base of the altar in the worship chamber. She held a jar or chalice in front of her, proffering it to someone whose hands were visible, though the rest of the other figure was covered with sand.\n\nDrake had a pretty good idea who that other figure must be.\n\nHe started to brush at the vase. Some of the sand was tightly packed, and though he was careful, he had to brush a bit more vigorously. He needed a little elbow grease, so he leaned his knees against the piled sand, which had remained undisturbed for thousands of years.\n\n\"Hey, dude, get away from there,\" the grad student Guillermo said angrily, ducking his head back into the antechamber.\n\nMelissa turned to stare at him in annoyance. Drake smiled and held up his hands.\n\n\"No harm done. But I think I found\u2014\"\n\nThe sand gave way. He started to tumble forward and caught himself by planting his hands on either side of the vase, feeling triumphant because he hadn't damaged it. Triumphant for half a second before the vase and all the sand around it dropped as if sucked into the floor.\n\nDrake let out a yell as he fell after it, spilling into a shaft.\n\nHands grabbed his legs, then his belt. As the sand sifted around him, trying to suck him down, whoever had hold of him prevented him from falling into the shaft after the vase and the granite block it had sat on and at least a few other tablets that he glimpsed before they were swallowed by the darkness below. He heard something crack and knew he had just broken a piece of history.\n\n\"Whoops!\" he said.\n\n\"You stupid son of a bitch!\" Melissa snapped. \"What did you think you were doing?\"\n\n\"Helping?\"\n\nThe upper half of Drake's body still hung down inside the shaft. The hands started to pull him out. In the dim reflected light from the bulbs strung in the antechamber, he saw a painting on the wall of a figure that he could not mistake for any other.\n\n\"Guys?\" he said. \"You're gonna want to take a look at this.\"\n\n\"What did you find?\" Ian Welch asked.\n\nDrake grunted as they dragged him out, and he turned over, lying on the sandy floor, to find them all staring at him. But when he spoke, his focus was on Jada.\n\n\"The Minotaur.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Drake looked around for something to lower himself down into the shaft. He glanced at Sully and Jada, saw the gleam of discovery in their eyes, and knew they didn't have a moment to lose. Henriksen might be there any moment, with the authority to throw them out or even have them arrested. Whatever the dig turned up would be his to do with as he wished. There would be restrictions\u2014the Egyptian government would see to that\u2014but wealth had a way of bypassing rules. If the secrets Luka had sought were here, not to mention treasure, they needed to hurry.\n\n\"Welch, I need a rope or a ladder and a light,\" he said.\n\nMelissa had been bent over, shining a heavy-duty flashlight into the shaft, examining the painted Minotaur on the interior wall. Now she glanced up sharply, and she and Guillermo exchanged an uncomfortable look.\n\n\"Sorry, Professor Merrill,\" Melissa said to Drake, shaking her head. \"You're an observer. We can't allow you to\u2014\"\n\n\"Guillermo,\" Welch interrupted, staring at the shaft. \"Run out to the breach and get one of the ladders the workers use.\"\n\nEven the photographer, Alan, seemed surprised. \"Dr. Welch, you're not going to let him descend the shaft?\"\n\nThey were all hesitating. Welch turned toward Guillermo and gestured for him to hurry.\n\n\"Go quickly. Come on, move it!\"\n\nWith a worried look toward Melissa, Guillermo dashed away. They heard his footsteps echoing along the corridor. The tension between Welch and his associate was palpable. Melissa looked as if she wanted to speak to him in private, but there was no privacy to be found in such a cramped space. Even if they went out of the worship chamber and around the first corner, whispers carried in this place like the voices of ghosts.\n\nAlan set up his camera and started to take photos of the open shaft and the paintings in its gullet. Sully had continued to investigate the antechamber, searching for any other secrets the place might hold. Jada gave Melissa an awkward, apologetic look, and Welch only stood, vibrating with anticipation and the need for Guillermo to be swift. The way things had turned out, he would never be able to hide the fact that Jada Hzujak had been here or cover the lie about Sully and Drake being from the Smithsonian. He might be able to pretend he had been duped by them, and if it would help, Drake would be happy to back up the lie. But chances were good that unless they could uncover the truth about Luka and Cheney's murders, Ian Welch had destroyed his career today. If there were secrets below, he was damn well going to get them before Tyr Henriksen did.\n\n\"Listen,\" Drake said to Melissa, \"we're not amateurs. Once we're in the chamber down there, you can pretend we're shadows on the wall. We won't get in the way.\"\n\nMelissa gave him a look normally reserved for alcoholic circus clowns and reality TV stars with delusions of grandeur. \"Really?\" she asked. \"You're not amateurs? Then what do you call the crap you just pulled?\"\n\nDrake winced, glancing at the shaft and thinking about the vase and other priceless artifacts he'd probably just destroyed. He saw Jada give a single nod as if to say, She's got you there.\n\n\"I call that discovery,\" Drake replied, trying for a charming smile, an effort that obviously fell short. \"You had no idea the shaft was there. This could be the breakthrough you've been waiting for.\"\n\n\"And we could've waited another few days while we explored this chamber properly,\" Melissa said, her irritation only growing. She turned to Welch. \"Ian, please. I know these people are your friends, but\u2014\"\n\n\"That's enough, Melissa,\" Welch said coldly.\n\n\"Ian\u2014\"\n\nWelch rounded on her. \"That's enough!\"\n\nIt brought her up short. His voice echoed in the chamber. Alan's flash went off and they all blinked the brightness away, but the tension did not dissipate. Melissa stared at Welch, clearly wondering what had come over him. This was not the demeanor she had come to expect from any colleague, but it was clear she'd had particular affection for Welch, which was now shattered.\n\nThen she glanced from Welch to Jada, from Jada to Sully, and then to Drake. He could actually see the moment when suspicion entered her eyes.\n\n\"What's this about?\" she asked, pushing her dusty, unruly ginger hair from her eyes. \"What aren't you telling me?\"\n\nWelch seemed about to crumble with regret. \"Melissa\u2014\"\n\n\"Hey!\" Sully interrupted.\n\nHe had sunk down onto his belly in much the same position Drake had been in when they'd pulled him out of the hole. The photographer glared at him impatiently, waiting for him to move out of the shot, but Sully wasn't budging. Shifting on the sand, unmindful of priceless antiquities that might be breaking beneath it, he pulled himself a little farther, his head dipping into the shaft.\n\n\"Does anyone else see light down there?\"\n\n\"Of course there's light,\" Alan snapped. \"It's coming from up here, reflecting off the walls of the shaft.\"\n\nSully swiveled his head to shoot the guy a look that silenced him. \"I'm not an idiot,\" he growled. \"You're the photographer. Aren't you supposed to know a thing or two about light sources and angles? Get down here and have a look at this.\"\n\nThe fight looming between Welch and Melissa had been short-circuited. Drake glanced once into the worship chamber, wondering what was taking Guillermo so long with the ladder and then realizing that the tunnels would be hard for him to navigate\u2014especially with any speed\u2014carrying a stepladder under his arm.\n\nThey all watched Alan set his camera aside and move gingerly into place beside Sully.\n\n\"This shouldn't be happening,\" Melissa said. \"Their weight on the sand could\u2014\"\n\n\"I know,\" Welch said. When she glanced at him, he reached out a hand to touch her arm, his eyes pleading for understanding. \"I know, Melissa. But there are forces at work here that you're not aware of yet.\"\n\n\"What forces?\" she asked. \"Talk to me, Ian. We're throwing protocol all to hell.\"\n\n\"Melissa,\" Alan said, looking up from the shaft. \"He's right. There is another light source.\"\n\n\"How can that be?\" she asked. \"The only light sources possible down here are our lights and the sky, and you can be damn sure it's not sunlight or we'd have found that point of entry already.\"\n\nAlan stood up, brushing off his pants. Sully stood as well but didn't bother.\n\n\"It's your light,\" Sully said, and he pointed into the worship chamber. \"The angle's from in there.\"\n\n\"There must be another shaft,\" Jada said.\n\n\"Spread out,\" Sully barked, and no one argued about who was in charge.\n\nAll six of them worked their way through the worship chamber, running their hands over the walls and floor. In less than a minute, Jada called out.\n\n\"Here! I think I've found it.\"\n\nDrake turned to see her kneeling in front of the altar. A sliver of a gap existed between the base of the altar and the floor. He spun and saw the lights hung from the wall behind him and nodded to himself.\n\n\"Everywhere else there's either a tighter seal or some kind of mortar,\" Jada said, glancing up at Welch. \"But it looks like the altar is just resting here.\"\n\nMelissa crouched on the other side, and they all heard her swear under her breath. \"There are scrapes on the stone here.\" She rose quickly and glanced around, argument forgotten. \"Keep looking. There's got to be a trigger.\"\n\n\"You think there's a shaft under the altar?\" Sully growled.\n\nWelch grinned. \"Don't you?\"\n\n\"I love the ancient Egyptians,\" Drake muttered to Jada as he joined her, the two of them running their hands all over the wall. \"Sneaky bastards.\"\n\nLong minutes passed during which the air in the worship chamber seemed to become thinner and dustier, and the rock and sand over their heads closed in, growing heavier, until Drake thought the whole thing might come crashing down on top of them if something didn't break the silence and the renewed tension of their search. Alan and Melissa had no idea what the hurry might be, but they felt the urgency and acted accordingly. Melissa apparently had decided that since Welch was technically her boss, she would let his boss worry about breaches in protocol. Drake thought it had a lot to do with her own sense of discovery. The urge to see what was beneath their feet was powerful.\n\n\"Come on,\" Jada whispered.\n\nShe turned and stared at the altar, causing Drake to do the same thing.\n\n\"What?\" he asked.\n\n\"There's got to be some clue. Something Daedalus put in so that anyone coming from one of the other labyrinths to this one could find the trigger for whatever mechanism moves the altar.\"\n\nWelch froze. He hurried to the altar and put his hand on the symbol in its center\u2014the etching of three interlocking octagons within three circles.\n\n\"I've seen this somewhere else here. I'm sure of it.\" He turned to Jada. \"If there's any symbol here that hints at Daedalus's presence, his design, it's this. The rest is all Egyptian, but this is clearly meant to represent his three labyrinths.\"\n\n\"I feel like I've seen that, too,\" Alan said.\n\n\"Look around,\" Sully rasped. \"And be quick about it.\"\n\nThey stopped testing every stone in the room and started examining the images and symbols instead. Drake watched them, frowning, certain that if the symbol had been in this room, they would have noticed it in their search just now. He stepped outside the worship chamber and studied the door frame and lintel and saw nothing like the triple-octagon symbol. A thought occurred to him, and he reentered but passed through and into the antechamber.\n\nIt took him only seconds to locate the symbol, carved into the bottommost stone in the exposed corner of the room. Drake used the toe of his boot to put pressure on it and frowned when nothing happened. He tried again, pushing harder, hands braced on the wall. Frustrated, he dropped to his knees and began to feel around the edges, and he felt it give a little on one side.\n\nThe stone hadn't been built to slide inward. The architect had installed it to turn.\n\nHe pushed hard on the left side of the stone, and it shifted, turning clockwise. The stones on either side had been carved at sharp angles to allow for the freedom of movement of this keystone. Drake rotated it a quarter turn until it clicked into place again, this face of the stone carved with the same symbol.\n\nA heavy, grinding thump resonated through the chamber. He felt it in the stones under his knees.\n\n\"That's it!\" he heard Melissa say. \"Who did that?\"\n\n\"Nate?\" Sully called.\n\nDrake peered around into the worship chamber. \"I think I found it.\"\n\n\"Damn right you found it,\" Jada said.\n\nThey were all gathering around the altar, and Drake joined them. The entire altar, base and all, had shifted two inches toward the rear wall of the chamber, away from the door. The scrapes on the floor had been from the base dragging across it, though obviously some kind of stone wheel mechanism was in place for the altar to roll on.\n\nThe gap had widened, only darkness visible within. Alan knelt down and put his hand in front of the opening, then looked up at Welch in surprise.\n\n\"There's a draft,\" he said, glancing at the door. \"The air coming from outside\u2014it's slipping right through here.\"\n\n\"What does that mean?\" Jada asked.\n\n\"Means there's air circulation,\" Sully said. \"If it's going in here, it's gotta be going out somewhere down there. Whatever this is, it's not just a room. It goes somewhere.\"\n\n\"Come on,\" Drake said, putting his hands on the altar and getting ready to push.\n\nWelch and Melissa joined him, but there wasn't room for them all to push. They had to be careful. If there was a shaft underneath the altar, none of them wanted to tumble into it. But when they pushed, the altar would give only a little.\n\n\"It's stuck on something,\" Melissa said.\n\n\"Sully, come on,\" Drake said.\n\nHe joined them, and the four of them tried again. Drake pushed, low to the ground, putting all his weight into it. He felt his muscles strain with the effort.\n\n\"Come on,\" Sully grumbled. \"It feels like it's giving a little.\"\n\n\"Something's blocking\u2014\" Alan began.\n\nWith a grinding snap, the altar began to shift. The four of them pushed, keeping to the sides as they uncovered the darkness below. The rumble and scrape of its movement echoed through the chamber, and then it was open.\n\nThey stood around the edges of the hole. Melissa shone her worklight downward, and Drake jerked back in surprise at the sight of the skeleton that lay on the granite stairs.\n\n\"This is incredible,\" Melissa said, her voice hushed. \"Alan, get your camera.\"\n\nWelch descended the first step, examining the skeleton and the way its arms were extended, lying on the upper stairs. The fingers of both hands were broken off, the small bones missing. Welch took out a small but powerful flashlight and studied them closer.\n\n\"Fresh breaks,\" he said, frowning. He sighed, then glanced up at Sully. \"This is what was in the way. This poor guy had his fingers stuck. We just broke them off.\"\n\n\"What, he got caught like that?\" Jada asked.\n\n\"More likely trapped down there,\" Drake said. \"He died trying to dig his way out or get a grip on the altar base to try to move it aside.\"\n\nJada looked at Alan. \"But you felt air moving past. Sully said it meant another way out.\"\n\n\"Another way for air to get out,\" Sully said, stroking his mustache thoughtfully as he studied the bones on the stairs. \"Not for this guy, apparently.\"\n\nMelissa stared at him. \"Sully? I thought your name was\u2014\"\n\n\"Nickname,\" Sully said, brushing her off as he stepped nearer the secret stairwell. \"Nate, what do you think? This guy looks bigger than the typical Egyptian to me.\"\n\nDrake nodded. \"I was thinking the same thing. For the standards of the time, he was huge. I've never seen a sarcophagus big enough to fit him.\"\n\nWelch ran his flashlight over the bones. \"Nor have I. And there's something more. His skull is\u2014misshapen.\"\n\n\"Like, The Elephant Man misshapen?\" Jada asked as they all crowded closer to the top of the hidden stairs, trying to see past the crouched Dr. Welch.\n\n\"I'm no biologist,\" Welch said, shifting aside to give them all a better look. \"But something like that, yes.\"\n\nThe skull seemed inordinately large, with a jutting jawbone and several raised areas that looked rough and pitted.\n\n\"This guy was a monster,\" Drake said. \"Look at the size of him.\"\n\nThe second the words were out of his mouth, he glanced at Sully.\n\n\"Wait a second,\" Drake went on. \"Are you all thinking what I'm thinking?\"\n\n\"If you're thinking this is the Minotaur, then yeah,\" Alan said.\n\n\"Where are the horns?\" Jada asked. \"He could just have been big and ugly. Besides, we don't even know it was a man. It could have been the Mistress of the Labyrinth.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Welch said slowly. \"Maybe.\"\n\nBut the weirdness of the skeleton lingered, and Drake knew they were all curious enough to ponder it for a while.\n\n\"We don't have time for this,\" he said.\n\n\"What?\" Melissa snapped, incredulous. \"You don't have time for what might turn out to be evidence of the existence of a man who might have been the historical antecedent of the Minotaur legend?\"\n\nDrake shrugged. \"Sorry, but no.\"\n\n\"He's right,\" Welch said. Standing, he began to pick his way down the stairs, careful not to disturb the skeleton on his way down. \"We've wasted too much time already. We're being stupid.\"\n\n\"Wasted?\" Melissa asked, and now she laughed in disbelief.\n\nAt that moment, they heard shuffling out in the tunnel, a few bumps and thuds, and then Guillermo came carefully around the corner and stood at the entrance to the worship chamber, the ladder under his arm. He looked sweaty and pale from the effort.\n\n\"Got it,\" he said.\n\nDrake waved him off. \"Yeah, thanks. We're all set.\"\n\nGuillermo saw the open stairwell and slumped against the door frame. \"Seriously?\" he said to no one in particular. \"Someone couldn't have come to tell me?\"\n\n\"We've been a little busy,\" Alan said, snapping photos of the skeleton and the open stairwell.\n\n\"Holy crap,\" Guillermo muttered, coming into the chamber and staring at the bones.\n\n\"I know, right?\" Alan agreed.\n\nDrake had spotted a rack of industrial flashlights like the one in Melissa's hand when they had first entered. Now he snapped a couple off the rack and tossed them to Sully and Jada, then took a third for himself. Melissa and Alan stared at him, but neither made a move to stop him, perhaps because it was so clear that he had Welch's blessing.\n\nHe started down the stairs after Welch, and Sully and Jada followed, all of them treading very carefully.\n\n\"Ian, please, you have to stop,\" Melissa pleaded. \"If you do this, I'm not going to be able to cover for you.\"\n\n\"Trust me,\" Welch called back up to her. \"You're better off. Just stay up there. I'm sure Hilary will be along shortly.\"\n\nDrake cast a glance over his shoulder and saw Melissa pacing, tugging at a lock of her coppery hair. She wanted so badly to be with them, to see what secrets might lie below, but she knew that if she went any farther, her job might be forfeit. She started for the stairs.\n\n\"Melissa,\" Guillermo said.\n\n\"Shut up!\" she snapped at him.\n\nBut it stopped her. She cursed loudly, first in general and then down into the darkness at Welch. By then, Drake couldn't see her anymore and had lost interest. The labyrinth's secrets awaited."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "At the bottom of the hidden stairs was a corridor. Their flashlights threw ghost shadows along its length. Every twenty feet or so there seemed to be another doorway, and for a moment Drake was reminded of the optical illusion created by standing between mirrors. With one in front and one behind, the reflections seemed to go on forever in a diminishing hallway of gleaming frames. This corridor did not go on forever. It ended in a darkness that beckoned them onward, as if hungry for light.\n\nThe silence troubled Drake the most. They were underground, in a place that had been a secret even in the age in which it had been occupied. The dry, cool air seemed thick with ominous portent. If he had been a more superstitious man, he might have said it felt as if it had been waiting for discovery, as if\u2014after so many years\u2014it finally had exhaled. But superstitious or not, he wouldn't have said the words out loud. Unless you'd had too much tequila, he thought. Tequila makes you say stupid things.\n\nHe comforted himself with the knowledge that tequila could make almost anybody say stupid things.\n\n\"Spooky as hell down here,\" Jada whispered.\n\nSully chomped on a fresh cigar. When he'd smoked the stub of the other one\u2014or lost it\u2014Drake had no idea. But Sully didn't light up\u2014not down here. They were surrounded by stone, but there was no telling what they might encounter. Drake figured he didn't want to drop burning ashes on ancient papyrus or the bandages of a mummy.\n\n\"How much time do you think we have?\" Drake asked Welch. \"If your boss gave Henriksen the full tour, I mean?\"\n\n\"Twenty minutes,\" Welch said. \"Thirty if we're lucky.\"\n\nBarely time to get back up the stairs and through the labyrinth to the breach in the wall. No one addressed the renewed urgency, but they hurried a bit faster along the corridor. The slight draft Jada had noticed before persisted. It might be no bigger than a mouse could fit through, but there was an opening down here.\n\nAnd \"down\" was the operative word. The floor slanted downward, and the four of them followed. Flashlight beams danced on the painted walls and the floor and the unadorned ceiling. Drake shone his straight ahead and saw that they were coming to an opening; a moment later, he realized it was some kind of junction.\n\n\"How far does this thing go?\" Sully asked.\n\n\"It could be quite extensive,\" Welch replied.\n\n\"You know how these things work,\" Drake added. \"Whatever they were hiding down here, the Egyptians loved their secret passages and halls.\"\n\n\"So far it's just straight ahead,\" Jada said. \"Not much of a maze.\"\n\n\"Interesting, isn't it?\" Welch asked. \"Part of the labyrinth and yet not part of the labyrinth.\"\n\nUnlike a reflection of a reflection, the corridor did not go on forever. They'd followed it for perhaps fifty yards when it opened into a small anteroom that resembled the one above, and they found themselves looking at the entrances to three separate worship chambers. Each had the triple-octagon symbol engraved in the lintel above the doorway, and each had the trio of steps leading down.\n\n\"This is different,\" Drake muttered. \"The lady or the tiger\u2014or the other tiger?\"\n\n\"I don't think we should split up,\" Welch said quickly.\n\nJada laughed. \"Yeah. Bad idea.\"\n\n\"No need,\" Sully said, flashing his light into the leftmost doorway. \"They're not much bigger than the worship chamber upstairs. Altar. Same layout.\"\n\nThen he stopped and glanced back at them. \"Except there's a door on the other side.\"\n\nDrake hurried to the central doorway and stood on the threshold, flashing his light across the small chamber. \"Here, too.\"\n\nHe quickly scanned the room with his torch, agreeing with Sully's assessment. The layout was identical to that of the worship chamber upstairs. He figured the dimensions would be the same. But as he let the light linger a moment on the altar, he froze, brows knitting.\n\n\"Hey, Sully? Does your room over there have the same paintings, hieroglyphics, and stuff as the chamber upstairs?\"\n\nSully flashed his light at Drake's face. \"Yeah, why?\"\n\nDrake squinted, putting up a hand to block the brightness as he turned to look at Welch and Jada. \"This one has the same altar. An octagon.\"\n\n\"The shape of the labyrinth's design, I suspect. It's a circle, but within the circle, the perimeter of the maze is really an octagon,\" Welch explained.\n\n\"Yeah, great. Daedalus knew his shapes. Call Elmo. What I was saying is that this one doesn't have Egyptian writing.\" Drake flashed his light into the room and held it on the altar as they all moved to see inside. \"It's Greek.\"\n\nThe look on Welch's face was almost comical. He went from surprise to childlike glee in an instant, pushing past Drake and hurrying down the few steps into the worship chamber and flashing his light around in fits and starts.\n\n\"This is remarkable,\" he said, pausing every few seconds to take a closer look at the writing on the wall or the paintings on the base of the altar.\n\nAs Jada, Sully, and Drake followed him into the room, Drake saw that it wasn't exactly like the chamber upstairs, after all. There were several shelves cut into the walls, each holding several large jars. Then, of course, there was also the door at the back of the room, a formidable stone block with no visible means of opening it. But Drake felt sure it was genuinely a door, just one that required some kind of trick to open.\n\n\"What does this mean?\" Jada asked.\n\nWelch nodded to her but didn't answer. Instead, he hurried from the room and rushed into the chamber Sully had been investigating at first. Twenty seconds passed, and then he rejoined them, standing on the threshold of the central room, a fervent smile on his face.\n\n\"The room on the left is devoted to Sobek, as we would expect. But this one\u2014this one is dedicated to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and madness.\"\n\nDrake focused his light on the jars on one shelf, studying the grape design there. \"That doesn't make any sense.\"\n\n\"It makes perfect sense,\" Jada said, tucking a magenta strand behind her ear and lighting up with a grin. \"Daedalus built the labyrinth at Knossos to impress Ariadne, but according to myth, she was the bride of Dionysus.\"\n\nSully slipped an arm around her shoulders and favored her with a proud look. \"Someone's been paying attention.\"\n\n\" 'Bride' could mean many things,\" Welch said. \"She could simply have been devoted to him, as a priestess, for instance.\"\n\n\"Like the Mistress of the Labyrinth?\" Drake suggested.\n\nWelch nodded thoughtfully. \"Possibly. But you're all missing the point. The first chamber explicitly refers to Crocodilopolis, and this one to Knossos and the island of Crete.\"\n\nDrake stared at him, eyebrows shooting up.\n\nSully chomped on his cigar and growled, \"What the hell are you standing there for?\"\n\nWelch stood aside as they rushed out of the worship chamber corresponding to the labyrinth at Knossos. Jada led the way down the few steps into the third room, her flashlight beam bouncing around in front of her.\n\n\"Greek!\" she said, turning to face them as they followed. \"This one's in Greek, too.\"\n\nBut as Drake studied the octagonal altar, noticing the triple-octagon symbol in the center, he thought something looked different about the inscriptions on the base. He flashed his light at the walls and at the vases, and his suspicion increased.\n\n\"Are you sure\u2014\"\n\n\"It's Hellenic, without question,\" Welch said, picking up one of the jars and peering more closely at the writing. \"But it isn't any variation on ancient Greek I've ever seen. Doubtless a dialect, but something rare.\"\n\nHe looked over at Sully. \"This might be a lost language,\" he said excitedly.\n\n\"That's nice, Ian. Really,\" Sully said. \"I'm sure you and your lost language will be very happy together. But the clock is ticking.\"\n\n\"Can you tell what god the chamber's devoted to?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"Oh, that's easy enough,\" Welch said, moving his flashlight beam across the paintings on the walls. Drake spotted a trident. \"The third labyrinth was built in worship of Poseidon. Or some aspect of Poseidon native to\u2014wherever this language comes from.\"\n\n\"And?\" Jada asked, frustrated. \"Any idea where that might be?\"\n\nA chill went up the back of Drake's neck, and he felt a shiver. Frowning, he glanced around. Had he heard a whisper?\n\nThe four of them moved through the chamber with the flashlights, though Welch concentrated mostly on the jars. Some things required no explanation. There were images on each altar base that showed the same scene as the one upstairs of the Mistress of the Labyrinth, and there were others that depicted the Minotaur. There were labrys, the symbol for a labyrinth, carved into stone and painted on jars. He had noticed in the second chamber that there were paintings clearly showing a throne made of gold and other objects that had been painted that color and might have indicated the presence of treasure. There were similar images here. But the rest of it was unreadable to him.\n\nA shadow moved in his peripheral vision, and he thought he heard the rustle of cloth. He glanced at the entrance to the room and thought the darkness seemed a bit darker than before.\n\n\"Did you guys hear something?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"Just you,\" Sully said, gnawing the end of his cigar.\n\nJada glanced at Drake and shook her head. She hadn't heard a thing.\n\nWelch was crouched at a lower shelf, one of the jars\u2014or honey pots, if that was really what they were\u2014in his hand.\n\n\"Here we go,\" he muttered.\n\nDrake and the others turned to stare at him. Welch whispered to himself, translating under his breath and nodding.\n\nHe gave no warning before his legs went out from under him and he sat down hard, the jar slipping into his lap, protected from breaking by the loose cotton of his shirt.\n\n\"Thera,\" he said.\n\n\"Never heard of\u2014\" Sully began, but then his eyes lit up.\n\n\"Thera as in Santorini?\" Drake asked.\n\nWelch's face had gone slack. Drake thought he'd had too much revelation and epiphany for a single day and his archaeology geek brain might have blown a circuit.\n\n\"I've been there,\" Jada said. \"It's beautiful.\"\n\nDrake agreed. The whitewashed buildings and blue domes, the multicolored boats and shutters, the bells, the ocean, the wine. There was nothing about Santorini he did not love, though he'd been there only once. But he had a feeling Welch wasn't thinking about vacation spots.\n\n\"Talk to us, Ian,\" Drake prodded.\n\nWelch looked up at him. \"Daedalus built the third labyrinth on Thera.\"\n\n\"Santorini,\" Jada said, apparently trying to clarify that they were talking about the same place.\n\nBut Welch shook his head. \"No.\"\n\n\"The whole thing's an active volcano,\" Sully said.\n\n\"Right,\" Jada said, snapping her fingers as she recalled. \"There are a bunch of little islands that make up the rim. So you're talking Thera before it exploded or whatever?\"\n\nWelch smiled. \"Oh, yeah.\"\n\nDrake frowned, not sure what he was getting so excited about. In modern times, Thera was an archipelago, but really the string of islands formed a circle around the deepest spot in the Mediterranean. The islands were all that remained of the much larger Thera as it had been before the massive eruption in\u2014he thought it was the fourteenth century B.C., but it might have been the fifteenth. He didn't remember any lava flowing on Santorini, but he knew that some of the smaller islands in the archipelago had volcanic vents and were still active.\n\n\"Minoan civilization collapsed around the same time as the destruction of Thera,\" Welch said.\n\nJada threw up her hands in frustration. \"Well, that's great. So if the third labyrinth was there, we've lost any clues we might've found in a volcanic eruption thousands of years in the past.\"\n\n\"Maybe and maybe not,\" Sully said quickly, jabbing at the air with his unlit cigar to emphasize the point. He turned to Welch. \"Are you saying what I think you're saying?\"\n\nWelch grinned. \"I think I am.\"\n\n\"Would the two of you stop talking in riddles!\" Drake snapped. \"It hurts my head.\"\n\nSully arched an eyebrow and shook his head. \"Oh, Nate, you're going to kick yourself for not getting this one. You've been to Santorini. There's only one archaeological dig going on there that's of any consequence.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Drake said, shrugging, the beam of his flashlight bouncing on the wall. \"Akrotiri.\"\n\n\"Which was a Minoan settlement,\" Welch said. \"One that many modern scholars believe once went under a different name.\"\n\nDrake heard the strange rustling again but barely noticed. He stared at Welch and Sully and grinned.\n\n\"You can't be serious.\"\n\n\"It all fits, Nate,\" Sully said.\n\nJada punched Drake in the arm to get his attention. When he shot her an angry look, she hit him again.\n\n\"Hit him!\" Drake said, pointing at Sully.\n\n\"Tell me!\" she demanded.\n\nDrake gestured at the other two men. \"These two\u2014they think this language was lost because all of the people who spoke it were killed in that volcanic eruption. They think the third labyrinth was in Akrotiri, on Thera.\"\n\n\"So?\" Jada asked.\n\nDrake smiled. \"They're talking about Atlantis.\"\n\nShe hit him a third time. \"I'm serious. Tell me.\"\n\n\"Ow!\" Drake shouted. \"I just did.\"\n\nJada turned to Sully. \"Tell me he's kidding.\"\n\n\"You didn't hear the stories about the dig at Akrotiri when you went to Santorini?\" Sully asked.\n\n\"I went shopping and to the beach. I flirted with guys and drank too much ouzo and rode bicycles with my friends,\" she said. \"We didn't have the kind of fun time I seem to have with you, Uncle Vic.\"\n\n\"Sarcasm? Now?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"Seems like it's always time for sarcasm with you,\" she said.\n\n\"Okay. That's mostly true,\" he replied. \"But a lot of people think Akrotiri is what remains of Atlantis\u2014that Atlantis was a branch of Minoan culture\u2014the perfection of it, really. And whether that's true or not, if the third labyrinth was on Thera, the only chance we have of finding any trace of it or any records of it would be in Akrotiri.\"\n\nWelch gazed at the jar, studying it closely. He spoke without looking up.\n\n\"It can't be Akrotiri. They've been excavating there since the sixties and have they found any hint of a labyrinth? I don't think so. If there's any trace of it left, it has to be somewhere else on the caldera.\"\n\nThe caldera\u2014the cauldron\u2014was how the locals referred to the part of the deep circle of water ringed by the islands of Thera.\n\n\"So we're going to Santorini,\" Sully said, wearing a dubious expression, \"and we're going to search every crevice in each of those islands for the ruins of a labyrinth that no one\u2014in thousands of years\u2014has stumbled across before?\"\n\nJada gave a small shrug, refusing to be defeated. \"No one's ever known what they were looking for.\"\n\nBut Drake had been watching Welch and could see the man's lips moving while he studied the jar.\n\n\"You're reading,\" Drake said.\n\nWelch nodded, a smile stealing across his face. \"Yeah.\" He gestured in the direction of the other chambers. \"The room dedicated to Dionysus\u2014the writing in there is Linear B, an ancient syllabic script used primarily by the Mycenaean Greeks. Now that I've had a minute to look at this, it's really not very different. Linear B-2, let's call it.\"\n\n\"So?\" Sully asked. \"You got a point?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" Welch said happily. He lifted the jar as if it were a trophy. \"Here's your link. I should've thought of this immediately, but I'm a little overwhelmed today, y' know?\"\n\nJada smiled at him. \"We know.\"\n\nWelch looked grateful. \"Anyway, there were texts found in the excavation of the temple at Knossos, written in Linear B, that decreed that all the gods were secondary to something called qe-ra-si-ja. Scholars have argued whether or not this was a god or a king or a kingdom. One school of thought translates qe-ra-si-ja as Therasia, a settlement on the precataclysm island of Thera.\"\n\nThe archaeologist looked up, inspired. \"But Therasia still exists. It's small, and the side facing the caldera is all cliffs. Only a few hundred people live there.\"\n\nDrake felt an old, familiar excitement building. Whatever perils they had faced, whatever tragedies had led them here, they were on the trail of a secret.\n\n\"So we're headed to Therasia,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm coming with you,\" Welch said quickly. \"After Melissa's done telling Hilary what went on today, I'll be fired anyway.\"\n\n\"First we have to get out of here without Henriksen's goons killing us,\" Sully said.\n\nJada scoffed. \"He's not going to shoot you with the expedition staff and workers around as witnesses. Rich people can get away with almost anything, pay off anyone, but it'd be pretty damn hard to cover up killing the entire crew up there.\"\n\n\"I hope you're right,\" Sully said. \"Still, we need to go.\"\n\nWelch held the jar he'd taken from the shelf as he stood. \"All right. But I'm taking this with us. I want to have a closer look, and if we don't have time now\u2014\"\n\n\"Where's the gold?\" Drake asked suddenly.\n\nThey all looked at him.\n\n\"The gold,\" Drake went on. \"Midas or Minos or whoever was supposed to be an alchemist, right? Daedalus paid the workers in gold. The cult of Sobek put gold crests on crocodiles.\"\n\n\"We found some of those already,\" Welch said.\n\n\"Yeah, okay,\" Drake replied. \"But if the mistress took the offering of honey from the worshippers and fed it to the Minotaur and the Minotaur was here to protect the gold, then where is the gold?\"\n\n\"Gone, apparently,\" Welch said thoughtfully.\n\n\"From here,\" Jada said. \"But if Daedalus and his people moved the gold from here\u2014maybe from all three of these chambers\u2014the logical place for them to have moved it is to one of the other labyrinths. Maybe they moved it around to keep it safe. It could have been on Thera, maybe destroyed in the eruption.\"\n\nDrake nodded. \"Maybe. Or maybe it's in the fourth labyrinth.\"\n\n\"Look around you,\" Welch said, gesturing at the walls and the altar. \"Do you see any reference to a fourth?\"\n\n\"I can't read this,\" Drake replied. \"And no one alive is exactly fluent in ancient Atlantean.\"\n\n\"I told you, it's a variation on Linear B,\" Welch said. \"I could muddle my way through a basic translation, but so far I haven't seen any indication of a fourth labyrinth. And the three-labyrinth symbol is everywhere.\"\n\n\"So the fourth one came later,\" Drake said. \"Companies change their logos all the time. Daedalus didn't get a chance to do the rebranding he needed down here before he died. The point is, Jada's father thought there was a fourth one, and somebody killed him because he was investigating the possibility. That's evidence right there, as far as I'm concerned.\"\n\nWelch cradled the jar against his chest, looking like he was in the mood to argue. Not too bright, Drake thought, considering how urgent it was that they get out of there.\n\nWhen Sully drew his gun, whatever Welch had been about to say was forgotten.\n\n\"Nate. Did you say you heard something?\" Sully asked, the question almost a snarl around the cigar clamped in his teeth.\n\nDrake reached for his gun, turning to face the entrance to the Thera worship chamber. \"I did, yeah.\"\n\nBoth weapons were trained on the doorway. Drake narrowed his eyes and peered at the darkness out in the antechamber. Jada looked at them in confusion and then reluctantly pulled out her pistol. Welch wore a worried expression but didn't ask them about the guns, smart enough not to want to tip off whoever might be out there listening to their conversation. Drake figured if it was Henriksen or the dig director, Hilary Russo, they would have been interrupted already.\n\nDrake padded quietly toward the door, gun at the ready. Sully used his flashlight to wave Welch back. The archaeologist shuffled backward past the altar, looking faintly ridiculous with his unruly hair and glasses.\n\nDrake wondered if he held the vase because of its value or for comfort, the way a toddler clutches a stuffed animal.\n\nThat rustle of cloth came again. Drake frowned, all his attention on the open doorway now. He and Sully moved in, one on either side of the three stairs that led up into the darkened antechamber. They had guns in one hand and flashlights in the other, trying to figure out if there was anything for them to shoot at or if they had been spooked by nothing. They kept their flashlights aimed away from the opening, hoping that whoever lurked out there would show themselves. Jada hung back, just in front of the altar, her gun and flashlight both pointed at the floor.\n\nDrake glanced at her, on the verge of issuing a snarky remark about how useless it would be to shoot a bullet into the floor. But when he glanced back at the doorway, he caught the shadows moving, one separating from the others, and whipped his flashlight beam up to spotlight the open doorway.\n\nSomething dashed by. Someone. No question now. They weren't alone.\n\n\"Sully,\" Drake said.\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\nMore motion, deeper into the antechamber, shadows within shadows. Drake whipped his flashlight beam up, illuminating the man dashing across the opening so quietly that he might have been a ghost. Only he wasn't a ghost; they had seen him before. He was one of the killers who had stopped Jada from being abducted and killed by the hit squad Henriksen had sent to do it. Hooded and veiled, the man froze, glancing into the worship chamber at them.\n\nThey told us to go home, Drake had time to think.\n\nThe assassin narrowed his eyes and then leaped into the room, drawing a short curved blade as he raced at Sully. Drake and Sully fired at the same time. Though Drake's bullet missed, Sully's shot took the assassin in the chest, and he staggered backward, wheeling toward the steps. For a second, Drake thought he would run out of there as fast as he'd jumped in, but then the wounded, bleeding man spun and lifted his blade, about to hurl it at Drake.\n\nJada shot the assassin twice, once in the thigh and once in the abdomen. The blade whickered out of his hand with the speed of a boomerang, but she'd ruined his aim and the curved dagger clanged off the altar inches from her. He fell on his back, rolled, and began to drag himself out of the worship chamber.\n\n\"Don't let him get out!\" Sully barked.\n\n\"Him? I'm worried about us getting out,\" Drake said.\n\n\"Where did he come from?\" Jada asked.\n\nOther rustling noises came from the anteroom, and Drake swore loudly, pressing himself against the wall beside the stairs.\n\n\"There are others!\" he said. \"Of course there are others!\" It was their luck.\n\nA scraping noise came from behind him. For a second he thought Jada was the cause, but then his mind sorted out the distance and the weight of stone on stone and realized the sound came from farther back. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Welch's flashlight had died. In the gloom at the back of the chamber he saw shadows that did not belong, then heard the scuffle of a struggle. He swung his flashlight beam over in time to see another of the hooded assassins dragging Ian Welch through the partially open stone door at the rear of the room.\n\nThe archaeologist's hands twitched and dropped the jar, which shattered on impact.\n\n\"Welch!\" Drake shouted, turning to Sully. \"They're getting in through the other door!\"\n\nJada rushed toward the stone door, beating Drake there. He wanted to tell her to back off, afraid they'd drag her in as well, but she wouldn't have listened and he didn't have time to get the words out before she was already there. She aimed her flashlight and gun together, not firing for fear of hitting Welch, and started to take a step through the gap in the door.\n\n\"Dr. Welch!\" Jada called. \"Ian!\"\n\nA hooded figure rushed from the darkness and grappled with her, pushing her gun away, trying to twist it from her grasp. Drake shot him in the shoulder. The attacker spun, blood spraying from the wound, and staggered back against the wall. In the shadows where Welch had vanished, others were moving. Welch was gone\u2014maybe dead\u2014and they had to get the hell out of the labyrinth before they joined him.\n\n\"Come on!\" Drake shouted. \"Jada, let's go!\"\n\nThey bolted, racing around the altar on either side and then toward Sully and the three steps to the exit together. Sully had his back to the wall on the left, but when he saw them coming, he led the charge, rushing up the stairs into the antechamber.\n\nDrake heard the first shot but didn't see it. Then he and Jada were out of the Thera worship chamber. The assassin they'd shot lay on the floor of the anteroom, bleeding but alive, but he was the least of their concerns. Two others were in the anteroom, and Drake saw motion off to his right. Several other hooded men were emerging from the darkness of the other doors.\n\n\"Look, if you want us to go home that bad, we'll go home!\" he shouted, swinging his aim over to cover them.\n\nLoud footfalls came echoing along the tunnel through which Drake and his companions had arrived. A glance showed flashlight beams bouncing off the walls. They were about to have even more company.\n\nA woman's voice shouted in Italian and then in English.\n\n\"Who's there? Ian, what the hell is going on down here?\" she called angrily.\n\nHilary Russo, Drake thought. But her deputy, Welch, wasn't going to answer. He was a captive of those hooded men or had become just another part of the labyrinth's history, another thing that needed to be excavated from this place.\n\nThere were a lot of voices and a lot of footfalls, and Drake had the idea that at least a dozen people were headed their way. Maybe that was more people than the assassins were ready to kill at the moment or more people than they could risk letting live after having seen them down there in the secret corridors under the labyrinth. Drake and Sully and Jada weren't even supposed to be there. Who would believe them?\n\nOne of the hooded men Sully and Jada were aiming at lunged, and Sully shot him.\n\n\"Go!\" Sully shouted, and started to run.\n\nTrust saved Drake. He couldn't see if the way was open, couldn't tell if Sully had done any real damage to the guy he'd shot or if they had the second or two they needed to get clear, but he and Sully had been friends since Drake was a kid. They might not have always gotten along and sometimes they frustrated the hell out of each other, but Sully had been his mentor for almost twenty years. In a moment like this, they had to trust each other or they'd both have been killed years ago.\n\nJada rushed into the tunnel, Drake right on her heels. He flashed his light ahead of them with his left hand even as he covered the assassins coming from the Knossos and Sobek chambers with the other, arms spread wide.\n\nHe could hear Sully to his left, muttering, \"Go, go, go.\" A swift glance showed him that the one Sully had shot had fallen but still lived, and Sully had his gun aimed at the face of the other assassin, who gazed back coolly in the semidarkness of the anteroom. The only light remaining in that junction room came from Sully's flashlight, and Drake wondered how the assassins could see so well in the dark.\n\nIt occurred to him that these were not ordinary men. He thought of the swiftness with which they killed Jada's would-be abductors in the parking lot the night before and realized that the assassins were no longer trying very hard. As he glanced back and saw Sully racing after him into the tunnel\u2014Sully fired a bullet into the darkness as if for punctuation\u2014he understood that they were not following. It might have been the number of people or the possibility of defeat that made them vanish back into the secret heart of the labyrinth, but whatever their reason, Drake thought they would be all right now. They would be safe, for the moment at least.\n\nThe brunette woman running toward them had to be Hilary Russo.\n\n\"Sully, gun,\" Drake murmured, noticing that Jada already had put hers away as she saw the people running toward them, waving flashlights in their faces.\n\n\"Who are you people?\" Hilary, the dig's chief archaeologist, demanded. \"Was that gunfire?\"\n\nJada collapsed into her arms and hugged her tightly, then pushed her back and stared at her. The look on Hilary's face could only be shock.\n\n\"There are\u2014there are people back there!\" Jada said, glancing frantically from Hilary to the dark length of tunnel behind them and back.\n\n\"That's not possible! Where's Ian Welch?\" Hilary demanded.\n\nDrake and Sully surveyed the others. Past the brightness of the flashlights it was difficult to make out faces, but he was sure he'd caught a glimpse of Olivia Hzujak's hair, and the tall blond silhouette had to be Henriksen. But there was no cameraman, and most of the people seemed to be workers from the dig.\n\n\"He was with them,\" Guillermo said, stepping forward. \"He came down here with them.\" He pointed. \"She's supposedly Luka Hzujak's daughter.\"\n\nHilary glanced behind her, and now it was clear who she was looking at. \"What about it, Mrs. Hzujak? Is this your stepdaughter?\"\n\n\"Olivia!\" Jada cried, and rushed to her stepmother's embrace. She hugged the older woman tightly, and the beautiful mask of concern Olivia wore cracked with surprise.\n\nThat was when Drake realized he'd underestimated Jada. He had thought that she had snapped, that panic and hysteria were setting in. But the whole thing was an act. The girl was hustling them all. He wanted to kiss her. If Sully wouldn't have frowned on it, he might have. Though at this point it would have been more like kissing his sister.\n\n\"Jada, are you all right?\" Olivia asked, and if she was feigning concern, her acting skills were as good as her stepdaughter's. Olivia pushed her back and stared at her face and shirt, which were dappled red from when Drake had shot her attacker. \"Whose blood is that?\"\n\n\"Where is Ian?\" Hilary demanded. \"Who was shooting?\" She glared at Sully and Drake. \"And who are you two? Not from the damned Smithsonian, I know that much!\"\n\n\"Dr. Russo,\" Drake said, hoping for profound sincerity even as he tried to remember the false name he'd been using. \"I'm Nathan Merrill. We're friends of Jada's, trying to help her figure out if there's any connection between her father's recent trip to Egypt and his murder.\"\n\n\"Murder? Oh, my God!\" Hilary said, and she snapped an incredulous glance at Olivia, wondering why she hadn't been told of this before.\n\n\"You've got three worship chambers at the end of this corridor,\" Sully said. \"There are stone doors on the other side of each. When we found the secret passage, Dr. Welch let us investigate it with him, but we weren't alone down here. There were other people here.\"\n\n\"That's impossible!\" a voice piped up from the back.\n\nSheepish but worried now, ginger-haired Melissa moved forward, pushing past the towering blond statue that was Tyr Henriksen. They were clustered together now, and his face was illuminated. He stared at Drake with ice blue eyes, but he said nothing. If he wanted Jada, Sully, and Drake dead, he'd have to kill everyone else there as well and then everyone up top. He might be a vicious son of a bitch, but he still had an international corporation to run, and covering up a mass murder could have gotten messy\u2014but he sure looked like he wanted to shed some blood.\n\n\"No one else went down,\" Melissa said. \"I was by the entrance the whole time.\"\n\n\"There's gotta be another way in, then,\" Sully said. \"Those doors in the worship chambers\u2014people came out of them and attacked us. They've taken Dr. Welch.\"\n\nHilary Russo stared at him in obvious disbelief. \"That's a lie.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, but it's not,\" Drake said. \"They dragged him through one of the doors, and\u2014\"\n\nBut she wasn't listening anymore. Hilary rushed along the corridor, picking up speed, with Guillermo and a couple of others behind her. Drake wished they could stay and help look for Ian Welch, but if the man was there to be found, his colleagues would find him. Drake, Sully, and Jada needed to get the hell out of Crocodilopolis before things got even messier for them, at which point they would not be allowed to leave. Drake didn't relish the idea of spending time in an Egyptian prison.\n\n\"We need to get Jada some air,\" Sully said to Olivia. \"You understand.\"\n\nOlivia seemed to be practically vibrating with indecision. She glanced at Henriksen, who had his hands clenched into fists. Melissa and a couple of other dig employees had stayed with them, and Drake thought it was touch and go for a moment as to whether he might start breaking people's necks with his massive hands.\n\n\"Of course,\" Olivia said, but her eyes were on Henriksen, keeping him in check with her pleading gaze. \"I'll come up with you.\"\n\n\"No,\" Henriksen snapped, the first time they'd heard him speak in his crisp, deep voice. \"I need you here.\"\n\nOlivia hesitated. Drake studied her, hating that he couldn't read her. Was she really a victim in Henriksen's thrall, or was she in on the whole thing and simply trying to prevent him from doing anything stupid? Did she care about Jada at all or care that her husband had been murdered? Had she helped murder him?\n\n\"Fine,\" Olivia said. She gave Jada a little push. \"See you outside. Don't go far.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Drake said, glancing at Henriksen. \"We'll stick close.\"\n\nDrake held Henriksen's icy stare as he backed away, cognizant of the weight of the gun he'd tucked into the back of his waistband and hoping he didn't have to use it in such close quarters.\n\n\"What did you find?\" Melissa asked as they walked past her. \"What's down there?\"\n\nDrake looked at her, then at Henriksen, wanting the bastard to know that they had beaten him to it and were that much closer to solving the mystery he'd killed Luka Hzujak to keep from talking about.\n\n\"Secrets,\" he said, smiling at Henriksen. \"Stuff that's going to blow your mind. Things you never would have expected.\"\n\nHenriksen lifted his chin, sneering. \"Some secrets can be dangerous. Sometimes it's safer for them to remain secret. Men can become very wealthy keeping secrets.\"\n\nDrake smirked. Was the guy trying to buy him? Not that he was offended by the idea of someone trying to pay him to shut up and go away. But Henriksen was the kind of arrogant bastard who thought he was king of the world. He'd had people murdered, including Jada's father, because he thought he was too special to have to follow rules or share his discoveries with the world.\n\nSully took Jada's hand and led her along the corridor, headed for the stairs that went up into the labyrinth. Drake hung back a moment, still locking eyes with Henriksen. Then he glanced at Melissa and smiled.\n\n\"Nothing stays a secret forever.\"\n\nHe didn't want to turn his back on Henriksen, but he figured if the guy was going to paint the walls with his blood, he'd have done it already. Still, it was all he could do not to run for the stairs, knowing those icy, soulless eyes were behind him, wanting him dead. Not that I'm afraid, of course, he thought. I'm just also not stupid.\n\nFifteen minutes later they were outside.\n\nFour minutes after that, they were in the Volvo wagon, racing across the desert, wondering how long it would take the authorities to get out to the dig once someone radioed them.\n\nThree hours later they were on a boat racing north on the Nile, headed for Port Said in hopes of finding a ship's captain willing to run them northwest across the Mediterranean to Santorini. There would be ferry service, but a ferry would have other stops and might take a couple of days to get them there, and they didn't have a moment to spare. They had a head start on Henriksen, but that wasn't likely to last very long. Henriksen had more money than God, and he had the luxury of traveling under his real name, not a false identity that might not hold up under real scrutiny.\n\nThey did have a few things in their favor, however. Welch had given them their destination before he'd been abducted and maybe killed\u2014more blood spilled over this secret\u2014and since Hilary and her team didn't know what Henriksen was looking for, they would come to their revelations more slowly. Also, Hilary and her staff would be occupied with the police, trying to figure out who had taken Welch and trying to get him back.\n\nThey would beat Henriksen to the third labyrinth, Drake decided. They had to.\n\nAs for Welch's abduction, Drake, Jada, and Sully avoided that subject as much as possible, partly because they knew the police would assume they had something to do with it. Fleeing the scene hadn't helped their case, but there had been no other choice. Now they were armed fugitives and suspected kidnappers.\n\nSomewhere along the way, Drake figured, he had taken a wrong turn. He promised himself that if he survived this mess, he was going to find another line of work. Something quieter and safer, like fighting fires or sticking his head in a lion's mouth after hitting it with a whip. Something nice and quiet. None of the perils of racing around the world with Victor Sullivan. If they could just get to Santorini and off the island again without anyone else dying, he would consider himself lucky.\n\nBut when it came to his adventures with Sully, he couldn't fool himself for long. Their luck rarely turned out to be the good kind."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Santorini was unlike any other place in the world. The towns overlooking the caldera were built into the caves and folds of the cliffs left behind when the volcano at the heart of ancient Thera exploded. The blue domes of the larger buildings matched the blue of the swimming pools that dotted the cliff towns and the water of the caldera. Drake reckoned there must have been tens of thousands of stairs just in the village of Oia alone, all of them curving around the inner wall of an island that was part of the rim of a sleeping volcano. Some of the beaches had black sand\u2014volcanic sand\u2014and the beauty of the caldera somehow allowed the people to tell themselves that the sea would never erupt with lava and flame, killing them all.\n\nBut it might. Drake knew that, and though Santorini had a beauty and serenity greater than almost anywhere else on the planet, it was this strange peace with potentially imminent destruction that fascinated him most.\n\nIt was Sunday night, and the warmth of the day still lingered though the sun had gone down. Drake and Jada walked side by side along the alleys and stairways overlooking the caldera, surrounded by bars and restaurants and shops. Many of the shops were closed on a Sunday night in October, but some remained open, and they wandered and window-shopped, sometimes talking about their lives and sometimes in companionable silence.\n\nThey had managed a great deal in just over twenty-four hours. In Port Said they had found a marina where captains offered their boats for day trips. It was an expensive proposition and even more costly when they explained that they wanted the captain to take them to Santorini but didn't plan on making the return trip. The weathered Egyptian captain made noises about the laws they were asking him to break but was happy enough to break them when money had changed hands.\n\nThey had slept fairly comfortably on board the ship, all things considered, and arrived at Santorini in midafternoon on Sunday. It had been a stroke of genius\u2014or luck, Drake allowed\u2014that they had checked out of the Auberge du Lac and brought their duffels with them, guns and ammunition stuffed in among their clean and dirty clothes. They had left the Volvo abandoned in Port Said, but once they took the cable car up from the Santorini docks, getting a taxi was easy enough. Hungry as they were, they had shopped first. October nights could get chilly on the islands, so Sully and Drake each picked up sweaters, and Jada purchased a stylish leather jacket.\n\nOr, rather, Drake purchased them all, as well as a couple of changes of clothes for each of them. He felt bad about using the fake credit card he'd gotten on the way to Montreal, but he couldn't exactly use his own, and he had to conserve the significant amount of cash he was still carrying from his adventure in Ecuador. He promised himself that when this was all over, he'd pay the store back; he'd even kept the receipt. Drake might have broken the law on a fairly regular basis\u2014that came with the territory in his line of work\u2014but he drew the line at ripping people off.\n\nThey'd gone into the first decent hotel they'd found in the village of Oia, pretended not to be twitchy about the exorbitant prices, and booked a suite so they could all be locked up behind the same door that night. In the summer they would never have found a vacancy so easily, but in October rooms weren't in such high demand.\n\nDinner had followed, and now Sully was back at the hotel, trying to figure out the best way to get them to Therasia in the morning. Even if they paid someone to take them over tonight, searching for ancient mysteries tended to be easier when the sun was shining. In the dark, Drake figured they'd just walk off a cliff and that would be the end of the whole business.\n\nNow he and Jada were drifting into one of their comfortable silences again. They were on the downhill side of a rise in the cliffside village, on a path among the shops and bars and eateries. There were stretches of path and then a few steps and another longer walk and a few more steps, which was as close to flat as this part of the island got. The smell of burning pipe tobacco reached them, and Jada inhaled and smiled.\n\n\"You like that smell?\" Drake asked.\n\nShe shrugged. \"When I was little, my dad smoked a pipe.\"\n\n\"His doctor made him give it up?\"\n\n\"No. When I got to high school, I told him it was pretentious and embarrassed me,\" she said, a melancholy smile on her face. \"He gave it up for me. This thing that gave him pleasure and some kind of peace of mind, and I\u2014\"\n\nShe couldn't finish the sentence, her voice quavering. Her eyes filled with tears, but Jada seemed resolutely against shedding them. A moment later she brushed at her eyes, but her cheeks were dry.\n\n\"What happened to your parents?\" she asked. \"Uncle Vic would never tell me.\"\n\n\"You were asking about me?\" Drake said, teasing her.\n\n\"I was curious,\" she admitted. \"But don't flatter yourself.\"\n\nDrake smiled, but after a moment he looked down at the homes and hotels and shops on the cliff beneath them and at the surf smashing the rocks on the rim of the caldera farther below.\n\n\"Okay. Sorry,\" she said. \"I didn't know it was a taboo subject.\"\n\n\"It isn't really,\" Drake replied, turning to look at her. \"Just something I don't enjoy talking about. You know what a ronin is?\"\n\n\"Something Japanese, right?\"\n\n\"A masterless samurai,\" he said. \"One who has left his master's house and cut off all connections to his past, gone into the world, and made his own path. I know it sounds ridiculously geeky and self-important\u2014\"\n\n\"Actually, it sounds like something that takes a lot of courage. Having no one.\"\n\n\"Sully was around when I needed someone there,\" Drake said, voice low. He wasn't used to opening up, to letting the court jester that seemed to rule his tongue half the time go silent.\n\n\"He's always been like that,\" Jada agreed. \"He plays it like he's a rogue, like he doesn't care. He vanishes for months at a time, makes out like he's only out for himself, pretends that the money is his top priority\u2014and maybe most of the time it is. But my dad used to say that with his back against the wall, when it counts, there wasn't anybody he'd rather have in his corner than Victor Sullivan.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Drake agreed, and they walked on a couple of minutes longer before he spoke again. \"Listen, I wish none of this had ever happened, but if it had to happen, I'm glad I'm here with you both. You've got me in your corner, too.\"\n\n\"I know,\" she said. \"And it's appreciated.\"\n\nThey fell silent again, but this time the quiet between them had a breathless quality, as if each of them feared the next words that might be spoken. A burst of song, Greek voices raised in alcohol-fueled camaraderie, caught on the breeze and swept by them. It came from the nearest bar and was followed by a round of laughter. A man jogged by, intent on the effort of his athletic self-discipline. Two stylishly dressed young women came up the walkway, exuding sexy confidence. But for those few seconds, Drake and Jada couldn't take their eyes off each other.\n\nBlinking, taking a quick breath, Jada forced a nervous smile. \"It's beautiful here. Romantic. Gives you all kinds of crazy thoughts.\"\n\nDrake felt grateful. If she'd kissed him, he might have kissed her back, and that wasn't the way any of this was meant to go. For just a moment, the dynamic between them had been on the verge of drastic changes. He smiled, waiting a few seconds before speaking, wanting to be certain the moment truly had passed them by.\n\n\"I haven't had a lot of luck in that department,\" Drake said.\n\n\"Yeah. Me, either. Maybe I should come back here afterward, meet some handsome fisherman, and open a dress shop.\"\n\nDrake laughed. \"You've seen too many movies.\"\n\nWhen Jada punched him in the arm, back to her usual abuse, he knew that the moment was officially over. They were allies. In a strange way, they were almost siblings. And nothing else. Drake knew that that was for the best, that anything else would be far too complicated, but he knew he would always be curious about the road not traveled. It wouldn't be the first time he'd felt that way in his life, and he knew it wouldn't be the last.\n\n\"Look,\" she said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, pushing magenta bangs away from her eyes as she huddled into the leather jacket as if the night was colder than it felt. \"There's something we've been avoiding talking about, and I don't think we can go any further without at least addressing it.\"\n\nAw, no, Drake thought. We had the perfect moment, the silent acknowledgment. Talking about it is only going to lead to crippling awkwardness and me babbling like a fool.\n\n\"The hooded guys,\" Jada went on.\n\nDrake arched an eyebrow, his mind shifting gears. \"Yeah. Of course. Them.\"\n\n\"I mean, yeah, we talked about them in the sense of 'those guys are creepy, who the hell are they and why are they trying to kill us and why did they try to warn us to go home before they tried to kill us \u2026' And I'm babbling.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Drake leaned against the railing over the cliff. \"Yes, you are.\"\n\nJada smiled. He thought she might punch him again, but apparently she was too tired from all the other times she had punched him.\n\n\"We haven't really talked about what I think is the big question.\"\n\n\"Which is?\"\n\n\"Those doors in the labyrinth of Sobek,\" Jada said. \"I don't know about you, but I've kind of been avoiding it because I'm trying not to think about Welch being taken. His sister's boyfriend was murdered because he tried to help my father solve this puzzle, and now Ian's missing, maybe dead, because he did the same for us. It's weighing on me. I can't help feeling responsible.\"\n\nDrake nodded grimly. \"It goes away, that feeling. Not as quick as you'd like, but it does. The thing to remember is that we didn't force him to help us. He knew there was danger, and he wanted to help anyway. That won't make you feel less guilty, but it's a good thing to remind yourself that you can't control other people. Not the ones who want to help you and not the ones who want to kill you.\"\n\n\"They dragged him through the door at the back of that worship chamber. And the rest of the hooded guys had to have come through the sealed doors in the other rooms. Even if we assume there's a simple way to open those\u2014triggers, something to make them swing easily, that we just hadn't found yet\u2014how did they get down there?\"\n\n\"They could've gone down the night before and been waiting for us,\" Drake said. \"They told us to go home, but they figured either we were going to find those rooms or Henriksen would.\"\n\n\"Uh-uh, no,\" Jada said, shaking her head. \"The skeleton, the Minotaur or whatever\u2014his fingers broke off when we slid the altar back. If anyone else had gone down that way before us, that would've happened then, not now.\"\n\nDrake pondered that, running a finger inside the collar of his new sweater. The tag was bugging him, distracting him, but there was no arguing with Jada's point. Not that he had actually believed the hooded killers had slipped past the dig workers or security and gone down through the upper-level worship chamber. Sure, he'd seen the way they seemed able to melt silently in and out of shadows like some kind of crazy ninja assassins, but if they wanted to, he would have bet they could have killed every person working on the dig team.\n\nSo why hadn't they? They had rules, he thought. They weren't going to kill people who didn't break them.\n\nHad they been giving Drake, Sully, and Jada the benefit of the doubt? The hooded men had told them to go home; had they been waiting for the three of them to cross some invisible line? To trespass?\n\n\"We already talked about there being another way in,\" he reminded her. \"We felt the air moving. By now, Hilary Russo and her people\u2014and probably the antiquities minister or whoever\u2014have already found the other entry point.\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" Jada said. When she nodded, her hair veiled her face again. \"But the labyrinth was buried for, like, thousands of years. If the archaeologists unearthing the site didn't know there was another way in, how did they?\"\n\n\"Now you're just creeping me out,\" Drake said.\n\n\"I'm creeping myself out!\" Jada said. \" 'Cause the next question is, if they knew the bat cave entrance to that labyrinth, do they know about this one?\"\n\nDrake caught another whiff of the pipe smoke he'd smelled before. Mixed in with that odor were delicious aromas of frying onions and spices. From another bar, a ways back along the walk, loud music had begun to play, the kind of thumping dance noise that roared in the sort of nightclub he had always avoided. But earlier they had passed a young bearded guy playing a bouzouki, and Drake had allowed himself a moment to wish they were here on some less troubling errand and without the specter of Luka's death looming over them.\n\n\"I don't think I want the answer to that,\" he admitted. \"But I figure we'll find out when we find the labyrinth on Therasia.\"\n\n\"Can't wait,\" Jada muttered.\n\nThey turned together, in silent agreement that they were moving on from both the topic and the location. Something caught Drake's attention, a shifting of the night shadows on top of the darkened jewelry store to their left. He glanced up and froze, staring.\n\nJada walked on several steps before she realized he wasn't with her.\n\n\"Nate?\" she asked, turning to see what had snagged his attention.\n\nDrake started walking again, taking her elbow and hurrying along the path. He glanced over his shoulder, looking at the jewelry store's roof and then checking others on both sides of the path. They went down five steps, and he picked up his pace further.\n\n\"What the hell's wrong with\u2014\" she started. \"Wait, did you see one of them? The hooded guys?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure,\" Drake said.\n\nAnd he wasn't. It had been a momentary glimpse, little more than a shadow detaching itself from another shadow and retreating out of sight. But something had been moving up there, and even if Henriksen had caught up with them this quickly, the men he'd hired thus far weren't clever or stealthy enough to lurk in shadows.\n\n\"You think they're trailing us right now?\" Jada asked.\n\n\"Maybe.\"\n\n\"Why just watch? They don't know what to make of us? Or they're biding their time?\"\n\nDrake wanted to comfort her, but he'd had a lifetime of telling people what they needed to hear instead of what they wanted to hear. And Jada wasn't exactly a damsel in distress.\n\n\"These guys are like shadows. They don't like being seen,\" Drake said. \"They took a risk back in Egypt with so many people seeing them. My guess is they didn't like it. They're doing what any decent hunter would do, waiting for the right moment. They'll want us alone, away from a crowd. Better still if they can take us one by one.\"\n\nJada's face went slack. \"Oh, no. Uncle Vic.\"\n\nDrake felt his heart sink. He couldn't be sure of what he'd seen, but if they were being shadowed\u2014if these ninja assholes really did want to take them out\u2014and they'd left Sully alone\u2014\n\nHe took Jada's hand, and together they ran.\n\nThey raced along the walkway, past the bars and darkened shops, watching rooftops and shadows for any further threat. But Drake's thoughts had shifted away from self-preservation. The fear that made his heart race, thrumming in his skull, had nothing to do with his own safety. He hadn't seen the corpse of Luka Hzujak, but he knew how the dead man had ended up\u2014in a trunk with his arms and legs cut off and his decapitated head resting on his chest, abandoned on a train platform. He had to force himself not to picture Sully's face staring up from inside that trunk, a bloodstain spreading out beneath it on a vintage guayabera, the copper stink of blood mixing with the earthy odor of old cigars.\n\nJada let go of his hand, and he wished she had held on. But they needed to run faster, and that didn't leave time for them to soothe each other's fears.\n\nDrake darted along a narrow path that led down, cut into the cliff face. The island fell away to the right. There were homes and hotels and even a few more restaurants below, slashed into the rock, but none of them were likely to save them if they fell. Small trees and bushes grew around the path, along with fall flowers, a minor miracle considering the severely arid climate of the island. Drake scratched his arm on something as he whipped by, but those were the sorts of things that grew on Santorini\u2014the prickly, dangerous ones.\n\nA chorus of laughter rippled into the air ahead. They descended narrow steps carved from stone and came to another long slash of a terrace, a walkway filled with middle-aged Germans on holiday. Several of them swore as Drake and Jada elbowed through them. One man tried to grab Jada's arm, but she popped her open hand against his chest, shoving him away. Drake smelled licorice and knew that one of them had spilled ouzo on his clothes. These were the details he absorbed as he ran, the minutiae he tried to use to drive back the dark thoughts.\n\n\"He'll be all right,\" Jada whispered as she ran beside him. \"He has all the guns.\"\n\nThe guns had occurred to Drake the moment he saw the dark figure on the rooftop. He and Jada had not wanted to risk carrying illegal weapons in public unless they were sure they would need them. Stupid, he thought now. Careless. They weren't on holiday. The very idea of a moonlit stroll had been ridiculous. The three of them should have holed up in their suite until morning, waiting for daybreak, when they could search for the labyrinth.\n\nThe hotel lay ahead. They reached a narrow set of stairs winding up the cliff face and ran up the seventeen steps to the top, and the doorway loomed on their left. Straight ahead was the pool, still bright blue under the lights, heated just enough that a few brave souls stood quietly flirting with one another in the water and admiring the view of the caldera far below, glistening in the moonlight.\n\nDrake scanned the entrance, checked the darkness beyond the lights of the pool. Nothing. He hauled the door open and hurried inside, Jada darting along in his wake. They hurried through the lobby, trying to move fast without attracting too much attention. Drake ignored the elevator. They were only two stories up. He vaulted the first three steps, gaining speed as he ascended, holding on to the railing. By the time he reached the third floor corridor\u2014the walls curved to follow the line of the cave in which the hotel had been built\u2014he had a lead of half a flight of stairs on Jada, but he didn't wait for her.\n\nHe sprinted, slowing as he neared his room so he could retrieve the key card from his wallet. As he slid the key into the slot, he held his breath. Jada came rocketing toward him and skidded to a halt on the carpet as the light turned green and he shoved the door open, his hands aching for a gun.\n\nThey entered, and Jada pushed the door quietly shut behind them.\n\nDrake led the way into the suite. He glanced into the bathroom, where the faucet dripped and there was evidence that Sully had shaved. The suite's bar was open, a bottle of wine open on the small table in the common room. Jada ducked into her room, poked around a moment, then emerged, shaking her head. No sign of Sully. But she held the gun that had been in her duffel, so that, at least, had been left alone.\n\nJada frowned, glancing around in alarm. It took Drake only a moment to realize what was troubling her\u2014the breeze. He shivered a little at the cool night air that eddied around them and turned to stare at the door to the last place Sully might be, the other bedroom. The door hung open wide, but only a dim light glowed within. Drake and Jada moved to either side of the door and took a breath. Jada motioned for him to wait, showing him the gun, indicating she wanted to go first.\n\nDrake slipped into the bedroom, forcing her to follow. But as she came up beside him, they both stared at the French doors, holding their breath. The doors were open, the curtains rustling with the breeze. They could see through to the balcony and the Mediterranean night beyond, but the only trace of Sully was the cigar smoke that lingered in the room.\n\nA sick feeling swept over Drake. He closed his eyes and pressed his palms against his temples, trying not to scream in fury and anguish, trying not to think about heads and torsos in railway trunks.\n\nJada found their duffels, and the sound of her rustling through Sully's made Drake open his eyes. She pulled out the gun Sully had been carrying, and Drake stared at it. Whoever had come for him had been stealthy enough that he hadn't had enough warning even to go for his gun.\n\nShe handed the gun to Drake and then sat down on the bed. Her face looked drawn and pale, her eyes hollow.\n\n\"Uncle Vic,\" she whispered, hanging her head, the gun dangling from both hands, down between her knees.\n\nJust as she said it, Drake frowned. The cigar smoke hadn't dissipated. If anything, the odor had grown stronger.\n\n\"Wait a\u2014\" he started to say.\n\n\"Who's there?\" asked a voice from the balcony.\n\n\"Sully?\" Drake called.\n\n\"Out on the terrace, making friends,\" Sully replied.\n\nDrake and Jada both exhaled, chuckling softly at their panic and the grief that had come and gone in half a minute. She rolled her eyes at him, mocking them both, but Drake knew he had not been wrong in chiding himself. They had gotten careless. Paranoia had to be their ruling emotion if they wanted to stay alive.\n\nJada hurried to the door, putting her gun in the rear of her waistband. Drake didn't even do that, holding on to Sully's gun but keeping it out of sight as he followed her to the balcony. He stood half inside and half out. The noises of Santorini were dim and distant enough not to intrude on the breathtaking vista of the caldera and the rest of the islands that ringed it.\n\nSully stood at the balcony to the left, leaning with his back to them. On the next balcony, separated from theirs by a gap of barely a foot, a thirtysomething black woman with flawless skin and copper-penny eyes smiled as Jada and Drake emerged.\n\n\"These must be your mates,\" the woman said in a bright British accent. She held Sully's cigar in one hand and a wineglass in the other. \"Nice to meet you both.\"\n\n\"Jada and Nate, meet Gwen,\" Sully said, barely looking at them, clearly enchanted. As he half turned to make the introduction, Drake saw the wineglass in his hand. \"Gwen, say hello to Jada and Nate.\"\n\nGwen raised her nearly drained wineglass in a salute. \"Cheers.\"\n\n\"Hi,\" Jada said.\n\n\"Hello,\" Drake added.\n\nThey had come onto the balcony\u2014Drake only halfway, still hiding the gun\u2014carrying an air of urgency that Gwen must have seen. Her eyes narrowed, and she gave a small, reluctant smile.\n\n\"Looks like you have business to attend to,\" Gwen said. She puffed on the cigar, coughing a little before handing it back to Sully. \"There, I've tried it. And it sort of tastes sweet and like crap at the same time. I hope you're happy.\"\n\nSully smiled at her. \"Very.\"\n\nGwen glanced at Jada and Drake. Sully did as well, though he had an irritated smile on his face, as if wondering why they weren't going away. It was obvious he had been doing some serious flirting with the woman, and it seemed like he might have been making some progress. Now she handed him back the second wineglass.\n\n\"I'll only be a few minutes,\" Sully promised her. \"It's a sin to leave a bottle of wine this good half full.\"\n\n\"Sorry. It's getting late, and I have to meet some friends,\" Gwen said. \"Maybe tomorrow night?\"\n\nSully smiled. \"I'll be here.\"\n\n\"It's a date.\"\n\nGwen turned to go back inside, and Sully shot Drake and Jada an unforgiving look. They retreated to the suite together, and Sully closed the French doors before turning toward them.\n\n\"This better be good,\" he grumbled.\n\n\"You won't be here tomorrow night,\" Drake said. \"Well, probably not.\"\n\n\"Thanks, genius,\" Sully muttered, one eyebrow raised. \"As if I didn't know that.\"\n\n\"But you just told her\u2014\"\n\n\"Hey, a guy can hope. It's about all I can do if you two are going to barge in on me any time I've made a new friend.\"\n\nDrake lifted the gun, drawing Sully's attention to it. \"We barged in because we thought the spooky ninjas were about to cut your throat and chuck you over the cliff. Then we got here, and hello, no sign of Sully. The doors are open, and we're thinking 'intruder.'\"\n\n\"It was so hard to imagine I might be smoking a cigar and relaxing with my thoughts?\"\n\n\"We didn't see you,\" Jada said, obviously irritated with his truculence. \"Not until we smelled your stinky cigar.\"\n\nSully actually looked wounded. He brandished the smoldering cigar. \"This is a Cuban. They're harder to smuggle into the States than guns, drugs, or antiquities.\"\n\n\"Oh, well, in that case, good job, Uncle Vic,\" Jada said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.\n\n\"We were worried about you, dumbass,\" Drake said. \"Or did you miss that part?\"\n\nSully gave him a devious smile. \"No, I got that. I just like to rile you guys up. You deserve it after interrupting what could've been a beautiful\u2014Wait. Why were you so worried? Did something happen?\"\n\nDrake opened his mouth, then closed it again. He glanced at Jada.\n\n\"We're not sure.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, 'not sure.' Either something happened or it didn't.\"\n\n\"It might've,\" Jada said. \"We might've seen one of the hooded men from the labyrinth up in the village, on a roof.\"\n\n\"I guess it's pointless to ask if you noticed anything weird or saw anyone skulking around,\" Drake said. \"Your attention being otherwise occupied by the lovely Gwen.\"\n\nSully grinned. \"Smokin' hot, right?\"\n\nDrake gave a nod of appreciation. \"No argument.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Sully said, turning to Jada. \"So you maybe saw something and you maybe didn't. We'll stay vigilant\u2014\"\n\nJada shot him a dubious look.\n\n\"We'll work on our vigilance. Get better with that,\" Sully corrected. \"But since none of us has had their throat cut tonight, can we talk about something that's actually important?\"\n\n\"Like?\" Drake asked.\n\nSully stabbed his cigar out in an empty hotel water glass, then made a beeline for Drake's duffel. He dug through it and pulled out the maps and journal Luka had squirreled away for Jada to discover in Egypt. He set the maps aside and started flipping through the pages again.\n\n\"Before I went out for a smoke, I had a little wine and took a closer look at the journal.\"\n\n\"We've been through the whole thing,\" Jada said.\n\nSully found his page, stroked the paper with a finger, holding it open, and nodded to her. \"I know. But sometimes things like this don't make sense until you've gotten new information. When you look back through it, it's like you've got new glasses on, and you can see things you didn't see before.\"\n\n\"How much wine did you have?\" Drake teased.\n\n\"Two glasses,\" Sully said. \"I opened a beer, but it tastes like crap.\"\n\n\"Focus?\" Jada prodded, hands on her hips. Drake would have thought it difficult to look stern with magenta bangs, but somehow she managed.\n\n\"Right.\" Sully nodded. \"So I found a book about Akrotiri in the little library in the hotel\u2014it's out in the living room\u2014and I was reading about the excavation there. If there ever was an Atlantis, I understand why so many people believe this was it. Atlantis was supposed to be advanced, right? Well, Akrotiri was so far ahead of the rest of the world for its time, it's amazing. They only unearthed one tiny tip of the town. More of it is there, and some is underwater. But what they found\u2014we're talking multistory buildings, neighborhoods, looms to weave textiles that they exported. They had hot and cold running water. Think about that. Four thousand years ago, before anyone else, hot and cold running water. Then the volcano erupted, and it was bye-bye Akrotiri.\"\n\n\"This is all fascinating,\" Drake said, \"but\u2014\"\n\n\"Yeah, yeah,\" Sully said, frowning. \"I'm getting to it. The volcano wasn't the only thing. They had a lot of earthquakes on Thera in those days, leading up to the big blow. But the earthquakes didn't stop then. They're not as frequent, but they still happen. There was a major one here in 1956\u2014did a lot of damage to the modern village of Akrotiri, which is near the excavation but not right next door. The modern village had been built around a medieval fortress that stood at the top of a hill, but the earthquake in '56 did a ton of damage, destroyed a lot of houses, and turned the fortress into unsafe ruins. They rebuilt the houses at the bottom of the hill, but the fortress has essentially been abandoned and off-limits for more than half a century.\"\n\nSully smiled. \"All interesting, right. But a hell of a lot more interesting when you consider this.\"\n\nHe opened the journal to the page he'd marked with his finger. There were labyrinth designs and notes scribbled all over the two-page spread, so it took a moment before Drake noticed the sideways scrawl in the margins of the left-hand page.\n\n\"Quake of '56,\" Luka had written. \"Under Goulas?\"\n\n\"What the hell is 'Goulas'?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"I'm guessing the Greek name for this fortress you're talking about,\" Jada said.\n\nSully grinned. \"Smart kid.\" He beamed, almost as proud of her as he seemed of himself.\n\n\"Wow, look at that,\" Drake said. \"I didn't think Victor Sullivan had ever done homework in his life.\"\n\nSully flopped onto the bed, set the journal on his chest, and put his hands behind his head\u2014the picture of relaxation.\n\n\"I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks,\" he said.\n\n\"So we're not going to Therasia tomorrow, I take it?\" Jada asked. \"Ian seemed so sure that the reference to Therasia on that jar meant that's where the labyrinth must be. And you've gotta admit, there was logic to that.\"\n\nDrake went to the French doors and looked out at the moonlit water of the caldera. \"There still is. But it's been awhile. What's called Therasia now is not the same as what was called Therasia then. We can't know until we look, but if you think about Knossos and Crocodilopolis, the labyrinths there were not in the city or next to the temple; they were a short distance away. That fits with the location of the fortress.\"\n\n\"Which would mean the labyrinth was underground,\" Sully said. \"Built right into the hill. That would've taken a hell of a long time.\"\n\nDrake ruminated on that a minute, then glanced at Jada.\n\n\"Your father thought it was under Goulas.\"\n\nJada came up beside him, and together they stared out at the water for a moment. Then she smiled and turned to Sully.\n\n\"That's good enough for me.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "The sun had started its leisurely crawl across the sky shortly after Drake hauled himself out of bed. Now the clock on the dashboard of their taxi ticked toward nine a.m. as the Greek cabbie steered around the potholes on the road to Akrotiri village.\n\nThe first sight of the village made Drake wonder if they somehow had ended up in the wrong place, but the taxi driver explained that the tourists who made the trip out to see the ruins didn't bother to stop in the village and that that was just how the villagers liked it. The place reminded Drake of little American towns that had dried up and blown away when highways were built that took most of the traffic off the byways of earlier days.\n\nOther than the single blue dome at the center, the rest of the village that sprawled around the base of the hill looked like a scattering of child's blocks, painted white and left to fade in the sun. Rising in the middle of that ordinariness was the hill Sully had read about, and atop it the Goulas\u2014the tower\u2014and the fortress around it.\n\nAs the taxi wound its way through the narrow streets of the village, people paused to watch them pass, eyes narrowed with curiosity, some of their expressions not at all welcoming. People worked here, going about their lives with no interest in the more commercial concerns of the rest of the island. Driving through Akrotiri village, Drake felt as if they were slipping back in time.\n\nThe driver took them up the hill as far as he could manage, past the single blue-domed building, and then in toward the crumbled wall of the fortress, but there he had to leave them off. Drake paid him double his asking price and promised twice as much if he would retrieve them at five o'clock. He took the cab company's phone number along with the driver's promise and then watched the man drive off, raising a cloud of dust with his departure. He spotted several other, smaller clouds in the distance\u2014vehicles on the road, either to the village or, more likely, to the dig site.\n\n\"You think he'll come back?\" Jada asked, standing beside him and watching the shrinking dust devil that indicated the retreating cab.\n\n\"We can hope.\"\n\nThey had eight hours before the taxi driver returned\u2014if he returned. Drake figured that gave them plenty of time to explore the ruins. If the labyrinth was there and there was a way in, they would find it. And if they came up empty-handed, he could always call and try to get the taxi driver to return sooner, though he worried that they could end up with a lot of walking ahead of them.\n\nDrake unzipped his pack and took inventory, making sure he hadn't forgotten anything vital: water, fruit, and cheese from the hotel, rope, flashlight, gun. They all carried the same essential supplies, but Drake hoped they wouldn't be down there long enough to require the use of anything but the flashlights.\n\n\"Nice place,\" Sully muttered, looking up at the fortress. \"We should convert it into a bed-and-breakfast.\"\n\n\"I feel like I'm in some Greek version of Dracula,\" Jada said, gazing up at the fortress. \"We've got the remains of a castle and the little village of people who stare at you as you go by. All we're missing is a Greek Dracula.\"\n\n\"That'd be just our luck,\" Sully sighed, and started walking.\n\n\"Good thing there's no such thing as vampires,\" Jada replied, setting off after him.\n\nDrake said nothing. He slipped his backpack on and started walking.\n\n\"Wait, there aren't, right?\" he heard Jada ask.\n\n\"Not that we've ever run across,\" Sully admitted. \"And we've seen some wild stuff. Sometimes stories are just stories. Vampires are absurd, anyway. They're always better dressed than everyone else, right? But they're up all night killing people and drinking blood, and half the time they live in graves and crypts or whatever. Yeah, these are not creatures well versed in the laundry arts. Stupid. Who believes that crap?\"\n\nDrake smiled. Laundry. He could always trust Sully to find the practical angle.\n\nJada and Sully caught up with him. Sully patted his pockets in search of a cigar but apparently had left his last one behind in the hotel. He'd managed to remember his gun but not a cigar. Drake almost suggested it might be his subconscious trying to make a statement about smoking but decided not to antagonize his friend. Don't poke the bear, Sully had often said when Drake was younger. As rules went, it was a smart one.\n\nThey began by making a complete circuit of the fortress, following the perimeter and examining the places where the walls had crumbled. The medieval stone structure had begun to collapse like a sand castle in some places, eroded by entropy, but in others the walls remained standing strong. They found only a handful of places where crevices had formed in the exterior of the ruin, and none of them yielded evidence of anything beneath the structure.\n\nIn the most dangerous places, haphazard attempts had been made to block off entry. There were signs and in one place a piece of railing that looked new enough to be a recent effort, but if so the village or the island had run out of money before it could be completed. A twelve-foot stretch of metal railing with nothing on either side of it would do little to keep inquisitive visitors away. It slowed Drake and his friends not at all.\n\nAt the rear of the fortress they encountered a partially collapsed doorway. Wooden supports had been put in place to prevent more of the stone above the door from falling, and makeshift wooden doors had been put in place to block the entrance. Once upon a time, the wood might have been strong and new, but the arid weather and sea air had dried and weakened it. A chain looped through the door handles, but it took Drake three kicks to smash the doors open, one of the handles tearing right out of the wood.\n\nAnd they were in.\n\n\"Now let's see what we can find before the police show up,\" Jada suggested.\n\nSully pushed the doors closed, then dragged a couple of heavy blocks of broken masonry over to keep them from swinging inward.\n\n\"Do they even have cops here?\" he asked.\n\n\"Maybe not in the village, but on the island?\" Jada said. \"Yeah.\"\n\n\"This is as remote as you can find on Santorini,\" Drake said. \"I'm guessing there aren't a ton of cell phones. And no matter what weird looks we got on the way up here, they must see the occasional tourist checking this place out. They're more likely to think we're idiots than thieves or vandals or something.\"\n\n\"So we're relying on them thinking we're just American fools?\" Sully asked.\n\nDrake shrugged. \"Pretty much.\"\n\n\"It's probably a safe bet,\" Sully agreed after thinking about it for a second. \"But if we're out here long enough, someone will get the police to check on us or come looking themselves.\"\n\n\"Then stop talking and get to work,\" Jada said, smiling.\n\nSully snapped off a salute. \"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nFor more than an hour, they explored the courtyard and the rooms of the fortress. Some were completely shattered and full of debris, and Drake tried not to wonder what was beneath the rubble. If what they sought had been closed off by the earthquake, it would take a lot more than bare hands to uncover it.\n\nOther rooms were well preserved but empty, dust on the floor a reminder of the unsteadiness of the whole structure. The wind off the Mediterranean gusted powerfully from time to time. When it whistled over the hill and through the cracks in the walls, it seemed to make the very foundations shiver.\n\nThe second and third hours found them peering beneath fallen stairs and investigating darkened alcoves. Throughout the fortress there were cracks in the walls, and in some places the floor had given way. They treaded carefully there, warily creeping through rooms Drake wouldn't ever have dared to enter by choice. They all carried their guns, and Sully and Jada each had one of the industrial flashlights they'd stashed in their duffels before boarding the ship from Egypt. Sully's kept flickering, the battery threatening to die, but so far it worked well enough.\n\nMany of the breaks in the walls and floor opened into jagged nooks, and they examined those holes carefully, searching for any indication that there might be more open space below. In one of the less damaged corners of the fortress, Drake found a doorway with stairs leading downward.\n\n\"Jada, I need a light,\" he called.\n\nShe and Sully abandoned their searches to join him, shining their flashlight beams down into the dark of the old stone stairwell. One part of the left-hand wall had fallen in, but Drake started down, careful not to get ahead of the pool of illumination. They managed to pick their way over the debris on the stairs and found a bit of hallway at the bottom. Only a bit, however, as the corridor to the left had been entirely blocked by a rockfall from above. The ceiling had given way there, and whatever lay in that direction was closed to them.\n\nThe right-hand side held much more promise.\n\nIf the door had been made of metal, they'd never have gotten through. The earthquake had shifted and buckled the frame enough that the lintel pressed down on the door from above. The whole frame seemed off kilter, slanted to the left, and the door was tightly jammed within the new angles of the frame, squeezed from the top and sides. But the pressure had been enough to split the wood down the middle. The boards were thick planks, but they had splintered and now the two sides of the door were held together only by thin iron bands on the top and bottom.\n\n\"I'm a little worried the whole thing's going to come down on top of us if we try to break through,\" Jada said.\n\nDrake and Sully studied the doorway. Sully ran his fingers along the top of the broken door, where the ceiling pressed down onto it.\n\n\"I can't promise you it won't,\" he said.\n\nDrake scoffed. \"Come on. You think this piece of wood is holding up the thousands of tons of rock above us?\"\n\n\"No,\" Sully said, frowning as he looked at the door. \"But if it's what kept the doorway from collapsing\u2014\"\n\nHe shrugged\u2014\"Ah, screw it\"\u2014and put all his weight behind a kick that made the wood shriek and dust sift down from above. Sully kicked the door twice more in rapid succession and then winced, backing away. He massaged his knee.\n\n\"You all right, old man?\" Drake asked, smiling.\n\n\"Why don't you give it a shot, wise guy?\" Sully growled.\n\n\"I would've been happy to if you'd let me know before you started unleashing all your righteous kung-fu fury on the mean old door.\"\n\nSully sighed heavily and stood, preparing to kick the door again. Jada covered her mouth, trying not to let him see her laugh.\n\n\"All right, grumpy,\" Drake said. \"Let me give it a shot before we end up having to carry your geriatric butt out of here.\"\n\n\"My geriatric butt is still young enough to knock you unconscious,\" Sully warned. Then he stretched his leg, still trying to work the kinks out of his knee. \"But yeah. Have at it.\"\n\nDrake smiled, knowing it was a cocky grin but unable to help himself. He stared at the door, determined, and shot a hard kick at the split in the wood. It shrieked, the crack widening, but the thin iron straps were not going to give so easily. The impact on the door had shot up his leg hard enough to rattle his teeth, but he wasn't going to let Sully know that. Drake kicked again, and it might have been that the stone lintel shifted a little, or it might have been the door frame. It was hard to tell.\n\nHe glanced at Jada, wondering if she was right to be concerned. If they hadn't run out of fortress to search, he would have suggested that they keep looking, but this room was their dead end. If they found nothing beyond the door, they would have to start over. Drake would go over the various chambers and sublevels of the fortress even more carefully, and Jada would go with Sully into the village to start asking around about the earthquake and what might have been on the hill before the fortress was built.\n\n\"This is turning out to be a waste of a day,\" he said.\n\nJada had her hair back in a ponytail, and when she frowned and crossed her arms, she looked like someone's recalcitrant teenage daughter.\n\n\"Are you giving up?\" she asked.\n\n\"Nah,\" Drake said, deciding this was not the moment to suggest they call the taxi back and head somewhere for a drink. He slid the gun from the back of his waistband and handed it to her. \"Hang on to that for a second, will you?\"\n\nAs she took it, he drew a deep breath, glanced at the door, then ran at it. Even as he launched himself off the ground, he knew what a stupid idea it was. Trying to be Action Man always ended in bruised ribs and a bruised ego. His regret lasted a millisecond, and then his feet struck the crack in the door and it burst inward in a shriek of metal and wood.\n\nDrake tried to put a hand down to break his fall but still rapped his knee hard when he struck the ground. He grimaced, sucking air between his teeth, and got up slowly, massaging the same knee Sully had been nursing a minute before.\n\n\"You're no Bruce Lee,\" Sully muttered.\n\n\"I got the damn door open,\" Drake countered, dusting off his trousers.\n\n\"Do you two ever not bicker like children?\" Jada asked.\n\nDrake and Sully exchanged a look, and then both of them grinned.\n\n\"Not really,\" Sully said.\n\n\"It's always his fault,\" Drake said. \"I'm innocent.\"\n\nSully rolled his eyes. \"How is it I've let you tag along with me so many times over the years?\" he asked, stepping through the wreckage of the door, shining his flashlight around a room that had been closed up for more than half a century.\n\n\"You? I'm the one who lets you tag along. But that's going to change, trust me. Grumpy old man with stinky cigars.\"\n\n\"Enough with the cigars,\" Sully called back to them, his voice echoing off the walls of what seemed like a fairly large room.\n\n\"I agree,\" Jada whispered to Drake. \"Enough with the cigars.\"\n\n\"I heard that,\" Sully said.\n\n\"Good,\" she shot back.\n\nJada handed the gun back to Drake, who returned it to his waistband as they followed Sully through the shattered door. As they passed over the threshold, Drake looked up at the buckled frame. He said nothing to Jada, but he didn't like the look of it. The split door had been acting as a massive support beam, just as she had feared. Grit sifted down from cracks in the stone above the ruptured wooden frame. But it was only a single room and the last one open to them. If they left without examining it, they would always wonder.\n\n\"Suddenly I'm thirsty,\" Sully said, waving his flashlight around.\n\nAs Jada swept her light across the ceiling and then aimed it forward, Drake understood the joke. They were in a medieval wine cellar. Unlike the rest of the fortress, this room had been carved right out of a section of ancient stone, part of the hilltop. The curved ceiling was built of stone blocks, and arched alcoves lined the walls. Old casks were stacked in several of the alcoves, but over time the wood had dried so badly that the seals had opened and the wine had long since drained away and evaporated, leaving only stains and a dull but distinctive odor.\n\n\"Nice. How come I don't have one of these?\" Drake asked.\n\nNo one answered. Jada and Sully had both begun searching the room. He figured they were checking the alcoves for secret passages, since there was no obvious sign of cracks or breaks in the cavern floor. The fortress had been built eons after the labyrinth would have been abandoned, but if this was the location of Daedalus's third maze, it was entirely possible that whoever had built the fortress would have known about the labyrinth and constructed some kind of hidden access. And given that the wine cellar had been carved out\u2014or plugged into an existing split in the rock\u2014it made sense that if there were any kind of access, it would be through here. But with a single circuit of the room, half in darkness since he didn't have a flashlight, Drake could tell that the builder of the fortress had given this room only one purpose, and that was storing wine.\n\n\"Guys, this isn't the place,\" he said.\n\n\"Maybe not,\" Sully allowed.\n\nBut Jada kept looking, trying to haul a cask out of the way so she could shine her light behind it.\n\n\"Jada,\" Drake began.\n\n\"Hang on,\" she said.\n\nHe shoved his hands into his pockets. If she wanted him to wait, he would wait. She had more riding on solving this puzzle than he did. Drake glanced at Sully, who had started to examine the ceiling with his flashlight. There were cracks there that Drake hadn't noticed upon entering, and he didn't like the look of them at all.\n\n\"We should get out of here,\" he said.\n\nSully kept searching. In the far corner of the wine cellar, a long, jagged crack\u2014several inches across at its widest\u2014had opened in the ceiling. Drake followed the beam, walking over for a closer look. He didn't like it at all.\n\n\"Do you hear that?\" Sully asked.\n\nThey all paused to listen. Jada had given up her search behind the cask and now stood at rapt attention. At first, Drake couldn't make out any particular sound. In the cellar of the abandoned fortress, all noise seemed so far away, and he expected the keening of the wind or some muffled cry or perhaps footfalls in the hallway. Then he realized that the sound Sully had heard existed on a different level, a low groaning that seemed to come almost from inside his own skull.\n\nNo. It's not in your head. It's coming up through you. And it was. The groaning, grinding noise traveled up his legs from the floor, his bones vibrating almost imperceptibly.\n\nHe stared at his feet, anxiety rising, but then he noticed something that distracted him from his alarm. The wine casks in the alcove right behind him had long since given up their contents, and a small river of wine must have flowed across the floor, leaving a dark bloody stain on the stone when it dried up. Drake followed the zigzag course of the trickling wine stain with his gaze and realized it ended against the back wall.\n\n\"Sully, give me your flashlight,\" he said.\n\n\"Nate, we've gotta go,\" Sully said.\n\n\"Just for a second.\"\n\nSully complied, and Drake used the beam of the flashlight to follow the dry river of wine to the wall. The floor had been slightly canted at the time the casks gave way. But there was no large stain near the wall to indicate the wine had pooled there, which made no sense at all.\n\nDrake dropped to his knees, following the wine with the light, and then he saw where the wine had gone. Along the seam where wall met floor, though the wine cellar was mostly carved out of the rock, a split had occurred at the juncture of floor and wall. The spilled wine had not puddled there because it had poured into that crack and down into the hill below.\n\n\"Look at this,\" Drake said.\n\n\"Nate,\" Jada said worriedly, studying the cracks Sully had found in the ceiling.\n\n\"Just for a second,\" Drake insisted. \"The wine went somewhere. I know it could just be a fissure, that it doesn't necessarily mean Luka was right about the labyrinth being here, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course he was right,\" Jada said. \"I mean, fathers think they're right about everything, but when it came to his research, mine didn't like to guess. He would hypothesize, sure, but if we found that reference in the journal, it's safe to assume there were other clues and bits of evidence he gathered that we don't know about. Maybe there's even stuff in the journal but we just don't know how to interpret it.\"\n\nSully went rigid. A second later, Drake felt the tremor that had frightened him.\n\n\"Know what?\" Drake said. \"If there's a way down there, it isn't from this room. I vote we\u2014\"\n\nThe crack was so loud that it shut him up. The whole room began to rumble, and that was enough for Drake.\n\n\"Go!\" he shouted, shoving Jada ahead of him.\n\nDrake led the way with Sully's flashlight. Jada twisted as she ran, shining the flashlight above them, and Drake couldn't keep himself from glancing up to see the long cracks racing across the ceiling, opening wide spaces between the rows of stones that had been laid there centuries ago.\n\nThe noise grew so loud that it drowned out his thoughts, and just as he was about to shout for Sully to run faster, the roof of the wine cellar started to cave in. A piece of stone hit his shoulder, and again he shoved Jada, but harder this time. She careened into Sully, and the two of them fell through the open door, sprawling on the floor in the corridor, near the bottom of the stairs.\n\nDrake swore as he saw the wooden door frame buckling further as the weight of the ruin above them shifted and the frame began to give way.\n\nHe dived through the opening just as the frame splintered and a huge slab of rock crashed down, barely missing his legs. The three of them scrambled backward, rising unsteadily, the corridor pitching around them. The slab seemed for a moment as if it would block the wine cellar from view, but then it tilted away from them, and they watched in astonishment as it fell into a hole where the floor of the wine cellar had been.\n\nAn entire section of the fortress above collapsed into the room and crashed through the floor, smashing it open in two places, rubble sliding down to half fill the gaping openness of the broad corridor beneath them.\n\nRubble shifted, and they coughed, covering their mouths and noses until the dust had begun to settle.\n\n\"You've got to be kidding me,\" Sully murmured, shining his flashlight across the holes in the shattered floor.\n\n\"We almost died,\" Jada said, unsteady on her feet.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Drake said. \"On the other hand\u2014\"\n\nJada shone her light into the rubble and the ancient corridor below them. \"Yeah. The labyrinth of Thera.\"\n\n\"It better be,\" Sully said. \"Or we've done all this damage for nothing.\"\n\n\"All we did was open a door,\" Drake reasoned.\n\n\"Says Captain Dropkick,\" Sully rasped.\n\n\"Guys, can we just find out if this is the labyrinth, please?\" Jada asked.\n\nSully put an arm around her. \"Come on, kid. You know we entertain you. It's like going on a Mediterranean adventure with a couple of vaudeville stars.\"\n\n\"Or the bickering brothers I never had,\" Jada mused.\n\nDrake crouched at the edge of the pit that had opened where the wine cellar had been moments before. Dust still lingered, a low cloud misting above the rubble. The huge piece of masonry that had been above the door made a sort of ramp down into the more treacherous wreckage, but the fortress had ceased its trembling. The rubble shifted a little, bits of rock sliding down to find a new resting place.\n\n\"Jada, can I ask you a question?\" he said.\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nDrake turned from the rubble and arched a mischievous brow. \"Are you old enough to even know what vaudeville is?\"\n\n\"Hey. Don't knock vaudeville,\" Sully protested.\n\n\"I'm not. I'm saying you're old.\"\n\nSully sat down beside him and slid his legs over the shattered edge of the floor. \"I'm not old. I'm seasoned. And for your information, I wasn't alive in the vaudeville era. I've just seen a lot of old movies.\"\n\nDrake smiled but said nothing more. He couldn't really tease Sully about old movies because he loved them, too.\n\n\"Are we really doing this?\" Jada asked.\n\nFor a second, Drake thought she was still talking about their bickering. Then he saw that she'd come up to stand behind him and Sully and was staring down into the pit. So much of the roof had come down that in places they could see the blue Aegean sky. But Drake was much less interested in what had been opened above than he was in what had been revealed below.\n\nSully pushed off the edge of the floor.\n\n\"Damn it, Uncle Vic, be careful!\" Jada said.\n\nDrake figured all three of them were holding their breath, but the huge slab of stone did not shift as Sully slid down it. When he reached the rubble, he waited as Drake slid down after him. The stone was warm under Drake's steadying hands. At the bottom, he glanced up at Jada.\n\n\"This is really stupid,\" she said as she sat down on the shattered edge of stone that had once been the wine cellar's threshold.\n\nDrake and Sully grinned at each other.\n\n\"We've never let that stop us before,\" Drake said.\n\nJada slid the length of the slab, and Drake caught her at the bottom. The three of them exchanged weighted glances, none of them wanting to admit just how dangerous their next step would be. Under their feet was hundreds of tons of stone both from the part of the fortress that had given way and from the buckled floor of the wine cellar. But the opening at the far end of the debris called to them. There were secrets there, and that was what they'd come for. None of them would have turned back now.\n\nThey picked their way carefully across the rubble. Several times, the stone shifted under Drake's feet, and he nearly toppled over before Sully or Jada grabbed him. He did the same for them, and soon they were sliding down a slope of debris, loose stone cascading around and beneath them.\n\nDrake pitched forward and jumped the last few feet down into the ancient corridor below. As Jada and Sully followed suit, he glanced up into the ruin that once had been the wine cellar, peered through the openings above into the blue sky, and wondered how difficult it was going to be to climb back up the rock pile with it all giving way beneath them. He thought it might be like Sisyphus trying to roll his stone uphill. He figured they had four or five hours before the taxi driver returned. He hoped that would be enough time to figure a way out of the ruins.\n\n\"All set?\" Sully asked.\n\nJada took a deep breath, tested her flashlight, and shone it down the throat of the dark corridor ahead. \"Set.\"\n\nDrake would have been happier if he'd had a flashlight, too. But the ones Sully and Jada were carrying provided plenty of illumination. He had a lighter with him in case he needed to make a torch in an emergency.\n\n\"Follow the yellow brick road,\" Drake said softly, his words slipping down the corridor and coming back in a whispery echo.\n\nThe stones rustled behind them, settling further. It occurred to him that as unstable as it was, the rest of the fortress might collapse while they were underground, trapping them. He tried to push the thought away, but it lingered in the back of his head, haunting him.\n\nThe corridor led them north about a hundred paces, sloping downward the whole way, and then turned west, where it ended abruptly in a steep set of stairs. Small cups had been carved into the stone at intervals. Drake rubbed the inside of the bowl and then licked his finger. His nose wrinkled with distaste.\n\n\"Lamp oil,\" he said. \"Nothing left, but these were lights.\"\n\nAs they descended the stairs, Jada and Sully used their beams to illuminate the walls and ceiling, searching for any art or ornament and finding nothing. They had found some kind of subterranean complex built into the hill beneath the Akrotiri fortress but no indication they were in a labyrinth.\n\nThat did not come until they were deeper.\n\nThere were flowers over the door. Not actual flowers but an engraving in the stone depicting a small array of large-petaled blossoms. Sully kept his light on the engraving, and they all studied the flowers for several long seconds.\n\n\"What are they?\" Drake asked.\n\nSully grunted. \"I look like a florist?\"\n\nThey both looked at Jada.\n\n\"What?\" she said, shrugging. \"Because I'm a girl I'm supposed to know botany? I have no idea what they're supposed to be, aside from flowers.\"\n\nDrake tried to play off their presumption, ready to make some excuse, but Jada gave him a look that warned him not to try and then went through the arched doorway.\n\n\"What?\" Sully said. \"Girls like flowers.\"\n\nDrake shook his head. \"You're such a Neanderthal.\"\n\n\"And you're what, Mr. Sensitive?\"\n\n\"Come on!\" Jada snapped at them.\n\nTheir bickering was really starting to get to her, which amused Drake no end. It was also, he hoped, distracting her from her grief and from the danger they were in and from the burden of guilt they all felt for Ian Welch's abduction and possible murder. They were all on edge, aware that they had to at least accept the possibility that the hooded men who had been waiting for them in the labyrinth of Sobek might be lurking down here already.\n\n\"She loves us,\" Drake whispered to Sully.\n\nSully nodded sagely. \"How could she not?\"\n\nThe corridor jagged to the left, then to the right, and in a dozen steps they came to a junction with three possible avenues ahead.\n\n\"Looks like we're in the right place,\" Drake said.\n\nJada stared at the three doorways, shaking her head. \"This isn't going to work. We need rope\u2014something better than bread crumbs to leave a trail. Otherwise we could be down here forever. We could get so lost, we might die before we found our way out.\"\n\nDrake shook his head. \"I don't think so.\"\n\n\"How do you figure?\" Sully asked.\n\nDrake lifted his shirt and tugged a cloth packet from his waistband. He unwrapped the cloth napkin he had taken from a room service tray left in the hotel corridor to reveal Luka Hzujak's journal and maps, folded tightly and all tied together with shoelaces he'd purchased in the small store in the lobby.\n\n\"I didn't think we should leave this in the room for sneaky ninja guys or Henriksen's thugs to find if they searched it. Also, y' know, maps.\"\n\nSully frowned. \"What the hell good will those do us? None of them are for this place. No one's been here in forever.\"\n\n\"He's right,\" Jada said. \"My father was working with Maynard Cheney, studying labyrinths in general, including the design of what had already been uncovered at Crocodilopolis. His sketches in the journal refer to the maps in some places. It might not tell us every turn to take, but it could be the Rosetta Stone as far as figuring out the logic of this place.\"\n\nSully shone his light on the journal while Drake flipped pages. Jada unfolded a map and then a second, finding what she wanted.\n\n\"Here,\" she said, pointing to a junction in the labyrinth map that mirrored the one they were standing in. \"It's not the middle door. That's going to double back into one of the other two. We'd be going in a circle.\"\n\n\"If you're right,\" Sully told her.\n\nDrake flipped another page, then went back three. \"She's right,\" he said. \"Luka has half a dozen variations on this, and only one of them has the middle door being the right one.\"\n\n\"How do we know this isn't one of those instances?\" Sully asked.\n\n\"I don't have all the answers,\" Drake replied. \"And neither did Luka. If it's gotta be trial and error, then that's what it'll be.\"\n\nSully nodded. \"Okay.\" He went over to the corner of the right-hand door, where the stone seemed worn by time, and kicked at the rough edge of the frame, knocking several chunks of rock to the floor.\n\n\"Just in case,\" he said, holding up the biggest shard of stone. \"Which way?\"\n\n\"Let's try this one first,\" Jada said, shining her light into the left side tunnel.\n\nHolding the journal open in his hands, Drake followed her. Sully seemed thoughtful but said nothing as he took up the rear. Drake studied the doorway, then looked along the corridor, which seemed to turn left again just ahead. Behind him, Sully paused to scratch something into the wall just inside the doorway.\n\n\"Your initials?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"Hey, at least I didn't write 'Sully was here.'\"\n\n\"But you were tempted.\"\n\nSully shrugged. \"Of course.\"\n\nDrake started to turn, but something caught his eye. He reached out for Sully's arm and pulled him over, making him shine the flashlight beam at the wall just above the door. Something else had been inscribed there, and it wasn't Sully's initials.\n\n\"Jada!\" Drake called.\n\nShe hurried back to join them, merging her light with Sully's. In the bright splash of illumination, they could all see the small diamond shape engraved into the stone above the door.\n\n\"Do you think that means we chose right?\" Jada asked.\n\nSully stepped back out into the junction, but Drake had a glimmer of memory. In the light from Jada's flash, he scanned pages of Luka's journal again, and a smile crept across his face. He tapped the same page he'd looked at before, showing several variations on the three-choice junction. In each instance, Luka had drawn a small diamond shape on two of the possible avenues but not the third.\n\n\"Look at the map,\" Drake said quickly.\n\nJada set it on the floor and unfolded it. They huddled over it, studying it in the light.\n\n\"The middle path isn't marked,\" Sully called from the junction.\n\n\"He's drawn them here, too,\" Jada said, tapping a fingernail on the map, where her father had inscribed tiny diamond shapes in many places.\n\nDrake got up and went out to the junction with Sully. He snatched the flashlight away and went into the middle tunnel, searching the wall above the door. Then he went into the third tunnel.\n\n\"Yes!\" he shouted in triumph.\n\nSully and Jada stood in the junction watching him.\n\n\"So the diamond marks the path?\" Sully asked.\n\n\"No,\" Drake said, gesturing to the stone above the doorway. \"It's here, too. Only on the inside. No way to see it from out there.\"\n\n\"But if it's on two of them, how do you\u2014\" Sully began, and then he grinned, nodding. \"Oh, I like that. The right way is the one that isn't marked.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Drake said, glancing excitedly at Jada. \"Your father had it figured out. But we never would've realized it if we'd only run into forks in the labyrinth. If it was one or the other, the diamonds wouldn't have helped. But this has three choices, and if two are marked, that's gotta mean that the absence of a diamond is what shows the right path. Which means we were wrong. It's the middle door.\"\n\nThe three of them stared at one another, smiling in triumph.\n\nThey hurried through the middle door and had gone about twenty feet when Sully halted abruptly.\n\n\"Wait, wait,\" he said, running back to the entrance and scrawling his initials just inside the door. \"Just in case we're idiots.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Though the difference was gradual and subtle, there could be no mistaking the fact that their travels through the labyrinth were taking them deeper. Drake had the impression they were also moving farther away from the fortress. In Egypt, they had explored only a small section of a sprawling maze that might have been the size of a town. The temple at Knossos had thousands of rooms, and he suspected that they were inside a structure just as vast as that one. There were small chambers off the tunnels and corridors; some apparently were for storage, whereas others appeared to have been used for rituals. Several had frescoes on the walls that were neither Egyptian nor Greek in style but a merging of both. Those rooms surprised them, as did the presence of the flower motif they had encountered at the entrance, which was repeated in many of the small rooms.\n\nIn the tunnels, however, there were no decorations, no frescoes, nothing that might be used as a landmark for those lost in the maze. Only those side chambers might have given an intruder clues, but although their contents might be different, their design was consistent from one to the next.\n\nThey had come three times to what seemed a dead end only to discover hidden doorways, and twice they had descended secret stairways into lower levels of the labyrinth. Sometimes it felt as if they were traveling far from their origin point, and at others it seemed to Drake they were going in ever diminishing circles.\n\nThe diamonds or lack thereof had not failed them yet. Not once had they had to retrace their steps. Yet Drake had wondered if the trail without diamonds was leading them to the center of the labyrinth or to some trap for fools who thought they were clever and ended up instead broken after a fall through a shaft in the floor.\n\nThere had been dozens of shafts. After Drake had come around a corner and had to hurl himself across one, nearly tumbling into it, they were taking corners more carefully now. The air that came up from the shafts was warm enough that each of them had built up a sheen of sweat. The deeper they descended, the more the temperature increased.\n\n\"I guess this is what comes from digging into the skin of a volcanic island,\" Jada had said the first time she touched a wall and pulled her hand away, surprised at the heat.\n\nBut it didn't slow her down. If anything, it spurred her on so that half the time she was in the lead, though they didn't let her get too far ahead. There was no telling when some hidden trap might be sprung.\n\nThey worked their way through a series of narrow openings, nearly missed a turn made invisible by the placement and coloration of stone, and had to backtrack when they discovered they had entered a tunnel marked with a diamond. When they had righted themselves, they found a tunnel so low that they were forced to crouch to pass through.\n\nOnce they had reached a place where they could stand again, they found themselves at a fork where both tunnels sloped downward at steep angles, the first time they had encountered such a significant drop without stairs.\n\n\"How deep are we?\" Jada asked as she looked for the markings inside each of the doorways, shining her flashlight into the darkened passages.\n\n\"Good question,\" Sully replied, studying the walls inside the left passage. \"Look at this.\"\n\nDrake crouched to get a closer look at the engraving. Near the floor, just inside the door, was an octagon inside a circle like the ones they had found in Crocodilopolis. Just one, which made sense given that only in the worship chambers had they encountered that triple-octagon design that seemed to represent the three labyrinths designed by Daedalus. But this one was different in another way. Etched inside the octagon was the same flower design they had seen all through this labyrinth.\n\n\"What the hell is that flower?\" Drake asked, but it was a rhetorical question. None of them knew the answer.\n\n\"No diamond here,\" Sully said, shining his light on the stone above the door.\n\n\"Jada, come on,\" Drake said. \"It's this one.\"\n\nHe poked his head out and saw her standing just inside the entrance to the right-hand passage of the fork. She wore a puzzled expression.\n\n\"Hey,\" he said. \"What's up?\"\n\nJada looked at him. \"I hear water.\"\n\nDrake went to join her, Sully hurrying to catch up. He gestured for Jada to take the lead, and she did, making her way cautiously down the sloping tunnel, using her flashlight to study the floor in front of them before taking a step. The incline grew steeper until only the roughness of the surface gave them enough traction to avoid sliding down into the dark.\n\nThe noise of the surf grew louder as they descended, and Drake wondered if they possibly could have gone so far from the hill. Granted, Akrotiri village was a stone's throw from the cliffs overlooking the ocean, but how far had they gone underground? The question seemed moot as the sound of the crashing water increased.\n\n\"Anyone notice the temperature difference down here?\" Sully asked.\n\n\"I made the mistake of touching the wall,\" Jada replied.\n\nDrake tested it, placing his palm against the stone. Though it was not hot enough to burn him, the temperature had risen. When the floor began to level out, they found themselves in a small chamber whose floor was shot through with circular vents. Unlike the shafts they had seen on the upper levels of the labyrinth, these seemed natural. Steam rose from the openings.\n\n\"Kill the lights,\" Drake said.\n\nJada cast an odd glance his way, but when Sully shut his flashlight off, she complied as well. He heard her small gasp. Though dim, each of the vents gave off a reddish glow.\n\n\"We really are on top of a volcano,\" Jada said softly.\n\n\"Did you think it was an urban legend?\" Drake asked.\n\nShe clicked her flashlight back on. \"No. It's just so hard to imagine how anyone can live here, knowing that it might all be obliterated at any time.\"\n\n\"People will give up a lot for paradise,\" Sully rumbled.\n\nDrake glanced at him. \"That may be just about the smartest thing you've ever said. Seriously.\"\n\n\"Inside this grizzled exterior is a great philosopher,\" Sully advised him.\n\n\"I'll try to remember that,\" Drake replied.\n\nThey continued through the small chamber and into a series of short zags and switchbacks, the water growing louder. Only a minute or so later, their flashlight beams were swallowed by vast gray nothing. Sully grabbed Drake's arm as Jada came to a startled halt. They swept the lights back and found the precipice half a dozen feet ahead. Part of the labyrinth had collapsed, opening up a cavern thirty feet above them and at least sixty feet wide. Stone blocks and what looked like the remnants of walls painted with frescoes were amid the rubble strewn far below, picked out by the flashlight beams as Sully and Jada investigated.\n\nThey were in a sea cave, but no light came from outside. Perhaps at low tide there might have been an opening, but the entrance to the cave was submerged. The water crashed on the rocks not in waves but in a churning ebb and flow that reminded Drake of breathing, in and out, filling and emptying. If this had been the path to the center of the labyrinth and the worship chambers, they would have been out of luck.\n\n\"The earthquake must have shaken this wing of the labyrinth apart,\" Jada said.\n\n\"Some earthquake,\" Sully said. \"I'm sure there've been a hell of a lot of them since the island blew up in the first place.\"\n\nFor several seconds, they just stared at the sea cave and the salt water washing over the rubble far below the precipice. Drake thought he could make out some of the details on the shattered frescoes down there. There were images of flowers yet again, but another caught his eye: a veiled woman kneeling before a horned figure, offering a chalice. He would not have been able to make out the image if not for the fact that he'd seen one quite like it in the labyrinth of Sobek. Then the water washed over it, falling against the debris, and he reminded himself that whatever they were supposed to find, it would await them at the heart of the labyrinth.\n\n\"Come on,\" he said. \"We're wasting time. Don't want to miss our taxi.\"\n\nSully took point as they retraced their steps. After the small cave with its steaming volcanic vents, the three of them had to make their way up the steep tunnel. Bent into the effort, sometimes using their hands to steady themselves on the severe incline, they climbed back toward the fork in the maze.\n\n\"Damn, I need to cut back on the Oreos,\" Drake muttered as he hiked after Sully. The heat of the labyrinth had begun to affect him more, and he wished they had brought more water.\n\nThey ascended for several seconds in silence before Jada chuckled.\n\n\"Wow,\" she said. \"Uncle Vic doesn't even have the energy to be snarky.\"\n\n\"I'm taking the high road,\" Sully rasped tiredly.\n\nDrake chose not to comment. Either they both were taking the high road or they both were too busy clambering up through the steep tunnel to bicker. As they reached the fork, where the labyrinth leveled out again, Sully sighed in relief. But as Drake looked up, seeing Sully illuminated by the golden glow of the flashlight, which threw strange shadows all around the labyrinth corridor ahead, he saw a figure dart from the right and strike Sully across the head.\n\nSully cried out in pain and went to his knees, clutching his skull where he'd been struck.\n\nTyr Henriksen stood over him, brandishing a blue-black pistol with cruel confidence. He stepped back so that Sully couldn't lash out at him but kept his gun aimed at Sully's head.\n\n\"I know you're armed,\" Henriksen said. \"But I've got kind of a head start, and bullets travel fast.\"\n\nDrake took the warning, keeping his hands where Henriksen could see them as he emerged from the steep tunnel. He could vaguely hear the sound of water behind him, but that sea cave seemed distant and beautiful now, like some forgotten grotto.\n\n\"Leave him alone, you son of a bitch,\" Jada said, pushing past Drake and hurrying toward Sully. She knelt by him protectively, and Henriksen did nothing to stop her, though he kept the gun on them both.\n\nOthers began to emerge into the split corridor. From the other sloping tunnel in the fork came two gunmen, one short but powerfully built and the other the kind of dead-eyed, buzz-cut mercenary whose very aura suggested a military career gone wrong. Three others appeared from the tunnel Drake, Jada, and Sully had used to get this far. By their complexion and the curiosity in their eyes, Drake decided they must be local talent: homegrown Greek thugs. One had long since gone gray, and his skin was taut and weathered so that it looked almost like tree bark. The other two looked enough like him to be his sons. They were also armed. Counting Henriksen, that made six guns against three, but Henriksen and his goons had theirs drawn already, which made the odds moot.\n\n\"You followed us,\" Drake said.\n\n\"Of course,\" Henriksen said, giving a small shrug, blue eyes shining in the illumination from the flashlights. Several of the thugs carried them, and the corridor was lit up brightly now.\n\n\"You had a chance to talk to Welch before our mysterious hooded men snatched him away,\" he went on. \"And we knew you had Luka's notes. The Russo woman was helpful at the Temple of Sobek, but she had to bring in others to interpret the writing there, and we couldn't wait for her and track you at the same time. It was a gamble, but we put all of our faith in you.\"\n\nHis smile made Drake's hands ball into fists.\n\n\"I'm glad we could help,\" Sully said, voice dripping with sarcasm. \"You want to point that thing somewhere else?\"\n\nHenriksen glanced down at his gun as if he'd forgotten it was there. \"This? Not just yet.\" He gestured with the barrel. \"What I'd like is for the three of you to take out your own weapons and set them on the floor, then back away slowly. We wouldn't want anyone to get shot.\"\n\nDrake frowned. Something in the man's tone surprised him. It almost sounded as if Henriksen meant it. Quickly glancing around, Drake noticed the easy stance of the other men. They might be thugs and even\u2014particularly in the case of the one with the buzz cut and the stumpy musclehead\u2014killers, but they didn't look ready to kill. Not at this moment. Certainly, if Drake went for his gun, that would change, but these guys seemed way too relaxed for men who had tracked down prey.\n\nFor the first time, he wondered if they had somehow gotten it all wrong.\n\n\"Guns,\" Henriksen repeated, because none of them had moved.\n\nAs Jada reached delicately for hers, Drake stopped her, a hand on her arm. Every one of the gunmen shifted to aim at him.\n\n\"I don't think so,\" he said, studying Henriksen's face. \"If you're going to kill us all the same, you might as well get it over with.\"\n\nHenriksen arched an eyebrow. \"You're an enigmatic man, Mr. Drake. Most people don't volunteer to be shot.\"\n\n\"I've been shot before. I'm still alive. Not that I really like the idea. The food on this island is amazing, and I had my heart set on the lamb special tonight.\"\n\nWith a grim smile, Henriksen nodded. \"That does sound enticing. And truth be told, I have difficulty with the idea of murder. You've all been so useful in helping me reach my goals. I wonder, perhaps, if you could be trusted to continue that usefulness under a more formal arrangement.\"\n\n\"I'd rather die,\" Jada said, and this time when she reached for her gun, it was not to surrender.\n\nDrake grappled with her for a second, stripping the pistol from her hand.\n\n\"Whoa, whoa,\" Sully said, standing up to fill the space between Jada and the gunmen, putting himself between his goddaughter and death. Then he glanced at Drake. \"What's your play here, Nate?\"\n\n\"I'm working on it,\" Drake replied.\n\n\"Are you kidding me?\" Jada shouted. \"There's nothing to work on. This son of a bitch murdered my father.\"\n\nHenriksen looked affronted. \"I did no such thing.\"\n\n\"Then you paid to have it done,\" Sully said.\n\nThe gunmen shuffled aside to make room as another figure emerged from the darkness of the left-hand fork. Olivia looked lovely as ever, her hair golden in the electric light. She gazed at Jada with something resembling true sadness.\n\n\"He's telling the truth,\" Olivia said.\n\n\"Where the hell were you hiding?\" Sully asked.\n\n\"It's a little crowded in here,\" she said, and then dropped her gaze. \"I don't like any of this. Guns and tight places. This isn't a life I ever dreamed for myself.\"\n\n\"You've been in on this from the start,\" Jada said. \"Admit it! You show up at our restaurant in Egypt playing damsel in distress. The grieving widow\u2014\"\n\n\"I am grieving!\" Olivia shouted, tears springing to her eyes. She wiped at them. \"I loved your father. He had his suspicions about this research, and he withdrew from the project. He might've ruined everything, and I know how it looks. But I can promise you, Tyr had nothing to do with his death and neither did I. Who does that? The way he was\u2014mutilated \u2026\"\n\nHer voice trailed off. Her shoulders shook as she tried to contain her grief, and Henriksen put a comforting arm around her.\n\n\"You told us you thought Henriksen had killed him,\" Sully said.\n\n\"I would not do such a thing,\" Henriksen said. \"And if I had, why would I have done such a grisly job of it and then left him out in public in a way that would cause such an uproar?\"\n\nDrake hated to say it, but someone had to. \"It's a fair point.\"\n\nJada looked at him as if he'd betrayed her.\n\nBut Sully nodded. \"Nate's right. I'm not convinced Henriksen would've let his secret project fall apart, but when you're trying to keep a lid on things, you don't draw that kind of attention. Whoever murdered Luka, they were trying to send a message.\"\n\n\"I think we know the message,\" Drake said. \"We got it in the parking lot outside the restaurant back in Egypt.\"\n\nJada looked at him, eyes alight with reluctant understanding. \" 'Go home.'\"\n\n\"In New York, we caught a glimpse of the man who killed Maynard Cheney. The guy who cut the video feed before doing the deed. Did he look like any of these goons to you?\" Drake asked.\n\nThe goons in question stiffened, some of them intelligent enough to be insulted, but Henriksen gestured for them not to react, watching Jada. Drake studied him, knowing that nobody would have the patience to stand and listen to this if he intended to commit triple homicide.\n\nJada pointed a shaking finger at her stepmother. \"You told us you were afraid of Henriksen! That you thought he'd killed Dad!\"\n\nOlivia seemed ashamed, glancing away.\n\n\"My suggestion,\" Henriksen confessed. \"We wanted to know what you know. We wanted Luka's journal.\"\n\nDrake stared at him. He doubted the man had chased them down with murder in mind, but he had a hard time buying the level of innocence Henriksen was attempting to cloak himself in.\n\n\"So now what?\" he said. \"We're here. You're here. Maybe the answers you're looking for are here. Maybe you can figure out the location of the fourth labyrinth\u2014if Daedalus even designed one\u2014and find the treasure you're after.\"\n\nHenriksen frowned. \"Treasure?\" Then he blinked, smiling, and his eyes lit up. \"It would be nice.\"\n\nDrake shook his head. Something was off. He just couldn't put his finger on it.\n\n\"Say you find it,\" Sully put in. \"What happens then? You try to hurt Jada and I will kill you.\"\n\n\"I don't doubt it,\" Henriksen said. \"And you have my word. We have no intention of killing any of you.\"\n\nSully glanced at Drake and Jada. \"Strangely, I don't feel comforted.\"\n\nNeither did Drake. There were pieces that didn't fit. The hooded men might have murdered Luka and Cheney. They might even have set Luka's apartment on fire. But the van full of guys with guns who tried to kill all three of them at the site of that fire in New York? That wasn't the spooky ninja dudes' style\u2014not at all.\n\nDrake glanced at Jada, then at Sully, and he had a feeling they were putting it together as well. Maybe not specifics, but he figured they had their suspicions. None of them was in a frame of mind to join forces with a guy who had sent a hit squad after them, not to mention the thugs who'd tried to abduct Jada in Egypt. All along they had wanted the journal and whatever information Drake and Sully had helped Jada gather. Whether Henriksen had ordered Luka murdered and hacked apart didn't really matter in the end.\n\n\"I'm glad to hear you say that,\" Drake told Henriksen. He smiled at Olivia, making sure to put as much of a chill in his expression as possible. \"Thing is, we're not interested in partnering up. We're doing this for Luka. And whatever we find at the end of the rainbow, it's not going to end up in your pocket.\"\n\nFor a long moment, Drake thought Henriksen would change his mind about killing them. The man stiffened, his smile frozen into a mask that barely hid his fury. But then Olivia touched his arm, stroking his bicep before gripping his wrist. The thugs all sensed their boss's tension, and the promise of violence seemed to wake something in their eyes.\n\n\"Tyr,\" she said.\n\nHenriksen exhaled. Relaxed. The thugs seemed disappointed.\n\n\"If this ends in bloodshed, it won't be because I didn't attempt another way,\" he said to Jada. Then he focused on Drake and Sully. \"You've been doing such a good job of making your way through the labyrinth so far,\" he said, nodding once at Sully. \"Thank you, Mr. Sullivan, for so clearly marking the way with your initials. We might've gotten lost if not for you.\"\n\n\"Bite me,\" Sully growled.\n\nAny trace of amusement in Henriksen's face faded away. \"As I said, you've done well thus far. I'm inclined to let you continue.\"\n\nWith the barrel of his gun he gestured them toward the left-hand fork, where the floor sloped steeply away, just as it had on the right. The gunmen moved out of the way to let them by. Olivia studied Jada as if hoping for some kind of acknowledgment, but Jada wouldn't even look at her.\n\n\"Lead on,\" Henriksen said.\n\nGrimly, Drake and Sully exchanged a look, both well aware that moving forward was their only choice and only hope. Sully shone his flashlight down into the sharply sloped tunnel, and they began to descend.\n\nA gunshot split the air like the crack of a bullwhip. Drake turned in a crouch and drew his gun, pushing in front of Jada and Sully. Shouts came from the split in the corridor behind them. Flashlight beams crisscrossed, blinding him for a moment, throwing shadows that separated a moment later to reveal a scuffle that sent echoes bouncing off the walls.\n\nHe saw Henriksen struggling with a black-clad hooded figure. The big blond man slammed the hooded killer against the wall and tore a long curved blade from his hands. A flashlight beam illuminated Henriksen's back, and Drake saw the blood spreading from a knife wound there. Now the big man returned the favor, driving the blade into the hooded man's gut.\n\n\"I wondered when those sons of bitches would show up,\" Sully rumbled. He gripped his pistol and moved to pass Drake, headed toward the fighting.\n\n\"No, don't,\" Jada said, grabbing his arm. \"This is our chance.\"\n\n\"Chance for what?\" Sully said. \"To see who wins the right to kill us?\"\n\nMore gunshots rang out. Men shouted in pain and grunted with the effort of their struggle. One of the Greeks lay on the floor of the corridor, throat cut, bleeding out onto the stone. Drake tried to make out how many of the hooded men were there and wondered if Henriksen had any other thugs waiting outside. Had the hooded men followed them as well, or had they already known the labyrinth was here?\n\n\"No!\" Olivia screamed.\n\nFor a second, they could hear only her voice. Then she appeared ahead, framed in the mouth of the tunnel, running toward them down the steep slope with a flashlight in her hand. The light blinded Drake for a second, but when he blinked and his vision returned, he saw one of the hooded men rushing after her.\n\nDrake raised his gun, aiming right for the tip of Olivia's nose. \"Down!\"\n\nShe saw the gun, glimpsed his determination, and dropped to the ground just as he fired. The bullet took the hooded man in the chest, stopping him cold. He fell across her legs, both of them skidding down the steep tunnel floor, and Olivia screamed again as she extricated herself from the dead man's burdensome weight.\n\n\"Who the hell are these guys?\" Sully growled, shaking free of Jada.\n\nHe climbed the sharp incline and knelt to tear the hood away from the corpse, shining his light on the face he had revealed. The dead man's eyes were already glazed and empty, staring forever into the void. His features were distinctively Asian, his eyes dark and almond-shaped. Whoever he was, he wasn't Greek and he wasn't Egyptian. Chinese or Tibetan, Drake thought.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Olivia said, grabbing hold of Sully and rising shakily.\n\nThe fighting went on back in the corridor before the fork. Another gunshot boomed and the scuffling and cursing and grunting continued, but with the flashlight beams darting around, it was impossible to make out much detail. Shapes and shadows fought, and the copper stink of blood filled the air, along with the acrid odor of cordite from the guns.\n\nOlivia grabbed Jada by the arms, unmindful of the gun in the younger woman's hand.\n\n\"Do something,\" she said, her pristine beauty tarnished by desperation. \"If they kill Tyr and his men, we're next!\"\n\nJada shoved her with such force that Olivia slammed into the wall, skull thunking against stone.\n\n\"There's no 'we,' Olivia,\" Jada snapped. \"You and me\u2014there's no we.\"\n\nDrake didn't take the time to tell Jada that Olivia had a point, and he suspected she wouldn't have listened if he had. But there was no doubt that they were in trouble. If Henriksen survived, he might stab them in the back at some point, but if the choice was that or death for him and his friends in the next ninety seconds or so, he'd take a knife in the back somewhere down the line.\n\n\"Sully,\" Drake said.\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\nThey started past the dead man, bent low to keep from toppling backward, and climbed back toward the split in the corridor. Drake caught a glimpse of the man he'd thought of as Buzzcut staggering past the doorway ahead, the hilt of a blade jutting from his back. One of the hooded men followed, intent on finishing the job he'd begun.\n\n\"Hey!\" Sully shouted.\n\nThe killer turned.\n\n\"This is for Luka,\" Sully said, and shot the hooded man three times.\n\n\"Overkill, maybe?\" Drake suggested. \"We don't know how many bullets we're going to need.\"\n\nThey reached the door, sliding their backs along the walls opposite each other, guns raised. Drake studied Sully's face, wondering how many times the two of them had been stuck like this, trapped somewhere they might be imprisoned just for entering, with merciless killers between them and the exit. But he didn't bother to count. Once was once too often.\n\n\"On three,\" Drake said. \"One. Two\u2014\"\n\nOlivia screamed again, even more frantic than before.\n\nDrake and Sully turned to see Olivia scrambling up the sheer stone, climbing over the dead man, eyes wide with terror. Jada had her back to them, her flashlight aimed farther down the severe drop-off of the tunnel. More hooded men were coming up from deeper within the labyrinth, scrabbling up the stone slope like spiders.\n\n\"Damn it!\" Sully shouted.\n\nJada shot one of them, tried to turn and flee up the steep incline, but slipped and fell onto her side on the stone floor of the corridor. The hooded men swept toward her. In the glow of Sully's flashlight, Drake made out four of them, not counting the one Jada had just shot. They had swarmed over their wounded comrade as if he weren't there.\n\n\"I thought they followed us in, like Henriksen,\" Drake said.\n\n\"They flanked us,\" Sully muttered.\n\nDrake had wondered before if the hooded men knew about this labyrinth, if they were as knowledgeable about its secrets and hidden chambers as they had been about the one in Egypt, and now he had his answer.\n\nOlivia kept screaming, and Drake wished she would shut up. He took aim and was about to pull the trigger, but then Sully blocked his shot. Drake shouted at him to get out of the way, but with Jada in danger, Sully wasn't going to be able to be reasoned with. Drake realized he didn't want to risk trying to shoot the killers unless he was right up close.\n\nWith a roar that managed to be warning and battle cry and profanity all in one, Sully hurtled down the sheer slope with his gun and flashlight both held out in front of him. One of the hooded men reached Jada, grabbed her leg, and brandished the curved blade they all seemed to carry. Sully shot him in the head, but Drake knew the shot was pure luck. At that angle and speed, careening out of control, Sully's next move was no longer his choice to make.\n\n\"Sully, no!\" Drake shouted.\n\nThe words echoed off the walls as Sully lost his footing, moving too fast, yet managed to lunge at the three remaining killers, passing right over Jada. He crashed into them, knocking two of them backward, and they all fell sprawling and rolling down the tunnel into the darkness, Sully's flashlight shattering and winking out.\n\nThe scuffling from that darkness chilled Drake's blood.\n\n\"Son of a\u2014\" he began.\n\nJada cried out for her godfather. Drake slid and skidded down the tunnel toward her, stepping over the man he'd shot and calling out for Sully, hearing only the whisper of movement below. Jada stood, recovering her flashlight and shining it down into the dark, and they both saw the figures twisted around one another. The three hooded men struggled with Sully, one of them clamping a hand over his mouth. His eyes were wide and gleaming in the beam from Jada's light, and Drake wanted to look away, sure that any second a curved blade would slice Sully's throat.\n\n\"Down here!\" Olivia shouted behind them. \"There are more of them down here!\"\n\n\"Drake!\" a low voice called.\n\nHe didn't turn. The voice belonged to Henriksen, and he put together what it meant. The man was wounded but alive, and if he and Olivia and others\u2014given the footfalls Drake could hear\u2014were starting down the sloped fork, it meant they had won back there at the split in the corridor.\n\n\"Let him go!\" Drake roared at the hooded men.\n\nThey did not, but neither did they cut Sully's throat. Instead, they dragged him deeper into the tunnel, scrambling back into the darkness.\n\n\"Crap!\" Drake barked. It was just like Welch. They had lost the fight and were retreating, but they were taking Sully with them.\n\nDrake spun as Henriksen came down the slope toward him. The wounded man had lost his gun but still held a flashlight.\n\n\"Give me that,\" Drake demanded.\n\n\"He's as good as dead,\" Henriksen snapped.\n\n\"No,\" Jada said. \"They took him! They didn't kill him!\"\n\nDrake snatched the light from Henriksen. \"I'm going after him.\"\n\nHe started down into the forgotten heart of the labyrinth, and when he sensed Jada behind him, heard her footsteps, and saw her flashlight beam merging with his to illuminate the darkness below, he didn't argue. With her father dead, Sully was the closest thing either one of them had to a father. They would save him together or not at all."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Drake stood in total darkness, his forehead pressed against hot stone, trying to contain the urge to scream. He could hear the rustle and click of Jada going through her pack nearby, putting a fresh set of batteries into her flashlight. She spoke in a low voice, but he barely heard the words. Was she trying to comfort him or herself? He couldn't be sure. Probably both.\n\nHow much time had passed since the hooded men had dragged Sully away? An hour and a half? Two?\n\nAt first it had felt as if Drake and Jada were giving chase, and he had believed they could catch up with the murderous bastards. He had reminded himself that if they'd wanted Sully dead, they could have killed him right there in the tunnel, and they hadn't done it. But still the image of Sully struggling with the hooded men as they hauled him into the shadows haunted Drake. Would it be the last time he would see his friend and mentor alive? After a time, he forced himself not to think about it, focusing entirely on the pursuit.\n\nBut soon the chase gave way to something more closely resembling a search. They had followed the twists of the labyrinth, ignoring blind alleys thanks to the diamond markings that indicated the proper path. They stopped from time to time to listen for the sounds of scuffling or any hint that the killers were up ahead. Sully would call out, Drake had told himself. But the only scuffling they heard was the sound of their own shoes on the stone floor, and the loudest sound was the pounding of Drake's heart inside his chest.\n\nAfter fifteen minutes, Drake had begun to fear that they had been wrong in assuming the hooded men would have taken the marked route toward the center of the maze, and they had backtracked to search the side tunnels and blind alleys. With no trace of the killers and no shout from Sully, they'd had no choice. Some of the tunnels led to dead ends, though in a couple of places Drake thought there might be some mechanism that would lead them to a secret chamber. Other avenues ended in a collapsed section of the maze, and twice they came to places where the labyrinth had given way and the underground caverns had opened up enough that the sea had made its way into the subterranean world. Turgid water ebbed back and forth.\n\nThose sunken rooms were full of water, but Drake saw a glimpse of the split at the top of a cave entrance in one, and he thought the tide must be going out.\n\nThere had been more shafts as well, and Drake had rounded a corner too fast and plunged into one, barely catching himself on the edge. He had managed to haul himself up, bathed in the heat and glow coming from the volcanic vents down below, but the flashlight he had taken from Henriksen had been lost\u2014sacrificed to the volcano.\n\nEventually they had given up on dead ends. They had begun searching not for a secret passage where the killers might have taken Sully but for the center of the labyrinth. Drake thought they might try sacrificing him to Poseidon or whoever else this temple had been dedicated to, and if that were to happen, it would be in the worship chamber.\n\nAnd now they had found it.\n\n\"Damn it,\" Jada muttered.\n\nDrake heard a soft thunk and realized she had dropped one of the batteries. He froze, thinking they were going to be trapped down there in the dark and wondering how they would ever find their way out, and then the light snapped on, so bright that he had to shield his eyes.\n\n\"Sorry,\" she said, moving the beam from his face.\n\n\"I thought you'd dropped a battery.\"\n\n\"I did. One of the dead ones.\"\n\nDrake only nodded. Neither of them smiled. They had lost the heart for the banter that had kept them going for the past few days and allowed her to focus on something besides her father's murder. Now neither of them could think of anything but Sully meeting the same fate, a head and torso in a steamer trunk left on a train platform somewhere.\n\nJada looked tired and pale. They still had water and food in their packs, but Drake wasn't hungry. It was all he could do to stop himself from shaking with fury, though he knew the rage only masked his fear for Sully and the sadness he felt in his bones. More than once before he had been convinced Sully had died, only to discover otherwise, and they had been in dozens of tight scrapes. He liked to tell himself this was because Sully was a tough son of a bitch, but he knew there had been just as much luck involved as toughness or determination.\n\nThey had to get him back.\n\n\"Come on,\" he said. \"We're not going to find them just waiting around.\"\n\nJada shone the light around the worship chamber. The flash had flickered out while they were descending the three steps down into the room, and she had stumbled and fallen to her knees. It was only sheer luck that she hadn't broken the flashlight. They were going to have to be more careful; their only flashlight might be more important to their survival than the water bottles they carried.\n\nAs the light swept across the walls and the octagonal altar and found the antechamber where the Mistress of the Labyrinth would have prepared for the rituals that took place there, Drake knew there could be no doubt that Daedalus had designed this chamber as well as its Egyptian counterpart, but there were no hieroglyphics here. Jada's light illuminated frescoes painted on the altar depicting the Mistress of the Labyrinth receiving honey from kneeling worshippers, along with images of Minotaurs, but the writing on the walls was the same ancient dialect that had been on the jar Ian Welch had found in the Atlantean chamber in Egypt. Some variation on Greek. If Welch had been there, he could have read it.\n\n\"It's exactly like the one in Egypt,\" Jada said.\n\n\"Let's hope so,\" Drake replied, striding directly into the anteroom. The details of this chamber didn't interest him. All he cared about were the true worship chambers below, the ones dedicated to each of the gods of the three labyrinths: Dionysus, Sobek, and Poseidon. If this labyrinth truly had the same design, there would be stone doors in those chambers that led into secret recesses, and he would find a way to get them open somehow.\n\nIn the glow of Jada's light, he went straight to the corner where he expected to find the false stone block that would trigger the altar to slide back. Yet the stones along the bottom of the wall did not move when he tried to push them, and when Jada came closer with the light, they saw no symbol engraved there. The chill that had clutched at Drake's heart for the last two hours turned to ice. Had they reached their last dead end?\n\n\"Look around?\" he said.\n\nBut Jada didn't need his urging. She had begun to search the anteroom for the octagon with a circle symbol that had indicated the trigger in the labyrinth of Sobek. There were symbols everywhere that he could only imagine must be some Atlantean arcanum. Shelves held painted jars, just as in Egypt, and a side shelf had a shaft built into it, hot air wafting up from below.\n\n\"Here!\" Jada said.\n\nHe turned to see her pushing a spot on the wall between two shelves, and they both heard the grinding of stone as hidden weights and balances shifted. Wiping sweat from his brow, he rushed from the anteroom and saw that the altar had moved several inches. The mechanism that locked it in place had released, and Drake ran to it and threw his weight against it. It slid back easily so that even as Jada joined him, the huge stone octagon rolled away to reveal the stairs beneath. No skeleton awaited them this time, and Drake started down.\n\nHe'd reached only the third step when he heard Jada gasp.\n\n\"Nate, look at this.\"\n\n\"Jada, come on,\" he urged, looking up to see her shining the flashlight on the top of the altar.\n\nHer eyes were wide with surprise. Reluctantly, he went back to the top of the steps and stood beside her. The moment he saw the symbol engraved on the top of the altar, he understood her reaction. In the Temple of Sobek, they had found a pattern of three octagons within circles, all interlinked.\n\nHere there were four.\n\nDrake looked up at Jada. A sheen of sweat made her face almost luminescent in the glow from the flashlight. It brought home to him how truly hot it had become inside the labyrinth and reminded him of the danger they were in. Volcanic vents, collapsed corridors, caverns where the sea had flooded in, and killers who would not hesitate to cut their throats or drag them off through secret passages to some unknown fate.\n\nBut they had found what they had been looking for all along.\n\n\"There really is a fourth labyrinth,\" Drake said.\n\nJada's lower lip quivered a moment, and he could only imagine the emotions flooding through her.\n\n\"I knew there had to be,\" she said. \"My father knew.\"\n\nAt the mention of her father, Drake felt the ice in him melt in the renewed heat of his anger and his fear for Sully.\n\n\"Come on,\" he said, leading her to the stairs.\n\nThey descended together, Jada guiding their steps with her flashlight. At the bottom, they hustled along the corridor. Drake kept an eye out for open doorways but was certain that the only ones that mattered would be the ones that led into what he now knew would be four worship chambers at the end of the hall.\n\nTheir footfalls echoed off the walls. Drake felt his hands clenching into fists. A thousand images of Sully strobed through his mind, memories of the man laughing at one of his own jokes, smoking his cigars, or looking up in triumph from some discovery, face covered in grime but eyes alight with childlike excitement. Sully had been like a kid on Christmas morning every time they found something the rest of the world had told them would never be found or didn't exist at all. He often behaved as though the money was all he cared for, but Drake knew him better than anyone alive. Sully appreciated all kinds of treasure.\n\nWhere are you, old man? Drake thought.\n\nBut the only way to answer that question was to figure out who the hooded men were. Who were they working for? They had murdered Luka and Maynard Cheney and many others since to keep the location of the fourth labyrinth secret. That seemed clear. Drake had believed Henriksen's denials\u2014about those killings, at least. But the hooded men had taken Welch and now Sully. In both instances, the abductions had occurred only when the killers had realized they were about to be defeated. They had retreated to fight another day, apparently, and taken prisoners.\n\nThough it did not slow him, he had the terrible feeling that the chambers ahead of them were empty and that even if they were able to find a way to open those recessed doors at the back of the chambers, the passages beyond also would echo with the stillness of the ages.\n\nThey heard the shush of water even before they reached the turn in the corridor. Dread curled tightly in Drake's gut.\n\n\"Nate\u2014\" Jada began.\n\n\"No!\" he said, sprinting the last twenty feet, almost outpacing the flashlight beam.\n\nHe rounded the corner, slowing before he would have entered the darkness ahead. He could feel the vastness, the emptiness of the cavern ahead and heard the ripple and wash of water, and then Jada appeared behind him and the scene illuminated by her flashlight surprised him. To the right, the labyrinth had collapsed. All that remained of whatever worship chambers had been there had fallen into a massive rift that had opened in the rock. Only the upper arch of a doorway was still visible to indicate that anything had ever been there.\n\nBut to the left, two worship chambers remained.\n\nDrake ran to the nearest door and darted inside, taking care on the three steps to the chamber floor.\n\n\"Jada, the light!\" he called, though she was right behind him.\n\nShe flashed the beam around the room, dispersing ancient shadows, and Drake realized he had been holding his breath. Now he swore. The writing on the walls was in Greek, the engravings of grapes immediately signifying Dionysus to him. He glanced at the massive slab of a door at the back of the chamber, tempted to test it, but instead he spun toward Jada.\n\n\"Let's check the other one.\"\n\nThe symbol on the altar upstairs had included four octagons inside four circles. That had to mean four labyrinths and one chamber down here dedicated to the primary gods of each. Two of those chambers had caved in and been eroded by seawater for more than half a century. The clues they needed might be lost forever.\n\nOutside the last worship chamber, Drake hesitated a moment. As Jada entered, descending the three entry stairs, the shadows closed around him. He put a hand on the hot stone wall and watched her. For a moment, he thought he heard a rustle of whispers back in the corridor, but it might have been the undulating sea washing against the ruins down in the collapsed cavern.\n\nThen he saw Jada turn toward him, a look of wonder on her face, and the only thoughts in his mind were of Sully. They had found it.\n\nHe ran down the three steps and joined Jada. Side by side they examined the walls of the worship chamber. The style of the painting on the walls was entirely different from anything they'd seen thus far, and he recognized the Far East influence instantly. The Minotaurs were there, but the most frequently repeated image was that of the flower that they had seen upon entering the labyrinth this morning. All around the images, on columns in the chamber, and on the octagonal altar at the center of the room were ancient Chinese characters.\n\n\"The fourth labyrinth\u2014\" Jada began.\n\n\"Is in China,\" Drake finished.\n\nThey looked at each other and swore, sharing a chorus of profanity.\n\nDrake followed Jada's light as it traveled across the walls, and what he saw disturbed him profoundly. There were images of men being hung from wooden braces and skinned alive, being burned, and having long spikes hammered into their bodies. They were horrifying, all the more so for the paintings of the same flowers and other plants and tree branches decorating the hideous imagery.\n\n\"I don't think I want to know what god they worshipped in the fourth labyrinth,\" Jada whispered.\n\n\"Swing the light over here,\" he said, going to the door at the back of the chamber.\n\nFor long minutes they searched for a trigger, but to no avail. The walls were hotter here than anywhere else they had been in this subterranean maze, and he wondered what kinds of vents might wait on the other side. His shirt, damp with sweat, stuck to his back and shoulders.\n\nWhen Jada paused to take a drink of water from her pack, she looked as if she felt guilty, and when she passed the bottle to Drake, he felt the same way. But it was no use. Even if they found a way to trigger the door open, they weren't going to find Sully.\n\nA scuffing noise at the entrance to the chamber made them both spin, Drake reaching for his gun. Flashlight beams blinded them momentarily.\n\n\"Don't shoot, Mr. Drake,\" a deep, accented voice said.\n\nHenriksen.\n\nAs the bright lights moved away from his face, Drake kept his gun aimed at the figure in the doorway while his eyes adjusted. Henriksen's blood-soaked shirt had been torn open and the knife wound on his shoulder bound to stop the bleeding. The man looked pale, but his eyes were alert and glittering with a zealot's joy. He descended the three steps into the room, smiling as he gazed around, totally unmindful of the gun in Drake's hand.\n\nHenriksen's short, powerfully built sidekick followed him into the room, followed by the gray-haired Greek and then Olivia, who still managed to look beautiful despite her unruly hair and the sheen of sweat on her. Her features had a hard, flinty edge and her eyes had gone cold, but the moment she spotted Jada, she softened and seemed to wake from the haze of heat and fear that had entranced them all.\n\nThe old Greek's surviving son stayed just outside the door, guarding the entrance with a gun in his hand and grief for his dead brother burning in his eyes. He wanted more of the hooded men to come. Drake had seen that look in the eyes of anguished men before. His loss hurt so much that he wanted to kill until it didn't hurt anymore or die and end it completely. It was probably for the best that he remained in the hall. With that kind of rage, he could not be counted on to remember who his enemies were.\n\n\"China,\" Henriksen said, shaking his head. \"I never would have guessed it.\"\n\n\"They let you live?\" Jada asked, staring at Olivia. Her meaning was clear; she wished the hooded men had done a more thorough job.\n\nOlivia flinched, and the innocence with which she had approached Jada all along fractured, letting a flicker of dark intelligence and hatred show through. Then the mask was in place again, but Drake had seen the cold, calculating face of the real Olivia for a moment, and now he was even more on guard. He still had his gun out, and the old Greek and the short sidekick were both also armed, their weapons aimed casually at the ground. The promise of bullets made the hot air in the chamber go still.\n\n\"We fought them off,\" Olivia said softly. \"Nico lost a son. Tyr lost one of his best men.\"\n\nDrake figured she must be referring to Buzzcut, and Nico was the old Greek.\n\n\"We lost someone, too,\" Drake said.\n\nThat made Henriksen look up, his blue eyes somehow even paler in the glow of the flashlights. \"Sullivan may still be alive. If they were going to kill him, why not just do it? Why bother abducting him? He only slowed them down.\"\n\nDrake had had the same thought, but he didn't want to agree with anything Henriksen said. He nodded slowly, narrowing his eyes.\n\n\"So what now?\" Drake asked. \"These guys have a history of coming back in greater numbers. We drove them off this time, but they obviously would rather see us all dead than let us make it to the fourth labyrinth.\"\n\nTyr Henriksen smiled, revealing sharp little teeth. Despite his handsome features, in that moment he looked more like a shark than a man.\n\n\"I'm a businessman, Mr. Drake, and I've been successful at it. That means I'm used to there being people out there in the world who would like to see me dead.\"\n\nDrake hesitated. His heartbeat pulsed in his temples, and his breath came in short, angry inhalations. The gun in his hand seemed to thrum with an urgency all its own, pleading to do its brutal work. Henriksen hadn't killed Luka or Cheney and he hadn't taken Sully or Welch, but someone had burned Luka's apartment and sent gunmen after Jada in New York. The hooded men didn't seem overly fond of guns, and it was clear Henriksen didn't have a problem with killing when necessary. But where did all that leave them?\n\nHenriksen watched him closely now, his instant fascination with the Chinese worship chamber set aside for a moment. The so-called businessman must have been able to see the indecision\u2014the temptation toward violence\u2014in Drake's eyes, because he took a step forward, closing the space between them.\n\nHe waved at his men, and they holstered their weapons. \"Mr. Drake,\" he said. \"You can put the gun away now. The danger has passed.\"\n\n\"Has it?\" Jada asked, never taking her eyes off her stepmother.\n\nOlivia ignored her, taking out a camera and beginning to photograph the writing and the paintings that decorated the worship chamber. Nico used his flashlight to help dispel the shadows so that she could get the clearest shots. There were shelves of jars there as well, and the short man began to lift them one at a time for her to photograph.\n\nHenriksen looked meaningfully at Drake. \"These men, whoever they are, clearly do not want to squander their lives. In a conflict where they don't see the possibility of achieving their goals, they withdraw and await another opportunity. They are gone, Mr. Drake. They have given up on the idea of preventing us from learning what we can about the fourth labyrinth from this chamber. If they had more men with them, we would all be dead. Instead, they have taken your friend Sullivan. Why they took him and didn't kill him, I don't know, but for the moment let's assume he's alive. You have two choices.\n\n\"You and Jada can continue to be obstinate and hostile, working to find the fourth labyrinth on your own\u2014as finding the killers who strive to protect its secrets is your only hope of locating Sullivan\u2014or you can accept that we are all seeking the same answers. If our motivations differ, isn't that a debate that can be postponed to another day?\"\n\nDrake glanced at Jada and then took a sideways shuffling step so that he was beside her. From the outset they had been convinced that Tyr Henriksen was their enemy, and even now they couldn't be sure he was not. When Luka Hzujak had discovered Henriksen's plans for the fourth labyrinth, he had quit working with Phoenix Innovations and tried to beat Henriksen to the punch. Henriksen wanted the treasure of the labyrinth for his purposes, and to make sure he could claim it, he intended to keep secret the historical revelations involved in his discovery. Jada would never let that happen, and Henriksen had to know that.\n\nBut the selfish, entitled bastard was right. It was an argument that could wait. The only thing that really mattered at the moment was finding Sully.\n\nDrake lowered his gun. After a moment, he slipped it back into his waistband and nodded toward Henriksen.\n\n\"We'll settle our differences later.\"\n\nHenriksen smiled. \"I look forward to it. But for now\u2014\" He turned toward Jada's stepmother. \"Olivia, what can you tell us?\"\n\nOlivia paused in her photography. \"Not a lot yet. The writing is ancient Chinese, but we'll need to transmit these pictures to Yablonski for translation. No idea what the flower motif is meant to represent, but it's all through here, an addition to the same repetitive imagery we've seen in the other chambers.\"\n\nDrake frowned and glanced at Jada. If she seemed surprised that her stepmother was the expert on Henriksen's team, she didn't show it.\n\n\"Any idea what god this chamber is dedicated to?\" Drake asked. \"The paintings over by the door look like something out of Dante's Inferno.\"\n\nOlivia stared at him. Drake thought about the way she had come into the restaurant in Egypt the other night, pretending to be the damsel in distress from some film noir. Olivia might not be as evil as Jada had made her out to be\u2014she hadn't murdered her own husband, at least\u2014but that didn't mean she wasn't a manipulative bitch and a hell of an actress.\n\nNow though, Olivia seemed to deflate a little, and most of the remaining tension in the chamber dissipated. They were all there together, hundreds of feet underground, sweating from the heat of volcanic vents, and they shared a goal. If they were going to work together, now was the time.\n\n\"I'm not as familiar with ancient Chinese mythology as I'd like to be, and as I said, I can't read this. So I'm not sure of the name of the god.\"\n\n\"But?\" Jada asked.\n\nOlivia took another photograph, then grabbed Nico's wrist to aim his flashlight at the hideous paintings Drake had seen before of men and women being flayed and tortured. They were arrayed in a curling, descending pattern, the torment growing gradually more horrific and explicit toward the bottom of the wall.\n\n\"In Chinese mythology dating back to the twelfth century B.C., after death, tainted souls were taken to a subterranean hell called Diyu, where they were punished until they had atoned for their sins. According to the legend of Diyu, they existed in a cycle of torment, enduring gruesome torture until they died, only to have their bodies restored so the punishment could start again.\"\n\n\"I didn't even know the Chinese believed in hell,\" Jada said.\n\nOlivia shook her head. \"It's not the Christian hell. Diyu was said to exist underground and be composed of many levels, each with its own ruler. But above them all was a kind of king.\" She snapped another picture. \"I wish I could remember his name, because I'm guessing he's the god this chamber is meant to worship.\"\n\nHenriksen had been studying the paintings on the walls more closely while she talked, but now he turned.\n\n\"Don't worry about that. Yablonski will figure out what all of this means,\" he said. \"Let's just get it all photographed and take our leave. The police have been well paid to stay away, but I would rather not be discovered in the presence of men who have been murdered.\"\n\nDrake saw Nico flinch at that, but the old Greek kept his grief to himself.\n\n\"We'll bring our own people out, of course,\" Henriksen continued. \"And see to it that they're properly buried.\"\n\nJada sneered at him. \"How noble of you.\"\n\nOlivia snapped one last photograph of a jar the short man held, then gestured for him to return it to the shelf. She turned to regard the rest of them.\n\n\"There's something else,\" she said.\n\nDrake didn't like the smugness of her tone. \"Just spill already.\"\n\nOlivia traced her finger over one of the most repulsive paintings of the Chinese hell.\n\n\"I told you that Diyu was believed to be underground,\" she said, a thin smile forming on her lips as she glanced at Henriksen. \"According to the myths, it was also a maze.\"\n\n\"You're not saying you think this place actually existed?\" Drake asked, the idea of such tortures in the real world making him sick.\n\n\"Some real-life version?\" Olivia replied. \"I think we have to conclude that it did. Look at all of the evidence around you. What does it say, Mr. Drake?\"\n\nJada pushed her hair from her face and wiped sweat from her eyes. \"It tells us that Diyu was the fourth labyrinth.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Olivia replied.\n\n\"Hell?\" Drake said, turning to Henriksen. \"We're saying hell is the fourth labyrinth?\"\n\n\"Hell or something like it,\" Henriksen replied. \"And when Crocodilopolis was abandoned and the volcano destroyed Thera, where do you think Daedalus and his followers brought all of their accumulated wealth? What better place to hide it than an underground maze where the people believed they were already dead? It's insane, but what other conclusion can we draw?\"\n\nSpeechless, Drake had no reply. He turned it over and over in his head, examining it from every angle, and he couldn't deny that it felt like there were at least shards of truth to the theory, as crazy as it sounded. The frescoes on the wall said as much.\n\n\"How did my father know?\" Jada asked, her gaze locked on her stepmother.\n\nOlivia managed to look sad at the mention of her late husband, but Drake knew that might well be just part of the mask she wore.\n\n\"In researching the historical origins of the myths connected to the labyrinths, he developed the theory that King Minos of Crete and Midas were the same man\u2014\"\n\n\"We got that much,\" Drake interrupted. \"But the archaeologist at the labyrinth of Sobek thinks it wasn't Midas who was the alchemist. It was Daedalus.\"\n\nOlivia narrowed her gaze, smirking. \"Aren't you clever.\"\n\nJada scoffed. \"No such thing as alchemy.\"\n\nHenriksen leaned against the wall, wincing at the pain from his wound. \"Then where did all that gold come from?\"\n\n\"Not from magic,\" Jada said. \"Or even some pseudo-science. You can't make gold.\"\n\n\"Maybe not,\" Olivia replied. \"Probably not. Your father believed that Daedalus must have been some kind of charlatan, but he kept an open mind because he had no other explanation. And the more he researched Daedalus and alchemy, the more he began to see other connections that defied explanation. There were stories of the ancient alchemist Ostanes\u2014\"\n\n\"The Persian,\" Drake said. \"Sure, there were similarities in his background. Same with St. Germain and half a dozen others. They were all alchemists. Half of what they did was about creating the illusion that they had abilities they didn't have to give them that mysterious, mystical aura. They all claimed to be immortal. Fulcanelli even claimed he was St. Germain.\"\n\n\"What if he was?\" Olivia asked.\n\n\"Seriously?\" Drake scoffed. \"You are an entire jar of nuts.\"\n\nHenriksen started to speak up, but he hadn't gotten half a word out when there came a boom and rumble from far above them and the whole chamber began to shake. A jagged crack raced across the ceiling. Dust and debris rained down, and a jar fell to shatter on the floor.\n\nOlivia screamed and pressed herself against the wall as Drake grabbed Jada and ran toward the doorway. Nico's son looked around in fear and surprise but did nothing to stop them as they joined him in the corridor. They froze there, unsure what to do. The rumbling continued, a grinding roar from far off but loud enough that the muffled noise reached them despite how far they had come into the subterranean maze.\n\nOlivia staggered toward Henriksen, and he put a protective arm around her.\n\n\"Is it the volcano?\" Olivia shouted, looking at Nico.\n\nThe old Greek did not move. He seemed resigned to whatever fate held in store for him. His eyes were narrowed as he tried to make sense of the noise from above.\n\nThen the rumbling subsided and the last bits of grit rained down from the ceiling. Whatever had happened, it was over as abruptly as it had begun.\n\n\"If it was the volcano, we'd be dead already,\" the short, stocky thug muttered. \"It's the fortress.\"\n\nHenriksen flashed him a dark look. \"Corelli?\"\n\nThe stocky man\u2014Corelli\u2014looked at him, dark certainty in his eyes. \"Explosives, Mr. Henriksen. The assholes brought the whole place down on top of us. We're not going anywhere.\"\n\n\"Oh, my God,\" Olivia whispered. Her gaze turned haunted. \"I can't die down here.\" She looked around at the walls as if they were about to start closing in.\n\nDrake frowned, shaking his head. No way. He couldn't even let himself wrap his mind around it. The hooded men had used explosives to destroy the rest of the fortress ruins, trapping them down here? They used daggers. They were killers from another era, all about stealth and secrecy. Explosives?\n\nBut there was no other answer. It wasn't as if Henriksen would have trapped himself down here voluntarily.\n\n\"What do we do?\" Nico's son said, his Greek accent think and frantic. He stared not at Drake or Henriksen but at his father. \"What are we going to do?\"\n\n\"There are other ways out,\" Jada said, turning to Henriksen. \"Those hooded men\u2014they got out with my godfather, and they didn't go back the way we came in.\"\n\nHenriksen trembled, gaze shifting around the room. Drake thought others, watching him, might have thought he shook in fear, but he understood that the man was filled with anger at having been trapped like this\u2014at having his will thwarted. At length, Henriksen aimed his flashlight at the huge stone slab of the door to the secret passage at the rear of the chamber.\n\n\"We figure out how to open that door.\"\n\n\"And what if we can't figure it out in time?\" Olivia demanded.\n\n\"There's another way,\" Drake said. As they all turned to him, he pointed at Olivia. \"Please tell me that camera is waterproof.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "Drake raced out of the Chinese worship chamber ahead of them. A crack had appeared in the wall of the corridor outside and chunks of stone had broken off the support pillars in the hall, but he knew that would be nothing compared with the damage they would encounter if they attempted to retrace their steps. They had only one chance of getting out of the labyrinth quickly\u2014perhaps at all.\n\nThere had been four worship chambers in Daedalus's original design for this junction in the secret heart of this labyrinth. Two of them had been destroyed, collapsing into the cavern formed by the earthquake of 1954. Now even more of the stone floor had calved off into the large cavern. The others followed Drake with their flashlights as he led them to the sheer ledge. Below, the sea churned in and out like a watery bellows.\n\n\"You can't be serious,\" Corelli said. \"And you thought Olivia was nuts?\"\n\nHenriksen shot him a dark look. \"Shut your mouth, idiot. We could all die down here.\"\n\n\"Yeah. I'd like to avoid that,\" Drake said.\n\nJada stood on the verge of the chasm. Drake took her arm and pulled her back a foot or two. Part of that ledge had given way already. After the explosion, cracks might have formed to make it even more unstable.\n\nShe did not try to pull her arm away but glanced up at him.\n\n\"How far do you think we'd have to swim underwater?\"\n\nNico and his son were back in the entrance to the Chinese worship chamber, whispering quietly to each other. Corelli shook his head, scratching the back of his skull in doubt. But Henriksen's eyes were lit with anticipation. Drake had to hand it to him; the man was motivated.\n\n\"There's no way to tell,\" Drake said.\n\n\"I don't know how long I can hold my breath,\" Olivia said, walking up to the edge and looking down into the roiling water.\n\n\"Look, the tide is low,\" Drake said. \"It could still be going out; I don't know. But we're not going to get a better shot than this for another twenty-four hours.\"\n\nJada, Olivia, and Corelli all looked dubious. But Drake noticed the Greeks watching him and thought he saw interest and encouragement in their gazes. They were locals, and they looked as though they thought he might not be entirely crazy, after all.\n\n\"The camera,\" Drake said, looking at Olivia. \"I asked you before, is it waterproof?\"\n\nOlivia nodded. \"Supposedly.\"\n\n\"And there's a waterproof pouch in my pack,\" Henriksen said, gesturing to the backpack Corelli carried. With his wound, Henriksen apparently had given up the burden. \"We can double up protection.\"\n\n\"And if the camera's ruined?\" Olivia complained. \"What then?\"\n\n\"Then we come back,\" Henriksen said sharply. \"Or I do, with or without you.\"\n\n\"We could try through those stone doors,\" Corelli argued. \"There's gotta be a way to trigger them open.\"\n\n\"If there were any easy way, we'd have found it in the Temple of Sobek,\" Henriksen argued. He looked at Drake and nodded. \"We go.\"\n\nDrake shook his head. \"No. I go.\" He made his way to the edge and sat down, taking off his boots and then stripping his khakis off. He balled up the trousers and stowed them in his pack, hesitated, and then decided to put the boots back on. The climb down would be jagged, and even underwater he'd hesitate to be barefoot. Despite their weight, he decided he was better with the boots than without them, although he knew he looked ridiculous in his boxer briefs and boots.\n\nHe swung his legs over the edge of the broken floor, then turned back to Henriksen. \"You're filthy rich, right?\"\n\nHenriksen nodded gravely. \"Yes. Yes, I am.\"\n\nOf course, Drake thought. The guy wants treasure. The rich want to get richer.\n\n\"You're a man who wants the best of everything. Who spares no expense?\"\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\nDrake smiled. \"Good for you. Give me your flashlight. If you're that particular, I'm guessing it's waterproof.\"\n\nHenriksen walked over and handed his flashlight to Drake. His boot shifted and a piece of the cliff broke off, but he scrambled backward in time.\n\nDrake turned to Jada. \"I'm going to see if there's a way through. It may not be far to the outside, or if it is, there may be air pockets along the way, even open caverns. I figure no more than half an hour. If I'm not back, you'll have to move to plan B.\"\n\n\"What's plan B?\" Corelli asked.\n\n\"Anything but dying,\" Drake replied.\n\nHe checked that his pack was tightly zipped and then turned around and slipped over the edge of the shattered floor. There were handholds, but halfway down a chunk of stone broke off under his fingers, and he slid the last ten feet, turning as he fell. He turned his ankle on the debris below as he landed in the churning water at the edge of the cavern, and he bit his lip to keep from crying out.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" Jada yelled, her voice throwing haunted house echoes all across the cavern.\n\nDrake tested his ankle and found it only a little sore. He shone his flashlight upward to find the entire group, including the Greeks, staring down at him.\n\n\"I'm good,\" he said with a wave. \"I'll be back.\"\n\nHe told himself that they wouldn't hurt Jada, that if they had any intention of doing so, they would have done it already. And then he dived into the water, surfacing a moment later. The flashlight beam illuminated a patch of the water, unaffected by being submerged, and he felt a sliver of relief. He shifted over to the left side of the cavern, where he could scrabble along the wall and his boots would not drag him down.\n\nDrake kept his head above water all the way to the other side of the cavern. He kept his breathing steady, calming his heart, and then he ran out of room. The tide had lowered the water level in the cavern, but it wasn't low enough that he wouldn't have to swim underwater to find an exit.\n\nHe took a deep breath and went under, stepping away from the wall and letting his boots drag him down. With the flashlight out in front of him, he kicked forward, swimming as best he could despite the light in his hand and the weight of his clothes and boots. He blinked his eyes against the sting of the salt water, and only then did he realize how hot the water was. It came from the sea, pushing in and dragging back out again, but the volcanic vents underwater heated it while it churned in these caves.\n\nAs long as he didn't boil or drown, he figured he'd be fine.\n\nKicking off the walls and bottom of the crevasse he had entered, Drake waved the flashlight left and right. Cave fish, unused to the light, darted away from the beam. He saw silver eels rippling in the ebb and flow of the current that tugged him along. For once, fortune was with him. The tide was still going out. He only hoped it did not turn before he went back to get the others.\n\nWhat are you thinking? Just hope you make it back to them.\n\nHe could almost hear Sully's gruff voice in his head, telling him to focus. His anger returned full force, and he had to tamp it down to stay calm and hold his breath.\n\nAhead, the dark water seemed to lighten, and he let himself hope. Clicking off the flashlight for a moment, he confirmed the glow, but as he swam toward it, he saw the gloomy luminescence came not from daylight but from cracks in the floor of the cave. As he swam over the pair of volcanic vents, he could feel the heat from below, and again he wondered how the people of Santorini could knowingly make their lives on the rim of an active volcano.\n\nHis lungs began to burn. Clicking the light back on, he kept swimming even as he began to realize that he would have no choice but to turn around. Searching upward with his free hand, he hoped to find an air pocket where he could get a sip of oxygen, but there was no space between water and stone.\n\nDrake cursed the weight of his boots, wishing he had risked taking them off. They had slowed him, and now they felt heavier than ever. He wondered if they would be the death of him, if he would be able to make it back even if he turned around now. Though his thoughts had turned sluggish, he tried to figure out how far he had come, how far the cavern with the ruined worship chambers might be from the outside, but he knew it was foolish even to wonder. Any guess would be nothing more than that.\n\nThe pressure built in his head, and he felt his chest constricting with the need for air, and suddenly he understood that he'd come too far, that turning back was no longer an option. Forward was his only chance.\n\nEven as the thought struck him, he saw light ahead yet again. It might have been more vents, but this time, when he clicked off his flashlight, he realized the glow luring him forward came not from below but above. Desperate for air, he swam another ten feet, then fifteen, and finally twenty-five, and then he could stand it no longer.\n\nChest burning, mind screaming, he kicked for the surface and emerged with a wheezing gasp into a much narrower cavern, perhaps as little as eight or nine feet in width. The afternoon sunlight that streamed in came from a crevice another twenty yards ahead, but beyond it, he could see a sliver of deep blue sky.\n\nA grin split his face.\n\nAnd then he realized he had to swim back and let Jada and the others know and then lead them through the underwater passage. His lungs hurt just from thinking about it. But they would be out, and that meant the real search could start. He would find Sully, and together they would expose the secrets of the hooded men to the world so that the murderous bastards couldn't get their hands on anyone else. He thought about the paintings in the Chinese worship chamber, the hellish images of torment in Diyu, and he felt more determined than ever.\n\nDrake clung to the wall, catching his breath for the swim back.\n\nThis time he would take off his boots.\n\nHe couldn't help but wonder if, when they finally got back up to Akrotiri village, the taxi driver would be waiting."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Turbulence jostled Drake from an unsettling dream. He had been standing in the rain at Sully's funeral, the only person without a black umbrella. Among the sea of faces he could see through the veil of dream and rain were many of the less savory characters he and Sully had encountered over the years. Thieves and cutthroats, smugglers and corrupt politicians\u2014all of them had gathered to pay their respects. Jada stood by the grave, her magenta bangs now dyed a bloody crimson, and the priest who stood at the head of the gathering, one hand on the coffin, was Luka Hzujak.\n\nThe priest had looked at him, dry beneath his huge black umbrella.\n\n\"When you lie down with snakes, you've gotta learn to hiss,\" the priestly Luka had said, his voice like a whisper in Drake's ear. \"But that doesn't mean you have to slither.\"\n\nHe had laughed then, and the entire gathering of mourners had laughed with him, their voices the shush of rain pattering on umbrellas. Drake, soaked to the skin, had not found it funny. Sully had used that line about snakes with him ten years earlier, the morning they had paid a ship's captain in Valparaiso to carry them and their cargo home to the States. The man had had a huge cache of drugs on board, also headed for the USA, and Drake had needed to be persuaded not to throw them overboard. Sully had reminded him that if they didn't want the captain to interfere in their business, they couldn't interfere with his.\n\nWhen he woke from the dream, he found Tyr Henriksen watching him.\n\nDrake sat up, groggily reaching for his gun.\n\nHenriksen nodded. \"It's all right, Mr. Drake. Your weapon is still there and still loaded.\"\n\nDrake's hand closed on the butt of the gun, but he didn't take it out of his waistband. The guttural drone of the engine made him blink, and only as he glanced around did he remember that they were on an airplane chartered by Henriksen for the journey from Greece to China. Out the oval window beyond Henriksen the sky was dark. He wasn't sure how long they had been flying or how long he'd been sleeping, but it was still night.\n\nThe plane Henriksen had chartered was of a sort he rarely had been inside: a private jet with seating for twelve in the center and a cabin for business in the rear, complete with a narrow conference table. Henriksen, Olivia, and Corelli had been in the back when Drake had fallen asleep, and it disconcerted him to wake with the man studying him as if he were some kind of exotic pet.\n\n\"You slept soundly,\" Henriksen said. \"You snore.\"\n\n\"Back off, pal. You're freaking me out.\"\n\nFeeling something sticky on his chin, Drake wiped his mouth and realized he had been so deeply asleep that he had been drooling a little. Henriksen had had the good grace not to mention it.\n\n\"I guess I was more tired than I thought,\" Drake said.\n\nHenriksen leaned back in his seat. \"We all were. I dozed for several hours myself. Jada is still sleeping.\"\n\nDrake craned his neck to look back along the aisle and saw her stretched out in her wide, fully reclined seat, a blanket over her. She looked peaceful, and Drake felt happy for her. Peace had been hard for Jada to come by of late. Only sleep offered any respite from her grief and the fears and tensions of recent days. Olivia and Corelli were nowhere to be seen, which he assumed meant they were still in the rear cabin. Whether they had gotten any sleep, he didn't know. Not that he had a lot of concern for their well-being.\n\n\"How much longer?\" Drake asked, sitting up straight.\n\nHe had fallen asleep so quickly that he hadn't even taken the trouble to recline his seat completely, and now his back ached from slouching in the chair for so long.\n\n\"We have several hours yet,\" Henriksen replied.\n\nWhen he shifted in the seat, he winced, and Drake realized that the knife wound was bothering him badly. Corelli had stitched him up, and it seemed their first aid kit had included some serious painkillers, but if Henriksen had taken anything, Drake hadn't seen him do it.\n\nAfter escaping from the labyrinth beneath the Goulas in Akrotiri village, they all had spent a little time recovering and letting their clothes drip-dry on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff not far from the village. Getting topside had been a time-consuming process. Drake had hoped the taxi that had dropped him and Jada off in the morning would be there waiting, but night had fallen by the time they returned to the village, and he and Jada had reluctantly accepted a ride back to their hotel from Henriksen. They had ridden in relative silence, all the suspicion and ill will poisoning the air in the limousine.\n\nDrake and Jada had returned to the suite, entering with guns drawn, just in case the hooded men were waiting. Not that Drake had believed they would be. All they seemed to want was for everyone to stop searching for the fourth labyrinth, and now that they realized Henriksen and Jada were both on the verge of locating it, Drake figured they would retreat and just wait. He wondered how many killers would be waiting for them when they got to China.\n\nThey had showered and put on clean clothes, then packed up what little they had. Without a word, Jada had put all of Sully's things in his duffel, including the sweater he'd bought when they had shopped the night before. Neither one of them was willing even to consider the possibility that he wouldn't have need of the contents of that duffel again.\n\nA door clicked open at the rear of the passenger cabin. Drake turned and saw Corelli poke his head through.\n\n\"Mr. Henriksen,\" the short man said. \"Olivia has something you're going to want to hear.\"\n\nDrake frowned, turning to Henriksen, who popped up from his seat with the exuberance of a child.\n\n\"Well?\" he said, turning to Drake. \"Are you coming?\"\n\n\"What is it?\" Drake asked, still not completely awake. The echoes of his dream had lingered like cobwebs in his mind.\n\n\"I'm going to guess it's a translation of all the ancient Chinese back in that chamber,\" Henriksen said. \"Or don't you want to know if my people have figured out the location of the fourth labyrinth?\"\n\nDrake stretched and started to rise. \"I'm coming.\"\n\nHenriksen went on without him, hurrying excitedly to the back of the plane and slipping through the door to the rear cabin. As Drake watched him go, a voice from his dream came back to him.\n\nYou've gotta learn to hiss, but that doesn't mean you have to slither.\n\nHe crouched to shake Jada awake. When he saw that she had been drooling as well, he smiled and used the edge of his shirt cuff to wipe her mouth.\n\n\"Wake up, sleeping beauty.\"\n\nShe blinked and then sat up quickly, pulling away from him in a tangle of blanket, eyes wide. For a second she seemed almost not to recognize him, and then she relaxed, remembering where she was and how she had gotten there.\n\n\"Bad dreams?\" he asked.\n\n\"No. Good ones,\" she replied, but she didn't elaborate. Jada glanced around. \"And now I wake up to the nightmare.\"\n\nDrake nodded, giving her a moment to come more fully awake. Then he hooked his thumb toward the rear of the plane.\n\n\"Henriksen just went into the back. I guess Olivia's got something new.\"\n\nAt the mention of her stepmother's name, Jada's eyes darkened. She didn't bother using the control to put her seat upright, just shoved the blanket aside and joined Drake in the aisle. She ran her fingers through her sleep-mussed hair and nodded to him, then led the way to the door to the rear cabin.\n\nJada didn't knock, just opened the door and stepped through.\n\nOlivia and Corelli were seated at the narrow conference table and glanced up from the laptop open in front of them when Jada and Drake entered the cabin. Henriksen had expected them and did not bother to turn away; he stood over the nearer end of the table, studying one of the maps Luka had left with his journal for Jada to find. Drake knew the sight must have given Jada pause\u2014her father had hidden his research to keep it out of Henriksen's hands, and now she had handed the journal and maps over to the man who'd been his rival. It had been the right choice at the time, the only choice\u2014they had more dangerous enemies to be wary of\u2014but Drake could tell the decision didn't sit right with Jada at all.\n\nDrake had no doubt they would come to regret it. The only question was when that moment would arrive and whether they would be ready for it.\n\n\"What've you got?\" Jada asked, staring at her stepmother. Henriksen might be Olivia's boss, but when the two women were in the same room, the bitterness and tension existed for the two of them alone.\n\nOlivia smiled thinly. Either she had wearied of her stepdaughter's hatred and suspicion or she had decided it was time to stop pretending she gave a crap what Jada thought. Whatever happened now, it was all business. They shared certain goals\u2014all of them\u2014and for the moment that was enough to keep them cooperating.\n\n\"Quite a lot, actually,\" Olivia said. \"Why don't you have a seat.\"\n\nDrake waited for a cue from Jada, wondering if she might refuse to sit. But she hesitated for only a moment before sliding into one of the remaining chairs around the table. Drake sat next to her, glancing for a moment at the large screen at the rear of the cabin, which flickered with blank light. The monitor was on but displayed nothing at the moment.\n\n\"Are we gonna have a slide show?\" he asked. \"Fair warning, I tend to fall asleep. Unless it's the one on fire safety. I like the sirens. And the Dalmatian.\"\n\nHenriksen shot him a disapproving glance, and Corelli scoffed like a man about to start a fight in a bar. The women ignored them all. Jada stared impatiently at Olivia, who tapped a couple of keys on the laptop. The plane's engine whined loudly enough that they had to raise their voices slightly to be heard, and the pungent smell of urine and industrial cleanser came from the bathroom. Drake figured no amount of money could build an airplane without those two elements, but wealthy people liked to pretend they didn't notice them. The thought crystallized a feeling he'd had in the back of his mind all day: Henriksen was a brat, just a spoiled rich kid grown up into a spoiled rich man. He wanted the secrets and treasures of the fourth labyrinth because he liked to own things that nobody else could have.\n\n\"Phoenix Innovations employs a man named Emil Yablonski,\" Olivia said. \"Yablonski is the most brilliant man I've ever met, but he's almost incapable of functioning socially. He's a historian and archaeologist, but he hadn't done fieldwork in more than twenty years. He doesn't mind e-mail or even the phone, but he doesn't like talking to people in person. He'd rather you be in the next room than in his office.\"\n\nHenriksen waved a hand to indicate she should move along. He slipped into a chair, though still studying the map unfolded in front of him.\n\n\"They don't care about Yablonski,\" Henriksen said. \"The guy works for me, and I don't care, either.\" He shot a look at Jada. \"Part of my company is a think tank. Yablonski has his own division. Now we move on.\"\n\nOlivia smiled at her employer, but there were sharp edges to her expression and it was clear she didn't like being spoken to so brusquely. Drake couldn't muster much sympathy.\n\n\"Yablonski is practically paralyzed with geek joy over the information he's getting from these translations,\" Olivia said. \"His exact words were, 'This changes everything.' Frankly, I think that's a rash overstatement. The ancient Chinese writing on the walls and on the ceremonial jars clarifies certain things, confirms others, and gives us some vital clues as to our next step.\n\n\"We start with Daedalus. With the writings from the three chambers in the labyrinth of Sobek for comparison, Yablonski has confirmed that Daedalus designed the first three\u2014Knossos, Crocodilopolis, and Thera\u2014though if you want to refer to the Thera structure as the labyrinth of Atlantis, it would make Yablonski very happy.\"\n\n\"He really thinks Atlantis was there?\" Drake asked.\n\nOlivia shot him a withering look, cold and beautiful. \"Atlantis is a myth, Mr. Drake. The labyrinth of Poseidon on Thera is the seed from which the roots of that myth grew.\"\n\n\"Are you saying Daedalus didn't design the fourth labyrinth?\" Jada asked.\n\nOlivia arched an eyebrow. \"Someone was listening. Let me back up, though. The temple at Knossos was built around 1700 B.C., the same era in which the Egyptians built Crocodile City. But what's become clear here is that these cities were already under way or already built by the time the labyrinths were constructed. We're putting our best guess at around 1550 B.C. Knossos came first. Daedalus tried to impress Minos\u2014or Midas\u2014in order to win his approval so that he could marry Ariadne. But one entire wall of the Chinese worship chamber on Thera is given over to telling the story, and it's clear that Daedalus only met Ariadne when he went to the king with his plans to build the labyrinth.\"\n\nHenriksen grunted. \"The labyrinth came first.\"\n\nOlivia nodded. \"It did.\"\n\n\"So what was Daedalus? The traveling inventor?\" Drake asked. \"He just wandered around the ancient world saying, 'Hey, want me to build you something cool?'\"\n\n\"He was an alchemist, of course,\" Olivia said, her smile genuine for once.\n\n\"That's crap,\" Jada snorted.\n\nCorelli hit a key on the laptop, and an image appeared on the monitor screen on the rear wall of the cabin, showing several paintings and a lot of ancient Chinese characters.\n\n\"The people who wrote this disagree,\" Corelli said.\n\nDrake stared at him. \"Relax, junior. The grown-ups are talking.\"\n\nCorelli froze, his features practically turning to stone. For a moment, Drake thought he might lunge across the table or pull a weapon, but then Olivia put a firm hand on his arm and he relaxed, forcing a smile.\n\n\"Go on, then. Why don't you tell me what it says?\" Corelli said.\n\nDrake shrugged. \"It's all chicken scratches to me,\" he said, looking back at Olivia. \"But I know a little bit about alchemists. You can't make gold.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter,\" Henriksen said. He pointed to the screen. \"They believed it could be done, and they believed Daedalus could do it.\"\n\nOlivia leaned back in her chair. \"Exactly.\"\n\n\"So Daedalus was a snake-oil salesman,\" Jada said. \"He didn't fulfill a need; he invented it.\"\n\nDrake glanced down at Luka Hzujak's journal, which had been in the center of the table since they'd entered. He picked it up and flipped to the first maze sketches he found, and then he looked up at Jada, ignoring the others.\n\n\"Your father had figured that part out, I think.\"\n\n\"Why do you say that?\" Olivia asked.\n\nDrake ignored her, opened the book, and leaned over to show Jada a page where Luka had titled one maze drawing \"The Labyrinth of Anygod.\"\n\nJada's eyes were bright as she lifted her gaze. \"He knew.\" She looked at Olivia and Corelli and then turned to Henriksen. \"Daedalus went to the kings and high priests with the labyrinth design and claimed he could make them all as much gold as they could ever want. And he promised them that the labyrinth would be the perfect treasury, a place for them to store their own gold where it could never be stolen.\"\n\n\"And then he stole it,\" Drake said, grinning. \"The lovable bastard.\"\n\n\"You can't know that,\" Olivia sniffed.\n\n\"Sure we can,\" Drake said. \"It makes sense. Dionysus, Poseidon\u2014Sobek? The crocodile god? Daedalus would dedicate his labyrinth to whichever god was best loved where he wanted to build. Real estate developers do basically the same thing every damn day.\"\n\nOlivia and Henriksen studied each other a moment, and then Henriksen nodded. Once again, Drake felt sure they were hiding something. Not all of this stuff about Daedalus, because he sensed their excitement about the revelations that Yablonski's translations had turned up. But they had a piece of the puzzle they weren't sharing.\n\n\"It could be,\" Olivia said.\n\n\"What else did your supergeek turn up?\" Drake asked.\n\nCorelli hit another key. More of the flowers that had been a part of the design throughout the labyrinth under the fortress and the Minotaur.\n\n\"There are about a dozen flowers this could be,\" Corelli said. \"The research team thinks it's most likely something called false hellebore or white hellebore. They're poisonous.\"\n\nDrake had been wondering why he'd take an interest until Corelli mentioned poison, and then he saw the thug's eyes light up. The information had stuck with him because he had a fascination with ways to hurt and kill people. Drake had met his kind before and didn't like the unpredictable quality they brought to the table.\n\nOlivia typed a couple of things. Images flashed by, ending with the large painting of the Chinese hell\u2014Diyu\u2014that they'd found in the chamber.\n\n\"Obviously the labyrinth on Thera was begun later than the other three,\" Olivia said. \"It may be that Daedalus was moving his hoard from one to the next, abandoning the kingdoms he had duped. By the time the construction of the worship chambers on Thera had begun, he had obviously found a new sucker and a location where he could break ground on a fourth labyrinth. It would've been under construction while the labyrinth on Thera was still being completed.\n\n\"By the time of the eruption on Thera\u2014which destroyed the Minoan offshoot colony there\u2014\"\n\n\"Atlantis,\" Drake put in just to irritate her.\n\n\"\u2014the fourth labyrinth was being built in a place called Yiajiang in southern China,\" Olivia continued. \"Yiajiang was a tiny settlement that grew and later became known as Yecheng.\"\n\n\"It doesn't really ring a bell,\" Drake said.\n\nOlivia turned to Henriksen. \"Today we know it as the city of Nanjing.\"\n\n\"That's nuts,\" Drake said. \"I've been to Nanjing. The original city wasn't built until\u2014what, fifth century B.C. That's a thousand years after Thera exploded.\"\n\nOlivia nodded. \"That was my first reaction, too. But Yablonski confirms there were tribal settlements in the area all through that period. And would you care to guess what myth is consistent with every one of those settlements?\"\n\nDrake sat back in his chair, letting it sink in. He glanced at the hideous painting on the screen.\n\n\"Diyu.\"\n\n\"You're not as dumb as you look,\" Corelli muttered.\n\nHenriksen had his phone out. He punched a couple of keys, and a moment later he was barking orders. It took Drake a minute to realize that he must have a whole new batch of hired thugs either already in China or on their way and had just instructed them to rendezvous in Nanjing. A second later, Henriksen hit an intercom switch and the pilot answered. Henriksen gave him their new destination and then signed off, turning his attention back to the conversation.\n\n\"The gold was on Thera during the eruption,\" Jada said, eyes narrowed as she worked it out. \"Had to be. The labyrinth there was unstable but only partially destroyed. Once they'd finished the fourth labyrinth, they would've moved Daedalus's hoard there. But what about Daedalus?\"\n\nOlivia clicked past several other images and stopped on one of the ceremonial jars, which showed the Mistress of the Labyrinth, a Minotaur, and what Drake realized was a funeral pyre.\n\n\"They burned him?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"He died,\" Olivia said. \"His nephew, Talos, finished the design for the fourth labyrinth and altered it considerably. Beneath the painting of Diyu in the chamber, it is written that Talos wanted an army of slaves to build the labyrinth for him, and that would require overseers and protectors.\"\n\n\"The Minotaur was supposed to be the protector,\" Drake said.\n\n\"Of the labyrinth, yes,\" Olivia replied. \"But the Minotaur would've been like a guard dog. They'd have selected the biggest, most frightening warrior they could find.\"\n\n\"So, not Corelli, then,\" Drake said.\n\nCorelli made a rude gesture but said nothing.\n\n\"Talos wanted what Yablonski translated as 'Protectors of the Hidden Word,' \" Olivia finished.\n\nHenriksen looked at her. \"Tell me about Diyu. What did the research team find?\"\n\nOlivia glanced at her laptop screen. \"According to the myth\u2014as opposed to the writings we found\u2014the labyrinth was ruled by Yan Luo, sort of a god himself. Yablonski's translations confirm that the Chinese worship chamber was dedicated to Yan Luo, the king of hell. On Thera, Daedalus had started to expand more with the idea of underground, multilevel labyrinths, and that matches up with the myth of Diyu, which was a maze of levels and chambers where souls were supposed to be brought and punished for their earthly sins. Once they had redeemed themselves, they could be given the Drink of Forgetfulness and return to the world, or so they were promised.\"\n\nDrake felt something unlocking in his mind, tumblers clicking into place. Jada must have sensed a change in him, because she gave him an odd look.\n\n\"Nate? What is it?\" she asked.\n\nCorelli, Olivia, and Henriksen were all looking at him. The airplane's engine seemed louder than ever. Sudden turbulence shook them hard enough that his teeth clacked together, and it felt like the plane veered to the right. Drake chalked it up to the pilot correcting their course for Nanjing.\n\n\"Daedalus's nephew wanted slaves. The people believed in hell. What if that's the reason they chose this location and the reason they changed the design? What if they built hell and then abducted people, maybe drugged them and pulled them down there and made them think they were in Diyu? Who knows, maybe there really was some kind of Drink of Forgetfulness. When they grew too old to be useful, they'd drug them again and return them to the surface.\"\n\nDrake glanced around, the plane taking a bounce that jarred his knees against the underside of the table. He grimaced, then threw up his hands.\n\n\"Am I crazy?\"\n\nHenriksen frowned and cast a dark look toward the front of the plane, apparently irritated at the pilot. But then he turned back to Drake.\n\n\"That may not be as far-fetched as it sounds,\" he said.\n\nJada rolled her eyes. \"Everything about this is far-fetched. But all the pieces fit together too neatly not to be true.\"\n\n\"Nanjing has a long history of stories about people vanishing. Three Jin princes and their courts went missing in the third century. During the Ming Dynasty, when Nanjing was the capital of China, hundreds of thousands of workers were brought in to rebuild the city, and there were stories that a demon lived under the old city gates and would eat the workers if it caught them out at night. Many of them supposedly vanished.\"\n\n\"The Minotaur?\" Jada asked. \"Or whoever the Mistress of the Labyrinth made up to look like a Minotaur?\"\n\n\"Could be,\" Drake said.\n\n\"These guys in the hoods,\" Corelli said. \"If they're still down there, how many do we think there are?\"\n\nDrake could see he was thinking in terms of combat. How many guns would they need to get past the hooded killers of the labyrinth, the Protectors of the Hidden Word?\n\n\"Are there still slaves?\" Olivia wondered aloud.\n\nDrake thought of Sully and Ian Welch, and he knew the answer. It enraged him to think what Sully might be going through\u2014he didn't want to think about the images of torture in Diyu\u2014but it reassured him as well. If all of their conjecture held together, it meant that Sully was still alive.\n\nHenriksen looked contemplative. \"There's a famous story about an army detachment\u2014three hundred men\u2014who disappeared while returning to Nanjing in 1939. They were expected, but they never arrived.\"\n\n\"Maybe they did,\" Drake said. \"But they hit a detour.\"\n\nOlivia cried out as the plane shook violently. The laptop slid from the table. Corelli made a grab for it, but the aircraft pitched to starboard and he toppled after the computer to the floor. The large screen winked out as the laptop landed with a crack, Corelli sprawling on top of it.\n\nJada slid into Drake, who held on to the table to keep from falling from his chair. Henriksen stood, but the pitch of the plane threw him into the wall. He made his way to the door and flung it open. Drake could see into the vacant passenger cabin, and his stomach lurched as he got a better view of just how badly they were listing.\n\n\"What the hell is going on?\" Drake asked, following Henriksen into the passenger cabin. They leaned on seats and braced themselves on the overhead compartments as they struggled toward the cockpit. The tall man had a small spot of blood seeping through his shirt where his knife wound had been bandaged.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Henriksen replied, eyes dark with resignation. \"But this isn't turbulence.\"\n\nThey reached the front of the cabin. Henriksen began pounding on the door to the cockpit, shouting for the pilot or the copilot to let him in. Drake shifted his stance and felt something sticky under his boot. When he glanced down, he swore under his breath and tapped Henriksen, pointing out the narrow pool of blood trickling out from underneath the door.\n\n\"Back up!\" Drake shouted, drawing his gun.\n\nHenriksen moved aside, eyes wide, and covered his ears against the boom a gunshot would make in such a closed space. Drake tried not to think about the possibility of a ricochet and what would happen to the plane at this altitude if a bullet ripped through the aircraft's skin.\n\nThen he pulled the trigger three times, blowing apart the cockpit's lock.\n\nDrake kicked the door in, Henriksen right behind him.\n\nThe pilot lay dead on the floor, his slashed throat gaping like a bloody, mocking grin. The copilot held a disturbingly familiar curved blade, the same sort used by the Protectors of the Hidden Word. The guy looked Greek; he sure as hell wasn't Chinese. For a second, Drake wondered if everything they had been assuming was wrong, if they really knew nothing at all about the threat they were facing and the people trying to keep them from finding the fourth labyrinth. Then he noticed the glazed look in the copilot's eyes, his lost and distant gaze, and he knew the man was not in his right mind.\n\n\"Drop the knife or I will shoot you,\" Drake said.\n\nThe copilot didn't even acknowledge them. Instead, at the mention of the knife, he glanced down at the gleaming blood-streaked blade, eyes wide with recognition. His face slack and expressionless, he slashed his own throat.\n\n\"No, damn it!\" Drake shouted, reaching for the copilot with his free hand.\n\nThe man crumpled to the ground, twitching, blood pulsing from his wound. The cut was deep and long, blood vessels severed. There would be no saving him.\n\nHenriksen stared slack-jawed at the two dead men even as the hull of the plane screamed around them, air currents twisting the craft, dipping it even harder to starboard. Any second, the plane would begin to dive.\n\nDrake tucked away his gun and dived for the pilot's seat. He grabbed the stick and held on, trying to keep the plane from shaking apart around them.\n\n\"Please tell me you know how to fly an airplane,\" Henriksen said.\n\nDrake didn't spare him a glance as he replied. \"Does 'sort of' count?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Tyr Henriksen seemed capable of wielding his wealth like a scalpel or like a club, depending on the circumstances. Either way, the man clearly was used to smoothing the path of his life with money. But no matter how rich he was, he could do nothing to hurry the Nanjing police. When a handful of Americans and a filthy rich Norwegian made an emergency landing at the local airport with two dead men on board, the cops were going to have questions.\n\nAny other day, the boredom drilling into Drake's brain would have had him on the verge of screaming. But considering that a couple of hours earlier he had landed a jet, talked in to the runway by air traffic controllers whose entire English vocabulary seemed to have been learned from old Tom Cruise movies, all he really wanted was a beer. Not that he blamed the air traffic controllers for not speaking his language\u2014he was in their country, after all. But the first time one of them called him \"Maverick,\" he had pretty much assumed he was going to die.\n\nNot dying, in contrast, had made his day.\n\nThey'd left Santorini just after eight p.m.\u2014two in the morning, Nanjing time\u2014and the flight had taken just under twelve hours even with the unfortunate murder/suicide interruption. Now looking out the windows of the airport security office, Drake could see the shadows growing long as the daylight turned late afternoon gold. The clock read just after five p.m.\n\nJada had curled up on a sofa and fallen asleep\u2014adrenaline hangover, he figured. Corelli sat on an uncomfortable-looking plastic and metal chair across from Drake, hands in his lap. He looked like a waxwork dummy of a 1940s movie gangster, Jimmy Cagney's bulkier brother. Or a robot someone had shifted into the idle position.\n\nThrough a glass partition, Drake could see Henriksen and Olivia standing in sullen silence as Nanjing police, airport security, and a dark-suited representative of the Chinese government argued with representatives from the Norwegian and American embassies. The copilot had been a paid assassin or a terrorist, the diplomats were insisting, bent on the murder of a prominent and wealthy businessman. Henriksen and his people were lucky to be alive; they shouldn't be treated as victims.\n\nThat was essentially how the argument was going from the snippets of it Drake had heard through the glass and through the door when security agents went in and out. The real conflict going on in that room had to do with the guns that had been found on the plane. While Drake had been trying not to crash the aircraft, Corelli had gathered all the weapons from their bags, wiped them down, and hidden them inside a food service cabinet. Now Henriksen and Olivia were insisting that they knew nothing about the cache of guns and that they must have belonged to the copilot assassin. The Chinese authorities were having difficulty believing that one killer would need half a dozen guns, but the representatives from the U.S. and Norwegian embassies were putting the pressure on. Drake had a feeling that it wouldn't be long before they were allowed to leave, though not without the government putting some kind of surveillance on them. It was going to be an interesting night.\n\nDrake stood and walked toward the exit. Corelli frowned, shattering the notion that he might be a robot, and watched his progress. A pane of glass was set into the metal door, and through it Drake could see a pair of guards in the corridor outside. The security director and the police investigators had been polite enough, though their manners came with a frosty demeanor. Polite or not, though, there could be no mistaking this for anything other than a detention area. As far as Drake could tell, nobody had said they were in custody, but until they were released, they might as well be behind bars.\n\nHis thoughts turned constantly to Sully. While they were locked up here, spinning lies and deception, where was he? Drake had put all his faith into the belief that the Protectors of the Hidden Word had taken Sully with them back to the fourth labyrinth, and all signs pointed to the labyrinth being here. But until they found the labyrinth, he wouldn't know for sure if Sully was still among the living. What bothered him most was that they were prisoners not only of the authorities but of their own ignorance. They were in Nanjing, but in reality they were no closer to the labyrinth. Until they knew exactly where it was, the facts they did know were useless.\n\nSo, while Jada slept and Corelli zoned out, Drake had been racking his brain for what he knew about Nanjing, trying to bring logic to bear on the problem. They had no Internet access. Corelli couldn't even contact Yablonski back at Phoenix Innovations to see if the brilliant recluse had come up with anything else that might be helpful. For the moment, Drake was alone with the puzzle.\n\nWhile the security team was hustling them in from the tarmac, they had passed down a corridor with advertisements on the walls. One of them had shown a subway train and had a map of various underground transportation lines. Drake couldn't read Chinese, but the words \"Nanjing Metro\" were in English, and the poster had gotten him thinking. If the city had been built on top of the fourth labyrinth, there had to have been thousands of opportunities over the years for builders to break through into the ancient maze. There were basements, subway lines, underground malls, and, most recently, subterranean bomb and earthquake shelters.\n\nHe suspected that if they did the research, they would find all sorts of stories about workers vanishing while engaged in excavation for those projects. If the Protectors of the Hidden Word had been active for two thousand years before the foundations of the first real city had been built in Nanjing, they would have been careful all along to keep excavators away. The labyrinth might be deep underground, but Drake doubted it would have been deeper than the subway.\n\nThey needed a map of the Nanjing Metro. They had to find a piece of the city with no tunnels underground, a space wide enough for a labyrinth the size of the one on Thera. He had been thinking about the legend of the demon that supposedly had lived under the city gates during the construction phase of the Ming Dynasty. Once upon a time, Nanjing had had thirteen gates, but now only one remained. Drake knew it had another name, but it was known simply as the China Gate, a major tourist attraction. He'd only ever seen pictures, but he had to wonder.\n\nHe turned to find Corelli still watching him. Jada began to stir and opened her eyes. For a moment she smiled at Drake, but then it was as if a veil of hurt had been drawn over her eyes, and he knew that she had remembered where they were and why and all the events of the last week. He thought of that blissful moment she'd had in the haze between sleeping and waking, and he envied her.\n\nThe door to the inner office swung open, and the three of them looked around to see a security guard emerge. Drake exhaled with disappointment, but the guard didn't let the door close behind him. Instead, the man held it open for Henriksen and Olivia, who wore matching facial expressions, a mixture of arrogance and irritation at the inconvenience they had been forced to endure. The two diplomats followed, along with a Nanjing police officer. Through the glass partition, Drake could see the dark-suited government agent speaking with the director of airport security. They did not look happy, which confirmed Drake's suspicion that they were being allowed to leave.\n\n\"Come on,\" he said to Jada. \"We're going.\"\n\nA limousine awaited them outside. Porters carried their bags out and put them into the trunk, and Corelli slammed it shut. Drake and Jada climbed in after Olivia while Henriksen had a quick conversation with the Norwegian and U.S. embassy men. Corelli went and stood by him, taking up a position as his employer's bodyguard. None of them had guns anymore\u2014they couldn't exactly have asked for them back after denying ownership of the weapons\u2014but Corelli looked like he knew how to hurt people without bullets. Drake assumed the conversation had to do with Henriksen's gratitude for the diplomats' intervention and the manner in which his thanks would be expressed. In cash, probably, Drake thought.\n\nHenriksen opened the passenger door and looked in at the driver.\n\n\"Get out.\"\n\n\"Mr. Henriksen,\" the blond man said, his accent much thicker than Henriksen's, \"the embassy sent me. I'm to take you anywhere you like.\"\n\nHenriksen glanced back at the diplomats on the sidewalk, then looked at the driver again.\n\n\"You'll be paid. But I have my own driver.\"\n\nAs he spoke, Corelli opened the driver's door and gestured for the man to get out. The driver hesitated, then shrugged and climbed out, leaving the car running. He said something in Norwegian, calling to the embassy man over the top of the limo. The diplomat nodded tersely, and the driver threw up his hands and moved out of the way, letting Corelli slip behind the wheel.\n\nThe driver still stood mystified beside the limo as Corelli slammed the door. Henriksen joined Olivia, Jada, and Drake in the back and shut his door, and moments later they were gliding out into the traffic leaving the airport. Jada and Drake exchanged a glance.\n\n\"Have you ever driven in Nanjing before?\" Jada asked.\n\n\"Never been to China,\" Corelli replied. He nodded toward the dashboard. \"We got a GPS. How hard can it be?\"\n\n\"Hand me that,\" Henriksen said.\n\nCorelli passed the GPS back through the open window between the driver's seat and the rear of the limo. Henriksen tapped the touch screen, quickly switching languages, and then keyed in an address before handing it back.\n\n\"Thanks, boss,\" Corelli said.\n\n\"Where are we going?\" Jada asked.\n\nOlivia stretched her legs, the leather seat creaking beneath her. Drake couldn't help noticing how shapely those legs were, straining against the fabric of her pants, and he wondered if she did such things on purpose to draw attention or if it was just a reflex after decades of wanting to be the center of attention.\n\n\"We're going to the hotel,\" she said.\n\nDrake frowned, shaking from his musings about her. \"I don't think so. These ninja bastards have Sully. I'm not lounging around in some hotel suite while they're doing who knows what to him.\"\n\n\"Ninjas are Japanese,\" Corelli supplied from behind the wheel, glancing in the rearview mirror as the GPS gave him instructions in a soft feminine voice.\n\n\"Shut up,\" Drake snapped. \"You think I don't know\u2014oh, forget it.\" He stared at Henriksen. \"Listen, I've been trying to work out where the labyrinth might be. We need to take a hard look at the China Gate. And we need a subway map.\"\n\nHe explained his reasoning, and Henriksen listened calmly. Jada nodded in support, but Olivia only stared through the limousine's tinted glass window at the lights of Nanjing coming to colorful life as night fell around them. The cityscape included a strange mix of gleaming modern office towers and pagoda-like buildings. They passed cars and buses and bicycles, the city teeming with people, but Drake shut it all out. They weren't here to sightsee.\n\n\"I've been to the China Gate,\" Henriksen said when Drake had finished.\n\n\"You've been to Nanjing before?\" Jada asked, eyes narrowed in suspicion.\n\nHenriksen gave her an amused look. \"I do business around the world. I've been almost everywhere at one point or another. But the last time I was here, nearly fifteen years ago, I was touring the country with my ex-wife. Mr. Drake's logic is sound. The China Gate was built during the Ming Dynasty, but its builders included portions of the original city gate, which dates back to the Tang Dynasty in the eighth century. I specifically remember that it was once called the Jubao Gate, which translates as the 'Gathering Treasure' Gate.\"\n\nDrake felt a chill. \"You think that's a reference to the gold Daedalus's nephew moved from Thera?\"\n\n\"It's possible,\" Henriksen said.\n\n\"Wouldn't someone have found it by now?\" Olivia asked, her eyes alight with interest now. Eager, she leaned forward in her seat. \"It sounds like this gate must get a constant stream of tourists. Even if you assume the labyrinth's protectors would abduct or kill anyone who found an entrance, they would have to come and go themselves. It doesn't seem likely there'd be a way into the labyrinth from somewhere so public.\"\n\n\"Maybe it isn't there at all,\" Jada said. \"How many people could vanish in that one spot without the authorities taking a much closer look?\"\n\nDrake nodded and stared out the window as the limo crossed a bridge over the Qinhuai River, the calm water replete with yellow-canopied riverboats. Jada's argument made sense, and his momentary excitement had been extinguished.\n\n\"Regardless, we can't simply go there and start searching,\" Henriksen said. \"Whatever we do, we require the cover of night, and if we find the labyrinth, its hooded killers are sure to be waiting for us, which means we need reinforcements. I have a security team on the way. They'll be here by midnight. And of course the government and the police will be watching us. I need time to put the appropriate bribes in place to make sure they look the other way when the moment comes.\"\n\nDrake swore, hands clenched into fists as he thought of Sully.\n\nJada touched his arm. \"He's a tough old guy. He'll be all right until we can get to him.\"\n\n\"We go to the hotel,\" Henriksen said, pulling out his phone. \"Meanwhile, we get Yablonski looking at the Nanjing Metro map and see what else is as old as the China Gate.\"\n\n\"He's already compiling a database of disappearances,\" Olivia said. \"If we see a concentration of people going missing in one particular spot over the centuries, that'll help, too.\"\n\nDrake couldn't argue with any of them, and that made his frustration all the worse. Several long minutes passed as Henriksen phoned Yablonski, and then the interior of the limo fell into a silence broken only by the white noise of the engine and the hum of the tires on pavement. He stared out the window toward the east, where the city gave way to a forested mountain. When he glanced over at Jada, she looked as if she wanted to crawl out of her skin. She and her stepmother were on the same seat but sitting as far apart from each other as the space inside the limo would allow.\n\nHow did it come to this? Drake wondered. Relying on the people we were out to stop from the beginning? Henriksen and Olivia might not have killed Jada's father, but Luka had wanted nothing more than to stop Henriksen from getting to the fourth labyrinth before him.\n\nSo what would you have done if you got here on your own? he thought. What would be the next step?\n\nDrake turned to Henriksen and held out his hand. \"Give me your phone.\"\n\nThe big man narrowed his icy blue eyes. \"What?\"\n\nJada studied them both, a what-the-hell-are-you-doing look in her eyes.\n\n\"Phone?\" Drake said.\n\nHenriksen shrugged and handed him the smart phone. Olivia seemed nervous, as if she was worried Drake had something tricky up his sleeve. The limo slowed a bit as Corelli glanced in the rearview again, apparently thinking the same thing. Drake thought about reminding them that he wasn't a ninja, either, and it wasn't like he was going to be able to use the phone as a deadly weapon. He decided to let it go. If wondering what he had in mind kept them nervous, that was probably for the best.\n\nInternet access was limited in China, so that was no good, but a quick call to London information services got him the phone number for the archaeology department of Oxford University, and moments later he sat listening to the phone ringing half the world away.\n\n\"Margaret Xin, please,\" he said when a male voice answered.\n\nHenriksen's eyes widened in alarm, and he reached for the phone. Drake slapped his hand away, though he was impressed that the man had recognized Margaret Xin's name.\n\n\"Relax, blondie,\" Drake said. \"We're in this together for now.\"\n\nHe hated saying the words, wanted to spit to clear the taste of them out of his mouth. As far as he was concerned, they were in it together as long as their fate was twined together and not a moment longer. He figured Henriksen felt the same way.\n\nA quiet female voice came on the line. \"Hello?\"\n\n\"Maggie, it's Nathan Drake.\"\n\n\"Nate? This is a surprise. Are you in London?\"\n\n\"No, Maggie, listen\u2014Sully's in trouble,\" Drake said. \"I know you two ended kind of messy, but I need your help.\"\n\nHe heard a deep intake of breath, and when she spoke again, there was a tremor in her voice.\n\n\"This isn't cheating-at-cards sort of trouble, is it?\"\n\n\"Would I be calling you if it was?\"\n\n\"I guess not,\" Maggie said softly. \"You're right, Nate. It ended messy between Victor and me. In fact, messy probably doesn't begin to cover it. I wish he was a different sort of man, but I can't blame him for that. How can I help?\"\n\nDrake let out a breath, relieved. He gave a slight nod to Jada.\n\n\"Nanjing,\" he said. \"Something old. Maybe underground. Catacombs, maybe, or a fortress or palace.\"\n\n\"You're in China?\" Maggie said. \"What are you doing in\u2014\"\n\n\"Now's not the time. When it's all over, I'll call you and tell you everything. Right now I just need to know what you can tell me.\"\n\nMaggie hesitated, thinking. \"Well, you're not going to find real catacombs there. The rest\u2014I mean, fortresses, palaces\u2014there are all sorts of things. But underground, the only thing that comes immediately to mind is the palace of Zhu Yuanzhang, who you might know as the Hongwu Emperor. He was the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty. The palace is supposed to be under the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum, inside the Treasure Mound.\"\n\nDrake froze, his heart thrumming in his chest along with the limousine's engine. \"Treasure Mound,\" he repeated, wanting to be sure he'd heard her right.\n\n\"Well, there isn't any actual treasure there,\" Maggie explained. \"It's a reference to the emperor's tomb and whatever might have been buried with him.\"\n\n\"Why do you say it's supposed to be there? Don't you know?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"Nobody does for sure. The mausoleum is a complex of twenty buildings that took decades to complete. The Treasure Mound is a hill in the midst of the complex, which is east of the city. Archaeologists have used geomagnetic surveying equipment to confirm the presence of tunnels under the mound. Turned out the whole mound was covered with large bricks from the Six Dynasties, dated to the fifth century, which suggests there was another structure there at some point.\n\n\"In any case, the team analyzing the Treasure Mound found tunnels that go right to its heart. Part of the mausoleum complex is a structure called the Soul Tower, the base of which goes fairly deep into the mound. They were able to map the tunnel, and it leads to the base of the Soul Tower and some kind of opening, but couldn't go any further.\"\n\nDrake frowned. \"What do you mean they couldn't go any further? Was there a cave-in?\"\n\n\"I'm not clear on some of the details,\" Maggie said. \"I found the research fascinating, but I haven't written about it or taught it in class, so I can only tell you what I remember, which is that some kind of room was found but no real entrance. Still, the archaeologists working at the mound were convinced they'd found the actual burial site of Zhu Yuanzhang.\"\n\nDrake gazed out at the glittering lights of Nanjing. \"I don't get it. Why didn't they excavate?\" he asked.\n\n\"It's against the law.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The only one of the Thirteen Imperial Tombs of the Ming Dynasty that's been excavated is the tomb of Emperor Wanli in Beijing, and that was back in the 1950s. After that, the government forbade the excavation of any of the other 'underground palaces.'\"\n\nDrake was silent as he felt puzzle pieces clicking into place in his mind. He glanced at Jada and Olivia, then at Henriksen.\n\n\"Nate, are you still there?\" Maggie asked.\n\n\"I'm here. But I should go now.\"\n\n\"Is that helpful at all?\"\n\nAn image flashed through Drake's mind of the hooded men dragging Sully down into the darkness of the labyrinth of Thera.\n\n\"I sure as hell hope so,\" he said.\n\n\"So do I,\" Maggie replied. \"When you catch up to Victor\u2014\"\n\n\"Yeah?\"\n\n\"Give him my love.\"\n\nDrake could feel years of regret in those four words, but he could offer her no comfort other than to promise that he would pass the message on. In a way, it was a promise to himself as well, a vow that he would see Sully again and be able to tell him that Margaret Xin sent her love.\n\nHe reiterated his assurance that he would tell her the whole story when he could and then ended the call and handed the phone back to Henriksen.\n\n\"What was all of that?\" Henriksen asked.\n\n\"What's this 'Treasure Mound'?\" Olivia added.\n\nDrake leaned back in his seat, feeling the soft leather crinkle beneath him. \"What would you say if I told you the tomb of the first Ming emperor is under a hill not far from here but archaeologists have never been inside it because the Chinese government has forbidden them to excavate it?\"\n\nHenriksen and Olivia stared at him. In the front seat, Corelli swore.\n\nJada smiled. \"I'd say somebody in the government is either well paid to keep a secret or too afraid not to.\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Olivia said. \"It doesn't prove anything.\"\n\n\"Maybe not, but it's a start,\" Drake said. \"And you can bet there's no subway underneath it.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Henriksen seemed reluctant to go along with Drake and Jada's insistence that his men not kill the guards at the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum. Corelli, in contrast, seemed actively disappointed.\n\nSeven hours had passed since Drake's phone conversation with Margaret Xin, and Henriksen had used the intervening time wisely. Two separate mercenary groups had arrived to report for duty, a total of sixteen men and women willing to take orders without questioning things such as morality and legality. They were introduced to Drake and Jada as employees of private security firms on loan to Phoenix Innovations, but that was just a fancy way of saying they were ex-military personnel willing to put their training to use in the service of whoever could afford to pay.\n\nHenriksen's latest thugs came complete with an arsenal of weapons that would have made the Nanjing police officers who'd questioned them at the airport go into cardiac arrest. When Drake had asked for guns for himself and Jada, Henriksen had started to speak up, on the verge of telling Perkins, the ranking officer, not to give them weapons. Then he apparently had remembered that they were all still pretending to be on the same side and gave Perkins the nod.\n\nIt had underscored the question that had been on Drake's mind for a while. Henriksen knew they weren't looking for the same result from this mission. Yes, Drake's first priority was Sully's safety, but he and Sully had promised Jada that they would follow through on Luka's last wish and make sure the world learned the secrets of the fourth labyrinth. If Henriksen planned to loot Daedalus's hoard, how did he expect to hide that theft from the public?\n\nThe obvious answer was that he didn't. That meant, of course, that he also didn't intend to let the secrets of the labyrinth get out. To prevent that, he'd have to kill Drake, Jada, and Sully, and what better place to do it than down in the labyrinth, where they probably would never be found?\n\nBut if Henriksen hadn't killed Luka and Cheney, was he a killer? Did he really intend to come to some compromise with them? Drake knew only one way to find out. It gave him a small sliver of hope when Henriksen ordered his people not to kill the mausoleum guards. They were bound and gagged and several were knocked unconscious, but in the morning they'd still be alive, and that boded well.\n\nThey were almost certainly in the right place. In addition to their suspicions after what Margaret Xin had told Drake, Yablonski had come through with another small fact that solidified their belief: the three hundred soldiers who had vanished near Nanjing in the 1940s had been camped on Dulongfu, a hill at the foot of the Zijin Shan Mountains.\n\nThe site of the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum.\n\nNow in the moonlight, they raced north through the grounds of the mausoleum toward the Soul Tower and the Treasure Mound beyond. On a curving path, they passed carved stone figures of animals both real and mythical and then figures of humans. Crossing several small bridges, they reached a red stone gate and then hurried across an open plateau where the bases of temple pillars were all that remained of one of the original buildings. Another bridge and then a tunnel, and at last they approached the Soul Tower, an enormous stone structure that abutted the Treasure Mound.\n\nYablonski's research team had dug up articles and reports from the archaeology team that had confirmed the location of the tomb, so they didn't have to scour the mound for the location of the tunnel. Henriksen had a map that pinpointed it exactly, and Corelli and Perkins led them all directly to it. The hired guns were stealthy; Drake had to give them that. They moved in relative silence even carrying weapons and packs, and the wind was the only sound up there on the hill. With the trees all around the perimeter of the mausoleum complex, even the late night noises of the city could not reach them. It felt to him as if the night were holding its breath.\n\nA chain-link gate had been installed to block the tunnel entrance. Perkins gestured to a grim-faced brunette woman, who hurried forward, slid off her pack, and pulled out a set of folding bolt cutters. In thirty seconds, she had the chain cut, and Perkins caught it so that it wouldn't clank when it hit the ground. The gates screeched a little as they were dragged open, and then they were pouring two by two into the tunnel.\n\nAbsent the wind, they were swallowed by the ancient stillness of the place. Footfalls, no matter how stealthy, seemed to scrape the walls all around them, echoing off the floor. Drake glanced at Jada and saw the anticipation on her face. His heart raced, and he knew that hers must be hammering. It was still possible that they might be wrong, that the labyrinth would not be found beneath the emperor's tomb, but he felt the rightness of it and a certain menace in the air. It might have been the menace that truly convinced him they had reached their goal.\n\nFlashlights searched the darkness at the end of the tunnel, where it ran into the base of the Soul Tower, underground. Four of the mercenaries guarded their flank, lights and guns aimed back toward the entrance.\n\n\"Mr. Drake,\" Henriksen said, gesturing for him to come forward.\n\nDrake and Jada joined Henriksen and Olivia at the horn-shaped opening in the base of the Soul Tower, then slipped through and into a small oval chamber. The walls were constructed of stone blocks, unmarred by paintings or engravings, and the chamber was small enough that with the four of them inside it felt claustrophobic.\n\nFlashlight in one hand, Drake started testing every block with the other hand. He pressed edges and crevices, and Henriksen followed suit. Jada and Olivia joined in. Olivia tried setting her shoulder against a wall, perhaps thinking the whole thing might move. They found no trace of the genius that had gone into using counterweights and perfect balance to create hidden doors and secret passages in the other labyrinths. Unless they were missing something, it was just a room.\n\n\"Damn it,\" Olivia muttered. \"I was so sure.\"\n\n\"We all were,\" Henriksen said.\n\nJada shook her head. \"No. We've got to be missing something. Otherwise what purpose does this chamber serve? It's no ritual space. They built a tunnel to get to it. It's absurd to think there isn't something we're missing.\"\n\n\"The geomagnetic survey showed crevices in the mound and in this tunnel,\" Henriksen said. \"Maybe there's an entrance near one of those. Whether the labyrinth is here or not, there's no question the emperor's tomb is, so we've got to find a way in.\"\n\nDrake shined his flashlight along the base of the wall, all around the chamber, frowning deeply. He examined the floor, which had been made of the same stone blocks as the walls. Some of the stones seemed to go beneath the walls, as though they continued on the other side, which made sense if the entrance was in one of the walls.\n\nHe got on his hands and knees and ran his fingers along the crease between floor and wall on the north side of the small room. The wall definitely sat on top of the stone blocks that made up the floor. Flashing his light around, he realized that the same was true on the eastern and southern walls.\n\n\"You've got something,\" Jada said. \"What is it?\"\n\nDrake stood and rushed from the tiny chamber, nearly colliding with Corelli, who had been standing just outside, watching the proceedings.\n\n\"Watch yourself, moron,\" Corelli growled.\n\n\"Back up,\" Drake snapped at him. He waved his light at Perkins and the goon squad. \"All of you, give me room.\"\n\nThey obliged, and he stood just outside the room, using the flashlight to study the horn-shaped entry and the walls around it. The stones just above the point of the horn were a variety of shapes, as if they were remnants of quarried rock put into place solely because they would fit together. But six inches above the point was a stone that had a roughly octagonal shape. It wasn't perfect, but studying it now, he felt sure the shape could not be an accident. At first none of them had noticed because they had been searching for an engraving, as they'd found in the other labyrinths.\n\nDrake looked into the chamber again, stared at the floor, and gestured toward Jada.\n\n\"Come out of there,\" he said. \"All of you.\"\n\nJada and Henriksen did as he asked, and he stood aside to let them pass. Olivia frowned. She didn't seem to like the idea of Drake telling her what to do. After a moment, though, she followed her boss out of the chamber. For the moment, they were all still sharing the same goal.\n\nHe turned to Perkins and Corelli.\n\n\"Give me a boost?\"\n\nCorelli sneered. \"I'll give you a boost, all right.\"\n\nBut Perkins turned to the largest of his squad. \"Massarsky. Help the man out.\"\n\nThe massive thick-necked mercenary slung off the strap of his semiauto and handed it to Garza, a Latina with cold eyes who had her hair tied back in a tight knot. She took it, but Drake noticed that her own weapon remained steady, aimed not quite at him but not away, either.\n\n\"Up you go,\" Massarsky said.\n\nDrake handed Jada his flashlight\u2014he hadn't yet drawn his gun tonight\u2014and steadied himself on the edges of the horn-shaped entrance as he stepped up onto Massarsky's back. Several flashlight beams converged on the octagonal stone he had identified. When he pressed his fingers against the stone, it did not move, but when he put one hand over the other and put his weight behind it, the octagon slid backward an inch and then two.\n\nHe thought of Sully and allowed himself to hope as he heard the grinding of stone and the heavy thunk of weights shifting in the walls. He dropped down from Massarsky's back and peered into the chamber beneath the Soul Tower, but nothing was happening.\n\nThen Jada tapped his arm, and he turned to see a square block sliding out of the wall to the left of the entrance. Dust fell to the ground. Flashlight beams swung over to illuminate the ten-inch square.\n\n\"There's another one,\" Corelli said.\n\nDrake turned and watched the second stone, exactly opposite the first, sliding from the wall. With a loud double thud, the noises in the walls ceased. Henriksen pushed past Massarsky and examined the square on the left. Garza handed Massarsky his gun, but her gaze was on the other square. Jada had her flashlight on it, and now Drake joined her, running his fingers around the edges.\n\n\"There's open space behind this one,\" Henriksen said.\n\n\"Here, too,\" Drake said. His fingertips touched what felt like a smooth stone cylinder, like a post or the axle of a wheel.\n\nA wheel, he thought, gripping the square and trying to turn it. When he twisted to the right, he felt it give.\n\n\"Turn it!\" Drake told Henriksen. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the big Norwegian doing just that.\n\nSimultaneously, they rotated the squares until they wouldn't turn any further. Drake felt something in the wall give way, and this time the grinding and thumping inside the walls was much louder, and he heard Jada cry his name at the same time he realized much of the noise was coming from the small room under the Soul Tower. The mercenaries were well trained\u2014not one of them moved, ready for whatever happened next\u2014but Corelli, Olivia, and Jada crowded in front of the horn-shaped doorway, and Drake had to crane his neck to get a glimpse inside.\n\nThe stone blocks that made up the floor of the small chamber were sinking in horizontal rows, each dropping a foot farther than the last, and Drake quickly realized they had released the mechanism they had been searching for. The floor had transformed into a set of stairs leading down into darkness.\n\n\"Massarsky,\" Perkins said, \"you and Zheng take point.\"\n\nThe two mercenaries slipped through the horn-shaped entry, flashlights clipped to their guns, and started down the stone steps, weapons ready to fire. Drake had entered ancient temples and ruins before, and normally he'd have thought their caution unwarranted. But they were expecting an attack here. The Protectors of the Hidden Word would be waiting, but they didn't know what kind of number to expect. It was possible that most of the hooded killers had died in their skirmishes in Egypt and on Santorini.\n\nStill, better safe than dead.\n\nHenriksen, Olivia, and Corelli followed the first half dozen mercenaries, ignoring Drake and Jada. Now that they had found the way into the emperor's tomb, their former animosity was forgotten. Their full focus was on the yawning darkness below, and Drake understood why. As much as he wanted to find Sully, he had no problem letting some of the goon squad precede him. If the spooky ninja dudes were waiting, he was more than happy to let the hired guns take the first few hits.\n\nThey descended the stairs and found themselves in a long, sloping corridor. The rest of the mercenaries fell in behind Drake and Jada, though two of them hung back, staying to guard their exit. That made fourteen in Perkins's squad and nineteen all together, counting Drake and Jada, Henriksen and Olivia, and Corelli. Nobody spoke as they moved along the corridor, listening for any sign of a potential attack coming from ahead and watching for hidden doorways.\n\nThe tunnel spiraled downward, taking them deeper, and then straightened out again and ran on for perhaps fifty yards before it ended in a vaulted chamber that caused them all to come to a halt. Two passages led away and farther downward from the chamber, and mercenaries were investigating both paths. But the rest of the group had focused elsewhere, and as flashlight beams illuminated the walls and ceiling, Drake stared in amazement.\n\n\"This isn't man-made,\" Henriksen said. \"It's a natural cave.\"\n\nMoss grew in thick patches on the walls. Stains on the solid rock showed the patterns where water had dripped down from above, and Drake shone his flashlight upward. He pressed himself against the wall alongside Olivia, who was doing the same thing.\n\n\"Do you see it?\" she asked.\n\n\"A crevice,\" he said.\n\nLong, thick roots jutted from stone and earth and hung down, partially blocking the view, but Drake could see the glint of his light off jagged stone. Far above, where his beam could not reach, was a thin sliver of moonlight.\n\n\"Another one over here,\" Garza called from the other side of the cave.\n\nCorelli swore softly. \"Olivia. Better have a look at this.\"\n\nDrake frowned and glanced at Henriksen, who had turned to look at Corelli. The bodyguard had his light trained on a blanket of moss, but there were hints of white among the green and brown.\n\n\"They're flower buds,\" Olivia said, a tinge of wonder in her voice.\n\n\"Not just buds,\" Jada said, from a jagged alcove where the moss grew particularly thick. She shined her flashlight at a spot perhaps ten feet off the cave floor, where a trio of white flowers grew, dangling and half wilted.\n\n\"Those look familiar to you?\" Drake asked.\n\nJada nodded. \"Sure do.\"\n\nHenriksen came over to inspect them. \"These aren't white hellebore at all. They look similar\u2014could be related\u2014but the petals have a different shape.\"\n\n\"And white hellebore can't grow in moss with this little light,\" Olivia added, coming up behind him.\n\nDrake pushed against the wall and looked up, spotting another crevice. The moss was wet from the rain that ran down into the cave when it stormed. He pushed back and thrust his fingers into the moss, finding thick vines beneath it. He tugged them out to show the others.\n\n\"There you go,\" Corelli said, as if to himself.\n\nPerkins called for Henriksen, but Drake kept his eyes on the flowers. Cave hellebore, he thought, wondering if they had discovered a new species of flora.\n\n\"\u2014no sign of diamond carvings or any other differentiating marks,\" Perkins was saying.\n\nDrake stiffened and turned. He stared at the two men and then at the two doors, and he realized something they obviously had figured out already. Two doors\u2014two possible choices\u2014this was the start of the fourth labyrinth.\n\n\"Jada,\" he said. \"Where's the emperor's tomb?\"\n\nJada nodded slowly, but it was Olivia who answered.\n\n\"Maybe it was never here. Your professor friend in Oxford said they'd established it was here because they knew something was here. It made sense to assume it was the burial site\u2014the underground palace.\"\n\nCorelli had gone over to the right-hand passage and begun to explore it, searching for markings the mercenary team already had established weren't there. Drake liked the man less and less as the minutes ticked by. For a flunky, he seemed fairly presumptuous, almost as if he forgot from time to time that he was just an employee.\n\nHenriksen glanced at Drake. \"I have a theory.\"\n\nDrake nodded. \"Let's hear it.\"\n\n\"It never made any sense to me that Daedalus would've marked the correct path through the Thera labyrinth.\"\n\n\"He didn't,\" Jada said. \"He marked the wrong path.\"\n\n\"Granted,\" Henriksen replied, blue eyes turned gray in the reflected illumination of so many flashlights. \"But how long did it take us to figure that out? A man who would design such a puzzle would never offer so simple a solution. But what if those markings were added later, when it no longer mattered if intruders could find their way?\"\n\n\"After the Thera eruption?\" Drake asked. \"Why bother?\"\n\n\"No, it makes sense,\" Jada said, and he could see it pained her to admit that Henriksen had a point. \"If we're going on the theory that there even was a golden hoard and that Talos\u2014or someone\u2014supervised the removal of Daedalus's treasure from Thera, wouldn't it go faster and much more smoothly if those moving the gold couldn't get lost?\"\n\nDrake thought about it, then nodded reluctantly. \"I guess. If they were really abandoning it.\"\n\n\"Half of it had already collapsed,\" Henriksen reminded him. \"They wanted to move the gold to the fourth labyrinth, as Daedalus had done at least twice before.\"\n\n\"It's all about the gold with you, isn't it?\" Drake asked.\n\nHenriksen smiled. \"There are other treasures, but as far as motivations go, gold has its appeal.\"\n\nDrake knew he was supposed to hate the man, so he turned away before he let himself smile. Henriksen had a point. He had been motivated by gold plenty of times in his own life. This time, he had other interests: saving Sully's life and getting vengeance for Jada's father. The thought made the smile die on his lips.\n\n\"How do we choose a path?\" Olivia asked. \"I don't think splitting up is a good idea.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Jada asked. \"There are plenty of us.\"\n\nCorelli snorted derisively. \"Maybe because we're not the only ones down here.\"\n\nNobody acknowledged the comment. The mercenaries were already wary\u2014they were paid to be\u2014and Drake didn't need reminding. He went over to the doorways into the two passages and studied them with his light. Runnels had been carved in the cave floor over time by rainwater from heavy storms searching for somewhere to drain. But in both of the doorways he saw that gutters had been cut into either side of the sloping passages. More of the runnels seemed to go to the left-hand passage, but that seemed like it must be a natural phenomenon. Still, the different levels of wear had him searching his mind. The water erosion triggered a thought.\n\nDrake slipped off his pack and pulled out a sports bottle full of water. He uncapped it, went to the entrance of the left passage, and knelt to pour a few ounces across the threshold there. Jada had followed, giving him the benefit of her flashlight.\n\n\"What the hell are you doing?\" Corelli asked.\n\n\"Thinking,\" Drake replied. \"Try it sometime.\"\n\nHe went to the right-hand passage and repeated the process, nodding as he saw the water running into tiny cracks and pooling into depressions as it trickled down the slope into the tunnel.\n\n\"This way,\" he said, standing and going back to stow the water and slip his pack back on.\n\n\"What was that?\" Henriksen asked. \"Are you Tonto now?\"\n\n\"If they had so much gold then they had to mark the path for workers to carry it all out of the labyrinth on Thera, there was a hell of a lot of traffic going in and out of here at one point,\" Drake explained. He pointed to the right-hand passage. \"There's a hell of a lot more wear on that side and hardly any erosion on the left. Not a lot of foot traffic that direction.\"\n\nHenriksen considered that but looked unsure.\n\nDrake shrugged. \"Do what you want. Sully's here somewhere. Jada and I are going to find him.\"\n\nHe glanced at her to make sure he had the right to speak for her, but she already was following. She had put her hair up in a ponytail, magenta on black, and without it veiling her features, her face had a soft vulnerability that was deceiving. But when she met his gaze, he saw the familiar determination in her eyes and knew there was no turning back for either of them.\n\nAs if there ever could have been, he thought.\n\n\"The man makes sense,\" Perkins said.\n\nHenriksen glanced over at the mercenaries, who had spread out, some of them still investigating the cave while others were on alert for any sign of approach.\n\n\"The logic is solid, Mr. Henriksen,\" Perkins continued. \"I can't say we're going to be able to determine which path is correct at each turn in the labyrinth, but right now, I advise we take the tunnel on the right.\"\n\nHenriksen glanced at Olivia, but her face was an unreadable mask.\n\n\"Right it is,\" he said. \"But everyone be on guard. The protectors know these corridors intimately. And I have no doubt they have doors we'll never see. Perkins, make sure someone is covering the rear.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Perkins said, gesturing for two of his people to guard their flank.\n\nBut that was the problem in a labyrinth full of hidden chambers and secret passages. It was impossible to know where an attack would be coming from. Anything could be hiding in the shadows."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "They set off down the sloping tunnel in twos, as before, and the twists of the labyrinth quickly revealed themselves. Several times they were able to find the right path by measuring the wear on the floor, but in other places they were forced to explore wrong turns for long minutes before realizing they had chosen poorly.\n\nThis labyrinth differed significantly from the others in that it was a combination of man-made tunnels and natural caves. In another of the caves they passed through they found moss growing and fissures that led up to the surface, and Drake wondered how far underground they had traveled. There were vines as well, but only small blossoms of cave hellebore, nothing in full bloom.\n\nA curving stone staircase had been carved into the side of a large cavern that dropped away precipitously on the right. Drake kept a hand on Jada's shoulder as they went down the stairs, feeling the presence of the mercenaries behind him. He had been careful to make sure that Corelli preceded them down, not trusting the man to follow. At the bottom of the steps, they found the first writing on the walls and familiar paintings of cave hellebore, as well as the symbol of the four interlaced octagons that stood for the four labyrinths.\n\nAt the sight of that symbol, Henriksen could not hide his elation. Olivia did not smile, but Drake thought she looked flushed and heard her exhale as if she were trying to steady her breathing. Corelli's face gleamed with anticipation. Drake worried that they were allowing themselves to be distracted and were letting their guard down. But as long as Perkins and his goon squad were with them, he figured someone was making sure they weren't going to get dragged into the shadows and have their throats cut.\n\nHe nudged Jada. \"You all right?\"\n\n\"Is that a joke?\" she asked, one eyebrow arched.\n\n\"I'm not in a joking mood.\"\n\n\"That's a first,\" she said.\n\nAfter a few more steps, Jada bumped lightly against him. \"I'm just wondering how it all got turned around.\"\n\nShe didn't have to explain what she meant. Right about then, he figured she must be wondering what her father would have said if he could have seen her exploring the fourth labyrinth with his traitorous wife and his rival.\n\n\"It's not over yet,\" he said. \"What matters is how it all turns out.\"\n\nJada nodded, but her knitted brow showed she was still troubled. \"That's not all that matters.\"\n\nHe knew she was right, but it would give her no comfort for him to agree with her, so he said nothing. At the bottom of the steps, a tunnel opened to the left, and they entered a complex series of alleys, forks, corners, and dead ends that vexed them for nearly half an hour until Jada forced them all to stop and just listen. It wasn't what they heard that showed them the right path, however, but what they felt. Air moved through the labyrinth\u2014this strange combination of natural caverns and man-made maze\u2014and by following the drafts they found a side passage off what they'd thought was a dead end and were on their way again.\n\nWhen they reached a sloping tunnel that seemed more crevice than passage, the path downward nothing but jagged edges of stone that would barely function as steps, there was some doubt that they had chosen the right path, but they forged ahead nevertheless. They had to descend as if climbing down a ladder, seeking footholds among the sharp striations of stone. Drake clutched his flashlight in one hand and used the other to steady himself, knowing a fall would mean torn flesh and broken bones. He scraped his left knee and right forearm and nearly shattered his flashlight when he momentarily lost his footing.\n\n\"Where the hell are they?\" Henriksen asked aloud as they clambered down through the treacherous terrain.\n\nNo one asked who \"they\" were. Henriksen wasn't the only one who had expected to fall under attack by now, but Drake didn't let himself surrender to the temptation to think that the Protectors of the Hidden Word had abandoned their duty. Unlike the others, which had the dry stillness of age, this labyrinth felt alive to him. Aware. They were there, he felt sure.\n\nIn the narrow confines of that tunnel, clambering on the sharp, jutting stones, he felt almost alone in spite of the string of people ahead of and behind him. Drake had rarely suffered from claustrophobia\u2014being trapped beneath tons of earth in the cave-in of an Aztec tomb seven years earlier had been a rare exception\u2014but his heart began to hammer in his chest, an edge of panic gnawing at him. His body ached for open sky and fresh air the way it did when he went diving and stayed under the water too long, and he didn't like being jammed into a place so vulnerable to attack with no way to defend himself.\n\nWhen he heard the commotion ahead and below\u2014the thump of boots and clatter of slides being racked back on assault weapons\u2014his need to get out of that sharp-toothed tunnel only grew. He could hear the soldiers muttering, and when he glanced down, he realized he was almost there. Olivia had been right in front of him, and he saw her carefully extricating herself from the jagged rocks and stepping into an open chamber. Corelli and Henriksen and the mercenaries on point were already out of the tunnel.\n\n\"What is it?\" Jada asked from behind him.\n\nBelow, he heard Olivia suck in a harsh breath, and he glanced down again, watching as she swung her flashlight around.\n\n\"Diyu,\" she said, almost to herself.\n\n\"It's hell,\" Drake replied.\n\nBut it wasn't until he reached the bottom safely and emerged into the chamber\u2014a natural cave with jagged walls and a peaked ceiling like some kind of primeval chapel\u2014that the reality of it struck him. There were stone altars with the carved faces of Chinese demons, and along one pitted wall, massive iron hooks had been driven into the rock face. The wall and floor were stained a horrid copper brown, caked with centuries of spilled blood and viscera. The place breathed with the anguish of tortured souls. If it was not quite an abattoir, it was the nearest to such a place Drake had ever entered.\n\n\"Oh, my God,\" Jada said as she came in behind him.\n\nDrake flinched at the sound of her voice. The other mercenaries came behind her, some of them voicing their own surprise but most too hardened to the worst cruelties of humanity to react. Drake hoped he never became so callous.\n\n\"Look at this,\" Corelli said, pointing to a sacrificial altar.\n\nSluices had been carved around the edges of the table to carry blood away. It ran like a gutter down the side of the altar and across the floor, into a spill-off cut into the far wall, next to the cave's exit.\n\nHorrified as he was, Drake felt ice fill his veins as he remembered the map on the wall in the Chinese worship chamber on Thera.\n\n\"This is just one room,\" he said. \"There are others\u2014maybe a lot of others.\"\n\n\"Nate, look at this,\" Jada said.\n\nHe turned to find her shining her flashlight on a wall painted with horrible images of demons and torture. There were hulking men with horns and brutish faces\u2014Minotaurs\u2014and a woman with a veil over her face who had to be Diyu's version of the Mistress of the Labyrinth. Despite the Chinese characters painted on the wall and the difference in visual style, the most significant difference Drake noticed between these images and those they'd seen before had to do with the huge chalice or vase in the mistress's hands. Seven slaves knelt in a semicircle before her as if awaiting an anointment. They were all reaching for the chalice, and she seemed to be extending it, as though willing to hand it over.\n\nHenriksen and Olivia came up behind them. He glanced back at them and saw Olivia nod once, as if she'd just confirmed an earlier suspicion, and then she turned away, uninterested. Henriksen lasted only a moment longer before he, too, had moved on.\n\nThe mural hadn't surprised them at all.\n\n\"Is that supposed to be Daedalus's honey?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"That was my thought,\" Jada said.\n\nMassarsky sidled up next to them. \"Come on. We're moving out.\"\n\nDrake spun to see that he was right; Perkins had ordered his people forward. Henriksen and Corelli were vanishing through the exit from the torture chamber already, and Olivia followed. Like the soldiers, she had her gun drawn and now held it at her side. He wondered if seeing this bit of Diyu had unnerved her. She didn't seem easily shaken.\n\n\"Thanks,\" Jada said.\n\nMassarsky nodded, but he wasn't paying any attention to them. He and Garza and a few others were covering the flank, which meant they couldn't proceed until Jada and Drake got moving. Drake reached for his own weapon\u2014a ten-millimeter Glock that carried fifteen rounds\u2014and unsnapped the guard on the holster. He hesitated only a moment and then drew the gun.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Jada whispered.\n\n\"Making sure I'm ready when the moment comes.\"\n\n\"You're certain there's going to be a 'moment'?\"\n\nDrake nodded. \"There always is.\"\n\nHe and Jada hurried after Olivia, ducking through the low exit. The others had gotten a distance ahead, and only the scuff of their boots and the bouncing beams of their flashlights gave away their location in the long tunnel. Drake picked up the pace. He heard Massarsky and the others behind them, equipment jostling as they, too, made better time.\n\nThe tunnel ended at a narrow ravine perhaps a dozen feet across at its narrowest and four times that at the widest. Its walls rose precipitously. High above, a glimmer of moonlight showed through, and when they shone their flashlights upward, they could just make out the shapes of thick roots that had burrowed their way through the stone. The walls a hundred feet above them were caked with moss and vines and dotted with the white blossoms Drake thought of as cave hellebore.\n\nNarrow ledges had been carved into the walls above and below, walkways that zigzagged up toward those blossoms and down toward the dark depths of the ravine. The flashlights picked out jagged rocks far below.\n\n\"There was a bridge here,\" Corelli said.\n\nFlashlight beams illuminated the remnants of wooden supports that once had held up a footbridge that must have spanned the gap.\n\n\"Are you kidding me?\" Olivia said. \"We have to walk all the way down and then up the other side. On that?\"\n\nShe pointed out the rocky ledge with her flashlight. The walkway couldn't have been more than three feet wide.\n\n\"How do we do that?\" she continued.\n\n\"Carefully?\" Jada suggested.\n\nHer stepmother cast her the darkest glance Drake had ever seen pass between the two women.\n\nDrake glanced across the ravine, where a wide, diagonal split in the wall showed what he assumed was the door into the rest of the labyrinth. There were probably other torture chambers in the warren of tunnels that he presumed they would find on various levels as they climbed down into the ravine and up again, but the fact that a bridge once had existed suggested that their path lay ahead.\n\n\"We could jump,\" he said.\n\nHenriksen scoffed. \"It's too far.\"\n\nDrake wasn't sure about that. The ledge on the other side looked wider, and it was a good six feet lower. If it weren't for the fact that a fall onto the rocks below almost certainly would kill them, he would have been willing to gamble that with the right footing and trajectory, he could have made it.\n\n\"So we walk,\" Drake said.\n\nOlivia gave a pensive sigh and then raised her gun and took aim at Drake's chest.\n\n\"Well, we do,\" she said.\n\nAs Jada reached for her holstered weapon, Drake started to bring his Glock up to shoot her. All over the ledge there was movement, guns coming up, flashlight beams dancing around. Corelli let out a cry that sounded like a celebration.\n\nTyr Henriksen stepped between Olivia and Drake.\n\n\"Olivia, what do you think you're doing?\"\n\nIt seemed to Drake that she had removed her mask at last. The smile that lifted the corners of her mouth was cruel and lovely and tinged with madness.\n\n\"Finally disabusing you of the notion that you're in charge here,\" she said, raising the pistol and aiming it at Henriksen's face.\n\nDrake blinked in surprise even as Jada let out a small gasp. Neither of them had seen this coming. Apparently, Henriksen hadn't, either. He stiffened, lifted his chin, and glared at her, then tilted his head toward his bodyguard.\n\n\"Corelli,\" he said. \"Try not to kill her.\"\n\nWith a laugh, Corelli shuffled over beside Olivia, but his gun was trained on Drake and Jada. \"Nothing to worry about on that score, boss.\"\n\nEven as Henriksen absorbed this shock, the mercenaries took aim as if they were a firing squad, but all the guns were pointed at Henriksen, Drake, and Jada.\n\n\"You incredible bitch,\" Jada said. \"You killed my dad, after all, didn't you?\"\n\nOlivia gazed at her with regret. \"I know you'd like to believe that, but I actually really liked Luka. Sweet man. In the end, he was too innocent for me. I wanted him to be a part of this, but when he went off on his little crusade\u2014well, somebody was going to kill him. It just didn't end up being me. The protectors got to him first.\"\n\n\"You knew they existed?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"Not until Luka turned up dead. Then when I heard about Dr. Cheney, well, it was obvious someone didn't want us to find this place.\"\n\n\"Us,\" Drake echoed.\n\nCorelli smiled. \"Us.\"\n\nDrake narrowed his eyes, feeling his hand tighten on the grip of his gun. \"You came after us in New York. In the van. You set Luka's apartment on fire.\"\n\n\"I coordinated,\" Corelli said, correcting him. He glanced at Perkins. \"You can hire anyone to do anything if you know who to call.\"\n\nDrake turned to Perkins. \"If those were your guys, they were pretty sloppy.\"\n\n\"Not my people,\" Perkins said. \"This is my first time working for Mrs. Hzujak.\"\n\nHenriksen winced at the words, this confirmation that Perkins was taking orders from Olivia instead of from him.\n\n\"I'm the one who hired you, damn it!\" Henriksen snapped at the mercenary commander. \"How the hell is she paying you?\"\n\n\"What you offered them is nothing compared to a cut of what's waiting for us in the treasure chamber,\" Olivia said, her eyes alight with greed and zealotry.\n\n\"It's a calculated risk,\" Perkins admitted. \"We consider it an investment.\"\n\nMassarsky shifted uncomfortably. When Drake glanced at him, the huge ex-soldier shrugged.\n\n\"Sorry, man.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Drake laughed drily. \"No hard feelings.\"\n\n\"Enough,\" Olivia said, tilting her head toward Jada. \"Get the girl's pack.\"\n\nWhen Corelli came forward, keeping his weapon trained on Drake, Jada started to shuffle away from him, dangerously close to the edge of the ravine.\n\n\"Give it to him,\" Drake said. \"She wants your father's journal and the maps. They're useless to us down here. Luka never made it this far. If he guessed the fourth labyrinth was in China, he didn't write it down. There's nothing in there that can help us.\"\n\nOlivia laughed. \"Nothing can help you.\"\n\n\"God, when did you become so cold-blooded?\" Henriksen asked.\n\n\"Says the man who'd stab his own brother in the back to get what he wants,\" Olivia said.\n\n\"Never literally,\" Henriksen said. \"I've never killed anyone.\"\n\n\"Too bad you missed your chance,\" Olivia said.\n\nPerkins cleared his throat. \"Can we just get on with this? It's a long climb down and up again, and we've gotta do it again coming back.\"\n\nOlivia shot him an irritated look, then gestured to Corelli.\n\nCorelli lifted his gun and pressed the barrel against Drake's temple. \"Drop the gun, dumbass. You're slightly outnumbered.\"\n\nHe snickered. That, more than anything, was what flipped the switch inside Drake.\n\n\"Dropping it,\" he said. \"Just don't talk anymore. Your breath is terrible.\"\n\nCorelli shoved the gun against his temple. Drake held his gun away from him and bent down slowly, lowering it to the ground.\n\n\"This guy,\" Corelli said, glancing over at Olivia. \"Can I kill him now or what?\"\n\nThe second his gaze shifted away, Drake knocked his arm back, throwing off his aim, and kicked him in the chest. Corelli staggered backward, arms pinwheeling, right over the edge of the ravine. He screamed on the way down and pulled the trigger twice, but the bullets vanished in the darkness above them.\n\n\"Son of a bitch!\" Olivia shrieked, striding toward him, leaving Garza and another mercenary to cover Henriksen.\n\nPerkins and Massarsky were on Drake instantly, guns pointed at his head, but Drake wasn't stupid. He didn't try picking up his weapon, just laced his fingers at the back of his neck.\n\n\"Come on, guys,\" he said. \"Tell me you weren't tempted to do that yourself. I mean, I know you're going to shoot us, but that clown had to go first.\"\n\n\"Nate?\" Jada said quietly.\n\nHis bravado failed when he heard the crack in her voice. But he didn't regret what he'd done. Corelli had been about to kill him, which meant he'd bought them a couple of extra minutes of life. And now Olivia had no sidekick, no one to share her plan, no one else who knew where to find what they were looking for. Perkins had just become her best friend, but he cared only about the gold. Olivia was alone, and she deserved that.\n\n\"What are you waiting for?\" Olivia snapped, glancing at Perkins even as she kept her weapon aimed at Henriksen.\n\n\"What's wrong, Olivia?\" Henriksen said. \"Afraid to get blood on your own hands?\"\n\nDrake had been fighting his instinct to like the guy. But since they were both about to be shot, he figured that put them on the same side, and he couldn't help but admire the big Norwegian's fearlessness.\n\n\"Just waiting for your order,\" Perkins said.\n\nFourteen mercenaries and one coldhearted witch, all with guns aimed at them. Drake felt a terrible sadness grip his heart as he thought about Sully and realized that whenever they caught up with him, they were going to kill him, too.\n\nHe stood, ignoring the mercenaries who shouted at him not to move, and reached out to take Jada's hand. Hell, they were family. She squeezed, and he glanced at her.\n\n\"Now I know how Butch and Sundance felt,\" she whispered, but her smile was strained and her eyes were damp with unshed tears.\n\n\"Do it,\" Olivia said. \"Kill\u2014\"\n\nMassarsky shouted and backed away from the ravine, swinging his assault rifle around to aim at the edge.\n\n\"What the hell?\" Garza yelled, and pulled the trigger.\n\nAll eyes turned toward the ravine as hooded men clutching metal claws dragged themselves onto the ledge, moving inhumanly fast. Garza's bullets punched through one of them, sending blood spraying out into the gap, the body tumbling down onto the rocks below. Gunfire echoed off the walls of the ravine, mercenaries shouted, but the Protectors of the Hidden Word were silent as they attacked, killing and dying in equal measure.\n\nOne of them lunged at Drake, his blade whistling through the shadows in a wide arc, aimed for his throat."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "The gunshot made Drake flinch even as he tried to dodge the killer's knife. But the hooded man fell short, his lunge losing momentum, and he crashed to the rocky ledge at Drake's feet and twitched once, then went still.\n\nJada stood behind him, gun in hand, looking like she might throw up. Her weapon was still holstered; she had managed to pick up his Glock. Amid the chaos of gunfire and voices, bloodshed and brutality, he darted forward and snatched the gun away from her. A hooded woman\u2014one of the first females he'd seen among them\u2014raced up, metal climbing claws like brass knuckles on her hands, ready to slash him to ribbons. Drake held his breath when he took aim and shot her in the chest.\n\nThey had no time for hesitation, but it would haunt him. Even in self-defense, killing haunted him. Almost always, he thought. Corelli might have been an exception.\n\nWith a glance around, he spotted Olivia up against the wall of the ravine, gun held out in front of her, firing at the hooded killers still swarming up from over the ledge. But Perkins and Garza were nearby, and they had firepower to spare. The semiautomatic weapons' fire ripped at the air, the echoes punishingly loud.\n\nDrake grabbed Jada's hand and dragged her back into the tunnel that led back up to the torture chamber. For a moment, they were out of sight of both sets of killers. Drake turned to her, put a hand under her chin, and forced her to look up at him. Her gaze was far away, and he worried that she was in shock.\n\n\"Jada, listen to me.\"\n\n\"I shot that man.\"\n\n\"If you hadn't, he'd have gutted me,\" Drake said. \"You saved my life. But we're both on borrowed time here. Whoever wins out there, they're going to kill us, so we've gotta run for it.\"\n\nShe blinked as if coming awake. \"If we try to go back, they'll catch us. We'll never make it to the surface.\"\n\nDrake shook his head. \"No, no. I don't want to go back.\"\n\nJada glanced at the end of the tunnel and saw one of the hooded men straddling a mercenary on the ledge, slashing at the ex-soldier's throat with a curved blade. Arterial blood sprayed in an arc.\n\n\"We can't walk down the cliff paths. We'll never get past them, and even if we did\u2014\"\n\n\"There isn't time,\" Drake said, his heart like a tiger trying to smash free of its cage. He thought his chest might burst, it was hammering so hard. \"There's only one way we're surviving the next hundred seconds or so.\"\n\nOne of the hooded men slipped into the tunnel, spotted them, and cocked back a hand in which he clutched a throwing knife. Drake shot him twice. Twelve shots left in the Glock's magazine before he'd have to reload. The killer and his blade hit the rock floor at the same time. The man dragged himself to his knees, blood raining from his chest, and reached for the knife.\n\nIt was Jada who put the third bullet in him.\n\nShe had her own gun out now, the two of them staring at that opening, waiting for more of the killers to come for them. But through the opening, they could see the flashlight beams slashing the darkness, and enough of that light bounced off the walls that they could make out the dim outline of the tunnel across the ravine.\n\nJada stiffened and then spun toward him. \"You can't be serious. If we fall short, we're dead.\"\n\nDrake holstered his gun. \"We don't jump for it, we die anyway.\" He shoved his flashlight into his backpack, working fast, zipped it, and slipped it back on. \"Sully's waiting for us, kid.\"\n\nJada swore, snapping her gun back into its holster. She kept swearing over and over again, the profanity like a mantra as she jammed her flashlight into her backpack and then turned to look at him defiantly.\n\n\"It's gonna be\u2014\" he began.\n\nJada punched him in the arm. \"Just shut up and run.\"\n\nDrake felt a strange, mad surrender then. Not to death but to fate. An old song floated into his mind, one Sully played from time to time: Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. He'd never understood just how true that was until this moment. Free, exhilarated by his terror and hope, he took Jada's hand, and they ran to the tunnel's end and onto the ledge. Their hands unclasped just as they reached the edge, and then they launched themselves full speed across the twelve-foot gap.\n\nFor an eyeblink, Drake felt weightless, with the jagged rocks below and the slivers of moonlight high above. Then gravity took hold, and they began to fall. He windmilled his arms to keep balanced in the air, and then he slammed into the far wall, cracking his head against it. He slid to the ledge, then spun around and saw Jada land on her belly, legs hanging out over the yawning darkness below. Her fingers scrabbled for purchase and found none, and he knew she was going over, knew she would die broken and bloody.\n\nHe caught her wrist, throwing himself backward so he wouldn't be pulled along with her. He slammed the heel of his boot against the remains of a support that once had held up this end of the missing bridge. The rocky ledge scraped his back and legs as he dragged her up on top of him, and for a moment they lay there, hearts racing together. Then a stray bullet struck the wall above them, sending tiny shards of rock flying, and they were in motion. Drake rolled Jada off him, and the two got to their knees and turned to look at the scene playing out across the ravine.\n\nHalf a dozen hooded men were still scaling the wall below the opposite ledge. Many lay dead, crumpled in bloody heaps around the mercenaries and protectors who were still trying desperately to murder one another. Olivia remained pinned against the wall, with Perkins putting himself between her and the hooded men. At least five of the mercenaries were down, wounded or dead\u2014he figured probably the latter. The Protectors of the Hidden Word didn't seem like the wounding kind.\n\nHenriksen let out a primitive, furious roar and grabbed hold of the hooded man who'd been trying to cut him open. The big Norwegian, a blond silhouette captured in the illumination from someone else's flashlight, slammed the hooded man against the wall twice, then a third time. The echo of cracking bone mixed with the sounds of death and battle, and then Henriksen hurled the man into the ravine.\n\nThen he spun and stared right at Drake.\n\n\"He's looking at\u2014\" Jada started.\n\n\"Us,\" Drake agreed, standing up and waving. \"Jump! It's your only shot!\"\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Jada demanded.\n\nBut even as she spoke, Henriksen stooped and snatched the gun from a dead mercenary, slung it across his back, and retreated a couple of steps before sprinting for the edge.\n\nOlivia screamed and pushed past Perkins, taking aim and firing while Henriksen was airborne.\n\nThe Norwegian crashed into the wall and almost fell backward into the ravine before Drake steadied him. Only then did Drake realize that Olivia had missed. Across the gap, she shrieked in anger and started shooting at the three of them. There were still hooded men trying to get to her, to cut her throat, but she was more concerned with trying to make sure they died first.\n\nPerkins knocked her back against the wall, saving her from a blade that whistled through the air and would have caught her in the chest. But the action cost him, and as he turned to take aim, two of the hooded men descended on him, their blades rising and falling, blood spattering the lens of his flashlight so that its beam was darkened with spots of shadow that had been his life, now extinguished.\n\nStill, the odds had changed. Assault rifles tended to have that effect. The last few hooded men came over the ledge and were shot before they could make it a handful of feet. The mercenaries were going to win this, but either way, Drake knew that he, Jada, and Henriksen needed to be gone.\n\n\"We can't stay here,\" he said.\n\nHenriksen risked one last hate-filled glance at Olivia, and then all three of them rushed for the tunnel entrance near the supports of the long-ruined bridge.\n\n\"Go get them!\" Olivia screamed at someone. \"Get over there and kill them!\"\n\nAs Drake ducked through the tunnel entrance, he thought it was Massarsky's voice he heard behind him.\n\n\"You're out of your mind, lady. No one's jumping that. You'd have to be crazy or out of choices, and we're neither. They can't get out without going past us.\"\n\nThere was more, but as Drake, Jada, and Henriksen hurried into the twisted knot of tunnels on the other side of the ravine, the voices were muffled and they could hear only gunshots.\n\nHenriksen had no flashlight, but Drake and Jada lit the way ahead. They made wordless progress, coming to junctions and doors, narrow passages and dead ends, as they had before, but they had become veritable experts in navigating through labyrinths by now, and when they chose the wrong direction, it was never for very long.\n\nSoon they had left the echoes of gunshots and murder behind, but Drake knew the danger would catch up to them eventually and hadn't a clue what they would do when it did.\n\nIn another piece of hell\u2014these torture rooms like the chambers of this diabolical labyrinth's heart\u2014they stopped to catch their breath. Drake and Jada leaned against the edges of the entry passage while Henriksen walked around the hideous cavern, plunging unwisely into the shadows.\n\n\"Throw some light over here?\" he asked.\n\nJada ignored him, so Drake raised his flashlight. Henriksen had his back to them, staring at an enormous mechanism composed of a huge stone wheel with hooks jutting from the rock. The wheel had been stained dark with ancient blood, yet Drake thought he detected the scent of copper in the air. He wondered if pain could have a ghost, if the stink of human suffering could haunt a place when even the most tenacious souls had long since departed.\n\nHe wanted out of the fourth labyrinth. Out of Diyu. He didn't care about gold or treasure. From the moment Sully had been dragged off, this job had been about getting his best friend back alive, but the sense of adventure and the promise of gold had maintained a certain secondary allure in the back of his head. No more.\n\n\"Hey,\" Jada whispered.\n\nDrake looked over at her. In the glow of their flashlights, he saw that magenta strands had come loose from her ponytail. To someone who hadn't been at her side these last days, she might have looked fragile, but to Drake, she seemed as strong as if she'd been forged in fire.\n\n\"Thanks,\" she said.\n\nHe didn't feel deserving of her gratitude. What had he done for her thus far except be by her side while people died around her, while she took a life for the first time, while her godfather had been stolen from her and her stepmother betrayed her? He couldn't bring her father back to life.\n\nThe best he could do was finish the job they'd started.\n\n\"Any time,\" he said, grinning. \"I wouldn't want to go on a suicide mission with anyone else.\"\n\nJada pushed off from the wall and went to punch him.\n\n\"Enough!\" Drake said, holding up his hands in surrender.\n\nJada smiled. \"Tough guy.\" Then she walked toward Henriksen. \"All right, Tyr. Time to tell us what the hell that was all about back there.\"\n\nHenriksen turned, still in the pool of Drake's flashlight. He hung his head, shadows gathering under his eyes, and it made him look a century older.\n\n\"I never thought she would go so far,\" he said. Lifting his head, he turned his sorrowful gaze upon Jada. \"Tonight I have blood on my hands for the first time.\"\n\n\"Join the club,\" she said. She tried to sound cavalier, but Drake heard the pain in her voice. \"But you're not exactly an innocent. Your whole career has been about doing whatever it took to get what you wanted. If you never killed someone or had anybody killed, I'm willing to bet people have died because of you before.\"\n\nThe words scuffed the walls, but they were nothing compared to the screams that once had reverberated here.\n\n\"She's got you there,\" Drake said.\n\nHenriksen glanced at him and managed to look almost ashamed. \"You are not what I expected, Mr. Drake.\" He nodded toward Jada. \"Either of you. You are survivors, and you have my admiration.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, considering we thought you were pretty much the devil when this all started, I guess you're not what we expected, either,\" Drake said. \"But we don't have time for group therapy, Tyr. I'm going to bet there are still some spooky ninja guys\u2014\"\n\n\"And girls,\" Jada put in.\n\n\"Yeah, I noticed that,\" Drake said. \"My point is, no matter how many Protectors of the Hidden Word were killed by Perkins's goon squad, I doubt they're all dead. If I was calling the shots, I'd have held some of my people back. They've got Sully and Ian Welch somewhere, and maybe others. Never mind the gold. There could be one or two right around the next turn. So we're not going another step until you tell us what it is you've been holding back.\"\n\nHenriksen frowned. Jada aimed her flashlight at his eyes, and he squinted, turning away.\n\n\"Come on,\" she said. \"No more secrets. If the three of us are going to make it through till morning, we need to work together.\"\n\nSeveral seconds ticked by in the silence of the torture chamber. Its gruesomeness struck Drake anew, and he became more impatient than ever to be gone from there, to find the heart of the labyrinth and make an end to things.\n\n\"Tyr\u2014\"\n\n\"Knossos,\" Henriksen said.\n\nDrake shrugged. \"What about it?\"\n\n\"The labyrinth there is in ruins,\" Henriksen went on, his gaze shifting from Drake to Jada. \"But I've had theories about Minos for years, and I've had teams going through the ruins, doing small excavations, all through museums and universities but with my people running it. One of those excavations turned up the wreckage of a chamber.\"\n\n\"A worship chamber,\" Jada said, her voice low.\n\nHenriksen nodded. \"I brought your father in after my people had translated fragments of several tablets and the writing on a shattered sacramental jar we had recovered. I had been keeping track of progress at Crocodilopolis for a while, but once your father confirmed my suspicions that Daedalus had designed both the labyrinth at Knossos and the one in Crocodile City, it became my priority. I'd hoped to find a complete worship chamber there, and of course we found even more than that.\"\n\n\"But there are things you knew already,\" Drake said, studying his face. \"Things you learned from the fragments from Knossos.\"\n\n\"Bits and pieces. Suppositions,\" Henriksen said. \"The first Mistress of the Labyrinth was Ariadne herself. Her beauty and gentleness kept the Minotaur calm\u2014\"\n\n\"There's no such thing\u2014\" Jada began.\n\n\"But there was!\" Henriksen snapped. \"You don't understand.\"\n\nHe took Drake's flashlight and shone it upon the wall, where a gruesome painting in the ancient Chinese style represented the Mistress of the Labyrinth tipping a cup of honey into the mouth of a slave whose back was streaked with scars from the lash. Others awaited the same communion. One of them, off to the right, was hunched over, having already received the cup. Horns jutted from his head, and his features were contorted, almost savage.\n\n\"You've gotta be kidding me,\" Drake rasped, staring. \"The honey? What, it turned them into monsters?\"\n\n\"Not with horns,\" Henriksen said, waving his disbelief away. \"Those were an affectation, something to frighten the others, I think, and to perpetuate the legend that Daedalus had so carefully built. The skeleton we examined in the labyrinth of Sobek\u2014the one you found on the stairs under the altar\u2014had the horns of an actual bull. They were probably tied to his head with some kind of leather strap.\n\n\"There are conditions that could explain many of the Minotaur's legendary features. The chemical composition of the honey might have triggered hypertrichosis, causing the growth of thick, shaggy hair all over their bodies, their faces included. I also suspect they attained their monstrous size through slave labor and the honey's activation of the pituitary gland's growth hormones. It's even possible that one or two grew cutaneous horns, prompting the legend to begin with and leading Daedalus and his inner circle to use fake horns to perpetuate the monstrous image of the Minotaur in order to keep people too terrified to attempt to explore the labyrinth. But the key element is strength and aggression. Savagery. Perhaps an edge of lunacy.\"\n\nJada's flashlight beam wavered. \"What are 'cutaneous horns'? Is that even something real?\"\n\n\"They're not actual horn. In rare cases, people have seemed to grow horns on their heads or faces or hands, but it's a buildup of keratotic material, like hair or fingernails. Sometimes there's cancer involved \u2026\" Henriksen waved the topic away. \"This is not important.\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" Drake said. \"And it's pretty gross. How the hell do they do it? What's in the honey?\"\n\nHenriksen smiled slightly, as if he couldn't help it. \"The white blossoms you've seen? Much of what we learned from the fragments discovered at Knossos concerned them. White hellebore.\"\n\nDrake turned his flashlight back on the wall painting of the slaves being given honey in a ritual presided over by the Mistress of the Labyrinth. Images of those flowers were mixed amid ancient Chinese characters and portrayals of hellish torture.\n\n\"But those flowers aren't white hellebore,\" Jada said. \"We've established that.\"\n\nHenriksen arched an eyebrow. \"Tell me what you know about Helleborus.\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"Only what your research team turned up. The ancients thought there were two species, white and black, both poisonous.\"\n\n\"In the legends, black hellebore was a cure for madness,\" Drake said.\n\n\"But the flower they thought was white hellebore back then\u2014\" Jada began.\n\n\"It's still called white hellebore\u2014\" Drake put in.\n\n\"\u2014isn't white hellebore at all. It's a different species. Like Nate said, they still call it that, but it's something else.\"\n\nHenriksen nodded. \"But what if, in ancient times, true white hellebore did exist? What if the flower they call by that name today, knowing it isn't the same species, is not the same flower the ancients called white hellebore? What if true white hellebore has been all but extinct for more than two thousand years\u2014except inside this labyrinth, where it had continued to be cultivated all down through the ages?\"\n\nDrake stared at him. \"You're telling me this whole thing has been about flowers?\"\n\n\"More than you can imagine,\" Henriksen said.\n\n\"Why?\" Jada asked. \"You want to create an army of Minotaurs or something?\"\n\nHenriksen's expression hardened; whatever camaraderie they had built through their mutual survival was shattered.\n\n\"I don't,\" he said. \"But I'm sure there are more than a few governments that would love that.\"\n\n\"Oh, my\u2014\" Jada started.\n\n\"I don't think it's that simple, though,\" Henriksen said, forging onward. \"Look at that painting. There are six or seven slaves being fed that honey, but not all of them are Minotaurs. What we've translated suggests that creating the Minotaurs was a happy accident, a by-product of the intended purpose of the white hellebore and the honey made from it. Daedalus\u2014and later Talos\u2014wanted slaves, and the primary effect of the distilled essence of the white hellebore was to make those who ingested it suggestible. Controllable. In theory it's not unlike the manner in which Haitian 'witch doctors' were once supposed to have used tetrodotoxin from puffer fish and other species to induce a trance state, but without the motor and mental impairment associated with those toxins. In small doses, Daedalus's honey left his subjects none the wiser, and in larger doses it either turned them into mindless drones or triggered the physiological and psychological changes that created Minotaurs. At Knossos, the honey had another name. In English, it translates as\u2014\"\n\n\"The hidden word,\" Drake interrupted. \"The word they all had to obey.\"\n\nHenriksen nodded. \"Precisely.\"\n\n\"You're saying the hooded men aren't protecting Daedalus's treasure,\" Jada said. \"They're protecting the white hellebore.\"\n\n\"This is where Olivia and I disagree,\" Henriksen replied, his voice echoing off the torture chamber's walls. \"I believe that all references to treasure in the ancient records are really references to the flower. Mr. Drake, if you're the expert you claim to be, you must know that historically, white hellebore has also been reputed to be one of the key ingredients used\u2014\"\n\n\"In alchemy,\" Drake finished for him. He shook his head, waves of disbelief washing over him. He just had to make sure he didn't drown in them.\n\n\"I don't think alchemists turned base metals to gold any more than I think you can pull a rabbit out of a hat,\" Henriksen said. \"I think all the great alchemists did was get their hands on some white hellebore and use it to influence the minds of those around them to control their perceptions and make them believe they had seen something they had not seen.\"\n\n\"There's no treasure,\" Drake said. \"No gold?\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm sure there must be something, or there was once upon a time,\" Henriksen said. \"Do I think that Daedalus paid his workers with gold from inside the labyrinths? No. At Knossos, I suspect he paid them in stones or nuts before he realized that it would be much easier to simply take over their minds entirely and enslave them, which is what he likely did while building the labyrinth of Sobek.\n\n\"Olivia disagrees. She believes that Daedalus must have accumulated vast wealth, and perhaps she's right. But we won't know until we reach the center of the labyrinth. If she cared only for the white hellebore, she'd have turned around the moment we found it as we entered Diyu. But she wants that gold.\"\n\nDrake scowled. \"While all you want is to sell mind control to whichever government is the highest bidder.\"\n\nHenriksen shrugged. \"Someone's going to profit from this. I'd rather it were me.\"\n\nJada took a step backward. \"This is what my father wanted to stop,\" she said, staring at him.\n\n\"I have no doubt,\" Henriksen agreed. \"But I'm not some James Bond villain, Jada. It's not as if I'm going to try to take over the world. I'm only a businessman.\"\n\n\"Do you have any idea what this could be used for?\" Jada demanded. \"Think of the espionage applications. Dosing world leaders so you could control their decisions. Never mind the military uses. You know that soldiers would be experimented on. And what about dictatorships that want more pliable people?\"\n\n\"As I said,\" Henriksen replied, \"someone's going to do it.\"\n\n\"Unless we destroy the white hellebore,\" Jada said. \"Burn it all.\"\n\nHenriksen clenched his fists. \"I'm afraid I can't allow that.\"\n\n\"Whoa!\" Drake said, dropping his hand to the gun on his belt. \"Let's all take a breath, okay?\" He shone his flashlight at Jada and saw the emotions wracking her features. \"Henriksen might not be a world conqueror, but right now, we have no idea what Olivia has in mind.\"\n\n\"Oh, make no mistake,\" Henriksen said. \"If whoever she hires for the science can synthesize the chemicals, there's nothing Olivia would like more than to have presidents and despots as her puppets.\"\n\nDrake glanced back and forth between them. \"Our goals haven't changed. I'm here for Sully.\"\n\n\"I'm here for my father,\" Jada corrected him. \"I love my Uncle Vic, but I'm here to stop Henriksen\u2014or my stepmother\u2014from getting what they want.\"\n\n\"Just hang on!\" Drake snapped. \"Do not fight this fight right now. We have two choices, all three of us. We go forward or we go back. If Sully's really still alive, I'm not leaving here without him, and I'm guessing both of you need to know what's at the heart of this place, yes?\"\n\n\"I'm not going back,\" Jada said.\n\nHenriksen's eyes blazed with his own intent.\n\n\"Then let's get going,\" Drake said. \"One fight at a time.\"\n\nThey had lost time with revelations and argument, and as they renewed their exploration of Diyu, Drake felt constantly aware of the darkness they'd left behind. Every shadow and crevice breathed with menace because they had no idea how many hooded men might remain, but the longer they went without being attacked, the more his main concern became Olivia and the surviving mercenaries. It had sounded like Massarsky had taken charge when Perkins had been killed. He'd seemed okay for a guy who used his military training as a soldier for hire, and maybe a killer for hire if the price was right. But Drake had a feeling they wouldn't be having a beer together anytime soon.\n\nThey moved swiftly, making fewer wrong turns, working half on instinct now. Jada froze Henriksen out as if he weren't there at all, and that sat just fine with Drake. If the two of them weren't talking, it meant he didn't have to worry about breaking up a fight. Having to walk through three additional torture chambers\u2014they were more plentiful down in the twisted bowels of the maze\u2014only put more of a damper on any idle conversation. No one was feeling chatty except for Drake, and even he stopped trying to fill the silence after a while.\n\nWhen they discovered the living quarters of the Protectors of the Hidden Word, they drew their guns and didn't holster them again. Yet amid the stone chambers\u2014filled with wooden frame walls and floor platforms, as well as blankets and makeshift beds from a variety of eras\u2014they met no resistance. Drake tried counting rooms and beds but decided the quicker they left the place, the better.\n\n\"Nate, do you hear it?\" Jada whispered, her breathing low and even, her gaze shifting about with a new degree of skittishness.\n\nDrake nodded. They could hear the sound of running water, but not from pipes. He led the way with his flashlight, and at the rear of the warren of rooms that made up the living quarters, he found a small door that led into a natural fissure. The smell hit him even before he entered, and he knew he'd found what passed for a bathroom. Twenty feet below, a narrow river sliced through rock, rushing along an underground course it must have followed for centuries, even millennia.\n\n\"That's disgusting,\" Jada said.\n\n\"But necessary,\" Henriksen said. \"Somewhere they'll have a kitchen. They must hunt for their food and gather greens in secret. They might even go into the city to find\u2014\"\n\n\"We don't care about their culture,\" Drake said, giving him a hard look.\n\nHenriksen nodded. Interested as he was, he understood this wasn't why they had come. It wasn't an anthropology study.\n\nDrake threaded back through the rooms, ducking through doorways until he had led them back to the tunnel they'd diverted from to investigate the quarters. The river had him thinking, wondering if the ravine they'd jumped also once had had water at the bottom. He had a feeling they had almost reached their destination, so he was surprised when the contortions of the labyrinth began to take them upward.\n\nThe sound began as a dull roar.\n\n\"What is that?\" Drake asked.\n\nThey backtracked along a dead end turn and then started along a zigzag tunnel that had started as a natural cave and been smoothed and widened by human efforts. The sound diminished and then built again, growing ever louder, until the hissing roar filled the tunnel around them.\n\nWhen Drake's flashlight beam picked up the gleam of moisture on the tunnel wall ahead, he knew what they had found.\n\nThe cavern was longer and wider than either of the others they'd encountered thus far. The river came rushing in from the right and over a ledge, creating a forty-foot wall of crashing water that filled the vast cavern with a damp chill and a deafening white noise. Their tunnel ended on a plateau at the top of the waterfall.\n\n\"It's beautiful,\" Jada said in surprise, raising her voice to be heard.\n\nTheir flashlight beams strobed the walls, picking out faded characters and symbols painted in some places and engraved in others. Far above, slits of moonlight provided no real illumination but a glimpse of eyelet crevices that would allow the tiniest bit of sunlight in on a clear day. Long strips of moss ran down the far wall and covered the rocks on either side of the waterfall, both there on the plateau and in the lower half of the cavern below them, and vines of white hellebore, long since adapted to this bizarre subterranean hell, were plentiful amid the moss.\n\nThough the flashlights were powerful, they could make out few details below. But Drake saw at least one tunnel leading away from the area around the bottom of the waterfall, and he suspected that what looked like deeper patches of darkness beyond all but the dimmest glow of their lights might be other such tunnels.\n\n\"This is it,\" he said. \"Down there somewhere.\"\n\nJada scanned her flashlight beam across the other side of the rushing river, then ran it along the plateau toward the edge of the waterfall. Drake saw the stairs the same moment she discovered them, carved into the wall beside the waterfall, descending into the lower cavern. They gleamed with spray, and he knew they would have to watch their step.\n\nThe violence began so quickly, Drake barely knew what was happening. Henriksen grabbed his shoulder and spun him around, reaching for his wrist. Drake held his gun in one hand and the flashlight in the other, and for several heartbeats he thought that Henriksen was attacking, making his move now to eliminate them to save the white hellebore. He cracked the man across the skull with the barrel of the Glock, and Henriksen staggered back, dropping to one knee, blood welling on his forehead.\n\nBut he was waving his gun the other direction along the plateau, toward the dark cave mouth from which the river spouted.\n\n\"There!\" Henriksen shouted. \"Turn the bloody light over there!\"\n\nDrake swung the flashlight beam. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jada just beginning to turn.\n\nThen he saw them, five shadows rushing along the river's edge into the pool of light. Only five, Drake thought, which had to mean that their numbers were thinning badly. Their odds of surviving to see the sky again were improving.\n\nOne of the figures broke away, picking up speed. Henriksen raised his gun, steadied his aim, and fired. The killer crumpled, but forward momentum brought him rolling along the rock shelf toward them, and in the circle of Jada's flashlight beam, he tumbled to a halt and lay dead, gazing up at them with hollow, lifeless eyes.\n\nIan Welch.\n\nSick dread clutching at his heart, Drake directed his light at the others. Henriksen was taking aim again.\n\n\"Don't shoot!\" Drake shouted.\n\nHis flashlight found four faces, but only one of them was not half hidden beneath a black hood. Drake swore.\n\n\"Sully, stop!\"\n\nBut Drake could see in his eyes that Sully did not know him. The Sully who had been his best friend for nearly twenty years did not live behind those eyes anymore. Sully did not know him.\n\nFor half a second, Drake wondered if he could shoot him just to wound, but he wasn't that good a marksman and they'd never be able to carry him out of the labyrinth if he couldn't walk on his own.\n\nIt was half a second too long.\n\n\"Sully, it's me!\" Drake yelled.\n\nThen Sully barreled into him with enough force to knock the flashlight from his hand and the air from his chest. Drake staggered backward, only just managing to hold on to his gun as Sully put both hands around his throat and squeezed.\n\nStruggling, trying to retreat, Drake felt his boot slip off the plateau's rocky edge. Jada screamed his name, and then he and Sully were falling. They plunged into the cold, roaring river, Sully still with his hands wrapped around Drake's throat. Drake's mind was screaming for oxygen, his chest tight and burning after Sully had knocked the air out of him, and he wondered if Sully or the river would do him in.\n\nThen they were spilling over the waterfall, falling, punished and dragged downward, and he realized it would be the fall that killed him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "Drake thrashed in the water, tearing loose from Sully's grip. The river rushed around him, but for long drowning seconds he could not discern up from down, life from death. Then his left foot hit something hard and unyielding, and he knew that it must be below. Fighting to keep himself from flipping over again in the powerful current, he thrust his legs down, struck bottom, and propelled himself upward. His chest convulsed with the need for air, and when at last he broke the surface, he gave himself over to a helpless primal gasping, his mind devoid of reason, desiring only to breathe.\n\nA hand snagged his shirt, and then Sully latched on to him, arms and legs wrapped around him from behind, trying to force him down. Drake shot an elbow into his gut, felt the sharp exhalation behind him, then reached around and put Sully in a headlock. Choking and dragging him at the same time, he pushed for the rocky riverbank. He'd dropped his flashlight up on the plateau, and though he didn't remember letting go of his gun, he had lost it when they'd plunged over the waterfall. All he had to fight with were his hands and his wits, and he hoped they wouldn't fail him.\n\nOnly the dimmest light existed down there in the lower cavern. It might as well have been pitch-dark save for the gleam of moonlight and reflected illumination from wavering flashlight beams above. That wet blackness gave form to rocks and walls and its absence indicated the presence of tunnel mouths, but otherwise Drake was in darkness.\n\nHe felt the river bottom underfoot and knew he must be near the bank. The roar of the waterfall on his right made it hard to hear much else, yet another churning noise came from his left, and he glanced that way to see the glistening blackness of a vertical rock face\u2014the far end of the cavern. The river flowed into a tunnel at the base of the rock.\n\nPanic raced through him. His throat raw from nearly drowning, his profanity-laced mutterings came out a meager rasp, but in his mind he was shouting. If they were dragged into that river tunnel, the darkness would be complete, and there was no way to know when or if they would enter another cavern where they might climb out. The underground river might go on for miles, joining the Qin Huai or Yangtze somewhere beyond the city of Nanjing. By then, they probably would be dead.\n\nDrake tried to hoist Sully from the water, staggering toward shore, fighting the current. Sully had seemed disoriented, but now he thrashed against Drake's choke hold, elbowed his ribs, and clawed at his hands. He twisted and bucked, and Drake lost his footing. Then he fell into the torrent again, washing toward the back of the cavern to vanish into the subterranean river's hidden path forever.\n\n\"No!\" Drake screamed, getting his footing, grabbing Sully around the torso as if tackling him.\n\nHe drove Sully toward the shore, dragging them both waist deep through the water even as Sully tried to break his grip. In the shallows, where the river turned almost gentle, Drake gave Sully a shove and sent him careening onto the rocky bank. Lungs burning and heart thundering, Drake stood with his hands on his knees. His muscles were exhausted from fighting the river, and though the air tasted sweet, each sip made his ragged throat ache even worse.\n\nIn the dark, he saw the black silhouette of his best friend rise and turn toward him. The only feature he could make out was Sully's eyes, which glistened in the dark, as wet and black as the rocks by the river.\n\n\"Sully, please,\" Drake rasped. \"It's me. It's Nate. I know you're still in there. Don't make me fight you.\"\n\nSilent as the hooded men, Sully lunged at him. Drake dodged left, grabbed his outstretched arm, and used it for leverage, slamming his knee up into Sully's gut. He heard the explosion of breath as he knocked all the air out of Sully's lungs. But Sully held on, wheezing and groaning, as Drake kneed him a second time.\n\nSully bit his arm, teeth sinking into flesh, and Drake cried out in pain that merged with the waterfall in a roaring chorus. With his free hand he punched Sully in the temple five times in quick succession until Sully's jaw let go. Drake reeled away from him, careful not to fall into the deep current again. He felt hot blood coursing down his arm, smelled its coppery stink, and knew he had to finish this before Sully killed him.\n\nDrake waded toward him, feinted twice, and then landed a blow to Sully's gut and followed up with three quick strikes to the face. In the dark, he could make out only the shape of his old friend, but he didn't need to see the details, didn't want to see the lack of recognition in those blank eyes, especially now.\n\nWith one final blow, he sent Sully crashing to the rocky bank again, but as his friend began to rise, Drake got him into a choke hold again. This time Drake had solid ground beneath him and held on tightly as Sully's struggles grew weaker. In what seemed only moments, his friend began to sag in his grasp, and Drake released him. Sully crumpled to the ground, where Drake felt for his pulse and found it still beating. He wrapped his arms around his friend and let out a shuddering breath.\n\nSully's alive, he thought, frozen with shock and relief. For the first time, he admitted to himself that he had been half convinced that the hooded men had killed him. He had no idea how he would get them out of the labyrinth or what it would take to shake Sully out of the honey's effects, but he knew he had to take it one step at a time.\n\nSomething dark floated by on the swift current, jutting from the water. Drake cursed himself and set Sully down, standing and turning to look up at the plateau. A pair of flashlights moved down the water-sprayed stairs, slowly descending toward him.\n\n\"Nate!\" a voice cried, carrying to him over the crushing thunder of the waterfall.\n\n\"Here!\" he shouted back, wading a few feet into the shallows. \"I've got Sully!\"\n\nThe two beams of light continued down the stairs carved beside the waterfall, and slowly he began to make out the shapes behind them. Jada and Henriksen had managed to defeat the three attackers who had come at them on the plateau with Sully and Ian Welch. One of them had just floated by in the river, dead or dying, and Drake figured the other two were probably dead as well, as was Welch.\n\n\"How deep is it?\" Henriksen called. \"Can we cross?\"\n\nDrake thought about that. At its deepest, would Jada's feet reach the bottom?\n\n\"I don't know. The current's pretty strong!\"\n\nWhen Jada and Henriksen reached the bottom of the steps, standing on the rocky shelf on the opposite bank of the river, they began to scan the lower cavern with their flashlights, and Drake got a much better idea of his surroundings. The blossoms he still thought of as cave hellebore grew all over the walls on vines and in the moss. Where nothing grew, the cavern walls were carved with octagons, flowers etched inside of them, and ancient Chinese symbols had been painted and repainted over centuries.\n\n\"Nate, look!\" Jada called, flashing her light on something at the end of the cavern, where the river flowed into the rock face.\n\nIt took a second for him to realize that the stony edges that glinted in the light were steps. He frowned, then started along the rock shelf on the riverbank, pacing their progress on the other side. As they searched with their flashlights, Drake saw the steps on his side as well and ran toward them. He passed high, rounded tunnel mouths but could see nothing but deeper darkness inside as he hurried by, and in seconds he had reached the bottom of those steps.\n\n\"There's a bridge!\" he called to them, amazed at the way the solid rock above where the river left the cavern had been cut away to form a crossing above the water.\n\nJada and Henriksen picked up their pace. Drake hesitated. He'd left Sully on the bank and still could make out the silhouette of the man lying in the dark. He went up the half dozen steps to the bridge but halted there. As Jada and Henriksen hurried toward their side of the bridge, Drake studied the tunnel mouths on the other side. Jada barely spared them a glance, but Henriksen slowed and shone his light inside as he went past, searching for the worship chamber they all expected to find.\n\nAs Henriksen continued, it seems for a moment that the illumination from his flashlight remained behind in the last of the tunnels. Drake blinked, staring at the phenomenon, and then realized the light inside the mouth of that tunnel was moving, jittering and swinging and growing brighter.\n\nCompany, he thought. He was about to shout to the others when staccato gunfire came from the tunnel, muffled but echoing out into the vast waterfall cavern. Drake flinched before he realized that whoever was coming wasn't shooting at him, Jada, or Henriksen.\n\nJada turned, pausing on the steps on the other side of the bridge.\n\n\"Run!\" Drake shouted, racing toward her over the rushing river.\n\nHenriksen did the running for her, linking arms with her and sweeping her along as he bolted toward Drake. They both still had their flashlights and guns out, and it made for an awkward flight, lights bobbing and legs almost becoming tangled.\n\nMore gunshots rang out, and then the first of the mercenaries came hurtling out of the tunnel mouth, twisting around to cover the others with both light and weapon. They poured from the labyrinth and into the cavern; Drake counted five, including Olivia, Massarsky, and Garza, and when he saw the hooded men dart from the tunnel, hurling knives and what looked like small, sharpened metal rings, he knew the rest of their team must be dead.\n\n\"Go, go!\" Jada yelled.\n\nDrake already was turning back the way he'd come. The way Jada and Henriksen's lights were bouncing, it was hard to make out the top of the stairs, and he had to go slowly. Henriksen had let Jada go, but now she nearly collided with Drake as they ran down the half dozen slippery steps to the rock shelf of the riverbank.\n\n\"I thought you were dead!\" she said.\n\n\"So did I!\"\n\n\"Don't do it again!\"\n\nDrake had no snappy comeback. His focus was on the tunnel mouths on this side of the river.\n\n\"Jada!\" he said, pointing. \"Check those; see if any of them lead out of here. Olivia and her goons found another path to get into this cavern; there might be more than one way out.\"\n\n\"I'm not going until I find the worship chamber!\" Henriksen snapped.\n\nGunshots, and they all looked over to see a hooded woman with long black hair streaming beneath her hood drive a long blade through one of the mercenaries, momentum carrying them both into the river. But Olivia and the others were already at the base of the bridge. Drake knew she had spotted them\u2014flashlights were dancing all over the cavern\u2014but she had only three more thugs between her and certain death, and she was running like hell.\n\n\"You can do whatever the hell you want!\" Drake snapped at Henriksen. \"After you help me get Sully to cover!\"\n\nHenriksen blinked, but only once, and then they were running along the bank toward where Sully lay sprawled, still unconscious. They grabbed him under the arms as they heard Jada shouting their names and began to drag him toward her. She stood in the mouth of the tunnel closest to the waterfall, and they ran to join her, Sully's boots trailing across the ground between them.\n\nBack on the bridge, Massarsky, Garza, and a square-jawed black guy Drake thought was named Suarez were making a stand. They stood on the stone walkway above the river and shot the two hooded men who were out in the open on the riverbank. One or two more\u2014perhaps only one or two more; it was impossible to tell\u2014remained in the tunnel they had just vacated, but Massarsky and his people pinned them down. They couldn't come out without being killed. Olivia stood behind Garza, gun in hand. Her blond hair was a tangled, dirty mess, and her face was etched with grim determination.\n\nOlivia turned and looked right at Drake as he and Henriksen dragged Sully into the open tunnel. He could read the profanity on her lips. Then they were inside the tunnel and out of her sight, and she out of his.\n\nOnly when Drake turned to look for Jada did he see that the tunnel rounded a slight curve and then ended just ahead.\n\nWith three steps down into a worship chamber.\n\nThe octagonal altar sat in the center of the room. Drake felt himself go cold, a numb amazement spreading through him. They had found it. After all this, they were here.\n\nHe and Henriksen dragged Sully down the three steps, and then Henriksen let go. Drake had to catch Sully to keep him from crashing to the stone floor of the worship chamber as Henriksen raced around the room, shining his flashlight on the Chinese characters and the symbols and paintings all over the walls.\n\nJada already had rushed into the anteroom, the ritual preparation space that had been built next to the worship chamber, its design identical to that of the other labyrinths Daedalus had created. In every other way, Diyu was different from the first three labyrinths, but here at its heart, its origins echoed loudly.\n\nSeveral more gunshots rang out, and then he heard Olivia shouting. He feared they were not going to be alone in the chamber much longer.\n\n\"The trigger!\" he called to Jada. \"Find the\u2014\"\n\n\"Already on it!\" she replied, searching the corners of the anteroom with her flashlight. In the reflected illumination, he saw her eyes light up, and then she bent, pushing and then kicking at a stone block in the wall of the anteroom.\n\nWith a loud clunk of stone, the altar shifted a couple of inches. Jada had found the trigger.\n\nHenriksen and Drake stood staring at the altar for a few seconds. On the ground, Sully began to groan and then move as he slowly came around. Drake had no idea which Sully would be waking up, the one he knew or the one the white hellebore poison had made.\n\nHe glanced at Jada. Regardless of her intentions toward the flower that had caused so many so much grief and suffering, he could see that she needed to know just as much as he did what they would find in the chamber below.\n\n\"Push!\" Drake said, glancing at Henriksen.\n\nIn the short tunnel behind them, they could hear the footfalls and voices of Olivia and her trio of mercenary survivors. On the floor, Sully groaned louder, and in the most pissed-off, most graveled voice Drake had ever heard, he started muttering colorful curses about the Protectors of the Hidden Word and payback.\n\nHenriksen threw himself against the octagonal altar, and Drake did the same thing; the whole thing slid back with a rumble of stone on stone.\n\nThe first thing Drake noticed about the darkness yawning below was the nauseating stink that wafted up at them. Then he saw two yellow eyes gleaming against the black and heard the bestial snarl that grew into a roar as the Minotaur thundered up the steps, slavering and reaching for Henriksen's throat.\n\nDrake had no gun. He threw the hardest punch he had in him, aiming for the vulnerable muscle cluster under the Minotaur's arm. He felt his knuckles crunch on impact, and pain shot up his arm as he swore and reeled back. As the Minotaur closed one hand around Henriksen's throat, it twisted and snarled at Drake. Jada shone her flashlight into its eyes, and it flinched, startled.\n\nHenriksen shot it twice in the chest, and the human monstrosity rocked with the bullets, relaxing its grip enough for Henriksen to shake free. The Minotaur looked down at the holes in its chest, blood weeping and then spilling from the wounds, and Drake had a better look at its face and head. There could be no doubt that this was a man, deformed and hideous to behold but no less human for it. A light coat of hair covered even his cheeks, and ridges of what looked like bone were visible through the hair, but the horns on top of his head were those of an animal, clamped inside a frame of tarnished gold and held there with leather straps. The beast had no clothes, and the matted hair that covered its body had begun to thin in places. It looked almost sickly.\n\nBut the bullets had not stopped it.\n\nA clatter of footsteps came from behind Drake, and he heard Garza swearing.\n\n\"Son of a bitch!\" Suarez yelled.\n\nMassarsky grabbed Olivia and shoved her behind him even as Garza lifted her weapon, taking aim.\n\n\"Get clear of that thing!\" Garza shouted.\n\nDrake didn't have to be told twice. The single glance the Minotaur had given him had chilled his bones, so now he grabbed Jada and backpedaled with her into the wall. Henriksen backed up as well, and Drake wondered why he hadn't kept shooting. He had his weapon leveled at the Minotaur, but it was almost as if now that its attention was elsewhere, he had no interest in destroying it.\n\nSully had risen unsteadily, and now he wavered on his feet, half blocking Garza's aim.\n\n\"Get down!\" Garza shouted.\n\n\"Just shoot!\" Olivia screamed at her. \"Kill him, too! You're going to kill them all anyway; just shoot through the bastard!\"\n\nThe Minotaur roared, batting at the flashlight beams that blinded it for a moment, but the way it twisted, gaze narrowing, Drake thought it had zeroed in on Olivia's shrill voice, as if it recognized that she was giving the orders. And why not? Once upon a time, it had been just a man.\n\nIt barreled toward Olivia despite the others in the way. Sully dived from its path, dropping wearily to his knees as the Minotaur continued past. Garza pulled the trigger, bullets chipping the walls, the echo of the semiautomatic fire assaulting their ears. Three bullets stitched the Minotaur's hip and arm and shoulder, and it screamed in pain, but it was inhumanly fast and changed direction in an instant.\n\nGarza's weapon clicked on empty, dry-firing, the clip out of bullets. She might have had another, but her time had run out. Her eyes went wide as the Minotaur reached for her, grabbing her head and giving it a savage twist. The dry snap of breaking bone was like a whip crack in the worship chamber.\n\n\"Come on, kid,\" Sully said, grabbing Drake's shoulder, half for support and half to get him moving.\n\nDrake turned and saw that Henriksen already had started down through the secret passage beneath the altar. He slapped Sully's back and pointed, then called to Jada, and the three of them were following fast. Gunfire ripped the air behind them, and Drake heard the sound of bullets punching through flesh. This time when the Minotaur roared, it came out as a scream, but then they left the sounds of violence behind, descending into the heart of the fourth labyrinth at long last.\n\nIn the shadows, with only Henriksen and Jada's flashlights to guide them, they found the corridor leading from the bottom of the steps. The heavy, musky stink of the Minotaur seemed to coat the walls and floor, so strong that Drake scowled in disgust.\n\nSully stumbled a bit, and Drake looked at him, still wary of the way the protectors had toyed with his mind and still feeling the bruising on his neck from Sully trying to strangle him. He was alive, and the relief of that still felt like victory, but Drake didn't want to celebrate just yet.\n\nThen Sully tripped and would have fallen if Drake hadn't caught him. He ducked under Sully's arm, helping him stay balanced as they moved down the corridor. Under his breath, Sully grunted something that might have been words.\n\n\"What was that?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"You deaf?\" Sully rasped. \"I said it smells like your laundry down here.\"\n\nDrake blinked in surprise, and then a smile spread across his face. \"Glad to have you back, old man.\"\n\nJada caught up to them, then, and they had to stop in the corridor as she threw her arms around Sully. Drake backed away to give them a moment, and for several long seconds they just held each other, Jada's shoulders trembling with emotion as she buried her face in the crook of Sully's neck.\n\n\"I'm so glad you're not dead,\" she murmured into the collar of his shirt.\n\n\"You and me both, darlin',\" Sully replied.\n\n\"Look at this,\" Henriksen said.\n\nDrake glanced up and saw Henriksen shining his flashlight through an open side passage. When Drake looked inside, he saw a warren of tunnels as well as an opening that seemed to lead into a kind of living space decorated with crude wall paintings that looked as if they'd been made in blood. The stink of filth and death was powerful, and Drake knew it must be where the Minotaur slept.\n\n\"Let's go,\" Sully said. \"Let's finish this.\"\n\nIn moments they had reached the end of the corridor. It couldn't have been more than sixty feet in length, so short that the beams of the surviving mercenaries' flashlights still provided some illumination back on the stairs. At the end of the corridor was a heavy wooden door with iron bands holding the thick planks together. They had encountered nothing like this in the other labyrinths, but Drake noticed the age of the wood and realized the door had been added within the past century or so, as if in this one place the hooded men had acknowledged the passage of time. It didn't jibe with the Minotaur's savagery, this tiny concession to civilization.\n\nAnd there was light under the door.\n\n\"What the hell\u2014?\" Drake began.\n\nHenriksen handed Sully his flashlight and tried the latch. The door opened, swinging inward, and Henriksen gave it a shove with his gun. Empty-handed, Drake felt more vulnerable than ever, but as the door swung wide, he forgot about protecting himself\u2014forgot almost everything.\n\nConsistent with Daedalus's design, there were three steps down, but this room dwarfed any of the other worship chambers they had seen. Fires burned in braziers set at intervals that went deep into the cave. A pair of iron chandeliers hung from chains hooked to the ceiling, fat white candles burning brightly. But even all that light could illuminate only a portion of the shadowed cave, which seemed to be some bizarre combination of vault and sepulcher.\n\nThe treasure of Daedalus lined the walls and filled the dark recesses at the back of the cave. Stone jars and vases overflowed with gold coins struck in ancient Greece and Egypt, with gem-encrusted headpieces and golden necklaces and gleaming scepters. A solid gold crocodile three feet in length must have come from the Temple of Sobek. And in the middle of it all, on a pedestal, stood a golden statue of a Minotaur, its horns massive shards of ruby.\n\nIn a single glance, Drake drank in the forgotten majesty of the place and the enormity of the secret truths it confirmed. But a moment was all he allowed himself, for the menace in that cave was far more dominant than its promise.\n\nIn the middle of the floor were three stone tombs, massive things like sarcophagi but with a Chinese influence on the design and the engravings. Beyond the three tombs, a small cluster of people waited, watching the intruders with eyes full of fear and loathing. There were three hooded men\u2014one guardian for each tomb, perhaps. A woman stood in their midst, tall and veiled, the firelight throwing shadows across what little of her face was visible. Her eyes seemed to flicker yellow like the Minotaur's. Behind her was an altar above which were shelves arrayed with vases and chalices. Upon the altar were drying white flowers, fragments of bone, and a variety of small stone cups. One cup had spilled a coppery powder across the pale stone.\n\nThe Mistress of the Labyrinth. It could be no one else.\n\nYet Drake's gaze was drawn past her, to the right of the three tombs, where a withered monster lay ailing on a wooden pallet, swaddled in thick woolen blankets. Its eyes were opalescent, blind and seeking, and its ugly, wrinkled, misshapen head was covered with scabs and the stains of age. Once it had been a Minotaur, but now it was only a pitiful, mindless old man on the verge of death.\n\n\"We should never have come here,\" Jada whispered.\n\nDrake understood. The scene wrenched at his heart so powerfully that for a moment he allowed himself to forget more than two thousand years of slavery, torture, and murder. And then the mistress of the fourth\u2014and last\u2014labyrinth pointed one trembling finger at them and barked an order with a sneer of such cruelty and disdain that he could feel the venom in her.\n\nThe hooded men attacked, leaping on top of the three tombs and launching themselves through the air. Henriksen fired, but the black-clothed protector was too fast, twisting and lunging. The two careened to the ground and fell, struggling, onto the floor. Henriksen's gun skidded away across the stone.\n\nJada shot the one nearest her. The bullet struck his shoulder and spun him around, but Drake missed whatever happened next. The third killer came at him, darting and moving, swaying like a serpent, a curved blade flashing in his grip. Drake waited for him to attack, then swung Henriksen's flashlight, which shattered the hooded man's wrist. The dagger clattered to the floor, but the killer kept coming, striking Drake in the throat with his good hand. Drake spun, trying to avoid the strike, and the hooded man missed his larynx by inches, punching the side of his neck instead.\n\nSully tackled the killer, lifting him off the ground and slamming him into one of the tombs so hard that the hooded man cried out in pain and fell to the ground, wheezing and grabbing for the small of his back, dragging his legs behind him uselessly.\n\nAutomatic gunfire stitched the firelit vault, bullets chinking into gold and shattering vases.\n\nEveryone froze except for Henriksen, who delivered a final blow that knocked his opponent senseless. The hooded man groaned, barely conscious, and Henriksen glanced up, his enemy's blade in his hand.\n\nDrake and Sully stood together. Jada hovered near the corpse of the hooded man she apparently had shot a second time. But they all stared at the entrance to the vault, where Suarez and Olivia were descending the last step, his arm around her. Blood soaked his left side and pain etched his face, but his grip on his gun was strong enough and his eyes seemed clear.\n\nOlivia gazed at the gold with open lust, her grin fervent with glee. The Minotaur had clawed the right side of her face, slicing deep furrows in her cheek, and she hardly seemed to have noticed. In her left hand, she still clutched a pistol.\n\nShe started to speak but couldn't get the words out without bursting into a fit of laughter. Blood trickled down her chin and neck, staining her shirt and jacket.\n\n\"Look at this!\" Olivia said. \"Damn it, Tyr, look at all of this!\"\n\n\"I'm looking,\" Henriksen said warily.\n\n\"We were both right!\" Olivia said, extricating herself from Suarez, who managed to stay standing on his own. \"Go on, soldier. Finish them. All of them.\"\n\nSuarez's gun barrel didn't even twitch. \"I don't think so. No way am I getting out of this pit without help, and you can't exactly carry me.\"\n\nOlivia turned to sneer at him.\n\nAs she did, a shriek came from behind Drake, and he turned, ready for a fight. The mistress, he thought. She and her dying charge had seemed helpless, and for a moment they'd forgotten her. Even as he turned, he saw the tall veiled woman grab Henriksen from behind, one hand clamped over his face as she drew the wickedly curved blade across his throat. Dying, he tore at her veil, revealing a grotesque countenance without the bestial features of the Minotaur but ruined by a lifetime's slow poisoning by white hellebore.\n\nSuarez opened fire, blowing her back among the tombs in a heap of tangled limbs and a growing pool of blood. The final hooded man began to rise groggily from the beating Henriksen had given him, and Olivia took aim and tried to kill him, but she had run out of ammunition. With a short burst from his weapon, Suarez finished the job.\n\nDrake reached for Jada, as much to take comfort as to give it. He put an arm around her, and Sully joined them. Only Jada still had a gun, but whatever happened next was going to be up to Suarez. Drake felt sick looking at Henriksen and the Mistress of the Labyrinth and the bodies of what he could only assume were the last of the Protectors of the Labyrinth.\n\nHe glanced over at the ancient dying Minotaur on its worn pallet. It shivered, staring blindly into nothing, as if its mind was so far gone that it barely knew they were there in the vault with it. Perhaps that was true. If so, Drake thought it was for the best.\n\n\"There's nothing here I want,\" he said.\n\nSully looked sick. It was clear he and Jada shared that sentiment.\n\nBut Olivia still wore the same lunatic grin. She left Suarez standing at the bottom of the steps and rushed to the wall on her left, digging her hands into the stone jars of coins and letting them run through her hands. Drake tried not to calculate the worth of so much gold pressed into such ancient coins. Each was practically priceless.\n\n\"Stop,\" Sully said. \"There isn't\u2014\"\n\nSuarez took a step toward him, gesturing with the gun. \"For the moment we're all friends here, 'cause I want to live. If you folks don't want to be richer than sin, that's your business. Me, I have no objection to treasure.\"\n\nDrake could have told him that the flowers they had passed upon first entering the labyrinth and seen many times since were worth more than all the treasure in the vault combined. But he doubted Suarez would believe him and didn't much want to share the information, anyway. For her part, Olivia knew all about the white hellebore, and Henriksen had suggested she would not hesitate to do as he'd planned and sell it to the highest bidder, but it was clear that gold was her first priority.\n\nOlivia took out a heavy Egyptian necklace of beaten gold and put it around her throat, smiling like a little girl playing dress-up in Mommy's closet. She stepped on top of the golden crocodile and glanced around, shaking her head as if it were too much for her to take in, and then her gaze locked onto the gold statue of the Minotaur with its ruby horns. She jumped down and ran to the pedestal where it stood.\n\nAs she reached for the statue, Drake felt a surge of shame. He glanced over at the dying Minotaur, an old man ravaged by poisons and physiological side effects his entire life, and saw the monster lower its head and turn away. Perhaps it was not entirely blind, but what, Drake wondered, did it not want to see?\n\nDrake turned and stared at Olivia, firelight and shadows playing across her slim body, and as her fingers touched the gold and ruby statue, somehow he knew. He broke away from Jada and Sully and ran toward her even as she hefted the statue from its pedestal, admiring its shine.\n\nA wide octagonal stone began to rise out of the top of the pedestal. The statue had been a counterweight, and now it had been removed. Loud grinding noises filled the walls, the thunking and crashing of stone blocks shook the room, and Drake turned and ran.\n\n\"Get out of here!\" he shouted at Sully and Jada.\n\nSuarez looked at him, and the man's eyes went wide. He didn't know what had just happened, but he saw their panic and turned and started to limp toward the three stairs.\n\n\"Where the hell are you\u2014?\" Olivia screamed after them.\n\nA huge block of stone in the wall of the cave pushed inward, falling onto the coin jars. They shattered, spilling coins all over the floor, just as a torrent of water rushed in through the hole the block had left behind. The rumbling and grinding went on. Another block slid from the wall, then a third and a fourth, and water crashed in, filling the vault with all the power of the river. So much water flooded in so quickly that in moments it began to rise around them.\n\nJada reached the stairs first, helping Suarez out of the rising water, which already had reached the second step. Drake and Sully were right behind them, but Sully turned to look back into the vault.\n\n\"What about her?\" he said.\n\nDrake turned to see Olivia in the middle of the maelstrom formed by the half dozen raging torrents coming through the walls. Treasures were flooded, knocked over, swirling and sinking, and Olivia screamed not in panic for herself but in anguish over the loss of the gold. She clutched the Minotaur statue to her chest as if it were her child, trying to keep it above the swiftly rising water.\n\n\"Come on, damn it!\" Drake shouted, wading back toward her.\n\n\"Nate!\" Sully called.\n\n\"Just go,\" Drake snapped, waving him on. \"I'm right behind you!\"\n\nThe water had risen with stunning speed, washing around his waist now and still churning into the vault.\n\n\"Olivia! Drop the statue and swim!\"\n\nShe glared at him with such hate that it stopped him cold. Olivia struggled to hold the heavy statue and forge her way through the maelstrom inside the vault. Drake swore and pushed toward her again, the river still flooding higher.\n\nSomething underwater must have tripped her, because she went down with a splash, submerging instantly. Drake thought she would drop the statue then, but there was no sign of flailing arms until suddenly she surfaced twenty feet to his right.\n\nBut Olivia was not alone. The dying Minotaur held her from behind, its gauzy white eyes shining in the light from the chandeliers above. The floodwater had knocked over the braziers and put them out, but the candles still burned. At first Drake thought the Minotaur had found the strength to attempt to survive and was trying to drag Olivia toward him and toward the door, but then he saw the way one of its clawed hands was tangled in her hair and the other gripped her throat, and the two of them sank under the water together.\n\nDrake hesitated, furious with Olivia and with himself. Then, over the roar of the water, he heard Sully shouting to him from outside the vault and knew he had to go. He turned and slogged back toward the door, the floodwater swallowing him.\n\nBy the time he reached the steps, the water was up to his shoulders. As he climbed the submerged steps, he saw a flashlight up in the corridor and realized Sully had waited for him.\n\n\"Go!\" he called, struggling out of the water and up the last step.\n\nSully hit him with the flashlight beam\u2014Suarez must have had it in his pack\u2014and shouted at him to hurry.\n\n\"Turn around!\" Drake snapped as he ran toward Sully.\n\nThen the water reached the top of the steps and began to pour into the corridor, and Sully's eyes widened as he understood. They had a hundred feet or more of corridor to cover, and the water would keep churning, keep rising, until it matched the level of the river\u2014at least ten feet above them.\n\nThe water washed around their legs, flooding along the tunnel. Sully stumbled once and Drake caught him, but they kept going. Up ahead they saw Jada helping Suarez up the stairs of the secret passage into the worship chamber. Suarez slipped and fell and didn't rise again until Drake got there to help Jada with him, the water already above their knees.\n\nThey had to drag Suarez the last couple of steps and through the opening of the hidden entrance, where the altar remained rolled back from the stairs. Panting, bent over, with a single flashlight and only Suarez's gun, they staggered out of the worship chamber, past the corpses of Massarsky, Garza, and the younger Minotaur, even as the water rushed up the stairs after them.\n\nThree more steps took them out of the worship chamber, and then they were in the short tunnel that brought them to the rocky shelf of the riverbank, where the waterfall roared and the white hellebore grew as it always had.\n\nSuarez died there only moments after they had set him down gently, too much blood lost from the wound in his side. Drake sank to his knees beside the man, sick to the bone of death and greed.\n\n\"Thanks for not killing us,\" Drake whispered before he reached out and closed the dead man's eyes.\n\nHe glanced at Sully and Jada, who were leaning against each other, exhausted and drained. Then he sat back on his haunches and glanced around the vast cavern, waiting long seconds to see if any of the Protectors of the Hidden Word would spring from one of the tunnels and try to kill them. No one appeared.\n\nFar up in the ceiling of the cavern, he thought he could make out tiny slits of morning light.\n\n\"What do we do now?\" Jada asked.\n\n\"What your father would have wanted,\" Sully replied.\n\nDrake nodded, rising wearily to his feet. He stared around at the blossoms on the walls among the moss and vines.\n\n\"Exactly,\" he said. \"We rip it all down, and then we burn it. We make sure white hellebore\u2014the real thing\u2014stays a myth.\"\n\n\"We could set a charge, blow the tunnel under the Treasure Mound,\" Sully suggested.\n\nDrake shrugged. \"Why bother? Once we close it up, the entrance is hidden, and the government forbids anyone from excavating.\"\n\n\"Perkins left two of his people on guard. What do we say to them when we get out of here?\" Jada asked.\n\nSully laughed. \"Tell 'em they got lucky.\"\n\nDrake clapped him on the back, and the two of them smiled at Jada.\n\n\"Better yet,\" Drake said, \"tell 'em they're fired.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Five days later, Luka Hzujak finally got his funeral. The autumn sun cast a golden hue across the quiet beauty of the cemetery. Woodlawn was one of the most famous burial grounds in New York City, an oasis of peace and quiet in the Bronx. Jada said she had chosen it for that reason, and Drake could understand.\n\nIn late October, there were as many red and gold leaves on the ground as there were on the trees, and with every breeze they skittered across the broad lawns, catching on tombstones and statues of angels. Aside from the distant rumble of car engines that seemed the eternal background music of New York City, the only sounds were the wind in the leaves and the voice of the minister.\n\nDrake stood on Jada's left, Sully on her right. She had wept as any grieving daughter would, but she held her chin high. Her father had loved nothing better than unraveling the secrets of history. Even if he hadn't been attempting to beat Henriksen to the discovery of the true history of Daedalus and his labyrinths, once Luka knew about them, he would have been unable to resist the temptation to learn more. But his intentions had been pure.\n\nDrake knew that he and Sully usually could not claim such innocent ambitions. They walked a fine line, often on the razor edge of both criminality and greed. Olivia had been willing to hurt anyone\u2014kill anyone\u2014to fulfill her desire for gold, and the idea of turning people into puppets for her personal amusement had inspired her. It was easy for Drake to think of her and to know that he and Sully were different. Like Luka, they loved history and the thrill of uncovering its secrets, but half the excitement came from the fact that those secrets were so often treasures. They wanted the rewards that came along with the risks they took along the way, and that was certainly part of their motivation.\n\nHow different did that make them from Henriksen? That was the question that had been haunting Drake ever since they had emerged from Diyu, beaten and exhausted. He and Jada had watched over Sully for a day and a half in a Beijing hotel suite, where they had checked in under false identities and prayed they wouldn't be arrested. Though he hadn't been given enough doses to alter his mind permanently, the poison he'd been fed needed to work itself out of his system.\n\nDuring that time, Drake had thought a lot about Tyr Henriksen. In the end, he'd decided that although the gulf between his philosophy and Henriksen's might not be as wide as he would like, it was wide enough for him to be able to sleep at night. Henriksen loved history and discovery, and he coveted the treasures of the past. But though he might not have been as deeply tainted as Olivia, he was still a black hat. He hadn't been willing to kill or ask others to kill for him, but he hadn't cared at all how many might die because of his actions. He had intended to sell the white hellebore to the highest bidder, and Drake, Sully, and Jada had burned it, no matter that it could have given them unimaginable wealth if they had done as Henriksen or Olivia would have.\n\nDrake would never be able to say that what he and Sully did wasn't at least partly about the treasure\u2014about the money. But in his heart he knew that it had never been only about the money and it never would be. That distinction would have to be enough.\n\nThe minister finished his blessings and then gestured to Jada. She knew what he expected and started forward. Her father's casket rested on a riser beside the open grave, which had been covered by a green tarp. Enormous floral arrangements created a kind of path for mourners to pass by the coffin, and Jada led the way. A gust of wind tousled her hair, blowing magenta strands across her face, but she did not bother to tuck them back as she drew a flower from the first arrangement, walked to her father's casket, and threw the flower on top. She paused, kissed the fingers of her right hand, and then pressed those fingers to the smooth metal. She drew in a long, shuddering breath and then let it out. If she said goodbye to him, it was in her heart rather than aloud.\n\nDrake and Sully tugged flowers from the arrangement and tossed them onto the casket before escorting her away as the line of mourners formed behind them to take part in the same ritual farewell.\n\nJada had cousins and a couple of aunts at the funeral, but Sully was her godfather, and she had wanted him with her through the service. Now she stopped and waited for her other relatives, but she turned to Drake and took his hands.\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nDrake nodded. \"Nothing to thank me for. He was a good man.\"\n\nJada turned to Sully, her eyes welling up again. Her lower lip trembled.\n\n\"I don't think I could've handled this\u2014\" she began, but then words failed her. She glanced at the ground, watching the leaves that danced across the lawn at her feet.\n\nSully put a hand on her shoulder, leaning forward to kiss her head. \"It's okay. We're not going anywhere. Go talk to your family and we'll wait.\"\n\nShaking, she looked up at him. Her eyes were red and glistening but filled with a ferocious love.\n\n\"You're my family,\" Jada said. She glanced at Drake. \"Both of you.\"\n\nShe threw her arms around Sully and hugged him so hard that he grunted in surprise, his eyes widening comically. Then he relaxed into her embrace and just held her for a minute, until she exhaled and stepped away from him.\n\n\"You'll be here?\" she asked. \"I know you have a life to get back to.\"\n\nSully pointed toward one of Jada's aunts, who already had left her flower on the casket and was hovering, not wanting to interrupt.\n\n\"Go. We're here for days still.\"\n\nJada smiled, wiped at her tears, and then went to talk to her aunt. Others gathered around her, and for a while Drake and Sully were forgotten.\n\nSully straightened his tie, uncomfortable in the suit he'd bought for the funeral.\n\n\"Thanks,\" he said.\n\n\"What for?\"\n\n\"For coming when I asked and for staying alive.\"\n\nDrake shrugged. \"You'd do the same for me.\"\n\nSully gave a pensive nod and turned to watch Jada talking to other mourners who wanted to give her their condolences.\n\n\"Are you worried about her?\" Drake asked.\n\n\"A little. But she'll be all right. She's smarter than either one of us.\"\n\nSomething in his tone gave Drake pause. He cocked his head and studied Sully a little more closely.\n\n\"What's on your mind?\" he asked.\n\nSully gave him a sidelong glance, thoughtfully smoothing his mustache. \"I got a phone call from Massimo last night. Did you know he has a cousin who's a cardinal in Rome?\"\n\nDrake frowned. \"No. Did you?\"\n\n\"No. Point is, his cousin the cardinal isn't a cardinal anymore. Sixty-seven years old and he's quit the priesthood, left the Vatican. Disillusioned, apparently. But he didn't leave empty-handed.\"\n\n\"Spit it out, Sully,\" Drake said. \"Massimo's cousin the former cardinal took something with him when he left. So what was it?\"\n\nSully smiled thinly, almost a smirk. \"You know the story about the Italian archaeologist\u2014this is about ten years ago\u2014who found a report in the Vatican archives about this missionary, Andres Lopez\u2014\"\n\n\"I know the story,\" Drake interrupted. \"What was it, end of the sixteenth century? Lopez supposedly found Paititi in the Amazon basin in Peru, but he and the Vatican kept it a secret for four hundred years. We've heard a million stories like that. There's no evidence, and I need a break from lost cities and ancient treasure.\"\n\nSully arched an eyebrow. \"You do, huh?\"\n\nDrake nodded. \"I do.\"\n\n\"What if I told you Massimo's cousin worked in the Vatican archives before he decided he didn't want to be a cardinal anymore? What if I told you that not only was the Italian archaeologist right, that Andres Lopez did find Paititi, but that Massimo's cousin has the secret map Lopez made that shows exactly how to get there? What would you say to that?\"\n\nDrake looked over at the minister and then at the casket covered with flowers that were spilling all over the ground. He glanced at the trees and the autumn colors and the buildings in the distance, New York unfolding all around them. Sully was right, of course. Jada would be okay. She would go home to the embrace of her friends, she had family to check on her, and she had made it clear that the perilous adventure she'd shared with them was a one-time thing.\n\nHe was going to miss her.\n\nWith a quiet, rueful laugh, Drake shook his head. \"You know you're going to get us both killed one of these days?\"\n\n\"Someone's going to find Paititi, Nate,\" Sully replied. \"I'd rather it be us.\"\n\n\"Well, then,\" Drake said, turning up his collar as the October breeze turned chilly. \"I guess I'd say we're going to Peru.\""
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Tomb Raider) The Cradle of Life",
        "author": "Dave Stern",
        "genres": [
            "adventure"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "For the first time in almost a month, Lara Croft was comfortable.\n\nShe was back home, in the study at Croft Manor, sprawled out in a red leather chair. On the table to her left was a mug of tea and a plate of scones\u2014cinnamon walnut, fresh from the oven. Plutarch's Lives was open in her lap, there was a warm compress on her neck, and Coltrane playing gently in the background.\n\nShe did not intend on moving for several hours and only then to make her way into a hot bath. Then to bed. Up in the morning and repeat again till relaxed. A week or so should do it, she calculated\u2014dispel the ghosts of Von Croy and Eckhardt from her mind, give the bruises she'd obtained in Prague and Paris time to heal.\n\nWhen she heard the study door creak open, she frowned.\n\n\"No,\" she said without looking up. \"Resting. Incommunicado.\"\n\nShe waited for the door to shut.\n\nInstead, she heard the sound of a throat clearing. High-pitched, hesitant.\n\nBryce.\n\n\"Don't make me get out of this chair,\" she said. She wet a finger, and turned a page.\n\n\"Er,\" Bryce replied. \"It's just\u2026\"\n\nHis voice trailed off. His footsteps edged closer. She looked up from the book.\n\nBryce was staring past her, at the scones.\n\n\"Oh my.\" He sniffed the air. \"Are those cinnamon?\"\n\n\"Cinnamon walnut.\"\n\nHe smiled, and actually licked his lips. \"Really?\"\n\nShe glared at him.\n\nBryce was her tech man\u2014resident geek. Kept her equipment\u2014weapons, communications systems, transport vehicles, etc.\u2014in tip-top shape. She was glad to have him around\u2026usually.\n\n\"One,\" she said, holding out the plate.\n\nHe snatched the biggest and started cramming it into his mouth.\n\n\"Now off with you,\" Lara said, putting down the scones. \"I'm on downtime. Unavailable. System maintenance, to put in terms you'll find easily comprehensible.\"\n\n\"Mmm,\" Bryce said. \"I understand.\" He licked his fingers. \"Delicious. Hillary never makes these for me.\"\n\n\"It's because you're a pain in the arse.\"\n\nBryce looked shocked.\n\n\"I mean that in the nicest way possible,\" Lara said. \"Now shoo\u2014exit stage left. Close the door behind you.\"\n\n\"I\u2014\"\n\n\"Go,\" Lara repeated firmly. \"Don't make me lay hands on you.\"\n\nShe turned to the Plutarch again. She was skipping around in it\u2014no reason for her to study up any further on Pericles or Alexander, she'd done those two to death, and she never bothered with the Romans because she'd long ago decided that they were soldiers and nothing more\u2014as far as culture was concerned they'd simply followed in the footsteps of the Greeks and appropriated whatever they\u2026\n\nHer musings puttered to a halt.\n\nFootsteps, she thought. She hadn't heard Bryce's.\n\nShe looked up. He had, in fact, not moved at all.\n\nHe smiled. \"Good stopping point?\"\n\nShe sighed heavily and pinched the bridge of her nose.\n\n\"Bryce. Am I not making myself clear?\"\n\n\"You're clear, you're clear,\" he said quickly. \"I just thought you'd want to see this.\"\n\n\"This\" was a sheet of paper, which he held up with both hands, turned toward her. A computer printout\u2014a photograph.\n\n\"That looks like the ocean,\" Lara said.\n\n\"It is,\" Bryce agreed.\n\n\"Why would I be interested in the ocean?\"\n\n\"You're not. What you might be interested in is this.\" He pointed at the middle of the picture, though from where she sat Lara couldn't see at what.\n\n\"Come closer,\" she said.\n\n\"It's a wooden something or other,\" Bryce supplied. \"An artifact, to put it in terms you'd find easily comprehensible. With a very interesting carving on the face of it\u2014\" He pointed again. \"Here.\"\n\nBryce was closer now\u2014close enough that Lara could just barely make out the object he was talking about, floating in the middle of the sea. And on it, a geometric design of some sort\u2014a representation of the sun, she realized. No, a star\u2014an eight-pointed star, with\u2014\n\nLara bolted upright. The Plutarch slid to the floor with a resounding thump.\n\nAn eight-pointed star.\n\n\"Let me see that,\" she said, standing.\n\nBryce shrank backward, mistaking her interest for anger.\n\nLara crossed the remaining distance between them in two quick steps and snatched the photo from him.\n\nIt was, indeed, an eight-pointed star.\n\nThe emblem of Alexander the Great.\n\n\"Where?\" she demanded, shifting her focus from the picture to Bryce.\n\n\"The Aegean, as I said. Thirty-six point seven-four degrees north by\u2014\"\n\nShe grabbed his arm. He winced.\n\n\"Show me,\" she said and marched him out of the study, double-time.\n\nLess than a minute later, they were standing in front of a huge flat-screen monitor. The screen displayed a landmass shaped like a backward C. There were two small islands in its empty center and another, slightly larger one to the northwest of it.\n\nShe recognized the area immediately.\n\n\"This is Santorini.\" She pointed at the largest island, the backward C. \"That's Thera.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Bryce smiled. There was a walnut stuck in between his two front teeth. \"Very impressive.\"\n\nNot really, Lara thought, but didn't bother to say it out loud because any archaeologist\u2014and certainly any tomb raider\u2014worth their salt would have recognized the island group just as quickly, Thera having been the site of a spectacular eruption almost four thousand years ago, an event that destroyed Minoan civilization and gave rise to the myth of Atlantis. And of course there was Akrotiri, a Minoan-era city on Thera itself, an excavation that had unearthed some of the most spectacular finds of the last twenty years. An excavation that her father had played a prominent role in, which had fixed the island\u2014and its importance\u2014permanently in her own mind.\n\n\"There was an eruption fifteen minutes ago,\" Bryce was saying. \"Fairly minor\u2014three point eight on the Richter, but what it did\u2014here, I'll show you.\" He began feverishly typing on the keyboard.\n\nLara sat back again, letting Bryce do his thing, taking in the whole of the tech center\u2014what he liked to call the mansion's \"control room\"\u2014and shaking her head.\n\nThe place was a disaster area\u2014a mess of cable, and monitors, and spare parts scattered haphazardly around the room. He'd put the helicopter simulator back online, as well, if she wasn't mistaken\u2014and given the size of the joystick controller off to the right, she didn't think she was\u2014which she'd told him more than once was a disastrously bad idea. The notion of someone as easily distractable as Bryce flying a helicopter\u2026\n\nNot for the first time, Lara wondered if actually sectioning off part of Croft Manor for Bryce's use had been a good idea. Perhaps she should have done as Hillary suggested\u2014build him a shed next to the trailer he insisted on living in, right next to the manor. But Bryce had been so persuasive about the benefits of having the house \"wired,\" she'd gone along with his desires.\n\nSomeone laid a hand on her shoulder. She turned and saw Hillary standing over her.\n\n\"This does not look like rest,\" Hillary said.\n\nShe smiled and laid her hand over his. \"Don't worry\u2014Bryce is doing the work. I'm just observing.\"\n\nHe frowned. Hillary was her man Friday\u2014his family had served the Crofts for more than a generation. He'd lived in the manor longer than Lara had, knew things about it\u2014about the Crofts, about Lara\u2014that she'd long ago forgotten.\n\nHe also knew about Prague, and ever since Lara's return, had been watching over her like a mother hen.\n\n\"Where's your tea?\" He frowned, and looked around the room. \"I'll get you some more tea.\"\n\n\"Not necessary,\" she said. \"I'm fine.\"\n\n\"Won't be a minute,\" Hillary said, heading off in the direction of the kitchen.\n\n\"Here we are,\" Bryce announced. \"This is fifteen minutes ago.\"\n\nLara turned back to the monitor. It showed Thera as it looked from several hundred feet up, whitewashed stone buildings coating the hillside, the narrow cobblestoned streets, the churches, a tavern\u2014\n\n\"Bryce,\" Lara said, suddenly realizing something. \"Where are these images coming from?\"\n\n\"No need to worry.\" He spoke without turning around to face her.\n\nLara frowned. \"Tell me you're not tied in to Langley again.\" She did not want to have to deal with the Americans again. The last time they had caught Bryce hijacking their signals, she'd had to fly to Washington and kiss ass for a week to prevent them from starting extradition proceedings.\n\nIf he was doing it again\u2026\n\n\"No, no,\" Bryce said quickly. \"These are courtesy of a ZY-Three out of Jiquan command center. And it's all legit, believe me. Well, at least as legit as you can get doing this sort of thing.\"\n\nLara frowned. \"Out of where?\"\n\n\"Jiquan Command Center. Gansu Province.\"\n\nLara looked at the images again, and shook her head. \"These are off a Chinese satellite?\"\n\n\"Yes, that's right.\"\n\n\"The Chinese don't have anything nearly this powerful.\"\n\n\"Not officially.\" He smiled again. \"But I've made a friend, recently\u2014on one of the AI forums the other night, and we got to chatting, and of course I asked him what he did, and it turns out he's one of the surveillance monitors for\u2014\"\n\n\"Enough,\" Lara said, holding up a hand. \"As long as it's not Langley, I can deal.\"\n\n\"It's not Langley,\" Bryce said. \"Ah.\" He pointed at the monitor. \"Watch this.\"\n\nWhoever was controlling the satellite's focus\u2014Bryce's friend, perhaps?\u2014had found something of interest. The camera zoomed in closer on the town\u2014Fira, or Oia, possibly even Merovigli, where she'd spent one idyllic summer as a teenager\u2014and stopped.\n\nThey were looking at a wooden deck, perched precariously on a cliff overlooking the ocean. A large portion of the deck was covered by a white tent\u2014no, not a tent, a thinner cloth, a canopy, almost transparent to the satellite. Beneath the canopy, Lara saw movement\u2014people, dozens of them. On the portion of the deck not covered by the canopy, tables were set up, filled with people eating, drinking, in mostly formal wear\u2026\n\nLara suddenly realized she was looking at a wedding.\n\nThe people moving underneath the canopy were dancing.\n\n\"Your friend,\" Lara said, smiling, \"is somewhat of a voyeur.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Bryce said. \"Er.\"\n\nThe camera moved away. Naturally\u2014as high up as the satellite was, it couldn't focus on such a small area for long.\n\nExcept that a split second later, the satellite was focused on the wedding again. From farther off, and at a different angle this time\u2014one that let it peer underneath the tent. Lara caught a glimpse of guests in formal dress, arms clasped around each other, making a circle\u2014she marveled at the resolution the satellite was capable of\u2014when suddenly the image on the monitor wavered.\n\nThe dancing stopped.\n\n\"That was shock number one,\" Bryce announced. He pointed to another monitor just to the right of the one they were watching, which showed an X-Y graph. \"Two point seven on the Richter.\"\n\nGuests milled about on the screen.\n\nThe image wavered again. This time, Lara saw objects on the monitor actually shake. For a second, she feared the entire deck might topple off the mountain and plunge into the sea.\n\n\"Shock number two,\" Bryce announced. \"Three point eight.\"\n\nThe white canopy collapsed, covering dozens of people. The cloth rippled and surged. The bride sat down on the deck, and put her head in her hands.\n\nThe satellite moved off again. A second later, she was looking at the ocean. And as she watched, something popped to the surface and rested there, bobbing on the current.\n\nThe artifact Bryce had shown her, bearing the symbol of Alexander the Great. The eight-pointed star.\n\nThe earthquake had clearly disturbed something, but what\u2026\n\n\"Can you go in closer on that?\" she asked Bryce, pointing at the screen.\n\nBryce nodded. She watched the image grow larger, theories about what might have happened\u2014what the earthquake might have disturbed\u2014running through her mind. A shipwreck, perhaps\u2014that seemed the most likely candidate, although\u2014\n\n\"Terrible resolution at this size,\" Bryce said. \"Hold on a minute.\"\n\nHe keyed in a few more commands. Lara watched as the image grew sharper and sharper, till Bryce leaned back with a satisfied smile.\n\nLara leaned forward, and studied the carving intently.\n\nThe first thing that struck her was how sharp the lines of the carving were.\n\n\"No decomposition,\" she said.\n\n\"It can't be very old then, can it?\" Bryce asked.\n\n\"One would think so.\" It couldn't be from a shipwreck, either, she thought. So then what\u2014\n\n\"It has that look, though\u2014something out of another time,\" he said. \"That's why I came to you.\"\n\n\"It does at that,\" Lara said, trying to remember if had Alexander ever traveled to Thera during his lifetime, which of his generals had inherited that portion of the empire. Her memory of Plutarch, clearly, was not as up to snuff as she'd thought.\n\nShe looked at the artifact on the screen again, watched as it rolled over slowly in the current, as the eight-pointed star disappeared beneath the ocean\u2026\n\nAnd Lara gasped.\n\nOn the other side of the piece, just coming into view, was another carving, even more detailed. This was of the moon\u2014and etched within it, the instantly recognizable image of Alexander himself.\n\nNow she knew what the earthquake had disturbed. Where the artifact had come from.\n\nLara smiled, and stood up again. The aches and pains she'd been all too aware of for the last few days were suddenly no longer with her.\n\n\"I've got to go pack,\" she announced. \"Make a few phone calls.\"\n\nOn her way out the door, she brushed past a surprised-looking Hillary, carrying another pot of tea and more scones.\n\n\"Lara?\" he called after.\n\n\"Lara?\" Bryce chimed in, his voice just reaching her as she reached the foot of the main staircase. \"What is it? It's obviously something.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes indeed,\" she called back. \"It's something, all right.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "Gus Petraki came down the ladder from the wheelhouse to find his eldest son Nicholas waiting for him on the deck.\n\n\"Papa, hey. Papa, listen.\" Nicholas had stripped to the waist. He had diving tanks on, and held a mask in his right hand. \"Let me go down, scout things out for you, all right? Take a quick look, come back, give you the lay of the land, okay?\"\n\nGus shook his head. \"No. I said we'd wait, and we'll wait.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\" Gus glared at his son. \"Take the tanks off, and go keep watch off the back, all right?\"\n\nNicholas glared, then spun on his heels, heading for the stern, cursing under his breath. Gus smiled, watched as his son shrugged off the tanks. Nicholas was a good boy, even if he was a little impatient. Not without cause\u2014time was of the essence here, but it wouldn't do any good for Nicholas to go down, he didn't have the expertise, the knowledge to know what he was looking for. Or looking at, for that matter.\n\nGus turned his back on Nicholas and headed toward the front of the boat.\n\nHis youngest, Jimmy, staring off the bow through a pair of binoculars, turned at his approach.\n\n\"Anything?\" Gus asked.\n\n\"No.\" Jimmy passed the binoculars to his father. \"They're all still down there.\"\n\nGus took the glasses and scanned the horizon, then focused downward, into the ocean itself. The water was a deep, dark blue, and clear down to three meters, which was about as good as it ever got. There was no sign of Kristos, or Leyden, or any of their divers.\n\nHe passed the glasses back to Jimmy and looked at his watch. Half an hour since the divers had gone in the water. Too long\u2014he had a sinking feeling in his stomach that they'd found something else.\n\n\"You know, Papa, we could call Kristos.\"\n\nGus glared, and started to open his mouth. Before he could squeeze out a word, Jimmy went on hurriedly.\n\n\"No, no, hear me out. I know him\u2014you know him, twenty years, right? You know he'd rather work with us than with Leyden, Papa. Yes?\"\n\nGus could only frown and nod reluctantly.\n\n\"Yes, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, you see?\" Jimmy smiled. \"And we've got those, right? He doesn't have anything like those.\"\n\nJimmy pointed off toward the back of the ship, and Gus didn't have to look to know he was talking about the DPVs. Personal diving vehicles, three of them, the pride and joy\u2014and the bread and butter\u2014of his salvage business. Gus had been doing salvage for three decades now, hiring out the Konstantinos and himself to treasure seekers, fortune hunters, family members looking to find loved ones (or their remains) lost at sea\u2014and only during the last five years, with those sleds, had he been able to turn a consistent profit.\n\nGus nodded. \"Yes, Kristos doesn't have anything like the sleds. But neither did we before that business with the Natla woman, and the Scion. And don't forget who's responsible for that, hey?\"\n\n\"I didn't forget,\" Jimmy said. \"But look at how many ships there are. How many divers are going down. We have to\u2014\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Gus interrupted. \"We have to wait.\"\n\nJimmy frowned.\n\nGus ruffled his son's hair.\n\nIf Nicholas was impatient, Jimmy was just the opposite. Considered and calm\u2014a little too much of the thinker, for his taste. Join forces with Kristos? Hah. That would be the day.\n\nThing was, his sons were right. He didn't know how much longer he could afford to stand by and watch. There might not be anything left to find by the time\u2014\n\n\"They're moving,\" Jimmy said.\n\nHe pointed off the starboard side of the Konstantinos, to the other boats. They had indeed started moving, heading northwest, toward the straits between Thera and Therasia.\n\n\"Let's stay close!\" Gus shouted up to his pilot, Stefano, in the wheelhouse.\n\nA few seconds later, he heard the motor come to life, and the Konstantinos inched forward. Gus went and stood by the railing. Something was happening, that was for sure\u2014the other boats were all converging on a single spot in the ocean.\n\nHe pulled out his cell phone, punched the redial button, and waited.\n\n\"We're sorry. All circuits are busy at this time. Please try your call again later.\"\n\nHe restrained himself\u2014barely\u2014from throwing the phone in the ocean and looked at his watch. It only confirmed what he knew already.\n\nClose to two hours past their scheduled rendezvous time. He didn't think they could wait much longer.\n\n\"They found another one!\"\n\nThat was Nicholas, behind him, pointing off into the distance. Where a handful of divers had just surfaced, holding something roughly the size and shape of a man propped up between them.\n\nThe divers passed it along to waiting crew on one of the other boats, who started lifting it up out of the water.\n\nAnother statue. Damn it.\n\n\"Mark their location!\" He shouted up to Stefano as he walked around the wheelhouse again, to the back of the boat. Jimmy followed him, his binoculars out and trained on the divers.\n\n\"Can't make out the statue, but\u2014that's the Frenchman,\" Jimmy said. He swung the binoculars around to focus on the other ship. \"And over there\u2026Kristos.\"\n\nGus shook his head. He picked up the cell phone again and punched redial. Got the same recording.\n\nHe sighed, and stared out to sea.\n\n\"They're all here\u2026all except one.\" He made a decision. \"Follow Kristos. When he dives, we dive. Maybe we'll get lucky and find whatever it is\u2026\"\n\nHe frowned. The phone was making a buzzing noise now. No. Not the phone.\n\nHe turned, behind him, in the direction of the harbor.\n\nSomething was coming up behind them. Fast.\n\nGus squinted into the distance. It was a boat\u2014three boats, very small, moving very quickly, and\u2014\n\nNo. Not boats at all. Jet-skis. Three of them. The one in the middle, now pulling ahead of the other two, going way too fast, but whoever was riding it was an expert, he was\u2014\n\nNo. Not he.\n\nGus broke into a big smile.\n\n\"Hey!\" he heard Jimmy shout. \"Isn't that\u2014?\"\n\nGus laughed. \"You're damn right it is.\"\n\n\"Better late than never\u2026.\" Nicholas said.\n\nGus nodded, still watching as the jet-skis got closer. Still moving very quickly.\n\nToo quickly, he realized.\n\n\"She's not slowing down.\" Jimmy frowned. \"Why isn't she slowing down?\"\n\nJimmy turned to his brother, whose eyes went wide as the lead jet-ski approached the Konstantinos. Barreling straight toward them. Collision course.\n\nExcept at the last second, the skier cut her engine, and started to brake\u2014sharply to the right, away from the ship.\n\nGus saw what was about to happen, and leaned back from the railing.\n\nJimmy and Nicholas watched, transfixed\u2014\n\nAnd got showered with a few dozen gallons of seawater. Jimmy sputtered, wiped his face.\n\n\"You were asking? Why she wasn't slowing down?\" Nicholas said, glaring at his brother.\n\n\"Pay attention, boys,\" Gus said. \"The wake.\"\n\nHe pointed off the side of the boat with one hand, holding onto the railing with the other. Jimmy and Nicholas just managed to get handholds, as well, and then the wake from the jet-ski caught up to the Konstantinos, and the ship rolled. Big wake. Big waves.\n\nThe skier wasn't done with her fancy moves yet.\n\nShe came in hard again, used one of the wake waves as a ramp, and shot high up in the air.\n\nGus's mouth dropped open as his head leaned back and he followed her flight. Up in the air, into a flip\u2014a flip, with a jet-ski!\u2014and then back down again, at a dead stop, six inches from the Konstantinos' s ladder.\n\nThe skier brushed the hair out of her eyes and looked up at the boat.\n\n\"Hello, Gus.\" She looked over at Nicholas and Jimmy. \"Boys.\"\n\nShe climbed up on deck. Gus folded his arms, and tried to look angry. \"Half the world's raiders are already here. You make us wait.\"\n\n\"You know I can't resist a bit of fun\u2026forgive me?\"\n\nThe skier stood before him, waiting.\n\n\"Lara Croft,\" he said, shaking his head. \"All grown up.\"\n\nGus glanced from her, then over to his soaking wet sons, and back again.\n\nThen he broke into a big smile.\n\nHe could never stay mad at Lara Croft.\n\n\"Of course, Lara. You're here. All is forgiven.\"\n\nHe patted her on the cheek.\n\nLara smiled, then turned to look at Nicholas and Jimmy, who were helping unload her things.\n\n\"How are you two?\"\n\n\"Wet,\" Nicholas called back, without looking up. \"And I don't forgive you\u2014not just yet.\"\n\nJimmy grunted his assent.\n\n\"You two ought to know me better,\" Lara said, bending down to give the boys a hand. Seeing the three of them, together again\u2014Gus thought back to the summer that Lara had spent with the Petrakis, in Merovigli\u2014Lara and Jimmy and Nicholas had been practically inseparable. Always fooling around. Diving off the boat, pushing one another into the water. It seemed like yesterday.\n\nIt was, he realized, close to fifteen years ago.\n\nLara straightened up again and smiled.\n\n\"It's good to see you again, Gus.\"\n\n\"It's good to see you, too, Lara.\"\n\n\"Thanks for waiting. I'm so sorry I was late.\" She looked off the starboard, to where the other divers were going down again, and laid a hand on his shoulder.\n\n\"It's all right.\" Gus covered her hand with his own, then turned toward the back of the boat. \"Come on. Let's get to it.\"\n\nLara had been up before dawn this morning, just in time to pass Bryce on his way to bed, and stop him, ask him obtain one more series of images she realized might be helpful in her task. Getting those pictures proved more time-consuming than she'd thought, so she'd missed her flight at Heathrow, had to grab a second, later one, which hadn't gotten her into Athens till eleven, local time. Still, she'd been at Thera by one, and alongside the Konstantinos on her jet-ski half an hour later. Yes, two hours behind the schedule she and Gus had agreed to the night before, which she was sorry for, but there'd been no way of avoiding the delay. And Gus's anger had been almost entirely feigned, she decided\u2014and the boys were simply mad at her for one-upping them with the jet-ski stunt. She was sure they'd be seeking revenge for that soaking soon enough.\n\nIt was wrong to think of Nicholas and Jimmy as boys\u2014they were grown men now, and Gus\u2014\n\nWell, Gus was older. Five years since she'd last seen him, and he'd aged twenty in that time. Not recognizable at all as the man she first met, during that long-ago summer when she was thirteen and in the middle of a cross-continent \"excursion\" arranged by her guardian at the time, Miss Stehlik. The excursion consisted of attending every stuffy society event on the continent, doing the things that were expected of a \"proper\" young English girl, heir to the renowned Croft name, a few scant years away from her majority.\n\nLara had been bored to tears by all of it\u2014the dances, the teas, the dinners, the talk of who was spending the summer where, which plays were must-sees, which restaurants must-experiences, what clothes were in style and what weren't\u2026she just wasn't interested.\n\nWhat made it even worse, of course, was that their travels had taken them so close to places she'd been dreaming about all her life, places her father, Lord Richard Croft, had drawn for her in bright, vivid detail in the stories he used to tell her before bedtime. Stories about Lascaux, and the cave paintings found there\u2014the Great Hall of the Bulls, the Shaft of the Dead Man, the most miraculous example of paleolithic art on the planet\u2014\n\n\u2014And they'd passed a sign for it, Lascaux Cave, right on the highway from Bordeaux heading east, and Lara shouted for the driver to stop, and Miss Stehlik ignored her request completely, insisting they were on a tight schedule.\n\nLara hadn't spoken a word to her guardian for a week.\n\nIt wasn't that long afterward that they'd found themselves on the road to Naples, and suddenly, there was Pompeii\u2014Pompeii, for God's sake, she didn't need her father to tell her stories to know about Pompeii\u2014though she did have to refresh Miss Stehlik's memory about the town in order to get her to pull off the road for even an hour so Lara could run through the site, which had resulted in a temporary truce between the two of them\u2026\n\nUntil they were on the road to Athens, heading south from Thessaloniki, and drove right past Philip II's tomb\u2014Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great's father, inventor of the phalanx, the cavalry formation with which his son conquered the world. Without Philip, Lara's own father had been fond of saying, there would have been no Alexander.\n\n\"Daddy surely would have wanted me to see this, Miss Stehlik,\" Lara had pleaded\u2014all to no avail, no chinking her guardian's armor on this one because they were on a tight schedule, on the clock. So she never got to see Philip's tomb\u2014not that summer, at least.\n\nThough she soon forgot about that disappointment, because a few hours later they were in Athens, and that was the worst of all. They were scheduled to lay over in the city for only two days\u2014and she spent the better part of the first of those trapped in a hotel ballroom, mingling with her \"peers\" as they listened to speaker after speaker drone on about the benefits staging the Olympics would bring to Greece. Dinner turned out to be on the agenda, as well, so by the time Lara got back to her hotel it was nine P.M., and there was no time to do anything, Miss Stehlik told her, except get ready for bed and prepare for her busy day the next morning.\n\nLara said good night, locked her door, and raced to the hotel window.\n\nShe was three stories up, there was a tile roof just beneath her, pitch not steep at all, and a drainpipe that looked sturdy enough leading down to the ground.\n\nLara was going to the Acropolis, she was going to the Parthenon, she was going to the Piraeus, and any other sight that struck her fancy once she was out and about in Athens, come hell or high water.\n\nShe had just changed out of her nightgown into black jeans and a T-shirt when someone knocked on the door. Miss Stehlik, as it turned out, who announced that they had a visitor, an old friend of her father's who wanted to see Lara \"all grown up.\"\n\n\"Just for a moment, of course,\" Miss Stehlik had said, an odd lilt in her voice, \"because you need your rest,\" and then the door had swung open, and Gus Petraki walked in.\n\nHe'd stopped dead in his tracks when he saw her, and laughed out loud.\n\nLara looked to Miss Stehlik, trying to understand his reaction, and was surprised to see her smiling, as well. Odd behavior from her guardian.\n\n\"A perfect combination of your parents,\" he said, smiling. \"You don't remember me, do you?\"\n\n\"No.\" Lara shook her head, and to her surprise found she was smiling, as well. She didn't remember him, but she liked him instantly, this smiling stranger with the full head of dark, dark hair, the olive skin, and the infectious laugh.\n\n\"I'm Gus Petraki,\" he said. He held out his hand, and the two shook. \"Last time I saw you, you were two months old, and glued to your mother's breast.\"\n\nLara flushed crimson. Few adults in the circles she traveled in used the word breast. She expected Miss Stehlik to remark on this, as well. But instead her guardian merely giggled. More odd behavior.\n\nLara ignored it, and focused her attention on Gus again.\n\n\"You knew my mother?\" she asked.\n\nHe nodded. \"And your father, as well. You stayed in my house for a month, the two of you, while your father and I worked at Akrotiri with Professor Marinotos.\"\n\n\"Akrotiri?\" Lara asked, unable to keep the excitement out of her voice. \"You were at Akrotiri?\"\n\nYes, Gus had replied, and then Lara couldn't stop the questions, about Akrotiri, about her parents, and once she learned that Gus had worked with her father on several other occasions, about every moment the two of them had spent together. They'd talked for hours that night, about all of it, and Lara went to sleep no longer angry over what she was missing, but excited about what she'd learned.\n\nThe next morning, things got even better. Somehow Gus had talked Miss Stehlik into canceling their plans for the week, and visiting his home on Santorini instead. It was another day of sharing memories, of good food and good times for both Lara and her guardian (it took Lara until the following winter to realize the obvious, that Miss Stehlik and the recently divorced Gus had been having a torrid affair that entire summer, one that lasted for several years afterward). Those good times continued for several weeks thereafter, as the two of them stayed the remainder of the summer season on Santorini with Gus and his young sons, Jimmy and Nicholas, eight and nine at the time. At first the two boys had been a constant nuisance, harassing Lara endlessly. They were the younger brothers she'd never had, constantly in her face with requests to take them here, take them there, do this, do that, and every time she'd complain to Gus about his sons, he would smile and ruffle their hair and simply shrug at Lara, as if to say \"boys will be boys.\"\n\nShe smiled, thinking about Gus then, and realized that he had been the spitting image of his sons.\n\nNow the thick black hair she recalled was gone, and he was\u2014well, to put it charitably, thicker\u2014and nowhere near as imposing a figure. He looked tired, looked\u2014as he'd put it in their conversation last night\u2014ready to retire to a little island somewhere, and hand the business over to the boys.\n\nWell. If she was right about what was down there, he'd definitely be able to do that. Maybe even buy an island all of his own.\n\nShe followed him now to the back of the boat, where there was a table set up. The four of them\u2014her, Gus, the two boys\u2014gathered around it.\n\n\"So fill me in,\" Lara said.\n\n\"They've brought up two statues,\" Gus said. He pointed at one of the charts. \"Found here, and here. That's about all we know that you don't.\"\n\n\"Mmm,\" Lara said. \"Did you get a look at them? The statues?\"\n\nThe three Petrakis exchanged glances, shook their heads.\n\n\"No, not really,\" Gus said.\n\n\"What does it matter what they found?\" Nicholas interrupted. \"They don't have sleds. We have the sleds. We can cover more ground, we should get down there, we should\u2014\"\n\n\"You should know what it is that we're chasing,\" Lara said.\n\nGus nodded. \"All right, Lara\u2014tell us. What's all this fuss about? What do they think is down there?\"\n\nIn answer, she reached down into her pack and pulled out a stack of paper. On top were copies of the images Bryce had shown her yesterday, pictures of the wooden vessel that had bobbed to the surface immediately after the quake. The eight-pointed star, the image of Alexander in the moon\u2026she dropped the entire stack of paper on the table in front of them. Gus and the boys all leaned in close to get a good look.\n\nThe elder Petraki was the first to speak.\n\n\"The eight-pointed star. Alexander.\" Gus smiled, and clapped his hands together. \"What is it, you think? A shipwreck? Something from one of the garrison towns?\" He looked around the table, at Lara and his sons. \"This could be big. We should\u2014\"\n\n\"Gus.\" Lara shook her head. \"You're missing it.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Look.\" She jabbed a finger at the image again.\n\n\"The moon.\" He frowned. \"I see it, so what does the moon\u2014\"\n\nAbruptly, he stopped talking and leaned forward again.\n\n\"The moon,\" he repeated. Lara saw his hands tighten, grip the edge of the table until the veins on the back of them stood out. \"Lara, is it\u2026\"\n\nShe nodded. \"The Luna Temple.\"\n\n\"The Luna Temple?\" he whispered.\n\n\"I think so, yes.\"\n\nNicholas and Jimmy looked at her, then their father, and then finally at each other. Both were frowning.\n\nLara realized they had no idea what she was talking about.\n\nGus looked at them and realized the same thing. He rolled his eyes.\n\n\"My sons, if it's not on TV, forget it!\"\n\nLara smiled.\n\n\"The Luna Temple was built by Alexander the Great.\"\n\n\"Who was Greek, in case you don't know!\"\n\nNow it was Jimmy's turn to roll his eyes. \"We know who Alexander the Great was, Papa.\"\n\n\"You know what he did, then,\" Lara continued. \"Conquered the known world, at the age of thirty. Europe, Persia, India\u2026\"\n\nShe pulled another piece of paper from the bottom of the stack, and laid it on top so all could see. It was a map\u2014showing Greece, and Macedonia, Cappadocea, and Armenia, Northern Africa and the Middle East, stretching out into what was now Afghanistan, and into the Hindu Kush. Athens, and Gaza. Babylon, and Persepolis. Damascus, and Nicea.\n\nShe pointed from one edge of the paper to the other.\n\n\"This is his empire, at its height. He collected treasures from all over the world. He stored them in two places. The majority went here, to his library at Alexandria\u2014\" she pointed to the Northern Coast of Africa\u2014\"which the Romans torched in an act of historical stupidity. But his most prized possessions went here\u2026\"\n\nShe set aside the map, pulled out another set of images. These were sketches of a massive temple, typical Greek construction, columns on either side, and at the center, a statue. This statue, however, was not of Zeus, or Herakles, or Apollo, or any of the other Greek gods, but of Alexander himself, seated on a throne. Presumptuous, one might say.\n\nOr given the man's accomplishments, perhaps not.\n\n\"This is the Luna Temple. By law, no one was allowed to record its location. Then, in 350 B.C. it was\u2014\"\n\n\"Swallowed by the sea,\" Gus put in.\n\nLara nodded. \"Destroyed by a volcanic eruption. Lost forever. Until yesterday.\" She looked around the table, making eye contact with first Nicholas, then Jimmy. \"If the temple contains even half of what was rumored to be in it\u2014if even half of that temple is intact\u2014this will be the greatest find since Tutankhamen.\"\n\nThe brothers exchanged a look.\n\n\"So what are we waiting for now?\" Nicholas asked. \"Let's get down there.\"\n\n\"Yes\u2014we're already way behind,\" Jimmy chimed in. He reached underneath the table, and pulled out a set of nautical charts, laid them over the temple drawings. \"All morning, the others are heading here, along this shelf\u2014going almost due west.\"\n\nLara looked at the charts. Jimmy had penciled in the exact locations where the other boats had stopped, and the length of time they'd spent there.\n\n\"Right here,\" he said, pointing to two Xs on the chart, \"these are the places where they found the statues.\"\n\n\"They're following the currents,\" Lara said.\n\nJimmy nodded. \"Of course.\"\n\nLara smiled. \"No they're not.\"\n\nAll three of the Petrakis looked at her quizzically.\n\nLara pulled out a photograph from the stack on the table. It was a satellite image of the Santorini group, the one she'd waited for Bryce to get for her from his friend in Jiquan this morning.\n\n\"This is why I was late,\" she said, showing them the image. \"It's a geological taken two hours after the quake. The epicenter was here, five miles northeast of us. Look at the currents along the shelf now.\"\n\nShe drew a finger across a reddish swirl that went from the upper left-hand corner of the photo to the lower right.\n\nNicholas was the first to see it.\n\n\"They've shifted.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Lara said. \"I don't know how long it will last, but for right now, the currents are moving north\u2014not west.\"\n\n\"So\u2026\" Jimmy looked from Lara's photo to his charts. \"So while they're all diving there, the ruins will actually be\u2014\"\n\nLara put her forefinger down on the other side of Therasia\u2014out in the open Aegean.\n\n\"Oh boy,\" Jimmy said. \"They're nowhere near it.\"\n\n\"But we will be,\" Lara said.\n\nNicholas and Jimmy looked at each other, and grinned.\n\n\"I'll do the tanks,\" Jimmy said.\n\nNicholas nodded. \"I'll do the sleds.\"\n\nThey took off like a shot.\n\nGus smiled, watching them go. \"That is the fastest I've ever seen them move.\"\n\n\"I'm moving, too.\" She picked up her backpack, hefted it over her shoulder. \"Where can I change?\"\n\n\"Any cabin you want,\" Gus said. He picked up the charts, and the satellite image. \"I'll go plot our course.\"\n\nTwenty minutes later, the Konstantinos was anchored off the southern coast of Therasia, and Lara was standing on the deck in her wet suit, frowning. She'd used the time not only to change and get her gear unpacked, but to call Hillary at the manor. No one had been there to answer the phone\u2014which was strange. The way Hillary had been fussing over her last night when she was getting ready to leave, the way he'd insisted on her taking full GPS equipment, so they could find her if there was any trouble\u2026\n\nShe would have thought he'd be pacing next to the receiver, waiting for her call. Ah well. Hers not to reason why.\n\nLara climbed up to the wheelhouse, and took a look back toward the islands. No other boats, anywhere in sight\u2014she had worried someone might follow them.\n\nShe looked starboard, saw Nicholas and Jimmy in their wet suits, prepping for the dive. The sleds were hanging by the side. In the water, they looked like motorbikes, submerged from the seat on down\u2014though beneath the surface, of course, the sleds had no wheels, no engine block, no exhaust pipes, not even a footrest. They were electric-powered, propeller-driven\u2014and Nicholas was rotating the propellers now, checking the blades, the batteries, the electrical systems. Jimmy, meanwhile, was up on deck, looking over a row of oxygen tanks. Seeing him bend over, squint at the gauges on the tanks, suddenly reminded her that she had a few instruments of her own to check over.\n\nLara looked down at her belt, swung it back to front, and glanced at her D1000C. Bryce had outfitted her camera with new housings from Subal just last week. The housings added several new controls, more than worth the expense of the retrofit, she decided after a few seconds of fiddling\u2014she'd wait to fine-tune the camera until they actually got underneath the water.\n\nBryce had also spent quite a bit of time last night on the newest addition to her photographic arsenal, a miniature camera housed on the outer rim of her diving mask itself, set to record whatever she was seeing. And speaking of arsenals\u2026\n\nShe swung the belt back around, and pulled the retrofitted Colt out of her holster. This was Subal work again, the weapon sealed and armored so that it worked underwater, firing true at almost any depth. She slid the clip out\u2014saw she had five rounds left, she'd squeezed off a test back at the manor\u2014then back in again with a satisfying thunk. Checked the spare clips on her belt, slid the weapon back in its holster\u2026\n\nAnd looked up to see Stefano, the pilot, frowning at her.\n\nShe smiled. \"Just in case the boys misbehave down there.\"\n\nOff his confused expression, she descended the ladder, from the wheelhouse down to the deck.\n\nUp front, Gus was standing with arms propped up on the railing, staring out across the ocean, a pensive look on his face. She walked over to join him.\n\n\"Something wrong?\" Lara asked.\n\nHe shrugged. \"First Alexander doesn't record its location. Then God wipes it from the earth with a volcano. Now even the currents change\u2026\"\n\n\"And your point is?\"\n\nGus avoided her gaze. \"Did it ever occur to you that maybe this temple's not meant to be found?\"\n\nShe leaned in closer. \"Everything's meant to be found.\"\n\n\"Hey, Croft! Lara!\"\n\nShe turned and saw Nicholas and Jimmy standing on the deck, waving to her. They'd put the DPVs in the water, moored them to the Konstantinos with motors running.\n\nShe waved back at the boys and smiled at Gus.\n\n\"Showtime,\" she said.\n\nLess than a minute later (after a bit of clowning around that reminded her of other times she'd spent with Nicholas and Jimmy, back when they really were boys) she was on her sled.\n\nLara put her mask over her face, felt the oxygen flowing immediately. She set the digital camera to record, and sat up straight on her sled.\n\nThe boys were on either side of her. She pointed forward with one hand, then gunned her vehicle straight ahead. They followed an instant later.\n\nJust before they submerged, Lara turned back to the Konstantinos. Gus was still at the railing, watching. He waved now, his face expressionless.\n\nLara waved back, and as she did, Gus's words came to her again.\n\nMaybe this temple's not meant to be found.\n\nSuppressing a sudden chill, she descended into the inky blackness of the Aegean, in search of the past."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "In 332 B.C., Alexander the Great conquered Egypt. He was crowned Pharoah at Memphis, and proclaimed the son of Ammon-Ra\u2014making him a god on earth.\n\nHis ascension into divinity was not fiat, imposed by the will of his army. No, Alexander was loved\u2014beloved\u2014by the Egyptians, who hailed him as deliverer, saw in him the glories of their fabled past come to life again. They brought him their country's most priceless treasures, mountains of gold and precious gems, statues and relics bearing the emblems of long-vanished empires, papyruses and cuneiform tablets relaying secrets thousands of years old.\n\nThe celebrations lasted for weeks; Alexander held ceremonial games for his new subjects, and his old ones, too, issuing invitations to athletes from throughout the known world. Among the messengers that went forth was one directed to Pella, capital city of Macedonia, Alexander's home. This messenger carried not only an invitation to the games, but (according to a fragmentary reference Lara had found) a command from Alexander to his regent Antipater, a directive to start construction of a magnificent temple to be devoted to \"the treasures of mankind.\" This temple was to be a twin to one Alexander planned to construct in his new capital, Alexandria. But whereas that temple was to be devoted to Ammon-Ra, the sun god, the one he commanded Antipater to build was intended to honor the goddess of the night.\n\nThis, as best as Lara could tell, was the first reference to the Luna Temple.\n\nAll other mentions she found (and every free moment she'd had, from the instant she finished packing last night to the moment she stepped on her jet-ski this afternoon, Lara had spent searching her library for those references, reading the extant sources, the fragments of descriptive history that had survived, reviewing her notes on the bits and pieces of rumor she had heard over the years) were as maddeningly elusive as that one. All told, what was truly known about the Luna Temple\u2014its construction, its contents\u2014didn't amount to much more than what she'd told Nicholas and Jimmy.\n\nThe temple was, in short, more the stuff of legend than historical fact. And unlike other legends\u2014Atlantis, El Do-rado, the Cave of Kyir-Banoff\u2014this one was virtually unknown to the general public.\n\nBut if it existed\u2026\n\nIf it could be found\u2026\n\nIt would be easily the most historically significant discovery of her career. Never mind the treasures the temple was rumored to contain (which included a laundry list of items from the ancient world whose very existence was surely apocryphal\u2014the armor Achilles had worn in the Trojan War, the pelt of the Nemean lion killed by Hercules, Pandora's box itself, and so on), extant sources hinted that the diaries of Alexander's royal biographer Callisthenes had been sent to the temple, and that alone was enough to make her blood race, a contemporary account of history's greatest hero which she would be the first to see in over two thousand years.\n\nWhich was why, a scant two meters down from the surface, she had the throttle full-out, headlights (the sleds eachhad four, two groups of two that could be independently operated) blaring, and was streaking toward the ocean floor like a guided missile.\n\nShe was in front, the boys behind her in single-file formation, Nicholas first, Jimmy lagging. She turned and gave them a smile, and then focused her attention downward again, leaning so far forward on the sled that she was laying straight out, just like she sometimes did on her Norton; in fact, now that she thought about it, riding one of the DPVs was a lot like riding her bike. No roads here, of course, no yellow lines or guardrails to help ward off danger, but that was part of the fun then, wasn't it?\n\nThe ocean floor appeared just beneath them, and Lara leveled out, slowing slightly as she began scanning the bottom.\n\nNot for the Luna Temple itself\u2014they weren't going to find Alexander's treasure out here, in the open, the lack of decomposition on the artifact Bryce had found was proof enough of that. The Konstantinos had anchored at what Lara calculated to be the extreme southern position of the temple's possible location\u2014their plan was to follow the current north, looking for clues to the temple's presence.\n\nThe smooth floor gave way to jagged rock. Spectacular formations created by the Santorini volcano seemed to rise up and surround them, lava flows thrusting from the ocean floor at odd angles, encrusted with barnacles and coral, filled with numerous nooks and little caves, home to no end of sea creatures. Beautiful.\n\nBut hard to follow a straight path through. Lara glanced down at the compass on her wrist to orient herself. Nicholas and Jimmy shot past her as she calculated their location.\n\nWhen she looked up, the brothers had slowed. She pulled closer and saw why. Just beyond where they waited, the sea floor came to an abrupt end.\n\nLara rolled her sled sideways, slipped in between them, and dove straight over the edge without hesitation.\n\nShe caught the surprised expressions on the boys' faces as she shot by, and smiled.\n\nShe really did have to stop thinking of them as boys.\n\nThe cliff face was sheer, and smooth. She counted one, two, three seconds before the ocean floor came into view, four, five, six before she had to slow the throttle. Sixty-one meters, at a rough guess. A long way down. They were going to have to decompress on the way up.\n\nShe leveled off. Nicholas and Jimmy appeared alongside her, none the worse for wear. Jimmy pointed to his oxygen tanks, and held up one finger. An hour's worth of oxygen\u2014half of that time they'd have to spend decompressing, Lara knew. Which left them another half hour of dive time to find the temple.\n\nShe nodded her understanding to Jimmy, and turned to examine the cliff face.\n\nRight in front of her was a narrow opening in the rock. She frowned, and scanned it with the DPV's headlights.\n\nThe opening itself was barely more than a gap in the rock. But farther in\u2026\n\nIt looked like the gap widened, became a tunnel.\n\nLara frowned, and looked up at the cliff again, then at the tunnel.\n\nHer mind began to churn.\n\nAlexander had ordered construction of a temple to house the treasures of his empire. He'd decreed that no one record the location of the temple.\n\nRidiculous, on the face of it. How could you possibly keep such massive construction\u2014such a splendid temple\u2014a secret? Only one way, really. Do what the pharoahs had done with those who'd helped build their tombs, who knew where their treasures were buried and how to get at them.\n\nKill them.\n\nWhich was what most who granted the possible existence of the Luna Temple assumed that Alexander had done.\n\nBut Lara had never bought into that line of thinking. Indiscriminate slaughter was simply not Alexander the Great's style.\n\nNext to her, she sensed Nicholas and Jimmy eager to move forward. She held up a finger.\n\nWait.\n\nAlexander wanted a place to keep his treasures safe, she thought. A place that wouldn't be found, and ransacked. If he couldn't build it, he would have to find it.\n\nAnd these islands were honeycombed with caves.\n\nSmiling, she gunned her sled forward into the dark, foreboding tunnel.\n\nThe three of them went single file again\u2014this time, because there was only room for one to squeeze through the tunnel at a time. Lara had to lay flat on the DPV, and even then, the runners of the sled scraped against the tunnel walls.\n\nAs she came around a particularly tight curve, she glanced down.\n\nThe headlights reflected off something unnaturally white. Lara bent even farther forward, stretched out a hand, and scraped dirt away with it as she passed by.\n\nThe white surface was smooth as glass. No, not glass. Marble.\n\nThe edges of her mouth twisted up into a grin.\n\nA second later, the headlights caught another glimpse of white stone, this time embedded in the wall. No need to touch it to know what this was. A column fragment, embedded in the tunnel.\n\nThe grin turned into a full-fledged smile. Her instincts had been correct\u2014about Alexander, about the temple. How he'd managed to keep its construction\u2014and its location\u2014a secret.\n\nBut her satisfaction was short-lived.\n\nAround the next curve, the tunnel came to an abrupt end, blocked by a rockfall from the roof above. Lara's smile disappeared with it.\n\nShe turned. Jimmy and Nicholas were stopped in the tunnel behind her, their expressions grim, as well. She saw Jimmy glance down at his wrist, knew that he was checking to see how much oxygen they had left. By her guess, they'd been traveling ten minutes, so another twenty before they had to start surfacing.\n\nHalf an hour to the Konstantinos\u2014half an hour, roughly, before their tanks were full and they could dive again, armed with explosives to clear away the rock. An hour all told before they were back here, in this exact position.\n\nA more prudent person might have waited.\n\nBut Lara Croft had never been prudent. And she wasn't going to start now.\n\nShe turned back to the rockfall, and focused both sets of headlights on it, searching for something\u2014a passageway narrow enough to squeeze through?\u2014that might allow her to continue.\n\nThe headlights found the rockfall, and lit it up\u2014really lit it\u2014this time.\n\nAnd suddenly, Lara's smile was back.\n\nShe gunned the throttle and drove her sled straight for the center of the collapse. Gritted her teeth and bent over the nose of the sled as it strained forward\u2026\n\nAnd smashed into not rock, but coral, the blockage had been coral, solid enough, sharp enough if you scrape against it while diving, but if you hit it hard and fast\u2026\n\nNot much of an impediment at all, really.\n\nThe DPV burst through the coral, and shot straight up into open air.\n\nFor a split second, despite everything that she'd worked out before, Lara thought that she'd miscalculated the depth of their dive, that the tunnel had led them right back to the surface, only it was somehow dark outside and the Konstantinos had disappeared and the air had gotten dank and stuffy, just like the inside of\u2026\n\nA cave. A massive, underground cave.\n\nThe sled bobbed in the water, came to a rest. The glow from her headlights lit up the cave interior, and as her eyes adjusted, gave her just enough light to see by.\n\nShe smiled, and took off her mask.\n\nJimmy, then Nicholas surfaced. One by one, they removed their masks, as well, stared around in wide-eyed wonder.\n\n\"My God\u2026\" Nicholas said.\n\n\"Is this\u2026?\" Jimmy whispered.\n\n\"Yeah,\" his brother said. \"I think so.\"\n\nLara nodded. \"Welcome to the Luna Temple.\"\n\nThey had come up through a hole in the floor, in the middle of the temple. Great columns, fifty meters tall at least, lined the walls around them, and just beyond the columns, Lara glimpsed the original cave walls, the cave that Alexander had found, and converted, into a storehouse for his most valuable treasures. The cave that had been buried, entombed intact by the eruption on Santorini more than two thousand years ago.\n\nThe cave that was now tilted almost twenty degrees to her left.\n\nA drop of water splashed down from above, striking the floor near her.\n\nLara looked up and saw the drop was coming from one of countless leaks in the ceiling. Were the leaks\u2014the structure's tilt\u2014the result of the quake that had sunk this whole portion of the island\u2014or the one that happened yesterday? No way of telling.\n\nBetter safe than sorry, she thought, and turned her attention to the temple floor, intent on checking its structural integrity.\n\nThe floor was marble\u2014composed of tiles perhaps two feet square. The ones closest to them were mostly broken, some shattered into small pieces, others split into one or two large fragments. The tiles looked in better shape toward the rear of the temple.\n\nWhere a seated statue of Alexander himself waited.\n\nLara squinted, and studied it closer.\n\nOdd position to find Alexander in. Most statues of him\u2014not only those still extant, but those which only survived in the pages of history\u2014depicted the man in action. This was Alexander at rest, a position he'd rarely occupied in real life\u2014caught in a rare moment of repose, as if he was contemplating something.\n\nPossibly the treasure that lay strewn at his feet.\n\nLara saw gold and silver coins, jewels and other precious objects, piled high before the statue and on either side of it, all along the temple wall.\n\nJimmy and Nicholas saw the treasure at the same time as she did, and laughed. They began to climb off their sleds.\n\nLara held up a hand.\n\n\"Patience.\" She pointed to the tile floor.\n\n\"They're broken,\" Jimmy said. \"So?\"\n\n\"So we need to be careful.\" She didn't think this temple was booby-trapped\u2014again, something about Alexander's character\u2014but she was worried nonetheless. Any structure tilting the way this one was needed to be approached with a certain degree of caution. Besides, Alexander himself wouldn't have decided whether or not to booby-trap the temple. He'd never been here. Luna had been built by people who may have had their own ideas of how best to protect their king's treasures.\n\nThey needed to be very careful indeed.\n\nShe climbed carefully off her sled, and set foot on the cave bottom. Coral crunched beneath her feet. A step away, the temple floor proper began.\n\nLara stepped forward, and set a foot down lightly on one of the broken tiles.\n\nIt sank into the ground.\n\nOne of the columns on the wall to her right began sinking, as well.\n\nAbove them, the ceiling creaked ominously.\n\nLara withdrew her foot, and frowned. Jimmy cursed under his breath.\n\n\"Damn,\" Nicholas said. \"What do we do?\"\n\nLara looked at the floor again. About six feet straight ahead of her, there was a series of unbroken tiles.\n\nShe took a deep breath, and swung her arms. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth\u2014\n\nShe crouched, and jumped, landing square on one of the unbroken tiles.\n\nThe columns stayed as they were. The ceiling didn't creak.\n\nShe reached into her pack and pulled out a handful of nylon bags. Turned, and tossed them back to Jimmy and Nicholas.\n\n\"Fill these,\" she told them. \"And stay off the broken tiles.\"\n\nLara was interested in the treasure, of course\u2014she kept a close eye on what Nicholas and Jimmy were filling the bags with. Caught sight of what looked like a primitive abacus, and made note of which bag that went in. Saw something that looked like a sextant, and made a mental note of that, as well. Some spectactular necklaces that looked Egyptian, a crown in the shape of\u2014of course\u2014an eight-pointed star, and a scabbard encrusted with more diamonds than she'd seen in quite a long, long time\u2014all of those piqued her interest.\n\nBut as they'd approached the treasure, her primary focus had shifted to the wall behind it, and the mural that ran the length of that wall. The colors had long ago faded, and parts of it showed signs of serious water damage, but nonetheless, as she drew close, she knew that she was looking at something quite spectacular indeed. A few seconds of up-close study confirmed her intuition.\n\nShe switched on the new digicam Bryce had prepared for her, the one affixed to her mask, and began recording.\n\nWhat she saw was an illustration of Alexander's journey across Europe and Asia\u2014his triumphal march across the known world, laid out in pictures. The images were reminiscent of something\u2014a memory that tugged briefly at her consciousness, and then flitted away.\n\nNo matter\u2014it would come to her again. She returned her attention to the glyphs on the wall.\n\nThere was a young Alexander fighting with his father, Philip, while Philip was still king\u2014and here, the newly crowned Alexander, leading the destruction at Thebes. A few panels down, there was the cutting of the Gordian knot. Then, the triumphal procession into Egypt, the sacking of Persepolis, the death of Darius, and the long march across Persia. Here, his marriage to Roxanne, and here, the launching of his final campaign, the journey into India, and here was his army\u2014\n\nLara frowned.\n\nHere was his army, in a scene she didn't recognize at all.\n\nSoldiers lay strewn by the score across a battlefield. Dead, obviously, but not from fighting\u2014they looked untouched by any weapon.\n\n\"I could get used to this tomb raiding,\" Nicholas said, interrupting her train of thought. \"Lara\u2014what do you say to two handsome Greek partners?\"\n\n\"I'll be gentle,\" she replied, giving him a brief smile before returning her attention to the battlefield scene. The more she studied it, the less sense it made. No weapons were drawn, the men had fallen in formation as if struck by lightning\u2014\n\nHere was something\u2014a soldier off to the side of the battle, holding a small box in his arms. A treasure chest of some kind, perhaps? Something they had died defending?\n\nIt still made no sense. Was this a battle that history had failed, for one reason or another, to record? A defeat for the legendary Alexander the Great? The glyphs on the wall were arranged chronologically\u2014which, looking on either side of the battlefield scene, put this between his first conquests in India, and his death in Babylon.\n\nRight about the time, she realized, that Alexander had stopped his march eastward, and turned for home.\n\nLara had always been puzzled by that decision. According to the history books, the army, tired of fighting, tired of marching, had simply refused to go any farther. Alexander's initial response to those complaints had been to tell those who wished to turn back to do so\u2014that he would proceed with his auxiliaries.\n\nThat's what she would have done\u2014by herself, if she'd had to. One of the reasons why she'd always felt such a kinship for Alexander\u2014his unshakable determination to push the envelope, to fulfill his destiny\u2014to dream the spectacular, and then to live it. Not for him an ordinary life\u2014nor for her.\n\n(Which put her in mind, for just a split second, of the other men she'd allowed to share her life\u2014Alex West, Tobias Grayson, Terry Sheridan, even\u2014all of them had that same thirst for adventure.)\n\nSo why had Alexander changed his mind?\n\nBecause that was what he had done, just a few days after the declaration that he would continue, he'd turned his back on his most cherished dream, of finishing his eastward exposition in the Bay of Bengal\u2014what he believed to be the Eastern Ocean, and the veritable edge of the world.\n\nWhy?\n\nDid it have something to do with the scene before her? A disaster history hadn't recorded? One that necessitated his sudden about-face?\n\nShe zoomed in on the battlefield scene, let the camera linger on it a moment.\n\n\"Bad day\u2026\" she murmured, frowning.\n\nThere were other symbols underneath the glyphs, she saw now, barely visible even this close up. They looked like writing\u2014but she didn't recognize the language. Odd. Lara was familiar with virtually all the Hellenic dialects.\n\nTime enough to puzzle it out later, she thought, and recorded the new symbols, as well.\n\nThen she turned away from the illustration to the statue in front of it, the seated Alexander. It was not a particularly noteworthy sculpture, she decided\u2014and no wonder, since whoever the artist had been had to work from memory, as Alexander himself had been half a continent away. There was something off about the figure, and she couldn't quite put her finger on what. The mouth, perhaps, was just a little too angular\u2014or was it the nose that was angular? In any case, the eyes\u2026\n\nThe eyes. Lara stepped closer, and saw that one of them was covered by something. A medallion.\n\nShe stepped closer, reached up, and removed it from the eye socket.\n\nThe medallion was copper, turned dark with age. Lara had to hold it close to see that there was an image on one side.\n\nA seated figure, playing a musical instrument.\n\nDetails were hard to make out in the semidarkness. More light might help, she thought, reaching for the flash on her belt.\n\nIt slipped from her grasp, and struck the temple floor.\n\nThe impact switched it on, and a beam of light shot straight up into the semidarkness. All at once, the temple was showered in a kaleidoscope of reflected light.\n\nLara looked up, and saw that the beam of light had struck something hanging from the ceiling. A cage of iron, suspended in the air by narrow horizontal bars, resting on a formation that seemed totally out of place in the temple\u2014a black cone-shaped rock.\n\nAnd within the cage, the source of the multicolored rays that flooded the interior of the temple\u2014a shining, black Orb.\n\n\"Hey!\" That was Nicholas. \"How did you know that was up there?\"\n\n\"I'm a professional,\" Lara said, without a trace of humor. She set down her guns, most of her gear, and the medallion.\n\n\"So what is it?\" Jimmy asked, as the brothers picked their way carefully across the temple floor to where Lara stood.\n\n\"I haven't a clue,\" Lara admitted. \"But I'm damn sure going to find out.\"\n\nShe looked up at the Orb, and the cage, and the bars. Frowned at the statue, at the sloping walls of the temple, and then up at the Orb again.\n\n\"Come on,\" she told Nicholas and Jimmy. \"I need a boost.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "They helped Lara up onto the statue. She perched on Alexander's hand for a second, then, using it as a platform, leapt straight up. Caught on to the protruding cornice of a column, and hung a moment, studying the route before her. The temple walls sloped inward, coming to a point high above the tiled floor. The Orb, and its cage, hung from a point perhaps halfway up. Not an easy climb. She'd have to\u2014\n\nSomething within the column cracked. Lara felt the stone beneath her fingers begin to crumble.\n\n\"Lara!\" Jimmy shouted.\n\nShe leapt again, just as the stone gave way. Her fingers closed on a handhold, and she hung in space a moment, suspended by one arm.\n\n\"No worries!\" she called back, and started to climb. Within seconds, she was sweating like a greased pig\u2014the humidity was much worse higher up, and Lara realized that it couldn't have been this humid in here for two thousand years, nothing would have survived, which meant that the recent quake had affected things inside the temple much more than she'd previously surmised.\n\nThey should not, she reflected, plan on staying long.\n\nShe had reached the cage now, was practically back-to-back with it, level with that strange, cone-shaped rock formation. Holding on tight to the wall with her right hand, Lara brought her left behind her body, and grabbed hold of the iron bars. So far, so good\u2014she'd planned this maneuver since she'd spotted the Orb from the floor below.\n\nBut now came the hard part.\n\nLara took a deep breath and then let go with her right hand, at the same time pushing off with her heels.\n\nFor a minute, she hung in midair.\n\nThen her heels slammed into the wall again, chipping off stone, sending it crumbling to the temple floor below. At the same instant, both hands stretched out, and she grabbed hold of the cage.\n\nThere. Lara smiled and hung a moment, gathering herself as she lay suspended in space, parallel to the temple floor far below.\n\nThen she looked down, and gasped.\n\nThe tiles of the floor formed a pattern, one visible only from high above.\n\nA giant figure, drawn on the floor. A threatening, foreboding image\u2014some sort of warrior\u2014one whose like she'd never seen in Greek art before.\n\nAnother mystery, Lara reflected, thinking of the battlefield scene she'd spent so much time studying earlier. Neither of which she had time to puzzle through right now. She turned her attention to the black Orb, and the cage that held it.\n\nSteadying herself with one hand, holding her legs straight as steel rods for support, she reached down and pulled the small acetylene torch off her belt. Thumbed on the flame, and brought the torch up to the cage bars.\n\nAs she did so, Lara happened to glance down again. The cool blue light of the torch's plume caught the eyes of the mysterious figure on the floor below, making them glitter like a thing alive, and casting shadows all about the cave, as well.\n\nThe earth shook.\n\nLara' s heels slipped on the temple wall. The cage started to swing away from her. She almost lost her grip\u2014almost dropped the torch, as well.\n\n\"Aftershock!\" she heard Jimmy shout from below.\n\nThe walls shook again, harder this time\u2014and this time, Lara couldn't keep her legs in place. She slipped free of the temple wall\u2014her body swung out into space, and she dangled in midair, suspended by one arm from the cage, her other hand gripping the still-lit torch.\n\nDrop the torch, the voice of common sense told her. Grab onto the cage with both hands, and hold tight. No telling how long the aftershock will last, no telling what might happen before it stops, and you'd better be prepared for anything.\n\nYou'd better hold on to that torch, another little voice in her head whispered, a voice that told her if she dropped it she might never get it back, might never cut through the cage to get what instinct told her was the most valuable treasure in the entire cave, the black orb that hung just out of reach in front of her.\n\nLara gritted her teeth and held on with one hand.\n\nThe temple was vibrating like a tuning fork now. Chunks of stone, and marble, and dirt fell past her head like rain. She caught a clump of clay smack in the face, swallowing some, and turned away to spit it out.\n\nThe support column closest to her was separating from its base, sliding off it inch by inch, propelled by the force of the aftershock.\n\nIf it slipped all the way off, the whole temple was going to come down around them.\n\nLara opened her mouth to shout at Nicholas and Jimmy, to warn them, tell them to get out before\u2014\n\nThe shocks stopped.\n\nLara looked all around her.\n\nThe small leaks from the temple roof were now streams. The temple was canted at closer to a forty-five-degree angle\u2014the lower half was a wading pool.\n\nFar below, the brothers were struggling to their feet.\n\n\"You all right down there?\" Lara called out.\n\n\"Yeah. I think that's a sign to leave!\" Jimmy shouted back.\n\n\"I think that's a sign to leave now!\" Nicholas added.\n\nThey were right. No doubt about it, the Luna Temple was falling apart, about to disappear from the sight of man for a second and final time.\n\nAnd yet, she still wanted the Orb.\n\nLara looked at it once more, trapped within the iron cage, so tantalizingly close and yet at least a couple minutes of cutting away. The light from the flash below was hitting the Orb at a new angle now, revealing details she hadn't been able to see before.\n\nIncluding markings on the Orb's surface.\n\nIntricate, gleaming carvings that shone like platinum against the black.\n\nA pattern of some sort, clearly, but what\u2026\n\nNo way to scan all the way around the object, get pictures of its entire surface while it\u2014and she\u2014were hung from the ceiling like this. Only one way to figure out what this pattern meant, really.\n\nShe had to have the Orb.\n\n\"Two minutes,\" she shouted down to Jimmy and Nicholas.\n\n\"What are you, crazy?\" Jimmy shouted back up. \"Get down here, we have to start packing up, we have to get out of this place\u2014\"\n\n\"Two\u2026minutes\u2026\" Lara repeated firmly, bringing the torch to bear on the first of the iron bars.\n\nSparks began to fly.\n\nLara's mind raced as she cut.\n\nShe peered through the torch's plume at the markings on the Orb. She'd wracked her mind, trying to figure out what language the strange markings on the Orb were, but had drawn a blank. Not Greek, clearly, nor any of the Arabic languages that had dominated the Asiatic side of the Hellespont during this time frame. She was stumped.\n\nShe was through the first bar. She glanced down, and saw Jimmy and Nicholas busily loading the sleds with the bags of treasure, casting nervous glances up toward the ceiling as they did so.\n\nPerhaps it was her imagination, but the water did seem to be falling faster, harder, from the holes in the temple roof. And the huge support column nearest her seemed inches away from coming entirely off its base.\n\nShe finished cutting through the second bar, moved on to the third. Six in all, on the side she was cutting, and now the cage hung at such an angle that the Orb was poised to roll out the second she'd finished slicing through.\n\nHer mind returned to the markings on the Orb. Perhaps they had something to do with the circumstances of the temple's building, what treasures Antipater had decided to store there, and yet that was wrong, too, because all the fragments she'd found stated with no uncertainty that it was Alexander who'd decided which treasures were to be brought here, and which were to be stored in Alexandria.\n\nIt was a mystery all right.\n\nShe was through the fourth bar, and saw now that she only needed to cut one more for the Orb to fall free.\n\nSweat beaded on her forehead. Lara wiped it away.\n\nShe was halfway through the fifth bar\u2014really, a hard punch would snap it now, and the waiting Orb tumbled right into her hand.\n\n\"Lara, watch out!\"\n\nThat was Jimmy\u2014with a panicked overtone to his voice.\n\nThe temple was collapsing\u2014that was her first, instinctive reaction.\n\nShe looked up, expecting to see part of the roof falling toward her. Nothing. She looked down.\n\nHer mouth fell open in shock.\n\nThey were no longer alone in the temple.\n\nSix men, in full diving gear, armed with spearguns, had joined them. The boys were fighting them\u2014they'd been surprised, as well, Lara saw, because both brothers were being held from behind. The Petrakis struggled, but the other men were well trained.\n\nNicholas elbowed the man who held him at the chest\u2014hard enough to make a resounding thump. The man only grunted.\n\nLight glinted off something in his hand\u2014a knife.\n\nThe blade flashed\u2014Nicholas fell to the ground, blood gushing from his throat. He flopped once on the ground, then lay still.\n\n\"No!\" Lara screamed, but her shout was lost in the guttural noise Jimmy made as he saw his brother fall. Jimmy reached for Nicholas\u2014\n\nThe man nearest him darted forward, quick as lightning, Lara had never seen anyone move so fast. He punched Jimmy square in the stomach.\n\nThe air went out of Jimmy in an audible whoosh.\n\nThen the man dragged his hand up Jimmy's chest, and Lara saw that he hadn't just punched Jimmy, he'd stabbed him, sinking the blade of his knife deep inside his body, and now that blade was traveling upward, as well, gutting Jimmy, and Lara blinked. She couldn't see for a second, she felt ill, she\u2014\n\nWatched Jimmy fall backward, near where his brother lay. The two boys, side by side.\n\nBoys. She had to stop thinking of them as boys\u2014and yet in the instant she watched them die, that was all Lara could think of, images of the two of them as they had been.\n\nLittle boys, following her around like love-struck puppy dogs. Do this, do that, take me here, take me there\u2014\n\nLook where she'd brought them to now.\n\nSpears flew through the air at her.\n\nLara dropped the torch, sprung off the cage, and landed on the wall. Another spear hit behind her. A second chunked into the wall above her head. A third passed right between her thighs, so close it tore the fabric of her wet suit.\n\nShe looked down and saw that the man who'd killed Jimmy had thrown that one.\n\nThe two of them locked eyes.\n\nHe was Asian, Lara saw. A face she didn't know.\n\nBut one that now she would never forget.\n\nLara watched as he walked over to the Alexander statue, which was now so tilted that its base was partially submerged, as well. He collected the equipment she'd left there, including her speargun\u2014and the medallion from the statue's eye. Damn it.\n\nShe had to get down to the temple floor again to stop this man. Climbing was out of the question, though, she'd be a sitting duck, and it was too far to jump\u2026\n\nUnless she could land in water.\n\nLara scanned the temple\u2014there. Halfway across the interior, she saw a pool that looked deep enough for her to risk a dive. One problem, though\u2014there wasn't a handhold in sight.\n\nA spear flew past, close enough to graze the hair on her head, reminding her that she couldn't stay where she was, either. She had to get moving.\n\nThe spear stuck in the wall next to Lara, deep enough that the wall vibrated with its impact.\n\nAah. That gave her an idea.\n\nLara faked a move forward, and another spear flew through the air, anticipating where she would be. It chunked in the wall, just ahead of the first.\n\nPerfect.\n\nShe cursed out loud for effect, then faked the same move again. With the same result.\n\nAnother spear in the wall. And then a third, right on its heels.\n\nThat should do it, Lara thought, and launched herself for real now, diving forward through the air, and grabbing onto the spear closest to her.\n\nIt held for a second, then snapped off in her grasp, and as she tumbled the Orb dropped behind the statue.\n\nLara used the momentum from her jump to grab onto spear number two.\n\nThat broke, as well, but she used it to swing forward again, to number three, and even as number three snapped, she stretched out, hands above her head, and jackknifed into the water, even as another volley of spears flew past.\n\nLara went down as deep as she could and stayed there.\n\nShe waited ten seconds, fifteen, thinking about what had just happened up above, wondering who the men were, how they'd followed her, formulating a plan of action.\n\nKill them all.\n\nWhich she would need a weapon for. Jimmy's murderer had her speargun. But\u2014he'd missed the modified .45. Lara hadn't seen it, either. She thought\u2014she hoped\u2014that it was lying somewhere in the shallow water at the statue's base.\n\nOnly problem was getting there.\n\nShe swum twenty feet along the bottom, then quietly surfaced in front of the damaged support column.\n\nTwo of the attackers were poised over the water near where she'd entered it, spearguns at the ready. As she watched, first one, then the other fired into the pool, then stood over it a moment, waiting.\n\nShe noted they were Asian, as well.\n\nThe two men were firing blind, hoping to hit her. Not such a bad strategy, since the pool was not very big at all.\n\nThe two men exchanged a glance, then reloaded their spearpistols, and started circling the pool again.\n\nLara scanned the rest of the temple interior. Along the far wall, three other attackers were finishing what Jimmy and Nicholas had started\u2014loading up the DPVs with the filled treasure bags. She didn't see the sixth man anywhere.\n\nBut there was the Alexander statue\u2014now covered almost up to the knees by water. Lara took a deep, quiet breath and swam for it. Five feet away, she spotted the Colt. Without surfacing, she picked up the gun and released the safety.\n\nThen she turned around. Closest to her were the two men circling the pool with spearguns, hoping to spot her.\n\nLara raised the gun, sighted, and fired.\n\nThe bullet exploded out of the water and caught her target square in the chest. He flew backward through the air, and even before he'd hit the ground, the other man was spinning, quick as lightning, raising his speargun and pointing it right at Lara.\n\nBut she was quicker. She fired a second time, and that man fell, as well.\n\nLara rose up out of the water and spun, aiming toward the first of the other three men, clumped near the DPVs.\n\nMovement from above distracted her, and even as she squeezed the trigger, she knew her shot was off. That upset her.\n\nWhat upset her even more was the source of that movement above her\u2014the sixth attacker, Jimmy's killer, determinedly making for the Orb.\n\nThat was hers.\n\nA spear whizzed past her.\n\nLara dove for the ground, and rolled, once, twice, then coming to rest flat on her back.\n\nShe raised the Colt, targeting the sixth man.\n\nThe sixth attacker raised his spearpistol. He smiled as he closed his hand around the Orb, and took aim at Lara.\n\nThe three remaining attackers\u2014spread out along the far wall with him\u2014did the same.\n\nLara's finger tightened on the trigger of her Colt. A split second before firing, she stopped herself.\n\nThis was her last shot.\n\nShe had four targets\u2014four men to kill.\n\nOnly one way to take them all out.\n\nLara spun and fired at the base of the column behind her, shattering the last bits of supporting marble.\n\nWith a loud thunk, the column dropped five feet straight down, to the temple floor. A huge chunk of the temple roof came with it.\n\nAnd then the entire cave began to collapse. Bits of earth and tile plunged all around her\u2014from one of the leaks in the ceiling, a torrent of ocean water began pouring in.\n\nLara began to run toward the DPVs, and the treasure. Toward the hole in the temple floor that was the only way out of what was now a death trap.\n\nA meter-square piece of tile plunged directly toward the attackers.\n\nTo Lara's immense disappointment, the sixth attacker\u2014Jimmy's killer\u2014shattered it with a well-aimed spear from his gun.\n\nEven as he fired, he was pushing the others back toward the DPVs, shouting in Mandarin as he did so. On a course to intercept Lara.\n\nShe gritted her teeth, and willed herself forward, even faster.\n\nAs she passed the Alexander statue, a huge chunk of the petroglyph mural collapsed in front of her. She tried to leap over it, but her timing was off, and she clipped it with one foot, stumbled, and fell to the ground.\n\nA cloud of earth and dust collapsed directly on top of her.\n\nBy the time it had cleared, the two men were dead, two had escaped, and the remaining DPV was useless.\n\nShe coughed up some of the dust she'd swallowed, and started crawling on her hands and knees toward where she knew the hole in the temple floor had to be. She found it, eventually. Only one problem.\n\nLara no longer had her breathing mask. Or oxygen. And by the most optimistic of reckonings, she was a hundred fifty feet from the surface. Surfacing without any sort of decompression was risky, but she'd have to take that risk.\n\nBehind her, the temple rumbled again. Another portion of the wall collapsed.\n\nFirst things first, Lara thought. Get out of here.\n\nTaking a deep breath, she plunged headfirst into the tunnel.\n\nSqueezing through the opening in the coral that she'd made with her DPV, Lara made her way through the winding passageway, out into the open ocean at the floor of the cliff base.\n\nAs she emerged, she nearly collided with a tiger shark, swimming by the entrance to the tunnel.\n\nLara reached reflexively for the knife at her belt. Brandished it in front of her, to warn the animal off. It paid her no mind whatsoever, and kept swimming\u2014looking for an easier target, she supposed.\n\nShe slid the knife back into her belt and tensed her body, preparing to spring off the ocean floor for the long swim to the surface above.\n\nBut when she looked up, that surface\u2014the dim light of day\u2014seemed impossibly far away.\n\nShe'd been holding her breath for too long already\u2014she would never make topside, even swimming as fast as she could now.\n\nShe needed to think this through.\n\nShe swam back into the tunnel, through the break in the coral, and emerged back into the collapsed ruins of the Luna Temple. To a rude surprise.\n\nThe air pocket above her was barely the size of a coffin.\n\nSomewhere off in the distance, she heard a great rumbling. Soon even this little air pocket would be gone, she knew, taking one deep breath, then another. The last air she would get until she reached the surface.\n\nAnd she would reach the surface, there was no doubt in her mind about that. She would find a way\u2014she would have to\u2014because she had to pay back the men that had killed Nicholas and Jimmy. Pay them back in kind, put a knife of her own into their hearts, make sure that those vicious killers would not get away with\u2014\n\nVicious killers, Lara thought.\n\nShe pulled the diving glove off her left hand, and slid it, backward, over the glove already on her right. An extra layer of protection.\n\nShe would need it.\n\nLara pulled the knife out of her belt again, and slashed her right forearm. Blood welled up instantly in the cut.\n\nShe stuck the knife away again, and dove.\n\nThrough the coral, through the tunnel, toward the open ocean again. Felt a rumbling behind her as she swam that she knew was the final collapse of the Luna Temple.\n\nBlood billowed from her arm as she emerged from the underwater cliff.\n\nThe tiger shark was nowhere in sight.\n\nCome on, you cold-blooded bastard, Lara thought, waving her cut arm about in the water. Thrashing like a wounded animal. Come and get me.\n\nThe first attack came from directly behind her.\n\nShe spun just as the shark shot past. A bolt of blue-and-gray lightning. God, it was fast. But that run had just been a test\u2014a feint to see how badly injured Lara was. It hadn't come within five feet of her.\n\nNot close enough for what she planned.\n\nNow the animal was circling. It came about and faced her again, its cold, dead eyes weighing her.\n\nLara let herself go limp.\n\nAnd the shark struck\u2014even faster this time, coming straight for her.\n\nAt the last possible second, Lara's left hand shot forward, clenched into a fist. She punched the shark right in the nose. An old diver's trick\u2014the shark veered off, convinced again that this prey was not worth the risk.\n\nAs it swam past, Lara grabbed onto its fin with her double-gloved right hand, and held on for dear life.\n\nThe shark bolted for the surface, thrashing and weaving as it tried to rid itself of its unwelcome passenger.\n\nFor her part, Lara just concentrated on holding on. Her breath was already gone, and she felt the beginnings of a faint queasiness that she knew could represent the bends, but she couldn't worry about either of those things now, as she narrowed her whole world down to her right hand and the fin, to squeezing with every ounce of her strength, ignoring the throbbing pain in her wound, the rush of the water sliding past her, the seemingly endless expanse of blue above\u2026\n\nThe shark swam.\n\nThe animal thrashed hard to the left\u2014Lara's body went with it.\n\nThen the shark thrashed back to the right, and its tail caught Lara square in the stomach.\n\nShe went flying backward\u2014her hand let go of the fin.\n\nNo, she thought.\n\n\"No.\"\n\nShe said the word aloud\u2014and opened her eyes to find herself bobbing on the surface of the ocean. Calm, featureless, no sight of land or boat anywhere.\n\nHer entire body was a bruise. Her right hand was numb.\n\nShe felt consciousness slipping away.\n\nShe reached out and grabbed a piece of wood as it drifted past.\n\nDraped herself over it and activated the transmitter on her collar.\n\nEverything went black.\n\nLater. The sun burned down on her from high above. She felt something sticky, and wet on her face. Dried saltwater\u2014dried blood, who knew which?\n\nNot her.\n\nShe closed her eyes again.\n\nShe opened them with a start.\n\nIt was later now. The sun was at four o'clock, drifting toward the horizon.\n\nSomething was wrong.\n\nLara pulled herself up farther on the driftwood.\n\nThe water around her shifted.\n\nBefore she could move, something slammed into her from beneath.\n\nThe shark? No, too big for the shark, too hard for the shark.\n\nWhale, she thought, adrenaline surging through her system as she rolled to the side and\u2014\n\nTouched metal.\n\nThe thing beneath her rose up, breaking the surface, sending her rolling backward.\n\nIt was a submarine.\n\nLara found a railing and held on.\n\nThe conning tower popped open. Hillary burst through the door, a panicked expression on his face.\n\nBryce followed a second later.\n\n\"Oh my God,\" Hillary said, stumbing down the ladder in his haste to get to her. \"Oh my God.\"\n\nHe knelt down next to her, and from somewhere, produced a mug. It smelled like tea.\n\nHe held it up to her lips, and Lara drank.\n\nIt was tea.\n\n\"Oh. I needed that,\" Lara croaked.\n\nHillary continued to look stricken.\n\n\"Oh my God,\" he whispered.\n\n\"It's not that bad,\" she repeated, struggling to sit up.\n\n\"It's awful!\"\n\nLara turned and saw Bryce poking at the remnants of her new digicam, which dangled off her shoulder.\n\n\"This is awful,\" he repeated, looking as distressed as Hillary had. \"Lara, I spend countless hours making sure you have the best equipment. I don't think you appreciate that\u2014\"\n\n\"Bryce,\" Hillary interrupted, laying a hand on his shoulder. \"Not now.\"\n\nBryce humphed, and glared at Lara. \"That means you don't appreciate me.\"\n\nShe reached out and shoved him to the deck. He looked up at her, shocked.\n\n\"What did I say?\"\n\n\"Not what you said\u2014what you are. A pain in the arse.\"\n\nIt was only then she saw the piece of driftwood she'd been hanging on to.\n\nWith the word Konstantinos painted on it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Somewhere over the Atlantic, an hour out from the airport, the waiting finally got to Monza.\n\n\"Ridiculous!\" He'd been holding his pen in one hand, flicking the point in and out, his impatience growing with each passing minute. Now he squeezed the barrel tight between thumb and forefinger, only for an instant, but his strength\u2014like the rest of him\u2014was prodigious.\n\nThe barrel snapped.\n\nMonza laid the shards on the table in front of him, and cleared his throat. \"Did you\u2014did any of you know he'd moved the meeting to\u2026this?\"\n\nAs he spoke he spun in his chair, making eye contact with each of the five people sharing the main cabin with him in turn. First those seated behind him, San, Krev, and Al-Sabah\u2014then, directly across the cabin, Duvalier\u2014and finally, the sole woman in their group, seated directly across a small serving table from him, Madame Gillespie.\n\nAll shook their heads.\n\nMonza snorted. He'd spoken more out of exasperation than anything else, wasn't really expecting that any of the others had any more advance knowledge than he had of the change of location. He was frustrated, that was all\u2014moving the meeting had upset his schedule, ruined some carefully laid plans of his.\n\nHe glanced forward now, to the curtain that separated the main cabin from the Gulfstream's forward compartment, said compartment being\u2014presumably\u2014where their host waited to make his appearance. As Monza looked, he thought he saw a shadow pass behind the curtain. He craned his neck, trying to peer around the edge of the fabric, but it was no use. The curtain was drawn too tight.\n\nMonza snorted, and downed the rest of his wine. When Monza was frustrated, he tended to indulge. It was a fault of his, he knew it, but not one he had any desire to change.\n\nAs he settled back in his chair, one of the serving girls stepped forward to refill his glass. She avoided making eye contact with him\u2014not surprising, really, people\u2014particularly people of the opposite sex\u2014had been treating Edgar Monza that way for his entire life. When he was younger, it was because his physical appearance\u2014his size, the way he carried himself, the way he spoke, and acted\u2014repelled them.\n\nNow that he had earned himself a reputation\u2014one that had clearly preceded him aboard this plane\u2014it was because they feared him.\n\nWhich Monza far preferred.\n\n\"What's the matter? Don't you like me?\"\n\nThe girl\u2014she and the other server, the blonde, had introduced themselves as he'd boarded the plane, but Monza had forgotten their names immediately\u2014forced herself to smile. Tried to laugh as she finished pouring his wine, but Monza could see through that.\n\nShe was terrified.\n\nMonza reached for his drink, and deliberately knocked the glass over.\n\nThe girl bit her lip, trying not to show emotion. Monza smiled.\n\n\"Can I have some more. Please?\"\n\nShe avoided his eyes, wiped up the spill. Then she picked up his glass and started pouring again.\n\nMonza put his hand on her bottom, caressed her.\n\n\"I'm sorry, angel, if I seem irritated,\" he said. To her credit, she didn't spill a drop. Monza smiled even more broadly. She had more spunk than he'd given her credit for. He thought about taking her to the back of the plane, indulging some of his other desires with her. He wondered if their host would be annoyed.\n\nHe rather hoped so.\n\n\"I am not patient like my friends,\" he continued. \"I don't like it when plans are changed for no reason\u2014\"\n\n\"Really, Mister Monza.\"\n\nMonza looked up.\n\nThe curtain at the front of the cabin had been pulled back\u2014\n\nAnd Dr. Jonathan Reiss stood in the doorway.\n\n\"I should think you know me better than that.\"\n\nThe girl took advantage of Reiss's appearance to back quickly away. Monza let her go, took a sip from his glass as he studied their host.\n\nReiss was immaculately turned out, as always, in a tan suit\u2014probably Italian, obviously custom-made, it hung off him perfectly, made him look like he'd stepped out of the pages of a catalog, his hair perfectly coiffed, matching shoes, tie, and handkerchief completing the ensemble. Monza, who had his suits made by the finest tailors in the world and yet could never quite avoid rumpling them, could never get them to fit properly, thought that another reason to dislike the doctor\u2014as was the grateful smile the serving girl flashed at Reiss as she scurried to her post at the back of the plane.\n\n\"You'll all accept my apologies, of course,\" Reiss said, \"but behind every choice I make, one will always find a reason. In this instance, the six of you in one room makes for a tempting target for NATO. Rather than move any of you, I decided to move the room.\" Reiss flashed a brief smile. \"At six hundred miles per hour.\"\n\nThe others nodded understandingly. Mr. San, in the chair just behind Monza, even chuckled.\n\nMonza was not as amused.\n\n\"That's not an apology!\" he shouted, banging his hand on the table. \"It's our money that pays for the shirt on your back, not to mention this jet! Yet you make us wait like dogs!\"\n\nThere was silence after his outburst\u2014a silence born out of tension, and expectation. Everyone\u2014Monza included\u2014waited to see what Reiss would do, how he would react.\n\nThe doctor locked eyes with Monza a moment, then nodded thoughtfully. He smiled.\n\n\"Then I apologize, Mr. Monza.\" He looked around the room, including the others in the conversation. \"To you, and to everyone. Please\u2014let's drink to it.\"\n\nHe waved the serving girls forward. They poured from new bottles\u2014Monza swallowed what remained of his drink in a single gulp and held out his glass for one of the girls to refill.\n\nTo his surprise, the brunette\u2014the one he'd been amusing himself with\u2014stepped in front of the other server to see to his glass herself. Their eyes met as she poured, and Monza was surprised to see her so cool, so composed.\n\nOdd, he thought, as she stepped away. Then her eyes went to Reiss, and he understood. Reiss was here, and she felt safe, protected. False security, Monza thought. His plans for today might have changed, but Jonathan Reiss would not be able to offer this delicate flower a safe haven for too much longer.\n\n\"Gentlemen\u2014and lady,\" Reiss began, and he turned to the back of the plane a moment, seemed to study something there, though Monza couldn't tell what, there was only a painting of some kind, a clock, and the toilet of course.\n\n\"There is an expression,\" Reiss said, walking forward as he spoke. \"It's not nice to fool Mother Nature. And yet, whether it be sarin gas for Mr. San\u2014\" he stopped next to San just then, and laid a hand on the other man's shoulder \"\u2014improved typhoid for Mr. Krev to use in the Balkans,\" he continued, lifting his hand and nodding toward Krev, \"or enhanced cholera for Mr. Duvalier,\" and at those words, he and the Frenchman exchanged the briefest of smiles, \"or the more exotic work I've done for you, Mr. Monza,\" Reiss said, and Monza looked up to find the doctor's eyes focused on him now, \"that is precisely what I've been doing.\"\n\nSomething in the doctor's gaze unnerved Monza. He turned away, and took another sip of his wine. Different vintage, this, he decided. There was an aftertaste he didn't care for.\n\nReiss turned away, and glanced back at the rear of the plane again. Again, Monza wondered why. As he wondered, the doctor began speaking again.\n\n\"Yet while those weapons served their purpose, there are always limitations; stable diseases aren't lethal, deadly ones burn out too quickly\u2026Mother Nature can only be fooled so much. So, after years of fighting her, I've surrendered. Rather than take a disease and attempt to transform it into a weapon of mass destruction, I've gone and found the one such weapon Nature ever gave us. Something meant for more than scaring the public into wearing gloves when they open their mail. This is why I've called you all here today\u2014to show you the way that Mother Nature levels nations. And to offer you a chance to possess that power for yourselves.\"\n\nMonza saw the others in the cabin exchange glances; he met Madame Gillespie's eyes and saw the hunger in there, felt that same hunger from all the others, felt it fill the sudden silence left by the doctor's words. Reiss had them.\n\nAnd that didn't fit into Monza's plans at all.\n\nThe big man barked out a laugh.\n\n\"Crap,\" Monza said, the word slicing through the silence like a knife. \"We've come all this way to hear crap. Forgive my crude outburst, doctor,\" and he made the title sound like a sneer, an insult, \"but for years men like you have promised such a weapon and for years they have failed.\"\n\nThe doctor's eyes narrowed. \"You've never heard the promise from me.\"\n\nMonza laughed again, and felt a tickle in his throat. Some sediment in the wine\u2014something stuck there. He coughed, and the slight tickle turned into a burning sensation farther down. Indigestion, acid reflux\u2014he had them all. Nothing serious, never serious. He cleared his throat, and met Reiss's eyes again. Steel on steel\u2014the two men eyed each other warily.\n\n\"Gentlemen\u2014Madame Gillespie,\" Reiss said. \"Your governments have attacked their enemies. Those enemies fought back. You've terrorized their citizens\u2014those citizens rallied around waving flags.\"\n\nSpare us the philosophizing, Monza thought, and opened his mouth to speak again, but instead let loose another cough. Damn.\n\nHe had a glass of water next to him, untouched. He picked it up now and drank.\n\n\"Deploy my weapon,\" Reiss continued, \"and those same citizens will tremble at the sight of one another. As they begin to die, they'll blame their own government. Looting will erupt. Rapes, murders\u2014your enemies, however great, will collapse from within like a house of cards. Or like\u2026\"\n\nReiss stopped, hung over Monza with a strange sickening smile.\n\n\"Like Mister Monza here,\" he finished.\n\nMonza swallowed, and felt the burning in his throat again. Worse this time.\n\nLooked up at the mocking smile on Reiss's face.\n\nAnd looked down at the glass of water in his hand, the one he'd just drank from, saw red streaks in it, not wine, no, it was\u2014\n\nHe gurgled, and set down the glass of water.\n\nNo. God, no.\n\nThrough the sudden fire in his chest, he was vaguely aware of Duvalier jumping to his feet, backing away from him.\n\n\"What the hell is going on?\" Duvalier shouted.\n\n\"What's going on?\" Reiss repeated, his voice sounding eerily calm, sounding to Monza as if it was coming from a million miles away. \"He told M-I-Six about our meeting. That's why I changed the location.\"\n\nThe burning in his chest was unbearable now\u2014Monza pulled the napkin from under his glass, and coughed into it. Felt something tear in his throat.\n\nThe napkin came away stained red, and white.\n\n\"Bastard,\" Monza whispered. \"Bastard.\"\n\nHe looked up at Reiss, disbelievingly. The doctor continued to smile.\n\nMonza knew he was dying\u2014whatever Reiss had given him was sure to be lethal.\n\nBut perhaps\u2014just perhaps\u2014he could take the good doctor with him.\n\nThere was a gun inside his jacket\u2014he had to reach for it without seeming to make a threatening move, disguise it somehow, yes, pretend he was reaching for a handkerchief, pretend\u2014\n\nA sudden spasm of coughing overtook him, and with it, an equally sudden attack of nausea. Monza felt his whole body wrenching upon itself, his insides twisting and turning themselves inside out and\u2014\n\nHe moaned, and the moan turned into a gurgle, and a viscous stream of grayish matter poured out of his throat.\n\nMonza stared, disbelieving, at the napkin, coated with what had just come out of him.\n\nEveryone else in the cabin moved reflexively backward, seeking to put more distance between themselves and Monza. Everyone except Dr. Jonathan Reiss.\n\nThe doctor allowed himself a small shiver of pleasure, and then moved closer. He wanted to enjoy every second of Monza's death throes.\n\n\"He was going to turn me in, then seek asylum from the West,\" Reiss said. He noted sweat breaking out on Monza's forehead\u2014the disease was progressing as rapidly as Holliday and the others on the team had said it would. Faster, even.\n\nMonza was trying to get up. Reiss put his hand on the man's neck and forced him back into his chair.\n\n\"A smart man would have known I was on to him, would never have gotten on this plane. But I knew you would, because you actually thought\u2014\" Reiss found Monza's eyes, and a spark of whatever reasoning consciousness remained in the man, in the face of the unbearable agonies his body was suffering through right now \"\u2014you actually thought you could fool me.\"\n\nThe doctor shook his head pityingly.\n\nMonza had another coughing fit, this one the worst yet. Halfway through Reiss heard a loud crack, and shook his head in wonder. That was a rib going, he thought. And there\u2014another crack, another bone.\n\nMarvelous.\n\nReiss had to hold Monza's neck even tighter to keep the man steady in his chair.\n\n\"These, my friends\u2014\" Reiss spoke without taking his eyes away from Monza's, he wanted to see every ounce of agony reflected there \"\u2014are the sounds of a traitor.\"\n\nThen all at once, there were no more sounds.\n\nThe coughing had stopped. So had Monza's breathing.\n\nReiss stood over the fat man, whose head had come to rest against one of the Gulfstream's windows. Red matter trickled out of both sides of his mouth, and had stained his suit and one of the armrests on his seat.\n\nThere was some on the floor, as well, Reiss saw. And on the windows. The doctor didn't envy whoever was on cleanup duty after this flight.\n\nHe turned away from the corpse and focused his attention on his other guests.\n\n\"Please forgive that unpleasantness. It was necessary, of course, but\u2014\" Reiss shrugged. \"I regret you had to see it. In case you were wondering, that was an accelerated form of ebola. It is the deadliest disease known to man. Highly contagious.\"\n\nDuvalier, who still hadn't sat down (for someone with such an illustrious pedigree, Reiss thought, the man was a bit\u2026well, jumpy), exchanged a nervous glance with first San, and then Krev. Even the normally unflappable Al-Sabah looked tense.\n\nReiss nodded sympathetically. \"Yes, it is an airborne pathogen\u2014I don't doubt the cabin is full of the virus. However\u2026\"\n\nHe nodded toward the two ladies at the rear of the cabin. They came forward and placed a single black pill in front of each of the other guests.\n\n\"Like all known diseases, there exist stockpiles of antiserum in the West\u2014ready to stifle any outbreak.\"\n\nHis guests all studied their pills for a moment. Then, one by one\u2014Duvalier first of all, and Reiss made a mental note to speak with Sean about the man, he was too jittery today, he would fold under any sort of pressure, Reiss knew that now\u2014they each picked up the capsules and swallowed them.\n\nOnly when they'd all done so did Reiss take his own dose of antiserum. He sipped from his water, and smiled at the others.\n\n\"My friends, there's no antiserum for what I'm offering to you. No treatment, no protocol, no vaccine, no cure. The modern world has never seen anything like what I've uncovered.\"\n\n\"Uncovered?\" Mr. San asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Reiss nodded. \"I branched out. Archaeology.\"\n\nSan looked at him questioningly. Madame Gillespie frowned.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" she said.\n\n\"It's not important that you do,\" he told her. \"All you need to know is zero-seven-seven-four-four-six-eight-one.\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon?\"\n\n\"Zero-seven-seven-four-four-six-eight-one. That is the account at the Lardesbank in Bern. Nine-figure deposit\u2014a fair price for what you're getting. Those of you who pay will see their enemies eliminated. Those of you who don't\u2014\" he looked from her to the others \"\u2014I hope for your sakes none of your enemies buy it. You have twenty-four hours.\"\n\nAgain, there was silence in the cabin.\n\n\"That's too soon,\" San said. \"I'll need more time to gather that kind of money.\"\n\nReiss sighed. \"Ah. Then I'm sorry for you, Mister San. Because this is, as they say in America, a limited-time offer. And the time limit is twenty-four hours.\"\n\nJust as Reiss finished talking, a soft chime sounded in the cabin. The two serving girls made their way toward the back of the plane.\n\n\"I'll leave you now,\" Reiss said. \"But the girls will be serving dinner shortly\u2014after we've had a chance to clear the cabin of\u2014\" He nodded in the direction of Monza's body. \"That.\"\n\n\"Let me prevail on you to stay with us a moment, doctor,\" Al-Sabah said. \"I would like to discuss exactly what it is you've found. Since you're asking us to take an awful lot on faith.\"\n\nReiss shook his head slowly. \"I cannot believe, sir, that after my demonstration here\u2014\" he nodded again at Monza's body \"\u2014that you doubt my ability to deliver what I promise.\"\n\nAl-Sabah, to his credit, Reiss thought, met his stare.\n\n\"I don't doubt your abilities\u2014I just don't like paying that kind of money blindly.\"\n\n\"Not blindly, sir,\" Reiss said. \"I believe you have more than enough information to make a rational decision here. And now, if you'll excuse me\u2026\"\n\nWithout waiting for an answer, Reiss spun on his heel and walked forward to his own cabin.\n\nThe doctor spent the next several hours resting. He preferred plenty of rest\u2014ten hours a day, not necessarily in contiguous time chunks, blocks of an hour at least, though, at a minimum\u2014though he did not use the time solely to sleep. Reiss spent much of it just thinking. The most valuable time he had, and the hardest to find, particularly in a world that seemed determined to supply a sound track\u2014be it music or commercials or what passed for news\u2014for one's every waking moment. It really was astounding to him, every time he went out in public, how anyone got anything done with the constant din of so-called civilization howling in their ears.\n\nAmong the things he considered now, as he sat in the half-darkness of his cabin, were the implications of Monza's contact with MI6. He of course knew the British Intelligence organization was on to him\u2014Rankin, and Calloway, and Stevens, all three of them had been tracing his activities surreptitiously, and not-so-surreptitiously over the last several years. But if Monza had given them even a clue as to what he was up to now, that surveillance would turn into active pursuit. Relentless pursuit.\n\nSo what had Monza known? What could he have told them?\n\nThe invitation Reiss had sent to all his guests for today's meeting had been the same tersely worded message, delivered by fax to their respective offices.\n\nSomething of interest has just become available. Please join me at one P.M., our usual rendezvous point.\n\nAnd of course, when Sean had spotted the MI6 operatives at the Harrod's salon, Reiss had moved the meeting, and Sean had moved to discover who was behind the betrayal. Monza topped his list of suspects from the start\u2014Reiss had a profound distaste for the man, his crass, deliberately revolting manner, his poor hygiene\u2014and a cursory survey of Monza's cellular calls was all it took to prove his instincts right. Thus, the enhanced ebola.\n\nBut what could he have told them before he died?\n\nThat Reiss had something new. So MI6 would right now be looking in the usual places for clues as to what Reiss had found. They would corral scientists who'd worked with him before, visit facilities he'd utilized, countries whose stockpiles he'd raided\u2026no, there was simply no way that MI6 could suspect what he was up to. They\u2014like everyone else\u2014thought the newest, most dangerous weapons would come from the development of new technologies. They were looking forward, keeping their eyes on the future. Where Reiss's attention had been focused for the first two decades of his professional life.\n\nBut the problem was, everyone was looking toward the future, exploring the same techniques, technologies, treatments, seeking the cutting edge. What he had said earlier was true\u2014as fast as the new diseases were being developed, there was always a cure also being tested.\n\nOver the last few months, Reiss had been looking somewhere else entirely. The ancient, dimly remembered past.\n\nHe'd gotten the idea from a book, of all things\u2014which was more than a little surprising. Reiss was not a man who read frequently, not even within his chosen field of expertise. Scientists today published because the universities or corporations who employed them demanded it, and their conclusions were always predetermined matters, driven by the bottom line. Reiss preferred to do his learning in the laboratory\u2014or through experience.\n\nWhich is just what had happened, several months back, when the Gulfstream had been forced out of service for repairs. Reiss had been forced to fly a commercial plane out of London into the States. First class, of course, but still\u2026a horrendous experience.\n\nA baby in coach, sneezing and spreading all sorts of God-knew-what germs throughout the plane (luckily, Reiss had taken a half-dozen immune-system boosters before boarding), a woman next to him\u2014a taut, tense, business executive a few years older than him, late forties\u2014who'd flirted shamelessly throughout the flight, and the way the flight attendant prepared his steak\u2026\n\nReiss shuddered, remembering how closely she'd leaned over his food, the minted scent of her breath, the stifling musk of her perfume\u2014good Lord, there were no doubt traces of that horrible stinking liquid underneath her fingernails, all over her hands\u2026\n\nHe'd passed on lunch.\n\nHe'd also passed on all the businesswoman's attempts at engaging him in conversation, preferring instead to stare intently out the window, pretending to focus on the view but instead working a bit of third-level calculus, working out the diffusion matrix for a cannister of Tyrolean flu, delivered via a low-flying airplane\u2014a skydiving school having just presented itself as the perfect cover for such an attack.\n\nAnd then at some point during the flight, he'd turned away from the window to find that his seatmate had picked up a book.\n\nPlagues and Peoples in the Ancient World.\n\nReiss's interest, of course, was piqued.\n\nHe cleared his throat.\n\n\"May I take a look at that?\" he asked.\n\nThe woman's eyes flickered from the page to Reiss, and she shook her head.\n\n\"In a moment,\" she said absently, obviously no longer interested in engaging Reiss in anything.\n\nHe reached into his pocket, and pulled out his billfold. Extracted a five hundred-pound note, and laid it on the woman's tray, next to her drink.\n\n\"Please give me the book,\" Reiss repeated.\n\nShe looked from the bill to Reiss, and shook her head.\n\n\"Really.\" She looked insulted. \"I don't see how you can simply ignore people and then expect\u2014\"\n\nReiss pulled out another five hundred-pound note, and laid it next to the first.\n\n\"The book, please.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"This is quite ridiculous.\"\n\nReiss couldn't help himself. He was getting angry.\n\n\"Please don't waste time,\" he said. \"Give me the book.\"\n\nShe opened her mouth to speak again, then saw the look on Reiss's face.\n\nHe saw the look on hers, as well, and smiled.\n\nThen he slid the book out of her hand, and settled it on his lap.\n\n\"Honestly,\" the woman said a moment later\u2014after she'd picked up the bills and put them away. \"What makes the book so\u2014\"\n\nReiss held up a finger to silence her and began reading.\n\nThe author's position he gathered at once, it being identical to not only his but that of several other popular works. The idea that disease played a pivotal role in history\u2014in allowing Cort\u00e9s to take Mexico, the English to overrun the North American continent\u2014none of this was new to him.\n\nWhat was new\u2014and quite interesting\u2014were the less-credibly documented examples the author drew on from ancient times. Rumors of what really caused the downfall of Minoan civilization, where the Anasazi had actually gone\u2026\n\nWhat had stopped Alexander the Great's march east.\n\nIt had put Reiss in mind of a story he'd heard as a child, a story that had made quite an impression on him at the time. Over the years, while he hadn't forgotten that story, he had tended, more and more, to dismiss it as apocrypha. Now, as he sat there on the plane, greatly intrigued by the book's discussion of ancient catastrophes, he wasn't so sure.\n\nOver the last several months, Reiss had followed up on those discussions. Several promising lines of research had developed.\n\nAnd now, through a serendipitous series of events, he was very close to reaping the rewards of that research. A thousand pounds well spent, he thought\u2014and he was also convinced now that there was no way MI6 could have a clue as to his current plan of attack. Not from Monza, not from anyone, in fact. All in all, a very satisfactory state of affairs.\n\nHis train of thought was interrupted by the sound of a soft chime, followed a second later by Ms. Kelly's voice at his door.\n\n\"Landing in five minutes, Doctor.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Reiss called back.\n\nHe stood up, flicking the lights on to full, and checked his appearance in the mirror. Straightened his tie, dabbed water on his temples\u2014there.\n\nThat was satisfactory, as well.\n\nReiss's chief of operations\u2014Sean O'Sullivan\u2014was waiting for him on the runway. Three bodyguards\u2014Reiss had made more than his fair share of enemies over the years\u2014waited with him.\n\nSuddenly, Reiss was not happy.\n\nThere was supposed to be a fifth man.\n\n\"Where is Chen Lo?\" he asked.\n\nIn response, Sean handed him a piece of paper. A faxed photograph, Reiss saw.\n\nThe Orb.\n\n\"And?\" he asked Sean.\n\n\"Chen Lo got the Orb, but M-I-Six is on to him.\"\n\nReiss was stunned. \"How\u2026?\"\n\nHe had just gone over this, in all possible permutations. There was no way for MI6 to have known about the Orb. Or Chen Lo.\n\n\"He doesn't know,\" Sean said. \"But rather than risk bringing the Orb here, he's waiting.\"\n\nReiss shook his head. This was unacceptable.\n\n\"I just told a cabin full of people about Pandora. That clock cannot be reset. Tell Chen Lo to bring the Orb at once.\"\n\n\"Are we sure that's wise?\" Sean asked. \"Let me find out more from him\u2014what M-I-Six knows, check my sources, as well\u2026\"\n\n\"No,\" Reiss interrupted. If he had to gather those five again, ask for more time to make good on his promise to them\u2026he would never get the money he'd asked for. Besides, the Gulfstream was gone, taking off behind them even now. Not that he couldn't have told them to turn around, but\u2026\n\nNo. He had set his plan in motion. He would see it completed.\n\n\"Have Chen Lo bring the Orb,\" Reiss repeated. \"Now.\"\n\nSean nodded, and took out his satellite phone, dialing even as he walked toward a waiting car. Reiss followed, so preocuppied with the impossibility of MI6's knowledge that he accidentally dragged the cuff of his trousers against the side of the car as he climbed in.\n\nGrease. That would stain.\n\nReiss frowned.\n\nAt that moment, he was not a happy man."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "The funeral was to be in Merovigli\u2014a week from today. Lara had already rescheduled her entire calendar so that she could attend. A single ceremony, for all three men.\n\nShe'd heard from Miss Stehlik this morning, the first time in years, asking for transport down to the island. Lara hadn't been able to face calling her back yet, risk a conversation that would certainly turn very emotional. She couldn't do emotional yet, not now. She had things to do. Revenge.\n\nHillary thwacked her on the arm.\n\n\"Pay attention,\" he said.\n\nIt was midmorning. They were in Lara's study, at Croft Manor, drilling with kenzai staves\u2014wooden sticks five feet long. Hillary was wearing a padded vest and trousers for his safety. Lara was in a long flowing skirt.\n\n\"Are you sure this is a good idea?\" Hillary asked. \"Doctor Johnston said the only reason you're still alive is because you're in such good shape.\"\n\n\"No comments about my shape, please.\" Lara feinted to her left\u2014Hillary went for it, and she thrust to the right, hard.\n\nHe took the blow square in the gut.\n\n\"Whoof,\" he said, and stumbled backward.\n\nLara pressed the attack.\n\nHillary righted himself, looking a little green, and blocked her next thrust. He thwacked her again, hitting her left forearm. Right where she'd cut herself yesterday. The wound sang with fresh agony.\n\nLara smiled.\n\nThis was exactly what she needed: action. To be moving, to get her blood flowing again so that when she tracked down the men who'd killed the Petrakis\u2014\n\nShe thrust forward again, propelling Hillary back through the study door and into the library\u2014\n\nShe would be ready.\n\nLara pushed through the library doors. Hillary stood in the middle of the room, holding his stave defensively, waiting for her.\n\nBryce was sitting in the red leather chair, fussing with her digicam, his laptop open on the table next to him.\n\n\"Bryce. What have you got?\" Lara asked.\n\nHe snorted in frustration. \"Well. I haven't even finished loading the images from your camera yet.\"\n\nLara pursed her lips in frustration. That wasn't what she wanted to hear.\n\nShe stepped forward and smacked Hillary good.\n\n\"Hey!\" Hillary looked at Bryce, sensing the reason for Lara's attack. \"Thanks.\"\n\nHe glared at Lara, and raised his stave once more.\n\nThey started drilling again.\n\nLara had to give him credit\u2014Hillary had been practicing. A few months back, when he'd first volunteered to help with her training, she'd thought the idea preposterous. Hillary's performance during those first sessions hadn't convinced her any differently.\n\nNow, though\u2026he'd improved tremendously. Enough so that she had to give him her full attention. Well, ninety percent of her attention anyway.\n\n\"Bryce,\" she called out as Hillary danced around her. \"What about references to an Orb? If we find out what it was, it might help us find who attacked me.\"\n\n\"Shite,\" Bryce mumbled, hunched over in his chair. \"Damn camera.\"\n\n\"I took the liberty of checking,\" Hillary interrupted. \"What historical inventories there are of the Luna Temple do not list any Orb.\"\n\nLara frowned.\n\nHillary smacked her on the side\u2014hard.\n\nShe looked at him and raised an eyebow.\n\nHe smiled back. \"I believe I was fairly thorough in my examination.\"\n\n\"Fairly thorough won't cut it,\" Lara said, deciding to devote her full attention to him. She stepped forward, raising the stave in front of her.\n\n\"I want both of you to make a list of every Orb mentioned in Greek history.\"\n\n\"Every one!?\" That from Bryce, behind her.\n\n\"Every one,\" Lara repeated.\n\n\"But,\" Hillary began, feinting forward, \"that's\u2014\"\n\nLara, seeing his weight remaining on his back foot, ignored the feint and stepped forward herself, through his defenses, and struck his stave hard.\n\n\"Liable,\" Hillary continued, fending off her assault. \"To\u2014\"\n\nShe whapped his right hip.\n\n\"Be\u2014\" He stepped back, and she brought her stave forward again, then jabbed out.\n\n\"Thousands!\" he finished, stumbling backward to avoid the point of her stave.\n\nShe changed the forward motion to an upward one, sending his stave flying out of his hands. Hillary continued to move away, till his back was pressed up against a wall of books and he could move no farther.\n\n\"Then we'll read thousands.\" Lara drove her sharpened stave just past Hillary's ear, into the spine of a volume whose title had caught her eye. Greek History by Biester and Conant.\n\nShe pulled the book off the shelf with her spear, and flipped it to Hillary.\n\n\"You can start with that one,\" Lara said, lowering her stave. \"I'll be in my office, making a call.\"\n\nOn the way out of the library, she whapped Bryce across the back of the head.\n\n\"Ow,\" he said. \"What was that for?\"\n\n\"Speed it up,\" she told him. \"You've got a lot of reading ahead of you.\"\n\nLara wasn't able to make her call right away though. She had to wait almost an hour\u2014time needed for the embassy not only to locate her party, but to set up a secure line. She had time to shower, change into her riding clothes, and sort through the day's correspondence before her phone rang softly.\n\n\"Hello?\"\n\n\"Is this Lady Croft?\" The voice was clipped and very upper-crust.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"We have your call.\" A moment's silence, then a click over the line, and then\u2014\n\n\"Lara?\"\n\n\"Kosa. My God, it's good to hear your voice.\" Lara smiled, thinking of the man on the other end of the line, at the British Embassy in Nairobi. Kosa Maasai\u2014one of the chieftains of that near-legendary African tribe, the Maasai. Tall, elegant, skin as black as night, and a sense of humor just as dark.\n\n\"And yours,\" Kosa said. \"I'm so sorry about the Petrakis.\"\n\n\"Not as sorry as whoever did it is going to be. You received my fax?\"\n\n\"I did, yes.\"\n\nLara had woken early this morning, with the sudden knowledge of what it was that the petroglyphs in the Luna Temple had reminded her of. She'd had Bryce (who'd finally finished downloading the images from her digicam) print out the relevant shots, and faxed them off to the British Embassy, for Kosa's attention.\n\n\"I appreciate the look, Kosa. The drawings reminded me of work you showed me in Kenya.\"\n\n\"The Gloman exhibit? Yes, they are reminiscent. And I am happy to help.\" He chuckled. \"Any excuse to give your diplomats a scare.\"\n\nShe laughed, too\u2014the first genuine laugh she'd had since what had happened in the temple. She could just picture Kosa, prowling the halls of the embassy, wearing traditional robes and headdress, the bureaucrats scurrying by him, trying not to look fearful, while keeping a respectful distance.\n\n\"I'm looking at the fax now, Lara,\" Kosa said. \"Page three.\"\n\nLara picked up her copy, flipped to the third page. It was an image of the mosaic of Alexander's journey across Asia\u2014specifically, the scene that had puzzled her, the one of Alexander's army, lying dead on the battlefield.\n\n\"What do you think?\" she asked.\n\nThere was silence for a moment. As Lara waited, she opened a drawer in her desk, and pulled out her hunting rifle. To call it hers was perhaps inaccurate, it was a family heirloom, an Enfield full-bore, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. Originally the property of Lord Winston Croft, her great-great-grandfather. Made an even more satisfying recoil than her Colts\u2014when you fired the Enfield you knew whatever you shot was going down, and was staying down. Winston had used it to hunt boar\u2014specially freighted in for the occasion on the grounds.\n\nLara was planning on using it for a little target practice of her own.\n\n\"I'm looking at the glyphs beneath the drawing,\" Kosa finally said. \"The symbols are a primitive version of Ol Maa. They read: 'with life comes death.'\"\n\n\"Ol Maa?\" Lara thought for a second she'd misheard. \"I'm sorry, did you say Ol Maa?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"That makes no sense.\" Ol Maa was the Maasai language\u2014scant wonder the drawings from the temple had reminded her of the ones Kosa had shown her in Kenya.\n\nBut why were there Ol Maa inscriptions in a temple built by Alexander the Great? Yes, his triumphal march through Egypt had included a brief visit to the African continent, but history recorded no contact between Alexander and the Maasai, or any other African peoples. He had stopped there for all of three months, at most, and then headed eastward, never to return.\n\n\"I can't explain it, either,\" Kosa replied. \"I can only give you the translation. Now. Turn to the next page of the fax.\"\n\nShe did. It was an image taken while she was suspended high above the temple floor, trying to get at the Orb.\n\n\"The figure on the floor is a shadow guardian. A mythical creature brought to earth to protect the treasures of the gods.\"\n\n\"This is from Maasai mythology?\"\n\n\"Maasai, Chagga, Hadzabe\u2014all tribes in this part of the world have legends pertaining to the shadow guardians.\"\n\n\"What are they guardians of?\" Lara asked, turning the Enfield in her hand while she did so. The barrel shone, and the stock had been recently oiled, as well\u2014Hillary had obviously been taking care of it.\n\n\"I don't know. I'm sorry, that's all I can tell you.\"\n\nShe sighed. \"Well. It's somewhere to start. Thank you, Kosa. Try not to scare anyone on the way out.\"\n\n\"I'll do my best, Lara.\"\n\nHe hung up.\n\nLara stood there a moment, phone in hand, frowning.\n\nOl Maa? How could that be? What did the Maasai have to do with Alexander the Great? Who were the shadow guardians? And the Orb\u2014where did that fit in?\n\nLara glanced down at the desk, at an image of the Orb Bryce had left lying there for her. Staring up at her like a great shining eye\u2014\n\nShe dropped the rifle to the floor with a clatter.\n\nAn eye. That was it.\n\nThe mati.\n\n\"Hillary!\" she called, heading for the library.\n\nShe found the volume in short order. Huge, massive pages coming out of the binding, she lifted it carefully from the shelf and set it down on the table.\n\n\"Apocrypha of the Hellenic Age,\" Hillary read off the spine. \"I've been through this, you know. There's no mention of an Orb.\"\n\n\"It's as I said,\" Lara told him, as she began flipping pages. \"The reference is not to the Orb at all. It's my fault for not seeing the resemblance sooner.\"\n\nHillary held up the image of the Orb, and turned it sideways.\n\n\"An eye? I don't see it at all,\" he announced.\n\n\"You have no imagination,\" Lara said. \"Ah. Here we are.\"\n\nShe'd come to the section on Alexander the Great, and now began scanning the text, translating from the Greek as she read. Assembled in the early fourth century, the book was a collection of stories and myths associated with Alexander, offered by various writers as proof of his divinity. Like the tale of the two snakes who had magically appeared to lead him and his army safely through the Sahara to the oasis at Siwa. The Gordian knot. His victory over the Persians.\n\nThe mati.\n\nLara cleared her throat, and read out loud.\n\n\"It was at this time that word reached Antipater of Alexander's decision to turn for home. The messenger who brought word of this also brought a leather pouch he had taken directly from the king's hand, and borne in secret across the continent. Alexander had commanded him to give this pouch only into the hands of Antipater, and failing that, to see it destroyed.\"\n\n\"Within this pouch,\" she continued, \"Alexander had placed the key to a terrible secret. He called this key the mati, and commanded Antipater to hide it far from the sight of men, forbidding anyone to look upon it. For according to the king\u2014\"\n\nShe stopped reading.\n\n\"What?\" Hillary leaned over her shoulder. \"What does it say?\"\n\nLara paused a moment before answering.\n\n\"Some things are not meant to be found.\"\n\nAlexander's words, now nearly two millenia old, were an exact echo of Gus's last words to her.\n\nThe resonance made her uncomfortable.\n\nShe closed the book.\n\n\"The literal translation of mati is eye. It, and the Orb, are one and the same.\"\n\nHillary nodded.\n\n\"So the Orb is the key to some terrible secret?\"\n\n\"I think so.\"\n\n\"Such as\u2026\"\n\n\"That's the question, isn't it? When we find that out, we'll know why someone was willing to kill for it.\"\n\nLara stood up. At least she now had some idea of what the Orb was, though she was no closer to discovering who the men in the tomb were.\n\nEnough of flipping through books. Right now, Lara needed action.\n\nShouldering the rifle, she headed for the stable\u2014and the target practice she'd promised herself.\n\nLara entered the grove cautiously, sitting side-saddle (like the proper English girl Miss Stehlik had raised her to be), with the rifle poised on her shoulder.\n\nThe trees made a canopy above her, blotting out the sun. A thick, seemingly impenetrable wall of green surrounded her.\n\nThe first man popped out from behind a pine to her left.\n\nIn one fluid motion, she swung the rifle around, targeted, and squeezed the trigger.\n\nShe'd fired true. The bullet caught her target square in the forehead, and he simply exploded, disappeared from sight, shattered into a thousand pieces.\n\nCardboard pieces, of course, but Lara pictured the Asian man from the Luna Temple\u2014Jimmy's killer\u2014in the target's place, and smiled, tight-lipped, with satisfaction.\n\nA second target slid down from a branch high above her and to the right.\n\nShe fired again\u2014another hit.\n\nAnd before she could even lower the rifle, another target came swinging toward her through the canopy of trees and she hit that, as well.\n\nLara reloaded.\n\nIn her mind, she put all the targets she'd just killed in diving suits, placed them in the Luna Temple, and stood over their bodies.\n\nShe rode on. There was a slight breeze in the grove, from out of the north. Leaves rustled above her.\n\nA target shot up directly in her path, swinging back and forth like a pendulum.\n\nLara aimed\u2026\n\nAnd just as she fired, her horse reared up suddenly, and her shot went wide.\n\nShe frowned. Something had spooked the horse\u2014what?\n\nThen she heard the noise, as well\u2014a thrumming from up above.\n\nLara looked up and saw a helicopter plummeting from the sky\u2014a government copter, heading straight for the launching pad behind Croft Manor.\n\nMI6, Lara knew instantly. What other branch of the British government wouldn't even bother phoning for an appointment?\n\nShe didn't know what they wanted, didn't care. She didn't have time for them right now.\n\nShe dug in her heels, urging her horse forward. As they rose past the target Lara had missed, she frowned.\n\nShe pictured Jimmy's killer, holding up the Orb in his grasp, smiling. Escaping on her DPV while the temple collapsed around her, burying Alexander's treasure, Jimmy and Nicholas's bodies.\n\nWithout easing up on the reins, Lara swung the rifle back over her shoulder. A quick glance behind her to sight the target, and she fired again.\n\nAs she swung back around, she heard the target explode.\n\nAnd another popped up right in front of her, barely five feet away. No time to bring the rifle to bear.\n\nSo she punched it square in the face.\n\nLara rode on, her knuckles stinging. She didn't mind a bit. Hitting things was much more viscerally satisfying than squeezing a trigger. Part of her even hoped that whoever MI6 sent would give her a hard time.\n\nShe wouldn't mind dealing out another punch or two.\n\nLara burst through the door into the long hall, and saw two men\u2014strangers to her\u2014sitting at the table.\n\nBryce and Hillary stood over them, looking uncomfortable. Hillary was talking.\n\n\"Perhaps you gentlemen would like some tea while you wait\u2014\"\n\n\"No, they wouldn't,\" Lara interrupted. \"Tea is for guests. The door is for intruders.\"\n\nShe nodded to the entryway behind her.\n\nGive them credit\u2014neither of the two men blinked.\n\n\"Lady Croft,\" one said.\n\n\"Or should we call you Lara?\" the other asked.\n\n\"In any case,\" the first continued, \"we need your help. I'm Agent Calloway. This is Stevens.\"\n\nBryce edged closer to her, lowered his voice. \"Lara, these men are from M-I-Six\u2014\"\n\n\"I know that, Bryce,\" she said, folding her arms across her chest, not lifting her gaze from the two intruders for a second. \"It's clear from their soft hands and pressed suits that these are men who make decisions then leave the dirty work to others. I have no interest in\u2014\"\n\nCalloway reached into his pocket and dropped a photo on the table.\n\nLara glanced at it quickly, then froze in place.\n\nHer mouth dropped open in shock.\n\nThe photo was of the Asian man\u2014Jimmy Petraki's killer.\n\n\"This man's name is Chen Lo,\" Calloway said, nodding at the picture. \"Along with his brother Xien, he runs a ring of Chinese bandits known as the Shay Ling.\"\n\n\"I know the Shay Ling,\" Lara said, which wasn't exactly the truth; she knew of the Shay Ling, knew their reputation, she'd come close to run-ins with them once a few years back, and had only on the advice of a certain person who at that point in her life she'd trusted stepped aside to avoid that runin, which was neither here nor there.\n\nWhat was important was what had happened in the Luna Temple.\n\n\"Then you know what they do,\" Calloway said. \"They deal in guns, diamonds, antiquities\u2026anything Chen Lo can sell on the black market. They followed you from the moment you arrived in Santorini\u2014\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"For this.\" Stevens stood and handed her a piece of paper\u2014a fax.\n\nIt was a drawing of the Orb.\n\n\"After you were picked up at sea, a listening post in Malta intercepted that fax,\" Stevens continued. \"It was sent from Chen Lo to a man named Jonathan Reiss.\"\n\nLara nodded. Another name she knew.\n\n\"The scientist?\" she asked. \"Won the Nobel Prize?\"\n\n\"One and the same,\" Calloway replied. \"He's now the foremost designer of biological weapons in the world.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"No. That can't be right. He's a respected man, I've seen him at\u2014\"\n\nCalloway handed her a sheaf of photos.\n\nThe first she recognized instantly\u2014it had run on the front page of every newspaper, worldwide, two years ago last August sixth. The anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. There had been an attack on a group of tourists visiting the museum that commemorated the bombing. Two hundred and ten people killed\u2014most of them Americans\u2014by a nerve gas that had disrupted brain function in the most painful way conceivable, before death followed.\n\nLara stared at the image of the two women lying on the floor, their faces frozen in a rictus of horror, and flipped to the next picture.\n\nIt was of a small village\u2014one-and two-story houses, some of them with chunks of building missing. The image brought to mind someplace in Europe, the Balkans most likely. The focus was on the burning stack of bodies at the center of the image, and their blackened, bloated faces.\n\n\"Enhanced cholera,\" Stevens said.\n\nLara nodded, and flipped again.\n\nThe third and final picture was from a battlefield somewhere\u2014Africa, most likely, the soldiers were all black men. They were all dead, as well, sprawled unnaturally on the ground.\n\nCalloway took the pictures back.\n\n\"Reiss's creations have been at the heart of every act of bioterror in the past fifteen years,\" he said.\n\n\"His disdain for life is legendary. He has no political agenda, doesn't care who his weapons kill or why,\" Stevens put in.\n\n\"A modern-day Doctor Mengele,\" Calloway said.\n\nLara nodded, her mind racing as she absorbed what the two agents were telling her. Reiss, after the Orb. The mati\u2014the key to a terrible secret. What did he think he was going to find?\n\nShe paced the length of the room, once, twice.\n\nIt had been a day of surprising revelations. The Shay Ling, and Jonathan Reiss. Shadow guardians, and smatterings of the Maasai language in a Greek temple.\n\nHer eyes fell on the fax she'd sent Kosa. The drawing of Alexander's army lying dead on the battlefield.\n\nThe picture Calloway had just shown her\u2014the army of bloated, disfigured corpses\u2014flashed before her eyes.\n\nThe connection struck her like a physical blow.\n\nA plague, she realized. Alexander's army had perished from a plague.\n\nStevens started talking again.\n\n\"We know Chen Lo followed you to obtain the Orb. We also know that he'll deliver it to Reiss soon. What we don't know is why. Candidly, that terrifies us.\"\n\nLara was listening\u2014barely. Her eyes were still on the drawing of Alexander's army.\n\nOn the soldier holding the small box in his arms. What she'd thought to be a treasure chest of some kind.\n\nNot a treasure chest at all.\n\nShe thought of the objects the temple had been rumored to contain, and a chill went down her spine.\n\n\"Pandora,\" she whispered.\n\nThe ultimate biological weapon\u2014the sum of all evils contained in this world.\n\n\"Reiss is not to be trifled with,\" Stevens was saying. \"The doctor\u2014\"\n\n\"Pandora's box,\" she repeated, louder this time.\n\nEveryone in the room turned to her.\n\nHillary cleared his throat. \"I beg your pardon?\"\n\n\"Pandora's box\u2014that's why Reiss wanted the Orb,\" Lara said. \"He's going to use it to find Pandora's box!\"\n\nA long silence followed.\n\n\"Umm,\" Bryce said. \"Pandora? Like in the fairy tale?\"\n\n\"You mean the Greek myth,\" Stevens said. \"Pandora is given a box by the gods, told not to open it. She does and unleashes pain in the world?\"\n\nLara nodded. \"I'm afraid that's the Sunday school version.\"\n\n\"There's another?\" Calloway asked.\n\n\"Several. There are analogues to the Pandora story to be found in almost every culture.\"\n\nShe crossed to the far wall, to her father's prized Loring\u2014a globe close to a hundred years old. Until a few months back, she'd kept it in the room that used to be his study, where Lara had sat at his feet, enchanted, as he spun her bedtime stories night after night, tales of the long-vanished kingdoms that dotted the ancient globe. Stories of gods who walked the earth, secret societies that controlled mankind's destiny\u2026\n\nCreation myths from every corner of the world.\n\n\"How do you think life began?\" Lara asked, spinning the globe. \"Shooting stars, meteor, primordial ooze\u2026\"\n\nStevens and Calloway shook their heads, waiting for her to continue.\n\n\"Actually,\" Bryce said. \"It's fairly well known that\u2014\"\n\nHillary whacked him.\n\n\"My father told me a story once,\" Lara said. \"In 2300 B.C., an Egyptian pharoah found a place he named the cradle of life; where we, life, began. There he found a box. The box which brought life to earth. The pharoah opened it, but all that was left inside was the Ramante: a plague which came as a companion to life.\"\n\n\"Companion?\" Stevens asked.\n\n\"In nature there's always balance. The world comes in pairs. Right and wrong. Yin and yang. What's pain without pleasure\u2014\"\n\nCalloway cut her off. \"What did this plague do?\"\n\n\"It leveled pharoah's army.\"\n\nShe met Calloway's gaze, held it with her own. \"That's right. Just like the army in your photo.\"\n\nThe two agents glanced at each other, and sat a little straighter. Leaned a little closer.\n\n\"Go on,\" Calloway said.\n\n\"The pharoah's son dispatched his finest soldier to take the box and transport it to the end of the world, beyond the reach of man. The story ends there.\" Lara spun the globe again. The room was silent a moment.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Calloway finally said. \"What does this have to do with Reiss? With the Orb?\"\n\nLara stopped the globe, with her finger stuck square in the middle of India.\n\n\"Two thousand years later, Alexander the Great reached India. His army was ravaged by a plague\u2014\"\n\nShe passed her copy of the fax she'd sent Kosa to Calloway\u2014\n\n\"\u2014after one soldier discovered a small box among some remains.\"\n\n\"India.\" Stevens frowned. \"So you're saying\u2014that's where the pharoah's man brought it?\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Lara said. \"India\u2014specifically, the Bay of Bengal\u2014was commonly regarded as the end of the world in Alexander's time. No one knew about the Americas, or China.\"\n\n\"And Alexander found it?\"\n\n\"I think so.\" She was going on conjecture now, based on what she knew of the man, but it all made sense to her. \"Found it, and realized the box was too powerful to be trusted to any man. So he returned it to its home\u2014at the cradle of life. It's never been seen since.\"\n\n\"Is this still a story? Or is any of this fact?\"\n\n\"That's the question, isn't it?\"\n\n\"And this cradle of life is where?\" Calloway asked.\n\n\"I don't know. But Alexander did. He found a map that led him to it. The name he gave this map was mati.\" A literal translation of the word mati is\u2014eye.\"\n\nLara picked up the fax Stevens had shown her of the Orb.\n\n\"The Orb is the map, hidden in the Luna Temple by Alexander. Reiss wants it to find Pandora's box. When he does, when he opens the box, he'll unleash a weapon more terrible than any you can imagine.\"\n\n\"Good Lord,\" Calloway said.\n\nHillary exhaled. \"I'll go fetch that tea now.\"\n\nLara looked at the pale white faces of the two MI6 agents in front of her, and managed a smile.\n\n\"I should think something stronger than tea,\" she said.\n\nCalloway looked up at her and nodded weakly. \"Yes. Much stronger, if you've got it.\"\n\nHillary cleared his throat and Lara knew he was about to launch into a detailed description of the contents of their liquor cabinet.\n\nShe clapped Bryce on the shoulder. He looked up at her quizzically.\n\n\"You. Come.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "A half hour later, she and Bryce had downloaded and cataloged all the still images from her digicam onto his laptop. They were in the library, him sitting at Lara's desk, her leaning over his shoulder, watching as he arranged the shots she'd managed to take of the Orb into a rough semblance of order.\n\nLara heard the door open, heard the rattle of silver on a tray, and spoke without looking up.\n\n\"How are our friends from intelligence?\"\n\n\"Gone outside to make more phone calls.\" Hillary stepped over to the desk, set the tray down next to the laptop. Tea and scones. \"Thought you two might like some sustenance.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Bryce looked up and sniffed the air. \"Cinnamon walnut, yes?\"\n\nHe reached for one of the scones.\n\n\"No,\" Lara barked. \"Focus.\"\n\nHe grumbled and bent over the laptop again. Hillary came around behind the desk, stood next to Lara.\n\n\"What do you have so far?\" he asked.\n\nBryce pointed at the screen. \"The markings are definitely a pattern, but even if I figure out what they represent, we won't be able to read the full map because we don't have a full view of it\u2026see?\"\n\nHillary nodded. Lara shook her head impatiently.\n\n\"Full view or not\u2014get to work on how to read it.\" She straightened, turned to Hillary. \"I have to start packing.\"\n\nA noise at the door made her turn.\n\nCalloway and Stevens were back.\n\nBefore Lara could open her mouth to speak, Calloway stepped forward.\n\n\"On behalf of Her Majesty, we formally request you find and recover this box before Doctor Reiss.\"\n\n\"Oh. Well.\" Lara smiled. That was just what she was planning to do. Find Reiss and the Orb. A worthwhile mission in and of itself, with an added bonus: where the good doctor and the Orb were, there she would find the men who'd killed the Petrakis, as well.\n\n\"Now that I have Her Majesty's permission,\" she said, \"tell me where to find the Orb.\"\n\n\"Last we heard, it was still with Chen Lo and the Shay Ling. Somewhere in China,\" Stevens said.\n\nLara cursed under her breath. She'd thought the Orb would have made its way to Reiss by now. Taking the Shay Ling on in China, that would be tantamount to a suicide mission, the only reason she'd even contemplated it before was because of the relationship she'd been in at the time, and it was only because of that person she'd been in the relationship with that she'd even been able to locate them; they moved from hideout to hideout, they had local help in every province, there was no way she could do it again, not without\u2026\n\nShe cursed again, out loud this time.\n\n\"Lara?\" Hillary asked. \"Is something wrong?\"\n\n\"I'm thinking,\" she said, and she was, but she didn't like the direction her thoughts were going in.\n\nStevens cleared his throat and spoke.\n\n\"I suspect you're aware of the difficulties involved in locating the Shay Ling. You're right to be concerned\u2014I'm afraid finding them will be next to impossible. But we'll assign you two of our best agents to help\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't want them,\" Lara said softly, her hands resting on the back of Bryce's chair.\n\nCalloway and Stevens exchanged a glance.\n\n\"With all due respect,\" Calloway began, \"expertise in archaeology doesn't qualify you\u2014\"\n\n\"I didn't say I don't need help,\" Lara said, cutting him off. \"But your agents will never get me to Chen Lo in time. I need an insider. Someone who knows the Shay Ling. Their methods, hideouts\u2026\" She sighed. There really was only one person who could help with this, could help her avenge Gus and Nicholas and Jimmy, and just realizing that cost her, but she didn't see any way around using him, the conclusion was inescapable, it had to be him, and only him.\n\n\"I need Terry Sheridan,\" she said.\n\nBryce, in the middle of sneaking a mouthful of scone, spit up crumbs all over his laptop.\n\nHillary, standing next to her, used a four-letter word she didn't even know he could pronounce.\n\nCalloway's expression hardened into stone.\n\n\"Not if he were the last man on Earth,\" the MI6 man said.\n\nStevens looked puzzled.\n\n\"Someone fill me in on who Terry Sheridan is, please,\" he said.\n\nWhile Lara was debating how she wanted to answer that, Calloway spoke.\n\n\"Terry Sheridan. Formerly a commander in the Royal Marines. Quite possibly the finest, most lethal soldier ever to serve this country. Who one day, for reasons known only to him, disappeared. He resurfaced as a traitor\u2014a mercenary selling his skills to the highest bidder.\" He glared at Lara. \"You don't expect me to put him on the trail of a weapon he'll turn around and auction?\"\n\n\"I'm not any happier about the idea than you,\" Lara shot back, \"but Terry is the only man I know who can get me to Chen Lo in time.\"\n\nCalloway shook his head. \"Lady Croft, some men are capable of betraying their friends, but Terry Sheridan is the only one I know who enjoys it.\"\n\n\"Then it's lucky for us Terry's friends include Chen Lo and the Shay Ling, isn't it?\"\n\nCalloway had no response for that.\n\nHillary did.\n\n\"Ah,\" he said. \"May I point out that at one time, Terry's friends also included\u2014\"\n\nLara spun and silenced him with a glare. Then she pointed upstairs, in the direction of her bedroom.\n\n\"You'll recall what I said earlier? About packing?\"\n\nHillary sighed heavily, and left the room.\n\nLara turned back to the MI6 agents.\n\n\"You'll get me to him?\" she asked Calloway. \"Or do you need to make more phone calls?\"\n\n\"No more phone calls,\" Calloway said, his expression grim. \"We'll get you to him. But we want access to everything your man here finds,\" he said, pointing to Bryce, \"so that we have a backup in case Sheridan betrays you again.\"\n\n\"When,\" Bryce mumbled. \"When he betrays you again.\"\n\nLara thwacked him on top of the head.\n\n\"Focus,\" she told Bryce.\n\n\"Agreed,\" she told Calloway.\n\n\"I know what I'm doing,\" she told Hillary a few minutes afterward, upstairs in her bedroom, as she changed for her journey.\n\nOn the landing pad an hour later, walking toward the helicopter MI6 had sent for her, Lara said her good-byes, trying to make them short and sweet.\n\nBryce and Hillary were having none of it.\n\n\"I know you may well hit me again,\" Bryce said, handing her the digicam as he escorted her toward the waiting copter, \"but a leopard doesn't change his spots, Lara.\"\n\n\"I know,\" she said, not breaking stride for an instant.\n\n\"You know,\" Hillary said, coming up alongside her on the left, opposite from Bryce, \"you know, and yet the first chance you get, you run and save him.\"\n\nLara stopped suddenly, and both men stopped with her.\n\n\"I'll handle him,\" she said firmly. \"Now good-bye.\"\n\nShe ducked low, under the whirling blades, and ran for the open chopper door.\n\nHillary's shouted response followed her.\n\n\"Even if it means killing him?\"\n\nLara slammed the door shut without answering, without looking back. The copter rose immediately into an overcast sky, until the landing pad, Croft Manor itself, Bryce, and Hillary all disappeared from sight.\n\nAnd yet the questions continued to echo in her mind.\n\nWhat would she do when she saw Terry Sheridan?\n\nLara wasn't quite sure she knew the answer to that.\n\nShe drifted in and out of sleep, dreaming\u2014daydreaming\u2014about North Korea. And Terry Sheridan.\n\nFive years ago. She had airlifted into Chasong, right along the Chinese border, to try and preserve what she could of an archaeological site dating back to the Silla dynasty, before alliance bombs started falling.\n\nSAS had arranged for her rendezvous with the advance squad of marines on the ground already, working to pinpoint targets. Commander in charge, one Terence Patrick Sheridan.\n\n\"You must be Lady Croft,\" he'd said, stepping out of the bush right as she was climbing out of her chute.\n\n\"No lady necessary. And you're Sheridan.\" They shook hands. Sheridan was lean and muscled-\u2014the veins on his arms stood out like ridges against this skin. The backs of his hands were calloused, and bruised\u2014Lara had seen similar marks on other SAS soldiers, those on \"special force\" assignments the nature of which they could never talk about.\n\nSheridan had no doubt been on many such missions himself. According to her briefing, he'd gone through SAS training and come out with the highest markings ever given in unarmed combat.\n\nHe had a knife strapped to each forearm, and guns\u2014decidedly nonregulation guns\u2014hanging off his equipment belt. He looked dangerous. Lara had been impressed. Even a little intrigued.\n\nSheridan also had a very big scowl on his face.\n\n\"This isn't going to be tea and crumpets, Croft. You sure you're up for it?\"\n\nLara had sighed heavily.\n\nMight as well get this part over with, she thought, and dropped her pack to the ground. She assumed a fighting stance.\n\n\"Shall I knock you on your ass now\u2014or later?\"\n\nSheridan had smiled. He looked her over.\n\n\"Nice stance. But you've left yourself open here\u2014\" and as he'd spoken, he swung a leg and knocked her feet out from under her.\n\nShe rolled as she fell, landed both hands on the ground, and kicked back with her feet, catching him square in the mouth.\n\n\"Nice move,\" she'd said, getting to her feet. \"But you left your mouth open there.\"\n\nSheridan rubbed his lip, and his hand came away bloody.\n\nHis smile got broader.\n\n\"All right, Croft,\" he'd said, getting to his feet. \"Let's see what else you've got.\"\n\nA week later, they were living together in her tent.\n\nFour months after that, Terry had deserted his unit\u2014and sold the most valuable pieces she'd found from her dig to the Shay Ling.\n\n\"We're here.\"\n\nLara opened her eyes to see the copter was landing. It was twilight, and much, much colder. Men in uniform hustled her into a waiting half-track. The driver smiled at her as she climbed up into the cab alongside him.\n\nOnce they were underway, he turned to her and offered a gap-toothed smile.\n\n\"You're a beautiful woman,\" he said in halting English. \"I have much whiskey.\"\n\nLara glared at him until he turned away, red-faced.\n\nNobody else spoke to her the entire trip.\n\nNight fell as they drove deeper and deeper into rugged foothills, covered with snow, devoid of life. More snow was falling now, big flakes that danced in the headlights before fluttering down to the road and melting away. Then they began to fall harder, stopped melting at all. The road grew slick, the windshield white with accumulated flakes\u2014the wipers couldn't keep up. Every few minutes, the driver had to open his window and clear the windshield by hand. A bitter, arcticlike wind entered the cab every time he did so.\n\nLara burrowed further into the fur coat she was wearing, and stayed warm.\n\nSometime after what was probably midnight, Greenwich Standard Time\u2014if her internal clock was accurate\u2014a light appeared in the distance, and grew closer. The truck slowed to a halt.\n\nLara climbed out.\n\nShe was standing on pavement, in the middle of a fenced compound. Soldiers patrolled in formations of three men, AK-47s at the ready. Half-tracks, marked with the red star of imperial Russia, were parked haphazardly around her truck.\n\nDirectly before her, in the center of the compound, was an old Soviet-era missile silo\u2014a massive blockhouse of a building, albeit only a single-story tall. Above ground, that is. Below\u2026\n\nIn the days of the cold war, not so long ago, upward of a half-dozen ICBMs had no doubt been hidden in this structure, buried beneath the ground, along with the requisite crew needed to send those missiles flying toward the United States of America should Moscow give the signal. The missiles were long gone, but the cavernous space they'd occupied still existed, in a slightly reconfigured format.\n\nThe silo was now a prison\u2014Barla Kala, the locals called it. It housed the most feared, most wanted men and women on the planet. Abu Sayaaf, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda\u2014this was the place where the civilized world sent those who would never learn to be civilized. Once they arrived, and were locked behind the massive steel doors in front of her, they were never heard from again. There were no parole boards or rewards for good behavior at Barla Kala, no such thing as easy time or exercise yards or movie night here. Prisoners at Barla Kala went in, and they never came out again.\n\nTerry Sheridan had gone in five years ago, and Lara hadn't heard a word about him since.\n\nA bearded, balding blockhouse of a man detached himself from a group of soldiers nearby and approached her.\n\n\"Lady Croft?\"\n\nLara nodded.\n\n\"I am your host, Armin Kal.\" He laughed, and spread his arms in welcome. \"Welcome to Fantasy Island.\"\n\nLara was in no mood. \"Take me to Sheridan, please.\"\n\nKal frowned, his smile disappearing as quickly as it had come.\n\n\"Perhaps we can discuss this a moment, Lady Croft. To see this man is not a good idea.\"\n\n\"I'll grant you that,\" she said. \"But it's necessary.\"\n\n\"May I ask why?\"\n\n\"No.\" Lara put a little extra bite into the word\u2014she'd only known this fat little man for thirty seconds, and already she disliked him intensely. \"You may not. Now please\u2014I'm on a schedule.\"\n\nKal shrugged. \"As you wish. Come this way\u2014I will take you to him.\"\n\nTwin ramps, built to accommodate the wheels of a missile transport trailer, led up to the prison entrance. Kal turned and headed up one of those ramps, Lara staying a step behind.\n\nAs they reached the top, the main doors to the prison opened. Two men emerged, carrying a stretcher. The someone occupying the stretcher was covered by a sheet\u2014one hand dangled from underneath it. The fingers looked wrong\u2014it took Lara a second to figure out why.\n\nThey were twisted around, front to back. Broken, each one of them, not once, but several times.\n\nFantasy Island indeed.\n\nKal was waiting for her at the steel doors.\n\n\"Please\u2014we don't get many visitors here,\" he said, allowing her to enter first. \"Not like you. You're very brave.\"\n\nLara felt him leering at her without turning around. She didn't say a word. No way she was going to get drawn into a conversation with this man. She had business to do here, she was going to get it done, and leave\u2014with or without Sheridan.\n\nKal preceded her down two sets of stairs, then into a long concrete shaft wet with ground water, and finally through a series of locked gates. At the last gate, he paused, reached underneath his coat, and pulled out a set of headphones.\n\n\"What are those for?\" Lara asked.\n\n\"You,\" Kal said. He gave a thumbs-up sign to a guard standing on the other side of the gate. \"Go ahead.\"\n\nLara frowned, but before she could ask him what he meant by that, the gate hissed open, and Kal entered the cavernous main cell block. Lara was a step behind.\n\nThe space before her was huge\u2014five times the size of the Luna Temple, big enough to hold a football pitch, and that tall again. There were three levels of cells, surrounding a central atrium\u2014she saw guards everywhere, again patrolling in groups of three, and an old missile gantry that was now doing duty as a guard tower.\n\nShe took a step forward, and the prisoners caught sight of her.\n\nThey erupted.\n\nAll at once she understood why Kal had donned headphones, why he'd said they were \"for her\" as he put them on.\n\nThe residents here, Lara realized, probably hadn't seen a woman since they'd been locked away. The things they were shouting at Lara, about her\u2026well, nothing she hadn't heard before, though never in so many languages at once. Only one way to deal with that kind of verbal abuse, really.\n\nShe shut off for a few minutes, and simply moved her feet forward, one after the other. Staying behind Kal, her eyes focused on the back of his coat, until he stopped walking.\n\n\"We're here,\" he said, pulling off his headphones.\n\nLara looked up. Four guards stood ramrod straight in front of a single steel door, two on either side, rifles slung across their shoulders.\n\nShe stepped past Kal and walked to the door. A set of bars at eye level covered a small window in the door. Lara peered through the opening.\n\nThe only light in the cell came from a window directly across from her. She could make out a cot against the wall to her left and the outline of someone sitting on it. The light touched his hands.\n\nThe backs were calloused, and bruised\u2014even more so than the last time she'd seen him.\n\nSheridan rose from the cot.\n\n\"I always knew one day you'd rescue me,\" he said, taking a step out of the darkness.\n\nLara's first thought was, he can't have been in here five years. He looks exactly the same as he did the day I last saw him.\n\nTerry was unshaven, in a military-issue T-shirt and trousers. He looked strong and healthy. Like he'd spent the last five years at an island resort\u2014not in a prison cell.\n\n\"Hello, Terry.\"\n\n\"Croft.\" He frowned. \"You're favoring a leg. What happened?\"\n\nFor a moment, Lara was taken aback.\n\nShe'd forgotten all about the injury\u2014it had happened two weeks ago, in Prague, chasing Eckhardt through one of the catacombs. It had hurt like hell at the time\u2014faded to a dull roar in the days following, and now to a barely noticeable twinge.\n\nNo one else\u2014not even Hillary\u2014had even noticed it. For Terry to pick up on it so quickly\u2026\n\nTime in prison clearly hadn't dulled his senses.\n\n\"Argument,\" Lara told him. She saw that there was a cut on Terry's hand. \"What happened to you there?\"\n\n\"Argument.\"\n\n\"Ah. I'd hate to see the other bloke.\"\n\n\"Maybe you did. They're offloading him now.\"\n\nThe corpse she'd seen while entering the prison, Lara realized. The fellow with the broken fingers.\n\nTime in prison clearly hadn't dulled Sheridan's skills, either.\n\nTerry smiled. \"What do you think of the place?\" he asked. \"Not quite Croft Manor, is it? A little more like Chasong, wouldn't you say?\"\n\nShe glared at him.\n\n\"Let's cut to the chase, shall we?\" Lara asked. She pulled a set of keys out of her pocket.\n\n\"Ah.\" Sheridan smiled. \"Key to your heart?\"\n\nLara shook her head. \"To a flat in Zurich. You can pick another city if you want. Your record will be expunged, citizenship restored\u2014\"\n\n\"By?\"\n\n\"M-I-Six.\"\n\nHe was silent a moment.\n\n\"Would that make me Faust, or the devil?\"\n\n\"No need to be melodramatic\u2014it's business, Terry. You do a service for them, they'll do one for you.\" Lara shrugged. \"You can be Faust, if you want. You can be anyone. Pick\u2014they'll arrange a new identity for you.\"\n\n\"If I was out of here\u2026\" He shook his head. \"You think I'd need their help\u2014to disappear? Become someone else entirely?\"\n\n\"Having two faces doesn't count,\" Lara snapped.\n\n\"Temper, Croft.\"\n\n\"Just making a point. Are you interested?\"\n\n\"What do I have to do?\"\n\n\"Is there anything you wouldn't?\"\n\nHe laughed. \"You like that about me.\"\n\n\"Answer the question.\"\n\n\"Sorry.\" Sheridan smiled. \"Just making a point.\"\n\n\"Noted. So again\u2014are you interested?\"\n\n\"And again\u2014what do I have to do?\"\n\nShe met his eyes. \"You have to take me to the Shay Ling.\"\n\nSheridan suddenly found something interesting to look at on the cell floor.\n\n\"The Shay who?\"\n\n\"Ignorance doesn't become you.\" Lara pressed closer to the bars. \"A man named Chen Lo took something from me\u2014I want it back.\"\n\n\"You\u2014or M-I-Six?\"\n\n\"We're in this together.\"\n\n\"Now who's being two-faced?\"\n\nLara bit back the first reply that came to mind, which was she'd get in bed with Satan himself if it meant her getting a shot at the people who'd killed the Petrakis. Damned if she was going to tell Terry Sheridan about them unless she had to. Damned if she was going to expose any of her feelings to him at all.\n\n\"As I said,\" she told him, \"it's business.\"\n\nSheridan moved closer to the bars as well, till his face was scant inches from hers. \"The Shay Ling are hard to find, but then you know that\u2014or you wouldn't be here.\"\n\n\"The government will wire you five million pounds when we succeed. Call it second chance money.\"\n\n\"I don't need any second chances,\" Sheridan said.\n\n\"Happy where you are?\"\n\n\"Don't press me, Croft.\" He smirked. \"Maybe we should call it life insurance for you.\"\n\n\"Ha.\" She met his eyes. \"I don't need any life insurance.\"\n\nTerry shook his head.\n\n\"You and I, Croft\u2014working together. I can't see it, somehow.\"\n\n\"Easier to see through you that way.\"\n\nTerry paced back toward the window, disappearing from her view. \"What happens afterward, Lara\u2014when M-I-Six decides that having me back in the world is not such a good idea?\"\n\n\"Then I'll feel sorry for whomever they send to get you.\"\n\n\"Who they send is not the point.\" He stepped forward again, stared straight at her. \"It's you I'll hold responsible.\"\n\n\"Naturally.\"\n\n\"Doesn't that frighten you at all?\"\n\n\"Do I look scared?\"\n\n\"No.\" Sheridan smiled. \"You have authorization to kill me.\"\n\n\"Anytime, any reason.\"\n\n\"That must have pleased you.\"\n\n\"You have no idea.\"\n\n\"What is it they say, 'Hell hath no fury\u2026'?\"\n\n\"Oh, please.\" Lara shook her head, and laughed. \"You weren't that good.\" Her voice hardened again. \"Are we going to do this or not, Terry? Make up your mind\u2014the clock is ticking.\"\n\n\"Don't rush me.\"\n\n\"Fine. On to candidate number two.\" Of course, there was no candidate number two, there was only MI6 itself, and Lara didn't like the idea of working that closely with them, but if Sheridan was going to pass\u2026\n\nShe'd do what she had to.\n\nLara spun on her heel, and walked back to Arman Kal, who was standing a discreet distance away from Sheridan's cell. \"Let's get out of here,\" she told the man.\n\nTerry called out from behind her.\n\n\"The Shay Ling are ghosts, Croft! They move constantly, their home base is the most remote region of mountains in China. Maybe on Earth. I'm the only one who can get to them without being killed.\"\n\nLara stopped.\n\n\"Is that a 'I'm interested in your deal, Lara', and 'All right, I'll take you to the Shay Ling, Lara?' If so, you'll have to be a little more exact than 'region.'\"\n\n\"Get me into China\u2014I'll get you to them in a day.\"\n\n\"That's about what we have.\" Lara turned to Kal. \"Unlock the cell.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"This is a very bad idea.\"\n\n\"It's my call, and I want him out.\"\n\nKal sighed, and shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"As you wish.\"\n\nHe waved the guards forward. There were four locks on the door\u2014each of the guards took out a key and unlocked one.\n\nTerry Sheridan stepped out into the hall. Cracked his knuckles, smiled at Lara, at Kal, and then turned to the guards.\n\n\"Boo!\" he said suddenly.\n\nAll four flinched as one, and took a step backward. One tripped over his own feet, and stumbled to the ground with a clatter.\n\n\"Priceless,\" Terry said.\n\n\"Stop showing off,\" Lara told him. \"Come.\"\n\nThe two of them, walking side by side, followed Kal down the corridor.\n\n\"Five million pounds, Croft,\" Terry said. \"I'll be able to hobknob with the same crowd as you.\"\n\n\"When the job is done,\" Lara said. \"Until then\u2014no money, no guns, no weapons of any kind.\"\n\n\"Talk about taking the fun out of life.\"\n\n\"You don't have time for fun, Terry. Your only concern is Chen Lo. Run, you'll be hunted. Give me trouble, you'll be back here. Are we clear?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"We're clear.\"\n\nKal slipped on his headphones again, and Lara saw they were about to reenter the main cell block.\n\n\"Brace yourself,\" she told Terry. \"They're quite loud.\"\n\nThe noise started up again\u2014and just as quickly died down.\n\nLara was puzzled. Then she realized everyone was looking past her, at Terry. Assuming that she was with him, so she was under his protection, so she was no longer a target for their abuse.\n\nShe didn't like how that made her feel.\n\n\"Keep moving,\" she told Terry.\n\n\"Sure, Croft.\" He smiled thinly, then, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking, \"You're in charge.\"\n\nShe'd forgotten what a cold bastard he could be.\n\nThey climbed in the half-track. Lara and Terry sat opposite each other on the bench seats in the back. A guard sat on either side of each of them. Add in the driver, that was six of them to handle Sheridan. All of them armed, while he was weaponless.\n\nGood odds, she thought.\n\nAnd then a memory came to her\u2014\n\nWorking on one of the dolmen\u2014the burial mounds\u2014in Chasong. She had been surprised by a squadron of NVA soldiers. They'd marched her to a base camp twenty miles away, near Chosan. Bound her hand and foot, left her with two guards in a tent and four outside.\n\nTerry had killed all six without making a sound. Without using a gun, or even a knife.\n\nShe looked up, and saw him casting surreptitious glances around the interior of the half-track. Lara followed his eyes, saw his gaze stop on the guard sitting to his right. She saw it the same time Terry did\u2014\n\nThe guard had left the flap on his holster unbuttoned.\n\n\"Tempted?\" she asked.\n\nTerry turned and smiled at her.\n\n\"Not by him.\"\n\nAnother memory came to her, and she chased it away.\n\nShe didn't have time for this now.\n\n\"This isn't some second-chance honeymoon, Terry. This is business, understood?\"\n\n\"All work, and no play\u2014is that it, Croft?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"That's it.\"\n\n\"Well then.\" Terry settled back in his seat. \"Let's talk about work. What do I need to know?\"\n\n\"That we have the better part of a day to find Chen Lo. And get back what he stole.\"\n\n\"Well. We'd better get cracking then.\" He leaned forward. \"The Shay Ling will be in Luoyang. But they have spies all over China, so we have to get into the country undetected. If we slip into Beijing, we can go by truck\u2014\"\n\n\"Truck?\" Lara shook her head. \"How about something a tad faster?\"\n\n\"I'm game,\" Terry said. \"What do you have in mind?\"\n\nShe told him.\n\nAs Armin Kal watched the half-track pull away. Karenkov, his second-in-command, came up alongside him.\n\n\"Good riddance, yes sir? That Sheridan.\"\n\nKal shook his head. \"I can't believe we're rid of him so easy. He'll be back, I suspect.\"\n\n\"I hope not, sir.\"\n\n\"As do I, Vasily. As do I.\" Kal shook his head. \"That woman has balls to go off with him.\"\n\n\"She has balls to come in here at all, sir.\"\n\nKal nodded. \"Mmm. Well. Sheridan's cell being empty, we now have a space to fill, don't we?\"\n\n\"Yes sir. I was thinking Mr. Donovan.\"\n\n\"Yes. Mr. Donovan. Good.\" Kal patted Karenkov on the shoulder. \"Take care of it, will you?\"\n\nKarenkov turned and headed back toward the prison.\n\nWhen he was out of earshot, Kal took out a satellite phone he'd been given several months back as a way of maintaining exclusive contact with a certain party interested in \"undesirables.\" It seems this certain party had a usage for experimental subjects no one would miss\u2014should said experiments ever go wrong.\n\nThis certain party also had an interest in the Shay Ling, who were known to frequent this Godforsaken part of the world from time to time, and had phoned Kal just a few hours earlier asking him to be on the lookout for\u2014in particular\u2014the group's leader.\n\nSurely this certain party would be curious to know of someone else's interest in the Shay Ling, as well.\n\nKal dialed the number he'd been given. The phone rang\u2014once, twice, three times.\n\nOn the fourth ring, a woman answered.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"I need to speak to Doctor Reiss, please,\" Kal said.\n\n\"Doctor Reiss is not available,\" the woman said.\n\n\"Then please give him a message for me.\" Kal looked off into the distance, where the half-track's taillights were just now vanishing into the storm. \"This is Armin Kal. You can tell him that someone else is looking for Chen Lo. A woman named Croft\u2014Lara Croft.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "\"A tad faster.\" Terry shook his head, as the scenery outside the cockpit whipped by. \"You always were the master of understatement, Croft.\"\n\nLara was about to reply when the pod hit a wind shear, and they were smacked sideways. Her head slammed into the canopy glass next to her.\n\nEven wearing a helmet, her ears rang with the impact.\n\n\"Christ, here we go again,\" Terry said, grabbing hold of the single lever in front of him. \"Trying to control this thing is like trying to fly a rock.\"\n\nThe only controls in their pod were directional, passive\u2014they had no infrared signature for the Chinese to lock missiles onto, no e-m signature to trace or identify. They might as well have been a meteor, hurtling through the atmosphere\u2014which was the idea, after all.\n\nThey didn't want anyone\u2014not the Chinese, or the Shay Ling\u2014to see them coming.\n\nThey were in north China now\u2014Barla Kala lay half a day and two thousand miles behind them, the NATO base in Turkey an hour in the past. They'd launched from there at o-four-hundred after catching a few hours of sleep in the belly of a cargo transport. They'd flown in through Russian, then Mongolian airspace, the glider strapped to the belly of a Blackbird SR-71 stealth fighter, Terry and Lara crammed into the small craft like sardines.\n\n\"There it is,\" Lara said, raising a hand and pointing directly ahead of her. \"Our landing pad.\"\n\nDirectly in front of them was a tranquil lake, surrounded by mountains on three sides. They were coming in from the open end of the formation.\n\n\"Hope it's deep enough,\" Sheridan said, frowning. \"We're going to hit pretty fast.\"\n\nPretty fast was an understatement\u2014they were rocketing in like a missile, no surprise really, considering they'd cut loose from the SR-71 while that craft was moving at Mach five.\n\n\"Going to change the angle of impact just a little,\" Terry said, grabbing hold of the lever again. \"So we don't slam into the surface and snap in two.\"\n\nLara nodded, and then suddenly they were out over the lake, hundreds of feet of open water going by in a heartbeat, impact seconds away, and then they slammed into the water\u2014\n\nAnd shot back up into the air again, like a skipping stone.\n\nThere was a little rowboat directly in their path. The image barely had to register\u2014an old man standing up in the boat, staring right through the windscreen into her eyes\u2014when they shot past him (Lara hoped he'd ducked in time), and headed straight for\u2014 A rock wall on the opposite side of the lake.\n\nAll the maneuvering in the world couldn't stop them from slamming into it.\n\nLara reached down, and yanked the only controls she had access to\u2014\n\nThe eject levers.\n\nWith a loud whump, the canopy flipped open, and flew backward. Lara and Terry's seats shot high up into the air, the force of the wind snapping her head back against the top of the seat as\u2014 The canopy snapped off the glider, smacked into the lake\u2014\n\nThe glider smashed into the cliff, shattering on impact\u2014\n\nAnd with a puff barely audible over the roar of the air rushing past them, their chutes shot open, and Lara and Terry fell to earth.\n\nThey landed in a field near the lake. Stashed the chutes, changed their flight uniforms for less conspicuous clothes.\n\n\"So you going to tell me a little more about this job now?\" Terry asked. \"Like what it is Chen Lo stole from you?\"\n\n\"Not important.\" Lara paused a moment, got her bearings, then started off down a dirt path at the side of the field.\n\nTerry caught up to her. \"Bloody hell, Croft. Don't take me for thick. Look at what M-I-Six has gone to just to get us this far. A Blackbird, Croft, you know how much that little flight back there cost?\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Not as much as the glider.\"\n\n\"Ha. What I'm really wondering, though, is why send a tomb raider? What is it we're after\u2014a scepter? An obelisk?\"\n\n\"At the risk of sounding like the proverbial broken record\u2014worry about the Shay Ling, Terry. Ah. There we are.\" Lara smiled, and pointed straight ahead.\n\n\"'There we are' what?\" Terry frowned. \"That?\"\n\n\"That\" was a farm, a hundred yards down the road. There was a small wooden house with a thatched roof, and a one-story wooden barn. Chickens and goats, horses, and a single, massive cow wandered aimlessly about the yard.\n\n\"That,\" Lara said.\n\n\"Welcome to the nineteenth century,\" he said as they drew close. \"Ah, Croft. The ditching was good\u2014well done. But expecting to locate a vehicle in a place like this? You planned badly.\"\n\nLara pointed to a pair of old horses nibbling next to a stack of hay.\n\n\"How about them? Will they do?\"\n\n\"Hardly.\"\n\n\"Well, how far do we have to go?\"\n\n\"Farther than that\u2014hey, hang on a minute.\" Terry had caught sight of a truck on the far side of the barn. He strode toward it confidently\u2026\n\nAnd stopped.\n\nNo wheels.\n\nBut now he started forward again, heading for what looked to be a motorcycle, hidden beneath a plain canvas cloth. He whipped the cloth off\u2014\n\nTo reveal a bicycle\u2014a rusty two-wheeler, no gears, a flat front tire.\n\nHe shrugged.\n\n\"Ah\u2014the proverbial bicycle built for two, Croft? What do you say?\"\n\n\"Hardly.\"\n\n\"Thought you had a thing for wearing tight little shorts.\"\n\nShe pushed past him, headed for the side door of the barn, and pushed on through, Terry a step behind.\n\n\"I expected better, Croft. I expected much, much better. Now let me say I do have a contact in Beijing who might be able to get here with a car in a few hours\u2014I stress the might, and we'd have to pay her handsomely for\u2026\"\n\nHe came up beside her and stopped short.\n\n\"You were saying?\" Lara asked.\n\nTerry shook his head. \"Never mind.\"\n\nThe two of them were looking at a small arsenal of equipment. Motorcycles, guns, gadgets, clothing\u2026\n\nA woman\u2014middle-aged, dressed in traditional Chinese peasant garb\u2014stepped out from behind a large equipment locker. She looked incongruous among the gleaming steel gear.\n\nLara felt Terry tense beside her.\n\n\"It's all right,\" she said to him. \"This is our contact\u2014Shumei.\"\n\nContact was perhaps an understatement, considering how long Lara had known the woman before. Shumei had been the first person Lara had met, on her very first expedition into China, looking for the dagger of Xian. Over the last decade, their paths had crossed half a dozen times during Lara's trips into Asia.\n\n\"Lara. I saw you come in over the lake.\" She shook her head. \"I expected better. You know how much that glider cost?\"\n\n\"I know.\" Lara turned to Terry. \"He was driving.\"\n\nSheridan frowned. The two women laughed and hugged.\n\n\"Everything ready?\" Lara asked.\n\n\"Of course. Your clothes and guns are there\u2014\" Shumei pointed to one corner of the barn. \"Knives back there.\" She pointed to a table nearby. \"And I took the liberty of tuning your bike.\"\n\n\"You're a saint.\" Lara caught sight of a stack of communications gear on a table. \"May I\u2026\"\n\n\"Go on.\" Shumei turned to Terry. \"So. This is him.\"\n\n\"That's him,\" Lara agreed, picking up one of the satellite phones.\n\n\"Imagine that. I'm world famous,\" Terry said.\n\nShumei shook her head. \"Infamous, I would say. Come on\u2014let's get you some gear.\"\n\nLara dialed. Hillary answered.\n\n\"Croft Manor.\"\n\n\"It's me,\" Lara said.\n\n\"Ah. What is the happy couple up to?\"\n\nLara ignored the jibe. \"Accessorizing. Where are we on reading the Orb?\"\n\n\"Bryce is doing a lot of frowning. Here\u2014I'll put you on speakerphone.\"\n\nThere was a click, and then Bryce's voice was in her ear.\n\n\"No key.\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon?\"\n\n\"Maps have a key, Lara. A legend, a scale\u2014yes? The Orb's key is not on the Orb. It must have been lost\u2014\"\n\n\"Or was somewhere in the temple,\" she responded. \"Go through every image I took. Start with things near the Orb. The key would have been linked to it in some way.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"Right. Tell Hillary I'll call back later.\" Lara hung up the phone, just in time to catch the tail end of the conversation between Shumei and Terry.\n\n\"It's not like Lara to take a partner,\" she was saying.\n\n\"Oh, we've worked together before.\"\n\n\"So I understand. So where are you two going?\" she asked, helping Terry on with a jacket.\n\n\"Maybe a nice walk, fresh mountain air.\" He shrugged. \"Stop by and see my friends.\"\n\n\"You have friends here?\"\n\n\"The Shay Ling.\"\n\n\"The Shay Ling?\" Shumei looked past Terry to Lara, and shook her head. \"You need more weapons.\" She walked over to a table piled high with ordnance, and began sorting out clips for Lara's .45s.\n\nFive minutes later, the pack was full, and digging into the small of Lara's back. She and Terry were perched on motorcycles, the farm and Shumei to their rear, the dirt road and the mountains in the distance before them. A sliver of orange and red off in the distance caught her eye. It ran up one side of the nearest mountain and down the other.\n\nShe squinted, and saw that, in fact, the sliver continued as far off into the distance as she could see.\n\n\"The Shay Ling watch all the roads,\" Terry said. \"We'll have to go around the back\u2014\"\n\nLara was still looking at the sliver. \"We'll go straight.\"\n\nTerry looked at her like she'd grown two heads. \"Ah\u2014maybe you didn't hear me, Croft. They'll have men on every road from here to Luoyang.\"\n\nLara smiled and shook her head.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Not every road,\" she said.\n\nIf only Alexander had kept going, Lara thought. If he hadn't stopped at the Hesperus, who knows what might have happened. Perhaps the Bay of Bengal wouldn't have seemed like the end of the world to him. He might have reached Cambodia. And from there, China. And maybe, just, maybe\u2026\n\nHe might have made it far enough to see this.\n\nShe brought her bike to a stop, and looked ahead and behind her, down the length and breadth of the Great Wall. Almost twenty-five-hundred kilometers long, supposedly the only manmade object on earth visible from the moon. Finished sometime in the third century B.C., if she was remembering right, although sections of it certainly would have been complete in Alexander's time. Probably this section, in fact\u2014running as it did right along the old China\u2013Mongolia border, it would have been one of the first to be built.\n\nThey'd been traveling on this part of the wall for about two hours, heading west. So far they'd only come across a single group of elderly tourists, standing outside a tour bus parked near the base of the wall. The look on their faces when Lara and Terry had driven by high above, on their motorcycles\u2014 Priceless.\n\n\"Hey!\"\n\nShe looked down. Terry, traveling for the last few miles on the road running alongside the wall, had stopped, as well.\n\n\"We need to think about heading south!\" he called up.\n\nShe nodded and gave him a thumbs-up. Terry was right, they needed to turn for Luoyang soon. Which meant coming down from the wall.\n\nFive minutes farther on, she found a long, sloping stairway that led to the ground. A minute later she was back on terra firma and searching the road ahead of her for Terry.\n\nAh. There he was\u2014looking up at the wall, hoping to catch sight of her.\n\nSuddenly, she felt like a bit of fun. Terry was always fun to play with, she remembered. Mainly because unlike ninety-nine point nine percent of the population, he could keep up with her.\n\nLara smiled, and gunned the motor. Came up behind him on a curve, shortcut through the brush, and\u2014\n\nShot past him, close enough that he struggled to maintain control of the bike.\n\n\"Bit rusty, are we?\" she called back.\n\nTerry's only answer was a smile.\n\nA second later, he'd blown by her, gotten twenty feet ahead.\n\nAt which point, he started slaloming across the road, weaving from left to right in front of her to block her way.\n\n\"I think it's coming back!\" he shouted.\n\nLara shot straight down the center line.\n\n\"I expected better from a Scot!\" she yelled as she flew past.\n\n\"I don't expect anything from an Englishwoman!\" he replied\u2014and just as she was almost past him, he accelerated, and their wheels locked.\n\nLara needed every bit of her strength to keep the bike from flying out from underneath her. She wrestled the bike upright, slammed on the brakes, and came to a dead halt.\n\nTerry was right next to her when she stopped.\n\n\"Another thing that's coming back to me,\" he said. \"What it feels like to get tangled up with you\u2014Lady Croft.\"\n\n\"Don't, Terry. That's over and done with.\"\n\n\"Is it?\" He smiled. \"You sure you don't want to knock me on my ass? Now\u2014or later?\"\n\nLara glared.\n\nThen she gunned her motor, and shot off down the road.\n\nThree hours on, the sun just reaching its high point in the sky, Terry pulled off the road and stopped his bike.\n\n\"From here it's by foot.\"\n\nLara looked around. There was nothing in sight, just scrub and a few isolated trees. And off in the distance, mountains.\n\nTerry saw where she was looking.\n\n\"Yeah,\" he said. \"Those hills\u2014that's our destination. A good few hours of walking.\"\n\n\"Let's get started then.\" Lara dragged her bike over behind a bush, hiding it from any passersby. She checked her Colts, then slipped on her pack.\n\nWhen she turned around, Terry was standing right in front of her.\n\n\"Best to reconsider that no gun rule,\" he said. \"Anything that happens is going to happen very fast.\"\n\nLara shook her head.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Come on, Croft. Do you really think I'm going to turn on you?\"\n\n\"It has happened before,\" she said.\n\n\"That was then.\"\n\n\"And this is now?\" She shook her head. \"One thing about archaeology, Terry\u2014it forces you to learn from the past. Which I have done.\"\n\n\"Fine. Have it your way then.\" He threw up his arms in defeat and started walking.\n\nLara was soon on automatic\u2014one foot in front of the other, hand up to push aside the occasional brush, eyes focused on the mountains ahead, Terry walking right at her side.\n\nShe turned around at one point and saw that the road they'd been on had vanished from sight. As had all signs of civilization. No sounds around them either, save the occasional birdsong. She and Terry could have been the last man and woman left on earth.\n\nAs isolated as they'd been in Chasong.\n\nShe looked up just in time to avoid walking into Terry.\n\n\"Keep moving,\" she said.\n\n\"Sure. But tell me something Croft\u2014where do I fit in?\"\n\n\"You're my guide. Keep moving.\"\n\n\"That's not what I meant.\" He sounded serious. \"When you think back on the vast scheme of your life\u2014where do I fit in? Was I a bump in the road? The love of your life? Was I time well spent? Four months, Lara\u2014was it more good than bad?\"\n\n\"I know what you meant, Terry. I'm just not going to answer that question.\"\n\nShe pointed ahead. The mountains loomed over them like silent, disapproving guardians.\n\nThey moved on."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "What a fascinating woman, Reiss thought, setting down the dossier on his desk.\n\nLara Croft. Lady Croft, sole surviving member of one of England's most revered and influential families. A prize-winning photographer, an avid outdoorswoman, and\u2014most important from Reiss's perspective\u2014one of the most controversial figures in archaeology today. A \"tomb raider,\" the papers called her.\n\nReiss wondered why he had never heard of her before. Especially given her connections with MI6, which his sources had been able to outline in some detail. Croft had done a considerable amount of work for Her Majesty's government\u2014though only, he noted, when her interests and theirs meshed. Unfortunately, none of that work had involved cooperating with the MI6 agents Reiss had in his pocket, which made it harder to assess the potential threat she did represent.\n\nNonetheless, Reiss decided, her abilities were formidable. He would treat her with a considerable degree of respect\u2014especially now that she'd added the Sheridan fellow to her team.\n\nHe wondered if he could persuade the two of them to change sides\u2014to come work for him. They were exemplary specimens, both prime examples of what the human species was capable of achieving. Sheridan was a lethal weapon, and Croft\u2014 Well. In addition to being very well trained herself, she was a superbly attractive woman.\n\nReiss flipped through a few more pictures.\n\nYes, he decided finally. If circumstances developed to the point where he could reach out to either of them, he would endeavor to do so. In the meantime\u2026he had work to do.\n\nThe doctor sat down and logged on to his computer. Ah. Here was a message from Madame Gillespie\u2014the last of the five he'd offered Pandora to respond. She, like the others, had agreed to his terms, had promised the doctor would see the money deposited in his account before the close of business.\n\nHe was in the middle of composing a reply to her when the soft shushing of the entrance doors caused him to look up.\n\nSean, Reiss's chief of operations, walked into the lab, followed by one of his operatives, and a stranger. This third man carried a crate.\n\n\"From Chen Lo,\" Sean announced.\n\nReiss took a closer look at the man, and the crate he carried, and frowned. Wrong size, wrong shape.\n\nChen Lo had gotten greedy\u2014broken their deal. The ingratitude. The duplicity. The cheek. The doctor had paid him millions, in American dollars.\n\n\"That's not the Orb,\" Reiss said, rising.\n\nTwo frowns\u2014one from the messenger, the other from Sean.\n\n\"What?\" Sean asked.\n\nReiss waved dismissively at the crate.\n\n\"The Orb. It's not in there.\"\n\nThe doctor rose and walked to a plain white filing cabinet at the back of the lab. He punched in the proper combination and a drawer popped open. A moment later Reiss had found the file he was looking for.\n\nHe turned around, folder in hand, to see that the crate was now open and the messenger's hands cuffed behind his back.\n\nSean held out a satellite phone to him.\n\n\"You were right. This was all that was inside,\" he told Reiss.\n\nThe doctor took the phone, noting the number displayed on the screen. Chen Lo's, if his memory served. All he had to do was punch send to speak to the man.\n\nReiss composed himself and turned to the messenger. The unfortunate fellow looked confused\u2014nervous. His eyes darted hurriedly from Reiss to Sean to the crate and then back to Reiss.\n\n\"Is there anything you can tell me about this?\"\n\nThe messenger shook his head.\n\nReiss nodded to Sean, then hit the send button.\n\nThe tones sounded at exactly the same instant as Sean's gun. A second later, the messenger's body crumpled to the floor.\n\nChen Lo answered on the first ring.\n\n\"Doctor.\"\n\n\"I hope you didn't like your messenger,\" Reiss said.\n\n\"I didn't. But I did like the men I lost in the temple.\"\n\n\"You underestimated Lady Croft.\"\n\n\"I underestimated how much this Orb is worth.\"\n\nReiss opened the folder in his hand. It was a dossier he'd assembled on Chen Lo over the last several months. It contained not information on the Shay Ling or any of their operations, but rather more personal details. Information about Chen Lo's schooling, his parents, his years at university, his family\u2026\n\nReiss turned to a picture of Chen Lo and his wife\u2014sweet thing, didn't look a day older than twenty-one. She and Chen Lo had two children already\u2014a boy and a girl, featured in the next photo in the folder. Precious, precocious-looking children. And\u2014as the file made clear\u2014very important to Chen Lo.\n\nReiss had their medical records in front of him, as well. They'd been to the United States for all their vaccinations\u2014TB, influenza, hepatitis, even smallpox. Drat. That would have been his first choice\u2014he had so many choice strains, and the virus was so easy to transmit. Still\u2026\n\n\"There are so many horrible diseases,\" he said to Chen Lo. \"Things we are susceptible to as children. You never know when you could find yourself holding little Shiho and Tai's hands as a mysterious ailment begins to ravage their bodies.\"\n\nChen Lo cut him off.\n\n\"You kill them, and I'll just give your Orb to Lady Croft. My scouts tell me she's a few miles from here as we speak. I wonder how much she'd pay\u2014\"\n\n\"I'll transfer an additional twelve million dollars to the twelve currently awaiting release,\" Reiss said curtly, cutting him off. He didn't have time to quibble over money, not with Croft so close. A few miles away? This was not good news at all. He no longer had the luxury of trying to turn her anymore. She was moving fast\u2014best to kill her quickly, and proceed with his plans.\n\n\"I will release it all once you've delivered to me the Orb. And Lady Croft's body.\"\n\n\"That will be a pleasure,\" Chen Lo said. \"The Orb will come by truck to the flower pagoda in Shanghai. Nine P.M. You'll find Croft's body with it.\"\n\nReiss was about to hang up when he realized he'd forgotten something.\n\n\"Croft has company,\" the doctor said. \"A former British commando\u2014a Royal Marine, by the name of\u2014\"\n\nChen Lo laughed out loud.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"It's Sheridan, isn't it?\"\n\n\"In fact, yes. Terry Sheridan. You know him?\"\n\nChen Lo's voice hardened. \"Terry and I go way back. It'll be a pleasure to see him again.\"\n\nFrom the way Chen Lo talked, the pleasure would be one-sided.\n\n\"Enjoy yourself,\" Reiss told him. \"I'll expect the Orb in Shanghai tonight.\"\n\nHe hung up, and shook his head. It was a shame about Croft, really. He was sure she would appreciate what he was trying to do, or failing that, would at least have appreciated the opportunity to see Pandora. Too bad.\n\nFor her.\n\nThe scrub was long behind them. There was no sign of civilization, or life of any kind. No trace of the Shay Ling, either. Lara would have thought they were lost, except that over the last few moments Terry had actually picked up the pace, as if they were close to their destination. But all she could see, stretching out before them like an impassable obstacle, was a sheer, rock mountain face. Were they going to try and find a way up? Go around? Was there a trail somewhere that she hadn't spotted?\n\nShe watched Terry's eyes as he surveyed the route ahead. He hadn't spoken in quite some time, had stopped trying to quiz her about their shared past, or what they were hoping to take from Chen Lo and the Shay Ling. He was concentrating on the task at hand\u2014and while part of her welcomed that focus, part of her was worried.\n\nShe wouldn't put it past Terry to be leading her into a trap. A place where he could surprise her, get the gun away, and make his escape. Leaving her with egg on her face, leaving Reiss with the map to Pandora, leaving the Petrakis un-avenged. Not that he cared about any of that.\n\nAs Terry had proven to her several years back, he didn't care about anyone, or anything, except himself.\n\nThey came around a bend in the cliff and found themselves in a cul-de-sac, with an old mining tunnel directly ahead of them.\n\nTerry stopped walking.\n\n\"Straight through?\" she asked, coming up alongside him. \"Or go up, and around?\"\n\n\"Doesn't matter.\"\n\n\"Excuse me?\" Lara frowned.\n\nTerry smiled. \"Doesn't matter, I said.\"\n\nLara stared at him. \"You don't have any idea where they are\u2014do you?\"\n\n\"They're close.\"\n\n\"Which means what?\" She was furious. \"Tell me you haven't been pretending to know where they are all along, just so I'd get you out\u2014\"\n\n\"Croft, this isn't some tomb, and the Shay Ling aren't mummies. They're killers. If you don't trust me\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't. And I don't have any time to waste.\"\n\nShe had to get back to Shumei, she had to get in touch with Calloway, she had to find the Orb, yes, but even more importantly, she had to find Chen Lo.\n\nShe drew her gun and pointed it at Terry.\n\nHe glared at her. \"Normally you hand it to someone butt first.\"\n\nLara motioned with the gun. \"We're turning back.\"\n\nTerry didn't move a muscle. Lara was about to speak again when something changed in his eyes.\n\n\"Go ahead, pull the trigger. I'd rather you than them.\"\n\nShe froze where she stood.\n\nAll around them, the rocks were coming to life.\n\nThe Shay Ling weren't ninjas\u2014they were dressed like street punks, Lara thought, as they stepped forward, weapons at the ready\u2014but they were nonetheless experts in the art of camouflage. Three had hidden themselves in the cliff formations near the tunnel, another handful had been right behind them, but somehow Lara had missed them altogether\u2014 Another came up and ripped the gun from her grasp and Lara's eyes widened in surprise.\n\nIt was Nicholas's killer.\n\nLara knew there were guns trained on her all around and yet she couldn't stop herself from charging forward.\n\nNot that it did any good.\n\nShe was shoved to the ground, kicked once in the side. She tasted dirt and spit it out. She rolled over onto her back\u2014\n\nAnd found herself staring straight down the barrel of not one, not two, but three machine pistols.\n\nShe looked to her left, and saw Terry facedown on the ground, getting the same treatment. Worse, actually. They were still kicking him.\n\n\"So, Terry.\" Nicholas's killer was standing over Sheridan, shaking his head. \"What part of 'never come back here' didn't you understand?\"\n\n\"Xien. Always a pleasure.\" One of the Shay Ling had a boot on Terry's neck\u2014somehow he still managed to turn his head toward Lara. \"Lara, this is Chen Lo's brother, Xien. Xien, this is Lara Croft. Lady Croft\u2014treat her nice, or Her Majesty's Secret Service will want a word with you.\"\n\nXien shook his head. \"Good to see prison hasn't cost you your sense of humor, Terry. Where was it, Barla Kala?\"\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\nXien bent down next to Sheridan. \"You should have stayed.\"\n\nHe punched Terry in the mouth. Blood dribbled from Sheridan's lower lip.\n\nXien stood up.\n\n\"Search them both\u2014thoroughly.\"\n\nThe Shay Ling swarmed over her.\n\nLara gritted her teeth, and endured their none-too-gentle probing.\n\n\"All right, Croft?\" Terry asked at one point.\n\n\"Fine.\"\n\n\"Don't get mad at me now. You wanted to find the Shay Ling.\"\n\n\"Find. Not be found.\"\n\n\"The only way we can get into their place is as their prisoners, okay?\"\n\n\"You might have told me that little gem before.\"\n\nThe searching stopped. Someone wrenched her arms away from her sides, bound her hands in front of her. Her guns were gone. Her pack was gone.\n\nShe turned and saw Terry being bound, as well.\n\n\"Wonderful planning,\" she told him.\n\n\"Relax,\" Sheridan told her. \"Now all you have to do is make Chen a better offer than his buyer. He'll cross them.\"\n\n\"Even if his buyer is Jonathan Reiss?\"\n\nTerry closed his mouth. Gave her a hard look.\n\n\"You might have told me that little gem before.\"\n\n\"Shut up, both of you.\" That was Xien. He nodded to his men, who dragged Lara and Terry to their feet.\n\n\"Now,\" Xien said. \"March.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "\"Out of the country completely,\" Chen Lo said. \"And don't tell me where.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"Move them,\" Chen Lo ordered. \"That is my command. You are to contact me at this number again in two days time. That is the only contact you are to attempt. Do I make myself clear?\"\n\n\"Yes sir. But your wife\u2014\"\n\n\"She will understand. Do you?\"\n\nThere was silence. \"Yes sir.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\nAnd with that, Chen Lo hung up. So. His family was\u2014for the moment, at least\u2014safe. Which gave the Shay Ling's leader time to consider his position.\n\nSheridan and Croft would be here in a moment. They would undoubtedly offer him considerably more money than Reiss had to turn over the Orb. Money was important, but it was not everything. Chen Lo had already taken one grave risk in the name of money\u2014asking Reiss for more of it\u2014and he was not prepared to take another. Grave risk was an understatement\u2014Chen Lo knew that once Reiss had the Orb, the doctor planned to do exactly as he'd threatened. Kill Chen Lo, and his family, and anyone and everyone unfortunate enough to be associated with the Shay Ling. He estimated his grace period\u2014once Reiss got the Orb, of course\u2014to be a matter of days. Hence, the decision to move his wife and children.\n\nThat grace period would disappear entirely, Chen Lo knew, if he were to cross the doctor again.\n\nSo no more bargaining. He would kill Sheridan and Croft.\n\nWell\u2014kill the woman, at least. Terry, he would leave to other hands. But the Croft woman\u2014before she died, perhaps she could enlighten him as to the significance of the Orb. Its historical significance, its practical application. Perhaps\u2026\n\nAn audacious idea occurred to him. What if he cut a deal with MI6? Not for money, but for Reiss. Give up the Orb and the doctor's location, take cash and his safety in return.\n\nOr perhaps\u2026\n\nIf Croft could be made to tell him what the Orb was, what power it represented, then\u2014perhaps\u2014Chen Lo could utilize that power for himself.\n\nHe frowned, considering that path in his mind. Not a road one set out on lightly, for once you began traveling upon it\u2026there was really no turning back.\n\nThat decision was one he would have to make very, very carefully.\n\nChen Lo heard footsteps scuffle on the cavern floor, and looked up.\n\nXien was bringing in Croft and Sheridan through the cliff entrance. The two had their hands bound in front of them, and were being escorted by a dozen Shay Ling warriors. Lu Yao was not among them.\n\nChen Lo motioned a subordinate to him, and sent the man to go fetch Yao.\n\nXien left the two prisoners and came forward.\n\n\"It is Sheridan,\" were the first words out of Xien's mouth. \"Unbelievable, that he could show his face here again.\"\n\n\"Unbelievable indeed,\" Chen Lo agreed. \"They put up a fight?\"\n\n\"Didn't give them a chance. Why?\"\n\n\"Because Terry always has an angle. And if he didn't fight\u2026\"\n\n\"He brought the woman here to negotiate for the Orb,\" Xien said. \"Isn't that obvious?\"\n\nChen Lo nodded thoughtfully. Of course, it was obvious. What was less obvious was the proper course for him to take in this instance. The Orb was clearly of immense value\u2014Sheridan and Croft were willing to risk death for a chance at it, Reiss seemed willing to pay almost any amount of money for it\u2026\n\nChen Lo frowned. He was operating at a distinct disadvantage here. The others knew what it was they were bargaining for, and he didn't.\n\nHe needed to find out what the Orb was. He needed to talk to Lady Croft.\n\nBut he had promised the doctor delivery of the Orb by nine P.M. Shanghai time, which meant he needed to send it on its way now.\n\nHowever\u2026that decision, Chen Lo realized, could always be rescinded with a simple phone call.\n\nHis mind made up, Chen Lo clapped his brother on the shoulder.\n\n\"Get the Orb on the road to Shanghai. Reiss has doubled his price. I'm going to find out why.\"\n\nAs Xien left to do as he was told, Chen Lo turned his attention to the prisoners. The two of them\u2014Croft and Sheridan\u2014stood in the main cavern, their backs to him, talking softly to each other. As he approached, he caught the tail end of their conversation.\n\n\"Were you really going to shoot me?\" Terry was asking.\n\nBefore Croft could respond, Chen Lo spoke.\n\n\"Oh, I bet she would have.\" He crossed in front of them, came around to face Croft. \"I've seen her work firsthand.\"\n\nThe two of them locked eyes. Chen Lo saw fury in her gaze. For a second, he thought she might actually attack him then and there, despite the presence of the armed guards at her back. The reason for her anger puzzled him for a moment\u2014then he remembered the two boys he and his men had taken out at the cave. Could that be it? It seemed the most likely explanation.\n\nHe let his gaze linger on Croft a moment longer, and allowed himself a small smile\u2014which only increased the rage smoldering in her eyes. Good. Anger was something he could use\u2014an emotion he could play on, perhaps, to get the information he desired.\n\nHe turned away from Croft then, and clapped Sheridan on the shoulder. The file said he'd been in Barla Kala, but Chen Lo wondered about that. Sheridan looked fit, healthy, and as always, Chen Lo could see the gears in his mind moving at a million miles per hour.\n\nBest to kill him quickly.\n\n\"Did Terry tell you,\" Chen Lo asked Croft, \"the last time any of us saw him he was riding away in a truck. It was filled with Ming vases I found near the Longmen grottoes?\"\n\nCroft looked at Terry, but Chen Lo's attention was drawn to one of the side passageways, and the man making his way toward them.\n\nPerfect timing.\n\n\"And that next to him in the front seat was\u2026his sister?\"\n\nLu Yao stepped past the guards and stood facing Sheridan\u2014though facing was perhaps the wrong word, as Lu Yao was more than a head taller than Terry and considerably wider. Chen Lo was pleased to see Croft's eyes widen as she took in the whole of the man.\n\nLu Yao spoke in Mandarin to Terry.\n\n\"I will crush your bones,\" the giant said.\n\nSheridan shrugged.\n\n\"How is your sister?\"\n\nChen Lo laughed. Sheridan\u2014making jokes in the face of his own death. Some things never changed. But this was not a laughing matter.\n\n\"You shouldn't have come here,\" Chen Lo said.\n\n\"It got me out of prison.\" Terry nodded toward Croft. \"Besides, the lady's got a good offer. Better than Reiss.\"\n\n\"Really? Should I take it?\"\n\n\"Take it.\" Sheridan nodded again, and then a smile crept slowly across his face. \"Or better yet\u2014you and I ransom her and the thing back to the British for triple.\"\n\nChen Lo had to laugh again. From the look on Croft's face, she couldn't tell if Sheridan was serious about the offer or not. Neither could Chen Lo, truthfully. Not that it mattered.\n\n\"Let's discuss it,\" he said.\n\nSheridan started to step forward. Chen Lo shook his head.\n\n\"Not you, Terry. Lady Croft and I. You wait here and\u2026\" Chen Lo looked up at Yao and smiled. \"Catch up.\"\n\nThe giant returned his smile.\n\nTerry muttered something under his breath.\n\nOne of the guards jabbed a gun into Croft's back and pressed her forward.\n\nIt had taken several minutes, but Lara felt under control again at last. Seeing the men who'd killed Nicholas, Jimmy, and Gus, having both of them scant inches away from her\u2026\n\nShe'd almost snapped, been on the verge of attacking them even though it went against what she'd promised MI6 she'd do, and would have certainly meant death for her and Terry. Not that she cared about that, all that she'd cared about for that first few seconds that she'd seen Chen Lo and had him and Xien within her reach was killing them.\n\nShe was better now though.\n\nHer focus was back on the Orb. On obtaining it, and some idea of Reiss's whereabouts. MI6 had given her a blank check to do so, authorized her to promise Chen Lo however much money he wanted, as well as safe passage to any destination in the world for himself and his family. The idea of Chen Lo sunning himself on a beach somewhere for the rest of his life stuck in her craw, but Lara had promised she'd make the offer, and so she would.\n\nPart of her was sincerely hoping he'd turn it down though.\n\nAs the guards pushed her forward, she pretended to stumble. Righting herself, she passed close enough to Terry to whisper in his ear.\n\n\"I'll need three minutes,\" she said.\n\nShe heard a mumbled \"terrific\" from Terry and then she was being pushed past him, and toward Chen Lo.\n\nThe Shay Ling's leader waved the guards away as she approached.\n\n\"Let's walk a bit,\" he said. \"Please.\"\n\nNot waiting for her answer, he turned his back and started down one of the half-dozen passageways that branched off the central cavern. Lara followed, catching up after a few steps.\n\nThe passage was new\u2014as this entire complex seemed to be. The Shay Ling's headquarters was located at the top of the sheer cliff Lara and Terry had stood in front of moments before being captured, at the end of a narrow, winding trail. And the complex appeared to contain not just their operational headquarters, but the Shay Ling's massive smuggling outfit, as well.\n\nAs Lara and Terry had begun their march up the mountain, they had seen two Shay Ling carefully loading a life-size terracotta warrior\u2014as impressive an example of Tang dynasty sculpture as Lara had ever seen\u2014into a waiting wooden coffin. Climbing to the top, she'd seen a half-dozen other coffins being lowered down the cliff face by ropes, as well. And then, in the central chamber where they'd first met Chen Lo, she'd seen wooden crates of varying sizes stacked everywhere.\n\nLara took the whole smuggling thing personally\u2014to her way of thinking, it gave tomb raiding a bad name.\n\nShe turned to Chen Lo, about to make a comment along those lines, when light flashed on something hanging from a chain around his neck. A medallion\u2014copper, turned dark with age. It took a moment for Lara to recognize it.\n\nThe medallion from the Luna Temple. The one that had been hidden in the eye of the Alexander statue.\n\nA sudden chill ran down her spine.\n\nHer own words to Stevens\u2014talking about the map that led Alexander to the cradle of life\u2014came back to her.\n\nThe name he gave this map was mati. A literal translation of the word mati is eye.\"\n\nThe Orb was the eye\u2014the map to Pandora.\n\nAnd intuition told her this medallion\u2014hidden in Alexander's own eye\u2014was the key to reading that map. Lara was certain of it.\n\nChen Lo saw her staring, and smiled.\n\n\"You remember it.\" He held up the medallion for her to examine more closely. \"I took it as a trophy.\"\n\nLara forced herself to return Chen Lo's smile.\n\n\"I'll have to do the same.\"\n\nHe let go of the medallion and let it fall back around his neck.\n\n\"You mean that.\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"You're not frightened?\"\n\n\"Of what?\"\n\nChen Lo smiled again. \"I'm surprised we haven't met before today, Lady Croft. We have much in common.\"\n\nLara bit her tongue to keep from replying.\n\n\"Come.\" Chen Lo slowed as they passed a narrow opening in the passageway, flanked by two Shay Ling. \"There's something I think you'll appreciate in here.\"\n\nHe led Lara through the opening. The light dimmed\u2014it took a second for her eyes to adjust. When she did, it was all she could do to keep her mouth from dropping open in wonder.\n\nThey were inside a large, low-ceilinged cave. A handful of lights were strung above her. And all around, as far as the eye could see, were terracotta statues\u2014warriors\u2014identical to the one she'd seen being loaded into the coffin below. All of them looked in perfect condition.\n\n\"There must be hundreds,\" Lara whispered.\n\n\"Thousands, actually,\" Chen Lo said. \"This is the largest group of terracotta warriors I've found. The king of Qin made them for use in the afterlife. To fend off enemies he made in this one.\"\n\n\"You and I both need a set.\"\n\nChen Lo spread his arms wide. \"I have many, as you see. I'll be happy to sell some to you.\"\n\n\"I hope,\" Lara said, choosing her words carefully, \"you are as entrepeneurial with the Orb.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Chen Lo smiled. \"That is the question of the day, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Most certainly.\" Lara paused. \"Chen Lo\u2014you lost men. I lost men. I see no reason why we should both lose again.\"\n\n\"Nor do I.\"\n\n\"So you're prepared to sell?\"\n\n\"Perhaps.\"\n\n\"It's a yes-or-no question,\" Lara said.\n\n\"Suppose I want double what Reiss offered me?\"\n\n\"We'd be prepared to pay that,\" Lara said quickly. \"If the Orb is still here.\"\n\nChen Lo studied her a moment. \"I believe you're serious.\" He sounded surprised; Lara wondered why. Surely he knew that MI6 would pay any amount to avoid the kind of casualties Pandora would\u2026\n\nThen, all at once, she was struck by a sudden realization.\n\nChen Lo didn't know what the Orb was. Didn't know why Reiss and MI6 wanted it so badly. Didn't know anything about Pandora.\n\nWhich explained a number of things that had been troubling her. Chief among them, why he was taking his time with her.\n\nHe wanted to pick her brain, to have her tell him everything she knew about the Orb.\n\nFat chance, that.\n\nThree minutes, Lara had told Terry. She estimated half that time was gone already.\n\nLara took a deep breath and started again.\n\n\"We're your only chance, Chen Lo,\" Lara said. \"You have no idea how important this Orb is\u2014\"\n\n\"It is very valuable,\" Chen Lo agreed.\n\n\"Really?\" Lara asked, a cutting edge to her voice. \"If you knew that, you would also know that Reiss will kill you the moment you give it to him.\"\n\n\"But your government will guarantee my safety?\"\n\nLara nodded. \"I will.\"\n\n\"That must hurt. Saying that to me.\"\n\nShe would have punched him out if her arms weren't still tied in front of her. Then Lara realized Chen Lo was trying to bait her, get her angry again, perhaps inspire a careless outburst.\n\nShe forced herself to stay calm.\n\n\"Take the offer.\"\n\nHe laughed\u2014not a laugh of amusement, but incredulity. \"You presume to give me orders?\"\n\n\"Take the offer. Before it expires.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"No thank you, Lady Croft.\"\n\nThe amusement had disappeared from his voice. His eyes were suddenly cold, as well.\n\n\"Then I'll have to force you,\" Lara said.\n\n\"No.\" Chen Lo shook his head. \"Then I'll have to kill you.\"\n\n\"You're welcome to try,\" Lara said, letting her voice grow cold, as well.\n\nThe two locked eyes then, and somewhere deep inside Lara was glad it had worked out this way. The thought of paying Chen Lo money, of keeping him safe\u2026\n\nIt turned her stomach.\n\nJimmy, she thought. Nicholas. Gus.\n\n\"Killing me's not going to be easy,\" she said. \"Not as easy as, say\u2026killing innocent people from behind.\"\n\n\"Sure it is,\" Chen Lo said, and in a blur of motion, he brought his gun up to fire.\n\nBut Lara was moving even faster.\n\nShe kicked out, sending the gun spinning from his hand. It flew off toward the recesses of the cave and skittered away out of sight.\n\nShe kicked again, catching Chen Lo in the side with one foot and then in the head with the other, a roundhouse blow that sent him sprawling to the floor, unconscious.\n\nAt least, that's what it should have done.\n\nBut Chen Lo merely frowned, looking annoyed.\n\nThen he looked past Lara, off to his left, and smiled.\n\nLara glanced that way and smiled, too.\n\nDirectly behind her, just barely visible in the dim overhead light, was a rack of spears. Intended for the king of Qin's terracotta warriors to use in the afterlife, they nonetheless looked solid enough to use in the here and now, as well.\n\nLara pivoted and ran, reached the rack first. Hands still bound, she grasped the haft of one spear and began to draw it out\u2014\n\nChen Lo got there and kicked the entire rack to the floor. Spears flew everywhere\u2014Lara had to let go of the one she had to dodge another flying at her\u2014\n\nShe looked up just in time to see Chen Lo successfully do what she'd failed to\u2014grab a spear out of midair.\n\nIn one smooth, fluid motion, he charged, jabbing and thrusting the spear at her. Lara backpedaled furiously, evading his attack as best she could. Twice the spear point came uncomfortably close to connecting, and Lara stumbled, almost falling the second time.\n\nWhich would be the end for her, she realized. With her hands still bound, she'd have no way to move with any sort of speed or precision once her legs were out from under her. She couldn't let that happen.\n\nShe had to get herself loose, and fast.\n\nOf course she also had to stay alive and Chen Lo was making that difficult. He attacked relentlessly, always moving forward, chasing her now around one row of statues and then down another. Lara slammed backward into one of the warriors and grimaced as its outstretched hands dug into her back.\n\nShe slid between that warrior and the one next to it.\n\nChen Lo followed with a grin and a quick glance over her shoulder told Lara why.\n\nShe had backed herself into a corner. There was only five feet of floor left between her and the wall, and that space was disappearing fast as Chen Lo closed in, spear jabbing toward her like an angry, spitting cobra. The blade flashed once, twice, in the dim cavern light.\n\nAnd suddenly, Lara had an idea.\n\nShe turned and faced Chen Lo straight on, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.\n\n\"Death wish, Lady Croft?\" he asked, twirling the spear in the air once, twice\u2014like a baton. The man wasn't even breathing hard, she noted with admiration. Which was fine with her.\n\nNeither was she.\n\n\"On the contrary.\" Lara rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet. She could feel the wall behind her, scant inches away now. \"Bring it.\"\n\nChen Lo obliged.\n\nWith one quick, lightning-fast stroke, he closed the distance between them and thrust the spear forward\u2014a death blow aimed straight for her gut.\n\nThe man's speed was incredible.\n\nLara, though, was faster.\n\nEven as he was moving, Lara whirled, turning her back to Chen Lo. She brought one leg over the oncoming spear, straddling it and the blade, which struck the wall behind her with a resounding crack.\n\nLara tensed her hands, stretching the rope between them, and chopped down on the blade.\n\nThe rope snapped with a loud thwack\u2014one final emphatic burst of strength, and Lara's hands were free.\n\nShe raised her leg, spinning back the way she came, slam-kicking Chen Lo square in the chest as she did so\u2014a solid shot that she felt in the bones all the way up her leg.\n\nThen, back in her original position, back to the wall, she turned to face Chen Lo.\n\nOnly he wasn't there.\n\nLara had barely a split second to brace herself when Chen Lo's roundhouse kick caught her square in the face. She staggered and almost fell.\n\n\"Oh,\" Chen Lo said, bending to pick up his spear. \"This is going to be fun.\"\n\nLara didn't necessarily think so.\n\nMomentarily dazed, her ears still ringing, she slipped back behind a row of statues, seeking out the cover of darkness and a chance to recover.\n\nThis could be trouble, Terry thought.\n\nHe was surrounded by Shay Ling\u2014four of them, arrayed in a circle. Terry didn't know any of them from the old days, but the way they stood\u2026well. It would be a fight, that was for certain. It went without saying that Chen Lo trained all his people well. Each would know how to deliver the maximum possible pain with every blow.\n\nAnd the four didn't even include Lu Yao, who was fifty feet away, talking to Xien. No doubt receiving the go-ahead to make Terry's pain as intense and lingering as possible.\n\nAnd there, Terry thought, was the problem in a nutshell. Lingering.\n\nCroft had said three minutes, but Terry knew she'd need at least five. Especially if it came to a fight between her and Chen Lo\u2014which he suspected it would. No matter what MI6 had told Croft to do, he couldn't see her cutting deals with the Shay Ling. And there was something else there, too, something personal between her and Chen Lo.\n\nTerry wondered what that something was, but that was all he could do, wonder, because Croft hadn't seen fit to tell him anything at all so far. Not about her dealings with Chen Lo, or this mysterious thing she and MI6 were after\u2014hell, he was totally in the dark. Which\u2014to tell the truth-\u2014pissed him off a little bit.\n\nAs did Croft's stonewalling him on the walk here, refusing to talk to him not just about the present but the past\u2014their past\u2014as well.\n\nTerry was tired of it. He wanted to know what Croft and MI6 were up to, what Jonathan Reiss had to do with it, and what the cause of the bad blood between Croft and Chen Lo was. Thing was, he needed some kind of leverage, something that would force people to talk to him, divulge some answers.\n\nWatching Xien head back toward the cave entrance, accompanied by a half dozen Shay Ling and a wooden crate roughly the size of a large milk carton, he suspected he might have that leverage.\n\nTerry caught Lu Yao's eye as the big man approached.\n\n\"Where's Xien taking that crate?\"\n\nLu Yao ignored him. With a nod and a few quick words in Mandarin, he dismissed two of the men from the circle and took their place.\n\nThen the giant gave another almost imperceptible nod to the two remaining men in the circle, and all three began to move with slow, deceptively languid movements that had Terry instantly on his guard.\n\nHe braced himself for their attack.\n\n\"Listen to me,\" he said, turning as he spoke to keep Lu Yao directly in front of him. \"While you're out here doing Chen Lo's fighting\u2014he's making a deal worth twice as much as he's told you. Tell me where that crate is going and I'll give you each a full share\u2014\"\n\n\"Shanghai,\" Lu Yao said abruptly. \"It's going to Shanghai. But don't worry, you'll be joining it. In a crate all your own.\"\n\nHe nodded to his left, where Terry saw two Shay Ling lifting another one of those gray statues into a coffin. Next to them, there was an empty coffin.\n\n\"Just your size, Sheridan,\" Lu Yao said.\n\n\"Don't go to the trouble of a formal burial on my account,\" Terry told him. \"I'd prefer to be cremated.\"\n\nLu Yao launched a side kick. Terry made no attempt to dodge it.\n\nThe big man's boot caught him square in the side, slamming into his ribs with an ungodly force.\n\nTerry dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes.\n\nBefore he could get up, Lu kicked him again. Terry flew backward, rolling five feet on the ground from the force of the blow. He tasted blood in his mouth and climbed onto his hands and knees.\n\nHe glanced at the watch the old woman from the farmhouse had given him and felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Lara had only been gone a minute or so.\n\nHe had to linger here for a little while yet.\n\nLu Yao drew closer, and Terry braced himself for another attack.\n\nCome on Croft, he urged silently, as the giant loomed over him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Head no longer spinning, Lara stalked silently through the vast cavern of terracotta warriors, her eyes darting in all directions, searching for Chen Lo.\n\nShe had thought his claim that there were thousands of statues an exaggeration, but now, after a few minutes of traversing through row after row of the unmoving warriors, she decided he'd spoken the truth. Which made this chamber a discovery on the order of the Longmen grottoes\u2014the fabled treasure trove of the Qin emperors Chen Lo had spoken of earlier. She had no doubt there were experts around the world who would give their eye teeth to be where she was right now.\n\nShe'd have to appreciate the scenery later though. Right now she was more concerned with staying alive.\n\nLara paused a moment, sensing something.\n\nShadows flickered uneasily all about her\u2014she looked up to see one of the strands of lightbulbs above swinging gently from side to side, as if stirred by a breeze.\n\nShe doubted very much, though, that the wind had moved them. Which meant only one thing: Chen Lo was close.\n\nLara pressed back tight against the statue behind her. She needed a weapon of her own\u2014to face Chen Lo unarmed was like suicide. If she could\u2014\n\nThe head of the warrior in front of her exploded.\n\nLara caught a glimpse of Chen Lo's face, grim, unsmiling, determined\u2014and spun away to her left. Metal flashed\u2014and the warrior on her right collapsed, suddenly carved into two.\n\nWonderful, Lara thought. Chen Lo has a sword.\n\nShe spun again and slammed backward into another statue, almost knocking it over. It wobbled, then unexpectedly steadied itself.\n\nMove, a little voice inside her head told her.\n\nLara dove forward, just as a spear point burst through the stone, impaling the terracotta warrior and the air where she had just stood.\n\nShe did a forward roll and sprang up on her feet, ready to confront Chen Lo.\n\nBut the cavern was silent and still.\n\nLara drew a breath and slid forward. She moved behind one statue and then a second, her eyes scanning the cavern. Nothing. No one.\n\nShe listened a moment, then took a hesitant step out from the shadows. The warriors facing her held their swords (stone, unfortunately)\u2014at the ready, prepared to attack.\n\nLara flashed suddenly on a memory from the none-too-distant past\u2014of stone soldiers coming to life and trying to kill her. Their weapons had been rock, as well\u2014but effective enough, if used correctly. She looked up at the statue before her, wondered about trying to remove its sword for her own use.\n\nAngered, the statue lunged at her.\n\nAt least, that was her first surprised thought. Lara was so shocked to see the stone warrior move, all she could do was fall backward. She landed hard on the ground and looked up to see the statue falling straight toward her.\n\nShe rolled to the side, and its sword missed her by an inch.\n\nA second warrior came crashing down toward her.\n\nShe rolled away from that one, too, and scrambled to her feet.\n\nChen Lo stood in the space left by the two terracotta warriors, sword in hand, smiling at her.\n\nHe'd pushed the statues, she realized. No stone-comingto-life miracles happening here.\n\nHe took a step forward and Lara ran.\n\nBlindly, at first, as fast as she could, hearing his footsteps behind her. Sliding between the statues, running at top speed through row after row of indistinguishable terracotta figures\u2014\n\nThen she burst into an open area, and all at once, recognized her surroundings. There was the entranceway to the cavern, ahead to her left. And directly before her\u2014\n\nSpears\u2014from the rack Chen Lo had overturned\u2014lay scattered on the ground.\n\nHe was a foot behind as she grabbed one up and\u2014using it like a pole vault\u2014leapt up onto the shoulder, and then the head, of the warrior nearest her. Then, using the terracotta figures as stepping-stones, she began to run again.\n\nChen Lo cursed as he came after her, chopping furiously, smashing statues out from under her even as she stepped on them. His relentless assault made it impossible for her to consider turning to fight\u2014he would have gutted her had she tried it.\n\nLara stumbled, and almost fell. She literally felt the whoosh of Chen Lo's sword as he came within millimeters of cutting her off at the ankle.\n\nShe put on a renewed burst of speed. So did Chen Lo. He was going to catch her, unless she could think of something. And then\u2026\n\nSuspended from the ceiling directly ahead of her, Lara saw a string of lights.\n\nShe raised her spear, and as she ran by the lights, swung her weapon like a bat. The bulbs shattered\u2014a shower of tiny glass shards filled the air. She heard Chen Lo slow behind her, and curse.\n\nLara vaulted down from atop the statues and ran for the darkness.\n\nHe was standing in the middle of the Shay Ling fighters\u2014three of them now, Lu Yao and two of the newcomers. Circling him, cocky smiles on their faces. A crowd had gathered to watch\u2014Terry supposed that even if most of them hadn't been around when he was running with Chen Lo and Xien, they'd heard about his betrayal and wanted to see him get his comeuppance. Fine.\n\nHe was remembering faces. Making mental notes of who was saying what, and how often. They'd get theirs.\n\nAs soon as Croft got back here, that is.\n\nSomeone kicked him in the ribs and Terry snapped back to the here and now.\n\nOne of the Shay Ling fighters landed an uppercut to Terry's jaw. The other moved in, and dealt a combination kick and punch to his chest. Terry shot backward like he'd been kicked by a mule.\n\nBut he didn't fall.\n\nHe moved back to the center of the ring and glared at Lu Yao.\n\n\"You and I both know I could kill you right now,\" Terry said.\n\nThe giant responded by spinning into a massive roundhouse kick that connected square to Terry's temple.\n\n\"Why don't you fight back?\" Lu Yao asked.\n\n\"I'm waiting,\" Terry said.\n\nLu Yao smiled, bobbing.\n\n\"Don't wait too long.\"\n\nAmen to that, Terry thought, bracing himself for another blow.\n\nLara didn't know where the bamboo ladder led to, but the second she spotted it leaning against the wall at the far end of the cave she ran for it anyway. Anyplace, she decided, had to be better than here.\n\nShe ran full out now, no more trying to pad quietly through the cavern. That was Chen Lo's game\u2014hers was to seek another battleground, and a weapon of her own.\n\nShe sprinted the last twenty feet between her and the ladder full out, and sprang for it. Grabbed the ladder, started climbing\u2014\n\nA sword appeared from nowhere, slicing the horizontal rungs in half.\n\nThe ladder split. Lara grabbed on to one of the poles with both hands. She slid down it like a fireman, reached the ground, and turned.\n\nChen Lo had two swords now. He flipped one head over heels in the air, caught it. Did the same with the second.\n\nThen, wielding his weapons like machetes, he advanced.\n\nLara considered the bamboo pole still in her hand. Not unlike the kenzai staves she and Hillary had been training with.\n\nLara changed her grip on the bamboo, held it with her hands a few feet apart before her, and moved forward to parry Chen Lo's attack.\n\nHe sliced down with his sword and split her weapon in two.\n\nLara dodged by him and shifted her grip. She turned to face him again, holding both halves of bamboo together, in front of her.\n\nAnother flash of metal and she had four sticks of bamboo.\n\nSo much for training with Hillary, Lara thought.\n\nShe tossed the sticks at Chen Lo. As he knocked them to the ground, she spun and did a series of back flips across the cavern floor. She landed in a crouch and picked up the spear she'd seen lying there. Just in time.\n\nChen Lo was on her again.\n\nLara had to give ground as he slashed, backing her down a row of terracotta warriors. This spear was no better than the bamboo pole had been\u2014bits of wood flew into the air as Chen Lo pressed his attack, slicing the weapon in her hands into smaller and smaller pieces.\n\nShe almost tripped over another spear and picked it up. Chen Lo's pace never faltered\u2014he attacked like a man possessed. Lara tried to put a statue between the two of them and he pulverized it with a single blow from the sword in his right hand.\n\nWith the sword in his left, he split the spear in her hands. The force of the blow made her arms shiver.\n\nLara found herself holding a single stick barely as long as her forearm.\n\nChen Lo raised both blades again. Smiling, he moved in for the kill.\n\nLara cocked her arm back and threw what remained of her spear at him.\n\nIt flew like a javelin\u2014not entirely straight, the stick had broken too jaggedly to fly true\u2014but close enough. It caught one sleeve of Chen Lo's shirt and pierced it, pinning him to the terracotta warrior directly behind him.\n\nChen Lo screamed in rage and ripped the shirt free. She must have grazed his skin\u2014blood stained the shirt where it had ripped.\n\nNo more measured moves for Chen Lo\u2014he charged wildly now, both blades swinging. Lara backed away as fast as she could, trying to keep from stumbling over her own feet, thinking that she usually preferred an angry opponent, rage made most people careless, but it only seemed to be making Chen Lo faster.\n\nShe bumped into something. A glance sideways showed her a wooden crate\u2014she remembered seeing a stack of them off to the side when she'd first entered the cavern.\n\nChen Lo swung again and Lara spun to the side. He missed by not inches, but millimeters\u2014the wind from the blade blew a lock of hair free from her cheek, where sweat had plastered it down.\n\nThe blade smashed past her and broke through the top of the crate, revealing its contents. Lara saw metal inside, and even before she consciously realized what she was looking at, her hands were darting into the crate and grabbing a rifle and she jumped to the side and aimed the weapon\u2014an old 303, complete with bayonet at the end\u2014right at Chen Lo.\n\nFear darted across his face.\n\nLara squeezed the trigger.\n\nClick. She looked at the rifle more closely. No clip. No bullets.\n\nChen Lo roared and came at her with both swords again\u2014she barely got the rifle up in time to parry his attack. Faster than ever he came, swinging one sword, then the next, and Lara's arms rang with the force of each blow.\n\nBut even though the 303 wasn't loaded, it was the best weapon she'd had yet in the fight. Unlike the spears or the ladder pole, the metal withstood Chen Lo's attack without shattering. And now, at long last, Lara had a second to breathe, to study Chen Lo's rhythm as he fought, the pattern of his attack, and she could see that there was no subtlety to his charge, anger had gotten the best of him, and Lara waited and watched, and then\u2014\n\nShe saw an opening.\n\nAs Chen Lo brought the blade in his right hand down on the rifle, as the one in his left hung at his side for a nanosecond before he raised it again, Lara stepped forward and thrust up with the rifle.\n\nThe blade in his right hand went flying.\n\nChen Lo looked surprised. No, not just surprised, shocked\u2014as if such a thing had never happened to him before. Maybe it hadn't.\n\nFirst time for everything, Lara thought, and thrust the bayonet at the end of the 303 down, toward the ground, and through Chen Lo's foot.\n\nHe screamed in agony.\n\nShe twisted the rifle hard, snapping off the blade, and then, still holding the barrel of the weapon, thrust up, smashing the headstock into Chen Lo's chin.\n\nHe screamed again, the blade in his left hand flew up in the air as he dropped to the ground, writhing in agony.\n\nLara caught the sword in midair. She tightened her grip on the hilt and held the point to the bare flesh of his neck.\n\nJimmy, she thought. Gus. Nicholas.\n\nLara pressed the blade forward. Chen Lo gasped involuntarily.\n\nAnd then she remembered Terry. And MI6, and Reiss, and Pandora, and she lessened the pressure on Chen Lo's throat.\n\n\"Where's the Orb? Tell me and it spares your life.\"\n\nChen Lo gazed at her in fury. He spat and opened his mouth to curse her.\n\nLara decided she would be happy to kill him and find the information elsewhere.\n\nThen suddenly, Chen Lo changed his expression. Almost smiled, and she could visibly see him swallow the curse on his lips.\n\n\"The flower pagoda. Shanghai. Nine P.M.\"\n\nLara looked him in the eye. No way of being certain, of course, but she would bet he was telling her the truth, that she would find the Orb then and there.\n\nAnd to read it\u2026\n\nShe ripped the medallion from the Alexander statue away from his neck and placed it around hers.\n\n\"Good luck, Croft,\" Chen Lo sneered. \"Reiss will have you for breakfast.\"\n\n\"We'll see.\" Lara paused a moment, looking down at him. She let a fraction of the contempt and hatred she felt for him show on her face.\n\nChen Lo flinched.\n\nGripping the hilt in both hands now, Lara raised the sword over her head and quickly brought it down, point first.\n\nShe jammed the blade into the ground between his legs, missing his crotch by an inch.\n\n\"Now we're even.\"\n\nSuddenly she heard a noise from behind her. Voices in the hall. Guards, no doubt coming to see what had happened. Damn.\n\nShe pulled the machete up out of the ground again and darted back toward the maze of terracotta warriors, hoping to escape the newcomers, or failing that, cut them off.\n\nAs she ran, she heard Chen Lo scrabbling on the ground behind her. Trying to get free. She wondered why he didn't just yell out, let the guards know where she was. Ashamed to have lost to her? That could be it, although\u2014\n\nLight glinted off the statue before her. Coming from behind, Lara realized instantly, and reacting on instinct, spun around.\n\nShe took in the scene in a split second\u2014\n\nChen Lo, still lying on the ground, but now a few feet from where she'd left him, holding the gun she'd kicked out of his hands when they'd first entered the cave.\n\nHe raised the weapon to fire\u2014\n\nLara threw the sword just as he squeezed the trigger.\n\nThe bullet went wide. The blade didn't.\n\nChen Lo gasped once, shuddered, and lay still.\n\nLara took a deep breath, and it was only then that she saw a trail of blood leading from the bayonet, still sticking up out of the ground, to where he lay.\n\nChen Lo had torn through his own foot to get to the gun, she realized. He must have hated her almost as much as she hated him.\n\nThe key word there being almost.\n\nVoices behind her made Lara turn. Guards, bursting into the cavern. Raising their weapons now.\n\nAnd she was out of swords.\n\nHere we go again, Lara thought, and began to run once more.\n\nIt had been the longest three minutes of Terry Sheridan's life and, unfortunately, it showed no signs of ending.\n\nAll three of the Shay Ling that had been circling before were now taking turns kicking him. Now, that is, that he was lying on the ground defenseless. One would dash in and kick his stomach, then another his side (which side depended on which direction he rolled in, of course, they always attacked from behind), and finally he'd get a boot to the head.\n\nFor a split second there, Terry missed Barla Kala. The thought put a smile on his face.\n\n\"You won't be laughing too much longer, Sheridan,\" Lu Yao said.\n\nOne of the others spoke in Mandarin then\u2014Terry didn't catch all of it, but it sounded to his ears like a slur on his manhood, his fighting ability.\n\nWhich was almost enough to get him on his feet and putting a fist down the speaker's throat. Then he remembered what he was supposed to be doing in this fight.\n\nLingering. For three minutes.\n\nLu Yao kicked him in the stomach. Terry doubled over and rolled to his left. One of the others kicked him in the back. He felt a boot in his face.\n\nTerry rolled over and looked up at Lu Yao. Glared.\n\nThe giant spit on him.\n\n\"You're nothing, Sheridan,\" he said.\n\nTerry smiled.\n\nLu Yao frowned. \"What?\"\n\nTerry got to his feet and winked. Not at Lu Yao, but at Lara Croft, who had suddenly appeared behind the giant, hidden in the shadows of the cave, a smile of her own fixed firmly in place and a gun in each hand.\n\nIf it had escaped him before, Terry was beginning to remember why he liked her so much.\n\n\"Remember what I said before\u2014how I could kill you any time I wanted?\" Terry asked Lu Yao.\n\nThe giant laughed\u2014Terry heard the two other Shay Ling behind him join in.\n\n\"Ha, ha,\" Terry said, the smile gone from his face. \"You don't remember?\"\n\n\"I remember,\" Lu Yao choked out between laughs.\n\n\"Well,\" Terry said. \"Told you.\"\n\nHe took a deep breath then and moved\u2014the way he'd been trained to, first by the marines, and then the Kon-shari, the way he'd practiced, in Afghanistan with Al-Hassari, and then by himself in his cell at Barla Kala for the last five years.\n\nTerry Sheridan moved like the killing weapon he was.\n\nHe exhaled and snapped the rope holding his hands together, spun and broke the wrist of Shay Ling number one, and struck that same man's femoral artery with his clenched fist. As that guard toppled, Terry attacked the second man behind him, flooring him with a fist to the Adam's apple. He picked up the rope from the ground and wrapped it around the man's throat. Twisted tight, and heard his neck snap.\n\nAs that man fell, Terry looked up at LuYao.\n\n\"Next?\" he asked.\n\nThe giant, to his credit, didn't run.\n\nNot that he would have had time.\n\nEven as he spoke, Terry kicked out Lu Yao's right kneecap. Kicked again, and snapped the man's left Achilles. As the giant crumpled, face twisted in agony, Terry punched up, thrusting underneath his ribs. Something cracked.\n\nTerry stepped behind him and snapped his neck.\n\nThe other Shay Ling, who'd hung back while Terry was lying on the ground, allowing himself to be kicked, looked at him now in open-mouthed surprise, their minds still trying to process what had just happened.\n\nThe entire fight\u2014such as it was\u2014had taken three seconds.\n\nLara sprinted forward from the shadows. Terry started after her and a second later heard the Shay Ling following them.\n\nGunfire sounded. Terry dodged to his right. Lara went left.\n\n\"I was beginning to think you weren't coming!\" he shouted after her.\n\n\"Sorry!\" she called back, as they zigzagged again. \"Chen Lo was harder to deal with than I thought!\"\n\nHe caught up to her and they ran together, sprinting full out for the main entrance. Terry saw half a dozen coffins scattered in front of them\u2014loaded with terracotta statues like the others, no doubt\u2014waiting to be lowered to the ground below.\n\nHe bounded over one. Lara, a step behind now, did the same.\n\nThe cavern entrance loomed ahead of them, twenty feet away. Through the opening, Terry saw the rocky face of the mountain due opposite them, lit up by the midday sun. He felt a cool breeze on his face, smelled the fresh air.\n\n\"Nice work back there,\" Lara said, and as she jumped another coffin, flipped him one of the guns she was carrying.\n\n\"I thought there was a rule\u2014me and guns,\" Terry said. The cavern entrance was five feet away.\n\n\"I reconsidered!\" Lara yelled.\n\nAnd then she dove out the entrance into the open air beyond."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "The cliff face whipped by her.\n\nThree meters down, Lara reached out and took hold of one of the ropes the Shay Ling had used to lower the coffins.\n\nNext to her, she saw Terry do the same.\n\nThey continued to drop like stones, their fall guided by the hands they kept loosely on the ropes. It was delicate work\u2014if she squeezed the rope too tightly, she would slow her smooth descent, turn it into a somersaulting tumble that would end up with her dead, either pancaked into the cliff wall or splattered on the ground below. Without the rope at all, though, she'd have no control over her descent, and end up just the same way. Done correctly, though, it was almost like being in free fall. Exhilarating.\n\nGunfire took out a chunk of the rock next to her.\n\nLara looked up and saw Shay Ling hanging over the cliff edge, firing down at them. She squeezed tighter with her left hand, removed her right, and unholstered one of her Colts. Which she'd recovered, along with the pack on her back and the other gun strapped to her leg, when she overpowered the last of the guards chasing her through the cave of the terracotta warriors.\n\nShe fired up at the Shay Ling. One man screamed and fell off the edge. A second crumpled.\n\nThe cliff emptied. But the gunfire continued\u2014coming from below now. Lara looked down and saw more Shay Ling. Before she could shift and bring her weapon to bear, she became aware of Terry at her side, drawing his weapon and firing straight down.\n\nOne, two, three shots. Three dead men.\n\nTime in Barla Kala hadn't cost Sheridan any of his firearms skills, either. Even hanging upside down.\n\nLara made a mental note of that as she squeezed off a couple rounds of her own toward the ground\u2014which, she realized with a sudden start, was hurtling toward them very quickly.\n\nShe dropped her gun and squeezed the rope tight with both hands. With a jolt, her fall stopped. Lara held herself straight up and down, hanging upside down, and looked around.\n\nThe ground was inches away.\n\nShe was staring straight into the vacant, glassy eyes of one of the men Terry had shot.\n\nAnd speaking of Terry\u2026\n\nLara looked up and saw him hanging upside down in midair, as well\u2026a full meter above her.\n\n\"Losing your nerve?\" she chided him, flipping over and somersaulting to her feet.\n\n\"The altitude must be affecting me,\" Sheridan said, as he did the same. \"Where to now?\"\n\n\"Shanghai.\" She wondered for a moment how they were going to get there\u2014then saw that the Shay Ling, considerately enough, had left them a Jeep. Keys and all, Lara discovered as she jumped in. Terry climbed in, as well, and she started the engine.\n\nShe did a series of rough calculations in her head as she drove\u2014time, her best guess at their distance from Shanghai, the condition of the roads they were likely to hit, how fast the Jeep was. After about ten seconds, she stopped calculating.\n\nShanghai was near the coast, and south. They were going to have to drive like a bat out of hell to get there by nine P.M. and meet the Orb.\n\nAnd speaking of the Orb\u2026\n\nLara had set her pack on the seat next to her\u2014she reached into it now and pulled out her sat phone. Keeping one hand on the wheel, she keyed in a text message to Bryce and Hillary, letting them know she'd found the key to deciphering it.\n\nAs she hit the send button, she became aware of Terry staring at her.\n\n\"What?\" she asked.\n\n\"Nothing.\" He adjusted the rearview mirror.\n\n\"Someone coming?\"\n\nTerry shook his head. \"We lost them.\"\n\nHe was silent a moment. Lara recognized the look on his face. Terry was stewing about something.\n\n\"What?\" she repeated.\n\nHe made a show of taking out his gun, checking to see how many bullets he had left.\n\n\"Look,\" Terry said, tucking the weapon into the waist of his pants. \"You said get you to Chen Lo and I did. For me this is over.\"\n\nChrist, Lara thought. Same old Terry.\n\nShe slammed the Jeep to a stop.\n\n\"Of course it is.\"\n\nShe set the emergency brake and waited for him to climb out.\n\nTerry stewed a moment longer. Then he erupted.\n\n\"Tell me what this is about, Lara. Tell me what you're looking for\u2014or where it is. Do that, trust me, and I'll help you.\"\n\nShe snorted. \"For another five million pounds?\"\n\n\"Will I even live to see the first five?\" He shook his head. \"Jonathan Reiss, for pity's sake? Come on, Croft, I'm involved now. Up to my neck. At least let me know what's going on.\"\n\nLara wavered. He had a point.\n\nBut he had a history, as well. And that history said that Terry Sheridan couldn't be trusted.\n\n\"I'll be fine,\" she said. \"Thank you.\"\n\nTerry stared at her, disbelief and anger warring on his face.\n\n\"You're welcome, Croft. See you around.\"\n\nWithout waiting for a reply, he opened his door and got out. Slamming it shut behind him, Terry walked off down the road, kicking and cursing every few feet. Looking for all the world as if he was actually, honestly, upset with Lara for not trusting him.\n\nLara watched as he stalked away and remembered Hillary's words to her.\n\nA leopard doesn't change his spots.\n\nBut something seemed different about Sheridan\u2014he seemed to honestly want to help.\n\nThough there was that crack he'd made to Chen Lo, about selling her and the Orb back to the British. Was it a crack?\n\nOnly one way to find out, she decided.\n\nShe drove up alongside him and stopped the Jeep.\n\n\"We need to be in Shanghai by twenty-one hundred,\" she said.\n\nTerry stopped walking. The beginnings of a smile crossed his face.\n\n\"I knew you'd miss me,\" he said.\n\nLara reached across and opened the door for him.\n\nHe climbed in and opened his mouth to speak.\n\n\"I have some questions for you,\" Lara began, her face grim. \"But first, I want you to listen.\"\n\nAnd she began to tell him of the map Xien was bringing Reiss, and what the doctor hoped to use it to find."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Reiss tapped his foot impatiently. The bodyguards on either side of him\u2014Sean's men, he couldn't be bothered to learn their names, there were so many of them\u2014shifted positions, scanning the surrounding buildings, their weapons at the ready. Off to the west, the sun was setting over the mainland.\n\nReiss looked at his watch: 7:03. They should have been in the air already. Sean knew better than to keep him waiting, he didn't understand what the holdup was here, he\u2014\n\nSuddenly the door leading onto the building roof slammed open and Sean raced out. From the expression on his face, Reiss knew it was not good news.\n\n\"Chen Lo is dead,\" Sean said simply.\n\nReiss shut his eyes and took a minute.\n\nThis was not a problem. It was not inherently a bad thing that Chen Lo was dead\u2014he had been planning on doing just that himself. The only bad thing was how that death now might affect his timetable for obtaining the Orb.\n\nHe opened his eyes. \"It was Croft, I suppose?\"\n\n\"And Sheridan. They killed twenty Shay Ling, give or take.\"\n\n\"Impressive.\" And it was, but Reiss didn't give a damn about the Shay Ling. \"Did she get the Orb?\"\n\n\"No. Xien has it. He's on his way to Shanghai. Croft is, too, I'll bet.\"\n\n\"Of course she is.\" Reiss rubbed his forehead. Given her background, Croft alone would be fully aware of the magnitude of the threat Pandora represented. She would never stop until she had the Orb.\n\nHe was beginning to get a migraine. He was beginning to wish he'd never heard the name Lara Croft.\n\nAll thoughts of turning her to his side had vanished. He wanted her dead now\u2014almost as much as he wanted that Orb.\n\n\"We have to change the location of the rendezvous,\" Sean said. \"We\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\" Reiss climbed aboard the copter. Sean followed, a confused look on his face. Both men strapped in.\n\n\"But if she comes to Shanghai\u2014\" Sean began.\n\n\"Oh, there's no if. Croft will be there waiting for us. So we will be there waiting for her.\" He leveled a thin smile at Sean. \"In force.\"\n\nSean nodded, and pulled out his cell. \"I'll get on it right away.\"\n\n\"Please have a contingency plan in place, as well, Sean,\" Reiss added as his security man began to dial. \"Let's not underestimate Croft and Sheridan.\"\n\n\"No sir, I won't.\" Sean turned away then and began talking into his phone. Guns, personnel, diversionary operations to keep the local authorities occupied\u2014Reiss listened with approval, then looked to the pilot and gave a curt nod.\n\nSean's men slammed the door behind them and the copter rose into the air.\n\nThree fill-ups at gunpoint, one run-in with local authorities, and a frantic chase along the railroad tracks leading into Shanghai later, Lara and Terry were on the roof of a fish market overlooking the flower pagoda. Directly beneath them was a market square crisscrossed with a maze of handmade signs, banners, and rickety-looking telephone wires. The few scattered farmers and shopkeepers that remained in the square were hurriedly closing up their stalls for the night\u2014almost as if they knew something bad was about to happen.\n\nLara checked her watch and realized they were right.\n\nIt was 8:58.\n\nShe checked her guns, reloaded courtesy of the local authorities she and Terry had encountered earlier, then crouched down next to Terry at the roof's edge. He lay flat out on the roof, scanning the area.\n\nThe flower pagoda was opposite them, in the center of the square. Behind it was a newer-looking brick building, with a helipad on top. On noticing it, Lara realized instantly that was how Reiss would come in, where he would want to make the exchange.\n\n\"There's one.\" Sheridan pointed toward a dimly lit alley to their right. Light glinted off the grille of a car, waiting there. \"Another Mercedes. That's a half-dozen cars altogether\u2014make it four men in each. Plus the ones we saw creeping in on foot.\" He shook his head. \"The good doctor isn't taking any chances.\"\n\n\"We'll have to,\" Lara said. \"To even things up.\"\n\nTerry looked up at her now and smiled. \"Seems like old times.\"\n\nShe smiled, as well, remembering what had happened after Terry got her loose from the NKA.\n\n\"Thirty, forty against two.\"\n\n\"Just once I'd like to go somewhere with you where there weren't people trying to kill us.\"\n\nShe had to smile at that.\n\n\"That's the first time you've smiled because of me, Croft. In a long while.\"\n\n\"It's the first time I've seen you in a long while, Terry.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Well\u2026\" He shrugged.\n\nLara turned to him, her face suddenly serious.\n\n\"Why'd you do it, Terry? How does someone wake up one day and leave everything they've worked for? They offered you a command\u2014\"\n\n\"They offered me a desk,\" Terry snapped. \"A nice cozy office. A nice cozy life.\"\n\n\"All you had to do was say no\u2014\"\n\n\"That wasn't it, Croft.\" He stood up now, too. \"I'd started asking the wrong questions. 'Why this mission? Why not that one?' I got tired of doing things somebody else's way. And it was always going to be somebody else's way.\"\n\n\"But deserting your men, your country\u2014\"\n\n\"I've paid my price for that.\" He looked her in the eye. \"I don't know what it says about me, but leaving my men, my country, didn't hurt as much as I thought. Leaving you was what did. You're a hard act to follow, Croft.\"\n\nShe didn't know what to say. Terry had never\u2014not in all the time they'd been together\u2014opened himself up to her like this.\n\n\"The reason you and I got along? We both despise being normal. We both love what we do too much to leave room for much else. We're two of a kind, you and me.\"\n\n\"Terry.\" Lara shook her head. \"We're nothing alike.\"\n\n\"I don't think we're alike. I think we're a pair. Opposite\u2014and alone.\"\n\nHe leaned in closer. Almost as if he was going to kiss her.\n\n\"Wait,\" Lara said.\n\nTerry looked up and then he heard it, too.\n\nThe sound of a helicopter, closing fast.\n\n\"On your command,\" the pilot announced.\n\nReiss looked down out of his window and saw the helipad lit up below.\n\n\"Hold here a moment,\" he said and nodded to Sean.\n\nHis security chief pulled out the thermal imager and aimed at the square. The imager looked for all the world like a videocamera with an oversize display screen\u2014in its case, though, the screen provided a negative image of whatever the lens was pointed at. In this case, the area immediately surrounding the pagoda.\n\nSean pressed a button then and the screen filled with red dots. Each dot represented a heat signature\u2014a man\u2014more than likely, one of Sean's men. Reiss stopped counting at thirty.\n\n\"One of those is Croft,\" the doctor said.\n\nSean nodded. \"She'll be somewhere with a vantage point of the helipad.\"\n\n\"I'll make the call,\" Reiss said. \"Have your men start forming teams.\"\n\nHe picked up the phone and dialed.\n\n\"Speak.\"\n\n\"Xien?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"This is Reiss. We are prepared to land.\"\n\n\"We're prepared to receive you. Give us your landing coordinates.\"\n\nReiss frowned. He wondered if Xien had any plans to duplicate his brother's foolish action\u2014to try and hold him up for more money.\n\n\"We're using the helipad. My men have the situation well in hand,\" Reiss replied. \"But I do appreciate your offer of assistance.\"\n\n\"Why don't you set down in the square instead? That way, my men will also have things covered.\"\n\nReiss was about to turn him down, and none too graciously, when he thought of Croft. No doubt she was in position already and, were he in her shoes, the helipad would most certainly be the place she was watching most closely. Surprising her at this stage of the rendezvous could only help them. And as for Xien's men being in control of the situation on the ground\u2026\n\nReiss glanced over at the imager, and the handfuls of red dots scattered all over the square, and smiled.\n\nHis men were everywhere.\n\n\"Fine,\" he told Xien. \"The square it is. And in case you weren't aware\u2014Croft is here.\"\n\nXien waited a moment before replying.\n\n\"Oh, I'm aware.\" Even over the phone, Reiss could hear the menace dripping from the man's voice. \"We'll deal with her.\"\n\n\"Please do.\"\n\nReiss hung up the phone then and thought:\n\nAnd then we'll deal with you.\n\nThe helicopter was coming down.\n\nBut not where Lara had expected.\n\nShe cursed under her breath and then shouted to Terry.\n\n\"They're not landing on the helipad!\"\n\n\"I can see that,\" he said. \"They're going to use the square!\"\n\nLara looked down. Two men were emerging from the shadows of the pagoda. One carried a large case in his arms. The other was Xien.\n\nShe started scurrying across the rooftop, looking at the maze of wires and signs directly beneath her, trying to figure out some way to get down there without getting killed.\n\n\"Croft.\"\n\nShe turned. Terry was looking left; she followed his gaze.\n\nOn the building next to the fish market, a huge neon sign, shaped like a dragon, hung from a thick wire cable that stretched completely across the square. Lara smiled.\n\nThat would do.\n\nShe kicked her pack over to Terry.\n\n\"Extra clips. Another gun,\" she said. \"You'll need them.\"\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"See you down there.\"\n\nAs Reiss's helicopter roared by, Lara took a running leap and jumped onto the building next door.\n\nThey hovered just above the ground, the rotors kicking up dust clouds from the bare earth below. Xien stood almost directly beneath them, giving the all-clear signal. Reiss saw another man standing next to him, holding a case that\u2014this time\u2014looked the proper shape and size to contain the Orb.\n\nInside the copter, in the seat next to him, Sean was receiving signals from his men on the ground through his earpiece.\n\n\"All clear so far,\" he told Reiss.\n\nAt those words, the pilot glanced back, waiting for the go-ahead to land.\n\nBut the doctor hesitated. Something about the idea of touching down, of committing himself to the ground for however brief a period of time, made him suddenly uneasy. He didn't want those rotors to stop, or slow down, for a second.\n\nCroft, he thought. Sheridan.\n\nHis fear was ridiculous, of course. Unreasonable. He had thirty-odd men in position, highly trained every one of them, plus however many Shay Ling Xien had waiting in the shadows. Call it an even dozen\u2014which made the odds forty-something to two. But still\u2026\n\nHis instincts told him not to land. And Jonathan Reiss always listened to his instincts.\n\n\"This is far enough,\" he said. \"We'll make the exchange from here.\"\n\nSean nodded and reached below his seat for the suitcase.\n\nLara jumped from the roof directly onto the cable. Caught it with both hands and hung there a moment, suspended in the space between the dragon sign and the building. Then she pulled herself up and sat on the cable, her legs dangling.\n\nThe helicopter hovered in the center of the square. Xien and his man stood nearby. As she watched, the copter door opened and a man climbed out onto the landing skid.\n\nReiss wasn't even going to land, she realized. They were going to make the exchange right now.\n\nLara looked down. A secondary steel wire held the sign tight against the building, prevented it from sliding down the cable. She drew one of her Colts and shot that wire away\u2014the sound of the isolated gunshot swallowed up by the roar of the copter's rotors.\n\nShe holstered her gun then and spun around. Braced her feet up against the wall of the building, reached behind with her hands, and held on tight to the dragon's neck.\n\nThen Lara pushed off.\n\nSlowly at first, then picking up speed, the dragon sign began to slide along the cable, heading toward the center of the square.\n\nReiss saw Sean holding onto the skid with one hand, holding out the suitcase of money toward Xien with his other. Xien, in turn, was holding up the case with the Orb in it toward the copter.\n\nThe doctor allowed himself a small sigh of relief. The exchange was going to come off clean. His fears had been for naught.\n\nHe glanced at the imager screen then, and froze.\n\nA single red dot was moving toward them\u2014very quickly.\n\nReiss spun in his seat and scanned the square.\n\nWhich made him the first to see the dragon.\n\nHe had a second of total disconnect, when his mind was simply unable to process the information his eyes were presenting to it. There was a dragon\u2014a purely mythological creature, for goodness sake, nothing like it had ever existed on the planet\u2014rushing out of the sky toward them.\n\nIt was, Reiss saw, even spitting fire.\n\nFor a second he thought he was dreaming.\n\nThen one of the windows next to him shattered and Reiss realized that the sparks of fire were gunshots. He took a second look at the dragon and saw that it was simply a metal sign, sliding toward them along a cable that traversed the square, and that there was a person riding that sign, firing at them, and that person was\u2014 Lara Croft.\n\nAnother window panel shattered. Reiss hit the floor. The imager landed next to him\u2014Reiss saw red dots moving every which way on the screen.\n\nAll hell was breaking loose.\n\n\"Get us out of here!\" he yelled to the pilot, and the copter rose into the sky.\n\nLara ducked just in time.\n\nAs the dragon shot past the rising copter, the main rotors chopped off its head, sending a shower of sparks everywhere. The copter wobbled and lurched right. It took out part of a balcony.\n\nThe man on the skid jumped to the ground. Lara fired at him and missed. She looked for Xien and the Orb, but they'd already vanished from sight.\n\nAll around her, guns were blazing. She returned fire as best she could, vaguely aware of Terry running parallel to her, along the rooftops to her right, providing some degree of covering fire without which she would have been long dead.\n\nBut at least she'd managed to prevent the exchange.\n\nSo far.\n\nReiss had to wait several long rings for an answer. In the interim, he imagined worst-case scenarios: Croft had the Orb. The Orb had been destroyed. Xien had been killed, the Orb was somewhere on the ground below.\n\nHe forced himself to remain calm.\n\nThere was a click on the line.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"Xien. You have it?\"\n\n\"Yes, I still have it.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Reiss said. The copter was making long, slow circles of the square\u2014right now, the helipad was directly beneath them. He was about to have Xien rendezvous with them there when his eyes fell on the flower pagoda itself. Set off by itself in the middle of the square. Impossible to reach without being spotted, no wires running near it, the steep pitch of its long, sloping tile roof\u2026\n\n\"All right,\" the doctor told Xien. \"We tried it your way. Now listen carefully.\"\n\nLara had come to the end of the line.\n\nShe and her dragon sign had reached the far side of the square and the end of the cable they'd been riding, which was fastened to an uncomfortably solid-looking brick building directly in front of them. Time to get off.\n\nLara saw only one option: ten feet to the right of the cable tether, there was another large sign. A white rectangle with black lettering, fastened lengthwise to the building. It looked solid enough.\n\nNot like she had much choice anyway.\n\nLara gathered herself and jumped. She landed on the top of the sign just as the dragon slammed into the building.\n\nThe impact was tremendous\u2014dust and pieces of brick, glass from the sign's shattered neon bulbs rained down on her. The building shook.\n\nMetal groaned beneath her. Lara glanced down to see a rickety-looking fire escape slowly detach itself from the building and topple to the ground.\n\nThe bolts holding her sign began to pull free, as well.\n\nThe top one went first: Lara slid down the sign as the next one gave, and then the next, her weight pulling out each successive bolt.\n\nLara was lucky: the last bolt held. The sign toppled toward the ground, falling over like a ladder. She walked down it to the ground below, shaking her head in wonder as she went.\n\nSafe at last.\n\nWindows shattered in the pagoda across from her. Gun barrels poked out and began firing at her.\n\nA Mercedes screeched across the square in her direction. More gunfire.\n\nLara ran.\n\nReiss's phone rang. It was Sean, wanting to know what had happened to the money. Wanting instructions.\n\n\"Don't worry about the money,\" the doctor told him. \"Don't worry about the Orb. I'll handle that end of things. Your job is to handle Croft.\"\n\nSean asked for clarification.\n\n\"Kill her,\" Reiss explained. \"Slowly. Painfully.\"\n\nThe doctor hung up and directed the pilot forward, toward their new rendezvous point.\n\nTerry reached the ground and paused a moment, listening.\n\nNo chopper. Isolated gunfire and the sound of men running.\n\nHe risked a quick peek out the building's front door.\n\nShay Ling were falling back toward the flower pagoda. Reiss's men were moving across the square, toward another building. Some of Xien's people, he saw, were headed down an alley, moving parallel to them.\n\nThey were chasing Croft, he decided. Probably thought they had her cornered.\n\nThe idea was laughable.\n\nBut he decided to go help anyway, on the off-chance it was true.\n\nHe reloaded his guns and stepped out the door. Hugged the front of the building, hiding in the shadows until the facade ended and the empty street loomed in front of him.\n\nAs he prepared to dart across, one of the Shay Ling\u2014a straggler, apparently\u2014hurried by. Terry walked quickly up behind the man and snapped his neck.\n\nThen he continued on his way.\n\nA Mercedes blocked the entrance to the next alley over\u2014two men stood on either side of the car, talking to each other in hushed tones.\n\nTerry shot each with a single bullet.\n\nThree bodies later, he turned a corner and saw Croft hiding underneath a sign that advertised the best hot and sour soup in Shanghai. She was watching Reiss's men and the Shay Ling surround the building she was supposed to be in.\n\nTerry approached from behind and laid a hand on her shoulder.\n\n\"I heard you two streets over,\" she said without turning. \"You move like an elephant.\"\n\nTerry was preparing an insult of his own when a low, rumbling noise from above made him look up.\n\nReiss's helicopter was descending toward the square again.\n\n\"They're going to try it again. Where this time, you think? The helipad?\"\n\nLara shook her head and pointed.\n\nXien had just emerged from his truck and was now crossing the square, carrying the Orb case. Heading for the flower pagoda.\n\nTerry frowned.\n\n\"The pagoda?\"\n\nLara nodded. \"The top. That's where they'll make the exchange.\"\n\nShe was right. Even now Reiss's men were pulling back toward the pagoda, as well. Surrounding it.\n\nTerry scanned the square and realized that there wasn't a building within fifty feet of the pagoda that they could use for cover.\n\n\"How in the hell are we going to stop them this time?\" he muttered.\n\nCroft shook her head. \"See any more dragon signs?\"\n\n\"Ha.\" He kept scanning the square and the buildings around it. There was the fish market, there was the structure Croft and her sign had wrecked, and next to it, the building with the helipad, which would have been much easier for them to attack, sandwiched as it was between two equally tall structures. Good choice on Reiss's part to opt for the pagoda\u2014even though Croft had disrupted their previous exchange, the incident in the square proved there was no need to actually land the copter, given the absence of any meaningful wind shears in the area. The windsock atop the helipad lay limp and still, fastened to the end of a long pole, which towered at least fifty feet above everything else in the square.\n\nFifty feet, Terry thought, and all of a sudden he had an idea. Crazy idea, but it just might work.\n\nHe turned to Croft, and by God if she wasn't looking up at the windsock herself. She turned to him and smiled.\n\n\"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?\" she asked."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "There was no direct route up to the helipad. So they had to improvise.\n\nUnder pressure, at times, because halfway up the side of the building a handful of Reiss's men caught sight of them and began shooting. Lara and Terry returned fire as best they could, all the while using whatever handholds they could find\u2014signs, fire escapes, ridiculous midair jumps worthy of a trapeze act\u2014to keep climbing up.\n\nFinally, they reached the floor just below the helipad. The lip of the roof stuck out a good three feet from the face of the building. Lara was preparing to jump for it when she heard Terry curse under his breath.\n\nShe looked down and saw Shay Ling and Reiss's men pouring out of the pagoda en masse.\n\n\"Go,\" Terry said, and Lara leapt.\n\nGunfire raked the side of the building where she'd been.\n\nHer hands caught the edge of the roof and she used her momentum to swing herself up and over and onto the helipad.\n\nLara ran for the windsock. The gunfire behind her continued, though she was no longer in range. Terry, still providing a target for their attackers. Awfully sporting of him\u2014she'd have to thank him later. In the meantime\u2026\n\nShe surveyed the helipad as she ran. The facility was in an obvious state of disrepair\u2014and just as obviously, someone had made very recent attempts to bring it back up to snuff. A coat of fresh paint on the tarmac, a new array of lights fastened to the far edge of the roof. Very, very recent attempts, she realized, spotting some supplies stacked underneath a plastic tarp right by the light array. An old furniture dolly lay turned upside down atop the tarp, placed there to keep it from blowing away.\n\nShe'd bet good money that the work had been done on Reiss's behalf, in advance of a planned landing here tonight. Well\u2014for whatever reason the doctor had changed his plans. Not once, but twice. Now the exchange was set for the pagoda and that was where she needed to be.\n\nWhich was when she heard the roar of the helicopter and looked up to see it descending toward the square.\n\nReiss was going to make the exchange now.\n\nTime was up. She had to move.\n\nXien had done as he was told without a word of complaint or even suggestion, which at this point in the evening Reiss was thankful for. Not that the man had much choice in the matter\u2014Reiss's operatives on the ground outnumbered the Shay Ling by more than three to one. On top of which, Sean had already given Xien the suitcase containing payment for the Orb.\n\nBut still\u2026\n\nReiss appreciated a smooth transaction.\n\nHe intended to make his appreciation known to Xien shortly, but for the moment, the doctor was focused on completing the exchange\u2014and making sure that Croft did not interrupt him this time.\n\nHe punched up Sean's number on his cell.\n\n\"O'Sullivan.\"\n\n\"Where is she?\"\n\n\"The helipad. We have her and Sheridan pinned down on the top floor.\"\n\nReiss glanced across the square at the tall building, and frowned.\n\n\"I see movement on the roof, as well.\"\n\n\"Understood,\" Sean said. \"We will redeploy.\"\n\n\"See that you do\u2014and don't forget your previous instructions. Once I have the Orb\u2014\" Reiss glanced down, and saw Xien waiting on the roof of the pagoda \"\u2014I will be taking it directly back to Hong Kong. Follow me when\u2014and only when\u2014your task is completed.\"\n\nWithout waiting for a reply, Reiss hung up.\n\n\"Take us down,\" he told the pilot.\n\nLara ran for the pole with the windsock. She looked down: the anchors holding it to the roof were rusted almost clean through. One good push and that pole would fall.\n\nShe looked up, judged its height and the distance to the pagoda, and then frowned.\n\nNot quite long enough. The little brainstorm Terry and she had shared\u2014repeating her accidental stunt with the sign from before, when it had fallen and made a ladder for her to climb down the side of the building\u2014wasn't going to work.\n\nTime for Plan B. Only problem was, she didn't have a Plan B.\n\nShe watched the copter descend and realized she was not going to be able to stop Reiss. He was going to get the Orb\u2014there was nothing she could do to prevent it.\n\nOn the plus side, she still had the medallion. If her instincts were right, and that was the key, Reiss would need it to read the Orb. Making the exchange would bring him no closer to Pandora.\n\nIf her instincts were right.\n\nIf the key wasn't on the parts of the Orb that she hadn't been able to photograph.\n\nIf Reiss wasn't able to find some other way to read it.\n\nHell, Lara thought.\n\nPlan B it was.\n\nHer mind raced. The pole. The dolly. One of the nifty little gadgets Shumei had given her.\n\nShe put the pieces together in her head as she ran.\n\nThe copter slowed its descent, leveling off a few feet above the roof of the pagoda. Xien stood there, holding out the Orb in its case.\n\nReiss slid open the copter door and leaned out to take it from him.\n\nDown in the square, someone began setting off firecrackers.\n\nAs he took hold of the case, the doctor paused to look down. Odd. He didn't see anyone but his men. Most of them, as Sean had said, were gathered around the building with the helipad atop it.\n\nThey were all pointing up at something.\n\nThe copter, Reiss thought at first, but then he turned and saw what had drawn their attention.\n\nThe pole atop the helipad was falling right toward them.\n\nAnd riding atop it, guns blazing, was Croft.\n\nAll of a sudden, Reiss's men stopped firing.\n\nTerry wondered what had happened, but while he was wondering, he ran. No sense in looking a gift horse in the mouth, not in his situation. Which up until a split second ago had seemed quite bleak.\n\nAfter Croft had leapt for the roof, he'd made a leap of his own\u2014a jump back inside the building, into an office of some kind. He had no chance to look around, however, because hot on his tail came several hundred rounds of ammunition. He took refuge behind a metal desk, but the gunfire continued so hot and heavy that the walls themselves began to cave in around him. So he'd made a break for a window clear on the other side of the room, climbing out onto a balcony on the back of the building and what he thought was safety. For about two seconds\u2014until the strafing started again, even heavier than before. He'd managed to slide down a fire escape ladder to the building next door, getting himself another momentary respite, and was just about to make another move when the gunfire had stopped.\n\nPuzzled, Terry looked out the window. Reiss's men were still down there, all right, only they were all looking back toward the building he'd just come from. Toward the helipad.\n\nTerry looked up and saw the pole with the windsock falling and smiled. Croft was heading for the pagoda. She'd need help when she got there.\n\nHolstering his guns, he'd headed for the street.\n\nThe dolly she'd used for a skateboard.\n\nThe pole like a ski jump.\n\nAnd the little gadget Shumei had given her\u2026\n\nWell, what were little gadgets for, after all?\n\nLara had grabbed the dolly from off the tarp and jumped on it with both feet, running full out. She built up speed with a circuit around the building's outer ledge, then jumped the board smack into the pole. The anchor bolts popped right away and the pole began falling. She rode it as best she could, sliding down the smooth steel surface toward the pagoda.\n\nShe fired as she went, but her aim was way off, distracted as she was by trying to maintain her balance. The gunfire caught Reiss's attention though\u2014she was close enough to see him turn away from Xien and fasten his gaze on her. It was the best look she'd had at him yet, and the expression on his face was priceless. Equal parts disbelief and anger\u2014or was that annoyance? Lara fixed the image in her mind\u2014she looked forward to savoring it in the days to come.\n\nFor right now, it was the Orb she was interested in.\n\nGood God, was there no stopping her? Was he surrounded by idiots and incompetents? Was he going to have to kill Lara Croft himself?\n\nThe answer to all three questions, unfortunately, appeared to be yes.\n\nThe case with the Orb was at his feet, just inside the copter door. Keeping one foot in front of it to prevent it from falling, Reiss reached back into the copter for his gun. Bullets pinged off the copter skids and he looked up just in time to see Croft flying toward him. Actually flying. The sight so unnerved him for a moment that he forgot to bring his weapon to bear.\n\nThen he saw that her flight was actually a free fall, and that the pole she'd used to vault across to him was tumbling away behind her toward the ground below.\n\nCroft was about to join it when she reached out and grabbed the bottom of the helicopter skid. I've got her now, Reiss thought, and raised his gun to fire.\n\nShe raised hers first and fired, and he had to duck away.\n\nWhen he looked back, she was hanging from the copter door, with a hand on the case holding the Orb.\n\nReiss pulled the trigger. Behind Croft, he saw Xien's gun spit fire, as well.\n\nShe flinched\u2014Reiss couldn't tell if she'd been hit or not\u2014and fell.\n\nHe leaned out the copter door and watched her hit the pagoda roof and slide down the slick tile surface toward the edge.\n\nReiss pulled the Orb the rest of the way into the copter.\n\n\"This has been a messy business, doctor,\" Xien said. \"I'm glad it's over.\"\n\n\"The mess has just begun, I'm afraid,\" Reiss said. \"My regards to your brother.\"\n\nXien's eyes narrowed in confusion.\n\nReiss shot him in the heart.\n\nXien toppled backward onto the roof and plunged toward the street below.\n\nReiss, watching him fall, smiled for the first time in what seemed like days.\n\nThen he saw Croft, hanging onto the edge of the roof, dangling over the alley, and his face fell.\n\n\"Up!\" he yelled to the pilot. \"Up!\"\n\nShe couldn't hold on for more than another few seconds, Lara realized. Her grip was slipping on the slick tile surface already.\n\nThe trick was going to be deciding where to fall.\n\nUnfortunately, the pagoda's isolation didn't work to her advantage in this instance, either. The paved surface of the market square looked like her only option, unless you counted Xien's truck, which had a nice soft canvas roof, but was parked a good twenty feet away from the pagoda. That roof might be reachable if she could get up some momentum and do a flip, but if she failed\u2014 A body slid just past her right then and plummeted to the street below, smashing into the decapitated head of her dragon sign with a loud crack that made her wince.\n\nIt was Xien. Correction\u2014it had been Xien.\n\nHappy as she was to see him dead, the killing sent her dislike for Reiss shooting up another notch. And sent an extra jolt of adrenaline through her body.\n\nShe took a second look at the truck and decided it was within reach after all.\n\nLara swung her legs back and then lunged forward, kicking out with all her might. At the height of her swing forward, she let go of the roof and soared out into space.\n\nHer legs continued their backward motion, swinging out over her head.\n\nShe completed the flip, landing feet first atop the canvas, and immediately jumped down to the ground.\n\nReiss's men had seen her and were on the move again.\n\nShe took a step forward and then froze.\n\nSomeone was inside the truck.\n\nShe drew her gun and ripped the back flap open.\n\nTerry hopped out and handed her another gun.\n\n\"Fresh clip,\" he said. \"And how are you?\"\n\nBefore she could answer, gunfire ripped through the canvas. They both dove to the ground.\n\n\"We've got to get out of here,\" Terry whispered. \"They've got cars blocking all the alleys.\"\n\nLara pressed her back up against one of the huge rear wheels. Terry was right\u2014if they didn't break through the cordon Reiss's men had set up, that cordon would tighten, and despite the faith she had in her abilities and his, they were outnumbered thirty to one. They would be killed and she wouldn't get to use Shumei's little gadget.\n\nShe leaned out from behind the tire and scanned the square, looking for a way out. Terry was snaking his way along the ground to join her.\n\n\"Bull,\" she said when he got there.\n\nHe misunderstood her. \"What do you mean, bull? Look for yourself\u2014every street is covered\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" Lara interrupted. \"Bull!\"\n\nShe pointed across the square.\n\nSqueezed in between two of the market stalls was an animal pen. Standing at the entrance gate, horns jutting out into the street, was a huge black bull. Other animals were visible behind it.\n\nTerry snorted. \"You've got to be kidding.\"\n\n\"Not in the least. Ferdinand there is our ticket out.\"\n\n\"If we can reach him, you mean.\"\n\nTerry had a point. They had at least fifty feet of open ground to cover between them and the pen.\n\n\"Think we can get there?\" she asked.\n\n\"You've been pretty good at dodging bullets so far, Croft, but\u2026\"\n\nShe waited for him to finish, and when he didn't, turned to face him.\n\nHe was staring at the shop closest to the truck. It looked to have been some kind of hardware store, though she couldn't be entirely certain since the sign above it had been shot to pieces. As had the windows facing the street.\n\nBut somehow, miraculously, the pyramid of spray-paint cans in the store display hadn't been touched at all.\n\n\"Do I think we can get to your bulls?\" Terry repeated. \"I do now.\"\n\nReiss's men seemed to be content to wait, to let Croft and him make the first move. Which they missed entirely\u2014that move being Terry crawling to the store commando-style and retrieving the spray-paint cans\u2014ten in all.\n\nWhen he was ready, he gave Croft the high sign.\n\nShe stood up and ran for the pen.\n\nTerry followed, facing back toward the truck. As he ran, he threw the first can high in the air and\u2014taking careful aim\u2014he shot it as it fell.\n\nThe can exploded, bursting into flames, sending drops of blazing paint shooting through the air. Some of those drops splattered Reiss's men\u2014those unfortunate few dropped their weapons and brushed frantically at their clothes.\n\nTerry smiled and threw another can.\n\nFour explosions later, he and Lara had reached the gate. The bull had retreated a few feet back from the entrance and was now eyeing them suspiciously.\n\n\"Now what?\"\n\n\"Now we wave the red flag,\" Lara said, pulling off her jacket. The inside, Terry saw, was a deep, deep crimson.\n\nJust as he was about to tell Croft that he'd done the whole running-of-the-bulls thing before, and once was plenty for him, gunfire nicked the fence post right next to him.\n\n\"Hold them off,\" Croft said, turning her jacket inside out.\n\n\"I'll try\u2014but hurry.\" Terry showed her five paint cans\u2014all he had left from the display. \"That's how long you have.\"\n\nShe nodded and leapt into the pen.\n\nTerry turned. Reiss's men were coming, fast and furious.\n\n\"Here goes number five, Croft,\" he shouted, tossing the can in the air. As soon as it exploded, he threw another. \"Four!\"\n\nBehind him, he heard a loud snort and the charging of something massive.\n\n\"Three,\" he shouted. \"Croft\u2014where are you?\"\n\nHe turned, and almost got his head taken off by a piece of the gate, which shattered as Lara rode through it astride the huge black bull. Two others, even bigger than the first, followed.\n\nTerry slipped between them, heading straight for a clump of Reiss's men, who looked bewildered and then terrified.\n\nThey broke and ran.\n\nTerry used the last two paint cans to break up a knot of men massed together by one of the Mercedes.\n\nThe bulls brushed past the massive auto like it was a toy and continued full speed down the alley for several minutes.\n\nFinally, when Lara judged they were clear of any possible pursuit, she jumped down from the black bull. The animal immediately slowed. With a slap on its rear, Lara sent it walking back up the street the way they'd come.\n\n\"Runaway,\" she explained to a crowd of curious onlookers.\n\nTerry caught up to her at the next corner.\n\n\"You have a way with animals, Croft.\"\n\n\"And you have a way with paint.\"\n\n\"Thank you. Sorry we didn't get your Orb. Any idea where Reiss would take it?\"\n\n\"Let's find out,\" Lara said.\n\nShe stepped into the shadows. At Terry's confused look, she reached into her pack and pulled out the second half of the gadget Shumei had given her\u2014MI6's latest GPS display.\n\nThe other half, of course, was the transmitter\u2014which she'd fastened on the crate with the Orb, while the copter hovered over the pagoda.\n\nShe flipped the display on and saw the signal was coming through loud and clear.\n\n\"You put a tracer on it,\" Terry said. \"I'm impressed.\"\n\n\"I don't go skating down flagpoles, full guns, unless I know I'm going to succeed.\"\n\nShe watched the transmitter move off and smiled. She had the Orb again\u2014after a fashion.\n\nThe question now, of course, was where Reiss was taking it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "A hot shower. A clean suit. A good Shiraz, a strong cheddar, a fresh loaf of olive bread, ten cc's of a rejuvenating cocktail specially engineered for his system\u2026\n\nReiss felt almost human again.\n\nHe returned to the main lab, anxious to begin work. Dr. Holliday, who had been with him since the Nobel, the only one of his staff who could make that claim, was there waiting. They had already talked once this evening after Holliday had tested the Orb for biological contamination. He noted that she'd already changed, from biohazard gear into a standard lab coat.\n\nThe Orb remained where he had left it, in the clean room, still in its case. Reiss had taken a preliminary look at the delicate etchings on the object's surface and decided to prohibit his staff from handling it.\n\nAt a nod from him, Holliday began.\n\nAs Reiss watched, robotic hands gently lifted the Orb from the crate and held it motionless in the air. Reiss moved closer to the Plexiglas window separating him from the Orb. Seen up close like this, the object was truly amazing. Luminescent markings, silvery etchings reminiscent of nothing so much as computer circuitry, covered its glowing black core.\n\n\"There was always a part of me that allowed for the possibility Pandora's box was just a legend,\" Reiss whispered, as much to himself as the doctor. \"But seeing this, I know it's there.\"\n\nAnd the Orb, he knew, would tell him exactly how to find it.\n\nHe nodded again and Holliday activated the scanning laser.\n\nThe instrument would map every millimeter of the Orb's surface in the minutest possible detail and record it into his computers. Then the analysis would take place.\n\nReiss had recently purchased a handful of NEC Earth Simulators\u2014the machines that had just taken the title of the planet's fastest supercomputer away from the Crays\u2014for just that purpose. He looked forward to putting them through their paces.\n\nBased on a sample he and Holliday had just completed, the doctor expected that deciphering the Orb should take the NECs approximately twenty-nine seconds. Give or take.\n\nAnd then the real fun could begin.\n\nSomeone coughed behind him. A newcomer\u2014Reiss had been so absorbed in his work he hadn't heard anyone enter.\n\nHe turned and saw O'Sullivan. Saw the look on the man's face and felt the tranquility begin to leak out of him like air from a burst balloon.\n\n\"She escaped.\" Reiss felt a faint pounding just behind his temples. He reached into his pocket for an ibuprofen\u2014specially modified, of course, to suit his body chemistry.\n\nSean nodded. \"She has no idea where we are.\"\n\nReiss swallowed the pill and shook his head.\n\n\"We'll take no chances.\" He turned to Holliday. \"Start transferring everything we need to manufacture an antidote to the jet.\"\n\nShe nodded and waved a white-coated assistant forward to monitor the scanning. Sean left the room to begin preparations of his own.\n\nReiss stayed a moment longer, watching the laser's progress on the computer display.\n\n[ Percent Surface Scanned Completed: .028 ]\n\n[ Time to Scan Completion: 7:12:29 ]\n\nSlightly under seven and a half hours until they had the Orb deciphered and were on their way. Reiss didn't expect to see Croft pop up before then, but if she did, he would order an immediate evacuation.\n\nHe planned to treat her like an infectious disease from this point forward. Or to put it more colloquially\u2026\n\nHe was going to avoid her like the plague.\n\nMI6 got a Chinese military transport to follow the copter. Someone high up was pulling strings\u2014the plane (Lara and Terry met it at a base just outside Shanghai) had been reserved for their exclusive use. And not only were they the sole passengers, rations and sleeping hammocks had already been prepared for them.\n\nLara skipped the food and took a hammock, exhausted. Before closing her eyes, she took a final look at the GPS readout, but it only confirmed her previous guess and the intelligence MI6 had given her when she'd called for help.\n\nThe Orb was headed to Hong Kong. Intelligence had Reiss's operation based there, though no one could confirm its exact whereabouts.\n\nWe'll be taking care of that little item tomorrow, Lara thought, and immediately fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.\n\nDaybreak found them at a Kowloon pier, waiting with a queue of early risers for the first hydrofoil across to Hong Kong.\n\nWhen they were allowed to board, Lara made for the bow of the boat, holding the GPS display in front of her as they walked. Absorbed in the task of trying to narrow down the Orb's location, she didn't notice Terry bringing her breakfast until she looked up and the tray was on the rail at her shoulder.\n\n\"Eat,\" he told her.\n\n\"Thanks.\" She gulped down her espresso and nibbled at a croissant, all the while concentrating on the readout. Hong Kong was roughly split into two distinct regions\u2014the urban north side of the island, whose gleaming towers they were fast approaching, and the suburban south. Reiss's headquarters were definitely in the north, probably the central district that was the heart of the island's shopping and financial community, but that was all she could tell from the readout at this distance. Still, it was good news. Central started at the pier and went only a few blocks deep. With any luck, they'd have his exact location within the hour, and the Orb not long after that.\n\n\"We did well back there, Croft,\" Terry said.\n\nShe glanced up to find him studying her intently, in a way that made her immediately uncomfortable. In a way that reminded her of other breakfast mornings they'd shared, in another life.\n\n\"We did nothing,\" she snapped. \"Reiss has hours on us now. He may have already deciphered the Orb. He may be on his way to Pandora at this moment.\"\n\nTerry frowned. \"You said you had the key to reading the Orb. The medallion.\"\n\n\"I believe I have the key,\" Lara corrected. \"I haven't established that yet.\"\n\nAn airhorn sounded. The hydrofoil was docking. Lara folded up the GPS, and hurried to join the crowd already gathering by the exit ramp.\n\nMinutes later, she and Terry were forcing their way through a crowded market plaza. They seemed to be swimming upstream, fighting through businessmen and women in freshly pressed suits, street vendors jockeying for sidewalk space, and knots of elegantly dressed shoppers seemingly intent on walking as slowly as possible. The air was thick and smelt heavily of diesel fuel\u2014Lara found it hard to believe Reiss could find a quiet space to work in this madhouse, much less to build a laboratory.\n\nTerry's thoughts seemed to be running parallel with hers.\n\n\"Are you sure about this?\" he asked.\n\nShe checked the GPS again and nodded.\n\n\"That way,\" she said, pointing.\n\nThe signal led them out of the marketplace at last, and into a more upscale commercial district. The sidewalks here were slightly less crowded, but the streets were lined with taxis and limousines, double and triple parked. Office towers loomed overhead, circling them on all sides.\n\nTerry stopped walking and shook his head. \"A weapons lab in the middle of the city? No way. He dumped the crate.\"\n\nLara checked the GPS again. The signal had stopped flashing entirely, which meant\u2026\n\n\"It's right here,\" she announced. \"The Orb.\"\n\n\"One of the buildings?\"\n\n\"No. It's exactly where we're standing.\"\n\n\"There's nothing here.\" Terry did a three-sixty, his eyes coming to rest on Lara. \"It's like I said. He dumped it\u2014\"\n\n\"No he didn't.\" Lara was looking at the tall skyscraper right in front of them. Its facade was glass\u2014beyond the entrance, she glimpsed an escalator leading up to the floors above. And another, leading down.\n\n\"New Central Shopping Mall,\" Terry said, reading off a banner that hung just above the building entrance. \"Eight floors, eighty stores, International Food Court.\"\n\n\"Nothing about a biological warfare laboratory?\"\n\nTerry smiled and shook his head. \"Hardly.\"\n\n\"False advertising,\" Lara said, snapping the GPS display shut.\n\nShe jogged for the entrance, Terry right beside her.\n\nOn sublevel four, she stopped and checked the display again.\n\n\"Down,\" she said, putting one foot forward, then stopped.\n\nThere was a bank of payphones right beside the escalator.\n\nShe'd been unable to reach the manor since Luoyang\u2014since finding the medallion. And in case anything happened to her\u2026\n\nBoth Hillary and Bryce answered on the first ring.\n\n\"Lara! Are you all right?\"\n\n\"Fine.\" She heard the scrape of chairs pushing back from a table and realized she was on speakerphone. \"Have you made any progress on reading the Orb?\"\n\n\"Not really.\" That was Bryce, sounding guilty. Lara could hear a faint whirring noise in the background, which she recognized as the helicopter simulation. She hoped that wasn't all he'd been doing in the day or so she'd been gone.\n\n\"Well, I may have some help for you. I need you both to look at something.\"\n\nShe reached into her pack and pulled out the wireless digicam. She attached one end to her belt, tucked its lens over her ear, and turned it on.\n\n\"Do you have this?\"\n\nShe waved a hand in front of the lens.\n\n\"Hello to you, too,\" Bryce said. \"We're live.\"\n\nShe lifted the medallion out from around her neck, held it up to the lens.\n\n\"This was in the Luna Temple, close to the Orb. I'm betting it's the key to reading the markings\u2026\"\n\n\"Do that again, slower this time if you would,\" Bryce said. \"I'm recording.\"\n\nShe did as she was asked, showing him both sides of the medallion.\n\n\"What's that figure?\" he asked as she ran the lens over the figure on the medallion's obverse side.\n\n\"The musician?\" Lara frowned. \"It could be Pan, I suppose, though the face isn't exactly\u2014\"\n\nBryce whispered something.\n\n\"Say again?\" Lara asked.\n\n\"Music,\" he said, his voice suddenly full of life. \"Sound! Brilliant!\"\n\nLara thought she knew what he was driving at. \"A tonal language?\"\n\n\"Maybe. Or maybe not a language at all. Maybe musical tones.\"\n\n\"A song?\"\n\n\"Maybe.\"\n\n\"Maybe, maybe, maybe,\" Lara said. \"Find out.\"\n\n\"Will do,\" he said.\n\nShe said good-bye. Next to her, Terry was finishing a call of his own.\n\nHe put a hand over the phone. \"Escape route,\" he mouthed to her, then returned to the call.\n\n\"If that's the only way, then set it up,\" he finished, and set down the receiver\u2014harder than necessary, Lara thought.\n\n\"Problem?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"No, no\u2014piece of cake. Escape Plan A in place.\"\n\n\"All right then.\" She started for the escalator, taking out the GPS locator again. \"Let's go find the good doctor.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Percent Surface Scanned Completed: .934",
                "text": "[ Time to Scan Completion: 0:18:42 ]\n\nReiss studied the display and frowned, wishing he hadn't taken the stimulant cocktail in a sleep-deprived state. It was affecting his judgment, making him paranoid. The closer the computer came to finishing its task, the more anxious he became.\n\nHe expected to look up at any minute and see Lara Croft staring out at him from the clean room.\n\nRidiculous. She was half a continent away.\n\n\"The jet is ready.\"\n\nHe turned to see Sean standing in the doorway to the lab.\n\n\"I'll be there in a moment.\" Reiss didn't like leaving before the scan was finished, but the delay Chen Lo had caused by not delivering the Orb immediately had put them behind schedule. Duvalier had already called twice and the others would no doubt follow suit very shortly. He had calls to make, ruffled feathers to smooth, tasks best accomplished from his office aboard the Gulfstream.\n\nHe motioned Sean forward.\n\n\"Call me with the location of Pandora, as soon as you get it. Until then, make sure the Orb is never left unattended. Understood?\"\n\n\"Understood.\"\n\nReiss left the room. Two of Sean's men fell into step beside him.\n\nHe stopped to check in with Holliday, regarding the delivery system they'd set up for Pandora. She had questions regarding containment of the virus once it had been disseminated.\n\nReiss smiled and reassured the woman that containment would not be an issue.\n\nStill trailed by Sean's men, he passed from the lab into the security room. A bank of video monitors lined one wall, tied in to cameras strategically placed throughout the lab and the mall beyond.\n\nReiss's laboratory occupied all of sublevel eight beneath the skyscraper. He'd personally supervised its construction, paying off the architect and his employees\u2014in a manner of speaking\u2014in a way that insured its existence remained secret. Research facilities, manufacturing equipment, living quarters for almost two dozen associates\u2014the space had provided all the doctor could have asked for over the last decade.\n\nAs this was more than likely the last time he would pass through its doors, Reiss took a final look around, courtesy of the monitors.\n\nA nod then, to the guard on duty, and the main entrance to the lab\u2014a massive steel door\u2014slid open.\n\nReiss, followed by the two men Sean had assigned to accompany him, stepped through.\n\n\"Sure?\" Terry asked.\n\n\"You keep asking that. And I keep telling you the same thing.\" Lara snapped the GPS display shut. \"The Orb is here. Right here, in fact.\"\n\nThey were on sublevel eight\u2014the bottom level of the mall. According to the display, the transmitter was less than fifty feet away. Where, though\u2026\n\nThat was the question.\n\nThere were no shoppers down here, no shops, either, just empty storefronts boarded over with plywood, painted with ads promising exciting new shops, coming soon. They'd passed an emergency exit to the parking garage, offices for a Korean real estate firm, a rest room with an Out of Order sign hung over it\u2026\n\nThey'd tried every door\u2014all were locked.\n\nLara was studying the ceiling, looking for an access panel when Terry grabbed her arm and pulled her behind a support column.\n\n\"What\u2014\"\n\n\"Shhh.\" He put a finger behind his lips and pointed.\n\nJonathan Reiss, followed by two of his guards, was walking directly toward them.\n\n\"He came from there,\" Terry whispered, nodding toward the real estate firm.\n\n\"Think he's buying real estate in Pyongyang?\"\n\n\"Hardly.\"\n\nReiss and his men walked past, on their way to the elevator banks. A car came and Reiss and one of his men stepped inside. Just as the doors were closing, a young boy burst out of nowhere, ran to the elevator, and stuck his hand in between the closing doors.\n\nThe doors popped back open and the boy\u2014followed by a harried-looking couple Lara took to be his parents\u2014dodged inside the elevator.\n\nLara caught a glimpse of a very annoyed-looking Reiss and then the doors shut again, this time for good.\n\nLara's attention was on the other security man.\n\n\"Take him?\" she asked Terry.\n\n\"Take him,\" he agreed, and as the guard walked back past, stepped out from behind the column.\n\nTerry's knowledge of pressure points was truly amazing.\n\nApproximately twenty seconds later, Reiss's man had supplied them with details of the lab's security system.\n\nAbout a minute after that, Lara and Terry were inside, and their guide\u2014as well as two guards who'd been manning the control center\u2014lay unconscious at their feet.\n\nThe guards all wore wireless headsets. Lara took one for herself and another for Terry, adjusting the frequencies so they could communicate directly.\n\n\"Croft.\" She looked up to see him standing next to a wall of video monitors. \"We've got problems.\"\n\nShe joined him and quickly grasped what he meant.\n\nThe monitors were apparently wired in to cameras scattered through Reiss's lab. It was huge\u2014and very well manned.\n\n\"So much for easy\u2026\" Terry muttered.\n\nBut Lara's attention was elsewhere.\n\nShe had found the Orb.\n\nSeeing it on one of the monitors, she heaved a sigh of relief. Watching Reiss leave before, she had feared he'd already finished with the Orb, and was on his way to Pandora. But there it was, in an isolation chamber of some sort\u2014a clean room, perhaps\u2014surrounded on all sides by floor-to-ceiling Plexiglas walls. Cradled in a pair of robotic hands some five feet off the ground, while a laser beam traveled slowly across its surface.\n\nThere was a display of some sort next to it: Lara used the controls on the monitor to zoom in on the image.\n\n[ Percent Surface Scanned Completed: .939 ]\n\n[ Time to Scan Completion: 0:17:06 ]\n\n\"I've got your back.\" That was Terry, leaning in over her shoulder. \"Go.\"\n\nLara nodded and ran.\n\nIt took her a full minute to sneak past a secondary security post, four doors down the corridor.\n\nAnother minute wasted hiding in the shadows outside the canteen, while white-coated technicians paraded by her.\n\nShe doubled back, guided by instructions from Terry over her headset. Finally she found a side route that brought her to the main lab entrance.\n\nShe paused there a moment, hidden in an alcove. Beyond a double glass door, three technicians in full hazmat suits were gathered around a centrifuge.\n\nJust past them, she caught a glimpse of the Orb.\n\n\"No good.\" Terry's voice came over her headset. \"There are two guards on the other side of the corridor and a good dozen technicians between you and the Orb, as well.\"\n\n\"Take me 'round another way.\"\n\n\"There is no other way. You've got to get everyone out.\"\n\n\"What do you suggest, the fire alarm?\"\n\nThe doors to the lab hissed open then and a technician walked out. Lara squeezed farther back into the alcove. It was a tight fit\u2014behind her, a supply cart, lab instruments scattered on top of it, filled most of the available space.\n\nLara grabbed a knife from the cart and crouched down, prepared to attack if she was spotted.\n\nShe needn't have worried\u2014the technician walked past her hiding place without once lifting his eyes from the clipboard in his hands. Not his hands, actually\u2014he was wearing thick rubber gloves. Full hazmat gear, as well.\n\nThe entire lab, Lara realized with a start, was a hot zone.\n\nHence the glass walls, with biohazard symbols pasted all over them.\n\nLara looked up at those walls, down at the knife in her hand, and smiled.\n\n\"Hang on a minute,\" she whispered into the headset. \"I've got an idea.\"\n\nSeconds later, alarms were whooping throughout the complex.\n\nAs he stepped out of the elevator, Reiss's phone rang.\n\nDuvalier, no doubt, the doctor guessed, glancing at his watch. Or one of the others\u2014he was all of ten minutes late with the update he'd promised them. Well, they'd be happy enough once they heard his report, heard that they were hours away from having Pandora in their possession.\n\nSuppressing a momentary flare of irritation, Reiss raised the receiver to his ear.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\nBut it wasn't Duvalier.\n\nIt wasn't any of the five.\n\nIt was the distinctive sound of the alarm in his lab below\u2014and hearing it, Reiss froze where he stood.\n\nNormally, that alarm meant the elaborate containment system he'd designed had failed, that somehow, one or more of the toxins he worked with had escaped into the atmosphere. Cause enough for concern.\n\nBut he feared that in this instance, it meant something far worse had happened.\n\n\"Croft,\" Reiss said through clenched teeth.\n\nHe whirled, in time to see the elevator doors closing just behind him.\n\nCursing, he ran for the escalators.\n\n\"Rats fleeing a sinking ship,\" Terry said into her ear. \"Only two men left\u2014both of them in the Orb room.\"\n\nLara nodded and slid the knife into her pocket. The puncture she'd made with it was a small one and had only breached the outer glass wall of the lab, but\u2014as she'd suspected\u2014had done the trick. Set off sirens, sent the technicians and the guards\u2014none of whom, she guessed, were paid enough to stick around to see how dangerous the breach actually was\u2014scurrying out the buildings' emergency exits.\n\nShe walked silently through the now open lab door, past the centrifuge, and into a room whose walls were lined with row after row of sleek, silver boxes. The new NECs, she realized. The Earth Simulators.\n\nIf Bryce was here, he'd think he'd died and gone to heaven.\n\n\"Sorry?\" Terry asked.\n\n\"Nothing,\" Lara said, realizing she'd spoken aloud.\n\nShe wondered how Bryce was faring with his own translation of the Orb\u2014whether or not he'd managed to figure out what the markings on the medallion meant. She wondered if the computing power she saw would allow Reiss to decipher the Orb without that key.\n\nA flash of movement up ahead caught her eye.\n\n\"Terry?\"\n\n\"Careful,\" he whispered. \"One of them's on the move.\"\n\nLara walked on. There was a glass door at the far end of the computer room. Through it, she glimpsed the next\u2014and final\u2014chamber between her and the Orb. It looked like some sort of office, or meeting room. Desks and chairs, a long low counter at the back and\u2014oddly enough\u2014a mirrored ceiling. Through the glass door at its far end, Lara saw a man, standing on guard next to the Orb. She recognized him from the flower pagoda\u2014he'd been with Reiss aboard the copter, before all hell had broken loose.\n\n\"I see him,\" she said. \"Right next to the Orb.\"\n\n\"No,\" Terry shot back. \"He's the one I've got.\"\n\n\"Where's the other?\"\n\n\"Lost him,\" Terry said, frustration evident in his voice. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\"Guesses?\"\n\n\"He has to be in that next room over\u2014the one you're making for.\"\n\n\"You can't tell?\"\n\n\"There's no camera in there.\"\n\n\"Wonderful.\" Lara took a deep breath. \"All right. I'm moving.\"\n\n\"Careful.\"\n\n\"You said that already.\"\n\nShe stepped toward the door and it slid open automatically.\n\nLara ducked down, and rolled forward, coming up behind the counter.\n\nThere was no sign of the second man. Perhaps he'd gone in another direction\u2014or decided to run off with the others after all.\n\nShe paused a moment, considering how to best mount her assault on the Orb, and its sole remainding defender.\n\nWhich was when, of course, the man attacked.\n\nOnly the flash of the gun barrel in the window opposite her alerted Lara to her danger. She spun and saw him slipping out from behind the half-shut door of a storage closet, the noise of the still-blaring alarm covering the sound of the door creaking open, the rustle of the gun being drawn, the scuffing of his shoes on the floor as he stepped forward.\n\nShe continued her spin, turning it into a kick, catching him on the wrist even as he squeezed the trigger.\n\nThe gun went off and skittered across the floor.\n\nHe slammed her back against the counter with his left hand, grabbing her throat like a vise. Lara dropped her chin, easing the pressure. He punched at her face with his right fist, or tried to\u2014she caught that arm with both hands and yanked forward, twisting him up and onto the counter.\n\nShe jumped to her feet\u2014just as bullets began flying everywhere.\n\nThe other man was firing at her from the Orb room.\n\nLara reacted instinctively, lifting the man lying on the counter by the scruff of the neck, raising him in front of her like a human shield.\n\nHis body shook like a leaf in the wind as gunfire tore into him. He gurgled once and was silent.\n\nLara dropped him and dove to the floor.\n\n\"Bloody hell.\"\n\nThat was Terry.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Our trigger-happy friend hit something in the walls\u2014some wire or something. I've just lost visual.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"Everywhere. All I've got is static.\"\n\n\"Wonderful.\"\n\n\"Stay put. I'm coming.\"\n\n\"No\u2014stay where you are. Likely he's called for help. You can catch them as they come in.\"\n\nA sound came to her then, over the alarm, and she paused. Metal on metal. It took a split second to recognize it\u2014a clip, being slid out of a gun.\n\nThe man in the Orb room was reloading.\n\nLara drew her own gun and sprang.\n\nThe wall behind her exploded and she hit the ground again, pieces of the counter flying around her. She heard a thump and turned to see a lab technician\u2014where had he come from?\u2014sprawled in the doorway to the computer room.\n\nThe man in the Orb room had tricked her. He'd had a second gun\u2014kept that trained on her while ejecting the clip from the first. Hoping to goad her into attacking. It had worked\u2014she guessed the technician's appearance behind her had distracted the gunman just enough to save her life.\n\nIn any case\u2026\n\nThis boy was clever.\n\n\"I'm glad,\" the gunman called out. \"That would have been too easy.\"\n\nGood God, Lara thought in disgust. One of those. Men who liked a challenge, particularly when the opponent was someone like her. She seemed to draw them like flies.\n\n\"Mmm.\"\n\nTerry again.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"My turn for a clever idea, I think,\" he said\u2014and then the lights went out.\n\n\"Ah. Thanks.\"\n\n\"Sure. That ought to even things up a bit.\"\n\n\"Let's hope.\" Lara slid sideways along the back of the counter, making her way across the room. She heard the other man's footsteps heading toward her.\n\nShe stopped. He stopped.\n\nSilence, except for the low humming from another row of computers along the wall next to her.\n\n\"I'm waiting, Lara!\" the man called out. \"Give me your best!\"\n\nShe risked a peek. He was standing in the very center of the room, a machine pistol in each hand, spinning slowly.\n\nLara frowned. From where she crouched now, she didn't have a good shot. She'd have to risk moving, but there was little cover to her left, none to her right, and up ahead\u2014\n\nUp, she thought, and raised her gaze to the ceiling. The strangely mirrored ceiling, directly above her, and the gunman.\n\nShe took aim and fired over his head.\n\nThe ceiling shattered, splintering into massive, razor-sharp shards. The gunman was moving even as the first of those shards began to fall. He dove to the ground, rolled, and a split second later was back on his feet.\n\nNice reflexes, Lara thought, measuring the distance he'd traveled.\n\nShe fired over his head a second time.\n\nHe dove to the ground again, rolled in exactly the same fashion, and got to his feet once more.\n\nLara stood right in front of him.\n\n\"Careful what you wish for,\" she said, and clocked the man. His eyes rolled back in his head and he fell to the ground, unconscious.\n\nLara raced into the Orb room. Her eyes fell on the display.\n\n[ Percent Surface Scanned Completed: .962 ]\n\n[ Time to Scan Completion: 0:08:25 ]\n\nShe pictured Reiss, wherever he had gone, checking his watch, anxiously awaiting word of the Orb's translation.\n\n\"Sorry to disappoint, doctor,\" she whispered, pulling off her pack, \"but the only person deciphering this particular key is going to be me.\"\n\n\"Missed that, Lara,\" Terry said into her ear. \"Say again.\"\n\n\"I said I'm going offline,\" she told him. \"Can you give me the lights again, please?\"\n\n\"Ah. Roger. Hold on a minute.\"\n\nThe lights came back up. Lara slipped off her headset, then pulled the digicam out of her pack.\n\nFastening it around her neck, she flicked the cam on and pressed the transmit button.\n\n\"Crop circles,\" Bryce said. \"There's your proof\u2014what about crop circles?\"\n\nHillary raised an eyebrow.\n\n\"Crop circles?\"\n\n\"Like in Devonshire. Farmer goes to sleep, next day wakes up and his whole cornfield's been whittled into the shape of a cigar. Who do you think did that, hey?\"\n\n\"You've been watching too many Hollywood movies,\" Hillary said.\n\n\"It was in the paper.\"\n\n\"The Tattler, I suppose.\"\n\nBryce glared. The two of them were in his trailer working. Or rather, he was working, and Hillary was giving him a hard time. Being very close-minded, Bryce thought. The evidence was right in front of the man\u2014what didn't he understand?\n\nBryce was about to go at him again when the computer beeped. He spun in his chair, turning away from Hillary to face a bank of video monitors.\n\nRight now, only a single screen was active. It showed a portion of the Orb's surface\u2014one of the images that Lara had taken in the Luna Temple. The beeping indicated that the computer's analysis of the image was done.\n\n\"That's the last one, isn't it?\"\n\nBryce looked up to find Hillary leaning over his shoulder.\n\n\"Yes, that's the last one,\" he said. He keyed in a series of commands and the image disappeared, to be replaced by a series of wave functions scrolling down the screen.\n\n\"Can we hear what it sounds like now?\"\n\nBryce nodded and punched in another command.\n\nA series of tones issued from the speakers at the far end of his workspace. Cacaphonous, distorted\u2014it sounded to him like someone playing the vibraphone\u2014with a cat instead of mallets.\n\n\"Ow.\" Hillary wriggled a finger in one ear. \"And this is supposed to be the translation?\"\n\n\"It's not made for our ears,\" Bryce said. \"My guess is, these tones will activate the Orb.\"\n\n\"And what happens then?\"\n\n\"I don't exactly know,\" Bryce admitted. \"But here's my point.\"\n\nHe held up a printout of the Orb. \"This thing is over two thousand years old? Where on Earth did the technology exist to make something like this?\"\n\n\"India, apparently,\" Hillary said.\n\n\"Be serious.\"\n\n\"Perhaps Egypt.\"\n\n\"No.\" Bryce shook his head emphatically. \"Nowhere on Earth. This Orb is not a product of human civilization. This\u2014\" he waved the picture in front of Hillary's face\u2014\"is alien technology.\"\n\nHillary still didn't look convinced.\n\nBryce was about to recount the evidence yet again when the monitors at his workstation came alive.\n\nA woman's face stared up at them.\n\n\"Lara!\" Bryce and Hillary shouted in unison.\n\n\"Gentlemen. Keeping busy?\" Her voice\u2014marred by a burst of static\u2014came over the speakers.\n\n\"We are,\" Bryce said hurriedly. \"Breaking the code, as it were.\" He started to tell Lara his theory about the source of the technology they were dealing with, but she listened for only a brief moment before stopping him.\n\n\"Bryce. All that is very interesting, but besides the point. You understood the medallion?\"\n\n\"Yes. The markings are sound waves. We've translated all we could see on your images, roughly half the Orb\u2014\"\n\n\"Good work. Let's finish the set.\"\n\n\"You're in Reiss's lab?\" Hillary asked.\n\n\"I am. Though the good doctor himself is absent at the moment. Still, he's been good enough to leave the Orb for me.\"\n\n\"Sporting of him,\" Hillary shot back. \"Where's Sheridan?\"\n\n\"Watching my back,\" Lara replied. \"No comments, please.\"\n\n\"My lips are zipped,\" Hillary said. \"However\u2026\"\n\nTheir conversation continued; Bryce focused his attention on the images coming over the monitor. Lara had turned the digicam forward, so he could see the lab as she walked through it. The facility was state-of-the-art, from what he could tell of the electronics. There was a Cooper-Janson relay box, a half-dozen Nystrom servers, and\u2014 \"Hey!\"\n\nThe camera passed over a brushed metal machine, about the size of a small refrigerator.\n\n\"Is that an Earth Simulator?\"\n\n\"Down, boy,\" Lara said. \"I'll see if I can bring one home for you.\"\n\nBryce was about to ask if she was kidding when the image on the monitor jumped\u2014Lara focusing the digicam\u2014and suddenly, filling the screen in his trailer, was the Orb itself.\n\n\"Beautiful,\" he said, staring at the delicate silver etchings on its surface.\n\n\"I'll record the rest of the images, then send them to you,\" Lara said. \"Once you have them\u2014finish the translation and transmit the sounds back to me.\"\n\n\"Hi-res images, yes?\" Bryce asked. He didn't want to be dependent on the quality of capture they got at this transmission speed.\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nLara got started then.\n\nThis should do it, Terry thought, and flipped the switch.\n\nFor a second nothing happened. The wall of monitors before him remained unchanged\u2014row after row of screens filled with only static.\n\nThen, one by one, those screens came to life.\n\nTerry smiled. Look at that\u2014he'd managed to do something useful while he waited for Croft to scan the Orb. Found a control panel and rerouted the system video feed, bypassing the circuitry that had been shot up. He could monitor the lab again. A quick survey of the facility told him that Lara was still the only one\u2014or rather the only one conscious\u2014in the entire lab complex.\n\nStanding around like this made him itchy\u2014Terry wasn't used to being support staff while someone else waded into the fray. Even if that someone was Lara Croft. It was part of what had raised his hackles about the military, the idea of living his life as a little cog in some big wheel's plans. Not for him taking orders blindly\u2014nor sitting behind a desk and giving them.\n\nHe wasn't down on Croft for waiting here\u2014not that at all. It made sense for her to be the one going after the Orb. Though he still wasn't certain about this whole Pandora business\u2014sounded more like something out of a fairy tale than a legitimate bioweapon. Still, Jonathan Reiss was involved, and Jonathan Reiss had a pretty legitimate reputation in some of the circles he'd traveled in.\n\nHe flicked a second switch now and brought the cameras out in the mall back on-line. The crowds were out in full force now\u2014\n\nThen he froze in place.\n\nReiss and another guard were running flat out for the lab entrance.\n\n\"Croft!\" he shouted into his headset. \"Lara!\"\n\nA split second later, he remembered. She'd taken off the headset to use her digicam. He had no way to warn her Reiss was coming.\n\nThis was bad."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "This was worse than he'd expected.\n\nNot only was the command post deserted, but the doctor couldn't reach Sean at all. Given the very, very specific instructions he'd left regarding the Orb, how important it was to keep it guarded at all times\u2026\n\nReiss shuddered involuntarily and tried hard not to dwell on the implications. Of what he would do if, in fact, the Orb was not where he had left it. One thing was for certain\u2014this was no ordinary containment breach, not a case of something toxic getting out of the lab but of something\u2014someone\u2014breaking in.\n\nAnd that someone had to be Lara Croft.\n\nThe guard with him keyed open the main door and reached to shut down the alarm. Reiss put a hand on his arm.\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"We don't want to let them know we're coming.\"\n\nThe man nodded and stepped forward into the security room. At the all-clear sign, Reiss drew his gun and made to follow.\n\nSuddenly he stopped and looked around.\n\nThe doctor had the strangest feeling someone was watching him.\n\nCrouched in the shadows opposite the main door, Terry hesitated.\n\nHe had a shot at Reiss. Not a good one\u2014the angle was bad, a filing cabinet near the door blocked most of the doctor's body\u2014but Terry had made a career of taking hard shots.\n\nKilling Reiss would end this whole thing. Pandora would never be found.\n\nTerry hesitated.\n\nReiss walked through the door, and out of sight.\n\nLara came around the front of the Orb, stepping over Reiss's man, still out cold on the floor. She was somewhat surprised he was still unconscious\u2014she hadn't hit him that hard, had she?\n\n\"There,\" Bryce said in her ear, and Lara stopped where she stood and focused the digicam on the Orb's surface.\n\n\"Excellent. This is the last one we need,\" Bryce said.\n\n\"All right, then.\" Lara clicked the capture button and heard the whir of the Panasonic writing to the flash card. \"We're done.\"\n\n\"Not until you send me the images,\" Bryce said, and Lara was just about to pull the flash card out of the digicam when she heard a faint, just barely audible noise coming from behind her.\n\nHer eyes darted around the room and came to rest on the Orb. And the reflection she saw in it.\n\nReiss.\n\nShe pocketed the camera assembly and, in one smooth move, drew her gun.\n\nThe doctor\u2014and there was another man who'd entered with him, she saw now\u2014dove behind the long counter at the rear of the lab.\n\nNeedlessly, as Lara hadn't intended on shooting them.\n\nInstead, she turned to the NEC mapping the Orb and fired.\n\n\"NO!\" Reiss screamed and charged, but she was already taking out the second NEC, which left only one, and she turned to blast that\u2014\n\nAnd a shadow passed over her.\n\nThe gun flew from her hand.\n\nSomeone took hold of the back of her head and slammed her face first into the desk in front of her. Lara's head rang and she tasted blood.\n\nShe felt a gun at her throat and at the same instant, her right arm being yanked up behind her back.\n\n\"I've had your best, Lara,\" a voice whispered in her ear. \"Now I'm looking forward to giving you mine.\"\n\nReiss's man\u2014the one she'd coldcocked before. So he'd been playing possum after all.\n\n\"That was hardly my best,\" she said. \"Lackeys don't get my best.\"\n\nHe yanked hard on her arm and Lara grunted in pain.\n\nThis one could be rattled. She filed that information away in her mind and as she did so, a question that had been tumbling around in the back of her head marched front and center.\n\nWhere was Terry? And how had Reiss managed to get past him?\n\nThe doctor leaned over her and brought his face close to hers.\n\n\"Lady Croft. Lara. We meet in person, at last. Needless to say, you've already made quite an impression on me.\"\n\n\"Charmed, I'm sure,\" Lara said.\n\n\"I doubt it, but it's nice of you to say so. And I see you and Sean here have had a chance to get acquainted, as well. Wonderful.\"\n\n\"The pleasure's been all mine,\" the man holding her down\u2014Sean\u2014said. \"Too bad it's going to be ending so soon.\"\n\nThe gun barrel pressing on her at her neck disappeared then, and Lara felt the point of a knife on her throat.\n\n\"Ah,\" Reiss said. \"Not just yet, Sean. Not until we're sure the NEC here has done its job, and that we will have no further need of Lady Croft's expertise.\"\n\nLara turned her head and looked at the monitor.\n\n[ Percent Surface Scanned Completed: .976 ]\n\n[ Time to Scan Completion: 0:04:13 ]\n\nLess than five minutes and Reiss would have Pandora's location.\n\nShe couldn't allow that to happen.\n\nShe had to do something\u2014stall for time, hope that Terry would arrive, hope that Bryce and Hillary could get MI6 to their location\u2026talk Reiss's ear off, perhaps?\n\n\"I'm curious, doctor,\" she said. \"How does a man go from Nobel Prize winner to terrorist?\"\n\n\"Terrorist? Please, Lara\u2014I'd ask you not to use that word. It conjures up some very unfortunate images. Lice-ridden, religious fanatics in dirty robes\u2014ugh.\" Reiss shuddered. \"I remain what I have always been\u2014a scientist, working for the greater good of humanity.\"\n\n\"I'd be very interested in hearing how Pandora ties into that vision, doctor.\"\n\n\"I should think that obvious,\" Reiss said. \"Pandora is\u2014\"\n\nReiss's phone rang.\n\n\"Excuse me a moment.\" He flipped open the sat phone. \"Jonathan Reiss. Ah. Madame Gillespie. Yes. I appreciate your concern, but we are now back on schedule. I'll have the item for you by the close of business tomorrow.\"\n\nLara stretched her neck, trying to see past Reiss to the monitor, to gauge how much longer she had.\n\nSean slammed her head back down on the table.\n\n\"It's not going to be pleasant, Lara.\" He leaned closer. \"I can promise you that.\"\n\n\"And it's been such fun so far,\" Lara said.\n\nReiss finished his call and put the phone back in his pocket.\n\n\"That's all of them, isn't it?\" Sean asked.\n\n\"Yes it is. Madame Gillespie was the last.\" He crooked a finger at the man he'd entered the lab with and pointed him toward a row of display screens on the other side of the room. \"Check the network computers, if you would. I'd like to confirm the financials.\"\n\n\"You were saying,\" Lara prompted. \"About Pandora.\"\n\n\"Yes. Pandora.\" Reiss folded his hands behind his back and began pacing. \"In a way, it's been my lifelong inspiration. You see, when I was seven we moved to Calcutta. Filthy place. It was there I heard the local legend of a box that purged Alexander of half his army. I filed it away in the back of my mind.\"\n\n\"Planning ahead?\"\n\n\"Hardly.\" The doctor laughed. \"I just thought it fascinating\u2014ironic\u2014that a tiny germ, invisible to the naked eye, could succeed where the armies of the world had failed. That a disease could defeat Alexander the Great.\"\n\n\"Pandora isn't a disease,\" Lara said sharply.\n\n\"No,\" Reiss agreed. \"Pandora is something altogether different. But I didn't know that then, did I? In any case\u2014\" he shrugged \"\u2014the story of that box started me thinking. About the function of disease\u2014how in nature, it acts as a curb, a balance if you will, on the too-rampant spread of life. The ultimate predator. Certainly the only one that man still fears.\" He looked her in the eye. \"I'm not boring you with all this, am I?\"\n\n\"Not at all. It's rare I get a close-up glimpse of such depravity.\"\n\n\"And here I thought I was making your last few moments on earth pleasant ones.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry to disappoint you.\" Lara shook her head. \"You really believe you'll be able to control what's in the box. Make it another of your weapons?\"\n\nReiss stared at her a moment and shook his head.\n\n\"Really, Lara. Now you do disappoint me.\"\n\nShe frowned, suddenly lost. What on earth was Reiss driving at?\n\n\"Excuse me, sir.\" The doctor's man\u2014the one he'd sent to check on the network\u2014had returned.\n\n\"Go on,\" Reiss said. \"Have we received payment from all the buyers?\"\n\n\"Just confirmed, sir. As you can see on the monitor.\"\n\nReiss's gaze went to one of the display screens on the far wall. Lara's followed. The screen showed a map of the world, with five blinking green lights\u2014one on each of the major continents. Lara supposed those lights represented Reiss's buyers. So despite his crack about terrorists\u2014Reiss's clientele spanned the globe. And so would Pandora, once it was released. If the legends were true, it would indeed act like the ultimate predator Reiss had referred to. There would be no stopping it.\n\nA sudden chill went down her spine.\n\n\"You don't want to control it,\" she said.\n\nReiss turned to her and smiled. \"Ah. Well done.\"\n\n\"You're using the buyers\u2026they release what you give them, thinking it's just another weapon\u2026and the world blames them for what happens.\"\n\n\"What's left of the world blames them.\" Reiss moved closer to her. \"Politics bore me. One side killing another over some god or some resource like oil. Trivial compared to the real challenge we, as a species, face. Look around and you'll see it, Lara. The human race is growing weak. As a species, we are failing.\"\n\nHis eyes glinted and Lara found herself wondering when the change had happened, when the Nobel Prize winner had become a madman.\n\n\"I grew up on a farm,\" Reiss continued. \"On a farm, when the herd is at risk from disease or has simply grown too fat and frail for its own good, you thin the herd. That's what the box is for. To weed out our weak, our feeble. Those races which would have expired but for our ludicrous notion that all men are created equal\u2014that we should help our weaker members to survive. Every organism has a state of balance. Mankind is out of ours. Properly thinned, we'll evolve and grow.\"\n\nSean's grip eased for a moment. Lara was able to twist her head just enough to see the other monitor again\u2014the one displaying the laser's progress.\n\n[ Percent Surface Scanned Completed: .994 ]\n\n[ Time to Scan Completion: 0:00:41 ]\n\n\"You're insane. To think you can control something like Pandora.\"\n\n\"Not at all. Once I have it in my grasp\u2014before I open the box\u2014I'll make enough antiserum to spare the best and brightest. Heads of corporations, heads of state. Life will go on.\"\n\nReiss leaned closer.\n\n\"Are you telling me you haven't looked around and thought, the world would be better off without some of these people? Come now, Lara\u2014the truth.\"\n\nLara looked up at him. \"Well, I can think of a few I could do without.\"\n\nA soft chime sounded.\n\nLara looked up at the monitor again.\n\n[ Scan complete ]\n\n[ Translation in progress ]\n\nReiss stood up. She heard footsteps\u2014lots of them\u2014entering the room. Reinforcements.\n\nWhich perhaps explained what had happened to Terry.\n\n\"I'm sorry to kill you, Lara. You would have been welcome in my world.\" He turned to the man who'd delivered the news about the financials.\n\n\"Take no chances. Shoot her right between the eyes.\"\n\n\"Damn,\" Sean whispered in her ear. \"Looks like we aren't going to get to play after all.\"\n\nHe lifted Lara roughly to her feet and pinned her in front of him, his grip so tight that she couldn't begin to think of moving.\n\nThe man before them raised his weapon and pressed his gun right up to her forehead.\n\nThe barrel was cool against her skin.\n\nLara tensed and waited for the click of the trigger."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "A gun fired.\n\nThe guard toppled over backward and fell to the floor, crimson spreading across his chest.\n\nA gun went off again and a bullet whizzed just past her shoulder, and Sean let go of her and dove, for the floor. Reiss dove, too, and it was only then that Lara realized what was happening.\n\nThe cavalry had just arrived.\n\nTerry\u2014somewhere up ahead, hidden in the shadows, in perfect sniper position. He'd gunned down Lara's would-be killer before that man could shoot her and was now spraying covering fire all over the room, pinning down Sean and Reiss and what looked to be a half-dozen newcomers, as well, providing Lara with a chance to escape. Which she fully intended to take advantage of\u2014once she'd attended to two minor details.\n\nNumber one, Reiss's translation of the Orb.\n\nShe snatched her gun off the floor and shot out the last NEC.\n\nReiss roared out a series of curses totally out of character with the polished, urbane image he'd been so careful to project.\n\nLara somersaulted clear across the room and snatched detail number two\u2014the Orb itself\u2014out of its robotic cradle. She placed it carefully into her backpack.\n\n\"Good luck with the farm animals,\" she shouted to Reiss and turned to run.\n\nOne of the newcomers popped up from behind the desk in front of her and took aim.\n\nShe dodged and a bullet took him square in the shoulder\u2014courtesy of the unseen Mr. Sheridan.\n\nLara jumped over the man's body and ran back the way she had come.\n\nTwo rooms down, she saw half a dozen more reinforcements heading straight toward her.\n\nNo good, she thought, and turned to her left. There was another glass wall directly in front of her.\n\nShe charged at it full speed, and at the last possible second, fired at it.\n\nThe wall exploded and she ran straight through.\n\nA second wall loomed before her, and then a third, and she did the same thing\u2014shot them out and ran through. Turning around, she saw Terry backpedaling right along with her, laying down covering fire as he ran.\n\n\"I was beginning to think you weren't coming!\" Lara called out.\n\n\"Would I forget about you, Croft?\" he shouted back.\n\nLara was about to respond when she looked up and saw a final glass wall straight ahead\u2014final because just beyond it she could glimpse the mall concourse itself, sublevel eight, and directly ahead of them, the elevator bank.\n\nShe raised her gun as she ran, intending to blast away that last wall.\n\nClick. Out of bullets.\n\nTerry was catching up to her, still firing. Reiss's men were getting closer. Bullets ricocheted off the floor and zinged past.\n\nLara didn't slow down for a second.\n\nShe shouted out a war cry and jumped straight for the wall, covering her face with her arms, aware that if she'd misjudged her companion, something very, very embarrassing was about to happen.\n\nBut she hadn't.\n\nTerry blew out the glass a split second before she smashed into it.\n\nLara went sailing through the air and landed on the tiled floor of the mall beyond.\n\nA second later, Terry was running right along with her.\n\n\"The elevators!\" he shouted, pointing straight ahead.\n\nLara shot him a glance. Elevators did not sound like the best plan to her.\n\n\"Trust me,\" Terry said, seeing her look. \"Escape Plan A.\"\n\nThey dashed into a waiting car. At that exact moment, Reiss's man Sean\u2014followed by at least half a dozen guards\u2014raced out of the lab's main entrance.\n\nTerry hit the button for the top floor.\n\n\"A hundred and ten?\" Lara couldn't keep the uncertainty from her voice.\n\n\"Trust me,\" Terry repeated.\n\nShe shrugged. Not as if she had much choice.\n\nTerry opened the elevator panel and pulled the emergency button. Smart, Lara thought. Now the car wouldn't stop anywhere else. They were on an express route to\u2026\n\nWell, wherever.\n\nThe doors began to close. Sean and his men were running full out toward them.\n\nBut they'd never make it.\n\nLara waved good-bye.\n\nInches away from shutting, a little hand poked in between the elevator doors and they popped open again.\n\nLara looked down at a little Chinese boy\u2014the same boy, she realized, who'd scooted aboard Reiss's elevator earlier.\n\n\"Kay-bee,\" the boy asked. \"Toys 'R' Us?\"\n\nLara looked up and saw Sean, twenty feet away.\n\nShe pushed the little boy firmly out the door.\n\n\"Not this car, sonny,\" she said.\n\nTerry slammed the door close button and the car rose upward. It\u2014like the walls of Reiss's lab, like the walls of the skyscraper housing the mall\u2014was made of glass, giving them an incredible view of first the New Century mall, and then Hong Kong itself, as they rose up along the side of the skyscraper.\n\nLara looked down and touched Terry's elbow.\n\n\"Look,\" she said.\n\nTwo other elevators were rising right along with them. Each filled with Reiss's men.\n\n\"You know we're not going to be able to get back down,\" she said. \"They'll have men covering the stairwells.\"\n\n\"We'll get down,\" Terry said. \"Don't worry.\"\n\nThe car pinged to a stop then and the doors slid open. Terry raced out, Lara a step behind.\n\n\"There.\" He pointed to a staircase labeled in Mandarin, Portugese, and English: Rooftop Access.\n\nHe shot out the knob, and they jogged up a small flight of stairs onto the roof itself.\n\nThe naked sunshine, after so much dim, artificial light, was dazzling.\n\nThe rooftop was empty.\n\nTerry spun about wildly.\n\n\"This is Escape Plan A then, is it?\" Lara asked, folding her arms across her chest.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"What about B? Is there a B?\"\n\n\"No,\" he snapped. \"No Plan B.\"\n\nLara opened her pack. She was going to have to destroy the Orb. A fall of one-hundred-ten stories, she judged, ought to do it.\n\nPerhaps she would accompany the object on the way down. That would be a relatively quick, relatively painless way to go. As opposed to what Reiss\u2014and in particular, Sean\u2014might have in mind for her.\n\n\"Ah.\"\n\nShe looked up and saw Terry running for the edge of the roof. Seconds later, he'd dragged two backpacks out from underneath the ledge and begun pulling out swaths of colored nylon from within one of them.\n\nLara smiled. \"Parachutes.\"\n\n\"Not exactly.\" Terry tossed her one of the packs. \"Something a tad faster.\"\n\nShe began to pull out the contents of the pack and soon saw what he meant.\n\nReiss paced back and forth in the lab, willing himself to remain calm.\n\n\"Excuse me, sir.\"\n\nHe looked up and saw Holliday, knelt over the last of the NECs Croft had shot out. She was shaking her head.\n\n\"I'm afraid the data is compromised. It will take approximately eighteen hours to reconstruct.\"\n\nReiss shut his eyes a moment. This was not happening. He'd been within seconds of Pandora's location. Now Croft was going to beat him to it.\n\n\"Croft,\" he said, opening his eyes.\n\n\"Sir?\" Holliday asked.\n\nHe drew his pistol and shot her.\n\n\"If you'd stayed in position,\" he said, standing over her corpse, \"instead of running, perhaps this wouldn't have happened.\"\n\nHe dropped the gun to the floor then, as angry with himself as anyone. This was his fault, for not shooting Croft himself when he had her helpless. Never again.\n\nHis phone rang.\n\n\"Team A in position.\" It was Sean. \"Teams B and C are flanking.\"\n\n\"English please,\" Reiss said. \"I'm in no mood for paramilitary acronyms.\"\n\n\"We're ready to storm the roof. We have the stairwells leading down blocked and surrounding rooftops manned, as well.\"\n\n\"Excellent. Proceed\u2014but Sean.\"\n\n\"Yes, doctor?\"\n\n\"The Orb is paramount. Croft and Sheridan are secondary.\"\n\n\"Yes sir. Understood. The pack is our target.\"\n\n\"Good work. Notify me when you have it.\"\n\nReiss snapped the phone shut.\n\nThe guards in the room shifted position and eyed him nervously.\n\n\"What do we have to reach?\" Lara asked.\n\nShe and Terry stood on the roof ledge, looking out over Hong Kong, back toward the mainland.\n\n\"That ship.\" Terry pointed due west of the Kowloon harbor. Lara was barely able to pick out a spec on the horizon.\n\n\"Great,\" Lara said\u2014and at that second, the door to the rooftop behind them burst open.\n\nSean and his men stepped out, rifles raised.\n\n\"Hands up!\" he shouted. \"Throw down the pack, Croft. And I'll make it quick.\"\n\n\"That's sweet of you!\" She looked down and saw more of Reiss's men coming into firing range, on the roofs of the buildings nearby.\n\nThis was going to be harder than it looked.\n\n\"Backup plan?\" she asked Terry.\n\n\"Stand here and get killed.\" He smiled. \"Why? Losing your nerve?\"\n\n\"Please.\" She adjusted the straps on her pack then, cinching them as tight as possible. Nylon\u2014the jumpsuits she and Terry had donned over their clothes\u2014bunched beneath the cloth as she fastened it securely.\n\n\"Last chance, Croft! Drop the pack.\"\n\nLara turned.\n\n\"Say hello to Reiss for me,\" she said, and jumped out into space.\n\nTerry was right alongside her. They dropped twenty stories in a heartbeat.\n\nThen she spread her arms and the webwings woven into her suit caught the air.\n\nGliding high above the city streets, she and Terry sailed toward the harbor, the Orb secure in her pack, whatever curses Sean was shouting after her lost in the swirling winds above Hong Kong.\n\nReiss did not kill anyone else.\n\nNeither did he curse, or stamp his feet, or smash things.\n\nHe simply waited in silence for Sean's return, for an explanation of Croft's escape. When he heard it, he laughed.\n\n\"Jumpsuits\u2014with wings?\" Reiss had to chuckle again. Had to, because the alternative was simply to give up, and he refused to do that.\n\nHe had won the Nobel Prize twenty years ago, fresh out of university. He had evaded the intelligence agencies of every country in the world for the last decade\u2014evaded with ease, and impunity. He was not going to have his plans thwarted by some dilettante of an archaeologist and her steroid-enhanced paramour.\n\nHe strode past Sean, surveying the wreckage of the lab. Guards gave way as he walked, his brow furrowed in concentration. Was there anything salvageable here? No. Croft had seen to that. She had been very thorough in her destruction of all the data relating to the Orb. And yet\u2026\n\nDestruction was not all she'd been intent on. Or she would have shot out the last Earth Simulator long before he'd arrived.\n\nSo what else had she been doing?\n\nHe cast his mind back in time and pictured Croft, standing next to the Orb, as she'd been when he first entered the lab.\n\nShe'd been wearing an earpiece of some sort.\n\nReiss walked to where the Orb had been and bent low, rummaging among the wreckage on the floor.\n\nA second later, he rose to his feet.\n\n\"Sean. Have the field team assemble at the airfield.\"\n\n\"Where are we going?\"\n\nReiss held up the object he'd found in the rubble. It appeared to be a digital camera of some sort\u2014with a transceiver built right into it. A transceiver whose signal, he realized, could be traced back to its point of origin.\n\n\"Our destination?\" He smiled. \"Why, Lady Croft is going to tell us that.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "Terry and the ship's captain were arguing details of their passage in the hallway. Lara couldn't hear all of it\u2014and her Tagalog was not up to snuff\u2014but the conversation had something to do with money, of that she was certain. From Terry's tone of voice, the captain apparently wanted more.\n\nShe was inclined to tell Terry to pay it. The cabin they'd been given was surprisingly spacious and comfortable-looking, considering the condition of the freighter that housed it. Twin beds, clean sheets, and in an adjoining bathroom\u2026\n\nA shower. Hallelujah.\n\nLara turned the knobs and was even more pleased to discover actual hot water.\n\nShe returned to the main cabin area and found Terry juggling the Orb in his hands like a soccer ball.\n\n\"So\u2026this rock is the map.\"\n\nHe didn't seem at all concerned about her finding him with it.\n\n\"That's right,\" Lara said.\n\n\"I've never seen anything like it, have you?\" He held the Orb out at arm's length and studied it. \"It's quite beautiful, actually.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is.\" Lara moved to take it\u2014and Terry stepped back, keeping it just out of her reach.\n\n\"And it's the only way to find that box?\"\n\n\"Pandora? Yes, that's correct.\"\n\nThey exchanged smiles.\n\n\"Just think,\" Lara said. \"You could tuck it under your arm and go right out the door.\"\n\n\"Window's better, actually. Off the ship faster. Harder to track.\"\n\nHe kept grinning. Lara felt the smile on her face begin to waver.\n\nShe wondered if he was serious.\n\nTerry set the Orb back down on the bed and laughed.\n\n\"Would I do a thing like that to you, Croft?\"\n\nThat was the question, wasn't it?\n\nTerry set about unpacking what little he had\u2014his gun, a few spare clips. Lara put the Orb back in her pack.\n\n\"I'm going to take a shower,\" she announced, and took out a spare set of clothes. Then she changed her mind.\n\nShe took the entire backpack with her into the bathroom and shut the door.\n\nShe scrubbed every inch of her body clean and let the hot water pound against the sore muscles in her back until her skin was numb.\n\nWhen she finally emerged from the bathroom, dressed in a silk wrap, Terry had fallen asleep completely undressed on one of the beds.\n\nShe went to the window and stared out at the ocean.\n\nThey were well out to sea now\u2014far from Reiss, and any of his men. The Orb was safe\u2014which meant Pandora was safe. She still needed to transmit Bryce the rest of the images, but that could wait. The clock had stopped ticking.\n\nSo why was Lara still worried?\n\nA memory tugged at the back of her mind.\n\nBut before she could dredge it to the surface, a creaking noise from behind made her turn around.\n\nTerry had risen from the bed and was coming straight toward her.\n\nShe looked over his shoulder and saw the pack safe on her bed, where she had dropped it after coming out of the shower.\n\nThen she saw the expression on his face and knew what he wanted. Not the Orb.\n\nHer.\n\nHe came forward and reached out to take her in his arms.\n\nLara grabbed hold of one of his wrists with both hands.\n\n\"Don't,\" she said.\n\n\"Break it, if you want,\" Terry told her. \"I'm still going to kiss you.\"\n\nAnd he did.\n\nShe let it happen\u2014a long, slow, lingering kiss that for a moment made her forget about everything\u2014the Orb, Reiss, Pandora. She dropped his wrist and relaxed in his arms.\n\nThey fell over onto one of the bunks, Terry on top.\n\n\"Shall I kick you on your arse now, or later?\" Lara asked. \"Never mind, I'll do it twice,\" she said, and rolled him over so she was on top.\n\nTerry laughed and tried to push her over again. She resisted\u2014they both laughed then, and looked into each other's eyes.\n\nAnd at that second, the memory that had been nagging at her surfaced.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" he asked.\n\nLara didn't answer\u2014she leaned over and kissed him again, passionately, hungrily\u2014one hand reaching into the front pocket of her pack as she did so.\n\nClick.\n\nTerry looked up at her in surprise. \"What?\"\n\nShe stood up and Terry pulled feebly on the cuffs she'd shackled him to the bed with.\n\nAfter a second, he gave up, and smiled at her.\n\n\"This isn't exactly what I had in mind, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Why didn't you shoot Reiss?\" Lara snapped. \"He must have walked right past you in the lab.\"\n\n\"I didn't have a clear shot,\" Terry said. \"And I had no idea where you were.\"\n\nLara looked into his eyes and knew he was lying.\n\n\"I'll inform MI6 you've completed your service. You'll get your money and your life. Don't waste it.\"\n\nTerry laughed in disbelief.\n\n\"Now is no time to be splitting up, Croft\u2014\"\n\n\"You're wrong,\" she said savagely. \"Now is exactly the time\u2014before you're in a position where you make the wrong decision.\"\n\nHis face twisted in anger.\n\n\"You want to leave, go ahead, but don't pretend it's to save me. You're afraid. Afraid you might not be able to pull the trigger. Afraid of letting your guard down, letting anyone in\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not leaving because I couldn't kill you, Terry. I'm leaving because I could.\"\n\nHe stared at her.\n\n\"And if you're wrong about me, Croft? What about that?\"\n\nLara shook her head.\n\n\"I'm not wrong, Terry. You know it, and I know it.\"\n\nShe slipped on her clothes and collected her things, pausing at the door.\n\n\"Good-bye, Terry.\"\n\nHe gave her one last smile. \"This isn't good-bye, Croft.\"\n\nBut she hoped, for both their sakes, that it was.\n\nThe freighter they'd landed on had two Zodiac speedboats strapped to the hull. Lara had seen them when they'd glided down to the deck.\n\nShe paid (overpaid) the captain for one, outlining Terry's history of abusive behavior and begging him for the chance to escape. She didn't know if he believed her or not\u2014the important thing was that he let her go. She headed due east with the Zodiac. Taipei, she decided. Not only did she have friends there, but the political climate was favorable\u2014MI6 would have no problem picking her up, should that become necessary.\n\nShe arrived within sight of the harbor by early morning, still bone-tired, having been limited to the occasional thirty-minute catnap at the wheel of the Zodiac. Coffee, she thought, and then communications. She would have good reception here for the sat\u2014she could get the rest of the images to Bryce, have him send her the translation and be on her way to Pandora by midmorning. Well in advance of Reiss, even assuming he could somehow piece together the data she'd destroyed and translate it.\n\nEven this early in the morning, the harbor was busy. Lara had to join a queue of ships trying to make their way down the single narrow channel to the docks ahead.\n\nGlancing off to her right, she spied an antiquated Chinese junk\u2014with a very modern-looking set of communications aerials.\n\nWorth a try, she decided, and pulled out of the queue. She came up alongside the boat and tied off onto a gang wire next to it.\n\nAn elderly couple and two children were just sitting down to their breakfast when she rapped on their door.\n\n\"Good morning,\" she said, bowing. \"Might I borrow your television? It's important.\"\n\nThe old man looked at her in confusion. The youngest child\u2014a girl\u2014smiled.\n\n\"This way,\" she said, grabbing Lara by the arm and tugging her forward.\n\nNot only did Lara get the television, she got breakfast. Duck's eggs instead of the scones she'd been anticipating, tea instead of coffee, but a much-needed pick-me-up all the same.\n\nShe repaid the elderly couple's kindness by ripping apart their television set.\n\n\"I'll put it all back together once I'm done, I promise,\" she assured them in her best Mandarin, but they only looked on with mild curiosity as she went about her business. Combining components from her cell, their television, and the digital camera to put together a makeshift wireless video conferencing facility.\n\nIt took the better part of an hour to put the pieces together.\n\nThen she set the Orb down on top of the television, and dialed up the manor.\n\nTo her surprise it was Bryce, rather than Hillary, who answered.\n\n\"Lara.\"\n\nHis image filled the screen\u2014behind her, Lara was aware of the elderly couple hugging their children closer. He looked terrible\u2014haggard, as if he hadn't slept all night.\n\n\"He's a fright, all right,\" she said without turning around. \"But he is a friend of mine.\"\n\nBryce leaned closer. \"Where are you?\"\n\n\"Never mind that,\" she said. \"I want to send through the captures from Reiss's lab. Are you ready?\"\n\n\"In a second.\" Bryce leaned out of the picture a moment. Then he was back. \"Ready.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Lara said. \"Sending the last images of the Orb\u2026now.\"\n\nShe'd already slid the photo chip into her phone\u2014now she pressed the send button and the air filled with the squeal of the electronics handshaking and then the data being transmitted.\n\n\"Got them,\" Bryce said.\n\n\"Translate them.\"\n\n\"Already on it,\" he said, swiveling around in his chair to study a display screen behind him. The resolution on her end was well below snuff\u2014she could vaguely make out lines of data scrolling by on the monitor.\n\n\"Done.\"\n\nLara repositioned the Orb on top of the television slightly, so that the speaker from her cell was as close to it as possible.\n\nThen she stood back and nodded to Bryce.\n\n\"All right. Send the sounds.\"\n\n\"Hang on. I'll verify the data.\"\n\n\"Bryce.\" She shook her head. He knew her better than that. \"No. Send the sounds, please.\"\n\n\"All right. Sending\u2026now.\"\n\nFor a moment, nothing. Then a series of tones began issuing from the speaker. A simple melody at first, then a flood of noise, sometimes harmonic, sometimes utterly discordant. There was a curious, muted quality to some of the notes, as if they were coming from underwater.\n\nLara had no idea what was supposed to happen next\u2014but after a minute of listening, and watching the Orb intently without anything on its surface changing, she knew something was off.\n\n\"Nothing,\" she said.\n\n\"Back to the drawing board,\" Bryce said quickly.\n\nLara shook her head. \"Play them again.\"\n\nBryce sighed and did as she asked.\n\n\"Hang on,\" she said, half a minute into the playback.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nIt was that muted quality to some of the tones; it had bothered her the first time through and now she knew why.\n\n\"The tones are being distorted.\"\n\nBryce frowned. \"I don't think\u2014\"\n\n\"There's a phase shift,\" she realized. \"Because of the phone line. The pitch is wrong!\"\n\nShe looked up at Bryce, expecting to see the light of discovery in her eyes reflected in his.\n\nInstead, she saw only disappointment.\n\n\"Bryce?\" She frowned. \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\"Fine. I just don't see it, is all.\"\n\nLara tried again. \"Have you ever listened to your voice on a tape recorder? It's the same thing.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Bryce said.\n\n\"Maybe nothing.\" Lara frowned.\n\n\"So what do you want to do?\"\n\nShe thought a moment. \"Send me the raw data.\"\n\n\"I could try to compensate on this end,\" Bryce said. \"Send the tones again.\"\n\n\"No. The sounds came through this speaker distorted. So either send me the file or I'll bring back the bloody Orb to the manor.\"\n\n\"Sending it,\" Bryce said.\n\n\"To be honest, I'm surprised you missed that.\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" he said, looking anything but. He really did look terrible\u2014not that she would ever say such a thing out loud, but perhaps she had been riding him too hard.\n\nWhen this was over, she would send him on a long, long vacation. With one of those NECs she'd promised him for company.\n\nA soft beeping announced that the file had arrived in her in-box. She picked the phone off the television and used its keypad to first open the file, and then set the tones to play.\n\nHalfway through the playback, Lara realized that in using the phone to open the data, she'd accidentally bumped the Orb to one side, moving it farther from the speaker.\n\nShe reached out to push the two closer together\u2014\n\n\u2014and as her fingers touched the Orb, the world around her suddenly changed.\n\nIt was as if the Orb was a movie projector, and the ship around her the projection screen. White light blanketed every surface, turning the junk, the elderly couple, the television into a blank screen.\n\nAnd then that screen exploded with images. A jumble of them, rushing past Lara so quickly they barely registered. An endless black sky, a flash of light, an explosion\u2014\n\nThe horror-stricken face of a young girl and then the crinkled face of a dark-skinned, elderly man.\n\nThe lid of a box, snapping shut.\n\nA village of primitive-looking people, falling dead at her feet, their faces swollen and black with disease.\n\nWarriors, wearing armor plates, carrying short swords falling, as well.\n\nDarkness again, and then\u2014\n\nShe was standing in the middle of a vast grassy plain. African savannah, she realized, but how\u2014\n\nShe looked down at the Orb in her hands and tried to reason out what was happening. The tones had activated some kind of image projector, that was clear, but it was ungodly realistic, holographic in detail\u2014technology so far beyond the capability of twenty-first-century civilization as to seem the stuff of science fiction.\n\nAnd yet\u2026the Orb was two thousand years old. So how on earth had Alexander and the astrologers who passed for his \"scientists\" managed to do this?\n\nMy father told me a story once.\n\nShe recalled her words to Calloway and Stevens, in the library back at Croft Manor.\n\nIn 2300B.C., an Egyptian pharoah found a place he named the cradle of life; where we, life, began. There he found a box. The box which brought life to earth.\n\nIt was the only possible explanation. Bryce was right, after all.\n\nThe Orb in her hands, Pandora itself\u2026\n\nThey were not of this world.\n\nShe tried to step forward then, to see how far the illusion extended, but her feet refused to move. Part of the illusion, as well?\n\nShe moved the Orb, then, trying to disrupt the projection.\n\nInstead, the world around her slipped, as if she was actually tilting it with her hands.\n\nShe continued to turn the Orb, bringing it around a full rotation. Images slid past\u2014hundreds of flamingos basking on a lakeshore, a herd of elephants trampling the savannah, impossibly green, impossibly leafy patches of jungle, filled with the chattering of a million creatures\u2014one overlapping the other, moving faster and faster.\n\nLara suddenly realized she was moving through the projected space\u2014it was almost as if she was strapped to the front of an impossibly fast train, hurtling through the African countryside.\n\nAnd the second she realized that, she realized something else, as well.\n\nThe Orb was in control here, not her.\n\nAnd the Orb had a definite destination in mind.\n\nThe savannah flew past. Drifting by her on her right, she saw the snow-capped peaks of Kilimanjaro. She was in Tanzania then\u2014near that country's border with Kenya. A few hundred miles south of Nairobi.\n\nA few hundred miles south of Kosa.\n\nShe remembered talking to him as he walked through the halls of the British Embassy\u2014a conversation about the shadow warrior on the floor of the Luna Temple, and the seemingly incongruous inscriptions within written in Ol Maa.\n\nSeemingly incongruous no longer.\n\nShe set that knowledge aside, as another mountain appeared, this time directly in front of her. Shrouded in gray clouds, its summit came not to a peak, like Kilimanjaro, but rather ended in a cone. A volcano? She didn't recognize it specifically, but from what she recalled of the geology of this part of Africa, there were a number of active volcanoes in this area.\n\nThe savannah came to an abrupt end, became desert. She saw no vegetation, no signs of life anywhere. She drove toward the mountain's summit, up a winding path through a barren, rocky canyon, past strange conical-shaped rock formations.\n\nThey reminded her, she realized, of the cone the Orb had rested on within the Luna Temple.\n\nThe images slowed. Lara sensed her journey had come to an end.\n\nShe stood before one of the cone-shaped formations\u2014bigger than the others she had passed before. And black\u2014a deep, midnight ebony exactly like the cone in the temple.\n\nIt exuded a palpable sense of menace.\n\nPandora, she thought. It's right here.\n\nBut where was she?\n\nLara began to turn the Orb in her hands, trying to get a better sense of her location.\n\nA shadow fell upon her then and touched the Orb.\n\nShe heard something behind her\u2014a low, rumbling sound, like the sound of lava bubbling in a volcano, only almost musical. Like something alive.\n\nSuddenly the fact that she couldn't move, couldn't turn her body even an inch while holding the Orb, was no longer a curiousity.\n\nIt was downright scary.\n\nThe shadow covered her entirely.\n\nThe sound grew louder.\n\nOut of the corner of her eye, Lara saw movement.\n\nMove the Orb, she thought. Then you'll see it. But she didn't want to see it. She wanted to run.\n\nToo late, though. It was upon her.\n\nBryce actually thought Lara was going to scream.\n\nHe had never seen her so scared before\u2014scared at all, for that matter, and he'd seen her in a lot of fairly terrifying situations. Like that time with Gunderson and the Mai Tufari in Chango, or the ants in that Purepecha tomb in Tzintzantzun\u2014she'd been cool as ice then. Cracking jokes, while he'd been sweating bullets. And he'd certainly never seen her actually turn white before.\n\nSomething quite extraordinary had obviously happened.\n\nAll at once, she let go of the Orb and staggered backward.\n\n\"Lara? Are you all right?\"\n\nShe looked straight at the camera lens. Bryce had her, head-and-shoulders view, on the main console monitor.\n\n\"Africa. It's in Africa! Somewhere past Kilimanjaro!\"\n\n\"Pandora?\"\n\n\"Yes, Pandora. Of course Pandora.\"\n\nBryce sighed.\n\nHe wished she hadn't told him that.\n\n\"That's great, Lara,\" he said, in what he hoped was a convincingly enthusiastic tone.\n\n\"I'm half a day away. How long will it take Reiss to put his computers back together? He's mapped the Orb completely\u2014he might be able to get Pandora's location, as well.\"\n\nFor a number of reasons, Bryce wasn't sure how to respond to that.\n\n\"Hmm. Err. Twenty-four hours at the fastest, I'd say.\"\n\nShe looked down at her watch and nodded.\n\n\"Then that's what we'll assume. Get in touch with Kosa. Tell him to pick up my car and meet me north of his village.\"\n\nShe cut the line then and the screen went dark.\n\nSean, who'd been leaning over the console, gun pointed directly at Bryce's head during the entire conversation, shook his head and smiled.\n\n\"Bit faster than twenty-four hours, I'd say.\"\n\n\"Indeed. I should expect we'll be in Africa before Lady Croft. Though we'll have to wait for her to lead us to Pandora.\" Reiss, who'd been hanging back in the trailer entrance, turned to one of the guards standing over Hillary (who had remained silent throughout Lara's call, pressing an icepack to the large black-and-blue mark on his forehead), and spoke. \"Tell Mr. Garner to have the Gulfstream fueled and ready to leave within the hour.\"\n\nThe man nodded and left the trailer.\n\nThe doctor turned back to Bryce.\n\n\"Now all we need is for you to call this Kosa fellow\u2014whoever he is\u2014and arrange for him to pick up Lady Croft. We don't want her aware that anything is out of the ordinary. Do we?\"\n\nBryce sighed. What could he do? From the moment Reiss and his entourage had arrived at the manor in the middle of the night, they'd shown a willingness to use force to get what they wanted.\n\nHence, the ruins of his copter simulator in the manor's control room.\n\nAnd the bruise on Hillary's face.\n\nIt was all his fault, anyway, Bryce decided, for having constructed the digicam in such a way that the transceiver signal could be traced back to its source. Bad design. The next revision would incorporate a completely different architecture.\n\nAssuming, that is, he got the chance to build it.\n\nHe looked over at Hillary, then at Reiss.\n\n\"All right,\" he said. \"I'll make the call.\"\n\nTerry had a nasty cut on his wrist.\n\nHe was going to have to get it attended to soon, although he was certainly better off than Davos, who really should have known better than to ignore Terry's shouts for help, and who certainly shouldn't have stood there, laughing at him naked and chained to the bunk, while Croft made her getaway.\n\nIn retrospect, of course, it would have made more sense for Terry not to explode the way he had (and he really didn't care to dwell on the late Captain Davos, or his unfortunate crew), because it had taken several long, frustrating hours for him to get the second Zodiac in the water. He had an easier time tracking her to Taipei, thanks to the transceiver he'd stuck on her pack when looking at the Orb.\n\nBut she'd gone out of range by the time he reached the harbor.\n\nFortunately, she'd left her Zodiac anchored in front of an old junk, and it didn't take more than a few moments of polite conversation with the old couple who owned the boat to ascertain where she had gone after leaving them.\n\nAfrica.\n\nTerry smiled. He'd pick up the signal there, then.\n\nAnd\u2014he guessed\u2014have a good shot at Pandora, in the bargain."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Kosa had done something to the Jeep. Lara saw that right away, though she couldn't figure out what that something was as yet.\n\nShe punched in his number on her sat phone.\n\n\"Kosa. I'm here.\"\n\n\"Lara? What do you mean? Where is here?\" He sounded confused\u2014she could understand why. She watched the Jeep swerve and barely miss going off the road entirely. That would have been a mess.\n\nAh. She knew what was different about the vehicle now.\n\n\"You cleaned my Jeep.\"\n\n\"I know how you like your equipment. But where are you? I can't see you.\"\n\n\"Don't worry. I can see you\u2026just keep going straight.\"\n\nKosa was driving south from Nairobi, on a dirt road that ran parallel to the Namanga highway, some thirty-two kilometers north of the Kenya\u2013Tanzania border.\n\nLara was about a three hundred meters off the ground, paralleling his course, several hours and several thousand kilometers away from Taipei, courtesy of MI6 aerial transport. She was thoroughly sick of air travel and looked forward to being safely on the ground.\n\nShe pulled down on the straps of her parachute, adjusting her angle of descent.\n\n\"Keep your speed steady,\" she told Kosa.\n\n\"Right. I'm switching to cruise control.\"\n\nAbout thirty seconds and a half-dozen tugs of her landing straps later, Lara set down gently in the backseat of her Jeep. She cut away the chute and it flew off in the distance behind them.\n\nKosa slid over to the passenger seat and she climbed in front and grabbed the wheel.\n\nThe two of them embraced.\n\n\"I don't suppose you considered a more normal means of getting here?\"\n\nShe adjusted the seat, then shook her head. \"No time.\"\n\nAnd she told him about Reiss, and Pandora, and what the Orb had shown her.\n\nAfter she finished talking, Kosa was silent a long while.\n\n\"How long do we have before Reiss finds this place?\"\n\n\"Hours, if we're lucky.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Worse than I thought.\"\n\n\"I don't understand.\"\n\n\"I feared this,\" he said. \"When you sent me the fax. When I saw the box.\"\n\nShe slammed on the brakes. \"You knew about Pandora? And you didn't tell me?\"\n\n\"You are my friend, Lara, but\u2014\" he hesitated. \"You are an outsider here. And there are things that are not spoken of to outsiders.\"\n\n\"I see,\" she said tightly.\n\n\"You have no call to be angry with me. Had I known about Reiss, I would have told you everything. But as a matter of archaeological curiosity\u2014no. Do you not understand what this box is\u2014what it contains?\" He shook his head again. \"There are some things that are not meant to be found.\"\n\nHis words\u2014an echo of Gus Petraki's, of Alexander's\u2014struck her like a dash of cold water in the face.\n\n\"I'm beginning to think you might be right about that,\" she said.\n\nThey drove on in silence.\n\nThey stopped to eat and refuel the Jeep just before crossing the border into Tanzania. Lara tried the manor, but was unable to reach either Hillary or Bryce. Strange. Perhaps Bryce was sleeping off whatever strange mood had come over him earlier in the day. As for Hillary\u2026\n\nIt was very, very out of character for him not to answer the phone.\n\nPerhaps he needed a vacation, as well.\n\nOnce in Tanzania, the scenery started to look very familiar to Lara indeed. They were driving along the same route the Orb had shown her\u2014there was Kilimanjaro, off in the distance, and to their left a huge soda lake with hundreds of flamingos baking in the sun. Jungle, and savannah, and then looming before them\u2026\n\nA mountain, shrouded in clouds.\n\n\"Kosa. We've never been here, have we?\"\n\n\"No.\" He turned in his seat to face her. \"That's the mountain you saw, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"It is Ol Doinyo Lengai\u2014the mountain of God.\"\n\n\"The box is there somewhere. We have to stop Reiss from getting it, Kosa. You understand that, don't you?\"\n\n\"I do.\" He nodded. \"There is a tribe that makes a home on it. They might help us.\"\n\n\"Might?\"\n\nKosa nodded. \"When you see them, you will understand.\"\n\nOl Doinyo Lengai, it turned out, was an active volcano. One that had erupted as recently as 1983, so the entrance was clearly marked with danger signs, warning of possible seismic activity.\n\n\"In many ways, this is the last bit of pristine wilderness on the continent,\" Kosa said. \"Tanzania is not as popular a tourist attraction as my country, so there is not as much pressure for development.\"\n\nLara nodded as they walked through a cloud bank. She hadn't realized they were that high up already.\n\nAnd then she realized they weren't.\n\n\"This is all smoke\u2026\"\n\nKosa nodded. \"To keep the tribe hidden from outsiders.\"\n\nIt got thicker and thicker as they climbed. She stumbled over an outcropping of rock and made it a point to keep her gaze focused on the path ahead of her to avoid a repeat performance.\n\n\"We're here,\" Kosa said suddenly.\n\nLara looked up and saw only thick smoke. She must have misheard him. Turn here, he must have said, and she stepped up behind him.\n\nBut Kosa had indeed stopped walking.\n\n\"I will be a moment. Stay in this exact spot.\"\n\nHe moved away from her and it was only then that she looked up and realized she hadn't misheard him at all.\n\nThey were in the middle of the village.\n\nNot ten feet to her right, a group of figures, barely visible through the mist, were gathered around a bonfire, feeding wood to the flames. There was another group three meters beyond them. She turned and saw another fire directly behind her and another one to her left.\n\nA man stepped forward out of the blinding white mist.\n\nHe was tall and thin, dressed in a plain brown, one-piece toga. Maasai, Lara thought at first, just like Kosa.\n\nThen he moved closer and she saw his face.\n\nThere were markings carved in his skin\u2014elegant, decorative patterns that were at once strange and yet completely familiar to her, and a second later she knew why.\n\nThey were undeniably reminiscent of the etchings on the surface of the Orb.\n\nLara became aware of voices behind her. She turned and saw Kosa talking to a man dressed in robes far more elaborate than any of the others were wearing. The village leader, no doubt.\n\nHe was angry, almost shouting\u2014Kosa was trying to calm him down, reason with him. Both men pointed in Lara's direction several times\u2014she was no doubt the focal point of their argument.\n\nTime for her to get directly involved, then.\n\nShe pulled the Orb from her pack, and suddenly, the entire village got very, very quiet.\n\nKosa walked quickly to her side.\n\n\"I'm not sure that was the wisest move,\" he whispered.\n\nThe village leader walked up to her, as well, and began speaking. Kosa translated the words as fast as they were spoken.\n\n\"He says to leave this object and go. Never speak of it. To trespass on the cradle of life is to risk flooding the\u2014\"\n\nLara cut him off. \"Men are coming for the box.\"\n\nThe leader's mouth dropped open and his eyes clouded with anger.\n\nClearly he wasn't used to being interrupted.\n\n\"Tell him,\" Lara said to Kosa.\n\nHe repeated her words in their dialect to the leader. The entire village listened. A wave of murmuring\u2014fearful murmuring\u2014swept through the crowd.\n\nWhen Kosa finished, the leader's reply was abrupt and angry.\n\n\"He says the gods forbid you to speak of the box.\"\n\nLara took a step forward of her own then and met the leader's gaze.\n\n\"These men are not like me. They won't look at the box with fear or respect,\" she began, and then nodded to Kosa, who started translating as she spoke. \"They will open it. They want to use it. Now, I am sorry if I have to disturb your gods to keep this from happening, but I will do whatever I must.\"\n\nThis time, when Kosa finished talking, the crowd was silent.\n\nThe village leader studied Lara intently. Judging her.\n\nThen he folded his legs beneath him and sat. He looked up at Lara and Kosa and motioned for them to do the same.\n\nKosa translated as he began talking.\n\n\"Do you truly, truly understand what you are doing? Are you truly prepared for what you will learn? Some secrets must remain secrets. These are very heavy burdens, very lonely burdens. If you find the box, you will have to bear those burdens in solitude. Are you prepared to do that?\"\n\nLara looked into his eyes and nodded.\n\n\"You must speak the affirmation,\" Kosa said, and gave the words to her. She pronounced them the best she could\u2014African languages had never been a specialty of hers.\n\nThe leader nodded, satisfied, then began to talk again.\n\n\"He's going to give us ten men,\" Kosa translated. \"They will take us to the cradle of life. To the box.\"\n\n\"Thank him,\" Lara said.\n\nKosa did. The leader stared at her then, and began speaking again.\n\n\"He warns that no one who has gone looking for the box has come back. He says the land beyond the canyon belongs to the shadow guardians. They do not sleep, they never rest. To them sky and earth are meaningless. They move like a wind. Anything that walks their land will die.\"\n\nLara's gaze darted to Kosa and she thought of the figure on the floor of the Luna Temple. And then she remembered something else\u2014the presence she'd felt hovering over her, the last few seconds of her journey with the Orb. Something dark, and deadly, something that had scared her so much she couldn't even bear to look at it. Now, at least, she could put a name to that fear.\n\nShadow guardian.\n\n\"What are they?\" Lara asked. \"Where did they come from?\"\n\nKosa repeated the question. The leader looked puzzled a moment, then spoke.\n\n\"He says they came with life,\" Kosa translated. The leader pointed to the sky. \"From up there.\"\n\nLara fell silent then, realizing any further questions were academic.\n\nTen minutes later, they were on the move again\u2014Lara, Kosa, and ten warriors from the village, all of them armed with spears and shields. Lara wanted to phone up MI6 and have them airlift in a case of AK-47s. This was the twenty-first century, after all.\n\nThen she reconsidered.\n\nWho knew what weapons\u2014if any\u2014would work against shadow guardians?\n\nJust outside the village proper, the jungle thickened, becoming a curtain of thick, green vegetation. Their progress slowed. Some of the warriors passed their spears to others and pulled out machetes. They began hacking their way through the forest. Lara joined in, glad to have something to do to take her mind off what lay ahead. Pandora\u2014what she might have to face off against to protect the box from Reiss.\n\nShe fought her way through a particularly dense patch of brush and emerged into a bare patch of forest. Ol Doinyo Lengai\u2014the mountain of God\u2014was suddenly visible through the trees.\n\nLara stopped in her tracks and stared. The angle, the distance to the summit\u2026she'd been this way before. With the Orb.\n\nKosa and one of the tribesmen stepped up next to her.\n\n\"Take a break,\" he suggested, misunderstanding why she'd stopped. \"Let me go first.\"\n\n\"No, I'm not tired.\" She pointed to the summit. \"It's just that we're getting closer.\"\n\nThe tribesman frowned, then spoke to Kosa.\n\n\"He said you're right,\" Kosa told her. \"The cradle of life lies near the summit. He wants to know how you knew?\"\n\n\"Tell him I had help.\" Lara reached behind her then and brought out the Orb. A flight of birds in the trees ahead of them suddenly squawked and flew past, startled by the sudden movement.\n\nThe tribesman looked from Lara to the Orb and nodded. Then he spoke to Kosa.\n\n\"He says he will not turn back with the others. He will go as far as we go. He will fight the shadow guardians.\"\n\nLara met the man's gaze and smiled.\n\n\"Tell him thank you. With brave men like him, we shall win. No, hang on\u2014\" she put a hand on Kosa's arm to stop him from speaking. \"Tell me how to say that.\"\n\nKosa did. Again, she did her best with the pronunciation. Apparently it was good enough\u2014the warrior smiled and raised his spear in acknowledgment.\n\nThen he said something else to Kosa and both men laughed.\n\n\"What?\" Lara asked.\n\n\"He says you have a funny accent.\"\n\nShe frowned, then joined in the laughter.\n\nThe laugh turned into an exclamation of surprise as an animal came charging out of the brush ahead and ran right by her. She only got a quick look at it and then it was past her.\n\n\"Ducker,\" the tribesman said, or something to that effect.\n\nLara was about to ask him to repeat the word when another one shot past, followed quickly by a third. Something swung by in the trees above, moving fast. Moving in the same direction as the animal that had charged her, as the birds that had fled earlier.\n\nRunning from something, Lara realized. But what?\n\nThen she heard it. A low, mechanical sound, a relentless thrumming that came on them so fast that she couldn't localize the source until it was directly above them.\n\nHelicopters.\n\n\"Reiss,\" she whispered and exchanged a quick glance with Kosa. But how? It hadn't been anywhere near twenty-four hours\u2014they should have had more than enough time to reach the summit and find Pandora before he showed.\n\nThe tribesmen were all looking at her now for direction, casting frightened glances around as the wind from the copters above whipped up dirt and debris from the forest floor.\n\nShe saw ropes dropping from the copters and camouflaged figures sliding down them.\n\n\"Run!\" Lara shouted.\n\nBut it was too late.\n\nGunfire filled the air. The tribesman next to her\u2014the one who had sworn to fight the shadow guardians at her side\u2014was the first to fall.\n\nIt was over in seconds.\n\nReiss's men\u2014there were at least two dozen, all in spanking new camouflage fatigues, all equipped with AK-47s\u2014surrounded her and Kosa. The two of them were marched through the jungle, past the bodies of the villagers sent to guide them (she counted eight, which gave Lara hope that perhaps the others had made it safely into the surrounding jungle), and into a clearing.\n\nThe copters landed as they approached.\n\nReiss hopped out of the nearest one.\n\n\"Lady Croft. A pleasure to see you again.\"\n\n\"I wish I could say the same,\" Lara shot back.\n\nThe doctor looked confident and relaxed. He'd actually managed to find the time to change clothes, even to shower, and it was at that instant that Lara realized Reiss was actually going to do it, he was going to find Pandora and release it into the world. Unless she stopped him.\n\nUnless she killed him.\n\nShe had a throwing knife hidden in her boot and a small blade tucked into the small of her back, as well. One of those should do the trick.\n\nShe shifted position, keeping her hands raised high in the air, but taking the weight off one ankle\u2014the one with the blade strapped to it. Kick off her boot, grab the blade and throw. Should take her somewhere between one and two seconds.\n\nLara tensed.\n\nReiss smiled and waved to one of the men behind her.\n\n\"Search her,\" he said. \"Thoroughly.\"\n\nHands seized her and drew her back, away from the doctor. Someone grabbed her pack and pulled it off her shoulders.\n\n\"Hello, Lara,\" a man whispered in her ear. It was Sean. \"Hold still\u2014this won't take a minute.\"\n\nHe found the knife strapped to one ankle right away and took the gun tucked into her waistband, as well. His hands began roaming elsewhere then, all over her body. In between trying to keep the disgust off her face and herself from kicking him in the groin, Lara realized that in about two seconds Sean was going to find the butterfly knife hidden in the small of her back and then she would have no way to get Reiss.\n\n\"You missed something,\" she said. The tips of his fingers were inches away from touching the knife.\n\nSean's hands stopped moving.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"My watch.\" She held it up for him to see. \"It's really a small high-powered laser.\"\n\n\"Ha,\" Sean said, and returned to his search.\n\nBut she'd used the intervening seconds to turn her body, ever so slightly.\n\nHis hands, when they started moving again, were past the knife.\n\nSean finished his search. He stepped in front of Lara and handed the Orb to Reiss.\n\nThe doctor was kneeling down next to one of the dead tribesmen. He gripped the man's face in his hand, turned it to one side, and frowned, staring at the markings there. Then he studied the etchings on the Orb.\n\n\"Remarkable. The similarity of the patterns.\" He shook his head. \"Primitives will do anything to please their gods.\"\n\nLara began, ever so slightly, to lower one of her arms. Despite the enthusiasm and thoroughness with which he'd conducted his search, Sean had left her shirttail tucked in. She was going to have to pull it out before grabbing the knife and that would add a second to her task. Any head start she could get on the maneuver, she would need.\n\nReiss stood and walked closer.\n\n\"Thank you, Lara, for leading me here. And for finding the Orb in the first place. I'm sure you are aware that if you hadn't found the Luna Temple, none of this would be possible.\"\n\n\"It had crossed my mind.\" The doctor was ten feet away\u2014easily within killing range. The problem was Sean, whose gun was pressed right up against the back of her skull. The second she moved for the knife, he would fire. And if she tried to take him out, the other guards would get her.\n\n\"My getting the box is a foregone conclusion,\" Reiss said. \"However, you've seen its exact location. You can save me hours\u2014perhaps even days. I'll make you a proposal. Help me\u2014and I'll make it worth your time.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Thanks, but\u2014\"\n\nReiss took another step forward.\n\n\"Think about what I'm offering before you answer. The chance of a lifetime. The chance to find out how all of this began.\" Reiss's gaze bore into her. \"Life, Lara\u2014the origin of all we are. Don't tell me that's not tempting.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"That's what got Pandora in trouble.\"\n\nReiss shook his head. \"Ah, Lara. I admire your resolve.\"\n\nHe was within arm's reach now. She might be able to do it\u2014have the knife in her hand before Sean could fire. A lunge forward, executed properly, and even a bullet would not be able to stop her.\n\nIt was a chance worth taking, Lara thought. Especially given the alternatives.\n\nShe tensed, ready to move\u2014\n\n\"They told me you wouldn't do it,\" Reiss said.\n\nLara paused. \"They.\"\n\nThe doctor snapped his fingers and a single guard emerged from one of the choppers, holding a machine pistol ready. A second later, two other men\u2014dressed in civilian clothes\u2014jumped to the ground.\n\nBryce and Hillary.\n\nShe felt all the air come out of her at once. The guard marched the two men toward them.\n\nBoth men had been beaten\u2014Hillary had a particularly nasty welt above one eye.\n\n\"And I told them you would do it,\" Reiss said. \"Rather than lose two more friends. These, your closest\u2026\"\n\n\"Sorry, Lara,\" Hillary said. \"We couldn't stop them. They\u2014\"\n\n\"It's all right.\" She turned her attention to Bryce, who had remained silent. \"I should have realized you'd never mess up those tones by accident.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I should have known you'd hear the distortion and found another way to throw you off.\"\n\n\"You should have,\" Lara agreed, which earned her a brief smile from Bryce.\n\nReiss stepped in between them.\n\n\"Take us to the cradle of life, Lara. It's your destiny to see what's inside. It would be foolish to stop when you're so close.\"\n\nHer eyes darted over his shoulder and found first Hillary's gaze, then Bryce's. She could see the determination she felt in their eyes, as well.\n\nReiss could never be allowed to get to Pandora. No matter what the cost.\n\nShe steeled herself, more aware than ever of the knife, pressing against her back.\n\n\"He's right, Lara.\"\n\nKosa, who had remained silent several long minutes, stepped up next to her.\n\n\"It's foolish to stop. Especially when we are so close. Just through that canyon\u2014remember? Such a short walk might save your friends.\"\n\nFor a second she didn't know what Kosa was talking about. Had he lost his senses? Take Reiss to Pandora? Yes, that short walk might save her friends, but\u2014\n\nAnd then it came to her.\n\nThe shadow guardians.\n\nThey were out there, in the canyon. And she suspected AK-47s would be as useless against them as spears.\n\n\"I'm up for a walk,\" Lara said. \"If it spares my friends.\"\n\n\"Excellent,\" Reiss replied. \"I knew you'd see reason.\"\n\nHe barked out a series of orders then, and split the group."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Bryce couldn't believe what had just happened.\n\n\"What is she thinking?\" he asked Hillary, as the two were being marched back toward the helicopter.\n\n\"She's not thinking, she's feeling. A damned ridiculous time to start acting all emotional, if you ask me.\"\n\nBryce stopped walking. He'd never heard Hillary swear before\u2014the words didn't sound right coming out of his mouth.\n\n\"Keep moving, you.\" The guard jabbed Bryce in the back with the end of his rifle.\n\nHe led them toward one of the copters. As they strode to the door, Bryce saw the pilot, night visor on his helmet down, studying the instrument panel with the oddest little smile on his face. The man had a nasty cut on one of his wrists\u2014a ring-shaped bruise, gouged deep into the skin.\n\nOdd. Bryce hadn't noticed that before.\n\nTheir guard slid the copter door open.\n\n\"The doctor wants them kept in here for the time being. Any particular place you want 'em?\"\n\n\"Anywhere is fine.\" The pilot turned around in his seat then, and flipped up the visor on his helmet.\n\n\"Hillary,\" he said. \"And you must be Bryce.\"\n\nHillary visibly blanched. \"Sheridan.\"\n\n\"Bloody hell,\" the guard said and raised his rifle.\n\nBryce saw the flash of a knife in Terry's hand and threw himself to the floor of the copter.\n\nDarkness fell as they marched on.\n\nLara and Kosa were in the lead, guards flanking them on either side. Sean followed, directly behind, his eyes never leaving her for an instant. Reiss and the rest of the eleven men he'd brought held the rear.\n\nLara was moving by instinct now\u2014taking them out of the jungle, into a narrow, winding canyon. There was no trail to follow, no familiar landmarks for her to set a course by, save the occasional glimpses of the mountain's summit. The landscape was desolate and deserted, and as the sun set, shadows began to play tricks with her vision.\n\nOn a rocky path that snaked along one side of the canyon wall, she stumbled and Kosa caught her arm.\n\n\"Thanks.\" The two of them exchanged a glance.\n\n\"How close are we?\" Kosa said, and she knew he was asking not about Pandora, but the shadow guardians. She had been wondering the same thing herself for the past several minutes\u2014looking for the cone-shaped rock formations she had been looking at when she sensed the guardian's presence.\n\nNo such formations were in sight.\n\n\"I don't know,\" she told Kosa and started up the path again, hoping they hadn't bet millions of lives on creatures that didn't even exist.\n\nSome time later, Reiss called for a break. He allowed them all a five-minute rest and directed one of the guards to pass out water and rations to everyone. Everyone, that is, except for Kosa.\n\n\"We should maintain a bit of urgency about this, after all,\" he told Lara.\n\nShe was about to protest when Kosa laid a hand on her arm.\n\n\"It's all right. You forget who I am\u2014where I come from.\" He straightened and stared at Reiss. \"I have gone for days without food or drink in this country.\"\n\nReiss smiled. \"Hopefully this won't take anywhere near as long as that.\"\n\nThey marched on, heading up the canyon walls. It was night now\u2014the guards flanking her and Kosa took out flashlights and shone them on the path ahead. The landscape began to look familiar to Lara\u2014the rock formations, the dirt beneath her feet\u2026this was the way the Orb had shown her.\n\nAnd then, all at once, the path came to an end.\n\nThey stood at the edge of a forest. Not jungle\u2014the trees ahead of her were tall, slender, isolated shapes against the moonlit sky beyond. There was no brush in the space between the trees\u2014no signs of life anywhere.\n\n\"The Petrified Forest,\" Kosa said.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I've heard of this place, but\u2014\"\n\nA terrible scream came from the trees directly in front of them, followed almost instantaneously by a second and then a third, each louder than the next.\n\n\"Jesus Christ,\" one of the guards said. \"What the hell was that?\"\n\nKosa pointed to the treetops. Lara saw shapes darting about there, and a second later, her eyes had adjusted enough that she could pick out details.\n\n\"Baboons.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Kosa said. \"They're letting us know this is their territory. They will defend it aggressively.\"\n\n\"Filthy apes,\" Sean said, stepping forward and raising his gun to his shoulder.\n\n\"No, no,\" Reiss said. \"Save the ammunition. They will fall back.\"\n\nThe doctor was right\u2014even now, the apes were scurrying away from them, into the depths of the forest. Lara followed their progress and then saw something else, in the distance beyond.\n\nThe final rise to the summit. The moonlight made it hard to judge distances accurately, but she guessed they had three more miles to go, at the most.\n\nReiss was within striking distance of Pandora.\n\nIf the shadow guardians didn't show soon, she was going to have to make alternate plans to deal with him.\n\nThe doctor stepped up alongside her.\n\n\"Through here or not?\" he demanded.\n\nLara hesitated a moment, then decided that if it came down to a fight, the forest would provide her better cover\u2014a better chance at turning the tables on Reiss.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said.\n\nSean stepped up on her other side.\n\n\"Then move,\" he said, pushing her\u2014and then Kosa\u2014into the forest.\n\nIt was like entering another world.\n\nPetrified Forest was perhaps not an entirely accurate name\u2014whatever the trees were that made up this patch of jungle, they were most definitely not petrified\u2014but she could see where the term had come from. The trees looked as if they were made of stone\u2014gray, sleek, branchless shafts that stood stock straight, spaced apart with what seemed like almost mathematical precision.\n\nThey didn't, Lara decided, seem like living things at all.\n\nShafts of moonlight shone down through the canopy, casting one patch of forest in brilliant white and leaving a second, right next to it, in pitch darkness. All the guards had flashlights out now and the beams, darting through the woods, catching the glare from the moon in places, turned the forest around them into an eerie, flickering light show.\n\nNext to her, Kosa's head suddenly darted left and then right.\n\n\"What is it?\" she asked quietly.\n\n\"Listen.\"\n\nGradually, she began to hear it.\n\nA low, rumbling sound\u2014like the distorted tremors of some angry volcano. There were subsonic components to the noise, as well\u2014something felt as much as heard, a sound that reached right inside her and made her feel faintly queasy and more than a little bit scared.\n\nBecause she knew exactly what the sound was.\n\n\"Shadow guardians,\" she whispered to Kosa.\n\n\"Just in time,\" he nodded, casting a fearful gaze around, looking not at all happy about the news.\n\nReiss stepped forward.\n\n\"Keep moving.\"\n\nLara turned around and smiled at him.\n\n\"Your wish is my command,\" she said and set off again.\n\nBryce knew Sheridan was less likely to kill them than Reiss, but the man still made him very, very nervous. The way he had methodically dispatched every guard Reiss had left behind, betraying not an ounce of remorse or emotion as he went about his business\u2026that MI6 man had been right. Sheridan was a killing machine. Best to stay out of his way entirely.\n\nHillary had the same idea, apparently. The two of them hadn't moved a muscle since Sheridan had gone after their guard. They stood outside the helicopter he'd been hiding in, watching as he scavenged among the equipment that had belonged to Reiss's men, picking and choosing his weapons.\n\nHe slung a single rifle across his shoulder and stalked over to them.\n\n\"Do you know where she's going?\"\n\nBryce and Hillary looked at each other.\n\n\"No,\" Bryce said. \"We don't.\"\n\nSheridan studied them carefully.\n\n\"What are you going to do?\" Hillary asked.\n\nSheridan suddenly jabbed a pistol right up against Hillary's throat.\n\n\"Worried about your precious skins? Or your precious Lara?\"\n\nBryce tried to clear his throat. It came out as a squeak.\n\n\"Both, actually.\"\n\n\"I don't blame you,\" Sheridan replied. \"But you don't have anything to fear from me.\"\n\n\"I'd find that easier to believe without the gun at my throat,\" Hillary croaked.\n\nSheridan lowered the weapon.\n\n\"I don't suppose either of you can fly a helicopter?\"\n\nBryce nodded. \"I can.\"\n\n\"What\u2026?\" Hillary shook his head. \"Don't fool around, Bryce. He's serious.\"\n\n\"He\" meaning Sheridan. But Bryce was serious, too.\n\n\"I have one hundred and fifty hours of flight time.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Sheridan looked impressed.\n\n\"Yes. Between simulators and models.\"\n\n\"How about the real thing? How many hours have you actually spent flying a copter?\"\n\n\"Eleven.\"\n\nHillary moaned softly. But Sheridan, to Bryce's surprise, didn't seem deterred by that revelation at all.\n\n\"You're only going to fly it once I'm gone, so\u2026\"\n\nHe threw Bryce a set of keys.\n\n\"Those are for the shackles. Undo yourselves and let's get this thing in the air.\"\n\nHe climbed into the copter.\n\nA moment later, Bryce and a very reluctant Hillary followed.\n\nThey went another fifty feet through the forest when suddenly, someone screamed.\n\nThe noise came from the back of the group. Everyone stopped walking at once.\n\n\"What the hell was that?\" Sean asked.\n\n\"Those baboons?\" one of the guards asked hopefully.\n\n\"Not a baboon,\" Reiss said. His eyes went to Lara and he frowned. \"That was a man.\"\n\nAnother guard\u2014Lara didn't recognize him, he must have been with the group bringing up the rear\u2014came jogging forward. \"Cassovitch. He was walking with us a minute ago and now he's gone.\"\n\nSean frowned. He pointed to the guard who'd just joined them and then two others.\n\n\"You three. Check on him!\"\n\nThe men nodded\u2014somewhat reluctantly, Lara thought\u2014and turned around, heading back into the forest the way they'd come.\n\nLara looked up to find Reiss's eyes still on her. The good doctor suspected something was up. Smart man.\n\nFor all the good it would do him.\n\nThey walked on. Kosa and she were alone at the front of the group now. He cast a nervous glance over his shoulder.\n\n\"Whatever they are. They're getting closer.\"\n\nLara nodded and thought: Just in time. The summit was getting closer, as well.\n\nAll at once, gunfire exploded behind them. One weapon, then a second, and a third. She heard screaming\u2014sudden, intense, agonized. And beneath the screaming\u2026other sounds, as well. Low-pitched, rumbling\u2026not human.\n\nA burst of staccato gunfire sounded again\u2014then the forest fell silent.\n\n\"What's happening back there?\" Sean asked. He looked at Reiss, and the doctor, in turn, looked at Lara once more.\n\nThey were all facing back the way they'd come now. The man at the rear group raised his weapon.\n\n\"There!\" He pointed at one of the trees. Lara didn't see anything at first.\n\nThen a shadow swooped down out of the forest and passed between the guard and the tree he pointed at\u2014a bat? No. Too big to be a bat.\n\nWith a howl, the guard ran forward, firing as he went.\n\nHe got perhaps ten feet before something reached down from the trees and grabbed him up.\n\nThere was a single agonized scream and then nothing.\n\n\"The hell with this.\" Sean broke from her side and stepped forward.\n\n\"Two teams, epsilon formation. Shoot to kill,\" he barked to the remaining men and separated them. \"Go.\"\n\nThey swarmed through the trees, spreading out, rifles at the ready.\n\nShadows danced around them.\n\nOne guard fired into the air, barely missing the man next to him.\n\n\"Careful!\" someone shouted.\n\nThe guard on point, crouched over in combat position, turned around to Sean.\n\n\"Something in the branches over there,\" he said. \"Give me cover, and I'll\u2014\"\n\nA blur of black shot through the air and literally sliced him in two. He died with a gurgle.\n\nThe guard next to him broke and ran. Another began firing at the spot where the first had stood.\n\nShadows were suddenly everywhere. Gunfire and screaming filled the air.\n\nIt was a slaughter.\n\n\"Poor bastards,\" Kosa said.\n\nLara didn't share the sentiment. Those poor bastards had helped kill her friends. She didn't mind watching them die. Not in the slightest.\n\nSean fired into the air, screaming futilely at his men.\n\n\"Cease fire! Fall back! Cease fire!\"\n\nReiss drew his gun and jammed it into Lara's face.\n\n\"What is this? What are you doing?\" Anger distorted his features.\n\nShe smiled. \"Thinning the herd.\"\n\nHe gritted his teeth and spun around again.\n\nThe four of them\u2014Sean, Reiss, Kosa, and her\u2014were separated from the guards. Inching slowly away from the killings before them.\n\n\"The tribal leaders were right,\" Kosa said. \"We don't belong here.\"\n\n\"If you have a way out, I'm all ears,\" Lara said, backing up against one of the trees. Not that she was sorry she'd come\u2014Reiss was going to be finished in a few more seconds and that alone was worth the price of admission\u2014but she didn't think it right for Kosa\u2014or Hillary and Bryce, wherever they were\u2014to pay for her mistakes. Her arrogance.\n\nThe tribal leader's words\u2014Gus's words\u2014came back to her then.\n\nSome things were never meant to be found.\n\nAnd she remembered the tribal leader had had a few other things to say, as well.\n\n\"What did he say about them?\" she asked Kosa. \"The shadow guardians?\"\n\nKosa nodded. \"They move like the wind\u2026\"\n\nA terrified guard came to a stop right before them and froze.\n\nShadows flickered nearby, hovering in the air.\n\n\"\u2026earth and sky are meaningless.\"\n\n\"Whatever walks their land dies,\" Lara finished.\n\nShe stared at the guard, still frozen in fear, just as another of Reiss's men ran past.\n\nThe shadow darted away from the first man and blanketed the other. He screamed.\n\nAnd Lara knew.\n\nWhatever walks their land dies.\n\nA black shape crossed before her eyes and stopped directly in front of her and Kosa.\n\nShe got her first look at a shadow guardian.\n\nIt ebbed and flowed before her, like a pool of dark oil spilled on the surface of a lake. Roughly the shape of a man one instant and formless the next. She glimpsed a single, dark red Orb in the center of it\u2014an eye, a mouth\u2014and the glinting surface of what could have been metal.\n\nIt looked like nothing on earth she'd ever seen before. Which only made sense.\n\nThe guardian flickered in the air and moved from her side to Kosa's. She felt him tense, ready to run.\n\n\"No. Don't move!\"\n\nHe looked at Lara, the question on his lips, in his eyes.\n\n\"Whatever walks their land dies,\" she repeated, and nodded to the fallen shape that had been one of Reiss's men on the ground before them. \"They only react to movement.\"\n\n\"Then we better not move.\"\n\nThe voice was Reiss's. He came around the side of the tree and put his gun on her throat. Jammed it right up against her windpipe so hard that for a second, Lara thought he was going to drive it right through her neck.\n\nFrom the look on his face, he wanted nothing more than to do just that.\n\nSean came around the other side of the tree and put a gun on Kosa.\n\n\"Who wants to see if the coast is clear?\" he asked, pushing Kosa forward.\n\nLara looked around and saw two things.\n\nReiss's men were all dead.\n\nAnd they had come to the end of the Petrified Forest.\n\nJust beyond, framed by the suddenly bright light of the moon, lay the summit of Ol Doinyo Lengai. The mountain of God.\n\n\"I know it's close,\" Reiss said. \"I see it in your eyes. Take me to Pandora's box.\"\n\n\"I don't know how,\" she said.\n\nReiss shook his head. \"Now.\"\n\n\"I can't\u2014\"\n\n\"DO IT NOW!\" he screamed and lifted his gun to her face, on the verge of losing control and firing.\n\nThen he pivoted the weapon around and pointed it at Kosa.\n\n\"You're the one who wanted to go on this walk,\" Reiss said. \"Start walking.\"\n\nHe fired the gun into the ground.\n\nKosa flinched, but didn't move.\n\n\"The next one will be higher up,\" Reiss said, taking aim at Kosa's head.\n\n\"Don't,\" Lara said. \"Those things will tear him apart.\"\n\n\"Of course they will.\" Reiss turned to Kosa. \"Start walking. Do not stop walking until Lady Croft takes me to Pandora.\"\n\n\"He has nothing to do with this,\" she protested. \"It was my idea, the shadow guardians\u2014\"\n\nReiss fired a second shot, right next to Kosa's foot.\n\n\"Shadow guardians, is that what they're called? Useful information.\" He raised the gun again. \"Of course I won't kill him, that would ruin my bargaining position but I shall put your friend through a great deal of pain if he does not\u2014START\u2014WALKING!\"\n\nKosa turned to her and attempted a smile.\n\n\"I am not worried, Lara. Don't\u2014\"\n\n\"Enough already.\" Sean whacked him across the face with his pistol. \"Shut up and walk.\"\n\nKosa turned to the forest. Hesitated a moment.\n\n\"Now!\" Reiss screamed, and fired.\n\nLara's heart leapt into her chest\u2014Reiss really was out of control, he had said he wouldn't kill Kosa and then he fired anyway\u2014but then she saw the bullet had missed and relaxed.\n\nOnly for a second, though.\n\nThe bullet had missed because Kosa had started walking forward.\n\nAnd the second he'd taken his first step, shadows began gathering in the forest. A low-pitched rumbling noise reached her ears.\n\nWhat to do?\n\nHer gaze fell on an oddly shaped rock formation just ahead of her. A small cone of volcanic rock, no more than three feet high.\n\nAnd suddenly she saw there were at least half a dozen other, similarly shaped rock formations all around her.\n\nLara flashed back to this morning, when she'd stood aboard the Chinese junk, holding the Orb in her hands. This was the landscape she had seen then\u2014with one difference.\n\nShe cast her eyes about the rocky summit, searching for the final image the Orb had shown her.\n\n\"I don't like his chances.\"\n\nThat was Sean.\n\nLara looked up, her concentration broken, and saw Kosa still walking toward the forest, his face impassive.\n\nThe shadow guardians were waiting for him\u2014blurring and swirling behind the slender tree trunks, moving faster than the eye could follow.\n\nHer friend was going to die any second, unless she made something happen.\n\nAnd then she saw it.\n\nA cone of pitch-black ash, dark ooze gurgling out of the top of it.\n\nA cone identical to the one the Orb had shown her this morning.\n\nIdentical to the one she'd seen in the Luna Temple, a lifetime ago.\n\nShe turned to Reiss.\n\n\"Give me the Orb.\"\n\nHe took it out of the pack and held it. \"Why? Why do you want it?\"\n\nShe looked toward Kosa. The shadow guardians were coming out of the trees now. He continued to walk forward, seemingly oblivious.\n\nDamn it.\n\nLara took a step toward Reiss and the Orb.\n\n\"You want to get out of this alive?\" she asked. \"You want to find the cradle of life\u2014then give me the Orb.\"\n\nHe stared at her a moment then, and she could see his mind working, weighing his options.\n\n\"I don't think so.\" Reiss smiled. \"Tell me what to do with it.\"\n\nLara met his gaze head on.\n\n\"No,\" she said.\n\nReiss frowned and hesitated.\n\nLara didn't.\n\nShe snatched the Orb from Reiss's hand and leapt forward, running toward the black cone. Behind her, the guardians' low-pitched rumbling literally doubled in intensity.\n\nLara had no doubt she was now their primary target.\n\nBut Sean had moved, as well.\n\nHe caught her from behind and grabbed hold of one arm. Lara tried to twist away and fumbled the Orb in her hands\u2014\n\nAnd then she caught it again and swung it behind her, toward Sean, using its weight to regain her balance. She continued her spin, moving like a discus thrower, moving through a full three hundred-sixty-degree turn, ending up with her right fist connecting squarely with Sean's jaw.\n\nHe rolled with the blow and came up on his feet, gun in hand.\n\nAnd then the shadow guardians were on him.\n\nHe had no time to react, no time to do anything other than utter a wordless exclamation of surprise\u2014and then he was jerked into the air and literally snapped in two.\n\nThe guardians slammed him down on the ground with such force that he disappeared into the earth.\n\nReiss stood motionless, shocked into silence.\n\nLara gathered herself and the Orb\u2014and ran again for the black cone.\n\n\"Stop!\" Reiss shouted. She glanced over her shoulder and saw him take aim.\n\nKosa blindsided the doctor, knocking him to the ground.\n\nThe shadow guardians flowed over them, leaving the two men untouched, coming straight for her.\n\nLara gritted her teeth and ran harder.\n\nTwo meters away from the black cone, she saw a series of smaller rock formations, arranged like stepping-stones. She jumped for the first and used it to reach the second, each formation taking her higher than the one before, until she stood opposite the top of the black cone.\n\nShe heard shadow guardians behind her and yelling that sounded like Reiss, and she set the Orb down on top of the cone, duplicating the arrangement she'd found back in the Luna Temple.\n\nThe second the two touched, both disintegrated into a fine black ash.\n\nThe rumbling of the shadow guardians behind her disappeared.\n\nAs Lara turned, the entire cone crumbled, giving way underneath her. She fell to the ground, only it was black ash, too, and she continued to fall.\n\nShe looked up and saw Reiss jumping down after her.\n\nThen the earth swallowed them both."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "All at once, the tracking device he'd put on Croft's pack stopped working.\n\nTerry jiggled the GPS display. Nothing.\n\n\"Something the matter?\"\n\nThat was Bryce, in the copilot's chair next to him.\n\n\"Don't know,\" Terry said.\n\nThey'd been tracking Lara and Reiss rather easily up until now, staying well behind them so as to keep their presence a secret. Then this. Terry frowned. He couldn't take a chance on losing them now\u2014not when they were so close to the box.\n\nHe decided to move closer.\n\n\"Hang on,\" he told Bryce and Hillary and gunned the copter forward.\n\nThey flew up the side of Ol Doinyo Lengai, passing from jungle into a narrow, rocky canyon. The wind currents were tricky\u2014Terry had to stay focused on the instrumentation, on holding the copter steady as they climbed.\n\nSo he missed the exact moment the canyon ended and the forest began. All he knew was that one minute he was flying over rock and the next\u2026\n\n\"That's the weirdest-looking jungle I've ever seen,\" Bryce said, his nose pressed to the window.\n\nTerry looked down. It didn't look like jungle to him\u2014even in the dark, he could tell there was nothing green growing down there. The trees below looked as if they'd been covered with a thick coat of gray ash.\n\nTerry glanced at the GPS display and realized they'd come to the exact spot where the signal from the tracking device had stopped working. He flicked on the copter's spotlight and shone it down on the ground below.\n\nBodies\u2014no, make that parts of bodies\u2014were scattered everywhere. Hanging in the trees at the edge of the forest, strewn across the sandy ground directly beneath them.\n\nThere was blood, too, wherever he looked.\n\n\"Ugh,\" Bryce said.\n\nThere was no sign of Lara, or Reiss, or any living thing, for that matter.\n\nTerry frowned and set the copter to hover.\n\n\"Take over,\" he told Bryce. \"I'm going to see what the hell happened down there.\"\n\nLara slammed into the ground and lay there a second, stunned.\n\nShe was in some sort of cavern. The walls, the floor, the ceiling above her\u2014all were a dull, mottled shade of black. Anthracite.\n\nThat was all she had time to notice before Reiss plummeted to the ground next to her. His gun went skittering across the floor.\n\nShe dove for it, but Reiss was closer. He grabbed the gun and then dragged her to her feet, holding the weapon to her head.\n\n\"You took us through them on purpose!\"\n\n\"Wouldn't you?\"\n\nHe cocked the gun and pressed it harder into her head. His eyes blazed and she could tell he was using every bit of self-control he had not to shoot her right then and there.\n\nReiss took a deep breath. He eased the gun away from her head, still keeping it cocked and pointed directly at her.\n\n\"Do you have any other surprises for me, Lara?\"\n\n\"No. What happens from here on out is a mystery to me.\"\n\n\"Then let's explore, shall we?\" He looked around. Lara saw what he did\u2014the cavern was closed on one end, but at the other, someone\u2014something?\u2014had carved rough steps, leading down, directly into the rock face.\n\nReiss waved his weapon in that direction. \"You first. And don't think you'll be able to outsmart me.\"\n\nLara bit back her reply and started walking.\n\nThere was a small opening in the cavern above them\u2014the one they'd made falling through to the chamber. Beams of moonlight shone down through that opening, just as they had through the trees in the Petrified Forest. Only here, the effect was different\u2014not light and darkness, but light and shadow. As they descended, Lara noticed that shadow seemed to change texture, becoming almost solid one minute, transparent the next.\n\nShe brushed up against what she thought was a cavern wall and her arm went right through it.\n\nReiss noticed and frowned.\n\n\"Keep moving,\" he said.\n\nBut the farther down they went, the more pronounced the effect got. The more confusing the chamber around them became\u2014what was solid, what was illusion.\n\nLara walked smack into a wall and Reiss ran into her.\n\nShe swung for him and he danced back out of the way, just out of her reach.\n\n\"Don't do that again,\" he cautioned. \"Or I'll shoot you where you stand.\"\n\nShe turned without a word and started down the stairs again.\n\nExcept she was heading upward.\n\nLara stopped where she stood. Clearly this was no ordinary cave. Just as clearly, whatever sort of technology (or magic, if you wanted to call it that) had produced Pandora and created the shadow warriors as its first line of defense, had set up another obstacle between the box and whoever desired its power.\n\nReiss, on the step beneath her now, was shaking his head.\n\n\"What sort of place is this?\" he asked out loud.\n\nA place that was never meant to be found, Lara thought.\n\nThey continued onward. Lara began to lose her sense of direction\u2014where the steps had turned, which way they'd come from. She had to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other, on pushing her body through what at times felt like an amusement park attraction\u2014the Incredible Chamber of Optical Illusions, where down is up, left is right, and nothing is what it seems.\n\nAll at once the steps ended and they were on level ground.\n\n\"There it is,\" Reiss whispered.\n\nLara looked around. The chamber they'd entered was empty, save for a small, star-shaped pool at the far end. The pool was filled with a thick, viscous, tarlike-looking substance\u2014the same black goo, she realized, that had been oozing forth from the cone above.\n\nIn the middle of the pool floated a small box.\n\n\"Pandora.\"\n\nShe couldn't tell what the box was made of\u2014stone? meal? It looked ancient, primordial.\n\nNext to her, Reiss laughed out loud.\n\n\"Perfect, isn't it? All that power in such a small container. The gods don't need fire and brimstone to kill.\"\n\nNeither did she, Lara suddenly realized.\n\nShe'd forgotten all about the blade hidden in the small of her back. All she needed to do was get close enough to use it.\n\nReiss pushed her forward.\n\n\"Let's have a closer look, shall we?\"\n\nTerry sat in the open door of the copter and lowered a rope to the ground.\n\nHe was about to follow it down when he noticed a sinkhole at the edge of the forest. He shone a light on the rim and saw flashlights scattered on the ground nearby.\n\nHe turned to Bryce, who had the helicopter in a hover, and motioned him to bring the copter closer to the hole. He saw scuffmarks on the ground near the hole.\n\n\"I think we've found them,\" he said.\n\nHe pulled the rope back up and let it down again. It passed through the hole and into the darkness beyond.\n\nThen he grabbed his rifle and a pack full of supplies.\n\n\"I'll be back,\" he said to Bryce and Hillary, and jumped.\n\n\"With Lara?\" a voice called after him.\n\nHe saw no sense in answering\u2014whatever reply he made would have been lost in the roar of the chopper's blades.\n\nReiss stopped at the pool's edge and stared at the black liquid bubbling within.\n\n\"I don't like the looks of that,\" he said and took hold of Lara's wrist with his free hand. He turned her so she was facing directly toward the pool.\n\n\"I see no reason to break with tradition. I think a woman should collect the box.\"\n\nBefore Lara could tell him what to do with his tradition, he kicked her legs out from under her, sending her falling face forward toward the pool.\n\nOnly the fact that he hadn't let go of her wrist saved Lara from plunging in.\n\n\"Go on\u2026\" Reiss said, the gun in one hand pressed to her head, his other hand holding her up, dangling her over the bubbling, black liquid.\n\nHe lowered her closer to the pool.\n\nLara made a show of stretching out with her free arm, letting her hand dangle inches away from the box. In truth, she could have grabbed it from where she was right now. But she couldn't just give it to Reiss\u2014he would kill her the second he had it.\n\nHe lowered her closer to the pool and a few loose strands of her hair brushed the surface of the black liquid.\n\nThey dissolved instantly.\n\nLara flinched and drew back.\n\n\"Go on!\" Reiss repeated. \"Take the box.\"\n\nHer fingers touched the box and Lara knew she was out of time.\n\nIf ever she was going to make a move, this was the moment.\n\nTerry landed softly on the cavern floor and unhitched the rope from his belt.\n\nFor some reason, his heart was going a mile a minute. He'd actually been apprehensive\u2014all right, scared\u2014sliding down toward the sinkhole, as if something was trying to get to him before he disappeared beneath the surface.\n\nRidiculous. There hadn't been a single living creature above within miles.\n\nTerry let his eyes adjust to the dim light and got his bearings.\n\nThere was Croft's pack, on the ground in front of him.\n\nSo she was here. No surprise\u2014there was no place in the world Croft wouldn't go if it meant an adventure. Glory. And the money that went with it, of course.\n\nAll right, for her it might not have been so much about the money\u2014only because Lady Croft didn't need it. She was fabulously, independently wealthy\u2014to the manor born. Unlike some of us, Terry thought.\n\nWe need every dollar we can get.\n\nThe cavern was closed on one end, so Terry set off toward the other. Found steps going down and took them.\n\nA minute on, he walked straight into a brick wall. He'd taken a wrong turn somehow. So he went back to the cavern he'd landed in and tried again.\n\nThe same thing happened.\n\nHe turned to start back up\u2014\n\nAnd stepped down instead.\n\nHe froze a moment and looked around.\n\nThe walls seemed to literally be changing shape.\n\n\"What sort of place is this?\" Terry whispered, shaking his head.\n\nLara had decided. Reiss was not going to get his hands on Pandora, no matter what. Even if it cost her life.\n\nOf course, she hoped it wouldn't come to that.\n\nHe pressed the gun closer to the back of her head. He lowered her closer to the pool.\n\n\"Pandora,\" he whispered. \"Give it to me.\"\n\n\"I'll give it to you, all right,\" she snapped.\n\nShe swung her free arm behind her then and grabbed the knife from the small of her back. Then she did the last thing in the world that Reiss could have expected.\n\nShe stabbed him in the arm\u2014the arm that held her wrist, the arm that was keeping her from falling into the acid.\n\nReiss cried out in pain and let her go. She released the knife and dropped toward the pool. Reiss fired as she fell. The bullet passed close enough to literally part her hair.\n\nLara twisted in midair and kicked out.\n\nHer foot found Reiss's chin and connected squarely, sending him flying backward through the air.\n\nHer hands found the edge of the pool. She landed in a push-up stance, her face the width of a finger away from the acid.\n\nShe scrambled to her feet. Reiss did the same, picked up his gun again, and fired.\n\nThe bullet passed by her shoulder and smashed into the chamber wall.\n\nLara somersaulted through the air, landed on her feet, and ran back the way they came.\n\nReiss fired again and agony exploded across the back of her right thigh.\n\nShe stumbled, bit her lip to keep from screaming, and kept running.\n\nFinally.\n\nReiss could just kill her and be done with it.\n\nNo more threats to Croft or her friends, no more false promises of wealth and power. He didn't need her to share some secret about the Orb, or to lead him to where Pandora had been hidden. He knew exactly where the chamber was now, where the box floated, and so he was free to hunt her down, shoot her like the dog she was, and feed her body to the acid. He would call for assistance then\u2014have the box removed from the pool, brought to the lab in Yemen, whatever lay within it analyzed, the antiserum created, and Pandora itself passed on to his buyers.\n\nReiss could picture every step of the process in his mind right now and the part he was going to enjoy most was seeing Croft's body dissolve into nothingness.\n\nThe hunt was off to a good start. He had got her with that last shot\u2014she'd been visibly limping as she ran. Reiss smiled and jogged after her, heading back up the steps.\n\nThe path widened suddenly and he looked up to find that he was teetering on the edge of a twenty-foot drop down to solid rock.\n\nReiss gasped and leaned backward, stopping himself from falling at the last possible instant.\n\nWhere had that drop come from?\n\nHe peered over the edge and noticed a beam of light shooting up at him from below. Its source was a hole in the floor that looked familiar to him. In fact, Reiss thought, it looked exactly like the hole in the chamber roof\u2014the one he and Croft had fallen through.\n\nHe looked up and saw the path he'd been walking on, now directly above him.\n\n\"What on earth\u2014\" he began, and then he was falling, up toward that path\u2026\n\nDown to the ground.\n\nReiss pushed himself up on his hands and knees and shook his head.\n\nMore of what he and Croft had encountered on the way down. Annoying, but effective as a last obstacle to Pandora. He couldn't help but wonder what sort of technology was involved here\u2014was gravity itself being manipulated? Or was some sort of optical illusion taking place? He favored the latter, given the way shadow and light had been manipulated here in the chamber, and above (Croft's shadow guardians), but he had no way of being certain.\n\nNot that it mattered. Whoever\u2014whatever\u2014had created this place was capable of performing near-miraculous feats\u2014which only made him want to eliminate Croft quickly and get back to the box that much sooner. Get it open and see what sort of biochemical miracles lay within.\n\nAh. And speak of the devil\u2026\n\nThere was Croft on the path twenty feet below him, oblivious to his presence.\n\nReiss smiled and raised his gun. He had a straight on head shot, no obstacles, and Croft had obligingly stopped moving for a moment.\n\nThis was going to be even easier than he'd expected.\n\nThen Croft looked up and saw him.\n\nReiss swore and fired. She gathered herself and sprang twenty feet through the air to her left\u2014\n\nAnd landed on the cavern wall, feet first, tilted ninety degrees from the position she'd started in.\n\n\"Impossible,\" Reiss said.\n\nThis whole place was impossible. It was like being trapped in an Escher painting, for God's sake. Down was up, left was down\u2014how was he supposed to know which direction was which?\n\nSilly question, he realized. He'd spent his lifetime acquiring knowledge, and there was really one correct way to learn anything. Experiment and deduction.\n\nCroft had done the experiment for him. She'd jumped left and fallen down. Therefore, at this instant\u2014\n\nLeft was down.\n\nDeduction complete.\n\nReiss jumped left and dropped down through space directly toward her.\n\nExcept as he fell, the chamber twisted, and suddenly Croft was on a ledge, above him.\n\nHe reached out to try and stop his fall and lost hold of the gun.\n\nCroft's eyes widened and she gathered herself and jumped down toward him.\n\nWrong, Lara. Reiss smiled in satisfaction as she flew past without stopping. You've miscalculated. Down is\u2014\n\nHe didn't get to finish the thought.\n\nCroft fell back up through the air at him and caught him square across the chin with her boot.\n\nReiss dropped to the ground\u2026right next to his gun.\n\nCroft saw. She turned to run.\n\nReiss grabbed the gun and stood. He brought the weapon to bear and fired.\n\nGravity was with him this time. Luck wasn't. The bullet missed her by inches.\n\nCroft limped out of sight and Reiss lowered his weapon.\n\nHe only had two bullets left.\n\nBetter make them count, he thought, and started off after her.\n\n\"We can't wait any longer.\"\n\nHillary, leaning out the copter door, turned around at Bryce.\n\n\"You're not seriously suggesting we abandon Lara?\"\n\n\"I don't know what the bloody hell else to do!\" Bryce shouted, louder than he'd intended.\n\nHillary glared at him.\n\n\"Look,\" Bryce said, pointing at the instrument panel, where the low fuel light was flashing insistently. \"I don't know how long that thing goes before we actually run out, but I have to think we don't have that much longer.\"\n\nHillary cursed (again, Bryce thought\u2014bad habit he was picking up), and climbed back in the copter.\n\nThey rose into the air.\n\n\"We'll go back to the clearing,\" Bryce said. \"We'll siphon off fuel from the other copters and we'll come back.\"\n\n\"In time, hopefully.\"\n\n\"In time,\" Bryce said. \"Besides, don't forget Sheridan's down there, too. He'll\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" Hillary snapped. \"No one knows what the hell Sheridan will do.\"\n\nThe second he entered the chamber, Terry saw the box.\n\nIt floated in a pool of dark, bubbling liquid at the far end of the cave.\n\nPandora. His for the taking.\n\nSomehow he'd managed to beat Croft and Reiss to the prize. Perhaps they were still lost on the steps leading here\u2014God knows he'd had to turn back more than once. No matter. He'd be sure and tell Croft all about Pandora. Afterward.\n\nHe'd brought a lead-lined bag to transport the box in. He pulled it out of his pack and started toward the pool.\n\nHalfway across the chamber, he stopped and sniffed the air.\n\nGunpowder.\n\nShots had been fired in here\u2014and quite recently.\n\nSo Croft and Reiss had gotten here first after all.\n\nHe set down the bag and shone the flash in a wide circle. The beam fell on flakes of dark stone, scattered along the floor by the far wall. He found the spot where the bullet had struck.\n\nA little farther on, he found the blood.\n\nIt was Croft's, he knew instantly\u2014it had to be. She was a crack shot. If she'd fired at Reiss, Terry would have found his body.\n\nSo she was injured. Reiss was chasing her.\n\nThat changed things.\n\nTerry might not wear the white hat these days, but he had been a marine once. Coming to the rescue was still part of the job description, as far as he was concerned.\n\nThe key word there being part, he thought, as his eyes went again to the box.\n\nShe was losing blood fast.\n\nThe wound was deeper than Lara had originally thought and running around on the leg wasn't helping. Not that she had much choice about that\u2014Reiss was still coming. Apparently he'd decided that finishing her off was more important than getting Pandora in a timely fashion.\n\nFine. He might have the Nobel Prize, but Lara would wager she had considerably more combat experience than he did.\n\nUnfortunately, being wounded tended to even things out.\n\nHer vision blurred. Lara leaned back against the cavern wall a moment to steady herself.\n\nReiss had chased her into a part of the chamber they hadn't passed through before. A bridge of some sort, looming high over the pool of acid Pandora floated in. Who knows, perhaps it hadn't even existed before, the way the walls seemed to keep shifting on her.\n\nShe looked down a moment and blinked. Now she really was seeing things.\n\nThe box was gone. How was that possible? Had Reiss doubled back to take it?\n\nShe heard the sound of a gun being cocked and turned.\n\nReiss stood in front of her, smiling.\n\nThen her vision blurred and two Reisses stood in front of her.\n\n\"Lady Croft,\" they both said. \"You seem to be in a bit of distress. Something I've done, I hope.\"\n\nLara blinked. The two Reisses resolved into one again and he moved closer.\n\nAnd as he moved, Lara realized that she had one final chance to end this\u2014here, now, on her terms.\n\nBecause Reiss was one step away from joining her on the bridge. One step away from being directly over the pool of acid.\n\nWounded she might be, but Lara knew she had one good leap left in her. One good leap that would send her and Reiss over the edge and into the pool below.\n\nUnfortunately, Reiss wasn't going to take that step.\n\n\"So it ends, Croft,\" he said, raising his weapon. \"Survival of the fittest. And the wisest.\"\n\n\"I don't think you're either of those.\"\n\nThe voice came from behind Reiss and now Lara knew she was really injured much worse than she'd thought, because not only was she seeing things, she was hearing them, as well. Impossible things.\n\nTerry Sheridan, who she'd left shackled to a slow boat in China, jumping down on the path behind Reiss.\n\nTerry Sheridan, proving everything she'd ever thought about him wrong, and coming to her rescue.\n\nExcept the doctor seemed to be seeing the exact same thing he was, for he'd spun around at the sound of Sheridan's sudden appearance, as well.\n\n\"Give me the gun and I'll make it painless,\" Sheridan said.\n\nReiss took a step backward\u2014the step she needed. She launched herself across the path, tackling Reiss and sending both of them off the ledge together, falling straight for the pool below."
            },
            {
                "title": "Twenty-TWO",
                "text": "Reiss's gun went off and fell out of the doctor's hand.\n\nThe doctor's eyes were wide with surprise. He had yet to react to the peril beneath them, had barely registered the fact that they were falling through the air.\n\nLara knew why\u2014Reiss was a scientist, given to careful contemplation of events unfolding before him. Situations like this, however, didn't lend themselves to contemplation. They required split-second reactions.\n\nLara was used to dealing in split seconds.\n\nEven as she'd leapt for Reiss, she was gauging the distance to the pool, weighing a half-dozen possible courses of action. As they'd gone over the ledge, she'd registered their relative positions in the air and decided instantly on the best way to insure not only Reiss's death, but her survival.\n\nAnd that one, she acted on.\n\nShe pulled the doctor closer and flipped him over in midair, so that he was facing up toward her. Then she snapped her arms and her one good leg out, pushing off, putting distance between the two of them.\n\nThe shell-shocked expression on his face hadn't changed at all. Reiss still looked like a deer, caught in the headlights. An apt comparison.\n\nHe was about to meet the same fate.\n\nThe gun smashed off the rim of the pool and skittered across the cavern floor.\n\nReiss plunged into the acid.\n\nFor a split second, Lara saw the expression on his face finally change, from shock to sheer agony as the black, bubbling liquid touched him.\n\nShe jumped down on him, landing feet first, simultaneously pushing him farther down into the acid and pushing herself back up into the air.\n\nShe flipped and rolled to the ground just outside the pool.\n\nThe soles of her boots were smoking where they'd touched acid.\n\n\"Fitter? Wiser?\" Lara shook her head. \"You weren't either of those, doctor.\"\n\nA skeletal hand shot out of the pool, clawed for the rim\u2026and failed.\n\nThe last of Dr. Jonathan Reiss dissolved before her eyes.\n\nShe turned and saw his gun lying in the dirt. Operating on instinct, Lara picked it up and tucked it into her waistband.\n\nAnd here coming toward her, through the far end of the chamber, was Terry.\n\n\"Nice work there.\" He smiled, nodding toward the pool.\n\n\"Thanks.\" She hesitated. \"And thank you for coming back, Terry.\"\n\n\"You're welcome\u2014Lara.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"You know that's the first time you've called me that. In a long time.\"\n\n\"I know.\" He set down his pack on the ground. \"Here. Let's take care of that wound.\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" Lara said.\n\n\"Yeah. Just the same.\" He eased her down to the ground and pulled some supplies out of his pack.\n\n\"Hillary? Bryce?\" Lara asked as he tended to her wound.\n\n\"They're fine. They're up there\u2014\" he nodded toward the surface. \"In a copter.\"\n\nLara nodded, then frowned. \"Wait a minute. Bryce is in a copter? He's not flying it, is he?\"\n\n\"He is. Not doing a half-bad job, either. Though I'm glad it's not my copter.\" Terry started to wrap the wound\u2014looser than she would have liked.\n\n\"Here\u2014let me.\" Lara took the gauze from his hand and finished dressing the wound. Terry helped her to her feet when she was done.\n\n\"I'm not fooled, you know.\"\n\n\"About what?\"\n\n\"I know the only reason you helped was to prove I was wrong about you.\"\n\nTerry smiled back. \"Come on. Let's get out of here.\"\n\nHe slung the pack over his shoulder and turned to go.\n\nIt was only then that Lara saw the other bag hanging from around his neck and the outline of what was contained within it.\n\nPandora.\n\nThe gauze in her fingers slipped through her hand.\n\n\"Terry.\"\n\nHe turned to look at her.\n\n\"No. We can't.\"\n\nHe saw where she was looking and his eyes widened in surprise.\n\n\"You're joking.\"\n\nShe shook her head.\n\n\"We just leave it here? When it's worth a fortune?\"\n\n\"Millions of people could die.\"\n\n\"You're being melodramatic. No one will actually use it\u2026\"\n\n\"You'd take that chance?\" She shook her head. \"Terry\u2014\"\n\n\"WHAT?\" He advanced on her, eyes blazing. \"You want to tell me again about those millions who could die? It won't happen. And I'm not going to leave this here on the chance it might. I served my country, then I served my time for going out on my own. I've helped keep this away from Reiss. I deserve my reward. I'm taking it.\"\n\nHe turned to go.\n\nLara stepped in front of him.\n\n\"That's the longest speech you ever made, Terry. Congratulations. Too bad it's all just a load of self-serving bull.\" She stared into his eyes. \"What happened to you, Terry? What happened to the man I knew in Chasong?\"\n\n\"I became wise in the ways of the world, that's all.\"\n\nHe took a step forward and she blocked him again.\n\n\"You have authorization to kill me? Better do it then. Because if you think standing in front of me is enough\u2026\"\n\nHe moved then, too fast for her to do anything, and cracked her across the face.\n\nLara fell to the ground, stunned. She blinked away tears.\n\n\"You don't have it in you to stop me, Croft. Because when it comes down to it, all your beliefs, all your ideals\u2014they're just words. They're not real. I am. And you've loved me. I don't care how strong you think you are. You're not going to choose them over me.\" He stared her in the eye. \"Now move.\"\n\nShe hesitated.\n\nTerry was right about one thing. It was time for her to make a choice. Her beliefs, her ideals\u2026or him.\n\n\"Fine,\" he said, shrugging. \"We can just stand here all day long and argue, and\u2014\"\n\nBut she wasn't listening. Because at the same time Terry had shrugged, his arm had started to move toward the gun in his waistband.\n\nSplit-second reactions, Lara thought, and her fingers closed around the grip of Reiss's gun.\n\n[ Twenty-Three ]\n\nTwo thousand years, or twenty-five thousand\u2014the force within the box knew no conception of time. It had no conception of space or distance, either.\n\nOne world was much the same as the next.\n\nLife and death, shadow and light\u2014all aspects of existence were contained within its being. It knew the essential, existential truths that lay at the heart of mankind's eternal, never-ending quest for knowledge.\n\nLara sensed all those things, somehow, as she held the box in her hands, on the verge of placing it back in the black pool. For a minute, she was tempted.\n\nThe lid seemed to lift a little, beckoning her to gaze within.\n\nJust a peek, she thought. Just a glimpse of the knowledge, the power that lay within.\n\nBut she knew how that story went.\n\nShe set the box down in the pool and stood.\n\nAll at once, a shaft of white light filled the room. Daybreak so soon?\n\n\"Lara!\" That was Kosa's voice coming from above.\n\nShe looked up toward the roof of the chamber and began to climb.\n\nIt wasn't just Kosa. Standing outside the crater that surrounded the entrance to the chamber, waiting for her, was the entire tribe. They had made the light she saw\u2014all of them carried flashlights, or lanterns, or lamps of some sort.\n\nKosa smiled and walked toward her. She smiled back, happy to see that he was all right, that neither his fight with Reiss or his encounter with the shadow guardians\u2014 Sudden terror filled her heart and she spun around, looking to the forest.\n\n\"They're gone. The shadow guardians,\" Kosa said.\n\n\"So is Reiss,\" Lara said.\n\nThe tribal leader stepped forward and spoke.\n\n\"The box is safe now, he says,\" Kosa told her.\n\nLara nodded. \"Will you tell him something for me?\" She looked the leader in the eye. \"Tell him I understand now, what he was saying before.\"\n\nShe looked back across the summit, at the primordial, windswept landscape, the towering cones of black rock, the pools of bubbling mud, and the entrance to Pandora's chamber.\n\nThe mountain of God.\n\n\"Tell him he was right,\" Lara said. \"Some things aren't meant to be found.\"\n\nThe descent to the village was a long one.\n\nThe whole way down, Lara found herself thinking about Terry.\n\nShe thought of him lying on his back in the chamber below, staring up to the heavens with a stunned expression on his face. To the last, he hadn't believed she would shoot him. And to be honest, up until that very instant that Terry had gone for his weapon, Lara hadn't known herself what she would do.\n\nShe thought, too, about why he'd done what he had. Why the five million pounds MI6 had promised him wasn't enough for him.\n\nWhy she hadn't been enough for him\u2014either back in Chasong, or in Pandora's chamber.\n\nSomething had died inside him long ago, she decided. Maybe there was even a little part of him that had wanted to die, had wanted Lara to shoot. Maybe that was why he hadn't killed her right off in the chamber, why he'd only slapped her, telegraphing his intentions so that she was ready the next time.\n\nMaybe. Lara didn't suppose she'd ever know for sure.\n\nThe sun was shining high in the sky now. Just ahead, she saw a clearing in the jungle. The village.\n\nShe heard Bryce and Hillary laughing in the distance. Well. At least somebody was having a good time.\n\nKosa came up alongside her.\n\n\"Sometimes it's a lonely path.\"\n\nLara nodded.\n\n\"But it is the right one.\" He smiled and laid a hand on her shoulder. \"You did well back there.\"\n\nHis words\u2014an exact echo of what Terry had told her, not once but twice over the last couple of days\u2014stopped her right in her tracks.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" he asked, frowning.\n\n\"Fine.\" She managed a smile now. \"And Kosa\u2014thank you.\"\n\n\"I did very little\u2014but I do appreciate the sentiment.\" All at once he burst into laughter and pointed straight ahead, toward the village.\n\n\"I see your friends have made themselves at home.\"\n\nLara's eyes widened in surprise.\n\n\"What on earth\u2026\"\n\nBryce and Hillary were seated in the middle of a large group of tribespeople\u2014most of them women. Both men had abandoned their clothes for traditional tribal costume.\n\nLara and Kosa joined the group. Both men were so involved in what was being done to them\u2014Bryce was having his hair braided and Hillary was having his face painted\u2014that they didn't even notice.\n\n\"That rather tickles,\" Hillary said.\n\n\"Be thankful you don't wear makeup everyday,\" Lara said.\n\nHillary's eyes opened and he shot to his feet.\n\n\"Are you all right? Where's Reiss?\"\n\n\"Pandora?\" Bryce asked. \"Sheridan?\"\n\nShe avoided their eyes. \"I'm fine. It's over.\"\n\n\"Lara?\" Hillary frowned. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"Sure. Really. Even better now seeing the two of you. It's\u2026touching.\"\n\n\"You know us,\" Bryce said. \"Always making friends, sharing a laugh\u2014\"\n\nKosa, who had been talking to one of the women in the group, leaned forward and interrupted.\n\n\"Getting married.\"\n\nBryce's jaw dropped.\n\n\"What?\" Hillary said, the smile suddenly frozen on his face.\n\n\"This is a wedding ceremony. And these\u2014\" Kosa pointed toward the two largest women in the group, who smiled back at him \"\u2014are your brides.\"\n\n\"Er.\" Bryce stammered. \"That was never explained to us.\"\n\n\"No. Definitely not.\" Hillary shook his head. \"No proposals were exchanged.\"\n\n\"That we know about,\" Bryce said.\n\nHillary glared at him. \"Definitely not.\"\n\n\"Don't worry,\" Kosa said, winking at Lara. \"I'll explain this is a miscommunication.\"\n\nThe tribal leader had joined them. Kosa and he began to talk.\n\nLara discreetly backed off. She'd spotted her Jeep at the edge of the village\u2014Kosa must have had it brought up earlier.\n\nHe suddenly looked up and spoke in English to Bryce and Hillary.\n\n\"Run,\" he said.\n\nThe two men turned and headed straight for Lara.\n\nShe fired up the Jeep. They clambered into the back\u2014Kosa ran up alongside and jumped in the front.\n\n\"This'll teach you to spend time with other women,\" Lara said, eyeing Hillary and Bryce in the rearview mirror.\n\nBoth men smiled back.\n\nLara and her friends sped away then, across the African savannah, heading for home."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Indiana Jones Prequels 13) Indiana Jones and the Army of Dead",
        "author": "Rob MacGregor",
        "genres": [
            "adventure"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "In the Air over the Windward Passage, Eight Miles West of Haiti",
                "text": "[ Summer 1943 ]\n\nIndy hated small airplanes.\n\nYes, yes, planes were necessary evils, he knew. If there was going to be a race to collect an ancient treasure in the modern world of 1943, the winner wasn't going to be the guy who sailed 'round the Horn on a clipper ship to find it. Flying was a sharp knife in any field archaeologist's tool chest\u2014but because planes were necessary didn't mean he had to like the blasted things. Or trust them. Oh, sure, mostly they flew just fine. Sometimes they didn't. After the third or fourth time one came down hard enough to blow out the tires or break the undercarriage, he was less trusting. Yeah, you did what you had to do to get where you needed to get. Someday your number was going to be up no matter what you did. No point in worrying about it too much, but... flying around like a bird?\n\nBecause of his OSS training, Indy knew more about aircraft than he wanted to know, and this one\u2014a Taylor/Piper J-2 that looked a lot older than it could possibly be\u2014seemed to be held together with baling wire and prayer. It was noisy, underpowered\u2014a forty-horsepower engine was stock, it weighed a little over 500 pounds empty, and with Mac, who had to go 210, and Indy at about 190? That was the maximum cargo capacity right there. Raul, the little Cuban pilot, was small, but even he had to go 140, and that didn't count the weight of the fuel and what luggage they had, and all that meant this plane ought not to be able to get off the ground. Yet here they were, cruising two thousand feet above the Caribbean, at all of sixty miles an hour. Yeah, Raul said he had rebuilt the engine and perked it up a fair bit, but even so, that it had taken off three times with them so far? That was still amazing\u2014\n\nThey say that bad thoughts draw the devil's attention.\n\nThe engine sputtered, was silent for what seemed like a thousand years but was probably only a second, and Indy's belly roiled as if it contained a most unhappy lizard trying to get out. The imaginary creature wasn't too choosy about its exit route, trying to go up and down at the same time . . .\n\nIndiana Jones said a word that would have gotten his mouth washed out with soap in polite family circles.\n\nMac laughed.\n\nThe pilot said something in rapid Cuban Spanish, and he laughed, too.\n\n\"He said\u2014\" Mac began.\n\n\"I heard him,\" Indy said. \"I'm sitting right here, third guy in a two-seater, and since I know there is no aerodynamic way this thing can stay up, he better have an in with the Virgin Mary.\"\n\n\"You worry too much.\"\n\n\"And you don't worry enough.\"\n\nMac\u2014George McHale\u2014was British to the core, and MI6. He and Indy had been paired on a dozen secret assignments for either His Majesty's government or Uncle Sam, mostly in Europe, a couple in the Pacific, and while Mac was a good man to have covering your back, he was also prone to recklessness. Indy had saved Mac's bacon more often than the other way around, though he did have Mac to thank for keeping him alive a few times\u2014and his recent increase in rank. That latter was a mixed blessing. Indy hadn't even wanted to be in one army, much less two of them, and he had just gotten used to being \"Major Jones\" in one of them, and now he was a light colonel.\n\nWell. In an odd, technical sort of way he was a colonel . . .\n\nThe engine coughed again.\n\nThis time, Indy managed to keep from cursing.\n\nIn Spanish, Raul said, \"Not far now, se\u00f1ors, only a couple of miles to the coast there.\"\n\nIndy had to lean to his right to see through the windshield, and the act of doing so caused the little plane to bank.\n\nHe didn't say anything, but Raul must have noticed how quickly he leaned back the other way.\n\nRaul\u2014or maybe it was Indy\u2014straightened the plane out. \"Rosita is very sensitive, se\u00f1or.\"\n\nSensitive? A plane that you could turn by leaning? Indy shook his head. At least they had made it this far. They had taken off from Santiago, Cuba, flying to Guantanamo, then to a landing strip hacked out of a sugarcane field outside Baraco. They had refueled and then started over the Windward Passage, the strait that connected the Atlantic and the Caribbean, heading toward Mole Saint-Nicolas in Haiti. There was supposedly a runway and a fuel tank there at which they could gas up for the hop into Saint-Marc, and yet another fuel stop, before the final leg to Port-au-Prince. Maybe somebody would want to see a passport or visa, but Raul didn't think it likely. The war and all, who had time to stand around waiting because a plane might land?\n\nThe J-2 had a range of only a couple of hundred miles, but it was what Mac had found. The \"war and all\" had sucked up a lot of available aircraft, along, apparently, with border patrolmen.\n\nIndy looked at Mac. \"I don't know why I let you talk me into this. We need the rest. It's why they gave us the furlough.\"\n\nMac smiled. \"Because, Jonesy, you are a dedicated archaeologist, right? How could you pass up a chance like this? What if the Nazis or the Japanese got there first? Then that bloody giant black pearl would be buying jackboots for Adolf or maybe a sub for the emperor.\"\n\nIndy didn't want to say it but couldn't stop himself: \"Haiti is tropical. Crawling with snakes.\"\n\n\"Actually, old chum, they aren't any of them poisonous in these parts, you know.\"\n\n\"Well, yippee for that. It's not the poison, Mac, it's the... snakiness.\"\n\nMac laughed again.\n\n\"You wouldn't think it so funny if it was rats,\" Indy allowed.\n\nMac's smile disappeared. \"Bloody Germans!\"\n\nGotcha, Indy thought. Mac was like Indy's father\u2014he hated rodents. He felt pretty good about that comeback. That thing with the rats in the Nazi castle\u2014\n\nThe plane's little engine went sput-sput-sput! and died.\n\nIt got very quiet.\n\nThe engine didn't come back on.\n\nThe plane started to drop.\n\nRaul began praying to the Virgin Mary.\n\nLaden as the craft was, the glide pattern suddenly seemed more like that of a brick than a plane.\n\nIndy tightened the tie holding his whip onto his belt, made sure his Webley's holster was snapped shut. \"Where's my hat?\" he said, looking around\u2014\n\nThe sea, which had been a comfortable two thousand feet below, rushed toward them. It was only a hundred yards or so away now and coming up fast. They were, if they were lucky, going to ditch. If not, they'd go straight in and blow apart on impact.\n\n\"If I die and you don't, I'm coming back to haunt you, Mac.\"\n\nHe braced himself.\n\nThe plane hit the water\u2014\n\nThe jolt clacked Indy's teeth together as his body snapped forward against the seat belt. The plane skipped once, like a rubber ball bouncing off concrete. The right wing tore loose, the pilot's door ripped away, and Indy saw the windshield shatter as Raul's belt broke and his head went through the glass.\n\nThey bounced and jostled over the water like a skipped stone, hard enough to break up more of the plane\u2014\n\nFinally, they stopped moving foward. The water rushed in, filling the little craft, which began to sink.\n\n\"Out!\" Indy yelled.\n\nMac was already moving."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "The tropical seas under the bright sunshine were clear enough that Indy could easily see the shark as it cruised lazily past them. Fourteen, fifteen feet long, at least, and doubtlessly wondering if they were worth the trouble it would take to eat them.\n\nGo away. We taste bad. Really. Worst thing you ever ate.\n\n\"Blacktip, you think?\" Mac said. \"I didn't know they got that big.\"\n\nThey were only a couple of hundred yards away from shore.\n\n\"Classify it later\u2014swim!\"\n\nIndy put his face into the water in an American crawl. You couldn't see as well as when doing the Australian stroke, but it was faster, and speed was preferable at the moment. Fortunately, he was a strong swimmer, having spent far too much time in ponds, lakes, ditches, rivers, and oceans around the world.\n\nMac, whose style was more unorthodox, made more noise and bigger waves, but he wasn't far behind.\n\nIt seemed as if it took forever, but eventually Indy achieved shallower water, enough so he could stand on the sandy bottom with the waves lapping just under his chest.\n\nWhew. The shark was too big to risk water this shallow. He wouldn't follow them.\n\nMac was right behind him.\n\nAnd right behind Mac? There was a big fin\u2014\n\nMac must have seen it in Indy's eyes. He turned, said, \"Bloody hell!\" and started a high-knee run toward the shore.\n\nIndy was already moving, but Mac blew past him, churning the water into white foam. He wouldn't have thought the man could run that fast on land, much less in the ocean . . .\n\nThey stumbled onto the gray sand beach and fell prone.\n\nOnce he recovered his breath, Mac said, \"They aren't supposed to do that, go into water that shallow.\"\n\n\"Send him a telegram explaining it to him,\" Indy managed.\n\nAfter a moment, Mac said, \"Pity I don't have a dry cigarette. All this exercise is terrible for my lungs. The smoke would calm them.\"\n\nIndy said nothing. Everybody knew cigarettes cut your wind. As much running as he seemed to do, he sure didn't need that.\n\nAfter a moment, Mac said, \"Too bad about Raul.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, if he had taken better care of Rosita, we'd still be in the air.\" It was a poor joke, but\u2014what were you going to do? Raul was probably feeding that shark's cousins by now, and bits and pieces of the shattered plane would likely be washing ashore for weeks. Done was done. The Cuban must have known how dangerous flying that overloaded aircraft was. It was part of the risk he took. Some you won, some you lost . . .\n\n\"Hello? Have a look.\" Mac pointed.\n\nAt first, Indy wasn't sure what he was seeing, but then he was.\n\n\"My hat!\"\n\nHe managed to get to his feet, and to the hat. He picked it up, shook the sand off it, and put it on. He suddenly felt better. Things could be worse. Yeah, they had crashed into the sea, but they were alive, he had his whip, his revolver, and his hat. That was a good sign. Nothing was broken. The day was definitely looking up.\n\nMac said, \"I've been meaning to ask you\u2014how have you managed to keep that blasted hat in one piece? You've had it as long as I've known you.\"\n\nIndy grinned. \"I've had it a lot longer than that.\"\n\nMac raised an eyebrow.\n\n\"I was... thirteen? Almost fourteen. It involved the Cross of Coronado.\"\n\n\"I've heard of that. Gold, precious stones, supposedly had a sliver of Christ's cross tucked away in it?\"\n\nIndy nodded. \"Yeah. If every sliver of wood that's supposed to have come from that cross got piled up together, it would be bigger than a giant sequoia. Anyway, I swiped the artifact from some tomb raiders, but Fedora outfoxed me.\"\n\n\"Fedora?\"\n\n\"I never knew his name. This hat was his. I think he took a shine to me after we went 'round. He gave me some good advice, and this hat, as a consolation prize.\"\n\n\"What was the advice?\"\n\n\"Essentially, you can't win 'em all. Sometimes you have to wait for another day. He was right. Eventually, I did collect Coronado's Cross and got it to the university's museum.\"\n\n\"And you still have the hat.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I get it blocked and dry-cleaned when I'm back in civilization, use a hat jack when it's in the closet. Had the sweatband replaced eight or nine times. And there are hatmakers who can repair a tear or hole in felt, though it costs an arm and a leg. For what I've spent on this fedora over the years, I could have bought my own haberdashery.\"\n\nMac shook his head.\n\n\"Hey, everybody has to be someplace,\" Indy said. \"And when I'm there, I want my lucky hat.\"\n\n\"Lucky?\"\n\n\"I'm still breathing, aren't I?\"\n\nMac grinned.\n\n\"What say we go and find some locals and see where we are?\" Indy said.\n\nWhere they were, it turned out, was not far from a dirt road whereupon a large and ancient flatbed truck was passing. Indy waved it down.\n\nThe driver, a dark-skinned native, had a cabful of passengers\u2014three adults, two children, a dog, and a small pig, maybe a couple of chickens, which Indy heard but didn't see. The cab was missing the windshield, side windows, and most of the roof, over which a dirty sheet had been draped to provide shade.\n\n\"Bonjour,\" the driver said.\n\nIndy could get by in various dialects of French, from Paris to New Orleans, and he asked if they could get a ride. The driver agreed. They'd have to sit on the back, which was piled high with bales of long, sword-shaped green plant stalks, but it would be better than walking. The driver was heading south to Saint-Marc, he said, a few hours away. That was the direction Indy and Mac needed anyhow.\n\n\"Merci beacoup, mon ami.\"\n\nThe back of the truck had a fresh, peppery smell from the cut plants.\n\n\"What's this lot, then?\" Mac asked. He waved at the plants.\n\n\"Sisal. They use it to make rope. Not generally as good as the best hemp, but since many of the countries where that grows are still in Japanese or German hands, there's a demand for it. It's named for the Yucatan port where most of it used to be shipped from, though they don't actually grow it there. In the New World, it's believed to have originated in Chiapas, in southern Mexico. They raise it in tropical countries around the globe\u2014South America, Asia, and the best grades come from Africa. Historically speaking, the crops are about\u2014\"\n\nMac cut him off: \"Thank you, Professor Jones, for that fascinating lecture. Will there be an examination on Monday?\"\n\n\"Hey, you asked.\"\n\n\"No, I asked what the plant was, not for its bloody life story!\"\n\n\"That's your trouble, Mac\u2014you have no depth. You need to expand your education beyond grave robbing. Learn some sociology, biology, anthropology. A little history would be good.\"\n\nBoth of them smiled.\n\nIndy stretched out, exhausted. He pulled his hat down over his face. It was warm, and the rutted road and bouncing ride were less than ideal, but it took only a few minutes for him to drift off to sleep. He had been looking forward to getting back to the States and taking it easy for a while, after all the long days and nights island-hopping in the Pacific and then the weeks behind the lines in Germany, but sometimes you just had to go where the trail led . . ."
            },
            {
                "title": "Port-au-Prince, Haiti",
                "text": "Colonel doktor edwin gruber sat at a rattan table outside a ratty little caf\u00e9 off the Ruta de Delmas, half a mile from the sea, drinking bad schnapps. The afternoon was warm, the breeze had died, and the shade of the half-rotten canvas umbrella jutting up from the table was little help against the heat. His ice-cream linen suit was damp with sweat and humidity. A few miles offshore, a rain shower seemed to be forming. If it came this way, the umbrella wouldn't stop much of the rain, either.\n\nHe hated the tropics.\n\nThat they had any schnapps, even low quality, was amazing. They called it eau-de-vie here, using the French name, but it was the same thing. Mostly, they drank rum, which was hardly a fit beverage for an educated European. Paint remover.\n\nIndeed, he detested this island in particular even more than the tropics in general. Still, one did one's duty; and in this case, Gruber, formerly of the Waffen-SS Medical Corps, one of the first officers to wear the serpent on his patch, as well as a founding member of R\u00f6ntgensturmbann SS-HA, the beloved Hauptamt X-Ray Battalion, was certainly one to do his duty, wherever it led him.\n\nIt had, alas, led him a long, long way from good schnapps and Berlin . . .\n\nBut Gruber had been sent by the F\u00fchrer Himself, and if Herr Adolf deemed it necessary, Gruber would march through Hell without question\u2014which was good, since this spot surely wasn't so far removed from that region. Gruber was perhaps not as good a Nazi as some, though he agreed with most of the party's goals\u2014there needed to be a German Reich ruling the world, and keeping the race pure was necessary. So many mongrels\u2014all you had to do was look around, wherever you happened to be. First, they would clean up the Fatherland, then the rest of the world . . .\n\nOf course, after the war was over and the Third Reich ran things, a man who had the F\u00fchrer's favor? Well, such a man would do very well indeed. At least he wasn't off at the Russian front patching up wounded. If there still was a Russian front . . .\n\nHe looked up to see Henri approaching, a fat glass tumbler of amber-colored rum in hand. Henri was a local, and his loyalty was not to the Reich but to money; since Gruber had enough of that to spread around, Henri's loyalty was his, at least as long as he continued to pay him well. The rum he could smell from ten feet away. The vile stuff was strong enough to etch the plate on a battleship.\n\n\"Henri.\"\n\n\"Monsieur.\"\n\nThey spoke French, since that was the local language. Haiti was aligned with the Allies and not the Axis, and Gruber's cover was that he was a Dutch businessman here to facilitate export of sisal and assorted spices. Few, if any, of the savages on this island could tell the difference between a Dutch and German accent, and he spoke perfect if somewhat idiomatic Dutch, since his grandfather had often used that tongue at home, having taken a Flemish wife.\n\n\"What do you have for me today?\"\n\n\"Two men, English or Americans, arrived in the city by the bus from Saint-Marc this afternoon.\"\n\nAh. More spies, perhaps. \"Do they have names?\"\n\n\"The bus driver allows them to be 'Jones' and 'Mac.'\"\n\nGruber smiled. Obviously fake, those names. \"And why do they concern me?\"\n\n\"Word on the street is that they are looking for a guide to take them to Zile Muri-yo.\"\n\nThat got his attention fully. Somebody else heading for the Island of the Dead? A coincidence? Unlikely. This needed more exploration. The formula Gruber sought was there, somewhere, and he did not believe these two just happened to be looking for something else on the same island . . .\n\n\"Monitor them. Find out who they talk to, what they want.\"\n\n\"Oui.\" Henri paused to sip at his drink. \"There is one other thing, monsieur. These men have come to the attention of other people. Including the\u2014ah\u2014Chinese scholar.\"\n\nGruber frowned, swallowing the curse he wanted to utter. It would be in German, and somebody might recognize that.\n\nThe man in question was no more Chinese than Henri here, though it was true that they did all look alike, the little Orientals. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, as matching as peas in a pod. This \"scholar\" was Dr. Yamada Hajime, a scientist like himself, respectable enough, but Japanese and working for the emperor. Nominally, they were on the same side, but in this instance Gruber was certain the Nipponese had come here seeking the same thing as he, and he did not intend to share it, once it was found. Of course, finding it was problematic in itself, but one step at a time . . .\n\nThis was not particularly good news, but he couldn't let Henri know how important it was. Knowledge was power, and a smart man never gave power away. He affected a lack of interest. \"Well. No matter, the Chinese. But keep me apprised.\"\n\n\"Oui.\" Henri upended his tumbler and drained the last of the rum. About 160-proof, Gruber had determined. Light a match to it, it would burn with a pure, blue flame . . .\n\nJones and Mac, whoever they were, would bear more scrutiny. And not just from Henri. Gruber had other agents, and he tried to keep one set from knowing what the others were about.\n\nTrusting anyone outside oneself was dangerous.\n\nIn his library at a large rented villa south of the main part of the city, just off the Dessalines and close to the bay, Yamada Hajime sat in a wicker chair. The breeze had picked up, and the wicker allowed it to reach more of him. He nodded at the man, who had several names. As \"Louis,\" he worked for Yamada; when he reported to the German doctor Gruber, he called himself \"Henri.\"\n\nThey spoke in French, one of nine languages in which Yamada was comfortable. He had already picked up a few phrases of Creole, a useful local dialect. \"So, you think that the Dutchman considers these men to be of importance?\"\n\n\"He did not say it as such, no, monsieur,\" Louis said. \"But my feeling was, yes. He asked me to find out more about them. I saw his eyes glitter when I mentioned their intended destination.\"\n\n\"Then you must do as he asks. But before you report to him, I would appreciate it if you report to me first.\"\n\n\"But of course, monsieur.\" He smiled.\n\n\"You are a man of great skill and honor, Louis, and I much appreciate your diligent service.\" Which I expect will last only as long as I pay more than the German. For you would, I believe, sell your grandmother for the right price.\n\n\"Perhaps you would consider accepting another bottle of the special rum before you leave?\"\n\nLouis Henri Whoever-else-he-was grinned. \"Ah, oui!\"\n\nYes, he paid more, but the small gifts also mattered. The German did not offer such, and a few gourdes' worth of cane liquor, which meant nothing to Yamada, indicated that he valued Louis. All men wished to feel valued. Small respects could make a difference. Men, even dishonorable ones, wanted to be appreciated.\n\nAfter Louis was gone, clutching his fresh bottle of dark rum, Yamada looked at the clock. He was supposed to send a radio transmission at ten past six o'clock local time. It would take most of an hour to get to where he had hidden the radio transceiver this week\u2014he had to move it after each use, and that was not easy: The device was heavy, and the batteries even heavier. Well. He had plenty of time. A Japanese B-1 submarine was close enough to the island to receive the transmission, but it wouldn't stay near the surface long. The aerial would go up at exactly six ten P.M., and if no transmission was forthcoming within two minutes exactly, down it would go again. There were not many enemy warships about, but there were spotter craft. An imperial sub here was a long way from home.\n\nYamada knew something of naval vessels\u2014he had an uncle who was a vice admiral in the imperial navy. Just last year, one of the long-range B-1s, the I-25, had deployed its Yokosuka E14Y seaplane off the northwest coast of the United States, where it had dropped a firebomb that started a forest fire on the mainland that would have done much damage... well, had it not started to rain.\n\nNo one could blame the imperial navy for the rain. Not yet.\n\nOne of the reasons this mission was so critical was due to the unfortunate decision to involve the United States in this war. There were so many of them, and they had so many resources. It had not been Yamada's choice, of course, but he had deemed it unwise to kick the sleeping giant. Some considered all Americans overfed and lazy, but Yamada had been to the country, and seen what they had accomplished there. They knew how to work with their hands as well as their minds, and the imperial army and navy were beginning to see what those overfed and lazy Americans could do once they turned their full attention to war. With much of the American fleet destroyed at Pearl Harbor less than two years earlier, they had built new ships in record time, and the battles at the Coral Sea and Midway had been disasters for the imperial navy. U.S. Marines had landed on many of the Pacific islands, and the Japanese army there was being pushed back into the sea or roasted alive in caves.\n\nThe Americans were barreling over the Germans in Africa and Europe, as well.\n\nToo many enemies on too many fronts was a bad way to fight a war. Involving America had been a tactical error. Left alone, she might have stayed out of it, for at least a year or two more, and that would have given the empire enough time . . .\n\nExcept that the military had attacked Pearl Harbor, and time was running out . . .\n\nHis mission must succeed. The war itself might hinge on it.\n\nTo the navy, Yamada was but a code name, and their role was simply to pass messages back and forth. To them, he was a colonel. In truth, he worked for an organization known only as Himitsu, a spy group so secret that almost nobody in the military even knew it existed. And his goal here was critical. The Germans\u2014albeit that they were allies in this war\u2014could not be allowed to collect what Yamada had been sent here to find and obtain for the empire. If he failed, it was unlikely he would even be allowed to commit seppuku, so great would the shame be. To the grandson of one of the last samurai to carry two swords in the service of the shogun, an honorable death was much preferable to dishonor. Always.\n\nBut such worrisome thoughts were not necessary now. He had been on this island for only a short time, a few weeks, disguised as a Chinese scholar. It was amusing\u2014the locals could not tell the differences among those from the Orient, and since he spoke Mandarin, Wu, and even a bit of Cantonese, how would they know? If a man has epicanthal folds and he speaks Chinese? Well, then, he must be Chinese . . .\n\nHe had gathered much information during his stay. The prize was not far off, and he would reach it before Gruber, a barbarian if a decent enough scientist. Honor demanded it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "\"UH-OH,\" INDY SAID.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nIndy inclined his head slightly. \"Move! We need to get behind that bush. Slow and easy.\"\n\nMac complied, then asked, \"Something?\"\n\n\"There's a guy over there, next to the shoeshine stand, front of the hotel. Tall, reddish hair, Panama hat.\"\n\n\"I saw him.\"\n\n\"I know him. That's Joe Edmonds. He was army intelligence, moved over to the OSS\u2014or he had when I met him in DC a few months after Pearl.\"\n\n\"So, a colleague. What's the problem?\"\n\n\"I'm supposed to be going home for a six-week furlough, remember? Not running around Haiti looking for an ancient black pearl. The boys upstairs might not like it if they found out.\"\n\n\"Bosh. You worry too much.\"\n\n\"Plus, we don't need to be getting tangled up in whatever he's doing here. If he's working in the field, his superiors might decide that he needs help. Mine. And yours.\"\n\nMac frowned at that. \"Oh, that won't do, that would put a crimp in our plans. Perhaps it is best if we avoid your former colleague.\"\n\n\"What did I just say?\"\n\nAs they made their way elsewhere from the shoeshine stand, a small boy, shirtless and barefoot, maybe ten, came running up. \"Monsieur Mac.\"\n\nMac looked at the boy.\n\n\"Follow me, s'il vous pla\u00eet.\"\n\nIndy gave Mac a raised eyebrow. \"Your agents are getting a little young, aren't they?\"\n\n\"Good help is ageless.\" To the boy he said in French, \"Lead on, young sir.\"\n\nFollowing the boy along a twisty path that led past market stalls, past tiled walls, and through a warren of back alleys, the pair moved farther from the bustle of the city and into a more residential area, with small houses jammed close together. Indy had a pretty well-developed sense of direction, but if it weren't for the sun, he would have gotten totally lost.\n\nThey arrived at an unremarkable whitewashed house surrounded by a short picket fence. The boy stopped and pointed. \"Mademoiselle Arnoux's.\"\n\n\"Good lad,\" Mac said. He fished a handful of coins from his pocket and handed them to the boy.\n\n\"Merci!\" The boy ran off.\n\n\"Old girlfriend?\"\n\n\"Not at all. Never met. But that toothless woman at the fruit market mentioned that Mademoiselle Arnoux was the person to see if we wanted to travel to the Isle de Mort. I asked her to send a boy to set it up.\"\n\n\"Island of the Dead? I was hoping to avoid that for a few years,\" Indy said with a grin.\n\n\"Your humor skills are deteriorating, old sod. You need to work on them. How is your Creole?\"\n\n\"I can order breakfast, as long as it's steak and eggs. I can ask where the bathroom is. Beyond that . . .\" He shrugged.\n\n\"The locals call the place Zile Muri-yo, which means pretty much the same thing as the French name. Since that's where we are going, we need a guide who knows the area. It's not even on the map. Thus, here we are.\"\n\nThe woman who answered their knock at the door was stunning.\n\nShe was tall, a few inches shorter than Indy, with black hair and dark eyes, and skin the color of heavily creamed coffee. Her face was handsome, with balanced features, and when she smiled, her teeth were even and white, save for one slightly crooked one that gave her expression character. Indy guessed she was in her early to midtwenties. She wore a white blouse with an off-the-shoulder cut, a long blue cotton skirt, and sandals. There was a small silver cross on a chain around her neck. She smelled like sandalwood.\n\nTaken altogether, she was quite striking.\n\nIndy was suddenly much aware that he was several days from a real bath, that he needed a shave, and that his clothes could stand washing.\n\nAnd that he was old enough to be her father.\n\n\"Messieurs?\"\n\n\"Good afternoon,\" Mac said. \"I'm George McHale and this is Professor Indiana Jones. Do we have the honor of addressing Mademoiselle Arnoux?\" Mac's French had a strong Belgian accent, no surprise given the amount of time he had spent there.\n\n\"Oui, I am Marie Arnoux.\"\n\n\"Dr. Jones and I are archaeologists. We are seeking an antiquity that we believe is on Zile Muri-yo, and we understand that you are familiar with the island. We would like to engage your services as a guide.\"\n\nShe smiled again, revealing that endearingly crooked tooth.\n\n\"Ah. Well, you must come inside,\" she said.\n\nThe house was small but clean and neat, and somewhat cooler than the outside. The young woman led them to a wicker couch and bade them be seated.\n\nIndy noticed a set of icons on the wall, but they were too small for him to make out the subjects of the tiny paintings. Catholic saints? There was also some kind of tribal mask he didn't recognize on a narrow table next to the wall. He wanted to go and examine these more closely, but he held himself in check. Not everybody understood an archaeologist's passion for snooping.\n\nArnoux left the room and returned shortly with a pitcher of liquid and three glasses on a copper tray. \"Tea,\" she said. \"But I am afraid the ice has all melted this late in the day.\"\n\nIndy sipped at the tea, which tasted as if it had been sweetened with cane syrup. It was refreshing. They all smiled at one another. This was Mac's show, so Indy leaned back to let him speak.\n\nThe woman beat Mac to it: \"So, what could be on such a small island unknown to many but the locals to draw a British and an American archaeologist such a great distance?\"\n\nIndy frowned. Mac's accent could have given her the Brit connection, but how did she know Indy was an American? He hadn't said a word.\n\nAs if reading his mind, she said, \"Indiana is an American state in the Midwest, so I am assuming that a man bearing that nickname would be from the United States, non?\"\n\n\"You seem knowledgeable about U.S. geography.\"\n\nShe smiled yet again, and it made Indy want to smile in return. \"I spent four years at a women's college in New York State in the late 1930s,\" she said.\n\nIt took Indy a second to realize she had switched from French to English.\n\n\"Majored in history, with a minor in comparative religion,\" she went on.\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"I'm a Dodgers fan. I saw Waite Hoyt pitch his last game in '38. The Merry Mortician. Go, Brooklyn.\"\n\nNow Indy did smile. Hoyt had worked as an assistant undertaker in the off-season, hence the nickname.\n\n\"So, speak of this artifact.\"\n\nMac and Indy exchanged glances.\n\n\"Come, gentlemen, if I am to act as your guide, I will need to know the proper questions to ask the locals\u2014unless you have a map that shows the location?\"\n\n\"No, no map,\" Mac allowed.\n\n\"So if this item is to be located, we will have to talk with somebody on the island who has some idea of where such a thing might be found. Sooner or later, I must have this information. Better now, I think.\"\n\n\"Then you are willing to help us?\" Mac asked.\n\n\"Yes. But we must trust each other.\"\n\nThe two men exchanged another quick look.\n\nIndy said, \"During the height of the slave trade in the late 1700s, a Central African woman was taken in a raid. The exact location of this is less than clear, but it was probably in the equatorial regions\u2014Ngoyo, Kakongo, Ndongo, or Matamba.\n\n\"This woman was somehow very dear to the ruler of one of the most important kingdoms, a fellow known as the Manikongo. Some accounts have her as the wife; others, a daughter; still others say she was his mother.\n\n\"This ruler sought to buy her back from the slavers, and offered what was a rare and extremely valuable ransom. The item was a large, asymmetrical black pearl, taken from a giant oyster species long extinct. The pearl was the size of a man's fist and shaped somewhat like a human heart. Legend had it that it had been the centerpiece of some kind of magic practiced by a family of witch doctors on the west coast before it was taken during a tribal conflict. Supposedly imbued with a curse.\"\n\n\"Aren't they all,\" Mac said under his breath.\n\nShe either didn't hear him or affected that she didn't. She nodded. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"The slavers agreed to the deal, but when the pearl was delivered, they killed the men who brought it and took the treasure. Kept the woman, too, so the story goes.\n\n\"They sailed to Hispaniola, but during a storm, the vessel\u2014either Spanish or Portuguese, that part is also unclear\u2014was caught and wrecked in a storm off the south coast of Haiti. A result of the curse, so it was said. Most of the crew and cargo drowned, but somehow the pearl\u2014which, by the way, was known as the Heart of Darkness\u2014was saved by a man who managed to swim ashore to an unnamed island.\"\n\nIndy'd had another adventure with a black pearl a few years back\u2014smaller gem, different continent, and Nazis involved, too, complete with a Chinese dragon, or a pretty good illusion of one, but . . .\n\n\"The Heart of Darkness?\" Marie asked.\n\nIndy said, \"If it sounds familiar, that's probably because there's a Polish writer, Joseph Conrad\u2014he was a boat captain on the Congo River who wrote a story\u2014\"\n\n\"J\u00f3zef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski,\" she said.\n\n\"Excuse me?\"\n\n\"Conrad's real name,\" she said. \"I did read while I was at college, and I do know a bit about history.\" Butter wouldn't have melted in her mouth, so cool was her smile.\n\nMac gave Indy an I-guess-she-told-you look.\n\nIndy nodded, properly abashed. \"Right. Sorry.\" It would be a mistake to underestimate this woman. Smart and beautiful and educated, a powerful combination. He could hardly forget Elsa, and how he had felt about her\u2014right up until he realized she was a Nazi on their trek to find the Grail. Elsa had been gorgeous, sexy, sharp as a tack, and man, what a bad girl and a wrong number that liaison had turned out to be. Though it had had its moments before it went sour, those few hours in Venice... But\u2014then he'd found out about her and his father? Oh, that had been really bad . . .\n\nMac took over the lecture, interrupting Indy's stroll down memory lane: \"So, from the descriptions\u2014and these are oral, and passed down among certain tribes in what is today the Belgian Congo and Nigeria\u2014the Heart was put in a place of safety and warded with magic to somehow attenuate the curse. Supposedly, it has rested there for a hundred and sixty years, give or take.\"\n\n\"And you want it. To sell?\"\n\n\"No,\" Indy said, \"to put in a museum! To keep treasure hunters from getting it first and peddling it to some gloating rich man who will keep it in a safe in his bedroom, hidden away, to drool over alone. Such things should belong to the world.\"\n\nShe turned her gaze to regard Indy. \"Is this what you really believe, Dr. Jones?\"\n\nHe realized he might have sounded a little over the top. \"Yeah. And call me Indy.\"\n\n\"Then you must call me Marie. I will help you find this Heart of Darkness, gentlemen. But I must warn you\u2014the Island of Death is a strange and dangerous place, at least as much so as Conrad's Congo. Your lives will be at risk.\"\n\nIndy thought, Huh. She agreed to that pretty quickly. He said, \"There's a surprise.\" He paused. \"We've managed to keep ourselves alive in some dangerous places. We'll chance it.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"We will need to hire a boat, and once we arrive there will be more expenses. Have you funds?\"\n\nIndy started to tell her they were broke, but Mac interrupted. \"We do.\"\n\nIndy looked at him. \"We do?\"\n\nMac patted his ample waist. \"Money belt. A fair number of gold coins. Been saving them for a rainy day, but it's only money\u2014and who needs that?\"\n\n\"I hope you have enough to get us a room with a bath and a couple of razors. Some washed clothes would be nice, too.\"\n\n\"Not a problem, old man.\"\n\n\"I know a woman with rooms to let,\" Marie said. \"They are clean, and she is honest. Best if you don't check into one of the city's hotels. Port-au-Prince is full of spies since the war began.\"\n\n\"Yeah, we noticed one of those ourselves,\" Indy said.\n\n\"Really? Which one?\"\n\nIndy looked at Mac. In for a dime, in for a dollar. \"An American.\"\n\n\"Joe Edmonds,\" she said. \"OSS, posing as a sisal buyer.\"\n\n\"You seem well informed about spies, too,\" Indy allowed.\n\nShe smiled. \"It is my home. One pays attention.\"\n\nYeah.\n\n\"Go and see Madam Josette, for the rooms. We can begin as soon as you are ready.\"\n\n\"All we need are directions,\" Indy said.\n\n\"You do not need those. Alain will show you.\"\n\nA young man suddenly seemed to appear from nowhere, to stand in the doorway. He looked enough like Marie to be a younger brother or maybe a cousin. She said something to him in a soft and liquid Creole, none of which Indy caught except his name: Alain.\n\nMac and Indy stood.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Mac said to Marie.\n\nShe gave him a slow nod, and for a moment Indy thought he could see something in her eyes, some knowledge, a hint of amusement. But he was tired and dirty and he realized he was probably imagining it. It had been a long and exhausting few days . . .\n\nAs they headed away from Marie's house, Mac said, in English and quietly enough so their guide couldn't hear, \"More to that woman than meets the eye.\"\n\nIndy nodded. \"Yeah. Surprised you noticed.\"\n\n\"I have passed time with a woman or two.\"\n\nIndy nodded again. Penelope. Indy still had a letter to her from Mac, to be delivered if Mac died. Well, he didn't have it with him. The letter was in a bank box in Washington, DC, which was good, because the ink would have gotten a little smeary during that swim if it had been in his back pocket.\n\nEvery so often, Mac gave him an updated version of the letter, telling Indy to burn the older one.\n\nA pity he didn't have anybody like that. Not since Marion . . .\n\nMarion Ravenwood. Had that been only six years ago that he'd left her at the altar? Yeah, 1937. Marion... and he couldn't count Elsa, who hadn't been at all what she had first seemed. And then there was that woman revolutionary in Peru, early in '41, and his decision to join in the war effort, and look where that had led . . .\n\nDon't go there, Jones. No point. It's all history now. What was it Satchel Paige said? Avoid fried meats and don't look back: Might be something back there, and it might be gaining on you.\n\nOnward and upward."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Boukman stood in the warm darkness outside the rooming house, watching people as they passed in front of the windows. No electricity here, but they had kerosene lanterns aplenty, and the yellow lamp glows suffused the two-story wooden house, leaking out the glass and cracks into the night. Moths bounced from the windows, trying to get to the flame, unaware that the clear panes were all that kept them from turning into torches . . .\n\nBoukman, a head taller than average, was effectively invisible even to the mosquitoes as he leaned against the rough bole of a palm tree, a phantom in the shadows. If a man looked right at him, he would not see him. Boukman could hide in plain sight, so great were his talents in the black arts.\n\nHe could have sent somebody. A man of his status? He did not have to skulk around in the blackness spying. But he did need to see them for himself, for they were something unlike anything he had ever felt before, even at his age.\n\nHe smiled at that last thought. As far as he knew, there were no other living men his age. It was possible that somewhere in the world there were magicks equal to his own, other ways to stave off the Final Harvest, to extend one's years far beyond the oldest normal men. He had heard rumors, but if there were such, he had not felt their energies vibrating through the realms on either side while he was chwal espri\u2014the Horse of the Gods. And he was most sensitive to such things. He had felt the two white men\u2014the imen blan\u2014as soon as they had set foot on the land. Felt them as strongly as if they had touched him with their pale hands.\n\nThat meant something.\n\nHe'd had The Dream again last evening, the same recurring nightmare that had been with him since he'd been a boy. The Dream had small variations, and he had yet to determine the full meaning of it, even after all these years. But each time he had The Dream, events of great importance followed it, always. So these imen blan meant something. He did not yet know what\u2014nor how he was to use them; only that he must. Boukman had a destiny, and it was part of some grand design, he knew that. He had not risen to be the most powerful man in the islands for no purpose, even if he did not know what it was.\n\nThat they had found their way to Marie Arnoux? But another sign they were espesyal. One could possibly be foolish enough to ignore a Sign, but no bokor, nor even an average houngan worth his own salt, would ignore two Signs, and there were other things of which he had become aware of late, interlinked pieces of a great puzzle that he was being given to solve. It would be a thing of much power, he felt, perhaps more than any Vodoun bokor ridden by the loa had ever possessed.\n\nWho sent these men? Why? He would find out, eventually.\n\nSuch a thing was like a lighthouse beacon on a moonless, cloudy midnight. One had to go to it. Power called to power, and in this land bokor Boukman was supreme. The world was larger than his island, however, and if he was to bestride the seas and control more of it? He would need to increase his strength. The strongest man in a village was not necessarily the strongest man everywhere. He was at his limits now.\n\nThese two white men from afar? Somehow, they were the key.\n\nHe had seen them. Now he would have them watched. He could call upon many eyes, and he would. Something of great import was happening, and these men were the catalyst.\n\nHe turned and walked away from the house. The night was overcast and ebon, but there was nothing natural in the dark that frightened bokor Boukman.\n\nNothing that possibly could.\n\nThe P\u00e9tionville Road,\n\n[ Four Miles South of Port-au-Prince ]\n\nIndy, Mac, Marie, and, as it turned out, her brother, Alain, rode in a rusty, mostly black Chevrolet of uncertain vintage, a rattletrap four-door sedan. Indy guessed it was about a 1930. With the war, they'd stopped making cars for commercial sale in the United States, churning out Blitz Buggies\u2014\"jeeps\"\u2014tanks, and planes in their place, so whatever you had, you had to keep running. Even so, this was an old beast, and grumpy.\n\nAfter a good night's sleep and a bath, with their clothes washed and dried, not to mention a good breakfast, Indy had felt a lot better\u2014though that feeling was beginning to fade already. They were bumping and jostling along a rutted dirt road heading south, more or less, climbing into the mountains, and Alain drove with a slapdash, carefree attitude that made Indy nervous more than a couple of times. The car smelled as if somebody had roasted a pig in it, long ago, so that only a faint hint of the odor remained. They bounced around on the old cracked leather seats like Ping-Pong balls.\n\nNow dressed for a trek, Marie wore khaki slacks, a long-sleeved khaki shirt rolled up past her elbows, and hiking boots. Fixed to her belt was a stubby sheath knife, with what looked like a bone handle. She had a small backpack in the car's trunk.\n\nAs his teeth clacked together for maybe the fifteenth time, Indy said, \"How far did you say it was?\"\n\n\"As the crow flies, only about thirty, thirty-five kilometers to Terre Rouge. But because of the hills and the way of the road, twice that and a little.\"\n\nIndy nodded. Terre Rouge. That meant \"red dirt.\"\n\n\"Two, three hours, longer if it rains.\"\n\n\"Bad road in the rain?\"\n\n\"Bad road anytime. Worse in the rain. Easy to slip over the side.\" She made a diving gesture with one hand.\n\n\"And if we don't fall off the road or get beaten to death by the time we get there?\"\n\n\"My cousin Andr\u00e9 is a fisherman, he has a boat. Zile Muri-yo is only four kilometers to the south of the coast at Terre Rouge. It is not large, the island, only five kilometers long by two at the widest. But it is heavily forested, mostly jungle, with a couple of sisal plantations hewed from the woods. A small village there.\"\n\n\"Shouldn't be hard to find what we're looking for on an island that size,\" Mac said.\n\n\"Maybe not so easy. There are many places where the trees and brush are so thick, you cannot see a meter into the forest,\" she said. \"Much of it is accessible only on foot and by way of sharp machetes and strong arms. In such terrain, it can take all day to go three hundred meters. Even if you knew exactly where it was, getting there wouldn't be a picnic.\"\n\nToo much to ask that it would be easy, Indy thought. Aloud, he said, \"Three miles by a mile and a quarter, that's not an inconsiderable piece of real estate. I don't recall ever seeing this island on a map before.\"\n\n\"Perhaps no one who made maps saw it. Or perhaps it was not there when the maps were made.\"\n\nHe started to reply, but just then Alain hit a particularly deep rut and said \"Damn!\" Indy shut his mouth to keep from accidentally biting his tongue off. What did that mean? Wasn't there?\n\n\"Two or three hours of this, I'll need new kidneys,\" Mac said. \"Bladder, too.\"\n\nIndy nodded.\n\nMarie chuckled. \"Mes amis, this is the good part of the road. Wait until we go to the rough stretch.\"\n\n[ Port-au-Prince ]\n\nYamada looked at the spy. \"You have done well, my friend. Please, take the remainder of the case of rum as part of my thanks.\"\n\nLouis/Henri/Whoever grinned. \"Oui, monsieur, I am most grateful.\"\n\n\"I expect that we will do much more business in the future. I would take it as a personal favor if you would not pass this information along to the Dutchman.\"\n\nThe man shrugged. \"No reason he needs to know.\"\n\n\"Thank you, my friend. I am in your debt.\"\n\nAfter he was gone, Yamada sent a boy to bring Captain Suzuki\u2014ostensibly another Chinese scholar, but actually an agent of the imperial army and his own second in command. Suzuki had men standing by\u2014more fake Chinese\u2014and they would be ready to move at an instant's notice. Men from good families, willing to do whatever was asked of them. And of course, the way of the samurai was found in death.\n\nIt was only a few minutes before Suzuki arrived in the rented car, a 1938 Packard 8, a powerful and well-built automobile. Yamada was fond of big American cars\u2014the Japanese had nothing like them, and it was doubtful the zaibatsu like Nissan, Toyota, or the new Hino truck maker would ever produce vehicles of such quality. It didn't seem to be in the Japanese nature to do that kind of mechanical work. A pity.\n\nAfter the required polite greetings\u2014manners and honor had to be observed, even here\u2014Yamada came to the point.\n\n\"The two gaijin, along with a local woman and man, have headed south on the P\u00e9tionville Road.\"\n\n\"Ah. As you surmised. The craft will be ready by the time we get to it, Yamada-san.\"\n\n\"Excellent, Captain.\"\n\nThey set off for the airport. Suzuki had a chartered plane standing by. They would have needed it eventually, and sooner was better than later. Likely their quarry were heading for Marigot or Dep\u00f2t, on the south coast, or perhaps Jacmel on the river. There were many villages with boats there, and it didn't really matter which one. Yamada knew where they were going to wind up eventually; the stops in between? Not important to know.\n\nThere were no aircraft landing sites on the Island of Death, as he understood it, but there was a packed-dirt strip along the river at Marigot near the southern Haitian coast that was long enough for a large plane to land. That was where he was going.\n\nYamada's plane would get them there, and a boat from there would put them on Zile Muri-yo long before the two men, whom his man Louis had determined were American and British archaeologists. This confirmed his suspicions. They had come looking for the same thing as he. Well, perhaps not precisely such, but the result would be the same. That they had come meant they either knew where it was or had some way to find it, and the Japanese had learned long ago that if you could follow a bee to its hive, it would save you much work in collecting honey . . .\n\nWhen he and Suzuki arrived at the Port-au-Prince airport, the plane, a Boeing 247, was already warming up its twin engines. The craft was loaded, since Yamada had known he would be needing it sooner or later. Plenty of room for his men, since it could easily carry ten passengers, along with a three-man crew and several hundred pounds of supplies. The flight would take only a few minutes, and they would be well ahead of Jones and McHale and their local contact.\n\nThe sword had been drawn, the edge glistened in the hot sunlight, and now it was time to address the cutting . . .\n\nGruber said, \"And what do you have for me, Henri?\"\n\nThe little brown man appeared to consider the question as he sipped from his glass. \"Nothing today, monsieur, I am afraid.\"\n\n\"Ah, well. So it goes. Listen, Henri, I have left my wallet in my car, behind the market there. Come with me and I shall pay you for this week.\"\n\n\"Oui, monsieur.\"\n\nHenri finished his drink and stood.\n\nThe car, bought locally, was an old but well-maintained Ford, parked in the quiet alley behind the market. Nobody was around.\n\nGruber double-checked to make certain they were unobserved. He opened the passenger door, reached under the seat, and came out with an American .45 pistol. Of course, he preferred the Luger, which was a much better-made weapon, sleek, perfectly machined, and using the smaller and more elegant 9mm round. Even the Mauser HSc pocket pistol in 7.65mm issued to doctors was much better, but it would not do to be found here with a German sidearm. There was the tiny hideaway single-shot Swiss pistol in his pant pocket, but the Swiss were neutral . . .\n\nHenri's senses were not so fogged by the rum that he didn't know what he saw.\n\n\"Monsieur? What is this?\"\n\n\"It's a Colt, I believe. Very nasty. A real manstopper.\" He pointed the gun at Henri.\n\n\"But\u2014why menace me this way?\"\n\n\"Because I don't care for liars. You saw the Chinese scholar today, only a few minutes ago. And yet you did not mention it.\"\n\n\"But\u2014but\u2014there was no need! I had nothing to tell him!\"\n\n\"I don't believe you. I am certain you did have something to tell him. I've had men watching you, my friend. You are being devious. I will know why, or you will not be drinking any more rum, you understand?\" He waved the gun. \"If I think you are lying again, I will shoot you dead, right here and now.\"\n\nHenri didn't go pale, but he certainly began to sweat. \"It\u2014it slipped my mind. Nothing of importance, monsieur, I swear!\"\n\n\"Let me decide that.\"\n\n\"The two men. Dr. Jones and McHale, they\u2014\"\n\n\"Doctor Jones?\"\n\n\"They\u2014they are, how do you say? Arch\u00e9ologues?\"\n\nArchaeologists? Damn! This was unexpected and bad news.\n\n\"And you told this to the Chinaman?\"\n\n\"Y-y-yes.\"\n\n\"What else?\"\n\n\"Nothing! Only that they had engaged a local woman and that they had left town today, driving south in an automobile, through the mountains.\"\n\n\"Gott im Himmel!\"\n\n\"Monsieur?\"\n\n\"All right, Henri, I believe you. I am going to let you live. Go on now, before I change my mind!\"\n\nHenri relaxed and turned away\u2014\n\nGruber shot him in the back of the head.\n\nThe noise was quite loud, it made his ears ring, but could be mistaken for a truck backfiring, and pinpointing the location would be difficult if anybody bothered to wonder. Most of the locals here wouldn't turn a head to look at an erupting volcano if it might interrupt them dozing, eating, or drinking. Yes, the heat and all, but still, they made sloths look energetic. Haiti-time, they said when they were late for a meeting. It meant they got there when they got there. Clocks and watches were wasted here.\n\nHaiti-time. Uncivilized beyond measure.\n\nQuickly he climbed into his car and started the engine. He had to get to the airport and rent a plane. It would not do that Yamada was ahead of him. He also had to send a coded wire. He would need help, and there was a group of dedicated German soldiers in the Dominican Republic standing by, waiting for his order. They could meet him in Marigot in a matter of a couple of hours, perhaps less.\n\nEven so, he was behind, and he hated it. It would not do.\n\nAs for Henri? He simply could not have been left alive to tell tales. Gruber wasn't planning to return to this city or country ever again if he could help it, but, better that there weren't any loose ends. He doubted if anybody really cared about the death of a ne'er-do-well like the late Henri anyhow . . .\n\nWith any luck, in a week or two he would be on his way home, and in charge of a project that would give Germany the victory in this war. If he never saw a tropical country again, it would be fine by him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Terre Rouge, Haiti",
                "text": "\"We are going to cross a couple of bloody miles of the Caribbean in that?\"\n\nMarie looked at Mac. \"Unless you would rather swim?\"\n\n\"No, I won't be swimming in these waters, thank you.\"\n\nIndy could see what Mac saw. The \"that\" in question was a boat, but it looked neither sturdy nor large enough to carry four people. Not much longer than the shark that had chased them ashore, the thing was open-topped, its wood lacking much in the way of paint or varnish. The outboard motor on the back looked like it would have been more at home on a sewing machine.\n\nIndy shook his head. Yeah, it was bad, but he had been in worse.\n\n\"My cousin Andr\u00e9 has been fishing these waters for fifteen years in this bateau. It will get us there\u2014unless a storm comes along.\"\n\nIndy grinned. Well. There was one more thing to worry about, wasn't there? This was the Caribbean, after all. Wouldn't that be fun? The sky was free of clouds at the moment, but the tropics were volatile when it came to the weather.\n\n\"It will only take a few minutes. You can see the island from here, look.\"\n\nIndy had already spotted the place, a green blob on the sea less than two miles out.\n\nHe looked at Mac.\n\n\"In for a penny, in for a pound.\"\n\n\"I suppose.\" To Marie, he said, \"What about supplies? We can't carry much in that.\"\n\n\"There is a store on the island. We can get what we need there.\"\n\nIndy shrugged. \"Fine. Let's go.\"\n\n\"In a bit. Andr\u00e9 and I must first offer a small sacrifice to assure our safe journey.\"\n\n\"Sacrifice? Aren't you a Catholic?\"\n\n\"Among other things, yes. It is traditional when Andr\u00e9 takes the boat out to sea to ask for a blessing.\"\n\n\"God has pretty good ears, I expect He can hear you as well from here.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"We have our ways, Indy. Surely a man of your experience understands?\"\n\nIndy sighed. \"Yeah, I suppose. Go, do what you need. Mac and I'll wait here, make sure the boat is shipshape.\"\n\nMarie and her cousin Andr\u00e9 approached Alain and spoke to him. Her brother waved at Indy and Mac and headed back for the Chevrolet.\n\n\"Lad seems to be in a bit of a hurry. Must have left the water running back home.\"\n\n\"Might as well have a look at this tub,\" Indy said. \"We don't want to see a snout sticking up through the bottom halfway there.\"\n\nMac laughed. \"That's my line, isn't it?\"\n\nAs they headed toward the water's edge, Indy caught a movement in the trees to the left of the fisherman's house.\n\nMac caught the look. \"Something?\"\n\n\"I thought I saw somebody there, in the woods, watching us.\"\n\nMac glanced that way. \"I don't see anyone.\"\n\nIndy shook his head. \"Gone, now. All I got was a glimpse. A face. Not real healthy looking.\"\n\n\"Maybe a trick of the light,\" Mac said.\n\n\"Maybe.\" But his impression was that it was somebody sneaking around, and there was something odd about them . . .\n\nWell. He'd check it out, but they wouldn't be here that long. Maybe on the way back.\n\n[ Zile Muri-yo ]\n\nWhen Boukman spoke, it was with the voice of Baron LaCroix\u2014called here Lakwa\u2014of the Gu\u00e9d\u00e9, the Spirits of the Dead. To grant Boukman power, the Gu\u00e9d\u00e9 demanded much of their horse\u2014though the rider was inside rather than without, and they rode him hard. Often after such a ride, Boukman was too tired to move for hours, sore for days. Lakwa was not as fierce as Cimeti\u00e8re, the Guardian of the Cemeteries, and neither was as hard on him as Samadi's wife, Maman Brigitte, who liked to drink hot pepper sauce and curse long and loud, burning his belly, roiling his bowels, and turning his voice into a hoarse whisper.\n\nHe shared his body with Lakwa now, and the voice coming from his lips was that of the loa:\n\n\"Kill the black rooster and bathe in the blood! The dark of the moon comes, and thus the Risen will flourish!\"\n\nThere were half a dozen zombi servants gathered around Boukman in the small clearing. These were the True Risen, not the Children of the Potion, and their powers were much greater. No thirst, no hunger, they were bothered not by the heat of day nor the insects at night; their hearts did not beat, nor their souls yearn, for their souls were passed on, leaving them empty, existing only to serve the bokor who commanded them.\n\nThey took much power to raise and hold, the true ones. At his peak, too many years ago, he had been able to keep two score animated, and those able to travel the length and breadth of Hispaniola even while he himself slept. These days? Half that many were all he could manage, and when he was really tired some of them dropped and lay still. Age wanted to rob him of everything, and fighting it cost more and more power each year. Despite being weaker, the Children of the Potion were so much easier to make and control than the True Risen. Administering a drug was easier than bringing someone back from the dead . . .\n\nThere was a change blowing, he could feel the herald winds brushing against his lips, could taste the coming of it . . .\n\nAbruptly the baron left him, and he felt himself sag as the loa's spirit flew away.\n\nThe Risen stood silently, waiting.\n\n\"Go,\" he said. \"Watch. Learn. Come back and report.\"\n\nThe half a dozen dead\u2014five men and one woman\u2014shambled wordlessly toward the forest.\n\nBoukman already knew the white men were on their way here. One of his servants had seen them by the sea on the mainland, and he knew they were coming. He did not know why yet, but that knowledge drew nearer. He would uncover it soon.\n\nFor now? He needed to rest. He was exhausted.\n\nThe hut on the edge of the clearing beckoned. It was rude\u2014walls, a roof, a straw mattress on a new bamboo floor already half eaten by mites\u2014but it would serve. It would keep off the rain when it fell, shade him from the sun. Nothing alive, no bug, no animal, no man would bother him as he slept and regained his strength. Later, one of the Children of the Potion would come with food, and to attend to his other needs. He was old, but having a young, pretty, and pleasingly plump woman come to bathe his face, rub his body with scented oils, and do anything else he might deem necessary\u2014anything at all? That was part of his power, albeit only the smallest part.\n\nThere was an old saying on the islands: If your daughters are pretty or your sons handsome, best hide them away, lest Boukman claim them for his own . . .\n\nHe grinned. It was true\u2014he liked them attractive. Many of the young and beautiful had died suddenly, for no apparent reason, and come back to serve as Boukman's slaves. That was the way of things when you were a bokor. You took what\u2014and who\u2014you wanted.\n\nLater, after he was rested, he would be ready to deal with the white men and whatever it was they had been sent to bring him.\n\nIn the dream, Boukman was running, and his steps were slow, as if his bare feet were sunk deep in a thick mire. As hard as he tried, he could only manage a pace akin to a slow walk.\n\nSomething was behind him, unseen, and it was coming for him.\n\nThough he could not see it, he knew it was a monster beyond measure, a thing of such vile composition that to behold it would curdle your blood. To be touched by it would be infinitely worse, a horror beyond any a sane man could imagine. Gibbering madness for ten times ten million years.\n\nIn the dream, Boukman was seventeen again, a man, but not one of enough strength to stop the terror chasing him. His machete was made of rubber, his gun held only cotton bullets, and his powers were small. What use was a love potion against the thing that wanted his soul? How could he possibly survive?\n\nEven though he knew it was a dream, he felt the fear.\n\nAnd the answer, he knew, was that as he stood, he could not.\n\nBut: There was hope, a faint ray that shined down supernally from the heavens. There was a way. A way to become more than he was, and it was in front of him, just... there, ahead . . .\n\nLike the monster behind him, what lay before was unseen, and he could not fathom what it was, only that it was his salvation. If he could get to it before the thing chasing him, if he could steep himself in whatever it was, he would have the power to stop it, to defeat it, and to become more than a man\u2014more than any man had been or would ever be . . .\n\nHe pushed himself to move faster, his lungs laboring, his muscles aching, his heart pounding close to its bursting point\u2014\n\n\u2014to no avail. He was a fly in hardening amber, wading through glue, and the evil behind him kept gaining. He felt it well over him, a malignant black wave about to crash down and engulf his soul\u2014\n\nBoukman awoke with a start, sitting up with a yell stillborn on his lips, sweat soaking the thin sheet upon which he lay.\n\nThe Dream. Come to warn him. Come to tell him there was something for him to find that would help, as it always did when he heeded it. Attention must be paid, and if it was done properly, it would reward him.\n\nIt had to be Marie and her white men\u2014her imen blan. Nothing else was new.\n\nHe would have to examine it as a boy did an ant under a magnifying glass. And he would have to take care that he did not focus the sun's light into a burning ray that would destroy the insect before he learned its secrets . . ."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "Marie had been right about the place being a jungle. There was a strip of beach, a few palm trees, and then a wall of rain forest that looked like, well, a wall. Most of Haiti had been logged, Indy knew; the Spanish, the French, the natives, whoever, had cut down trees to build houses, ships, churches, even sidewalks. But this looked to be old growth, towering trees little bothered by axes or saws. Odd. You'd think somebody would be in there harvesting this valuable timber like gangbusters.\n\nMarie spoke to her cousin, and this time Indy was pretty sure he caught a couple of the Creole words, one of which meant \"home.\"\n\n\"He's leaving us here?\" Indy asked.\n\nIt was an unnecessary question, since Andr\u00e9 had already walked his boat around and pointed it nose-out toward the mainland. As they watched, he waded it out, rode it over the first waves, which weren't much, and then hopped in and cranked the engine. He turned and waved good-bye.\n\nThe trip over had been fine. The water had been calm, the little two-cycle motor ran merrily along, putt-putting and burbling to itself, the burnt smell of gasoline-and-oil mix mostly blown away by a slight cross-breeze. That it was not the greatest boat in the world didn't lessen Indy's desire to have it stay close at hand.\n\n\"He will be back in a few days. There are other boats on the island if we need them. Come. The store is this way, only a kilometer or so, and slightly inland.\"\n\nIndy didn't think that any kind of permanent structure would do well only \"slightly inland,\" given the storms that raked this part of the Caribbean every year or two. He'd been in typhoons, and the hurricanes in this hemisphere were every bit as nasty as the typhoons in the Pacific. Winds at 130 or 140 miles an hour, tidal surge going halfway across the island? That would make living here risky, and the summer brought the storms . . .\n\nMac stood looking at the jungle.\n\n\"Something?\"\n\n\"Well, I don't see anything but greenery, but it feels as if somebody just walked across my grave. Rather a creepy sensation.\"\n\nMac stuck his hand into his jacket pocket, and Indy knew he was checking to make certain his gun was still there. Indy carried an English revolver, a Webley, a big, clunky, hard-hitting old piece. Mac had a thing for Italian weapons, and he favored a Beretta, a little .32 semi-automatic, the like of which he had been carrying since the early 1930s. He preferred the extra rounds, he said, eight in the magazine and one in the pipe, for a total of nine. Indy argued that the little 7.65mm round was anemic\u2014you needed to shoot somebody two or three times to get the same effect as the Webley .455\u2014but Mac was obstinate about such things.\n\nA lot of folks had their talismans . . .\n\nOne of the first things they had done when they'd reached a town after the plane crashed was buy a little can of oil to deal with their guns' immersion in the sea. Salt water was bad for blued steel.\n\nMac's pistol was better than no gun, though, and a lot of guys had been killed with Berettas. Not for much longer, though. The Italians were on the run, and he'd be surprised if they stayed in the war until the end of the year.\n\n\"I don't see anything,\" Indy said.\n\nMac nodded. \"Probably nothing to see. Getting spooked in my old age.\"\n\n\"Old? You aren't any older than I am.\"\n\n\"Look at that sweet young woman walking ahead of us, Indy. Compared with her, we are ancient.\"\n\n\"Speak for yourself, pal. I don't feel a day over thirty.\"\n\n\"And you don't look a day over sixty.\"\n\n\"Hey, forty-four\u2014!\"\n\nMac laughed. \"Come along. We don't want to be huffing and puffing to keep up with her. I pray this store has some cigarettes. My nerves are entirely too jittery.\"\n\n\"I'd settle for a bottle of beer and a couple cans of beans.\"\n\nYamada was not a field agent, in the sense of tromping around in the woods and enjoying it, but he wanted to see these men for himself. Suzuki and his eight troops were equally at home in a jungle, in the desert, or upon an ice floe, so it didn't matter to them. Spread out here in the thick forest, denser than any Yamada had seen, even in Borneo, coated in mosquito repellent that kept them from sweating where it covered their pores, it felt like an oven, but with steam mixed into the heat. Through the set of Zeiss 6/30 binoculars, courtesy of their allies the Germans, Yamada got his first glimpse of the four who came ashore, right where their local contact had said they would. Something to do with a reef that made it the best place to land for half a mile in either direction, apparently.\n\nA small, dark, pretty woman led them\u2014that would be Arnoux. According to the description he had gotten, the heavier of the men was George McHale, the Englishman. The thinner one, Dr. Henry Jones, called himself Indiana. Yamada had radioed the sub and asked about them, and a coded message had been sent in return. There was not much information on the two since 1939. Jones worked for an American university, teaching and doing fieldwork recovering ancient artifacts. McHale seemed to have no permanent address or job, but several of his exploits involved working for the British Museum. Nothing on either man specifically for the last four years, though one notation claimed that they had been in certain of the occupied territories in the South Pacific, and there was some speculation they might be spies, of a sort. Documentation was spotty regarding this.\n\nNothing to spy on here, though, unless insects had joined the war.\n\nNo, they were here in their capacity as treasure hunters.\n\nOnce their quarry were well away from Yamada's position, he said to Suzuki, \"We are done. Let us return to the campsite.\"\n\n\"Shall I have men follow them?\"\n\n\"No need. They will be going to the village store.\"\n\n\"How can you be sure?\"\n\n\"If they plan to tramp around in the interior searching for something, they will need supplies, and somebody to guide them. There is no place else to get such. Have a man watch the store, so that we know when they are outfitted and ready to go.\"\n\n\"Hai, Yamada-san.\"\n\nThe blade was drawn. The edge glittered in the tropical sun.\n\nThe first cut was already in motion . . .\n\n\"Eh?\" said one of the men.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"Your pardon, Yamada-san, I heard something behind us.\"\n\n\"A pig,\" Suzuki said.\n\n\"It did not sound like a pig, Captain-san.\"\n\n\"Really? Do you know what a pig sounds like?\"\n\nThe man lowered his gaze to the thick humus that was the jungle's floor. \"Hai. I was raised on a farm outside Hiroshima, Captain-san. We had a few swine.\"\n\n\"Well, then, go and see what it is and report back!\"\n\n\"Hai!\"\n\nBut when the soldier returned, there was nothing for him to report. Whatever it was had departed.\n\n[ Port-au-Prince ]\n\nThere was a war on, but you could hardly tell it in Haiti. A curious question to the man behind the desk at the Flughafen\u2014the airport\u2014was all it had taken:\n\n\"Pardonnez-moi, monsieur, I was wondering if my friend the Chinese scholar and his party have left yet?\"\n\nAnd without blinking: \"Ah, oui, they left only half an hour ago.\"\n\n\"For Jacmel?\"\n\n\"Non, for Marigot.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, I forgot. Well, we'll meet them there.\"\n\nBut of course Gruber knew better than that. Another two planes bearing foreigners landing at the same dirt strip so soon? Too easily remembered. His crew, led by SS captain Sch\u00e4efer, should have already been in the air by the time Gruber achieved this airport.\n\nGruber was an excellent pilot. Once he was aloft in his chartered plane, a Bl\u00e9riot A\u00e9ronautique two-seater about five years old, he sent a radio message on the agreed frequency, consisting of one word: \"Jacmel.\"\n\nIn French, the two-word reply: \"Je comprends.\"\n\nSo, they were in accord.\n\nThe flight, only thirty-five or so kilometers in a straight line, needed some zigzagging to avoid the mountaintops. The craft was not pressurized, nor did the heater seem to work. At more than ten thousand feet, breathing the thin air was most uncomfortable. Fortunately, the French plane came equipped with a heavy leather jacket and gloves, so it was not an altogether miserable flight, and it was less than an hour from the time he took off until he landed.\n\nIn another hour, Sch\u00e4efer and his men arrived in a more substantial and much faster twin-engine, all-metal Douglas DC-2.\n\nSch\u00e4efer, dressed in planter's clothes\u2014a wide-brimmed white hat and colonial-white linen trousers and jacket\u2014but still obviously a military man by his bearing, marched over to Gruber. For a horrible second, Gruber was afraid the captain would offer him a Sieg Heil extended-arm salute, but he only nodded.\n\nIn Dutch, he said, \"Mijnheer.\"\n\nGruber smiled. \"Good to see you again, Hans. Shall we go?\"\n\nJacmel was at least forty kilometers from the final destination by boat\u2014but Yamada was perhaps wily enough to have left a guard with his airplane, and Gruber did not want the Japanese doctor to know he was going to have company on the Insel der Toten\u2014the Island of the Dead. Forewarned was forearmed, and while Gruber had no doubt that in a fight, his elite SS warriors would be more than a match for whatever the Japanese imperial army had dispatched, he would rather avoid such a thing. Best was to get there, find the two Arch\u00e4ologen, follow them, collect what they found, and depart. It was obvious they were after the same thing, and they seemed to know where they were going. Gruber had heard that the formula was supposedly somewhere on the island, but nothing further. That the American and Brit were here meant they thought so, as well, and that was some kind of a confirmation. They must be after the formula, and the clues regarding it? From what little he knew, the information about this couldn't have been too hard to uncover, else how would the Japanese have found it at almost the same time?\n\nHe was willing to sacrifice his troops if need be, but there were times when stealth was smarter than force. This might be one of those times.\n\nSo now, in the boat Kapit\u00e4n Sch\u00e4efer had procured, a stout fishing craft ten meters long with a good engine, manned by a local who knew a spot to put ashore where they would be unlikely to run into anybody else\u2014they made best speed for the island, bearing all the supplies they would need to stay for two weeks, if necessary.\n\nThe sea was calm, the day bright and hot, and even though he was running somewhat late, Gruber had every hope that he could make up for lost time. He was, after all, a German. In such matters, his natural superiority would shine through. The Japanese were superficially clever, but they had less depth. The prize would be his. It was a matter of when, not if.\n\nAnd how glorious it would be when he returned to Berlin in triumph. How glorious indeed . . ."
            },
            {
                "title": "Zile Muri-yo",
                "text": "When indy saw the local store, he nodded to himself. Of course.\n\nThe place sat nine feet off the ground on a platform mounted on eight thick tree trunks. These supports looked to be covered with some kind of grease, probably to protect the wood from moisture and insects, and to keep rats and whatnot from climbing the poles.\n\nBig storm surge managed to wash this far inland? It would pass right under the building. Smart.\n\nOf course, if the wind was strong enough to get through the heavy forest and blow the place off its platform, it would be a nasty fall to the ground.\n\nThe stairs looked kind of rickety, lashed together rather than nailed, and it appeared they could be raised using a crank and ropes. The steps\u2014indeed, much of the whole place\u2014seemed to be constructed of bamboo. It was easy to see that there were ongoing repairs\u2014new, green canes were woven into older brown mats. Even so, the steps were more solid than they looked.\n\nInside, the store was stocked with the usual kinds of items one might expect at an outpost shop. Tools, basic staples\u2014rice, flour, beans, sugar, rum, tobacco\u2014and shelves stacked with work clothes, canvas, and all manner of gear: tents, ropes, water or fuel cans, like that. Should be no problem gathering decent camping supplies.\n\nThere was a long rack of blades along one wall, some short, most of them longer\u2014cane knives, machetes, bolos, hatchets, axes, and the like. If you were going to be hacking your way through vines and branches or felling trees, you'd need those.\n\nPretty well stocked for a small island store. Indy wondered how many people actually lived around here.\n\nMarie approached an old man sitting in a rattan rocking chair\u2014there was no counter per se\u2014and began speaking to him in a dialect totally unfamiliar to Indy.\n\nIndy glanced at Mac, who shook his head. He didn't know it, either.\n\nDidn't sound anything like French or Creole. Amazing how many languages there were, and how small the pool of speakers for some of them. Indy had been in places in South America where a village of fifty or sixty were the only people in the world who spoke their particular patois. If they were suddenly wiped out by some natural disaster, the language would vanish with them.\n\nIndy wandered around, mentally shopping. Shelter, food, those were important\u2014\n\nHello?\n\nHe came to a lane on the floor under a shelf that was six or seven feet long and maybe a foot and a half deep, stacked with boxes of firearm ammunition. All kinds\u2014rifle, shotgun, pistol, a lot of different calibers. Several thousand rounds.\n\nHere was a stroke of luck. All Indy had was what was in his Webley, plus a few tarnished and half-corroded cartridges in his pant pocket\u2014twelve, fifteen in all. While good ammo was more or less waterproof, when it was your neck on the line, you wanted to be sure. The two loudest sounds in the world, so the old joke went, were click! when you were expecting bang! And bang! when you were expecting click!\n\nFresh, undunked-in-the-sea ammunition would be good.\n\nHeck, they even had some for Mac's puny little .32 auto. How unlikely was that?\n\nMac, who had been looking around, drifted over.\n\nIndy said, \"Hey, check it out. We can grab a box of ammo for your peashooter and one for my more manly revolver.\"\n\nMac blinked. \"Might want to grab more than one box each.\"\n\nIndy turned to look at Mac. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Think about it, Jonesy.\" He held his right hand out, palm up, in the direction of the ammo.\n\nIndy did.\n\n\"Uh-oh . . .\"\n\n\"Right,\" Mac said.\n\nThey were on a small island. Mostly jungle or not, it wouldn't be big enough to support many large predators. Could be some game here, but again, it wouldn't be in the rhino/elephant size range. Pigs, maybe, or even some cattle; deer, birds, squirrels, like that. If there weren't many big cats or wolves or bears, things dangerous to humans, then why all the ammunition?\n\nWho would be buying it?\n\nWhat would they be shooting at?\n\n\"I don't think I like this,\" Mac said.\n\nIndy shrugged. \"We are here now. We'll just have to be vigilant.\"\n\n\"Yeah? What are we looking out for?\"\n\nHe shrugged again. \"Marie might know.\"\n\n\"We should ask her.\"\n\nIndy collected four boxes of ammo for each of their guns. Just to be on the safe side . . .\n\nForty-five minutes in the store gave them everything they needed. Mac went to dicker with the old man, who apparently spoke enough French to bargain. Marie approached Indy.\n\n\"I have hired a local man, Batiste, and some porters.\"\n\n\"Do we need porters?\"\n\n\"Unless you want to haul our gear and chop our way through whatever forest it takes to reach wherever we are going?\"\n\n\"I see your point. Porters would be good.\"\n\n\"Batiste will meet us here shortly and take us to Efreye, his village. We'll stay there tonight and get started in the morning.\"\n\nIndy nodded. \"Got a question for you. Seems like an awful lot of ammunition for a little country store.\" He nodded in the direction of the ammo aisle.\n\n\"It is harder to get such things with the war,\" she said. \"Armies shooting at each other and all, takes a lot of bullets. P\u00e8re Ours stocks up on such whenever he can.\"\n\n\"Still, there are rounds for shotguns, rifles, pistols, two dozen different calibers. Seems like a bit much for such a small island.\"\n\nShe gave him a small shrug. \"Men want guns and they like variety. C'est la vie.\"\n\nShe was right and it made a certain sense; still, something didn't quite ring true about her answer. She had been quick to agree to help them. Maybe she had an ulterior motive? But\u2014what would it be? She couldn't have known they would show up.\n\nA mosquito buzzed him, and Indy shooed it away. \"Come dark, these things will drain us dry. I hope Papa Bear here has 6-12.\"\n\n\"There is a bathhouse in the village,\" she said. \"After we get cleaned up, the locals have a lotion that keeps the insects at bay. Much better than the commercial stuff. Lets your skin breathe.\"\n\nIndy nodded. He liked that idea.\n\nWhat the professors didn't tell you when you were a freshly minted graduate student all eager to travel to exotic places in search of archaeological wonders were the small things: the heat, cold, dust, the sand. The lack of drinkable or bathing water. They didn't talk about the mosquitoes, chiggers, and ticks; the spiders and scorpions and leeches.\n\nHe recalled a time in some tropical outpost once after a hard rain. Had that been India? The Malay Peninsula? Hard to say, the way these adventures ran together. What he wouldn't forget was the lawn in front of the house where he was staying, which seemed to be undulating after the daylong downpour\u2014and the moment he realized it was because there were thousands of slugs oozing across it . . .\n\nYou learned to live with such things if you were going into the field; it was part of the business. Finicky archaeologists didn't last long. They stayed home and taught full-time.\n\nNot that he was finicky, but there were days when the lecture hall had a great deal of appeal. No dust. No broiling sun.\n\nNo snakes . . .\n\nWhatever Marie was keeping to herself, it wouldn't matter if they could find the Heart of Darkness and get on their way. Let her have her secrets. Everybody deserved a few. Lord knew he had plenty of his own. The Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, and the Peruvian werejaguars, even that Chinese tomb and its black pearl, just to consider the first few that came to mind . . .\n\nBoukman listened to the speech from his slaves who could still talk, the potioned ones, and frowned at what he heard. The white men had people watching them, followers from the mainland. The Japanese who pretended to be Chinese, and the German who passed himself off as Dutch, and this was not at all to Boukman's liking, oh, no. Somehow these people had fastened on to his two white men, and that would not do. They were his, they had been sent for him, and no one was going to get between him and them.\n\nHe pondered his options as he sat in his hut. As long as the white men with Marie were running around loose in the jungle, they might be at risk from these new threats. What the Germans and the Japanese wanted was of no importance, but that they might interfere with whatever it was Boukman was supposed to do with the imen blan? Non. Not to be allowed.\n\nThe Dream had come for a reason, it always did, and while he didn't immediately know what that reason was, eventually it was revealed.\n\nThe white men were here for a purpose, and they knew what it was. He had intended to watch them and allow them to lead him to whatever it was. But accidents happened, especially when men with guns were involved, and what if the imen blan were injured or killed before he could reap their secrets? Perhaps a mistake on his part.\n\nSo. A new idea:\n\nHe would ask them. They would tell him. And then he could see exactly how it concerned him.\n\nHis slaves, standing silently and with infinite patience, were awaiting his command.\n\nBoukman gave it to them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "\"Just as you said, yamada-san. They went to the island store. They are now on their way to the village near the largest of the sisal plantations.\"\n\nYamada nodded. \"Keep them under observation. They will not leave this late in the day. Have the men set up the camp here. No fires, we must stay invisible.\"\n\n\"Hai, Yamada-san.\"\n\nAs the evening drew near, the insects were already swarming, kept from alighting upon them only by the oily lotion that covered every inch of their exposed flesh. The buzzing of tiny wings was constant, and Yamada had learned to tune it out long ago, enough so that he was not bothered by it. It was a part of the tropics, where mosquitoes sometimes grew so large that even a shirt was no protection against their bites, were it not of a thick and heavy weave. He had seen the bloodsucking insects clustered so thick on comrades' clothes that it looked as if they were wearing fur . . .\n\n\"Suzuki-san, please also to post a sentry. I should not like to be joined in my tent by a... pig in the middle of the night.\"\n\nSuzuki grinned. He gave Yamada a slow, military bow, no more than a nod. They were not really speaking of pigs.\n\nOf Gruber, there had been no sign\u2014with luck, Henri's avowal that he would not tell the German of the archaeologists' departure would hold, and Gruber would not be a factor. A wise man did not depend on luck, however, and the German could not be entirely discounted. Yamada had heard of his exploits. He was intelligent, and while too much of that could be a handicap, just enough was most dangerous. Best to keep one's guard up.\n\nIn Bushido, the samurai's code of behavior, sneak attacks were allowed\u2014and should be expected. If an enemy leaped out of the bushes and cut you down, you had no one to blame but yourself. You knew you had an enemy, and you knew a bush could conceal him. Until he was no longer among the living, he was always a threat, and even gone he might have family or comrades who would avenge him.\n\nDeath was not a concern\u2014the way of the samurai was found there\u2014but being caught unprepared? Dishonorable, that, and worse than mere death.\n\n[ Efreye Village, Zile Muri-yo ]\n\nThe village was bigger than Indy would have guessed. Forty, forty-five small huts, bamboo with palm-thatched roofs, along with a couple of larger communal structures of sturdier wood, one of which was the bathhouse. In the tropics, the heat, humidity, and sweat combined to make you feel pretty grubby even after one day, and a wash would feel good.\n\nThe villagers had cooking fires going. They didn't rush over with enthusiasm to greet the new arrivals, but neither did they start shooting, and Indy saw several shotguns leaning against walls or trees. Subdued was the word that came to mind.\n\nOf course, it was getting near dark, and subsistance villagers generally had long days just to keep food on the table, so maybe they were all tired. Indy was tired, for certain.\n\nMarie introduced them to Batiste, a tall, well-built man of perhaps thirty with dark skin and a very white smile, who wore old but clean and mended khaki trousers and shirt, with a bandanna tied around his forehead. He sported a machete as long as his arm and a holstered pistol on his belt as well as a short lever-action rifle. Batiste spoke French, Creole, English, and whatever the locals mostly used, which seemed to have a lot of glottal stops and a definite singsong tonality to it. African roots, to be sure.\n\n\"Bathe or eat first?\" Marie asked.\n\n\"I'm good either way,\" Mac said.\n\nIndy shrugged.\n\n\"I think I will use the bathhouse,\" Marie said. \"Batiste will provide you with food and show you a hut for the night.\"\n\nMarie headed off, and Batiste said, \"Gentlemen, this way please.\"\n\nThey followed him to a hut. There was a kerosene lamp inside, short-wicked but bright enough to reveal a circular room sufficient for four or five people to bed down. The floor was of packed earth, no furniture save for some rolled-up sleeping mats. The door was heavy bamboo, and there was a hardwood bar on the inside that slid into hoops on the wall to keep company from walking in unexpectedly.\n\nIndy took notice of that but said nothing.\n\nBack at the large communal fire, people were eating roast beast and some kind of tuber, and both Mac and Indy took wooden platters and served themselves. The meat was good, juicy if a little tough, and seemed vaguely like pork. The tubers tasted like a cross between a yam and a carrot. There was some kind of spicy ale-like drink. Indy had eaten a lot worse. He recalled once drinking an alcoholic brew made by the women in a village in South America\u2014one that was fermented by the women spitting into it. He'd eaten fried scorpion and beetle larvae, too.\n\nFinicky archaeologists didn't last long, but there were things even the stouthearted would avoid when they could.\n\nIndy wandered around, cataloging the village with an anthropologist's gaze. Definitely subdued. He didn't see any small children, and every person he passed, man or woman, would glance at him, take heed of him, and then look away. Not much on foreigners, these folks.\n\nHe found himself standing outside one of the larger structures, and even though the big window was covered by a sheet of yellow cotton, he could see the glow of a lamp inside.\n\nA woman moved in front of the window, backlit by the lamp. He couldn't see details, only a silhouette on the shade, but he could tell by the motions that she was combing her hair, and that she didn't seem to be wearing any clothes.\n\nThis would be the bathhouse, then. And in all likelihood, that would be Marie.\n\nDespite the juicy meat he was still eating, Indy's mouth seemed suddenly very dry. He turned away. He didn't want to seem a peeping Tom. Not that he could see anything, not really\u2014but there was nothing wrong with his imagination . . .\n\nEasy, Indy. The woman is young enough to be your daughter. But, said a little voice inside his head, she's not, is she?\n\nAnd there is something she's not telling you. Might be wise to keep your distance, hey?\n\nNext to the ebbing campfire, Indy, Mac, Marie, and Batiste sat or squatted, drinking a bit more more of the local brew. Indy had washed\u2014the bathhouse consisted of a planked bamboo floor and a couple of barrels of clean water. You soaped up, using some kind of local plant to make a lather, poured dippers of water over yourself until you were rinsed clean, then dried with several small towels, which were not much larger than washcloths. The water ran down you, through the slats, and onto a slightly angled floor that allowed it to drain into a small ditch. You blotted what remained and came away with the dirt and sweat cleaned off. It wasn't a giant, claw-foot enamel tub at the Ritz, but it did the job.\n\nCitronella candles burned, filling the night air with an acrid, lemony-smelling smoke that kept the bugs from swarming you while you stood there wet and naked. This was typical of tropical bathing houses, and looked much like those Indy had seen in Indonesia, where people would wash this way daily, sometimes more than once. There was a jar of lotion near the door, the bug stuff, he guessed, and he slathered on some of that. Didn't smell too bad, and was less oily than 6-12.\n\nAt the fire again, Mac said, \"So, you feel confident that you know our destination?\"\n\nBatiste shrugged. \"Confident, monsieur? No, I cannot say that. There is a place, nearly as far from here as it can be on the island. Nobody goes there, and the story is that bad ju-ju awaits anybody who dares. My father told me this, his father told him, and his father told my grandfather.\"\n\n\"Never curious?\" Mac asked.\n\n\"My father had it that anybody who neared the place would go blind, his flesh would rot, his family jewels would fall off, and he would be damned to spend ten thousand years chewed on by ants. As a boy, I was not curious enough to test it.\"\n\n\"Hmm,\" Mac said. \"I can understand your reluctance.\"\n\nBatiste said, \"I am less afraid of such things now. I have some protection against curses.\" He reached up and gripped something unseen under his shirt.\n\n\"Any idea what it's supposed to be?\" Indy asked. \"This place?\"\n\n\"No. The story speaks of a gris-gris there\u2014what the form is, they do not say. Only that the site is cursed and horrors await unwary visitors.\"\n\nIndy nodded. Of course. What else was new?\n\nHe knew those terms: Ju-ju. Gris-gris. They came out of Africa, and generally referred to fetishes imbued with magic. Sometimes small leather bags of things blessed by a witch doctor, fingernails, hair, stones, animal teeth, but they could be other items\u2014skulls, bones, or jewels. A black pearl would fit in.\n\nOnce, when he was young and thought he knew it all, Indy would have scoffed at such things as magic. He was a scientist, an educated man, not superstitious. But\u2014after dealing with the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail? Seeing men\u2014and a woman\u2014turn into big spotted cats? A dragon? Only an idiot would continue to ignore the possibilities. Science did not have all the answers, and whatever else he might be, he wasn't an idiot.\n\nWell, not most of the time . . .\n\n\"How long do you think it will take us to get there?\" That from Marie.\n\nBatiste shrugged again. \"I cannot say. We must go through the densest forest\u2014the cliffs on the south side and the northeast corner of the island are impassable on foot, there are ravines and vertical rock faces, so we cannot bypass the jungle that way. We might take a boat to the southeast point and try to ascend the cliff there, but the sea offshore is full of jagged coral reefs, bad currents, and rips, and teems with sharks. More than a few boats have been wrecked on that coast. There is a dead zone in the water\u2014you know the term Langmuir circulation? No fish swim in it, and a man who drowns there will float in circles for days or weeks until his body rots. Not even the crabs will feed on him.\"\n\n\"Nice,\" Indy said.\n\nBatiste continued: \"If we went that way, did not founder, and managed to make shore, the climb would be difficult and risky at best. The rock is rotten\u2014it seems solid, but it can crumble under your feet. Men have fallen attempting it, and carrying supplies and without training? I would not try it.\"\n\n\"So we take a hike in the woods,\" Indy said.\n\n\"Oui. There are a few trails for the first part, but the terrain is rough and rugged all the way, beset with streams, rocks, gullies, and most of it heavily forested. We must move with caution.\" He paused. \"There are many dangers in the jungle.\" He glanced at Marie.\n\nIndy caught the look. Marie gave no indication that she had.\n\nBatiste said, \"It will not be\u2014how you say?\u2014a walk in le parc.\"\n\n\"We can walk in the park at home if that's all we want,\" Indy said.\n\n\"Two days, three?\" Batiste shrugged yet again. \"It will take as long as it takes.\"\n\n\"And on that note, I'm going to turn in,\" Indy said. \"We want to get started early, while it's still relatively cool, right?\"\n\nBatiste nodded. \"Oui.\"\n\n\"It has been a long day,\" Mac said. \"I believe I will sack out as well.\"\n\n\"See you in the morning,\" Marie said.\n\nIndy watched her walk away.\n\nHe shook his head. A thing of beauty was a joy forever, and it had been a long time since he had passed this much time with an attractive woman who wasn't trying to kill him . . .\n\nGruber's scout reported back, and the doctor noticed that the fellow, a pale-skinned blond, had mosquito bites all over his face.\n\nGruber looked at Sch\u00e4efer, who nodded. It was Gruber's operation.\n\n\"Herr Braun, tropical insects carry a number of unpleasant diseases. Why is your skin not coated with indalone?\"\n\n\"Colonel Doktor,\" Braun said, \"the repellent has a distinct smell. I did not wish for someone with a sharp nose to catch the odor as I spied upon them and perhaps wonder as to its source.\"\n\nGruber shook his head. Well. You had to give the SS elite their due. That they would suffer was a testament to their stoicism; that they would consider it necessary indicated intelligence and proper training. All reasons why the Reich would eventually prevail. Truly dedicated men would do whatever was necessary for victory, that was the German way.\n\nToo bad the kaiser had not realized this in the Great War\u2014Germany would now run the world and Gruber would not have to be in this particularly nasty part of it . . .\n\n\"Very good, Sergeant. I have a lotion for you to treat the bites. Your report, please.\"\n\nSergeant Braun nodded. \"Our quarry is at the local village, and they seemed to have bedded down for the night. The two men are in a hut. The woman is in a different hut, alone. A group of locals have collected gear from the store and returned it to the village.\"\n\n\"And your guess as to their intentions?\"\n\n\"They will leave the village in the morning. Early, first light, to make best use of the relative coolness before the day heats up.\"\n\nGruber nodded. \"Any signs of the Japanese?\"\n\n\"I did not see any, Doktor. One of our men remains hidden, watching, but trying to trek through the jungle any distance in the dark would seem unlikely. If the Japanese are about, they will likely stay where they are for the night.\"\n\nGruber nodded. Yamada and his people were here, which was bad. Then again, if Gruber's men had not seen them, perhaps they had not seen the SS troops, either. The advantage might be his\u2014he knew Yamada was here, but Yamada might not know he was.\n\nAny advantage was a good one. Always.\n\n\"Good work, Sergeant.\"\n\nAfter Braun and Sch\u00e4efer had departed, Gruber lay down upon his cot in the small tent. It was dark, and the day's heat was still oppressive, no breath of wind stirring. Even with a net over the tent's doorway, insects had gotten inside, and their incessant buzzing was annoying. His repellent kept the bugs from biting him, but their small noises made sleeping difficult. Well. He would have to get used to them, wouldn't he? They might be here for several days, and staying awake that long would hardly be likely."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "Indy was being chased by somebody\u2014Nazis, agents of Kali, some South American werecats, all of whom were yelling or roaring for his blood. He moved as if his legs were mired in glue, so s-l-o-w-l-y! but he managed to get to a building and inside. He slammed the door behind him, but his pursuers began pounding on the portal, on the walls, trying to break in\u2014\n\nIndy came awake suddenly, aware of a drumming noise.\n\nWhere was he\u2014?\n\nHe looked around, saw Mac getting to his feet, drawing his little pistol from his pocket. The dim light of a kerosene lantern suffused the inside of the little hut. Right, yeah, the village\u2014\n\nThe hammering on the door and walls grew louder. It vibrated the building, shaking the place like an earthquake.\n\n\"What the hell is going on?\" Indy said. He reached for his own gun.\n\nMac shook his head. \"I don't know. But I see why that bar for the door was installed, and I'm glad I slid it into place!\"\n\nThe pounding grew yet louder, and its sound was joined by something else, a kind of monotonic drone, like that of a man-sized bumblebee.\n\nOh, man! Now what?\n\nThe bar on the door seemed to be holding, but both Mac and Indy pointed their guns in that direction. Whatever it was\u2014or whoever it was\u2014if it came through the door, it was going to be dining on lead . . .\n\nAbruptly, the pounding stopped. The drone continued.\n\n\"What the devil is that?\"\n\n\"Some kind of chant, sounds like,\" Indy said.\n\nThe sound started to fade.\n\n\"Moving away,\" Mac said. \"Let's have a look.\"\n\n\"Are you crazy! Get away from there!\"\n\nToo late. Mac already had the door halfway open.\n\nIndy gripped his revolver tightly, his hand sweaty.\n\nMac stuck his head outside. \"Oh, my.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nDespite himself, Indy stepped forward to look.\n\nThe village fires had all died down, but there was enough of a moon and stars in the clear sky so that they could make out forms moving away from the hut. People, five or six of them, shambling, walking in a slow shuffle.\n\nWho were these guys?\n\nBeyond them, Indy saw Marie. She stood there, dressed in a long white robe, her arms spread wide, speaking softly in a language he didn't recognize.\n\nIndy pushed the door open and stepped outside. He started for Marie.\n\nBatiste appeared as Indy neared the young woman. \"Do not break her concentration, monsieur!\"\n\n\"What is going on?\" Indy said. \"Who the hell are these people?\" He waved his revolver at the retreating forms.\n\nMarie, Indy saw, had her eyes closed and was still speaking softly. She had what looked like a cross drawn in dark paint on her forehead.\n\nMac apparently didn't hear what Batiste had to say:\n\n\"Marie?\"\n\nIndy looked at Mac. \"Shh!\"\n\nToo late. Marie's eyes fluttered open. Then they rolled back, revealing nothing but white, and she collapsed onto the ground.\n\nPassed out\u2014\n\nThe drone Indy had heard began to rise again.\n\nThe retreating forms stopped, turned around, and began to move toward them.\n\n\"Back off!\" Indy yelled, pointing his gun at the closest one.\n\nBatiste said, \"She has lost them! Help me with her! We must get inside the communal house!\"\n\nThey, whoever they were, kept coming.\n\nIndy aimed at the nearest one. \"Okay, you asked for it!\"\n\nHe squeezed the trigger. The revolver's roar was very loud in the night. He saw the man take the bullet, saw the impact, saw it punch a hole in the cloth of his shirt over his chest\u2014\n\n\u2014but the wound didn't bleed. And the guy never slowed a step, he just kept coming in that shuffling walk\u2014\n\nOh, damn\u2014!\n\n\"Help me with her!\"\n\nIndy squatted and helped Batiste lift Marie, who was out cold and deadweight. Batiste got her over his shoulder and stood. \"This way, quickly!\"\n\nMac fired three fast rounds from his pistol\u2014bam-bam-bam!\n\nThen Indy saw Mac blow by him, headed for the communal building.\n\nWhat\u2014?\n\n\"Our visitors seem to be bulletproof!\" he said in passing. \"I'll get the door!\"\n\nWell. This explained the big supply of ammunition at the store, didn't it? How many shots did it take\u2014?\n\nInside, Mac shut and barred the door as Batiste laid the inert form of Marie onto a pad.\n\nIndy looked around and realized that the place was full of villagers. All of them standing and watching, not saying a word.\n\nThe pounding began.\n\n\"Some water,\" Batiste said. \"We must wake her.\"\n\nSomebody came forward with a bamboo cup. Batiste sat Marie up, poured the water over her face.\n\nShe awoke, sputtering. Looked at Batiste with a glare that would have melted stone, then her face cleared. \"I am okay. Give me room.\"\n\nBatiste stepped away and motioned for Indy to do the same.\n\nMarie stood, wiped her face with her hands, and began to speak again. Softly, musically. The tone had a hypnotic quality, lulling . . .\n\nThe hammering on the door stopped. The drone of the voices from outside began to fade. In the light of the lamps, Indy saw that the water had partially washed away the cross painted on Marie's forehead. Only it didn't seem to be paint. He was pretty sure that it was blood\u2014\n\nYamada was only half asleep when he heard the soldier rush into the campsite. The man's voice was low but excited to the point of hysteria. Yamada came up, grabbed his Nambu pistol, and opened the mesh flap over the tent's door. \"What is it?\"\n\nHis second in command, Captain Suzuki, stood there holding a lantern in one hand, his drawn sword in the other. Yellow light gleamed from the mirror-bright surface of the katana's patterned steel. \"Trouble at the village,\" Suzuki said.\n\n\"What kind of trouble?\"\n\nThe scout, a young man from Tokyo named Ito, looked at Suzuki. The officer nodded. \"Speak!\"\n\nIto told the tale, and it sounded so fantastic that he was sure Suzuki was going to slap the boy and call him a liar. Yamada held up a hand to caution the captain.\n\n\"You are dismissed,\" Yamada said, after the boy was done. \"I will speak with the captain.\"\n\nYamada considered what he was going to tell Suzuki. Until now, he had not been certain of the truth of his mission. Oh, he felt that the powers-that-were at home believed it, and his duty was not to question them. He would go and do as he was ordered, but in his heart he had not been convinced. At this juncture, it seemed less than useful to maintain the secrecy he had kept for himself.\n\nSuzuki had not needed to know more, but given the circumstances, Yamada reasoned that it was advisable to tell him. Ignorance might be cause for failure, which could not be allowed.\n\n\"Come into my tent,\" Yamada said. \"There are things you need to know.\"\n\nBraun looked shaken, and Gruber could understand why. It was not something an ordinary soldier could easily deal with, this kind of information. The cat, as the English said, was out of the bag, and there was no way to put her back in, not now.\n\n\"Perhaps, Kapit\u00e4n Sch\u00e4efer, you would assemble the men?\"\n\n\"Jawohl.\"\n\nOnce the men were gathered around the lamp, Gruber began:\n\n\"That which I am about to tell you must never be repeated elsewhere, to anyone, do you all understand? To do such will be considered treason against the Reich and worth the firing squad or piano wire around your throat, is that clear?\"\n\nThere came a murmur of assent.\n\n\"You are probably aware that Reich scientists have been working to create ways to make better soldiers. There are chemicals, drugs created in our laboratories that will make a man stronger, able to stay awake longer, and the like. Even now, some of the soldiers in certain elite units have access to these drugs, the new anabolic agents and amphetaminics. But these drugs have limits and side effects, and are not yet perfected.\"\n\nThe men nodded but said nothing. He was the doctor, he would explain, they knew this.\n\n\"Some cultures have developed similar things. The Thuggees have the Black Sleep of Kali Ma; the Peruvians have the coca leaf mixed with certain roots; there is a kind of mushroom tea in central Mongolia that allows a man to run for miles without feeling hunger or tiredness.\" He looked at them.\n\n\"The Africans stumbled upon a formula centuries ago. How such ignorant savages managed this seems beyond belief, but they did. They created a concoction that makes a man stronger, immune to pain, able to heal faster, run farther, leap higher. It was kept a secret known only to a few, who used it to their own ends.\n\n\"Such abilities would be a great asset to the German armies, nicht denken Sie?\"\n\nYes, they nodded, they surely did think so.\n\n\"This African formula was, during the slave days, written down, then transported here to Haiti. To this very island. This is the reason we have come, to collect it. And it should be apparent that somebody local has access to this formula.\n\n\"The men we are following are going to lead us to it.\"\n\nOne of the men, a corporal, looked somewhat dubious.\n\n\"Herr Wagner? You have questions?\"\n\n\"It\u2014it seems... rather... fantastic, Colonel.\"\n\nSergeant Braun said, \"Wagner, I saw a man shot three times with a pistol who paid it no more attention than he would a bee's sting. Last I beheld him, he was walking into the forest, and I saw not a drop of blood on him.\"\n\nThat drew a disturbed murmur from the others.\n\n\"The sergeant is correct. It is not your duty to worry over the effectiveness of this formula, only to assist me in retrieving it. I tell you all this because it may be that some of the men who have taken this drug might stand against you, and you need to be aware that they will be formidable adversaries. With luck, we won't have to find out how formidable, but whatever it takes, we must retrieve this for the Fatherland. If it costs all of us our lives, that will be a small price to pay.\"\n\nThe men nodded. They were soldiers. They would follow their orders. Good Germans did that."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "\"ZOMBIS?\" MAC SAID.\n\nIndy said, \"The undead.\"\n\nMarie looked at Indy. \"You know the term?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course, but\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014you thought it was just a tale to frighten children?\"\n\nIndy shrugged. \"Actually, I didn't think that much about it at all. Most cultures and societies have stories about the undead: ghosts, wraiths, vampires, lich. It's a common trope\u2014I've always liked the one about Saint Felix, Saint Regula, and Saint Exuperantius.\"\n\nMac said, \"Who?\"\n\nIndy said, \"You really do need to catch up on your history, Mac. They were Catholics, decapitated by the Romans in the year A.D. 286. The story goes, after they were killed, they picked up their heads and climbed to the top of a hill, where they dug graves and buried themselves.\"\n\n\"There's a nice trick,\" Mac allowed. \"Much more impressive than water into wine.\"\n\n\"Yeah. If you believed they could do that, you might be a tad nervous about running into them on a battlefield.\"\n\nThe dawn had laid her tentative fingers upon the night, and Marie had assured them that the group of zombis would not be able to return for a while. She said, \"There are strange things under Heaven, messieurs. Science cannot explain everything.\"\n\nIndy nodded. He had plenty of reason to agree with that. He had experienced some unbelievable things himself. Whatever your beliefs, you had to develop a pragmatic view of things.\n\n\"Most of what I know comes from India or the American South. What's the local version?\"\n\n\"In Vodoun\u2014they call it 'voodoo' in the American South\u2014priests and priestesses\u2014houngan and mambo\u2014communicate with gods and demigods, the loa. In exchange for the use of their bodies\u2014acting as 'horses'\u2014the possessed are granted certain powers. Among these, depending on the loas involved, is the ability to raise and animate the dead.\"\n\nIndy nodded. He knew that.\n\nMac gave her a funny look.\n\nShe ignored Mac. \"There are two kinds of zombi: the True Risen and les enfants du breuvage magique\u2014the Children of the Potion. The latter are more common. To make these, a houngan uses certain drugs derived from the datura flower, mushrooms, and other plants found on our islands. Liquid from a certain kind of toad. A rare lizard's blood. Fish roe. There are different formulas in various branches of the art; some work better than others.\n\n\"By this method, a victim is poisoned, put into such a deep trance that he or she appears to be dead. A funeral is held, the body is buried, and the houngan comes back later and digs the victim up. He\u2014sometimes she\u2014then controls the victim with drugs, forcing them to do whatever the houngan wants.\"\n\nIndy nodded. Fascinating stuff. He knew some of it, of course, but he hadn't heard these particulars before.\n\n\"The other kind of zombi is much less common. Only a bokor, a master houngan, has the power to bring the true dead back to life. It demands great resources and supernatural concentration. A hundred years ago, at his peak of power, bokor Boukman, the strongest of all Vodoun priests, was supposedly able to raise and keep fifty or more of the dead up and animated at once.\"\n\nIndy and Mac exchanged glances.\n\n\"Today the strongest bokor might manage twenty, and his control of that many would be less than ideal. Much easier to use the potion, even though those slaves are not as durable.\"\n\n\"And you shooed them off,\" Indy said. \"So...?\"\n\n\"Yes. I am a mambo. What I did was small compared with the man who brings forth and keeps the zombis under his hand. I cannot raise the dead or control them on my own. I was able to divert them only by pretending to be the bokor who owns them and sending them away.\"\n\nIndy held back a sigh. Great. Never happened lately but that a woman he found attractive had some kind of kink. What was it with him and bad girls? A Vodoun priestess. Terrific.\n\n\"The bokor will not be pleased when they return without you,\" she said.\n\n\"Me? Us?\"\n\n\"Yes. There is some kind of link here. Boukman feels things, and he must believe there is power to be had.\"\n\nMac said, \"Boukman? What, he's the grandson of the powerful wizard you mentioned?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"No. He is the same man.\"\n\nMac frowned. \"How old is he?\"\n\n\"No one knows for sure. Two hundred years, perhaps more.\"\n\n\"Bosh!\" Mac said.\n\nBut Indy knew such things were possible. He could hardly forget the Guardian of the Holy Grail, a knight from the First Crusade, and all that transpired in the Canyon of the Crescent Moon. Kept alive by the power of the Grail, that knight had to have been born around the time of the Battle of Hastings, in A.D. 1066, making him at least 870-something. Two hundred? A drop in the bucket next to that. Still . . .\n\nAnother old guy giving him grief . . .\n\nMarie said, \"Boukman is my great-great-great-and-then-some-uncle, and whatever his age he is still the most powerful bokor in the land. I cannot stand against him, my magic is pale and small. I will do what I can, but if you still wish to seek this artifact, we must hurry. The sooner we can leave this island, the better.\"\n\n\"I hear that,\" Indy said.\n\nNot once while he was teaching Introduction to Archaeology had a magical old man ever wandered into his class to disrupt it. Not once. Still, living to be two hundred or eight hundred might be something useful to know\u2014long as you didn't feel or look that old. That knight had been in pretty good shape for somebody who'd been around since the Crusades, but he didn't look all that spry. Had more wrinkles than a laundry on wash day.\n\nBoukman knew before the zombis told him what had happened. They would not have returned without their quarry unless there had been some kind of magical interference.\n\nSo. Petite Marie had developed some skill in the art. She came of good stock, so it was perhaps not altogether unexpected that she would become a mambo of some power. He had not spoken to her in years, not since she was a child, and he had not kept track of her as perhaps he should\u2014there were no rivals near his strength on the islands, but some who might cause trouble if allowed to grow, and he had spent more time watching and dealing with them. Those with potential to be a danger to Boukman were eliminated before they reached that stage. Women took longer to mature in the art, and while they could be formidable, little Marie wasn't old enough to have gotten very strong yet.\n\nThen again, she bad turned his zombis back.\n\nInteresting . . .\n\nWell, he could prevent that, now that he knew of it. A few words added to a spell, and his slaves would be immune to any blandishments Marie could offer. She would realize this, of course, but it did not matter\u2014she did not have the power to match his.\n\nBoukman stood considering things.\n\nThis was a sign of some kind. Extracting the meaning from such signs was often tricky, but it was always there.\n\nWhat did it mean?\n\nHe had, he decided, moved too early. The gods or the loa did not want him to know yet, so they had stepped in. Very well. He would back off, be patient, and wait for the right moment. The greater powers apparently wished for the imen blan to continue on with their quest. So be it.\n\nBoukman feared nothing natural that walked the land, but he most among men knew better than to challenge the gods. That way lay ruination.\n\n\"Go,\" he said. \"Watch the white men. Stay hidden while you do. You\u2014\" He pointed at a man who in life had been a policeman in Port-au-Prince, a strong and fierce fellow. \"\u2014return tonight and report.\"\n\nThere came the nods of acknowledgment.\n\nIt was a small island, but there were a score of people involved who normally were not here. He could perhaps use a little more help. \"You,\" he said, indicating another of the zombis, \"go and collect the other Children of the Potion. Bring them here.\"\n\nThe undead shuffled away to their tasks.\n\nAfter they were gone, Boukman decided that he needed a big meal, one washed down with blood. And human blood would be best.\n\nHe felt as if he would need to be fortified. Great things were in the air, and he must be ready to deal with them.\n\nWhen the Children of the Potion arrived would be plenty time enough. They still circulated blood, and any of them could spare a pint or two without any ill effects\u2014not that it mattered. There were always more of them to be had if needed. Draining one dry would only provide a new possibility for creating another of the undead.\n\nYamada was ready before dawn, his excitement too much to allow him to sleep. They would have to move with care while stalking their prey, but as thick as the jungle seemed to be, staying unseen ought not to be too big a problem.\n\nHe considered the idea of bypassing the archaeologists, of collecting the native guide and questioning him directly, but decided that it was too risky. The man might know where they were going, but the two gaijin doubtless had more specifics. This mission was too important to risk it, and the safest course was to simply follow them to the prize and then collect the formula. Truth was, Yamada didn't know exactly what form that prize was going to be in. He might not know it when he saw it; antiquities were not his field of expertise. The second man who had been chosen to offer that aspect of knowledge had yet to arrive in Haiti. The first man selected, from the Imperial Academy in Tokyo, had, in an ironic twist of fate, been on a ship traveling from Hong Kong that had been sunk by a Japanese submarine. Killed their own expert.\n\nAh, well. It was war. Bad things happened . . .\n\nThe American and Englishman certainly knew more about antiquities than did Yamada.\n\nRisking failure was not in the cards he wanted to play.\n\nSuzuki approached, looking a bit eager himself in the dim glow of the lantern.\n\nYamada looked at him, one eyebrow raising in question.\n\n\"I have three men in place,\" Suzuki offered. \"As soon as our prey starts off, one of them will come back and report. We should be able to catch up quickly, and the soldiers following will leave a trail.\"\n\n\"Bread crumbs?\"\n\nSuzuki frowned. \"Excuse me, Yamada-san?\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon, Captain. It's an old joke. I will tell it to you sometime.\" Of course. Even though Suzuki was fairly educated for a military man, any depth in Western fantasy literature was unlikely. No reason he would know the tale of Hansel and Gretel, by the Brothers Grimm\u2014who had undoubtedly lifted it from other sources. And being a pragmatic sort, Suzuki would be quick to notice the obvious\u2014a trail of bread crumbs in the forest would certainly be eaten by insects or animals in a hurry, just as it had been in the fairy tale.\n\nSuzuki nodded as if dismissing the comment. \"It is likely that we shall have to stay some distance away,\" he said. \"And probably not wise to follow too directly on their trail, just in case they might be watching for such a thing.\"\n\n\"Why would they do that? They don't know we are here.\"\n\n\"The attack at the village might be repeated,\" Suzuki said. \"They would be unwise to ignore that possibility. Who knows what other dangers might reside in these forests?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course.\" He gave Suzuki a slow nod, a military-style bow, to acknowledge his expertise. Honor always had to be served.\n\nSuzuki returned the bow.\n\n\"First light won't be long,\" Suzuki said.\n\n\"I am ready,\" Yamada said.\n\n\"Doktor,\" Sch\u00e4efer said.\n\n\"Kapit\u00e4n.\"\n\n\"My sergeant has sent one of the men back to say that they have discovered the Japanese campsite.\"\n\n\"Ah, good. And...?\"\n\n\"They have packed their tents and are prepared to march. Though we have not seen their agents, surely they have men watching our quarry.\"\n\n\"Of course. When the Englishman and American and their party depart, we must allow the Japanese to follow them first.\"\n\n\"Ja, of course.\"\n\n\"It would be best if neither group knew we were trailing them.\"\n\nSch\u00e4efer nodded. \"All is in readiness, Colonel Doktor.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\nSch\u00e4efer moved off, to unnecessarily inspect his men yet again, and Gruber turned his thoughts back to a question that had been nagging at him: Sergeant Braun's observation about the incident at the village seemed, as Herr Wagner had said, far-fetched.\n\nThree shots, to the heart?\n\nOnly if he had armor hidden under his shirt . . .\n\nFor certainly, no medication would make a man bulletproof. That was beyond any science that Gruber knew or could possibly believe. Perhaps some drugs indeed might raise a man's pain threshold to such an extent that he could shrug off a wound that was non-fatal. And mayhaps even retard bleeding from such an injury\u2014some coagulant, say, that when exposed to free air might do the trick. It would have to be something like that, else the fluid would thicken too much to circulate in the vessels.\n\nHumans could be very fragile or very durable, but they were not invulnerable.\n\nOf course, in the heat of a violent encounter, guns going off and in the middle of the night, Braun's excitement must have gotten the best of him. What he had taken as fatal gunshot wounds could have, under the circumstances, easily been misconstrued. A handspan to one side would miss the heart and aorta. A small-caliber bullet could glance from a rib, doing little real damage, but appearing to be worse than it was. Some of the most minor wounds bled profusely at first but were not particularly debilitating.\n\nAs a doctor, he had seen more than a few strange things when it came to injuries. Once, a man had come to a traveling clinic complaining of a headache. Gruber had not done the initial examination and workup, one of the assistants had, but when he read the chart and saw the patient, the case had seemed unremarkable. A headache of a few days' duration, not terrible, but annoying. No other significant medical history, according to the chart. The patient was not a drinker or a drug addict, he had no other signs or symptoms, he'd been a farmer.\n\nWhen Gruber had run his hands over the man's head, he had felt a small bump near the center of the patient's skull, between the frontal and parietal bones, along the coronal suture. He asked about it, but the patient shrugged and said the bump had been there a long time. Years.\n\nSuspecting a tumor, Gruber ordered up a series of R\u00f6ntgenographs, even though such images of the brain were not always useful. This time, however, they were. Once the pictures were developed, he instantly saw the problem:\n\nSomebody had driven a large nail into the man's head, straight down from the top. Six inches long, and miraculously, it seemed, the nail had not damaged any neural tissue, but had slotted neatly between the left and right hemispheres of his brain.\n\nGruber had never seen anything like it. Fascinating!\n\nUpon questioning, the man finally admitted, that yes, some years earlier, he had been possessed by a demon, and that the only way to disable the thing had been to attack it where it lived, inside his head. To this end, he had placed the point of a copper nail against his skull and hammered it in. Had to be copper to work, he explained, since steel would eventually rust from the demon's acidic saliva. He had skewered the demon, he said, but not killed it, and so the nail had to remain in place to prevent the creature from escaping to elsewhere in his body, where it might not be so easily reached next time.\n\nApparently the hair and skin had grown over the nail's head after some time, leaving only the little bump visible from without.\n\nAs incredible as this had been, the patient had explained it all in a completely matter-of-fact manner, attaching no significance to the fantastic aspects. It sounded rather like somebody relating offhandedly how he had found a weed in his garden and had pulled it up. Ja, I had a demon in my head, so I hammered a copper nail into my skull to transfix it. Hardly remarkable, what else could I do?\n\nGruber had been more than a little taken aback. He had given the man some pain pills, and after checking on him the next day\u2014the pills had done the trick, his headache was gone\u2014he'd sent him on his way. Pulling the nail out? That might have done more harm than good. If it had been there for years, it obviously wasn't doing all that much damage. Fiddling around inside someone's head was seldom a good idea, given how fragile those tissues could be; besides which, the patient would not have allowed it anyhow. So there it was.\n\nSo, a bullet that should have killed a man but did not? Certainly not the most unusual thing Gruber had ever heard or seen, not even close.\n\nStill, even in such cases as keeping pain at bay and preventing blood loss, it would be a wondrous thing, and the event had provided some evidence of this. Certainly worth the effort to attain the means by which it could be accomplished.\n\nWell, that's what he was here for, nicht war? He had a team of crack German soldiers at his command, and on an island this size they could never be all that far from the goal.\n\nIt was only a matter of time until he attained it. Then he could go home. And that in itself would be reward enough. To sit in a castle somewhere, dining and drinking with the wealthy. Even though the F\u00fchrer was not particularly fond of nobility, he probably wouldn't abolish it altogether; there were times when the idea of nobility was useful. Perhaps after the war, Gruber might be able to put a von in front of his name and become a baron.\n\nBaron von Gruber\u2014that had a nice ring to it.\n\nNo matter, no matter. As a doctor and favored by Herr Hitler, he would be a man of substance. A title was not necessary\u2014if you had enough Reichsmarks, you could buy anything you wanted.\n\nAnd you could spend them at home, like a civilized person."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Indy was willing to take what he thought of as reasonable risks, always had been. Now and then, maybe some that, in retrospect, didn't seem so reasonable. But, also being pragmatic when it came to keeping his hide in one relatively unbattered piece, he did ask Marie the question as they were doing final packing to head out, just after dawn.\n\n\"So, if your great-great-times-however-many-uncle's friends come to call again and you're taking a nap or something, how do we stop them?\"\n\n\"It is difficult,\" she said.\n\n\"Yeah, I kinda got that when I saw them shrugging off bullets like they were cotton balls.\"\n\n\"A true zombi has no soul, and its body is kept motivated by magic. They feel no pain, no hunger, they do not tire. They are like automata. But for the most part, they are otherwise limited to what human bodies can do\u2014they cannot fly, for instance, nor can they walk on water.\"\n\n\"That's the good news, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Their hearts do not beat, nor do they breathe, but their brains work, after a fashion, as do their eyes and ears. Plug a zombi's ears, it cannot hear. Poke out its eyes, it cannot see. Offer enough injury to its brain, and it will stop it. A hot enough fire will destroy it.\"\n\n\"So you are saying\u2014\"\n\n\"If you stab it in the eyes, it will be blind. If you lop off half its head, it will collapse. Burn it to ash, it is finished. But a few bullets to the body won't stop it.\"\n\n\"Ah.\"\n\nMac sidled over. \"What was that last business? I didn't quite catch it.\"\n\n\"Marie says that if our undead friends drop by for more fun and games, we need to shoot their eyes out, chop their heads off, or broil them well done.\"\n\nMac raised his eyebrows. \"Tricky shooting, trying for the eyes. Perhaps we might wish to hone our machetes and keep a couple within reach. I don't supposed you brought a flamethrower?\"\n\n\"Left it in my other suit,\" Indy said.\n\n\"Boukman cannot keep many of them animated at once,\" Marie said. \"Though he has more Children of the Potion he can use.\"\n\n\"They bulletproof, too?\"\n\n\"They are somewhat hardier than normal people, but not immune to injury in the same way, no. Hard to kill, but it can be done.\"\n\n\"So our best plan is to move fast, get done, and hurry away,\" Indy said. \"Or go and take them all out.\"\n\n\"Yes. I would vote for the former,\" she said.\n\nIndy shrugged. He liked being proactive when it was useful, but running around hunting down creatures who were hard to kill might take longer than it was worth.\n\nBatiste, who had hired five men to go along, using up a fair amount of Mac's gold coins to convince them it was worth the risk, came to where Indy, Marie, and Mac stood. \"The first part of the hike will be the easiest,\" he said. \"There are a number of trails around the village, and we can use these. Perhaps half a day before we have to start finding or making other paths. And the terrain is worse the farther away we travel. The village is on the flattest part of the island; the land grows steeper, rockier, and is crisscrossed with streams, some of which are deep, as well as narrow and quite steep gorges. Some of the streams can be forded; some may require that we construct bridges. The gorges we can avoid, we will circle around; those we cannot bypass, we will have to descend and ascend with care. A distance that can be easily walked in an hour on flat ground might take ten times that long, or longer, in places.\"\n\nBatiste looked at the sky, which was clear. \"We'll get a rain shower later today, probably not much of one.\"\n\n\"Well, we aren't getting any younger,\" Indy said.\n\nAnd so they set off.\n\nTrue to what Batiste said, the first couple of hours were easy going. The path through the forest was wide enough for three people to walk side by side, the dirt well trodden, and only the occasional spider's web or creeper reaching from the woods on either side to impede their progress. Easier to walk around those than to bother cutting them.\n\nHe didn't see a single snake, for which he was grateful and somewhat surprised.\n\nBefore noon, they had made what Indy would consider substantial progress. Of course, according to Batiste, they would walk eight or ten times the distance that it would take a bird to fly, so a four-or five-mile flight could easily become a thirty-or forty-mile hike, maybe longer; it would depend on what had to be crossed or circumvented.\n\nIndy knew about jungle travel, and the shortest distance between two points might be a straight line in theory, but in practice that was seldom how you got to do it.\n\nJust once, he'd like to arrive at the site of an archaeological trove, drive up on a nice paved road, collect what he'd come for off a shelf without even having to bend down for it, and go back to his vehicle and drive away. No spiders, scorpions, crazed Nazis, ancient knights, curses, or walking dead. No snakes. Just once . . .\n\nThe way his adventures had gone, he wouldn't be at all surprised to look up one day and see a spaceship full of little green men from Mars dogging his heels . . .\n\nHe smiled at that image.\n\nAs they moved farther from the village, the route narrowed and grew more twisty. The damp-earth and pollen smell of the rain forest intensified. From other, more pungent scents, Indy knew their path had been an animal trail at some point\u2014and that you needed to watch your step. The largest animals here, Marie had told them, were wild pigs, going to a couple hundred pounds and nasty in a pack, but apt to run rather than fight. It was easier to follow the crooked path they created on their meanderings and step carefully than to cut a straight new path. Much easier. He had bought a new pair of leather gloves at the store, to help prevent blisters once they had to start swinging sharp blades to clear their way, but even so, that was hard and sweaty work, and he wasn't looking forward to it.\n\nStill, so far it wasn't so bad, all things considered.\n\nA moment later it was as if they were standing in some god's shower stall. A tropical frog-drowner, so heavy you could barely see ten feet, and accompanied by lightning, thunder, and wind.\n\nIf Batiste thought this wasn't much of a rain, Indy didn't want to see what he thought was a hard one.\n\nBatiste came over. He had to yell to be heard over the spatters against the forest's greenery. \"We should stop, put up a tarp!\"\n\n\"Little late to worry about staying dry!\" Indy yelled back. But he had a point. Walking in the dark or during a downpour like this was risky. Easy to step into a hole or trip on a root when you couldn't see it.\n\nDry socks was the other thing they didn't tell you about in school. Indy always tried to bring two or three pairs, stuffed into a waterproof pouch for just such situations as this. Always room for socks . . .\n\nBlisters on your hands were one thing; on your feet, they were ever so much worse. It was sometimes the little things that made a hard trip bearable.\n\nYamada worked out, alone in the rain.\n\nThey were in a small clearing next to a trail, and he was completely soaked, so moving around under the cloudburst didn't make him any wetter.\n\nTheir quarry was perhaps half a kilometer away, but they could be a hundred meters and not know it. The rain assaulted the ears, the eyes, the skin . . .\n\nHe raised his wooden practice sword, the bokken, into a basic two-handed guard, shifting his weight forward, his right foot leading.\n\nReady . . .\n\nKendo was, technically, the way of the sword, though that art was done mostly with bamboo or wooden blades. Iaijutsu was with the live blade and designed for combat, not to strengthen one's spirit, as a do usually was. Yes, it was true that an archer who trained diligently in kyudo could hit a target with his arrows, but cultivating one's Zen mind was not the same as skewering one's enemies. Yamada would rather have an angry and excitable archer who could hit his target every time guarding his back than a Zen master who was unruffled, but couldn't shoot straight.\n\nHere, in this tropical hole with the rain pounding the verdant jungle and blurring everything into a torrential gray, Yamada, alone outside the hastily erected tents, did his practice with a wooden sword. No need to expose his precious real blade to such elements unless it was necessary.\n\nHe faced an imaginary opponent and lifted his wooden blade high for the cut to the head.\n\nHe brought the sword down, hard, drawing back a bit, wrists locked, one hand behind the tsuba, the other at the end for leverage.\n\n\"Hah!\" The sound was guttural and harsh, not particularly loud against the backdrop of the rain rattling the trees and fat-leaved bushes. It wasn't volume that mattered in the kiai, in any event, but focus. A strong enough kiai had been known to stun an attacker into immobility long enough that he could be cut down.\n\nHad a real attacker been there and this wooden sword been sharp steel, Yamada would have bisected the head to the chin. Even with the bokken, such a blow would have cracked a skull and knocked a man senseless.\n\nIn kendo, there were restrictions on where a cut or stab could be offered. The proper targets were the top and sides of the head, the right wrist\u2014but only if upraised, so as to allow blood from it to flow into the eyes\u2014the ribs, and the thrust to the throat. Seven targets, no more. Very stylized. Wearing armor, using bamboo blades\u2014shinai\u2014one might get a bruise now and then, but there was no real danger.\n\nIn real combat, there were no limits\u2014you could cut a man off at the ankles or stab him in the groin if you could manage it. Victory was more important than form\u2014though form must be considered. It was possible to do both.\n\nNow Japanese soldiers fought with guns in combat, like other modern armies, and had for a long time. The sword was still carried onto the field of battle, however, and used now and again to dispatch one's enemies.\n\nWrapped in protective oilcloth in his tent, Yamada had his family katana, wearing the army's cheap furniture and looking like one of the machine-made blades issued to the troops. Many officers did as he did\u2014re-dressed a revered family sword in the handle and guard and sheath of the issue weapon, and tossed the cheap steel blade away. Yamada's katana was four hundred years old, gleamed like a mirror, and had been hammered and folded by a master smith in a time when such a weapon was worth a year's pay. You could see the layers in the polished steel. The hamon\u2014the temper line that gave a hard edge backed by a flexible body\u2014was called cranes-in-flight.\n\nHis sword was as beautiful as it was deadly. The sword was the soul of the samurai.\n\nOnly a man ready to die would charge a machine gun with nothing save a sword. After the machine gun was blown up by a grenade and the wounded enemies taken prisoner?\n\nA wounded and soon-to-be-dead-anyway captive could be used to practice one's stroke. Any idiot with a strong arm and a sharp blade could lop off a man's head; an expert could slice through the bone and muscle but leave a small bit of skin at the throat, so that the head stayed connected to the body. When someone had elected\u2014or been ordered\u2014to commit seppuku, once the belly was slit, it was appropriate to allow a friend or relative acting as a second to finish the job by taking the head. But\u2014for the second to allow his stroke to completely decapitate the suicide? Well, that was bad form. And practice on living tissue was, in these modern times, harder to manage. At the height of the samurai period, a man allowed to wear the two swords could pick anyone of low status he wished and kill him for any number of reasons, and because he felt like it and needed the practice was enough. No one would blink at such a thing. When a man was hungry and sheep were there, who would speak for the sheep?\n\nSince the wearing of swords had been banned sixty-seven years ago by the Meiji emperor Mutsuhito\u2014a black day, that\u2014the samurai class had been effectively destroyed. Yamada's grandfather had been the last in his family to wear both wakizashi and katana, and Yamada remembered the old man's stories of how many samurai had taken their own lives on the day the order banning swords as public wear had gone into effect.\n\n\"Mutsuhito was possessed of an akumi,\" the old man had told a wide-eyed Yamada when he'd been a boy of but six or eight. \"He was not the real emperor, though none dared say so aloud. A powerful evil spirit infested him and bade him destroy the samurai class, and this he did.\"\n\nThe old man would always spit on the ground at this point, and such an action inside the house irritated Yamada's mother no end, but there was nothing she could say about that, either. Her husband's father was not to be berated for such things by a woman.\n\n\"Never forget, little Hajime, that you are a samurai, no matter what anyone says. You must learn the code of Bushido and live by it.\"\n\nYamada had nodded, and he had made some effort to keep to the code. He had learned the arts, martial and intellectual. He could compose poetry, draw with ink and brush; he had even helped cast his own tsuba, the brass guard for his sword, a blade that had belonged to his grandfather, and his grandfather's grandfather before that.\n\nAnd yes, he had, a few times, availed himself of captives, or even condemned Japanese criminals, to practice his cutting. His sword was a three-body blade, which meant it could slice through three men stacked one upon another. Inscribed into the tang of the blade, hidden under the handle, along with the name of the smith and the season the sword had been made, were the date and name of the man who had performed the body test. Three men had been used. Sometimes it was done with corpses, but in this case the tang recorded that the men used in the test had been alive.\n\nThere was a story his grandfather used to tell, about a certain condemned samurai who knew he would be used for cutting practice thus. Denied the right to commit suicide, the night before, the man had gone into the sand garden outside his home for a final meal. He was not kept in prison, of course, Hajime's grandfather had told him, for although he had been forbidden to take his own life, his honor had been sufficient to assure that he would turn up on the appointed morning scheduled for his death. But for his last meal, he had sat down and slowly and carefully eaten several pounds of smooth stones. Enough to fill his belly from top to bottom.\n\n\"Stones, Grandfather? Why would he do that?\"\n\nThe old man had smiled. \"Because,\" he'd said, \"he knew that the enemy who had caused his downfall planned to stack him atop other condemned men to blood his new sword. And that the traditional strike is to the belly, below the ribs and above the hips. A well-forged blade would easily cut through human flesh and a living spine, but a cut powerful enough to bisect two, three, or even four men stacked up on one another? That would take a most sharp blade and a strong arm. And if such a hard cut was swung at a pile of rocks? It would break the steel . . .\"\n\nThe old man's laugh stayed with Yamada for a long time. \"How clever was that?\" he had asked. \"The perfect samurai revenge. How clear his mind was, to think of that.\"\n\n\"Did it?\" the young Hajime had asked. \"Did the sword break?\"\n\n\"Oh, indeed! I myself was a witness to the execution. The owner of the blade was an arrogant bastard\u2014rumored to have had family come out of the merchant class\u2014and his katana was a thing of great beauty, forged for him by one of the premier smiths of the day at great cost. It was his pride, and he meant to demonstrate it to the world.\n\n\"Shattered as if it were made of glass when it hit. The condemned samurai died slowly, bleeding from the cut that did get halfway through his belly, but he died with a smile on his lips. Later, when it was found out what he had done, condemned men used for sword testing had to be specifically forbidden from swallowing rocks . . .\"\n\nYamada shook his head at the memory. Yes, while some men would be nervously composing their death-poems, the unnamed samurai had been methodically preparing his revenge. What calmness of mind and spirit that had shown.\n\nHis own sword was a powerful blade, Yamada's, and he had used it to release half a dozen souls from their flesh. He was a doctor, and he could heal, but he was also a samurai, and he could kill. Whatever was needed.\n\nHe turned, the rain pouring over him like a waterfall, to face another imaginary enemy\u2014\n\n\u2014and saw in the trees a face that was not the least bit imaginary. Watching him.\n\nWithout a second thought, Yamada raised his wooden blade and charged at the watcher\u2014\n\nGruber would have pressed on once the rain began, but he was quick to realize that the American, Englishman, and Japanese wouldn't be doing so; and since he had to stay behind them and far enough back to avoid detection, then stop they must.\n\nHe was eager, but he did not wish to behave rashly.\n\nHe was drenched, his clothes soaked, and the tarp that had been quickly stretched and angled with ropes among several trees sagged under the weight of water that sluiced over the lower edge in a continuous sheet, like a waterfall on a river. The men laughed and joked, but it rained big here, and the lightning and thunder came close together\u2014flash... boom!\u2014so you knew the strikes were nearby, and when such happened, the laughter stopped before it nervously began again. The captain had forbidden smoking, and just as well\u2014the gusty wind drove rain under the tarp, and cigarettes not kept in a tightly capped tin would have been too wet to light. But it was warm enough, the rain, the only good point connected to it.\n\nGruber sipped from a flask of schnapps and watched as the water runoff from the tarp dug a trench in the muddy ground. This would certainly make walking more like slogging until it dried up.\n\nHe didn't envy the scouts out there in the jungle with nothing but hats and thin oilskins for protection.\n\nIt did not rain this way in Germany. Oh, yes, they got weather, fair and foul, but not this end-of-the-world feeling as a crackling thunderstorm swept over an already fetid jungle, scrubbing all underneath it with a mighty and electrically charged wet hand, leaving ozone in its wake . . .\n\nA summer shower in the Bavarian hills? Yes, one would certainly get wet if caught outdoors, but the promise of a balmy afternoon usually lay past that. And that beautiful, golden, actinic light, right after a rain? Nothing in the world compared to how it was in the Fatherland. Proof that there was a God and He favored Germany above all others.\n\nAh, home. It was a comforting thought out here in this wet hell, the ideal of it. He would go back in triumph and glory. The war would end, and it would be time to start a family\u2014a sturdy, well-made blond and buxom wife with whom he could produce tall and fair sons and daughters; and since he would be a man of substance, perhaps a mistress or two to keep the fires fanned as he grew older. There had been so little time for that, save a few women he had been with during medical school, local waitresses at the beer gardens, mostly; once, the daughter of a professor, ah, what a sweet and tasty thing she had been. A shame she had moved away, to keep company with a Canadian somewhere in the frozen wastes of North America . . .\n\nBetween those images and the schnapps, and with a tarp to keep much of the water off, he could bear up here a bit longer. The end would justify the means.\n\nHe heard a noise. It was faint, and he was uncertain of it. There were several fast claps of thunder, far off, and then another sound.\n\nHe turned to Sch\u00e4efer. \"Did you hear that?\"\n\n\"Thunder?\"\n\n\"No. Something after that.\"\n\n\"A pig,\" Sch\u00e4efer said.\n\nGruber listened, but the cry was not repeated\u2014or if it was, he couldn't catch it. It had not sounded like a pig. As a doctor, he had heard many injured men and women yelling over the years, and that's what it had sounded like to him.\n\nNot a pig.\n\nSome person screaming in pain."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "The watcher seemed slow to take notice of Yamada's charge, as if the sight of him somehow did not register.\n\nYamada splashed through the puddles for four meters\u2014five!\u2014gathering speed on the slick ground, and was but two meters away. And still the man had not moved. Dark-skinned he was, with black hair and eyes, wearing no more than a sleeveless shirt that might have once been tan, and dark trousers cut off below the knee, not even any shoes Yamada could see\u2014\n\nHis sprint was fast, and the watcher would have to be able to spring like a rabbit to avoid him now, he would knock him silly with his bokken\u2014\n\n\u2014except that Yamada's speed was too fast\u2014he hit a muddy spot and his foot shot out from under him. He lost his balance, slipped and fell, hit on his back, and skipped like a flat stone thrown at a pond\u2014!\n\nYamada cursed as he slid to a muddy stop. By the time he managed to get back to his feet, the watcher was gone.\n\n\"Chikusho!\" he said. A choice word to be employed when in a rage.\n\nA gun went off. Once, twice, three times. Somebody screamed, a sound so horrific it frosted Yamada's entire body with chilblains.\n\nThe sound came from the direction in which the watcher must have gone, and without stopping to consider Yamada ran into the forest.\n\nSomebody had shot his watcher, it seemed.\n\nHe didn't have far to go to see the source of the terrified yell.\n\nIt was not the watcher who had screamed.\n\nLying on the ground where a tree had fallen and beaten down a wide spot in the brush was one of Suzuki's men. His throat was torn out, blood spraying from the torn vessels in his neck, pumping into the rain and washing onto the soaked ground.\n\nThe watcher, who stood over the downed soldier, turned only slightly to regard Yamada, and despite the downpour his teeth and lips were coated with blood as he smiled.\n\nYamada had no doubt at all what had happened here. He knew in a heartbeat.\n\nHe was a scientist, but also a samurai; however, samurai were not immmune to superstition. His grandfather had filled his head with tales of spirits, demons, ghosts, and while he had turned away from such things as he became educated, there was always some doubt . . .\n\nHe had fought men in matches where the loser was carried off, and he had killed others with a sword. He was not unused to seeing blood, nor was he a coward. But the sight of the dying man's gore dripping down the jowls of the... thing that had bitten his throat out? It was unnatural, this creature. He raised his wooden blade, afraid, expecting that the bokken would be useless. This was no ordinary human\u2014\n\nThe thing turned away and lumbered off, moving steadily if not quickly. Yamada stood there, frozen. He should go after it. He should\u2014\n\nA second later somebody ran toward him from the camp, yelling. \"Yamada-san! What is it!\"\n\nSuzuki, with another soldier, rifles held ready.\n\nThank the gods\u2014\n\n\"Doctor?\"\n\nYamada pointed at the downed man with his wooden sword.\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"A demon,\" Yamada said. \"A gaki.\"\n\nSuzuki shook his head. \"A hungry ghost? Here?\" To the soldier, he said, \"Go, shoot whatever it is!\"\n\nThe man ran after the thing, but Yamada knew it was gone. He would not find it. And if he did?\n\nThere was nothing to be done for the fallen soldier. His blood had run out and been diluted by the driving rain. He was as dead as they got.\n\nAs they made their way back to the impromptu camp, carrying the body of their fallen comrade, Yamada found himself looking carefully at the woods around them. Something evil lived here.\n\nThe soldier sent after the killer returned. He had not seen it, he said.\n\nJust as well, Yamada thought. These soldiers were the best in the empire. The dead man had fired his weapon thrice, and surely he had not missed all three times?\n\nSomething evil lived here, all right, and it was hard to kill, whatever it was.\n\n\"You hear something?\" Mac said.\n\n\"What, besides the rain, thunder, and trees not fifty yards away burst into splinters by high-voltage electricity?\"\n\n\"Yes, besides that.\"\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\nBut Indy caught an exchange of looks between Marie and Batiste, as if they were sharing a wordless secret.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nBefore either could speak, as if somebody had shut off a faucet, the rain stopped. Water still dripped from everything\u2014trees and bushes, spattering upon the tarp and the puddles\u2014but the storm had passed.\n\n\"Not so bad,\" Batiste said.\n\nMac looked at him as if the man had just grown horns and a forked tail. \"A man looking up during that deluge would have bloody well drowned!\"\n\nBatiste laughed. \"In a hurricane, it will rain like that all day and all night, and the wind will knock down trees and buildings like a child does a house of matchsticks. When you go through l'oeil\u2014the eye\u2014of such a storm, the wind comes at you fiercely from one side... and then it just... dies. Your ears pop, the sky clears, you can see the stars, nothing stirs. Then the wind comes back just as hard, but from the other side. Boats will be torn from their moorings and thrown into the trees a hundred yards from the sea. Houses pushed across fields. A whole village leveled into piles of rubble. The sea will come far inland, and when it ebbs, it takes the living and dead alike. This? This is nothing compared with that.\"\n\nIndy nodded. Yes, he had been in typhoons. He understood.\n\n\"We should go,\" Marie said. \"We are not alone in the jungle.\"\n\n\"We never are,\" Indy said. \"No help for it. Come on.\"\n\nBoukman's rider today was La Petite Fille, the loa called The Little Girl. Not much was known of her, the little one, and she rarely chose to enter one of the male bokor, preferring women. Even so, from what Boukman knew, few among the living mambo had served as her horse, and there were plenty among the houngan who had never even heard of her. There were myriad loa, and many of them never came to find a human horse to ride.\n\nWhat worlds, he sometimes wondered, did they visit instead of this one? What creatures did they mount there?\n\nThe loa were not gods themselves, only servants of good or bad gods\u2014Bondye or Maldye\u2014but like angels, they had great power. The Little Girl had a particular strength that she could, if she pleased, allow her horse to share: She could speak to women at a distance, and command them to stillness.\n\nBoukman had prepared the ritual sacrifice with care\u2014La Petite had a fondness for fresh fruit rather than blood, and she especially liked syrup made from sugarcane, so sweet it would make you shiver to taste it. Boukman had already eaten fruit and drunk a cup of this sugared brew, and La Petite was demanding more. He poured the cup and began to sip at it.\n\nBoisson plus rapidement! she demanded.\n\nHe smiled. \"Yes, ma petite, I will drink it faster.\"\n\nHe chugged the syrup down. It was too sweet, but he had drunk much worse, more than a few times. Such acts were but means to an end, and had to be endured.\n\nHe could feel her contentment growing as the solution filled his belly.\n\n\"A small favor,\" he said aloud, \"s'il vous pla\u00eet.\"\n\nAsk, horse.\n\nHe did.\n\nHer response was, he interpreted, akin to a shrug. A matter of no great importance.\n\nGood. She would allow it.\n\nBoukman smiled.\n\nThey buried the dead soldier. The grave was shallow and scavengers would likely dig up the corpse eventually, but that was not to be helped. A few days, a week, and it would not matter to the mission. The man had died doing his duty. That would be reported to his family, and they would take comfort in knowing that. Died in the service of the emperor. Killed honorably in battle. Although what had killed him would not be spoken of in detail. Families did not like to hear that hungry ghosts or demons had taken their sons.\n\nAs they were making ready to leave, it was the man from Hiroshima who reported back with the unpleasant news.\n\nYamada said, \"You are certain?\"\n\n\"Hai, Yamada-san.\" He bowed to punctuate his comment with the proper respect.\n\n\"It could not have been one of the locals?\"\n\n\"Skin as pale as milk where it was not pinked by the sun. He had a spyglass, a slung rifle, a canvas pack, and while he was not in uniform, he stood and moved like a soldier. He did not see me.\"\n\nYamada looked at Suzuki.\n\nSuzuki said, \"My men are well trained. They can tell the difference between a European military man and one of the natives.\"\n\nYamada nodded. \"The Germans.\"\n\nSuzuki nodded. \"It would seem so.\"\n\nSo. A European soldier skulking about in the woods? He might be many things, but the odds were overwhelming that he belonged to Gruber. The Germans had caught up. Not what he had hoped for, but it was what it was, and not a great surprise.\n\n\"Should we eliminate him?\" Suzuki asked.\n\n\"No, not yet. As long as they don't know we are aware of them, it could be to our advantage. Tell your men to pretend they do not know they are being watched. They are not to engage the Germans if they see them, unless attacked directly. We will deal with them when it is to our best advantage.\"\n\n\"Hai,\" Suzuki said. He nodded at the man from Hiroshima. \"You heard the doctor. Tell the others.\"\n\nThe tents were repacked, as much of the water sluiced from them as they could manage. Eventually, the canvas would rot in this climate if not allowed to dry out. They wouldn't be here that long. Already the sun was turning the water to a steamy vapor, the heat beating down on the forest's canopy, lancing to the ground here and there and cooking the wet humus. \"Best we get going,\" Yamada said. \"We don't want to allow our quarry too big of a lead.\"\n\nGruber said, \"Captain? Are we ready?\"\n\n\"Jawohl, Colonel Doktor. Our ranger has reported that the Japanese are on the move.\"\n\n\"And they are unaware of us behind them?\"\n\n\"My men are most stealthy,\" Sch\u00e4efer said. \"The Japanese show no indication they are aware of us.\"\n\n\"They are good at that,\" Gruber observed, \"not showing things. One can never be sure what they are thinking.\"\n\n\"They are Orientals. We are Germans,\" Sch\u00e4efer said, the disdain evident in his voice, and a great deal being said in that simple comparison.\n\nOnce, Gruber would have let such comments pass, for he had agreed with them. But this was a mission of critical importance.\n\n\"Yes, that is true. But recall how the Japs kicked the stuffing out of the Russians less than forty years ago. Those same Russians who are currently kicking the stuffings out of the German army on the Eastern Front. These little yellow men are not to be underestimated, Captain. Such could be a grave error.\"\n\nSch\u00e4efer nodded, but Gruber knew he was unconvinced. Like most officers, he was certain of German superiority in virtually all areas of human endeavor. Gruber knew the thinking. It had been delivered with lectures from his first days at school, right up through his last days at medical college\u2014Germans were industrious, inventive, original. Japanese? Well, they were like... clever monkeys. Give them a toy, they could take it apart and then copy it, but they would never be able to think it up in the first place. Everything their culture had, they had borrowed from somewhere.\n\nThere was an old joke he had heard about the fastest way to defeat the Japanese navy. Allow them to steal the plans for the best Western carriers and battleships, but leave plates missing in the hulls. The Nipponese would copy the plans slavishly, replicate the construction exactly, and the hole would be there when the ships were launched. It must serve a purpose, yes? And believing that, they would leave it, not understanding that it was a trick, and the ships would sink like bricks tossed into the water . . .\n\nIt was funny when he had first heard it, but it was not true. Made in Japan was considered equal to saying \"cheap and shoddy,\" but this was not the case in all things.\n\nGerman steel was famous around the world, and rightly so. But he had seen some of the Japanese handmade swords, and the construction of them was beyond the best German forges in Solingen. Clash a German saber against a Japanese sword? The saber would break first nearly every time. Hardly the creation of clever monkeys, those blades.\n\nIn matters of war and death, the Japanese were well practiced.\n\nYes, yes, it was not in question that those of the Oriental persuasion were inferior to Germans overall, but the Americans, like the Russians, had learned that the Nips were not inconsiderable adversaries. The Yanks had been caught with their pants down at Pearl Harbor, and it had been the Japanese who had sunk half the U.S. Pacific Fleet there.\n\nYamada might not rank among the top German scientists who had ever lived, but he was an educated man who served his emperor and, like all the Japanese, was willing to die for him without a second's hesitation if that was required. A man who was smart and didn't care if he died? He could be most formidable. You did not wish to give such a man anything sharp to use against you.\n\nSch\u00e4efer could not understand that, but Sch\u00e4efer was not in command. Gruber was, and he would keep what he had learned in mind. It was all well and good to laugh at the Orientals over a stein of good dark beer with your friends at the Hofbrau; it was another thing to be roaming in a foreign jungle with the wily D\u00e4monen skulking around the rain forest with you. Spilled beer was of no importance, a joke. German blood on the ground? Not so funny."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "Mac said, \"my. Quite the stream.\"\n\nIndy nodded. The muddy water gurgling past in the channel slightly downhill from where they stood did so in a rush. And it was more like what he'd call a river than a stream, carrying branches and even an entire downed tree by them in the roiling brown flow. Wouldn't think you could get that kind of flow on an island this small, but\u2014there it was.\n\nThey weren't going to be wading across that. How were they going to get past it?\n\nAs if reading his thoughts, Batiste said, \"The water is too deep, the current too strong to try to ford here. There is a bridge around that bend.\"\n\nThey followed the edge of the waterway for several hundred yards, rounded the curve, and came to the bridge.\n\nOr rather, what was left of it.\n\nThe bridge was a narrow, planked affair, affixed to thick ropes at the base, with thinner lines strung above it as handholds. The four ropes, upper and lower, were laced together with thinner twine, and the lines all looked as if they had been coated with some kind of preservative, creosote or somesuch, to prevent rot. A clever, well-designed, useful construct.\n\nUnfortunately, the big tree to which the ends on their side of the river had been attached had toppled over into the water. The first fifteen feet of the bridge was under the rushing current, along with half the tree's crown, and the tree had been turned and rolled by that current to point downstream, enough so that the bridge was also twisted to almost a right angle at the nearer end. The fallen tree looked recently felled, probably during one of the storms. The leaves on its canopy were still green.\n\nIf you could get to the bridge without being washed away, you'd have to be a fly to walk on it until you were almost all the way across to the other side.\n\nIndy didn't see a boat anywhere.\n\n\"It seems we shall have to make repairs to the bridge,\" Batiste said.\n\n\"No kidding,\" Indy said. \"Can't we find another place to cross?\"\n\n\"Non. The rains have swollen all the streams, and many of them wind back and forth over most of the island. Too deep to ford during this season, and swimming is risky. One of my men might make it across here with a rope.\" He pointed at the far shore. \"And we could then tie a dragline, onto which we could hand-over-hand our way against the current, but our supplies would suffer from the immersion. A slip of the hand, and one would be carried away. A strong swimmer might eventually make it to shore, but maybe not. There are logs and brush being carried downstream that might ram into anybody crossing on a dragline, too. The bridge is better.\"\n\n\"How do we fix it?\"\n\n\"We have had some experience with such matters. It is not complicated, though also not easy.\"\n\nIndy said, \"Story of my life.\"\n\nMarie smiled at him. \"We shall have some time while the bridge is being repaired. Perhaps you can tell me some of your story?\"\n\nHe returned her smile. He had a weakness for smart and capable women, always had been that way.\n\nHe'd never dated a witch before, though.\n\nWell, at least not to his knowledge.\n\n\"Maybe,\" he said, \"we could trade stories.\"\n\nBatiste and his men had apparently come equipped for stream crossings.\n\nIndy and Marie watched as one of the men, four coils of rope over his shoulders and chest like bandoliers, scurried along the top of the downed tree and into the branches.\n\n\"Moves pretty good,\" Indy observed.\n\n\"The children here learn to climb trees as soon as they can walk. That is the easy part,\" she said.\n\nThey watched as the man made it to the straining ropes holding the bridge. He uncoiled one end of one of the ropes and began to make it fast to one of the base lines. Because he was curious as to just how much Marie knew about such things, he asked: \"What kind of knot is he using?\"\n\n\"A sailor's grip hitch,\" she said, without hesitation. \"Better than a constrictor hitch for attaching a small rope to a larger one. Harder you pull, the tighter it gets.\"\n\nShe looked at him. \"You know about knots?\"\n\n\"I got the merit badge when I was in the Boy Scouts,\" he said.\n\nThe man finished the first knot. He moved to the handhold rope and used a thinner line to connect to it.\n\nThe third and fourth connections were going to be trickier, since the nearest bits of rope on that side not under the water were at least fifteen feet from the tree. He'd have to work his way out on the high side, then reach across\u2014\n\nBut\u2014no. Instead, the rope man slid down, took a deep breath, and, hooking one leg through a gap between planks, allowed his upper body to sink into the muddy water.\n\n\"He can tie that underwater? Upside down?\"\n\n\"Can't you?\"\n\n\"It's been more than thirty years since I was a Scout,\" he said. \"I couldn't remember how to tie that knot in an air-conditioned lecture room with all day to practice it. If you want a nice clove hitch or a bowline, I'm your man.\"\n\nShe laughed. He enjoyed the sound of it. Been too long since he had made a beautiful and smart woman laugh. Especially one who hadn't tried to kill him several times, like Elsa and Rosita both had . . .\n\nA few seconds later, the rope man emerged from the water and clambered up into the tree. He tied the fourth and final line then worked his way back toward the shore, uncoiling the rolls behind him.\n\nA second man, bearing a machete, climbed past the rope man and into the branches.\n\nMeanwhile, behind Indy and Marie, Batiste was fifteen feet up a large hardwood tree fifty or sixty feet back from the fallen bridge anchor, hammering spikes into the wood. Below him on the ground, Mac stood talking to one of the other men.\n\nMac caught Indy's gaze and sauntered over.\n\n\"D'you see the little contraption they have?\"\n\n\"I did.\" Indy said. \"Clever device. A kind of ratchet and triple-pulley system, see, there? Not very large, but mechanically efficient. One estimates how much slack there is going to be. A loop is tied into the rope a way along, where they figure it will be made most effectively taut, and the rope is run into the pulleys. The ratchet is tied to the tree, and the loop is cranked toward it until they can snag it over one of those spikes, which are a foot long each. This is done with all four of the ropes, and the ends of each are wrapped around more spikes for added security. Batiste says it won't be quite as strong as the original, but it will be more than enough to allow our party to cross the river.\"\n\n\"And the guy with the machete is there to cut away any branches that might tangle and keep the bridge from being raised,\" Mac said.\n\n\"Precisely. It will take a while to tighten all the ropes. Once the first line is pulled taut, the others have to be adjusted properly.\"\n\nMac nodded, though he looked bored. \"Fascinating, right. Anyway, Batiste says we should be able to leave in an hour or so.\"\n\nMac headed back to the tree where Batiste continued to drive spikes into the thick trunk.\n\n\"So, you were a Boy Scout?\"\n\nHe looked at Marie. \"Yeah. In Utah.\" He took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He smiled at the hat.\n\n\"You remembered something amusing,\" she said.\n\n\"This hat,\" he said, as he put it back on. \"It was a... gift from somebody I met in the Boy Scouts. Sort of.\"\n\nShe raised an eyebrow, so Indy told her the story.\n\nShe listened, laughing in all the right places, looking grave as she considered the plight of a young teenager running from possible death, falling into a nest of snakes, and even a lion's cage.\n\n\"Already an adventurer as a teenager?\"\n\n\"My father is a retired professor of medieval history,\" Indy said. \"And something of an authority on... religious artifacts. How I got interested in archaeology and history.\"\n\nHe didn't mention that his father was alive after being fatally shot only because he had drunk water from what was the Holy Grail . . .\n\n\"What happened to it? Coronado's Cross?\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Took me until 1938 to find it and get it again,\" he said. \"Now it's in a museum where it belongs.\"\n\n\"Not a man easily deterred, are you?\"\n\n\"Not once I've made up my mind to do something, no.\" He smiled at her.\n\nShe smiled back. How lovely that was.\n\n\"And what about you, Marie? How does a nice girl with a degree in history and comparative religion wind up in the jungle with a creaky old archaeologist looking for a hidden treasure?\"\n\n\"Not so old and creaky,\" she said.\n\nHe felt his heart beat faster.\n\n\"And you asked me to go, remember?\"\n\n\"Speaking a little more broadly than that?\"\n\nShe paused a moment, as if reflecting on her answer. \"My mother was a mambo. She was a doctor of traditional medicine in her village as a young woman. She hungered for knowledge. She managed to find her way to Cuba in the mid-1920s, and to a most progressive medical school. The place was destroyed in a hurricane in '28 or '29, but not before she learned enough to become a doctor of Western medicine, too. She came home and started a clinic. She had hoped I would follow in her footsteps and also become a doctor. She was teaching me how, along with other things.\n\n\"That was why I went to the United States, to eventually go to medical school. But my mother died in 1939\u2014a fire, the clinic burned down. I had to come home, to sort things out. And then there was the war . . .\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"C'est la vie,\" she said.\n\nSuch is life. But trust the French to make it sound so much more profound.\n\nIndy was still basking in the warmth of that not-so-old-and-creaky comment. Hope springs eternal . . .\n\nThere came a grinch! noise, and he looked up to see one of the new ropes connected to the old bridge stretching tighter as Batiste cranked on the handle of the ratchet Mac had mentioned. The man in the downed tree over the water was carefully hacking away at small branches in the crown to free the bridge from the tree's grasp as the rope grew more taut.\n\n\"Ever think about going back? To the States? The war won't last forever. Another couple of years, it will probably be over.\"\n\n\"I have considered it. But I have responsibilities here now. I know enough to treat many of my mother's patients\u2014with either Western medicines or our own. And there are other things that require my attention. If the war goes on for another few years and then I must leave for four or five more past that? It would not seem to be in the cards. But\u2014who can say what the future will bring.\"\n\nThey smiled again.\n\nThe bridge was now clear of the water on the right side, not by much, but a few feet, and Batiste was starting to tighten the lower rope on the opposite side. They'd be leaving soon. Maybe they could get back to this conversation later. Indy hoped so. He really liked Marie. He definitely wanted to get to know her better.\n\nSuzuki said, \"The natives have managed to repair an old bridge that spans the stream ahead of us. According to our scouts, there is no other way across this stream\u2014it is deep and beset with a strong current.\"\n\n\"So we shall have to follow them over the bridge,\" Yamada said.\n\n\"Yes. But once on the other side, if we cut the ropes...?\"\n\nYamada nodded. Yes. That would greatly slow Gruber's pursuit, if not stopping it altogether. Especially if the supports were not entirely parted, but only weakened enough so that they would give way once a load was put upon them. It was an amusing and gratifying thought to envision Gruber and his men tumbling into the raging waters . . .\n\nIt did not happen that way, though.\n\nWhen, an hour after their quarry had crossed the repaired bridge, Yamada and his men arrived there, they beheld an incredible sight:\n\nThere were two men across the river. Well. Not men, Yamada knew, but things. Each of them had, with its teeth, attacked the bridge support ropes.\n\nThey were hunched over the cables.\n\nChewing . . .\n\nSuzuki said, \"Shoot them!\"\n\n\"No!\" Yamada counter-ordered. \"The noise will reveal us! Besides, it is too late, look!\"\n\nAs they watched, the rope on the right parted and the bridge canted vertically that way. A few seconds later, the other rope snapped, and wooden planking fell into the water. It drifted downstream, still attached on Yamada's side of the river, fluttering in the water like a flag in a hard wind.\n\nThe two things stood and, without looking back, shambled off into the forest.\n\nYamada frowned. \"The attackers at the village. Like the one that killed our soldier.\" He paused a beat. \"I do not like this.\" He paused again. \"Do we have a good swimmer?\"\n\nAll of the men stepped forward.\n\nOf course.\n\n\"The strongest man will carry a rope across and we will use it as a dragline,\" Suzuki said.\n\nYamada shrugged. They would get wet. There were worse things.\n\nSome of which he had just seen chew through a rope.\n\nAnother time, Yamada would have been intrigued enough to chase down and collect one of these man-creatures, to see what made him tick. But the mission was too important.\n\nGruber listened to the report the scout offered. There had been a bridge, but it had been cut on the other side of the river. There was a fresh rope spanning the crossing, a foot above the water. Though he had not seen it, the scout reckoned that Jones and McHale's party had crossed via the bridge, which had been repaired on the west side of the river, and then felled it behind them, requiring that the Japanese devise other means to cross.\n\n\"That would only make sense if they knew they were being followed,\" Gruber said.\n\n\"Perhaps they spotted the Japanese.\"\n\nGruber nodded. \"Well. Nice of them to leave it for us,\" he said.\n\n\"Pragmatic,\" Sch\u00e4efer said. \"The Japanese no doubt intend to use it again when they come back this way. We shall probably see other such lines.\"\n\n\"Point taken, Captain.\"\n\nOnce they arrived at the crossing, Sch\u00e4efer ordered one of his men to inchworm his way across the river. If the Japanese had done it, they certainly could.\n\nThe soldier did so, his body flagging downstream as he slid his hands along the rope, left, then right, then left. It took him only a few minutes to achieve the far shore.\n\n\"Not so bad,\" Gruber said. \"I'll go next.\"\n\n\"You have gloves?\"\n\n\"Yes, I think so.\"\n\n\"Best you wear them. The hemp will be rough on your hands.\"\n\n\"I am not made of sugar, Captain. I believe I can manage it.\"\n\nHalfway across, Gruber wished he had taken Sch\u00e4efer's advice, for the wet rope was harsh against his fingers and palms, and the pull of the water was strong enough so that it was not easy work to support one's weight with one hand while the other slid forward. Nonetheless, he managed to make it at the cost of a small blister on his left palm, no more. Once there, he stood and sluiced off as much water as he could. Being wet in the jungle was uncomfortable, but hardly unusual. One had to get used to it.\n\nSch\u00e4efer crossed next, and then the rest of the men. The last man to cross was Heinrich Wagner, the doubting Thomas private. He was but a third of the way along when another of the men said, \"Gott!\" and pointed upstream.\n\nGruber turned to see, and beheld a log as big around as a man and thrice the length, with several broken, jagged-end branches jutting from the trunk, floating toward the crosser at a good rate.\n\n\"Schnell, schnell!\" somebody yelled. \"Heinrich, go back, go back, hurry, go back!\"\n\nBut Wagner thought he could make it. He began moving his hands faster\u2014\n\nThe log looked like it would miss him\u2014\n\nBut\u2014no. The log twisted, just a bit, just enough so that it hooked a branch under the rope. That slowed the front end almost to a stop, but the tail end came around\u2014\n\n\u2014and slammed into Wagner, rolling over the top of the rope where his weight pulled the line below the surface. The log hit him on the head\u2014\n\nThe scream he tried to get out turned into a gurgle and he lost his grip on the rope and sank.\n\nThe rope stretched... but held. The log rolled and floated on.\n\nThere was no sign of Wagner.\n\nSoldiers ran along the bank but were stopped by a tangle of brush a few meters downstream. They cursed and attacked the brush with machetes, but Gruber knew that Heinrich was almost certainly drowned, if the impact had not been enough to fracture his skull.\n\nHe looked at Sch\u00e4efer and shook his head. \"He is a dead man.\"\n\nSch\u00e4efer nodded. \"Yah.\"\n\n\"He died for the glory of the Third Reich,\" Gruber said. \"Our report will reflect that. But we must move on.\"\n\nSch\u00e4efer nodded again. He didn't like leaving one of his men floating down a stream in this godforsaken jungle, but dead was dead, and he had his orders. The mission was all that mattered, even if all of them died for it. So ist Lieben\u2014such is life."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Boukman smoked the sacred herb and mushroom blend in his pipe, which had been carved from the thighbone of a long-dead bokor. The smoke, pungent and acrid and potent enough to drop flying insects in the small hut, shrouded his head and hung low, no breeze to stir it as the power of it suffused his mouth and nose and lungs, the drogue bringing to him the state called pens\u00e9e fra\u00eeche, cool thought.\n\nBoukman had been there many times, wreathed in the magic smoke that allowed him to focus his energies so that he could use the permissions granted him by the loa who rode him. When he was properly prepared, when he was in accord with all ways, he could, albeit in a smaller manner, go forth like the loa themselves and find his own horse, could mount it and ride.\n\nSuch trips were hard\u2014they took much from him\u2014but they offered great gains, as well.\n\nThe patterns of manic geometry strobed across his vision, overlaying the inside of the hut with intricate grids\u2014lines, whorls, the structure of everything made into blueprints designed by the gods, the order of things to the smallest detail, expanded large enough to behold.\n\nColors sparked along the periphery of his vision, flashes of primary red or blue or even black light, which was not the same as darkness.\n\nAlmost there . . .\n\nThe sense of weightlessness came over him; his body grew light, lighter than a feather, and it became less than a wisp, less than the smoke around him. He became \u00e2me, spirit, and was able to rise, up, through the smoky air, through the thatched room, up, up, above the trees and into the sky . . .\n\nIt took effort to keep himself focused. A lesser mage who took the sacred smoke might, as the smoke itself did, dissipate, lose himself, and leave nothing but a fleshy shell behind as he achieved the air, scattering to the winds like dust, never to return. In such a case, his body would breathe; its heart would beat; as long as somebody fed it and cared for it, it would live, but there would be no one home. It would be prey to wandering loa, or some bokor like Boukman, who had the power to stay collected and to move with intent.\n\nBoukman floated above the jungle. He listened and he looked, and there, miles away, was a slender thread of white light, shining up from the forest like a thin beam, reaching to Heaven . . .\n\nBoukman moved toward the thread. He flew faster than a bird until he arrived at the light, and then he rode it down, like a man sliding along a pole, shooting toward the ground and the source of that light, faster and faster, so that when he arrived he would be unstoppable . . .\n\nIndy was talking to Marie as they took a break. Ahead, the trail was narrowing, and soon it would become too small for a man to walk, Batiste had told them. They needed to drink water, for the work of cutting their way through a jungle was about to begin.\n\nMarie smiled at Indy. \"Did the Boy Scouts have a vine-slashing merit badge?\"\n\nHe grinned at her in return. \"Not as such. Not a lot of vines in Utah, though we did whack at sagebrush and cactus now and then.\"\n\nHer smiled vanished. Her eyes rolled back, showing the whites, and she moaned. She toppled backward off the stump upon which they were perched.\n\nIndy grabbed her as she fell. She felt like rubber under his hands, as if her bones had vanished. \"Marie!\"\n\nBatiste heard Indy yell. He ran and helped Indy lower her.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\nBatiste shook his head, said, \"What happened?\"\n\n\"Nothing! I mean, she was talking and she just moaned and fell over!\"\n\n\"She is being ridden,\" Batiste said.\n\n\"By whom?\"\n\nBatiste shook his head. \"I don't know. The loa do not usually ride those with power unless they are invited. I have never seen this happen to her.\"\n\n\"What can we do?\"\n\n\"There is nothing we can do. Watch her. Protect her body.\"\n\nIndy stared at Marie. Her eyelids were partially open, but only the white was showing underneath her pupils.\n\nMarie sat up. She looked around, not comprehending at first, Boukman knew, then she saw him.\n\n\"Bokor Boukman,\" she said.\n\nHer voice was strong, no fear in it. That was good, he admired that. Of course, some of his blood, much thinned, flowed in her, so it was not altogether unexpected. She was a mambo, and her thread to Heaven, while white, was thicker than many much more experienced.\n\nShe was a beautiful child. Her mother had been likewise a beauty. Unfortunately, her mother had also been a mambo of some power who had resisted him, and it had been with regret that he'd had to eliminate her. It was always a waste to destroy beauty, but sometimes it had to be done.\n\nMarie had even features, smooth skin, thick and lovely hair. Very much a woman in her shape. In the flesh, he would be pleased to touch her, to feel the supple muscles and skin, but here in this realm, they were \u00e2me, and such sensations were pale compared with the real world. A pity.\n\nWell, that could be remedied later.\n\nHe saw her understand what had happened.\n\n\"You are very powerful, Oncle Grand,\" she said. \"More than I knew.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"More than anybody knows,\" he said. \"You have grown since last I saw you. Now tell me, what of these blan with whom you travel? Why are they here?\"\n\nShe said nothing, only watched him.\n\nHe smiled. Ah. Brave, the little one was. \"Must I compel you?\"\n\nHe saw her jaw muscles flex and her eyes narrow. She spoke a short phrase, low so that he could not hear, but he saw her lips move and knew it was a spell of power she invoked. A glowing shield began to form about her, like green glass with the sunlight glinting from it.\n\nBoukman laughed. He pointed his right hand's fingers skyward and closed them into a fist.\n\nMarie's shield made a noise like a nail being pried from wet wood, and vanished. There came a whiff of brimstone burning. \"Child, child, you have heart, but where is your mind? You cannot resist me.\"\n\n\"I can try.\"\n\nHe laughed again. Such spirit was to be admired. She knew she had no chance against him, none, but even so she stood defiant. Just as her mother had. He liked her for that. Not that liking her would slow what he was going to do, of course.\n\nHe opened his fist, waved both hands, said a Word of Power granted him by The Little Girl that was halfway between a hiss and a curse.\n\nHer eyes went wide as she felt the grip of giant, invisible hands. They pulled her arms up, so they jutted straight out from her body, pulled her feet apart so that her legs were spread shoulder-width apart, and lifted her into the air, a foot, two feet, three . . .\n\nShe struggled against the geas, but to no avail. She was a fly in ice, unable to move more than a shiver.\n\nHe walked to where she floated and gestured. She settled back to the earth, and at more than six and a half feet tall, Boukman looked down at her. \"My zombis are in the jungle. I can keep you here, away from your body and have them kill the white men, you know I can. Tell me.\"\n\n\"No. You could have killed us before now, if that was your wish. That you have not? Means you do not wish it. The gods might frown upon it.\"\n\nHe shook his head. Ah, smart, too. Certainly he had uses for women with beauty, power, and cleverness. She would be too strong to be a zombi, but there were other ways to serve.\n\n\"Tell me. I can make you suffer.\"\n\nShe tried to shrug, couldn't quite manage it.\n\n\"They came here for something,\" he prompted. \"It concerns me, I know this. A thing of power. Hidden somehow, from my sight.\"\n\n\"And if you kill them, you will certainly never find it.\"\n\n\"You think not? My servants are tireless. They can search forever.\"\n\n\"It might take them forever to find it. You don't have that long, Uncle. If it was open to your gaze, you would have known about it and uncovered it long ago.\"\n\nHe shook his head. Too smart for her own good.\n\nHe reached out, stroked the side of her face with the tip of his forefinger.\n\nSmoke rose from the line he traced across her cheek.\n\nShe swallowed her yelp of pain. It came out no more than a grunt.\n\n\"Very well, my little niece. You are right\u2014the gods are not ready for me to know, so I will allow your imen blan to live another day. They will lead me to that which I must have. They will die when I need them to die.\"\n\n\"I will warn them against you,\" she said.\n\n\"It would not do any good, ma petite, they are white men, they have no power, and yours is not sufficient to protect them. Besides, you won't warn them.\"\n\n\"I will!\"\n\n\"No, you will not. Because you will not remember any of this. Go back to your self, child. And awaken in wonder as to where you have been . . .\"\n\nHe gestured at her, spoke another Word.\n\nHer eyes grew wide.\n\nBoukman reached out, took hold of her thread leading skyward, and pulled. His spectral body flew up like the ghost of a monkey ascending to Heaven.\n\nMore and more interesting, this. He had not been so intrigued in a score of years, he decided. Perhaps not in two score.\n\nAs he flew above the jungle, his \u00e2me smiled to itself again.\n\nHe would return to his body. And there would be those others in the jungle with whom he must deal. Perhaps there was something to be gained from them, as well. Every small bit gathered was useful.\n\nMarie took a shuddering and deep breath, sat up, and her pupils rolled down, to behold Indy.\n\nHe held one hand behind her back, steadying her. \"Are you okay?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"What happened? Where'd you go?\"\n\nBehind him, Mac leaned in, along with Batiste.\n\nShe shook her head slowly. \"I\u2014I don't remember,\" she said.\n\nBatiste said something in that soft and smooth language of his.\n\nIndy caught but one word of it: \"Boukman?\"\n\n\"It would seem so. I do not recall the meeting, but there is no one else who is powerful enough to ride me without my leave. And a loa would ask.\"\n\n\"He would have wanted to know about you,\" Batiste said. He nodded at Indy and Mac.\n\nIndy looked at Marie again. There was a red mark on her cheek. It looked like a burn.\n\n\"I do not think I would have told him anything,\" she said. \"But I cannot know for sure.\"\n\n\"What's to tell?\" Mac asked.\n\nShe shrugged. \"Not much. But with Boukman, any information adds to his power.\"\n\n\"So we should be worried,\" Indy said.\n\n\"Yes, though not so much just yet,\" she said. \"If he had wanted us dead or taken, he would have already had it done\u2014he has zombis in the jungle, you may be certain of that. He wants something from us, and I think he doesn't know exactly what it is. He is waiting to see what we do. After we find the artifact, that will be the time of greatest danger.\"\n\n\"Maybe they won't be able to get across the river?\" Mac said.\n\n\"Oh, they can. Tumbling downstream for a mile means nothing to them. They are already dead.\"\n\n\"Well... swell,\" Indy said. \"Never a dull moment.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "Suzuki said, \"one of our scouts is missing.\"\n\n\"Missing?\"\n\n\"Hai, Yamada-san. He was due to report back an hour ago.\"\n\n\"Perhaps his watch stopped.\"\n\nSuzuki look to see if Yamada was jesting, which was the case, though Yamada did not grin to give it away.\n\nHe shook his head. \"My men can tell time well enough from the sunlight to know when they are due back.\"\n\nYamada nodded. The man could have had an accident, of course. This jungle was full of places to trip and fall and wind up with a broken leg or worse. He could have tumbled into a river and been swept away. Quicksand, perhaps. Dangers everywhere.\n\nWell. That was the nature of a military unit. One had to scout the terrain and enemies. And some losses were to be expected, whether by accident or by enemy intent.\n\nMaybe the Germans, though if they thought they were still hidden, probably not. They wouldn't want to do anything to cause Yamada's crew to be more alert\u2014and a missing man would certainly be cause for concern.\n\nBefore he had seen that creature with the blood dripping down its jaws crouched over one of the imperial army's finest men, he might have been more apt to believe in an accident, but not now. The scout wasn't going to be coming back if one of those things had gotten him.\n\n\"I will pair the men from now on,\" Suzuki said.\n\nThat horse was out of the barn and closing the door wouldn't help him, but Suzuki was right\u2014it might help the others.\n\nMaybe.\n\n\"One of our men is gone,\" Sch\u00e4efer said.\n\nGruber stared at him. \"Gone, what do you mean, 'gone'?\"\n\n\"I mean he is not with us and cannot be located.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Private Gr\u00fcn.\"\n\n\"Are you sure? How did it happen?\"\n\n\"He was in the group bringing up the rear. He apparently stepped off the trail to answer a call of nature. Private Schinken waited. When, after a few moments, Gr\u00fcn did not return, Schinken went looking. He did not find him. He marked the spot, and two more of our men went back to look. No sign of the man.\"\n\n\"Scheisse!\"\n\n\"My sentiments, as well.\"\n\n\"The Japanese, do you think?\"\n\n\"No. Our forward scouts would have certainly seen them heading back along the trail.\"\n\n\"Then what happened?\"\n\n\"Perhaps there are larger animals than we know about in these woods.\"\n\n\"Surely there would have been evidence of an animal attack?\"\n\n\"I do not know what to tell you, Colonel Doktor. He is gone, and it is as if he vanished into the air.\"\n\n\"Pair the men,\" Gruber said. \"Nobody goes anywhere alone, even to answer calls of nature.\"\n\n\"Already done,\" the captain said.\n\n\"I do not like this.\"\n\n\"Nor do I, but done is done. Perhaps he wandered too far, got lost, and he will find his way back to the trail eventually and catch up with us.\"\n\n\"Do you think so?\"\n\n\"Not really.\"\n\nGruber sighed. First, they had lost a man to the river. And now this. Turning ugly, this mission.\n\nAh, well. That had always been a possibility, hadn't it? They would just have to continue on as best they could, and be more vigilant. They were a crack unit of the German army, men who could shoot a fly off a wall at ten paces or slice a man into bloody ribbons with a pocketknife\u2014there ought not to be anything or anybody in this forest who could stop them from their goal. Nor would he allow that.\n\n\"We're supposed to climb down that?\" Mac said.\n\n\"Unless you can wave your arms hard enough to fly over it,\" Marie said.\n\nIndy looked at the gorge. It was both steep and deep, easily eighty feet of dirt and rock embankment on this side, slightly less on the opposite side. Yeah. He had climbed worse.\n\nMac said, \"Why isn't there a river at the bottom?\"\n\n\"There is,\" Batiste said. \"But there are clefts in the rock\u2014you see? And the river is below, in a natural tunnel through the stone under the ground. Even when it rains, the water does not rise to fill the gorge, but is drained into the river beneath the earth.\"\n\nIndy nodded.\n\nBatiste said, \"We will anchor ropes here and climb down. If we move slowly and with care, it will not be so bad.\"\n\nIndy looked at Marie.\n\n\"Do not worry about me,\" she said. \"I have been climbing trees and ropes since I was a girl.\"\n\n\"Well, I haven't done much of that since my last trip to the Schweizer Alpen, in '34,\" Mac said. \"I hope I haven't forgotten how.\"\n\nIndy looked at Mac. \"The Swiss Alps in '34? Dufourspitze? That was you?\"\n\nMac grinned.\n\nMarie looked blank.\n\nIndy said, \"Leonardo da Vinci had another set of mirror-writing notebooks that disappeared after he died. The story was, somehow those writings wound up in the hands of thieves, who eventually hid them somewhere between Italy and Switzerland. The thieves had a falling-out, some were killed, others arrested and executed, and the location supposedly died with them.\n\n\"But in 1934, these notebooks showed up in the British Museum. Found in a cave on the Dufourspitze\u2014so the provenance the English offered said.\" He looked at Mac.\n\n\"Modesty forbids,\" he said, holding his hands palms up.\n\n\"Since when did you develop any modesty?\" Indy shook his head. \"The Italians were not happy about those notebooks winding up in British hands.\"\n\n\"And since when are the Italians ever happy? Besides, they had so many of the great man's writings already and wouldn't share them. It was only fair. Leonardo belongs to the world, not il duce Mussolini.\"\n\n\"Hey, I'm not arguing with you\u2014\"\n\n\"Messieurs,\" Batiste said, \"we would probably be wise to cross the ravine while the daylight is still strong.\"\n\nThe descent wasn't so bad when you had a rope down which you could rappel. It was hard work in the heat and humidity, but the angle wasn't so steep that it ever approached vertical, so you weren't ever just hanging there.\n\nMac had a bad moment halfway down when something slid under his boot and he nearly lost the rope. He cursed, but managed to stop himself after a couple of feet.\n\n\"You okay?\" Indy asked.\n\n\"Peachy,\" Mac said. He didn't sound peachy, though.\n\nMarie was as good a climber as she claimed.\n\nIndy had done enough of this kind of work that he wasn't particularly worried, but after Mac's slip, he paid more attention to his footing.\n\nIt took only a few minutes for most of them to reach the bottom of the ravine. Indy saw the fissure in the rock at the bottom before he reached it\u2014the gap was probably three feet on average, narrower here, wider there, and had been there long enough so that the edges of the split had been smoothed by time and weather. He could also hear the subterranean river rushing below the crack in the earth. It was loud\u2014the sound channeled up through the fissure from the enclosure was full of echoes.\n\nIndy peered into the gap. The sunlight from above was just enough to get a glimpse of the roiling water about thirty feet down.\n\n\"Careful you do not fall in,\" Batiste said. \"The Fleuve Cach\u00e9\u2014the Hidden River\u2014does not surface until she reaches the sea, and there she tumbles down a high cliff into a rocky cove. It is most impressive to see the waterfall from a boat offshore. Much foam and spew, it fills the air with rainbows and mist. You would almost certainly be drowned long before you got there, but if you survived the swim and the tide was out, you would be dashed to death on the rocks.\"\n\nIndy took a step back from the edge.\n\nThe bearers were already tossing the supplies over a narrowing of the cleft, an easy step for an adult, and slender enough so that it wouldn't cost you a fall into the river if you slipped.\n\nUp top, one of the bearers undid two of the three ropes, rolled them up, and clambered down the remaining line.\n\n\"We will leave a rope for our return,\" Batiste said.\n\n\"Only one?\" Indy said.\n\nBatiste shrugged. \"We may need the others between here and where we are going.\" He looked up the easier slope ahead of them. \"The forest thickens above us, and we will have to hack our way through for at least another half kilometer.\"\n\n\"And after that?\" Mac asked.\n\nBatiste shrugged again. \"I cannot say for sure. I have never gone past that myself. I have only the accounts of others. There is a small grassland, supposedly. More streams, other ravines, a few hills. If we get past those, finally the place we seek.\"\n\n\"Seems like somebody went to a lot of trouble to take the relic there,\" Indy said.\n\nBatiste said, \"Oui. The story my father's grandfather told him said that of those who went, a score of men, only one returned to speak of it. The others died on the trip, or once they were there.\"\n\n\"Accidents?\"\n\n\"The lone survivor would not speak to this. When asked, he would cross himself and go silent, so the story goes.\"\n\nJust keeps getting better, Indy thought.\n\nBoukman looked at the two captives, the German and the Japanese. He would question them and find out what they knew. The German would be easy\u2014he spoke that language, along with a score of others: Spanish, French, Portuguese, English, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, a little Russian, and several Caribbean dialects. Over nearly two hundred years, he had learned a lot of tongues. Unfortunately, he had little opportunity to avail himself of languages from most of Asia, so he had no Chinese, Japanese, or Hindi. But that was not such an impediment\u2014there were many among the loa who knew human speech in all its forms, and Boukman could petition one on such a small matter at little cost.\n\nThe two men were bound and blindfolded, sitting there against the outside wall of his hut, and Boukman nodded at two of his servants and pointed at the German. \"That one.\"\n\nThe two Children of the Potion moved. They dragged the German to his feet, removed his blindfold, and held him so that he faced Boukman.\n\n\"We must talk,\" he said in German.\n\n\"I will tell you nothing!\" the German said.\n\nBoukman smiled. \"You are a soldier, and a brave man, but that does not matter. You cannot resist my questions.\"\n\n\"Torture?\"\n\n\"I would not waste my time.\" He nodded.\n\nTwo more of the Children approached, one of them bearing a vial of the potion. He would have to make some more of it, soon; he was running low.\n\nThe German was strong and tried to fight them, but in the end he was forced to swallow enough of the fluid. It was only a matter of minutes after that before he belonged to Boukman. The Japanese soldier would enjoy the same fate, and when he was done with them here, he would send them back out to spy upon their former fellows.\n\nThey would be possessed, serving as Boukman's cat's paws until they died the True Death. And if he felt like it, they would be his beyond that . . .\n\nBoukman smiled at that thought. It must be terrifying to see a comrade shamble into view and realize he was no longer anything like the man you had known.\n\nOnce the elixir took him, the German grew slack in the grips of the others. His face relaxed, his eyes dulled. Who he had been sank deep under the tide of the drug and all but drowned.\n\nBoukman knew the signs well. He had been causing them for nearly two centuries. He waved the others away.\n\nThe new slave stood there, swaying slightly, waiting for his master's voice.\n\n\"Now, tell me\u2014what are the Germans doing in my country?\"\n\nLike a schoolboy reciting lessons by rote, the German told him everything he knew about that subject. Not that much, but all that he had.\n\nBoukman listened. Ah. Most interesting. He did not see how it really concerned him directly\u2014he already had the secret to the potion; he doubted that an African version, which might require plants and other ingredients from that far continent, could serve him any better. But he would see. Knowledge was power. The more you knew, the more powerful you could become.\n\nHe would question the other soldier and see what his group was doing\u2014\n\nOn a hunch\u2014the Germans and Japanese were allies in this current war\u2014he said, \"Do you speak Japanese?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" the German said.\n\nBoukman smiled again. He would not even have to call upon the loa, making it even easier.\n\n\"Bring the other one,\" he said.\n\nGruber looked down the side of the incline. Steep, but not insurmountable. The opposite side was even less of a grade. And the archaeologists had left a rope in place. Gruber had a man test it, to make certain it wasn't rigged to break or let go.\n\n\"Post a guard,\" he told the captain. \"To make certain nobody fools with the rope as we descend. Two men.\"\n\nSch\u00e4efer nodded. \"Of course.\"\n\nIt would be a nasty fall if the rope were to part as one descended, and while Gruber didn't mind losing men if it was necessary, it ought not to happen from inattention. \"It will be dark soon,\" Gruber said. \"Have the scouts find a suitable site for camp. I do not think we wish to try to travel in this jungle after dark.\"\n\nSch\u00e4efer nodded.\n\nYamada had enough room to sit up comfortably in his small tent, in the kneeling butt-on-heels position called seiza. Europeans and Americans used chairs, seldom the floor, but such a position was traditional in Japan, save for the very elderly or injured. In such a pose, a samurai could draw and cut with his sword, drink sake, or practice shodo\u2014calligraphy\u2014as he now did.\n\nAs with the tea ceremony or kendo, there were proper ways of doing things. Yamada had unrolled his tools\u2014the brush, stone, ink stick, and wiping rag\u2014from a thin sheet of chamois and laid them out on the edge of the sleeping mat. He poured a small amount of water into the stone's well. He preferred a rectangular one over a round one, and his, lovingly made by an expert craftsman, was of excellent quality for a travel stone.\n\nThe grinding area was wide enough to rub the ink stick in an oval pattern in and out of the water, which was also his preference, and the resulting ink was black and of the right consistency; it did not stick to the stone. This was a simple activity but had to be done mindfully. He had seldom missed a day doing it in thirty years.\n\nOnce the ink was prepared and the paper unrolled and ready, the brush was selected. Some liked the soft goat's hair, some the harder bristles of wolf's hair\u2014which was rarely made from wolves, but usually horse or weasel, sometimes rabbit\u2014but Yamada like those with mixed hairs, for his expertise was enough to justify them. He had but two of these with him, and he took great care to make sure they were clean and dry before he clipped them into the special container that protected the bristles from contacting anything once they were encased. Once a brush was worn out, it was proper to bury it, with a prayer of respect for what it had taught you. The two he had should last until long after he was home, but he was careful with them. A day without calligraphy seemed unthinkable.\n\nReady, he dipped his brush, lifted it, and approached the waiting paper.\n\nThere were times when Yamada worked on specific kanji to hone his technique\u2014cursive dragon strokes or complex symbols to test his abilities. Of late, he had spent less time on the complex and more on allowing whatever feeling welled within him to take control.\n\nThus it was this evening. He allowed his mind to go quiet, and his hand took a life of its own and began to draw bu, the martial strokes that evoked a warrior with a long battleax stepping forward. Quickly he completed the kanji and moved down to begin shi, a simple cross-with-a-platform, representing a person\u2014and more, one who was a samurai. His hand flowed naturally down into do. This was a highly stylized human head\u2014there the eye, there the hair\u2014and beneath it, a foot to indicate movement. Do was the Way, which was embodied by someone moving.\n\nBu-shi-do, the Way of the Warrior.\n\nHe leaned back, took a deep, slow breath, released it, and beheld his drawing. Yes. The smallest imperfection in the first character, just on the left stroke, a single, errant hair, was not enough to mar the power of the three symbols taken together, and was, in fact, a good sign\u2014that perfection was desired but not always necessary. A fine effort, he knew. Concise, strong, powerful, flowing\u2014which was the essence of the Warrior's Way.\n\nYamada smiled. Yes.\n\nIt was time to clean the stone and brushes. He was done. The preparation took much longer than the act, and that was also part of the Way.\n\nIn the morning, when the ink was dry on his rice paper, he would roll it up and put it into his pack. With luck, he would bring it and other of his better writings home, to install in his private room. Those drawings he had made each day that were unworthy to keep, he burned at the first opportunity.\n\nOnce the stone and brush were pristine again, he put them aside to dry. He extinguished his typhoon candle. Then he lay upon his bedding and began to compose his daily haiku. A samurai was a man of culture\u2014he was a warrior who could take a man's head, satisfy a woman, create art and poetry, and display total loyalty to his lord, his daimyo. There had been men who were fierce fighters but could evoke a wren landing on a reed with a few brushstrokes as adeptly as a dedicated artist. That was the goal of a samurai\u2014to be a man of many talents.\n\nTonight, he thought, he would do a poem about the moon. Not the fuzzy one that hung over the muggy lands so far away from home, but the one that shined like a Chinese bowl in the skies behind Mount Fuji on a clear autumn day.\n\nThe buzzing of the mosquitoes became a background drone as he considered his verse. The moon. Not as light, too easy, but as perhaps a painting on the curtain of the sky...?"
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "\"We have made good progress,\" Batiste said.\n\nThe morning was hardly what one would call \"cool\" as the sun's early light tried to sneak down through the thick green canopy and mostly failed to do so, but it was the least hot part of the day. Take what you can get, Indy thought.\n\n\"I think we might be able to attain our destination, laisser d'un Dieu, by tomorrow night, or the morning following.\"\n\n\"God allowing,\" Marie said in English, echoing Batiste's acknowledgment.\n\n\"What's for breakfast?\" Mac asked. He rubbed at his belly. \"I always seem to lose far too much weight on these adventures.\"\n\n\"Hard to see that,\" Indy allowed. \"You look like you could skip a week's worth of meals and not suffer.\"\n\n\"You are a cruel, cruel man, Dr. Jones, to insult me thus.\"\n\nBoth men grinned.\n\nMarie said, \"We have fruit, coconut milk, nuts, hard biscuits, cold coffee.\"\n\n\"What? No steak, eggs, sausage, and kippers? No tea? What kind of establishment are you running here, madam? Can't you at least send the concierge out for The Times?\"\n\nShe smiled at Mac. \"We could bake bread, but we would need to make a fire and let it burn down to coals, and perhaps our time would be better spent moving before the day warms up.\"\n\n\"Ah, well. I suppose rabbit food is better than nothing.\"\n\nOne of Batiste's men passed around pieces of fruit\u2014bananas, melons, chunks of coconut, and a canteen of coconut milk with bamboo cups. There was some thick, and unheated, tepid coffee, welcome enough even so. Indy chewed on a handful of nuts that tasted like cashews but looked like large peanuts, not bad. He washed the food down with the coconut milk, which was warm, but wet enough. And the coffee.\n\nMarie, sitting next to him, smiled, and he loved the way it looked on her.\n\n\"I find it curious,\" she said. \"You could be a tenured professor in a university, living a comfortable and easy life teaching students. Or in a governmental building in Washington, far from the rigors of war, shuffling papers, and no one would think less of you for it. And yet, you are in the war, in the field, and for relaxation you come to our islands and slog your way through a daunting, dangerous jungle, to collect and protect an artifact that, if you succeed, will wind up in a museum, viewed by people who will not know, or care, who collected it, nor how hard the doing of it was.\"\n\n\"Well, everybody has to be someplace,\" Indy said.\n\nShe reached out and touched his hand with her fingertips. \"You make light of your calling. But it is not a small matter. Love and dedication are powerful things. A man who knows who he is and thus what to do in his life is a rare and valuable thing. A treasure of a different kind.\"\n\nShe pulled her hand away and nodded at him.\n\nThe sensation of her fingers on his hand lingered, evoking a warmth unlike that of the jungle around them. Lord, another smart and insightful woman. Indy could feel that attraction. In their own way, those kinds of women were scarier than a room full of Nazis with guns. All the Nazis could do was kill you\u2014women could do so much more . . .\n\nTwo more hours into their journey\u2014it was not really a walk, but a stop-and-start affair involving a fair amount of work with flashing machetes to clear a path, move the cut brush, and then proceed to the next curtain of vines or brambles. Every fifteen or twenty minutes, the men leading would switch places so they could sharpen their blades and relax their tired arms and shoulders. Indy had taken his turns at the front and, after a few minutes' slashing at the growth, had much more appreciation for the men who were doing most of the cutting. This was hard work.\n\nTwo hours, and perhaps five hundred yards' progress\u2014that much only because a couple of old-growth hardwood trees had fallen sometime in the last few years and provided wooden walkways through the underbrush. Even so, some of the creepers and fast-growing brush had started to reclaim the fallen giants, and those had to be cleared. A few more years in the tropical clime and those huge trees would be rotted and gone, the jungle leaving little sign they had ever been. A militant greenery, this.\n\nAt one point, when Mac was coming up to take a turn, they spotted something by their feet:\n\n\"Good Lord, look at that! Bloody spider is the size of a small dog!\"\n\nIndy shook his head. Maybe not quite that big, but he'd seen smaller rats. \"Brown tarantula,\" he said. \"Got to be almost a foot across. I've seen bigger ones, in the Amazon. The Goliaths there eat birds, when they can catch them, and they are bigger than these.\"\n\nMac shuddered.\n\n\"Not dangerous to us,\" Indy said. \"Bite's no worse than a couple of wasp stings. And if you pick one up and drop it? It will splash like an egg. Fragile things, which is why they don't climb much.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, but a spider that can span a serving platter is more than I want sharing my tent, thank you.\"\n\n\"Wimp,\" Indy said.\n\n\"Oh, look\u2014a snake\u2014\"\n\nIndy jumped. \"Where!?\"\n\nMac laughed. \"Now who's the wimp, eh?\"\n\n\"Not funny, Mac.\"\n\n\"Oh, but it is!\"\n\nIndy dropped back from his stint of chopping and slashing, letting Mac take his place. Snake jokes were definitely not funny. He looked at the nice new red blisters on his hand, despite the leather work gloves. One of Batiste's men appeared from behind them and came forward to hold a hurried conversation with their guide.\n\nBatiste waved the others to stillness while he listened.\n\nMarie drifted back to where Indy stood. \"Hebert has seen men in the forest trailing us.\"\n\n\"Zombis?\"\n\n\"No. From his description, they are Asians. And they move like soldiers.\"\n\nIndy frowned. \"Asian soldiers? Here? Why would they\u2014ah . . .\"\n\nMarie nodded. \"Oui. It would be a coincidence of great magnitude that they just happened to be in this jungle for any reason not connected to us. Especially since they are following us.\"\n\nMac walked over, raised an eyebrow in question.\n\nIndy told him what Marie had said.\n\n\"They are after the pearl,\" Mac said.\n\n\"Maybe. Maybe they don't know about the pearl and are tracking us to see what we are after,\" Indy said.\n\n\"Doesn't make sense, following us,\" Mac said. \"They would have had to trail us from the main island\u2014no way they could hang about here for long without the locals spotting them. My sources for information about the Heart of Darkness were not particularly secret. Anybody with an archaeologist's nose and a little money to grease the wheels might have sniffed it out.\"\n\n\"Unless they've been watching us since Port-au-Prince,\" Indy said. \"Remember what Marie told us about spies on Haiti?\"\n\nMarie said, \"Yes. There are representatives of both the Allies and the Axis in the capital. Germans pretending to be Dutch, Japanese disguised as Chinese.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Mac said. \"I could see Germans passing for Dutch, but I would have thought the differences between Chinese and Japanese would be all too obvious.\"\n\n\"To a man as well traveled as yourself, perhaps. Here? Not too many opportunities to compare and contrast.\"\n\n\"Point taken,\" Mac allowed.\n\nBatiste came to join them. \"You heard?\"\n\nMarie nodded.\n\n\"Hebert saw only one man, but heard others moving in the bush. He also heard them speak at a far remove, and he did not know the language, but he said the voices had harsh, singsong tones.\"\n\nIndy and Mac glanced at each other.\n\n\"Japs,\" they said together.\n\n\"What would they want with such an antiquity?\" Marie asked.\n\n\"War has been running against them,\" Mac said. \"Might buy a few new tanks with what the pearl would bring. And some of the high mucky-mucks in the Gestapo and SS are art collectors, too. They've looted scores of museums and private collections. Maybe the Japanese are taking lessons from the Krauts.\"\n\nIndy shook his head. \"That's a reach, Mac. Japanese hunters halfway around the world because maybe there's a big black pearl out in the jungle? Not the same as looting the Nanking museum.\"\n\nBatiste looked puzzled.\n\n\"The Nazis want to show they are cultured,\" Mac said. \"Demonstrate that the Third Reich has taste. As a result, they have stolen a raft of Western art. And caused many of Europe's most famous paintings and sculptures to be hidden away in barns and basements all over the Continent. The Japanese aren't averse to swiping artwork themselves, though I'm not sure they have quite the same motives as Jerry.\"\n\nIndy wasn't buying this line. \"Still doesn't scan. Assuming they got the same information you did, why follow us? Why not just go and collect it themselves?\"\n\n\"Maybe they got to Haiti after we did? Maybe they just wanted somebody to blaze a trail for them. Or maybe they heard about the zombis. Could be they didn't get the same information. Who knows?\"\n\n\"I don't like it,\" Indy said. \"Something's not right about this. Maybe we should go and collect ourselves one of these Japanese and discuss it with him.\"\n\nBatiste said, \"Perhaps not the wisest action. The jungle is full of dangers, and that includes the undead. Does it really matter why they are here?\"\n\n\"It matters,\" Indy said. \"But maybe not so much yet. Can your man find out more about them without being spotted?\"\n\n\"Oui. This is our forest, we know its ways better than anybody from outside.\"\n\n\"Good idea, mate,\" Mac said. \"If it turns out they are Japs out to collect the pearl, we can't allow them to do so. If we know how many of them there are and where they are, it would be to our benefit. Perhaps we might trap them somehow, or at least sneak past them.\"\n\n\"Or shoot them all down like diseased pigs,\" Marie said.\n\nIndy looked at her.\n\n\"A Japanese navy submarine sank a transport carrying five hundred of my countrymen to West Africa earlier this year,\" she said. \"Two of them were my cousins. We have little love for the Axis here.\"\n\nIndy wanted to grin but kept it in check. Smart. Beautiful. A voodoo priestess. And potentially lethal. What was not to like about her?\n\nBatiste spoke to Hebert, a rapid, liquid, sibilant-filled speech, and the man nodded and moved back along their trail. Indy was looking at him when he stepped into the trees and vanished.\n\nSo. Awful terrain\u2014woods, rivers, cliffs\u2014a local ju-ju man who controlled a couple of varieties of zombi, who were either outright dead or close to it, and now Japanese soldiers skulking around the forest after them. Yeah. That seemed about par for the course.\n\nWhat next?\n\nA couple of hours later, he found out. Hebert returned, had another quick session with Batiste, then vanished into the jungle again.\n\nBatiste collected Indy and Mac and Marie.\n\n\"There are more men in the forest. Tracking the Asians is a similar group, Europeans. Hebert heard them speak, and this language he has heard before. They are Germans.\"\n\nIndy just shook his head. Germans. Couldn't seem to get away from those guys.\n\n\"What do we do?\" Marie asked.\n\n\"Mac said it\u2014they must think we know where the pearl is,\" Indy replied. \"And they don't\u2014otherwise, they wouldn't be following us. Like you said about Boukman, we're probably okay until we collect it. As soon as we do, it would be a good idea for us to leave them wandering around in the jungle and go back to the big island.\"\n\nThe rest of the day was largely a repeat of the first part\u2014rivers, hills, ravines, nothing they hadn't really seen before.\n\nAnother river had a rope they had to hand-overhand to cross.\n\nMore brush had to be cut, more blisters raised.\n\nHebert returned and reported that the Japanese were still trailing them.\n\n\"Maybe we should cut down the bridges and such,\" Mac offered.\n\n\"We would just have to rebuild them,\" Batiste said, \"if we want to get home.\"\n\nWell, yes, there was that.\n\nBut the Japanese\u2014if that's who they truly were\u2014stayed back, and through the heat of the long afternoon Indy and his party slashed and picked and climbed their way through the jungle.\n\nAs dusk approached, Batiste stopped the group. \"Almost there,\" he said. \"Half an hour more, according to my man.\"\n\n\"Thank goodness,\" Mac said. \"I confess I was beginning to get a bit winded.\"\n\n\"I don't believe that 'goodness' has much to do with it, monsieur,\" Batiste said. \"Not much at all.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Boukman flew, high above the earth. There, a few kilometers away, a thunderstorm flashed and grumbled, the light blinking on and off in the dark clouds. Below him, half a kilometer or more, the dark carpet of the jungle lay over the island, and the breakers lapped at the shore where the land ended and the sea began.\n\nIn the Other Realm, things had forms much like those they possessed in the everyday life\u2014only the same rules did not always apply.\n\nBoukman reached down with his feeling, sought, and found Marie, his great-grandniece. She had raised wards to protect herself against him. He could break them easily enough, but there was no need. He knew where she was, he knew that his slaves were in the woods, watching and waiting, it was all as it needed to be.\n\nThere was still a puzzle to it, though. He felt that there was something of great importance here, most great, and yet\u2014he had not detected the kind of energy such a thing would ordinarily emit. People, animals, objects of power, they all produced signs revealing themselves. Even a modestly strong bokor would shine like a bonfire visible day and night. Little Marie glowed less so, more like a lamp in a dim room, the tendril of her connection to Heaven a thin, glimmering white ribbon. Over many years, Boukman had seen many such lights, from the sizzling electric primary colors of loa, to the softer, purer lights of holy men and women, to the malignant purple fires of truly wicked people and wicked places. And yet, upon this corner of this small island, there was nothing to be seen. Either that meant there was nothing here, which was a possibility he had to allow, or that some power greater than his own had shielded it from view.\n\nNow, that would be something. There had been no power here greater than his for a long time. Once, long ago, on a ship far out to sea, he had beheld a spiritual fire passing, a pillar of roiling blue and orange flame that shot up into the heavens with an intensity he had never observed, not before, nor since. He had been afraid to approach that beacon. Whoever or whatever it had been, it had frightened him. He had known, on a deep and certain level, that had he made to touch that roiling column, he would have been sucked into it and blasted into the cosmos, torn loose from himself and this world to wander for eternity.\n\nThese days, maybe he would feel strong enough to peer more closely at such a vile and wondrous thing, but even as a young man he had not been completely stupid. Knowing when to stand or when to leave was how a man survived. The jungle's law was eat or be eaten, and he would have choked on that kind of power.\n\nAnd yet, he somehow felt that whatever his niece was on to down on the island, whatever the two blan had come here to find, was as powerful as what had passed by on the sea more than a hundred years ago. Somehow, they would obtain it. And then, he would obtain them . . .\n\nSpiritual travel had dangers; creatures that lived in the Other Realm, even a man of power had to avoid. Sometimes you had to risk these, for it was necessary. Sometimes, you should not.\n\nThere were other, safer ways to have a look at things without being there in person . . .\n\nAs he served the loa as a horse, so did his zombis serve Boukman. His \u00e2me could travel the Other Realm and imbue one of the True Risen with his own essence.\n\nThere was little risk involved in taking such a mount\u2014zombis were durable. But there was no joy in riding a zombi. The senses were dulled\u2014the sight dim, the hearing lessened, the feelings coarse. Food held no pleasure\u2014roast pork and raw feces would smell and taste the same. There was no sex, no effects from liquor or drugs, no delights in the warmth of the sun on dead skin. When Boukman rode a zombi, however, the zombi was still a part of this world, at least on a gross physical level. Sometimes, that was necessary.\n\nSo it was that Boukman found and rode a woman six weeks dead, crouching in the forest and watching as little Marie and her imen blan arrived at their intended destination: an impossible clearing in the forest, kept that way by something not the least bit natural.\n\nEven with the greatly reduced senses available to him, Boukman could feel the thrum of hidden power from inside his zombi's form. Like a low fog, that energy did not extend much above the ground\u2014he would never have felt it in either realm were it not close enough to touch. This was something of a surprise, even though he had known it must be so. A bokor of power beyond any he had ever known, far past his own considerable strength, had been here. That powerful mage had hidden something, and warded it with such a spell that even the ward itself was all but invisible\u2014even to one such as Boukman.\n\nAmazing. He would not have believed it were he not now feeling it.\n\nThis was like a bonfire to a lamp, the sun to the moon, and that the gods and loa had allowed him to come to it was a gift beyond any he could imagine.\n\nThey had sent the imen blan and his great-grandniece to collect it for him\u2014they must have their reasons for doing it thus, and Boukman would respect those. Once it was collected\u2014whatever it was\u2014then he would harvest it. And that harvest would ripen soon, he felt.\n\nHe had a small army of his potioned ones and True Risen in the woods. They would stand ready, and wait.\n\nBut not, he felt, much longer . . .\n\nBatiste and the bearers and Marie had all crossed themselves before they first stepped into the clearing, and Indy understood why. It wasn't lost on him that this place ought not to be here. That the jungle just stopped, as if cut off by a knife, and the ground was flat and lacking any plants, save for what looked and felt like thick gray-green moss underfoot. That seemed more than a little odd.\n\nOne more odd thing to join the party . . .\n\nMac said, \"Could just be salted earth or somesuch. Some acid or alkaline substance in the dirt. Anybody happening upon the place might consider it a sign from the gods or the like, but I'm sure there's a perfectly natural explanation.\"\n\n\"You think?\"\n\n\"Well, it would seem a reasonable thesis.\"\n\n\"Reasonable. Like, say... dead men walking?\"\n\nMac wouldn't admit it, but Indy could see it felt creepy to him, too. \"With any luck, we'll be gone soon enough,\" Mac said.\n\n\"I hope. I still plan to sleep with my revolver under my pillow.\" Pillow. Right. Should have had Mac's imaginary concierge fetch him one of those. A pillow. A hot bath. A nice snifter of Napoleon brandy . . .\n\nMac went along with the lame joke: \"Careful you don't thrash around in a nightmare and blow your head off.\"\n\nThere was a certain whistling-past-the-graveyard feel to the banter, and Indy was too tired to pick it up again. He just nodded at Mac.\n\nIt was late dusk, near enough to dark so that any kind of search would be likely a waste of time, especially since there wasn't anything to see\u2014just the clearing, no buildings, no burial mounds, no stacked-up stones for altars. No flashing neon arrows pointing to a spot, saying Here it is! In the fast-fading daylight, the ground could have passed for a carpeted floor, flat, maybe half an acre. Nothing to see.\n\nThey were all exhausted anyhow, and fresh eyes in the morning made more sense. They lit lamps, started a fire, and broke out food. This was a big part of their goal, to arrive here, and they had managed that much. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Now all they had to do was find an artifact hidden for a century and a half, get past a bunch of Nips, Nazis, and walking dead, catch a boat to Haiti, and then a plane for home. That was all. No problem, hey...?\n\nAs he had the night before, Indy set up his own sleep shelter. There were some larger tarps, to protect the supplies, but the sleeping tents were small, three-sided and floored sheets of stitched-together green canvas, barely tall enough to sit up in. There were two sets of door flaps, mesh and canvas, each of which could be zippered shut. If it was cold or raining, you could batten things down; if it was hot, you could leave the door flaps open and use the screen to keep the bugs out. The floor was a necessity, in Indy's view. In the jungle, anything that could crawl under a gap would, and the idea of sharing your bed with a scorpion, a hand-sized spider, or\u2014he repressed a shudder\u2014a snake? No sir, no thank you, no way. Zipped up fully, the shelters were bug-and snake-proof.\n\nPup tents, they'd called them when Indy had been in the Boy Scouts, and big enough for two, if you didn't mind lying shoulder-to-shoulder. Plenty of room for one adult.\n\nThe tents were held up with poles inside at each end, anchored with wooden pegs driven into the dirt through loops along the edges, and with a couple of guy lines attached to the support poles, front and back. Once set up properly, this kind of tent was very sturdy, and would keep the weather off and the small critters out.\n\nIf there was a chance of rain\u2014something more common than not in the tropics during the season\u2014then it was a good idea to trench the perimeter of one's tent. Using a small folding shovel, Indy did this, digging a six-inch-deep ditch around the edges of the tent, as well as a short trench that led slightly downhill from this potential moat. The theory was, if it rained, the trench would keep the water from pooling under the tent's floor and cause it to stream away. It was a lot of work but, like digging a latrine downwind, worth the effort. You didn't want to wake up in the middle of a rainstorm bobbing in a pool of water on the inside of your tent . . .\n\nAfter he had his tent pitched and trenched, and his bedroll laid out, it was fully dark, only the dim light from the fire's coals and a small kerosene lamp illuminating the area. It had been a long day, and he was ready to sleep. He lost no time in crawling in and stretching out. He always slept head toward the door, an old habit. He pulled the steel zipper down to seal the tent against mosquitoes and drifted off . . .\n\nHe awoke suddenly, unaware of how much time had passed. He looked at his watch, the glow-in-the-dark hands dim and barely visible. One fifteen A.M. What had\u2014?\n\nHe sensed movement to his left. He rolled slowly and carefully onto his belly, to see better, and reached out to move his revolver to his other side, near to hand.\n\nThe night lay heavy on the clearing; the partly cloudy sky admitted little moonlight or stars' gleam. The lamps had been extinguished, and the fire's embers burned low, so what he thought he saw was hard to identify visually. All was gray, most of that deeply so, and it was more an impression than anything he could truly see:\n\nSomebody dancing in the dark.\n\nNot a zombi, he didn't think.\n\nHis eyes adjusted as much as they were going to, and the form seemed human, and small, and once, when a coal caught a moth or other insect and caused it to flare in the campfire for a second, casting a tiny bit of brighter glow, he realized that the dancer was likely a woman. He couldn't be sure, it was just a blink of what seemed like a bare hip rolling in a quick step, and then the night covered it again.\n\nA woman pretty much narrowed it down.\n\nHis mouth felt suddenly dry. Marie. Dancing naked in the dark?\n\nHe was dreaming, must be . . .\n\nWhen he awoke, Indy's back hurt from sleeping on his belly. Resting on the hard ground, something that hadn't bothered him when he'd been young, was a lot less comfortable these days. Might have to start carrying a pad or something . . .\n\nHe remembered a dig, years ago, when he had been doing some work for the Smith. It had been in North Africa, Arabia, maybe. He recalled the archaeologist in charge, a professor from one of the Ivy League schools\u2014Harvard? Yale? He'd been an old fossil, as Indy remembered him, but he realized that the man he'd thought ancient had probably been no older than he was now.\n\nNormally, on an excavation that would be worked for months, the tents were high-walled, and people slept on canvas cots, which were considerably more comfortable than the ground. But because this site had been halfway up a rocky hill with almost no flat spots on it to set up camp, smaller tents had been the main shelters. Not much room for a cot, which would have had to be packed in, so Indy, like most of the students and other workers, had slept on the ground. But the professor... what had his name been? Dr. Lucas? Something like that. Twenty-five years, he could be forgiven for not remembering the man's name. Anyway, he'd had the damnedest thing with him. The ground cloth normally used under a bedroll or sleeping bag had in his case been some kind of rubberized pad with what looked like fat tubes or hoses in it. There was a tire valve on one end, and the professor had one of the laborers hook up a tire pump to it. After fifteen minutes or so, there was a enough air in the thing that it looked like a small raft.\n\nIndy and the other students had laughed at the old man for that. An... air mattress? Whoever heard of such a thing? How sissified was that?\n\nDidn't sound so bad now . . .\n\nWhen he crawled out of his tent, dawn had just arrived. Others in the camp were already up, including Marie. She saw Indy and nodded at the small campfire. \"Hot coffee this morning,\" she said.\n\nHe nodded. He thought about saying something. Say, was that you I thought I saw dancing naked out here in the wee hours of the morning?\n\nNo, he decided.\n\nBut for the coffee, small favors were gratefully appreciated. Indy fetched a cup and poured himself some of the brew. It smelled better than it tasted, but it was hot and strong and he wasn't complaining. It wasn't that bad, and even bad coffee was better than no coffee . . .\n\nAs he sipped, Mac crawled out of his tent, stood, shook himself like a wet dog trying to get rid of water in his coat. \"I thought I smelled coffee. Any plain hot water, by chance?\"\n\nMarie smiled. \"As it happens, the blue kettle.\"\n\nMac grinned. After he had doused the tea leaves he produced from somewhere with hot water, he said, \"I don't suppose we have cream and sugar?\"\n\nIndy shook his head. \"Still no kippers, either. Might be able to find a rat to roast if you look hard enough.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, next to fresh eggs and sausage, stale tea and roast rat is my favorite breakfast.\"\n\n\"No rats,\" Marie said. \"This ground is warded. No animals from the forest will come here.\"\n\nMac sipped at his tea. \"And you know this how?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"I can feel it the same way you can feel the sun on your face. This clearing is aswirl with power. It is old, but still potent. It lies over the ground like a shroud\u2014it hides that which we seek, and it repels at the same time. It must be why Boukman has not found it before.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I wondered about that,\" Indy said. \"If he's been around for so long, surely he must have heard the stories. Wouldn't he have been curious before now?\"\n\nMarie shrugged again. \"I cannot say what moves Boukman. He might have discounted the tales because his magic did not reveal anything\u2014he would trust that more than tall stories told around the cooking fires. It might be that the gods or the loa were not ready for him to find it. I cannot say.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Mac said, \"we're here and he doesn't seem to be at the moment. Best we get searching for our little item. I don't suppose your\u2014ah\u2014magic can help us?\"\n\n\"I think not. Whoever laid this spell upon the land was skilled far beyond anything I can do. I can sense it, but I cannot break it.\"\n\n\"So, we do it the old-fashioned way,\" Indy said. \"We look for clues, we set a zero point, we lay out a grid.\"\n\n\"That might take some time,\" Marie said. \"It's a pretty large area.\"\n\nIndy grinned. \"Maybe not. This is what I do. I have a few tricks.\"\n\n\"I am sure that you have,\" she said, matching his smile.\n\nOf a moment, Indy knew there was no need for him to speak about what he had thought he'd dreamed in the night. It had been real. It had been her.\n\nAnd she had known he was watching . . ."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "\"SCHNAPPS?\" GRUBER OFFERED.\n\n\"A bit early, but\u2014I wouldn't say no,\" Sch\u00e4efer said.\n\nIt was half past six in the morning. The two men sat in the doctor's tent, a walled and floored affair tall enough to stand upright without hitting your head on the roof, if you did so in the middle. It had canvas walls that could be rolled down to reveal mosquito nets that would allow a breeze to flow through, but not insects. Inevitably, some bugs did manage to slip inside, and there hadn't been any breeze to speak of, save that accompanied by heavy rain. Here, it remained damp, hot, and uncomfortable for any except some native born to it, Gruber reckoned. The chairs were simple folding things, of wood and cotton, and the table of like construction. Serviceable gear, under the circumstances.\n\nIn the distance, thunder rumbled softly. Some other part of this miserable and hellish island was being drenched by a storm grown angry in the unabated heat of the night, and now spewing its fury in the morning's humid light.\n\nGruber produced a pair of silver cups from his kit and into these poured some of the schnapps. He had brought three bottles, carefully packed to avoid breakage. The locals in Port-au-Prince had assured him it was the best available, but that meant little in this part of the world. This liquor was cheap, likely made from apples or pears, possibly even plums, but certainly not cherries. The best of those brews, sometimes called Kirschwasser, had a refined, complex, delicious taste, and were quite expensive.\n\nSomeday, he would drink from such bottles. After the war.\n\nIn the New World, they drank peppermint schnapps, a thing that was so vile the very thought of it made Gruber want to shudder.\n\n\"Sieg Prachtvoller,\" Sch\u00e4efer said. He raised his cup in salute.\n\n\"Yes, glorious victory,\" Gruber echoed, lifting his own cup.\n\nBoth men downed the liquor in one long swallow. Not great, but at least it wasn't rum.\n\nGruber poured two more.\n\n\"So, do you think it was the Japanese who collected our man?\"\n\n\"No, sir. Perhaps they killed him and hid the body, but there is no sign of him with their party, and where else would they keep him? Our scouts say that the Japanese party seems to be short a soldier\u2014they are not sure, the Nipponese could be out in the jungle following the Engl\u00e4nder and Amerikanisch.\"\n\n\"Perhaps he and our man met and and ran off hand in hand to live in the forest together.\"\n\nSch\u00e4efer laughed, a full-throated bray. The idea was beyond silly.\n\nThe loss of a man meant nothing against their mission. Nor would the loss of them all.\n\n\"And you believe that our quarry has reached their destination?\"\n\n\"Jawohl. Half a kilometer past where they are camped is the sea, according to our outwalkers. It is possible they could turn west and continue that way, but that would make little sense, given the route so far. They have made no moves to pack up their camp this morning.\"\n\n\"And have our watchers seen anything else useful?\"\n\n\"Nein.\" He sipped at his schnapps. \"No ruined temples or anything like that. Of course, it was growing dark when they arrived, and the conditions were not the best for spying. We'll learn more today.\"\n\nGruber nodded. \"Yes. We shall see what is what soon enough. To victory.\" He raised his cup.\n\n\"To victory!\"\n\nBoth men upended their cups again.\n\nYamada, practicing with his wooden sword, saw the scout return to camp. He turned his attention back to his form. One could not allow distractions in one's practice.\n\nA few moments later, Suzuki approached.\n\nSuzuki stood quietly until Yamada had finished his martial dance. Greetings were offered and returned. Suzuki commented on the excellence of Yamada's sword work.\n\nFinally, he got to the main business at hand. \"Our quarry has arrived at its destination, Yamada-san.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\n\"Our men will watch them and see what transpires.\"\n\n\"Also good.\"\n\nSuzuki paused, seeming to reflect. \"We should perhaps consider what we need to do about... the Germans.\"\n\n\"Our stalwart, round-eyed, pale-skinned, bosom friends?\"\n\nBoth men grinned at that.\n\nSuzuki said, \"Either the Englishman and American will find that which we seek or they won't. If they do, we will relieve them of it. I believe that the Germans might not be content to allow us to retain possession of the item.\"\n\nYamada nodded. The enemy in your camp, if you had marked him, could be much less of a threat than one outside. At his first wrong move, you could lop off the head of a man in reach.\n\nThe Germans were nominally on the same side as the empire, but Yamada trusted them less than the distance he could walk on water. It was not just that they were treacherous, it was that the treaties that kept them joined in this war were worthless. Everybody on both sides knew this. As soon as the Allies were defeated, the Germans would turn on the empire. There was no room in their hearts for little yellow men; their entire philosophy was racist.\n\nNot that Yamada believed for an instant that his own people were kinder to the notion of foreigners. Gaijin\u2014outlanders\u2014were tolerated for many reasons, but no Japanese worth his own sweat believed that any of them were equals. The notion was absurd. Japan's living god resided in a palace, here on earth\u2014Yamada had seen him more than once. Germany's god lived in the sky, invisible, and not all of the Deutsch even believed there was a god. They were savages, the Germans. When the Japanese had been creating bonsai and the art of arranging flowers, the Germans had still been painting themselves green and running naked through the countryside like animals.\n\nIf a man was your enemy, it was not wrong to stab him in the back if you could\u2014a samurai expected such things. Once it was known where you stood, not only were surprise attacks acceptable, they were smart. A man slain in his bed was less dangerous than one awake with his sword in hand. Honor was sometimes complex, but if a man who knew you were his enemy was not prepared to deal with you, day or night, front or back? That was his failure.\n\nSooner or later, the empire and the Reich would find themselves at odds. There could be only one world power, and the empire had no intention of ceding the title to pale-skinned barbarians whose culture, such as it was, was crude and wrongheaded. It was not Yamada's decision to make as to when and where that eventual split would take place, but he knew it would happen, as certain as the sun rose each day.\n\nHere and now, however, he did have a choice. His mission was of the utmost importance. His honor lay in fulfilling his task. Nothing less would do. And nothing and no one could be permitted to stand in the way of his task.\n\n\"Once the archaeologists find what we came for, we will take care of the Germans before they can become a problem,\" Yamada said.\n\nSuzuki gave him a slow military bow, and a slight smile to go with it. They were of like mind on the subject. The Germans would have to be neutralized in such a way that they could offer no threat to his mission. Killed to a man would do the trick nicely.\n\nSuzuki bowed and left, and Yamada went into his tent. He had a duty to which he needed to attend.\n\nAs was his custom when traveling, Yamada now and then took time to write a letter to his wife and children. Often there was no way to send such missives, as was the case now, but eventually, he would find a way to post them, and eventually, such mail would wend its way home. It might take weeks or months, and more than once he had actually arrived home before a letter he had written and sent weeks earlier did, which was amusing, but the nature of the mail during war.\n\nHis calligraphy in this case was much less formal, though he did strive to keep his pen's strokes clean and sharp.\n\nThere were constraints\u2014he could not offer any information that if the letter was somehow intercepted by enemies, would give them aid. Thus there were few specifics, save those that would mean nothing to a nonfamily reader, and many generalities that could be taken to mean a hundred things, none of them militarily useful:\n\nMy Dear Fujiko\u2014\n\nAs I write this, I am in a forest so thick that the sun's light has difficulty finding me even at noon. The climate here is unlike that of home, and I miss the breezy summer evenings we would be enjoying were I there.\n\nI am fine, in good health, and I hope that you, our daughter Isoko, and our son Jiro are well and happy.\n\nNone of the names he used in his letters were the actual names of his family, nor would he use his own for the signature. His wife's real name was Fukiyo, not Fujiko, and they had played this game for so long that it had become a family joke. Sometimes after dinner, when the sake was warm and flowing and the children abed, she would tease him: \"Ah, Hajime, and how is your mistress Fujiko these days...?\"\n\nThey would laugh at that together.\n\nEventually, this war would be over, and it was Yamada's intention to return to his family and cease roaming the world. The constant sound of hammering from the shipyards, dawn to dusk and back again, from all the vessels being frantically built there, that would ease somewhat. Perhaps even be limited to the daytime, so the nights would once again be peaceful. Their house was half an hour's winding walk from the main construction, but the sound did carry after the sun went down.\n\nThe war would end and there would be no more worries about the possibility of Allied planes dropping bombs on the city. They had been lucky in that respect. Even though his home was in a major seaport, and the industrial sites there produced much ordnance and many ships, thus far such attacks had been few. That far south on the China Sea in Kyushu, far from Tokyo, had largely been spared. With luck, it would continue to be safe.\n\nI cannot say for certain when I shall return, but I hope it is in time to see the flowers in our garden still in bloom.\n\nThose would be the hydrangeas, which ran to pinks and whites in their garden. The Chinese tallow trees would have already lost their flowers, and the acrid, waxy seeds would be turning dark and almost ready to be made into oil, which was great for cooking fish and tempura. Perhaps the cherry trees would bear more fruit this year, as well. If he were home by fall, he would know.\n\nOur mission is proceeding well, and I anticipate success. I hope that this letter finds you and our children and your parents well. I look forward to our meeting with much pleasure. Your loving husband . . .\n\nYamada signed the letter \"Hanshiro,\" the false name he had selected for himself. Another source of humor\u2014when his wife would tease him about his \"mistress,\" he would draw himself up to an indignant pose and say, \"Oh, my mistress? What of your lover, Hanshiro, eh? A young and strong man, is he?\"\n\nHe set the letter aside for the ink to dry. When that was done, he would fold it carefully and address it\u2014no specifics connected to him there, either, of course. There was a military address in Tokyo to which all such letters went, and a record there showing where they were to be forwarded. Eventually, his posts would make their way south, away from the clutter of Tokyo to his more peaceful and beautiful city made from wood and silk at the southern end of the beautiful land of Japan.\n\nTo his wonderful home in Nagasaki . . ."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "When the angle of the morning light was as good as it was apt to get, Indy stretched out on the mossy ground, his left cheek touching it. He closed his right eye and scanned the ground using his left eye, looking . . .\n\n\"What is he doing?\" Batiste asked.\n\nMac said, \"Searching for innies or outies\u2014dips or bumps. At ground level, with the light at an angle, the smallest distortion in the surface will be visible. Something buried for a century might have caused the dirt to settle. Or perhaps a hundred years might not be enough for a slight mound to flatten out. People always leave traces unless they are trying very hard to avoid it.\"\n\nIndy got up, moved a few feet to the north, and lay back down again. With his eye only an inch or so above the moss carpet, he shifted his gaze slowly back and forth as if reaching out and sweeping crumbs from a tabletop.\n\nHe moved for a third observation. Nothing... nothing\u2014wait, there\u2014\n\n\"Mac, move west, twenty paces, then north about three.\"\n\nMac stepped off the distance.\n\n\"A little more... right there, mark it.\"\n\nMac pulled out a small pocketknife, opened it, and bent to stick it into the soft ground. He was perhaps ten yards away from the northern edge of the clearing.\n\nIndy stood, brushed himself off. He looked at Marie.\n\n\"A slight declivity,\" he said. \"Now we dig.\"\n\nBatiste nodded at a couple of his men.\n\n\"No,\" Indy said, \"Mac and I will have to do it.\"\n\nBatiste looked at him.\n\nIndy said, \"Tell them, Mac.\"\n\nMac explained. \"There is a certain amount of... finesse required. One cannot simply thrust a shovel into the ground and risk damaging a priceless artifact. It's more like... peeling an onion than digging a latrine.\"\n\nBatiste shrugged. No skin off his nose.\n\nUsing the folding shovels, Indy and Mac outlined a square patch about five feet on a side. Carefully, they scraped the moss from the area, revealing the bare and damp ground beneath it. Both of them stood back and observed the result carefully.\n\n\"Now what?\" Marie asked.\n\n\"We are looking for differences in color, texture, any bits that seem as if they don't belong.\"\n\n\"And what do you see?\"\n\nIndy shrugged. \"Plain old jungle dirt. Humus. All the same.\"\n\nIndy and Mac bent to their task again, using the shovels as scrapers rather than diggers. After half an hour, they had another layer of soil exposed, a couple of inches deeper.\n\nThe color was somewhat lighter. Indy, in professorial mode, didn't wait for the question, but delivered the lecture:\n\n\"Soil is formed by many things,\" he said. \"It's a combination of climate, whatever animals or plants or bacteria are around, the slope of the land, what the underlying parent material might be\u2014clay, rock, sand, and so forth. And time, of course. It can take a few thousand years to build up. The Russians have done a lot of work on the subject\u2014Dokuchaev's text is the old standard. Jenny's most recent book, Factors of Soil Formation, takes it to another level. Milne uses the term topo-sequence.\"\n\nMarie nodded.\n\nBatiste looked at him as if he were speaking gibberish.\n\nMac said, \"Dirt is made from the rock or clay and whatever lands on it and rots.\"\n\nBatiste laughed. \"Lot of big words to say what everybody knows.\"\n\nIndy grinned. \"That, my friend, is science in a nutshell.\"\n\nMac said, \"We've removed about a hundred years' of topsoil, give or take. We will keep doing it this way until we find something or become convinced there is nothing there to find.\"\n\n\"That could take a while,\" Batiste allowed.\n\n\"Yeah. But that's how it's done.\"\n\nThe man shrugged.\n\nAfter two hours of patient scraping, they were down a foot and a half.\n\n\"I think we've come a cropper,\" Mac said.\n\nIndy nodded.\n\nMarie didn't understand. \"But surely they would have buried it deeper,\" she said.\n\n\"Yeah, but when you dig a hole and then fill it back up with the same dirt, there are usually signs of mixing in the earth. It's hard to put it back exactly the same way\u2014some of the newer material gets put lower, some of the older winds up closer to the surface. If there were layers of dirt that were completely different colors\u2014red, blue, green\u2014and you dug, piled up the loose soil, and then tried to shovel it back into a hole, it would be almost impossible to do it so that somebody who knew how to look couldn't tell.\"\n\n\"Ah.\"\n\n\"If we don't spot any signs, chances are nobody has dug here,\" Mac said. \"And we haven't seen any indications that they have.\"\n\n\"So now what?\"\n\n\"We look for another likely spot and try again.\"\n\nIt was well past noon when Mac and Indy gave up on the second dig, having excavated another five-foot square to a depth of almost two feet.\n\nBoth men were sweating, and certainly Indy was tired.\n\n\"Perhaps some of Batiste's men could dig,\" Marie said. \"Now that they have seen how you do it. You could oversee their efforts.\"\n\nNormally, Indy would be less than enthusiastic about such an offer of untrained diggers, but at the moment it sounded like a pretty good idea.\n\nBatiste snorted.\n\nIndy looked at him. \"What?\"\n\n\"It would still take forever that way,\" he said. \"We could be digging here for months.\"\n\n\"You have a better idea?\" Mac asked.\n\nBatiste gave them one of his frequent shrugs. \"Who were the people who buried this thing?\"\n\n\"I don't know their bloody names,\" Mac said. \"And it doesn't matter.\"\n\n\"Wait. Wait. He has a point,\" Indy said. He wanted to whack the heel of his hand against his forehead. How stupid was he? He should have known!\n\n\"And his point is, pray tell...?\"\n\n\"They wouldn't have just picked a spot at random and dug,\" Indy said. \"These were people being driven to hide something of great value to them. Something dangerous. They probably expected they'd return for it\u2014or that somebody else would.\"\n\n\"And...?\"\n\n\"They'd have to know exactly where to dig, or give directions to somebody who'd never been here. There'd have to be a map, or it would have to be something oral that would be easy to remember.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Mac said. \"Yes, I see. Some kind of marker.\"\n\n\"Assume that this clearing was here then,\" Indy said. \"How would you do that? Mark it?\"\n\n\"So many paces from a certain tree, in a certain direction,\" Marie offered.\n\nIndy shook his head. \"Too risky. The storms that blow through here could take down any of these trees. It would have to be a more permanent landmark.\"\n\nMac looked around. \"I don't see anything. No rocks, no rises, nothing but flat ground. Pointer shadows or beams, you'd have the same problem.\"\n\nBatiste said, \"Shadows? Beams?\"\n\nIndy said, \"Certain time of day, certain time of year, a shadow cast by a tree or rock spire, or a beam of light shining through a hole drilled in a wall, like that. It's very common in ancient religions to use such things, because the sun and moon are constants. Meatball astronomy.\"\n\nMac glanced up. \"The night sky would be visible here. A certain star, perhaps?\"\n\nIndy said, \"Maybe if they had a sextant and a compass or somesuch. But that would make the time to find the right spot critical. Maybe even a certain day\u2014solstice, perhaps.\"\n\nBatiste laughed.\n\n\"Something funny?\" Indy said.\n\n\"Oui. You make things too complicated, mon ami. The men who came here through the forest, who found this spot? They would not be scientists, to calculate such things. They would not be bearing instruments to observe the sun or moon or the stars.\"\n\nIndy considered that. Probably true. But they would have known enough about the land to know that a tropical storm could take out what landmarks were available. If the tree you used was gone, then what?\n\n\"All right,\" Indy said. \"If you had come here to bury a treasure, what would you have done to mark it? So that ten or fifty or a hundred years later, you or your grandson could come here and dig it up, without digging holes for days?\"\n\n\"Nobody would know this was the clearing where I chose to hide it,\" Batiste said, \"so there would be no reason for them to come here and know it was here.\"\n\n\"Yeah. So...?\"\n\n\"So it is simple. I would remember where it was, and if I had to tell my son or grandson, it would be easy:\n\n\"Go stand in the middle. Dig there.\"\n\nIndy and Mac looked at each other.\n\n\"Stone the bloody bleeding crows,\" Mac said. \"Of course!\"\n\nIndy nodded. Sometimes being the most educated guy in the room wasn't an advantage. You tended to overthink things . . ."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "Ensconced in the form of his zombi, Boukman watched through dim and fuzzy eyes. They dug holes in the ground. One there. A second one. Then they started a third one. Ah. They did not know exactly where it was. Interesting.\n\nGruber looked at the scout. \"You came back to report that they are digging holes?\"\n\n\"Yessir.\"\n\n\"Amazing. And have they found anything?\"\n\n\"No, mein Colonel.\"\n\n\"Then return and keep watch. I don't care how many pits they excavate, only if they come up with something from one of them.\"\n\nYamada finished another scroll, this one with the kanji for \"success\" inked upon the paper. Suzuki waited outside the tent.\n\n\"They have begun digging. They are on the third hole.\"\n\nYamada nodded. \"It might take them a while. It does not seem as if they know the location of the object.\"\n\n\"Hai.\"\n\n\"Continue our surveillance.\"\n\n\"Hai.\"\n\nTwo feet down, and when Indy and Mac stepped back to look, they could both see it.\n\n\"Different stratum, just there.\"\n\nIndy nodded. \"Yes.\"\n\nMarie, who had been talking to Batiste, walked over. \"Something?\"\n\n\"That mixing of the dirt we talked about,\" Indy said. He felt a surge of excitement.\n\nHe and Mac returned to their digging.\n\nIt was almost four thirty in the afternoon and four feet deep when Indy felt the edge of his shovel scrape something. \"Gotcha,\" he said quietly.\n\nMac, sitting on the edge of the hole, drinking from a canteen and taking a break, said, \"What?\"\n\nIndy grinned up at him.\n\nIt took another hour to reveal the outline of the crypt and to dig deep enough to see the way into it, a stone box whose top was about the size of a steamer trunk stood on end. The top had been fitted to the box and the edges sealed with some kind of resin. Indy worked the point of the small folding shovel into the sealant, which cracked and allowed him to get the blade between the top and the rest of the box. Mac put his shovel into the opposite side. The two of them worked their way around the perimeter, carefully chipping the resin away.\n\n\"I think that's got it,\" Mac said.\n\nIndy nodded. He put the shovel down, pulled his machete out, and, again moving with great care, sawed the edge of the big knife between the top and bottom all the way across, as if slicing bread.\n\n\"Here we go . . .\"\n\nHe pried the lid up a hair, enough to get his fingers under the edge, and slid the stone, about an inch thick, to the side. He and Mac grabbed the lid and lifted it clear.\n\n\"Flashlight,\" Indy said.\n\nBatiste offered him one. Indy pressed the switch forward and pointed the beam into the box.\n\n\"Looks like oilcloth,\" Indy said. He reached into the box. He was careful\u2014sometimes the people who hid their treasures left nasty surprises to protect them. Nothing should still be alive after more than a century and a half under the ground, nothing natural, but a poisoned spike or some kind of sharp-edged trap was possible.\n\nHe pulled slowly on the cloth. Came up with a wrapped bundle the size of a concrete block, a dark gray color.\n\nCarefully\u2014carefully! Indy started to unwrap it . . .\n\nThe oilcloth, in surprisingly good shape, fell away to reveal a wooden box, of a size that might contain a pair of men's shoes. The lid to this was attached by copper hinges gone green and a turn-clasp. The wood was carved with symbols all over, something that looked vaguely like runes. The carvings were not in a language that Indy recognized, but they seemed somehow familiar. Akin to Egyptian hieroglyphics, maybe?\n\nIndy turned the clasp and opened the lid, using the flashlight, leaning to one side to avoid something that might be spring-loaded and capable of stabbing his hand or spraying up into his face.\n\nNothing of that sort erupted from the box.\n\nInside, a second wooden object, this one a stubby cylinder as big around as a man's leg, a foot long, and of a darker wood than the outer box, ebony, mahogany, perhaps, and also inscribed with the unfamiliar runes.\n\nThe lid on this jar had no hardware on it but seemed snug, and it took Indy but a few seconds to realize the lid was held on with threads, like a screw.\n\nIndy unscrewed it, slowly and carefully.\n\nIt moved smoothly, as though lubricated.\n\nNo spring-loaded darts or immortal snakes jumped out, another relief . . .\n\nInside the wooden jar was a piece of black cloth\u2014silk, Indy guessed.\n\nHe looked at Mac, who nodded, eyes wide with excitement.\n\nIndy removed it, unwrapped it, and inside that . . .\n\nThere it was. A pearl the size of a man's fist.\n\nAnd what a glorious thing!\n\nIt was less round than egg-or heart-shaped, and the way it caught the light of the afternoon sun was stunning. Indy blinked at the raw beauty of it. It seemed to swirl with bright, iridescent smoke and fire, not really black, but more of a deep, dark, metallic, blue-green shade, an electric gunmetal color . . .\n\nAmazing. Looking at it resting on the black silk in his palm, it was as if he could see miles into it.\n\nHe had viewed pearls, of course, many cultures valued them, but nothing close to this gem\u2014\n\nHe looked at Marie in triumph\u2014only to see that she had collapsed next to the excavation, as if she had been knocked unconscious by a big hammer."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "The unleashed dynamism of the thing the imen blan had just dug up slammed into Boukman's zombi horse like a giant's boot. The zombi collapsed as if suddenly boneless, overwhelmed by the exposure, and Boukman knew if he didn't get out of it and back to his own body fast, he, too, would be lost. Any spirit wandering around here would be cooked by the flame of this magical fire!\n\nSuch force! It was like opening the door to a raging furnace\u2014he was blasted by the raw etheric heat of it!\n\nOld magic, this, closer to the Grand Source, and still vibrantly potent after all these years. Remarkable. Stunningly so.\n\nHe left as quickly as he could, astounded at the energies that now radiated from that clearing below and behind him. It was as if somebody had plucked the sun from the sky and put it on the ground!\n\nHe felt weak. As soon as he could get back to his body, he would do what needed to be done. He had to move with care\u2014he could not risk losing this new treasure. Oh, no. He must have this. It would transform him.\n\nIt would transform the world . . .\n\nIndy shoved the treasure at Mac and leaped to attend Marie where she had fallen. Batiste was already kneeling next to her.\n\nThe other men in their party had all moved back from the excavation, as if they had found themselves standing next to a sudden bonfire whose heat they couldn't stand.\n\nBatiste looked down at Mac. \"Put it away!\" he said. \"The pearl!\"\n\nMac frowned at him.\n\n\"Do it now!\"\n\nMac wrapped the gem in the silk and put it back into the jar.\n\nAs soon as he replaced the lid, Marie moaned, and her eyes fluttered open.\n\nIndy said, \"Marie? Are you okay?\"\n\nShe said something he didn't understand.\n\nBatiste said, \"Yes, even I felt it.\"\n\nMarie sat up. \"Mon Dieu. Magie g\u00e9ante.\"\n\nIndy knew that term. Giant magic.\n\nShe looked at him. \"Boukman will be coming for it. This artifact is more than just a pearl\u2014it is lightning in a bottle\u2014old, old magic, and anyone with any power will feel its release. It is like a volcano erupting.\"\n\nShe looked at the wooden jar. \"The container wards it, keeps its power contained. Take it out, and it will shine into the heavens like a searchlight\u2014Boukman will be able to see it half the world away. We cannot hide it from him unless it is warded.\"\n\nShe scrambled to her feet. \"We must go, now.\"\n\n\"Now? It'll be getting dark in a few hours\u2014\" Mac said.\n\n\"We cannot wait. Nor can we go home the same way we came. Boukman will know that route.\"\n\n\"Not to mention the Japs and the Krauts back there,\" Indy said.\n\nShe shook her head. \"They are not the problem. Boukman will move Heaven and Earth to collect this pearl. And more than anything, he cannot be allowed to do so. Before we let him take it, we should destroy it!\"\n\nMac and Indy both frowned at this. \"Hold on a moment,\" Mac began. \"Let us not be hasty\u2014\"\n\nShe was no longer listening. \"Batiste, pack up. Anything we can leave behind, leave it. We have to move fast, and we have to move now!\"\n\n\"Marie\u2014\" Mac began.\n\n\"Listen to me\u2014if Boukman catches us and gets this pearl, we are all dead, and we will be but the first of many to die. He will lay whole countries low. If you believe nothing else that I say, believe this!\"\n\nIndy looked at Mac. \"You heard the lady. Grab your backpack and let's get the hell out of here!\"\n\nHe had expended too much of himself, Boukman realized when he reattained his body. Travel in the Other Realm always took much energy, one had to return to the real world now and then to recover, and he had seldom been able to project his spirit more than two or three times without a long interval. Fifty years ago, he might have made another immediate leap, but the past two days had drained him. And that brush with the old magic in the clearing had not helped. It had sucked at his fleeing spirit like a vortex, drawing at his essence. He would only be able to manage one more short jaunt now, if that, and he had to make it count.\n\nIf he had his zombis attack Marie's imen blan to steal the artifact, his slaves would still be at risk from the Germans and Japanese, who also wanted the treasure, albeit for different reasons. Marie and her white men weren't going to get far in any kind of hurry, and he knew where they were going to go eventually. So... it would be best to eliminate the competition now.\n\nYes. He would find and ride one of the Sons or Daughters of the Potion, one who still had air with which to operate his or her voice, and he would use that one to task the others. He wouldn't have much time\u2014he would have to hurry before he grew any weaker.\n\nBoukman gathered what power he still had to himself, took a deep breath, and sent his weakened and unsteady \u00e2me forth. Once more, he could manage that. He had to\u2014there was no other choice.\n\nWhen their spy reported back, Gruber was most pleased. At last! \"I think it is time that we go and collect our prize, jawohl, mein Kapit\u00e4n?\"\n\n\"Ja,\" Sch\u00e4efer said. He grinned.\n\nAll going well, in a few minutes, certainly less than an hour, they would have what they had traveled to this hellhole to get and be on their way home. An unpleasant mission, but with a satisfactory conclusion, and that was the important thing\u2014\n\nSomebody screamed.\n\nNot just a scream, but a sound full of absolute terror\u2014\n\nGruber's hand had, without conscious intent, snatched his pistol from its holster, not that ugly, clunky .45 automatic, but a fine Luger Parabellum that he'd gotten from Sch\u00e4efer. He thumbed the safety off\u2014\n\n\u2014More screams followed, punctuated by rifle fire, several shots in rapid sequence, and whatever the cause, the element of surprise they might have had over the archaeologist's party was certainly gone. Gunfire was noisy\u2014\n\n\"What is this?\"\n\nHe saw one of the SS men standing ten meters away, his Mauser rifle aimed. The man fired\u2014once, twice, three times, working the bolt frantically\u2014the sound loud and bouncing back from the trees\u2014\n\nThe man's target took the impact of the bullets in the chest not five meters in front of the soldier. Gruber saw him jerk as the bullets smacked into him\u2014but watched in awe as he kept going\u2014\n\nThe soldier fired again, twice more\u2014and the attacker was on him, knocking the rifle aside, grabbing the soldier in a bear hug, and sinking his teeth into the man's throat\u2014!\n\nAround them, other attackers charged in\u2014some of them took bullets and fell, others did not\u2014\n\nWhy? How? Impossible\u2014!\n\nOne of the natives, a dark-skinned and bald fellow, came at Gruber. He was unarmed, arms spread wide to grab, and Gruber felt the panic envelop him as he pointed the Luger and squeezed the trigger\u2014one-two-three-four-five\u2014!\n\nThe bald man stumbled, fell to his knees, and collapsed\u2014\n\nNext to him, Sch\u00e4efer, his own Luger raised, fired repeatedly at a woman half his size, but\u2014\n\nGruber saw the woman take the bullets to the body, four, five, six, and the last round tore a chunk of flesh from her neck\u2014he saw the gap appear as if a child had poked his finger into a clay figure and ripped it, but there was no blood, and she kept coming\u2014\n\nSch\u00e4efer dropped his empty pistol and reached for a knife on his belt, managed to get it clear, and thrust it at the woman as she fell on him. It was a long knife\u2014Gruber saw the blade enter her torso near her left hip, saw it sink to the hilt\u2014\n\n\u2014saw the blade emerge from her back\u2014\n\nSch\u00e4efer screamed. \"Help!\"\n\nShe bore him down, teeth working, biting his face, his hands as he tried to push her off\u2014\n\nGruber stood there, frozen. God in Heaven, what kind of thing was this? That could take a magazineful of bullets, a knife stab to the body, and not be stopped? Unreal\u2014\n\n\"Gruber! Help me! Aaahh\u2014!\"\n\nGruber ran, in a full panic. It was too late for Sch\u00e4efer, and he did not wish to suffer the same fate. Behind him, gunfire continued.\n\nAs did the screams.\n\nThe bullets didn't seem to affect all of them, Yamada saw, but he had his sword, and when one of them came at him he took its head. The razor-edged steel of his katana cleaved through the rotten flesh and bone without slowing, and whatever evil thing dwelled in the creature, it was not strong enough to keep it going without a head. The severed skull rolled\u2014the monster's body collapsed.\n\n\"The head!\" Yamada yelled. \"Shoot them in the head!\"\n\nAround him, the remainder of his men\u2014some of them\u2014heard and obeyed. Half a dozen shots later, the jungle fell silent . . .\n\nNo, that wasn't true. There was more gunfire, but it was distant, not close to them.\n\nThe Germans. Or the archaeologists?\n\nHe looked around. Most of his men were down, dead or dying.\n\nThree of them still stood, two soldiers and Captain Suzuki. Suzuki had used his sword to good effect, as well.\n\n\"We will grieve for our fallen brothers later,\" Yamada said. \"For now we need to get away from here, quickly!\"\n\nThey ran. He regretted having to leave his calligraphy materials behind. If he survived, he could return for them someday. The tent might withstand the wind and rain for a season or two.\n\nIf he did not survive, it would not matter.\n\nIn the forest, Gruber took stock. He had two men left, the rest... well, they were dead, dying, or lost, and he was not going to waste any time looking for survivors. He had replaced his pistol's spent magazine but he had no faith it in, nor in the second pistol he had tucked away in his pocket, a flat, single-shot 7.65 mm, handmade by a clever Swiss jeweler, thin enough to be tucked into a wallet. Some officers carried a poison pill they could take if captured. Gruber preferred an option, to kill his captor and take his chance on escape. The Swiss pistol was a last resort, and if the Luger wouldn't stop the attackers, the tiny gun wouldn't do the job.\n\nSome of the attackers could be stopped with a gun, some not, and you would likely not know which was which until it was too late. Better to avoid them all.\n\nHe was still warring with his notion that such a thing could not possibly be.\n\nOne of the men said, \"Somebody is coming!\"\n\nThe two soldiers raised their rifles, trembling in fear, and Gruber held his pistol out, unable to keep his own arm from shaking.\n\n\"Don't shoot,\" somebody called out. The voice spoke English but the accent was heavy and Gruber immediately realized who the speaker must be\u2014\n\n\"Lower your weapons,\" Gruber ordered.\n\nThe two soldiers glanced at him in wonder, but he had already pointed his pistol at the ground. They obeyed his orders, of course.\n\n\"Come ahead,\" Gruber said, also in English.\n\nYamada, carrying an unsheathed sword, followed by three Japanese men, stepped into view.\n\n\"Dr. Gruber,\" he said. He offered a slight bow.\n\n\"Dr. Yamada,\" Gruber responded.\n\n\"Are these all your survivors of the attack?\"\n\nGruber nodded. \"As far as I know.\"\n\nYamada nodded at his own men. \"We are what remains of our group. It would seem wise for us to combine our forces against those terrible gaki of the forest.\"\n\nGruber didn't recognize the word Yamada used, but he understood the sense of it: Monsters. Demons. Not ordinary humans as he knew them. Silly, but\u2014\"Yes. We all know why we are here. We must survive, and we must obtain the secret of these creatures. Our armies would be unstoppable.\"\n\nThere was no point in speaking of their competition to this point. Done was done.\n\n\"You will agree that we share this discovery, then, once we obtain it? Equally?\" Yamada had lowered his sword so that the tip pointed at the ground.\n\n\"Yes, I agree. Once we obtain it.\" That seemed less certain than it had only an hour earlier. Most of his men were dead, and the same with the Japanese group. Only seven of them together.\n\n\"Perhaps we should find a safer place, if we can, to discuss our strategy.\"\n\n\"Good idea, Dr. Yamada.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "The gunfire seemed distant, but sound in the forest could be tricky. How far away the shots were\u2014from rifles and pistols, as best Indy could tell\u2014was impossible to determine with any kind of precision.\n\n\"Now what?\" Mac said.\n\nMarie said, \"If I had to guess, I'd say the Germans and the Japanese are dealing with Boukman's slaves.\"\n\n\"Why them and not us?\" Indy asked.\n\nShe shrugged into her backpack, adjusted it, and nodded at Batiste. They were leaving behind the tents and most of the cooking supplies, and taking only enough food and water to keep them going for a couple of days. Long and slow meals around the campfire weren't going to be part of the program. Nor campfires, either. If you were running and hiding, you didn't light beacons to draw your enemies. And if something that wanted to kill you was on your trail, you didn't stop moving until you could no longer keep going.\n\n\"Boukman knows we won't be able to get far and that he will be able to find us when he wants. I might be able to throw him off\u2014there is a spell I haven't tried, it might help\u2014but the Germans and the Japanese, they could be a danger to his plans. If he gets rid of them, he eliminates the risk that they might get the artifact and manage to fight their way past his zombis.\"\n\n\"Cutthroat the competition,\" Indy said.\n\n\"Yes. Perhaps literally. And there is something else to consider.\"\n\n\"Which is?\" Indy had his own pack loaded and shouldered, an extra canteen strapped to his belt, and extra ammunition in his pockets. His bullwhip was attached to his belt with a slipknot so he could get it into play in a hurry, if it came to that.\n\nIf it came to that, things were going to be bad . . .\n\n\"The Japanese or Germans who fall might not stay fallen. If his true zombies are destroyed, he can replace them.\"\n\nIndy shook his head. Wasn't that just great?\n\nBatiste said, \"We will head for the coast. There may be a way to skirt the edge of the forest for a bit, to get a lead on our pursuers.\"\n\n\"'May be'?\" Mac said.\n\nBatiste said, \"We have few options. We know how long it takes to cut our way through the jungle. If we can save any time by not having to do so, it is to the good.\"\n\n\"Can't argue with that,\" Indy said. In his backpack were the wooden boxes containing the Heart of Darkness. At least they had found it, and had possession of it. For now. If Marie was right\u2014and he had no reason to believe she wasn't\u2014then there were things out there in the woods who would be coming for them.\n\nThey surely didn't want to be here when that happened.\n\nBatiste frowned and looked up. He sniffed.\n\n\"Rain coming,\" he said. \"Big rain.\"\n\nIndy glanced up, too. The late-afternoon sky was clear, not a cloud in sight.\n\nBatiste said, \"Not today. Tomorrow. Might be to our advantage, might not, but hurik\u00e1n on the way, for sure.\"\n\nIndy wanted to laugh. Just when you thought things were as bad as they could be, they got worse. Never failed.\n\nOh, well. Part of the job.\n\nThey set off.\n\nBoukman nearly died.\n\nThe last trip to instruct his slaves and the return to his body was almost too much. He had taken his form for granted for so long, kept it vital with the application of his skills and magic, that the idea of it actually failing him hadn't ever really seemed possible. He had been alive longer than any man he knew of, certainly in the Caribbean region.\n\nHe had barely made it back from the Other Realm. Another two minutes? It would have been too late. He'd had to thrust hard to force his spirit back into his body, which didn't want to accept it. The struggle had exhausted him, in both realms.\n\nWhen, at last, he managed it and awoke, the heat that normally would not have been noticeable lay on him like a heavy blanket. His heart beat rapidly, his eyes fluttered, and his breathing was shallow and fast. He trembled, was too weak to even sit up at first. He had nearly spent himself during the last couple of days, and he was not going to be able to wave his hand, importune a passing loa for added energy, and shake it off like a dog does water. His vessel was tired and weakened, and importing energy not its own before repairing it might well cause it to burst.\n\nIt was ironic. Out there in the jungle was a source of power that could raise the dead by the thousands\u2014raise them and make them dance. But any hand that dared to use it thus had to be strong and steady. How much time he would need before he was recovered enough to risk it he did not know, but it wasn't going to be in the next few hours. Another attempt to fly into the Other Realm now would be the end of him. He had no doubt.\n\nPower beyond measure was out there\u2014and he could not go to it.\n\nAny enemy who saw him now could destroy him with a minimum of effort, and Boukman did not care for that thought at all.\n\nHe needed food, drink, and blood. He needed medicines, and he needed sacrifices, and even then it would not be a thing done before the sun had come and gone, maybe more than once.\n\nHe managed to sit up. He drew in a breath to call for an attendant\u2014someone would be outside, awaiting just such a command. There was no way that Marie and the imen blan could get off the island safely for at least a day or two, and even then they must return to Haiti, where Boukman's forces were also strong. They would not get that far, though. He was sure of it.\n\nAnd he had left instructions for his slaves. It would have to do for now. There was no help for it.\n\nYamada had sheathed his sword, after carefully wiping it as clean as he could of the bloodless and greasy flesh that had smeared it. The wooden sheath he had under his belt held the blade secure, edge-up, and ready for an instant draw and cut. After years of practice, Yamada could, now and again, achieve the state called zanshin\u2014a complete melding of body and spirit so that the sword could go from sleeping in its wooden bed to effortlessly appearing in his hand, ready to strike, in less time than the blink of an eyelid. The thought was the deed.\n\nHe and his men followed Gruber's lead\u2014it was not a matter of any importance who led a retreat, only who led an attack, and given their forces they were going to have to be most selective in such matters. Falling gloriously in battle was honorable; failing your mission by dying first was not.\n\nYamada had heard stories of samurai who had sustained mortal wounds but managed to stay alive long enough to take their killer with them. Spirit mattered. And that was surely somehow involved with these gaki, that they could do the same . . .\n\n\"One doctor to another,\" Gruber said, keeping to English as they walked along a narrow and winding animal trail, \"have you ever seen anything like that before?\"\n\nYamada shook his head. \"No. Some of the attackers were as you and I\u2014a bullet to the heart dropped them. Others were invulnerable to guns or knives. Removing the head of these worked, and perhaps a shot to the brain might do it, but I did not witness any such shots.\n\n\"I cannot imagine that any potion would offer such protection, no matter what it was made from. Nor why it would work on some, but not others.\"\n\n\"But what else could it be?\" Gruber said.\n\n\"Gaki,\" he said. \"Hungry ghosts. Undead wanderers.\"\n\nGruber shook his head. \"I do not believe in fairy tales. I am a man of science.\"\n\n\"As am I. But I have no science to explain these things. Have you?\"\n\nGruber shook his head. \"No. But because I haven't uncovered the reason yet does not mean that it is supernatural.\"\n\n\"Nor does it mean that it is not. There are many things under the heavens that science cannot explain.\"\n\nGruber shrugged, unconvinced, and Yamada did not choose to continue the discussion. Instead, he said, \"Regardless of that, the reason we are here is unchanged, and certainly, somebody locally has the formula or some variant of it, and there is ample evidence that it has some efficacy.\"\n\n\"Indeed, Doctor, indeed. We must obtain it. Nothing the Allies have could stand up to soldiers bolstered by this medication. Those people in the woods were not even armed\u2014they attacked men with rifles bare-handed. Imagine how effective they would have been had they been shooting or even using machetes!\"\n\n\"I suspect that had that been the case, we would not be here to speak of it,\" Yamada said.\n\n\"Precisely my point.\"\n\nThey had been walking for nearly an hour, and one of the German soldiers came back and offered a quick report to Gruber.\n\nYamada's German was excellent, and he easily understood the soldier's comments. There was a stream not far ahead, and a curved rocky outcrop near it. It would be a place that would offer some protection on three sides\u2014anybody trying to come at them by swimming the river or climbing the hill wouldn't have an easy time of it. A good spot to stop and consider future plans.\n\nYamada pretended to less understanding than he had. In English, he asked: \"What did he say?\"\n\n\"There's a place to stop up ahead that's somewhat sheltered and defendable,\" Gruber said. \"It might be a good idea to rest and plan what we need to do next.\"\n\nIn this much, the man was telling the truth. \"Good thought, Dr. Gruber. Please have your man lead us there.\"\n\nGruber had little respect for foreign tongues, believing as most in his homeland did that civilized people would all eventually come to speak German. Even so, he had good English, some French, a smattering of Italian; as soon as the war broke out, he had learned basic Japanese. They said that a man's language shaped how he thought, and Gruber considered it wise to learn as much about how his enemies\u2014and allies\u2014thought, to at least know the rudiments of their tongues. Yamada didn't know that Gruber had any Nihongo, and Gruber wasn't going to let on that he did. Never knew but that somebody who thought you couldn't understand him might allow something useful to slip. And he suspected that Yamada probably understood some German, so Gruber wouldn't make the mistake of saying something he wanted to keep secret aloud in any language in front of Yamada. Some of these little yellow men were clever; it would be folly to underestimate them with so much at risk.\n\nThey needed each other now; survival might depend on it. After they had claimed the prize, well, the idea of sharing it with the Japanese? That was but a convenient fiction. Herr Hitler would have this presented to him with clicking heels and a grand flourish. The Emperor Hirohito would never see it, of that Gruber was certain."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Indy brought up the rear as they moved along the swine trail through the forest. The smell of the sea was in the air, and they were close enough to hear waves breaking. They had the artifact, they were free and moving, things could be a lot worse, knock on wood.\n\nIt had been only forty minutes or so before they came to the cliffs, and when they arrived and he looked over the sheer drop, Indy could see they weren't likely to climb down. The dark gray rock had a spongy look to it\u2014like pumice, but with bigger holes\u2014and the distance was 180 or 200 feet, almost vertical, to a shore that was gravel and jagged rock, with breakers rolling in to spray as they hit the stone.\n\nFall, break your legs, drown when the tide came in. Not pleasant prospects.\n\nIndy was a few feet back. He moved closer to the edge. He put his right boot down on the honeycombed rock and swiveled his heel with a little force, to see how solid the\u2014\n\n\u2014a section of the cliff's face six inches thick and half a yard wide sheared off and tumbled down to the rocks. When it impacted, it broke apart as if it were made of glass.\n\nNo, they weren't going that way, no siree . . .\n\n\"This way,\" Batiste said. \"You want to stay back from the edge.\"\n\nThere was advice Indy could take.\n\nThe bad thing was that the cliff was unstable. The good thing was that the trees stopped several yards away from the precipice, and there was, at least for the next few hundred yards, an open path that skirted the edge.\n\nIt would be dark soon, though, and no way did they want to be walking, either here or in the forest, so they'd have to stop. They needed the rest, but\u2014\n\nIndy moved up to stand by Marie. \"The Germans and Japanese will have to call it quits at night, like we will,\" he said. \"But what about the zombis? Can they function in the dark?\"\n\n\"Not particularly well,\" she said. \"The True Risen can't see as clearly as even we can, but then again they cannot easily die. If one falls over this cliff and hits the rocks, it may break so many bones that it won't be able to walk.\"\n\n\"That's something.\"\n\n\"If it can climb and crawl, though, it will.\"\n\nIndy stared at her. \"Even I can outrun somebody going that slow.\"\n\n\"As can the hare outrun the tortoise,\" she said.\n\nHe blinked at her.\n\n\"A zombi dispatched on a task will continue to move using whatever is left to it, without ever having to rest,\" she said. \"While we are sleeping, it will be crawling . . .\"\n\nIndy shivered at the thought of a man with broken legs doggedly dragging himself along on his bloody elbows . . .\n\nMac edged over to where they walked. \"What?\"\n\n\"You don't want to know,\" Indy said.\n\nBoukman drank from the bowl, sipping at the blood therein. It was warm, and he needed to finish it before it cooled, for clotted blood was of no use to him; its power faded quickly once it was out of its container. He had taken a pint from one of the potion-slaves, a pint from another, and that was enough to start.\n\nHe had leaves brought in and piled into a soft pad, covered with a sheet, upon which he could lay. Two of his slaves stood nearby, waving large palmetto fans to circulate the air over him.\n\nHe had laid a restoration spell, offered a chicken and a goat to the proper loa for their assistance. He had eaten fruit and bread and roast pig, washed down with the blood.\n\nIt was all he could do for now. He would have to sleep and allow his work to help heal his body and spirit. This spent, ideally, he would stay quiet for several days, a week, longer. He could not do that now. Time was of the essence, and even this amount of forced rest tried his patience, though he knew he had no other option.\n\nHe finished the bowl of blood, had it removed, and lay down upon the bed. He closed his eyes. He deepened his breathing, slow and long, to bathe his innards in life-giving air. He felt it flow into his limbs, into his feet. His toes. Fresh air in; used air, out; easing slowly his aches and pains.\n\nAt the edge of his consciousness, before he drifted off, he was aware of something . . .\n\nStorm. A storm was coming.\n\nThere would be power in that. He might be able to use it. Hurricane-loa were fierce and manic and they sometimes would extend favors when the winds tore at the world, just because it pleased them to do so . . .\n\nYamada had composed a death-poem as they walked, a simple haiku about a falling cherry blossom, just in case. He did not feel impending doom, but men had been surprised by Death's cold touch many times, and it was best to be prepared if there was a chance of sudden demise.\n\nNow, in the lee of a rock outcropping next to a stream, Yamada considered his new circumstances as night crept in to steal away the day. In the final gleamings of the dusk, there were many things he must consider and resolve as best he could.\n\nGruber, of course, would say whatever he thought was necessary to stay alive. A cornered rat facing a pack of dogs had more honor than the German, of this Yamada was sure. But things had taken a dire turn, and since survival was paramount, a man had to use the tools at hand. He would not trust Gruber, but he recognized that the man might be crucial to Yamada's mission.\n\n\"Schnapps, Doctor?\" As usual, they spoke in English.\n\nYamada had been aware of Gruber's approach, though he pretended otherwise.\n\n\"Thank you, but I think not.\"\n\nGruber sat next to where Yamada rested on a fallen log, and raised a small silver flask to his lips. He took three swallows of whatever was in the container. Yamada could smell the alcohol as the man removed the flask from his lips. \"Want to keep a clear head, eh?\"\n\nYamada gave him a slow nod.\n\n\"Personally, I think a few sips of good schnapps helps in that regard. Clears away the cobwebs. Of course, this is not good schnapps, but it is what I have.\" He took another drink.\n\n\"The scouts should be back soon,\" Gruber continued.\n\n\"It is to be hoped so.\"\n\nThey had each sent one of their men in the joint effort. For safety, Yamada had said, and Gruber had nodded, but both men knew that safety was not the reason. Neither trusted the other's man to come back with a completely objective report for both to hear.\n\n\"The American and Englishman will not be able to travel any better in the dark than we,\" Gruber said. \"We will be able to catch them.\"\n\n\"Perhaps.\"\n\nGruber screwed the cap onto the flask and slipped it into his pocket. \"Perhaps? You don't believe that the cream of the German SS and of the imperial army can move faster than some out-of-shape civilians?\"\n\n\"In an ordinary race, there would be no question of it,\" Yamada said. \"But we are chasing them to fulfill our mission. They must be aware that they are running for their lives. Such knowledge can offer impetus to move faster.\"\n\nGruber chuckled. \"Of course. But I think you over-estimate them.\"\n\n\"Perhaps.\" He paused for a moment. Then: \"There is a story in our country. A man, of no great talent or achievement, was condemned to die by the local daimyo. You know the term?\"\n\n\"Warlord, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Near enough. The condemned man worked as a simple laborer on an estate, cleaning the walks, pulling weeds. He had committed no crime, but somebody of high status had been offended by his manner or his look\u2014the reason doesn't matter. They complained, and the daimyo sent his executioner to slay the laborer.\n\n\"Such things were of no importance back in those days, the removal of a servant for small reason\u2014or no reason at all. People lived or died on a ruler's whim.\"\n\nGruber nodded, as if he understood that.\n\n\"The daimyo's executioner was a samurai most skilled with his sword. He found the man on a pathway, using a broom to sweep the leaves away. He announced himself and his purpose. Pulled his sword, and strode in to cut the laborer down.\"\n\nGruber nodded. \"Yes...?\"\n\n\"Know that this was no great event for the executioner. He was an expert, he had killed many men, armed, skilled opponents, with swords, spears, arrows, even his bare hands. He had never lost a match, and he was as calm as a frozen pond on a windless January day.\n\n\"The laborer had no skill with weapons at all. It was the samurai's duty, a chore that needed little of his ability, and he was unconcerned about the outcome. He was a master swordsman, the greatest such for miles in any direction.\n\n\"The condemned man had done nothing wrong, he knew it, and he did not wish to die for no reason. He charged the samurai assassin using his broom.\"\n\n\"And was quickly hacked to small pieces for his trouble, eh?\"\n\n\"No. So fierce was the man's attack that the samurai had to give ground. The broom was everywhere\u2014the man had wielded it for much of his life, and it was a tool with which he was comfortable. The executioner took hard knocks from the stout wood as the laborer attacked like a man possessed of a demon.\"\n\nHe paused again. \"A man who knows he is about to die, with nothing to lose? He can be a formidable foe.\"\n\nGruber nodded. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"It was only when the samurai was pressed and in danger of defeat that he was able to unleash his own fear. Only then could he call up his own inner demon to match that of his attacker so that his superior skill was able to come into play. When that happened, he cut the laborer down.\"\n\nGruber smiled. \"All is well that ends well.\"\n\nYamada shrugged.\n\nGruber frowned. \"Once the samurai was cranked up, he defeated the laborer, right? The end was never really in question, was it?\"\n\n\"No. But he learned a lesson: Never to take an opponent for granted.\"\n\n\"But, Doctor, all the laborer was able to do was fend off his death for a bit longer. In the end, he died.\"\n\nYamada favored Gruber with a small smile. \"And in the end, we all die, do we not? Isn't that the goal of most men in their lives? To fend off death for a bit longer?\"\n\n\"We will catch them, Dr. Yamada. We must.\"\n\n\"I agree, Doctor. But I do not think it will necessarily be easy\u2014and I do not think we should assume so.\"\n\nThe two scouts chose that moment to reappear, and Gruber waved them over.\n\nYamada listened more to Gruber's man making his report than he did his own, and the German soldier's account was substantially the same as that of Yamada's soldier. Their quarry was some distance away and probably stopped for the night. They could not be certain of their exact position, because there were pickets, and the scouts did not wish to reveal their presence; still, it seemed reasonable.\n\n\"And could we move through the dark and take them?\" Gruber asked.\n\nThe German soldier was polite and deferential, but the essence of his reply was that such action would be dangerous in the extreme. The cliff face near the sea was unstable; a misstep would be fatal. If the pickets were able to offer a warning, a direct attack would be risky. There were more people in the civilian party than in the German and Japanese camps together, and all of them were armed, with machetes and with guns. While the tactical superiority of German and even Japanese military troops over such a ragtag assemblage was unquestioned, a frontal assault on a larger, armed force, in the dark, without the element of surprise? Perhaps not the wisest course. Better to catch them somewhere unexpected, jawohl?\n\nYamada's solider had much the same assessment. Though he was, of course, more willing to lay down his life than the German was, even such a sacrifice would not ensure victory. It would not be the best strategy. And, though he did not address it, Yamada knew the man must be thinking about the superhuman creatures that had wiped out most of their number. One had to know they were still out there somewhere. And who knew what they might do? Or how well they could function in the dark? Maybe they had eyes like cats?\n\nNo, stealth was the proper path here. Not samurai, but more like ninja. Less personal honor involved, but the mission was more important than even that. Personal glory might have to be put aside to satisfy the mission, and if so, then that was how it would be.\n\nAfter the scouts were finished, Gruber and Yamada sent them back out to keep watch. That left five men in their combined group, and they would need to post a couple to stand guard. It would not be the most comfortable night's rest, sleeping on the ground, but Yamada had been through worse, as he was sure Gruber had. They would endure. They would continue following their prey, and at the right moment they would strike.\n\nBoukman felt the thing behind him, though he was too afraid to turn and look at it\u2014he knew the sight would freeze his heart solid. It was gaining, and try as he might he could not increase his speed, the air itself seem thickened to a gel, it was as if he were trying to walk and swim at the same time and managing to do neither very well.\n\nHe could feel it. He could smell it now, it was a thousand years of mold overlaid with the offal behind a butcher's shop on a hot summer day. It reeked with the hot breeze from a village latrine overflowing with waste. Ashes and brimstone and obscene heat . . .\n\nAnd he could hear it, too, a rasp of a tree-sized coarse file on rock, a breathy whistle, a steam kettle coming to boil.\n\nBoukman swore and pumped his legs and arms harder. Useless as they were, he had lost his gun and his machete, even his clothes were gone, and his young and strong body moved like that of an old cripple. It would be on him in a moment, and he would be engulfed in a horror beyond all comprehension.\n\nHe felt the touch of something loathsome on his bare shoulder, softly, softly, at first, like a woman's breath, but then with the insistent sear of a malignant flame . . .\n\nBoukman screamed\u2014\n\nBoukman awoke, eyes snapping open, instantly alert.\n\nIn the dim hut, the two slaves waving their fans moved like automata, set into a mindless function by Boukman's command. The morning sun tried to push its way through the thatch and around the edges of the door and bamboo, but mostly failed.\n\nBoukman lay still, pondering The Dream. It had never gotten so close to him before, the thing that had chased him for nearly two hundred years. What did that mean? What was he to learn from this? He could only believe that things were coming to a climax soon, and that his actions from here on would have to be considered quickly, but executed flawlessly. Riding the edge of powerful magic gave a bokor great abilities, but there was always a danger of falling off. He had lived a long and full and rich life, master of his corner of the world, and the time, he felt, was coming soon whereupon he would expand his abilities beyond anything he had considered possible, or he would be harvested by the monster of his dreams. The edge along which he ran was sharp and narrow, and he had negotiated it with skill and \u00e9lan for so long, he sometimes took his ability for granted. That would not do, now. To slip was to be sliced in half.\n\nUltimate power was just outside his grasp. He had to reach out for it, but he had to have a steady hand.\n\nThe smallest mistake now would be worse than death.\n\nMuch worse."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "They headed back to the open rock close to the cliff's edge, and for almost an hour the going was pretty easy. Then they came to a spot where a huge section of the cliff had fallen away, a hundred yards or so, taking the path all the way to the forest. Beyond this avalanche, the cliff soared, higher than they were now by another hundred feet. Even if they circled the rock-slide, they would have to climb the rotten cliff.\n\nNot going any farther in that direction.\n\nDamn.\n\nThey'd have to go back into the jungle and find more animal trails or start hacking their way through the brush.\n\nIndy could feel the sense of tension, of being pursued, and everybody was on edge.\n\nA fast-moving scud of tattered, dirty-gray clouds appeared in the blue sky not long after they started, and by now the sun was mostly blocked, the hard-edged shadows gone fuzzy and dim. A herald wind began, cooler than the fetid jungle air had been, if not by much. Even Indy could smell the approaching rain.\n\n\"Storm comes,\" Batiste said. \"Soon the wind will start to blow hard and the rain will come at us sideways. It will be impossible to track us in such weather, but we will have to move slower ourselves. Mixed blessing, this. Best we move quickly while we can. It will get bad soon.\"\n\nIt was only forty-five minutes or so later when the first drops began to fall, pelting hard enough to sting Indy's eyes, making a sound like fine gravel thrown into the trees. Wind whipped the branches and canopy. Leaves tore loose and flew past, swirled away in the tempest.\n\n\"We must stay on the pigs' trail!\" Batiste said, yelling to be heard above the increasing downpour. \"There will be some kind of shelter along it that the pigs sometimes use.\"\n\n\"I hope they won't be using it now!\" Indy yelled back.\n\nThe rain and wind grew fiercer, and visibility dropped to a few feet. Batiste led the way while Mac brought up the rear; in the middle with Marie and the other men, Indy could not see more than a few yards. The wind seemed to be behind them at the moment, which was a small blessing, but it kept trying to take his hat, and Indy had to jam it down hard on his head to keep it from flying off. Bad for the shape, that. He'd have to spend another week's salary to get it spruced up when he got home.\n\nIf he got home . . .\n\nYamada was yelling something at him, and Gruber was unable to hear most of it in the wind and rain. He did catch the word \"typhoon,\" and while he had never been through one of those, this was a storm that seemed much worse than any he had experienced in the Caribbean so far. Wind had to be blowing at thirty or forty knots, gusting to fifty or sixty. Stand up too straight at the wrong moment, it would knock you sprawling.\n\nYamada leaned in. \"It will get worse!\" he yelled. \"We have to find shelter or risk being crushed by falling trees!\"\n\n\"We will lose them!\" Gruber yelled back.\n\n\"No! They can't move any faster than we can! And if we die in the forest trying to catch them, that is unacceptable!\"\n\nThe man had a point, Gruber had to concede. Being squashed by a falling tree would not serve to collect their quarry, who would certainly be having the same thoughts about shelter.\n\nAs if to punctuate the thought, a branch as big around as his leg fell not two meters away, hit the ground with a muddy splash, and then was pushed and tumbled away by the slashing wind.\n\nGruber had a cousin who had been a logger in the Black Forest. His cousin had been killed by a falling branch while cutting trees. Widowmaker, they called those things . . .\n\n\"We need something to block the wind!\" Gruber yelled. \"A rock wall, a cave!\"\n\n\"Best we find such quickly, Doctor!\" Yamada said.\n\nBoukman woke again to the sound of rain. He stood, shook himself to loosen the stiffness in his joints, and moved to the hut's door.\n\nThe wind drove the rain over the ground in sheets; it looked like rippling grass. The trees whipped back and forth, leaves tearing free, filling the air with bits of greenery. The hurricane-loa would be rejoicing, for this had the feel of a big storm.\n\nBoukman had lost count of how many such whirling monsters he had endured. Some years, there were none; some years, two, three, even four of them, raging against the land, flattening trees and houses, throwing boats onto houses nearly a kilometer inland. He had been through the eyes of these beasts a dozen times, felt his ears pop as the wind and rain died, seen the stars above with no clouds to block them before the wind came back from the other quarter.\n\nFierce monsters, these tempests.\n\nThey were part of the cycle here, the big storms, and while many structures were swept away each time one of them stomped ashore, there were places that had been standing for two hundred years. Normally, Boukman would be inside one of those places\u2014on Haiti, he had a low-walled stone house with heavy Spanish roof tiles that shrugged off the wind and rain the way a pelican did a drizzle. Even on this tiny island, there were places like that, and he would have to go to one of them, to protect this body, until he could collect the talisman he sought. And now, before the wind grew much worse.\n\nTo the two slaves with fans, he said, \"Put those down and come. Stand between me and the wind.\"\n\nHe was stronger. Not as strong as he would wish, but he would have to make do\u2014hurricanes brought many dangers, and those who had his talisman would be at risk. He would have to do something about it. As soon as he had his body in a place where it would be safe.\n\nIn the far jungle, Boukman chose the strongest of the potion-slaves, one who had been a cane cutter, and he sent his spirit into this horse and took control of it.\n\nIt was but the work of a few minutes to find others, then order them to collect their brothers and sisters for the attack.\n\nEven inside such as he was, his slaves knew who he was.\n\nAn hour later, all those in the area were returned to where Boukman's drugged human horse stood, the rain and wind lashing at them and the trees.\n\n\"We go to fetch the talisman,\" he said. \"Follow me.\"\n\nHe could not see Marie's spirit-cord. Perhaps the energies of the storm extended into the Other Realm and hid it, but it did not matter. His slaves had marked their prey in this realm, and Boukman knew what his horse knew.\n\nBoukman led the band along the animal trail. Marie and her imen blan were only half an hour's march, even in the foul weather, and once he got there with the eighteen other slaves, it would take only a few moments to overwhelm them and collect their trophy. He would direct the attack\u2014he had much experience in such matters, going back over most of his two hundred years. He knew where to put his troops to best advantage\u2014living a long time gave you plenty of opportunity to test out theories. One thing he had learned was that patience always led intent. Not because it took extraordinary skill, but because being in exactly the right place at the right time made all the difference.\n\nThe strongest of men would trip over a small foot, placed just so as he ran past. Smooth was better than rough.\n\nThey were drawing nearer their destination, and Boukman was ready to survey the situation, see what he needed, then to order his slaves into position.\n\nHe sent two of them to look.\n\nThere was a break in the rain. The wind continued in fits, but it was no longer pouring like a waterfall. For a while\u2014the rain would return soon enough. Maybe by then, he would have his prize and be on the way home.\n\nWhile he was waiting for them to report back, his horse began to buck\u2014\n\nBoukman frowned. What was this? He could feel the \u00e2me of the slave rising, trying to reassert control of the body they shared.\n\nGo back to sleep!\n\nWho are you? Get out of me!\n\nBoukman felt a surge of anger. I will kill this body! Go back to sleep!\n\nBut\u2014no. The man who had lived here until Boukman's potion had taken his will and submerged it so deep it was nearly extinguished had, somehow, broken free of the chemical bindings.\n\nOf a moment, Boukman realized how it had happened: This slave had been too long from maintenance\u2014he had not drunk of the potion in some time, perhaps weeks, and the effect had begun to wear off. Somehow, this one had been left on his own and the drug not administered when it should have been.\n\nBoukman had his regulations in place, he had a method he'd used ever since he had developed the powers of a bokor and first mixed the potion and used it. Somehow, this one had slipped through the normal net.\n\nIt happened. Not often, but a man as busy as he was sometimes lost track of minor things\u2014\n\nOut! Out of me! Leave, demon!\n\nThe horse's owner began praying.\n\nThis was the wrong time, the worst moment for a minor mistake to show up. The man's spirit was strong\u2014too strong to squash from inside the same body without the Potion to help. Boukman would have to leave, find another host, but his strength had not returned fully, and he could not risk trying it and failing. He would have to depart, retreat to his own form, regather his strength, and come back!\n\nDamnation! Why did the gods task him so?\n\nThe prey would leave with his prize, and he would have to find them again!\n\nIn that moment of weakness, being pressed by the owner of the horse he rode, Boukman made a choice. It was not the patient and considered decision he would normally have made, but he deemed it worth the risk.\n\n\"Attack them!\" he said. \"Go, kill them, collect the box, and bring it to me! Now!\"\n\nIt was not so much a risk. The odds were in his favor. Chances for success were good, based on numbers alone\u2014\n\nAnd with that, he leaped free of the chemically bound horse he rode. What the man who regained control would do didn't matter. He meant nothing. He would find and deal with him later.\n\nBoukman flew, cursing to himself as he went.\n\nThey came out of the jungle just after the rain got cranked up again, and the panicked yell of one of the bearers alerted Indy and the others to the danger:\n\nZombis! A dozen, fifteen\u2014more\u2014!\n\nIndy pulled his revolver.\n\nHead shots were difficult, but Indy had spent enough time practicing with his Webley that he knew what it would do. The .455 round wasn't a tack driver\u2014you weren't going to be knocking walnuts off a fence post at a hundred yards\u2014but at close range, a few yards, he could hit a head-sized target most of the time. And it was faster to reload than his old Smith Hand Ejector II had been.\n\nEven in a pouring rain, you didn't need to be a crack shot when the head-sized target was shambling in a straight line right at you and only a few yards away\u2014\n\nIndy fired, and was gratified to see the approaching zombi's head splatter, followed by a boneless collapse onto the wet ground.\n\nMore of them headed at him. He fired, two, three, four, five, six\u2014\n\nThree more collapsed\u2014\n\nSome of the bearers were shooting, some using machetes. They were making a lot of noise, screaming loudly. Men fell. More zombis did, too\u2014\n\nNext to him, facing the other way, both Mac and Batiste were shooting their weapons to similar effect. Of the score or so attackers who had swarmed them, at least eight or ten were down\u2014\n\nIndy's gun was empty. He snapped the top-break weapon open, which automatically ejected the empties. They seemed to fall in slow motion to splash into a puddle at his feet... Quickly he began to reload the cylinder. He managed to drop one of the replacement cartridges, but hurriedly fished another one from his jacket pocket and jammed it into the chamber\u2014\n\nHe noticed in the middle of all the ado a rivulet run down the brim of his hat and onto his nose. How odd that he would focus on that . . .\n\nMarie, next to him, mumbled some kind of invocation. Indy couldn't tell if it was doing any good, though\u2014\n\nHe snapped the revolver closed, swung the gun around, and fired at another attacker\u2014\n\nJust as he pulled the trigger, the creature lurched, slipping on the soaked earth, and Indy's shot missed\u2014\n\nHe stroked the trigger again\u2014this time the shot found its mark, and the thing fell\u2014\n\nHere was another one\u2014Indy fired twice more, got it\u2014\n\nBehind him, Batiste said something that sounded like a curse, and added, \"Bloque!\"\n\nA jam. His rifle had jammed\u2014!\n\nTo Indy's right, a zombi fell on one of the bearers. More screams. A second bearer leaped at the fallen pair, swinging his machete\u2014\n\nIndy's field of fire was, for the moment, clear. He spun as Batiste dropped the rifle and drew his machete\u2014\n\nWhy not the handgun at his hip? Indy had time to wonder.\n\nIndy couldn't get a clear shot at the things charging from that direction. \"Mac! Move over!\"\n\nMac took a step to his left, continuing to fire his little pistol. That move gave Indy an incoming target. He lined up the sights\u2014\n\nBatiste yelled and charged the two attackers closest to him, but his body blocked Indy's target. Indy jerked his weapon down to point at the ground\u2014\n\n\"Batiste! Move\u2014!\"\n\nBut Batiste was in a full sprint. He swung the machete and caught one of the attackers just above its left ear. The zombie was a large fellow, but the cut took off the top of his head as if it were a cantaloupe, and the zombi fell, no blood from the cut, none\u2014\n\nUnfortunately, the thing's fall was not straight down. It had enough momentum that it slammed into Batiste. It wasn't a threat, but its weight was enough to knock the guide down. As Batiste struggled to get up, one of the remaining bearers panicked. The man yelled and pointed his rifle at the fallen pair.\n\n\"Don't\u2014!\" Indy yelled. \"The zombi is dead!\"\n\nWell, yeah. It was, but that's not what Indy meant\u2014\n\nThe bearer fired. Worked the bolt of his weapon, fired again\u2014\n\nThe first bullet hit the zombi in the back.\n\nThe second bullet hit Batiste as he struggled to his knees. The round took him dead-center in the chest. Batiste fell\u2014\n\nA zombi leaped on the bearer and bore him down, teeth sunk into the man's throat\u2014\n\nMac ran closer, pointed his pistol down, fired off the remainder of his magazine into the zombi's head. It released the bearer, but too late for him, his throat gushed red\u2014\n\n\"I'm empty!\" Mac yelled. \"Cover the left\u2014!\"\n\nIndy turned and saw three more zombis coming in, a tall, thin, pale-skinned male with red hair; a shorter, heavyset darker one, a female; and one in such bad condition that he couldn't tell what it had been in life, man or woman\u2014\n\nThe tall one was closer. Indy got a quick sight picture, stroked the trigger\u2014easy, easy, don't jerk it!\u2014and the redhead fell.\n\nHe lined up on the woman... fired\u2014got her!\n\nHe swung his revolver to cover the last one, still twenty feet away\u2014squeezed off the shot\u2014\n\nClick!\n\nIt really was the loudest sound in the world. Either a dud or it was empty\u2014how many had he shot?\n\nNever mind! Indy dropped the gun, grabbed the slip-knotted cord holding his whip to his belt, and pulled it free. He cleared the coiled leather to his right and whirled the plaited whip overhead at the zombi as it moved into range\u2014\n\nThe lash caught it across the face, sliced it open as if the tip had been a knife. Got its attention\u2014it turned its head to look at Indy as he pulled the whip back for another strike\u2014\n\nThis time he didn't try for a cut, but twisted his wrist and came at the thing horizontally\u2014\n\nThe end of the whip wrapped around the thing's neck\u2014\n\nIndy jerked, hard, and it stumbled forward and sprawled into the puddles facedown\u2014\n\nIndy ran to where it was trying to get up. Pulled his machete, aimed for the middle of its head, and swung as though he was trying to split a log with an ax\u2014\n\nIt made a sound like a hollow gourd being hit with a baseball bat\u2014\n\nMac fired his pistol again, one-two-three-four-five! and Indy turned to see the last of the attackers collapse.\n\nThey had stood them off, but at a great cost. All the bearers were down, gone or dying, Batiste among them.\n\nOnly Marie, Mac, and Indy were still standing.\n\nHe unwrapped the end of his whip from around the motionless thing's neck. Coiled the leather absently as he looked around.\n\nThis was bad. Could be worse, but still bad.\n\nIn the stone house on the highest part of the island, Boukman awoke, still cursing. Had he been able to stay on his mount, he could have directed the attack, could have taken them!\n\nBut without his guidance, the slaves had simply charged en masse, no attempt at stealth. Of course. They had no fear.\n\nA mistake.\n\nNow he could feel that most of his force was down. The True Risen who had fallen would not be able to stand again; the potion-slaves might be useful, some of them who weren't too badly damaged, but he would have to animate them. He could not manage that now, given his current state. He would have to do something to give himself power\u2014risky, but it must be done. Even so, he would have to turn all his energy in this direction, focus it, and everything else in his realm would suffer. There was no help for it. It must be done. Must be.\n\n\"Did you hear?\" Yamada asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Gruber answered. \"Gunfire.\"\n\n\"It must be the Englishman and American's party.\"\n\n\"Shooting at our spies?\"\n\nYamada shook his head. \"I think not. Too many shots. The things in the forest. The gaki.\"\n\nGruber nodded. Yes, that was possible. But\u2014what did it mean? What did those things want?\n\n\"We should go and see. The situation might have changed materially.\"\n\nYamada nodded."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "Indy looked around, and they quickly took stock\u2014wasn't much to that chore:\n\nThe three of them were the only ones left alive.\n\nWere there more of the zombis, real or chemical, around? Had they gotten them all?\n\nMarie could not say. She had been trying to control them, but Boukman had protected them. She did not have enough magic to break through his wards.\n\nMac moved about and collected odds and ends, including a coil of rope, and more food and water. He picked up one of the rifles, hefted it, then put it back down.\n\nIndy got that\u2014if pistol bullets to the head would do the trick, then a rifle was just one more item to carry. Rifles were superior weapons, no question, but better to leave it and haul something more useful\u2014whatever that might be in this particular situation . . .\n\nThe rain and wind started and stopped, pouring, then not, then blowing and raining again, and the breeze was definitely getting stronger. They needed to find somewhere else to shelter\u2014this place was marked. If there were still zombis about, they would probably show up here. And there were the Japanese and the Germans. If they had heard the shooting over the wind and rain, they might be thinking about dropping by, too.\n\nThey were on the southeastern end of the island, and they needed to head north and west to get back to the village. If they followed the shore and kept it on their left, that would handle the western part, and that would mean north would be to their right. But if they didn't keep within sight of the ocean, which was already the case and going to stay that way as they started north, the heavy cloud cover wouldn't let them use the sun or stars for reckoning.\n\nIndy dug into his backpack, fishing for something he knew was there somewhere . . .\n\nAh.\n\nHe came up with a small compass. Showed it to Mac, who nodded.\n\n\"We want to head that way,\" Indy said, pointing. \"And find us a big tree or something to block the wind!\"\n\nMarie had moved to Batiste's fallen body. She knelt and spoke a few words over it, made the sign of the cross. A final blessing, Indy figured. A shame, he had been a good man. Best they got moving so they didn't join him . . .\n\nYamada, sword drawn, followed the two scouts, Suzuki next to him, his own blade bared.\n\nThey came into the sheltered area, which partially blocked the wind and rain because there was a slight rocky rise on the west side.\n\nThe place was littered with bodies. More than a score of them.\n\nIt did not take long to determine that none of them was the Englishman, the American, or the woman.\n\nSuzuki said, \"They know the trick to stopping them.\" He pointed with his katana's tip.\n\nYes, the downed gaki had been shot or cut on the head.\n\nGruber said, \"Helmets.\"\n\nIt took Yamada a moment to understand it. Ah, yes. If their soldiers took this drug and were able to protect their heads from attack, they would be virtually immune. Yamada had always wondered why Achilles had not worn stout boots, with the heels sheathed in iron. It would not have taken a particularly bright man to come up with that thought. Perhaps if you were spear-and sword-proof, you didn't have to be particularly bright . . .\n\n\"The three we want aren't here,\" Gruber observed. \"They cannot have gotten far.\"\n\n\"But which way did they go?\" Yamada said. \"We cannot find a trail in this.\" He waved his sword at the driving rain.\n\n\"Northwest,\" Gruber said. \"If they want to reach the place where their boat came ashore, they must eventually go that way.\"\n\n\"Eventually is not now,\" Yamada said.\n\n\"If we cannot catch them from behind, then we might be able to get there before them,\" Gruber said.\n\nYes. That was true\u2014but: \"We are not the only ones after them.\"\n\n\"There is nothing to be done about that. Besides, it looks as if they have dealt with that problem.\" He waved at the corpses.\n\nGruber had a point.\n\nA tree behind them creaked in the wind. The tree gave up the fight and fell, ripping the ground up as the root-ball tore loose.\n\n\"It is still dangerous!\" Yamada yelled. \"We should find shelter.\"\n\n\"Agreed!\"\n\nThey moved out of the battlefield, leaving the dead behind them.\n\nTwenty minutes away, the three of them found a big tree that offered some respite against the wind and rain. The tree seemed to be some kind of tropical hardwood, gnarled and sturdy looking, a baobab tree, maybe, but Indy couldn't be sure. Did they even grow here?\n\nWell, whatever the species, it had been here for a couple of hundred years and was still standing. Maybe it would survive this.\n\nThey tucked themselves in close to it, and it stopped enough of the weather so they weren't under constant bombardment by the wind and rain.\n\nThis couldn't go on forever. They'd wait it out if they had to, or at least until it slackened some.\n\nOf a moment, the rain seemed to ease up. That was good\u2014\n\nThere was a sudden silence, only a heartbeat or two long, and then an ominous roaring noise.\n\nMac said, \"What is that? Sounds like a bloody train!\"\n\nIndy shook his head. No trains in the jungle. \"A tornado!\"\n\nThey didn't get many of those in England, Indy knew, but he had seen a few connected to thunderstorms in the United States, and he knew that hurricanes and typhoons often spawned the whirlwinds as they made landfall. Smaller but fiercer versions of the big storm that birthed them. A hurricane might flatten some of the trees and blow houses down, but a tornado was like a sickle through dry wheat\u2014it mostly cleared a path\u2014\n\nThe rain returned with a vengeance, and the terrible sound of what had to be a tornado was getting louder fast.\n\nThere was no place to go.\n\n\"The rope!\" Indy yelled. \"We have to tie ourselves down!\"\n\nThat was a danger, being plucked up from the ground and carried away. Indy had heard stories of people being snatched from the ruins of their houses and tossed half a mile by the spinning winds. More of a danger was being hit by debris inside the tornado, where even a straw could, with enough velocity, be turned into a deadly spear\u2014\n\nLightning flashed, a sudden blast of brightness against the gloom, and thunder crashed half a second behind it. Close\u2014\n\nThe wind began to blow harder, leaves and branches spinning past.\n\nThe tree's trunk was too big for their rope to go around and leave them enough to work with, but there were a couple of thick roots that arced free of the soil, there\u2014\n\nQuickly, Indy looped the rope through the larger of the roots, as big around as his leg. He ran one end through his belt and passed it to Marie. \"Tie it around yourself!\"\n\nMac was already working with the other end.\n\nThe roar of the tornado blotted out anything else they might have said, but Indy waved them down. Lying prone, they would present less for the wind to catch and lift.\n\nThe world turned black and the noise grew even louder.\n\nFacedown in the mud, Indy wondered if this was the last thing he would feel in this world. He gripped his hat to his head with both hands. If he survived and he let the wind take the fedora, he'd probably never find it again . . .\n\nIt was like being next to a plane's propellor, only worse.\n\nSmall objects smacked into Indy's back, pocking like popcorn. Something slightly larger bounced off his hip, ow! that hurt!\n\nHe felt himself starting to slide along the ground, moving in little hops as he bounced like a ball, the wind catching him, losing him, catching him again.\n\nHe pulled his knees in tight, used his interlaced fingers to draw his head closer to his body, and curled into a fetal position as the wind nudged him onto his side.\n\nHis belt went taut, and he felt himself sliding along the rope as if held by a giant's insistent hand: Come with me, it said. Now!\n\nHe stopped when he arrived at the end of the line that was tied around Marie. She wrapped arms and legs around him and held on tightly. He grabbed his hat in one hand, let go with the other, and used it to encircle Marie. Nearly face-to-face they bobbed up, cleared the muddy ground, then fell back down. The water that had puddled on the earth was gone, blown away. He felt the rope straining, could feel the vibration, could hear the sound of the rope thrumming as might the string of a musical instrument\u2014\n\nWould his belt break? Would the rope? Would the tree fall?\n\nHe couldn't catch his breath, so fast was the wind rushing past his face. He tucked his cheek into the hollow of Marie's throat and managed to draw in air as he labored to breathe.\n\nOdd what a man notices when he is close to death\u2014she had a musky, pleasant smell\u2014\n\nHe heard wood cracking under the wind's force, felt rather than saw something big rush past, missing them by inches\u2014\n\nIf it got any stronger, it would be all over\u2014\n\nAnd then, the wind slowed. A heartbeat... three more... yes, definitely it was easing up . . .\n\nThe tornado went on its way, heading to the northwest, clearing a path in front of itself like a steamroller . . .\n\nA few seconds later and the driving rain began to fill the empty hollows the wind had cleared. The near pitch blackness lightened enough for him to see that Mac was no more than a few feet away, the wind having dragged him along the same path.\n\nThe wind eased yet more. Enough for Indy to yell, \"Mac! You all right?\"\n\n\"Never better!\" Mac hollered back.\n\n\"Marie?\"\n\n\"I am fine.\" She released her grip on him, and reluctantly he did the same. He slid back a bit along the rope so that there was a bit of space between them.\n\n\"It appears that we have dodged another bullet, old sod. Dame Fortune smiles on us yet again.\"\n\nWell, they were still in the middle of a hurricane with all kinds of people in the forest who wanted them in the worst way, but yeah.\n\nIndy nodded. Sooner or later, Dame Fortune was going to turn her smile elsewhere\u2014you couldn't have it forever\u2014but this had been a big favor on her part. Luck had favored him more than a few times, and he was happy to accept that. Better to be lucky than good . . .\n\nThe good thing? The tornado had created for them a walkway, and it was going in the right direction . . ."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "Boukman considered his choices, but he could see no better one, and so he invoked Papa Legba, the Master of the Crossroads. This was nothing out of the ordinary, for Papa Legba was both the first and last called upon in heavy magic\u2014he was the Gatekeeper, and contact between human and loa went through him. He controlled the access between the real world and the Other Realm.\n\nPapa Legba was usually revealed as a little old man who smoked a pipe, wore a broad-brimmed hat, and leaned on a cane.\n\nHe generally walked with dogs. They revered him, for he was their patron and protector. Abuse a dog, and sooner or later Papa Legba would find you and make you pay. Might be tomorrow, might be fifty years, but find you he always would.\n\nEverybody knew this much about Papa Legba. But it was not so well known that he could and did borrow bits of mojo from every loa who passed through his gate. Not much, and the loa didn't miss it\u2014if you have millions, you do not miss a few pennies, but after many centuries those small bits from tens of thousands of crossings added up. Papa had amassed strength beyond most. He was not a god, but he could do things that most loa could not. For what each loa had, Papa Legba had, too. Not as much, but more than anyone probably knew.\n\nBoukman approved of dogs. He had never been overly harsh with any that he owned, and he had never\u2014not once\u2014kicked a dog in anger. In many ways, dogs were better than people, and Boukman respected this. It was his best calling card, and he needed to use it.\n\nSo he called upon Papa Legba, but instead of asking him to open the Gate, he bowed his head thrice and called his name each time. A request for something other than normal business.\n\nEnergy swirled and darkness flowered with multicolored light, washing away the world . . .\n\nThe place approaching the Beyond where Boukman found himself was not the usual one where Papa Legba stood in front of a massive iron gate as high as an elephant's eye with bars as thick as a man's arm. No, this time the gate was but a short wooden affair in the middle of a chest-tall fence, and Papa sat on a three-legged stool in front of it, smoking his pipe and tossing tidbits of something bloody to the three black and white dogs who lay at his feet. The dogs were short, stubby-legged things, pointed ears, white-tipped tails and feet, bigger than terriers but smaller than chowchows.\n\nThe dogs heard or smelled Boukman's spirit approaching.\n\nThey turned to look at him.\n\nHere was the test. If they growled, if the hair went up on their backs, if they barked and showed their teeth, he was in trouble . . .\n\nAfter a moment, their tails began to wag, though they didn't leave Papa Legba's feet.\n\nThe old man drew on his pipe, blew out a cloud of red smoke, and smiled. \"The dogs like you,\" he said. \"Speak.\"\n\nBoukman offered the old man a low bow. \"I am weak, Papa, and there is a task for which I must be stronger.\"\n\nThe Gatekeeper nodded. \"I can offer you strength\u2014what your form can tolerate. Not as much as once it could, but some.\"\n\n\"I would be in your debt.\"\n\nPapa nodded, acknowledging this. After a moment, he said, \"There are too many strays,\" he said. \"Poor creatures with no home, no food, no one to scratch behind their ears, to spell away their fleas.\"\n\n\"I could build a shelter,\" Boukman said. \"A roof against the sun and rain, with food and water, run by boys who like to scratch dogs behind the ears. A place where fleas will fall off and die and where all strays would be welcome.\"\n\nThe old man smiled. Blew out another cloud of red. He nodded. \"That would be a good thing, such a place, hey, dogs?\"\n\nThe dogs wagged their tails faster.\n\nHe waved his pipe in Boukman's direction. \"Strength you shall have. Such that you are able to use.\"\n\nBoukman bowed. \"Thank you, Papa.\"\n\nThe old man looked at the three dogs, then back at him. \"You are evil as men go, Boukman. I have seen many, and I know\u2014there are few who approach your infamy. But a man, even an evil one, who likes dogs? That man can be worth something to me. Go. I will look forward to the shelter you build.\"\n\nBoukman bowed again.\n\nWhen he awoke this time, Boukman felt better than he had in months. Strong, fit, full of vigor. Yes, it was magical strength, and if he misused it, it could kill him\u2014his body had been healed and made stronger, but it was still old by any human standard, and even magic could only protect it from so much. He didn't need a whole lot, only enough to collect the talisman. After that, he would remake himself\u2014a body completely reborn, perhaps even a new one entirely. With enough power, with enough care, almost anything was possible.\n\nAfter he collected the talisman, he would be, one way or the other, a new man.\n\nBoukman's \u00e2me stood in the middle of the carnage the imen blan had left behind. With his new strength, he focused his energy, channeled it, and poured it into the corpses at his feet.\n\nIt was like standing under a waterfall\u2014magic rushed through and over him like a raging torrent, spewing, filling the dead at his feet with ersatz life.\n\nThey began to judder and bounce about on the wet ground, the bodies. Like sparks struck from flint by steel, some of them took life, some did not. The recently killed stirred: those who had been under the spell of the potion, and those who had been in the party of the imen blan. Took life, these did, shook themselves, and stood, empty, soulless husks now his to command.\n\nPapa Legba had been generous in his gift. Boukman would have to build a grand shelter for dogs in return, but that was of small importance now.\n\nFifteen zombies attained their feet and stood, some of them swaying to an unheard rhythm, waiting for Boukman's order. And he had energy left. He could raise this many more, he felt, and thirty would be more than he had been able to animate for eighty or ninety years. It was wonderful. More, this would be but a drop in the bucket compared with what he could do once he had the talisman, and was able to use it . . .\n\n\"Go and collect the imen blan,\" he said. \"And the woman with them. Alive. I want them all alive. I have use for them. Follow the path left by Papa Bad\u00e9's demon-wind.\"\n\nObediently, the zombis shuffled into the rainy forest. The wind blew over them hard enough to whistle.\n\nBoukman smiled. The gods had tasked him. Very well. He would overcome the obstacles needed to reach his goal. He had always done so before. He would do so now. It was only a matter of time.\n\nThe rain came, it stopped, it came back. The wind roared, slackened a bit, then gusted enough to make it impossible to stand erect. Gruber fretted about Jones and McHale, but he knew they would have no easier a time of it than he was having. To attempt to move about in the jungle during a storm of what seemed biblical proportions would be madness, and he didn't think the Englishman or the American was completely insane.\n\nOf course, after leaving the slaughterhouse floor, it might be that they were panicked into a mindless flight, preferring to be crushed by falling trees over having their throats ripped out. He could understand that.\n\nEven over the thrum of wind and lashing rain, they heard a roaring noise that, to Gruber, sounded like a freight train rushing past only a few meters away.\n\nThe rain fell harder, and there was lightning and thunder to go with the new sound.\n\n\"Tatsumaki!\" Yamada cried.\n\nIt was not a word in Gruber's Japanese vocabulary. \"What, another of your ghosts?\"\n\n\"No. It is a whirlwind. In English, they say 'tornado.'\"\n\nAh. \"Windhosen. Trombe,\" Gruber said. \"We have those sometimes during spring thunderstorms.\"\n\nThe roar grew briefly louder, but then faded, until the rain and wind covered it again.\n\nYamada said, \"Typhoons bring them, sometimes more than one. In my country, when I was a young man, a typhoon hit our prefecture. From a hill near my home, I watched four tatsumaki dance together through the fields, smashing flat all they touched. It was an amazing sight.\"\n\n\"Well, this one seems to have missed us.\"\n\n\"Yes. But we must hope that it also missed our quarry.\"\n\nGruber blinked at that. Yes. Having them sucked up into a violent trombe and hurled out to sea? That would be bad.\n\n\"It is a large jungle! What are the chances?\" Gruber said. He had to yell, for the wind had come back harder.\n\n\"Who can say?\" Yamada ducked as a branch blew over his head, barely missing him.\n\nGruber put his own head down. None of this was to his liking.\n\n\"I think we've got company!\" Indy yelled.\n\n\"Where?\" Mac said.\n\n\"Behind us! I thought I saw something move!\"\n\n\"Indy, we are in the middle of a hurricane! Everything is moving!\"\n\n\"Not against the wind, it isn't!\"\n\n\"Germans? Japanese? Zombis?\"\n\n\"I didn't get a good look.\"\n\n\"Zombis,\" Marie said.\n\nHe glanced at her, saw that her eyes were closed. \"I can feel them. Almost as many as before... ah!\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"It doesn't matter. If Boukman can raise that many so quickly, he is even stronger than I knew. We must go faster!\"\n\nIndy didn't need any prodding to agree with that.\n\nThey ran.\n\nWell, as much as they could.\n\nThe tornado's track wasn't an easy walk\u2014there were downed trees and branches, but there were gaps, and it was much faster than slashing their way through the jungle.\n\nIt wasn't long before they came to an obstacle the tornado couldn't help them with\u2014a river.\n\nThe rain was still driving, and the river foamed and rushed past, full of leaves and branches and debris\u2014\n\n\"Wait, have a look!\" Indy said. \"There!\"\n\nMac and Marie looked.\n\n\"It's a rope,\" Mac said.\n\n\"Yes! Somebody has crossed here,\" Indy said. \"We can hand-over-hand using that line!\"\n\n\"If we don't get smacked by a fallen tree.\"\n\n\"Would you rather wait for the zombis?\"\n\nMac shook his head. No, he didn't want to do that.\n\n\"I'll even go first,\" Mac said.\n\nThey hurried down to the riverbank, slipping and sliding in the mud. Well. They were about to get a bath . . .\n\nIt wasn't the most fun Indy had ever had\u2014it was tough on his hands, and his shoulders, back, and stomach all ached, too, by the time he crawled onto the opposite shore behind Marie. As soon as Indy achieved the muddy bank, Mac pulled his machete out and cut the rope loose from where it was tied to a tree. The river streamed the cut rope across itself toward the other side.\n\n\"That ought to help,\" Mac said.\n\n\"It will slow them only a little,\" Marie said. \"They will swim across, and most of them will make it. They cannot drown.\"\n\n\"Anything we can get, we'll take,\" Indy said."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "Gruber and yamada looked at the fast-flowing river. \"This is where we crossed before,\" Yamada said. \"See there, the rope.\"\n\n\"For what good it does us,\" Gruber said.\n\nOne of Yamada's men approached, bowed, and, from what Gruber could gather of his conversation, offered to attempt to swim across and reattach the rope.\n\n\"Iie,\" Yamada said, in Japanese. \"We will look for another way.\"\n\nThe soldier bowed.\n\nGruber looked at him as if he did not understand any of what had passed between them. \"What?\"\n\n\"My soldier has offered to try to swim across and retie the rope. As island people, we are good swimmers, but that would cost me a man I cannot afford to lose, I think.\"\n\nGruber looked at the river. \"Yes, I believe you are correct.\"\n\n\"There will be fallen trees in the water. Perhaps enough have gathered to form a dam or bridge. We should look for such.\"\n\nGruber shrugged. Perhaps that was wishful thinking, but sending men into the raging water to drown wasn't appealing, either. He wouldn't mind if it served a higher purpose, of course, but he couldn't see how it would in this instance.\n\nFollowing the tornado's path until it stopped abruptly more than a mile later, the trio found another animal trail. A couple of hours later, they reached the gorge they remembered from only a few days before. The rain had finally slackened some, though Marie said it would come back strong again. Yet, even after as much rain as they'd had, the gully had not been filled.\n\nThat seemed moderately impossible.\n\nIndy said, \"That must be one hell of a big tunnel below to drain that much water away that fast.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, fascinating,\" Mac said. \"Let's keep moving!\"\n\nMarie shook her head. \"We cannot keep up this pace.\"\n\n\"Maybe if we cut the rope going up the slope\u2014\" Mac said.\n\n\"I can feel them behind us,\" she said. \"It didn't work at the river\u2014they draw closer as we speak. This slope won't stop them.\"\n\nIndy looked at the bottom of the trench, at the fissure that ran its length. \"I got an idea. Stay here.\"\n\nQuickly he used the rope they'd left rigged on the way in to ascend partway up the steeper side of the narrow canyon. Twenty-five... thirty feet... that ought to do it. He pulled his machete out and hacked at the fiber just below where he had grabbed it. The sharp blade severed the sisal in one stroke, and the cut piece fell and slithered down the drenched slope.\n\nSlithered, like a giant\u2014\n\nDon't even think the word, Indy . . .\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Mac yelled.\n\n\"When they see this, they'll think we went this way and then cut the rope behind us!\"\n\n\"Maybe. And maybe they split up, look for tracks, and trail us down the gully!\"\n\nIndy sheathed the machete and skidded and scuffed his way back down to where Marie and Mac stood. Indy bent, grabbed the rope, wrapped the center of it around his waist, and tied it in a square knot. He handed one end to Marie, the other to Mac.\n\n\"Link up,\" he said. \"Just like during the tornado.\"\n\n\"What good is this going to\u2014ah.\" Mac got it.\n\nMarie didn't. \"I don't understand.\"\n\n\"We can't move as fast as they can on foot. They might be able to track us on land.\"\n\n\"On land? Can you now fly? I don't\u2014oh.\"\n\nMac was already knotting the rope around his waist. \"We'll probably drown, you know. Or be dashed against the rocks at the drop to the sea like Batiste said.\"\n\n\"Maybe. But roped together, we might be able to snag something along the way and avoid the fall at the end. Or maybe the tide will be in.\"\n\n\"Rather iffy, Indy.\"\n\n\"Maybe we drown or go off the cliff, as opposed to for sure we get caught by the walking dead. If we hurry, they won't know which way we went.\"\n\nMarie nodded. \"You have a point.\" She quickly tied her end of the rope around her waist.\n\nIndy took his hat off. \"Sorry,\" he said to the hat. Then he used the awl on his pocketknife to punch a small hole in the hat and the leather sweatband. He ran a spare bootlace through the hole and tied the hat to his belt on the left side. Given all the rain, a little more water wasn't going to hurt it, and this way he had a chance of keeping it. His hat guy could fix the hole, if Indy got home again.\n\n\"Leave anything you don't want to carry while swimming,\" he said. He hoped that the wooden boxes holding the Heart of Darkness would be buoyant enough to help keep his backpack from dragging him down.\n\nMac dumped out his own backpack, put a few things into his pockets. Held up his canteen, looked at it, grinned, and dropped it. \"I doubt we'll have any trouble finding something to drink around here for a while!\"\n\nMarie shrugged out of her pack and let it fall. Indy had his gun, his whip, and his hat on his belt.\n\nTogether they edged down to a wide spot in the crack that sundered the bottom of the crevasse. \"Ready? On three. One... two... three\u2014!\"\n\nThey jumped.\n\nIndy was a strong swimmer, but the current in the huge underground river was so fast that even if he hadn't been roped to Marie and Mac, there was no way he'd be able to move against it. It wasn't huge, the river, but it was wide enough. He might make it to one side or the other, but there was no real shore as far as he could see in the dim light; it was like being in a railroad tunnel half filled with water. Nothing to climb.\n\nThere was enough of the afternoon's rainy light seeping down through the fissure above so it wasn't completely dark, though there were some stretches where the gloom was fairly thick.\n\nThe only good thing Indy could see was that the river was deep; there didn't seem to be any white water, or rapids, or rocks upon which to snag or get smashed. The sound of the river was contained by the enclosure, though, and it was too loud to hear anything but a full-out yell.\n\nHe could see Mac and Marie bobbing along with him, and both seemed to be treading water well enough to be able to breathe okay.\n\nThe river meandered, twisting into tight S-curves, then straightening for a bit before curving again. The scientist in him figured that this was due to the density of the rock; the softer material would probably have worn away faster than the harder stuff. It was easier to hollow out limestone than it was granite, but how long had this waterway been here? A million years? Ten million? No way to tell zipping along as fast as they were; they had to be going four, five miles an hour. Could be an old or mature river, given all the rain, but it was a really fast flow. There must be a fairly steep grade in the equation somewhere . . .\n\nNow and then, the rocky ceiling dropped lower, to a height of no more than a few feet. Fifteen minutes or so along, there was a gap in the wall high and to the right where a section had caved in, leaving a hole big enough to drive a truck through. The light was gray\u2014it looked like another band of showers had arrived, and Indy saw rain coming in through the collapsed wall.\n\nIf this tunnel narrowed too much, it might be like the inside of a garden hose, completely filled to the walls, and that would be bad . . .\n\nThey came to a maelstrom, water whirlpooling widdershins like a giant bathtub drain. With all three of them paddling frantically, they managed to skirt the edge, barely.\n\nThey had little choice about where they were going.\n\nWhere it narrowed, the flow moved faster; where it widened, less fast, but slow it wasn't. The ride wasn't going to last long at this speed.\n\nBobbing like three corks, they flowed along the underground waterway.\n\nAs they passed under a wide gap in the ceiling, the gray light was bright enough for Indy to notice something swimming in the water not far away, going with the current.\n\nSnakes\u2014! Two, three of them\u2014!\n\nHe cursed\u2014\n\nMac and Marie didn't seem to hear him, and if the snakes did, they didn't let on.\n\nRiding his human horse, Boukman cast around, trying to find some sign of Marie. They had not caught up with their prey, and that seemed odd. His zombis were faster, and even though they'd had to swim and climb, they should have overtaken them by now. The tornado's path had stopped when the funnel had lifted, and the going was slower after that.\n\nWhere where they?\n\nHer \u00e2me and the cord that connected it to Heaven were nowhere to be found. He frowned. Unless she was dead\u2014and there was no evidence of that\u2014then the only way she could mask it was with a spell that, by rights, she should not have the power to use.\n\nBut\u2014she had been exposed to the talisman when it had been dug up. Boukman had been there, and the same exposure, in his weakened state and inside a zombi, had nearly been the end of him. Marie was young and strong, and... what if she had absorbed some of the talisman's vast energies?\n\nHe frowned at the notion, but it was one he had to consider seriously. Any mambo or houngan could work small magicks, like watering a plant with a mist sprayer. But if they had a firehose connected to an ocean? Oh, that could be a problem. Without some skill, some practice, attempting to use any major part of that kind of energy would kill them, it would blow them apart as a giant's breath would a child's balloon. If, however, they did not try to be greedy, if they tapped but a trickle, and did it with great caution...?\n\nNo, Boukman didn't like this thought at all! The more Marie was exposed to the talisman, the greater her power would grow\u2014if she did it carefully. And she was not stupid, his great-grandniece, he had already determined that. She would know. And to resist him, she would dare to draw energy from the talisman, even though it could well be worth her life if she made a mistake.\n\nThey had to find her, and they had to do it quickly, before she grew too strong.\n\nAnother risk, but one he had to take. He removed himself from the horse and flew above the island, searching. Finding her light was the only way, and if it cost him most of what Papa Legba had given him, so be it . . .\n\nFloating high in the Other Realm, Boukman extended his senses, searching. He concentrated, narrowing his gaze, shutting out distractions. There were things in this realm that drew attention, and he could not allow them to draw his.\n\nFocus, Boukman... Find her . . .\n\nThere! There, a glimmer!\n\nBoukman forced power into his gaze, leaching it from his other senses. His hearing grew quiet. Taste, touch, smell, all faded as he reached, reached . . .\n\nYes! It was her!\n\nBut\u2014she was moving too fast, faster than she could possibly walk in the jungle and in a fairly straight line toward the northern coast . . .\n\nA river. They were in a river. They had a boat, or they swam, but that was the only explanation. The storm would flow all the waterways downhill to the sea, flooding as they went.\n\nThe Fleuve Cach\u00e9, the Hidden River\u2014he and his slaves had crossed it but a few minutes past. Yes.\n\nBoukman flew into his horse.\n\n\"Back,\" he said. \"To the Fleuve Cach\u00e9. They are in the underground waters. Go after them.\"\n\nHe felt a pain in his chest. It was not the horse's body, he knew, but his \u00e2me. It had cost him to reach out for Marie. He had to rest. He could not go after them himself, it would be dangerous. To be so close and to fail would be unthinkable.\n\nUnthinkable\u2014but he had to keep it in mind. He wasn't ready to die\u2014he had too many debts to be settled on the other side of life's gate . . ."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "The trio rounded a hairpin curve. Just ahead lay a rock sticking up in the middle of the river. It was a jagged, sharp-edged spire a good six feet higher than the water. It looked like a giant, deformed shark's fin.\n\nSo much for the notion that the water wasn't shallow.\n\nIt would not do to hit that as fast as they were going.\n\n\"Rock! Look out for the rock!\" Indy yelled.\n\nMarie and Mac looked at him, and he pointed.\n\nThey saw it.\n\n\"This way!\" Indy yelled. They needed to all be pulling in the same direction\u2014\n\nAs they drew nearer, Indy saw that Mac would be far enough to the right to clear it; he might make it, but Marie was going to have to hurry\u2014!\n\n\"Come on!\" he called, trying to tow her along faster\u2014\n\nA swirl in the water in front of him startled Indy. Was it the snakes? He hadn't seen them in a while\u2014he stopped swimming, just for a heartbeat or two, then realized they were almost at the spire\u2014\n\nIndy, following Mac, was swept past the rock on the right, barely clearing it.\n\nMarie was on the left side. She missed colliding with it, thank God, but the rope hit, caught, and Indy felt himself moving toward the back of the rock, which was a good nine feet long. The rope pivoted him inward\u2014\n\n\u2014until the rope parted!\n\nHe saw the cut end of the line pop into the air as the water swirled him past the impediment\u2014\n\n\"Marie\u2014!\"\n\n\"I'm here!\" she yelled. \"I'm okay!\"\n\nHe saw her, slightly behind him and ten feet away. The rope had been sliced apart, but she was okay. They would have to swim toward each other and tie the rope together, but they were okay.\n\n\"Indy! Look out!\"\n\nIndy turned and saw what Mac was hollering about\u2014\n\nThat rock spire was obviously part a formation. Ahead and to the center of the river was a frothing, foamy patch of white water. Something had to be close to the surface to cause it.\n\nThey didn't want to hit that. Aside from banging into whatever sharp rocks might be hidden just under the water, there was a chance of snagging a foot or leg and being shoved under to drown.\n\nIndy started swimming hard toward Mac.\n\nMarie went in the other direction.\n\nIt was close, but Indy managed to stay in the deeper water. The foam boiled up and blocked his view of Marie, and when he was past the white water\u2014\n\nMarie was gone!\n\n\"My men cannot find a trail,\" Gruber said.\n\n\"Nor mine,\" Yamada said.\n\nThey had followed along the path of the tornado, but the path ended and there were no signs of which way their quarry might have gone, if they had come this way at all.\n\nThe rain was not a complete deluge, but steady, and the wind still gusted enough to knock down trees and men alike.\n\nThis was hopeless, Gruber realized. Like trying to find a particular grain of sand in a bucket. A very wet and rocking bucket, at that.\n\n\"We should return to the village,\" Yamada said, echoing Gruber's unspoken thoughts. \"If we move quickly, we can get there ahead of them.\"\n\nGruber nodded. Yes. His soldiers were excellent in the field, they could move faster than civilians, and he had to assume that Yamada's men were of like expertise. They could plot a course, they had compasses and would not need landmarks nor the sun to do so. \"Let us move with all due speed,\" he said.\n\nCatch them in the jungle, catch them at the village, it was the same either way, and since they didn't know where they were but did know where they were going, that was the most reasonable choice to be made here. It was not the way he would have chosen, but things had changed since they'd arrived here.\n\nSlogging through a jungle during a hurricane wasn't going to be the easiest of hikes, but there was no choice.\n\nThe need for a physical body kept Boukman from getting ahead of Marie and her imen blan. Without a horse, he could not ride, and none of his slaves was in position. Even if he could take over or send somebody who might be able to motor to the end of the river to intercept them, it would do no good. On a sunny, calm day, a fast boat might make it the length of the island in time.\n\nIt was not a sunny, calm day. No small boat would be safe offshore in a hurricane. He would have to hope that his zombis could catch up to them. Some things, no man could manage; it was up to the gods to decide.\n\nIndy felt a surge of panic\u2014and then a rush of relief\u2014there she was! Marie had been swept toward the left side of the river, and was farther back than he expected.\n\n\"Marie! Are you okay?\"\n\nShe didn't answer, and she seemed to be in trouble. As he watched, her head went under.\n\n\"Marie!\"\n\nAfter a second, he saw her bob back up to the surface. She was struggling, but still treading water. Had she hit the side of that spire? Or a rock he hadn't seen?\n\nThe river took another turn, and the light grew stronger.\n\nIndy looked around. There was another big hole in the wall and roof ahead, and enough of the rubble from that collapse had spilled into the river to make a ragged ramp that offered a way out of the pipe.\n\nMarie was closer to it, but Indy couldn't tell if she saw that.\n\n\"Mac! This way!\"\n\nIndy put his face down and began to swim toward the opening. The rope connecting him to Mac went taut, then slackened a bit as Mac started paddling. If they could reach the shore made by the cave-in, they could climb up and out.\n\nThe drag of the backpack and his hat didn't help. He was working hard, but not moving very fast.\n\nIndy lifted his face from the water to breathe and saw that Marie was approaching the pile of rock and earth that projected from the tunnel wall into the river\u2014yes, go for it!\n\nThe next time he came up for air, he saw that Marie was on the rocks, scrabbling from the water.\n\nBut the current was pulling Indy and Mac along very fast.\n\nIndy dug in, swimming for all he was worth. For a second, he thought about jettisoning the backpack, but he would lose more time stopping to do that than he gained\u2014\n\nMac couldn't keep up. The rope went taut again, slowing Indy's crawl stroke even more.\n\nMarie, meanwhile, had gotten clear of the water, but had collapsed facedown on the bottom of the rubble pile. At least she wasn't going to drown\u2014\n\nThe water's grip was too strong. As hard as he could paddle and kick, Indy realized that they weren't going to reach the finger of rock and dirt that stuck out into the water\u2014\n\nThey swept past, missing by ten feet.\n\nTrying to swim against the current was useless. After a few seconds, he gave it up.\n\nThe river carried them away from Marie. In a few seconds they reached another bend, and she was gone.\n\nAnother bend past that, and the noise inside the stone pipe grew louder, the river narrowed, and they began to speed up.\n\n\"This can't be good,\" Indy said.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nIndy shook his head.\n\nMac had managed to get closer to Indy, they were almost touching, but even so he had to yell loudly for Indy to hear him.\n\n\"I think we are coming to the end of the ride!\"\n\n\"Way ahead of you, pal!\"\n\nA spray, fine and misty, filled the air. Another bad sign\u2014that meant water was probably hitting something solid hard. There weren't any more rocks, no banks to climb onto, nothing to stop them that Indy could see.\n\nThe noise got louder. The mist thickened. The river flowed even faster\u2014\n\n\u2014the ceiling ended. There was enough light to see pretty well now, and the river ahead of them\u2014well. A hundred yards away, there wasn't any river ahead of them, there was only gray sky and the whitecaps of a storm-stirred sea.\n\nUh-oh.\n\nIndy looked at Mac.\n\n\"Good luck, Jonesy\u2014\"\n\n\"Yeah, you, too\u2014\"\n\nAt home in his own body, inside a low structure built to withstand the winds of a major storm, Boukman rested. He was not asleep, but he was not altogether awake, either. He was hoping for a sign. Something that would offer the proper direction for him to take.\n\nOutside, the hurricane raged."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "In the dream, boukman heard something that he had never heard before. A voice, deep, melodious, and what it said was one word:\n\n\"Horse.\"\n\nBoukman awoke and sat up. The storm was passing\u2014even through the walls, he could feel that the winds, though still howling, were weaker. Usually that was the way of them. The wind and rain would be fierce, and then the hurricane would pass by\u2014a day, sometimes only a few hours, and the rain would be less, the wind dying down. Another day hence, and there might come a cloudless sky under a blazing sun, and save for the destruction and flood left behind, you would not know the storm had come at all\u2014the sky would hold no memory of it.\n\nHorse. What did that mean? Was he to offer himself to a rider? Or did he need to return to one of his mounts?\n\nHe could throw the bones. Or he could smoke the magic smoke. Either might give him more clarity.\n\nOr he could just listen to his own inner voice. Ride? Or be ridden?\n\nRide, came the voice inside his head.\n\nHe took a deep breath. It would need most of the strength he had borrowed from Papa Legba to send his \u00e2me forth yet again. But a bokor who failed to heed his intuition usually regretted it.\n\nBoukman gathered himself.\n\nIndy looked around frantically for something\u2014anything\u2014that he might grab. Anything that he might reach with his whip\u2014\n\nBut there was nothing\u2014\n\nAnd a moment later they were falling\u2014\n\nBoukman felt his zombis and potioned ones below him. They were in the river, floating along. He aimed himself at the strongest of the potioned risen\u2014\n\n\u2014and was swimming, treading water, actually, carried along by the river. He didn't see any reason to be here\u2014\n\n\u2014and then he did.\n\nAhead, lying on a pile of rocks and earth to the left side of the rushing river, was a figure dressed in khaki. She was lying sprawled on her face.\n\nMarie.\n\nBoukman's horse grinned for him. He didn't see the imen blan, but there was Marie, waiting to be collected. If she was alive, that was good. If not, he would bring her back and use her that way. Dead or alive, she would serve.\n\nBoukman aimed his horse at the shore.\n\nA minute later, he climbed from the river, as did four of his other slaves, two of them True Risen, two potioned ones. The others? Well, no matter.\n\nMarie coughed and spewed up water.\n\nBoukman laughed. Alive and warm was much the better.\n\nThe imen blan would not have climbed up and left her here, and the rope around her waist with the frayed end told him the story. They had come down linked, but the rope had been severed. The men must still be in the river, heading toward the cataract at the sea, a kilometer or so away.\n\n\"Go and find the imen blan,\" he said to the zombis. \"Tell them I have Marie. If they want her to live, tell them to follow you. Bring them to the clearing at the sisal plantation. Go!\"\n\nMarie coughed again and managed to push herself up onto one elbow. She looked around, and saw Boukman's horse squatting next to her. Saw the zombis jump back into the water.\n\nShe looked at the horse.\n\n\"Boukman.\"\n\n\"In the flesh\u2014though not my own,\" he said. He laughed. \"Come, petite Marie. We will go for a walk in the rain together, you and I. If your friends are alive, they will join us eventually.\"\n\nHe saw her reach for a rock as big as her fist.\n\n\"Don't make me hurt you, little one. I can kill you and bring you back if I need to, you know.\"\n\nShe let the rock fall.\n\nHe laughed again.\n\nIndy's life didn't flash before his eyes. The many times when he'd thought he was about to die, that had never happened, but the weightlessness he felt as he fell, surrounded by the falling water, seemed to last for a long time. Months, years, eons . . .\n\nHe couldn't see much, but he opened his eyes wide. He wanted to see the rock he smashed into\u2014\n\nSploosh!\n\nIndy felt himself hit not rock, but water. He sank deep, ten or twelve feet, and stopped, then started to float upward.\n\nThe tide, apparently, was in.\n\nAs soon as he broke the surface and got a breath, he yelled, a wordless cry of victory.\n\nA second later Mac popped up next to him, still connected by the rope. Grinning like a hyena he began to laugh.\n\n\"We bloody well made it in one piece!\"\n\nBut the sea was roiling, wind and rain and river, falling into it, and they weren't home safe yet. They started swimming aslant to the froth from the falling river, aiming for a shore that didn't seem all that far away. Even so, it took them five minutes to make it.\n\nThe beach was more rock than sand, and not the most hospitable place in the rain and wind, with the breakers spewing foam, but it was, by God, better than drowning or being smashed on the rocks.\n\n\"This,\" Indy said, when he managed to catch a breath, \"is getting old, this swimming stuff.\"\n\n\"I hear that,\" Mac said. \"I wonder if my cigarettes stayed dry?\"\n\n\"The storm seems to be decreasing in intensity, don't you think?\" Gruber asked.\n\nYamada nodded. \"Yes.\" He was actually thinking about his scrolls and letters to his wife, back in the abandoned tent. Doubtlessly blown down and carried to who-knew-where by now. A shame.\n\n\"Make the going a little easier,\" Gruber said.\n\nFor our quarry, too, Yamada thought, but there was no need to say that aloud. Gruber knew. They were going around the thickest brush when they could, cutting through when they couldn't. The scouts would find animal trails and they'd follow those until it looked as if they would go the wrong way, then they'd strike out in the woods again. It was hard travel, but they were making progress in the right general direction. It was the best they could do.\n\nYamada entertained a small fantasy: Someday he would come back here with his grandchildren, and they would go on a hunt for the lost tent and the treasures it held, to prove that the stories he had told them were true. That, fetched up under a fallen tree that protected it from the rain and wind and harsh sun, they would find the rotting canvas, and inside, wrapped in the oilcloth, would be his scrolls. How delighted the grandchildren would be to see them!\n\nYamada smiled to himself. A small fantasy, but that was all it was. The tent could have been snatched up by a tornado and shredded to bits, or blown all the way to the sea by now, to make a home for the fish a hundred fathoms down. And he would never inflict this place on his grandchildren. Maybe if it was made civilized, the trees cut down, roads laid, it would be a spot they could visit and peer at from behind the window of an automobile. Why, Grandfather, this is not an awful jungle like you used to tell us about! It's not so bad at all!\n\nAh, he would say in his old man's voice, but you should have seen it fifty years ago . . ."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "Indy and mac were looking for a way to climb the rotten rock of the cliff, which was an easy hundred feet almost straight up, when something made Indy turn around and look at the sea.\n\nIt was not calm. The rain had slackened, the wind was noticeably less strong, and the tide, while still sending breakers close enough to splash over their feet now and then, seemed to be ebbing.\n\nA man was wading ashore.\n\nIndy knew it wasn't an ordinary man, and he reached for his revolver, unsnapping the sodden leather flap of his holster. He had the gun out and was bringing it up when the man raised one hand and held it palm-out in a Stop! gesture.\n\nMac was fishing for his own pistol. \"Shoot him, Indy! My bloody gun is caught on something\u2014!\"\n\nIn French, the man called out, \"Don't!\"\n\nHe was big and heavy, the speaker. Must go 250, 260 pounds, Indy figured.\n\nIndy brought the gun up and aimed at the man's head\u2014\n\n\"Boukman says you must follow me.\"\n\n\"Like hell I will.\" He started to squeeze the trigger . . .\n\n\"He has Marie. Come to him, or she dies.\"\n\nIndy eased up on the trigger.\n\nThe rain had stopped, though water still dripped from the trees enough so it didn't seem all that much of an improvement. The wind still gusted hard now and then, but was definitely dwindling, Gruber thought.\n\nAs they curved around a hairpin turning in the animal trail upon which they had been traveling for the last half an hour, Gruber heard several things in quick succession: a yell\u2014in Japanese\u2014some squealing and grunting, and two shots.\n\nHe pulled his Luger\u2014\n\nNext to him, Yamada drew that long sword of his and gripped the handle in both hands\u2014\n\nHe felt the ground vibrating, heard more of the grunting, getting louder\u2014\n\n\"Off the trail!\" one of the Japanese soldiers yelled.\n\nYamada and his captain leaped into the brush to the right, and Gruber did the same to his left, along with his remaining man.\n\nA moment later a herd of pigs came into view, slogging and splashing through the mud and puddles on the trail, heading in their direction. There were twelve or fifteen of them, the biggest of them waist-high and probably 150 kilograms.\n\nThe pigs thundered past, never slowing.\n\nOnce they were gone, the men worked their way out of the brush. Gruber had gotten a nasty scratch from a branch on his left arm, it was bleeding freely, but otherwise he was uninjured.\n\nAhead on the trail, Gruber's outwalker was down, being attended to by the Japanese scout. Gruber and Yamada both hurried to the fallen man.\n\nThere was a pig nearby, a bristly hog heavier than a man, shot dead.\n\nAs Gruber examined the fallen soldier, the Japanese scout gave a report to Yamada. Gruber caught parts of it, but it was obvious what had happened. They had come across the herd of pigs, which had been sheltering under a toppled tree whose crown had provided respite from the weather. The ground was all trodden down and muddy, a wallow. The animals had been startled. They had charged, the men had shot, but the fallen man had been knocked down and trampled. He was barely conscious, in pain, and a quick examination revealed broken ribs, what was likely a punctured lung, and almost certainly internal bleeding. They were a long way from an operating room or anybody skilled enough to save him.\n\nThe German soldiers all carried first-aid kits, bandages, and drugs that might be necessary on a battlefield.\n\n\"Give him a morphine injection,\" Gruber said to his last remaining soldier. \"Four grains.\"\n\nThe soldier blinked. \"Four grains? But, Doctor\u2014\"\n\n\"Do as I say!\"\n\nGruber stood and gave Yamada a quick jerk of his his head.\n\nThe two doctors moved away.\n\nYamada said, \"He needs major surgery.\"\n\n\"Yes. And he'll be dead long before we can carry him that far.\"\n\nYamada nodded. \"Four grains, yes.\"\n\nWith that much, the man's breathing would slow and eventually stop. It would be a painless death. He would simply go to sleep and never wake up. Regrettable, but under the circumstances Gruber could see no option. Trying to carry the injured soldier would require making a litter, and the use of such a thing in the jungle where trails were narrow or nonexistent? For a man who, at best, would survive a few more hours? No.\n\nGruber moved back to the downed man. Already the morphine was starting to take effect. \"Hurst,\" Gruber said. \"Can you hear me?\"\n\n\"Jah, Colonel.\"\n\n\"We are going to knock you out, to keep you from feeling the pain when we move you. When you wake up, you will be in a better place, do you understand?\"\n\n\"Jawohl, Herr Doktor. I understand.\"\n\n\"You're a good man, Hurst.\"\n\nThe man closed his eyes.\n\nAfter another minute, Gruber said, \"Move him off the trail.\"\n\nGruber's soldier and one of the Japanese men did so.\n\nYamada nodded at Gruber. \"War forces us to make hard choices, Doctor,\" he said.\n\nGruber nodded. \"It does.\" He was down to one man and himself now. Not looking good, but it was what it was.\n\nThey moved out.\n\nTo the man, whatever was left of him in there, Indy said, \"I hope you know another way to get up this cliff, because if we fall and die, Boukman probably won't be real happy with you.\"\n\nThe big man, who wore only a pair of ragged green pants, appeared to be about forty, with long and tangled black hair and dull brown eyes. He said, \"Wait.\"\n\nIndy and Mac exchanged glances. \"For what?\"\n\n\"Wait.\" He looked out into the still-roiling sea.\n\nIndy looked that way, too. Nothing to see but waves and\u2014\n\nHold on a second\u2014\n\nThere was a dark spot on the surface of the water, a hundred yards out. It looked like a coconut or somesuch floating there, but as Indy watched, it rose from the water, and attached to it was, was\u2014it took a couple of seconds for it to register.\n\nIt was a man. Walking toward the shore, his head and shoulders rising from the water as it got shallower.\n\nWhen the water was only waist-deep on the figure, Indy saw that he was carrying a large rock clasped to his belly, the size of a suitcase; it must have weighed a hundred pounds or more.\n\nIndy looked at Mac, who got it at the same time. \"Ballast,\" Indy said. \"So he doesn't float away. Amazing. He's using the rock so he can walk on the bottom.\"\n\nA moment later, a second figure began to rise from the sea.\n\nIf there had been any doubt before that they were dealing with living humans, this would have erased it.\n\nAnother couple of minutes, and the two zombis arrived on the shore. They dropped the rocks they were carrying and stood still and silent, looking at the one who had spoken to Indy and Mac.\n\n\"We must climb up,\" Green Pants said to the zombis. \"Make us a way.\"\n\nAs they watched, the first zombi\u2014a man who had probably been in his twenties when alive, dressed in a blue jacket and cutoff shorts\u2014picked up another stone, this one the size of a softball and pointed on one end. He walked to the cliff, reached up to eye level with the hand holding the stone, and began to hammer at the porous and friable rock face. With four or five strikes, he gouged out a depression deep enough to stick a foot into. He reached higher, and chipped out another hole. He climbed up the rock, put his left foot in the first hole, his right in the other, and hammered away at a third spot.\n\n\"My Lord,\" Mac said. \"He's making a stairway. Handholds and footholds!\"\n\nThe zombi was fifty feet up, just a little under halfway, when one of the hand-or footholds crumbled under his weight, and he fell.\n\nHe felt straight backward, landing on a pile of rocks with a sound that made Indy want to heave his long-past breakfast.\n\nAfter a moment, the fallen zombi got up. He seemed... crooked, somehow, as if something in his spine or hip had broken, but he went back to the rock face and began to climb. When he reached the spot where he had fallen, he chipped out another depression to replace the crumbled one.\n\nHe continued his task, climbing higher.\n\nHe was eighty feet up the second time he fell, only this time he landed head-down. His skull split open on the rocks, and he didn't move.\n\nAfter a few seconds, Green Pants nodded at the second zombi, who picked up his fallen comrade's pointed stone and ascended the rock wall. In a few minutes, he was at the top. He clambered over and out of sight.\n\nGreen Pants said, \"I will go. I am heavy. If I do not fall, it will be safe for you.\"\n\nWith that, he began to climb.\n\nIndy and Mac looked at each other. \"Don't say it,\" Mac said.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"That this can't be good.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Well. Long as you know.\"\n\nIndy began to climb.\n\nThere came a scream, the sound of branches breaking, and Yamada's sword was in his hand without conscious thought. He and Suzuki were first to round the curve in the trail\u2014\n\nA big tree, weakened by the storm, had fallen. Yamada's scout was pinned to the ground by it; actually, smashed to the ground would be a better term. He was dead\u2014Yamada could see that ten meters away.\n\nSo. Two Germans, Gruber and one soldier; and three of the Empire's force\u2014Suzuki, one soldier, and himself\u2014remained out of a score of men sent to collect the formula. Which they had thus far failed to do. Worse, they had lost contact with the men who had the item, and their only hope was to try to head them off before they left this hellish island. A smart gambler would not risk much on their chances, Yamada knew. Of course, a samurai would take such a wager, for he would know the determination to succeed that Yamada felt. And that failure was simply not an option, as long as Yamada had one breath left in his body.\n\nA quick examination confirmed what they already knew.\n\n\"He was a good soldier,\" Yamada said, rising from his squat next to the dead man. \"He did his duty.\"\n\nThat was as good an epitaph as a man needed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "Late in the afternoon, they had to take a break, and Gruber and Suzuki took the watch so that the others could try and catch a bit of sleep. Even though the rain had stopped and the wind died down, that would be difficult, given the sodden ground, but the conditions were what they were, nothing to be done for it.\n\nGruber considered his next action. He had been thinking about it for a while, and it seemed to be a good idea every time he examined it. Yes. Do it.\n\n\"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?\" he said to Suzuki.\n\nThe Japanese shook his head.\n\n\"Speak English?\"\n\nAnother negative shake. Apparently not.\n\nWell, it would have to be Nihongo, then. Not the best, but he could make himself understood, he had a fair grasp of the language. In slow Japanese, he said, \"What part of Japan are you from?\"\n\nSuzuki's eyes widened a hair. He was surprised that Gruber spoke his language, but after that initial clue he hid it well. \"Tokyo.\"\n\nGruber nodded and smiled. \"Family?\"\n\n\"A wife, no children yet. My father and mother and grandmother. A brother, two sisters.\"\n\nGruber nodded again. \"I hope the conflict has not been bad for them.\"\n\nSuzuki shrugged. War was war, the gesture seemed to say.\n\n\"It will not last forever. What will you do after?\"\n\nAnother shrug. \"Who can say? Probably stay in the army.\"\n\n\"Pardon me for being impolite, but is your family well-off?\"\n\nSuzuki didn't understand the question. \"Well-off?\"\n\n\"Wealthy?\"\n\nSuzuki chuckled. \"Wealthy? Ah, no. Soldier's pay.\"\n\nHere came the moment of choice. Up until now, it was just idle, if nosy, conversation. \"Would you like to be? Wealthy?\"\n\n\"No chance of that.\"\n\n\"What if there was? A chance, I mean.\"\n\nSuzuki, who had been mostly avoiding eye contact, looked directly at Gruber.\n\n\"Fortunes are lost during war,\" Gruber said. \"But also gained. Some become poor. Some become rich. A man who\u2014\" He faltered, trying to think of the words he needed. \"\u2014was in the right place at the right time might come into money, hai?\"\n\nSuzuki gave him a small nod. \"Stranger things have happened, I suppose.\"\n\n\"The Reich has earmarked a certain amount of funding for . . .\" What was the word? \". . . guzen no koto.\"\n\n\"And what contingency are we talking about?\"\n\nGruber took a deep breath. \"Helping the Reich's agents to accomplish certain goals.\"\n\n\"By which you mean yourself?\"\n\n\"Hai.\"\n\n\"And what would this help require?\"\n\n\"Not much, really. More of an... inaction on your part than anything you would need to do.\"\n\n\"An inaction.\"\n\n\"Yes. Perhaps if you heard a certain noise, saw something in the jungle, you might ignore it.\"\n\n\"Look the other way.\"\n\n\"Precisely.\"\n\n\"I see. And how much would such... inaction be worth to the Reich, exactly?\"\n\nWhat was the value of the yen to a Deutschmark or British pound these days? Twenty-to-one for the pound? Four or five yen to an American dollar? Well, it didn't really matter, did it? \"Five million yen.\"\n\nSuzuki didn't blink. \"That much. That would make a man most wealthy in my country.\"\n\n\"The Reich values its friends.\"\n\n\"So you say. But by my... inaction, might I not be found derelict in my duty to the empire?\"\n\n\"Not if the empire did not know. I would not tell them.\"\n\nThe unspoken inference here was that anybody who might make such a report could... have an accident and be unable to do so.\n\n\"Ah. I see.\"\n\n\"Think on the matter,\" Gruber said. \"We could speak of it again later.\"\n\n\"Yes. We could.\"\n\nAfter the others roused themselves, it was Gruber's turn to try to rest a bit. He didn't think he'd be able to sleep, but he did smile as he closed his eyes. If he had Suzuki figured correctly, the man wouldn't be able to wait to lay out his conversation with Gruber to Yamada. That the stupid Kraut would think he could bribe an imperial Japanese officer, for any amount? The European savages had no concept of honor whatsoever! But as it happened, Gruber did know a bit about that, having learned it with the language, and he was, he hoped, using it to his advantage.\n\nWhatever Suzuki said? He couldn't be trusted. He was a dead man, sooner or later; however, if he believed that he could gull Gruber into thinking they were allies, even for a few hours, it might lull the Japanese into a false sense of confidence. It might provide Gruber with an opportunity to strike when least expected. There were just two of them now, and three of the Nipponese. The time was not ripe, but it would be eventually. And any advantage he could get, he wanted . . .\n\n\"Yamada-san,\" Suzuki said. \"A few words in private?\"\n\nYamada nodded. \"There, by the fallen tree. We will not be overheard.\"\n\nThe two men edged that way.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"The German colonel speaks passable Japanese.\"\n\n\"I suspected such. And...?\"\n\n\"He has offered me a bribe to aid him.\"\n\n\"Really? How much?\"\n\n\"Five million yen.\"\n\n\"Ah. He thinks your honor worth that much?\"\n\n\"That little,\" Suzuki said. He spat on the wet ground.\n\nYamada smiled. \"This is useful information, Suzuki-san. It would serve us to have Gruber believe that you will enter into such a bargain, hai?\"\n\nSuzuki nodded. \"Hai. If he believes that I have become his agent, it could be to our advantage. He might turn his back at the right moment.\"\n\nYamada nodded. \"For now, there are but five of us, and we might need every man to survive and win our goal. A man chased by wolves might need to run with dogs. After we obtain our object, the Germans will no longer be our allies here on this island, nor do we need to treat them as such.\"\n\n\"I understand.\"\n\n\"Contrive to speak to him again on the trek. Let him think your greed is stronger than your sense of duty. We will show him that the Japanese know how to deal with treachery . . .\"\n\nBoth men grinned.\n\nBoukman waited. Victory was almost his. He had Marie\u2014she was on the way\u2014and with her, the key to the imen blan. They valued women, the whites did. They would not let her come to harm if they could help it.\n\nVictory was almost his. He could almost taste it.\n\nGreen Pants was thirty feet ahead of them, wending his way through the forest. The zombi was behind them. It had gotten its foot caught in a fallen branch a way back and broken its ankle. It was continuing to walk, but the foot was crooked and its progress had been slowed. It was falling farther behind as they went.\n\n\"We have to hide the artifact,\" Mac whispered.\n\n\"He's got Marie,\" Indy said. \"It's what he wants.\"\n\n\"Yes. And if we march right into his hands, he'll have what he wants and no reason to let her\u2014or us\u2014go.\"\n\nIndy considered that. Yes. Mac was right. They needed something with which to bargain. If they hid the wooden box with the pearl somewhere that only they could find it, maybe they could get Boukman to release Marie to learn where the treasure was. There was a chance that way.\n\nOf course, he could try to torture it out of them, which wasn't a particularly pleasant thought; still, just handing it over to the voodoo man and trusting to his sense of fairness didn't seem like a particularly wise idea. They already knew he was ruthless enough to have men killed. Two more wouldn't bother him.\n\nAt some point, they would have to slip away from Green Pants and the crippled zombi trailing them and find a spot to hide the box. That might be tricky.\n\nIndy whispered as much to Mac.\n\n\"Don't worry about that\u2014I have a plan,\" Mac said.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Well\u2014\" He stopped. Ahead of them, Green Pants had come to a halt, waiting for them to catch up. \"Later,\" Mac said.\n\nThe two of them moved on, stepping over fallen trees, skirting puddles that were probably hip-deep. Now and then, something would scuttle across the animal trail, small creatures still trying to deal with the aftermath of the hurricane. Indy saw a long green snake slithering past once.\n\nSnakes!\n\nIndy had been offered teaching fellowships across the length of his career, from various universities around the world. He was considering the idea of taking a couple of these: one in New Zealand, the other in Ireland. The two countries had some things in common. They mostly spoke English, which would make teaching easy. But, more importantly, there were no snakes in either country. None. Not even itty-bitty garter snakes.\n\nWouldn't that be nice for a change? A stroll down any garden path in Dublin or Auckland, a trek through the countryside in either place, and not a chance of seeing one of the legless reptiles?\n\nIt was the kind of thought that made a man want to smile. This man, anyway.\n\nOne thing at a time, Indy. One thing at a time . . ."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "As suzuki dropped back, gruber smiled to himself. The man had taken the bait. If he was truly willing to sell out for the chance at becoming rich, or if he was simply trying to string the fool German along, either was to Gruber's advantage. The way to defeat an enemy was to outmaneuver him, to have him dancing to your tune, reacting rather than initiating. The Japanese code of conduct, as Gruber understood it, allowed a man to stab an enemy in the back\u2014treachery was considered both valid and useful. He could expect no less from them, and he had to assume that they would expect the same from him. Well and good\u2014it had bought him an advantage. The Japanese would think it was theirs, and that was an error. He was a step ahead of them, and if he could maintain it, he would prevail.\n\nYamada thought of his home in Nagasaki, of his family, and was content in the knowledge that whatever happened to him, at least they would be safe there.\n\nGruber's overture to Suzuki was unexpected, but not really that much of a surprise. The Germans used everything at hand to ensure their victories, and when you could print money? Such an offer as he had made was cheap. Not, Yamada knew, that the man would keep his end of the bargain even if Suzuki had agreed and meant it. If\u2014no, when\u2014they collected the box the American and Englishman had, Gruber would take his first opportunity to rid himself of his allies. Knowing this gave Yamada the advantage. He would be alert, and he would strike first.\n\nThe day wound down, but they were making good progress, moving west and north much faster than they had on the eastward trek. The island was not that large. They had come a fair distance, and with fewer men and supplies, and no need to keep hidden from the prey they had been following, it was likely they would arrive back at their starting place in mere hours\u2014\n\nThe sound of three gunshots echoed through the jungle. Small caliber, he guessed, or a long way off. What did it mean\u2014?\n\n\"Somebody's shooting,\" Gruber said unnecessarily.\n\n\"Hai. Best we see who. And why.\"\n\nMac and Indy were working their way around a swampy area with Green Pants. \"Much farther?\" Mac asked him.\n\n\"No. We are not far from the plantation. There by dark.\"\n\n\"Where is your friend, I wonder?\" Mac said. Referring to the zombi.\n\nGreen Pants shrugged. \"No matter,\" he said. \"He is not needed.\"\n\n\"Right,\" Mac said. \"Say, what's that there, in the trees to the left?\"\n\nGreen Pants looked. \"Where?\"\n\nMac pulled his pistol from his pocket and shot Green Pants in the head. Three times\u2014\n\n\"Whoa!\" Indy said, as the chemically made zombi collapsed.\n\n\"See. Not so tricky as all that,\" Mac said. \"Shall we find a place to hide our artifacts?\"\n\n\"That was your plan? Jesus, Mac\u2014\"\n\n\"Them or us, Indy, and they have Marie.\"\n\nIndy blew out a sigh. \"Yeah. We better hurry before the other one gets here.\"\n\nMac, adding more cartridges to the partially emptied magazine for his pistol, smiled. \"Oh, I don't think that is going to be tricky, either.\" He held the pistol up and pressed the magazine into the butt. \"I've got plenty of ammunition left.\"\n\nYamada's scout returned to where the four of them waited. He was excited. \"Yamada-san! The English and American! They are here! Alone!\"\n\nYamada glanced at Gruber. There was no need to translate, he knew, but he continued the fiction. \"Our quarry is not far. Just the Englishman and American, it seems.\"\n\nFive to two. Good odds, and not likely to get any better.\n\n\"Let us go and catch them,\" Yamada said.\n\nThey moved out.\n\nBoukman walked into the clearing. Darkness was near, and he ordered the torches lit. Around this part of the sisal plantation was a ring of makeshift torches, made of coffee cans nailed to posts. Each can held a roll of toilet paper drenched in kerosene. They put out a fair amount of light when there were thirty or so of them flaming at once. Plenty enough to see what he needed to see.\n\nAnd that was Marie, being led into the clearing by his slave.\n\nThere were a dozen True Risen here now, and twice that many potioned ones\u2014Boukman had expended most of his power to raise the dead, and had borrowed a few villagers for the others. They would be but a small number compared with those he would have once he obtained the talisman. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, more. The power was coming to him.\n\n\"Ah, petite Marie. At last we see each other face-to-face.\"\n\nShe spat on the ground at his feet.\n\nBoukman laughed. Oh, he enjoyed her. Too bad.\n\n\"Just like your mother,\" he said.\n\n\"Do not speak of her!\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Why not? She is dead and I allowed her to stay that way. You should be grateful for that much.\"\n\nThat got her attention. \"You... killed my mother?\"\n\n\"She was becoming dangerous. Just as you are.\"\n\nShe struggled, but his slaves had her.\n\nToo bad, for what he had to do to her would not be pleasant for her. Boukman knew that a man was not granted such as the talisman without payment. And that the loa or the gods\u2014surely Maldye, for the good would not allow such a thing among men\u2014would demand more from him than the sacrifice of a few chickens or a goat. No, they would want human blood. More, they would want some kind of power in exchange. A houngan or a mambo might be enough, along with a handful of less talented folk. A few Europeans, some of the Japanese, and the Englishman and American would probably be sufficient. If not, then Boukman would slay the entire village on this island, if need be. Whatever it took for him to deserve the talisman, and to bend it to his will.\n\nMarie would open the door, though. She would have to be first. Once he had the talisman in his hands. And that should be soon.\n\n\"Tie her,\" Boukman said. \"Put her there.\"\n\nThe True Risen shuffled her forward. She struggled, to no avail. In a few moments she was bound, trussed up, waiting for whatever Boukman would do next.\n\n\"What are they doing?\" Gruber asked, his voice a whisper.\n\n\"Putting something into that hollow log,\" Yamada said.\n\nGruber felt his heart beating with excitement. The treasure! What else could it be? \"We should shoot them.\"\n\n\"No,\" Yamada said. \"The sound might bring others. Our number is small. Better to see what they are hiding first. If we must shoot them, we can do it anytime. Alive, dead, they do not matter.\"\n\nGruber nodded. Yes. Yamada had a point.\n\n\"Look,\" Yamada said, \"they are leaving.\"\n\nThe two men moved out of sight.\n\nThe Germans and Japanese waited for a couple of minutes, to make sure they weren't coming back. Then they headed for the hollow log.\n\nHalfway there, something limped out of the jungle\u2014\n\nIt lunged at Suzuki\u2014\n\nThe Japanese pulled his sword, but the thing fell upon him and sank its teeth into his throat, ripping and tearing like a mad dog\u2014\n\nThe other Japanese soldier raised his rifle\u2014\n\n\"Don't shoot!\" Yamada said. He pulled his sword\u2014it just appeared in his hand\u2014and he ran three steps and slashed down, catching the thing behind the head, across the neck\u2014\n\nThe thing collapsed\u2014\n\nYamada stuck his sword into the ground and bent, rolled the beheaded thing off his officer, but\u2014\n\nSuzuki's throat was gone, a ragged, pulsing wound, blood pooling everywhere\u2014\n\n\"Suzuki\u2014!\"\n\nThe downed man could not speak, managing only a gurgle.\n\nHe was done, Gruber could see that.\n\nYamada could, too. He reached for his sword, pulled it free of the earth. Lifted it. Brought it down\u2014\n\nGruber watched, fascinated.\n\nYamada raised his sword. Slung blood from the blade.\n\nNobody spoke. And now they were four. Alas, poor Suzuki. Gruber didn't need his fake bribe anymore. Wasted effort now.\n\n\"Hard choices,\" Gruber said, after a long moment.\n\nYamada nodded. \"Hai.\"\n\nBut in the end, it did not matter, for the artifact they had come to collect was inside a backpack stuffed into the hollow log.\n\nAt last!\n\nThere was a moment when it might have been dicey, but Gruber nodded at Yamada: \"Your man can carry it, if it makes you feel better.\"\n\nYamada nodded in return. \"Or yours. We are allies, hai? What does it matter who holds the prize?\"\n\n\"Shall we have a look?\"\n\nYamada nodded again. He told his man to remove the box from the pack, and in a moment it was done. Inside, a wooden jar. And inside that\u2014a large black pearl, wrapped in silk.\n\nThe men looked at the pearl. Very nice, worth a fortune, and nothing to sniff at, but it wasn't the important thing. The runes carved into the boxes\u2014those were the real treasure here. The formula for the chemical Herr Hitler had sent him to find.\n\nGruber couldn't decipher them, of course, but there were experts in the Reich who could. All he had to do was deliver these boxes. Maybe he would keep the pearl for himself. Captain Doktor Edwin von Gruber, and richer than Croesus . . .\n\nThe Japanese soldier rewrapped the pearl, stuck it into the jar, and put that back into the box and into the pack. He shouldered it.\n\n\"We should get off this damn island as soon as we can,\" Gruber said.\n\n\"Hai.\"\n\nThey started off, Gruber and his man taking the lead. In a quick and quiet whisper, Gruber said, \"Don't lose sight of that backpack, on your life.\"\n\n\"Jawohl, Colonel.\"\n\nIn the jungle, they were still at risk. Once they got back to the boat, then would come the reckoning with Yamada."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "Boukman felt the surge of energy wash over him, as unexpected as the sun suddenly shining at midnight. The talisman! Somebody had taken it from its protective case!\n\nGreedily, he tried to draw the power to himself, but after only a few seconds the energy vanished as quickly as it had come.\n\nHe frowned. What did this mean? The Englishman and American who had the talisman should be close by now. Why would they have stopped to look at it?\n\nHe glanced at Marie, tied up and sitting with her back against the wall of a storage hut. She had closed her eyes, and Boukman knew that she, too, had felt the talisman's flux. No one with any sensitivity could have failed to sense it, and she had been exposed to it before, had drawn upon its energy to hide herself from him.\n\n\"Your friends are coming, Marie. Bringing the prize right to me.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" she said.\n\nHe smiled, but it quickly faded. What did she mean by that? Of course they were coming!\n\nIndy and Mac arrived at the edge of a cultivated area, and even in the dark, the star-and moonlight was enough so they could see that it had been planted with sisal. On the far side of the clearing, four, five hundred yards away, torches blazed against the night.\n\n\"This must be the place,\" Indy said.\n\n\"I don't think this is is one of your better plans. Which is not saying much.\"\n\n\"It's what we have to work with, Mac. If Boukman thinks you're dead, you can sneak around and maybe be in a position to do us some good. If you walk in there with me, that gives us fewer options.\"\n\n\"Yes, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Listen, I have my gun. Soon as I get close, I'll shoot him. I'll grab Marie, we light out for the coast and leave the zombis and Japs and Krauts to dance with each other.\"\n\nMac sighed. \"Yes, well, but\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm open to a better idea.\"\n\n\"Would that I had one.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Would that you did.\" Indy took a deep breath. \"Wish me luck.\"\n\n\"Good luck, Jonesy.\"\n\nIndy squared his shoulders and stepped out of the jungle into the clearing.\n\nBoukman's slaves noticed the man before he managed two steps into the clearing, and several of them made as if to go and collect him. \"Non,\" Boukman said. \"Wait.\"\n\nThe man\u2014the American\u2014walked toward them.\n\nBoukman opened his senses to the night. After a moment, he grinned. He waved a trio of potioned ones over, spoke a few words.\n\nThen he waited.\n\nPlace was occupied pretty good, Indy noticed. Thirty or forty people, mostly standing around. He figured Boukman for the old, tall, and thin guy dressed in a black shirt and pants. In the torchlight, he saw Marie. She was tied up and sitting next to the shed behind Boukman.\n\nThe rest of the folks here were probably zombis or drugged\u2014they weren't moving, save for three of them heading away to the west.\n\nIt didn't take long to get close. When he was twenty feet away, Indy stopped.\n\n\"Where is your comrade?\" the tall man said. He had a deep voice, and he spoke good English.\n\n\"Dead,\" Indy said. \"Along with the guys you sent to fetch us. We were attacked by Japanese soldiers.\"\n\nBoukman laughed. \"Plausible story.\"\n\nIndy figured this was as good a time as any. He snatched his revolver out of his holster, thrust it toward Boukman, indexing the whole gun against the man's form, no time to line up the sights, he'd just shoot until he hit him\u2014\n\nBoukman waved his hand as if he were shooing flies.\n\n\u2014Indy's gun flared into a searing heat, as if it had suddenly turned into molten steel. He couldn't hold on to it\u2014the gun fell\u2014\n\nIndy squatted and reached for the gun again\u2014okay, it would burn, but\u2014\n\nBoukman laughed. \"Oh, no, Dr. Jones. That won't do!\"\n\n\u2014the gun shimmered, shivered, elongated, and in a moment transformed itself into a large, tongue-flickering, hissing, undulating\u2014\n\n\u2014snake\u2014!\n\nIndy recoiled.\n\nBoukman laughed again.\n\nIndy had his whip. If he moved fast enough\u2014\n\n\"Bide a moment\u2014!\" Boukman said. \"If you do anything else stupid, your friend truly will die. Bring him!\"\n\nBoukman stared past Indy. Indy turned, to see Mac being dragged in their direction by a trio of Boukman's slaves.\n\nAh, damn\u2014!\n\nMac wasn't making it easy for them, but he was outmatched.\n\nApparently Dame Fortune had shut off the good-luck tap.\n\nIndy turned back to face Boukman.\n\n\"I have been around a long time, Dr. Jones. A very long time. I am adept in the ways of deception and deceit. I am not so easily fooled. You are mine now, and I will have the talisman.\"\n\nIndy waited until Mac arrived. The zombis\u2014magic or chemical, he couldn't tell\u2014released Mac. He gave Indy a quick look, and Indy knew what he was thinking\u2014he still had his little pistol.\n\n\"Don't bother,\" Indy said. \"Gun isn't gonna do it.\"\n\nBoukman laughed again, a sound that already grated on Indy's nerves.\n\n\"The talisman!\"\n\n\"You see it anywhere, Sparky?\" Indy said.\n\nBoukman frowned. \"Where is it?\"\n\n\"It's in a safe place. Here's the deal\u2014you let Marie go, we'll take you to where it is.\"\n\nBoukman shook his head. \"I can get the information from you.\"\n\n\"Maybe.\"\n\n\"Oh, no 'maybe' to it. A sip of my potion, and you will tell me everything I want to know, from your first memories of crawling to this very moment. But... I would have to send one of my slaves to go and collect some of the potion, which is not nearby. I would rather not wait.\"\n\n\"Let Marie go, I'll take you there right now. You'll have what you want in less than an hour.\"\n\nBoukman appeared to consider this. After a moment, he smiled and said, \"Very well. She means nothing to me.\" He said something to the three who'd brought Mac, in a language Indy didn't know. One of them went and stood Marie up, untied her bonds, then followed her to where Indy stood.\n\n\"You okay?\"\n\nShe rubbed at her wrist. \"I am okay.\"\n\n\"We're doing a swap,\" Indy said. \"You for the pearl. He lets you go, we take him to where we hid it.\"\n\n\"You cannot trust him, Indy!\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, there's not a lot of choice here.\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\nIndy knew she was right, but what he'd said was true: There weren't any good choices. A small chance was better than none. Not that he trusted Boukman as far as he could throw him one-handed.\n\nBoukman said, \"So, petite Marie, you are free to leave.\"\n\n\"Indy, he can't get the talisman\u2014\"\n\n\"Go on, Marie. Take off.\"\n\n\"You can't\u2014\"\n\n\"Just go, okay?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"All right.\"\n\nShe turned and walked toward the jungle.\n\n\"Once she's got a good head start,\" Indy said, \"we'll take you to the pearl.\"\n\n\"I expect no less.\"\n\nBoukman grinned yet again. How child-like these imen blan were! Did they really believe they could walk in here and force such a bargain on him? That he would just roll over like an old dog wishing to have its belly scratched?\n\nHis slaves would collect little Marie before she got five minutes away\u2014Boukman needed her for the sacrifice, he could not just let her go. Once he had the talisman, the rituals would proceed. Within a few hours, he would be the most powerful bokor who had ever lived.\n\nIt was a thought to savor, like a fine meal or a vintage liquor. It was why he had let the imen blan live rather than just killing them and raising them to his bidding. For the pleasure of it.\n\nAfter a few moments, Boukman said, \"Shall we go?\"\n\nThe one Marie had called Indy nodded. \"Yes.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "With a dozen assorted zombis carrying torches to light their way, Indy and Mac led Boukman to where they had hidden the artifact. They took their time, did it in as roundabout a way as they could, stalling for time. Which was pretty much all the plan they had. At least Marie could get away . . .\n\nThe priest was no fool. After nearly an hour of wandering, he said, \"Enough of this. Either you take me directly to the talisman or I will kill one of you. If the other one continues to drag his feet, I will kill him, as well.\"\n\n\"That won't help you find it,\" Indy said.\n\n\"Oh, but it will\u2014for you see, you won't stay dead. And while the True Risen do not have air to breathe and thus voices to speak, they obey my commands to the letter. Dead or alive, you will lead me to that which I seek. It matters not to me which it is, comprenez?\"\n\nIndy blew out a sigh. Yeah. He understood.\n\nSo, an hour and a half after they left the sisal plantation, they arrived at the hollow log where they had stashed the backpack earlier. The backpack\u2014\n\n\u2014was gone!\n\nIndy was certain this was the right spot\u2014he had marked the log with his machete, and there was the cut, right there\u2014\n\n\"My patience is no more, Dr. Jones.\"\n\n\"It was here, I swear. Look, you can see the footprints!\"\n\nBoukman waved at one of the zombies, who held his torch down low. Sure enough, there were footprints in the soft earth.\n\nToo many footprints.\n\nAnother of the zombis came over and stood in front of Boukman. \"What?\"\n\nThe zombi turned and shuffled away.\n\nBoukman and the others followed.\n\nA few yards away in the darkness, a cloud of flies buzzed around something on the ground . . .\n\nIndy saw the two bodies there. One was a local, dark-skinned, and Indy recognized him as the crippled zombi who had followed them from the sea. The other man was Japanese.\n\nBoukman said, \"So. The yellow men were here. They found your hiding spot. They have what I want.\"\n\nHe spoke rapidly to the dozen slaves with them. They scattered and melted into the forest.\n\n\"Back to the plantation,\" Boukman said. \"My slaves will find the little men from Japan and capture them.\"\n\n\"If it is all the same to you, we'll just be on our way,\" Mac said.\n\n\"No, I think not. Our bargain was for you to deliver the talisman. Until I have it, you will stay with me.\"\n\n\"Two of us, one of you,\" Mac said. \"And I have this!\"\n\nMac pulled his little Italian pistol from his pocket.\n\nBoukman laughed.\n\n\"How the bloody hell did he do that?\" Mac asked. He was staring at his hand, looking for blisters.\n\nThe three of them walked through the jungle, Boukman in the lead, carrying a bright, flaming torch.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Indy said. \"Some kind of illusion. Tactile hallucination, maybe. He did it to me earlier, and I would have expected to find third-degree burns on my fingers, but there's not a mark on them. And it got worse when I tried to pick up the gun.\"\n\n\"Worse? How?\"\n\n\"Never mind.\"\n\n\"We could just run.\"\n\n\"In the dark? Not a good idea. Place is full of bogs, probably quicksand, and the jungle is crawling with zombis. If he catches the Japs and gets the pearl, maybe he'll let us go.\"\n\n\"You think so?\"\n\nIndy shook his head. \"I wouldn't bet on it. But at least there we can see what we're doing. Maybe Marie can get help at the village. Bunch of men with guns could come back to rescue us.\"\n\nMac gave him a look.\n\n\"Well, it could happen. We'll just have to wait for our chance.\"\n\n\"I don't fancy that idea much.\"\n\n\"Me, neither. But I'm not seeing a lot of options here. If Boukman can make us think our guns are too hot to touch, what else can he do to our minds? We try to run, he could make us think we're getting away clear and direct us off a cliff.\"\n\nMac didn't have anything to say about that."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "Yamada gave a good account of himself, but in the end there were too many of them. His last soldier fired his rifle empty and went down; Gruber's final man also fell, mortally wounded.\n\nYamada's sword dug deeply into one of the things\u2014sheared off an upraised arm that deflected the blade slightly so that it sank into a collarbone and got stuck. By the time he managed to wrench the sword loose, a pair of the things hit him from behind and bore him down. He struggled. No good.\n\nThe thing with the chopped-off arm seemed largely unaffected by its loss.\n\nNot men. Once, yes, but not now. Evil things. Gaki. Had the formula done this? Or was it something else?\n\nGruber shot his pistol until it clicked dry, then tried to run, but he was tripped by one of them on the ground and caught.\n\nThey didn't kill them, which surprised Yamada. Instead, the remaining half a dozen half dragged and pushed them along.\n\nBeing captured by these things had not figured into Yamada's plans. He had a short knife in his boot, and they hadn't noticed it. If worse came to worst, he could take his own life. Knowing that, he resolved to stay alive a little longer, to see if he might salvage something from the situation. Things were not good, but all was not yet lost.\n\n\"Where are they taking us?\" Gruber asked. His voice was full of fear.\n\n\"Your guess is as good as mine,\" Yamada said. But he reasoned that it was not a place that he would have chosen to go on his own. Certainly not without his sword."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "When they got back to the clearing, Indy got a rude surprise:\n\n\"Marie!\"\n\n\"Did you really think I would just let her go, iman blan? I have a need for her. You, too.\"\n\n\"Indy!\"\n\nHe started for her, but half a dozen zombis grabbed him and held him fast. He couldn't break loose\u2014\n\nMarie said, \"The talisman is too powerful for even you, Boukman! It will destroy you!\"\n\n\"He doesn't have it!\" Indy yelled.\n\nMarie stared at him.\n\n\"The Japs were on our trail again! They found it and took it!\"\n\n\"Good!\" Marie called back.\n\nBut it wasn't so good. As the zombis were tying the three of them, binding their arms and legs, another group of the things emerged from the forest. They had a couple of captives, and they dragged them to stand in front of Boukman.\n\nIndy looked at the two. One of 'em was Japanese, sure enough, but the other was fair-haired and light-skinned. A German.\n\n\"So nice of you to drop by,\" Boukman said. \"And with a gift for Boukman!\"\n\nA zombi took the backpack the German carried and handed it to Boukman. He opened the pack, removed the wooden box. Opened it, took out the wooden jar within, dropped the box onto the wet ground. He held the jar up in the torchlight and looked at it. \"Finally!\" he said. \"Finally!\"\n\nCome on, Jones! Now is the time to come up with something brilliant\u2014!\n\nNow that he had the talisman, there was no rush. A few more minutes would not matter. Preparations needed to be made properly, patterns laid out, an avatar constructed. Bowls for the blood, the ceremonial knife must be razor-sharp, all must be done before the spirits were called upon, all must be perfect.\n\nBoukman smiled. All would be.\n\nIndy looked at the two new arrivals, his first chance to see them, even though they had been dogging him since they got to this island. Maybe even since they'd left Port-au-Prince. Tied up, same as he was, they weren't a threat anymore. No, they were all trussed together and in the same boat now, and given the way things looked it would be sinking to the bottom pretty soon . . .\n\nIndy said, \"Marie? What's next?\"\n\nShe sighed. \"Boukman will ready his rituals. Things must be done a certain way when you speak with loa or gods; an error could be fatal. He has been doing this a long time, he doesn't make those kinds of errors. He wants the power invested in the pearl. Whoever put it there is in the Other Realm. It seems too strong to be any of the loa I know about. Could be an unknown one. Could be several combined their energy to store it in the pearl. Might be one of the Maldye\u2014the evil gods. I cannot say.\n\n\"It does not matter. Boukman will offer a petition. He will render sacrifices.\"\n\n\"What kind of sacrifice?\" Mac asked.\n\nIndy noticed that the German and the Japanese were listening as intently as he was.\n\n\"For small favors, you make small offerings. For something this big, it must be more.\"\n\n\"Are we talking human sacrifice?\" Indy asked.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"One of us?\" Mac asked.\n\n\"More likely all of us,\" she said. \"I have some small power, and the loa enjoy the taste of that. You are white men, and not usually on their menu around here. The German and the Japanese are also rare in these lands. Boukman will offer us and as many of the locals as he believes necessary to attain his desire. If he can absorb and contain but half of the force in the black pearl, he will truly become a heart of darkness himself. More powerful than any bokor, as powerful as some loa, maybe even approaching some of the minor gods.\"\n\nShe paused. \"As evil as he is, such an infusion will be catastrophic for the world. He could raise thousands of zombis, an army of the dead, and woe to anybody who tries to stand against him.\"\n\n\"I really don't like the sound of that,\" Indy said.\n\n\"It would seem as if we are cooked,\" Mac said.\n\nMarie hesitated a moment. \"There is a small chance,\" she said. \"When he removes the pearl from the warded jar, the energy will spill out in all directions. I might be able to collect part of it. I have been somewhat... attuned to the talisman. If I can siphon off a bit before Boukman takes it all, it might be possible to use this to help you escape.\"\n\n\"Us escape? What about you?\"\n\n\"I am doomed, no matter what. Boukman cannot keep the power without feeding the loa\u2014or the gods. If he cannot do it now, he might be able to put them off for a time, but he will come for me. He must. And I cannot allow him to obtain this magic and live if there is even the smallest chance to stop him. My life would be a small price to pay for that.\"\n\n\"Not so small,\" Indy said.\n\nShe smiled at him. \"Would that things might have been different, Indy. That we could have had more time.\"\n\nThe German, in good English, said, \"This romantic moment is touching, but would it not be better to turn our attention to escape?\"\n\nIndy stared at him.\n\n\"I am Dr. Gruber, this is Dr. Yamada.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, I can't say it's a pleasure to make your acquaintances. My experiences with Nazi Germany and imperial Japan haven't been among the highlights of my career so far.\"\n\n\"Would you rather be sacrificed to some pagan god here in this tropical hothouse than work with us?\"\n\nIndy shrugged. Gruber had a point. Then again, he didn't see what help they were going to be\u2014they were as helpless as Indy was. He said, \"You aren't exactly bringing a lot to the table, are you?\"\n\n\"I have a knife in my boot,\" Yamada said, also in good, if accented English. \"It might be useful at the right moment.\"\n\n\"So would a Sikorsky R-4 helicopter. I don't think a knife is gonna do us much good against a small army of zombis.\"\n\n\"Well, it would be easier to run if we weren't tied up,\" Mac allowed. \"If we could get to a boat and off this island . . .\"\n\n\"If Boukman gains the power held in the pearl, that won't help,\" Marie said. \"His reach will be farther than we could run, swim, or fly.\"\n\nIndy shook his head. Whatever. He wasn't going to let Marie die if he could possibly help it, no matter what she said.\n\nBoukman worked, setting up more torches in the circle he would need to help ward the talisman's power once he began the ritual. They must be placed precisely, else they would offer a way for the power to escape when he took it from the jar.\n\nWhen the torches were done, he had to prepare himself. The magic smoke, the call to Papa Legba, the invitation for the creator of the talisman. Once invocations were done and the loa or god arrived, the blood would have to flow for him\u2014or her\u2014and the petition be offered with the proper prayers. The principle was the same, but the desire was bigger than any Boukman had ever sought.\n\nEven so, it would succeed\u2014else why had he been given the talisman? It had been delivered into his keeping, and there could only be one reason: The gods were now ready to transfer its benefits. He would step precisely, toe the line perfectly, observe the forms, that was necessary... but he would have his reward.\n\nHe did not doubt it for a moment. His time had come.\n\nGruber watched the witch doctor walking around inside a small circle of torches he had just erected, smoking something from a pipe that looked suspiciously like a human's thighbone. The blue cloud wreathing Boukman was dense; even thirty meters away, he could smell the sharp and spicy odor of it.\n\nGruber didn't believe in magic, but obviously this Boukman character did, and he was ramping himself up into some kind of trance to do whatever it was he was planning to do.\n\nGruber didn't care about that. What he needed was that wooden box lying there on the damp ground, not ten meters away. If he could get loose, if he could snatch the box up and run, if he could attain the jungle and then a boat? All the rest of this would be a bad memory he would leave behind him.\n\nHe might need the wooden jar, too\u2014that had more carved symbols on it, and those might be key\u2014but if all Boukman wanted was the pearl, then let him have it. In the grand scheme of things, it didn't matter. If Gruber returned home in triumph, he could find other ways to get rich.\n\nYamada had a knife. Good. There would come a moment. He was certain of it.\n\nIndy watched as Boukman sat cross-legged on the earth, the wooden jar on the ground in front of him. Boukman's eyes were closed, he'd finished smoking whatever had been in his pipe, and he was chanting softly.\n\nAround him, the chemically created zombis began to chant, their voices joining Boukman's. The other ones, the dead, did not make a sound, but they swayed back and forth like a captive elephant, rhythmically, in unison\u2014all to the left, all to the right, as if joined at the hip.\n\n\"He calls upon the Gatekeeper,\" Marie said. \"And once the Gate is open, he will call for the creator of the talisman. When he comes, even you will feel it. Boukman will take the talisman out of the jar for its creator to examine. The circle of torches will keep most of the power warded, but some of it will escape. I will try to catch what I can.\"\n\nThe chanting, more of a wordless drone now, increased in volume. It had a lulling, almost hypnotic quality to it . . .\n\nYamada felt a chill sweep over him, like a wind from a glacier, a sensation he never expected to feel in the jungle. It was as if some alien presence had arrived and settled nearby.\n\nHe nodded to himself. Demons and hungry ghosts. He was not a deeply religious man, he was a scientist, but he knew what he was feeling. This place was imbued with the spirit of something inhuman. A wrong move at the wrong moment, and this thing would consume a man as a wolf would a mouse. A single crunch of otherworldly teeth and that would be the end of you.\n\nYamada sat very still.\n\nIndy felt something, no question, but what it was, he couldn't say. Whatever it was, it smelled of evil.\n\nIt wasn't something you wanted to notice you if you were tied hand and foot nearby. Indy found himself holding his breath . . .\n\nFor a moment Gruber thought he was hallucinating. He saw something settle down inside that ring of torches, some ethereal, translucent something that assumed a vaguely man-like shape and sat on the ground facing the witch doctor Boukman.\n\nMust be whatever the man was smoking. Some kind of drug, and some of it drifted this way to affect my mind. That has to be it . . .\n\nThis was no loa sitting across from Boukman. It was some Maldye godling, full of arrogance, reeking of power. It spoke not, but waved what looked like a hand made of fire at the jar. Boukman felt its thoughts:\n\nShow me, it demanded.\n\nBoukman unscrewed the wooden lid, removed the talisman, unwrapped it from the silk covering it. He had slitted his eyes almost completely closed, yet even so it was like looking into the noonday sun. To stare directly at it was to go blind, so he shifted his gaze to one side\u2014\n\nMine, yes.\n\nNext to him, Marie moaned. \"It is so bright! Come to me\u2014!\"\n\nIndy didn't see anything, but he felt the air stirring around him as a wind that was hot and cold at the same time.\n\nThe zombis that could speak were in full voice now, and all of them swayed together, as precisely as a machine. Boukman had taken the pearl out, unwrapped it, and set it on the ground\u2014\n\nBoukman felt the Maldye's smile more than saw it. The god was shifting fires, reds, blues, greens, yellows, swirling and contained, like nothing natural could possibly be.\n\nYesss? it seemed to say silently inside his head.\n\nAloud, Boukman said, \"I importune thee. Grant me thy favor.\"\n\nWhat do you offer in return?\n\nBoukman stood, rising up effortlessly, filled with the radiant energy that shined from the talisman, stronger already than ever before. The potential was astounding.\n\nIn the graveyards on the island, anyone dead within the last year began to stir, hearkening to his unspoken call.\n\nAcross the miles of sea passage, on the south coast of Haiti, graves rumbled as the dead strove to leave, digging free of rotted coffins, shoveling away earth with their hands . . .\n\nAmazing! And this but a reflection, like the sun in a mirror!\n\nTime passed, how much Boukman could not say. Hours? Eons?\n\nEventually, Boukman drew his knife from his belt. The polished steel glittered in the torchlight. \"Bring her,\" he said.\n\nFour zombis headed to where Indy and the others were tied up.\n\n\"Not yet,\" Marie said. \"I am not ready yet.\"\n\n\"Now would be a good time to get your knife out,\" Indy said to Yamada. \"Hurry!\"\n\nThe four zombis arrived. They picked up Marie and carried her back toward Boukman.\n\n\"Yamada!\"\n\n\"Almost... almost... here\u2014\"\n\nHe managed to toss the knife toward Indy. It fell two feet short. Indy fell forward, extending his tied hands toward it\u2014\n\nHis slaves laid Marie on the ground in front of him. Boukman squatted, raised the knife, offered a Word\u2014\n\nWait. I will see her dance first.\n\nBoukman frowned. Well. It was the god's sacrifice, he could do with her what he wished.\n\nBoukman laid the edge of the knife onto the ropes. In a moment Marie was free. She rose up, as if to run, but the living fire gestured and she stopped.\n\nDance, it said.\n\nMarie leaned her head back. Shook her hair out. Began to dance, under the Maldye's control\u2014\n\nIndy managed to saw away the ropes holding him, cutting himself a couple of times, but that didn't matter. Quickly he cut Mac's hands loose and handed him the knife. \"Cut yourself loose,\" he said.\n\n\"What are you going to do?\"\n\n\"I'm going to give Boukman something to think about!\"\n\nBut as Indy gathered himself to go, he noticed something.\n\nAround the periphery of the clearing, forms began appearing and moving toward the center. It took a second for him to realize what they were, what he was seeing.\n\nZombis. And some of them little more than skeletons\u2014they had to have been buried for weeks, months, maybe years\u2014!\n\n\"Oh, damn,\" he said. \"Okay, Mac, listen\u2014I'm going to get their attention. Try to get to Marie, okay?\"\n\nMac nodded. \"What about them?\" He nodded at Gruber and Yamada.\n\n\"His knife, we owe him. Cut them loose, they get the same chance we do.\"\n\n\"Good luck, Indy!\"\n\n\"Yeah. You, too.\"\n\nIndy stayed low, halfway between a crawl and a duckwalk, and made his way to one of the torches nearby. He grabbed the stick, worked it back and forth a bit, then jerked it out of the ground.\n\nOne of the swaying zombis noticed him.\n\nIndy swung the torch like an axman trying to split a log and slammed the torch down onto the top of the zombi's head.\n\nIt screamed. Ah. One of the live ones\u2014\n\nGruber saw the American attack one of the men with a torch. The man took fire as some of the fuel splashed onto him and lit.\n\nThe man screamed.\n\nOthers turned to see, and the American began flailing like a baseball player, back and forth, back and forth\u2014\n\nAs soon as his feet were free, Gruber got up and hurried to the wooden box. Nobody was paying him any attention.\n\nIt would have to do\u2014the jar was too far and there were too many people between it and him.\n\nYamada appeared next to him.\n\n\"Time to leave,\" Gruber said.\n\n\"Hai!\"\n\nBut both men were scientists\u2014and transfixed enough by what they saw that they stood there watching . . ."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "Indy dodged, ducked, and kept swinging the torch. Kerosene spewed, igniting as he slung the thing back and forth, making strings of flaming liquid that arced into the night.\n\nZombis came at him, and he jinked to the side, avoiding their grasps. Too many of them, he'd never beat them all, but if he could get them chasing him, Mac might have a chance to save Marie\u2014\n\nA ragged circle of eight or ten of them started to close in on him, though, and he was trapped\u2014!\n\nAll right, he'd go down swinging\u2014\n\nThere was a sudden bright flash, and a big whoosh! behind him. Indy turned to see Mac, holding a torch of his own and standing next to a drum with flaming liquid pouring from it onto the ground\u2014the darkness retreated from the burning pool\u2014\n\n\"Over here, you bloody bastards! Come and get me if you can!\"\n\nIndy managed a grin.\n\nDistracted for an instant, the zombis in front of him lost focus, and Indy battered his way through them. Last one he hit, the torch broke open and fire whooshed! from that, too, as the zombi seemed to explode into flame. It uttered no sound\u2014\n\nBoukman's rage flared in him like the fires the imen blan had started. How dare they interrupt this ceremony! He would squash them like insects! He would have them ripped limb from limb!\n\nThe Maldye seemed to take delight in the chaos. As Marie, in the grip of the thing's power, danced almost erotically in the circle, the Maldye's thoughts came:\n\nYesss . . .\n\nThe power Boukman had absorbed was but a small piece of what was in the talisman, incidental to the main part of it; even so, it was like bathing in energy, he felt stronger than he had ever felt, and all he needed to do was focus it properly.\n\nThe dead were rising and more of them coming, but he couldn't seem to connect to them directly. Something was interfering, somehow, something was blocking him\u2014what was it?\n\nNo. Not what. Who . . .\n\nMarie! She was bathed in the same energy. The Maldye had her dancing to his unheard tune, but even as she did, she soaked in the light from the talisman! Here was a danger\u2014!\n\nShe had to die. To feed the Maldye, now!\n\nHe reached for his knife again\u2014\n\nIndy found another handy torch, pulled it up, and hammered his way toward Marie. He would have to do it; Mac was too far away.\n\nAs he got closer, he saw Boukman pull a knife and raise it\u2014\n\nIndy had thrown the javelin in college. Not well, and not far, but he was only thirty feet away. He pulled the torch back like a spear, felt the heat of the flame singe his hair and scorch his hat\u2014\n\nHe threw the torch\u2014\n\nIt was top-heavy and didn't fly straight. It started to spin, rotating, so it wasn't the fire that hit Boukman, but the stick part. Even so, it was enough to knock the knife from his hand\u2014\n\nIndy ran toward them\u2014\n\nBoukman felt the impact, and the shock of it caught him unprepared. He lost the knife, lost his balance, staggered, but kept to his feet.\n\n\"Sakpata Loa!\" he screamed\u2014\"Help me!\"\n\nIndy was almost there\u2014\n\n\"Indy!\" Marie yelled. \"The pearl! I need the pearl!\"\n\nShe continued to dance, as if she were a puppet on strings. It was bizarre.\n\nIt was all bizarre\u2014\n\nHe knocked over one of the inner circle of torches, and when he did, the zombis in line with it behind him collapsed, as if struck by lightning. He kept going\u2014\n\nBoukman turned, saw Indy, and raised a hand\u2014\n\nIndy dove, hit the ground on his shoulder\u2014ow!\u2014but rolled up and kept going. He scrabbled past Marie, still dancing, and dove again. This time he grabbed the pearl as he rolled.\n\nHe came up, and the black pearl felt like his gun when Boukman had made it hot. It was burning him, but he held on.\n\n\"No!\" Boukman screamed.\n\nIndy thought he heard another voice, deep in his head:\n\nYes! it said.\n\nBoukman cursed, and Indy felt his legs turn rubbery. He fell, unable to support himself, but he crawled. Marie was only a couple more feet . . .\n\n\"Marie!\"\n\nBoukman was coming\u2014\n\nShe looked down at him. Dropped into a low dance step, as if doing a split\u2014\n\nHe shoved the Heart of Darkness into her hand.\n\nSomebody laughed inside Indy's head. Something was really funny, though he didn't have a clue what it was\u2014\n\nMore zombis appeared and came at Indy. Six, eight, ten of them, and he knew it was about to be all over. He couldn't get to his feet in time, and even if he could\u2014\n\nMarie was there. Holding the black pearl in both hands and singing? chanting? moaning? He couldn't tell.\n\nBoukman stopped. He cursed again, but Marie said, \"No. Not this time!\"\n\nThe zombi closest to Indy grabbed him, lifted him up, and bared its teeth as it lunged to bite out his throat\u2014\n\n\u2014but the zombi next to it smashed the one holding Indy with a head-butt to its nose, and the thing let go of him. The two zombis grappled and fell to the ground\u2014\n\nIndy looked around. Boukman was moving away, waving his hands and yelling.\n\nAround them, the zombis had turned on one another.\n\nIndy realized what must have happened. Marie had done it. Just as she had at the village. Only now, she had a lot more horsepower.\n\nBoukman called on every bit of strength he had taken in. He was more skilled than Marie, he knew so much more, but she was feeding from the talisman, and the raw energy of it was too much. He would have to use his talents to beat her!\n\nTwo hundred years' practice to her scant twenty or so, he had ten times her experience! He could do this, he could still prevail\u2014he just had to be careful\u2014!\n\nShe had taken control of some of his slaves\u2014!\n\nIndy looked at Marie. Her eyes were completely white and her face creased with veins. Her hands trembled. She chanted, words Indy didn't understand. But he knew that Marie had wrested control of some the zombis from Boukman and they were going at one another.\n\nBut\u2014which were hers and which his?\n\n\u2014a zombi dressed all in black leaped onto one wearing what looked like a sarong\u2014the one in black looked alive, the other much less so. They toppled to the wet ground, clawing and biting at each other\u2014\n\n\u2014a naked and rotting man was ignoring the pair biting and tearing chunks out of his body in favor of the one he was dismembering\u2014\n\n\u2014five zombis were locked in undead combat against ten others, a tangle of limbs and teeth\u2014\n\n\u2014one of them, on fire but apparently not bothered that much about it, lurched past Indy and wrapped its flaming arms around another of the mob, pulling it close\u2014\n\n\u2014the second one's clothes caught fire, and it screamed.\n\nWho was in control of which ones? Which should Indy attack?\n\nAnd with what? His gun was gone. Another torch?... wait, he had his whip, for all the good that might do\u2014\n\nGruber stared as one of his men\u2014the missing soldier!\u2014went up against a dark man with a shaved head. The pair of them grappled and fell, and a Japanese soldier arrived and wrapped his arm around the bald one's neck\u2014\n\nYamada, awed, watched the battle. There was no skill to it, no sense of strategy or tactics, just the hammering of fists and feet, the flashing of stained and broken teeth.\n\nThere\u2014was that one of his men? Trying to gouge the eyeballs out of a woman he had pinned to the wet ground?\n\n\u2014vertebrae cracked as another one lurched in and grabbed the soldier, twisted his head\u2014\n\nThey had to go. They had to\u2014but the scientist in him wanted to stay and watch, it was so unbelievable\u2014\n\n\"Doctor!\" Gruber said.\n\nYes. Time to go, now!\n\nBoukman screamed and unleashed what energy he had remaining in all directions. Zombis fell, living and dead, flattened by the blast. Marie was too strong\u2014he had to hit her hard!\n\nBut he made a mistake\u2014what he let go also splashed against the Maldye\u2014\n\nThe evil god was enraged. Boukman felt the malignant darkness well and flow reflexively from the fiery creature, roiling like lava and spewing toward him\u2014\n\nBoukman raised his shield, and the black fire splashed harmlessly over him but knocked down zombis, smashed into the shed, flattened trees in its path. He could withstand that, but it took all his concentration. \"I did not mean it!\" he yelled. \"Please!\"\n\nHe had to concentrate or he would\u2014\n\n\"Hey, pal!\" somebody yelled.\n\nBoukman looked. Jones. The American, lunging at him with something in his hand\u2014a rope? No, a whip\u2014\n\nBoukman raised his hand to ward off the attack\u2014\n\nTwo things happened: His protective shield slipped\u2014just a hair, but enough to allow a bit of the black fire to touch him. And then he flinched at its touch, enough so that his warding-off gesture missed Jones\u2014\n\nIndy snapped his wrist out straight and tugged back a hair as he cast the length of his whip at Boukman. The leather end flew past the bokor, not fast enough to crack the sound barrier, but enough to curl back and wrap around the man's thin neck\u2014\n\nBoukman screamed as the whip encircled his throat. He grabbed it, and the leather caught fire. He needed only a second and it would be be burned to ash\u2014\n\n\u2014but his attention upon the whip choking the life out of him took his attention away from his shield . . .\n\nIndy saw his whip burst into blue-green fire, but he pulled for all he was worth\u2014\n\n\u2014Boukman toppled, face-forward but in slow motion, as if falling through thick glue\u2014\n\n\u2014Boukman, as he fell, realized that it was The Dream. The awful heat at his back, the vileness of his pursuer, it was, after all these years, coming to pass. The Maldye\u2014!\n\n\u2014Boukman's shield winked out, leaving him unprotected against the black fire that washed over him\u2014\n\nHe screamed\u2014\"No\u2014!\"\n\nThe blue-green fire raced up Indy's whip toward him, and he let go of the handle just as it exploded into unnaturally colored flame\u2014\n\n\u2014Boukman was down, and as Indy watched, a different kind of conflagration enveloped the bokor, what looked like black fire, swirling around him. He screamed, and the darkness somehow flashed in a way that blinded Indy; he threw his forearm up to cover his eyes from a bleakness too intense to behold\u2014\n\nWhen he lowered his arm and looked past the afterimages on his retinas, he could see what was left of bokor Boukman on the ground: a pile of smoking gray ash . . .\n\nMarie stood there, smiling, and it was not a pleasant expression, but one full of triumph. She waved one hand at Indy.\n\n\"Marie . . .\"\n\n\"It wasn't me. He did it to himself,\" she said. \"The evil turned on him.\"\n\n\"Are you okay?\"\n\n\"I am fine, Indy. More than you can imagine. What was Boukman's is now mine. I have... energy beyond any I have ever imagined. We are safe.\"\n\nIndy nodded. \"You knew all along about the magic attached to this, didn't you? From the moment we met?\"\n\n\"I didn't know for sure. I suspected. I grew up hearing the stories. Once I realized they were true, I could not allow Boukman to obtain the pearl. I'm sorry. I should have told you.\"\n\nHe nodded again. \"Yeah. You should have.\"\n\nHe looked around. \"Mac?\"\n\n\"Still here, by God!\" Mac called from behind him.\n\nIndy turned.\n\nThey were alive.\n\nSon-of-a-bitch! How about that?\n\nWhat about the German and Japanese?\n\nAs if in answer to his thought, Mac said, \"The Axis seem to have left the field.\"\n\nIndy nodded. \"I wonder how far they got?\"\n\n\"Not far,\" Marie said.\n\nIndy looked at her.\n\nShe shrugged."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "Despite all the odds, all the death and destruction, the storms and fighting and everything, Gruber had survived. More, he and Yamada had escaped and were approaching the sea. A hundred meters away, there was a small boat tied to a rickety dock, both of which had somehow escaped the hurricane's heavy winds and waves. A man stood by the boat, his back to them.\n\nExcellent!\n\n\"It appears that we have won,\" Yamada said.\n\nThe two men were no more than a couple of meters apart.\n\n\"Yes, it does, doesn't it? Why don't you let me carry the box for a while? You must be tired.\"\n\n\"It does not weigh all that much,\" Yamada said.\n\n\"I insist. Give it to me.\"\n\nYamada laughed. \"You insist? I am a samurai, Doctor. Trained with a sword, but also with my hands. You cannot defeat me in personal combat.\" He looked at Gruber in wonder. Did the man think that he had come all this way to simply give him the artifact with the formula because he asked for it? Whatever training Gruber might have in hand-to-hand combat, it could not begin to approach Yamada's expertise in ju-jitsu. He could take the German apart like a child's toy, break his neck and leave him here without working up a sweat, even in this climate. If Gruber was ready to die, then that was up to him.\n\nYamada bent to put the box onto the ground, to free his hands.\n\nWhen he straightened, Gruber had something pointed at him. What was\u2014?\n\nThe realization hit him. He had made a mistake.\n\nHe had underestimated his enemy.\n\nGruber aimed the little Swiss pistol at Yamada. There was but one shot, and the barrel was short and had no sight, so it was like pointing his finger at a target. But the distance was small, less than two armspans, and he could spit and hit Yamada this close.\n\nYamada frowned.\n\n\"Walk away from the box and live, Doctor,\" Gruber said.\n\n\"No! I will not\u2014!\"\n\nGruber pulled the trigger.\n\nDespite the rigors of rain and tropical heat, the tiny gun worked. The noise was louder than one would expect from such a small thing.\n\nThe bullet hit Yamada dead center in the chest. Even so, he jumped at Gruber, screaming wordlessly\u2014\n\nGruber leaped to the side and Yamada's rush missed.\n\nYamada stumbled, fell to his knees. Gruber watched as the other man frowned. He tried to speak, but his voice failed him.\n\nYamada fell onto his side. Gruber heard the death rattle as the Japanese doctor's final breath left his body.\n\n\"Sorry, Yamada,\" Gruber said. \"It was never your destiny to prevail. Our German God is stronger than your Japanese one.\"\n\nGruber bent, picked up the wooden box. He walked toward the wooden dock. The man at the boat, if he heard the shot, gave no sign. A deal would be struck.\n\nGruber walked along the planking, the smell of creosote under the clearing sky and warm sun acrid in his nostrils. The man at the end of the dock had his back to Gruber, staring out to sea.\n\n\"I will pay you well to take me to the mainland,\" Gruber said, in French.\n\nThe man turned.\n\nThe shock of seeing the ruined face so stunned Gruber that he dropped the box. Saw it hit the dock, bounce, and fall into the sea. He turned to run, but it was too late\u2014\n\nThe monster's hideous expression was the last thing Edwin Gruber saw in life as it sank its teeth into his neck . . .\n\n[ At the Gate to the Other Realm ]\n\nPapa Legba stood drawing upon his pipe, blowing clouds of red smoke, three dogs lying at his feet.\n\nThis time when Boukman approached, the dogs all growled at him.\n\nBoukman came to stand in front of Papa Legba.\n\nThe old man shook his head. \"You have much to answer for, Boukman. Many in the Other Realm would speak to you\u2014some harshly, I expect. Waitin' a long time for the chance.\"\n\nBoukman nodded. Of course.\n\n\"Did you get to build the shelter for the dogs?\"\n\nTime ran different for the loa. He could have been here a thousand years compared with the few days that Boukman had lived.\n\n\"No, Papa, I am sorry.\"\n\nThe old man nodded. \"Well. One more thing you must make good. But the line ahead of me is long. Could be a long time before you come available for us to discuss your repayment.\"\n\n\"I would have built the shelter, had I lived.\"\n\nPapa Legba blew out a thin stream of ruby-colored smoke. It hung shimmering redly in the sun's hard light, hardly moved by any wind at all. \"Maybe. But it doesn't matter now, does it?\"\n\nBoukman shook his head. No. It didn't matter, now.\n\nPapa reached for the gate. Opened it. Nodded at Boukman.\n\nBoukman walked through the opening.\n\nMonstrous, grinning things were waiting for him.\n\nFear enveloped him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Port-au-Prince Airport",
                "text": "\"Why don't you come with me,\" Indy said, even though he knew she wouldn't. He didn't have any long-range plans, but who knew where it might go? She was smart, beautiful, and she liked him, he knew that.\n\nMarie put her hand on his chest and smiled up at him. \"I cannot.\"\n\n\"We might make it work.\"\n\n\"It isn't about us, Indy. It is about this.\" She waved her hand to encompass all of Haiti. \"You are a man of the world, you will travel far and wide to do what you must, but I am needed here.\"\n\nYeah. She was right.\n\n\"And you would certainly not be happy in Haiti for long.\"\n\nHe sighed, then nodded. She was right about that, too. Even his notion of settling into teaching was already starting to fade. Someday, maybe. Not yet. He wasn't that old. \"Yeah. I figured that's what you'd say.\"\n\n\"Perhaps I can visit you.\"\n\n\"I'd like that.\" But they both knew she never would.\n\n\"Before you go, I have something for you.\"\n\n\"You've already given me more than I deserve,\" he said, remembering last night at her house.\n\nHer smile grew. \"That was a mutual gift. Here.\"\n\nShe produced a fist-sized silk bundle from her pocket.\n\nHe knew what it was. \"The pearl? But\u2014\"\n\n\"It has already given me all that it can. I have beheld the true heart beneath the darkness. It has been drained, there is no power left. Take it and put it in a museum somewhere. Perhaps you can tell a bit of the story\u2014not that anybody in your world will believe it.\"\n\nHe took the silk package, stuck it into his pocket. \"Thank you.\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"It is the least I can do, after all you have done for me.\"\n\nThey embraced, and he kissed her. Not like a brother does a sister. A farewell kiss, sweet and bitter at the same time. Acknowledging what would never be.\n\n\"Go. Your plane will leave without you.\"\n\nHe released her, held her at arm's length.\n\nHe turned and hurried toward the old Ford Tri-Motor, whose engines were already coughing blue smoke and whirring to life, set to take them to Cuba. Mac stood in the doorway, waiting.\n\nOn board, Indy moved to one of the vacant seats, which were low wicker chairs screwed to the deck. He looked out the window at Marie. Another road not taken.\n\nThe plane taxied from the apron onto the runway. The engines roared louder, and the aircraft sped down the tarmac faster and faster until it was able to leap into the air.\n\nThey banked and went back the way they had come, a few hundred feet up, and Indy saw her standing there, waving at him. Maybe he was making a mistake. Forget the war, forget roaming from country to country, chasing history, tilting at windmills. Maybe he should have stayed, to live in the moment.\n\nHe looked at her.\n\nSaw someone behind her . . .\n\nBehind him, Mac leaned over the wicker seat back. \"Odd, thing, Indy!\" He had to yell to be heard over the engines' noise. \"I thought I saw someone\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014No,\" Indy said. \"You didn't see anything!\"\n\nMac blinked. Then he nodded. \"Ah. Right. Nothing.\" He leaned back in his chair.\n\nBehind Marie, in the shade of an outbuilding, Mac had seen someone\u2014someone that Indy hadn't noticed when he'd been on the ground with Marie saying his farewells. But it wasn't some one, it was two men, and even as the plane sped away, shrinking them to the size of toys, he recognized them easily.\n\nThe hair on his neck stirred as he beheld the duo and knew who they were:\n\nDr. Gruber, the German, and Dr. Yamada, the Japanese officer. They were not watching the plane but staring into space, as still as statues.\n\nDead men, standing, waiting to be commanded.\n\nIndy's breath caught, as he suddenly remembered what Marie had said to him after that terrible night only two days past at the sisal plantation: What had belonged to Boukman, she'd said, now belonged to her. And when Indy had wondered about where they had gone?\n\nNot far, she'd said.\n\nIndy swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry, as he realized just what that meant.\n\nThe low clouds obscured his view. It was an image he would carry forever, that last glimpse of petite Marie Arnoux, waving good-bye... standing in front of two zombis.\n\nHer zombis, now."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Tomb Raider) Path of the Apocalypse",
        "author": "S. D. Perry",
        "genres": [
            "adventure"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "ANA\u00cfS NIN",
                "text": "The most difficult thing is the decision to act; the rest is merely tenacity."
            },
            {
                "title": "AMELIA EARHART",
                "text": "Luis Marin was writing a report at Trinity's airfield east of town when he found out that the world was ending.\n\nIt was late, dark, and only the flight controller and two guards were awake at the small compound, which was little more than a radio room and a few offices attached to a long, single-story barracks. Marin sat in an office off the radio room, using one of Trinity's encrypted computers, a small fan buzzing air across the side of his face. It was quiet except for the fan, and the faint snores from the open rooms down the hall. There was bunk room for twenty men but there were only a handful here, pilots and mechanics for the helicopters parked outside.\n\nA soft, warm breeze that smelled like machine oil drifted through the propped door behind Marin. The guards leaned on the walls outside and smoked and talked about football. The controller sat in front of a scrolling screen in the radio room with headphones on; Marin could just see the back of his chair, his slouching shoulders. Marin didn't know the man and he hadn't introduced himself or said a word after looking at Marin's ID, only nodding him toward the offices. His nametag read YELTSIN. He had graying hair and an old, sour face.\n\nMarin should have been home helping Eva pack, but he had been called out to assess the structural stability of a new area discovered at the cliff site dig. He'd spent all afternoon and evening measuring rocks and running formulas while impatient workers paced around him, gossiping about Lara Croft, who'd been seen in town. Marin knew the name\u2014he guessed everyone in Trinity's upper ranks knew her name, after what happened in Siberia. Marin wasn't worried, but then, he wasn't a soldier. Lara Croft was somebody else's problem.\n\nSince he had to drop the GPR unit back at the airfield, he'd decided to write up his summary in the relative quiet there. Once he got home, packing would warrant his full attention. They were only moving to his cousin's rental for a short time, perhaps a few months, but there was a lot to get sorted. With Natalia teething, it was unlikely that Eva had gotten much done.\n\nMarin tapped at the keys quickly. He was tired, but running on nerves. Dr. Dominguez had been looking for the sacred artifacts for a long time, but there had been a flurry of activity in recent weeks that suggested he might actually be getting close to finding them\u2014the Key of Chak Chel, the Box of Ix Chel. A dagger and a silver box, both hidden, although Dominguez was sure that the dagger was here in Mexico, perhaps buried at the cliff dig. Marin had worked the other Maya sites, he'd read the reports, he knew what could happen if the items were found. Dr. Dominguez had personally assured him that there were plans in place for an orderly evacuation if the dagger was discovered, before it was touched; the great cleansing was supposed to kick off with a tidal wave, when the \"key\" was taken from its hiding place. The Doctor had local roots, too; surely he wouldn't let anything bad happen\u2026 And Trinity had a full squad of soldiers here, and teams of workers; if, God forbid, the prophecy was triggered early, there were enough men to lead an emergency evacuation. There would be damage, certainly, but no one would die.\n\nIf Dominguez is even successful. He'd claimed to be close more than once, but he'd been searching for years. This could be another false lead\u2026 Since Natalia's birth, Marin's vague plans to move his family to a new home had sharpened into a deadline. The structure his grandfather had built had withstood many a harsh storm, but it was close to the water. Too close. He felt bad about the other coastal villages that wouldn't have Trinity to help them, but his family would be safe, his friends and neighbors would be alive.\n\nMarin was making his final recommendation, that a geologist be consulted before blasting any deeper at the cliff dig, when Yeltsin sat up bone straight in his chair, and started hitting buttons.\n\nA klaxon blared through the barracks and the guards out front ran inside, voices high and panicked over the screaming alarm.\n\n\"What's happening?\"\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"Evac, emergency channel!\" Yeltsin shouted, and Marin stood up, his heart thundering. He grabbed the radio off his belt and turned it on, but there was nothing being broadcast.\n\nThe guards' radios started to crackle. Sleepy-eyed men were piling into the hall, and Yeltsin turned off the wake-up alarm. Marin could hear the orders being delivered over the guards' radios, and Yeltsin flipped a switch so that the gathering pilots could hear.\n\n\"\u2014detected, initial wave expected within ten minutes. Evacuation is mandatory for all Trinity workers and staff. Proceed immediately to designated emergency evacuation points. External communications strictly prohibited. Repeat, seismic tremors have been detected\u2014\"\n\nYeltsin started snapping directions at the blinking pilots. \"Mendes, you're up first; you're picking up the Doctor and his guards at the main compound\u2014go. Abadi, Teller, take the big birds in behind him, get everyone else. Juan, you're on the dig, there are workers waiting\u2014I'm going with you. Everyone else, grab a ride. We're headed to the Huerto strip an hour east.\"\n\nMarin couldn't believe what he was hearing. The men were already moving, grabbing bags and running out the door.\n\n\"No! Wait! We have to evacuate the town!\" He sounded just as desperate as he felt.\n\nYeltsin was the only one who even looked at him, and that was barely a glance. \"You heard the order.\"\n\n\"You don't understand!\" Marin's voice was a strangled, high-pitched shriek. \"This is where I live! There's a plan to get everyone out!\"\n\nNo one listened. Outside, he heard the first helicopter engine whine into life, then a second.\n\n\"Wait!\" he cried. \"The wrong protocol has been activated! Stand down! Everybody stand down!\"\n\nYeltsin turned his sour gaze back to Marin. \"You'll shut up, and board one of the helicopters. Now.\"\n\nFrantic, Marin switched to the command channel on his radio. He was technically part of the sciences division but he had pull; he'd been with Trinity for a long time. \"Captain Trent, respond! Commander Polis! Dr. Dominguez, this is Luis Marin, somebody please respond!\"\n\nThere was a brief silence, and then he heard Trent's voice, terse and clipped. \"Orders are from the top, Marin. Mandatory evac.\"\n\n\"I have to get home!\" Marin pleaded. Captain Trent had been to his house, had met his wife when she was still pregnant. \"Please, my wife can't get to the compound in time!\"\n\nSilence. God, what about Tomas? His brother sometimes slept on his boat in the fall. This can't be happening!\n\n\"Remember your Oath, Luis,\" Trent said, and then the radio went dead in Marin's hands. Yeltsin nodded at one of the guards, whose eyes narrowed as he stepped toward Marin. He held an assault rifle and was built like a bouncer.\n\n\"Go sit your ass on one of those birds,\" the guard said.\n\nMarin nodded wildly, the radio dropping from his numb fingers, clattering to the floor. He grabbed his phone as he stumbled for the door, into the dark where the engines were rising and the first rotors were starting to spin. He would warn them. Eva would have time to get to higher ground, at least; Tomas could ride farther out to sea, he could\u2026\n\nThe guard's hairy hand reached over his shoulder and snatched the phone out of his hands. \"No communications. Now get on the\u2014\"\n\nMarin turned and tried to grab the phone. The soldier shoved him, hard. He fell backwards a few steps, black despair welling in his gut as the soldier pointed the rifle at him.\n\n\"Get on the fucking bird!\" the guard shouted, and Marin turned and ran into the night, ignoring the threats to open fire. There were no shots. He ran as fast as he had ever run, pounding west through stands of palm and open land, refusing to consider that he would never make it home in time, that it wasn't possible. The drive was half an hour and he was on foot, but he thought of his daughter's face, and his wife's soft, dark eyes, and ran faster. Behind him, the first helicopters took to the air.\n\nRemember your Oath, Luis. To serve Trinity. To sacrifice everything, if that's what it took to promote the cause. Captain Trent had just told him in no uncertain terms that his family was already as good as dead, and Trinity expected him to bear the loss.\n\nMarin was staggering and breathless and still far from home when he heard the roar of the ocean, and the first distant screams.\n\nThe sun rose over the receding waters, shining brightly on the dead that littered the streets. The long, hot Mexican morning gave way to another tropical day, steam rising from the pools and rivers that lapped at the tsunami's devastation. It was chaos. Lara and Jonah joined the uninjured and walking wounded, desperately working to save what lives they could. Lara lost sight of Jonah after a while. She hoped he was finding a pilot who was ready to fly.\n\nShe dug through piles of crumbling adobe and broken wood, waded into broken homes with other rescuers, helped splint bones and carry bodies. The cries of the bereaved and the injured and the desperate beat at her the way the sun beat down on her trembling arms, the way horror and guilt beat at the edges of her heart.\n\nLara joined a chain of survivors, handing bricks back along the line as they tried to find anyone still alive beneath a broken building. It was exhausting, monotonous work, but she was grateful for something to focus on. To try to focus on, anyway. She didn't see the sodden rubble that passed through her fingers; all she could see was the marvelous dagger she had held the night before, carved in the shape of a serpent, decorated in bright blues and greens, with a wicked-looking blade\u2014a Maya artifact like no other, the Key of Chak Chel itself. She'd wrenched it from the hidden altar in the Temple of the Moon, where it had lain undisturbed for centuries. Agents of Trinity had been minutes behind her\u2014 she'd had no choice.\n\nWhen she'd pulled the dagger free, she'd felt its power, and the first pulse of dread, a bleak feeling that had only grown since. Even as the temple had trembled around her, she hadn't really comprehended what she'd done\u2014thoughtless, hurried, afraid, her only focus had been keeping that power from Trinity's hands.\n\nAnd you failed. Dr. Dominguez and his people had outgunned her, taking the relic off of her like she was a child. The tsunami had hit only minutes later.\n\nShe saw the dagger, but it was Dominguez's words that she heard, again and again.\n\nBy taking the key, you've set the apocalypse in motion. Do you realize the tragedy you have unleashed?\n\nMy fault. Taking the dagger, the key, had set off the first of the prophesied cataclysms\u2014the \"cleansing\" that would prepare the world for the rebirth of a Maya god. The tsunami had been triggered by her own hand; every face she looked into was wracked with pain or loss or heartbreak, because she had acted.\n\nWhat else was I supposed to do? If she hadn't taken the dagger, Dr. Dominguez surely would have. What had he said? With this key and the silver box we can remake the world\u2014without weakness, cruelty\u2026 But pushing the blame onto Dominguez meant little when she could hear the cries of parents searching for their missing children.\n\nAnd how many more people are going to die, if we don't find the hidden city before Trinity does? She saw again the mural in the Temple of the Moon where she'd found the dagger: the tsunami, the storm, the earthquake, the erupting volcano. If she couldn't find the Silver Box of Ix Chel before Dominguez, all of it could come to pass.\n\nMy fault.\n\nShe ached and sweated and stayed focused on the physical toil, on the sound of her pounding heart, so that she wouldn't have to hear the sorrow of the people she'd hurt.\n\nShe'd joined a trio of locals hauling buckets of mud from a drowned well and was starting to stagger when a warm hand landed on her sticky, filthy shoulder.\n\n\"Emergency crews are here from inland,\" Jonah said. \"You need to rest.\"\n\n\"I'll rest on the plane.\" Lara tipped out the tin pail of heavy black sludge. \"Please tell me you found one.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Jonah said. \"There's this guy, Miguel, he says he can get us to Peru under the radar. Single engine with floats. We'll have to stop in a couple of, ah, private airstrips, but he's willing, for a price.\"\n\nLara dropped the bucket and turned. Jonah stepped back and studied her, frowning a little. He looked like she felt\u2014 grimy and dazed with exhaustion\u2014but something loosened in her chest at the sight of him.\n\n\"When do we leave?\"\n\n\"Tomorrow morning,\" Jonah said. \"Right now, you and I are going back to the hotel and\u2014\"\n\nThe thought of waiting another night was insupportable. Dr. Dominguez and his Trinity goons were actively looking for the Silver Box of Ix Chel, and she'd been forced to hand over the key.\n\nLara shook her head, blinking up at the merciless sky, rich and blue and horribly bright. \"We should leave today. Now, as soon as possible.\"\n\nTo find yet another lost city, to prevent yet another prophecy of catastrophe being fulfilled, her treacherous mind whispered. More dead with more to come. The friends you've lost, who've suffered horribly, who died for you. These poor people. But it's all Trinity's fault, right?\n\nBlack dots swam at the corners of her eyes, and suddenly Jonah's arm was around her waist. She leaned into him and took a deep breath, trying to clear her head. How long had she been awake? Since yesterday she'd been beaten up, knocked out and half-drowned. The cut on her thigh burned, and with Jonah's steady arm to sag against, her muscles spasmed and twitched, rubbery from overuse. God, she was tired. She felt heartsick and broken.\n\n\"We can't go today,\" Jonah said patiently. \"Miguel's out looking for survivors along the coast, along with every other pilot in the area. And you're going to go lie down, right now.\"\n\n\"We have to get to the box before they do,\" she said, but even her voice was weak, and then he was walking her away from the well, past straggling groups of men and women carrying food and buckets and tents, past crying children and heaps of baking wet debris. She let herself be led, too tired to even be embarrassed when he had to carry her through the flooded lobby of their hotel and up the stairs.\n\nHe helped her to the hot, dark cave of her room and made her sit on the bed and drink a glass of water, warm and flat and inexpressibly sweet. She lowered her exhausted body to the soft mattress while he started digging through her backpack for a protein bar, but she blinked, and he was gone.\n\nLara sat up, wincing at the instant scream of a thousand unhappy muscles. The shade on her window was up, a cooling breeze cutting through the thick heat of her room, smelling of mud and salt. It was dark outside. Her boots were at the foot of the bed and there was a clean bandage on her thigh.\n\nShe scooped up her watch from the nightstand. Nearly midnight. She'd been out for hours.\n\nTrinity.\n\nThe day was gone, and they were no closer to finding the hidden city. Dread blossomed fresh in her gut, the same dark feeling that had sparked when she'd pried the dagger from its holder.\n\nThe power was still out but Jonah had left an oil lamp burning on the desk against the far wall. Lara saw a tray with dishes and the pale square of a note propped against a basin of water. She stumbled to her feet and crossed to the desk, stretching. The tray held a big bowl of beans and rice, a plate of wilted greens, and a half-dozen corn tortillas wrapped in a cloth.\n\nShe picked up the note.\n\nLittle Bird\u2014We leave at 0800. Eat, sleep. I'm next door. J.\n\nHer eyes prickled at the rush of warm gratitude. Jonah's kindness was incredible, and she was lucky that he seemed to love her as much as she loved him. She'd have died a dozen times over if not for him. Even after all she'd put him through, all that he'd lost because of her\u2026\n\nShe blinked back the tears, recognizing that her emotions were on high pitch, everything at the surface. She couldn't afford to let despair or doubt take hold, much as she deserved her share; she had to focus on the task at hand. Feeling awful wasn't going to bring her any closer to the Silver Box of Ix Chel.\n\nLara quickly washed, then devoured the cold meal, studying a topographical download of the Andes she had on her tablet, tracking tributaries off the Amazon. She wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed, she was a mass of aches, but she doubted she'd willingly sleep again before this was over. The only advantage she had over Trinity at this point was that they were looking for the silver box in the wrong spot. She was near certain that they'd misread a damaged number from the tomb's instructions, which was why they had teams in Brazil digging for the Box of Ix Chel, rather than Peru.\n\nShe pulled up the pictures she'd taken in the Maya tomb the day before, reading the glyphs again, filling in the gaps.\n\nHidden manifested place. South, go, river. Fish. Chase, heart, serpent. Crown mountain, twins come together.\n\nThere were two color signifiers, at fish and crown.\n\nTo find the hidden city, go south along the shore until you find the pink fish, then chase the heart of the serpent to the silver-crowned mountain, where the twins confer.\n\nJonah had already confirmed that pink dolphins were found all along the Amazon; the Maya would have considered them fish. And she was sure the serpent had to be the constellation Hydra, as the star charts she'd seen on the walls of the tomb suggested. The Maya belief that the will of the gods could be read in the stars had made them keen astronomers. The damaged number in the clue had been a baktun, a Maya time period measuring nearly four hundred years. Trinity had gambled that the marking was the number thirteen, and had followed the heart of the serpent\u2014Alphard, the brightest star in the Hydra constellation\u2014to where the star had been aligned at the beginning of the thirteenth baktun, at the end of 2012. Lara believed the marking was actually an eight. The beginning of the eighth baktun was in the fall of AD 40, at which time Alphard had been aligned farther north; back then, using it as a guide would have led a traveler to the mountains of Peru, not Brazil.\n\nAssuming you're right. And how long before Dr. Dominguez decides that the glyph is an eight, too, if he hasn't already? Pedro Dominguez was a respected archaeologist, an expert on Central and South American precolonial ruins; he'd been a colleague of her father's. How much did Trinity have invested in him? They could already have a team investigating the alternative possibility.\n\nBut they don't have the box yet\u2014Dominguez asked me where it was. Which means I can get to it before him.\n\nThe problem was, the directions weren't particularly specific. The Amazon had over a thousand tributaries, though only a handful that ran near Peru's dozens of \"crowned\" mountains, assuming the Maya who'd written the inscription had meant snow\u2014but did they mean snow? The Mesoamerican civilization had reigned on the peninsula for three thousand years, but its people weren't known to have traveled even as far south as Nicaragua. How well had these distant travelers known South America? Perhaps the \"crown\" in the inscription simply meant clouds, or some geographical feature that the culture had denoted a crown. And which river's shore should she follow, if she was right about the baktun? Ucayali? Mantaro? Ene? There were hundreds of kilometers of river to search. Jonah was right, the riddle was too vague\u2026 But it was what they had, and it would have to be enough. If Trinity found the Silver Box of Ix Chel first, if Dominguez got his hands on it\u2014\n\nHe'll summon Kukulkan.\n\nLittle was known about the god beyond its depiction as a feathered serpent, like the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. She thought of the stone representation of the entity that slithered down the side of the pyramid at Chich'en Itza, its massive, terrible head swallowing a man whole at the foot of the stone steps. A creator and destroyer, powerful beyond measure.\n\nIs this what he ran across? Is this why they killed him? She'd come to Mexico to look at the sites Trinity had been working at the time her father had been murdered. Both of the sites here were centered on the resurrection of Kukulkan. Had her father been seeking to prevent exactly the catastrophe that she'd just set off?\n\nLara shook her head, her emotions catching at her. I'm so sorry, Dad. His reputation had been ruined for his \"beliefs\" about sacred, powerful artifacts and the arcane prophecies surrounding them\u2026 and she'd grown up siding with his detractors, until her first disastrous expedition to the cursed island of Yamatai. He'd known the truth all along.\n\nFocus, damn it! She couldn't get sidetracked. Nothing else mattered if she couldn't prevent the rebirth of a world-killer. Maybe Dominguez was trying to stop things from getting worse but she couldn't assume that\u2014how could she, knowing that Trinity was supporting him? He'd said he would save the world from what she'd done, but also that he'd remake it. How could he remake something without destroying what already existed?\n\nAll you know is that the box has to be found. So, find it.\n\nShe picked up the thesis on gods of the Maya mythology that she'd borrowed from her father's library, leaned closer to the lamp, and started to read.\n\nSometime later, she heard light footsteps in the hall. Light and sneaking.\n\nHer holstered Remington was on the nightstand. Lara stood and in two quick steps the deadly weight of the .45 was cool in her hand. She dropped the holster on the bed and walked softly and quickly to the archway by the bathroom.\n\nOutside, the footsteps stopped in front of her door. She heard fast, high breathing\u2014a child?\u2014and the door moved very slightly in its frame as someone leaned their weight against it.\n\nA beat later, the interloper was pushing an envelope beneath the door.\n\nLara stepped forward, flicked the lock and pulled the door open. A young boy fell into the tiled entryway, letting out a squawk. She immediately lowered her weapon. The child scrambled to his feet, his eyes wide and fixed on the shining handgun. Lara moved it behind her back. The boy couldn't be more than ten years old.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" she asked.\n\n\"Nothing! He paid me to bring a note, that's all! He said come very early. I wasn't doing anything bad. I can go now, yes? It's only a note!\"\n\nShe'd been proud of her fluency in Spanish since they'd arrived, but he spoke so quickly that it took her a second to understand.\n\n\"Who was this man?\"\n\nThe boy's thin mouth trembled, his gaze darting away. \"A man! He's just a man, a stranger. I don't know him, I swear, I would tell you if I did!\"\n\n\"Okay,\" she said, gently. She thought he might be lying, but he was also terrified. \"I'm sorry I scared you. You've earned your money. You should go home, it's late.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes! I'll go now!\"\n\nThe boy nodded vigorously and was gone in seconds, pounding for the stairs. Lara closed and locked the door before sliding a single sheet of paper from the envelope.\n\nI can help you find it. Come to the market at dawn, if you want to stop them. I'll look for you.\n\nThe note was unsigned.\n\nA trap? If so, it was rather theatrically laid. It would have been just as easy to walk up to her door with a gun as send a child with a note. Anyway, if Trinity wanted her dead, they could have killed her when they'd taken the dagger from her.\n\nOn the other hand, her brief interaction with Dr. Dominguez had shown him to be charismatic, and his talk about stopping an Armageddon meant he was likely to have followers. What if the note was from some acolyte who had decided to take Lara out of the equation, and had talked themselves into playing cloak-and-dagger, rather than going for a direct hit? She'd certainly run across far stranger things.\n\nAnd what if it's exactly what it says? Some perfectly sane person who wants to stop Dominguez?\n\nWhat if he doesn't need to be stopped? What if he's the answer to what you started?\n\nLara sighed, then went to put on her mud-caked boots. The sun wouldn't be up for hours yet, but she wasn't going to sleep anyway, and she might as well make herself useful while she waited. There was no question that she would meet with the note writer. If this cautious stranger knew how to help her find the Box of Ix Chel, or even the mythical city where it was rumored to be hidden, that could cut days off their search.\n\nShe took a minute to quickly give the Remington a once-over\u2014Roth would have chided her for not cleaning it before she slept\u2014and buckle on a shoulder holster beneath a clean overshirt; she didn't want to scare anyone else. Guns were an unfortunate tool of her trade, but they were often the only effective measure when it came to interactions with rifle-toting killers. Trinity had probably evacuated all of their people when the tsunami hit, but she wasn't going to take chances.\n\nShe scribbled a note to Jonah on the back of the message and left it on the desk, hoping she'd be back before he even woke up, turned down the lamp, and let herself out."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 3",
                "text": "A few minutes after Mitchell reported the kid's departure, she called in again from her stakeout across the road from the hotel.\n\n\"Commander, she just came out the front door.\" Mitchell's voice was cool. \"Turning south on Hidalgo. On foot.\"\n\nOn the other side of town, Damon Harper tapped his inconspicuous collar mic, pleased. \"You and Greaves stay on her. Leave Byers to watch for her friend. And let me know when she gets somewhere.\"\n\n\"Copy.\"\n\nHarper nodded at the pair he had brought with him to watch the spot where his own target had holed up, a dilapidated rental owned by the target's cousin. The bungalow had escaped the worst of the tsunami due to its location on a low, leafy hill, away from the coast. Plenty of cover, an easy stakeout. \"Stay here. I'm going to see what Croft is up to. As soon as Marin moves, say the word. Don't lose him and don't get seen.\"\n\nBoth men nodded. They weren't his A team\u2014except for Mitchell, all of his top players were catching some sleep\u2014 but they were highly qualified and hungry to move up the ranks. Harper didn't work with novices.\n\nHe cast a last look at the crappy shack where the traitor Marin was staying, his lips curling into a sneer. He fucking did it. He used that kid to pass along something to Croft. Disgusting. How many of the faithful had died through the centuries to keep Trinity alive, to promote the cause? And Marin wanted to hand their hard work off to an entitled, reckless woman. A dangerous one.\n\nHarper's team\u2014their official designation was Special Tactics Unit, a brave new term for wet work, but someone had started calling them Harper's Dozen, and the name had stuck\u2014had been brought in to assess Marin's loyalty to Trinity and either bring him back into the fold or take him out, depending on his next move. Luis Marin had been with Trinity for more than a decade; he was valuable\u2014a top practical field engineer and a walking encyclopedia of dig sites and trap networks. Unfortunately, his family was local. He'd resisted the evac order and run off, and hadn't checked in since. Marin had been observed talking to a little boy earlier, the same one who'd just left Lara Croft's hotel; Mitchell had confirmed it. The only question now was whether Marin had already passed data to Croft, or if he was about to. It was a massive fuck-up on someone's part that Marin had even heard the orders.\n\nWe should just kill Croft. Would that it were so easy. There'd been a stalemate in the upper echelons of the Trinity organization regarding the troublesome woman for some time, one that had yet to be resolved. She had unwittingly led them closer to artifacts they sought, some argued. She had her father's talent for the work, no question. Others wanted her dead: she fought Trinity's interests at every turn. Harper sided with the latter group, although his reasons were much more personal. Half the men who'd died in Siberia had been cadets under Harper, when he'd still been a trainer. Croft was an existential menace, a threat to the lives of Trinity soldiers. She had already killed too many.\n\nHarper walked toward the heart of the small town, its market square, down streets lined with huddled, sleeping people, past blocks of bellowing machinery and shouting workers lit up by spotlights. Noisy diesel generators pumped fumes into the humid air. He'd memorized the town's simple layout on the flight in. The Dozen had been tapped while the waves were still pounding the coast; Croft's presence had modified their orders, to \"monitor developments.\" He was pretty sure his next instructions would be a vague directive to keep Croft from upsetting Dominguez's work, but without a kill order.\n\nAccidents happen, though. Rounds go astray. If the opportunity presented itself, Harper only hoped he'd have time to spit in her face before she died, for all of the good men she'd murdered. And if the traitor Marin managed to relay something of real value to the girl, well, all the more reason to finally solve the Croft problem, wasn't it?\n\nMitchell spoke into his ear. \"Commander, she's at the aid station on Rio Po, just north of the market street.\"\n\nHarper veered west at the next alleyway, climbing the mud-choked passage between two ruined houses. \"What's she doing?\"\n\n\"She's gotten into a line to help unload a truck. Pallets of water bottles, looks like.\"\n\nPerhaps it made her feel better, to hand out supplies to the families of the people she'd killed. Technically, Lara Croft herself had triggered the cleansing. Marin's house had been washed away in the tsunami, his wife and infant daughter still inside. He'd also lost a brother and god knew how many friends and neighbors and in-laws. Harper wondered why Marin had decided to pass information to her but thought he knew the answer. Lara Croft had taken the dagger but Trinity had let Marin's family die, and by her actions, Croft had declared herself Trinity's enemy. Who better to serve as an arbiter of Marin's vengeance?\n\nGreat change requires great sacrifice. It was a fundamental pillar of the Trinity organization. Shocked by grief, Luis Marin had lost his way and turned away from their cause, but he wasn't going to stay lost; one way or another, Harper would take care of him. And if Lara Croft happened into harm's way, whose fault was that?\n\nHarper stepped over a drowned doll, a tiny fist and one glass eye staring up from the mud.\n\nI'll bury her, he thought, and found himself smiling at the prospect."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "\"It's just around the corner,\" the old woman said again. \"But then you'd know that if you visited us more often, Camila.\"\n\nLara nodded. The poor woman was very confused; she seemed to think Lara was her sister, clearly an infrequent visitor even at the best of times. Lara had been helping to unload a truckload of supplies when the white-haired woman had wandered up, attracted by the headlights, lost and looking for home.\n\nThey walked slowly south and west. Most of the power was still down, but lanterns had been lit here and there. Shadows grouped and gathered in the piles of wreckage. The cool early morning smelled like salt, mud, smoke. Twice, Lara thought she heard the stop-start steps of a tail behind them, but she didn't see anything. She found herself studying the faces of the men along their meandering path, watching for any overt signs of interest. Everyone just looked tired.\n\n\"Mama!\" someone called. \"Oh my god, she's safe!\"\n\nA man and a young boy came running from the ruins of a community garden, still strung with decorations from the Day of the Dead festival.\n\n\"Thank you for bringing her home,\" the man said to Lara, tears in his eyes. The boy hugged the old woman. Catching their mood, the old woman embraced Lara, and made her promise to visit more often. Lara agreed that she would try. It didn't occur to her until she'd walked away that she'd never learned the old woman's name.\n\nLara started back toward the market, studying the sky between the sporadically blaring emergency lights. The night had turned to the soft blue-purple of pre-dawn, and the first birds were starting to sing. Her note writer might already be waiting. Lara stepped up her pace.\n\nThe market had stayed open overnight, a gathering place for searchers, a central receiving site for incoming supplies. Locals were passing out coffee and had set up stands to make food\u2014the cool, early air smelled like fish and fry oil. The muddy square was littered with tents set up between puddles of standing water. There was a makeshift triage station, though the most seriously injured had already been transported out.\n\nLara gratefully accepted a bottle of water from a teenaged girl who was carrying a laundry basket of them, and wandered to where a small group had gathered by a fire, clothes and tarps hanging from lines all around the dancing flames. She took a drink and turned in a slow circle, observing the active square. She thought she saw a young blond woman in tourist's clothes turn away a little too quickly, but she was gone before Lara could relocate her. An older man, thin and sallow, stared at her for a beat too long, but then walked away, out of the market area.\n\nOkay, I'm here. So where's the guy who invited me? She took another sip of water, trying to be inconspicuous. She probably looked ridiculous, standing around and pretending not to be waiting; spycraft was not her forte.\n\nAfter a few minutes, she wandered toward the shops at the square's west side, where, by the poor light of a few electric lanterns, a number of vendors were raking mud out of their stores, family members with buckets picking up broken glass and wood and not a few dead fish. She had just reached the northwest corner of the square, where a bakery and a tavern bordered a narrow alley, when a low voice spoke from the shadows.\n\n\"Ms. Croft.\" The man stayed in the dark alley, taking a step back so she could join him.\n\nHere goes. Lara glanced around and quickly followed him into the alley, her heartbeat picking up speed.\n\nIt was the man she'd seen before, the one who'd stared at her a little too long\u2014tall, thin, early forties, with an unhealthy cast beneath his bronzed skin. His dark eyes were rimmed in red.\n\n\"There's not much time,\" he said. \"I lost the two men following me, but they'll be looking. Listen. My name is Luis Marin, I work for Trinity.\"\n\nLara nodded dumbly, tensing. She hadn't expected that.\n\n\"They've\u2014he's going to do it,\" Marin said. \"Pedro Dominguez. If he unites the key with the box, he'll raise Kukulkan. The world will have to be destroyed before it can be recreated, and all those children, the babies\u2026\"\n\nMarin's eyes welled up, his expression anguished and twitching, but he spoke firmly. \"You must find the hidden city before Dominguez gets there. Find the silver box, keep it from him.\"\n\n\"Where is it?\" Lara asked. \"Is there a map?\"\n\nMarin shook his head. \"No. But there are more Maya sites in South America. Dominguez spent a lot of time at a dig in Colombia that had inscriptions about the city\u2026 And there was a mural with a river system, and mountains. A whole room dedicated to it. Drawings of the cleansing, depictions of a giant serpent.\"\n\nSerpent. \"Kukulkan?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Marin said. \"I'm\u2014I was an engineer, not an archaeologist. I know there was something about the dig that wasn't right, I'm not sure why\u2026 But there was also a puzzle Dominguez couldn't solve, about the path to the hidden city where the Box of Ix Chel is. His report said there were missing tiles, damage\u2026 I know it's important. He didn't want anyone else to find the site, he ordered us to set up traps. I led the team that planted them.\"\n\nHe grabbed her hand as he spoke, pressing a small, hard square into her palm. His fingers shook.\n\n\"The triggers are all pressure plates, easily avoided if you know where to look,\" he went on. \"The coordinates, everything you need is on this card. There's an extensive cave system surrounding the dig, but the rooms you're looking for are near the surface, at the top of the tunnels. This will take you a few hours, no more.\"\n\n\"So there may be information that I may be able to interpret,\" Lara said.\n\nMarin continued as if she hadn't spoken. \"The maps of the dig are rudimentary, but I had to draw from memory. I didn't dare try to log into the database, I'm flagged by now, but there's enough there to get you safely in and out. It's likely that they know I'm trying to get you information about one of the digs, but there are a number of sites relating to the rebirth; they won't know which one. And I'll die before I tell them.\"\n\nLara didn't pocket the tiny SD card. Marin came off sincere, but that counted for exactly nothing.\n\n\"I appreciate your good intentions, but as I said, time is of the essence and\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't you think I know that?\" Marin interrupted, searching her with his haunted gaze. \"If I'd had time, I could have saved them. The future is just a dream; it can be taken from you in a moment. Last night, my wife, my baby\u2026\" His voice cracked as he gestured at the devastated town.\n\nGuilt rose up in Lara's throat like bile.\n\nHis eyes hardened suddenly. \"Dominguez has to be stopped, I see that now. I see everything now. I'm paying for what I've done. But you took the key, you brought the waves. I thought about killing you, but you owe more than your life. He has the key now because of you. It's your responsibility to stop him.\"\n\nLara didn't answer, her personal sympathy for him drying up. He wasn't wrong about what she owed, though.\n\nHe nodded at the card in her hand. \"I can give you this. It will help you, I know it.\"\n\nLara reluctantly tucked the card into her pocket. She didn't dare plug the card into anything that could track her or corrupt her devices, but it wouldn't hurt to buy a cheap phone and take a look before they got on the plane. They'd fly over Colombia on the way to Peru. Depending on the exact location of this place, perhaps\u2014\n\nShe froze. Her eyes had finally grown accustomed to the alley's shadows, still black as night even as the sun's first rays spilled over the square, and she thought she saw movement. A flash of shadow beneath the muddled dark, at the alley's far end. It was low to the ground, half hidden by an overturned garbage bin. A cat?\n\n\"Go today, now,\" Marin was saying, taking a step backward. \"God have mercy on us all.\"\n\nThe low shadow humped forward, became a crouching figure. Lara didn't stop to think. She grabbed Marin's hand and pulled him back into the square, turning to run.\n\nEdging quickly along the north border of the market was the blond woman she'd seen earlier, the tourist, flinty-eyed and holding a pistol down by her waist. Weaving toward them through the tents in the middle of the square was a heavily built guy with a shaved head and a steel SIG just inside his bulging sports coat.\n\nShit! The only open direction was the way she'd come, past the families cleaning up the shops. Lara hesitated\u2014if they meant to shoot, people could get hurt\u2014but there was no other option. She broke south. Marin stumbled a step to catch up, then ran at her side.\n\n\"Get down, get down!\" Marin shouted, waving his arms.\n\nThere was a shot from behind them, muffled by a silencer but loud enough to draw attention. Lara scrabbled for the Remington as men and women shouted and ducked. She drew the .45, cocked and locked, but left the safety engaged, all too aware of the innocents on every side.\n\nTheir pursuers didn't care. Another shot behind them, a third, and wet mud pocked up behind Marin's feet. Lara dared a look back and saw four people after them, two more men in addition to the couple, all carrying top-grade firearms. They were dressed in civilian clothes but they could only be Trinity.\n\n\"This way!\" Marin grabbed her arm and pulled her right, into the open door of a fabric shop. A round tore into the doorframe a handspan behind Lara's head.\n\n\"Through here!\" Marin ran for the back of the empty shop, as its proprietor called out from the street in anxious terror, \"Get out of my store!\" Lara hurtled after Marin, vaulting a cutting table, knocking bolts of brightly colored cloth to the floor. They ran past the counter, Marin leading them toward an unassuming wooden door in the back wall. He stumbled over an open box of ribbon but managed to keep his feet, turning his head to see that she was still with him, his eyes widening as he looked past her.\n\nThe next two shots were fast, bam-bam, and one went high, but the other punched into Marin's left shoulder, blood splashing and immediately spreading down the front of his canvas shirt.\n\nLara shoulder-rolled across the wooden floor and spun on the balls of her feet, low, bringing up the Remington, flicking the safety off. The couple had followed them in, the big guy in a shooter's stance with his nine-mil raised, the blond in the doorway behind him. There were people running through the street behind them. Keep it low\u2026\n\nLara aimed for the guy's right knee and fired, the .45 round obliterating his patella. He screamed and crashed to the floor, a hundred kilos of thrashing weight rocking the rickety boards.\n\nMarin had pulled his own weapon, a .38 snub-nosed revolver, and he fired at the blond woman, who was taking aim with a cool eye. The discharge was deafening. The round missed but she was forced to duck back into the street. The big guy on the floor was left alone, hyperventilating.\n\nThey ran together for the shop's back door. Marin's left arm hung limp at his side.\n\n\"Stay close,\" Marin gasped, his voice tight with pain, and kicked the door open. Behind them, Lara heard the woman shouting in English over the panicked cries of the citizens.\n\n\"North end, go, go!\"\n\nMarin led her into a narrow alley that ran between the backs of more shops, rotting garbage slick and stinking beneath her boots. She stumbled after him, five running steps south through the muck, the end of the alley opening into the street a dozen meters ahead. She glanced back, saw shadows and garbage bins. How long before they pen us in? Ten seconds? Twenty?\n\nMarin turned suddenly and side-kicked an unmarked door, hitting the latch directly with his heel. The lock held but the wood around it splintered, the door swinging open almost gently into a dark storeroom.\n\nLara ran after him, whacking her hip on a shelf she couldn't see, and then Marin was pushing through a swinging door ahead, outlined in a rectangle of early-morning sunlight. Lara followed him into the front room of a closed souvenir shop, shelves of mugs and banners and painted shells dimly visible by the breaking dawn through the large front window. Marin hurried to the door, turning the lock as he looked out at the street. He glanced back at her, his expression set in a grimace\u2014the bloody patch on his shirt had nearly reached his waist\u2014but his gaze was clear, calculating.\n\n\"Straight across,\" he said, opening the door, and took off for a block of apartments across the street, four stories of windows and peeling paint. Lara kept the Remington close in and aimed at the sky, her gaze flickering south and then north as she ran after him. She saw people about, but no one was running or pointing anything in their direction.\n\nThere was a young couple on the front step, locals, the woman holding a little boy's hand. The man had set down a battered suitcase to unlock the door.\n\nBastard. Marin had seen the family before deciding their next step.\n\nThe mother saw them coming and pulled her child close, squawking for her husband to get out of the way. The door was open. The man turned with an expression of surprise, and then Marin was barreling past him, through the entrance and up a worn flight of stairs. Lara caught the woman's terrified gaze as she ran past.\n\n\"Come inside, the street is not safe!\" Lara called in Spanish, pounding up the steps after Marin.\n\nMarin ran up two flights, then took off down the main hallway of the third floor, long and echoing. An open window at the end revealed a fire escape, but Marin stopped short, at the last door on the right side.\n\nHe knocked fast and light with his revolver. His voice shook. \"Paolo! Help me!\"\n\nFootsteps thudded inside, and then someone was fumbling with the lock. \"Luis?\"\n\n\"My cousin's boy,\" Marin gasped.\n\nA skinny young man of about eighteen opened the door, his eyes bleary, dark hair sticking up on the back of his head. He wore a food-stained tee shirt and boxers.\n\nHis eyes went wide when he saw them. \"What happened?\"\n\nMarin shook his head. \"Inside.\"\n\nPaolo stepped aside to let them in, staring at Lara like she was an alien life form. \"Who's she?\"\n\nMarin turned and closed the door behind them, leaning against it. \"Better you don't know. We won't stay long. It will be safe for us to leave in a few minutes.\"\n\nThe single room was strewn with dirty clothes and dishes, and smelled like stale corn chips and teenage sweat. There were two small windows, both open to let in the cool morning air, but they faced another building. No one could see them from the street. Lara allowed herself to take a full breath.\n\n\"Mother of God, you're bleeding!\" Paolo shrieked.\n\nThe young man turned and grabbed a towel off a heap at the foot of his bed, rushing forward to press it to Marin's shoulder. Outside, people were shouting, bright sounds of panic and accusation\u2014\"Get down, over there, he has a gun!\" A police whistle blew, and there were more shouts\u2014 but no shots were fired.\n\nMarin exhaled heavily, and staggered to the bed, looking at Lara. \"They won't get into a fight with the local law. At least, that was the agreement until yesterday. You can make it back to your friend now, but you should assume that Trinity is watching.\"\n\n\"How big is Trinity?\" Lara asked. She locked the semi but didn't put it away. \"Where are you based?\"\n\nMarin shook his head. \"Bigger all the time, and there are chapters across the globe.\"\n\nShe had so many questions. How were they organized? Who funded them? What was their actual ideology? She'd never gotten any clear answers and it was information that she needed badly\u2026 But the question that popped out was the one she wanted the answer to the most.\n\n\"Who ordered my father to be killed?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Why would I know that?\" Marin seemed irritated by the question. \"I told you, I'm just an engineer. You should go. You could be at the labyrinth by this evening, if you leave now.\"\n\n\"The labyrinth?\"\n\n\"We called it the Blue Labyrinth,\" Marin said, gritting his teeth as Paolo applied pressure to his shoulder. \"For the caves, and the predominant color of the murals. Maya blue.\"\n\nThe most sacred of colors. Maya priests were depicted wearing robes in the bright azure shade; victims of human sacrifice had been painted with the pigment before their hearts were cut out.\n\nThat wasn't an especially reassuring thought, and she didn't trust Marin any more now than she had at the outset\u2026 but she didn't doubt that the loss of one's family might bring about a sudden change in values.\n\nIf that's even true. This whole thing could be a setup, to keep her occupied while Dominguez searched for the box. Or to use her to uncover another clue, to see if she could solve whatever it was that Dr. Dominguez couldn't.\n\nLara sighed, holstering the semi. Her instincts said Marin was telling the truth, at least about losing his wife and child. Which means I have a decision to make, before 0800.\n\n\"I'll look at it,\" she said, backing toward the door. \"I'm\u2014 I'm sorry for your loss.\"\n\n\"Fuck you,\" he said, his voice drained of feeling. \"You don't get to be sorry. Just stop him.\"\n\n\"You should lie down,\" Paolo said, his stunned silence breaking in a rush. \"Why did you get shot? Who shot you? What should I do?\"\n\n\"Keep firm pressure on the wound,\" Lara said. \"And get him to a doctor.\"\n\nPaolo stared up at her with the same look of incredulity he'd worn upon seeing her, like she was a talking dog or a unicorn. From outside, Lara could hear the tone shifting from panic to relief, voices rising to talk about the armed strangers who'd run down the street.\n\nThere was nothing else to say, and Jonah was probably awake by now. Lara slipped back into the hallway, closing the door behind her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "Jonah had worked another few hours after seeing to Lara, helping to set up shelters. By the time it got dark, he was running on empty. He went back to the hotel, gratefully accepting trays of food from the owner's wife, Luisa. She was using the kitchen to turn out huge vats of beans and rice and corn to send to the nearest aid station, two blocks away.\n\nHe checked on Lara, leaving supper and a note. She was in the exact same position she'd fallen asleep in, but her color was back, which was good. She'd been pale earlier, beneath the sunburn and the dirt. Jonah had gone to his room, wolfed down the simple, excellent food and then passed out himself.\n\nThe sun wasn't up when he woke, but he'd gotten close to eight hours and felt mostly recharged. Good thing, considering the day ahead. He wrinkled his nose as he laced his boots. At least a full day of flying, crammed into Miguel's tiny plane. Fine for Lara; she was little.\n\nLara. He'd snapped at her last night, when the tsunami hit. He hadn't meant to, but there had been people drowning at their feet, and she'd only been able to talk about getting to Peru. She was right, Dominguez had to be stopped, but sometimes it was like she couldn't see the trees for the forest. He'd never known anyone so single-minded.\n\nExcept you, maybe. He sometimes wondered which was stronger, her obsessive need to validate her father's life's work and keep Trinity in check, or his own commitment to protect her. She was daring and resourceful and she had mad skills, but she was also a trouble-magnet. Their \"little\" research trip to Mexico had now become a full-fledged life-or-death race to Peru, to keep Trinity from necromancing a Maya god. Lara found apocalyptic prophecies like some people found loose change between their couch cushions.\n\nHe packed and then went downstairs and had coffee with the owners. Esteban and Luisa were good people; they had already opened the hotel to their displaced neighbors and the kitchen had been running all night. Jonah paid his and Lara's bill, adding a substantial sum to help defray their costs. Esteban put up some resistance, but not much. It took money to rebuild a community, and the Croft Foundation could afford it.\n\nJonah brought a cup of black tea back up to Lara's room, tapping at the door. No answer.\n\n\"Wake up,\" he called, knocking again. \"Come on, you need to pack. I brought tea.\"\n\nSilence.\n\nJonah had her extra key\u2014in spite of her many talents, Lara had an amazing habit of losing hotel keys\u2014and wasted no time using it. \"Hey, I'm coming in. Don't be naked.\"\n\nThe door opened into an empty room. She hadn't packed. Books and maps still littered the desk; her pack was open, with clothes spilling out. There was a piece of paper on the empty tray, next to his note from the night before. Jonah set down the tea and scooped up the paper, frowning.\n\nJonah\u2014mystery man wants to help, could be important. I'll be back soon, don't worry. Thank you for dinner! L.\n\nOn the other side of the paper was a stranger's spiky script describing a meeting at dawn. Unsigned.\n\nJonah checked his watch. 0712: the sun had been up at least half an hour. The market was a five-minute walk away. Where was she? And who sent the note, and what was Lara thinking?\n\nYou expect something different? The meeting promised precious information. When had Lara ever shied away from sketchy circumstances to get what she wanted? It wasn't like she was some delicate flower that needed to be sheltered, but seriously, there were times she needed to think better. Common sense dictated backup on something like this, and there was no reason he couldn't have gone with her. He'd been in the next room.\n\nHe heard quick footsteps in the hall, and then Lara was standing in the doorway, her eyes bright. She looked sweaty and disheveled, strands of loose hair stuck to the back of her neck, and held a disposable phone in one hand.\n\n\"We're going to Colombia first,\" she said.\n\n\"Are you kidding?\" Jonah dropped the note to the desk. \"Why?\"\n\n\"I met with a Trinity worker,\" Lara said, striding into the room. \"Ex-worker, I should say. Luis Marin. He gave me data on a dig in Colombia that references the path to the hidden city directly.\"\n\nJonah frowned. \"Why do you look like you just ran a 10K?\"\n\n\"Trinity was watching Marin. They probably have eyes on us, too. They gave chase. Clearly, they were worried about what he might tell me. Do you think the pilot will be willing to change his plans? Miguel, right?\"\n\nShe handed the phone to Jonah, then squatted next to her pack and started shoveling in her clothes.\n\n\"Lara\u2026\" Jonah trailed off, not even able to find the words.\n\n\"I know, it was a risk,\" she said, looking up at him. \"But think about it\u2014we could spend days searching for the right river, the right mountain. Look at the coordinates: this dig is practically on the way. And there's a file with the site mapped out, including where Trinity laid charges. What we need won't be hard to access, at all.\"\n\n\"What makes you think Marin was telling the truth?\"\n\nLara broke eye contact, rising to step to the desk.\n\n\"Well, they shot at us,\" she mumbled, picking up her books. \"Marin was hit in the shoulder.\"\n\nBefore he could respond, she quickly went on, turning to face him again. \"It wasn't a bunch of soldiers after him, it was a trained team. He's obviously important to Trinity, to merit that kind of attention.\"\n\n\"Or they're all in on it,\" he said. \"You think you set off this doomsday prophecy, right? That makes you a player in this. Maybe they need you to go to this dig and figure something out for them, to work the big mojo. What's a flesh wound, if they can maneuver you like this?\"\n\n\"My instincts say otherwise. I don't trust him, but I believe him. He lost his family in the tsunami and had a wake-up call about what's actually going to happen if Dominguez is successful.\"\n\nShe looked so certain. Jonah scowled. How was he supposed to argue with instincts?\n\nWhy do you want to?\n\nHe realized he was irritated with her and gave it voice immediately rather than let it keep steering him towards a fight. \"I'm mad because you snuck off to a spy meeting without even telling me. One that turned out to be dangerous.\"\n\nLara nodded, her gaze softening. \"That's fair.\"\n\n\"I mean, we're both here, right? What's the point, if we're not working together? I wake up and you're gone? There was no reason to go alone.\"\n\n\"You're right. I'm sorry.\"\n\nJonah exhaled heavily. \"Okay.\"\n\nShe let him enjoy the apology for about a second before she was nodding at the phone still in his hand. \"What do you think? About Colombia?\"\n\n\"I don't even know.\" He squinted at the screen, at a tiny grid marked with Xs. He wasn't sure what he was looking at. \"If you think it's worth a shot\u2014\"\n\n\"I do. It's a gamble, there could be nothing worth finding, but that would be a few hours wasted in all. If it pays off, we could be on our way home before Dominguez even knows we beat him.\"\n\nJonah nodded. \"I guess it's Colombia, then.\"\n\nLara grinned and lifted her pack, shoving the books inside. \"Brilliant. Is that tea for me?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"You are brilliant,\" she said, and stepped forward and hugged him. \"I know this is more than you bargained for. I really am sorry.\"\n\nAnd this is why I've got your back, right here. Lara was a sweetheart. She was family.\n\nSpeaking of backs\u2026 He returned the embrace but quickly let go. Her shirt was soaked.\n\n\"You might want to change before we go. Maybe wash up a little. I mean, if we're going to be sitting together in a soda can for the rest of the day.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Give me five minutes, I'll be ready.\"\n\nJonah nodded, and went to collect his bag. He hoped the pilot was amenable to altering his route."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "Jonah Maiava and his friend\u2014an attractive young woman in her mid-twenties\u2014showed up at the airfield on time, each carrying a couple of packs. Miguel Riviera waved to them from next to his Cessna, one in a line of five parked along the dirt strip, and hoped he wasn't making a mistake.\n\nJust keep your eye on the prize. Jonah had offered a lot of money for what they wanted\u2014a private trip to Peru so his friend could look for some kind of archaeology thing, hidden ruins or something. Private, meaning \"off the grid.\" Which meant filing a false flight plan, and Miguel getting his license pulled if they got caught.\n\nYou won't get caught. And if you do, you know who to pay.\n\nHe sighed. He thought he'd put all this behind him. He took tourists through the Amazon basin or to the Yucatan on eco-trips now, and while he didn't make half as much money as he used to, it was legitimate work, legal work doing what he loved. Two days ago, he would have turned Mr. Maiava down flat.\n\nTwo days ago, Mama still had the home. His mother ran a small nursing home for a handful of old women, only blocks from the beach. No one had died in the flood, thank God, but Mama had broken her arm and there was no money to rebuild. His father had passed away years ago, and Miguel was her only son.\n\nMiguel had been worrying over it when his friend Hector told him that there was a big Polynesian guy looking for a private flight to Peru, an American. Hector said that Jonah was all right, not a criminal type. If it had been drugs or guns, that would have been a different story, but a trip to look at ruins? Miguel still knew most of the guys running private airstrips all the way down to Argentina, ones that certain officials could be paid to ignore. Not the most scrupulous bunch, the airfield owners, but this young woman apparently had money to burn. For the right price, most of them would sell their own mothers.\n\nWe all have our price. Jonah had been reasonable and clear\u2014they needed to get to the Andes of central Peru without anyone knowing about it. And he had presented half the money up front, in cash. More than enough to take care of Mama and her friends, and that was half. If a rich grad student wanted to take a tour, that wasn't so bad. And he was 99.9 percent sure that they weren't going to get caught.\n\nMiguel shifted from one foot to the other and back, watching the big man and his friend approach. They could get where they needed to go on a commercial flight in a third of the time\u2014and for a fraction of what they were paying\u2014 then rent a private plane locally. Why were they hiding?\n\n\"Miguel,\" Jonah said. \"This is the friend I told you about, Lara Croft. Lara, this is Miguel Riviera.\"\n\n\"Nice to meet you, Miss Croft.\"\n\n\"Call me Lara,\" she said, shaking his hand firmly. She had a sweet, youthful face, but her gaze was much older. Much cooler. And she carried herself like an athlete; balanced, good posture. Not a student, maybe. Out of his league, definitely, and he never hit on customers, anyway.\n\nMiguel pulled out the map he'd worked out that morning, where he'd marked places to refuel. He used a pencil to point to the route he meant to take. \"We'll have to make several stops, but assuming the weather holds, we can reach Peru by\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Lara said. \"Can we make a stop in Colombia first?\"\n\n\"Colombia?\"\n\nLara motioned to his pencil. \"May I?\"\n\nHe handed it over and she studied the map for a moment before marking an area north of Los Indios, not far from the northern coast.\n\n\"What's there?\" It was a swath of jungle with nothing nearby, heavy greenery and hills. The Santo Almeda brothers ran an airstrip not far from where she'd indicated.\n\n\"A dig site. A Trinity dig site.\"\n\nMiguel frowned. \"Trinity\u2014they're that historical research group, or something like that?\" He knew they'd been working ruins just outside of town for a few months, which meant money for the local markets\u2014they had a lot of employees to feed\u2014but they had generally kept to their compounds in the hills to the east. Nobody knew much about them.\n\n\"I want to be honest with you, Mr. Riviera\u2014\"\n\n\"Miguel, please.\"\n\n\"Miguel. I know you have no reason to trust us, but here's the truth: I'm trying to stop Trinity from doing something terrible. The mountains in Peru are where we ultimately need to go, but there's information that should tell us where, exactly, at this dig in Colombia. Trinity doesn't want me to interfere with their plans, which is why we need to go looking in secret. And we need to be quick about it.\"\n\n\"Won't they know you're looking when you get to this dig?\"\n\n\"It's not active,\" she said. \"There shouldn't be anyone there. And we only need a ride, we're not expecting you to help us look.\"\n\n\"We'll pay for the extra stop,\" Jonah said.\n\nMiguel hesitated. Davi and Gabriel Santo Almeda were temperamental, and could be picky about who dropped in. They also hung out with a bunch of lowlifes. Last time he'd been by, some hopped-up lunatic had pointed a gun at him. Gabriel and his friends had laughed, and Davi hadn't bothered to intervene. Miguel had hoped to never see them again.\n\n\"How much?\"\n\n\"Name it,\" Lara said.\n\n\"Within reason,\" Jonah added.\n\nWell. The idea that there were people looking for Lara and Jonah wasn't appealing; he'd definitely preferred thinking that she was a grad student\u2026 But he was already breaking the law, and he could do a lot with the figure that had popped into his head. Including pay whatever it cost to calm the Santo Almeda brothers down. Probably.\n\n\"What terrible thing does Trinity mean to do, that you think you can stop?\"\n\nLara met his gaze directly. \"Does it matter? Do you want this job, or should we find someone else?\"\n\nShe had a point. \"I can take you there. But if we're being so honest, you should know that I can't vouch for the character of some of the men we're likely to encounter along the way. Especially where you want to go. Money can smooth over a lot, but some of these people are criminals. Killers, crazies.\"\n\nNot only did the young woman not look frightened at the prospect, she actually smiled, just a little. \"We can handle ourselves.\"\n\nMiguel glanced at Jonah, whose expression was unreadable. The big man blinked back at him, waiting.\n\nName it.\n\nMiguel blew out a breath, nodding. \"Okay. Yes. Colombia.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "They stopped first in the short, jagged foothills of the Cordillera Isabelia in Nicaragua, where a handful of men with guns glowered at them until Miguel hopped out and did some talking, handing out \"fees\" for the use of the bumpy, rocky strip. After that, the men were all smiles, first happily escorting Lara and Jonah to a really unpleasant outhouse, then inviting them to share their lunch\u2014a root stew with chunks of some gamey, unrecognizable meat. Lara firmly reminded herself that she needed the protein, ignoring the tiny claw she had to discreetly spit out. They ate quickly in the oppressively humid heat, the air slick with the smell of petrol and hazy with smoke, the noise from the fuel pump killing the need for conversation. In barely an hour, they were back in the air.\n\nThe interminable day passed as they flew over lush green hills and muddy lakes, small villages glittering with tin roofs and chain-link fences. They veered out over the Pacific several times, Miguel regularly changing altitude, the effect somewhat nauseating in the unpressurized plane\u2014hot and then cold, falling and rising and banking. Lara packed her kit for the site and pulled out the disposable phone again to read and reread the information Marin had given her, committing the simple maps to memory.\n\nShe looked again at the riddle they'd found before the tsunami. \"Chase the heart of the serpent to the silver-crowned mountain, where the twins confer,\" she read out loud. \"Ever heard of the hero twins, Jonah?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Well, there are legendary twins in most cultures\u2014Castor and Pollux, Romulus and Remus, arguably Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The Maya hero twins were great players in the Mesoamerican ballgame, competing against the gods of the Underworld to avenge their father's death.\"\n\n\"That's what we're looking for?\"\n\nShe smiled at his expression. \"For our purposes, the twins could represent anything\u2014a pair of lakes, mountains, caves, or perhaps something man-made\u2026\"\n\nAfter a while she ran out of guesses. Jonah started rereading a battered pulp novel and finally slumped down in his seat, dozing. Miguel mostly kept to himself, occasionally pointing out places of interest\u2014a national reserve, mountains and rivers that delineated one country from another.\n\nThey refueled in Panama, in the tropical heat of a flat lake area, deep in a swampy jungle. Lara estimated that they were close to the border with Colombia, although she thought it impolitic to ask; of the small group of suspicious men who greeted them, several were dressed like soldiers, and none were welcoming. Miguel had told Lara and Jonah to keep close to the plane for this stop, which was just as well. Stretching was an incredible relief, but moving about in the full heat of the afternoon was like walking through syrup. It was beautiful, though\u2014the greenery was vibrant, the earth rich and dark, the sky a thick, lustrous blue.\n\nThey ate boiled trout and beans, and a man with a nasty scar over his eye stared at Lara and licked his lips when he saw her notice. Jonah noticed, too, and his expression made the scarred fellow find something else to stare at. Had she been on her own she would have dealt with it\u2014whatever his intentions, the man had the physique of an overfed bulldog\u2014but she had to appreciate the value of one's best friend being the size and shape of a top power-lifter. It saved a lot of trouble.\n\nWhen they got back on the plane, Miguel said that he thought they could be at the Colombian dig by dark. Lara nodded and tried not to let her dread well up at the hours slipping by. They could only go as fast as they could go. She would head for the Blue Labyrinth as soon as they touched down, take pictures, and figure out the clues on a night flight to Peru. They could be looking for the city by tomorrow morning.\n\nWhich means you need to sleep if you can. Miguel would have to catch a nap while she and Jonah checked out the dig. She hoped he would agree to not stopping for the whole night. For the price he and Jonah had finally worked out, she didn't think there'd be any objections.\n\nThey took off from the rutted mud airstrip, ever south.\n\nLara didn't sleep, exactly, but for a time her thoughts became heavy and dull, the steady blur of the engine lulling her to the barest of awareness. She could see the mural from the Temple of the Moon in her mind's eye, the towering wave crashing down. She saw the clear sky darken with an approaching storm, heavy clouds gathering from the air, lightning crackling through the swirling, ominous mass. She saw a terrified child clinging to the church roof, falling, swept away, while in the distance a great serpent rose from the sea, its eye a black sun, shining across the water, searching for her\u2026\n\nShe realized that Jonah had moved up to talk to Miguel at some point, their voices low beneath the drone of the engine, pulling her awake. The evening light blared through the small cabin.\n\n\"\u2026didn't think I'd be seeing any of these people again, this side of the grave,\" Miguel was saying. \"Davi runs things. He's not as bad as his brother, but he only steps in if there's money in it for him. Their crew is worse.\"\n\n\"Who's Davi?\" Lara asked.\n\n\"Davi and Gabriel Santo Almeda,\" Jonah said. \"They own the airstrip where we need to go. We're still an hour out.\"\n\n\"How far is it from the dig?\" Lara asked.\n\n\"Miguel says maybe fifteen, twenty klicks.\"\n\nLara nodded. Good. The closer the better.\n\n\"Do you need more cash to get us a ride?\" Jonah asked.\n\n\"No, there's still enough,\" the pilot said. \"Though I hope you don't mind driving in some flunky's busted truck. I'm more concerned with personal safety. When I spoke earlier of unsavory men, I was thinking mostly of the brothers. The last time I saw them, Davi was clean but Gabriel had a habit. Cocaine. He's the older of the two, so Davi doesn't give him orders. They keep a lot of guns, and so do their friends. It's important that we are passive with them, that we say and do nothing that might make them feel suspicious or anxious.\"\n\n\"Fun,\" Jonah said. \"Any chance they'll try to shoot us down?\"\n\n\"No, I'll radio first, and they know my plane anyway,\" Miguel said, but he didn't sound all that certain. \"Perhaps it's better if you say nothing about Trinity, though.\"\n\nLara could see from the nervous glance he threw back at her that he was worried.\n\n\"Once I have a deal with Davi, he'll keep the rest in line, but you should go nowhere unattended while we're here.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" Lara said.\n\n\"I'll stay with the plane, while the two of you go see this place,\" Miguel said. \"Only a few hours, you say?\"\n\n\"Less, I hope.\"\n\nMiguel nodded. \"We don't want to stay any longer than we have to. I'm going to tell them that you're photographing ruins all through the basin for a research study, your institute has paid to see this site\u2014and that we're expected to land at Los Indios before dawn. The officials there would be quick to send out a search.\"\n\nLara and Jonah both nodded. The threat of a visit by the authorities should deter these brothers from taking them hostage, or killing them for what they had.\n\n\"Did you leave on good terms, last time you came through?\" Jonah asked.\n\n\"I wouldn't say good, but not openly hostile,\" Miguel said. \"I always paid.\"\n\nHe hesitated, then added, \"I'll tell you all about my checkered past, if you'll let me in on what it is you think you're going to find here.\"\n\nJonah glanced back at Lara, who considered it briefly, then shook her head. Miguel deserved to know what they were up against, but if a confrontation with Trinity lay ahead in all this, it was safer for him if they thought he was some smuggler they'd hired for his plane. Which, essentially, he was. Marin's betrayal of Trinity meant there was a chance that they were sending soldiers to all of their digs, but that would take time. She didn't think they had the bodies, not close at hand\u2026 Although what she didn't know about Trinity could fill a book. It was all a risk.\n\nTo either side of the plane Lara could see water, the endless shining Pacific to the right, the lighter blue of the Caribbean farther off to her left. Ahead of them were the Andes, rising from a dense green ocean of rivers, jungle, and hills. Shadows grouped and fled across the canopy of what seemed a billion trees, scattering like lizards.\n\n\"When this is over, my friend, I'll make us the best empanadas you've ever eaten, and then we'll talk,\" Jonah said.\n\nMiguel hesitated, then half smiled. \"That's a bold claim. You do flan?\"\n\n\"My flan is the GOAT,\" Jonah said, and then both of them were grinning.\n\nLara stared out at the darkening sea, remembering something her father had written in his notes from a trip to South America\u2014that the beauty of the jungle there was matched only by its duplicity.\n\nShe had checked her pack three times already; the bow case and the shotgun were in a duffel, the Remington was clean, the climbing gear had been inspected. Not that there appeared to be a need for any real climbing, but she had to get to the site; Marin's notes made clear that the Blue Labyrinth was completely underground, a meandering series of rooms built into the upper levels of a winding cave system. She planned to leave Jonah at the top of the fifty-meter drop\u2014technically a cenote or sinkhole, as there was underground water present, but the shallow lakes were far beneath where she would need to go. She'd take her pictures and be back up in short order. Even padding her time, she didn't see how it might take more than an hour to get to the most distant of the areas Marin had highlighted, and coming back would be even faster: she'd have her marks to follow.\n\nHurry. The urgency grew every time she stopped to think.\n\n\"How long did you say, until we land?\" Lara asked.\n\nMiguel glanced at the buzzing dashboard. \"Unless it gets windy in the wrong direction, about forty minutes.\"\n\nLara leaned back in her seat and pulled the phone with Marin's maps out of her bag, opening the files again."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "Luis Marin wasn't hard to find. Only a few hours after Lara Croft flew off their radar in a single-engine prop, Ace called in. He and Sergei had found the traitor trying to sneak into a hotel where his mother had taken refuge. Marin gave up without a struggle. Harper put Mitchell on collateral immediately, and gave orders that Marin be taken to the outpost north of town, a solitary farm that Trinity had purchased for private meetings and visiting researchers. There'd been a lot of interest in Dominguez's work.\n\nHarper rode out to the farm with the rest of the Dozen, in a troop transport taken from the deserted Trinity compound; all of the local personnel had been pulled out before the tsunami. Koboshi drove, coaxing the shitty truck over dirt roads, while Harper considered his options. The men in the back kept quiet. Greaves had been a popular guy, and he was out of the game permanently, stuck in a clinic bed until an evac copter could take him to an actual hospital. Lara Croft had crippled him.\n\nTechnically, Harper should call his superiors immediately with the update\u2014Marin was a loss, Croft was in the wind\u2014 but, also technically, his initial directive was still in play; in addition to assessing Marin, they were to monitor Croft's movements. If he waited for an official order, up and back down the line of command, she could get away\u2026 Whereas if he and his team were to follow her to wherever Marin had sent her, and then call it in, there would be no chance of another escape. Keeping up their surveillance was likely to be the decision, anyway. Admin would huff about Harper overstepping his bounds, but there were those higher up who would want to know what Lara Croft found and wouldn't care about such a minor break from regulation.\n\nKoboshi turned into the drive for the farm, a long, low brick building set in the middle of three acres of beans and squash. Ace and Sergei had already arrived, a mud-spattered jeep parked by a leaning, dusty tool shed. They'd taken Marin inside.\n\nHarper hopped out of the truck and into the sweltering heat, waiting until everyone was out before assigning tasks. Hux would get on the sat and order the transport back in, then download everything they had on their Maya-related sites. Koboshi would hack into the Civil Aviation Authority's network\u2014Byers and Alanis had followed Croft to the local airstrip and gotten the tail number off the plane she and her friend had taken\u2014and start looking for her. The rest would sleep, eat\u2014according to the files, the farmhouse had a pantry full of MREs\u2014and run equipment checks. Harper wasn't worried about the firearms\u2014every member of his team was a fanatic about maintenance\u2014but on their last assignment, taking out a troublesome bureaucrat and his personal guards in a banana republic, the helmet mics had been spotty. Lara Croft was a brat, but a tricky brat; she had managed to kill a number of trained soldiers all by herself. Only a fool would underestimate her. Harper wanted everything at a hundred percent if they were going to take their shot.\n\nFirst things first. \"Let me know when Mitchell gets here,\" Harper said, and the guards nodded.\n\nHe walked through the wavering mirage of the dirt yard, stepping into the cooler dark of the building's front room. Hux had set up his laptop on a table there and was already tapping away. Hux Lane was one of the top players in the Dozen, along with Mitchell, Ace, Sergei, and Reddy. Pure sociopaths, every one of them, and devoted to Harper. The others were hard and well-trained, but not necessarily the brightest. Harper didn't mind. All of them followed orders.\n\nMarin was in one of the back bedrooms; the two at the home's east end were soundproofed, allegedly. Harper moved through the hall, letting his eyes adjust to the dark, sneering at the cheap utilitarian furnishings. Trinity had no interest in aesthetics.\n\nSergei was strapping Marin to a high-backed wooden chair in the last room on the left; Ace had his Ruger trained at Marin's feet. Both nodded at Harper when he came into the room but didn't speak. The engineer's face was covered by a burlap hood. He groaned, rolling his head. A spot of blood had leaked through a bandage on his left shoulder.\n\nSergei used most of a roll of electrical tape to secure the prisoner\u2014ankles, arms, hips and chest. He taped Marin's hands to the heavy wooden arms of the chair; Marin's fingers twitched and trembled, useless. Sergei finally looked up at Harper and gave a nod.\n\n\"I'll have a moment alone,\" Harper said, and both men filed out, closing the door behind them. The room was small and bare. Dusty flowered curtains hung in the tiny window, a number of dead flies scattered on the floor beneath.\n\nHe watched the hooded man, waiting. Marin gave in first.\n\n\"You should kill me now,\" Marin said. \"I don't have anything to tell you.\"\n\n\"Oh, I doubt that,\" Harper said. \"For example\u2026 what was your daughter's name?\"\n\nMarin shook his head, the burlap swaying.\n\nThey would need to establish a few ground rules. The transport plane would have got the Dozen to wherever Croft had gone\u2014one of the sites Marin had set traps for, surely\u2014in half the time it would take her to fly the distance, but after it had dropped them here, the pilot had taken it back to Mexico City for maintenance. Even if it was flight-ready\u2014unlikely\u2014they were stuck waiting for it. Harper had some time to kill.\n\nHe pulled his sidearm, a Glock 19, checked it, then flipped it around so he was holding the barrel as he stepped to the prisoner. He slammed the butt of the gun down on the top of Marin's right hand. Bone crunched beneath the heavy metal.\n\nMarin howled in agony, writhing, his hand immediately turning purple, swelling. Harper waited until the throes had passed before speaking again.\n\n\"When I ask a question, you'll answer it,\" Harper said. \"If you don't, there's going to be pain. Your daughter's name.\"\n\nMarin's voice shook. \"What does it matter?\"\n\nHarper tapped Marin's uninjured hand lightly with the gun butt. A promise.\n\n\"Natalia,\" Marin said.\n\nHarper nodded to himself, satisfied. He reached out and pulled the bag off of the man's head. Marin squinted up at him, gasping, his long face streaked with tears and dirt. He looked purely miserable, and unwell\u2014the soul sickness of utter devastation radiated from him like a smell.\n\n\"Loss is never easy,\" Harper said, \"but when faced with this reminder of your own mortality, you betrayed the faith.\"\n\nMarin looked like he wanted to respond, but his gaze darted to the weapon.\n\n\"Speak up,\" Harper said, dropping the Glock into its holster.\n\n\"What is the faith, to you?\" Marin asked.\n\n\"As it ever was,\" Harper said. \"To serve in God's army. To expose the false gods that mock his existence. To secure evidence of his supremacy, for all to see.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Marin said. \"Because God cannot do these things for himself. It's up to Trinity to call forth miracles, to convince the world.\"\n\n\"It is our covenant,\" Harper said patiently. \"We pledge our arms as prayer. You took the Oath.\"\n\n\"Yes, and that's what I told myself,\" Marin said. \"Pledging my life to a glorious purpose, to show man proof of God. A cause to die for, to kill for. But it's a concept that denies the lives of those lost, that denies the meaning of those lives.\"\n\n\"Sacrifice is part of the whole,\" Harper said. \"People die every day. If their deaths serve to advance the greater purpose, to finally unite mankind in belief\u2026 no sacrifice is too great for that.\"\n\n\"Trinity would stand righteously at the grave of the world,\" Marin said. \"I looked into the face of my daughter and saw God. I felt his love, in my love for her, and for my beautiful wife. Precious moments of connection that can only exist in their own time. After what happened yesterday, I\u2026 I believe now that those moments are God's true gift to us. Trinity chases only the future; it denies God's gift to his children. We are foolish, prideful men, trying to create meaning for ourselves. It's wrong. I was wrong.\"\n\nHarper shook his head. The rhetoric of emotion, weak and selfish. Harper was no fanatic, but Trinity's goal was altruistic, and he believed in it. A world under one God, the way it was supposed to be. Eden reborn. He might not see it in his lifetime, but Trinity would endure, its soldiers would keep fighting to guide humanity to such a place. If Dr. Dominguez was even partly successful, they would be that much closer.\n\nThere was a soft rap at the door. Mitchell had arrived.\n\n\"You know, I was going to torture you for the information I want, but honestly, I've lost my appetite for it,\" Harper said. \"You're weak, Marin. You took a loss and crumbled. Tell me where Lara Croft is going, and I'll send you to your wife and child.\"\n\nMarin stared back at him. He looked scared but resolute. \"I won't.\"\n\n\"Oh, you will,\" Harper said. \"That's absolutely what's going to happen. You can tell me now or later, but later you're going to be hurting.\"\n\n\"Then I'll be hurting,\" Marin said, lifting his chin. \"And she'll have time to find what she needs.\"\n\nHarper walked to the door, cracking it open. \"Mitchell, step in here, please.\"\n\nMitchell nodded and followed him into the room, bouncing the gurgling, dark-eyed collateral on her hip. A little boy, about a year old, his mouth and chin speckled with chips of the candy skull he was slobbering to mush in one chubby fist. Marin's youngest nephew, and namesake. The boy goggled at the room, his brow drawing up.\n\n\"Any problems?\" Harper asked.\n\n\"Playpen in the yard, they never saw me,\" Mitchell said, in a cooing, girlish voice as she nuzzled the worried boy's neck. \"Isn't that right, baby? They never saw me, did they?\"\n\nThe baby giggled, ducking his head. Harper was slightly unnerved by how maternal she was acting to keep the child calm; if he asked her to, she'd put a finger through its eye.\n\nHe looked at Marin, who had frozen in shock. He'd seen fear in the man's face before, but this was true terror.\n\n\"No,\" he whispered, through trembling lips.\n\n\"I guess little Luis's father\u2014your only brother, I believe\u2014 died when the big wave hit. Fisherman, right?\"\n\nMarin didn't respond, his desperate, helpless gaze glued to the baby. Mitchell continued to bounce the little cherub, producing another candy from her shirt pocket.\n\n\"Little Luis can be dropped off in the market in an hour, none the worse for wear,\" Harper said. \"Someone will find him, take him to his mama. She's probably losing her mind right now. My god, can you imagine? Her husband dies, her son disappears\u2026 Think of how happy she'll be when he gets home. How relieved.\"\n\nHarper took his Glock back out of the holster and chambered a round. \"Or. She'll never see him again, and he will die, here, now, in this moment\u2014God's gift, as you say. Now, I'm breaking my own rule here, but there's no need to upset the baby with further incentivizing, is there? Really, haven't you suffered enough? So, I will ask one more time. And only one.\"\n\n\"You'll kill him anyway,\" Marin breathed.\n\n\"No, sir, I won't,\" Harper said. \"No reason. He's too young to tell anyone what happened. I'll let him go, if you'll answer me. On my Oath.\"\n\nHe already had Marin, he'd had him the second Mitchell had come in, but the scenario had to play out\u2014the prisoner seeking reassurance. As if a man who would threaten a baby could be trusted. It wasn't logical, but it was human nature to play certain roles, Harper had found. And he actually wasn't lying. Even in the aftermath of a disaster, there'd be an outcry about a missing baby, and someone might remember the strangers running around with guns. And Trinity had burned its bridges by getting out before the waves hit; their usual agreements with the local law weren't stable. Harper doubted he'd ever set foot in the crappy little town again, but there was always a chance. He'd never thought he would end up in a lot of places.\n\nMarin nodded. \"Okay. Yes. On your Oath.\"\n\n\"Where did you send Lara Croft?\"\n\n\"Sabre-Dominguez 3, the Blue Labyrinth in Colombia, the one with the tunnels,\" Marin said. \"Please, please don't hurt him.\"\n\nHarper nodded, looking at Mitchell. \"Drop him off somewhere and report back. Tell Hux on your way out where we're headed; I want detailed layouts. ETA on the transport is unconfirmed, but it's less than four hours. We'll be flying out well before dark.\" They might not beat Croft, but she was in a puddle-jumper; it would be close.\n\n\"Copy that.\" She reached out and took hold of the baby's hand, waving it at Marin.\n\n\"Wave goodbye to your uncle,\" she said cheerily. \"Say bye-bye!\"\n\nShe walked out, her smile disappearing before she'd reached the door. Mitchell was the only woman on Harper's team, and possessed a kind of darkness that sometimes transcended brutality. Nobody even joked about fucking with Mitchell.\n\nMarin had started weeping again, his body limp against the rubbery tape that held him to the chair. His hand had swollen considerably. Harper considered making it fast, but in the end took a few moments to express his rage at Marin's betrayal of Trinity. To Lara Croft, a privileged child with the luck of the devil.\n\nHe worked until he got tired of the screams, then put the hood back on Marin and placed a round through his skull. The burlap kept Harper from getting splattered. He called into the kitchen for someone to clean up the mess, then went to see if there was any word on that ETA. He was eager to move. If everything continued to go so smoothly, by the time the sun rose tomorrow, Croft would be dead."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "It was true what they said, the sun set fast in the tropics. One minute there were trees and mountains and wide empty spaces crawling with muddy, winding snakes of water, then it was dark, bam. They'd gone from flying over the jungle to floating in infinite darkness. Kind of creepy. Jonah concentrated on his counting; he was setting aside cash from their funds, in case they needed to smooth anyone's feathers. It wouldn't be wise to let anyone see how much he was actually carrying. Lara always traveled prepared.\n\nMiguel started up on the radio a few minutes later, calling in on a channel choked with static. He repeated his ID number in a steady voice, asking for copy. After long minutes, a low voice crackled back.\n\n\"Copy.\"\n\nMiguel cleared his throat. \"Tell Papa I owe him a drink.\"\n\nThere was a long pause. \"This Spicy?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" Miguel said. \"Just need to fuel up, friend. Drinks are on me all around. I'm five minutes out but can head on, if you're busy.\"\n\nAnother pause, longer. Jonah glanced at Lara, a seat away, but she was checking her kit for about the hundredth time. If she was alarmed that they were about to fly into a den of armed killers, it didn't show. Jonah shifted in his seat. He had no worries about her ability to handle herself, but if somebody got out of line and Lara had to break an arm, there might be trouble.\n\nFinally, the low voice came back. \"Yeah, okay.\"\n\nThe channel snapped off, and Miguel tapped at the mix valve, studying the gauges. \"Now we watch for the lights.\"\n\n\"They'll guide us in?\" Lara asked.\n\n\"They'll turn on some lamps. We set down with the lights on the port side and hope we don't overshoot.\"\n\n\"That sounds totally safe,\" Jonah said.\n\n\"Yeah, well. It's a risky business. You're lucky you've got an experienced pilot.\" Miguel had forced some humor into his voice but his shoulders were up.\n\n\"Yeah, but I didn't realize you were spicy,\" Jonah said.\n\nThe pilot chuckled, relaxing a little. \"Hush now, help me look.\"\n\nJonah looked. Shades of black, and too early for the stars to kick in. He could feel the world beneath them, the heavy pull of life and green, but he was staring at a blank screen. All he could see was vague reflections of their searching faces, ghosts low-lit by the dashboard lights.\n\nLara spotted it the same time as Miguel, pointing. \"There!\"\n\nJonah squinted. A thin crack in the dark at the bottom of the windshield, a sliver of yellow-white, low and slightly east.\n\n\"That's the spot,\" Miguel said.\n\nThe scratch of light got closer, and Jonah could see faint smudges of light close by, fires or perhaps windows in the Santo Almeda compound. Miguel tilted the yoke and pushed at a lever, and then they were dropping, the engine cranking up.\n\nJonah felt some anxiety, so he closed his eyes and let himself get still in his mind, breathing slowly. Miguel was a good pilot, and would land them safely\u2014and if he couldn't, Jonah wasn't going to spend his last moments of life worrying about shit he couldn't control. Instead, he thought about his grandmother's laulau\u2014butterfish and pork and sweet potato wrapped in taro leaves and slow-steamed over wet banana leaves in a pit oven. Simple, fresh ingredients, a little salt\u2026 When he got home, he was going to have to build himself an imu; he could put it in the backyard by the rocks. Throw a luau, can do a pig, maybe some tuna poke, a fruit thing\u2026\n\nThe small plane banged into the ground and braked violently. He opened his eyes as they shot past the lights and hurtled forward into the dark, pitching and bouncing. He kept his breathing easy. Lara was clutching her armrests, but her face was calm.\n\nThey bumped to a stop and Miguel powered down. Jonah broke into a light sweat almost immediately as the hot, wet night settled over them. He could hear a revving engine, and light splashed across the wall of trunks and vines in front of them, weak headlights reflecting from the shadowy jungle. Someone was coming to meet them.\n\n\"Stay here until I come get you, personally,\" Miguel said, unfastening his belt. His dark hair was stuck to his forehead, and he kept a straight face but Jonah could see he was nervous. He popped his door and climbed out, walking toward the plane's tail. The engine for the approaching vehicle cut off, and they heard Miguel calling out to his \"friends\" in a deliberately happy tone.\n\nMiguel spoke for a minute, and then a man shouted angrily, \"Are you fucking kidding me?\"\n\nJonah tensed, and Lara reached into her kit, putting her hand on the Remington.\n\nThe pilot was talking fast, his tone conciliatory, and there were a few grumbling replies, but Jonah couldn't make out what they were saying. The conversation went on for a few minutes. The fact that the plane wasn't being pumped full of holes seemed like a positive.\n\nSoon, Miguel was climbing back in, a nervous smile on his face. \"Okay, so Davi is here with a couple of his friends, and he says you can use a truck. He'll take us to their camp to get it. Leave your things. You can pick them up when you drive me back here.\"\n\nHe lowered his voice. \"They will search your bags, if you bring them.\"\n\nLara looked at Jonah, nodding. They needed to sell the idea that they were harmless.\n\nThey crawled out of the plane and into the glare of headlights. Miguel's Cessna was at the end of a long dirt strip surrounded on all sides by heavy foliage, rubber trees and palms. There were three men behind the plane gathered at a battered jeep truck, silhouettes in the harsh light. Two of them were holding assault rifles. One of those moved forward when he saw the newcomers, whistling.\n\n\"Hey, hey, look at this.\" His voice was a nasty drawl. \"What is this?\"\n\nCrap. Jonah raised his chin and stared at the dark shapes of the men. He could see Lara's tension in the set of her jaw, and silently willed her not to react. Before she could, Miguel stepped forward, looking past the two guards at the third man.\n\nThe henchman shut up and turned his head as his boss approached. Smart move. If he'd pressed the issue, Lara would have blown their cover as harmless.\n\nMiguel introduced Davi Santo Almeda, a rough-looking man with a pocked, angry face and narrow, suspicious eyes.\n\n\"He says you are here to see caves, for a school?\" Davi asked, looking at Jonah. \"To take pictures?\"\n\nLara stepped in to answer, her words flowing easily. \"Yes, sir. We are documenting several small South American sites, seeking instances of certain pigment combinations.\"\n\n\"Colors?\" He sounded skeptical. \"You want to see colors?\"\n\n\"Yes, that's right,\" Lara said, nodding eagerly. \"Specifically, reds from the carajura tree, and indigos made from the mollusk family Muricidae. We know these were used to dye textiles in a number of Andean cultures, but we've found cave paintings using these very substances, all the way through Ecuador and into the Colombian Andes. It's an astonishing find, really. We believe it's all down to an extended family of travelers that came here more than a thousand years ago, moving east along the riverways.\"\n\nThe man's expression had gone from wary to bored in the time it took Lara to finish. She played the enthusiastic researcher to perfection, of course, since that was essentially Lara at her core. Jonah gave her a little half-hug, big proud dumb boyfriend brought along to lug equipment and keep his girl safe.\n\nDavi looked them over, and shot a dark look in Miguel's direction, the meaning as clear as if he'd spoken it: If you're lying to me, you're dead.\n\n\"Okay,\" he said finally, and climbed into the passenger seat of the truck. He motioned at his men. The one who'd harassed Lara hopped into the driver's seat, the other jumping up into the open truck bed. \"Get in.\"\n\nLara let Jonah help her into the truck as if she needed it, a corner of her mouth twitching when he told her to watch her step. Jonah sat next to her on the warm, warped metal, night jungle sounds thick in the air: frogs calling to one another, the steady drone of a billion insects, rustling and random squawks and the flickering whisper of bats. Miguel sat across from them. He gave a discreet thumbs-up, but still looked nervous. The guy with the AR-15 took a wide stance behind the front compartment, one hand on the roof. He ignored them entirely.\n\nThe truck turned and rattled back along the potholed strip. This would either be fine, or it wouldn't. Jonah let his thoughts and worries and expectations go, keeping his eyes and ears open instead."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "They passed the dented fuel tank at the strip's north end, draped in layers of rotting netting, and then they were approaching the shabby compound of the Santo Almeda brothers. It was pretty much the same as Miguel remembered it\u2014a line of rusting trucks, a collection of piecemeal shacks and cabins, a generator chugging away behind the radio room. The camp smelled like burning citronella and dead earth, with a hint of garbage and human waste; the brothers and their friends weren't particular about hygiene. At the center of it all was a big open-sided tent littered with sagging lawn chairs and lanterns. The men beneath the tattered tarp, eight or nine of them, stood up to watch them drive in. Miguel knew there was a table in the back covered with rifles and small arms from an extensive collection, but nobody was edging in that direction.\n\nMiguel saw the older brother, Gabriel, among the dirty crew looking both twitchy and drunk, a bottle of whiskey in his hand. He was as thin as a rake, his eyes wild and bloodshot. Miguel recognized a few others: the main radio operator\u2014a retired pilot they called Fish Eye\u2014and a mechanic, Nuno, and a short guy whose name he didn't know but who had been around three years ago. The rest were strangers, but they all carried the same look: dangerous. It was a pure wonder that Miguel had survived the flaming recklessness of his twenties, blind to the concept of mortality.\n\nDavi hopped out before the driver turned off the truck, speaking loudly.\n\n\"Miguel brought us some guests, and he's buying drinks. Relax. They're not staying.\"\n\n\"What does that mean?\" Gabriel had a rasping, quick voice. \"Who did he bring? Why are they here?\"\n\nDavi stepped forward, lowering his voice, explaining; both of the men who'd come out with Davi got out of the truck and joined them. Miguel had kept the story simple, implying to Davi that he was fleecing a couple of Americans for a private trip, that he'd brought them here to throw some money Davi's way. They'd settled on a ridiculous price\u2014 Miguel was still hurting from the number\u2014but Gabriel clearly didn't like what he was hearing from his brother, his tone tight with paranoid anger. He raised his voice.\n\n\"Spicy, what the fuck are you doing? Get over here, and bring your fucking friends!\"\n\nJonah and Lara both looked intent but remarkably calm. Miguel nodded at them, then got up and jumped from the back of the truck, leading them into the stark light of the lanterns beneath the tarp.\n\nImmediately, several men started grinning, one of them making cat noises, another hissing through his teeth.\n\nDavi's manner was firm. \"Shut the fuck up. They're paying, they're guests. You don't like it, get the fuck out of my camp.\"\n\nIt got quiet, and most of the men went back to their seats, looking sullen. Gabriel and one of his toadies\u2014from the way he sniffed and blinked, he was the older brother's current coke buddy\u2014stayed. Gabriel glared at Miguel.\n\n\"You bringin' guests now? The fuck you think this is, a party?\"\n\n\"I offered to keep flying when I called,\" Miguel said. It was a weak argument\u2014he hadn't said anything about having civilian passengers\u2014but it was something.\n\nDavi put his hand up to his brother's arm, trying to steer him away, but Gabriel was lit up. He stepped forward aggressively, waving his bottle at Miguel.\n\n\"I should have let Monkey shoot you, you traitor,\" he rasped, his sour breath and body odor staggering, his fury very real. \"I knew you were a piece of shit the first time you ever came, all smiling and simpering, looking down your nose at us like your ass doesn't stink!\"\n\n\"Fuck that!\" the cokehead friend chimed in.\n\nOne of the men in the chairs stood up quickly, scowling. A second joined him, wiping at his nose.\n\n\"And now you bring guests? Where did you get the idea that I wouldn't stomp your sorry ass into the ground for this kind of bullshit? And put your guests into a hole?\"\n\n\"Gabriel!\" Davi barked, but more men were nodding.\n\nIn the sudden tension, Jonah spoke up, calmly.\n\n\"This is on me,\" he said, shaking his head. \"I asked our pilot to take us as close as possible to our destination. He told us you might not be comfortable with strangers coming in, but I insisted. I figured you'd be okay with the money, I mean, it's a lot of money, but I can see that we're not entirely welcome here.\"\n\nLara, standing a step behind him, cleared her throat. \"On behalf of the institute, you have our sincerest apologies.\"\n\nGabriel blinked rapidly, his mouth slightly open. The men stared.\n\nJonah looked at Davi. \"We can afford to pay a little more. We don't have much, but it's all yours. This is important historical research, and the basis for my friend's doctorate. But if you'd rather that we take our business elsewhere, we'll leave immediately. There should still be time to drive back up from Los Indios before we have to pick up our tickets. Lara?\"\n\nLara stepped forward with a folded envelope in her hand. She looked inside, riffling through a number of large American bills, for everyone to see. \"You sure? There's still a lot in here\u2026\"\n\nJonah answered her but kept his gaze on Davi. \"I'm sure. It's our last stop before home.\"\n\nLara walked up and held out the envelope to Davi, shaking her head slightly as if in mild disbelief at Jonah's generosity.\n\nMiguel had a split second to marvel at what Jonah had done, in under a minute: calmed Gabriel and the other men, sweetened the deal, established that they were expected somewhere and that they'd just used up all of their funds.\n\nDavi quickly took the envelope, and then nodded at Jonah. \"You'll excuse our manners, please. At night, we sometimes drink too much.\"\n\n\"It's our fault, for showing up like this,\" Jonah said. \"We should have made earlier arrangements. Can you direct us which truck to use?\"\n\nDavi nodded at the mechanic. \"Nuno, does the red one have gas?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You know where you're going?\" Davi asked.\n\n\"We have a map,\" Jonah said.\n\n\"Give him the keys,\" Davi said to Nuno. \"Then get the Cessna gassed up.\"\n\nGabriel finally found his voice, glaring at his brother. \"What about what I have to say? Don't I get a say in how we operate our\u2014\"\n\nDavi cut him off, his jaw clenched. \"Stop. Talking. Now.\"\n\n\"Thanks, man, this means a lot,\" Jonah said. \"Miguel, we'll give you a lift back to the plane. The cameras are still on board.\" He chuckled, nodding at Lara. \"Can't take pictures without the cameras, can we?\"\n\nLara smiled, looking at Davi. \"This whole trip has been such a whirlwind, I'm amazed that I still have my head attached. We've been to five sites in four days!\"\n\nDavi actually smiled back at her, a creaky, foreign twitch. \"I can't imagine, miss. I wish you luck looking for your colors.\"\n\nLara offered her hand, and Davi Santo Almeda, who'd personally killed at least five men that Miguel knew about, shook it limply.\n\n\"We should have the truck back in a few hours, and then we'll be out of your hair,\" Jonah said. \"Lara, Miguel?\"\n\nJonah turned and walked toward the trucks, Lara at his side. Miguel fell in behind them, trying not to look dumbfounded. It was like they'd practiced. Miguel still didn't know what Lara and Jonah were trying to do, exactly, but he suddenly thought it very likely that they would succeed."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "Harper dozed off as soon as they hit altitude and slept for nearly three hours, deaf to the low roar of the transport plane. He didn't wake up refreshed\u2014he couldn't remember the last time he'd actually lain down in a bed\u2014but he'd slept enough to carry him through. ETA was less than an hour, they'd be dropping soon.\n\nHe looked around at the Dozen, harnessed beside him and along the opposite wall of the dimly lit echoing plane\u2014 sleeping, tapping at devices, reading through hard copies of tunnel maps and Trinity's reports on the Santo Almeda brothers and the layout of their \"airfield.\" When the Blue Labyrinth dig had gone active, Trinity had assessed the operation\u2014they were the closest strip to the site\u2014and come away unimpressed, at least according to recon. Couple of druggies with a stretch of dirt and a private gun collection: minimal threat. Trinity had set up its own airfield a bit farther south. But the Dozen were going to be dropping in on the brothers; if Harper had managed to get ahead of Croft, he could be there to meet her.\n\nHarper put on his helmet and tapped the mic. \"Wake up, people. Get your gear on.\"\n\nHe unstrapped himself, stopped at the head, then walked up to the cockpit along a narrow aisle of web-roped cargo, boxes and barrels, grabbing hand straps along the way to keep on his feet. The pilot, Winters, wasn't enthused about their destination, and Harper was in the mood to hand out a pep talk. He felt good. He liked the idea of being there to witness the expression on Croft's face when she realized she'd been beaten. Of course, there was a chance she would land somewhere else, but Harper thought the odds were low. Hux had reasoned that she would be using a network of airfields used by smugglers\u2014the pilot who had flown her out of Mexico had a history, and his plane miraculously hadn't set down for fuel anywhere since taking off. The Santo Almeda field was fifteen minutes from the dig, it was where she was going\u2026 and if she was already there, all the more reason not to dick around with travel time.\n\nHe rapped on the door to the cockpit, then pushed it open. Winters, a nondescript white thirty-something with bad teeth, nodded at the headset on the open seat next to him.\n\nAs soon as Harper put it to his ear, the pilot started in. \"I don't believe I have fully expressed how strongly I feel we should land at the Trinity strip, Commander. It's less than thirty miles south of the site, it's far better maintained and nearly twice the length.\"\n\n\"You said you could do it,\" Harper said.\n\n\"I said it was possible, but\u2014\"\n\n\"You can do it,\" Harper said. \"You will do it. I have faith in you.\" As if he knew anything at all about Winters, besides the fact that he didn't floss. He was a contract hire, he hadn't taken the Oath, but he was fully theirs the first day he'd signed his name. Another silly scenario to play\u2014encourage and empathize with the people you needed, at least for as long as you needed them. Worked better than threats.\n\n\"Look, we have to go in steep, really steep,\" Winters explained, \"and if we don't keep the speed up, we're going to stall. This isn't a glider\u2014we'll drop like a ton of bricks. The chances of stopping in a timely fashion are therefore really low, and slamming into the jungle at any speed will kill at least your pilot. Even if I pull it off, getting back off the ground may not be possible. And these brothers could have traps rigged, they could have gotten hold of some anti-artillery firepower or\u2014\"\n\n\"Let me stop you there,\" Harper said. \"We're looking at a handful of addicts with small arms, and they're not going to open fire after you declare an emergency landing and make assurances that you will pay handsomely for the inconvenience. As far as they know, you're a cargo plane with a bad engine\u2026 But you are carrying a team of armed and highly trained special-tactics personnel, you understand? Security is handled.\"\n\n\"Our field is literally minutes away, though, and there'd be no risk of an emergency situation or, or violence\u2014\"\n\nBlah, blah, blah. Harper was done. He stood up, clapped the stammering pilot on the shoulder. To his credit, Winters only flinched slightly, even when he applied some pressure. Not enough to cause pain, but firmly, grounding the pilot to his physical self. Nothing made a man see reason like a reminder that he was only flesh and bone.\n\n\"You will do it,\" he repeated, without the encouraging emphasis. \"Comprende?\"\n\nWinters nodded, swallowing. \"Okay. Sure.\"\n\n\"Good man.\" Harper dropped the headset and started back to his team. They were restless, amped up. He found himself almost hoping that the Santo Almeda brothers would react badly to a surprise landing. His best players were a special breed; violence inspired them, kept them operating on top form. Blowing away some low-level criminals would have them revved up to handle Croft when they finally met with her.\n\nHarper wasn't sure exactly when his plans had changed from following Croft and managing an accident to engaging her with intent to harm, but that seemed to be how things had worked out. After Marin's death, perhaps. It galled him to think of her scurrying around with her clues, plotting, looking for ways to undermine the cause, to interfere with a great man's life's work. Pedro Dominguez would have statues dedicated to him, and Croft was just a scurrying little rat. Harper was going to exterminate her.\n\nSoon. He walked back to his seat, pleased to see that most of the Dozen were already in Kevlar and had strapped back in to check their firearms and to go back over the maps. Croft wasn't going to know what hit her."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "The trip to the Blue Labyrinth was rough, to say the least. There was no insulation between the engine compartment and the interior, the roar of the truck's unmuffled engine incredibly loud, the air reeking of burnt oil. Lara held on to the seat, her kit wedged between her knees, as Jonah drove, the truck jouncing along the dark road that wound through the jungle and into the hills. She gave up taking a last look at Marin's maps after she bit her tongue when they hit a hole big enough to hide a crouching child, halfway to the dig. The metal taste of blood lingered in her mouth. The truck's headlights illuminated the insects that smacked into the cracked windshield, caught crashes of sudden movement ahead, small animals running for cover. Wide nocturnal eyes watched them pass by from a safe distance.\n\nAfter the truck made a final nerve-wracking leap onto a low rocky hill, the headlights fell across the opening to the site\u2014basically a sunken hole in the ground, about ten meters across and surrounded by jungle. There were signs that a team had worked there\u2014a field of stumps crisscrossed by rutted tracks, a half-burned pile of refuse next to a jeep chassis being swallowed by crawling vines. How long had it been since Trinity had gone? Marin hadn't said, but she'd gotten the impression it had been a while. Months, perhaps.\n\nThere had been some kind of passenger elevator for the cenote\u2014Lara could see a small metal platform hanging by ropes on the far side\u2014but whatever machinery had run it had been taken out. A staked rope was strung around the hole.\n\nJonah turned off the engine, the sudden cessation of noise making Lara feel she'd been struck deaf. She got out and started kitting up, climbing into her harness while Jonah walked over to look into the hole, leaning over the rope with a torch. He cast a long shadow walking back, the light from the headlamps thick with gathering moths. He reached into the truck and turned off the lights, popping open a small electric lantern.\n\n\"Just more jungle down there,\" he called. \"Open spot in the middle.\"\n\n\"There's water beneath that,\" Lara said. \"The tunnels angle off and down to a series of shallow lakes\u2026\"\n\nShe turned, getting her bearings.\n\n\"\u2026that way,\" she finished, pointing south and west. \"The direction I need to go, actually. The tunnels are a real tangle, layers and layers of them, but the places Marin marked as relevant are all right at the top. I'll hit the farthest out first and work my way back to the big room, the prize. Whatever it was Dominguez couldn't figure out. Would you check me, please?\"\n\nJonah stepped over and pulled at the buckles on her harness. \"So, you're feeling good about this?\"\n\nShe nodded, pulling items from her bag, hooking them to her harness. Climbing axe, extra carabiners, flares. Her knife went on her belt, along with the radio, markers, matches\u2026 She had Marin's maps on the disposable phone she'd bought in Mexico, the slim case buttoned into her hip pocket. She'd downloaded and run scan apps and the card seemed clean, but she still didn't want to risk her own device. Anything from Trinity was suspect. \"I really don't think this will take long.\"\n\n\"That's good,\" Jonah said, looking around at their isolated surroundings. Even the trail they'd come in on seemed to have been swallowed back up by the jungle. \"I was thinking I might catch a movie or something while I waited, but I'm pretty sure everything's closed.\"\n\nThey walked to the rim of the cenote, Jonah carrying the rope and extra equipment. She helped him set up the simple winch and tie off an anchor rope; Trinity had left behind a hook post drilled deep into the rock. They dropped three flares, brilliant hissing sparks of red falling through the black, lighting up the abundant growth in the cavern\u2014ferns and small rubber trees, mostly, but Lara saw a tall walking palm near the center, its spreading roots lit by the fiery glow. That meant the ground was solid. She had expected as much from Marin's notes, but the confirmation made her feel better. She couldn't see the entrance to the tunnels thanks to the overhang of the opening's heavy lip, but there was a coolness in the air this close to the rim, a sense that they were at the edge of some hidden abyss. She imagined she could smell the flat mineral tang of water beneath the burning chemicals of the flares.\n\nThey lowered her pack and the bow case off the edge of the well, watching the duffel settle on the guano-spattered dirt next to a spindly rubber tree, fifty meters down. She had a canteen and a filter straw in her pack, rope, a small first-aid kit, a light thermal jacket, two LED torches with extra batteries, camera, duct tape, protein bars\u2026 She was ready.\n\nA few dozen small bats spun up through the red light, whickering out of the cenote's mouth and away. She doubted she'd run into anything more dangerous so far underground, but the tunnel system was set into karst\u2014sinkholes and vents were inevitable, which could mean larger animals, and better safe than sorry; there were a dozen arrows with the bow if she ran across anything that meant her harm. She had no plans to fire a weapon underground, but with Trinity involved, she wasn't taking chances. The 1911 R1 Enhanced held eight and she had both mags loaded, plus a single reload. Twenty-four rounds was undoubtedly overkill and added extra weight to her load, but Trinity's demented ideology demanded that she be cautious; if they had guards in the area, they might send them, and to the self-proclaimed army of God, the end justified any and all means.\n\nJonah helped her tether to the rope and pull up slack so she could thread the figure-eight and lock in. They both checked her work. Lara leaned back a little, and everything held as it should. She was ready.\n\n\"How far do you have to go?\" he asked.\n\n\"Barely three kilometers, and it's tunnels all the way. But the radios aren't going to be much use well before I get there.\"\n\nJonah gave her a look at the understatement. They'd lose contact as soon as she walked out of sight, and they both knew it.\n\n\"Try not to worry,\" she added.\n\n\"We're in a Colombian jungle at night so you can tour a secret Maya labyrinth booby-trapped with mines,\" Jonah said. \"For real, why would I worry?\"\n\nShe grinned. Jonah could always get a smile out of her. With that flicker of thought, she got a hint of the emotional maelstrom waiting for her if she let her guard down. Somehow feeling even a moment of happiness brought up everything\u2014that constant beat of dread, terror that she would fail to stop Dominguez in time, wrenching regret for so many things\u2026\n\nLara shut it down before it could go any further. Feeling shitty still wasn't an option. She put on her helmet, adjusted the strap. \"I'll be back soon. If you see any wild pigs, climb a tree.\"\n\n\"You're kidding, right? I thought the jungle had jaguars.\"\n\n\"Yes, but jaguars don't hunt at night,\" she said. \"Wild pigs are nocturnal, and it's mating season.\"\n\nJonah nodded toward the truck, a gray metal heap with a few flecks of red paint still on the panels. \"I've got shelter. And failing that, the shotgun and a recipe that calls for pork. You worry about finding what you came to find.\"\n\nLara stepped to the rim, tapping her headlamp on. She donned her gloves and grabbed the rope.\n\n\"Wish me luck,\" she said.\n\n\"You won't even need it,\" he said. \"This is what you do.\"\n\nLara took a breath and walked herself backward, finally pushing off from the lip, lowering herself into the cavernous dark."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "Jonah watched her drop neatly into the eerie, sputtering echoes of the cavern, touching down and climbing out of the harness in a minute. She turned and looked around, her headlamp flashing over the greenery, then waved up at him. She seemed impossibly small down there, a tiny figure bathed in flickering red from the flares.\n\n\"Test, test, copy?\" her voice crackled over the radio.\n\n\"Loud and clear,\" Jonah said. For what it was worth. Specialized mine radios were too heavy for a single caver to manage, so they'd opted for these. Waiting for Lara often meant being out of touch for extended periods.\n\nHe watched her refit herself by the tiny light of her headlamp\u2014putting a loaded magazine into the Remington, slinging her bow, tying her jacket around her waist. She finally took off the helmet and hooked it to her belt, turning on a flashlight. She aimed the narrow cone of light past a low clump of greenery to her right. Her voice was calm.\n\n\"The entrance is just this way. Two hours or less. You can time me.\"\n\nJonah looked at his watch. \"Don't hurry on my account, Little Bird. Safe and steady wins the race. 2142.\"\n\n\"Take care, Jonah,\" she said, and did her voice tremble the tiniest bit? \"Over and out.\"\n\nShe turned and jogged into the thick red shadows. She was out of sight in the space of a breath, the glow of her flashlight disappearing a second later.\n\nJonah sat back on his heels, frowning. He reached over and tapped off the small lantern, which was being bombarded by giant moths. It wasn't like Lara to get maudlin, not at a dig site. Ever. He'd heard her scared, angry, and in a hurry; she always sounded determined, but never tearful. She'd been quiet on the plane, but she got like that when she was studying for an expedition. He hadn't thought anything of it.\n\nThat tiny quiver in her voice bothered him. He'd gone through a very dark time after what had happened at Yamatai, but had gained some valuable tools when he'd been putting his life back together. Maybe the best one was taking regular time to observe his emotions, good and bad, to feel them without judgment, and then let them pass by. He didn't like the word \"mindfulness,\" he thought it sounded pretentious, but the concept was the thing. Lara agreed with the principle, but when her father was involved, her defenses took over. And this whole Maya thing\u2014the reason they'd traveled to Mexico in the first place\u2014was all about her father.\n\nAlthough it was unclear who had pulled the trigger, Trinity had murdered Richard Croft, and set it up to look like a suicide. Lara was usually very good at channeling her feelings into her work, which had gone from historical and archaeological research to putting out the fires that Trinity kept lighting\u2026 But when she'd taken that dagger back in Mexico, she'd inadvertently lit this fire herself, sparking an event that her father may have been trying to stop when he'd been murdered\u2014a horrifying, cataclysmic tsunami, in which many had died. Of course she was freaked out, anyone would be, but Lara was still in the habit of setting unpleasant feelings aside, as if she could somehow store them until she was ready. He knew from experience that they had a tendency to seep up as anxiety, distraction, self-doubt. Lara was the most competent person he knew, hands down, but if she lost her focus, she could get hurt.\n\nShe's not going to lose her focus. And she'll process or she won't. Take your own advice and chill, or it's going to be a long couple of hours.\n\nJonah let his eyes adjust to the sultry dark and then leaned back on his hands, looking up. The sky was amazing, a deep velvet scattered with brilliant pinpricks of light. He could see the dust between the stars.\n\nHe was still worried, but all he could really do now was wait."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "The small patch of rainforest at the bottom of the well didn't last far into the first tunnel, which was nearly high enough for her to stand upright in, and a bit wider. There were some slicks of moss and a few struggling ferns for the first dozen meters, and then it was moist packed dirt and rock and bat guano. Chilly. She'd dropped from the humid tropics to the dank cold of a leaking basement, and her sweat cooled quickly.\n\nShe crouched her way down the long entrance tunnel's gradual descent, the torch's beam illuminating the roughly sculpted walls of dank sedimentary rock. Marin's notes had been from memory rather than expedition logs, but he had supplied as much useful information as he could recall. A geologist had suggested that the labyrinth had been a natural drainage point for the local river system millennia ago, but had been cut off by geological changes. It was still a wet cave; the lower tunnels flooded during heavy rain seasons.\n\nThere were signs that Trinity had been through\u2014metal supports jammed into crevices to hang lights, along with cigarette butts and random garbage. Clearly, they hadn't been concerned about polluting the delicate environment. From a strictly professional view, Lara was surprised that any respected archaeologist could work for them. The way their people treated digs was truly appalling.\n\nLara shook her head at herself. Dominguez wanted to recreate the world, he wasn't going to worry about embracing low-impact methodology or preservation ethics. And Trinity was operating so far outside the realm of such considerations it was ridiculous to even think about it.\n\nYou're distracting yourself, because you're going to fail, her mind whispered. Pedro Dominguez has been studying Mesoamerican cultures since before you were born. Do you honestly believe you're going to find something he missed? He could be laying his hands on the Box of Ix Chel right now, this second, while you're chasing a long shot hundreds of miles away\u2014\n\n\"Stop it,\" Lara said aloud, and hesitated, listening to the slight echo of her voice. There was an opening ahead, a large one. She'd already reached the first branch.\n\nLara didn't need to look at the map; she'd memorized her route. The tunnel opened into a small chamber, several meters high and about the size of a living room. There would be a second tunnel branching somewhat west from the chamber, which descended rather quickly to the deeper layers of the labyrinth and the true bottom of the cenote. She was to continue south. There was a stone bridge to edge across and another winding passage before she got to the first charges; she would look at Marin's notes when she got there, although she could see the grid in her mind, knew where the trap was laid. There were only a few along her path, small charges set to trigger cave-ins at convenient joints and fractures.\n\nShe reached the opening to the chamber, and shined the torch around. Someone had spray-painted on the worn stone of the walls: a red X for the western tunnel, a blue arrow for the southern. The floor was thick with fresh guano, the ammonia smell singeing her nostrils.\n\nLara pulled out the radio. \"Checking in. Jonah, do you copy?\"\n\nShe waited, and there was a long burst of static, and a buzzing that might have been talking.\n\nA hundred meters in. She was surprised she was getting anything.\n\n\"Good, good, good,\" she said into the radio, hoping he'd catch a word. She waited, then depressed the send button twice, quickly. Two taps meant \"All's well.\"\n\nThere were two short hisses in response: Message received. She hooked the radio to her belt and stepped into the chamber. She could hear squeaks and rustling overhead. She raised the torch as far as she dared, not wanting to startle the colony, and looked up.\n\nThere were several dozen brown bats about two meters over her head, hanging and climbing, active. The largest was no bigger than a man's fist. From the way they turned their tiny snub-nosed faces as they chirped, their delicate ears trembling, she thought they were insectivores. They had tiny eyes, too. Fruit bats generally had large eyes, and didn't depend on echolocation to eat. Not that she was any kind of bat biologist.\n\nChiropterologist. She remembered the order name, chiroptera, because it meant \"handwing,\" which she thought was an unusually apt description. Her father had taught her that.\n\nShe lowered the light and hurried through the small chamber, trying not to step on the teeming insects that littered the floor\u2014mostly roaches, but she saw beetles and crickets, too. She paused to put her own mark beneath Trinity's arrow with a white grease pencil, then ducked her head and entered.\n\nThe tunnel she moved into was similar to the one she'd left but narrower. It jagged upward for a dozen meters\u2014not sharply, but enough to stretch her legs\u2014and then down, the bottom curving out of sight, to the right. In a few places, the Trinity excavation team had wedged boards between the walls of the tunnel. Lara moved down easily, feeling the moist air cool further, her steps echoing back at her as she neared the bottom. This deep, the darkness had weight; the light of her torch sliced through it cleanly, but she could feel the black pressing against her from all sides.\n\nThe curve at the bottom of the passage opened into a pit that staggered downward through many layers of tunnels, spanned by a descending, uneven stone bridge less than a meter wide. There were several such spots in the labyrinth, vertical holes connecting two or more of the passages. Lara stopped well back from the edge, looking across and slightly down. About six meters of bridge between her and the continuation of the tunnel. The ceiling was low enough that the Trinity people had put in clip line, running the length of the formation. Lara reached up and tugged at it. Solid. Her harness was back at the drop\u2014she hadn't expected to use it at all\u2014but she had nylon rope and carabiners\u2026\n\nLara looked down, studying the slope beneath the bridge. The torch's beam ran the length of what was essentially a giant, very steep slide, nearly vertical in spots. The initial drop was about four meters, to a lip of water-worn rock\u2014 beyond that, Lara could see the bottom of another length of tunnel, with another vast opening down into dense black.\n\nThe bridge is wide enough to dance on\u2014just go.\n\nAnd you're alone down here. Take the time, do it right.\n\nLara hesitated, and felt a flush of anxious irritation with herself for wasting time debating the point. She hooked the torch onto her belt and donned her helmet, activating the lamp, then put on her gloves. She grabbed the narrow line and stepped out onto the bridge.\n\nEdging forward carefully, hand over hand, she tested each step before trusting her full weight to it. About halfway across, the bridge dipped too far for her to easily reach the line, but by then she'd found her balance and the footing was firm, free of loose rocks. She let go of the line and crouched forward. If she fell, she only had to pitch forward and she'd be fine, she'd roll right into the tunnel\u2014\n\nA high animal shriek echoed up from the dark, strange and wavering.\n\nLara froze as the scream died off, echoing wildly. A bird? Was that a\u2014\n\n\u2014and she had only just registered the frantic rush of beating wings beneath the fading echo when a thousand bats came pouring up from the pit. They squealed and flapped and funneled around her. She ducked, dropping to one knee, hands down, her headlamp illuminating a dark, disorienting swarm of membranous wings and tiny white teeth.\n\nDon't move! The colony was huge but they were spinning toward the tunnel behind her, seeking escape. She only had to wait\u2014\n\nClaws caught in her ponytail, caught and held.\n\nThe snared, terrified animal screamed in her ear, the sound so high she could feel it in her teeth, its wings beating at her ears.\n\nLara reached for it as several more smacked into her. She made the mistake of opening her eyes, and felt her balance shift.\n\nShe rolled forward, the bat struggling free and skittering away as she aimed for the end of the bridge, or where she thought the end was, in the storm of dark furry bodies. She was wrong, but only knew it when her right shoulder found open air, and then she was falling.\n\nMuscle memory kicked in. Lara grabbed for the bridge, managed to slap it on her way down, getting her feet under her. She relaxed her legs and hit the sloping edge into the tunnel beneath on the balls of her feet, facing the wall of the cavern. She threw herself forward, scrabbling to grab hold of anything that could slow her down, but the rocks were smooth here, the cracks shallow.\n\nShe slipped backwards from the wall, tumbling at an angle, rocks and rapidly shrinking bats flashing past her in a dizzying swirl.\n\nHead up, keep your head up!\n\nShe ripped the ice axe from her belt, swung it. The head scraped across the wall and she got her legs pulled around\u2014\n\nHer butt slammed into and skidded off the steep slope, pushing her forward into open air.\n\nLara twisted and struck with the pick as hard as she could, the impact shuddering up her arm, her fall arrested for a split second before the pick broke loose and she was falling again, this time her right hip crunching against the wall of the passage between the next two tunnels, spinning her sideways.\n\nArrest!\n\nShe struck with the pick again, putting everything into it\u2014and again, the pick held for less than a second, but it was enough time to spot the floor, only a few meters down.\n\nShe dropped. When her feet touched she pushed forward, tucked herself tightly and shoulder-rolled across a tumble of guano-splattered stones. She came up crooked but threw herself into another roll. When she came up again, she ran three steps and then stopped.\n\nShe grabbed her pocket torch and added its more powerful light to that of the headlamp's, quickly taking in where she'd landed. She was in a rock chamber at the bottom of the slide, several meters high and quite wide. It descended south, narrowing to a tunnel. There were other openings along the wall to the west, dark holes in the stone.\n\nThere was no sign of whatever animal had spooked the bats. No bats, either, although she'd clearly found their roost, or one of them. The reek was spectacular, the floor thickly greasy underfoot, creeping scat-eaters crawling over the surface. She wiped at her shoulder, breathing through her mouth.\n\nShe checked herself. Her tailbone ached; she wouldn't sit right for a week. Her hip was going to bruise spectacularly, too\u2014but nothing was broken. She'd trained to fall, to go loose and slow the descent, to channel the force of the landing, but no amount of training could have prevented her from slamming into a boulder on the way down. She'd been extraordinarily lucky.\n\nLara stepped back to the slide, looking up. She'd managed to drop twenty meters, and there wasn't a way to climb back up without putting in some serious time.\n\nShe exhaled heavily, putting the axe on her belt. Her sigh echoed back at her. She hadn't focused overly on the layout of the lowest levels, but she remembered that they were mostly connected, and some of the chambers had tunnels that went up into the center. She could find one of the vertical wells higher up. The maps\u2014\n\nUh-oh.\n\nShe quickly unbuttoned the pocket over her aching hip and pulled out the cheap phone that held Marin's SD card. The screen was shattered, and the power button did nothing but click.\n\nShe stared at the broken device, considering her options. She thought the middle opening in the west wall connected to the tunnel that she'd passed back at the first branch\u2026\n\nWhich is also a serious climb; Marin's notes said so. And you'll be back where you started. Go south.\n\nShe thought she had a pretty good mental map of how the labyrinth was laid out. Wide, wet chambers at the bottom, a confused mass of dead ends and winding passages through the middle, two main corridors that twined across and over each other at the top. The rooms she needed were there. As deep as the labyrinth went, it didn't extend more than four kilometers from side to side. She was going to have to climb up somewhere, but if she continued south along the floor, she was bound to find an easier ascent.\n\nSure, like you knew you were going to be fine on the bridge.\n\nIf she got into more trouble, Jonah wouldn't know where to come looking. The safest course was to wait where she was; when she didn't get back on time, he'd come in after her. She'd left only the one grease-pencil mark for him to follow, but if she stayed here, she would hear him get to the bridge.\n\nThe radio. No chance he would hear her, but the signal might still get through. Three taps, followed by three more: Come find me. He could be hauling her up in less than an hour.\n\nCould be, if he hears it, which he won't. You're too far out of range for anything and you know it. And you also know you're not going to wait for two minutes, let alone any number of hours.\n\nJust as well that they couldn't make contact. What would she say? Jonah, due to an entirely preventable accident, I'm not where I'm supposed to be and I've lost the maps. I'm pretty sure I remember everything important, though, so I'm going to wing it. Fingers crossed that I don't get lost or accidentally blow myself up. Also, there's some animal down here that may or may not be predatory, but I'm hopeful that it's a bird, so don't worry.\n\nWould he argue with her, though? Jonah knew the clock was ticking. The disasters she'd set off would continue, and Dominguez was racing against time, too, to have everything in place when the \"cleansing,\" as he'd called it, was complete. He had Trinity's resources and a mad dream and she was one of a very few people who knew what he was looking for and might actually be in a position to stop him.\n\nHow sure are you that he needs to be stopped? What if he can use the box to halt the cleansing?\n\nWhat if he's insane and means to destroy the world?\n\n\"It doesn't matter,\" she said aloud, and when the echo died, she could hear the whisper of the crawling bugs but nothing else. It didn't matter. There were risks, but it was on her to take them.\n\nShe set the dead phone at the bottom of the long slope, in sight of the bridge, checked her compass, and headed south, doing her best to skirt the gently moving mass of whispering insects."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "In his dream, Miguel was in a bar that he liked in Mexico City, playing darts with his friend Diego. Diego had just won, but barely, and he was grinning as he pulled his darts from the board.\n\nMiguel was glad they were out on the town. He and Diego had learned how to fly together, studying for tests in the back of Diego's mother's apartment. He hadn't seen Diego in forever but here they were, standing at the board, and Diego was saying something but Miguel couldn't hear him. There was a crowd of men in the back room, watching a game or playing one, shouting, laughing. They were loud.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I said, somebody's coming! You have to\u2014\"\n\nThe men in the back room roared, and Miguel could see Diego's lips moving but he couldn't make out the words\u2014 and hadn't Diego died in a crash in Argentina? Miguel had been to his funeral, he remembered, he'd worn his only suit.\n\nEven as he thought it, Diego's face started to blacken and shrivel, his eyes falling back into his skull, his jaw hanging open and then falling off. Miguel screamed but the unseen men screamed louder, and then Diego raised one rotting hand and slammed his darts into the board, stabbing it, bam, bam, bam!\n\nMiguel jerked awake.\n\n\"\u2014up, you fuck!\" One of Gabriel's friends, the guy with no front teeth, was hammering on the door of his plane. He had a rifle and he looked pissed. \"Get out!\"\n\nMiguel shook his head, confused. After Jonah and Lara had gone, he'd fueled the plane and taxied to the top of the runway, close to the camp. Everyone was in a good mood with money to spend; even Gabriel seemed to come around when they'd started shooting dice. But now all the men were shouting in confusion, Davi and Gabriel both barking orders, men taking up arms.\n\n\"What? Why?\" Miguel sat up and realized that beneath the shouting he could hear the faint sound of engines, coming in from the northwest.\n\nThe thug pointed his rifle at the window. \"Out!\"\n\nMiguel was wide awake. He fumbled at the door. As soon as it was open, Toothless grabbed his shoulder and yanked him out and to the ground. Miguel stayed down, his heart thundering.\n\n\"Who is it, Spicy?\" Gabriel Santo Almeda screamed above the din, and Miguel looked up to see the older brother striding over, an Uzi in his hand. \"Who's coming? Who did you sell us out to, you bastard?\"\n\nMiguel's blood ran cold, a lead ball forming in his gut. Trinity. Somehow they had followed Lara or found out where she was going.\n\n\"Stop!\" Davi shouted. \"Shut the fuck up, all of you!\"\n\nIncredibly, most of the men shut up.\n\n\"The pilot, Winters, says it's an emergency\u2014\"\n\n\"Bullshit!\" Gabriel spat.\n\n\"Of course it's bullshit, it's about whatever he's into,\" Davi said angrily, gesturing at Miguel. \"But Winters says he's got money and he's paying twice as much as what we just got. We let him land.\"\n\n\"The fuck we do!\" Spittle flew from Gabriel's cracked lips. \"When was the last time strangers came at all, and now twice in hours? That bitch conned you! She came in on Spicy's fucking word and now her friends are coming, it's some suspicious shit happening and\u2014\"\n\n\"Calm down!\"\n\n\"\u2014and we're not going to get caught with our pants down! How do you know this guy Winters has money? How do you know? He's with those people Spicy brought; it's some kind of fucking bust or a takeover\u2014\"\n\n\"Think, you idiot!\" Davi shouted. \"Who gives a shit about us? We don't need to insert ourselves into this, and that plane is going to fucking land anyway! You're high and you're drunk, and you will keep your shit holstered and your friends calm until we at least talk to the man!\"\n\nGabriel swayed, glaring at his brother, gears grinding\u2026 then raised the Uzi, pointing it at Miguel. \"Fine. I'm taking out this rat, though.\"\n\nToothless and most of the rest called out encouragement, or at least looked at Miguel like he was dog shit, scowling. He was going to die.\n\nGunned down by the Santo Almeda crew, doesn't it just fucking figure, he thought, with a detachment that surprised him. He hoped Mama didn't take it too hard.\n\n\"Not yet,\" Davi said. He had to raise his voice, the approaching plane's engines loud, powerful. And approaching very quickly. \"Winters might pay for him. Now quit fucking around. All of you, clean up!\"\n\nGabriel stepped up to where Miguel half lay in the dirt, blinking, stunned that he was still alive.\n\n\"Get up, Spicy,\" he growled, and then hauled back and kicked him in the thigh, hard enough to immediately lock the muscle, to spread agony through Miguel's entire body.\n\nMiguel cried out and rolled onto his back\u2014and saw the giant silhouette of a Beechcraft 1900 bearing down on them, coming in at an impossible angle, its massive shadow blocking the stars.\n\n\"Get down!\" Fish Eye shouted, and then everyone was ducking and hot air was blasting through the small compound, rattling the tarp of the shelter, knocking over chairs. The men's cries were lost beneath the roar of landing. Miguel hugged the ground, his arms wrapped over his head, trying to brace for the explosion.\n\nIt was all over in a minute, and there was no fiery blast, only the dull crack of a few trees being slapped out of the ground and then the descending whine of engines powering down.\n\nThe men got to their feet, staring at each other.\n\n\"That was goddamn amazing,\" Fish Eye said, and Miguel had to agree, distracted from his aching leg. The pilot had set a twin-engine cargo plane down on a strip that barely cleared its wingspan, and had stopped in impossible time.\n\nGabriel ordered that Miguel be tied to one of the canopy's metal posts at the back, a rusting steel bar set into a rough block of concrete. By the time Davi and two of his men rode out to meet \"Winters,\" Miguel's hands were secured behind his back and he was looped to the post with clothesline, two guys watching him. He couldn't see any path here that was going to turn out well for him. Davi was right, someone had come because of what he was involved with\u2014taking Lara Croft to her tunnels. It could only be Trinity.\n\nUnless this is the police or the government, and they lied about Trinity. Lara and Jonah could be mental patients or international criminals on the lam, what did he know? He didn't believe that, though. He thought they were nice people, not cons, and they'd hinted that this could be dangerous, even if they hadn't come out and said it.\n\nEven so, Miguel was all for a good cause, but not if he was going to end up shot for it. What the hell is Lara doing that they'd send in someone after her?\n\nYeah, and what were you doing, thinking that it was worth the cash? You're not here because you said no.\n\nThe men had slung their rifles but they stayed standing, listening to the truck drive out and stop. A minute passed, then another. A couple of the drunks were mumbling trash talk, boasting about who they would kill and what they were going to do to Lara if she came back, and Gabriel told them to shut up. Miguel kept still and quiet, his eyes down.\n\nThe jeep started up again, and then its headlights were aimed back at the compound, growing, the sputtering whine of the engine rising through the warm night.\n\nEveryone started to relax.\n\n\"It's all worked out,\" Fish Eye said. Several of the men nodded, a couple smiling.\n\n\"Gonna get paid today,\" Toothless cackled.\n\n\"Yeah, we'll see,\" Gabriel muttered, and turned to look at Miguel. \"Whatever happens, you're dead, Spicy, and I'm going to make it hurt. You hear me? You're dead, you're\u2014\"\n\nA neat black hole appeared in Gabriel's forehead, the soft bang of a silenced pistol round whizzing by an instant later\u2014and then there were more flat shots. Gabriel fell to his knees, blood running down his dirty face. He pitched forward and Miguel saw that the back of his head had been blown open. Fish Eye and Toothless and three others fell in quick succession, crumpling without even crying out.\n\n\"They're shooting!\" Two of the crew began firing their automatic rifles into the jungle, randomly spraying wide swaths of the dark beyond the compound.\n\n\"Finish it!\" someone shouted angrily, in English, from the direction of the other plane. The surviving members of the brothers' crew collapsed like they were marionettes whose strings had been cut. There was a final burst of fire from Gabriel's screaming coke buddy, crouching in front of the radio room, and then the unseen shooters took him out, three head shots arriving in a patter, one-two-three: two across his cheek, one through his right eye.\n\nA single member of the Santo Almedas' crew was left\u2014 Nuno, the mechanic. He had thrown down his rifle and fallen to his knees, his hands high. \"Don't shoot! I surrender!\"\n\nThe jeep pulled up, and a half-dozen strangers piled out. There was no sign of Davi or his men.\n\nA handful of people crept into the yard from the jungle, wearing dark clothes, their faces smudged with black paint. They moved in as a team, sweeping short rifles and expensive-looking handguns.\n\n\"Koboshi, report!\" A man had walked in among them, tall, dark, with burning eyes. He was broad-shouldered, his chin up, his dark facial hair and scowl giving him a sinister look. Even without the order there was no question of who was in charge.\n\nOne of the men from the truck responded quickly. \"Greeting party dead, Commander, no casualties. Croft landed about two hours ago, took a truck.\"\n\n\"Dixon caught one in the throat,\" the commander said, and shook his head. \"Random shot. All right, let's get this going. You and Byers, wrap up Dixon and put him on the plane. Both of you and Alanis, you're staying with the plane, in case any of these assholes had friends. Do some decorating; make it look like a deal gone wrong, a rival gang or something. The rest of you are with me.\"\n\nThe man turned, looked around, saw Nuno still on the ground, his hands in the air.\n\n\"Who are you?\" the man snapped.\n\n\"Just the mechanic,\" Nuno said. \"I'm not\u2014\"\n\nThe commander raised his handgun and fired, a single round punching through Nuno's temple. The mechanic collapsed, blood soaking into the dirt around his head.\n\nMiguel tried to swallow and found he couldn't, his throat only clicked drily. He'd just watched a group of men get slaughtered in under a minute. The air stank of blood and smoke.\n\nHe looked up at the commander to find that the man was staring back at him, his dark eyes cool. \"You're coming with us, Mr. Riviera, to collect Ms. Croft and her friend.\"\n\nMiguel found his voice. \"They just hired me to fly. I don't know anything, I swear.\"\n\nThe commander nodded. \"Yeah, that doesn't matter. You're what I like to think of as leverage.\"\n\n\"I only met Jonah yesterday,\" Miguel said. \"They barely know my name.\"\n\nThe man smirked. \"Wait, so you're arguing that I should just kill you now? Really?\"\n\nMiguel opened his mouth and then shut it.\n\n\"Ace, put him on a truck,\" the commander said. \"Come on, let's move, everybody. We've got her.\"\n\nA burly man with slicked-back hair stepped forward holding a knife, leaning around to cut Miguel's hands free. Miguel tried to swallow again, and again failed. He wasn't going to mourn the Santo Almeda brothers, but he felt bad for Lara and Jonah. These people were psychopaths. His new friends were about to be in a world of hurt."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "The tunnel from the first bat cave was wide and high at first, but quickly narrowed, the ceiling finally dropping so low that Lara had to edge forward in a crouch. She was starting to think she might have to go back, try one of the other tunnels, when it opened up into another chamber.\n\nShe stepped into a cavern that was even larger than the first. A shallow pool covered much of the floor, the water clear and still, rough calcite formations rising up in places. There was a lot less spoor. She was now firmly out of the system's twilight zone and into the dark\u2014she saw several troglobite species of small creepy-crawly, all with the characteristics of selective regression that typically evolved in dark zones: pale and slow-moving, long-legged with extended antennae, eyeless. There were crickets and millipedes and white harvestmen\u2014Jonah called them \"daddy longlegs\"\u2014skittering over the dung, eating the products of its decay\u2014mold, fungi, bacteria. She didn't stop to inspect the water but imagined that it, too, was teeming with life\u2014small crustaceans, fish, salamanders and frogs. With these chambers flooding fairly regularly, there was no lack of nutrients coming in to oxygenate the water and support a fairly complex bionetwork.\n\nLara did pause long enough to check for unusual tracks or scat. That scream she'd heard\u2026 Every cave system had its own unique biosphere. New species were regularly discovered\u2014 mostly insects, but occasionally larger animals\u2014with some so rare that they existed as a handful of individuals in a single cave, found nowhere else on Earth. It was most likely that the screamer was an \"accidental\"\u2014a beast or bird that had become lost or trapped\u2014but she couldn't discount running into something unheard of that called the labyrinth home. Trinity had apparently ignored the lower caves; Marin's documentation about them was sparse, noting only that the regular floods had long since destroyed anything of interest there.\n\nShe didn't see anything unexpected. She put on her jacket, checked her compass and watch\u2014it had only been about half an hour since she'd left Jonah, but she had a way to go\u2014and moved on.\n\nThree more tunnels led out of the chamber, but there were no markings from the Trinity team to guide her. Lara chose the southernmost but hit a dead end after less than fifty meters. She quickly backtracked and tried a second passage. It was a crawl, and she regretted not packing her good kneepads, but she was rewarded after ten minutes of wriggling through the dark: another large cavern, narrower than the last.\n\nOver many years, calcite had leached from drip water through the limestone; monstrous stalagmites and stalactites\u2014speleothems\u2014ran across the chamber, looking eerily man-made in her torchlight. Gypsum crystals glittered here and there along some of the formations. A rugged stone wall led up to a platform on the east side of the chamber. The shadows up there suggested the platform was the start of another passage, though even her lamp and torch combined were too weak to illuminate much. She couldn't tell if it was one of the labyrinth tunnels, but it seemed likely. The platform was fifteen meters up.\n\nAnd it's an easy climb, she thought, studying the wall. The caverns were smooth along the waterways, craggier at the walls, the result of abrasive erosion by the water that must flood the chamber regularly. Lots of hand and foot holds. At least some of them had to be steady.\n\nShe took a quick look around the chamber before climbing. There were fewer signs of life\u2014no unusual animal spoor, or none that she recognized. She was surprised at how breathable the air was. Really deep caves were often filled with noxious gases. There must be vents in the tunnels higher up that were staggered all the way to the surface, which was encouraging. Exposure to the elements meant more wells and openings; the more opportunities, the faster she could get to the rooms and tunnels she was looking for. She'd have to free climb but she was confident in her skills, for as scarred and battered as her body was, Lara was in excellent shape. When she wasn't traveling, she was training.\n\nShe suddenly thought of Conrad Roth, and the look he would have on his face if he could see her ditching safety protocols left and right. It had been his voice she'd heard in her mind, when she'd been falling. Roth, who'd stepped in when her father had died, who'd taught her how to climb, taught her survival tactics, who'd sparred with her when she'd first learned how to fight. She missed him, his calm guidance, his thoughtful frowns, his thing for pistachios. He had been exactly what she needed\u2014encouraging, stable, committed to giving her a foundation of skills so that she could pursue her dreams. And he'd died on her first big expedition, so that she could have a shot at making it to safety. She remembered sitting at his funeral pyre, watching it burn, and how she'd sworn to herself that she would work harder to protect the people she loved\u2026\n\n\"Shut up,\" she mumbled, and tapped at a few protruding rocks with her axe's adze. She found some good candidates and started to climb.\n\nHer body warmed as she scaled the wall, stopping to hammer at stones over her head, checking for solid holds. The climb went quickly, and she was near the top when she heard an animal sound. A high-pitched chirp, behind her in the chamber.\n\nFrog, she thought. It had that strange liquid quality and high pitch. There were a number of rainforest frogs that screamed during mating season. Was this her mystery bat-frightener?\n\nLara dropped a hand so she could half turn, her headlamp swinging across the cavern's floor. There was no movement except for shadows, but she heard the chirp again, and realized it was coming from a bit higher.\n\nShe scanned where the sloping roof met with other passages in the room\u2014and saw something scuttling into the dark, walking along the ceiling. She caught just a glimpse of what might be the slender whip of a white tail, and then it was gone.\n\nSalamander? Had to be. It seemed to move awfully quickly for a deep-zone dweller, but cave biology was not her strong suit. Perhaps it ate bats, and could support a higher metabolism. And that might explain the bats' reaction to its scream.\n\nShe turned to finish her climb. She'd keep an eye out, but wasn't too concerned. The largest cave salamander ever measured was only about thirty centimeters. Even if this kind was twice the size and suddenly felt compelled to attack something hundreds of times bigger than its regular prey\u2014a ludicrous idea\u2014she had her bow.\n\nShe had pulled herself to the top of the wall and saw that the platform was, as she'd hoped, an opening in a passage that extended off in both directions. Darkness crouched beyond the reach of her lamp. It was cold and silent but for her breathing and the sound of her heart. She'd climbed up into the labyrinth proper.\n\nLara marked the wall and started walking south, ducking beneath drops in the ceiling, twice having to crawl up and over sharp rises. There was no sign that Trinity's people or anyone else had traveled this way, no marks or trash or random destruction. Marin's maps hadn't been terribly specific beyond the top corridors, but Lara had the impression that the deeper tunnels had been partly surveyed and then ignored.\n\nAt the very first branch in the new tunnel, Lara got lucky\u2014a rocky well in the ceiling that she could climb. It would be a tight fit, but it ran only a few meters before opening into another room overhead; she could see the rounded ceiling. Another tunnel? Getting back to the top would take time, but she could make up for the lost minutes on her way back through the top passages, once she got up.\n\nCarefully, she promised herself, but glanced at her watch. She still had an hour and twenty-two minutes before Jonah would expect her. It was vitally important that they were on their way to Peru as soon as she got her pictures.\n\nShe had to jump to catch the bottom of the well, then pull herself up, finally wedging her sore arse into its lip, bringing her legs up after. Her bow smacked into the rock, and she unslung it and strapped it across her chest at an angle.\n\nLara edged higher, using her legs to hold her in place where the passage widened near the midpoint. The rock was uneven, and she forced her body into strange contortions to get to the top. The bow snagged again. Wriggling around in the tight space to work the bow loose, she took a breath. It was enough to make one a touch claustrophobic\u2014stuck in a crack deep underground, unable to move, all those many tons of wet dirt and crumbling rock just over your head\u2026\n\nShe pulled herself up and into the space above, scowling. It wasn't a tunnel, but a room with no exits, empty except for\u2014\n\nA human skeleton was slumped by the chamber's ragged edge, tucked beneath a low ledge.\n\nLara stepped closer, crouched to see. The skeleton was in pieces, everything that had connected the bones eaten away. The bones themselves were old, pitted in a few places by the weak acids dripping through the rocks.\n\nThere were a few items with the remains: a square metal belt buckle black with age, a few rivets, a broken, rusted compass from the early nineteenth century\u2014and a small item wrapped in layers of oilcloth.\n\nShe picked it up, hefting it. A book. Lara quickly unwrapped the thing, the outer layers of cloth disintegrating into mush. The small notebook inside was still intact, mostly protected from the moisture. It was hand bound, its leather cover splotched with mold.\n\nLara opened the book. Printed neatly inside the front cover, she found the owner's name and a date: Mateus Sousa Pereira, 1937. She carefully turned the thick pages, which were filled with thin, slanting handwriting. It was in Portuguese\u2026\n\nMateus had been an archaeologist, it seemed. The first part of the book was filled with descriptions of an Aztec site, and small, careful sketches of artwork he had seen there. His observations were casual, unstudied, but he was excited by everything, rhapsodizing over his discoveries. Lara flipped ahead\u2014and saw drawings of Mayan hieroglyphs. Sacrifice, stars, the twins, the moon. She saw the tiles representing Ix Chel and Chak Chel\u2026 Mateus had focused particularly on a room with pillars that had been painted with rings, drawing them from several different angles. And there were rough sketches of the labyrinth itself, at least parts of it.\n\nThe last few pages were smudged, the writing hasty and shaking. Lara read the final lines.\n\nI am still trapped, and my supplies are exhausted. It has been days now, I think. The flood rages on beneath my feet, pounding the rocks, and I only want to sleep. I have marked this site with a cross, accepting it is my fate to die here. If this record is ever found, please return it to my beloved sister, Maria Sousa Oliveira, in S\u00e3o Paulo, and tell her that she was right: my enthusiasm far exceeded my amateur abilities. I rest now in God's loving hands.\n\nLara flipped back to one of the maps Mateus had drawn, and found a shaky cross marked above a small rounded hole at the top of a thin tube. It seemed he'd mapped much of this level before getting trapped. Where the tunnel branched beneath the room, if she kept right, she would come to a chamber that had a number of passages branching from it. Almost every extending line ended with an X, suggesting that they were dead ends\u2026 But a lot could happen in eighty years. Regular flooding had a way of moving things around.\n\n\"Thank you, Mateus,\" she said, tucking the notebook into her belt. His map might whittle away the time it would take to get through this\u2026 And she felt a kinship to him, for his geeky exclamations about the poetry of the past. He'd gone adventuring when there was no such thing as nylon rope or batteries or rescue teams, because he was in love with that particular awe that came from experiencing real history.\n\nHe was like you were, once upon a time. As long as Trinity still existed, love didn't really play a part in what she did. She'd been forced to run full speed through temples and tombs filled with incredible artifacts, sites that she could have spent years happily documenting.\n\nShe readjusted her equipment and climbed back into the tight well. It should have been easier with gravity helping, but she still got caught up, this time because of the knife on her belt. The sheath snagged on a rock, pushing the handle into her side. The belt would snap if she tried to jam through.\n\nShe wormed her way up and twisted her hips, trying again\u2014and when she was surrounded by rock, tight on all sides, she heard that raspy chirp in the chamber beneath her, a chirp and then a short, wavering, high-pitched cry that seemed to run straight through her spine.\n\nShit. She pushed herself through the tight spot, scraping the side of her arm, the bow smacking her in the chin. She dropped through the wide part and climbed down quickly. Before she lowered herself out, she unsheathed the knife, gripping it tightly. She was undoubtedly overreacting, but she didn't really know what this thing was, yet.\n\nLara dropped to the floor of the chamber, quickly scanning up, left and right. Nothing.\n\nThe animal cried again, from the direction she'd come, shockingly loud. From the echoes, it had reached the cavern she'd climbed up from\u2014\n\n\u2014and another cry rose up from the cavern. And a third, ahead of her somewhere above, the high shriek bouncing through the bare tunnels.\n\nLara put the knife away and unstrapped her bow, readjusting the quiver on her back. It seemed she'd arrived during mating season. That, or the creatures were hunting. Marin's notes hadn't made any mention of cave life\u2026 But Trinity had come in a group, soldiers and archaeologists stomping around in the upper tunnels. Quite different from a lone caver. It was most likely that the creatures weren't even aware of her, and were behaving normally\u2026 But she didn't know how many there were. She hoped they were smaller than they sounded. Otherwise they could turn out to be a problem.\n\nAdd it to the list. She had lost fifteen minutes, climbing into and out of Mateus's room.\n\nLara marked the right-hand passage and started into the next tunnel."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "Lara had been gone almost an hour when Jonah heard the trucks.\n\nHe'd been sitting in the dark with his eyes closed, listening to the jungle, enjoying the cool that seeped up from the cenote. Night birds squawked and trilled over the chants of cicadas and crickets. Some small animal he couldn't imagine occasionally called from a stand of palms to his right, a few hundred feet from where he sat\u2014it made a clattering sound, like a tiny jackhammer. Frog? Monkey? Baby sloth? He'd never heard it before.\n\nBeneath the racket, the jungle was an ocean, a susurrus of life. Branches sprang up in the dark as creatures leapt from them. Bats cheeped and fluttered and smacked into bugs. There were whispering waves of cracks and rustles from the passage of small bodies through leaf litter. As carefully as he was listening, when he first heard the distant whine of the engines, they were still minutes away.\n\nJonah grabbed the radio. \"Lara, someone's coming.\"\n\nHe repeatedly tapped the transmit button\u2014emergency\u2014 but there was no response. He hadn't actually expected one, but it never hurt to try.\n\nJonah turned on the lamp and left it by the rim, hopped to his feet and moved quickly to the truck. He grabbed the Mossberg, chambered a shell and stuffed more into his pockets. The twelve-gauge held eight shells and was pretty accurate up to a hundred yards. He wasn't into guns at all, but when she'd told him they were going to be visiting Trinity sites, it had been his idea to have Lara pack something he could use. Couldn't bring a fist to a gun fight.\n\nHe grabbed his pack and headed for the wall of trees east of the cenote, frondy palms and rubber trees and shadows in the pale starlight. He hustled in a few yards and then picked out his new best friend, a young banyan tree with thick branches that stretched back into the jungle, the lowest just over his head. He slung his stuff and started to climb.\n\nHe had just found the perfect spot\u2014about fifteen feet up, screened by leaves, with a clear line of sight to the lamp he'd left burning\u2014when the first truck pulled into the clearing. It was one of the wrecks from the Santo Almeda compound. A second came in after it, baked dust rising up in a haze. The two trucks parked between the cenote and the truck he and Lara had borrowed. He'd held onto a faint shred of hope that it was just the Santo Almeda crew, drunk and looking for trouble, but he could see immediately that the newcomers were Trinity. The figures were armed and dressed for a night raid, black face paint and all. They sat in the trucks, not moving.\n\nJonah steadied the shotgun in a crotch of the branch he was lying on, taking a breath. He counted six, maybe seven people in all, assuming the drivers had passengers. He couldn't see into the dark cabs over the glare of the headlights.\n\nThe passenger door of the first truck cracked open, and a voice called out.\n\n\"Hey, anybody here? Don't shoot, we've got a friend of yours, wants to say hello!\"\n\nThe driver, a big muscly guy, got out of the truck, pulling a second man with him. Jonah clenched his jaw. It was Miguel. They walked toward the lamp, the driver pushing Miguel to the ground and then pointing a handgun at his head. The pilot looked like he was in shock.\n\nThe man in the truck called out again. \"My name is Harper. If you throw down your weapons and come out, your pilot lives to fly another day, you've got my word. You have ten seconds to do it, or my man is going to shoot!\"\n\n\"What if he's not here?\" Miguel's voice was bleak.\n\nHarper ignored him. \"Ten! Nine! Eight!\"\n\nHe's lying, they'll kill him anyway; they'll kill you, too.\n\n\"Seven!\"\n\nTake out the driver now, one less to deal with. Renegotiate.\n\n\"Six! Five! Four!\"\n\nIf you surrender, they've got another hostage. Or you're both dead.\n\nIf you don't, Miguel dies, right now.\n\n\"Three!\"\n\nMiguel had closed his eyes.\n\n\"Wait!\" Jonah shouted, and the soldiers in the backs of the trucks shifted, pointing their weapons in his general direction.\n\n\"Excellent!\" Harper was grinning, Jonah could hear it in his voice. \"Mr. Maiava, right? Am I pronouncing that correctly? Come on out; we can have a little talk.\"\n\nJonah took out his pocketknife and slipped it deep into his boot. He left the shotgun and his pack in the tree, sliding down the fibrous trunk on his soles. From the way the soldiers were scanning, they weren't sure where he was. He took several big, hurried strides closer to the trucks before he stepped out from beneath the dark canopy.\n\n\"I'm unarmed,\" he shouted, and put his hands up, and started walking, ignoring the pain of the small folded knife behind his heel. If they were planning to sit and wait for her to get back, Lara would know something was up when he didn't answer the radio.\n\nAnd if they're going in after her?\n\nHe couldn't predict what they would do. Miguel was alive\u2014that mattered. As long as there was life, there was hope."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "Lara Croft's bulky friend had given up without a fight. That was the problem with self-proclaimed good guys, they could be as brave as lions but they always caved as soon as you pointed a gun at someone else. Weak. Reddy patted him down while Ace kept his Ruger aimed at the pilot. As soon as Reddy gave a thumbs-up, Harper climbed out of the truck, gesturing for the rest of his team to join him. There were six of them here, all of his best plus a lantern-jawed sniper from his B team, Smith.\n\n\"Smith, Reddy, tie them up. You're going to babysit. The rest of you, get ready to drop.\"\n\nLucas Reddy frowned, but nodded along with the others. Harper knew that Reddy wanted in on the hunt\u2014everyone was riled up after the shootout with the druggies, and the unfortunate loss of Dixon, retired from the team by a wild shot\u2014but Smith wasn't smart enough to play tactics if Croft somehow got around them. One of the top people had to stay behind, and Reddy was a big guy, like Smith, the better to help haul them back out once Croft was dead.\n\nThey broke out the equipment, drop lines and helmets, tapping mics and loading mags. They had night-vision gear but it was first gen; Hux said it was useless without ambient light, so they'd left it on the plane. They had a few infrared scopes for the rifles, but no one wanted to lug in a rifle. Besides, Croft would be wearing a light. The Dozen all carried nines, but each had their own preferred make\u2014Glock, SIG, Ruger. Mitchell carried a CZ 75B. Sergei, their top shot, used a Springfield XD. Hux passed out boxes of rounds.\n\nSmith and Reddy had zip-tied the prisoners' hands behind their backs. Both men were sitting cross-legged on the rocky dirt a few meters in front of the trucks. Harper walked over and crouched in front of Lara's special friend. The guy was built like a tank, tattoos all over.\n\n\"Jonah, right?\" Harper said. \"We know she's in the tunnels. When is she due back?\"\n\nThe big man shrugged. He looked angry and disgusted but not afraid, at least not for himself.\n\n\"I can still kill your pilot,\" Harper said, more patiently than he felt.\n\n\"Can't see my watch,\" Jonah said. He had a mild voice.\n\nHarper glanced at his. \"It's 2245.\"\n\n\"Ten, fifteen minutes,\" Jonah said.\n\nHarper studied him. Jonah gazed back, his dark eyes giving nothing away, his face impassive.\n\n\"Seems pretty fast,\" Harper said, probing for a tell. \"Not a lot of time to sightsee. She'd have to be running.\"\n\nNothing. Jonah could have been a statue.\n\n\"What do you say, Miguel?\" Harper asked. \"They give you an ETA, for when to have the plane ready?\"\n\nThe soft-faced pilot shook his head, not looking up. \"I told you. They said fuel up and wait, that's what I know.\"\n\nThrough the exchange, Harper kept watching Jonah. It bothered him that he couldn't tell if the man was lying. If Croft was really going to be back that quickly, they should stay close, save themselves from having to chase her through a maze. The Dozen were itching to go in, but as far as he knew, none of them had any kind of actual caving experience. His own was minimal. Croft was a mountain climber and had worked underground digs before. She had famously taken out most of a squad working at a tomb in Mongolia, sneaking up behind them through the dark passageways, choking them out, cutting their throats. Granted, they'd been locally trained, but the environment was the point: she would have an advantage.\n\n\"You worrying about your odds, going in after her?\" Jonah asked.\n\nHarper felt a flush of rage at the calm curiosity in his voice, at the fact that the other man had read him so easily. He leaned in close. The words spilled out like acid, flowing without thought. \"No, I was thinking that when she hears we've got you, she'll surrender without a fight, and whoever gets to her first is going to thoroughly enjoy their work. Mitchell likes to use knives, that's her thing. My man Hux is a hands-on type; he'll shoot her down and then choke her, or beat her to death. Sergei's your best bet; he's a real professional\u2014probably a double-tap to the back of the skull and he's out. Ace, though, he's got a taste for the ladies. And you're lucky that Reddy's not going in, he likes a little bit of everything.\"\n\nHe lowered his voice, grinning in a clench. \"Between you and me, I think a lot of my people only took the Oath so that they could punish sinners. Trinity's been divided about your friend's meddling, but I'm not. We've come here to eliminate a mass murderer and an enemy of God, and we all want to claim the glory. If I happen across her first\u2026 well, who knows what I'll do?\"\n\nJonah's brow had knotted up, and Harper felt an instant of triumph that he'd finally broken through the man's unflappable calm\u2014until he realized that the look on his face was pitying, his eyes sad.\n\n\"You seem really angry,\" he said. Sympathetically.\n\nHarper stood up, the heat of his rage snapping off. Waste of time, talking to a dead man.\n\nWho is literally wasting your time. Trying to keep you from acting.\n\n\"Drop in two!\" he called, stalking toward the open pit. They would go in. And as soon as Croft was dispatched, he would let Reddy work out his frustrations on Jonah and the pilot. The great thing about the jungle was that there was no need to hide bodies; corpses could be picked clean in a matter of hours, the bones dragged away and crunched into pieces for the marrow.\n\nIf Dr. Dominguez is successful, nobody will even be looking.\n\nHe told Reddy to monitor the radio and keep in touch, then moved to the stony rim of the natural well, clipping onto his line. Was it his destiny to bring an end to the Croft line on the eve of a new world? Or would one of his team get to her first?\n\nNo matter. As long as it was done, he was good. No more men were going to be lost, ever. Lara Croft was going to die painfully and lie rotting in the cold dark. The Blue Labyrinth would be her tomb."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "When she reached the low chamber that had all of the tunnels branching off, Lara carefully studied the labyrinth drawings in Mateus's notebook, comparing them to the black openings on every side of the rocky room. There were seven passages. Mateus had marked Xs and tapering points for all but two, one a descent to the west, the other opening curving back north. She spent only five minutes checking out the western option\u2014after ten meters, the passage stopped, all but for an abrupt opening in the floor. It looked like a steep drop down to one of the pools at the bottom of the labyrinth, thick with the stench of ammonia and wet rot. Lara saw movement in the water meters below, a wriggling shadow, and heard bats rustling, and the whisper of bugs. It was interesting that the pool chamber north of her had been mostly devoid of life, and this one had a thriving ecosystem yet was farther inside. This section of the labyrinth must open into a passage that accessed the higher tunnels. If the northern passage didn't check out, she would come back and see if there was any way to climb down for a look.\n\nThe northern passage was another crawling climb. She kept at it longer than she should have, but its slight incline was encouraging. It finally curved straight up and into a slick-sided well, ten meters tall and too wide by half a meter for her to push herself up. She stared up at the well's opening, scowling. She could hammer her way up but it would take too long.\n\nYou might want to consider putting in the time. You've just used up another ten minutes, plus whatever it takes to get back.\n\nShe closed her eyes, bringing to mind the rough cross-section of the labyrinth that Marin had drawn. No. If she came up here, she'd be in the thick of the maze. It had to be her last resort. She'd go back down to the bottom, keep heading south, the direction of her destination. She still had some distance to cover before she was beneath the rooms, and there was clearly more than one way up.\n\nShe crawled back to the central chamber and hurried to the western opening over the pool, leaning down to assess. There were a few hundred bats, hanging and crawling along the ceiling amid the calcite stacks, cheeping, pooping\u2014and a thick column only a meter away, beneath the rough edge of her tunnel. Better to climb down than get wet.\n\nLara lowered herself down from the rim of the hole, swinging her legs under the rocks, wrapping them around the column. It was a trick, letting go of the lip. She tried to think of it as an opportunity to test her core strength, and muscled herself to the column, hugging the cold, slimy rock.\n\nShe clambered down quickly and took in the chamber\u2014 rough, newer, many of the more delicate calcite formations broken and washed to the sides. The southern wall sloped to the floor but where they met there was a jagged opening about two meters high and three across. A trio of bats dropped from the ceiling and flitted for the hole, disappearing into the black. There was a soft, consistent echo of high-pitched squeaks and small movements all around her.\n\nLara followed the bats, doing her best to minimize stomping the delicate food chain into goo, stepping wide. She kept her bow in her hand, ready to duck if the screamers started in, ready to shoot if they showed up and wouldn't run from a shout or a hand clap.\n\nThe opening connected a short, wide tunnel with a chamber twice the size of the others she'd seen, the light from her headlamp not touching the southern end. The ceiling sloped upward from where she stood, perhaps five meters overhead, to at least twenty before it disappeared into darkness. There were bats and pale bugs and a lake of shallow water, pitted with deeper holes, and more signs that a roaring flood had been through sometime in the not too distant past.\n\nLara started across the chamber, and was just climbing over a large broken pillar when she heard the rasping chirp of a screamer, off to her right, low.\n\nShe turned, bringing the bow up\u2014\n\n\u2014and saw a white salamander sitting at the still water's edge, a big one. White wasn't quite the word: parts of it were translucent. She could see some of its bones along its back and tail, opaque rings beneath the pale wet skin. The creature was nearly a meter long, although more than a third of its length was a whip-thin tail. Its legs were better developed than the average salamander, still thick but longer. The creature had long, wide jaws and pointed teeth; flared, quivering nostrils and tiny pits instead of eyes. It cocked its head in her direction, swinging its albino face to the side, chirping again, a small trill of sound.\n\nA dozen bats dropped and flew away, heading south.\n\nAmazing. For a troglobite, it was a giant. And salamanders weren't known to vocalize the way frogs did; they didn't make a lot of noise. Lara stomped her boot into the squelching floor, making a weak thump. The animal swung its head in the other direction, now chirping with each breath, the sound getting louder.\n\n\"Hey!\" Lara shouted, and the salamander dropped its jaw and screamed, piercingly, a furious, high-pitched shriek.\n\nLara ducked as more bats took off, a hurricane of ultrasonic screeching and crap raining down as the frightened animals flew south, the salamander's wavering echoes chasing them out.\n\nThe screamer turned and ran straight up the western wall, flattening its body, wriggling quickly between the muddy rocks. It disappeared into a crevice.\n\nLara let out a breath. Okay, there's that. So long as the creatures ran away when confronted with a noisy unknown, all was well. What a noise, though, so much sound from such a small throat. Highly effective for herding bats.\n\nLara picked her way through the cavern, the southern wall slowly coming into view\u2014and it was beautiful: a long, forty-five-degree slope of rough wall, stretching up and up, a few short vertical pitches but nothing she couldn't handle or go around. Water trickled down in places, patches of muddy seep. She couldn't tell where the bats had gotten out but there were passages up high; she could see the openings in the rocks. Fifteen minutes of brisk climbing and she'd be at the lowest.\n\nAnd you've come far enough to be at least near the rooms. High above, but not far ahead.\n\nShe slung the bow and grabbed her axe, using the spike at the end to steady herself against the layered, clammy mud as she found holds, pushing and pulling herself up the long slope. Quickly falling into the work, Lara focused on the climb. She was better than halfway to the first opening and carefully skirting a chest-high chunk of stone when she heard several chirping salamander cries. To her right and below, but on the slope with her.\n\nLara looked down. Three of them had assembled about ten meters away, pale, wet skin splotched with mud, their strange heads cocked and listening. One of them crawled closer, chirping.\n\n\"Hey!\" Lara called, and the creatures flinched, and then all three were screaming in response. One turned and fled, moving nimbly over the rocks, still shrieking. Another stayed put. The one nearest took a step closer.\n\n\"Back off!\" she shouted loudly, drowning out the din, and both of the salamanders turned and darted away\u2014\n\n\u2014but there was more chirping now, rattling, rasping, breathy. Lara looked up the slope and saw two more of them had appeared, perched on the rocks ahead of her, small, sharp teeth glinting in the light. The head of a third bobbed up from a pool of shadow.\n\nThe runners had turned around, and started chirping again. Their tails flicked, the tips high. It seemed they were figuring out that her commotion wasn't followed by any action.\n\nLara flipped the pick and hammered at a rock in the slope, the adze striking the chunk of limestone with bright metallic sounds. She shouted at the same time, and the added vibrations did the trick. The salamanders scuttled away.\n\nShe started climbing again, watching out for company this time. She didn't like the creatures' behavior. They had to be the top predator of this closed ecosystem. There were enough bats down here to support a sizable population, and they were showing clear evidence of a pack mentality. It wasn't a good thing that they were only wary of the large animal that had dropped in to their habitat; they weren't hiding, they were checking her out. She expected they would keep pushing to find out what she was\u2014a threat or something they could eat. If enough of them attacked at once, she'd likely be bitten before she could drive them away.\n\nTwo meters up was a ledge, wide enough to stand on. She quickly pulled herself to the platform and climbed up, adjusting her balance; she was standing up straight on the long, tilted plane of shattered, rocky earth. She nocked an arrow and took a minute to catch her breath, gazing around at the cavern. It was surreal, like something from a Lovecraft tale\u2014a massive underground chamber deep in the dark zone, fantastic mineral formations rising from an icy, eldritch lake. Moonless shores, indeed. She waited.\n\nThe blind creatures didn't take long to approach again. They crept in from the shadows beyond her light, making their odd cries. Locating her. Each would stop and chirp and listen before suddenly darting ahead, scuttling like lizards, halting abruptly to repeat the process.\n\nLara raised the bow, sighted the nearest and hooked back the string, leveling her sight line. She stomped her foot, shouted wordlessly, \"Yahh!\" and released the arrow, her scream echoing loud through the high chamber. The salamander's rounded head grew a shaft. It made a choking sound and collapsed.\n\nLara grabbed a second arrow, still shouting and stomping, found the next target atop a hump of rock, drew and released. The creature flipped out of sight behind the rock, screeching as it went over, its dying cry quickly coughing to a stop.\n\nLara nocked a third arrow, but they were all turning and scuttling away, convinced. It would be nice if they could pass the information along, but depending on their habits, she might have to repeat the performance. If they were as smart as they seemed, they'd quickly learn to avoid her.\n\nYou won't be here long enough to train them. Move.\n\nShe didn't backtrack to retrieve her arrows, instead throwing herself into the next jagged rise. It was abhorrent behavior, she knew, leaving anything behind in a cave, but going back down to get the arrows meant five more minutes, expending energy that was by no means limitless.\n\nSo when Trinity breaks the rules, it's repugnant. You get a free pass on everything, because you're trying to save the world, right? It doesn't matter what gets destroyed or who dies, it doesn't matter if you ditch every value you hold as a historian or as a scientist or as a human being. It's an emergency, so nothing applies. That's why it's okay that you took that dagger: it was an emergency.\n\nLara sneered and grunted, pushing herself up another meter. \"Not gonna fall for that one,\" she whispered. Yes, it was an emergency. Shaming herself for taking license was a useless path. Dominguez's motivations weren't clear, but she knew enough about Trinity not to trust anything they were into. She needed to find the box before they did.\n\nShe scaled the last few meters to the base of the first opening, a long, low wedge of dark in the slope, stopping short to listen. There was a slight rustle, a few bats perhaps. She tossed the axe inside, grabbed the rim and pulled herself up with a grunt\u2014\n\n\u2014and there was a trio of salamanders gathered near the axe, heads cocked. At the sound of her vocalization, they ran at her, shrieking.\n\nLara threw herself forward, into the oncoming things, shouting, landing on her hands and knees. They split to run around her, one snapping its teeth into the meat of her calf. It couldn't close its jaws and immediately let go, but it had punctured skin. The biter followed the others over the edge of the platform and down, scuttling away, their tails winding through the rocks.\n\nLovely. At least now you know where the bats are getting out. She was sitting in a thick layer of droppings. She'd have to burn these clothes before Jonah let her back on the plane.\n\nLara caught her breath, feeling hopeful as she took in the new passage. The cave had a single opening, a wide, rounded tunnel that appeared to climb upward some meters ahead. Another slope like the one she'd just climbed and she'd be on top of the labyrinth in no time.\n\nShe stopped long enough to disinfect the stinging wound, trying to quell thoughts of toxic saliva and flesh-eating bacteria as she scrubbed it clean. She slapped a piece of duct tape over the small bite, drank some water, checked her compass and moved on."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "The soldiers, led by Harper, dropped efficiently into the cavern, the buzz of their lines echoing up into the night. Miguel slumped, staring at the seam of his boot, and the dry dirt beneath the worn sole. Trinity was going to kill Lara and then he and Jonah would die, and that would be the end.\n\nThe man Reddy was tall and broad, with a crooked nose and a stubbly shaved head beneath his helmet. He ordered the other one\u2014Smith, a tall blond twenty-something with blank eyes\u2014to go looking for anything Jonah might have stashed in the jungle. Smith nodded and started for the place where Jonah had come out into the clearing. Miguel still couldn't believe he'd done that, walked out of the jungle with his hands up.\n\nReddy held Jonah's radio, nodding at Jonah. \"She calls in, you're going to tell her to come back immediately, you understand? Or I'll shoot your pilot here through his teeth.\"\n\n\"Sure, absolutely,\" Jonah said. \"I understand.\"\n\n\"Shut the fuck up,\" Reddy said. \"Don't give me any fucking trouble and I won't put my boot to your face.\"\n\nHe backed up to the closest truck and boosted himself onto the rusting hood, speaking into a handheld radio.\n\n\"Team has descended to site, repeat, team is inside.\"\n\n\"Copy that,\" someone answered.\n\n\"How many are at the airfield?\" Jonah asked, very quietly.\n\n\"Three,\" Miguel said. \"Plus the pilot, that's four. They're staying with the plane.\"\n\n\"I said shut up,\" Reddy called, but leaned back on the hood, clipping the radio to his belt. Smith was crashing through the trees behind them, his flashlight beam cutting back and forth across the bare clearing.\n\n\"These guys are going to get bored just sitting on us,\" Jonah said. \"When we get the chance, we'll break for the jungle.\"\n\nMiguel shook his head. \"I'm no commando, Jonah. And we're tied up.\"\n\n\"All you have to do is run,\" Jonah said. He shifted his feet, recrossing his legs. \"And I'll see what I can do about the tied-up part, give me a few.\"\n\n\"I don't understand any of this,\" Miguel whispered. \"They killed everyone at the compound. Who are these people?\"\n\nJonah sighed. \"Trinity's like a death cult, masquerading as crusaders. Power trippers. They're helping an archaeologist, Dominguez, who's claims he's going to resurrect an ancient god. He has to find this one artifact to do it, and Lara's trying to get to it first.\"\n\nMiguel blinked. \"You believe he can do it? That such a thing is even possible?\"\n\n\"I think he can find the artifact,\" Jonah said simply. \"The rest of it\u2026\" He trailed off, seeming to look inward for a beat before continuing. \"Lara wants to get to the artifact first, but all we've got is a riddle about where it is. She was hoping to narrow the search range, coming here.\"\n\nJonah looked at him directly, his gaze apologetic. \"I'm sorry about this. We didn't think they would come after us, not this fast.\"\n\nMiguel didn't believe in ancient gods, but he didn't think Jonah was lying, either, about any of it. He didn't know where that left him. He didn't have a problem siding with Jonah and Lara\u2014Trinity seemed to be made up of killers and villains\u2014but he couldn't imagine summoning the courage to run, here, now, with armed men standing guard.\n\nA minute passed, and another. Smith came back, declaring that he couldn't find anything, and Reddy went to take a look. Miguel felt exhaustion creeping through him. He'd been surfing an ongoing adrenaline dump for what seemed like hours, and as the night started to cool, slowly, he found himself nodding.\n\n\"Catch a few minutes, I'll wake you if anything happens,\" Jonah said.\n\nMiguel nodded. He pulled his knees up and rolled onto his side, closing his eyes.\n\n\"So how come they called you Spicy, anyway?\" Jonah asked.\n\n\"When I was smuggling, I transported Aji Charapita peppers, from Peru up into Mexico,\" Miguel said.\n\nJonah sounded surprised, and amused. \"Peppers?\"\n\n\"Current market value is something like $25K per kilo,\" Miguel said. \"That's a lot of taxes to avoid. I had a distributor who could get my stuff to gourmet restaurants on three continents.\"\n\n\"Shut up over there,\" the blond snapped.\n\nJonah went silent, shifting again against the warm ground. Miguel reminded himself that he was going to die soon, but the thought wasn't compelling enough to keep him awake even a second longer."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "They went in together, moving in a line through the entry tunnel, past a stinking bat cave and over a rock bridge, clipping to a fixed line for the crossing. Past that was another chamber, with several offshoots. According to his map, two of them opened into the main passages along the site, north\u2013south tunnels with a dozen rooms decorated by the ancient Maya spaced out along their lengths. A third branch led into the thick, winding twist of the labyrinth; there were a few more Maya chambers in the maze, plus some murals, all at the very top.\n\nHarper stopped them there. They'd lost radio contact with Reddy and Smith almost immediately. Once they split up, it was unlikely they'd be able to communicate unless they were in a line and in sight of each other.\n\n\"I'm putting you in pairs to start, but play it as you like,\" he said, and watched their eyes light up at the freedom he'd just granted them. \"Mitchell and Hux, take the top. Ace and Sergei, lower tunnel. I'll stay here in case she comes out of the maze, or gets past all of you.\"\n\n\"That's likely,\" Ace said. Hux and Sergei grinned. Mitchell only waited, her eyes like chips of ice.\n\n\"Check your maps often. There are six charges laid at critical locations. Geology reports say this system is relatively stable, but try not to get into a shootout, and watch your step. Any kind of emergency situation crops up, fall back to the drop point.\"\n\nNods all around.\n\n\"Report back here at double-oh hundred. If there's no sign of her, we'll re-evaluate. If we can't do this fast, better to rely on the insurance.\"\n\nAce spoke up. \"Closest charge is a big one, fifty meters in. We could tap it now, probably block everything.\"\n\nHux answered. \"There are vents and cracks through the ground all around here. All small and technically difficult so Trinity didn't use them, but she could probably find another way out.\"\n\n\"I want confirmation of her death, anyway,\" Harper said. \"We're stepping outside the lines to get this done, we're going to do it right. Questions?\"\n\nThere were none. \"Go play,\" he said. \"Curfew is midnight.\"\n\nMitchell and Hux started into the tunnel at the chamber's southeast corner, Mitchell leading. Sergei stopped to adjust his helmet and then trotted after Ace, who was already disappearing into the dark of the adjacent opening.\n\nHarper listened to their careful footsteps fading away. He'd been through a few caves in the Middle East, but they'd been dry as bones. Just as cold, though, when you went deep. Harper didn't like either kind. He clearly remembered the few times he'd had to turn off his light, how he'd felt like he was suffocating, like the dark was a presence and not just an absence of light. Like there was no air, only blackness too heavy to breathe.\n\nThis won't take long. One of his people would take out Croft, quickly. He'd bet on Mitchell or Hux, but luck was a big factor\u2014it depended on who found her first. As soon as she was dead they would climb back up into the world, clean up the loose ends and then report that they'd followed Croft to Colombia, and were standing by for new orders. The great thinkers of the hallowed halls would still be arguing about what to do next when Dr. Dominguez fulfilled his purpose; with the cleansing already begun, it was probably only a matter of days. After that, no one would ever wonder or care what had happened to Lara Croft.\n\nIf she makes it to me, I'll take her ear, he decided. Shoot her in the gut and then slice off her ear as a keepsake. A decade from now he could look at it and remember how he'd made the call.\n\nHarper found a wall to lean against and reluctantly turned off the light on his helmet, closing his eyes as the dark flooded over him. If she miraculously made it past his top players, she was still most likely to come through here to get out. He'd be ready."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "Just as she stepped off the wall to pull herself higher, a slender white scorpion crawled out of a crack in the rock and onto the back of Lara's left hand.\n\nShe gritted her teeth, resisting the urge to shake it off until she found a solid place for her feet. The scorpion was agitated by her movements, raising its pincers, its tail up and stinger poised.\n\nAs soon as she had her footing she whipped her hand away, a shiver running down her spine. The tiny animal dropped off without stinging.\n\nShe had climbed several meters of a near-vertical rock well, bats occasionally fluttering past. The holds were easy, if a bit slippery. Luckily, the scorpion was the only incident. She pulled herself into a low passage that branched after only a short walk, and followed the guano, clambering over humps of rock, the ceiling opening up into a tunnel. Lara only had to boost herself inside on her hands. She estimated by how many meters she'd come up overall that she was somewhere near the top of the maze by now, just below the main tunnels. She'd had to wedge herself up through a few squeezes and had to backtrack a few times, but there were a lot of places to go up. She was making excellent time.\n\nThe wide passage ran north\u2013south, the trail of guano heading north. Lara saw a glint of metal at the ceiling, then found others, heading in both directions. Supports for Trinity's lights.\n\nShe felt a burst of optimism. It was likely that she was still in the maze part of the dig. There were a few areas at the top that had items of interest\u2014murals, mostly\u2014but she was at least close to where she needed to be, and if Trinity had seen fit to run lights, the difficult climbing was over.\n\nNow you just have to figure out where you are, exactly. And start watching for charges. She remembered the mines she needed to avoid along her route, but there were others that Marin only mentioned, all of them set in the uppermost tunnels.\n\nShe started south, moving as quickly as she dared. The passage narrowed to about a meter across and veered east. When she reached the curve, she saw a small chamber ahead that opened off the east wall.\n\nLara stepped carefully, reached the rounded entry and looked inside, her heart picking up speed immediately. She knew where she was. And she understood why the dig had been given its nickname.\n\nA vast, apocalyptic mural was painted on the curving wall inside, meters across, an ocean of tiny figures painted blue, raising their hands to a black sun. The rich, bright indigo of the original pigment was stunning. Maya blue. Scientists had long marveled at its staying power, struggled for decades to replicate its exact chemistry.\n\nA thousand years old. Older.\n\nShe automatically got out her camera and took a picture, the flash shockingly bright against the crushing darkness. She clipped the camera to her belt for ease of access. There wasn't any writing, but she had no idea what might end up proving valuable. She felt sure the tunnels she wanted were directly overhead. She could go north, back through the labyrinth\u2014 she had no doubt that Trinity had drawn great sloppy arrows on everything this high up to keep their people from getting lost\u2014and start at the beginning of the main corridors, where she'd meant to come in\u2026 Or she could find the upper labyrinth's southeast corner. Marin had noted an access point between the lower main tunnel and the maze there. She was more certain of the northern route, but was undoubtedly closer to the access point; she could climb up into the lower of the main passages, and then it was a short walk to the first of the glyph rooms a bit farther south\u2014\n\nShe heard something, a faint echo from somewhere behind her. A rock, falling? She listened for a moment but it wasn't repeated.\n\nLara continued south. When the tunnel branched, she followed the eastern passage, scanning the ground for disturbances, any sign that Marin's team had been through. She passed through a narrow tunnel that had the same kind of painting as the first she'd seen\u2014a blue multitude, a black sun overhead.\n\nAn eclipse. The eclipse. The final cataclysm she had seen depicted in the mural back in Mexico, in the Temple of the Moon.\n\nShe snapped a picture, checked her compass and watch, and kept moving. If she found the rooms she was looking for immediately and ran all the way back, she was still going to be late, but maybe not so late that Jonah would start to worry. It was cold but she had started working up a sweat again, focused on the rocks beneath her hands and feet, her senses wide open.\n\nA salamander shrieked, a lonely, echoing cry. Another answered. They were somewhere in the labyrinth behind her. Her breathing sounded loud in her ears, and so did the rustle of her clothes, her movements. She watched the ground for any unlikely stones where Marin's pressure plates might be hiding.\n\nShe passed a third mural in an alcove, of a priest in blue robes offering a dagger up to a full moon. Beneath the flash of the camera she could see the haste in the artwork, in the rough lines of the priest's face, a few drips of the precious paint. She felt a stab of regret as she left it behind. Evidence of Maya culture so far south was an incredible find. Had the Maya been on their way to Peru when they'd stopped here to hide the Silver Box of Ix Chel, or on their way back north? How many had come? She couldn't help wondering what Dominguez had concluded as she continued on, only twice having to backtrack from a dead end. She followed the compass as best she could, south and east, and marked her passage.\n\nLara came around a bend in the winding tunnel she'd entered and saw a rough black opening in the ceiling where a small charge had been detonated. A heap of shattered rock had been pushed to one side on the floor of the tunnel. It seemed that Marin hadn't found a hole; he'd blasted one.\n\nShe climbed the hill of broken stone and looked up. It was barely two meters into the tunnel overhead, and someone had hammered in a staggered line of pitons. This had to be it. Lara quickly climbed up, testing the thin metal pegs at each step, and then she was heaving herself into a wider passage, one that was clearly better traveled than the ones she'd come through. She saw scuffed boot prints in the dirt, a plastic bottle cap.\n\nI made it. Finally. There were no traps this far in, they were all north of her, so she broke into a jog, confident that she would reach the first room in minutes\u2014a tall chamber that connected to the top tunnel, decorated in Maya blue, with writings Marin thought she should see. After that, she only had to find one more room and a bit of tunnel before she got to the prize, the big chamber on the top level where Dominguez had failed to solve some puzzle\u2014and all of it was on her way out.\n\nThe salamanders had started calling again, the cries both dampened and carried by the labyrinth, the sound distorted\u2014and as the echoes faded, she heard a voice, a bare whisper of words carrying through the long empty dark behind her. English.\n\n\"\u2026the fuck was\u2026\"\n\nThere was a low response, a mumble. That faded, too, and there was silence again.\n\nTrinity.\n\nThere were at least two people in the system with her, likely more.\n\nDread and fear for Jonah knotted her guts. Had he hidden? Was he safe?\n\nDead?\n\nShe had to get back to him, immediately, and there were soldiers blocking the exit. Even as she thought it, she heard the scuffle of movement, another whispering echo through the dark. Faint and far, the strange acoustics had carried the sound from a fair distance back, but she thought they were coming her way.\n\nDrop back down, let them go by, get out behind them.\n\nNo. Go to the glyph room, climb up, take the top level back.\n\nThere will be people there, too. And even if you get past them, how many are waiting for you to climb out?\n\nAll of this passed through her mind in a flash. She dimmed her lamp and kept moving south, working out a plan as she went. Picking up speed, she breathed through her mouth, stepping ever so lightly. There were several connections between the uppermost tunnels, short passages and a few wells. If she was very careful, she might be able to skirt the soldiers, ducking from one set of tunnels to the next. It was the fastest way back. If there were guards waiting at the cenote, she'd deal with it when she got there. Assuming she got there.\n\nMarin's notes had mentioned the glyph room's distinctive double-curved opening, and now she saw it, ahead and on the right. Lara swung her pack around and pulled out the camera, immediately bringing it up to get her pictures. She figured she had at least a minute before they would see her light, more if they stopped to check out anywhere she might be hiding; the tunnel was thick with cracks and crevices. She took in the large chamber as she turned and snapped.\n\nA giant mural of the cataclysms stretched up the far wall, perhaps seven meters of smooth limestone reaching into the upper tunnel. A wide, thick ledge of stone ran at about the midpoint of the chamber's height, where the two tunnels joined, but it had been chipped away on the west wall so that the paintings weren't interrupted. At the bottom of the wall was the tsunami, a wave of sacred blue. Above it raged a blue storm, tiny figures flat on the ground beneath the angry clouds. The earthquake was represented as cracks in the ground and fallen blue temples, birds flocking above; the volcano spouted blue lava. And near the top of the chamber, a massive serpent rose from a background of Maya blue, the sea or sky. There were feathers around its face. One of its eyes was the full moon, the other an eclipsed sun. Kukulkan. She remembered a flash of a dream. There were lines of writing in both rooms, close to the mural.\n\nLara walked to the center of the room, turning, the camera clicking and flashing, then hurried to the giant mural, crouching to take pictures of the hieroglyphics to either side. She recognized many of the words and signifiers\u2014snake, heart, stars, river, mountain\u2014but didn't try to translate, all too aware of her extremely limited time. There was a lot, but it clearly referenced the same directions she'd found in Mexico. She didn't see anything new.\n\nThere was a nylon rope ladder hanging from the ledge, anchored by bolts drilled into the stone. Lara gave it a pull and then quickly climbed up to the ledge, edging to the mural to get a clear image of the rest of the glyphs. The upper room's writings didn't look the same as the writings in the lower half, the carvings deeper\u2026 In fact, it looked like some of the original glyphs had been overwritten. She could see shallow marks where paint had been scraped away. Weird.\n\nShe had pictures of everything. Footsteps, soft but clear now, were coming from the lower tunnel. Lara snapped off her headlamp and started edging toward the upper chamber's entrance. The dark was absolute, but a smudge of light appeared only seconds later from the tunnel below, quickly brightening.\n\nLara unsnapped her holster then nocked an arrow, sidling as quickly as she could\u2014but the first man swung into the room before she made it to the opening. She couldn't see him; only his light, and the sound of his stealthy steps gave him away. A beat later, someone else came in.\n\nShe was a meter from the exit but didn't dare move. She lowered herself into a crouch. If she couldn't see them, they shouldn't be able to see her\u2014but they would hear her, no question.\n\n\"Look at this shit,\" one of them whispered. Light moved up over the mural, then flicked around the top of the room.\n\nThe man who answered him had a very slight accent. Russian. \"Should I climb up?\"\n\n\"Knock yourself out.\" Definitely American. West Coast. \"You can see, though, can't you?\"\n\n\"There's only a few more chambers along this passage,\" the Russian said. \"You think Mitchell and Hux got her?\"\n\n\"No shots.\"\n\n\"There might not be if Mitchell finds her first,\" the Russian said. \"She got a new knife.\"\n\n\"Bro, shut up. You hear that?\"\n\nA salamander screamed, faintly, from somewhere in the maze. The sound really was uncanny, a steady, rasping shriek. It must be at an incredible volume to reach so far. The tunnels echoed with it.\n\n\"Seriously,\" the Russian said. He stepped into view, and Lara caught a glimpse of dark, hooded eyes beneath a furrowed brow before she tucked her head, flattening into the shadow of the ledge. His face had been smudged with black. He wore a tactical helmet with a lamp and a mic. \"What is that?\"\n\n\"Lara Croft, calling for me,\" West Coast quipped. \"She wants me, bro. She's gonna swoon when she sees me coming.\"\n\nThe Russian didn't sound impressed. \"Great. Easy shot for me, and then I'm going to get the fuck out of here.\"\n\nA torch's light played over the upper chamber again. Lara tucked in tight, but the beam passed high.\n\n\"No way you get a shot before I do,\" West Coast said. \"Come on, let's get this done.\"\n\nThey left the chamber, their light fading away south.\n\nMitchell and Hux, the Russian and the Romeo\u2026 So at least four, and presumably more at the drop, or in one of the passages leading out. If they were working in pairs, she might be able to pull off her vague plan to dodge between the top corridors.\n\nWhen she was sure the two men were well past, she climbed back down. She was behind them; she would use the lower tunnel back to one of the connectors. The last rooms were a klick north and up. There was an explosive trap at the final chamber, the puzzle room, but she remembered exactly where it was. Getting back to Jonah was her primary concern, and from that last area it was a straight run back to the cenote's opening, one last mine to jump at the tunnel's entrance and she could be out. If the path was blocked, there was a well she could use near the north end of the tunnel. It was a drop but she had rope; if she had to she could get into the maze and follow the arrows, approach from another angle.\n\nOr you could just shoot your way out.\n\nThere was that, too. It was a terrible idea, risky\u2014firing any caliber of gun underground with bare rocks as a backdrop was not a survival skill\u2014and being willing to shoot wasn't the same as having the opportunity. The killers could just turn off their lights and wait for her to walk by. They couldn't actively hunt for her in the dark\u2026 but she couldn't move, either, without some light.\n\nLara pulled one of the tiny LEDs from her pack and clicked it on, a soft beam of blue light, barely enough for her to see her feet. It was enough. She left the mural chamber and headed north, walking quickly and lightly, bow and arrow in hand. If she could get through without alerting everyone to her whereabouts, so much the better.\n\nShe hurried past the access point between the maze and the lower of the top tunnels, feeling the distance between her and the soldiers grow, and was still cautiously optimistic when she remembered that Marin's team had laid a charge about twenty meters past the spot where she'd climbed up\u2014a pressure mine between two small chambers on the tunnel's west side.\n\nLara raised the tiny beam, saw the rocky edge of the first chamber ahead of her. She hesitated, then tapped on her headlamp. It looked as though flagstones had been set into the tunnel floor in the stretch between the rooms, placed and then covered in dirt. If she hadn't been looking, she might not have noticed. Marin's notes had rated the mine as a D2, whatever that was, low level, enough to bring down the wall between the chambers and block the main passage.\n\nThe charge had to be right between the chambers, but she hadn't expected to be traveling down here at all; she didn't know which stone. She didn't want to touch any of them. She could back up, run and jump the whole thing, but she would make noise landing.\n\nThe tunnel wall opposite the chamber entries was rough, had some good holds. Easy, only a few meters. She leaned over the first stones and stepped onto the wall, slipping her boot into a crevice, then pulled herself hand over hand, shifting herself across. There was some seepage in the wall here but it was recent, and she made sure of her holds. She was almost across when the rock beneath her right foot gave way, crumbling out of the packed mud. The small stones around it shifted, a larger rock above leaning forward.\n\nLara threw herself right, diving for the unbroken tunnel floor past the laid stones. She tried to tuck but the angle was wrong and she ended up flat on her back with a resounding thump, her axe and bow clattering against the rocks, the echoes spinning through the dark.\n\nThey'd be coming. She rolled onto her feet, spared a glance for the tunnel wall\u2014only a handful of rocks had fallen, resting against the eastern wall in a dark clump\u2014 and snapped off her lights."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "Sergei Andreov knew that Ace saw any fear as weakness, but that screaming. Sergei wasn't afraid of the dark, or claustrophobic\u2014he'd been excited to go on a hunt for the near-legendary Lara Croft, the woman who had killed so many soldiers of God\u2014but he was not chill about howling cave monsters, even with the XD in hand, even with Ace making his dumb gross jokes. As soon as they heard those weird, echoing screams, Sergei had lost his taste for prolonging the chase. Another one shrieked now, closer.\n\n\"Ever heard of a drekavac?\" he asked Ace.\n\n\"Sounds Russian.\"\n\n\"Because I'm Russian, you dumb fuck. Drekavac means 'the screamer.' It's a creature that haunts the darkest woods, preying on the lost.\" He was about to add, My grandmother used to tell me stories about it, but remembered who he was talking to in the nick of time. He'd never live down a confession like that.\n\nAce grinned. \"Aw, you scared, Serge? Want me to get you a blankie and a nightlight?\"\n\n\"Oh, go fuck yourself,\" Sergei said. He shouldn't have said anything. The man was clearly still psyched to get some payback on Croft, who was absolutely deserving, but Sergei wasn't feeling it. The sooner they capped this treacherous bitch and were on their way, the better.\n\nThey were nearing the end of the passage Harper had assigned them, and they'd found exactly nothing. There was no way to differentiate between old prints and new in the packed, rocky dirt, and all of the rooms and tunnels looked essentially the same, except for the size, and the unpleasant artwork\u2014floods and knives and snakes and that bright blue color everywhere. That shade of blue didn't belong down here in the dark. It was like seeing a butterfly at the bottom of a shit bucket.\n\nThey swept the last chamber, a low, dead room at the very end of the tunnel. There were empty ledges where presumably some fancy Maya crap had been displayed before Trinity came and took it.\n\nFor this prophecy. This opportunity. The commander hadn't come out and said it directly, but everyone knew he thought Dominguez was the real deal. If Harper thought so, that was good enough for Sergei. For all of them. Trinity pushed the cause forward; Harper's Dozen smoothed the pathway.\n\nAce was scowling, that they hadn't come across the girl. \"All right, let's back it up. She could have heard us coming and ducked down somewhere.\"\n\n\"Then we should hurry,\" Sergei said. \"If she's heading back, we can catch up to her.\"\n\nAce smirked. \"Still worried about cave trolls?\"\n\n\"Fuck you,\" Sergei said. \"Didn't you hear them?\"\n\n\"Nothing the SR9 can't handle,\" Ace said, patting his Ruger. \"I understand you're worried, with a pussy XD. How many does it hold? Eight?\"\n\nSergei stifled a sigh. Eddie \"Ace\" Darnell was a solid player at work but he was competitive, deeply committed to his personal ideal of masculinity, which was almost comically toxic. Ace always had to dominate, to be the most willing to fuck or fight, to bench-press the most, to win the game. There were several men on the team like that, but Ace was Alpha. Sergei didn't play like that; he had been with the Dozen for two years, working his way up because he didn't panic and he didn't question orders. Ace's psychotic bravado was going to cost him one day.\n\n\"Whatever,\" Sergei said. \"Let's\u2014\"\n\nThey heard a sound. A thud, and the clatter of some light metal or plastic. Close in, back the way they'd come.\n\nAce darted to the opening of the low room, leaning out into the tunnel, a tight grin on his face.\n\n\"We've got her. Take the west wall,\" Ace whispered, and hurried out into the passage. Sergei followed, hanging back a step. Ace barely checked his corners, too eager. Reckless.\n\nNot necessarily a bad thing. He didn't want Ace to get shot or attacked\u2014the Dozen were a team, even if they weren't personally close\u2014but it was a distinct possibility, and Sergei didn't mind being second in range. If Ace went down, he would have time to react, and he was an expert fucking shot with his \"pussy\" XD. He didn't need more rounds. If Croft went for Ace, Sergei would take her out before she could blink: a single, perfect shot. They could be back on the plane in an hour, flying away from this demon-infested hole.\n\nHe swept the rooms on the west wall, flashes of blue paint and ugly pictures, dirty rocks and crawling fungus and scuttling tiny bugs. They heard another distant call of the whatever-it-was\u2014\n\nDrekavac!\n\n\u2014and Sergei tensed further, hurrying through the passage behind Ace, waiting for his light to play across some white screaming face filled with teeth, lurking in the black. It was bullshit, he knew\u2014his grandmother had been an illiterate from a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, and her stories about thin, long-clawed demons were nonsense\u2014but somehow it was harder to be certain of that in the cold, smothering dark, with those awful cries echoing around.\n\nThey reached the first of the charges that had been placed along the tunnel\u2014there was another, larger pressure mine much farther north\u2014and they both dropped their beams down, looking for the trigger. The flat rock looked like the rest of them, but touched the wall exactly between the chambers and extended to nearly the middle of the tunnel. The charge beneath it was small, but in Sergei's mind there was no such thing as a minor explosion underground.\n\nAs soon as their lights were pointed down, there was a soft noise in front of them. Sergei looked up as the sound registered in his ears, a whizzing, like\u2014\n\nAce grabbed his throat with his left hand and started burbling blood. He staggered sideways, an arrow protruding from between his bloody fingers. A second arrow hit him in the shoulder. It would have hit Sergei had Ace not been in the way.\n\nAce clawed at the arrow in his throat, then brought up his Ruger and started firing vaguely north, the shots wild, ricocheting off the rocks, chips of limestone flying.\n\nThe charge!\n\nSergei just caught a glimpse of the woman's face at the very limit of his light, her visage pale and grim, before she turned and ran, hurtling out of sight.\n\nSergei fell back double-time, turned to sprint as Ace staggered again over the stones, crumpling\u2014\n\nBOOM!\n\nSergei threw himself forward as the tunnel shook, dirt and rock crashing down behind him in a thunderous blast. Choking dust blew over him in a cold gust that smelled like mud and burning chemicals. As the ringing in his ears dimmed, he heard more of those horrible animal screams, echoing up from the labyrinth.\n\nFuck!\n\nHe scrambled south on his hands and knees, ignoring the scrapes, the trickle of pebbles that pattered down on his back like rain. That bitch had been waiting for them at the charges, waiting in the dark until they had to watch their step. Ace was dead and Sergei had missed his shot.\n\nHe turned around, saw a wall of rock and dirt blocking the passage, cutting him off from where the chambers had been. There was blood on some of the stones, but no sign of Ace.\n\nHe tapped his helmet's mic while dirt was still rattling down the side of the new wall. The ceiling had grown a meter but had held. \"Commander, do you copy? Come in, Commander? Hux? Mitchell?\"\n\nThere was a crackle of static. He thought about calling out\u2014Hux and Mitchell were somewhere above him, they might hear him, but then, so would Croft. He wouldn't count on either of them to help him, anyway. Killing Croft was the priority, and their time wasn't unlimited.\n\nHe had the maps. He could go back to the big room that opened into the upper tunnel, see if there was still a way through up top. Or he could drop down into the maze and\u2026\n\nNo. No way. God knew what was down there.\n\nYou'll complete this mission, and you'll kill anything that tries to stop you. Commander Harper's voice was louder than Sergei's fear, calm and sane. The mission. It was a cave, not a fairy tale; he was armed and careful, better than Ace. Clearly, because Ace was dead\u2026 which meant there would be a reshuffling of the top players. If he could bring down Croft there'd be a bonus, but the real win would be moving up in Harper's esteem. The commander's very best had gone on to lead teams of their own.\n\nStill. He decided he would go back through the top tunnel. Easier to drop back down to where he was supposed to be than to climb up, and there was no reason to think she'd gone down, so there was no reason to go deeper\u2026 where anything could be squatting in the dark, waiting\u2026\n\n\"Fuck off,\" Sergei whispered, and quickly started back south, refusing to think any more about his grandmother's stories."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "Lara ducked around a curve in the passage as West Coast started firing his semi, blood pumping from the side of his neck. She tapped her lamp and ran as soon as she was clear, praying that the whole system wasn't about to collapse.\n\nBOOM! The charge detonated. Lara threw herself onto her knees and covered her head, the blast rolling past and then echoing back at her from the caverns ahead, dust sifting down. She waited, listening to the tumble of rock behind her, the changing echoes.\n\nWhen the tremors stopped, she stood up in a clatter of loose rocks and walked back a few steps, examining the cave-in. The passage was blocked by an untidy sprawl of dirt and shattered stone. There was a new hole in the floor next to the heaped, muddy rocks, opening over the top of the labyrinth. It would be a tight fit and she'd have to go in on her side, but it might be a useful route if she couldn't find another way out.\n\nShe fixed its location in her mind, starting north again. For the moment, she thought she was okay. The Russian was behind the cave-in, and West Coast Romeo had been dead before he'd hit the floor, his jugular pierced.\n\nListen to you. That was a human being.\n\nShe shook her head. A disgusting human being who'd been coming to murder her. These weren't average Trinity soldiers. They wore tactical gear and were carrying expensive hardware. The same people who'd been after Marin, perhaps. A hit squad. And there were at least two more in the tunnel overhead.\n\nHux. And Mitchell, who has a new knife.\n\nWhere were they now? She recalled from Marin's map that there was a room about fifty meters ahead that opened into the upper tunnel, through a narrow climbing passage in the back, a crawl. She could get up there\u2026 but she'd be the proverbial fish in a barrel. If someone was waiting at the top, they could lean in and shoot her while she edged up.\n\nThe well, farther along. There was a sloping well ahead that cut through the top half of the dig, one of several. That was a trickier climb, but it let out near the final areas that Marin had marked, including the puzzle room. If she ran into anyone from Trinity along that route, she'd have more options.\n\nYou're still planning to get your pictures. Jonah could be being tortured right now, your best friend in this world.\n\nIt's on the way, and it's fastest. If I don't get what I came for, all of this is for nothing.\n\nIf Jonah dies\u2014\n\nHe won't die. I'm not going to play games if they're in my way.\n\nFirearms had become a regular part of her training regime since Yamatai. She was good, her groupings consistent even on quick draws. These killers wouldn't keep her from getting back to Jonah.\n\nA voice from the past whispered through her mind, tempering the burst of determination. You think you kill to survive, but you kill because it is in your nature. The Trinity agent, Auger Ramille, had said that to her. She'd thought about his statement often over the years, and had finally come to the uncomfortable conclusion that he might be right. His terminology was imprecise, though. She was only a pragmatist in a war against people with no empathy, who were playing with powers they couldn't hope to control. Her nature was to fight them as hard as she could, using everything she had. She no longer clung to the childish belief in her innocence when it came to killing, but she didn't enjoy it or seek it out; if Trinity would stop trying to murder everyone, she would gladly retire.\n\nShe stopped outside the chamber with the crawlway up, the route she didn't mean to take, her attention caught by a glimpse of colors in the low light of her beam. There were glyphs carved into the farthest wall of the small room, a series of numbers, representations of travel\u2014directions, stars, lines of waves. Lara grabbed her camera, clicked off a fast series. Marin hadn't told her this chamber was important, but it looked like a calendar\u2014perhaps to calculate the Maya travelers' journey, to estimate how long it would take them to get where they were going.\n\nEstimates aren't facts.\n\nYes, and Marin laid mines, he wasn't an archaeologist.\n\nPerhaps the Maya had made the trip many times; she wished she had time to study her findings properly. She wondered if there were more chambers like this one, with information that Marin hadn't deemed worthwhile.\n\nShe stepped closer to the carvings, frowning. Like the glyphs in the upper chamber of the mural room, some of these had been changed. She could see where lines and dots had been added to some of the numbers. The changes looked newer, sharper than the others. Like, centuries newer.\n\nShe touched one of the etched lines, remembering what Marin had said\u2014that there was something not \"right\" about the Blue Labyrinth. Had someone come through and changed some of the writing? Why?\n\nLara clipped the camera to her belt and moved back into the main passage. She'd go up at the well and take pictures of everything she saw from now on, assuming she could do so without getting herself shot.\n\nThere was a shuffle of movement, somewhere close. Lara cocked her head, tapping out her light. There, again\u2014a whisper like scattering rocks. It was coming from the calendar room behind her.\n\nPebbles and dirt falling down from the top of that crawling passage.\n\nSomeone was looking down. Looking for her.\n\nShe turned on her LED again and hurried on, the tunnel walls closing around her in the meager blue glow."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "Harper had his light back on in an instant when he heard the shots; three, four rounds from Ace's Ruger, he thought, followed almost immediately by an echoing blast. Dirt sifted down and Harper hit the ground as a few hundred bats came rushing up from the labyrinth, pouring through the chamber over his head, flying back to the drop. He heard that ugly bird sound again, and distant echoes of rocks falling, and then it was over.\n\nHe got to his feet, saw the rush of dancing dust pouring from the lower tunnel's entrance, the motes white and falling in the light from his lamp. \"Sound off. Ace, Sergei, copy?\"\n\nNothing. \"Hux? Mitchell?\"\n\nThere was a blur of static, a short burst of sound. \"\u2014back now. Limit\u2014return\u2014\"\n\nHux. Harper took a breath, walking into the upper passage. There were some curves but it was a mostly straight shot across the top. \"Repeat your status.\"\n\n\"\u2026contained cave-in in the lower tunnel,\" Hux said, his voice gaining clarity. \"Mitchell heard one of them call in; she's 99 percent that it was Sergei.\"\n\nHarper came to a stop, waiting for the beep that signaled Hux was finished talking. He wanted a good signal, but wasn't going to risk leaving his post unguarded. A sickly scattering of albino fungi grew from the line of crap along the floor. What a miserable place. \"Nothing from Ace?\"\n\n\"Negative.\"\n\n\"Any sign of Croft?\"\n\n\"Not that I've seen, unless that trap was her,\" Hux said. \"Mitchell is ahead of me. She's going to climb down, get eyes on what happened. If Croft is dead, we'll confirm. I'm going to double-check some of the connecting points.\"\n\n\"Yeah, fine. Do what it takes. If you see anyone, tell them to flush her this way if they can't get a shot. And watch your six.\"\n\nNot advice he normally felt compelled to give, but he had a sinking feeling that he might be down another crew member. He could easily see Ace forget about watching his feet if he'd been running down Croft. With Greaves crippled and Dixon taking that freak shot\u2026\n\nAll in two days. All because of Lara fucking Croft.\n\n\"Copy,\" Hux said, and the radio went silent.\n\nHarper fell back to his position, briefly considering whether to bring in the men from the airfield, set up a perimeter. It would only take a few minutes to walk back into range, relay instructions through Reddy. The trio would have to bring the pilot with them\u2014Winters was a cut-and-run type if ever there was one\u2014but Reddy could go over the maps, they could figure out where she might come out and stake the likeliest places.\n\nNot yet. She's here, right in front of us, now. Hux was one of the best professional problem-solvers working for the cause\u2014smart, manipulative, driven. Mitchell was perhaps even better, her ruthlessness impeccable. Ace and Sergei were both professionals; Ace could play it a little high and loose at times, but he got results. Sergei was probably the best shot with a nine-mil and had never panicked under fire, under any circumstances.\n\nIt's only just starting. No matter how good Croft was, he had faith that his people were better. He was better. He couldn't discount her training or her demonic luck, but he also couldn't deny the feeling he'd had since landing in Colombia, that this was a fateful day. Croft's death wouldn't make amends for the trouble she'd caused but it would be his own personal triumph, on behalf of all those who'd sworn the Oath.\n\nHe settled back and cut his lamp. This time, the dark didn't bother him so much."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "When they heard the rumble, Reddy and Smith both edged toward the cenote.\n\n\"Come in, Commander,\" Reddy said into the radio. \"Do you copy?\" But there was no answer. A hundred bats poured up into the sky.\n\n\"That was one of the traps, right?\" Smith asked, and Reddy shook his head, staring down into the well as if he'd be able to see anything.\n\nMiguel only shifted in his uneasy sleep. Jonah used the distraction to work on his own zip-tie cuffs, the tactical kind favored by bounty hunters and riot cops. The plastic looped around each wrist, the ends cinched with a simple ratchet lock. Not a long-term hold for a big man such as himself. He knew that Reddy would be over to check before long, so he hurried, twisting his wrists, flexing. It was going to hurt, but he'd get out. He'd cut Miguel loose and fight if he could, run if he couldn't. If they could get to the cover of the jungle, he'd find the banyan with the shotgun.\n\nIf. He was going to have to wait for the right circumstances. He thought Harper and his team might be the people Lara had seen back in Mexico, going after Marin. She'd said they were trained, not grunts. Harper's team all had the flat eyes of killers, their equipment was extra, and the way the commander had gone off on his psycho murder fantasy, Jonah thought this was some kind of personal thing for him.\n\nDoesn't matter who they are. He hated that Harper and his psychos were down there looking for her, but he could only do what he could do. First thing was to make sure that Lara had a clear exit.\n\nOr die trying. He considered the thought, relaxing his arms while Reddy stared at him for a moment before turning back to the cenote. It was what it was. Better than not trying.\n\nHe tried not to overthink the underground explosion. Lara wouldn't have triggered a trap accidentally, which meant either she'd done it on purpose, or one of Harper's people had set it off.\n\nAnd maybe she was right under it when they did. Maybe they blew a hole that dropped her a thousand feet into the ground.\n\nHe didn't try to deny the fear, but also didn't let it stop him from rotating his sore wrists, working the plastic. He'd shifted the pocketknife high up into his sock already, while Reddy stalked around, looking like he'd bit a lemon, and Smith kept jerking his Glock toward the jungle every time anything bigger than a beetle moved.\n\n\"Think that was your girl?\" Reddy asked abruptly, taking a step toward Jonah. \"You think she maybe just got buried under a ton of rock? That'd be a goddamn shame.\"\n\n\"A goddamn shame,\" Smith repeated, and laughed, a dumb guffaw. Reddy looked away, irritated.\n\nJonah didn't answer, filing the interaction. Reddy was an arrogant pig and hungry to fight. And Smith might be a trained killer, but he came off like a serious moron; Reddy's lack of respect for him backed up the impression. They had guns, and therefore the upper hand, but not necessarily for very much longer. The team who'd gone in after Lara had been wearing Kevlar, but both guards had shed theirs in the sweaty heat, tossed them into one of the trucks soon after Harper left.\n\nReddy tried to raise the commander again, and Smith slapped at his neck, cursing the mosquitoes for the tenth time, then swung his fancy handgun toward the hollow mechanical clatter of the unknown night caller.\n\n\"The hell is that, anyway?\" Smith said. \"It's fucking weird.\"\n\n\"Calm your shit,\" Reddy snapped. \"It's a toucan.\"\n\n\"In the dark? Anyway, I thought toucans squawked,\" Smith said.\n\n\"Yeah, well, they also sound like that.\"\n\nJonah raised his eyebrows. You could learn from the most unlikely of sources.\n\nHe kept his eyes open and used every second of the guards' continued distraction to flex and rotate his wrists, turn and pull, patiently ignoring the growing pain."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "Jennifer Mitchell found Sergei climbing up from a mural chamber that opened to the lower tunnel. She'd seen his light first and swept in fast, lowering the CZ 75 when she saw the young Russian on the rope ladder.\n\n\"Sergei,\" she said, and his head snapped around. He looked a little pale around the eyes. \"Where's Ace?\"\n\nSergei climbed the rest of the way up. \"Dead and buried. Croft put an arrow through him. He fell on a D2 trap, blocked off the lower tunnel. She's on the north side of it somewhere.\"\n\nSloppy, that they'd let her get away. Ace was no loss, she'd considered killing him herself every time he said titties, which was often. Was Croft looking for a way up, or down? If Mitchell were in her position, she might drop into the maze. More places to hide, to crouch in the blackness and wait for targets to walk by, announcing themselves with lights and noise.\n\nWho says she's hiding? Croft had taken out Ace on top of a charge, not exactly a stealth maneuver. She might just march down the main corridor, .45 blazing.\n\nMitchell considered it critically. The woman's attachment to her friend would urge her to move quickly, but she wouldn't be reckless. Croft was no amateur.\n\nShe turned back north, visualizing the layout of the site as she started walking. If she could get ahead of Croft, she could be the one waiting in the dark. There were several passages connecting the tunnels. All she had to do was set up near the last one, whichever was closest to Harper.\n\n\"Is Hux with you?\" Sergei asked, hurrying to catch up to her. Mitchell didn't answer. The evidence spoke for itself.\n\n\"I should go down past the blockage, in case she's using the lower tunnel to get back to the drop,\" he said.\n\n\"Do that, then,\" Mitchell said, and kept walking. She hoped she would be the one to end Croft. No one else in the Dozen would fully appreciate the gravitas of striking down such a rare creature, a fit, highly competent, intelligent woman pursuing an agenda with the full force of her well-developed abilities. Mitchell had no idea why Croft had set herself up against Trinity, but the reason was incidental. Croft was a force to be reckoned with, and the Dozen, even Harper, underestimated her because they were stupid men. They talked about her incredible luck and scoffed about how she was no match for them, as if there was anything in Croft's history that suggested she couldn't or wouldn't kill them. Their arrogance was typical, and utterly unfounded.\n\n\"Is Hux talking to the commander?\" Sergei asked. \"Are you sweeping together up here?\"\n\nHe was seeking some kind of reassurance. Mitchell didn't generally offer advice but she had nothing against Sergei. Good with a gun, didn't panic, kept to himself.\n\nNo mind for strategy, though. \"It's hide and seek now, and the drop point is home base,\" she said. \"Nothing's off limits, but Croft isn't going to do anything that costs too much time. Find a likely spot and go dark, wait for her to come to you. And do it fast, because she might be doing exactly the same thing while you're looking for a place to set up.\"\n\nSergei nodded, his eyes appreciative, raising his chin at her. It was funny how people responded to the things she said when she wasn't angling for a result. She liked having the power that respect afforded.\n\nOne of the cave animals called from somewhere in the maze below, and was answered by two more.\n\n\"What is that, anyway?\" Sergei asked, nervous\u2014eyes wide, voice high.\n\nMitchell shrugged, adjusting her weapons as she walked. She had the extended mag for the CZ 75, sixteen rounds locked and loaded. She also had an assortment of knives: a Gerber Mark II, a double-edged dagger with serrations just past the ricasso and a custom grip, perfect for slashing and stabbing; a matte black karambit that she had practiced with extensively, the small, curved knife a precision killer, made for blood-letting swipes; and a brand-new Dark Ops Interceptor E&E, eight and a half inches of silver death with an extended handle for versatility, full tang, tanto tip, and a hook for gutting. A single smooth extension, a flick of the wrist, and all that amazing vibrancy and energy would flood out of Croft and puddle on the stone at her feet.\n\n\"I think we should fall back to the drop,\" Sergei said.\n\nThat was the problem with interacting. People assumed things about you, like that you gave a shit what they thought.\n\nMitchell didn't answer and deliberately picked up her pace, considering the maps she'd studied on the flight in. There was a place where the top tunnels joined to the labyrinth less than a mile north, a well that Croft might choose\u2014not the easiest spot, but not obvious, and certainly in the woman's skill set. Hux would probably set up near there. He might get Croft, he was good\u2014but Croft might actually be better. She lacked that fundamental arrogance, the belief that her talents alone entitled her to win. Mitchell decided to set up farther north. Let Hux take his shot; if he could beat Lara then the woman wasn't a worthy opponent for Mitchell, anyway.\n\nShe turned off her helmet's lamp and pulled out a small flashlight, aiming the beam at her feet, excitement warm in her belly. Hux was the only possible snag. Sergei would hang back, too careful, and Harper would never get his shot because if Croft made it past Hux she was going to run across Mitchell first. Who would win? It was exciting to not be entirely certain of the outcome.\n\nShe smiled to herself. Not entirely certain, but reasonably sure."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "Lara moved quickly through the site's lower main tunnel, pausing three times for pictures\u2014glyphs on the wall, a depiction of the star path with a lot of numbers, a compass rose painted with the Maya directional colors and smooth, unfaded lines of blue cutting through the center\u2026 But the blue didn't look right on the compass, the shade too light, and she wondered again if the site had been tampered with. If someone had changed things, they'd done it a long time ago. The color was wrong but very old.\n\nShe worked fast, nervous about the light, wishing the salamanders would be quiet. The explosion had riled them. She estimated that there wasn't a large population, certainly less than a hundred, but they sounded like a hundred thousand. They kept shrieking, their cries echoing up from the lower tunnels, drowning out any footsteps she might hear, any rocks falling or whispering.\n\nAt least Trinity won't hear you, either. She started to time her movements for when the shrieks crested, hurrying when the cries were loudest.\n\nShe reached the small tunnel she was watching for, a narrow crack that extended parallel to the lower main corridor and veered east and down. She sidled through quickly, keeping the bow ready, turning off her lamp when she reached the opening at the end of the crevice.\n\nShe waited\u2014no sound\u2014then edged forward. No light, either. A salamander called up through the dark, close but meters below. She could hear that she'd reached the well from the way the sound echoed back at her.\n\nLara turned on her larger torch, quickly scanning the chamber. The crack she'd slid through ended in a short, steep drop, to a ledge of rock that opened into darkness below. The maze.\n\nShe looked up. Four meters to the platform above, and it angled out at the top. She could get up but she had to do it quietly, no hammering, and she'd be totally vulnerable on the last pitch\u2014and visible from the two uppermost levels of the maze, the opening in the top corridor, and the crack where she was standing.\n\nAnd hanging from your fingertips over a, let's see\u2026 about a dozen meters before it bottoms out in the labyrinth?\n\nWhen she looked down to estimate, she saw a salamander run across the floor of the lowest tunnel, a flicker of white. A second ran after it along one curved wall, silent, blind head cocked as it scurried out of sight.\n\nYet another reason you're going to do this fast.\n\nShe tapped her headlamp back on, clipped the torch to her belt, slung her bow and climbed up and away from her position, angling toward the most promising path\u2014a steep climb, but crosshatched by a number of narrow cracks that ran up the side of the well. The first part was rocky, not difficult. She made it to the cracks and wedged her toes and fingers deep, reaching high, pushing for holds that stretched her arms and legs to their limit. She was at the thick and curving base of the top tunnel only minutes after she started, warmed up for the last pitch.\n\nLara took a deep breath, deciding where she would put her hands and feet. The outward-leaning slope was nearly as tall as she was. If she took her time she was going to fall; she couldn't support her full weight hanging at that angle, what with gravity and all. She'd have to push off fast and scramble like one of the salamanders, swiftly, flat to the curve. There were a few divots she could use. She'd pitched worse.\n\nYes, with rope and a harness.\n\nFortune favored the bold, and also those who didn't stop to think for too long while standing over a long drop. She exhaled and reached for the first holds, tightening her stomach muscles, psyching herself up for the push\u2014\n\n\u2014and she heard footsteps, floating down from somewhere above. Coming from the south, coming her way.\n\nClose enough to hear you. Or possibly see a reflection of light, if they were looking. Lara tapped off her lamp and was instantly enveloped by the chill dark. She hesitated, already feeling the strain in her fingers.\n\nBeneath her, directly beneath her, a salamander shrieked.\n\nNow! Go, go! Lara moved, finding the divots and cracks in the dark, her whole body pressed to the wall, telling her where to go. The echo of the scream covered the sound of her desperate climb, reaching for rocks that she remembered from when she could see, pushing off hard with every step.\n\nShe got her right knee into a depression and threw herself forward, hands finding the flat lip of rock over her head as her boots fell away from the slope. She pulled herself up, arms trembling, as the salamander screamed again. The sound fell away fast, the creature darting back down into the maze. The echoes followed her onto a ledge. If Marin's mapping was correct, she was in a small passage just off the main upper corridor, but she was blind and didn't dare move. She waited on the cold stone and listened.\n\nNo footsteps, no rustle of movement, no light. Had the walker passed by or stopped? She thought she heard a whisper of something north, but acoustics were strange underground, sound carrying clearly through some passages, distorted or muffled by others, and the Blue Labyrinth was never completely silent. There was always a backdrop of animal noises and trickling water.\n\nShe sat in silence for a full two minutes before moving, sweat chilling to her skin. She heard salamanders crying, more faintly, and a rush of sound that she recognized as a rather large mass of bats coming or going south of her, fluttering wings and cheeps, but she heard nothing human.\n\nLara finally turned on the small LED, cupping her hand over the bulbs, and took in where she was. A ledge, with several meters of low passage in front of her that curved west. Only a short duckwalk to the main tunnel, according to Marin's notes. Assuming she remembered correctly. She thought she was alone but she didn't want to turn on her lamp, not until she had some idea of where everyone was. Caving in the dark was not her idea of a good time. It was unnerving, despicably slow, and bruises were inevitable, but she wasn't about to pop into the site's major corridor with a light on when there were Trinity commandos running around. She would creep and keep the LED handy until she was more certain of the situation.\n\nDirect to the main tunnel, then south for about twenty meters; the first glyph room is on the west side. The mural of the rivers that had so struck Marin. There was one side passage along the way, a dead end, she thought; she would skip the first opening she came to. Along the east wall there was another short tunnel that opened over a drop, but as long as she didn't get confused about which way she was going, she wasn't concerned.\n\nThree things to see and you're out. After the river room was the part of the tunnel itself she would need to photograph, the damaged glyphs that Dominguez had mentioned in his report\u2026 and finally, the puzzle chamber that had so frustrated him. Right in a row, laid out in front of her on the way back to Jonah.\n\nSoonest begun. Lara turned off the light and crouched, finding the dank walls with her hands. She positioned herself, unslung her bow, and started forward."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Hux had the perfect place staked out\u2014a large room full of murals and hieroglyphs in the upper chamber, near the end of the dig's length. The Trinity report had referred to it as the pillar room; there were several rock formations in the center of the chamber, hourglass-shaped and painted with rings of startling blue, wide enough at the base for him to duck down behind. If she walked through the main corridor, he'd see or hear her; if she came into the room, he could get behind her.\n\nHe crouched in the oppressive blackness behind the column closest to the entrance, the air cold and stale and damp, smelling faintly of ammonia. Unless she'd flat out run from the explosion, he had to be in front of her. He'd reasoned that she'd try to come up from the lower tunnel, for ease of access to the surface, but also perhaps to search the Maya chambers, if she hadn't already done so. She'd come to the Blue Labyrinth to find something that Luis Marin had thought important. Considering that the site had been thoroughly excavated, this important thing probably wasn't an item. The rooms were painted with writings about the Maya resurrection, however, the very thing that was unfolding even as they played their games in the dark. She'd come for information, and from the photos he'd looked at coming in, the pillar room had been a star attraction, marked specifically for an explosive charge; there was a big one only a few meters outside the entrance. Croft would still be watching her feet when she came in, or if she walked by.\n\nHux shifted his weight. This would play out in minutes, not hours, but he hoped not too many. According to the prophecy there was a storm coming. Maybe not a good time to fly.\n\nAlso not the best time to be sitting in a flood system.\n\nPerhaps the storm was already raging overhead, hail and lightning crashing down, rivers swelling\u2026 He wouldn't even know, buried down here in the earth as the waters gathered force and barreled ahead, filling all the empty spaces. A fanciful thought, but then, he was in a cave, with bats and mushrooms and randomly screaming trolls. He wondered what they were. Frogs, perhaps; they were known to scream. He hadn't heard any in the upper levels\u2026\n\nSomewhere to the south, there was a rustle of movement, a bare whisper of sound. Not repeated.\n\nHux breathed evenly, the HK VP9 ready to fire, grips warm in his hand. Sixteen rounds of armor-piercing safety tips. He rested his finger lightly on the guard. If Mitchell was tracking her, he might lose his shot\u2014Mitchell was scary-lethal, a full-on sociopath\u2014but he was pretty sure the diminutive blond would do the same as him, set up shop somewhere and watch. Sergei and Ace would probably keep sweeping, assuming they were still alive. Sergei followed orders and Ace was too macho to creep around in the dark.\n\nThere. Footsteps, moving quickly from the south.\n\nHux rose to his feet as light smudged the air\u2014and then his radio chirped, signaling that someone wearing a helmet was in range.\n\nHe dropped down again, listening as the figure got closer, adjusting his position from the shadows that were cast into the room. Whoever it was paused at the charges, then stepped quickly and lightly past. They tapped off their light before passing in front of the opening to the room where he waited, not acknowledging that he was near.\n\nMitchell. Anyone else in the Dozen would have spoken. She'd joined Harper's team three years ago, just after Hux. A couple of guys had tried to strike something up\u2014she was chesty, with big gray eyes and a pouty mouth\u2014but had stopped the day after her first live performance, when the Dozen had gone in to quell a workers' rebellion in an undeclared zone outside of Russia. Mitchell had sliced and diced villagers like she was dancing, smiling a little bit the whole time until her hair dripped with blood like in that old movie about the psychic prom queen, staring out from a mask of red. She'd been in Harper's top three ever since. Hux had his own proclivities, he wasn't one to judge, but Mitchell was something else.\n\nAnd yet you're overshooting, my dear. Presumably, Ace and Sergei\u2014well, Sergei, at least\u2014had found a way past the exploded charges and were still working the lower tunnel as assigned. If Croft was down there they'd catch her or push her to Harper. The commander would also get the shot if she tried to come out through the maze\u2026 But the main strip of the dig was the fastest way back to the drop site. She'll have to cross me first.\n\nHux checked his watch. Still plenty of time before they had to report. He settled back in, his thoughts of proclivities leading him to imagine how it was going to happen. She'd walk into the room, and he'd step out behind her, jam the semi's barrel into her back. He'd disarm her and then strike her down, power coursing through his muscles, and then he'd wrap his hands around that narrow white throat, squeezing, watching the tiny blood vessels in her eyes burst while she flailed at his big, strong hands with her tiny white fingers\u2026\n\nHe shifted again, trying to accommodate his excitement at the fantasy. He'd broken out in a light sweat. It had been too long since he'd exorcised his own personal demons. He was Harper's right hand when it came to operations, stresses built up\u2026 He deserved the opportunity to release some of that energy, and who better to receive than Lara Croft? Harper had the right idea about her: she was a menace to the cause and should have been taken out long ago. Her continued existence mocked the lives of the men she'd murdered.\n\nAlso, killing her would feel really, really good.\n\nHux didn't realize he was wearing his own tiny smile. Almost show time, he could feel it, could feel her getting closer to him. She wouldn't get past."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Lara viewed the chamber through flashes from the camera, snapping off a dozen shots, wincing at the brightness. She hadn't come across anyone since climbing up, but was extremely aware of every move she made, and the light struck her as loud as a scream.\n\nI have to get this, though. The mural was magnificent\u2014 some artist or artists had painted a complex river system across the chamber's sloping walls, the water twining through hills, the ocean to one side. Glyphs ran along the waterways, numbers and directional markers. She could understand why Marin thought it important.\n\nExcept there's no way to know if this is a map from life or something a priest envisioned. And some of the glyphs have been overwritten. Even assuming it was accurate and was meant to represent what she was looking for, what were the chances that the rivers hadn't changed course in a thousand years? And none of the mountains represented were crowned, nor were they detailed in any way.\n\nShe didn't stop to ponder. Still getting used to the darkness after the flash, she used the LED to take her back to the chamber's entrance, then turned off the light and waited. As on her careful walk to the chamber, she heard nothing, saw nothing. The silence was profound.\n\nIt was at least fifty meters to the section of tunnel with the hieroglyphs Marin had told her about. About twenty meters past that was the final chamber she needed to see, the puzzle room. That had a charge in front of it. From there, she wouldn't be far from a connecting tunnel that united the upper passages. She'd decide which exit to use when she got there. Someone was undoubtedly guarding the chamber where the tunnels met, but she might be able to draw them out.\n\nFifty meters.\n\nThere's nobody here. Use the light; you can run quietly if you can see.\n\nAnybody sticks their head into the hall, they'll shoot you down.\n\nYes, and the longer it takes you to get through, the more likely someone's going to come along.\n\nShe compromised, squatting down to roll up her pants leg and stick the small light into the top of her sock, the bulbs barely showing through. Enough to see where she put her feet.\n\nShe nocked an arrow and ran low. The seep of light allowed her to pick up the pace considerably. A sudden salamander chorus stopped her once, mid-run; then the sound of rocks tumbling sent her crouching down to cover the soft glow of the light. But the sound was distant, north, and she thought it might have come from the tunnel below.\n\nLara reached the glyphs carved large on the tunnel wall, set into a grid. Ancient Mayan was read left to right, top to bottom, in columns of two. There was no way to avoid using the flash, unless she meant to copy them down by hand. She stepped back from the wall and held up the camera. The flash strobed brightly, dazzling.\n\nWalk, path, stars\u2026\n\nMost of the rest of the glyphs were damaged, unreadable, until the end\u2014reveal message? Water seepage had eroded the carvings through the middle, not a trace that they'd ever been there.\n\nNot much of a key. No wonder Dominguez had been frustrated.\n\nShe moved on toward the puzzle chamber, then stopped to listen. If the commandos were moving in, they weren't close. It seemed likely that they had fallen back to the northern exits to wait.\n\nBut they could have done that in the first place. The conversation she'd overheard had laid out pretty clearly that they'd been eager to find and kill her, but the number of searchers had to be small or she would have heard them.\n\nSilence. She took a step\u2014\n\n\u2014and heard the echoes of pebbles rolling down a slide, the sound coming from the north. Something was moving in a chamber large enough to echo, far ahead. It was either the passage that connected the tunnels, or the last big well, a nearly vertical drop down into the heart of the labyrinth.\n\nYou're almost out, and either one is well past the puzzle room. Get the pictures.\n\nShe couldn't see the opening in the dim light of the LED, but Lara knew she was close. There was only the charge to look out for, and she started scanning the tunnel floor well in advance. The tunnel curved slightly east. The trap housed a substantial charge, placed to dump the top two tunnels into the maze, to bring an end to any curious cavers or enemies of Trinity. The last big charge was just at the entrance to the top tunnel. Trinity's need to keep secrets was pathological.\n\nShe spotted the opening first as she came around the curve, a low arch. She realized she knew nothing about the room, except that it contained something written in code. Apparently something Trinity really didn't want her to see, if they were ready to chase her through a maze.\n\nOr they're on the offensive, and this site is just where they happened to catch up with you. With a prophecy actively unfolding and Marin's involvement, maybe they'd just decided to curb her meddling permanently.\n\nLara stopped, searching for the pressure plate among the dirty stones in front\u2014\n\n\u2014and smelled something, a slight difference in the standard miasma of cave smells, just for a second. Beneath the dirt and wet and minerals, the guano and decay.\n\nSweat.\n\nLara ducked down and put out her light, then backed up a step, shifting quietly. A man's sweat. Someone was in the chamber, perhaps just inside, waiting.\n\nShit. She couldn't walk in without a light, not with the trigger trap so close to the entrance. She could run past the chamber, jump the charge, but whoever it was would come out after her, fire loose down the passage and undoubtedly get lucky. Even if she could outrun rounds, after that, her only options were to jump into a vertical well or try her luck getting through the chamber where the tunnels emptied out at the front, where others were likely waiting. Neither were good choices.\n\nAnd it means not even seeing the puzzle. God damn them. She needed to get into that room, it was vital, her entire reason for having come. She needed to be done here and on her way, and she couldn't move because some murderous asshole was in her way.\n\nUnless.\n\nHow well did her ambusher know the Blue Labyrinth? If she could get him to follow her back south, the tunnel curved enough that she'd have a short window of time in which to run. And across from the room of rivers was a passage that opened abruptly to a drop.\n\nHe chases you, you hit the deck, bring up the semi\u2026\n\nShe could do it. If she pulled it off, this would be over in less than a minute. Lara backed up farther, already committing to the insane plan.\n\nBait him. Make him mad.\n\nShe secured her bow and slid the heavy .45 off her hip, then reached down and turned the LED on, thin blue light across the top of her boot. She backed to the tunnel's curve and cleared her throat, raising the .45 and flipping the safety. She could barely see the edge of the chamber's entrance.\n\n\"I'm not coming in,\" she said. \"And if you come out, you're dead.\"\n\nThere was a pause so long that she was starting to think she'd imagined that whiff of sweat, when a low, deep voice spilled out into the passage. Frighteningly calm.\n\n\"We're holding your friend, and your pilot,\" the man said. \"Unless you want them killed, you'll surrender immediately.\"\n\nSomething about the way he said surrender was creepy. She jumped on the inflection, her only insight into the stranger, and readied herself to run.\n\n\"Radios don't work down here. You can't order anything. You're powerless. And you think I'd surrender to a man like you?\"\n\nWhen he spoke again, she could hear the strain in his voice, the carefully controlled anger beneath a forced amusement.\n\n\"So you're going to stand there all night, little girl? You've got things you want to do. People you care about. Me, I'm in no hurry. But if you walk away, what's going to stop me from putting a bullet in your back?\"\n\nShe waited, as if thinking, counting down from ten\u2014 then turned and ran south, making plenty of noise.\n\nThe man was after her in a beat. She heard the thump of his boots coming down past the charge, saw the rocks ahead of her blur into sight as a light snapped on, hidden by the curve. She pounded down the tunnel, leaping through the flickering dark, pumping with her arms. The writing on the tunnel wall flew past, a bounce of light from the man's torch passing over the ancient glyphs. Lara picked up speed; it was a straight stretch\u2014\n\nBam-bam-bam!\n\nThe rounds thundered through the tunnel. Chips of rock sprayed across her right shoulder, ricocheting off into the dark ahead, the tunnel faintly visible now as her pursuer ran into a clear sight line. Lara saw the ragged hole in the wall across from the river room and dove for it, two more rounds blasting after her, barely missing, too high. Salamanders had started screaming, echoes rising up from below.\n\nShe hit her headlamp as soon as she was inside the rough passage, and spotted the abrupt edge only two meters ahead. She had less than ten seconds before he came in after her, firing. If she couldn't get a grip or if the edge crumbled\u2014\n\nThere! A thick notch in the lip. Lara ran and ducked down, slapping her left hand across the notch, pivoting and letting herself drop over the edge.\n\nHer body slammed into the rugged rock, her boots finding purchase as the short passage lit up and a man ran inside, ducking, firing round after round, his face contorted with rage. He was moving too fast and aiming high.\n\nKevlar. Lara brought up the Remington and fired, aiming for his belly but not steady. She hit low, two rounds tearing into his upper left thigh.\n\nHe spun but stumbled forward, shock registering on his blandly handsome face as he pitched toward a yawning abyss. She'd envisioned him flying over her head, but he fell short by a meter, crashing toward her.\n\nLara crammed her right boot into a crack, ducked and crouched as the man fell half on top of her, the top of her head suddenly buried in his stomach, her neck jacked down painfully. He was overbalanced. He dropped his weapon and grabbed for her, the heavy metal clanging off the rocks all the way down.\n\nLara got her gun hand under his hip and stood up, pushing with her legs, lifting him into the air. She fired again, the gun angled wrong to do anything but make him flail, which he did, losing his grip.\n\nThe man shouted in rage and disbelief, a wordless howl as she tipped him over her and into the well. Weight shifting, she scrabbled to keep her grip on the side, hearing his fury turn to pain when he hit the labyrinth below. Bone snapped\u2014then there was a final thud, and his scream cut off. The echoes faded quickly. The salamanders were chirping inquisitively; it sounded like they were approaching in numbers to see what had fallen. If her attacker was still alive, she didn't think he would be for much longer.\n\nLara climbed up into the passage, moved well away from the drop and then reluctantly turned off her headlamp to wait and listen. There was only the puzzle chamber left, then she'd be on her way out, less than a klick from the drop now. Even a hundred meters of lost ground felt like a slap, but she couldn't afford to give in to impatience. West Coast had been impatient. The broken man below had been impatient.\n\nI'm coming, Jonah. As soon as I can.\n\nShe checked her watch. She was officially late."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "Sergei had dropped down a tight crawlspace to get back into the lower tunnel, past the cave-in, and hurried north through the terrible dark, expecting to be shot or eaten at every step. He finally found a narrow alcove near a branch of the main corridor and backed in, immensely relieved to be surrounded on three sides by solid rock.\n\nThe good feeling fled after less than a minute of waiting with no light. The screamers were in the knot of tunnels only meters beneath his feet, roaming through the dark, doing God knew what. They made rasping chirps almost like birds, like something harmless, and then they'd scream suddenly, violently, and Sergei's blood would run cold.\n\nYou're going to laugh about this later. You will absolutely nail this bitch if she comes through, and if someone else gets her that's fine, too, because you'll be back in that shitty truck soon, on your way back to the plane, and you'll make a joke about how scared you were, and you will laugh.\n\nHe checked his watch. Another ten minutes and he could fall back. That would suck, too. Minutes of walking the winding, muddy tunnels back to where the commander waited, wondering if one of Croft's arrows was about to come flying out of the dark, listening to the monsters scream. He'd fully support a decision to pull out and wait for the target to come back for the boyfriend.\n\nWhy had they even come down in the first place? It had seemed an adventure back at the drop, chasing the girl down, competing for placement, but the reality was just terrible. They shouldn't be here, people didn't belong down here. It had barely been an hour since they'd descended but it felt like days; the Dozen were down another man and for all he knew\u2014\n\nShots, south and above him, three rounds from Hux's HK, he thought, then two more. The cave creatures started shrieking, and then there were two weapons firing, Hux's drowned out by a heavier blast from another weapon\u2014 Croft's. A .45 or .357. She fired the last round.\n\nHe heard Hux scream as he fell. The echoes sent Hux's fury and pain running in every direction, whispers and shouts of sound that cut off at the bottom of his drop. He must have landed in the maze.\n\nFell down one of the wells, maybe. Sergei pulled out his tablet with numb fingers, the soft glow sudden and intense in the black. He called up the layout of the upper tunnels, scanning\u2026 There. One of the larger connecting wells, several hundred meters south. He remembered passing the branch that led to it.\n\nGo up. The chamber he was in had one of the few walking passages connecting the top tunnels; it was why he'd chosen it. He could be at the top of the well in two minutes; if she was climbing up or down, he'd have her. He could take her out before she did any more damage.\n\nHe swapped his tablet for a flashlight and draped the beam, then walked quickly to the spot where the tunnel branched, jogging up the sloping incline that would let out on top. He turned south and hurried, trying not to make noise.\n\nHux. He couldn't believe it. How had the target gotten the better of Hux Lane? It was ridiculous. Up until he'd heard that scream he might have said impossible. Ace had been reckless, his death wasn't a complete surprise, but Hux was the poster boy for prepared.\n\nWas. Sergei slowed down, listening. He was surprised at how fast his heart was beating, how loud it was. Croft was a little English girl. Yes, she was trained, but up against someone like Hux?\n\nHow good was he, really? He's dead, he missed. You wouldn't have missed. It was undoubtedly true that if Sergei had been firing at Croft, she wouldn't have had the chance to fire back. The perfect shot was always fatal.\n\nHe must be close to the well by now. Sergei stopped and covered his flashlight completely, listening.\n\nAhead of him, a flash strobed, a stutter of weak light against the curving tunnel.\n\nShe's at the big pillar room, with the mine in front. The bitch was taking pictures.\n\nWhen the light stuttered again, Sergei moved, walking in a crouch, close to the slight curve. He didn't make a sound, using his own light sparingly, only to place his feet.\n\nHe came to a stop just where the tunnel curved. The flash stuttered again, and Sergei dared a quick glance around the curve, saw the sharp reflection against the stones of the passage ahead, twenty meters away.\n\nHe pulled back, grinning. This was the only exit from the pillar room. She was going to walk out in a minute, and it didn't matter which way she went, he would step out from the curve and hold up his light and fire until she dropped. Even if he wasn't the best, he couldn't possibly miss.\n\nThere was no more light. She was very quiet, he couldn't\u2014\n\nAh! A rattle of pebbles clattered in the chamber, soft but clear. She wasn't so careful as she thought.\n\nSergei held himself ready and waited, listening."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "Lara heard the commando coming while she was finishing up her pictures\u2014the faintest scuffle of gritty mud being gently crushed against stone, the creak of fabric. Whoever it was, they were very careful, but she had been listening for an approach.\n\nTime to go. The chamber was magnificent\u2014the speleothems, hourglass columns, had been painted with all sizes and widths of blue rings. Mateus had sketched them in his diary several times, she recalled, and they were incredible; the Maya artists had climbed high to paint the brilliant rings, outlining them in black. On the south wall of the lofty room was a huge, masterful painting of the ballgame that the Maya had revered, blue players running across the court holding daggers and bleeding hearts, stone rings at either end. Opposite the mural was another, this one of Kukulkan, its strange serpent head peering out from its plumage, with more overwritten glyphs alongside. All along the back of the chamber were extensive writings laid out in grids.\n\nThe puzzle. At least the hieroglyphs on the back wall hadn't been overwritten. If someone had messed with the site, they'd left the important part alone. There was too much to even begin to read. Lara desperately wanted more time, but she would have to make do with what she had.\n\nThe quiet sneak had stopped moving not far north of her. She slipped to the entrance and out, south, carefully stepping around the trigger stone, placing her feet just so. She could hear them loudly shifting about in their hiding place\u2014settling in to wait for her to emerge. When she'd managed a nearly silent two meters, she stopped and slipped her hand to her belt, pulling out a few waterproof matches. She tossed them into the chamber before slipping farther away. How long would the sneak wait before he or she figured it out? Would they come after her or fall back?\n\nDon't try to guess. If they follow you'll hear it; if they don't, you're still blocked. What are you going to do?\n\nShe'd planned to go to the vertical drop at the north end of the site and then make a decision about where to come out, depending on what she could gather about the team's movements. She had enough rope to drop down into the maze from there, if necessary. But now there was a commando in the way, standing in the dark with a loaded gun. The top tunnel was no longer an option.\n\nShe let herself pick up speed the farther she got from the chamber, thinking over her choices. Climb down and out the lower tunnel, or try to get under him and come back up. Neither was ideal, both opened to the same spot, where someone would surely be waiting. There was no way past them\u2014\n\nThat's not true. The labyrinth of tunnels that made up the main body of the site had an exit that let out way back at the beginning. She remembered the first tunnel she'd passed before she'd fallen down the slide\u2014the one the Trinity excavators had marked with a red X, in the small bat chamber. She could go into the maze, find the passage that let her get out behind her pursuers. The fact that the sneak was another solo act suggested to her that the team she was dealing with might be even smaller than she'd originally thought. There wouldn't be anyone wasting time on the maze, and maybe not enough bodies to spare covering unlikely exits\u2026\n\nBut you don't know how to get there. Marin's notes were for a quick in-and-out job; they didn't tell her how to navigate the labyrinth. If she couldn't find the right passage, or if the ascent proved to be unmanageable, she could lose a lot of time backtracking. And the labyrinth was where the salamanders seemed to live and hunt, where the largest bat colonies had presumably settled. She wasn't worried about facing off with the troglobites while walking through the tunnels\u2014they weren't going to overpower her and she was armed\u2014but what if she was halfway up a pitch somewhere when a big group moved in and got bitey?\n\nAnd what if these killers just decide to fall back to the cenote and wait for me to climb up?\n\nWhat if. What if was useless.\n\nShe passed the room of rivers and the short tunnel that led to the dead man, passed the narrow entrance to the slope where she'd clawed her way up after the cave-in. She could use the double chamber with the cataclysm mural to get down, slip back into the labyrinth through the access hole that Marin's team had blasted. She had marked the few tunnels she'd wandered. If it got to be too much she could always climb back up farther north, re-evaluate.\n\nAt least you'll be moving. She had to keep moving, couldn't let herself slow down or even acknowledge how tired she felt suddenly, trying to imagine how she was going to secretly climb fifty meters of rope at the end of all this and then face off with whoever was guarding Jonah and Miguel.\n\nAnd then work out what all of this actually means, get to the hidden city, find the silver box, and figure out how to stop the rest of the prophecy from being fulfilled. That's assuming you can get past the rest of these psychopaths, which is by no means certain.\n\nI got off of Yamatai. I made it back from Kitezh.\n\nSo this is a sure thing, then? You've survived terrible things, so this one's in the bag?\n\nNo, I'll likely die and Jonah will die and then everyone will die. She was tired of this inner critic, pushing doubt. Before that, I keep trying. What more can I possibly do?\n\nThe critic had no response and Lara hurried on, affirming that simple truth to herself: she would do the best she could, and if that wasn't good enough, she still couldn't do any better."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "Harper heard the shots, and the scream. In the dark, the sound was monstrous, the death cry of Hux Lane chorused by the squall of cave creatures. He heard movement, close in, footsteps maybe\u2014from the lower tunnel? Whoever it was, they weren't heading toward him. The sound faded quickly.\n\nGoddamn it. Was Hux dead? Or had he taken out Croft?\n\n\"Report,\" he said. The word whispered back at him from the walls, but there was nothing from his headset.\n\nHe waited impatiently for someone to get into talking range, his jaw clenched. It was almost 0000; they'd be on their way in, anyway.\n\nThis was a bad idea. You should have stayed on top, waited.\n\nNot necessarily. Turnover on any mission isn't unexpected. If Croft is dead, it's a success.\n\n\"\u2014copy? Just a\u2014\"\n\nSergei, in a crackle of static. Harper waited for light to appear, finally saw a glow sketch out the opening meters of the top tunnel. He suddenly felt like he could breathe easier. He pointed the Glock, waiting, until he could hear soft footsteps.\n\n\"Coming out of tunnel one now, copy?\"\n\n\"Copy,\" Harper said, and then Sergei was stepping out. He looked terrible, pale and sweaty by the soft light of a dimmed flashlight.\n\n\"Report.\"\n\n\"Ace and Hux are dead.\"\n\n\"Confirmations?\"\n\n\"I saw Ace get hit with two arrows before he fell into one of the charges. I didn't get eyes on Hux, but\u2026 that was a long fall. And she fired last.\"\n\n\"Where is Croft now?\"\n\n\"No info on that,\" Sergei said. \"She was a klick south ten minutes ago, on the top. I thought I had her pinned in the pillar room, but she got out. She must have gone south, but there are a lot of connections between tunnels and levels down there. Places to move.\"\n\n\"Anything from Mitchell?\"\n\nSergei shook his head. \"She was going to lay up somewhere and wait.\"\n\nHarper looked at his watch. Mitchell had three minutes to report.\n\n\"Commander, we should fall back to the drop. The target's got an edge on us down here, and she won't be going anywhere without her pilot or her friend.\"\n\nHe was trying to sound reasonable, but his voice was strained. Sergei was as close to shook up as Harper had ever seen.\n\nHe's also right. It galled him to think that he'd made a mistake, but half of his caving team was dead and Croft wasn't.\n\n\"We'll wait on Mitchell,\" Harper said. \"Put your back to a wall and turn off that light.\"\n\nSergei hurried to obey. \"Did you hear those scr\u2014\"\n\nHarper cut him off with a terse hiss. They waited in silence.\n\nAs his watch ticked over from 2359, there was a whisper in Harper's ear, Mitchell's voice low and quite clear. \"I may have a line. Request channel silence for twenty.\"\n\n\"Copy that,\" Harper said.\n\n\"Stand by.\" Mitchell's cool voice snapped off.\n\nYes! He couldn't imagine what had happened with Hux, but if Mitchell had Croft in her sights, that bitch wouldn't escape.\n\nThe thought was more hopeful than certain.\n\n\"Sergei, get back into range of the drop. Put Reddy in charge, have him bring in the airfield team, including Winters, and get that collateral locked down tight, gagged and hobbled.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"You'll station yourself at the first chamber from the opening tunnel, where there's that drop into the maze. It's the last place she can come out before the cenote opens.\"\n\nSergei had been looking relieved, but his expression sagged at the additional order, even as the lines around his eyes tightened.\n\n\"You don't like caves?\" Harper asked, and didn't wait for the obvious answer. \"Me either. Creepy as fuck down here. But you'll hear her if she climbs up, and if you're any closer to the drop, she could get behind you. I'll wait on Mitchell, we'll meet you at the branch ASAP.\"\n\nSergei nodded more firmly and turned to leave, moving quickly. His shoulders were still high, his Springfield tight in his hand.\n\nHarper waited until Sergei's light faded and then chewed on the facts. Even with the rest of the team coming in, the Dozen were down to eight. Ace had finally blown his winning streak. And Hux\u2026 The fury that he felt at Croft for Hux's loss was fiery and sharp, a burning blade in his guts, a beat of blood at his temples. Who else on his team was as qualified to keep operations running smoothly?\n\nAnd how could she possibly have beaten him? It was beyond infuriating, and perplexing, and it was driving home that he'd made a bad choice, following her into the dig.\n\nIf Mitchell gets a shot, Croft's dead. And if she doesn't, we've still got the insurance. He would set up his snipers in the trees, get the area covered, then wait. Croft would likely fall for the same pitch that had drawn Jonah from his hiding place: surrender or watch your friend die\u2026 Or, she'd open fire. Either way, as soon as she popped up, she was dead. No more fun and games, no spitting in her face or making her suffer, no frills. She would be gunned down like the rabid dog she was.\n\nNot rabid. Smart. And careful.\n\nThe tunnels seemed to go silent as Sergei's footsteps disappeared in the black. Harper checked his watch again, trying to regain any of the confidence he'd felt only moments before. He had faith in Mitchell's abilities\u2026 but he'd had faith in all of his top players, and two of them had failed to make the grade. Was Mitchell up to the task?\n\nNineteen minutes on the outside, and he'd have his answer.\n\nOr you won't. Maybe she doesn't call in. Maybe Croft steps out in front of you in two minutes, and you get your shot after all\u2026 Unless Croft shoots first.\n\nThe thought was unsettling. It wasn't like him to doubt himself so. Croft couldn't see in the dark, she wasn't faster than him. This wasn't over, not even close. If Mitchell didn't get her, Harper would. He clenched his teeth against the cold, suffocating blackness and started counting down."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "Mitchell had been waiting at the vertical well, near the dig's north end. She'd found a crack in the wall to slide into, and could hear every sound that the Blue Labyrinth had to offer, coiling up through the rounded hole\u2014the calls of the cave animals, the small storms of moving bats. Beneath that she could hear the steady whisper and tick of a billion insects and spiders, crickets and lice.\n\nThe sound of Hux dying\u2014the shots, his furious scream, the snap of bones\u2014had whirled through the well like a dark, lovely song, brutal and brief. The tune told her where Croft was, and gave her some ideas about where she might go next.\n\nShe heard Sergei come up from the lower tunnel to pursue Croft, his light, clumsy steps shuffling quickly away from Mitchell's position. If Croft believed that her enemies were focused on the top tunnels, she would use the maze. It was possible she'd go all the way to the lakes at the bottom, bypass the tunnels completely, but Mitchell thought not. Too far to climb.\n\nShe checked her watch and then edged into the well, stepping carefully on the rim of rocks. Some thoughtful engineer or tunnel mapper had installed a thin strip of bright orange netting between the first few openings going down the eastern wall, the stiff nylon web about three meters long. The well itself dropped fifteen meters through staggered layers of tunnels, the lowest too deep for her light to penetrate. If she fell, she would die. Her heart beat very slightly faster. This was exhilarating.\n\nMitchell started climbing down. The labyrinth south of her was a mess, but Croft was a caver and not afraid of tunnels. To get to the surface, though, there were only a few places where she would have access to the climb. Mitchell had time to get there first.\n\nShe'd reached the bottom of the net when Sergei started talking. She heard his footsteps overhead even as his voice sizzled in her ear. Harper responded, and she listened to their conversation as she lowered herself down, her boots scraping on the gritting rocks. Croft was still south, it seemed. There was a ledge only a meter beneath her feet.\n\nShe let go of the web and dropped, landing easily. There was a low, flat passage that opened off from the ledge, a crawl that sloped down to a tunnel. She was at the top of the maze.\n\nShe called in, requesting silence so that she could concentrate. As soon as Harper acknowledged, she pushed into the dark crack, pulling herself forward on her stomach. She was crouching into a narrow tunnel only a moment later.\n\nMitchell heard chirps in the passage south, the small rasps of sound that came from the screaming cave animals. She only went a few steps before she saw one, scuttling into the light of her lamp, climbing on the wall not far from the bumpy ceiling. She had to smile, remembering Sergei's anxiety about them. It was a lizard, white, blind, delicate-looking.\n\nThe lizard\u2014salamander?\u2014darted closer. She could see its teeth, small triangles of bone tight behind lips so pale they were almost clear. The animal seemed to glow in the low, dirty light of her helmet's lamp. There were small dirty pits where its eyes should have been. The thing flicked its wire-thin tail out into the air and chirped again, tipping its head.\n\nMitchell unsheathed her new Interceptor, fascinated. Would it attack her? Was its blood red? She waited\u2026 But the creature chirped once more and then turned and darted back into the dark, running in that sliding symmetrical way that lizards moved.\n\nNeat. She wondered if they were eating what was left of Hux and Ace. The cave was uncomfortable, cold, but interesting. Lethal.\n\nTo the north were the maze's connections to the upper chambers. Mitchell crouched her way forward, knife in hand, boots sliding over the mucky, shitty rocks. If Croft came into the maze, she'd be headed this way. Mitchell had asked for twenty minutes but thought she might take an extension, depending on Croft's movements. Harper would forgive the transgression, but only if it paid off. He generally ran a tight ship, but he wanted Croft dead as much as he'd ever wanted anything. Croft had killed soldiers he had personally trained, and now two of his top players in one-on-one. He wanted revenge. His pride was in play.\n\nMitchell wasn't troubled by such considerations. She was only pleased by the opportunity to meet with a peer and compare skills. If she got a chance to use any of her blades, Croft would fall. Harper would reward her, but the true reward was in the act itself. To kill someone was to remove them from existence. A shot to the head and all of their thoughts and dreams and potential would snuff out like a candle. With a blade, you could actually watch the flame flicker and die; you could savor that moment of transition as the target's life spilled away, as the hope left their eyes. Mitchell had killed soldiers and civilians, strongmen and college professors, she'd seen fury, tears, disbelief, but at the very end, they always wore the same look: recognition.\n\nShe looked forward to seeing it in Lara Croft's eyes, that awareness that her brief, powerful life was over, that Mitchell had taken it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "Miguel woke and felt a gentle pressure against his leg. He'd been half dreaming that he was flying over a bleak desert, wide and empty and endless, but Jonah's knee bumped him again, and everything came back in a rush.\n\nHis whole body hurt. He opened his eyes, wincing at the pain in his wrists, his shoulders. Jonah was sitting next to him, his dark gaze moving between the guards. Reddy was pacing near the cenote, Smith was slumped on the fender of one of the trucks.\n\nMiguel rocked himself awkwardly back into a sitting position. He still felt numb, like his brain had been punched out, but better than before.\n\n\"So, here's the plan,\" Jonah said, his voice soft. \"I'm going to cut you loose, but keep your hands behind your back like you're still cuffed. One of them's going to come over to check on us pretty soon. When he does, I'm going to move, fast. Be ready. You only need to run, straight for the jungle. Keep low and don't stop, even if they tell you to. There's a shotgun in a banyan tree a few yards into the growth, directly southeast. Make sure you're clear before you go looking for it.\"\n\nMiguel's heart was pounding. \"What are you going to do?\"\n\nJonah shifted, leaning in slightly. A small, thin blade slid against his left wrist. There was a tug and then his hand was free, the plastic cuffs hanging off his right.\n\n\"I'm leaving that open-ended, but I'll get a gun, hopefully,\" Jonah said. \"Whatever happens, shots are gonna be fired. You just concentrate on making it to cover.\"\n\n\"Aren't you scared?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Jonah said. \"Who wouldn't be? Keep low, okay?\"\n\nReddy clapped his hand to his helmet suddenly, tensing. \"Yeah, copy. We're\u2014what?\"\n\nThere was a long pause, and then they could only hear Reddy's part of the conversation, terse acknowledgements. The burly man started to pace again as he listened, then turned and snapped at Smith.\n\n\"Put your helmet on!\"\n\nThe kid scrambled, almost falling off the truck in his haste to comply.\n\n\"Copy,\" Reddy said into his mic, then covered it to yell at Smith, his agitation coming out in a lash.\n\n\"Did you catch any of that? Why the fuck aren't you wearing your helmet? This is a live fucking op!\"\n\n\"What'd he say? Was that Sergei?\" Smith asked.\n\nReddy shook his head, disgusted. \"You're too dumb to be embarrassed, aren't you? Get out the tape. The commander wants the insurance secured. The team's falling back.\"\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"Just do it,\" Reddy said, unclipping the radio from his belt. \"And use a whole fucking roll.\"\n\nSmith went to rummage through a bag on the ground.\n\n\"Koboshi, come in. We've got casualties here. Commander wants everyone at the dig, ASAP. Lock down the plane. Bring the pilot, too.\"\n\n\"Copy that,\" crackled a voice from the radio.\n\nCasualties? Not Lara, or Reddy would have said so. And the commander wouldn't be calling in the rest of his team, or ordering the guards to strap him and Jonah down if they'd caught her.\n\nSmith was cautiously approaching, a thick roll of duct tape around his wrist, a few long strips hanging from his sleeve. Miguel had thought he'd been bounced around too much tonight to ramp up to terror again, but the killing machine aimed at his face was doing the trick. Knowing that Jonah was about to act slid him right up to the edge of panic. Reddy was stalking over to another equipment bag, scowling, but keeping an eye on Smith's approach, his own gun in his hand.\n\nWhat if I freeze? What if I just freeze?\n\n\"What's happening?\" Jonah asked, when Smith reached them. \"Did something happen?\" He sounded nervous and he leaned back, using his massive frame to hide his hands.\n\n\"Shut up,\" Smith said, brow lowering. \"I'm going to tape over the cuffs. Try anything and I'll put a bullet in you.\"\n\nMiguel kept his eyes on Reddy. The man was armed and watching\u2014he clearly didn't think much of Smith\u2014but he was also trying to look through the bag at his feet. Smith stepped around Jonah.\n\nJonah shifted and rose to his feet so quickly that for a beat Miguel was afraid he had frozen, but in fact time had somehow slowed\u2014Miguel could see that Reddy's gaze had dropped to the equipment bag and he was only just looking up, even as Jonah shifted himself with a single step and went in tight behind Smith, wrapping around the blond guard like a shawl. His giant hand covered Smith's, and he swung the semi toward Reddy through sheer physical force, using the blond to shield himself\u2014\n\nGo, go!\n\nMiguel pushed off the ground and flew to the trees, faster than he'd run since childhood. The semis were exchanging rapid fire, two-three-one shots. The dark jungle pounded closer; someone was shouting but he didn't stop.\n\nThe dark dropped in fast away from the cleared area, Trinity's lights quickly strained to nothing by the swerving trees. With the canopy blocking the sky, it was too dark to keep running. Miguel tried anyway, but a dead tree or a rock or something big and solid had other ideas. He tripped and went sprawling, and when he took a breath, he finally heard the words still being shouted.\n\n\"It's okay, you can come back! Miguel!\"\n\nJonah?\n\nMiguel sat up, turning toward the faint light and the sound of Jonah's voice, shaking slightly.\n\n\"Miguel! You all right?\"\n\n\"Yeah!\" Miguel got to his feet, a little surprised to find that except for a scraped knee, he was unharmed. \"Yeah, I'm coming!\"\n\nHe walked back toward the clearing, feeling a little shocked by how quickly everything had changed. Mama would say they had God on their side. But then, Mama also said that if you spit on a Sunday, a baby got sick.\n\nWhen he stepped back into the light he saw that Jonah held Smith's gun, and was taking Reddy's off of him. Both men were dead\u2014Reddy had collapsed over the bag, bleeding out on whatever had been so important that he'd looked away. Smith had taken fire from Reddy's gun, three rounds to the chest. He'd died with a shocked expression, wide eyes staring at the wheeling stars.\n\nMiguel was glad they were dead. He didn't know if that made him a bad person but they'd tied him up and threatened him, they'd laughed about Lara being dead. Fuck these guys.\n\n\"You okay?\" Jonah asked again, walking over to meet him.\n\n\"Yeah. Well, I scraped my knee.\" The words were out before he considered how ridiculous they sounded.\n\nJonah didn't laugh at him. \"There's some antiseptic stuff in my bag.\"\n\n\"What happens now?\" Miguel asked.\n\n\"Seems like reinforcements are coming,\" Jonah said. \"I'm going to try and stop them.\"\n\n\"What should I do?\" So far, he had successfully run when told. His knee stung. Not technically true.\n\n\"You're not obligated to do anything,\" Jonah said. \"All things considered, I wouldn't blame you for breaking our agreement\u2026 Although when Lara gets out, we'll still need a pilot. I hope you'll stick with us. But I've got to deal with these people coming. You can hide and wait until this is over, or take a truck back to the strip. It's your choice.\"\n\n\"Or I could help you,\" Miguel said.\n\nJonah nodded, a look of relief in his eyes. \"Yeah, that would be my pick, but no pressure.\"\n\nMiguel could drive back to his plane and fly away, file this whole thing under \"regrets\" and go back to giving tours. Except he'd be turning his back on the man who'd just saved his life, and then given him an out for the rest of the fight, against villains so obvious they might as well have mustaches to twirl. Trinity had sent trained killers after a bright young woman who was trying to stop some kind of tragedy. He still didn't know what to think about the resurrected god thing, but he knew how he would feel about himself if he walked away from them.\n\n\"I'm in,\" he said. \"This is all totally insane, though, can I just say that?\"\n\nJonah nodded. He was looking around, marking things with a careful gaze. \"That's the truth. You ever fired a semi before?\"\n\n\"Long time ago, but I remember the basics.\"\n\nJonah handed him Reddy's heavy gun, carefully. \"Good, because I barely know them myself. I emptied the chamber but it's loaded.\"\n\nMiguel checked anyway. He remembered that much, at least, and to keep the barrel pointed at the ground or the sky. \"Okay. So what's the plan?\"\n\nJonah outlined his idea, and Miguel listened, and started nodding along. Why not? It was no crazier than anything else that had happened since they'd set down in Colombia. Listening to Jonah's plan, he felt a little bit like his much younger self, back when he'd been running peppers. Wide awake, fully alive. Gone was the cocky, youthful faith in his immortality, but it had been replaced by a feeling that he'd picked the right side to be on.\n\nJonah went to get the stuff he'd stashed in the tree, tossing a tube of bacitracin to Miguel when he got back.\n\n\"You can never be too careful,\" he said. At the big man's insistence, Miguel stopped what he was doing to tend to his knee, and then they set to work."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "Lara kept to the top of the maze for as long as she could, but finally had to drop down a level; it was that or climb back up, but she was hopeful. As she'd expected, the Trinity site mappers had marked the passages when they'd passed through: Xs for dead ends and drops, a Y shape if the passage connected to others, arrows pointing up and down. Someone had made an effort to color code, red and yellow and blue, but it seemed they'd run out of paint or patience. The drippy marks were often all the same color.\n\nThe tunnel she climbed down to was wide and low and thick with bat guano. She crept through the muck, bow in hand as soon as she heard the first chirps. She had her first run-in with the salamanders only a moment later, a trio of the pale animals appearing from a narrow crack in the stone on the passage's west side, near the floor. They bleated at her, edging closer when she tried to ignore them.\n\nShe didn't dare yell but she tapped her foot, and when one of them opened its toothy mouth to scream at her, she put an arrow into its throat. The other two disappeared back into the crack when she went to retrieve the shaft. She wiped it on her pants leg. If they were particularly scent-oriented, perhaps the smell of their own blood would act as a deterrent\u2026 although she didn't really know. They were unique. She didn't want to interact with them at all, or kill any more of them than absolutely necessary; they weren't deadly. Trinity had done enough to disrupt the cave system, blowing holes, surely chasing out colonies of bats, contaminating a contained environment. Perhaps they hadn't recorded the salamanders because there hadn't been so many before, or the animals had never had to come so high. Who knew how their population had been affected by Trinity's negligence?\n\nShe nocked the arrow again. Didn't mean she was going to let them eat her or chirp themselves up into an attack.\n\nShe headed south at a Y passage, making her mark near the floor\u2014if someone was fool enough to follow her, she wouldn't make it easy for them\u2014trying to estimate where she was in relation to the rooms overhead, the caverns below, and to the cenote's opening. She stopped and checked her compass and then closed her eyes, trying to remember Marin's maps. The center of the maze was a knot with several largish chambers; past that, she only remembered that the northernmost tunnels veered east before curving back toward the cenote. They'd looked like dead ends on his map, but one of them had to open up to that chamber at the beginning. Just because Trinity hadn't climbed it didn't mean it wasn't possible.\n\nFine, but what if it's some piddling crack two levels down that leads to that chamber? Something you've already overshot? How long are you willing to spend crawling around down here looking for the magic tunnel? You don't have time for any of this.\n\nNo, I don't have time. And?\n\nIf she could walk a straight line from where she was to the drop site, she'd be back in ten minutes. Through the top tunnels, about half an hour.\n\nBut that's walking, and I'm going to run. No charges down here, no soldiers. If I'm not looking up a pitch in half an hour, I climb back up and take my chances with the killers.\n\nThe man who'd been waiting for her in the puzzle chamber had been right about that much: she had things to do. Charging into an ambush was last ditch; she'd try to find the climb first, but she wasn't going to just wander around if she couldn't.\n\nAnd you're also not going to throw caution to the wind. It's not either/or. Work the problem in front of you before worrying about the next one. That was Roth talking. As usual, he was right.\n\nShe had to duck for a bit to get through a narrow spot, but the going was mostly easy\u2014carved passages of stone, worn smooth by water, and chunky holes where the walls had been ripped out in more recent floods. Deep cracks opened into chambers of strange formations, thousands of years of chemical reaction\u2014water dripping through the limestone, creating weak acids that could hollow out mountains and fill them with marvels, crystal chambers, vast pillars, echoing pits. It was no wonder so many indigenous cultures believed that caves were sacred places, or that the Maya travelers had chosen to use up so much of their precious color here.\n\nShe reached another marked tunnel that opened off the passage she was in, but there was a symbol she hadn't seen before on the wall next to it: a blue circle. A well? She thought she was west of the one where she'd lured the Trinity killer to his death, but she wasn't certain.\n\nThe passage was rocky, the floor uneven and sloping slightly upwards, curving west, but it wasn't especially tight. She left her mark and then started up.\n\nShe moved quickly over the rocks, steadying herself against the wall. The passage was drier than the one she left below, more rock than dirt. She hit a curve a few meters in, and knew from the sound of her breathing and the feel of the air that it opened ahead.\n\nLara stepped up into a small room, two meters tall at its highest, barely wide enough for her to turn with her arms outstretched. A dead end, except there was a small painting on a smooth surface of the wall, bright lines of blue paint next to a directional compass.\n\nA circle means a dig room. She leaned in to study the markings, not sure what she was looking at. Short lines of blue paint in seemingly random columns. She counted them. Thirteen lines, spaced out over five columns. The Maya believed that there were thirteen heavens, it was a holy number\u2026 But why the groupings? Three, one, two, four, three. She leaned closer, squinting. There were shadows between the marks, thin blurs\u2026 Had there been more lines originally?\n\nLara took a picture, then turned and hurried back down to the tunnel, turning north again. Ahead somewhere, a salamander started screaming, its cry taken up by two, three more of them before the sounds died away. She could hear bats moving, faintly, a hollow rustle of sound that stretched and spun before fading back to silence.\n\nShe reached another Y passage with an arrow pointing down and passed it by. After a long slog through a winding corridor infested with tiny white spiders, she was starting to think about going back when the passage opened up, presenting her with three choices. One was a dead end; both of the others had the Y marking, tunnels that connected to others. There were no arrows, and red was the only color used.\n\nLara looked at her compass and chose. She made her mark, and kept moving, deeper into the maze."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "Sergei had just made it back to the small, crap-filled chamber to which he'd been assigned when he thought he heard shots behind him, outside\u2014but he also heard a rush of sound like an oncoming wave, and then a big fucking bunch of bats streamed out of the passage that led down to the maze, whirling frantically through the room and squeaking like rodents, their leathery wings flapping in his face. Sergei hunched in the tiny dark chamber and waited it out, purely miserable. He was cold, he had shit all over his gear and he was still angry that Croft had slipped away from him. How foolish he'd felt as the minutes ticked past and he slowly realized that he was alone and watching an empty room. He hoped Mitchell would get her and cut her up good.\n\nBut quickly, please God. He only wanted to get out. He'd had a bare moment of reprieve talking to Reddy, standing at the mouth of the tunnel in the warmer air. It had still been horribly dark, the chamber beneath the drop overhung by the rim of the opening, but he'd been able to see starlight pouring down from the round hole high overhead, shining down on living green trees not twenty meters in front of him. Unfortunately, there had only been so much to say, and then he'd had to turn his back and return to this cold, stinking pit.\n\nWhen the last of the flying rats had whisked out, he tapped his radio. \"Reddy, this is Sergei, do you copy? Did I hear shots?\"\n\nNothing.\n\nSergei tried again. \"Commander, message relayed, in position. Do you copy?\"\n\nA crackle of static and a buzz.\n\nThat's just fucking great. It was reassuring to know that if anything else went disastrously wrong, they were all cut off from one another. He'd known this already, but the confirmation made him feel angrier, and he far preferred anger to dread. Maybe one of the hostages had tried to escape, and had been filled full of holes. Good.\n\nThree passages led out of the room he was in\u2014the tunnel south to the upper levels of the site, the tunnel north, back to the drop and the living world, the real world, and the passage that opened west over the maze. It was marked with a red X. Sergei moved over to check it out, wincing at the crunch of bugs beneath his boots, the sharp reek of bat piss.\n\nHe had to duck to get into the passageway. The rough rocks ran only a few meters before they tipped down into a slide, too steep to get down without a rope. Sergei shined his flashlight down the chute of rock, and caught his breath\u2014the passage opened up about two meters down into a darkness so deep that his beam couldn't find the bottom of it. The void was framed by dirty rocks and black holes on all sides, descending as far as he could see.\n\nAs he gazed down at the abyss, he heard the far screams of the demons, the sounds curling up like smoke.\n\n\"Fuck,\" he murmured, and heard it whisper down through the open space, into the black.\n\nSergei swallowed. He imagined the things down there looking up as the tendrils of alien sound filtered down to them, imagined them reaching up from the bottomless pit, pale and clawed, worming through the tight rocks like eels, stretching long bodies over the gaps in the passage to find the source of the strange noise. To find him.\n\nNope. No thank you. He quickly backed out of the tunnel. Harper thought that the target might come up from there? It was an actual hellhole.\n\nIf she came up, if anything came up, he would hear it, though. And he had the advantage, a clear line of sight into the depths; he couldn't miss if he fired down the chute.\n\nOr you could stay out of there entirely and just kill anything that comes out.\n\nNot the worst idea. He looked around for a place to lean or sit in the chamber that wasn't awful, but there was nothing. Vermin crawled across the shitty floor, the rocks were covered in slime and crap. There were a dozen bats still climbing around on the ceiling. One of them dropped suddenly and flitted away north, to the open night sky, to freedom.\n\nSergei resisted the urge to shoot it. Fucking bat.\n\nHe squatted in the nasty dark and waited."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "Lara didn't know the hole was there until she stepped into it.\n\nShe had tried to keep to the upper layers of the maze, heading progressively north, and had taken a rough, rocky passage that sloped down a bit. A curve near the bottom was puddled with thick, wet mud, loose rocks poking up from the accumulation. She couldn't quite step over the slick jumble but there was a flat bit of stone sticking up from the middle that she could reach.\n\nShe steadied herself against the wall and stepped forward, pushing down on the stone with her boot. Solid. She shifted her weight forward\u2014\n\n\u2014and the rock started to sink, fast.\n\nLara pushed off of the stone and dove as far forward as she could, landing on the hard rocks at the other side of the slick and scrambling ahead. Her stepping stone and a half-meter chunk of packed mud dropped away into the dark. A small chorus of chirps came up from below.\n\nShe looked into the new hole. Her headlamp revealed a narrow pit of jagged walls, riddled with thin cracks, a dead end at three meters. A few salamanders had their strange heads sticking out of the cracks lower down, chirping at the fallen rock and its crust of mud at the bottom.\n\nThe hole was just wide enough for her to have fallen in and been shredded on the way down. She turned away, her chest tight at the reminder of how easily she could die down here and what that would mean for Trinity's aims\u2026\n\nDon't. One problem at a time. Lara moved ahead, forcing her thoughts back to her escape. She'd be getting to where the labyrinth curved east soon, under and around the north end of the site. Even if Trinity hadn't marked the passage that led back to the surface, the bats at this end of the maze had to get out somewhere, and they generally left behind plenty of evidence that they'd come through. Not necessarily passages she could use, but it would cut down on exploring dead ends.\n\nShe was midway down a short passage between two narrow chambers when she found the dead salamander. It had been gutted, a long, clean slice curving across its belly and off one side, pale, glistening entrails seeping from the line. A few roaches crawled over the white flesh like disease.\n\nFreshly killed, by a blade. Mitchell? The Russian had said she had a new knife, and implied that she might prefer using it to a pistol. Lara wondered if Mitchell was the cool-eyed blond in Mexico who'd been after Marin. Trinity wasn't big on recruiting women as soldiers, they tended to stand out.\n\nDoesn't matter, and don't form any expectations. Open your senses. Work with reality. Be aware.\n\nLara clicked off her headlamp and stood in the dark, turning her head to listen to either end of the passage she was in. She heard the soft backdrop of whispers, distant movement, echoing chambers of ticking insects, dripping water. Over the miasma of bat-related smells, the thin metal tint of the salamander's blood, and her own sweat. The air was cold and still and perfectly lightless. She had no feeling that there was anyone else close by, but her senses could only tell her so much.\n\nThey didn't try to hide the salamander. Did they want her to know they were down here, or were they just passing through, and the creature had gotten too close? The kill was recent or there would be more insects, but that didn't help much. Whoever it was could be anywhere\u2014a level up or down, crouched ahead in a tunnel. Perhaps the killer had waited a meter inside one of the dead ends she'd passed by, and was coming up behind her even now.\n\nYou can't know, give it up. You can go back, go up, or move forward.\n\nThe well she'd been planning to drop into up top could be no more than a hundred meters west, and perhaps a bit behind her. If she wanted to go up, that was probably her closest option. Which will put you back into the exact situation you were trying to get away from: walking into an ambush. At least down here you might be able to get around them. And there's more than one direction to run if you can't.\n\nWell, maybe, depending on what the salamander-killer was planning. Not all of the passages were narrow, and some of the branch chambers were meters across, filled with dead ends and alcoves, lots of places to hide.\n\nLara unclipped the small LED and checked the compass and her watch. She'd made good time up to here, but it was back to stop-and-start, which she should have been doing anyway. She tucked the light into her sock once again, resigned to ducking for the rest of her walk. Even that bare glow at her feet was more than she liked, but she couldn't go blind in the maze, and she could cover the light in a second with a finger. She'd be ducking, anyway.\n\nWith the bow or the Remington in hand? She'd prefer the bow\u2014less chance of telegraphing her location, causing a cave-in, or being hit by her own shot\u2014but as competent an archer as she was, the gun was the better choice. If she had to run, it was a lot easier to blast at a pursuer than to stop, nock and draw.\n\nOn the other hand. Muzzle flash would strobe in the blackness. Firing would put a target on the shooter, whether it was Trinity or her pulling the trigger.\n\nThis is your life now, considering the best way to kill people.\n\nNo. The best way to survive. The only way. If I die in this labyrinth, who's going to stop Dominguez?\n\nThe thought she didn't want to have, that made the dread flush up from her belly in a wave. Lara took a slow breath, turning the volume on her thoughts down to zero. She moved ahead, through a small chamber with clear puddled water on the floor and then into a large, slightly tilted room with a number of passages leading out. She examined them quickly by the light of her shaded torch. There were a half-dozen openings, high and low, mucky and slightly less mucky. Two of the passages weren't marked, the rest had arrows and letters. The ones that the bats clearly used the most were an opening due west, marked with a down arrow, and two of the north-facing entries, both marked as connecting passages.\n\nShe covered the light, considering. She didn't want to go down, although it was entirely possible that the passage to the climb out was another level beneath her, or two, or five. Level wasn't even the right word; it implied some kind of order. The labyrinth was honeycombed with passages, cracks and wells and chambers.\n\nAnd you can rule out the most likely before you start second-guessing.\n\nShe quickly examined the stones and muck at her feet, looking for signs that someone had walked through, but it was too rocky and wet. She turned off the light, back to the bare glow of the LED, and moved quietly across the chamber, stopping to mark the tunnel on the left before easing into it. A salamander cried somewhere behind her and she waited for the echoes to die before she continued. The passage opened up ahead of her. She couldn't see it in the scant light but she could hear it in the air, the way the salamander's distant call curved back at her.\n\nLara crept to where the rocks opened up, waited for a full minute, listening, and then crouched into the wider space, stepping carefully, lightly\u2014\n\nA whisper of movement, a press of air. Someone was stepping up behind her from the right, fast.\n\nLara didn't think. She dropped the Remington and brought her hands up, finding an extended limb just centimeters over her head. She grabbed the arm and twisted it, pulling it in as she stood. She heaved the assailant up and over her shoulder, throwing as hard as she could.\n\nThe attacker let out a grunt when they hit\u2014woman\u2014but Lara heard her coming back up, the shift of cloth, another soft grunt of exertion.\n\nLara reached for where the Remington should have been and came up empty. No time! She turned and ran back through the passage in a crouch, unslinging her bow. She heard steps behind her.\n\nShe dove into the tilted room and rolled, grabbed an arrow, turning, drawing, letting it go low through the middle of the passage, a wishful shot, another arrow already in hand as she sidled backwards and up the gentle slope.\n\nBam-bam!\n\nThe shots whizzed past her and Lara targeted the muzzle flash, a strobe of white light that outlined the shooter for an instant. Lara marked her and pulled and released, grabbed another arrow, dodged farther right.\n\nShe didn't hear the arrow land but she heard the woman gasp, and step back, heard the arrow clatter to the ground somewhere between them a beat later\u2014and then she went entirely silent. She didn't fall, or move, or breathe.\n\nThe woman\u2014it could only be Mitchell, and from the flash Lara had caught, she was definitely the blonde from Mexico\u2014was standing in the dark less than five meters from Lara, standing and perhaps bleeding with a gun in her hand, waiting for Lara to make a single sound.\n\nLara had an arrow nocked, but didn't dare pull back. She didn't dare breathe."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "Mitchell stood in the cold black, listening, her head tilted awkwardly. The arrow had poked a neat hole through the cartilage of her left ear, just above her ear canal, and buried itself in the foam padding at the back of her tactical helmet. She'd jerked the projectile free and tossed it toward Lara, sidestepping when it hit the floor, but now she had to keep her head tipped over her shoulder so that the blood wouldn't fall to the rocks. Blood had gotten into her ear canal, and she waited impatiently for the blockage to drain.\n\nCroft was still in the room, and probably four or five meters roughly southeast of her. The woman was also holding still, not a shift, not a breath. If Mitchell fired and missed, Croft's next arrow probably wouldn't. And if Mitchell made too much noise, Croft might whip off another shot like the one that had pierced Mitchell's ear. Mitchell had leapt to the side when she'd seen the bow up, managed not to take the arrow in her eye, but barely.\n\nYou won't win this game, this one's mine. Croft was good. Mitchell had barely heard her approach and couldn't hear her at all now\u2014the blood bubbling in her ear wasn't helping\u2014but Mitchell had learned how to play statue at a very early age, and was an expert in the craft. Croft would move first, she would give herself away and then she would be dead.\n\nCroft was flawed. She hadn't detected Mitchell waiting just inside the tunnel's opening. She'd heard the knife coming and responded as a trained fighter. Stupid of her to drop her gun in the dark\u2026 But then, Mitchell had been thrown flat on her back, her perfectly executed kill move thwarted, so mistakes had been made all around.\n\nNot a mistake. She'd left a calling card in plain sight, inviting Croft to play. She could have ended this talented creature with a finger pull, but had chosen to engage differently. And this was infinitely more satisfying\u2014better than a shooting, richer than Croft's blood, a true test of ability. Of control. Whoever got distracted first would lose, and\u2014\n\nThe radio in her helmet beeped, and a broken transmission spilled out, Harper's voice crackling into her right ear.\n\nMitchell dove as the arrow pinged off the top of her helmet, slamming it against her head.\n\nShe rolled and came up running, nine, ten meters before the wall, dead end to the south. She ran full tilt, didn't hit her lamp until she knew she was close, pointing the CZ at Croft's position and tracking with it\u2014\n\nMitchell hit her light and fired at the same time, three rounds, the flare lighting up the empty chamber.\n\nShe turned to find her hole and hit the edge of it hard, before leaping inside, turning, raising the heavy gun.\n\nShe saw Croft disappearing back into the passage north, the one where she'd dropped her weapon. Mitchell fired but the round hit rock. Lara was already gone. The woman had run past her in the dark, using Mitchell's movement and the echoes of the shots to cover the sound. They had to have passed within inches of one another.\n\nHarper's voice hissed into her ear again, the signal very slightly stronger.\n\n\"\u2026report. Have\u2026 target? What's your\u2026 copy?\"\n\nMitchell took off the helmet and disabled the radio before putting it back on. She replayed the recent events, considering her own performance thus far. She'd foreseen Lara using the maze to get out, and had chosen the very same tunnel that Croft had, one of only a few routes that could bypass the site's upper entrance.\n\nAnd now she's on it. Running. Did she have access to the same maps that they had? Would she know where she had to drop to get to the climb out?\n\nDoesn't matter. Mitchell knew what Croft was looking for. She'd follow and create another opportunity.\n\nShe stopped long enough to grab a small roll of wet-tape out of her kit and cover the hole in her ear, then worked the blood out of her ear canal with her finger, the roaring silence of the cave clear once more. She heard echoes floating down from above, a man's voice, demanding a response. Harper.\n\nIdiot. Where was he going? Why had he left his position? Hadn't she asked for radio silence for at least twenty minutes? Had he not agreed to that? She knew the commander believed that Mitchell was entirely loyal to him, but that wasn't the case at all. She had joined Trinity for the opportunities to fulfill her potential. Harper had recognized her abilities, but that was like recognizing the sky was blue; she didn't owe him anything for noticing. Lately she'd been thinking about moving on to something else, bored by the competitive dynamic, the testosterone poisoning and ridiculous ideology flamed by Harper's tireless ego. She'd played along for too long, perhaps.\n\nWe'll see. If she survived, she would reassess. Resolving the unique relationship that she and Lara had entered into was her only interest at the moment.\n\nMitchell took out a flashlight, laid it across the CZ and pointed both at the ground, starting after Croft. If Harper interrupted her again, if anyone tried to interfere, she'd kill them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "The minutes stretched out. Harper waited. The air was getting harder to breathe as the dark tightened its grasp, squeezing him. Mitchell was taking her goddamn time.\n\nTwo shots spilled out of the passage to the maze in quick succession, close enough to make his ears ring. Mitchell! He tapped on his lamp and hurried to the opening.\n\nThe sudden cessation of the dark was such a relief that he followed the light further, to a split where the western branch tilted down. A handful of bats fluttered out into the pale light of his headlamp, disappearing into the dark behind him. He was sure the shots had come from below, and hurried on with his Glock up and ready, sidestepping down the rocky slope. Mitchell didn't fire without a target in sight.\n\nHe came out of the sloping tunnel into a long, low chamber with four openings. He hesitated, sweeping the dark, rocky holes.\n\n\"Mitchell, report,\" he snapped. She'd had enough goddamn time and he was close. If she hadn't just killed Croft, they'd have a better chance if they\u2014\n\nThere were three more shots, clearly coming from a thick crack on the western wall, a pause, and a fourth. No return fire.\n\nHe ran for the crack, boots pounding the mucky rocks. He squeezed inside, shuffling sideways into a tunnel that soon opened up enough for him to walk straight. He ducked beneath the dripping stone as he ran.\n\n\"Mitchell, report,\" he said again. \"Have you hit the target? What's your position? Do you copy?\"\n\nThe tunnel twisted and opened into a wide slope that curved south. He thought he heard running footsteps, a patter of sound, close enough that he expected to see the runner cross the slope in front of him. Where was it coming from?\n\n\"Mitchell!\" he called, crouching his way forward. He saw an opening in the rocks, hidden by a bulge in the stone on the north side of the passageway, and hurried to it, boots skidding in the crap. He stumbled into the hole, following the tight, downward spiraling curve. \"Mitchell! Answer me! What's your\u2014\"\n\nHe was still following the curve and wasn't watching his feet as closely as he should have been, the toe of his boot landing wrong on an angle.\n\nHarper lost his balance and pitched forward, stumbling, and the tunnel opened up suddenly, straight down.\n\nHe fell, cracking his knee on a rock at the lip of the hole, dropping through the dark, crashing on the bare rocks two and a half meters below. His right ankle twisted painfully under his weight.\n\nHarper staggered sideways, sweeping the Glock, taking in a flat, ugly chamber with tunnels branching off to every side. Empty, cold and dark. Crawling with bugs.\n\nHe looked up at the hole he'd fallen through, reaching for it, the barrel of the Glock almost touching the lowest rocks.\n\nSomething chirped. Harper turned, wincing at the pain in his ankle, and saw a big white lizard crawl out of a crack high in the wall, a few meters away. It chirped again, a raspy sound, like it was straining air through its many teeth, tilting its blind face to one side.\n\nHarper targeted it but didn't fire. It wasn't big enough to be a threat, but he couldn't stop himself from making a face, viscerally repelled by the hideous thing. It screeched at him, and he jumped at the unexpected change of pitch. It was a sound like someone stomping on a mating cat, or a bird being burned to death. He'd had plenty of time to make comparisons, sitting at the top of the labyrinth and listening to the creatures call, but he hadn't realized how loud they were, or expected to be so disgusted by the reality. Corpse white and eyeless, bones visible beneath its gelid skin, the monster abruptly went silent, then turned and darted back into its hole.\n\nHarper tapped his mic, spoke calmly. \"Mitchell, report. I'm in the maze, do you copy?\"\n\nNo answer. No footsteps, no shots. He had blundered into the tunnels, expecting to find Croft bleeding out and Mitchell standing over her at every single turn\u2026 And now he didn't know where he was, let alone anyone else. The maps they had of the maze were incomplete, only the tunnels closest to the dig marked clearly.\n\nIt's fine. You're fine. Croft and Mitchell both got down here somehow, and you're right behind them. Croft had to be heading for the climb that bypassed the main tunnels, and Sergei was waiting at the top of that climb. The rest of the team were coming in from the airstrip. She wouldn't escape.\n\nAssuming she's even alive. Mitchell had fired six shots. It was hard to believe all of them had missed. But then, why didn't she respond? He had to be close enough for Mitchell to have heard him. Even if the radios were useless, he'd been shouting. Or had Croft got hold of Mitchell's gun somehow? No, that was impossible.\n\nMaybe she decided not to answer. The thought made him uneasy. The problem with leading people like Mitchell, you couldn't entirely depend on them to defer to authority when they were hunting, and there was no leash to yank. It was possible that Croft had taken her down with an arrow\u2026 He couldn't actually imagine it, but he hadn't thought Hux would go out on this one, either.\n\nHarper hobbled closer to the wall, studying the marks that the dig team had left behind. The footsteps he'd heard had been just north of him, he was sure of it, possibly deeper than where he was. He picked the northernmost passage that was designated as connecting to another and started walking, ignoring the pain in his ankle and his knee. He had light and the Glock and a purpose\u2014he was hunting, too\u2014 and it beat the shit out of waiting in the airless dark for his players to play.\n\nI'm coming for you, now, he thought, steadying himself against the filthy rocks as he moved deeper into the winding, narrow passage. Even the not so distant scream from one of those repulsive monsters couldn't dim his fierce resolve, or the persistent feeling of fatefulness. The endgame was in sight."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "Setting up for the incoming Trinity thugs was a lot like staging a play. Props, lighting, costumes, directions for the actors. Jonah focused on the idea that he and Miguel were about to perform a scene, which was true\u2026 And it was also true that his plan could get both of them killed, but focusing on that wasn't going to help. He'd been roped into a drama-society production back at high school\u2014and now he remembered the advice the teacher had given him: Relax, stick to the script, don't psych yourself out. Once the curtain goes up, you'll be fine. All totally reasonable, but when they heard the approaching engine, Jonah's throat went dry.\n\nSince Miguel was shorter than Smith and clearly not blond, he was kneeling by the guards. The dead men were face down on the ground, hands tied behind their backs.\n\n\"Head down when they come in, wait until they're all out of the vehicle, then left to right, until they fall down,\" the pilot said. Was he reminding himself, or Jonah? He seemed less nervous than Jonah felt.\n\n\"Exactly,\" Jonah said. He would be firing right to left. He wished he could use the shotgun, but it was the wrong prop; the guard's fancy pistol would have to suffice. \"And remember, one of them won't be dressed in combat gear. Don't shoot him, unless he pulls a weapon.\"\n\nMiguel nodded. \"You really think this is going to work?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Jonah said. \"They're going to see what they expect to see, right?\"\n\n\"Right,\" Miguel said. \"But what if one of them is actually paying attention when they pull up?\"\n\nThen we're screwed. \"They won't,\" Jonah said. The faint engine sound was getting louder.\n\n\"What if they start shooting right away?\" Miguel asked. \"Do we fall back to the jungle, or can you blow up their truck or something?\"\n\n\"Blow up their truck?\"\n\n\"Like, shoot the gas tank.\"\n\n\"I don't think that even works,\" Jonah said. \"And honestly, I'm not that great of a shot.\"\n\nMiguel turned to look at him, blinking his light eyes. \"Didn't you say you were ex-military?\"\n\n\"I said I was in the army, but that was a long time ago,\" Jonah said. \"In New Zealand. And I was a cook.\"\n\nMiguel was starting to look sincerely worried. He picked at the Velcro strap to the vest beneath his shirt, fingers working nervously. \"But with the guards, you were so\u2026 You took them out like a professional or something.\"\n\nJonah almost told him the truth, that he'd been crazy lucky, but the engine was getting close and there was no time for another plan. The curtain was about to go up.\n\n\"This is going to work,\" he said, recalling the pep talks from his drama teacher. \"Clear your mind as much as you can\u2014and if you can't, that's okay, too, just let yourself be in the moment and do what you know you're capable of doing.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Miguel said, and blew out a breath. \"You're right. We got this.\"\n\nA single headlamp rose and bumped over the crest of rock to the east, the engine squealing.\n\nJonah adjusted the uncomfortable helmet and turned his back to the incoming vehicle, standing half behind one of the trucks they'd moved so that the new arrivals would have to park behind them. He'd traded shirts with Reddy and tried to ignore the cold sticky spots under the protective vest. At least the holes weren't obvious.\n\nMiguel turned his head away as the rusting truck clattered into view, reaching down as if to adjust handcuffs. Smith's helmet was big on him, and the pilot had slid it back to cover his hair. Jonah pointed the nine-millimeter, a Glock, at the back of Reddy's head, listening to the badly maintained engine sputter to a stop.\n\nStick to the script. Jonah raised one hand up in a wave, still facing away. He stepped forward and to his left so that he was near parallel with Miguel, clearing them both to fire as soon as they turned. He'd never been good with guns but Lara had worked with him on it, dragging him to the range every now and again. He could hear her calmly reminding him to relax his eye, to visualize where the rounds were going to go, not to pull the trigger but to squeeze it gently.\n\nThe single headlight went out, and two doors creaked open, passenger then driver. The jungle was recovering from the noisy intrusion, nocturnal life again taking up its chorus.\n\nA man with a slight lisp called out, \"What's the word, Reddy?\"\n\nJonah pretended he hadn't heard, listened to boots hitting the ground. Two men from the front, a third hopping down from the back.\n\n\"Who is that?\" someone else called. \"Sergei? You on guard duty?\"\n\nFootsteps, coming closer. Showtime.\n\nJonah nodded for Miguel's benefit, then turned and sighted the target farthest right, a tall Asian man holding an equipment bag, a Kevlar vest hanging off his shoulder. The lamps they'd set up were perfectly placed.\n\nThe gun's hair trigger spat out four rounds, all of them smacking into the man's broad chest. He was dead before he fell, the bag jangling to the ground, and Jonah had moved to the next target, a short, olive-skinned man who was scrabbling for his holster. He wore a vest and was gray at the temples.\n\nMiguel fired three times and someone shouted but Jonah only saw the man's face contorting into a vicious mask as he grabbed his gun, only saw the exact place he wanted his own rounds to go. Jonah squeezed the trigger, and two ugly holes appeared in his forehead. The short man dropped.\n\n\"Stop! I'll fucking kill him!\"\n\nJonah saw that Miguel's target, a burly young redhead with the broken nose and cauliflower ears of a boxer, had managed to survive getting shot\u2014blood poured from his left shoulder in two places\u2014and had jumped up into the back of the truck. He had grabbed another man, a pale, dark-haired guy in khakis who had his hands up and an expression of absolute terror on his otherwise nondescript face.\n\nTheir pilot. Red had a heavy silver semi pointed at the terrified guy's head.\n\nJonah raised the Glock, squinting, finding Red's twitching right eye. If he missed\u2026\n\nGet him to move.\n\n\"Why would I care if you shoot your own pilot?\" Jonah called, and watched the kid's dull eye churn, saw him decide to change tactics. Before Red had even started to swing his gun around, Jonah found the space between his own heartbeats and squeezed, a single round. The kid went down like a ton of bricks.\n\nThe pilot staggered forward, shrieking, hands as high as they could go. \"Don't kill me! Swear to God, I won't ever work for these people again! It was contract work, I only did it for the money\u2014\"\n\n\"Be quiet,\" Jonah said.\n\n\"\u2014and I only ever moved people and equipment, I never saw anyone get killed or\u2014\"\n\nJonah pointed the gun at him. \"Hush!\"\n\nThe pilot shut up, his eyes wide and shocked. There was blood on the side of his face from Red. Jonah let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding, lowering the weapon. Miguel was okay, he was okay.\n\n\"What's your name?\" Jonah asked, walking toward the truck, pausing to look at the dead men on his way. He didn't like killing, didn't believe in it as a practice, but sometimes there was no other way.\n\nYou've killed more than your share, following Lara. The thought was an unhappy one, and he did his best to set it aside. Not the time.\n\nThe pilot hadn't answered, and Jonah realized the man was still stuck on hush. Jonah pointed the gun at the ground, moving to the back of the truck.\n\n\"You can talk, man. Just stop yelling. What's your name? I'm Jonah.\" He looked at Red, another genius who hadn't gotten around to putting on his Kevlar. Not that it would have changed anything. The round had punched through his right eye.\n\n\"Winters, Brian Winters.\" He had bad teeth, pitted and yellowing.\n\n\"How long have you worked for Trinity?\"\n\n\"Less than a year, and only a few times.\" Winters lowered his hands slowly, keeping them in clear sight. \"Ah, four times. It's their plane, they just paid me to fly. I knew they were shady, what they were paying, but I never saw anything like this, I swear.\"\n\nJonah thought he might be telling the truth. He glanced at Miguel, who gave a tiny shrug.\n\n\"If we let you go, what are you going to do?\" Jonah asked.\n\nWinters radiated sincerity. \"Whatever you want.\"\n\nGood answer.\n\n\"Tell you what,\" Jonah said. \"Start walking back to the strip. If you stay on the road, you can get there in about four hours.\"\n\n\"I could take one of these trucks,\" Winters said hopefully.\n\n\"If I trusted you, that would be a possibility,\" Jonah said. \"But I don't. No offense. I mean, I believe you're sincere, and if Harper trusted you, he probably would have left you with the plane\u2014but if I'm wrong, I can't have you getting to a radio or those guns back at the compound. I guess you could hang out with us until we're ready to leave, but there may be more shooting.\"\n\n\"Okay, no, I'm good,\" Winters said, nodding. \"None taken, I mean. Thank you.\"\n\nHe climbed down from the back of the truck and hurried away, looking back over his shoulder every other step, stumbling into a run by the time he'd reached the edge of the jungle. He was gone a minute later.\n\nMiguel had stood up to watch the pilot run away, as Jonah walked back to join him. \"Sucks to be that guy,\" he said.\n\nJonah nodded. \"Long walk.\"\n\n\"I shot high,\" Miguel said. \"And then he was running, and I missed.\"\n\n\"You did great. It all worked out.\"\n\n\"It happened so fast.\" Miguel shook his head, took a shaky breath\u2014and then smiled. \"I thought you said you weren't much of a shot.\"\n\n\"I'm usually not,\" Jonah said. \"Hanging out with Lara\u2026 I guess I'm getting better.\"\n\nMiguel's smile faded. \"Is that a good thing?\"\n\nJonah didn't have a ready answer. He would die\u2014he had died\u2014for Lara, and would do it again\u2026 but his loyalty and love for her couldn't stretch to cover the people lost in the tsunami, and the idea that he was becoming a better killer didn't sit well with him, not at all.\n\nMiguel must have read something in his expression. \"So, what next, my friend?\" he asked.\n\nJonah sighed. \"The hard part. We wait.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "Shots rolled out of the tunnels, from deep in the maze. Sergei counted six. He thought he heard shouting. Harper? The echoes distorted everything but it had sounded deep. A few dozen bats came up from the labyrinth and flew away toward the drop.\n\nThe fuck. Sergei took a few steps into the southern tunnel. \"Commander?\"\n\nHe waited. Nothing. He was at the edge of the great winding darkness, could feel the weight of its empty silence and the secret life that crawled through the black muddy holes. He couldn't hear anything but the whisper of an echo, the scream of a lonely demon.\n\nSergei turned and started walking north, quickly, his body moving before he realized he'd decided. Koboshi, Byers, and Alanis were probably here by now. He would confirm, so that he'd have something to report when the commander and Mitchell came out. The Dozen were a tight outfit, orders were fixed, but Harper expected his A team to use their heads, to take the initiative when it came to keeping operations smooth. Confirming that everyone was standing by, that was the kind of thing that kept things smooth, was it not? That was what he told himself, and he was only hurrying because he had left his post and shouldn't be away for long, not because there was anything creeping along behind him in the dark, silently reaching out with spindly claws to tap him on the shoulder.\n\nThe hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end and he didn't look back, there was no reason to look back.\n\nSergei was more than halfway back to the drop when he heard what sounded like a truck's engine, some mechanical noise from the world above. The sound was like music, and made the cold, ugly silence of the caverns behind him all the more horrid.\n\nHe stumbled forward, gasping\u2014and then he heard the shots, ahead, on the surface.\n\nSergei froze, trying to count, but there were two nines firing: four and then a blur, four, five more?\n\nAre they shooting the hostages?\n\nThere was one more shot\u2026 and then nothing.\n\n\"Reddy?\" Sergei's voice came out in a strangled whisper. \"Reddy, come in.\"\n\nHis own voice whispered back at him, and Sergei couldn't stand it for another second. He spun around, the Springfield up, his lamp pushing the blackness back. There was nothing behind him but cold shitty rocks, dirt and bugs.\n\nReddy didn't answer. Sergei tried again, and then open called. Nobody answered. There wasn't even static, and he knew for a fact that he was close enough to get that much. He turned back toward the exit, but didn't move.\n\nThere was no way the men up top would have killed their insurance without a valid reason. Harper would be furious. With the backup lost, if Croft got out, she'd be gone. The only valid reason therefore was if the hostages were shooting back.\n\nImpossible. Even if they'd somehow gotten free and armed themselves, he would have heard more than two weapons firing. There were five Trinity men up there.\n\nAnd two prisoners. You thought you heard shots earlier. What if that was the boyfriend and the pilot escaping, and what you just heard was the rest of the Dozen going down?\n\nAn unlikely scenario, but the night seemed full of them. Assuming the worst was a handy survival tactic.\n\nGo closer, try again. At least you'll be out of this fucking cave.\n\nAnd if it's true? If there are now enemies waiting at the drop? They'll pick you off the second you step out of the tunnel.\n\nAs much as he desperately wanted to be out, he couldn't risk it. Inside the dig, he was afraid of the creatures, of the dark, but those were feelings. Catching a bullet in the face was a reality, and far riskier than his imagination. Whatever the monsters were, they didn't have guns.\n\nCroft does, though. And a bow. God, how he wished he could just walk away from this. For a half-second he considered crawling out of the tunnel and into that small patch of underground rainforest. He could find some palms and hide, and just wait for everything to be over. He'd at least be able to see a sliver of sky\u2026\n\nAnd then you'll walk away from this life forever, because no one will trust you and you won't trust yourself. You'll know that you were beaten, broken by your own fear. No more perfect shots.\n\nReluctantly, Sergei turned south again. Harper needed to know about the situation. He would go back to his post and keep trying to raise the commander, and wait, as ordered. If Croft made it to him, he would shoot to disable, not kill; if her friends had taken over they could use her to get out, but not if she was dead.\n\nSergei started walking. He told himself to hurry, but his body wouldn't listen. Every step deeper was a reason to slow down."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 43",
                "text": "Lara fished the LED out of her boot and scooped up the Remington on the run. She heard Mitchell come after her but the passage Lara was in widened and split almost immediately, widening into a chamber with multiple unmarked openings and a few marked connector passages. Lara ran for one on the west and slid inside, tapping off her lamp. Unfortunately she had to step around a curve and didn't have the view she wanted of the chamber, but if Mitchell managed to find her, she would regret it.\n\nLara waited\u2014and heard Mitchell run through, straight across and into one of the other tunnels.\n\nLara stuck her head out, saw the woman's shaded light fading down one of the passages marked with down arrows.\n\nWhy that tunnel? She didn't even look for prints.\n\nBecause she thinks she knows where I'm going. She thinks that I know where I'm going.\n\nFollow or take a different route? The woman was deadly. Lara didn't like the idea of trying to sneak up on her, but it might be a wise choice to take the offensive. And if she was right about Mitchell's thinking, the other woman would lead her to the exit.\n\nAnd, at any moment she can turn off her light, turn around and wait. A special skill for her, apparently. Lara had listened for a full minute before stepping into that passage, and hadn't heard her until she'd stepped in with her knife. Their subsequent waiting game in the dark had been cut short by Mitchell's radio, but before that, she might as well have been a ghost. If she set up another trap, there was no guarantee that Lara would sidestep it.\n\nSo what, then? Give up on the climb? Go back, go up? Or look for a different route?\n\nThere was a second passage marked with a down arrow, next to the opening Mitchell had gone through. If Mitchell was heading for the exit, that meant the route began below them somewhere. She could drop down, try to run parallel to Mitchell while she was still moving.\n\nGo now, then. Her soft footsteps were still dwindling away.\n\nLara moved quickly into the new passage, a tight, lifeless channel of dark rock that sloped rather dramatically after a few meters. The air coming up didn't smell good; it was wet and foul, but breathable.\n\nShe strapped on her gear and started down the slope, quickly having to drop into a near sitting position, edging forward on her hands and feet\u2014\n\n\u2014and she heard footsteps behind her, out in the chamber. Careful, light\u2014but heavier than Mitchell's, by a fair amount. She listened as the steps passed through, hesitated, and then fell away. Was the stranger following Mitchell? She couldn't be sure.\n\nTwo of them. That might complicate things.\n\nAnd? It's already complicated.\n\nShe had to turn to hop down a half-meter drop, noticing that the passage was starting to narrow. Looking ahead, she could see where it opened up again, over a level patch\u2014 but there was about a two-meter stretch that was going to be tight.\n\nShe scooted to where the rocks narrowed, sliding her feet in, twisting so that she could lower herself down. It was a test, fitting herself to the rocks, turning her hips and shoulders. There was a spot midway where she had to pull up so she could find solid footing, and that was when she heard the chirps in the tunnel beneath her\u2014and felt a cold, wet something knocking against her calf, touching where her pants had been torn.\n\nLara kicked her leg and there were more chirps, faster. She couldn't see past her own body, couldn't see how many there were, but there were at least three.\n\nShe kicked her legs aggressively, pushing herself down.\n\nOne of the things shrieked and she used the sound to slam her boot into the tunnel wall, making vibrations. There was a patter of movement, and another shriek. She was almost through when something clamped onto the back of her thigh and bit down.\n\nLara ejected herself violently and crashed a meter to the rocky floor. The salamander hung on, whipping its body when she hit the ground, trying to tear away a mouthful, and a half-dozen around her darted in, half of them screaming, jaws open.\n\nShe rolled, pushing down hard on the biter, smashing it into the rocks, feeling its soft body give, its bite releasing. She snatched the knife from her belt as she came up and switched on her lamp, slashing at the closest, hissing as loudly as she dared.\n\nThe blade skidded across its teeth, unhinging the animal's jaw in a mist of blood. She cut again, finding its throat. Before it fell she crouched forward and stabbed a second through its chest, still hissing.\n\nThere was a final half-hearted feint from one of them but then it dodged away, and the others did the same, falling back, but they didn't scatter, or turn and run. They backed away slowly toward a shallow pool that took up the entire southern end of the chamber, crying in short, aggressive bursts.\n\nDelicate shards of bone littered the shore. Roaches and white beetles skittered over small heaps of rotting fur. She saw movement in the pool, tiny flickers of white.\n\nThere were only two openings to the room, both on the north wall, neither marked. Lara backed toward them, placing her feet firmly, trying not to slip on the thin greasy layer of spoor or the insects feeding thereupon. She could feel blood welling out of the bite, trickling down the back of her leg. The salamanders stayed by the water, keeping between the intruder and their young. They had gone back to chirping.\n\nLara stopped and took a bandana out of her pack, tying it tightly around the stinging wound before examining her choices, keeping an eye on the salamanders. The tunnel on the right was impassable; two meters in, it narrowed to a crack about the width of her skull. The one on the left was thin but tall. At least she wouldn't have to duck.\n\nYou're in unmarked territory. You should climb back up now, go back. There are two people ahead of you already, that you know of, looking to block this exit. Even if you get past them, you'll be climbing at the end of this. Vulnerable.\n\nThey'll be looking to block every exit. And you're vulnerable as long as they're down here hunting you.\n\nShe wasn't going to be able to sneak out of the cenote without having to kill anyone else, and was resigned to the fact, but operating in the dark zone of a cave made frontal assaults extremely difficult. Light was a necessity and sound carried. If she had more time, things would be different\u2026\n\nShe was struck by the absurdity of the thought. If she had more time, so many things would be different. Every aspect of her life was defined by time\u2014regretting the loss of it, racing against it.\n\nYou're still headed out and you're almost there. She didn't let herself think about Jonah or Miguel, not yet, or that they were still long hours from the silver-crowned mountain they needed to find.\n\nLara turned off her headlamp and slid into the crack."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 44",
                "text": "Mitchell had reached the branch that led to the climb out and was starting to believe that Croft had gone another way or circled back\u2026 But then the cave animals sent up a cry, south of her, their strange voices huffing with alarm. A new sound.\n\nMitchell considered. The target might be the cause of the uproar. It certainly wasn't Harper. She could hear him behind her, descending the passage that led to the branch where she stood. He wasn't as loud as Sergei could be, but she was aware of his presence, a heavy step here and there. Was he limping? Croft wouldn't be able to miss him, either. Was the commander a liability to Mitchell, or a useful distraction? She hadn't decided yet.\n\nThe newts or whatever they were continued to huff, sharp, angry cries. Wait or go see?\n\nGo see.\n\nMitchell tapped on her lamp and looked at the south wall. There was a tunnel set high, a crawlspace that looked promising. She climbed into it and started up on her hands and knees. The rocks were cold and rough, the tunnel twisting but not long. It opened into a rock hole with another, smaller passage low to the ground, still south.\n\nMitchell crawled through. A low rock tapped her injured ear and bright sensation pulsed for a minute, whining and far away. She got her nine-mil up to wave through a nest of long-legged white spiders and dozens of them clambered over her face, tiny, panicked feet tickling her sweaty skin.\n\nShe crawled out into a room that had multiple unmarked passages, and quickly turned off her light, listening. The creatures had stopped screeching, but she could hear them chirping, ahead of her and to the right\u2026\n\nLight.\n\nMitchell felt a grin surface. Two o'clock, a narrow crack in the wall of the small room had lit up for only a second, a smudge of light there and gone\u2014and she heard the soft scrape of fabric against the stone, bare meters away.\n\nToo narrow for her to come out straight on. And she won't hear me over the sound of her own movement.\n\nMitchell crept to the passage, holstering the CZ, taking out her karambit, palming the small, vicious blade. She had a winning idea, one that formed fully in her mind in the time it took her to crouch in the dark next to the crack.\n\nCut twice.\n\nCroft kept her knife and her semi on a leather belt, one that she could slice through in an instant, if she cut in the right place. A hook and pull near the buckle, and Croft would lose everything\u2014except her bow, and Mitchell could pop the string with a single flick on her way up. Croft would be disarmed, forced to run\u2014or engage.\n\nMitchell listened to the careful passage, listened to Croft stop and wait for a moment before moving ahead. She watched in delighted anticipation as the tip of the target's boot appeared at the opening of the crack, her blood singing. Now!\n\nShe swept in and up, curved blade finding the thinner leather near the front, parting the thick hide with a single strong pull. The other woman gasped as the blade pierced her skin lightly.\n\nMitchell carried the movement smoothly upwards, hooking with the blade. The string on the bow broke with a twang and Mitchell dodged back a step. Yes, she's\u2014\n\nCroft brought the bow down and forward, stabbing Mitchell in the neck, knocking her backwards. The thin fiberglass tore through her skin and then she was choking, blood running down her throat.\n\nThe target charged out of the narrow crevice, swinging the bow wide. Mitchell ducked and then darted in, ready to slash on the follow-through, but Croft was still moving, incredibly fast.\n\nShe spun and brought the bow around again, smashing it into Mitchell's shoulder, sending her to the ground. Mitchell rolled and came up coughing, air and blood spraying. She dropped the knife and went for the CZ\u2014\n\n\u2014but Croft had reversed her swing and the bow smashed across her jaw, knocking her back. Croft jabbed with the bow again, powerfully driving it into the corner of Mitchell's mouth. More blood, more shining pain, two teeth torn free and floating.\n\nMitchell grabbed the CZ and brought it up but her opponent had moved, was already back at the crack somehow, flowing like water. She dove inside as Mitchell fired, bright strobing flashes that told her the target was already out of sight.\n\nAlready back at her belt.\n\nMitchell's head was spinning, she couldn't breathe without choking. She fired at the crack and edged rapidly west to an unmarked hole in the wall.\n\nTwo rounds came back at her from the crevice, the roaring crash of a .45. The first hit the rocks an inch behind her, spraying her with splinters of stone. The second winged her hip, poked a searing hole across the top. Blood started to pour.\n\nMitchell staggered into the tunnel, choking, pointing the CZ at the opening as she backed away. She had to stop the bleeding. And she'd lost her karambit.\n\nPerhaps you should stop inviting her to play, since you seem to keep losing.\n\nMitchell turned and hurried forward, stifling her cough, letting the broken teeth fall out in a rope of blood. Croft was ahead on this one, just as she'd had the advantage in the last interaction\u2014or did, until Harper had stumbled in. At their next meeting, Mitchell would end the game. No more knives. She, too, had underestimated Croft. She wouldn't repeat the mistake."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 45",
                "text": "Harper heard the shots just as he reached the opening to the climb\u2014a hole in the rocks over his head big enough to drive a truck through, leading up and up into the dark.\n\nHe heard Mitchell's CZ and the heavier thunder of Croft's gun, the shots echoing from behind him, back in the maze. Somewhere over his head a group of bats took flight, up and away.\n\nShit. He'd expected to find one or both of the women at the climb, and they were far behind him. Mitchell must have chased Croft off her route.\n\nHis radio crackled. \"Commander\u2026 in\u2026 you copy?\"\n\nSergei, at the top of the climb. His voice was low and anxious. He didn't sound like he expected an answer.\n\nHarper shined his flashlight up the long tunnel, considered how far back the women were. \"This is Harper. I'm right under you, in the maze.\"\n\n\"Commander?\" The Russian's voice gained a new urgency. The signal got sharper. \"I heard shots.\"\n\n\"Mitchell and Croft,\" Harper said, shifting his weight. His ankle hurt, and his knee kept stiffening up. \"They're behind me somewhere. Coming this way, I think, unless it's already over.\"\n\n\"No, I heard firing above ground a few minutes ago, at the drop,\" Sergei said. \"And I can't raise Reddy.\"\n\n\"We're too far in for contact,\" Harper said.\n\n\"Yes, but I walked back into the tunnel,\" Sergei said. \"Far enough, he should have heard me.\"\n\nNo. Can't happen. Maiava was a big dumb flunky and the pilot wouldn't say boo to a goose.\n\n\"I think you should take Croft alive,\" Sergei continued. \"If we have to negotiate\u2014\"\n\n\"That's not the mission here,\" Harper said, irritated by the suggestion. \"Have you forgotten our objective? She's on the run. The only thing we have to negotiate is the fastest way out, once she's dead.\"\n\nHe studied the walls of the overhead passage. He couldn't get through here, not without a rope. The climb was impossible, a bottleneck about fifteen meters up. Unless Croft could hang like a bat, she wasn't going to come this way either. A dead end.\n\n\"But if her friends have gotten loose, we may need to rethink our exit strategy.\"\n\nSergei wasn't wrong, although the idea that those two men had miraculously taken out half the team was too fantastic to invest in. Far more likely that the radios had finally crapped out.\n\n\"Do a recon, try to get a visual,\" Harper said. \"Then come back. Maintain radio silence until you hear from me unless you've got something to report. We're going to have to come back up through the maze to get out, we may need a relay.\" They had rope. He'd much rather climb than have to go back through those tunnels\u2026 But the maze hadn't been all that difficult. Unnerving, maybe\u2014the dark and the dreadful lizards and the stink\u2014but not difficult.\n\n\"Copy, yes, sir,\" Sergei said, almost eagerly.\n\nHarper moved back to the passage he'd taken in, turning off his light, listening for movement. Croft might not know that the climb was impossible, she would come looking\u2026 Unless Mitchell had killed her already.\n\nHe imagined Croft bleeding, crawling through the dark, convinced that her salvation was in front of her. She would lurch out in front of him begging for her life and he would shoot her down, and leave her to the lizards.\n\nAnd then maybe have Sergei bring that rope in, after all. He didn't want to walk back through the creeping, whispering chambers. God only knew what diseases were breeding down here. And what if his batteries died? They hadn't packed for an extended trip. Hux had been carrying spares but Hux was gone.\n\nKilled by Croft.\n\nHis anger kept him warm, kept him breathing. He waited, willing Croft to him, praying that he was to be the instrument of her death."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 46",
                "text": "Mitchell took off west, leaving a small trail of blood behind. Not a mortal injury\u2014Lara was sure she'd only grazed her\u2014but between that and the hole in her throat, she was out of the hunt, at least for the moment. Lara considered following, finishing the madwoman off\u2014for who else but a psychopath would keep trying to stab her when they had a gun? But she was likely only minutes from the climb, and might have a clear shot at the exit.\n\nExcept for whoever else it was that you heard walking through. She pulled a new bowstring from her pack as she hurriedly crept down a western-veering passage, stopping at an alcove long enough to repair the broken weapon and her gear. She pulled the string over one end of the bow and put the other end in its grooves, then stepped through, holding the bow fast with her feet, curving it against her body and pushing it forward to hook the string at the top. The belt took a minute longer; she made four cuts through the leather, two on each side, and patched it together with carabiners. It hung lower than she liked but was good enough. Blood oozed from where the knife had sliced into her belly, but the cut wasn't deep. She taped it anyway, wondering if Mitchell would come after her again.\n\nOf course she'll come after you. She's a killer with a thing for knives and that was her second try. Trinity was an organization of psychopaths with funding. Dressing it up with devotion to some grand end result didn't negate who they were, at their core.\n\nPeople who kill indiscriminately? Who can shrug off the deaths they cause, rationalize killing their enemies?\n\nShe had a sudden vivid flash of that child clinging to the cross on top of the church, reaching for her, framed by the rushing water in the streets below. The look on that small face.\n\nDon't do this. Concentrate.\n\nLara stepped out of the alcove and started forward again. She hit a dead end at the next branch and had to backtrack, but the second opening she tried carried her north. The narrow passage went up, a gentle, steady incline, but the tunnel was winding and uneven. She had to crouch or crawl for most of it, and was starting to think of going back when she saw the end of the passage ahead of her, by the shaded light of the LED\u2014the passage narrowed to a slot that opened up at the top, wide enough for her to climb out but barely. She put out her light and edged toward the opening.\n\nIt was quiet, but she got the sense that the opening on the other side of the hole was a big one\u2014the press and quality of the air, the faint roar of echoing space.\n\nPlease let this be it. She'd come far enough, she was sure, to have reached the end of the maze. But was someone guarding it? She didn't hear anything but wasn't sure that she would, unless the watcher was quite close or actively moving.\n\nThrow something.\n\nLara reached for her belt, for one of her grease pencils\u2014 and then grabbed a flare instead, pulling the cap off. If there was someone in the chamber, she'd get a clear shot at them. If there wasn't, she'd be able to cover herself getting to whatever was next.\n\nLara struck the flare and tossed it.\n\nTwo shots blasted. The shooter was less than three meters down and close enough that she might have hit him with the burning stick.\n\nThe gun's echoes faded and she heard movement, fast steps\u2014and then two more shots were fired at the rocks in front of her, chips raining over her shoulders. A second later, another shot fired, the round off to her right a few meters\u2014and then another shot, hitting above her position and farther east.\n\nThey must be aiming at openings in the wall. The lone shooter didn't know where the flare had come from, but clearly, there were several options.\n\nThere were a few more quick steps. The shooter ducked into a passage beneath her and stopped. The hiss of the flare echoed at her but the gunman had gone still.\n\nLara raised her bow up into the opening, following it with a quick look when no one shot at it, taking in the glowing red well before ducking back down. If it was the climb she was looking for\u2014and she feared that it was\u2014she was out of luck. The walls of the passage overhead sloped inward, a long stretch that she wouldn't be able to climb without spikes.\n\nPast that, though? What if you can go in higher?\n\nThere were other openings from the maze, the shooter had been firing at them. She could climb to a higher passage, stay close to the well, and see if she could get past the tricky part. She didn't want to go back into the maze, not this close to the way out.\n\nThe walls flickered red. The man below her held still but she imagined she could feel his tension. He didn't know if she was perched on the wall, waiting for him to stick his head out, or if he could safely take a shot. He was stuck.\n\nThere was a passage close overhead, only a few meters up. It was bracketed by deep cracks, easy holds.\n\nLara stood, pointing the Remington toward the ground at the bottom of the chamber, watching the hissing red shadows closely as she slid out of the crevice. The flare had landed in a mud slick, but sputtered on. She stepped onto the lip of the passage and wedged her left hand into one of the cracks, keeping the gun trained on the opening below, pushing upward.\n\nShe had to glance away long enough to find her next step\u2014and the shooter seemed to know it. She saw a narrow flash of dark, furious eyes behind the barrel of a Glock, and then two rounds were fired, both high. Lara fired back at him, missing him by centimeters as the man ducked into his tunnel.\n\nLara charged up the rock, firing again just before she reached the ledge of the next opening. She threw herself in. Another two rounds from the Glock smacked into the rocks over her head, useless, echoes from both weapons crashing through the tall chamber, lapping at her ringing ears.\n\nThere was a single passage south. Unless she wanted to try for another ledge, this was the next step.\n\n\"You can't get out!\" the man called up, his voice tight with barely contained fury and a note of glee. \"There's nowhere to run!\"\n\nLara didn't bother correcting him\u2014he was certainly wrong on the second count\u2014but she had to wonder at his rage. As though he hated her, personally. She'd killed two of his teammates, but they'd been trying to murder her. Did he not expect her to fight for her life? Did he think his derision was going to dishearten her? She was worried about Jonah, she was afraid she wouldn't be able to stop the disasters she'd triggered, she was in a desperate hurry to look at her pictures and figure out how to get ahead of Trinity, and part of her own mind had become a kind of maze itself, of doubt, guilt, worry, and there were wells everywhere she turned. The arrogance of the man's taunt meant less than nothing to her.\n\nFine, unless he gets on your tail. He wants you dead. Badly. She could still see his fiery eyes. Rasputin came to mind, and the name stuck in her head. He had the black eyes of a man burning inside, a man with a mission\u2014but for all that, only a man.\n\nLara left Rasputin behind in the flickering red chamber and moved on, back into the maze."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 47",
                "text": "Harper didn't hear Croft leave but knew when she was gone, sensing that he was alone again. The flare sputtered and hissed, lighting the cavern with hellish shadows.\n\nHe was infuriated that she'd just walked up the wall in front of him. He'd only seen her for a blink but the way she'd looked down at him, her jaw firm, her eyes narrowed and unafraid as she fired\u2026 Who was this girl, to treat him so dismissively? She should be terrified. She should be pleading for her life!\n\nHe'd assumed that she would take the only tunnel leading to the climb, but in fact, it was the only tunnel that the dig team had marked as coming from the maze, and when did site mappers put in more effort than was strictly necessary? Their intel was incomplete. And how could he have expected that she would squirm through the rocks like some cave lizard, or crawl up the walls?\n\nAnother failure. Did you underestimate her again, or have you only overestimated your own skills, and the skills of your team?\n\nUnacceptable and wrong\u2014this wasn't how it was supposed to go. The impotence of his rage beat at him, turned him back into the maze. She was above him but not far; there had to be a way up that he could use. He turned on his headlamp and ran, the light flashing over the walls, the ceiling.\n\nHe found a wide crack on the eastern wall that ran into another opening, a tunnel or a room. He slid in, his heart pounding. He would find her and end this, now.\n\nHe stepped into another tunnel and saw an opening practically in front of him, one that sloped gently upward. He hurried in, listening for her footsteps. The ground became rockier as he went; he clambered the final few meters over rounded slopes of smooth rock. His knee and ankle protested but the pain wasn't enough to slow him down.\n\nHarper came out in a low, rocky tunnel. At the end of it to his left, perhaps fifteen meters away, the light from the flare flickered. There was another western passage between him and the open chamber he'd left behind, and he hurried toward it eagerly. He couldn't get lost this close to the climb and she couldn't be far above him, not now.\n\nHe reached the opening, and saw that it was only a divot in the rock.\n\nHe turned, grip tight on the Glock, looking for another passage that he could use. The tunnel ran off past several openings on both sides before vanishing into darkness. He wasn't even sure which one he'd come through\u2014\n\nBehind him, the red light died. The mud had finally won.\n\nHarper started down the tunnel, dimming his lamp. No matter. If he had to search every crack, every room, crawl down every passage, he was going to find her, he was going to wipe that dismissive look off of her face."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 48",
                "text": "Sergei worked out his plans on the way back to the opening. This was it, the last time he was going to make this fucking walk. Harper and Mitchell didn't need his help climbing out. If Sergei lost his status for disobeying orders, that would be too bad, but he wasn't going back in.\n\nHe heard more shots from inside the maze, blasts that rolled over him through the long tunnel and sent new flurries of bats winging past\u2014Harper's Glock, he thought, and Croft's gun. How many shots would it take to kill that woman? Harper had misjudged the situation, thinking that Croft was on the run. It seemed to Sergei that she'd stayed ahead of them pretty easily so far.\n\nSergei dodged the bats and hurried on, every miserable second confirming his decision. If the Dozen were all accounted for, he would station himself at the entrance and wait. If that was not the case, he'd bargain his way out, at least to a position where he could take the offensive.\n\nHe finally got close enough to the entrance to see the shapes of trees ahead, dappled in pale blue starlight. He couldn't see the sinkhole's opening from the cave's entrance but there was no chance he wasn't close enough.\n\n\"Reddy, come in.\"\n\nNo answer, and was he really expecting one? This shitshow of a night just went on and on.\n\n\"If anyone's listening, identify yourself,\" Sergei said. \"We've got Croft. Unless you want us to put a bullet in her skull, you'll answer.\"\n\nThere was a brief pause, and then a calm voice spoke in his ear, low and even.\n\n\"Let me talk to her.\"\n\nFuck.\n\n\"We're holding her inside,\" Sergei said. He flipped the safety on the XD and stuck it into his collar at the back of his neck. It wasn't stable and it pulled at the fabric, the front of the shirt tight against his throat, but he only needed it to hold for a few minutes.\n\n\"Right,\" the man said. \"So, bring her out, we can talk.\"\n\n\"Jonah, right?\" Sergei asked. \"Who's left up there? Maybe we can work out some kind of trade.\"\n\n\"That sounds good,\" Jonah said. \"Bring her out, we'll trade.\"\n\nSergei changed tack, readying himself. Jonah definitely had the advantage, the higher ground, but he wasn't prepared for Sergei's expertise with the XD.\n\n\"Okay, fine. I don't know where she is, I don't know where anybody is. Just let me out of this place, there's things in here. I surrender, okay? You can tie me up, I don't give a shit, I just want out.\"\n\nThere was a long silence and Sergei waited. Jonah had to believe him, because he was telling the absolute truth. Not about surrendering, but the rest of it.\n\nSparks of burning red rained down from the top of the cenote, far above, landing among the trees in front of him. Four, five flares.\n\n\"Walk out where I can see you,\" Jonah said. \"Hands up. Move wrong and I'll shoot.\"\n\nSergei took a breath and stepped out of the tunnel and into the dark, the regular, normal dark of heavy shade at night, the smell of green life. He turned off his headlamp and walked slowly toward the drop point, angling to keep the XD hidden as he moved into view from the opening high above. He put his hands on top of his head.\n\n\"I'm unarmed,\" Sergei said, as sincerely as he could. \"I lost my gun in there, please don't shoot.\"\n\nHe looked up at the wide circle of stars, searching for movement, shapes against the night sky, but there was nothing. No lights up there, only the pale stars and a moon he couldn't see.\n\n\"I'm unarmed,\" he repeated, moving through the wavering shadows toward the first of the flares, bitter smoke rising through the red light. He saw a dark silhouette bob up for a second on the east side of the hole\u2014and then a flashlight snapped on, a powerful one, the beam making him squint. He slid his hands to the back of his head.\n\n\"Far enough. Turn around.\"\n\nHe couldn't see the man behind the light but it was a clear target\u2014and he saw a second shape, the head and shoulders of another, peering over the side.\n\nNow!\n\nSergei grabbed the XD and fired, twice, the first shot shattering the light, the second knocking down the second man, two perfect shots. Triumph swelled his heart as he dove for the nearest cover, a clutch of palms not two meters ahead\u2014\n\n\u2014and white heat blasted through his back and his side, between the thick pads of his vest, tearing into his guts. A second shot was mostly deflected off his chest armor, but the third seared into his thigh, the hearty blasts of a shotgun echoing through the open chamber. Pain exploded through him, muscle and bone torn apart. Blood jetted out of his leg, spraying wildly.\n\nSergei crashed to the ground, understanding immediately that he was dead as his blood fountained down over him. Within seconds the pain was fading, the dreadful heat turning to ice, freezing him, like he was back under the ground.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" Jonah asked, and for a beat Sergei thought he was talking to him and was confused, his thoughts firing strangely, but then someone else answered, breathlessly, the words unclear. The second man.\n\nWhy would he be talking to you? You tried and you lost. Your two perfect shots were useless. Now you're going to die, you're never going to eat another meal or have another drink or make love to another beautiful woman. It's all over.\n\nWith the last of his rapidly draining strength, Sergei managed to roll onto his back.\n\nAt least I'm out of that fucking cave, he thought, staring up at the stars until they winked out."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 49",
                "text": "Jonah had been lying on the ground with the flashlight out over the drop and the shotgun propped across his arm. He let go of the light even as the Russian fired\u2014\n\n\u2014and then Miguel was on his back, and Jonah was firing, and Miguel squeezed his eyes tight and didn't move until Jonah asked him if he was okay.\n\nJonah reached and offered his hand to Miguel. Miguel let himself be pulled to his feet, trying to catch his breath. The bullet had knocked him down like a punch, but hadn't gone through the hot, bulky vest. He couldn't believe it.\n\nMiguel staggered when he got to his feet, touching his chest. Right over his heart. If he hadn't been wearing the Kevlar, he would be dead.\n\n\"I thought you were going to stay back,\" Jonah said, turning off his microphone.\n\n\"He said he was unarmed,\" Miguel said, realizing how stupid that sounded even as it came out of his mouth, but Jonah only nodded.\n\n\"Trinity's not an honest group, on the whole,\" he said. He leaned forward to look over the rim of the drop again. Miguel risked a glance. He could see the Russian lying face up at the bottom, light from the flares bathing him in red. His expression was strangely peaceful for someone shot full of holes. The blood from his wounds only oozed, black liquid in the strange light.\n\n\"You don't think they have Lara?\"\n\n\"No,\" Jonah said. \"I think they're running around in circles looking for her, and she's picking them off one at a time.\"\n\n\"How?\" Miguel asked. \"I mean, why do you think so?\"\n\nJonah stepped away from the edge. He still wore the Kevlar but had taken off the bloody black shirt he'd worn to fool the men who'd come. He picked up a water bottle off the ground, drank, passed it to Miguel.\n\n\"Lara, she's\u2026 She grew up with a kind of legacy, I guess you could say, to find hidden things, artifacts. To keep them away from men like Dominguez. She's had a lot of private instruction. And a lot of practical experience. Her father was an archaeologist, and worked against Trinity until his death. Her guardian after that was a treasure hunter and ex-Royal Marine.\"\n\nMiguel was fascinated. \"So she just\u2014she goes around trying to stop people from using these artifacts for evil purposes?\"\n\n\"Not exactly. She just\u2026 she gets caught up in these ideas,\" Jonah said. \"She means well, but she also gets fixated, and won't let anything stop her or even distract her from what she wants to achieve. She's like a force of nature.\"\n\nLike before when Jonah had talked about getting better with a gun, Miguel got the impression that he wasn't happy about what he was saying.\n\n\"So you're not worried about her,\" he said.\n\n\"Oh, I'm definitely worried. Any idiot with a gun can get lucky, and these people are trained. She's not invincible.\"\n\n\"You just\u2026 you seem so calm about it,\" Miguel said. \"I barely avoided pissing my pants about five times tonight already. You say you're scared, but you don't act like it.\"\n\nJonah shrugged, sitting down on the rocks. \"I'm working on my mindfulness.\"\n\nHe said the word like he was using quote marks. Miguel couldn't tell if he was kidding. He sat down, too. His legs felt rubbery.\n\nThe big man looked at the cenote and sighed. \"She's doing what she does. What she was born to do, maybe. I have faith in her, but yeah, it's scary.\"\n\nMiguel continued to be impressed with how honest Jonah was, about everything. His clear respect for Lara boosted Miguel's esteem for both of them.\n\n\"How did they even find us?\" he asked.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Jonah said. \"I think they got to the guy who gave Lara the info about this place. That, or he sold us out. Harper definitely knew we were here.\"\n\nHe nodded at Miguel. \"When she gets back, we're going to want to be out of here ASAP. Think you can sleep some more?\"\n\n\"I seriously doubt it,\" Miguel said. He was pretty wide awake from getting shot, adrenaline working its jittery way through his blood. His brain hadn't processed much of anything since he'd hit hostage status, but he still felt good, even a little giddy.\n\n\"It may still be a while, is all,\" Jonah said, then cleared his throat. \"Listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate what you're doing for us. You stepping up like you have, that's a pretty awesome thing.\"\n\nMiguel grinned. \"If you count not dying as stepping up, I'm your man. Although to be fair, you're the only ones not shooting at me.\"\n\nJonah smiled back at him. \"We lucked into you, Miguel. You're a good pilot and a good guy.\"\n\nMiguel was at a loss for words. When was the last time anyone had praised him so warmly, for anything?\n\nWhen was the last time you did anything worth praising?\n\nJonah picked up on his awkwardness and smoothed it right over. \"If you're hungry, there's some stuff in the duffel\u2014trail mix, jerky, protein bars.\" He wrinkled his nose. \"I'd stay away from those, actually. Lara likes them but they're disgusting. Like eating chocolate-flavored tar paste.\"\n\nMiguel realized he was hungry. They'd missed dinner, and apparently abject terror burned a lot of calories. He got up and walked to the bag on the ground in front of the trucks, fishing out several packets of food to carry back. Both of them ate, and it was probably the best food Miguel had ever eaten, the flavors electric, salty and sweet. The temperature had dropped to nearly comfortable, and the living jungle carried on its business, surrounding them with the whir and hum of life\u2014chirps and squawks and rustling, a commotion of some animal conflict far south, a single mournful cry, rising and then fading.\n\nJonah watched the cenote patiently, the shotgun across his lap, and after he'd eaten he went back to not talking much. Miguel could feel his tension as the minutes passed, as bats came and went and the jungle resumed its buzz. He hoped that Lara was safe, and that she'd be back soon. He also hoped that she was every bit as good as Jonah maintained, and that Harper and his killers all got what was coming to them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 50",
                "text": "Mitchell found a sheltered hole and stripped off her vest and shirt. She ripped the poly blend into strips, leaning over so that the blood could drip from her mouth and throat. More blood ran down the outside of her leg, already puddling in her boot.\n\nShe stuffed a knotted strip into her mouth and bit down, forcing the fabric against the ragged holes where an upper incisor and the tooth behind it had been knocked out. She bandaged her throat and hip and spent a moment applying pressure to both, on her knees in the small, low hole she'd found, bent over to keep from choking. A white millipede nearly the length of her forearm crawled past her on the bare rock, its body rippling on feathery legs. She watched it disappear into a crack and waited for the bleeding to slow down. It took a few minutes.\n\nWhen everything was only oozing, she reloaded her weapon and put her vest back on. She used handfuls of cold mud to cover her bare arms, smudging more of it into her hair and across her face. It felt good on her swollen mouth.\n\nShe shaded her light and left the scant shelter, listening for echoes of movement, then headed north, stopping to drink deeply from a perfectly clear pool, the cold water stuttering down her throat like acid and tasting of her own blood. Croft had taken a detour from the main passages but she'd definitely been heading to the northernmost exit from the maze; there was no other way out from this deep. Harper would be waiting there, if he hadn't gotten lost. The commander was highly competent in most things, he led the team for a reason, but Croft was operating at a creative level\u2014an artist of reaction and critical, timely thinking, a powerful instrument of her own will. Harper was a hammer and he was driven by emotion, as most men were. Not that there weren't literally billions of feckless women. Both sexes were hampered by their crudest feelings, Mitchell felt, missing every nuance of their lives in order to scratch their itchy spots\u2014sex, power, self-victimization, control. Wasted lives.\n\nMitchell found a long chamber with a number of openings. She turned off her light and hung at the center of the chamber, where she could hear the tunnels breathing. She didn't have to wait long. Ahead of her, north and down, Harper fired multiple times\u2014and Lara fired back. The commander shot again and then stopped, the echoes spinning around Mitchell and away\u2026\n\nAnd she heard a whisper of footsteps, Harper's heavy, hurried tread, she thought, only because she couldn't imagine Croft moving so recklessly. Was he limping? The steps were faint and faded quickly.\n\nHe's chasing her, or thinks he is. But where is she going? If the climb out was as steep as the Trinity map indicated, Lara wouldn't be able to attempt it with someone on her tail. Would she try to go up where she was, or turn back south, access the upper tunnels farther along the maze?\n\nHarper's performance was dismal. He'd had no contact with Mitchell; for all he knew she was dead. If he was behind Croft now and she climbed up, that meant she only had to go through Sergei to get out. Sergei was definitely outmatched. He could shoot, but that was all.\n\nOr maybe she'll find her own way out, a vent or a crack somewhere. The rest of the Dozen were killers, but except for the tempestuous Reddy, they weren't worth much when it came to strategy. Little Alanis had some sense but couldn't lead. If Lara's big friend was half as competent as her, they might already have a problem. And if Croft got out somewhere else and went back for her people, the Dozen would be fucked.\n\nIt was moot, Mitchell planned to kill her, but meeting Lara had underscored for her how lacking Harper's Dozen actually were. Harper had been at the top of the food chain for too long without challenge. Leading a team of wolves among sheep, he'd forgotten that there were other wolves.\n\nNo, not a wolf. Lara was something brighter and sharper. She had skill and a guiding intelligence that put every one of the Dozen to shame, painting them as thugs with guns. Only Mitchell could even see what she was, let alone hope to challenge her.\n\nShe'll try to go up as close as she can to where she is. There weren't a lot of options, most of the maze's tunnels curved away from the climb, but she had to be in a hurry by now. Harper had probably chased her off her route.\n\nMitchell looked at her map. There was a good-sized chamber between where she was and where she thought Lara might be looking, one that intersected several of the maze's layered tunnels. It didn't connect to the top but it led to tunnels that would, eventually. An ideal place to stand and listen, a bigger web for Mitchell to sit at the center of, waiting for Lara to whisper along one of its threads.\n\nOr she'll fly straight into the heart of it. But you have to get there first.\n\nShe headed north and west, quickly, silently. She felt renewed, expectation silencing the cries of her damaged flesh. She was glad that she hadn't had the opportunity to kill Harper. His inept pursuit might help push Lara right into Mitchell's waiting arms."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 51",
                "text": "Lara worked her way up, climbing from crack to passage, forced to stray farther from the well than she wanted; the tunnels of the maze had a tendency to dead-end every time she tried to veer back north, and her marks were the only ones this deep. Once she hauled herself up nearly four meters before the crack she was in became impassably narrow, and she had to drop back down.\n\nRasputin was looking for her, below her and to the north, a scuffle of steps that came and went. He had a limp; she could hear it in the hop-step of his gait. She did her best to keep the gap between them but was on high alert, aware that he might find a way up at any time. Three times she passed by chirping salamanders, but they were solitary, and none of them attacked; they scuttled away into the deep dark, tails slashing.\n\nShe was duckwalking through an east-veering rounded tube when she passed an oddly angled crack in the rocks, less than a meter high. She flattened herself to the rocks and looked inside. Nothing, a wall less than a meter ahead\u2014but the stale air was heavy and cool, not stuffy. She edged inside, looking up.\n\nA hole just big enough to climb into angled up from the smooth stone, bending north.\n\nLara marked the secret tunnel and started to climb. It was snug, but nothing she had to go into contortions over. A short curve and the passage opened into a\u2014\n\nOh.\n\nShe stepped up into a small chamber with smooth walls. A neat line of glyphs was carved beneath a drawing like the one she'd seen at the other end of the dig, in the room marked with a circle\u2014short lines of true, brilliant Maya blue in columns. There were more than thirteen in this painting, thin lines to either side of thicker ones. Five rows. The glyphs next to the ambiguous lines were the originals carved, no blurred lines, and were the same as those that had been written on the tunnel wall at the top of the site, but none of these were damaged. On the floor in front of the paintings was a small clay bowl, delicately carved with images she already knew too well: the Silver Box of Ix Chel, which she had seen in a mural in Mexico, and the Key of Chak Chel, something she had held in her own hands.\n\nThe room was unmarked and clearly deeper than Trinity had gone looking. They would have taken the beautiful bowl. Lara felt a rush of excitement, stepping in to look at the glyphs, careful not to disturb the bowl.\n\nWalk, path, stars, follow, path, rings, sacred place, stones, something, message\u2026\n\nLara took out her camera\u2014unless someone was in the tunnel directly outside and looking for it, the flash wouldn't be seen in the hidden room\u2014the glyphs and lines as clear as if they'd been painted only recently, the words repeating in her mind.\n\nRings?\n\nLara considered the stacks of blue lines again\u2026 and thought of the pillars in the puzzle room. They had been painted with rings. There had been at least five formations that stretched all the way to the ceiling. Mateus had sketched them in his notebook, too. Not lines, rings.\n\nJourney the path of the stars to follow the path of rings, at the sacred chamber of stones. A message is revealed.\n\nThe key to the puzzle. Lara wished she could stop and look at her photos, compare the line stacks to the ringed columns of the puzzle room. The back wall of that chamber had been covered in glyphs. Were the rings meant to physically indicate specific words, or was it a counting code?\n\nShe tamped her sudden enthusiasm, putting it away with her camera. The chamber was an incredible find but there weren't any exits, and Rasputin was still looking for her.\n\nAnd you let Mitchell go. It had seemed a reasonable idea at the time; she'd thought she'd been leaving\u2026 But she'd made the decision based on what she'd wanted, not reality, and now Mitchell could be anywhere. In almost every interaction with these killers, she'd chosen to turn and run for the exit. She couldn't keep doing that and expect to make it out.\n\nShe climbed back down into the crevice and slid into the wider tunnel, one that relentlessly steered her farther into the maze. She had to be getting close to one of the large chambers that connected the inner passages; she would go up and try again.\n\nLara kept an arrow nocked, wary of announcing her passage with more gunfire, her senses tuned and open as she crept ahead. No more mistakes, not down here.\n\nShe had just reached a bend in the low rocks when she heard a salamander start to shriek, below her and a bit south\u2014\n\n\u2014and five shots fired, no hesitation between them, stopping the animal's cry instantly."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 52",
                "text": "Where the fuck was she? He couldn't hear Croft, couldn't hear anything but lizards and bats and his own breathing, the drip of water, the festering crawl of insects in a vast and uncompromising blackness. Harper stopped in one of the endless curving tunnels and looked at his map, and his compass.\n\nWhere the fuck am I? The map was a quivering knot of meaningless lines when it came to the labyrinth, only useful if one knew where one was already. His fever to track Croft had been tempered by a growing disquiet as his rage dissipated. There were no markings this deep and he'd been choosing his route by instinct\u2026 Except, hadn't he walked through this tunnel already? He thought he remembered the same stretch of rocks, the way they narrowed and then flared\u2026\n\nHe put away the phone and started forward. He would go up, as soon as he found an ascent. Mitchell had been offline for too long, she could very well be dead, and his rush to catch Lara had been a misstep. He should have walked back out the way he'd come in, retreated immediately to the drop to prepare for her arrival.\n\nHe stepped over a dip in the rocks, wincing. His knee and ankle were swollen, his limp getting worse.\n\nIt didn't matter. Sergei would be back in position by now, everyone else standing by at the drop. He would climb out and lead them, and they would settle with Croft in the open air, away from this hideous pit. They could dump her and her friends inside, set off one of the big charges, burn this site permanently.\n\nYes, good. And climb up where, exactly?\n\nHis headlamp dimmed very slightly. Harper tapped at it, a pulse of dread threading through his veins, knotting his gut\u2014\n\n\u2014and a lizard screamed, not five feet away, hanging from the rocks where it had crept in close.\n\nHarper brought up his Glock and fired, the first shot blasting it off the tunnel wall, four more rounds pulverizing its wet flesh, blood and tissue spattering up in hot flecks.\n\nThe slide locked back on the Glock, the trigger dead. He was empty.\n\nFive rounds. He'd fired in a panic, and just alerted Croft to his exact location. Over a fucking lizard.\n\nHarper reloaded quickly. The light was definitely dimmer. He had to go up now, immediately. His phone had a light but it would burn through the battery in minutes.\n\nHe tapped on his mic, keeping his voice low. \"This is Harper. Everybody fall back to drop point, repeat, fall back to drop point.\"\n\nNo answer, of course\u2026 And it was dawning on him what a bad position he was in, that he'd willingly put himself into. He'd been so certain of their chances coming after her, he hadn't considered that they might fail. That he might fail.\n\nYou haven't failed, nor will you. You will force her surrender with the collateral, as was always the fail-safe. You only have to get out.\n\nHarper hobbled past the bloody carcass of the lizard, visible, gory proof that he'd lost his composure, overreacted in a moment of fear. When he saw a tunnel that looked like it went up, he took it."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 53",
                "text": "Mitchell had only just reached the entrance to the large, open chamber when she heard the shots. Below and south. It was Harper's Glock.\n\nShooting at Croft? She didn't think so. One of the cave animals had started to shriek right before the first shot.\n\nHarper must have been startled. There was no telling where the target was.\n\nSo thinking, she moved into the big room carefully, turning off her lamp as soon as she was inside, only a sense of vastness before she was in the black, rock formations on the floor, water to the east. There were a few chirps and a stir of movement from one or more of the lizard-like creatures, the scratching of bugs, bats rustling high overhead. The small sounds echoed, the effect like gentle audio feedback, blurred and steady. In some distant tunnel north there was a stir of more bats; from the southeast, a lizard's cry. Perfect. When she felt reasonably sure she was otherwise alone, Mitchell tapped the light back on, quickly assessing the chamber.\n\nIt was impressive, forty feet high and big enough to fit a house into, with multiple entrances at the floor and higher\u2014 open holes dotted the walls, ledges leading between some of them. Mitchell counted eleven openings in all, facing every direction, climbing all the way to the ceiling\u2014a warren of partially collapsed tunnels, arching patches of holes small and large; dozens or hundreds of bats nestled in the cracks and flitted through the shadows there, disappearing into the broken passages.\n\nShe had come in from southwest right at the floor, which pulsed with its blanket of insects, rolling humps and puddles and black-and-white between the scattered stalagmites. She saw six of the blind lizards at the far side of the chamber, stationed at a long stretch of water that curved along the east wall. Salamanders, she decided. Lizards had scales, salamanders were the ones that stayed near water. They didn't approach her or move from the pool, only chirping and listening.\n\nAt the southern curve of the chamber wall, the stone had eroded away into layers, creating natural steps that ran up to well past the room's midpoint, perhaps thirty feet up. They weren't symmetrical or flat but there were angles to climb, cover to be had in the passages they touched.\n\nGet as high as you can. Croft would be heading up. Even if she didn't come through here, Mitchell was counting on hearing her attempt to make her ascent, and wanted to be in a position to pursue as needed.\n\nMitchell dimmed her light and moved to the south wall, stepping around stone stumps and columns, sliding her feet into the teeming masses of insects so as not to crunch them. Fat roaches scuttled over her boots, trying to climb her, perhaps drawn to the smell of blood. She continued to seep from all of her injuries and she'd stopped trying to swallow, her chin slicked with bloody drool. Her body's infirmities annoyed her. She'd started shivering involuntarily, as well, short bursts of uncontrollable shaking that came and went at random. If she didn't meet with Lara soon, she might be forced to retreat\u2014not to concede, but to defer to biological considerations. Mitchell's will was indomitable but the flesh was weak. She couldn't determine not to get hypothermia.\n\nI won't go yet, though. Mitchell wouldn't leave before taking a final shot, the magical third. She was connected with Croft, bound to her by their shared commitment to craft. It was so very rare, to find another who danced where others plodded. So rare, in fact, that Mitchell had been starting to believe that she was entirely alone. She cared about the quality of her work, she invested herself, but never saw her efforts matched by the blank stupid faces that surrounded her. Lara Croft gave her hope.\n\nShe started climbing, stopping often to listen for any approach, covering her light to watch for a hint of another's. A few rocks clattered somewhere south, near where the Glock had fired. Harper. Was he lost, or did he have reason to believe that Croft was in front of him? Either was possible. He didn't deserve to kill her, although Mitchell understood how badly he must want to by now. Damon Harper was persistent, if nothing else, and didn't give up.\n\nShe had to pause in her climb, struck by another attack of shaking\u2014\n\n\u2014and she heard something from the northern wall, north and west. A brief whisper of something soft, perhaps fabric brushing against rock. It was very close, and higher than the floor.\n\nThere were two passages the sound could have come from, ragged holes one above the other, at an angle where the chamber curved, a little below and across from Mitchell's position. A ledge staggered off the lower tunnel's lip, ending about ten feet off the floor.\n\nMitchell was fifteen feet up, give or take. The nearest solid cover was a passage about ten feet ahead of her and up, or she could drop back to the last hole she'd passed.\n\nShe'll come in quiet and dark but when she decides it's safe, she'll turn on a light. You don't need to hide, only aim.\n\nLikely true, but that was also the kind of thinking that had probably felled Ace and Hux\u2014the absolute belief that only they were doing the hunting.\n\nTwo steps ahead of Mitchell, one of the layered steps flared away from the wall. There was barely room to crouch, it wasn't a good position to defend, but it was something. She carefully turned off her lamp and hugged the rocks, inching to where she felt the edge of stone rise up.\n\nHer hip was bleeding again from the climb, a warm seep, not enough to touch the deep cold at her core, but her hand was steady. She raised the semi and waited."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 54",
                "text": "Lara had to stuff herself through a crack to reach what she was sure was an antechamber to a much larger room. She could hear the sounds of an active cave ahead with a large number of bats, which definitely meant access to the higher tunnels\u2014maybe she could get back to the central well, maybe not, but she had let go of the idea that she would be out quickly. She thought Rasputin had fired the shots she'd heard, which meant she knew where he was\u2014 but Mitchell was still lurking around somewhere, and she was a pro at the quiet game. Lara hadn't seen the Russian again, either.\n\nShe stopped to listen outside a short tunnel that led into the larger room, killing her light. The chamber was big, tall and wide. She estimated that she was well off the floor, three or four meters. She heard the susurrus of bats and bugs, punctuated by a few salamander chirps, down and off to the left\u2014\n\n\u2014and she heard the dull click of a switch, a small, mechanical, plastic sound.\n\nSouth, straight across, up a bit.\n\nLara tilted her head, straining to hear beneath the whisper of the cavern's life\u2026 and was that movement, the careful slide of a body pressed against rock? She could be imagining it, but she hadn't dreamed up the click of the switch.\n\nSomebody heard you coming.\n\nShe couldn't walk in blind; she might step off a drop. Flare? She'd have to get right up to the opening to throw it. At the climb, she'd been shielded by rocks and Rasputin hadn't been expecting her. Whoever was in the cavern, they were waiting for her to step inside.\n\nRetreat was the safest course, but she had to go up somewhere\u2026 And if she snuck away, they would follow or get ahead of her again, set up and wait. Her policy of running from these people was over.\n\nThey'll be watching for the light. And they're wearing vests.\n\nLara quietly took off her pack, taking out rope, cutting a healthy length. She unbuckled her helmet, then slid the axe from her belt, setting the helmet on the narrow axe head. She used the rope to secure the helmet as best she could, looping through openings in the lining and tying it to the axe's shaft. It wasn't especially sturdy but it didn't wobble too badly, either.\n\nShe shaded the lamp, then lightly smeared mud across the bulbs before slinging her bow and taking out the Remington.\n\nThis is going to go fast.\n\nLara turned on the light and then held the axe at arm's length. She moved into the passage, tilting the dim light down like she was watching her feet, and edged forward.\n\nShe couldn't see into the dark that opened in front of her but kept the .45 trained south, her entire body in play, her muscles working to keep the helmet steady, to hold the gun steady, to move forward and keep her balance. There was a ledge at the front of the passage and she crept toward it, letting her gaze relax, not fixed on any single point, extending the axe as far away from her as possible\u2014\n\n\u2014and there was an explosion of light and sound, the axe ripped out of her hand as a dark, slender shape opened fire from the wall south, four shots.\n\nRock sprayed up behind Lara. The salamanders screamed and Lara saw Mitchell's eyes in the stutter of light, wide and triumphant in a mask of caked mud, her throat wrapped with a strip of black cloth, strings of mud-soaked hair plastered to her head.\n\nLara fired twice, aiming for the woman's belly, low, then ducked back into the passage.\n\nA large number of bats had taken flight at the first shots, and as their passage faded Lara heard Mitchell gasping\u2014 and then a stumble of movement on the rocks, and then silence. The salamanders huffed for a moment, three, four of them, but stayed on the east side of the chamber.\n\nLara quietly edged forward again, and picked up the axe. The helmet had been knocked sideways and hung from the rope, the lamp still functional, but the shaft of the axe had been hit, the hollow metal dented and torn.\n\nShe held out the makeshift decoy, waited, but the cave had gone back to its hum.\n\nLara put down the axe and took out her hand torch, holding it away from her before flicking it on\u2014\n\n\u2014and saw Mitchell lying on a walkway of angled steps that ran up the south wall, blood pouring from her belly. When the light touched her, Mitchell raised her nine-millimeter, her hand shaking, and emptied it.\n\nLara dove from the ledge. The rounds were mostly wild but one of them pinged across the zipper of her backpack as she landed on the cave floor, throwing herself into a roll.\n\nShe came up and dodged behind a thick stalagmite, beetles and spiders falling off her back. She crossed the torch under the Remington and ducked around the rock, finding Mitchell\u2014but the woman's bare, muddy arm had sagged to the rocks where she sprawled, and her finger was tight on a dead trigger, her semi's slide locked. Blood continued to pulse from her gut but it was slowing.\n\n\"Clever Lara,\" Mitchell called, almost fondly, blood dribbling from her swollen mouth, her voice rasping. Her body shook, her skin deathly pale beneath the heavy smears of mud, streaked with red. \"When I die, the entire world will disappear\u2026 except for you, I think.\"\n\nMitchell exhaled heavily and didn't inhale again. Her gray eyes stayed open.\n\nLara quickly looked around the room, the woman's strange last words still hanging in the chill air. There were half a dozen salamanders by a pool at the chamber's east wall, agitated but staying close to the water; another spawning ground, presumably. She ran the beam up the walls, looking at the openings, at the ceiling. She could go up the rocks past where Mitchell's body lay, take the highest passage she could reach and\u2014\n\nShe heard footsteps coming from the south, Rasputin's limp more pronounced than before but approaching quickly.\n\nLara stepped back behind the formation and turned off her light, pressing tightly against the damp rock, ignoring her initial inclination to turn and walk out.\n\nThe fast hobble slowed as Rasputin approached the chamber, and she saw the faintest smudge of light in an opening at one o'clock some meters away, rounded rocks framing a dull yellow glow.\n\nHe stopped, breathing heavily, making no effort to be quiet, which made sense when he raised his voice and started talking."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 55",
                "text": "Harper heard the first shots just as he'd managed to climb up a short but torturous slope and through a wide crack that opened into a north\u2013south tunnel. The sound of Mitchell's Czech gun was sharp, north and maybe a bit east of him, and he started running, jaw clenched against the pain of his leg, a snarling red glee twisting through him. Croft fired back, but after a short pause he heard the CZ again. Mitchell was alive and well and taking another run at the target, and he was close enough to join in.\n\nAfter the echoes of the last shots spun away, he could still hear the huffing cries of lizards. He came to a branch in the passage and followed the sound. Mitchell had fired the last shots, and at the thought of Croft dead his worry about getting out of the tunnels was overridden by a sudden hope that he wasn't too late to see the bitch breathe her last.\n\nHe reached a tunnel that curved east and realized he could hear his limping steps echoing back at him over the subsiding chirps of the lizards. He had arrived.\n\nHarper stopped before the passage's turn, listening. Cave noise. No footsteps, no obvious sounds of movement. Were one or both of them dead? Had they left?\n\nThey're close enough to hear you.\n\n\"Mitchell, report,\" Harper called, and waited, his voice circling back at him.\n\nLizard chirps and crawling pestilence. Nothing.\n\nHad Croft gotten to Mitchell? Where were they?\n\nMake a deal. He should have done it at the climb, but had been too furious to think about bargaining, too committed to seeing Croft struck down.\n\n\"We have Jonah,\" Harper called, the words reverberating through the cold air. \"And your pilot, Miguel. Walk out with me now, and I'll let them go.\"\n\nHe heard her. A tiny shift of clumsy movement, a scrape of sound.\n\nShe was close, only a curve of rock and he estimated less than fifty feet between them, somewhere to his left, southwest. He spoke calmly, with authority. \"My name is Harper, this is my team. There's no way you can get out of this, but Jonah can. Miguel can. Agree to surrender and I'll let them go. On my Oath.\"\n\nBugs crawled and bats cheeped and his voice whispered away in musical canons. She didn't answer. He imagined her weighing his sincerity. He'd admitted that her own life wasn't up for debate, a fact that she would have gathered already, thereby establishing that he was truthful. And he had given her an opening to pursue negotiations over terms of surrender, which was far more than she deserved. Croft thought nothing of murder, but had gone to great lengths to protect her own friends. He was counting on her loyalty, and on her assuming that his system of honor was the same as hers. People under duress still tried to connect.\n\nHe looked at his watch in the weakening yellowish light from his helmet.\n\n\"They have orders to kill the hostages in twenty-two minutes, if I'm not there to advise differently,\" he called with absolute confidence. A bluff to tip the scales, and to remind her of who actually stood to lose here. \"Even if you beat me to the exit, my people are watching the drop. You still have to climb up; you won't have time to stage a rescue before Jonah and Miguel run out of time. And I swear to you, if I have to chase you, you will all die.\"\n\nNothing\u2026 and then a sound like something heavy sliding, followed by an impact that cut through the rustle of the cavern like a dull hammer\u2014to his immediate right, east, and falling from over his head. One of the salamanders let out a short shriek, a blast of ugly sound.\n\nBody. The thump was like a side of beef hitting the ground from off a roof. Dead meat.\n\nA trick? An accident? He turned off his light and stepped around the bend in the passage, forcing himself to use his bad leg, to walk without making a sound. He leaned into the cold open space, scanning\u2014\n\n\u2014and saw a firefly of pale light, high and to his right. Someone climbing along the rocky wall.\n\nHe raised the Glock and fired."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 56",
                "text": "Lara climbed while Rasputin\u2014Harper\u2014talked, using the echoes of his pompous voice for cover, quickly ascending the stone steps on the southern wall. She'd started walking as soon as she'd made the small sound, kicking at the stalagmite with the toe of her boot, quietly moving towards him and east. It was obvious he couldn't see into the cavern; he kept his voice focused in the wrong direction while she passed directly in front of his tunnel, stepping lightly between the bases of the formations, avoiding the crunch of tiny exoskeletons.\n\nThe ascent was an easy one, angled lengths of limestone cutting into the wall, but she had to stretch her legs to get up some of them. Keeping the .45 handy meant one-arming it for the most part, but she was fast and the few sounds she made were covered by Harper and the hiss of the bugs\u2026 until she got to Mitchell's sprawled body, the woman's blood slicking the stone.\n\nHarper had stopped talking and Lara was in a hurry, the tunnel she wanted still a short climb ahead. Mitchell was half on her side, blank gray eyes staring at the void, blocking the stretch of rocks almost entirely. Both of Lara's shots had hit just beneath the hem of Mitchell's vest; there was a lot of blood.\n\nLara edged past her, setting her foot down in a narrow space behind the small of Mitchell's back. Her boot came down on blood-wet rock and she skidded into the dead woman's legs, rolling one of them off of the narrow ledge.\n\nThe dead weight pulled Mitchell to the floor, the sound heavy and unmistakable. And Lara was still three meters away from the arch in the rock that she'd hoped to reach and disappear into before Harper realized he was talking to thin air.\n\nA salamander cried and Lara threw herself upward, kicking off from the rock, scrambling. Harper would come in, she knew he would, the second he realized she wasn't where he thought. He had a tunnel to duck back into, but she was absolutely in the line of fire.\n\nGet there! She leapt for the last pitch before the opening, boosted herself up, walking her boots up the steep slope\u2014\n\nThe first round whizzed past her left ear before the roar of his Glock tore through the chamber. Lara threw herself flat and slid back a meter, slamming her arm down over the light and switching the .45 to her left hand as more rounds tore over her head, pinging off the rocks.\n\nShe turned her head and saw him fire again, still too high, his narrow head and one broad shoulder outlined in the white flare from his weapon, his body pressed to the wall.\n\nAn internal conversation happened in the time it took her to mark him, a millisecond of yammering.\n\nTake the shot!\n\nMiss and he'll see you!\n\nDon't miss!\n\nLara rolled onto her hip and fired: three rounds at his torso, two more at his face.\n\nHarper cried out, falling back a step, and Lara clambered up, climbing from the memory of what the last pitch had looked like. She dove for the opening in the dark as another round hit the rock, banging her right shoulder against the lip of the rock before she was inside.\n\n\"You bitch!\" he screamed, and fired again, the rounds blasting the stones just past her feet.\n\nLara shook out her LED and held it out. A low tunnel that bent south and east. She was on her feet and walking before the echoes of the last rounds died.\n\nA dim light snapped on in the chamber below her, the beam wavering, playing over the southern wall\u2014and she heard him start to climb, grunts of exertion and pain, his breath hissing through his teeth.\n\nWait. Pick him off when he's at one of the steep spots. With a bad leg, the climb would take him a few minutes.\n\nAnd if he'd told the truth about the deadline? You have to get to the drop now, whether Harper's dead or not.\n\nShe turned sideways as the tunnel started to narrow, aware that she might not have a choice in the matter. If she'd just climbed into a dead end, confrontation was inevitable.\n\nAnd you'll kill him and keep moving! Hurry, go!\n\nTwenty-two minutes, twenty by now. If she could get up fast, she could make it. God only knew what she'd do when she got there but she would worry about it then. She didn't think Jonah would sit still for being shot, but he could be injured, maybe unconscious\u2026 She had to be there.\n\nLara sidled through the narrow tunnel, breathing easier when it opened up and branched a minute later. The eastern-facing passage sloped up, and there was guano on the floor. She took the passage, holstering the semi when the rocky floor tipped more steeply, the better to climb. She could hear Harper's rough ascent, soft echoes from the chamber where Mitchell had died. Falling farther behind.\n\nThe climb wasn't technically difficult but it was muddy and strenuous. The muscles in her arms and legs were getting tired but she pushed on, the tunnel opening in front of her, branching again\u2026\n\nShe climbed into a small, rounded chamber with three openings besides the one she'd come from, a thick slick of mud on the floor. She checked her compass, wiped sweat from her brow. Three openings: one that that faced northwest, aimed back toward the chamber she'd just left; a crack that turned down and south; and a low, rounded tunnel that opened to a gentle incline, a straight stretch that aimed right at the drop, northeast.\n\nToo good to be true. The passage had been used by bats, but not much.\n\nAnd if it's the wrong choice you'll find out but not if you don't GO!\n\nLara went."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 57",
                "text": "Harper threw himself up the rocks, propelled by his rage.\n\nBlood leaked steadily from the flesh wound on his upper left arm. He stopped on a ledge to bind it; a healthy chunk of flesh was actually missing. He bore down hard on the knot, the physical distress fueling him. How dare she? Did she think he wouldn't kill her and torture her friends to death for such an affront? He only regretted that he wouldn't be able to watch her die more than once.\n\nHis weak headlamp took in Mitchell's broken body as he climbed, flashes of her corpse slowly disappearing under the simmering blanket of insects. She looked like she'd been to hell and crawled through mud on her way back. Three of the lizards ventured away from their curving lake to scuttle toward her, chirping, perhaps drawn by all the blood. There had been six of the small monsters lined up along the shore when he'd first looked, but now there were eight of them, swinging their eyeless faces to listen to him labor up the rocks. More had crept in when he wasn't looking, blind witnesses to his shame. Crawling up rocks in a disgusting hole, injured, limping, actually bleeding, his top players dead.\n\nBitch. Lara fucking Croft had killed three of his best, then shot him and skipped away, but she wasn't counting on the power of his will. He forced his body to work, his knee to bend, his ankle to support him. A deep, dreadful ache radiated from the hole in his shoulder, burning, but the pain wasn't incapacitating him, it wouldn't interfere with his mission.\n\nHe reached the opening in the rocks where Croft had escaped the chamber and followed the Glock inside, ready to fire at anything that moved, holding his gasping breath to listen for her.\n\nNothing. He moved quickly, turning and sliding as the cold rocks narrowed, pushing at his back and chest. On the other side the tunnel branched. He followed the one that sloped upwards. She'd gone up, he was sure; his bit about a kill order had pushed her to get back to the surface before time ran out. She was going to lead him to the exit, all he had to do was follow\u2014and he could take her light after she was dead, and spend the rest of his Glock's rounds blowing away every lizard he saw on his way out.\n\nThe floor sloped up to near forty-five degrees but it was like a climbing wall, lots of holds and holes. He saw part of a fresh boot print in the mud, a small one, and grinned. He was on her trail. If his leg had been working, if he hadn't been holding the Glock, he'd have been up in no time, but he wasn't about to disarm, not until that bitch was dead.\n\nHe willed himself up, grin turning back into a clench as the muddy rocks crept past."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 58",
                "text": "Dead end.\n\nLara turned away from where the tunnel narrowed to a wide, flat crack, not quite big enough for her to get her head through. Past the crack a chimney rose straight up, thin and smooth. Too tight for her to get up, even if she could wedge herself through the crack.\n\nShe'd wasted three minutes working through the low passage. Lara hurried back toward the small chamber where the tunnels met, feeling the seconds tick by\u2014\n\nMovement. Far ahead of her, back in the tunnel of the easy climb. She heard Harper's boots scuffing over rock, a grunt of exertion.\n\nLara picked up speed, racing him to the chamber. He was faster than she'd expected, but he wouldn't beat her. She'd have two choices when she got back, south or northeast. Had she come up high enough to be on safe ground if she went back towards the big room where Mitchell had died? It was that or go in the wrong direction entirely.\n\nShe reached the mouth of the dead end and saw the weak light from Harper's helmet reflecting off the roof of the tunnel that had led her up to the branch. He was less than a minute behind her, if that.\n\nLara didn't hesitate, spanning as much of the muddy floor as she could in two hops, stepping to the northeast passage and in. The roof was higher than the tunnel she'd just been in; she still had to walk bent over, but at least she wasn't crouching anymore. The passage ran straight for a few meters and then curved farther east, sloping down.\n\nShe reached the curve as Harper's faltering light swelled behind her, his uneven steps coming into the chamber at her back. He stomped quickly to the dead-end tunnel\u2014but stopped, not going in.\n\nThe mud. Lara covered the LED with her hand and slid around the curve, pulling the Remington again. She'd hoped he would follow the obvious prints, but it seemed not. Her two light steps to the northeast opening would be obvious, for someone looking.\n\nHarper didn't move. She unshaded the barest glimmer from her light and forged ahead, ducking, watching her feet, slowing down enough to move very quietly. The tunnel curved north again, but continued to descend.\n\nShe heard him come into the passage\u2014and turn off his light, and start to creep forward. A squeak of mud, a hobbling step.\n\nThe tunnel leveled abruptly and branched. Lara didn't even have to pause her stealthy steps; she could see the one veering east and up was dead, no sign that any animal had been through. Not an exit.\n\nDid Harper know what to look for? She was sure he couldn't see her LED. The floor was rocky here, no prints to follow. She stayed with the gradual descent. Perhaps twenty meters behind her, Harper stumbled. His headlamp tapped on for a bare second, flickering weakly. Even from the bare smudge of it she could see, it was obvious the batteries were about to give out.\n\nThe tunnel branched again, both passages opening west, both alive with rustling bats somewhere ahead. Larger echoes stirred. Lara quickly calculated where she was in relation to where she'd been, remembering the crumbling ceiling of the big room. Tunnels with holes in the floor, and she was headed right for them.\n\nShe didn't have her axe and the idea of jumping across open pits above a twelve-meter fall was distinctly unappealing; the floors hadn't collapsed because they were stable. Jumping meant noise. And there would be bats to contend with, she could hear them; the ceiling of the chamber had been packed with them.\n\nKill Harper. Go back.\n\nNo. She didn't want to go back. These passages turned north again, and the large bat colony had to have access to the top of the cenote. It was the closest exit. If she couldn't do it she'd turn around, but she had to keep moving, aiming for the drop. Jonah's life might depend on it.\n\nYes on killing Harper, though. The dead end had cost her\u2014he was too close. If she had to line up a jump she couldn't afford to have him on her heels.\n\nLara considered the passages. The one on the right opened at an angle; she had to step inside to see down it\u2026 And so would he. Good enough.\n\nShe settled against the wall in the dark, Remington up, listening. Harper had reached the split behind her\u2014and she heard him take the wrong passage, the dead one.\n\nLara hesitated. How far would he go before he had to turn back? She considered going after him but it was more time that she didn't have, and she definitely wasn't going to wait.\n\nShe turned on her torch, shining it down the passage she'd stepped into, then quickly checked the other one. They both curved out of sight; she only saw rocks and heard the sounds of the big room whispering, ahead and below.\n\nThe one on the right was closer to Jonah, and taller. She started into it, moving quickly but tapping her steps, not sure where she might find weakness. Between the bumps and drips of calcite formations, the walls and floor were smooth, ancient. Within a few meters she saw the first crawling bugs and the sound and smell of the colony sharpened, rustles and squeaks. A curve to the right and she saw rows of dark hanging bat bodies on the rising ceiling in front of her, and the first hole into the open dark below.\n\nThe jagged hole was just over a meter wide, barely a hop, and the rock on the other side was thick, no other holes in immediate sight. The guano was layered deep, there were fewer insects around the opening to process it, but it looked solid. She listened for Harper but heard nothing.\n\nLara holstered the .45, backed up and then ran, jumped, landing well past the far edge of the opening\u2014\n\n\u2014but the hole was bigger than she'd allowed for. Thick layers of guano gave way beneath her foot and she stuttered forward, landing on her knees. A hefty clod of the crusted shit fell into the chamber below, widening the hole by another thirty centimeters.\n\nIt splashed a second later, and the salamanders below started to scream aggressively, incredibly loud in the huge space. The sound filled the tunnel, filled all of the tunnels. The bats in front of her shrieked, dropped and flew north, a furry, rushing frenzy of sudden movement as the agitated troglobites howled their distress.\n\nShe couldn't hear if Harper was coming over the din but with most of the bats rushing out, she could see that the tunnel she was in branched ahead of her\u2014openings up high, and from the quality of sound, plenty more holes to navigate.\n\nShe hurried on, boots sliding in the crap. He couldn't be close yet; she would look at her new choices and be on her way before he reached her\u2026 Or she would hear him coming and wait inside one of the tunnels ahead.\n\nNot for a second longer than I need.\n\nNo, not a second. The salamanders had left off screaming but were huffing, defensive, ready to attack, the sounds rising up from the big room in echoing bursts. More bats fluttered away, disappearing into the passages ahead.\n\nLara followed them. The first tunnel she came to opened over the cavern three meters in, the entire bottom of the passage gone. A crumbling ledge ten meters away and the passage continued, but there was nothing she could climb, the walls slick.\n\nShe turned and hurried back to look at the next one, listening for Harper."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 59",
                "text": "The tunnel he'd taken crept upwards, cold and damp and perfectly empty, no bats or bugs or lizards. Harper was starting to think that Croft hadn't taken it even though it clearly ascended. Bats wouldn't roost somewhere with no exit, would they? She wasn't hiding, she was trying to beat him out, and the silence in front of him was as cold and dead as the rocks themselves.\n\nThe screams of the lizards spilled up behind him and he turned eagerly, hearing the rush of bats somewhere close. It was confirmation, a sign. He ran down the slope as the lizards screamed, not worried about keeping quiet or his flickering lamp. She must have kept going down, westwards. She can't have gotten far.\n\nHe turned where the tunnel branched, dimly aware that his shoulder was bleeding again, his knee locking up, a ring of fire around his ankle\u2026 But she was on the move and he was close, so close. They both had guns but he was also bigger than her, stronger in spite of his injuries. There was nowhere she could go that he couldn't follow.\n\nHe came to a pair of tunnels and chose the one on the right with the higher ceiling, not stopping to check his compass. West? North? It didn't matter, he could hear the bats ahead of him, the rising, spiraling squawks of the mutant lizards below. He needed to look at the map but he could feel how close she was, maybe no more than a minute between them. If she took a wrong turn or got hung up on\u2014\n\nHe'd rounded a curve and saw the wide hole in the floor, four feet long and no way around. He looked ahead, the Glock up. More cold passages, and shadows squirming with bats.\n\nHis light dimmed and flickered off. Harper tapped his helmet and it came back on but too weakly for him to see what was under him, through the hole. He could hear it, though, the chirps of the foul lizards settling themselves, the hiss of insects. Lara had led him to the top of the big chamber they'd just left.\n\nThere were prints in the mud and dreck on the other side of the hole, a thick crust torn away at the edge. She'd jumped it and knocked some mud loose, riling the lizards below.\n\nHarper backed up, aware that he couldn't trust his right leg to perform. He'd jump it anyway, before his lamp died. He wasn't letting her go.\n\nHe ran and leapt, throwing himself forward, landing on his left foot. When his right came down his ankle screamed and he staggered sideways. His lamp faded and died.\n\nHe let himself fall forward, away from the hole, left hand sinking deep into the reeking cold muck. The black took his breath away, and he sat up and grabbed for his phone, wiping bat shit across his shirt so he could punch the button.\n\nThe flashlight came on, bright and strong. Too bright. He slid his finger over the light and crawled to his feet, sweeping with the Glock as he started forward. He gripped the phone more tightly than the gun. It was the only light he had; if he lost it, he was lost. Reddy would send people in eventually but Croft could get out, get away\u2014\n\nAnd you'd be here. Trapped in the cold, overwhelming black, bleeding, unable to move for fear of falling.\n\nHe heard movement, a light thump followed by a small flurry of bats. Coming from one of three openings ahead, on the left.\n\nHarper covered the light more and crept forward quickly. A few bats spilled out of the second opening and fluttered around, cheeping, before flapping back in.\n\nThere you are.\n\nHe hurried to the edge of the passage, breathing with his mouth wide, minimizing his steps. He covered the phone's light completely and darted a look into the tunnel\u2014\n\n\u2014and saw her. The tiniest blur of pale blue light, floating in the black thirty feet in front of him, disappearing a second later.\n\nHarper raised the Glock and fired, four rounds right where he'd seen the spark. The flare from the Glock blinded him and he ducked back, heart hammering. Bats screeched and flapped.\n\nNo return fire. The ringing in his ears faded and he strained to hear anything\u2014a groan, a gasp, footsteps\u2014but she didn't make a sound.\n\nDid I get her? Her light had disappeared a second before he'd fired, but had she covered it, or moved into another passage? He couldn't hear anything\u2014she could be dead or dying, but she could also be waiting for him to step into the tunnel, to turn on his light.\n\nOr slipping away, while you wonder.\n\nThere were holes in the floor, he'd heard her jump one of them. He couldn't go after her without taking a look. He hugged the edge of the rock, readying himself to hold up the phone, to fire, praying that he would see her bleeding to death on the shitty rocks.\n\nHe extended the phone low into the passage and slid his finger down off of the light\u2014\n\n\u2014and the phone exploded, his index finger blown off at the top knuckle, the darkness crashing over him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 60",
                "text": "Harper shrieked, and emptied his Glock down the chamber, firing wildly. Lara lay on her stomach in the dark, 1911 extended, and fired twice more at the muzzle flare. She didn't hit him again and he ducked away, presumably to reload.\n\nOne-handed. In the dark. His helmet light had died and he didn't have a torch or he wouldn't be using his phone. There were two holes in the floor between them, one a hop, the second a running jump. Unless he had a lighter, he was stuck.\n\nShe started edging backwards, nervous bats shifting overhead. She hadn't heard him until the last second, barely enough time to drop to the floor. He was persistent, and capable of moving quietly in spite of his injuries; she should have been more careful. Her initial impression, that he was a driven man, had proved correct.\n\nThe rock curved behind her, and Lara turned her body, dragging the tips of her boots lightly back and forth, making sure there was floor behind her as she backed out of his firing line. As soon as she was clear, she could get moving again. Even if he found some other source of light, she'd hear him make the jump.\n\nHarper ran into the passage and charged her, firing."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 61",
                "text": "Fucking bitch!\n\nHarper ducked into the tunnel, firing straight ahead, spacing the shots, watching his feet in the flare from the Glock. He saw the first gap and leaped over it, landing on his bad leg. He stumbled and fired again, and again, lurching ahead, blindly laying down his cover, using the rounds to light his path. He saw the second hole, a longer jump, and picked up speed, firing a last round before he leapt\u2014\n\n\u2014and as he hurtled over the gap, Lara fired, two shots from out of the dark and low, the flash of the .45 illuminating her grim face only a few meters ahead of him, down on the floor.\n\nThe first round slammed into his upper right thigh, spinning him. The second tore into his stomach, just above his groin.\n\nHarper dropped the Glock and shot his arms out, suddenly in the dark, grasping, his forearms slamming down on rock as he fell into the hole. He clawed up mud and slipped backwards, grasped a single horn of stone and hung on, his body dangling over open space.\n\nThe black beat at him. He pulled on the stone, tried to pull himself up, but his body shook, his arms suddenly weak, shocked by the heat of the wounds, by the heat of the rivers pouring from his guts, his leg. Far below him, the lizards started their inquisitive calls.\n\nA soft blue light snapped on and Lara Croft was standing over him, pointing her .45 at his face.\n\n\"You won't get past my men,\" he said. He wanted to scream it at her, but his voice was a gasp. \"They'll kill you, they'll kill your friends.\"\n\n\"We'll see,\" she said, the first time he'd heard her speak. Her voice was soft and feminine and absolutely unimpressed.\n\n\"You'll never stop us,\" he said. \"Dominguez has the key, you gave it to him, and he's ahead of you. Trinity will win, we will win.\"\n\n\"You may be right,\" she said. \"But you won't know about it, will you?\"\n\nHis fingers were slipping. He could hear his own blood splashing into the water far below, where the lizards waited for him, calling. Croft watched, her wide brown eyes as pitiless as any soldier's.\n\nHarper fell, clawing at the air, at the dreadful black that rose up to swallow him."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 62",
                "text": "The fall didn't kill Harper. He landed with a splash and screamed weakly. The salamanders shrieked.\n\nLara turned on her torch and looked down, the sharp beam cutting through the deep black. His legs were in the water, bent in all the wrong places, and he was trying to fend off the attacking animals with an obviously broken arm. She raised the Remington and then lowered it again as the pale creatures darted in, snapping. He was already dead.\n\nJonah. Go. She turned away on Harper's last strangled cry, the sound following her to the curve in the passage ahead\u2026 And for no reason at all, her eyes filled, and there was suddenly a terrible knot in her throat.\n\nDominguez has the key, you gave it to him.\n\nShe blinked and tears spilled. That child falling into the swirling water, swept away.\n\nI'm so sorry. She'd only wanted to carry on with her father's work, to fight Trinity, but what if Dominguez hadn't been about to take the key, what if there'd been some other way to keep him from it? She had triggered the cleansing, she had brought the wave, all those people that her father had died trying to protect and there was no getting away from the horrible truth of it. She'd failed him. Again.\n\nSelfish. It's about you, it's always about you and Dad. The world is at stake and those poor people died, Jonah and Miguel might die, and you're too damaged to get past your own personal bullshit; you're crying for yourself and what you lost.\n\nLara wiped her eyes as she ran, but the tears wouldn't stop. She would always be running, even if she managed to keep Dominguez from fulfilling the prophecy. Trinity would find something else, there would be another one, and one after that, and she would run until she couldn't anymore, until she collapsed or someone like Harper put a bullet in her.\n\nThat's right, you will. And how you feel about it doesn't matter at all, you still have to fight.\n\nIt was a depressing thought and even thinking it made her feel horribly shallow and pathetic\u2026 And she realized that was the great emotional monster that she'd been avoiding, that had her tied up since the tsunami. She felt sorry for herself, like a selfish child, and how could she indulge in self-pity when all of this was her fault?\n\nShe missed her parents horribly. She could have grown up to be a whole, undamaged person, with experiences of safety and love instead of absence and loss, and it was so stupid, she was so stupid still to be mourning something that never was and couldn't be.\n\nShe let the tears fall, refusing to let them slow her down. If anything happened to Jonah or Miguel, she would hate herself forever.\n\nShe had to climb around another gaping hole but the tunnel widened after that and she found a branch that led up and east, and the whole time she cried and felt shitty and broken and worried, the .45 ready\u2026 But she heard nothing, the passages stretching all around her silent and still.\n\nShe broke into a run again when she hit a straight incline. There was a tunnel at the top that climbed into a small bat cave with three openings\u2014and two of them were marked. One with an arrow that pointed up.\n\nHer heart picked up speed, the tears finally drying as she hurried up through the cold dark, watching for charges again as the passages widened and stretched, carrying her into the upper tunnels. Jonah was her family now, and she ran for him through the last chambers of the Blue Labyrinth, barely pausing at the corners and openings, leaping past the entrances and over the flat stones, into a chamber that led to the stone bridge where she'd fallen only a few hours before.\n\nShe unhooked her radio, moving quickly toward the small chamber that led to the exit, keeping behind the Remington. She stepped into the cave, gasping, the bats stirring over her head.\n\nLara stopped in the bare room and hit the transmit button, twice.\n\nA double-tap of static came back at her a second later.\n\n\"\u2026you\u2026 Bird?\"\n\nLara closed her eyes at the sound of his voice. He sounded hopeful and happy.\n\n\"Yes, it's me. I'm coming,\" she said, walking past the tunnel of the drop with its red X and into the last tunnel. The cluster of bats squeaked at her, the soft sounds following her into the long and winding passage, the very slight ascent.\n\nShe looked at her watch. Harper and his team had cost her less than two hours. She had found the code to solve whatever was written in the chamber of pillars, she had only to apply herself and she would find what Dominguez had missed. They could be deep into Peru by dawn.\n\nLara let out a shaking breath, suddenly aware of how tired she was, all her muscles aching, cuts and scrapes and bites stinging\u2026 But her mind felt clear and empty, her heartache faded like a bad dream. She could live with the idea that she wasn't always going to feel the way she thought she was supposed to feel, about anything. Denying to herself that she hurt or made mistakes or wanted things only made all of those feelings bigger, scarier.\n\nJust like Jonah's always saying. God, she couldn't wait to see him. The warmth that filled her at the thought spurred her back into a jog. It felt like it had been days since she'd seen a friendly face.\n\nThe cold started to lift, slowly, the smells of the labyrinth giving way to the cleaner scent of fresh night air as she hurried past the first green plants, mosses, and then ferns nestled in cracks. In another minute, she was out."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 63",
                "text": "They pulled her up and she threw herself into his arms as soon as she'd unclipped her harness.\n\nJonah wrapped her tightly, squeezing. She held on for an extra minute and he grinned.\n\n\"It's good to see you, too. Anyone chasing you?\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" she said. \"How many went in?\"\n\n\"Five, but that guy you just stepped over came back out.\"\n\n\"Then no,\" she said.\n\nHe squeezed again, then let go of her and stepped back, looking down at his shirt, smeared with bat crap and mud. \"Nice. Remind me to get you a present next time.\"\n\nLara laughed. She was filthy, nearly every inch of her covered in muck. A bandana was tied around one of her legs and her face was heavily smudged\u2014except for around her slightly swollen eyes, where tears had left obvious streaks. She looked exhausted.\n\n\"How are you, Miguel?\" she asked, turning her attention to the pilot, who had stood back some distance for their reunion.\n\n\"Not so bad,\" he said. \"I mean, I scraped my knee, but Jonah had ointment.\"\n\nLara looked around at the clearing, the bodies, the new trucks. \"And to think I was worried. No problems, then?\"\n\n\"We're fine,\" Jonah said. \"Did you find what you need?\"\n\nLara nodded eagerly, climbing out of the harness. \"I think so. I got pictures of everything, and found a reference that Trinity missed, about a path of rings that follows the path of stars. I don't know if I have the right angles on the formation to read the glyphs, but I also found a notebook with sketches I can use.\"\n\nHe wasn't sure exactly what she meant, but more of the story unfolded on the ride back to the airstrip. Miguel volunteered to drive and Lara wasn't fit to sit inside, even in the rusting cab of the junker; she and Jonah rode in the back, hanging on to hammered boards to keep from flying into the jungle, Lara calling out over the roar of the engine about an explorer's diary, damaged glyphs, a secret message hidden in plain sight.\n\nJonah kept an eye out for Winters as they bounced through the warm night, but didn't see the pilot along the rocky road. Had he gotten lost, or just hidden as they'd gone by? It was a mystery to which Jonah was perfectly fine never knowing the answer.\n\nLara tried to look at her pictures as Miguel coaxed the truck over the rutted road. Jonah found himself frowning, watching her. She was battered and exhausted but entirely focused on her new puzzle, oblivious to everything else.\n\nJonah breathed deeply, taking in the wild green scent of the jungle, the feel of the rainforest in the early hours of a November morning. He wished they were going home but instead they were heading to Peru, to a secret city and a dead god and more Trinity.\n\nAnd another long flight on a small plane.\n\nHe sighed. Lara studied her camera intently, scanning through her shots. She was one of those rare people who burned brighter than most, worked harder, invested more of herself\u2026 but she also kept going when any sane person would have tapped out. He had taken it upon himself to support her and was generally proud to do so, to the best of his abilities, but at what cost? He was along for this ride regardless, but he didn't know if either of them were doing the right thing\u2014assuming there even was a right thing anymore. He trusted Lara, but her obsessive nature allowed her to discount all kinds of red flags and warnings that might make a more rational person think twice.\n\nJonah watched the jungle go by, not sure how to process what he felt. The only thing he absolutely knew was that he loved her. He did his best to hold onto that, to be glad that she was alive and that they were together."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 64",
                "text": "The truck rattled through a burn scar and into the Santo Almeda compound, flies already buzzing over the carnage. Miguel parked well away from the slaughter and went to get the plane ready. Lara carried her kit over to the water tank while Jonah snagged the good first-aid kit and some clean clothes out of her pack. He stopped to help Miguel check the landing lights before heading over to help Lara hose off her equipment.\n\nMiguel watched them interact while he ran through his inspection checklist. They worked well together, quickly and efficiently, but they didn't talk much and neither looked especially happy. Lara cleaned up and then broke down the weapons while Jonah packed up her stuff. Neither of them seemed particularly exceptional\u2026 except he knew that they were. Jonah had saved his life, more than once, and Lara had come out of the tunnels leaving four trained killers in her dust.\n\nJonah leaned into the cabin. \"How's it going?\"\n\nMiguel nodded. All that was left was startup. \"Good. We're ready to fly.\"\n\nLara handed the weapons up to Jonah, then climbed into the passenger seat beside Miguel, looking at him with a serious expression.\n\n\"I wanted to thank you, for getting us this far,\" she said. \"And for agreeing to take us on to Peru. I'm sorry about\u2014that we didn't tell you the full nature of the risks. That I didn't.\"\n\n\"You didn't know they were on your tail,\" Miguel said.\n\n\"I knew it was possible,\" she said. \"And there may be more trouble ahead. Rough weather. And Trinity's looking for the same place we are. If you want to drop us off at the nearest strip where we can find another ride and go home, I wouldn't hold it against you.\"\n\n\"Yeah, Jonah tried to give me an out, too,\" he said. \"The way I see it, if you don't find this city, I may not have anything to go back to.\"\n\nHe didn't have all that much, anyway. Circling tourists from Mexico to the basin, drinking with his friends, dates that went nowhere, Sundays with his mother. As crazy as this night had been, it had woken something in him. A savor for life, an excitement. Like flying, like running contraband, but better; he was helping people with a real purpose, something noble, even.\n\n\"Also, Jonah owes me dinner,\" he added.\n\n\"I didn't forget,\" Jonah said.\n\nLara smiled at him. \"You're a good man.\"\n\nHer statement was awkward, but sincere. Miguel smiled back at her.\n\n\"I don't know if I'd go that far, but thanks, anyway,\" he said. \"Now, what do you say we get the hell out of here?\"\n\nHis passengers strapped in and Miguel locked everything down, then settled into his seat. He pushed in the mixture knob and the carburetor, flipped the master switch, toggled the throttle in and started the engine.\n\nHe ran his checks and then they were moving. He had to get up to speed fast on the short strip and did so, feeling the familiar rush as the plane lifted into the air, adding to his good feeling about his decision. Whatever else happened, he was flying."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 65",
                "text": "As soon as they were in the air, Lara double-checked the message she'd found down in the labyrinth: Journey the path of the stars to follow the path of rings, at the sacred chamber of stones. A message is revealed.\n\nLara clicked through the pictures she'd taken of the ringed pillars in the puzzle room, making notes on each series and separating them into files. She studied the meticulous drawings from Mateus's crumbling notebook, and drew out the zigzagging pattern of Hydra by its major stars, and looked up glyphs, reading all of the writings from the room before attempting to apply her star overlay. In the Mayan alphabet, each glyph could represent a word or a syllable, and she was by no means fluent; it took some time. The grids of text were absolutely a jumble of code, disparate phrases and descriptors in long lines that included images of Ix Chel and Chak Chel and Kukulkan, but nothing made sense. Without knowing that the columns' rings were part of the puzzle Dominguez would never have figured it out. She matched the thicker rings to points along Hydra near its heart, but there were a lot of variables to consider\u2014from what angle had the puzzle-makers been working? Did the thinner lines represent descriptors?\n\nJonah sat next to Miguel and they talked for a while but she didn't really hear them, or notice when they finally fell silent some time later.\n\nShe made several false starts and stopped to erase and redraw her lines, patiently searching for a message that wasn't utter nonsense. They'd be deep in Peru by the time the sun came up. Everything else she'd seen at the Blue Labyrinth, Dominguez had already studied. She was convinced some of it was fake, although she couldn't imagine why someone had gone through the tunnels and changed certain dates and directions, rewritten pieces of text. But the puzzle hadn't been altered and it was her only edge now, the one thing she knew that she'd seen and Dominguez hadn't, so she erased and drew again.\n\nIt was about her tenth attempt when she saw the first part of an actual phrase. Excited, Lara scribbled down the words she knew and quickly filled in the blanks, reading it through.\n\nAnd again, her heart was pounding.\n\nAt the sacred altar where the key opens the box, she who has unleashed the cleansing will witness its culmination. The ultimate sacrifice will be asked and accepted.\n\nShe looked up. The plane buzzed steadily west, the moon low in the sky. Beneath them, the black rainforest stretched on into Peru, dappled with moon and starlight. Jonah was asleep, nodding in the passenger seat next to Miguel.\n\nAs far as finding something that could help her get closer to the hidden city, this stop had been worthless. Marin had been right, that she would find what Dominguez had missed\u2014but he'd been mistaken about how useful it would be.\n\nNot useful to anyone but me. \"She who has unleashed the cleansing.\" Lara had taken the dagger\u2026 but what if she wasn't the \"she\" who'd been meant to take it? Maybe it didn't matter anymore, the damage was done, but she had to wonder. She didn't believe that everything happened for a reason, but how coincidental was it that she would be the one to find and decipher a bit of prophecy about herself?\n\nDid the information have any value? If the ring puzzle's prophecy was true, the dagger and silver box would be reunited and she'd be there to see it. The thing she was trying to prevent was going to happen.\n\nAnd the ultimate sacrifice will be asked and accepted. Asked of her, or was it something she would ask? Was it saying that she would die? That was the ultimate sacrifice, wasn't it? She wouldn't hesitate to offer her life if it would save others, but the words were maddeningly vague. If she sacrificed her own life, would that halt the rebirth? And who was doing the accepting?\n\nBut it doesn't say your life, it says the ultimate sacrifice will be asked. What else might she be asked to give up that had any real value to her? Jonah? Memories of those she'd lost? She would prefer her own death.\n\nIt doesn't mean anything. Prophecies could be halted, that was why she was going to Peru. If everything foretold came to pass, what would be the point of even trying?\n\nShe gazed at Jonah in the seat ahead of her, the curve of his scruffy cheek, his chin tucked as he dozed. What would she tell him when he woke up? She wouldn't lie if he pressed her, but it might be better to say only that the stop hadn't revealed anything new about the hidden city's location. The grim, ambiguous prophecy would add to his worry and benefit him nothing.\n\nLara leaned her head back against her seat, closing her eyes. She was disappointed, but at least Harper and his team of killers weren't still after them, they were well on their way\u2014and she didn't feel like she was hiding from herself. She felt strong, ready to face the next steps. She might even cry more, and that was fine; whatever she had to do to keep going. The sun would rise in a few hours and they'd be flying into the Peruvian Andes soon after, chasing rivers, searching for the mountain with the silver crown.\n\nAnd watching for the storm. She could feel it, gathering, knew it by the urgency that still pulsed through her\u2026 but the pulse was overshadowed by simple exhaustion, her body sinking into the padded seat. Her thoughts darted from her head, fleeing into the dark.\n\nLara slept, and dreamed of her parents' smiling faces. In the dream, she was home."
            }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "(Rogue Angel 36) Magic Lantern",
        "author": "Alex Archer",
        "genres": [
            "urban fantasy",
            "adventure",
            "action",
            "female protagonist"
        ],
        "tags": [],
        "chapters": [
            {
                "title": "Chapter 1",
                "text": "\"Ms. Creed. Get in the car, please.\"\n\nAnnja hesitated, but realized the window of opportunity to run had passed.\n\n\"If you attempt to flee, I will shoot you in the legs and pull you into the car.\" The speaker was a man of medium height and Asian ancestry. He held the pistol with a steady hand.\n\n\"You'll shoot me with the police just up the street?\" Annja asked calmly.\n\n\"I will. And I'll get away with it.\" He waved the pistol. \"Now, get in before I have you put in. We won't be gentle.\"\n\nShe'd escaped many traps in the past. Sometimes it was better to step into them. Annja folded herself into the backseat of the car. Another man, also Asian, sat in the front passenger seat, a pistol in his lap. Once she was seated, the two other men got back in. She was sandwiched.\n\nAt a word from the driver, the car pulled into traffic as smoothly as wax running down a candle.\n\nAnnja sat quietly between the men on either side of her. \"Do you want to tell me what this is about?\"\n\n\"It's simple.\" The man in the front passenger seat turned to face her. \"We want the magic lantern.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 2",
                "text": "...The English commander took Joan's sword and raised it high.\n\nThe broadsword, plain and unadorned, gleamed in the firelight. He put the tip against the ground and his foot at the center of the blade. The broadsword shattered, fragments falling into the mud. The crowd surged forward, peasant and soldier, and snatched the shards from the trampled mud. The commander tossed the hilt deep into the crowd.\n\nSmoke almost obscured Joan, but she continued praying till the end, until finally the flames climbed her body and she sagged against the restraints.\n\nJoan of Arc died that fateful day in France, but her legend and sword are reborn...\n\n[ Prologue ]\n\n[ Les Carri\u00e8res de Paris ]\n\n[ Paris, France ]\n\n[ 1793 ]\n\nIn the darkness of the tunnel, the strong smell of old death struck MicThel Toussaint like a sharp blow to the face. He barely managed to keep from turning and leaving as the hair on the back of his neck rose.\n\nEven the Revolution sweeping through Paris these past four years hadn't affected him this much. Possible sudden death in the streets at the hands of madmen was not the same as death of an arcane nature.\n\nGulping back bile, he wrapped his arm over his mouth and nose and breathed through his rough coat sleeve. He peered at the darkness outside the reach of the lantern light. Most of the others in their group\u2014three abreast in this dank passage\u2014complained loudly.\n\n\"Where are we?\"\n\n\"What is this place?\"\n\nThe sound of their voices echoed and echoed again as it got lost in the long tunnel.\n\nTheir young guide raised the lantern above his head. The orange light cascaded over the nearby cave walls, chasing the shadows. The white limestone seemed to warm from the glow, but the chill air rattled Michel. He couldn't forget that he was now dozens of feet below Paris.\n\nGod willing, he would go home again tonight.\n\nA fat man in expensive business attire tried to seize the lantern from the guide. Michel recognized him as one of the wealthy merchants who had convinced Michel's editor to assign him the task of covering Anton Dutilleaux's show. As a distraction to the conflict raging throughout the city.\n\nThe boy refused to part with the lantern. Michel didn't know if that was out of ownership or fear of the dark, which steadfastly lay in wait.\n\n\"Give me that light, you rancid bit of flotsam,\" the fat man snarled. He swung his walking stick with considerable force at the boy's head.\n\nOutmatched, the dirty-faced street urchin let go the lantern and retreated with one hand raised protectively, scarcely avoiding the stick. Metal gleamed in the boy's hand, and Michel knew the urchin had drawn a knife. For a moment the reporter thought blood was about to be spilled.\n\n\"I hope the ghosts get you, you oozing pox,\" the boy called belligerently, backing away. He pocketed his knife and no one except Michel seemed the wiser.\n\nThe fat man snarled an oath at the retreating boy, then shined the lantern's beam farther ahead into the waiting catacombs.\n\nMichel hoped the man's cruel act didn't curse them all. Michel believed in ghosts and curses. He never walked across a grave and always went in the opposite direction if a black cat crossed his path.\n\nI am, he thought miserably, without doubt the last person that should have been assigned to this story. Before he'd left the offices of the newspaper, he had made certain the editor had known that. Shaking just a little, he pulled his cloak more tightly around him.\n\n\"Dutilleaux!\" the fat man roared. \"I demand that you show yourself! I didn't come all this way to be made to wait!\" He paused as the thunder of his voice rolled down the throat of the tunnel. \"Dutilleaux!\"\n\n\"Quiet.\" From out of the shadows, a man calmly asked, \"What are you trying to do, Gervaise? Wake the dead? We all know that is my job.\"\n\nAnton Dutilleaux stepped from the shadows, but they didn't easily part company with him. Rather, they lingered in his dark hair, his dark gaze and his black evening suit. Black gloves covered his long-fingered hands.\n\nThe three women in the crowd drew back with small, frightened cries.\n\n\"Pardon me, ladies. I didn't mean to startle you.\" Dutilleaux smiled disarmingly and bowed deeply.\n\nLiar, Michel thought unkindly. You meant to scare them. He was even angrier because Dutilleaux's appearance had scared him, as well.\n\n\"Is that your fancy, then, charlatan?\" the fat man named Gervaise demanded. \"Spending your nights with the dead so you can scare women and children?\"\n\nDutilleaux smiled a second time, and it was a good smile. Michel had heard that the magician excelled with women. A number of scandalous stories had followed him through Europe.\n\n\"I didn't mean to scare anyone,\" Dutilleaux replied innocently. \"I merely stayed overlong at my studies. I've not lost my keen fascination for the things I'm about to show you. In fact, I'd wager after I reveal them to you that you won't soon find them far from your mind, either.\"\n\nThe mocking certainty in Dutilleaux's voice served to further unnerve Michel. He cursed himself for not having the foresight to bring a handful of candles. They would have been better than nothing should he need to...leave these others behind.\n\n\"Well, I hope to see these fascinations of yours before I grow much older,\" Gervaise groused. \"Otherwise, you won't see a single franc from me.\"\n\nMichel gazed at the other men and women gathered around the fat man. Nearly all of them appeared to be his toadies and hangers-on. Gervaise didn't attract friends as much as he did dependents. Michel was certain the merchant was paying for everyone.\n\n\"Please come this way.\" Dutilleaux gestured.\n\n\"How much farther?\"\n\n\"Only a little.\" Without another word, Dutilleaux walked into the darkness as if he could see in it.\n\nThey all hesitated. Then Gervaise took a fresh grip on his lantern and walking stick and started forward. The crowd seemed to shrink in on itself as everyone began to move.\n\nSwallowing his fear once more, Michel cast a last glance back the way they'd come. The urchin had disappeared. Doubtless he knew his way to the surface, but Michel wasn't so sure he could find his way back even with the marks on the walls. He turned and followed the light down into the tunnel.\n\n\"As you may have heard,\" Dutilleaux said as they walked, \"I've recently returned from an extensive stay in the Orient. Shanghai, actually.\"\n\nMichel knew that because he'd written the piece on Anton Dutilleaux divulging that information. The reporter had interviewed one of Dutilleaux's servants the previous week.\n\n\"While there, I learned much about the spirit world,\" Dutilleaux said. The lantern light revealed him ducking beneath a low arch. \"Do watch your heads here, please.\" He continued down the steep incline. \"The Chinese spirits and ghosts are quite active, you know. Have you heard of the huli jing?\"\n\n\"No,\" one of the women answered. Others echoed her answer.\n\nMichel followed cautiously. His fingers trailed over the rough stone as he passed beneath the arch.\n\n\"The huli jing is a fox spirit,\" Dutilleaux continued. \"It takes the form of a beautiful maiden and seduces men, turning them weak or cruel. There are a number of stories about them.\"\n\n\"Have you ever met a huli jing?\" the woman asked with keen interest.\n\n\"No, sadly.\"\n\n\"Why do you say sadly?\"\n\n\"Because the amorous nature of the fox spirit is legendary.\" Dutilleaux turned and smiled at his small audience. \"I'm told it would have been quite the experience. I embrace challenges on the field of ardor.\"\n\nA couple of the women laughed.\n\nGervaise glared them into silence. \"Dutilleaux, if I don't see something soon, I'm going to\u2014\"\n\nDutilleaux clapped his hands. Immediately pale yellow flames jumped from his palms and raced along the walls to outline a small chamber filled with stacks of bones.\n\n\"God help us,\" one of the men said.\n\n\"Witchcraft,\" one of the women gasped.\n\nCotton-mouthed, Michel stared at the flames. For the first time in his life, he felt he was in the presence of something truly arcane.\n\nAs if entertaining in a well-appointed drawing room instead of beneath the city, Dutilleaux turned to face his audience and spread his arms wide. \"Come. Don't be afraid. I won't let anything you see here harm you in any way.\"\n\n\"Where\u2014?\" Gervaise raised the lantern and walking stick before him. \"Where did you get all these skeletons?\"\n\n\"He's brought us down here to kill us,\" a woman whispered. \"Those are the bones of his previous victims.\"\n\n\"I should think I would have been quite busy, if that were true.\" Dutilleaux smiled and shook his head. \"These poor souls aren't here through any doing of mine.\" He gazed at the stacks of skulls and long bones. Rib cages lay in another pile. \"The church is responsible for their presence with us. Everyone interred at Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs is being moved here.\" He shrugged. \"The church takes care to work at night. It wouldn't be seemly for people to see them trundling around wheelbarrows filled with skeletons, would it?\"\n\n\"Dutilleaux is telling the truth,\" an older man said. \"I've talked to some of the priests. They're emptying the graveyards so Paris can grow.\"\n\nThe flames in the room continued to burn. Upon closer inspection, Michel noted that gutters had been cut into the wall for oil. Dutilleaux had simply\u2014through some sort of sleight of hand\u2014lit the oil.\n\n\"Did you want to talk about real-estate possibilities, gentlemen?\" Dutilleaux asked. \"Or did you want to talk about what I discovered in my travels?\"\n\n\"Show us,\" Gervaise ordered. \"I've not got all night.\"\n\n\"Don't be so demanding,\" Dutilleaux cautioned. \"The spirits of China can be quite vengeful. I thought I'd already apprised you of that.\"\n\nThe fat man scowled at him and his jowls quivered as he restrained what was no doubt a sharp retort.\n\nFor a time, Dutilleaux talked about his journey to the old empires of China. He mentioned the people he'd met and the places he'd seen. As he spoke, the flames depleted the oil in the gutters and the room grew gradually darker.\n\nIt wasn't until full dark had almost returned that Michel wished Dutilleaux would hurry up his presentation. Dutilleaux was an excellent storyteller, though, and his trained orator's voice filled the cavernous space with excitement.\n\n\"Though I saw all these things,\" Dutilleaux concluded, \"I saw nothing as stupendous as that which I'm about to show you.\" He paced the room like a wild animal, and the darkness settled about him like a favorite cloak. \"I found a way to open a gate to the Celestial Heavens. I can visit the Oriental afterlife. Tonight, I can take you with me.\"\n\nMichel leaned against the cold stone wall and waited. The room seemed colder, and he didn't think it was his imagination.\n\n\"I don't see a gate,\" Gervaise grumbled.\n\n\"That's because your eyes aren't finely attuned to the spirit world. But perhaps I can help you to bring the spirit world into better focus.\"\n\nMichel's heart thudded in his chest and blood roared in his ears.\n\nTheatrically, as if all of this was taking place on one of the stages where he'd first honed his showmanship, Dutilleaux gestured to either side. Gray smoke billowed up from the stone floor.\n\nIt's just a trick, Michel reminded himself. It's nothing you haven't seen in theaters.\n\nBut the unsettling sensation within him grew stronger. The smoke continued to swell till it nearly filled the room.\n\nThen a glowing shape appeared in the haze. Indistinct at first, the image gradually grew sharper, till it revealed itself as a beautiful young Oriental woman. Dressed in a long flowing red gown and with her black hair pulled up, she hovered there in the smoke.\n\n\"My lady,\" Dutilleaux greeted warmly. \"I bid you welcome to the earthly realm.\"\n\nThe apparition nodded slightly but did not speak.\n\n\"I crave a favor,\" Dutilleaux said. \"I have friends with me tonight. They wish to look upon the Celestial Heavens.\"\n\nJust a trick, Michel thought. It's all done with lights and painted glass. No one is there.\n\nBut the woman in the smoke moved and pointed to her right. A moment later, a doorway appeared and hung in midair.\n\nThe crowd sat silently. Michel didn't know if they were even breathing.\n\nSlowly, ponderously, the doorway opened within the smoke. On the other side of the doorway, a beautiful land filled with flowers and trees lay waiting.\n\n\"Do you see it?\" Dutilleaux asked softly. \"Do you see the Celestial Heavens?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" a woman said in a strained voice. \"I do. I see it. I can't believe I see it, but it's there. Right there.\"\n\nDutilleaux basked in the glory of the moment. He turned to the crowd and bowed deeply.\n\n\"We must be careful at this point,\" he told the audience. \"We have to keep a wary eye on the gateway before someone\u2014or something\u2014manages to get through.\"\n\n\"You brought us here to endanger our lives!\" Gervaise shook his walking stick and the cover fell away to reveal a gleaming sword cane.\n\nDutilleaux raised his hands in a placating manner. \"There is nothing to be afraid of.\"\n\n\"I'm not afraid,\" Gervaise insisted. \"But I won't allow you to endanger these women.\"\n\n\"I'm not endangering them. I can control the ghosts.\"\n\n\"Listen to him,\" another man, this one's voice harder and more confident, interrupted. \"There is nothing to be afraid of\u2014because there's nothing there.\"\n\n\"Who's speaking?\" Dutilleaux demanded. The confident smile never left his handsome face.\n\nAnother man stepped from the back of the crowd. He peeled back his cloak and revealed saturnine features. \"I am.\"\n\nFor a moment, Dutilleaux seemed at a loss. Then he smiled and said, \"Professor \u00c9tienne-Gaspard Robert. Welcome to our festivities.\"\n\nMichel recognized Robert's name. The man was Belgian by birth but had recently moved to France to pursue a career in art. He was also reputed to be a professor of physics.\n\n\"Not festivities,\" Robert stated. \"This is merely a parlor show.\" He turned to the audience. \"What you're seeing is an illusion. A play of light and shadow. Less substantial than an early-morning fog.\"\n\n\"Are you so sure, my friend?\" Dutilleaux asked in a calm voice. \"Perhaps you'd like to be the first to go through the gateway.\"\n\nMichel stared at the professor.\n\n\"There is no gateway there.\" The people nearest Robert stepped back as though afraid of being struck down by any forces that chose to punish him for sacrilege. Robert sneered at the audience. \"Superstitious fools. You're letting this bag of wind with a handful of tricks sway your good judgment.\" He locked eyes with Dutilleaux. \"Permit me passage, then, charlatan. Show these sheep your power. Or be cursed for your fakery.\"\n\nBoldly, Robert strode forward.\n\nAn eerie hiss came from within the mystical doorway. Michel tried to remind himself that everything he was witnessing was a trick, but the mood Dutilleaux had established held him firmly in place.\n\nBefore the Belgian professor reached Dutilleaux, a garish figure with a horribly white face darted out of the doorway. The figure raised a long-bladed knife in one hand.\n\nRobert stepped back with a curse.\n\nBut the figure wasn't hunting him. The phantom turned on Dutilleaux. The knife flashed down and the flames went out.\n\nMen and women cried and screamed as they stood in the meager pool of light provided by the lantern. None of them were close to where Dutilleaux had stood.\n\nTrembling, Michel scooped up the lantern and carried it toward Robert and Dutilleaux. The light crept across the stone floor with him.\n\nRobert stood against the nearby wall, obviously fearing for his very life. \"That thing was here. I felt it. By God, it was real.\"\n\nMichel turned the lantern toward Dutilleaux and found the man stretched out on the stone cavern's floor. Several skulls and bones littered the ground around him.\n\nAnd the large knife the phantom had carried stuck out of the phantasmagorist's chest. Dutilleaux's face was already pale white in death."
            },
            {
                "title": "London, England",
                "text": "[ Current day ]\n\n\"Couldn't you have worn something a little more...revealing?\"\n\nAnnja Creed frowned as she considered the question over the Bluetooth earpiece that linked her with her satellite phone. She stood in the middle of a dank alleyway stinking with rotting garbage and Chinese takeout. Dark rain clouds hung in the sky visible between the buildings. Sporadic smog patches drifted past.\n\n\"Doug, I'm way underdressed for a potential mugging as it is.\" Annja wore a silver calf-length duster over black pants and a pearl-gray silk tie-waist blouse. Slouchy microsuede boots pushed her five-ten up to something over six feet. The boots were comfortable, stylish, and she could run for her life in them if she had to. She wore her auburn hair clipped back.\n\n\"This guy's not a mugger.\" Doug Morrell sounded put out. The producer of Chasing History's Monsters\u2014the syndicated television show Annja costarred in with Kristie Chatham\u2014was twenty-two, young and driven by all things Twitter.\n\nDespite the fact that he wasn't really interested in history or archaeology, Annja genuinely liked Doug. He was like the younger brother she'd never had.\n\n\"I know he's not a mugger.\" Annja walked through the alley with her hands in her pockets. \"He's killed three women that the Metro police know about.\"\n\n\"I saw those reports, too, which is why I want you to be careful.\"\n\n\"Careful, but less dressed.\"\n\nDoug hesitated only a moment. \"Yeah.\"\n\n\"Not happening.\"\n\n\"You could at least get rid of the jacket.\"\n\n\"And give it to Igor to carry?\"\n\n\"Don't make fun of your bodyguard.\"\n\nAnnja resisted the impulse to look back at Ray Venard, the guy Doug had hired for the shoot tonight. Venard was a large, hulking brute who had played professional rugby before he'd gotten caught shaving points, then was injured by outraged fans. He'd gotten through the court system unscathed, but the fans had left him with a knee that would never be the same.\n\n\"I thought he was a cameraman.\"\n\n\"He is. He's both. Kind of like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. Bodyguard and photographer.\"\n\n\"Did I mention to you that when I met him in his office he was taking pictures of women for a skin magazine?\"\n\nDoug sighed. \"You did.\"\n\n\"So not only am I not going to take my coat off to be more revealing in this cold, rat-infested alley, I'm also not going to take it off in front of Igor.\"\n\n\"I only mention the coat because it could help ratings.\"\n\n\"The ratings are fine. We just got a two-year renewal.\"\n\n\"So we could work on the next two-year deal.\"\n\nAnnja kept walking. Working for the television show was sometimes a pain, but mostly it was fun. And there was Doug and a few of the other people she liked who were connected to the production. Not only did she get to travel, but the salary and bonuses were nice and allowed her to follow up on other explorations and digs.\n\nShe watched the shadows carefully. Detective Chief Inspector Westcox hadn't been happy when she'd come to his office to discuss the recent murders that the media was attributing to \"Mr. Hyde.\" Of course, the reporters were only doing that because \"Mr. Hyde\" had written in, claiming responsibility for the murders.\n\nWestcox had shown Annja the morgue photos of the victims. The DCI was closemouthed and professional, and he'd thought to frighten her off with the brutality of the killings. The victims had been stomped to death, their faces pulped by size eighteen Rufflander work boots.\n\nWhat DCI Westcox hadn't known was how much violence Annja Creed had seen. The police inspector had assumed she was a young woman inquiring into things much too bloody for her.\n\n\"I'm keeping my clothes on for the next two years, too.\"\n\nDoug whined. He was a good whiner when he wanted to be, but Annja was impervious.\n\n\"You have Kristie for the T and A ratings. With me, you've got history and archaeology ratings.\"\n\nThe fact that Kristie Chatham was the fan darling because of her habitual loss of clothing and \"wardrobe malfunctions\" bothered Annja more than she would ever tell anyone. But she accepted it. She had her fans, too.\n\n\"Would Kristie agree to walking in a rat-infested alley at midnight so a serial murderer could leap out of the shadows and murder her?\"\n\n\"No, of course not. If she got hurt, she wouldn't be able to work.\"\n\n\"And I would?\"\n\n\"You're not going to get hurt. You have Igor. Besides, you're only there tonight to shoot a little mood footage. Igor also tells me the fog is going to have to be enhanced. Says it's really weak.\"\n\nAnnja looked back over her shoulder at the lumbering shadow that trailed her. Igor carried a portable video camera in one giant paw. \"You're talking to him?\"\n\n\"Texting. I'm talking to you.\"\n\n\"Great. So you're distracting my bodyguard.\"\n\n\"He'd probably be more focused on you if you weren't overdressed.\"\n\nTurning her attention back to the alley ahead of her, Annja shook her head. Sometimes\u2014most of the time\u2014Doug had a one-track mind. \"About the Mr. Hyde thing.\"\n\n\"You said you loved the Mr. Hyde thing,\" Doug said, instantly wary. \"You said the Mr. Hyde thing was awesome. You couldn't wait to do the Mr. Hyde thing.\"\n\nAnnja had said that. But that had been when she'd thought her schedule wasn't going to be so tight. She'd hoped to get out to Hadrian's Wall. That had been the site of her first dig, and the place still held a special spot in her heart.\n\nThen, when she'd seen those poor women in those police photographs, she realized that the \"investigation\" bordered on sensationalism. That the women were going to be fodder for the conspiracy mill Chasing History's Monsters routinely set into motion didn't sit well with her.\n\n\"You do realize Mr. Hyde isn't real.\"\n\n\"When you meet Mr. Hyde, tell him that. Either we've got one of London's oldest and eeriest monsters returned from over a hundred years of being missing, or we've got someone who rediscovered Dr. Jekyll's secret potion. I don't care which it is. It's a great story.\"\n\n\"That's what it is\u2014a story. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was a novella written by Robert Louis Stevenson. An allegory some say was based on Victorian views of sex.\"\n\n\"Yeah, yeah, yeah. You told me that already. And I agreed that you could put that stuff in there. As long as there's not too much of it. Which is why we're picking up the tab on your date with Professor Beeswax.\"\n\n\"Professor Beswick. And it's not a date. He's an expert on film, literature and myth.\"\n\n\"I suppose it doesn't hurt that Professor Beeswax is good-looking, though. I ran a Google search on him. I see what you saw.\"\n\n\"Really? You thought Professor Beswick was attractive?\"\n\nDoug nearly choked. \"No! That's not what I said. Are you recording this?\" He cursed. \"Now I've got Diet Coke up my nose. Don't do that.\"\n\nAnnja chuckled. Doug was easy to set off.\n\n\"As for this Mr. Hyde thing, I got a very convincing email stating that the Dr. Jekyll formula had been discovered on the internet and someone had re-created it.\"\n\n\"Who was the email from?\"\n\n\"An anonymous source.\"\n\n\"Doug, it's me and you. You can tell me.\"\n\n\"I can't. That's how the writer tagged the email.\"\n\n\"And you bought into this based on that.\" Annja couldn't believe it, then reminded herself she'd been in the same situation with Doug dozens of times before.\n\n\"Sure. There are the three murders. Mr. Hyde claims to have done them.\"\n\nAnnja bit her tongue. She was looking forward to her stay in London and dinner tomorrow with Professor Beswick appeared promising.\n\nAhead, one of the doors suddenly banged open and four figures spilled out into the alley. Three of them were young Asian males dressed in dark clothing backing out of a restaurant. One of them held a young woman trapped with an arm across her neck. Her eyes rolled fearfully and she hung on to the man's arm to keep her balance.\n\nThe woman was dressed in black pants and a white shirt, the typical server's uniform for a lot of restaurants. Light shined from the open doorway and revealed tattoos on the necks of two of the men. All of them carried pistols. A handful of pound notes drifted from the cloth bag one of the guys fisted.\n\n\"Doug, I'm going to have to talk to you later.\" She unclipped the Bluetooth earpiece and shoved it into her pocket. Annja was calm as she surveyed the scene. Her heart went out to the frightened young woman.\n\nAn older man in a suit raced through the back door and quickly stopped when he saw the gunmen. \"Laurel.\"\n\n\"Get back, old man.\" One of the youths took a step forward and pointed the gun at the businessman.\n\n\"Please. You have the money. Don't take my daughter.\"\n\nThe youth opened fire. Annja didn't know if he was trying to hit the man or not, but one of the bullets chewed into the door and the other went through the doorway.\n\nThe man dropped to the ground, covered his head with his arms and screamed for his daughter.\n\n\"Papa!\" The young woman cried out in fear and tried to free herself. One of the men not holding her backhanded her across the face.\n\n\"Hey!\" Igor's loud voice thundered in the alley. \"You blokes want to put the guns down before you get hurt?\"\n\nGlancing back, Annja saw that Igor had a gun in his own hand instead of the camera now. He stood holding the revolver like he knew what to do. Unfortunately, so did the three Asians. Two of them opened fire while the third hung on to their hostage.\n\nAnnja pressed herself flat against a building.\n\nThe bullets drove Igor back into cover. He rose up just long enough to fire two rounds. Both bullets went wild, and one of them came dangerously close to Annja.\n\nIn the next moment, a car roared into the alley behind Igor. The bright lights pinned him for a moment as he threw up a hand in front of his eyes. He stepped aside, but the driver opened the door and hit the bodyguard hard enough to bounce him off a brick wall. Igor rolled and dropped as the car roared by.\n\nThe driver brought the car to a rocking halt only a few feet from the three men. They opened the doors on the passenger's side and started to get in with their captive.\n\nAnnja sprang for the driver, shoved a hand into the car and caught the man by the jacket front. She yanked hard and the man's head cracked against the window's edge. The driver's eyes rolled up and showed white just before he slumped across the steering wheel. His foot pressed against the accelerator and the car sped forward before the others could climb in.\n\nReaching into the otherwhere that contained her sword, Annja drew the blade into the physical world. Moonlight glinted along the three-foot-plus polished steel blade. The hilt was plain, unadorned, wrapped in leather strips, and it felt completely at home in Annja's hand. The sword had been forged for Joan of Arc and only the one destined to take up Joan's crusade could wield it.\n\nAnnja shot forward as the car passed, and she knew she was moving too fast for the men to track. To them it would have looked like she'd appeared out of nowhere. She drove a double-fisted blow into the face of the man on the right. Propelled by the great strength she had when she wielded the sword, the man sailed backward and thudded against crates of trash. Rotted vegetables and refuse tumbled over him. Rats scattered and ran.\n\nWhirling, Annja lashed out with the sword as the man holding the money took aim at her. Beyond him, the out-of-control car rammed into a streetlight, shuddered and died with an explosive release of steam. Her blade caught the man's pistol as he lifted it, and drove it from his grip. She took two quick side steps forward, then raised her right leg and drove her foot into his face.\n\nHe went down in a loose jumble of flesh and blood, unconscious before he hit the ground.\n\nStill holding his hostage, the third robber fired again and again.\n\nAnnja ducked and went low. She shoved her left leg out and swept the legs of the man and his hostage from the ground. As they fell backward, the man kept firing, wildly spraying the stone walls on either side of the alley. Trapped between the buildings, the sharp reports rolled like thunder.\n\nShe swung the sword at the gun and knocked the weapon from the man's grip. He tried to get up, made it to his knees, but she met him with the sword hilt between his eyes. The impact snapped his head back and he sank.\n\nSatisfied that the immediate danger was over, Annja released the sword and the weapon vanished. She walked over to the young woman and helped her to her feet.\n\n\"You're all right.\" Annja cradled the woman in her arms. \"You're going to be fine.\" When her father reached them, she released the woman into his custody and went back to check on Igor.\n\nThe big man was just coming around, groaning and still trying to get his breath back.\n\n\"C'mon. Let's get you up and get out of here.\" Annja pulled him to his feet.\n\nIgor held an arm across his ribs and stared at the men lying in the alley. Cooks and waitstaff were already taking them into custody.\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\nAnnja shrugged. \"The driver's brakes must have gone out. He hit them and knocked them down.\"\n\n\"The girl's not hurt?\"\n\n\"We got lucky.\" That was an easier story than telling the truth to the police. \"Let's go. I really don't want to spend the whole night in a police station being questioned.\"\n\n\"Shouldn't we stay?\"\n\nAnnja looked at him.\n\nIgor grinned sheepishly. \"I mean, I did try to save the girl. Maybe a little publicity will help the business, you know.\"\n\n\"Right. And that way Doug Morrell will know you got taken out by a couple thugs. Think he's going to want to keep you around protecting me from Mr. Hyde?\"\n\n\"On second thought, I've never been a glory hound.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"But we can't leave just this minute.\" Igor looked at the side of the alley. \"I have to find my pistol. I must have dropped it. Can you help give us a look?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 4",
                "text": "Professor Edmund Beswick stood on the curb in front of Carlini's Magic Bullet Club when Annja arrived by cab. He was a few years older than Annja, in his mid-thirties, and was about the same height. His black hair brushed the tips of his ears and he wore a neatly trimmed goatee. His olive complexion hinted at some Indian or Middle Eastern ancestry and lent him an Old World elegance. The dark blue tux and top hat made him look like he'd stepped from the pages of a Charles Dickens novel.\n\nHe opened the cab door for Annja and thrust pound notes at the driver.\n\n\"I can get that.\" Annja had her pocketbook at the ready.\n\n\"Nonsense. This evening is my treat. I insist.\" Edmund offered her his gloved hand.\n\nAnnja took it, then held on to his arm. She wore a simple black dress, but it was one of her favorites and she knew she wore it well. Still, she couldn't help feeling underdressed.\n\n\"I wasn't expecting anything so formal.\"\n\nEdmund grinned. \"You look marvelous, and you'll find that not everyone inside is dressed as pompously as I am.\" He waved a dismissive hand. \"I tend toward the exotic when I'm given my head. I do hope you'll forgive me my eccentricities this evening, but this is a special occasion.\"\n\n\"You look dashing.\"\n\n\"Thank you. You are most kind.\"\n\nAnnja surveyed the front of Carlini's Magic Bullet Club. The first floor of the small building was covered in wooden gingerbread that made it look positively ancient. Red velvet curtains covered the large plate-glass windows. Torchlight created golden pools against the material and shadows moved inside. A red carpet under a small canopy led to the front door, which looked like it would open to a dungeon.\n\n\"Now, that looks foreboding.\"\n\nEdmund's smile was so big and innocent, Annja was certain she could see the twelve-year-old he had been. \"Doesn't it just?\" he replied.\n\n\"And I notice there's no doorknob.\"\n\n\"So it's mysterious, too.\" His dark brown eyes twinkled. \"Carlini's is a very special place. No one gets in here who isn't invited.\" He waved a hand and suddenly there was a single red rose in it. He offered it to Annja.\n\nSmiling, she took the rose in her free hand and smelled it. The fragrance was subtle and sweet. \"You're a magician?\"\n\n\"Alas, you thought I was merely a literature professor?\" Edmund feigned a look of pain.\n\n\"From what I've heard, you're an authority on English literature. I saw you in an interview on the History Channel and was impressed. When I got this assignment, I knew I wanted you as a guest speaker.\"\n\n\"I'd wondered about that. Your program doesn't draw immediate confidence from a cursory look.\"\n\n\"No.\" Annja knew that was true, and it was one of the things she had to accept about the opportunities Chasing History's Monsters afforded her. \"I like to go below the surface of a story.\"\n\n\"That was true of most of your segments that I saw.\"\n\n\"Sometimes a good deal of what I've prepared ends up on the cutting-room floor. So I have to warn you that some of what I'm doing could end up in the same place.\"\n\n\"Well, we'll just have to roll the dice, won't we?\"\n\n\"I do put interviews on the television website.\" That was a deal Annja had recently negotiated. \"Added-value pieces I believe are interesting.\"\n\n\"Then I shall endeavor to be interesting. I consider it a challenge.\"\n\n\"That's hardly fair for you.\"\n\n\"Trust me when I say that I am a fierce competitor.\"\n\n\"All right.\" Annja grinned in self-satisfaction. She'd known Edmund was going to be intriguing. She was happy to be proven right.\n\n\"So how goes your hunt for our new Mr. Hyde?\" Edmund looked troubled.\n\n\"We're still looking.\"\n\n\"Please don't hold it against me for hoping you're not the one who finds that man.\" Edmund shook his head. \"I saw some of the pictures and videos they released of those poor women. I would hate to think of you facing such a brute.\"\n\n\"I don't think that's going to happen. Not with Metro increasing surveillance on the streets.\" Annja looked at the pub. \"Tell me about this place.\"\n\n\"Carlini's has been a home to magic for over a hundred years. All the great masters have come here. Magicians. Escape artists. Illusionists. Mentalists. And prestidigitators of every stripe\u2014fair and foul. They've had just as many villains as they've had heroes.\" Edmund smiled fondly at the pub. \"Houdini was here. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, though he came looking for real magic and a way to contact the spirit world. Walter B. Gibson. Robert Harbin. Chung Ling Soo. David Nixon. David Copperfield. Penn and Teller. You've heard of the Magic Circle?\"\n\n\"The organization committed to sponsoring and reimagining magic. Of course.\"\n\n\"They formed here in London in 1905. Carlini's predated them. The Great Carlini preferred to keep a lower profile and only invited in the very best in the field. They gave private shows to the royals and other important people, perfected their craft and studied other masters. This was the place where they could be themselves and enjoy magic without the stress of an unfriendly or doubting audience. The people in this place appreciate the orchestration of a skilled magician.\"\n\n\"It sounds like the hardest audience in the world to play for.\"\n\nEdmund grinned. \"No. And do you know why?\"\n\nAnnja shook her head, enjoying his enthusiasm.\n\n\"Because magicians want to believe in magic.\" Edmund's eyes sparkled. \"Carlini's guests are the best audience. They live to be astonished, amazed and entertained. Now, observe.\" He gestured at the door.\n\nIn response, the door quivered, rattled and slowly pulled inward with a theatrical creak that gave Annja goose bumps. She'd been in scary situations before, circumstances that would have gotten her killed if she hadn't been quick enough or strong enough or lucky enough to get through. But there was something about the atmosphere of the pub, Edmund's story and her own awakened childish fascination with magic that affected her.\n\nEdmund took her arm and guided her inside.\n\nAfter the outside door closed, a small yellow light flared to life overhead. The tiny bulb was barely enough to reveal the three wooden doors at the end of the hallway. One door lay dead ahead and the two others were on either side. The doors were unmarked.\n\n\"Magic is all about choices.\" Edmund waved toward the doors. \"Tonight you have three.\"\n\n\"And if I choose wrong?\"\n\n\"We go hungry and I don't get to show you my biggest surprise.\" Edmund grinned. \"But I have faith in you.\" He gestured her forward. \"Please have a look. This challenge has been designed for you.\"\n\nAnnja cocked an eyebrow at Edmund. \"You realize we could go hungry.\"\n\n\"I've always found that risk increases appetite and appreciation for a meal.\" Beswick looked at her. \"I wouldn't have figured you for someone unwilling to risk.\"\n\nAmused, Annja advanced. As she did, a slot opened up in each door and a three-by-five notecard slid out to hang from each of them.\n\n\"Kind of creepy.\"\n\nEdmund just smiled and waited.\n\nExamining the cards, Annja discovered the one on the left door had a drawing of a chicken in charcoal-gray ink. The middle door had a drawing of an egg in brown ink. The third one she wasn't quite sure of but it was black and the drawing was etched deep into the card. She pointed to it. \"What's this?\"\n\nEdmund shook his head. \"The best I could do at drawing a chicken nugget.\"\n\n\"A chicken nugget?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"So the obvious correlation would be that I'm supposed to pick the door that comes first?\"\n\n\"If that's what you think.\"\n\nAnnja examined the cards again, more closely this time. She paid particular attention to the drawings, the ink and the shape of the lines. She even smelled them to confirm her conclusions. \"If you listen to a biologist, the biologist would say that the egg comes first. But a theologian would insist that the chicken came first.\"\n\nEdmund's face remained unreadable.\n\n\"However, a mystery lover could be tempted to pick the chicken nugget simply because it doesn't fit, or because it's not a natural thing, as the chicken and the egg are.\" Annja smiled. \"You went to a lot of trouble.\"\n\n\"Then you already know the answer?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Annja knew she'd surprised him. He hadn't thought she would fail, but he hadn't expected her to succeed so early. \"But only because you went to such great detail to make your clues.\"\n\n\"Elucidate.\"\n\n\"The answer is in the inks, and somewhat in the drawings, but not in what was drawn.\"\n\nEdmund smiled in startled appreciation. \"You are good.\"\n\nAnnja pointed to the egg. \"That ink is atramentum, or it's supposed to be. It's a replica of a Roman ink made about sixteen hundred years ago. You can tell because it's faded out and has turned brown. That's because it was made from iron salts and tannin. It goes on bluish-black, then fades to brown.\"\n\nShe moved on to the nugget. The image was drawn deeply into the card with fine, black lines. \"This ink was called masi and was created in ancient India about 400 BCE. The drawing is deep and thin because they used needles to write with. So did you. Quite a good touch on that, actually.\"\n\nEdmund inclined his head in thanks.\n\n\"This, however, was the first.\" Annja touched the drawing of the chicken. \"The ink is graphite based and it was drawn with an ink brush. When you look closely, you can see the brushstrokes. This ink, or at least the original, was created by the Chinese about 1800 BCE. Definitely the first.\"\n\nEdmund quietly applauded her. \"Bravo, Ms. Creed. Quite the performance.\"\n\nAnnja curtsied, thoroughly enjoying herself. \"Did you think of this little test yourself?\"\n\n\"No. I must admit that I had help. After all, I'm just a professor of English and literature. This was beyond my ken.\" Edmund walked to the door with the chicken on it and the door opened before he reached it.\n\nA large man in a good suit greeted Edmund with a warm handshake. He had a high forehead and glasses and looked to be in his sixties. \"Welcome, Ms. Creed. It is indeed an honor.\"\n\n\"Annja Creed, may I present Gaetano Carlini, the current owner and host of the Magic Bullet Club. Gaetano, my beautiful guest, Ms. Annja Creed.\"\n\nTotally charmed by the big man, Annja offered her hand and he took it, bowed deeply and kissed the back of it. \"Please come in and make yourselves at home. I have your table this way.\" Gaetano swept them into a large dining room.\n\n\"OVER THE YEARS, MS. CREED\u2014\"\n\n\"Please call me Annja.\"\n\nGaetano nodded solemnly. \"Annja. Over the years, Carlini's has been host to a number of important and famous people.\" He gave a careless shrug. \"And, at times, some who were more infamous than famous.\"\n\n\"But no one that was ever shot or hanged for their crimes.\" Edmund swirled his wine around in the fluted glass.\n\n\"Thankfully, no. We've never had that notoriety.\" Gaetano pushed the glasses up on his nose. \"But we do ask one favor of those guests, other than to enjoy themselves while they are here.\"\n\nAnnja sat at the small, intimate table in the center of the ornate dining room lined with stage magic memorabilia and framed caricatures of magicians. Her red rose occupied a small vase in the middle of the table. They were adjacent to the small, curtained stage. Noises came from the back, so Annja knew something was going on. Her curiosity was getting the better of her.\n\n\"What would that favor be?\" Annja nibbled on a piece of Havarti cheese.\n\n\"To allow me to sketch a caricature to hang on our wall.\"\n\n\"Gaetano is very good. Very knowledgeable about a great many things. Including history.\" Edmund sipped his wine. \"He's the one who helped me figure out your puzzle.\"\n\nGaetano waved the compliment away.\n\n\"In another life, had not magic called to him so strongly, I fear he would have been a forger.\"\n\n\"Oh, now I'm offended.\" But the big man's boisterous laugh plainly indicated he was more flattered than anything.\n\n\"I would love for you to draw a caricature of me. But I'm not a magician.\"\n\n\"I beg to differ.\" Gaetano sat up straight in his chair. \"I have seen many episodes of your television show. You are a great performer at revealing some of history's best-kept secrets. I knew who you were before this youngster did.\"\n\nEdmund held up his hands in surrender. \"Sadly, that's true. I told him I'd gotten an email from an American archaeologist regarding the Mr. Hyde murders.\"\n\n\"He was set to turn you down.\" Gaetano shook his head in mock exasperation. \"Silly boy.\"\n\n\"In my defense, it was only because the murders were so heinous. I didn't want to contribute to the gratuitous exposure of the misfortunes of others. That was before I spoke with you and you assured me that would not happen.\"\n\n\"It won't.\" Annja fully intended that the Mr. Hyde piece, if it aired, wouldn't dwell on the murders as much as it did the legend. Hopefully the London Metro police would have the killer in hand by then, as well.\n\n\"He might not have called you at all had I not shown him one of your programs.\" Gaetano chuckled. \"He was, of course, instantly smitten.\"\n\nAnnja laughed. \"Obviously he's easy to impress.\"\n\nThe meal came then, thick steaming platters of pastas and seasoned vegetables along with crisp salads. Annja ate with gusto, listening to the familiar camaraderie of the two men as they played off each other and took turns telling her stories.\n\nWhile they dined, several magicians from other tables went to the stage and performed their acts. The audience oohed and aahed in approval and delight as things disappeared, reappeared and changed into other things.\n\nAnnja loved every moment of the shows, from the theatrics to the conversational patter that established the history and the obvious familiarity the men and women all had with one another.\n\n\"If you'll excuse me, I'll return shortly.\" Edmund left the table and headed for the kitchen area.\n\nGaetano kept Annja enthralled with stories about his adventures as a magician. He also kept the wine flowing and managed small sleight-of-hand tricks with dinnerware, napkins and coins between magic acts.\n\nThen the stage curtain parted and Edmund passed through. He no longer wore the old-fashioned suit. He was dressed in a swimsuit and carried swim goggles in his hand.\n\nInstantly, the dining area filled with catcalls and good-natured teasing.\n\n\"I see you've got nothing up your sleeve, Professor Beswick!\"\n\n\"And chicken legs.\"\n\nEdmund held up his hands in surrender. \"Go ahead, mates. Take your shots. Make them the best you can, because I'm about to amaze and astonish you.\"\n\nAfter a few more catcalls and hoots of laughter, the crowd settled into an expectant hush.\n\n\"Tonight I'm going to attempt my grandest escape ever. As many of you know, I've been studying to become something of an escapologist. I'm going to perform this escape in honor of my guest\u2014Ms. Annja Creed of Chasing History's Monsters and something of an escape artist herself, according to the stories I've read about her.\"\n\nAn enthusiastic burst of applause followed the announcement.\n\n\"Stand up. Let them see you.\" Gaetano pushed back out of the spotlight that suddenly fell on Annja.\n\nShe stood, waved and bowed, and felt more than a little embarrassed. She sat back down and glanced at Gaetano. \"Does Edmund bring all his dates here?\"\n\nGaetano smiled. \"You are the only person Edmund has brought here in all the years that he's been coming.\"\n\nFlattered, Annja turned her attention back to the stage.\n\n\"You have all heard of the Great Houdini, and you have heard of the Chinese Water Torture Cell. Or, as the master himself called it, the Upside Down.\" Edmund stepped back and swept a hand toward the stage.\n\nThe curtains parted and a large glass-and-steel box filled with water was revealed. A beautiful young woman walked out of the shadows. Like Edmund, she wore a swimsuit, except hers was a spectacular yellow bikini designed to draw the attention of every male in the room.\n\nAnnja kept her focus riveted on Edmund. The assistant locked his feet into stocks, then operated a mechanical winch to lift Edmund off the stage floor, suspend him in the air and place him headfirst into the water tank.\n\nDespite the fact that she knew the trick was part of a planned show, Annja tensed as she watched Edmund submerge. He put his hands on the glass, steadying himself as he went into the water. His hair floated around his face. She caught herself holding her breath with him and felt foolish.\n\nA moment later, the assistant locked Edmund in. Once the woman stepped back, Edmund started working to free himself. At first, his movements were controlled, smooth and confident. Then, as time passed, he became more frantic. His hands slammed against the glass walls as he jerked and strained to pull free of the stocks."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 5",
                "text": "\"Something's wrong.\" Annja started to get up. She was already reaching for her sword, thinking that she could break the glass walls and release the water.\n\nCalmly, Gaetano put a hand on her forearm to restrain her. \"Relax. This is part of the show.\" But he didn't take his eyes from the stage.\n\nAnnja forced herself to sit, but she noticed that several of the other dinner guests were ill at ease, as well. She didn't know how much time had passed, but she thought at least two minutes had gone by. Perhaps as many as three.\n\nAbruptly, the assistant hurried forward and draped a bloodred curtain over the water tank. Maybe it was supposed to protect the audience from the horrid sight unfolding before them. Then the woman lifted an ax and prepared to strike.\n\nThe audience held its collective breath.\n\nThe only thing holding Annja in her seat was Gaetano's firm, unshaking hand on her arm. And that wasn't going to hold her back for much longer.\n\nThe assistant started her swing with the ax just as the curtain rose above the water tank. She dropped the ax and yanked the thick material away to reveal Edmund standing triumphantly on top of the locked water tank.\n\nAnnja released a tense breath as enthusiastic applause filled the dining room.\n\nDripping wet and looking magnificent, Edmund bowed theatrically. Then the stage curtains closed.\n\nGaetano smiled at Annja. \"Now are you glad that I asked you to wait?\"\n\n\"Yes, but that was nerve-racking.\"\n\n\"It was meant to be. Magic is meant to confound or astonish. But really good magic, the kind like Houdini practiced, was more in line with a circus performance.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"An aerialist working without a net. A lion tamer sticking his head into a lion's mouth. A motorcycle daredevil whirling madly inside one of those steel balls. And even someone who allows himself to be shot from a cannon. They all flirt with death. At least, they do to an untrained eye. But the reality is that even the best performers sometimes catch an unlucky break. The audience never truly wishes to see something like that, but the expectation is there that it could happen.\"\n\n\"I suppose that doesn't speak highly of us, does it?\"\n\n\"We're all human. What is life without spectacle? And risk?\"\n\n\"I love doing magic.\" Edmund, dressed again in his tux, sat at the table and walked a euro across his knuckles. The coin flashed in the light. \"Ever since I was a boy, I wanted to know how magicians did the things they did. So I worked at it.\" He shrugged and smiled sadly. \"Unfortunately, magic doesn't pay much unless you get very good and very lucky.\"\n\n\"Being good doesn't always help.\" Gaetano poured more wine all around. \"Edmund, you are good. What you need is a dedication to your craft and luck.\"\n\n\"So why didn't you become a magician? The money?\" Annja basked in the glow of the dinner, wine and company.\n\n\"I thought I needed a legitimate job. Something to fall back on. In addition to magic, I also loved stories. So I became a professor of literature.\"\n\nGaetano threw his arm around the younger man. \"Edmund is being modest, which is no way for any self-respecting magician to be. He attracted the attention of Oxford University and is now one of their shining lights.\"\n\nAnnja grinned. \"So I've been told.\"\n\nGaetano shook his head. \"Modesty ill becomes a magician. A performer of magic must be unique and daunting and commanding, while being extremely skilled at his craft. Edmund lacks the callous disregard for others that a magician must develop.\"\n\n\"Appearing on Chasing History's Monsters should help correct that.\"\n\nGaetano licked his finger and mopped up graham cracker crumbs from the small dessert plate that had once contained an excellent blackberry cheesecake. \"And that is precisely why I pressed him to agree to see you. Of course, that might not have happened, anyway, except for that little predilection of his.\"\n\nAnnja was intrigued. \"What predilection?\"\n\n\"Oh? Usually he's very prompt about mentioning it and the curse.\"\n\nAnnja studied Edmund, who looked even more pained. \"Now I'm curious.\"\n\n\"Annja, you must be tired.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Not too tired to hear about cursed predilections. And I hate mysteries. If you don't tell me, I'm going to be wondering all night.\"\n\nEdmund grinned. \"Well, we can't have that, can we?\"\n\n\"What do you know of phantasmagoria?\"\n\nAnnja walked beside Edmund as they strolled from Carlini's Magic Bullet Club. Still feeling a warm glow from the after-dinner wine, she linked her arm through the young professor's. \"It was theater, kind of early film. Phantasmagorists projected images on walls\u2014usually of supernatural creatures\u2014and told stories about them. But that's the extent of what I know.\"\n\nCars whizzed by on the dark streets. Windows of closed shops caught their reflections as they passed. The wind held a chill and the fog had increased, but the weather was still pleasant enough.\n\n\"The images weren't just shown on walls. They were also projected onto smoke and semitransparent surfaces, which created even more eerie effects. Phantasmagoria began in France in the late 1700s and spread all over Europe during the next hundred years. People do love being frightened.\"\n\n\"The human culture seems to thrive on ghost stories. They address common fears and offer a backhanded belief in God.\"\n\n\"If demons and monsters exist, then so must God?\"\n\n\"Something like that.\"\n\n\"You learned that in archaeology?\"\n\n\"Anthropology, actually. All part of the same field.\"\n\n\"Interesting.\"\n\nAnnja patted him on the arm. She relished the conversation, and her curiosity about the young professor's pastime remained unanswered. \"This has something to do with your predilection?\"\n\n\"Everything.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\n\"Phantasmagorists owed their success to the magic lantern.\"\n\n\"That was made by the Chinese.\"\n\nEdmund grinned. \"Not according to the phantasmagorists. They claim that Christian Huygens invented it in the mid-seventeenth century, and that Aim\u00e9 Argand's self-named Argand lamp made the device even better. However, I do know that the Chinese were the first to use lamps to project images painted on glass as storytelling devices. Actually, that comes into this story, as well.\"\n\nAnnja continued walking and listening.\n\n\"Once the magic lantern was successfully designed, others were quick to use it. To backtrack a little, Giovanni Fontana, a physician and engineer and self-proclaimed magus, used a candle-powered lantern to project the image of a demon. The idea of the supernatural became a fixture when it came to the magic lantern.\"\n\nThey paused at the street corner.\n\n\"Athanasius Kircher, a German priest, reportedly summoned the devil with his device. Thomas Walgensten called his projector a lantern of fear and used it to 'summon ghosts.' A man named Johann Georg Schopfer performed in his Leipzig coffee shop and summoned dead people, images projected on smoke. Later, he went insane\u2014believed he was being stalked by devils and shot himself. He also promised he would raise himself from the dead.\"\n\n\"I take it that didn't happen.\"\n\nEdmund grinned and shook his head. \"No.\"\n\nThe streetlight changed and they crossed.\n\n\"The latter part of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century gave rise to the phantasmagorists. They began their craft in Paris, as I mentioned, but the use of magic lanterns spread quickly. At the same time, Romanticism and Gothic literature were growing. The timing for the magic lantern and the phantasmagorists, you might say, was dead-on.\"\n\nAnnja rolled her eyes at the pun.\n\nEdmund chuckled. \"Suffice it to say, I am smitten by the whole splendor of the phantasmagorists and their lucrative entertainment. During the heyday of the shows, many hosted gatherings within the catacombs beneath Paris.\" Edmund looked at Annja. \"Can you imagine what that was like? There they were, deep under the city, and these phantasmagorists could make them feel as though they were walking through the bowels of hell itself.\"\n\n\"That doesn't sound like my idea of a good time.\"\n\n\"Ever watch horror films when you were young?\"\n\nAnnja smiled. \"I did.\"\n\n\"We take pleasure in tempting the dark, wondering if it will one day come out of hiding and pounce on us with a predator's fangs.\"\n\n\"Not me.\" Annja had been there too many times.\n\n\"And yet, here you are, Ms. Creed, tracking a man who has savagely beaten and killed three women.\"\n\nSome of Annja's good mood evaporated, though she knew Edmund hadn't intended for it to. And he was right about her being there in spite of the danger. She was never drawn to the danger, but she was attracted to the mysteries and curiosities. \"I'm not afraid of the man who killed those women.\"\n\n\"I would prefer it if you were.\"\n\n\"He's just a man. The police will find him soon enough.\"\n\nEdmund nodded. \"I hope you're right. In the meantime, I'll tell you about the particular magic lantern I have in my possession.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 6",
                "text": "\"Anton Dutilleaux was a Parisian phantasmagorist in the late eighteenth century.\" Seated at the small table in the tea shop not far from the hotel where Annja was staying, Edmund added milk to his tea and stirred. \"Have you heard of him?\"\n\n\"No.\" Annja stuck with coffee and cupped her hands around her cup to absorb the warmth. She took a deep breath, enjoying the sweet baking smells.\n\n\"I can't say I'm surprised. Rather, I would be flabbergasted\u2014very much so\u2014if you had heard of him.\" Edmund reached into the messenger bag he'd brought with him from Carlini's. He took out an iPad and placed it on the table. The screen flared to life.\n\nNot many people were in the tea shop at that late hour, and none of them paid attention to Edmund and Annja. They were mostly watching the television in the corner of the room. The low rumble of the news and casual conversation was a comforting undercurrent of background noise.\n\nEdmund touched the handheld device and opened a folder. He sorted through images, then selected one. Immediately, a taciturn man with slitted eyes filled the screen.\n\n\"Anton Dutilleaux. This image was used on several handbills that advertised his shows. He toured Paris for three years. I couldn't find much history on him, no parents and no idea where he lived. I just know that he traveled.\" Edmund sipped his tea. \"And no one ever knew much about his murder.\"\n\nThat heightened Annja's interest. \"He was murdered?\"\n\nEdmund nodded and grinned. \"Intriguing, no?\"\n\n\"It is.\"\n\n\"According to a newspaper account of the murder, Dutilleaux was stabbed through the heart by a Chinese ghost in front of several eyewitnesses.\" Edmund tapped the iPad screen again and shifted to a new image. \"He was pronounced dead at the scene by a doctor in the audience. Do you read French?\"\n\nAnnja nodded. \"Mais, oui.\" And she read on.\n\nPhantasmagorist Slain by Celestial Spirit!\n\nOn the eve of the twenty-first of June, in the catacombs, M. Anton Dutilleaux, late of Paris and previously from parts unknown, met with an untimely end at the hands of a supernatural murderer. M. Dutilleaux was a phantasmagorist conducting a group comprising this reporter and several others through a dark and winding tunnel under the city at the time of his death.\n\nThe reporter described several of the events leading up to the murder. The account meandered, as stories did in those days because the news was meant to be savored and enjoyed and\u2014in this case\u2014puzzled over.\n\nM. Dutilleaux had barely begun what was to be a fascinating presentation, this reporter is convinced of that, when the crafty killer sprang from the darkness. Merciless and without hesitation, the apparition brandished a knife and drove it through M. Dutilleaux's heart with cold savagery, like a predator pouncing on much weaker prey. The stricken man had no opportunity to defend himself or call upon his Maker before he lay stretched out dead before us.\n\nA few paragraphs of the reactions of the crowd, the panic that had ensued and the desperate attempts to revive Dutilleaux followed.\n\nAs of this morning when I write this piece for you, Dear Reader, the Parisian police have yet to decide who killed M. Dutilleaux. There are some who believe that the phantasmagorist was the victim of a Celestial spell that followed him from the Far East during his travels. Many readers this reporter knows believe in those curses. All I can tell you is that whatever killed the poor man was not human. I stared into that White Face of Death and knew fear the like of which I have never before known.\n\nMy only prayer is that the thing that killed M. Dutilleaux has completed its mission. Otherwise, that thing may yet haunt the catacombs. At present, the tunnel has been boarded up and placed under guard by the police until such time as they deem it safe.\n\nAnnja looked up at Edmund. \"I assume you followed up on this story?\"\n\nThe young professor nodded. \"Of course. I've checked for months and years following. And I've gotten absolutely nowhere. No one ever mentioned Anton Dutilleaux again. Only a few magicians remember him. I wouldn't have known him at all if I hadn't discovered some of his handbills in a collection I purchased a year ago.\"\n\n\"Two hundred years is a long time.\"\n\n\"It is. But history has a way of making itself known, don't you agree?\" Edmund sipped his tea.\n\n\"Tell me about this lantern you found.\"\n\nSlipping his hands around his teacup, Edmund leaned conspiratorially across the table toward her. \"Only a few weeks ago, I was at an estate sale.\"\n\n\"Looking for the lantern?\"\n\n\"No. Merely poking about. A lot of magicians have made their home\u2014temporary and permanently\u2014here in London. During my days off, I research those people. Occasionally I stumble across stage props or costumes while dissembling through estate sales.\"\n\n\"Treasure hunting?\"\n\nEdmund smiled in pleasure. \"When history is not valuable or fashionable, it is garbage and people toss it out. Or they sell it to speculators for pennies on the pound. I have assembled quite the collection of mementos and collectibles. Trust me when I say I have made several acquisitions that other fans of magic envy, and that no one else would want.\" He shot her a rueful look.\n\nAnnja didn't doubt him for a moment. Passion showed in Edmund's dark eyes and she knew he wouldn't easily turn away from something he wanted.\n\n\"Have you heard of \u00c9tienne-Gaspard Robert?\"\n\nAnnja thought for a moment, then shook her head. \"Another phantasmagorist?\"\n\n\"Yes, but he was also an inventor and physicist from Li\u00e8ge, Belgium. His stage name was \u00c9tienne Robertson.\" Edmund waited expectantly.\n\nAnnja shook her head again.\n\n\"Robertson, by either name, was one of the most important phantasmagorists who ever lived. I have copies of some of the lenses with which he used to conduct his magic-lantern shows. I can't afford the real lenses, not on a university professor's salary. Fascinating stuff. Especially for the time.\"\n\n\"I'll take your word for it.\"\n\n\"Do. Anyway, Robertson was there the night Dutilleaux was murdered by the Chinese ghost.\"\n\n\"Coincidence?\"\n\n\"No. Robertson was there to take umbrage with Dutilleaux. Robertson felt certain Dutilleaux was copying aspects of his own magic-lantern show. Which I'm sure he was. But at that time, many people were copying Robertson.\"\n\n\"Was Robertson a suspect in the murder?\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Edmund grinned, warming to the subject. \"Robertson and Dutilleaux were rivals for a long time. But the murder occurred in 1793, four years before Robertson revealed his pi\u00e8ce de r\u00e9sistance at the Pavillon de l'Echiquier. That was when Robertson left his competitors in the dust, to use a colloquialism. During that time, Robertson perfected the magic-lantern craft by putting the projectors on wheels to create moving images as well as make the images larger and smaller simply by moving the projectors.\"\n\nAnnja sipped her coffee.\n\n\"The police never found any evidence against Robertson?\"\n\n\"No. But Dutilleaux's magic lantern went missing that night. I believe that Robertson, or one of his assistants, liberated that projector while the gendarmes were en route. Or perhaps it was merely a spectator looking for a trophy. Or simply theft.\"\n\n\"And the lantern was taken even though it was cursed.\"\n\n\"Dutilleaux claimed that he could open a doorway into another world. Maybe they didn't think the projector was cursed so much as it was truly a miracle.\" Edmund smiled. \"You have to remember\u2014magicians, the really good ones, want magic to be real. Perhaps whoever took it believed the magic lantern possessed supernatural powers. Fast-forward two hundred years.\"\n\nAnnja finished the last of her coffee.\n\n\"I was tracking down Robertson's apprentices. There were dozens of them, by the way. In 1799, Robertson's phantasmagoria show had created such a stir that the courts ordered him to reveal his secrets to the public. Once he did that, there were many imitators. Some of them carried phantasmagoria back to the United States. Did you know that?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"In May 1803, the first of the magic-lantern shows was presented at Mount Vernon Garden, New York, and the entertainment caught on readily enough.\" Edmund looked into his cup.\n\nFor the briefest moment, Annja felt uncomfortable, like someone was watching her. She glanced around the teahouse, but no one seemed especially interested. It was too dark to see much out the window. She returned her attention to Edmund.\n\n\"The point is, I tracked down some belongings of one of Robertson's assistants at auction those few weeks ago.\" Excitement gleamed in Edmund's eyes. \"I think someone else was searching, as well, because after I bought the lot\u2014for a song, practically\u2014the auctioneer informed me there was an interested party asking about the lantern I'd bought. They told me I could more than double my money if I wished to sell it. Of course I refused. What I gave for the lantern was a pittance, and it was purely for my own amusement. Even doubling my money wouldn't leave me a rich man.\"\n\n\"So you now own Anton Dutilleaux's cursed magic lantern?\"\n\nEdmund nodded happily. \"I truly believe I do.\" He hesitated. \"What I'd like to ask, and I wouldn't want to impose in any way, is if you could look this magic lantern over and see if there's a possibility of authenticating it.\"\n\n\"Confirming that it was owned by Anton Dutilleaux would be extremely difficult if the man is as hard to trace as you say he is.\"\n\n\"He is, and I wouldn't ask you to do that. If possible, I'd like to confirm the approximate age of the lantern.\"\n\n\"I would love to.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Edmund checked the time on the iPad. \"We'll have to save that for another day, though. I have a literature class bloody early in the morning, and none of my students is especially keen on Beowulf. I don't want to go dragging in looking like one of the underclassmen. But I had an absolutely brilliant time, Annja.\"\n\n\"Me, too.\"\n\nEdmund insisted on walking Annja back to her hotel, then he flagged down a taxi and left, promising to see her the following afternoon so they could start working on the Robert Louis Stevenson piece.\n\nUp in her room, still slightly muddled from the rich food and the wine but not quite drowsy enough to sleep, Annja exchanged the black dress for a T-shirt and flannel pajama pants. The room was just cold enough to make the flannel welcome.\n\nShe booted up her notebook computer and logged on to the internet. She checked Google for Anton Dutilleaux but didn't get any hits on the name that had anything to do with magic lanterns or phantasmagoria.\n\nFrustrated, but not surprised, Annja backtracked and bookmarked sites that dealt with phantasmagoria, magic lanterns and \u00c9tienne Robertson. At least that way she could meet Edmund Beswick on a more equal footing when they were together again.\n\nHer sat-phone chirped for attention before her head hit the pillows. Caller ID showed it was Bart McGilley.\n\nBart was a longtime friend, a detective on the New York City Police Department and a guy who had ended up being a big part of her life\u2014on and off. There was a definite attraction between them, and they'd been the \"plus ones\" for each other several times as well as going out on legitimate dates. However, the only permanent thing they had between them so far was friendship.\n\nThe caller ID picture showed Bart in his shirt and tie, which was how Annja usually saw him. He wore his dark hair cut short and was square jawed, the kind of guy women would want to have children with.\n\n\"Hey, Bart.\"\n\n\"Hey. Not calling too late, am I? Wherever you are.\" He sounded distant and a trifle off his game.\n\n\"London. Only a five-hour time difference.\"\n\n\"It's midnight there.\"\n\nAnnja looked at the time on the computer. \"Yes. But I'm not asleep. Still working on New York time at the moment.\"\n\n\"Morning's going to come early.\"\n\n\"Morning is six hours away no matter how you look at it. I go to sleep and I'm awake six hours later. I don't have to be up till eight. I've still got a couple hours.\" Annja waited. Bart McGilley wasn't one to call frivolously.\n\nBart hesitated. \"Maybe I should call at another time.\"\n\n\"You've got me now.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\nAnnja waited.\n\n\"We caught a bad one tonight. I don't really want to get into it. I just wanted to hear a friendly voice.\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"So what are you doing in London?\"\n\nObviously the Mr. Hyde story wasn't going to fly. That would have reminded Bart of his own problems as well as put him into worry mode. Instead, Annja talked about phantasmagorists, magic lanterns and what little she knew of \u00c9tienne Robertson.\n\nMostly, Bart listened. She'd seen him like this before and knew that he appreciated her talking about something, anything, while he sorted himself out. Chances were, she'd never know what he'd gotten into unless she went back and researched the news. Usually, she chose not to do that.\n\nFinally, Bart thanked her and said he had to go. \"You should be careful while you're over there. There's some creep in the city calling himself Mr. Hyde who's killing women. I was watching CNN while you were talking.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I heard about that.\"\n\n\"Well, be careful. According to the news release, he just killed his fourth victim tonight.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 7",
                "text": "The streets were packed near the East End alley where the fourth Mr. Hyde murder had taken place. Annja instructed the cabdriver to get as close as he could, then paid him and walked the rest of the way.\n\nShe didn't like being at a crime scene. Several of the digs she'd been on had been crime scenes, as well. But there wasn't the immediacy of present-day death.\n\nA logjam of onlookers, police and emergency teams filled the narrow street. Flashes went off from cell phones and pocket cameras. A cold breeze, shot through with patchy fog, blew in from the Thames. The blue lights of the police cars whipped across the apartment buildings and stirred the shadows.\n\nDespite the number of people, Annja got close enough to see a middle-age woman sprawled half on the curb and half in the street between parked cars. Blood darkened the sides of the cars. Bloody handprints streaked the back windshield of one.\n\n\"She fought him.\" A woman in her late forties or early fifties stood in front of Annja in a faded house robe with a grape Popsicle in one hand, talking to an older man. \"'Course, didn't do her no good. Poor thing couldn't get away from that madman.\"\n\nAnnja nudged closer. \"Excuse me.\"\n\nThe woman looked back at her.\n\n\"Did you see what happened?\"\n\nHer eyes narrowed. \"You're American?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Thought so. I recognize the accent. And yes, I did see what happened. I called in the bobbies. My name is Jane. Jane Morris.\"\n\n\"It's nice to meet you, Mrs. Morris.\"\n\n\"Are you a reporter?\"\n\n\"Something like that.\"\n\nJane regarded her suspiciously. \"I don't see no notepad.\"\n\n\"I've got a very good memory.\"\n\n\"No camera, neither.\"\n\nAnnja nodded toward the policemen as they started out into the bystanders. \"Anyone who's taken a picture is likely to have their phone or camera removed as part of an effort to collect evidence.\"\n\nThe woman watched as the police officers gathered the cell phones and cameras. Of course, the law enforcement officers didn't get them all because the crowd started dispersing. The ones who had their grisly souvenirs were intent on keeping them. They'd pop up on Facebook, blogs and Twitter within minutes if they hadn't already.\n\n\"This is my first murder,\" Jane said in a low, confiding voice.\n\n\"Could you tell me what you saw?\"\n\nThe woman pointed the Popsicle at the murder victim. \"I saw that poor thing fighting with a proper big bloke. He was huge. Like some kind of gorilla. Shoulders out to here.\" She placed her hands about three feet apart and the Popsicle dripped on the neck of the man ahead of her.\n\nThe man cursed and shot her a nasty look. He took a step away.\n\n\"Sorry, love.\" Jane licked the Popsicle momentarily dry. \"She hardly had time to cry help. I was standing up there.\" She pointed at a balcony on the third floor of the nearby building. \"I called the police immediately.\" She shook her head sadly. \"But I knew it was too late.\"\n\n\"The man got away?\"\n\n\"Of course he did. A man who can stomp in a woman's head like he's stepping on a peanut? No one around him is going to stop him. We don't carry guns like you Yanks.\"\n\n\"Do you know who the woman was?\"\n\nJane shook her head. \"Looked like she was a waitress, from the way she was dressed.\"\n\nFeeling ghoulish, Annja surreptitiously took out her sat-phone and brought up her Twitter account. Keeping the phone hidden from the police, she scrolled through the news and didn't have to go far before she found the first tweets about the dead woman.\n\nAudrey McClintok. A twenty-seven-year-old waitress at a diner.\n\nAnnja put her phone back in the pocket of her Windbreaker. So far, none of the victims had anything in common except for being women. The ability of the man to kill and disappear was chilling.\n\n\"Well, now here's something.\" Jane sucked on her Popsicle.\n\nTwo uniformed policemen pushed through the crowd, backing people off and heading straight for them. Probably wanted to talk to Jane, since she'd reported the murder, Annja thought.\n\nThey stopped in front of Annja. The oldest of the two was grizzled, and his bleak eyes indicated he'd seen too much over the years. \"Ms. Creed.\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\n\"DCI Westcox would like a word with you, miss.\"\n\n\"Now?\" The last thing Annja wanted to do was get involved in the murder investigation.\n\n\"Yes, miss. Now.\"\n\nThe two policemen had flanked her and she got the distinct impression turning down the detective chief inspector's invitation wasn't an option.\n\n\"This way, miss.\" The older policeman waved her forward and the crowd parted once again.\n\nAlong the way, bright flashes from cell phones and cameras temporarily blinded Annja.\n\n\"Didn't take you for a looky-loo, Ms. Creed.\" DCI Alfred Westcox was a tough, no-nonsense cop. Probably ten pounds underweight, he looked as if the excess had been hammered off him. He wore a trench coat and hat, and the tie clipped to his chest lifted as the wind gusted. His cottony white hair matched his eyebrows and mustache. He wore thick glasses over his watery blue eyes.\n\n\"I'm not.\" Annja respected how the chief inspector ran his business, but she wasn't happy with the way she'd inadvertently ended up on the wrong side of him.\n\nWestcox didn't like her any more than he did any of the other media people gathered around for the story. In fact, she didn't know why he'd singled her out. There were plenty of others on hand.\n\n\"Yet here you are, Ms. Creed. In the middle of my murder investigation.\"\n\n\"I came out to see if I could help.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Westcox cocked a dismissive eyebrow. \"You? I don't know why that idea never crossed my mind.\"\n\n\"Your time would be better served solving Audrey McClintok's murder, than coming down hard on me.\"\n\nWestcox took a deep breath and his nostrils flared. \"Who gave you that name?\" He glared at the two policemen who had fetched her.\n\n\"Not me, sir.\" The grizzled man stood his ground.\n\nThe younger man took a step back. \"Nor me.\"\n\n\"Brought her here straightaway. Just as you said.\"\n\nAnnja didn't like the two men taking heat for something that wasn't their fault. \"It wasn't either of them. I got the woman's name off Twitter.\"\n\nWestcox turned his glare on her.\n\n\"Someone tweeted about the murder. Probably someone in the neighborhood who recognized her.\"\n\n\"Or it was the killer.\" He raised his voice to call, \"Peters!\"\n\nA younger detective in a Windbreaker turned toward his superior.\n\n\"Get your mobile and give the lab a ring. Put one of the computer lads on to the Twitter accounts. Find out who put up posts regarding this unfortunate girl. I want their names, addresses and a chat with them.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" Peters turned away and pulled out his cell phone.\n\nAnother uniformed policeman trotted up to Westcox. \"The coroner is here, sir.\"\n\nAt the end of the street, Annja saw a new vehicle with flashing lights.\n\n\"Get him over here so we can shut this circus down.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" The policeman turned and fled.\n\n\"Now you, Ms. Creed.\"\n\n\"I don't know why you're taking such issue with me.\" Annja met the man's gaze full measure.\n\n\"I was told this absolutely amazing story about a botched robbery last night. Apparently a few young Asian gang members held up a restaurant not far from here.\"\n\nAnnja kept her face devoid of emotion.\n\n\"The restaurateur and his lucky daughter\u2014and even the gang members\u2014all tell the same fabulous story of a red-haired American woman with a sword who interfered with the robbery.\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\n\"Would you happen to know anything about that?\"\n\nAnnja didn't like lying, but in this case the truth wasn't something she was prepared to tell. \"No.\"\n\n\"Why would the woman with the sword run off like that?\"\n\n\"Perhaps she heard how appreciative you were of anyone trying to help with your investigation.\"\n\nThe grizzled officer laughed, then quickly covered it with a coughing fit. \"Sorry, sir. It's this bloody fog.\"\n\nWestcox glared at him, but the man stood with his eyes averted.\n\n\"You're not here to help me with my investigation, Ms. Creed.\" Westcox returned his attention to Annja. \"If you interfere, or turn vigilante with a sword, I'm going to lock you up.\"\n\n\"All right.\"\n\nThat answer seemed to take Westcox by surprise. He stood there for a moment. \"I don't much care for your nose in my case. Your particular television show seems dedicated to prattling on to the feebleminded about ghosts and ghoulies.\"\n\nThe accusation touched a nerve. Annja liked what she did for Chasing History's Monsters and was tired of defending her work.\n\nBefore she could speak, Peters turned back to him.\n\n\"Chief Inspector.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I've accessed the Twitter feed regarding the murder.\" Peters pointed at Annja. \"They also appear to be aware that Ms. Creed is with you.\" He held out his cell phone for Westcox to see.\n\nAnnja saw it, as well. Someone had snapped a picture of her talking to the detective chief inspector.\n\n\"Whoever took this is assuming you called Ms. Creed in for a consultation regarding the Mr. Hyde murders.\"\n\nWestcox looked apoplectic. \"No one has even said this is a Hyde killing.\"\n\n\"Actually, someone has. Mr. Hyde himself has tweeted in and claimed credit.\"\n\nAnnja responded immediately. \"Trace the tweet.\"\n\n\"Computer forensics is already on it.\"\n\n\"This is a break,\" Annja said to Westcox. \"Hyde has never tweeted before.\"\n\n\"And he may not have...have tweeted now. Someone else may have done that. We can't jump to conclusions.\" Westcox shoved his hands into his trench coat.\n\n\"I wouldn't dream of it, Inspector.\" Despite her respect for the man's job, Annja had had enough. She wasn't the only person interested in the Mr. Hyde story. The number of people taking note of the murders was growing every day. He had no right to lean on her while she was simply trying to do her job. \"Are we done here?\"\n\nWestcox hesitated. Finally he gave a brief nod. \"We are. But watch your step, Ms. Creed.\"\n\n\"I always do, Inspector.\" Annja walked away as the haggard-looking coroner hunkered down beside the woman's corpse. She headed into the crowd without looking back. She'd seen more than she'd wanted to.\n\n\"Annja! Annja!\" A young female reporter with blond highlights held out a microphone while a camcorder operator trained his sights on Annja. She raised a hand to block the sudden bright light.\n\n\"Ms. Creed, what kind of help do you expect to give Detective Chief Inspector Westcox regarding the Mr. Hyde killings?\" That came from another journalist, one with an Irish accent.\n\nAnnja ignored them and headed for the other end of the street. A few of them followed her, but gave up when she hit the cross street.\n\nHer phone rang. Caller ID showed it was Doug Morrell. She didn't want to take the call, but she knew if she didn't Doug would just keep calling back.\n\nJust as she started to answer, a dark Jaguar S-Type glided to a stop at the curb. Both passenger doors opened and two men holding pistols got out.\n\n\"Ms. Creed. Get in the car, please.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 8",
                "text": "For a moment, Annja hesitated.\n\n\"If you attempt to flee, I will shoot you in the legs and pull you into the car.\" The speaker was a man of medium height and Asian ancestry. He held the pistol with a steady hand.\n\n\"You'll shoot me with the police just up the street?\" Annja asked calmly.\n\n\"And I'll get away with it. They are compromised in this area. Before they can mobilize and get here, we'll be gone.\" He waved the pistol. \"Now get in before I have you put in. We won't be gentle.\"\n\nShe'd escaped many traps in the past. Sometimes it was better to step into them and work on the fly. A moving trap couldn't stop and think, or reset itself. At least, not most of the time.\n\nShe folded herself into the backseat of the car. Another man, also Asian, sat in the front passenger seat. He held a pistol in his lap. Once she was seated, the two men who had gotten out got back in. She was sandwiched between them.\n\nAt a word from the driver, the car pulled into traffic as smoothly as wax running down a candle.\n\nAnnja sat quietly between the two men on either side of her. \"Do you want to tell me what this is about?\"\n\nThe man in the front passenger seat turned to face her. \"It's simple. We want the magic lantern Edmund Beswick purchased from the antiquities auction.\"\n\nThe answer surprised Annja. \"I don't know where it is.\"\n\nThe man's expression remained flat and unreadable. \"That's too bad. My employer will not believe you. It would be better if you knew where the lantern was.\"\n\n\"Why would anyone think I knew where it was?\"\n\n\"Because Edmund Beswick has shown you the lantern.\"\n\n\"No, he hasn't.\"\n\n\"Then he planned to. My employer knows this.\"\n\n\"Planned to. Didn't.\" Despite her anger, Annja was worried about Edmund. Why hadn't the men gone to his flat first?\n\n\"My employer will believe you're lying.\"\n\n\"Why would I lie?\"\n\n\"I only asked you so that we could stop and pick up the lantern before I take you to him.\" He shrugged. \"It's too bad you don't know. He is a very determined man. Many people fear him, and with good reason.\" He turned back around and watched traffic, then gave directions to the driver in Chinese.\n\nAnnja couldn't understand what was said, but she guessed it wasn't good. She shifted in the backseat. \"How did you find me?\"\n\nOne of the men sitting beside Annja showed her his cell phone. The picture of her talking with Detective Chief Inspector Westcox. He grinned. \"We have been watching you. We only just missed you in the hotel.\"\n\nThe commander flicked his gaze to the rearview mirror and spoke harshly.\n\nA scowl darkened the face of the man beside Annja. He put his cell phone away.\n\nEven in the shadows of the car, Annja saw the tattoos ringing the guy's neck. As with the Japanese Yakuza and the Russian Mafiya, in the Chinese Triad, tattoo designs were badges of office and warnings to everyone else.\n\nHow had Edmund's magic lantern drawn the attention of the Triad?\n\nSince she didn't know where the magic lantern was, she had to escape.\n\nHer captors wouldn't hesitate to harm her. The only edge she had was that they hadn't been given permission to kill her.\n\nShe hoped.\n\nAt a traffic light, the car came to a stop. The man in the passenger seat turned up the radio. Techno-pop filled the Jaguar.\n\nFocusing on what she was going to do, she breathed deeply enough to charge her lungs without drawing the attention of the men beside her. Then she threw a backfist toward the man on her right. As she expected, he was prepared for the attack and caught her arm. However, he wasn't prepared for her to shift and slam her forehead into his face as an immediate follow-up. She repeated the move and heard the man's nose crunch under her assault.\n\nHe cried out once, then lapsed into unconsciousness.\n\nAs the other man tried to bring his pistol into play, Annja fell into the lap of the unconscious man, lifted her left leg and thrust her foot into her second attacker's face.\n\nThe kick slammed the man against the window and shattered the glass. His pistol fell to the floor. Annja kept her foot pressed against his jaw to hold him in place. He struggled weakly, obviously dazed from the impact.\n\nThe man in the front passenger seat swung quickly and threw his gun arm across the seat. Annja didn't wait to see if he was going to threaten her before he opened fire. She reached up and seized his wrist, then yanked down hard and snapped his elbow.\n\nThe man screamed hoarsely and dropped the pistol.\n\nCommitted now, aware that her life was possibly measured in heartbeats, Annja opened the passenger door, pushed off the guy she had trapped against the broken window and rolled onto the street. She got to her feet at once, cognizant that the conscious men inside the car were clawing for their weapons. Even the man with the broken arm was determined to get his pistol, or maybe he had another.\n\nAnnja vaulted to the back of the car and headed for the roof. Bullets ripped through the back windshield, blowing out chunks of glass, and punched calderas in the car's roof. She never broke stride as she ran across the hood of the car and leaped onto the next stopped vehicle.\n\nJumping, vaulting and changing directions like a fleet-footed deer, Annja crossed the stalled traffic and reached the sidewalk just as the light turned green. She kept running as car horns, shouts and pistol shots made a huge cacophony behind her.\n\nAt the corner of the nearest building, she risked a quick glance back. Bullets tore into the bricks and threw dust in her face. She ducked out of sight, then dared another look. Two of the men had started after her, but their hearts weren't in it and they'd retreated to their vehicle. Annja resumed running.\n\nSeveral blocks later, Annja slowed to a walk. Thankfully London stayed busy nearly twenty-four hours. She called Edmund Beswick's cell several times but didn't get an answer.\n\nShe also debated calling the Metro police, but decided against that until she knew more of what was going on. Detective Chief Inspector Westcox was going to have a lot of questions, and she didn't have any answers.\n\nDoug Morrell called again and this time she picked up.\n\n\"Hey,\" he whispered irritably.\n\n\"I need you to do me a favor.\"\n\n\"Me? I was calling you.\"\n\nAnnja would've smiled at that, but she was too worried about Edmund Beswick. \"Still need the favor, Doug.\"\n\n\"Fine. What did you find out from the police?\"\n\n\"What?\" For a moment Annja was thrown for a loop.\n\n\"I saw the pictures on Twitter. You and Detective Scarecrow.\"\n\nAnnja couldn't believe it. Then she checked herself. Doug Morrell lived for Facebook and Twitter. It only made sense that he'd be trailing any mentions of her or Chasing History's Monsters. \"His name's Westcox.\"\n\n\"Whatever. Man looks like an advance warning for a famine.\"\n\n\"He's not that thin.\"\n\n\"Your perspective is skewed because you're always looking at mummies and skeletons. Skinny living guys must look obese to you.\"\n\nAnnja shook her head. \"Let's talk about the favor.\"\n\n\"Let's talk about Detective Scarecrow.\"\n\n\"Westcox. Get his name right. The lawyer will need to know it.\"\n\n\"Lawyer?\" Doug's tone changed immediately from irritated to anxious. \"Did you do something?\"\n\n\"No, but the chief inspector is threatening to deport me if I don't stay out of his investigation.\"\n\n\"He can't do that, can he?\"\n\nAnnja loved putting Doug on the spot. \"Not if I have a lawyer. A good one.\"\n\n\"We do have a good one.\"\n\nCuriosity got the best of Annja. \"Why are you whispering, Doug?\"\n\n\"We're having a council meeting.\"\n\n\"Who?\" Then it clicked. Doug Morrell belonged to a group of would-be vampires. That was one of his hobbies and one of the interests that endeared him to the production company that underwrote Chasing History's Monsters. \"Right. You're with the Bat Boy Legion.\"\n\nDoug refused to take the bait and stayed focused. \"Did you find out anything more about Mr. Hyde?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because there's nothing to tell.\"\n\n\"Mr. Hyde just took his fourth victim.\"\n\n\"I know. I was there.\" Annja looked up and down the street for a cab. If the men who had kidnapped her hadn't doubled back around and found her by now, she felt fairly sure they wouldn't.\n\n\"Oh, yeah, the Twitter feed. And there are a couple YouTube videos up now.\"\n\nAnnja groaned.\n\n\"In fact, I think maybe Chasing History's Monsters\u2014\" Doug's voice grew louder \"\u2014is the only program not getting video of your meeting with Scotland Yard.\"\n\n\"Shhh, you'll wake the baby vampires.\"\n\n\"I'm just saying...\"\n\n\"Westcox isn't with Scotland Yard. He's with Metro. And he called me over when he saw me at the crime scene to warn me away. Actually, warning is too soft. It was definitely a threat.\"\n\n\"Well, we're not going to put up with that crap. He's not going to threaten us and get away with it. We're going to follow the Mr. Hyde story no matter where it goes.\"\n\n\"You do realize that I'm the only person in danger of going to jail, don't you?\"\n\n\"There's Igor.\"\n\n\"He's missing in action tonight.\"\n\n\"What? He should be there with you.\"\n\nAnnja silently disagreed. The last thing she needed was Igor going all macho. \"I need the favor.\"\n\n\"What favor?\"\n\n\"I filled out paperwork on Edmund Beswick.\"\n\n\"Professor Beeswax.\"\n\n\"I need his home address.\"\n\nDoug chuckled. \"Don't tell me you couldn't get that from Professor Beeswax. I mean, c'mon, Annja. A professor of reading? That should have been a slam dunk.\"\n\n\"He's a professor of literature. Are you sure you went to college?\"\n\n\"Business degree with a minor in video productions. Got the diploma on my office wall.\"\n\n\"I haven't seen it for all the action figures and comic books.\"\n\n\"Hey! Graphic novels.\"\n\n\"I need Beswick's address from the file.\"\n\n\"Do I look like a walking computer?\"\n\n\"You don't go far without your computer. Just look up the information for me so you can go back and play with the other vampires.\"\n\n\"We don't play.\" Sullenly, Doug put her on hold.\n\nAfter a couple minutes, during which the light changed and Annja crossed the street, Doug was back on the line with the requested information.\n\n\"And keep me up to date. We're paying for your little trip over there and we don't want to have to put this program together from YouTube videos. Make sure Detective Scarecrow keeps you in the loop.\"\n\n\"I'll get right on that.\" Annja broke the connection, tried Edmund's number one more time, got no answer and flagged a passing taxi."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 9",
                "text": "A few tense minutes later, Annja got out of the cab in front of Edmund's apartment building in Chelsea. She paid the driver and walked up to the security door. Frustrated, she rang Edmund again, but he still didn't answer.\n\nShe knew it was possible the professor was asleep and had turned his phone off. However, she couldn't get the Triad members\u2014if that's who they were\u2014out of her mind. She didn't doubt they'd go after Edmund.\n\nShe retreated to the back of the building. Studying the old metal fire escape, she leaped up, caught hold of the bottom rung on the ladder leading up to it and was pleasantly surprised when the ladder rolled down more quietly than she would have figured.\n\nFor a moment, she lingered in the shadows, watching the windows of the back apartments to see if any lights came on or if anyone looked out to check on the sound. Then, when nothing happened, she went up the ladder. There was still the chance that someone could have called the police, but she was willing to take the risk.\n\nOn the third-floor landing, she stayed low, duckwalking under two windows to reach Edmund's flat. The window was locked. The room was dark. When she peered inside, she couldn't see anything.\n\nShe liked Edmund. She wanted to know he was all right. But if she got caught breaking into his flat\u2014either by Edmund or by the police\u2014the situation was going to be really embarrassing.\n\nShe could finesse Edmund. He'd wanted to show her the magic lantern, and her news that someone was searching for it, even to the point of shooting at her, would gloss over the forced entry.\n\nThe police would be a different matter.\n\nTaking out the Leatherman multitool she'd purchased after arriving in London, because she hated to travel without some sort of tools, she opened the longest blade. Working carefully, she ran the blade around the glass and removed the plastic liner that held the window together.\n\nWhen she finished, she set the liner aside, then used the knife blade to leverage the glass free. The pane popped out easily and she set it aside, as well. She folded the knife and put it away. Then she stepped into the flat.\n\nInside the room, after negotiating a small sofa, Annja moved to one side and waited for her vision to acclimate to the darkness. She also listened intently. Someone in another flat was watching television, a program with an obnoxious laugh track. In another flat, farther down, people were in the midst of an argument. And there was a crying baby somewhere in there.\n\nAnnja wished she had her backpack, where she kept her Mini Maglite. Abruptly, she realized her possessions might not be safe in the hotel. Her mysterious abductors had mentioned that they'd missed her there, but she didn't know if that meant they'd broken in or merely seen her leave.\n\nEyes adjusted, Annja looked around the small studio flat. It was basically a tiny office under a miniloft that held a modest bed. Two separate areas for Edmund to work and sleep.\n\nClutter covered the floor. Most of the mess was books and papers, but Annja knew Edmund wouldn't have left them like that. He was responsible for the corkboards on the walls and the books piled on the small dining table, but not for the haphazard way everything had been thrown.\n\nThe door was ajar and light from the outside hallway leaked in. Someone had broken in.\n\nRemaining calm, Annja closed the drapes over the windows and crossed the room by memory to find the lamp mounted on the wall. She switched it on with a curled knuckle and soft yellow light filled the studio.\n\nShe closed the door, then picked up three of the biggest books she could find. She used her sleeves to cover her hands so she wouldn't leave fingerprints behind in case any crime scene techs got overly industrious.\n\nMoving quickly, she stacked the books against the bottom of the broken door. They wouldn't keep anyone out, but they would serve as an early warning system if anyone tried to enter.\n\nThe small desk had once held a notebook computer. A network cable lay abandoned on the desk. She checked through the drawers, but it was obvious they had been searched. Judging from the clutter in front of the desk, the searchers had simply emptied the drawers onto the floor.\n\nThere were no thumb drives, no CDs or DVDs, nothing that could have been used to store files. A business card file folder lay abandoned upside down. Evidently the searchers had been instructed to find anything high-tech.\n\nAgain using her sleeves, Annja picked up the folder and flipped through it. Most of it was contact information for various agencies, libraries, library staff, other Oxford professors, plumbers and electricians. She guessed that Edmund didn't entirely trust his computer to remember everything for him. She didn't blame him. She didn't, either. That was one of the reasons she maintained her journals as well as her private blog.\n\nOne of the cards caught her attention.\n\nGaetano Carlini stood out in a heavily embossed but simple font against the grayed image of a rabbit peering over the edge of a top hat. The number on the front of the card was to the club. With difficulty, Annja extracted the card from the plastic holder using her sleeved fingers.\n\nWhen she flipped the card over, she found another telephone number. Feeling a little better, she tucked the card into the back pocket of her jeans, then continued her search.\n\nTwenty minutes later, Annja was satisfied she'd combed the entire flat. Edmund Beswick lived the cramped life of a confirmed scholar with too much to do and too little space to do it in.\n\nAlthough Edmund had spoken proudly of the collection of magical props he'd assembled, only a handful of small things occupied the built-in bookshelves in the office area. Decks of playing cards, coins, scarves, cups and balls, and even a gibeci\u00e8re, the large pouch street magicians used to hold props while putting on shows, shared space with the books on magic.\n\nThat meant Edmund kept his collection somewhere else.\n\nAnnja returned to the card file and flipped through the thick plastic pages till she found three business cards for storage units. Two of the storage businesses were in Chelsea and one was in Mayfair.\n\nShe'd been relieved to discover there was no blood in the apartment. If the men had gotten to Edmund, they'd taken him easily enough. She didn't know if he would tell them about his storage unit. Then she realized almost in the same thought that he would. He would be fearful for his life, for good reason, and wouldn't hold back when asked.\n\nBut what would the Triad do with Edmund when it recovered the magic lantern?\n\nAntsy, ready to move, Annja retreated to the window and climbed out. She took a moment to replace the glass pane in the window so others\u2014less altruistic\u2014wouldn't be tempted by an easy mark. Then she clambered back down the fire escape.\n\nAnnja bought a cup of coffee at a pub around the corner, fended off a couple halfhearted attempts at picking her up and retreated to the back area and the phone. She was happy to find one there because public phones were a dying business now that everyone had cell phones. Still, cell phones were known to go dead at inopportune moments.\n\nShe switched off her sat-phone because it had a GPS chip in it that would allow police to track her if they wanted to. After she finished speaking with DCI Westcox, she was pretty sure the man would want to find her.\n\nShe dialed Westcox's office and was greeted by a polite male voice. She identified herself and asked to speak with Westcox.\n\n\"I'm afraid DCI Westcox is unavailable at the moment, Ms. Creed.\"\n\n\"I know. He's working the fourth Mr. Hyde murder.\"\n\nThe assistant didn't respond to that.\n\n\"I just left him less than an hour ago.\"\n\n\"I understand that, Ms. Creed, but DCI Westcox asked not to be disturbed\u2014\"\n\n\"A man has been kidnapped and it might have something to do with Mr. Hyde. Do you think that will interest DCI Westcox?\"\n\n\"Wait a tick, Ms. Creed.\"\n\nAnnja sipped her coffee and waited anxiously. She didn't know if Edmund's disappearance was connected with the Mr. Hyde murders or not, but it was a way of getting Westcox's attention. She didn't have to wait long.\n\n\"Ms. Creed, where are you?\"\n\nAnnja ignored that, but she felt certain that the chief inspector already knew. The landline would show up immediately. If he really wanted to see her, a patrol unit would already be en route.\n\n\"Professor Edmund Beswick has been kidnapped.\"\n\n\"Who is he?\"\n\n\"I don't have a lot of time to get into this.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because I'm trying to find him. I think it would be better if you were looking, too.\"\n\n\"Come into my office. We'll talk.\"\n\n\"Haven't you already sent someone to pick me up?\"\n\nWestcox didn't bother to deny the charge.\n\n\"I don't know what Professor Beswick is involved in\u2014\"\n\n\"The Mr. Hyde murders?\"\n\n\"I doubt it. Saying that was the only way I had of getting your attention.\"\n\n\"That also constitutes interfering in a police investigation. I'll have you up on charges.\"\n\n\"Fine. If that's what it takes to get you looking for Professor Beswick, do it. In the meantime, he needs to be found. His life is in danger.\"\n\n\"What makes you so certain of that?\"\n\nAnnja peeked down the hallway to assure herself the police had not yet arrived. \"Because the men looking for him also kidnapped me.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Westcox's tone indicated he wasn't happy, and he wasn't entirely convinced.\n\n\"Yes. Right from under your nose. Now that I think about it, maybe calling you is a waste of time.\"\n\n\"Ms. Creed, you're not doing much to endear yourself to this office.\"\n\n\"You're not very endearing, either, Inspector. I need you to help me find my friend.\"\n\n\"I was given a report only a short time ago. Something about a shooting involving an automobile loaded with possible Asian gangsters and a young red-haired woman spotted fleeing the scene. Would you happen to know anything about that?\"\n\n\"Have those men been taken into custody?\"\n\n\"Not as yet. We're searching for them. Nor do I intend to discuss this over the phone with you, Ms. Creed. We'll talk in my office.\"\n\n\"Thanks for the invitation, Inspector, but I'm going to decline for the moment.\"\n\nWestcox's voice was hard as he replied, \"That course of action wouldn't be prudent.\"\n\n\"With all due respect, you weren't in the back of that car when the guns came out. I like my chances on my own at the moment. Find my friend. Then I'll be happy to speak with you.\" Annja hung up.\n\nShe regretted not having gotten her backpack from her hotel room, but it was possible that Westcox already had men there. Or that the Triad had set up camp there.\n\nOr both, which would have been interesting.\n\nShe started for the front of the pub, noticed the police car pulling to a stop out on the street in front of the building and headed for the back door. She was in the wind before the police arrived."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 10",
                "text": "A few blocks from the pub, Annja stopped at a bodega and used the pay phone. She called the number she'd found for Gaetano Carlini's home and listened to it ring twice before it was picked up.\n\n\"Hello?\" Gaetano sounded half-asleep.\n\n\"It's Annja Creed. I'm sorry to be calling so late.\" Annja glanced at the clock on the wall behind the counter. The young Indian male working the counter watched her, though whether he just liked looking or was suspicious she couldn't say.\n\n\"Ah, Annja.\" She heard fumbling noises over the line. \"It's very late, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Or very early, depending on your point of view.\"\n\nGaetano chuckled. \"Yes, it is. Are you all right?\"\n\n\"I am, but I'm afraid something's happened to Edmund. He's not with you, is he?\"\n\n\"No. Why would he be with me?\"\n\n\"I was just hoping he was there because he's not at home.\" Annja quickly brought Gaetano up to date on her attempted kidnapping and Edmund's probable abduction.\n\n\"Oh, dear. You've gone to the police?\"\n\nThat required a further explanation.\n\n\"I see.\" Gaetano sounded thoughtful and more awake. \"I could, as Edmund's friend, insist that something be done to find him. You said this inspector's name is Westcox?\"\n\n\"Yes. But I was hoping you might be able to help out a little more.\"\n\n\"How so?\"\n\n\"What do you know about the magic lantern Edmund bought from the auction house?\"\n\n\"Only what he's told me, but I can find out more. I have a number of contacts throughout the city. I'll try to uncover what I can.\"\n\n\"That would be awesome.\"\n\n\"What about you? Are you safe?\"\n\n\"I think so.\"\n\n\"But you can't go back to your hotel, can you?\"\n\n\"Not without a forced audience with DCI Westcox. And he might be successful in putting me on the first plane out of London.\"\n\n\"Well, we won't let things go that far. However, it's plain that you can't do anything else until we know more, and you require safe habitation while we look. Would you feel comfortable coming here? There's an extra room in my quarters, and I don't mind putting you up.\"\n\nAnnja almost sighed in relief. Being on the run in London, which she was partially familiar with as a tourist but definitely not as a fugitive, sounded horrible. Her chances of getting caught by the police grew exponentially the longer she stayed on the streets. The trip to London wasn't turning out the way she'd expected it to.\n\n\"You don't mind?\"\n\nGaetano laughed. \"One of my neighbors is an old spinster who is convinced that\u2014because of the magic\u2014I am in league with the devil. I can't wait for her to catch a glimpse of you arriving at all hours.\"\n\nAnnja didn't much feel like laughing.\n\n\"Meet me here at the shop. I'll put on some of that terrible coffee that you Americans treasure so much. And try not to fret about Edmund. He's a resourceful lad and a skilled escapologist. I'm sure he's handling himself just fine.\"\n\nEven though she wanted to believe that, Annja didn't hold out much hope. Escapology was all about knowing the traps inside and out. It wasn't about escaping from people determined to kill you.\n\nFifteen minutes later, Annja stood in front of the entrance to Carlini's Magic Bullet Club. The morning had grown colder and the fog had gotten more thick.\n\nLess than a minute later, it opened with the same theatrical creak as before. The weak light in the corridor flared to life as the door closed behind her. For just a moment as she stood there, alone, Annja felt nervous.\n\nHer chances of getting out of the corridor if this turned out to be a trap weren't good. Just as she felt ready to explode, the door on the right opened and Gaetano stuck his head through. He wore a colorful bathrobe over flannel pajamas.\n\nHe waved her forward. \"Come on, then.\"\n\nAnnja walked through the door. As she'd noticed earlier, all the doors actually led to the foyer outside the dining area. The puzzle was that in name only. Of course, a guest could still be wrong, but he or she wouldn't be turned away.\n\n\"You haven't heard from Edmund?\"\n\nGaetano shook his head as he led the way back into the dining room. \"No. I've tried some of the friends we have in common. Woke them up and worried them, as well.\"\n\n\"Then he is missing.\" The news hit Annja hard. She'd hoped that the break-in at his flat only signified that his home had been violated and that he might yet be free.\n\n\"Yes. I'm afraid so. Please. Sit.\" Gaetano gestured to the table he'd set up with a coffee and tea service.\n\nAnnja slipped out of her coat and draped it over a chair. She sat in the chair Gaetano pulled out for her, then watched as the man took a seat across from her. He poured coffee and pushed the cup and saucer across.\n\n\"Would Edmund call you if he was in trouble?\"\n\nGaetano poured a cup of tea for himself. \"About something like this? Something involving magic?\" He nodded. \"Of course he would. In addition to knowing a lot about legerdemain and the art of illusion, I also know a great number of people. Like, for instance, the auctioneer that worked the estate sale where Edmund picked up Anton Dutilleaux's magic lantern.\"\n\nGaetano poured milk into his tea before continuing. \"There was nothing special about the sale. Merely a descendant of a collector getting rid of items no one else cared about.\" He set the creamer down and looked at Annja.\n\nShe blew on her coffee and waited. She wrapped her hands around the cup to absorb the welcome heat.\n\n\"In the case of Dutilleaux's magic lantern, there was another interested party, but he learned of the sale too late to bid. This is where it gets interesting. And, perhaps, more troubling.\" Gaetano laced his fingers. \"Have you heard of a man named Jean-Baptiste Laframboise?\"\n\nFrom the way Gaetano said the name, Annja knew the person wasn't a good man. She missed having her computer and a ready internet connection. In seconds she could be infinitely more knowledgeable than she presently was. \"No.\"\n\n\"Neither had I, but the auctioneer told me about him. As it turns out, Laframboise is a black marketer. One of those chaps who can\u2014no matter how difficult or how illegal it is\u2014get it for you. For a price.\"\n\n\"Laframboise deals in antiquities?\"\n\n\"Not as a regular field of operations, no. In fact, the auctioneer inquired after Laframboise to a policeman friend of his. A man in Scotland Yard who deals with forgeries and the like. According to the detective at the Yard, he's made quite the name for himself in the drug trade and human trafficking.\"\n\n\"Then why is he after Dutilleaux's magic lantern?\"\n\nGaetano shook his head. \"I have no earthly idea. The auctioneer went on to tell me that Laframboise was quite distraught when he discovered the magic lantern had been sold.\"\n\n\"When did Laframboise find out?\"\n\n\"He talked to the auctioneer two days ago.\"\n\n\"When was the sale?\"\n\n\"A few weeks ago.\"\n\n\"Laframboise just found out about it?\"\n\nGaetano shrugged. \"Evidently. The auction was a small thing. I remember that Edmund was worried someone might snatch up his prize. Professors don't make a lot, you know.\"\n\nAnnja nodded. She knew. That was one of the reasons she didn't teach full-time. But the main reason was because she'd rather be at a dig getting her hands dirty. The chance to see something no one had seen in a very long time was exciting. A lot of archaeologists lived for it.\n\nAnd a lot of them had died for it.\n\n\"How did Laframboise find out about the auction?\"\n\n\"My friend didn't know.\"\n\n\"How did Laframboise track Dutilleaux's lantern to Edmund?\"\n\nA deep frown creased Gaetano's face. \"Two of Laframboise's bullyboys showed up on my friend's doorstep and assaulted him.\"\n\n\"He didn't think to tell you or Edmund?\"\n\n\"This only happened a few hours ago. And they threatened him if he told anyone. He has a family to think of. He was very scared the whole time he was talking to me. Had I not gone to him and had we not been longtime friends, I don't think he would have told me.\"\n\nTaking a deep breath, Annja pushed her anger away. \"There are a lot of innocents involved in this.\"\n\n\"Exactly my thoughts.\" Gaetano sighed. \"I fear I, too, have been remiss in the assistance I could have given Edmund.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Edmund was thrilled with his acquisition. I'd promised to help him research the matter and Anton Dutilleaux and I hadn't. I'm currently endeavoring to correct that oversight by calling in some favors.\"\n\nFor a moment, Annja was silent, chasing thoughts of her own. \"There is one other possibility.\"\n\nGaetano cocked an eyebrow.\n\n\"I was at Edmund's flat. His collection of magic props doesn't appear to be there.\"\n\n\"No. He keeps them in a storage unit.\"\n\n\"Do you know which storage unit?\"\n\nGaetano smiled when he realized what she was actually asking. \"Of course I do. That's where Edmund shows off his collection. There's no room at his flat.\" He pushed himself up from the table. \"Let me go change clothes. I have a car around back.\"\n\nWhile waiting for Gaetano to get dressed, Annja wandered the dining area and stared at the caricatures. Most of the names were unfamiliar to her, but she recognized the famous ones.\n\nThen, on the third wall she examined, she found a caricature that she recognized immediately, though the name was new to her. It had been drawn thirty-three years ago.\n\nThe man in the picture hadn't changed in the intervening years. He was gaunt to the point of emaciation, had white hair that hung to his shoulders and a beard that extended to his chest. He held a long staff in one hand and was dressed in a robe and tall, pointed hat. His eyes were deep-set and she knew the color of them even though the caricature had been done in charcoal and sprayed with a fixative.\n\nRoux."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 11",
                "text": "The name came unbidden to Annja. She was aware that she smiled and grimaced at the same time. Roux and Garin Braden were the two people who, like her, were somehow connected to the mystical sword she carried.\n\nFive hundred years ago, Roux had been charged with watching over Joan of Arc, and he had failed. As penance, he and his apprentice, Garin, had been assigned\u2014or cursed\u2014with finding Joan's broken sword, reforging it and placing it once more in the hands of a champion.\n\nMost days, Annja was pretty certain a mistake had been made regarding her role as a champion. But she had to admit that the sword had changed her life in a number of ways.\n\n\"What do you see?\"\n\nStartled, Annja looked at the doorway where Gaetano stood. She didn't know what to say.\n\nGaetano walked over to her and pulled on a pair of glasses. He studied the picture. \"Ah, yes. The fabulous Raymond the Red.\" He smiled happily. \"He was quite an amazing performer.\"\n\n\"Was he?\" Annja looked closely. \"He looks kind of crotchety and unpleasant.\"\n\n\"If you can see that, then my father truly captured the essence of this man in his sketch.\" Gaetano shook his head. \"Raymond the Red had a sweet-and-sour disposition. You never knew what you were going to get with him. Children and women loved him, though.\"\n\n\"Seriously?\" Annja's own experiences with Roux had left her between camps. She loved him as a mentor, and perhaps even as a father figure\u2014though she couldn't be sure since she hadn't known her own father\u2014but he often got on her last nerve. Roux could be vexing and irritating, and incredibly demanding.\n\nOver the time they'd known each other, she'd come to look forward to and dread every moment they spent together.\n\n\"Oh, yes. I was just a boy when I first met Raymond the Red. Perhaps eight or nine. The adults didn't care for him so much. He was far too opinionated for their tastes, and he didn't seem to delight over magic the way they did. But he had the gift.\"\n\n\"The gift?\"\n\n\"For magic.\" Gaetano shook his head. \"He was fantastic. Things appeared, disappeared and changed into other things. Even as practiced and experienced as the audience here was, there were a number of his tricks no one could explain. It was as though he were truly able to work magic.\"\n\nAnnja didn't comment on that. \"Raymond the Red asked to be drawn as Merlin?\"\n\n\"No. That was my father's idea. I asked him about it once, but he told me Raymond could be no one else.\" Gaetano gestured toward the door with his hat. \"Shall we?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Annja led the way, but she couldn't resist taking one more look at the drawing.\n\nSince they were in Gaetano's car and moving through the early-morning London traffic and wouldn't be easily traced if DCI Westcox had assigned someone to look for her, Annja turned on her phone and called Roux. The phone rang three times.\n\n\"What?\" Roux sounded as gruff as always.\n\n\"Dutilleaux's magic lantern. Have you ever heard of it?\"\n\n\"You called me for a game of Twenty Questions?\"\n\n\"No. Actually, I don't have a lot of time.\"\n\n\"Neither do I. I'm in Atlantic City and the tables are running hot. I've got a private poker game set up in...twenty minutes.\"\n\n\"I'm in London and the police are looking for me. Do I win?\"\n\nRoux harrumphed theatrically. \"Okay. Tell me about it.\"\n\nAnnja grinned at that. Roux treated her like she was a pain, like she was the child that kept returning to the nest, but he cared about her.\n\n\"I don't have time to go into all the particulars. I'm trying to help a friend. He got mixed up with something called Dutilleaux's magic lantern. From the old phantasmagoria shows.\"\n\n\"I know what a magic lantern is and I'm familiar with phantasmagoria. Childish theater for adults. Shameless.\" In the background, a croupier called for bets.\n\n\"I thought it might be one of those things you sometimes look for. This one's supposed to be cursed.\"\n\n\"No. Not to my knowledge. I'll have a look around. Later.\"\n\n\"Sure. Just any time. I'm sure I can keep the police waiting till you decide to act. And as long as I don't actually have the magic lantern, it's not like the curse can harm me or my friend.\"\n\n\"Sarcasm isn't an endearing trait.\"\n\n\"It wasn't intended to be.\"\n\n\"Did you kill someone?\"\n\nFrom anyone else, the question would have been ludicrous. But not from Roux. He was serious. He had been with Annja when they'd left dead men lying in their wake. \"No.\"\n\n\"And you're not with Garin?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Because getting in trouble with the police is something I'd expect from Garin.\"\n\nGarin Braden lived outside the law but he was so rich that a phalanx of attorneys protected him from most repercussions.\n\n\"It's not like I planned this.\"\n\nWhile he drove, Gaetano glanced at her with polite but definite interest. He had an easy touch on the wheel and the sedan glided through the traffic.\n\n\"Are you going to be in London long?\" Roux sounded only mildly interested.\n\n\"Maybe longer than I'd planned to if this doesn't work out right.\"\n\n\"I'll text you the number of a private inquiry agent there in London.\"\n\n\"A private inquiry agent? Like Sherlock Holmes? I've got goose bumps already.\"\n\n\"Don't be insufferable. Do you want the number?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I'll text it to you now.\"\n\n\"Just tell me. When I get off the phone with you, I'm turning the phone off. I've got the police looking for me, remember?\"\n\n\"How am I supposed to know if anything happens to you?\"\n\nHis concern warmed Annja, but she wasn't going to relay that to Roux. They'd only both be embarrassed. Roux was as uncomfortable with airing personal feelings as she was.\n\n\"Even the London police give me one phone call. I'll call you.\"\n\nRoux sighed. \"You know, I just got away to do a little gambling. It's truly depressing when an old man can't relax in his twilight years.\"\n\n\"As long as you've lived, you've already passed your twilight years.\"\n\n\"Don't be impertinent.\" Roux gave her the phone number and made her repeat it. \"Should you contact her, give her my name. Tell her she will be compensated for her time.\"\n\n\"I can pay my own way.\"\n\n\"This woman is one of the best I have ever seen, Annja. She'll surprise you.\"\n\nRoux didn't speak highly of many people other than himself.\n\n\"Whatever she tells you to do, or even suggests, don't take it under advisement. Just do it.\"\n\n\"All right.\"\n\n\"And take care of yourself, Annja. I still find you more interesting than vexing.\" Roux hung up before she could respond.\n\nFor a moment, Annja sat there dazed and a little mystified. Roux and Garin were part of her life because of the sword, which Garin wanted to destroy or control, but she sometimes forgot that their relationships went deeper than that. Roux and Garin had started out as master and apprentice and often carried on more as father and wayward\u2014very wayward\u2014son. Now, when they weren't operating under a truce, they occasionally tried to kill each other.\n\nIt was all very complicated.\n\nShe remembered to shut off the phone, then dropped it into her pocket.\n\n\"An old friend?\" Gaetano glanced at her.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nGaetano was waiting for her to reveal more, but magicians weren't the only ones who could keep secrets. She glanced at the dash clock. It was 2:48 a.m. She decided to wait till later in the morning to call the number Roux had given her.\n\nIf she didn't have Edmund Beswick back by that time.\n\nFifteen minutes later, Gaetano pulled to a stop at the curb in front of the storage facility. He got out of the car and fished a walking stick from the backseat. He looked a little embarrassed as he carried it.\n\n\"I don't like walking into a potentially dangerous situation without some kind of weapon.\" He used a swipe card to open the storage building's security door, then led the way inside.\n\n\"I don't suppose you have a key to Edmund's unit.\" Alert to everything around her, Annja trailed after the big man. She felt into the otherwhere and briefly touched the sword. The weapon was ready to spring into her hand.\n\n\"No. Then again, locks have never been a problem for an escapologist. I'm certain we'll manage.\" Gaetano winked at her and followed the twisting labyrinth without hesitation. Weak yellow bulbs lit the way.\n\nAnnja noted the numbers and tried not to think about what might be happening to Edmund at that moment. Jean-Baptiste Laframboise didn't sound like a forgiving man\u2014or one who would want to leave a witness behind.\n\nShe heard furtive jostling and a muttered curse ahead.\n\nAnnja caught Gaetano's elbow and guided him back against the wall. She put a finger to her lips. His face tightened in consternation as his hands worked along the walking stick, but he nodded his understanding.\n\nEdging forward, Annja peered around the corner. Halfway down the hall, three men snapped a lock with a large pair of bolt cutters. Their casual clothes gave nothing away, but they kept glancing around.\n\nOne of them took out a cell phone and said in French, \"Yes, we're here now. Number three twenty-seven. There are two locks, Mr. Laframboise. We'll be through them in just a moment.\" He nodded to the one with the bolt cutters.\n\nAnnja pulled back around the corner and glanced at Gaetano. \"Three twenty-seven?\" she whispered.\n\nGaetano nodded.\n\n\"Laframboise's men are breaking into the unit now.\"\n\nHe scowled. \"Well, that isn't good.\"\n\n\"Can I borrow your walking stick?\"\n\nGaetano hesitated, then handed it over. \"What are you going to do?\"\n\n\"Try to keep them from taking Dutilleaux's lantern. Once they have that, they might not need Edmund anymore.\" Annja focused on what she was about to do, not what might happen. She took a deep breath, kept a loose grip on the walking stick and spun around the corner. Calmly, almost nonchalantly, she walked toward the three thieves breaking into Edmund Beswick's storage unit."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 12",
                "text": "Annja walked as if she'd been inside the storage facility several times. She acted a little wary, as any woman would bearing down on three strangers in a close hallway. She didn't meet their gazes, but she could feel them on her, and she nodded politely. She kept the walking stick tucked behind her right leg. Despite her efforts at hiding her weapon, she knew the subterfuge wouldn't last.\n\nThe ringleader caught sight of the walking stick, doing a double take. \"Look out!\" He slid a hand inside his jacket.\n\nReacting swiftly as the two other men started to stand, Annja brought the walking stick up. The ringleader expected her to swing at his head, so she feinted the swing. When he raised his left arm to block, she took a quick step forward, whipped the stick around in her hands and jabbed him in the stomach with it.\n\nThe air gusted out of the man and his face turned pale. He had a small pistol in his hand now, but he lacked the strength to raise the weapon.\n\nAnnja snap-kicked the pistol from the man's hand and sent the gun spinning down the hallway with a rasp of metal. Then she whipped the stick around again and delivered a line drive to his temple. The man sank bonelessly.\n\nInstantly, the man with the bolt cutters lunged forward and snapped the razor-sharp edges at Annja's face like a maniacal bird beak. She managed to elude the attempt, but only just. When the bolt cutters closed, a lock of her hair fell away. He immediately thrust again and she gave way before him, measuring his stride and getting his rhythm.\n\n\"Get the lantern, Fran\u00e7ois! The lock is open!\" The bolt cutter operator snapped at Annja again and again.\n\nShe kept giving ground, not wanting to do battle over the body of the unconscious man. When the man lashed out once more, she jammed the walking stick into the jaws of the bolt cutters, then twisted hard.\n\nYelping in pain, the man lost his grip. Annja flung the tool away. The man immediately drew a locking knife from his pants and took up an experienced stance with the blade reversed and laid along his arm.\n\n\"That's right, girl. Come on. I'll take your head off.\" He spoke in heavily accented French to himself, obviously not knowing or even thinking she could speak French fluently.\n\nAnnja dropped into a crouch and swung the walking stick only inches off the ground. The hardwood shaft contacted explosively against the man's ankle. In the next instant, the numbed foot gave way under him. She blocked a feeble thrust of the knife with the stick as she stood, then kicked the man in the crotch.\n\nHe screamed high and thin, like a dying horse, and fell over. The knife tumbled from his hands as he reached for his ankle and his crotch.\n\nAnnja stepped past him and saw that Fran\u00e7ois had opened the storage unit door and gone inside. She stepped through the door and was amazed to see all the boxes and crates piled inside.\n\nA small stainless-steel table, like something salvaged from a hospital, stood against the wall on the right. Several objects sat on it, and chief among them was a lantern.\n\nThe device looked like a dragon rearing on its hind legs. Crafted out of brass, the dragon held a round glass lens in its mouth. Heavy coats of lacquer covered the dark wood at the lantern's base, but it was scraped and scarred from rough handling and hard years.\n\nFor a moment, Annja just stared at the piece and wondered about all the stories it held. How many people had stared enraptured at the ghostly images Anton Dutilleaux had projected for them in the Parisian tunnels? Where had the stories come from? Were they ones Dutilleaux made up? Or were they ones he'd borrowed from the places he'd traveled?\n\nThen the present rushed at her again as Fran\u00e7ois grabbed the lantern and wheeled around. He wasn't any bigger than Annja and he had his hands full. The only problem was making sure the lantern wasn't harmed.\n\nSlowly, Annja spread her arms out to her sides, the walking stick still in her right hand. She spoke in French in a calm voice. \"Fran\u00e7ois, I don't want to hurt you.\"\n\nHe sneered and produced a knife. \"You will not hurt me.\"\n\nAnnja smiled. She let go of the walking stick.\n\nFran\u00e7ois got the wrong idea. He started forward with the knife held out before him. \"Now go away before I carve the face off you.\"\n\nReaching into the otherwhere, Annja drew the sword into the room. The dulled lighting ran along the razor-sharp edges. \"Mine's bigger. And I promise, I will hurt you if I have to.\"\n\n\"Where did you get that?\" Fran\u00e7ois backed up.\n\n\"Where is Edmund Beswick?\"\n\nThe Frenchman looked uncomfortable. Nervously, he glanced past Annja toward the door.\n\n\"Your friends aren't coming. I made certain of that. Tell me about Edmund Beswick. I'm not going to ask again.\"\n\n\"Laframboise has him.\"\n\n\"Jean-Baptiste Laframboise?\"\n\nFran\u00e7ois nodded angrily.\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"In a warehouse on the Isle of Dogs. I don't know the address. This city is new to me.\"\n\n\"Is he all right?\"\n\n\"Yes. Laframboise gave us instructions that the professor was not to be harmed until we had the secret of the lantern.\"\n\nHer relief was short-lived when Gaetano called hoarsely from outside, \"Annja!\"\n\nMoving back cautiously, keeping the sword between her and Fran\u00e7ois, Annja peered out into the hallway. Down at the corner, Gaetano pointed at the other end of the corridor.\n\nThree Asians in jeans and a whole lot of leather approached the locker.\n\nAnnja ducked back inside. There was no way those men happened to be here by accident. She looked at the Frenchman. \"Who are the Asian guys?\"\n\n\"Chinamen.\" Fran\u00e7ois spat, but he looked afraid. He clutched the lantern close to his chest. \"They work for a man named Puyi-Jin.\"\n\n\"Who's he?\"\n\n\"A Triad boss. He hired Laframboise to find the lantern.\"\n\n\"If your boss is supposed to get the lantern for him, why is Puyi-Jin sending people after me?\"\n\n\"Once my boss figured out where the lantern was, he tried to cut a new deal with Puyi-Jin.\" Fran\u00e7ois grimaced. \"They haven't reached an accord.\"\n\n\"So whoever has the lantern gets to negotiate the new deal.\"\n\n\"You see how it is.\"\n\n\"Great. Your boss gets greedy and I've got Chinese gangsters after me.\"\n\nFran\u00e7ois shrugged. \"Puyi-Jin must have figured Edmund Beswick told you about the lantern.\"\n\n\"No.\" Not yet. Annja drew in a deep breath and took a fresh hold on the sword. \"Do you know why everyone is after the lantern?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"You realize it's supposed to be cursed?\"\n\nFran\u00e7ois didn't look happy all of a sudden. \"Laframboise didn't mention that.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Well, it is. And guess what? Now we've got the Triad out in the hallway. You'd think the curse is working.\"\n\n\"We can give them the lantern,\" Fran\u00e7ois said hopefully.\n\n\"Do you really think they'll just let us go?\"\n\n\"Probably not.\"\n\nAnnja didn't think so, either, and she wasn't going to lose the opportunity to get Edmund away from Laframboise. She glanced around the shelves, looking for anything she could use. The possibility of getting out of the storage facility unscathed was dim.\n\nEdmund had a storage chest against one wall that had paraphernalia from his magic act. She looked through the contents, searching desperately for an advantage.\n\n\"Annja!\" Gaetano sounded positively panicked.\n\nShe heard footsteps and quiet voices speaking Chinese.\n\nSpotting a box marked Flash Paper, Annja grabbed a handful of sheets and a lighter. The next shelf yielded a gallon jug of cleaning solvent that smelled properly combustible. She took the jug, added it to her collection and hurried back to the door.\n\n\"Annja Creed.\" That wasn't Gaetano.\n\nShe opened the gallon of solvent and poured it at the edge of the door. She'd already seen the fire extinguisher out in the hallway. She hoped it would be enough to take care of the fire. Or that the fire department would get there in time to save everything.\n\n\"Come out.\" The speaker sounded young and irritated. \"Otherwise, we're coming in to get you.\"\n\nOnce the gallon jug was empty, Annja placed it behind her. The sword had vanished the moment she'd let go of the hilt, but the weapon was still there waiting for her.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Fran\u00e7ois shifted nervously farther back in the storage unit.\n\n\"Trying to save us. Get ready to run.\" Annja watched as shadows fell across the doorway. She held the lighter and the flash paper ready.\n\nA moment later, a young Asian man rounded the corner and came into view of the doorway. Metal studs glinted on his face, and tattoos snaked up from his neck to his chin. He held a pistol before him. Satisfied Annja wasn't holding a weapon, he grinned. \"I have her.\"\n\nShielding her movements in her hands, Annja lit the flash papers. There was an instant flare of bright light and heat. She threw them at her attacker.\n\nThe flaming sheets sailed into the young Triad member's face and dropped to the floor. The solvent started to burn at once and the harsh chemical smell grew even stronger.\n\nThe gunman's feet caught on fire from the burning solvent that had coated them in the doorway. He screamed and backed away, but his finger was on the trigger and he fired three times in quick succession as Annja pursued, jumping over the solvent trap. Safely inside his gun arm so the bullets couldn't hit her, she punched him in the throat and ripped the pistol away from him.\n\nAs the man staggered backward, flames wrapping his feet, Annja moved out into the hallway and used the man for cover. The two other men with guns weren't standing in the growing pool of fire.\n\nAnnja shoved the staggering man into the others and tossed the captured pistol away. She wasn't going to kill anyone if she could help it. She was already in enough hot water with Westcox and the Metro police. But she wasn't going to let her or Gaetano be killed, either. With her right hand now free, she reached for the sword and pulled it into the hallway with her.\n\nThe element of surprise was only going to last a moment. She stayed low as she stepped over the gangster on fire. The man was too distracted by kicking his shoes off to be a threat at the moment.\n\nThe pool of solvent that had collected in a depression worn into the hallway ignited in a rush that sent flames spiraling three feet high, much higher than Annja had anticipated. She threw her left arm across her face as she charged through them, keeping the flames from her face and eyes and hair.\n\nOn the other side, the two remaining Triad members took hasty steps back from the fire and their fallen comrade. They lifted their pistols and fired, and the crescendo of sudden thunder pealed through the hallway. At the same time, the fire alarm stuttered to life.\n\nOne bullet plucked at Annja's jacket sleeve. The other five or seven\u2014she lost count\u2014screamed off the walls.\n\nShe swung the sword and caught the weapon of the man on the left in midrecoil. The slide snapped off the pistol, flying through the air and leaving the weapon useless. She set her left leg, pivoted and drove her right into the man's face.\n\nThe second man whirled on her and fired again. Annja dropped into a crouch and the bullets cut the air over her head before thudding into the wall behind her. She stepped forward and drove the sword into the man's shoulder just deeply enough to cause him to drop the pistol. Blood streamed from the wound but she knew it wasn't life-threatening.\n\nThe man stumbled back and clasped his good hand over his injured arm. Annja kept moving forward and kicked him in the crotch. When he bent over, she brought a knee up into his face and left him sprawled on the floor.\n\nThe man whose shoes she'd set on fire had scrambled out of them and was batting at sparks on his pant legs. He caught her looking at him and quickly backed away.\n\nThe fire in the hallway licked at the walls, seeking fresh footholds in the building. Annja let go of the sword and sprinted a few steps down the hall to grab the fire extinguisher from the wall.\n\nAs she returned, the man she'd kicked in the face was scrambling for his weapon. She swung the fire extinguisher against his head and he dropped like a rock.\n\nAiming the fire extinguisher at the base of the flames, Annja yanked the safety pin and squeezed the release handle. A cloud of white chemicals boiled from the nozzle and spewed over the fire. When it finally cycled dry, the flames were out and only scorch marks remained.\n\nAnnja ran back to Gaetano and found him nursing a large bump on his forehead. His eyes looked glassy. \"I'm afraid we've lost Edmund's magic lantern. I tried to stop the Frenchman, but he got away. I wasn't strong enough to overpower him.\"\n\n\"That's all right. We've got a lead on where Laframboise is keeping Edmund. That's more than what we had when we came here.\" Annja pulled Gaetano into motion and herded him toward the door as the fire alarm continued to shrill.\n\nThankfully, none of the combatants she'd left behind were in any shape to pursue."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 13",
                "text": "The sign on the door was professional and understated. Bronze letters barely stood out against the simulated wood. Fiona Pioche, Private Inquiries.\n\nWhen Annja knocked, the solid sound told her the wood was merely a veneer over a security door. Fiona Pioche's offices were in the upscale Mayfair district of London. She had a downstairs corner office, which would be even more expensive. Annja decided that whoever Fiona Pioche was, she must be doing quite nicely for herself.\n\nAnd she wondered how Roux knew the woman. Of course, Roux and Garin knew all sorts of people, from refined gentry to cold-blooded killers. Unfortunately, both Roux and Garin seemed more at home with the latter. And that made Ms. Pioche even more interesting.\n\nGaetano stood unsteadily at Annja's side. He blinked repeatedly, trying to bring his vision into focus. Seeing her concern, he patted her on the shoulder, missing the first time before correcting his aim.\n\n\"I'm perfectly fine. Don't worry about me.\"\n\n\"I wish you'd let me take you to see a doctor. You could have a concussion.\"\n\n\"It won't be the first concussion I've had. We need to find Edmund.\"\n\n\"If you're not feeling any better when we finish up here, you're going to see a doctor.\"\n\n\"I fear the chief inspector will have you locked up and possibly deported if he gets his hands on you.\"\n\nAnnja worried about that, too.\n\nThe door opened and a young man about Annja's age stood there in an expensive suit. His black hair was neatly cropped and he wore a tailored Savile Row suit that emphasized his lean athleticism. \"Ah, Ms. Creed, we'd been wondering when you would show up.\"\n\nHe opened the door wider to reveal a large and expensive office filled with modern furniture.\n\n\"My name is Oliver Wemyss. You may call me Ollie, if you like.\" He waved Annja and Gaetano to plush seats in front of the desk. \"Would you care for a refreshment?\" He crossed the room to a service bar. \"We have tea and coffee, and a large selection of juices, liquors, beers, wines and soft drinks.\"\n\nAnnja shook her head. \"No, thank you.\"\n\nGaetano declined, as well.\n\n\"Come, Mr. Carlini, you simply must have a spot of tea. I have some analgesics for that headache you're obviously sporting, and you need something to wash them down.\"\n\n\"You're right. And thank you. Tea with milk, please.\"\n\nOllie poured and brought a steaming cup and saucer over to Gaetano, who managed to take it in shaking hands.\n\nEfficient and crisp, Ollie folded himself into the chair behind the big desk and studied the three monitors in front of him. He tapped the keyboard in rapid syncopation, then looked up at Annja. \"Were you at the Cleburne storage unit this morning?\"\n\nSurprised, Annja nodded. \"How did you know that?\"\n\n\"It appears Detective Chief Inspector Westcox has interviewed men taken from there who named you as their attacker.\"\n\n\"Preposterous.\" Gaetano was so upset he almost lost his tea, but he recovered quickly. \"Those men attacked us.\"\n\nOllie typed more. \"Oh, I'm certain their claims will fall apart once the inspector pulls their records. They each have long criminal histories. I'm quite convinced you'd be exonerated even without Ms. Pioche's help.\"\n\nWatching Ollie work both impressed and irritated Annja. She shifted in the chair, wishing she could just take a quick nap, but knowing she wouldn't be able to until Edmund was safe.\n\n\"We've got a friend out there who's in trouble. If it's going to be a while before Ms. Pioche can see us\u2014\"\n\n\"Ms. Pioche is already working on that. That is to say, I am already working on that. Your friend's troubles\u2014Professor Beswick's kidnapping\u2014is precisely the reason I have broken into the Metro Police Division's files.\" Ollie shot her a small smile. \"If I am discovered, they will be properly vexed.\"\n\n\"I'm sure they would.\" And I'm going to be one step closer to deportation. Annja sat tensely. \"But shouldn't we have some kind of arrangement before she starts working?\"\n\nOllie glanced at her and raised his eyebrows. \"You should. Ms. Pioche assures me that we don't need the usual contract agreement in your case. She considers you...special.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"She did not see her way clear to elucidate. Mystifying, actually.\" Ollie shrugged. \"I have been through your files and see nothing that connects you to Ms. Pioche.\"\n\n\"Until this morning, I'd never heard of her.\"\n\nOllie grimaced at that. \"Oh, dear. She's quite well-known. And getting her known\u2014to the right people\u2014is part of my job description.\"\n\n\"Maybe I'm not the right people.\"\n\nOllie nodded and smiled. \"Judging from the background checks I've done on you, you seem to travel in areas outside Ms. Pioche's normal purview. Though you both certainly have been in the news regarding aggressive involvement with criminal types.\"\n\n\"One of the drawbacks of the job.\"\n\n\"As a television personality?\"\n\n\"As an archaeologist.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Ollie nodded again. \"To be sure. There are any number of unsavory types in that job field. Ms. Pioche has dealt with some of them, as well.\"\n\n\"She's an archaeologist?\"\n\n\"No. But she has worked for those who are.\" Ollie cocked his head to one side. \"Yes, Ms. Pioche?\" He listened for a moment, then nodded. \"Of course, Ms. Pioche. Straightaway.\" He stood and looked at Annja and Gaetano. \"Ms. Pioche will see you now.\"\n\nGaetano frowned. \"If that was supposed to be ESP, I'm not impressed. All you had to do was set up a prearranged time to make that announcement.\"\n\nOllie grinned. \"Nothing so esoteric, I'm afraid. I have an earbud that keeps me in touch with her. Would you like another cup of tea, Mr. Carlini?\"\n\nThe inner office was at once imposing and impressive. Blond wood covered the walls and Italian marble covered the floor. Persian rugs added a layer of wealth that the paintings and sculptures might not have fully expressed.\n\nAnnja stood in awe of the artifacts that were on such casual display. Arranged as they were, though, she didn't get the sense that they were shown to intimidate prospective clientele. Rather, the pieces were there as keepsakes of an extraordinary life.\n\nDrawn to a brass gladiator mask, Annja noted that it hadn't been restored. Instead, it showed the scars of having been taken in battle centuries earlier.\n\nAnd beside it was a ceramic Russian icon, an image taken from Christian stories of Christ, which showed an angel Annja assumed was Archangel Michael. The figure brandished a flaming sword.\n\n\"That one is a particular favorite of mine.\"\n\nAt the sound of the woman's voice, Annja turned. \"Ms. Pioche?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" The woman sitting behind the desk was in her late fifties. Her silver hair was cropped at her jaw and parted on the left side. She wore red lipstick that enhanced her dark blue eyes. Diamond earrings glistened from under her bob. Her white cashmere sweater, black skinny pants and black boots suggested wealth, class and good taste.\n\n\"I apologize. I just didn't expect to see anything like this here.\"\n\nMs. Pioche's right eyebrow arched. \"What were you expecting?\"\n\n\"For starters, a much smaller office.\"\n\n\"Roux told you nothing of me?\"\n\nAnnja couldn't decide whether the older woman sounded angry or hurt. Of course, with a man in the picture\u2014especially with a man like Roux\u2014the one wasn't very far from the other.\n\n\"Only that you were very good at what you do.\"\n\n\"I am.\" She glared at Annja.\n\nAnnja folded her arms and returned the woman's challenging gaze full measure. She didn't know the source of the animosity between them, but she wasn't simply going to roll over. \"Perhaps coming here wasn't a good idea. I'm sorry to have imposed.\" She turned to Gaetano, who appeared to be too dazed to know what was going on. \"Let's get you to a doctor.\"\n\n\"Nonsense.\" The woman's voice was a razor claw in a velvet glove. \"That poor man is almost out on his feet. If you ask him to move from that chair, he might well collapse.\"\n\nGaetano started to force himself out of the comfortable chair in front of the massive Louis XIV desk. \"Madam, I am quite capable of\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, do sit down, Mr. Carlini, before you topple over.\" She never took her eyes off Annja.\n\n\"Quite right, madam.\" Annja didn't know if it was Gaetano's realization of his own infirmity or Ms. Pioche's imposing will that motivated him, but he sat.\n\n\"Ollie, be a dear and ask Dr. Whitehead to come around.\"\n\nOllie took out a small, slim cell phone and punched a single digit.\n\n\"I'm awaiting orders, Ms. Pioche, but I have yet to figure out whether you're helping this young woman.\" Ollie beamed at Annja.\n\n\"Oh, God.\" Ms. Pioche leaned back in her chair. \"Annja Creed, I apologize for my behavior and would like to do my best to help you rescue your kidnapped friend.\"\n\nThe woman stood and offered her hand. \"Although you obviously do not know the history involved in this situation, I hope we can put that aside and bring your friend\u2014Mr. Edmund Beswick\u2014home safely.\"\n\nAnnja took the offered hand and felt the calm, cool strength of it. \"Roux said you were the best at this. Please, call me Annja.\"\n\nHer blue eyes glittered. \"I am. On that we can agree. My name is Fiona.\" She waved Annja toward a chair beside Gaetano.\n\nOllie spoke rapidly on the phone and put it away. \"The physician is on his way.\"\n\nGaetano shifted in his chair. \"Being able to call a physician in so quickly is most impressive.\"\n\n\"Not so impressive. He has an office in this building.\"\n\n\"Still, proximity alone\u2014\"\n\n\"I also own the building.\"\n\nGaetano was silent for a moment. \"That, too, is most impressive.\"\n\nWell, that explains the office space. Annja settled into her chair as Fiona did the same across the wide expanse of the ornate desk.\n\n\"Ollie has been sending me files all morning, since I got Roux's call predicament. Apparently, Jean-Baptiste Laframboise is a criminal of the worst cut. And you don't know where your friend is.\"\n\n\"I have a lead.\"\n\nFiona looked at Annja.\n\n\"He's being held somewhere on the Isle of Dogs. And by now Laframboise also has the object he's been searching for.\"\n\n\"How do you know this?\" Her blue eyes searched Annja's face.\n\n\"Because it was in the storage unit and I lost it to one of Laframboise's men.\"\n\nGaetano sat up straighter. \"We lost it.\"\n\n\"Ollie, be a dear and have Jenkins bring the car around.\" Fiona Pioche stood, opened a locked desk drawer and took out a small black automatic. She slipped the pistol into place at the small of her back, then turned and opened a hidden compartment in the wall. She took out a thigh-length shapeless beige jacket and pulled it on.\n\n\"Would you like me to accompany you, Ms. Pioche?\" Ollie asked.\n\n\"That won't be necessary.\" She nodded at Annja. \"Annja and I should be able to handle things for the moment.\" She took out extra magazines for the pistol and an elegant cell phone, then dropped them into her jacket pockets. \"I'll need you to take care of Mr. Carlini and keep me apprised of any developments we may need to know about.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Ollie was all business now.\n\nThe woman took a tiny earpiece from a small box and slipped it into her ear. She looked at Annja. \"Are you ready?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Annja had chafed at waiting. If she'd known where to go, she'd have gone already.\n\nFiona walked to a back corner of the room, pressed a hidden button, and a section of the wall swung out to reveal a passageway. Without another word, she stepped through the secret door."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 14",
                "text": "Evidently once Fiona Pioche made up her mind about a course of action, things happened quickly. Annja was hard-pressed to keep up with the woman as they strode down the long, narrow tunnel.\n\n\"Private route to the parking garage.\" Fiona had her hands in her jacket and her eyes fixed straight ahead. \"That's one of the reasons to own the building.\"\n\n\"It wasn't just the office space?\"\n\nFiona laughed in delight. \"Don't make me laugh. I'd rather not like you.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because you're with Roux.\"\n\nAnnja thought about that for only a moment before the ramifications of that declaration set in. \"Eww!\" She looked at the older woman. \"When you say with, are you talking about\u2014\" She couldn't go on.\n\n\"Sleeping with him?\" Fiona's eyebrows arched. \"Of course. What else would I be talking about?\"\n\nAnnja cringed.\n\nHer response obviously puzzled the other woman. \"Do you mean to say you're not?\"\n\n\"No! Pigs will fly before that happens. On second thought, there will be flying pigs and it still won't happen.\"\n\nFiona chuckled. \"I have to beg your pardon. It appears I have jumped to an incorrect assumption. When Roux called me and spoke so glowingly of you\u2014\"\n\n\"Glowingly?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Roux treats me like I'm a pain in the butt most of the time. Like I'm some kind of kid that prattles on incessantly about things he has no interest in.\"\n\n\"That part, unfortunately, is probably true.\"\n\n\"That I prattle?\"\n\n\"No, that Roux would find you boring.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\"\n\nShe smiled again, then reached over and took Annja by the hand and squeezed. \"Given his background, I think Roux finds most people boring. Don't take it personally.\"\n\nAnnja looked at Fiona as she took back her hand. \"What background?\"\n\n\"The fact that he's lived five hundred years. He told me that you knew.\"\n\n\"You know about that?\"\n\n\"Yes, and I rather think he's lying about his age. I think he's lived considerably longer than that.\"\n\n\"He told you he's lived that long?\" Annja couldn't wrap her head around that. Roux had told her only after the sword had reforged itself and she'd needed some kind of confirmation. His age wasn't something he talked about.\n\n\"Yes. Of course, at the time he thought he was dying. Someone named Garin had tried to kill him. I arrived in time to get Roux to a physician.\" Fiona shrugged. \"Even given his inexplicable existence, there are things that can still kill Roux.\"\n\n\"I know.\" Annja remembered how frail the old man had looked in the hospital bed after that business in Loulan City. She'd thought Roux was going to die then, and she'd been distraught when faced with the possibility. Until that point, she hadn't known for certain how much he'd meant in her life.\n\n\"Well, since I was wrong and you're not sleeping with that old goat, I insist you call me Fiona.\"\n\n\"And I'd really prefer Annja.\"\n\n\"It's a pleasure to meet you, Annja, and this time I mean that. I look forward to knowing you better. There aren't many people I can share stories with about Roux.\"\n\nFiona reached the end of the corridor, pressed her hand against a section of the wall and stepped back as a door flipped inside on well-oiled hinges. On the other side of the threshold, a small office space overlooked the parking garage. She led the way to the office door, then through it.\n\nNo sooner did they reach the curb than a sleek, silver sports coupe pulled to a stop. The gullwing doors opened like a raptor about to launch itself after prey and a small man climbed from the driver's seat.\n\n\"'Ello, Ms. Pioche.\" The man smiled and helped Fiona into the car as Annja climbed into the passenger seat.\n\n\"Good morning, Mr. Jenkins.\"\n\n\"She's filled with petrol and clean as clean can be. Do try to bring her back in one piece.\"\n\n\"I shall so endeavor, Mr. Jenkins.\" Fiona pulled the seat belt around her and buckled in. As soon as the connection snapped together, the door lowered. She pulled on a pair of supple driving gloves.\n\nAnnja buckled in, as well, and the door folded in.\n\nFiona hit the accelerator and the powerful engine roared to life. The sudden acceleration shoved Annja back into the seat and she closed her eyes twice during near-misses with a support pillar and a wall as the coupe shot out of the garage and screamed into early-morning traffic.\n\n\"Where did you meet Roux?\" Fiona drove effortlessly and with audacity, as if nothing on the street would ever cause her any harm.\n\n\"In France. On a dig. I was looking into a local legend. Roux was there.\" Annja braced her feet against the floorboard and tried to control the fight-or-flight instinct that screamed through her. She told herself that Fiona knew what she was doing. \"Do I need a crash helmet?\"\n\n\"No. Of course not. I don't intend to crash. That would interfere with the whole rescue mission we're undertaking.\" Fiona jetted into the oncoming lane, downshifted and accelerated, breaking the rear wheels free and throwing them into a tire-eating skid across an intersection. Horns blared all around them as she cut the wheel, upshifted, found traction again and veered off in a ninety-degree turn just ahead of the panel truck she'd outrun.\n\n\"And you don't have a death wish?\"\n\nA faint smile crossed Fiona's red lips. \"If that question should be asked of anyone, it would be you.\"\n\n\"Me?\"\n\n\"I haven't had a single shoot-out on the streets in...oh...weeks, I suppose. Things have been dreadfully dull.\" Fiona slewed around another two cars, then jumped back into her lane just in time to avoid a head-on collision. Then she turned the next corner into a skid across cobblestones.\n\nAnnja braced her hands against the roof of the car.\n\n\"Don't be silly. Get your hands down. You're going to give the other drivers the impression that I'm holding you at gunpoint.\"\n\nAnnja dropped her arms at her sides and held on to the bucket seat instead. The scenery blurred by as Fiona roared through the streets. They narrowly missed locking bumpers with a bright red double-decker bus, buzzed through a red light that had just changed and juked back and forth into momentary voids in the traffic.\n\n\"For someone Roux obviously puts stock in, I'd expected you to be made of sterner stuff.\"\n\nAnnja closed her eyes as a maintenance vehicle filled the windshield. Then she was slammed against the side of the car as Fiona applied acceleration, brake and acceleration. Annja would have sworn she'd heard metal scraping as they passed, but it might have been the maintenance vehicle's worn brakes protesting.\n\n\"I'm pretty stern.\"\n\n\"Yes, well, perhaps under other circumstances. Obviously you have no qualms when it comes to personal combat. Driving, however, seems to be another matter.\"\n\n\"I'd prefer to be the one driving. And that term seems to be used loosely at the moment.\"\n\nFiona grinned and slipped on a pair of wraparound sunglasses from the glove box, then smoothly shifted gears again, once more accelerating. \"I'm an excellent driver, and this coupe is an excellent machine. Bristol Fighter Turbo. First in its class.\"\n\n\"Did it rate well with the crash test dummies?\"\n\n\"Your friend's life is in danger. We are in something of a hurry.\"\n\nGrudgingly, Annja admitted that was true. \"We don't even know where he's being held.\"\n\n\"Isle of Dogs, you said. We're off to see if we can narrow that down a little.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"We're going to talk to a...an associate of mine. Over in the East End. If there's anything to know about Laframboise, Paddy will know.\"\n\nAnnja dug her feet harder into the floorboard. \"How did you meet Roux?\"\n\n\"I was a girl. Twenty, I think. Still in university at Oxford.\"\n\n\"You went to Oxford?\"\n\n\"That surprises you?\"\n\n\"The people I've known from Oxford are generally a little more reserved\u2014 Look out!\" Annja pointed at the delivery truck that nosed out of an alley.\n\nFiona blasted her horn, cursed, then downshifted again and managed to pull into the alley the delivery truck had just vacated. Annja stared at the rapidly passing brick wall only inches on the other side of the window. The roar of the car engine trebled inside the enclosed space.\n\nUnbelievably, Fiona was once more accelerating. \"I was reserved at that time. Running with Roux changed me. I'll be the first to admit that.\" She pulled on the wheel hard and slid out into the next street, then jockeyed for position in the traffic.\n\nA taxi driver, forced over to keep from colliding with the sports coupe, made a gesture.\n\n\"Some days I like the changes, but other times I wonder what kind of person I'd have been if Roux hadn't become infatuated with me.\"\n\n\"Infatuated with you?\"\n\n\"Does that seem so difficult to believe?\"\n\n\"No, but it's Roux. He has a thing for younger women. I've seen that.\"\n\n\"When Roux met me, I was a younger woman.\"\n\n\"Okay, but he wasn't a younger guy. He was old then. Really, really old.\" Despite her fear of impending doom, Annja couldn't help but be curious. \"You became infatuated with Roux?\"\n\n\"He's a deeply complex man.\"\n\n\"I know he likes young girls. Girls. Plural. You had a relationship?\"\n\n\"We did.\" Fiona grimaced. \"And he does like girls. As I said, he's something of a randy old goat. But while he was with me, I believe he was monogamous.\"\n\n\"You're blowing my mind. Seriously. I don't want to think about Roux's sex life.\"\n\n\"Well, we won't talk about that.\" Fiona smiled. \"But I have to admit, he opened my eyes to a lot of possibilities. There's nothing like the touch of an older lover who knows what he's about.\"\n\n\"Don't. I'm going to be sick.\"\n\n\"Is it the car?\"\n\n\"It's this conversation.\"\n\nFiona grinned. \"You're the one that asked.\"\n\n\"Maybe we could just stick to the highlights.\" Annja closed her eyes again as the woman briefly left the street and zipped along the sidewalk.\n\n\"Remind me to have Jenkins take a look at the suspension when we get back.\" Fiona checked the traffic, spotted a gap and got back over just as an early-morning breakfast crowd fearfully vacated the tables of an open-air restaurant. \"At any rate, I was working my way through university. I answered an ad for a personal secretary.\"\n\n\"In London? I thought Roux lived outside Paris.\"\n\n\"Does he? I didn't know that.\" Some of the lightheartedness deserted Fiona then. \"So close, and he's never once...\" She frowned.\n\n\"The ad was for a personal secretary?\" Annja couldn't help prompting.\n\n\"Yes. You do know that Roux looks for legendary objects from time to time?\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"Such as those stupid sword pieces he was forever going on about. Did he talk to you about those, too?\"\n\n\"Uh...\" Annja wasn't sure she wanted to get into her relationship with the sword.\n\n\"Of course he did. I don't know why I bothered to ask. The man was\u2014and probably still is\u2014obsessed with finding the lost pieces of Joan of Arc's sword.\" Fiona shrilled around the next corner. \"I spent years helping him look for it. But they weren't all bad years. We had a lot of fun traveling around the world.\"\n\n\"But when you found out how old Roux was, didn't that kind of creep you out?\" Annja held her thumb and forefinger marginally apart. \"Just a little.\"\n\nFiona laughed. \"You look at Roux and see an old man.\"\n\n\"Um, yeah. Gray hair. Wrinkles. Skinny. Yeah, definitely an old man.\"\n\n\"That's because you're superficial.\"\n\nAnnja couldn't believe what she was hearing.\n\nFiona reached across and patted her on the knee. \"Don't take it to heart, love. Everybody's superficial to a degree. Roux certainly is. Some sweet young thing would walk by, his head would nearly twist off turning to look.\"\n\n\"Gross.\"\n\n\"Is it, now?\" Fiona laughed. \"Just means he's alive, is all.\" She accelerated around another car. \"Do you want to know what I saw when I looked at Roux?\"\n\nAnnja gave the question considerable thought. She didn't want to be scarred for life. And she was comfortable\u2014mostly\u2014with how she dealt with Roux. She didn't want that to change.\n\nEvidently Fiona decided not to wait on her answer. \"I saw a man who was on fire to live.\"\n\n\"Roux?\" When Annja thought of Roux, she thought of sloth and selfishness. The old man never truly did anything unless it suited him.\n\n\"Yes.\" Fiona smiled in memory. \"Just thinking about him makes my heart beat faster. I used to watch him play baccarat. That was his game.\"\n\n\"He plays Texas Hold'em now.\"\n\n\"Does he? Probably with the same zeal.\" Then Fiona grimaced and tightened her grip on the steering wheel. \"Of course, I also think about how the weasel ran out on me in the middle of the night.\" She jerked the car violently and avoided another vehicular encounter, leaving horns blaring in her wake.\n\n\"He just left?\" That was the Roux Annja knew. Of course Roux didn't give an answer about something unless someone was holding a blowtorch to his face.\n\n\"He did. We were together eighteen years. Then, one day, he went out and never came back. For a while I was convinced someone had killed him. He has quite a number of enemies, as you might know.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Then there's that man, Garin.\"\n\nAnnja decided not to say anything about that.\n\n\"And out of the blue, Roux calls me and asks me to look after you.\" Fiona glanced at Annja. \"You can see how I might not have been as friendly as I could have.\"\n\n\"Did you ask Roux why he left?\"\n\n\"My pride may be tattered, but I do still have it. I most certainly did not ask him that.\"\n\n\"Don't you want to know?\"\n\n\"Yes, but do you think Roux would tell me? The truth, I mean?\"\n\nAnnja shook her head. \"Probably not.\"\n\n\"But I know he still cares.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"Because he knew how to get hold of me, and that I would be able to help you. If he didn't care about me, he wouldn't have known that. Since he left, I've made something of myself. Adventured for a while, mostly hoping to run into him again in our old haunts, and continued working.\"\n\n\"Private inquiry work?\"\n\n\"Among other things. I made a fortune from some of the things I'd done with Roux, and some of the things I did afterward. After a while, I came back to London to live, but I still couldn't settle down. I opened up the business to keep from being bored, and because I found out I enjoy helping people.\" Fiona smiled grandly. \"And I love nettling Scotland Yard and those stuffed shirts when I get the opportunity.\"\n\nAbruptly, Fiona braked and pulled the car to the curb. She parked in front of an old two-story building a block off Cheshire Street, if Annja had managed the geography correctly.\n\nA sign out front declared Snooker.\n\nFiona pressed a button and the gullwing doors opened. \"Come along, then. Paddy practically lives here. We'll see what he knows about Jean-Baptiste Laframboise.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 15",
                "text": "Annja had definite misgivings as she stepped into the snooker hall. Although much of the East End had undergone reconstruction and refurbishment, seedy patches remained. This was one of them. Even at this early hour, men were at the tables, drinking and smoking, and talking to one another in language better used on the docks and in the factories where they normally worked.\n\nThe interior was dark and stank of smoke and stale beer. Curtains covered the windows, but thin lines of sunlight fell through gaps and drew lines on the stained wooden floor. Billiards cracked sharply somewhere in the back.\n\nVoices quieted as the crowd spotted Fiona. She also drew a number of salacious comments, but she ignored them.\n\nAnnja flanked the older woman as they walked to the bar on the other side of the room.\n\nA scroungy man in a red shirt unbuttoned to the navel tended bar. He leaned over the scarred surface, pencil in hand as he worked a Sudoku puzzle. His limp black hair fell into his face. Eyeliner outlined his dark eyes and made them look sad and sensitive.\n\n\"You're in a bad place, love.\" He spoke softly so his voice didn't carry. He didn't look up. \"You should pack up and go back to wherever it is you come from.\"\n\n\"I've been in worse places. I don't suppose you have a pot of tea back there, do you?\"\n\n\"I do.\" The bartender left the Sudoku puzzle lying on the counter. \"Milk?\"\n\n\"Please.\"\n\nThe bartender glanced at Annja. \"Would you like tea, as well?\"\n\n\"I would. Thank you.\"\n\nA grin thinned the bartender's lips. \"You're an American.\"\n\nAnnja nodded.\n\n\"Interesting.\" The bartender threw a towel over one shoulder and retreated to the back. He returned a moment later with two steaming cups of tea. With polite deliberation, he put the teacups in front of them. \"Brace yourselves. Here comes the bloody cock of the walk.\"\n\nAnnja glanced at the small mirror on the wall at the back of the bar and watched a stout man approaching the bar. Three younger men trailed after him. With the builds they had, lean and muscular, they probably worked the docks. Or they had in their past. The hardness of their expressions marked them as something other than warehouse employees.\n\nFiona turned casually, leaned back against the bar and hooked her elbows over it. She looked like a cat stretched in the sun, but Annja read her wariness. A small grin pulled at the corners of her mouth.\n\nAnnja hoisted herself onto a bar stool a few feet from Fiona and waited. She hoped the woman knew what she was doing.\n\nThe big man leaned on the counter. Then he swiveled his attention to Fiona. \"My name is Leon Copely. I've got a nose for cops. My nose is telling me you're a cop.\"\n\n\"You need to check in with your otolaryngologist at your first opportunity, Mr. Copely.\"\n\nThe big man frowned, held his gaze on Fiona for a moment, then looked at his nearest lackey.\n\nFiona leaned over to the man and added in a low voice, \"An otolaryngologist is an ears, nose and throat physician, Mr. Copely.\" She tapped her nose. \"He should be able to help you with your sense of smell. I'm certain he can put things to rights. He might even be able to recommend someone to straighten it.\"\n\nThe man grimaced with cold deliberation. \"I don't need help with my nose. I don't need it straightened. And you're a cop.\"\n\n\"I'm not a police officer.\"\n\n\"You don't belong here, neither. So I'm only gonna ask you one time\u2014what are you doing here?\"\n\n\"I came for some information.\"\n\nThe man scowled. \"You ain't getting nothing from me.\"\n\n\"I didn't ask you, now, did I? You didn't even know what an otolaryngologist was. I suspect you may be pathetically deficient in information.\" Fiona sipped her tea. \"As far as I'm concerned, you can go back about your business.\"\n\nAnnja couldn't believe the way Fiona was deliberately antagonizing the man. Something bad was going to happen.\n\nCopely bristled and his jaw worked as if he was chewing cud. \"You got a smart mouth.\"\n\n\"Trust me, the smart mouth suits the rest of the package.\" Fiona eyed Copely coolly as the man stood straighter. \"Have a care that you don't bite off something bigger than you can chew.\"\n\n\"Haddock.\" Copely's voice had turned to gravel.\n\nThe biggest of his three companions started forward. He knotted his hands into fists, his intention clear.\n\nUnable to sit back, Annja slid from the bar stool. She took one step forward, hooked her hand in the man's shirt collar from behind and yanked at the same time she kicked his supporting knee.\n\nThe big man fell with a squawk. Annja stepped back at once, already aware of a second man setting himself and throwing a punch at her. She slipped under it, then twisted and caught the extended arm by the wrist. Shifting her stance, she set herself, redirected the man's forward momentum and took the captured arm down and around. Pivoted by his own strength and the fulcrum of his shoulder, the man screamed in pain as he landed flat on his back.\n\nAn amateur enthusiast rather than a trained fighter, the third man rushed at Annja. She hooked a bar stool with her foot and propelled it into the man's path. He tripped over it, caught himself and tried to fight his way clear. Annja whirled into a spinning back kick that caught the point of the man's jaw and stretched him out on the floor.\n\nBy that time, the big man she'd choked and tripped was getting his feet back under him. He reached into his pocket and flicked open a knife as Annja seized another bar stool and broke it across his teeth. Bloody and unconscious, the big man toppled to the floor.\n\nStill holding the stool, Annja threw it down and turned back to Copely. He had already reached under his jacket and was coming out with a pistol.\n\nA few of the other men in the room had started approaching with pool cues.\n\nFiona flicked out a hand quick as a striking snake, seized Copely's thumb and snapped it like a breadstick. The pistol fell from his grasp and he yelled in pain. Still holding on to the man's injured hand, Fiona locked her prey in place, then shoved her pistol into his ear. She pulled the trigger and a spray of blood misted over Copely's shoulder.\n\nCopely screamed.\n\nThe bartender cursed and jumped back.\n\nHalf the room away, the men with the pool cues pulled up and watched in fascination.\n\nFor a moment Annja thought the woman had shot her opponent in the head and that she'd watched a cold-blooded murder. Instead, she noted the small hole in the center of his stippled and charred earlobe and knew that Fiona had deliberately not killed the man.\n\nFiona shoved the pistol into Copely's mouth. Copely stopped screaming as he choked on the heated metal.\n\nAlmost politely, Fiona leaned forward to the man's uninjured ear. \"Do I have your attention, Mr. Copely?\" She had him turned so she could watch the other men in the snooker parlor.\n\nWeakly, eyes glassy and not properly focused, probably concussed by the detonation in his ear, Copely nodded.\n\n\"That's good. I'd hate to repeat myself, and it would be only a waste of time because then you wouldn't be able to hear me at all. You only have two ears.\" Fiona smiled and Annja's estimation of the woman shifted. She decided she wouldn't want Fiona Pioche as an opponent for any reason. \"I want you to go away now, Mr. Copely. Pick up your friends and go wherever it is when you're not here. And as free advice, don't ever be anywhere around me again. Do you understand?\"\n\nShivering, Copely nodded.\n\n\"I hate a bully, Mr. Copely, and I do business on this side of the city. If I have a client who has a problem with you in the future\u2014no matter how far away\u2014I will help them for free. And when I am finished with you, you will be dead or in prison. I hope I make myself clear.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"On your way, then.\" Fiona gently pushed Copely into motion.\n\nHe stumbled, touched his ear and stared at the bright blood. Then he motioned to the other man who was still conscious and they started working on their two unconscious friends.\n\nFiona placed the pistol on the bar and sipped her tea.\n\n\"Never a dull moment with you, is there, Ms. Pioche?\"\n\nAnnja tracked the man's voice upward to the second story overlooking the first. He stood at the railing dressed in a double-breasted suit. He looked almost as wide as he was tall and wore a salt-and-pepper goatee. His dark hair was slicked back. He wore rimless glasses that made him look professorial.\n\nFiona smiled. \"Hello, Paddy.\"\n\n\"You're a pip, my dear.\" Paddy smiled for a moment, then his face hardened. \"Mr. Copely.\"\n\nCopely stood with one of Haddock's arms across his shoulders.\n\n\"You're no longer welcome on these premises.\"\n\n\"That would be a mistake.\" Copely had some of his nerve back. \"I throw you a percentage of everything I do.\"\n\n\"I know that.\" Paddy fixed the man with a harsh stare. \"And I run an establishment that's safe for everyone that comes through those doors, whether it's for snooker or... You know that.\"\n\nCopely's face darkened. \"You can't talk to me\u2014\"\n\n\"Eddie.\" Paddy's voice was sharp with rebuke. \"If that imbecile insists on continuing to waste his breath and my time, blow him out of his shoes.\"\n\nThe bartender reached under the bar and took out a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. \"Yes, sir.\" He ratcheted back the hammers and the clicks sounded ominous in the silence that filled the big gaming room.\n\nWithout another word, Copely staggered out under the weight of the big man. His other two companions leaned on each other and followed.\n\n\"Now, Ms. Pioche, I am to assume you are here on business and not merely to harass my patrons?\" Paddy peered down at Fiona.\n\n\"The only reason I have for ever coming here, my dear man, is to be enchanted by your charm and wit.\"\n\n\"And my information, of course.\" Paddy grinned.\n\n\"Merely part of your charm.\"\n\n\"Well played, Ms. Pioche. Please come up.\"\n\nThe spacious upstairs office contained a great many books on built-in shelves. Most of the volumes looked as if they'd been read.\n\n\"Annja Creed, it is my pleasure to present Mr. Paddy McGurk.\"\n\nPaddy smiled and inclined his head. \"Ms. Creed, this is indeed an honor. Judging from your articles and your books, we share similar interests.\"\n\n\"We do?\"\n\n\"Antiquities. Legends. Stories of long-lost things.\"\n\n\"You're a collector?\"\n\n\"An appreciator of fine arts.\" Paddy bowed and took Annja's hand briefly before gesturing her to one of the plush sofas on either side of a glass-topped coffee table.\n\nFiona busied herself at a tea service on one side of the room while Paddy took a seat on the sofa across from Annja. \"What he isn't telling you is that he collects antiquities for other people who aren't too picky about how he got his hands on them.\"\n\nApparently embarrassed, Paddy waved Fiona's words away. \"Avarice is a mean thing. First cousin to jealousy. And I don't hide away every antiquity that I set my sights on. Some of them end up in museums. I'm very careful to...give back.\"\n\n\"You are.\" Fiona brought the tea service over and put it on the coffee table. She poured the steaming liquid into cups.\n\n\"Thank you. You spoil me.\" Paddy lifted the cup and blew on the tea.\n\n\"Another thing Paddy won't mention, unless he knows you very well, is that he is a gifted forger.\" Fiona settled onto the couch beside Paddy with her own cup of tea.\n\n\"I wouldn't say gifted.\"\n\n\"He has seven pieces hanging in various museums.\"\n\n\"Nine. Nine pieces, actually.\" Paddy grimaced.\n\n\"See? He does have an ego.\"\n\n\"Only when you're around, love.\" Paddy shifted his attention back to Annja. \"Since you're in Ms. Pioche's company, I assume she is helping you find something.\"\n\n\"Someone, actually.\"\n\n\"Mr. Hyde?\" Paddy shook his head. \"I've been following the media and I'm afraid I can't help you with that. I apologize, but crime like that isn't especially my field.\"\n\n\"What the old dear means is that he hasn't yet found a way to make money from it.\"\n\nPaddy slapped a hand over his heart. \"You wound me, woman.\"\n\n\"I seriously doubt that.\"\n\nPaddy nodded thoughtfully. \"Who are you looking for, Ms. Creed?\"\n\n\"Edmund Beswick.\"\n\nCocking his head to one side, Paddy thought for a moment. \"I'm afraid I can't help you there, either. I'm not acquainted with Edmund Beswick. Never heard of him.\"\n\n\"He's a friend. He was kidnapped last night by a man named Jean-Baptiste Laframboise.\"\n\nSipping his tea, Paddy appeared troubled. \"Now, that's a name I am familiar with. Laframboise is a horrid man. No appreciation for the finer things in life. He's a ruffian and a scoundrel. Why would your friend be kidnapped by the likes of Laframboise?\"\n\n\"For a magic lantern that supposedly had its origins in China.\"\n\n\"Why would anyone want a magic lantern from China? Perhaps Laframboise doesn't know that he needs a Middle Eastern lamp if he's looking for a genie and three wishes.\" Paddy smiled at his own wit.\n\n\"Laframboise was supposed to turn over the lantern, if he found it, to a man named Puyi-Jin. Instead, Laframboise has double-crossed his employer.\"\n\nPaddy trailed his fingers through his goatee absently. \"The name Puyi-Jin is known to me, as well, and he is as much an animal as Laframboise. The thing I keep stumbling over, though, is that neither of these two men are collectors. Why would they be interested in this magic lantern?\"\n\n\"I don't know. All I've managed to discover is that Edmund is being held on the Isle of Dogs.\"\n\nPaddy brightened at once. \"So he would have to have a base of operations.\"\n\nFiona nodded. \"That is what we were thinking.\"\n\n\"Then that is something I can help you with.\" Paddy took out a cell phone. \"Ever since the construction and rebuilding began in that area, there have been many hiding places criminals have used for all sorts of purposes. Let me see what I can find out.\"\n\n\"That would be lovely, Paddy.\" Fiona stood.\n\n\"Leaving?\" Paddy looked disappointed.\n\n\"Yes. Ms. Creed and I have things to do. Policemen to upset. While you're ferreting out Professor Beswick, we need to pursue what we can of the magic lantern. As much as I love to watch you work, you'll be calling people I'd rather not know about. Until I have to.\"\n\n\"Right you are.\" Paddy got to his feet and accepted the peck on his cheek that Fiona offered. \"I have your mobile number. I'll give you a ring as soon as I have anything to report.\"\n\nAnnja shook Paddy's big hand. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Before you leave London, I'd love to take you and Ms. Pioche to dinner. If you will allow me the privilege.\"\n\n\"When things are settled and Edmund is safe again, I'd like that.\"\n\n\"Then I shall endeavor to work harder and swifter.\"\n\nAlthough she didn't say it, Annja felt certain that news of Edmund wouldn't come swiftly enough."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 16",
                "text": "\"Professor Beswick.\"\n\nEdmund struggled against the heaviness that kept his eyelids closed. He wanted to see, but he just couldn't open his eyes. In the distance, he heard boat motors and machinery that weren't the normal morning noises around his flat.\n\n\"Professor Beswick.\"\n\nHe tried to open his eyes again. This time he also moved his head slightly, but it felt as if someone had filled his skull to bursting with wet cement.\n\nThe man cursed in French and it was so fast that Edmund couldn't follow all of it.\n\n\"Why isn't he waking?\"\n\n\"The chloroform takes a while to wear off.\" This second voice was cold and impersonal.\n\nHearing that sent a charge of adrenaline through Edmund's body. Frantic, he tried to gather his scattered thoughts. The last thing he remembered was working in his flat.\n\nNo, that wasn't right. The last thing he remembered was walking into his flat. He'd been looking forward to working, and he'd especially been looking forward to seeing Annja Creed again.\n\nExcept he hadn't been alone in the flat. He vaguely remembered a shadow stepping away from his office area. Before he'd been able to react, someone had hit him. The left side of his jaw felt tender.\n\n\"Then chloroform wasn't the best idea, no?\"\n\n\"No, sir. At the time, we wanted to control him without having to hurt him.\" The impersonal voice held a note of resentment.\n\nEdmund succeeded in lifting his head a little. A rough hand touched his face. A thumb pried open one of his eyelids. Someone shined a bright light into his eye. He tried to protest, but he couldn't get his voice to work.\n\nThe eyelid was released and the hand drew back. Edmund's head dropped heavily to his chest. Then something slammed into the side of his face, he felt a searing blast of pain and everything went dark.\n\nWaking this time was easier. Edmund even managed to crack his eyes as he raised his head. His mouth was dry as a sock and he tasted salt, which he assumed was blood. His mouth was swollen and felt crooked. Harsh chemicals stung his nose.\n\nA quick glance revealed that he was sitting in a dilapidated warehouse. Piles of debris sat in corners of the big, wide-open space. The place had been gutted. Black and gray and white utility cables hung from the ceiling like dead snakes.\n\n\"Professor Beswick.\"\n\nThe hard-voiced Frenchman lounged in an office chair in front of a battered desk that had only three legs and listed heavily to one side. The Frenchman had his boots on the desk.\n\n\"I am Jean-Baptiste Laframboise.\" The man obviously had a lot of ego. Self-satisfaction resonated in his voice and he smiled. He was lean and muscular, probably nearing forty, and had short black hair and a short matching beard that crowded his cheeks and eyes. The overall effect of all the hair made him look like an eight ball on a human body.\n\nHe dropped his boots to the floor and faced Edmund. The man wore what looked like designer jeans and shirt\u2014gray. With a dark pin-striped vest. A coat hung on the back of a nearby straight-backed chair. He held a very large stainless-steel revolver in his right hand.\n\n\"Do you know me?\"\n\nNot trusting his voice, Edmund shook his head. He instantly regretted the motion. Pain speared his skull and his stomach twisted.\n\nLaframboise's mouth screwed up in irritation. He lifted the revolver and laid the long barrel over his shoulder. \"You will come to know me. Have no fear of that.\"\n\nEdmund didn't know what to say to that, so he didn't speak. He glimpsed two armed thugs standing slightly behind where he was sitting.\n\n\"I have Anton Dutilleaux's lantern.\" Laframboise gestured with the revolver and pointed at the magic lantern sitting in a box beside the desk.\n\n\"How did you find my storage locker?\" Talking made Edmund's left jaw ache and he knew it was swollen.\n\nLaframboise paced. \"You told us where it was.\"\n\nEdmund couldn't remember doing that, but there was a lot he didn't remember. Despite the plywood sheets that covered the warehouse windows, enough light leaked in that he could tell it was daylight outside. He wondered how long he'd slept.\n\n\"Unfortunately, you haven't told us much else.\" Laframboise sat on the corner of the listing desk and laid the revolver across his thigh. \"You're going to\u2014\" he hesitated over his word choice \"\u2014amend that now, non?\"\n\n\"What do you want me to tell you?\" Edmund shifted slightly and discovered he was bound to a steel folding chair. For the first time, he realized how much his body hurt from being restrained. Wide bands of green tape wrapped his ankles. His hands must've been trapped behind him with the same tape.\n\n\"I want to know about the lantern.\"\n\nEdmund sucked in a deep breath and felt blood clots inside his mouth shift. Sickened, he spat them out onto the cement floor. Bright red blood mixed with older stains. \"It...reportedly belonged to a man named Anton Dutilleaux.\"\n\nA few of his teeth felt loosened, but they all seemed to be there. The inside of his cheek was swollen and torn. In all his life, he'd never been hurt so badly. He just wanted to go home. Better yet, he wanted to go to the emergency room, then home.\n\n\"Have you heard of a man named Puyi-Jin?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nLaframboise tapped the revolver muzzle against his thigh irritably. \"You're certain of this?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"He is a Chinaman.\"\n\nSeeing the man's obvious frustration with him, Edmund grew more afraid. \"I don't know anyone named Puyi-Jin.\"\n\n\"A few days ago, Puyi-Jin came to me and asked me to acquire this object for him.\" Laframboise tapped the box containing the lantern with his boot. \"Why is he so interested in this thing?\"\n\nEdmund hesitated only a moment, then realized that Laframboise at least knew part of the story concerning Anton Dutilleaux's magic lantern. Sensing that his life was on the line, Edmund resolved to tell the truth.\n\n\"You're sure this man, Puyi-Jin, is Chinese?\"\n\n\"With a name like that, I should hope so.\" Laframboise smiled at his own wit and his two thugs laughed.\n\n\"Just because he has a Chinese name doesn't mean he's Chinese. There are many people of Chinese heritage born in London.\"\n\nThe Frenchman's face hardened. He stood and walked over to Edmund. The big revolver rose to touch the end of Edmund's nose. The cold steel felt alien. \"Are you trying to be the wise mouth with me?\"\n\n\"No.\" Edmund could scarcely speak for the fear that coursed through him. \"It helps to know this man's culture. To know where he would have picked up knowledge of the lantern.\" He sipped his breath, his eyes crossed as he stared at the revolver muzzle. \"The lantern has a lengthy history.\"\n\nLaframboise considered that. \"Keep talking.\"\n\nEdmund licked his lips and tasted more blood. \"I just don't know what you're looking for. Anton Dutilleaux's lantern has inspired many rumors. The foremost is that it's cursed and brings bad luck to anyone who owns it. That story rose predominantly after Dutilleaux's murder in Paris, but I believe the lantern already held a malign aura about it from China before then.\"\n\nOne of the thugs shifted uneasily.\n\nLaframboise leaned in and the barrel of the revolver mashed Edmund's nose hard enough to bring tears. \"Men run from curses. They don't chase them.\"\n\n\"There's also the belief that the lantern actually opens a gateway to the dead. Or at least to another place.\"\n\n\"Now you're trying my patience.\"\n\nEdmund blinked the tears from his eyes and concentrated. He didn't know what his captor wanted. He was going to die and there was nothing he could do to stop it. \"It's also rumored that the Nazis chased after the lantern.\" Actually, he'd never confirmed that was a rumor, and he'd never particularly cared because his interest in the lantern was as a keepsake, nothing more.\n\n\"Why would they do that?\"\n\n\"During World War II, Adolph Hitler organized special units to search for things related to Aryan history, and for things repudiated to have mystical properties.\" Edmund's jaw ached as he spoke, but he forced himself to go on. As long as he was talking, he was staying alive. \"One of the sources I turned up about the lantern suggested it was on those lists, but I couldn't confirm that.\"\n\nLaframboise breathed out in exasperation. \"I get the notion you are trifling with me. This is a very dangerous thing.\"\n\n\"I'm telling you everything I know.\" Edmund felt desperate, caged and as though he were looking death in the eyes. And, in that moment, he knew that he was.\n\n\"Then Puyi-Jin knows more than you do. Pity.\" Laframboise didn't seem happy about that.\n\n\"I had only just acquired the lantern.\" Edmund swallowed and tasted blood again. \"I have not even been able to verify that the lantern I bought at the estate sale truly belonged to Anton Dutilleaux.\"\n\nLaframboise tapped the pistol barrel against his thigh. \"This is very upsetting. I have betrayed an employer in order to get you and the lantern.\" He shrugged. \"Not such a big thing, usually, but I always turn a profit. On this, I am not so sure I will profit.\" He frowned. \"Sadly, I have made a very powerful enemy.\"\n\nEdmund forced himself to think. He was an escapologist. He'd trained himself to pay attention to an audience. One of the basic tenets in dealing with an audience was to always give them what they wanted. Obviously Laframboise wanted to believe the lantern had some secret. So Edmund had to manufacture one. But it had to be based on truth.\n\n\"Has Puyi-Jin told you anything of the lantern?\"\n\nLaframboise scratched his beard with his free hand. \"No. The only reason he came to me was because I had people in London who could snatch you. He didn't want to trust the young thugs he has access to. They tend to be messy and not so trustworthy.\"\n\nAnd trusting you turned out so much better, Edmund thought, but didn't say. Desperately, he focused on Laframboise, seeking some kind of leverage. All he needed was a hint of doubt. \"But you have your reasons for betraying Puyi-Jin.\"\n\nThe Frenchman's eyes slitted.\n\n\"What I'm saying is that you have your suspicions about why Puyi-Jin wants the lantern. Tell me what you think and I'll see if that information triggers something I may know.\"\n\n\"You said you know nothing more.\"\n\n\"But I might know and not be aware.\" Edmund licked his split lips. \"I read a lot of information about phantasmagoria and phantasmagorists. I'm not at my best at the moment. Not like this.\" He strained against his bonds but didn't get anywhere. \"What you tell me may trigger something. So please, if you want answers, tell me.\"\n\n\"All right.\" Laframboise rested the long muzzle of his pistol over his shoulder again. \"The Chinaman is certain the lantern marks the location of a treasure.\"\n\n\"Whose treasure?\"\n\nLaframboise looked displeased.\n\nNervously, Edmund hesitated for just a moment. \"There is a rumor, but it's only a rumor, mind you, that Dutilleaux had hidden away a fortune in gold.\"\n\nFor a moment, Laframboise looked unmoved. Then interest flickered in his dark eyes. \"Gold?\"\n\nEdmund nodded. \"I couldn't confirm it, and I thought it was just a legend.\"\n\n\"You're saying it isn't?\"\n\n\"I'm telling you I don't know.\" Edmund gathered himself the way he would before he got ready to free himself from a trap and cleared his mind of fear. It was harder than during a performance. \"But I do know that Anton Dutilleaux worked in Shanghai before he came to Paris.\"\n\nLaframboise shrugged. \"So? This means nothing to me.\"\n\n\"He worked as a stockbroker in the International Settlement. A lot of money flowed through that city after the Treaty of Nanking opened China to Western colonialism. A man in the right place at the right time, with a plan, could have made a fortune. Several men did.\"\n\nFor a moment, silence filled the large warehouse. Edmund sat strapped in the chair, and he thought he could hear his heartbeat echo throughout the emptiness, but that was just the blood rushing in his ears. He kept his expression calm. He was a showman.\n\nAnd he was certain he was about to die.\n\n\"Interesting.\" Laframboise smiled. \"I'd like to hear more, mon ami.\"\n\nEdmund didn't know what he was going to do next. He was all out of rabbits. That little tidbit about Dutilleaux's life prior to his arrival in France was all he had. He didn't even know much about Shanghai.\n\nAnd then the double doors of the warehouse exploded inward and a van screeched to a halt a short distance inside the building. The doors flew open and armed Asian youths bolted from the vehicle and took up positions behind piles of debris and crates.\n\nBullets filled the air and the world turned into a rolling crash of thunder."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 17",
                "text": "\"Shouldn't we call the police?\" Annja unbuckled her seat belt and stepped from the low-slung sports car. The gullwing door protected her from the misty fog rolling in from the river for just a moment, then the cold damp reached her. Fiona had parked the car in a narrow alley between two-story run-down warehouses being eaten away by rust.\n\nThe Isle of Dogs wasn't truly an island. It was a peninsula surrounded on three sides by the Thames. It wasn't a home to dogs, either, though there were several stories to that effect.\n\nCanary Wharf Tower stood eight hundred feet tall and cast a long shadow over the area. Anyone looking at it would think the whole region was affluent, but Annja knew that wasn't true. The Canary Wharf office complex tilted the odds on the per capita breakdown. Slums and poor neighborhoods stood shoulder to shoulder with the wharf area.\n\nThey were in one of them now, parked in Blackwall not far from the condemned warehouse where Laframboise was supposed to be holding Edmund Beswick.\n\nFiona slipped off her jacket and left it lying on the car seat. \"Do you really want the police?\"\n\nAnnja hesitated. The police would complicate things, and there was no guarantee they could ensure Edmund's safety. On the other hand, they weren't even sure Laframboise and Edmund were there.\n\n\"How certain of Paddy's information are you?\"\n\n\"Very. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here.\"\n\nAnnja gazed at the warehouses ahead of them, vaguely aware of the clang and chug noises of the nearby port. The one Paddy's informants had fingered was three down and to the left. The news had come from a man also doing illicit contraband business in the warehouses.\n\nOut on the river, tugboats and other ships hauled cargo or sat in port awaiting loads or unloading.\n\n\"All right. No police.\"\n\nFiona smiled at her. \"Brilliant. I do hate working alongside the police when time is of the essence. Oh, don't get me wrong, those lads are useful, but they tend to move in large groups and get noticed rather more than we will.\" She clicked her key fob and the car's trunk swung open to reveal an arsenal. \"Care for a shotgun? Or do you prefer a minisubmachine gun?\"\n\nStunned, Annja gazed at the weapons. They lay in neat order in special boxes. Along with Kevlar vests. \"Do you drive around with a weapons locker all the time?\"\n\n\"Don't be ridiculous. I had Jenkins load the car before he brought it around.\" Fiona glanced at Annja, then pulled out one of the Kevlar vests and handed it to her.\n\nAnnja started putting it on. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Because I thought we might need them. Things to do with Roux often have a way of going sideways. I've been caught unprepared before. I was lucky to get out with my life.\" Fiona reached in and took out a military shotgun with an abbreviated barrel. \"You do know how to use weapons, don't you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I rather thought you might. Did Roux teach you?\"\n\n\"No. I've picked it up here and there. The first guys to really teach me how to handle a pistol and a rifle were SAS soldiers working security on a dig at Hadrian's Wall.\"\n\n\"Do you see anything you like? Don't be shy.\"\n\nAs a general rule, Annja didn't like guns. They were noisy and violent and the people using them often tended not to be discriminating in a pitched battle. She preferred her sword, and she preferred not to have to kill.\n\nHowever, both Laframboise and Puyi-Jin didn't seem to have those qualms.\n\nAnnja chose a Glock 21 .45 ACP for the knockdown power. She belted that around her hips, tied the holster down and slid the pistol in and out a few times. The belt came with four extra magazines in pouches. She also picked up a military shotgun that had been cut down. She added ammo for the shotgun and a Mini Maglite.\n\nFiona reached back in for an H&K MP5 submachine gun and slung it over her shoulder. The woman was turning out to be quite the surprise.\n\nAnnja indicated the naked weapons. \"Not exactly on stealth mode here.\"\n\n\"You fret entirely too much. Men never understand women's fashions.\" Fiona reached into the trunk and pulled out two brightly colored plastic rain ponchos with collar snaps. She handed one to Annja and pulled her own over her head. The folds covered the weapons easily. \"This isn't my first time at this particular dance.\"\n\nAnnja pulled hers over her head, too. Then gathered her hair in one hand and pulled it back. She secured it with a hair band from Fiona. The woman thought of everything.\n\n\"Right now we're just trying to help your friend.\" Fiona closed the trunk and set the car alarm. She took the lead.\n\nAnnja followed behind, overly aware of the weapons she carried. Unconsciously, she felt for the sword hilt and touched the blade. Knowing it was there made her a little more comfortable.\n\nFiona was a fast mover on foot as well as in a car. Annja had to step up her pace to match the woman. She didn't know where Fiona got the energy, but she was definitely a power walker.\n\n\"These men are dangerous.\" Fiona's voice was flat and neutral. \"If we engage them\u2014when we engage them\u2014I want you to remember that. They chose their own fates before they stepped foot inside that warehouse.\"\n\nAnnja wiped a wet layer of fog from her face.\n\nFiona glanced at her. \"You're not as hard as I am.\"\n\n\"I've done what I had to to survive.\"\n\n\"And you still have to make your peace with that, don't you?\"\n\nAnnja didn't say anything. Every time she'd taken a life, it had been to save one.\n\nBut she had taken lives. And they did weigh on her.\n\n\"You're different from the young women Roux has taken up with before.\"\n\nStartled, Annja looked at the older woman.\n\n\"He's told you about his past?\"\n\n\"Never intentionally.\"\n\n\"But he's told you about the things he's seen? The people he's met?\"\n\n\"Not while he was sober. He would never do that sober.\"\n\nAnnja turned that over in her mind. \"Do you realize everything he's seen? All the history?\"\n\n\"You mean all the violence and bloodshed?\" Fiona's voice had turned harsh. \"That's what much of history boils down to. Greed, murder, torture, rape. It isn't all pomp and pageantry.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"Good, because for a moment there you looked like a dewy-eyed romantic.\"\n\nAnnja didn't say anything.\n\n\"Not that I have anything against dewy-eyed romantics. As long as they realize there's another side to history.\"\n\n\"What we're living in now is going to be history one day. I don't think things are any easier now than they were.\"\n\nFiona blew out a breath and her voice softened. \"You're right, of course. I'd like to think that we've come further than those bleak times.\"\n\n\"Fiona, we're walking into a warehouse to rescue a man that might already be dead. And we're probably going to have to kill men to get that done. I don't think much has changed.\"\n\n\"Right you are.\" Fiona nodded. \"As I was saying, though, you're a different kind of young woman than Roux usually keeps time with.\"\n\n\"More of a dewy-eyed romantic?\"\n\nFiona chuckled. \"To be quite candid, yes.\"\n\n\"Maybe I am.\" Annja thought back to all the violence that had been in her life since she'd claimed the sword. Or since the sword had claimed her. She was never quite certain how that worked.\n\nWhen she thought about it, she was surprised at how easily she'd adapted to the violence. And sometimes she was ashamed of herself and the way she craved action. But it was who she was now. Maybe it was who she'd been all along.\n\n\"When we get inside the warehouse, you won't have to worry about me or what I'll do.\"\n\nFiona patted her on the shoulder. \"You will do what is necessary. I can see that in you. I just wish you wouldn't have the regrets.\"\n\n\"That's part of what keeps me who I am... And, just so we're clear, I'm not keeping time with Roux.\"\n\nWhen they reached the target warehouse, Annja realized almost at once that her uneasiness came from the men she saw in front of her. They weren't office workers or dockworkers. They weren't even the homeless, beggars or blue-collar workers barely getting by.\n\nThe young Asians stood out against the warehouse background because they were clearly gang members. Tattooed Triad thugs with their low-slung street bikes. They wore black wraparound sunglasses that hid their eyes and long dusters that concealed whatever weapons they carried.\n\nAnnja put a hand out to Fiona, but the woman had already stopped.\n\n\"It appears we're not the only ones to discover M. Laframboise's hiding spot.\" She smiled mirthlessly. She looked at Annja. \"There's no question about this turning bloody now, I'm afraid. What do you wish to do?\"\n\nTaking a deep breath, Annja shook her head. \"We don't leave Edmund in their hands.\"\n\n\"Agreed. Follow me.\"\n\nFiona led the way through a small alley that went by the warehouse where Edmund was probably being held. At the corner of the building, a yellow-and-black-striped fence circled a manhole cover. She knelt down and a wicked pry bar appeared in her hand. She inserted the pry bar into the keyhole in the manhole cover and pulled the lid up a few inches.\n\n\"Give us a shove.\"\n\nAnnja knelt, as well, and grabbed the manhole cover. It had to weigh seventy or eighty pounds. She shifted it to the side to reveal the opening. Foul odors drifted up from below.\n\n\"At least it will get us into the warehouse.\" Fiona pulled out a Mini Maglite and flicked it on. \"When the East India Docks filled with cargo ships and extra warehouses were needed, tunnels were built under the buildings to allow small cargoes to be shifted in and out. Also, coal was brought in underground, as well. These tunnels are filthy things at best.\"\n\nAnnja grabbed the edge of the manhole and swung down into the darkness. She breathed shallowly, hoping the sewer gas wasn't powerful enough to cause respiratory problems.\n\nAt the bottom of the ladder, Annja stood in a couple inches of drain water that ran through the irregular bottom of the tunnel. She pulled the poncho off. A rat sloshed through the water only a few feet away and scurried into the darkness. She took out her borrowed flashlight and scoured the tunnel bottom for a rock.\n\n\"What are you looking for?\" Fiona stepped down beside her and removed her poncho, as well.\n\n\"A rock. I want to mark this ladder. If we're in a hurry coming out of that warehouse, I want to be able to find the way out immediately.\"\n\n\"Good thinking.\" Fiona pulled a small cylinder out of one of the pockets on her Kevlar vest. She sprayed a quick yellow X on the wall beside the ladder. \"Phosphorescent. We'll be able to find it in the dark. Now let's move along, shall we?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 18",
                "text": "The tunnel ran straight for forty yards, then arrived at a four-way intersection. Annja went to the right, following the new passage toward the warehouse. Although she listened intently, all she heard was the trickle of water, the rapid smacking of rats frantically avoiding them and the echo of their own movements.\n\nThe flashlight beam picked up the occasional pair of red eyes over whiskered snouts as well as other flotsam and jetsam. She ignored all that and concentrated on Edmund, hoping fervently that he was still alive. And that they could bring him out that way.\n\nTwenty yards later, she found another ladder mounted on the wall. She switched off the flashlight and put it away, secured the shotgun behind her and glanced at Fiona.\n\nThe older woman held her MP5-SD3 in both hands while managing her own flashlight and gave her a quick nod. \"Keep your head down.\"\n\nAnnja climbed the ladder rungs. Her wet boots slid on the metal, but she forced her way up. She bumped her head on the manhole that covered the opening.\n\nLocking a leg and an arm in the ladder, she reached up with her other hand and pressed her palm against the manhole cover. One-handed, she lifted the heavy disc out of place and shifted it to the side. The manhole cover made only a slight grating sound as she let go.\n\nAbove her, the crescent-moon-shaped opening let in weak yellow electrical light. Men's voices sounded far away, not on top of her.\n\nCautiously, she reached up with both hands and gripped the manhole cover. Lifting it by the edge to move it quietly was difficult. She'd always been strong, but since the sword had come into her possession, she was stronger and faster, as if some new part of her had blossomed.\n\nShe set the cover aside, then gripped the sides of the tunnel mouth and pulled herself up. When she peered over the edge, she discovered she was in a small office bereft of furniture. The walls went only halfway up. The rest was window and venetian blinds in disarray.\n\nShe hauled herself up but remained in a crouch, then brought the shotgun around. Just as she turned around to help Fiona, the woman pulled herself up.\n\nFiona crossed the room in a crouch and took up a position on the other side of the open doorway. Together, they peered out into the warehouse.\n\nIn the center of the open space riddled with remnants of walls, Edmund Beswick sat tied in a chair. Jean-Baptiste Laframboise stood before him with a big pistol in one hand. Annja recognized the man from the crime photos.\n\nTwo other men stood in the room slightly behind Edward, both armed with assault rifles.\n\n\"Just three of them, then,\" Fiona whispered. \"Shouldn't be too hard. When you're ready.\"\n\n\"All right.\" Annja flipped the safety off the shotgun, held it in both hands before her and stayed low as she went through the door.\n\nThe gloom that filled the warehouse helped keep her in shadows. Laframboise had lights in the area where he held Edmund and plywood sheets covered the windows. She took advantage of the partial walls to hide her approach.\n\nTwenty feet away, at the edge of the pool of light where Edmund was, Annja stopped behind the low remnant of a wall. Fiona crept to a support pillar and readied her submachine gun. She looked at Annja, waiting.\n\nAnnja stared at the men around Edmund. From all accounts, Laframboise was a murderer and a thief. He'd left the bodies of victims and betrayed partners scattered in his wake. She had no doubt that the Frenchman fully intended to kill Edmund once he had everything from the professor that he thought he could get.\n\nBut she couldn't just kill someone in cold blood. The heat of battle was another thing. That felt right. But this...\n\nAnnja steadied herself and prepared to step out to confront the men, hoping she could dissuade them from taking action. Fiona stared at her as if she'd gone mad, then whirled around the pillar quickly and lifted the MP5 to her shoulder.\n\nAt the other end of the warehouse, the door suddenly exploded open, propelled by a van. Sheet metal screeched as it tore and the vehicle's motor howled inside the building. Men carrying weapons flung themselves from the van. Annja recognized the gang tattoos at once.\n\nGunfire erupted, but instead of coming from Laframboise's group or the Asian gang, it came from Fiona. With two quick bursts, she put down the armed guards around Edmund. Laframboise was on the other side of the professor, in the line of fire.\n\nThe Frenchman fired at the men ahead of him and squalled for reinforcements. He dove into hiding as bullets sliced through the air where he'd been standing.\n\nAnnja ran toward Edmund, slung the shotgun over her shoulder and dug out her Tinker knife. Kneeling beside him, she sliced the tape binding his hands and feet.\n\n\"Annja.\" Edmund looked nonplussed.\n\n\"Run.\" She shoved him forward, then had to catch him as his legs gave way beneath him. He'd been tied too long and didn't have control over his body. She hauled his arm across her shoulders and supported him as they ran toward the back of the warehouse.\n\nFiona hosed the van with the submachine gun. Bullets tore through the body and smashed holes in the windshield. Annja glimpsed at least two of the Asian gang members sprawled on the floor.\n\nBy that time Laframboise knew he was under attack on two separate fronts. He aimed his big pistol at Fiona and fired twice, but both rounds went wide of the target.\n\nWhen her weapon cycled dry, Fiona ducked back behind the pillar, dropped the magazine and inserted another one. She wheeled back around and started firing again, meeting a wave of Asian gang members who had chosen that moment to try to gain ground. Her bullets slapped one of them back.\n\nOther gang members closed on Laframboise's position. The Frenchman fought desperately, trading shots. Then he gained a brief respite when a group of his men poured into the building. The new arrivals took up positions and attacked the gang members, but they also fired back out the door they'd come in, obviously under attack from outside.\n\nWith Edmund's arm pulled across her shoulders, Annja kept running. He pounded along beside her and his rhythm came to him before they reached the back office area. She got him settled behind the wall.\n\n\"Does Laframboise have the lantern?\"\n\nHe stared at her. \"Yes.\"\n\nAnnja peered around the doorway as Fiona skidded into the office in a crouch. \"Where?\"\n\n\"You're not seriously thinking of going back there.\"\n\nAnnja was, though she didn't see how she could do it. But the first priority was to get everyone to safety.\n\n\"No.\" Even as she said it, Laframboise broke from cover and ran back toward the desk. He yelled orders into a phone as he sprinted and fired blindly at the gang members. He hunkered down beside the desk.\n\n\"We've got to go.\" Fiona radiated calm on the other side of the doorway from Annja.\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nBeside the door Laframboise's men had come through, the wall suddenly exploded as a heavy sedan smashed through it. The vehicle immediately drew fire from the gang members, but it was apparent that the sedan was armored and had bulletproof glass. Bullets ricocheted off the body and left only tiny spiderwebbed cracks behind instead of punching holes through the windshield.\n\nThe driver pulled the car between Laframboise and the gang members. Instantly, the Frenchman scooped up the box near the desk and clambered into the rear of the sedan.\n\n\"Laframboise has the lantern.\" Edmund peered through the glass above the half wall.\n\nAnnja felt a pang of frustration. She still hadn't even held the lantern.\n\nThe sedan reversed and sped, mostly, back through the hole it had made. Some of the gang members went after the fleeing car, but others raced toward the back office where they were taking cover.\n\nAnnja grabbed Edmund's arm and shoved him toward the manhole. \"Time for our disappearing act.\"\n\nEdmund reacted immediately and dropped down the opening.\n\nFiona recharged her weapon and glanced at Annja. \"You're next. I'll hold them.\"\n\nArguing with the woman hadn't proven successful, and there was no time under the circumstances. Annja rushed over to the opening as Fiona leaned around the doorway and opened fire. The staccato string of explosions blotted out her hearing as she went down the ladder.\n\nAt the bottom, Annja took out the Mini Maglite and started off. Edmund followed close behind. Conversation was impossible in the tunnel with all the gunfire echoes. She kept the flashlight moving, knowing their entrance could have been discovered and that someone could be in the tunnel with them. Rats ran for cover and she had to keep from blasting them with the shotgun.\n\nThe phosphorescent X glowed on the wall ahead of them. The opening stood out in the darkness.\n\nAnnja slung the shotgun and went up the ladder. Her attention was torn between what lay ahead of her and whether Fiona had made it into the tunnel with them. She didn't see the men waiting for her till one of them had her by her hair.\n\nHe yanked her head back and another man thrust a pistol into her throat. The second man grinned. \"Found your back door. Now you come up out of there or I'm going to shoot you.\"\n\nFor a moment, Annja held her position. She thought she could break away from the man holding her hair, and she believed she could knock the pistol aside. But Edmund was below her, already on the ladder, and that was going to be a problem.\n\nWorse, the two men weren't alone. Three others with submachine guns stood around the manhole.\n\n\"I won't tell you again.\" The man with the pistol was hard and his eyes were empty of compassion, almost feral.\n\nSlowly, Annja climbed up. As she emerged, the gang members stripped her of the shotgun and the pistol. Two of them grabbed her by the wrists and held her arms behind her back. They pulled her back from the hole and pushed her facedown on the ground.\n\nThe man with the pistol leaned out over the hole. \"Come up now or I'll shoot you where you stand.\"\n\nA moment later, Edmund crawled out of the hole. He was patted down, then pulled back and forced to the ground, as well.\n\n\"There's another one in the tunnel.\" The leader readied his pistol. \"These two were too close to the opening to be shooting back in the warehouse.\"\n\nFiona was going to be ambushed. If she fought, which Annja felt the woman might do, she was going to be killed. And if she surrendered, they were all going to be in the hands of the gang. Annja had no doubt about their eventual fate.\n\nThe men focused on the hole as someone sloshed through the water below.\n\nAnnja rolled to her left, jerking her right arm violently in an attempt to break free of the man holding her. He managed to hang on, but he was off balance. She swung her right leg up and swept his feet out from under him, knocking him backward.\n\nThe man on her left tried to aim his submachine gun, but he'd retained his hold on her left wrist, as well. Anna reached back with her right arm, caught the back of the man's shirt and yanked him over her body to trip him. He fell heavily and his grip on her wrist broke as he tried to keep his face from striking the pavement.\n\nStill in motion, Annja rolled to her feet, reached for the sword, and the blade nestled easily in her hands. Mercilessly, knowing their lives were measured in heartbeats now, she struck. The blade glittered as she swung and took off the head of the man on her right as he brought up his weapon.\n\nStepping toward the man on the left, Annja turned the blade and brought it down in an overhand strike that caught her opponent between his neck and shoulder. Almost cut in half, he dropped without a sound.\n\nThe man at the opening lifted his pistol and snarled with rage and fear. Annja ducked and followed her blade home as she took another step. The point crashed through the man's breastbone and skewered his head. He fell backward just as Fiona appeared in the opening.\n\nAnnja spun back toward the men she'd knocked down behind her. They were getting up, grabbing for their weapons. Before she could move, Fiona blasted them with the MP5.\n\nOn solid ground now, Fiona dumped her empty magazine and put a fresh one in. She glanced at Annja. \"Is that the sword Roux was looking for?\"\n\nNot knowing what else to say, Annja nodded. She let the sword disappear, then picked up the shotgun and pistol that had been taken from her.\n\n\"We have a lot to talk about, don't we?\" Fiona smiled grimly. \"So let's try to stay alive over the next few moments.\" She shifted her attention to Edmund, who was slowly getting up from the ground. \"Come along. We've a car waiting.\"\n\nThey ran through the alley as gunfire echoed all around them."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 19",
                "text": "The dock area in front of the warehouse had turned into a bloodbath as Laframboise's men battled the Asian gang members. Bodies lay strewn across the pavement. Klaxons rang out across the river and boat traffic had powered to the other bank.\n\nAnnja sprinted at Edmund's side. He was in good shape and had made a quick recovery. Fiona led them toward the Bristol Fighter, skirting along the warehouses so they wouldn't be immediately noticed.\n\nTheir luck didn't hold, though. Two of the gang members on motorcycles spotted them and gave chase. The high-pitched whine of the engines cut through the noise of the firefight like buzz saws.\n\n\"Fiona!\" Annja brought up her shotgun.\n\nAhead, Fiona swept around and threw a protective arm across Edmund, grasping his shirt and yanking him off balance. He fell and covered his head with his hands.\n\nAnnja aimed at the lead motorcyclist as he fired a machine pistol left-handed. Bullets stitched the warehouse wall near Annja and the ringing sounds of the rounds tearing through the sheet metal sounded like steel rain. She squeezed the trigger and rode out the recoil as the shotgun fed another shell into the chamber. The empty cartridge dropped as she sighted in again.\n\nThe initial double-ought burst caught the man in the chest and tore him from the motorcycle. The machine fell on its side and skidded across the ground while the man tumbled forward like a rag doll.\n\nAnnja squeezed the trigger again and caught the second man in the head. He jerked sideways, parting company with his ride.\n\nA third motorcyclist who'd joined the chase broke his approach and wheeled to his left. Unfortunately, that was directly in the path of Laframboise's escaping sedan. The big car hammered the motorcycle. The rider tore loose and bounced across the hood and the windshield before dropping in its wake.\n\nFor a moment, the sedan got caught up on the fallen motorcycle. Sparks flared from the machine as it ground to pieces beneath the bigger vehicle. The driver stopped, reversed and left the motorcycle debris on the pavement. He whipped around the wreck.\n\nFiona already had Edmund moving again. They were less than fifty feet from the sports car.\n\nAnnja fed more shells into the shotgun as she raced over to the nearest fallen motorcycle. She slung the shotgun and righted the motorcycle. Everything looked fine and the handlebars remained straight, in alignment with the front wheel. She threw a leg across, pulled in the clutch and pressed the start button. The engine caught immediately and she stepped the gearshift into First.\n\nOther gang members on motorcycles roared by in pursuit of the sedan. None paid any attention to Annja. She twisted the accelerator and raced over to Fiona.\n\n\"I'm going to follow Laframboise. See where he goes. The car only has two seats.\"\n\nFiona hesitated for just a moment, decided arguing was obviously not going to work and nodded. \"Be careful.\"\n\nAnnja rolled the throttle and shot off in pursuit. Four motorcyclists and a car trailed after the sedan. A gunner leaned out of the sedan, took aim at the car following and unleashed a spray of bullets that smashed into the vehicle's windshield. Annja was close enough to see the driver jerk with the impacts of the bullets.\n\nThe driver tried to maintain control but lost the battle, swerving to the left and cutting off two of the motorcycles without warning. One of the motorcycles went down under the car's wheels. The other got clipped by the front bumper and spun out of control. Still accelerating, the dead man's car hit the end of a dock and sailed out into the river.\n\nAnnja downshifted, swerved and powered out of a slide, narrowly missing the crushed motorcycle. She checked her mirrors and saw that Fiona was in hot pursuit.\n\nThe two gang members remaining on motorcycles hadn't given up. They dodged and weaved behind the sedan, making hard targets of themselves. They didn't try to return fire because they'd realized the car was armored and because it took all their skill to manage the rough road and dodge the gunner.\n\nThe sedan smashed through cargo loads and sent dockworkers scattering. One man barely had time to leap off his forklift before the sedan smashed into it. The collision ripped the sedan's fender away and mangled the steering. Annja didn't imagine that the passengers inside the car fared much better. Despite the damage, the sedan was slowed only for a moment and continued more or less on course.\n\nLess than a hundred yards ahead, the sedan slewed around in a ninety-degree turn that left it broadside in the middle of the road. The move caught one of the motorcyclists unaware and he smashed into it. Annja and the other gang member braked to a halt, then sped away as the gunner in the sedan opened fire again.\n\nThe sedan drove forward toward one of the docks. For a moment Annja thought it was out of control and was going to go over the side. Instead, the driver brought the vehicle to a skidding halt that left the right front tire hanging over the dock's edge. The passenger doors opened and Laframboise and his lackeys scrambled out toward the water.\n\nThe last gang member on motorcycle fired at them, then got picked off by one of the Frenchman's gunners. Annja remained behind a parked car and ducked as a swath of gunfire took out the windows. Safety glass rained down over her.\n\nWhen she stuck her head back up, Annja saw a speedboat racing away from the dock. She caught just a glimpse of Laframboise as he ducked belowdecks. In seconds, the speedboat zipped through the lazy river traffic and was gone.\n\nFiona braked the sports car in front of the car where Annja had taken cover. Peering through the window, Fiona nodded in the direction of the speedboat. \"That was Laframboise?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Ah, well, there's nothing to be done for it now.\"\n\n\"You don't have a boat handy?\" It was a joke, but Annja did halfway expect the woman to have one waiting somewhere.\n\n\"Disappointing as it may be, no, I don't. Nor helicopter, either. I do have a helicopter, just not at the ready.\" Fiona shot her a rueful look. \"I hadn't planned on this.\"\n\n\"Me, neither.\"\n\nThey could hear sirens coming closer with each passing second.\n\n\"Be a love and put your weapons in the back.\" The sports car's trunk flipped up. \"Wouldn't do any good to get caught with those. There would be far too many explanations for us to make at this juncture. The game is afoot, so to speak, and it wouldn't do to break stride.\"\n\nAnnja rode the motorcycle over to the car and dumped her weapons into the trunk. Edmund watched her in fascination.\n\n\"You know, Ms. Creed, I don't believe any of this was covered in the information you sent me.\" He looked slightly pale.\n\n\"No. I try not to get involved in things like this.\" Annja closed the trunk lid. \"But they seem to keep...involving me.\"\n\nIn the rearview mirror, Fiona was smiling knowingly.\n\nThere were going to be a lot of questions. Annja got back on the motorcycle and followed the sports car away from the docks as the arriving police tried in vain to contain the area.\n\nThey made their escape at a leisurely pace.\n\n\"I'm really not sure this is a good idea.\" Self-conscious, Annja walked beside Fiona Pioche into the hotel. Annja tried to remember how many nights she'd actually stayed there and couldn't. She remembered the first night, but thought maybe she'd only caught a nap there before heading out into the streets looking for the new Mr. Hyde.\n\n\"I know this isn't a good idea.\" Looking guilty and somewhat like a vagabond after all his rough handling, Edmund trailed the two women. \"After all that shooting on the docks, I should quite imagine most of the Metro police are looking for us.\"\n\n\"No one got a good look at us.\" Fiona nodded to the concierge and headed for the elevators.\n\n\"There are security cameras over there, you know.\"\n\n\"Well, we'll just have to see how good their systems are, won't we?\"\n\n\"You drive a rather distinguishable car.\"\n\nFiona pressed the elevator button. \"I believe at the time we would have been spotted, Annja and I were freeing you from kidnappers.\"\n\n\"True, but\u2014\"\n\nSmiling sweetly, Fiona turned to Edmund. \"But nothing, dear man. Relax and enjoy the adventure.\"\n\n\"Adventure?\"\n\n\"Yes. Events like this remind us why we're alive.\"\n\n\"After this morning, we're lucky to be alive.\"\n\n\"That's part of the package. So few people get to enjoy adrenaline like that anymore.\" Fiona faced the elevator doors as they opened. \"I know I've missed it.\"\n\nEdmund shot Annja a look of disbelief.\n\nAnnja smiled at him and stepped into the elevator after Fiona. \"I don't have to collect my gear. I can get internet access practically anywhere.\"\n\n\"True. But these are your tools we're after. I think a professional should have access to her tools. This thing\u2014whatever it is\u2014is going to require some serious effort. I think you'd be at your best working with tools you're comfortable with.\"\n\n\"Detective Chief Inspector Westcox is going to have a man stationed on my door.\"\n\n\"There was a policeman in the lobby. I'm sure he's already phoned the inspector.\"\n\n\"Was there?\" Annja hadn't seen the man.\n\n\"Yes. Callow fellow. Gray suit and a bad haircut. He was reading a fishing magazine. That's what gave him away. Well, I'd already sussed him out, of course, but the magazine confirmed it.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"It had an address label on it. The magazine wasn't one provided by the hotel, and it wasn't one bought in the shop, or in any nearby shop.\"\n\n\"He brought it from home.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\nStanding there beside the older woman, Annja felt foolish. \"I wouldn't even have thought of looking for something like that.\"\n\n\"But now you'll never forget it.\" Fiona reached over and took Annja's hand. \"Don't waste time chastising yourself. We all have our specialties. This one happens to fall within my bailiwick. I don't know as much about archaeology and antiquities as you do. And I definitely cannot pull a sword out of thin air even if my life depended on it.\"\n\nEdmund stood there and looked fondly back toward the front door.\n\nFiona held the door and waited for him. She lifted her eyebrows quizzically. \"Are you coming? If you don't, there's a good chance you'll never see Anton Dutilleaux's magic lantern again. Or learn why so many people seem to prize it.\"\n\nWith a piteous snarl of self-loathing, Edmund stepped into the elevator. He wrapped his arms around himself. \"I'm going to regret this.\"\n\nFiona smiled. \"Only if you live long enough.\"\n\nThe elevator doors closed with finality and they started to rise.\n\n\"Normally, I'm braver than this.\" Edmund pursed his lips. \"Then again, normally I don't have to face gun-toting criminals who tie me to chairs and hit me. Seriously, that's something that doesn't happen every day.\" He paused. \"If it did, I'm convinced I'd find another line of work.\"\n\n\"We'll see.\" Fiona took out her small pistol and checked it. Satisfied, she put it away. \"You might be surprised how quickly you become accustomed to such a lifestyle.\"\n\nThat was true. Occasionally, when she thought about her own life, Annja marveled, as well. But the action was addictive.\n\nEdmund shook his head. \"Absolutely brill.\"\n\nWhen the elevator stopped without fanfare at the correct floor, Annja stepped out first. After she turned the corner to the hallway leading down to her room, she saw the big man standing beside a chair in front of her door. He surely hadn't been standing long.\n\n\"Ms. Creed?\" The man faced her with his hands at his sides, his jacket unbuttoned, and the blue-and-yellow bulk of the X26 Taser nestled in a hip holster. He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"I'm Constable Stanbrook.\"\n\n\"Is there something I can do for you, Constable?\"\n\nThe smile stayed in place. \"Detective Chief Inspector Westcox would like a word with you.\"\n\n\"I'm not interested in talking to the inspector.\"\n\nThe constable's smile disappeared. \"I'm afraid the inspector has insisted.\"\n\nFiona stepped in beside Annja. \"On whose authority?\"\n\nStanbrook looked momentarily flummoxed. \"On his own authority, of course.\"\n\n\"Balderdash. What you're doing here is illegal.\"\n\n\"Back off before you get hurt, gran. I'll be deciding what's legal here and what's not.\"\n\nFiona kicked the constable in the shins.\n\nYelping, the man stepped away and bumped into the wall behind him. When he bounced off the wall, Fiona grabbed his jacket lapels in one hand, stuck out a foot and tripped him with an economy of motion. Stanbrook fell heavily to the carpeted floor. He reached for the Taser. Fiona was on him in a flash, controlling the man's arm as he came up with the weapon. She helped him fire the Taser and both dartlike electrodes lanced into his crotch. He cried out in pain, then shivered as the current hit him and he finally relaxed into unconsciousness.\n\nFiona stood and ran a hand through her platinum hair. \"Gran, my arse.\" She nodded at the door. \"Let's go in, shall we?\"\n\nStill stunned at how quickly events had escalated, Annja fished her room key card from her pocket and slotted it. She was surprised when the lights turned green and the locking mechanism worked. She opened the door and went inside."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 20",
                "text": "Laframboise sat in a small bar just off the Thames. On the television above the bartender's head, police boats rocked on the river current as they tried to contain the Isle of Dogs crime scene. Several uniformed officers stretched yellow warning tape around the area. Other constables put up sawhorses to block vehicle access.\n\nThe news reporter covering the story talked excitedly, but the conversation buzzing around the bar was too loud for Laframboise to make out what she was saying.\n\n\"Another drink, sir?\" A thin server with black skin and close-cropped blond hair and electric-blue highlights stopped beside his table.\n\n\"Please.\" Laframboise tapped his wineglass.\n\nThe waitress took it and scurried back to the bar.\n\nLaframboise swiveled his attention to Gilbert Campra, his majordomo. \"Those were Puyi-Jin's people?\"\n\nCampra was a large man, over six feet tall and steroid-enhanced. He shaved his head but grew a thick goatee that was artificially colored black. Silver hoop earrings glittered in his ears. He wore loose-fitting gym pants, a T-shirt and a lightweight jacket that covered the pistols he carried. Red-lensed wraparound sunglasses masked his eyes.\n\n\"Yes.\" Campra wore an earpiece that kept him in contact with the rest of the security team.\n\n\"How many are still on our tail?\"\n\n\"Three.\"\n\n\"That we've found.\"\n\nCampra nodded. His team was good at surveillance, but Puyi-Jin's people were good at not being surveilled.\n\nThe two women at the ambush had been a surprise.\n\nThe server brought back another glass of red wine. Laframboise paid her, tipped generously and swirled the glass by its stem. The wine had a good nose. He sipped. It was far from the best he'd ever had, still, it was good.\n\n\"Do we know who the woman was with Annja Creed?\"\n\nCampra shook his head. \"Not yet.\"\n\nIf the woman had shown up in Paris, Laframboise would have known who she was within minutes. \"Where are the rest of Puyi-Jin's men?\"\n\n\"Nearby.\" Campra frowned. \"They appear to be closing ranks.\" The big man had spent time in the military before turning mercenary. The other men who worked with Laframboise didn't hang out with Campra. To them, he was dangerous and unpredictable. Campra would rather kill someone than worry about them.\n\nLaframboise found that Campra's most endearing quality. Laframboise didn't believe in leaving witnesses alive behind him, either. He hated that Annja Creed had gotten away with Professor Edmund Beswick.\n\n\"They're closing ranks?\"\n\nCampra nodded again and sipped his water. He never touched alcohol. \"Evidently they're satisfied that they know where you're going.\"\n\nLaframboise fully intended to return to Paris. That was where he felt the safest, and that was where Anton Dutilleaux had lost the lantern\u2014along with his life.\n\n\"Then what do you think they're going to do?\"\n\nCampra shrugged. \"Kill you.\"\n\nHe grinned at that. People had tried to kill him before. He carried scars and two bullets from those encounters.\n\n\"Are you certain the professor didn't know anything more about your little party favor?\" Campra glanced at the shopping bag in the seat next to Laframboise. Inside, a specially constructed protective box held the magic lantern.\n\n\"He's not the kind to hide the truth when he's being physically punished. Everything he knew, he told us.\"\n\nCampra ran a hand through his goatee. \"Something you have to ask yourself.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Is the lantern worth going up against Puyi-Jin?\"\n\nLaframboise smiled at the other man. \"Are you afraid of the Chinaman?\"\n\nA grin twitched Campra's lips but failed to light his eyes. \"Afraid, no. Wary, yeah. The guy is dangerous.\"\n\n\"So are we.\"\n\nCampra nodded. \"I still can't help thinking you're making a very powerful enemy for no reason. Puyi-Jin hasn't been able to figure out the lantern, and that professor doesn't have a clue, maybe you should cut it loose.\"\n\nCampra's opinion was valued in his organization and he was offered the opportunity to propose courses of action. \"Do you think I could buy Puyi-Jin's forgiveness for betraying him with that act?\"\n\nThe red lenses remained focused on Laframboise. \"No.\" Campra sipped his water again. \"Not forgiveness, but he's losing money and men on this, too. Several of his people have been arrested, chasing Annja Creed. He's lost some good men.\"\n\n\"I don't want to give the lantern to him.\"\n\nCampra didn't say anything.\n\n\"I didn't get where I am by letting people push me around, my friend.\"\n\n\"I know that.\"\n\n\"And I'm curious.\" Laframboise upended his wineglass and drained the dregs. \"I hate being curious. Especially if there's money involved. The professor mentioned that Dutilleaux was around Shanghai when money was flowing. You and I both know that a smart man, one willing to take risks, can divert some of that free-flowing money into his own pockets.\" He tapped the shopping bag with his hand. \"I have a feeling about this\u2014a very strong feeling\u2014that there's something to the story of Anton Dutilleaux's lantern.\" He smiled. \"Annja Creed being involved is most interesting. Have you seen her show? Chasing History's Monsters?\"\n\n\"Not much of a TV watcher.\"\n\n\"Pity.\"\n\n\"You're a fan?\"\n\n\"Of Annja Creed?\" He shook his head. \"No. I am, however, a fan of Kristie Chatham, the cohost of the show. Loses her clothing in all manner of delightful ways during most episodes.\"\n\nCampra shook his head. \"You through with that wine?\"\n\n\"I am.\" He set the empty glass on the small table.\n\n\"Then we should be going. The car is here.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Laframboise picked up the shopping bag and followed Campra through the crowd.\n\nResearch he'd done into the lantern had included scouring old photographs of Dutilleaux standing in front of wild phantasms in the catacombs. Laframboise had gone down into the catacombs to the exact spot where the phantasmagorist had been stabbed to death.\n\nLaframboise liked to believe he was psychic. His mother had told fortunes when he'd been a boy. He remembered watching her spread the large tarot cards on a black felt cloth.\n\nFrom the moment he'd put his hands on the magic lantern Puyi-Jin had offered to pay him so handsomely for, he'd felt certain the device would change his life forever. His mother's gift was real enough and he'd inherited it. He was convinced of that.\n\nOutside on the docks, they headed for the rendezvous point. Despite the mad rush from the warehouse, everything else had gone according to plan.\n\nOut of the corner of his eye, he spotted the three Chinese men trailing him. The men were dressed in street clothes, but the loose shirts and light jackets easily concealed whatever weapons they carried.\n\nLaframboise felt alive. He didn't know where Puyi-Jin had come from or what the man had been forced to do to create his empire, but Laframboise had been killing for survival since he'd turned fourteen. He fisted the big pistol in his jacket pocket.\n\n\"Campra?\"\n\n\"I see them.\" The big man's voice was flat and hard. \"We don't have to take them on ourselves. We have men nearby.\"\n\n\"Worried?\"\n\nCampra snorted. \"Not about me.\"\n\n\"I want one of them left alive.\"\n\n\"I can't guarantee that.\"\n\nLaframboise turned right and took the next alley. \"Work on it.\"\n\nHe guessed that the three Chinese men would meet him on the other side. They gave themselves a moment and then wheeled and ran back out of the alley, hoping to double back around behind their stalkers.\n\nShoppers and tourists, already edgy from the police boats out on the river and the reports cycling through the media, hurried out of the way.\n\nThe three gangsters had no clue they'd been outfoxed. They'd spread out at the end of the alley Laframboise had initially taken, waiting.\n\nA few yards away, holding the shopping bag in one hand, Laframboise lifted the Colt .44 Magnum and squeezed the trigger. The heavy round cored through the head of the closest man. The detonation sounded like an artillery shell going off, so near the narrow confines of the alley.\n\nThe .44 Magnum bullet nearly decapitated the target. Already dead on his feet, the man stumbled onto the man in front of him. The other two men tried to turn and draw their weapons from under their jackets. One of them was blocked by the dead man, but the other took a step to the side.\n\nCampra's bullet snapped into his face and drove the man backward. He jerked and fought for his balance, then sank to one knee. Campra shot the man twice more in the chest, making certain of the kill.\n\nThe third man finally managed to get the corpse off him. Covered in the other man's blood, his young face tight with fear, he lifted his weapon.\n\n\"Alive, Gilbert.\" Laframboise held his weapon in a relaxed grip. He wore body armor and didn't think the man would get a shot off, anyway, but he was prepared to put a round into the man's chest if he had to.\n\nCampra didn't speak. His weapon barked twice.\n\nThe Chinese gangster shuddered at both impacts, and the pistol fell from his nerveless fingers. At different times, Campra had explained the shot to Laframboise, how the round could tear through the brachial nerve cluster in the shoulder and leave a wounded man unable to use his hands.\n\nThe shot was difficult, but Campra was a master.\n\nHe strode forward, keeping the wounded man covered. \"Get down.\" He waggled the pistol for emphasis. \"Down on your knees. Do it now.\"\n\nOff balance, the man did as he was told. He barely managed to stay upright. He couldn't raise his hands because his arms wouldn't obey him, but he held them out from his sides.\n\n\"Don't shoot.\" The young man blinked fearfully.\n\n\"You work for Puyi-Jin. Tell me a lie and I'll kill you.\"\n\nHe hesitated only a moment, then nodded. His eyes were glazed and otherworldly. Between the fear and the pain, he was barely hanging on to consciousness.\n\n\"What did Puyi-Jin send you to do?\"\n\nThe man clenched his teeth and swallowed hard. He was afraid. He wanted to run. All of that showed in his eyes. \"To kill you. To get the lantern.\"\n\nLaframboise smiled. \"All right. I want you to do something for me.\"\n\nHe didn't respond.\n\n\"If you're not going to do it, I'll kill you and leave you with your friends.\"\n\n\"It will be done.\"\n\n\"Give Puyi-Jin this message\u2014I'm not easy to kill. Tell him that and tell him to stay away from me. Otherwise, I'll come after him.\"\n\nHe nodded.\n\nLowering his weapon, Laframboise strode past the wounded man with Campra at his side, heading to the black luxury sedan idling down the street.\n\nThe driver got out and opened the back door. Laframboise holstered his weapon and slid in. Campra joined him a moment later.\n\nIn the space of a drawn breath, the chauffeur put the transmission into gear and eased into the morning traffic.\n\nCalmly, Laframboise shook the empties from his pistol and replaced them with fresh cartridges. \"Do you think Puyi-Jin will get the message?\"\n\n\"Yes. But he's not going to listen.\"\n\n\"You don't think so?\"\n\nCampra snorted. \"Would you?\"\n\nLaframboise grinned. \"No.\" He put the pistol away. \"Puyi-Jin's continued involvement will only make things interesting.\"\n\n\"Isn't that an old Chinese curse? May you live in interesting times?\"\n\n\"I suppose it is.\" Laframboise looked down to the magic lantern in the bag at his feet. There was something there, something just beneath the surface. He sensed the darkness inside the device and it called to him. \"A curse can be a powerful weapon against people who believe it. We'll make it our weapon.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 21",
                "text": "\"You travel light.\"\n\nZipping her duffel bag, Annja glanced up at Fiona Pioche. \"It's a gift. And a necessity in my line of work.\"\n\nFiona stood at the window with her arms crossed, looking out over the city. \"And which line of work would that be? The television personality? The archaeologist? Or whatever it is you are when you draw that sword?\"\n\n\"Sword?\" Sitting in the small straight-backed chair beside the equally small writing desk, Edmund perked up at once. \"There was a sword, wasn't there? And you had it. What happened to that sword?\" He didn't look happy at all.\n\nAnnja dropped the duffel on the floor. \"I don't have it anymore.\"\n\n\"I didn't see what you did with it.\"\n\nAnnja ignored him and went back to the bathroom to make sure she'd got everything. Satisfied everything was packed, she returned to the bedroom.\n\nSomeone knocked on the door. Fiona casually drew her pistol and nodded at Annja.\n\nAt the door, Annja stood to the side, almost inside the small closet. \"Who is it?\" She'd seen nasty things happen to people who made the mistake of looking through the peephole.\n\n\"Ms. Creed, it's Detective Chief Inspector Westcox. I'd like a word if I might.\" The man sounded irate.\n\nFiona put her pistol away.\n\nAnnja opened the door.\n\nWestcox stood in the doorway with his hat in one hand.\n\n\"I was just leaving.\"\n\n\"That might not be as easy as you like. There are several matters I need to discuss with you.\"\n\nFiona stepped forward. \"If I may be permitted, Annja.\"\n\nWestcox gritted his teeth. \"Ah, Ms. Pioche. I would say it's nice seeing you again. If that were true.\"\n\nFiona smiled thinly. \"Likewise, I'm sure.\" She waved a hand toward Annja's duffel and backpack. \"As you can see, Ms. Creed was on her way out. If you'd like, you could help carry.\"\n\n\"No, I don't think I would. Furthermore, I was just thinking of escorting Ms. Creed\u2014and you\u2014down to the station for questioning.\"\n\n\"We have rather pressing business to attend.\"\n\nWestcox worked his jaws and his color deepened.\n\n\"Unless your offer wasn't an invitation? In that case, I'd have to get my barrister involved. And as you know, Chief Inspector, Maurice doesn't care for the bullying tactics you sometimes employ.\" Fiona's smile was saccharine.\n\nDistaste compressed Westcox's lips. \"There's no need to get that man involved.\"\n\n\"So this is an invitation?\"\n\nWestcox hesitated, then nodded reluctantly. \"Of course.\"\n\n\"Then we decline.\" Fiona turned to Annja. \"Grab your things. The car should be out front by now.\"\n\nAnnja retreated long enough to pick up her duffel, backpack and leather coat.\n\n\"Chief Inspector.\" The constable who'd been guarding the door stood in back of Westcox with a hand held protectively over his groin. His voice had risen a full octave. His eyes looked watery and his face was red. \"You can't just let that woman go. Not after...not after what she did.\"\n\nWestcox glared at Fiona. \"My constable says you assaulted him.\"\n\n\"With his own Taser. And he's a head taller than I am.\" Fiona shook her head sorrowfully. \"Do you really want something like this to end up in the papers and on television, Chief Inspector?\"\n\nThe constable tried to edge forward.\n\nWestcox held the man back with an arm. \"Walk away, Constable.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"I said, walk away. Do it now.\"\n\nCursing, the constable turned and walked down the hallway.\n\nWestcox shifted his focus back to Fiona. \"You're going to involve yourself in this, Ms. Pioche?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I am already involved.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"At the behest of an old friend, Chief Inspector. And you know how I treasure my friendships.\"\n\n\"I also know that the moral nature of your friends is often questionable.\"\n\n\"Merely part of what makes them interesting.\"\n\nWestcox glanced at Annja. \"What has made this woman so interesting?\"\n\nAnnja objected to being casually dismissed, but she allowed Fiona to handle the situation.\n\n\"After you get to know her, Ms. Creed is quite endearing.\"\n\n\"Endearing or not, the two of you are in a mess.\" The chief inspector reached back over his shoulder. A serious young woman in uniform stepped into view in the open doorway and handed him a file. Westcox opened it and took photographs out. \"I just got these from a security camera on the Isle of Dogs where an apparent skirmish was fought between known criminals\u2014and yourselves.\" He handed them the pictures.\n\nAnnja studied the images with a sinking feeling. They were of Fiona, Edmund and her fleeing the scene.\n\nFiona took one of them and pulled a pair of reading glasses from her jacket. She put them on and studied the photograph.\n\n\"Tell me what you were doing there,\" the chief inspector said.\n\n\"I don't think these images are high quality enough to prove that the people in these pictures are us.\"\n\n\"That car of yours is sufficiently distinct to mark you. Your ego is going to drive the nail in your coffin.\"\n\nFiona handed the photograph back dismissively. \"If you'd like to take your chances before a judge, Chief Inspector, then, please, by all means. I keep Maurice on year-round retainer. It would be good to see him work for some of that.\"\n\nWestcox returned the photographs to the folder and handed the file back to his young subordinate. \"Tell me what you were doing there, Ms. Pioche.\"\n\n\"You haven't proven I was there.\"\n\nEdmund cleared his throat nervously and spoke up. \"Actually, they were there to rescue me. I'd been kidnapped, you see.\"\n\nWestcox rounded on Edmund like a cat that had just swallowed the canary. \"And who are you?\"\n\n\"Professor Edmund Beswick.\" He brushed ineffectually at his ruined and bloody clothing. His face was swollen and bruised and his hair was in disarray.\n\n\"Pleasure to meet you, Professor.\" Westcox stood a little taller. \"Ah, it appears I have a witness that can put you at that scene, Ms. Pioche.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Edmund said frantically. \"Did you not hear me? I said I was kidnapped.\"\n\n\"I'll be glad to take you down to the station where you can fill out a report.\" Westcox reached out for Edmund.\n\n\"No. I'm no longer kidnapped.\"\n\nFiona looked amused. \"If you choose to go with the inspector, Professor Beswick, I think you might as well consider yourself kidnapped again. And the process will be about as regrettable.\"\n\nWestcox snorted.\n\nEdmund looked confused. \"What I'm trying to tell you is that Ms. Pioche and Ms. Creed had a reason to be there.\"\n\n\"They could have contacted the police, Professor Beswick. That's what we're here for.\"\n\nFiona yawned. \"Police take forever and a day getting paperwork together.\"\n\n\"But those men had guns. Really big guns.\" Edmund still seemed to be impressed by that.\n\nWestcox scowled. \"We can get guns when we need them. Now come along.\"\n\nEdmund stepped back. \"On second thought, I wasn't kidnapped at all. And I was never there.\"\n\nAnger boiled behind Westcox's features. \"If I have to, I'll take you into custody.\"\n\n\"For what?\" Fiona moved into position to confront Westcox. \"There's no law that says a man has to report his kidnapping, is there? And wouldn't that make a fine headline?\"\n\nWestcox looked apoplectic. With an effort, he peered past Fiona to Edmund. \"You're making a mistake. Ms. Pioche is a loose cannon.\" Westcox flung a forefinger in Annja's direction. \"And I'm working on getting this one deported.\"\n\nFiona glanced at Annja. \"Sounds as though you might need a barrister. I know a good one.\"\n\nAnnja checked her own anger with difficulty. Nothing that had happened to her had been her fault. She was just experiencing an incredibly bad run of luck. \"If it goes that far, sure. I'm also convinced that the media company I work for wouldn't like the idea of getting pushed around, either.\" She wasn't certain of that, but Doug Morrell and the production staff had interceded on Kristie Chatham's behalf a number of times.\n\nWestcox fixed Fiona with his stare. \"You cannot just circumvent the law.\"\n\nFiona stared up at him. \"Until Ms. Creed releases this room, it's still hers and she has a right to expect privacy.\"\n\nFor a moment, Annja didn't know which way the situation would go. Then Westcox stepped back from the doorway.\n\nFiona took the lead out of the room. Annja followed and Edmund fell into step behind her.\n\n\"Be careful, Professor.\" Westcox's voice was chipped ice. \"I get the distinct feeling that you're a lamb among lionesses.\"\n\n\"Flatterer,\" Fiona muttered without turning around.\n\nAnnja and Edmund followed Fiona to a long limousine waiting outside the hotel. The chauffeur opened the rear door for them. Two other men, both dressed in dark suits, stood around the luxury car.\n\n\"I thought it would be better if we improved security.\" Fiona slid across the seat and patted the one next to her.\n\nOne of the security men relieved Annja of her backpack and duffel bag. Before he spirited them off to the trunk compartment, Annja slipped her notebook computer out of the backpack.\n\nEdmund sat on the seat across from them. Annja indicated the notebook computer. \"Do you mind? I've been out of touch.\"\n\n\"Of course not. We need information.\"\n\nAnnja booted it up.\n\nFiona took out a small notepad and pen. \"Now, Professor Beswick, it seems we have time for a little chat.\"\n\nEdmund nodded. \"Definitely.\" He grimaced. \"Sorry about that back in the hotel. I was trying to help.\"\n\n\"Of course you were.\" Fiona held her pen poised over her pad. \"You said a man named Laframboise kidnapped you.\"\n\nAnnja lost touch with their conversation as she immersed herself in the thread she'd created on alt.history. Anton Dutilleaux's magic lantern had sparked more interest than she'd anticipated. She started reading and taking notes as the limousine wound through the London streets. She was hunting now, and she knew on some level that Fiona Pioche was doing the same thing."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 22",
                "text": "In addition to the offices she kept on the bottom floor of the building, Fiona Pioche also reserved the top floor for herself, which she'd remodeled into spacious living quarters. She told Annja that she also maintained an estate in the country, if they had to leave the city, and that it was a proper fort.\n\n\"Good afternoon, Ms. Pioche.\" Oliver Wemyss held open the door to the foyer of the top suite of rooms. He took jackets and weapons without hesitation, storing them in a secure closet off to one side of the foyer. \"Everything went well, I trust.\"\n\n\"Well enough, Ollie. We're still alive and several of our opponents are not.\"\n\n\"Cutting down the odds already. Sounds as though you've had a productive day.\" Ollie grinned at Annja and lifted an eyebrow. \"Does Ms. Pioche surprise?\"\n\n\"Every minute.\"\n\n\"One of her more endearing and consistent qualities, rest assured.\" Ollie glanced at Edmund. \"And you're the erstwhile Professor Beswick.\" He offered his hand. \"Oliver Wemyss at your service. I work with Ms. Pioche. Please be at ease.\"\n\n\"Is that possible around her?\"\n\n\"On most days, no. But occasionally it does happen. This way, please.\" Ollie swept an arm toward the open room on the other side of the foyer.\n\nAnnja kept her backpack and duffel with her.\n\nThe immense living room was filled with plush cream and tan furniture\u2014easy chairs, two love seats and a huge modern couch. An enormous Persian rug anchored them all. The walls were a rich gold, with deep brown curtains over arched lattice windows. Pink and white lilies filled a gold vase on the large coffee table.\n\nAnnja just stood there a moment, taking it in. \"Wow.\"\n\nOllie beamed at her, then shifted his attention to Fiona. \"Ms. Pioche, I've taken the liberty of assigning rooms.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Ollie.\" Fiona went to the wet bar in the corner of the large room and began preparing a drink.\n\nOllie stood before them like a tour guide and Annja slightly resented his energy. \"I thought the three of you would like to freshen up first. I'll have sandwiches and fresh fruit laid out, or you can have something more substantial if you wish.\"\n\n\"Sandwiches will be fine. I think we'll want to talk and finger food will be excellent.\" Fiona lifted her glass to Annja and Edmund, but both politely declined.\n\nEdmund glanced down at his clothing self-consciously. \"I'm not exactly dressed for lunch.\"\n\n\"I took the liberty of ordering a suit and other clothing for you,\" Ollie said. \"You'll find them in your room.\"\n\n\"I have other clothes at my flat.\"\n\n\"I thought it best you stayed away from your flat until we got the lay of the land. Safer all around that way, I think.\"\n\n\"I suppose. But how did you know what size to get?\"\n\nOllie grinned. \"I'm a very good judge of a man's clothing, Professor. If I'm wrong, I'll have it attended to.\"\n\nFiona smiled and sipped her drink. \"He won't be wrong.\"\n\n\"Ms. Creed, I took the same liberties for you.\"\n\nAnnja lifted a speculative eyebrow. \"Good at guessing women's sizes, as well?\"\n\n\"Very dangerous territory, that. I followed Ms. Pioche's direction.\" Ollie shook his head. \"Americans are also rather too casual for my expertise, I'm afraid. When it comes to style, I don't speak American.\"\n\nFiona waved a dismissive hand. \"Cut Ollie and he'd bleed Brit aristocrat.\"\n\nOllie grinned. \"And be smug about it the whole time.\"\n\nThe bedroom proved to be as incredible as the living room, with a view of the Thames from the king-size bed.\n\nEvidently when Fiona Pioche decided to put a guest up, she did so in style.\n\nBoxes of clothing in the correct size sat on the bench at the foot of the bed. Annja went through them in short order, picking out a pair of olive khakis and a fitted black T-shirt, before heading to the bathroom.\n\nShe started the bathwater, added one of several floral bath gels and stripped.\n\nNo one appreciated a bath the way an archaeologist did. They often spent days and sometimes weeks working on location without the benefit of anything other than makeshift showers at best.\n\nShe retrieved her notebook computer and power cord, crawled into the spacious tub and logged on to the internet using the pass code Fiona Pioche had provided.\n\nDozens of emails had come in since she'd last logged on. Several of those were from Doug, and a glance at her phone confirmed that he'd even started calling her. She put the phone away and filed the emails in the folder she'd set up for Doug. Chances were good he'd call again before she got back to him.\n\nShe dug into the responses to her posts about Dutilleaux's lantern. Several of them were without basis and she dismissed those. The ones that looked promising she copied and filed into a folder.\n\nAs she soaked, she reviewed the more promising posts from alt.archaeology.esoterica.\n\n\u2002Hey, Lantern Girl,\n\n\u2002Your mysterious lantern looks cool. I'm an American college student in France and have been doing a doctoral thesis on popular illusionists, primarily \u00c9tienne Robertson (I'm sure you know who he was, but if not, hit me up for the 411). I came across some flyers from Anton Dutilleaux's shows as part of my research.\n\n\u2002Dutilleaux was amazing for the time. A lot of people were convinced he was doing actual black magic. Getting killed like that kind of sealed the deal.\n\n\u2002Anyway, I also found out that Dutilleaux's lantern was on Adolph Hitler's short list of things to acquire during World War II.\n\n\u2002Is that news to you?\n\nThe message was from eyesontheprize@doctororbust.com. And the information was news, although Annja wasn't convinced how important it was.\n\nShe knew about Hitler's efforts to track down supernatural artifacts, including the Spear of Destiny that had been used by a Roman soldier to kill Jesus Christ. Originally, Hitler had intended to gather items that belonged to Aryan history, but the stories had grown during the war, and after the war the stories had exploded into cryptohistory, providing so many tales that finding out the truth was almost impossible.\n\nEyes on the Prize had also appended photocopied pages of resource material. Annja flicked through both pages. Basically the mention was more or less a footnote, a tale that had spread from a Paris museum worker who'd cooperated with the Nazis.\n\nThe information wasn't what Annja was looking for, but it let her know that more people than Edmund Beswick, the mysterious French gangster and the Chinese crime lord had been interested in Dutilleaux's lantern.\n\nShe flipped through the next two entries. One of them insisted that Dutilleaux's magic lantern actually held a trapped demon who had eventually gotten out and killed him. The other presented an unsupported case that the lantern was mystical in origin and would give three wishes to its owner.\n\nThe three wishes smacked too much of genies, or djinn, which were from the Arabic culture. Neither Dutilleaux nor the lantern had been there as far as she knew.\n\nHowever, melodybaby@toocooltobetrue.net had another tidbit.\n\n\u2002Hola, Lantern Girl,\n\n\u2002Interesting subject you have there. I've been writing an article on illusionists\u2014prompted by my love of the very sexy Hugh Jackman in The Prestige. But I digress. Sigh\n\n\u2002I did a lot of research on Anton Dutilleaux but eventually dropped him\u2014they cut my word limit! Don't you hate when that happens? Anyway, I found a diary entry in a journal written by one of \u00c9tienne Robertson's understudies that had been put online. It said Dutilleaux got the lantern in Shanghai, China.\n\n\u2002From what I've been able to piece together, Dutilleaux was an assistant banker for the French businesses there in Shanghai. But he also worked for the Shanghai bankers as a go-between for emerging international business interests. There was some kind of kafuffle there and Dutilleaux left the city\u2014and China!\u2014in a hurry.\n\n\u2002Hope this helps. I'm sending my research as an attachment.\n\nAnnja sent a quick thank-you to all those who'd written in to the thread. She opened her mail client and sorted through her email. Doug Morrell had sent another dozen emails since she'd filed his other ones.\n\nShe sighed, shut down the notebook computer and put it on the floor beside the tub. Then she held her breath and slid beneath the warm water for a thorough soak."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 23",
                "text": "The phone rang just after Annja had finished drying her hair and putting on makeup. Caller ID told her it was Doug Morrell. He'd called four times while she'd been in the bath. Knowing she couldn't really put the call off any longer, she answered.\n\n\"You're alive!\" Doug sounded more irritated than relieved.\n\n\"I am.\" Annja checked her hair in the antique full-length mirror in one corner of the room. She was having a surprisingly good hair day in spite of everything she'd been through.\n\n\"The bit about you being alive? That was sarcasm.\"\n\n\"Noted.\"\n\n\"See, I knew you were alive.\"\n\n\"Why the sarcasm?\"\n\n\"Because I've been calling for hours.\"\n\n\"I've been busy.\"\n\n\"Working on the Mr. Hyde story?\"\n\n\"Not exactly.\"\n\nDoug groaned. His chair springs squeaked and Annja pictured him leaning back in his chair in his stuffed office. He kept a lot of vampire paraphernalia there, including an old original Revell Dracula model kit Annja had found on eBay.\n\nAnnja sat on the bed and pulled her computer over to her. \"How did you find out I was alive?\"\n\n\"Legal contacted me. They told me you're going to be listed as an undesirable in London. If you are, we don't get the Mr. Hyde story.\"\n\n\"That may not be a story, anyway.\"\n\n\"Somebody's killing those women.\"\n\nAnnja scanned her notes on Anton Dutilleaux and focused on the material concerning his job in the financial sector while in Shanghai. \"I think that whoever the actual murderer is will probably turn out to be a regular serial killer\u2014and I'm using regular loosely\u2014not some college student who's discovered Dr. Jekyll's secret formula.\"\n\n\"You think that. You don't know it. We want the truth for our show. Our viewers deserve to know what happened to Dr. Jekyll's freaky little formula.\"\n\n\"Doug, listen to me a minute.\"\n\nHe sighed noisily and as unpleasantly as he could.\n\n\"Dr. Jekyll wasn't real. Neither was Mr. Hyde. They are fictional creations Robert Louis Stevenson made up during a bout of fever and sickness.\" She'd already had this conversation.\n\n\"Were you there? Stevenson got his inspiration from somewhere.\"\n\n\"He had a fever. He was sick. Chronically.\"\n\n\"So that means he knew a lot of doctors. Doctors. He lived in a lot of places. See? I was listening.\"\n\nHe had been. Annja was shocked.\n\n\"Since he met lots of doctors, Stevenson also could very well have met one like Dr. Jekyll. One who invented a formula that changed people into monsters. That's all I'm saying. Our viewers don't need much. Just a nudge in the direction of conspiracy.\"\n\nFor a moment, Annja was taken aback. Then she remembered how stubborn Doug could be once he had an idea in his head. \"Look, I'm working on something else.\"\n\n\"Annnnnnnnjjjjjjaaaaa, please. You're killing me here. I've been covering for you. Tell me we're close to the Mr. Hyde story.\"\n\n\"Not even.\"\n\nShe heard a thumping noise over the phone.\n\n\"Doug.\"\n\nThe thumping stopped. \"What?\"\n\n\"How do you expect me to tell you when the London Metro police are going to catch this guy?\"\n\n\"They don't have to catch him. It's better if they don't. More mysterious. Continuing danger. That sort of thing. All I need is a story that hints that Mr. Hyde is still out there roaming around. An interview would be cool, too.\"\n\n\"More people will be killed.\"\n\n\"Then the police should stop him. And we need to be there when they do. Or at least to film them trying to catch Mr. Hyde.\"\n\nAnnja took a breath, then repeated, \"I'm working on another thing.\"\n\nDoug's response was immediate. \"No.\"\n\n\"I was nearly killed today.\"\n\n\"I understand. You're not easy to work with.\"\n\nAnnja almost argued. She knew for certain she was a lot easier to work with than Kristie Chatham was. \"And if I keep poking around in the Mr. Hyde investigation, Inspector Westcox is going to put me on a plane.\"\n\n\"I'll get the lawyer working to fight that.\"\n\n\"Getting back to the me nearly getting killed part.\"\n\n\"Does it have anything to do with Mr. Hyde?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Annnnnjjj\u2014\"\n\n\"It has to do with a magic lantern that's said to be haunted and can give its owner three wishes.\" It was all she had to work with.\n\nDoug stopped moaning. A beat passed and she could almost hear him thinking. \"Wait. Did you just say a magic lantern?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And three wishes?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" He'd registered that but he'd glossed over the fact that she'd nearly gotten killed. Annja marveled at Doug's attention span.\n\n\"Cool. Three wishes is awesome. I don't think we've done a three-wishes story in a couple years.\" Doug's connection became fuzzy for a moment, then she heard the rapid-fire tapping of his keyboard. \"Nope. We haven't since that well in Italy that Kristie did the story on.\"\n\n\"The one that was supposed to have the mummy in it?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"There was no mummy in that well.\"\n\n\"No three wishes, either, but the viewers loved the episode... Three wishes. I'm sure I can get marketing to give this a special look.\"\n\n\"And the lantern is said to have already caused several deaths.\" That was also true. Annja knew for certain that several men had died earlier.\n\n\"Sweet.\" Doug lowered his voice. \"Look. Right now we've got a little fat in the schedule. We've got some time\u2014maybe a few days\u2014before we have to wrap the next episode. I can let you do this if you bring in the lantern story and the Mr. Hyde story.\"\n\nAnnja let out a calming breath. She didn't know if she'd have either story. \"All right.\"\n\n\"Have you made a wish yet?\"\n\n\"No. I don't have the lantern.\"\n\n\"Not feeling the love right now.\"\n\n\"But I know where the lantern is. I don't know where Mr. Hyde is.\"\n\nDoug was silent for a moment. \"Three wishes, you said?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"If you get the lantern, if there are three wishes, you get one, I get one, then we flip for the third. Deal?\"\n\nA few minutes later after hanging up on Doug, Annja discovered the large library where Fiona and Edmund sat at a table with a buffet spread out before them. They hadn't hesitated about digging in. Edmund's new suit fit him well and he looked refreshed except for the bruises and small bandages on his cheek and chin.\n\n\"Sorry.\" Annja took a seat across from Edmund. Fiona sat at the head. \"Didn't realize I took so long.\"\n\n\"You didn't take long.\" Fiona placed ham and cheese and vegetables on a flatbread wrap. \"Edmund and I just got here a few minutes ago ourselves.\"\n\nAnnja picked up a plate and selected sliced meat, cheese, vegetables and a boiled egg, with a selection of fresh berries and cut melon on the side.\n\nShe glanced at Edmund. \"Did you know that Dutilleaux's lantern was on Hitler's list of arcane items?\"\n\nEdmund nodded. \"I did.\"\n\n\"You didn't think that was significant?\"\n\n\"I saw no reason to give that particular myth credence. There was nothing to support it. Unless you've discovered something I couldn't... Did you find something?\"\n\n\"Nothing to substantiate it, no. But I did hear from researchers in the field about some of the lantern's myths.\"\n\n\"Did they mention the legend about how Dutilleaux was using the lantern to enter the spirit world and steal gold and gems to finance himself in the real world?\"\n\n\"No.\" Annja dug into her meal, surprised at how hungry she was.\n\n\"You'll get to that one eventually. Laframboise seemed to be particularly enchanted with the idea of the lantern's mystical properties.\"\n\n\"I suppose.\" Annja bit into a boiled egg, chewed and swallowed. \"Did you know that Dutilleaux worked for the Shanghai banking companies?\"\n\nEdmund frowned and winced almost immediately as the expression caused him obvious pain. The bruises on his face and mouth had started to show up a little more. Some of the swelling had gone down, though. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Dutilleaux was an aide to the French businessmen trading with China through Shanghai.\"\n\nFiona sipped her drink and set it aside. \"I thought the First Opium War and the Treaty of Nanking were what opened the port cities to outsider trading. That was well after Dutilleaux died in the catacombs in Paris.\"\n\nAnnja raised an eyebrow. \"History buff?\"\n\nFiona smiled and reached for a peach. \"Traveling for years with Roux.\"\n\nAnnja wiped a crumb from the corner of her mouth with her napkin. \"The Opium Wars gave the Chinese no choice about opening the ports. Once that happened, the British, French and Americans were there to stay. Those were the big three. From the information I received, Dutilleaux was a banker first for the French, then worked for the Chinese.\"\n\n\"Why is that important?\" Edmund pushed his plate aside. \"And who is Roux?\"\n\nShe ignored his second question. \"Why did he take employment? Or why did the Chinese offer it?\"\n\n\"Either.\"\n\nFiona held up a forefinger. \"The Chinese would have wanted an insider. Someone they could trust who could explain to them the Western mind-set.\" She took another bite out of her peach. \"They would have sought out someone they believed they could control.\"\n\nAnnja nodded. \"They made a mistake with Dutilleaux. He worked there for three years, then was discovered to be pilfering gold and gems from the bank where he worked. According to the papers I was sent, Dutilleaux got out of Shanghai just ahead of the Qianlong Emperor's royal executioners.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 24",
                "text": "\"Anton Dutilleaux was just a common thief?\" Edmund looked shocked and dismayed, and Annja couldn't tell which feeling was stronger. \"That can't be.\"\n\n\"I'd hardly call a man who could steal a small fortune from under a Chinese emperor's nose a common thief.\" Fiona shook her head. \"A walking dead man, perhaps. But never common. He had to have been very skilled at what he was doing, with nerves of steel.\"\n\nAnnja silently agreed. She watched Edmund and felt sorry for him because he'd obviously built Dutilleaux up into so much more. During her early years working in archaeology, heroes and legends had sometimes fallen like wheat before a thresher.\n\n\"The missing money could explain why Dutilleaux's murderer was Asian.\" Annja maneuvered a chunk of honeydew melon into her mouth.\n\n\"No one ever proved the nationality of Dutilleaux's killer. That person was never caught. Dutilleaux had rivals as well as jealous husbands of his lovers.\" Edmund returned his attention to the buffet, but his heart wasn't in it and he merely picked at the food.\n\n\"No matter what the truth is, the cold, hard fact of the matter is that we may never know.\" As always, Fiona looked unflappable. \"Sometimes the truth does hide in history.\" She paused for a moment. \"Ollie was able to put together quite the package on the man who kidnapped Professor Beswick. If we choose to pursue the lantern, we're up against an accomplished foe.\"\n\nThe doors to the library opened and Ollie strode in. \"Did I just hear my name mentioned?\" He carried a small computer tablet tucked under one arm.\n\n\"I thought I was going to have to call for you.\"\n\n\"Never.\" Ollie flashed a winning smile. He paused near the table and tapped on the computer screen.\n\nA wide-screen television monitor dropped from the ceiling to cover a section of the bookshelves. Almost immediately, the image of the man Annja had noticed with Edmund in the warehouse filled the screen.\n\n\"As you know, this is Jean-Baptiste Laframboise, not one of the biggest criminals in Paris, but certainly one of the most lethal,\" Ollie said in a calm, clear voice. \"He's never risen to the top of anyone's list, but that's more by design than ability. Laframboise has deliberately stayed away from high-profile crimes that caught the national eye, much less international attention.\"\n\nAnnja worked to build another sandwich. \"He's been taking small jobs?\"\n\n\"On the contrary, he's taken very lucrative jobs. But he's been careful to pick very quiet ones, as well. Things that ran under the radar when you consider the varied nature of criminal enterprise. He's done quite well for himself.\" Ollie tapped the tablet again.\n\nOn the screen, pictures rotated quickly, showing a penthouse, a country home, a yacht and Laframboise in either a Jaguar or a Lotus. There were also several pictures of him at big social gatherings.\n\n\"He's become something of a gentleman crook.\" Ollie smiled. \"He's even ingratiated himself with the Parisian government by undertaking to buy back some paintings taken from the Louvre a few years ago.\"\n\nFiona stared at the screen. \"Did Laframboise steal the paintings first?\"\n\n\"No, surprisingly.\"\n\n\"Then who selected him as the go-between?\"\n\n\"The thieves.\"\n\n\"Interesting. That means the thieves knew Laframboise had a connection he could go to. Are we aware who that is?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid not, Ms. Pioche. At least, not yet.\"\n\nEdmund frowned. \"Laframboise's contact within the Parisian government, especially an entity like the Louvre, could explain how he knows so much about Anton Dutilleaux.\"\n\nAnnja regarded him. \"Laframboise doesn't exactly strike me as the scholarly type. Is there anything in his background to suggest interests like that?\"\n\nOllie sniffed delicately. \"The man never even finished a secondary education. By all accounts, though, he's a reasonably intelligent man. I did discover one oddity that might be interesting to you. It appears that Laframboise's mother was a fortune-teller.\"\n\n\"What kind of fortune-teller?\" Fiona looked surprised.\n\n\"Cards, Ms. Pioche. Tarot, to be exact, though the reports I've obtained from police records indicate that she was taken into custody a number of times with a regular deck of cards.\"\n\n\"Which is nothing more than an abbreviated tarot deck.\"\n\n\"She claimed she was a Gypsy and possessed otherworldly skills.\"\n\n\"Why was she arrested?\"\n\n\"The bunco squad pulled her in. She was convicted of numerous cons. She even served jail time. No more than a few months at a stretch.\"\n\n\"Where's the mother now?\"\n\n\"Dead, I'm afraid. Nine years ago from cancer.\"\n\n\"Was Jean-Baptiste Laframboise ever indicted in his mother's crimes?\"\n\n\"No, but by then he was well on his way down the criminal career path. Robbery. Burglary.\"\n\n\"He had no ties to the metaphysical?\"\n\n\"None that I've found.\"\n\nFiona leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. \"Laframboise didn't find Dutilleaux's lantern on his own. He wouldn't have had an interest in something like that.\"\n\nAnnja picked up on the other woman's line of thinking. \"I think we're safe in assuming Puyi-Jin brought the lantern to Laframboise's attention.\"\n\nEdmund nodded and his eyes looked distant. \"That's what Laframboise said. That Puyi-Jin had told him about the lantern. Had, in fact, hired Laframboise to get the lantern from me.\"\n\n\"Maybe Laframboise picked up on the lantern because of the supernatural story connected to it.\"\n\nFiona nodded. \"Laframboise would have had to have a personal reason for betraying an employer\u2014especially a dangerous employer\u2014if there wasn't an immediate payoff of some kind. And I think we're all in agreement that we don't see one. The lantern, unless it is worth more somehow than its presence would suggest, is worthless for the simple materials involved in its construction. There has to be something more.\"\n\nStunned, Edmund looked at both women. \"Are you saying you believe there's something magical about that lantern?\"\n\nFiona smiled. \"Do you mean, do I believe in magic, Professor Beswick?\"\n\nEdmund looked uncomfortable as he nodded.\n\n\"Of course I believe in magic.\" Fiona glanced at Annja. \"I've seen it.\"\n\nAnnja felt the sword blaze hot for just a moment.\n\n\"But why should we go to such extreme lengths to get this lantern back?\" Edmund shook his head. \"People have died in pursuit of this lantern. You've already\u2014\" He stopped himself short.\n\nFiona tapped her glass with an elegant forefinger. \"I've already killed people. Is that what you were going to say?\"\n\nEdmund squirmed in embarrassment. \"I had no right to say anything about that.\"\n\n\"There is a distinction in how Laframboise and his Chinese counterpart are going about their business,\" Fiona said, her voice cool and soft.\n\nIf Fiona hadn't liked Edmund, Annja was sure she wouldn't be controlling herself so well. Roux and Garin tended toward a more simplistic view of life, of predator and prey, of kill or be killed. Annja had seen a lot of that life herself, but she hadn't quite bought into it. Killing, though sometimes necessary, was still something to be avoided.\n\nWhen possible.\n\n\"Those men are killing to obtain the lantern, and to obtain you. I killed to save you.\"\n\n\"I know. And I'm grateful. Truly I am.\" Edmund knotted a fist uncertainly. \"But at this point, I'm safe. We could step away from this thing.\"\n\nAnnja felt a sick twist in her stomach that told her she wasn't ready to let go of the hunt.\n\nFiona smiled. \"Hasn't all of this made you curious, Professor?\" She held up her forefinger and thumb a fraction of an inch apart. \"Just a little?\"\n\nEdmund hesitated, then nodded. \"Of course. I don't believe any of the stories that I've heard circulating about that lantern\u2014\"\n\n\"But you know there must be something there. Otherwise, Laframboise and his ex-employer wouldn't be working so hard to get it.\"\n\n\"They could be wrong.\"\n\nFiona shrugged, then glanced at Annja. \"Maybe they are. But I feel certain Annja will attempt to find the lantern. Or am I wrong?\"\n\n\"No.\" Annja shook her head. \"You're not wrong.\"\n\nFiona shifted her gaze back to Edmund. \"Furthermore, even should you decide to stay out of this, there is every possibility Laframboise or someone else looking for the lantern will think you know more than you're telling.\"\n\nEdmund paled a little, and Annja didn't blame him. She'd thought the very same thing, but she hadn't wanted to mention it. Of course, not mentioning it would have been irresponsible.\n\nFiona continued in a deadpan voice. \"Personally, I believe it would be better if we had the matter settled. Wouldn't you agree?\"\n\n\"There's no guarantee you'll do anything except get yourself killed. And Annja.\"\n\nFiona pursed her lips. \"We're going, Professor. All I need to know is whether I should make reservations for you, as well.\"\n\nEdmund vacillated for only a moment. Then he took a deep breath and nodded. \"But I want to stop short of getting killed for my curiosity.\"\n\n\"We're going to work on that.\"\n\nDespite the spacious trunk of the limousine parked in front of Fiona's building, Annja kept her backpack with her. Ollie stood by with his computer tablet and chatted on his Bluetooth headset while overseeing the loading of Fiona's bags by the chauffeur. A bodyguard in a black suit and wraparound sunglasses stood watch nearby.\n\nWith her backpack slung over one shoulder, Annja joined Fiona. The woman looked elegant in casual wear and sunglasses.\n\n\"I suppose you noticed the car across the street?\" Annja shifted the backpack to a more comfortable spot.\n\nFiona pulled on a leather glove. \"I did indeed.\"\n\n\"Are they police?\"\n\n\"Yes. Some of Inspector Westcox's men. Ollie has already verified their identities.\"\n\nA small knot unraveled in Annja's stomach. She hadn't noticed the car until only a few moments ago.\n\nOllie smiled. \"I was of a mind to have them move by filing a harassment action with our solicitors, but Ms. Pioche told me not to.\"\n\n\"There's no reason.\" Fiona tugged her second glove on. \"We've already tweaked the inspector's nose enough. Besides, those men will only follow us as far as the airport. There's really not much for them to see.\"\n\nThat was true and Annja tried to take solace in it. Being followed made her feel vulnerable.\n\n\"Did you find out anything about the Chinese gang that's involved with the lantern?\"\n\n\"You mean Puyi-Jin?\" Ollie reached into his pocket and pulled out a small thumb drive. \"You can review the files at your leisure.\"\n\nFiona took it from him. \"Good work.\"\n\nOllie's ebullient nature gave way to worry for just a moment as he gazed at his employer. \"The gang members we've identified have led us to one man\u2014Puyi-Jin. This man, Ms. Pioche, is much worse than anything we've seen from Laframboise. He has a rather long reach. I'm surprised he needed Laframboise.\" Ollie grimaced and nodded at the thumb drive. \"You might want to skip over some of the police files. They're in color and they're very gruesome. Puyi-Jin is not a nice man.\"\n\nFiona patted Ollie's cheek. \"I am not a nice woman when properly motivated.\"\n\n\"I do know that, Ms. Pioche.\"\n\n\"Do we have someone in Paris who can outfit us?\"\n\n\"Yes. Georges will meet you at the airport with a car. He promised me that you would have everything you needed.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Ollie.\"\n\n\"My pleasure, Ms. Pioche.\" Ollie grabbed the limousine door before the chauffeur could. \"As always.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 25",
                "text": "Even though Fiona had her own personal jet, there was still a fair amount of red tape to go through to get airborne. Despite that, less than an hour later, they were wheels up in the small Embraer Phenom 100 microjet.\n\nAnnja had never flown in a jet so small. The four main seats sat in two-by-two formation and faced one another. Toward the rear of the jet, there were two more seats and a small toilet.\n\nAfter stowing her gear, Annja strapped herself in. Edmund sat across from her. He looked tired and rumpled. The bruises on his face were even darker. He kept fidgeting after he'd strapped himself in, unable to relax.\n\nFiona handed him a glass of soda water and a pill. \"Take this. It's an analgesic. It should help with the pain.\"\n\nObediently, Edmund tossed the pill back and drained the glass.\n\nAnnja pulled her computer out, then attached it to the outlet in the wall. In addition to the power, the jet also maintained a satellite connection.\n\nShe checked the alt.history sites again, looking for updates. Not finding any, she moved on to emails. There were three invitations from universities to speak, galleys for two articles she'd written for magazines and queries from her editor concerning her latest book. Business as usual.\n\nBeside her, Fiona spoke quickly on her cell. Judging from the snippets of conversation Annja was privy to, Fiona kept her hand in several investigations at one time. After a few moments, she finished the calls and tucked the phone back into her jacket pocket.\n\nAnnja glanced at her. \"You stay busy.\"\n\n\"I try.\" Fiona was contemplative for a moment. \"After the time I spent with Roux, a mundane existence seems impossible. I kept telling myself I'd probably slow down at some point.\"\n\n\"But you haven't?\"\n\n\"No. Roux used to always say there would be time enough to rest when you were in the grave.\"\n\n\"This from a man who seems determined to avoid that particular destination.\" Annja glanced over at Edmund, but amazingly, the pill seemed to have knocked him out in record time.\n\nFiona laughed. \"True.\" Her expression sobered. \"Despite all his years, Roux is vulnerable. He can be killed.\"\n\nA chill crept over Annja as she recalled how Roux had looked in the hospital bed in China.\n\n\"Yet even facing death, he can be fearless. Not truly heroic, though, because he faces death for his own reasons, not necessarily for the greater good.\"\n\n\"I've also seen him be cautious.\"\n\nFiona regarded her. \"What kind of relationship do you have with Roux?\"\n\nAnnja thought for a moment, then answered, \"Complicated?\"\n\n\"I can believe that.\" Fiona took a breath as the jet taxied down the runway.\n\nShe stared out the window, but Annja knew that the woman didn't see a thing. \"For a few days I was afraid the mysterious Garin person had finally succeeded in killing him. I kept watch over the newspapers and news channels. There was nothing.\"\n\n\"Until he called about me.\"\n\nFiona looked back at Annja. \"Yes.\" Tears brimmed in her eyes, but she blinked them back. \"Surely between us we can find another topic. After all, we're potentially flying into the jaws of death.\"\n\nThe jet had reached cruising altitude after a steep climb and settled into a level course. Edmund was snoring softly in his seat. She looked at Fiona. \"That wasn't an analgesic, was it?\"\n\nFiona settled back in her seat. \"Tell me about that sword.\"\n\nAn hour later, Annja stood in line waiting for the French customs agent to clear her through Orly Airport. Air traffic was lighter at Orly than Charles de Gaulle. But the customs agents were no less demanding. She'd been separated from the other two by a few people and the conversations going on around her were in a half-dozen languages. Behind her, two women with Texas accents were talking loudly.\n\nAnnja took out her cell and punched in Roux's number.\n\nThe phone rang three times and she was sure it was about to go to voice mail. She didn't know if she hoped it would or if she wanted Roux to pick up. She liked Fiona a lot and hearing what her sometime-mentor had done to the woman was exasperating. Roux's behavior wasn't without precedent, though. Annja knew that neither Roux nor Garin invested too heavily in the feelings of others. They put their own welfare first.\n\n\"Must you keep interrupting me? I was playing cards.\"\n\n\"If you were at the table right now, you wouldn't have answered.\" Roux cared about her, though, or he wouldn't have taken her call.\n\nRoux harrumphed. \"For all you know, I just threw in a winning hand to answer this infernal device.\"\n\n\"Did you?\"\n\n\"No, but that could have happened. Don't tell me you called just to ask what I was doing.\"\n\n\"I called to tell you you were an asshat,\" she snapped.\n\nRoux didn't reply right away. \"I don't think I'm familiar with the term.\"\n\n\"It means you wear your ass for a hat.\"\n\nRoux was silent for another moment. \"I suppose that isn't a sartorial comment.\"\n\n\"No.\" Annja moved forward, now only a dozen people from the customs agent. \"It means you have your head up your ass.\"\n\n\"Since we haven't been in contact for hours, I assume you're basing this conclusion on something other than what I might have done.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm definitely basing this on something you've done.\"\n\n\"Did Fiona Pioche not work out? I must tell you, Annja, that would surprise me. She's quite capable. Of course, she is older now, no longer the young woman I knew.\"\n\nOkay, that ageist comment brought the anger back full force. \"No, Fiona is great. Terrific, perhaps. She's tougher than any of the nuns that raised me in the orphanage, and she's entertaining and witty. Not only that, she helped me rescue Edmund.\"\n\n\"That's the professor you'd lost.\"\n\n\"Not exactly mine to lose, and I wasn't responsible for him when he went missing.\"\n\n\"But Fiona helped you get him back nonetheless.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Then you should be happy.\"\n\n\"Why did you leave Fiona?\"\n\nThe silence over the phone stretched out.\n\n\"Roux.\"\n\nNo response.\n\n\"Roux?\" For a moment Annja thought he'd hung up on her.\n\n\"That is not a topic open for discussion.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Annja shifted the phone to her other hand as the line moved forward.\n\n\"Quite frankly because it's no business of yours.\"\n\n\"It's Fiona's business.\"\n\n\"Then she should ask.\"\n\nAnnja took a breath. \"She's not going to ask.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\n\"She's not going to ask because you hurt her.\"\n\n\"That was...regrettable.\"\n\n\"Regrettable? Regrettable is when you send a birthday card and it doesn't get there on time. Regrettable is when you burn the eggs for breakfast and you don't have any more. Leaving a woman without a word is more than regrettable. It's cowardly and selfish.\"\n\nThe phone clicked in Annja's ear. She stared at it. Roux had hung up on her. She couldn't believe it. Then again, she couldn't believe she'd had that conversation with him in the first place. She didn't like people prying into her business, either.\n\n\"He hung up on you, didn't he?\" The Texan woman behind Annja spoke up. She patted Annja on the shoulder. \"I could have told you he was going to. Men don't like confrontation. They know when they've been bad, and they don't like anybody rubbing their noses in it.\"\n\nAnnja put the phone away. She didn't really know what else she could say to Roux. Worse, she knew it wasn't her place to say anything.\n\n\"A pretty little thing like you?\" The woman continued patting Annja. \"Why, you don't have anything to worry about. If I was you, I'd move right on to the next one.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\" Annja gave the woman a smile and hoped the line would move faster.\n\n\"Men, most men, anyway, are just dogs, honey. Just dogs.\" The woman's companion nodded sagely. \"They don't know the first thing about love. And you can't teach them no matter how hard you try. Why, let me tell you what happened to my friend Ethyl here.\"\n\nAnnja hoped the line moved a lot faster.\n\n\"MS. PIOCHE!\" A SMALL dapper man in a maroon sweater and khaki pants stood waving near the doorway leading out to the pickup area. He looked like a grandfather picking up a favorite grandchild.\n\n\"Georges!\" Fiona changed directions and cut through the crowd to reach him.\n\nAnnja tried to keep up, but it was difficult. The crowd was thick and relentless, and she found herself momentarily carried along in its tide. Before she could turn back, a young Asian woman stepped in beside her. In the next instant, Annja felt the prick of a very sharp blade pressed into her side.\n\nThe Asian woman was in her thirties, compact, five and a half feet tall. She gripped Annja's arm above the elbow. A martial-arts hold.\n\n\"Remain calm, Ms. Creed,\" the other woman said in flawless English. \"Do that and you will live.\"\n\nAnnja breathed in and out, thinking fast. There was no room to work in the crowd, and nowhere to run if things got out of hand. She kept walking forward, with the woman's hand on her arm, going with the flow of traffic.\n\n\"Are you with Puyi-Jin?\" Annja glanced back at Fiona, who was looking at her in concern.\n\n\"Do not talk. Walk where I take you.\"\n\n\"Annja.\" Edmund was beside Fiona, staring at Annja in confusion. \"Annja?\"\n\nReluctantly, without a choice, Annja walked out through the door. As soon as she stepped outside the air-conditioned building, the foul odor of car exhaust and diesel smoke hit her, burning her nasal passages and tightening her lungs. Brakes squealed and horns honked as taxis jockeyed for position at the curb. Voices in a dozen different languages surrounded them. Twilight was already falling and the lights around the airfield shone brightly.\n\nThe woman redirected Annja to a black luxury sedan to her left. A uniformed airport worker stood engaged in a heated debate with the driver.\n\n\"Get this vehicle out of here, sir. I will not tell you again. You cannot pick up private travelers in this lane. You must go out and around.\" The airport worker glanced up and saw the woman approaching with Annja in tow. \"Do you know this man?\"\n\nThe woman answered without breaking stride. \"I do.\"\n\n\"He can't park here. It's against the rules.\"\n\n\"I will explain that to him.\"\n\nThe airport worker shook his head wearily and held up his walkie-talkie. \"You're lucky I haven't called a tow truck.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" The woman guided Annja to the vehicle's rear door and opened it. \"Get in.\"\n\nAnnja hesitated, but the woman pressed the keen blade into her side. Without a word, she climbed in, then she shot across the seat and tried to open the other door.\n\nThe handle lifted, but the lock remained engaged.\n\nWheeling around in the seat, Annja looked back as the woman closed the other door. Then Annja noticed the thick security acrylic that separated her from the front seat. She tried the release on the other door.\n\nThe woman smiled at her from the other side of the window. Then she opened the front passenger door. Moving easily, the woman took her seat as the driver pulled out into traffic amid screaming horns and a torrent of offensive language."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 26",
                "text": "The driver maneuvered smoothly out of the airport. From her other visits to the city, Annja knew they were traveling the A6. The Autoroute de Soleil\u2014the Sun's Motorway\u2014was a nod to King Louis XIV, the Sun King. She'd never known if the highway's name was actually derived from an old trade route from Paris to the south of France and the French Riviera or if someone had just given the thoroughfare that as an honor.\n\nEvidently their destination was Paris because the driver turned north.\n\nNeither the woman nor the driver paid particular attention to Annja. They kept their eyes on the slowly darkening highway. The woman spoke on the phone, but the acrylic partition was soundproofed, as well.\n\nAnnja took her sat-phone from her backpack, powered it on and went to her contact list. She glanced at the names only for a moment, then decided to call the Parisian police. They would be able to track her GPS signal.\n\nShe opened up the maps app and waited to enter Paris Police, knowing it would give her the phone number. Instead, the phone remained blank. A quick glance at the bars showed that she was receiving no signal. Something inside the car was preventing the sat-link.\n\nFrustrated and a little panicked, Annja returned the phone to her backpack, then leaned back in the seat so that her feet shoved forward. Thrusting violently, she lay on her back and drove her feet into the acrylic partition. The thud of impact echoed in the spacious backseat.\n\nIn the front seat, the driver glanced at the rearview mirror and the woman turned around to gaze into the backseat. Annja rammed her boots against the acrylic again.\n\nThe woman flicked a switch on a panel on the back of the front seat. Her voice came over a concealed speaker. \"Stop that.\"\n\n\"Come back here and make me.\" Annja drove her feet against the acrylic panel again. Truthfully, she didn't feel the barrier giving way or loosening. It felt like she might as well have been trying to kick a hole through a steel plate.\n\nTemporarily abandoning her efforts against the partition, Annja swung around and set herself to drive a boot against the passenger's-side window. Bailing out of a car doing sixty or seventy miles an hour wasn't something she wanted to do, but she had to have options. If the glass would break, the car eventually had to slow or stop. She'd seize whatever opportunity came along then.\n\nBut hammering the side window didn't help much, either. The acrylic there bore up just as well.\n\n\"You can't escape.\" The woman's voice was devoid of emotion.\n\nAnnja ignored her and turned her attention to the rear windshield. A quick examination assured her that it, too, was thick acrylic. Then she eyed the seat, wondering if there was a release that would let her into the trunk space.\n\nA moment later, she gave up looking for it. She reached for the sword and it was there in her hand. Thankfully there was enough room for it to materialize in the back of the car.\n\nOn the other side of the glass, the woman's eyes grew huge. She spoke hurriedly to the driver, who glanced over his shoulder.\n\nAnnja drove the sword through the backseat cushions easily. Many cars now had safety releases in the trunk to keep people from getting locked up there. Of course, she'd again be forced to wait for the car to slow or stop before continuing her escape.\n\nFabric and stuffing came away in pieces as she bared the seat's steel frame. Disappointingly, the framework was too tight to allow her into the trunk. She released the sword and it vanished.\n\nIn the darkness filling the back of the car, Annja couldn't see clearly but she thought she'd revealed a thin backing that sealed the backseat off from the trunk. When she pushed against it, the backing moved easily. The steel supports across the backseat prevented her from crawling through. She seized one of them in both hands, set herself, one foot against the back of the seat, and pulled.\n\nNothing moved.\n\nShe tried again to no avail.\n\nJust as she was thinking she might be better served using the sword as leverage against the support, Annja spotted a large gray sedan racing along on the highway shoulder. Her Asian captor and the driver hadn't noticed the vehicle rapidly gaining on them because their attention was on Annja.\n\nIn just a few seconds, the gray sedan pulled onto the highway and cut off a car trailing the vehicle that held Annja. At the same time, two other vehicles converged on the trailing vehicle. Windows rolled down on both those cars and muzzle flashes punctured the gathering darkness.\n\nWary of ricochets, Annja ducked down. The back window went untested, though. The driver hit the accelerator and the big car shot forward, only to slow again a moment later as traffic continued to block its progress.\n\nTraffic quickly backed off. Drivers recognized gunfire and wanted no part of the battle. Cars, buses and shuttles gave ground to the large sedan holding Annja captive and the other cars in pursuit.\n\nA large muzzle poked through one of the large gray sedan's windows and belched fire a moment later. In that instant, the wheel and axle assembly sheared away from the pursuit vehicle on the left and caused the car to swerve hard to the right.\n\nThe gray sedan met the other vehicle in full side-to-side contact. The smaller car, already out of control, rebounded from the larger vehicle and shot into the median. A deep scar snaked behind the car as it left the highway. Upon reaching the uneven ground, the vehicle flipped and rolled till it came to a rest on its side. The flaming wheel well blazed in the night.\n\nIn the front seat of her captors' car, the Asian woman pounded the dashboard and spoke frantically. Annja still couldn't hear her. In fact, she just realized she wasn't able to hear any of the gunfire or collisions. The soundproofing was excellent.\n\nA moment later, the muzzle of the rocket launcher\u2014and Annja knew that was what the weapon had to be\u2014shoved through a window on the opposite side of the gray sedan. The smaller car tried to accelerate and get around in front of it.\n\nThe brake lights of the gray sedan gleamed red as the wily driver slowed to let the other car pass. As soon as it did, Fiona Pioche inched out the passenger window just enough to take aim with her rocket launcher.\n\nDespite her trust in the woman, Annja sank down just a little in case the rocket missed its intended target or skated off a curved surface. The missile sped true, though, and caught the back of the second pursuit vehicle. Instantly, the car's rear section shredded and flames wreathed it. Lifted by the concussion, the car went airborne and spun in a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn that left it facing the oncoming sedan.\n\nThe gray sedan's driver accelerated and pulled hard to the right, going wide of the stricken car as it crashed down on the highway. Debris scattered across the pavement, but the traffic had already pulled to a stop several yards back. All of the drivers had recognized that they were in danger.\n\nIn the passenger seat, the Asian woman rolled down the window and shoved her arm through. A large-capacity pistol in her hand jumped and spat bullets. Annja couldn't tell if her captor was missing her intended target or if the gray sedan was armored. The sedan had a lot more power than the car Annja was in. The driver closed the intervening distance quickly, then switched lanes and came up on the driver's side.\n\nFrustrated and probably out of ammunition, the Asian woman dropped back into the seat and pulled her safety belt back in place. Concern tightened her features as she watched the gray sedan pull up alongside their vehicle. She yelled at the driver, who yelled back at her.\n\nSwerving, the driver pulled the car into the sedan, but the other vehicle was larger and heavier, and all he managed to do was confirm his opponent's prowess. His own car shuddered and swerved, barely remaining under control.\n\nThrough the window, Annja stared at Fiona Pioche. The woman's hair blew back from her face and her black-lensed sunglasses looked implacable and unyielding. She no longer held the rocket launcher, which Annja was happy to see, but had pistols in both fists. Looking at her, Annja couldn't help but think how well Fiona must have fit with Roux.\n\nAt her age now, Fiona would fit even better with Roux. And that made Annja wonder even more why Roux had left her.\n\nThe dapper Georges, Annja could see, was piloting the gray sedan. He dropped back a couple feet, then pulled hard on the wheel. Guessing what was coming, Annja grabbed the nearest safety harness and held tight.\n\nThe sedan's front bumper slammed into the car's rear hard enough to break the traction the rear wheels had on the pavement. Hammered by the heavier vehicle, the car drifted sideways. The driver tried to recover control, but before he had the chance, Georges swerved and hit the car again.\n\nThis time the car tore completely free of the highway and went into a drift. The sedan muscled forward and hit the skidding car broadside this time, driving it in front of it. In the backseat, Annja bounced and ricocheted as the car left the highway and went onto the shoulder.\n\nDirt and grass flew in a maelstrom around the car as it went off-road. Something under the vehicle, a tire or a strut or the frame, buckled and dug into the ground. Caught for just a moment, the car almost stopped, then it was struck again. Driven forward once more, the car slid sideways, then went up on one side and rolled over onto its side, then onto its top and over onto the other side.\n\nAnnja bounced around the car's interior. The floorboard and the roof weren't covered in anything soft. The impacts hurt, but she kept her head and focused on escape.\n\nThe car warped as it rolled. The back passenger's-side door warped out of its frame. Standing on the left door, Annja reached up and shoved on the right one. For a moment, the door held, refusing to budge, then it gave way with a loud screech. She reached back and caught the straps of her backpack.\n\nMovement on the other side of the acrylic partition, which was no longer in its housing and now had gaps around it, caught Annja's attention just as she shoved the broken door open farther. The Asian woman was struggling to shove her pistol into position to fire. The driver was immobile behind the steering wheel, held there by the deployed air bag.\n\nGrabbing the sides of the door frame, Annja heaved herself up and out as the Asian woman started firing. Bullets bounced off the glass and the seat's reinforced undercarriage. Off balance and desperate, Annja threw herself from the car in an inelegant sprawl. She tried to hit the ground prepared to run, but the soft earth gave way beneath her boots and she went down to one knee.\n\nThe driver's-side door opened and the Asian woman popped up with her pistol in her fist.\n\nKnowing she wouldn't be able to run without being gunned down, Annja released her hold on the backpack, took a step toward the car, another step on the driveshaft to propel herself upward again and launched a flying snap-kick. Her foot caught the woman in the face and knocked her backward. The pistol fell from her hands and tumbled to the ground. Unconscious, the woman dropped back inside the car.\n\nAnnja landed on her feet, listed badly to one side and quickly righted herself. She sprinted for her backpack, then raced up the small incline toward the highway.\n\nThe sedan had stopped on the shoulder. The cars Fiona had taken out were a football field away, and the traffic ahead of the accident had mostly kept going. Only a few drivers had pulled over to see if they could help or to gawk. Motorists on the opposite side of the highway were all gawking.\n\nFiona, Georges and Edmund stood outside the sedan. Evidently they'd been about to come to Annja's rescue.\n\nEdmund looked enormously relieved. \"You're alive.\"\n\n\"Of course she's alive.\" Fiona calmly lowered her pistols and smiled at Annja. \"She's made of stern stuff.\"\n\nGeorges sighed theatrically. \"Maybe you could give a smidgen of credit to my driving, eh? I am very good at what I do, Ms. Pioche.\"\n\n\"Yes, you are, dear man.\" Fiona looked down the highway.\n\nIn the distance, three men raced toward them and flashes lit up their hands. A moment later dirt clods lifted from the nearby ground and sparks leaped from the sedan's top. They heard the harsh pistol cracks shortly after.\n\n\"Maybe you could postpone the mutual admiration fest till after we've made our escape.\" Edmund held the rear door open for Annja.\n\nAnnja slid inside, quickly followed by Edmund, who slammed the door shut. Part of the backseat lay forward, revealing the armament hidden there.\n\nFiona passed the rocket launcher back to Edmund. \"Be a dear and put that away. I don't think we'll be needing it any further.\"\n\nGingerly, Edmund took the weapon and shoved it into the recess.\n\nMore bullets thudded against the back of the sedan, but they didn't penetrate. Edmund ducked at the sounds, though. He glanced at Annja. \"I know the glass is bulletproof, but I can't help it.\"\n\n\"It's not something you get used to easily.\" Annja had taken cover, as well.\n\n\"I have no wish to ever get used to it.\"\n\nGeorges pulled the sedan back onto the highway and roared into the night that now shrouded Paris."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 27",
                "text": "Forty minutes later, Georges pulled to a stop in front of a small electronics store on rue Marx Dormoy in the 18th arrondissement in Paris just down from a streetlamp. The neighborhood was also known as Montmartre and was equally famous and infamous in history.\n\nGeorges parked the car and opened the door. \"Come, come. We must step lively now.\"\n\nFiona got out at once and stood on the sidewalk, her sunglasses pushed up onto her head. She watched the lighted street as a parade of vehicles flowed through.\n\nA lanky African-American youth in a soccer shirt and maroon hoodie stepped out of the shadows. \"Georges.\"\n\nGeorges's face lit with a smile. \"Ah, Hasan, it is good to see you. You are on time tonight.\"\n\n\"I try, mon ami.\" The young man spoke in a lilting accent that Annja placed as West African.\n\n\"It is good.\" Georges tossed the car keys into the air.\n\nHasan caught the keys with a quick flicker of movement and never broke stride as he walked toward the car. \"What do you wish done with the vehicle?\"\n\n\"Take it to Gardiah.\"\n\n\"And what should I tell him?\" Hasan opened the sedan's door and glanced at the scars left by the bullets. He got in.\n\n\"That it needs a new face and a new name, okay?\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\n\"There are things in the back I will need. You know the address?\"\n\n\"I do. I will have them there in a few hours. When I am certain I am not followed.\" Hasan glanced over his shoulder and pulled out into traffic.\n\nGeorges turned to Fiona. \"The car has to disappear as we do, true?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"As you have heard, your things will arrive shortly. If not, I will replace them.\"\n\n\"You are as capable as ever, my friend.\"\n\nGeorges waved down a cab. \"I have suitable quarters for you a short distance away. Hasan will meet us there with your things. Taking a few cabs along the way will ensure we are hard to follow.\"\n\nThe cab pulled to the curb and Georges opened the back door for Fiona.\n\nFour cab rides later, all of them sandwiched between walks of a few blocks\u2014and sometimes split up into two groups of two and a mix of one and three to keep the numbers off in case the police were looking for four\u2014they arrived at the studio apartments Georges had leased for their stay. Although they'd taken different cabs, none of them within sight of the other, they'd remained within the 18th arrondissement.\n\n\"The apartment will not be up to hotel standards, I'm afraid.\" The lower floor housed a shoe repair shop and a dress shop. Both businesses were currently closed and had steel curtains pulled down over the doors and windows.\n\n\"I'm more interested in privacy than in the accommodations.\" Fiona studied the street.\n\nEdmund walked beside Annja. The air was cool enough that she felt a chill. Traffic noises and shouts of passersby and residents rang around them. Neon lights shone dimly from a bar on the corner and a small Chinese restaurant across the street. American rock and roll competed with Japanese pop and some Delta blues. Paris had always been an eclectic city. That was one of the things Annja loved about it.\n\nThe neighborhood was one of the rougher districts in the city. The street was paved, not cobbled, and some of the surrounding buildings had been made over, but everything remained old. It wasn't too hard for Annja to close her eyes and imagine the city as it had been two hundred years ago.\n\nThe 18th arrondissement had been the eye of the storm of political unrest in the city since the mid-1800s. The Paris Commune, with its focus on the rising power of the working class, had taken root here.\n\nEdmund matched his steps with Annja's. \"You've been to Paris before?\"\n\n\"A few times.\" Annja had found the sword not far from where they now were, and she'd bearded Roux in his home outside Paris. Since then she'd visited Roux here on a few occasions, and come on her own, as well.\n\n\"Then you know this isn't a very good neighborhood.\"\n\n\"I think we'll be safe enough with Georges.\"\n\nA frown knitted Edmund's brows.\n\nCrime had favored the 18th arrondissement since the influx of workers had settled here to work at the coal mines and the factories that sprang up with the Industrial Revolution.\n\n\"What I'm trying to say,\" Edmund continued, \"is that Laframboise may have spies everywhere, and he most assuredly has them in this place.\"\n\n\"We knew we were taking a chance in coming to Paris.\" Annja glanced at the traffic but saw no one giving them any special attention. \"Fiona trusts Georges, and he risked his life to get me back. I think we're in good hands.\"\n\nEdmund nodded but he wasn't happy.\n\nThe apartment didn't have much in the way of flash, but it held all the creature comforts they would need. Like a proud real estate agent, Georges conducted a brief tour of the rented rooms.\n\nThe apartment had two small bedrooms and a common bath, but Georges assured Edmund that the couch pulled out into a comfortable bed. There was also cable television and internet. A sprig of flowers sat on the dining table just off the small kitchen.\n\n\"Are you hungry?\" Georges stood beside a pantry and waved, like a game show host presenting a prize. When he opened the door, shelves laden with canned and boxed items stood in neat rows. \"The refrigerator is well stocked, also. Meat. Fresh vegetables. And there is a Russian bakery only two blocks away that makes wonderful breads.\" He closed the pantry door. \"It will suffice, yes?\"\n\nFiona crossed to Georges and kissed him on the cheek. \"This is perfectly lovely. More than I had expected.\"\n\n\"Good, good.\" Georges rubbed his hands together. \"But we should see to your armory needs.\"\n\n\"Please.\"\n\nOn the way out of the kitchen, Annja picked up a green apple from the fruit bowl on the counter. As she followed she bit into the apple, relishing the tart, sweet taste. Edmund still didn't look happy.\n\nGeorges apologized as he led the way to the back bedroom. \"If this had been one of the usual safe houses I've used, I would have had a much better hiding place for these things. And more built-in security measures.\"\n\nFiona nodded in understanding. \"But if this had been one of your usual haunts, someone might know about it and might take an interest in what we're doing here. I'd rather we remain off-grid as much as possible.\"\n\nConcern filled Georges's face as he came to a stop at the back wall. \"Laframboise is a most dangerous man, Fiona.\" He drew the heavy drapes over the room's only window, plunging the room into near-darkness till he turned on a bedside lamp.\n\n\"So I've heard. But you know yourself that I'm lethal when prompted to be.\"\n\n\"And then there is this Asian contingent that tried to kidnap Miss Creed.\" Georges tapped his chin with his forefinger. \"I suppose you know who they are?\"\n\n\"I believe they were with Puyi-Jin, a Chinese\u2014\" She stopped when she saw Georges wince. \"Have you heard of him?\"\n\n\"Have you had dealings with Puyi-Jin before?\"\n\n\"No. He's new to me.\"\n\n\"A very bad man. Is his interest in Miss Creed separate from your business with Laframboise?\"\n\n\"They're tied together.\"\n\n\"Either one of those men would be daunting by himself, yes?\"\n\nFiona smiled. \"It is our good fortune, though, that Laframboise was working for Puyi-Jin and betrayed him.\"\n\nImmediately, Georges brightened. \"Ah, then we can use this to our advantage.\"\n\n\"I was hoping so.\"\n\n\"You've always been such a fascinating woman, Ms. Pioche.\" Georges turned toward the wall and took a small knife from his pocket. \"I'm afraid getting to your armory won't be quick if you should need it in a hurry.\" The blade glinted as he pried molding from the corner of the wall, then from a decorative beam three feet away. \"This wall adjoins the apartment in the next room, but the occupants living there have no idea what this space conceals.\"\n\nWhen Georges finished removing the molding, he inserted the knife behind the wallboard and quickly pried the section out of place. He set the piece of wall aside and the lamplight played over the lubricated sheen of the weapons hanging on the wall. A dozen handguns and an equal number of assault rifles and shotguns hung from pegs. Boxes of ammunition sat neatly organized at the bottom of the space.\n\n\"The ammunition is color-coded for the weapons.\" Georges pointed to the small colored dots on the boxes and the matching colored stripes on the butts of the handguns and rifles and shotguns. \"For speed.\"\n\n\"Wonderful.\" Fiona took out a pair of thin gloves, then selected a pistol and cut-down belt holster. She loaded the weapon's magazine and slammed it home. Methodically, she worked the action, stripped a bullet into the receiver, then popped the magazine and replaced the bullet. Satisfied, she tucked the weapon and holster at the small of her back.\n\nFiona looked back at Annja and Edmund. \"Would you care to make a selection?\"\n\nEdmund shook his head. \"No. I don't know the first thing about pistols.\"\n\n\"Well, we'll have to attend to that, won't we, Professor. And for you, Annja?\" Fiona held out another pair of gloves. \"Mustn't leave any prints, so don't touch the weapons without gloves on. Unless the situation calls for it.\"\n\nKnowing Fiona wouldn't be satisfied until she picked something, Annja pulled on the gloves, then stepped forward and surveyed the pistols. After a moment, she found one she easily recognized. She plucked the Baby Desert Eagle 9 mm from the wall, then took time to load the weapon. Unlike Fiona, she didn't put a round under the hammer. She chose another of the cut-down belt holsters.\n\n\"Anything else?\"\n\n\"No, thanks. I'm good.\" Annja stepped back.\n\nFiona chose a chopped semiautomatic shotgun with a shoulder sling. Meticulously, she loaded the shotgun, worked the slide and fed a last shell into it. Then she slid the weapon under the bed.\n\n\"I'll be taking this room, if that's all right.\"\n\nAnnja nodded.\n\nSmiling, Georges clapped his hands. \"Then, perhaps, we could return to the kitchen. I've laid in an excellent selection of wines, if I must say so myself. And I can show you the information I have on Laframboise.\"\n\nHead swimming a little from the wine, Annja settled into bed. Georges had departed, slightly tipsy but as professional as ever, in the company of Hasan and a couple other young men who looked capable of violence. Fiona had retired to her room, and Edmund was curled up asleep on the couch. His body wasn't used to being pushed so hard for so long.\n\nAches and pains plagued Annja, too, most of them from the car wreck, but she knew from past experience that she'd probably feel just fine in the morning. Since she'd found the sword, her recuperative powers had surpassed Olympic standards.\n\nHasan had brought them their luggage a couple hours after their arrival, and had stayed around for the wine. He had been watchful and intelligent, and Annja had recognized almost immediately that he was a street kid who paid attention. She had known kids like that while she'd been at the orphanage in New Orleans. Hasan, no matter where he was\u2014West Africa or Paris\u2014was a survivor.\n\nSo was she.\n\nDressed in gym shorts and a Yankees jersey, Annja opened up her computer and dug into the alt.history sites, hoping for more information. Several of the entries were just basic information on the magic lanterns, a few focused on different illusionists scattered across two hundred years of legerdemain, and there was even a flame war regarding Criss Angel's ability to do real magic.\n\n\u2002Ni hao, Lantern Girl,\n\n\u2002Don't mind the two rockheads arguing above. Apparently they didn't see Criss Angel's interview with Larry King when he said he didn't believe in magic. Sigh\n\n\u2002Anyway, I was writing because the lantern you've got in this picture looks a lot like one I heard about while visiting one of my friends in Shanghai. Their family has some kind of legend about that lantern, about how they were disgraced by an ancestor or something. You know how big that is in Asian culture.\n\n\u2002I'm adding a picture of the lantern my friend's grandmother told me about. The pic is in black and white and it's not very clear, but maybe this helps?\n\n\u2002New Shanghai Girl\n\nA surge of excitement stirred Annja as she clicked on the attachment. The photograph was large and it took a while to download, but when it had, the image was big enough to blow up and examine.\n\nAt first blush, the lantern resembled the one Edmund had bought. Then again, all lanterns looked a lot alike.\n\nWhat most interested Annja was the two men in the photograph. Neither of them was Anton Dutilleaux, but they stood in front of a small building that had signs in the windows advertising banking in English, French and Chinese.\n\nHer excitement grew."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 28",
                "text": "\"You think this is where Anton Dutilleaux worked?\" Edmund looked doubtful.\n\nSitting at the dining room table the next morning, Annja stared at her computer studying the old Chinese picture. She spooned up another bite of key lime pie yogurt, not the most breakfasty yogurt ever made, but she liked it. \"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Doesn't really look like a bank, does it?\"\n\n\"Banks didn't always look like banks back then. China was expanding, growing rapidly. It took time for construction to catch up.\" Fiona poured milk over her cereal. She was already dressed for the day in pants and a loose pullover to cover her pistol. A thick folder sat at her elbow. \"You have to remember, Professor, Shanghai was a budding community back then. Trade was opening up along the Yangtze River. The customs office was moved to Shanghai from Songjiang in the 1730s.\"\n\n\"Seventeen thirty-two.\" Annja's response was immediate and she didn't know she'd said anything until the others stopped to look at her. \"Sorry. I suppose saying the 1730s was close enough.\"\n\nFiona smiled. \"You must worry Roux to death with everything you know. He remembers events and people, but he's not one to keep dates in mind.\"\n\n\"I didn't exactly know the date until I refreshed what I knew last night.\" Annja said that, but she'd also been blessed with a near-photographic memory.\n\nAnnja glanced at the lower right side of her computer screen. It was 8:13 a.m., a lot earlier than she'd expected to get up, and much earlier than she suspected Jean-Baptiste Laframboise would be up. Still, it was better to get a lead on her quarry.\n\nEdmund leaned back in his chair and sighed. \"I truly don't know how your head can hold all that information without exploding.\"\n\nShe glanced at him. \"Name the Romantic poets.\"\n\n\"William Blake, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Percy B. Shelley, John Keats, Matthew Arnold and John Clare.\"\n\n\"And why were they called Romantic poets?\"\n\n\"Because their work contrasted sharply with previous literary styles, philosophy, the church and the problems and promise of industrialization.\" Edmund shook his head. \"I get your point. I know the facts of my field as well as you know yours\u2014history.\"\n\nAnnja swallowed another spoonful of yogurt. \"But my field\u2014history\u2014touches your field\u2014literature. The same period we're talking about? The one with these Romantic poets? That took place at the same time Shanghai was becoming a major trade franchise in China. Lord Byron died in the 1820s in the Greek War of Independence, didn't he?\"\n\nEdmund frowned. \"He did. From illness. In 1824 at the age of thirty-six while preparing to battle with the Greeks against the Turks.\" He paused. \"You know, I hadn't before thought of the relationship that period in Europe had with China.\"\n\nFiona stirred her cereal and spooned up a bite. \"Yet Europe and the United States were bent on invading China through Shanghai at the same time to open up the opium trade, which they primarily owned and operated down in India.\"\n\nAnnja set the empty yogurt container aside and picked up a piece of toast. \"Enough of the history lesson. Where are we going to find Laframboise?\"\n\nFiona poured a cup of strong tea from the carafe on the table, then stirred in milk. \"What do we know about him?\"\n\n\"That he's a violent killer.\" Unconsciously, Edmund touched his bruised face.\n\nFiona waved that away. \"He made a momentous decision to betray a very dangerous enemy. He's also come into possession of an artifact that might possess magical properties. We know from his upbringing, from his mother's interest in the arcane, that Laframboise is a man given to a belief in the supernatural. His world has been turned upside down. So where would he go?\"\n\nAnnja glanced at the thick folder at Fiona's elbow. Georges had provided the information last night, and all of it concerned Laframboise and Puyi-Jin. She had a digital copy of the same information on her computer hard drive. Fiona liked hard copy. Last night she had spread it out around her and looked at photographs and documents. Judging from her responses and observations about the materials, Fiona was a much better hunter of men than Annja was. She was a remarkable woman.\n\n\"Getting out at all will be dangerous for him.\" Edmund steepled his forefingers under his chin. \"He knows Puyi-Jin is looking for him. The attack on Annja last evening would have told him that. The story was all over the news last night and this morning.\" He nodded at the television against one of the living room walls.\n\nAnnja had picked the story up on her computer in her room last night. So far, the Parisian police and the D\u00e9partement de la S\u00fbret\u00e9, the equivalent of the FBI, known locally as the S\u00fbret\u00e9, hadn't identified Annja.\n\nThey had identified the Asians involved in the kidnapping attempt. They were all known Puyi-Jin gangsters. No one had a clue why the attack had taken place.\n\nThey had been lucky the story was so vague.\n\nFiona nodded. \"The danger is something Laframboise will accept, though. That's the price he pays for doing business. What is the least known thing he's got on his hands at the moment?\"\n\nAnnja understood where Fiona was headed now. \"The lantern.\"\n\n\"Yes. Now that he has his hands on it, he'll want to know more about it. Where will he go?\"\n\n\"A museum.\" Edmund sounded certain of himself. \"Like me, he'll want to verify the authenticity of the lantern.\"\n\n\"I mean no disrespect, Professor, but Laframboise would take the lantern to a museum or auction house only if he were interested in the financial value of the piece. He's not interested in that, is he?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nAnnja tapped at her computer and called up the file on Laframboise. She found what she was looking for quickly. \"He's going to be more interested in the mystical aspects of the lantern.\"\n\nFiona set her teacup on the saucer on the table. \"And where is he going to go to find out about that?\"\n\n\"Georges has listed three fortune-tellers here in Paris that Laframboise sees on a regular basis.\"\n\n\"None of them will be able to satisfy Laframboise, because whatever knowledge they have is going to be incomplete at best.\"\n\nEdmund tapped his fingers on the table nervously. \"We have no way of knowing which one he'll see.\"\n\n\"On the contrary, I think he's going to see them all. He has no choice.\"\n\n\"Then we stake out these three people?\"\n\n\"Georges has already put eyes on them. I asked him to do that last night.\"\n\nAnnja was impressed.\n\n\"So we're going to try to intercept Laframboise when he goes to see these people?\" Edmund didn't sound happy.\n\n\"No. If we try to engage Laframboise in the streets, he'll be riding in an armored car. We won't be able to get at him.\" Fiona rummaged through the file and pulled out an eight-by-ten of a luxury car, which she spun into the center of the table. \"This is his vehicle. Top of the line and very well equipped.\"\n\nAnnja glanced at the photograph. \"Laframboise could always just have the fortune-tellers come to him.\"\n\n\"One of them does on a regular basis.\" Fiona drew out another photograph, this one of a young man with intelligent eyes and thin lips. \"He'll have to go to the other two.\" She laid their photographs out, as well.\n\nThe first was a stylishly dressed young African woman. The second was an older Asian woman whose face was gnarled in wrinkles and flecked with age spots. Her hazel eyes glittered in an otherworldly way.\n\n\"The first is Magdelaine de Brosses, a popular Parisian psychic.\" Fiona touched the photograph. \"She has a network set up. Phone lines and websites. She has a local television show and does private consulting in her office.\"\n\nFiona laid another photograph on top of de Brosses's. A tall building in downtown Paris.\n\n\"That building has considerable security and manpower.\" Fiona tapped the photograph of the old woman. \"This is Bui Thi Trinh.\"\n\n\"Vietnamese?\" Annja studied the picture.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nEdmund leaned in. \"I wasn't aware that the Vietnamese went much in for fortune-telling.\"\n\n\"Belief in the supernatural is cultural.\" Annja buttered a piece of toast. \"Every primitive people developed some sense of the supernatural to explain things. You're thinking of the Vietnamese as they are now and were back in the twentieth century. Influenced by communism and torn apart by one outside nation after another. Back in the feudal era, the Vietnamese people believed in th\u1ea7y ph\u00f9 th\u1ee7y. Sorcerers or witch-men. They set up small temples all over the country. They also believed in \u00e2m binh, ghost warriors that could cure disease or insanity, or cast love spells.\"\n\n\"Interesting.\" Edmund leaned back. \"Where does this woman operate?\"\n\n\"In her flat,\" Fiona replied. \"It's also interesting to note that this woman was one of those who taught Laframboise's mother fortune-telling.\"\n\nAnnja nodded. \"So Laframboise's link to this one isn't just professional.\"\n\nFiona shook her head.\n\nEdmund frowned. \"Don't tell me we're going to go after this old woman?\"\n\n\"No. She lives in a building that could be hard to control, hard to get into and out of.\" Fiona put Bui Thi Trinh's picture back into the folder. \"We're going after the lantern when Laframboise goes to see Magdelaine de Brosses.\"\n\n\"I thought you said she worked out of a heavily secured office building.\"\n\n\"She does.\" Fiona smiled. \"It'll make it more interesting, won't it?\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 29",
                "text": "Annja sat at a small table in an internet caf\u00e9 across from the building where Magdelaine de Brosses regularly delivered the future for her clientele. Jean-Baptiste Laframboise arrived a few minutes before noon. That saved Annja the hassle of finding a new observation post. She'd been rotating locations with Fiona, cycling through the internet caf\u00e9 across the street, a bistro a half block down the street and a tourist shop in the bottom floor of the building.\n\nAcross the street, Laframboise got out of his car while one of his bodyguards held the door. The man looked good, sleek and rested, and that made Annja even more annoyed with him. Despite the solid hours of sleep she'd gotten the previous night, she still felt ragged and off.\n\nEdmund Beswick's continued involvement plagued her. The literature professor was probably safer with them than he was in London on his own, but she was too aware that he was on the firing line with them when things went wrong.\n\nAnd things were going to go wrong even if they went right, of that Annja was certain. Thankfully, for the moment, Edmund had agreed to remain with the car.\n\nOn the curb, Laframboise glanced around, spotted the window washers working on the eighth-floor windows, then he buttoned his coat and nodded to his bodyguard. The big man took the lead toward the building and Laframboise followed. Two more bodyguards came after him. One of them carried a case slightly larger than Dutilleaux's lantern.\n\nAnnja lifted the disposable phone Georges had given her to use. She punched in Fiona's number. The woman answered on the first ring. \"He's here.\" Annja watched Laframboise pass through the building's double glass doors and into the foyer.\n\n\"I have him.\" Fiona's voice was cool and competent. She was currently inside the tourist shop. \"We know where he's going.\"\n\nMagdelaine de Brosses operated out of a small office on the sixth floor. According to the information Georges had provided, the fortune-teller's day began promptly at eight o'clock and was over by 5:00 p.m. Clients came and went every thirty minutes and stayed no longer than twenty minutes\u2014unless they made arrangements to stay longer, and that was expensive.\n\nGeorges's information on the fortune-teller was extensive. Some of the background came from a man Georges knew inside the Parisian police. De Brosses and her operation had been under investigation for some time, but none of the law enforcement people had found anything incriminating. The woman claimed to deliver glimpses of the future, and she never took more money than she charged for her time.\n\n\"I'm on my way.\" Annja felt her pulse speed slightly as she got up from the chair at the table. She clipped the phone's earpiece to her ear and pocketed the cell, leaving the connection in place.\n\nOut on the street, Laframboise's car pulled into traffic and glided away. There was a parking garage two blocks away. Georges had assumed the driver would take the car there, or he would simply circle the block until Laframboise reemerged. Either way would keep the man out of play.\n\nIn the foyer across the street, Laframboise and his retinue stood waiting for the elevator to arrive. Fiona was nowhere in sight.\n\nOutside the internet caf\u00e9, Annja pulled her jacket a little tighter against the wind and walked to the corner to cross. She wore a black wig and wraparound sunglasses that dramatically altered her features. She felt confident that neither Laframboise nor his people would recognize her. They hadn't met, but Chasing History's Monsters had an extensive database of pictures of her online.\n\n\"He is going up to six.\" The detached male voice had a West African accent, but there was a lot of Parisian influence there, as well. He might have been born somewhere else, but Annja knew he'd spent most of his formative years in France.\n\nShe hadn't met the young technical wizard Georges had provided for their recovery effort. They'd talked briefly by phone before leaving the flat that morning, but there had been no face-to-face encounter. As Georges had explained, it was as much for their benefit as it was for his young technical wizard.\n\nWhen the light changed, Annja strode across the street with the other pedestrians. She wore cargo pants and a T-shirt with a loose shirt and a jacket to cover the pistol at the small of her back. She didn't want to have to rely on the gun. She also wore the thin gloves so she wouldn't leave prints on the weapon. Thankfully, the weather was cool enough that gloves wouldn't draw attention.\n\n\"He's arrived at six.\" The tech spy had hacked into the building's CCT system. The closed-circuit television system showed all the public areas, the hallways and the elevators.\n\n\"Very good.\" Fiona's voice was calm, like she did this kind of thing all the time.\n\nMaybe she did. Annja smiled at the thought, but she felt out of depth. She'd been involved in similar operations in the past, but she'd never grown comfortable with all the clandestine cloak and dagger.\n\n\"What about his associates?\"\n\n\"They're with him.\"\n\n\"Let me know if there's any deviation.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nAnnja pushed through the double glass doors and entered the building's lobby. A uniformed security guard stood at one post. He had a magazine in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, but he was talking over a phone headset. Despite the man's inattention, Annja's stomach knotted.\n\nFiona fell into step with her and they reached the elevator together. She'd changed her appearance also, adding a long brown wig and different makeup.\n\n\"Are you ready for this?\" Fiona stood beside Annja like she was in no hurry.\n\n\"As ready as I can be.\" Her heart was beating rapidly. She watched the elevator numbers drop lower as they neared the lobby.\n\n\"I always get nervous right before we get down to it.\"\n\n\"I thought you were born for stuff like this.\"\n\nFiona chuckled. She leaned over to Annja conspiratorially. \"I just put on a good show.\"\n\n\"Yes, you do.\"\n\nThe elevator pinged and the doors separated in front of them a moment later. They were the only two people to get on.\n\nFiona snaked a hand to her back, checking on the pistol. \"Are you still with us, Heimdall?\" She glanced at Annja. \"I feel ridiculous using that sobriquet.\"\n\n\"I see everything.\" The young man sounded amused over the headset links. \"No evil shall escape my sight.\"\n\nAnnja grinned as she felt the elevator start up. \"You're mixing your comic book cultures. Heimdall is from the Norse mythology in Thor as published by Marvel Comics. The bit about 'no evil' is from Green Lantern's oath, a DC Comics thing.\"\n\n\"Depends on your point of view. It's all Hollywood to me. Idris Elba and Ryan Reynolds. And how do you know so much about comics?\"\n\n\"I'm a big reader. I was always a big reader.\"\n\nFiona smiled and looked at her. \"You do surprise, Annja Creed.\"\n\n\"You should hear me talk about Lost and Supernatural.\"\n\n\"Given your schedule, I wouldn't think you'd have time to keep up with television.\"\n\n\"If it weren't for the internet, I wouldn't be able to keep up.\"\n\n\"Personally, I've always enjoyed Gilmore Girls.\" Fiona briefly took out her pistol and racked the slide. \"Shame they took it off the air.\" She put the pistol away again.\n\nThe elevator went past the sixth floor and stopped at the seventh. The doors opened and Annja went through at Fiona's side. The plan was to take the stairs back down to six. Magdelaine de Brosses's office was near the corner.\n\n\"Good morning, m. Laframboise.\" The young man seated behind the glass-and-chrome desk looked relaxed and cheery. He always did.\n\nLaframboise couldn't recall the man's name and had never liked him. The man was too pretty, too perfect. But he suited Magdelaine well as an intermediary. He was handsome enough to keep the attention of young women and too laid-back to threaten the husbands of those women. He was also young enough to stir the fantasies of older women and make them wish they had a few years back, and at the same time make them look on him like a son or grandson.\n\nInnocuous. That was the word that often came to Laframboise's mind when he dealt with the man.\n\nLaframboise nodded.\n\n\"Would you care to have a seat?\" The young man gestured toward one of the seats in the elegant room. Plants and art prints of scenic areas around Paris brought an Old World feeling to the modern room.\n\n\"No.\" Laframboise wandered over to look at a print of the Eiffel Tower. His mobile showed three minutes of twelve. Magdelaine wouldn't keep him waiting. She wouldn't dare.\n\nGilbert Campra took one of the seats and gave the appearance of relaxing. The news reports of Puyi-Jin's men attacking a woman who was doubtlessly Annja Creed had confirmed the Shanghai crime lord's continued interest in the lantern.\n\nOne of Laframboise's security guards sat in another chair, the case containing the lantern in his lap.\n\n\"Mademoiselle de Brosses should only be a moment.\"\n\nLaframboise didn't respond. He knew for a fact that Magdelaine had finished with her prior client at eleven-fifty. The woman was prompt, conscious of time and never broke her rules. She always took ten minutes between clients to recover the psychic energies she expended.\n\nThe time he was kept waiting irritated Laframboise, but he knew better than to push it. In past visits, when he had made an issue of being kept waiting, the readings hadn't gone as well, and he believed Magdelaine needed time to gather herself.\n\nHe took a deep breath and tried to relax. He hadn't slept well last night, and only alcohol and drugs had put him out of his head at all. He had spent hours working on the lantern, trying to guess its secrets. One thing was for sure: the lantern possessed power. He could feel it. He was enough of his mother's son to sense that.\n\nAt precisely twelve, Magdelaine opened the door to her office and greeted him with a smile. \"Jean-Baptiste, how pleasant to see you.\"\n\nLaframboise put on his best smile. His wealth didn't impress her. Magdelaine had a number of wealthy clients, and she had considerable wealth of her own. Clients not only paid her steep prices, but they also befriended her, often giving her investment tips that had proven to be lucrative. Laframboise had done background checks on the woman.\n\n\"Magdelaine, you look positively radiant.\" Laframboise took her proffered hand and kissed the back of it.\n\n\"Flatterer.\" Her full, plump lips tweaked in a smile.\n\n\"But no, love, I'm only speaking the truth. As you do.\" Just as Laframboise was about to release her hand, he felt an electric tingle in his hand that coursed up his arm to his heart.\n\nThat had never before happened.\n\nMagdelaine's smile faltered for just a moment and something flashed in her eyes. \"You've brought me something to look at, haven't you?\"\n\n\"I have.\"\n\n\"And it's very important to you.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Laframboise released her hand and turned back to the man holding the case. He gestured and the man came over at once with the case.\n\nCampra never moved.\n\nLaframboise held the case up for inspection. Magdelaine hesitated, then ran her hands over it.\n\n\"This is very powerful. Very dangerous.\" She looked at him. \"But you already know this, don't you?\"\n\n\"No.\" Laframboise gave her a smile he didn't truly feel. \"That's why I brought it to you. To learn.\"\n\nMagdelaine stepped back inside her office. \"Bring it inside. Let's have a look at it.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 30",
                "text": "Laframboise followed Magdelaine into her private office. The room was understated, darkened by the heavy drapes pulled against the noonday sun, and furnished in heavy wooden pieces that were more than a hundred years old. The broad desk was clear of everything except a black velvet spread.\n\n\"Put it here.\" Magdelaine gestured to the desk as she walked around behind it. She sat as Laframboise placed the case on one of the two chairs in front of the desk and opened it.\n\nGently, he lifted the dragon lantern from the foam padding and placed it on the black velvet. The dragon sat there, frozen in bronze and roosting on its wooden platform. Laframboise sat in the other chair and gazed at the fortune-teller.\n\n\"What is this?\" Magdelaine studied the lantern but she made no move to touch it.\n\n\"It's called a magic lantern.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Magdelaine's voice had taken on a dreamy quality, like she was half in the physical world and half somewhere else.\n\nLaframboise was impressed. He'd seen her like this before, but she had never gone into a trance state so quickly. \"It's an old magician's trick. A device used to project images to scare people. Illusionists used these before the digital age of holograms.\"\n\n\"This one\u2014\" Magdelaine's voice was almost a whisper \"\u2014is very old.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Very dangerous.\"\n\n\"How so?\"\n\n\"People have killed for this.\" Her dark eyes focused on him for a moment. \"You have killed for this.\"\n\nLaframboise didn't deny the charges, but neither did he admit to them. He trusted Magdelaine implicitly, but he knew that the police sometimes bugged her office while she underwent an investigation. As far as he knew, she wasn't currently under suspicion. But he didn't take chances.\n\nMagdelaine shifted her attention back to the lantern. \"You betrayed a man for this lantern.\"\n\nLaframboise squirmed in the seat. He had known that Magdelaine would undoubtedly ferret that out, but it was the price of finding out more about the lantern. He remained silent. She didn't judge. Probably a lot of her business involved those who weren't good people.\n\n\"This man was very powerful. Very dangerous. You have made a mistake there.\"\n\nHe curbed a sharp retort. He didn't like being told about his mistakes or what he should do. \"Tell me about the lantern. I want to know the secrets it holds. I know all I need to about its current history.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Magdelaine placed both her hands on the desk, palms turned upright, but she still made no effort to touch the lantern. She certainly seemed wary of it. She was more tense than he could remember ever seeing her. Her eyes grew darker and looked through him. \"This object belonged to a family. It was an heirloom, something they regarded very highly. It was taken from them, but not without their knowledge.\"\n\nLaframboise considered that. He'd believed the lantern stolen by Anton Dutilleaux when he'd left Shanghai.\n\nMagdelaine frowned. \"There is something missing.\" She cocked her head to one side. \"Something that was in the lantern.\"\n\n\"Something was concealed in the lantern?\" He wasn't supposed to ask questions that might shape Magdelaine's efforts or lead her astray. As she had explained her work, the connection she made to people, things and events was tenuous at best.\n\nShe shook her head and frowned. She closed her eyes for a moment. \"Something valuable was hidden in the lantern. A fortune. A treasure.\"\n\nLaframboise's heart beat faster and he had to restrain himself from moving. \"Where is the treasure? What is it?\"\n\nEyes still closed, Magdelaine shook her head. \"You cannot demand. You know that.\"\n\nRestraining his anger and impatience, Laframboise nodded. Magdelaine had been a favorite of his, and her glimpses into his future had nearly always been helpful.\n\nMagdelaine took in a deep breath and let it out again. \"One of the contents of the lanterns was hope. I feel that emotion very strongly. It was hope for the future, hope for an escape. It promised an end to very bad circumstances.\"\n\n\"For the man who owned this lantern?\"\n\n\"Yes. But there were several who have owned this lantern. The bad circumstances belonged to the original owner. He made his life harder by choosing to take the treasure. But the hope he had then echoes still within this lantern.\"\n\nHe said nothing, but he was seething inside. He couldn't sell hope. There was no method of weighing or measuring it. He stifled a growl of frustration.\n\n\"The lantern was a doorway to another world.\"\n\nThose words checked Laframboise's anger and he was certain he felt a cool breeze pass over his face. That told him he was in the presence of real magic, the kind Magdelaine had always brought. Once she had told him about an investigation by the S\u00fbret\u00e9 that could have gotten him in a lot of trouble, or possibly in prison for several years, in time for him to prevent it.\n\nMagdelaine raised her hand before her, eyes still shut, as though she was reaching for a door. \"I can feel the door, and I can feel those who are just on the other side.\" She lowered her hand and placed it once more beside the lantern.\n\nAnother chill passed through Laframboise. Part of the legend that surrounded the lantern was that Anton Dutilleaux had been killed by a vengeful ghost. Laframboise had accepted the fact that the lantern might be haunted.\n\nMagdelaine opened her eyes and focused on him. \"Taking this lantern was a very bad thing, Jean-Baptiste.\"\n\n\"Not if it leads me to treasure.\"\n\nDarkness clouded Magdelaine's face. \"You will never see the treasure.\"\n\nThe chill returned, and this time it was almost cold enough to turn Laframboise's blood to ice. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Because this lantern is going to get you killed.\"\n\nFrozen by her words, Laframboise was slow to react when a section of the wall slid open behind Magdelaine. From the hollow, two Asian men dressed in black stepped into the room. They held machine pistols equipped with laser sights.\n\nThe ruby dots centered on his chest.\n\nA third man stepped from the recess, as well, and this one Laframboise could put a name to. \"Zhang.\"\n\nZhang was Puyi-Jin's right-hand man. Although only in his early thirties, Zhang had killed dozens of men and steadily climbed to a position of prominence. There was even a story that when his predecessor turned and agreed to immunity in England in exchange for his testimony, Zhang had gotten himself sent to the same holding facility to kill him. And got away.\n\n\"Good afternoon, M. Laframboise.\" Zhang spoke French without an inflection. He was of medium height and compact; wearing black clothing and a long leather duster. To most observers, he didn't look like a dangerous man. His face was filled with hard planes, and his short-cropped hair was black. A scar ran across his chin and a wispy mustache drew a line over his mouth. He held no weapon in his hands.\n\nMagdelaine stood up from the desk and retreated against the room's back wall. \"You promised me that there would be no bloodshed in this place.\"\n\nZhang's hard eyes never left Laframboise. \"That promise is contingent on the behavior of your guest.\"\n\nLaframboise turned to Magdelaine, hurt and confused. He thought of how the treasure the lantern hid was almost within his grasp. \"You betrayed me?\"\n\nMagdelaine didn't answer.\n\n\"You betrayed me? Me? After all these years?\" Laframboise couldn't believe it.\n\nZhang stood there complacently, his hands clasped.\n\nTears leaked down Magdelaine's cheeks. \"I was given no choice. They knew you would come here to ask about the lantern.\"\n\n\"You could have warned me.\"\n\n\"I have warned you. What you do in this room, how you act now, will determine whether you live or die. Choose to live, Jean-Baptiste. What is on the other side will be very dark and cold for you. You must atone for what you have done in this life.\"\n\n\"My boss is being very generous today, M. Laframboise.\" Zhang spoke flatly, as if he didn't care about anything Laframboise said or did. \"In spite of your treachery and deceit, he is willing to let you live. All you have to do is walk away.\"\n\nLaframboise cursed the man, but he made no move to reach for a weapon. The laser sights remained unwavering.\n\nZhang didn't appear to take the abuse personally. Until his boss told him to kill, he wouldn't. And even when he did, the bloodshed would be impersonal.\n\nAngry and trapped, Laframboise rested his hands on his thighs, touching the key chain in his pants pocket. Gently, he pressed the panic button, sending a silent command to Gilbert Campra in the outer room.\n\nLaframboise fixed his gaze on Magdelaine. \"You shouldn't have betrayed me, Magdelaine. That wasn't wise of you.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"I didn't have a choice. And the warning I gave you is true\u2014the lantern will get you killed.\"\n\nZhang gave a command in Chinese. One of the men stepped forward and seized the lantern. Taking the padded case, the man placed the object inside and shut it. Laframboise had to restrain himself from lunging for the lantern.\n\n\"In the future, M. Laframboise, my boss will not be so generous.\" Zhang stared at Laframboise.\n\n\"Tell him that I was being generous, too. I only took the lantern. I didn't take his life. Now things have changed.\"\n\nA smile touched Zhang's mouth, but there was no warmth in his expression. \"I will tell him that. I hope that once I do, we will see each other again. Soon.\" He nodded at the man with the lantern.\n\nHolding the lantern under one arm, the man stepped up into the recessed area behind the desk. Laframboise tried to peer into the darkness, but couldn't. There had to be a passage. He assumed it led into the room behind Magdelaine's office.\n\nZhang turned to follow.\n\nAt that moment, the office door burst open and Campra took cover to one side. He brought up his H&K MP5 outfitted with a sound suppressor. The machine pistol chugged to life."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 31",
                "text": "\"Guys, we have a problem.\"\n\nIn the stairwell just outside the door leading to the sixth floor, Annja came to a halt and looked at Fiona. The other woman drew her pistol from the folds of her jacket. Annja reached for the sword and felt it in her fingers but didn't pull it into the stairwell.\n\n\"What problem, Heimdall?\" Fiona peered through the wire mesh window that looked into the hallway.\n\nAnnja leaned in beside her. Only a short distance away, a lone guard stood at the entrance to Magdelaine de Brosses's suite. Heimdall had told them about the man. The two other guards and Laframboise had to be inside.\n\n\"The psychic woman has just called the police.\" Heimdall's voice sounded more urgent. \"I took the liberty of tapping her phone lines as a precaution.\"\n\nAnnja was impressed. This was way past television host skill sets.\n\n\"Why did she call the police?\"\n\n\"There's some trouble in the office.\"\n\n\"What trouble?\"\n\n\"I'm looking... The psychic rents the room behind her office, as well.\"\n\nFiona glanced at Annja. \"A bolt hole.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Heimdall sounded more strained. \"I'm checking through the security footage... Late last night, a group of Chinese men entered that office. They haven't come out.\"\n\nFiona nodded. \"Then we have to assume we aren't the only ones who know about Magdelaine de Brosses's second room. Can you identify the men?\"\n\n\"I've downloaded images of them, but I don't have access to those kinds of databases. I'm limited to situations like these. I never cared to get into anything heavier.\"\n\n\"Understood. I have a chap who can take care of the identification. Just keep those images.\"\n\nAt that moment, the sharp cracks of gunfire sounded from inside the office. The guard drew his weapon and charged.\n\n\"Well, that's a sure indication that things have gone awry. The second room is just around the way?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nFiona opened the door and raced into the hallway. \"Since our quarry hasn't come back through this door, let's assume he\u2014or someone\u2014is going to come through the other one.\" She started running toward the intersection of hallways only a short distance ahead of her. Her feet made no sound on the plush carpet. Annja kept pace.\n\nLaframboise pushed himself up from his chair and snapped his right wrist, then twisted. Immediately a small, heavy-caliber Semmerling XLM derringer popped into his hand.\n\nThe weapon was almost a museum piece and hard to acquire. Once Laframboise had heard of the weapon, he'd had to have it. Chambered in .45 ACP and semiautomatic, the pistol was deadly in close quarters.\n\nIt was also painful to shoot. He squeezed the trigger and immediately felt like someone had struck his hand with a baseball bat. No matter how much time he'd spent at the target range, his grip and his reaction to the recoil couldn't prevent it. Shooting the pistol hurt.\n\nBut it also gave him a chance to get back the lantern. The bullet struck Zhang high on the left shoulder and staggered the man, knocking him to the ground. Laframboise fired again but he'd hurried his shot. The bullet gouged the wood surrounding the hidden door and tore a white scar across the varnished surface.\n\nWith only three rounds left, Laframboise turned his attention to the man carrying the lantern. He aimed low, starting at the man's knees and letting the pistol rise naturally on the successive recoils. He fired the three remaining rounds in a thunderous roll.\n\nThe heavy-caliber bullets tore the man's legs out from beneath him and left him flattened on the ground, the lantern on top of him.\n\nPartially deaf from the detonations in the enclosed room, Laframboise shoved the pistol back up his sleeve and locked it into place. Then he reached for the pistol at his hip.\n\nCampra had already killed the other Chinese gangster. Blood splashed the wall behind the man and soaked the bullet holes. Magdelaine had shrunk down in the corner and was trying to wrap her arms over her head and hide herself. She was screaming, and Laframboise couldn't help but wonder what she might have seen in her immediate future.\n\n\"Gilbert, be careful of the lantern.\"\n\nCampra nodded.\n\nHolding his pistol before him in both hands, Laframboise took one step to the side to get around the desk. He intended to finish killing Zhang if the man wasn't dead.\n\nInstead, Zhang seemed to return to life. The Chinese killer jerked and rolled over. In that brief second, Laframboise saw there was no blood on the man's back and knew that Zhang must have been wearing body armor. A pistol appeared in Zhang's hand as if by magic.\n\n\"Look out!\" Campra brought up the machine pistol. Before he could fire, Zhang fired three rounds into him, knocking him back. The H&K flew from his hands.\n\nLaframboise brought his pistol to bear and fired two shots. He didn't think either of them hit his target, and then he was looking down the barrel of Zhang's weapon.\n\nCursing, Laframboise threw himself backward and down, seeking shelter as a bullet cut the wind near his ear. He took cover behind the desk. The wood vibrated as Zhang continued firing. The rounds cored through in a couple places, but most of them were stopped.\n\nMagdelaine wailed and shrieked in the sudden silence. She was shaking uncontrollably now.\n\nLaframboise cursed her silently. Even without psychic powers, she should have been able to see what was going to happen. Thinking that Zhang had cycled his weapon dry, Laframboise rose from behind the desk with his pistol gripped in both hands.\n\nZhang wasn't there. Neither was the lantern case. Only the wounded man remained, and he was trying desperately to escape by crawling away. Mercilessly, Laframboise shot the man through the head from behind. By the time the corpse collapsed, Laframboise was already moving toward Campra.\n\nBlood matted Campra's left shoulder. Bullets had made holes in his jacket, and there was a tear on the right side where a round had ricocheted and tore through the coat. Campra wore body armor, as well. As Laframboise watched, the man finally managed to draw a deep breath. Then he rolled over, cursed and reached for the machine pistol.\n\n\"Did you get him?\" Campra rose to his feet, dropped the empty magazine and fed another one into the weapon.\n\n\"Zhang? No. He's gone, and he's got my lantern.\"\n\nA man filled the doorway behind them and they turned with their weapons. His other guard stood there with his weapon pointed at them. He lowered it.\n\nLaframboise pierced the man with his gaze. \"You saw nothing in the hallway?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Call the car and have it waiting in the alley. Call in the other team and let them know we're looking for Puyi-Jin's men.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" The man fumbled inside his jacket and produced a mobile. He pressed a button and started speaking rapidly.\n\nCampra glanced at the hidden door. \"Cute.\" He pressed a hand to his side and winced. \"The woman knew they were there?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"What are you going to do about her?\"\n\nLaframboise glanced at Magdelaine. \"Leave her.\" He pinned her with his hot gaze. \"But if I lose my lantern, I'm coming back here to kill you.\"\n\nThe woman reached toward him with a shaking hand. Her face was racked with fear as tears streamed down her cheeks. \"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Forgive me.\"\n\n\"Where does this door lead?\"\n\n\"To the adjoining room.\"\n\n\"Then out into the next hallway?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"There are elevators at the other end of the building?\"\n\nMagdelaine nodded and her head jerked with the movement. \"Forgive me, Jean-Baptiste. Please. I beg you. I had no choice. You must understand that.\"\n\nIgnoring her, Laframboise nodded to Campra. \"Let's go get my lantern back.\"\n\nTogether, they plunged through the hidden door.\n\n\"I've got your target.\" Heimdall tried to speak calmly, but his excitement betrayed him.\n\nAnnja was a step behind Fiona as they rounded the next corner that took them to the hallway where the door to Magdelaine de Brosses's second room was.\n\n\"Where?\" Fiona stared down the hallway at the scattered individuals cowering in the hallway at the sound of gunfire.\n\n\"Ahead of you. On the left. No. On your right.\"\n\nStaring ahead, Annja spotted the Asian man just stepping out of a doorway less than ten feet away. Just before she asked Heimdall for further clarification, she spotted the familiar case tucked under the man's arm. When the man pulled up a pistol, he removed all doubt as to his identity.\n\nHe swung the case up as Fiona fired. The bullet screamed off the reinforced case and dug into a nearby wall only a few feet over the head of a reluctant observer. The man went flat to the ground immediately.\n\nFiona held her fire, obviously deciding unless she had a clear shot she didn't want to risk accidentally hitting a bystander. Never breaking stride, Annja plucked the sword into the hallway with her and swung. The blade flashed as it cut through the air and smacked into the pistol.\n\nThe weapon flew from the man's hand as he stared at the sword in surprise. He raised the case to block another sword strike and backed away, talking rapidly.\n\nAnnja didn't realize who the man was talking to until four men rounded the corner at the far end of the hallway. They opened fire at once. Deciding to cope with the more deadly threat, Fiona flung herself into a doorway and fired from cover.\n\nOne of the men sagged with a bullet between his eyes. Another lost interest in the gun battle when a bullet ripped through his throat. He stood, frantically using both hands to stem the tide of blood. His efforts were in vain and he staggered to one side, falling over a woman who went into immediate panic.\n\nBrandishing her sword, Annja focused on the Asian man with the lantern case. She swung at his head, trying to scare him into stepping back against the wall. Once he was off balance, she intended to take him down.\n\nInstead, the man spun, blocking her sword with the case, then coming around with a back kick that caught her in the middle of her chest. The air whooshed out of her and she went backward. Dumb, dumb, you should have seen that coming. He knew the wall was there, too.\n\nAs she fell back, the man spun again, lashing out with a foot and sweeping her legs out from under her. Reflexively, she reached out to break her fall and released her hold on the sword. It disappeared at once, returning to wherever it was when she didn't have it. She slammed against the floor. The only reason she didn't have the breath knocked out of her was because it was already gone.\n\nHer vision turned spotty and she hovered on the edge of unconsciousness. The man loomed above her. He raised his foot and she knew he intended to drive it through her face."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 32",
                "text": "Reaching up, Annja caught the man's foot. She stopped his boot sole only an inch or two from her nose. Her arms burned with the effort of keeping him at bay. He was quick, though, almost too quick. He let her hold on to his foot and used it to push himself up so he could drive the other foot down into her throat.\n\nLungs burning for air, a sudden headache splitting her temples and her vision grayed out at the edges, Annja wrenched her opponent's foot. Physiology and leverage created an insurmountable pressure. The man cried out in pain as his body torqued off balance. He came crashing down, arms windmilling, and he lost his hold on the case.\n\nAnnja rolled out of the way and air finally rushed back into her lungs just as she thought she was never going to breathe again. She pushed herself to her feet and grabbed the handle of the case.\n\n\"No!\" The man scrambled to get up, but his wrenched ankle betrayed him and he crumpled to his knee. He lunged for the pistol but Annja got there first and kicked the weapon away.\n\nGunshots still rang out in the hallway. Only one of the gunmen had survived Fiona's marksmanship, but he had holed up around the corner at the end of the hall in another corridor.\n\nFiona took refuge in the recessed doorway and calmly reloaded her weapon. She took note of Annja. \"You got the case. Good job.\"\n\n\"Let's get out of here before some of these people get hurt.\" Annja headed toward the opposite end of the hallway. Another corridor ran perpendicular to the one they were in. If she had the floor configuration worked out, there was another emergency stairwell and a set of elevators there.\n\nFiona released the slide on her weapon to chamber a fresh round, took another shot at the man around the corner, then turned the pistol toward the man Annja had fought. Annja didn't have any doubt that the woman would kill in cold blood if she had to. The man was already a recognized threat.\n\nBefore Fiona could pull the trigger, though, Laframboise yanked open the door the Asian man had come through. Another man with a machine pistol stood at his side.\n\n\"Fiona!\"\n\nEffortlessly, Fiona wheeled around and fired at the open door, triggering shot after shot. Annja was uncertain whether any of the shots hit Laframboise or his lackey, but both men dove back inside the room as splinters ripped from the door.\n\nFiona cursed and dropped the empty magazine, pulling still another from her jacket and slamming it home as she ran to join Annja. \"Bloody cross fire is not where we need to be.\"\n\nIn full agreement, Annja ran after her. Bullets cut the air around them and punched holes in the wall at the end of the hallway. The percussions sounded impossibly loud.\n\nAt the end of the hallway, Annja started to go to the right, toward the second set of stairs and elevators. She'd barely managed two steps before she spotted another group of armed Asians sprinting toward them.\n\n\"Well, this isn't where we want to be, either.\" Fiona brought up her pistol and fired rapidly, scattering the new arrivals.\n\nRetreating the other way, Annja ran hard but didn't leave Fiona behind. The older woman kept up surprisingly well. \"Heimdall, is the other stairwell and elevator bank clear?\"\n\n\"Negative. You guys are boxed. I'm sorry. I'll call our friend. Perhaps there's something he can do. The police are on their way.\"\n\nFiona drew up alongside Annja and they ducked around another turn in the hallway. This one left them facing a wall of glass that looked out over Paris. The view was spectacular. In the distance, Annja could see the Eiffel Tower and perhaps even white crenellations of the Arc de Triomphe sitting in the Place de l'\u00c9toile.\n\nAnnja took a breath. You're trapped. How are you going to get out of this?\n\nFiona stood at attention beside her. Gunshots rolled and echoed around them. She held the pistol, pointing at the ceiling. \"You don't think they'd be willing to surrender, do you?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"I didn't think so, either. But it's only because they don't know what they're up against.\"\n\nAnnja couldn't help but laugh. Fiona Pioche was irrepressible.\n\nMore staccato gunshots peppered the hallway.\n\n\"For the moment, they're distracted by each other, but they'll get round to us soon enough.\" Fiona brandished her weapon ruefully. \"I'm down to my last magazine. And to be frightfully honest, I don't think either Laframboise or Puyi-Jin's group intends to let us survive this.\"\n\nA flicker of movement on the other side of the window distracted her from the dark thoughts that crowded her mind. When she saw the second snakelike flicker slide across the glass, she recognized what it had to be.\n\nShe rushed over to the window, listening to the steady roar of weapons closing in relentlessly on their position. There, outside the window, the suspended scaffold she'd spotted earlier hung a floor below them and to one side, perhaps eight feet away. Two men dragged squeegees across the windows with iPod earbuds in their ears.\n\nAnnja turned to Fiona. \"How do you feel about heights?\"\n\n\"We're on the sixth floor. Jumping is not an option.\"\n\n\"It's the only option we have.\"\n\nFiona joined her at the window and peered down at the window-washer rig. \"Oh, bloody hell. Surely you're joking.\"\n\n\"We're all out of places to run to.\" Annja stepped back from the window and drew her pistol. She aimed for the center of the glass and fired.\n\nAt first she thought the window was going to hold. Though the surface integrity of the glass had been compromised, with thin cracks that looked like spiderwebs spreading out from the bullet hole, it clung stubbornly to its moorings. The windows had been designed to handle the wind shear and accidental impacts.\n\nAnnja set down the lantern case and reached for one of the spare magazines she carried. Just as she slammed it home, the glass sucked out of the window and broke apart, leaving the space relatively empty. The pieces glittered as they sailed across the street, smashed into the building opposite, then rained down over the sidewalk as pedestrians ran for cover.\n\nNo one was hurt.\n\nBreathing a sigh of relief, Annja holstered her weapon and picked up the case.\n\nBelow, the window washers were definitely aware that something was going on. Both young men looked up at the broken window and spotted Annja. They plucked the earbuds out of their ears and stood waiting. The gunfire was unmistakable, and they hunkered down immediately.\n\nAnnja didn't give them much more time to think. She climbed into the window, barely managed her balance against the sucking pull of the wind and the vertigo as she stared down at the street far below.\n\nShe blew out her breath, hefted the lantern case and brought it in close to her body to better manage the balance, then flung herself toward the nearest cable supporting the washing rig.\n\nShe clamped her hand around the wire rope and the rigid surface bit into her palm. Maintaining her grip, she wrapped her leg around the rope, as well, and then released her hand and wrapped the rope inside her elbow to protect her fingers. Holding on, able to somewhat control her descent, she slid down until her foot reached the scaffold's safety rail.\n\nThe wind caught her again, but she fought it and dropped onto the scaffold. The men stared at her in shock. Driven by Annja's landing, the scaffold swung sickeningly.\n\n\"Mademoiselle.\"\n\nIgnoring them, Annja set the case down and turned to look up at Fiona. The woman stood at the window and gazed down. Gunshots cracked behind her and reverberated over the street. Sirens screamed, growing closer with every passing second.\n\n\"Fiona.\" Annja wished the scaffold weren't swinging. She hadn't considered the effect her jump would have on the platform. \"Just get the timing and jump. Wrap your arms and legs around the cable. Don't try to hold on with your hands.\"\n\nCautiously, swaying with the wind, Fiona climbed into the window frame and gathered herself. Without a word, she leaped toward the scaffold.\n\nPanic froze Annja for just a moment when she realized that something had gone wrong, that Fiona had misjudged the jump. Then the woman wrapped her arms and legs around the wire rope and she slid. She came too fast, though, and her foot hit a glancing blow on the scaffold's edge and bounced off. Her legs shot past the scaffolding and her grip with her arms was slipping.\n\nAnnja grabbed the back of Fiona's jacket, prayed that it would hold and yanked. Fiona came up a couple inches, giving Annja just enough purchase to catch her under the arms and start hauling.\n\n\"It's okay. I've got you. Just hang on.\"\n\nThe scaffold swayed and banged against the windows, jarring Annja as she pulled and fought against the changing leverage provided by the uncertain fulcrum of the safety railing. Before she could get Fiona onto the scaffold, an Asian gunman thrust his head and shoulders through the window above. He pointed his pistol and fired.\n\nBullets ricocheted off the scaffold and cracked into the nearby windows. The scaffold's wild swings and the wind shear hammering the gunman made them a harder target, but it was only a matter of time.\n\nFiona released her grip on Annja's arm with her right hand and drew her pistol. She had the weapon up and firing even as Annja set herself and yanked again. Fiona's bullets slapped into the man's chest. He struggled to step back or shoot, Annja wasn't sure which, but the wind caught him and sucked him out the window.\n\nHis screams echoed around them as Annja pulled Fiona onto the scaffold and fell onto her haunches.\n\nFiona rolled and contorted, then got into a crouched position with her pistol braced on the scaffold's safety railing for support.\n\nSearching the scaffold, Annja spotted the control panel. The directions were simple and in French. But there was another problem. She looked at the men.\n\n\"Will the scaffold reach the ground?\" Scaffolds were usually mounted on rooftops with parapet clamps and didn't necessarily reach the ground. They were designed to clean the upper-story windows of buildings.\n\n\"Second floor.\" One of the men answered in a stunned monotone. \"It will go to the second floor. Perhaps a little farther.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" Down, then. Up would have been more problematic, requiring them to escape from the building all over again. Annja pressed the button and the scaffold started dropping. \"Heimdall, are you still with us?\"\n\n\"Yes, but I thought you were dead when you jumped out of that window.\"\n\n\"Have the car brought around. There's an alley\u2014\" Annja made sure she hadn't gotten her sense of direction mixed up during the excitement \"\u2014on the west side of the building.\"\n\n\"Siasia will be there. Don't worry.\"\n\nAnnja looked at the two window washers. \"Can this go any faster?\"\n\nThe man who had spoken pointed to the control panel. \"The lever.\"\n\nSpotting the lever, Annja threw it in the other direction. Immediately, the scaffold dropped almost as fast as an elevator. The dizzy feeling in her stomach was there, but it was constantly interrupted by the scaffold banging against the side of the building as the wind caught them again and again.\n\nFifty yards away, white Peugeot cars with Police on the sides in red and blue slewed to a stop in front of the building. Pedestrians ringed the dead man on the sidewalk only a few yards away. So far no one was paying particular attention to the window-washing scaffold.\n\nReaching the end of its tether, the scaffold swung six or seven feet from the ground. The motor hummed for a moment, then shut off automatically.\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" The window washer wrung his hands apologetically but didn't get up from his position on his knees. \"This is as far as it goes.\"\n\n\"That's fine. Thank you.\"\n\nHe looked at her hopefully. \"Will you be going now?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Annja grabbed the lantern case and clambered over the side of the scaffold, which was still swinging, though less so now that it had come to a stop. Several pedestrians stared at the scaffold as Annja heaved herself over the side and dropped to the sidewalk. Fiona dropped into place beside her.\n\n\"Well, that was certainly an adventure.\" Fiona tugged the bottom of her jacket into place. \"Is it like this for you all the time?\"\n\n\"More often than not.\"\n\n\"Does Roux accompany you much?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"I didn't think so. I believe the life you lead is perhaps a little too exciting even for his tastes.\"\n\n\"It's a little too exciting for mine.\"\n\n\"Ah, Annja Creed, I don't think that's exactly true.\" Fiona grinned. \"There's a certain glow about you that I see when we're under fire. Or jumping from tall buildings.\"\n\nSeveral of the pedestrians called to the nearby policemen. One of the uniformed men came toward them, then saw the dead man lying on the pavement. He clicked his shoulder radio and more policemen came running with their guns drawn.\n\nAnnja shoved through the pedestrians and broke into a full run on the outside of the crowd. Fiona followed her. Together, they sprinted for the alley and she hoped the car would be there.\n\nWhen she arrived, the alley was empty. She came to a stop and looked around. \"Heimdall.\"\n\n\"Patience. He's almost there.\"\n\nThree uniformed policemen had pursued Annja and Fiona, probably only because they had run. Pursuit was an instinct and man was, by nature, a predator.\n\n\"You two,\" one of the officers, a woman, said, in French. \"Hold it there. We want to talk to you.\" She repeated her order in English.\n\nJust as she finished, the car that had brought Annja and Fiona roared out on the street and swooped into a tire-eating turn. The police officers drew back as the vehicle bore down on them.\n\n\"Stop! Stop the car!\"\n\nThe driver did stop, but he came to a rocking halt beside Annja and Fiona. In the backseat, Edmund flung the door open, his face tight with anxiety.\n\n\"Get in.\"\n\nAnnja wasted no time sliding in, and was immediately followed by Fiona. The police officer who'd first spoken yelled in protest and gave chase on foot, but none of them fired their weapons.\n\nThe driver, Siasia, was a young West African man who wore his multicolored hair in dreadlocks and chewed gum incessantly. Despite the situation, he blew a pink bubble as he wheeled out onto the next street and churned through traffic.\n\nEdmund stared at the case. \"You got the lantern.\"\n\nAnnja nodded. \"Now we get to see what secrets it holds.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 33",
                "text": "Two hours later, back in the safe house Georges had provided, Annja had to admit she was stumped. If the lantern had any secrets, and she was certain it had to, then it was stubbornly holding on to them. Her back aching from the prolonged strain\u2014and maybe from leaping out of buildings and wrestling thugs\u2014she sat up straight at the dining table and massaged her back.\n\nThe bronze dragon held on to the lens in its mouth, as well as any secrets it had, and seemed to mock her. She knew that was just her imagination and frustration, but she couldn't keep from personalizing the little monster.\n\nFiona and Edmund sat across from her. Fiona occupied herself cleaning their weapons. Edmund had watched every move Annja had made but had thankfully kept his questions to a minimum.\n\n\"Is there anything at all you can tell us about the lantern?\" Edmund looked a little desperate and worse for wear.\n\n\"No more than I've already told you.\" Annja glumly surveyed the object on the dining table. \"The lantern is authentic. Handmade. At least three hundred years old.\" She shook her head. \"Other than that, I can't find anything.\"\n\n\"No secret markings? No hidden code?\" Edmund's disappointment colored his words and showed in the slump of his shoulders.\n\n\"None that I can find.\" Annja gestured at the array of chemicals and powders she'd used on the lantern. \"There are no inscriptions, no contact points that could be braille or glyphs.\" The Chinese written language was a collection of strokes that fit neatly into a square shape, and those were sometimes referred to as glyphs.\n\nExasperated, Edmund leaned back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. \"But that doesn't make sense.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"There has to be something.\"\n\n\"If there is, I haven't found it. The only discrepancy I've found is in the lens placement.\"\n\n\"The fact that there are three grooves for the lens in the dragon's mouth?\" Edmund nodded. \"I'd already noticed that.\"\n\n\"Do you know why they're there?\"\n\n\"To focus the lens better during projection. Probably marked off for different distances. Depending on the image.\"\n\nAnnja looked at the lantern. The reasoning was as sound as anything she'd come up with. \"The lens in the dragon's mouth isn't the original, is it?\"\n\nEdmund shook his head. \"No. That was too much to ask for.\"\n\nAnnja leaned forward again and popped the lens from the dragon's mouth. It didn't come out easily.\n\n\"I got the best fit I could. I intended to have the lens ground to a better size at a later date. Once I'd figured out what I was going to have painted on the lens.\"\n\n\"What were you thinking of?\"\n\nEdmund frowned. \"A black-and-white image of Anton Dutilleaux. Nothing terribly imaginative, I'm afraid.\"\n\nAnnja tried the lens on the other grooves and couldn't get it to fit. She finally surrendered and placed it back in the original groove.\n\nEdmund drummed his fingers on the table nervously. \"Men have been killed over that lantern. Not just now, but two hundred years ago Anton Dutilleaux was killed for it. There has to be something.\"\n\n\"I know.\" Annja wished she had more to say. She ran her fingers along the lens grooves.\n\n\"It could well be that the treasure, whatever it was, is already gone.\" Sitting nearby, Fiona poured herself a cup of tea. The aroma lifted Annja's flagging spirits. Noticing Annja's look, Fiona pushed the tea across the table to her. \"I'll pour myself another.\" She glanced at Edmund. \"Would you like one?\"\n\n\"No. I couldn't.\" Edmund sighed. \"Yes. Please.\" He ran a hand through his hair. \"I simply can't believe that we would have to undergo all of this for nothing.\"\n\nAnnja sipped her tea. \"Not every mystery gets solved. Not every treasure gets found. Imagine how disappointed Laframboise and Puyi-Jin are going to be.\"\n\nEdmund paled. \"They're not going to believe the treasure doesn't exist. They're still going to hunt us.\" He looked at Annja. \"Aren't they?\"\n\n\"Unless we can stop them or make them believe it doesn't exist.\"\n\nFiona returned with two cups. \"That's going to be hard to do, I'm afraid. Now that we've had the lantern in our hands, even if we give it back they'll assume we've already figured out whatever secret was there. We're dealing with greedy men. I daresay they may not even trust themselves.\"\n\nWhen Edmund tried to pick up his teacup, the porcelain tapped against the saucer because his hand was trembling. \"We're in an impossible situation, aren't we?\"\n\n\"Getting the lantern didn't help as much as I'd thought it would.\" Annja felt bad about that.\n\n\"In one respect, no, it didn't.\" Fiona opened a tin of shortbread cookies. \"However, we have definitely set Laframboise and Puyi-Jin at each other's throats, so that should buy us some time. Otherwise, either of them could have pursued you, Professor.\"\n\n\"Perhaps we should go to the police at this point.\" Edmund looked hopeful. He squared his shoulders. \"After all, it is me those two want. Me and the lantern, actually. If I were to turn myself over to the police, they could provide protection and the two of you would be left out of this whole sorry mess.\"\n\nFiona snorted. \"I must apologize. I'm not very polite, am I? The police have their uses, Professor, but they're not so good when it comes to protecting individuals.\"\n\n\"But as long as I'm with you, I'm putting you in danger.\"\n\n\"Annja and I are adults, perfectly capable of making our own decisions. We involved ourselves. We could have let you go hang, after all, instead of showing up to rescue you.\"\n\nEdmund smiled slightly. \"I'm awfully glad you didn't.\"\n\n\"Of course you are. Now you need to have a little faith and let us work through this situation.\" Fiona leaned back in her chair. \"Now, we can kill Laframboise and Puyi-Jin, or we can solve the riddle of the lantern.\"\n\nEdmund's jaw dropped.\n\n\"The first will, of course, take some time, but it can be managed. I am not without my resources, and\u2014given the base natures of our opponents\u2014I am not without resolve.\" Her eyes glittered like glass. \"And after all we've been through, I am certainly motivated.\"\n\n\"Doesn't sound like I'm going to be getting back to my life anytime soon.\"\n\n\"That wouldn't happen until we manage this problem, anyway, would it?\"\n\n\"No, I suppose not.\"\n\nFiona glanced at Annja. \"Not to put any pressure on you, dear, but a solution on your part would certainly be faster and involve less bloodshed and less potential police interest than anything I can offer at this point.\"\n\n\"I know.\" Annja stood. \"Let me have some time.\"\n\n\"Of course. We're perfectly safe here for the moment. You tend to your investigations, and I'll see about making more arrangements.\"\n\nAnnja took the lantern and her backpack, then headed to her room.\n\nThree hours later, Annja sat cross-legged and short-tempered on the small bed in the room she'd been assigned. She wished she was back in her loft apartment in Brooklyn. There, surrounded by her books and her personal things, she thought her best.\n\nShe stared at the lantern, perfectly balanced on the bed. The dragon looked like it was perched and ready to leap out at her.\n\n\"Try it. Just give me any excuse.\" Annja shook her head. \"Talking to the artifact isn't a good sign. Threatening it is even worse.\" Carefully, she got up, put the lantern back in its case and headed out into the living area.\n\nThe television was on, replaying a story about the shoot-out at the office building. She'd watched the footage in her borrowed bedroom. So far Laframboise and Puyi-Jin had been mentioned, but no one had dropped Annja's or Fiona's names. Magdelaine de Brosses had stated that thieves had broken into her office and stolen the object Laframboise had brought her.\n\nNo fingers had been pointed, but Annja knew the fortune-teller was more involved than she was letting on. Puyi-Jin's men hadn't found the second room by accident. Laframboise had been set up, and he was probably aware of that, as well.\n\nAlthough Laframboise probably wasn't going to be held accountable for much more than defending himself and his property, the legal entanglements would at least slow the man in his pursuit.\n\nEdmund sat on the couch with a deck of cards. He kept making them disappear and reappear mechanically. His eyes were unfocused, unseeing, and he didn't notice her until she stepped directly in front of him.\n\n\"Going somewhere?\"\n\n\"Rooftop. I need to clear my head.\" Annja looked around. \"Where's Fiona?\"\n\n\"She went out with Georges. They're up to something, but she didn't say what.\" Edmund squinted at her. \"What's on the rooftop?\"\n\n\"Peace of mind, I hope.\"\n\n\"You still haven't gotten anywhere with\u2014\" Edmund stopped himself and sighed. \"Of course you haven't. Otherwise, you'd say.\"\n\n\"I would.\"\n\n\"Are you going to be all right on your own?\"\n\n\"Yes. In the meantime, why don't you look back through the Dutilleaux material. See if there's some new angle. Anything.\"\n\n\"What should I look for?\"\n\n\"If I knew, I'd tell you. Hopefully we missed something. We need a new trail.\"\n\nGlumly, Edmund nodded and reached for his computer.\n\nAnnja went down the hallway to the fire escape. The window was unlocked and she went out it.\n\nThe traffic noise from the street below was muted as Annja looked out over the city. Cooing pigeons lined the roof's parapet. Occasionally one or a small group of them took flight in an explosion of gray and white.\n\nAnnja started slow, limbering up her body with stretches, then falling naturally into martial-arts katas. Her muscles loosened and warmed, taking less and less thought as she worked into the familiar routines. She'd started different martial arts while still in the orphanage, and she'd stayed with them all of her adult life.\n\nAfter a few more minutes, she reached for the sword and pulled it onto the rooftop with her. The keen blade cleaved the air and reflected the late-afternoon sun. She whirled and danced, feinted and struck and blocked and counterstruck. The blade was a part of her, an extension of self. Continuing her workout, a fine sheen of sweat covered her and cooled her body.\n\nHer mind freed up and went dormant. In her mind's eye, she studied the dragon lantern, turning it over and over and around.\n\nThe secret is incomplete.\n\nThe realization jarred Annja, but she continued to exercise, to become one with the sword. How was the lantern incomplete? The missing lens? That was one way.\n\nBut was there another?\n\nThere was something there. She sensed it. All she had to do was grasp it.\n\nHer phone rang and she had the immediate impression she should answer it. She came to a stop with the ease of a leaf falling and was suddenly at rest. Holding the sword in her right hand, she fished her sat-phone from her cargo pants.\n\nDoug Morrell.\n\nAnnja didn't want to deal with Doug at the moment, but she knew she had to answer. \"Hello.\"\n\n\"Just checking in.\" Doug sounded relaxed, and Annja chose to view that as a good thing. \"How's it going with the magic lantern?\"\n\n\"I've got it.\"\n\n\"That's great, Annja.\" Doug suddenly started whispering conspiratorially. \"You haven't used up all the wishes, have you? Because we had an agreement. You know, a wish each and then\u2014\"\n\n\"I remember.\" Annja stared at the Eiffel Tower in the distance. \"I'm afraid I haven't figured out how to get it to work yet.\"\n\n\"That's cool. We can figure it out somehow. We just gotta find the instructions.\"\n\nInstructions.\n\nA chill ghosted through Annja and she felt certain she had part of the answer she was searching for. \"Thanks, Doug. I've got to call you back.\"\n\n\"Wait\u2014\"\n\n\"As soon as I know something, I'll call you.\"\n\n\"But what\u2014\"\n\nAnnja closed the phone and tucked it back into her pocket. When she turned to face the fire escape, she spotted Fiona sitting there, watching.\n\n\"How long have you been there?\"\n\nFiona smiled a little. \"I honestly couldn't tell you. Long enough to tell that you and that sword were made for each other.\" She shook her head. \"I've never seen anything like that. Was that dancing?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Annja blushed. \"It's just...natural when I'm with the sword.\"\n\n\"Don't be embarrassed. That was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, and I can tell you, I've seen some beautiful things.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" Annja didn't know what else to say. \"I just realized that we missed something. Is Edmund still downstairs?\"\n\n\"Poring over his records of Anton Dutilleaux when I left him.\"\n\n\"I've got to talk to him.\" Annja started for the fire escape.\n\nFiona stood. \"Maybe you shouldn't take the sword. He might get the wrong impression.\"\n\nSmiling ruefully, but no less excited, Annja released the sword and the weapon disappeared before it hit the rooftop."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 34",
                "text": "When they returned to the flat, Edmund was pacing the floor with nervous energy while he spoke on the phone. \"Yes, yes, of course. No, this is very important. Those things should have been together. No, I'm not placing any blame on you. Do forgive me if I sounded that way. It was not intended.\" He continued apologizing for a moment longer. \"Please let me know what you find out.\"\n\nFiona sat in the easy chair in the corner and steepled her fingers together. She smiled inquisitively at Edmund. \"You sound like you've had an epiphany, Professor.\"\n\n\"Not an epiphany. That would be putting a happy face on it. No, I've made a dunderheaded mistake is what I've done.\" Edmund turned to Annja. \"Do you know what I missed?\"\n\n\"There were papers in the lot that had Anton Dutilleaux's magic lantern.\" Annja was so thrilled with her breakthrough that she forgot to let Edmund have his victory. \"Papers that had belonged to Dutilleaux.\"\n\n\"That's right.\" Edmund looked troubled. \"How did you know that?\"\n\n\"If Dutilleaux took the lantern, if there was a treasure somehow attached to it, then he might have had something else, as well. Other belongings.\"\n\nEdmund grinned. \"Exactly. It came to me as I went back through the original auction I attended that the lantern might not have been the only thing Dutilleaux left behind. There was an assortment of magic books, and I had all those, but\u2014as it turns out\u2014there was a diary.\"\n\n\"But it wasn't his.\"\n\nA frown knitted Edmund's brows. \"You're more magician than I am. How are you coming up with this?\"\n\n\"I didn't know there was a diary until you told me. I was hoping there might at least be papers or letters.\"\n\n\"I don't know if there were any papers or letters. I should probably ask.\"\n\n\"Tell me about the diary.\"\n\n\"What? Don't you already know?\"\n\n\"It's written in Chinese.\"\n\nEdmund shook his head in disbelief. \"Perhaps I should venture up to the rooftop, as well.\"\n\n\"And so...?\" Annja prodded him.\n\n\"The sellers were going to list the lantern and the diary together. Those items, after all, were discovered together. But they had no way of knowing that Anton Dutilleaux had ever owned the diary. In fact, I was only guessing that he might have. I was looking for anything written that had been in that lot. The sellers thought they might get more money offering the lantern and the diary separately. But I should have thought of that.\"\n\n\"You went there looking for the lantern.\"\n\n\"I did.\" Edmund scowled. \"Once I'd heard of it, and of its possible history, I'm afraid that was all I could think of. Blindness on my part.\"\n\n\"Why would you have wanted a diary written in Chinese, and probably not even written by Dutilleaux?\"\n\n\"True. There was nothing in his past that mentioned his knowledge of written Chinese.\" He shook his head. \"Though, in retrospect, given my awareness of his history as a banking employee in Shanghai, I should have at least considered that.\"\n\nAnnja grinned. \"Tell me about the diary.\"\n\n\"Not much to tell, I'm afraid. The diary popped up with the lantern when Robertson's assistant's things were found in an old boardinghouse three months ago, and is listed as having belonged to Dutilleaux, but that's all that's really known about it.\"\n\n\"No one's had it translated?\"\n\n\"No one's cared to. It's over two hundred years old. The sellers figured that whatever was in the pages of that diary surely weren't of interest to anyone in this day and age. They thought it was a keepsake. Nothing more. Possibly a volume of Chinese literature or a family history.\"\n\n\"It may yet be that.\"\n\n\"I know. I can't imagine what it might be, but surely it must be something. Anton Dutilleaux wasn't the kind of man who would travel from the Orient carrying things that were useless to him.\"\n\nAnnja nodded. \"Where is the diary now?\"\n\nEdmund frowned. \"It was sold. I asked the sellers if they could let me know the name of the person who bought the diary. They're not in the habit of disclosing information, but I pointed out that Jean-Baptiste Laframboise certainly got hold of my information.\"\n\n\"Did they admit to that?\"\n\n\"Not even, but it cut some difference with them. Their resolve weakened. They're certainly more receptive to the idea of putting me in touch with the purchaser.\"\n\nFiona spoke up from the other corner of the room. \"Perhaps I can be of assistance.\"\n\nAnnja had almost forgotten about Fiona. She smiled. \"Of course you can.\"\n\n\"I'll put Ollie on it right now.\" Fiona took out her sat-phone. \"I'll just need the particulars of that sale, if you please, Professor.\"\n\nWaiting for Ollie's imminent success was hard. Annja occupied her time with her work. Chiefly, the Mr. Hyde investigation back in London. Detective Chief Inspector Westcox was the star of a half-dozen media interviews, four on television and two on radio, and he was collecting a lot of ink and rising in Google stats as more and more people wrote about the murders and speculated on the killer's identity and continued interest. And the helplessness of the London Metro Police Department.\n\nAnnja felt bad for the dead women. She looked at their faces and wished she hadn't. The photographs revealed on the various websites were garish.\n\nYou're not a detective. She had to remind herself of that. You're an archaeologist. There might be some overlap in skills, but you don't have the resources of a police department. Westcox will find the murderer. He's good at that sort of thing. If there was something in that investigation you could help with, you would.\n\nThere were several emails from Doug, letting her know he was collecting the media reports for her, covering for her while she was off trying to find the magic lantern.\n\nMr. Hyde continued to taunt the police. He'd written in twice more, claiming his victory, that they wouldn't catch him and that he would kill again.\n\nSoon.\n\nAnnja felt torn. She knew she wasn't equipped to help out with the police investigation, but she still felt a need to be there. Despite her lack of police training, she'd gotten involved in the search for the killer and that chafed at her.\n\n\"Why so pensive?\"\n\nStartled, Annja looked up to see Fiona standing in the doorway. \"I'm sorry. I didn't hear you come in.\" The woman was developing an irksome habit of popping up without Annja knowing.\n\n\"No wonder, what with the material you're looking at.\"\n\nGuiltily, Annja closed her computer down. \"I shouldn't be. Keeping up with all of that just makes me feel useless.\"\n\n\"Those murders aren't something you can do anything about.\"\n\n\"I've been reminding myself of that.\"\n\nFiona regarded her. \"But you feel guilty, anyway.\"\n\nAnnja hesitated and wanted to deny that, but she couldn't. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Because of your involvement through the television show?\"\n\nAfter everything she'd seen Fiona do in the past two days, Annja wasn't surprised the woman knew about her Mr. Hyde investigation for Chasing History's Monsters even though it hadn't been mentioned. \"Yes.\"\n\nFor a moment, Fiona was silent. \"Have you always been so aware of this need to feel responsible for people?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Most individuals wouldn't take on the responsibilities that you shoulder, Annja. If they'd met someone like Edmund Beswick, they would have felt badly for him and wished him well, maybe drop a donation into a bucket, but that sense of responsibility would have ended there.\"\n\nAnnja hadn't thought about that. \"Maybe.\"\n\n\"There's no maybe to it.\" Fiona's voice was soft. \"You stepped right into the young professor's battle without an instant's hesitation.\"\n\n\"Seems to me you did the same thing.\"\n\nFiona arched her brows. \"The pot calling the kettle black?\"\n\n\"Something like that.\"\n\n\"Not so. I took you on at the express request of an old friend. You didn't even know the professor, except for a few phone calls and a couple meetings.\" Fiona shook her head. \"Not the same thing at all. Furthermore, I'm in the business of dealing with other people's troubles. You are an archaeologist.\"\n\n\"And a television personality.\" Annja smiled.\n\n\"I rather think you happened into that one and are using it to your own ends. I don't believe for an instant that being a television personality was ever an ambition of yours.\"\n\nAnnja couldn't disagree.\n\n\"What I have to wonder, though, and I am concerned, is how much that sword influences your sense of judgment.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I'm thinking perhaps it pushes you in the direction of helping others rather more than you would if left to your own devices.\"\n\n\"Couldn't I just be a good person?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't think you could be anything else.\" Fiona was silent for a moment. \"But I saw you with that sword up on the rooftop. It was like...like you and that sword know each other. As if you're in a relationship.\"\n\nAnnja would never have considered using those words.\n\n\"I know about the troubled things that Roux searches out. I know how bad they can be for people, and the horrible things that some of them can do.\"\n\n\"I've never seen anything like that.\"\n\n\"Then you're fortunate.\" Fiona shivered. \"My point is that perhaps that sword might carry some trouble with it, as well.\"\n\n\"I don't believe that.\"\n\n\"I didn't think you would, but I wanted you to at least consider the possibility. The things you do, Annja, the bad situations you're drawn into, they may be brought on by that sword. It may well be that the sword doesn't push you toward these troubles, but perhaps it draws them to you.\"\n\nAnnja took a deep breath. \"I've thought about that, Fiona. But I'm more of the opinion that\u2014if anything\u2014the sword lets me see the bad things that are happening. There's no forced involvement. The choice is mine.\"\n\n\"I hope that's true.\"\n\n\"Let me ask you a question.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"You searched for the sword with Roux, even found a few of the pieces.\"\n\n\"That's not a question, and you already know that I did.\"\n\n\"Here's my question\u2014how do you know that the search you went on with Roux, that the contact you had with those sword fragments you helped him find, didn't somehow influence you and what you're choosing to do?\"\n\nFiona held Annja's gaze, then smiled uneasily. \"That sword was put here to change the life of one young woman.\"\n\n\"I've met several people whose lives have been changed because I was able to help them.\"\n\n\"Touch\u00e9.\"\n\nAnnja smiled. \"Did you just come up here to offer advice?\"\n\n\"To pry, you mean?\"\n\n\"If I thought you were prying, you wouldn't have gotten a word out of me. I was raised by nuns. I know how to keep my mouth shut, and when to shut it and disavow all knowledge of anything.\"\n\nFiona laughed. \"You are a treat, Annja. I can see why Roux is drawn to you.\"\n\n\"I don't think drawn is the word he would use. The last conversation I had with him? I called him an asshat.\"\n\nFiona laughed. \"I wish I had been there.\"\n\n\"I had to explain the term to him. That kind of took some of the sting out of it.\"\n\n\"No worries. I'm sure Roux was still considerably stung.\"\n\n\"I hope so.\" Annja sighed. \"Roux can be a real jerk sometimes.\"\n\n\"Yes, he can. He is only a man, after all, and proof that even if a man lives five hundred years\u2014or more\u2014he is limited in what he can learn.\" Fiona shook her head. \"I came up here to let you know Ollie has located the missing diary.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 35",
                "text": "Night had fallen over Paris. The glow of the City of Lights pulsed against the windows of the flat as Annja took a seat on the couch beside Edmund. She hadn't realized how late it had become.\n\nFiona sat on the other side of Edmund. The professor's computer was open on the coffee table, displaying Ollie Wemyss, as immaculate and unflappable as ever, center stage in Fiona's office back in London. The view showed him from the waist up, and Annja was certain the man had staged it.\n\n\"Good evening, Ms. Creed.\"\n\n\"Hello, Ollie.\"\n\n\"As I was telling Ms. Pioche and Professor Beswick, I have had a bit of luck locating the contents of the diary you people are looking for.\"\n\n\"Wait.\" Annja held up a hand. \"The contents of the diary?\"\n\nA small frown turned down the corners of Ollie's mouth. \"Yes, you see, there was a problem with the diary. At about the time Professor Beswick went missing and Laframboise's people were breaking into his storage unit\u2014with Puyi-Jin's people vectoring in at that moment as well, all very exciting\u2014the purchaser of the diary had her house burgled. The diary appears to have been the target of the invasion.\"\n\n\"Was the woman harmed?\"\n\n\"No. Fortunately she was out of the house when the theft occurred.\"\n\n\"Then how did you end up with the contents?\"\n\n\"Ms. Creed, when you're about to deliver a lecture, do you allow the audience to pester you with questions\u2014which you plan to answer in their proper due course\u2014at the outset?\"\n\nChagrined, Annja restrained her curiosity. \"I apologize.\"\n\n\"We'll have time for the Q and A afterward.\" Ollie smiled. \"As I said, the original document was lost. Whatever secrets might be in the architecture of the book itself, I'm afraid, are beyond us at this point. Though, I am told, the new owner had checked the volume quite thoroughly.\"\n\nAnnja curbed her impulse to point out that a hidden message could have been contained in the weave of the material comprising the cover, or that there could have been bumps or irregularities, or any of a dozen different things. If Ollie knew about such things, and she was almost certain he did, then he knew what they had lost. And if he didn't know for a fact, he was too clever not to realize that a facsimile wasn't as good as the original document.\n\nIt was gone. They had to concentrate on what crumbs they had left.\n\n\"Mrs. Rollison\u2014quite an invigorating old bird, and I use that as a term of endearment\u2014took it upon herself to photocopy all of the pages. She found me absolutely charming when I presented myself on her doorstep and asked after the diary.\"\n\nAnnja made herself be calm, but she was exploding with questions.\n\n\"I had to endure a lot of cheek pinching, but I persuaded her to part with a copy of her computer file. I'm sending it along now through the FTP site Professor Beswick has accessed. Since Mrs. Rollison is quite the expert in Chinese written language across the ages, and a suitable person will take some time to locate even with my connections, I also got her to share her partial translation with us. She's still working on the document.\"\n\nFiona interrupted at that. \"Even though you're quite taken with Mrs. Rollison and her translation abilities, I'd like to have the translation double-checked.\"\n\nOllie put a hand over his heart as though wounded. \"Seriously, Ms. Pioche?\"\n\nFiona sighed. \"Sometimes, Ollie, dear though you are to me, you are insufferable.\"\n\n\"How very magnanimous and eloquent of you. I've currently got the document with two other learned souls who shall get back to me forthwith because I bribed them heavily with your money. Since you're a woman of means, I saw no reason not to get the best available.\"\n\n\"I trust they're working independently, as well?\"\n\n\"Definitely.\"\n\n\"How long will their translations take?\"\n\n\"Days, I'm afraid. But since time is of the essence, I asked them to work the diary backward, believing that the last entries would be the most beneficial.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Ollie.\"\n\nOllie gestured broadly. \"I live only to serve, Ms. Pioche.\" He smiled. \"From the pages Mrs. Rollison has translated, the diary belonged to a man named Tsai Chien-Fu. At the time of the writing, he was a Chinese official working with the Shanghai banks in the late 1790s.\"\n\nExcitement flared through Annja and she couldn't help grinning.\n\nEdmund was smiling, too. \"Looks like we're back in the race.\"\n\n\"I don't want to dim your spirits, but I would like to put things in perspective for you.\" Ollie looked serious. \"Mrs. Rollison has been quite diligent in her translation, and I gave it a read-through as I was preparing it to send to you. There is no mention of a treasure. Tsai Chien-Fu appears to have been a very thorough Chinese bureaucrat working for the emperor. And quite boring.\"\n\nFiona waved that away. \"But is there any mention of Anton Dutilleaux?\"\n\n\"As it turns out, Ms. Pioche, there is. Tsai Chien-Fu worked with Anton Dutilleaux.\"\n\nFor over an hour, Edmund's computer downloaded the graphic-intensive files through the server. As each page of the diary came through, he printed it out and sent it to Annja's computer so they could all look at the work being done.\n\nMost of the reading was dry material. Tsai Chien-Fu wrote mostly about the day-to-day business of Shanghai banking as he learned it. He was fastidious about his recollections of the people he met and the transactions that were made.\n\n\"Typical bureaucratic documentation.\" Sitting at the table, Fiona leafed through the pages of translation she'd been passed.\n\n\"The Qianlong Emperor wasn't known as a generous person and was very conservative.\" Annja kept her focus on the images on her computer, blowing up the characters and searching for hidden meanings. It was mostly wasted effort on her part, though, because she couldn't read Chinese and only had the barest acquaintance with the characters. \"He abdicated the throne in favor of his son, the Jiaqing Emperor, so he wouldn't rule longer than his grandfather, the Kangxi Emperor. That didn't really matter, though, because he ruled his son, anyway, until his death three years later.\"\n\nEdmund stared at her. \"No one plays Trivial Pursuit with you, do they?\"\n\n\"I knew Dutilleaux was there during the Qianlong Emperor's reign. I read up on the history.\" Annja turned her attention back to the documents. \"The point is that Tsai had every reason to make sure he had a separate record of what he was doing. In case the emperor's accountants took his books.\"\n\n\"This isn't going to help us much.\"\n\nFiona held up a printout. \"Tsai seemed quite enamored of Dutilleaux, though.\"\n\nAnnja looked at the paper. \"When's that from?\"\n\n\"October 22, 1790. This details how the two of them met.\"\n\nEdmund consulted a small notepad. \"Dutilleaux was in Shanghai from 1786 to 1792. He went to work at the Shanghai bank in 1790.\"\n\nAnnja thought about that. \"So the two of them met in 1790, and two years later, Dutilleaux left. Did he have another job offer?\"\n\n\"No. He returned to Paris and began his career in magic.\"\n\n\"He didn't have much time to work on it.\"\n\n\"On the contrary, Dutilleaux was a magician before he went over to Shanghai. He just didn't have his act together. Before then, he'd toured the small Parisian theaters but didn't have much success. He took the accounting job in Shanghai to avoid debtors' prison. Over the next few years, he was able to pay off his creditors and sharpen his craft.\"\n\nFiona sipped her tea. \"Tsai was quite impressed with Dutilleaux's sleight of hand. In some of these references, Tsai calls Dutilleaux 'Xian.'\"\n\nThat caught Annja's attention. \"I don't know enough Chinese to do much more than survive in the country, but that's a word I know. The literal translation is magician. Or wizard or shaman. Among other things. But if Tsai was calling Dutilleaux that, I'd be willing to assume that's why he did.\"\n\nTilting the paper, Fiona started searching. \"All right, if we now know that Xian was a pet name for Dutilleaux, then this later part makes more sense.\" She handed papers over to Annja. \"In this section, Tsai refers to putting all his hope into the Xian.\"\n\n\"The translator could have inferred the article. Tsai might have been referring to Dutilleaux.\" Annja leaned over to more closely examine the paper. It didn't do any good. She still didn't have enough of a command of the language to make a difference.\n\nFiona looked at Edmund. \"Do you know when Dutilleaux left Shanghai to return to Paris?\"\n\nEdmund consulted his notes. \"July 15.\"\n\nNodding, Fiona smiled. \"On this page, Tsai talks about how the Xian carried all the seeds of his family's future to more fertile pastures. This is dated July 15, and if memory serves me correctly, that corresponds with the Chinese Hungry Ghost Festival, the traditional day the deceased are believed to visit the living. By all accounts, a most singular day.\"\n\nEdmund looked hopeful. \"Then perhaps there's reason to believe that Dutilleaux stole nothing. Whatever treasure he was carrying was something he got from Tsai.\"\n\n\"There's still the question of what happened to Tsai.\" Fiona returned to the printouts. \"Tsai's diary goes on for five more weeks, then stops abruptly. The last few entries are filled with his concern that the emperor's men have discovered what he has done, and that they are going to kill him. He goes on to say that they didn't know Xian was already gone.\" She looked up at Annja. \"You said that some of the information you had dug up indicated the Qianlong Emperor's men were searching for Dutilleaux?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Annja pulled up the information and scanned it. \"According to this, there was a theft from the royal treasury. Several bank employees were executed.\"\n\n\"Was Tsai one of them?\"\n\nAnnja shook her head. \"The information doesn't say. But the time frame appears right. Sometime in the early days of September.\" She took a deep breath. \"We need to find out what happened to Tsai Chien-Fu.\"\n\nFiona's phone rang and she answered it. She talked briefly to Ollie, then took down a URL. When she was finished, she thanked her major-domo and passed the slip of paper to Annja.\n\n\"Ollie said we need to access that site. He says he got lucky and got video footage of the break-in at the Rollison home.\"\n\nAnnja quickly typed the address into her computer and waited as the site came up. A video dawned on her screen and black-and-white footage rolled.\n\nOn the screen, Asian men got out of a nondescript sedan in front of what Annja assumed was the apartment building where Mrs. Rollison lived. The scene cut, then opened up again on a hallway view of the three men as they broke into a flat. This time the camera revealed that they were Asian. They returned seventeen minutes later carrying a box. The time lapse sped up to get through the waiting.\n\nFiona looked grim. \"We have to believe that the diary is in Puyi-Jin's hands now. He could well be caught up with us at this point.\"\n\nAnnja pushed herself back from the table and took her computer. \"Then he'll probably be looking for Tsai Chien-Fu, as well. We'll just have to find him faster.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 36",
                "text": "Searching back two hundred years of history while looking for one man was an arduous task. It was easier to track an event or political climate, or even an environmental one. Finding people lost in history could be hard. Fortunately, it was only two hundred years. Though, the task would have been much easier if Tsai Chien-Fu had been more than a drone at a Chinese bank filled with drones. Killers and kings were much easier to locate.\n\nConsumed by her mission, Annja worked through the night. The Tsai family name was one of the less common in China, and the country had a lot of genealogical documentation despite the wars and unrest that had torn it apart at different times. Annja had hoped the name would be enough to help her find Tsai Chien-Fu.\n\nIt wasn't. She failed and failed and failed again to the point she was ready to put her computer through the wall. In the end, it was the alt.history site that pointed the way.\n\nAt 5:53 a.m., a new posting came through from New Shanghai Girl. At Annja's request, the young woman had investigated her friend's family.\n\nNi hao again, Lantern Girl!\n\nI'm glad my posting helped you find what you were looking for. Wouldn't it be cool if your lantern was the same one my friend's family had lost? Or if the two lanterns were somehow related? I mean, I know there are probably a million dragon lanterns, but this one's gotta be special, right?\n\nAnyway, my friend's family still lives in the same place. They own a flower shop in Nanqiao Town, the largest city in the Fengxian district. The shop's name translates to Beautiful Moon Petals, which has got to be one of the corniest names I've ever heard of. Her father's name is Li Shusen, or Shusen Li if you want to write it in English.\n\nBut my friend's mother's maiden name was Tsai. Which, I think, is the name of the man in the picture. The Chinese one, not the European one.\n\nMy friend's name is Guifang, but we call her Amy. Can I tell her that you may have found her family's long-lost lantern?\n\nGotta go. iCarly is coming on and I have a paper due in Anthropology tomorrow!\n\n\u2002New Shanghai Girl\n\n\u2002Ni hao, New Shanghai Girl,\n\n\u2002Don't mention this to your friend yet. I'm planning on coming to Shanghai soon and can arrange a meeting. Maybe it will be a great surprise.\n\n\u2002I appreciate all your help. Give me a post address and I'll send you a few seasons of iCarly as a thank-you.\n\n\u2002Lantern Girl\n\nAnnja woke Fiona and Edmund, then went to the kitchen and started the coffeemaker and put on a kettle of water for tea. Evidently her two companions had been up late because they were slow to rise. Working on nervous energy, Annja pulled sausage links and orange juice from the refrigerator. She found pancake mix in the pantry and set a frying pan on the stove to heat.\n\nTaking a few apples from the bowl on the countertop, she washed them and chopped them into small pieces, then dropped them into a pan with a little water and set it to boil for applesauce. Turning her attention to the sausage links, she plopped the links into the frying pan to cook. She turned the sausages to brown them while she made pancakes.\n\nBy the time Edmund was sitting up and Fiona arrived fresh from the shower, Annja was placing the food on the dining table. She added fresh melon and grapes.\n\nFiona sat and arched an eyebrow. \"You're still in your clothing from yesterday. Did you sleep at all?\"\n\n\"No.\" Annja sat and dug into the meal. \"But I think I found the Tsai family.\"\n\nEdmund paused in the middle of forking pancakes onto his plate. \"Truly?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" As they ate, Annja told them the story of her discovery.\n\nAfter Annja had finished relating her tale, they were well into the meal.\n\n\"Are you planning on contacting the Li family and finding out if they are indeed the family we're looking for?\" Fiona carved a sausage link with a knife and fork, then popped a piece into her mouth and chewed.\n\n\"By phone?\" Annja shook her head. \"I don't think we could get the answers we need by doing this over the phone. I think we need to go there.\"\n\n\"Actually, I agree. This is something that will be best handled in person.\"\n\n\"Wait.\" Edmund held up his hands. \"You're seriously talking about just jetting over to Shanghai?\"\n\nFiona nodded.\n\n\"You do realize there are people looking for us?\"\n\n\"Not a thing we're likely to forget, given the nature of our arrival and all the trouble we got into yesterday.\"\n\nEdmund sighed in exasperation. \"How do you plan on getting out of Paris? Laframboise, and possibly Puyi-Jin, will know about your private jet by now. You can't just hop on that and take off.\"\n\n\"I wasn't planning to. In fact, after the debacle that occurred at the airport, I had the pilot take my jet back to London. I didn't want to risk Laframboise or Puyi-Jin targeting the jet just for spite. People could have gotten hurt because it might become a target.\" Fiona sipped her tea. \"I'm certain Georges can find us a way to Shanghai. He does business with that side of the world, as well.\"\n\nAnnja was ready to go. She didn't like the idea that Puyi-Jin might already be closing in on the family they hoped to see. \"How soon can we leave?\"\n\n\"Let me give Georges a ring, but I'm willing to bet we can leave fairly quickly.\" Fiona reached for her phone.\n\nGeorges reacted a lot more quickly than Annja could have imagined. Within an hour of getting Fiona's call, he had a flight available for them aboard a cargo jet that would be flying nonstop. They had to hurry to pack and get to the airport on time.\n\nGeorges drove them himself and talked with the flight crew to make sure everything was in order. He stood at the loading gate and talked with Fiona as the plane was prepped for departure.\n\n\"Everything will be in order for the customs people when you arrive in Shanghai.\" Georges handed Fiona a thick manila envelope. \"I've provided paperwork that will show all of you as consultants for an investments business that I'm associated with in Shanghai.\"\n\nFiona regarded him with interest. \"Doing a bit of piracy, are you?\"\n\nGeorges smiled. \"You've got a suspicious nature, Ms. Pioche.\"\n\n\"Only when I'm around suspicious people.\"\n\n\"Rest assured, the business I'm doing with these people will not reflect onto you. Your trip should be uneventful, and I'll keep hoping that you find whatever it is you're looking for.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Georges. You've been very kind.\"\n\nHe bowed slightly and kissed the back of Fiona's hand. \"Your presence always reinvigorates whatever poor kindness resides within me.\" He straightened. \"I do wish you'd have been able to stay longer. I would love to take you to dinner.\"\n\n\"I would have enjoyed that, as well, but that would be better at a time when someone isn't gunning for me.\"\n\n\"True.\"\n\n\"I'll see you again soon, Georges.\"\n\nStanding in the shade of the small warehouse, Georges waved them off.\n\nMechanically, dreading the eleven-hour flight ahead of them, Annja carried her baggage to the waiting cargo jet. Once aboard it, she discovered the passenger section was larger than she'd expected. She chose a seat against one of the windows, stowed her gear and settled into the chair.\n\nWithin minutes before takeoff, Annja was asleep.\n\nEleven and a half hours later, Annja woke to find Fiona shaking her gently by the shoulder. Annja looked up at the woman, realizing that the vibrations of the plane were caused by it taxiing. She got up from the seat in the back of the plane and started grabbing her gear. She slung her backpack over her shoulder.\n\n\"I can't believe I slept so long.\" Annja unplugged her sat-phone from the charger and tucked it into her pocket. Her computer was at capacity, as well.\n\n\"I think we all did.\" Fiona picked up her bag, but one of the flight crew came over and took it from her.\n\n\"No. Please. I was given very specific orders.\" The man smiled politely at her. Then he called over to another man.\n\nAnnja surrendered her carry-on, but she kept hold of her backpack. That never left her sight.\n\nEdmund still looked tired. \"I envy the two of you sleeping the way you do. I watched you do it, and I still can't believe it.\" He ran a hand through his hair. \"I've never been one to sleep on a plane, and this thing jumped and bounced nearly the whole way.\"\n\nFiona patted him on the shoulder. \"If all goes well, we'll be in a hotel tonight. Unless you wanted to stay there this morning.\"\n\n\"And leave you two to go off and figure out the secret that everyone is looking for?\" Edmund shook his head. \"That's not going to happen as long as I have a breath of air left in me.\" He fisted his bag and followed them out of the plane.\n\nAs Georges had promised, their passage through the China Inspection and Quarantine was relatively uneventful. There were a lot of passengers deplaning, though, and that took almost an hour. They had left Paris shortly before noon. With the eleven-hour flight and the time change between countries, they had landed at Shanghai Pudong International Airport at 5:40 a.m. It was now almost seven, but still too early to go calling on the Li family. There was still over an hour of travel time to reach Nanqiao Town.\n\nOnce they had cleared customs, Fiona led the way to the Avis car rental area and surprised Annja by speaking fluent Chinese.\n\n\"You can speak Mandarin?\"\n\nFiona nodded. \"I can speak it, but I can't read it. I came here a number of times with Roux. There were all kinds of interesting things we found while we were in this country.\"\n\nAnnja recalled the jade ogre Roux and Garin had destroyed when they had been at the Loulan City dig. China was thousands of years old, and the country jealously held on to its secrets because there had been so much turmoil, and because the emperors hadn't shared their knowledge. So much of it had been lost.\n\n\"I didn't think you could rent a car here. The last time I tried, I was told I had to have a Chinese driver's license and that it took about three weeks to get one.\"\n\n\"I have a Chinese driver's license.\" Fiona took the document from the small handbag she carried. \"And it's up-to-date. As I said, I've been here a number of times, and I still have business that brings me here on occasion. Having a license is just smart.\"\n\nSilently, Annja agreed. Otherwise, they would have been stuck with public transport or have to hire a driver. They would have been more or less stranded on foot or forced to give up part of their privacy.\n\n\"You're amazing.\"\n\n\"I've had an amazing life. As I'm sure you're going to have. The trick is to always manage to survive such a life.\"\n\nAfter the car was promised within the hour, which Fiona said would be more like two hours, she took them to the Canglang Ting restaurant, which was already open and business was booming. The scent of the spices and herbs made Annja's stomach growl. They sat and ate in relative silence, putting away an enormous amount of noodles and rice cakes.\n\nWhen they finally pushed away from the table, Edmund sighed in discomfort. \"I'll never be hungry again.\"\n\nAt the car rental agency, they picked up a gray Volkswagen Passat. Fiona drove them to the nearby Ramada Pudong Airport Hotel. Inside, Fiona walked directly to the Executive Lounge desk and the well-dressed man there greeted her by name.\n\n\"Not the best hotel we could stay at, but certainly the most convenient. And I don't expect our stay will be long.\" Fiona booked them into rooms.\n\nA few moments later, they all had keys and agreed to meet back in the abbreviated lobby in twenty minutes.\n\nAnnja arrived first, five minutes early, freshly showered and in a change of clothes. She'd thrown her bag onto the bed but she'd kept her backpack. Seated on one of the chairs in the lobby, she pulled up a map site and plotted their route from the airport to the Li family flower shop.\n\n\"You know, the car does come equipped with GPS navigation.\"\n\nAnnja glanced up. Fiona stood just behind her. The woman wore business casual, dressy enough to ensure respect, but not so much that it would intimidate a small business owner.\n\n\"I know, but I'd rather know my way around when I can.\"\n\nFiona nodded. \"I'm the same. I had Ollie upload street maps to my phone so I'll be able to navigate with that if I need to. You'll also find them in your phone now, as well.\"\n\n\"I didn't think about that. Everybody needs an Ollie.\"\n\n\"Maybe one day you'll have one.\"\n\nEdmund arrived only a few minutes later and apologized for his tardiness. Then they headed for the car."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 37",
                "text": "Li Shusen's Beautiful Moon Petals flower shop wasn't far from Guhua Park. From the passenger seat of the rental car, Annja looked out over the trees and waterways. Though she could barely see them as they passed, several red and white temples with peaked roofs sat at the ends of paved walkways or stood on stilts. The whole area looked quiet and serene, and part of her wished they were headed there instead.\n\nFiona guided the car through the morning traffic into one of the business districts. Fiona swore on several occasions as bicyclists shot out in front of her and she had to swerve to avoid them.\n\nSeveral of the bicyclists carried farm produce for the morning markets, and some of them even had crates of chickens on the backs of their bikes. Annja heard the strident din of traffic chaos even through the closed windows and limited soundproofing.\n\nA few minutes later, Fiona pulled onto Renmin Road and took it to their destination. Trees and single-story shops lined the street. Shoppers and tourists were already out in full force. Unlike in the United States, where strip malls and shopping areas tended to be uniform, Nanqiao Town was a mix of old and new.\n\nMiraculously, a block from the flower shop, a delivery van pulled out and left a vacant spot. Amid the shrill squeal of brakes and the blare of car horns, Fiona claimed the space at once.\n\nIn the backseat, Edmund sighed. \"My God, I thought we were about to die.\"\n\n\"We had closer calls in Paris.\" Fiona checked her hair in the mirror. \"I had everything under control.\" She opened the glove compartment and took out a sleek Walther PPK. \"I could only arrange the one, I'm afraid.\" She tucked it into her small handbag. \"I notice you don't carry a purse, Annja.\"\n\n\"Not if I can help it.\"\n\n\"Of course, having a sword you can pull out of thin air trumps a handbag.\"\n\nAnnja smiled. \"It does.\" She got out of the car, backpack over her shoulder, and retrieved the case holding the dragon lantern from the trunk.\n\nEdmund watched, clearly torn.\n\nAnnja held up the case. \"Having second thoughts?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"No second thoughts. Regrets, yes. That lantern belonged to Anton Dutilleaux, and it would have been a coup in my collection.\"\n\n\"I'm told the worst thing that can ever happen to a collector is to have everything he wants.\"\n\n\"I don't subscribe to that particular line of logic.\"\n\nAnnja laughed. \"Totally understandable.\"\n\n\"All right. If I'm to give up that lantern, which I've owned for too short a time, I can only hope we'll get some answers about Anton Dutilleaux.\"\n\nA small Asian man swept the walkway in front of Beautiful Moon Petals. He worked in swift, economical movements. He was thin and bald, perhaps in his forties, and neatly dressed in black pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He noticed Annja and the others, but he only nodded until he saw that they were headed straight for him.\n\nThen he rolled down his sleeves and reached for the black jacket hanging on the handle of the open door. He pulled it on and smiled.\n\n\"Good morning.\" The man waved to the baskets of flowers lining the table behind him. \"Would you like some flowers? Very pretty. Smell very nice.\"\n\nAnnja had to agree that they did smell good. \"Mr. Li?\" she asked.\n\nA troubled look stole over the man's face. \"I am Mr. Li.\"\n\n\"My name is Annja Creed.\"\n\nLi looked uncertainly at the three of them.\n\n\"This is Fiona Pioche and Edmund Beswick. Friends of mine.\"\n\n\"I see. You are not here to buy flowers.\" Li sagged a little. \"You need directions?\"\n\n\"Is your wife here?\"\n\nLi hesitated for a moment. \"In shop, yes. Working very hard. We have many orders to fill. Very busy time right now.\"\n\n\"We'd like to see her if we could.\"\n\nLi shook his head. \"My wife not know you. If she know you, I know you. I not know you.\"\n\n\"Mr. Li, we came here today hoping to return something to her. And to get some answers.\" Annja opened the case and revealed the lantern to the shopkeeper.\n\nLi's face darkened and Annja knew she had his full attention. \"Is this Tsai Chien-Fu's lantern?\" he asked.\n\n\"We think so. We've traveled a long way to find out.\"\n\nNodding, Li motioned them into the shop. \"Come. Come. We talk to my wife.\"\n\nLi shut the door after they entered, hung up a Closed sign and drew the drapes. He cleared a space on the wooden counter beside the big, old-fashioned cash register.\n\n\"Please. Put lantern here. I will go get my wife.\" He turned and disappeared into the back of the shop, through a heavy curtain.\n\nAnnja shivered. She'd learned that having someone she had just met vanish wasn't always a good thing. On several occasions those people came back with weapons they were eager to use. She reached for the sword, brushing it with her fingertips.\n\n\"Easy.\" Fiona's voice was quiet and reassuring at her side. \"He's only telling his wife about the lantern. She's excited, but she doesn't believe it.\"\n\nEdmund fidgeted. \"Frankly, neither would I. Family heirlooms usually don't reappear two hundred years after they went missing.\"\n\nA moment later, Li returned with a tiny woman about his age. She wore a black dress and had her hair in a bun. The couple talked hurriedly, and the woman kept touching the dragon's face on the lantern as if to make sure it was truly there.\n\nFinally, Li focused on Annja. \"This is my wife, Xiaoming. She is very pleased to meet you, and she wants to know if you have eaten.\"\n\n\"Ni chi le ma\" or \"Have you eaten\" was one of the standard greetings in many provinces in China.\n\n\"We have just come from breakfast. Thank you.\"\n\nLi translated for his wife. \"She has very little English.\"\n\nThat bothered Annja because it was the woman's family that had been entwined with Dutilleaux.\n\n\"She wants to know how you find lantern.\" Li licked his lips hesitantly. \"And I want to know why you brought it here.\"\n\nSeated on the couple's red couch behind the shop in the living room, with the Chinese husband and wife in small chairs across from them, Annja told the story. Li translated for his wife and had to stop only at a few points to clarify a word or a phrase. Fiona hadn't offered to translate, but the woman probably thought keeping her knowledge of the language to herself might prove beneficial.\n\nPerhaps it was, because the Li's seemed to be involved in an argument.\n\nXiaoming's husband shook his head. She glared at him balefully, but he refused to budge.\n\nAnd then Fiona said something in Mandarin.\n\nXiaoming looked shocked, then happy, and addressed Fiona with renewed excitement. Li got up and walked away in apparent disgust.\n\nAfter the exchange went on for a time, Xiaoming left the room.\n\n\"What was that about?\" Annja asked Fiona.\n\n\"Mr. Li doesn't believe his wife should tell us anything. We are gweilo. White people. Outsiders. He's afraid we are here to do something bad, and that having anything to do with us will only bring bad luck to them.\"\n\nEdmund snorted. \"Explain to Mr. Li that we are the least of his worries, that he could have been found by someone a lot less friendly than we are.\"\n\n\"I don't want to bring that up if we don't need to. I'd rather communicate on a need-to-know basis.\"\n\nAnnja nodded. \"We're the outsiders here, and these people didn't ask for any of this.\"\n\nAfter a few minutes, Xiaoming returned carrying a small lacquered chest. As she spoke, Fiona translated for her.\n\n\"My family has carried the story of the dragon lantern and the Frenchman named Anton Dutilleaux for many generations. My ancestor, Tsai Chien-Fu, was a low-ranking administrator at one of the Qianlong Emperor's banks and worked with the Europeans and Americans. He became great friends with Mr. Dutilleaux because the Frenchman was a magician.\n\n\"One day, Tsai Chien-Fu told Mr. Dutilleaux that he would like to disappear from Shanghai. My ancestor's life here was very hard and he was a young man. After hearing stories of France, he believed he could make a better life for his family in Paris.\n\n\"My ancestor and Mr. Dutilleaux made a pact. They would raise money to move the family that wished to come. It was a very big thing they planned to do. Almost an impossible thing.\"\n\nAnnja thought of how dangerous it would have been to try to take a family so far to unknown lands\u2014without aid of modern technology.\n\n\"Together, Tsai Chien-Fu and Mr. Dutilleaux invested in shipping. They made money. They were very good at what they did, and they were motivated. Mr. Dutilleaux had dreams of becoming a performing magician in Paris.\n\n\"They traded the money they made into pearls and gems, always saving and saving, always dreaming of the future. They put the savings into the dragon lantern that my ancestor got from his mother as a wedding gift. When the day came that they filled the lantern and it could hold no more, they decided Mr. Dutilleaux would return to Paris and prepare a home and send for Tsai Chien-Fu.\"\n\nEdmund couldn't wait. \"Did Anton Dutilleaux steal from your ancestor?\"\n\nSurprised when the question was translated, Xiaoming hurriedly shook her head. \"No. Mr. Dutilleaux was a very honorable man. They were good friends. Mr. Dutilleaux was in love with my ancestor's sister.\" The woman grimaced. \"It was that bad luck caught up with them. My ancestor was not a greedy man. You must understand this. He was just desperate. And he wasn't dreaming for himself. He was dreaming for his whole family. A large family. A very large dream.\"\n\nFor a moment, the room was silent. They waited patiently for the woman to resume the story, and Annja feared for the worst.\n\n\"In his desperation, my ancestor made a mistake. A terrible mistake.\" Xiaoming looked miserable and her eyes were wet with unshed tears. \"This story I tell you now, it is not one my family likes to share. We have told no one.\"\n\n\"I understand, Mrs. Li. But this lantern has drawn the attention of several bad men.\" Annja kept her voice soft. \"And if we do not solve this mystery, those men may one day show up here.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 38",
                "text": "For a long moment, the woman made no reply. Annja knew no amount of pushing would make the woman decide any faster. Trusting someone was always a big decision, and she'd known them for only a few minutes.\n\nXiaoming glanced at the mantel to pictures of what might've been a daughter. In the photographs, the girl aged from a baby to a teenager. The woman shook her head. \"We were not blessed with a boy. My husband works very hard, but he knows that he has no son to give this shop to. There is no one to care for us in our old age. The day will come when our daughter will marry and she will go live with her husband's family. But I do not want my daughter harmed.\"\n\n\"We're going to keep this away from you. If we can... Please.\"\n\nXiaoming sipped her tea. \"Tsai Chien-Fu took something of the Qianlong Emperor. He should not have done this, but he was desperate. He knew, that were he to be caught, his life would be forfeit. But he wanted to ensure his family's survival.\"\n\n\"Do you know what Tsai Chien-Fu took?\"\n\n\"The Qianlong Emperor was a writer and an artist. Did you know this?\"\n\nAnnja nodded. \"Over forty thousand poems and more than a thousand texts.\"\n\n\"Yes. And the Qianlong Emperor also added calligraphy to paintings and other works of art. In the bank where Tsai Chien-Fu worked, there was a royal seal. The Qianlong Emperor's seal.\"\n\n\"Your ancestor took the seal?\"\n\n\"That, and some jade figurines the Qianlong Emperor himself had carved to be hung in a museum. Tsai Chien-Fu didn't know the figurines or the seal belonged to the Qianlong Emperor at the time he took them. They were only things. There was no name associated with them. He took them from the bank manager's office and thought they belonged to that man, who he had cause to dishonor. The bank manager was a very evil man.\"\n\n\"Why did Tsai Chien-Fu take those things?\"\n\n\"Because Dutilleaux told him the Europeans sought out Chinese art. He thought they could sell those, as well. Besides, they fit in the lantern.\" Xiaoming gazed at the lantern on the small coffee table. \"That lantern.\"\n\nEdmund studied it. \"Even if that were filled with pearls, would the amount really be worth so much now?\"\n\nAnnja laced her fingers together. \"You don't know much about antiquities, do you?\"\n\n\"If they don't relate to magic, no.\"\n\n\"A royal seal that belonged to the Qianlong Emperor recently sold for over twelve million dollars.\"\n\nEdmund's eyes widened. \"Oh. My.\"\n\n\"Couple that with the jade figurines, which can also be tied to the Qianlong Emperor, and you can plan on the contents of that lantern being worth several millions more.\"\n\n\"But what happened to those contents?\"\n\nFiona translated the question to Xiaoming.\n\n\"While my ancestor awaited word from Mr. Dutilleaux, the theft was discovered. The bank manager was going to be executed. Tsai Chien-Fu stepped forward and informed the Qianlong Emperor's guards that he was the thief.\" Xiaoming's expression hardened. \"At first Tsai Chien-Fu would not tell of his partnership with Mr. Dutilleaux, but he was tortured. My ancestor was beheaded for his crimes, as was the bank manager for allowing the theft.\"\n\nEdmund sat enraptured, his elbows resting on his thighs. \"And Dutilleaux had already left for Paris.\"\n\nXiaoming nodded. \"They never found the things Tsai Chien-Fu stole. The guards killed him too quickly. In turn, for their failure, they were killed. My ancestor's immediate family was fortunate to survive. After that, their lives were very hard.\" She sat a lacquered chest on the table. \"Weeks after Tsai Chien-Fu's death, a package arrived from Mr. Dutilleaux. This package. And there was a letter describing the contents of this chest.\"\n\nEdmund looked hopeful. \"Do you still have the letter?\"\n\n\"No. It was destroyed as dangerous. But in the letter, Mr. Dutilleaux wanted to show his good faith to Tsai Chien-Fu. He said that the items in this chest would show him the hiding place he had found for their futures.\"\n\nAfter unlatching the chest, Xiaoming opened the top to reveal three glass lenses sitting on rice pillows. Inscriptions in different colors stood out against the glass.\n\nThere was a moment of silence as they all stared.\n\nAnnja gestured to the lenses. \"May I?\"\n\n\"Please. I would like answers as much as you would.\"\n\nAnnja studied the first lens. The glass was uneven, proof that it had been hand ground, shaped and polished. The lines painted on the lens made no sense, though. They weren't any kind of symbols that Annja recognized as language or a glyph.\n\n\"Do you have a candle I can borrow?\"\n\nXiaoming got up and quickly fetched a candle and a lighter.\n\nAnnja lit the candle and placed it inside the lantern. When she closed the lantern, a spray of light erupted from the dragon's mouth and threw an oval of light onto the wall behind the couch. They all shifted so they could see it.\n\nThe lenses only fit into the dragon's mouth one way, as Annja had expected. She popped them in one at a time. The first lens projected a pile of skulls with red serpents running through them.\n\n\"This looks like one of the images Dutilleaux might have used in his phantasmagoria show.\"\n\n\"It has to be more than that,\" Fiona said. \"Why would he send a phantasmagoria image to Tsai Chien-Fu?\"\n\nThe second lens projected a moldering corpse with the bones showing through the skin. And more red snakes.\n\nXiaoming spoke up and Fiona translated. \"When my ancestor's family first received the lenses, they almost threw them away, thinking they were the work of a demon.\"\n\nAnnja removed the second lens and inserted the remaining one. A black-cloaked figure pulled a skeleton from an open grave. More red snakes.\n\n\"Well, that's macabre.\" Fiona tapped her chin with a forefinger. \"But I fail to see what point Dutilleaux was trying to make.\"\n\nAnnja cycled through the images again, then again. \"They all focus on death.\"\n\n\"Morbid, but it hardly gives us a direction.\"\n\n\"I think it does. We know he hid the treasure in Paris. And there's one place Dutilleaux knew intimately that focuses on death, skeletons and bodies being removed from their graves.\"\n\n\"The catacombs,\" Edmund whispered.\n\n\"Where he was killed.\" Annja nodded. \"I don't think Dutilleaux went far from the wealth he and Tsai Chien-Fu collected.\"\n\n\"People have been searching that chamber where Dutilleaux was killed for years.\" Edmund shook his head. \"The story about the curse and the possible treasure brought out all the fortune hunters. If anything was there, it would have been found.\"\n\n\"Yet no one ever admitted to finding anything.\"\n\n\"Perhaps the treasure had been lost in one venture or another.\"\n\n\"And it may still be there waiting. You and Xiaoming both believe Anton Dutilleaux was a good man, Edmund. Do you think he was the kind of man to steal from his partner?\"\n\n\"I want to believe in Dutilleaux, Annja. But this was over two hundred years ago. Whatever was there is surely lost.\"\n\nActing on impulse, Annja placed two of the lenses in the dragon's mouth.\n\nThe images created a confused jumble on the wall, and the red snakes ran rampant.\n\nCarefully, Annja adjusted the lenses, gently turning them in the dragon's mouth until they overlapped each other. Then, slowly, the snakes lined up and made longer snakes.\n\nAnnja picked up the third lens and fitted it into place. Again, she twisted and adjusted. The glass ground and squeaked against the groove. Then, after a moment, the red snakes on the third lens lined up with the others and made a solid line.\n\n\"It's a map.\" Edmund's voice was a croak.\n\nAnnja nodded. \"It is a map. Probably through the catacombs, and hopefully to where Dutilleaux left the treasure he and Tsai Chien-Fu collected.\"\n\n\"But there are nearly two hundred miles of tunnels and rooms beneath Paris.\" Edmund shook his head. \"You're still looking for a needle in a haystack.\"\n\n\"Dutilleaux was killed in 1793, right?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"The catacombs would have been smaller then. The work of moving the bodies didn't start until 1786 and continued until 1814. I think we can start at the beginning\u2014Place Denfert-Rochereau, which was called the Barri\u00e8re d'Enfer when Dutilleaux was alive. I can match this up to a map and see what we have.\"\n\nWalking over to the wall, Annja examined an interlocking image on one side. Lines from at least two of the lenses came together there and formed the barest outline of a gate.\n\nFiona joined her. \"That is your starting point, you think?\"\n\n\"The Barri\u00e8re d'Enfer remains the main entrance to the catacombs. It was located inside the old Wall of the Farmers-General. The wall was originally built to keep merchants from evading taxes, and they called it the Barri\u00e8re d'Enfer.\"\n\n\"The barrier of hell.\" Fiona smiled. \"I imagine merchants didn't think highly of the tax collectors.\"\n\n\"And once the catacombs opened up, the name took on a whole new connotation.\" Annja tapped the gate. \"That could be the marker for the wall.\"\n\n\"If this is a true map, then there has to be a legend. In order to follow the route, you have to have a reference, a scale to estimate the distance.\"\n\nAnnja searched the combined image projected on the wall. Fiona was right. Dutilleaux wouldn't have made the map without a key.\n\nXiaoming came close and studied the image, as well. She spoke briefly with Fiona. Judging from the intonation, it was a question. Fiona replied and gestured with her hands, showing different sizes. The woman peered more closely, then pointed to something.\n\n\"This one.\" Her English was heavily accented, but she got her point across. \"One equals eighty-eight.\" Her finger indicated three characters.\n\nAnnja didn't recognize either one of them. One of the characters was a single vertical line, which might have represented the number one, the next looked like the Roman numeral III only with the right crossbar missing and turned on its side. The second number was next to the same symbol, sitting upright to the III with the lower crossbar missing.\n\n\"What is that?\"\n\nUnderstanding the question, Xiaoming spoke to Fiona, making her grin.\n\n\"That is your key. We were looking for numbers written in English. These are written in Chinese. Very old Chinese, actually. Suzhou numerals.\"\n\nAnnja closed her eyes. \"Missed that. The Suzhou numerals were also called the huama system. It was used in the Chinese markets before Arabic numbers replaced them.\"\n\nEdmund shook his head. \"Maybe you've heard of it, but I haven't.\"\n\n\"The Suzhou numerals were based on the rod numeral system involving horizontal and vertical strokes. There were two different styles, the traditional and the Southern Song. The Southern Song replaced symbols for the numerals four, five and nine to reduce the number of strokes necessary to make the symbol. Like changing the symbol for the number four from four vertical or horizontal strokes, depending on which way you were writing on the paper, to an X. That was quicker and more efficient.\"\n\n\"Eighty-eight seems like a strange number to use as a base.\"\n\nAnnja traced her finger over the combined lines, following the path along and counting marked divisions that showed in the changes of snake scales. \"The number eight is considered a lucky number. It sounds like the Mandarin word for prosper. Same in Cantonese. The Summer Olympics in Beijing started on August 8 in 2008, at eight minutes after 8:00 p.m., just for that reason.\"\n\nAnnja followed the winding trail to its final destination. There was no marking, just the end. \"And if we can follow this correctly, if Anton Dutilleaux's hiding place has been left undisturbed, we'll find the treasure.\"\n\nFiona already had her phone out. \"I'll have Ollie get us back to Paris.\"\n\nAnnja stepped back from the map again and took in the bigger image. Excitedly, she realized they were in the final stages of the hunt.\n\n\"You're smiling pretty big there, Annja Creed.\"\n\nSelf-consciously, Annja turned to Edmund. He was smiling, too. \"This is magic to me. Tracking something down through history, finding stories that were thought forgotten. This is what I live for.\"\n\n\"I see that.\" Edmund glanced back at the image projected through the dragon's mouth. \"Do you think it's still there?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I hope so. We'll see soon enough.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 39",
                "text": "Sixteen hours later, jet-lagged this trip, Annja got out of the SUV in an alley not far from the public entrances to the catacombs. She wore black and wore a black watch cap to keep her hair out of sight.\n\nSimilarly dressed, Fiona walked at her side. Edmund brought up the rear but did so reluctantly.\n\nThey'd landed in Paris at 7:00 p.m. and decided to wait till after midnight to begin their search of the catacombs. Georges had equipped them with urban exploration gear\u2014primarily flashlights, gloves and durable clothing\u2014and small-arms weapons.\n\nSo far, there had been no news about Jean-Baptiste Laframboise.\n\nAnnja led the way down the narrow alley and flicked her flashlight beam around. Cats and rodents exploded out of the shadows and disappeared. The pervasive smell of rot formed a thick miasma in the alley, pouring off the garbage bins.\n\nEdmund flicked his beam around, as well. \"What are you looking for?\"\n\n\"Markings on the wall. They'll show us the way into the catacombs.\"\n\n\"I thought we were going to enter through Place Denfert-Rochereau.\"\n\n\"It's locked up this time of night, and we're going to be wandering off the tourist routes. Exploring the catacombs on your own isn't legal. If we get caught, we'll be arrested by the catacombs police, the cataflics.\"\n\n\"Great. Probably not a good idea to explore at night, either.\"\n\nFiona patted Edmund on the shoulder. \"During high noon, the catacombs will still be dark, Professor.\"\n\n\"Still...I'd feel better if we were underground during the day.\"\n\nAnnja spotted the markings she was looking for in a space behind a bakery. Urban explorers were obsessed with the vast underground and had developed symbols to help their fellow explorers. Annja had been down in the catacombs before and was acquainted with some of it, but she'd spent some time on Skype with a few people she'd explored with before to bring her up to date. They'd given her this location.\n\nThere wasn't much room behind the bakery, but a manhole cover gleamed under her flashlight beam. She checked around and found a brick with more markings. She removed the brick and took out a crowbar that fit into the manhole slot. Working carefully, she pulled the manhole up and placed the heavy cover aside.\n\n\"Those markings told you the crowbar would be there?\" Edmund held the flashlight on the wall as Annja returned the tool and replaced the brick.\n\n\"Yes. They're left there by cataphiles.\" Annja aimed her flashlight beam down into the manhole. \"Urban explorers whose focus is the catacombs.\"\n\n\"How do you know about them?\"\n\nAnnja grinned up at Edmund as she climbed into the manhole. \"This isn't my first trip down here.\"\n\nAnnja shifted her flashlight, gripped the iron rungs mounted on the wall and started down into the waiting darkness. Climbing into the catacombs was frightening, but she relished the adrenaline spike.\n\nJean-baptiste Laframboise knelt in the shadows across from the alley where Annja Creed and her companions descended into the underground labyrinth. He watched them through the lenses of night-vision binoculars. Campra, in black Kevlar hung with weapons, knelt next to him.\n\n\"Have you ever been in the catacombs before, Gilbert?\"\n\nCampra shifted slightly. \"No.\"\n\n\"I don't care for it very much. I may be a touch more claustrophobic than I care to admit.\"\n\n\"I've been underground before,\" Campra said in a monotone. \"Out in Africa and the Middle East, a lot of people use catacombs for defense, storage, shelter from the heat...and to bury their dead.\"\n\nLaframboise checked his watch after the professor was the last to disappear. Someone reached back up and replaced the cover. \"We'll give them a five-minute head start.\"\n\n\"They can cover quite a distance in five minutes. They've already been to Shanghai and back in the past twenty-four hours.\"\n\nThat was true. In fact, they'd gotten lucky catching Annja Creed and her companions coming back into the country. Laframboise's people had been watching for the group to try to leave Paris, not return.\n\nCampra shifted again. \"Do you think Creed has solved the riddle of that lantern?\"\n\n\"Why go down into the catacombs otherwise?\" Laframboise glanced over his shoulder at the man. \"Are you certain your device will work underground?\"\n\n\"I've used the tracking chips under similar circumstances.\" Campra held up the small computer-tablet-size device. \"As long as we stay within a quarter klick of our target, I can find them.\"\n\nWhen they'd first captured Professor Edmund Beswick, Campra had insisted on injecting the man with a subcutaneous RFID tracking chip in the event that he escaped. The insertion wound hadn't been any more noticeable than any of the other damage the man had suffered in London.\n\nLaframboise checked his watch again. \"All right. Let's go.\" He led the way across the street. Campra and the other men followed after him. He was excited about the thought of learning what secrets the lantern hid, what the hope was that Magdelaine de Brosses had talked about, but he kept remembering how the fortune-teller had promised him that the lantern would be his death.\n\nBut his greed drew him on.\n\nAs always, the orderly stacks of corpses on either side of the catacombs inspired Annja with dread and awe. She played her flashlight beam over the wall of yellowed bones. Leg and arm bones lay neatly stacked. Skulls with missing teeth and missing lower jaws sat on top of the walls or were interspersed among the other bones. Given the neat order to the bones, it was almost possible to forget that the bones had at one time belonged to six million people. They seemed like something artificial, like a movie set.\n\n\"Oh, my,\" Edmund said softly into the emptiness.\n\nAnnja turned her beam onto the wall nearest Edmund, deliberately not shining the light on him. \"Are you okay?\"\n\n\"I will be. This is all...just a bit much.\"\n\n\"On several levels. On one hand, these are the remains of a lot of people. On the other, a lot of work went into bringing them here.\" Annja started forward, her voice echoing eerily around them. \"Legend has it the priests worked at night so no one would see them disinterring and transferring the dead. The priests supposedly sang the burial service while transporting the bones.\" She smiled at Edmund's discomfiture. \"Must have been a sight.\"\n\n\"Okay, that's enough.\" Fiona stepped between them. \"After everything I've seen, I don't blanch easily, but I've only been down here once before, and I promised myself I'd never come again.\"\n\nAnnja grinned and continued down the tunnel. She had the map in her head. During the flight back from Shanghai, she'd studied what she knew of the catacombs and what she could pull up on the internet and through various urban-explorer sites. Some of the people she'd been in contact with had been very helpful.\n\nCertain parts of the map Anton Dutilleaux had left on the lenses weren't on anyone's maps, though. That had been expected. There were a lot of areas in the catacombs that were still being discovered\u2014rediscovered.\n\n\"Were these tunnels always under Paris?\" Edmund flicked his light around the wall of bones nearest him. \"Some kind of natural system?\"\n\n\"No. This is where the stone was quarried that was used to build the city. The construction crews found natural veins of gypsum and plaster.\" Annja kept moving forward, halted at an intersection and chose the left fork. The dark pressed in at her, barely kept at bay by the flashlight.\n\n\"Why did they dig under the city?\"\n\n\"The mines were dug in the fourteenth century. Most of them at the time were open-air pits that allowed the workers to haul rock up out of the earth. But the stratification was deep. It made more sense to dig into the side of a hill and empty out all the rock through an underground mine. For the next five hundred years, Paris kept growing, until it finally grew over the mines.\"\n\n\"It's a wonder the tunnels didn't collapse.\"\n\n\"They did.\" Annja turned left at the next turn. Her flashlight beam skated over a wall covered with graffiti, probably kids who came down into the catacombs on a dare, judging by the content. \"Sometimes they still do. Erosion is a problem.\"\n\n\"Lovely thought.\" Edmund's voice was tight.\n\n\"Sometimes whole buildings have dropped into the mines.\"\n\n\"We climbed down, what? Forty, fifty feet?\"\n\n\"At least. But there hasn't been a cave-in for a long time.\"\n\n\"So once they finished taking all the stone out, the city administrators decided that it would be easier to transfer skeletons here to reclaim the land as the city grew?\"\n\n\"Reclaiming the land was only part of it. Paris, like London, had grown fast. Buildings sprang up almost overnight. The growing population also aged. Bodies had to go somewhere. While it's true that the graveyards filled up quickly, and funerals were using the same casket over and over again, space wasn't the most important issue. Buried bodies were decomposing, and the various body matters were returning to the soil. Paris depended heavily on well water. The water table is quite close to the surface. The upside was that wells were easy to dig. However, the downside was that the water table often flowed through the cemeteries.\"\n\nOut of the corner of her eye, Annja saw Edmund flinch.\n\n\"The resulting sickness from the bad water triggered the removal of the bodies.\" Annja couldn't help smiling. \"I guess that kind of lends a whole new meaning to urban decay.\"\n\nEdmund sighed. \"All right, I am grossed out quite enough, thank you.\" He paused. \"I don't know why anyone would want to come down here.\"\n\n\"Same reason Anton Dutilleaux drew crowds down to watch his phantasmagoria. For the atmosphere. And the illegality of the adventure.\" Annja hesitated for just a moment at the next intersection and checked her sat-phone. She no longer had a signal, but she'd uploaded maps into the device's memory. \"One of the caverns down here was even set up as a movie theater.\"\n\n\"You're not serious.\"\n\n\"I am. The police discovered it in 2004. The operation was set up by La Mexicaine De Perforation, the Mexican Consolidated Drilling Authority. It's just another name for a group of cataphiles, a splinter off the UX.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"Urban Experiment. La Mexicaine De Perforation is dedicated to delivering clandestine artistic events. They had a movie screen, a bar and a kitchen down here.\"\n\nAnnja continued. \"After the police came back for a more in-depth investigation, all the equipment had vanished.\"\n\n\"Vanished.\"\n\n\"Like magic. There were whispers that the whole thing was run by ghosts. Rumors get out of hand pretty quickly.\"\n\nFiona snorted. \"Children. All for the momentary thrill of being afraid of the dark.\"\n\n\"A lot of criminals have used the place, too.\" Fiona flicked her beam across a section of graffiti. \"Marijuana growers, mushroom growers, any number of drug dealers...\"\n\nEdmund cleared his throat. \"I suppose there's a chance of bumping into them, too?\"\n\nAnnja turned another corner and was surprised by the steep descent in front of them. The map hadn't indicated that. She headed down thirty yards, measuring the distance by counting her strides. If it became necessary, she had a Leica DISTO D2 laser distance meter to measure spans. So far the way had been easy to follow.\n\nA moment later, her flashlight beam revealed the calm surface of a gray-green pool of water that blocked the tunnel mouth."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 40",
                "text": "\"What's wrong?\" Edmund pressed into Annja, adding his flashlight beam to hers.\n\n\"The tunnel's flooded ahead.\" Annja moved her beam around, looking for intersecting tunnels that might offer another route.\n\nFiona stepped up and did the same. \"The walls look solid. It doesn't appear to be a cave-in.\"\n\n\"No. Probably caused by the rising water table. Groundwater levels reroute themselves occasionally.\" Annja took out her sat-phone and opened the file she had that contained the catacombs maps.\n\n\"So the adventure ends here?\" Edmund stuck a foot into the water.\n\n\"Not necessarily.\" Annja slipped off her backpack and set it on the stone floor. She opened it and withdrew a scuba mask and small oxygen tank. There was also a pair of swim fins. \"I knew some of the tunnels in the catacombs were flooded. I thought maybe we'd encounter them. So I came prepared.\"\n\nFiona shook her head. \"Surely you're not planning on going down there.\"\n\n\"I am now.\" Annja tied her hair back and pulled on the scuba mask. She took out the yellow-and-black canister of Spare Air. The small tank was a little over a foot long and about two and a half inches in diameter. She slid into a harness and attached the tank over her shoulder.\n\nFiona looked worried. \"That can't hold much air.\"\n\nAnnja smiled. \"You've never used one of these?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"They come with the equivalent of fifty-seven breaths. Three or four minutes if you space it out, and you can't deep dive because you'll use the air up faster. Enough for a little exploring.\"\n\n\"Enough to get you into serious trouble, you mean.\"\n\n\"That's why I brought spares.\" Annja reached into her backpack and took out another cylinder. She'd left her computer and cameras in the car to make room for the gear. The foray into the catacombs was about exploration, not documentation. \"Georges was able to get me a half-dozen tanks. Should be more than enough to get through this.\" She attached a second tank. \"They transfer quickly. If the dive is longer than that, we'll come back with proper scuba gear.\"\n\nEdmund gaped at her. \"You expect to descend into those stygian depths, search for a way through that tunnel and keep track of how many breaths you take?\"\n\n\"Actually, I figure if I run out of air in the first cylinder, I'll switch over to the second and head back. Kind of keeps things simple, don't you think?\"\n\n\"I think you're barking mad to even consider diving into that.\" Edmund flushed deeply enough to be seen even by the secondhand glow from the flashlights. \"No offense.\"\n\n\"As I recall, I had to watch you do the whole water torture chamber thing.\"\n\n\"That was staged.\"\n\n\"I know what I'm doing, Edmund. If I didn't think I could do this, I wouldn't.\"\n\nFiona snorted. \"I don't think you're in any way close to a litmus test for safe precautions.\"\n\n\"I can do this.\" Annja strapped a long knife to her right shin, tested the grip the holster had on it and stood.\n\nFiona grimaced. \"Before you do that, we could look around. There could be another tunnel that intersects this one past this point.\"\n\n\"That would take time and we could get lost.\"\n\n\"Annja, that whole tunnel could be flooded.\"\n\n\"If it is, we'll come back prepared for that.\"\n\nFiona sighed in resignation. \"Show me how to use one of those. In case I have to come after you.\"\n\n\"You've used a scuba?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"These aren't much different.\" Annja went through the procedure, showing both of them. Then she strapped on the swim fins. \"I'll be back in minutes.\" She turned and stepped into the pool.\n\nThe cold water quickly rose to her ankles, then to her knees and thighs and hips. The tunnel took a severe incline down, but she didn't feel any debris that would suggest there had been a collapse. The flashlight was waterproof and remained on, but the viscosity of the pool dampened the beam so that it only illuminated up to a few feet. She wouldn't be able to see much underwater.\n\nA few steps farther on, the water came up to her chin and the tunnel roof angled down to meet the pool. She filled her lungs with air, then clenched the Spare Air mouthpiece between her teeth and dove.\n\nWith the night-vision goggles in place, the catacombs stood revealed in multiple shades of green to Jean-Baptiste Laframboise. The flashlights held by the two people ahead of him churned his vision with too much brightness when he rounded the corner, though, and he had to raise his goggles.\n\nCampra was at his side, their men behind. Laframboise looked at Campra in the darkness, and the man nodded and raised his machine pistol. Moving carefully, Campra went ahead.\n\nLaframboise trailed after the man. They wore Kevlar vests from neck to knees, and Kevlar military helmets.\n\nIn the pool of water, the flashlight Annja Creed had carried with her dimmed and grew steadily smaller.\n\nFor a moment, Laframboise wondered if they should have closed in earlier.\n\nThen he decided letting the woman forage on had been best. Although the three people weren't going to be able to put up much resistance, having them split up\u2014and inattentive\u2014was advantageous. Laframboise could capitalize on surprise, as well.\n\nYou will never see the treasure.\n\nHe forced Magdelaine's words away and concentrated. There were riches waiting.\n\nThe woman, Fiona Pioche, must have sensed something at the last moment. Laframboise was certain Campra had made no noise, but the woman reached into her pocket and came up with a small pistol as she spun around.\n\nRuthlessly, Campra moved in and smashed his rifle butt in the woman's face. She went back and down into the water, and the pistol flew from her hand.\n\nThe woman tried to get back up, but Campra pointed the rifle at her and growled, \"Stay down or I'm going to kill you.\"\n\nFor a moment, she looked as if she was going to lunge at him, anyway. Then she remained still. \"The water's cold. May I get out?\"\n\nCampra gestured with the rifle and directed her against the wall to the left. They took the professor into custody easily enough.\n\n\"Hello, Ms. Pioche,\" Laframboise said, pistol in hand.\n\nShe was bleeding from her mouth and nose, and her right eye was already starting to turn black. \"Laframboise. Sorry. It took me a moment to pick you out from all the other sewer rats down here.\"\n\nHe grinned at her. \"I'm still deciding whether I need to keep you alive.\"\n\nShe didn't reply. Instead, she drew her sleeve across her face. It came away bloody.\n\n\"Where is Annja Creed?\"\n\nShe just smiled at him through her split lips.\n\nHe smiled back. \"Be stubborn if you wish, I won't have you killed.\" He pointed his weapon at Edmund Beswick. \"I'll start with the professor.\"\n\nThe water was almost arctic and the cold leached into Annja's bones. She swam effortlessly, gliding through it with both hands ahead of her. In her left hand, the flashlight served only to create a lighted cone for her to swim through. Still, when she was close enough, she could see either the tunnel's floor or the roof. Either was fine. Both together would have meant the tunnel was narrowing and the way was coming to an end.\n\nShe counted her breaths as she went, and made sure she stayed oxygenated. The movement warmed her slightly, but she still felt cold. After twenty-two breaths, the cone of light flattened at the top. She angled upward and came out of the water at about the same time her flippers touched the tunnel floor.\n\nCautiously, she walked out of the water and sniffed the air. It was fetid and stank of mold, but there was no noxious odor of harmful gases. She took a deep breath and held it, checking for vertigo or any other indication that there wasn't enough oxygen. She felt fine, so she started breathing normally.\n\nShe estimated the time she'd been underwater and figured it was something over a minute based on the number of breaths she'd taken. The average adult breathed between twelve and twenty breaths a minute based on physical shape and circumstance. She guessed she'd been breathing about fifteen breaths a minute and revised her underwater trip estimate to just over a minute and a half.\n\nIf she'd known that, she could have simply held her breath.\n\nExcept that there had been no way to know.\n\nShe took the flippers off and left them at the water's edge. Then she widened the flashlight beam and moved forward. She had to guess at the distance she'd covered swimming. Olympic swimmers averaged a hundred meters in a minute. She wasn't an Olympic swimmer even with the fins. Her best estimate was that she'd covered forty or fifty yards underwater.\n\nThe tunnel rose only a few feet, just enough to keep it from the water. According to the map on the sat-phone, there was only one more intersection.\n\nAnnja found the four-way juncture another twenty-six yards ahead. She had to use the laser distance meter to accurately measure the distance, but the intersection was clearly marked on the map. She took the left turn and ended up in a short corridor that dead-ended.\n\nThat had been on the map, too.\n\nExcitement tingled through Annja. The map had shown a door, a secret place that existed just beyond the door. She widened the beam again and played the light over the moldy surface of the wall.\n\nLike the rest of the walls, the surface was uneven and irregular. The stones hadn't been shaped into any kind of standard dimensions. But there was a difference in the mortar. The grouting between the stones was smoother, and it wasn't pitted. The color was almost the same, and if she hadn't been looking for the differences, she knew she would never have found them.\n\nAnton Dutilleaux was an illusionist. Why wouldn't he hide his treasure behind an illusion?\n\nEdmund would love it. For a moment, she felt guilty that she was seeing everything before he did. This had been his mystery. He deserved to be here for the discovery.\n\nShe ran her hands over the wall, but felt only the rough surfaces of the stones, no irregularity. Turning the flashlight beam toward the stone floor, she studied the surface in front of the wall.\n\nThere were no scars, no scratches, to show that the door swung outward.\n\nIf the door didn't open outward, it had to open inward.\n\nAnnja fisted the flashlight and put both hands on the door. Gently, but with increasing pressure, she pushed. Just as she was about to give up, the door moved.\n\nGrinding over loose debris, it slid backward about two feet and stopped. No matter how hard Annja pushed, the door wouldn't move any farther.\n\nUsing the flashlight, she spotted openings on either side of the door. She chose the one on the right and went through.\n\nThe air inside the room was thicker and stank more of rot. Evidently the door had been shut for a long time.\n\nA square room forty feet across\u2014measured by the distance meter\u2014sat empty except for an obelisk in the center. Twelve feet tall, flush against the ceiling, the obelisk was carved of what looked like stone. It was only three feet wide.\n\nUpon closer inspection, Annja realized the obelisk wasn't carved from a single stone the way a true monolith was. Instead, it was pieced together with large stones. The mortar looked like the same that had sealed the false door. Several of the stones had carvings on them. Faces and strange figures.\n\nSlowly, Annja walked around it. There were no openings that she could find, and no marked areas that indicated hidden places. She had no doubt that Dutilleaux was responsible for the creation of the thing, though. Some of the engravings revealed rough figures from Chinese mythology\u2014dragons and koi and ghostly apparitions.\n\nMaybe it was there as a final warning to anyone who happened into the room, or maybe it was a puzzle Anton Dutilleaux intended for his friend Tsai Chien-Fu. Annja didn't want to touch it until Edmund had had a chance to study it and give her his thoughts on the matter.\n\nShining her flashlight around the room, she discovered that two of the walls were piled high with bones. At one point in the tunnel's history, it had been a storage area for the relocated Parisian dead. The skulls sat neatly among the long bones.\n\nShe walked back into the hallway and tested the door. It moved easily forward. Evidently Dutilleaux had used some kind of counterweight to keep the door shut. She directed her flashlight beam toward the ceiling, which she hadn't checked, and spotted the metal rod that extended through the ceiling.\n\nFurther examination of the ceiling over the entrance to the room revealed that the ceiling had been lowered there and a false floor put in. Only the length of the shadows gave it away.\n\nAnnja was impressed. Dutilleaux had gone to a lot of trouble to disguise his treasure trove. But that only stood to reason. The Qianlong Emperor's warriors were searching to kill him and recover their ruler's lost belongings.\n\nShe'd just put her flippers back on when she heard the gunshot."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 41",
                "text": "With the sharp report of the gunshot ringing in his ears, Laframboise spun around toward his men, ready to threaten whichever of them had fired. Instead, he stared in confusion as one of his men fell forward, his face a bloody mess.\n\nThen Campra was at his side, bumping him roughly and shoving him toward the wall. Back the way they'd come, the corridor suddenly lit up with muzzle flashes.\n\nCampra lifted his machine pistol and opened fire. Brass tumbled out of the gun. Instinctively, Laframboise brought up his pistol and added to the thunder and lightning, but he was only firing into the mass of muzzle flashes and didn't see any actual targets. The pistol bucked in his fist.\n\nHis men fell, torn to rags by withering fire. The ambush had caught them all off guard. The muzzle flashes lit up the tunnels and threw impossible shadows against the walls one moment, then ripped them away in explosions of light the next.\n\nLaframboise fired his pistol dry, then tried to reload. He stood behind Campra, partly shielded by the man's bulk. Then Campra fell back on him, taking him down with his dead weight. Laframboise hit the ground hard. His elbow struck stone and he felt the pistol squirt from his fingers. He lay on his side and stretched for it, trying desperately to get his fingers around the butt.\n\nWhen he realized he wasn't going to reach it, Laframboise twisted and sat up, pushing himself forward with one hand while he reached for Campra's machine pistol with the other. Campra's head turned with a sickening looseness. In the light from a nearby dropped flashlight, Laframboise saw the bullet wounds in Campra's eye and throat. Blood streaked the man's face.\n\nHe curled his fingers around the machine pistol and started to haul the weapon up. A black-garbed figure dashed forward and kicked Laframboise in the face.\n\nKnocked backward, senses spinning, he struggled to hang on to consciousness. His head felt too big, wobbly, and his neck felt as if it was trying to support a pumpkin. A bright light in his eyes blinded him.\n\n\"Jean-Baptiste Laframboise.\" The voice was harsh and foreign. French was not the speaker's native tongue. \"Can you hear me?\"\n\nHe blinked until he could see Puyi-Jin. The Asian warlord was in his fifties, a grim-faced man with hazel eyes. His black hair was graying at the temples.\n\n\"I hear you.\" Laframboise licked his lips and tasted blood.\n\n\"Where is Annja Creed?\"\n\n\"She dove into the water. The tunnel's submerged.\" Laframboise didn't want to answer, but he didn't want to die, either.\n\nYou will never see the treasure.\n\nHe tried to screw up the courage to grab for the machine pistol again, or maybe to spit in Puyi-Jin's face. But his mouth was so dry he couldn't manage it.\n\n\"You should not have betrayed me.\" Puyi-Jin pointed his pistol.\n\n\"The lantern's cursed. That's what made me to do it. The curse.\" Laframboise wanted to face death bravely, but he couldn't. His teeth chattered. \"If you go after it, the curse will get you, too.\"\n\nPuyi-Jin shook his head. \"I do not believe in curses.\" He squeezed the trigger.\n\nBullets hit Laframboise in the face, then darkness closed in around him.\n\nAnnja swam through the water, her flashlight barely lighting her way. Then she saw two figures in the water ahead of her, backlit by a flood of lights in the tunnel on the other side. She could barely make out Fiona. As she came up for a breath, the other woman grabbed her arm and pushed her back under. Muted gunshots echoed through the water.\n\nEdmund was beside Fiona, also barely recognizable in the dark water. He wasn't a strong swimmer. Annja pulled him past her, then grabbed his belt and swam on top of him, dragging him along at a faster clip since she had the fins. A moment later, he started flailing in panic.\n\nRealizing that Edmund thought he was about to drown, Annja took the Spare Air mouthpiece from between her teeth and passed it over to him. The short hose just reached to him. He shoved the mouthpiece between his teeth. Annja kicked strongly with her flippers and got him going again.\n\nTwenty or thirty seconds later, she angled up and the three of them were safely on the other side.\n\nAnnja shone her flashlight over them. Fiona's face was bruised and swollen, but she was concentrating on the machine pistol she'd brought with her. Water drained from the barrel and the empty magazine space. She held the magazine in her other hand.\n\nThe gunfire continued sporadically.\n\n\"What's going on?\" Annja kicked her flippers off and wished she had her boots.\n\n\"Laframboise's men were following us.\" Fiona held up the machine pistol's magazine and checked the load. The magazine was taped to another. She reversed the magazine and shoved the other one back into the weapon.\n\n\"How did they follow us?\"\n\n\"Let's figure that out later.\" Fiona glanced around. \"Does this tunnel continue?\"\n\n\"No. It's a dead end.\"\n\nFiona cursed. \"Not good.\"\n\nThe gunfire ceased.\n\n\"Laframboise and his people aren't shooting one another.\" Annja led them toward the room where she'd found the obelisk.\n\n\"I think Puyi-Jin and his people arrived.\" Edmund looked pallid in the dark. \"I didn't see much because Fiona grabbed me by the shirt and hurled me into the water, but the men I saw looked Asian.\"\n\n\"One thing was for certain.\" Fiona flicked on a flashlight attached to the machine pistol. \"We couldn't stay there.\" She glanced back over her shoulder. \"I should think Puyi-Jin's men will be along shortly.\"\n\nA single gunshot rang out.\n\nAnnja glanced back and spotted light dawning in the darkness of the flooded tunnel. Swimmers were on their way. \"Come on. Dutilleaux managed to hide a room. If we can get there, we might be able to hide, too.\"\n\nAnnja guided them into the room, then turned and forced the door closed. She shut off her flashlight because she didn't want the glow leaking around the door. For a moment all she could hear was Fiona and Edmund's ragged breathing in the darkness.\n\nThen they heard footsteps out in the hall. Voices filtered through a moment later.\n\nAnnja couldn't tell how many voices there were. The sounds were too confusing and her hearing was blunted from the gunshots. Certainly there were more than three opponents. She stood behind Fiona, who held her captured machine pistol at the ready. Quietly, Annja reached for the sword and pulled it into the chamber.\n\nSomeone spoke in Chinese, angry and commanding.\n\nFiona whispered just loud enough to be heard. \"That must be Puyi-Jin, or perhaps one of his lieutenants. He doesn't believe we've disappeared.\"\n\nLight glared along the bottom of the hidden door. Annja focused on keeping calm. They could see the light on this side of the door, but the men on the other side couldn't see the crack.\n\nWater dripped from Annja's wet clothes, curling around her ankles and running between her toes. Suddenly she knew that their hiding place wasn't going to remain secret for long. With all their wet clothing, they'd left a trail.\n\n\"Let's hope they muddied our tracks with theirs before anyone noticed,\" she whispered in Fiona's ear. \"The door will only come into the room a couple feet. For just a moment, they're going to be trapped there.\"\n\n\"Good. It will give us a temporary kill box. I'll make the most of it.\" Fiona adjusted her grip on the machine pistol.\n\nAnnja waited tensely. The men out in the hallway stopped talking and things got quiet.\n\nThen a deafening blast ripped through the chamber and the secret door flew into chunks of debris that ricocheted off the walls. Light flashed and ripped away the darkness for a moment. The concussive wave knocked Annja backward off her feet. She lost the sword and it vanished. She barely clung to her senses as vertigo slammed through her and sickness twisted her stomach. She swallowed to ease the pressure in her ears.\n\nDizzy, she tried to get to her feet to pull the sword back. Before she could, an Asian man dressed in black pressed a pistol against the back of her head.\n\n\"Move and you die.\"\n\nAnnja remained still, struggling just to stay on her feet even with the man holding her.\n\nOnly a few feet away, Fiona tried to get up, as well. Her hand flashed out for the machine pistol, but one of the men in black kicked the weapon away. Her opponent pointed his weapon at Fiona's face and Annja knew he was going to pull the trigger.\n\nA man's voice barked out of the darkness.\n\nThe other man pulled back his weapon, then grabbed a handful of Fiona's hair and yanked her roughly to her feet.\n\nEdmund quietly got to his feet and stared at their captors. Eight men all dressed in black stood in the room. All of them heavily armed.\n\nThe man Annja figured must be Puyi-Jin strode in and trailed a flashlight around the room. She recognized him from his pictures. He gave orders and, within seconds, the men had lanterns set up around the room.\n\nMost were trained on the obelisk.\n\nThe Asian crime boss surveyed it in silence for a long moment. Then he turned back to Annja. \"Miss Creed.\"\n\nThe man holding Annja jerked her forward to within arm's reach of Puyi-Jin.\n\n\"You are surprised to see me here?\" Puyi-Jin smiled broadly, but there was nothing friendly in his expression. \"You found your way into Shanghai very easily, but I have informants among airport customs. I knew when you arrived, and I knew when you left. Following you here was child's play. I had men on the flight with you.\"\n\nAnnja wasn't about to give the man the satisfaction of a reply.\n\nHe shrugged. \"The only thing I want to know from you, Miss Creed, is where Tsai Chien-Fu's treasure is.\"\n\nAnnja glared at him.\n\nPuyi-Jin motioned to the man holding Edmund captive. The warrior pulled out a sharp blade and pressed it against Edmund's throat, slicing just enough to draw blood.\n\n\"Now, Annja, I want to know the location of that treasure.\"\n\nReluctantly, Annja thrust her chin at the obelisk. \"This is what I found when I got here. Evidently the treasure's gone. Maybe the Qianlong Emperor's assassins got it when they tracked and killed Dutilleaux in the catacombs.\"\n\n\"No.\" Puyi-Jin's hazel eyes glittered. \"I would know that if it had happened. I know the story of the captain assigned to bring Anton Dutilleaux back to Shanghai\u2014with the things Tsai Chien-Fu took from the Qianlong Emperor. One of his assassins killed Anton Dutilleaux before locating the treasure. The captain himself was killed when he returned to Shanghai. The Qianlong Emperor had no mercy for those who failed.\"\n\nAnnja's ears still rang from the explosion. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched as Fiona and Edmund were brought closer. Fiona was measuring the opposition, memorizing the locations of the men and their weapons. Edmund was staring at the obelisk.\n\n\"The treasure has not left this room.\" Puyi-Jin gazed at the stacks of bones and at the obelisk. \"It remains here, and you must find it.\"\n\nThe man holding Annja released her with a shove. She held out a hand. \"I need a flashlight.\"\n\nOne of the warriors passed her a flashlight.\n\nAnnja switched on the beam and approached the obelisk. She studied the carvings, trying to make sense of them. The dragons, koi, ghosts and foxes didn't appear to have any real order.\n\n\"Hurry.\"\n\nWith deliberation, Annja trailed her fingers over the obelisk. Some of the stones seemed more deeply set than others. \"If the treasure is still here, Dutilleaux might have set a trap. You might want to consider that.\"\n\n\"There is also the chance that someone heard the gunshots in this tunnel. If someone else arrives, I will have you and your friends killed at once.\"\n\nAnnja considered the problem and tried to put herself into Dutilleaux's mind.\n\n\"He was an illusionist, Annja,\" Edmund said quietly. \"Whatever Dutilleaux hid, it wouldn't be in plain sight.\"\n\nThe warrior guarding Edmund chopped him in the throat with the edge of his hand. Gasping and coughing, Edmund dropped to his knees. Annja started toward him, but two warriors intercepted her.\n\nPuyi-Jin glared at her. \"Find the treasure. You are running out of time.\"\n\nAnnja turned back to the column. Edmund was right. Dutilleaux wouldn't have hidden the treasure in such an obvious spot.\n\nShe glanced around the room again, taking in everything. It would have to be something Tsai Chien-Fu would know to look for in case something happened to Dutilleaux.\n\nHer gaze settled on one of the piles of bones across the room. For the first time, she saw the pattern in the lower left corner of the stack. Skulls had been placed there in front of the bones but tucked back so they matched the bones.\n\nEight of the skulls sat in a horizontal row. Under the second, fourth and sixth skulls stood three skulls, two skulls and three skulls. There were eight skulls across and an aggregate of eight skulls piled under those in vertical columns.\n\nAnnja knew then where the hiding place was, and that the obelisk was a trap. Glancing up, she again noticed how the obelisk touched the ceiling, and the way the ceiling curved over the front door.\n\nShe looked at Puyi-Jin. \"I know where the treasure is.\"\n\n\"Then reveal it.\"\n\n\"It's a magic trick. Have you heard of the disappearing woman?\"\n\nPuyi-Jin shook his head irritably. \"Show me the treasure.\"\n\nAnnja glanced at Edmund and Fiona. \"The disappearing-woman trick works like this\u2014a woman lays on a table and a cloth is dropped over her. The audience doesn't realize that the cloth has an internal wire structure that blends to the woman's body, then collapses when the magician yanks away the cloth.\" She turned to Puyi-Jin. \"For all intents and purposes, the woman vanishes.\"\n\n\"Now, Miss Creed, or the man dies.\"\n\nHoping that Edmund and Fiona had understood her warning, Annja turned back to the obelisk. She grabbed one of the carved stones on the column and pulled."
            },
            {
                "title": "Chapter 42",
                "text": "For a moment, the carved stone Annja pulled on held. Then it grudgingly came away from the obelisk. It wasn't just a stone, though. The carved rock had been attached to a three-foot-long iron rod that was pitted with orange rust.\n\nSomething shifted inside the obelisk.\n\nBehind Annja, Fiona said one word. \"Jenga.\"\n\nAnnja nodded. \"Exactly.\" She searched for another stone to remove. Evidently Dutilleaux had hoped his ostentatious structure would draw the attention of anyone who didn't know the room's secret. At least Fiona knew what was going on and what would probably happen.\n\n\"Shut up.\" Puyi-Jin stepped forward with a small automatic in his hand. He pointed the gun at Annja's head. \"No more talking.\"\n\nAnnja grabbed another stone and pulled. The obelisk moved again, and this time a tremor ran up to the ceiling. Puyi-Jin and his warriors stared around the chamber, trying to fathom what was going on.\n\nIgnoring them, Annja grabbed another stone and pulled another rod from the obelisk. This time when the grinding inside the obelisk started, it didn't abate. The sound continued to escalate in the space of a heartbeat and became a thunderous ripple of cracking that filled the chamber.\n\nThe mortised area over the door that concealed the counterweight shattered and a rock slide poured out of the opening. Fiona broke free and grabbed Edmund by the shoulder, yanking the professor back as the avalanche toppled from the ceiling. She forced him against the wall. With all the dust rising up from the rock slide, Annja quickly lost sight of them, but she believed they'd managed to avoid the brunt of the falling rock.\n\nThrowing herself forward, Annja dived clear of the obelisk as it came apart in a cascade of tumbling rock. Puyi-Jin had time to shout, then he was knocked down by the falling stone. Dust plumed up and the lantern's light hit the cloud of particulates and filled the chamber with a milky-gray fog. The light-reflecting properties of the gypsum dust was almost as bad as the dark. Through the haze, Annja could only see vague images of the others.\n\nShe rolled to her feet in a squat, her left hand before her for support. With her right, she reached for the sword and pulled it into the chamber.\n\nOne of the black-clad warriors came at her from out of the dust. He had his pistol pointed in front of him and started firing immediately. Bullets struck the stone floor where Annja had been, but she was already running toward the man, angling for his right side. He wheeled and tried to come around, his pistol still jumping in his fist.\n\nAnnja swung the sword and the blade passed above the man's outstretched arms and through his neck. The man's head toppled down one shoulder and the body slid to the floor. Choking on the dust, her eyes watering, Annja got her bearings and headed back across the pile of rubble that had dropped where the obelisk had been. She searched desperately for Fiona and Edmund.\n\nThe column was now just debris covering the floor. The carved rocks were mixed in with the rough stones. A warrior tried to push himself up. Blood covered his face, but he freed his machine pistol.\n\nWithout breaking stride, Annja kicked the man in the head and he fell back, unconscious. Another warrior came out of the dust at her with his machine pistol chugging. Knowing she couldn't throw herself across the rock-covered floor without sustaining injury and that she had no hope of sliding away, Annja leaped up as hard as she could, trusting her enhanced speed and strength to get her clear.\n\nShe flipped over the man and came down on her feet behind him. Reversing the sword, she thrust the blade behind her and felt the point crunch through the man's chest. The resistance gave way at the last and she knew she'd pierced him through.\n\nSpinning around, she put a foot into the man's back and kicked him off the blade. Her breath came in hoarse rasps as the dust coated her mouth and throat. She searched for more opponents, remembering where they'd been before the rock had knocked them all down. Five were left. And Puyi-Jin.\n\nFrantic, Annja raced toward the wall near the door. She'd last seen Fiona and Edmund there. The rubble appeared to thin. The swirling shadows created by the multiple lanterns caused even more confusion. She caught sight of a gunner slightly behind her in her peripheral vision. Planting a bare foot, feeling the sharp stone bite into her flesh, she pushed herself sideways as bullets split the air where her head had been.\n\nAnnja went into a low crouch and spun to face her attacker. He was ten feet away and content to keep his distance advantage. She watched him, hoping that she would know which way to move before he started firing again.\n\nHarsh gunshots thundered through the chamber.\n\nConfused, certain that she'd seen no muzzle flashes, convinced that the man would not have missed her at that distance, Annja watched the man fall back limply as his face came apart.\n\nAt Annja's side, Fiona stepped out of the swirling dust holding a machine pistol in her hands. \"How many?\"\n\n\"I've put down three.\"\n\nFiona nodded grimly. \"Then we're up to five. When I liberated this weapon, I killed the man holding on to it with his knife.\"\n\nAnnja stood. The dust was still too thick for her to see far in any direction. Her eyes ached and burned and required constant wiping to clear the dust.\n\n\"Where's Edmund?\"\n\n\"He's fine. I left him by the wall.\" Fiona strode to the left, circling the biggest section of the fallen rock. Puyi-Jin and his warriors had been struck by most of it.\n\n\"Annja! Look out!\"\n\nWhirling at the sound of Edmund's voice, Annja tried to bring the sword around, but the man who had risen behind her was too far ahead. He shoved his pistol muzzle toward her face and pulled the trigger.\n\nAnnja dropped in a loose sprawl, falling on top of the rock and below the pistol. Three shots thundered, and the muzzle flashed over her head. Lying on her side, she swept her right leg forward and knocked the man's feet out from under him. The warrior went down as more gunshots rang out from Fiona's position.\n\nThe warrior landed on his back and struggled to get up. Annja rolled over on her side, rose to her knees and grabbed the man's gun wrist in her left hand. The sword couldn't be effectively used in such close quarters. She released it and it promptly vanished. Surging forward, she caught the warrior's face in her palm and banged his head off the stones until she felt him go limp beneath her.\n\nAnnja picked up her attacker's gun and threw it aside. She didn't want to risk ricochets inside the chamber. No one else involved in the firefight seemed to worry about that. She reached for the sword, found it and walked forward.\n\nA shape stood about fifteen feet in front of her. Annja wasn't sure if it was just a trick of the gypsum fog or if it was Fiona. Almost too late, the fog thinned and she recognized Puyi-Jin. Evidently he'd been waiting for his vision to clear, as well.\n\nHe pointed his pistol at her.\n\nReversing her grip on the sword as it hung at her side, Annja rocked her body forward and threw the blade underhanded, then raced toward Puyi-Jin. Even if the sword didn't hit him, she hoped that it would be enough of a distraction to cause him to miss.\n\nInstead, though, the sword sailed true and sank into the Asian warlord's chest just below his heart. He looked down at the sword that transfixed him. Stubbornly, he tried to aim the pistol again, but the weapon dropped from his nerveless fingers. He sank to his knees and started to fall forward.\n\nAnnja reached for the sword and it disappeared from Puyi-Jin's chest and was once more in her grasp.\n\n\"How did you do that?\" Edmund said from a few feet away as he stared at the sword.\n\nAnnja grinned. \"Magic.\" She searched for Fiona, who was trudging across the rubble.\n\nFiona glanced down at Puyi-Jin. \"That will be the lot of them.\"\n\n\"What about Laframboise?\"\n\n\"I'm pretty sure he's dead. Puyi-Jin and his people were thorough about wiping them out.\" Fiona gazed around the room.\n\nMost of the dust had settled and less than half of the lanterns had been broken so there was still plenty of light.\n\nFiona wiped blood from her face. \"So this is it, then? There is no treasure?\"\n\n\"We'll have to see.\" Annja walked over to the wall of bones. \"The obelisk wasn't Dutilleaux's hiding place. That was only window dressing.\"\n\n\"And a rather nasty trap.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Annja looked at Fiona. \"You don't see the clue, do you?\"\n\nFiona wiped grit from her eyes and looked at the wall of bones. \"All I see are a lot of poor souls who ended up as landscape.\"\n\nAnnja shifted her gaze to Edmund. \"But you do, don't you?\"\n\nExcitedly, Edmund nodded. \"Dutilleaux marked his hiding place with a symbol that Tsai Chien-Fu would understand.\" He approached the wall of bones and knelt in front of it. \"The secret's here. In these skulls.\" He traced a line with his hand. \"See? The long line of skulls here.\"\n\n\"Eight of them.\" Annja released the sword and knelt beside him.\n\n\"And three columns. Again, only using eight skulls.\"\n\nFiona nodded in understanding. \"The numeral eight in Suzhou. Very clever.\"\n\n\"Unless it's just an anomaly.\"\n\n\"Surely you don't believe that.\"\n\nAnnja reached for a skull. \"No, I don't believe that.\" She pulled the first skull away.\n\nEdmund joined in the efforts and they quickly cleared the space of skulls and bones. Behind the bones sat a brass box. Annja leaned back and gestured to Edmund.\n\n\"Your lantern is what brought us here. The honor's yours.\"\n\nEdmund shook his head. \"I'd never have gotten this far without you.\" He removed the brass box and set it before Annja. \"You do it.\"\n\nCarefully, Annja opened the box and tilted it so the lanterns' light better illuminated the contents. A jumble of gold coins, pearls and gems.\n\nReaching in, Annja plucked out the royal seal of the Qianlong Emperor. As she did, her fingers brushed against another hard surface in the pile of coins and gems. Digging through them, she found two books, one of them written in Chinese and the other a collection of sketches, but there was an English translation on the title pages.\n\nPoems of the Qianlong Emperor and Sketches of the Qianlong Emperor.\n\nAnnja couldn't believe what she was holding. She turned the pages reverently.\n\n\"What is it?\" Fiona leaned in more closely.\n\n\"These books are supposed to have belonged to the Qianlong Emperor.\" Annja studied the pictures of loons, petrels and pelicans. There were other birds she couldn't recognize, and animals, as well, including tamarin, alligators and pandas. \"If they are, if that can be verified, they'll be worth a fortune.\"\n\nFiona stood and looked around the room. \"I think we need to be going. We should probably notify the Parisian police before they end up catching us down here, don't you think?\"\n\nAnnja nodded and closed the brass box. \"I'll need to get my backpack first. We don't want to get those books wet.\" She handed the box to Edmund. \"Well, Professor Beswick, how does it feel to find your first treasure?\"\n\nEdmund's eyes gleamed. \"Like nothing I've ever felt before.\" He shook his head. \"But this isn't the first time for you. I suppose after a while an experience like this loses its luster.\"\n\nAnnja grinned. \"Never.\""
            },
            {
                "title": "Epilogue",
                "text": "\"So you're back in London?\" Roux sounded only vaguely interested.\n\nAnnja walked through the winding alley in the East End. It was two in the morning and darkness draped the buildings. Sorting out the discovery of the treasure and accounting for all the bodies in the catacombs had taken three days and a host of Fiona Pioche's lawyers.\n\nIn the end, though, the law-enforcement agencies had cut them loose, but none of them had been happy about it, and Annja had gotten the distinct impression that her presence in Paris wouldn't be appreciated anytime soon.\n\n\"I am back in London. And I'm looking for Mr. Hyde. Again.\" Annja turned her collar up against the chill and watched a group of college-age men walking down the streets. Judging from the way they were walking, they'd been on a pub crawl.\n\n\"I read about the catacombs find.\"\n\nThe story had made international news, and that was one of the things that had mollified Doug Morrell and the Chasing History's Monsters production management. Doug was working on cobbling some of the story together for a feature. It wouldn't be quite Mr. Hyde caliber, Doug had been quick to point out, but they were going to heavily work the Chinese curse angle. After all, a lot of people had ended up dead.\n\n\"Congratulations on your success.\"\n\nAnnja smiled. Roux was digging for something. He'd pried himself away from a Texas Hold'em table long enough to make the call. She'd ignored it, then returned his call when she was ready. \"Thank you. So how's the table action?\"\n\n\"I'm making my way. What is your professor going to do with his share of the treasure?\"\n\n\"Need a backer for your gambling?\"\n\nRoux made a grunting noise.\n\nIn the end, Edmund hadn't been able to hang on to the find. Tsai Chien-Fu had given his life in the hope that he would provide a better future for his family. Two hundred years later, Edmund felt that the original effort needed to be honored. He had returned the treasure to the Tsai family, but Li Xiaoming had insisted that her good fortune be shared. She had given half of it to Edmund, Annja and Fiona.\n\n\"He doesn't know what he's going to do with the money yet. He gave the treasure to the Li family. He's a good man.\"\n\n\"If he invests it wisely, he wouldn't have to work again. Neither would you.\"\n\n\"I'm investing my share wisely.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"By leaving it with Fiona. She's smart and capable, and I don't like the idea of managing money. I never have. Mostly, I have what I need. I'd rather pile up experiences and memories than try to hang on to material things. Physical things just provide a lot of clutter.\"\n\n\"You forget, I've seen your loft. You have boxes stacked everywhere.\"\n\nThat was true, but most of the antiquities were there for classification and validation. Some of it she'd asked for to pursue her own studies. \"Most of those artifacts go back as soon as I finish with them. I enjoy seeing them in museums when I get the chance.\" It wasn't often, but it was enough.\n\n\"As much as you have found over these past years, you could retire.\"\n\n\"Not all of us can spend all of our days playing Texas Hold'em.\" Annja knew that would never happen. As long as she was able to take up the chase, she wanted to be doing exactly what she was doing. Success wouldn't change that. Financial gains weren't what made her life good. It was the hunt, the challenge of the unknown and the friendships she made along the way.\n\nRoux harrumphed. \"There will come a time when you grow jaded.\"\n\n\"I don't think so.\"\n\n\"Trust me.\"\n\n\"If things do change, money will be there waiting for me. Besides, the way I live? I don't think retirement is part of the package.\"\n\n\"You shouldn't talk like that.\" Roux's voice softened. \"It's depressing.\"\n\n\"You know who else hasn't lost that zest for life and become curmudgeonly?\"\n\nRoux didn't reply.\n\n\"Fiona.\" Annja kept walking, but she heard the echo of someone's footsteps behind her. She turned at the next corner to put a streetlamp behind her. Long shadows of things behind her stretched across the cobblestones. \"I've been with Fiona these past few days. She hasn't changed. She still enjoys the danger and excitement. Probably more than I do. Or, at least, she's more comfortable dealing with it.\"\n\n\"She is an exceptional woman. I told you that when I sent you to her.\"\n\n\"Why did you leave her?\"\n\nRoux was silent. Annja felt certain he was going to duck the issue. She hoped he wouldn't.\n\n\"When I first started working with her, I didn't really think about the danger I was involving her in. I never considered the consequences,\" Roux said thoughtfully. \"Do you know how many times she was nearly killed working with me?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nRoux sighed. \"I got up one morning and I realized I couldn't watch her get killed. After everything I've been through, and I've been through some horrific events, I could not bear losing her in such a fashion.\"\n\n\"So your abandonment had nothing to do with the fact that Fiona was getting older? Or that you hadn't ever loved her?\"\n\n\"I love her with all my heart, Annja. I just couldn't protect her. My life was spent looking for the sword that you now carry, and that search took me into dangerous places.\" Roux paused. \"And I couldn't give her children. I wasted twenty years of that woman's life before I knew it. That was how much in love with her I was.\" He drew in a breath. \"I suppose, in your parlance, I had been something of an asshat.\"\n\nAnnja felt sorry for him. \"Nothing in return? Roux, did you ever stop to think that maybe all she wanted was you?\"\n\n\"Annja, you're young in so many ways. You're not ready for commitment. You live for the adventure each day brings. Tell me that you're looking forward to settling down with a husband and a house filled with children.\"\n\nGuilt stung Annja when she realized she couldn't. \"Maybe Fiona felt the same way.\"\n\n\"The life I lived then, it was too big. You have trouble keeping up with what that sword brings you, and that's the truth.\"\n\nAnnja had no argument.\n\n\"Now, if we've discussed this enough, I've a game to get back to.\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"Maybe we should plan to get together again soon.\"\n\nAnnja heard the loneliness in his voice. He wasn't all hard bark and bluster. \"I'd like that. But it can't be Paris. They don't want me back there for a while.\"\n\n\"Well, then, we have all the rest of the world, don't we?\" Roux broke the connection before Annja could reply.\n\nShe stayed on the phone and sucked in a breath. The footfalls behind her grew louder. \"Fiona?\"\n\n\"I'm here.\"\n\nBefore she'd called Roux back, Annja had dialed Fiona and included her on the three-way call. She'd wanted to give the woman something.\n\n\"He didn't leave you, Fiona. Not in the way you thought.\"\n\n\"I heard.\" Fiona's voice was brittle and sounded far away. \"At least I'll have better memories, and I thank you for that.\"\n\n\"You're welcome.\"\n\n\"Roux would be livid if he knew what you did.\"\n\n\"That's part of what made it worth doing.\"\n\nFiona laughed. \"I suppose so. Do you know when you'll be leaving London?\"\n\n\"Soon.\" The footsteps behind Annja were definitely closing in on her now.\n\n\"We should have lunch before you go.\"\n\n\"Definitely.\"\n\nAnnja hesitated. \"You know, you could reach out to Roux. Maybe give him a call.\"\n\n\"Out of the blue?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"For good or bad, he has his life and I have mine. Perhaps that's for the best.\"\n\n\"And perhaps it's not.\"\n\nFiona sighed. \"I enjoy you, Annja Creed. Truly I do. Roux was right about one thing\u2014you are still so very young.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"Is there someone you care for very much, who could change your life if you let them?\"\n\nImmediately, Annja thought of Bart McGilley. They had been friends for years, and she knew they could be more if she would just stay still.\n\n\"I can tell by your silence that you know exactly who I'm talking about. Now ask yourself why you don't let that happen.\"\n\nThe question made Annja unhappy. Fiona was right. Right now her life was one thing and there wasn't room in it to be another.\n\n\"Now let me know when you plan to leave London. I do want to get together.\"\n\n\"I will.\"\n\nFiona said goodbye and hung up.\n\nAnnja took a deep breath and placed the phone back in her pocket. Instead of being thrilled at putting one over on Roux, now she felt depressed and irritable.\n\nThe footsteps behind her accelerated and she saw the long shadow of her pursuer closing on her. She sidestepped at the last minute and the big man ran past. His heavy boots clomped on the cobblestones, but he stopped himself and twisted around.\n\nHe stood a little over seven feet tall and would have shamed an NFL linebacker. His skin was pallid, almost fish-belly white, and his face looked like a cinder block stretched across his thick neck. Intelligence gleamed in his milk-white eyes, but there was no shred of compassion or humanity.\n\n\"Annja Creed.\" His voice was a low rumble.\n\n\"You know me.\"\n\n\"I've seen you on television.\" He started to circle her. Annja stepped to put her back against the wall.\n\n\"Mr. Hyde, I presume.\"\n\n\"And I'm going to kill you.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nHe grinned at her. \"Because I'm a monster. Everyone has always said so. Killing you will make me even more famous. Besides, I have learned to enjoy killing. The bones in those women snapped so easily, and you could hear it. Snap, snap, snap.\" He sighed. \"I look forward to hearing your bones snap.\"\n\n\"You're going to be disappointed.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because I fight monsters. And you picked a really bad night to make yourself available for me to vent my frustration.\" Annja reached for the sword, felt the hilt brush against her palm, then decided not to use the blade.\n\nHyde rushed in and she let him. His size and weight were advantages he was used to, ones he counted on.\n\nAnnja ducked beneath his outstretched arms, but only barely. He was quicker than she'd believed possible. She rolled away as he threw one hand against the wall and halted himself, turning amazingly quickly. But his size worked against him in the end. She rolled to her feet behind him and slightly to one side. Coldly, with calculated precision, she kicked hard at his right knee.\n\nThe joint went violently sideways and shattered in a staccato of sharp cracks. Snap, snap, snap.\n\nCrying out, Hyde threw himself at her, trying desperately to get those big arms around her. Annja stepped back slightly, batting his arms aside with her forearms, and brought her right knee up into his face. Blood spurted and his nose broke.\n\nHyde went to the ground, caught himself on his knees and reached for her again. He howled like a rabid animal.\n\nThinking only of the women the man had killed, Annja grabbed Hyde's outstretched right hand, slid her grip down to his ring and pinkie fingers, and twisted them viciously. The fingers dislocated and fractured. When Hyde drew his hand back, Annja twisted and delivered a side kick to the big man's face that broke his jaw and knocked him out.\n\nBroken and bloody, Mr. Hyde lay stretched on the cobblestones as a crowd from a nearby pub started to gather. The last few moments of the fight had attracted an audience. Conversations gained momentum and volume.\n\nAnnja took out her phone. It was a toss-up whether to call Doug Morrell or DCI Westcox first. She decided on Doug. Judging from the glowing lights of the cell phones in the hands of the crowd thronging the street, the inspector would know soon enough."
            }
        ]
    }
]